The Semi-Colon, Knives and Collectable Books

Jeremy rang one day to say he was enjoying my short story collection Knives* ‘… and I wanted to ask you, Wendy , about a novel by R C Hutchinson that’s mentioned in one of the short stories.’

This short story, Married Life? is a forensic, possibly comic, examination of the long marriage between Imogen and her husband Freddie. Submissive wife Imogen has finally broken out, visited India and made new friends.

…Imogen's new friends considered her very special and treated her tenderly. After six weeks she came back with a notebook full of contact addresses all over the world and some wonderful photographs. Freddie barely glanced at them. He was not interested in these wonders. After all he had not been there. And anyway he’d just acquired a first edition R C Hutchinson in an Edinburgh Oxfam shop. He gloated about it to Imogen. Now that he had every edition of every one of Hutchinson's masterpieces, he could relax…

On the phone Jeremy said he himself had a book by R C Hutchinson and didn’t realise they were collectable.

In fact, many years ago, I actually did know a man who collected RC Hutchinson and had all his first editions. This man even gave me his spares and I now have many – not all – R C Hutchinsons and a few first editions.

Who is this writer? you say. In his time Ray Coryton Hutchinson (1907-1975), was a best selling novelist in the class of post-Edwardian novelists such as H E Bates. He became a fellow of the Royal Society Of Literature, won the WHSmith Literary award in 1966, and was on the Booker shortlist for his posthumously published novel A Child Possessed.

Only connect! Just yesterday I saw that Faber’s inspired new print-on-demand initiative, Faber Finds, is including on their list R C Hutchinson’s Testament, first published in 1939. Set in Russia, the story is structured around the evolving relationship of two very different men - on street corners, on the battlefield, in Russian salons and in prison camps. According to the Faber pitch ‘it is a novel steeped with political ideals, with philosophical truths, and with personal heroism.’ According to me, it’s a well researched, rollicking read with great characters, from a great craftsman. It also looks good in this restrained, handsome edition.

So, in the afternoon I was lurking by my bookshelves and my hand fell on Hutchinson’s novel Elephant and Castle, (A novel set in London; I love London-set novels.) The acknowledgement list alone is a quirky rendering of R C Hutchinson’s London in 1948, the time of writing of this novel.

The opening lines of chapter one of Elephant and Castle - which would never survive the counter-pedantic eagle eye of front line editors in today’s publishing - is a miracle of grammar and syntax which could be an exemplar for any aspiring writer who is confused about semi-colons or punctuation in general. (Many are…)

A beginning writer, journalist, or reviewer could also learn much from the substance of the paragraph.

What do you think?

‘…In the strictest sense, it is impossible to give facts uncoloured by opinion. When a man says ‘We had dirty weather’ you know that he disliked it; another would have said ‘It was fresh and exhilarating, though there was a good deal of rain.’ No one can relate all the circumstances, and those which a man selects, deliberately or not, will owe their inclusion at least a little to his prejudices, as well as his habits in observation and memory. But remember too, that your own prejudices operate all the time. Whatever comes to your mind comes through your own screen of intricate associations: the memory of something said in a schoolmaster’s sarcastic voice; the loneliness of a foreign city; a soldier’s kindness in a railway carriage when the first light was revealing frosted fields; defections and disillusionments. The phrase ‘What I should have done …’ marks, as a rule, a misunderstanding of the nature of things. The largest mistake about truth is to imagine it is simple…’ From The Elephant & Castle by RC Hutchinson

Wx

Afternote: Jeremy is not alone. Knives is enjoying positive reactions from all over the place. And my friend Charlie says it’s in big demand in prison.

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

* My mother Barbara used to say that self praise was no recommendation, but here’s what publisher Peter Mortimer wrote to accompany the review copies of KNIVES:

‘Some of the short stories were published in magazines, newspapers and anthologies; one has, surreally, been transformed into a Manga comic. They are collected in book form for the first time and bring together a dozen tales inspired, as the author herself puts it ‘by the consummate experts on the darker side of experience.’
Novelist Wendy Robertson spent three years working with female prisoners, and though these resulting stories may be dark on one level, on other levels they reflect the author’s take on the recoverability of the human spirit, plus the qualities of stoicism, wit and irony. From plunging cat burglars, hallucinating old
ladies, gender bender confessions, and women seeking fleshpot escapes, these short stories expand Robertson’s already considerable reputation. First book of short stories from one of
the country’s best selling novelists.’

IRON Press
0191 253 1901
ironpress@blueyonder.co.uk
www.ironpress.co.uk
5 Marden Terrace
Cullercoats, North Shields
NE30 4PD

http://www.ironpress.co.uk/

So, What's Your Book About?

You meet someone at a party, or in the supermarket or a bookshop: ‘A new book?’ they say. ‘So. What’s it about?’
You struggle to answer. ‘Oh. It’s about these three women who work together in a factory in 1965. And there’s a man. And his father. And two men and their wives. And this celebrity comes… Er…’

Then you say. ‘You really have to read the book, to know that!’
And now, this special week you have to say, 'You really have to read both books,to know that!'

But you know your book is about many things.

‘Sandie Shaw and the Millionth Marvell Cooker’ is about:
• Friendship and salvation between women
• Authentic factory life when industry was booming
• The birth of celebrity culture
• Changes in access to higher education
• College life
• About changing cultural attitudes brought about by the Women’s Movement.
• The nature and hesitancies of young love.
• The experience of immigrants moving into British life
• The ironies, assumptions and secrets of institutions


In addition to many of the above, my collection Knives is about:
• The darker ironies, the comedic undertones and the isolation of modern life
• Ironies of escape after the endurance of false and repressed lives
• The loss of childhood innocence and freedom
• The death-dealing outcomes of sexual abuse
• Survival on the fringes of modern society of those labelled mad
• The young as the saviours of the old.

Of course the reader can – and must - love reading stories, short and long, without even bothering to think what they are about. Even for the writer these realisations can continue to emerge long after the books have been written. Intense writing is full of involuntary evidence about the writer. We have a literary criticism industry built on this fact.

In my workshops I often use a quotation which makes total sense to me: ‘How do I know what I mean till I see what I say?’ (I’ve looked and can’t find the source for that quotation. Does anybody know?)
wx

NB The images here are some indications of what my next book 'At The Maison D'Estella' will be about.But that is only just beginning. What would I know about what it will be about?

Notes on Long and Short Fiction

This Wednesday night, at the Hexham Book Festival I have agreed to give a talk about ‘The Long and The Short of It’. I will read from my novel Sandie Shaw and The Millionth Marvell Cooker, and from my short story collection Knives to illustrate the differing challenges of writing long and writing short. Rather conveniently both of these books are just out this week.

I have to admit that, in the main, the focus in my writing has been towards long fiction, (sometimes very long fiction). I love writing my novels. But I have always written - and from time to time published - short stories.

Among serious and aspiring writers the short story is now very fashionable. As well as being a distinguished, discrete literary form in itself, the short story can be a showcase for writing talent. Beda Higgins' success in the recent Mslexia Short Story competition, for instance, has led her into discussions with an agent and a major publisher. These conversations, I feel, will veer towards talk of a novel...

Up until a year ago I was co-director, with Gillian Wales, of a national writing competition which ran for ten years. Our first winner was Jonathan Tulloch whose clever story Season Ticket later exploded into a novel and was then made into a film called Purely Belter. Another success in one of our competitions was Beda Higgins herself. It was very nice to see Beda at the launch of Knives last week.

Such showcasing of talent is surely one reason for the increasing popularity of short story competitions. However I have found that in the competition stakes the novel surely loses out. In our national competition we alternated each year between short stories and three-chapter novel samples. It was always extremely difficult to judge a novel with so little access to its essential architecture and true outcomes. In the light of such difficulty, judging a short story was a gem of a task: a short story is a whole thing in itself, its language, architecture and outcomes were visible to the judges.

Herein lies the charm of the short story. Like a poem, it is a prime example of economy - the right word in the right place implying multiple layers of meaning. A short story may present a whole life in a coherent slice of it; or it may present an encounter which defines two lives and their intersecting energies; or it may present us with bright fragments that we readers must make into our own whole thing. A short story can bring people and places to life with a few strokes of a pen. It can show us tragedy, comedy, misery or irony with a single allusion or a clever metaphor. It may reflect our lives back to us or take us into strange new interior or exterior worlds.

Short stories are like those scrunched up Japanese paper flowers I loved as a child. Tight, rolled up nuggets when dry, when you put them into liquid they would open up into technicolour glory. For me, the reader's imagination is that liquid. We writers give the readers our tight flowers and they open up and blossom in unexpected and unique ways to deliver the story.

Perhaps, word for word, the short story has more screwed up power than the novel - that more languorous form which twists and turns in our minds like a great bolt of silk. A novel demands of the reader diligence, and a certain indulgence so that our story can unfold and take a proper shape. We invite our readers to live with us through time and space. We make them wait for our explanations, our outcomes, our illuminations. With them we celebrate our resolutions, our epiphanies.

Readers, of course, are quite capable of enjoying and responding to both our long and short writing. I only hope they don't just prejudge these two distinct forms as a fast read or a slow read. Each form brings with it, its own literary enjoyment.

As a writer and a fan of both literary forms I have more usually leaned towards the luxuriant expanse of the novel. I love playing with the multi-layers, inventing a large cast of players, and relishing the sheer literary manipulation of a large idea. But an equally pleasurable challenge is the encapsulation of a hot idea in the short story form. For certain inspirational notions the pure form of the short story is the only way to tell it.

So here you have it: ‘The Long and the Short of It’, two different but – I trust - equally exciting reading experiences for my readers. If you are one of them, I hope you enjoy both Sandie… and Knives, equally but in different ways.
What do you think?

Wendy <

Wendyx

Officially Mint Book Launch

We had a special launch for my short story collection Knives last night. We expected forty and nearly eighty came. Publisher Peter Mortimer, (Iron Press) brought his boxes of books and many friends, colleagues and lots of very welcome newcomers came along. (see avril's account at www.avriljoy.com).

A writing friend, Jackie, brought her sixteen year old daughter Ashleigh and has just emailed me. 'I just wanted to let you know that Ashleigh thought you were ‘mint'. This, if you don’t know, is the ultimate accolade among today’s youth – it my day it was always ‘ace’... She’s also taken your book so it may be some time before I get a look in.'
That has just made my day.


My friend Terry, who, apart from being a seriously good photographer, is known as a country music disc jockey for BishopFM, with internet fans round the world, took some photographs. Here's me getting carried away with my own prose... I am reading from Glass, my short story about a young burgler who drops in on a vicar's wife through her glass roof.



My friend Avril and I gave the reading as a kind of double act, an 'In Conversation With WR'. As always she was great - knew the stories inside and out and threw me some very inspiring questions. She read an extract from the story 'My Name Is Christine' which refers to the savage experience of some of the women we worked with in prison. She read it with such feeling.


My cousin Carol Winskill, whom I have not seen for years, came along with her husband Jack. When I read from the story 'The Making of a Man' ( about a boy's first day working undergound at in the pit), I referred to her father, my Uncle Tom, a very clever and thoughtful man who loved the pit and knew the layers of the earth like the veins on his hands.



So thank you, all you lovely people who went home my book in your bags and pockets. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed reading it to you last night. Let me know.

Love

Wendy

PS Next Wednesday to the Hexham Book Festival to talk about Knives and Sandie Shaw and the Millionth Marvell Cooker with a talk called 'The Long And The Short of It - about the two different modes of writing. Come, if you fancy it...

Editing in the Garden

Warm enough to work in the garden. Hooray!

My big task today has been to respond to the line-edit for THE WOMAN WHO DREW BUILDINGS. The sunshine filtering through the old trees and the sound of the twittering birds - only slightly muffled by the distant traffic - helps this quite challenging work to flow.

As I work through the manuscript I feel pleased that now, emerging, is tht text that will be 'it' between covers. And now I feel pleased. It's looking good. For a moment I think that - with the sunshine streaming through the green, and the tea and toast delivered by B at half time - 'Nobody except you or I, love, knows what goes into these books' - how could I fail? How could it not go well?

Done now! And this great lump of work is ready to be sent to Celine Kelly, of Headline, who so efficiently drives my manuscripts through the system.

Now I only have three books to think of: Sandie Shaw.... - just out in her paperback livery; Knives, my short story collection; and At The Villa Estella - just embarked upon and to be written in the Languedoc in May and June. (I think...)


Then, at four thirty, I flee from of my garden down the High Street as far as No 1 Market Place - the new bar I'm just in love with - to meet and drink coffee with my buddy Avril (avriljoy.com). We talk about the launch in Wednesday, at Bishop Auckland Town Hall, of my short story collection KNIVES.


We will launch KNIVES in the in the art gallery at Bishop Auckland Town Hall with a public conversation between Avril and me, about why my stories - whatever their up-front narrative - focus on people on the edge, people confined, and people running away to a new life. (Of course, it could be about me running away to France for eight weeks, but the stories have a much older history than that).

I was so reassured by our conversation that I now know that the public conversation with Avril on Wednesday will be interesting, entertaining, and fun. And then, if all else fails, there is the glass of wine and the nibbles. Anton always makes an effort...

But we did take a bit of time out to discuss: linen trousers, Ryanair's measurements for onboard luggage, essential cosmetics, medication and other frou frous to take to France. To be honest, we just gloated a bit... Then we had a glass of wine.

We hope to generate a good gathering of friends, new friends, old buddies and acquaintances who are interested in writing, to our event. I see - to my great delight - some of our friends from the prison will be there.

I'll tell you about it....

Wendy
x

THINKING ABOUT KNIVES...

The social crimes of family dysfunction, petty long term cruelty, and occasional suicidal or psychopathic outbursts have frequently been part of my long fiction. However two long terms as writer-in-residence in a women’s prison have shown me that the sharper focus of the short story might perhaps be very well suited to explore the darker themes inevitable in such a setting.

In prison I worked with individuals who had walked the razor edge of survival all their lives, whose given role as victim had been transformed by circumstance to that of perpetrator. At first, these perceptions crept into my long fiction, from Long Journey Home - about women in a Japanese internment camp - to my most recent novel The Woman Who Drew Buildings (out in September) where one of the two main characters is just out of prison.

However, more and more those sharp insights into individuals on the edge began to crystallise into elements of a short story. This distilled form reflects the epiphanic glimpses and the flashes of insight I experienced many year in recent years through this inspiring contact with the people as I encouraged them to write and to read to make more sense of their world.

The outcome of all this is KNIVES, a series of short stories - ranging from the inspired ravings of an old woman, once respectable and now on the streets, to a young man who goes to view a house and has a near miss with a psychopathic killer, to a young woman - more sinned against than sinning - hell bent on self destruction. There are other, less pathological stories in the collection - of a woman breaking free from a long and confining marriage, of a boy learning his craft deep in the bowels of the earth.

But I think that - more than violence, more than darkness, all these stories reflect the knowingness and the sense of irony - even comedy - that is the human saving grace of people under stress and in either physical or psychological confinement.

Knives (Iron Press) is launched this month (April 2009).

Happy reading, happy writing

Wendyx