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...

Radio Gremlins!

As you know here, I am enjoying the work for The Writing Game, my community radio programme all about writing. It is hard work but good on all kinds of levels.* I’ve had good personal response and the people I work with from the station are so kind and clever.

But if you managed to get to hear Tuesday’s programme you will think I’m crazy.

I have to admit that I myself listened with increasing consternation. Gremlins were dancing around in the works. The very good reading by writer Geri Auton was cut altogether; the beginning was cut; the book sequence was cut so that one crucial title was missed. Adverts blasted into the centre of the programme and at one point screeching music from some other line intruded. I have to say I cringed. 

It honestly was a case of crossed wires and probably really nobody’s fault. However, James, the Programme Director is on the problem and he and I are going to re-edit the programme this week and it will go out next Tuesday at seven in its proper form. That version will be on the podcast. He tells me all the podcasts should be available, The previous programmes should be podcasted soon. I’ll let you know here when that happens.

Certainly my learning curve is climbing! Things can only get better from this.

wx

For example, I had the enormous pleasure yesterday of recording a long interview with the extraordinary , iconoclastic Terry Deary, writer of the worldwide best sellers, The Horrible History series. He was talking about his new -  longer-  World War Two children’s novel. Put Out The Light. We have so much to learn from Terry about the Writing Game. This marvellous conversation will go out on The Writing Game the first Tuesday in September.

Schools and The Great Story Vandalism

I did feel like hanging up my hat when I heard on late night radio that some school somewhere  had given up its library altogether. I’ve been too heartbroken since to check it out, deciding it was just a bad dream and we are not really on the edge of a precipice, preparing to leap back into barbarism.

Now this fear has returned as, on succeeding days in my daily paper, I read interviews with two great children’s writers who separately nail the importance of school experience in the making or breaking of a story reader. Michael Morpurgo, the eminent ex children’s laureate, reflects on his own experience where, having loved stories at his mother’s knee he went to school, where ‘stories’ became ‘texts’ to be studied rather than enjoyed. Rescued from that by an inspired university teacher he became a teacher himself when ‘…the only time I had all their heads pointing one way was when I was telling them a great story.’

The iconoclastic writer Terry Deary goes a step further, declaring that he detests schools with a passion. In his own education his obvious talents went unremarked and unsupported and (unlike Michael Morpurgo) his obvious intelligence did not thrust him on to a university education. Terry is cynical about the value of schools, saying here, ‘Schools are an utter waste of a young life… (the bureaucrats said) “lock them up all day in the same room and call it school” ’.

Although there are ironic, comedic overtones to Terry’s assertions here,  one senses heartfelt conviction. He would ‘cut off my left arm’ rather than go into schools to read his immensely popular books to children.

Yet, (declaring an interest, as I have been there), when he talks to children in other arenas he definitely has ‘all the heads turned in his direction’ as the children wait with baited breath for the next part of the story. Then afterwards the children wait patiently and expectantly in a queue clutching their books ready to sign. And when their individual turn comes he speaks to them directly, matily: he is one of them. They go away, eyes shining. (The other great writer who achieves this par excellence is the children’s writer, David Almond).

In fact, Terry, like Michael Morpurgo and David Almond, is a great teacher who doesn’t need a school. Great storytellers. by definition, are great teachers. They can do it under a tree, in a cave, on a street-corner. For proof of this, go right back to – amongst others - the Irish, the Greeks and the native Americans.

With his million-selling Horrible Histories and his many other firecracker works of fiction Terry locks onto the anarchic child in all of us and makes her see how wild, how strange, how interesting has life been through the ages and makes us reach for more of the horrible stuff...

Of course there are still great teachers and librarians in school who – under economic and institutional constraints  -  do a fantastic job of teasing and seducing children into the world of books, putting the right book into the right hand and the right time, essentially giving them a doorway to their future. My friend Gillian W is just such a one, as is my Australian correspondent here called  The Genteel Arsenal, (also called Bookpusher) whose site demonstrates perfectly the creative sometimes surreal matrix of obsession with  books and children that is the sign of a good librarian.

But still the vandalism goes on! How many children get As or starred As for English and have never read a whole book – just bite-sized chunks that will allow them to score well on directed questions? How many  clever thoughtful children have missed out on even this much story (losing therefore the benefits listed below) because they are deemed not academic? How many teachers (of all subjects, not just English) have time, in their hard pressed lives, to read full texts around their subjects – or, horror of horrors – for sheer enjoyment?

I taught in schools at a time when the good teacher, intellectually independent while still well prepared and delivering the goods, was not shackled to the Sadean chair of  tick boxes and computerized reports.  Working with the primary children I told stories continually, of my life, and of theirs, of the ideas we were tackling and of life around. And we always had a good story from a good book every day. I liked to read that to them in the morning, when they and I were fresh enough to imagine the wonder of the world in the book. So we were united and this set the tone of the day.

I have to emphasise that all this was not instead of a directed curriculum. It was incorporated all the significant elements of the curriculum and made it memorable. They learned it through story, you see?

So what do children learn through story?  They learn to empathise, historically and culturally; to incorporate their own world into the larger one;  they learn that cause is followed inevitably by consequence; that the weak can hold their own with the strong; that laughter is good for you; that it’s OK to cry now and then; that the people world can be reflected in the animal world; that in a just world evil does not go unpunished; that hard stuff happens in families and they are not alone.

Crucially they also learn how to sit still and concentrate, to listen, to hear words distinctly and in consequence will read and write more naturally; they extend their vocabulary by hearing new words in context, without the necessity for explanation. They learn to read on their own, with absorption and understanding. And these skills will take them naturally on reading history, geography, politics, current affairs and so they become part of the larger world. And they will always have the pleasure of escaping into a book when all around them is chaos.

Idealistic? Not really. I did it myself as a very poor and disadvantaged child: I learned all the elements listed above and I made it part of my philosophy as a teacher and as a writer.

But the barbarians with their clipboards are rattling the gates. We should watch out.

wxx

 Post Script from (my good friend) Sharon Griffiths from her article in The Northern Echo: her take on this issue

‘........Parkside Sports College at Willington has apparently scrapped its library, though it says books will still be available in the classroom.  And yes, when it comes to reference books, I can see there might be a point.  What’s the point of an out of date atlas when the internet can give you the most immediate up to date information?  We are in a fast changing world and we need to keep up with it.

And yet…. Before you can make the most of the internet and the unbelievable amounts of information available, you need to serve a long apprenticeship.  I can get what I want from the internet in minutes – simply because  all those years ploughing through reference books has trained me in how to access information, to find out what is relevant, and discard the dubious.  Today’s children will have no such training, no weighing and considering what they are told.

But what horrified me is that the governors of the school apparently declared books “obsolete”.  Obsolete?  ALL books?  If anyone involved in any way with teaching children  genuinely believes that, then the world is in meltdown.

Parkside might be much improved, but  with an attitude like that, what it is doing is training children to pass exams, tick the right boxes and little more It has nothing to do with broadening minds, exciting dreams, awaking aspirations and showing the children the endless possibilities of the world.

And absolutely nothing at all to do with education............"

Parkside incidentally, has just recorded its best ever exam results.  Says it all really.’ Sharon Griffiths,

This is a photo of the library where I sat and wrote for periods while I was in France. If you look hard you will see it is a young teacher introducing her small pupils to the delights of this fine library

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