My niece’s wedding on Saturday was held in an idyllic setting in the Devon countryside - a beautiful ancient church, accessed by a long flight of steps - you can get an idea of it from this photo

Fortunately the sun shone throughout the whole event - it might not have felt quite so idyllic if we’d all been squelching up the aisle and dripping rainwater all over the pews. Our journey down the M5 the day before had been accompanied by torrential storms, and the skies opened on us again this evening when we got back home.

One good thing for me about long car journeys is that for the last fifteen years or so, I’ve been able to read a book when I’m in the passenger seat. This weekend, my book was the aptly named A Seriously Useful Author’s Guide to Marketing and Publicising Books by Mary Cavanagh. I know I’m going to be dipping into various chapters over the next few months, while I’m working at getting my next novel, Paper Lanterns, into print. (Thank you, Mary, for producing this well-timed book!)

In my previous posts I was talking about my first writing course on the island of Kithera in Crete. There have been a lot of changes in the world of publishing and marketing books since then (about seven years ago now).

I’d say that the ‘real’ start of The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society was during that week in Kithera, in June 2001. It was my individual tutorials with Helen Carey that helped me discover my main character’s back-story and her motivations for the future - I already had a general idea of what was going to happen to seventy-five year old Agnes Borrowdale, but it wasn’t till Helen asked a few key questions, that I realised I was focusing too much on the intricacies of the plot, and didn’t yet know my characters from the inside out.

One of difficulties that Helen identified was the relationship between Agnes and her son, Jack, who places her in an old people’s home, from which she escapes at the start of the book. As the main protagonist, Agnes must engage the reader from the start, and maintain their interest and affections to the end. I had to show that Jack himself, though a flawed character, was not unsympathetic. I also needed to show why Jack, and his new partner, Monica, felt that The Harmony Home for The Young At Heart, was the best place for Agnes.

Gradually, these characters, and many more, developed both inner and outer lives of their own, as the action moved to and from Sussex to Nottingham and Birmingham. I had enormous fun in getting to know them all, and extricating them from the various awkward situations I landed them in.

Even now, as I think about them I can see and hear them in my head. They’re absolutely solid and real as the friends and relations I met up with again this weekend at the wedding. And yet at the same time, I’m fully aware of the fact that I invented everyone of them. (And I still regard myself as sane!)

I’ve been working on this blog-site for most of the weekend, and I’m gradually getting my head round some of the weird codes on the admin pages behind the scenes. There’s an amazing difference between these, and the effect they have created on the visible site that you’ll be looking at. Click here, and admire the spaces between the authors’ names - it took me hours of trial and error towork out how to do this!

Anyway, enough of that for the time being - I’m meant to be telling you more about my writing course on Kithera. It was organised by Andy Mullett, the driving force behind The Greek Experience – he used the local facilities, (including the tutor of the Greek course, whose main occupation was running his own delicatessen). The creative writing workshops and tutorials took place on the sheltered terrace of the small hotel, or outside one of the local bars. The art tutor lived in a nearby village, and her course took place outdoors, wherever there was an inspiring landscape, ruined farmhouse or small church.

The students on all the courses were allocated accommodation scattered around the little town of Chora. This itself was not one single place – the old ‘town’ of Chora was up at the top of a hill, and the other part was the harbour front, a long, steep road of at least a kilometre, though when walking uphill it felt like more than double that distance.

Tutors for writing courses came mainly from England. Mine, was a novelist called Helen Carey. I’d sent her parts of the novel I’d intended to work on at Arvon, and also the first few chapters of my new novel. By the end of May, I’d already won the prize of a free read from TLC, so, since I was about to get feedback on that novel, it made more sense for me to ask Helen to discuss the new novel with me. At that stage, I hadn’t got a title for this book which was to become my first published novel, The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society
Helen offered me some useful suggestions, and pointed out some possible pitfalls that I needed to be aware of, if my main character, Agnes was to keep the sympathy of the reader.

The sun shone, the mountain slopes were crisscrossed with narrow winding tracks, the air was scented with wild thyme. The sea was clear turquoise above the flat white rocks. It couldn’t have been more different from the Midlands urban setting of the novel whose characters were beginning to emerge.

It was one of the best (and most productive) holidays of my life. I was lucky enough to have another week there the following year, and that opened up yet more opportunities - but I’ll come to that later.
(Unfortunately, Andy Mullet stopped organising these activity holidays a few years ago.)

If you’re wondering about any possible connection between the terrible Foot-and-Mouth outbreak of 2001/2 , and an idyllic Greek island, read on! (if you haven’t read my previous post, it might make more sense if you read that one first)

I thought this peaceful picture of a typical Greek Island
would be a more soothing way for you to approach a post that includes mention of Foot and Mouth.

Having gained so much from my first Arvon course, I decided to apply for an ‘advanced’ fiction course, which was to be held at Totleigh Barton in Devon in March 2001. I was to bring my novel to work on and to get feedback from the tutors. This was shortly before In The Lamb-White Days had undergone its final re-write after the help I’d had from TLC.

I sent the first part of this manuscript as part of my application, and was thrilled to be accepted on the course. I knew that more work was needed on this, but I wasn’t quite sure what was missing, and/or what needed to be added. Agnes Borrowdale was already whispering in my ear, pushing for her story to be discovered, but she’d have to wait till I’d got my first novel sorted.

Anyone who’s been connected in any way with farming, or has lived/was living in the countryside in the spring of 2001, basically, anyone who watched the flaming pyres on TV news night after night, will understand that a venue set in farmland in the middle Devon, could not take the risk of encouraging visitors, who might inadvertently spread the terrible disease.

I’d realised this, even before the letter arrived, but was still disappointed. I’d been so looking forward to this week since the previous autumn, and now it had been snatched away. My brain quickly kicked into action: first, to scold me for my selfishness, when all my sympathy should be directed to those who were losing their treasured stock, and their livelihood. My sister, Jo, who had moved with her family to a small organic farm just a few years earlier, was in the middle of an infected area herself.

Then, as my brain has a helpful tendency to do, it switched my thinking on to the bright side, and encouraged me to search out a writing course somewhere unaffected by foot and mouth.

On a recent trip to Cannon Poets, I’d picked up a few leaflets with information about competitions and new poetry collections. In the middle of these, was one that I’d barely glanced at, until now: The Greek Experience – writing courses held in May/June and September/October on a small island called Kithera, in the south of the Peloponnese . There was one on fiction writing, and it fell during the Whitsun week.

I rang the contact number. There was space for me on the course.

Arvon would have been wonderful, but the combination of sunshine on a Greek island, and help with developing my novel, sounded like a very fair exchange. And so it proved to be.

This post is about starting to write what I consider as my first ‘proper’ novel, but I’ve been whisked back into the world of poetry for a moment, after reading an article in Times 2 in which Libby Purves expresses her views on the row about the Oxford poetry professorship. I admire Ruth Padel’s poetry and when I first heard about her resignation I did wonder what the actual (as opposed to the reported) facts were.

I have to admit that it’s taken me years (decades, even) to stop and think before I make judgements based on a media story - there’s almost invariably an opposing way of looking at the same event, so it was nice to read Libby’s measured view of the incident. It’s one thing to hold politicians to account for what they say to journalists, but poets aren’t expected to be constantly on the alert in that way.

And now, back to what I was saying in my last post about feeling vulnerable on my MA course - it wasn’t until the following term that I began to feel more at ease with myself and with the others in the group. The main reason for my surge in confidence was Rosie Jackson, the tutor who took over our small fiction tutorial group of six. ‘Right, it’s time for a larger project now,’ she announced. ‘I want you to bring the start of a novel for next week.’

We all gulped.

‘This doesn’t have to be the actual beginning,’ Rosie went on, breaking a shocked silence, ‘You can start anywhere. The main thing is, to write.’

Then she explained the method we would all follow for giving feedback to each other. To start with, nothing negative would be written. Instead, a highlighter pen would be used on any sections that seemed to the reader to be genuine, to ‘sing’. Any queries or suggestions for improvement would be given verbally later.

This approach unplugged the block that had been building up in my head over the previous term. I wrote freely for the first time in ages, without striving to produce something that would be of a suitable standard for an M.A. course.

I handed it in the following week, and waited nervously for it to be returned to me. There’s something very positive about colours, any colour, but especially the green of the highlighter pen that Rosie had used across great chunks of my printed pages.

This was the start of what I think of as my first ‘real’ novel, In The Lamb-White Days.

When the fiction year of the MA course came to an end, our writing group (five of us, by that time) continued to meet to work on our developing novels. It was Helen H who’d suggested our monthly meetings outside of the official course times. She’d started her MA the previous year, so our first year had been her final one, and she’d realised the value of keeping in touch as a working fiction-writing group.

There was something a bit weird (as well as wondeful) in being part of the process of the making of four other novels in addition to my own. We all knew that the places, characters and plots that we were discussing were total inventions, but it was sometimes hard to remember that these stories weren’t yet ‘real’, and that their writers were almost as much in the dark about what would happen next as the readers were. At the same time, we were working on our next section of the MA course – in my case, poetry, but we still meet up to discuss our fiction writing.

This post might make more sense if you read the ones below first – or at least An Arvon course and a poetry prize

It’s the half term break, but I was at work anyway – I know that lots of people would be envious of my 10 weeks annual leave, but to be honest, it was partly because of the long holidays that I went into teaching in the first place, and when I started working in Adult Education, I got 14 weeks, so having that reduced to 10 in the last few years, hit me quite hard – but at least I still get a certain amount of satisfaction from it, and I’m pretty sure that this is due to my other ‘career’ – my writing.

I’ve already mentioned that the Arvon course at Lumb Bank changed my life, but there was a lot more to it than winning first prize in the Envoi poetry competition, and being invited to be part of the poetry ensemble, Late Shift.

I’ll be saying more about Late Shift soon, but first, there are other opportunities that can also be traced back to that same course. Maybe the most important for my writing development was the fact that I became a life member of the Friends of Arvon, and this entailed a regular news letter. The first one I received mentioned that there were still a few places left for the M.A. writing course at Nottingham Trent. The part-time option would involve a two year commitment of two evenings per week during term times.

I rang for more details, and liked what I read: This didn’t seem like a strictly academic approach, involving huge amounts of research into Eng Lit. It sounded very practical – everything would be based on our own writing and on critiquing each other’s work, with guidance from a small team of lecturers. There was a compulsory core programme which comprised weekly lectures given by relevant members of the university staff, and by visiting published writers. The other evening of each week would be set aside for the chosen subject area, one for the first year, the other for the second. I chose to start with fiction and then move on to poetry.

Just as I had sensed the need for a poetry writing group that would offer me challenge as well as support, I had already realised that, for my fiction in particular, I needed to be mixing with other writers who had the same needs, and taught by those who had already enjoyed some level of public recognition for their work.

To start with, though, what I felt I needed was support. In bucket-loads.

I had become (gradually) a confident , outgoing, outspoken person in my workplace. I enjoyed my job, which brought me into daily contact with all sorts of people. In fact, one of the unforeseen benefits of enrolling on the MA course, was that it would force me to cut back on the ‘gift time’ I was donating to my job, often working four evenings a week, instead of the expected two, simply because I found it so stimulating working with the students, constantly trying out new ways of helping them to use the wealth of the English language to express their own ideas more effectively.

I knew who I was in that environment – but here, back at university after all those years, conscious of being one of the few, much older ‘mature students’, unsure of the quality of my own expressive skills and creativity, I was suddenly as vulnerable as my teenage self had been.

(This post might make more sense if you read the ones below, first)

It’s ages now since I’ve managed to get to one of the monthly workshops at Cannon Poets – this Sunday is one when I’d be free to go, but it doesn’t happen to be the first one in the month. I’ll be visiting my mother in Sussex on the weekend of the June meeting – and so another month will slip by. I’m only an associate member now, but I still feel attached to the group, and very grateful for all the opportunities that it gave me.(Yes, I will make it to a meeting at least once this year!)

Not the least of the benefits of this group, is their practice of reading aloud round the huge, angular table in a room at the top of the Midlands Arts Centre in Cannon Hill Park. (Now temporarily meeting at a different venue, during the renovation the MAC) There were often more than twenty of us there, and at first I found the readings very daunting – we started the meeting with poems of our choice, by established poets, alive or dead, and finished by reading one that we’d just been working on. To encourage us to develop our delivery of these poems, everyone had the chance of putting their name forward to fill the monthly twenty-minutes member’s slot.

By the time my turn came round, about a year after joining, my voice had grown accustomed to this large audience and was managing to remain not only steady, but also, reasonably expressive.

It was after this reading that I was approached by an experienced poet, Don Barnard, who later became Poet Laureate of Birmingham, and asked if I’d like to be the fourth member of a group that he was putting together with one other woman and another man, both of whom lived further south, and were keen to take part in this venture.

And so my role as a member of the performing poetry group, Late Shift, began.

Hurray! A beautifully sunny day, and it’s Saturday, so I don’t have to go to work and can take advantage of the unaccustomed warmth and relax in the garden, listening to the blackbird belting out its song from the chimney pot behind my head. Bliss!

(The rest of this post might make more sense if you read the ones below, first)

Winning that competition had been an amazing boost to my confidence after all those years of rejections. Did this mean that I could be justified in calling myself a poet? Whether it did or not, it made no difference to the amount of courage I had to summon up when I visited my first ever writing group. It was even more daunting than my trip to Lumb Bank. Everyone there would be a stranger, and unless I chose, I’d never see any of them again after the end of the course. (I’m still in touch with people from that group)

What was particularly scary about the idea of this first writing group was the fact that it was so close to home. Oh my god, I might even bump into someone I knew, and expose my lack of talent and inability to read aloud without my voice quivering and flapping like wind through a line of washing. As it turned out, there was someone I knew, but she, and every one of the other twelve or so present was welcoming and very encouraging about my work.

After a few visits, I began to see that though it had been a good place to start, it fulfilled only one of the two-fold commitment of Adult Basic Education: to offer maximum challenge and maximum support (not always an easy balance to achieve) . Everyone was kind, but I knew that I needed more challenge if I was going to develop my work. Praise needed to be tempered with incisive critique.

Having scoured the local papers and libraries for more information, I located a group called Cannon Poets on the other side of the city. Here, I found what I was looking for: an open-to-all meeting place for poets and would-be-poets. The small workshop groups that formed after the main meeting almost invariably contained at least one or two men or women who were further along the road of experience and skills in creating and critiquing poetry.

Sometimes the feedback came as a rather bitter pill, particularly when I’d brought a poem that I’d felt had been honed to perfection, only to realise that what I was being told was true – there was still more work to be done before I’d got it to the stage where it was actually saying to others as well as myself, what I’d wanted it to say, rather than what, from my exclusive viewpoint I’d thought it was saying superbly.

I’d already discovered that the passage of a few weeks was usually a sound critic - (what a disappointment it was to take a cherished creation from a drawer where it had been left to ‘prove’ itself, and to find, instead of a nicely risen, nourishing object, a few dull stanzas lying flat on their face). No, to be fair to myself – there were sometimes a few real nuggets in there, but they’d been smothered by over-explaining, rather than being trusted to speak for themselves.

(This post might make more sense if you read the ones below, first)

I’ve already had my main holiday abroad this year (the inspiring poetry course in Spain at Almaserra Vella, run by Penelope Shuttle, but the weather then was cold and wet, so I’m hoping to get some proper sunshine in August during my summer break from my job with the Birmingham Adult Education Service.

This August, it’ll be thirteen years since that poetry course at Arvon’s Lumb Bank Centre in Yorkshire. Joining that course was far more daunting than floating around in the sky, firmly linked to a boat in the coastal waters of Gran Canaria. It was also a more significant stepping stone into the future I wanted: being a writer. It’s amazing to think how far I’ve got with my writing since that particular turning point in my life.

I’d been dabbling in poetry during the previous years, when my job took up more and more of my free time. Not that poetry can easily be squeezed in to a brief half hour, here and there, but it was something that helped to satisfy that creative itch, and is still a significant part of my writing life.

Various friends and family members had said, ‘That’s really good.’ But then they would, wouldn’t they? I knew I needed to brace myself for something more objective from someone with more experience and knowledge of the craft of poetry.

The workshops, run by Joan Poulson and John Lyons were an inspiration, but I always dreaded the time when we were expected to subject our half-finished creations to the comments from the tutors and the group. It was fascinating to hear the contributions from all the others and I’d marvel at the standard of these offerings. I found it very enlightening to see how the tutors focussed in on the best parts, and explained what they felt had worked well, and why, with suggestions on how the piece might be further developed.

My life-changing moment came with my one-to-one appointment with Joan. She looked through the poems I’d brought with me and seemed to consider some of them worthy of publication. I’d known nothing about the various small poetry presses and she suggested a few that I might try.

One of these, Envoi, was running a competition, with a deadline that October. That was my very first success with poetry. My poem, Something Like a Stone won first prize – a cheque for £100 !

Anyone who’s ever written poetry or fiction can imagine the size of the smile on my face for hours after receiving this news.

The next hurdle was to find somewhere to lodge this cheque. I’d decided years earlier to use my maiden name of Coleman for my writing endeavours, rather than my husband’s name that I’d (willingly) taken on at our wedding. I was shocked to find how hard it was to open a building society account in my own, original name. For the first time in my marriage, I felt like ‘goods and chattels’ as I was sent home to fetch my birth and marriage certificates, my passports, and a bill for the water rates that just happened to be in my married name, rather than his.

(This post might make more sense if you read the one below, before you read this)

It was during my teaching experience in Dublin – when I had to help a particularly keen group of sixth form girls to explore the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - that I first realised I was learning as much from my students as they were from me. That’s been the case all through my teaching life, and still is.

One of the things I enjoy about my day-job of working with adults who want to improve their literacy skills, is the way it helps me to see teaching and learning (at any level) as part of the same continuum line.

I love the way subjects and activities and bits of learning come together in the most unexpected ways - there I was last month, in that mountain village in Spain, reflecting on my writing life and wondering what direction it’ll take now, and I pick up that book about the early years of the Arvon Foundation,with its links to the start of my writing life.

I skimmed through enough of that book to see that it says succinctly a lot of what I’ve learned about writing (and life in general) over the intervening decades. One thing The Arvon Foundation seemed to have set out to achieve was to do away with the boundary line between ‘writers’ and ‘people who want to be writers’. The Memoir states that Arvon’s ‘door is open to anyone interested in exploring their gift to write.’

So, who’s to say if another person has a ‘gift to write’ or not? I’m not suggesting that no piece of writing can be judged more effective than another – I do think there are some objective standards that can be used as benchmarks – Mmm… maybe I’m venturing into dodgy territory, here - the word ‘objective’ doesn’t fit comfortably with judgements of creative work – I think it’s virtually impossible to keep subjectivity at bay. But discussions like that could go on forever –

And when I read that sentence again (‘anyone interested in exploring their gift to write’) I realise it’s the individual’s exploration that’s the crucial thing.

I’ve always disliked the phrase ‘wannabee writers’, as if the mere fact of having been published makes some people ‘real writers’ while the huge numbers of un-published writers, (or, worse still in some people’s eyes, self-published writers), aren’t worthy of that name.

As a writer (and even more so after having a novel published) I’ve wondered about what writers themselves count as ‘success’, so I was interested to read John Moat’s chapter on ‘Notes for Course Tutors’. This states that the outcome for the student isn’t the concern of Arvon, or the tutor. The important thing is whether it was what the student wanted to write, and was written in the understanding that ‘everything matters’, be it a distinctive secret journal, or a best-seller.

I like that.