J K Rowling and her Cloak of Invisibility

I was intrigued by J K Rowling’s recent flirtation with her cloak of invisibility. There will be plenty of people – particularly publishing folk – who will dissect and analyse her motives, as well as sniffing out a cynical marketing exercise that will of course, in time, make money.

I do have to be honest – the industry that Rowling began has given me my house and the food I eat. My ex other half worked on Potter for ten years and it was fascinating, but more so for the tactile talent it stirred up amongst designers and artists, who had a vision that was spurred from a reasonably-sized book. The creativity of crafting wands and Rowling’s early involvement with drawings and notes was genuinely exciting. But talk of it was forbidden at home - it grew so big that it was too overwhelming at times. I went to a few Potter parties and again, if I’m honest, I was bored. Actors are lovely but they ‘are’ rather than have vast and complex things to say that have not been written for them. Film folk too sometimes have a hard edge or they live in a rarified world where the veneer is important, but nothing is deep. So when I finally got to talk to Rowling – a fellow writer - I felt a sense of relief.

She has been typecast so much – so many have built a sense of romantic poverty about her life. People flutter around her, waiting for their good fortune to arrive from a touch of her hand. So what did I ask her? About Wales of course. She went to school in Chepstow and grew up in that area. I was a Tintern teenager and although the valley is lovely, I can fully understand the need to create worlds of your own, to cloud-dream lying on your back in a field. The penultimate film recreated the forest in the Severn Valley and so I asked her if she missed Wales. I had a lot of champagne inside me and she had more – but the joyful way she talked about Wales was real, very passionate.

But I didn’t ask her about the name Hermoine. My mother – who had an antique shop in Tintern, not far from Chepstow, had her name across the shop front. Her name is Hermoine – not Hermione – my grandfather spelt it incorrectly on the birth certificate. But I often wondered if J K Rowling made the connection. Yet I never want to know – to be disappointed, perhaps.

But drunk or not, she struck me as intelligent, mischievous and playful. In some ways, it’s sad that people can only see her as money as a ‘standard’ for writers. ‘You can be the next J K Rowling’ is the most vulgar and depressing thing I hear from non-literary folk and even, shame on them, some bookish souls. Money is important of course – it cushions you from some pain – but literary excellence is better, surely?

So I understand why she wrapped herself in Gaibraith (which means ‘stranger’ but also is a Scottish estate agency.) For a moment she could walk in the world with a moustache and a big hat pulled down over her face and people would still say ‘Handsome fellow.’ Writers are about words, the quiet internal worlds. But successful writers – where we know their faces and every aspect of their lives – invite huge amounts of criticism and some jealous sneering. Many attack the work as sport and it often goes beyond literary criticism. So the production of this work quietly let her know that she can write, that other writers rate her without all the baggage of the Rowling name. She has broken out of the typecast and instead of the main part in the panto, she was for a while the back end of the horse, watching the audience from a hole in the cloth.

Many discussions will be made and now of course, like people who forensically analyse the darkness in pop songs, meanings will be made for her Cuckoo. But a cuckoo too is of course in disguise and the over-grown nest baby and by the time it is revealed, it is too late. I’m sure that there was lots of playful knowing symbolism that made her chuckle when she was writing the book.

She is not the first writer to write under another name and if you can afford to experiment as a writer, then why not? It worked for the wonderful George Eliot in a sexist age. When writers become a clumsy and monstrous brand – they surely crave some delicacy and impartial judgment of the words they spill on the page? Let’s love our writing – be the best we can and stop being jealous of those who actually get off their backsides – or should that be settle down on their backsides – and write! Not to be the next Rowling, not to copy any particular voice or see gold in the print. Just to write because you have twitchy fingers and some tiny little fictional people keep matchstick-poking your brain to smear their lives on some paper.

In The Lowlands

Depression is like a dog chasing its tail. But it’s a tail that not even the dog wants. Not really. It is just the compulsive need – a short circuit in the brain – that prevents the dog from leaping up and racing outside to join a world of new. Of vibrant. Of delicious potential.

I now put my hands up and admit that I am deeply depressed. But I am only depressed on certain days, when my Interferon kicks in and the bugger causes this reaction. So I know the cause – it’s a recognised side effect. I don’t want anti-depressants. Really don’t like the idea of a pill-popping Valley of the Dolls existence. I have a bit of an obsessive and compulsive personality but not OCD. They are separate things.

Matt Haig – he of new book The Humans – has spoken out about depression. I saw him launch the book last week and when he was asked by a fellow depression sufferer if he wrote through the low bits, he admitted that he hasn’t had a major low for quite some time. His focus and humour were very – oh I hate the word ‘inspiring’ – but yes, they were.

In fact, I do love the way writers are formed. It is rarely a linear process. They get battered as they go along, something is chipped or they stumble. Or they deviate into various daft adventures. Where else can you see a CV that is proud of ‘I was a circus performer at gunpoint, ran cigarettes for the Gestapo and plucked chickens in Margate’ etc? But writers do need not to be neat creatures, if they are to find little strange moments, characters that you would never meet in an accountancy firm. Of course, there are those who live a neat carefully controlled life who can write purely from imagination – particularly famous fantasy writers. But they are rare. Things spark from wandering down wrong streets.

I have been down some bloody awful streets. Taken risks, been in relationships with unsuitable folk, been reckless. There were times, when I met a golden-haired Oxford graduate that I felt ‘Jeez – how messy my life is and how blessed and Brideshead brilliant their life must be.’

So depression is a dark street and sometimes, a rough hand pulls me into a street littered with fag butts the smell of failure. But stories also come in those times – they just may need a little lighter shading in the good times. Dark is good but some stories are coloured in by oblivion – so much so you can hardly see them.

I mentioned the dog and that depression can be a debilitatingly circular affliction. You worry and thoughts magnify, repeat and then hurt you so much you can’t function. It’s bloody annoying because you end up being a bore, melodramatic. Yesterday I went to a Quaker thing in London. Religion can be boring too – if people with shine in their eyes try and persuade you that their happiness can be your happiness, I run away. Quakerism is never like this. I am an atheist Quaker and this is fine. All manner of things are fine in Quakerism. It’s a Society of Friends and activism is a huge part of it all – whether it be political or compassionate. It’s also about thinking, challenging preconceptions. One Quaker talked about his bisexuality and how the Society of Friends now embraces same sex marriages. Another fellow talked about his militant atheism and how he loves to ‘embrace the anarchy.’

It felt like an intellectual movement, rather than an incense and robes kind of religion. The latter is fine for some but really, I’ve done that and I have the ‘Bloody Guilty All My Life’ t-shirt. But finding a group of folk who share your world view is also about joy, finding it wherever you can.

So – what was I talking about – oh yes, depression. Yeah, it’s annoying but I seem to be pushing myself to productivity. Most writers do. It almost becomes a ‘I haven’t got depression or alcoholicism– good grief I can’t be a writer!’ If you are not in the gloomy club….tut, tut.

But when you are in that low place, your skin is softer. I was hit hard recently by someone beloved telling me that ‘You were special, but not that special.’

Someone who can kick a dog (chasing its tail) when it’s down – may reveal much about a person that no further comment should be made. It helped me let go of them completely – hoorah! No one that heartless deserves much from me. Special is subjective and we shouldn’t really be hostage to anyone else’s approval. Special is what you do, how you treat people, that soft chicken fillety thing in your chest. Trying not to sound like a shy over-sensitive snuffly schoolteacher in thick-can’t-see-you-without-them-glasses – but YOU ARE ALL SPECIAL.

News?

I am writing a novel: The Modelmaker’s Daughter. Trying to run along with a 1,000 word challenge with my writing group Reading Writers. Keep getting sidetracked by various travel writing and article things.

Have had article on Abruzzo published in The Independent on Sunday: http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/europe/abruzzo-poetry-in-motion-in-central-italy-8603826.html

The best thing about that?

My guide Alessio – who is mentioned quite a lot in that piece – sent me a message: ‘Brave, Maestro!’ To put his beautiful country in a British newspaper, made him incredibly happy. You can warm your hands on other people’s happiness, can’t you?

I have been shortlisted for The Bath Short Story Award, which felt like some bloody achievement.

White blood cell count is very low but I treasure the ones I have. I will treat them well and try to keep them away from stress. Maybe I shouldn’t take them down too many dark streets. In fact, I should be a better writer and not mix my metaphors. Dogs chasing tails and dark streets indeed! Ah who cares. They are my words, my indulgences, my legacy.

Write well and prosper, folks!

ALL THE LOST CHILDREN

It has been a crazy few weeks. Whenever I have been tired, I have remembered greater folk than me. Did Scott of the Antarctic seek a comfortable chair and a Hobnob? Did Shackleton watch bad TV? No because they pushed up through unpleasantness and strain – to achieve great things.

Not at all comparable – but I have challenged myself to do interesting stuff and none more interesting than going to Downing Street. Me – an ex-anarchist – walking the stairs where many decision-makers' slippers have trodden. But this was important – an event for RAILWAY CHILDREN

http://www.railwaychildren.org.uk/campaigns/help-make-the-invisible,-visible/

A group of mostly women (as we had been selected through our connection with Mumsnet, the very vocal parenting site that often makes the news) met first at Horseguards Parade Hotel – for lurid macaroons and to meet several other charities around the country who deal with children on the streets:

www.streetwork.org.uk
www.safeatlast.org.uk
www.aberlour.org.uk

These lost children are invisible to most. Outreach workers, who can see them, are out there all the time – not only checking on anyone obviously homeless, but identifying children at risk.

Statistics can be powerful – but these just made me sad:

‘Every year thousands of children across the UK, India and East Africa run away or are forced to leave homes that have become unbearable through poverty, abuse, violence and neglect.

In the UK a child runs away from home every 5 minutes. That's 100,000 children under 16 a year, and 70% of those children are never even reported missing by those who are supposed to love and protect them.
Unwanted, unloved and often abused, children find themselves alone and at risk on the streets simply because there's nowhere else to go and no one left to turn to.

The streets are often even more dangerous and frightening than the homes these children were desperate to escape. Violence becomes a way of life; something to be endured and often a necessary means of survival. Sexual abuse and exploitation is rife. Drug use often seeps into the lives of children living on the streets and becomes impossible to avoid; drugs are often the only available escape from the hopelessness of their situation. These factors are the same across the three continents in which we work.

With no means of support or protection, these children fade into the background of the streets, often unseen by societies who either deny their existence or regard them as the 'norm'.’


So many of these children are under twelve years old. Imagine not even having a dozen years on the planet under your belt and to be out in the world. Vulnerable, maybe superficially tough but on the inside, where it matters, to be tender and lost. Truly disturbing.

The flip side wass hearing about the incredible workers who put their time into these projects. They radiated enthusiasm and sincerity when they explained their work. It must never be forgotten how vulnerable a child is out there.

Downing Street is a tiny political village. Policemen laughed with us but their hands never left their guns. Inside the place there is Tardis magic and as you walk up the stairs, you have to stop to look at the handsome Earl of Aberdeen and the many many portraits Prime Ministers who have graced the place. Samantha Cameron came to support the charity. She is not her husband and is a person in her own right. But it still felt a little uncomfortable, especially when I talked to her. I felt a bit better when I chatted to Andy, who gives talks for Railway Children and has been at the rough end of things – in care, waking up with another strange tattoo he can't remember. He told me that being in a Tory den was nothing – there were plenty of places where he had felt a lot, lot dirtier. But it’s all about the kids to him. Theresa May arrived as we were leaving but was not impressed by a gaggle of women giggling on the steps.

Fanastic charity, great experience.


I have also:

Helped to judge a short story competition with Reading Writers

Auditioned unsuccessfully for Blithe Spirit

Rejoined my playwrites group

Attended a Writers and Artists’ event at Bloomsbury and spent time with wonderful writers Vanessa Gebbie and Tania Hershman

Said goodbye to someone and truly meant it – a door closed and locked firmly

Met a member of great Indie band The Real Tuesday Weld at a gothic and gin-pickled event called London Bone (which I will blog about shortly).


Exhausted. Communing now with my pillow but still thinking of all those children out there. Some stories are coming too...always a good thing...

The Society Club in Soho - What a Night!

On Saturday, while sitting Last Supper style at The Society Club in Soho, I talked to Tania Hershman about a book she had read on the power of the introvert. It was a fine night – in a pockety, vibe-laden corner of Soho. There were dogs – tiny little ones and a happy-gloomy bulldog, who were taken away before the literary performances by a tall boy-man in a black suit, with otter hair. One was left – Foxy – who barked only sometimes but was zen mostly.

But it’s a interesting thought – that we all fall into various levels of extrovert/introvert comfort zones. A writer, by their very nature – has to live in the mind for some considerable period of time. But then hermit land will not sell books – so the writer has to emerge, blinking – to pump hands, flash teeth and look interested when dull people ask ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ Is there any smart answer? Perhaps to elaborately mime pulling them down from trees, or something equally sarcastic.

Saturday was immense. Tania of course but also James Meek, Jane Rogers and Alex Preston. Alex read an unpublished story about a literate, angst-infested dog. James Meek – who had apparently only just finished writing his story but it sounded slick, cleverly-shaped. Tania read the title story from her collection, which she said ‘got more laughs than usual’ – plus treated us to three other stories. Tania is a natural performer and shines when reading her work. Jane Rogers really showed us an unreliable narrator – but unreliable because the narrator was losing her power to remember as she slipped into dementia.

Four writers and much to learn from all of them – as they stepped out into the world to be extroverts – or at least to share things created in a quiet place.

The Society Club is a marvel and there is more to come as they further champion the short story.

Paul McVeigh’s blog is here too, plus some pictures. I am in one of them…but it might be like ‘spot the ball’:

http://paulmcveigh.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/whats-story-becomes-word-factory.html?spref=tw

PRIVATE LIVES

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/poet-sharon-olds-scoops-ts-eliot-prize-for-confessional-work-about-her-husbands-affair-8451387.html


The news that Sharon Olds has won the T S Eliot Prize for a work that mines her experiences of betrayal – a husband leaving her after three decades, raises an interesting element of the creative process. What chemistry occurs in the creative brain – not all brains but some – that percolates negative elements and like Rumpelstiltkin then makes straw tragedy into ingots of resonant prose?

Olds’ work intrigues and seeing just one quote from the book:

‘I did not know him,/ I did not work not to lose him, and I lost him’

makes me see how raw and powerful her feelings are still – but how powerfully she has translated her loss. It is controlled – reminding me of method acting, where emotions are used but they are never allowed to take over the professionalism of reading the script.

Of course – it is not logical or fair to say that writers and artists who enjoy fortuitous lives, in the arms of partners who adore them perhaps, are bland and barren. This is just not true. Many writer friends in particular seem to have beautiful and productive personal lives. Their partners or family give them space, the impetus to create. Some understandably wish to make a division between private and public lives – so we may never know what makes them tick. They need their enigma – they feel exposed without it.

So comfort and discomfort can produce good work in equal measure. It is work of the imagination, after all. But when we are thrown a bad hand, like a nasty card sharp chucking things at us from a speeding car – we either throw it away or shuffle it a little.

I have always felt that poets are different animals – pain and suffering does induce some peculiar type of reaction – like a twitch in the synapses that cannot rest. I once wrote – in a review of the wonderful Irish poet Nuala Ní Chonchúir’s book – that poets are more alive than ordinary folk. I truly believe that – it is their curse and their gift. They see things far below the surface of live as the rest of us hurry along – like veins beneath the smoothest of skins.

I have shared – perhaps cryptically at times – some negative things that have happened in my life. In fact, I have lymphoma – manageable at present – but I have been through experiences that have been horrifying, but have fascinated me at the same time. Losing hair, going through odd machines to see if a lump that appears might kill me, being naked with lead goggles in a room full of strangers – while a nurse inappropriately plays ‘Having the Time of My Life’ from Dirty Dancing.

And then, when it is finally under control at least – with a strong chemo drug – the man I spent twenty years of my life loving and supporting, decides that future with someone ill was too traumatic. He wanted freedom from the responsibility. Flippantly, I can say fair enough.

I wanted to die, frankly. I could see no future. But then a light ignited in that unnecessary damp bitterness and hate that kept rising in my throat and threatening to poison me. Write. Write. Fury. Reach out to people. Join things. Help people. Write. Write.

I still hurt and I will carry it always. It is a scar that opens to a cold wind all too often. But I am busy:

• Winning the 2013 Don Louth Writer of the Year Award, run by Reading Writers www.readingwriters.wordpress.com

• Writing blogs for a friend’s advertising company

• Writing articles for magazine The Simple Things

• Penning another travel article for The Independent on Sunday

• Planning a travel writing workshop and writer’s day for Reading Writers

• Writing the arts/books pages of Wolfprint, the magazine for www.ukwolf.org - which includes book reviews, poems and articles about fascinating conservation folk – such as an arctic explorer and cult writer Glen Duncan.

• Pitching ideas

• Writing plays for the Prospect Theatre Writers’ Group

• Attending as many literary events as possible, including Windsor’s Book Swap, Short Story Aloud (Oxford)…..anything where writers are…

• Mentoring a friend and encouraging her ambitions – then swelling with pride when she gains more confidence

• Proofreading

• Applying to work part-time with the Society for Storytelling


I am far from rich. I am far from happy. But it is a fair enough approximation of happiness to get me through. Writing sometimes feels like flames from the fingers. It soothes, it transports. You can see by its light.

So good luck to Sharon Olds. I shall raise a glass to her. It sounds like a work I would really want to read.