For some reason, my blogging brain staged a shut down after my latest post on October third, and here I am now on 5th November, wondering, to the sound of exploding gunpowder, if some part of that missing month is hiding in my attic.

I blame the accumulation of clutter in our house over the last two decades. I could stand it no longer and embarked on a frenzied clearout that could not be completed methodically, step by step. What was done in room A, would affect Room B, and room C had to be half emptied, to make space for refugee pieces of essential items that were banished from room D . And so on, from mild untidiness to chaos, then utter chaos and eventually, after several trips to charity shops and the municipal tip, to soothing order.

Phew! I was able to draw breath, and after producing a couple of passable poems to ease my creative famine, I turned to my neglected blog and started browsing some of the headlines on my daily updates from the on-line Bookseller. Poetry and clearouts were combined several months ago here in the post

During the last month, there seems to have been a glut of articles about the state of publishing, such as this,
this
and this

Last week I received an email from one of my favourite bloggers, Litlove of ‘Tales from the Reading Room’,
asking if I would take part in an on-line interview with her. Coincidentally, publishing was the topic. Litlove was interested in my own venture into publishing, Novel Press. Though probably it wasn’t such a coincidence, since Litlove feels that small publishers and publishing cooperatives are going to be important in the years ahead. She is not the only blogger to be investigating publishing trends, as you can see from this post.

I was pleased to spend time in looking back on my experience of being published and becoming a publisher. All sorts of half-forgotten details came to the fore, and now I can see more clearly what a challenge it has been – and, in spite of some frustrating moments, how satisfying I have found the whole venture.

Thank you, LitLove, for asking me in the first place, and also for tidying up my rather rambling answers to your stimulating questions!

This hasn’t been the only interview I’ve taken part in this week. I’ll wait till my next post before I tell you about Tuesday afternoon, when a small BBC team brought their own clutter of lights, tripod, camera, monitor and numerous trailing wires into my own little writing room. Very exciting, even though the focus wasn’t really on me and my writing.

The last few days have been like another world! The only time I’ve picked up a pen to write anything in a book was on Saturday when I was one of the witnesses to sign the register at St Nicholas Church
in Chiswick at my daughter’s wedding.

I know that many other proud mothers and fathers of the bride will have experienced similar emotions to mine, but I doubt that any can have had quite such a wonderful day as we all did! OK, OK, so you disagree! But I think there’s something about this type of occasion that places it on a higher plane altogether – some kind of parallel universe that we can stumble into for a brief section of time. Once we’re back in our real lives we can store those memories and value them for what they were, rather than cling to them as a bench-mark against which we measure our happiness quotient!

One way of extending the pleasures of a very special event for a little longer, is to meet up with close friends and family the following day and share perceptions of the event, so I felt doubly lucky to have been invited to lunch by Clarissa, my friend and my daughter’s godmother, for a birthday treat at the Goring Hotel together with my husband, my son and his new girlfriend. His presence was an extra treat as, like my daughter, he lives in London. (If you want to read more about this fabulously opulent place, and see a poem I wrote after my first visit there, click here).

Back to the wedding itself: my daughter, Sara and her (now) husband, had organized every detail of the entire event, so all I had to do during the months of preparation was to offer verbal support over the phone and carry out one or two minor tasks. When she showed me the draft of the order of service, and asked if I might be able to write a poem to be placed on the back page, I agreed to try. As you might imagine, this was a huge challenge, so I was very relieved when the creative juices began to flow in the right direction! You can judge for yourselves below.

Sara and Ric met at the Corinthians sailing club,
and they had arranged for the bride’s wedding party to go in a boat, a minute’s walk from their home,to be taken to the beautiful old church further down the river. As mother of the bride, I didn’t take my own camera with me – for one thing, it didn’t fit into my small handbag and anyway, I realised that photographer wasn’t included in my role. I’ll post a few pics in a few days.

The reception was at the club house, an ideal venue for the happy couple!
And here’s the poem:

The Wedding Day
For Sara and Ric

Although the day itself seems magical,
the slow unfolding of a fairytale
in which the princess in a silken gown
glides down the river in the bridal barque,
her radiance out-dazzling the white wings
of her attendant swans, it’s merely
a bright exclamation mark in the elusive
book of chance that led them here.

Now they’ll set out as man and wife in the same
boat, the frail vessel of their hopes and dreams,
but they both know their love, if nurtured,
will be strong enough to anchor them
in times of harsh reality, and light enough
to harness all the winds of happiness.

I’m pleased to say that there are several Treasure Hunters out there who are on the way to winning one of the free five books on offer. You’ll find the fourth question below. The fifth and final one will be posted next week.

Each of the posts with a Treasure Hunt question will take you back to the previous one, so for number 3, click here (or just scroll down). This will make it easier for newcomers to join in, and have the same chance of winning, as answers can be sent in one by one, or all at once with the correct answer to question 5

QUESTION 4
What were the words that Dave Reeves used to introduce me on his radio show?

(HINT) This group give great PERFORMANCES. Once you’ve found them, you’re just one click away from the post that holds the answer.

And now for a few totally irrelevant photos –Well, they are relevant to my life at the moment, but not to my writing activities.

I’ve mentioned Gardening Husband in some previous posts, and one of those links him with poetry though he’s as much of a poet as I am a gardener – in other words, not at all!

However, he has made a significant contribution to the content of Paper Lanterns, my latest novel, as you can see here and here.

These pictures show where he spends a great deal of his time.

In the last few weeks
we’ve been devouring:
baby broad beans,
spinach,
peas,
strawberries
and, just recently
some of the new crop
POTATOES.

Eaten within a couple of hours from being wrenched from the earth, they are the best you could possibly ask for.

The taste of them is as near to the irradiated, several-months-old spuds from supermarkets
as our Earth is from the moon!These are the first digging of Jersey Royals.

The sight of these is a poem in itself!

It’s beginning to seem that whenever I’ve planned to write about poetry, I really feel like posting about fiction, and vice versa. Therefore, since I’ve designated Sunday for my Poem of the Week, it’s no surprise that I really want to tell you about the work I’ve just been doing on my novel, Paper Lanterns.

So here’s a short digression first. Although I produced the final version of this novel a few months ago, there were one or two of the early parts that I’ve kept tinkering with - especially the first part of Chapter One, and now I really do think it’s sorted.

The other thing I’ve been doing today relates to aspects of sign-posting (which I may, or may not keep to, when I’m laying out the final PDF version ready for self-publication). I’ve been experimenting with giving dates and titles to different sections, in order to present an initial overview for the reader. I’m very visual myself, and I like to see the overall shape of what I’m about to read.

I’ve also made a list of the 35 chapters, with just a few words about the content of each, in case I decide to give them all a title (that’s not very likely, though).

Not counting the brief prologue (Sutton Coldfield 1971), I’ve identified ten section headings – starting with:
Sutton Coldfield 2008 – Ann; (chapters 1 to 3)
Hong Kong 2008 – Vivienne; (chapters 4 to 10)
Hong Kong 1930 - Belle (chapters 11 to 13)

I now have an A4 page with the relevant chapter numbers and brief details arranged under the different section headings, and I like the shape of the book’s structure!

And now, it’s back to poetry again. My post last Wednesday mentioned the event at the Kitchen Garden Café, so here’s one of the three that I read that evening

Legacy
Through her camouflage of mohair
my fingers meet a sudden shoulder blade
and jut of rib. Bone of her bone is nothing new.
Flesh of her flesh. But this is new:
that stem cells of a foetus make their way
into the very marrow of their host –
renew themselves, year after year. So
I transmit my thoughts, electric pulses along
axons and dendrites out through my palms
and fingertips into her skin then down
to the dark centre of bone where my own
cells and my siblings’ cells and the cells of our
long-dead brother, her first baby, jostle each other
and I tell them push your strength into her.

I wrote this a few years ago, inspired by an article that caught my imagination (I can’t now remember where). It revealed that the bone marrow of mothers contains some of the stem cells of their own children – and these are still renewing themselves many years after the birth. I read this shortly after returning home to the Midlands after visiting my mother in Sussex. She was in her late 80s at the time, and I’d noticed that she seemed to have become thinner and more frail since , and I’d last seen her. (She’s now 92, and still doing well, so maybe those cells have been doing their job! )

I decided to start this blog because I wanted to share, with anyone who’s interested in writing matters, a little of what I’ve learned about the craft of writing over 25 years or so, and the highs and lows of these experiences – as well as giving updates about my novels and poetry, and any future talks or readings I’ll be doing.

I started thinking about this a few weeks ago when I was staying in Relleu, an (almost) unspoilt mountain village in Spain. I’d enrolled on a poetry course run by Penelope Shuttle and decided to arrive a week early to give myself time to focus on my writing.

The weather was much colder than I’d expected - and wetter. For this first week, I’d rented a flat from the owners of Almaserra Vella, the beautiful house where ‘my’ course would be held.

Half way through the second morning, I realised that the heavy clouds were fraying at the edges, revealing patches of brilliant blue. I was just about to go out for a walk, when my eye was caught by the title of a book on a shelf nearby: The Founding of Arvon – A Memoir of the Early Years of the Arvon Foundation by John Moat.

This might not sound very exciting to you, but it seemed like a good omen to me, at a watershed in my writing ‘career’. That book was a direct link back across more than two decades, to when I’d first started writing seriously. My second child had just started school, and I was staving off the day when I’d have to take on more work. Two evenings a week of Adult Literacy classes didn’t bring home much extra money, but I wanted to keep the day times free to develop my writing.

Becoming ‘a writer’ was proving harder than I’d thought. The stories I was sending off to Radio 4 for their ‘morning story’ slot returned with the regularity of homing pigeons. By mid-November, it was becoming clear that I needed some impartial feedback, so I decided to look around for a creative writing course.

At that stage, I’d never heard of the Arvon Foundation – or any other residential writing courses, and even if I had, there was no way I could have afforded to spend that kind of money on myself. I knew that my (very part-time) employer, Birmingham Adult Education Service, provided weekly courses in all sorts of subjects, including Creative Writing, for a relatively modest fee. With any luck, there’d be a course nearby that I could join the following term.

There was a course, but not in quite the way that I’d expected.