Gladstone's Library -- A Magical Place

One of the greatest joys of being a writer is the access it gives you to magical places. Places like Gladstone’s Library, which I was fortunate enough to visit last weekend for the first, but hopefully not the last time.

The entrance to Gladstone's Library

Like many writers I spend idle moments Googling things like ‘retreats’ and ‘writer opportunities’, and that’s how I found out about Gladstone’s Library. It is such a ‘me’ place that I can’t believe I haven’t known about it all my life.

Gladstone’s Library describes itself as a ‘residential library and meeting place …dedicated to dialogue, debate and learning for open-minded individuals and groups, who are looking to explore pressing questions and to pursue study and research in an age of distraction and easy solutions.’

As the name suggests, it was founded by the statesman William Gladstone himself, and part of his own extensive library forms the core of its magnificent collection. It’s the most wonderful memorial to his life, work and liberal values.  Gladstone wanted to ensure that anyone who needed to use the library should be able to do so, so access to the library itself is free, and there are many bursaries and scholarships to help those who need to stay. 

And there is the most fantastic Writer in Residence scheme. https://www.gladstoneslibrary.org/events/writers-in-residence

This year, feeling that my recent publications Name Upon Name and Star By Star qualified as ‘engaging with liberal values’, I decided to apply. I was thrilled to be shortlisted, and the disappointment of not making the final four was greatly assuaged by the invitation to read and talk at Hearth, their winter ‘micro-festival’, held in November and February. 

This was one of the best events I have ever attended. It’s deliberately small – four writers and about thirty participants, many of whom choose to make a weekend of it in the comfortable accommodation. Each writer gave a talk, and there was a panel event on the Saturday evening. I’d never met my fellow writers – Annabel Abbs, Jenny Lewis and Dipika Mukherjee – but we had a great panel event, thanks not only to our own brilliance but to the expert chairing by Peter Francis, Gladstone's Library's Warden and Louisa Yates, Director of Collections and Research,  and to the intelligent questions of a hugely engaged audience.

I was slightly nervous about turnout for my Sunday morning talk, Soldiers, Solidarity and Suffrage. Though the blurb made it clear that my novels, though marketed for teens, are enjoyed by adults, I was worried that the snobbery which sometimes dogs the children’s writer might prevail. I knew that it was the first time the Library had invited a children’s author, and I didn't want to let them down! I should not have worried. The room was full and Star By Star sold out in the festival bookshop. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a long signing queue or responded to such in-depth questions.

This is where the festival takes place -- yes, literally round the hearth!

As well as attending my fellow writers’ talks, and much chatting, eating, drinking and walking, I was also able to use the library itself to work in. It’s the most wonderful space – silent and spacious and yet with such a full, rich atmosphere. In my little nook, surrounded by nineteenth century books on theology and art, I felt hugely grateful to be part, for one weekend, of this benevolent and civilised place. I managed to do a week’s worth of editing in under three days, and I’m already planning my return.

a wonderful place to work

On my last morning, though I'm not really a religious person, I decided to start the day by attending the short Eucharist with which every weekday morning at the library starts. My fellow writers had had the same idea. It felt like a fitting end to a wonderful experience. 

I’ve taken  away with me some new friends, some wonderful books by my fellow Hearth writers, and a special new place on my mental map of wonderful places to write. I’ve also taken the confidence to keep on applying for new opportunities. I think Gladstone would have approved. 

RETREATS – the Baviaanskloof – Dianne Hofmeyr

A retreat can be a chance to get away and write undisturbed. But sometimes a retreat can be a place not to write – to just be.

Yesterday I came back from a valley that holds evidence of the footprints of human history spanning over a million years. A place too big, too silent and too majestic to describe, where words fail and cameras are too inadequate to capture the magnitude, where roads wind high above vertiginous cliffs and plunge down to rivers and can only be traversed in a 4x4 and empty houses and rusting cars are evidence to the remoteness.

  

The narrow valley between the rocks of the Baviaanskloof (Gorge of the Baboons) is a World Heritage Site and one of the richest plant regions in the world where almost 70% of the species are endemic, where three of the planet's 34 plant “hotspots” exist, where I found minute wild lobelia creeping out from under rocks and the smallest geranium ever and where hot bread can be bought from a lonely house, a labyrinth can be walked in a remote valley, where goats roam freely and people still use donkey carts and mobile phones and the Internet don’t reach.

The wilds folds of red rock, tumbled stones and horizons outlined with aloe, cactus and agave plants could be the setting for a Clint Eastwood movie or something from a Cormac McCarthy novel whose words from Blood Meridian seem to capture what I can’t…

‘They set forth in a crimson dawn where sky and dawn closed in a razorous plane. Out there dark little archipelagos of cloud and the vast world of sand and scrub shearing upward into the shoreless void…
They rode through the particoloured stone upthrust upward in ragged kerfs and shelves of traprock reared in faults and anticlines curved back upon themselves and broken off like stumps of great stone treeboles and stones the lightning had clove open, seeps exploding in steam in some old storm. They rode past trapdykes of brown rock running down the narrow chines of the ridges and onto the plains like the ruins of old walls, such auguries everywhere of the hand of man before man was or any living thing.’

Then I came home to hear Leonardo di Caprio’s parting words in his acceptance speech for his Oscar in The Revenant – 'Let’s not take this planet for granted.' 

www.diannehofmeyr.com