Anna Vaught's Blog, page 20

Launch tomorrow and something for book groups!

So tomorrow is the launch of Killing Hapless Ally and it occurred to me that, since we haven’t published book group questions and starting points at the back of the book, I’d do some here. You know, in case, wherever you are in the world, you belong to a book group and would like to tackle the book  (as I know a couple of book groups local to me are already planning to do) – maybe with a few ideas to get you going?

Who is Alison and who is Hapless Ally? Are the same person or two separate people?

Would you describe Hapless Ally as real?

What is your opinion of Santa Maria?

Who is the most horrible person in the book and to whom do you warm most?

Did you guess the ending?

What’s the significance of the book’s title? Is it simple and straightforward, or something more complex and nuanced?

Did you like the names for people and places in the book?

Did you take offence to any of the descriptions – for example, of the f…… caravan, the funerals, dying?

There are many literary references shot through the narrative. Some are obvious and documented explicitly in the text (and thus you will see them on the acknowledgements page) but some are harder to spot. So get spotting!

Did you feel that you learned more about mental health from the book?

Did you think that the book gives us insights into therapeutic practice and the sort of help available (although I feel I must add, not routinely available) through our National Health Service in the UK?

Did the book help you? By which I mean, did it make you feel better about your own problems or state of mind? Did it give you a nudge to tackle things that are holding you back and making you unhappy?

Was the book shocking? If so, why?

Is it a happy ending? Is it over – in a good way?

Who was your favourite imaginary friend – and why? Dolly, Shirley, Albert, JK….

Did you feel sympathy for Santa Maria? For Dad? For Brother who Might as well be Dead? For Terry?

What do you think of Dixie Delicious?

What makes you laugh in the book? Is it the pickled egg murder/horrible deaths/caravan of evil/revenge on the tutus…?

What does the book show us about the power of literature and, more broadly, of the written word? What of the spoken – the “curses ringing”?

Why do you think there’s a shift in narrative from first to third person between the prologue and chapter one? Do you think it’s successful?

What’s the significance of the foreword to the rest of the book?

Is Alison strong, or is she weak?

Did all this really happen? Do you believe it did? Why?

 

 

 

 

 

Today’s Goodreads review

This is today’s pre-publication review on Goodreads.

‘This was worth reading. It is a powerful book that gives you a peek behind the mask into a private struggle, a concealed personal experience of being someone who lives with overwhelming levels of shame and self-contempt. We use these terms a lot but in this case it is a military grade phenomenon with significant consequences. So what happens when some-one is really unwanted, really unloved and learns to assume that if some-one else knew them, they would hurt them, reject them. This is what Alison has to live with and this is her story. How she manages to survive and how when the real world becomes unbearable, there are other places to go with other people in them. It’s a demanding book, not an easy read and you have to concentrate, but it’s worth it. The content can be upsetting, the madness difficult to keep up with, but that’s the point. I’ve read loads of accounts of this kind of thing, but rarely is the author up to the task of telling a good story and keeping it up through the whole book. Anna Vaught, the author, is bold and honest. She respects the reader and doesn’t try to protect you so at times you have to put the book down and take a break, but not for long as it is a page turner and you want to know how it turns out. It’s not easy to live with this kind of stuff, the professional help has its limits and it’s a test, but you come away from the book with hope and a belief that although some people can be cruel, not everyone is and sustained kindness can really help.’

 

Killing Hapless Ally is out on Thursday with Patrician Press (link at content page to buy) in paperback; a new kindle edition has just been made available at Amazon.co.uk. The review above was written by a psychologist – an entirely wonderful person. At the moment, the book is in the hands of various health professionals, including a GP and a psychiatrist. It will be interesting to see what feedback the book has there. Yes – it is to entertain; but it is also to console and to give hope. x

 

Writers and Artists, Goodreads, reviews and being thankful.

Here is the last review on Goodreads, just left, by one of my pre-publication reviewers.

‘There are so many books out there, so many tales to tell and yet this book is a rare find. As you turn each page of Killing Hapless Ally, you start to understand why. It takes more than a good story to make a great book and the author’s use of language, her ability to interlace harrowing with humour and extract strength from despair, is nothing short of extraordinary. With black humour and crafted language, you are transported to an emotionally harrowing childhood in Wales, introduced to Ally and the characters she created in a bid to control a world that that could make no sense to an innocent child. Adolescence sees a whole new set of challenges and it’s an extraordinary writing ability that makes you laugh, cry and shake your head with incredulity. With lusty shenanigans afoot in France, you accompany Ally in the f**cking caravan and shudder as she experiences her first orgasm.

There are few books that really stand out for me. As a small child, televisions were banned and I was raised with the likes of Dickens, the Brontes, classical poetry and oddly, Pam Ayres! As an adult, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabrielle Garcia Marquez stills stands out as a tale that is all consuming on every page, with no need for superfluous cliff hangers. The Killing of Hapless Ally combines the beauty of language, the skill of a gifted writer and a story so realistic that it is almost unbelievable. When you throw in sex, death, self harm, suicide attempts and the ability of the human mind to survive, this becomes a book that you simply have to read. A rare find indeed.’

Yesterday, I heard I had publication from Bloomsbury’s Writers and Artists website for an article on the value of poetry in today’s society. I focused – and it was a very personal piece in the end – on poetry and, in its broadest sense, mental health and included a section on my observations on poetry and teenagers. I hope you like it. I would have liked to write a much bigger piece (hint to anyone…)

I have a piece on ‘Mother’s Day’ that I couldn’t place in the press, so I will put it here. It may not seem like a celebration and it’s rather full of curses, and yet love is a complicated thing. I have spent decades trying to get out from under the shadow of my mother, someone, as with my father, I never knew as a adult. I have heard only and repeatedly that she was a saint. This is my riposte to that. But did I love her and do I miss her? Oh yes, oh yes: every day of my life.

So my book launches a week today. I have had an exhilarating week, but one that gives pause for thought. I have found that people are coming forward, having read a little about my book or heard what it is about, to tell me about their own experience of depression and anxiety; to begin to put in words their feelings about obstacles they want to get over or cruelties from which they feel they have not recovered. It would not be my place to give advice, only to say, ‘I hear you.’ And also this. Look at the fear you feel or have felt; address the things that hold you back; seek professional help if you feel you need this to heal. If you ask and don’t get (for you have only to look at the brilliant supportive MH community on twitter to see the stories of this), ask again; try a different GP; speak to Mind for advice and support. I know it is hard. But I have found that in dealing with my febrile imagination, rapidly shifting moods and moments of panic and despair – and I want to say that I had thirty mangling, enervating years of these before I even fully believed I deserved help. Yep: thirty years – I was able to begin again. Some days, it’s like I am going backwards, such is the delight in the spontaneity and freedom I can feel; some days are difficult, but that is life. I have learned that in the more difficult elements of my personality, there are also clues to, for example, a greater elasticity of imagination. That scared me when I was younger, but now I am beginning to appreciate its other side.

 

x

 

 

Early pre-publication reviews of Killing Hapless Ally..

If you buy the book through Waterstones or Amazon, do please leave a review. I also have a page at Goodreads (pop the button on the page) where you can review and add a question for me, if you would like.  Praise is wonderful – of course, it is – but so is constructive criticism. I also like to tangle with others’ arguments and views, so please ask me questions or comment on things you thought didn’t work. The book is candid in its exploration of what it means to be well; to have mental health problems; to hurt and wish to annihilate yourself. Also, its humour is dark. Oh yes, dark. It will offend some people. But if reviewers comment that the events don’t seem plausible, I’ll have to state that the foreword tells you it’s fiction “drawing on many episodes in (her) own life…” The things I could tell you of caravans, spotted dick, tripe, people buried with their dog, evil relatives….

Anyway,

“I thought it was a splendid read. And it made me laugh. I enjoyed her literary references too – all my favourites; I used The Wind in the Willows as comfort reading too. I genuinely liked this book (or I wouldn’t have read it so quickly!) – very likeable narrator, many familiar references that chimed – and funny – which is difficult to pull off, especially whilst dealing with such a knotty subject. Congrats to Anna!”

‘Killing Hapless Ally’ is an intriguing and powerful novel which explores one woman’s quest for freedom from the overpowering clutches of depression and dislocation. With dark humour, sprightly wit and insight the author follows Alison’s twisting and often frightening path towards positive mental wellbeing and a release from fear and self-loathing. The book is both touching and savage and is imbued with exquisite description throughout. I think this story will appeal to many people; it is definitely a ‘page turner’ and one which will make you laugh (a lot) and cry. I greatly enjoyed reading it and will definitely be recommending it to my friends….

Two ways to pre-order Killing Hapless Ally online!

Here you are. Killing Hapless Ally is available to pre-order from today.

FROM AMAZON

here…..

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Killing-Hapless-Ally-Anna-Vaught/dp/0993238866/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1455107252&sr=1-1&keywords=hapless+ally

and here…..

FROM WATERSTONES

https://www.waterstones.com/book/killing-hapless-ally/anna-vaught/9780993238864

And I am looking forward to my launch at the wonderful ‘Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights’ in Bath on March the third…which would be here…

http://www.mrbsemporium.com/ (I know I’m not listed but then I’m not of elevated status and also it’s a private do)…

…and I have just promised to sponsor a song from the wonderful ‘The Bookshop Band’ with the plentiful (ho ho) royalties from book sales. They would be here…

http://www.thebookshopband.co.uk/

….and I look forward to a year’s worth of book-related things as I knuckle down to THE NEXT ONE, The Life of Almost and, you know, the day job, the three kids, the… (Ellipsis overkill there.)

The books featured are those from the thousands in our house. Seized by a strange frenzy I once colour-coordinated the lot. You see that deep purple edition of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men? That was my husbands’s revenge.

My favourite book so far and a competition to enter….

I’d say I read between sixty and seventy novels a year (plus short stories, poetry and non-fiction). I thought I would be honest and say that, of this number, only a small handful will linger with me and demand re-reading. I am eight books into 2016 and this (I will write a review when I have time) has blown everything out of the water so far.

And in between GCSE classes today, I am plotting the next bits of my entry for this year’s BBC/Booktrust short story competition. I am new to this, so my chances aren’t good, but they’re a darn sight better than if I didn’t enter. And it’s a good way for me to practise! Here’s the link to the relevant page. You have to have a history of publication to enter this one, but you may enter it as publisher/agent or author.

http://www.booktrust.org.uk/prizes/1

 

My Goodreads Giveaway and a film I was making

Hi all.

Just a short post.

If you pop over to this page https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh... you can enter the giveaway for copies of Killing Hapless Ally. It has a couple of weeks to run, after which it’s names out of a hat!

Here’s the website for which I was filming (about anxiety) this week -http://www.healthizmo.com/ and this film (with its accompanying text) will run on the AXA PPP thread here https://www.youtube.com/user/AXAPPPhealthcare  I hope it helps people. x

 

Articles of Faith

Here is a funny little pamphlet I started writing for The Emma Press submissions window before Christmas. However, illness and a stay in hospital meant I missed the deadline. Knowing this, there were kind enough to extend it for me – but I found I couldn’t complete it as I was still recovering. Now, other projects (like the launch of my novel Killing Hapless Ally in just a few weeks and the fact that I’m working on the next novel, the working title of which is The Life of Almost and the raising of three nippers and running a business and and and…) have to take priority, but I’ll write more to give to The Emma Press and they are kindly publishing me in the poetry Anthology of the Sea in October. Here is the unfinished pamphlet, in draft form and with definitely a few dashes that should be an em. It is about finding ways to lift depression. I have used a variety of forms in the pamphlet, so we have poems on Snowflake Bentley (one of my abiding heroes and on the backburner for a book), recipes, the use of a poem and a short story. But these are all real things to me. The pamphlet wasn’t intended as a short self-help book; more just a series of observations, a hand to hold and an illustration of what I do and have done in the hope that this might be helpful to someone. x

Well hello there. I am a quite ordinary person, so don’t be alarmed at the fact that I’m about to delve into a slew of rather ripe facts — or be startled by the familiarity of my greeting. I, like you, am a reader. I’m a reader of all sorts. But my reading has shattering and cosmic proportions for me because, frankly, I couldn’t do without the books: they have saved my life; they continue to do so — with brave and colourful glory; full of words, orient and on fire. I’m someone who has spent much time battling demons and wrestling dead but refusing to lie down relatives. Someone who has been sometimes too frightened to go out. There’s depression for you. There. Look at that now, see? (as my maternal grandmother used to say): that’s what anxiety does for you. As a child and teenager, I was heartily committed to rituals; before I went out, I used to recite the first lines of The Secret Garden four times. I really don’t recommend this route. A book isn’t a talisman or an insurance. But oh do I know about the books and their importance!

Did you notice the word ‘orient’ there? I realise that it probably doesn’t quite go, but that’s because I have a tendency to use obsolete, obsolescent or (putting it more gently) uncommon variants of words. And orient, to a seventeenth-century reader, might have meant rich. Blame the books, in which I live. It’s wonderful to play with words and to enjoy your language. Why not? And there are other things besides the books. Depression puts a dark glass between you and the world. It is, as the great Dorothy Rowe described it, a prison. I felt it for years like this; the world was there and I was here and the two could not meet. I tried to put my hand -that didn’t work. When you can’t get past the dark things that disable you, the books will help, but so do other things — other articles. That’s why I called this essay ‘Articles of Faith’. When you feel like you are drowning, you need a life raft; something to hang onto — there are your articles of faith. Books, yes — a poem; a novel — but also a flower, observed in minute detail, the weather patterns, miraculous and shifting and full of numinous detail as you consider hoar frost, colour to surround yourself with and colour to dress yourself with, food and drawing on the simple pleasures of its preparation — in the crushing of a cardamom there is much to encourage and comfort you — fire, be it a candle or a fire in your grate and the last one is not really an article at all, but the acceptance of a friend — someone who loves you because you are you and with whom you don’t have to apologise or pretend to be someone else.

Come on a short journey with me because I want to tell you how I, friable, frequently ill and often terribly lonely in a crowded room, animate and populate my world with what I read. And maybe it will give you hope, inspiration and company. Because I got better and I didn’t see through a glass darkly anymore, but with open eyes at a rush of colour.

A Poem

I can’t write about all poems because they are legion, so let me pick one. A favourite. It is Louis MacNeice’s ‘Meeting Point’, which I have always thought was a magisterial coming together of the ordinary and the the extraordinary; of quotidian rhythm and something magical, just out of reach and only inchoately grasped. Can you climb into it and see what happens?

Time was away and somewhere else,

There were two glasses and two chairs

And two people with the one pulse

(Somebody stopped the moving stairs)

Time was away and somewhere else.

And they were neither up nor down;

The stream’s music did not stop

Flowing through heather, limpid brown,

Although they sat in a coffee shop

And they were neither up nor down.

The bell was silent in the air

Holding its inverted poise –

Between the clang and clang a flower,

A brazen calyx of no noise:

The bell was silent in the air.

The camels crossed the miles of sand

That stretched around the cups and plates;

The desert was their own, they planned

To portion out the stars and dates:

The camels crossed the miles of sand.

Time was away and somewhere else.

The waiter did not come, the clock

Forgot them and the radio waltz

Came out like water from a rock:

Time was away and somewhere else.

Her fingers flicked away the ash

That bloomed again in tropic trees:

Not caring if the markets crash

When they had forests such as these,

Her fingers flicked away the ash.

God or whatever means the Good

Be praised that time can stop like this,

That what the heart has understood

Can verify in the body’s peace

God or whatever means the Good.

Time was away and she was here

And life no longer what it was,

The bell was silent in the air

And all the room one glow because

Time was away and she was here.

When I read this poem, I am caught up by its concept of the loved ones part of but isolated in happiness from the world; they are separate while they participate in daily activity and while they do so, it is as if, elsewhere, something else is affected by her actions — the fingers flicking away the ash and the tropic trees. Something absorbing, supernatural and cosmic happens in the poem. If you feel sad or if you find anxiety about your daily life is skewing your experience of the beauty around you, anchoring yourself in a poem might help. Is there, beyond or daily our even bland experience, something extraordinary and connecting us to a myriad things? You’ll see that ‘God or whatever

means the Good’ is a phrase used. For you, faith may be about your church; your mosque or synagogue; here the notion if broader — diffuse. It is there, just not grasped; it is not less wondrous because of that and so you might find something in this poem to cheer you and give you solace. It’s about the transformative power of love, too — its possibilities and the idea of time being suspended. I think we may feel this in love, but also in finding something that absorbs us, whatever that is.

As for the structure of the poem: how might that make you feel better? Read it aloud and test it on your pulse. What does it do to you? For me, the ‘time was away’ refrain is comforting in its repetition, both of words but also of rhythm. You don’t need to know about metrical feet or consult a dictionary of literary terms to hear this and feel it. Here’s an idea. Learn the poem. Learn any poem. By heart. Then, when you feel your mood slump or you feel scared, pull it out and hear it in your head, mouth it quietly or say it loudly and clearly. As I said before, it’s not that a poem is a talisman, but why not let it be an anchor? Every time you encounter it, you might something new or notice you read it or say it slightly differently. You may see the characters of ‘Meeting Point’ in your mind’s eye, observing at a discreet distance. Or maybe they are you and a loved one, or you in a situation you would like to be in, finding a situation when ‘time was away’ and there is ‘a brazen calyx of no noise’ — when the bell is silent, held in stasis, miraculously, by the ‘ calyx’; sepals of the flower forming a whorl around the bud, which is a fascinating description of the bell. Pick any poem you like; let it be a cure.

A flower

How would I pick a single flower? Impossible! So I am going to choose the flowers I know and love best. First of all, consider the rose. I prefer a pink or a soft yellow rose; if a crimson rose lifts your spirit, then that shall be your rose. So, sometimes when I have felt so at sea that I haven’t known what to do or how to interact with others, I start by observing something in detail. A rose in bloom is an excellent. choice. Look at it. Really look at it. The calyx again. What do you see? It is a little world, its centre wrapped in damask petals, whorls and soft edges, at its most beautiful when it is full blown, yet at that moment soon to drop its petals. But that should not make us sad, for tend it and it will bloom again. Watch it from a bud. Every day its tight petals unfurl just a little as it reveals itself to you.

Sometimes, when I have felt sad, confused or particularly anxious, I just go and spend time with the plants and — this is the key thing — observe them in as much detail as I can. So say it was time for honeysuckle in the garden or in a hedgerow. I might gently cup a flower in my hand and raise its gentle head to my face, as I am lounging there in its sweetness. Look at those fuchsia or carmine curves; the alabaster or honey-coloured partners; the sweet, viscous texture of them. Another little world.

Something to eat

In my habit of banishing depression by observing detail and absorbing myself in the minutiae of some or other craft, I might issue the following instructions to myself:

Take as many potatoes as you can eat.

As many carrots as you can eat.

As much green cabbage, spinach or robust, greens as you can eat; make it a butchy brassica, though.

If I feel like I want to run away or cannot get a purchase on the world, I might really look at these funny vegetables. They’re plain, aren’t they? But when was the last time (don’t laugh but bear with me, here) you looked at a carrot and noticed its different textures, or smelled the earth on a potato or felt the tiny, tiny little coruscation on a brassica, noticing that, like the carrot wasn’t just orange, the greens weren’t just green. There were a partial paintbox: isn’t that amazing? Bottle green, Windsor green, fern, olive: verdant and viridescent. But when you have finished really looking at what you have in your hand, cook the lot, peeling the potatoes if you’re up to it. I suppose you could cook them all together, if you time it right. Cook them until they are well done, then drain, mash roughly and chop up the greens further if need be. Mix, then pile the lot into a bowl and season very generously with balsamic vinegar, or plain old malt, sea salt flakes and freshly ground black pepper. A fried or couple of poached eggs on top would be good. Or grate some cheese — whichever you fancy and even a dog-end that has been hanging around in the fridge; give it a couple of minutes’ heat and it is transformed. This potato and green collation should serve one. Eat in bed or maybe under a blanket somewhere. Eat it and know that you are being kind to yourself, and I say that not in a fey or saccharine way, but as someone who knows what it is and how it feels to wish to be obliterated; to feel so sad, so bitter that you wish to be annihilated. At the heart of depression lies, in my experience, a sort of self loathing where you think you should be rubbed out because you are a Bad Thing. A Worse Thing than anyone else. I am not saying that, if you cook a potato, you will fix yourself — more that if you still your chatter and really think about what you are doing and what you have in your hand, then perhaps much of what arrests you so brutally can be stilled and will dissipate. I am bound to say, however, that the NHS is a beautiful thing — and I am living proof that help is out there: the right help for you. But eat up your mash first.

And here is another simple recipe.. I am, largely, a lover of vegetables, grains and the like. But, as my friends have observed, I do roast a lot of chickens. You may shy away from cooking a chicken with stuffing in it. Maybe this is because you’re concerned about getting them both at the right temperature and fretting about it. But hey: there is another way. You just put hot stuffing in the chicken. Makes it less fiddly to ensure that both are properly hot and cooked through and it’s also kind of sexy and Earth-Mothery to produce this big pan of golden stuffing and bird and just dole it out. I think it’s good for us to serve up something bountiful that was child’s play to make. So here… Take a proper chicken- which is to say an organic (and free range) bird. Put it upside down (thus, breast side down) in a large roasting tin, having rubbed it with olive oil and salt and pepper. Now cook about 500g of couscous and, when done — but barely thus — add a tablespoon of olive oil, a teaspoon of crushed red chilli, lots of freshly ground black pepper, a good pinch of sea salt flakes, a handful of fresh parsley, roughly chopped, a finely chopped garlic clove and the zest of a lemon. While you are doing all this, pause, pause, pause, Smell everything, taste the acrid bite of the garlic and, before you squeeze the juice of the lemon over the chicken just before you put it in the oven, take the lemon between your palms and roll it, roll it, roll it. It will feel warm and you will be, temporarily, elsewhere, as the oils begin to release just a little onto your hands. The oven should be on 200 and you roast the chicken on its back for half an hour, then you turn it over and cook it until its juices run clear when you pierce the bit where the thigh meets the breast.

I am not joking when I say that on one occasion I used this gap in hands-on cooking requirements to allow myself a mighty great cry about something that had always made me sad. Familiar story: unwanted child; cruel to the point of ferral much older sibling; told I was a waste of space. Believed it for years and years. Yell. Scream. Cry. I looked it…IT…in the face and found that I was still functioning and, what was more, was required to turn the chicken over. Like, NOW. I needed a steady hand and eyes that weren’t frosted with tears to do it. And I found that I felt better.

When the chicken is done (clear juices where the breast meets the thigh — so approximately an hour after you have turned it), you will find that there will be plenty of stuffing to fill the bird and go around it, so you get some couscous which is soaked in all the delicious juices and very soft, and some which has crisped and caramelised in the heat. You could serve some green vegetables alongside, but I’m not sure I could really be bothered. One idea is to roast some green beans with olive oil and chopped cherry tomatoes plus a couple of garlic cloves (which you then squish into the ad hoc sauce that’s produced) and lots of black pepper.

I do believe, now, after years of talking treatments, that much of what you do is down to self care and, for me, self care, means having something in the oven. It smells of home, of plenty and of good within. And should the old black dog come to visit for a while, you could try and see that he is accompanied by the timely arrival of an enormous slow cooker. So here’s a thought: if you are stuck in the doldrums (for to be becalmed sounds lovely but it actually means that temporarily you cannot go further: I digress), invest in a slow cooker. A great big one. And try these. All serve six with leftovers. All these are based on the simple principle of setting the cooker to low and leaving it on overnight. When you are feeling sad or listless or even at your wits’ end, you probably won’t feel like eating, or perhaps you eat too much of the wrong thing which I know, from experience, is its own vicious cycle, so going through the mechanics of putting things together to go into the oven, or assembling things for a great big dish, may provide solace because they are productive and the end is so much more than the means.

For a simple pasta sauce, a good couple of tablespoons of decent olive oil, two cans of plum tomatoes, which you crush in your hands as you go. Then add a tin of anchovies, soaked a little perhaps, two handfuls of pitted green olives, lots of freshly ground black pepper, a tablespoon of capers, a heaped tablespoon of tomato purée, three finely minced garlic cloves, half a fresh red chilli, finely sliced (I don’t decide because I am tough like that). Into that go three handfuls of fresh or frozen mixed peppers and about 500g minced beef, preferably organic. Stir and that’s it. I just stand there chucking it in because that seems to befit this style of cooking. Your pasta sauce will be ready by morning — or just leave it cooking all day. Serve with a pasta of your sauce, but if it were me (which it was), that would be spaghetti or linguine.

Failing any of this, make some really good toast with proper butter.

The weather

I am an inveterate cloud watcher. I also to stand in the rain and go out early and touch the prickles of hoar frost. I know that, with ice thus under my fingers, an echo of faith and of constancy seems to return. I think that, as with the rhythms of the poem I gave above, its repetition gives home. We have seen it before; it will come again. And yet…each time it does, we might find something new in it — a pattern; a new shape. It is because I like to observe the weather that a great hero of mine is someone called ‘Snowflake Bentley.’

In 1898, a young boy called Wilson Alric Bentley began watching the snow fall around the family farm in Jericho, Vermont; he watched it with an unusual rapt and earnest attention. He thought about its composition, about where it came from – about its auspices in both meteorological terms (although he was likely unaware of that word just yet) and those more divine: how could it be that something so pretty should fall so casually? Was it part of a conversation with God and creator – a dialogue which we could not translate and construe? The young Bentley also watched rainwater, seeing it composed in rivulets and torrents, looked at dew as it settled in exquisite beads and watched as frost formation drew delicate shapes across windows of ferns and feathers on the windows of his farm. But it was with the snow that Bentley was most in love: he wanted to understand how and what it was and to look at it more closely. That journey is the story of The Snowflake Man. Times came and went; others laughed, but Bentley kept on watching the snow – and he remained the devout watcher of the skies until just before his death. 

Bentley’s mother understood her boy’s fascination; his father thought him foolish and possibly unmanly for finding some diversions when, on the farm, there was much practical work to be done. That boy wrote, fifty five years later, that everything he was and had ever done, he owed to her – because she saved and showed considerable devious acumen in presenting her son, aged seventeen, with a microscope and then a camera. Over the next few years, Bentley, working alone in the woodshed, developed the science of photomicrography as he learned to connect the camera to the microscope and photograph the tiny snow crystals on his slides. The results were exquisite and remain, to this day, the fullest and most extraordinary collection of stunning snow crystals – of a myriad filigree stars, strange tiny pillars with hexagons at either end; things possessed of an inchoate beauty and, as Bentley wrote, “no two snowflakes are alike.” When Bentley wasn’t photographing and cataloguing the snow crystals, he made fine studies of the frost formations and patterns of dew. looking at its beads strung along spiders’ webs; tying down a grasshopper atop a blossom overnight so that he could photograph the creature bejewelled with the dew. All this he did while remaining a farmer, playing his trumpet, providing holidays to city folk of slender means: he quietly became a world authority on snow crystal formation and, through his articles and published copies of his photomicrographs, became known as ‘Snowflake Bentley’,or sometimes just ‘The Snowflake Man’. He saw and entertained worlds others merely glanced at: he was a humble, absorbed genius.

Sometimes, when the black dog is howling behind the door, I imagine what his life might have been like as he sat for fifty winters, alone, in silent thought and study. It explores intriguing questions: who were the three impressive women in his life – one ‘Mina,’ for whom he once scratched ‘Window frost monogram, Mina’, a beautiful but timid declaration of love to the girl the neighbours called ‘sassy’? The story ponders how does an individual can sustain, over a lifetime, a brilliant interest in something others –even his own father– called foolish? Bentley saw in the snow crystals a numinous, spiritual quality: he saw them as a metaphor for heavenly life. I unfurl, for myself, a tale of a boy mocked, an interest passionately abided by, of loneliness and love lost and found and celebrates in its story that it is Bentley who is also a metaphor – for those who were laughed at, chided or mocked for what they believed: the Snowflake Man never gave up.

I do think that depression, as the great psychologist Dorothy Rowe described it, is a prison. But I also know that we are both prisoner and the jailed person: we hold they key. So when I feel that sense of confinement, I hold Bentley’s story in the palm of my hand like a tiny book and they story gets bigger in front of my eyes and I see someone who was fascinated by the world around him and who did not give up in in his pursuance of an understanding of it because his delight was so much. A Sisyphus of snow and ice.

Horae

How beautiful it is to see

The eye trained on a telling shape –

Which seems to say, “I am the first

You are the last, to see me in my perfect form,

The only man to sit and wait

For what this moment must become.”

The snowflake falls; he catches it

On worsted cloth of deepest black:

It takes a place – but not alone,

For, ferried from beloved sky,

The crystal specimens collude

To give a pattern to a world

Through Vermont’s still and patient man.

For fifty years he sits and holds

The architecture through his glass:

Dendritic crystal, needle fine,

A bullet, hexagon or flower.

He does not mind if they should laugh

At Sisyphus in snow and ice.

So all is well, but glances ask:

The man with camera, microscope —

With evanescence in his heart,

Is he lonely, sat out there,

With slide and board for hours and hours?

A splint of broom to hold each one –

The snowflake man who gathers up

Each tiny plan to hold it dear:

It will not come again to us.

The horae, hours of prayer or joy,

But not with words, this silent man:

His goddesses the six point stars:

He sits and worships, reverent still,

A lucent world and what it tells.

He checks the hoar frost and the glass

To see the curlicues of line —

The ivy leaf or comfrey stem,

The miracles of build that come.

He does not care to go, for now,

Beyond the cloth, the hands that serve

To show us all a myriad frames

Which coalesce within his grasp.

How beautiful it is to see

The eye trained on a telling shape

Which seems to say “I am the first,

You are the best to see me in my perfect form.”

In Jericho

If I should fall, then say to me the reason clouds form as they are,

Why ice should seed along a scratch, why I should love my six point star.

I do not know or care to see the smiles that fall in brazen line,

But innocence and clearest eye embolden me to make her mine.

I speak of love and quiet worlds, of Jericho on winter nights:

The sweets of patient maple taps, a sugar house and amber lights

Of unctuous syrup mixed with snow, auroras made of rosy glow,

My borealis blood red sheen – if I should fall, then make me know.

When I am not and you are here, beholden to this dusty room,

Be gentle with the tenuous forms; please do not break the splint of broom,

But hold the snowflakes page by page, arranged as I have left them now;

Consider this – why should they be, ephemeral and urgent? How?

In nature’s fragile crystal frame I see a world beyond the hill,

Beyond the log pile, brook and shed; behind our eyes when we lie still.

And when I fall, then say to me you read its language, pure and keen —

And set my records on my desk and light my lamp: make them be seen.

A loved one

In my childhood, I internalised a notion of being the wrong kind of kid because that’s what I was always being told. So sometimes I spoke to a litter of imaginary friends, gleaned from books or bands and sometimes, as I got older, I tried to stand back from myself and make myself into another character, with another name, observing all the way. Along the way I learned what I needed in friendship: understanding; humour; rebellion. Background or age were—and remain—an utter irrelevance and, so, when I was thirteen my best friend was a quirky eighty year old Irish great grandmother. There was nothing I could do or say that would shock her. And she is here in this story along with a characterisation of me.

Flora was a funny kind of kid; struggled with friendships in school, in the way at home. Never going to be one, as she was often told, to set the world on fire. Hmm. She struggled with that one because, of course, like more than would care to admit it, she wanted to set the world on fire; to be conspicuously brilliant at something, (modest, though) known to be kind, intuitive, creative. Well, and pretty, too. Shy throughout, she would smile at other people—older people- but it never really occurred to her that she might engage them in conversation.

Flora, I suppose, was damned by faint praise.

“All that matters is that you try hard.”

“I know you’re not really determined, but we’re still proud of you.”

Lovely, but somehow missing the spot, she felt.

Rhoda lived down the row. She was about eighty, with a soft, kind face but, Flora sensed, girders of steel. Rhoda had had a tough life, widowed two years ago and had lost a child in adulthood, too. There was something resilient about her; joyful, even. One day she asked Flora in. The girl had always smiled at her, but never chatted. That shyness thing again. One day, though, she was just kicking about in the garden, disconsolate, after a bad week at school which nothing seemed to cure, when Rhoda asked her to come and help. Flowers needed moving but Rhoda had stiffened up.

  Flora felt that she wouldn’t know what to say to Rhoda, but also understood that she must lend a hand. So flowers were moved to a better spot; clumps of irises and opium poppies were divided: Flora discovered that she knew a bit about this from having watched her father at work. Not instruction; just osmosis. The next week, clematis and honeysuckle cut back, under Rhoda’s watchful eye. Flora saw to her own delight, though,  that she knew about finding a strong shoot and where to cut. Getting ready for Spring.

   Flora found that she relaxed and began to chat. Squabbles with her more articulate, popular, profoundly cooler schoolmates began to recede with snipping, tidying, mud and the abundant cakes and cups of tea that Rhoda produced. The girl began to chat to Rhoda — about her parents, school, not being particularly good at anything. Rhoda listened; gave her the occasional pat on the arm and said simply: “You will find your voice and, you know, when you get to my age, you’ll see that none of the things you worried about ever came to much.”

Flora is older now, more sure of herself; Rhoda is a little unsteady on her feet. But the visits are kept up and assuaging the loneliness cuts both ways. Sometimes the least likely person might be a peculiar girl’s best friend — when it matters most.

First review on Goodreads

S0 I had my first review on Goodreads. Here. Can’t help noticing that the reviewer writes beautifully!

‘Killing Hapless Ally’ is an intriguing and powerful novel which explores one woman’s quest for freedom from the overpowering clutches of depression and dislocation. With dark humour, sprightly wit and insight the author follows Alison’s twisting and often frightening path towards positive mental wellbeing and a release from fear and self-loathing. The book is both touching and savage and is imbued with exquisite description throughout. I think this story will appeal to many people; it is definitely a ‘page turner’ and one which will make you laugh (a lot) and cry. I greatly enjoyed reading it and will definitely be recommending it to my friends….

If you pop over to Goodreads (press the Goodreads button) you’ll see I’ve answered a few questions and that there’s a book giveaway scheduled for the end of the month.

Tonight I am going to Reasons to Stay Alive with Matt Haig at Toppings’ Bookshop in Bath. Next week, I am making a short film for http://www.healthizmo.com and for the well-being site for AXA PPP; you’ll be able to view it on their youtube channel and read the accompanying text. I am talking about anxiety – and how I have managed it, kid up.

More soon,

Anna.

 

Food for a writing competition and a beautiful book to buy.

Now that Killing Hapless Ally has gone to press and awaits its first reviews, I am doing various media bits and pieces to promote the book. Well, not only to promote the book, because I do have a passionate and campaigning interest in mental health and in mental health provision and so, with the exception of (fingers crossed) a piece on my correspondence with Catherine Camus, daughter of Albert, that is a book link up I shall make the most of. I have been asked to make a short film about managing anxiety and will tell you more about that later. Soooo…I am working on The Next One, the working title of which is A Life of Almost and, for practice and for joy, I thought I would enter some short story prizes.

Here’s something that caught my eye last year; I thought it was a wonderful idea: a short story on the theme of food.

http://www.oxford-hotels-restaurants.co.uk/the-mogford-literary-prize/

This morning I am working on an entry for this competition. Wish me luck! Last year I wrote a piece called ‘A Tale of Tripe’ (didn’t win but up we get – competition is stiff indeed). Anyone, previously published or unpublished can enter and the winning entry will be featured in the Oxford Literary Festival.

Then…tonight I start on the next of two short stories, but still mulling over which one to think about first. Here’s the BBC/Booktrust competition, which has just opened. You do need to have a history of publication to enter this, but it need not be in fiction.

http://www.booktrust.org.uk/prizes/1

Then there’s this – which has a chosen theme: ‘Ageing’.

https://www.writersandartists.co.uk/competitions

This competition ends pretty soon (15th February; the other two are March) but I have already plotted it out…..

HAPPY WRITING

PS. The image I have set for this post is the gorgeous cover of Martin Johnson’s new title for Patrician Press, Robert Macfarlane’s Orphans which launches on the 24th of February at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, (where Robert Macfarlane is an English fellow). Martin’s book of poems draws on the beautiful, rich and important  prose of Robert Macfarlane, who has written so evocatively on landscape, place, travel and nature – just as Edward Thomas  in his prose works did with the poems of his friend, Robert Frost. I look forward to buying this book. Here’s an article about the friendship between Thomas (of whom I am a huge fan) and Frost while I’m at it…http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jul/29/robert-frost-edward-thomas-poetry