Nicola Griffith's Blog, page 85

Feeling my roots and loving it

I took this photo yesterday afternoon, tootling about in Leeds. It is beautiful. I wish I'd got a photo on Wednesday evening driving north to Stockton-on-Tees. The sun was setting over the valleys of Yorkshire--Hild's native heath, and mine. It was golden hour; cows and pasture and stone walls lit like like honey.

In Hild's time there wouldn't have been tarmac'd roads. The cows would have been smaller, and fewer, the walls non-existent--probably. But the rise and fall of the land would have been the same.

And the Stockton Central Library was lovely: a sunlit room, bright comfy chairs, and wine! There were plenty of smart, engaged readers, two of whom were nuns, Sisters of St Hilda.

We had a great evening. We talked about Bede, and gender, and politics, and hagiography, about how and why I chose to write about Hild, about the historical socio-economic divide between North and South.

Northern identity is becoming a clear theme of these events. It was true at the Calderdale Central Library in Halifax, too. I find that about half an hour into the evening the slight American overly evaporates from my accent and I become quite Yorkshire.

Tomorrow I'm in Ilkley at the Literature Festival--more Yorkshire. And last night I was in a bar drinking Ilkley beer, and Kelley ate Yorkshire Blue cheese. I am feeling my roots, and loving it.

Tonight: Halifax

If you happen to be close to Halifax tonight I'm at the Calderdale central library. Join us—and bring everyone you've ever met! It will be a fine evening.

Thursday 2nd October
Calderdale Library
Central Library, Northgate, Halifax HX1 1UN 
7:00 - 8:00 pm

Tonight: Stockton-on-Tees!

Tonight I'm at the central library in Stockton-on-Tees. Come on down!

Wednesday 1st October
Stockton-on-Tees Library
Church Rd, Stockton-on-Tees TS18 1TU
7:30 - 8:30 pm

This week: Yorkshire!

This week I'm in Yorkshire and Teeside. I'll be spending most of my time with family and friends. But I'm also doing some business, and three events. So if you're in the north, take a look:

Wednesday 1st October
Stockton-on-Tees Library
Church Rd, Stockton-on-Tees TS18 1TU
7:30 - 8:30 pm

Thursday 2nd October
Calderdale Library
Central Library, Northgate, Halifax HX1 1UN 
7:00 - 8:00 pm

Sunday 5th October
Ilkley Literature Festival
St Margaret's Hall, Ilkley LS29 9QL 
4:30 - 5:30 pm

I love doing these things. I hope you'll join me.

Don't experiment on guests

A conversation we had in our house many years ago:

"I think I'll try that brand new recipe when so-and-so and such-and-such come over tomorrow." 

"Only if we cook it for ourselves today. Because it's rude to experiments on guests."

Don't experiment on guests. If you have invited someone into your space for an evening, make sure you know what you're doing and can steer them safely through it. This applies tenfold if you've never met them before.

If you are inviting people, you are the host. Being host comes with certain responsibilities. One of those responsibilities is to be alert: to how your guests feel, how your experiment is landing. When you invite guests it's about them, not you. If, for example, we're talking about dinner, and people have toyed with it, pushed it to one side, talked loudly about the wine, then the thing to do is to laugh, say, Well, that didn't work! apologise, and order takeaway. Because if your guests have arrived hungry, you need to feed them. Or they will go away annoyed.

Alternatively, ask their permission. Say, I've never done this before is it okay if I try it on you? There are times when your guests will say, Sure! And there are times when your guests will say, Y'know, our workload is currently hellish, now is not a good time. If you surprise people with something half-baked, you are not respecting their time and energy and you are fucking with their expectations. No one likes to have their time wasted, particularly after a hard day.

When I teach writing, I often use the host metaphor. The reader wants to trust you. As a writer, it's you job to help them. So welcome them, set context, let them know what to expect. Make them comfortable, make sure they feel as though you know what you're doing. Once they know they're in good hands, they relax. When the reader relaxes you can do what you want with them, take them places they've never been in ways they'd never considered—because you have made it clear you know where you going and they trust you.

So here's a personal, professional, and creative tip: do not experiment on guests. Ever.

Grief and its anniversaries

Today is the 26th anniversary of my little sister Helena's death. This is a repost from four years ago. Nicola and Helena, Hull, 1982Just over a week ago it was the 22nd anniversary of my little sister Helena's death. I forgot. I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I'm glad that grief--this grief; I have others--is no longer front-and-centre in my life. On the other, well, I forgot. And she was my sister, knit through my life for 24 years, the one I went to the ends of the earth to protect and, in the end, failed.
In Stay, Aud says, "Grief changes everything. It's a brutal metamorphosis." And it does, it is. Helena's death taught me that. When I heard the news of her death I felt as though someone had torn off my skin, just yanked it off like a glove. I felt red raw. Everything--other people, sound, breath--felt like sharp salt. For a while, I think I understood what it meant to be mad.

So. I forgot. And yet, physically, I knew I should be paying attention to something. For several days that week I was emotionally labile: what Kelley, kindly, labels mercurial and what others, less politely, call being a moody bastard. For days I felt irritable, morose, jumpy. I felt unmoored. I had no idea what was going on. No idea why I felt so tense. Someone suggested that perhaps turning fifty was a bigger deal than I'd thought. I shook my head; I knew it wasn't that. Fifty is just a number.

Then I realised: it's the anniversary that counts. And then I understood what anniversary I'd missed--consciously. My body knew. Our bodies always know. We remember, deep down, on the cellular level, what happened long ago on an almost-autumn day, when the air looked and felt the same, when the sun was slanting at that angle, when the leaves rustled with just that still-green-but-beginning-to-dry whisper. We feel uneasy. We know something wicked this way comes. And, yes, this anniversary is bound up with my birthday.

Here's an excerpt from my memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner notes to a writer's early life. It's 1988, September. Kelley and I had recently met at Clarion and then had to part.  Kelley was back in Georgia and I had returned to Hull, England (to the house in Stepney Lane I shared with my partner, Carol), half mad already with missing her. Carol knew, of course, but none of my family did. It was too private. So, one afternoon on my 28th birthday, love, grief, and birthday got melded forever. This is how it happened.

On Kelley's birthday, just nine days before mine, I phoned her for the first time and for five precious minutes, all I could afford, I clutched my grey plastic phone to the bones of skull and jaw and listened to the marvel of the pressure of her breath on the handset microphone membrane, of her hand repositioning itself on the receiver. 

The next day, on the same grey plastic phone, I listened to my mother tell me Helena was dead.

It was about dinner time. Carol answered the phone. She passed it to me silently. 

As my mother spoke I felt a vast internal shudder. This was not the soft shock of falling in love, but a much more brutal metamorphosis. My bedrock shifted, and the world was poised to fall on my head. I took a breath--I remember that breath, every slow-motion swell and stretch of muscle and expansion of cartilage--and stepped to one side.

She's dead, I told myself. Cope.

So I coped. I switched to automatic pilot--very calm, very reasonable; I told Mum I'd be with them the next afternoon. In the morning I went to work, and negotiated time off, and took a train to Leeds, where I began the process of phoning relatives, and helping to bring Helena's body back from Australia, and mediating the sudden deadly family squabble about whether she should be buried or burnt.

Two days later, the autopilot failed. I felt as though someone had ripped my skin off: red raw, so exposed I couldn't bear light, noise, smells, people.

Helena was woven into my earliest memories. I couldn't understand a world without her in it. Helena would never read my first novel. She would never meet Kelley. She would never see America. Everything I ever did from now on would be less real in a particular way because she wasn't there to share it. My life in England felt even more dreamlike now because Helena, the only one in the world with whom I'd shared much of it, had vanished.

I had already felt as though I were living in a strange double-printed story. Now I felt unmoored, lost between worlds.

Kelley was farther away than ever. I wrote to her, told her about Helena, but I knew she wouldn't get the letter for about ten days; her world strode on without me at her side.

On my birthday, my entire family showed up at Stepney Lane to celebrate, to prove that life goes on. I let them in our seating-for-four living room. I made tea. I sat on the carpet in a daze.

The phone rang. Everyone--Mum, Dad, Anne, Carolyn, Julie, Carol--looked at the phone, looked at me: Who was this outsider disturbing our grief? I answered.

"Hi, honey," Kelley said. "I love you, Happy Birthday! How..."

"Stop," I said. "Wait. Helena's dead."

A moment of satellite-bounce silence. "Dead? Oh my god. Are you--"

"Everyone's here." None of them even knew who the stranger on the phone was. She wasn't real. But they were all looking up from their tea: they had heard the tone of my voice. Something was happening. "I can't talk."

"I love you," she said.

"Yes," I said. "Oh, yes."

Carol put down her tea and left the room.

"Everyone's here. I have to go."

I put the phone down and met the Griffith family basilisk stare. I stared right back. It had now been seven weeks since I'd last seen Kelley--longer than the time I'd spent with her at Clarion.

When I remember the anniversary of Helena's death consciously I can label and identify the weirdnesses, I can take into account what's connected to the here-and-now and what is being reflected through that emotional wormhole to the past. When I forget, it's much harder. I don't think I'll forget again.

Birthdays and webs

Today is as brilliant as any in early summer. But the air has that sharp clarity of autumn, and the spiders are not fooled, they know what time of year it is.

It's Kelley's birthday. We have a magnificent Bordeaux awaiting our attention...

Miscellaneous links

Three things:
Two juicy reviews:
The Critical Flame:
"Virginia Woolf’s Mistress Joan, on the pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, becomes absorbed in the details of her surroundings and in the “strange, merry stories” her fellow pilgrims have to tell. But as she approaches the statue of the Virgin at the top of the hill, Joan’s mind becomes filled “with an image that was so large and so white that no other thought had room there.” Christianity, it would appear, whites out the detail. This totalizing energy becomes the root of the tension between Hild and Paulinus: between Hild’s feminine attention to detail and the Crow’s single-minded masculine devotion to an idea—the conversion of Britain to the master narrative of Christianity. Hild’s power, based on observation and interpretation of a multiplicity of details, threatens to subvert the Crow’s authority, which is based on enforcing a single dominant ideology."

Armarium Magnum:
"Like the Beowulf-Poet, Griffith evokes a world that is hard, harsh, rich and elaborate. Edwin's royal hall at Yeavering is brought to life with descriptions with more than a touch of Hrothgar's Heorot in Beowulf. The kings warriors - the gesithas of his retinue and the core of his warband - glitter with arm rings, rich belt fittings and ring-hilted swords. And Edwin wears a garnet ring that evokes the rich garnet decorations from Sutton Hoo. There a no trolls and dragons (though there are dangers and terrors enough in Hild's world), but this novel is has the worlds of both Beowulfand Sutton Hoo as its backdrop and its recreation of this culture is intricate and effective as a result."

Goodly sized chunks of my Locus interview are now available outside the paywall for your delectation and delight: "A lot of my work is about the body, and how we feel, and how the world works on our bodies and our bodies work on the world. Setting is my primary joy as a writer: the world and the body in it. I think story comes from that interface, where body meets world. Sort of the way some people think mind is born at the interface of world and brain. Whether you want to call it the problem, or the circumstance, or the situation, or the setup, the place a story begins is the world."
A reminder that I'm in the UK at the beginning of October: events in the North (mostly but not entirely Yorkshire) and three in London. I'll probably read a snippet of Hild II at some point so come and listen.

Teaching HILD

I've been hearing about colleges in the US and UK that are teaching Hild from a variety of perspectives: history of English, gender and history, landscape history, and so on. This pleases me enormously. 

I'm a big fan of what in the corporate world are called communities of practice, so if you're teaching Hild please let me know, and if you like I can two things:
Put you in touch with others doing the sameAnswer any questions you might have about the bookOr I could just beam to myself, and hug the notion of this thing I made from a few stray thoughts being out in the world and taught.

Many of my other books have been taught, too, but for some reason this one is special. Perhaps because St Hilda herself is so associated with education. It just feels right. So thank you. 

Evening lake

We had dinner at a friend's the other night high above Lake Washington (on the Seattle side). Fine Rioja, delicious Korean beef, great conversation. A drive home in moonlight. 

Poor photo but a lovely evening. Only a few of them left this summer. We'll be seizing every one.