Cherry Potts's Blog, page 23

The Historical Birthday-Tea Party January 3rd

Today’s birthday girl is Henry Handel Richardson (don’t you love a male nom-de-plume?) known to her family as Ethel Robertson.

Born 3rd January 1870 HH wrote the lovely and semi-autobiographical coming of age novel The Getting of Wisdom about Laura, a young Australian girl sent away to school where she finds it hard to fit in until she develops a monumental and hopeless crush  for an older girl.

It is extremely funny but honest and kind about Laura’s naive and furious jealousies. So HH gets an invitation to the fantasy tea party, although as it’s a fantasy, it’s Laura I really want to turn up, perhaps with her beloved Evvy in tow.

LGBT History Month is coming up: part 1

Mosaic of Air – image copyright Melina Traub

You may have realised from the last couple of posts, that I’m a bit of a history gal.  So of course I am taking part in a few events over February.

First out of the traps:

Lewisham Library 199-201 Lewisham High Street, SE13 6LG

6th February 7.45  for 8, until 9.30

I will be reading from Mosaic of Air (It’s twenty years since it was first published, it qualifies as history – actually that’s a bit alarming – there are quite a few historical stories in it, and what are now period pieces but were contemporary at the time! ).

I will be joined by poet Kate Foley,

 

humorist  V.G. Lee and debut novelist V.A. Fearon.

(Incidentally, should you be keen enough to want to come to all the events I’m involved in over February, I shall be making an effort to read something different each time, and the focus will vary too.)

The Historical Birthday-Tea party 2nd January

The second in my celebrations of women from history who stuck up for themselves and each other, and this one rather more likely to be a lesbian than dear Maria E.

M. Carey Thomas, born 2nd January 1857 in th USA, prefered to be known as Carey rather than her given name of Martha (another useful signifier), fought all her life (to a large extent against her father) to get a decent education, something she achieved with flying colours by eventually getting a degree summa cum laude from Zürich university, one of the few places willing to award a degree to a woman at the time.

Carey stated publicly that she thought many woman need not marry, and that those who did should be able to carry on their careers. She took her education to the newly opened Bryn Mawr, which she ended up running.

Importantly for this project, Carey  lived with two other women:

Mary (Mamie) Gwinn lived with Carey in Europe and until her marriage in 1904, and later  Mary Garrett shared a house with Carey, and left her money to Carey on her death in 1915.

Carey would probably not get an invitation to tea, since she was into eugenics and immigration control, but a small coffee and a buttered bun in a suitable cafe close to a library would probably be acceptable. We could always talk about something safe, like education.

The Historical Birthday-Tea Party 1st January

So: YEARS ago, pre the internet, A and I used to go to the Lesbian History Group at the London Women’s Centre, and for a while we had this plan to produce a birthday book with a lesbian from history for every day of the year, complete with a good quotation for every week. It proved too time consuming and was forgotten.

Turning out a cupboard the other day I came across some of the research. Annoyingly, the actual work has vanished – I remember we had a mock-up of the book with a week to a spread and a lot of the information filled in. What I did find was the ‘wanted’ list, of the ladies we hadn’t got a birthday for or wanted particularly to quote.

It seemed a shame to waste the idea, but it isn’t really viable as a book, and I’m too busy to research in great detail where I haven’t already – I have lots of 17th century notes – so it’s this year’s blog project.

After a few days of footling about online have come up with a surprising number (Research is so much simpler these days). People have disobligingly not spread their births evenly around the calendar, and the January ones may be a bit sketchy until I’m into a rhythm of getting this together. Some birth dates are impossible – too long ago, or weirdly too recent – living subjects are a bit coy about dates.  So I have plenty of ‘who knows?’ with regard to birthdays to shoehorn in on a blank date. (Incidentally, if you happen to be a half-way famous lesbian -or one of my friends – wondering if you are going to be included and your birthday isn’t going to be found in the first two pages of a search on the web, or in my diary, you could always drop me a line).

To be frank after something like 25 years I can’t really remember why we had some people on the list, or who they are, so if the name is rather ordinary I’ve given up the effort; I think we played the could be-should be game a little bit too much back then.

These may not all be yer actual card-carrying lesbian, ok? My yardstick is not how provable the sexuality of the subject (because really, how can you x centuries later?), but was she a fellow traveller, did she put women first, did she resist marriage, behave ‘badly’, have close female friendships, tell it like it is, stand up for us, burn her letters and diaries (oh, those burnt letters), but most importantly (what A and I use as an acid test for people we admire) and a bit like Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party: would we be happy to invite them to tea? (Actually some of them we would meet somewhere neutral for a swift half, rather than invite them in for cake: revolutionaries and the opinionated can be a bit of a pain socially, but you get the idea.)

So my first entry, born 1st January 1768, a contemporary of Jane Austen and one of those I’m not sure why she was on the long list, but meets the new tea-drinking criteria is:

Maria Edgworth, Irish author of Letters for Literary Ladies (1795), Castle Rackrent and many others. Maria was a campaigner for women to be educated and listened to. In her lifetime she was considered on a par with Jane Austen for her literary skills, but has been rather forgotten since. She never married and was against absentee landlords in Ireland in her youth, but was a bit of a Tory in her old age, so it’s definitely the younger Ms Edgworth sitting down to shortbread and lapsang souchong.

Inspirations – Deja Vu

I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of Déjâ Vu, and this story originated in something I wrote when I was still at school, a highly melodramatic piece about walking into one’s own past. That story remains as just one scene, as Lucy/Hilary steps out of the train at a station, and goes to a house she once lived in. The rest is dystopia and fairy tales – Sleeping Beauty and Snow White both get their tropes in, waking from long sleep and being offered poison by a door to door saleswoman. There is a hefty element of paranoia to the story – a Stepford Wives meets Smiley’s People cold war angle inspired by one of those what-if conversations. Huge fun to write!

Singing and ringing and feeling like christmas

So: Saturday was a singing day, 3 hours or so, rehearsing, performing, singing with the audience, interspersed with beer at the lovely Ivy House.

We like to have a theme or a project for Vocal Chords, in the summer it was love songs for the planet, this autumn  it has been folk carols, learnt from Lester Simpson and dragged out of our collective record collections and memories, and performed with gusto!

The arrangements sound quite complex and the parts can get a little  competitive as to who can sing loudest, but they are actually quite simple so long as you can keep in time.

Here is a sample, my absolute favourite of the songs we sang, although it is a hard, hard choice, as I loved all of them!

This is the definition of Joyous, for me, cynical old atheist though I am.

Download: shepherds-rejoice.mp3

And then Sunday we were selling Arachne Press books at a christmas market at the delightful Alexandra Nurseries (still singing under our breaths, both ‘Curly Hark’ and snatches of Britten’s St Nicholas, mostly ‘landlord take this piece of gold, bring us meat before the cold’…although we weren’t cold, thanks to our lined walking trousers, winter coats, hats mittens, long-johns…) It was a very jolly day, good weather and plenty of punters.

SO apart from all the events we are going to and taking part in over the next week – Liars’ League Snow & Stars tomorrow, Story Sessions Wednesday, (where I am reading as well as compereing)The ‘work’ xmas party with my fellow WooA writers,  and christmas shopping at Brockley Xmas market & the £3 christmas bazaar and enjoying V G Lee and Rose Collis’ drollery at Bah Humbuggers (Dyke the Halls) on Saturday – all spare time is going on rehearsing for St Nicholas, which we are singing at Blackheath Halls in the Christmas Concert on Friday 20th

and for our Carol Singing in aid of Shelter with Summer All Year Long around Brockley, Honor Oak and Forest Hill on Saturday 21st.

final stop the station

 

Tis the season

Carol singing, my friends, the sound that cheers: loud, raucous and invigorating. We’ll be driving the cold winter away and getting our vocal chords around some songs going right back to the 15th Century at the Ivy House today at 3pm (ish- depends on how long the rehearsal overruns by). Come along, listen, drink and JOIN IN, with songs about getting cold and drunk and herding sheep. We will teach you the tunes, which you may never have heard before, to words you  almost certainly have. There may be some incidental religion.

New Review of Mosaic of Air

An absolutely lovely review from Sabotage!

High points

‘Mosaic of Air’ is an interesting parable featuring a proto-post-feminist lead, a computer programmer whose programme becomes sentient which surprisingly encases an abortion debate.

If you read nothing else in this book you must read ‘Arachne’s Daughters’; this takes apart a myth about Arachne (a human) challenging Athene (the goddess): ‘”Now, can you believe anyone would be so stupid?” ‘.  It’s set as a speech given at a women-only meeting with a clever twist on why so many women shouldn’t fear spiders despite the extra legs and pincers ‘ “Forgot something though didn’t they?…[Men]… How many Cancers and Scorpios are in the audience?” ‘.

Inspirations – Russian Fairytales, illustrations and London Bridge

Two stories came from the same picture, which I have been completely unable to trace. I think it is from an edition of The Snow Queen, and the illustrator might have been Kay Neilsen or Edmund Dulac or possibly Arthur Rackham, but as I’ve been unable to track it down I can’t confirm; maybe, like the rest of the story, I dreamt it.

The Bone Box (Mosaic of Air) definitely owes something to Kay Neilsen, whose illustration of the North Wind for East of the Sun, West of the Moon (a book I haven’t read!) influenced the design of the story and the language too. I had a reproduction of this picture on my pin board for about eight years. Neilsen’s North Wind is a solid, rather Art Deco god. This lent simplicity to the language I used, while my heroine, Adamanta, got her stubbornness from the frowning wind, and her good sense from the girl in the lost picture, in her voluminous coat. If this was a real fairytale its origins would be in Siberia, despite the lack of snow.

Another girl in an oversized coat features in All Hallows, (Tales Told Before Cockcrow) where she embodies my objections to TS Eliot’s claim that London Bridge is swarming with ghosts – ghosts don’t go anywhere, I remember thinking, and started wondering about the everyday ghosts, the homeless, with nowhere to go, and I imagined this ghost rooted to the spot, in all the surging humanity that is London and the more I thought about her the further back in time she went. This could have been really long, but I reused some scenes for the beginning of another novel, and this remains what it started as: concerned with what it is that keeps a ghost rooted to a place through time and how they might be set free by the right intervention.

Inspirations – Dancing in the Darkroom

Getting a book ready for publication (Typesetting, proofreading) even second time round and twenty years later, does send me back to the roots of the stories, and with so many of the stories in Mosaic of Air I can remember exactly where and when the idea first stuck its claws into me.

Ladies Pleasure, the cover story for Mosaic of Air this time round, came from a session in the darkroom. I like the radio on when I’m printing up photographs, and normally that would be radio 3 or 4, but in this case there was nothing I wanted to listen to, so I spun the dial and got Radio 2.  I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I’ve listened to R2 (apart from the folk music programmes). It was an afternoon, midweek in about 1984 and Michael Aspell was talking to elderly women living in a care home.

All I remember about the programme was one woman saying how difficult it was to get a male partner for  dancing, and how it wasn’t the same dancing with a woman. I laughed quoted Alix Dobkin to myself and got on with what I was doing,  but the seed was sown.  What if like me, that woman had prefered dancing with women? What if she had always wanted to dance with women, or what if due to circumstances, women and dancing had always gone together? And there she was, Grace Carew-Petrullo, a minor character in one of those movies about brave gels on the home front, a bit player in a book from sixty years earlier, given her own voice, her unspoken jealousy of, and desire for, the glorious Jessica Markham still fresh after a lifetime of experience.

Grace and Jessica confront each other on the cover of Mosaic of Air by Cherry Potts (cover Melina Traub)