The medium and the message

There's a question that nearly always comes up in interviews and Q&As: What do you write with: a pencil or pen or straight onto the keyboard? When I first heard this question it struck me as an irrelevant one: what did it matter, wasn't the work, the end result, the thing that mattered, not the mechanics by which it was set down? But then of course in order to answer the question I had to think about why my personal preference was to write my first drafts by hand. The reason, I realised, was that I felt there to be some kind of connection between the brain and hand: it was like drawing, drawing the pictures in my head, only with the shapes of the letters and the words; it was a way to get the proper shape and the feel of things - a more bodily, visceral connection to the story than I could ever get with the tips of my fingers on a keyboard. And the reason I liked to use a fountain pen was that the liquid flow of the ink somehow helped to make the words and the pictures flow. I hadn't always used a fountain pen, though: before someone bought me one for Christmas one year, I used any old biro to hand, and for a long time I was far less fussy about the kind of paper I wrote on than I ended up being. And others wrote straight onto the computer. So surely it was a matter of habit and personal preference, and therefore of no real wider interest in the question of how to write?

One thing that swapping to a fountain pen did for me was to make my handwriting neater. Writing by hand for years with your mind on the story and not on your handwriting makes your handwriting terrible, or it did mine. The nib forced me to be more controlled than the slippy ballpoint or rollerball could, and created subtler, more differentiated letter shapes. But there came a time - about eighteen months ago - when even my fountain pen couldn't make my writing neat enough for me to easily read back what I had written. Eighteen months ago I sat down to write a novel. On the second day I looked at what I had written on the first, and I could make neither head nor tail of it without doing a scrutinising, translating job. Hardly conducive to an overall view and fluid leaps of the imagination. How was I going to get any sort of flow? Apart from which, if I did ever manage to get to the end, how long would it take me to transfer the thing to the computer, if I couldn't even read what I'd written?

In fact, although once upon a time I'd write everything this way, I was by now writing everything apart from fiction straight onto the computer. It started, as far as I remember, with blogging, and I soon moved on to writing everything beside fiction - reviews, articles, reports - that way. Was I just being superstitious about fiction, clinging superstitiously to old habits? After all, I was very used by now to forming ideas via my fingertips directly on the screen. And it wasn't as if I didn't, after all, ever write fiction on the computer: unless I needed to do radical rewrites, once I'd transferred the first draft to the computer, all further work on a piece was indeed done on the computer. It's often pointed out - though perhaps less than it was at one time - that once a piece of writing is on the screen it looks authoritative, finished, which leads to a temptation not to rewrite and edit. But didn't I edit endlessly on the computer? And I thought of the way that my old method doubled the time it took to make a first draft - writing it once, then typing it all over again. So, as I recorded on this blog at the time, I abandoned my pen, and because the novel was, I knew, going to be short and linear, I wrote it - my first time ever with fiction - straight onto the computer. It felt like utter liberation. I felt I had dispensed with an old, useless time-consuming habit.

Well, this winter I came to work on the novel again, and I saw: it was rushed. It was fluid enough, too fluid: it was short of those beats, those pauses and longeurs that take you emotionally into the characters' psyches and the drama of the situation. There was too much telling - fine, well-expressed telling - but, simply, not enough feeling. I could see: I had brought to it the wrong mentality altogether: the summing-up, intellectual mentality, the quick-fire making of abstract connections, the explicitness of article-writing, that mentality with which my fingers, clattering across the keyboard, are so used now to being in touch. I had lost the slow emotional burn, the subtle implication, and the visceral feel of fiction.

I have had to rewrite it, and, guess what, I had to do whole chunks of it by hand. Only by writing by hand could I properly sink into the world I needed to create, and once I did that, in fact, the connections and meanings grew. Perhaps it's simply a matter of time: it takes longer to write legibly by hand that it does to type, and there's more time for the pictures and feelings to form. But I think I actually paused more, spent more time dreaming, dreaming about the story between putting the words down. And that's the crux, perhaps. Article-writing is purely thinking, and fiction-writing is chiefly dreaming. Article-writing requires an incisive, controlling mentality; fiction-writing requires a kind of loss of self, a giving oneself up, a receptivity. I know others don't suffer this associative dichotomy - and surely the children now starting with computers in their cradles won't - but for me, for the present at any rate, while my article-writing mind can fly with my fingers over the keyboard, my fiction-making dreams must travel down my arm to the pen in my hand. (And I'm trying to write more neatly!)

Getting things covered

We're in the process of deciding on a cover for my new collection of short stories which takes the title of the first story, 'Used to Be'. My great publisher, Chris Hamilton-Emery, is designing the cover himself, and last night he revealed the draft below for discussion. It's not at all the final cover, and can easily be changed. I know I'm really lucky to be consulted like this, and its also great to have the chance to garner the opinions of others, so I'd be very grateful for any comments on it you may wish to leave here.

Personally, I think it's really striking and intriguing, but I do have a doubt. I love the Magritte echo, which beautifully underlines the stories' theme of hidden things/truths and things turning out to be not what they seem and alternative realities/lives. My doubt about it is that the hairdo/coiffure perhaps suggests something of a fifties-ish Mad Men or Stepford Wives vibe, and indicates that the stories are about the role of women, which they're not. Any comments would be enthusiastically received!

A break from writing

Recently I got to the end of a big writing project, a rewrite. Because it was a rewrite, and therefore, I predicted, time-manageable, and because I have so many other projects pending, I had set myself a deadline to finish it by mid-February. It was nevertheless harder work than I'd anticipated - I seemed to be going at a snail's pace for the first part of it, and towards the end I was doing ten-hour days at my desk to catch up, and ended up suffering the most dreadful backache and getting badly unfit. I did finish in time, but felt so mentally exhausted and physically sluggish that there was no way I could turn immediately to the next project, and, since John and I had been invited to the party of an old friend in London and neither of us had any other commitments for the next few days, and since we had the chance to stay in someone's flat there while they were away, John persuaded me to take a few days' break with him. I was reluctant at first - I really felt I couldn't afford the time - but I'm glad I did.

My little holiday kicked off here in Manchester with a visit to the newly reopened Whitworth Gallery. I was at the Friends and Family preview (a week before the official opening) which was tremendously crowded, so it was quite hard to look at things, but the new building looks quite amazing, and I did take some photos of the major exhibition by Cornelia Parker with which the gallery reopens. Above is her War Room, made out of the fabric left behind after memorial poppies have been stamped from it, and here is the hanging in closeup:

here her famous exploded shed, Cold Dark Matter:

and here her flattened silver objects suspended from the ceiling:

In London I did some more gallery visiting. First, to the Photographer's Gallery and the exhibition Human Rights and Human Wrongs, which once again was extremely crowded, too crowded to see anything properly, but I have to say that in any case I simply couldn't take it: after one photo of black slaves chained together, another of a German child (presumably an officer's child) jauntily sauntering past dead bodies lined up at the side of the road in Belsen, another of a Japanese soldier standing grinning beside a Chinese prisoner in the process of being hanged, and another of a dead body lying outside a Jewish ghetto while unconcerned people pass by, I was having difficulty breathing from my attempt not to cry audibly, and I had to force my companions to leave with me. I feel it was a failure, and that I should have been stronger, though I also can't help feeling that I too would have had to become somehow inured to have been able to look at more all in one go. In view of this, I was interested in the attitudes of others in the gallery: although it was so very crowded the place was very, very silent; there was a sense that everyone was overwhelmed, and I did feel compelled to take a photo of this before I left:

It was strange, after this, to go down to the basement and 'We Could Be Heroes', an exhibition of photographs of teenagers and youth culture, including those by Picture Post photographers. You'd think this show would have seemed trivial and superficial by comparison - 'teenagehood' being after all a luxury of civilisation - but as always I found many of these photos moving portraits of humanity, and this picture by Bert Hardy of kids in a Gorbals cemetery - I once taught kids newly rehoused from the Gorbals - had me deeply moved.

This was a small exhibition and all the better for me: I find it impossible to do justice to any exhibition in one visit. The next day I spent the whole afternoon in the V&A regretfully ignoring all the other treasures while I looked at Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, a beautiful medieval tapestry depicting the fall of Troy (it was really interesting to see where the moths or carpet beetles had got to it!) and an amazing Renaissance glass panel depicting Tobias and Sarah of the Apocrypha refraining from sex for the first three days of their marriage in order to drive out the demon of lust that had killed her several previous husbands! (And they have Grampa Simpson slippers under their bed!)

Next day the National Portrait Gallery, and I was driven from another overcrowded (and expensive) exhibition - John Singer Sergeant - by hardly being able to see a thing and, frankly, the overpowering stink of perfume and fart, and retreated to Who Are You?, the free Grayson Perry show scattered throughout the permanent exhibition and questioning the very concepts of portraiture and of captured identity. Fantastic! Here's his huge 'bank-note' tapestry depicting the multiplicity of so-called 'British identity':

Finally, on our last day, Samuel Johnson's late-seventeenth/early-eighteenth century townhouse off Fetter Lane.

I'd never been before and I loved it: the winding lanes leading up to it, the quiet square it looks onto (though I wonder how quiet it would have been in his day?), and the long attic for which he took the house specifically to accommodate the long table on which the dictionary was compiled and which seated his sixteen assistants, and where you can now read a facsimile of the original edition:

And then it was time to walk to Euston for our train - though we did break the walk with a stop-off at Ciao Bella - and for me to discover that in spite of all the walking we had done over the past five days, I was still not yet fully fit. Writers beware: too much time at the desk is Not a Good Thing.

The Redemption of Galen Pike by Carys Davies

I'm so very happy to be on Salt's short story list: the company is amazing, and not least among them is Carys Davies, whose collection The Redemption of Galen Pike was published in the autumn. So many of the stories in this book have won prizes or have been short- or long-listed in prestigious competitions, it's quite dazzling: the V S Pritchett Prize, the Olive Cook Award, the EFG Sunday Times Award, and so on.

But to get to the stories, which I had to stop myself reading all in one sitting, so vivid and curious are the worlds they create, and so concise and witty the prose. But they are stories to savour. Each one creates a whole different and strange yet somehow familiar world where human emotions are stripped to their essentials - a jail in Colorado where a Quaker spinster visits a condemned man, the snowy waste of Siberia where a strange and threatening-seeming man turns up at an inn, a cabin in the woods of Eastern Europe where a woman lives in hiding, the Australian outback where a woman harbours a dark secret. These worlds are timeless and mythic: it's hard know in precisely which past century of Quaker Colorado the title story takes place, but it doesn't matter, and it's better that we don't; it's hard to remember, before the end of 'The Travellers' reminds us, that our Siberian innkeeper is an escapee from contemporary urban life, and it's a surprise - and entrancing - to find that the narrator of the fairytale-like 'Precious' has a modern wheelie suitcase. The effect is to make the stories, and the heartbreaking vulnerabilities and touching strengths of the characters, resonantly universal, and the marriage of this mythic quality with a sharp yet down-to-earth prose style makes for something very potent. In at least two of the stories, Davies reverses the myth-making process by telling us a story which turns out to be the 'truth' behind a familiar myth, and the effect is quite startling: the myth defamiliarised and made new to us all over again. There's an impressive restraint characterising the whole collection: in many of the stories a deep secret powers the actions of the central character, a secret not revealed until the end, and it is the wit and restraint with which Davies handles this that make so many of the stories in this impressive volume heartbreaking.

I thoroughly recommend this book: it's an absolute treat to read, and I guarantee that the stories will stay with you long afterwards.

Reading group: All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews

Back to consensus. Ever since I reviewed this novel in the summer, I have been recommending it to all and sundry, so naturally I suggested it for the group, and to my delight it was received with enthusiasm by all present. It's the story of the struggle of Yolandi, a tumultuous forty-something single mother and writer of young adult novels, with the desire to die of her elder sister, the beautiful, famous and successful pianist Elfrieda. Narrated by Yolandi with a slicing wit in a kind of time-lapse as-it-happens (sometimes in present tense, sometimes in a past tense recording just-happened events), the account follows Yoli's struggle to counter and dispel Elfrieda's death-wish as she visits her in hospital (as the book opens Elfrieda has made yet another suicide attempt), and to understand it, mining for reasons their background: childhood in a repressive north-Canadian Mennonite community with its own history of persecution by the Bolsheviks and exile from Russia, a father who has already committed suicide, and a mother motored by a fighting spirit and eternal optimism.

The discussion was short, since there was little to argue about: everyone loved the book, and everyone agreed that it was both laugh-out-loud funny and immensely moving and tragic - Doug said, to nods all round, that most of the time he didn't know whether to laugh or cry and often ended up doing both at the same time - and that there's a kind of unique alchemy in the way Toews achieves this effect. People thought the book brilliantly written, and loved the light touch with which it conveyed its deeply serious issues. We weren't entirely without some demurring: although it's clearly not the intention of the book, one person saw Elfrieda as selfish since, although she is made perfectly aware of the devastating effects on her family, her death wish is long-term and rational and her suicide attempts planned and orchestrated rather than irrational actions made in sudden moments of despair. No one else however shared this objection, feeling that despair can be ongoing. John pointed out also the immense stress on Elfrieda of being a world-touring concert pianist. Mark felt there was too much of what he called 'name-dropping': Yoli, Elfrieda and their mother constantly quote from literature and philosophy, and the title of the book, 'All My Puny Sorrows', is a quote from Coleridge - Elfrieda's 'romantic-poet boyfriend', as Yoli calls him - which as a teenager Elfrieda scrawled as an acronym graffito signature - AMPS - over their little Mennonite town. Doug rather agreed with Mark. He said he thought it especially towards the end, when the family quote whole poems: it seemed somehow forced, and geared to make authorial points. No one else had this problem, but felt rather that the family in the novel is so clearly steeped in literature that all of this was convincingly realistic. Beside which, one of the novel's strong points is that a reliance on literature and philosophy can't stop Elfrieda choosing death: 'Books are what save us. Books are what don't save us.'

After being discharged from hospital, Elfreida makes another suicide attempt and ends up there again, and once again Yoli has left her Toronto home, and her children to fend for themselves, to be at Elfrieda's Winnipeg hospital bedside and help support their mother, this time reinforced by their mother's sister Tina. Doug said he felt that at this point the novel became a bit repetitive. No one else minded this, repetition being in the nature of the situation, but also there are developments. In this section not only does Yoli move on from trying to persuade Elf against suicide to struggling with Elf's request to help her die, the focus shifts more closely towards Yoli and we see the effects on her. Also, in this section there is a drama concerning the aunt, Tina.

Such complaints were however only mild, and the general agreement was that this is a quite brilliant novel that we were thrilled to have read.

My own review of the book can be read here.

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

Reading group: The Sportswriter by Richard Ford

Warning: plot spoiler.

So much for the consensus we seemed to be developing in our reading group - though it was all of the rest of us against one. The dissenter was Doug who had suggested this 1986 novel. Getting on for 400 pages, it consists of the reflections over one Easter weekend of Frank Bascombe, a thirty-nine-year-old male sportswriter living in the fictional suburban Haddon, New Jersey, whose marriage has ended and who is struggling with the emotional aftermath. In a present-tense first-person narration the book follows Frank as he meets his ex-wife for their yearly visit together to the grave of their dead son; goes on a fishing trip with the Divorced Men's Club and is unwillingly befriended by another member, Walter; takes his girlfriend Vickie on a trip to Detroit where he's interviewing an ex-footballer; goes for Easter dinner at Vickie's parents' home and while there is simultaneously ditched by Vickie and called away because Walter has killed himself and left Frank a suicide note; escapes the drama of Walter's death to his office in the night-time city and encounters an attractive female intern, an escape which leads to eventual resurrection from his emotional gloom. Throughout all of this, Frank reflects on a low-key past punctuated by three dramatic events of loss or failure - the immediate fizzling out of a promising career as a fiction writer, the death of his young son and the end of his marriage - and on the meaning of life and his own feelings.

Doug found himself staunchly defending the book against a roomful of people who had found it, in Ann's word, 'tedious.' None of us disagreed with him that the prose is excellent on the sentence level, but he was the only person in the room who felt able to identify with Frank Bascombe and his troubles and musings. I said that I had really had to force myself to read the book, and Ann had been unable to make herself finish it in time. I said that I felt that if a woman had written a book of such self-indulgent and self-centred introspection she would have been immediately slammed (ie everyone would have recognised it for what it was), and everyone found laughable and objectionable Frank's sexism. Though Frank makes a great drama (an emotional drama of his own) out of the death of his son and a lesser drama out of his relationship with his living son, his daughter Clarrie appears (both in the action and as a focus of Frank's narrative attention) for the first time only on page three hundred and something (and thereafter is forgotten), and the fact that Frank refers to his ex-wife solely as X is a passable joke that not only wears thin but can't be excused the incipient sexism in its insistence (Doug admitted that he didn't find that psychologically convincing, that it seemed more of an author's joke than Frank's). Vickie is at one point 'a nice little bundle for a lonely fellow to call his in a strange city when time's to kill' (note the possessiveness, the patronisation of 'little', the objectification of 'bundle', and the disrespect implicit in the notion that she's something to kill time with). He refers to the girl his seminary-student lodger is seeing as 'the dumpy little seminary chicken'; he speculates an alternative past for himself which includes 'annexing a little wife', the female intern with whom he (briefly) runs off in the end apparently has 'a pair of considerable grapefruits', and all women are chiefly characterised by their physical characteristics. Reflecting on his escape from a woman asking for his help on the station platform and whom he thinks is the dead Walter's sister, he later muses: 'Fast getaways from sinister forces are sometimes essential.' Ann commented also on Frank's racism, the fact that any black character is initially characterised as precisely that, black, a 'Negro'. One description of his lodger is a quite splendid mix of racism and patriarchal penis envy: 'He is a man I admire, a bony African with an austere face, almost certain the kind to have a long aboriginal penis'.

Doug argued that this was Frank's mentality which the author is exposing with irony. It is indeed hard to believe that a master of prose such as Richard Ford would be unaware of such connotations. It's hard too to believe he isn't making fun of Frank when it turns out that the woman Frank thought was Walter's sister was nothing of the sort and he was escaping her for nothing, or by the fact that on the final day of the weekend, Frank goes from being in love with Vickie at lunchtime and wanting to marry her to contacting an old girlfriend in mid-afternoon, to trying by evening for a reconciliation with his wife and inviting her to have sex with him in the newly-dead Walter's bed (!) (a suggestion which makes her immediately send him packing), and late that same night is picking up the new intern. But the rest of us couldn't find a savage enough irony in the author's overall attitude to Frank either to entertain us or to prevent us from feeling that fundamentally we were meant to identify with him (a point raised in the review, less critical than ours, by Alice Hoffman for the New York Review of Books, which famously prompted Ford and his wife to shoot copies of one of Hoffman's own novels).

Frank's meditations on life seem to be intended to be taken seriously, and indeed merit it, stemming as they do from the grief of his son's death and the end of his marriage. I said that one problem for me, though, was that I wasn't ever clear precisely what Frank's attitude to life was. At times I thought he was looking for transcendence (in his relations with women, in his surroundings: 'Hoving Road this morning is as sun-dappled and vernal as any privet lane in England'), but at others he seems in retreat from anything so unsettling as the search for transcendence - 'Holidays can hold too many disappointments that I then have to accommodate' - and orderly suburbia his chosen place of retreat from it. Jenny said she had no such problem; she saw Frank as quite clearly suffering mid-life crisis. Looking at the book again to write this, I see that there is perhaps a progression (or rather, an about-turn) from Frank's relish of suburbia to contempt as he finally escapes on the train: '...climbing down tonight onto the streets of any of these little crypto-homey Jersey burgs could heave me into a panic worse than New York ever has'. However, the book did not engage me enough, I think, for me to perceive Frank's earlier attitude as ambivalent rather than merely inconsistent.

I also said I had an overall problem with the narrative voice: who was Frank speaking to in spilling out all of his deeper feelings? Doug said, well, he's talking to himself, as one does at life-crisis times. I said, but you don't need to tell yourself who you are or where you live, which is precisely how this novel begins: 'My name is Frank Bascombe. I am a sportswriter. / For the past fourteen years I have lived here at 19 Hovington Road, Haddam, New Jersey, in a large Tudor house bought when a book of short stories I wrote sold to a movie producer for a lot of money...' Thus the book doesn't work as an interior monologue. However, I wan't sure that the novel worked as a direct address to a reader, either, as although there are other moments of direct address and lots of backstory explanation, I felt that the listener was intended as other than the reader, more specific. If so, however, that listener is never identified as in the convention of a dramatic monologue. My overall impression therefore was that the focus of the narrative voice was blurred and it lacked integrity.

Finally, someone said to a chorus of agreement, and to Doug's dismay, that there wasn't an ounce of humour in the book. Here I had to come down on Doug's side. It seems to me that Frank's tone throughout is wry, that in spite of his sexism there's a gentle and often humane comedy in the depiction of many of the characters, and that Frank has a nice line in ironic word-play ('Face the earth where you can. Literally speaking, it's all you have to go on.')

One interesting thing was that this book was chosen for discussion by the group over another, contemporary novel, because of its good reputation stemming from generally enthusiastic critical response at the time of its publication in 1986. Mark in particular was very keen to read it, as he had read it many years ago and had really liked it as a depiction of male middle-age he could look forward to. However, he was shocked on reading it again to find his view of Frank, and of the book, markedly different. This perhaps indicates that the book suffers from a change in social attitudes - that we are perhaps meant to identify with Frank rather than despise him (rather than that Ford has failed on the literary level to satirise Frank properly), but that changed social attitudes made us unable to do so. It is also therefore perhaps interesting that Doug, who said at one point that he does identify with Frank, had also read the book fifteen years ago, but had not had time to read it again for the meeting.

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

New story collection

I am thrilled that a new collection of stories by me is to be published in August by the wonderful Salt Publishing (who published my first collection and two of my novels).

My writing life has been pretty quiet for the past year or so: I've been very much stuck to my desk working on two big projects (so I haven't had many comings and goings to write about here, and when you've spent a whole day squeezing your brain there's not much juice left for bloggish reflection), but I guess life will be different now that there's a publication in the offing.

Strange, the writing life, with its swings from hermit-like withdrawal to utter busy-ness out in the world. I wouldn't have it any other way...

Reading group: All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

If the last few meetings are anything to go by, our group seems to be developing a consensus about books - a bit of a change from some of the heated arguments we've had in the past.

All present admired and were greatly moved by this famous German novel suggested by Clare. Written in the aftermath of the First World War, and based on Remarque's own experience at the Western front, it is the searing first-person account of a young regular soldier's experience of the conflict. All of us said that although there is so much material about the First World War, so that one feels one knows all about it, reading this book was an eye-opening experience. Unlike most accounts (such as those of Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy of novels and of the British War Poets) it presents the vivid perspective not of an officer, but of a regular soldier. Pushed by their teacher with his ideology of national glory, the narrator and his classmates enlist as regulars at the age of eighteen, but, thoughtful and intelligent, the narrator is very soon aware of the ironies of army life and reflects on its de-civilising and dehumanising nature:

'At first astonished, then embittered, and finally indifferent, we recognised that what matters is not the mind but the boot brush, not intelligence but the system, not freedom but the drill... After three weeks it was no longer incomprehensible to us that a braided policeman should have more authority over us than had formerly our parents, our teachers and the whole gamut of culture from Plato to Goethe.'

Not only does the book present in acute detail the physical experience for the ordinary soldier, it is intently concerned with the psychological effects of war. Once his unit is moved into active service on the front, and as his experiences become searing, the narrator comments on the disassociation required to perform a soldier's tasks and manoeuvres, the suppression of thought and feeling - the need to be all animal instinct - simply to be able to stay safe. He comes to understand the devastating consequences for his generation. Home on leave, where the war is still viewed in terms of glory, and thus unable to communicate his experience, he sees that his particular generation of young men - signing up before they had had the chance to develop lives back home to return to - will be forever destroyed, alienated from society even if they survive the war, their promise shattered. I said that at the point where the narrator voices this notion, I was in floods of tears, and everyone agreed that it was devastatingly moving.

Needless to say, in the run-up to the Second World War the book was banned in Germany as unpatriotic. People in our group however expressed an appreciation of the fact that for us British readers the German point of view dispensed with all issues of patriotism and underlined the devastating effects of war per se for all. We were all immensely moved by the incident, recalling Wilfred Owen's 'Strange Meeting',  in which the narrator instinctively kills a Frenchman who jumps into a crater in which he is sheltering, only to then see his humanity and mourn him.

'I see how peoples are set one against another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains in the world invent weapons and words to make it more refined and enduring.'

Clare said that she wasn't sure it was the greatest literature, but it was certainly a book worth reading for its message. I said, though, I found that the style in which it is written - a particular plain realist style that was fashionable in Germany between the two wars - served admirably its stark subject matter and message, and was in any case enlivened throughout by moments of incisive irony: 'little Albert Kropp, the clearest thinker among us and therefore only a lance-corporal'. (There is a wonderfully droll irony in a discussion amongst the soldiers, prompted by a visit from the Kaiser, about why wars occur.) Like Clare, the rest of us said we were really glad to have read the book, and grateful to her for having suggested it.

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

A time-lapse year

Happy New Year to all!

It's been a funny time-lapse sort of year for me, writing-wise. All last winter I holed in and worked intensively on something long and then got stalled on it for various reasons not to do with writing, so there's nothing to show for it yet and may not be for a while. In the meantime, however, although as far as the actual writing went my focus was away from short stories, stories I'd written previously were published in several anthologies. In January I was in York at a signing for Red Room: New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontes, ed. A J Ashworth (Unthank Books), for which my story 'That Turbulent Stillness' was commissioned - an amusing day I wrote about here. Spring and summer brought three more anthologies. Best British Short Stories 2014, ed. Nicholas Royle (Salt) was launched in June at the first-ever London Short Story Festival and included my story 'Tides, Or How Stories Do or Don't Get Told', first published online by Fiction Editor Kate Brown at The View From Here. This was followed the very next week by Unthology 5, ed. Ashley Stokes & Robin Jones (Unthank), where my story 'Clarrie and You' appeared, which involved me in a truly enjoyable first-time trip to Norwich for the launch. In July I attended the 13th Conference on the Short Story in English in Vienna, and my story 'Where the Starlings Fly' was one in an anthology of stories by writers invited to read at the conference, Unbraiding the Short Story, ed. Maurice A Lee. Finally, in the autumn, my inverted ghost story 'A Matter of Light' saw publication in an anthology of creepy stories from Honno, The Wish Dog, ed. Penny Thomas and Stephanie Tillotson. In fact, I ended up with a clash: I was really sorry to have to miss the Cardiff launch of this book as I was already committed to read at an event at Edge Hill University for Best British Short Stories 2014, organised by fellow contributor and lecturer Ailsa Cox. Meanwhile, during the summer, my story 'Looking for the Castle' was runner-up in the Short Fiction competition, and in the week before Christmas I heard that it is to be published in Unthology 7 by Unthank Books in the coming summer.

After my winter of seclusion, I became suddenly a writer once more in touch with the wider literary world. A long time ago now I gave up teaching writing to concentrate more on my own work. I was lucky to be able financially to do that, I know, but the fact is that I was becoming decidedly itchy for the creative and intellectual stimulation I always found in teaching. So when in March I was invited to read at the Vienna conference, I jumped at the chance, and have to say that I revelled in the conference, in the to-and-fro with academics and other writers. An upshot was that I was invited to join a narrative research group, and I have to say that although peace and isolation are essential ingredients in the life of the writer, there's little more stimulating than sharing ideas about writing with your peers and to be able to feel a sense of your own place as a writer within the wider world of literary ideas. By the same token, I accepted a generous invitation to join the writers' group to which three of my writing colleagues already belonged, and I'm once again experiencing that mutual support between writers who trust and respect each other - there's really nothing like it.

I'm entering 2015 with a lot lined up writing-wise: two longer pieces to redraft and, before Easter, a commission to write a short story and linked essay, but I'm thrilled to be able to say I'm doing it all with a sense of backup, and with a greater sense of context in which to do it.

I wish you all similar happiness in your projects for the coming year.

New story publication

Great news yesterday that my story 'Looking for the Castle' is to be included in Unthology 7, due from Unthank Books in the summer. Editor Ashley Stokes had been deciding between two of my stories and this is the one he has finally plumped for, and I'm pleased, as it's by far the more complex of the two, another of the stories in which I've tried to do something more ambitious in the short story form than previously. ('Clarrie and You', which Unthank also published [Unthology 5] was another). One of the strange paradoxes of my writing life is that sometimes the things I've found easiest (and quickest) to write have been the easiest to publish or broadcast, and have received the most acclaim. Sometimes, I know, this is just because the thing happened to work right from the start, and the ease of conception comes out in the writing, but there's often the sneaking suspicion that the ease comes from, not exactly superficiality, but familiarity: a reliance on tried and tested codes. In these instances I feel that the reason the thing was so easily accepted was because I was writing into a borrowed reality - other people's, rather than my own. Then I feel I've cheated myself and my deeper aim in writing, which is precisely to question the ready-made realities.

The short story form is famously capable of exposing ambiguity and uncertainty, but there's also a danger of using its compactness to shut things down, to present a satisfying (but ultimately stifling) take on the world. In 'Clarrie and You' I wanted to show precisely how any 'take' on the world can be mistaken, and in order to do that I had to include a convoluted plot involving a secret, a real challenge for the short story form. 'Looking for the Castle' is similar, but this time it's not a secret creating a false view but the difficulties of memory and lack of understanding. It was one of the hardest
of my stories to write, and I'm hugely grateful to both Gerard Donovan, who judged the 2014 Short Fiction Prize and chose it as runner-up, and now to Ashley Stokes, for seeing what I was trying to do.

Crossposted to Fictionbitch.

Lovely new review of Too Many Magpies

It's a funny, once you start a new novel all your eggs are in the new basket, and you're striving to achieve things you feel you haven't achieved before, so the novels you wrote previously tend to fade in your own estimation. And then you come across a lovely review of one of the earlier ones, and it's like realising you've been taking a loved one for granted. Here's what Amazon reviewer Rachel Smart says about Too Many Magpies:

This rather slim book holds such depth and human truth that it's unnerving. I've read 'Too Many Magpies' numerous times since June because I'm bowled over by the sheer craft of the words and the quiet stalk of its narrative structure. The arrangement of language is beautiful - detailed yet spare and sets scientific fact up against the modern moralities and myths of an organic life style. There is breathtaking illumination of the innate maternal fears that mothers suffer, and the dark anxiety that gnaws at the main character makes every other book I've read recently wither into insignificance. The writer, Elizabeth Baines has a clear narrative reign on the most deep-rooted issues in a woman's psyche. It's quite simply a stunning read and this is one of the most accomplished pieces of work I've read in the last few years.

What? She's read it numerous times since June?! It's one of the most accomplished pieces of work she's read in the last few years? It makes every other book she's read recently wither into insignificance? Well, wow: I don't think you could get a better review than that, not in my view anyway. You know, it's just so wonderful to know when a book you've written touches someone that much, and I'm so grateful to her for telling others that it has.

And there's another Amazon review of Magpies I hadn't seen before: 'Silly01' calls the book

Unique, harrowing and highly original. This book deserves more publicity, it had a long-lasting impact on me, though it was not a quick read, you have to take your time to absorb the beautiful language and the emotions.

 They've both made my Christmas, basically.

Catch up

The family issues keep on distracting me from my blogs (and from writing - which is dreadful!), so some of the interesting events I've attended this autumn just haven't got reported here. One thing I should have blogged about (I did take notes, because I intended to) was a Manchester Literature Festival reading with Martin Amis and Nick Laird, which I did find very interesting. (It was one occasion when Amis proudly called himself a Philo-Semite, for which he's since been criticised on the grounds that it's racist to characterise a people as all good, as well as to characterise it as all bad). Amis is always very listenable to, and of course his prose is vivid and rhythmically flawless. I was very struck, too, by the sense of a lot of what Nick Laird said about literature and writing.

Another was the launch of Carys Davies's superb second collection of short stories from Salt, The Redemption of Galen Pike, a lovely evening held at Daunt Books in Holland Park. Many of the stories in this book have won or have been long- or shortlisted in major awards, such as the V S Pritchett and Society of Authors awards, the Manchester Writing Prize, the EFG Sunday Times award and others. Carys's writing is taut and vivid, with both a mythic quality and a touching insight into human frailty. I strongly recommend her book.

I thoroughly enjoyed two very recent events. Last week at Edge Hill University, C D Rose and Edge Hill Prize winning Kevin Barry gave truly stimulating readings. C D Rose's book, The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure (Melville House), is a brilliant compendium of talented but failed writers (and a rebuttal of the assertion that 'talent will out'). Fact or fiction? Well, it's not immediately clear, and that of course is the point: if, through external circumstances, you disappear from literary history or never make it in the first place, you may as well be fictional. Innovatively, before he read the first entry, C D Rose read the Index of the book, which sounded like a long poem and was both hilarious and moving. Kevin Barry read 'Fjord of Killary', a story from his Edge Hill Prize winning collection Dark Lies the Island (Cape). His reading was so animatedly brilliant that I wondered if the story would stand up to my scrutiny when I read it on the page, but it certainly did - as did all the others in his wonderful collection.

Here are the two writers in the Q & A afterwards with convener Ailsa Cox (C D Rose on the left and Kevin Barry in the centre):

The next evening I was at Halle St Peter's in Manchester, the beautiful Ancoats church with its elegant airy interior converted as a rehearsal space for the Halle orchestra. The event I was attending was part of the project Different Spirit, a series of installations and events curated by Helen Wewiora and produced by Julie McCarthy, Creative Director of 42nd Street, a charity working with young people under stress. This was a musical event, titled Local Recall, and the culmination of work done by Open Music Archive artists Eileen Simpson and Ben White with the 42nd Street young people in the Ancoats area and Unity Radio. Simpson and White work to explore the potential of public domain material, and for this project they revisited the free art, music and lectures that were available to the Ancoats public from the late 1880s. Using piano player rolls, the young people had remixed, cut up, looped and re-assembled Victorian popular songs, and this was what we first heard when we arrived and milled about the church - very impressive. Then there were two live piano recitals: first, musician Serge Tebu took Victorian popular songs as starting points for jazz improvisation and then recent RNCM graduates Calum McLeod and Liam Waddle played new music they had composed using the remixes made by the 42nd Sreet young people - really quite stunning.

 Finally, after the break, we saw a breathtaking film made by Simpson and White using out-of-copyright footage and making haunting visual connections between the inner workings of a player piano, Edwardian mill scenes, and mid-twentieth-century Ancoats streets. The film was accompanied by a live sound track specially commissioned from Graham Massey, founding member of 808 State, composed and played by him on the night using exclusively 1990s technology. A really startling and moving evening, which the large audience greatly appreciated.

Artists Eileen Simpson and Ben White talk about the project.

Reading group: Turbulence by Chico Buarque

It's some time now since we discussed this book, Trevor's suggestion, and my main memory, now that the discussion has receded in time, is that although we all found it a very quick and even compulsive read, most of us said that in the end we weren't left particularly affected by it. I have to say though that, looking back, the events of the book, and its atmosphere, have stayed with me quite vividly.

In fact, those events are not easy to relate, since right from the outset there is doubt as to whether all of them really happen, or whether at least some of them are merely possibilities imagined by the first-person narrator, a disaffected young man from a moneyed family who spends the novel more or less in a state of flight through a city of corruption, violence and uncertainty that is clearly the author's home city of Rio de Janeiro. Told in a breathless and immediate present tense that takes the reader right into the action, and in a riffing prose that recalls the author's earlier career as a jazz musician, the novel opens as the unnamed narrator spies an unwanted visitor through the door of his flat. Immediately we are in the realm of uncertainty and paranoia. To begin with, the narrator doesn't know who the visitor can be; we just know that he has cause to worry. Finally, as the unanswered visitor turns away, the narrator recognises him: someone from his past he doesn't want to see. The reader doesn't find out the visitor's identity, however: what's at issue is the narrator's paranoia - justified or unjustified (we just don't know) - as he watches the visitor walk away in the street below. The fact that he doesn't look up tells the narrator that the visitor knows he's being watched, which in turn means he knows the narrator is there, which means the narrator needs to escape immediately. As he does so, dressing quickly and leaving, he imagines the visitor stopping his taxi and rushing back to catch him out, a scenario so lengthy and detailed that it has the ring of reality, and indeed likelihood. Thus is established the novel's unique and disorienting mode of slippage between actuality and possibility, and its theme of the thin line between the two - the loss of control and the reality of awful possibility when social order breaks down. We follow the narrator as (escaping his unwanted visitor) he travels to his rich sister for money, tries escape to the farm where he was happy as a child only to find it taken over by criminal squatters whom in turn he must escape, steals jewels from his sister and gets involved in a police heist back at the farm.

The trouble was, our group found unsatisfying the lack of certainty about the events created by both this slippage and the fast pace which made us feel that we were reading too quickly and missing things. I don't think it was clear to any of us what actually happened at the farm in the end - who was who, who was tricking who - but several of us said that in the end we didn't care, not because it didn't matter, but because we had basically lost any emotional investment in the narrator's plight. Clare said she thought that part of the problem was that the prose takes us so deeply inside the unthinking narrator's head: there's no sense of an author distanced from the narrator's psyche and judging it or setting it in context. We had to acknowledge however that immediately after its publication in Brazil the novel sold over 130,000 copies, and that our reaction was probably a Western cultural thing: we like the rational and the certain and a more logical sense of consequence. And, as Ann said, we want redemption, which the ending of this novel, terrible and madly random, certainly doesn't provide.

Even Trevor, who had suggested this book with great enthusiasm, had found it less than satisfying; nevertheless, he said he would now try other books by Buarque, although I'm afraid everyone else said they wouldn't.

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

Best British Short Stories 2014 event at Edge Hill

Last night we had a most enjoyable event for Best British Short Stories 2014, organised at Edge Hill University by fellow contributor Ailsa Cox. Also reading were Claire Dean, Vicki Jarrett and Richard Knight (Richard arriving by the skin of his teeth after getting stuck in the rush hour on the M58!) It was very interesting to hear about the journey of the others' stories into this anthology, and great to hear them read aloud. I'm afraid the photos aren't so hot - I made John use my phone which he'd never used before and didn't get the hang of in time - but I thought I'd stick them in just to give some sense of it all.

Vicki (above) told us that her story, 'Ladies' Day',  first appeared in an anthology from enterprising Scottish independent publisher Freight before being picked up for BBSS by series editor Nicholas Royle. It's an account of a group of housebound young mums attempting with a day at the races to escape the inevitable sense of being sidelined (and stereotyped) in their role - amusing yet also very touching.

It turned out that Claire's story, 'Glass, Bricks, Dust', had its first outing in an academic publication: she had been asked to write a modern fairy story (this is her specialty) along with an essay explaining her process and rationale. The story, concerning a young boy playing on a pile of demolition rubble and a mysterious lamppost on which a host of black birds perch, is indeed a fairytale, yet, as we discussed in the brief Q and A at the end, there's also something very concrete about it, and a strong sense of the reality of place - an affecting combination that characterises her work generally.

Ailsa's haunting 'Hope Fades for the Hostages' was originally commissioned for an anthology accompanying an exhibition at the Bluecoat Gallery in Liverpool on the theme of night-time. It's an impressive orchestration of the viewpoints of three separate people awake at the same time in the night and caught with the thoughts that 3 am brings - very tense, and very moving.

Richard's story, 'The Incalculable Weight of Water' brings to vivid life a reservoir on Saddleworth Moor as the lone protagonist thinks of his wife in the cafe below waiting tensely for important news, and comes upon something unexpected in the water. It was first published online as a result of being shortlisted in the Manchester Writing Competition.

My story, 'Tides, or How Stories Do or Don't get Told', was first published online in The View From Here (now sadly discontinued). I'd been at Edge Hill last week for a reading by the brilliant Kevin Barry, winner of the 2013 Edge Hill Prize for the short story, and he said at one point during the Q & A that he isn't so keen on the well-rounded story with a satisfying ending, since life just isn't like that. As I said last night, I tend to agree, and the more I write the more strongly I hold that view. This particular story, which begins with the narrator struggling to tell a story based on a single memorised moment - a moment when she and her partner stand watching the tide come in - is actually about that idea.

There was a brief Q & A when we discussed the importance of place in stories. There was general acknowledgement that naming a setting can help readers imagine and identify, but Vicki and I both said that we tend not to if we can help it, because of the danger of, on the one hand, readers bringing ready-made connotations that are not necessarily useful to a story, and, on the other, of creating a sense of exclusion for readers who aren't familiar in life with a place. We were all agreed, however, that atmosphere was important, and a strong sense of place (named or unnamed) creates it.

Here are some of us milling in the interval:

Thanks so much to Ailsa, to our editor Nicholas Royle, and of course to our publishers Salt. And last, but not least, to the audience.

Reading group: Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys

This was one of those rare occasions when those present were unanimous in praise of a book. A short novel, Voyage in the Dark deals with the story of Anna, brought to England from the West Indies at the age of eighteen by her stepmother after her father's death, and then abandoned in a strange cold country to make her own way, uneducated and deprived of the family money. Starting off as a chorus girl in a touring company, she soon falls into financial dependence on a man who is only amusing himself with her sexually, and drifts perforce from there into a kind of high-class prostitution, destitution and despair.

Although it was written in 1934, and set in 1914, we were hugely impressed by how very much ahead of its time it was both in the issues it addresses and in its prose style. As Mark, who had suggested the book, said, it exposes the hypocrisy of an upper-class Edwardian society in which sexual exploitation of women was the norm, and the contempt for women in general and their lowly status within families, and touches on postcolonial issues long before they were widely addressed - as Creole, Anna is both seen as exotic and despised. But all of this is conveyed in an entirely non-explicit way via Anna's first-person narration, which simply replicates her experience as the events unfold, relating only what people say and do and Anna's feelings as events overtake her. There's an apparent simplicity to the prose that echoes her innocence, and perhaps her lack of status and power, but in fact it's very sophisticated. It's economical rather than simple and, as the novel progresses, slips seamlessly into Anna's memories of the West Indies, her lost paradise (though of course the place where the seeds of her doom were set), often without punctuation, in a way that re-creates the fluid thought processes of memory. Therefore the novel is chiefly psychological - and thus very modern - creating layers of consciousness which the reader shares, and the effect is very powerful. In my view, too, to make a reader share the experience of oppression - as Toni Morrison also does - is in addition very political.

However, perhaps because of the lack of explication, John had wondered to me beforehand if Rhys had actually been aware of the significance of the issues raised by her story, which is famously autobiographical. Mark was in no doubt that she was, and spoke of Anna's bitter understanding of what was happening to her, and why. There was some demurring here: Jenny thought Anna was hugely innocent: she seems to have no idea of the shallow designs upon her of the man she first takes up with, Walter Jeffries, and can't see, as the present-day reader can, the signs that he's about to throw her over. But as Mark, said, Anna learns. However, because of that lack of explicitness, those lessons are only implicit, unvoiced, which I'd say creates a powerful sense of the trap that Anna, and women in her situation, are in - a social trap and a trap of silence.

Ann expressed amazement that the book had never been popular - before the years-later publication of Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (which we discussed here), it had fallen out of print, and has never since achieved the same popularity. Ann thought that this was because people simply don't want to confront the issues it raises, and the feelings of discomfort and loss and depression that it so accurately (and beautifully) recreates. I said that I didn't think I'd ever read another book showing so accurately - or even at all - the feelings one has when one is despised simply for being a woman, and everyone agreed. Jenny and I said we could remember the deflation we felt, at a much later date in history, when we were young and men treated us, as they do Anna, with sneering amusement, but none of us could think of other novels that acknowledged that, not even self-consciously feminist ones that tend rather to depict women's anger or attempt redress by portraying women as powerful.

Doug now said that the one negative thing he would say was that he found the book depressing, and Ann and I agreed that we had too, but for none of us did this detract from our huge appreciation of it, and even Trevor, who had expected not to like it since he'd hated Wide Sargasso Sea, said he'd found it wonderful.

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

Anniversary prize draw results

Congratulations to the winners of my anniversary draw, to each of whom a copy of one of my Salt books will be winging its way:

Balancing on the Edge of the World: Pratibha Veronica Castle and Fran Slater

Too Many Magpies: Char March and Sarah Schofield

The Birth Machine: mrcc and Frances

Winners: please email me via my profile with your address, so that I can get your book in the post asap.

The Wish Dog arrives

A lovely parcel at the door this week: my author copies of The Wish Dog, ghost stories from Honno Press, which includes my story, 'A Matter of Light' - arriving just as the weather turns cold and wet and you need the electric light on halfway through the afternoon: just the weather for tucking up by the fire with a good book of spooky stories! Here they are, just unpacked, on my desk. The book's available here.

The Short Review looks at Unthology 5 and 'Clarrie and You'

Horrible rainy day - first real day of autumn, but I'm cheered no end by a lovely new review of Unthology 5 on The Short Review, which says some lovely things about my story, 'Clarrie and You', and the anthology as a whole. Sarah Schofield calls the book 'a glittering collection' and offers 

A huge credit to editors Ashley Stokes and Robin Jones that selection seems to be based on whether a story sings, not on who wrote it. Following a highly acclaimed backlist of Unthank anthologies, I believe Unthology 5 is the strongest to date.

Of 'Clarrie and You' she says:

My favourite story is Elizabeth Baines’ Clarrie and You. Rich with multifaceted believable characters, it explores deep held secrets and misunderstandings. The protagonist, Olive, reflects back on the complex relationship she has with her sister, Clarrie. Baines’ deft touch and acutely observed detail of family relationships make it a story with layers waiting to be undone;

"There are things you don’t want to remember, because doing so makes you guilty, after all these years and at your time of life, of ridiculous sibling rivalry."

The second person narration works brilliantly in both intensifying the reader’s involvement in the story and yet simultaneously feeling somewhat accusatory. We empathise with the slights Olive perceives but there are moments when we’re not entirely certain whose side to fall on. The story offers new subtleties with every read.

Anniversary giveaway

How can it be this warm on the 1st October? And in August in Wales I needed a scarf and gloves! It feels right, though, as 1st October will always be a special date for me - the date that my story collection, Balancing on the Edge of the World, and my novel Too Many Magpies were published, as well as the date of publication of the first edition of my novel The Birth Machine.

To celebrate, once again I'm giving away two copies of each of the three books published by Salt. If you want a chance to win one (or more), please leave a message below, email me through this website, or message me on Facebook or Twitter before the end of next Wednesday (8th) when the names will be drawn from a hat. Please say which book(s) you'd like to be entered for - but remember, even if you've read them, those lovely Salt physical books make great Christmas presents!