Will Buckingham's Blog, page 18

On Pakistan, Bicycles and Religious Experiences: Unmapped Magazine

I’m delighted to have another article in the most recent edition of the truly wonderful Unmapped magazine. Unmapped, for those of you who haven’t come across it, is a magazine for travel writing from all those hidden places that are off the map (whatever this map might be). The piece is called The Domed Heaven, the Domed Earth, and is about a strangely religious experience in the tomb of Ali Mardan Khan in Lahore, Pakistan. It is a piece I’ve been thinking of writing for about a quarter century, so I’m pleased that the editor of Unmapped pushed me into it!

Do pay Unmapped a visit and, whilst you are over there, subscribe.They are a fabulous publication.

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Complete Writing a Novel Course: Teach Yourself

Since this time last year, I’ve been working on writing a beast of a book for Hodder & Stoughton’s Teach Yourself series on the art, the craft, the mechanics and the business of writing novels. As the book has now been announced on Hodder’s website (see the link here), I thought I’d announce it on my blog as well. Although the link at the moment says that the book has zero pages, this is only because they have not yet received the manuscript yet. It will weigh in at something around 130,000 words, so it’s a weighty tome, and it has been huge amounts of fun to write.

I’m just polishing the final draft of the book, and I am looking forward to sending it off at the end of the month. The publication date will be some time in the first half of 2015.

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Extract in Dnevnik

There’s an extract from the Bulgarian translation of my novel, The Descent of the Lyre, or (in Bulgarian) “Произходът на лирата”, on the website of today’s Dnevnik newspaper in Bulgaria. If you want to know how the book reads in Bulgarian, then go to the link here. I’ll be following the comments with interest, but feel inordinately pleased with the person who said that I’m clearly not British because the book is, you know, poetic and stuff like that…

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Doing Literary Nothing

An email arrived in my inbox this morning, and in the email was a fantastic life-enhancing tip that I simply had to share — because you too can lose pounds and pounds by doing literary nothing!

And the best thing of all is that it really works! I have been doing literary nothing for years now, and can’t even begin to calculate the number of pounds that I have lost as a result.

Literary Nothing

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Press Clippings from Bulgaria

I’ve been sent a few media clippings from the recent launch of Произходът на лирата (The Descent of the Lyre) in Bulgaria, so I thought I’d upload them here. You can click the tabs below, and download the articles as PDF files.

An interview with Presa/Преса, published on 16th April 2014.

 

Download

A write-up in Weekend/Уикенд, 5th-11th April 2014.

 

Download

And finally a brief feature in Monitor/Монитор from 5th April, 2014.

 

Download

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Ontological Claustrophobia – A Short Story

So there I was, sitting amongst philosophers, and we were all talking about ontological claustrophobia, the fear of being, that kind of thing.

The room was getting a bit stuffy. We’d been there a long time, talking and talking and talking. Suddenly I felt out of breath. ‘How about opening the window,’ I suggested. ‘That will help, I’m sure. Then perhaps we can talk about something else.’

The philosophers grumbled. ‘You don’t understand,’ they said. ‘You never understand.’

‘Look,’ I told them, ‘I’m sure you’ll feel better when the windows are open.’

‘You are shallow,’ one of them said. ‘Our claustrophobia is ontological. It’s not the kind of claustrophobia that can be cured by opening a window.’

‘Besides,’ said another, ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m a monad. I have neither doors nor windows.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Still, a bit of fresh air would be nice.’ I started to walk over to the window.

‘No!’, the philosophers shrieked. ‘No! No! No!’

‘Oh, okay,’ I said. ‘If you like, I’ll leave it closed.’

I looked through the glass out of the window. It was a bright, sunny day. I heard a clock, far off, striking noon. ‘I’m going for lunch,’ I said. ‘Anyone coming?’

The philosophers looked appalled. ‘Lunch? You can think about lunch at a time like this? When the world is consumed by misery and suffering? When we have not yet atoned for the crimes of our ancestors? When God is dead, and we are soon to join him in the grave? All of this… and you can only think about is lunch?’

I picked up my bag and left the room. I waved goodbye, but the philosophers had already returned to their deliberations.

Out in the street, people were wandering here and there, going to and from the market. I bought myself a loaf of bread and some cheese. Then I walked up the hill on the outskirts of the town.

On the top of the hill, surrounded by the buzz of insect-life, I found a rock where I could sit to eat my lunch. The bread was fresh and the cheese pungent. I brushed the crumbs away and watched for a while as the ants carried them off to their nests.

Then I lay down on the grass, and for a long time I gazed up at the vast blueness of the summer sky.

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Interviews, Meetings and Plans

Today I catch the flight back to Manchester, and then head home to Leicester. The last couple of weeks in Bulgaria have been busy. At the last count, in the last ten days or so, I’ve done two book launches, one creative writing workshop, one school visit, one literary and cultural evening, two radio interviews, one TV interview, and five or so more media interviews. In addition, it has been an absolute delight to meet up with so many old and new friends, and to have all kinds of meetings making plans for future projects and collaborations.

I’m hoping to be back in Bulgaria before long. But until then, here’s my interview on Bulgarian National TV where — thanks to the miracle of dubbing — I’m miraculously fluent.

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A Few Photos from the Varna Book Launch

Click to view slideshow.

Just a few photos from the book launch in the Ciela bookstore, Varna.

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A Blog Post about Hospitality, Books and Big Sticks

In the town of Omurtag, Hasan the geographer welcomed me with a story about the perils of refusing hospitality. Hasan is a vigorous man in his late forties, and he is locally famous for his fierce home-made rakia (although, being a Muslim, he doesn’t drink any of it himself). He has about him an air of restless intellectual curiosity. He is an Esperanto speaker, an expert on the history of local place names, a respected scholar, a translator, and a compiler of collections of folk tales.

With Hasan the geographer in Omurtag

Hasan had invited us to lunch — myself and my hosts from the Lecti Center in Varna, Sabira Ståhlberg and Ivo Ivanov. We ate nettles cooked with bulgur wheat, whilst Hasan told us a tale about three guests beaten with a large stick for refusing the hospitality of their hosts. The nettles were delicious. I looked around the room. ‘Where’s your stick?’ I asked. Hasan laughed and told me that it was hidden, but cautioned me that it was within easy reach should he need it. I took another mouthful, to demonstrate my good intentions.

With teacher Louis Ayetola and Sabira Ståhlberg in Omurtag

We were in Omurtag — stopping on the way to Varna — so that I could pay a visit to the school and give a talk to some of the children. We were running late due to the heavy rain and sleet on the way from Sofia. When I arrived, I was greeted by the school teacher, Louis Ayetola, and then I was hustled straight into a classroom of where I had bunches of tulips thrust into my hands, and then I put on a show for forty minutes. It was good, but hectic, fun. I acted out parts of my children’s book, The Snorgh and the Sailor, took questions from the kids (“What do you think of the political situation in Ukraine and the Crimea?” — I hadn’t seen that one coming), and was briefly interviewed for the school radio station. Then I was hurried onwards for lunch with the geographer.

After nettles and bulgur wheat, we ate baked pumpkin and drank tea sweetened with treacle, home made from sugar-beet. The conversation was just beginning to hit full swing when we had to be on our way again, Hasan thrusting jars of treacle, jam and preserves into my hands, and reminding me of the large stick that he kept out of sight for beating guests unable to accept his hospitality.

We left Omurtag early afternoon and arrived in Varna at four. I caught an hour’s sleep and then we were back in town for a literary evening at a local restaurant. At the end of the evening, I staggered into bed, and slept for a good nine hours.

Friday was calmer. I slept for a good long while, had a couple of meetings during the day, and had the chance to spend a little more time in Varna. But yesterday once again I was back to doing events, with a two hour writing workshop in the morning in the library and then a launch event in Varna’s lovely Ciela bookstore in the afternoon. I always enjoy multilingual writing workshops. A couple of years back I spent a week or so in a French art school running creative writing workshops in both French and English, and found it hugely stimulating. Today’s session cut between Bulgarian and English, with some people writing in one language, some in the other. I’m always frustrated by the horribly monoglot character of creative writing as a discipline, as if English was the only language in which people might write creatively (how many creative writing courses, in the English-speaking world, are a part of English departments?), so working between languages is always enriching and exciting.

The launch here in Varna was my final formal event in Bulgaria. Between now and the end of my visit, I’m catching up with friends and making further connections, but I don’t have any official book-related things to do. And although I was nervous before the event, the second book launch was a relaxed affair: between us, Sabira, Ivo and I have honed our patter and our approach to two-way translation, and so the interview was fun and freewheeling. The audience members were considerably more loquacious than in Sofia, leading to an extended session of questions and answers.

Of course, given that The Descent of the Lyre is set in Bulgaria, the fact of launching the book over here in Bulgaria has a particular significance for me. But spending time doing events over here makes me also realise that it’s absolutely a worthwhile thing to do to move beyond the writing world in one’s home country and to go and run events, readings and launches overseas. It gives you a broader sense of the publishing world. It is a good way of meeting different readers. It puts you in touch with writers and people in the publishing world elsewhere. It potentially feeds into new projects. And it is — above all — huge amounts of fun.

On this occasion, I’ve been particularly fortunate to have such great support for this visit from the wonderful Lecti Center, and also from my Bulgarian publishers, Enthusiast (who are particularly well-named). I could not have hoped for better and more generous support. And I hope that I’ll be back to do more over here in Bulgaria in the future, whether writing new things or running further events.

As for the next few days, tomorrow is entirely free. I’m taking a break and enjoying being a tourist. Then on Monday I’m heading off to visit friends near the town of Teteven for a couple of days, before heading back to Sofia, where Im going to meet up with both old and new friends, prior to heading back home to the UK some time next Thursday. As for my book in Bulgarian, Произходът на лирата, I’ll leave it now to its own devices, although I’ll check from time to time to see how it does out there in the world. As the great Canadian poet Erin Mouré said (and I’ve quoted this before), books are emigrants — they belong where they end up. The Bulgarian edition of the book has cast off from the shore. Wherever it finds itself settling down, that’s probably where it belongs, or where it will find itself belonging. I wish it luck. The life of an emigrant is uncertain, but it is full of possibilities. As a writer you can only hope that your books, when they emigrate, meet with hospitality and generosity; and if they do, it is hospitality that should not be refused (stick or no stick).

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Levinas, Storytelling and Anti-Storytelling now in paperback

Just a quick post to say that my book, Levinas, Storytelling and Anti-Storytelling, is now available in paperback. The hardback was priced beyond the reach of ordinary mortals, but the paperback is much more reasonably priced. There’s more information on the Bloomsbury website.

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