A Story from Miss V About Italian Internment,

Feedback counts. We writers are needy people. We like to know that people read us and get us. This has always been so with my novels: every letter or note of appreciation warms my heartAnd response is equally significant with blogging and the world wide web. If someone takes the trouble to comment on the blog or email a response to a post I am very excited to know that someone somewhere has been touched by my notions.And now to my delight I have had wonderful verbal and email response to the Letters to Ilio from the Cafe de Luxe. Different people were touched in different ways by this post.


Sometimes people respond to a post by telling me their own story. This was the case with my London friend Miss V. (I didn't even know she read the blog...) Miss V comes from an  artistic and theatrical family herself and is a wonderfully ironic storyteller. But I had never heard this story until she read that post and wrote to me:

Dear Wendy,
I have just read your piece on the Italian cafe owners and the most interesting book you mention, both of which struck a cord with me. I will definitely buy it.
My former husband, Joe, had a musician Father who, like so many foreigners living in this county, was interned on the Isle of Wight during the War. Later he taught the cello at the Royal College of Music, but when he was young was a member of various dance bands which played in the fashionable night clubs of the day. One of his great stories, regaled in an almost unfathomable Italian accent-he spoke very bad English! was the time when the the ultra glamorous Prince of Wales asked him to play a certain tune, saying he would tip him later. He never did. `That man owed me money' he used to say !
Anyway, in the War there were loads of Italian musicians in the Camp, people who later became famous who all formed a huge orchestra. One imagines they were among the lucky ones who had something to do. Later he married a girl from his town in Northern Italy and moved to Dean Street, where Joe was born. He was their only child and Mama called him Pupo (baby) always !!
Later his parents divorced and Papa returned to Italy, Mother decamped to Tunbridge Wells. She died of cancer but Papa came to my wedding and I have a wonderful photo of him, in his 90's but still handsome and charming, talking to my Ma who fortunately spoke very good Italian.They were entranced by one another !

With much love 
V

A great story
- it could inspire a great novel couldn't it?
 And now it seems to have set off a chain of stories in my head. In searching the net for information about Italian internment I came across an interesting article by TANYA STARRETT telling the story of her grandfather Tomasso Pia. Fascinating stuff.All this convinces me that so many families have their own extraordinary stories of complex identity and citizenship. The novel is a great form to explore the ambiguities and contradictions embedded in such stories. Small Island by Andrea Leveyis a great example of this, I am not aware of a novel that springs out of these powerful stories of Italian internment in Britain. Let me know if you know of one.

I hope you enjoyed this post. As I said, feedback has its own delights.

Wxx

Letters to Ilio from The Cafe de Luxe - An Extraordinary True Story

In considering the history of my small Northern town I am always coming across glamorous Italian names - often but not always on the fascia of shops, cafes, and ice-cream parlours names like Gabriele, Alonzi, Zair, Rossi, Serefini, Franco.

We have a well embedded Italian presence here which started in the late nineteenth century, when young men travelled from rural Italy to Britain here for work, escaping from poverty and the sometimes feudal pre-war conditions of farming life. In later years a young man who grew up here in these families would return to this same Italian home district and come back with a wife well versed in taking care of Italian menfolk.

Now in this  twenty first century we still have shops sporting Italian names but – as is the way with successful migration - in more recent history the children of these families have strayed from the shop counter and taken their skills into other professions – education, the law, the media, and business.

I am reminded of this by a great book by Barbara Laurie entitled Letters to Olio from the Café de Luxe. This is an archive of more than 200 love letters written by her mother-in-law, Gloria Serefini, to Olio, an Italian prisoner of war who had, before being repatriated, worked in her father’s café in Selkirk.

Earlier in the century, Gloria’s father had come as a young man to Scotland from rural Tuscany. Later her mother had come across at fourteen first to help in the house and the business. Eventually their café – one of several Italian businesses in this small border town – flourished. Later other members of the family made their way into England as far as Easington and Darlington in County Durham and finally to my small town of Bishop Auckland.

The Selkirk café had to close when Gloria’s father – like other foreigners – was interned as an ‘enemy alien’ on the Isle of Man. (Churchill had crudely ordered the authorities to ‘Collar the Lot!’) Gloria,  with her mother ill and her brother in the forces, was virtually alone. So her formidable aunt drove up from Darlington on her motorbike and took her back to Darlington until her father was released and able to opened thecafe again.

On his return from internment the café and the next door chip shop were opened and flourished. Then Gloria’s father, looking for workers went to the local POW camp which housed young Italian men who were offered for work on farms and in businesses in the town. Apparently he want said, 'Any Tuscans here who want work?'

So Ilio came to work alongside Gloria in the café and they fell in love. The café was a gathering place for young women from the town and for the Italian workers and Gloria – because of her fluency in Italian – gained a central role as interpreter. At first this made her an arbiter of relationships in the café but then, when the young men were repatriated to Italy, she translated letters for the Scottish women from their Italian boyfriends as they desperately tried to sustain their wartime romances.

It was at this time that Gloria herself wrote this flood of letters to Ilio which is at the core of this excellent book. Interestingly these letters were only discovered by Barbara and her husband Peter at the turn of this century when Peter – through the magic of the internet – had tracked down Ilio. Now an old man with a family of his own, Ilio had kept the letters safe in a wooden box. He had clearly never forgotten Gloria. This quest and its outcome are the most moving part of the end of Barbara’s book which reveals secrets kept for over half a century.

Barbara reading from her book at
the Room to Read and Write Book Group

The letters themselves comprise wor an historic archive of the intricacy of lives in wartime Britain and a vivid record of first and second generation migration in all its complexity. Barbara sets alongside the letters very useful contextual information about Britain in wartime and also the wider personal context of this idiosyncratic family.

But these letters are not just plodding memoir material. Fluently and passionately written, they show us the yound Gloria’s own character in depth - vivid, attractive, articulate, adaptable, clever, observant, hardworking, generous, and controlling to the point of manipulation. She could be the heroine or anti-heroine of any great novel. In a good writer’s hands she could be a World War Two Anna Karenina. Or a World War Two Carmen. Her story would make a great film.

And as is the case of great heroines, her life was threaded through with secrets. Finally and famously ensconced in her Café Marina in Bishop Auckland she put the glamourous Ilio on this evidence the love of her life)  behind her, ruthlessly painting him out of her history and her life. Her family knew nothing of those times and these potent events.

That is, until Peter tracked his Tuscan family down and he and Barbara were shown the wooden box of letters by the now elderly Ilio himself . In time they were given the box and started to read the letters, uncovering the whole secret story. This led Barbara to collate the letters in book form and put them in the context of the extraordinary times and this extraordinary family.

Highly recommended.

You can obtain the book Barbara directly if you email her at barbara@pblaurie.plus.com
ISBN: 978-0-9523461-6-6
 

Mapping The Imagination: The magic of a New Novel on the Horizon.

I’m in that very enthralling, exciting, worrying, phase of embarking on a new big novel. I have this big idea and am reading like crazy, checking facts and looking at landscape in a different way.  It has been some time in coming. I have been waiting for a decision on my last novel about writers living together The Art of Retreating and this process has frozen me like a hare pretending to be a statue in the middle of a harvested field.

 I’ve kept busy, as an artisan writer should be, with my short story collection Painting Matters. I have read novels for my Room to Write reading group although novels have been losing their escapist appeal for me as I take it all too seriously and read as a writer, tending to be too analytical and failing sufficiently  to suspend my disbelief to read with true  pleasure. The other members of the group are very patient.

Then in a London park I was introduced to a girl called Lisa who talked about her current obsession:  Ley Lines in London. I wasvery  intrigued because the past-in-the-present is part of my own world view.  Layers in time and figures in old landscapes are a long obsession for me which has inevitably emerged in some of the novels. For instance it’s an important element in my novel An Englishwoman in France where present day Languedoc lives alongside Roman Gaul in the life-changing experience of a woman mourning her lost daughter.

So, when I got back home I started to read these esoteric texts about  Ley lines and this got me looking at maps in a different way. I looked at the ley line maps and moved on more conventional maps - both contemporary and historical.  Maps can be very exciting sources for a writer. They are both precise and non-literary. You have to think imaginatively to elicit their meaning.  My own invented maps are an important element in the way I have laid the ground work (the ground-world?) for my stories. For instance I made a whole 1850 wall map for my novel A Woman Scorned

Now from these maps there emerged a new person and an very new idea for a novel that had not been there before I started looking at the maps. Magic. . This story is not at all, except tangentially, about the things called Ley Lines. From the Ley line books I have leapfrogged to more intensely serious sources about pre-history and Romano British history and then - I realised -  into the world of polite internecine strife between,  conventional historians and progressive archaeological historians in their increasingly rigorous search for meaning in a world about which there is no direct written record. And I am looking at ancient songs.  Fascinating. 

My new novel  will be (I think) about a certain woman, about a landscape, about journeys, and about what it is to be British. I am  just now trying to make logical sense of the Druids, and the function of the myth of  King Arthur as a metaphor. A long journey ahead.

Beginning again. Ha-aleluya!!

Work In Progress

A Sketch.

In the beginning - alongside the reading -  there are always 'sketches'  which may (or may not) end up as part of the novel. Do you think this sketch will find its place?

****

... So anyway I came into this world of light quite by accident, first in my mother’s belly then into the throng of a broad river well known for its dark spirits. The rain was sleeting down. A strut of the bridge creaked and broke and the chariot carrying my mother and her sister Branwen slid into the river, rained on by golden bangles and silver brooches. 

My brother Lleu told me years later that he heard the river sing like a choir of many voices. I have a ghost memory of the strange glow of the water and also the singing.  No doubt there were also shouts and screams but I do not remember them. .. 

***

Long fiction, the short story and the poem. Plus Work in Progress

As friends here will know I am enjoying the new adventure of writing short stories.

So I thought I would share here my introduction to the six story collection Writing Matters where I meander about thinking of the connection between long fiction  the short story and the poem.

And then also here is work in progress - an extract from one of these stories. Hope you enjoy it.

I once said in a room full of dedicated short story and published writers that a short story was the waste of a good idea. Such blasphemy got the gasps it really does deserve. In the end I did protest that my tongue was firmly in my cheek.

In fact I admire the short story form. It sits neatly between the novel and the poem. It combines the broad narrative significance of the novel with the precision, the economy and illumination of the poem. Both the poem and the short story demand of the writer the precise and focused use of language and true involvement with the processing of unique human experience.

And the truth is that I have always written short stories. The very first publication for which I received hard cash was for a story in Annabel magazine about a little boy called Sam who stood on a rusty nail.

As the years went on, while publishing long fiction, I continued to write short stories, mopping up the ideas that teamed in my head. Some of these were published in Sunday supplements and other places. After a while I started to collect them together more systematically. So emerged the collection called Knives and Other Stories (first published by Iron Press). Then came Fear of Flight and Other Stories which is to be published soon with the re-issue of Knives by AudioGo.

It’s difficult these days for a writer to place very good short stories, despite substantial national campaigns to reinstate the value of this prose form in the public consciousness. I have been advising serious short story writers to build a collection around a theme.
In producing Painting Matters and Other Stories I have followed my own advice.

Often we don’t quite realise quite what we are influenced by or what may be threaded there in layers below our surface narrative. And recently, when re-evaluating my own long fiction, I realised how much painting, painters and teachers and inspirers thread themselves through quite diverse novels.

My first job (when barely out of my own teens) was teaching art to disaffected teenagers and when I moved on I continued to admire art history, contemporary painters and to paint a little myself. Also – very significantly as I re-read my work what also struck me was the degree to which I see painting as a liberating process.

So I decided that Painting would be the loose theme for my next short story collection which has emerged here as Painting Matters and Other Stories. I hope you enjoy these stories.

Work in Progress: from the short story actually called Painting Matters:

"… And the person knocking at the door could definitely not be Sheena’s sister Geraldine. She lived on a boat somewhere in the Midlands with her arty friend Roy and her musical so n Seth. Geraldine’s focus on Emma was a five minute telephone call every Sunday night.She often told her step-mother that she made phone calls standing up. Time, she would say, was to be spent, not wasted.

Emma was breathless when she finally reached the door. She put a hand to her throat, took a deep breath, undid the chain and opened the door. She blinked up at the boy who stood there. He was tall and rangy, his grey eyes were ringed with black; his black hair shot up from his brow was cut oddly short at the side and. He was clutching a big square parcel which he hoisted so she could see the label. ‘Emma Unthank?'

She nodded…"

Proud Mum’s Portrait of a Good Writer

 Phew! Nice to be back on song after a while under the radar.

Last month’s highlight for me was Licked Spoon launching her  super book  Gifts From The Garden which as the proud Mum I think everyone should have for themselves or buy for creative friends for Christmas. So far it's had good reviews in theTelegraph garden section and Gardens Illustrated - so it’s not just me!

The book is great – brimming with ideas, beautifully shot and – most important for me – beautifully written. This is her hallmark.

The launch at Stoke Newington Bookshop – a brilliant independent bookseller - was packed with every kind of booklover, gardener, cook, and maker.  As a Northern Outsider I was interested to observe the styles of these book lovers, which ranged from neat and familiar, through Shaker restraint, to the elegant and the cookie. My favourite style-statements were the elegant grey suit with black tee-shirt(man) and golden brogues with shocking pink bows (woman).

In between the laden bookshelves the tables were filled with gift-food made from the book, complete with luggage label page-references.(I was sent out in the afternoon to buy those labels…) Debora told the story of the book and burnished it with stories of our outrageous Uncle Jos, his witty wife and his amazing allotment. Then - using her recipes from the book - she  demonstrated how to make a calming tisane (lovely word that ...) and  a beauty skin scrub with the help of her friend Allison.

Here we had great food, aesthetic appreciation, much laughter, hard information and beautiful books. Here the medium was indeed the message. I can’t find it in me to apologies for the eulogistic tone of this post. This writer is my clever kind daughter after all. 

As well as rushing out to buy brown luggage labels, another thing I did that week was make a portrait on my tablet of Licked Spoon working, I know, I know! It looks like poker-work, But like Licked Spoon's  writing, cooking and gardening, it is all my own work.


If you fancy Debora's  Gifts from the Garden click here 

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...

Writing, Talking and Ghosthunting on Holy Island

A few days away with like-minded friends can be very refreshing. I remember a very fruitful time at Annamackerig on the Irish border, (where I saw a ghost...) While I was there  I drafted many of the short stories that later, transformed in some ways, were welded together in Paulie’s Web (see sidebar) now on Kindle and being enjoyed by those of you who like something different. You couldn’t get much farther away from prison than that idyllic place beside the lake full of merry musicians and inspired, surreal writers,

Then there was that time on the Scottish borders with the late great Julia Darling and the mistress of MsLexia Debbie Taylor. Julia was working out what proved to be her last novel The Taxi Driver's Daughter.  That was a funny, very female sojourn with lots of writing talk and (if I remember rightly)  a bit of reflexology.

Anne's Photograph

And now I have just come back from a very refreshing few days with writers Anne Ousby, Erica Yeoman, Gillian Wales and Avril Joy - first on the coast by Dunstanburgh Castle, then an afternoon, a night and a day on Holy Island.

This involved much inspired writing-talk and inspiration, active photographing and even writing. Erica was researching her new historical novel which is partly set on Holy Island. (She and we were disappointed at not hearing the seals singing. But we writers can always use our imagination.)

Gillian's Photograph of Gertrude Jekyll's Garden

The other three – very informed gardeners - visited Howick Gardens and the exquisite Gertrude Jekyll garden on Holy Island.  I looked and looked at the bright sky and and the glittering tourquoise sea and thought about ghosts – but they were as rare on these days as seals singing.


But over lunch Erica told us a true ghostly experience which winged its way right into to my notebook. We talked about Anne’s new website and urged her to love doing it. We also brainstormed with her a very original idea for a specialized blog which might come off. It is about gardening – and judging from the popularity of Gillian’s website it should be very well appreciated. We talked of Avril’s new newsletter which is full of great writing advice and also gives writers a range of competitions which can enhance their audience.

It’s always illuminating fun and joyful inspiration to meet, talk and work with writer friends of this quality. Of course it can also be physically and psychologically dangerous – which is the theme of my forthcoming novel The Art of Retreating. (See earlier posts here &   here &;  here,     But that novel is set in the Languedoc. Of course …er ….that is fiction. But it could never have been written without my wide and varied experience of going away with people to write, talk and think

Have you, like Erica, any experiences of (not neccessily  belief in…) ghosts that you’d like to share? Email me if it’s just too weird to comment here email me (wenrob73@hotmail.com)

Remembering Iris

My time in London with daughter Debora was fun. She is working on a new book and planning the launch  of her marvelous ( mother's pride...) book Gifts from the Garden on the 20th. 

We sorted out some papers and she handed me  a paper with a rather dark, long poem of mine which I'd entirely forgotten. Reading it again I remembered the girl who was its  inspiration - a friend I had when I was nine and she was fourteen. She used to call for me many days to come 'out to play'. Even at that age I thought her home set-up was puzzling. In retrospect her friendship with me was equally puzzling.I now feel that in writing this I was recovering some memory. 

The poem was first written in 1996.  I have edited it further to post it on the blog. It's still dark...

Hope at least you find it interesting.Wx

Remembering Iris

 Men open their wide mouths

teeth bite, bite like lions - 

soft hands, smooth pussy paws -

only going for the cream

lapping it with sandpaper tongues:

blue eyes, large black irises

In the house of her aunt and uncle

is a girl - dreaming, putty faced -

and on her bed  a bedspread.

whose white hanging-down  tassels 

vanish one by one

bitten off by pussy cats, they say.

Their house stands in our row -

Jerry-built like ours, fenced with chicken wire -

although unlike us they have no chickens

The aunt and uncle have red faces  

his more bulbous, hers sharp with make-up,

her hair all yellow feathers, sides upswept.

My father - prone to bad mistakes -

buys a dozen chicks for breakfast eggs.

and on a string above their fluffy heads  

he swings his wedding ring to sex them.

But his ring swings to the left and

tells us they are cocks, every one

No morning chucky eggs for us!

Still, we feed the chicks, clean their cage

cluck over them. But, come Christmas, 

we choke them. Not my father - all soft heart -

but my uncle who smiles as his strong fingers   

squeeze out their little chicken lives.

And by Christmas Day the dreaming girl

has palmed her savings, run right away.

Her aunt calls her a sly cat –

bad to the core  and so ungrateful –

as she burns the bedspread in the garden

fenced all round  with chicken wire.

© Wendy Roberton 1996/2012

Talking With Prison Writers Under a Clear Night Sky

The Indefatigable Pauline...

I arrived in London after a weekend in deepest mid Wales spent with other ex-prison writers in residence, before the induction week for new writers in residence for prisons. I was there at the invitation of the Writers in Prison Network, http://www.writersinprisonnetwork.org/. This is the  brainchild of Clive Hopwood and Pauline Bennet who work indefatigably to introduce into some fortunate English prisons energetic, creative people - writers, poets, film makers and storytellers - to leaven the mix of prisoners, teachers and officers and to offer something new and inspiring into these complex environments.

In my experience, the writer in residence can to a smaller or larger extent change lives. See here and here .

We stayed in an ancient extended farmhouse deep in the Welsh countryside - atmospheric to say the least.  It was good to talk to Steve a short story and historical writer now working on a book about a circle of friends of Conan Doyle - a kind of crime club where gentlemen read to each other papers about their own amateur sleuthing.

And also Andy, just appointed as a writer in residence in a men's prison, and wondering what he was in for. I recommended the short stories of (very blue collar macho...) Raymond Carver to inspire his students and Stephen King's On Writing to help them get inside the head of a writer. All quite macho of course. But that can help in a men's prison. (Look at Raymon Carver's What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Love?) 

And there was Sheilagh, who is about to go into the prison where I worked as a writer in residence. I told her she would enjoy it and find women to support her as they mostly support each other.

Clive and Pauline were recording short interviews for their developing WIPN website and I was asked for my top tips for new writers coming into this project.

I can't quite remember what I said but on reflection this is what I should have said:

1. Keep a very open mind.

2. Like the people you meet - this includes both prisoners and officers, some of whom do an amazing job

3. Don't get too fascinated by crime - don't identify your students by their crime  - move on with and for them.

6. Tailor your provision to the needs of individual students, not the needs of the institution or your own need for certain creative outcomes. Yes, I know this takes a certain amount of savvy and subtle political manoeuvring. But from experience, I know it is possible.

7. Always keep up  with your own writing and creative work. Read it and share it with your students. Write alongside them. (Risky I know, but they are taking a risk writing aren't they, writing for you?) In doing both of these things, you are showing proper respect and respect goes a long way in prisoners.

We were invited to take advantage of a outdoor hot tub at the farm but I am sure to everyone's relief I wasn't moved to disrobe.

But I did have two great treats.  One was a lady invited by Pauline who treated me to a hot stone massage on the Sunday morning and told me I had wonderful skin.

The other was the wide, unpolluted night sky of mid Wales which was pure and very grand. A good scene for a story or an inspiration for a poem.

 

PS For those out there who, as individuals or institutions, have long pockets or philanthropic inclinations Clive and Pauline are always searching for funding this remarkable project. Contact them at http://www.writersinprisonnetwork.org/.

Sweltering under the Paralympic Sun

Inspiration

Catapulted from sleepy mid Wales to central London -

I am now sitting in a leafy city garden eating gourmet avocado salad and drinking white wine. Overhead yet another jet flies by. Debora, the maker of said gourmet salad, tells me that for this month there have been more  jets directly overhead because the nearby Olympic stadium is a no-fly zone.

Despite the jets it feels green and peaceful here, like many surprising pockets of central London which confound the stranger’s expectations of a dark and dingy city. The new people just moved into the flat next door are working on their garden and Debora tells me of a man in a house nearby who has two beehives on his house.

We are somewhat exhausted today because we spent yesterday being roasted under hot sun watching wonderful athletic feats by remarkable paraympian athletes in the packed Olympic Stadium. This was smaller, more intimate than I'd expected. From where we sat we had a good view of the track events and a fair view of the long jump and the shot-put. Well edited television coverage obviously expands the whole shebang and makes it seem larger than life to the people at home in front of their television.

But I now know to be there was to apprehend a culture that was indeed larger than life, to witness the greater reality of the occasion. And this was not just about seeing the stoical, gifted and focused athletes competing before us, making us all more determined to try harder in our narrower lives. It was also about the crowd – lots of local voices and images reflecting our modern culturally diverse capital city alongside other faces and voices from the world. And so many families with children on the last day before schools round here began: children running up and down the aisles having fun, or being photographed against the arena, the Olympic flame in the background - historic images for the family albums.

The medal presentations seemed to come thick and fast, the massed audience applauding and standing up for winners from every country. One older man nearby stood each time to military attention, his thumbs to his trouser seams. I couldn’t stand up as my ankle was playing up a bit. But I was standing up with them all  in my heart.

And it was especially sweet at the end of the session to applaud David Weir when he was presented with his gold medal. If the beautiful stadium had had a roof it would have lifted as the whole crowd joined the athletes singing our own national anthem.

All this and wild flowers too...



NB THANK YOU TO DEBORA'S SEAN FOR THESE LOVELY PHOTOGRAPHS.

Next - scrolling back to my weekend  in mid Wales with prison writers

Dialogue in the short story: Top Tips from a novelist (2)

 As I embark on my short story collection called Paint I am reflecting on the crossover skills between the long and short writing forms. Today it is the role of dialogue in fiction.

Thinking of the story

 Dialogue has its part to play on both long and short fiction. It presents very common problem for new short story writers and novelists 

Dialogue is hot and hard and challenges the reader not just to imagine, but to hear different voices, It allows us to witness aggression, seduction, passion and anger and the nature of relationships without having to be told that this is happening. What is happening hits you in the face. Look at these writers, What do you witness happening here?

Look at  Why Don’t You Dance? by Raymond Carver 

and observe  his ability to imply risk and jeopardy through what seems like simple dialogue.

…He sat down on the sofa to watch. He lit a cigarette, looked around, flipped the match in the grass.

The girl sat on the bed. She pushed off her shoes and lay back. She thought she could see a star. ‘Come here, Jack. Try this bed. Bring one of those pillows.’ she said.

'How is it? ‘he said.

'Try it' she said.

He looked around. The house was dark. 'I feel funny,' he said.  'Better see if anyone’s home.'

She bounced on the bed. ‘Try it first,' she said...

Or look at Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now 

where she uses dialogue to set the tone of mystery, threat and personal grief near the beginning of the short story. . 

…‘They’re not old girls at all,’ she said. ‘They’re male twins in drag.’ Her voice broke ominously, the prelude to uncontrolled laughter, and John quickly poured some more Chianti into her glass.

        ‘Pretend to choke,’ he said, ’then they won’t notice. You know what it is – they’re criminals doing the sights of Europe, changing sex at each stage. Twin sisters here in Torcello. Twin brothers tomorrow in Venice, parading arm in arm across the Piazza San Marco. Just a matter of switching roles and wigs.’

         ‘Jewel thieves or murderers?’ asked Laura

          ‘Oh murderers definitely. But why, I ask myself, have they picked on me?’

           The waiter made a diversion by bringing coffee and bearing away the fruit, which gave Laura time to banish hysteria and regain control. …

 

In my story Sharpening Pencils I use dialogue

to show the uncomfortable contact between a shy girl and her equally shy tutor. I think.

...The girl stood back from the painting and surveyed it. Mrs Forrest came to stand beside her. She said. ‘I do like the way you manage to convey both humanity and abstraction, Miss Wintersgill. You hold onto the intimate relationship while making the meaning universal.’

The girl undid and redid her ponytail, filling the air again with the smell of turpentine. Mrs Forrest contemplated the thought of turpentine infusing the curly tumbling hair. Then she said. ‘I can indeed draw quite well. They told me so at the Slade, many years ago.’

‘You were at the Slade?’ 

Mrs Forrest laughed. ‘So I was. As I say, it was many years ago. I worked alongside people who now are what thy call household names.’

The girl coughed. ‘It must have been hard work there.’

Mrs Forrest noticed the accent for the first time. Somewhere from the West perhaps. She lifted her shoulders and sighed. ‘For the first year all I did, dear, was sharpen pencils, clear workspaces. I did draw at night. That eventually earned me my place. My night drawing earned me a place there.’ She paused. ‘Not that I was very good.’

‘It’s hard to think of you just sharpening pencils, Mrs Forrest.’

Mrs Forrest smiled showing discoloured teeth. ‘Of course I watched what they did and in my little room at night I tried it all out myself.’ She looked around. ‘Just as, perhaps, you do here, Miss Wintersgill, in the dark of night. But then you are so much more original.’ She backed away then, fading out of the room and closing the heavy door behind her with a click. Outside she untied Koppy and let him run through the darkened parkland around the house, barking now and then when he scented prey... 

And in this story, The Little Bee I have tried 

to show the world of a little girl observing the complex and ambiguous world around her. Clearly here I am unable to resist contextualising the dialogue in the larger narrative. But perhaps there is room for that in the wide world of the short story, I hope so.

... Amalie put a hand on my shoulder and I stood up before her. ‘And your Mama was very beautiful, ma p’tite. I knew about that. Hadn’t I been her dresser in the Theatre de Varietés? The sheer beauty of your mama drew great applause.’

My father giggled then. ‘But unfortunately she could never remember a line. Not a single line. The manager who had been intoxicated with her became embarrassed and employed beauties with more brain and better memories. Her friend Josephine was one of these.’

Amalie suddenly scowled at him. ‘But after all when you met her, Monsieur, you fell in love.’

He sighed very deeply. ‘So I did, Amalie. So I did.’ And with this he laid his head on the stout oak table and fell asleep, snoring and snuffling within minutes.

My gaze met Amalie’s and - both embarrassed and amused - we started to laugh. She hugged me tight and I could smell the meat and garlic on her. And my father’s fruity cigarettes. Still laughing, I helped Amalie to trundle the trolley through to the dark back places of the house, where her two nieces, who couldn’t speak French at all, washed the pots and dishes and cleared the kitchen for the following day.

As always you should make your own judgement.

? Why not try these …

- Abstract some dialogue 

from an existing short story – separate it on a page – and decide what you are doing here. Can you cut it back to just what is spoken? Can you implant more meaning, enhance the tone, and expose the difference in the way people speak by what they say?

- Take a one line encounter from your story 

and render it into dialogue which gives us more of the different lives of the speakers without telling us facts.

- Take an overheard fragment of the conversation of strangers 

and create a whole incident though invented dialogue 

Happy writing!
wxx 

@

Top Tips From a Novelist Writing Short Stories.

Even after so many novels I can’t begin another one until this existing one is properly ‘put to bed’. On the other hand I am not properly happy or resolved unless I am weaving stories, small or large.

So, while I am awaiting news of my new novel from the publishers I have decided to stop biting my nails and write six short stories around the theme of painters and sculptors. In reviewing my novels (here) lately I am reminded how often I the umpulse to paint re-occurs in my fiction.

Man in tree - Short story inspiration

This could be because I once briefly trained in and taught art and find many useful analogies between writing and art, For instance in The Romancer (or click on sidebar for Kindle) I  compare the large scale planning of a novel to blocking in a canvas. I have found that a number of writers have emerged from the art world. There is a serious kinship here.

In this ‘Paint’ project, for technical and creative inspiration I have gone back to the sublime William Trevor, the cool RaymondCarver, the elegant Scott Fitzgerald and the dark Daphne du Maurier. I would recommend these writers to anyone embarking on the writing adventure of  the short story.

Their works have inspired me to think of:

- The significance of the title: think of Carver’s What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Love; think of Du Maurier’s The Birds.

- Staying tight: every word must be a bullet  right to the heart of the meaning. This is even so if the prose looks casual or informal.

- The power and pertinence of title in combination with the first lines as they charge right into the story.

Now - putting my money where my mouth is - here are the titles of the first four stories with their first lines.  See what you think:

Short story 1. Wraparound

Using the invisibility afforded by the wide brim of her hat and her wraparound sunglasses the woman kept watch on the man on the rickety stool. He was painting on a small canvas clamped on to an equally rickety easel jammed against a rock, on top of which was parked a red coffee bowl.

    The man’s looks were unexceptional: dry skin creases of an ex-smoker; wispy grey-blond hair; nut brown skin;  whipcord muscles etched into long thin arms. She watched him as he stared for long minutes at the long beach and the sea and then – his brush held by the end, like a sword – he dabbed a spot of paint on the left hand side of the canvas…

Short story 2: The Little Bee

You ask how I met him? That you need this for your book? Well, it started very early mademoiselle.

    My father used to draw me as a child. He sketched my chubby feet. He outlined my roly-poly body and filled me in with pastel, rubbed hard - red, white and ochre with green in the creases. Alas it was a losing battle. The emerging face was always far too old for a baby. Those works remained hidden...

Short Story 3: Sharpening Pencils

Mrs Forrest always called her students by their formal names. ‘Miss Montague, your line is improving. Flow, dear. All is flow!’ And, ‘Miss Clark you must look for the light. Do look for the light, dear. Don’t imagine it.  Do make the light work for you.’

Mrs Forrest’s domain was a long chilly room - the ex-laundry of a large castellated house, once a great manor house, then a First World War hospital, then a psychiatric hospital. Now it was an obscure college for girls who – for one reason or another – had not made the grade elsewhere.

Short Story 4: How I Became a Painter

… The house was awash with Harry’s drawings and paintings pinned on chairs and cabinets, on walls and curtains. Each painting and drawing that Harry had made since he was eight or nine was on display in the narrow house. Thomas realised his friend was telling the world ‘This is me!’ in defiance of his father who’d never been comfortable about his son’s soft habit of drawing every dratted thing he saw. Boots, machines. What good’s such things, lad? Useless. The workings of a marshmallow mind. His dead father’s thoughts vibrated in the room now defied, contradicted by the rough papers and boards pinned around the room….

The Fifth Story will be about the impact of the prison art room on a woman prisoner

The Sixth Story will be about a painter who photographs a man cutting down her tree and the emerging disputes that define the space between them.

Suggestion!

Why don’t you plan a set of short stories around a theme? You could put them one by one into competitions, or keep them in a collection for publication either on Kindle or in more conventional form. The theme allows them to build into a coherent body of work, which is intrinsically satidfying for any writer. They could also be a showcase for the development of a novel around the same theme,

Happy writing!

For inspiration about short story success check out Avril’s blog.http://www.avriljoy.com/tag/tania-hershman/

© Wendy Robertson 2012