An Idealistic Esperantist

AN IDEALISTIC ESPERANTIST

 Just listening to a Radio 4 Programme about the idealistic international Esperanto movement and am reminded of my great friend, the late Mary Davies, a great Esperantist. Very interesting programme. Try to catch it on BBC Listen Again HERE

In tribute to Mary I am re-posting here two posts from 2009 and 2012. 

From Lifetwicetasted 2009

The Loss of the Exceptional Mary D

I have just heard from Jan Atkins of the death (aged 93) on the Isle of  Arran of my old  friend Mary Davies, a gifted painter, writer and healer.  My novel The Woman Who Drew Buildings was inspired by tales told to me by this wonderful  and somewhat  mystical writer and artist who  lived  in retirement on the Isle of Arran and who  also, in her time, drew buildings for a living. She was - remarkably -  a note taker and reporter for architectural historian Niklaus Pevsner and in her time helped to save important buildings from demolition.

Drawing from Mary's stories, experience and documentation the novel takes place in Poland in 1981 and Britain in 2006 . What’s it about? It’s about  the consuming nature of art, the shadowy place between now and the hereafter; it’s about passionate encounters arising from a confluence of cultures and the long journey of a mother and son to mutual understanding.  

Always a spiritual person, she was a member of the Quaker Community and towards the end of her life she embraced the very inclusive Ba 'Hai faith.  On this coming Monday she will attend own her funeral in the card-boards coffin,  decorated with flower paintings by her friends at a party she held some years ago. When I last visited her it was standing in the corner serving the purpose of a cupboardI met the exceptional Mary Davies at a workshop I ran in Cumbria and She kept in touch. Later in her seventies she published and sold out three novels including the very telling and sensitive Still Waters. I visited her several times on Arran, including once when she regressed me to an earlier life. She believed she herself had gone through several incarnations. 

In my little writing room I have a board plastered with influential pictures and texts. Mary's picture, with her Polish friend Halina, has been there at its centre for six years. So she has remained - and will remain - a true inspiration. I am hoping now that The Woman Who Drew Buildings will act as a tribute to this exceptional woman, this very good soul.

I find myself wondering which world Mary  will grace in her next re-incarnation.

 As a further tribute to Mary I have re-printed here the post I put up when the novel came out. In the extract the list of objects which the boy finds in his mother's flat is the exact list of objects which Mary brought me in two carrier bags and told me to make of them what I would. ... And I did...

From Lifetwicetasted 2012 

The Gift of the Exceptional Mary D

My new novel The Woman Who Drew Buildings is dedicated thus:
‘For the exceptional and inspirational Mary Davies - painter, writer and healer.’
This novel has been in the making for five or six years, when the exceptional Mary D gave me a box of materials about her travels and experience in Poland in the 1980s.

Mary knew I was interested in the idiosyncrasies of letters, notebooks, images and ephemera that I used to inspire my novels. I was, she said, to use them as I wished. We had long talks about her experiences and the the dilemma of using them as inspiration, for what I knew would be - in fact -pure fiction.

It has taken me some years to develop my imaginative take on on all this material and all these ideas in order to allow the novel to emerge of its own volition. It became more fluid – easier - when my purely imagined characters got to grips with the material of their true to life inspiration. In the novel I gave my heroine Marie Matheve.

The Woman Who Drew Buildings was the outcome of all these processes.

The extract below describes the moment when Adam, the estranged son of

Marie Matheve (who has problems of his own) comes upon just such a cache of materials as his mother lies in a coma in hospital:

… Adam’s eye moved to the wardrobe and the pile of boxes above it. Now this he could disturb. He climbed on the dressing stool and started to pull down the boxes. He worked swiftly and as he worked his spirit lifted. He started to drop the boxes so their contents spilled on the polished floor – books, notebooks, papers, brochures, travel documents, bundles of clothes, bright scarves, packets of photos, sheaves of drawings in a disorganised pile….

… he took a second bottle of wine from the fridge, took a new notebook from the pile in her bottom left desk drawer, came back and began to make a careful list of the things that had spilled out of the boxes. His face was burning with wine drunk too fast, his brain was racing, his hand was shaking, but one by one he listed the items from the brown cardboard box:

· Article in Esperantist magazine by Marie Mathéve, recounting her ‘Study In Poland.’

· A newspaper article about the visit of Marie Mathéve’s visit to Poland on a Siropotimist grant to consider buildings.

· Photo of Marie and a younger (very pretty)woman leaning towards each other, making a triangle. On the back Marie has written; Jacinta Zielenska and me in the Cherzov flat.

· Small published book of drawings of Krakov marked Ex Libris D. Adama Zielenski` Paperback with a brown paper cover to protect it.

· Photographic slides, small and hard to see, with viewer,.

· Poland’s Progress edited by Michael Murray first pub 1944 this the third ed 1945

· Krakow by Edward Hartig 1964. Coffee table book.

· Poland by Irena and Jerzy Kostrowicki

Official 1981 guide to Krakow

· Official guide to Katowice

· Notebooks, many notebooks

· Two small red Sylvine notebooks still with their 30p price tag on. Marked 'Poland Diary 1981'

· One Winfield exercise book marked Paris Diary 1985

· Daler Sketchbook full of Marie’s drawings eg: Cherrzov From My Bedroom; steelworks; estate with Tabac in foreground; old steelworks; coal mine looking towards Katowice; done in coloured markers, making her usual style brighter and bolder. But style is unmistakable.

· Spiral Bound Daler Sketchbook with more subtle drawings from Brittany, Paris Luxembourg gardens, View from my window 8th floor Rue de Rennes; Paris. Louvre 1985.

************

( 

If you fancy it, The Woman Who Drew Buildings (ISBN 978-0-7553-3380-6) or online HERE 

 

Writing for Life and ‘Forward Assist’

  Writing for Life and ‘Forward-Assist'.’

Having written professionally for more than twenty years and in those years mentored and tutored hundreds of aspiring writers I am very certain now that settling down to write and writing regularly is a life-affirming, self-enhancing, self-learning, and ultimately a radiant process.

In all these years of writing and working with writers I have started from the premise that everyone can write. We have hundreds of thousands of words available in our heads. Writing Is putting some of them down in an order that makes some kind of sense -  at first to yourself and then later perhaps to others. As you write down you unscramble impressions, perceptions, thoughts and ideas into an order that makes sense to you and could very well strike a chord with others. These ‘others’ might be counted in tens, thousands or hundreds of thousands. The number doesn’t matter.This is how language works and how writing can add meaning and self-worth to any individual in any community.

I have always sensed and felt that this was the case but it came to me as a certainty when I spent several years as writer in residence in a woman’s prison, working with talented and insightful writers, some of whom had read little and had no idea that they could write. (You can find examples HERE )

It was Mike Kirby, ex-governor of that prison who last week introduced Avril and me  Tony Wright Director of the Charity Forward-Assist See site HERE. We just thought we were going for coffee, but things turned out differently.

Not killing fields 

An ex-serviceman turned social and community worker himself, Tony  became concerned at the number of ex-servicemen of all ages (who had served their country in all the wars going back to World War 2) who ended up out of work, or in distress, or mentally stressed or homeless in the confusion engendered by their transition from military to civilian life.

So Tony developed  his idea as the charity Forward-Assist. ‘In Forward Assist ‘peer led’ support groups and structured diversionary activities provide a much needed service that reduces social isolation and promotes community engagement with other veterans on a daily or weekly basis’.

Tony also described his research in the USA and official and unofficial support there for ‘Vets’. It was interesting to hear his description developments in the US after what came to be seen afterwards as the shaming treatment of Vietnam  ‘Vets’.

It was impossible not to be infected by Tony’s energetic enthusiasm as he described the wide range of projects now flourishing under the banner of  Forward-Assist – Fishing, Debating, Cooking, Gardeing,  Drama, Football, Photography and Film, Their debating project ended up with a visit to the House of Commons to experience a parliamentary debate. (See the pictures HERE.) 

And quite naturally we came to the possibility that creative writing could be developed into one   ‘diversionary activity’ under  the First-Assist Banner. It has already been tried once. Tony described one great workshop he had set up with Andrew Motion, which had been a great success.

As I said earlier, I think everyone, given the right safe environment can write. And  also  that settling down to write and writing regularly is a life-affirming, self-enhancing, self-learning, ultimately radiant process.

So it seems natural to us that the outcome of meeting and listening to Tony Wright is that Avril and I have offered ten weeks of workshops for Forward-Assist ex-soldiers, starting in the summer. I know we will all enjoy the process and that the process will, in the end produce interesting pieces of writing on a whole range of subjects. And then – in  co-operation with First-Assist  - we will publish this writing book which will be a credit  to the writers and also make them visible to the much wider world in all their diverse individuality.

We can only hope, in its own way, that our Writing for Life project is as successful as are the football, gardening and the other Forward-Assist projects. We know that writing changes lives. See HERE 

We hope that this will be the case with anyone who joins our First-Assist group in the summer.

SOME INTERESTING LINKS  FOR YOU

Veterans and Mental Health: uTube clip. http://www.forward-assist.com/view/veterans_and_mental_health_documentary

The Dilemma :  http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/scandal-of-britains-soldiers-dumped-on-the-scrapheap-1142803

Tony Wright’s Project http://www.forward-assist.com/library/images/Newcastle%20Journal.pdf

The Debating Group.  http://www.forward-assist.com/view/articles 

The Magic of Words and The Boy Who Likes Chocolate

Like many of us I spent New Year’s Day reading a present. This is an old and much loved habit. This one, though, was very different from the historical tomes of the past ( belated acknowledgement to Hilary Mantel.*)

The book this year was very special as it was a gift from my grandson, who has now graduated from being the boy who loves chocolate to scientist in a white coat. By Mark Forsyth, it is called The Etymoligicon and he inscribed it To Wendy: A Book that I thought would be right up your street. Love… 

Seems that the scientist in a white coat has bought the book for

Aiming for the  right word'.

himself and had gone back and got one for me. He and I have always had a love of words in common. One of our things used to  be playing the dictionary game 

This book The Etymoligicon is a - sometimes droll, sometimes outright funny, always very learned - essay about the words we use, their historical meanings and the extraordinary way in which they are interconnected.

Forsyth explains the deep history of the words that we bandy about as though they sprang out of the ether ready-formed. He shows how words of many nations share deep roots of meaning which are as old as the existence of social communication. In so doing he dissolves artificial differences between people and cultures.

With witty wordy magic he connects the origin of making books to the contemporary notion of  bookmaking; he connect compassion to pantaloons and panties, he connects the Gaullish trouser bragues with braggarts moving neatly onto codpieces and the bulging parts of buildings (braggets) and then –extraordinarily - onto the bracket symbol we use in texts. [ ]

Forsyth leads us on our merry way on the trail from genus to oxygen and nitrogen to things engendered onto military generals. If you are a general …you can order your troops to commit genocide.

And so, so on. In this book this and much more is laid out with such self-deprecating wit that you don’t realise just how much you are learning, not just about language but about the unities that bind our human culture.

Me, I think I know a lot about words and how to use them. But this New Year’s Day, sitting by the fire reading The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth, I learned a lot more. Wx

Leaping out of a sea of words.

What present did you read after Christmas? Write and tell me in two hundred words and I will publish the first three on my new companion blog Twice Tasted Books.

*I see Wolf Hall will be a TV drama. Stand by for another test of whether a great book works as a film/

WIP: FIRST CLASS JOURNEY TO LONDON

WIP

First Class Journey to London

Click-clack, click-clack

No reading, no writing

Three hours of sitting

Embalmed in comfort

Tracks clicking

Click-clack, click-clack

Night journey, no windows,

Marked out by looming signal boxes.

And the length of the land

Flashing by unseen. Click!

Click-clack, click-clack

Bright lights, big city

Beckoning

Tracks clicking.

23^RD December 2014