When I first started blogging, I was sharing my poems freely – not that many people read them, back then I was lucky to get a couple of hundred views per month – but I didn’t care, it was inspiring me to write more. And that was what this blog was all about: creative writing on a regular basis.
Then I was told that it would be better to save my poems for submissions to literary journals, because even this not-quite-polished appearance on my blog might count as ‘previously published’. So I stopped sharing my poetry and my blog has become more about book reviews.
I enjoy reading and reviewing, but I also want to write more and share more. And seeing so many of my online publications disappearing, I realise that it’s better to have loved and shared (and not been formally published) than never to be read at all. So here is a rough first draft of a poem – or rather, two separate poems which have the same atmosphere and might belong together. Possibly.
There’s things about me I cannot fathom there’s things about me you want to control the broken wings the lyrics brushed down to minimum waste no polish no gain I don’t want to be haunted by you I never used the word perverse to describe myself we unravel somewhere out of sight unloved unnoticed you are made of the cowardice of the morning after
Leave lightly or do not leave at all no kiss, no touch but forever this the clouds grow thickest when the summit’s near and miles to go before I’m there if you can’t be free, be a dream if you can’t be free, be a mystery if you can’t be free, learn the art of losing not dead, not alive what can’t we let go?
Two very timely reads as I play around with the idea (and write fragments for) a memoir about living across and between cultures, in those interstitial spaces which show that you never quite fully belong anywhere. Below are some quotes and personal impressions rather than proper reviews, merely to give you a flavour of these books which will certainly sit proudly well-thumbed on my ‘writing craft’ shelf.
Amina Cain: A Horse at Night. On Writing, Daunt Books Originals, 2022.
This feels like a very personal book, a look at one writer’s thoughts as she reads, writes and thinks about fiction but also about life more generally. It is full of beautiful insights, some of which were instantly recognisable, or convincing… and others were persuasive, or at least a good starting point for own reflection.
While the book will appeal most to someone who also wants to write, it is full of wisdom and great quotes. I’ve either flagged or underlined nearly every page in this book and will return to it often.
As a writer, I feel I am always negotiating that: when to give something explicitly to the reader and when to hold back, or when to give just a little of it so that it can be sensed rather than simply seen. There is great value in what can be sensed. And in a way, one of the things that allows fiction its sense of possibility and freedom is this choice of what to make visible.
I don’t believe in perfection and when it comes to fiction, it’s a value I don’t understand. Why should it matter? Is a short story, or a novel, or a work of art, or a film, meant to be perfect? Is it even possible? Do we write in order to create perfect things? I don’t. I never think of it when I’m writing. Yet I too have described a work as perfect… I suppose I meant that I was strongly affected by the novel… that it exists on a special plane for me, above other books. That it is complete in itself.
Is the self what we’ve lived through, what we’ve felt and thought, what we’ve done? Is it what we’ve gone toward, or what we haven’t gone toward but have instead intensely imagined? If we are writers or artists, is it what we have written or made? Or none of those things?
I used to feel such joy all the time… I used to think that once you felt intense happiness, it would only grow stronger, that once discovered it would keep opening up and out, that experience was like this too, that life became more and more open to you. Naively, I didn’t anticipate a closing down… And now I know. You take hold of your happiness and enjoy it when it is with you. You experience it with gratitude, knowing nothing lasts.
Melissa Febos: Body Work. The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, Manchester University Press, 2022.
This book is less poetical and more combative, but perfect timing for someone like me, who is still somewhat ambivalent about whether I dare to write a memoir or not, however heavily disguised as something else.
The author, who has herself penned three memoirs or personal essay collections, lays bare her credo: that personal stories, even of trauma, are worth writing and being read, and that women and other marginalised categories in particular should not fear that their work is in any way inferior. It is a call to battle and a granting of permission to engage in personal storytelling, although it also warns that it requires more than just ‘blurting out’ to elevate it to art.
Being healed by writing does not excuse you from the extravagantly hard work of making good art, which is to say art that succeeds by its own terms. There are plenty of mediocre memoirs out there, just as there are plenty of mediocre novels… Writing about your personal experiences is not easier than other kinds of writing… Navel-gazing is not for the faint of heart. The risk of honest self-appraisal requires bravery. To place our flawed selves in the context of this magnificent, broken world is the opposite of narcissism, which is building a self-image that pleases you.
The most frequently asked question in any memoir workshop is what to do when writing about others, especially when we reduce them to mere cameo roles, or portray them in unflattering ways. After all, memory is fallible, and others may have equally unflattering views of us and there are always multiple ways of interpreting the situations we found ourselves in:
Cruelty rarely makes for good writing. It can be pleasurable sometimes, both to write and to read, but it is a cheap pleasure. People often rely on cruelty for humor… but the prose and people I find funniest do not deploy their punch lines at the expenses of those who cannot defend themselves. .. writing cruelly is almost always a form of bullying… It is profoundly unfair that a writer gets to author the public version of a story that has as many true variations as persons involved.
The final piece of advice which I found very useful is that memoir is not about events, but about reflection and growth.
Successful narration of a memoir depends upon the careful interplay of the past I and the present… Self-knowledge, the insights unavailable in the past and acquired in the time since, are what give memoir its depth. It is not experience that qualifies a person to write a memoir, but insight into experience… You make the past known in order to know yourself as changed.
This does not necessarily mean that we need to be sufficiently distanced to those events to have the benefit of hindsight or be able to talk about them without emotion (which is how I initially interpreted it: if it’s still too raw, it sounds too angry or whingey). Writing meaningfully about the past, Febos assures us, simply requires a change of heart, even if our personal transformation is not yet complete.
I went to Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate (to give it its full title) for the first time ever last week and it was exhilarating, fun, slightly scary, exhausting and much hotter than I expected from Yorkshire. I thought I’d share a few impressions with you, but I should preface this by saying that I was there not as a reader and blogger, nor as an author, but as a publisher who did NOT have an author attending, so my views might be slightly different from most other attendees.
Beautiful holiday atmosphere with all of the tents and tables dotted around.
Compact site makes it easy to meet people
I really liked the fact that the programmed events were all in the main tent (although it did get rather hot during the afternoon), and that all of the extra-curricular events were grouped together close by, inside the hotel or in tents dotted on manicured lawns, including the beer-tent and the bookshop. There was quite a bit of seating, and even some shade. This made it easy to wander around from one event to another, even stumble upon them by accident if your programme did not feature them (mine didn’t initially, until I discovered I’d been using an old version of the programme). It also made it easy to spot authors, reviewers and friends – or at least, it would have if my visual memory were a little bit better! But I did get to meet my old online chums from Crime Fiction Lover, Sandra Mangan (who still reviews there) and Luca Veste, who is now an established author and indefatigable committee member and moderator for the festival.
The Crime Fiction Lover Reunion. Admittedly, it was Mark Billingham not Luca Veste who was being hounded by gnome deliveries organised by the mischievous author Gytha Lodge, but it did seem oddly appropriate and amusing to keep the gnome theme going when we saw this picture of the shortened legs…
It is really easy to strike up a conversation
Everyone is there to have fun and share the love of books, so it’s easy to talk to people, and I’m not shy. Although I do feel sorry sometimes for the poor authors who are constantly being mobbed by people like me who tell them ‘we met at Capital Crime/Bristol Crimefest/Newcastle Noir etc. five years ago’ and then smile fetchingly, as if they’re supposed to remember you, when you’re just one of the thousands of people they’ve met at various events over the years. They are generally quite gracious, especially if you say something nice about one of their books (it doesn’t have to be the latest one, which you might not have read yet). It’s even easier to talk about books with readers and bloggers, of course – and I really enjoyed hearing different opinions about translated crime fiction – an opportunity for informal fieldwork/survey.
I had to apologise to Chris Carter that I was unable to make his early morning panel on Saturday, but I’ve always enjoyed the way he lives up to the brand of his books – all while being a really sweet, friendly, approachable person.
Hard not to be envious of the marketing budgets of the big publishers
As a tiny publisher with a very, very limited budget for marketing, I was stunned by the promotional stunts that the big publishers could afford: giveaways including ice-cream and other branded goodies, breakfast buttys and passport photo machines in a pop-up departure lounge for Richard Osman’s new crime series. I had to admire their creativity, but I also wondered if some of the big names really needed that much promotion (and six members of staff being sent to organise it all). There is no way that we could compete with that, and I have to say that most of the flyers, bookmarks, samplers that smaller publishers dispersed around on tables seemed to be ignored by most attendees, so are perhaps not worth the effort. One more cost-effective idea that I liked (and might borrow if we have any of our authors attending next year) was the author wearing a T shirt with the latest book cover and perhaps a brief blurb.
One example of the Spin-the-Wheel promotions, from Simon & Schuster
The airport lounge simulacrum for Richard Osman’s new series We Solve Murders, featuring a cat (of course), organised by Viking. It’s already at No. 3 in the Crime & Mystery category on Amazon, and it’s not even coming out until September.
Not many authors from abroad this year
I wasn’t the only one to notice that there were very few authors attending from abroad – and therefore very little translated crime fiction was represented, which I thought was a shame. Cost is of course the main driver – the organisers were quite frank that they could only afford to invite foreign authors if their publishers pay for their travel costs, which tends to exclude smaller presses. But there is an additional barrier I think to inviting authors who are writing in languages other than English: even if they are pretty fluent in English, they will not necessarily have the witty banter at their fingertips to entertain audiences quite as effectively during an afternoon panel when the heat is making your eyelids droopy… Although there were some very thoughtful contributions on some of the panels I attended, overall the emphasis remains firmly on entertainment rather than information. And I have to admit that with some authors and panels, I couldn’t help feeling that I’d heard it all before at other festivals or bookshop events. I think some of the smaller festivals do a better job of combining established and newer authors, so that the audience can also discover something new – but that is a riskier strategy, of course, when you have to sell a certain number of tickets to make events viable.
Emma Styles (in the middle) is an Aussie author, but technically she’s not from abroad, since she lives in the UK currently. I met hear at Bloody Scotland in 2022, when she was presenting her debut novel, No Country for Girls, which I really enjoyed. Sarah Blackburn is a blogger I’ve been in touch with for ages on Twitter, and I’m the far too cheerful one in the much-admired green T-shirt by David Graham, who modelled the orange equivalent at the festival.
PS: In case you are wondering about the title, Home, Thoughts from Abroad is a well-known poem by Robert Browning which I used to recite to myself when I was terribly homesick for England and longed to return here for my Ph.D. It’s a great reminder that although reality is wonderful in its own way, our expectations, memories, nostalgia are even more wonderful!
O, to be in England Now that April’s there, And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England—now!
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).
It’s that time of year when, whether I like it or not, I get to review my reading, writing, film-watching (even my performance appraisal at work), which inevitably leads me to wonder if blogging, reading at great speed and reviewing are indeed the best use of my time. Every year I decide that no, probably not, I should spend more time on translating and writing, and every year I fail to do things differently. Or do I?
Blogging
Actually, my WordPress annual statistics show that I’ve written far fewer blog posts in 2023 (and therefore also less words) than at any time after 2013. There is a downward tendency for the number of likes and comments on my blog posts anyway, this has been the case for years after a peak in 2017 (and this is what my other blogger friends report too), so this is probably a wise use of my energy. I certainly don’t intend to post more frequently in 2024 and will only review the books that fit the ‘theme of the month’ (more about that anon). The majority of my blog visitors are from the US, followed at quite some distance by the UK. France and Canada are nearly on equal footing (very far behind those first two), and Germany and Australia are slightly behind them. I am curious what drove the single visitor from Vatican City (or Namibia or Turkmenistan) to my blog! The most popular blog post has been my sort of review of Lessons in Chemistry, which simply shows the popularity of that book rather than my qualities as a reviewer, although I’m pleased to see that my second most popular blog post hopefully encourages others to discover my favourite Japanese author Dazai Osamu. It also amuses me greatly to see that most people discover my blog thanks to Pinterest rather than Twitter or WordPress subscription or any other links: and my Friday Fun posts remain popular, although as usual they require minimal effort and are not necessarily all that representative of my interests (although yes, I suppose I am a little bit obsessed with interior design).
Writing and Translating
I’ve not written as much as I’d planned (not edited/rewritten my novel, not written a lot of new poetry or submitted anything much), I only submitted 24 things (including translations and residency applications) and I’ve very nearly had more rejections than submissions. The only two acceptances have been translations: of the fantastic (as in fantasy) short fiction by Urmuz in Turkoslavia magazine and of a short play by Edith Negulici in Asymptote Journal (forthcoming). A previous translation of Urmuz which appeared in Sublunary Edition’s Firmament Journal in early 2023 got a mention in the annual round-up by that publisher, which was a nice little boost. I’ve also had my translation of Deadly Autumn Harvest by Tony Mott published, of course, and it was great fun working on that (being a translator and editor all at once) and developing a really close relationship with the author, who was game for anything. I am also currently working on my first full-length translation of a German crime novel (page 282 of 430), which we hope to publish in January 2025.
Travelling
2023 has also been a year of travelling, ostensibly for DIY writing/translating retreats although not that much writing got done: to Switzerland in January, to Lyon and Provence at the end of March/beginning of April, to Gladstone’s Library in Wales in November. Add to that family holidays – our much postponed Japan trip in August, a wedding in Romania in late October – and an online Translation Summer School in July, and you can see that I’ve managed to keep myself thoroughly busy (or distracted, whichever way you choose to look at it).
Publishing
At least one third of all my time and effort has gone into my publishing venture, Corylus Books, this year (and every year since we started in 2020). Like all tiny independent publishers, particularly those of translated fiction which has substantial upfront costs and generally lower sales, we have found this year quite rough in terms of trading figures. People kept saying that Twitter didn’t sell books, but the scattered flight from that platform with no clear successor emerging shows that perhaps it was far handier in building a community and raising awareness about your books than we thought at the time. Of course, there are many other reasons (rising costs of paper, printing, distribution), the decline of reviewing off-line (and the decline in readership for online reviews), the opaque nature of gaining visibility among booksellers and festival organisers (the latter is even harder when you have authors who have to come from quite far abroad). I also have to resign myself to the fact that Romanian authors will always have a very niche appeal in the English-speaking world compared to Scandinavian ones. Anyway, I don’t mean to moan, but I’ve heard similar stories from other publishers and have compiled some of their thoughts into an article which will appear in 2024 in a special edition about books of the Romanian academic journal Culture. Society. Economy. Politics.
Photo credit: Matias North on Unsplash.
Reading Plans for 2024
I rather like having themed months, but only selecting a few books on that theme each month, so that still have some leeway for book club reading or anything else that might catch my fancy. So these are the months I already have themed:
January in Japan
French February (includes any French language, not just from France)
Moldovan and Romanian March (because there is no month that starts with R, and March contains both the letters M and R)
#1937Club in April – and possibly that will lead to a Classics or at least pre-WW2 reading all month
Spanish and Portuguese Lit Month in July
Women in Translation in August
German Lit Month and Novellas in November
Additionally, I would like to make it a habit to start and end the day with some poetry, to help me gain some perspective and regain some hope, despite all this horribly depressing news from around the world.
Writing, Translating and Publishing Plans
I will stop my day job in early March and will therefore need to start making money from translating, editing and writing, as well as the freelance training work I’ve done prior to 2017. I also have a house to sell in England and a flat to buy in Berlin, and organise an international relocation, so that should keep me deeply mired in administration, NOT my favourite thing to do. Nevertheless, although I might have to scale back my personal ambitions this year, I still need to have some creative outlets or goals.
I’m almost afraid of making any writing plans, because I failed to stick to them last year, but one thing I realised, after being part of the Write Club Plus programme in 2023 with The Literary Consultancy, is that my default option is being a multitasker when it comes to writing. I need the variety of working on multiple projects: poetry, flash fiction, non-fiction, novel, alongside translating. I have to accept that and learn how to work within that constraint (and finish things). So my only ‘resolution’ is to keep working at my writing and to not give up hope.
I will continue to pitch translation projects to various publishers and generally make them aware of authors they might be missing out on, although it has been a very disheartening and depressing process these past couple of years. My dream authors to bring into English would be Marlen Haushofer, Ödön von Horváth, Lavinia Braniște, Alina Nelega, Tatiana Țîbuleac and many more. I just wish that copyright holders (i.e. foreign publishers) were more responsive to my queries, and that the English-language publishers were not so good at ghosting.
Corylus will keep us busy in 2024 with five books being published, as well as the prep for the 2025 list. We have been keeping Quentin Bates busy as a translator with no fewer than three Icelandic authors. Óskar Guðmundsson is back with a very dark, haunting novella The Dancer. The irrepressible Stella Blómkvist will appear in a second investigative outing in May. Meanwhile, fans of Sólveig Pálsdóttir’s solid police procedurals will be glad to hear that a fourth translated book will be available in the summer. The two I’m most excited about, however, are the more overtly political books: our first author from Argentina Elsa Drucaroff with Rodolfo Walsh’s Last Case and Catalan author Teresa Solana, whom I’ve long admired, with the start of a new series set in Barcelona, Black Storms, touching upon the long-term consequences of the Spanish Civil War.
I know September is not quite over yet, but I won’t get a chance to blog this weekend, and, besides, it’s felt like an endless month, so high time I wrapped it up with this summary!
It has felt strange not to have any more school runs to do or uniforms to buy this September. With the two boys leaving at such different times (the older one left for Geneva for his year abroad almost immediately after we returned from Japan, while the younger one left for his university only yesterday), with my hip being diagnosed as arthritic, and with work being very busy in preparation for the autumn term, it just hasn’t felt like that optimistic, energetic September New Year that I usually look forward to and enjoy.
Nevertheless, there have been some cultural events and books to keep me happy.
Reading
A month of deliberately aimless reading; in this case, lighter reading, to make up for the increased workload. Fourteen books: nine of them were crime fiction, my default option for relaxation. More surprisingly, two of the books were memoirs, which is not a genre I pick up all that often, one was creative non-fiction for want of a better word, and one was a speculative/fantasy YA with murder. Very untypically of me, only one of the books was a translation – The Mantis, a Japanese sort-of thriller. So clearly I felt a need for a bit of change as well as reverting to comfort reading. The number would not have been as high if I hadn’t attended the Crime and Wine event last weekend, which made me instantly acquire all three author’s books and instantly read them too, which doesn’t happen all that often. All three are marvellously entertaining and thrilling reads, which I read in just one or two gulps.
In fact, all of the books I read this month were really good, each in their own way, which just shows what a load of snobbishness it is to believe only ‘literary’ books are worth reading. They were exactly what I needed right now.
I hope I’ll recover my reviewing mojo in October, when I plan to go back to more thematic reading, namely Spanish and Portuguese language literature.
Events
I was still a bit jetlagged when I attended an online masterclass about the poetry of the uncanny with Helen Mort in early September and heard about the fascinating ‘broken spectre’ phenomenon for the first time. I also attended an incredibly useful session on editing your own work with Hannah Chukwu, editorial director at Dialogue Books, organised by the The Literary Consultancy.
The most exciting live event was a Q&A with my fellow Corylus director and translator, Quentin Bates, at Horsham Library. Entitled ‘Crime: A Universal Language’. We had a much better turnout than we expected (we thought it might be just us and the librarians initially), some really good questions and engaged audience, and we even sold a few books.
I also watched the latest Christian Petzold film: he is shaping up to be one of my favourite contemporary directors. I also have plans to watch another film tonight, a French one called The Innocent, directed by and starring the gorgeous Louis Garrel, because I need a bit of a comedy heist caper.
I also sneaked away early from work to catch the exhibition about the Rossettis at Tate Britain, which was the first time I saw so many of their works in one place, especially the work of Lizzy Siddal. Their style of painting is never going to be fully to my taste, but it is undeniably attractive, and I find their talent and passion across many fields inspiring. Christina is still my favourite.
You’ve been looking forward to finally having some time to spend on that novel you’ve been mostly NOT writing for the past few years, but have sworn to yourself that you will complete before the end of this year 2023. You’ve had one fairly productive week dedicated to it at the end of January but not much time since. What happens when you finally get a week off and are in beautiful surroundings, so conducive to creative pursuits, with someone else preparing all your meals?
You guessed it. Say hello to writer’s block.
OK, maybe I’m a bit harsh with myself, because I did go back to the novel’s timeline and iron out some problems, untangled some of the plot lines, although not quite the final twist. I’ve been thinking a lot about the novel, but not really written anything new. I’ve also jotted down some… well, I hesitate to call them poems, but some germs of ideas for poems, which could, with the right kind of nourishment, sprout in the future. But they are full of the most boring clichés, the metaphors seem far too obvious, and I can’t seem to find the words to describe even the nature around me without sounding like a schoolchild attempting their first poem.
‘Never noticed the beauty of the olive tree in spring the shimmer of leaves, now silver, now green tidy slender outlines of ballet dancers then the silence is pierced by Eurofighters slicing the sky at low altitude’
Compared to the last time I spent some time with my friends here in Luberon in 2016, when I produced 38 poems in 5 days – many of which went on to become fully-fledged and even published, this is very disappointing. All the more since then I had more of a reason to be stuck, upset and speechless, as I was getting ready to tell our children that we were getting divorced. Now I feel safe and content, am eager to write, but the well just seems empty.
All the more infuriating, because I know the next few months will be so, so busy and once again the novel will fall by the wayside and not get my undivided attention. I know I am a binge writer. I’ve always struggled with the ‘write wherever, whenever you can, for however long’ – although that does work for the occasional poetry. I crave long periods of uninterrupted writing time: the more I write, the more ideas I get… so why did it not work on this occasion? Perhaps I needed a little warming-up? But who has the time for that?
Has this ever happened to you? And how have you dealt with the frustration of it? Did it get better? What strategies would you recommend for dealing with it, to ensure such a situation doesn’t happen again?
In the meantime, however, let’s forget my frivolous whining, and wish you all a joyous return of Spring, happy Passover, happy Easter, happy Palm Sunday, and bonne continuation with Ramadan.
When I was in my early teens, I had a craving to become a nun. Not so much for reasons of faith, but because I kept thinking what fun it must be to have plenty of time to read, write, meditate and perhaps do a spot of gardening. Of course, in the meantime, I have realised that modern monastic communities do far more than that. And yet, when I see pictures such as these, I want to go on a retreat there for several weeks, if not months.
St Mary’s Monastery in Perth, Scotland, from TripAdvisor.
Metochi Monastery in Lesvos, Greece, has been rented out as a study centre for the University of Agder in Norway, from lesvos.com
The Swiss monastery of Kappel am Albis is a place where I once ran a training workshop over several days – the food was brilliant too! From Cityseeker.
The Chartreusian monasteries are among the strictest in the world – you are practically locked up in your cell – still, when the cell looks like this, I wouldn’t mind. Photo credit Nico Angleys on Twitter, from the Grand Chartreux Monastery.
The Abbaye de Lerin runs revision sessions for high school students preparing their Baccalaureate. It’s on an island near Cannes, so there is no escape. Photo credit: Jean-Jacques Giordan.
A very modern Benedictine monastery, Mucknell Abbey in Worcestershire was built on the site of an old farm. From Mucknellabbey.org
Combining two of my favourite things: South Africa and Buddhism, this Buddhist retreat near Durban is a dream – and has accommodation ranging from the basic to the luxurious. Photo credit: Chantelle Flores, from Travelstart.co.za
Ten years ago I started a new personal blog (as opposed to my professional one) and wrote a timid first post, in which I made a promise to myself.
This is where I can be myself, not a mother, not a daughter, not a wife, not a businesswoman. And not a scribbler, but most definitely a writer.
Morita Rieko: Double-flowered camellia tree.
This was not the first time I resolved to be a writer. Aged six, I had decided age that I was going to win the Nobel Literature Prize for Romania, wrote plays for my friends and me to perform (I also directed, earning me the nickname ‘Bossyboots’), stories and novels, diaries, letters, and above all poetry. Throughout secondary school and university, I wrote and wrote, almost always in English, the strongest of my three childhood languages.
But then I started working, often four jobs at once to make ends meet (at first as a school teacher and secretary, later as a university lecturer, private tutor, copyeditor and translator), and my writing fell by the wayside. I went abroad for postgraduate studies, then got married, started working in a completely different and very demanding field, had children, moved jobs, moved countries, became self-employed and worked crazy hours after the children went to bed to establish my business. I was still dreaming of writing creatively at some point, but that point just receded further and further away. I went into creative hibernation for twenty years.
Then, in the autumn of 2011, we moved to Geneva for the second time. After all of the administrative hassle of renovating and renting out our house in the UK, packing and unpacking, settling the children in at school, doing lots and lots of French admin, I found myself stuck at home with nothing much to do. I had lost many of my clients because of my move abroad and had not yet established myself in the new environment. The time to pursue my writing dream was now or never, I felt, especially after I attended the conference of the Geneva Writers’ Group in early 2012.
I jumped in with both feet, set up a blog and a Twitter account, discovered the storytelling site of Cowbird (now an archive) and started writing something every day. I resolved to never allow life to get in the way of my love of writing again.
But life had other plans for me.
The last five years have been all about survival. With hindsight, I wish I had used the previous five years in Geneva mostly for writing, but I hated being dependant on a man for money. So I worked and travelled to exhaustion, put up with all sorts of corporate (and marital) humiliations, only to then watch that money flow into my husband’s pocket during our acrimonious, long-drawn-out divorce. Because I was travelling so much at the time, I felt guilty about neglecting the children, so tried to give them as many happy memories when we were together as I could. My writing once again came last. And guess what? They don’t remember all that much about the years when I was pretending to be happy and doing so much motherly stuff with them, neither the good nor the bad. I’ve often thought what an outstanding husband, father, career man and writer I could have been, with half the amount of effort I put into things because of my gender.
That’s why it doesn’t feel like I have much to show for the ten years of ‘taking writing seriously’. Other than 165K of tweets (and many lost hours), and over 1 million words of blogging. Enough to have written around eleven average novels, countless short stories or poems, but no book to show for any of that. I’ve seen other bloggers become judges for literary prizes, get invited to speak on radio or at literary festivals, interview famous authors. That is not the reason I started this blog, but it’s only human to feel an occasional pang of envy – or of failure – that all that work has not led to more visibility and has settled down to a pleasing but not astonishing number of 4000-5000 views per month. Many years of book reviewing and volunteering for various literary organisations have not led to any startling insights or superb industry contacts or even a job in publishing, even though I was prepared to take a drop in income so I could do the thing I love.
Yes, yes, I know that it’s too easy to focus on the things you have NOT done, so let me remind myself of the things I have achieved. I have 38 publications in print and online journals, although for about 3-4 years I didn’t submit a single thing. I have co-founded a publishing company Corylus Books which is trying, by hook or by crook, to introduce the English-speaking world to a greater variety of languages and countries in crime fiction. I have translated two crime novels (published) and am working on a third, a play and a poem (although I said I would never translate poetry), and am busy pitching other novels to publishers. When I have the time to do it for longer than frantic ten minute bursts, I enjoy the actual writing as much as when I was a child. I have finished the second draft of my first novel and the first draft of my second. Above all, it’s the quality not the quantity of blog readers that really matters. I have made many excellent literary friends via blogging and social media, but also in real life, and they are often the people I consult most nowadays.
All the time, in the background, that relentless tick-tock, the clock being run down. How much longer can I afford to ignore it? No wonder ‘tick, tick… BOOM!’ resonated with me – although it was quite funny to hear the Jonathan Larson character complain that he is nearly thirty and still hasn’t achieved anything. At thirty I was just establishing my career for the second time in a new country after my Ph.D.
It’s been ten years since I vowed to prioritise writing. I never thought I would still be so close to the starting line after ten years. As Tillie Olsen says in her hugely influential work Silences, do I really want to remain mute and let writing die over and over again in me?
Work interrupted, deferred, postponed, makes blockage — at best, lesser accomplishment. Unused capacities atrophy, cease to be. … The habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing is not easily broken, even when circumstances now often make it possible for writing to be first; habits of years — response to others, distractibility, responsibility for daily matters — mark you, become you.
Forgive the self-indulgenct and self-pitying tone of this post. Two years of Covid have brought the fragility and transience of our human lives to the forefront. Call it foolish or egotistic, I will never not be preoccupied with my legacy. I don’t mean my children – they are their own people, and I was never the kind who felt the biological urge to perpetuate my line. I may not have the talent or the single-mindedness to succeed. But when the camellia falls, what is left behind? A blog that will be archived in some corner of the internet? Half-finished projects? A scattering of publications in journals that disappear as quickly as they appear?
In February 2022 it will be exactly ten years since I started this blog, hoping that it would force me to write frequently and thoughtfully. I don’t know about the thoughtful bit, but it certainly has turned into quite a demanding hobby. At first, it was more of a place for posting poetry or other odd bits of writing, but it has now transformed into a book blog… and is in danger of killing my appetite for writing (and possibly even reading), instead of feeding it.
So I have resolved to merely review the books that are part of my main reading topic every month (January in Japan, for example). If I read a lot of those, like I did with the Russians in December, I will only review as many as I can comfortably cope with – or the ones that impressed me most. I will then chuck in very brief reviews of the rest when I do the monthly round-up. If I no longer feel the pressure to review nearly everything I read, then I can perhaps provide more considered reviews when I do actually write one. (Although, in my experience, the more passionate I am about a review, the more time I spend on it, the fewer people read it.)
I may (or may not) include some posts on other topics, such as any cultural events I might attend, or books I have acquired within a certain time frame. However, I aim to post at most three blog posts per week: something more bookish or cultural on Monday and Wednesday, and a Friday fun escapism.
The hope is that I will then divert my energies into more productive channels, such as writing, editing the novel, translating… or simply going outside more.
findingtimetowrite 