Truth And Fiction Like Two Hands Clasping…

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 Early Days

When the majority of my books – around 15 - came to life my only contribution was to take an intense  year to research and write each novel and deliver my completed manuscript to my publisher on  November 30 ( the date agreed in the commissions). I dealt with two major publishers - Hodder & Stoughton and then Headline – now Hachette.

I posted my  precious manuscript – which some writers may tell you becomes like a baby in your life – to my talented editors, Anne Williams and later Harriet Evans  (now a successful novelist herself). I would get it back from them by Christmas. complete with some changes inspired by their  insightful comments.

Interestingly enough Anne always insisted that they were suggestions, not instructions. Through time I had great advice from both Anne and Harriet which has entered my permanent writing process.

After that I returned the amended manuscript  to my editor  who entered it into  post- editing production involving formatting and cover design processes. I don't think I was aware then that it takes more than a  village to raise a novel. Since I have started going it alone I am very aware of that.

The production safely  in process, I would then begin to  prowl around my shelves, my growing pile of heavily scored notebooks - and  in the busy universe of my mind - to ponder an  arena of  people, life and history that would be the basis for my next novel. This was - and is still - my professional habit and routine through a many years.

By the time the novel appeared in the Spring I would be writing again, always voyaging into very different territory. In the meantime my  publisher's marketing department took care of the (rather limited - I wasn't famous after all...) promotion process. 

The novels were well reviewed - mostly in provincial presses across England and in  some magazines, although they never reached the magisterial heights of the literary broadsheets. I was from the North, after all and I had come from a working, rather than the literary background. I notice that this issue of being ‘from the working class’ is quite a trend nowadays. When I was first writing  I was distinctly pre-trend: there were no literary festivals therefore no platforms for my kind of writing. There was no Internet and no metropolitan networking - this  was strictly for already established writers. I had no contacts – my novels were published, as it were, out of the blue by Headline in its earliest days. I have my then editor Anne Williams and later Harriet Evans to thank for that.

As each book came out I would write some articles about the ideas underlying it,  I would do a few presentations.  But really I was free to get on with writing the next - very different - novel. This was, of course,  as well as working at my full-time job, as well as being a companion for my hard-working husband and nurturing my two children. Of course they are very big people now. Bonjour  @lickedspoon 

When i became a professional writer, the writing of popular novels was a virtual cottage industry before it became corporatised and monetised, with - it seems to me - increasing distance from the intense personal creative activity which had been all about dreaming up  stories and writing them down. In had became clearer that my thriving career  could not survive, based as it was on  instinct and a powerful storytelling imperative, rather than the somewhat rigid and perhaps stereotyped perceptions of The Market.  

 Going It Alone?

I had always made a living alongside my profession but never expected to make a fortune through my writing. (I think people tend to hope this nowadays…). The professional and artistic satisfaction for me was always the possibility of seeing the novels out there being read, and hearing readers response to my stories.

And this is why and how – my children grown and flown - I began to explore ways in which I could still write my novels and shepherd them into the market myself. So I started to write novels for myself, creating a very tiny imprint called Damselfly Books in order to locate them. 

So I proceeded to  publish Paulie’s Web – a novel emerging from my seminal experience as writer in residence in a women’s prison. I wrote The Pathfinder – a novel exploring my inner fascination with my Celtic roots which keep re-emerging in my philosophies and ideas - and in my novels. This always seem to me to be begging for some fictional expression. I went on to write the novel called The Bad Child, focusing on my work as an educator and the fact that middle children – (I myself was one and I was observing my niece, also a middle child, as another) – could be independent, rebellious and self-activating – rather different from their siblings. This is how my very special  Demelza came to life in this novel.

Becoming Alice emerged from my increasing professional interest in the complex connections between what appears to be pure fiction and what seems to be true memoir. This novel was to be the first of three novels set in the arc of public and private life between 1941 and the Millennium. It is no accident that this time-span just happens to be the arc of my own life fully realised in the life experience of a girl called Alice. At the moment the second and third novels in this trilogy are just at the brainstorming/note-writing/plot-planning stage now.

I was now realising just how much the focus throughout my writing life had been  - rooted in my own life experience - transformed through fiction  - eventually appeared on the page. But I realised that my life experience was not unidirectional or set in a neat narrative; rather it was fragmentary – incoherent shards and fragments which took different shapes depending on how I cast my story-net. This, I thought, was rather like the toy kaliedescope that has sat on my mantelpiece for more than twenty years. Now I had my title! This was when I began to write and publish some short stories which reflected this concept more directly.

The Workshops

So it was that  last Spring -  one year ago - I presented a series of workshops on the connection between memoir and fiction. The participants were both enthusiastic and inspiring. That was when, in serious earnest, I began to pull together my stories and to write new ones which would illustrate an  original fusion of objective truth and pure fiction. This was why and how I wrote the stories one by one over this last year. And then laid them out and then I surveyed them to see just what I had created.

And now I turned to Damselfly to publish this new collection to be called Kaleidoscope - Stories from the Frontier.  This subtitle – like the nature of these short stories – was inspired by a good deal of reading, especially the work of Diana Athill and Jean Rhys. I was particularly engaged by Diana Athill’s insightful comment on the late work of Jean Rhys, with whom she worked in the last 15 years of Rhys’s long life. Athill remarked on Rhys’s writing ‘from the ‘frontiers of old age’ as being of her very best. So I had my sub-title.  

In my publishing process I’ve used the services of Word-2.Kindle   to ensure the technical standard of the text. This company were both patient and helpful, which is just what I needed as I was going it alone.  Inspired by the Kaliedoscope on my mantelpiece. For the cover design I joined forces with my artistic, literary friend Avril Joy and we designed the cover together.

The blurb on the cover of Kaliedoscope took some thinking about. It has so many functions for any new reader. Referring to oneself in the third person is truly odd. Anyway this is what I ended up with:

In this collection of short stories Wendy Robertson acquaints us with the life of career writer Ruthie Evans - rooted in the North, travelling from Ireland to Singapore and Soviet Russia, featuring characters who reflect their Twentieth Century times. In the stories Ruthie emerges triumphant – complex, highly intelligent, conflicted and full of joy: a unique and special memoir, exploring the relationship between memoir and the short story.‘…truth and fiction like two hands clasping… A rare glimpse of what it’s like to be inside the process of writing… ‘Kathleen Jones: biographer‘More than just a memoir… a masterclass in the writing process.’ Sharon Griffiths: Columnist & Author‘A powerful writer.’ Mail on Sunday.

I truly hope you enjoy reading Kaliedosope. If you like the idea of this adventurous combination of memoir and fiction you might be inspired to write a story yourself - a story which could leap out the truth of your own experience. And then another. And another.

It seems to me now that this present lock-down situation could be perfect for anyone, writer or not, to embark on such a self-enhancing and satisfying project.

Buy?     Click Here

Also read two earlier posts  where I discuss  the complex relationship betweem Memoir and Fiction.

Here
https://lifetwicetasted.blogspot.com/search?q=memoir+and+fiction

 and here 

https://lifetwicetasted.blogspot.com/search?q=Kaleidoscope.+A+creative+view+of+the+literary+connection+between+memoir+and+fiction.

If all this has made you curious about the stories. Here for you is the contents list:

Kaleidoscope: The  Stories

Keong Sak.................................................................... 1
‘I do enjoy Singapore, very much.’ Tim Rice
Watching and Feeling............................................... 18
‘Blake said the body was the soul’s prison
unless the five senses are fully developed andopen.’ Jim Morrison.
Masculinity............................................................... 27
‘Prithee, peace/ I dare do all that maybecome a man; / Who dares do more is none.’Shakespeare.

This Working Life...................................................... 44
‘Nothing will work unless you do.’ Maya
Angelou

Patchouli...................................................................  53
‘There is nothing automatic about political
change, about liberation.’ Gloria Steinem.
Bandages................................................................... 63
‘No one ever told me that grief felt so like
fear.’ C S Lewis
Ruthie’s Rant............................................................. 74
‘Even though I was shy, I found I would get
onstage of I had a new identity.’ David Bowie.
Rudder and Bridle..................................................... 79
‘The faculty of the imagination is both the
rudder and the bridle of the senses.’ Simone
de Beauvoir.

Brown Velvet............................................................. 83
‘I think writers are, at best, outsiders to the
society they inhabit.’ John Irving.]
The Woman Who Loved Jesus.................................. 95
‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Educating Tegger..................................................... 104
‘The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn …and change.’Carl Rogers

Governess............................................................... 118
‘.… it is the duty of the poet to obtain
citizenship for an increasing horde of nameless emotions.’ Ágnes Nemes Nagy
Going By Train......................................................... 152
‘I have learned how faces fall to bone/how under the eyelids terror lurks…’ Anna
Akhmatova, 1957

The Fox House......................................................... 165
‘Only connect the prose and the passion, and
both will be exalted, and human love will beseen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.’EM Forster

Story Teller’s Apprentice......................................... 179
‘My daughter is one of my greatest
inspirations. Every day she surprises me andteaches me something.’ Patti Smith.

White Frost on Grass - Parts One, Two & Three.....185
‘The first lie in fiction is that the author givessome order to the chaos of life.’ Isabel Allende.

Big Issue.................................................................. 212
‘Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinishedbusiness, that’s what.’ Salman Rushdie.

Tiananmen.............................................................. 231
‘Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your
balance you must keep moving.’ Albert
Einstein. 

x

The growiing significance of Audio reading in modern literary life.

Like many other writers I have an abiding passion for books. In my long life I have read many hundreds of   thousands books for the purposes of pleasure, for research, for information, and for inspiration. Then there is the added ultimate pleasure of meeting like minds through words on a page written many years ago.

In my long life as a writer the books I have read have   been my model - in informing in various ways the direction and the spread of my own writing. For me life without books would be a vacuum, a desert. Without the books in my life I would never have dared to write my own stories and allow them to be shared with strangers. Perhaps like my mother and her four sisters I would have been stuck with telling the stories round the tea table, the children listening eagerly underneath the table.*

So far so good.

However, all this reading appears to have wreaked havoc on my eyes, rendering one of them only usable by default and the other occasionally giving up the ghost. Medical intervention has helped to a degree but the days of reading quickly, skimming and scanning for information has lurched to a stop.

I can still read, but not for long periods of time and not – as was mostly the case – at speed. All that skimming and scanning was that had been so useful for research and context has rather petered out.

And then – as I said in the earlier post - along came Kindle, bringing new possibilities – not least the possibility of enlarging print for ease of definition. It has proved useful for research and exploring new titles. My reading on Kindle very much reflected and endorsed my established reading choices.

“But it’s not the same!” So many people say. Me too! I have to say. For me reading books has always been a sensual experience – the bright artwork on the covers; the smell of new paper; the crisp feeling as I flick through the pages of a new book.

These days I do still read books - somewhat slowly I admit. But I do mourn my regular encounter with the new titles in paper, between covers. These days I tend to read poetry. With poems one can absorb a whole concept or story in a much shorter space – just one or two, sometimes three pages. These encounters are both bracing and inspiring. In recent times I’ve been revisiting the ineffable poet American Robert Hass whose poems of walk through his life and mine; and Maya Angelou whose poems are songs reflecting the light and dark 20^th century history. And I am rediscovering the dark nature of poet Ted Hughes and the hearing the magical rhythms of William Butler Yeats. As well as this I have loved reading the new work of my friend Avril Joy – inspired literary insights into diverse modern experience.

And yet in all this I miss the regular encounters with new books and savouring the anticipation the pile of books waiting the bedside table.

My favourite mantra in these challenging days is ‘in every problem there lies a possible solution.’ In my case this problem of reading in substantive quantities has been solved by my discovering and embracing reading in audiobook form.

Eureka! By this means I am now reading as much and as   quickly and as widely as ever I have. It is worth noting here that this activity engages the sense not mentioned as yet - the crucial sense of hearing.

Such a delight.

Interestingly, in enthusing about all this I have met more than a degree of literary snobbery. In the air is the vague suggestion that this – listening on earphones to someone reading a great writer’s work – doesn’t count as “reading”. One might even infer from certain comments that this way of reading is to some degree lazy, even inferior.

So I have decided to “come out” as an audio reader and boldly to say “I am reading Hilary Mantel’s new novel The Mirror and the Light. So brilliant. I don’t say listening to. And I say ‘I’m reading John Banville writing as Benjamin Black -all those high literary skills bringing subtle life to novels one might pin night down as psychological/ detective/philosophical narratives.’

So it is that in the last year or so I have read many novels.   I counted them up this morning and it seems I have read 49 long novels. In his seminal book On Writing, Stephen King, in adding up his annual consumption of books included all the books he had read on audio; I think his list came to 80 something.

There is something else. I feel now that one should recognise that audio books actually offer added value to readers in the skills and nature of the person who narrates the story. This is a very high skill and makes a crucial difference in the way that one reads a book. The voice of the narrator can make or break your own reading of the book.  In some cases I have to admit that for me some of the narrations can lessen the impact of the book. But the novel can only be enhanced by the talent of a narrator whose skills allow the writer’s voice to come through richly, clear and true.

Among these I would list Peter Forbes reading the novels of Peter May, James Buchanan reading Ian Rankin, Gerry O’Brien reading of Galway writer Ken Bruen. Then there is John Keating reading Benjamin Black/John Banville. And Ben Miles reading Hilary Mantel. I also really admire Ann Dover’s reading of some of my own novels; she tackles the north-east intonations with insight and subtlety - no easy thing.

Looking at this I think perhaps I might be accused of some bias towards the Celtic voice – which might, I suppose, reflect some of my own deep heritage. But there is musicality there which doesn’t resort to flat actorish Received Pronunciation.

Audio reading is blossoming all over the place these days, edging its way into long car and bus journeys, into long afternoons in the garden, into the boredom of hospital waiting rooms. And now we have the enforced isolation engendered by the epidemic I feel it will broaden its appeal even further.

Self-isolation may not be such a deep punishment when we can add to our list of books read ad infinitum; we can track the work of certain writers we love and find writers who may illuminate our confined lives. Audio reading is great for fiction but in my experience is also great for disciplines like philosophy, sociology and psychology.  Even writing from the classical world is available in this form.

For some people, probably like myself, for whom book reading has become more difficult, audio reading adds to and intensifies the traditional benefits of having all those books on your bedside table. I can see that in this time isolation, even confinement, that audio reading could very much facilitate online reading groups or WhatsApp discussion groups.

So, in this time of crisis, whatever the state of our eyes, in addition to our singing, painting, jigsawing, and reading actual paperbacks, we can explore and extend our enhanced and enriched literary range by reading in Audio, whether we do it on our own or as a member an online group.

Our aim for the duration of this crisis has to be that we spend time rather than just pass it till things get better. Which they will.

*I have posted here a while ago about ways of reading, focusing more on social class and reading – a theme which is becoming fashionable these days,

   http://lifetwicetasted.blogspot.com/search?q=Ways+of+Reading

You will find useful information about  acquiring Audio Books on this site.
https://ribbonfish.co.uk/blog/11-awesome-audiobook-publishers/ 

Kaleidoscope. A creative view of the literary connection between memoir and fiction.

The final version – a certain kind of writer’s magic!

I have just printed off the final master copy of my new short story collection Kaleidoscope – inspired by a series of well received workshops I offered last spring on the crucial connection between memoir and the short story.  This master copy will go to my third highly informed and insightful reader whose views I will welcome.

The title – Kaleidoscope – Stories From The Frontier – and also the nature of these short stories – was inspired by a good deal of reading, especially the work of Diana Athill and Jean Rhys.

I was particularly engaged by Diana Athill’s insightful comment on the late work of Jean Rhys, with whom she worked in the last 15 years of Rhys’s long life. Athill remarked on Rhys’s writing ‘from the ‘frontiers of old age’ as being of her very best,

I realised recently the degree to which my mind and imagination is a storehouse of experiences of my whole life – perceptions, sensual reactions, pleasures and pains. These elements are like the tiny bits of glitter in a kaleidoscope – each bit existing in its own right. Each time I shake my kaleidoscope I make a unique pattern, a unique story, reflecting of elements my life in different times and different places.

After much thought I have come to the conclusion that all memory is best transmuted through fiction and that all fiction is a vehicle for memoir. My Kaleidoscope collection here echoes these ideas and, I hope, reflects the intimate literary relationship between memoir, fiction and the short story,

Kaleidoscope will be published in the spring. I’m looking forward to that. My life is there on the page. I hope Kaleidoscope will resonate with a wide range of writers and readers interested in this complex connection between memoir and fiction.    

My heartfelt hope is that Kaleidoscope will resonate with a wide range of writers and readers interested in this complex and intriguing connection between memoir and fiction.

Ah! Titles! 

The titles of the short stories here are part of the essential truth of the life they reflect – the meat on the bones, as it were...

Kaleidoscope – Stories from the Frontier

 Keong Sak. ‘

I do enjoy Singapore, very much.’   Tim Rice

 Watching and Feeling. ‘Blake said the body was the soul’s prison unless the five senses are fully developed and open.’ Jim Morrison.

Masculinity. ‘Prithee, peace/ I dare do all that may become a man; / Who dares do more is none. Shakespeare: Macbeth

‘

This Working Life. Nothing will work unless you do. Maya Angelou

‘The door is inscribed in gold Gothic lettering. Miss Hogarth: Principal…’ R.E

Patchouli. There is nothing automatic about political change, about liberation.   Gloria Steinem.

1963. ‘So, how’s your love life?’ Amanda’s small, round face examines me, top to toe, her eyes shrewd…’ R.E

Bandages. No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. C S Lewis

‘The man, his coxcomb of silver hair bobbing, walks with a spring in his step down the hospital corridor …’ R.E

 Ruthie’s Rant. Even though I was shy, I found I would get onstage of I had a new identity. David Bowie.

 Brown Velvet.

I think  writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit.   John Irving.

Educating Tegger

The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn …and change.  Carl Rogers

Governess… it is the duty of the poet to obtain citizenship for an increasing horde of nameless emotions…Ágnes Nemes Nagy

Going By Train.

‘I have learned how faces fall to bone,

how under the eyelids terror lurks…Anna Akhmatova, 1957

The Fox House.

 Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. EM Forster

Story Teller’s Apprentice.  My daughter is one of my greatest inspirations… Every day she surprises me and teaches my something. Patti Smith.

White Frost on Grass .Parts One, Two &7 Three

 The first lie in fiction is that the author gives some order to the chaos of life. Isabel Allende.

Big Issue; Esme’s Story.

Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.’

Salman Rushdie.  

Tiananmen. Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving. Albert Einstein.

Finding Myself in My Books,

About Finding Myself In My Books.

The following poem, Finding Myself in My Books , was inspired by the task of organising all of my books as part of the creation of an Archive of all my work

including my notebooks, my novels, and my other published works.

This mammoth task is being spearheaded by the truly Doctor Donna Maynard, a  literary authority on the works of George Elliot, Lewis Carroll and  Charles Kinglsey.  And me now, perhaps.

My contribution to this task has been to survey and organise all the books on all of my shelves. In its turn this exercise has inspired the following short line poem, Finding Myself In My Books. You might be interested to know that this was first drafted while I was waiting in hospital for an eye injection

Finding Myself In My Books will be included in my newest collection of stories, called Kaleidoscope –A View from the Frontier. The short stories in this collection have emerged  from shaking my own life-kaleidoscope and being surprised by the special patterns which have emerged from the virtually random elements locked up in my life-storehouse. This has liberated unique stories to spring out of elements in different times in different places, finally fused  together through the art of fiction - viewed from what  the inimitable Diana Athill called the Frontier of Older Age. 

Here goes 

Finding Myself In My Books.

I am here at the frontier, reorganising

and encouraging my reading self

to revisit all of my books – a lifetime’s

books borrowed, bought and stolen if.

Some, acquired for research, have

driven me to dive into time and power

in order to colonise people, language and places.

Some contain  esoteric matter –

magic, ritual, ghosts, exotic plants

the mysterious powers

of the natural world.

Some explore ways of growing children –

their language and their secret inner selves.

The books remind me of myself, pondering

on society with its inexplicable shifts,

its organic twists and bizarre beliefs, which

out-play solid facts and  iron-clad ideas,

rendering them fluid –identity,

class, perversions, norms –

making imperative the changes

fundamental to our new millennium.

Then there are the stories, written in a lighter fashion

now dusty and dated - yesterday’s dramas.

Alongside these work of great poets and writers

resists the depredations of time;

refreshing me with every reading.

Weighing heavy on the shelves are books laden with

the phenomenally detailed minutiae of war –

gruesome images and experiences laid bare

to enable us to learn anew all about

the horrors perpetuated on our behalf

in the name of nationality at the behest of greed.

And there in the corner stand two cases filled with

my own writing. The books still looking bright and new

despite their long existence. They wait  patiently for me

to open the pages and rediscover some new things

about myself –  things I thought, things I felt, things I thought

I knew and really didn’t know.

The words inside these covers

Differentiate between who I am now

and who I was then.

November 2019

Plundering Memory. A Writer's Odyssey

I am thoroughly relishing the work on my new short story collection called Kaleidoscope – Stories from the Frontier. I am now writing the sixteenth of what will be twenty short stories. Perhaps you read one of them on my last blog post - Patchouli?
One of the most exciting things in this new project has been to focus my mind on the whole notion of memory and how it works for a writer.

In the process I have asked myself questions. What is my memory? Is it objective? Is it all I remember? Is it, perhaps, what I have forgotten? Is it all that I’ve been told of what has happened to me? Is it what I have dreamt? Is it these buried subconscious memories that are meat-and-drink in popular articles on crime and its solutions?

Do I as a writer of fiction, plunder my own memory and the memories of others? In surveying my longish list of various kinds of publication I feel certain that I do this – not just in character, content, and narrative - but in those embedded memories of the language and syntax of storytelling – crucial inner memories of the senses, the feelings, the fugitive memories of pain of delight. 

From these I have created and recreated original characters in my fiction. And I have even borrowed others’ memories as though they are our own, and projected memories harvested from my reading. I reinvent lives as essentially original inventions and end up believing that that is what really happened.

The joy and privilege of being part of an oral as well as a written culture is that somehow we inherit memory as part of our acknowledgement of  our membership first of the human clan, and then the human race. This has been reinforced and strengthened throughout the millennia by the sharing of stories in family and social groups, allowing us to develop a shared heritage of collective memory, sensitivity and consciousness as human beings.  Modern discussions of genetic memory perhaps reflect this.  

A writer’s instinct is ultimately to express universalities which will link with our readers' own experience and world-view. Thereby hangs worldly success, after all. Perhaps this particularly might be said to be more purposely focused in novels attached to genres such as espionage, crime, romance or war.  But even in these fields the narratives and the characters should be unique and idiosyncratic to save the work from suffering from an uninspired sameness.

As novelists and storytellers  from the house of our own memory we invent characters with their own histories and conflicts and we use them as psychic dwellings for our own dense complex experiences.

 Each one of us, with our unique baggage of complex memory picks up our pen and then asks the writer’s question What if…?  This is what I have been doing as I am writing Kaleidoscope. Stories from the Frontier.  My theory is that our writing is fuelled and developed from our embedded and continuing memory, whether intended or not. So in the end – as I have found in working on Kaleidoscope -it’s quite exciting to do this with a greater degree of consciousness than ever before.