The Garden Cure for Writers,

A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself. – May Sarton

 I have just noticed that I wrote my last post on W.H. Auden in December....

I have suffered rather a fallow time in between then and now, when darkness has been my enemy – particularly last winter on short winter days. But now I   have turned to the light to find restoration and a cure.

I have begun sitting, reading and working in the large bay window that faces my garden. From here I can see the grass and the circle of trees that crowd around it. Peering through my trees to a nearby garden further down the bank I can see to  tall silver birch trees. These slender trees stand tall and still when there is no wind. When the wind blows they bend and sway in a supple fashion, new leaves trembling on  fine branches. When there is a storm  these trees are whipped from one side to the other. But never break. They speak the language of the storm until it fades away and when they can they stand still and graceful yet again. In the months when I spent a good deal of time looking out of my  window I got to calling them The Two Sisters.

Now the year has turned and the sun has been shining, spilling bright light day after day into the house and across the garden. Now I have  even begun to sit outside and look around me to see, smell and feel the garden - the trees, the shrubs, the plants and flowers and to listen to the birds who populate the old trees,

Although from necessity the borders have been neglected in this year, instead of feeling guilty I relish their very life and extravagant creativity. The borders are brimming over with perennials split, planted and trans-planted last year in the optimistic times before I landed up in hospital.

My rewards this year are the crowded green borders not tricked up with the noisy colours of bedding plants. Instead I am enjoying the fulsome green energy of the perennials threaded through with rogue bluebells here and there. Someone once told me that if you live in on ancient woodland then when you leave it to go back to nature then bluebells will pop up everywhere. This seems to be the case here. Normally at this time of year far end of the bar the garden, down the bank -- the more consistently neglected part of the land - is dense with bluebells. But they rarely appear in the more attended to edges and borders. Not so this year. They are in every border, popping up like random commas on a scribbled page.  

One challenge of all this growth is the brambles that run riot in the spaces that have been neglected. These are prickly, wily plants, weaving their way through all the borders - great sinewy snakes that  shout danger from the side-lines. So, I’ve been looking out my leather gloves and secateurs to do battle with these invasive monsters. Unlike the bluebells they are not welcome here. You can see that I am now motivated to get out into the garden to try and control the brambles. So that is real progress for me.

But most important of all I have learnt again to sit in the garden with a cup of tea or a glass of wine in my hand enjoying the seventeen shades of green interspersed up by the occasional Canterbury Bell or the striving  rose or the odd insistent Azalea

My good friend sitting here with me lifts her glass and says, ‘Let’s call it a woodland garden this year and celebrate its natural beauty.’

I’ll drink to that.  

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

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A special note for you: As well as tackling the brambles I have also  been  motivated  to  re-structure and relaunch my website, now called

 Wendy Robertson’s Damselfly Books

There are significant changes. If you have a minute, take a look 

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

 

Text , Sound and Cultural Taboos.

Putting your head above the parapet is often proscribed by powerful cultural taboos.  This is particularly so in the regions of the English working class from where I emerge. The old childhood maxim of not ‘making a show’ of yourself or drawing attention to yourself can bite deep into quite mature  personalities.

As a child and young woman I was achingly shy, didn’t like encountering strangers or being at a crowded gathering. In those early days, not ‘making a show’ of myself suited me fine. But it seems to me now that underneath the surface self of this watchful, tongue-tied girl, a raging exhibitionist was hiding.

It was hidden well. When I first went to college I lost my voice for a week before things normalised, But the inhibitions stayed. When I first started teaching I lost my voice for two weeks. I had this very boisterous class of twelve year olds in my first school. So I had to write QUIET!! in very large letters on the board quite a few times in those two weeks. They were great kids, though.

All that time,  though,  the exhibitionist was at work - writing articles, stories, mapping novels. It was a secret  nobody knew about. Writing was a perfect medium for this shy tongue-tied girl. She could say, imagine, invent what she liked without drawing attention to herself.

But the fact is that in teaching it only works if you do draw attention to yourself. Teaching children taught me not to hide behind my shyness, to let the exhibitionist inside have her airing.  She could be funny, daring, expressive. She could be herself. The children loved her, They didn’t know you shouldn’t put your head above the parapet or make a show of yourself so it was OK. That was a comfort.l

After that  working with adults in large groups was a very big leap for this shy girl, But she’d learned in school that there was something in her that could really teach people, really do this thing,  as long as she became her other, more exhibitionist self.

Then, when the books and stories began to be published it seemed that I was not just looking over the parapet , I’d leapt onto it. But now  I had the book to protect me. Or the books. It was not really me, it was them. They were the things  ‘making the show’. The shy, embarrassed  person that is still me was only holding them.

And now we have the crazy situation of the community radio programme. This voice that repeatedly let me down in the early days is put to work, up there to be judged.  I hear my voice on the tapes and think how strange it is, how thin and nervous I sound. But I’m pleased now that I’ve learned the basics of sound editing. Editing sound means that I can nip and tuck the excesses of the reluctant voice.  Just as I nip and tuck the texts of my novels and the stories, making them their best selves, I can begin to nip and tuck my voice so its becomes its best self for the programme. Which best self it expresses, the shy girl or the exhibitionist, I’m not quite sure.

I’m loving the creativity of putting The Writing Game together, and talking to and listening to these great writers and readers. Still though, the shy girl and the exhibitionist live on in me side by side and I have to deal with them.

The learning curve continues.

wx

The Best Ever - A Hand Made Birthday

 

  

I only started to celebrate my birthday last year, with a small gathering of people - each one a very special writing friend. That was so enjoyable that we had a few more enjoyable un-birthday gatherings during the year. But yesterday my actual birthday came round again and the same small gathering joined me at a round table at the historic  Pump House, Durham to celebrate not just my birthday but ourselves, our own survival in the constraints of sometimes challenging lives. We missed our friend Fadia who was away publicising her book.

So we ate well, drank wine, laughed and talked. (I think we might have been quite a loud table.) We talked of everything – from Hilary Mantel to Will Self, from Michael Foot to Nye Bevan to Barbara Castle, from the Emperor’s New Clothes to surprisingly winning books and films, from misery literature and film to the dangers of voyeurism, to the delights or otherwise of younger men, to jealousy and rivalry in the field of writing, to the challenged state of publishing nowadays, to inheritance of traits and the possibly suspect fascination with one’s own genealogy, to the need to look forward rather than back.

In all the talk I discovered that I had only started to know how to be happy – to laugh and see and be spontaneous - when I went to my small rural college when I was eighteen. Then on to the possibility that life might be a series of self –reinventions.

There was a great deal of laughter. I am a bit of a sober-sides myself but my friends are very witty. I noticed the delicacy, strength and expressiveness of their writers’ hands.

Then I went home to find I had missed a birthday call from my dear friend Judith Gates in Florida and thought how much she would have enjoyed the party. (She joined us in one or our un-birthday lunches last year…)

And there was a card from my friends Judy who is just now in New Zealand.

I had a little breather then, and watched a  saved episode of House, my favourite TV drama. I looked through my lovely cards which told me so much about myself and how my friends and family see me. Then I started to read a birthday present – a beautiful book about how to draw - and decided that this was the way I would teach myself to relax this year. I would teach myself to draw.

Then my son and his wonderful family surged in. A big kiss and a hug from my Grahame. Then greetings from Angus and Calum disguised by bunches of flowers, Then a kiss from Kate who was carrying the mandatory bottle of bubbly. The a hug from her lovely mother who handed over two beautifully wrapped square glass vases. And chocolates. And great, great chat.

Then later, just after B and I had settled down to a lovely quiet house, an hour long call from my dear girl Debora, known on this blog as love and a licked spoon. The interesting thing was that our long meandering conversation was a wide-ranging, intensely interesting, one to one version of the round table conversation with my friends this lunch time.

On my birthday this year everything connected, It was the best birthday. Ever. WX

Magpies, Canal Boats, and a Bottle of Red

I was thinking how we writers are like magpies. picking up bright things here and there, shaking them around like bits in a kaleidoscope so to make a grand, brand new pattern. If the shaking up works, then  the diamond seeds of the original  elements will - with luck - create a new truth that shines out and strikes a universal chord in those who encounter it.

Let me travel back with you a month in time: I am walking along a narrow tree-lined path along the Canal du Midi in southern France. The canal glows greenish silver, the nightingales are treating me to the longer version of their song. A turtle  is keeping pace (or is it keeping flipper?) with me in the middle of the canal.

I am relaxed, relishing the experience second by second, but my sharp magpie eyes are missing nothing.

This part of the canal  is lined with boats of all kinds and sizes –many houseboats;  some rather up-market tourist boats; some boats housing summer water gypsies; one boat which looks like a junkyard on water.

On the covered verandah of one houseboat I note a man of about sixty - a long, fit, silver haired, well-seasoned kind of man in drill trousers and bare feet. He’s lying on a long garden seat with his legs over one end, reading one of those old green and cream Penguin books – battered and well used. He looks English but I would not swear to it.

I walk on and by a long boat I pass a group of men on the bank, barbecuing something that smells of garlic and tomatoes and burnt flesh. Their v0ices rumble. They don’t look like tourists. Just further along is a girl with glossy dark hair swinging from a rope-swing fixed up on one of the great trees that line the canal. On the back- swing of the rope she glances back towards the men, the image of flirting temptation.

Further along I note a plump elderly man who  is organising his water bottles on the roof of his narrowboat, filling them from a large container. He smiles politely. ‘   ’jour  Madame!’  I bask in this French politeness and move on.

Half an hour later I return the same way. (I like doing this, whether driving or walking. The perspectives on a return journey are entirely different from those on the outward journey).

Now, the plump old man from the narrow boat is way ahead of me on the path, a bottle of red wine in his hand. The girl on the swing is  talking to the barbequing man.  A small child  is clinging to her, his arm around her neck. When I finally reach the houseboat again, the plump man is sitting at the table with the silver haired man. The bottle of red is open on the table, glasses half full. And these two men are talking, gesticulating. It looks like some pleasurable nightly ritual to me.

So there you are: a magpie’s collection from a summer afternoon walk, ready for the kaleidoscope. One shake of the kaleidoscope and I could have a short story. Another, and I could have the makings of a novel. Another could give me a pilot of a TV Series and … and….

Mrs Wood, my wonderful, very original, art tutor once said. ‘Once you learn how to look, you will never be bored.’  She was right there wasn’t she?

wx

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