Kathleen Jones's Blog, page 60

Katherine Mansfield in the Rain!

Some of you may have noticed that I've been away, but my friends across the Atlantic have been looking after my blog for me while I sneaked back to England for a couple of days.  Sadly, I came back with a sore throat and some horrid bug, so have been lying low until normal service could be resumed. 

England looked like this:-

and London was cold, with a bitter east wind.   I was there for a book launch at New Zealand House.  Edinburgh University Press (who published my Katherine Mansfield biog in the UK) were celebrating a new edition of Katherine Mansfield's stories .   It includes some new, previously unpublished stories, discovered in a King's College Archive, by a lucky young researcher.  One of them seems to relate to the period when the 19 year old Katherine, pregnant by a young musician who either couldn't or wouldn't, marry her, married her singing teacher and left him on their wedding night without explanation.

This edition is the first to include all KM's work, both published and unpublished, as she wrote it (ie not edited by her husband afterwards) and in chronological order, so that you can see her development as a writer.  It's a fantastic work of scholarship by the UK's Gerri Kimber, who fronts the Katherine Mansfield Society, and by New Zealand scholar - a poet and writer in his own right - Vincent O'Sullivan.  Vincent couldn't be there, but Gerri was on fine form.   Here's the two of us - I'm the one looking jet-lagged (airport at 4am!) and Gerri's the one with the bling!

It was a good party - my publisher Jackie Jones and Clare from Edinburgh UP were both there making sure that we all got enough of the New Zealand pink fizz.

NZ poet Fleur Adcock was there - that's Fleur in the middle.

And another KM fan, Margaret Drabble, with friends.
NZ poet Jan Kemp was also there - having flown over from Germany for the event.
New Zealand House is near Trafalgar Square and the views of London from the Penthouse suite are breath-taking - but not for anyone suffering from vertigo!  You can see the Shard on the horizon towards the right, and just pick out the dome of St Paul's, dwarfed by high rise blocks, to left of centre. Nelson's column and the top of the Trafalgar Sq Christmas tree are in the centre, with the National Portrait Gallery on the left.


Thanks to Gerri and everyone for a lovely time.  Pity the books are so expensive, but small university presses simply don't have the funds to publish at a discount.   My own Katherine Mansfield biography 'The Story-teller', will be out as an e-book just before Christmas, in time for the 90th anniversary of her tragic, early death at Fontainebleau.  If anyone would like to review it, I've got a few copies to give away either as Kindle or E-pub.

Cheryl Therrien talks about D.R.E.A.M. Catchers

This week I’m featuring another Indie author on the blog and a book that's a bit different.  Cheryl Therrien is from the USA.  Cheryl blogs aka Geek Girl  and she’s a writer and breast cancer survivor. In preparation for her public debut on Amazon, she began honing her writing skills through blogging. You can find her blog at Geek Girl USA. Her first book, D.R.E.A.M. Catchers, was a collaborative effort with fellow blogger and friend Susan Cooper at Finding Our Way Now.   Cheryl is an eclectic writer so every genre is open for her to pursue. Cheryl shares her Kansas home with her husband and their furry children - three dogs and a cat - all of whom are rescues.  
Cheryl - tell us the title of your current book.D.R.E.A.M. CatchersCan you tell us a little bit of what it's about?D.R.E.A.M. Catchers is a simple and easy to use introduction to dream analysis. D.R.E.A.M. Catchers is an introduction to understanding your dreams. It covers the some of the most basic dream symbols and encourages you to create your own dream symbol dictionary. Dreams are unique to each person so the context in which a symbol appears is every bit as important as the symbol itself. This is not a book you read from cover to cover. This is a manual where you look up the symbol and then try to understand its meaning within the context of your dream. This manual is set up like 'The One Minute Manager'. It's quick and easy to use. What genre does your book fall under?It's a self-help manualDo you always write for the same genre? I don't limit myself to one genre. I am a huge sci-fi fan so it only seems logical that I would explore that genre as well. You can look forward  to reading some good sci-fi from me in the not too distant future. Who or what motivates or inspires you to write?Writing for me is like breathing. I thrive on it. The subject doesn’t matter as long as I can write. Writing has always been my passion. Until recently I did not share it with anyone. I am a computer Geek thus the aka Geek Girl alias I use on my blog. I began blogging as sort of a proving ground to hone my writing skills. You will find app reviews along with Motivational Monday quotes there. It has been through the encouragement of my newly found blogging friends that I found the confidence to write books for publication. Tell us about your writing background. I am self-taught for the most part. After taking some college courses and getting positive feedback from the instructors I started my first blog. My blogging has served as my proving ground for honing my writing skills. How long does it typically take you to write a first draft? About 3 months if I work on it regularlyDo you employ an editor to assist you in your writing process? Yes. I find that having someone else look at my work is really helpful. They see things I am too close to the work to see for myself. Are you self-published or represented by an agency?Self-publishedDo you have future projects we can look forward to? My next book is a series of letters from me to my unborn grandchild. As a first-time grandmother I wanted to offer advice through a series of letters. It is called ‘Letters From Grandma: Before You Were Born’. They are full of all the anticipation of his or her arrival, along with little pearls of wisdom to store away until the time is right. Do you have any tips or advice to offer fellow writers? The most important thing I can say is to start promoting your book before you are finished writing it. Build the audience and the anticipation ahead of time. Is there anything else you would like to share with your potential readers? As an independent author and blogger you will see posts on my blog announcing all upcoming publications. Tell us how we can connect with you in the world of social media. On Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/geekgirlusa
On Twitter - https://twitter.com/geekgirlusa
On Google+ - https://plus.google.com/106513953587058272911/
On my blog - http://www.geekgirlusa.com/   Thanks to Cheryl for the answers.  I've read and reviewed D.R.E.A.M. Catchers over on my book blog. Fascinating reading.  My nights will never be the same again!

Barbara Lambert and The Whirling Girl

Having posted poetry from Canadian poet Catherine Owen on Tuesday, today I'm  delighted to feature Canadian novelist Barbara Lambert, who has written a guest post on her latest novel, set in Tuscany 'The Whirling Girl'.
 You can read my review of the novel over on my book blog.

Now - over to Barbara.  Where did the idea come from, I asked her.....



Beginnings .....



What was the spark that ignited the idea for The Whirling Girl? When I try to recollect, it’s like peering into a kaleidoscope. That burst of colour, that unexpected zing of thoughts falling into place, the pattern of things to come. But the pattern shifts - shifts again.


Was it that moment on a dusky terrace overlooking the Val di Chiana? The sky turning amethyst. A castled city across the plain, glimmering like an illustration in a fairytale? Then a voice in my head. This is where she will be standing, when…But who? When what? That sudden pulse of excitement as I stood there myself, and she was beside me for a moment, enticing if a little blurry. A woman troubled, this I immediately sensed. Look how her gaze avoids the closer view of Cortona directly across a narrow valley, its ruined fortress looming above ancient Etruscan walls. What’s with her and the Etruscans? Does thinking of those long-ago people upset her?  What does she know of them?What do I know, for that matter?
This was early in my first visit to Italy, a hiking trip.  I knew only that the Etruscans had ruled most of Italy once, then were vanquished by the Romans, almost forgotten until their buried tombs began to be discovered, centuries later, and astounding artifacts emerged….
~
Or, maybe the flash came earlier on that same trip. My husband and I had become lost in the woods somewhere between Volterra and San Gimignano, having misread the “orienteering” clues we’d been given. As dusk came down, we encountered others from our group, also lost. We managed to follow a power line to an isolated farm house where a kind woman poured wine for five total strangers, helped us telephone our hotel to send a car. The kitchen was lit just by one overhead iron lamp. A fire crackled in a hearth big enough to roast an ox. Shadows danced on the walls. An emerald lizard flashed across the ceiling beams. This is where she will live, in a room like this….A week later I returned to Canada to do final edits on a different novel.
Cortona It was another two years before we discovered the Molino di Metelliano, situated in that narrow valley behind Cortona, below the Etruscan wall. We went to stay briefly with friends who were renting there, following directions that led across a narrow wooden bridge, down a chestnut shaded lane, to the sight of a tile-roofed house so weathered and organic that it might have grown out of the slope.
And she was suddenly with us again - that troubled young woman – wedging herself between Douglas and myself as we climbed the lavender-bordered steps to the mill house. This is it. (Her voice, this time.) Something memorable is going to happen to me here….
~
Memorable things did happen there. To all of us.We went to stay in the Molino many times over the next few years, joined sometimes by friends, sometimes by family – and always by that complicated young woman. Clare. The first time, it was May, the hills a riot of wildflowers. What a coincidence that Clare turned out to be not just a flower artist, but a botanical artist, who could name all the wayside flowers. As I learned more about her artistic discipline – the fine line it walked between art and science - I realized what a clue this was to her complex personality, and the way (for reasons yet to be discovered) she had long teetered between guilt and desire. Her story began to take shape. This was exciting.
It struck me, at that point, as a story requiring only of the most amiable sort of research – hikes though the countryside, excursions to charming hill towns, lunches in little off-the-beaten-track trattorie  – all of which could be digested, so to speak, during serious sessions in the hammock back at the Molino, thinking deeply while gazing up at Cortona’s austere Etruscan walls. The Etruscan walls of Cortona  Those walls. No wonder Clare had avoided looking at them, early on. They brooded over us as we set off on light-hearted excursions, stonily assessed us as we returned. Such inconvenient questions they began to raise. If Cortona had been one of the seven great cities of the Etruscan League – as I’d learned by then - where were all the tombs? There were three great “princely” tombs, yes, down in the Val di Chiana – but where had all the others been buried? Might there be – for fictional purposes at the very least – undiscovered tombs in thislittle valley, in the vicinity of the Molino?An intriguing thought. I set it aside.  I had no intention of letting my novel be kidnapped by the Etruscans. Until - right in the Molino itself - I came upon the book that would change my life. And, finally, let me into the puzzle of Clare’s….
~
After that trip, I took out subscriptions to archaeological journals – spent hours in libraries – amassed an Etruscan library of my own. Eventually, too, I was fortunate in being able to engage in extremely helpful correspondence with archaeologists all around the world. But it was that single book, discovered one morning in the Molino, that set the whole thing off.
George Dennis was an Englishman who, in the mid-1800’s, made the first systematic exploration of Etruscan tombs and abandoned sites. That morning, when I scooted out to the hammock with the two-volume edition of Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, I was immediately enchanted both by the strange illustrations, and by Dennis’s erudite but at the same time amiable prose. It was like holding the hand of a charming uncle-ish sort of figure who knew … well … everything (and provided footnotes for what he didn’t). A man one could accompany on a fascinating tour, not just around Etruria as it had been in the mid-1800’s, but also deep into the Etruscan past.             Later, I managed to find a rare edition for myself. On subsequent trips to Tuscany, George Dennis was a constant companion on my own forays to tombs and ruins. At the same time, the past of that other constant companion, Clare, began to come clear - the lonely young girl she had been, who didhave an uncle of that enviable erudite sort. An uncle who (though in a location far from Italy) took her on imagined trips around the Etruria he had always longed to see, and read to her from that same book, which was his greatest treasure.            An uncle who became not so amiable, alas.            Eccola!  The Whirling Girl. 


Barbara has a video trailer of The Whirling Girl on You Tube at
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4NdsLCkq7o

You  can also watch it on her website at www.barbaralambert.com

Barbara Lambert's previous work includes A Message for Mr. Lazarus (2000) and The Allegra Series (1999). She has won the Danuta Gleed Award for Best First Collection of Short Fiction and The Malahat Review Novella Prize, and been a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Prize and the Journey Prize. Currently she is editor of the online literary Salon des Refusés, Dr. Johnson's Corner.

Lambert has lived in Vancouver, Ottawa, Barbados, and Cortona, Italy, where she stayed in a five-hundred-year-old mill house and researched Etruscan archaeology. She now lives on a cherry orchard in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia, with her husband Douglas Lambert.

Read my review of The Whirling Girl.....

Do Authors Dream of Electric Books?: Kathleen Jones on Being a Media Tart

Do Authors Dream of Electric Books?: Kathleen Jones on Being a Media Tart: Once upon a time, when I published a book, an elegant twenty-something girl with long legs, long hair, a media degree and a name that end...

Tuesday Poem: Nature Writing 101, by Catherine Owen

Today I'm the editor of the Tuesday Poem website and I'm featuring a young Canadian poet, Catherine Owen, and her poem Nature Writing 101, which is included in the new Entanglements anthology published by Two Ravens Press.  Catherine is a very original and inventive poet who is also an art model.
The poem begins:
'Our minds can turn anything romantic.
Is the problem. . .'

Please click the link to the Tuesday Poem hub t o read more......

The rain it raineth every day .... and in Pisa with Kandinsky

Large areas of Italy - Tuscany, Liguria, Umbria and Lazio - have been underwater recently and still are.  We've had apocalyptic thunderstorms and rain.  One small seaport had a tornado, which in Italy is called 'La tromba d'aria' - the trumpet of the air.   Apparently the floods, mud slides and winds have caused as much damage as the Emilia earthquake - factories and houses, roads and railways - near us a whole hamlet was covered when a part of the mountainside came down.  Fortunately, loss of life has been very small.

On Thursday we took an afternoon off and went to Pisa.  The Arno is very full, and has been cascading through the streets of Florence, but here it was contained, though running high and fast towards the sea. 

Pisa looked very beautiful in the rain with the lights just coming on and a very odd open window of sky - the eye of the storm? - where the river and the sea meet.

We came to Pisa for the Kandinsky exhibition, which I will write about later - more than fifty of his paintings and drawings from the early period of his life, charting the progress of his work from figurative (rooted in Russian folk art and folk tales) to abstract.
This 'Autumn'  in 1908
'In Blue', 1925 There were quite a few quotes from his own writing and I spent a lot of time reading them - the sheer joy of colour comes off the page.
"The sun melts all of Moscow down to a single spot that, like a mad tuba, starts all of the heart and all of the soul vibrating ....  Houses and churches in pink, lilac, yellow, white, blue, pistachio green, or flame red - each sings its own chorus."
Which is exactly how I feel when I look at his work!

Neil has posted some of the paintings on his blog here. 

A Pestle and Mortar

Ever since I came to Italy I've been wanting a marble pestle and mortar to grind spices, but they're very expensive - around 45 euros in the shops - and Neil wouldn't let me buy one.  'I'll make you one,'  he kept saying.  So I waited.   But sculptors are busy people and there are more fulfilling things to do than make domestic objects from off cuts of marble and I rather suspected that I wouldn't get my mortar!

But then yesterday, Neil came home smiling, opened his rucksack and put these two objects on the table.

 To say I was pleased, didn't quite cover it!  It's not just a pestle and mortar - it's a sculpture.  The mortar is made from a marble cobble that Neil found in a river bed near here.  He chose it specially.  The pestle is made from a fragment of the white greek marble he's been using for his latest sculpture, and he's been working on them secretly as a surprise present.  They are so beautiful I don't think I can bear to use them for pounding up peppercorns, or cumin!
 

A Sculptor's Diary: A Four Piece Sculpture in White Marble

Amazing - Neil has started his own blog!!!!

A Sculptor's Diary: A Four Piece Sculpture in White Marble: Still waiting for the new marble to be delivered to the studio, this is Italy, things happen when they happen. I crated up my last piece, w...

Bounce: From Ireland to New Zealand

Meet beautiful Bounce, the latest addition to my daughter's family in New Zealand.   Meredith moved out of Christchurch after the earthquake into a house in the country that had a plot of land attached, with the idea of being more self-sufficient.  Vegetable beds have been dug, trees planted, huts erected for the chickens and ducks, but the grass grew and grew and it quickly became clear that something would have to be introduced to eat it.  And that's where Bounce and her calf came into the picture. They are Dexters - a very small and hardy breed of cattle that came originally from Ireland.  This has freaked my daughter out, because she didn't know until after she'd chosen the cow. She's even learned to milk it by hand.  It's very strange that she's now experiencing a way of life, with the same type of animal, as her great, great grandfathers did back in Ireland.  Genes?   All my children have had urban childhoods - it must be in the blood!!   Can't wait to go to NZ in January and meet Bounce and her baby nose to nose. It's obviously in my genes as well.

Tuesday Poem: The Islands of the Light

Last night was the launch of a new anthology of 'Eco-Poetry' - Entanglements - published by Two Ravens Press, at the University of Glasgow campus in Dumfries.   A wonderful reading by some of the northern poets included in the anthology, on what was one of the wettest, wildest nights of the autumn so far.  I drove through floods to get there, and some roads were closed by flood-water.   It was interesting to find that, among the poets reading, we all had some connection to the land and perhaps that is the root of our writing and our awareness of the fragility of the balance.  Entanglements is not about conservation, or eco-politics.  It's an exploration of humankind's relationship with the natural world of which they are a part (the diverse interconnections of Life) and the individual poets all have very different things to say about it.  A good anthology sets up conversations between the poems, and this one (edited by Sharon Blackie and David Knowles)  certainly does that.
My contribution to the anthology is one of the 'Raven' poems that comes from my fascination with the culture of the Haida Gwaii First Nation people of northern Canada and Alaska.  I've always been interested in oral literatures and in this series of poems I'm exploring our relationship with the cosmos as it's expressed in Mythology. This poem is the first in the Raven sequence and describes a kind of shamanic journey towards the islands.

The Islands of the Light

This is where East is
where the sun harbours
ready to lift above
the glass horizon
still reflecting the after-
glow of the West.

Freckles of dark
on the silver skin of the sea
no more than you can count
on the double span of your hands.
A green bloom, blurring
into focus the rock, creek, forest,
a glittering scatter of water.

Then the rotted log houses
and the bay, excavated
by the archaeology of light.

Watch, how it alters perspective
drawing a line, flat
then elevated; how the sea
looks curiously level from here;
how the white underbelly
of the orca, seems like the white
curve of the waves’ lip, where
the Canoe People endlessly paddle
and the whales throw themselves
on the shore as a gift.

© Kathleen Jones



"'Entanglements' is an anthology of new poetry driven by the joy of our intimate entanglement with life - set against the spectacle of a planet-wide ecological catastrophe of our own making. It brings together work by international figures (including Jorie Graham, John Kinsella, Les Murray, Alice Oswald) with poetry from emerging voices.  The anthology costs £8.99, post free,  if bought from the Two Ravens Press website and all author royalties are being donated to an eco-charity."

For more Tuesday Poems, please go to the Tuesday Poem website and check out the contributions in the side-bar as well as the main poem.