Blackberries and Blues by Sheena Wilkinson

Is August really the cruellest month? Every year the blackberries take me by surprise – no! it can’t be that time already!  I once wrote a haiku:

 Never got round to picking raspberries;

Now the blackberries are out.  

that time again

I know it’s not a proper haiku, but at the time (I was young and pretentious) I thought it deeply meaningful. And being young, of course, I imagined that I would indeed grasp at all the raspberries in my path, so that by the time the blackberries ripened I would be ready for them. 

 

That quotation from Jeremiah: The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved used to pop up around Northern Ireland about this time of year, too: outside gospel halls or pinned to trees. It always deepened the Back to School Blues for me. 

such cheery words 

As a child, and later as a teacher, I hated the ‘Back to School’ promotions in shops, which seemed to appear earlier and earlier every August: a reminder that the summer holidays, once endless and full of promise, were nearly over. As a writer too, the summer has always felt different and special, as so much of my living still revolves round schools and universities. Often I’ll use the chance to focus hard on a book, freed from the term-time round of school visits, Royal Literary Fund Fellowship, Writer in Residence – whatever the year demands. 

 

By mid-August, my diary is starting to fill up with school visits, festivals, residencies and events, reassuring me that no, I wasn’t crazy to leave my sensible well-paid teaching job in 2013, and that I would still be solvent by the end of the year. There’s a particular, rather posh, diary that I favour, next year’s edition always available in a particular shop by the end of September, and by August I am champing at the bit for it, as the following year starts to offer up engagements too. (Yes, I know about academic year diaries, thank you, but they are Not For Me.) Every summer it’s the same. 

 

There's more where this came from...

Except this summer. I have barely opened my diary for months, and when I do, it’s to marvel at how fast time can go, even when the pages are empty. Of course there are a few commitments, zoom meetings, occasional online workshops, but compared to most years, the harvest is looking very slight. Even when schools are open fulltime, they are not going to want to invite and pay visiting authors. There’s an almost-finished novel draft, to be fair, but anxiety about what sort of publishing world it’s going to have to try to make its mark in dogs me more than usual. I have no need for a 2021 diary at the moment, which is lucky because the shop I would normally have bought it in has gone out of business.  

Every academic year, by about the middle of October, I would realise I was over-committed and start to write No More Bookings notes across the rest of the year. This year – well, I don’t have the Back to School blues, that’s for sure. I sort of wish I did. 

 

Lest this post seem too gloomy -- I had a lovely summer -- it's OK!