How to turn an author into an engineer - early December 'scenes' - Dianne Hofmeyr

THE STORY MUSEUM – Oxford
A freezing day in Oxford saw a group of authors become engineers at the stroke of a hat! You’ll recognize a few faces as we tried to interpret the spaces that will become the new Story Museum. The outing was devised by Jacky Atkinson and Kim Pickin, Director of the Story Museum, as part of the National Kids Lit Quiz day held in Oxford.

Herded across a snow-stewn courtyard by the enthusiastic Tish Francis, former director of the Oxford Playhouse, through a maze of winding passageways, rooms, halls and vast galleries of the old Oxford Telephone Exchange and finally up to the attics complete with resident spiders, peeling paint taking on the shape of unknown continents and fireplaces that must have once warmed poor starving artists… our imaginations were running wild. Towers could be added! Secret passageways! Peepholes! Escape shutes! A hoist in the courtyard was already in place to act as a gallows!The spaces are ripe to create magic in. The Story Museum won’t be so much a static ‘museum’ as a living, active place to share story and creativity. All the latent engineers can’t wait to be invited back here to be part of the action in creating a story-rich society!

http://www.storymuseum.org.uk/

THE ILLUSTRATION CUPBOARD – London

A few freezing evenings later (London didn’t quite reach the same scale of freezing as the rest of the country) the Illustration Cupboard Gallery in Bury Street, St James was ablaze with colour, light and sparkle (in the proper liquid form!) with their 15th Annual Winter Exhibition and Jane Ray was there signing her latest book out with Frances Lincoln, Ahmed and the Feather Girl … her illustrations a brilliant combination of paint and paper with individual feathers finely cut from patterned paper to create textured collage. A quick visit to the Illustration Cupboard on a dark, cold, wintery afternoon might be just the inspiration needed to get ‘someone’ to buy you a Christmas present.

http://www.illustrationcupboard.com/default_flash.aspx

THE BRAND NEW V&A READING ROOM – London
Not the research rooms inside the V&A, but an off-site, stand alone wine bar/ coffee bar/ reading room/ bookshop all wrapped up into an intimate space on Exhibition Road near the South Ken Tube station that has only been open for a few weeks. It’s filled with an eclectic collection of books, not just V&A editions, and obviously has a book buyer with quirky ideas. Rediscover the delights of browsing and encounter the wonderful and obscure. This is the place to browse through books on lethally toxic plants, a few vintage bindings and graphic novels too with a good glass of Merlot or chilled Pouilly-Fuisse in hand. A bit different to having Starbucks inside your average bookshop. So while the rest of the mob are ice-skating in the cold outside the Natural History Museum, sneak away and take refuge in the new V&A Reading room.
http://www.vandashop.com/shopimages/products/thumbnails/Reading_Room_PR.pdf

http://www.diannehofmeyr.com/

Set Texts - Andrew Strong

Without exception, all of the set texts I studied at school put me off reading literature for a very long time.

Dickens, Austen and Shakespeare: ‘Hard Times’, ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘Hamlet’. Each of them rinsed, squeezed, hung up to dry, until there was nothing left but questions on the text, model answers, the dreary farce that is English literature for most school pupils.

As a child I read superhero comics. I loved all that stuff; the flawed hero, the ridiculous costumes: a perfect preparation for Jane Austen. After comics I read nothing at all. I don’t think I picked up a book for years.

Luckily, I found literature for myself through a curious route: pop music. Every evening, once I’d escaped school, raided the fridge, had a fight with my brother, kicked a ball against a wall for twenty minutes, I would retreat to my bedroom and lose myself in sound.

Music was more noise than anything else, a beautiful aural slush that obliterated the horrors of the day. When things were particularly unpleasant just a song title could whisk me off into a distant realm: John Cale’s ‘Paris 1919’; Nico’s ‘The Marble Index’.

And now and again a single phrase transported me from suburban south Wales into a parallel universe. There are lines from David Bowie’s songs that summoned up images that now, decades later, are still with me.

Millions weep a fountain, just in case of sunrise (‘Aladdin Sane’)

With snorting head he gazes to the shore
Where once had raged a sea that raged no more (‘Drive-In Saturday’)

This isn’t Keats, but I’d had enough of Keats by the time I was fourteen. I needed to create my own world, and I couldn’t do that in the sweat and plimsoll stench of the classroom. At home, with Bowie, a few words would capture a thought and I’d be gone, lost.

These handful of images were a lifeline. I began writing songs, three or four chord constructions vamped on an old Bluthner in the front room. I grew to love the smell of that piano, the polish, the musty waft of the mechanism when I pulled off the panels to make the sound brighter.

And then, when all the exam revision was behind us, pupils were asked if we’d like to contribute something to the school magazine. I submitted some of my song lyrics, rewritten on Basildon Bond with an ancient fountain pen so my words looked like proper poetry, and every one of my efforts was selected for publication. To this day, it felt like the beginning of a new era. Someone was taking my writing seriously.

The meaningful texts of my youth were pop song lyrics. I don’t think of them as literature, but they did more to lead me to writing than ‘Pride and Prejudice’ or ‘Hamlet’. Decades later I’ve grown to love Austen and adore Shakespeare. I’d like to be able to say I’m fond of Dickens too. But two out of three isn’t bad.

The arts - who needs them? Sue Purkiss

Somerset, where I live, is a very beautiful county. (See picture of Glastonbury Tor for example of beauteousness.) It's also very rural. Its only city, Wells, is a pocket Venus, with a population of 10 500. The county town, Taunton, is just that - a town. It is one of the few counties which doesn't have a university. (Bath and Bristol are nearby, but they're not in Somerset.)

So it doesn't have the usual springboards for the arts; it doesn't have very much money. Despite this, there are several small theatres, in Frome, Taunton, Street and Yeovil. There's a group called Takeart, which takes drama round to schools and villages. There are stacks of amazing artists and craftspeople, drawn by the magical landscape of the levels, the hills, woods and streams of Exmoor, the Somerset coast, the Quantocks. And there are writers, of course.

Up until now, the County Council has helped to support the arts. The amount of money involved wasn't huge: £159 000, or 0.0004% of the total budget. (There has never been enough for luxuries such as a literature development officer.) But two days ago, the Conserative led council voted not just to cut the budget by 26% over four years, as had been anticipated: with a fine sweep of the pen, they have decided to cut the arts development budget completely. The only arts projects which will have any support are those which will be able to show a direct economic benefit for the community. Imaginative as they are, organisations such as the theatres and Takeart will find it difficult to plug the holes in their budgets - difficult to persuade other hard-pushed organisations such as the Arts Council to take up the slack.

This seems to be part of a general drift towards a society where the arts are valued only for their direct contribution to the economy. So - universities are to be encouraged by means of funding to favour science over the arts. Students are to pick up the tab for their studies because, after all, they will get a better job because of their degree. There seems to be a notion that artists and thinkers are a luxury, not a necessity in these difficult economic times. Well, I don't believe this is so. Let me quote this, from www.takeart.org:

In Somerset we believe in the transformational power of the arts, their capacity to fire the imagination, their ability to give meaning to our lives and our relationships with each other, a language to enable us to celebrate our common bonds – they empower and enable the 'Big Society'. We also believe all groups in society should be able to access the arts, such as those living in isolated, rural communities or children and young people living in difficult financial circumstances.

Wednesday was a sad day for Somerset. Maybe it's worth considering: why do we remember Ancient Greece? Worthy and important as they no doubt were, is it because of the tax gatherers? Probably not...

Think Herzog - Andrew Strong

Werner Herzog's ‘Heart of Glass’ is a film that still haunts me, long after I first saw it. The actors, famously hypnotised into stilted and glazed performances, play characters struggling to rediscover the recipe for blood red glass, a secret lost when an old glassmaker dies. Without this knowledge the village economy begins to collapse. It is apocalyptic, visionary, idiosyncratic and very, very weird.

There aren't a lot of jokes in ‘Heart of Glass', but like all Herzog’s films, it is extremely funny.

One of Herzog's more recent productions is a documentary about a man who wants to commune with bears. It's a true and tragic story. The bears eat him in the end. They do, really. And then there’s the film in which Herzog eats his shoe, inspirationally titled ‘Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe’.

Herzog's films teeter between the mystical and the insane; between high art and farce.

Whenever I set out to write a book, I watch a little of ‘Heart of Glass’. I want something of that weirdness in everything I do. Ideas for books usually begin with a subtle image: a dilapidated shop, a boy on sunlit steps. I want to create half-worlds in which realities are questioned and undermined.

If my books turn out a little weird (or ‘bonkers’ as one editor put it) then all the better. I realise it gets harder and harder for publishers to accept eccentric books, but I’m not going to write something that I hate, just to please someone who probably doesn’t really want what they are asking for in the first place.

Herzog never worries about what anyone wants. He does what he likes. He has been an outsider all his life, but has produced works of incomparable beauty and strangeness.

In these difficult times it may be that many children’s writers will take stock and decide to write something mainstream; something that will sell. Instead of doing what instinct has us do, we might try and determine a gap in the market, or attempt to have a guess at what will the next big thing. We’ve had wizards and vampires, what next, wombats?

I'm lucky, I have a day job, it affords me the luxury of being able to write what I like, and if I don't get published, I don't starve. But I still want to encourage everyone to Think Like Werner Herzog, do something extreme, and do it with all the energy you can muster. Be yourself. Be weird. You already are anyway. Just admit it.

A Dream Imprisoned: Sue Purkiss

Five years ago, I wrote a book called The Willow Man. It was about three children who were 'stuck' in different ways, and it told the story of how they became unstuck. The catalyst in this process was the Willow Man: a figure forty feet tall, woven out of willow.

I knew children who were stuck in the ways I describe in the book. And I knew the Willow Man. Ever since the year 2000, he had stood beside the M5, just outside Bridgwater. Thousands of people drove past every day, and like me, they gazed at him and marvelled. This is how I described him at the beginning of the book:

His powerful torso was twisted at a slight angle to his massive thighs, so that his small head gazed with a mixture of defiance and contempt across the concrete ribbon of the motorway. He seemed to be perfectly balanced on one leg: the other was bent, as if at any moment he might choose to complete the step and take his freedom...

He was created by Serena de la Hey as part of the millenium celebrations. She knew he wouldn't last forever: how could he, when he was made out of living willow? I don't think she guessed what an iconic figure he would become: the north of England had the great metal figure, the Angel of the North - but now we had our own angel, the Angel of the South. He stood outlined against the sky, emblematic of the power of life and nature.

About a year later, I was driving down the M5 and I saw that something terrible had happened. All that was left of the Willow Man was a steel skeleton. Vandals had set fire to him, and all that careful craft, all that artistry which had been woven in with the willow - all of this was turned to ashes. There was a public outcry, a positive howl of sadness and outrage: the Willow Man must be rebuilt. And he was.

He became an emblem of Somerset; his picture has appeared on leaflets, on posters, on the sides of trains. He was a part of the landscape - an expression of the landscape. But now the Willow Man is under threat from another direction. Well - from all directions. In fact he's not just under threat: it seems as if the battle is already lost. Developers have succeeded where vandals failed. On one side of him is a massive complex of warehouses, belonging to the supermarket, Morrisons: on the other, a housing estate. Instead of a proud figure silhouetted against the sky, a focus for wonder and imagination, he's hemmed in and imprisoned - you can scarcely see him. Look at the pictures: look at him as he was, and as he is.

It seems like the death of a dream.

Houses matter: new jobs matter. But something that makes thousands and thousands of people pause, and reflect, and experience the power of the imagination, every single day - that matters too. Would it be beyond possiblity to set the Willow Man free and rebuild him somewhere else? He cost in the region of £15,000 the first time round. Surely, even in these times perhaps especially in these times - that's not such a great sum for something that delivers so much?

DO YOU DRAW? - Dianne Hofmeyr

The best gift I ever received as a child was a box of Faber Castell coloured pencil crayons from my father. It was a tin box and if you pressed the back corners the lid popped open to reveal a layer of crinkly tissue paper and 24 crayons each sharpened to perfection, laid out in a rainbow that gave me my first introduction to names like rose madder, cadmium yellow, burnt ochre, raw umber and burnt sienna… the last two, long before I’d ever heard of the colours of Italian earth. They all had numbers and were faceted with sides of gold that alternated with the colour of the pencil. I know this because I still have the white one… least used and was kept because I read somewhere as a teenager that I should whiten the underside of my nails with a white crayon!

So why the digitally enhanced artwork heading up a writer’s blog on drawing? Firstly it’s the cover of a book I co-authored with Louisa Sherman on Print-making at GCSE level and secondly because there’s been a lot of right and left brain talk recently. Most say pencil and paper wins over digital but with technology so superb that can enable Richard Hamilton to produce this intense portrait of fellow artist Dieter Roth, then all is not lost.

As a former art teacher, pencil and paper are still for me the most direct form of story telling. That’s all any child is doing when they’re drawing. With those very first ‘head-feet’ representations, they’re telling: This is me with my large head and big smiling mouth with teeth and eyes, I eat and I see and (probably no nose…) I don’t care about smell just yet. I’ve arms and lots of fingers (possibly even looking like overgrown tarantulas) because I’m a tactile being and I'm so dexterous I can pick up the tiniest speck. I stand on my own legs (though they’re probably still floating aimlessly on the page or they might just look like one leg to you) because there’s nothing more important than me— its just me, me, ME in this world.

All this the child tells us in a few random but amazing marks he makes on paper. It's his first story.

Cavemen knew something when they were drawing their stories. Not only did they use the cave walls as story boards but they turned story telling into a multi-sound-visual event with dance, music and drumming with firelight and the odd lightning bolt too, adding atmospheric lighting affects. True story-telling and showmanship! In fact they were far closer to the idea of visual story-telling as in film or video than a lot of civilizations who came after them.

After Celia put a post up on notebooks, I went back to mine at random to see if I was trying to tell a story while I drew. I didn’t find any of my really early ‘head-feet’ representations but I found a conte crayon self-portrait done a few weeks before my twentieth birthday. The others are from more recent notebooks.

The giraffe page became my story of Zeraffa. The date on the page in this notebook is 1999. The book will be come out in 2013. Some stories take longer to infuse than others! But from the notebooks I discovered why I’m a writer rather than an illustrator. I’m an observer. Critical observation is the worst form of editor. It takes away the playfulness and stifles the way I want the story to grow and be ‘more’ than what I see. It seems easier to evoke this magic with words. It doesn’t mean to say I won’t be sitting with scissors and coloured paper like Matissse one day and telling stories of snails and blue dancing ladies when I’m ancient and can’t see too well.

So where is this blog meandering? Do you draw? is the question I began with and how I’ll end. Matisse has been quoted as saying later in life when he took up paper collage... Freedom is really the impossibility of following the same road as everybody else: freedom means taking the path your talents make you take.

Whether you draw with words, or with Faber Castell crayons, or through the lens of a camera, or through digital wizardry, its still story and as long as you do, is all that matters… if we lose the power to use our imagination and to create story we’ll lose what it means to be human. Let’s use all we have… digital and paper, bells and whistles, drums and dance!

www.diannehofmeyr.com

I have often walked down this street before - Elen Caldecott

This isn't going to be about writing, I'm afraid.

Instead, I thought I would tell you about the affect that art is having in Bristol.

Like London, Birmingham and other UK cities, Bristol has had its share of trouble lately. Young people have felt an appaling disconnect between themselves and the city that is their home - with ugly consequences.
But two weeks after the riots, a different kind of ugly has taken hold and it has changed the way that Bristolians see their streets, well, one street anyway.

Nelson Street in central Bristol was always rough as a badger's brillos. It has high-rise buildings, many deserted; overhead walkways that smelled of tramp's undercrackers and alleys that may as well have had 'get mugged here' written in neon above them.

But last weekend, a group of international street artists reclaimed the walls. The graffiti they produced is breathtaking in scale. Everyone who walks down Nelson Street now is affected by it.

The most noticable thing is the change of pace, no-one hurries anymore. People stop to stare, take pictures, point out things they want others to notice. Complete strangers smile at each other.

It isn't confined to the usual suspects either, urban hipsters and trustafarians are outnumbered by families, tourists, older folks and children. I saw one older lady being helped up steps to get a better view - steps that two weeks earlier would have needed a bleach enema before anyone could walk on them.

I don't pretend that this will cure all Bristols ills. But I do think that anything that makes us feel more connected, less afraid, can only be a good thing.

Here, with apologies to those using dial-up, are some pictures:

The building my husband works in

Steps and walkways

Slowing for a look

My favourite - these columns are wearing knitted jerseys. And check out the new sign.

Adding greenery to the cityscape

Find out more about Elen on Facebook or at www.elencaldecott.com

ART OR COMMERCE - Nicola Morgan

I have been having interesting conversations recently on the subject of writing more commercially. By which I mean writing with an intention to sell more books. There's been a revealing discussion in the comments of a blog post I wrote on my own blog, titled, SELLING OUT? In the post, I'd used the phrase, "Selling out? I call it selling."

Seems to me that we've got ourselves caught in a quite unnecessary, contradictory and damaging mindset. It goes like this: a writer's success is most often measured in volume of sales. (In the eyes of publishers and the public, if not by us.) Yet, at the same time, many people sneer at the idea of writing "more commercially" in order to attract more readers - ie more sales.We know that harder books will be read by fewer people, but we need to be read by more people in order to survive as writers. Yet we think that "harder" books are somehow "better".

Writers and other artists have always had to have an eye to what would sell. We don't produce art in a vacuum - or, at least, I would rather not. I write so people will read me. It would be pointless (for me) if no one did, and pretty pointless if only a very few did. Call me a mercenary - please - but what is wrong with us wanting more people to read our work? In my ideal world, lots of readers would choose to spend their time and money reading whatever I wrote; but it's not an ideal world so I have to think carefully about who my readers are, what they might enjoy enough to pay for, and how many readers I would like to have.

This week I spoke at an event in Glasgow for writers - Weegie Wednesday - and I talked about how all authors must decide what we want from our writing, whether we are in it for art or in it to making a living, and the possible and varied compromises we might need to make in either case. I gave a strident "take control of your writing lives" message. I said that neither writing for art's sake nor writing to try to make a living were positions to be ashamed of, but that we had to be clear about which we wanted and how we can achieve it - even if we end up doing a bit of both. (Which is my ideal.) From conversations afterwards it was really obvious that the published writers are being much more realistic, down-to-earth and commercial-minded than the unpublished. There's a lesson there...

What does this mean for me at the moment? Well, on my agent's advice, but also believing myself that it's the right thing to do if we want to offer it as a highly commercial, saleable venture, I am taking a machete to something I wrote about 18 months ago. I'm stripping out all the bits I thought I liked, all the bits that I thought made it special. Anything that doesn't take the story forward, fast and furiously, goes. Whole chapters are zapped. Lyrical pauses go. Back-story disappears. The philosophy and reasoning are subsumed. The gaps are injected with action and pace.

And you know what? Without all those "good" bits, it's better. I like it! I like it almost as much as I did before but - and this is more important for me than it is for the unpublished writers I spoke to this week - I think readers will like it better. And maybe that's the difference between arty and commercial: with arty, the artist likes it more; with commercial, the reader likes it more.

Well, I'm in this to write for readers and I am not ashamed if perhaps I can now write for a few more of them. If that's one measure of success, bring it on.

As an aside, I want to ask the writers amongst you something: have you noticed a recent tendency amongst publishers to want stories to be faster-moving, with greater "page-turnability"? Do you think they're right or are they over-reacting to the shorter attention spans which we keep being told people have? And have you felt the need or desire to alter your writing to accommodate it? If you thought that writing in a different way would gain you more sales, would you do it?

Readers, what do you think about this suggestion? Even if you still love to linger over a book, do you accept that many (more?) people want something more page-turning?

I'd love to know your thoughts!

The Curious Incidence of Felines in Paintings of the Virgin Mary – Michelle Lovric

The Da Vinci Code tugs the veil off ‘the sacred feminine’. According to Dan Brown’s novel, this cult was ruthlessly suppressed by sinister elements in the Catholic Church. Brown’s Code suggests that generations of acolytes continued to worship ‘underground’, transmitting their faith in the language of symbols.

So – what if the same thing happened to cats?

Worshipped and misunderstood to the point of persecution, the cat has suffered a similar fate to the Magdalene’s. Cats, like witches, were once even burned at the stake. (Of course, cats’ fortunes, like women’s, are currently on the rise.)

It’s a little-known but fascinating fact that Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Rubens, Murillo, Lorenzo Lotto, Giulio Romano and many others inserted a portrait of a cat into their depictions of the Virgin Mary.

Intrigued by da Vinci’s sketch of a Madonna cradling a baby and a cat in her arms, I began to look into the matter a couple of years ago. You know how it is with cat lovers: one cat leads to another, and another. In the end, my quest put me on the road, on a journey through the backwaters of northern Italy, to abandoned churches in remote towns such as Bagolino, Isola Dovarese and Esine, and to Siena, Perugia and Florence.

The more cats-and-Madonnas I saw, the greater my craving. I became bold and implacable. Flabbergasted priests were dragged from their lunch tables to unlock their churches. Engaged couples arriving for their blessing were made to wait while I entreated their priest: ‘Lei sarebbe così gentile da mostrarmi la Vostra Madonna con gatta, per cortesia!’ (‘Kindly show me your Madonna and Cat, please!’)

In the library and on the internet, I tracked down yet more pictures. Cats are to be found with Madonnas in Russia, in France, in Greece, in America and in eastern Europe. Annunciations with cats. Holy Families with Cats. Births of the Virgin with cats. Tabby cats. White cats. Grey cats. Sleeping cats. Running cats. Cats who stare out of the painting, as if narrating the story. In the church of San Giorgio at Montemerano there’s a Madonna della Gattaiola, a painting of the Virgin with a perforation said to serve as a cat-flap.

Had I uncovered a secret cult? If I had, then it’s still secret, for no one has yet established the link between all these pictures.

However, all this exciting research came to a sad end. I thought the book was going to be published by a big American house that loved the idea. I’d worked with them before and was delighted with their enthusiasm. Then suddenly all the material was returned with a regretful note.

Wires had been crossed. I’d seen it as a $25 book, lavishly illustrated, something to appeal to the art market, the gift book market, the cat market and even the Christmas market. But the publisher had seen it as a very small gift book. And a $9.98 price tag would never support the reproduction fees for 80 paintings from museums and churches around the world.

Or so they said.

As I filed the research in a wicker basket, and regretfully set to work on something more commercial, I did idly wonder if Opus Dei (or Dan Brown’s sinister version of them) might have had a hand in the suppression of a 'Da Vinci code' for cats.

There are no cats in the Bible, an omission that has allowed some Christians to brand them as evil. (Llamas and kangaroos aren’t mentioned either, but they haven’t been anathematized.)

Cats certainly disregard the part of the Bible where God gives Man dominion over all the animals. Cats obey none of the Ten Commandments. Cats are the familiars of women. Cats are feminine. Many people – many, many people – worship their cats.

It’s all adding up, isn’t it?

Of course Dan Brown’s Christian fundamentalists would want to suppress the Sacred Feline just as much as the Sacred Feminine.

Maybe even more ruthlessly?

Michelle Lovric’s website

Michelle Lovric will be discussing ways to write about Venice with Katie Hickman at the Edinburgh Festival on August 21st.

Picture: Virgin with cat (part of an Annunciation fresco) by Pietro da Cemmo (c.1474-1504) at the Church of Santa Maria at Esine, Italy.

The Power of Fiction by Lynda Waterhouse

Last Saturday Frugal Husband (FH for short ) and I went on one of our art forays to The Piccadilly Community Centre.
Several years ago FH invented this pastime. You gather a group of friends and spend a Saturday wandering around a variety of weird and wonderful locations in South London. You have no idea what you will find and the chances are you will be the only people at these venues which are free to enter.
I have found myself in a series of locations; former jam or biscuit factories, a defunct gin distillery, railway arches, a former workhouse, a bear garden and even people’s living rooms. All places worth a snoop around in their own right.
I have experienced an amazing range of emotions from suppressed rage as I tackled a four page manifesto to help me understand the artist’s decision to display a pair of rubber gloves, despair at the sight of yet another impenetrable video installation, extreme self consciousness at coming face to face with a man dressed as a crow in a railway arch or a woman balancing butter on her head. I have laughed like a drain as I watched someone knit jumpers for crustaceans.




I have walked into a deserted council flat to find it transformed by copper sulphate crystals.


I have been genuinely scared by being made to don a white mask and sent off alone into a scary and frightening unknown. In a darkened corridor I started with terror at the sight of a white faced stranger only to realise that it was my husband. (We all knew then that this Punchdrunk Theatre Co was something special)


Back to the Piccadilly Community Centre. What was it? Art masquerading as life or vice versa? This former Lutyens designed bank and up market art gallery had been transformed by Christoph Buchel into a shabby community centre complete with charity shop, WI run café and a bar. In one room a group of war gamers assured me that they weren’t actors that they really did this. I grinned back at them feeling like an extra in some downmarket Westworld style movie.
In another room a group of people were dancing intensely. Someone waved me inside I shied away. The prayer room was empty. I sat in there for a while. We climbed into the attic which had been transformed into a squat. Opposite was a roof complete with sleeping bags, soggy mattresses, fag ends, chicken bones and cans of Special Brew.
By the time I turned the handle of a heavy door that was marked ‘Private’ my heart was pounding. The room was an unnerving cross between a caretaker’s den and a squat. FH disappeared down a narrow cellar like corridor and I fled the room. He seemed to take ages to come back. Back upstairs to buy a book in the charity shop and to watch a Conservative Party video about the Big Society which was unsettling.
Then back to the ground floor for a snoop in an office and to stand behind the counter of the bank. Someone came in and smiled at me. I wanted to say ‘I’m not an actor’ then a reassuring cup of tea and cake.
I had experienced the power that fiction has to convey a greater truth.

Writing in the Sand - Dianne Hofmeyr

Once as I was strolling through the gardens of the People’s Culture Park just outside the Forbidden City in Beijing, I was stopped in my tracks by a man writing on the pathway. He used large sweeping movements across the stone with a brush dipped in nothing more than water. As fast as he wrote so the characters evaporated and disappeared like an invisible memory of the city. The temporality of the water writing took my breath away… it seemed as futile and at the same time as purposeful as shouting words on the wind.

There’s a similar concept in the work of Andrew van der Merwe who catches ephemeral moments, not in water but in wet sand. He uses the wide open vistas of the sea – sand, sky and rocks – to inform his work. The script appears totally at one with the landscape. The marks are as mysterious as runic or cuneiform inscriptions and seem to echo and almost emphasize the ripples left by waves and like mirror mosaics they catch glimpses of the sky in the water that collects in the hollows and grooves. The patterns and marks are precise. He has devised special tools to make them and he leaves no trace of footprints or upturned sand.

The work focuses on the fleeting moment as we wait for the wind to dry and blur the script, or waves to come and wash it away. Remember doing this with sandcastles? Rushing down to the beach the next day to see what had happened? It’s an ever-changing process –in his case, a tactile merging of words with the physical. To me the marks themselves together with the idea of being transitory – that sense of temporariness and ephemerality – seem to focus and accentuate glimpses of atmospheres, memories, sounds and movements that go unnoticed and sometimes even unseen.

So since it’s August and some of us are at our desks and not at the sea… here we are then…

Dianne Hofmeyr: www.diannehofmeyr.com

For a review of the 2011 Kate Greenaway:

http://awfullybigreviews.blogspot.com/2011/07/grahame-baker-smiths-farther-flies-off.html

For those interested in historical writing: http://the-history-girls.blogspot.com/

For more on Andrew van der Merwe: http://www.behance.net/beachscriber

An Awfully Creative Adventure - Meg Harper

I’m laughing this morning over Andrew’s 6 monthly skips! So that’s why our garage is stuffed to the gunnels! I’ve missed a trick there! I’m also taking a welcome break from the huge task of getting a house that has been ‘lived in’ (ehem) by 4 teenagers ready for the market. Anyone wanting a large family house in Warwick, step this way! It has new carpets throughout except, of course, in my study – another place stuffed to the gunnels and impossible to empty for the day. So my new study carpet is – guess where? In the garage!
Today, however, I really want to write about a school project that I’ve been engaged in intermittently all academic year. This was at Limehurst High School, a middle school in Loughborough which is definitely the pleasantest, happiest secondary school I have ever encountered and where it was a privilege to be the visiting author. There are times when I question the value of author visits. If it’s a case of the ‘author talk’ delivered to every class in the school, I wonder what lasting benefit there will be. I am far more excited by being invited in to run workshops or, as in this case, to be a partner in a long-term project.
The brief at Limehurst was to run a workshop with a small group of year 8s, teaching them the nuts and bolts of story writing so that they could teach a slightly larger group of year 7s, who would then write a story suitable to be turned into an animation for year 2s from a local primary school. Nothing too complicated then! As so often, I found myself deconstructing what I do myself (principally by instinct in my case) in order to make the vital elements clear enough for young people to absorb and cascade down to their juniors. Fortunately, I often write short stories, not simply novels, and I also have some very limited experience of writing animations – so I felt competent enough to know where to start. As so often, however, I learned as we went on. I was there as consultant when the years 8s taught the year 7s and was alongside them as they thrashed out their plots and wrote and edited their stories. I sometimes think I don’t know very much about creating story but as we worked, I appreciated that I really do know what I’m doing. I know where to cut and prune, I know what’s needed to lift a plot and to keep the pace. I know how to create the crisis and how to satisfactorily resolve. And I realised what a mammoth task the young people were facing – and yet again, how ludicrous it is that year 6s are expected to write short stories for their SATS in a mere 45 minutes. Grrrrrrr!
In the end, the year 7s had the barebones of two workable stories so we asked if they could animate both. Fortunately, the lovely Leo and Theo of Lunchbox Films were ready to give it a whirl and the school was confident they could provide funding – so the year 7s set out on the laborious task of animating their stories. A couple of weeks ago the big moment arrived. The year 2s from the local primary school arrived for the premiere – and so did I! You can see the results below. (Well - maybe not - I've tried to post the links and they're showing on the dashboard version but not on the blog - but here are none hot links if you're interested!


http://www.lunchboxfilms.co.uk/project.php?url=goldilocks_baldilocks

http://www.lunchboxfilms.co.uk/project.php?url=tanes_tremendous_trumpet)

My next task is to see if my agent’s interested in submitting the original stories to publishers. I’ve edited them in conference with the young people and have kept as much of their original wording as I can. I was thrilled by how engaged they were with that process – but then, we were doing what I wish schools could do more. A real task for a real purpose. There were lots of really memorable moments but it all felt very worthwhile when one of the participants said, ‘I used to think I was no good at English but doing this project has made me realise that I really am.

www.megharper.co.uk

Harry Potter and the Celluloid of Terror: Gillian Philip

I took my ten-year-olds to see Harry Potter the other day. There were three of us in that front row, trying to make sense of the slightly distorted soundtrack, and only one of us had read the book.

To the ten-year-olds, it didn't matter that for a good deal of the running time, they couldn't quite follow what was going on. It was, as Girl Child announced within five seconds of the credits rolling, the best movie they had ever seen. And with mother giving whispered side-of-the-mouth explanations of the tricky bits, the plot was perfectly comprehensible.

The cinema - an old-fashioned, sticky-floored, numb-bum relic of the golden age, and one of my favourite places in the world - was teeming with three- to ten-year olds who hadn't read the books, along with a lot of teenagers and young adults who had clearly grown up with them. I had high hopes that my two would ask to read all seven books afterwards, and when they didn't volunteer, I offered.

No takers. It's the films they've grown up with, and the Xbox games. Boy Child has spent the summer-holiday days since then watching and rewatching the earlier movies, and begging for the Xbox game. Girl Child has preferred more and more and different movies (and books) involving death, sacrifice, love, hate, good and evil.

I'm not sure they'll ever read the books, now. And I have wildly mixed feelings about that.

My strongest reaction is that these are my kids, dammit. MY KIDS, for whom the purchase of books by readers is the wellspring of the finance that buys them DVDs and Xbox games. What are they THINKING?

A subsidiary, guilty feeling, is that I'm probably even more of a movie addict than I am a book addict, and that's saying something. I'm not sure I'll read The Lord of the Rings again, however many times I've read it in the past, because the movies distilled the best of the books, while holding onto respect for them, and the pictures I made in my head weren't ever quite as good as the pictures made since 2001 by Peter Jackson.

At school talks, I torment myself and the audience with the question 'Books or Movies?' And while we all tear at our scalps shouting 'BOTH', I always advocate BOOKS with the argument that however many girls in the room love Edward Cullen, only around half think he truly looks like Robert Pattinson. For the others, he'll always be the perfect sparkly beauty they formed in their own heads, and R-Pattz will be no more than - well, not an impostor: just someone who once played the part.

I feel quite sad that my kids are unlikely to read Harry Potter as he was originally wrote - or not for a few years, anyway. They won't grow up, as so many young adults did, with a boy who grew up, slowly, on the page, along with them.

But the movies have created another part of the myth, and one of their own. My kids have grown up with Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter, and when I really think about it, that's fine. There are so many other books now - in great part thanks to the Potter phenomenon - that they can film for themselves, inside their heads, just like I do with my own characters while I'm writing. For them, Harry can be a movie.

Films make their own mythology. The story of the Lions of Tsavo is a true one, while the film version - The Ghost & The Darkness - follows to a great extent the template of Jaws. I honestly don't think that destroys its validity as a story. I remember being terribly upset and angry when I first saw James Cameron's Titanic, because why would anyone want to add fiction to a truth that had its own perfect tragic narrative and human pathos? Since then I've watched it often, and always cry - because I never believe in Jack and Rose, but they symbolise the real people dying in fractions of screen moments in the background.

Maybe it's distance that lends both enchantment and forgiveness - recent lies and distortions are less forgiveable; but is Troy, if it ever existed, diminished by being relegated to myth and a bloody good story? A seriously bad movie certainly didn't hurt that immortal myth.

We're humans, and we love a narrative arc. The best of them will survive in any form, and many. They start, and end, in our heads.

www.gillianphilip.com

www.facebook.com/gillianphilipauthor

Five Barnstorming Books-to-Movies: Gillian Philip

I know I’m going to get myself in hot water with this one. Books are so personal, and movies are so personal (but in a different way). There are films of children’s books that I should have seen but haven’t – The Secret of Moonacre (The Little White Horse) for instance, or How To Train Your Dragon (which I am desperate to see, but I’m having to wait for the DVD).

I think it’s harder with children’s books than it is with adults’ to find a movie that’s better than the book. Is that an indication of the higher quality of children’s books? I like to think so. At any rate, I can think straightaway of many adult movies that are better than the book – The Godfather, Jaws – but that very rarely applies to children’s books-to-movies.

I can, though, think of lots that are just as good but different. I actually think the different is important. I'm not crazy about films that are true to the book, which is why you won’t find any Harry Potter movies on my list – for me they are too faithful to the books and (with the exception of the third) don’t really have their own identity as films.


I don’t mind one bit when films take reasonable liberties with a book, because they need to be good in their own right, not just exact translations of page to screen. I want to be transported by movies and books in entirely different ways. I’m swept away far more by Inkheart the novel than Inkheart the movie. But (if I’m allowed to count abridged versions as children’s favourites) I’m far more enchanted by Last of the Mohicans (1992) and Tarzan (1999) as movies than as books.

I seem to have gone for five very recent movies (sorry, Bambi, I did want you). And I wanted more than five. I wanted Stuart Little, too, and Shrek, and Stormbreaker, and The Black Stallion, and I desperately wanted The (supremely quotable) Princess Bride, and... oh, that’s cheating. Get on with it.

Each of the five had to pass a simple test: do my children – one girl one boy – ask to watch it over and over again?

Peter Pan (2003)

A Peter who is ‘the personification of cockiness’ and whose American accent only makes him more otherworldly. Lost Boys you don’t want to throttle. Terrifying mermaids and thoroughly sinister pirates. A scheming, naughty, funny Tink. Jason Isaacs as a deliciously wicked and handsome Captain Hook - but ‘not wholly evil’. A soaring soundtrack. Scenes that make my spine tingle no matter how many times I watch them – Mr and Mrs Darling running home in slow motion, only just too late! Bankers and strict aunts and sleeping children chanting that they DO believe in fairies, they DO, they DO! Ah, I love this movie.


Stardust (2007)

I know, I know, it’s allegedly the nadir of Robert De Niro’s career. But I like his turn as an effete, cross-dressing pirate captain. I like the seven fratricidal brothers, too, both alive and dead. Jokes, danger, thrills, romance, unicorns, views of Skye. If I was gay I’d want to marry Claire Danes, and if I was younger I’d want to marry Charlie Cox, especially after his ‘reverse haircut’. What’s more, I’m a soft touch for a cheesy Take That song. I adore this movie so much, I can even forgive a Ricky Gervais cameo.

Coraline (2009)

Another Neil Gaiman adaptation, this time a captivatingly beautiful animation. Coraline is a clever, likeable heroine whose terror and danger seem very real, and whose bravery is therefore all the more impressive. The houseful of eccentrics are beautifully balanced by their vicious alternates, and I am a huge fan of that scrawny, smart cat who moves so comfortably between the worlds. As for Coraline’s button-eyed Other Mother: she’s evil enough to send even a parent diving behind the sofa. And (shhh) she makes me feel better about my own maternal inadequacies and laptop time.

Nanny McPhee (2005)

‘Once upon a time there was a huge family of children; and they were terribly, terribly naughty.’ And then Nurse Matilda went Hollywood and became Nanny McPhee, and disciplined a whole new generation. I came late to this one, and I watched it reluctantly, not expecting to like it. I laughed out loud as much as my children did, and I (surreptitiously) cried at the end. I’m a little afraid to see Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang, because I don’t trust sequels. But I might have to try.


The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

Oh, I had to sneak this one in. Not strictly a children’s book, but like many, many others, I first read the trilogy as a young teenager. The Two Towers and The Return of the King are grander, more threatening, more epic in scale, and you do get Gollum; but there’s something so watchable and entrancing about the first instalment. Aragorn’s rough and enigmatic and sexy, Boromir is still around (I always liked Boromir), the Black Riders are far more dreadful on horseback than on their flying mounts, and Arwen shows a bit of gumption, some blade and a nice way with a horse. And they dropped that ghastly old singing hippy Tom Bombadil. I could watch this one over and over, and I do.

Go on, I know your five will be different. Do tell...

http://www.gillianphilip.com/

What is on your playlist? Celia Rees

I was listening to Radio 4 the other day when I heard the author, David Nicholls, talking about his novel, One Day. Now, I haven't read the book, although my daughter has and recommends it highly, but I'm always interested in writers talking about their writing, especially ones who are selling shed loads. For those, like me, who have not read the book, it follows the lives of two people from their student days in 1988 to near present day. As I understand it, the device that Nicholls uses is to have them meet every year on St Swithin's Day. In this way we can follow their lives and changes, kind of When Harry Met Sally, but more organised and British. Do Americans know about St Swithin's Day? Anyway, what interested me was the way he described going back to these past years. He used the music, what he and everyone else was listening to in 1988, say, 0r 1992. He found this one of the best ways of getting into the feel of the time. Songs are like scents, they bring back detail, the kind of detail a writer needs to make a time come alive.

I have always used songs and music in my writing, not just to evoke different times, but also moods and states of mind. My first novel took its title from a song: Every Step You Take. I was listening to it in the car one day and remember thinking how creepy it was, the perfect way to get into the head of an obsessive stalker. Another early novel, Midnight Hour, also owes its title to song lyrics, Wilson Pickett singing, I'm going to take you girl and hold you, do everything I told you, in the midnight hour. 'Do everything I told you...' that was the line that chilled me. And it doesn't even matter if it is not the right words, that's what I heard, so it is what my killer heard, too.

I first heard the Ballad of Sovay, sung by Pentangle, more years ago than I care to remember. I had no idea then that I would ever become a writer, much less that this song would provide me with the title and main character for a novel. But the haunting melody stayed with me, as did the story of the daring young woman who dressed as a highwayman to test the fidelity of her lover. Many years after that first hearing, I was having a conversation with fellow novelist, Susan Price, about folk ballads and Sovay came up. We both said how much we loved the song, and the girl. By the end of the conversation it was more or less decided that I would make Sovay the heroine of my next novel.

Songs do not just provide titles, characters, basic plots and starting points. When I'm writing historical fiction, they give me a powerful way into the world that I am trying to create. When I was writing Sovay I listened to John Gay's The Beggar's Opera over and over again, not just for the beauty of the lyrics and the music, but for the moods and emotions that they evoked and the deeply subversive, satirical view of a corrupt society where the heroes and heroines are thieves, murderers and prostitutes. John Gay gives us a view into an 18th Century underworld that he knew well. At the same time, he is letting us know that respectable society was also under scrutiny by those who would seek to change it.

You cannot beat contemporary sources for insight into any past time. Popular songs and street ballads are often the only way we have to see into the lives and minds of ordinary men and women, allow us to hear the words that they used, the cadences of everyday speech. For me, they help to 'raise the spirits of the age', to evoke a sense of love, loss, danger and excitement. When I was writing Pirates! , I listened to songs of the sea, of dark eyed sailors and female sailors bold. When I was writing The Fool's Girl, I listened to Elizabethan street songs, jigs and bawdy ballads, as well as Shakespeare's own songs and court music. Each of my books has its own soundtrack,. Sometimes the music gets mentioned in the text, sometimes it doesn't. That is not important. Neither is exact authenticity. What is important is how this music, these songs have sustained and fed my imagination and freed my creativity.

Anyone else care to share their playlist?

The Rule Of Three : Penny Dolan

These three carved stones are in a small park in Dulwich. Cyclists and runners and dog-walkers were hurrying by so the stones don’t look quite how I wanted them to look. The shadows that animate the sculpture aren’t there strongly enough. The snap doesn’t emphasize their changing relationships or the dynamic that makes them more than three identically carved boulders.

I came across these stones shortly after a set of school visits, and the group made me remember how often I seem to highlight the number three when chatting to primary children about stories.

At the simplest level, there are the three sections of story: “the beginning, the middle, the end.” The three acts of the play. The three books that complete the narrative of the trilogy.

Then there are the slightly more complex stages of a basic plot - especially a picture book text -, where the writer has to put ideas into their best order, or so I explain to my young audiences. The adventurous hero rarely fights the extremely dangerous tiger and pulls faces at the monkey last.

The pattern of three appears everywhere in traditional tales.There are “the three wishes that must be used carefully lest they bring disaster or are wasted” like the mistakenly wished-for sausage stuck on the nagging young wife’s nose. Then there are the thrice repeated incidents – Cinderella or Ashenputtel escaping from the ball three times, or the true love waiting for three nights for her sleeping hero to wake, or the three ugly old women who arrive to spin straw into gold and save the girl, which is one of my favourite stories.

Gifts and objects sometimes appear in threes, but they aren't reliable. Three golden balls distract Atlanta from winning her race and Jack is almost caught when his third theft - the harp - starts calling for the Giant. But three lucky objects and their three accompanying actions that enable clever young children to escape the iron teeth of Baba Yaga or of Black Annis, whether butter to quieten a gate or a comb that grows into a range of mountains.

Characters revel in the “pattern of three”. It's not the oldest, nor the middle, but the youngest sibling who discovers how to complete the essential task. Even when Great Big Billy Goat defeats the Troll, it was cunning Little Billy Goat that set the Troll up for his fate. “Why not try my brother? He’s so much bigger than me.” It can be the differences between a trio of characters can make them able to adapt and withstand problems, as witnessed in the famous Harry, Ron and Hermione trio.

When talking about describing characters, objects or places, I try to suggest that three significant details are more effective than full head-to-toe descriptions of clothing or a cacophony of the dreaded “Wow!” words.

Mind you, there’s a magic within tripled words. On one hand there’s the “three men go into a bar” story and refrain. On the other there’s the power of the triple chant – from the “Be Bold, Be Bold, But Not Too Bold, Lest Your Hearts Blood Turn to Cold” carved over the doorways of Mr Fox’s house, Or the political declamation of “Veni, Vidi, Vici!” or other recently overused incantations.

And – sssh! - somewhere I’ve read that if you – Derren Brown style - secretly suggest something three times, a person is likely to choose whatever you have weasled away into their brain. Cunning, eh? (Must try it in book sale talks!)

Three is a tricky number, capable of easily changing shape. Which triangle will you end up with? Isosceles when you wanted equilateral? Three definitely creates tension, suspense, movement, a certain dynamic.

And that reminds me. This week’s work is battling with the third part of my current Tome. Need to get it into its most effective shape. So I will leave you with another example of the amazing rule of three . . .

Penny Dolan
www.pennydolan.com

A BOY CALLED M.O.U.S.E (Bloomsbury)
THAT NOISE! and THE WRONG HOUSE (Franklin Watts)

The Baghdad Book Collection : Miriam Halahmy

"Where they burn books they will also burn people." Heinrich Heine

In 2003 when the Allies invaded Iraq, Qasim Sabti, an artist and lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad, found to his dismay that the University Library had been looted. The library shelves had been ransacked and the books set on fire. "I felt like a fireman desperately in need of finding survivors," writes Sabti. Rummaging through the mess he found some books still intact but one of them collapsed when he picked it up and he was left just holding the cloth cover. Inside the cover were some Arabic verses scribbled in pencil and some notes from the librarian. "I was filled with a new sense of life and hope... Like the fireman realizing that some victims were still breathing, I began to gather together more covers..."

 Sabti took the covers back to his studio and created an amazing series of collages, "bringing back to life books whose texts had been completely destroyed."  Sabti's series of collages, Ashes to Art : The Iraqi Phoenix, can be seen in The Pomegranate Gallery in New York, owned by my brother-in-law, Oded Halahmy. The collages are a testament to the resilience of the Iraqi people and as Sabti writes, "They are also my attempt to gain victory over the destruction surrounding us in Baghdad."

One of the collages hangs on our living room wall in Golders Green, on loan from the gallery, a piece of Old Baghdad where my children's father was born.
As a child growing up in England reading books was the most important thing I did. My weekly visit to the library, through darkened streets, all by myself as a little girl, was almost a holy time. It would have been totally beyond my imagination to think that someone might burn a book.

So I wrote a poem about it.

Untitled, 2008
Qasim Sabti
Mixed Media Collage
8 by 12 inches


Eight years old I walk through softly lit
November streets, our little London suburb,
to the silence of the library and reading,


which came before everything
was the reason to be. Lost all day
with the Little Women, Dickon


at my side in our Secret Garden,
I sailed with Moonfleet to Treasure Island
lost in the fictional dream.


My mother and I sat reading
as coals burned red in the old living room.
Not even the tick of a clock


penetrated our reader silence.
I could not imagine burning,
stealing, destroying - books.

*

Qasim Sabti, artist, in agony as they looted

the Library, Baghdad, 2003.

books violated in the bewilderment of war,

collected broken spines,

shattered bodies, healed and repaired,

a book cover here, a torn page there,

made them into poems on canvas

painted  blue, red, white.

We have one hanging on our wall,

a piece of Old Baghdad in our London home.

It reaches a long blue finger all the way back

to your father's father's house beside the Tigris.

near the Shorja market and the pomegranates,

all the way to the room where you were born;

this broken book, this word, this blue.

www.miriamhalahmy.com