Listen Again to Sylvia's Story

Sylvia's Autobiography

We had a fabulous response to Sunday's Writing Game Programme where Sylvia Hurst, aged 90,  tells us how she arrived here on the
Kindertransport from Germany - on one of the trains which rescued threatened children from Nazi Europe.To listen again click HERE
Hope you  like it
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Paulie Smith Gets a New Cover!

On Amazon For You

One of the small pleasures of Kindling for yourself is the fact that you can design and develop your own covers and also your can if you wish, go back into the manuscript and improve things. When she downloaded my my kindled novel LIZZA, my eagle-eyed writing friend Avril spotted a dreaded typo on the second page and  - this being a Bank Holiday - once the new plants were planted in the garden, I went back into my manuscript, made the changes and there is LIZZA, even more perfect in my eyes especially with the new cover designed with me by my friend artist Fiona Naughton.

This crossover novel is A  Rights of Passage  story  framed in the strong characters of Lizza, her loose-living sister Ivy, their stern mother and their principled brother Bernard. It was very well received when it was first published in hardback and softback versions in 1980 and for years after.  Its message of self-belief, growth and survival is as relevant today as it has ever been.

She is selling well  - If you read LIZZA and enjoy it I would be very touched if you would take a moment to make a comment on Amazon. I am finding that getting the word out there is crucial to this process. Learning all the time!

On Amazon For You

Then my eye strayed down the Amazon column to PAULIE'S WEB,  So - it still being Bank Holiday -  I decided to brighten up her cover, because although this novel has some serious themes, Paulie and her  prison friends have bright optimistic, sometimes comic personalities, so I thought I would give her a brighter cover. It's nice to know that this novel is getting out there to  some appreciative readers. I think Paulie likes the new cover.  Gave me the thumbs up! I hope you give it the thumbs up too.

On Amazon by the end of the week.

And now this coming week I am about to put my novel CRUELTY GAMES on Kindle. Fiona has come up with a beautifully unique cover design. What do you think?  This is a strong story about a teacher and her pupil and savage events that have a profound impact on both their lives. It should be up by the end of the week and I will post more about it then. I suppose I should say Watch This Space...

My long time publisher Headline are putting books from my backlist on Kindle so it is all a glorious mixture for interested readers to enjoy.


I hope you enjoyed your Bank Holiday as much as I did...wx

I

WIP : A Daughter's Tale

 My father Billy died when I was nine years old and, it seems to me now, has permeated my life ever since, as my memoir The Romancer (see right) probably demonstrated. I miss him even now.

This is a poem about him which I have worked on for some time now

                            

                           Billy: A Daughter’s Tale

We walked along, your  giant’s hand in mine,  

long fingers up inside my woollen sleeve -

I remember nights she left the house

when you read the paper and I scaled your knee

settling, birdlike
into that rustling space.

I remember how we cut out pictures

for the Panjandrum book. And you read us stories -

your voice going up and down

What would you think of our young one?

Tall in Tai Kwan Do gear

white clad and obliquely oriental -

Or ready for cricket

complete with pads and faceguard,

grave and somewhat pedantic – a family trait

When I passed the age of thirty seven

- a lifetime since -

it dawned on me how young you were -  

yet at that dying time

you seemed to me so very old -

it did not feel too terrible.

wr

Endgame: The Eight Day Novel

For me,  researching and writing a novel can take anywhere from eighteen months to two years. More! If you take all the inklings and stirrings and brainstorms that precede a novel you can add another three years to that.
My new novel AOR* was just a twinkle in my eye about five years ago and it's a couple of years since I started to write sketches - actual sequences that could end up on a page in the final novel; dialogue (ditto); idiosyncratic biographies which would help me to become intimate with my characters: I also gathered notes, poems metaphors, analagies, images, quotations. maps, images and drawings.


Every day something new occurs to me, Some of this stuff goes on the wall, some on the table, some in boxes.


The more I go through this process the more things come to me - gathering like iron filings on a drum. (I am reminded that psychology there is a process called set presupposing perception. That’s when you think of something and then you notice it everywhere...)


In this way I begin to build up a mass of relatively shapeless inchoate material which has sprung out of that the original inkling: that first twinkle in my eye.


There comes a time when the mass becomes critical. In The Romancer I described this point as like fragments in the interior of a kaleidoscope. You shake those pieces and a distinctive shape emerges,


To develop my iron filing analogy - at this point you put a strong magnet under the drum and the iron filings shift into coherent and meaningful shapes and patterns.


This is the point where I find at last where the novel will begin;, what might be the issues; the possible low points; the possible high points; the ultimate climax; a possible ending. This is also when I discover significant gaps in the meaning and the structure of the narrative.
So begins a new brainstorming process to create credible links and  substantive new material to make the prose and the narrative work.

Clue to AOR:New Novel

Earlier this year with this current novel, AOR*, I felt as though I had more than enough material and the novel was going out of shape again. I could feel the energy of the novel outstripping its form. This can be quite a worry,


Somehtimes, at this stage working at home one can get stuck in the rich alluvial soil of a novel. For An Englishwoman In France at this stage I  went to France for two months to clear my mind to sort this out.


 This year my solution to this problem was - with my good writing friend Avril - to spent five days in the peace and quiet of Balliol College in Oxford to regain control of this mass of writing, material and inspiration and make my novel work.


And in that academic peace and quiet the final shape of my new novel did emerge. Reaching this point can be truly magical. This time it was like a key clicking in a lock: a door closing behind me. I knew that was it. I had the shape: all I had to do now was finish the novel,


ALL! Well there you go.

Oxford Wall Plan

On element that emerged in Oxford was that this novel would take place over an eight day week. While I was there I made a wall chart that showed me how all my parts fit into the whole.


I am now working in and on the crucial Saturday in the lives of my characters.


Phew!




*Title under wraps just for now, but it’s a good one.


PS Next!  - a work in progress extract from the end of the novel...

The Boy Who likes Chocolate and Academic Life...

Mismatched socks cool

‘A’ the boy who likes chocolate is visiting from university where his life is exciting, fulfilling, challenging, surprising: all one would wish. The usual subjects are covered: food, girls; a girl; studying; games; training. (As the game in question is American Football there is much to learn.)

 He plays me beautiful new sounds on his acoustic guitar which remains his relaxation in this welter of activity. He restrings his acoustic guitar. He takes to pieces his electric guitar and puts it back together again. It still works.

Secret Student

We talk quite bit, as is our custom. We get to genetics - his central study at the moment. He teaches me some very basic facts about genetics, with diagrams to  make it accessible. This is a world where the language is signs and concepts that can only be explained graphically.  New words emerge, which have a poetry all of their own: genotype, alleles, epistasis, diploid...

We discuss the  potential magic of intervention in the womb which could bring about the end of life-threatening genetic conditions. Inevitably we move onto ethical concerns and how medical ethics will be an important part of his future study.

Of course we move onto the way in which  nurture (my field) interacts with genetic predisposition. We talk about my own lifelong interest in twins – quite significant in the research into child development, which was once my own field of study.  My obsession was possibly due - I say - to the fact that my oldest siblings were twins,  christened the moment they were born  who died close to their birth.

 In the subsequent generation at the time of their birthday my mother would talk about them. The Twinnies would have been sixteen today … the Twinnies would have been twenty one today…  Calling them Twinnies made them seem so alive. She told me once that when the second twin died she stopped believing in God.

A man from around here once told me a story about an old woman, referring to her as ‘the Third Twin’, meaning the third of identical triplets. I looked it up and found that the likelihood of identical triplets was one in two million. That notion is at the core of my novel Family Ties. No novelist could resist it. Come to think of it my novel The Lavender House involved in-depth research into the Kray Twins, whom I used as models for two characters in that novel.  I suppose the notion of twins is closely linked to the nature of identity, which is a theme in so  many good novels.

‘A’ and I have played Scrabble together from when he was about four years old. For a few years I would manufacture sequences so he could make good words.  But soon we were playing  for real, which he enjoyed as,  despite being a quiet person, he is intensely competitive (think Rugby and American Football...) We played Scrabble this week-end. I banned two letter chemical formulae as it gave him an unfair advantage. It was a long, high-scoring game. 

Needless to say, he won.
wx

Once, in France

The Aviatrix Anne Lindbergh and the Double Sunrise

From my Boody Jar

'I began these pages for myself, in order to think out my own particular pattern of living, my own individual palace of life, work and human relationships. And since I think best with a pencil in my hand I started naturally to write.’  (Anne Morrow Lindbergh: A Gift from The Sea. More info about her life on  my Reading Blog..)

Anne Morrow Lindbergh's book  -  A Gift from the Sea is her meditation on aspects of life based on her observation of  sea shells.

 I have shells in the pot that I call my Boody Jar, written about here before, so having read this book I got them out and put them on my desk. Then I thought hard about where they had come from, from raw beach at Seaton Carew to a steamy  beach on the North Island of New Zealand.

Of course, being me, I read Ann Morrow's book as a writer.  As a writer I identify with her - particularly in terms of observation. So many writers look, but only see the surface of things and their seeing in not really embedded in their writing; it is not part of their thought  process. 

In her introduction Morrow  says.... 'And since I think best with a pencil in my hand, I started naturally to write.' This reminds me so much of my own mantra 'How do I know what I think till I see what I say?'

Shell Kiss

Each chapter focuses on one shell that Morrow finds, or is given, on her island retreat. First there is her observation and then comes her meditation. My favourite observation is the shell she calls 'The Double Sunrise':' Both sides of this delicate bivalve are exactly matched. Each side, like the wing of a butterfly is marked with the same pattern; translucent white except for three rays that fan out from the golden hinge binding the two together. Smooth, whole, unblemished shell. I wonder how is fragile perfection survives the breakers on the beach.'

 She goes on to compare this with a human relationship: 'Two people listening to each other, two shells meeting each other, making one world between them, There are no others in the perfect unity of that instant, no other people or things or  interests. It is free of ties or claims, unburdened by responsibilities, by worry about the future or debts to the past. ...And then how swiftly, how inevitably the perfect unity is invaded; the relationship changes; it becomes complicated, encumbered by its contact with the world...

This can be interpreted in all kinds of ways but to me speaks of the fragility of true romance and its claims on real life.And here the end of pure romance is the entry of the snake in Eden. It is a very feminine observation and thought process:  it can be taken as proto-feminist or retro feminine. 

Each chapter, each shell opens up another aspect of a woman's life perhaps in the 1950s. And the sensitive perceptions of this woman, who - although economically privileged - has flown the heights and plumbed the depths of family life, make thoughtful readon. Certainly millions of people have thought so since 1955.

My favourite aspect, though, of this book is the beginning of each chapter where she observes   the physicality, the nature of the shell. That level of observation should be in every writer's skill box, in every writer's habit-satchel. 

wx

The Power of the Wild Bluebell

On the bank in my garden leaves of bluebells are massing, ready to bubble forth  in flower late in April.

G., who has a writer's eye, took this photo on his phone: it is a wild bluebell in flower in the wild woods a short distance from here. Almost buried in last year's dead leaves and grasses and tangled in importunate ivy, this ancient flower stands there heralding a proper, wild spring.

The bluebells, long  naturalised in my garden, will be a paler, more apologetic blue, having lost their wild power.

Thank you for the thought, G.

Aslan in South Shields

Sand Aslan

Slick seal tide stains silk soft sand
when its  and the persistent push of water
makes a brand new tide of  pebbles

Food Bread in plastic, wrapped in silver,
tea from flasks in stainless steel
cigarettes in slackened fingers

Sisters, brothers,  all garnered
guile and  innocence
paw down  sand in rusty  tins

Sharpened spears of twice-used wood.
 pierce  the sand-scapes

- chips, perhaps,off the old lion block?

(This is a new one. I am stll working on it...as you see W)

The Itinerant Muse - Kathleen Jones Scribbling on Trains and Planes

Thinking, perhaps

I do love  Kathleen Jones' blog. It reflects her life as a  biographer, poet, teacher  and fiction writer of unique vision. Her blog reflects her life travelling the world and expresses her celebratory  and  principled approach to to life and literature. I asked her to be the guest blogger on Life Twice Tasted.

 Welcome Kathy...

'I’m writing this on a train - which is fairly normal for me, since I seem to be almost always on the move.  My partner works in Italy, our home is in the north of England, and my work as a writer takes me frequently to London and beyond.  Research trips for books have taken me to America, New Zealand, most of Europe, Russia, Cambodia and Australia. Before that, in another life, I was an engineer’s wife, trekking my children from one developing country to another across Africa and the Middle East.  You could say that I’ve learned to live like a nomad, with everything I need in my suitcase.
             All this travel is exciting and there’s all the input and stimulus that a writer needs, but it’s also necessary to have quiet, reflective, creative space to actually produce anything.  And that’s the hardest thing to achieve - a block of time to develop an idea in your head and put it down on paper.  I’ve learnt to use ‘transitional moments’ between one place and the next.  Trains and planes, buses and cafes - hours of time in limbo.   When you’re travelling, there’s no nagging list of ‘must do’s’, no washing up, no unexpected visitors.  Switch off the mobile phone and you’re secure.  The mind and imagination float free and - because nature hates a vacuum - all sorts of words and images begin to appear.
          Lots of writers have made use of the in-between spaces.  Katherine Mansfield  sometimes wrote on the staircase, which she saw as a transitional space, like a railway station - one had departed, but not quite arrived, and it became an alternative universe of space and time to be inhabited.   As AA Milne put it:

 Halfway up the stairs isn't up and isn't down.
It isn't in the nursery, it isn't in the town.

And all sorts of funny thoughts run round my head.
It isn't really anywhere, it's somewhere else instead.

            All this travelling has had an effect on the kind of things that I write.  Serendipity.  I’ve never concentrated on one genre, but always taken what turned up.  In the middle east it was English broadcasting for a local government station serving the Arabian Gulf states.  Then it was going a series of programmes for Woman’s Hour on what it was like to be a European woman living in an Arab world.  I’d have a go at almost anything - poetry readings in supermarkets, magazine articles on witchcraft, biographies of other writers I’ve admired, stories dug out of my own weird life.  Maybe I’d have been more successful if I’d stuck to one thing - but I wouldn’t have enjoyed it half as much!

              Although there’s a small part of me that longs to be ‘rooted in one dear, perpetual place’, as Yeats put it, the rest of my personality experiences a thrill of anticipation at the thought of travel - I can’t see a plane overhead, or a lighted train passing in the night, without wanting to be on it.   This passion for travel must be in my DNA - my mother’s family were seafarers who travelled the globe on ships and brought home foreign women as wives.   My father’s family were itinerant Irish, cattle drovers and horse dealers.

            But, for the itinerant writer, what happens to that sense of belonging, of writing out of place, the father/mother-land, believed to be essential for a writer?

             My roots, my sense of belonging, will always be in the north of England, Cumbria, in the wild landscape where I was born and brought up.  But even then we didn’t stay long in one place.  I was born in a farm labourer’s cottage not far from Caldbeck, then taken at the age of 3 to live on a remote croft in the Cheviot hills between England and Scotland.  At the age of 8 we moved back to the lake district, where my father had a farm manager’s job, before he begged and borrowed enough money to buy a small, ruinous (in both senses)  hill farm in the Uldale fells.  Different schools, different houses;  I became very independent and used to relying on my own resources.  Eventually my father went bankrupt and moved again, and I decided to go to London, where my real travelling (and writing) began.
        There are places I can’t write - places too noisy and busy, where I can’t settle.   And I can’t write when I’m stressed and anxious.  It was particularly difficult when my children were small.  We once lived in a hotel room for four months in the middle east, and we were shuffled round a series of rented apartments and other people’s houses - sometimes moving two or three times a year. Electricity and water were fragile things - not to be taken for granted. There was a busy expatriate social life I came to hate.   I learned to write in my head, memorising things to be written down as soon as I could snatch a moment. 

            I discovered that there’s a space inside your head you can go into and close the door, a parallel world of imagination.  Like Harry Potter’s Room of Requirement it usually appears when you need it. But no amount of searching will reveal it - the door opens by magic.  I’m always afraid that one day it won’t, and that the impulse to create will have vanished overnight, regardless of where I am at the time.  

            I’ve just written the last paragraphs in the airport departure lounge - plane an hour late - and, though I’m aware of the throng of people around me, it’s as though I’m in a little bubble of time, suspended out of real life for a moment.  In transit.  Very odd, but after so many years I now  recognise that it’s part of how and where I write.

© Kathleen Jones

Birthday Vibes: Translucent Butter Muslin

(1)

I wake up trembling

Time vibrating, tolling

Like a church bell



(2)



I see you standing there

dressed in yellow, arms raised -

backlit translucent butter muslin

Visions pulsing like stars before my eye:

You, with red hair in a fluffy coat

You, in sky blue crêpe party dress -

toggled at the neck in amber

You, in a silk dress, smiling -

he stoops, his arm slung

around your shoulders



You, standing straight and crisp

in your blue uniforn

silver buckle belted



A Place For Naming



(3)

The third of four children,

I slipped out barely noticed

among the dogs of war

and other fine distractions.

Later on I made you tea

and passed hard tests,

wrote so many books

just to please your heart

and catch your eye



There is the legend -

a story told so many times -

of me in your arms, you walking

to the church, waist high in snow -

to expunge your sin

and endow me with

a name made up by the man

who loved lost boys.



(4)

I see you standing here

dressed in yellow, arms raised -

all translucent butter muslin

Work in Progress: Recipe For Good Writing

It's lovely to be at the final stages of editing a long novel  but it can make your head hurt. At this point you have to juggle in your head with the ongoing narrative, the whole cast of characters, the themes, the atmosphere, and the setting all at once. But as well as this you have to make narrative flow, clear the undergrowth and retain its complexity, while allowing your readers true access to your meaning.

It occurred to me on this edit-run how important is the symbolism of food  to this novel; how meals can bring all these head-hurting aspects together.

Early in the novel American Tom Roache  surveys the table:

Tom looked up from his delicious porc aux cerises and surveyed the long table in the cloister. Ruthie Dancing was sitting at one end with Jonathon Tye to the right of her and the dark Spanish- looking boy in the washed out T shirt on her left. Jonathan was ignoring his hostess and concentrating on the plump feline girl on his right, whose eyes had flickered across to Tom more than once.  Here’s a chancer, Tom thought.


Ruthie was deep in conversation with the boy.Tom wondered about the boy:an unusual sort of guy for this kind of writing malarkey. He looked out of place and was therefore infinitely more interesting than anyone else around the table. Tom sometimes thought that gatherings of writers could be rather samey. He’d been to a few in his time: they could be drenched with cynicism, spite and the disabling atmosphere of people watching their backs.

Further down the table was the thin Englishwoman who had snubbed Tom on the plane: apparently she was a poet, name of Mariela. At this moment she was glumly working her way through what looked like porridge in a wonderfully bright blue earthenware bowl that had been brought down the courtyard, with some ceremony, by the Frenchman, Serge, who had placed it before the poet as though it contained pearls of great price. Serge was sitting beside her now, enjoying his own Porc au Cherises, chatting away to the poet. Tom could not tell from this angle whether or not the woman was responding.

Beside Serge sat the old lady Francine, who was deep in conversation with Aurélie LeBrun. They were talking in French and Aurélie was laughing and nodding. She was still wearing a rather distinguished chef’s apron and the fair hair that had escaped from her severe chignon was hanging in baby curls round her face.

Tom was fascinated by Aurélie. She was deeply attractive. But, having been bitten a couple of times in recent years, he now steered clear of attractive, mature women. Some of them, daughters of women of liberation, had been bred to believe they could and should have it all. Having it all – in the case of two fine women of his acquaintance – had meant owning his heart and creative soul as well as that of their hapless husbands. Having been stuck in such ambiguous mud a couple of times, these days he chose to stick to friendship. And women did  make fine friends.

Now, he appreciated Aurélie le Brun's grace as she stood up and gathered in the plates - helped by the boy Joe - and informed people they should retain their knives and forks.

At that point Serge LeBrun vanished down the courtyard and returned with a custard-yellow cheese - the size of a small wheel - on a board in one hand and a smaller white cheese on a blue plate in the other. He placed that before Mariela, the large cheese in front of himself and, without asking, cut everyone a slice and passed them around on small plates.

Tom didn’t care for cheese but, minding his manners, he took a nibble. It tasted tangy, salty in the middle and sweet at the edges. He found himself eating the lot, nibble by nibble. Aurélie returned from the kitchen with an apple tart the size of a bin lid. They ate their tart ate off their cheese plate, gathering crumbs of cheese enhanced by the sweetness of the apple. Serge brought a large shiny apple for Mariela. She looked at it resentfully but still took a very small bite, then another. Then another.

Just as Francine was taking her last dainty bite of the apple tart Aurélie tinkled her glass with her spoon and nodded towards Ruthie who resisted the pressure to stand up. Everyone looked at her expectantly. Jonno’s chair creaked as he sat back and folded his arms. The girl Abby smirked at Tom who raised his eyebrows, stern faced.

‘Well,’ Ruthie folded her napkin. She looked at them, from one face to another. ‘I suppose I should say something. I’ve welcomed you all individually and now I welcome you as a group. First, I’d like to thank my partners Aurélie and Serge for launching our retreat with this delicious meal.’ Tom led the patter of applause. Serge grinned and gave a vaguely military salute. Aurélie bowed her head gracefully.

Ruthie went on. ‘It’s great to see you here by the cloister talking and eating together, getting to know each other. I decided we wouldn’t to that awful thing of speaking about ourselves one by one. I’ve always hated that myself so can’t see why I should impose it in my own retreat.’

‘Bravo!’ said Francine quietly. And others round the table nodded and smiled. Except for Jonathan, whose glance had wandered across the courtyard up to the house and then further up to the wide blue sky. Tom thought he was either bored or embarrassed: hard to tell.

Aurélie and Serge were standing now, back from the table. Aurélie smiled. 'We do have some simple rules about the domestic arrangements.’  ...

‘I do have one question,’ said Tom Roache, looking straight at Aurélie . ‘Just how did you make the pork so very fine? I have never tasted such delicious pork.’

Aurélie beamed. ‘Thank you Tom. Me, I am not the  writer but I will write it down specially for you.’ Her gaze met his and for a moment he forgot hus good intentions about mature women.

Later that night the recipe turned up on the table:

Aurélie’s Roti de Porc aux Cherises
You need1 boneless, rolled pork loin or shoulder , 2 tablespoons olive oil , A couple of bay leaves , A sprig or two of thyme


250g cherries (stoned) or redcurrants , 10 sage leaves, roughly chopped , 2 onions, diced , 3 cloves of garlic, sliced 1 tablespoon runny honey , 1 tablespoon soy sauce, 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar, 1 biggish glass of rosé, white wine or cider ,Salt and freshly ground black pepper


Season the pork well with salt and pepper. Warm the olive oil over a medium high heat in a large casserole and brown the meat all over, then remove it from the pan and set it aside. Reduce the heat, add the onions with the bay leaves and thyme and sauté until soft and translucent, about 15 minutes. Add the garlic and stir for another couple of minutes, then add the sage, honey, soy sauce, balsamic and wine or cider. Give it all a good stir, then tip in the fruit and return the pork to the pan. Bring to a simmer, cover with a tightly fitting lid and cook gently over a low heat for about an hour and a quarter. Keep an eye on it. You might need to splash in a little more booze or water halfway through, though I didn’t. Serve the pork cut in thin slices with the sauce spooned over. The pork is also excellent the next day, cold, and sliced into salads or sandwiches.


Bon Appetit! Aurélie – Baises xxx

I know! I know! It's not perfect, but it's getting there...Wx

A Thousand Year Old Chinese Poem

While working in prison I met an elegant Chinese girl whose English was excellent and who at that time was working her way through Jane Austen. Her name was Xiaocsia He - first name pronounced  Shargia. She did some great work with me, including a short story which was read on th4 BBC and the beginning of a very ambitious novel set in China. One day she brought me a page of Chinese letters. She said it was a thousand year old Chinese poem and could we work on it as you couldn't do it word for word, you had to proceed concept by concept. So we worked together to render it into elegant English. Here it is,,,

We are parting
at the time when the leaves
are withered and keep on falling

The cutting winds of autumn
batter my heart,
bringing sorrow to every part
of my mind and my body
making me die inside.

Now, all I have to cherish
are our bygone times, our old days.
Oh! In what time of our lives
in what part of the world
could you and I ever meet again?


Collaborative Tanslation: Xiaocsia He & Wendy Robertson

This is a very poignant poem, considering her situation. Xiaocsia is back in China now, no doubt making her way in a better life.

The Writing Game: Writing Behind Bars

My preoccupation on this month's  Writing Game programme is Writing Behind Bars

It's always good to talk to other writers. This week it has been a special inspirational treat to talk to two other writers with  experience of working in prisons.

I will begin with a story. One day I was walking down Newgate Street in Bishop Auckland. Towards me came a group of three people: a woman in her forties, a woman in her early Twenties and a little girl of three of or four. The young woman tugged her mother’s arm ands said, ‘Look Mam, this is the writing woman.’

We all smiled and nodded and I said how beautiful the little girl was. I had seen her photo as a baby when her mother was in prison. I asked the young woman if she was still writing. She shrugged and said there was no time, on the out. ‘But I still have my poems.’ She turned to her mother. ‘Don’t I Mam?’

This can happen to me now and then because the prison where I was writer in residence was in the main a local prison with many of the women there from our local communities.

On the programme (broadcast Sunday 4th March at 12 noon) I share the experience of working creatively in prison with my two guests

They are Avril Joy – a friend of the Writing Game – who worked for twenty five years at Low Newton Women’s prison as a teacher and later as head of Learning and Skills before becoming a full time writer. (see her blog on imprisonment at http://www.avriljoy.com/ )

She has now published two great novels The Sweet Track and The Orchid House, and has a novella and a short story collection on Kindle about women who end up in prison - When You hear the Birds Sing, and Susie Drew and Other Stories.

The other writer is Richard Hardwick who is at present writer in residence at Frankland men’s prison in Durham. He has previously worked in neuro-linguistic programming and worked with young people in social care. He has since published a well received novel Kicked Out and a moving memoir Andalucia. Avril and Richard read from their work on the programme. (Contact: www.richardwhardwick.co.uk )

On the programme the three of us sit around the fire in my study and discuss our experiences working as teachers and writers in prison. I worked out that between us we have nearly thirty four years between us, so there was a lot to talk about. The talk ranges from the difficult context of prison, the dark times, the laughter the ordinary and the extraordinary nature of the people one meets inside. We talk about the way the creative writing process can contribute to the lives of prisoners and how it affects the work of the writers who go into prison to do this work.

This was quite an emotional programme. One of my conclusions is that the hard experiences discussed here are not far from any of us. When I was working with women in prison I often thought, there but the grace of god go I. or my sister, or my daughter. I wrote a book about it, Paulie's Web.  (see sidebar)

If you want to listen again, remember that this programme is available as a podcast from Bishop FM or as a free download on iTunes. You can also listen to it on your computer.

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How Lovely is The Light of Morning

How lovely is the light of morning
fingering its way
through chinks
in heavy curtains,
their hems weighed down
with fragments of lead

How lovely is the light of morning -
bright harbinger of a day
where work and play
may dance together,
like children in a park
excited by a red balloon.




The Light of Morning

 

Hockney, Bright Splashes of Colour and Directionality

There is something about directionality.
I come down to London to visit daughter Debora and the lovely Sean. Once here I go up to town on various days to the RA to see the Hockney Exhibition; to have lunch at Villandry  with my agent Juliet; to research  Victor West at Kings College. Then tomorrow I will, reluctanlty,  go home back up North.
The Hockney Exhibition is about scale. It is after all entitled The Bigger Picture. The Royal Academy is architecturally suited to these massive paintings and montages of paintings; the magisterial enfilade of tall rooms leading through (directionality again!)  large archways from a central hub is so well suited to this blazing collection of recent work which is admirably and appropriately contextualised in earlier work showing us how Hockney arrived at this high point in his career where his consummate skill and massive imagination here addresses trees and landscapes as  living, writhing, sensate things. Or in one case dying things in - my favourite series - paintings of a felled tree - the clean,  curved, greeny yellowy logs lying alongside their stumped parent beside the road leading through the trees.

The impact is astonishing. As the milling crowd enters the central hub there are gasps of appreciation at the long perspectives, the enormous canvases, the original rendering of the familiar. The eye is invaded by the vibrant, electric blues, the pulsing purples, the gorgeous greens, the tender yellows, the teasing greys. Then - most - dramatic- the reds and oranges that  bring a shimmering transatlantic echo of the Grand Canyon right into  the Yorkshire Dales.

Then there is a change of scale and you have to move right in discover delicate treats in terms of Hockney's artist's notebooks - large, small, fan-shaped. These are full of the  notes, drawings and inspirations - clearly the genesis of the larger work. These books  are testament to the fine draughtsmanship upon which the artist bases the flaring creativity that surges into his  experimental expression in the large canvasses,  projections and collages. The notebooks are set under glass covers but above them on screens you can see them -  the delicately wrought drawings.

Then there is a section on the way he uses iPad as drawing/painting tool. This is very interesting and does indeed bring his method up to date. However for me they are less personal and than the drawing or the painting: something of  a veil between the see-er and the artist.

No small view can do justice, though, to the larger than life painting of this artist. Interestingly the paintings and drawings are full of directionality. Repeatedly Hockney takes you down the same roads and pathways through landscapes, down woodlend paths, through a hole created by overhanging trees in woodlands, along motor roads, up mountain escarpments, through clouds hanging low between mountains.

 I love the direction, the energy, the vibrancy, the youth of this exhibition. It inspired me to think of my own directions.

I hope you manage to see this exhibition if you go up or down or across to London.

Stories from Other Lives: The Dreaming Bed,

I woke up too early then went back to sleep.

Now I am in this cluttered auction room surrounded by the detritus of a hundred lives. Something catches my eye. Here is a great  big  bed  standing  sideways  against a wall, illuminated by a skylight.  The head and foot of the bed are built from two great cupboards with finely carved doors.

An auctioneer in a yellow waistcoat strolls up and says. 'Interesting bed, that. Inside contents are part of the lot.'
I walk around the bed: once, then twice. Finally  I open the cupboard doors and inside I see:

one folded travel rug

one yellow jar with feathers in ;
two thermos flasks - one large, one small
a pile of books with bright leather bindings 
three blue Chinese jars in different sizes
two enormous  ledgers withe red spines
one very thick pink wool scarf
one a green ceramic cat with a long slender neck
one dusty whisky bottle half full
two boned bodices, one pink, one black
one silver aluminium step-ladder
one navy Fleet Air Arm peaked cap
three worn wool rolled up blankets;
one pot of orange marmalade with a faded label
on  folding beach  chair, striped


I decide to bid up to fifty pounds for the amazing bed. The yellow-waistcoated man takes the auction and  I'm driven to bid sixty five pounds to make this dream bed my own. The auctioneer nods at me, his eyes opaque,  as he brings his hammer down.

When I woke up I was very happy that I'd got this bed with my sixty five pound bid. I knew this was on important dream. It was very different.  I never dream in this detail, I never dream in such colour. Most importantly I know that the questions I ask myself about the bed will give me thirty stories or a very long novel.


Writer's bonus

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Three Elements of Place For the Artisan Writer

I woke up with the thought that there are three aspects of place that are significant in the writing life.

Editing in My Garden

Element One is the place where we write. A good artisan writer should be able to write anywhere – on planes and trains, in the garden, bedroom, bathroom or kitchen, inside, outside, in bars and hospital waiting rooms. And of course, (if you find one open) libraries. I suppose now we must add cyberspace to our writing locations.


The instinct and the ideal, though, is to make a special interior space in which to write: a temple dedicated to your vocation.

I did this even when I was very young, I lived then in a tiny two up and two down house with my my mother, sister and two brothers. In the bedroom which I shared with my sister and mother I set up a long collapsible pasting table by the window. This was was my private space. Here I did my homework and here I began to write seriously; I wrote at this table even when ice was etching snowflakes on the inside of the window.

After I married, in our second house there was a spare downstairs bedroom which I commandeered as a writing room. I got someone to build shelves all along one wall for my growing collection of books and bought a huge, battered office desk at an auction for £2. And there I did another kind of homework for my teaching job. And on that desk I wrote the first novels which were published.


Write Anywhere and Everywhere

 Occupying another house for many years now, I have a big study with a real fire mentioned by Avril in her post about our conversation with Richard Hardwick for The Writing Game. This is a generous space dominated by the same £2 desk which started it all and has shelves on all four walls, full of books. Lots of writing and talking stuff goes on in this space but the serious writing - the current novel, for instance - happens upstairs in the little writing room which I’ve written about before. This is where the real work happens. Here there is only room for one person – the writer. This is my place, My temple.



Stairway to Story

 Element Two the need to locate the characters and action in a place that adds to, that underpins, that shows rather than tells of the main themes of the novel. Think of the psychopathology of cities such as Dickens’ London and de Balzac’s Paris, of Martin Amis’s London and Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh.  Think of the drawing rooms of Jane Austen, the muddy nightmarish battle trenches of Pat Barker, the Gothic moorland of the Brontes!

These writers know how to use place as a substructure for the themes of the novel and to illuminate depth of the drama and the emotional pathology of the characters. The best of writers have always done this instinctively: the significance of place underpinning the pace and the active drama of their narrative.

I don’t know if there is some magic formula for this, except to read widely and deeply  the work of writers who do this well, until it is part of your own intuition of writing. And observe, observe, observe your own experience in life as you move around. Make lists of what you see and the feelings and wisdom it inspired. These days of course we can note place with a camera, of course, transforme it in our imagination and incorporate what we see into our fiction. But nothing in this process beats a sharp eye, a good ear, and a fat notebook.

Element three is doing it!

 Here's me...

Read and Write

AOR Work in progress

'… The courtyard is dominated on one side by a wall which is more like a black stone cliff. Lolette’s granddaughter Marie France. Aurelie’s cousin, tells us this wall is part of the medieval wall of the old village of St Thibery. Before we reached our destination - this tall house on the edge of the village - Aurelie had driven us through its narrow streets which seem to have no corners; they it coil around a mediaeval abbey whose ornate arched gateway is out of kilter with the dusty ordinariness of the village…

…  ‘Grand-mère is in the courtyard,’ announces Lola in her clear young voice. She leads us through a large kitchen lined with cupboards painted blue, set around a vast table covered with a gleaming green oilcloth. Then we are hustled  through double doors into the shady courtyard built into the wall of the old village. On the left is a long black stone trench filled with geraniums. In the middle a white umbrella offers shade a green plastic table and four chairs.  

Imagine and Transpose

At the far end, under a very old whiskery palm tree ,sits a very old lady with her leg up on a cushioned stool. Her hair ,  thin and whispy is pulled to the top of her head in a knot. She is wearing a yellow flowered crimpeline frock and slippers on her bare feet. I have to remind myself that she is the same age as Francine…'