NaPoWriMo - sticking it out

I am pleased to say that I stuck out the whole month of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month). I was worried that I would lose interest after the first week or so - especially as I didn't make it through the whole of novel writing month last year. However writing poetry is a little different to writing a novel, for a start you can write lots of poems on different themes so you don't need to worry about getting stuck with your plot. A poem is generally much shorter as well, so you don't have to write thousands of words a day. Thirdly the NaPoWriMo website had a writing prompt every day, and although they were nowhere near as good as Jo Bell's 52 prompts, it did give me a kick starter if I needed it. I not only managed a poem a day, but somedays I wrote several. Only time will tell, of course, whether any of them are any good, but I suspect there may be two or three worth keeping.

Some Brilliant News

So those of you who have read my posts on putting together a collection and sending out work might be pleased to know that all the hard work has finally paid off. My collection Bird Sisters will be published by Nine Arches Press in Spring 2016. To say I am pleased would be the understatement of the year. I am absolutely delighted. Jane Commane is my editor (yes I have an editor) and I am very much looking forward to working with her. Nine Arches won the Saboteur Award for most innovative publisher last year. They publish some really interesting poetry and prose and I love their journal Under the Radar so I am very pleased that they have decided to publish me.

If you happen to be at Wenlock Poetry Festival this weekend Nine Arches are the publisher in residence.

Some thoughts on Re-reading Books

'When I re-read The Rainbow I had thought I might discover, like a flower pressed between the pages, the dried remains of my younger self preserved within it.' (Geoff Dyer - Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D.H. Lawrence) 

This quote encapsulates for me why sometimes re-reading an old favourite can sometimes be a little disappointing. Haven't we all had that experience of going back to book or film that we loved when we were younger or that really resonated with us, only to discover that it just isn't as good as we remember or worse still that it leaves us cold? How much we enjoy a book isn't just about the quality of writing, or the way the story engages us (the readers) - it is about the experiences that we as readers bring to the reading of each particular story - our state of mind, our life circumstances, our past experiences etc. 

It makes sense that we respond to texts differently at different points in our lives - after all our life experience at sixteen-years-old is going to be vastly different to our life experience in our forties - and what seemed new and exciting to us as teenagers may seem like stale and hackneyed ideas to us as adults, or things that seemed plausible may seem less so. But I think also that Dyer has nit the nail on the head - when I re-read a book there is almost certainly an element of wanting to re-capture the original feelings it engendered in me - whether these are recognition, fear, excitement or whatever, and part of that desire might also be yearning to re-experience what it is like to be a younger version of myself. Of course this is next to impossible - unless you have amnesia you can't read a book you have already read and expect to have the same reactions to it as the first time you read it. We can only really experience something for the first time once, so on subsequent readings we will not only be bringing the life experiences that we have accumulated since the reading, but also our memories and thoughts (both conscious and subconscious) of the book to the reading experience. 

Of course that doesn't mean that we shouldn't re-read books or that we won't enjoy re-visiting novels that we have already read. Often a re-reading of a book can be enjoyable in a different way to the first reading, it can remind us how we felt when we first read it, and, perhaps more importantly, it can lead us to a deeper understanding of the text.

Getting it Out There

I was updating my personal bibliography a couple of months ago and was shocked to discover that I had only had one poem published in 2014. I had had work accepted that will come out this year, I had been shortlisted in a pamphlet competition and I had written a couple of reviews - but still only one poem. I was shocked. Part of my problem is that I have never been pro-active enough about sending out my work. I had a beginner's flurry - where you send out lots of work that isn't good enough because you are so excited about this amazing writing thing. But since then I have sent out in fits and starts - fits mostly.

Once I had discovered this I started sending the occasional thing out. I also made one of my New Year Resolutions to be to get my work out there more to send out at least one submission a week. The more work you send out, the more you stand a chance of having something accepted, and ultimately the more chance you have of a publisher taking your pamphlet or collection seriously - it's not rocket science. Amazingly once you start sending work out regularly it suddenly becomes less of a big deal. I have found that now I am sending out more and more work, and I have already had a few things accepted.

There are two things that really helped motivate me with this - one was being coached by a friend who was training as a writing coach - kind of like a life coach but for writers. She asked me lots of questions about my writing life that made me think about what I do and why - you can read more about that here. The second thing was reading a blog post by Canal Laureate Jo Bell, which you can read here. One of the things that Jo suggests is making a database or spreadsheet to track which pieces of writing you send where and when you might expect a reply by. This is a brilliant (and simple) idea. It means that you are less likely to submit the same poem to journals at the same time, or, and I have done this, send the same poem to the same journal twice.  I actually made two spreadsheets - one that shows which all the journals poems have been submitted to - I highlight the place it is eventually published in - and the other which shows what poems are currently out, where they have gone and when to expect a reply by. It has certainly revolutionised my submission practice.

Family Albums and the Movability of Memory

Blow the bugles, bang the drums - I seem to have started a new sequence of poems, although I must confess that I am a little scared of looking at them in the cold light of day. The seed of the idea has been germinating away somewhere in deep in my mind for weeks. It started when I watched a film called Stories We Tell - a film that describes the journey of one family (or really one woman) through interviews with family members and friends, interspersed with old home movie footage and photos. It is a fascinating film and a moving story - or rather stories - because what the film highlights is how we all view events differently from one another, and how memory manipulates events over time to suit our own world view.

A few weeks later I went to my Grandma's funeral. One of the things that my aunts had done was to leave out some photo albums for us to look at, and in one were photos of my family (me, my dad and mum and brother and sister) that I had never seen before - as well as quite a few pictures of my father as a child.  Some of the photos in the album were identical to photos in our own family photo albums and this got me thinking about who might have taken the pictures. I had always assumed that it was my mum and dad - but actually it could just as easily have been visiting relatives.  We did have a family camera but I don't remember it being used very much. I guess developing photographs was expensive in the 1970s.  

Things have been busy since the funeral and I didn't think much more about the photos, but yesterday evening, for some reason, the whole idea of family albums came back into my mind. I decided to write a few poems or verbal sketches of photos from the photo albums of my childhood, but rather than get the albums out and look at the photos I would try and write about them from my memories of the photos.  This was an interesting exercise - writing a memory of a memory of a memory. It will be interesting at some point to look at the actual photographs and see if my memory of them is true. I may even write from some of the other photos, but for the moment it is the process that I am finding interesting. 

Another thing that happened was that writing about a memory of a picture led me to realise that I could take a leap further - what if I was to write about a picture that could have been taken but never was. We all have memories of things that happened and people who came and went from our childhood homes, but we don't always have any photographic evidence of these people. Nowadays we have mobile phones with photographic capabilities so everything is much more documented, but in the 70s and 80s developing film was expensive so people tended to mostly take pictures of special occasions - birthdays, holidays, that kind of thing. Human memory is pictorial - I have lots of memories of childhood that are like little home movies or still images that I can call to mind - like the children next door looking over the fence or my aunt coming to visit unexpectedly in her fur coat and bearing gifts of easter eggs and cuddly toys. I found myself writing about the non-existent photos of those memories.  Of course it could be that the poems will turn out to be nonsense - they may be more like small vignettes and be of no interest to anybody else but me. Whether this is the case or not it is interesting writing them and I imagine it may trigger other memories - if nothing else I will have fun. I wrote quite a bit about autobiographical poetry back in 2008. Here is a rough draft.

The Girl from Number 79

This is the girl from next door
who offered to take you swimming,
this is her standing on the top rung of the fence
looking into your garden,
here is your mother explaining how to hold
her hand as you cross the roads,
here you are with your mouth and nose
filled with chlorinated water,
and here you are again
under the wheels of a Morris Traveller,
the driver's mouth an O of surprise,
and here is the girl
whose name you can't remember
wearing her grumpy face
because your mum has changed her mind
and said you are too young to go.

Books Read in 2014

• Last first...
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• 93 In the Bee Latitudes - ‘Annah Sobelman (poetry)
• 92) The Legend of Colton H. Bryant - Alexandra Fuller (non-fiction)
• 91) Maggie and Me - Damaien Barr (non-fiction)
• 90) The Gypsy and the Poet - David Morley (poetry)
• 89) Every Day is for the Thief - Teju Cole (fiction)
• 88) Notes From the Balcony - Lynn Woollacott (poetry)
• 87) Like Rabbits - Lynne Bryan (fiction)
• 86) Diary Of an Unsmug Married - Polly James (fiction)
• 85) Granta 113: The Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists (fiction - short stories)
• 84) My Sister's Keeper - Bill Benners (fiction)
• 83) The Mathematics of Friedrich Gauss: Family Snapshots - D.W. Wilson (fiction)
• 82) All One Breath - John Burnside (poetry)
• 81) Beneath Stars Long Extinct - Ron Egatz (poetry)
• 80) Small Grass - Jacqueline Gabbitas (poetry)
• 79) Place - Jorie Graham (poetry)
• 78) The Beginner's Goodbye - Anne Tyler (fiction)
• 77) The Waterproof Bible - Andrew Kaufman (fiction)
• 76) Picture Me Gone - Meg Rossoff (fiction)
• 75) And After All This I Saw: Selections from the Work of Julian of Norwich - Edwin Kelly (poetry)
• 74) The Book of Strange New Things - Michel Faber (fiction)
• 73) Irene - Piere Lemaitre (fiction)
• 72) At the Time of Partition - Moniza Alvi (poetry)
• 71) Black Country - Liz Berry (poetry)
• 70) Wreaking - James Scudamore (fiction)
• 69) Disgrace - J.M. Coetzee (fiction)
• 68) Thunderstruck and other Stories - Elizabeth McCracken (fiction - short stories)
• 67) Ballistics - D.W. Wilson (fiction)
• 66) The Dead Lake - Hamid Ismailov (fiction)
• 65) Strange Bodies - Marcel Theroux (fiction)
• 64) When I was Five I Killed Myself - Howard Buten (fiction)
• 63) Fauverie - Pascale Petit (poetry)
• 62) Zoo Father - Pascale Petit (poetry, re-read)
• 61) The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes (fiction)
• 60) Snapper - Brian Kimberling (fiction)
• 59) Imagined Sons - Carrie Etter (poetry)
• 58) Under the Skin - Michael Faber (fiction)
• 57) The Lake in the Woods - Tim O'Brien (fiction)
• 56) Moontide - Niall Campbell (poetry)
• 55) Comradely Greetings – Nadya Tolokonnikova (non-fiction)
• 54) This is Yarrow - Tara Bergin (poetry)
• 53) Parallax -Sinead Morrisey (poetry)
• 52) Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn (fiction)
• 51) Sins of the Leopard - James Brooks (poetry)
• 50) The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion - Kei Miller (poetry)
• 49) The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared - Jonas Jonasson (fiction)
• 48) Elizabeth is Missing - Emma Healey (fiction)
• 47) Ties that Bind - Catherine Deveney (fiction)
• 46) Hoad and other Stories - Sarah Passingham (fiction, short stories)
• 45) The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald (fiction)
• 44) The Universe Versus Alex Woods - Gavin Extence (fiction)
• 43) Erosion - S.A. Hemmings (fiction)
• 42) Sic Transit Wagon and other stories - Barbara Jenkins (Fiction, short stories)
• 41) The White Lioness - henning Mankell (fiction)
• 40) The Impossible Dead - Ian Rankin (fiction)
• 39) Hot Damn - Cat Woodward (poetry)
• 38) Candide - Voltaire (fiction)
• 37) Black Beauty - Anna Sewell (fiction)
• 36) Sleeping Keys - Jean Sprackland (poetry)
• 35) Double Negative - Ivan Vladislavic (non fiction)
• 34) Planet-shaped Horse - Luke Kennard (poetry)
• 33) Bysuss - Jen Hadfield (poetry)
• 32) Division Street - Helen Mort (poetry)
• 31) Tenth of December - George Saunders (fiction - re-read)
• 30) Adventures in Form - edited by Tom Chivers (poetry)
• 29) Bevel - William Letford (poetry, re-read)
• 28) Barcelona - Philip Langeskov (fiction)
• 27) Love Me Do - Lydia Macpherson (poetry)
• 26) Gathering Evidence - Caoilinn Hughes (poetry)
• 25) Perfect -Rachel Joyce (fiction)
• 24) Strange Weather inTokyo - Hiromi Kawakami ( fiction)
• 23) Standard Twin Fantasy - Sam Riviere (poetry)
• 22) Forward Book of Poetry 2014 (poetry)
• 21) Yoga - Tom Warner (poetry)
• 20) Love, Nina, Despatches from Family Life - Nina Stibbe (non fiction)
• 19) Instant-Flex 718 - Heather Phillipson (poetry)
• 18) Enough About You - Notes Towards the New Autobiography - David Shields (non-fiction)
• 17) Ink's Wish - Sarah Law (poetry)
• 16) When the Killing's Done - T.C. Boyle (fiction)
• 15) Violet - Selima Hill (poetry - re-read)
• 14) The Marlowe Papers - Ros Barber (poetry)
• 13) Pale View of Hills - Kazuo Ishiguro (fiction)
• 12) Truffle Beds - Katherine Pierpoint (poetry)
• 11) The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt (fiction)
• 10) Stag's Leap - Sharon Olds (poetry, re-read)
• 9) Splitfish - Kiran Millwood Hargrave (poetry)
• 8) The Shock of the Fall - Nathan Filer (fiction)
• 7) Conjure - Michael Donaghy (poetry)
• 6) The Paraffin Child - Stephen Blanchard (fiction)
• 5) Her Birth - Rebecca Goss (poetry)
• 4) The Museum of Disappearing Sounds - Zoe Skoulding (poetry)
• 3) Ice - Gillian Clarke (poetry)
• 2) Life: An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet (fiction)
• 1) Fallen Land - Patrick Flannery (fiction)

NoNoWriMo and Writing Coaches

Well I kept NanNoWriMo up for about half of November and I wrote a sizeable chunk of my novel in progress (which is shaping up to be a YA novel it seems), but then somehow I lost my momentum. There are lots of things that I can blame - general busyness, too much planning for work etc etc, but the truth is I found it too hard to sustain. It's not that I lost interest, but somehow I just screeched to a halt. I had other things that I wanted to write, I wanted to enter a poetry pamphlet competition and that took days of preparation. I suppose I just wasn't committed enough. I also think that if I am to try it again next year (and I might) I will try to write straight onto the computer. two thousand words is a lot to write by hand ( I generally managed just over a thousand a day) and it leaves you with a daunting pile of writing to be typed up. I haven't even begun to type up what I have written yet - every time I look at it it makes me groan.

On a more positive note I have been working with a writing coach. A writing coach is a bit like a life coach - but they just look at your writing life. They help you to look at any problems you may be having regarding writing, sending off your work etc. I have had two sessions and have found it invaluable. I had to come to the session with areas that I wanted to look at and the coach asked me a series of questions designed to make me think about what is holding me back. One of the things that I found really helpful was making a chart of how I used my time - I was then able to pencil time into my schedule for writing, editing and sending out work. The hard bit, of course, is sticking to it! The other thing that she really helped me with was thinking about pamphlet competitions. I had got rather stuck in my way of thinking about it. Because the pamphlet I had put together had been shortlisted for a major competition I am not able to enter it for any others, and for some reason I just couldn't see a way round this. My coach suggested pulling out a different thread from my collection - one that overlapped in terms of content so that I could still keep my strongest poems - she even suggested breaking up one of the poems and interspersing it throughout the pamphlet to make the theme stronger. It is funny how sometimes it takes a new pair of eyes to see the obvious in your work!