The Blue Remembered Hills - Savita Kalhan

I have found another perfect place for writing - overlooking the River Teme in Ludlow - a balcony, a river, a beautiful, tranquil setting, but within walking distance to a buzzing town full of fine food and access to the most amazing walks amongst the Blue Remembered Hills of A E Houseman's A Shropshire Lad.

I have been very lucky to visit Shropshire many times over the years, but I can honestly say that there is still so much to see and walks to be walked. Over the years Shropshire has been the home to many authors, and many other writers have spent time there writing and writing about it.

Charles Dickens' character Miss Haversham in Great Expectations was based on Elizabeth Parker who lived in Chetwynd Hall in Shropshire.

Mary Webb's novels are all set in Shropshire - there are several walks that take in many of the places where her books are set.

PG Wodehouse once said that Shropshire "is the nearest earthly place to Paradise". His Blandings Castle is set in Weston Park in Shropshire.

Stokesay Court - where Atonement by Ian McEwan was set

The Pond at Stokesay Court

 A mile away from Stokesay Court lies Stokesay Castle, a fortified medieval manor, which was home to Lawrence of Ludlow, one of the richest men in England. The castle has changed very little since the 13 Century and remains one of the best examples of a complete medieval manor house. It still has character and atmosphere - and it's freezing cold!

The Gatehouse at Stokesay Castle

Stokesay Castle

Woodcarvings on the way up to Bury Ditches

On one of the Mounds of Bury Ditches

Panoramic Viewpoint guide from the top of Bury Ditches

 Walking along the Ridgeway - with one foot in England and the other in Wales!

The ruins of Clun Castle. The village of Clun was EM Forster's Oniton in Howards End.

In the hills

 John Osbourne retired to Clun.
The Hurst - John Osbourne's home - is now part of the Arvon Foundation, a writers' retreat

Clun Church where John Osbourne is buried

Below are the Stiperstones in Shropshire. They are described by D H Lawrence in St Maur as a wild and frightening place. One of the stones in particular - the Devil's Chair is full of evil and foreboding. It's not so easy to imagine in full sunlight with blue skies, but I have been there when the skies have been dark, the clouds grey and heavy before opening to pelt us with the rain and wind. Then, it became a very different place.

Children's writers Pauline Fisk, Catherine Cooper were Shropshire based, and Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine series is set in and around Clun (I read them all when I was a kid). Ellis Peters, also known as Edith Pargeter, set her Brother Cadfael Series of medieval mysteries in and around Shrewsbury.

So, I'm leaving Shropshire with batteries recharged, summer coming to an end and nights drawing in. It's time to start the next piece of work...

Savita Kalhan 

Savita's website

What Would Happen If...? The Power of Imagination, by Pauline Fisk

This is my last post, regretfully.  Life and all its busyness has galloped ahead of me and needs reining back. Before I step down, however, I want to share with you some things I said the other night at Keele University’s Keele Link Awards Ceremony. 

I began with a story, because stories are what I do best and they’re also the means by which I make sense of the world. Five years ago now, as some of you will know, I was out in Belize, funded by the British Arts Council, researching gap year volunteering for my novel In The Trees.  I wasn’t an adventurous type.  I was a sixty year-old, asthmatic, stay-at-home author who’d never been anywhere more tropical than Rome in November.  What had kicked me out of my office, however, was the power of imagination.

And it was imagination that I was at Keele to talk about. That same imagination that 'will get you everywhere', according to Albert Einstein, whilst logic 'only gets you from A to Z'.  ‘I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination,’ he said. ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.  Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.’   And, again, from Picasso, ‘Everything you can imagine is real.’

Well, six years before my Belize trip, my son Idris Davies experienced what was real about that country as a gap year volunteer.  I’d waved goodbye to a white-faced, spotty [the result of back–to-back shifts in McDonalds] youth and returned  to the airport five months later to greet a person who was literally, physically unrecognisable.  By that I mean that when I saw Idris talking to my husband, I thought the tall man in the Trekforce t-shirt was one of the leaders of the trip explaining why our son had missed the plane.  Idris’s entire body shape had changed, but it wasn’t muscles, hair or tan that rendered him unrecognizable.  It was the way he inhabited his body, as if it wasn’t an accidental appendage but he was actually in charge of it.

Now there’s a story, I immediately thought.  As an author of young adult novels, how could I not? What happened to young gap year volunteers when they went off on those rites of passage projects?  What changed them - and how?

Six years later, I was in Belize finding out.  Six years, I have to say, of struggling not to go out there, because I wasn’t the sort of writer who wrote those sorts of books. I was a stay-at-home gal. I couldn’t afford it. Other writers would do it better. My publishers wouldn’t be interested. My agent would think it was a bad idea. Nobody was writing gap year novels for young teenagers – and I was terrified of snakes.

What drove me out there, against all odds?  It wasn’t my publishers being interested after all, my agent thinking it was a good idea and the money for the trip coming in. It was the power of imagination that sent me to Belize.  A story had me in its grip, and I didn’t know exactly how that story might unfold, but I knew that if I went out to this unknown country in Central America, it would come.  My Kevin Costner moment.  If you build it, they will come.

So, imagination.  The realm of creative, slightly batty, forgetful types like Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso - and me.  I think not. The realm of all of us – that’s what I went to Keele University to say.  What happened to me with In The Trees was that I was captured by an idea.  It got me so tightly that it wouldn’t let go.  And that’s exactly what had happened to the young people I went out to meet.  There, miles from civilization, guarded by soldiers because their project was so dangerous, I found groups of young school leavers trekking into the jungle and enduring hideously primitive living conditions because the idea of saving the rain forest had lodged itself in their heads and wouldn’t be removed.  They’d had the imagination to see what might happen if nothing was done - and they were doing what they could.

When did your imagination first kick off?  I have a photo somewhere of myself at the age of three making up stories for the big children next door.  They’re lined up on one side of the garden wall and I’m on the other and they’re asking what happened next…and next…and next… and I’m telling them.

I believe I was privileged to grow up in an age where imagination was valued. At my primary school my ability to make up and write stories was encouraged.  I was made to feel special because of what I could do.  But anybody who had half a good idea was made to feel special too.  These were the years after the war when the country was trying to grow itself again and its young people were not just its future but valued as a resource. 

There was so much freedom back in those days.  Half my childhood was spent lurking around back alleys, looking for fairies under bramble bushes, going early to the local park so that I could sit and enjoy it all on my own, making dens in the undergrowth and stories in my head.  I travelled alone on the underground.  My parents would put me on a bus on one side of London and I’d be met off it on the other.  Apart from that little matter of sums and science, languages and sport [in other words, all the things I wasn’t good at in school] I was free.  And my imagination was free.  

Even when my children were growing up, they too were free.  We lived out in a Shropshire village on the edge of the Long Mountain.  Summer holidays were spent playing cowboys in the long grass of the churchyard next door [when funerals weren’t taking place] or damming up the local stream. 

There’s a tendency, I know, to say that things aren’t what they used to be in the good old days.  By which we mean our good old days. Well, surprise, surprise, children are born and growing up with every bit as much imagination as children ever were.  The big question now, though, is what happens to it.  

Nowadays nobody in that village allows their children play down the stream. Not since the funny man was there, trying with some woman to get children into his car.  So often now it’s fear that fuels people’s imaginations, not opportunities.  Who might be lurking round the corner, waiting to pounce?  What are governments really up to if we only knew the truth?  When will Peak Oil happen and the world as we know it come to an end?

I think we have some very real reasons to be fearful sometimes.  But with imagination we can overcome our fears, or at the very least work our way round them.  Imagination doesn’t have to bring out the worst in us.  It can turn our problems into opportunities.  And that’s surely where education comes in.

Children need to be given space for their imaginations to flourish.  And they need this space in school, not just afterwards between home time and bed. You want to know what I fear? Here’s an example for you.  Imagine a local rural primary school.  This is one I know well - I’m not making it up.  It’s a lovely school full of lovely children in the middle of lovely countryside - hills, valleys, rivers and verdant woodland. The school’s environment is entirely nurturing.  If anywhere in this country is going to turn out free-thinking, imaginative children you’d expect this to be it.   But, come the end of the academic year, the Head wants artwork from the top class to go on display – and there is none.  Why not?  Do I need to spell it out?  I certainly didn’t the other night.  The children and their teacher had been too busy keeping up with the National Curriculum to have any time left over for art.

Is this really possible?  This school? What’s happening here?  And if this is what’s happening all over, what do we do?

My connection with Keele came about through the Children’s University, of whom Michael Morpurgo is National Chancellor and I’m Shropshire’s Chancellor. If you want an organisation that’s stimulating children’s imaginations you need look no further. Here it’s very much the children who take the lead, coming up with ideas and dragging themselves, their parents and their teachers off to do or see whatever it is that interests them.  And  it's not just a cosy, middle-class organisation either.  Shropshire's Children's University is operating in some of the most deprived areas in the county. I’m proud to be associated with an organisation like that. 

If we don’t see our children’s imaginations fed and stimulated, then the scientists of the future are a thing of the past, the artworks of the future will be black on black, the designers, the thinkers, the builders, the workers of the future – and those craft workers whom the government has just, in yet another of their fits of total madness, announced in a white paper are no longer part of the creative industry – where will they all be?

I don’t need to end here with John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ to make my point. Instead I’m going to end where I started – with Albert Einstein and his imagination encircling the world.  In his Commendation of  In The Trees,  Rafael Manzanero, the Chief Executive of the Belizean NGO responsible for the protection of that country’s rainforest, wrote that people like us really could make a difference to our planet, even though it seems we’re worlds apart. ‘It is not only moral to do so,’ he wrote, ‘but the survival of forests will make the planet a better place for human life.’

THIS is the idea that caught hold of a group of young people – that not only governments and multi-national charitable organisations could make a difference to the world around them; they could too. According to Rafael Manzanero it’s been an effective and lasting difference too.  And, in the face of illegal logging, poacher activities, unlicensed gold-panning, crime syndicates, the organized smuggling of everything from jaguar cubs to Mayan artifacts - it takes some imagination to achieve a result like that.    

PS. I did think of putting up no pics with this post [ie. leaving them to your imagination!], but here's a small collection of an exhausted author most definitely out of her comfort zone - and also of the terrain outside that comfort zone.  Would I go back?  You bet I would.  I'm plotting how.

Cockscombe Basin Jaguar Reserve

Jaguar paw print

Smuggler's den - our camp for the night

Author cools down

Gallant Trekforce volunteers guarded by Belizean soldiers

The end of the road.  Most definitely. The landrover's only round the corner, but do you think I could get to it? No.

Staying with the Kekchi-Mayan people

Project Gutenberg & The Value We Put On Words, by Pauline Fisk

Most people know, or at least have heard, about Project Gutenberg. Its mission is simple – to encourage the creation and distribution of e-books.  Up until now it’s focused on amassing works, even minor ones, of major authors whose books are in the public domain – a vast array of classics now numbering more than forty thousand. What it wants is to provide as many e-books, in as many formats, to be read world-wide in as many languages as possible.

Sounds great, doesn’t it?  At a time when the libraries are taking a flattening, certainly in the UK, here’s an online project appearing to achieve some of what libraries first set up to do – to spread public literacy [rather than stymie it], break down barriers that prevent people from reading, and develop an appreciation of our literary heritage. At least if one has access to a computer. 

Well, the reason I’ve chosen Project Gutenberg as my subject this month is because last year they launched a new e-book enterprise called the Authors Community Cloud Library and [typically] I’ve only just come across it and [even more typically] I’m not quite sure what I think about it, and I’ve always found that writing about a thing is as good a way of working that one out as anything else. 

The idea is that authors can now upload and distribute their self-published works through a self-publishing portal, and have it made available to Project Gutenberg’s vast worldwide readership. Project Gutenberg has had authors clamouring for this for years apparently.  There’s even  a social networking component to it all, allowing for all the stuff we’re now so familiar with - star ratings,  comments, reviews, feedback etc. 

All of this would have come sooner, but the sudden death of Project Gutenberg’s founder [and leading light in the Cloud Library’s development], Michael S Hart, meant that the launch didn’t happen until the 4^th July last year – a great date if you happen to be American, or interested in the fact that what many consider to be the first ebook [the digitized Declaration of Independence] appeared on that date in 1971.

There’s something for everybody here.  Project Gutenberg is happy because its Cloud Library enables it to add a contemporary component to its digital canon. E-authors are happy because their books are being made available to a whole new reading public and they don’t even have to give up their rights. And readers are happy because perhaps one of the biggest barriers Project Gutenberg smashes through is that of cost.  

Aye, there’s the rub, as Shakespeare might have said - especially if you’re a living author seeking to keep it that way by earning a crust. Maybe all those writers of classic literature who’ve been made available again by Gutenberg are cheering from their graves. But living authors? Self-published because the e-book market is an opportunity authors? Authors like me, say, still writing and trying to earn a living today – would I, seriously, want to be a part of this library?

This is a genuine question, not a rhetorical one. What do I think about books being for free?  Once my books are in the Cloud Library, readers can visit the site, search the archives and download those books AT NO COST.  Then again, on Amazon, readers can browse their free offers of the day [made available by e-authors who’ve signed up to Select] and download as many e-books as they want AT NO COST. 

NO COST is good, apparently.  Those of us authors who think otherwise have blinkered vision. NO COST has  a knock-on effect.  Giving away our books AT NO COST raises our profiles. Weird as it may sound it’ll actually sell our books.

Well, I haven’t seen much of that myself. On Amazon Select I’ve given away thousands of Midnight Blues and, apart from suggest I write the sort of books that have no worth, I don’t think it’s done anything for my profile.  It certainly hasn’t sold truck loads of books.

And if I don’t sell, why do I write? For those of you who think starving in a garret is part of the job, I’m not joking here. This is a serious and important question.  And equally important for those of us who are readers, what value do we put on the books we read?

I can only answer for myself.  I write to earn a living. I earn a living to write. I write because I have to; it sorts me out.  There’s no way I can separate these statements.  Writing stabilizes me.  Time and again it literally saves me.  And it sets me free. I write fiction because I see life in terms of story, and stories are what drive me.  I write non-fiction for much the same reason. There’s a story in everything, and I love finding the words that tell it – and the word ‘telling’ here is crucial.  Telling implies a recipient. These stories aren’t just for me.  They’re stories that need sharing, and I have faith to believe that, though I don’t always get things right, what I’m sharing is at least worth listening to.  

So if the answer to my first question is to tell, and to be listened to what’s the answer to the second question, the one about the value of books?  Well, if a writer’s worth listening to, they’re worth paying for.  It’s as simple as that.  The value I’d put on, say, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Hundred Years of Solitude, would be equal to what I’d pay for a Picasso if I could afford to buy one.  I could hang them both up side by side in my very own gallery and they’d be each other’s equal.  And the same for other books too.  You must know what I mean. Those books that have moved you and changed your lives are of inestimable worth.  And, when you think of it like that, it’s not just the 99p end of the e-book market that’s a giveaway - even a hefty £25 hardback price is a good deal.

At least, that’s what I think.  What do you think?  And look out for my post next month when I examine the other side of this coin – if an author’s work is of value and should be paid for, is there ever a place for giving words away?

Pauline Fisk: On Synchronicity, Extraordinary Coincidences in my Writing Life and 'Telling the Sea'

The term synchronicity, as I understand it, was coined by Carl Jung to express the concept of significant coincidences, or the imbuing of propitious moments with some form of transcendental meaning. As an author, such moments stand out in my writing life. They don’t happen often - but they are quite extraordinary when they do, and I never forget them.  

Let me share with you a few examples. When I was writing ‘The Red Judge’, one of my ‘Children of Plynlimon’ books, I had two such experiences.  The first involved the Red Judge himself. The climax of the novel needed to be in the heart of the Forest of Dean, and I’d made the decision that it shouldn’t happen outdoors, so booked myself into the Speech House Hotel - which was at the dead centre of the forest - to see whether it might be the right sort of location. It most definitely had the atmosphere I was looking for and, in case there should be any doubt that I had found what had to be my location, as I was settling up to leave I noticed a painting tucked away behind the Reception Desk. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked, looking at the somber face of some seventeenth century gentleman clad in red robes. ‘Oh, we don’t know,’ came the reply. ‘Just some old judge.’

Even stranger though, in the early stages of writing that book, I had reason to look into the history of conjuring.  I’d wanted the evil villain of my piece to be a conjuror, and to give him authenticity had decided to base him on some real character out of legerdemain’s long and colourful history. The character I’d chosen, whose name I used in the book, was one Dr Katterfelto, self-styled King of Conjurors. I’d enjoyed writing him in, and was doing further research out of interest because his colourful character had rather captivated me. I found out that he’d fallen on hard times, been forced to give up his theatre in Piccadilly and bowled up in my home town, which was something of a coincidence. Reading on, however, I discovered that he’d not only come to my small country town, but ended up in its debtor’s gaol - and that’s where the syncronicity kicks in because back in Katterfelto’s day, my house was the debtors’ gaol.  It still has the old gaol door, studded with iron nails. The basement, above which I’m writing this now, still containing the remains of the cells.

 In other words, I’d chosen to write into my book an obscure character out of eighteenth century history, who had once lived in my house. Carl Jung, what do you say about that?

I could go on like this, but I won’t. The only other story I’ll mentioned here happened when I was writing my second novel, ‘Telling the Sea’.  I had won the Smarties Book Prize with ‘Midnight Blue’ and was determined to prove I wasn’t a one-trick pony and could write other sorts of books.  Where ‘Midnight Blue’ had been shot through with fantasy, ‘Telling the Sea’ would be as gritty and down to earth a story as I could make it.

I laboured on it for a whole year, knowing my publisher would have liked a sequel to ‘Midnight Blue’, or something in similar vein.  By Christmas the book was nearly finished – and so was I. Taking a break for the festive season only increased my sense of anxiety about whether my tale of an abused mother, oldest daughter Nona and her four traumatized brothers and sisters running away to the wild Welsh coast was what anybody wanted to read.  I worried all through Christmas, and after New Year, chopping up the Christmas tree to feed onto the fire [prior to picking up my manuscript and carrying on], I was still worrying. It wasn’t that I had doubts about the actual quality of the book. I was proud of ‘Telling the Sea’. It had proved to me at least, that I wasn’t a one-trick pony. In addition, I’d grown deeply fond of my characters [I still think that among them are some of the best characters I’ve  written]. However, there was personal tragedy behind the central story of a fatal attraction to the sea, and I couldn’t imagine ever posting off my manuscript and allowing it out into the world.

And then in the Christmas tree, tucked down out of sight, I found a tiny wren’s nest.  Just at the moment when I most needed somebody to say it’s going to be all right, panic not, there it was.  And what was the name of the cottage to which Nona and her family escaped? You may have guessed it. In the Welsh, Nyth-y-Dryw. Or, in the English, Wren’s Nest.

‘Telling the Sea’ is being launched again TODAY, this time for the e-book market.  With a film crew, I’ve been down to the real live cottage behind the fictional Wren’s Nest to make a little film about the writing of the book.  If you want to view it, here’s the link.  If you want to buy the book to read on the fabulous new full-colour, yummy Kindle Fire that you’re going to be given this Christmas, here’s the link for that too.  I’ve been busy editing 'Telling the Sea' for a new generation of readers, and here it is, Christmas again. What will I find hidden in my tree? I’ll have to wait and see.

 

RAY BRADBURY, GREEN TOWN, ILLINOIS, AND NEW TENNIS SHOES – Pauline Fisk on the passing of a great writer

I’m not mourning Ray Bradbury, because I never knew him, not like Margaret Atwood who wrote about him so movingly this weekend.  No, I’m mourning that boy who was sometimes called Douglas Spalding, sometimes Will Halloway, sometimes Jim Nightshade, because that boy was my friend and now he’s gone, his life like a leaf blown down a midnight street.

But Green Town, Illinois, still stands.  Thank God for that.  With its ravine, which scared me witless first time I read about it, and its hero celebrating summer and new tennis shoes, it’s alive and well.  All you have to do is open ‘Dandelion Wine’, or ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ or one of the other stories drawing on Bradbury’s childhood in Waukegan, Illinois, in the 1920s, and there it is.

Over the last year or so I’ve been taking part in a Goodreads debate, started by me, on whether ‘Farenheit 451’ or ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ is Bradbury’s best book. In the course of this debate I’ve been introduced to ‘The Halloween Tree’ and ‘From the Dust Returned’.  Both have the power to fascinate, but for me they don’t match ‘Something Wicked.’ And they definitely don’t match the short stories.

Would Bradbury get a look in if he were writing today? How much shelf space would our booksellers – how much media space would our publicists – afford him?  And our publishers, who can’t imagine how to market authors without tidy pigeon-holes – how would they have dealt with a writer like Bradbury who created his own pigeon-holes?

If you’ve never read Ray Bradbury, do so immediately and see what I mean. And prepare to be inspired. Fiction’s a conversation.  You read a story and, by means of your own stories, find the way to join in. I’d never have written my first novel, ‘Midnight Blue’, for example, without ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’.  And how many other authors, I wonder, owe a similar debt of gratitude - not just to Bradbury as story-teller but as wordsmith too?

Bradbury always had a lot to say, but he always got it dead right. ‘The ocean burned,’ he wrote in the short story, ‘The Women’, in the celebrated anthology ‘I Sing the Body Electric.’ ‘A white phosphorescence stirred like a breath of steam through the autumn morning sea, rising. Bubbles rose from the throat of some hidden sea ravine.  Like lightening in the reversed green sky of the sea, it was aware. It was old and beautiful. Out of the deeps it came, indolently. A shell, a wisp, a bubble, a weed, a glitter, a whisper, a gill. Suspended in its depths were rainlike trees of frosted coral, eyelike pips of yellow kelp, hairlike fluids of weed. Growing with the tides, growing with the ages, collecting and hoarding and having unto itself identities and ancient dusts, octopus-inks and all the trivia of the sea.’

See what I mean.

Lately I’ve come to appreciate a more pared-back style of writing. When it comes to short stories, Raymond Carver’s my man. I love the clean, clear lines of Annie Dillard, Marilyn Robinson and - newly discovered by me - the wonderful American writer, Linda McCullough Moore.

When it comes to Bradbury, however, I’m a child again.  His words come tumbling out and I’m tumbling after them, seeing where they’ll take me, clinging on for the ride. Another me - the editor me - might groan as gusting follows spinning, and whirling follows trembles, shudders and inhalations of a wind-sucking kind.  But the reader me would have it no other way. Nor would the writer me, who can’t see a tattoo on an arm without wondering if it ever comes alive.   Nor the explorer me, young again, tucked up in bed with book and torch, waiting to see where Bradbury’s electricity will strike next. 

But now something’s come to Green Town, Illinois, and taken Ray Bradbury away.  Some might say it’s a rocket come to take him to the stars, or a train come to take him on a midnight ride. But I say it’s tennis shoes that have taken Ray Bradbury - shoes soled with marshmallows and woven of grass; new shoes, magic ones, and he’s off, jumping over fences and sidewalks, dogs and houses, rivers and trees. And it’s summertime where he’s heading.

It always is when an author gets new shoes.

ONE AUTHOR'S WEEK: Pauline Fisk on Survival Training, Ballroom Dancing and Free Downloads

What a week.  First the promotional giveaway, then the research into ballroom dancing, then the survival training course in the deep green forests of Northampton.  It’s amazing what we authors get up to.

The giveaway first.  I’d never done anything like it before but Authors Electric were planning a collaborative giveaway of e-books in celebration of World Book Night and as a member of the group I thought why not? My novel, Midnight Blue, was available for promotions on Kindle Select and after years of selling all round the world, maybe this was my chance to share a little and extend my readership to a new generation of readers. 

Well, to be honest I thought I’d get a couple of hundred hits.  Nothing prepared me for the figures to keep rising until over a thousand copies had been downloaded in just a few short hours.  And, since the promotion ended, the sales continued to roll in, putting ‘Midnight Blue’ back in the Top 50 Amazon fantasy and children’s charts for the first time in nearly twenty years.

As an author, it’s fantastic to find your books read and enjoyed by successive generations of readers, young and old.  Since my big career decision at the age of nine, I’ve been a writer all my life.  For the last twenty years I’ve been a full-time writer, and the e-book market is the latest of my ventures.  I don’t know how successful it will ultimately prove to be, but knowing that my books are out there in perpetuity is a form of success in its own right.  Over the next year I intend to bring out much of my back list as e-books too.

But I haven’t forgotten the publishing world, and that’s why this week saw me not only on the internet giving away books but a] hitting the dance-floor, learning [from the sidelines] how to cha, cha, cha, and b] out in the jungles of Northamptonshire, learning first-hand how to light fire, collect water and bed down in torrential rain without getting wet.

For the first time in my writing life, I’m ghost-writing a book. I met the subject of that book out in Belize whilst researching my novel, ‘In the Trees’.  A six-foot-God-alone-knows-how-many-inches ex-Marine, care worker, boxer, expedition fixer for media companies, expedition leader, adventurer who’s lived with cannibals and learned his survival training skills from the Penan tribes of Borneo – even an avid ballroom dancer, John Sullivan’s a gift of a subject  to write a book with.  Not only are his stories extraordinary, but his photographs and films are stunning.  John’s a man who has done it all.  My week was finished off by going into school with him and seeing the effect of his talk on a theatre packed with sixth formers, who couldn’t have been more impressed if they’d met David Attenborough himself. 

I’ll be posting more on this subject, so watch this space.  In the meantime, I can tell you that if you want to learn to dance and live near Northampton, Andre’s your man.  His dancing school is heaving and, even for a clod-footed, rhythmless observer like me, what he’s teaching looks almost do-able.

Not only that, but if you want to cook your supermarket chicken [or freshly-caught road-kill] to perfection without pots or utensils in the Great Outdoors, an underground oven is the way to go [and would be great for a Christmas Dinner with a difference, to impress your friends].  Oh, and sleeping in a hammock strung up between trees can be as good a night as in the best hotel.  I do not kid.  Even if it rains – and it rained for me – you can still be comfortable. 

After all those hours before the computer watching figures rising on my free downloads, it was great awakening in woodlands to the smell of firewood and the gentle hiss of rain. The author’s life - who could want for anything else?

Pauline Fisk blogs on the author's life on:  www.paulinefisk.co.uk

 

   

Pauline Fisk on Secret Heroes [Who are yours?]

I was sitting in a local coffeehouse when the background music struck up with a few immediately recognisable guitar notes, followed by Leonard Cohen’s voice intoning Suzanne takes me down... Immediately a shiver ran down my spine, not because I loved the song so much, but because I’d been reading about Cohen in the Guardian [the Dorian Lynskey interview] and had just got to the bit about Suzanne when up she popped in Starbuck’s music stream. Synchronicity, or what?

Who are your heroes? The names that spring to mind for me always start with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and end somewhere around Bob Dylan, passing through the likes of Marilyn Robinson, Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, Annie Dillard, Robert McFarlane, Ella Maillart, Raymond Carver, Raymond Chandler and Gerard Manley Hopkins. In fact, if you bring in poetry, the list could go on and on, and the name Leonard Cohen probably wouldn’t spring to mind. Yet his song in Starbucks sent shivers down my spine. Suddenly I was transported back to the girl I used to be, lying in a darkened room, being young and green about some stranger’s lonesome voice.

Beyond my public heroes, it seems, are other heroes - secret ones who’ve so thoroughly woven their way into my life that I don’t even know they’re there. Plainly, Leonard Cohen is one of them. Even when he’s talking about how he writes, he’s speaking for me:

I think you work things out. I wouldn’t call those things ideas. I think ideas are what you want to get rid of. I don’t really like songs with ideas. They tend to become slogans. They tend to be on the right side of things: ecology or vegetarianism or antiwar. All these things are wonderful ideas but I like to work on a song until those slogans, as wonderful as they are and as wholesome as the ideas they promote are, dissolve into deeper convictions of the heart.

But Leonard Cohen’s not the only one. In any list of influence-wielding secret heroes, that giant of children’s literature, Hans Christian Andersen, has to come top. It was he, after all, who first stirred my imagination when I was young.

Hans Christian Andersen was a complex character, revered and reviled in equal measure. Welcomed throughout the palaces of Europe, he was regarded as puffed-up and vain by many, including some of his own countrymen. In a letter, Georg Brandes described him as ‘a mind completely and entirely filled by himself and without a single spiritual interest.’ When he stayed with Charles Dickens, the Dickens children couldn’t wait for him to leave. But when he met the Englishwoman, Annie Wood, she told him she’d kept his fairy tales under her pillow as a child, and believed him to be an angel. ‘At last,’ she wrote in an article in ‘Temple Bar’ in 1875, ‘I was in the presence of the man whose writings had been the joy of my early life, dearer to me than aught else in the world.’ Clearly, to those read his stories, Andersen had the power to enchant.

And I know why. I grew up in a decidedly unbookish family, apart from a single copy of Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Stories, which I read so much that it nearly fell apart. In fact, I still have that book to this day. I love everything about it - not just the stories themselves, but the illustrations, the feel of the blotting-paper thick pages and even the shapes of the words. You say the words ‘Big Claus and Little Caus’ to me and I feel the way I did when Cohen sang that first word, ‘Suzanne…’

The same goes with ‘The Tinder-Box’ or ‘The Swineherd and the Shepherdess’, ‘The Nightingale’, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ or ‘The Snow Queen’.

Oh, ‘The Snow Queen’...

As a writer who delights in what some people call ‘magic realism’ and others ‘fantasy’, the influence of Hans Christian Andersen is all over my writing - and I’m not just talking about his stories but his choice of words. The same Georg Brandes who above criticized Andersen’s self-centredness later acknowledged Andersen’s influence on children. ‘What author has a public like him? His book of fairy tales is the only book we have spelt our way through as children and still read today.’ Certainly for me, coming to Andersen as the child of a new century, I learnt that stories are made of words and every one of them matters. And as a young writer, Andersen’s fascination with the magical amid the ordinary had me delving into folklore to enrich my own stories - and I’ve been doing it ever since.

If you’re interested, there’s an excellent programme on Scandanavian Children’s Literature to be heard on Radio 4, hosted by Mariella Frostrup. And if you’ve never read Hans Christian Andersen - or at least not since you were a child - give him a go. ‘It was Orpheus that he called to mind,’ August Stringberg wrote of him, this poet who sang in prose so that not only animals, plants and stones listened and were moved, but toys came to life; goblins and elves became real, those horrible schoolbooks seemed poetic; why, he squeezed the whole geography of Denmark into four pages – he was a perfect wizard!’

The Tiina Nunnally deluxe edition of Andersen’s Fairy Stories, published by Penguin, is worth every penny of its current price on Amazon of £8.44. [Oh, and if you want to listen to Cohen, you may find him playing at a Starbuck’s near you.]

All quotes in this post are taken from Hans Christian Andersen, by Elias Bredsdorff, which is worth a read.

Pauline Fisk blogs on http://www.paulinefisk.co.uk and www.authorselectric.blogspot.com

PAULINE FISK - A NEW VENTURE AND A VERY OLD ONE

In 2008, I went out on a fact-finding trip to Belize. It was a massive fifty years since as a child I'd made my big career decision to become a writer when I grew up, and twenty years since I'd started writing fiction for children and young adults, and it felt like time for a shake-up.

In particular I was fascinated by the idea of gap year volunteering as a modern rite of passage. My younger son had returned from Belize changed to the point of being virtually unrecognizable after five months in the jungle, and I'd sensed a story. Who was writing gap year novels, I asked myself, targeting young teenagers who might one day want to head off round the world? Nobody, as far as I could tell, so funded by the Arts Council and backed by Fabers, I headed out to Belize to write one myself.

I like adventures. Mostly they’ve happened on screen but over the years research has taken me up the occasional Welsh mountain and Shropshire hill, down a few rivers from source to sea, underground into defunct mines and up into the sky in a hot air balloon.

Nothing I’ve done, however, matches Belize. I spent six weeks touring the country from Caribbean coast to jungle interior, enjoying its extraordinary cultural mix, staying as the guest of the Kekchi-Mayan people and seeing the rainforest with my own eyes - not only its destruction but its incredible beauty. I also saw the very real difference that young volunteers, fresh from school and with no particular skills [apart from a will to learn, work and endure discomfort] had been able to make in helping stem that destruction. And there was the story I'd gone out there to find.

‘In the Trees’ is the result of that trip. Fabers brought it out in 2010 and I’ve been visiting schools, libraries and festivals ever since, telling what I saw and encouraging young people to think about the wider world and understand that it’s not just governments and multi-national organisations that can make a difference, but people like them, with a will to get out there and give it a go.

I have such a story to tell, and this novel feels so important, that I haven't been able to start anything since. But there's another reason too, why I haven't started the next novel.

For the last twenty years I've been writing them back to back. There's been precious little time for seeing the world around me as anything but material for the next book. Those of you who are writers too will know what it’s like. The screen becomes your world, the world becomes your book and the years go by. Now, post-Belize, I've awoken like Sleeping Beauty to find life moved on, my hair turned white, my children grown up and the babies theirs, not mine.

How can this be? How come my husband and I are rattling round an empty house on our own? When did the kids leave? When did that little girl who dreamt of being a writer one day turn into me? And, if I do start writing again - if I dare - will I wake up after another twenty years knowing that the party was over and I might have been there but I'd missed the action?

One of the joys of this last year's sabbatical has been catching up with friends, taking time out for family, becoming a Chancellor in the wonderful Children’s University and making friends online. Which, of course, is what this post is all about.

ABBA is a new venture for me. It's my way of saying I'm here. If authors are online talking to each other, I want to talk too. If they’re sharing experiences I want to share. If they’re giving advice, I want to hear it - and maybe I'll have advice to give as well. And if they’re talking to readers, then I want to be a part of that conversation.

So a new venture this year – and, at the same time, an old one too. Twenty-one years ago my first novel, ‘Midnight Blue’, won the Smarties Grand Prix award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread. As one reviewer commented at the time, 1990 was my annus mirabilis. Well, in celebration of that win, an anniversary e-edition of ‘Midnight Blue’, newly jacketed and re-edited for twenty-first century readers has just been published - by me.

‘In the Trees’ is an e-book too, but 'Midnight Blue's different. This time, as well as being writer, I’m also publisher, marketing director, art director, publicist and editor. Suddenly this feels like being in the jungle again, stepping out into the unknown. The howler monkeys are screaming in the darkness, and I don’t know what tomorrow will bring - but better to make this trek in company than on my own.

So thank you Scattered Authors everywhere for the chance to join you on your Awfully Big Blog Adventure. And forgive me for this first post being so single-mindedly about myself. I do have other things to write about, I promise you. But this is the best way I know of saying hello.

Buy MIDNIGHT BLUE

Buy IN THE TREES

Visit www.paulinefisk.co.uk

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