A review missed and found

The internet is really amazing. The story 'Leaf Memory' is one of the very oldest in Balancing on the Edge of the World. It first appeared in an anthology published by Penguin, and I had no idea that the anthology had been reviewed in Punch until, years later, indeed this week, I came across the fact on the internet. Imagine how I felt when I read these words:

'[A short story] must emulate the swift, swallow or martlet. Most impressive in this respect is Elizabeth Baines' "Leaf Memory" which charts the fortunes of three generations in as many pages without any sense of strain or thinness.'

I guess nowadays, thanks to the internet, you wouldn't miss a review in that way!

Work/pleasure

Can't help identifying with these insects in my garden. In the poppies the bees are  not only frenziedly busy but seem utterly drunk, and when they fly out they are dusted all over and coloured purple from the dark pollen and seem hardly to be able to fly straight for a moment.  It does seem to replicate the state I've been in while writing recently...

Finishing a draft

On Monday I came to the end of the current draft of the wip (I've written on Fictionbitch about the all-consuming nature of the process), and this is the state my room was in after I printed the last page and walked away from it all. That's my old writing table to which I'm crazily, psychologically attached - I got it from a junk shop when I was a hard-up single parent and sat down then and wrote The Birth Machine on it. Everything I've written since - apart from what I've written in Wales -  has been written on that, so it feels really important to the writing process for me.

Scattered on the floor is the previous draft which I tore apart so radically, which is why it's all over the place, and the new draft - 40,000 words shorter! - is sitting on top of the printer. Under the table are the Pukka pads in which I hand wrote each day before typing up: I found I had to do that, cut right away from the previous printed draft, even when I kept the scenes, because I had a new overall perspective affecting the language, however subtly. So it was very much a rewrite...

On the desk are the notes I made last April, when I first started on it all, and the charts and timelines I drew for the characters and scenes, since I was changing the structure so radically (making it much more linear, in fact) with all their page references. In January, after a long break to promote The Birth Machine reissue, I abandoned that scheme and started again, having seen that I could make the book even simpler, but the charts with their page refs were still useful, and I used them right up to the end.

Notice the bits on the floor. But I won't be doing any cleaning in that room until I've done the editing...
It's never been decorated, either, and I'm not sure it ever will be...

Reading group: Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.

Doug suggested this novel because, he said somewhat provocatively, he thought it was time we had a 'boys' book'.

In fact, it's a novel that sets out to subvert the conventions of the Western. It's based on real-life events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s and follows the fortunes of 'the kid', a fourteen-year-old boy who joins the infamous Glanton gang charged with running down Indians for their scalps but ultimately killing all in their way and turning in the end on each other.

Doug said he loved the novel, most especially for its stunning descriptions of the landscape, conveyed in a lyrical prose involving evocative verbal innovations/archaisms which we had already appreciated when we read McCarthy's The Road. He felt odd about this, however, loving the beauty of these descriptions, when at the same time the violence enacted by the gang and others was so graphically depicted and in such a sustained way. As for McCormac's message about the violence, he thought that, unlike that of conventional Westerns, it was that all parties were guilty of it, indigenous peoples and Europeans. (The book also subverts more recent views of the Indians as innocent and peaceful victims.) He was bowled over by McCormac's invention of the character of the white-gang member called the judge, a kind of superhuman being, huge and hairless and cultivated among illiterates yet the personification of violence. Doug reiterated that he felt odd about loving the lyrical aspect of the book, yet added only half-ironically that he'd have joined the Glanton gang, indicating, I think, that for him the book did not after all entirely succeed in subverting the boys'-wishfulfiment of traditional Westerns.

I said that while I'd had problems with the disjunction between the psyches of the characters and the descriptions of the landscape in Annie Proulx's Postcards (which we discussed last time), I felt that here the disjunction was authorially intentional and very interesting. I thought that what McCormac was consciously doing was placing the human figures and their violence as part of that landscape, no less a part of it than the animals and the geographic elements. Ann strongly agreed. Human violence, as a result, is an elemental force against which human morality and cultivation are impotent, and the judge is a kind of totem of this. He is supremely accomplished in all the human arts and civilised systems: he knows the law and legalese (hence his moniker) and several languages. He can play musical instruments and dance and draw beautifully; he knows Darwinian theory. But every natural thing he draws he must afterwards mutilate or erase. Nothing exists, he explains at one point, unless he owns it. Once he possesses them by drawing them, he can obliterate natural objects or the artefacts of ancient civiliations. Through the figure of the judge, even the human systems of cultivation are exposed as immoral and violent. The kid, as the motherless and illiterate son of a schoolmaster descended into drunkenness, is himself an icon of the precariousness of civilisation, and John said it was interesting that the novel began with echoes of David Copperfield, and then totally subverted that novel's theme of the making of a moral conscience. The kid is indeed the one member of the Glanton gang who tries, on several occasions, to act morally and to save others, but as the judge points out to him at the end of the novel, his apparently moral choices end in disaster, with death.  The most moving and symbolic instance is when, years after the Glanton gang has dispersed, or rather imploded, and he is travelling alone, the kid comes upon a massacred wagon train with just one old woman remaining, sitting upright in the sand. He kneels in front of her and delivers a long speech about how she must come with him, he will take her to safety, before she keels over, revealed as a mummified husk. Ann, Doug and Trevor agreed that this was a very moving moment. Ann said it had occurred to her that the judge represented all the seemingly cultivated dictators of our contemporary world who nevertheless indulge in barbarous practices, and I thought that was a very interesting point.

Trevor then spoke about some of the moments he'd found particularly vivid, such as when the Glanton gang are first invited as conquering heroes by the governor of a town to an elegant dinner, and end up trashing everything. Meanwhile, at some time during the discussion, Clare had said that she hadn't liked the novel at all, had hated the violence and had been unable to continue with it. Up to this point Jenny, a criminologist, hadn't spoken at all, and now she said that she too hated the book. She said that what she really objected to was the utter lack of engagement with the subjective experience of violence from the victims' point of view: the fear, and the loss, the psychological damage which is far, far worse than the physical violence.

I said that that was a feeling that I'd had too as I read the book. In fact, I had found the book a very difficult read, and the only way I'd managed to get it read was to set myself a certain number of pages to read each day and stick to it.  But when I got to the end I decided that that perspective - the emotional experience of the victim - was one that the author had deliberately eschewed, along with all interiority, in order to make his political point about the elemental nature of violence. Ann agreed: she said that she had found it difficult to read too; she had had to skip over the violence, and had wanted to dwell on the landscape descriptions but had found herself pushed on by the next (violent) episode, but when she got to the end, she'd had the same experience as me: she found the book an interesting political and artistic experiment.

For Jenny, though, this just didn't justify the omission. In any case, she said, historically at the time there were authorities sending people out to these frontiers to colonise the West, authorities who thus had a moral responsibility but were turning a blind eye, and this was a dimension totally overlooked by the book. I think she felt that fundamentally the book had abdicated a moral responsibility of literature, and in the end I and, I think, others were unsure...

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Family likeness

Recently, the online bookstore Printsasia asked me to write a guest post about my recent books for their blog (you can read it here). It's funny, the insights you get into your own work when you're asked to do such a thing, given just a short number of words to sum it up. While I had always been clear that there are broad issues running through both The Birth Machine and Too Many Magpies - magic versus science, intuition versus logic etc - I'd always thought of them as two very separate sides of the thematic coin. And indeed they are (as I said at the Didsbury Arts Festival last year): The Birth Machine opposes intuition and true logic on the one hand and bad science on the other by locating them in separate characters, but Too Many Magpies places the two opposing forces - the longing for miracles and the need for rationality - in the one character, the narrator.

For this reason I have always seen the two books as two very separate creatures, but the blog post pushed me to sum up thus:

...the message of both novels is the same: we need to be rational, but we ignore at our peril the possibility of things we would never have guessed…

and all of a sudden a saw them as a pair!

I guess your books are like your children. From the inside you see the differences, and not the family likenesses, but I have the feeling I've said this here before...

Distraction

I'm too immersed in my wip at the moment to cope with anything much else besides - I keep forgetting to pay bills and buy food, even. Just about the only thing I seem to be able to manage is taking the odd photo, and here are some from my garden, the iris above, cornflowers and some of the many and varied self-seeding columbines:

Competition: chance to tour Faber archives

I've only just found out about this, and there's only until midnight on Sunday to do it, but I thought I'd draw your attention to this great Museums at Night competition - a draw in which the prize is a night being taken round the amazing archive of publisher Faber. Really, some of my favourite writing has been published by Faber, and I think this would be just a wonderful thing to do. Here are some of the details from the website:

Archivist Robert Brown will take five lucky winners on a journey through 80 years of treasures held in the publishing giant's London office at Bloomsbury House, which is not normally open to the public.

Faber and Faber's unique publishing archive ranges from its famous early twentieth century poetry collection including manuscripts of TS Eliot and WH Auden to books on farming, gardening, art and architecture.

The evening will conclude with an intimate poetry reading by one of Faber's most acclaimed poets, Jo Shapcott [recent winner of the Costa with her collection Of Mutability].

Jo Shapcott 

The event will take place between 6.30pm and 7.30 pm on Friday May 13 at the Faber Archive in London.

To enter, click here.

The competition closes at midnight on Sunday May 8 2011.

Cross-posted with FictionBitch

Too much waist

Writing, you might think, is a pretty safe occupation. After all, you are at your desk most of the day and so more unlikely than most to a) catch infectious diseases from others b) walk under a bus or get knocked down by a car c) sprain your ankle on an uneven pavement etc, and it's always seemed pretty damn silly to me that I'm charged a huge whack on car insurance because technically I'm in 'the entertainment business', as if most of the time I'm driving round in fast cars after showbiz parties rather than cooped up in my room for a greater proportion of the day than most normal human beings.

But there are hazards. DVT, if you get too damn involved in your imaginary world and forget to move, and, as Margaret Atwood has pointed out, backache and long-term problems with posture. But, dear readers, the thing that is truly taxing your vain writer at the moment is LACK OF WAIST. Think about it: if you do housework or stretch to fill supermarket shelves or to write on a whiteboard, you are stretching your waist. If you walk for at least a portion of the day the movement of your legs pulls on the muscles around your waist. But if you SIT COMPLETELY STILL for at least five hours of the day you are not going to exercise your waist muscles, and so, even if you forget to eat, which is happening to me more and more at the moment, YOUR WAIST DISAPPEARS.

Next time you see me, dear readers, I shall mostly be wearing a burka...

Paring and realigning

After blogging so little recently (because I'm so immersed in my writing) I'm going to make you groan. You'll know if you've been following this blog for the past year that this time a year ago I began a new draft of my novel in progress, and, in the obsessive way of us writers, I kept seeing symbols of the redrafting process in nature all around me. Well, I'm doing it again.

After working on the novel from April to the end of August, and getting about half-way through, I stopped writing altogether to promote the reissue of The Birth Machine. As I've previously described, when I finally got back to the wip after Christmas and looked at it with fresh eyes, I realised that I could in fact be going a lot further with the redrafting, and so I went right back to the beginning again. (I'm about halfway through once more.) As I've said before, this is the piece of work I've had to work on harder than any other so far: it's been a question of paring (over and over) as well as some radical realigning, and I can't help but see symbols of this in the bird life in our garden:

Firstly, paring. In our garden we have the bird house above, and for some years running it was used by great tits for nesting. But last year, although we watched a pair investigating, to our disappointment none nested there. In the winter we looked inside: no wonder, there wasn't any room, the whole thing was choked with nests from the previous years! So we cleared it out (just as I've been clearing the dross from my novel) and this spring there are tits nesting there again.

Secondly, realigning. This January three huge trees at the end of our road and close by were felled, just as my latest draft came in for the chop. And the crows that used to nest there? Well, they've found themselves a new structure: under the eaves of the next door house...

Flash Mob Competition

I've been asked by blogger Fat Roland to let you know about the the Flash Mob Competition he's helping to run and judge for the Chorlton Arts Festival:

Stories of 500 words or less, theme and style completely open, entry free. Deadline for entries April 29th. A shortlist will be announced on May 13th, then the whole thing will be topped off with a reading night and awards ceremony on May 26th. 12 shortlisted entrants will get to read their story, and the winner gets their story illustrated and framed. Further details on the website here.

Jane Rogers and Rachel Genn

I haven't been going out much at all lately - for the first time in my life I don't particularly want to: when I finish actually writing for the day all I want to do is sit around tinkering with it in my mind and thinking about next day's episode: just waiting for bed, really, so I can wake up and start again...

But I couldn't miss the launch last night of a new book by Jane Rogers and a debate on the value of teaching creative writing with her ex MA student Rachel Genn, whose debut, The Cure, will come from Constable and Robinson in May.

 

Jane is a wonderful writer, and her new book, The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone Press), looks fantastic. It' s set in a near future when pregnant women are mysteriously dying, and concerns a 16-year-old girl who, against the will of her parents, sets out to make a stand. You can read the rave Sunday Independent review on Jane's website here.

It was a Central Library event, and took place in Eliot House on Deansgate (where the library has relocated during the refurbishments) with its elaborate ceilings and stained-glass windows. The debate that followed the readings was interesting, Jane (who is Professor of Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam) expressing the view, which I share, that you can teach grammar and structure and plot and character-building, but you can't teach a basic, and essential, feel for language.

Edge Hill short story prize

On Wednesday I had a great evening at Edge Hill University, when the winner of last year's Edge Hill Short Story Prize, Jeremy Dyson, read from his winning collection, The Canes That Build the Cranes.

Just beforehand, the long list for this year had been announced, as follows below. It includes a full seven collections from my own publisher Salt Publishing, as well as collections by several other internet friends. Congratulations to all. (Thanks to The Short Review for the list; links are to reviews on The Short Review.)

• Martin Bax - Memoirs of a Gone World (Salt Publishing). 
• Alan Beard - You Don't Have to Say (Tindal Street Press).
• Peter Bromley - Sky Light and Other Stories (Biscuit).
• Jo Cannon - Insignificant Gestures (Pewter Rose Press).
• Roshi Fernando - Homesick (Impress Books).
• David Gaffney - The Half-life of Songs (Salt Publishing).
• Vanessa Gebbie - Storm Warning, Echoes of Conflict (Salt Publishing). review coming soon
• James Kelman - If it is Your Life (Penguin).
• Andre Mangeot - True North (Salt Publishing). review coming soon
• Jay Merill - God of the Pigeons (Salt Publishing). 
• Magnus Mills - Screwtop Thompson (Bloomsbury). 
• Graham Mort - Touch (Seren).
• Nik Perring - Not So Perfect (Roast Books).
• Susannah Rickards - Hot Kitchen Snow (Salt Publishing). review coming soon
• Michele Roberts - Mud, Stories and Sex and Love (Virago).
• Polly Samson - Perfect Lives (Virago). review coming soon
• Helen Simpson - Inflight Entertainment (Random House). 
• Fiona Thackeray - The Secret's in the Folding (Pewter Rose Press).
• Tom Vowler - The Method and Other Stories (Salt Publishing). 
• Susie Wild - The Art of Contraception (Parthian).

Reading group: Postcards by E Annie Proulx

Clare suggested this PEN/Faulkner-Award winning novel, Annie Proulx's first, which charts the fate of the Bloods, a Vermont farming family, in the years between 1944, when the elder son Loyal flees after accidentally (it seems) (and secretly) killing his lover, to the end of the eighties. The novel is structured around the postcards sent by and to the various characters over the years, in particular those sent back by Loyal to his family, never including a return address and poignantly revealing his ignorance of their fate.

Unfortunately Clare was unwell and unable to attend the meeting but sent a message that she had found the novel very atmospheric but also hard-going. Introducing the book in her place, Trevor said he had really enjoyed it as a depiction of the flipside of the American Dream and outlined the downfall of the family and most of the characters, since it turned out that four of the members present had however failed to finish the novel. John had given up after about thirty pages as he had found it dull and didn't feel it promised to go anywhere. Ann and Jenny had given up about halfway through, Ann because she had been very busy and Jenny because she said she just hadn't been in the mood for serious literature, but both suspected that if the novel had had the potential to grab them they'd have finished it anyway. Mark hadn't even tried, because he'd hated Proulx's second novel The Shipping News.

Jo said she'd disliked The Shipping News too, but she had absolutely loved this book. I said that my problem with the novel was that it was perhaps the first book I had ever read that left me feeling depressed rather than cathartically uplifted. One of my favourite books is The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty by Sebastian Barry, which similarly deals with the exile and gradual degradation of a main character, who meets a similar tragic end, but I don't find that book depressing at all in the way I found this. There was something about the treatment of the situation in this novel, of the way that all of the characters end up dying with wasted lives behind them and forgotten.

Trevor and Jenny objected that that was just realistic: in real life everyone does end up dead! I said, but we don't all die with a sense of our lives wasted! Jenny said that she thought that a lot of people did reach the ends of their lives with a sense of waste, and she and Trevor said, and most people end up being forgotten. I said, But surely the point of the novel (as an art form) is to transcend that, to give significance to lives. Trevor said it's one point, but I said no, actually, it's the point. Even in life, we see significance in the lives of others even if they die not seeing it themselves, and the point of the novel surely is to focus significance and meaning. But somehow, to me, this novel fails to do that. In fact, as Jo pointed out, not all of the characters in this book feel that their lives were wasted. Daughter Mernelle and her husband Ray are saved by their marriage, and mother Jewell is basically emancipated by the events, yet there is something about the perspective of the novel which makes their lives seem wasted.

Jo said, but didn't I find the writing absolutely beautiful? Those wonderful descriptions of the landscape? I said, yes, they were stupendous, but I thought that this was perhaps the key to the problem: although the narrative is purportedly a shifting intimate third rather than omniscient, on the whole I felt those descriptions were made from an authorial viewpoint rather than that of the characters. I wouldn't say that the descriptions were exactly touristic, but the sense of appreciation of the beauty and grandeur was often at odds with the situations and psychic journeys of the characters. Jenny said, Yes, the farming characters would probably find the landscape pretty grim, wouldn't they? As well as that basic matter of the attitude to the landscape, there's also the question of the metaphorical language in which it's described. I did think it worked brilliantly for the psyche of the skin doctor who buys up Loyal's fields to build himself an outback retreat, and whose emotional focus is indeed the landscape to which he looks for succour but which overwhelms him:

There was too much to look at. Knotted branches. The urgent but senseless angular pointing of the tree limbs. Grass the colour of wafers. Trees lifting soundless explosions of chrome and saffron. Mountains scribbled maroon... 

However, I felt that such language was inapt for the farming characters who are revealed by the framing handwritten postcards as semi-literate. At one point, just after the murder, Loyal's heightened perception of the landscape was psychologically acceptable - He saw and heard everything with brutal clarity - but the terms in which he sees it didn't seem so: Evening haze rose off the hardwood slopes and blurred a sky discoloured like a stained silk shirt. (As John said: would he ever have even seen a silk shirt, leave alone readily think of one?) I felt, as a result, the chief subjects of the novel were the landscape and the author's appreciation of it, rather than the characters, who simply floated towards their inconsequential fates amongst the fine descriptions.

This is reinforced by the focus in terms of event. Of course everyone (in real life) dies, but the novel is so plotted that every character is propelled towards nothing more than their own death, which always ends on a note of waste, as in the description of the death of Mernelle's husband Ray. At the end he fails to recognize Mernelle (after their seemingly loving marriage) and in his mind's eye sees instead a figure from his childhood:  her slender back to him, her bare arms, the square of sunlight on the floor enclosing his own shadow. / 'Too bad we never did,' he said, and died.

John said that this novel had changed his previously firm view that the most important thing about a book is prose style, and Doug, arriving late and having missed the discussion up to this point, said independently that he thought the book was brilliantly written but basically tedious.

Mark (who hadn't read the book) asked, But surely it must be saying something about America, and people said what they thought it was saying: that technological progress had destroyed people like the Bloods. Unfortunately, though, most people felt that the book did a disservice to that message by being too tedious, and I felt it did a disservice to those characters by subsuming them to the landscape.

I said I found the framework of the handwritten postcards rather forced and artificial, not much more than a linking device for the episodic structure: it's not as if all of the postcards were in the bundle grabbed by Loyal when he's first on the run, and in reality many of those communications would not have been made on postcards but in letters. Most people, including even Jo, agreed. Jenny said the postcards had really irritated her, as she found them extremely difficult to read, which meant that she often lost their significance to the chapters they headed, and there were murmurs of agreement. Ann said, with reference to both the episodic structure and the linguistic style, that she wondered if Proulx's narrative mode was better suited to short stories than novels: she had read two volumes of her short stories and had found them wonderful.

Finally, I asked people what they had made of the sections appearing every so often and titled 'What I See' and set apart from the rest of the narrative by being printed in bold (which last Mark said he hates in novels, along with sections in italics). Most people were blank, and even Jo said that she hadn't known what to make of them. It seemed to me now on reflection that that they were intended as authorial intervention, but I hadn't previously been sure, probably because, as I said, there was such an authorial feel to the main, purportedly intimate-third narration.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here.

Bookshops I Love: Waterstone's Gower Street

When I was in London last week I happened to be passing Gower Street Waterstone's and popped in, and lookey-here! So there's one place you can get The Birth Machine, if you happen to be passing too...

Thank you, Gower St W!

Wisewords reading - how it went

Well, it was great! Great to get away from the desk and the WIP on Wednesday - even if it did feel like pulling off a big sticking plaster - to actually wash my hair and put on some togs other than the writing gear (which consists of my grandmother's old jumper [as featured on Dovegreyreader] and the kids' cast-off jeans and tops), and get on a train and actually WHIZZ down the country (a countryside wreathed in mist all the way, which was both disorientating and mightily exciting for your necessarily agoraphobic and home-stuck writer), and actually WALK DOWN SOME LONDON STREETS FILLED WITH PEOPLE! and GO IN A PUB! and meet up with two great writer friends!! Honestly, the headiness of it all!

And The Luxe in Spitalfields, where we were doing the reading, turned out to be just that: a really plush space. And what a great evening it turned out to be - a great audience and superb readings from the talented bunch of women writers I was lucky to be joining. Jay Merill, who organized and presented the whole event, kicked off by reading 'Little Elva' from her great Salt story collection, God of the Pigeons:

 She was followed by Catherine Smith who read us a striking story about an unusual house-hunter, from her new collection , The Biting Point, published by Speech Bubble. After a short break, Sarah Salway read from her wonderfully wry story collection 'Leading the Dance':

 and then Tania Hershman read us a series of her amazing science-inspired flashes, some from The White Road and Other Stories (Salt) and some new and unpublished:

In the final third, Susannah Rickards read beautifully from her Scott Prize-winning collection Hot Kitchen Snow (Salt):

and, since the event was part of a women's arts festival, I read my story about two sisters, 'Holding Hands', from Balancing on the Edge of the World:

And then I had a fabulous chat to the others and all the lovely audience members who included writers Debi Alper, Emma Darwin and Judith Amanthis.

Thank you to the others for their great readings, to all who came and made a great audience, to Jay especially for organizing and inviting us, and to the Wisewords Festival.

Next day I actually had a DAY OFF (in London)!!
Weird. (But fabulous.)

Wisewords reading

Sorry not to be blogging much at the moment: I'm very immersed in my WIP and hardly able to hear what people are saying to me, leave alone finding enough mental and creative space to do any other kind of writing!

This week I'll be having a break, though, as I'm off to London to read at an event organised by Salt author Jay Merill, which I'm really looking forward to: five exciting other short-story authors are also reading: Jay herself,  Susannah Rickards (recent winner of Salt's Scott Prize), Tania Hershman, Sarah Salway and Catherine Smith.

JayLive
Wednesday 16  March 2011, 6.30pm FREE
The Luxe Spitalfields 020 7101 1751
109 Commercial Street, E1 6BG Liverpool St tube
One of the Wisewords Bookclub series of events and part of the Wisewords Festival 

World Book Day and Save Our Libraries at Crystal Peaks

I was delighted to be invited by Claire Molinari, Chair of Sheffield's Local & Live Community Theatre, to read and talk yesterday, World Book Day, at Crystal Peaks Library. I felt a bit agoraphobic about leaving my novel (I'm in that stage now where it's like a cocoon) but it was lovely to have a change and drive out with John in beautiful sunshine and over the frosty Pennines. When we arrived at the library, retired policeman Martyn Johnson, author of 'What's Tha Up To - Memoirs Of An Attercliffe Bobby' was holding his audience spellbound, and he told how, after its huge local success, the book has now been picked up by a bigger publisher.

The day-long series of events was also part of the Save Our Libraries campaign, so I talked about what libraries had meant to me as a child and the part they had played in the making of my books. As I've said before, I find libraries very inspiring for writing - often when I've got a general idea for a story but can't find the starting point I'll wander down to the library, and sure enough a first line will come to me - it's as though they're there waiting for me, somehow nurtured by the library! This is what happened very startlingly with Too Many Magpies: the first line just seemed to drop down to me from the domed ceiling of Didsbury Library (photo below by Gene Hunt).




The Birth Machine couldn't have been written without the help of the library in Chorlton, where I was living at the time: there was a big Obstetrics book in the reference section which I constantly referred to for the sections set in a maternity ward.

(Thanks to Paul Ashwin for this photo of Chorlton Library)

And my story 'Glossary of Bread' (included in Balancing on the Edge of the World), which is structured around dictionary definitions of bread (and the changes over time of those definitions) was written using the 1933 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary ranged at the time around the reference shelf walls in Didsbury Library.

Anyway, I had a lovely time yesterday, and thanks so much to those who came and to Claire for inviting me to join in the day.

The other World Book Night

If you don't already know about it, do go on over to Nicola Morgan's blog to read about her great idea for contributing to World Book Night. Essentially, having had some doubts about the wisdom of the WBN project to give away 40,000 copies of each of 25 books (doubts I share), she has thought up the notion of buying a book between now and Saturday (5th March) and giving it away with an inscription marking WBN and stating where the book was bought. I'm definitely in, for one!

Since the official WBN is concentrating on books already well known, I suggest too buying from a small publisher and a less hyped author - and you couldn't go wrong with my own publisher, Salt!

EDITED IN:  Here's a great suggestion from the comments on Fictionbitch, made by Nicola Morgan herself:

I'd love if people who did go for my Buy-and-give-a-book idea would add a comment here: http://helpineedapublisher.blogspot.com/2011/03/what-did-you-do-for-books-this-week.html to say what they bought and who they gave it too. 

Crossposted with Fictionbitch.

Bookshops I love: Waterstone's Deansgate (yet again!)

Today I had one of those moments that can make an author's entire week. Last time I went into Waterstone's Deansgate they had four copies of The Birth Machine. I went in today and they had ten, (stacked face outwards - see pic!). What did it mean? Had they ordered more, or just got some out of the storeroom? I plucked up courage and asked, and the assistant told me that they keep reordering it because it's selling, adding, 'Well, it's such a good book. I've read it myself and it's a really good book.'

Not sure I can convey quite how chuffed that made me! Thank you so much, the fiction staff at Deansgate!

An article and two readings

Here's a laugh: last week I had an article on The View from Here in which I said that when I'm really immersed in my writing I can forget even to talk to my children. And then, although I'd intended to mention it on here, because I am currently so immersed in my writing, I forgot.

Another thing I meant to mention and forgot is the event I'm taking part in next Thursday at Crystal Peaks Library in Sheffield for World Book Day and the Save Our Libraries campaign. There are events all day, and I'm on at 2 pm, reading from my work and talking about the role libraries have played in my life as a reader and a writer.

2 pm Thursday 3rd March 2011
Crystal Peaks Library
1-3 Peak Square, Sheffield, South Yorkshire S20 7PH 0114 203 0612 FREE.


I'm also excited to be reading later in the month at the Spitalfields Wisewords Festival with some really great writers :

Jay Merill presents Jay LIVE (Salt Publishing) with authors Elizabeth Baines, Tania Hershman, Susannah Rickards, Sarah Salway and Catherine Smith Wednesday 16  March 2011, 6.30pm FREE
The Luxe Spitalfields 020 7101 1751
109 Commercial Street, E1 6BG Liverpool St tube
One of the Wisewords Bookclub series of events and part of the Wisewords Festival