Deborah Swift's Blog, page 47

Roman Ruins and the Fall of Nations

I've recently come back from Seville where I was researching for my next book, which will be set in partly in 17th century Spain. Seville is a city that was first under the Moorish and then under Christian rule. Its Cathedral still retains the tower of the old mosque, where the muezzin would call the faithful to prayer, incorporated into the gothic splendour of its catholic vaults and pillars.


What I didn't realise though, was that Seville was also the third largest Roman city in the empire, after Rome and Alexandria, settled in 206BC. It was the birthplace of Hadrian who spent his youth there.The excavated ruins, now known as Italica, lie a little outside Seville, and up until this century were ignored as ruins of little interest. These ruins include a very well preserved amphitheatre where you can walk the path the gladiators took from the passageways up to the searing heat of the arena. A truly terrifying spectacle to see the ranks of seats and imagine the roar of the crowd, the amphitheatre is truly monumental and seats 25000.
There are also thermal baths, and some of the most beautiful intact mosaics I have ever seen, inside the villas of the roman dignitaries. One shows the seven gods of the days of the week, (shown above) and one over thirty different species of birds.
Unfortunately, the bulk of the Roman town, including its Forum and many other important buildings lie underneath the current suburb of Santiponce, and cannot be excavated without demolishing the new town. To uncover some of the Temple remains, householders were re-settled to allow archaeology to take place. It is staggering to think that until a recent preservation order was put on the site, many of the mosaics were removed complete into the hands of amateur enthusiasts or wealthy collectors. Below you can see a mosaic of the life of Zeus about to be removed by a private collector.
What struck me most about this was how the city of Seville has been held by three very different sophisticated societies each of which has cannibalized the previous culture for its own ends. Moorish tiles are everywhere, despite the fact the Moors were forcibly expelled from Spain in the 17th century. Seville's modern bypass was built using some of the stone from the Roman ruins of Italica, as were many civic buildings right up until the thirties. Walking Seville you come across the Columns (a remnant of the Roman Era, topped by Caesar and Hercules), a little further and you can immerse yourself in the moorish architecture of the Alcazar Palace, and a few more strides takes you to 17th century Baroque Seville, all cheek by jowl. This is what makes a city fascinating, in my view, and it is interesting to think that my 17th century characters would have known Italica as simply "old Seville" - a ruin, marked on maps as a heap of old stones of little importance or significance.

Goodreads Lists featuring The Lady's Slipper

The Lady's Slipper is on seven Goodreads Lists. Take a look at the company it's in. My favourite category is probably "Dresses to Die for" though the ones in the top five would certainly take some beating. The most frequently mentioned book in these lists is The Hunger Games, so I will put that on my TBR list, though I know nothing about it. Anybody read it? What's the book you can't wait to read this summer?

Books You Wish More People Knew About


Historical Fiction: England's Second Civil War and Restoration
What will you read this year (2011)
Dresses To Die For!

What Should I Read in 2011?
What To Read Next

Review of The Rhetoric of Death by Judith Rock

Judith Rock has certainly led an eventful life. She has been a dancer and choreographer, a police officer in the NYPD and also holds a doctorate in art and theology. You might think it would be difficult to weave ballet, crime and Jesuit theology into one novel, but Judith Rock does it with aplomb.
Her main character, the delightful Charles du Luc, is rather too good looking to stay as a Jesuit priest without encountering romance, and without it causing him problems. He is also blessed with a fierce intelligence which he puts to use to solve the murder of a young boy at the Jesuit college of Louis le Grand where he is employed to teach Rhetoric.
The story has many notable and well-drawn characters, most of whom, including the police officer that dogs Charles' investigation, were real people of the time. The past is brought beautifully to life in Rock's evocation of 17th century France. She obviously knows the geography of Paris well and the college feels authentic. I had no idea that colleges put on ballets of such lavish proportions, but evidently they did.
This is a novel with texture - a fast-moving exciting plot which keeps you guessing who-dunnit, alongside the deeper theological questions of who to serve when the holy orders demand one thing and your conscience another. There is a dash of politics and romance too, which made the novel my perfect in-flight entertainment travelling home from Seville.
Judith Rock's new novel, "The Eloquence of Blood," another in the Charles du Luc series, is out now and you can hear Judith talking about it on my other blog Royalty Free Fiction. I chose this earlier book on the basis of her interesting article and wasn't disappointed. Highly recommended for francophiles and historical crime fans.

Finding your readers

I have noticed a disturbing thing, which is that the e-book and kindle readers consistently rate my novel lower than those who buy the paper version of the book. Have any other writers noticed this phenomenon?

From this, I can take it that those who read on e-readers are not "my readers" - i.e the readers that will love my book. Either that, or that those who buy e-books regard all books as more disposeable, and are quick to give up on a book if they don't love the opening chapter, and are therefore rating all books more harshly than those people who buy paper books. But it is obvious that there is a distinction between the paper book buying public and the e-book buying public at least in my corner of the historical fiction market.

So, it seems to me that finding your reader in this tide of e-books is not as easy as just exposure. It is not just a matter of getting the book to the notice of those who are internet-savvy. People are buying the kindle version or e-book version, but how do I target the thinking reader, perhaps someone who reads literary fiction as well as popular fiction and has a broad diet of reading, not just historicals?

Someone suggested that I should blog about what is of interest to my readers, and this would build an audience for my work. This is dead easy if you are a non-fiction writer. If your book is about horse -management, then you blog about horses. So - blog about history, you might think! And of course I do, but fiction readers are not necessarily as interested in my research as I am, and those of my readers who are also writers are too busy doing their own historical research to want to read mine!

But the thing I like doing the best is discussing books with other book-lovers. I've decided that this is probably the best way to bring my book to people's attention - by simple word of mouth. And I am more than happy to meet readers face to face, give talks to book groups, the WI, libraries or any other place where readers meet. Any takers?!

Three Question Thursday

I put three questions to Zoe Saadia, who is the author of a book about Pre-Colombian Native America, a topic which has had scant attention from other historical novelists.

Tell me 3 things that helped you as a writer.

Well, it's hard to define who or what helped me first.

· My obsession with anything Native American began as soon as I learnt to read (not that I lived anywhere near this continent). So probably this obsession comes as the first drive of my writing career.

· Relocation to California when I was in my mid twenties, utterly fed up with being an accountant, was another push that could not be ignored. As a girlfriend (a wife somewhat later) of a relocated software engineer I was offered to do nothing but have fun for a few years. Some of the relocated wives went for a life of shopping and homesick boredom; I disappeared into the wonderful Californian libraries.

· And of course, my family – my husband, my parents, even my kids these days – are of an invaluable help. They kept believing in me all those years when I worked on the research, then the first (unsuccessful) novel, through the writing classes, then this current novel, then the process of translating it into English, refusing to accept the polite "not interested" from my countrymen publishers, then polishing it and so on. It took years of frustration and no-income and I'm not sure I would have persisted if not for the fact that my husband continues to push and give moral support.

Tell me 3 things you hope your readers will enjoy about your book .

· My book deals with the interaction of nations in pre-Columbian North America, which, for some reason, catches people by surprise. The general assumption is that the Americas were hardly populated and not cultivated at all, while the exact opposite is true. I think the reader would like to discover some new, unknown cultures and even empires.

· The story comes before the history. The history lesson my novel is teaching is written fairly lightly and not "aggressively". The novel is full of action and drama, with a fair amount of love and betrayal – it could easily fit in another historical setting, such as Medieval Europe or Ancient Greece. It's just a novel, regardless of the message I am trying to smuggle along the way!

· This novel is getting positive reviews. The storyline is strong and the characters are vivid and full of life – worth getting acquainted with!

Tell me 3 things that have inspired you in life.

· As an avid reader and writer of historical fiction, I can say that I drew much inspiration from great writers such as Colleen McCullough and James Clavell.

·As a history geek, I'm inspired by great generals such as Caesar and Hannibal (inspired to do what, I haven't quite figured out yet); by great politicians - Caesar again, before his infamous dictatorships, and the Great Peacemaker of the Iroquois; and, to leave aside the fighting spirit, by a few great scientists such as Eratosthenes for his early (and by our standards amazing) discoveries.

· I also draw inspiration from some people around me who take life with an amount of good, healthy humor.

By 1,250 AD the Great Mound of Cahokia on the Mississippi River was the centre of the largest North American empire, populated more densely than the 13th-century London. A hundred years later the Great Mound lay abandoned.

"The Cahokian" is a historical novel, based on the final years of that empire.



The chief warlord of Cahokia - a magnificent center of the Mississippians - is embroiled in a dangerous political conspiracy. An attempt to escape the consequences brings him northwards, up the O-hi-o River and into the lands of the powerful League of the Iroquois, where his life takes an unexpected turn.

Thanks Zoe, for answering my questions.Anyone else who would like to answer the same three questions, just email me

Want to be a poet? Cath Nichols invites you in.

I have always loved poetry, both the writing and reading of it, as a way of enriching our dialogue with the world. Someone else who has found a rich source of pleasure in poetry is poet and lecturer Cath Nichols. I took the chance to ask Cath about her writing life, and was really inspired by her answers. If you live anywhere near Lancaster, don't miss her excellent workshops.

What is it about poetry that makes it essential to you?

Cath: Something about the reading of poems makes me go into a different space/time experience – reading them in my head or hearing the poet read them out loud. It's not usually a 'story' space (escapism, learning or forward momentum) as I get from reading prose. It's more like meditation or a quality of attention. If prose is forward momentum, poetry is circular! It ripples out form centre. Certainly when I'm writing poetry, too, there is a sense of 'tardis space' – time spent 'in' poetry is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside!

2.Tell me about the themes that most excite you at the moment, or structures in poetry or prose that make your eyes light up.

I have been preoccupied with the sea for years and various myths. Also hybrid people and characters: mermaids and over the last couple of years the Procne and Philomela myth where both women are turned into birds. I've noticed that I often get hooked on material that was someone else's first. The hook is where my mind keeps going back to a thing that I disagree with strongly. It's the gritty irritation than later develops into something. Often a kind of injustice in the older writing that needs re-writing for today (in my opinion). Philomela (the nightingale in various odes) had real appeal: why should she sing a sweet sad song having been raped by her brother-in-law? It made me furious! So, I wrote a poem and later a play (set in the present and involving an Asian family in Manchester) to work out a different approach.

I am building up a novel now which is a response to Shakespeare's Cymbeline. Again deep outrage that Imogen's husband agrees to a bet to test his wife's faithfulness. She is put at great risk; he believes she has been unfaithful and sends someone to kill her; and then at the end of the story they reunite to live happily ever after! Aargh! The gall of it. Of course I realise in those days women had to put up with a great deal and possibly marriage was the best protection available, so you'd do all you could to make it work, and forgive all kinds of crap. But not now.

Structures: something about rhythm and alternation. It happens in my poems and dramatic writing. There's even a trace of that in the novel. In prose it seems to be to do with suspending the revelation of plot; and in a poem it's to do with tension and enjambment...

3. You are interested in radio and the aural experience of words. How has this influenced your work?

It was a big part of my PhD research. I'd noticed that many poets write for radio as dramatists, docu-drama writers and sometimes as poets. I love Michael Symons Roberts work (he used to be a BBC documentary producer and later Head of Religious Broadcasting before becoming a full-time poet and academic). Paul Farley and Simon Armitage too have done a lot. Way back you have Dylan Thomas and in fact almost every poet based in London in the forties. Samuel Beckett did some innovative stuff (the first really radiophonic work All that Fall – using sound in a distorted way for atmospheric effect). Joan Littlewood and Charles Parker valued working-class history and experience. With Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger they made the Radio Ballads series: this pretty much invented documentary without commentary – people were heard in their own voices for the first time instead of transcribed interviews being read by actors! That followed on from the invention of new technologies that made recording equipment portable – writers and producers could get out and about. Kathleen Jamie did a wonderful radio play in the 90s that had imagined characters from Larkin's Whitsun Weddings talking about their lives since the great Whitsun train ride. Their stories were interleaved with Larkin reading the poem. You can listen to it in the British Library if you go to the sound archive there. All of it is just so inspiring.

I've done some local radio short drama and poetry but I'm still trying to crack Radio 4 drama. New writers have to go via the Afternoon Play slot which is pretty pedestrian. Only the famous get asked to do docudrama stuff, which would be more up my street. So, watch this space!

4. Which other writers have made a lasting impression on you and why?

For novels, Shani Mootoo's The Cereus Blooms at Night. Fabulous, surprising novel set in the Caribbean with race, sexuality (as in queer as well as straight) and gender issues seamlessly woven through a great story set in the past and present.

Anne Carson, a Canadian poet and Classics professor who writes book-length poems or sequences. The Autobiography of Red (Red is a little 'creature' from a Greek myth alive in the present day), and Glass and Gods. The sequence where the narrator goes home to Mum after heartbreak but re-investigates Emily Bronte and the moors sums up a particular kind of sadness and detachment. It is sometime shocking when it describes certain acts of desperation, but it's so truthful as to how humans can be with each other. And she never loses her amazing touch of language and surprise even though there is a fair amount of 'story' going on. Carson also does translations of Greek drama and writes fantastic essays.

5. You teach poetry workshops, what has surprised you most about the process of passing on your skills?

I really enjoy it. University students on Creative Writing courses are sometimes there because they want to write prose and might be a bit dismissive of poetry. So getting them engaged with an exercise and enjoying themselves feels terrific. In other non-uni settings students are more likely to be keen poets already. I think it becomes a dialogue. I'm interested in people's responses and the happy coincidences and surprises.. When you have a conversation you sometimes stumble on things you didn't know you knew – or they do! I think teaching makes you a better writer – so long as you can create the time to keep writing your own stuff.

6. Tell me about your publications, and how we might join a workshop with you.

Collection, My Glamorous Assistant (Headland, 2007). Pamphlet, Tales of Boy Nancy (Driftwood, 2005)I think these are out-of-print now. But I've poems forthcoming in Poetry Wales and The Stinging Fly and, I found out last week I'll be in 2012's Lung Jazz: Young Poets for Oxfam. (I'm not that young but the line was drawn at 40 at the time of sending work in!)

I'm teaching a six week course at litfest in Lancaster (near the train station)

on Monday evenings from the 26th September. http://www.litfest.org/litfest-workshops/

We'll be exploring how ideas about form can inform the way we create free verse poems. I felt that poets today often get stuck in one of two camps: the 'strict form only brigade' and the 'totally free verse crew'. I wanted to show how both sides have something to offer the other and that free verse (where many writers start) can become stronger from a few well chosen techniques. It's partly about re-drafting: making your initial poem much more 'poem-y'. Lots of exercises, some reading and happy discussions I hope.

Mondays 26th September - 31st October, 6.30pm-8.30pm.

Cost: £60 (£50 concs.)

Book by 9th September by phone, 01524 62166, or by cheque (post to Get Writing, Litfest, The Storey, Lancaster LA1 1TH, with course name, ticket price and your full contact details)

The Water Theatre by Lindsay Clarke, Review

Totally absorbing, real literature.

The Water Theatre's hold on the reader is difficult to define, but I think it succeeds superbly as a work of fiction precisely because it operates on so many levels. As pure story, the characters are engaging and the plot (which I won't spoil) gripping. But this is also a serious work, with big ideas and depth.

On the one hand it is a story of one man's transition from naive teenager to man-of-the-world, and through that into some sort of acceptance and maturity. His family and the surrogate family he aspires to be part of, thinking them preferable to his own humble beginnings, both feel real, and are portrayed along with all their conflicting tensions - the complexities of class, politics and religious allegiances.

On the other hand, it is an exploration of how the imaginative faculty can bring us to a different more metaphorical experience of the world, and how old rituals can have transformative power. The fact that we might all be living out our own myth is hinted at by the archetypal names of the characters and by the structure of the plot.

It asks very real questions about the nature of evil and the best way to change an oppressive regime.The novel spans forty years and three continents, so this is a book with scope. It brings us back to asking about where a poetic vision and a spirituality might meet, and whether we can keep our innocence as we gain our experience.

If I could give this book more than five stars I would. Undoubtedly one of the highlights of my reading year.

Confessions of a historical fiction writer - Leftovers

The question I get asked the most, and the thing people are most obsessed with when I talk to them about historical fiction is historical "accuracy".

Recently whilst working on my novel "The Gilded Lily" which is set in 1661, I was working with minor characters that were twins. In those times according to my research, people still were very suspicious of twins, viewing them as something unnatural, eerie and an enigma. The most common view of the time was that twins were sired by different fathers (if they were not identical) or that the mother had conceived twice by the same man (and was therefore a bit of a nymphomaniac) if they were identical. In the case of non-identical twins one of the babies was therefore often labelled "the bastard" and the woman ostracized as an adulteress.

During the research I went off on many intriguing sidetracks, fascinated to discover the story of conjoined twins, who were even more suspect to the 17th century eye, and viewed as an aberration against God or monsters. The conjoined twins born at Isle Brewers, Somersetshire, in 1680, were among the earliest live-born English conjoined twins and people travelled from all over the country to see them. The twins died, probably in 1683, after being bought from their mother and exhibited for money by a certain Henry Walrond, an unpopular country squire who also by the way was a great persecutor of the quakers. A memorial plate in Lambeth Delft still exists that was made after their death to commemorate their popular appeal as a sideshow attraction and to mourn the passing of a unique "monster".

All this was engrossing, so I duly included back-story scenes about the twins birth and wrote them into the plot. At the end of the first draft I realised that all the stuff about the twins was unbalancing the main thrust of the narrative and undermining the main characters, so reluctantly I cut most of it out, leaving a few sentences so as not to "waste" my research. After the second draft, leaving in the information about attitudes to twins raised questions in the reader, rather than being illuminating. So I cut it further. In the finished draft a mere veiled reference is made to my identical twins birth and back-story.

What a shame, I thought. There is such a good plot in there, but unfortunately not for "The Gilded Lily". My research on twins went the way of much of my research - cut to make way for a better story.

This often happens. The research cannot show too much in a novel or it turns into a history book, or readers get frustrated whilst you go down back-alleys of the plot. I recently read Mary Novik's brilliant book, Conceit, (set in a similar period to The Gilded Lily) about the daughter of the poet John Donne. At the back of the book she says,

"I have consulted all the usual scholars and biographers but, after all is said and done, this is my seventeenth century and I have invented joyfully and feely."

There can be thousands of individual views and reconstructions of an era, and all will contain accuracies, inaccuracies, omissions and inventions. That is the nature of fiction.

Whilst browsing online the other day though, I suddenly came across this - the cover drew my eye as it looked historical. When I clicked on it I found this blurb:



"London 1661. In this era the old belief that twins cannot be sired by one man still prevails, a superstition which automatically makes the mother of Edgar and Emma Torbet an adulteress. Desperate to protect her children from their violent father she flees, finally settling in London......

It made me laugh because all the time what I thought of as bits of my story had already been germinating and sprouting in someone else's imagination. It reminded me that we can never own history, and that what are the leftovers to me will make a very nice main meal for someone else. Good Luck with Twins, Katherine!

But what's the betting that when The Gilded Lily comes out, a reader somewhere will say, "she didn't get that right, about the twins. In the 17th century they...."

Story is King - Originality

The net is full of writers who want to be the next best seller, whether or not they have been through the route of traditional publishing.

I was interested to read a review of one self-published novel which said it had many typos, errors of grammar and other textual flaws, but that this did not mar the reviewer's experience because the story was so good. The book has sold a lot of copies and is flying high in the e-book charts. I think the flaws might have irritated me more because to me spelling, grammar, and generally 'good' english is part of being a writer. I was brought up to think that way through my old-fashioned education.

But more and more I see that these "good english" skills have been replaced by machines that do the job of checking spelling, grammar, repetition, past participle searching and so forth. So in the current world of writing (at least as far as one reviewer is concerned) Story is King.

There are millions of stories out there all clamouring for an audience. If we are to believe Christopher Booker in The Seven Basic Plots, all of us are replaying ancient myths whether we know it or not, so originality is hard to achieve. What makes an idea original and how can one go about finding something original? And not just to one reader, but to many?

I'm sure it must be partly about voice. The readers must trust the storyteller. On this journey the initial premise of the story must transport them so that the readers lose their own reality and join with the writers vision, but at the same time feel that they are on this journey alone.

Often people say, "It caught my imagination" as if somehow the author has managed to trap it like a butterfly in a net. So, how to catch an imagination? The writer has to make the reader work hard so that they are engaged in creating the scenes in their head, but not so hard that they tire of it and put the book down. This is a hard tightrope to walk, the juxtaposition of the familiar to draw the reader in easily, and the unfamiliar to make it interesting.

Everyone thinks their story is unique, so I cannot claim to have done anything startlingly original, but thinking about this I realise that my best and most surprising ideas come from the following practices:

A lightness of touch. Trying to be original somehow provokes the very opposite.

A sustained attention on the minutiae of the character I am working with.

Researching real events. Truth is often more original than my mind seems to want to invent.

Giving the characters room not to reply to each other in words but to do something physical instead. Allowing them freedom of movement.

"Originality lives at the crossroads, at the point where world and self open to each other in transparence in the night rain."Jane Hirshfield



Image from: http://www.paintermagazine.co.uk/

Flipback books - Print fights back

A new concept for reading, I love the look of it. Sideways bound book that fits in a handbag or pocket and is the size of an i-phone.Anyone handled one of these yet?click the link to see what it's all about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXnfQS9cWgg