A Surreal Treat from The Pied Piper of Cullercoats

On Saturday our Room to Write Trio ploughed through walls of Northumberland Rain to spend a day at IRON AGE a very different literary Festival in the little fishing village if Cullercoats  on the North East Coast.  For five days the village hosted  the fortieth anniversary of IRON PRESS (set up in 1973): an example of independent publishing  to be celebrate in these days of depression and downgrading in the broader field of publishing.  

IRON PRESS is the literary child of one-off writer, playwright, cultural entrepreneur Peter Mortimer. Over the years what started out as the influential  literary magazine IRON  in the 1970s has evolved into a full blown independent publisher IRON PRESS,  dedicated to finding and publishing writers and poets of quality and originality.

Vintage IRON magazines in the window
of Oliver's bookshop on Cullercoats.

The festival was presided over by Cullerocoats' most illustrious literary resident Peter Mortimer who like the Pied Piper had enticed here hundreds of the literary and musically  minded young at heart  from across the north, including writers, poets, musicians - some to bread or perform, some to just relish the special atmosphere that seems to gather around Peter who has managed to sidestep the be-fogging bureaucratisation of the arts and retain his originality and iconoclastic vision of the nature of artistic enterprise.

Peter Mortimer: A literary Pied Piper - funny, clever, the doyen of original writing in the North East. Every region should have one.    

Novelist Kitty Fitzgerald reads a short story from her new collection Miranda's Shadow.  The talented Kitty works alongside Peter Mortimer as editor and quality controller to ensure the high standard ot the IRON PRESS list. She has been the other  key player in the success of this vivid festival,

One venue for the readings and performances was the Lifeboat Station witt this marvelous view of the Cullercoats harbour. Very moody. Worth a poem in anybody's page.

Despite the weather they built a symbolic Flat Iron 'birthday cake' on the beach,complete with candles and the Number 40. Worth braving the weather.

The Carnival band played, making us dance about under a canopy in the rain, then led brave souls  onto the beach to march and caper around the 40th birthday cake.

Musicians in red and black

Blue sails of the Lifeboat Station in the background

Sweet music! On Saturday night  Bridie Jackson and her stunning group Arbour made ethereal music in The Community Centre, warming us up for  before the headlining David Almond event.

 (And more music in the evening when David's daughter  Freya Grace and her friend sang a set for us alongside the poets  in the pub.)

After the Arbour performance David Almond read from his retrospective IRON PRESS publication NEST.
Listening to him read his own work is like listening to music crafted in spoken words. David is a friend so it is hard to reach for the proper superlatives. So i'll l let others speak for me....

  

"There is nobody quite like Almond writing in adults' or children's fiction today. A writer of visionary, Blakean intensity."

The Times

"David Almond's books are strange, unsettling wild things. They are, like all great literature, beyond classification:"

The Guardian

In a street a bit back from the harbour in Cullercoats we found this beautiful bookshop.

The interior could very well be an atmospheric setting for a  labyrinthine thriller.
     

Thank you Peter and Kitty for bringing true cultural warmth to a rainy day. 

LINKS FOR YOU

Iron Press:  Iron Press 

David Almond  lDavid Almond

 Kitty Fitzgerald /Kitty Fitzgerald

Bridie Jackson  Bridie Jackson

Room to Write Room to Write

 

A Writer's View of Youthful Romance

A little bit stir crazy and crazy to write, I  found myself in a local hotel with its own ancient history but  with modern spa facilities that mean as well as  the usual through-put  of ladies lunching and businessmen meeting and lovers assignating, you are sometimes treated to the sight of women with their hair up in toweling robes resting, after having a flash of fitness. 

Writing in such neutral places - escaping, relaxing entirely separate - can be a flash of fitness for a writer too. I've posted here on the blog before about the joys of  Cafe Writing. This evolves in a changing world.

I can be invisible in such places - useful for a writer who needs to think and imagine. Here I draft an introduction to the new book. I  think of where it goes from here. I estimate its direction and audit its possible impact. I write some notes on aggression that might end up as a poem in a year or two. Probably never. But at least that aggression is expressed, which could be therapeutic. Unexplored emotion can be ugly on the page.

While I've been busy in my other writing world a young couple enter the deserted lounge. They buy a beer and a latté and play musical chairs until they find just the right place to sit before a window on a deep couch.

She has her natural hair swept up and not a speck of make-up on her face.  With his stylish specs he is handsome in that geeky way that is so fashionable these days.

At each station they flip open a miniature laptop and peer at the little screen, saying nothing - squandering,  in my view,  a clear  opportunity for intimacy.

But who am I to judge the reality of this situation? This is surely only the modern version of the back row of the cinema where you listened to the dulcet Americanised tones of stars and looked at  the iconic images of great films, This was always so useful to cover up the tongue-tied awkwardness of that first or second - or tenth - date.  I remember you would both  look hard at the screen in silence while his hand crept along the back of the seat.

But then - if I remember rightly - that screen was very big: much larger than life. This screen in the silence of the hotel lounge is very small - no larger than the palms of two hands. And this girl and boy could very well be  guests at this rather sweet hotel where there are other spaces to get closer, and to say more.

Nothing like that in the 1960s. More's the pity.
WX

Writing Out of Your Comfort Zone and the Perfect Apple Pie

Notebooks help you work outside
of your comfort zone.

Our second Back to Basics workshop seemed to go very well. 

More than twenty eager and interested writers focused with energy on  series of challenging tasks that related to the equally challenging tasks they completed last week.

After many years of organising workshops, this time, as mentioned in the earlier post  we have dispensed with the read-around and the more or less friendly talk-about-yourself interludes. I reckon now you don’t have to be somebody’s best friend to write alongside them.

One problem with the read-around  is that – apart from being time-consuming – it can be off-putting for neophytes and and occasionally vainglorious for the already experienced or talented.

(All this, of course, can be different with a much smaller longer-standing group where reading out and tutor led evaluation can be a learning experience for all.)

So this time, no ‘this is me’ no 'am I better at this than you or worse than this?’
Instead we had two hours of hard work and attention to almost minute details. You could almost hear the brains ticking, the thinly veiled anxiety/excitement.

We did relax a little over coffee, looking at writing in action in notebooks and reading hand-outs of inspirational quotations on this week’s theme of Place. There were some sidebar conversations about the sometimes confusing nature of memoir and the intriguing evolution of fact into fiction.

One very nice writer, nursing her coffee told me. ‘To be honest, last week’s session, though I enjoyed it, got me right out of my comfort zone about writing.’
‘Pleased about that,’ I said.’Out of your comfort zone is a good place to be. It’s from there that you make progress as a writer.’

The place for comfort zones is writing groups. They are brilliant support and interest groups. They are great at providing short term targets for specific pieces of writing.They are wonderful places to meet people of like interests.

However to stick too closely to this process can allow aspiring writers to stay fast in their comfort zone. In time it can be difficult to make real writing progress from within that comfort zone: the accomplished polish their accomplishment; beginners can flounder and not make progress. Even if you get better at the small steps it bresembles making a perfect apple pie every time and not extending your cuisine.

I related the 'comfort zone' comment to the larger group. To my relief there were nods of agreement all around, so I may have got that right.

So some hard work was achieved in this session where our dominating theme was how the nature of Place works to earn its space in our prose writing. The response was intense and lively, as our ‘out if comfort zone’ workshop went on its merry way.

It felt so much better than making the perfect apple pie yet again.

I’m looking forward now to next week  when we'll be thinking about the large scale creativity of the memoir or the story in fact and in fiction – a smorgasbord rather than an apple pie, perhaps.

I'm also looking forward to seeing some of the written outcomes of all this hard work ...

  Happy writing
Wx

The elegant Nicholas Evans talking to the twinkly James Nesbitt

 
I enjoyed watching the elegant  Nicholas Evans talking to the twinkly James Nesbitt  on the recent  Sky Arts Living The Life. I particularly identified with Nicholas Evans when he asserted that for him the great thing was thatevery novel is a very different thing. ‘Of course the publishers agree with this but in reality what they want is the same thing time and time again.’

When you think that this ‘same thing’ is the phenomenally successful Horse Whisperer you can have a smidgin of sympathy with the publisher, while still bewailing their lack of creative understanding  and obsession with the ‘safe bet’. They and their accountants would clearly wish for more of the same,

I’ve heard similar regrets from equally successful writers whom I will not name as we all know  criticism of one’s publishers is a tight rope to walk.,

These days  there is so much advice in the widespread HowToWrite industry about knowing your market and building your brand – as though novels were soap-powder or mobile phones. We’re urged to become our own agents, editors, PR people and publicists and developing our brand.  

That leaves in fifth place the hardest and the most original aspect - the actual invention of a world, giving the breath of life to a cast of characters, the driving of an arc of narrative and the spending of a year or three actually putting coherent words on the page.

I had no such insight when I started.  I had written this novel about a very special girl of fourteen in the year 1926, I called the novel Lizza after the main character. Not having read any How To books I chose a publisher at random (Hodder and Stoughton).and posted the package in the large slot at Spennymoor Post Office and they published it in hardback and paperback in the next year.

This novel was bought by libraries and was still being borrowed ten years later.
They said it would be great for their Young Adult list. I’d never heard of Young Adult or any other genre. I wrote three more novels – very different to each other - which they guided into their young adult list.

But  all I did was write the novels that I wanted to write.

Then – still writing what I wanted to write -   I started to write bigger novels with a wider range of characters. These, I was told, were adult novels.  The first of these – a well researched intergenerational  historical novel - was taken by another publisher who slotted it very easily into what they were now calling the Saga category, Other novels followed – each very different - which also slotted into the convenient publishers’ category. They did moderately well sitting on the middle of the publisher’s list and were borrowed in hundreds of thousands from the libraries.

Then I progressed – pursuing the commitment that each novel should be different – to less easily categorised novels still with my focus on  good stories, original authentic characters moving now to accurate  twentieth century and contemporary historical backgrounds. Really my work was slipping out of the clearly marked saga territory and was, I sup[pose,  more difficult to market.

 Although distinctively twentieth century historical, Sandie Shaw and the Millionth Marvell Cooker and The Woman Who Drew Buildings are not by any manner of means sagas. Nor are my later novels An Englishwoman in France (a slightly spooky novel about a woman whose daughter has been murdered).The same goes for my most recent novel - first called The Art of Retreating, now renamed The Search For Marie France which recedes from the present day to France during World War 2.

So, in my writing life I’ve kept my faith with myself and written the novels I wished to write. Then my very decent publishers – along with most other publishers – lost their faith in the popular well written mid-list.

The paradox is that, without exception, my novels continue do very well in libraries where the greatest readers follow their fancy.  Readers have followed me as I kept faith with myself and wrote the novels I was impelled to write. They just seem to turn up again and again to read something with my name on the cover, whether or not it looks like a saga cover, (Surely in twenty first century business-speak this should count as the best focus group ever??)

Where was I? Oh. With the elegant Mr Evans and the twinkly Mr Nesbitt
Their discussion was imbued with an almost feminine insight (compliment, that..) about their common  and uncommon backgrounds. We learnt about the bad karma of great professional success surfing the wave of personal misfortune. They spoke movingly about their mothers and with dealing with their different but equally tragic deaths.
It was fascinating watching these very different men with substantial artistic egos winkling from each other revelations which would have been unavailable in professional interviewers. There were signs of editing and cutting which indicated that it was part of a much longer, perhaps more rambling (perhaps even more interesting) conversation,
This is a great  format for exploring the field of popular culture. I would watch it again if your machinery allows it.

If this has caught a smidgen of  your interest – all my novels are in your library, on Amazon or on Kindle . Click.
Or to see a complete list of possibles categories  click here

Stop Press! Great Workshoppers.

Wednesday's workshop was great - more people that I'd expected but everyone set to with such a will, tackling the series of challenging tasks with energy and imagination. Some great words are emerging and two new people have asked to come to next week's workshops. They will be very welcome.

Wednesday 8th  2pm Bishop Auckland Town Hall. 

(Scroll  down to last post for details.)  

I was touched that my lovely sister Susan did
some great research  and found the house
 in North Wales  where  our
grandmother was born in the 1890s.
Now, there's a story there...

Join My Back to Basics Workshops at 2pm in May 1st

 

I’ve always said that teaching is the best way of learning. After so many books and so many years I still have stuff to learn about the fascinating process of writing. So it’s with the delight of anticipation that for the last couple of weeks I’ve been working very hard with my friend Avril Joy preparing for the first of a series of four writing workshops at my old stamping ground, Bishop Auckland Town Hall Library.

We have called this series Back to Basics with the idea that in any craft of skill going back to basics is a refreshing and inspiring process for both experienced and new practitioners.

So, as  well as being a refresher course for existing writers who want to look at their method

and process, these workshops have been designed for absolute beginners. These starter workshops are intended to give them confidence to make a start whether their aim is fiction, memoir, family stories or factual writing there will be something inspiring here for everyone.

We will explore the role of writing in everyone’s life even if they don’t consider themselves yet to be a writer - letters, diaries, reports, for instance. We will show the value of normal use of language in speaking, recounting, telling stories. We will talk of the necessity for more experienced writers to audit their skills and practices and go back to basics to evaluate their work, to refresh and rediscover their style.

This first workshop will involve three different and intense writing experiences which will be productive for all writers, from absolute beginners to those who have poems, stories or even books in their literary folio.

These workshops will not involve individuals reading out their own work, as I’ve come to think that this process is time-consuming and more suited to some writers than others. I know that reading out is a convention in workshops but I sometime think that reading out loud at an early stage can be destructive for some people. In the latter of this series fo four workshops we will find other ways of sharing work

So if you happen to be reading this and are in travelling distance of lovely old Bishop Auckland come along and join Avril and me and learn how to develop your writing by going Back to Basics.

As I said at the beginning I think that teaching is the best way of learning so I am sure we will learn lots from you as well.

The workshops start on

Wednesday 1s May at Bishop Auckland Town Hall 2 -4.30

The workshops are free to you but BATH will charge you £2 for the tea/coffee and biscuits includedas a the treat to keep us going.

Workshops Start at 2pm May 1st Bishop Auckland Town Hall. Ring to reserve a place.

 

 

Address: Market Pl, Bishop Auckland, County Durham DL14 7NP

Phone:0300 026 9524

Faces and Fiction Your/My Novel and Work in Progress

Think how we refer to the face in our language: the term face is already loaded with metaphor and ulterior meaning.

Consider:
Putting a good face on it; facing someone down; facing it;  facing up to things; being two faced; facing the consequences

The physiology of the faces has its own message system:
Eye being the window to soul; hollow eyes; haunted eyes; shadowed eyes; bright eyes; folded lips; wide smile; rigid jaw

Movements of  the face are part of the action in our prose:

The Writer's Challenge:
There's no art to find
 the mind's construction
 in the face. Shakespeare.

 frowning, raising eyebrows; smiling widely; grinning,  winking, smirking, winking, leering, sneering, glowering, eyes narrowing. Every micro expression has meaning that you may use..

The face is work in progress. It tracks the passage of time:
Faces seem to seem  remain the same yet alter  through time: plain faces become handsome, distinguished with time;  pretty people become plain with the passage of years. 

Faces are the place where the act of living maps your experience:

He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.  P G Wodehouse.

( A thought: A child's face  is hard to paint and hard to write, How do you paint or write a blank canvas? Even great painters have problems with children, Look at Van Gogh! We can portray children more through their emanations and actions, their wriggling and rolling, their screaming and chattering...) 



Returning to the grown-ups and how in our prose we use faces in our prose to indicate feeling, drama and action. 

 His eyes made a person think that
he heard things that no one else
 had ever heard, that he knew things
 no one had ever guessed before.
He did not seem quite human. 
Carson McCullars

Very strong genres do use direct description to establish the character so that we know very quickly the appearance of the hero/ine so we can  fit them into the shorthand stereotype of handsome hero, surly but good-looking  detective, beautiful maiden, sultry temptress, dark but handsome villain; or/burly but attractive action man. Guidelines for purely genre fiction assert quite rightly that we need to see our main characters  early  in the novel. Straight  description is very efficient for this.

My preferred way is to use the face in the process of the storytelling.I prefer not  to describe directly 
but to  allow the reader to  infer indirectly as the narrative grow. What happens in the face is part of the whole gradual package of the novel as we get to know the characters, their age and demeanour, their motivation, their transitory meaning as part of the ongoing narrative: 
What different things happens in their face as they speak to someone they love, they hate, they despise, they need? 
What happens when your character focusing on a particular task? eg the tip of my tongue shows when I am concentrating on drawing or writing.

My comforr is that old age,
that ill-layer up of beauty
can do more spoil upon my face
  Shakespeare.

More from Shakespeare:
-  Of course the face can tell lies. God has given you one face and you make yourself another.
- False face must hide what false heart must know
- I never see they face but I think on hellfire.


And one from JG Salinger
- She was not one for emptying her face of expression. 

Of course we don't have to make our characters gurning, grinning puppets but the use of  the mobility of the face to indicate character, drama and action is available to us and if we use it artfully and with restraint it will add vivid layers to our prose.

To illustrate: Work in Progress from my current novel :

... He spoke to them in the old tongue but both brothers answered in Latin. Kynan grinned at Magnus’s surprise. ‘Our father had us spend two seasons in the house of a merchant in Rome, an agent who sold our lead right across the great inland sea.’...

(In the context of the narrative the word 'grinned' has much more meaning here than the baring of teeth,..,,)

Half Way Through: Ten Tips for Editing Your/My novel

I’ve spent a week or two now carrying out an in-depth edit on the first half of the new novel and am very much reminded of  the words of John Braine in his 1974 book How To Write a Novel 

'The most difficult task for a novelist is the movement of people between time and place.'   

This deceptively simple statement occurs to me every time I embark on some heavy duty editing.

For me beginning a novel, involves researching, thinking, imagining, writing sketches, making bubbles of action and linking them into some kind of loose structure. It involves collecting images, drawing people and pictures, making maps (see my post about Mapping the Imagination).

So now, I’ve just finished the half-way-through-edit and here for you  is my new list of

 Top ten things to do on a half way edit.  

This involves: 

1.     Gradually recognising and refining your own style (always learning …)

2.     Establishing the strong foundation on which you will build the rest of the novel

3.      Inserting earlier the significant detail now emerging in the narrative.

4.     Reinforcing time/place where it seems useful

5.      Ensuring consistency in place and characterisation

6.     Checking continuity of action 

7.     Changing, evolving and establishing names as characters reveal themselves

8.     Recognising and endorsing the significant characters and points of view

9.     Ensuring that the structure is doing its job for the reader. - This could include the way the
       chapter and part structure work

10.                        Recognising structural implications for the rest of the novel

After that at last you (and I!)  can think forward to the second half of the novel. For me this means more thinking, more imagining, more images, and … er … another map…

I thought maybe you’d like to see some Work in Progress

… Lleu raises his hand. I close my eyes and think of the statue of Branwen in the centre of the pool in my father’s house. Then I raise my hand and, side by side, Lleu and I begin, steady step by steady step, to walk on fire. We do not hurry.  The crowd breaks into great applause as finally we leap back onto the grass at the far end. The old priest, still standing there at the end of the fire pit waves his staff across us and sings a blessing. I am filled with energy and delight and smile broadly and wave at the great circle of people there. Lleu holds up his arms in a victory salute. The young stick fighters beat their sticks against each other making a rattling rhythm. A pipes-man squeezes out a few notes. Another man makes his elk horn pipe squeal.

Lleu smiles and shushes the crowd. ‘Would any here like to walk the fire as do my sister and I?’ He grins broadly at the chorus of groans…

Writer's Note 5 : The charming, narcissistic Rosamund Lehmann

(One of an occasional series here about writers and writing, inspired by my correspondence with my friend Virginia Hiller...)

I've  just finished the biography of Rosamund Lehmann by Selena Hastings. Fascinating. A life more strange than fiction. - A beautiful, talented girl and woman who knew intimately

The shy, clever, seductive
intensely self-aware young beauty,,,

just everyone in the literary world of the mid twentieth century - from the Bloomsburies and Ian Fleming to Laurens Van Der Post; from Edith Sitwell to Carmen Callil,

On the downside she was narcissistic and stunningly passive aggressive. Possessing enormous  and seductive charm she looked for admiration and obsession from those around her -men and women - and was a terrible enemy to those who - as she saw it - rejected her. (Most famously Cecil Day Lewis.) She was case-book paronoid and obsessed with the emotions of the people with whom she was intimate.

She was incontinently disclosive in her desire to express her pain at the way people -0 as she saw it -  were treating her. As she grew older (scenes of things to come for some of us ...) she became something of a monstre sacre, ballooning because of her child like love of sweet things but still seeing the woman in the mirror as the beauty she had been. 

This biographer was one of those  who admired and loved her but witnessed this ultimate decay of a unique personality. Her critical assessment of the few novels is admiring but very sharp in its insight regarding  the inferred autobiographical nature of the characters and their doomed emotional journeys.

Reading biographies is a two edged pleasure. On the one hand it gives an illuminating

Still beautiful, seductive, clever,
 and intensely self-aware in old age.

access to uniquely talented personalities. On the other it can show you that your angels have feet of clay. 

This biography, however, has sent me back to Lehmann's novels - particularly Weather in The Streets. Nobody does better than Lehmann a woman's yearning to be loved and her desolation at being rejected. 

In the light of the contemporary  Women's Prize for Writing,  there is much discussion about  whether there is such a thing as 'Women's Writing'. Lehmann - much admired by men - disliked to be known as a women's writer but I feel  this biography shows her as just that. 

And being a bit that way myself, I found her ill-fated late-life obsession with life after death fascinating....

- a good read on a cold dark day!

Artistry and Playfulness Move Through The Fair

My friend Juliet became the fourteenth person -  alongside Avril Joy* and the knowledgeable Jack Haggerty of Glasgow - to offer me a new version of the eternal She Moved ThroughThe Fair - eulogised  here before

Juliet recommended Sandy Denny singing it with Fairport Convention. She has the ‘60s LP. I checked it online and found it at a sky high price in Vinyl far beyond my modest writer’s means. 

Then Juliet put me onto the re-engineered CD, well within my means. This features She Moved Through The Fair, sung by Sandy Denny - alongside great songs written and performed by the group and with the addition of iconic songs by Joni Mitchell (Eastern Rain) and Bob Dylan (I’ll Keep It With Mine).

I relished Sandy Denny‘s version of She Walks Through the Fair. Sung with elegant power and mystery, it is different again.  

Then on the tenth listen to this version I realise that in verse six Sandy is singing:

…I dreamt it last night that my dead love came in

So softly she entered her feet made no din

She came close beside me and this she did say …

Other versions I’ve heard render this as my dear love came in

This, of course reflects the dynamic nature of such traditional songs. Not only can they be re-interpreted, they can be re-worded.

But I very much prefer the dear love version

I did think the use of dead love  was a pity here. It’s easy to know from the more original versions is that it is a song of love and death, but in these the death part has to be inferred by the listener which increase the subtlety of the song, enhancing the enigma and the ancient significance of the words.

Still, Sandy Denny delivers the song superbly on this CD.

 Thank you Juliet.

But another great treat with this CD Album is the narrative in the booklet

It seems that in about 1968 Fairport Convention were playing a gig at Essex University. ‘We were given a classroom as a dressing room…some members, probably Sandy and Martin started to do a caricature (on the board) … it grew and grew … all the knobs on the amps, the names the voltage wires…’

They moved on, but later needing a cover for their new album they sent someone to photograph the board before the cartoon was rubbed off.

The artwork here reflects the  intuitive artistry and playfulness characterised the style and freedom of the music world in the '60s and '70s before the profiteering puppet-masters got the industry by the jugular.  Part of this was the playful, sometimes surreal, creative crossover between art and music, between music and lyrics, between art school students who explored their new freedoms in music and young audiences who recognised their own world and concerns in the new lyrics.

Words, Writing and Art have gone hand in hand in my own world since then.

From my collage: looking at me from the past.
She did move through the fair.

Though no great artist I do draw and paint and once had the privilege of teaching art in school.

I tend to use art analogies when trying to explain my writing process, talking of blocking in a large canvas before the start of a novel; adding colour and a depth field to a character.

I also work at the intricacy of my novel through building collages which spread across my study wall with a life of their own. And there is music. I describe myself as ‘on song’ when the writing is flowing and I am creating prose about the people, places and actions – living in a world that moves and lives before me.

In the case of my new novel my moving world is very ancient, plucked out of a non-recorded world where my collages drip with ancient maps and old cloth, with images of beautifully wrought objects handled by my people, with speculative images – some drawn my me – to feed my imagination.

I also feed that imagination with the ancient myths that came down to us through song and spoken story, trickling down from then to now.

One such song is She Moved Through The Fair.

*See Avril’s extraordinarily insightful writing blog at www.avriljoy.com