dovegreyreader scribbles

dovegreyreader asks ... Linda Grant

It was my pleasure to meet with Linda Grant and hear her talk in Fowey backalong ( as us sez down y'ere) and I am very grateful that Linda has taken some time off from her next novel to do dovegrey reader asks...

As you will see Linda said something that really resonated with me during her Fowey talk and which has opened up new and even more vivid understandings for me about her latest novel We Had it So Good. One of those books that is really good value, a great read that has stayed, shifted my focus and has added to my thinking at every level.

Linda, very simply...why this book, why now?

I don't begin with an idea for a novel, but there are certain thoughts which have often been in my mind for several years which come together, coalesce as plausibly something which might become a novel. It;'s usually a flash-bang while I'm filling the kettle. That's a novel! I'd been quite preoccupied in a more political sense since the day after 9/11, when I was fifty, with the thought that here we were, a generation which in Britain at least, had enjoyed unparalleled prosperity and peace, free from being clouted round the head by the forces of history, as our parents had been. I felt certain, that day, that London would be next. I expected a major bombing within the next month or two. In fact it took another six years and was far smaller in scale than the attack on America. Yet still I kept thinking about my charmed generation, our great good fortune and when it would come to an end.

In 2005, a rather distinguished looking man in a very good suit came over to me at a party and said he thought we'd been at the same university at the same time. We had indeed, and better than that, I remembered him when he told me that he and a group of other students, living in a commune out in the country, had started up a hippie wholefood brown rice brown sugar brown milk soya bean joss patchouli oil emporium called Alligator. I probably shopped there every day, everything really was brown, apart from the the milk. So what do you do now? I asked him. Advertising. I had to know how the guy with hair down to his waist had turned into the family man with the one and a half million pound house in North London. What was the arc of his life which had led there? I came to understand that the person who seemed at 20 to be the essence of his self, as we do at 20 when we are at our thinnest, prettiest and have the most energy and the most sex, is really just the briefest of highwater marks. We are more like ourselves as children than we are as young adults. 

So these thoughts which had been playing around in my mind for years turned one day into 'I could write a novel about that.'

Linda, during your talk at Fowey you made a very interesting comment about there being only one generation who had changed the world, I wonder if you could elaborate and explain a little more about that?

One of the ugliest characteristics of my generation was our tendency to dismiss our parents - they way they dressed, their conservatism, their allegiance to materialism and comfort. Believing as many of us did, that we wwre the generation put on earth to be young forever and to change the world, we regarded our parents as the obstacles in the ay of progress: 'Oh mothers and fathers throughout the land/Don't criticise what you can't understand/Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command/The old ways are rapidly changing/Please get out of way if you can't lend a hand/Because the times they are a changing.'

I played this over and over again on the the family gramophone in the living room, looking up at my mother and father and repeating the words to them with patronising menace. What I never did was ask my parents anything about themselves. In fact when they did let slip any information, (such as my father's stay of several days with Houdini in New York in the 20s) i was bored to tears with these dusty old reminiscences. 

But of course if any revolution was made, it was by those who suffered the Depression and defeated fascism. That was the world we inherited from them, the extraordinary peace and stability which was their bequest and which I don't think we ever really appreciated.

Can you tell us band of nosey parkers about  your writing day/life and your process, how you knuckle down to it, pen/computer etc, does the place need to be immaculate, easily distracted etc and please expand on your life as a writer if you wish to.

I have an office which is lined with books, a desk with a desktop computer on it, shelves with tax files and floor covered in mess. I very rarely go in there. Instead, for about ten years now, I have written on a laptop on the dining table in the living room. This is because it's a nicer room and is not a mess. I feel those book-lined walls pressing in one me, issuing taunts and curses. I start writing as soon as possible after I get up, because, I'm quite convinced, that is the time we are closest to our unconscious, to the dream state. I am not superstitious but I do have a sequence of routine which I don't like to be disturbed: get up, have a cup of tea, shower, get dressed, have breakfast, read the newspaper online. Finally I make my one-a-day cappuccino using the fancy machine in the kitchen, and this is the signal to start. 

I work usually for two or three hours. Anything I write after that will not be very good, and even that writing is done in no longer than 20 minute bursts. Save to Dropbox, print out, sit down and read through it, making notes and a lot of crossings out, feel depressed, do a bit of housework until lunchtime then brood. If possible, I go for a walk in the afternoon, because it is only while walking that plotting is worked out. I believe this is because we walk at he same natural rhythm as we think, but whatever the case, it is a kind of waking dream, which is why I frequently ignore people I know when I'm doing this. I would not like to tell you how I dress to write, all I'll say is that it doesn't really involve brushing my hair.

Who must we read ...

Like many people I have been honing my list of Desert Island Discs for several decades, but my choice of book remains remarkably consistent. It's Dickens' Bleak House which is, in my opinion is the greatest nineteenth century novel and possibly the greatest Modernist novel. I re-read a month ago, and was awestruck by its range, its control of language, its comedy and above all its ideas. I will sit on Carmen Callil's face myself if she does not stop talking nonsense about Philip Roth. he is a misogynist, I don't disagree with that, but American Pastoral, another novel I have read multiple times, stands beside Bleak House for its scope and daring and humanity. I would also like to mention here the Sadlers wells books by Lorna Hill, first published in the Fifties, and the novels I loved as a child. I re-read them a few years ago and saw what it was I liked so much for they are about girls and boys who want to be artists - ballerinas and conductors. They grow up in the country but see London as the place where dreams and ambitions can be fulfilled. I think the first five are the best though there are twelve in all. I still believe in Veronica and Sebastian and the flat in St John's Wood with the restaurant on the ground floor. 

 

dovegreyeader asks... Janet Frame even more

Janet's favourite books /writers and who would she be pressing on us to read and telling us we mustn't miss...

She was a voracious reader. You have to be, of course, if you want to write. She would tell you to read the classics, and the best writers of your own time too (you know who they are!). And the Russians! And the French! I remember her insisting I read Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Antoine de St Exupéry, Patrick White, Rilke, Kafka, Camus. Some of her other favourites were: Walt Whitman, John Updike, Pepys, Chekhov, Dickens, Tolstoy, Poe, Chaucer, Shakespeare.  She liked the perfection of the short form, and would reread the great short stories. She loved reading well-turned essays. She also read a lot of non-fiction and poetry, and always read the latest work of her friends who were writers. Just too many to name. And she would read the junk mail and the cereal packet too.

So now I hope everyone has a sense of the real Janet Frame and my sincere thanks to Pamela Gordon for answering the questions for me and for allowing me to use the photographs.

If you are thinking you might like to pick up a Janet but may not know where to start I have linked to some previous thoughts on her books here over the years. It was thanks to Stella Duffy and Linda Grant at that memorable event at the Du Maurier Festival in Fowey that I found an author I have really grown to love, respect and cherish and I really hope some of you will discover her too if you haven't already.

The Lagoon & Other Stories

'This story came last night. Everything is always a story, but the loveliest ones are those that get written and are not torn up and are taken to a friend as payment for listening, for putting a wise keyhole to the ear of my mind.'

The Lagoon is the book that saved Janet Frame's mind and most probably her life given that prior to its publication and subsequent garnering of literary accolades Janet was scheduled to undergo a lobotomy having been admitted to a mental hospital for depression.
This knowledge alone ensures that I will probably always read Janet Frame with that sort of reverence for a prodigious talent that could have been so tragically wiped out, lost forever and with utter gratitude for what still awaits for me to read, and the tears consequently well up in my eyes especially over stories like The Bedjacket.

'It was almost Christmas time and everybody in the mental hospital was wanting to go home.Some had homes and some didn't but that made not much difference, they all wanted to go to a place that could be called home where there were no locked doors... more

Living in the Maniototo

'A word which is exciting to look at and say and doesn't slop its meaning over the side is good; a word which comes up from the well is good; a word which clusters like last year's bee around last year's flower is bad if the flower is already dead, but good if the flower is surviving, beautiful, and alone in a place where flowers have not been known to grow and where bees have never swarmed before nor gathered nectar.'

Haberdashery....harbinger... I've been trying to think of them, words which don't slop their meaning over the side, though who can know which words Janet Frame had in mind when she wrote that... Janet Frame does something so clever here, choreographs something so complex and does it so capably that I had to keep stopping to figure out exactly what she had done and quite how she'd done it.... more

 

Owls Do Cry

The ethereal sense of the world of the child mediated through the child's stream of consciousness is remarkable in so many ways, but mostly because I effectively moved into this childhood world and lived alongside Francie, Daphne, Toby and Chicks and saw through their eyes all those childlike things that an adult misses but Janet doesn't. Fears, hopes, dreams and that interpretation of the world all piercingly accurate.

This is a book of two halves, childhood and adult life, and woven in amongst it all I spotted the lightly disguised events of Janet's life, and whilst she may have been beset by that ever-present sense of doubt in her own personal worth and the attendant inadequacy and low self-esteem, there is no question that on the page Janet Frame shapes up as one of the most superlatively adequate and exceptional writers that I have come across...more

Towards Another Summer

Writer Grace Cleave is thirty, unmarried, a native New Zealander, exiled and homesick, living in a cold wintery London and sees herself as a migratory bird 'it is time for me to fly towards another summer',

'How had she ever become used to living in Great Britain, she wondered. How had she ever been able to exchange the sun, the beach, the shimmering tent of light, the dramatic landscape, mountains, rivers, gullies, glaciers, for the brick bleeding wound that seemed so much part of this country.'

Not a difficult sentiment to identify with when you realize this book was written in 1963, the year of Sylvia Plath's death; London hasn't been as cold and wintery since and surely the presence of a Sylvia in the book no coincidence? A bout of writer's block prompts Grace unusually to accept an invitation to stay with friends for the weekend.... more

 

 

dovegreyeader asks... Janet Frame some more

Janet's writing day? Favourite places to write, pen or typed, solitude or company etc, how did she care for her manuscripts etc, her hobbies..

Janet used a typewriter. She only ever wrote by hand if she was travelling. But first, she did a lot of the composing in her head. I think that's why she needed silence when she was working. Sometimes she would go quiet and you could almost hear the thoughts whirring around in her brain. You could see something had been triggered. She would excuse herself and rush away to find the necessary solitude so she could concentrate. At the end of her life, when she was too weak to write any more, sometimes she would just talk about the idea, and how it would have made a good story.

She organised each project carefully - drawing it up in a notebook with suggested names of characters, and a few characteristics of each one, chapter headings, a synopsis and some key ideas, and working titles. Her plan included her goal for how many words she would write per day and per week, time off, and how long the book would take. She would then tick it all off day by day, or make excuses if she hadn't reached a particular goal.

She had a private study nobody else was ever allowed into. But she also had a work station in almost every other room in her house, even her living rooms and kitchen. There would be a desk or table, a typewriter, and plenty of blank paper. She could then work on several things at the same time. She hid her work behind screens so eyes couldn't pry when she had guests.

She had high standards and typed several drafts of her work - some of which are peppered with the exhortation to herself to "By God improve!" I remember she had a horror of being caught out inadvertently using the same word more than once. She usually cut her final manuscripts back quite severely. Once she was happy with the work, she strongly resisted any editing on the part of the publisher. When her manuscript was finished her ritual was to hole punch the pages and bind it inside cardboard covers, and write the title on the front.

She was very disciplined. She got up before dawn (it was quieter then) and had her first small breakfast, worked for a few hours, and then had her second breakfast, a cooked one. She was a coffee drinker - I never knew her to have a cup of tea. Then she worked until midday, which was the end of her writing day. She would emerge for lunch, and that was often shared with friends or family or out downtown somewhere. She was shaking off the internal world and her work was a forbidden topic from then on. There was no quicker way to alienate her than to try to press her on the topic of "what are you working on now?" We all knew that was taboo.

The afternoons were for shopping, chores, meeting friends, going for long walks, reading, and writing letters. She carried out multiple correspondences. Her letters were delightful: erudite, spontaneous, joking, wise, and beautifully written. She sometimes included satirical collages, and drew cartoons, and was a prolific sender of postcards.

She was not a fanatical gardener, but she had gardener's attention to plants. She always planted fruit and ornamental trees (lemon trees, gooseberry bushes, flowering currant) and grew a few vegetables and flowers. Some of her favourites were: lilac, sunflowers, peonies, geraniums, tomatoes, silver beet, asparagus. She was a good cook. She was famous for her light and fluffy scones (she used buttermilk) and her whitebait patties were divine. (Whitebait is a NZ seafood delicacy that was probably her favourite food.) She always had a beloved cat, but this conflicted with her love of the wild birds that she fed in winter with mutton fat and sugar water.

She loved music, especially classical music, although she had a soft spot for Johnny Cash ("I walk the line') and Frank Sinatra ("I did it my way'). She played the mouth organ and would bring it along to family gatherings if there was likely to be a singsong. She learned to play the piano just well enough to attempt some favourite pieces by Schubert or Mozart or Beethoven. She enjoyed concerts and film festivals and liked popular culture too - she was a fan of The Young and the Restless (she had a crush on Victor) and the Friday Fright movies on TV - horror, vampires and science fiction. Entertainment or research? I don't know. She often said it was marvellous to be a writer because absolutely everything was "grist to the mill".

She would lock her door before dark and close the outside world away again. She would read, watch TV, talk on the phone, surf the internet. If she was working on a book, she might do some more typing. But the usual story was "early to bed, early to rise."

Janet was very fond of handcrafts. She knitted, sewed, crocheted, wove, and made patchwork quilts. She loved chess and scrabble and almost any word game. She relished the freedom of her anonymous life. When I first saw the Disney TV programme Hannah Montana I was struck by the similarity of the plot to the way Janet lived. Just as rock star Hannah has a double identity (the public doesn't recognise her when she is plain everyday 'Mylie'), so Janet, by living under an invented name, was able to have a relatively ordinary life. At other times she was feted in literary circles and so she had "the best of both worlds".

 

dovegreyeader asks... Janet Frame

As Offspringette heads off for her New Zealand adventure my thoughts are very much there again and,as I said yesterday, it all seemed like a good opportunity to have a little New Zealand litfest of our own on here and celebrate that dovegrey favourite, Janet Frame.

Well may you wonder quite how I've managed this one, dovegreyreader asks... Janet Frame, but last year I put this project to Pamela Gordon, Janet's neice and asked whether she would be able to answer some questions that might give us the chance to get to know the real Janet Frame. We didn't set a deadline, I was happy to wait as long as it took and for Pamela to do this in her own time because I was just so grateful that she agreed to do it.

I think you will all agree this has been worth the wait and I am honoured and delighted to be placing Pamela's personal account of her aunt on the record here.

Pamela, firstly we'd love to know about the real Janet because I suspect the one we think we know from books and films may bear little resemblance to the one that you know.

The myth of her as a 'recluse', especially in New Zealand, is so deeply culturally ingrained that even if strangers met her in person, they interpreted everything they saw in terms of the stereotype. She could see through these people, and sometimes played up to their expectations. Her theory was, why bother when they had so clearly made their minds up. She could be very obstinate in unwelcome company, just shutting up completely until people gave up and went away. She liked to preserve her own creative space from rude interruptions. Writers have to spend much time alone. That doesn't mean they don't like company. She did, but she was discerning. And she did crave the intimacy of marriage and family, but she knowingly sacrificed it for the sake of her art.

Janet would occasionally behave like a Zen master. I remember an anecdote her US publisher George Braziller tells of their first meeting - they were having a meal at a restaurant and the communication was awkward. She was ever on the alert for patronising behaviour. So she upended the salad bowl onto the table. She probably muttered something like, "Are you happy now?" She had done the 'mad' thing, could they now get on with their meeting? That was quite instructive (she was studying Buddhism at the time). George got the message. And they did become close friends.

She was very funny. She was quick with her wit, and there was much laughter in her company. But she was also comfortable with silence, too. Aren't the conversations that incorporate pauses, deeper and more enriching? That's my opinion, and I feel very lucky to have been her friend, and to have shared quiet times with her. She loved to just watch people, animals, or landscape, and you can tell if you know her work, that she took in what she observed and turned it into literature. She had a photographic memory.

I loved her dearly and the feeling was mutual, and I was one of her closest confidantes. I know I can't claim to define any 'real' Janet, but I can say with some authority that there was a real Janet, and she was no disembodied cipher, and she didn't have any disability or disorder; she merely sensitively embraced her own humanity with courage and humour.

Janet had a lot of friends, although she did tend to compartmentalise them - some of them apparently didn't know about all the others. Or maybe she made everyone feel unique. I think she didn't like people getting together and comparing notes. She really hated being talked about behind her back because she had suffered from malicious gossip early in her life. So she expected loyalty and discretion from her inner circle. I used to think that was for her own protection, but now I realise she was also guarding her loved ones from the negative side of fame. Fame truly can be a curse.

She had a gift for making a wide range of friends, including with her neighbours. She often became close to her neighbours. She moved house frequently, partly in the search for a quiet environment or to be near loved ones, or because her address became too well-known and she was being harassed. Or because she needed some new material for the next book. Or to get away from the scene of the last one. Or just for the thrill of it. There was always a good reason.

She was an exciting person to know. She loved novelty and adventure and travel. She was an early adopter of just about anything new, including computers, but also slang, and she was fascinated by whatever was "the latest thing". But she was no slave to the current fad: she was original, and unconventional. She wore comfortable clothing in striking colours like orange or red or bright blue, whether that was fashionable at the time or not. She wore coloured stockings and patterned socks, and multi-coloured hats. She deliberately chose not to conform; she really didn't care what people thought. If they cared about such things, they were not her kind of person anyway. She did tend to test people, maybe because she had been betrayed in the past, and one of the first hoops she put a potential friend through was to expect them not to judge by appearances. I was lucky because she trained me up as a child, by giving me Le Petit Prince and pointing out the message explicitly: "The things that are important are invisible to the eye".

In saying all this I haven't even scratched the surface of a wonderful, lovable, complicated person who was full of contradictions, and who was so accepting of the mystery of herself and of other people.

Coming up next ::

Can you tell us about Janet's writing day? Favourite places to write, pen or typewriter, solitude or company etc, how did she care for her manuscripts etc, her hobbies..

 

 

 

 

 

dovegreyreader asks...The Literary Editor - Erica Wagner

Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

I am a New Yorker; I grew up on the Upper West Side and went to the Brearley School, a place I really loved. (Recently I interviewed Lydia Davis, the remarkable American short-story writer and translator – her new translation of Madame Bovary is just appearing from Penguin Classics – and was thrilled to discover that she too had been a Brearley girl in her time…) The year before my graduation, however, I spent a year at school in London; it was then that I determined to come to university here. Why? Oh, probably because it was a way of making trouble, really, but one where no one could really argue with me. So I read English at Cambridge, which nearly put me off reading books completely – but still and all, I truly began to feel that Britain was where I belonged. I can’t really explain why – I just knew it –

I went on to do an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, where I was taught by Rose Tremain and Malcolm Bradbury… and it was during that year long course that I began to take myself seriously as a writer, to accept that, in some ways, I didn’t have a choice about this. Finding a way after that to actually earn a living was another matter. How did I end up at as Literary Editor of The Times? Luck, perseverance – it’s hard to say. But even after fifteen years (!) I’ve never stopped being amazed that this is my job… seriously. I really feel I have never taken it for granted.

Can you outline some of the dilemmas faced by the literary editors today?

What’s a book? Is a memoir by Jordan or Russell Brand a book? Is a novel by Sharon Osborne a book? Or are these merely book-shaped objects which are part of a marketing scheme? In which case, how should we cover them? Do you interview a first-time novelist, or do you interview Chris Evans or Harry Hill? In some ways you could argue that it’s a fine thing that books are now seen as part of any famous person’s c.v. – but it leaves less space for what I would call real books.

Despite having lost a dedicated Books section, I still can’t really complain about not having enough space to review books – because when I first came to The Times a decade and a half ago, we had only a page of broadsheet book reviews – eventually two, and then more, but it’s absolutely fair to say that books have broader coverage than they ever have had. You can’t move for literary festivals  these days, which is another outlet for discussion, as are book groups, and of course blogs (of which more later). But there are always more books than there is space to cover them. I imagine the only time this wasn’t true was in back in Gutenberg’s day… and maybe even then…

How do you make your choices for books to be reviewed?

Sometimes it’s easy. New Salman Rushdie, new Margaret Atwood? The technical term for whether or not you’ll cover those books is “no-brainer”, I believe. What’s harder is picking the book that’s not necessarily obvious; not least because you’ll have to drop something else in its favour. You want to make the right choices – let your readers know about the books they already know they want to know about, but also alert them to things they never would have found otherwise.

How do you spot those books? Different ways. I look at everything myself, of course – but there are plenty of days when I get four big Royal Mail sacks of books to look at (that’s maybe 100-125 books I guess) so time is, shall we say, of the essence. Trusted reviewers/colleagues will draw things to my attention. I go through the publishers’ catalogues, of course, and I talk to publicists – with whom I try to develop good relationships. Yes, it’s their job to “sell” books to me, but if we each know what the other is trying to achieve we can work together. I know the publicists who understand what I am trying to do… and the ones who don’t quite get it.

I should also say I’m trying to build an interesting set of books pages to read, even if you are not going to buy any of the books. So, you need to create a balance. You can’t have two pieces on a page that are too similar; you need variety. Of course, that will affect the commissioning process too.

Like dovegreyreader, I am on the side of books. I will send out a first novel with the caveat, tell me if you don’t like it… Of course I have run (and written) reviews that aren’t positive in my time, but on the whole I’d rather they were…

Tomorrow's questions to Erica...

How do you select your reviewers...is there a marrying up of titles and expertise?

What do you expect from a book review as a Literary Editor?

How do you feel the litblogs sit alongside the review pages?

 

 

 

 

Off a-travelling...

I'm off on my annual November wanderings for the first half of this week and travelling light so in terms of technology no laptop, just an iTouch and thus entirely dependent on butting in on someone else's wireless signal. It's becoming something of a tradition now to book myself a week away from the day job about now, leave the men at home and head off to re-charge my batteries ready for working over the Christmas season, frequently not one of good cheer and happy family gatherings for those who have been bereaved or are seriously ill.

Working online and from home is a wonderful near perfect combination for me, PJs and a pot of tea, no more trekking out in the trusty Fiesta to farms on high Dartmoor on a freezing cold and wet November afternoon, or feeling like the only person stupid enough to be outside as I trudge through Princetown. Princetown can resemble a ghost town in winter, many the day I found myself whistling the old Clint Eastwood spaghetti western tune as I walked down the main street in the shadow of Dartmoor Prison, the tumbleweed twining around my ankles...
Do-do-do-do- do - doo-doo..

I'm always telling others to pencil in treats for themselves so I've pencilled in a few for me, talks, exhibitions, bookish events, lunches, theatre, walks with authors and all in three days which I think will add up to about a year's worth and I will be taking you along too, so much more about it all on my return.

However, I don't think you'll miss me because I have lined up something special.
It was my pleasure to meet Erica Wagner, the literary editor of the Times, at the recent PEN event in London and we had a fine old natter about books over dinner afterwards. It was a few days later that I asked Erica if she would kindly do "dovegreyreader asks... the Literary Editor" as part of this little series of interviews I then hatched to sneak us back stage on the world of books, writing, reviewing and publishing and I'm very grateful to Amanda Craig who launched the endeavour wonderfully with "asks...The Author."

It's all taking a while and I think I have a few people out there patiently waiting for their questions, but I want this to develop step by step over a period of time rather than map out the whole process with rigid questions from the start, plus composing open-ended questions that offer scope for interesting answers is often quite a challenge and not to be rushed....well those are my excuses.

So I am delighted to bring you not one but three posts from Erica this week, because in the end I sent over eight questions and she has answered them so diligently and thoroughly, and they make such sincere and fascinating reading that I felt it would be good to share them out over several days to give you time to read and digest and comment if you want to. I certainly hope you will enjoy Erica's answers as much as I have and she has very kindly to pop into comments occasionally and respond.
Here are Monday's questions ...

Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

Can you outline some of the dilemmas faced by the literary editors today?

How do you make your choices for books to be reviewed?

 

 

dovegreyreader asks...The Author

So what does it really feel like to have your book reviewed?
I mentioned a series of interviews I would be doing on here as a follow-up to the recent Everyone's a Critic debate at PEN, thinking that having slipped a foot in the door on that evening it would be interesting to get a glimpse behind the scenes in the world of book reviewing. So I have been slowly compiling a series of questions which various people will be answering for us, and today I am very grateful to Amanda Craig who has very kindly put on the author's hat.
As well as being the author of several novels, Amanda is also a reviewer and so has an in-depth knowledge of this world from from both sides. We often meet up when Amanda is staying down in Devon and have had some fascinating discussions about all this in the past, so it's good to be able to include all of you too, and Amanda has agreed to respond in comments if you want to ask anything else or comment on her replies.

Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

I am the author of six novels, including A Vicious Circle (which was very much inspired by the experience of being reviewed, and then reviewing other works of fiction) and most recently Hearts and Minds. I review literary fiction for a number of national newspapers and magazines, and am children’s critic for The Times

It seems an obvious question but what do reviews mean to an author?

Part of the problem with being reviewed is that they mean so many different things. Firstly, that you and your book exist – all reviews, good or bad, being a form of advertising. Secondly, they give a public response to what you have spent years writing, in isolation. Thirdly, if intelligent, they give an indication of the merit of the story and its execution. Fourthly, they may help you sell hundreds or thousands more copies of your book, thus enabling you to continue both in terms of morale and contracts. You become hardened over time (see below) to the extent that a bad review can spoil your day but won’t cause a total crisis, but in the beginning they are hugely important.

Whether favourable or unfavourable, what is it important for you to sense about a review of your books as an author?

Firstly that it’s written by someone whose intelligence and aesthetic sense I can respect. There’s almost nothing worse than a review by someone who has just not “got” your book, whether they like it or not. Accuracy matters. Having someone so careless that they get the plot or the character’s names wrong is especially galling. Fair-mindedness, political neutrality and lack of spite matter. It’s fine for someone not to like what you’ve done, but it’s not fair to give the thumbs down from personal grudges, imaginary slights or their own conception of how you should have handled your material.

Equally, the rave review from a friend, though extremely rare in my own experience, never really counts, either privately or in the circle of those who know.  

The stinker... does it help or hinder an author, or is all publicity good?

In theory, reviews being a form of advertising means that it is worse not to be reviewed than to get a stinker. The Literary Editor who tried to stop A Vicious Circle being published never, for instance, had any of my novels reviewed before or after, no doubt with this in mind.  Very occasionally I think a stinker can be so funny that it arouses curiosity and produces the opposite effect to making a book drop dead. Mostly, people are only too glad to be alerted to yet another book they don’t have to read....and even one stinker tends to stop a novel from getting onto the all-important submissions for prizes. So a stinker is almost always instant bad news from a publisher’s point of view even if they pretend it’s not. Publishers, too, have to have quite a lot of guts – especially nowadays.

Another obvious question but is it possible to define how those 'stinkers' really make you feel and how does an author deal with these and still carry on writing?

A real stinker is a form of public flaying, especially if you’re new to being published. For my first novel I got such venomous ones that I miscarried a baby at three months. It was one of the most terrible times of my life; I was completely defenceless, I was in tears every day for two years, despite writing a second novel that was better-received, and it also meant that I never had any of the encouragement that new novelists of any talent usually get.  I always remember this when reacting against a novel I’m given to review, especially if it’s a debut. Of course, over time you get tougher. A bad review now is not nice, but it’s not something to brood over unless very silly and a bit mad.

How do you feel the litblogs sit alongside the review pages?

I tend not to read blogs on newspaper websites, but I really like the good ones like yours, John Self’s, Kevinfromcanada, Susan Hill, Danuta Kean and Norm Geras; and, in the children’s sphere, Katherine Langrish’s Seven Miles of Steel Thistles, Lucy Coats’s ScribbleCity and Meg Rosoff. I like the way litblogs respond to novels much more as readers do, as a part of life and often as the start of a debate between readers. What worries me about print reviewing is the way critics so often act as “gatekeepers” and stop people getting through. Sometimes that’s due to shortage of space (my own problem on the Times) and sometimes it’s because some critics ascend to a kind of Olympian cloud, from which they dispense judgement. Blogs are more leisurely and earthy. Above all, they seem to be written by people who still love reading for pleasure, rather than seeing it as a way of earning an increasingly poor living, or operating what I called (in A Vicious Circle) “the fear or favours market”, or reminding their own publishers of their existence.

Amazon reviews? Helpful or Unhelpful to an author? To be trusted or not?

Amazon reviews, long or short, are incredibly helpful. I now ask readers who say they’re liked my books to write them, which may be why mine have shot up – and believe me, they’re read not only by publishers but by talent scouts. In fact, I probably have my Amazon reviewers to thank for my just getting an option to have Hearts and Minds adapted as a TV series by a company called Hat Trick. I’m always grateful to anyone who tries to help. I review lots of other books on amazon if I think they are good, or interesting, and I happen to have the time. Apart from buying a book, it’s the best way readers can help each other, and writers.

I think amazon reviews can be trusted if the reviewer has clearly read the book and gives reasons for liking or disliking it. We probably all know about the notorious Orlando Figes case, now in the public domain, in which he gave rivals 1*, and his own work 5* (adding, hilariously,“may he live forever!”) on amazon. He then threatened those who exposed him for doing this with libel, got his wife to claim she had written them on his account, and finally, after being forced to make an admission and an apology, claimed to be having a breakdown after studying Stalin’s Terror.  This is an extreme case. However, I’m pretty sure there are a number of authors who review their own books in ecstatic terms, just as there are those who hate someone and give them 1*. If you read amazon reviews, it’s nearly always obvious – they’re the stuck clocks striking twelve or one. The reviews I trust are the 3* or 4* reviews. There are no such things as perfect novels, I fear, and if you want one you’ll be stuck re-reading the same handful of classics that achieved this. Anyone who reviews, or is reviewed, does well to remember this.

dovegreyreader asks... Justine Picardie about Coco Chanel

For this special dovegreyreader asks... special because it has slightly more questions than usual and special because it is the first time a writer has done this twice, I have pulled out the even more special picture that Bookhound drew for Adele Geras when Adele sat in the virtual armchair as one of my first guests, and of course there's you-know-who sitting in the chair:-)
It was my pleasure to finally meet Adele last week when she was visiting the Appledore Book Festival here in Devon, more of which soon, but having been inadvertently blessed with a spare copy of Justine's biography of Coco Chanel I gave it to her, knowing what a fashion-lover she is and I really hope Adele enjoys this book as much as I have done.
Meanwhile my thanks to Justine who has taken time out of a hectic schedule to answer my questions, and how sorry I was not be in London for the launch party at Claridges, but all is not lost, Cornflower did make it to the Edinburgh event.

Why Coco Chanel and why now?

I've always been fascinated by her, for as long as I can remember -- all the way back to my childhood, when my mother had a bottle of Chanel no. 5, and it seemed to me to represent everything that was grownup and sophisticated -- the essence of what it might mean to be a woman. It's been bubbling away for a long time -- ever since I went to see Chanel's private apartment in Paris, at the end of 1997. So although the book has just emerged, the idea took root over a decade ago.

Your experiences whilst writing this book that takes you so close to such an iconic figure seem to have been full of memorable moments...

Writing and researching the book took me on an extraordinary journey -- from the Churchill archives in Cambridge, to Chanel's writing desk at 31 Rue Cambon, which is still preserved above her Paris boutique, to the bedroom where she died in the Ritz in 1971. There was such a palpable sense of her presence in the rooms she had inhabited -- I felt that if I turned around quickly enough, I might see a glimpse of her reflection the mirrored walls. And there were moments when the universe quietly chimed -- like the time I was talking to one of her oldest friends, and she told me that Chanel's favourite novels were Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier and Wuthering Heights. Both of those books seemed to provide a clue to the darker side of Chanel's life and her own self-created mythology, but the fact that I knew the narratives inside out, after writing 'Daphne', gave me hope that perhaps I might be on the right track...

I always sense your books take you deeply into uncharted waters and you emerge with new insights into yourself so where did Coco lead you?

Coco led me out of the despair that came with the end of my marriage, towards a deeper understanding of what independence might mean. You could say that in searching for Chanel, I found myself. But of course, it was far more complicated than that. There were times when all I wanted to do was curl beneath the duvet, and actually, I did spend a lot of time within the safety of my own home, writing this book, rather than presenting a brave face to the world. But I did do some traveling that was an essential element of my research: to the Chanel archives in Paris, and to Aubazine, the convent where Coco was abandoned by her father at the age of 11, after her mother died. And I also went up to Cheshire and the Scottish Highlands, where Chanel had spent time with her lover, the Duke of Westminster, It was in Sutherland that I found the crumbling mansion that the Duke had bought for her -- the ceilings were caving in, and the floors giving way, so it was literally terrifying going inside, but I couldn't resist tiptoeing upstairs to Chanel's bathroom, which still contains a 1920s bidet, apparently the first in Scotland.

Knowing what you already knew about Chanel before embarking on the book, where there any surprises in store as you researched? Any very unexpected revelations?

There were a great many unexpected revelations about Chanel that turned up during the course of my research. I don't want to reveal all the twists and turns of the narrative in my book -- it would be like giving away a spoiler in a spy story! -- but it does involve double agents and double dealings in the Second World War, that seemed to me to be as thrilling as a Graham Greene plot.
I was also surprised by the connections that Chanel had with the British -- I knew that her first lover was an Englishman, Boy Capel, but I hadn't realized that she had spent a great deal of time in the UK, until I started searching through various archives in this country, as well as the Chanel Conservatoire in Paris.

Do you know any more about her favourite books/authors? Did she read any of that Parisian milieu, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald etc?

She read certainly read Cocteau, and adored the work of Pierre Reverdy, a French poet who had been her lover in the 1920s. But when I spoke to the two women who knew her best -- and are still alive today -- they told me, separately, that Chanel's favourite novels were 'Rebecca' and 'Wuthering Heights'. As a passionate fan of Daphne du Maurier and the Brontes -- writers whose stories were central to my last book, 'Daphne' -- I felt really thrilled to discover that Chanel and I shared a taste for the gothic.

As for Scott Fitzgerald: I'm not sure, but they would have encountered each other on the French Riviera, and there is a reference to Chanel in 'Tender Is The Night', which I quote in my book (page 176). As it happens, I also bonded with one of the archivists at Chanel in Paris over our joint love of Scott Fitzgerald... so there is some resonance there... 

I have a feeling that anyone who is a fan of Chanel will also be a Fitzgerald enthusiast, and vice versa...

If you could meet and talk to Coco Chanel now, what would you tell her, what would you want her to know?

I would want her to tell me more -- about her childhood, about her nephew Andre, about the men she loved and lost, and those she walked away from... I'd still be the one asking all the questions.But if I were to tell her anything, it would be that her tenacity and unquenchable stubbornness is still inspiring. And that people still care...

dovegreyreader asks...Carol Drinkwater

I think Carol Drinkwater might not thank me for harping back to the old days and referring to her as Mrs Herriot when she is now such a successful author in her own right, but we were an All Creatures Great and Small - adoring family and with connections to Askrigg in Wensleydale where the series was filmed.
'Oh look' my mum used to say ' there's the Temperance Hotel, I expect Auntie Annie's in there.'
Carol's place in our hearts stems from that wonderful TV series, so I have to at least mention it in passing, and it was my complete pleasure to meet her during the recent book tour to promote the latest in her series about life on her olive farm in the South of France, Return to the Olive Farm.

Can you tell us about your writing, how the books came about...we love to know everything

The Olive Farm books are born of a real love story. A love story that now exists on many levels but began with a glass of wine in a hotel lobby in Sydney. I had been filming a children’s mini-series in Melbourne for the ABC and Central TV in Britain. After all my scenes were ‘in the can’, as they say in film speak, I flew to Sydney to do a little publicity. The hotel I was staying in – it no longer exists – was home to the entertainment world. (I frequently found myself having breakfast at the next table to Elton John or I’d sit in on a late-night jam session listening to Mark Knopfler on piano) so it was no surprise that the French executive producer of the mini-series I had been shooting was also staying at the same hotel. He heard I was there, rang my room and invited me to join him for a drink. He claims to this day that I walked into the lobby some half an hour and he first set eyes on me fell in love. I did not know that then, of course. He invited me to have dinner with him the following evening and during that dinner, even before the first course was served, proposed to me. I was flabbergasted, did not take him seriously, took a long slug of my Chardonnay and moved on to  other subjects. The following morning I saw him in the breakfast room. He was leaving the city and promised to telephone me for my response to his question... And so the love story began. The following spring he invited me to accompany him to Cannes for the TV festival. While he was setting up deals, I moseyed about and went looking for my House By the Sea. At the end of the week together we visited a jungled ruin of an olive farm and vineyard. Both crazily in love, completely broke, we were enamoured by the property and decided to put in an offer... Thus began our love affair with the Olive Farm. It took us over two years to cut back the land and when our hillside was finally cleared we found the ancient drystone terracing  and on those terraces were sixty-eight, 400-year-old olive trees... There began my love affair with the olive, the tree, its golden oil and the tree’s mysterious mythological past.

We also love to know about your writing day.. I imagine if I lived where you do I'd at least have to wander round the olive tress first, do a bit of sweeping...too many lovely distractions so can you tell us a little about the process, special writing place, fountain pen and paper or laptop, writing clothes (we've had several interesting garments without which a book can't be written)

If I began by sweeping the terraces, Lynne, I’d do nothing else. They run for many square metres! I write by candlelight, no matter what time of day or night. I find the flames (usually about six tall candles burning at once) soothing and inspiring. If possible, I like doors and windows open. The birdsong and sounds of nature are hugely important to me, to my work and descriptions. I am the world’s BIGGEST scruff at my desk and usually work in a sarong, barefoot, or a bathing costume. My hair is knotted up on my head so that I resemble a suntanned turnip. I usually work for about two - three hours, then pause, have a swim, root about in the garden, getting my fingers dirty and active. I like to run with the dogs, visit the bees, make sure they have sufficient water, and generally shout and holler to get the blood flowing and the energy channels moving after sitting still for a while. When alone I start about sixty-thirty am but a little later when Michel (my husband) is about. I work till somewhere round two in the afternoon then stop until about five when I go through till eight or later if I am deep in a book and up against a deadline. It is not unknown for me to work seventeen hours a day though I cannot keep this up for too long. It is usually the last month or six weeks before delivery when I want to be IN the book. Nothing else exists for me during that period of time and if I could go for twenty fours, seven days a week I would but obviously cannot. In other words, total immersion becomes the norm and then once delivered I crash, restlessly at first but slowly picking myself up and coming back to life

When you are not writing what do you like to do?

Aside from running an olive farm and rushing back and forth to Paris, to our Mad Old Château from where  Michel runs his small film business? I travel a great deal and write articles for quite a few journals and magazines. I love travelling. I am a gypsy, no doubt about it, and have Traveller blood in me from grandparents on my father’s side.
I love hanging out in Paris, going to the movies, sitting for hours in cafés and bars reading, watching people, eavesdropping on others’ conversations. We entertain a great deal and I enjoy that too particularly if we are serving our own produce.
Last night because I was leaving this morning for a three-week book tour and I had arrived at the Château with sixteen lettuces plucked from the garden we had a Salade Niçoise party and invited the neighbours, the priest who lives across the grass and those young trainees working with M and living in with us at the Mad Old Château. ‘Lettuce Say Bonne Chance to Carol for her Book Tour!’ It was great fun and I get very thrilled when I impress the French with the quality of my food products. It is a real coup!!

Who would you want us to read if we were short of a good suggestion? Who mustn't we miss?

I have recently read Troubles, the Farrell that has just won the Lost ManBooker. What a tragedy his early death. I love his humour and his attention to detail. He is a must, I think
Marguerite Duras is my heroine. I have no idea how popular she is in England or English. I read her in both French and English and think she is marvellous. She writes close to the bone and her raw emotional perception can be heart wrenching. I translated one of her plays into English when I was trying to master a level of French that went beyond: ‘Please can you deliver eight sacks of cement and one and half tons of washed grey sand’
It was a challenge but a wonderful discipline in the mastery of compression, of succinct elegance. When she hits her stride, I think she is almost unsurpassable.

dovegreyreader asks... Jon McGregor

I think it was quite clear  here that I rated Jon McGregor's latest novel Even the Dogs very highly indeed so it is my pleasure to welcome Jon to the virtual armchair for dovegreyreader asks... and my thanks to him for taking the time to answer our usual questions

Jon, I wonder if you could talk us through Even The Dogs...where the book came from, why this subject and how the book evolved, in other words, could you tell us as much about it as possible

You mean, a brief account of how I've spent the last four years of my working life? Okay....
The book started in 2003.  I'd got stuck in the early stages of writing what eventually became my 2nd novel (So Many Ways To Begin), and was struck by a story I heard about a man who'd been found dead in his flat.  Knowing little about the man, I began to imagine how his death might have come about, how he might have come to be alone when he died, what happened next.  "What happens next" being the key question in any story, of course.  I wrote the first chapter of 'Even The Dogs' at that point, and then put it away for a long time.  I realised that I would need to do a lot of research; I realised that the book would be about people living with drug addiction, people living on the streets, people living with all sorts of terrors and problems and ghosts; it just didn't seem like a book that I could or should be writing.  So I left it.
But then I came back to it.  The whole time I was working on my 2nd novel, 'Even The Dogs' was ticking away at the back of my mind, and I knew eventually that I would come back to it.  The characters were too vivid in my mind, and the narrative perspective which I'd established in that first chapter seemed like a really interesting challenge; something I would really be able to get my teeth into.
As for 'why this subject': I don't really know.  It started with the story of the dead man.  And I know some people who work in community health, and drug rehab, and the homelessness sector, so I had a bit of background info to begin with.  It was something I was interested in exploring - something I was interested in understanding a little more, and trying to capture something of the complexity and nuance of.  Which all leads into the next question -

I have to ask about the research...

There were two main strands to the research - the stuff about death and dead bodies, and the stuff about drug-use and living on the streets.  With the dead bodies, I started off by reading medical textbooks, books about corpses and pathology and post-mortem examinations: I also spoke to a pathologist at the local hospital, and to the Nottingham coroner.  I attended some inquests.  I didn't attend a post-mortem - the pathologist gave me enough detail to make that unnecessary.  This part of the research was pretty straightforward, just factual and procedural.
With the 'lifestyle' research, it was more a question of talking to people.  I spoke to a couple of ex-drug users, mainly to get the details of the logistics of heroin-use (where do you buy it? how much does it cost? how much do you need? what does withdrawal feel like? what does using it feel like? do you ever share it? what's the vocabulary you use to describe all these things? etc etc), and the logistics of street life.  I also spoke to drugs-workers, community nurses and GPs about the people they've worked with - again, to get some idea of the logistics/mechanics of living on the streets and using drugs.  What I didn't do was ask much about people's own personal life-stories - I wanted to be clear that I was writing a work of fiction, and not simply harvesting other people's narratives.  But at the same time, I wanted to get the detail right.  It was important to me that the people who've lived like this, who really know about it, could read the book and recognise the world it describes, and not be able to pick holes in it.  And in fact, the people who helped me with the research were the first people to read the early drafts of the book, for just that reason.
I tried not to do too much research - and I tried not to use all the research I did - but I wanted to make sure that anything I included was accurate.  Or at least, accurate for someone.  The vocabulary, in particular, is so time and location specific that few people would recognise all of the slang used in the book.  But everyone will recognise some of it.  (Often, I used slang words as much for their resonance as much as for their widespread use:  "dark and light" for heroin and cocaine seems very specific to one town, for example, but as soon I'd heard it I couldn't resist using it.)

We are incredibly nosy here so we always love to hear about the workings of a writer's writing day. To know and and visualise the process that gives us the finished book somehow completes the reading circle, so can we know about any special desk, pen, ink and paper, old typewriter or PC, writing jumper, lashings of Balzacian coffee, room with a view or a blank wall, anything that helps us visualise you at work?

My writing practice seems to change every few years.  While I was writing 'Even The Dogs', I was mostly based in an office in Nottingham city centre, a room I was renting in an old packaging firm's headquarters.  By strange coincidence, the building opposite was a supported housing unit for people moving on from hostel accommodation (much like the place Heather lives in in the book), so I was often interrupted by some little drama going on in the street outside - usually people shouting up to be let in.
I've moved office now, to a studio building I share with some other artists and designers.
Basically; I write 9-5ish, I work in an office or room or somewhere fixed away from home where I can keep my notes and papers spread out on the desk.  I don't have an internet connection where I work.  I sometimes write longhand, sometimes on a typewriter, sometimes on a laptop.  I try not to use the laptop until I'm typing up a draft to show someone - the process of going from longhand to typewriter to screen can be a useful part of the editing process.  I have an Olivetti Lettera 32 portable typewriter which was made in Glasgow in the late 1950s and is a very lovely thing.  I also have an Olivetti M3, which was made in very limited numbers in - as far as I can tell - 1941.  It's a big black desktop typewriter which weighs a ton and makes every word sound like you really definitely do mean it.  I like having things that I can turn upside down and figure out how to fix just by staring at them.  I can't remember ever doing that with a computer.
My favourite pen is a muji 5mm.
My rules for a working environment are: no internet, no music, no view, being able to leave everything on the desk, easy access to tea and coffee, a little bit of company from time to time but not much, and having an idea before you sit down.

Who should we read as a matter of urgency, who should we read for pure pleasure and who is writing now who we mustn't overlook?

 

WG Sebald.  If you've tried and not got on with him, then try "Rings of Saturn" again.  As you read, picture a grandfatherly man with an incredibly dry sense of humour, a deadpan delivery, a twinkle in the eye, and an almost-but-not-quite-

unbearable undercurrent of sadness.  Once you can hear his voice, you will love this book.

Pure pleasure?  Tom Drury, "The End Of Vandalism".  This is the funniest, warmest, loveliest novel I've read for a long time.  Rural America, small lives, deadpan humour.  Very very good indeed.

Overlooked?  For quite some time now I feel like I've been overlooking Sarah Hall - I loved her first novel, with the possible exception of the last 12 pages, and she's written three since then which all sound great.  So let's say her.  Also I still think Jonathan Buckley's "So He Takes The Dog" is one of the great British novels of the last decade, and I still seem to be alone in that.  So him also.

dovegreyreader asks... David Vann (part two)

Who should we read? Which books mustn't we miss?

Here’s my Tuesday Top Ten from The Book Depository blog.  I also have to add Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, which has had such a tremendous influence on me, and Ross Raisin’s God’s Own Country, which has an amazing voice.  He’s truly talented, a gifted story teller.  I’m envious of his use of language.  I’ve always been a big fan of Tobias Wolff, also.  And for new hardcovers this year, I loved Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn, Penelope Lively’s Family Album, and William Trevor’s Love and Summer.  So many great books.

The Shipping News by Annie Proulx

Proulx is a master stylist. Using Anglo-Saxon diction and meter (in the second paragraph, for instance, "hive-spangled, gut roaring" and "ham knuckle, buttered spuds"), she heaps up content. Sentence fragments and lists cut away everything grammatical, everything unnecessary. And this is appropriate for a protagonist learning to be a reporter, learning to write newspaper headlines. Quoyle is a fabulous creation, unwanted and unloved in a novel that finally is a love story.

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

In my opinion, our greatest American novel of the last fifty years (despite Beloved's great scope and considerable claim), an heir to Melville and Faulkner. Takes a garbage genre, the western, and raises it to high literature. Offers no access to thoughts or feelings but tells character entirely through landscape and violence written as landscape. Borrowing from Faulkner, extends literal landscapes into figurative landscapes. As with Proulx's The Shipping News, I reread this book simply for the sentences, for their unlikely existence.

The Complete Poems 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop is a great poet accessible to all. In her poem At The Fishhouses, she often chooses one fine detail to evoke a larger space. The sparse bright sprinkle of grass, for instance, creates a hillside. She was a painter as well as a poet, and she unifies her opening scene with silver moonlight, then emerald. We watch brush strokes and don't become distracted. Our attention is held by the shift in the quality of light, from opacity to translucence. This is theme developing, leading toward the moment we'll reach into "absolutely clear" water and taste it on our tongues, encountering a kind of knowledge.

The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor

Every sentence in O'Connor is about character. In Everything That Rises Must Converge, for instance, Julian is a model for what a divided protagonist can be: he can never speak of the old family mansion without contempt nor think of it without longing. As in Faulkner, O'Connor's characters are driven by race and class, many of them longing for a return to the Old South, but in O'Connor, the battle is more desperate and vicious. She's the writer that every American short story writer has to contend with.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

This is the novel declared the greatest American novel of the last 25 years. Not only does she extend literal landscapes into figurative landscapes, she also uses ghosts and other doubling as a way to reveal the stories behind her characters. Truly epic in scope, and gorgeous in every sentence.

The Riverside Chaucer

All of Chaucer's works in Middle English, with extensive notes. Everyone should memorize the opening 18 lines of The Canterbury Tales, because this is the beginning of literature in English after the collision of Old English and French. These lines show our language at the most beautiful it ever was or will be. The Germanic sounds not yet gone silent, the French vowels not yet shifted and made smaller. A remarkable event, two languages collided together, not just one borrowing from the other. A double lexicon, double metrical heritages, two ways of speaking and imagining, two class structures. All that was possible lives in Chaucer, and since then we have steadily turned the language into a doormat.

Beowulf: A Student Edition edited by George Jack

This edition in Old English is the most accessible, I think, because there are vocabulary notes beside every line. This is the easiest way to read our oldest English epic in the original. And why read Beowulf? Not only because of the uneasy relationship to Christianity and the look into an earlier culture, but also because the poetic line shows a different way of conceiving of experience and story. Hronrade is a whale-road, for instance, a name for the sea, and the syntax is different: Often Scyld Scefing, enemy bands, many peoples, took away mead benches, terrified earls. Beowulf offers a link to how we imagine story and self, people and place.

The Aeneid by Virgil

Maybe it's because I'm American, and our empire is corrupt and dying, but this epic which calls into question the founding of Rome seems particularly relevant. Most beautiful in the original, because a Latin sentence is far more flexible than an English sentence (mostly because of declensions but also because of poetic conventions and sound), but there are many great translations. The abandonment of Dido, Turnus in the end: there are many dramatic moments here that still feel current.

The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa

Can there be a better subject for a novel than the fall of aristocracy and the rise of the middle class? Ornate but not burdened, lovely and elegant, this one can make you want to hand all your money back to the aristocracy. Like rare birds. Maybe we should keep them.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins played in the movie based on this novel, and they are truly great, but the movie fails anyway, because this novel does something a movie can't. The final crisis is a slip in narrative voice, a dissolution of syntax and diction as the butler admits his heart is breaking. This elegant and subtle voice, in its great formality and distance, allows the exploration of all that is most private in us, and its look back on a life wasted really is heartbreaking.

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

In the title essay, Baldwin combines three portraits -- of his father, of himself, and of Harlem in the 1940s -- to devastating effect. A great short story writer, also, he builds to a scene in a diner in which he realizes he could have been murdered and also that he was willing to commit murder. His analysis of race and rage takes as its target, finally, his own heart -- and because of this I've always thought of the personal essay as having this aim -- but it is no less an indictment for that. Perhaps because he was the ultimate outsider, black and gay and an ex-pat, his portrait of America is still true in nearly every respect.

dovegreyreader asks... David Vann

I am so incredibly grateful to David Vann for taking a seat in the virtual armchair and answering the dovegreyreader asks... questions on his book Legend of a Suicide today, and I hope you'll understand why when you read what he has to say. I have been moved beyond words by David's responses here and will be reading the book again very soon in the light of them. I have also divided the post into two, the answers to the fourth question about reading recommends will appear tomorrow, when David has also very kindly agreed to stop by and reply to any questions of your own or comments you may wish to leave after reading this.

David, where did Legend of a Suicide come from? Can you tell us the whys, the hows, and also the highs ad the lows of writing this book?

For three years after my father killed himself, I told everyone he had died of cancer.  This was because what he did felt shameful and dirty.  He killed himself while talking on the phone with my stepmother (the second marriage he had broken up through infidelity), telling her “I love you but I’m not going to live without you” and having to repeat it since she was at work and couldn’t hear well.  This was eleven months after she’d lost her parents to a murder/suicide, so it was an especially cruel thing to do.  And then she received flowers from him a few days later, on her birthday.  I felt that what he had done transferred to me, became my shame.

I also lied because I didn’t want to cry in school.  I didn’t return to school for two weeks, but for months after that, anytime anyone said something kind to me, I would cry.  Or I’d just suddenly think of him and start crying.  I was afraid of this lack of control, and I think that’s why I became an insomniac for 15 years.  I also didn’t have my first alcoholic drink until I was 22, and I believe that again was about control.  What he did came as such a shock, I just couldn’t sleep or drink, and I didn’t want to talk about him and wouldn’t tell the truth.  Instead, I wandered the streets at night with his guns and shot out streetlights.  I led a double life.  By day, I was a straight-A student, in student government, sports, band, etc., but at night, I roamed our small suburbia with a .300 magnum rifle, which is why I have trouble now believing that any 13-year-old boys are not up to something (unfair of me, I realize).  During this time, I also lost all my friends.

So that’s the background behind the 3rd story in the book, “A Legend of Good Men,” which is the most autobiographical.  The title comes from Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, and the word “Legend” means a “legendary” or series of portraits, from the hagiographic tradition (saints’ lives).  That’s what “Legend” in the title of the book means, also, a collection of portraits of my father’s suicide, his despair, and my own bereavement.  The book also borrows from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in that it’s a collection of pieces which debate each other in style and content.  Taken together, they gain their full meaning and present the overall story.

The other very autobiographical story is the first one, “Ichthyology.”  I really did vandalize the neighbors’ house with the contents of their refrigerator when I was four years old and my parents were fighting, heading toward divorce.  And my father did have a commercial fishing boat.  But the event at the end is made up, and many events are made up in “A Legend of Good Men,” too.  The novella (“Sukkwan Island”) at the center of the book is entirely made up (we never went homesteading, I’ve never been to that particular island, etc.).

In my experience, fiction can be truer to a life than what was actually lived.  The moments in the novella better represent how I experienced my father than any of the real moments I can remember.  And fiction has the power to work beyond the conscious mind.  There’s a startling turn at the center of that novella, and I was shocked by it.  I didn’t see it coming until partway into that sentence.  But once I wrote it, I could see it was inevitable and was where I had been headed all along without knowing it.  And that moment provided such a perfect and satisfying psychological revenge after all the years of carrying his suicide around.  So that’s why I write, for moments like that when the work comes alive and speaks on its own, forms pattern beyond what I had imagined.

I worked on the book for ten years from when I was 19 years old until I was 29, and finished revisions just after I turned thirty.  Then the book sat for about 12 years and no agent would send it out, so I finally sent it to a contest, and it won the contest.  During the years I worked on it, I mostly failed.  I threw everything away from the first 3 or 4 years, in which there was far too much emotion on the first page.  But then I heard something more generous and lovely in the voice of Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping, and in Elizabeth Bishop’s poems, and I wrote “Ichthyology” very quickly, in a day.  I knew the material from all the failures, and I just needed the right voice, something more distanced.  Over the rest of the years, everything I labored over was finally cut, but the pieces that came quickly remained.  I wrote most of the novella in 17 days of sailing from San Diego, CA to Hawaii, for instance, in waves with my laptop strapped to my legs.  It came all in a rush as I was reading six novels by Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner.

“Ketchikan” works in the collection as the final story.  “A Higher Blue,” which follows, is an epilogue, telling the same story as “Ichthyology” but in a different mode, as fabulism.  But Ketchikan tests how close I can ever come to understanding the origins of ruin or recovering my father.  It also pushes landscape description and style as far as I can take it, borrowing from Elizabeth Bishop’s “At The Fishhouses” and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship.”

So the stories were a journey, a test, and finally the biggest truth I could tell.  And I’m so grateful for how the book has been received in the UK and Ireland.  The generosity has been overwhelming, and this has been the best time in my life.

We are very inquisitive here and love to know about the process of writing for you, is there a ritual involved, special space, special pen, special jumper (yes we've had pictures of those) Does the house have to be painted and the dog walked before you can sit down to write? Can you tell us about your writing day?

I recently finished a new novel, Caribou Island, which will be published by Viking/Penguin in January or February 2011, a little over a year from now.  I worked on that book every morning for about two hours, 7 days a week, not skipping days even for holidays.  I made no lunch dates.  I did nothing else for quite a while, because I wanted to ruminate on the book for much of the rest of each day. 

I don’t write for more than two hours because I’m afraid the work will suffer as I tire.  I wake up, grab a bowl of cereal from the kitchen, and return to sit in bed propped up with two pillows and my laptop.  I wear ear plugs, the bedroom door is closed, and my wife doesn’t come in.  The phone is off.  As I eat the cereal, I start reading through previous pages.  I read anywhere from 20 to 50 pages up to the point where I need to add new pages, and when I hit that point, I always feel afraid that nothing will come.  And the first paragraph is usually slow, taking about half an hour.  Then I write an additional two or three pages in the next half hour or hour and that’s it for the day.  I stop even if I know where I could go next, because I know it will work out better the next morning, when I’m fresh again.  And every two or three pages, every day, I try to find something.  Some richer moment, an image that becomes significant or a moment when one of the characters slows down and is revealed.  A story is always about something else, and I try to find some hint of that something else each day, or I feel I’ve failed.  It’s an emotional rollercoaster, and I do believe that if I don’t feel anything when I write, the reader won’t feel anything either.  I believe in the power of the sentence to communicate how it was created.

What do you do when you're not writing...and if there's a mention of salmon and fishing Bookhound will be very interested

The perfect day for me begins with writing but ends with a  long walk for several hours right before sunset, when the shadows are longest and the light is warmest.  And my favorite place to go for this walk is in New Zealand, where my wife and I have been residents since 2003.  So few people there, so friendly, and such beautiful land and sea.  My perfect yearly schedule would be Dec-May in New Zealand, May-Sept in Europe, sailing the Med or visiting the British Isles or other parts of Europe, then two months at most in California.  An occasional summer spent sailing and hiking Alaska.  But alas, I have to work.  I have a good job as a professor at the University of San Francisco, and so I live in California for 7 months of the year, with only 6 weeks in December and January for New Zealand.  Very sad.  Plenty of time in the summer for Europe or Alaska, and I’m very lucky in my job and should never complain, I realize, but I really am sad that we’ve never been able to fully live the New Zealand dream.  I can’t even get an interview for a job there for some reason.  Our bit of land is 5 minutes from the most beautiful harbor, deeply crenellated with bays and inlets, exposed dark South Pacific rock and lush tree ferns.  A place Bookhound would love to fish, I’m sure (and we must talk Alaskan salmon).  My wife and I have gone fishing at the mouth of the harbor, and even as we look at the mountains towering around us, we can’t believe the scenery.  It’s too beautiful to be real. 

Scroll down for prize draw copies.

dovegreyreader asks...Susan Hill

Unfortunately Susan Hill has had to cancel appearances at the Cheltenham Literary Festival this week so perhaps this will be some small consolation and I am very grateful to Susan, fortified by the virtual cream tea,  for taking the time to sit in the dovegreyreader asks... virtual armchair and tell it like it is.

So why Howards End and why On The Landing? I know you explain all this in the book but could you give us some insight into where this book came from, how it came about, what inspired you to write it?  

Title because my copy of Howard’s End is on the landing and it just sort of fitted. It’ll be a cataloguers nightmare of course. I was wandering round the bookshelves looking for something one day .. I didn`t find it but I kept finding other books, ones I had not read for a long time, not read at all, books which had memories attached to them, of the writers perhaps, the place where I had first read them.. books do acquire their own history.  I don`t have any sort of order or organisation to my books in this big house so it became a sort of treasure hunt. Then I started to think about how many stories I could tell after 50 years in the book trade as writer/reviewer/commenter/publisher, and of course reader… but I know I would never want to write a proper autobiography or memoir. The books seem to be my autobiography, in a way so I decided to put at least some of it down. I also realised that piles of new books come into this house – some unsolicited or review copies, but far too many bought, when I already own a lot I haven`t read yet. So I decided to try and spend a year ‘reading from home ‘ – reading only books that are here already, not new ones. I did make an exception of review books, of course – that’s part of my job. 

The recollections flow, so how easy or difficult was all this and has this book been the pleasurable experience to write that it is to read?

It was the easiest book I`ve ever written. It wrote itself really. I just went round the house pulling out books, re-reading them, remembering things…lovely.  

Could there be a sequel, I'm sure you have more books in the loft?  

I think there could but I`m always wary of spreading things too thin.  If this one sells well they may ask me. Or not. But I`d leave it a year or so and see.  

Can you tell us about your writing day, we do like to know just about everything, pen, paper, laptop, vintage Remington so don't spare any details especially about the new writing venue  

I don`t have a typical writing day, no routine, no rules. I write when I feel like it, fitting other things round it. I used to be a lark – because I had young children and a school run etc but since the youngest left school, I have become an owl. I often work till 2 or 3 in the morning, but  then I sleep in the afternoon.  I make notes and do my thinking on paper with a biro but I now write mainly on a laptop. I never typed, never used the old huge computer but a laptop is so intimate and close to one and quiet…. I need quiet. If something isn`t quite working out, I`ll go back to pen and paper though.   I work anywhere – kitchen table, on my lap, deckchair… but this year I have acquired a wonderful private space, a restored Cotswold shepherd’s hut, known as the Red Hut. It has been placed at the top of the cherry orchard. It has a little fold down desk, a chair, a box bed, a wooden barrel roof, small windows looking out onto all the views , around,  and for winter, oil lamps and a small wood burning stove with a chimney. I am surrounded  by fields, trees, deer, hares, rabbits, badgers and foxes and no one knows where I am. There is no electricity, no phone… it’s a magic place.  

At this point we usually ask what writers do when they don't write, can you tell us?

Do you mean, at the end of the day, or when I don`t have a book on the go ? The latter almost never happens, I am always writing something, but in fact I am having a break now till after Christmas, as I have written 6 books without a pause and I`m  booked-out. I know what I`m doing next and  after that  so I can relax. As we speak I am compiling the Village Hall Quiz for the Quiz night I will compere on Saturday – Village Hall Funds.  I'm also doing some book stuff – I don`t do book tours now but there are a few interviews, Cheltenham litfest etc. I also do all the usual domestic stuff and walk the dogs. I read. I sleep. I watch Coronation Street. I used to watch The Bill but I hate the new format so I`ve given that up. I eat. I used to play internet poker but it is dangerously addictive so I had to go cold turkey on that one.   I sit in cafes and people-watch. And I run a small publishing company.   Other than that, not a lot.  

Now this is really daft because this question is 'who must we read...which writers mustn't we miss' and you've just gone to a great deal of trouble to write a book telling us that, but can we know a selection anyway and why?  

No, you can`t, why do you think I wrote the flippin’ book ?  

Might you start a blog again and if not could you perhaps please explain why to all those people who still keep emailing ME to ask where it is, and tell me how much they loved it, how wonderful it was and how much they miss it...    

I won`t start a blog from my own website again, but I am about to start blogging for the Spectator online – they have a thing called Coffee House and I am going to blog there.  It won`t be quite the same as my old blog because that was quite intimate, this will be more public but I`ll talk about some of the same things – books, book life, the country and especially how people who do not live in London think and talk about current issues – because honestly, in the hothouse that is London – whether politically, the literary scene, the media scene – they don`t even KNOW  there is a  populated world beyond the M25. So I am going to enlighten them.   I begin any day now.. www.spectator.co.uk and go to Coffee House and Blogs. I hope some at least of those who liked my old blog will join me there.                          

dovegreyreader asks... Fay Weldon

Fay, we've kept them guessing all weekend and what a pleasure it is to have you seated in the 'dovegreyreader asks...' virtual armchair. I wonder if you could talk us through where Chalcot Crescent came from, what compelled you to write it and does this quote from Frances really speak for you,
'I have always used fiction to get to the heart of the matter, to discover what it is I know. It is up to the facility analysts, when they finally get around to reading this text, to decide what is memoir, what is fact, what is truth (Pilate-like I wash my hands) or some embroidery of the truth.'

How I came to write Chalcot Crescent makes  a long story.  Do you really want it? Stories about publishing are always interesting to writers, editors,  agents and publishers but I’m never sure about readers. Their concern, quite rightly,  is the finished book. But you have me seated in a chair , and asked me a question so I reply. I seldom volunteer information, but if people ask me questions I reply and reply and can’t stop. I always speak the truth but claim I tell lies so I can deny anything I have said afterwards, if people choose to use what I said as evidence against me, which quite often happens.
But here it is for what it’s worth: and  it’s in second draft – that is to say it is written down not spoken, the latter being  first draft stuff -   so I can’t even disclaim it. And it is a tale, I’m afraid,  of authorial delinquency.
Novel writing – I wrote the first in 1967 – used to be such a simple process.  You wrote a  novel and gave the finished MSS to a publisher and  if he liked it he would print it and give it to a bookseller who would be pleased to put it on his shelves (along with all your back list) and people would come in and buy. The editor was a person who saw the book through the production process in-house, and would not dream of making a comment other than point out the odd spelling mistake or inconsistency.
But the process is no longer simple; the art form grew into an industry and no one but me seems to feel ashamed of thus describing it.  The writer provides the raw material, but others refine it, process it and package it to suit the readership.  The writer is marketed as a personality, the book as of a  particular genre. The writer, guided by the editor,  provides a synopsis, on the strength of which he( more often these days she)  is commissioned, and given an advance to go away and write what is calculated to sell. The jacket will be designed on the strength of the synopsis.
All would be well except that  writers write novels out of both  left and  right brain joined in a marriage of equals,  and writing a synopsis is a left brain activity only, born out of reason, self-interest and common sense,  and the more you stick to the synopsis when you write, ironing out the entertaining follies of the right brain, the more boring your  book becomes. I have gone on strike and am never going to write another synopsis before I have written the entire book and can then  describe it. 
For any synopsis can sound good, if it has a what-if  theme, a beginning, and an end. This  kind, though persuasive, won’t have a middle – the  ‘what if’s’ having emerged in the first chapter – and what else is there to do but invent incident. 
Then you’re in trouble.    
In the middle of 2007  I gave the publishers one such  synopsis, too  persuasive for my own good. They accepted it with enthusiasm. For gloomy months I  stared at the page. I would write a line or two and then start  playing Pharoah. The editor’s title ‘What Made Her Run’ left  me feeling hopeless. It was my fault. I had given them a domestic tale about a family riven by run-away wives – surely  a genetic trait. By the beginning of 2009 the novel had its jacket – tormented girl; leaning against wall (sales said this was bound to sell) – but where were all the words that were meant to be in the middle? Somewhere stuck  in my head. So one day in January I just I gave up and wrote  an entirely other novel I didn’t know I wanted to write in ten weeks non stop, about a house I’d lived in twenty five years back, with my unborn sister Frances as its protagonist.  80,000 words of a Dystopia with jokes. Set in 2012 when we’re all living on National Meat Loaf laced with SRRI’s, suitable for vegetarians.
Chaos built up around me as I wrote in the form of scrumpled, shoddy bits of paper, dirty washing,  littered desk and unanswered e-mails. This is a good sign, though distasteful at the time.  Something real is going on.

It ended up as the novel you have been so kind about, Chalcot Crescent so unexpected it put my publishers into shock and they rejected it.
But  Corvus   picked it up within hours and published it within months,  with a jacket that fitted the text and did not put me into chick lit, where for years I have been cornered,  driving my readers  reasonably to claim for damages under the Trades Description Act. .
And yes, what Frances says in Chalcot Crescent speaks from my heart. Frances is an alternative version of me, but more unscrupulous than me and a mother of daughters not sons. 'I have always used fiction to get to the heart of the matter,’ she says, ‘to discover what it is I know. It is up to the facility analysts, when they finally get around to reading this text, to decide what is memoir, what is fact, what is truth (Pilate-like I wash my hands) or some embroidery of the truth.' The ‘facility analysts’ are the interrogators of NUG, the National Unity Government, who are reading Frances’s manuscripts and trying to decide to eliminate her, because she speaks the truth, or turn her into a national treasure, because she writes fiction..

Fay, I think you'll always be treasured for all your books, but is there one that feels most special, and if so why?

Puffball is special because it is about the birth of one of my children. I have four boys. My eldest son  is a musician and turned it into a kind of opera with speech not singing:  and my second son is a film maker and he turned it into a film directed by Nicolas Roeg. I discourage them from reading anything I write – who wants a writer for a mother -  but they somehow got hold of this one. We work on it together but never discuss it, just accept it as a given.

I'm really sorry but we are terribly nosy here and love to know about a writer's writing day, so can you tell us about that and what the process involves for you? We are always very impressed with news of special writing socks / jumpers/ trousers, fountain pens and ink but really how the writing happens and whether the dishwasher needs to be empty first etc.

The south west wind blows really cold into my office windows: it is an old house and  we are on top of a hill. So I have taken to writing down in the basement on the laptop in winter where it’s warm, if haunted, and  someone gave me some black woolen mittens with bright bobbles on the knuckles for which I am very grateful. I like it down there with the cobwebs and the bobbles dancing as I  type.

I'm now adding an extra degree of inquisition because I think we'd really love to know what writers do when they don't write, what interests you and fills your non-writing days?

What do I do when I don’t write?  I teach. I am a Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University
It’s meant to be one day a week but always  stretches to more. Teaching  students  who volunteer to learn  is a delight. You just tell them what you never knew you knew, and warn them about the problems they are going to run into if they’re not careful, and incidentally teach yourself by analyzing what it is you do yourself.  Otherwise I just assume I am writing all day, when  not sleeping or eating or going to the dentist.  If my head gets too tired I rest it  playing  old fashioned  empire building computer games. Chalcot Crescent was written with the help of Pharaoh. I go abroad when publishers ask me to,  and talking has to take  the place of writing.  Next week I go to Mantua for three days for an Italian translation  of  Puffball: in October I go to Norway to open a conference on the changing face  of copyright . This is frightening, but I am only really there for light relief.

Who must we read? Which authors and books would you urge us not to miss?

Sadie Jones’s Small Wars, just out,  is really good.

 

  

 

dovegreyreader asks... William Fiennes

A real treat in store today, and my thanks to William Fiennes as he settles down in the virtual armchair, and I suggest you might want to settle down too with a nice cup of coffee and a pile of biscuits to just enjoy this and be ready for a great reading list at the end. (The Escher print, by the way, was my bookmark whilst reading The Snow Geese.)

William, a very warm welcome to the virtual armchair and now that I've read both The Music Room and The Snow Geese I feel as if I have journeyed with you through two very important times in your life. I wonder if you could talk us through where the books came from, what compelled you to write them ...in fact can you tell us everything as usual, you know us here.

I don't know if I'd have written The Snow Geese if I hadn't fallen ill. I'd had Crohn's Disease since I was eighteen or nineteen, when I spent a year teaching in the north-east of Brazil, and the symptoms had flared and receded in phases all through my time at university. And things got pretty bad again in my mid-twenties, when I was studying as a postgraduate at Oxford, doing an M.Phil and then starting a D.Phil, my head full of English sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature. But then came hospital, surgery, complications, and a long convalescent period at home, at the house I'd grown up in, a place I loved above all others, where my sense of belonging was unambiguous.
So I thought a lot in those days about the idea of home, the idea of return, the power of that longing to find our place in the world, to belong in where we are, or in what we do, or what we love. And I thought about how our longing for the familiar, the known, exists alongside our appetite for the new, the undiscovered, and how we all have to negotiate a way through those contrary impulses.
At the same time, I was getting more and more excited about natural history.
I'd always been an outdoorsy person, a walker, but now I wanted to know the names of things - birds, trees, plants - and I was reading lots of books about evolution and ecology, books by Richard Dawkins, Matt Ridley, Richard Fortey, Jonathan Weiner, Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard. And sitting outside our house each evening, watching the swifts scream overhead on their exhilarating vespers flights. And dreaming of a return to health, independence, freedom of movement.
And then coming across Paul Gallico's The Snow Goose, which got me curious about geese, and imagining a journey, an adventure, a quest...
So now I can see how the book was born out of the confluence of several different streams of thought and experience - home, illness, recovery, poems, nature, science, love of language, and a great longing to drink down the world in gulps after such a period of deprivation. But it was only really when I started writing that I began to think I'd found a form in which to convey such ideas - a sort of poetic form, in which the images would do most of the talking... 

I don't need to tell you, Lynne, that it took me a long time to get from The Snow Geese to The Music Room... That gap wasn't for want of trying. I started about three other books - novels - but gave them up, despairing. I don't mean to sound grandiose, but to me there was a sense of rightness about The Snow Geese, as if there'd been a hole in the universe the exact size of that book, waiting to be filled. Perhaps many writers feel that about their first book, I don't know. But nothing I tried afterwards had anything like that feeling of necessity. They say that everybody has one book in them, and I thought that maybe The Snow Geese was mine; I started thinking about alternative careers, and even applied for a couple of proper jobs...
What was I thinking?!
I was a bit lost, really. Then I suppose I recognised that the problem with those abandoned books was that I didn't really care enough: nothing was at stake; nothing seemed to matter. Of course, this may just have been a failure of imagination on my part... But I wanted to write out of strong feeling. So I asked myself what I did care about. And immediately that took me to my brother Richard, and the way my parents had looked after him, and the strange magical scenes of my childhood... I didn't think I was writing anything like a "family history" or "memoir" - it felt much closer to a poem, or a song, or a novel in which everything happened to be true, and which also happened to introduce you to the history of neuroscience, and the principles behind our understanding of the brain... As with The Snow Geese, I didn't really think about the question of genre. I just wanted each book to be as perfectly itself as it could be. And again I hoped that the images would do the talking - that the right images would have more power than any amount of explanation or commentary. At first it came in a bit of rush, but then I got all knotted-up with fears - that it was too tender, too personal; or that nobody would be interested; or that it was really embarrassing to admit we lived in such a big house... And of course I worried that it might be painful for my family to relive some of those moments, even though I was writing from love, and, despite everything, in celebration. But as I went on, I began to realise that I wasn't just writing about Richard, or about our particular experience. The moated island was a microcosm, a little world, in which love and beauty and wonder coexisted with difficulty and violence and loss. So there was a vision of life, inside that ring of water. And at the heart of it was care - of parents for their children; of people for the places they live in. So my desire to sing a little bit about my brother led into these wider currents...

We love to know about a writer's writing day because we're completely inquisitive here too so can you tell us about that and what the process involves for you?

Well, I wish I could say that I was supremely disciplined and single-minded about the whole thing. I know that I've been most productive, and had my best periods with both books, when I've settled into quite strict routines, the structure of one day identical to the one before... Ideally I want to have the same breakfast, the same lunch every day; I want to work all morning; in the afternoon I want to walk or swim; I want to have tea and cake, and then I want to work again as it gets dark... I've had periods like that, and they've been really exciting and fulfilling. But too often my life's been too unsettled, or I've been too ready to prevaricate and dither, or I've been too frightened of the empty page, or simply too lazy to pitch myself into that fruitful pattern... Both my books have involved a lot of time in libraries, learning about ornithology or the history of nostalgia or neuroscience or epilepsy, and over the last ten years I've spent months in the Bodleian in Oxford, or the British Library, the London Library, the Wellcome Institute, or the neurology library in Queen's Square, following some thread of curiosity that seems part of the book's larger inquiry... I dream of having my own study, and one day I'd like to turn the attic of my small house into the perfect writer's room (the kind they feature in the Review section of The Guardian on Saturdays...), but for now I have to make do with the kitchen table, or desks in those libraries if I'm getting cabin fever... And once I get into a piece of writing I can sit hunched over my computer for hours, nothing moving but my hands on the keyboard, and I end up with all sorts of aches in my shoulders and down my legs, and because I sit so still I get really cold, and in my dream attic study I'm going to have some kind of brilliant high-tech underfloor heating... I always have a notebook on the go - not quite a diary or journal or commonplace book or image-cache but a mixture of all those things - but otherwise I tend to write directly onto the laptop, in part because most of my writing is rewriting: I go over things again and again; I love what Tobias Wolff calls "living at the level of the sentence" - the whole business of tweaking, planing, whittling and rejigging until the rhythm of the phrase, paragraph, passage or chapter sounds satisfying and somehow inevitable to the inner ear... And then I give about two days a week to teaching, and time to First Story, and I listen to lots of music and fantasize about being a musician, and I go for lots of walks, and I watch a lot of films, and (don't tell anyone) I really like TV, and then of course I want to read good books, and all of this is more of a disruption to that ideal writing day... But I think some of this belongs to the next question...

I'm now adding an extra degree of inquisition because I think we'd like to know what writers do when they don't write, what interests you and fills your non-writing days?

For a while now I've been Writer-in-Residence at the American School in London: I teach there every Tuesday afternoon. And I'm Director of the charity First Story (www.firststory.co.uk), which I set up with a teacher called Katie Waldegrave in 2007. Katie was teaching at Cranford Community College in Hounslow, and when she heard about my job at ASL she invited me to come to Cranford to do a similar thing. I started visiting the school every Wednesday afternoon, running a creative-writing class for about fourteen sixth-formers. I enjoyed it so much, and the students seemed to get so much out of it - not just in terms of their literacy skills, but also their self-esteem and self-confidence - that Katie and I thought that we should try and spread the idea to other schools.
We focus on "challenging" secondary schools - schools with at least 30% of students eligible for free school meals, and/or less than 25% getting five A-C grades at GCSE - and this year First Story has arranged and paid for fourteen writers to work as writers-in-residence in fourteen different schools in London and Oxford. The student writers give readings of their stories and poems, and at the end of the year we help them publish their work in anthologies - proper books that they can give to their friends and families, and that the students and their schools can be proud of. I used to do quite a lot of journalism - mostly book reviews and travel pieces - but for the last few years that other portion of my working life has been almost entirely taken up with school things.
Teaching full-time would knock me out, but I find the amount I do very rewarding. And I suppose it answers to some appetite in me to be doing something alongside writing, and to be working with other people, getting out of the house, engaging with the world. A sort of counterpose, as a yoga teacher might say, to writing's necessary inwardness and solitude. I'm remembering that passage in The Music Room where I talk about the rooks and the herons that haunt the moat, and how they seem to suggest two different modes of being - the rooks talkative and gregarious, the heron solitary and contemplative. I've always wanted to have room in my life for both those birds.

Who must we read? Which authors and books would you urge us not to miss?

It's a wonderful question to be asked, because you know it's been asked out of love for something and you can answer it out of love for the same thing... Chekhov's stories are a sort of holy book for me. Try the recent OUP selection called About Love, edited and translated by Rosamund Bartlett, or Granta's The Essential Tales of Chekhov, selected and introduced by Richard Ford. And Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. And War and Peace: I used a bread-knife to slice the Penguin Classics paperback into four sections and then it was much less intimidating... Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March. Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March. George Eliot's Middlemarch. I go back to all of these. The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard. Desperate Characters by Paula Fox. Cloudstreet by Tim Winton. Les Murray's verse novel, Fredy Neptune. Lorrie Moore's stories. Seamus Heaney's poems and essays and the thrilling autobiography-in-conversations called Stepping Stones. The Iliad and The Odyssey in the translations by Robert Fagles. John Cheever's stories, especially "Goodbye, My Brother" and "Torch Song" and "The Swimmer" and "A Vision of the World", and his extraordinary Journals... Poems by Ted Hughes, Paul Farley, Don Paterson... Cosmicomics and The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino. The Sportswriter and Independence Day by Richard Ford. The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. Primo Levi. Tobias Wolff. James Salter's Burning the Days. John Updike's Rabbit novels, with Nicholson Baker's U & I as a spritzy chaser. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. Edward Hoagland's essays. Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter. Moby-Dick - one of the books that made me want to be a writer. Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. And not forgetting the wonderful essays by Joseph Mitchell, hard to get hold of in the UK, but collected in a Vintage (US) paperback called Up in the Old Hotel. He is one of my heroes. Oh dear - I know that as soon as I dispatch this list to you I'll think of a dozen other things I should have added to it. But I hope this will do for starters...

You said a book every seven years...can we know, will I really be sixty (and a bit...) before the next one?

Did I really say that? Perhaps it was just a way of protecting myself... I do remember saying, at Dartington, that I'd learned I wasn't exactly Barbara Cartland... But I do hope it won't be as long as seven years... Because although I find the task of writing quite hard (run through with fear and anxiety, so that the whole enterprise can feel at times little more than an arena for self-criticism, etc) I really like the having written - I mean, I'm glad that those two books exist; I love feeling the miraculous leap of images from mind to mind that books make possible... Oh but I shouldn't pretend I don't relish moments in the actual writing, when some figure of comparison flies in out of nowhere, and the right combination of words makes both the language and the thing it's describing new somehow... And something to do with salvaging and consecration... But one of my problems is that I'm not very good at making things up; I'm not a natural yarn-spinner; I don't have a story-tap I can turn on and off at will - so instead I seem to have to wait for a book to float up in the sort of confluence of streams I was talking about earlier... Right now I do have an idea, a project, but already I'm aware that it's unlikely I'll be able to write something as whole-hearted - as Rich - as The Music Room. Or The Snow Geese, for that matter. So it'll just have to be different. And actually I'm quite looking forward to finding out how it's going to be different...

dovegreyreader asks...Tom Reynolds

Tom, I'm wondering if you can tell us quite how Blood Sweat and Tea came about, why you decided to start a blog, how it became a book ...yes in fact please do tell us how a blog becomes a book:-) how you write about your day without upsetting the 'organisation' (!) and what you want your readers to know and learn as they read, in fact anything you can tell us about it all.

Well, I'd like to mainly blame joey devilla I'd been reading his blog for a bit and it came to his birthday.  At this birthday he had a Jacuzzi on a truck delivered and had scantily clad women using it.  My thoughts on reading this was mostly 'how can I get a piece of *that* action?'.  So I started blogging, fully expecting to get bored and give it up within about six weeks.  Somehow, through comments and the burning desire that is still unfulfilled of having a Jacuzzi at my birthday party, I find myself still blogging.
As I kept writing I was discovered by Jane Perrone of the Guardian - this then led to a few more newspapers and even the BBC profiling me as one of these new-fangled blogger types, and I was noticed by a number of publishers who all came knocking at my door.  Turning down the 'big boys' I went instead with a spunky little start-up, 'The Friday Project' and so the book was born.
Later, of course, The Friday Project would be bought by Harper, so I ended up working with the big boys anyway.
I doubt that any of this had anything to do with any sort of writing 'skill', and more to do with what I was writing about.  In those days writing about the work ambulance staff do was fairly rare, especially from a normal member of staff.  I found my niche and have ruthlessly exploited it...
I think I've managed to avoid annoying the LAS (London Ambulance Service) by maintaining the confidentiality of my patients and by not being too negative.  It's true that I do take swings at various silly things that I come across but I do try to remain somewhat positive about what I think would be good changes to make.
The LAS communications department keeps an eye on what I write and I suspect they like it that I can write about things without them having to put an official seal of approval on it.  For example, I can whinge about frequent callers a lot more than the LAS can through official PR channels.
I think that they realise what the views of a frontline member of staff can do to humanise the service and explain that we don't just deal with heart attacks and car crashes.  At least I hope so, I'd hate to return to station and find my P45 waiting for me.
Really I just want people to think a little about the work that the ambulance service does, something that acts as an antidote to the TV dramas that seem to think that we fly around wearing our underpants on the outside of our trousers and shout 'C'mon Bob! You can make it!' to every cardiac arrest that we go to. I'd also like people to maybe take a bit of interest in the hidden folk that you don't think about normally - the alcoholics and the junkies and, most importantly, the elderly and vulnerable.

We are hopelessly inquisitive here and love to know about your writing day which I'm thinking must also be your working day, so is it a notebook in amongst the resus equipment, OK defibbing now, stand clear and jotting down a few things, are you thinking about how it will write up as you work, has it changed the way you see your working day?

After a job I might jot down a sentence of two in my iPhone or notebook - nothing too detailed but just something to jog my memory when I get home.  For example I might write 'NOF on floor - staff try to pick up' to remind me of the little old lady who broke her hip falling from bed and must have been in awful agony when the nursing home staff tried picking her up to put her back to bed.  I can then spin off from there.
Other times a job stays with me until the end of a shift until I can put finger to keyboard and offload it from my brain.  A classic example of that would be elder abuse, I can't sleep until I've  written about it.
My crewmate (who is a saint) somehow manages to put up with me when I start talking about how the last job will make a good blogpost.
What writing has done is make me a better practitioner - take for example the alcoholic patient.  You can only write about going to an alcoholic so many times before it gets stale, so what you find yourself doing is writing about their family, or you take a look at the place in which they live, or they way in which they get their alcohol, or why they started drinking, or the attitudes of different staff towards them, or...  Well you see my point.  By looking at people in all these different ways it lets me be more thoughtful about them, their families and the problems that they have.  All of which are good things.
That and of course the worldwide fame has meant that I can't be beating up annoying patients and pushing them out the back of a moving ambulance anymore, after all someone might notice.  However when I'm running short on interesting stories to write about I do have to start pushing people in front of cars and off tall buildings, just for something interesting to write about.*

*Dear Boss - this is an attempt at humour, I don't really do this. Honest. Despite the rumours that you may have heard.

Are you a reader and if so who do you read and who should we read?

I try to read as much as possible, although that isn't as much as I'd like - As my real life is quite full enough of tragedy and real life I like to avoid that in the books that I read.  I'm a huge fan of good SF, so I read things by Charles Stross, Neal Stephenson, Warren Ellis and Cory Doctorow but I will read pretty much anything that is put in front of me.  Besides recommending my own books *ahem* can I also suggest 'Blue Lights and Long Nights' by Les Pringle about his experiences in the ambulance service in the 70's and 'Six Months in Sudan' by James Maskalyk about a MSF doctor which is what I'm reading at the moment.
What I am doing at the moment is picking books that are available in e-book format, I have limited space in my flat so being able to read things from my Sony Reader is a real space-saver.  Sadly it would seem that publishers seem to be ignoring non-American markets for their e-books, what they really need to realise is that it is a global market now and restricting sales of books based on where you live is an easy way to lose money.

Tom, I hate to do this because I know people are always dialling 999 needlessly, but could you just check Rocky over for signs of life while you're here? I'm a bit concerned about his GCS, (Glasgow Coma Scale) he's been like that for about 3 mths.

I don't know how to break it to you but I think Rocky is a catnip addict, it's the glassy stare and slight drool that gives it away.  I recommend rehab...

dovegreyreader asks... Julia Blackburn

It is my absolute pleasure to welcome Julia Blackburn to the virtual armchair today, talking about her PEN / Ackerley prize winning memoir, The Three of Us.
I first heard Julia speak at Ways With Words some years ago when she talked at one of the most emotional and memorable events I have ever attended, speaking about With Billie, her biography of Billie Holiday. Julia read from her book over a recording of Billie singing and reduced us to tears of genuine compassion in the Great Hall that afternoon. I wrote about The Three of Us last year and was then fortunate enough to spend a week with Julia and Herman and Penelope Lively at the Ways With Words Memoir Writing Course in France last autumn. Much to our amusement, Julia and I kept getting out the the same Red Lamy Safari pens and wearing the same Crocs.
To mark the publication of the paperback edition of The Three of Us Julia has kindly answered our usual questions from her home in Italy and my thanks to her for taking the time to tell us more about the book.

Julia, after I'd read The Three of Us I wrote 'Writing as an adult and using her copious diaries as reference Julia has captured and bottled that childlike understanding of her situation, it must have been tempting to invest it with the wisdom and hindsight of an adult but she doesn't.'
Can you tell us why you decided to write this book now and how difficult was it to recapture your child self? Was this an exhausting revisit or an exhilarating release, a form of therapy? Anything you can tell us about the process at all would be of great interest

 

I think I realized I might be able to  do it when I was writing my biography of Billie Holiday. I did on opening chapter for that, in which I described a party at my mother's house when I first heard a Billie record. I was fourteen and the party was very wild with two prostitutes who did a strip and a rather competitive gay guy who wanted to show he could also do a strip, like a woman. I wrote the chapter as a way of saying that even though I was not American, or black, or a jazz buff, I did know something about the sort of  abandoned childhood that Billie experienced and so she and I had that in common.

To my surprise I found the chapter very easy to write and it became very funny as well.

 

I then did five short stories for Radio 4, called My Animals and Other Family and again I found that I could write about  my childhood in a way that remained quite light hearted, even though some of the suject matter was anything but. The stories were then published as a little book and my husband Herman, did the illustrations.

 

So, that was a beginning.

 

To tell the story and especially the story of the tangled  relationship with my mother, I  approached  the main characters   as if they were strangers to me and I wanted to try to understand them.

As source material I had the  diaries I kept from when I was 14 til 20...I realize now that I wrote  them as a way of breathing through a straw, keeping alive through difficult times. Maybe just the fact of writing things down made them less dangerous.

I also had my mothers diaries in which she recorded every dentist appointment and supper party, alongside the little stars for every time she had made love...even the occasional 3 Star 3 exclamation marks entries from  her early years.

I had my letters to her and hers to me which she had kept even when I had thrown them away in dismay and despair

And I had  my father's many notebooks and letters

 

In the manner of a biographer I began  to work out what was going on and when and how . As the book progressed I could  see the trajectory of my early life and my parents' lives in a way I had never seen it , with much more empathy for all three of us than I had known before.

 

But I don't think I could ever have written the book without  Herman. He and I ( for those who haven't read it) were together when I was 18 and then we were apart for some 35 years before we met up and married, ten years ago. He, more than anyone,  knew the story of me and my mother and while I was writing he was able to keep me steady while I tried to steer through all the sex, drugs and confusion of that time.

 I never saw the  book as an act of therapy, but it was a way of  letting go of the past and since writing it I  feel I have much less excess baggage to carry along. Some people have found it shocking  and several have been angry  with my parents, but I never meant it that way. It seems to me that we all got through in our own way, and that is what matters.  

My mother had a lot of qualities, including the extraordinarily steadfast and humorous manner in which she confronted mortality when it presented itself  to her as well as  her willingness to let go of the old battle between us, just in time. I thank her for that with all my heart.

We're very inquisitive here at dovegreyreader so we love to know about your writing day, it really helps us imagine the writer at work so special space, perfect view, cupboards cleared out before you can settle down, fountain pen or PC, we've had woolly socks and writing jumpers can you tell us?

 

 We live in northern  Italy, up in the mountains but with a distant view of the sea.  We have dormice in the roof and for the month of June and the first bit of July, we have fireflies falling hopelessly in our hair or in a glass of wine. We have a shaggy yellow hunting dog who was given to us because she is afraid of bangs and I have two water tanks which are used by frogs and water snakes. 

 After breakfast I start the day with wandering about, talking to the dog ,staring at insects and tadpoles  and the mountains. Then I go to my workroom which has a window looking out along a  quiet terrace and I start writing. Usually I read aloud whatever I wrote the day before, to listen to it, to hear if the words hang together.

Then I begin . Most days I work for about five hours...more if I am finishing something, less if I am getting stuck.

I use a laptop which still terrifies me for the possibility of the wrong command causing whole chunks of text to disappear, and I print out recent pages and correct them with an old fountain pen.

When I get really stuck I return to the round of staring at  small details of life and that helps. But I enjoy writing tremendously, even the difficult bits.

If you could just imagine for a minute that none of us read books, who must we read and why?

 

A  shifting, changing list.

Recently I have been reading a lot of Beppe Fenoglio. Some of his books, including the wonderful A Private Affair, have been translated. He was a Partisan in Italy during the war and that experience informs much of his writing, but it is his humanity in the face of human muddle that I like so much.

I've just finished a most unlikely book for me,  Minnie's Room by Molly Panter -Downes in which nondescript people in England in the 1940s and 50s do nondescript things and yet the result is deeply moving and much emotionally  wider than you would  think possible.

Another recent read is Direct Red, A Surgeon's Story by Gabriel Weston. It is comprised of  stories, meditations, observations by an Ear Nose and Throat surgeon , who tells you about what she has seen inside our bodies as  well as what was going on on the surface as it were.

 

So, Lynne, and all at Dovegreyreaders, I have said my bit.

Best wishes

Julia Blackburn

 

dovegreyreader asks...A.S.Byatt

Well, I asked and A.S.Byatt very kindly agreed to take a seat in the virtual armchair and answer our 'dovegreyreader asks...' questions. I think you're going to enjoy this and how grateful I am to A.S.Byatt for taking the time out to do this for us. If you've somehow forgotten quite how much I loved The Children's Book you can read again here.
Perhaps we sometimes mistakenly think of writers as inaccessible and remote from us as readers, but I hope you will agree that you will know A.S.Byatt (or Antonia as we settled on in the end) quite uniquely once you've read these wonderfully informative insights into her writing of The Children's Book, her working day and her favourite books. Have the printer plugged in or pen and paper to hand, because the reading suggestions create a must-have list and I've taken the liberty of linking back to a few that we've talked about on here, even our attempts at caffeine-loaded Balzac last Christmas.
And I'm afraid I know it all too well, sometimes I need saving from myself, I couldn't resist asking Antonia if she had thrown a pot in her research for this book, read on to find out.

Antonia, I've gone off on a frolic of my own with my reading of The Children's Book, probably many miles from the book's intention, and as I read I often paused to wonder whether a writer has intentions like this for their readers. Could you talk us through the genesis of this book, the germ of a beginning, its themes, what were the founding ideas and directions you wanted to take as you wrote and where did you want to take your readers?

I’m happy about the frolic. I don’t think novelists should have designs on or for readers – I have come to see my novels as worlds in which all sorts of things are connected in all sorts of ways. No two readers will read all the same words – the only people who read every word are translators. What’s good about writing novels is that one is writing for one person only – and each one has her/his way of reading and preoccupations. I have found that I increasingly use tales and fairy tale as a kind of underpinning structure – several of the plots in this novel are connected to the fairy story about the king who tried to marry his dead wife’s daughter (a version of Cinderella – Donkeyskin, Manyfurs, Catskin.) I began to wonder about children’s book writers – their children seem to be very unhappy people – there was a wonderfully funny tale about Alison Uttley (whose son drove himself off Beachy Head, which was not funny) in Saturday’s Guardian Review. I was intrigued by things I read about E Nesbit being a founding Fabian – how do fairy  stories and socialism go together? I got a lot of help from Jack Zipes, the great fairytale scholar, who said the fairytale was the natural form for socialists. Novels are topsy turvy – the City of London got in because of a repeated image of gold and silver such as  the gold and silver dresses the king gives his daughter-bride-to-be -  and because of the father  in Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows, who was preoccupied with bimetallism. That novel had a great effect on me – it started me thinking about the time when adults began to talk to children as grown-ups. I saw at the beginning that my own novel was going to have a large number of main characters – no one hero or heroine – but I did not see, at first, that children in 1895 were going to hit the first world war head on. So it’s only accidentally a war novel – which is a good thing – as I think that was an accidental war, that could easily not have happened. Re children’s book writers – there are bits of Kenneth Grahame, Kipling, Alison Uttley, and Evelyn Sharp in there – not only E Nesbit. I try not to make any of my characters a “portrait” of any real person – they move more freely if they have many originals. As one reviewer remarked, there is a lot of D.H.Lawrence in Olive Wellwood – E.Nesbit was southern and middle class, Olive brings with her the coal mines, and real poverty. And, as Philip does, the North. My own ancestors, on one side, were potters, from the Five Towns.

My reading gives me the impression that you had loved writing this book as much as I had loved reading it, the research into the arts and crafts, the potters and their work, the fabrics, the textures, the V & A, the puppets and fairy tales. Can you tell us what was involved in this research? (I'm actually desperate to know whether you threw a pot!)

I did indeed love all the research – this is not a period I knew a great deal about and it was all  there to find out. I find I am increasingly interested in human beings who make things – glassblowers, weavers, and so on. I watch the Antiques Road Show and Flogit not for the human dramas and revelations of value but for the things – furniture, jewellery, silver, pots. I had slightly avoided pots, because of the family connection,  before The Children’s Book but I became completely enthralled in finding out about them. I bought books about De Morgan and Minton, and books for would-be craftsmen, and reprints of the V and A’s textbooks for ceramics students and jewellery students. Amazon international and Amazon second-hand – and a great bookbuying research site called Addall – have transfigured the whole research process.  My daughter lives next door to a great modern potter, Edmund de Waal, and so I was able to go to his studio, where he told me a great deal about the processes of preparing the clay, and the kilns. It was Edmund who made me understand just how violent and in a way haphazard making pots can be – that you have the two extremes of cold clay and heat and flames. He sat me down at a wheel and centred a lump of clay for me – so I did get my fingers in it and feel the wall rising before it collapsed. I read a great deal about the Martin Brothers and Palissy. Edmund gave me a copy of his book about the history of modern pottery – you would love it, if you haven’t found it – and it was Edmund who told me about Morris and Co’s irrational dislike of porcelain (his own is exquisite) and the general Arts and Crafts mystique from the inside. He was apprenticed to a rural potter and remarked dryly that many Arts and crafts vessels don’t hold water!

The V and A got in because of E Nesbit – who went to the British Museum in search of a plot and had a love affair with the expert who helped her. So I thought I’d set some of the story in the V and A and invent a Keeper of gold and silver. I was very fortunate to meet Marian Campbell who showed me the Gloucester Candlestick and took me on a tour of the basement – the shrine where Philip slept is really there. And I was shown the majolica and the V and A’s collection of Palissy – I was fortunate enough to pick up an imitation Palissy in the Furniture Cave – I pointed out that a dragonfly was broken and got it at a reduced price.

I could go on and on. My husband has a collection of books about the first World War. My German translator Melanie Walz lives in Munich and showed me the puppet museum there – and everything else – and told me about Richard Teschner whose Golden Shrine I managed to visit in the Vienna theatre-museum when I was lecturing there. And my daughter who was then at the Women’s Library introduced me to Jennian Geddes whose help with Dorothy’s studies was invaluable – you cannot imagine what trouble I had in correlating all the dates of all the exams etc. with the rest of the story (and history). I did get one thing wrong – not about Dorothy but partly because of her inexorable timetable – but I am not going to tell you what it was. It was picked up by the American proofreader.

We always love to hear about the workings of a writer's writing day. To know and and visualise the process that gives us the finished book somehow completes the reading circle here, so can we know about any special desk, pen, ink and paper, old typewriter or PC, room with a view or a blank wall, anything that helps us visualise you at work?

I write in an attic looking out at treetops (ashes and a sad eucalyptus someone has cruelly cropped this year. ) Although it is south London herons and parrots fly past – and magpies and jays and wood pigeons and all sorts of small birds. I like colour – so there are bright prints by Matisse and Donald Houston and Patrick Heron – and an ecologically improper case of Amazonian butterflies. Then there is the glass – a number of paperweights, old and new and a lot of American marbles in bowls. American glass is amazing. And then there are a lot of stones – phantom quartz with which I became obsessed, a chunk of Filey Brigg, boulders from the Boggle Hole…Most of the walls are covered by books –a working library – and there is a low semi-circular bookcase inside  a bookcase round my chair which puts my working library for the book I am working on in reach – coalmines, Rye, Fabians, Germans and puppets, and the basics – bible (Authorised) dictionaries, place-names , Gray’s Anatomy, some maps…

I’ve banished the computer from my writing room. I write on narrow feint A4 with a Pilot fine-point (0.5) . I write fiction by hand and everything else on the computer. I was never any good with a type-writer and still rejoice in the computer’s wordwrap. But I think with my fingers through a pen. I write fiction in the mornings – or try to – I do my reading up there too – There are, even I admit it, too many books in the house. I fear the stairs may collapse. I should perhaps say that I suffer badly from SAD so I have a lightbox on the surface near the desk. Writing facing a blank wall would throw me into a real depression.

Could you try and imagine that none of us here read books at all, an unlikely scenario I know, but who should we read as a matter of urgency, who should we read for pure pleasure and who is writing now who we mustn't overlook?

Where to begin? I think I’ll start with a list of great novels of the world and then a list of moderns.

Tolstoi War and Peace Flaubert Madame Bovary  (You really ought to have Anna Karenina for comparison but I love War and Peace more.) Dostoevski The Brothers Karamazov. Thomas Mann Death in Venice (for starters). George Eliot Middlemarch Jane Austen Persuasion Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby  Saul Bellow Henderson the Rain King Henry James The Ambassadors. Chekhov stories – start with the collection in Penguin that includes Lady with a Little Dog. I am at the moment passionately reading Balzac but I don’t think I can ask anyone of you to take a run at him, especially in translation which doesn’t always work You could try Lost Illusions and its sequel. Dickens – what to include, what to leave out? Any and all. Bleak House and Great Expectations – one in the third person, one in the first person.

Moderns. Alice Munro’s short stories. Penelope Fitzgerald The Blue Flower  but all her books are wonderful. Like some of you I am excited by Hilary Mantel. Lawrence Norfolk (not easy but if you get caught up in it, amazing) The Pope’s Rhinoceros. Julia Franck The Blind Side of the Heart – translation just out, knocked me over. I am very interested in Michelle de Kretser. Michael Ondaatje’s early  novel  In the Skin of a Lion. I am also watching Nadeem Aslam who writes wonderfully. His last book was grim and beautiful in equal proportions. Iris Murdoch – my favourites are perhaps her first Under the Net and maybe The Black Prince. Philip Hensher – both his elegant early short novels and the two big ones – The Mulberry Empire and The Northern Clemency. I read Yiyun Li’s The Vagrants and cannot get it out of my head. She and Julia Franck are my Books of the Year, so far. And Wolf Hall.  As you can see I have mixed up two sections of the answer – moderns, and “who to look out for.” I truly enjoyed Dai Siije’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress – it’s translated from the French, and the French, who are preoccupied with style, say the sentences are not elegant. But it’s an amazing story, told with wit, and a way of seeing into a distant world. His second book is amazing too. A new way into China by a maker of fables who is both grim and funny and elegant. It’s not that I’m peculiarly interested in China – it’s because there are a few new Chinese writers who seem to be saying new things in new ways.

I could go on and on. Kafka is essential at some point. I love Ford Madox Ford – I think I’d recommend The Good Soldier and his first world war quartet before D.H.Lawrence and E,M.Forster – but I think this is partly reaction after having taught those two too much and reacted against their influence. This is a list of books that matter to me as a writer – and I write because I read. Which brings me on to my last point. I really write as I do because I was overwhelmed by Shakespeare as a girl. The English language is wonderful and can do all sorts of things both simple and complicated , straightforward and beautiful – and I do think much of its range and flexibility and breadth – for writers and readers – exists because he wrote as he did when he did. So you imaginary readers who have read nothing must at some point read him – the major tragedies first – Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet – and then things like Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure  - and The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale – and then, the comedies, which are harder than the tragedies because the jokes and the vocabularies have dated – except perhaps A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is a must-read. And haunts The Children’s Book, so maybe I’ll stop there. Thank you for all the intelligent reading.

 

Something very special for next Monday...

dovegreyreader asks...A.S.Byatt

dovegreyreader asks...Sarah Waters

What a fine way to start the week and how delighted and grateful I am that Sarah Waters has so kindly taken time out to sit in the dovegreyreader virtual armchair and tell us more about The Little Stranger, her writing day and favourite books.
Don't miss the prize draw for three copies of the book that follows this post.
 

Sarah, last week I wrote  "one of the year's great reads for me because this is a book that gives up its secrets slowly and deliberately and at unexpected moments", and still The Little Stranger is doing that and I know I'm not alone. I wonder if you can tell us where the idea for this book came from, how you have managed to sustain those secrets and tensions and what were your intentions for us as your readers?

I'm delighted you've found it so thought-provoking.
The Little Stranger very much grew out of my last book, The Night Watch. That novel is set mainly in wartime London, but begins in 1947; I finished it still really interested in the immediate post-war period - in particular, I was interested in what was happening to the British class system then, with the Labour government being voted in and so on. I was reading post-war novels by authors like Elizabeth Jenkins, Marghanita Laski, Angela Thirkell, Josephine Tey, and I could see that class was this really painful issue. Britain was changing, working-class people were losing respect for the old hierarchies, servants were disappearing, large houses were crumbling away; middle-class people seemed to be in absolute agony about it - and the more conservative they were, of course, the worse the agony was.

It was that agony, really, that attracted me: it was so extreme, it had an irrational, an hysterical - almost a supernatural - intensity to it, and I ended up thinking that the only way really to do justice to it might be with a full-blown haunted-house novel.
So that's where Hundreds Hall came from: I suppose in some ways it's a model of Britain itself at this very particular moment, with the poor old Ayres family being terrorised by forces they can't understand.
But I took the novel totally seriously as a kind of ghost story, too. I've always been drawn to novels and stories of the supernatural, and I really enjoyed this experience of writing within the genre. I wanted the book to be genuinely scary - though it was hard to judge whether that was working. I wrote the scene, say, where Roderick's shaving mirror starts to move by itself, and though I loved writing it, I thought,
'Is this spooky?
Or is it just a bit silly?'
Then I gave a draft of the novel to a friend to read, and she was really unnerved by it; so I knew I was on the right track. Dr Faraday is a bit of a dull narrator really, but I hoped that that would help the tension rather than hinder it. I was remembering those bachelor narrators in the ghost stories of M.R. James. They've rarely been involved in anything supernatural themselves; they tell us their tales at one remove, so that we get glimpses of terrifying things, rather than full-on horror. I think that's the more effective way.

I think off-blog and through countless e mails between us, we think we've fathomed the ending to our satisfaction, were we supposed to try and do that and reach a conclusion, or had you left it intentionally open to speculation?

Ha! Well - and again I'm thinking of a writer like M.R. James - it has always seemed to me that the best ghost stories are the ones that remain slightly enigmatic, slightly baffling. After all, if something is genuinely uncanny, then we shouldn't be able to explain it away with a neat resolution. So I wanted The Little Stranger to be as open-ended as I felt I could get away with; and I needed Dr Faraday to be a relatively unreliable narrator - not in the sense that he's lying to us, but in as much as there are things going on that he can't, or won't, confront. Those things seem very clear to me, personally, though not every reader has picked up on them. That's fine with me: I'm happy for people to have slightly different ideas about what's been happening at Hundreds Hall. I didn't want readers to feel frustrated, and I'm sorry that some have. But more people seem to have had your own response: they've finished the book and thought, 'Hmm'; the story has stayed in their mind; then a few days later they've gone: 'Aha!' I didn't know that that would happen; but I like it.

We're very inquisitive here at dovegreyreader so we love to know about your writing day, it really helps us imagine the writer at work so special space, perfect view, cupboards cleared out before you can settle down, fountain pen or PC, we've had woolly socks and writing jumpers, can you tell us?

I think that somewhere in her diaries or letters Virginia Woolf makes a rather sniffy remark about the novelist Arnold Bennett 'toddling off to write his two thousand words a day' - or something like that. But if writers are divided into sniffy visionaries and dull old hacks, then I am definitely, alas, on the hack side. I treat writing very much as a job: I start the day by answering emails over breakfast, but like to be at my desk by 10am, and when I am writing new material I will stay there until I have done at least 1,000 words. That's sometimes easy to achieve, and sometimes excruciatingly hard, but I will keep at it, because it reassures me that, day by day, I am moving my novel forward.
But I spend a lot of time re-writing, too. Every so often I'll print up a chunk of text, read it through and annotate it, then return to the computer to make the changes on screen. (I can write on computer, but not edit: I need to see the words on paper for that.) So a novel develops, for me, in a series of loops. 

I'm not that fussy about my writing space.
For many years I didn't have a separate study, and used to to write at a desk in my bedroom, and that worked fine: I think that all I need, really, is a desk, a computer, and long stretches of peace and quiet. These days, however, I have a lovely attic study with a view of gardens, rooftops, and the local gasworks: a perfect view, actually, because it's interesting without being distracting.
Like most writers I know, I like to snack as I work. I have three cups of tea a day, and lots of toast. The crucial thing for me, however, is not food but clothes: they need to be loose, which generally means shapeless; and because I wear the same items day after day, they get increasingly stained, torn and revolting as a book proceeds. I get particularly attached to my writing trousers, and still think very fondly about the pair of khaki combats that got me through Fingersmith and half of The Night Watch; they eventually became so ragged and filthy they looked like something that might have been worn by Jo the Crossing sweeper in Bleak House. It was a very sad day when I had to give them up.

If you could just imagine for a minute that none of us read books, who must we read and why?

Like everyone, I imagine, who reads this blog, I've got an awful lot of books on my shelves. Some have been there for years, and some are newer; but when I look across the range of spines, I find that there are actually only a few that are really 'alive' for me - ones that I see and think, 'Ooh yes.' These are the books that have moved, impressed or inspired me - the books I would save if my house were on fire and I had time to grab at the shelves. 

I can't think of a better recommendation than that. So, I'm looking at my fiction shelves right now, and here are the authors who are passing the 'Ooh' test for me today: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Margaret Atwood, Jane Austen, the Brontes, Rebecca Brown, Octavia Butler, Angela Carter, Jonathan Coe, Wilkie Collins, Ivy Compton Burnett, Barbara Comyns, Charles Dickens, John Fowles, George Gissing, Philippa Gregory, Patrick Hamilton, Patricia Highsmith, Alan Hollinghurst, Chris Hunt, Kazuo Ishiguro, F. Tennyson Jesse, Cormac McCarthy, Patrick McGrath, Olivia Manning, Hilary Mantel, Daphne du Maurier, Toni Morrison, Iris Murdoch, Anthony Powell, Mary Renault, Muriel Spark, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Donna Tartt, Elizabeth Taylor, Colm Toibin, Leo Tolstoy, Robert Tressell, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Denton Welch. 

All shelved in strict alphabetical order, you'll notice - though should Ivy Compton Burnett be under C or B? And what about Daphne du Maurier - D or M? I'm never sure.

dovegreyreader asks...Lilian Pizzichini author of The Blue Hour A Portrait of Jean Rhys

I am so pleased to welcome Lilian Pizzichini to the virtual armchair and the gentle inquisitorial glow of the standard lamp today.
I think, unless you've been away for a month or so, or perhaps this is your first visit to dovegreyreader, you can hardly have missed my renewed enthusiasm for reading the novels of Jean Rhys since I read Lilian's wonderful portrait of Jean's life, The Blue Hour. I can't quite believe what a reading trail this one book has opened up for me as I work my way towards a re-read and a new understanding of Wide Sargasso Sea. So I feel I have much to thank Lilian for and my thanks again to her for taking the time to answer our usual questions.

Lilian as I read The Blue Hour I felt I came to know Jean Rhys as never before and I'm wondering if you could tell us about the Jean that you met as you wrote, why you chose her as your subject, the pains and pleasures of writing the book, in fact we'd love to know as much as you can tell us about this process and how you went about it.

The Jean Rhys I got to know as I wrote The Blue Hour was a brave soul. A lot of the time, however, she struggled with uncontrollable spurts of anger. The more life proved to be difficult and the more people proved themselves to be unpredictable, the more despairing Jean became. I saw her courage as being her determination to bare her soul - in all its darkness - and to write her vision truly. She returns again and again to a psychological moment filled with hopelessness. I cannot believe humans exist who do not have these moments. Jean Rhys the writer gave them a voice. She gives us all a voice in these moments.
Jean the woman could be great fun. Her letters bear witness to her high spirits, wit and empathy. She found it easier to keep her intimates at a distance - so she was a sensitive soul, too.
I chose to write about Jean Rhys because I empathized with her - I find my coping mechanisms for life have been faulty at times and I have experienced depression. More than that, I knew what it was like to come to England at a tender age having lived, bathed in heat, in the Caribbean. It took me years to get over the shock of cold. It was such a joy to find someone else who wrote about that sudden break with the past so beautifully. Like Jean, I love warmth, cats, laughter and luxury. This was the Jean Rhys I got to know - someone who was funny but who found life difficult - and she wasn’t afraid to let everyone know about it!
You asked about the pains and pleasures of writing the book: Jean Rhys lived so long!
There was one point where I simply had to break off for a year or so because I was exhausted. I think she herself felt like that at times! By the time I had finished the book I was so relieved she was finally dead. Again, I think that was how she felt on facing her death. It was hard to live with that sense of life being a slog rather than a joy. The pleasure of having written the book is realising that life does not have to be like that.

We are incredibly inquisitive here at dovegreyreader and so we have to know all about your writing day, is it 9am the dishwasher empty and gallons of coffee before you start, we've had writing socks and writing jumpers do you wear writing slippers, special writing spaces,rooms with a view, fountain pen and ink or PC, anything you can tell us about your writing life.

My writing day starts in a jumble of ideas, associations and shopping lists that are designed to distract me from the day’s business. I wake up and take a few hours to clear my head. I practise Buddhism  so this involves chanting for at least an hour. What comes into my head during this time is some clarity and focus. Then I get on with the daily admin of watering the garden, shopping, phoning friends, etc, replying to emails. Once all this has been dealt with I can sit in front of my beautiful iMac and face the work in progress.
At the moment I’m constructing a novel based on the life of Lady Mary Grey. She was Lady Jane Grey's youngest sister, and a hunchbacked midget. She had a brief (thank God!) and extraordinary life but is a mere footnote in history. She is, in short, completely overlooked - as she was during her lifetime.
A lot of my writing is about giving voices to those who are not heard.
With Lady Mary, I see another brave soul who had real spirit and a mischievous nature that led her to marry a commoner (shock horror) who was six foot eight. The incongruousness of her choice is what intrigues me. She was put under house arrest for her boldness and when she was finally released insisted on dressing like a bumble-bee at Queen Elizabeth’s court. To my mind, she is adorable and deserves to be celebrated. So my thoughts are Tudor-bound and it’s a question of getting some structure. This is what I find hardest of all - structure! That’s why biography is so much easier than fiction: they’re born, they live, they die, that’s it. End of.

Who must we read, who do you recommend and who do you enjoy reading?

We must read Jane Austen! She is my favourite writer. Like Jean Rhys, Jane Austen had a lot of rage but hers is measured out in irony. Her prose carries a great load but it is weightless. She says so much but as Virginia Woolf said, it’s hard to catch her in the act of greatness. Her lightness of touch is astounding. Her profound understanding of human nature is an endless delight. I no longer read her for the romance but for the satisfaction that her heroines find their home - where they are appreciated and can thrive. This is something Jane Austen did not achieve  for herself - as far as I understand. But this sorrow is dealt with pragmatically and with unstoppable humour. She is pure genius.
Marcel Proust is another hero - I remember reaching the end of In Search of Lost Time and feeling I had undergone a spiritual experience. Maybe I was just relieved it was finally over but, really, there was more to it than that. He made me feel time; he made me suspend disbelief as few others can. I have had many Proustian moments and I feel indebted to him for learning about myself through reading his work. I like St Augustine, too. I love his meditation on time, and I love poetry generally. I like measuring out my life in coffee spoons!
I’m reading Ted Hughes’ Crow series a lot at the moment. I worked in a men’s prison and the Crow reminds me of a certain type of man - the type Jean Rhys liked. I’d like to write about my experiences in prison at some point. It sounds a strange thing to say but I found real beauty in prison: as writer-in-residence I encouraged prisoners to write about their lives, and what I found is that once people have everything taken away from them they have nothing left but their honesty. The depth of this honesty is rare, and it was a privilege to be part of its unfolding.
I’m also reading Sir Thomas Wyatt for his Tudor-ness and Nature poetry generally - R.S. Thomas in particular.  I imagine Lady Mary watching the birds from her window so I’m doing the same.
I don’t read much contemporary fiction.
I reviewed it for years and I simply got tired of it. I have recently tried to read Iain Sinclair’s book on Hackney and Roberto Saviano’s Gomorra - but my inclinations keep taking me back to watching the magpie outside my window and reflecting on Tudor times.

Don't miss the next post for the chance of a prize draw copy of The Blue Hour

dovegreyreader asks... Jude Morgan

Well I'm not sure how we've managed this given that Jude Morgan doesn't 'do' e mail, but we have persuaded this most reticent of writers to sit in the armchair for just a few minutes to offer us some insights into the book that took my breath away yesterday, The Taste of Sorrow. I'm very grateful to Jude for responding so gamely because this insatiable reader just had to know.

Jude, I have been completely steam-rollered by The Taste of Sorrow, I can't stop thinking about it and yet I thought I knew my Brontes inside out. Can you tell us just how you've managed this? The process of taking something familiar to many but making it so refreshingly new and vibrant?
 
The answer to this is, with great difficulty!
It was precisely that question of the familiarity of the Brontes’ lives that posed the challenge in writing a novel about them. Part of the answer was perhaps to go back to sources, try to forget what I knew (or thought I knew) about them and study their lives as if it was an entirely new experience – above all, trying to clear away the legend and myth that has grown up about them. My own conviction about the Brontes was that they were not these fey ‘children of the moors’ who somehow happened to write great novels. They were very driven, very conscious as artists. In terms of narrative style I wanted above all not to try and reproduce a nineteenth-century style – you can’t compete with the Brontes! – but to give a contemporary feel without any anachronism. And above all to strive for empathy, to subsume yourself as a writer in the consciousness of these living characters.

I'm really sorry but we are desperately inquisitive here at dovegreyreader scribbles, can you tell us about your writing day, must the dog be walked and the dripping tap sorted first, computer or pen (biro, fountain, fancy ink...we need to know), Balzacian white robe and lashings of black coffee, dedicated writing space, desk, view from window, special writing jumper (you'd be surprised what writers have revealed to us and please don't worry, we won't tell anyone!)

My writing day is more likely to be a writing night or small hours, with a lively five year old at home, other work, teaching etc. And I’ve developed the habit of writing draft in a notebook whenever possible – college coffee break, on the train…But I have a nice traditional book-lined study when I can get to it, and there writing straight on to the computer is the norm. Classical music on headphones sometimes.

3. Who and which books must we read, who are the greatest writing influences on you?

Hilary Mantel is my favourite contemporary author and her historical novel A Place of Greater Safety opened my eyes to the idea that historical novels needn’t be plush and stately but could be sharp and edgy. Before that, I think Mary Renault was a great historical novelist who as a critic said seemed almost ‘clarivoyant’ in her sense of period. The greatest single influence on me is Dickens, for fiction that is always vibrantly dramatized, alive, attuned to rhythms of language, always communicating.

The prize draw for three copies of The Taste of Sorrow is still open here.

dgr asks...Amanda Craig

My sincere thanks to Amanda Craig for submitting to the virtual cream tea and the glow of the standard lamp today and in case you missed it the draw for free copies of Hearts and Minds is open for just a little bit longer here. 

"An astutely portrayed cast of characters tell this story and slowly this becomes a book of both contrasts and similarities, everyone's under an exacting pressure and many and varied are the forms of slavery and entrapment; to work, to a lifestyle, to a master, to a mistress, to a past life, to a dream, to money, to poverty, to misguided values and Amanda Craig has rolled out a great big canvas on which to explore them all."
Amanda, can you talk us through that canvas, where the book began, your vision for it, the how and why?

I suppose H&M began when I heard about 9/11 at the school gates, and a white-faced mother said, "You realise that London is going to be next, don't you?" I'd been thinking about writing about all the immigrants I saw in my daily life - I had a Kosovan cleaning lady; the man who swept my street was Albanian; I kept chatting to Polish waitresses in my local cafe; I knew that much of my food was being picked by immigrants, and so on. So then I began to think about the fear that these people, who were making British life a good deal easier, would arouse if we had a terrorist attack. Because I live near King's Cross, it was logical to think of a bomb there. But then....7/7 happened, and for weeks and months I could hear sirens racing up and down York Way, just up the road. It was a dire time to live in London. People kept getting on the Tube and bus, and wondering whether they were going to be blown up, but in this wonderful British way refusing to stop using public transport.  Yet apart from the blown up bus, the carnage was all kept underground, out of sight, unlike the flashy cinematic attack on the Twin Towers. So I knew that I wanted to write about a terrorist attempt that was almost hidden. I talked to someone who trained police how to react in a bomb attempt, and he told me, long before it became public knowledge,  there had been over 30 foiled attempts.

By  2003, however, I had become seriously ill. I was rushed to hospital with acute appendicitis, discovered to have quite advanced thyroid cancer and then, a couple of years later, endometriosis. My novel kept being put back because I was too ill to write (though I still managed to keep up writing for the Sunday Times for the first year). But the good thing was that, being so dependent on doctors, Third World nurses, Eastern European au pairs, Muslim mini-cab drivers etc as all my normal work as a mother and housewife was outsourced, I learnt a great deal more about this underworld. When I became better, I interviewed real-life victims of torture - with whom I made contact through the Medical Foundation, PEN and the charity Women for Refugee Women. I also interviewed teenaged prostitutes. They were drug addicts; the youngest was fourteen. I wanted to get a feel for their lives to create Anna, my trafficked Ukrainian. They were happy (as long as I paid them) to talk in a warm cafe near King's Cross. They weren't trafficked, but said they knew girls who were - and in fact no sooner did I finish my novel than I saw three Eastern Europeans working the street just around the corner. 

I had what you might call an embarrassment of riches as far as stories about suffering was concerned. But I also wanted to reflect the hope, luck and kindness many of these people experienced in this country, and in London - which can be so hard and cruel, yet also so transformative. There is a real-life Job who helped a trafficked woman escape from the brothel where she was kept prisoner, just by giving her money. There are people like Katie who find it in themselves to do something amazing to help another person in dire distress. I want to emphasise that although parts of my characters' story are dark, the good do end happily and the bad are punished. I believe in love and kindness as a force for good in the world; I am against the kind of novel that emphasises hopelessness as the only truth about the human condition.

Very few of the stories I put in my novel are made up; it's how I deepened them and linked them that was the tricky part. I knew that there would be a love story about how a depressed American woman working in London gets a new man in love with her - Katie is there partly to provide comedy - but I had no idea how to link in my absurd political magazine, the Rambler, where she works with the main plot until quite late on. The detective story took longest to get right. I knew there had to be one because of the architectonic Victorian novel structure, but I also knew that I didn’t want to have the police involved. Having Polly find out what happened to her missing au pair seems obvious now, but it wasn’t for about three years.  We had a serial killer decapitating his victims into the canal just down the road. If you live in London there is just so much stuff. That's why I am fed up with historical fiction. The way we live right now is what's really interesting, exciting and urgent. 

I really groped my way forward over the seven years Hearts and Minds took to write. One thing I did discover was that if I kept each chapter to no more than 2000 words (six pages) then it kept up a kind of steady beat of tension. Once I found that, and switched viewpoints in each chapter, I found I had a kind of dance between my five main characters. I think of it now as a piece of music.

As you know we are devil for the detail here so I'm afraid we need the lowdown on your writing day. Must the windows be sparkling and the dog groomed before you can settle to write; computer, vintage Remington or Pukka Pad (pencil or fountain pen? If roller-ball please don't tell us, we don't like those), special writing jumper or ahem woolly socks (be truthful now, we won't tell anyone)

My working day is bounded by three things, getting the children to school and back, and walking the dog and cooking supper.

We get up at 6.45 in order for my daughter to get the school bus from Highgate to North London Collegiate (a fiercely feminist intellectual day school for girls.) The first forty minutes of each day in term time are pretty much as described in my novel, except that unlike Polly I have a lovely husband who lays the table before going to work at 7.15. He’s a high-powered economist in the City (and no, not the kind responsible for the recession, though he saw it coming long before most) who doesn’t reappear until 8.30. I stopped having an au pair three years ago, as soon as I was mended enough to bend at the waist...so it’s me rushing around and finding kit at the last moment.

The really nice bit of my day is walking son and dog round Hampstead Heath, testing him on Latin and Greek before he goes to Highgate school while dreaming about whatever book I’m writing. Even in winter, before dawn, the Heath is what keeps me sane – it’s a bit of almost-countryside, full of woods, birds, bluebells etc but with a nice cafe and the wonderful art collection (Vermeer, Rembrandt) at Kenwood House as well. On the drive home, I listen to either Radio Three or the Today programme, switching between stations if irritated.

I’d rather do anything than write, so when back I do about an hour of housework, read the paper, try not to eat a second breakfast, open emails, and then by 10 am start working. Once a month I meet up with one of my best friends, also a novelist, at a cafe called Kalender and we talk ferociously about writing over coffee. I write on a lap-top with a curvy keyboard – which is what you need if you have RSI – but I also write with a Waterman fountain pen. I dread getting arthritis, so take cod liver oil and glucosamine...it seems to help, like stretching and swimming. But writing always takes a physical toll of my hands.

One other thing I do is take notes when people ring me up. If I’m having an interesting conversation or hear a phrase that sounds good, I instantly write it down. I also keep a diary every day. Sometimes it’s just about the weather, occasionally it’s about politics or personal preoccupations but mostly it’s about other people – their problems, quirks, virtues, failings, hopes, blind spots, charms etc. I try to see people in the round, always, and to find patterns in behaviour. Some quirks and remarks do find their way into novels, but not whole people. I was extremely upset twelve years ago to be threatened with a libel case by an old boyfriend over a novel called A Vicious Circle, which had Penguin drop the book just before publication (it was then published by Fourth Estate for a much bigger advance). I create my characters for years before writing them; they live in a kind of parallel universe to this one.

I write 10-1, 2-3.30; collect my son and walk the dog on the way, then 4.30-6.30. Over lunch, I read through some of the 100 children’s books that get sent to me each week for the Times, and choose what to review. It’s a responsibility I take very seriously because I think children deserve only the best, and yet it’s often hard to select because we’re living through an extraordinary flowering of children’s literature.

My most precious piece of equipment in writing apart from my lap-top and pen are a pair of thick, green, hairy, thermal socks from M&S. Writing is a bit like falling asleep - you can’t do it if your feet aren’t warm! I also swear by Twinings ginger and lemon tea, and a handful of Brazil nuts when stuck. When really stuck, a whole bar of Divine milk chocolate is essential.

I write in a small moss-green study overlooking the top bit of my garden, so I can only see lime trees and three huge abutilon bushes which have violet flowers coincidentally the same colour as my blinds and bookcases. On the wall in front of me is a Keep Calm and Carry On poster, and a calendar from a children’s publisher. I’ve also got a collection of eight framed engravings by Gustav Dore of fairytale scenes (bought very cheaply twenty years ago in Madrid). The one I most want by him I don’t have, which is Little Red Riding Hood talking to the Wolf; but I’ve got various others, like Cinderella being fitted with the glass slipper, Bluebeard’s wife opening his treasure chamber and Puss in Boots telling lies to peasants, and tricking the ogre. I love Puss in Boots more than any other fairy-tale character because he’s a liar who makes his lies come true – which is what novelists do, in a way.

At the end of the day, it’s all family stuff – cooking, getting my children wound down and my husband perked up, running baths for them, watching a bit of TV and then getting everyone to sleep by 10.30. My daughter is doing GCSEs and insomniac, so on a bad night she’s creaking overhead until 2 am. My dog (Lucky, a Cavalier King Charles spaniel of exquisite beauty and  temperament) is very good at knowing just when to defuse stress with a full session of tickling, massaging and comforting. Lots of writers suffer from depression, and keep cats, which I think makes depression worse (because cats are the only creatures more self-centred than authors); dogs make you much more active and cheerful. The only thing is, they do snore.

Who must we read? Your greatest literary influences?

Reading: Anything that interests, moves, excites, amuses or instructs, I suppose. Read newspapers! Not to read one is to miss out on all the small and fascinating stories as well as the big, boring ones from TV. Read anything that makes you more thoughtful, kinder, brighter, braver and more able to enjoy life. Newspapers have a vile, seedy, spiteful side, but they are also our best weapon against sluggishness and thuggery.

My main influences as a novelist are probably Dickens, Balzac, Trollope, Austen and George Eliot, with a bit of Mrs Gaskell and Gissing too. EM Forster, Angela Carter and Alison Lurie are all well up there, but so are a host of other writers. I love classic detective stories (Conan Doyle, Walter Moseley, Ross Macdonald, Barbara Vine, PD James); I also love good SF (Ursula le Guin, Robert Heinlen and a lot of newer ones writing for teens like Neil Shusterman), and popular science (Matt Ridley, Steve Jones, Richard Dawkins). I love romantic comedies (PG Wodehouse, Eva Ibbotson and Stella Gibbons). I adore children’s books, from picture books (Sendak, Burningham, Quentin Blake) to novels (Sally Gardner, Michelle Paver, Philip Pullman, Anthony Horowitz). I re-read fairy-tales often, and among my most precious collections are the Andrew Lang colour fairy-tale books still printed by Dover; I will read almost anything by or about Shakespeare; I love certain poets, especially Keats. If I could go back in time and save just one person with antibiotics, it would be Keats, because I’m sure that he would eventually have written novels, and great ones. 

dgr asks...Helen Garner - The Spare Room and prize draw copies ( UK only)

I am really delighted to welcome Helen Garner to the 'dovegreyreader asks...' armchair and the gentle light of the standard lamp to answer our usual three questions about her book The Spare Room which I enjoyed so much last year and published in paperback this week by Canongate. We've done another plump up of the cushions and the virtual Devon cream tea is to hand and so now over to Helen.

Helen, you once suggested an image for writing that sits very comfortably with us here at dovegreyreader,

"like trying to make a patchwork quilt look seamless. A novel is made up scraps of our own lives and bits of other people's, and things we think of in the middle of the night and whole notebooks full of randomly collected details."

and I wonder if you could talk about this in relation to the writing of The Spare Room. Where did you find the fabrics and how did you piece together this wonderful book?

A friend whom I dearly loved did come to stay with me while she underwent alternative treatments for terminal cancer. I do live next door to my daughter and her family. The real-life clinic to which my friend entrusted her body did turn out to be an outfit of the most bare-faced shonkiness. The treatments were useless. She refused to acknowledge this and I tried to force her to. The deepest parts of our characters clashed. Our friendship began to crack under the strain. I couldn’t last the distance. My friend died.
So the fabrics of the story come from actual experience. I didn’t know what sort of quilt I was going to be able to stitch together, but I knew that if I didn’t make something out of it, I was going to go crazy.
My first few books, in the 1970s and 80s, had been novels or short stories. But then for twelve years or so I was married to another novelist. Gradually, and unconsciously, I shifted off our dangerous common turf into non-fiction. I enjoyed this. It seemed to suit me, and I had some success at it.
 I thought I could write The Spare Room as straight memoir, giving everyone their own real-life names and sticking to the dates and the literal development of events. But as soon as I sat down to start, it became disobedient. It had a life of its own, and it went bounding away from me.
The quilt metaphor has got left behind!
The shackles of non-fiction, which had been clamped round my ankles for fifteen years, fell off with a clang. I saw that if I thought of it as a novel, I would be free to compress the story, and trim away what was inessential. I would be able to create scenes about religion and psychology and their comfort, or their failure to comfort. I could bring to it any amount of material that had been haunting me in other contexts for years. In short, I could tell this story any way I damn well liked.
I gave the narrator my own first name for one major reason: my fantasy of myself as a decent person took a terrible battering while I was trying to care for my friend, and I’ve tried hard not to sentimentalise this, or to go easy on myself. I wanted to own up to the unattractive effects of caring for a dying person, the unheroic resentments, the impatience and anger, the bossiness and the bullying. I hope that in reality I’m slightly nicer than the Helen in the book. She’s a monster of anger at times. There’s a lot of the Head Prefect in Helen. Awful. The real Nicola would laugh about her, I know -- she was such a funny woman. Before our friendship turned into a power struggle, we were always staggering about in fits of laughter. I wanted to get that side of us into the story, and I think I did. The worst thing about someone you love dying is that once they’re gone, the language of laughter you created together is now spoken by only one person in the world -- you.
It took me about nine months, that wonderfully symbolic number, to write the book. Strangely I remember it as a calm and very happy time, though I spent a fair bit of it lying on the carpet in my workroom bawling till my nose went red. But now I don’t only miss the real Nicola. I miss the Nicola in the book as well. I’ve lost both of them. Even that sad thought makes me laugh, when I’m not crying over it. It reminds me of how I felt watching that movie Tootsie, where Dustin Hoffman plays a man disguised as a woman. When the trick is discovered and Tootsie no longer exists, I remember how empty I felt, even though it was only a story. As if anything is ever ‘only a story’!

We are hopelessly inquisitive here and we love to know all the details about your writing day, must the dog be walked and the taps polished before you can sit down, pen (fountain or biro ) or computer, special desk, special room, special place?

I never understand how anyone can work at home. There are so many worthy displacement activities available. You put on a load of washing, which means that in half an hour you have to get up from the desk to hang it on the line. On the way along the hall you see dust and can’t go back to work till you’ve run the vacuum cleaner over the carpet. And there’s that packet of biscuits that will go stale if you don’t finish them today, etc. So I rent an office in an old building two suburbs away. I can pedal over there in about 20 minutes, or take the tram if I’m lazy. I try to get here by 10am. It’s a small, quite shabby room without a view. Table, chair, lamp, bookshelf, sky-blue filing cabinet. Computer, printer. No phone, no internet. Mat, pillow, cotton blanket for a nap after lunch. Jug to make me drink more water. A lot of pencils. A mechanical sharpener. Dictionary. Thesaurus. Scissors. Hand cream. No one else has ever come here and I hope no one ever will. Sometimes I go for months without working, and of course even when I don’t use the space I have to keep forking out the rent; but just thinking that the office exists makes the rest of my life possible.

Finally, who must we read, your favourite authors and books, those greatest influences.

I’m not sure why I can never pull together a convincing answer to this question. But here’s what comes to mind right now:

Everything by Janet Malcolm. But particularly The Journalist and the Murderer,
Everything by Gitta Sereny.
Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina
Raymond Carver: Collected Stories
Henry Handel Richardson: The Getting of Wisdom
Marion Milner (aka Joanna Field): An Experiment in Leisure
William Thackeray: The Rose and the Ring
Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse
Elizabeth Jolley: My Father’s Moon

My sincere and grateful thanks to Helen for such a fascinating dovegreyreader asks... and names in comments because there are three prize draw copies of the new paperback edition of The Spare Room ready and waiting for three lucky winners (apologies, UK only)

 

dovegreyreader asks...Stella Duffy

Enormous thanks to Stella Duffy for braving the plumped up cushions, the glare of the standard lamp, the snoring cat, and the scones and lashings of clotted cream to answer our usual sort of questions. You might like to make a pot of tea yourself and settle down to a lovely read and do help yourself to a scone while you're here.

Stella I have been completely amazed by what I have called 'your sleight of pen', how you took me through the story of The Room of Lost Things, built up, backtracked, added detail, moved on, then a few steps back again, if this makes sense can you give us an idea of quite how it's done?
If it doesn't make sense we're in trouble so would you like to tell us about anything else to do with this wonderfully engaging book? Where it came from...what you wanted to achieve ....why a health visitor...oh, in fact just tell us everything.

Sleight of pen – nice phrase, I like that. Well, it’s exactly as you describe – I write a first draft, and at the point I start writing it I usually only know beginning/middle/end (maybe!) and a few points in between. And none of those very clearly. In writing the first draft the story begins to show itself – it’s almost impossible to explain this without sounding a bit esoteric and hippy, and I really don’t want to, as I think there is far too much mystification out there about the process of writing (and far too many people making money out of teaching people it’s harder and more muse/art-led than it is, I much prefer to talk about writing as a craft not an art) BUT I do feel that story is a bit like a river – it will find it’s own way. Plot (and character and sometimes style) are the things we use to let the story find itself/show itself/be revealed. So that’s the first draft, which is usually quite a lot longer than the subsequent ones and pretty messy, and can take anything from six months to a couple of years, but – hopefully, once it’s done – has the requisite elements to make up a story. Then the real work begins – backtracking, removing, re-placing, adding detail (in the case of this book removing quite a lot of unnecessary detail!), shifting characters, (again in the case of this book) amalgamating characters … for me, this part can take another two or three or more drafts.

I have had people ask me why I just don’t plan it all out in the first place and save myself this trouble – but that doesn’t work for me. Or it hasn’t in the past, am sure things might change. All writing is about making choices/decisions for characters/plot, I prefer to make those choices as I go along in the first draft because it feels more organic (whether it is or not, who knows), it  certainly feels freer and I’m less likely to get bored! It also allows for the occasional eureka/magic moment to slip in and, in my experience, planning things out in a very detailed manner, cuts the possibility of making mistakes – and I often find it’s the ‘mistakes’, the things that don’t quite work and need attention to make them work (or cutting entirely!), that allows some magic to happen. The magic of getting it wrong and finding a way to make it right. It does mean a lot of work in the re-writing, but that’s fine with me. I like that bit.

In working on The Room of Lost Things, because I’d originally imagined it as a novel with Robert and Akeel at the centre and up to sixteen characters spinning out from them (a sort of cartwheel, where they were the centre, the other characters the spokes, and then the macro-story of the place the outer rim), I had a lot of characters to cut/amalgamate. What I found – or rather, what was pointed out to me! – is that no matter how much I wanted to write a ‘true’ novel (ie, all fiction, but feeling like truth) that can become boring, it can become too meandering, and – at the other extreme – a single character, who pops into the shop just once for a few minutes, and to whom I give three great pages, is bound to make the reader want to know more. In reality, that character would never come back to Robert’s life. In a novel, if it’s a good character and the reader cares, then of course they must come back or the reader feels cheated. Basically, I think I wanted to try to be as ‘real’ as possible, allowing for dead ends and go-nowhere characters and the truth that all of us will meet people who matter, but sometimes so briefly we don’t notice it until later, and maybe even never see them again. Now, either I wasn’t good enough – am not yet good enough – to do this in a novel (and that’s fine, because I hope to write at least another eleven books and ideally learn more as I go along) – or it’s simply not possible in a book. Maybe possible in a film, but not in a book. We’ll see. Maybe one day I’ll try again.

In terms of where did it come from, I’ve said this several times now, but I assure you it’s entirely true – Faisal, the lovely man who owned the dry cleaner’s shop where this one is (sort of) located, I have fudged the geography of the actual junction a little – once said to me, after seeing one of my wife’s plays (she’s primarily a theatre and radio writer) : “You should write about a dry cleaner, we know people’s secrets.” And of course I started to think about how and why – the things left in pockets, the hems taken up or down, the stains. The stains! Like all my ideas, it sat with me for quite a while before I even thought I knew what it could be, but it was always going to be based in Loughborough Junction, and always going to be a “London book”. I love London, I love living in London (apologies to the London-haters), and I particularly love South London (I was born here, though I grew up in New Zealand) and I mind that North Londoners are so rude about South (all that divide is just weird to those of us who didn’t grow up here), and even more so that my own part (yes LJ is real!) and this whole swathe between Brixton and Camberwell and down to Herne Hill has such a bad rep in the press. It’s just a place - there are good people and bad people everywhere. And no, we don’t have a posh café – but we do have more nail bars than you could shake a stick at! Faisal sold the shop earlier this year and I kind of like that, miss chatting to him every now and then, but I quite like that even the shop I thought of as Robert’s shop has now been reincarnated - as a nail bar/hairdresser!

OK, some quick bits about the characters, as you ask -

Helen’s name is Helen Goff. Helen Lyndon Goff is the real name of P L Travers, the Australian who invented the most famous nanny of them all, Mary Poppins. (I like this stuff, the character note no-one ever knows unless you tell them!)

Marylin – the health worker! She’s a health worker because I was looking for a job that someone could do where they went into the lives of other people (as Robert also does), and took the job of a friend, Sarah Martin, who is a health visitor (also the wife of Pete Ayrton who, at Serpent’s Tail, published my crime novels). I also have several friends in mixed-race relationships, and have had conversations with people about their children being (apparently, in a world where colour tends to be the first thing most people see) a different race to them – white mothers with mixed-race children for eg, and about how that impacts on a mother-child relationship, the desire from a white mother that her child should not suffer racism, and the awareness that she will not be able to protect her child from an unkind world. I wanted to touch on that in the Audrey-Marylin relationship (and I did so a lot more in earlier drafts, but it was one of the points that was whittled back …)

Patricia Ryan. I love Patricia. I know no-one like her, have never lived with anyone with Alzheimer’s or dementia, I just really wanted to write about it, from her point of view, knowing what was happening to her. It also gave a nice added side to Robert’s character, his concern for her.

The Poet of the 345 – I once heard a man sing on this bus. Once. I made him into a character who was practically resident on it! And anyway, a bus that goes all the way from Peckham to South Kensington? That’s just a great route!

Dan and Charlie – the witnesses who watch the world around them, named for Dan Leno and Charlie Chaplin (who did both live and work in the area), the watchers.

Hmm, I’m just thinking about getting these answers quoted back at me, some time later in another interview – and it strikes me that this is what I think about the book now, today, what I remember about making it now – when actually I was writing it some time ago now. So I might well answer slightly differently another time. But this is definitely very close to what I think and why I think I wrote these things!!

We are sticklers for the detail here at dovegreyreader and we like to know about your writing day, must the bath be clean and the stairs hoovered before you can sit down to write, are you a 'fountain pen and inker' or a 'tip-tap-typer', the paper...does it need to be special, favourite writing shoes/jumper, these are the things we absolutely need to know.

OK, well … I get up. About 8 ish most days. Not often much earlier, very rarely later than 9am. As I have a Buddhist practice, I try to chant most mornings, I don’t always manage it, but things often seem to go better when I do – Buddhism (like writing perhaps) is a daily practice. It works better with discipline! Then I’ll eat something (toast or muesli – I make good muesli. I make good bread too actually. Very fond of brazil nut bread made with spelt flour. Mmm.) And then I go to my office. We’re both writers and, after seven years in one bedroom flats (in which Shelley wrote on the laptop in the kitchen and I wrote on the computer in the bedroom), we finally bought a three bedroomed house. We were hoping to have children, they didn’t come, so we now have an office each. I go to mine, she goes to hers. At this point, all the manuals/how to write books say I should be sitting down to work. Sadly not. Now I check emails, check facebook, maybe write a bit of my blog (I don’t do it every day, just when moved to), I fiddle, faddle, doodle, make notes, do interviews (like this). I listen to Radio 4 on and off up to the end of Woman’s Hour and sometimes a little beyond. I might edit a bit. I might do some work on one of the many other projects I seem to have on the go at once – a short story, an article, something for the play I’m directing later in the year, if it’s sunny I might do some work in the garden - I MIGHT even get some actual writing done. But most often writing is what happens in the afternoon. I long ago realised I do my best creative work between about 2 and 7pm. There’s no point fighting that, so now I try very hard to make sure that time of day is free (tricky if you’re trying to go out in the evening, or if people will insist on meeting for lunch, but I’m getting a bit better – not very! – at saying no and trying to keep that time clear) and then I work. Of course, all the rest of it is work too. The writing I’m doing in the morning for other projects is also work. The production stuff for the play I’m directing is also work. The answering interview questions (like this!) is also work. But the thing I think is my ‘real’ work, is the making of books. And I do that best in the afternoon. Always, if at all possible, directly on to screen. I can’t type properly, but am very fast with four of my fingers now, and – as I edit so very much – writing by hand followed by typing always feels like a real imposition to me. I started writing books on computer (an old Amstrad back then, took me seven hours to print up my first novel!), so I guess it’s what I’m used to. I can do it if I have to, I just prefer not to.

If I had my way I would work like this seven days a week. I almost never take whole weekends off, maybe one of the days, rarely both, and haven’t had a ‘proper’ holiday (as in doing no work at all) in many many years. Partly I don’t want to leave my work for as long as it takes to have a holiday – partly (as I discovered to my cost when I had breast cancer nine years ago) there’s no sick pay or holiday pay for freelancers! Not only do I want to keep working, I actually need to keep working. Lucky I like it!

As for cleaning, well, yes, the house does need to be clean too. And having cleaned houses for rich people all through my university years and well beyond, we don’t have a cleaner. I’m not sure I’d ever want someone to know as much about me as I knew – and still remember – about the people I cleaned for! I like a clean, clear, blank chunk of hours to work in, with nothing hanging over me. The fact that this almost never happens, I rarely have one day a week like this, let alone a whole week, has nothing to do with the truth that it’s still my preferred way of working!

Oh, and I prefer silence. Perfect blissful silence. That writing in cafés thing is certainly not me.

Apart from your books which of course we will all read now, who else must we read...sorry I think I've pinched Janet Frame off your list but please add her anyway.

Janet Frame then, naturally. The poems as well as the fiction. And while we’re on New Zealand women, how about Marilyn Duckworth and Elizabeth Knox (The Vintner’s Luck is really lovely). Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s The Settler’s Cookbook. We bought a copy at her launch today and it looks great, some of the material (having flicked through) is from her solo show which I saw and loved last year and I always like a good cookbook with stories. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving) and Riddley Walker (Russell Hoban) are still among my favourite novels ever. Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy is a work of genius and disturbingly under-lauded. My friend Serena Mackesy’s Hold My Hand is a great piece of contemporary du Maurier-esque suspense. Which reminds me, I read du Maurier’s The Scapegoat last year – really liked it, not sure why it’s not better known.
And that’s enough to be going on with for this week, perhaps? 

Sunday Salon - Party invite

One of the great and pleasurable reading experiences for me last year was my Daphne du Maurier revival. Sparked off by Justine Picardie's book Daphne and that was me up and running on a lovely read of some of Daphne's books I'd missed. I read for the first time The Scapegoat , The Loving Spirit, The Parasites and then re-read My Cousin Rachel and took in the very revealing volume of Daphne's letters to Oriel Malet too.
Then there was the Du Maurier LitFest down in Fowey, the Daphne weekend at Port Eliot and the event I did with Justine at Ways With Words at Dartington.
So bearing in mind that it is the dovegreyreader scribbles third blog birthday this week and not wishing to repeat last year's virtual party where certain people who shall be nameless but are called Sally :-) were sick on the blog carpet and had tantrums, I decided that we'd be grown up this year and invite a special guest.
This has all worked out perfectly because on the week that the paperback edition of Daphne is published I am delighted that Justine has agreed to do dovegreyreader asks... answering my usual nosey questions and will also pop in and out of comments during the day to chat and answer any questions you may have. Those who read Justine's blog will know that life has bowled her a few googlies of late so I am extra grateful to her for being here. We plan to plump up the cushions extra plumply and keep a steady flow of tea, scones and cream and of course a virtual birthday cake plus an added bonus, Rocky has agreed to be on virtual hand and purr contentedly at her feet. This usually rapidly converts to a very loud cat apnoea - induced, ninety decibel volume bout of snoring as he eventually rolls over and falls asleep, but we can but try to create the right ambience.
Bloomsbury have also kindly offered prize draw copies of Daphne so we'll be having ourselves a wonderful Daphne du Maurier happy blogbirthday Wednesday.

dovegreyreader asks... (and also gets some prize-draw copies)

It's time to plump up the cushions and focus the brilliant glare of the standard lamp on a writer once more, make a pot of tea, lashings of scones and clotted cream and today it is my pleasure to flip out a napkin onto the knee of Elizabeth Baines whose book of short stories, Balancing On The Edge of the World quite swept me off my feet.
Elizabeth Baines is a writer of prose fiction and prize-winning plays for radio and stage. Her short story collection, Balancing on the Edge of the World, was published by Salt in 2007 and was long-listed for the Frank O'Connor International Award for the Short Story 2008. Her novel, Too Many Magpies, will come from Salt in late 2009. Elizabeth was born in South Wales and now lives in Manchester. She has been a teacher and is also an occasional actor. She writes the critical-commentary blog Fictionbitch  and also has her own author blog

When I first wrote about Balancing On the Edge of the World I envisaged you hunched over a magnifying glass, the finest, most delicate of brushes in your hand, painting exquisite little miniatures, which all suggests observation of the minute details in life, is this how you envisage what you are doing? 

This notion of a lens is a good one, but as I said on Sarah Salway’s blog  , I don’t think of what I’m doing as focusing ON tiny details so much as hoping in each story to use some detail – an image or object, some small aspect of life or a tiny incident – as a lens itself, a telescopic one in fact, to look outwards at some bigger picture.
Take for instance one of the stories in the book, ‘A Glossary of Bread’. This tells the story of a girl’s itinerant childhood, and it does it by structuring the story around a list of dictionary definitions of the different kinds of bread the family encountered as they moved from place to place. On the surface, therefore, the story may seem to be focused on bread or definitions of bread, but what it’s REALLY about is the bigger, more important things that are revealed in the process: a history of existential unhappiness and domestic violence and in the end a deeper history behind that, one of racial/religious persecution. The same notions, racial prejudice and domestic violence, along with class prejudice, are the real substance of ‘Star Things’, but they are revealed only gradually through the unknowing perspective of a small child who is focused on closer, more concrete details as she follows her friend into the wood in search of flowers, the ‘star things’. ‘Who’s Singing?’, the story of two neighbours, an opera singer and a Professor of Medicine, appears to concentrate on suburban and domestic things, the gardens of the two neighbours and the domestic routine of the hospital where the Professor works and where the opera singer must go for an operation. But it does so ironically, to show in the end the very uncosy, even fatal effects of fame and vanity and academic self-absorption. In ‘Going Back’, which features a family walk in the dunes, the details of the environment conjure up the deep unease at the heart of this apparently idyllic scenario and the potential savage unraveling of the family, all with hints of environmental disaster and a vaster history of changing climates and seas. 

This technique, looking at the big things behind the little things and concentrating some huge idea into something concrete and vivid, is something which I think the short story as a form can do brilliantly (and which it shares with poetry), and indeed is its great strength. For me it’s especially useful, as one of the things I’m constantly trying to do in my writing is to explore the way we can gloss over terrible truths, and to expose the unacknowledged undercurrents in our lives.

 

Novel v Short Story? Is there a defining moment in the process when you know you have one or the other in front of you or do you set out with only one format in mind? In other words could you tell us a bit about the writing process and we do always like to know if it's a fountain pen (make, ink colour etc!) raven quills or a laptop involved, special slippers, Balzacian white robe and lots of coffee, must have been for a ten mile walk before can sit down to write,  etc etc. 

I always know immediately whether an idea is going to be a short story or a novel. A short story usually comes as a single image or phrase, very intense and vivid (the lens!), and with the sense of a single clear idea behind it (the bigger picture) (though I won’t always know yet what that idea is). With a novel, I’ll have a more conscious knowledge of the overall unifying idea, but it will also be an altogether more complex package of images and ideas, with the sense of lots of other sub-ideas and extra-ideas and story paths to be discovered along the way. 

As for what I wear to write the things! Well, it would be nice to be able to paint a glamorous picture, but I have to admit that mostly I wear my grandmother’s old homemade jumper in mustard and navy-blue stripes. In fact, Lynne, as an expert knitter you may be interested to know that my grandmother was a keen knitter, but also an absolutely terrible one. When she died I inherited a pile of her stripy jumpers, and every single one had dropped stitches which I had to sew up, except this mustard and navy-blue one. This jumper was her triumph. I really love it. It’s short and wide, as she was, but it’s very cosy; it makes me feel like a busy bee, and of course it reminds me of her and keeps me in touch with my childhood self, which as I was saying last week on my visit to Vanessa Gebbie’s blog  is a really important thing for a writer. I also have my grandmother’s beige-and-russet patterned carpet on the floor of my study, with a bare patch on one edge where the moths got it under her piano, and I can never look at that patch without thinking of her house in the village near Bridgend where I come from. My grandmother was a Hopkin, and she claimed to be descended from the family of the plasterer-bard Will Hopkin. I don’t know the truth of this – though possibly every Hopkin around Bridgend is descended from the same family! – but in any case she was both rather proud of this and yet somehow at the same time took it for granted, so I grew up with the idea that writing was both a wonderful and a natural thing for an ordinary person to do.  

I have to sit at the window: for some reason I need to gaze out while I’m thinking. I have never, ever written fiction straight onto the computer – although I write everything else that way nowadays. I write fiction in longhand on Pukka Pads with a Silver Cross fountain pen and Lamy ink, and if I run out of Pukka Pads or mislay my pen I go berserk and think I can’t write. Which is of course really stupid, because before there were Pukka Pads and before my partner John bought me the pen one Christmas I wrote on ordinary pads with any old biros to hand. But Pukka Pads are really beautifully smooth, and I am now so used to the particular feel of that pen in my hand, and the flow of ink from the nib, and they are now so bound up with that psychological process of sinking into a story… Mad, I know, and if all the pens and paper disappeared from the world, clearly I’d just adapt. 

As if you haven't guessed we are indeed very nosey here at dovegreyreader scribbles so we would love to know which writers inspire you and who MUST we read? 

WG Sebald’s Austerlitz is probably the book I’d say I recently found most inspiring, but my long-term inspirations include Nabokov, F Scott Fitzgerald and Margaret Atwood. Your inspirations tend to change, I find: when I first started writing I found Graham Greene very inspiring, but I don’t any longer, perhaps because I’ve so long ago digested the narrative techniques I found in him. I find Will Self very inspiring: he’s so fizzing with ideas and verbal energy I can’t help but be infected and want to rush off and write something of my own, however different, every time I read him. I haven’t read Tom McCarthy’s The Remainder; it’s beside my bed waiting, but I have already found just glancing at it inspiring. 

Sebald is one I’d urge everyone to read. Also Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader and Richard Yates – not because of the recent films, these last two: we read The Reader and Yates’s Revolutionary Road a couple of years ago in the reading group  I belong to, and they were unanimously voted our best reads so far in five years of monthly meetings.

My thanks to Elizabeth for polishing off all those scones and the cream and also for calling me an expert knitter (some may question that) and my thanks also to Salt Books who have offered three copies of Balancing on the Edge of the World to three lucky winners here, names in comments and the cat who didn't get the cream will oblige with the prize draw.

dovegreyreader asks...

I did one or two dovegreyreader asks... interviews on here a while ago and  may do more now that I have more time because they do take a fair bit of planning. But it helps if someone else plans it for you and so my thanks to Salt Publishing who have paid all Charles Lambert's expenses for him to stop over on his Scent of Cinnamon Something Rich and Strange blog tour and take a seat in the virtual dovegreyreader armchair (yes Adele Geras and Ralph McTell have sat there before him) enjoy a virtual pot of tea and answer a few questions, which were inevitably of that nosey dovegreyreader variety rather than the deep and meaningful literary variety.
I was completely enamoured with Charles's novel Little Monsters and have likewise enjoyed  The Scent of Cinnamon immensely. The first story in the collection rates as one of most startlingly clever short stories I have read in a long time and I was lured from one to the next with great ease. So in between sips of tea and Devon scones with lashings of clotted cream Charles did manage to answer my questions  and has now sensibly left to go and have his cholesterol tested, but he has also very kindly offered a signed prize-draw copy of The Scent of Cinnamon and Salt will send another copy out so two winners, names in comments.

Elements of grief and loss surface frequently in the stories I've read. Can you elaborate on that?

 Well, you’ll probably be surprised to discover that, before you asked me this question, I hadn’t even noticed that the fact of death crops up in the first four stories in The Scent of Cinnamon. I certainly was! So much for self-awareness… What’s more, to my further surprise, of the sixteen stories in the book, over a third are directly involved with death, while another third deal with emotional loss of one kind or another – relations breaking up, families falling apart, malicious theft. I’m not sure what to make of this. I see myself as a fairly cheerful glass-half-full sort of person. I’ve also led a blessedly unscathed life. Apart from losing a dearly loved aunt over ten years ago, my only personal occasion for grief was when my father died in 2006, a month away from his 101st birthday; I must also be one of the very few gay men of my generation not to have lost a close friend to AIDS. So I’m clearly missing something here.

Looking at the stories more closely from this angle, though, two things strike me. The first is that, although death plays such a central role, it isn’t always synonymous with loss, or grief. On at least one occasion, it’s a source of joy, on another of release, on another of remorse. Ironically, a few days after receiving these questions, I read a comment by Geoff Dyer, a writer I greatly admire, who says he avoids stories in which death is used instrumentally. I assume he’s referring to literary fiction here, because genre fiction without death is like apple pie without the cheese, as my father used to say. So the second thing is that the stories in which I use death all tend to have genre elements in them: horror, fantasy, murder mystery. So, yes, these imagined deaths are instrumental, and one of the things they might be helping me to do is test the ground, to see what it’s like, within the security of genre writing. Maybe I’m using the stories in the same way the little boy in Girlie uses the pillows in his bed, to make myself a cocoon against the reality of it.

Novel v Short Story? Is there a defining moment in the process when you know you have one or the other in front of you or do you set out with only one format in mind? In other words could you tell us a bit about the writing process and we do always like to know if it's a fountain pen (make, ink colour etc!) raven quills or a laptop involved, special slippers, Balzacian white robe and lots of coffee, must have been for a ten mile walk before can sit down to write,  etc etc.

With one exception, I think I always know what I’m doing when I start to write, if only in the sense of knowing that I’m starting a novel or short story – the rest of it is often a complete mystery until the piece is finished and a partial one long after that! I may only have a sentence, but at least I know what it’s the first sentence of! The exception was a short autobiographical piece that just growed and growed until I had a - non-autobiographical - novel on my hands (not Little Monsters – that was destined to be a novel from the first sentence). The actual writing process, though, is pretty much the same. I sit down in front of my computer, two fingers poised above the keyboard, and stare hopelessly at the handful of words on the otherwise blank screen until more words start to come, heroically resisting the temptation to play a quick game of Spider before I carry on. I’m a great one for buying new pens and slick black notebooks with the intention of recording ideas, plotting narrative developments, and so on, but the actual writing goes on at the computer. I tend to get it right – or what I think is right - before moving on, so that by the time I’ve done my thousand words – my daily limit - they’re pretty much the way I want them. I’ve tried to throw it all down and then revise but I just can’t do it; I feel as though I’m building on sand.

As far as routine goes, I would love to be able to devote, say, four hours each morning to writing, followed by a leisurely lunch and an afternoon of fine-honing the morning’s output, but I just don’t have the time. I teach and edit full-time, so the writing gets squeezed in where it will fit. I finished my last novel in early morning bursts of activity, getting up at five to write for a couple of hours before the normal day began. Right now, I’m working on the new one in fits and bursts between editing reports on camel management in Saudi Arabia and writing end-of-term exams. I would love not to have to do this.

The one thing I can’t do is write long-hand. I was given my first typewriter – a big black Olympia - when I was about eleven (by my much-loved aunt – see above), and I’ve been two-finger typing ever since. It broke my heart to give up my powder-blue Olivetti Lettera 22 for my first (Olivetti) computer, but I soon adapted. Seeing the words as though they were printed gives me the distance I need to judge them, or pretend to myself that’s what I’m doing, and I’m a great one for changing the format of a text to give myself a fresh idea of what I’ve produced. My hand-writing is just too me.

Oh yes, I often write in pyjamas, dressing gown and an old pair of Birkenstocks (as, indeed, I’m doing now), and I’m perfectly capable of getting up and working for hours without tea, coffee, or any other stimulant, either because I’m too lazy to make it myself (Giuseppe’s theory) or because I’m just too creative to care (mine).

As if you haven't guessed we are indeed very nosey here at dovegreyreader scribbles so we would love to know which writers inspire you and who MUST we read?

The writers I love and the writers who inspire me don’t always overlap. As a reader, I tend to discover a writer and read everything, then move on. In the past few years I’ve done this to William Maxwell, Lorrie Moore, Geoff Dyer, Penelope Fitzgerald, James Hamilton-Paterson, Sybille Bedford. I had an Anthony Powell period, and I’m still having an Annie Proulx one, and long may it last, and the same goes for Tobias Wolff. I’d recommend all these writers as must-reads. I also have a list of writers I can’t bear, but I’ll keep that to myself! As far as being influenced goes, I’m not sure how much any of these people has affected the way I write, although they’ve certainly changed the way I see the world, which is what inspiration is all about. In any case, inspiration and influence are different things…

My thanks to Charles Lambert for stopping by and don't forget, names in comments for those prize-draw copies of The Scent of Cinnamon.
In February we will be plumping up the cushions and inviting Elizabeth Baines to sit in the armchair beneath the illuminating, all-seeing spotlight of the dovegreyreader standard lamp and answer more penetrating questions on her book of short stories Balancing on the Edge of the World and her writing life.

On World Book Day dovegreyreader asks...Adele Geras

HAPPY WORLD BOOK DAY EVERYONE! Like many others, Adele Geras has been a source of great encouragement to this health visitor turned book blogger and so, as I said yesterday, I was delighted when she placed herself very sedately in the armchair for dovegreyreader asks...and I will now apologise for what happened next.
It was of course lovely to see Adele wearing the actual Costa Book Awards outfit and, had I known I would have suggested she brought some wellies too.I've yet to find out how to get that slurry-like mud, unique to the countryside, off her gorgeous teal suede shoes.We swear by the washing machine here (and Crocs go in the dishwasher and come out gleaming) but a 60 degree wash in Ariel Bio followed by a 1300rpm spin doesn't seem to have helped.
Things got worse as you'll see because Rocky took a real shine to his visitor and the cat fur just whoosed onto that black dress like iron filings to a magnet, we were busy with the sticky lint roller for ages.Nothing seemed to phase Adele though, not even bookhound in his apron bearing the tea tray.

Always a writer? If not how did it happen and who or what have been the greatest influences on you?

Absolutely not!I am a failed musical actress.
I was going to be someone like Judy Garland/Barbra Streisand till I got married. I was supposed to be a STAR! I spent most of my time at university on stage and appeared in musical reviews twice in the West End . Unfortunately, when I came up to Manchester after my marriage, there were no vacancies for stars, so I became a teacher instead. I taught French in a girls' secondary school. I fell into writing completely by accident. I went in for a competition ( I love competitions!) to write a story for children and though I didn't win, I enjoyed the process so much that I decided to persist with it. It took me about two years to get anything accepted. Influences? My father and my English teachers at school, Miss Godfray and Miss Sturgis. I imagine these two as ghostly presences when I read over anything I've written. They had fierce red pens and excellent judgement, which is a good combination. Thanks to my dad, I can't split an infinitive, never make mistakes like 'between you and I' and NEVER, EVER say 'phenomena' when I'm talking about one thing. I also always put apostrophes in the correct place. Pedantic? Moi?

Is the circulation to your feet OK with Rocky on your lap ? He is quite a phenomena… phenomenal… big cat isn’t he?

Rocky is lovely and I admire him on your blog whenever his photo appears. He's welcome on my lap any time. Almost any cat would be. I'm a great cat lover. I know you're doing tutorials on VW with the estimable Susan Hill but do you know Virginia's remark about Mrs. Gaskell? She said Gaskell wrote as though she had a cat on her lap. I'm not altogether sure whether she meant it as a compliment, but if anyone said it of me, I'd be overjoyed.

An ideal writing day for you...

A day when I get up, longing to continue the scene I've started the day before. I have no errands to run before I can begin. It's straight on to the laptop after breakfast, write for two hours or so and find it brilliant when I read it back, instead of thinking: oh, must do something about that later, or that'll have to be done again from scratch or any of the other, somewhat discouraging things one thinks. By then, it's half past twelve, I've written about 2000 words or so, which is plenty for one day. I then back up my work, close the laptop and take myself off to lunch with a good friend. You don't want to overdo it, right?

Well quite Adele, more scones, more jam, more cream, more tea?

Absolutely, always more of everything like that, which you can tell by looking at me, right? One of my many mottoes is: TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING CAN BE WONDERFUL...that's Mae West. My real top  motto, though, comes from Kaffe Fassett, the Californian knitting and tapestry wizard. Back in the 70s, the cry was always: If in doubt, add twenty more colours.

When you’re not writing…

I read all the time, like Dove Grey herself. I read fast and furiously. I read all sorts of things. I also watch an inordinate amount of tv, which I adore. I love cooking, I go to movies very often and the theatre, the ballet and opera whenever I can.I see my friends. I knit, though not nearly as much as I used to. I've never knitted a sock!

Your finest literary hour...

was the 23rd May, 2001. I was down in Birmingham at a day organized by the library for the children who'd been shadowing the Carnegie medal. This is the premier children's book prize and that year, my novel TROY  was on the shortlist. I was very elated about that. There were several of us there that day, including Philip Pullman and Jamila Gavin and Beverley Naidoo. She was the eventual winner, though Philip and I were joint runners-up with Highly Commendeds. It was a beautiful day, we had a splendid lunch in the Art Gallery ( do you notice a certain LUNCH THEME coming out here? Oh dear!) and best of all, I had to keep leaving the gathering to take calls on my mobile from my agent who was that very day organizing an auction for my first adult novel, Facing the Light. I had never had a book auctioned like this before. The sums I kept hearing about seemed astronomical and the little gifts ( Hodder couriered round some scented candles!) that came with the bids were amazing. At the end of the day, I'd already decided to go with Orion, but it was a heady experience and one I don't expect will ever be repeated. While I was at the Art Gallery I bought an address book and I'm stll using it.It's a reminder of that time.

Did you get a bus home or a stretch limo?

Good old British Rail from Birmingham New Street to Piccadilly.I adore trains

 
The book you most enjoyed writing...

The one I had most fun with was Made in Heaven. I didn't have a single problem with the plot, which worked itself out in a trouble-free way from the beginning. I loved doing the research for it, which involved emails to my pals asking them what their ideal wedding would be and also things like going to Wedding Fairs ( or Fayres, as they are sometimes called) and buying lots of glossy magazines full of STUFF. I didn't take long to write it and it was attended by none of the birth pangs, rewriting, etc that all other novels go through. It seemed to be completely trouble -free and I loved writing it. Another book I greatly enjoyed writing was TROY but that was for another reason. For the first time, I felt that I was tackling something big and in which I could spread myself. It was, I now see, an adult book to all intents and purposes: length, themes, etc, but like a lot of adult books, perfectly fine for teenagers

Recent good reads?

Too many to list, as I've been a judge this year for the Costa Book Award and have read lots of splendid novels. I won't talk about the category winners of that competition but rather about other things I've enjoyed. A lot of them will be familiar to Dove Grey readers, though I haven't gone the Woolf for Dummies route and I've missed out on Niall Williams. Will have to rectify that omission!
Recently, I loved Kate Atkinson's One Good Turn; Dissolution and Dark Fire by CJ Sansom; King Dork by Frank Portman; A Jealous Ghost by A NWilson; and all three thrillers, well known to readers of Dove Grey, by Arnaldur Indridason, who's a real find. These are: Jar City, The Silence of the Grave and Voices. Charlotte Mendelson's When We Were Bad is marvellous.

And of course you told me about Frank Portman and Arnaldur Indridason. Now the shoes, Adele leave them with me and we’ll sort those, can I offer you some wellies?

Yes, please to the wellies. I seem, with age, to have lost the ability to be comfortable in high shoes. But invisibility goes with age as well, so no one will mind if I appear at parties henceforward in rubber boots!

And with that Adele swept off elegantly to the World Book Day gathering at The Globe Theatre in London, expect her final party report of the season very soon and she’ll be easy to spot in the wellies (green Hunters, no pink spotty Boden's here)

 

dovegreyreader asks...Ralph McTell

It was a bit surreal having Ralph McTell, the troubadour nonpareil, singing a line of From Clare to Here over the phone to me on February 14th.
The folk scene was it for me in the 60's and 70's, many a glorious hour spent in Bunjie's off Leicester Square, so I've grown up with Ralph's songs from those early days of strumming the chords to THAT song (Streets of London) which we didn't mention once.It was a bit of an anthem for those of us who heard it long before it became a hit.But of course there is much more to Ralph's repertoire than that and the fact that he can still tour and fill concert halls wherever he goes suggests I am not the only one who loves his music and his guitar playing.
So dovegreyreader asks...welcomes Ralph McTell to the virtual armchair in the Tamar Valley just before he heads off on his tour of Australia this week, and with very grateful thanks to him for sparing the time to do it.

dgr: Always a musician…

Ralph: I was always always affected by music and wanted to make music for as long as I can remember. Music and magic fused into one as a little boy, I was fascinated by both. Music affected me spiritually and like magic was uplifting to me, my mum used to sing to me when she was in the kitchen,sad 40’s songs of parting after the war. I thought she was making them up but she was expressing everything, so they were very affecting for this little boy.
I’ve always been aware of the power and the hugeness of music but I didn’t really play anything until I got my first harmonica and I went around playing that, it was in my pocket constantly and learning to whistle was important because that meant I could play tunes. My grandfather gave me a one string fiddle made out of a cigar box and I played that for a while. It was always there, I always loved music, we got an old piano from somewhere and I plonked around on that. 
I've got quite a good ear so I just taught myself but not very well but when the guitar came along and the music, the American folky kind of bluesy guitar style well that was it.
I knew what I wanted to do and that just took over my entire life.

dgr:Your finest musical moment...

Ralph:I’m still waiting for it I think.
It sounds vain to say it but I think most musicians who’ve had a long career would say this. Apart from the obvious, aren’t we lucky to be able to do this for people, to create some sort of resonance between the performer and the audience which is the most marvellous spiritual thing, some nights you don’t ever want to do it again because it went so perfectly.
There are not very many of them, but some nights are just wonderful and those are all fine musical moments.
I think the other finest moment you look forward to is putting the pencil down having finished a new song and play it through and all the bits are brought together, the rhyme scheme, the spirit of the thing, the rhythm, the accompaniment.if it all sits right that’s a wonderful magic moment and that’s all I crave really.

dgr:Childhood reading...

Not very much for myself I’m afraid, I was spoilt because my old mum, even thought she was dog tired would read to us most nights, adventure stories, the Secret Seven, Famous Five. Sometimes some fairy tales when we very small but she didn’t like those because they were usually rather mawkish. As little boys it was a very special moment, mum sitting with us because she was out all day working and we were little street herberts really. But she’d learnt this from being in service, she was a nanny’s assistant to the Marquis of Hertford she read very well, so we had that and BBC’s Children’s Hour on the radio, which was a blind medium really. I used to read stories out of comics with pictures but I was lazy as far as books were concerned and I’m still not an avid reader.

dgr:Teenage angst reading...

Not until I was out of the army, reading and the army don’t go together it was all about shedding your softness and hardening up, I was a big gawky lad and I had to grow up quickly. But when I was baled out and got back to college there was a wonderful movement beginning, Woody Guthrie songs and Jack Kerouac writing and I just fell for it like I did with modern jazz as well and I thought it was all about unravelling the mysteries of life.
So I did start to read, poetry and a few books, Beat poetry and stories and then fell big time for God’s Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell which was I suppose fanciful Americana and then the brilliant books by John Steinbeck, Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat, I loved them and they were all in harmony with what was going on with my guitar and in my head and they were hugely influential.
And I still aspire, Steinbeck’s basis for short story writing is much the same I think as I would try to put into song writing.One of the most illuminating books for me was Conversations about a Novel by John Steinbeck which was bought for me in the early 70’s by a roadie from a band of mine and was a book of letters Steinbeck wrote to his publisher every morning before commencing his work on East of Eden. Fabulous book

 
dgr:Inspirational reading...

Ralph:When I was walking backwards from what I saw as the entrapment of religious belief indoctrination and so on, spiritual books still held a fascination for me and like most people who grew up through the 60’s and 70’s, I tilted at mystic religion but there was one book above all others that helped me through a bad time and it was the writing of Herman Hesse, namely Siddhartha.
What I took from the book was that you shouldn’t be afraid, that you are part of the world and you will make it resonate in a small way, even just by your footsteps, and if you listen and you look there could be enough of you, I’m not saying I’m an intellectual, please don’t think that, but if you have the ability to intellectualise it a little bit, to think a little deeper about it, it makes sense to me and then you have your lot of kindness and peace and that’ll do me because I have music and arts and other things and that will do instead of religion.

 
dgr:  A lot of people feel quite inadequate about their reading, thinking I’m not a literary person, I haven’t got a degree, but most people read and take something from it don’t they?

 
Ralph: I believe they do but you see when you write words you’re trying to write all the time and you don’t want to copy somebody else so you’re trying to find original thoughts and you think and hope that through the subtlety of whatever your message might be people will glimpse that each song is a little piece in the jigsaw that relates to your philosophy.I’m delighted when people are moved and touched by books and by songs because we’re all in it to communicate if we’re not why do we do it?

dgr: It's easy to be judgemental, classifying people by what they read, if somebody gets something from whatever book it is they read then that’s perfectly valid, do you think it's the same with music?

Ralph: Well it’s absolutely the same as music, some people can listen to an old blues player playing an out of tune guitar and they’ll get it, some people can listen to Charlie Parker playing the most unbelievable bee-bop solos on a bad saxophone and they’ll get it, others won’t get it. They’ll get it from somewhere else and they may never get it from music at all. There are plenty of people who don’t “get” paintings and don’t understand colours.
If you can get a handle on what the artist is trying to convey, it’s so uplifting and worthwhile. I say to someone who doesn’t get jazz, well listen a little bit more until you do, people often say it’s boring, well do it until it’s not boring, it’s kind of a Buddhist thing I think. Whatever medium, whatever turns you on and opens your head to other ideas, even if you understand it and disagree, that’s OK too…I do wish I read more.

dgr: Recent reading?

Ralph: I’ve just re-read Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie’s book Bound for Glory. Somebody very kindly sent it to me and I wish I knew who they were because I can’t thank them and I’ve just bought a first edition of that. Right now I’m reading an autobiography of an Irish writer and singer called Tommy Sands, The Songman, A Journey in Irish Music.
I’m equally likely to have a book of Dylan Thomas or Seamus Heaney poems by the bed. I read mostly in the evenings, I can’t give up time during the day to read, that feels like a total indulgence, I should be doing something else like practising the guitar.

dgr:For those of us in thrall to the Irish writer Niall Williams, could you please tell us the story behind From Clare to Here?

Ralph: Now, it follows on rather nicely from what I was saying about Woody Guthrie, the idea of the young socialist Ralph being all rebellious and trying to be strong and brave and all the rest of it and could do without Jesus and all that. Woody Guthrie’s message was a simple belief in humanity, the working man would triumph eventually although he was condemned in the main, through his education, to do rather lowly jobs.
I was more than qualified to do better than I did, but I wanted to work in as many manual fields as I could and I had dozens of jobs. But the happiest job I ever had was on a building site in South London, paradoxically opposite the grammar school where I was supposed to have been educated.I got fit and happy and well and strong as a horse and worked there for about eight months before an accident stopped that. During that time I worked with the Irish gangs, I noticed they were paid a bit more money than me and I was put together with a young fellow who was clearly lying about his age, all I remember is that his name was Michael.
I was playing a little guitar by that time and loving it and I was full of the poetry of work and music and young manhood and we were down in this trench and in an effort to bring him out of this ghetto mentality that a lot of the Irishmen had when they came over here in the early 60’s, it was a drink culture and they didn’t break out of their own very much, I tried to make conversation with this young fellow and it was very hard work.
One day I was rolling a cigarette in the bottom of this trench and I can remember it as clear as if it was yesterday, because we were way down, at least 12 foot deep with shoring and he was whacking away with the shovel and I said
“Oh it must be very strange for you Michael, being here in London" and he just said
“Ah sure it’s a long way from Clare to here”.
And if he’d said to me it’s a long way from here to Clare it would have just gone past in the conversation.We had an expression “Oh that sounds a bit Irish”, when we mean a bit convoluted, the subject and the object are in the wrong place. And I thought that’s it absolutely, it is a long way from Clare to here, that’s a poem, that’s worth examining because which came first, home or where he was?
Plainly he’d said home is more important, it’s a long way from where I’m from to where I am, rather than from where I am to where I’m from.
It stuck in my head.
I’d wanted to write a song in the 70’s about the continued exploitation of cheap labour again coming from Ireland.It was called The Lump at that time and it was uninsured work, trucks would drive round to various positions and say I’ve got work for 6 blokes, like the old dockers system, and I remember reading about beds that were never empty, one lot would go out and another lot would come in and I just got that opening line
“There’s four of us share this room” then the word craic. I didn’t even know how to spell it at the time, a lovely Irish word meaning how’s the tempo, how’s the mood, is there any fun in it and suddenly I got this betrayal of the ideal, of going away. I know mass doesn’t rhyme with craic but lots of things don’t rhyme and I had a first verse then all of a sudden...

(Sings) “It’s a long way from Clare to here”

And there it was and I just listed, as sometimes happens, the frustration and the boy who never settled down, just wants to get drunk and fight and get rid of his anger that way and another one not writing home like he promised to and the dreams of home and money disappearing and the song wrote itself in about an hour and has proven to be quite a hit, quite a few people have recorded it now.

There's four who share this room as we work hard for the craic
And sleeping late on Sundays I never get to Mass

It's a long way from Clare to here
It's a long way from Clare to here
It's a long, long way, it grows further by the day
It's a long way from Clare to here

When Friday comes around Terry's only into fighting
My ma would like a letter home but I'm too tired for writing

Chorus

It almost breaks my heart when I think of Josephine
I told her I'd be coming home with my pockets full of green

Chorus

And the only time I feel alright is when I'm into drinking
It sort of eases the pain of it and levels out my thinking

Chorus

I sometimes hear a fiddle play or maybe it's a notion
I dream I see white horses dance upon that other ocean

Chorus

It's a long, long way from Clare to here.

(If this song remains a mystery to you, listen to a bar or two here and check out everything else Ralph-ish at the Leola Music website)

With grateful thanks again to Ralph McTell for this interview.

 

 

dovegreyreader asks...

I read Niall Williams, then I start humming that lovely old Ralph McTell song From Clare to Here, unearth my shrine of Ralph memorabilia and start playing all the music again and before you know it guess who has agreed to stop by for dovegreyreader asks..?
I'm really grateful to Ralph McTell for taking time out from recording today and his very busy pre-Australia tour schedule to answer the questions over the phone and that will be on the blog next week.
As can see, apart from the fact that Ralph and I both know all the words to all his songs and we've both been to a lot of Ralph McTell concerts down the years, we have one or two other things in common.
Here's a little snippet of our conversation

DGR:You grew up in Croydon?

Ralph:I did

DGR: Mitcham for me

Ralph:I know it very well

DGR:Now  I read somewhere that Father Christmas at Kennards in Croydon gave you a mouth organ and that started you off on the music trail.

Ralph:He did and yes, it did.

DGR: Hmm, well he gave me a doll’s hairbrush so you see life could have been so very different couldn’t it?

Ralph: Well I’m lucky there, I’m glad I didn’t get the doll’s hairbrush, I would have been a hairdresser and you would have been a harmonica player.

I'll post the interview next week and you can read all about Ralph's inspiration, his reading and yes, how From Clare to Here came about and no, we didn't mention Streets of London once.

 

dovegreyreader asks Niall Williams

So a warm welcome to Niall Williams, my first guest in the dovegreyreader asks... armchair in the valley with lamp trained on countenance. After reading this  I'd best make a declaration, I'm not professing to be an interviewer, others will do a far better job.
No, I'm just plain nosey and I love talking to people, just think of me as the Mrs Merton of the blogworld.
What a brick Niall is to travel here through all that snow, thank heavens the gritter lorries were out. We've thawed him out, the cushions are plumped and he's tucking into the scones and cream already. Rocky has taken a real shine to him so I do hope he's not allergic to cats. He's been an absolute saint to take time out of his busy writing schedule to do this for me and I'm very grateful.
I've made no secret of my love of Niall's writing and I could have gone on all day but I'm limiting these to just six questions. I did however sneak in a final 7th one to Niall which I felt it my duty to ask and which he's still thinking about.

Always a writer? If not how did you achieve it and who or what have been the greatest influences on your work?

I was always a reader. As a boy I fell in love with Estella in 'Great Expectations' and thereafter I think sought in Dickens for such women, such strong emotion. When I went to college in Dublin to study English and French I was influenced by everyone. First DH Lawrence, then William Faulkner, Joyce, Yeats, Baudelaire. Whole years were spent inside books. And sometime then I began to write, probably to try and replicate that intensity of feeling I had as a reader. My first short story, 'Love' was published when I was nineteen in the national newspaper, The Irish Press, thereby giving me the first real prompt to take this most arduous path of equal parts doubt and rapture. Later influences are a whole throng. I admire many writers, but the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez when I first encountered them took my breath away.

Can you describe an ideal writing day for you?

I write for about three hours, always first thing in the morning, in the front room in Kiltumper overloking the big garden and the valley. I write out loud, saying the words as if I am the storyteller and the listener. Afternoons I try and get outside, to be in the garden, or go to the  Atlantic which is not far. I allow myself to believe that this too is part of a writer's working.

When you’re not writing….

I don't have any exact schedule, or ever set myself word counts or such things. I write as I feel I can, just trying to figure out where the book is going as my hands touch the keys. When not writing I try to be outside.

Your desert island books …

As above I think. Dickens of course. Shakespeare. The usual suspects. For a novel I have just finished on the last year in the life of the Apostle John, I returned to the Bible and found it startling and original and profound as a book.

…and if you could choose where to put your “ island” where would it be and why?

IN 2002 we took the children out of school and travelled around the world for a year while all the time I was writing 'Only Say The Word.' The two places that most stay with me are  Patagonia for its sheer austere otherness. And NewZealand, a country of unparelleled beauty I think.

Recent good reads?

The most striking almost classical book I have read recently was ' Gilead' by  Marylynne Robinson. I know it is not to everyone's taste, but I read it in small savourings and really thought it perfect.

One final question Niall...is it a long way from Clare to here?
Sorry, sorry, just couldn't resist.

 

 

dovegreyreader asks...

This has taken me an age to get sorted but I'm starting a new little series on here called dovegreyreader asks...and am delighted that to kick off the venture my first victim guest will be Niall Williams.
I have a few more in the pipeline and if a certain singer who reads would hurry back from doing his concerts he's on my hit list too.I decided that if you don't ask...
If any writers/ blog commenters/ fellow bloggers/ prime ministers/ the Queen/ pop idols/ Strictly Come Dancing Champions/ Ralph McTell/ people who love books/ people who publish/edit/sell books/ Alan Rickman / George Clooney do stop by here, and would be prepared to be placed in a comfy armchair with a pot of tea to hand, plus scones with strawberry jam and clotted cream nearby as I angle the glow of my very gentle spotlight upon your countenance then I'd be delighted to hear from you,
Don't be shy, do e mail me. We can do gluten-free and low cholesterol if you'd prefer.