Maria Donovan's Blog, page 12

On Eggardon – learning and poetry

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Eggardon hill with its Iron-age fort is a well-known landmark in West Dorset, from which you can see for miles, a view that takes in the sea and coastline and several more hill forts in this area including Abbotsbury Castle, Lewesdon, Pilsdon Pen, Lambert’s Castle and Coney’s Castle. Of all these I feel most attached to Eggardon. One branch of my mum’s family farmed here and as her side were embedded in this part of the country going as far back as we can know, I often wonder if some of my ancestors lived up here. It was first occupied in the Bronze Age, probably, although the ramparts visible today are deemed to be from the Iron age. I have often associated the place with a sense of loss and hurt pride, thinking of the coming of the Romans in AD 43, or thereabouts. Last weekend we were lucky enough to hear about some of Eggardon’s history from Steve Wallis, Dorset County Council archaeologist, who pointed out that we only have two lines reporting the campaign led by Vespasian, and that very little is truly known of what happened. He also showed us things about the place I didn’t know about at all such as the ditch and bank of an eight-sided enclosure, all that remain of a fenced-in stand of trees planted by famous smuggler Isaac Gulliver as a mark for his ships. (Despite what it says in the link I’ve given, interesting as it is, the trees are long gone. Certainly, they were not there half a century ago. Are they thinking perhaps of Colmer’s Hill?)

Steve also pointed out that the hill and the fort are divided into two parts, one owned by the National Trust, the other being in private hands. Separated now by a fence line through the middle of the fort, the south (N.T.) part is in the parish of Askerswell and the north part in the parish of Powerstock. Eggardon Hill would have been a convenient meeting place for conducting the business of Eggardon Hundred, the collection of parishes known at the time of the Domesday Book and on through the centuries.   

The weekend was part of the poetry parks programme, organised by Marc Yeats and poet Ralph Hoyte of Satsymph. There’s a series of these workshops connected to the Dorset AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) and the South Dorset Ridgeway, the Land of Bone and Stone. The aim is to create poetry which can be accessed via an app. By finding the correct GPS location – or poetry pool – you can hear the recorded poems. You don’t need a mobile phone signal and the app is free.

On Saturday we were all up on Eggardon. The rampart slopes were thick with pyramid orchids and there were bee orchids too, red-winged burnet moths and dragonflies. Below us three deer watched from a field. Buzzards wheeling, skylarks warbling overhead. Perfect midsummer. It was a lovely way to spend the day, a break to get away from the laptop and just work with pen (or in my case pencil) and paper and try something different. If prose sometimes feels like my day job, then poetry is recreation, an adventure, something I can just enjoy. Also slightly scary, which is part of the fun. 

On Sunday, David of Diva Contemporary came to Askerswell village hall to record our finished work. Throughout the day we were sharing books, knowledge and impressions, writing, re-writing and recording. Amazing to hear some of the work produced in such a short time. Schools in the area are also joining in with this project, so not all the poems will be in the app but I managed two examples of an englyn milwr (three-line poems, seven syllables to a line, all lines end-rhymed), a short history of Isaac Gulliver’s enterprising enclosure, another poem speculating on the original name of the place (not Eggardon, which is probably from the Old English for ) and something a little more free, mostly about the feeling of being up on the spur of rampart so high I was eye-to-eye with the buzzards while the deer swam through the landscape below. 

The experience of being up on Eggardon for those hours and hearing from Steve Wallis about the many different ways in which has been of importance to the people who live in or visit Dorset helped me to lengthen my sense of its timeline instead of focussing on that one period of defeat and change two thousand years ago. I look forward to finding out more of Eggardon’s roughly 5000-year history of occupation. 

I liked the weekend so much I’ve signed up to go to Maiden Castle too. This is said to be the biggest and most complex of all the hill forts in Britain. Many years ago we had a trip up there from our primary school but I had no idea what to expect, no clue of what the place was like and so was disappointed, having heard the word ‘castle’, to find myself on what seemed to be a bumpy hillside, with no towers or turrets. Now I find it a thrilling sight when passing by Dorchester and with Steve Wallis once again sharing his knowledge I’m looking forward to learning something I don’t yet know. 

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My Haiku Diary May 25 2017

[image error]One minute’s silence

twenty-two dead, dozens hurt

Millions sending love

 

I’m not a poet (can you tell?) but there’s comfort in putting words in order. Defining something out of chaos. I’ve been working on some posts about writing haiku: poems of just three lines – some say count the syllables, five, seven and five. You could try it. Anyone can – that’s the point. But more on that another time because …

In this terrible week for those who were out in Manchester to enjoy themselves in all innocence, I don’t feel like going ahead as if nothing’s happened. Gratitude that people I know are safe sits alongside sorrow for those who have lost. So this is a short one.

Maybe, reading my haiku, you will think, ‘I could do no worse and probably better!’ Please, I would be glad if you would share your haiku in a comment on my blog. Or just say hello.

Love, Maria

 

Credit where it’s due

The image is by Evelyn Hartshon, reproduced here under a CC licence.

Contract!

A long silence on the blogging front usually means much invisible work going on. I’ve been busy on a final edit of my novel, The Chicken Soup Murder. This was a finalist for the Dundee International Book Prize and has now found a home with Seren Books (publishers of my short story collection, Pumping Up Napoleon). Publication date for the novel to be confirmed, possibly as soon as September 2017.

Apart from writing books or blog posts or poems (I’ve been working on those haiku I mentioned in my last post, Poetry – 100 Years Asleep, in the chinks in time between editing, and to keep myself sane and sharp) one of the most important things a writer can do is sign a contract.

[image error]Sign the contract

I can highly recommend the services of the Society of Authors for writers, particularly if you do not have representation. Included with the annual membership is a contract vetting service. It is reassuring to have a professional view of the terms and feel that someone is there to support you when you negotiate. Stand-alone authors certainly can negotiate terms. I’ve managed to do so every time and to my advantage. It might not be the sum itself but could be the royalties or rights, or to take out or amend a clause that could cause trouble in the future. For anyone with their first book coming out, it’s worth the membership fee for this service alone.

Read the draft terms of the contract for yourself of course – very carefully – and compile a list of things you wish to query or ask to have changed. When you have finally agreed terms, and have two copies of a paper contract to sign, read the entire document again very carefully checking against the changes that should have been  made. The document you sign is exactly what you will be bound to and protected by. There might be some daft unforeseen error, which you will be sorry about later in life if it’s not put right – so take your time. And maybe snap a photo or a series of them to celebrate?

[image error]Contract signed – Smile!

Poetry – 100 years asleep

On Thursday 16 March 2o17 I had a revelation: I would, henceforth, make sense of my life through the medium of – poetry.

Given that most of my efforts at writing poetry so far have been of the kind that, set to music, easily pass for spoof country-and-western songs, this might seem pretentious of me. Who am I to think that I can write poetry?

That has always been my trouble. It’s the ‘who am I’? part. I’d tell anyone else, don’t worry about all that: just think it, feel it, sense it, write it. Why don’t I allow myself the same?

No. Instead I have to make a joke of it: like in my song, ‘Country Ladies’ – about the time when I lived ten miles out of town and had to take a bus if I needed to go anywhere. It was about the women I saw on the bus and it was sad and it was silly – as if I couldn’t just offer the sadness without wrapping it up as an amusement.

But what if I didn’t feel like making a joke? What if I wanted to be serious? Or just, I don’t know: be normal? Somehow I didn’t feel I was allowed to think in terms of poetry. I didn’t even know what it ought to mean to me.

Two things happened: I lay in bed, ill, and listened to ‘Poetry Please’ on Radio 4 with Roger McGough. I don’t always listen with full concentration because I’m usually doing something else but that day all I could do was lie there and surrender. The theme was ‘In-between days‘). There were two poems by Paul Henry (‘Three trees’ and ‘Between two bridges’) and one called ‘Growth Rings’ from the collection Murmur by Menna Elfin (which I enjoyed hearing in Welsh as well as in the English version, translated by Damian Walford Davies). I listened with more than my usual attention. And something in me seemed to break. Part of that wall that I put around myself. Every day, writing fiction, I feel like I need to climb over that wall to get away from everyday life and into the realm of freedom. But it seemed to me that, though poets do transmit stories, they are often sharing a pure form of experience. Unguarded, thoughtful and honest. Without walls. It must be a beautiful and also quite a scary way to live – ready to be pounced upon and to pounce.

Then along came my first-ever twitterchat on Poetry by Women Writers – hosted by Laurie Garrison (@lauriebg_) of the Women Writers School under the hashtag #women_writers. These chats are co-hosted by For Books Sake (@forbookssake) and Kendra Winchester (@k_d_winchester). This time the guest hosts were Afshan D’souza Lodhi (@AshLodhi) and Jen Campbell (@jenvcampbell).

I made one useful comment in answer to the first question (to say that my favourite poet is Sheenagh Pugh) and then in one swift hour was overwhelmed by the diversity and range of the poets and poems recommended. Some of the suggestions, which you can follow from Laurie’s article, involved performances in You-tube videos. Suddenly, poetry seemed like a way of getting to know not just a person but another culture, a different view of the world from the one I see out of my window. I thought – yes I want more of this!

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And why 100 years asleep? Prompted because it’s 100 years since Edward Thomas died. The story of how this writer of prose, often frustrated at the volume of ‘hack work’ he had to produce to support his family, came to be a poet in the last three years of his life, just as anything like a normal life was being overtaken by what we now call the First World War, has always seemed poignant and a great lesson in getting on with doing what is essential for your creative soul – before it is too late. 100 years asleep – that’s how I feel sometimes when I think how much time has passed in low awareness. Sometimes you can’t avoid how you feel. Grieving is like that. When my husband died, in April 2010, I found some comfort in copying out Thomas’s poem, ‘These Things Also are Spring’s’ and keeping it where I could see it, with one or two small things of significance that belonged to Mike. It helped me because I was so aware of Thomas’s limited time to live and his focus on what he could still experience. The poem is bleak with its ‘banks by the roadside with grass long dead’ and yet affirming: what is there to be seen but a  ‘chip of flint’ or ‘mite of chalk’ or ‘small birds’ dung’ when you search for ‘earliest violets’. It’s funny and ironic and it appreciates what is. I can imagine him walking and looking and this is what he saw. From these small observations he makes something and its meaning grows and resounds a hundred years later.

I realised that I should stop worrying about whether I was worthy of writing poetry and instead become alive to experiencing the world around me – in small ways. Trying to put an image or a feeling into words is just one way of intensifying and keeping that experience. It’s likely to make you receptive, more able to notice, to accept the painful and brilliant truth: we are all alive while we are alive. Then we are no more.

Still poetry (all of it) felt too big and baggy – where to start? I decided I would make things easy for myself by focusing on the shortest form, with a strict structure: the haiku.

And here my adventures in poetry begin.

 

Which poem helped you through a difficult time in your life?

Who are your favourite poets? 

 

 

Trish’s novel lives as author passes away

The sad coda to the story of Trish’s novel in my blog post ‘News: people are kind’ is that she really didn’t have very much time. She passed away on the 9th of March 2017 just as her novel came into being.

The crowdfunding via Justgiving reached a total of £1220 or 122% of the target set, which is probably indicative of the effort it must have taken for the publishers, Magic Oxygen, to turn the book out in the space of two and a half weeks, not forgetting that so many people offered to help and made donations. Trish had the support of her family to make her dream come true and a great friend and champion in Trevor Chambers, a volunteer for the Bridport Blind Club, who appealed for help to set her on the road to publication. To see and buy a copy of Trish’s novel, Grannifer’s Legacy, visit the Magic Oxygen bookshop. Donations from each sale will be made to the Southwest Dorset Talking Newspaper. 

News: people are kind

[image error]A while back I shared a post on Facebook about bees. What a hard time they’re having. And a Facebook friend commented, ‘Reposting a post doesn’t mean the problem has been solved. Sadly, this is what people think is protesting nowadays’. That stung – and I found myself scrabbling to tell her what I was actually doing about it – encouraging clover in my patch of lawn instead of keeping it in bowling-green trim, planting flowers the bees will like. And so on.

Most of the time we see things in the news, terrible events, and we’d like to help but we feel powerless. Often we’re too far away and so it’s a question of paying out money; it’s the quick way to feel you’ve contributed and all right if you can afford it. Affordability being always relative. I remember checking out a £5 pair of jeans in a charity shop and thinking, if I can spend this on clothes I can give the Big Issue seller £2.50 for a magazine. Since then I’ve been a committed buyer and it’s my favourite publication. The bonus to this commitment is that I feel free to come and go in Bridport, my home town and where I now live again, without feeling I’m ignoring or avoiding the Issue and its seller: usually Illy but sometimes Carina – both living in a hostel in Weymouth, both from Bosnia. But that’s another story.

That Friday, 17 February 2017, something online reminded me, was National Random Acts of Kindness Day. I’m all for being kind but also felt a little wary of the idea of having to be reminded. Later on, I opened the Bridport News (my second favourite publication) and there was the story of Trish and her disappearing novel. I remembered it from 2012 – perhaps because I was paying attention to everything in Bridport then, even though I wasn’t living there at the time. I was in the house in Wales that still felt so empty two years after my husband had died. I’d wanted to start working again and had started writing a novel, The Chicken Soup Murder, set in a fictionalised version of my home town and in Cardiff and anchored in real time.

Trish is blind. She was writing a novel with a pen along lines marked out by elastic bands. Every week her son came over and read her words back to her. She had quite a burst of inspiration but when she showed him what she’d written there was nothing to see. Her pen had run out: 26 blank pages.

Her story and the response bounced from the Bridport News into the national press because Trish’s family had the idea of phoning the police and asking for the fingerprint section. Over the next six months and in their lunch hours, staff at Dorset Police HQ recreated Trish’s missing pages from the impressions her pen had left on the paper. These were kind people who knew they could do something practical and and decided they would do it too. So far, so heart-warming.

Last week’s update was another matter. Trish has finished her novel, Grannifer’s Legacy, but now she has terminal cancer. No treatment offered, except care. She’d love her novel to be published, perhaps in time for her mother’s 90th birthday in May. If Trish has that long.

Who brought this to the Bridport News? Trevor Chambers. A kind man, a mathematician, retired, who started off as a volunteer driver for the Blind Club and ended up being the entertainment too, singing and playing the guitar. He wondered was there anybody out there who could help? And asked them to print his phone number.

I closed the paper. I opened it again. Sometimes things are happening far away and you feel helpless. I thought, I don’t know if I could help. And I told myself: be realistic – you could do something.

Before I called Trevor, I tried Facebook and immediately two of my former students responded. If there wasn’t any possibility for traditional publishing – tricky given the timescale, then maybe self-publishing was the answer. I’m sure a bunch of us could get together and help, was one comment. But how? I wondered. And another – with self-publishing she could have a book in her hands within a couple of weeks. I’m sure – but for me that would still be a steep learning curve. Maybe we needed someone close by.

So I tried a local contact, Frances Colville, who’s a writer and professional proofreader. She runs a writing group and has put together some anthologies. But sadly, the person who brought those to publication has gone abroad. She herself was very busy with her daughter’s wedding coming up very soon. Why not try Magic Oxygen, a company in Lyme Regis? They were next on my list. I spoke to Simon West, told him the story. He was interested but they were too busy. If only it were later in the summer. But he offered me an hour of his time the following day, to talk me through the process. Frances meanwhile, had emailed a PS, with a kind offer of free proofreading.

Then I tried another person I knew who lived locally and had self-published a book, not knowing if I would get an answer. And at last I phoned Trevor. ‘I just wondered if you’d heard from anyone.’ I asked. ‘Not apart from you,’ he said. ‘You’re the first.’ I’m so rarely the first for anything. Hang back and see what happens – that’s my usual style.

We had a good chat. The novel had been typed up by another kind woman called Carole and he’d gone through it and checked it for grammar and punctuation and hacked down a forest of exclamation marks. But how to go about the next step? I told him of my small experience with publishers and that there were people who knew about self-publishing if he wanted to go down that route, and about all the offers of help that had come in so far. We both felt something could be done.

By the next morning there were all kinds of choices. Trevor and I had made friends on Facebook and he was able to join in with the talk on my timeline and had an offer to take the novel from word document to publication from the friend who’d talked about it the day before. The other friend came back and asked what genre it was, to see if she could use her industry contacts. Trish’s family posted that they had set up a Facebook page and a Justgiving page for crowdfunding.

Less than a week later, the total had reached £600. And  the same day, Magic Oxygen rang back to say they’d love to help, after all. And although there were by then other offers, it looks like that’s the way it will go. So Trish will have her novel, I hope, very soon.

Still I found it hard to stop asking around, just in case. Even my local butchers, R.J. Balson and Son, were happy to give up shop time to tell me about their experiences of bringing out their own book to celebrate 500 years in business. Another possible avenue – with the services of a local printer – although the time scale, though fast enough in normal terms, might still have been too long. More people than could help, wanted to help. Sometimes with information, something with money, sometimes with something practical.

In my experience, when you know someone doesn’t have very long to live, you’d do almost anything to bring them a piece of  happiness. You can give comfort and look after someone but still you feel helpless in a way because you can’t change what’s going to happen. You can only try to make it easier. Perhaps we’re all being kind to ourselves by trying to help someone else. It doesn’t really matter – it just seems like a good time to say that people can be kind. They do want to help – if only they know how.

So there it is. The offers are still coming in: the self-published local author told me about her experiences and said get back to me if I can help. A friend asked a friend and he sent me a checklist of what to do in self-publishing that made it all look straightforward. Another friend offered to make an audiobook. I’ve learned a lot in the last week. I don’t know that these count as random acts – perhaps not. As it turns out it wasn’t even an official #RAK  day in the UK – that will be on November 13, which is also World Kindness Day. But I know that the big news is, so many people will help if they can; so many people are kind.

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Image: Bumblebee on Rose. David Wagner. Shutterstock

 

Bloggety-Blog

My books page is mostly about fiction – my blog posts are mainly about facts. Facts or factual stories that have interested me. I hope that something here will interest you. And there will be opinions, because it’s a fact that people do have them. 

I plan to give writing advice, particularly for the would-be writer, the solitary writer, and the writer who deals with small independent publishers. I’m interested in health and health troubles, right along the spectrum from tip-top condition to after death: physical, mental, social, spiritual. And there will have to be a place for those category-defying topics which just thrust themselves upon you. Perhaps I shall call that ‘News’.

There’s room to comment. Please do.