Six Poems

Time - Yours and Mine

The hart he loves the high wood.
The hare, she loves the hill.
The knight he loves his bright sword
And the lady loves her will.
- Words & Picture by Jackie Morris    

                                  

Here is a poem inspired by a moonlit drive home from a friend's house. A hare hopped into the middle of the road. It looked at me, I looked at it.

Creation, a mystery, pure and true
All I am, I give to you
Forged of clay
On a starlit night
Black as oak
Snowdrop white
Against the moon we laughed,
We played
We sang, we danced
As in a daze

Those hours were ours
Yours and mine
Wheat and barley
Buck and hind

Youth, a gift, come and gone
All I was, I’ll tell in song
A melody
One summer’s eve
Bright as laughter
Cold as grief
Against the sky, we kissed,
We loved
We touched, we felt
We understood

That love was ours
Yours and mine
Seed and berry
Honey, wine

Age, a curse, old and new
Something borrowed, something blue
Winter frost
Silent dawn
Smiles fade
Faces drawn
Night as dark
Black as white
Rage against
The fading light

This life is ours,
Yours and mine
Summer skies
Rain and shine

Thank You Libboo!

A few months ago I joined a new eBook promotion site called Libboo. Today they sent me a free Kindle for being one of their top buzzers. Was not expecting that. Well worth joining in the fun!

Point Being?

 

During adolescence, I used to devour Point Horror with a passion bordering on fanatical. It took off in a big way amongst girls at my school. It was always the girls who were reading. 

Some of my favourites included:

• Beach House 
• April Fools
• The Invitation
• The Perfume 
• Hit and Run

Beyond anything else, they taught you not to trust anyone. Not the 'responsible adult,' not your boy/girlfriend, not your best friend, not the teacher, the doctor or the lifeguard - nobody. Whoever you thought you could trust, it was always them!

More than that, though, they introduced the culture of books to me. 

It's hard to describe, but for a couple of years I always had my nose in a Point Horror. They introduced me to the smell of new books. The routine of book shopping. Going into Dillons (as it was before Waterstones took over the world) and shopping for a book, knowing that I'd come away with something I felt excited to read. The ritual of browsing the backs, feeling the covers, considering the price. Then the fun of swapping them with friends at school.

So, okay, looking back it's easy to write it off as the literary equivalent of Home & Away in that you didn't have to think too hard - but one thing adults often forget, is that childhood is very dark. From the brothers Grimm through to Punch and Judy - it's a creepy time, full of petty vengeance, social segregation, the first stirrings of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll (or Limp Bizkit and Slim Shady) - whatever - the point being, Point Horror didn't shy away from that stuff. It embraced it as a celebration of our fascination with fear. 

For that reason, it'll always hold a place in my (yes, still beating) heart.

CheltLitFest 2012: Roundup

And so ends another year at Cheltenham Literature Festival.

Collected some impressive signatures:

Philip Pullman

Sebastian Faulks

Ian McEwan

And saw other big names including Sue Townsend & Rachel Joyce, Jenny Agutter, Sir Terry Pratchett, Jon Ronson and Peter Serafinowicz, and David Suchet. Click on any of those names to go to the write-up about their talks, or click the Literature Festival tag to get the full rundown on this and other festivals.

You can find more signatures and write-ups from 2011/10 here.

There's even an (unrelated) signature from the Queen here. Weird.

Exhausting but happy couple of weeks. Off to drink complimentary Taylors coffee from Waterstones now.

CheltLitFest 2012: Ian McEwan

Oh, I'm rather just a little bit happy.

Last talk of this year's festival for us. What a way to end.

McEwan (Atonement, Enduring Love) was wonderfully entertaining. He had the audience laughing out loud for the first half, regaling us with stories about the English syllabus.

He said he'd prefer to be read voluntarily, but having his work on the reading list for students had led to some entertaining moments - especially when his son had to write an essay on Enduring Love. He picked it up and read the opening line: "In his book, McEwan..."

"What happened?" he asked. "You always used to call me Dad."

Apparently he did help him with one essay, which received a D. This prompted him to tell a wonderful story about Tom Stoppard, whose son wrote about his father's work for his course and received an F, followed by the lines: "You have clearly failed to understand the author's intentions."

He says he thinks the York Notes in study editions are great, because they summarise each chapter - you don't even have to read the book. He says he often reads these notes in his own books, they've helped him realise that he hadn't understood himself at all!

On the topic of social media, he says 'life's too short.' He calculated the other day that he probably has around a thousand weeks left to live, why waste them on tweeting? He also said that he took a break from the public eye for about three years, as he realised that the mystery of an author increases the less you say. Suddenly people become interested in you.

Thankfully he's stepped back into the limelight to promote his new book Sweet Tooth. 

He said that he never gives books to friends, and went into the different experience readers have when reading a book by someone they know, or are about to meet. How the temptation is there to look for clues to that person's psyche in the book. He's right. Both from friends telling me how much of me they see in my books (one once telling me that Phoebe in Georg[i]e was me! - damn, and I wanted to wear the dapper suit.) and because I'm currently reading a book that an author gave me, and I do find myself wondering which parts of himself are embodied in which characters, and where he lived the experiences he draws upon. 

McEwan calls this an 'embarrassingly intimate' issue. I understand that. It's excruciating to think that anybody would be analysing my mind on the basis of a work of fiction. Although, I often repeat the saying 'fiction is selective reality.' He calls this habit of looking for an author's personality within passages 'vulgar yet forgivable.' I'm not sure it's something you can consciously stop, though.

On the topic of writer's block, he now terms this 'useful hesitation.' Especially during the first 5,000 words of a new story, where you're pausing to make sure that the tone is right. I'm currently 5.6k into my next one and, for the first time ever, doing what he describes. I usually storm ahead to at least 30k before block hits. Perhaps if I take more time over the tone it will start slowly but keep rolling.

I love the topic of novellas, because authors always have such fun things to say about them. Check out my post on King's Different Seasons for a giggle on that count. McEwan, conversely, is a huge advocate of writing novellas, but agrees that the literary world tends to sniff down their noses at them. He feels that novellas force the writer to be focused and concise, leading to better prose and a complete story that you can hold in your mind all at once. He considers novellas the 'supreme literary form.'

He also recommends that new writers write short stories. He says it's a great way of getting all of the influences out of your mind in order to find your own feet, and better to write a bad short story than waste years writing a bad novel. Not, he emphasised, that short stories themselves are necessarily always bad. He should know, he is a master of the short story.

I must admit, Splintered Door was my way of clearing my palate; of trying all the things I wanted to try and, as I've heard many authors refer to this week, attempting at least one pastiche.

There were so many other funny anecdotes, not least the Italian interviewer asking the one question you can never ask an Englishman: 'McEwan, what is love?' He really was a pleasure to listen to.

I must admit, I had a little gush at the signing table.

I took up a copy of First Love, Last Rites. Couldn't help sharing the fact that "Butterflies is the most memorable short story I have ever read."

"That is the darkest thing I ever wrote."

"It's brilliant."

I'm sure he knew that already, and has been told many times, but I've never forgotten that one. It was the first time that I realised quite how clever a story could be at splitting a reader between what they know, deep down in their soul, and what they want to believe.

If you haven't read it, it's in that collection. It's unmistakably disturbing, but I wager you won't forget it either.

Incredibly privileged to have my favourite short story signed by its author.

It's been a fantastic festival from start to finish this year. You can catch up on everything using the Literature Festivals tag or go to the festival roundup post. Looking forward to the next.

CheltLitFest 2012: Townsend & Joyce

Last night we headed to our penultimate talk of the festival: Sue Townsend and Rachel Joyce.

Townsend won the heart and minds of the nation back in 1992 with her novel The Queen And I, which saw the royal family relegated to a council flat after the People's Republican Party won the general election.

She's also more than a little well known for her Adrian Mole series, of which she's writing another. He starts off aged thirteen and three-quarters and is, by now, around forty. That's quite an incredible feat of writing.

Joyce is a radio writer, and Harold Fry is her debut novel.

Whereas Townsend has just written a book about a woman who goes to bed for a year, Joyce has written a book about a man who decides to walk the length of Britain. An emotionally repressed English gent who, on receiving a letter from a dying school friend requesting he visit, realises, at the post box, that the reply 'I'm sorry' isn't quite good enough. So he decides to walk to her, in nothing but the clothes he stands up in.

It transpires that, at the time of writing, Joyce's own father was dying. She began writing in much the same vein as her character starts walking, with the hope that by doing something so irrationally focused, he (or in Fry's case, she) might keep living.

That was rather a silencer. A very profound and understandable place to start a story.

Townsend, when asked whether she still 'caries a lot of anger,' replied 'yes,' and went on to cite an incident in her childhood which typified class divide. She won a place at grammar school, but the uniform alone was three times what her parents earned, so she couldn't go. To which the interviewer said that the exact same thing had happened to his own mother. A system set up to show token equality whilst ensuring the working class never left their posts.

None of us had expected to see Townsend in a wheelchair, or blind. When asked whether the loss of her visual world had impacted on her writing, she said that it hadn't really, because she had a lifetime of memories to draw from. She could still imagine facial expressions clearly, and could recall more now that she had the time to think about it. Her son helps her to write, but the one thing she does miss very much is reading. She said that she still buys books, to encourage new authors.

A thought-provoking talk. 

I would like to read both books, and I am often annoyed with myself for being such a slow reader. They may have to wait whilst I continue through my current reading pile, but I hope to get there some day.