Book Launch - Joan Lennon

Book launches are a worry. Will anybody come? Will the venue sell enough books? Will I forget everything I know about my book and quite possibly my own name?

Despite the worrying, the book launch for Revolution! went ahead and none of the disasters happened!

 

Big thanks for everyone who came, to Lindsey Fraser for making the conversation flow, and to my favourite bookshop The Edinburgh Bookshop for hosting the event with such warmth and charm. 

Book launches? Worth every worry!

Joan Lennon website

Joan Lennon Instagram

Mountain, Sea, Holiday, by Paul May

By the time this very short post is published I'll be somewhere in North-West Scotland. It's probably fifty years now since I first heard the poet, Norman McCaig reading a poem on the radio, and forty years since I wrote out one of his poems on an index card and pinned it to my noticeboard. It has been pinned to various noticeboards ever since, along with a couple of other items that have somehow survived.

Here is the fisherman's cottage on the shore at Diabaig in Torridon where I spent a week with a friend in 1993. We paid £30.

Then there is this little cutting from The Guardian from a similar era which I bring out from time to time when I want to show someone the wonderful possibilities of the language of football. 

But the poem is a different kind of thing:

Between mountain and sea 

Honey and salt - land smell and sea smell, 

as in the long ago, as in forever. 

The days pick me up and carry me off,

half-child, half prisoner,

on their journey that I'll share 

for a while. 

They wound me and they bless me

with strange gifts: 

the salt of absence, 

the honey of memory. 

McCaig spent a lot of time in Sutherland, in north-west Scotland, and had a special relationship with the strangely-shaped mountain, Suilven, that rises from the watery moors behind Lochinver. I recommend that you go and climb the mountain from Inverkirkaig, where you'll see the moving monument which the Friends of Norman McCaig have erected at the start of the path. You'll also have a wonderful day out, if the midges aren't biting and the weather is fine. 

The Poems of Norman McCaig, edited by Ewen McCaig is published by Polygon/Birlinn

September - and a Library I knew long, long ago.

At the foot of Jolly Butcher’s Hill was a busy crossroad, where long-gone tram rails were still embedded in the tarmac. On one corner was the almost-Art-Deco Wood Green Tube station, where a warm nicotine fug seeped out into the damp air.

Across Lordship Lane, on the other corner, was a basic brick ‘retreat’ for drivers from the big Bus Terminus,which intruded on the more ancient and interesting expanse beyond. This was Spouters Corner, with its weekend flower stall. Here, strange men stood on boxes, ranting about diet, grievances or God while pigeons circled overhead or dived for crumbs. The third corner, to me, was merely a row of bus stops, and a narrow public house.

But the fourth corner? That held our destination, Wood Green Public Library, whose Victorian facade was decorated with ornate carvings and pillars and, at least to my eyes, glorified by the beautiful green copper dome above the entrance. The library was,to me, a book palace from the times before, when there had been no rationing or grimness.

I followed my mother up the steep stone stairs, through the carved door to the mosaic floor into the library, and then life felt safe again. I could feel the power of the library, the silence, the rows and rows of books and the sense that, for a while, nobody could get at you. Almost like a church, it was, without the hymns and statues. My mother gave me a gentle push, and trotted off up the short flight of steps, through the double doors with their stained glass panels, and into the vast mysterious space where only adults were allowed.

Down the echoing stairs I went, with their green tiled walls, to the basement, where the Junior Library welcomed me with its whispery silence. A subterranean daylight seeped through half-moons of wired glass high along one wall, where the passing feet and pram-wheels created flickering shadows from the outside pavement. But I was here, now, in this calm other world, rarely reached by sunshine. The room was wide and generous, with shelves around all four sides: one wall for my ignored non-fiction, and three satisfactory walls for the fiction, in alphabetically arranged rows.

In the centre of the carpeted floor stood the Librarian’s desk: a square wooden fortress, with a creaky gate to keep children away. With her tight rolls of mousy locks, pinned in a net, she reigned grimly over wooden trays of tickets, her date stamp, pens and ink pad at the ready, and her eyes watching for any child who stayed too long. Good behaviour, silence, few chairs, power & suspicion.

I recall no enticing prints or paintings hung high on the grey-washed walls. The only glow was over by Non-Fiction where, beyond the impressive set of encyclopaedias, was a table, holding a bubbling tank where tiny fish hid under loops of water-weed. Nearby there were books with pictures, made for children who could not yet read yet. Imagine that?

The books on the fiction shelves were bound in subdued tones of cloth: drab browns, faded blues, weary moss-green, withered rose, with gilt letters sparking on spines here and there. Occasionally, small black images were embossed on the front covers, hinting at the line drawings of the illustrations within. Occasionally, a coloured frontispiece appeared facing the title page. But, for the most part, then, colours came from the pictures that words made in your imagination.

Though the stock was old, that barely mattered; the books on our three shelves at home were old too. Newness was not something that mattered in books, other than the fact that ‘old’ writers like Dickens were revered. Did the book have pages? Yes. That was enough. 

(No wonder I found a recent ‘Get them while they’re hot!’ message, posted on a current fiction site, such an abomination. Don't stop for that: move on to this or be a failure!)

The books had probably been purchased when that Junior Library was created, part of the inspired movement for Children's Libraries and Children's Librarians pioneered by Eileen Colwell during the Twenties and Thirties, and which received much support, especially from the poet John Masefield, and which also led to Storytelling and Storytime sessions in libraries. But by now that original starting stock was a lot older. 

Book publication, and books available in schools and libraries, would have been affected for Wartime Rationing Restrictions some years before and taken a while to recover. Certainly this was the era of all the second-hand bookshops along Charing Cross Road.

George Orwell, writing in Tribune in 1944, protested about the severity of the cuts in paper allocation:

‘A particularly interesting detail is that out of the 100,000 tons allotted to the Stationery Office, the War Office gets no less than 25,000 tons, or more than the whole of the book trade put together . , . At the same time paper for books is so short that even the most hackneyed "classic" is liable to be out of print, many schools are short of textbooks, new writers get no chance to start and even established writers have to expect a gap of a year or two years between finishing a book and seeing it published.’

(Oh, just two years? Might just go check on publication waits now . . .)

However, back then, as a quick and early reader, I sped through fiction greedily. I re-borrowed and re-read favourite stories, although now I remember few titles specifically from the library. Black Beauty? Call of the Wild? Christmas Carol? Children of the New Forest? The Silver Skates? Heidi? Arthur Ransome? Where did I come across all of those?  My strongest passion was for myths and legends and fairy stories. I loved Andrew Lang’s famous Blue, Yellow, Green and Red Fairy Tale collections, which I borrowed time after time.

Another fondness was for the ‘Twins’ series, such as ‘The Dutch Twins’, ‘The Cave Twins’, ‘The Irish Twins’ and others. Recently, I found the books were written by an American, Lucy Fitch Perkins. She wrote the first – The Dutch Twins - in 1911, to help children and families understand the homelands and cultures of all its immigrant population. The last title of her 26 book series, ‘The Dutch Twins and Little Brother’ was published in 1938. Below is a 'library edition', not one of the more beautiful versions.

 

I did say the books in Wood Green Library were very old when I came across them, even then, but maybe some of that Lucy Perkin's cultural understanding would be useful in the States now.

My job, while my mother chose her latest crime novel and my father’s new cowboy adventure, was to behave myself, keep quiet, choose which three books to take home and, I’m afraid, to avoid thinking about needing the toilet as there were none available. So I waited and read on, basking in that bookish library scent until I was collected.

That beautiful copper domed library was a huge and significant part of my life, or whoever my self was trying to be just then, but three things happened, at almost the same time.

One: As a very good reader, I was granted an adult ticket, taken to find John Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrims Progress’ among the cavernous adult shelves, and carried it proudly all the way home with me. How or why I seized upon this heavy tome and title as the book my young self needed to read, I do not know, other than my delight in the alliteration of the title. Afterwards, I felt in a sort of limbo, neither of the unfamiliar adult nor the junior library and lost heart. That children’s librarian was probably pleased that I disappeared.

 

Two: I had another birthday and another school report, All at once, my time at home was strongly directed away from burying my head in books and towards the pages of the Progress Papers for the 11+ Exam booklets. Over and over again. Saturdays disappeared.

Thirdly: The Progress Papers exercises worked. I became a pupil at St Angela’s Convent Grammar School, where I had to learn a whole new culture of homework and subtle religious snobbery, and that there were ‘wrong’ authors and 'wrong books'.

And we moved away, to another area. So there were no more visits to that Wood Green Public Library. Soon, there could be no more, as the library was transferred to a new, accessible open-plan site within the vast Wood Green Shopping City nearby – for all sorts of valid, rational reasons, I know - and my lovely, copper-domed building was demolished. Please note: in pictures,it doesn't, look as big as it felt.

Those ancient slippery tram lines? My mother, cycling back down Jolly Butcher's Hill on her way to work one rainy day, caught her front wheel in a tram line and the bike crashed down. Luckily, thankfully, she was not run over by any bus or lorry but had mild concussion and suffered a bad back for ages afterwards. Double luckily, she had already delivered my young brother off at his nursery school and so the child seat was empty. I think they have since been removed.


Penny Dolan

Up to my elbows in flour by Sheena Wilkinson

This will be a short post because this week has found me mostly up to my elbows in flour. The reason? I am baking, not for a book launch this time, but for a charity coffee morning. 

current state of kitchen 

One of my best friends, Susanne Brownlie, died recently from a brain tumour. It is most heartbreaking of course for her family, but the loss of a close friend is horrible: we lose  a shared language, an esoteric frame of reference, and a particular way of being ourselves. 

That frame of reference for us was books. Susanne and I met through our mutual interest in the Chalet School and that love was at the heart of our decades-long friendship. She was always my first reader; long before I was published we used to share our works-in-progress, and though I was the one who went on to be a professional writer Susanne was a fine writer too. In fact we collaborated on a Chalet School 'fill-in' story, Robin Heeds the Call, which was published in 2014 by Girls Gone By and before she died Susanne self-published her own historical novel, Courage to Love.

Susanne's novel, with cover design by Emma Pass

Our birthdays were a fortnight apart, and we always had a joint treat halfway between the dates (22 August and 4 September). Women of modest, bookish tastes, our  outings generally involved book-shopping, having a cuppa or (best of all) once visiting a litter of puppies which my sister had thoughtfully bred around the right time of year.

tea and chat 

As this year's birthday approached I decided to do something in Susanne's memory, in aid of Marie Curie, the charity which gave her such wonderful care in their Belfast hospice for the last seven months of her life. I'd already done a couple of sponsored walks so I decided on a coffee morning. She would have been the first to offer to help. 

What has this to do with books, reading and writing? Not much perhaps. I started writing it mostly as an apology: I have been so busy baking (and cleaning!) that there's not much else on my mind -- apart from Dolly Parton, but I'm guessing that by Saturday everyone else will have had their say about the wonderful Dolly. 

Susanne, unlike Dolly (and me) was a very private person -- she would be mortified by this public post, but I think she would forgive me. I offer it not only as an excuse for having nothing more literary, but as a reminder that the friends we make through books -- and what is Awfully Big Blog Adventure if not friends made through books? -- are very much to be cherished. 

the dedication to Name upon Name (2015)

A Love letter to Reading

Since everybody reading this blog will be an avid reader themselves, I thought my little review of this book would fit right in. I loved this book.

Lucy Mangan’s Bookworm, about the joys of children’s literature, was a little overwhelming. That’s not a criticism; rather, she wrote in such detail about all the books she’d read as a child that my mind reeled at the detail she dived into. She seemed to have read every book written for children – in English – ever! And while I’d read a lot of them, I hadn’t read nearly as many as her – probably about a quarter actually - so had no frame of reference for most of her comments. 

(It did introduce me to Gwen Grant’s Private – Keep Out though, and for that I’ll be grateful for the rest of my days.)

Bookish: A Love Letter to Reading is – well, for me at least – far more accessible. Mainly because I’ve read just about all the books she writes about and so can involve myself more deeply in her thoughts and judgements. 

And it’s pure pleasure to discover them. She takes in everything from early YA, to set texts at school, to an English Lit degree at Cambridge, bonkbusters and bestsellers… Lucy Mangan likes to read! And her enthusiasm makes me want A) to run right out and ransack my nearest bookshop and B) take another crack at The Da Vinci Code. (Which I think is probably the worst-written book ever published, but which she continued reading, even when a snotty colleague at the Guardian wondered out loud why she was wasting her time on such rubbish. Because, she says, she was enjoying the story, and if that isn’t the definition of a good time with a book, what is?)

Lucy Mangan just likes to read, and Bookish is a loving, wonderfully entertaining tribute to doing just that.

Letters - a treasure trove. By Sue Purkiss

 Far back in the distant past, O Best Beloveds, there was a time before emails, before WhatsApp, before Messenger - before any of these things which we now rely on. And in that time, if you wanted to communicate with someone far away, you wrote a letter. If you were in the same country, that letter might arrive very quickly - the post then was very efficient. It had to be, because apart from telegrams and the telephone (land lines only, of course, no mobiles), it was pretty much the only means of communication. If the letter had to go abroad, of course, it took much longer.

Many people kept the letters which were most important to them - indeed, some people kept the vast majority of the letters they received, but they were more likely to be people in the public eye, who had an eye towards future memoirs and biographies.

In the later years of his life, my father knew that I was interested in his stories about his childhood and family and about his experiences during the war. So he gave me this old chocolate box, which contained a few old photographs, his army record book and that of my Uncle George, who was a rear gunner in the RAF and was shot down just before the end of the war - a tragedy, one among so very many. 

It also contained a number of letters from Dad's mother and some of his five sisters. The reason these letter survived is that they never reached him. This was because at the end of May 1940, he was part of the British Expeditionary Force to France, about 400,000 men, which was retreating with all possible speed towards Dunkirk, where they were hoping to be picked up by the navy and taken back to Britain. This was the famous effort, involving hundreds of small boats, which did indeed rescue the majority of the men. But not all. Many were killed, and others were captured before they ever got there. Dad was one of these, and he spent the rest of the war in prison camps in Poland.

But back at home, my grandmother and Dad's sisters had no idea of this. So they kept on writing letters, chatty in the case of his sisters, increasingly anxious in the case of Granny Course. And eventually - extraordinarily - these letters were not just chucked into the nearest bin: someone examined them, investigated, and some months later, returned them to their senders, stamped 'Addressee reported Prisoner of War'. Granny kept them, and years later, gave them to Dad, their intended recipient.

Dad with his company at the beginning of the war - he is sitting on the front row on the far right. He was in the RASC, the Royal Army Service Corps. I don't know how many of these survived the war. 

There's a little side story to this. For months, in the chaos of war, no-one knew what had happened to Dad. At some point a telegram arrived back at home, saying that he was missing in action. My Aunt Connie intercepted it, and decided that Granny wasn't to be told: they would wait until they knew for certain whether he was alive or dead.

It's so moving to read these letters now, in the knowledge of what was happening in France. This is from a letter Granny wrote on the 15th of May, when Dad still had about ten days of freedom left. She is hoping that he will have leave before long.

...I have cleaned the house ready waiting to hear that quick step. I often fancy I hear you coming home early (in the) morning, so I do hope things won't be so long. It seems hard and furious now...

And then this one, written on the 25th, around the time that he was captured. She is obviously desperately worried, beginning:

Dear Bernard

    Do just let me know how you are as soon as possible, I know I am impatient... I am only wanting to know if you are well, and are quite alright...

And ending:

...if you are too tired I am sending you some ready addressed envelopes if you can only just say I am alright mam, that will suffice for your loving Mother/too anxious.

These letters were one of the many strands that fed into my book, An Ordinary War, which is very loosely based on Dad's experiences. I found, and still find, that image of my grandmother writing to her son, pausing and listening for his 'quick step', not knowing that she wouldn't see him again for five years, just so moving. If you'd like to read more, the book is available here.

Hunting the Generated Subject - by Rowena House

It’s the last lap, the final six weeks of a six-and-a-half year creative writing PhD, which, terrifyingly, has taken up (or, at least, often took over) one-tenth of my lifetime.

I’m line-editing and proof-reading at the moment, ten pages a day of an 80K manuscript, cut down from 87K at its longest. It’s mad to try to do both at the same time, but that’s how it’s turned out and by this stage I’m not questioning my process, just getting on with it.

Hopefully, I’ll have time to read it through again on the iPad in a different format as reformatting always seems to throw up those glaringly obvious typos that have slipped past me, oh, probably hundreds of times.

I’m getting all sorts of deja-vu with the comparable stage of editing The Goose Road, my debut for young readers. Like asking, where did I put that sentence I liked so much, and really worked? And, for goodness sake, what on earth were you on about there?

There’s also been a nice moment of circularity or closure this month. 

Right at the start of this project, when Arvon began online masterclasses during Covid lockdowns, I listened to author Hisham Matar recommending that we stay open creatively during our first drafts (which I’ve taken to mean over multiple drafts) so that we don’t get trapped by our original idea and fail to access our deeper level of intuitive invention.

That became a kind of mantra for this novel: stay open to whatever comes along. 

 

 

Then, on August 7th, an email came in from Writers.com, an American organisation which I often find useful and thank very much for all their inspiration. This email offered up a notion from poetry which struck a chord. The article is by Sean Glatch, whom I’ve quoted here before, and is titled, Writing Titles of Poetry: How to Title a Poem, which has a lovely internal rhythm, which I guess is the point.

Mr. Glatch quoted Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town, which he called ‘a great grounding in the craft and mindset of poetry writing’. To quote him quoting Mr. Hugo:

To Hugo, all poems have two subjects:

· The Initiating Subject: the topic, idea, or thing that led you into writing a poem.

· The Generated Subject: the subject that the poem discovers or was actually, secretly, about the whole time.

I really like this idea. It makes a whole lot of sense. For the work-in-progress, a seventeenth-century witch trial was the initiating subject, and the importance of writing to critical thinking is the generated subject.

Looking back, I realise I spent a lot of time in the early years trying to think up a generated subject, to plan it, to plot it, to do exactly what Hisham Matar said you shouldn’t do. It’s the theme thing, innit. We’re supposed to know it, but if it’s the storytelling that generates it, how can one plan it?

They say that writing a novel is new each time around. If there is another one in me, I’ll try very hard to remember this lesson and stop hunting for a theme and let it wade out of the story sea in its own good time.

All the best, everyone. Nearly there.