Virginia Woolf, Alice and Me ..... by Miriam Halahmy

" So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say," wrote Virginia Woolf in, 'A Room of One's Own.

This year I was delighted to be taken on by a new publisher, Alma Books, for my MG novel, The Emergency Zoo, an untold story of kids and pets in WW2. Then I discovered that Alma's offices were in Hogarth House, Richmond, where Leonard and Virginia Woolf lived and where Leonard set up the Hogarth Press.

Cecil Woolf and Jean Moorcroft Wilson

I have had the good fortune in the past three years to be part of a committee to raise the profile of WW1 poet and artist Isaac Rosenberg. The meetings are held in the home of Rosenberg's biographer, Jean Moorcroft Wilson and her husband, Cecil Woolf, publisher and the nephew of Virginia Woolf. I told Cecil that my publishers were based in Hogarth House and that I had seen the printing press in the basement.

This was Cecil's reply, "I think the little hand-press in the picture is the one L & V used for printing circulars &c, rather than books. The small hand-press I bought from Leonard and stored in my bathroom was, I think, rather larger, probably the one on which they started printing small books in 1917. I eventually sold it to John Lehmann and it may be the press now at Sissinghurst. All that was about 60+ years ago . One must try not to have any regrets, well, not too many.

Lots of love,Cecil.

Cecil is in great demand to give talks about his memories of living with Leonard and Virginia and his stories are small nuggets of pure gold. "The last I time saw Virginia," he told us once, "she was picking apples." Having the chance to meet Cecil and hear stories first hand about such an iconic writer is quite amazing and both Jean and Cecil are two of the most fascinating people I have ever met. I have read several of Jean's books - she is an authority on Siegfried Sassoon and has just published her biography of Edward Thomas - and I can thoroughly recommend her work.

Alice in Wonderland - one of the great reading experiences of my childhood - completes this weird and wonderful blogpost. My new publishers, Alma Books, have just brought out their anniversary edition of Alice as it is 150 years since the book was first published and its absolutely brilliant. The edition includes Through the Looking Glass, Alice's Adventures Underground as well as Xmas and Easter Greetings to all readers from the author and extra background material. Beautifully illustrated, this is a fascinating new version for all fans of Alice.

I know all about six degrees of separation but this has been an incredible set of links, coincidences and experiences which are the very stuff of being an author.

www.miriamhalahmy.com

Memory and Character by Lynda Waterhouse

Last week I met up with an old friend. It had been at least fifteen years since we had last seen each other but soon we were talking endlessly about characters and writers that we loved such as Barbara Pym, Dorothy Whipple, Margery Sharp, Laurie Graham, Alexander Baron and David Mitchell. It was a real pleasure to talk about stories that I love and to give and to be given recommendations of what to read next. We talked about our own lives in between but fiction was the touchstone that set us alight. I left the café feeling elated by the conversation.  

I have always created imaginary characters. Night after night as a child I would take a battered tennis racket and ball out into the back alley under the pretext of playing out but really as I bounced the ball I was making up stories. Nowadays I stomp along the South Bank. Ideas come to me when I am moving about. My imagination likes to play games with me, letting me slog away fruitlessly for hours at a desk and then hurling an idea at me as I'm stepping on a train.

For my latest story, ‘Magic Moments and the Dull Bits in Between’, I found one of my characters reliving one of my childhood memories. I am a child of seven sitting in the empty room above my Aunty Lily’s baker’s shop. I am kneeling on the cold hard lino watching a group of sparrows eating breadcrumbs in the back yard. At the time I knew that I would never forget that moment. Virginia Woolf in ‘Moments of Being’ described it as follows:

‘We are the words; we are the music, we are the thing itself.’

The reality of being a writer trying to sell ideas and earn a living requires hard slog, a rhino hide and the crazy optimism that I always feel when I begin writing; the cockamamie belief that I can become an overnight sensation after years in the business.

Maybe the overnight success bit is a tad overoptimistic but my intention is always to create a bunch of characters and a story that will linger in a reader’s imagination long after they have finished the novel. I hope that my carefully chosen words and images will transfer to the reader’s imagination where they will settle into a satisfying memory. That by sharing my words I am sharing a bit of myself.

 I want my characters to be talked about between friends in a café. I want them to matter to people.

What do you want?

Sheds - Celia Rees

I recently visited the Boathouse in Laugharne. I'd been there before, and peered into Dylan Thomas' Writing Shed, but this time I was with my friend, the artist Julia Griffiths Jones http://www.juliagriffithsjones.co.uk, and she'd been inside! She had been allowed to go into the shed to draw. When she showed me the drawings that she had made there, and the photographs that she had taken, I must admit to being gripped by a strange excitement and considerable envy. There is something about the place where a writer works that exerts a peculiar fascination. Just to see what he or she had on the desk by way of distraction or because a particular object was special in some way; to see the pictures pinned up on the wall; the view, or lack of it from the window. These things serve to bring alive some of the process of mind that produced the work that one admires.

In Dylan Thomas' writing shed - Julia Griffiths-Jones

What I found especially wonderful here was the sheet of paper, stained and wrinkled, crisped by time, that was covered in lists and lists of words. Dylan Thomas is famous for the lyrical precision of his poetry,  the startling originality of his images, the sheer exuberance of the words he chooses. He once said that his first introduction to poetry was through nursery rhymes:

I had come to love the words of them. The words alone. What the words stood for was of a very secondary importance.

But this list showed that his poems were hard won. He had to prepare, work at them, think about what appeared on the page. What seems natural, effortless is supremely crafted and writing is a hard and lonely process, as he describes it in My Craft or Sullen Art.

word splashed hut - Julia Griffiths- Jones

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labor by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Here, on his table, was a little bit of that crafting.  I don't know where he wrote the poem but from his shed window he would certainly have had an unimpeded view of the moon over the Taf estuary and the wide sweep of Carmarthen Bay. Just seeing these things brought the poet nearer, as though time and space were collapsing and death, indeed, had no dominion.  

I can't claim a shed myself, my garden just isn't big enough, but I will admit to shed envy. There are quite a few writers who work in a shed, or have worked in a shed. Philip Pullman famously wrote his Northern Lights Trilogy in a shed at the bottom of his garden in Oxford. 

Philip Pullman's Shed

Roald Dahl's Shed

Roald Dahl was another famous shed man. Again, I can feel the pull, the fascination of the table carpeted in objects, collected bits and pieces: fossils, model aeoroplanes, and the tools of a writer's trade: pens, pencils, scissors. The walls are covered in pictures, photographs, postcards pinned up, curling and interleaved - put up as aide memoire or inspiration. The touch telephone, so modern once, so dated now, gives a feeling of time stopped at the moment when Dahl left, never to return, the point when the building ceased to be a vibrant creative space and returned to being just a shed. A trace of him remains, though, caught and contained in the things he gathered about him. 

Writers are often elusive creatures, rarely showing their true nature, wanting their writing to speak for them, but these glimpses into their private place allow us a rare insight into who they were. There is an eloquence to the space, it speaks to us of the writers' true nature. 

Sheds are not just a male preserve. There are shed women, too. Virginia Woolf is perhaps the most notable example, although hers is, perhaps, more of a summer house.

Virginia's Shed

And there is, of course, our own Linda Newbery who used to work in this elegant little number, complete with a Virginia style verandah, although she tells me that she is shed-less at the moment. 

Linda's Shed

Linda also warned that having a shed comes with certain risks. The writer and journalist, Francis Wheen, recently lost his archive, his book collection and the novel he was working on in a disastrous shed fire. Even with that warning, I still feel the pangs of Shed Envy. Maybe, one day, until then I'll have to make do with a study. The important thing is to have, as Virginia Woolf says, a room of one's own. 

My non-shed

Shed or shed-less? Where do you write? What do you have around you? I'd love to know....

www.celiarees.com

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