Jane Rusbridge's Blog, page 3
February 14, 2014
PIECE ON PLACE: Gabrielle Kimm & The Castello Estense – a Character with no Dialogue
The second writer to give us their PIECE ON PLACE is historical fiction writer Gabrielle Kimm, who’ll tell us about her trip to Italy to visit the setting for her sultry & atmospheric first novel His Last Duchess (Little, Brown 2009), and also explain why a fortress in Ferrara came to play a central role in her story about what might really have happened to Browning’s ‘Last Duchess’.
‘A stunning debut, rich in historical detail, that explores women’s freedom, forbidden love, and the passions and people of 16th century Tuscany and Ferrara’– Irish Times
Gabrielle: I never expected the setting of my first novel to take its place in the book almost as a character in its own right – but in the end, that’s just what it did. In ‘His Last Duchess’, the bulk of the book plays out within the Castello Estense – the family seat of the Este dynasty in Ferrara, Northern Italy and, do you know, had I invented a place in which my complex, damaged, obsessive, controlling duke could live, I couldn’t possibly have come up with anywhere more suitable!
Situated in the heart of the city of Ferrara, the Castello Estense was built in 1385, and is a large, square, red-brick fortress, with a bulky tower at each corner and a black-watered moat right around the perimeter. It was built as a fortress, and it certainly looks the part.
My story explores the doomed marriage of the fifth duke of Ferrara – Alfonso d’Este – and his very young Medici-heiress bride, Lucrezia, and it was originally inspired by Robert Browning’s well known and delightfully sinister monologue, ‘My Last Duchess’. Once I had decided to tell this particular story, I had no choice about the location for my novel: the Castello Estense is where the Este dukes lived, and the Castello Estense is where Lucrezia disappeared from the records, and if I was to recount events accurately, this is where my book had to take place. I needed to know as much about this castle as I could. So I went to see it for myself. As you do.
Accompanied by my sister, I flew to Ferrara, arriving in the city after dark. We located our hotel, dumped our bags and went in search of the Castello straight away – I couldn’t wait! Rounding a corner, a few minutes from the hotel, we walked straight into it. Looming up out of the darkness, it was floodlit an eerie pale orange; I was gobsmacked. My sister laughed at me, as I walked slowly around the edge of the moat, mouth open, staring up at the place I had been ‘living’ in for months. It was perfect: huge and dark and, in the event, far more impressive even than I had imagined. I had seen photographs, of course, and studied floor plans, and I’d even watched the permanent webcam they have running there, but nothing had prepared me for the sheer bulk and impact of the place. It sits in its place in the city-centre like the Godfather at the head of the table, glaring around, silently daring anyone to defy him, and it’s quite clear the place hasn’t changed a scrap in five hundred years.
The following day, we did the tour of the inside of the Castello. It was a very strange experience for me to be there, imagining my characters in situ, trying to remove the noisy tourists from my mental image of the place, and picturing scenes from my story unravelling as I walked through.
The lightless dungeons in the castle lie below the level of the moat. My duke has a vivid memory of one terrible day in his childhood in these dungeons, so they were one place in the castle I was particularly keen to see for myself. The corridors get ever narrower as you go deeper underground, and the ceilings of the final passages are only about five foot high, so you have to stoop to walk along them. The door to the biggest dungeon is squat, iron-clad and well over a foot thick. You step down into the cell, which is vaulted and windowless (vents lead up to air above the waterlevel). The ceiling is covered in ancient graffiti – written in candle-smoke, I discovered – the final thoughts of those luckless individuals incarcerated in there. It was chilling – quite by chance I found myself totally alone in there. There was no attendant, and no other tourists. Just me. In that horrible, horrible place.
The Castello Estense plays a very central role in my book. I think that if it were an actor, it would be the one who manages to get that sought-after ‘and’ before their name in the credits, after all the other names have rolled. The one that stands out.
‘Gabrielle Kimm writes with a charm that entices us into a world of intrigue and dark undertones. She draws a skilful portrait of a fascinating time and place’ -Kate Furnivall, author of THE RUSSIAN CONCUBINE
Gabrielle Kimm is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow and the author of three historical novels, all published by Little, Brown – His Last Duchess in 2010, The Courtesan’s Lover in 2011 and The Girl With the Painted Face in 2013. Her books have been translated into eight languages.
January 17, 2014
PIECE on PLACE: An interview with Voula Grand about the ‘Fairy Dust of Fiction’
‘To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from’ Carson McCullers
Location, location, location… Tracey Chevalier has described the writer’s relationship with place or setting as the ‘fairy dust of fiction’. For me, place is something rich, earthy and essential, from which my characters grow and into which they push their roots. I wonder how other writers feel?
Today I’m going to find out how my friend, novelist and psychologist Voula Grand, feels about place. John Mitchinson, founder of Unbound Crowd Publishing, has said of Voula’s debut novel ‘Honour’s Shadow’, ‘It is rare for a first book to manage the difficult trick of being both wise and gripping so successfully.’ I particularly admired the richness of character development, so it’s good news that a sequel is in the pipeline.
‘Voula Grand is a writer to watch,’ says John Mitchinson
Voula: What’s the first place you can remember? What did it feel like for you?
Jane: From somewhere, when you asked that question, came an image of wooden bars, of holding them and looking through, at a window. It seems unlikely this can be a memory of my cot but if it is, the memory is embellished with more detail each time I call it up: the butterflies on the wallpaper of my childhood bedroom; the tall trees at the bottom of the garden. It’s my first bedroom and feels safe. What’s yours?
Voula: My first “place” memory was going to see the council house in Barry that was to be the new home for my family: we were moving from a one bedroomed top floor flat. I was two years old, with an older sister and the new baby sister that had qualified us for our new home. My mother ran from room to room, joyful, saying “Look at all this space!” Whenever we have been house hunting, each house we look at brings this memory back: a “flashbulb” moment in which I can see, hear and feel the whole experience.
Flashbulb memories are particularly powerful in traumatic situations: most of us can vividly recall where we were when the twin towers came down in New York; or when John Lennon was shot dead. Memories like this are recorded as “emotional constellations” – a total sensory memory – in a deep and primitive part of our brain (the limbic system) so they are more profound than our memory of facts and figures, which are recorded in the more recently developed neocortex, the crinkled brain surface. As people age, it becomes harder to recall memories in the neocortex, whilst our emotional memories become more accessible: the very elderly may forget what they did yesterday, while having comprehensive recall of formative childhood incidents.
Jane: ’Emotional constellations’ – I like that.
When ROOK first came out, a question that came up often in interviews was ‘Why is place so important to you?’ Isn’t place important to everyone?
Voula: People vary in the extent to which they pay attention to the feel of places. For some, it is a primary touchstone, for others, secondary or negligible, until we are homesick and long for the place we consider home. Homesickness is a profound variety of flashbulb memory, as it’s closely related to separation anxiety, which has its origins in our earliest fears of being separated from our mother.
Successful novelists are often especially good at evoking a sense of place, a mood, over and above the physical descriptions of a room, a garden, a village, a country. As a writer myself, I am in awe of this capacity: place is not that central for me, so I’ve had to work hard to convey settings in my books, it just doesn’t come naturally.
Jane: Place is pretty central for me – I’ll choose a restaurant on the basis of the way the place makes me feel, rather than the food! And it’s interesting what you say about feeling homesick. I often yearn for the sea, specifically for a Sussex beach at low tide, perhaps because it’s a place closely associated with my mother, who died when I was a child.
‘To have a sense of place is not to own but rather
to be owned by the places we inhabit;
it is to “own up” to the complexity and mutuality
of both place and human being’
Place and Human Being by Jeff Malpas
Voula: At the beginning and end of a human life, the place we start and the place we finish may exert a powerful subliminal pull on our emotions. Depth psychologists pay special attention to our very first home, the womb, and the way our pre-birth life may shape our sense of place. The German psychologist Bert Hellinger points out that the placenta (PLACEnta) connects us to our first location; and our uterine and birth experiences may imprint our orientation towards place for the rest of our lives.
And in death, the sense of place becomes fundamental for everyone, as we select our last resting place, that final choice. Anne Michaels, in her novel Fugitive Pieces, about a Polish boy displaced during the war to Canada, points out: Many of us choose a resting place from our early life, and/or alongside family members already passed, especially our mother: the longing to go back to where we began, home.
Jane: “It is important to be buried on land that remembers you” - Both my parents expressly wished their ashes to be scattered in places they had loved and where they had spent a lot of time: my mother in the Ashdown Forest in Sussex, and my father in the highlands of Scotland at Burghead, where generations of his family are buried. The quote neatly highlights the two way relationship betweens humans and place, which is something that intrigues me. Thank you so much, Voula, for an enlightening chat.
To read more from Voula, you’ll find her website & blog here
*EXTRAS:
* Reading: Seamus Heaney explores the deep rooted connection with place in ‘The Sense of Place’ ( Seamus Heaney Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978). If you’re interested in place, it’s well worth a read.
*Writing Retreat: For author-led workshops focused on the use of landscape and setting in your writing, take a look at the Write & Walk Retreats The venue for March is a house right on West Wittering Beach – how inviting it that?
The Fairy Dust of Fiction
‘To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from’ Carson McCullers
Location, location, location… Tracey Chevalier has described the writer’s relationship with place or setting as the ‘fairy dust of fiction’. For me, place is something rich, earthy and essential, from which my characters grow and into which they push their roots. I wonder how other writers feel?
Today I’m going to find out how my friend, novelist and psychologist Voula Grand, feels about place. John Mitchinson, founder of Unbound Crowd Publishing, has said of Voula’s debut novel ‘Honour’s Shadow’, ‘It is rare for a first book to manage the difficult trick of being both wise and gripping so successfully.’ I particularly admired the richness of character development, so it’s good news that a sequel is in the pipeline.
‘Voula Grand is a writer to watch,’ says John Mitchinson
Voula: What’s the first place you can remember? What did it feel like for you?
Jane: From somewhere, when you asked that question, came an image of wooden bars, of holding them and looking through, at a window. It seems unlikely this can be a memory of my cot but if it is, the memory is embellished with more detail each time I call it up: the butterflies on the wallpaper of my childhood bedroom; the tall trees at the bottom of the garden. It’s my first bedroom and feels safe. What’s yours?
Voula: My first “place” memory was going to see the council house in Barry that was to be the new home for my family: we were moving from a one bedroomed top floor flat. I was two years old, with an older sister and the new baby sister that had qualified us for our new home. My mother ran from room to room, joyful, saying “Look at all this space!” Whenever we have been house hunting, each house we look at brings this memory back: a “flashbulb” moment in which I can see, hear and feel the whole experience.
Flashbulb memories are particularly powerful in traumatic situations: most of us can vividly recall where we were when the twin towers came down in New York; or when John Lennon was shot dead. Memories like this are recorded as “emotional constellations” – a total sensory memory – in a deep and primitive part of our brain (the limbic system) so they are more profound than our memory of facts and figures, which are recorded in the more recently developed neocortex, the crinkled brain surface. As people age, it becomes harder to recall memories in the neocortex, whilst our emotional memories become more accessible: the very elderly may forget what they did yesterday, while having comprehensive recall of formative childhood incidents.
Jane: ’Emotional constellations’ – I like that.
When ROOK first came out, a question that came up often in interviews was ‘Why is place so important to you?’ Isn’t place important to everyone?
Voula: People vary in the extent to which they pay attention to the feel of places. For some, it is a primary touchstone, for others, secondary or negligible, until we are homesick and long for the place we consider home. Homesickness is a profound variety of flashbulb memory, as it’s closely related to separation anxiety, which has its origins in our earliest fears of being separated from our mother.
Successful novelists are often especially good at evoking a sense of place, a mood, over and above the physical descriptions of a room, a garden, a village, a country. As a writer myself, I am in awe of this capacity: place is not that central for me, so I’ve had to work hard to convey settings in my books, it just doesn’t come naturally.
Jane: Place is pretty central for me – I’ll choose a restaurant on the basis of the way the place makes me feel, rather than the food! And it’s interesting what you say about feeling homesick. I often yearn for the sea, specifically for a Sussex beach at low tide, perhaps because it’s a place closely associated with my mother, who died when I was a child.
‘To have a sense of place is not to own but rather
to be owned by the places we inhabit;
it is to “own up” to the complexity and mutuality
of both place and human being’
Place and Human Being by Jeff Malpas
Voula: At the beginning and end of a human life, the place we start and the place we finish may exert a powerful subliminal pull on our emotions. Depth psychologists pay special attention to our very first home, the womb, and the way our pre-birth life may shape our sense of place. The German psychologist Bert Hellinger points out that the placenta (PLACEnta) connects us to our first location; and our uterine and birth experiences may imprint our orientation towards place for the rest of our lives.
And in death, the sense of place becomes fundamental for everyone, as we select our last resting place, that final choice. Anne Michaels, in her novel Fugitive Pieces, about a Polish boy displaced during the war to Canada, points out: Many of us choose a resting place from our early life, and/or alongside family members already passed, especially our mother: the longing to go back to where we began, home.
Jane: “It is important to be buried on land that remembers you” - Both my parents expressly wished their ashes to be scattered in places they had loved and where they had spent a lot of time: my mother in the Ashdown Forest in Sussex, and my father in the highlands of Scotland at Burghead, where generations of his family are buried. The quote neatly highlights the two way relationship betweens humans and place, which is something that intrigues me. Thank you so much, Voula, for an enlightening chat.
To read more from Voula, you’ll find her website & blog here
*EXTRAS:
* Reading: Seamus Heaney explores the deep rooted connection with place in ‘The Sense of Place’ ( Seamus Heaney Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978). If you’re interested in place, it’s well worth a read.
*Writing Retreat: For author-led workshops focused on the use of landscape and setting in your writing, take a look at the Write & Walk Retreats The venue for March is a house right on West Wittering Beach – how inviting it that?
October 28, 2013
Three Sussex Writers return to A Christmas Festival at Stansted Park House
The Three Sussex Writers - Jane Rusbridge, Isabel Ashdown and Gabrielle Kimm – will return to the magical Christmas Festival at Stansted House again this year, where they’ll be chatting to readers and writers, signing books and even wrapping them for you. Books will be sold at a special event price.
For details see the Christmas Festival website
Christmas Literary Lounge at The Kennels, Goodwood
Are you writer as well as a reader? Then bring your questions about writing and how to get published to this event with three award-winning writers, when Jane Rusbridge joins fellow Three Sussex Writers Isabel Ashdown and Gabrielle Kimm at The Kennels, Goodwood for a Christmas Literary Lounge. Jane and Gabrielle are both Associate Lecturers in English at the University of Chichester, and Isabel is Writer in Residence at the University of Brighton.
October 24, 2013
Meet Jane Rusbridge at Chichester Library
Meet Jane Rusbridge, author of The Devil’s Music & ROOK, at Chichester library
Invitation to a Railway Carriage House Writing Retreat – on the beach
Join me at two locations in West Sussex which have inspired my writing.
I lived for many years in a house just across the road from the beach at Wittering in West Sussex. It’s no coincidence that one of the main settings in my first novel, The Devil’s Music, is a railway carriage house. There are many of these converted train carriages along the Sussex coast and one opposite our house was being restored during the time I was working on the novel. Sometimes I’d take a cup of tea down to the beach and stroll along to observe progress.
You can image my delight when Amanda Saint, who runs Write & Walk Retreats , contacted me to ask if I’d be interested in teaching a workshop on the use of location and – even better – in a location connected to The Devil’s Music. These retreats are such a dream of an idea – workshops and walks in inspirational places, with the rest of the time to write and relax. The first, with Alison Moore, was held in a lighthouse and the second is in the very railway carriage house I watched being gradually ‘up-cycled’ into a beautiful holiday home, The Dodo.
My workshop is called ‘Sensing Place’, a phrase I’ve borrowed from Seamus Heaney who writes in Preoccupations about the nourishment which springs from knowing and cherishing a place. Our imaginations thrive on such nourishment. After the workshop at The Dodo, we’ll visit Bosham and its ancient church which appears on the Bayeux tapestry, and we’ll wander along the edges of Bosham Creek. Bosham is said to be where Canute demonstrated that even he could not turn back the tides, and there’s even a memorial stone in the church dedicated ‘To a daughter of King Canute’. Old Bosham is a place oozing with stories, and it’s the setting for my second novel, Rook.
Visit my Pinterest board for images of Bosham
October 10, 2013
Jane Rusbridge at Portsmouth Bookfest 2013
Jane Rusbridge will be appearing at Southsea Castle for the Portsmouth Bookfest 2013 on Sunday 20th October, and will be joined by fellow Three Sussex Writers Isabel Ashdown and Gabrielle Kimm. The three popular local writers will share inspirations and writing tips, and there will be a chance to ask any questions you have about writing or about their books during an audience Q&A . Copies of all three authors’ books will be on sale, so here’s your chance to get a signed copy or two.
Jane Rusbridge at Chichester High School for Girls
Best-selling Sussex authors Jane Rusbridge, Isabel Ashdown and Gabrielle Kimm at Chichester High School for Girls. If you’re an avid reader or member of a book club, do come along on 5th December to a festive evening at Chichester High School for Girls, where the Three Sussex Writers will host book chat and Q&A as well as signing and giftwrapping books at a special Christmas discount. And if that’s not enough to persuade you, there will be wine and mice pies too! In support of the CHSG PTA fund.
Littlehampton Bookgroup
Private event.
