Anna Vaught's Blog, page 15

Mentoring

https://womentoringproject.co.uk/

This is the link to a mentoring project about which I have heard many wonderful things. Its idea is to link women at the beginning of their writing with more established writers and also agents – and a good number of women give their time to it. It is a free programme.

And I was thinking about it earlier as I suppose I feel like I need the company and the guidance. The fire is there, alright. But I see I need to talk about my writing!

I started writing my first novel (by which I mean, the first word of the first draft) in July of 2014 and it was published in March this year; by any standards, I understand that to be a quick turnaround. Between December 2015 and very recently, I was also writing a second novel; that novel is currently out on submission. It has only been seen by a few people (in addition to some beta readers), but it has been requested in full – and I cannot, I think, write about that in detail, but I will say that it is somewhat nailbiting and yet…I continue to think about it: what might be wrong, what right. I am sure this is a funny period for anyone. Do you start a new book? Take a break?

I started a new book and have begun a third novel. I am actually about a third of the way through the first draft because I really, really want to do this. I’ve met a lot of setbacks and disappointments already, but I won’t go into those because, of course, the key is to keep writing. And if, after such things, you want to carry on, well now – doesn’t that show that it is important; this this is you: what you want?

I avoided writing for so long; or rather, I avoided submitting fiction for so long and then, one day, I took myself by surprise and just started. So, since July 2014, I have written two and a half novels (with the first published), been included in two poetry anthologies and had three national features on me; I’ve written articles for national publications on literature and mental health and I made a  (very frank) film for AXA about managing anxiety that has a huge reach. I started a collection of short stories, two of which I submitted to big competitions (don’t know how I got on yet!) and I am still raring to go.

I read all the time; that’s my greatest teacher. I run a business, tutor and mentor young people, I’m a secondary English teacher from time to time and I have three young sons, with no support from any extended family (I am saying this from a purely factual point of view – keep reading) and I struggle every day – yep; every day – with the legacy of complex trauma and mental health problems. Don’t always win, of course. I also hold down three volunteer posts, two of which I can’t write about here, and one of which is as a volunteer creative writing teacher for adults who have had long term mental health problems. So, these things on board, you see that I have proved to myself that I am able to write in pockets; to think even if there is a small chap tugging at my arm because he wants a snack or the other two chaps are punching each other. I am not going to have peace and quiet to write, but I’ve discovered that I can have a pop anyway.

I have found such rewards in corresponding with writers on social media – twitter in particular. It may not seem so from the outside, when, frankly, most of the time you are going to get rejected and, on sad days, you may have to avoid social media altogether because (well I know I do this and it is truly a bit pathetic!) you get to thinking, “They can do it!” as someone gets a splendid publishing deal or something like that…and then you think, “Oh – but not me. No – I am an outsider. I will never manage that!” But, you know, you have to get over that sort of thing. Do you want to do this, or not? Get in training, then. And what I was saying about writers: I have found great encouragement. I’ve asked questions; written to people when I have particularly enjoyed their books; had some great support and feedback and advice. I mean from both new and thoroughly established writers. And so today I was thinking.

Thinking this.

I see, through the work I do, in schools, through my company and my volunteer work, that mentoring can be extraordinary for young people. When I look back to my younger years, I know I only survived- in my health, or my floundering school work – which floundered because of the distress I was in, unspoken and scared – because there were some possibilities suggested by kind people around me who could nudge me towards the insight to carry on. A good class teacher may be a mentor, but I know from twenty years in and around teaching that the best mentor may also be a class tutor, or an older pupil and that you need to look around; eyes open. For do you know who I turned to, as a kid? A dinner lady called Evelyn who, today, is still one of the people I love most in the world. She’s 87; I met her when I was 4.

And so I am quietly looking around: mentoring for me. I don’t mean for my mental health (it is only that my extensive experience in this area shows me the power of an insightful person) but for my writing: for this career which is inextricably bound up with my deepest sentiment, values and fears. No way round that, I think! Still, I am not sure I can do this alone, as I am. Okay – moreorless alone. I feel a need a period with a guide, a teacher, a mentor. It isn’t, with a large family, a job and multiple commitments, plausible that I could do an MA in creative writing or one of the exciting-sounding courses run by, say, Curtis Brown, but I do want to see what I can do to find that mentor as I go forward with this. Eyes open, then.

Perhaps this will surprise me. Perhaps, with this second book, I will naturally meet this person as part of the process. We shall see.

Love to anyone reading this and…keep reading; keep writing. Bon courage.

My 2016 in books so far…

I think I have forgotten things, but please do share with me what you have read! Anna

Anna Vaught Writer

A sixth form student asked me which books I’d read so far this year and could I list them  for her – so here you go. Hope I’ve not forgotten anything. The list comprises fiction and non fiction I have read since new year and doesn’t include things that I have needed to read or re-read for English teaching, such as novels, poems, short stories, non-fiction texts, web texts, articles, essays and reviews – or blog posts, poems, magazines, journals and papers that I have read outside of this. And the list doesn’t include my own novel, published on 3rd March this year or the series of features I have written this year – or the poems or the bits of research I’ve been doing for the next book or the books I’ve read to or shared with the kids! Actually, all that adds up to a lot, now I think about…

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Patrician Press Anthology of Refugees and Peacekeepers

From the Patrician Press blog (below) earlier. (I am published in this splendid new anthology with ‘Emigree’). You can buy this book through the publisher’s site http://patricianpress.com/ or, you know, the usual outlets. Few bookshops will stock books from smaller presses but they can always order!

I am proud to say that my dear friend, Susie Freeman, who has been such an encouragement to me in my writing, novels one and two, entered the associated writing competition run by Patrician and the judges (I wasn’t one, I should add; Susie’s just awesome so they noticed her) picked her poem as a winner and have subsequently included it in this anthology. CONGRATULATIONS SUSIE AND I LOVE YOU SO.

I quote from the blog…

This year has been horrendous in many ways but at least on the publishing front we have some good news: our lovely Refugees and Peacekeepers anthology has been sent to the printer today. We are happy to report that as well as quotes by George Szirtes and the Bishop of Barking in the foreword, the back cover contains a quote by the wonderful Robert McCrum. We are hoping to have advance copies in time for our event at the First Site art gallery in Colchester on Saturday 10th December from 12-3pm. All our books will be on sale with a combined raffle. Various pieces of artwork by our cover artists will be the main prizes, as well as some consolation prizes.

We will be in good company as the retrospective exhibition on at the time is by Gee Vaucher:

http://www.firstsite.uk/whats-on/gee-vaucher-introspective/

Patician Press Anthology of Refugees and Peacekeepers

From the Patrician Press blog (below) earlier. (I am published in this splendid new anthology with ‘Emigree’). You can buy this book through the publisher’s site http://patricianpress.com/ or, you know, the usual outlets. Few bookshops will stock books from smaller presses but they can always order!

I am proud to say that my dear friend, Susie Freeman, who has been such an encouragement to me in my writing, novels one and two, entered the associated writing competition run by Patrician and the judges (I wasn’t one, I should add; Susie’s just awesome so they noticed her) picked her poem as a winner and have subsequently included it in this anthology. CONGRATULATIONS SUSIE AND I LOVE YOU SO.

I quote from the blog…

This year has been horrendous in many ways but at least on the publishing front we have some good news: our lovely Refugees and Peacekeepers anthology has been sent to the printer today. We are happy to report that as well as quotes by George Szirtes and the Bishop of Barking in the foreword, the back cover contains a quote by the wonderful Robert McCrum. We are hoping to have advance copies in time for our event at the First Site art gallery in Colchester on Saturday 10th December from 12-3pm. All our books will be on sale with a combined raffle. Various pieces of artwork by our cover artists will be the main prizes, as well as some consolation prizes.

We will be in good company as the retrospective exhibition on at the time is by Gee Vaucher:

http://www.firstsite.uk/whats-on/gee-vaucher-introspective/

The Life of Almost

On love; on writing. And welcome to the world, Almost. (You need to keep your eyes open for the last part of the epigraph, below…)

So, I have been holed up at home this week, on writing retreat, which is to say working on this novel and starting the reading, planning and drafting for two other books. I took a week off work and the lovely people in our community did the school run for the youngest of my three and took him home for playdates after school to free up time and energy for me. Ah, it isn’t straightforward, this. I have been sleeping badly for some months because of the effects of multiple bereavements, doing my level best to support others (including teenagers and other young people) in times of illness and loss and coping with some really thorny issues at the heart of my extended family which hurt me deeply and which I have had no choice but to tackle. I am exhausted. And hoorah: I still have some palsy on one side (won’t bore you with the details) so one hand is acting like a mess of sausages and won’t do what I  bid it. Typos an issue!

And yet

And yet and yet. I re-wrote a novel, started the others, looked after three kids and planned for my business – I kept my heart open and re-evaluated. Because, in the ready care that I have felt this week; in  the encouragement from my friends, new and old, and in the interest they have shown in what I am doing, I am immensely cheered and, so, stronger. The rest of it can be painful and frustrating because the cheer is not all there is. But you cannot wait for absolutely the right circumstances for happiness or to go boldly in the direction of your dreams; cannot (truly) line up each criterion and tidy it all up. That is to defer everything to fate. And for writing, as with life, there is not an ideal set of circumstances; I suppose you just…do it; make a start; carry on. One way and another, I have written around 80,000 words this week, plus other letters to publishers and just a little social media. I am not an island. Love. xxxx

The Life of Almost

or,

A Life Of Very Little Expectation.

The Life of Almost is a Welsh and spectral reworking of Dickens’s Great Expectations. Almost is a boy with poor beginnings, who begins his life shrouded by bereavement and alongside those on the run from the law and from life; he is also surrounded by the hauntings of the undead of his family and the cliff-top communities around him. He plays in the sea caves, visits graves, like Pip, sings into the sea and likes to tell stories—and telling stories is a key theme of the book. The book is the story of his life and work and of how he struggles and triumphs, is thwarted in love but also begins to understand that he has been gifted deeper and commanding powers the night he meets a ragged convict at the sea cave, for the convict is a merman, come on land, as are other characters in the novel.

Almost is dragged up by his sister Perfection, both of them kept in their place from beyond the grave by their mother and other matriarchs. Almost cries with the name his late mother gave him because he feels he will never amount to much, but gradually he begins to realise that, by calling to the world around him and by telling stories, extraordinary things begin to happen; to grasp how uncertain the edges of reality and of life and death might be when he meets the strange, ragged man (Derian Llewhellin, based on Magwitch) on the beach at the beginning of the story – and I am keen for a reader to enjoy the supernatural and mystical elements of this book; to see death and life, horror and love, beauty and brutality in one place, close by, complementary even: ‘Celtic Magic’, as Matthew Arnold expressed it.

Almost has, like Pip, a secret benefactor and a true love; he has his own convict (the strange ragged man mentioned above) and a cruel sister; he is apprenticed to a trade, but his is the mortuary, not the workshop. Almost is supported by his devoted mermaids, Dilys and Nerys, who follow him, changing form (I have drawn on mermaid lore in my research for the book), and by a number of friends in different locations. But readers of Great Expectations would recognise adaptations of characters, such as Pip’s friend, Herbert Pocket, Miss Havisham, Estella and Jaggers, the latter, for example, recast as a lugubrious but prosperous journeyman, basking in his gold and quoting Jonson’s Volpone from his gated community a long way from Almost’s Pembrokeshire.

The text is a curious and unexpected reworking of a well-known novel, and a dark comedy told, largely, by a protagonist whose state is ambiguous and unsettling. The initial narrator of this darkly comic book of literary fiction, Catherine, calls up her friend, Almost Llewhellin, of Charity House, The Headland, to tell her a story because she is sick at heart and tired of life. It is the summer of 2016 and yet an epigraph at the beginning of the tale announces that Almost Llewhellin was lost at sea, presumed dead, in 1963. So who is Almost? What special qualities does he possess and what are Catherine’s or the reader’s expectations of him? Is he there, imagined, alive or dead? And what of his cohort? Hot mermaids, longing mermen, morticians, houses that respire and a poltergeist moss that grabs your foot. A cast of family and friends drawn from sea cave, the embalming table, the graveyard and the dark Clandestine House, which respires heavily and in which time has stopped. I have allowed some risk-taking with the novel’s form in its use of original poems as epigraphs, all of which key into the themes in the novel, as they describe the dark vagaries of the Welsh landscape, which is itself a key character in the book, living and breathing and casting penumbra and surrounded by the sea. I have also offered two endings to the love story, subtly happy and sad, because I wanted to bring to mind how Great Expectations might have been radically altered in its reception, had Dickens been encouraged to use his original ending, far more melancholy that that which replaced it, but also that Almost is encouraging Catherine, the narrator, to choose her own ending. And the coda that follows allows us to know that Almost is not the only Pembrokeshire boy who has evolved magic, dead or alive, for to the door comes Muffled Mfanwy and perhaps her story can be a sequel, if only in the reader’s imagination.

Here is the epigraph to the novel:

When I was a kid, Lewis took his own life.

I heard them say he took it, but where it went,

I couldn’t say or wasn’t told. Perhaps it had

been drained, in The Sloop, with all his pints,

or thrown gladly off Stack Rocks with a shout

that he married well and was a man they liked,

but I don’t know. For once, though I was very young,

I saw a look from out the corner of his eye as he shipped

off, went laughing with the pot boys and his girl:

that look it said, I think, that Lewis wanted rescuing,

but no-one came, as the sea foam danced in Cardigan Bay.

Almost Llewhellin. ‘Lewis.’

 

“Look’ee here, Pip. I’m your second father. You’re my son—more to me nor any son.”

Abel Magwitch, in Great Expectations, Charles Dickens, chapter thirty nine.

 

‘…A tall tree on the river’s bank, one half of it

burning from root to top, the other half in green leaf.’

Peredur Son Of Efrawg (from The Mabinogion).

 

A grave at Capel Dewi, Broad Haven: In Loving Memory of Almost Derian Llewhellin of Druidstone Haven. Presumed lost at sea, with his beloved wife, Seren Davies Llewhellin, of Clandestine quay, May 1963.

Book Review: Killing Hapless Ally

Killing Hapless Ally, by Anna Vaught, is a fictional memoir exploring mental illness and how the protagonist, Alison, learns to cope with her life through the creation of an alter ego and a host of…

Source: Book Review: Killing Hapless Ally

The Life of Almost. My very own Pembrokeshire Estella.

 

He, Roland, touched her wrong; he did not cradle her at night, not understand that her own beautiful scorn was from her pain, sea girl trapped, and if he had, what would it have mattered? He had her to set on his arm and place where he should and that was enough. He used her roughly; cursed her barren; not a mother, nor a soft gentle thing. He cast her out, within her home. I could not stand to hear it all and howled again and she clung and my God I cannot tell you how beautiful she was because it would be like…it would be like trying to beat the heart of a star with a warped broom; like lifting up prayers with dirty hands and biting mouths. That is something like it was.
We walked out through the woods and I gathered bluebells, pressed them upon her.
‘Forgive me, Almost.’
‘I already have’ I said; I fell on my knees in the stream and mud and the bluebells were crushed with her, I me, oh -and us, together: tremendous.
Her heart was opened then. I saw it.
Afterwards, I took her hand and I knew that there would be no shadow of another parting from her. I thought, also that there might be a way back to the sea.

 

 

Epigraph of The Life of Almost

For Ned. Because Almost is also a love story: Seren, Mfanwy, Perfection, Mammy, the sacred headland and the mermaids. And you are my story and my song. x

This is what it says at the beginning of my next book, The Life of Almost: wish me luck, as it has gone, by kind request, out to an agent who liked the writing in Killing Hapless Ally; the ms has also gone to a press; later in October, it is going out elsewhere and, to my utter surprise, a really lovely person at one of, you know, the big five, said they would look at it just to be helpful. I said it wasn’t really, as far as I could see, a commercial proposition, but then it is the next story I had in me. I know it’s ambitious and I do know about Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs. Ah, but bear with now. This one now is comical, I hope; indebted to Dickens and to Dylan Thomas; to generations in Pembrokeshire and beyond; to the coffin hatch in my own house; to the dead, who are legion and all around; to mermaid lore; The Mabinogion; Celtic Magic, Gwyn Williams, Danny Abse, the earliest Welsh poems, the Southern Gothic I married, books on sex, embalming and death practice, John Donne and Dickens again. And don’t you want to know who or what Almost is? How mermaids love? Why a child was found sleeping on a headland gravestone? Why moss creeps and sucks at your feet as you dare to tread? How a love story happens over the embalming table and how Almost feels, when he meets Derian Llewhellin, both fear and happiness and a blurring of his edges and how it is he begins to understand what he is capable of. The story begins this squalid summer, June 2016, but oh…it is old, old, old.

 

THE LIFE OF ALMOST  OR,

A LIFE OF VERY LITTLE EXPECTATION

Anna Vaught

Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction, I swear on The Mabinogion and the sacred headland. Characters in this book are fictional, although I have drawn upon the history of my own Welsh family and diaspora and many things which to me seem normal and maybe which, to you, do not. I make no apology for references to the political situation in the summer of 2016 while a cunning clown and cohorts and a tide of rage pushed through the always unexpected rain. Real places named in the book are at least partly fictionalised and the dead and undead are somewhat mixed up. But enough: don’t you want to know about Almost? He was mine; now I am giving him to you.

All poems (unless otherwise attributed, but out of copyright) are by the author.

Lewis, the Younger, who went away

When I was a kid, Lewis took his own life.

I heard them say he took it, but where it went,

I couldn’t say or wasn’t told. Perhaps it had

been drained, in The Sloop, with all his pints,

or thrown gladly off Stack Rocks with a shout

that he married well and was a man they liked,

but I don’t know. For once, though I was very young,

I saw a look from out the corner of his eye as he shipped

off, went laughing with the pot boys and his girl:

that look it said, I think, that Lewis wanted rescuing,

but no-one came, as the sea foam danced in Cardigan Bay.

“Look’ee here, Pip. I’m your second father. You’re my son—more to me nor any son.”

Abel Magwitch, Great Expectations, chapter thirty nine.

 

Killing Hapless Ally by Anna Vaught (Fiction)

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Source: Killing Hapless Ally by Anna Vaught (Fiction)

The Emma Press Anthology of the Sea

Ta da! This is the next book I am in.

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