Ruth Hartley's Blog: Storyteller, page 3

The stories behind my stories

All my work over many years

Right now, my stories are in danger of vanishing from the world. Does that
matter? Ought I stop them disappearing? Does anyone care, except me? Here is my
account of why I wrote my stories and how much of my life they’ve taken up. The books are not in the order they were written or published – they’re in the order that I first conceived them. They can be found on Amazon as paperbacks and eBooks.

What are novels for?

Ah – this was a fun coincidence. I was starting a post about my books when this article by Jacob Brogan appeared in The Washington Post. He writes about Joseph Epstein, an eminent American literary critic, who has written a book that asks if we need novels. Well – I need novels – good ones of course – and I want you to read mine naturally – and they are good. Epstein needs novels. He suggests that novels guarantee our access to a “more complex view of life, its mystery, its meaning, its point.” – and yes – my novels do that! That is why I wrote them and why you’ll enjoy them. However, I’m moving the discussion onto why the writer writes – not only to “improve” the mind of the reader ( if that is not an irony and a joke!)but because stories matter and must be told not just for the reader’s sake but for the writer’s sake too. Do we find our friends, mentors, soulmates and maps to our world inside novels? Is this why we need them?

Four children alone in the Amazon Rain forest

There was good news. Four children had survived a plane crash and 40 days wandering in the Amazon jungle.They were children who had knowledge and experience of nature but they were weak and hungry when they were found. This is a profound lesson for all humans. We are human animals. We are part of nature and our survival depends on understanding and working with nature. We can learn from these children. They are Lesly ,13, Soleiny, 9, Tien, 4, and Cristin, 1

A bad Mother and an African village

Victims

The media are currently running stories about victims of poor parenting. Everyone has had mothers and fathers and was parented somehow by somebody. We know ourselves through understanding our families and parents. Unquestionably there are children who are victims and who have suffered, but there are also those who survive enormous difficulties and who still manage to forgive and love and built valuable relationships with people who failed as parents.

A migrant story

Back door work entrance

This is a story about doors and wages and a migrant. It ends with a death. A migrant is a person who moves from one place to another in order to find work or better living conditions. Who has never or not done that?

Long ago at the start of things

It was 1973. Mike and I had been one year in Siavonga, Zambia, and a bit of a year in Lusaka. Zambia was just entering its 9th. year as a new Republic. We went there to improve our financial situation. Everything was changing – everything was going to be different, but we had no idea how that would manifest itself. I had been 6 years in London ,but had grown up in apartheid South Africa and rural Rhodesia. I knew very little about Zambia and my radical political idealism was only theory– not yet put it into practice. I had much to discover and learn and what would Zambia teach me?

Another back door?

The Book of Memory by Petina Gappah

New Year in another country

Petina Gappah – photograph from the Guardian interview

On New Year’s Day we fled from France across the snow-covered Pyrenees pursued by stormy winds and heavy rain. There we wandered along empty twisting roads among ruined and isolated stone villages and ancient monasteries in the  brutal mountains of Spanish Aragon. In our hotel room the television showed no news and told no stories so we were free to lie down in silence and read the books we unpacked from our suitcases. John was reading Lost History, a book about the culture and science of Islam. I was reading Petina Gappah‘s The Book of Memory, published by Faber and Faber and long-listed for the Baileys women’s prize for fiction. I was soon so absorbed into the story that I couldn’t put the book down and we were almost too late to get supper. In Spain supper goes on so late that missing it is nearly impossible. It’s an indication of how much I was enjoying The Book of Memory

Chinongwa Reviewed

Chinongwa by Lucy Mushita is a timeless story. It is beautifully written and an easy fluent read.

An extraordinary book

This is quite a statement to make about the story of a skinny, snotty nine-year-old girl child called Chinongwa who lives in a remote village in Zimbabwe as her family become subject to colonialism in the early 1900s. Fundamentally, however, all of us experience significant relationships in the same way as each other no matter who we are or where we live. What Lucy Mushita’s Chinongwa does is add a whole new world and dimension in which we can understand both Chinongwa, her situation and ourselves much better.

Let’s Play Football

The wrong tweet?

Gary Lineker made an error in the tweet that had him cancelled from hosting Match of the Day on the BBC. Delivering her policy statement in the House of Commons, Home Secretary Suella Braverman declared that Britain was being ‘invaded by a huge influx of refugees.’ – there are a hundred million who want to come to Britain – and there are ‘potentially billions of people displaced by war and climate change who – she implies might turn up on our shores.’ In response, Lineker tweeted “There is no huge influx. We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries. This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s . . . ”  

The outcry

There was an outcry from Braverman, the Tories, the BBC and some of the press saying that Lineker should not have mentioned Germany and the Holocaust. There’s some truth in that.  What Lineker ought to have tweeted is this –  “There is no huge influx. We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries. “This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by the British Black Shirts led by Sir Oswald Mosley when the Cable Street Battle took place in London’s East End . . . .”

Poetry and people and the place of women

Poets are an elite species

Where did the idea come that poets are a separate kind of human that is more aesthetically refined, sensitive, better educated and therefore part of an elite? Where did the idea come from that we can’t sing unless taught how to do it? Is this why some of us avoid trying to write poetry and others of us avoid poets in case they are snobs? Who insisted that dancing must be done only in a prescribed pattern and as part of a learned ritual? Who decided that making art must be the work of a genius before it has value and what on earth is a genius anyway? Why is swimming as easy as walking for people who live by water but has to be learned by the rest of us? And while on that subject, why is swimming prescribed for women in certain religions when it’s instinctive for a baby and natural for children? I’m remembering something I hope accurately, that Laurence Durrell wrote about dancing and swimming being linked activities connected with the enjoyment of our sexuality and therefore with our creativity.

Freedom of Speech and truth-telling

The BBC Reith Lectures

I listened to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Reith Lecture on Freedom of Speech on the BBC and I knew I was once again in a world of curiosity and questioning where books are open doors to the whole world. As Adichie said, the essential freedom to be creative is only possible if there is freedom of speech. The Reith lectures were by four people on the subject of President Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. I had felt lost and homeless after our travels in the Middle East ended. We had journeyed through changing landscapes, differing perceptions of life and many other ways of being human and telling truths. My longed-for home seemed to have become a closed and narrow trap. I didn’t feel that I belonged anywhere. Once again I was a citizen of nowhere and not a citizen of the world.