A Writer's Life

Winter comes to Capezzano

2012-02-02T10:02:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we had a blizzard - winds strong enough to blow a steel barbecue across the terrace and relocate the TV aerial, and a few inches of snow frothing over the olive trees like soapsuds. We're on the edge of a Siberian front that's bringing unusually cold weather across europe. It's still snowing on and off and more snow and freezing temperatures forecast for the weekend. Winter weather like this doesn't usually last for longer than a couple of weeks, though further north it's more severe.

We're cat and dog sitting at Peralta for ten days or so at the moment - one frisky little hunting dog called Ellie who's obsessed with chasing objects, an elderly, deaf, arthritic, but very aristocratic Spinoni called Frank (short for Frankenstein!), Vaniglia- a shy burmese cross cat, and a big, affectionate black and white male called Pino. Tonight they're all in beside a roaring fire and we've opened a bottle of wine to keep out the weather.

Neil is about to start another sculpture down in the marble yard, but tomorrow is the feast of San Biaggio, so nothing is open now until Monday. Typical Italy!

Tuesday Poem: Norman Nicholson

2012-01-30T09:13:00.000-08:00

Well, the rabbit is out of the hat and in full view of the audience. I’d been keeping quiet about the subject of the new biography until everything was signed and sealed, but Melvyn Bragg mentioned it in his BBC Radio 4 programme and newsletter - so now everyone knows that I’m writing about Norman Nicholson!

So, who was Norman Nicholson? An obscure northern poet, from the small town of Millom in Cumbria, born in 1914, a protegee of T.S. Eliot and the Lake District’s second most famous poet after Wordsworth. 'Poem' is NN’s working manifesto.

Poem

I would make a poem
Precise as a pair of scissors, keen,
Cold and asymmetrical, the blades
Meeting like steel lovers to define
The clean shape of the image.

I would make a poem
Organic as an orchid, red
Flowers condensed from dew, with every lobe
Fitted like a female to receive
The bee’s fathering head.

I would make a poem
Solid as a stone, a thing
You can take up, turn, examine and put down;
Bred of the accident of rain and river,
Yet in its build as certain as a circle,
An axiom of itself.

I was approached recently by the Trustees of the Nicholson Estate to write a Life and Work for the Norman Nicholson centenary in 2014. This isn’t a commercial project, more a labour of love - I’ve always loved NN’s poetry - he wrote about the landscape I grew up in - a working landscape, not the pretty picture postcard views sold to the tourists. His best poems are probably Wall, Sea to the West and On the Dismantling of Millom Ironworks, which is about the brutal de-industrialisation of the north of England in the second half of the twentieth century. This is an extract:

            ‘They shovelled my childhood
On to a rubbish heap.   Here my father’s father,
Foreman of the back furnace, unsluiced the metal lava
To slop in fiery gutters across the foundry floor
And boil round the workmen’s boots; here five generations
Toasted the bread they earned at a thousand degrees Fahrenheit
And the town thrived on its iron diet. On the same ground now
Split foundations moulder in the sea air; blizzards
Of slag-grey dust are blown through broken Main Gate uprights;
Resevoir tanks gape dry beside cracked, empty pig-beds:
And one last core of clinker, like the stump of a dead volcano,
Juts up jagged and unblastable.....

He lived all his life in the house he was born in - stubbornly defending his northernness - always a fierce enemy of Metrocentrism. When anyone referred to him as a recluse he would say drily ‘They mean I haven’t been seen lately in London.’ People like Philip Larkin denigrated him as a 'Provincial'. He was emphatic about the truth of Robert Frost’s statement ‘In order to be universal, you must first be provincial’.

I’ve only just embarked on the initial research and will keep you posted. This will be the first time I’ve ever talked publicly about writing a biography, so it will be a new experience!

For more Poetry please check out the Tuesday Poets at www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

Author and Agent - Mitchell and Webb comedy

2012-01-28T06:09:00.000-08:00

This little clip made me laugh a lot! I once had a talk with an agent rather like this, though it wasn't as funny.

A Day in London - Flashbacks.

2012-01-27T12:55:00.000-08:00

A bar off Regent Street. Rich kids in clothes that don't come from department stores; the casual clunk of Mulberry bags, the click of Sophy Lazlo heels, the over-priced economy of Dolce and Gabbana. Gyozo Dumpling soup. A blueberry, free-radical infusion. A man eating sandwiches with one black leather glove. The Nash church is locked against student protest. A Bond Street jeweller sells diamonds bigger than the Ritz to Saudi princes and unshaven oligarchs.

Newspaper headlines signal the inevitability of Greek bankruptcy - a financial storm gathering over Davos. The red lines in the street outside the door. No Stopping. Someone selling consultancy at the next table. "Third party participancy." People on the pavement walking, walking, clutching their mobiles, bags, mineral water. A car with smoked glass windows, single numbers on the plate.

The doorman with a blue-tooth earpiece who wishes us a pleasant day. Standing in front of a Picasso with six noughts after the price. Underground, a crowded metal bullet hurtling through darkness. Another bar. Beyonce on the speaker system, Amy Winehouse - scorched throat music. Another tea, another wine. Spaghetti bolognese.

A spat of rain. The flowering of umbrellas.

This is my day.

(Extracts from my journal. Now on my way back to Italy)

Tuesday Poem: More stones from the river

2012-01-23T09:38:00.000-08:00

It's been such a busy week my small stones are just observations scribbled in my notebook that haven't yet made it into poems or prose. A summary of my week in a few images. Who knows where they might go?

A crow falling away from the wind, like a black rag.

The car waltzes on/water, powered by the wind./A pivotal movement.

What do you do when the switch inside your head decides it's morning, in the middle of the night?

In the pub, watching the fire-light through a glass of wine. A good place to be on a cold evening.

For lots of good Tuesday Poems please visit the Tuesday Poets website at www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com
For more Small Stones in the River of Stones check out www.writingourwayhome.com

Interviewing for a book

2012-01-22T10:11:00.000-08:00

One of the reasons that I'm back in Britain is to meet and interview several people for a possible new biography. The subject of the book (can't reveal the name yet!) lived through the 20th century, so there are many people alive who knew them, which is both a blessing and a difficulty.

When I wrote the Catherine Cookson biography many, many people wanted to talk to me and seemed desperate to give me information, but hardly anyone was willing to be quoted publicly because they feared a backlash. To a biographer, information you can't reference is virtually worthless. You have to be very careful of the libel laws in England, because they are much more stringent than anywhere else in the English speaking world. People's feelings matter too, even if the material you have is true. So I have to be very sensitive to those who are still alive and may be hurt by something I publish. That is always a big dilemma for the biographer.

I love talking to people and am always impressed by how kind they are and how generous with their time. This week I'm just having exploratory chats in order to establish the background, so that I know what information I'm going to have to ask for in further interviews. The most difficult interviewees are often people who work in the media, or are prominent in public life, who may ask you to submit questions in advance, which is difficult if you haven't met them before and don't know how close their relationship was with the subject, or what material they have in their possession. You simply don't know which questions you need to ask.

There are some ethical rules for interviewing - always ask if you can record the interview, if that's what you intend. Only once have I recorded secretly - a meeting with a very difficult individual who was denying information he'd already given me over the phone and was threatening to sue me if I quoted him. I feared he was going to misrepresent my own words in the tabloid press, so I recorded our conversation just in case. Recording is better than taking notes (though I take a few of those too, just in case there's a glitch) because you spend a lot of time writing rather than listening and it interrupts the flow.

I try always to let the interviewee have a summary of the interview afterwards, particularly the parts I want to quote from, so that they have the opportunity to draw back from publication, and to correct any errors that I might have made.

I do lots of homework beforehand - reading as much material as I can and trying to make sure I've got the relationships clear. I once interviewed someone who was a twin and got the twins' names the wrong way round. Very embarrassing and very unprofessional.

There's usually a list of questions in my notebook, but other questions come up in conversation and you have to be prepared for them - like ripples in a pond, you can go a very long way from the starting point!

So, a very interesting week and it's not over yet.

Two Katherines and grey weather

2012-01-20T03:41:00.000-08:00

It's grey here in northern England at the moment. The air tastes of snow and there's what - in Scotland - they call "a lazy wind" - lazy because it goes straight through you instead of going round! The Mill is very damp, having been uninhabited for a while, and it takes a few days for the heating to get a grip on the thick stone walls.

My trip back home is proving unexpectedly busy. Before I was even off the train I was being rung up by BBC producers wanting to talk about Catherine Cookson. Not having seen the UK newspapers for a while, I had no idea why and had to Google the subject. 'Catherine Cookson Country' is, apparently, to be abolished. The inhabitants are shocked and horrified. The novelist's sales have slumped since her death (inevitably), and she isn't the household name she once was, but the landscape Catherine Cookson wrote about and made famous is still associated with her, even though the tour buses don't come in their hundreds as they once did.
Apparently the tourist board in the north east have decided that 'Catherine Cookson Country' is not how they want to market the area at all, that it gives a negative image and they want to advertise their beaches instead. Catherine would have been furious with rejection. And it does seem to be a curious decision. The north east of England has some of the most beautiful beaches in Britain, but add in the Catherine Cookson connection and it definitely gives them an edge - beauty and books. Like the Bronte's Haworth and Du Maurier's Cornwall, Jarrow and South Shields will always be Catherine Cookson's country, even if they take the signs down.

So this morning I'm talking about CC on Radio 4, and then this afternoon I'm 'doing' the Wordsworth Trust's Arts and Books festival talking about Katherine Mansfield and the Dorothy Wordsworth connection. Let's hope I don't get the two C/Katherine's confused!

Book Review - Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21

2012-01-19T00:12:00.000-08:00

Lovely review from New Zealand poet and author Tim Jones, whose work (Men Briefly Explained) I admire, so it makes the review doubly valuable. Cheered me up on a grey morning. Thanks Tim! Review at 'Books in the Trees'

The Most Depressing Day of the Year?

2012-01-18T13:43:00.000-08:00

This is what it looked like at London Bridge station last night

Back to England yesterday. A weary journey. Two ‘incidents’ brought trains to a complete halt between Gatwick airport and Victoria station London, resulting in extreme congestion and delays on the remaining services. Forcing our way through crowds - like a riot, or sale day at Harrods, having station gates slammed in our faces because there were too many people on the concourse for safety. Then missing the main line train we could have got on because the doors were locked just as we reached the train (still 2 minutes to departure) Policemen patrolling the station in threes with AK47 assault rifles in their hands and other weapons slung about their persons, accompanied by sniffer dogs. This isn’t an England I recognise, but fear I must get used to.

It took less than 2 hours on the plane from Pisa to Gatwick and another three and a half to get from Gatwick to London (normally 30 minutes) then another three to get out of London northwards. Hungry, tired, cheated of an evening with my children and grandchildren, I wasn’t in too good a mood by the time I arrived in the midlands. But thinking about the suffering of the families of the two people who died after throwing themselves under high speed trains put it all into perspective. England isn’t in great shape right now.

And maybe it had something to do with the fact that the third week in January is statistically supposed to be the most depressing week of the year, and Monday, 'Blue Monday', the most depressing day. Obviously Tuesday wasn't good either.

Tuesday Poem: Kim Moore, The Drowned Fields

2012-01-16T12:17:00.000-08:00

Although being without him now
would be like standing on one leg
still everything seems paper thin.

If my foot slips and breaks the surface,
I’ll fall to a land of drowned fields,
where the only language is the language

of the sky and the birds make endless
patterns in the air and the pools of water
are words the rain has left behind.

The birds are like shadows in the corner
of my eye, or silver, as if the sky
is throwing money to the ground.

Next to the path the grass moves beneath
my feet. Hummocks store black water
while his thoughts, impossible to ignore

push their way across the land like large
enthusiastic dogs. The lives I could
have led are silver threads across

the drowning land and birds come
together , then spread apart, as if the sky
opened its hand and let them loose.

Kim Moore

Kim Moore (who just happens to live in Cumbria) is a young British poet who is regarded as one of the bright stars of the future. Kim has won two of the UK’s most prestigious prizes for young poets - an Eric Gregory Award and the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2011. She is 29 and works as a peripatetic music teacher, and is also in the final year of a part-time MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has been published in the TLS, Poetry Review, The North, The Rialto and Ambit - all excellent places - and has read alongside Carol Ann Duffy at the Royal Exchange in Manchester.

The title ‘The Drowned Fields’ resonates with the weather up here in the northern hemisphere at the moment. I like the way the poem starts in mid-conversation, with images of a fragile relationship - the thin crust we all walk on with the ones we love before our lives become inextricably meshed together. The repetition of the words ‘drowned’, ‘drowning,’ emphasises the feeling of being overwhelmed and adds to the sense of danger - committing yourself to a relationship is one of the most risky things we do.

I particularly like this image:

‘ his thoughts, impossible to ignore
push their way across the land like large
enthusiastic dogs.'

And the way she describes the birds flocking and re-forming in the air,
‘.........as if the sky
opened its hand and let them loose.’

But somehow the birds, coming together and spreading apart, are another metaphor for the fragility of the relationship.
Kim Moore is one to watch.

For other Tuesday Poems please take a look at the Tuesday Poets' blog over at www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com
There's some great stuff!

A Love Affair with Words - The Etymologicon

2012-01-14T02:41:00.000-08:00

I’ve always loved words - can remember rolling them round and round in my head as a child, trying to work out what they meant. My parents, living in an isolated croft in the Cheviot hills, used to listen to the radio a lot, and I can remember lying in bed listening to the voices in the next room. One of my favourites was the weather forecast for shipping with its strange litany of place names, Shannon, Rockall, Malin, Dogger, Fisher, German Bight.

Words had personalities, and sometimes colours, of their own. Monday was always yellow, Tuesday blue, Wednesday green - I learned long words from the radio without any idea of what they meant. Meretricious was one - I thought it sounded like being deliciously rewarded for being good. Only when I grew up did I find out that it means ‘befitting a prostitute’!

Being brought up in the North of England also means having a rich resource of Norse dialect to draw on - wonderful, strong words like pebbles in your mouth - ‘thrang’ meaning to be busy, ‘lowp’ meaning jump, and ‘nithered’ which meant shivering with cold, which we were - often. You didn’t fix things, you ‘fettled them up’ and if you were feeling well you were ‘in good fettle’.

The origin of words and how language changes over time is fascinating. English is such a hotch-potch of Anglo-saxon, Latin, French and other borrowed languages it often results in crazy connections - many of them logged in Mark Forsyth’s hilarious scramble through the dictionary - The Etymologicon (currently only £1.99 on Kindle).

The connection between chickens and snooker? A French ‘poule’ (chicken) which becomes a ‘pool’ of money in the centre of a gaming(chickens again) table - hence anything held in common - a gene pool, a typing pool, a car pool, not to mention the game of pool, billiards and snooker - and back to French hens again.

Anyone guess the relationship between male body parts and the New and Old Testaments of the Bible, and to detest, protest and contest? Apparently you once (well, men anyway) used to have to use essential body parts to guarantee veracity. And Avocado is the Aztec word for the same thing, since the Aztecs thought the fruit were shaped like gonads - so they should really be called Aztec Balls.

So many words came originally from eating and sex and, of course in English, the weather. No surprise to anyone living in the north of the country that the word for Sky comes from the Viking word for Cloud, since they’re often one and the same thing. Also no surprise that the word Dream comes from the Anglo Saxon for Happiness.

The expression ‘letting the cat out of the bag’ comes from a way of cheating someone who was trying to buy ‘a pig in a poke’. And sometimes it was a dog that was substituted, which meant they were ‘selling you a pup’ instead of a pig.

I laughed a great deal when I read this book and it reminded me how much I love words, just for themselves.

How to use Social Media to Promote a Book

2012-01-10T01:56:00.000-08:00

This is a really brilliant blog from ex-marketing manager turned author 'Rose Red', about using social media to get publicity for your work. She really spells out the do's and don't's of the medium. Especially Twitter. She has excellent advice for both self-published and mainstream published writers. Apparently the knack is to be understated, funny, friendly and definitely not needy! Advertise indirectly and don't bombard people with requests to buy/read/look at your books. It definitely struck a chord with me - I've been put off several authors because they are tweeting every five minutes about their work. Do take a look at her blog, which is called Sprig Muslin and you can find it here:- http://sprigmuslin.blogspot.com/2012/01/its-all-about-socialising.html?spref=tw

Also some excellent advice on E-publishing and marketing at The Writers Guide to E-Publishing which you can find at http://thewritersguidetoepublishing.com/help-my-books-not-selling

Tuesday Poem: The River of Stones

2012-01-09T09:43:00.000-08:00

At the beginning of the week I joined 'A River of Stones', which is a project that lasts until the end of January, and is a way of using the Buddhist concept of 'Mindfulness' in our creative lives. it was one of my students at Lancaster last year who introduced me to the idea of 'Mindfulness', which was the subject of her Ph.D. She pointed out that our lives are too fast and heedless and there's not enough time to sit quietly and observe, or just simply 'be'. Ted Hughes was a great advocate of sitting and looking too. He would sometimes spend over an hour observing something with furious concentration, before writing about it.

I'm never going to become a Buddhist (or Ted Hughes!) and simply don't have the self-discipline to become a disciple of mindfulness. but 'A River of Stones' simply asks you to commit to spending a few minutes a day sitting (or standing) quietly, observing and thinking, to focus on one thing and then write about it in as few words as possible. Then you can Tweet your 'small stone' if you're a Twitterer, or put it on your blog, or Facebook, or post it on the main River of Stones blog.

What you produce every day does vary in quality - sometimes you can't come up with anything - and it's difficult (impossible so far) to get beyond description in such a small space. Everything I write seems to have a romantic, rather sugary taint to it, which I'm trying to eradicate. But in the middle of my stressful life, I'm finding the exercise very therapeutic. Next week's aim is to try to get closer to the bare bones of things.

Here are this week's small stones.

1. Cloud curved over the sea like a shell hinged at the horizon, where a golden pearl is radiating light.

2. Deserted House:
Cracked walls and fallen tiles
the hanging gutters
but one mysterious light
behind blank shutters.

3. The swaying blind cord ticks away the moments to the beat of the wind.

4. A quiet room. Only a thought disturbs. A pulse of blood, a breath, the sunlight crawling across the wall. The pen on the page.

5. Haiku:
Olive leaves reflect
the sun like slim, silver fish
swimming in bright shoals.

6. The bells, nodding from rival belfries across the piazza, do not agree with each other. The clanging bronze vibrato tolls discord.

*The photograph is of a particularly beautiful, ancient wall on the road to Capezzano Monte where I live.

Of Cats, Polenta and more Etruscans

2012-01-08T12:14:00.000-08:00

The starving wild kitten we began feeding in July and christened 'Batcat',

is now a fully grown-up feline of the female gender. She no longer hisses and spits and will allow us a brief stroke when putting out her food, but attempts at further intimacy are furiously rebuffed and often result in disappearance at escape velocity!

Woke up this morning to cats yowling in the olive groves and suspect that Batcat is on heat, though she turned up innocently for breakfast with scarcely a hair out of place. When she is tame enough to catch we intend to take her to an animal charity for neutering, but at the moment that seems a distant prospect.

Meanwhile I'm trying to increase my repertoire of Italian cooking. Friends told me that Polenta is easy - you simply need a non-stick pan and the patience to stir for 30 minutes. So I made the attempt and produced something that should have looked like a golden mound, crisp at the edges, but actually resembled a pale yellow breast implant when it flopped out of the pan, and tasted of nothing much. Hey ho! Back to the recipe book.

I'd like to share some more pictures from Orvieto, if you can bear it? This is Civita di Bagno Regio, a few miles from where we were staying at Lake Bolsena.

Civita is miraculous - a pillar of rock rising up from the centre of a huge volcanic crater (which reminds one of pictures of Colorado) topped with a very ancient walled town.

The front gateway is Etruscan, as are the chambers hollowed out of the rock beneath. This is a staircase cut into the rock to go down to a water cistern. And yes, we did go down!

Most of the buildings inside the walls are medieval. The streets are very narrow and shady, so not good for taking photographs unless you have special lenses. This was one of the little bars.

Earthquakes destroyed parts of the town in 1349, 1695 and 1764, though the ruins of many houses are still standing.

Erosion has since caused many of the outer buildings to collapse into the crater. This house and garden (inhabited) were overhanging the edge and someone had inserted wooden props into the rock under them. But I wouldn't have spent a night there for any money!!

Only 5 families now live there permanently, though there are shops, B and Bs (all safely in the middle!), and some lovely small restaurants. It's one of the most beautiful places I've seen in Italy. Utterly unique. This is a cactus on someone's garden wall overlooking the canyon.

The Italian Witch and D H Lawrence

2012-01-06T11:48:00.000-08:00

It's Epifania here - Twelfth Night in the UK - the day everyone takes their Christmas decorations down and when, in Italy, La Befana - the witch - flies abroad with her broomstick and a bag of presents for good children. Bad children get charcoal in their stockings instead!

Mine arrived on my Kindle (La Befana may use archaic forms of transport but is definitely into new technology!) D H Lawrence's 'Etruscan Places', out of copyright in Australia and available from the Gutenberg project, is a book I read as a travel struck teenager and am now re-reading with the benefit of having visited the places he's writing about. I'd forgotten how good a travel writer Lawrence was and also how political his viewpoint. The Italy he travelled through was ruled by Mussolini and he seems to have regarded Roman rule as just another brand of Fascism. He describes the Etruscans as 'the people who occupied the middle of Italy in early Roman days and whom the Romans, in their usual neighbourly fashion, wiped out entirely in order to make room for Rome with a very big R - expansion with a very big E, which is the sole raison d'etre of people like the Romans'.

Lawrence was in love with the Etruscans and writes about them in the full romantic flush of his intoxication with their imagined lives. I don't believe the half of it, but I'm enjoying wandering about Etruria visiting tombs and museums and examining wall paintings and eating goats cheese in wayside taverns with taciturn, faun-like youths and listening to Lawrence's persuasive voice. Have made a note to read 'Twilight in Italy' and 'Sea and Sardinia' - neither of which I've read before.

A bit of Etruscan Tomb Raiding

2012-01-04T14:09:00.000-08:00

If a genie popped out of a bottle and offered me three wishes, my first wish would be to be with Howard Carter when he first entered the tomb of Tutankhamen. So, crawling about in 3000 year old Etruscan tombs has to be a brilliant way of passing the afternoon. True, most of the grave goods have already been legally looted by archaeologists, and the tombs were situated in a very muddy wood, but there was the odd sarcophagus and a few scraps of wall painting left. And we didn’t have to queue, or pay to get in, and we were the only people there.

A funeral urn

No one really knows where the Etruscans came from, but they arrived in Italy a long time ago with a language that looks a cross between hieroglyphics and Viking runes.

They knew how to build walls and buildings like the Egyptians, and they made bronze statues (which the Romans melted down) and objects like the Greeks. Their tombs are like the Egyptians too - sloping entrances cut into the ground, subterranean chambers with wall paintings and marble topped sarcophagi surrounded by a collection of objects designed to equip the dead for life after death. It's all very personal. Their funeral urns, like the one above, and their sarcophagi (below), have images of the dead person on them.

Small, bronze religious figures.

You can find the tombs anywhere there’s a rocky outcrop. Some of them have been converted into sheds and storehouses by more recent inhabitants, but others remained buried and have only just been discovered. Heksana, near Orvieto, is only one of a number of known necropoli in this area. We found this tomb beside a farm track only partially concealed by ivy.

Walking through the woods we, quite literally, stumbled on these. There were about seven in all, though the roofs had fallen in on some.

The largest and poshest was closed off with a glass door,

but this is what it would have looked like inside, had we made an appointment to view with the local office of antiquities.

The rest are protected only by tarpaulins - often rotten and full of holes. One of the most interesting tombs was flooded, but we could see a series of tempting chambers opening out beyond the entrance. Next time we’re going equipped for tomb raiding with wellingtons and a torch!

Italy has more history than it can afford, which is a pity, because these beautiful, historic places need protection from the elements and from less scrupulous human beings.

New Year in Orvieto - with Jazz

2012-01-03T12:06:00.000-08:00

Just back from Orvieto and thoroughly exhausted from having such a good time. I haven't been able to put up anything on the blog for five days because the small hotel out in the country didn't have Wi-Fi. There was an old computer you could rent by the hour in the foyer, but I was never in the hotel long enough to use it - what was going on elsewhere was just too tempting! Over the next few days I'll be posting a few photographs to give you a glimpse of what is one of the most beautiful and historic areas of Italy. This was my first visit and I was completely knocked out by it. Even on a grey day (and we only had one) it was wonderful.

Orvieto is in Umbria, on the border with Lazio, south of Tuscany. The area has a violent volcanic history and the scenery is spectacular. Orvieto itself is a walled town sitting on top of an outcrop of volcanic 'tuff' - a pale rock which is soft and looks a bit like pumice. Winding your way up the rock into the town takes a long, long, time - better to leave the car outside and walk, but it must have been ideal for defence against invaders.

Inside there are the narrow streets, piazzas, and that mixture of Etruscan, Roman, medieval and Napoleonic buildings that make Italy so beautiful. No photographs can do it justice. The Cathedral - taller than any other building in the whole town - is really spectacular in white marble.

The town is in the centre of the Etruscan area and was first settled by them more than 3000 years ago. Everywhere you go you stumble on Etruscan temples and walls. The rock under the town has been tunneled out to make tombs which you can visit. And there are other tunnels used by medieval despots fleeing their critics!

Orvieto hotels were completely booked out by the Jazz Festival - a winter edition of the famous Umbria Jazz Festival - and so we had to stay about 20km from the town in a place called Bolsena. It's the largest volcanic lake in Europe - the result of a volcano that exploded a hundred or so thousand years ago. The area is still thermal and there are a lot of Etruscan sites there too - perfect for anyone who loves landscape and history all in one package. Our hotel (built for the summer trade) was almost empty, on the edge of the lake, with the most beautiful views.

In Italy people spend their New Year's eve eating with their families and then they take to the streets for a grand 'passaggiata'. We watched the sun go down in Lake Bolsena before eating in a local Osteria and then drove into Orvieto for the fun. It was very hard work fighting your way through the crowded streets. Here, everyone was watching a group of fire-eaters performing in the Piazza.

At midnight there are the fireworks. I'm a complete child when it comes to the bangs and flashes - I could watch them for hours. Italian fireworks aren't like anything else - no health and safety issues here - they just let them off in the piazza in the middle of the crowd and you have to get out of the way as best you can. This year, in front of the cathedral, they were wonderful. Lots of noise and exploding multi-coloured fireballs.

Afterwards, fueled by hot punch, we went to the theatre for a jazz concert supposed to start at 1am, which didn't get going until about 1.45. It was an Italian programme. The Lydian Sound Orchestra comes from Vicenza, near Venice, and they are brilliant. They were playing with a Sardinian trumpeter called Paolo Fresu who was equally good, though I was struggling to stay awake by about 3.30!!

Left the theatre about 4am and then made the 20km drive back to the hotel (guess who drew the short straw for that one?) to fall into bed about 5 absolutely shattered! Worth it though. Tomorrow I'll put up some pictures of the Etruscan tombs we found in a wood and were able to crawl into. It was unbelievable!

Walking in the Marble Mountains

2011-12-29T08:20:00.000-08:00

Looking across to Mt Corchia

It's a bit of a ritual for us to go for a Christmas Day walk in the mountains, whatever the weather. We've been out in hurricanes, monsoon rains, Lake District mizzle. I've got a whole album of photographs taken cowering behind walls, under trees, almost invisible in thermo-fleece and Berghaus! But this year the sun shone - bitterly cold at 4,500 feet, but clear, blue and sunny.

The marble quarries stop work at christmas, so it's a good opportunity to get up into the high mountains using the tracks they've built for the gigantic rock lorries without risking one's life. This year we went up to the Henraux quarry on the highest flanks of Mt Altissimo, whose summit is getting lower year by year. They are literally slicing it off.

Tough environmental call for a sculptor who loves working with the stuff, watching the environment be altered so drastically. But it's not sculpture that's done this - a few blocks here and there for statues etc can be accommodated - no, it's the public appetite for bathroom tiles, fireplaces and table tops that's eating it away at this rate, helped by the ease with which it can now be quarried. Once it took months to cut a marble block by hand; now it takes minutes. And you don't have to take it down to the town by buffalo sled (which took days). A lorry can do the trip in half an hour. How much of the mountain will be there when we walk back next year? I suppose that depends on what happens to Italy's economy. The machinery is idle at the moment.

Tomorrow we're off to an Italian town further south - Orvieto, near Perugia - for New Year. It's the birthday of jazz musician Stan Tracey and Neil (who used to run a jazz festival in England) has been invited to the party. I'm really looking forward to seeing another part of Italy, as well as the music and the festivities.

Oh, and this year's Christmas picture? Muffled up to the eyebrows for the sub-zero temps, but at least it wasn't raining! Auguri and Buone Feste everyone!

Perched on the ledge of Altissimo, Mt Corchia in background

Christmas in Italy

2011-12-23T05:14:00.000-08:00

In England in winter, what I miss most is colour - the landscape seems to be leached by cold and rain to a dull, muddy, sepia. Not so here - where the buildings are picked out in every shade of ochre and rose, the olive trees are still a silvery green, and the sun sets in the sea every night in a spectacular light show. This was the solstice sunset last night.

The weekly markets too, are gaining in colour towards Christmas. the Italian have a sense of style in their shop windows and even their stalls. Not much sign of the Italian economy slowing down here.

I'm signing off for christmas now - to be spent with a group of friends - Israeli, Italian and Danish, a real mix of customs. And I've managed, despite an oven that probably knew Julius Caesar, to cook an English Christmas cake (and even ice it in a wobbly way!) to take with us.

Auguri a tutti! Wishing you all a very happy Christmas and New Year, whatever and however you celebrate. Particular thoughts to Christchurch New Zealand, where there has been yet another big quake. Daughter, husband and two little boys, were fortunately at home safe and not shopping at the time. Hope everyone else is safe too.

Tuesday Poem: Wordsworth's 'Minstrels'

2011-12-19T01:55:00.000-08:00

The minstrels played their Christmas tune
To-night beneath my cottage-eaves;
While, smitten by a lofty moon,
The encircling laurels, thick with leaves,
Gave back a rich and dazzling sheen,
That overpowered their natural green.

Through hill and valley every breeze
Had sunk to rest with folded wings:
Keen was the air, but could not freeze,
Nor check, the music of the strings;
So stout and hardy were the band
That scraped the chords with strenuous hand.

And who but listened? - till was paid
Respect to every inmate's claim,
The greeting given, the music played
In honour of each household name,
Duly pronounced with lusty call,
And "Merry Christmas" wished to all.

William Wordsworth

And a very merry Christmas to everyone!!!

I'm the editor of the Tuesday Poem hub this week and have posted 'A Child's Christmas in Wales' by Dylan Thomas. To listen to this and look at other Tuesday poet's contributions please visit www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

Ted Hughes in the BBC Archives

2011-12-14T07:38:00.000-08:00

Ted Hughes has just been honoured by a place in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey. Melvyn Bragg takes a walk through the BBC Archives with some wonderful tapes of Ted Hughes reading his poetry and talking about it. Informative interviews with his wife Carole and best friend Seamus Heaney, as well as intimate letters from Ted Hughes to and about Sylvia Plath. The programme deals very frankly with their relationship. The best thing I've ever listened to on Ted Hughes and his work. Available on BBC Radio 4 free anywhere in the world from this link.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0183glm/Archive_on_4_Ted_Hughes_Memorial_Tones/

Tuesday Poem: One Raven

2011-12-13T03:25:00.000-08:00

That day by the lake
when you wouldn’t stop and
I made you and you stalked
off into the bracken and I sat
on the rock looking up
at the crag wondering why
do I always take it why
am I still here and then
saw a bird circling
as a crow circles its carrion -
but more slowly, wings spread wide
and the feathers fanned out against the sun
and it seemed larger and darker
with more history than a common scavenger
and then I knew I was watching an omen,
riding the thermal, effortless,
croaking a harsh truth.

Kathleen Jones

I've now got almost a complete collection of poems on the raven theme, inspired by the culture of the Haida Gwaii indians of North America. This one is about a quarrel (quite a long time ago now) and the moment of realisation when you know a relationship is going nowhere! I'm also guest-blogging about the book that started it all 'A Story as Sharp as a Knife' over on Norman Geras' Blog today.

For more poetry please go to the Tuesday Poem website and check out to wonderful selection on offer at www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

Sculpture by Candlelight

2011-12-11T09:34:00.000-08:00

It’s the festive season in Pietrasanta - Christmas markets, parties, and exhibitions. We’ve been to several lately - nothing big, just quiet celebrations of current work in artists’ studios and small spaces.

Last night one of the bigger marble studios opened up for the people working there to show their work. Not just some lovely pieces, lit by candlelight, but a chance to see the context - the rough drafts of WIP. This is work by Swiss sculptor Rita Meier.

There are so many wonderful women sculptors working here. At one of the local wine producers, another artist, Swedish Nigerian Italian Yemisi Wilson was showing her ‘Animalia’ - lovely drawings of primates and joyful marble carvings of elephant seals and rhinoceros’s. There was the added bonus of being able to sample the local wine harvest at the same time!

One of the real treats last night was being able to go up into the loft of the Cervietti studio where they keep the plaster maquettes of all the sculptures that the artigiani used to be asked to copy. It’s a ghost gallery of figures out of fairy tales - a film set for a horror movie. These are just some of the ones that caught my eye.

I could have wandered around this attic all night - there are probably a thousand stories up here!

The Lost City of Luni

2011-12-08T01:12:00.000-08:00

Neil and I try to take our days off during the week, rather than trying to battle crowded roads and pavements on Saturday and Sunday. This week, grasping the opportunity of a bright, sunny winter’s day, we headed out a few miles north - about forty minutes drive - to find the ruins of an old Roman city we’d heard about from friends.

You wouldn’t think that a thriving Roman port of several miles in diameter would vanish. Luni had existed since Etruscan times and was home to tens of thousands of people, but somehow, around five hundred AD the sea began to recede, the population dwindled, the marble temples tumbled and the city disappeared under a tide of river silt and agricultural loam. Only one or two bits of evidence remained - fragments of the city wall, the ruins of the amphitheatre, a carved column - the rest was buried under farm buildings and fields, as you can see above. The sea is now half a mile further out and the nearest port is La Spezia.

This is what is under the grass.

In the 1960s archaeologists began to excavate and, although only a fraction of what is there has been uncovered, you can now wander round and look at the buildings they’ve dug up. Around you, green fields stretch out to the horizon with hummocks and bumps and dips and you know that you’re standing on what were once busy streets and people’s houses. Most of it will remain underground. Italy has so much archaeology and precious history - it’s a miracle they manage to afford to preserve so much of it.

This is all that is left of the foundations of the temple - the building itself stood on top in glittering white marble and must have been visible for miles.

These are vats that once contained olive oil or wine. You can just see the terracotta necks of some of the ones that have survived.

This is the amphitheatre - which is fenced off so I could only take a photo through the wire.

The people didn’t go far though. Luni is situated beside (and sometimes under!) the modern town of Ortonovo, and afterwards we drove up into the ‘centro storico’, built - like so many Italian medieval towns, on a fortified hill top. Here you can see profiles straight from a Roman coin, and a woman in the bar with curled hair held back in a band was the image of one of the marble statues in the museum. Ortonovo Paese was utterly beautiful in the evening light - a stark 9th century tower standing next to a baroque birthday cake of a church in total harmony. Down below, not a rumour of a Roman city on the plain visible to the naked eye, and you begin to wonder how long before these human habitations too will vanish and what will replace them?

Tuesday Poem: A Sad State of Freedom, Nazim Hikmet

2011-12-05T08:42:00.000-08:00

A Sad State of Freedom

You waste the attention of your eyes,
the glittering labour of your hands,
and knead the dough enough for dozens of loaves
of which you'll taste not a morsel;
you are free to slave for others--
you are free to make the rich richer.

The moment you're born
they plant around you
mills that grind lies
lies to last you a lifetime.
You keep thinking in your great freedom
a finger on your temple
free to have a free conscience.

Your head bent as if half-cut from the nape,
your arms long, hanging,
your saunter about in your great freedom:
you're free
with the freedom of being unemployed.

You love your country
as the nearest, most precious thing to you.
But one day, for example,
they may endorse it over to America,
and you, too, with your great freedom--
you have the freedom to become an air-base.

You may proclaim that one must live
not as a tool, a number or a link
but as a human being--
then at once they handcuff your wrists.
You are free to be arrested, imprisoned
and even hanged.

There's neither an iron, wooden
nor a tulle curtain
in your life;
there's no need to choose freedom:
you are free.
But this kind of freedom
is a sad affair under the stars.

Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963)

Translated by Taner Baybars

For more poems by Nazim Hikmet got to http://www.poemhunter.com/nazim-hikmet/poems/

I thought that, with the elections in Egypt and the ongoing push for more democratic freedom in the Middle East, it might be good to feature work by a Middle Eastern poet for this week's Tuesday Poem.

Born in Turkey in 1902, Nazim Hikmet was politically active as a communist and spent many years in and out of prison for his beliefs, despite being a recipient of the International Peace Prize (alongside Picasso and Pablo Neruda). He is one of Turkey’s most important writers. Hikmet died in Russia in 1963 suffering a heart attack as he bent to pick up a newspaper from his doorstep. His poems have been put to music and sung by Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen and The Byrds. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A2z%C4%B1m_Hikmet

For more poetry by the Tuesday Poets please visit the Tuesday Poem website at www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

Blogging at Author's Electric

2011-12-05T01:29:00.000-08:00

Today I'm blogging over at Author's Electric on the dilemma of whether to E-publish a novel or go down the traditional route.

Katherine Mansfield in Paperback

2011-12-03T02:55:00.000-08:00

Yay!!!! Katherine Mansfield is out in paperback on Amazon and in all good bookshops. And on the wonderful blog 'The Reading Life', Mel U is giving away a copy in a competition if anyone wants to try for a freebie.

The paperback looks exactly like the hardback, but it's a lot cheaper - list price £15.99 but being discounted.

Here in Italy it's pouring with rain today, raining and thundering as only the Italian mountains know how to do it! But I'm having a cosy day, making apple and lemon cake to take to a party tonight being held by some Danish friends. It takes my mind off 3 weeks Cambodian washing steaming on the radiators, and the fact that my ex-husband has just come back from Thailand having married a Thai wife of 4 days acquaintance, to the consternation of the family. This writer's life is never dull!

Autumn in Italy

2011-12-01T07:07:00.000-08:00

So here I am again in the little house in the olive grove. Despite the fact that it's the 1st December the weather is mild, with hazy sunshine - warm enough to eat lunch outside. Coming straight from a northern British winter it seems strange to step back a season. It's autumn here. The chestnut trees are turning a lovely golden colour and the leaves are dropping.

In the Pietrasanta Piazza they're putting up the Christmas tree.

And the Pri-mate is back from Cambodia, bringing a hammock in his luggage, which he's strung between the two trees on our terrace. It will be lovely in the summer - but not too bad even now. Just the thing for hanging about doing a bit of scribbling, though I might want it higher off the ground!

For me it's back to work - two guest blogs to write before Monday, the illustration permissions to sort out for the Japanese edition of Katherine Mansfield, and a proposal to write for the New Project - all will be revealed soon.

A Short Intermission

2011-11-27T11:55:00.000-08:00

Thoroughly enjoyed the reading yesterday with Martin Malone and the party afterwards with friends. Thank you everyone who came on a really terrible Lake District day with howling winds and horizontal rain.

Now wrapping Christmas presents, hoovering the carpets and packing the suitcase to start traveling back to Italy. So I won't be posting anything for a few days. Looking forward to getting back to the sun and the peace and quiet - this visit has been very hectic. Haven't read a book or had any peaceful writing time for three weeks! But there is an exciting new project brewing.......

Looking forward to seeing Neil again - he's flying back from Cambodia on Wednesday. And I'll be posting later in the week as soon as I get the suitcase unpacked.

Night Before Nerves

2011-11-25T13:02:00.000-08:00

Just getting myself together for the northern launch of 'Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21' at the Wordsworth Trust tomorrow. Trying to decide what poems to read ....... trying to decide what to wear ........ Taking along a few bottles of wine for the patient supporters who are (reportedly) coming (and a bit of dutch courage for myself!). Have a repeated nightmare where I go along to a reading and I've come to the wrong place and there's no one there - another one is not being able to find the pages I'm supposed to be reading from. Some writers really enjoy performing, but I've begun to realise I'm not one of them - I'm the hide-in-the-closet and write kind of writer!

Oh - and just discovered that Wendy Robertson has done a lovely review of the poems on her blog at http://www.wendyrobertson.com/not-saying-goodbye-at-gate-21/#comment-633
Thank you Wendy!

Book available from www.templarpoetry.com

Talking about Biography and Fiction

2011-11-24T12:50:00.000-08:00

Just been back to Lancaster University, where I was Royal Literary Fund Fellow last year, to meet this year's fellow Philip Caveney who writes scarey books for young adults. We'd been invited to give a joint seminar - actually just a posh way of saying that we gave a talk about our own writing to the university staff and whoever else wanted to come along.

Philip started out writing thrillers for grown ups but moved to young adult when his ten year old daughter asked why he wouldn't let her read any of them. The first YA was written for her and since then he's been very successful. He read from his latest WIP about a young boy who falls through the floor in a museum in Edinburgh and finds himself back in time and face to face with an infamous Plague Doctor during the time of the Black Death. It was wonderfully entertaining.

I couldn't compete with that! So tried to give some insights into how I write and the different approaches to writing biography and fiction and the fact that biography hasn't always been valued as much as fiction - biographers have been vilified as hearse chasers, vultures picking over the bones of the dead, purveyors of literary lace curtain twitching, and upmarket tabloid journalism. Like a kind of literary Burke and Hare we sell other people's lives and live off the proceeds.

Virginia Woolf said that biography neglected the imagination and worked 'at a lower level' than the sublime art of fiction. But why should it do that? I've always thought of biography as a 'found' novel, where you are given the plot, the characters and some of the dialogue and you have to create a riveting story that brings it all to life for the reader. A novel on the other hand, could be thought of as a fictional biography.

Jane Eyre, a literary fraud

Because I write across both genres I spend a lot of time thinking about the differences between them and how one can feed into the other - using the techniques of one genre to solve problems in the other. I've also been puzzled by the recent debate about fake memoirs. It seems that if a novel is discovered to be autobiographical it isn't a crime, but if a memoir turns out to be a work of fiction this is a sackable offence for an author. Very strange, since one of the most famous novels of all time began life as the autobiography of a governess, edited by Currer Bell.

These days, Jane Eyre would never have made it to the shops, the book tour would have been cancelled and the author blacklisted. Because this is what happened to Love and Consequences published by Penguin USA. It was, according to the sales team, a riveting, un-put-downable read, but as soon as it was discovered to be (mainly) fictional, it was unreadable and the author guilty of 'a huge personal and professional betrayal'.

Tuesday Poem: Tim Jones

2011-11-21T08:19:00.000-08:00

And Not to Yield

Leave home, and your ego
blooms as the square of distance. Return
is a necessary corrective,

a diminuendo of corridors,
anxious crowds, missed messages.
Fretting at the baggage claim:

did they even put your cases on the plane?
And the knowledge that, not far away,
an angry wife is pacing.

Pity Odysseus. Penelope
(the suitors done and dusted)
is on the surface calm

but furious beneath: all that crap
he put her through! She lets it out
in flechettes of resentment.

Odysseus learns to dodge or hide.
All he wants is a quiet life,
a place to write his memoirs,

but she keeps inventing tasks for him.
"I'm not bloody Hercules," he says, and,
"Didn't I tell you there could be delays?"

Tim Jones, from 'Men Briefly Explained'.

This newly released collection from Tim is excellent. There are some very impressive poems in it, but I also liked the way the collection framed them - the flow of the narrative through it. I was very happy to review the book and Tim quotes a paragraph on the back cover.

"Tim Jones writes about how it feels to be a man, of male relationships – father, son, brother, friend, lover, husband – exploring territory that men traditionally don’t talk about, saying what is often unsaid, confronting stereotypes, and genetic imperatives. He writes with a blend of economy, humour and compassion that is rare in poetry, often finding the unexpected phrase - ‘a diminuendo of corridors’ - or an unusual, but exact, image - ‘mountains piled like thunderheads’ - to surprise and illuminate. This poetry is how New Women want their New Men to be – strong, sensitive and empathetic." Penelope would probably have preferred Odysseus to be like that too. Living with (or more often without) a hero is hard work! Odysseus also features in the Derek Walcott poem posted by Mary McCallum this week.

For more Tuesday Poems please visit the website at www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

The Creative Cafe Project

2011-11-19T00:58:00.000-08:00

My story 'Jazz Cafe' is on the menu at the Cafe Lit Creative Cafe Project site today as a Mango Smoothie. If you love scribbling at cafe tables with a cappuccino on the side, and haven't found the Cafe Lit site yet, please check it out - there's some great work and some very good stuff for writers.

New Use for a Kindle

2011-11-17T23:55:00.000-08:00

Neil is on an island, far out in the Gulf of Thailand, where it meets the South China Sea. There's no electricity, no mobile phone signal and no wi-fi. But he's discovered that if he walks along the beach at one end of the island he can get a signal on his Kindle - not good enough for email, since it comes and goes - but enough for Twitter. And, yes, you can Tweet on a Kindle. So my entire relationship now consists of a series of Tweets - an affair in 140 characters. Plot for a novel?

As for me - I'm twittering from the John Rylands Library in Manchester where I'm doing some more research. And I'm being followed by three very lively authors from America who want to come and visit me in Italy! Sounds like fun.

Dark Satanic Mills

2011-11-16T14:13:00.000-08:00

The poetry festival was held in one of Arkwright’s old cotton mills - Masson Mill at Matlock Bath - which has been preserved, partly as a shopping centre and partly as a museum. Unlike many museums, this is not a reconstruction. The machines have been preserved just as they were when they stopped working and the mill has the eerie feeling that you might have just walked in while the workers have knocked off for a coffee break. Not that they had many of those. They worked long hours and conditions were terrible.

My great grandfather came from northern Ireland to work the cotton mills of northern England, beginning at 12 as a cleaner, crawling under the machinery to remove the build-up of lint. It was very dangerous as the looms travelled backwards and forwards on rails, constantly moving.

some very pink lint

Then he became a loom operator and eventually a pattern maker, putting holes in the card that programmed the loom.

A pattern punching machine

The pattern is hung in the front.

I had the whole place to myself and it was a very moving experience to wander through what would have been his working environment - it made it all very real to me and made me feel that I should write about it. He died, like many mill workers, of emphesema.

It was great to be able to just wander around. The machines were complex and fascinating and the workshops were wonderful - at least to someone odd enough to love rooting about in hardware shops and ironmongers. They looked like my father’s toolshed on the farm - utterly chaotic - and they had that unmistakable smell of iron rust and old machine oil!

Raw Cotton

first stage spun cotton

A bobbin machine

It was all very dark, so difficult to take photographs even though it was one of the most photogenic places I’ve ever been to. Every corner, every basket of bobbins, every strange machine was just posing to be photographed. And in the dying vats there were cubby holes of dyed cotton in every colour you could imagine.

For a lover of history, it was a fantastic experience and has given me a lot to write about -my notebook is crammed!

Poetry this Way

2011-11-14T14:02:00.000-08:00

It's not often you get the opportunity to wallow in poetry for three days, listening to it, reading it, talking to other poets, but that's what I've just had. The Derwent Poetry Festival is small as festivals go but intimate in a way that some of the bigger ones aren't.

Templar have a reputation for producing beautiful books and, as one of the three winning Straid poets, I was very pleased with the look of mine - as were Martin Malone and Susanne Ehrhardt with theirs. I'd met Martin before, but it was the first time I'd met Sue, who is a doctor and has worked for Oxfam in a number of third world countries and is a very good poet and really interesting person. Martin's also had a pretty diverse life, working as a rock musician, sound engineer and teacher, in Saudi Arabia and finally in Cumbria. He currently plays in Simon Armitage's band, Scaremongers and works as a special needs teacher.

Also reading at the festival were Jane Weir, talking about Walking the Block, her biography in poetry and image of the textile artists Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher. Another poet new to me was Christopher James whose pamphlet The Manly Art of Knitting was also being launched.

Stayed in a lovely B and B in Matlock Bath - B & Bs aren't what they used to be - mine was furnished and kitted out like a five star hotel - everything you might possibly wish for from a mini-bar to a tooth-brush (and it turned out to have free wi-fi too!). And towels twisted into swans on the bed and the most amazing display of fresh fruit for breakfast. Not to mention the fact that the owner rescued me from a disaster with public transport and drove me to the poetry festival. There are still nice people in the world. Thank you Roger!

Now back at the Mill for a few days before going off to do some research in Manchester for a new book proposal. It's colder than Italy and very misty, grey and autumnal. I miss the light.

It's finally launched!

2011-11-11T00:30:00.000-08:00

It’s finally going to be out!!! So forgive the outbreak of exclamation marks! This weekend is the launch of my new collection from Templar Poetry at the Derwent Poetry Festival. The books aren’t on the Templar bookshop website yet, but we’re assured that the web update is on its way and any books ordered online (£8.99) will be delivered asap, just e-mail info@templarpoetry.co.uk Should also be on Amazon.co.uk sometime next week. I’m reading with several other Templar poets as well as my co-award winners, Martin Malone and Suzanne Ehrhardt at the Arkwright Suite, Masson Mills, Matlock Bath if anyone's in the Derby area over the weekend. Mimi Kalvati is the guest poet reading on Saturday night and there are lots of others. It sounds good fun and I’m really looking forward to it. Won’t be able to blog from there, as the B&B I’m staying in doesn’t have wi-fi. And no, I don’t have a smart phone, or a Blackberry. But I’ll take lots of pictures and hope to do an update once I’m back home on Monday.

I write poetry very slowly - so much of the creative energy gets used up by writing prose in order to pay the bills. It’s ten years since I last had a collection out - an exhibition of poetry and photographs (called Secret Eden) to celebrate Visual Arts Year. Before that it was a small pamphlet called ‘Unwritten Lives’.   So this collection has been a long time coming. But whatever I write in order to make a living, poetry is where I start from, where I feel most comfortable, my natural voice, and I can’t tell you what it feels like to have the poems out there to share with others.

It may seem odd, but it means more to have one small poetry collection published than all the biographies put together.   This really is the blood on the page, rather than simply describing someone else’s blood on the page. This is my chance to show that I can do what the people in my other books do. Does this make sense?   I’d argue with anyone that biography is an art form, a found novel, a creative act, but deep in my bones, there’s a car sticker slogan or two lurking in the back window - ‘Biographers do it second hand’. ‘If you can’t write, write about people who can’.

Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21 is about journeys - departures and arrivals. I seem to have been waving goodbye to people at airports and train stations all my life - I once counted up that I’d had 27 addresses in three different countries by the time I was 25.   The poems are also about different kinds of goodbye - the failure of relationships, the deaths of close relatives.   It contains a few of the most popular poems in the earlier pamphlets (what the Pri-mate calls ‘Kathy’s greatest hits’!).   But there are a lot of new ones gathered together from little magazines that have published individual poems over the last few years, some that are too new to have been published anywhere, and a few more from E-zines such as the Tuesday Poem blog site.

I have a few review copies to give away - if anyone would like one please leave a comment or email me on kathyferber@yahoo.co.uk

Travelling and Plagiarism Scandals!

2011-11-09T09:19:00.000-08:00

I'm off to the UK for the launch of 'Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21' at the Derwent Poetry Festival. By an odd coincidence I've just waved goodbye to Neil who is off to Cambodia via Milan and I'm not looking forward to the next 3 weeks on my own.

Interesting story unfolding in Book World - Q.R. Markham's much hyped spy fiction 'Assassin of Secrets' released only a few days ago has been withdrawn after a tip-off that passages had been 'lifted' from classic spy novels. Amazon described the book (pre-revelation) as 'a narrative hall of mirrors in which nothing and no one are as they seem'. It proved to be absolutely prophetic!

Red faces and big losses for Little Brown and Hodder who have withdrawn all copies - end of career for author who didn't include the quotation marks. According to the list on the Huffington Post and a number of blogs, this isn't just the odd phrase picked up and unconsciously repeated, the book seems to have been a patchwork of other people's novels including classics such as Ian Fleming. Even Markham's interviews were quotes from someone else. How can this happen? Do editors no longer read? Don't they check for plagiarism? Apparently the Huff Post compiled their list by putting phrases into Google and seeing what came up. Shouldn't the publishers have done that? I have to do it with my student's work to check for originality.

Rain still causing chaos in Italy. Neil managed a couple of shots from the train as he passed through the Cinque Terre. At Vernazza you can see the huge mound of rocks, mud and debris that's still being bulldozed from the streets.

Tuesday Poem: Christina Rossetti

2011-11-08T00:30:00.000-08:00

A Pause

They made the chamber sweet with flowers and leaves,
     And the bed sweet with flowers on which I lay;
     While my soul, love-bound, loitered on its way.
I did not hear the birds about the eaves,
Nor hear the reapers talk among the sheaves:
     Only my soul kept watch from day to day,
     My thirsty soul kept watch for one away:-
Perhaps he loves, I thought, remembers, grieves.
At length there came the step upon the stair,
     Upon the lock the old familiar hand:
Then first my spirit seemed to scent the air
     Of Paradise; then first the tardy sand
Of time ran golden; and I felt my hair
     Put on a glory, and my soul expand.

Christina Rossetti, written circa 1853

Christina 1848 by her brother Dante Gabriel

Christina Rossetti's father was an Italian political refugee and poet. Her mother was the daughter of another Italian writer, Gaetano Polidori. Christina's uncle was John Polidori who accompanied Byron and Shelley to the continent and wrote The Vampyre. Although she was born in London and spent most of her life there, Christina was very Italian in temperament - which didn't fit very well with English Victorian notions of womanhood. She and her brother Dante Gabriel were known as the 'two storms' but while he was allowed to go his own bohemian way, Christina had to conform and she found it difficult to subdue her rebellious disposition. Much of Christina's poetry is about loss, loneliness and renunciation - themes that mirror her own life. She broke off two engagements to men she loved passionately because of religious differences (one was a Catholic, one an aetheist). She seems to have regretted both decisions in later life. Her mother was deeply, inflexibly, religious, an older sister became a protestant nun, and Christina's life under their influence was very restricted. She was always very shy and spent most of her life at home, avoiding social contact, writing poetry - some of which was erotic and passionate. Her most famous poems are 'A Birthday', 'In the Bleak Midwinter', which was set to music by Holst, and 'Goblin Market' - one of the most erotic poems in the English language. The poem above, A Pause, was written at a time when she had just broken off her engagement to the Pre-Raphaelite painter James Collinson who had converted to Roman Catholicism.

Christina Rossetti: Learning not to be First, originally published by Oxford University Press, is available as a Kindle book on Amazon for £2.86.

For more Tuesday Poems, please go to the hub on www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

For a review of contemporary American poet Stanley Plumly's collection 'Now that my father lies down beside me' , go to my book review site .

Signs of Change in Book World?

2011-11-07T02:34:00.000-08:00

What could be nicer than books and chocolate? The Galaxy Book Awards are rapidly upstaging the Booker prize, which has taken a knock lately after arguments about the need for readability which supposedly clashes with perceptions of literary value (are the two things irreconcilable?).

Alan Hollinghurst won the Author of the Year award - after having been left off the Booker shortlist - for his novel 'The Stranger's Child'. A lot of people will be pleased to see an award going to Sarah Winman's debut novel 'When God was a Rabbit', and an old-fashioned literary biography won the non-fiction prize ahead of the much hyped celebrity bios.

Apparently there's been a reader's revolt against the trend towards (often publisher generated) celebrity memoirs/biogs and Claire Tomalin's 'Dickens' is doing much better than anyone (even Claire herself) predicted. Hurray!!!!

Nothing for poets this time though.

Interesting post by Elizabeth Baines over at Fiction Bitch, about the experience of re-reading books you loved as a child. It's called 'What do we read, when we read?'

Galaxy Award Results:-

Waterstone's UK Author of the Year: The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst (Picador)

Specsavers popular fiction book of the year: A Tiny Bit Marvellous by Dawn French (Penguin)

More4 popular non-fiction book of the year: How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran (Ebury Press)

Crime and thriller of the year (available on iBookstore): Before I Go to Sleep by S J Watson (Doubleday)

Daily Telegraph biography of the year: Charles Dickens by Claire Tomalin (Viking)

International author of the year: A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Corsair)

Food and drink book of the year: The Good Cook by Simon Hopkinson (BBC Books)

WHSmith paperback of the year: Room by Emma Donoghue (Picador)

National Book Tokens children's book of the year: A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness (Walker Books)

Audible.co.uk audiobook of the year: My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You by Louisa Young, read by Dan Stevens (HarperAudio)

Galaxy new writer of the year: When God was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman (Headline Review)

Christina Rossetti re-issued

2011-11-05T02:18:00.000-07:00

Today I'm posting over on the Authors Electric blog site, about the re-issue of my Christina Rossetti biography as an E-book.

We have a huge storm here at the moment - just watching it from the sitting room. We've spent two days at Peralta trying to pick as many olives as we could before the storm arrived - four of us picked 243 kilos! Now have very bad back, but at least the olives are at the press. Genoa, sadly, is afloat with a flash flood generated by this storm. Italy does seem to be suffering from severe weather this year - meteorological as well as economic.

Amazon Link

Fright Night - my Halloween date!

2011-11-01T07:54:00.000-07:00

For Halloween we went to a fund raising event at the Croce Verde (Green Cross). In Italy a lot of the emergency services (eg Misericordia ambulances) are run by charities, rather than government run as in the UK. The Croce Verde has been much involved with the rescue effort in Monterosso and Vernazza, so particularly in need of support at the moment. We paid 15 euros for a gigantic portion of meat and chips, with wine, followed by a very sticky cake - estimated at about 1000 calories per slice! It was fancy dress, though not everyone managed it. Neil rather stole the show with a home made mask downloaded from the internet and a borrowed wig.

Here is my Pri-mate for the evening;

Today and tomorrow are public holidays here - All Saints Day and All Souls Day. Everyone visits the cemetery to tidy graves and place flowers and remember the absent members of their families. In even older times it was Samhain, when people believed that the fabric of the universe was at its thinnest and the spirits of the dead could communicate with the living.

So, in Italian fashion, I've been remembering absent members of my own family - my Italian grandfather Thomas, my lively grandmother Annie who loved to party, my story-telling Irish father and long suffering Geordie mother (I still miss them a lot) and two little grandsons, Alfie and Taliesin who died at birth, but are still very much part of our family.

Tuesday Poem: Halloween with Emily Dickinson

2011-10-31T08:29:00.000-07:00

It's Halloween in Italy - a Festa they celebrate well, since it coincides with All Souls Day, when everyone visits the family graves and places flowers on them and remembers the dead. In South America tomorrow is called the Day of the Dead.

Looking around for a suitable poem, I thought of Emily Dickinson's 'One Need not be a Chamber to be Haunted' and then found this strange video of the poem. Emily Dickinson's portrait has been animated so that it seems as if the poet herself is reading the words.

I love the poem because it works on so many levels - not least because it talks about the 'haunting' of the creative imagination. We all function on 2 levels - the conscious and the unconscious. The unconscious is the basement - we take the lift down, it’s a bit dark and murky - most definitely haunted - and most people don’t want to linger there for long, but if you want to create - that’s where you have to be. Margaret Atwood in her essays about writing 'Negotiating with the Dead', says that the act of writing is the business of going down into the underworld and making ‘something or someone’ that is dead alive again.

For more Tuesday Poems please go to the Tuesday Poem Hub and check out individual poets' contributions on the sidebar.

Italy's Storm of the Century

2011-10-30T06:07:00.000-07:00

Just back to Italy, arriving at midnight to discover that the storm that wiped out one village in the Cinque Terre and buried another, had removed the pathway to our house and deposited it somewhere in the olive grove. We are left with a rutted river bed strewn with rubble. The storm had also tripped our electricity so that the fridge and freezer were full of rotten food - not a good surprise when you open the front door!

But it could have been worse - we can see the Cinque Terre from our terrace and it’s only a few kilometres as the crow flies. Apparently the rain was biblical, making it impossible to drive or walk anywhere for a few hours. 20 inches of rain fell in that time. Roads turned into rivers and the water brought down rocks, trees, rubble and mud. There are mini landslides all the way up to our village, but nothing major. Different in the Cinque Terre - which is a World Heritage site. The pictures are horrific. In Vernazza rubble and mud have been deposited up to first floor level - filling houses and shops and railway tunnels. In Monterosso, parts of the town were washed completely away.

Rescuing people from 1st floor windows.

This used to be a shop.

Our road and the contents of the freezer fade into insignificance when you look at these pics. And it's such a delight to be back in Italy - the sun shining, still with some warmth. Our landlords are beginning to pick the olives, though this year apparently they’re small and dry and hardly worth the effort. Too little rain during the summer months. The storm we’ve just had has also stripped the trees of many of the olives that were there. Not much left for oil. Don't try being a global warming sceptic in the bars round here!!

Filming Rossetti

2011-10-25T21:52:00.000-07:00

Just off to London to make a short film for the BBC on Christina Rossetti. They want to feature her Christmas carol 'In the bleak midwinter' and the film will go out just before Christmas as part of the magazine programme 'The One Show'. Apparently I'm to wander around the streets of London (and the Tate Gallery) discussing Christina with a celebrity! I'm sure it will be great fun, but very nervous at the moment. Being camera shy I don't feel comfortable in front of a TV camera.

The really nice thing is that the phone call about the programme came just as we were re-formatting my Rossetti biography 'Learning Not to be First', for Kindle - hopefully it will give it some publicity - a brilliant piece of luck!

Christina was one of the most fascinating people at the centre of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and her poetry knocked spots off the poetry of her brother Dante Gabriel. Apparently she was very good at art too, but girls didn't get any training in those days. It makes you very glad to be a woman born in the 20th century.

Tuesday Poem: Autumn Haiku

2011-10-24T14:29:00.000-07:00

One of Tomas Transtromer's last poetry collections, published in 2004, is called 'The Great Enigma'. The largest part of the collection is a long series of haiku. This is one of them;

The darkening leaves
in autumn are as precious
as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And I liked this one - though it's rather sombre.

Death stoops over me.
I'm a problem in chess. He
has the solution.

At the moment I'm enjoying his 'New Collected Poems' published by Bloodaxe and translated by Robin Fulton.

For more Tuesday poems, please visit the hub at www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

One Writer's Week

2011-10-22T12:42:00.000-07:00

The reality of a working, free-lance writer’s life is not the peaceful existence a lot of people fantasise about. Virginia Woolf famously wrote all morning (after ordering meals from the cook), read and wrote her journal after lunch and took a little walk before dinner. For most writers it's very different. There's the business end of writing (it is like running a business these days) and then there's the actual writing. There are usually half a dozen projects swilling around in your head at any one time and the pace is killing. This week has been particularly brutal. It started in Italy.

Monday - up at dawn, drive to airport, early Ryan Air flight from Pisa to London. 3 trains in vile weather, eventually make it back to the Mill around 9pm clutching a pint of milk grabbed from a station shop.

Tuesday - up at dawn, open a month’s mail, sort whatever possible, dash out to bank, pay bills, go to dentist, hairdresser, get flu-jab, buy shopping. Pack suitcase and write talk for Manchester LitFest and print out directions for Library I’m also going to do research in. Fall into bed with 2 alarms set.

Wednesday - up at dawn, bus, 2 trains, arrive Manchester. Dash into Library Archive to arrange reader pass and check they received the manuscript order I emailed yesterday. 12 pm Drink coffee in the street on the way to the LitFest to arrange IT for power point and meet the organisers of the event. Give talk, meet audience and chat, answer questions, sign books, drink bottle of water (no time for lunch). 2.30pm Dash into archive to make a start on the ordered boxes.    3.20 Meet my new poetry editor in a café - latte and about an hours’ chat about book launches etc. 4.45pm sit outside station and eat yogurt and pot of fruit bought earlier for lunch! 5.00pm, train to Daughter no 1's house where I arrive just before 7 in time for supper. Do email and fall into bed.

Thursday - awake at 5.30am - do email - check library catalogue, catch train to Manchester - all day in archive until 7pm. Back by train to Daughter no1 about 8.30. Picnic supper on train.

Friday - ditto.

The problem is that you’re usually working on 3 books at once - arranging publicity for the one that’s in the publishing pipe-line, finishing another and working on ideas for the next. At the moment I’m publicising the Katherine Mansfield, arranging publicity and readings for the poetry collection Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21 (would anyone like a review copy?), and doing edits for the paper-back of Katherine Mansfield - due out in about six weeks. Then there’s the permissions for illustrations etc that I have to re-do for the Japanese edition of Katherine Mansfield, due out in 2013.

I’m also working on the Kindle edition of my Christina Rossetti biography - just finished proof reading and sorting out rights and permissions. By a huge stroke of luck the BBC have decided to do a small Christmas film about Christina, which I’m filming in London next week - so that’s all running around in my mind too.

Then there’s the research I've been doing in Manchester to put together a proposal for a new biography I’ve been asked to look at. Another publisher has also asked me to prepare a proposal for a non-fiction book that seems an attractive idea.   Two things on the boil.

Then there’s the creative work in progress - almost finished a novel, which I am deeply into at the moment and trying to get time to scribble bits on trains and planes and every single spare moment I get - not easy. Desperate to finish it. Fed up with characters running amok in my brain. But paid work has to come first.

Then there’s the blogs - 2 of my own, (they help me keep sane rather like an online shrink!) I also contribute to 2 others regularly, and I’ve just been asked to be a guest blogger on two other blogs - already said Yes. Am I mad? Oh, and I tweet.

And yes, I do have a personal life - a partner and four long-suffering children and I try to see as much of them all as possible, but this week I’ve been too tired to have an intelligent conversation with anyone. One of my daughters, who is older and more sensible than I am, tells me that I MUST STOP RACKETING AROUND LIKE THIS.   She’s right, of course, but can’t see any chance of it happening soon. Working for yourself is either all cream-and-custard or it's prison fare. You have to lap up the cream when you can!

Not Saying Goodbye - First Glimpse

2011-10-19T22:48:00.000-07:00

Just had the advance copy of the new poetry collection Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21 put into my hands yesterday by Alex McMillen, the editor of Templar Poetry in the coffee shop at Manchester Art Gallery. There's no feeling like seeing your book in print for the first time - however many you've published. Smiled all the way back on the train!

Templar Poetry are known for their unusual covers, so I was really interested to see what they'd do with the title and for a few moments couldn't work the image out, but then realised - Suitcase!

It's not out officially until the first week in November - launched at the Derwent Poetry Festival, Matlock Bath, Derbyshire, 11th, 12th, 13th November.

Lovely event at Manchester Literature Festival, good audience and very well organised event - introduced by a very enthusiastic librarian - Libby. It gives you hope when you find someone who really, really, loves books. Interested to discover that the libraries in Manchester operate an E-book lending system.

I'm now in the archives at the John Rylands Library investigating a New Project! Very exciting.

Tuesday Poem - There's Nothing Like the Sun: Edward Thomas

2011-10-17T14:35:00.000-07:00

There's Nothing Like the Sun

There's nothing like the sun as the year dies,
Kind as it can be, this world being made so,
To stones and men and beasts and birds and flies,
To all things that it touches except snow,
Whether on mountain side or street of town.
The south wall warms me: November has begun,
Yet never shone the sun as fair as now
While the sweet last-left damsons from the bough
With spangles of the morning's storm drop down
Because the starling shakes it, whistling what
Once swallows sang. But I have not forgot
That there is nothing, too, like March's sun,
Like April's, or July's, or June's, or May's,
Or January's, or February's, great days:
And August, September, October, and December
Have equal days, all different from November.
No day of any month but I have said -
Or, if I could live long enough, should say -
"There's nothing like the sun that shines today"
There's nothing like the sun till we are dead.

I've just been reading the new biography of Edward Thomas by Matthew Hollis, so I thought a less well-known poem by Thomas might be appropriate, particularly on a wild, wet autumnal day in England when the sun is in very short supply. But my late, last damsons are still clinging to the branches of the tree.

Edward Thomas wrote this poem when he was in training to go to France, convinced that he would be killed there, but nevertheless, resolved to go.

I've reviewed the biography on my book blog - it comes well-recommended.

For more Tuesday Poems, visit the Tuesday Poem hub and read the main poem and those of the other poets on the sidebar.

War Tragedies in Capezzano

2011-10-16T09:47:00.000-07:00

We realised soon after we moved in here that we were living in what had been a turbulent area during World War II. The massacre that occurred in Santa Anna is only a few miles over the hills and we are quite near what was called the 'Linea Gothica' - an important front between the Allied and Axis forces. This area was an active Partisan zone and the hillsides are scattered with crosses and memorials to long-forgotten battles.

A couple of days ago we began exploring our olive grove and went right down to the bottom, where we found a path that led through the woods. Just past our neighbour's olives, about a hundred yards from the bottom of our olive grove, we found this memorial to the massacre of six 'unarmed and defenceless' men who had been killed there.

Their names are also on a plaque in the village, which we'd read, but had had no idea where they had died. There are no ages listed on the memorial. As most of the men of military age were in the mountains fighting, it was probably only young boys and old men who were left. According to our landlord, Roberto, whose family have lived in this village for generations, the German forces came along the path below our olive grove, taking the village by surprise. These six were taken down into the woods and shot on the 12th August 1944. The memorial is very well tended, with fresh flowers and the Italian flag planted in the ground under the trees beside it.

Coming from England, it is very difficult to imagine having to live, as Europe does, with this kind of history - it's many centuries since we were occupied by a foreign power. But many of the people here are relatives of those who died and are old enough to remember them.

Big Book, Small Page. The Mobile Phone Novel

2011-10-14T04:59:00.000-07:00

Want to write a mobile phone novel? Apparently they're big in Japan as 'keitai shousetsu'. Flash Fiction writers all take note!

Just follow this link to Dan Holloway, at the 'Man who painted Agnieszka's Shoes' blog. At 100/200 words a chapter, it's even more challenging than Twitter!

And you might like the Mobile Phone Novel awards site at http://www.textnovel.com/home.php

Exploring the Olive Grove

2011-10-13T05:20:00.000-07:00

Below our terrace the ground falls away so steeply under the olive trees, you can’t see the bottom. It’s quite hard work clambering from terrace to terrace, so during the hot weather I haven’t explored very far. You can’t climb straight down, but have to tack like a ship in a gale, and it’s several hundred feet to the bottom.

But now, the weather is becoming cooler and the family who own the land have begun to spread the nets for the olive harvest. Soon it will be raining and slithery with mud. I realised yesterday that if I didn’t go now, I might not get another chance until the spring.

After three or four terrace levels I was already in another country - the house had disappeared from view, and wherever I looked there was evidence of a wide variety of wildlife. There were dens and bolt holes everywhere -

This one perhaps the den of the fox that came and looked at us one breakfast time.

This one looks as if it might be the badger den we’ve been told is there.

And who lives in these little holes?

The creatures who chatter in the trees at night and scamper across our roof are Ghiro’s - they look like a large squirrel and are a relative of the dormouse. They behave rather like possums. You rarely see them because they’re only active at night. I've been lucky enough to see a couple, but not quick enough to get a photo. I found this rather nice drawing on an Italian wildlife site.

At the bottom of the olive grove is an old pathway with walls of cyclopic masonry - all now falling into ruin. It used to be used by residents to connect the village and the town. To the right of the path is ‘the wildwood’ - a jungle of trees, shrubs and brambles that fills the precipitous gorge and apparently contains a huge number of wild animals including deer and wild boar.

Above the path, gazing back up towards the house, the olive grove looks quite beautiful.

Its ancient trees grow straight out of volcanic rock outcrops and the walls of the terraces are constructed from the same stone.

Some of the trees are very old indeed.

And in the rocks around their roots wild clematis are blooming in every crevice they can find a space to grow.

Neil and I also explored a short way along the path at the bottom of our neighbour's olive grove and found something very interesting, which I'll be blogging about as soon as I've managed to find out more about it.

Wild-Fire in the Trees

2011-10-10T07:46:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we had a bit of a fright when a forest fire sprang up just a few hundred yards from our house, at the bottom of our neighbour's garden. Just below Capezzano Monte, olive groves and clumps of pine and chestnut cover the hillside all the way down to the town of Pietrasanta. Fire had broken out in the undergrowth - probably a spark from a bonfire of grass cuttings - and quickly leapt up into the trees.

Suddenly we felt very vulnerable, as the pine cones burst in the branches like hand grenades and bamboo exploded in the undergrowth. But the fire brigade and the antincendio dei boschi arrived within about 20 minutes, ran a pump and hose down through the olive groves and soon got it under control. Luckily there was no wind to fan it or carry it deeper into the gully. It has made us see how easy it is for these things to happen. I was already calculating which of my possessions I was going to take with me when I ran from the house! Hopefully, we will never have to. Must take care with the barbecue!!

National Poetry Day, Tomas Transtromer wins Nobel Prize

2011-10-06T08:54:00.000-07:00

Happy National Poetry Day everyone. You may remember some time ago, I posted a poem by Swedish Tomas Transtromer on the blog. I loved his work, which I hadn't come across before. Just now, on Twitter, I've heard that he's won the Nobel prize for Literature 2011. Great stuff!

This is a copy of my previous blogpost.

Track

2 a.m.: moonlight. The train has stopped
out in a field. Far off sparks of light from a town,
flickering coldly on the horizon.

As when a man goes so deep into his dream
he will never remember that he was there
when he returns again to his room.

Or when a person goes so deep into a sickness
that his days all become some flickering sparks, a swarm,
feeble and cold on the horizon.

The train is entirely motionless.
2 o'clock: strong moonlight, few stars.

Tomas Transtromer (trans Robert Bly)

I've just found this poet - who is apparently one of Sweden's greatest and was a candidate for the Nobel laureateship. Why haven't I heard of him before? Translations don't always work either - but these do. Robert Bly, his translator, was a personal friend and I think this closeness has made for really good translations - not just a transcription but the creation of a new poem. Shelley is very good on this problem. He wrote 'It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as to seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower - and this is the burden of the curse of Babel'.

How to Get Your Book Blogged

2011-10-04T23:10:00.000-07:00

Today I'm blogging about how to get your book reviewed on the Blogosphere, over at 'Authors Electric'. You can find us at authorselectric.blogspot.com

Tuesday Poem: Allen Ginsberg, Howl

2011-10-03T10:34:00.000-07:00

I've just seen this film, which came out last year, and really enjoyed it. The script is taken from Ginsberg's collection 'Howl and Other Poems', from transcripts of interviews he gave, as well as the obscenity trial in New York, all linked together with some amazing passages of animation. It's a long time since I read Howl, and it made me want to pick it up all over again. It also seemed to fit with a book I've just been reading - Joyce Johnson's Beat Memoir 'Minor Characters'.

For more poetry please go to the Tuesday Poem hub, at www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

The Economic Crisis in Italy

2011-10-01T12:37:00.000-07:00

Nothing illustrates the state of the Italian economy more clearly than the plight of the marble yards in Pietrasanta. Once they were full of sculptors from all over the world and the skilled artisans helping them. They worked alongside other artisans making commercial objects out of marble - fireplaces, statues for churches, floors, bathrooms - and it kept the town alive. But over the past few years more and more marble yards have closed and there are fewer and fewer places for sculptors to work. Recently the pace of change has accelerated. Last September the yard Neil worked in had to close when the owner decided to sell the land for a block of flats. He and a few other sculptors found a new studio in a beautiful location with good working conditions - it all seemed set to continue happily. But the owner has been hit by the economic downturn during the summer - no one can afford fireplaces, or marble floors, garden statuary, and even the church is cutting back on renovations. Yesterday, Friday, the sculptors were suddenly told that the space had been sold and they had until Sunday to remove their work. Temporary space will be made for them on another part of the site, but it's been a big shock.

Packing Up

Ready to go

The newspapers are full of gossip stories about the private life of Silvio Berlusconi and rumours about his business dealings, but he remains the most powerful man in Italy, despite the fact that the country has one of the biggest national debts in Europe. We are watching our Italian friends struggling to make a living and hope that Italy will survive. The cartoon below is doing the rounds of the bars at the moment and really sums up the ordinary Italian's attitude to SB. It's called 'the Trouser Salute'.

Driving Back

2011-09-30T08:02:00.000-07:00

So here am I back in Italy feeling rather schizophrenic - it's very strange, this shuttling back and forth between different cultures, languages and weather. This time we drove, so that we could collect my car, since Neil's ancient banger has finally come to the end of its life. Mine isn't even vaguely new, but it's newer than his! And it also meant that I could bring out lots of bits and pieces for the little house in the olive groves to make it more home-like.

This time we took an overnight ferry from the north of England to Belgium to avoid the long, frenetic drive down the length of England. These ferries are amazing - like floating hotels - so big I couldn't get it into just one shot, or even two.

We went to sleep somewhere off the coast of Yorkshire and woke up in Zeebrugge - trying (as we're both nervous passengers!) not to remember the terrible ferry disaster there some years ago.

Then the epic drive - down through Belgium this time (the toll roads are cheaper than in France), through Luxembourg and then Alsace - sometimes in Germany, sometimes France and finally Switzerland, opting to go over the St Gotthard pass which was still snow free.

It was getting dark, and we were very tired, but with grotty hotels asking 140 euros for a basic room without services, decided that we'd just drive on. It would have been nice to see the swiss lakes in daylight, but that will have to wait for another trip.

After the expense of Switzerland (11 euros for a macdonald's burger in a service station!) it was a relief to cross into Italy. Where else would you get a motorway cafe selling the complete works of Kafka, Darwin, Pirandello and Garcia Lorca?

We reached Pietrasanta in the early hours of the morning and left the car still fully loaded while we fell into bed. It's taken two days to recover, but we're very glad to be here and our two wild cats - Batcat and La Grigia were very glad to see us too!

Tuesday Poem: What the River Told Me & This is What the Sky Says

2011-09-27T05:59:00.000-07:00

What the river told me .....

Nothing escapes
the memory
of water.

This
is what you are made of.

This is what you are afraid of.

This is what the Sky says .....

Don’t wait up.

I have all the time in the universe.

I'm currently in transit between England and Italy. These are two small fragments from the series I'm working on based on the Haida Gwaii Indian beliefs and poetry. Their shamanic rituals were mostly in the form of poems and incantations and they all have wonderful titles which are irresistible as prompts for poems. I'm having great fun exploring it all!

The photographs are from an autumnal, cloudy, but rather beautiful northern England.

For more Tuesday Poems, please visit the Tuesday Poets' Hub at www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

A Heron on the Bridge

2011-09-23T02:57:00.000-07:00

Very quiet at the moment on the blog front because I'm in the UK attempting a punishing schedule of work, packing up the house for the winter (to return to Italy) and catching up with friends and relatives. The weather is arctic here in the north (6 degrees last night) with grey skies, cloud, rain and a bitter wind. And it's only September!!! But walking into the town yesterday, we found a heron standing on the rail of the footbridge and, for once, he didn't immediately fly away. A rare moment of sunshine made the moment complete.

Tomorrow - Saturday 24th of September - I'm running an all day poetry workshop for the Sedbergh Literature Festival, The Write Idea, on the theme of memory and imagination, with a look at form and patterning.

Tuesday Poem: Barbara Crooker, In the Late Summer Garden

2011-09-20T00:30:00.000-07:00

In the Late Summer Garden

Green beans lose their adolescent slenderness,
broaden in plump pods. One pumpkin swells,
fills a corner with its orange lamp.
At night skunks slink in to dig for grubs;
in the morning we see their small excavations.
My friend's cancer has grown, spread to her femur
and liver. Everything that can be pruned has now been taken.
Tomatoes spark starry yellow blossoms, hope against hope.
Some will turn into hard green marbles, but the sun
has moved past equinox, days shorten and cool.
My son is learning his multiplication tables;
he flips flash cards at the maple table.
Numbers multiply like random cells. I am learning
the simpler but harder facts of subtraction. .......

For the rest of the poem click on the link.

I'm travelling at the moment so have put this up in advance - A wonderful poem by Barbara Crooker which appeared in the Valparaiso Poetry Review. Just click the link. It's rather sad in the beginning, but a great sense of seasonal rhythm and the natural cycle of life. Feeling a bit autumnal myself - first of the autumn storms yesterday leaving us without internet for a while - and sad at leaving Italy which I'm growing to love more and more.

The Flowing Forms of Helaine Blumenfeld

2011-09-16T10:05:00.000-07:00

Taking Risks

This is the latest exhibition in the Piazza at Pietrasanta and one of the nicest for a long while. The work, in marble and bronze, is by a woman called Helaine Blumenfeld. Do check out her site because her photos are much better than mine! Helaine is one of the older generation of sculptors working in Pietrasanta and very distinguished. She originally studied in Paris under the Russian sculptor Zakhine and has built herself an international reputation.

Helaine's personal studio

She’s based here, working in her own studio and in the marble studio SEM and specialises in exploring the territory between figurative and abstract forms.

These three bronzes I think of as three dancing women and I was amused to see some older Italian women out shopping and taking turns to pose for photographs beside them!

Pietrasanta is gradually getting back to its normal self after the tourist chaos of the summer. One innovation is that the local police have adopted very strange two-wheeled vehicles to patrol on. The Carabinieri of course, still dash around in cars!

Tuesday Poem: Isobel Dixon - The Tempest Prognosticator

2011-09-12T06:53:00.000-07:00

Moth Storm

The lamp stands on the stoep
so the moths crash the party,
fighting for the limelight,
their moment of brightness,
their fifteen minutes’ flame.

Tomorrow we’ll dust, and sweep
crisp wing-shreds up, wash
from the window panes the blight
of their massed batterings,
seeking the heart, the heat.

No: the house itself, with us,
has surged forth in the night,
a lit hulk lurching
to the clefted hill, urgently
in search of the ultimate

faraway blue, of the indigo wick,
blinding its placid glass
against this fitful blizzarding.

Isobel Dixon

Moth Storm comes from Isobel Dixon’s latest collection, just published by Salt. Salt is one of those amazing small presses (Two Ravens is another) that publish poetry and literary fiction of a very high quality. Like many of the best small publishers in Britain, its existence has been jeopardised by recent Arts Council cuts. One can only hope it manages to continue, as an antidote to the over-hyped commercial products that seem to be all that’s emerging from the big publishing houses these days.

‘The Tempest Prognosticator’ has to be one of the best titles of the year. The title poem refers to an ingenious appliance (illustrated above) constructed in 1850 by a Dr George Merryweather - appropriately named because his prognosticator was invented to predict storms. It consisted of 12 glass bottles in a circle with a bell hung above them. In the neck of every bottle was a small piece of whalebone, connected to a hammer. Each bottle also contained a leech and when the air pressure dropped, signalling a storm, the leeches climbed up the glass, disturbing the whalebone and ringing the bell. A model of it is apparently in Whitby Museum in Yorkshire.

This is an intelligent, carefully crafted collection, with poems that may take several readings to give up their cargoes of thoughts and ideas, caught in cleverly structured nets of language. Reviewers like JM Coetzee have described it as ‘virtuoso’, and elsewhere the contents have been praised as ‘lusciously feral and finely crafted poems’ that are ‘a wake-up call to the imagination and the senses and suggest myriad possibilities of what a poem can do and be’. So, if you like poetry that makes you dig deep, you’ll like this.

Moth Storm is one of my favourites - I love the tautness of the language, the sub-text under each line, the wind that blows all the way from the southern hemisphere - all the way from Africa. I particularly like the image of the house ‘surging forth’ into the night, ‘a lit hulk lurching/to the clefted hills.’

Isobel Dixon comes from South Africa, where she has won several awards for poetry. She is currently living in the UK, where she is a literary agent. I’m privileged to have her as mine! If only all writers could have agents who are writers too.

For more Tuesday Poems please visit the Tuesday Poem website at www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

Neil's New Marble

2011-09-10T13:35:00.000-07:00

Today is the day Neil's latest opus in marble has come home from the yard to be erected in the olive grove. It's always a question of where to put them if you don't sell them straight away. And if you're collecting things together for an exhibition, storage is a problem. Luckily there's a lot of olive grove out there just waiting for a few sculptures to liven it up!

The Process starts with the hunt for a suitable piece of marble. You have to go to a quarry, or to a quarry yard, and look. Some of the blocks weigh tons and cost thousands - sometimes tens of thousands if you want particular colours or quality.

Neil is looking for a smaller piece that costs a lot less! In the marble yard where he works, you can get offcuts - they make shelves and fireplaces and marble porticos. There's a huge machine for cutting the marble and they have compressors for power tools.

The sculptors work in small cubicles behind the main commercial workshop. This is Neil's marble in a more advanced state.

This new sculpture weighs a lot, even though it's small, so a forklift and a lot of manpower was required to get it into the back of the car and then out again, protected by wood and polystyrene. It came down the path on a bogey and Neil has used some acro-props to erect a primitive lifting device using a 'paranca manuale' to winch it up. It was all very tricky.

Still some work to be done inserting metal pins into the marble to hold it. But the finished product looks fantastic. Just waiting now for someone to ask 'what is it meant to be'?

The Ups and the Downs of a Writer's Life

2011-09-06T07:11:00.000-07:00

This is proving a weird week, with lots of ups and downs. Sunday saw the end of ‘il gran caldo’, with thunderstorms and 36 hours of much needed torrential rain. The landscape looks greener and the air is cooler, particularly at night.

On the work front, life seems to go according to this graph borrowed from Karen Ball on A.B.B.A. After a really difficult period, suddenly everyone wants me! I’ve had two approaches with exciting non-fiction projects I can’t say much about yet, and an offer has been made to my agent for a Japanese edition of Katherine Mansfield. I googled her name in Japanese and this is what appeared.

Neil and I have also, after a lot of effort, internet bother and swearing in two different languages (Italian expletives now quite fluent) published a small collection of short stories on Amazon Kindle as a Kindle Single. THREE is a collection of 3 stories, one rather longer story (called Three) previously unpublished and two other stories published in anthologies and read on BBC Radio 4.

The hardest part of the exercise was getting it onto Smashwords.com, which makes E-books available to Sony e-readers, i-pads, Nooks, phone apps and several other formats. Their submission criteria and formatting are very tricky indeed, despite the downloadable handbook. Just one code or character in the wrong place and the whole thing goes crazy. But we managed to put Three up there and my other e-title A Passionate Sisterhood.

I’ve been blogging about the sheer hell of it over on what used to be the Kindle authors blog site. This has been forced, by Amazon, to change its name as an infringement of their copyright. You’d think they would welcome the publicity, but no. In addition their legal department has requested us to remove all mention of kindling or kindled in our past web posts for the same reason. The Link will only work until Friday, and we have only a few days to decide how to rename ourselves.

Apparently no one, anywhere (not even in the paragraph above) can talk about kindling or being kindled except with reference to flames or small sticks of wood, without a writ appearing through the mail box. Despite both words being in the English dictionary and some powerful precedents - googled, googling -hoovered - hoovering - Have amazon never heard of the phrase ‘household name’? But, since they’re the only e-retailer offering 70% royalties on books, they have us by the proverbial short and curlies!

Shamanic Journey: Part Two

2011-09-04T04:50:00.000-07:00

I promised to tell more about my Shamanic journey. As I said earlier, I had serious doubts beforehand, being a sceptic, about whether anything would happen, or even whether I was capable of entering what I believed would be some kind of induced trance state. The only thing I was sure of was that I trusted my friend utterly.

I was shown into a small quiet room where incense sticks were burning and various rock crystals and stones were scattered around. A meditation tape was playing. We sipped herbal tea while B explained that she would take me on a short journey at first and then bring me back again. I mustn't say anything, but must write down the experience straight away in the notebook she'd asked me to bring.

B told me that the three dimensions could be thought of like a tree - the roots underground, the trunk in the world, and the branches reaching up into the sky. She asked me to think of a tree - a special tree that I knew well and could visualise strongly. I knew straight away that I would use the big sycamore that grew beside a mountain stream when I was a child. I used to believe it to be a magical tree because it had split into two when only a sapling and a circular basin had formed between the trunks that was always full of water reflecting the sky.

B made me lie down on a soft rug and covered me with a blanket. I was blindfolded with a scarf. After a few moments of deep breathing and relaxation B put on a CD of shamanic drumming. You must always go on a journey with a question, looking for something, B told me. On this first trip I must will myself downwards through the roots of the tree and I must look for a special animal who would be my protector. My Power Animal. How would I recognise it? The animal would approach me and then follow behind me.

Imagining the descent into the centre of the earth was the most difficult, but the drumbeats were hypnotic and the more I listened and blanked out all irrelevant thought the more I began to drift into a long tunnel like Alice down the rabbit hole. At the end of the tunnel was a light, and I came up through a pool in a clearing in beautiful woodland. A deer was standing beside the pool - very graceful and timid and I wondered whether this was going to be my power animal. But suddenly a wolf with red eyes emerged from the darkness of the wood behind the deer and approached me. As I began to move away, it followed.

I wandered about in this strange imaginary world followed by the wolf for some time - at one point I was on a ridge looking down on a valley, and then I was standing on a beach on warm sand, with the sea calmly hissing around my ankles. It was unbelievably peaceful and I was quite sad when the drumbeats changed and I was called back by B, retracing my journey as instructed, over the ridge, through the woods, down through the forest pool, into the tunnel and back up to the tree still followed by the wolf - my very own Patronus. I couldn't help thinking about Harry Potter - J.K. Rowling took so much from old mythologies and traditions of magic for her books I suppose it was inevitable that the 'power animal' would evolve into the magical Patronus.

Afterwards I felt incredibly relaxed. B told me I had been to the 'Clear and Shining Sea' where everyone goes eventually. Later I did another journey through the top of the tree, eventually surfing through the stratosphere, looking down on myself peacefully stretched out under the blanket. This experience was amazing, and when I was given the 'call back' I really didn't want to return which was rather scary.

Looking back on it now, it felt like that deep imaginative trance state you experience when you're deeply into a story - inhabiting that imaginative landscape, listening to your characters speak, waiting to see where they are going to take you. It is a creative journey inside your own imagination, your sub-conscious mind, exploring the deepest recesses of your psyche. I think for anyone with writer's block it would be liberating.

Perhaps Shamanic Journeys have always been creative - generating the huge amount of story and poetry passed down by the Shamen. And then there's the art, the music and the dance .....

This could be a tool, I thought, a way of entering a heightened creative state. It was certainly a wonderful way to relax.

If anyone is interested further there's an introductory book called 'Shamanic Journeying: A Beginner's Guide' by Sandra Ingerman (I've only read a sample on Kindle), and there are several shamanic drumming CDs on the internet. Then there's the novels - Carlos Casteneda and Paolo Coelho have made vast amounts of money writing about their own shamanic journeys.

A Shamanic Journey

2011-09-01T09:21:00.000-07:00

I became fascinated by the Haida Gwaii indians - a culture wiped out at the beginning of the 20th century - while reading ‘A Story as Sharp as a Knife’ by the American poet Robert Bringhurst.   This book is an account of the Haida culture - their art, religion and literature - the latter expressed in a highly developed tradition of oral poetry.

Theirs was a hunter/gatherer society, living in clans under the banner of either the Eagle or the Raven, and their religion was Shamanic. Many of their major poems - eg Raven Travelling - appear to be about shamanic journeys. On a journey the Shaman could traverse the three dimensions - earth, sea and sky - easily, flying to the bottom of the sea, or swimming up into the sky.

So, I began to read up on shamanic journeying in order to understand just exactly what it entailed and how it was done.   What I discovered is that its practitioners still exist, though these days it’s used most often, not as a religious ritual, but as a means of spiritual healing, or self-enlightenment.

Now, I’m a science and logic girl, and have always been sceptical of anything vaguely new-agey - while at the same time accepting (with Shakespeare) that ‘there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio’ etc etc, and that the mind has amazing powers we haven’t even begun to explore. I also believe that when Christianity threw out witchcraft, it also threw out a lot of useful knowledge at the same time.

So, with this crazy mixed up basket of thoughts and ideas I was bound to be intrigued when a friend (who is a Reiki Master) confessed over dinner that she was also a fully certificated Shaman.
‘Let me take you on a journey,’ she said.
And I agreed to give it a try.   Would going on a shamanic journey give me any insight into the practices of the Haida Gwaii? Would a journey into the depths of my own psyche have any benefits in accessing locked-up creativity?

Would I be able to do it at all - given my innate scepticism and strong personality? Years ago someone once tried to put me into a hypnotic trance, but had to retire defeated - apparently I was too much of a control freak to allow anyone to mess with my mind.

This has already been quite a long post, so I will write about what happened on Sunday. I’m still feeling surprised and a little weird! But I do have a few more insights into the culture of the Haida Gwaii and the roots of their story-telling.

Tuesday Poem: Scirocco

2011-08-30T02:24:00.000-07:00

The day opens
like an oven mouth
and the heat
eats up the hours

as cherry leaves crisp
to brown locusts
and the day lilies shrivel
before breakfast.

On the hill above us after dark ,
the wildfires leap
like desperate angels
winging from tree to tree

their acrid breath
smoking
across the moon.

© Kathleen Jones

A very quick bit of description I wrote the other night, watching the wildfires blazing on the hills above us. The Scirocco has mercifully given up and the weather is cooler now the wind direction has turned to the north.

The Bat-Cat

2011-08-29T03:16:00.000-07:00

Meet Bat-Cat, the masked marauder. When we arrived here at the beginning of July, there was only one feral cat attached to the house, a little grey and white female. But shortly after we arrived she brought along a big kitten, probably from her last brood, about 6 or 7 months old and obviously starving. His/her bones were visible through the skin and the spine stood up like a razor blade. So, we've been feeding this one too, with visible results. It has beautiful markings - a black mask just like Batman, and that's what we first called the cat. But now we aren't sure whether it's Batman or Batwoman, so have opted for Bat-Cat to be on the safe-side! It still hisses at me when I put the food down, but doesn't run away the moment I move. We keep all our scraps and it feels good not to be throwing anything away.

Wildfires in Italy

2011-08-26T03:15:00.000-07:00

So here I am back in Italy, in the little house in the olive grove, where it is hot, hot, hot - as the locals put it 'caldo a morire' which translates roughly 'hot enough to die'. Today it was around 40 degrees with no vestige of a breeze.

We walked along to the little bar in the village last night, to watch the sunset, but found ourselves watching wildfires instead. The photographs were taken in very dark conditions so it's difficult to see all the fires that we could see. One big one to the right of the church tower, another further over almost obscured by the tree branch, there was another one on the other side of the hill generating a lot of smoke, and shortly after we took this photo two more appeared on the hills just above the top of the tower. You can just see a number of points of light in this picture.

They were using helicopters and specially adapted planes to douse them. The planes actually touch the surface of the sea, ploughing a white furrow, in order to scoop up water.

Then they fly into the smoke to drop it all on the blaze. It's very skilful flying and very impressive to watch.

This morning the whole valley beneath us was under a pall of smoke.

Goodbye Edinburgh

2011-08-22T06:29:00.000-07:00

This is Alexandra Harris (author of Romantic Moderns) and myself happily signing away at Edinburgh. Really surprised that there are still people who can afford to buy hardback books - that can only be good. There were a surprising number of Kiwis in the audience too - about half a dozen people from New Zealand and all Katherine Mansfield fans.

Michael Holroyd has also been appearing at Edinburgh and he entered the biography debate with an article in Friday's Guardian about the death of literary biography. That type of 'life and work' is gone, he says, and he's right. People are 'writing lives backwards', writing group lives, or parts of lives, in other words being totally experimental. I've always been against the dry-as-dust academic tome full of facts about the subject, but utterly lifeless. No wonder readers want something more exciting and illuminating! Michael's comments are more ammunition against the academic lobby who don't like the way I've written my Mansfield biography - it's written for readers, not critics. And that seems to have worked. I had a quick coffee with my publisher after the event and it seems that the first edition of the book has almost sold out - reprinting time. Yippppeeeee!!!!

I had a lovely time in Edinburgh. But now it's back home to clean out the fridge, pack the suitcases and dash back to Italy for some 'creative space'. No Tuesday Poem this week because I will be travelling today and tomorrow, so apologies to the fans of the TP blog. Normal service will be resumed next week.

I've also been having adventures of a different kind associated with my exploration of the world of the Haida Gwaii indians and will report on that later in the week.

Edinburgh Festival

2011-08-20T12:53:00.000-07:00

Edinburgh - this big, grey, northern city. A mixture of Georgian, Gothic and neo Greek - steep streets with glimpses of the sea - wide Georgian streets with Hanoverian names - Frederick, William, George - and, dominating everything, the castle.

You would never think that this was the middle of August - the weather was freezing and, at 4.45pm, it was already overcast and dark.

But during the Festival, whatever the weather, Edinburgh is buzzing - fringe theatre and comedy, street performers, glitzy international music and art events.

We arrived at lunch time and wandered about sampling the street acts on the Royal Mile.

But on other streets in the centre, there are alcoholics and drug addicts, homeless,begging on the street - this photo says a lot for the state of Britain - busking in front of the discount sale in the designer boutique window, and he wasn't part of the festival fringe. I liked the dog with the hat.

Edinburgh Festival

2011-08-18T13:56:00.000-07:00

Very quick post, as I'm busy with preparations to go off to the Edinburgh Book Festival for duo event with Alexandra Harris, winner of the Guardian first book award. Don't think the weather is going to be as good as the picture above suggests, as it's very, very wet at the moment. Looking forward to Edinburgh though - beautiful even in the rain - but a bit nervous about the event.

www.edbookfest.co.uk

Tuesday Poem: Timed Out

2011-08-15T03:26:00.000-07:00

This is the twilight zone where the light fades
but no clock can tell how long the dark
will take to fall. Facing away from day
the turn of the earth accelerates
towards night, knowing only that arrival
is certain, and the hot desert wind
is coating the olive leaves with dust and
an unfamiliar owl tells midnight
from the cypress tree. And there is no time;
no time. I take a bottle of new wine
from the rack. Two glasses. Place them on the
terrace table where we watch the dusk
creep in towards us from the still-bright sea.

Writing in strict, classical form isn't something I do very often. This was written at George Szirtes’ workshop on Saturday in response to a request to write an irregular sonnet of either 13 or 15 lines. It has an unobtrusive rhyme scheme (some only hinted at) and I’ve tried to keep to the 10 syllables, though some lines have 9 or 11. It still needs a lot of work.
I suppose the right title for this poem would be ‘Tempus Fugit’. It’s my birthday today and I’m very conscious of the fact that there are suddenly many more behind me than there are in front and you have to make the most of every minute!

For more Tuesday Poems please visit the site www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

Literary Cabaret - Joel Stickley

2011-08-13T12:47:00.000-07:00

Just back - exhausted - from a whole day workshop on 'form' with poet George Szirtes. More of that next week.
Thought in the context of heavy politics, economics and weather in the UK a bit of light relief was required. I'm a great fan of Joel Stickley's 'Write Badly Well' Blog, and I love this clip from his literary cabaret slot in London.

London (and several other towns) Burning

2011-08-10T04:25:00.000-07:00

Scenes that only recently were safely at the other end of Europe in Greece are now on our doorstep and I'm fed up with the Media and politicians apportioning blame here and there like a horror version of 'pin the tail on the donkey blindfold'.

There's a really good post on the Live Journal by an ex teacher who gives a brilliant account of the kids who are out on the streets. I knew that a large number of kids left education barely literate, but I didn't know how large the number was. It is shocking for any supposedly 1st world country to have almost 20% of it's young people leaving school totally unemployable.

Romicula says:   "I know the stats for the last thirteen years only because I've been a teacher for the last thirteen years. These kids often have virtually no social skills. By that I mean they literally cannot sit in a room and hold a conversation with someone other than those in their peer group. That doesn't matter. They don't have the skills to fill in a job application form, they have nothing to put on it if they did, so no one is going to sit them in a room and give them an interview, unless that someone is in a blue uniform, and they are recording the interview."

Another blog makes a satirical poetic parallel between the bankers and the looters - one legal, the other not.

Children of Albion, you can take off that hood,
The world is your oyster, you’re out of the wood,
Directors and bankers have run off with more,
They’ve been there before you, they’ve cleaned out the store,
They’ve lit their own fires on the trading room floor,
Children of Albion
Sleep easy.

Children of Albion, sleep well in your beds,
There’s nothing to fear, no price on your heads,
No price and no buyer, you’ve romped and you’ve played,
And there in your hands is the loot you can trade,
Let none be deceived, let none be afraid,
Children of Albion
Sleep easy.

You can read the whole thing here.

The diversity of the blogs shows the complexity of the problem. One interesting fact - apparently Waterstone's in Clapham was the only shop not looted!   Either there's no market for books, or the looters are all illiterate - both explanations utterly depressing.

I have my grandchildren here for the holidays at the moment, going stir crazy with the rain, and wonder what kind of future they've got.   We need to educate and treasure them, because we're going to be relying on them to get us out of this mess.

Tuesday Poem: This is How the Day Looks

2011-08-08T14:22:00.000-07:00

This is how the day looks ...

now the rain has washed
its bright face
and the distant sea is the clean
blue of a surgical gown.

Far below me I can see
a patterning of terracotta
roof-tiles steepled
among the chestnut groves

the human sprawl
between the hills and sea
arranged with alien geometry.
Raindrops have sluiced the olives

dripping on the terrace; and
the happy sun is tracing
the outline of a plum tree
on the stone.

A peregrine stoops
silently past me slicing
a murderous trajectory
through the sweet air.

I'm feeling nostalgic for my little house high up in the olive groves - England is very grey, gloomy and wet at the moment, and the political and financial situations match the weather. This poem is far from finished yet - it's just a series of observations written one morning sitting on the terrace finishing my breakfast coffee.

The Price of a Book

2011-08-06T03:33:00.000-07:00

A good post today by Elizabeth Baines at Fiction Bitch on the pricing of hardbacks, paperbacks and e-books.

Kindle Authors UK

2011-08-03T13:58:00.000-07:00

I realise I’ve been going on about the Kindle experience quite a lot over the last few months, but I am really excited about E-books and the freedom they offer authors to control their own output. It’s the ultimate democracy of The Word. (If you're not convinced then read a very good post by Dee Weaver on 'Strictly Writing'.)

A few days ago I discovered a really good site for anyone who is interested in the E-book market. Kindle Authors UK are a new group of bloggers dedicated to Kindling their work and marketing it. Most are established authors either wanting to make their backlists available, or to publish new work difficult to place in the current publishing climate. This is how they describe themselves on the blog:

‘We are professional UK authors branching out independently for selected projects to bring you quality e-books at great prices. We hope you'll enjoy following our adventures and be inspired to try some of these titles we've published for Kindle, which include books out of print for many years.’

I’m really delighted that they’ve asked me to join. Most are writing fiction or books for children and apparently I’m their first biographer.

The blog is full of good information about the whole process of producing an E-book. The authors who form the group will be blogging at regular intervals. Katherine Roberts current post is called ‘How I didn’t sell a million e-books in 5 months’ - a response to a book by successful e-author John Locke who apparently did.

The way it works is that each author has been given a date to post on the blog and mine is going to be the 5th of every month. I’m going to be sharing my own experience of the e-market and hoping to learn a lot from the others about marketing work in cyber-space.

My new Kindle project is to go into Kindle Singles - individual short stories sold very cheaply at 90 cents each. I don’t know how (or if) they’ll sell but I’ll report back with the results.

On the personal front, I'm back in England for a couple of weeks - back to grey skies (whatever happened to the rumoured heat wave?) and pouring rain. I got drowned walking down from the station to the Mill! Italian sun and breakfast on the terrace watching peregrine falcons riding the thermals is just a rapidly fading memory. Sigh.......

Tuesday Poem: Maya Angelou - Cooking up a Poem

2011-08-01T04:58:00.000-07:00

From a recent interview with Maya Angelou:

Is cooking like writing poetry?

Yes, cooking is like writing poetry, but it’s also like building a house. You want the best ingredients. When you’re writing a poem, you hope to have a good vocabulary, and to choose the nouns and pronouns and verbs carefully. The way you put them together will determine how they affect another person. And it’s really because you’ve been careful in the choice of your ingredients and respectful of how they work together. That’s true of all the efforts in life.

Maya's latest book is: Great Food, All Day Long, Random House, 2011

The Wombles of Capriglia and Capezzano

2011-07-30T01:38:00.000-07:00

On the main road at the end of our track is a parking space containing the local recycling bins. Things don’t stay there long - recovering and redistributing is the local sport.

So far we’ve acquired a table for the terrace

two sun loungers

a garden bench in need of resuscitation

and (best find) a deep porcelain sink that’s going to become a herb garden.

Yesterday I was beaten to an ice box (ex Ikea, pristine) by an elderly Italian lady twice my width but much less inhibited about climbing into the skip and having a serious rummage. A television set with a broken, but fixable, on/off switch made up for it later. So now we can watch Berlusconi TV with half naked girls on seven inch heels fawning over paunchy, middle-aged presenters!

I can't believe how lucky I am to be here. It's the kind of luck where you feel it's too perfect to continue - something is bound to go wrong. How British is that?

Music for Norway

2011-07-28T07:28:00.000-07:00

We’re very lucky to live so close to a town dedicated to the arts. During the summer they have regular music events - most of them ticket only affairs (and much too expensive for our modest budget), but some of them are held in the Piazza and are free to anyone who comes along. On Sunday the Argentinian pianist Martha Argerich is performing (check out her Bach on YouTube) and two nights ago it was the Orchestra Cantelli from Milan.

We’ve had a few days of stormy weather, and the sunset on the drive down the mountain to Pietrasanta was spectacular.

We were too late to get a seat, so had to stand in the Piazza, but the music was well worth it. Perhaps it’s just the surroundings, but it felt magical.

They played Verdi (the audience humming along!) Corelli, Mozart and Vivaldi, and then the conductor Michael Guttman announced that they were going to play Grieg’s Andante Religioso as a tribute to those who died in Norway at the weekend. Everyone in the square was silent, listening and thinking of the bereaved families. It was very moving and I thought I'd like to share it here.

The Cat Man

2011-07-25T02:03:00.000-07:00

From the terrace you can see a house - just the top storey and the terracotta roof tiles jutting out of the woods on the side of the ravine that slopes down towards the town. It’s puzzled us ever since we moved in because there isn’t a road, or even a track that could lead to it.
Viewed from above it looks derelict - loose pantiles on the roof, flaking stucco, window shutters broken. But sometimes, late at night, we've seen a light glimmering through the trees.

Both Neil and I love walking and have been exploring alternative ways of getting to Pietrasanta without taking the car down the winding, suicidal road that connects the village to the town - spiralling up 900 feet in just three kilometres. Yesterday we decided to attempt to find the old pony track down to the town which was originally used by the workers in the marble yards. A man in the village assured us it was still there - very overgrown and possibly obstructed in places. ‘People build new houses,’ he told us, ‘and they put up signs that say “Proprieta Privata”.’
We followed several paths through the woods, many ending in a terraced olive grove with no way out, but on our fourth attempt, pushing through tangled shrubs and brambles we emerged into a clearing and there was the house in front of us. It looked almost as ruinous as it had seemed from a distance, surrounded by discarded rubbish and the rubble of a lean to that had leaned too far. But we could hear the sound of a strimmer and as we walked round the end of the house we could see a sturdy figure in protective clothing strimming the long grass under the olive trees below.

An old garden table standing outside was piled high with empty dog food cans. There was a plate and a beer glass beside them. All around were plastic sacks of refuse and supermarket carriers, but an old shallow sink stood under a stand-pipe with two pot plants in it. A broken door, propped open, revealed a room full of the plastic baskets they use for the olive harvest, a plastic chair, an old television and a stained mattress. A sky satellite dish had been tied to the window shutter with wire.
On the patchy grass that still seemed to remember being a lawn, a colony of cats lay in the sun, but as soon as we appeared they shot off into a bramble thicket, where seven pairs of eyes watched us carefully.
The man looked up, stopped strimming, pushed up his visor and smiled at us, calling ‘Buona sera’ as he wiped the sweat from his face with his sleeve.
‘Sera,’ we replied.
‘Questa casa,’ I gestured towards the house, ‘e occupata?’
‘Si, signora.’ He grinned broadly. ‘I sleep there. And the cats.’
I looked at all the cans of dog food, but no sign of a dog anywhere and thought ‘Does he feed it to the cats?’
‘Is there a path to Pietrasanta anywhere here?’ Neil asked.
‘Si. Basso.’ He pointed down through the olive grove, and then we could see a flight of old stone steps, very overgrown, but heading in the right direction.

We parted with friendly greetings, though I didn’t have the courage to ask him his name, but I’m sure we will be meeting our nearest neighbour again, since we have to walk through his garden when we want to walk into town. And now I know where the wild cats - who sometimes appear on my terrace - come from.

She would like to come in!

One of them has appeared regularly since we moved in. She will eat from a plate when we are there, but doesn’t tolerate any close contact. A sudden movement and she’s gone in a flash. I’m happy to feed her - I just hope she doesn’t bring all her brothers and sisters.

Pleasure at being here rather overshadowed by the weekend news from Norway. There are two Norwegian sculptors working here in Pietrasanta, one currently in Oslo and we hope that she, and her family, are safe.

Save the Short Story

2011-07-23T12:09:00.000-07:00

Today I've been in my new house a week and it's beginning to feel more like home. There are pictures on the walls and I've managed to organise the kitchen cupboards. Outside I've pruned and watered the rosemary bush which was almost dead from neglect.
The weather has been very unseasonal for Italy in the second half of July - rain almost every day, cloudy and grey with a strong, cool wind blowing. I'm writing this on the terrace wrapped in a shawl on what would normally be a balmy evening. The Mediterranean is very rough, as we found on an excursion to explore a new pier that's been constructed at Marina di Pietrasanta. Standing in the sea beside it is a bronze cloaked figure staring back at the mountains. On such a wild, dark day it felt rather melancholy. There was no plaque to say who the artist was, or who it is intended to be. The biggest waves were washing right up to the hem of the bronze robes, and the beach - usually crammed with tourists - was deserted.

I'm not doing much writing yet - I'm not settled enough and my mind keeps wandering off to write shopping lists or wonder how to decipher the impenetrable communication from Italia Telecom written in a form of Italian previous unknown to me and demanding 220 euros with no indication of how or where to pay!

More depressing news has filtered through from the world of books and writing. The BBC have decided to axe their daily short story slot - one of the only decent markets for the genre left to us. Not only that, it's such a good training ground for budding authors. Writing a short story for radio is such good practice for writing prose fiction - lucid, with a clear story line and strong voices. It's one of the ways I started out and I've discovered many a favourite author that way and gone on to read their novels. These cuts are all down to money and it makes me feel even more angry about the mess the bankers have left us in.

The Society of Authors has initiated a petition which I've gladly signed.

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/noshortstorycuts/

A Haunted House?

2011-07-20T07:56:00.000-07:00

The New Office

We’ve now been in our new Italian house for three full days. We’ve finally managed to find out how (almost) everything works. The large, rickety wooden bedstead which creaked and groaned at every movement has been taken apart and stowed in the shed. For the moment we’re sleeping on the floor. And we’ve managed to organise the box-room into an office, using the dining table, a recycled set of shelves and the top of a gigantic dresser that used to dominate the sitting/dining room.

All so far blissfully going to plan. But on our second night here, something very odd happened. Neil, who is as down-to-earth a bloke as you can find, had a very strange and disturbing dream, which he was convinced at the time was not a dream.
It was a hot, thundery night and so we went to sleep with the electric fan on. Somewhere in the middle of the night the temperature dropped and I woke up cold, but didn’t want to get up and switch it off because that would have woken Neil who was still peacefully asleep. Then, suddenly, he called out really loudly - ‘Hoy! Hoy!’ and sat up in bed.
I said ‘what’s the matter?’ And he shouted ‘Get out! Get out!’
I leapt out of bed thinking, ‘Is there a fire? A rat in the room?’ Neil carried on shouting - switching the bedside lamp on so violently it fell off the table and shattered on the floor.
‘What’s the matter?’ I was by now quite terrified. ‘What’s happened?’
‘There are people in the house!’ Neil got up and began to run out into the hallway. ‘Didn’t you see them? Two men, one of them had a lighted cigarette. They were just coming in through the doorway.’
I’d seen no one, but it took some time - and a complete tour of the house - to convince Neil, who was totally spooked. He had obviously had a very vivid, real dream, in which he was able to call out, smash a lamp, and sit up in bed. Either that or the house is haunted!
I’m not a great believer in ghosts, but we are quite close to Santa Anna, in the heart of Partisan country, where terrible things did happen and whole villages were massacred in these hills. Who knows what echoes of the past remain.
Neil was so spooked by it we went to sleep the following night with the hall light on and the bedroom door locked, but so far everything has remained peaceful. Perhaps this is a warning to reduce the consumption of local wine and pecorino cheese just before bedtime!

Tuesday Poem - Two New Zealand Authors

2011-07-18T08:40:00.000-07:00

Author’s Bluff

It never stops in the famous story
does it, the wind, the wind?
It is there
when the book is shut, pelting
the house walls, pushing the pines
the wrong way, making the girl’s
skirts flounce like the edges
of the streamed clouds, her heart
riding the wind.
No wonder the sea
rings, throws salt at her lips,
the street tilts its deck
beneath the bright, flung stars.

Open the book, only that
will stop it. Open the book
to let her through.

Copyright - Vincent O’Sullivan: Further Convictions Pending
Victoria University Press

It’s National Poetry Week in New Zealand, so I wanted to use work by an NZ poet, and this poem manages to cover two. The first lines reference Katherine Mansfield’s famous Wellington story ‘The Wind! The Wind!’

A big thanks to Vincent for giving me his collection when I was in NZ last year, and for giving me permission to post this on the Tuesday Poem site.

For more Tuesday Poems visit the web site www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

A New Life in Italy

2011-07-17T07:55:00.000-07:00

Just a quick post to say that I arrived here last night, have unpacked the suitcase, spent a night in the most rickety antique Italian bed I've ever slept in, had breakfast on the terrace and am now sitting under the cherry tree, looking at the sea, and organising myself to do some work. There is a recycling skip on the road outside the village and we found a small plastic table, absolutely perfect for the lap-top in a shady corner. It (the corner) has views out over the Mediterranean and across to the village of Capezzano Monte, which I haven't explored yet, but may tomorrow when I run out of milk and bread.
I can see that skip is going to come in useful! Currently looking for a bed frame.........

Dartington: Day 2

2011-07-15T15:29:00.000-07:00

Beautiful sunny day - though I woke up feeling the effects of too much wine and partying the night before. There were lots of interesting people at dinner - Howard Marks, the drug courier who has come out of jail to write crime thrillers (Sympathy for the Devil); comedian Harry Hill, who was quite unlike his TV persona. I sat next to him but was too diffident to strike up a conversation. What do you say to someone famous for their wit?
Food writers Joscelyn Dimbleby and Elizabeth Luard were very good company - Elizabeth could remember dancing with Mick Jagger at parties in the sixties (check out her memoirs!). Fiona Sampson, editor of the Poetry Review was there briefly, and Blake Morrison - who is as nice as his books suggest he might be. He was sitting with Ted Hughes wife Carol.
So, a very enjoyable dinner. Being shy is a distinct disadvantage though - I’ve never been good at this networking malarkey and have absolutely no small talk. But I do like people and enjoy listening to interesting conversations.

We ate our breakfasts on the lawn after the fire alarm went off and the building was evacuated, but it turned out to be only someone burning the toast. After my Christchurch litfest event was prevented by an earthquake, I did wonder whether my Dartington appearance would be thwarted by the Hall burning down - probably giving rise to the legend of the Mansfield Curse!!

In the end the talk seemed to go smoothly - all beautifully choreographed by staff and a very good chairperson. Though nervous I was soon feeling better in front of a friendly, welcoming audience - I even sold some books afterwards.

The only downside was having to get into the car and drive 350 miles home afterwards - a gruelling 8 hour motorway epic on a hot sunny day we would have loved to spend on the lawn at Dartington. I shall just have to write another book and get invited back!

Dartington Hall: the Ted Hughes Memorial Lecture

2011-07-14T14:09:00.000-07:00

The bliss of Dartington Hall and the Ways with Words literature Festival! The Hall is one of the most beautiful buildings in the south west of England - grey stone walls crammed with history. Add in the delight of many of your favourite authors, green lawns to lie on with the sunlight filtering through the cherry trees, a glass of wine in hand and Waterstones’ book tent just across the grass, and - as a way of spending the afternoon - it takes a bit of beating.

I first came to Dartington 20 years ago to talk about Christina Rossetti, so it is wonderful to be here again to celebrate their 20th anniversary as a literature festival. The bedroom I’ve been allocated is like a royal suite - one of the heritage rooms with antique furniture and medieval graffitti. The bed was so big I needed a step-ladder to get into it! Sadly, I couldn’t take a photo of the wall drawings because the white wall just reflected back the flash. A ship has been carved into the wall, probably by soldiers billeted here at the end of the 14th century.

Once we’d unpacked and recovered from the 7 hour drive, we went to the Ted Hughes Memorial Lecture in the Great Hall, given this year by Blake Morrison. He was brilliant on Hughes’s poetry and his life, making illuminating connections between the two informed by interviews he had had with the poet.

I hadn’t known that Ted Hughes had given up his study of English Literature because, after struggling for hours on an essay, he dreamt that a fox came into his bed, burnt and injured. The fox put his paw (a human hand in the dream) on a white page and left a bloodprint on the paper. ‘Stop this,’ he said to Hughes, ‘You are destroying us.’ After that, Hughes transferred to Archaeology and Anthropology believing that the structures of critical thought taught by the university system ruined creativity. The fox became the equivalent of a ‘spirit guide’ and it occurs three more times in his poetry - the marvellous Thought Fox, and the ‘fox for sale’ poem in the Birthday Letters. Later Hughes told Blake Morrison that for a poet ‘Prose is a killer’.

Apparently Hughes felt that the real fall in human history had come with the loss of animal innocence - and that our egotism, introspection and self-consciousness separate us from our creativity and prevent us being whole. He often quoted the phrase ‘Every man must skin his own skunk’, and he believed that every poet must be true to their own experience - getting to grips with what was real. Poets who could do that became healers.

Later he apparently acknowledged that much harm had come from his decision not to write about his own tragic experiences - the deaths of Sylvia Plath and then Assia Wevill and her daughter by Hughes. Not dealing with grief and its consequences, he said, creates a canker inside that eats away at your creative self - it ‘takes a piece of yourself away, like an amputation’.

More from Dartington tomorrow.

Ways with Words

2011-07-11T12:34:00.000-07:00

Not much time for blogging at the moment. I'm madly packing suitcases, arranging the house so that someone else can collect the mail and water the plants, and preparing a talk for the Ways with Words festival at Dartington Hall on Thursday morning. It's a long drive, so I leave tomorrow, returning for a few hours on Friday to collect the suitcases before catching a plane for Italy. It's frantic, but also very exciting.

Rather nervous about Dartington. It's a lovely festival in the most beautiful surroundings, but the hall is usually packed with an audience passionate about literature and expecting the best from their authors. It's one thing performing on the page, quite another on the stage! My talk is going to focus on Katherine Mansfield and her relationship with DH Lawrence and his wife Frieda when they lived in Cornwall - not that far from Dartington. Fingers crossed!

No Tuesday Poem from me this week, but please go to www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com web site to have a look at what others are posting.

Going Down - a newspaper sinks with (almost) all hands

2011-07-08T09:36:00.000-07:00

Extraordinary scenes in London this week as one of the most profitable newspapers in Britain has the plug pulled after revelations of a systemic culture of corruption, political skullduggery, police bribery and phone hacking. Now we know how they got all those stories about footballer's fancies and politicians' peccadilloes. The sight of white-faced journalists (with families and mortgages) having to pack their things and leave the office after only two days notice is sobering. Many of them weren't even employed during the crucial period, or were too junior to have been involved.

Unfortunately the captain of the ship and the chief engineer seem to be almost the only members of staff to get a lifeboat. Doesn't seem fair.

The News of the World crash is going to change things. My guess is that it's the end of the line for the extreme power that the media has exercised for the past several decades unchecked. The Prime Minister has already called in the men in dark suits to reform the Press Complaints Commission and we don't yet know how far the reforms will go. When politicians start tinkering with press freedom, one can't help but get a little anxious. But the current situation - where newspapers can operate above the law with owners too powerful to be called to account - is untenable.

I know people who feel so strongly about the Murdoch empire they won't have anything to do with literary events sponsored by them - I was given a very uncomfortable time when I agreed to do a creative writing workshop for the Sky Arts programme recently. I was very torn - but there isn't a lot of employment for authors and you sometimes find yourself at literature festivals with sponsors you don't necessarily approve of. After the revelations of this week, my reply to the invitation might have been different.

The Tuesday Poem: William Blake

2011-07-05T10:39:00.000-07:00

O Rose, thou art sick!
The Invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of Crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

William Blake, from Songs of Experience

This poem always makes me shiver, but it is so beautiful I keep going back to it. I suppose some would say it's because the poem articulates a universal truth, the mortality that lies at the heart of everything. For me, it's also a poem about passion and about the transformation of one thing into another. The worm that munches the rose petals, thrives and eventually becomes a butterfly, or moth, laying her eggs on yet another rose.

Roses, roses, roses and more roses

2011-07-03T15:08:00.000-07:00

We've had a few days of really lovely weather up here in the north - after months of poor weather and rain nearly every day. Suddenly the garden has sprung to life and the roses - about a month late this year - are opening everywhere. The mill looks at its best. I have a passion for old roses - the ones with wonderful names like Cardinal Richelieu and Madame Alberic Barbier, Ghislaine de Felisonde, and the beautiful Queen of Denmark. Couldn't resist taking a few pics to share - the perfume is unbelievable. This is one thing I will miss when I go to Italy. At the foot of the steps to the garden I've got one of the David Austin roses and the colour and scent are wonderful. I love the chaotic patterns of the petals as they unfurl.

I'm also very keen on wild rose species and have two - a red one from China which the bees go wild for, and another white one called Rosa Alba.

The Apothecary's Rose has striped petals and is supposed to be very ancient.

In order to deter Saturday night revellers from climbing into my garden I've got some really prickly specimens on the fence. Stanwell Perpetual flowers all the time, but is lethal! And then I have a German rose called ParkDirektor Riggers - single, dark red and very precise.

I'm particularly fond of rambling roses - scrambling up trees and up onto the cliff behind the mill. This one is called The Rambling Rector.

And this is the crowning glory - four storey's high and a pillar of colour and perfume. Paul's Himalyan Musk.

Hard to leave England when it looks like this! But Neil rang me last night, spending his first night in our new home. He described the lights twinkling in the valley below, the sun setting in the distant sea, and it sounds utterly magical. Two more weeks!

The Next Big Author Scam

2011-07-01T00:43:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I posted about what appeared to be a good competition for new writers working on a novel.
The Next Big Author invited writers to begin writing a novel and submit the first chapters during the second half of May. It had to be new writing - anything you’d already written was barred. The top five would win a critique with a big publishing house, with the possibility of a contract if successful. It seemed very exciting.
But what happened next was a big let-down for most of the authors who joined. When the submission date arrived in mid-May, writers were told to load their chapters into the already existing (and overloaded) You Write On dot com. They were instructed to join the peer critique process, revise and edit.   Silence.
So, in fact there was no point in being part of The Next Big Author at all. Those who joined, wrote the first chapters of their novels and submitted them within the date guidelines, have simply been thrown into the YWO pond to compete with the short stories, novels (both published and unpublished) and children’s books that were already on there - many of them for years. The Top Ten includes work that goes back to 2008.
There is no separate category or rating system for people who joined The Next Big Author, so one is forced to conclude that the whole exercise was simply a drive to get some new writing onto YWO. This is very unfair, if not downright dishonest.
And what about You Write On? The peer critique idea is generally a good one because you get feedback from readers on your own work and you have to work hard reviewing theirs - which, in theory, hones your own editing skills.
The flaws in the system are that everyone wants a five star rating for their own book and, because it’s competitive, they aren’t going to give anyone else a five star rating because that would mean they might go higher up in the charts. Reviews are also either very subjective ‘I don’t like this kind of writing. It didn’t do anything for me.’ Or painfully Creative-Writing-Text-Book ‘I think you should Show not Tell more in the Third Person Revolving mode’.   The process also favours commercial, main-stream fiction because it’s such a broad audience - anything difficult, or a little out of the way, doesn’t do so well. James Joyce would never have got anywhere with Ulysses!
The other problem is that YWO also operates as a publisher - for less than a hundred pounds you can get your work published by them and readers/reviewers can buy it either as print-on-demand or an e-book. That means that new writers are competing in the ratings with already published stories. There is no separate chart for them either.
It’s worth having a look though - you don’t have to load any work to join, you can simply sign up as a reader and browse. YWO is keen to sell the work of those authors it publishes. I would advise anyone to take a look before they decide to submit work. And there have been some notable successes, such as ‘The Legacy’ which was picked up by Orion and then won the Costa.

And what happened to the three chapters I uploaded to try the whole thing out? Well, I did make it into the top twenty (with about three hundred others!) and that - as any author will tell you - is just not good enough!!

Tuesday Poem: The Double

2011-06-28T08:28:00.000-07:00

Like but not like
through the eye of a lens
the distance of a gun sight
you can’t tell the difference.

There are two sets of clothes
two identical cars
the same hair-dresser.

But only one of them
must learn how to become
the other.

One goes to a restaurant
sleeps peacefully all night
with the window open.

The other lives behind
barbed wire, a coded door
uniformed guards.

One is the price
the Other has to pay.

© Kathleen Jones

This is another poem in draft - an idea I'm thinking about. Ever since I was an extra on a film set, I've been fascinated by the idea of having a double. All big film stars have them, on set as well as off, as well as pop divas such as Madonna. Apparently Kate Middleton also had a double when she was going to and fro to wedding rehearsals, traveling in identical vehicles to foil terrorists. Heads of state also have them. Who would care to be Obama's double? Does Gaddafi have one?

Apparently all writers are fascinated by doubles, the horror genre is full of Doppelgangers - and then there's Dostoevsky's novel 'The Double', and a film called 'Body Double' ...........

For more Tuesday Poems go to www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

How to get an Agent (or not!)

2011-06-23T04:15:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago my agent went on maternity leave and I was agentless. The process of trying to find another was joyless and humiliating. Networking has never been my thing and - faced with someone I'm supposed to impress - I'm either tonguetied and stupid or develop verbal diaorrhea! So this small video made me laugh and squirm all at the same time. I've been there. It's called The Elevator Pitch.

http://youtu.be/9UoWjXMe6OU

Tuesday Poem - Jetsam

2011-06-20T11:26:00.000-07:00

Jetsam

This is what the sea
           has remembered
A shell, coiled like a
          question mark
One finger bone of
          coral; a gannet’s
skull sucked clean.

This is the deep story of the ocean.

A line of narrative written
where the tide reaches.

Kathleen Jones

This is part of a work in progress - some small poems written around observations that I made in New Zealand last year, just exploring ideas. I love the sea, and New Zealand has some of the wildest, most amazing coastal areas I've ever visited. I'm trying to explore some of the stories that the sea hints at, washed up on the tide line.

For more Tuesday Poems, visit www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

Unemployed

2011-06-17T07:04:00.000-07:00

Well, take a deep breath ....... today is my last day of gainful employment. I have just stepped off a cliff of security. From now on I'm going to have to live on what I can earn as a writer, without the safety net of university creative writing tuition and the Royal Literary Fund Fellowship I've been enjoying at Lancaster. Scary stuff.

I took my books off the shelf, my personal belongings from the filing cabinet, took one last look at the tree outside my window and locked the door. I have very good memories of friendly colleagues and polite, hard-working, interesting students. Lots of thank you cards on my table at home - some quite exotic. And little presents of flowers, chinese red tea, a carved wooden desk jotter and chocs. It's lovely to feel appreciated. But I also feel a little sad.

On the plus side, I'm now free (after a couple of weeks of organisation) to begin my new life in Italy. Risky, exciting, financially mad. It's also a challenge. Will I be able to write there? Will any of the ideas I'm working on turn into publishing contracts? I've got a year to change my life before the savings run out. Wish me luck!

VS Naipaul and Women Writers

2011-06-15T05:08:00.000-07:00

I’ve been so involved with preparing for and running a residential creative writing course in Italy I’ve missed quite a lot of things that are going on in the world. Being without the internet for most of the last two weeks also means I’ve not had regular news updates. So I missed V.S. Naipaul’s infamous speech, quoted in the press. Naipaul doesn’t rate women writers at all.

“Women writers are different, they are quite different. I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me." Asked to elaborate, he said this was due to their "sentimentality, the narrow view of the world".

He added: "And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too. My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold it was all this feminine tosh. I don't mean this in any unkind way."

So in what way did he mean it? Such dismissive cruelty can’t be masked by a qualifying phrase. I didn’t know whether Naipaul’s speech was so laughable it should be ignored, or whether it represents a residue of misogyny we still have to fight.

To say that women write differently to men is OK. We do. And we write differently to each other too. Every individual sees the world from a different angle. It isn’t always possible to tell who wrote what. There are men who write so closely from the inside of a woman’s head that you can’t tell which sex authored it (Brian Moore’s I am Mary Dunne for instance) and women who can write equally convincingly as men.

His main gripe seems to be that women are sentimental. Does he mean we’re more in touch with our emotions than men? But he’s such a concise linguist I don’t think so. He means we wallow, we go over the top beyond emotion into sentiment. That’s palpably untrue. I know a great many sentimental men. Anyone read The Notebook? Message in a Bottle? And there are a great many witty, unsentimental women authors - Barbara Trapido’s ‘Sex and Stravinsky’ comes to mind. I’ve also just read Carol Clewlow’s ‘A Woman’s Guide to Adultery’ - which is just about as unsentimental as you can get.

But of course, however well a woman writes she will never write ‘equal’ to him (or any other man is the implication). In his opinion.

On his comment, that a woman is not ‘a complete master of a house’, now that is just plain prejudice. Maybe not in his house, but the days when a man was automatically master of the house by reason of his gender are long gone. And a lot of women writers are single - very much masters of their own houses. Not to mention head of publishing houses, literary agencies, book-selling houses. But the man is 78 and doesn’t seem to realise that we are living in a new world, so perhaps I’d better forgive him. The trouble is, I believe there are many in the literary, and academic, establishments - still solidly masculine - who privately agree with him. Women’s writing is weak; men’s writing is strong. What do we have to do to convince?

Tuesday Poem - Ant Watching

2011-06-13T12:37:00.000-07:00

Oh, who
can get into
the mind of ants?

Scribbling
their lines
skywards
up
my
wall.

Until
a perrssshhhhh
of aerosol
destroys them all.

Oh, who
wants to
think like a man?

© Kathleen Jones

After two weeks of traveling and struggling with non-existent internet, I've finally managed to arrive back in England and try to put together a Tuesday Poem. This is just a scribble - watching ants climbing up the tower wall at Peralta! They're so purposeful and dedicated, it seems a shame to get out the ant-killer.

Thinking tonight of everyone in Christchurch - have been exchanging texts with my daughter on the train on the way up from London. She was at the doctors with the boys when the latest group of quakes struck and they all went under the desk. She has recently moved out of Christchurch to Prebbleton which is not quite so shaky, but still comes into the city for shopping, schools etc. It seems the ground isn't going to settle down quickly and my heart goes out to everyone over there who's having to endure months of fear and uncertainty. Apparently more than 50,000 people have left the city already and I do wonder what is going to happen. It is one of my favourite places.