How To Lose Friends, but Influence People by Steve Gladwin

 

 

 I am back in the world of paid work, but it's more than a little odd as I'm sitting in the meeting room of the Oriel Davies gallery in Newtown, Powys, where Rosie and I are based two days a week for the 'Hidden Voices' series of creative workshops we are doing for the entirely wonderful Credu Powys Carers. This space is the pretty big and the sort of multi-space room I would have killed for in my career as a further education drama teacher. There's only one problem! The voices we are talking about are so hidden that they have never actually turned up. The space which Rosie, (ill today, sadly) and I regularly post videos and her lovely poems on our facebook site Stories of Feeling and Being and try to get a certain amount of comedy gold about the large spider plant which is the only other inhabitant is starkly empty. The real problem of course is that in this area at least - where covid cases in schools are pretty rife - people are more likely to retreat back to safety than venture into possible adventure and enlightenment of spirit. I myself am hardly one to talk because there is an increasingly large hermit part of me at the moment.

Luckily I have a few things to work on, but at least one doesn't come naturally to me and never has. I am not great and now at the age of 62 am unlikely to ever be at self-promotion. Even the phrase makes me feel nervous. I have been, amongst other things, a confidence and assertiveness trainer, but I don't know how tele sales people ever do it. I spend almost as much of my time feeling sorry for them when they're trying to get me to commit to something, as being annoyed how they got hold on an ex-directory number.

But now, dear reader, the shoe is very much on the other foot. I was never any good at phoning schools to get bookings for my own theatre company, so how am I expected to raise the huge sum that's needed to fully fund my wonderful book  with 'Unbound', 'Land in Mind', which originated from these very pages. Today, the 22nd day of November, equidistant between my parents' birthdays it is a month since I began to get pledges. Here, then is not so much a list of impressions and advice about trying to do this, but more like what the Americans might call 'a mess of stuff.'

 

 

 

* Be prepared to lose your friends.

I'm not saying it's going to happen, but be prepared that it might. Your timing might be lousy when you approach your first 'victim'. They might be on their way to a funeral, or standing in the middle of a flooded kitchen. Not that you need to think of them like the priest in 'Father Ted', who Ted always phoned when he was on the verege of doing something tricky or dangerous, but you get my point!

* And don't think of people as victims.

No, these are your FRIENDS, and not just pledged in the form of variously shaped humans. Part of the appeal of your book is because it is yours, and people like you and want to support you! Right!

* Don't sell away your life and sanity for a pledgeometer.

 You will be drawn to it constantly of course and if you are a dyspraxic worrier like me, far too often. But do try to get a life somewhere in between looks. Wars could happen, monsoons could overwhelm large areas of land, and regimes could fall, and you might not nudge up that extra per cent.

* Even though it is probably an act of madness to create an anthology which involves fifty plus people, stories and poems, features, articles and photographs, rather than something simple like say - a novel, you will automatically have that number of advocates for your (and their) book, to be drawn on in various ways.

NB You might also run a slight risk of losing their support if you approach them too many times, so that, like a grumpy sleeping animal, they just want to stick two metaphorical fingers up, and roll over in the straw.

* Use social media in a way in which you feel confident.

 In our first marketing seminar, Cassie, the head of marketing advised us to concentrate our focus mainly on one social media outlet. In my case that would be facebook, where I have had a presence for many years and already annoyed a great many people, (so they're used to it, presumably!) In my case, I have also reintroduced myself to twitter, for the short and snappy one-liner, which also sneakily adds a link to your book at every opportunity. And once people start posting about your book, post back a reply so that those of them who don't know you as some sixty two year old pot-bellied, grizzled old reprobate imagine that they must be talking to the very fount of wisdom itself, especially with a cerebral book like mine, which rather imagines some wise and benevelolent sage scratching away with a swan quill in hallowed cloisters.

* Be able to describe your book in a couple of sentences rather than waffling round the subject every time someone asks you. 

'Land in Mind', (it's surely about time I named it - what a lousy marketer I am!), is about recapturing the childhood landscapes that form us and reforming them in our memories so we can continually draw on them when we need them as a form of sanctuary. It's not about 'sort of' anything, and it has a definite absence of 'maybe'. It's a tough trick to learn, but well worth the mastery.

 

 

 

*Think of as many and as different ideas for both marketing and new pledges as you can.

Include copies of your one and only novel, or your partner's artistic talent, as part of a package. Ask contributors to do you an audio, or video, which you can either do in your official update on your 'Unbound' page, or on your own site/social media. Do a regular podcast and - in my case at least - persuade some of those lovely contributing friends to perform their audio or video in favourite landscape. I already have a lovely clip from Philippa Francis by the sea in Sussex, with the moon rising in the background, and another of John Matthews reading two of his Green Man poems, the second of which closes the book. Basically, keep the ideas coming.

 

* Be prepared for disappointments with contributors, or individual components. I came so close to getting TV explorer and historian Levison Wood, but in the end a quiet covid period for him gave way to a new adventure and we just couldn't fit in a chat first. Alan Lee continues to be elusive, although he has agreed to be involved, and Phil Rickman has provided a tantalising fragment of what could be!

 

* Try not to get overwhelmed or disheartened by what your running mates are doing.

I begun my pledging period with two other new Unbounders, Louisa and Tree. Because Louisa is better known by her twitter handle of 'Roadside Mum' and has a huge following on there and elsewhere, and because her book 'One in Five' is people talking about poverty through their own stories, she hit the ground running as a huge influx of people supported it in the first week. Now, she's heading steadily towards 50%, while Tree, who has written a fascinating but clearly niche book about the Rider Waite tarot, has made a slower start than me. I find myself willing Tree to get more when I look at her page, while being sort of relieved that Louisa has reduced her thundering pace a little. We still have five months to go.

* For as many pledge disappointments and bad responses you can have delightful ones. My first pledge was Jackie Morris, who is also one of my contributors, and, having announced that she was my first pledge, then told me how ******* hard the whole process would be.  (She's dead right!) Then, last week, I remembered I want to pledge for Elizabeth Garner's book of folktales. Having done this, I messaged her on facebook to tell her I'd done that, and to tell her about the book, whereupon she responded to tell me that she'd pledged £75 for the launch and then directed me to the event the evening after where she would be discussing her father's new book 'Treacle Walker', at the Yorkshire Festival of Story. The event was hosted by the festival's director Kevin Crossley Holland, who is also a generous contributor to 'Land in Mind'.

I immediately bought 'Treacle Walker', one of the finest stories of apprecticeship you will ever read, and was drawn back to 'First Light', the incredible collection of essays on Alan Garner and his work, which had been hiding low on my kindle list. The contributors to that anthology include Hugh Lupton, Ronald Hutton, Kath Langrish and Neil Philip, all of whom appear in 'Land in Mind'. It is - needless to say - an 'Unbound' book. Of course it is!

* Which brings me to the last and most important of my musings. I've got the chance to work with 'Unbound', which is turning out to be as unique, as warm and above all, as supportive an organisation as you might hope it to be. It is wonderful to be an 'Unbounder; and that's the case where you are near to the finishing line to a background flourish of trumpets, or just getting into your stride, while still hanging on to the rail a little. Masterminded by the wonderful John Mitchinson, who believed in the idea for 'Land in Mind' from the start, (thank you, Neil Philip) and looks like the rare sort of old testament prophet you can trust, his assistant Aliya Gulemani and Cassie Waters, head of marketing, (who missed our three launches through being in hospital), 'Unbound' is a family. And like all families it groans through the ups and downs of a book's family life, laughs politely at my bad jokes and allows for my dyspraxia. Having been supported a little on reins while you make your first tentative steps, they then allow you to stumble on until you can wander off on your own without going anywhere near traffic. And later, when it comes to your homework, the red pen is used very gently indeed!

So, this is my chance to sell the book to you and encourage you all to pass all this on to like-minded friends. Although 'Land in Mind' was first conceived in a 2018 conversation between Kevin Crossley-Holland and I at Ty Newydd about his poem 'Lifelines', (which begins this anthology), and later almost accidentally provided with it's name and ethos by Catherine Fisher, (coincidentally Kevin's co-tutor on that course), the book really began with two years of interviews on this blog. That is why it seems so appropriate that Sue and Penny provide the introduction to 'Land in Mind' and Kevin's poem follows it.

Without you SASSIES there wouldn't have been a book, so here's me taking another opportunity to thank Sue and Penny, Jackie Marchant and John Dickinson, Kelly McKain and Mary Hoffman, Elen Caldecott and Sharon Tregenza, Lu Hersey and Jasbinder Bilar, Inbali Isserles and Kath Langrish, Malachy Doyle, Frances Thomas, anyone I might have briefly forgotten, and the much missed Kit Berry, to whom the book is dedicated and by whom all of these lovely photos were taken..

 

 

 

Thank you. And now a brief word from our sponsors.

 

 

https://unbound.com/books/land-in-mind/

A Sea Full of Selkies with Steve Gladwin and Co - Kevin Crossley-Holland

In the first of these blogs I talked about 'The Woman of the Sea' a selkie tale of Kevin Crossley-Holland's which, in the most unexpected way first gave me the gift of storytelling. Asking Kevin to talk about that story and the subject of selkies in general for this series, I sent him a load of questions, which he then very sensibly ignored. Instead he responded to the essence and intent of what I wanted, through the prism of his own experience and enthusiasms. Below you can see not only what a fine decision that turned to be, but in addition Kevin's own version of the story of St Cuthbert and the Seals, a favourite of his. Thanks to Kevin for being such a regular and willing contributor to my blogs and I'm sure you'll enjoy what he has to say.

 

One evening, when I was ten or eleven, my father sat at his piano, and played and sang a simple tune.

 

 

 

 My father told me that it had been noted down in Orkney just a few years before, and that 'Sule Skerry' (or Skerrie) was a rock out in the Atlantic, all of fifty miles west of Hoy, frequented by a colony of sea

There are rare moments in one's life when something completely changes; when your head buzzes and your heart lurches, and a film lifts from your eyes. . .   This was one of those awakenings, more common perhaps in childhood and old age than in middle age, and it has led to a lifelong interest in and familiarity with seals, as well as to some small experience of shape-changers and stories about them.

 

Once upon a time, I returned from the island of Tory off the coast of Donegal, devastated by having just seen an old woman appear through a wall - there's almost no one on that island who has not seen ghosts - and attending a wake where the deceased was propped up and holding a hand of cards while four men sat around him, playing and smoking, and where I heard over and again the unforgettable wailing of newborn seals, so like the cries of human babies.

 

And once, on the island of Rousay, I engaged in a kind of antiphon with a grey seal, who followed me as I walked up and down a strand, always keeping her distance, never far away.  I called out; she replied.  She called out; I replied.

 

And again, when my own older daughter (aged eleven) was swimming alone off the tidal island of Scolt Head, wearing a black costume, I watched concerned as a single seal approached her, as if to verify that she was not one of her own, and did not wish to be.

 

As you'll imagine, I've sought out stories old and new about encounters with seals, actual and fictional.  Do you know, for instance, Bede's account (in his Life of Saint Cuthbert) of how the saint used to pray all night on a beach and how at dawn two seals or sea-otters 'bounded out of the water, stretched themselves out before him, warmed his feet with their breath, and tried to dry him on their fur'?

 

*

 

Have you come across the wildman or wodwo of Orford?  As Ralph of Coggeshall reported in his Chronicon Anglicanum, the fishermen who caught him during the reign of King John didn't know what to make of him.  Was he a human or a seal-man or an incubus or what?  And why did he prefer the company of humans, who tortured him, to a solitary existence?

 

Painting of Scolt Head by Gillian Crossley-Holland

 

When I compiled an anthology of British folktales and included their most celebrated collectors and retellers (Folktales of the British Isles, 1985), I wrote that 'The natural affection that exists between humans and seals has given rise to many folk-tales and folk beliefs, none of them more haunting than that of The Woman of the Sea, a story claimed by a number of the Northern Isles and here attributed to Unst in Shetland.  The tale-type has affinities with The Lady of Llyn y Fan Fach, for here is another union between male mortal and female fairy that is not destined to last, while in some versions the seal woman also returns like the lady of the lake to give her children medical knowledge.  The tradition that there are still a few families with webbed fingers or toes, or horny skin on their hands and feet, indicating descent from a seal-woman is still current in the north of Scotland.

 

Already aware of the work of Helen Waddell (1889-1961) as historian, novelist and translator, and of her enchanting Beasts and Saints, I included in my anthology her version of 'The Woman of the Sea', so simple and so graceful.

 

For my own version, 'Sea-Woman' (British Folk Tales, 1987 and Between Worlds 2019) I used Thomas Keightley's story of 'The Mermaid Wife' in his The Fairy Mythology (1828) as my starting point.  At the time, I was interested - less so now, I must say - in whether I could make a version that somehow straddled oral and literary traditions.  And as I noted, 'I have chosen to retell this story as a tale-within-a-tale in which. . .  the voice in the shell is a kind of externalisation of the girl's own memory and sense of loss'.

 

 

 

Sheila Disney, our own seal-woman here in the Burnhams in north Norfolk - the subject of my poem 'Diz' - did catch her breakfast (dabs and the like) in the creek with her feet, and it's true she was rather whiskery, and that she told me that she was the 'last child of a seal-woman', but some components of this short poem are imaginary.

 

https://www.blakeneypointsealtrips.co.uk/

 

 

But many times in recent years I've gone out to Blakeney Point to see the ever-growing colony of grey and common seals, swarming around the boat and lazing on the sands, as well as visiting a small rookery (or herd, or harem, or bob, take your pick) who have established themselves in a saltwater lagoon, sheltered from those who do not intend to find them.

 

How strange that on land, seals prefer to crowd together, when there is no obvious reason for them to do so.  And how predictable that their endless waddling and jostling leads to stress and aggression.

But I'm no sociologist or environmentalist, and leave it now to others to show all we humans can learn from the behaviour of seals.  But what will never be in doubt is their haunting appeal to our imagination.

 

 

SAINT CUTHBERT AND THE SEALS

 

Up on this cliff-top, there's always a storm of seabirds - whirling and swirling around the ruins.

            I met an old priest up here and he told me that maybe they're the souls of children like me, the ones who became nuns and monks, and stayed here all their lives.  That was hundreds and hundreds of years ago, before the monastery fell down.

            Saint Cuthbert used to come here.  He walked all the way up the coast from the island of Lindisfarne, and that's miles and miles away.

            'When the monks and nuns went off to their beds,' the old priest told me, 'and you bet they were lumpy ones, narrow and lumpy, Cuthbert used to steal out alone. By moonlight and starlight, he scrambled and slithered down that steep path there to the beach.

            'One night, a young monk followed him to find where he was going, and do you know what?

            'He saw Cuthbert walk straight into the water, right up to his neck.  All night he chanted loudly, and his song sounded so like the waves swelling and singing around him that you couldn't tell which was which.'

            At the first sign of dawn, Cuthbert waded back to the beach.  He knelt down on the pebbles, and began to pray.

            'Two seals followed him,' the old priest told me.  'They lay down in front of him, and panted loudly to try to warm his cold feet, and then rubbed their fur against him to try to dry him.'

            Well, when he had blessed them, the seals slipped back into the dark waters, and Cuthbert slogged up the path there, and got into the monastery just in time to sing dawn-prayers with the nuns and monks.

            The young monk following Cuthbert felt guilty.  He knew he had witnessed a secret between the saint and God - he'd witnessed a miracle.  And worse, he was sure the saint had heard him because he kept tripping over roots and stuff and cursing in his hurry to get back to the  monastery.  So he went and found Cuthbert, and asked his forgiveness.

            'Promise me,' Cuthbert told him, 'promise you'll never tell anyone what you saw until after my death-day.'

            'I promise,' said the young monk.

            The old priest stared at me.  His eyes were grey. 'The holy man who told me this heard it from a monk, and the monk said he had heard it from a nun, and she had heard it from. . . who. . .  heard. . .  heard. . .'

            Standing on the cliff-top, I felt quite dizzy. The priest was opening his arms, opening them, as if he were about to fly away; and when I closed my eyes and imagined, I saw nothing but surging salt-waves, and heard nothing but sea-voices, singing.

 

My thanks again to Kevin. Next month film-maker Sophia Carr-Gomm on the inspiration for 'A Wider Sun', her own film about selkies, and storyteller Sharon Jacksties gives us her own remarkable account of a selkie encounter. Thanks everyone.