Monthly Archive

I like things with a certain…symmetry? weight? Presence. I like things that come into the world already artefacts. Messages and Your Messages are two such things. The original Messages project, between Lynne Rees and Sarah Salway, grew out of a collaboration, just an idea that both of them stuck to. The result is hugely neat and satisfying: 300 pieces of 300 words each. Deep sigh.

Now it’s launching into a smaller format, along with the culmination of the Your Messages project, another brilliantly conceived and executed collaborative project. Lynne and Sarah collated the work, choosing at least one piece for each day of the month, and bluechrome have produced an anthology from it: all proceeds to charity. Talk about art. Yes, let’s talk about it: art as in making from materials, where process is valued as much as product. Where something emerges which moves the eye, the mind and the heart, fully occupying its own space.

Longer term readers of this blog will remember the fun I had doing my first one, on 8 November. It’s the one in Your Messages. Which I can’t wait to get my hands on.

Here’s the thing. A long discussion with a seven year old about point of view. I mentioned M’s new obsession with Nancy Drew mysteries last week or thereabouts… Now it emerges why she’s so taken with them: she feels she’s trying to solve everything along with Nancy. Ah yes. And how with Harry Potter she felt that she sometimes knew more than Harry did (because there were different scenes) and she was waiting for Harry to catch up…Ah yes again. So at the moment she loves Nancy Drew, because she’s right there with her.

I clearly remember having a similar discussion with E at about the same age, about what we know as narrative tension. This time it was over how the beginning of Brian Jacques’ Redwall didn’t grab him, didn’t make him ask questions like ‘what happens next’, whereas the first Harry Potter does. I remember him getting so excited that he took down both books and read the first paragraphs to me: see, see!

It’s remarkable how early on in their reading lives children — people — become aware of what works, and what doesn’t. For them, anyway. Which brings home with an awful crash how utterly vital it is to feed children the right books, to keep your eyes and ears open for where they are, what they might like, to keep broadening and opening out…And yet of course, my children are priviledged enough to have constant access to books of all sorts. So stupidly many aren’t.

***

Related to this, as part of my Canterbury Laureate brief I’m putting together a shortlist of children’s books — three categories I think, 5-8 years old, 8-12, then Young Adult. About three titles per category, to be used as ‘Summer Reads’ in the last term of 2008, put then to an online vote…Great stuff.

Any contributions or thoughts for unmissable children’s books would be gratefully received! I’ve got some ideas of course, and am spending some delicious time reliving the bookcases of my children…But I’d love to know others’ thoughts. Many thanks!

On the way back from school.

M: I found out I got a Work Star today Mummy that I didn’t even know I had.

Me: Wow, that’s good. In what?

M: History.

Me: For what?

M (obviously waiting for this): Well, you know how Egyptians believed things about going to the Underworld, and how their hearts were weighed on these scales against a feather…and if it was heavier or lighter then they went different places?

Me (not sure where this is going): Sort of…

M: And Osiris accompanied them. Pauses. I’m not sure how he was supposed to go with everyone, one by one. Pauses again. Maybe there was a whole army of Osirises…but the story goes there was only one. Hmm…Maaay-bee (warming to it now) everybody waits and then piles into something like the Eurostar, and as they are all getting comfortable, over the loudspeaker comes this voice (she shifts to a game show announcer), ‘And your driver today is…Osiris!’ And of course it’s always Osiris! And it goes on like that, all these dead people waiting at the station….

We guffaw over this image for maybe half a mile.

Me (calmer, finally): Okay, but look, what did you actually get the Work Star for?

M: Oh yeah! I drew such a good picture of the real story, with all these diagrams….I think that must be what I got it for.

***

I don’t think I’ll ever again be able to hear poor Osiris mentioned without thinking of him as a train driver. It’s a shame in a way that her teachers didn’t hear this invention — but I don’t think she would have got a Work Star for it, alas. More’s the pity, I can’t help but think.

Have I ever mentioned Jolie Holland? Have I? Well I’ll mention her again if so.

E is busy searching out songs and albums for his snazzy xmas present iPod. Has started me surfing. Again.

Formerly of the Be Good Tanyas. If you don’t know her, go find her. This is one of my all-time favourite songs of hers…The first time I heard it, I wept all the way through. I mean, all the way through. Standing in my kitchen.

I’d say not the best ever version (instrumental too loud). But couldn’t resist just sticking this up.

I mustn’t worry about how I am a) not writing b) not cooking c) not able to remember where anything is in the chaos…d) not keeping up with paperwork and this e) not in close enough touch with friends. Nor how much I miss doing/knowing all of these things.

Instead I shall rejoice in what I am doing/thinking/knowing. Let me just think about this….okay:

a) thinking. Mainly about writing. Find this rewarding, and I only really do it when teaching. Like to ponder process, the finer workings of rhythm, the creative process itself.

b) dancing. Managing still to do this twice a week, at last too in a ‘real’ class, with proper music, proper combinations. Am learning to acknowledge that grand plies — and any sort of pivot in fondu — are just not on the menu. My knees are thanking me and rewarding me with another class the following week. An added bonus is that when I’m dancing, I’m not thinking about anything else.

c) teaching. Yes, I really do love this. Good to be back. Could do without the admin, without the way time becomes juddery, punctuated by panicky emails or dire jobs — but the actual time in classroom and tutorial: yes.

d) imagining. Life in a new ground floor, one where we can all sit together, cook together, and where the dishwasher and refrigerator are actually in the same room as everything else.

e) ignoring. The floor in the bathroom that didn’t go back down well, the persistant plaster dust, grey hairs, dry knuckles. Etc.

f) noticing. Daffodil and crocus tops coming through the pots, lighter afternoons, striking pink mornings on the way to school.

g) enjoying. E’s obsession with iTunes and gathering music (the urge to collect from his father!); M’s new fascination with Nancy Drew mysteries (more later).

h) lastly, re-discovering. Things we’d thought we’d forgotten or lost while packing up for the plasterer, like a single given to me by a student years ago, which we all used to bop around to (okay, not R). While I’m ambivalent about its musical longevity — it does help me feel better about where this post began. It’s not that I’m not writing, it’s that the rest is still unwritten. Oh yeah, that’s right…

Right. The house is now officially stripped back to its components, and it’s not a pretty sight: the electrician is complaining that the whole thing is constructed from ’spurs’ (what a mess, he says); Wonderful Builder has even taken up the tiles now, so adhesive and plaster dust are making their own pretty footprinted design around and about. His complaint (among many, good-humouredly) is that nothing is done properly. When I tell him two owners back were builders and actually did the extension themselves…he rolls his eyes. Not even pointed, he says (referring, I now know, to the brickwork. Not to treat you like idiots, but hey, I had no idea…).

The television is in the loo. The toilet paper is on top of the television. The sitting room floorboards are lodged at impossible angles with cables jutting out. The cats are locked in our bedroom and have lifted the carpet up across the door in an effort to dig their way out.

Hmm.

AND: poor E, never the giving in sort, is home today with a vile cold. While I taught up the hill, he had to endure several hours of plaster chiselling under his room. Insult to injury or what?!

So what makes it better? Watching him devour a chocolate muffin I brought back, then lie down and curl up around me sitting on the edge of his bed, just like he used to.

The Canterbury Laureate stuff is just getting going: tomorrow morning I’m doing a preliminary visit with a group of young mothers, just to see if they are interested in doing some writing. As the theme for this year’s Laureateship (heavens!) is ‘identity’, I’ve found myself for this group thinking about returning to an exercise I’ve used frequently over the years — one indeed I think I was introduced to as an undergraduate (when dinosaurs roamed the earth…).

The exercise is ‘I am the person who…’ Write for 15 minutes without stopping. Any form. If you get stuck, re-write the last few words and see if that spurs you.

It’s remarkable how productive this exercise is. I’ll use it again in two days perhaps, when I meet my second year undergraduate students for the first time. The module is Narratives from Life — you can see why it might work! Inevitably makes you square up.
I do most writing exercises alongside my groups, and read back when they do too. This one in particular. It focuses the mind. If I’d had any idea that I would do it so many times, I might have started a book of my responses. Because over the years they’ve changed, shifted: from looking at where I’m from, to looking at where I am, to looking where I might be going. I remember one year all I wrote about was getting up at night to look after the children. I am the person who gets up in the night, stands over your cot, watches you sleep. One year I seem to remember it being all about writing. And one year about grief.

***

That exercise always reminds me of something I saw on a toilet wall when I was in high school: We are the people our parents warned us about.

I don’t know how — or even if — they relate. But there’s a tension there I quite like being in the middle of….

Okay, I knew I’d do it. Here’s a picture of the kittens, Schubert and Tilly (one guess which is which). Today I watched as by turns they climbed as high up a tree as they could manage, teetering on a branch. They think they can stalk birds invisibly through the branches and undergrowth. We can’t bring ourselves to tell them that they are actually as bright as neon signs in the January gloom.

Not that they’d listen.

What with Obama and Clinton raging in Iowa and New Hampshire, I’ve found myself longing to be ‘in the fray’. Not that I’ve ever managed — despite best intentions, admittedly — to be in any particular fray…but this one does grab me.

I also feel homesick. The lack of any interesting precipitation (where’s the snow for heaven’s sake?) along with Sarah Salway’s picture of a cardinal — the bright red state bird of Virginia (where I grew up) — over on her blog, together make me want to be there.

It’s abstracted. It’s irrational. But this morning I sang The Star Bangled Banner to M in the car. Yes I did. She listened all the way through before quietly remarking that she didn’t think she’d ever heard it before. Shame on me.

In recompense, please accept this particularly belting version. If you didn’t know it before M, you’ll know it now!

Some photos of the Night Train 5 launch have come through, and I thought I’d share them….As it happens, most of these are shots of some of the first cohort of the University of Kent’s MA in Creative Writing. (Except me of course, looking like I’ve just kissed a lemon. I’m from a different, altogether earlier cohort of an altogether different programme, though I don’t think this fact has anything to do with my expression…)

Thanks go(es?) to Maria McCarthy for use of the pics!

We were talking — idly, as you do, in the car from a to b — about new things, how one of her friends seemed to be put off a particular secondary school because there you had to pay for your own lunch using a card…

And M says, sympathetically: everybody’s frightened of change, of course.

I nod.

Then she says: Me, I don’t know… (her voice shifts to a strong American accent) … I kinda LIKE it.

Quite. Another reason to make it til Spring.

This time of year is not at the top of my list of favourite times. With Christmas over, all you can do is wait for the mornings to get lighter. And keep your head down.

Saying this, it is a time for considered thought somehow. I think of people who’ve died, who I’ve lost touch with, or things I’ve let slip. And I am grateful for those who’ve reminded me just by their friendship and steadfastness of what’s important: Nancy, Lynne, Lisa, Katherine, Deborah, Helena, Valerie. Not to mention relatives, again whose consistent and unconditional presence has been life-changing: David, Janet, Hugh, Bridget, Anna, Howard, and my mother.

And don’t even get me started on the children, or R.

***

I feel a need today to write for Valerie. From the ages of 10 to 12, we were each other’s best friends. Bestest friends. Times change though, and we moved on, and lost touch, and…to her credit she searched me out last year — after 25 years. It’s been a treat to talk to someone who is ‘from where I’m from’ and who — still, all these years later — is interested in what I’m interested in.

Anyway, today I heard that Valerie’s much-loved dog Luna had died. The memory of holding our 17 year old moggie as he died last year is always close to the surface, despite our two new lovely kittens. Like everything we lose or lose track of, they stay with us.

The title of this post is taken from a poem by Yehuda Amichai called ‘Ballad on the Streets of Buenos Aires’. It’s a love poem, really, and the whole thing is one of my all time favourites, but this particular line keeps me breathing this dark time of year: and the light is always there to serve all loss. (I prefer the Stephen Mitchell translation, so have used his version of this line.)

This is not exactly what I said to Wonderful Builder at 8.15 am this morning, but it is what the world feels like today. Another full inbox or two, a playroom which is impassable, cold and snow (they say) approaching. January throttling me.

Happy New Year, by the way.

Before I get really carried away, a breather: we enjoyed a sparkling and joyful Christmas with family and FOUR fluffy white cats meeting for the first time. Glad to report that after half a day of hissing and deliberate nonchalance, all are fast friends now. Sound familiar?!

Then four days back in the Lakes, where we shot up to Stickle Tarn like bats out of hell on the only good day for it. This time I did get a couple of pictures.

Yes, back too soon…I’ll hold onto these as long as I can though.