Changing My Priority Back To the Written Word.

Here on Lifetwicetasted you have heard from time to time of my adventure into community broadcasting with my programme THE WRITING GAME. Through producing writing and editing 23 one hour programmes I have learned a great deal. It has been exciting and full of month-by-month pressure. If I were thirty years younger I might  have made a career of it.

But I am a writer: my commitment is to the written word and I must now focus properly on that,
You might be interested in the whole story, so below is the  piece I have posted on my Bishop FM Blog which will give you the whole picture.  It has been a great experience is the significance of the spoken word and the deadline disciplines of broadcasting.  Any writer out there who wants to spread her or his creative wings whould give community broadcasting a try.

This is what I said:

'...They say every good thing should come to an end and I am sad to say that, due to pressure of work, I will be unable to continue with The Writing Game.
This winter - writing being my day job - I will be completing the third of three short story collections[1]* This new collection is called Painting Matters & Other Stories and features painting, painters, teachers and other life-changers. I will also be embarking in a big new novel involving ... er ...ghosts.

On The Writing Game we have celebrated writing and writers, reading and readers. We have interviewed great writers such as David Almond, Pat Barker, Terry Deary, Kathleen Jones, Maureen Almond and Ann Cleeves. We have featured talented local writers such as Barbara Laurie, Geri Auton, Noma Neil, Eileen Elgey and Alison Carr. Also musician Andy Jackson and Su Kane.

Of course the Writing Game is not just one person. On the The Writing Game team – all from Bishop Auckland – we have had novelist and short story writer Avril Joy, gardener, librarian, writer and expert on mining art Gillian Wales and historian Glynn Wales who reads more widely and more eclectically than anyone I know.

Between the four of us on our team we have celebrated the Dickens Bi-Centenary, the joys of writing and reading Children’s Literature, the inspirations of music, gardening and travel, and the writing of Bishop Auckland history; we have showcased the writing skills involved in writing novels, short stories, memoirs and poetry.

 With valued technical advice from Bishop FM’s James Burrage and Terry Ferdinand, and encouraged by Gillian Campbell, I have learned a such in the course of producing these many one hour programmes – researching content, recording interviews and discussions, editing two or three hours of source material into the coherent 56 minutes which is The Writing Game. This has all been very fascinating and absorbing – a great learning curve for me. But in the end it has left little time and energy for my equally fascinating and absorbing 'day job' of writing novels and stories.

The good news is that all of the Writing Game programmes will remain here as THE WRITING GAME ARCHIVE an archive of podcasts on the Bishop FM Website as well as being featured on the widely available iTunes. So the opportunity is there for everyone to listen again to these good words about reading and writing on The Writing Game.

So in signing off here I would like to thank Gillian C, James and Terry for allowing and encouraging me to share with them the airwaves of South Durham. And Gillian W, Glynn and Avril or their ongoing inspiration and comradeship. (I hope you will hear their voices again on the aor waves of Bishop FM.)
Thank you all so much.

I hope I too can come back here now and then to share with you my opinions about writing and books which may be in the news. If you want to share with me the ongoing delights of my day job, look at my blog at http://www.lifetwicetasted.blogspot.co.uk

Until then, happy writing, happy reading.

Wendyx ...

[1] The first two -The reissued Knives & Other Stories and a new collection Fear of Flight &  other Stories –   are both  now commissioned for publication. The third collection Painting Matters & Other Stories is in its final stages of writing...  '

So now, back properly to the day job...

Madame Claire, Menton and the Story of a Book

 

Kim Herring – see last post, ‘Found Treasures’  - has sent me an image of  this 1923 book, its illustration and its inscription which reads:

For Miss Park  Who, in the opinion of  the authoress must shoulder the blame and some of the credit for this first effort   .Affectionately      Susan Ertz                      Menton April1923

The picture  and the inscription tells us yet more about the story.  Here we have a gracious upright, Edwardian figure, complete with lace cap and collar,  set against a frieze of bright young nineteen twenties creatures posing in the brand new fashions of the day and trying to forget the ravages of World War One. Music, fashion, a very twentieth century elegance - what can Miss Claire have to do with this? This is an image of change.

Digging around, I find that Susan Ertz  was born in 1894, so when she inscribed this book she would be just twenty nine years old. She went on to write many novels which centre  around female characters who enter a challenging world at first timidly and then coming to terms with what is often a hostile environment. So Madame Claire is Susan Ertz’s  first novel of many.  Apparently one admired novel was  The Proselyte a story of a London woman who marries a Mormon Missionary and moves with him to Utah. That sounds interesting.

Digging further,  I find that Susan Ertz was born in Walton on Thames, Surrey. However her parents parents, Charles and Mary Ertz, were American.  As a child she moved between England and America but chose to live in England when she was 18.     So - as this was  1912! - eighteen year old Susan was doing what her heroines were to do – moving into an unknown , possible scary world.  In 1932, aged 38 ,  she married Major John Ronald McCrindle a barrister, formerly an army officer. (Is there a story there, I wonder?)

Information is sketchy. Susan Ertz died in 1985. And it seems that one of her later works, In the Cool of the Day, was the source of  a film of the same name which came out in  1963, starring  Jane Fonda, Peter Finch and Angela Lansbury.

Digging around my own bookshelves I find I actually have a copy of  Madame Claire in a Penguin edition!  It was  reissued in 1985 as part of a boxed set of facsimiles of the first ten Penguin books published as part of Penguin’s fiftieth anniversary. Susan Ertz  sits  there alongside Andre Maurois, Ernest Hemingway, Eric Linklater, Dorothy L Sayers, Agatha Christie, Beverly Nichols. Mary Webb and Compton McKenzie.  To my shame I have not yet read Madame Claire. But I will.

Madame Claire was first published by Penguin in 1935. Before that this novel was first published by Ernest Benn in 1923 and and went on up be published in fourteen impressions before becoming part of the Penguin revolution in 1935. And here I am, writing about it in 2010. 

The 1923  edition has the publishers wonderfully romantic publisher’s imprint. I suppose it would be called a logo nowadays. Isn’t it evocative?

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So there you have it. The story of a book and its wanderings through time. For me, though, the real story in in the inscription. Here you have the twenty nine year old aspiring American novelist meeting a Miss Park in the South of France, in  beautiful, fashionable Menton in 1923. I feel the young novelist could not have modelled the guru-esque Madame Claire on herself. So perhaps Miss Park was the model for this woman who gives others such wise advice. Perhaps that’s why she should have both the blame and the credit for this first novel. And she signs off affectionately. The inscription is a significant gesture.

As a novelist myself I know how important that first novel is. I also know there is another novel of time, place and character buried in here somewhere.

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