Tag: publications

Monthly Summary January 2024

It has been an endless month, I have some sympathy with that feeling and yet… it’s just wishing for time to pass us by, which those of us who have less of it can’t feel too comfortable with – especially when I hear from yet another friend my age that they’ve had a major health scare. So I won’t complain ‘will this darkness and cold never end?’ and instead celebrate the good things about this month.

January in Japan

It has been such a good themed reading month! I enjoyed all of the eight books I read, although some were more memorable than others, and there was only one rereading involved. I’d been hoping for more but I ran out of time and the books to be reread were a bit thicker than the ones I did ultimately choose. It was quite a mix of books : novellas and non-fiction by my favourite author Dazai Osamu, as well as manga featuring a fictional version of him; a return to Territory of Light; a mad crime caper through Tokyo and Osaka; a middle-grade book with fantasy elements; a collection of science fiction stories.

Poetry with Kasper

I was planning to read a poem in bed every morning before getting up, with or without Kasper (he sometimes gets a little impatient in the morning, wanting to play rather than listen to poetry). I’ve managed to do this at least 3 times a week on average, so I think that’s good progress, and as you can see from the picture above, that means I’ve also read more poetry in general, including Jacqueline Saphra’s stark reminder of the early days of Covid in One Hundred Lockdown Sonnets, Naomi Shihab Nye’s Selected Poems and John Ash drawing inspiration from Cavafy’s Alexandria to describe an equally multicultural city such as Istanbul.

Other Reading

Overall, I read 18 books this month, of which 3 poetry books, 8 for January in Japan, 10 in translation overall. Of the remainder, I was especially impressed by Mathias Enard’s The Annual Banquet of the Gravedigger’s Guild (great fun, with very memorable scenes, although occasionally a tad self-indulgent) and the chilling Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaggy, translated by Tim Parks. I also read a similar story of obsessive friendship written by a contemporary Swiss author, Saskia Winkelmann – Hohenangst, which makes me wonder whether the rule-bound Swiss society creates a desire for rebellion in its youth. Lowborn was frankly terrifying – I didn’t think people could lead such a precarious existence in the United Kingdom in the 21st century. On Java Road is our February Virtual Crime Book Club read, set in Hong Kong during the recent student protests, and it’s more obviously literary in style than most crime novels, portraying an end of era, end of Empire nostalgia perhaps. Hunted by Abir Mukherjee was quite a departure from his crime series set in India; it was a fast-paced, enjoyable thriller about a terrorist cell.

Having my sons at home

The holidays seemed to pass by in a flash, even though they were back for 3 weeks and 4 weeks respectively. They spent most of the time with me, and we were so busy doing both necessary things (dentist appointments, getting their Romanian passports – surprisingly quickly), as well as fun ones (going to see a jazz club version of The Nutcracker at the Southbank, having a mini birthday tea with some old friends, lots of favourite food and treats, playing board games and watching lots of films – as well as obsessing about The Traitors, which Older Son and I think is fascinating anthropological and psychological study).

Watching a lot of films and TV series

I usually watch 4-5 films at most in a month, but this time I watched 11 in January and another ten in December with the boys around. Of those, the most memorable were The Boy and the Heron (which to me had echoes of my favourite Shakespeare play The Tempest) and several of the films I rewatched, like Elevator to the Gallows, Amadeus, Decision to Leave, In the Mood for Love and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.

I was not impressed with Maestro (would have liked this to be more about his talent and music, especially his composing, rather than about his marriage and his affairs), Snatch (Guy Ritchie is not the director for me) or Parallel Mothers (I love Almodovar and his strong women, but this felt like two very different films squeezed into one).

I also had a brief free trial membership of Amazon Prime, mostly to watch Fargo Season 5, which was a return to form. So I made the most of it and also watched Carnival Row S1 (an interesting concept and charismatic actors, but I can see why it was cancelled, it must have been very expensive to film and with Covid interruptions…). I also watched Three Pines, the adaptation of Louise Penny’s novels, which I love, and, after an initial surprise that the characters didn’t look more like the image I had of them in my head, I made peace with the changes they made to the storyline and quite enjoyed it.

Sense of accomplishment or ambition

I’ve also been busy doing things that I feel are my vocation or my purpose. I’ve finished the first draft of the German crime novel I’m translating for Corylus Books (it was quite a mammoth piece of work, over 420 pages). My translation of a fierce contemporary Romanian play Funeral of Hearts by Edith Negulici finally appeared in Asymptote Journal, as did my article about the state of micro-publishing (tiny indie publishers with 1-2 members of staff) in the UK today. I’ve signed up for Italian lessons once more and will also be starting a memoir writing course with Emmanuel Iduma via the National Centre for Writing – after saying repeatedly that I wouldn’t be caught dead writing a memoir rather than fiction!

I’ve been back in the classroom thanks to the Stephen Spender Trust, running a translation workshop with Year 8s on a French war poem. The poem itself (Louis Aragon’s La Nuit de Dunkerque) is quite gritty, complex and tough to translate, plus French is only my fourth language, so I was quite nervous before going into the classroom. But the energy and creativity of young people always leave me buzzing (although also extremely tired – I don’t know how teachers manage to do this every day!).

Last but not least, I’m volunteering for Action for Happiness. I’ve attended several of their webinars and used their calendars, and I love the fact that it’s non-denominational and all about spreading kindness and happiness without being fixated on almost toxic, victim-blaming ‘positive mindset’ ideology like The Secret. I’ll be running a six-week online course, probably in April/May time, so that should keep me busy once I finish my day job in March (as will the London Book Fair).

Writing Update Spring 2017

It’s been quite a while since I have had anything to report about my writing. There was an outburst of poetic creativity in October/November, followed by a more regular one hour a day minimum writing commitment for about 6 weeks in January/February. Then work, life, rejections and low mood got in the way and writing anything other than reviews or the occasional doggerel verse (aka poetry which is not worth submitting) became too much of an ask.

However, I firmly hope and believe that things are looking up now. I’ve found myself an accountability partner and we share writing ideas, progress, goals and rants on a daily or weekly basis. She is based in California and writes screenplays, but the time and genre difference works in our favour. Plus, we have known each other nearly all our lives, so we can be brutally honest with each other. We were at university together (she studied Mandarin, I studied Japanese) and our lives have moved, oddly enough, on parallel tracks ever since.

California beach, a picture sent by my friend.

So here are some concrete achievements I can mention:

  1. Geneva Writers’ Group literary journal Offshoots 14 will publish my poem To Love and to Cherish (Sept 2017)
  2. Alexa, What Is One Plus One? is featured on Poetry Breakfast today 24 April, 2017
  3. A Mother’s Advice will appear in The Dying Dahlia Review, 2 May, 2017
  4. Two of my poems will appear in a dVerse Poets anthology. Although I’ve had to cut back on my involvement in that poetry community over the past year or so, I have learnt so much from its dedicated, inventive, talented and generous members.
  5. My review of Katie Kitamura’s A Separation has appeared in Shiny New Books, which is one of my favourite go-to sites for reviews of a broad range of books.
  6. I wrote a feature on crime fiction from the Celtic fringe which have a link to ancient myths and legends for Crime Fiction Lover.
  7. I’m quite proud of writing some blog posts which go beyond poetry and book reviews, require quite a lot of thought and editing (even if they don’t always translate into high number of views, but you should know by now that it’s not millions of views that I am chasing): on the differences between the French and Anglo-Saxon attitudes towards creative writing courses (the very topic which was then coincidentally discussed a few days later in Ploughshares), a meditation on how to cope with being in limbo or purgatory, celebrating my 1000th blog post and what Max Weber and Emile Durkheim would have thought about our age of oversharing.

So here is an entirely gratuitous celebration gif with one of my current footballing favourites, Antoine Griezmann (because his diminutive size and cute little face reminds me of my younger son).

Finally, my new resolution is to return to my first WIP. The second WIP had ground to a standstill when life started imitating art (all except the murders, one hopes) and it became too painful to carry on. The first novel has the first draft fully written and is temporarily entitled Beyond the Woods (a translation of Trans-Sylvania, which is where most of the action takes place – NOT a vampire novel, I hasten to add). So all (all?!?) I need to do is edit.