My Writing Life

Because they are exhausting, in the nicest possible way, and leave you, on the one hand inspired and over stimulated and dying to get home to write, and on the other hand never wanting to hear or read another poem again ever! Believe me I have just been to one and am in recovery…

Seriously though it was great. The festival was StAnza the National Poetry Festival of Scotland which takes place in St Andrews every March.  I had never been to St Andrews before although I have been camping on the Angus/Fife coast, which is spectacular. St Andrews is a lovely seaside town with the Byre Theatre as the hub of the Festival and other venues close by, and selection of great bars and cafes and the sea two minutes walk away if you fancy a stroll on the beach.

I went for two very good reasons. Firstly because my friend and fellow poet, Lizzie Burns, who died last year, and who was a faithful StAnza goer, was being remembered at a reading and at the launch of a film about her final collaborative project; which brings me to the second reason which was that my friend Sitar Rose made the documentary film about this final project. Sitar and Lizzie never met each other, and it is one of my life’s strangest coincidences that I knew them both.

The reading was on the Friday afternoon and part of a two poet event, Poets Past and Present. Introducing the reading the Chair announced that Lizzie’s last pamphlet Clay had been shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award 2015 which seeks to recognise excellence in poetry, highlighting outstanding contributions made by poets to our cultural life.

Here is the full quotation about the pamphlet from the Press Release on the Ted Hughes Award website.

Elizabeth Burns: Clay

is a short collection, published by Wayleave Press, of small, meditative poems exploring pottery and the potter’s craft which are themselves exquisitely formed vessels for larger enquiry and celebration. It was written by the poet Elizabeth Burns after she worked on a joint exhibition with painter Ann Gilchrist and potter Paul Tebble, and was published shortly before the poet’s death in August 2015.

(Wayleave Press is based here in Lancaster.)

So, to continue, the exhibition was also at StAnza having previously been at the Edinburgh Festival 2015. I spent the rest of Friday and Saturday at the festival, of which more later, and returned on Sunday afternoon for the launch of the documentary film about the Painter, Potter, Poet exhibition. It is a superb documentary (26 minutes) chronicling the progress of the project both in artists’ studios at the exhibition space and in Scottish woodlands.

If you go to the website A Potter, a Painter and a Poet there is a link to the film Big Words, which chronicles the biggest printed poem, Spiral, by Lizzie, which was displayed on Canongate in Edinburgh as the winner of the Big Words competition 2015.

Having devoted most of this blog to these key events, I have decided to devote the next  blog to writing about everything else I did at StAnza. There is lots more to tell.

My Reading Week

I didn’t have a lot of time for ordinary or leisure reading while I was the festival but I bought a book by Helena Nelson, of Happenstance Press, called How (not) to Get your Poetry Published. So far it is really helpful and I am working thorugh it. I particularly like the format of having a chapter about how to get published alternating with a prompt for creative writing. More of this later.

Hare in the Headlights

Just one scary moment coming on 19^th March: my reading at the International Women’s Day event …

Bye for now

My Writing Life

Since returning from my holidays last Monday, this week has been very busy and full of surprises, not all of them anything to with my writing life. However yesterday morning the phone rang, and it was a reporter from BBC Radio Lancashire telling me that they wanted to feature a clip from something I wrote more than a year ago on their lunchtime programme.

So here’s the back story. About 18 months ago I took part in a project called Documenting Dissent here in Lancaster which was about collecting the history of various kinds of protest and activism in Lancaster over the centuries and bringing it together in a digital record on line. Lancaster has been a city of dissent for a long time; Quakers, Conscientious Objectors, the student protests at the newly founded University in the 1970’s and many more. It also has a long and rich history as the home of gay men and lesbians. Therefore part of the Documenting Dissent project was to record the history of the LGBT community in our city.

I wrote a piece for the project called A Brief history Lesbian Lancaster in Six Nights Out, retelling my experience of coming out in 1980’s Lancaster. The piece was recorded in 2015 and can be heard in full on the Documenting Dissent website.

It was an extract from this piece that was played at the one o’clock news bulletin on BBC Radio Lancashire yesterday (Friday 26^th February), as the reporter, who was following the digital trail this month, stood outside the site of what was once Kizzy’s Bar on Castle Hill. Anyone who wants to hear the clip can go to the BBC Radio Lancashire website and listen again. Eventually a podcast will be available here.

Not out of the blue, but nevertheless with some excitement, on Tuesday I drove up to Ambleside to visit my students from the Creative Writing Course I taught at Learning Plus last Autumn. I took with me the booklet of their collected writing entitled Reflections. They were thrilled with it and I was delighted with what they had produced. I shall be returning there in the Autumn to teach the course again.

Other forthcoming writing projects and events are starting to take shape for me and they are listed below.

Reading Week

As I have been on holiday, trying, not entirely successfully, to get some winter sun, I have been reading lots of fiction lately. I have enjoyed Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, which I read for my reading group. I started by thinking it, frankly, just very weird, but it grew on me, as good books do, and now I want to read the sequel.

Currently I am enjoying William Boyd’s Sweet Caress, a venture into the world of fictional autobiography that is fascinating and masterly.

Hare in the Headlights – News

I am thinking of Headlights in the sense of lighting up what is in front of me and will use this week’s blog to list everything currently on my horizon (and who knows what else is round the corner).

Tomorrow, Monday 29^th February, I am being interviewed by the postgraduate Creative Writing students at Lancaster University for their programme on University Radio, called The Writing Life. The interview will include some reading of my poetry and I hope to get a link to it soon. Next week I shall let you know when it is being broadcast and if you can listen online.

On 19^th March at the Gregson Centre here in Lancaster, at 8 p.m. I shall be reading my poetry as part of an evening celebrating International Women’s Day: slightly late because of the flooding and storm damage, but still celebrating.

Later on in April / May there will be new pages here on this website.

There will be an online exhibition of photographs and poems for you to enjoy, entitled Ways of Exploring Morecambe Bay. This is the result of my collaboration over the last couple of years with stained glass artist and photographer Sid Barlow.

I will also be advertising and recruiting for my Creative Writing Course which is to take place here in Lancaster in the autumn. This will consist of ten weekly workshops aimed at people who have tried a bit of writing and would like to do more.

So that’s it for now. Watch this space.

Till Soon.

My Writing Life

Well it does round here, and that means that I am trapped indoors day after day, and I just have to write. Every time I look out of the rain drenched window, I try to think, ‘this is good, more writing time,’ but the garden calls… Let’s hope that by the time I am back from my forthcoming holiday, the weather will actually have dried up a bit.

Anyway, this week I managed to finish the second draft of the first two chapters of my children’s sci-fi book, and two members of my wonderful writing group have agreed to read them through. I look forward to two different perspectives, to help the process along; one from someone who has heard some of the first draft and the other from a member who is absolutely new to the work.

On the poetry front I am managing a poem a week, on various themes, helped along by reading poetry and books about writing. I have a number of different themes on the go at present, looking back at my life as a teacher and also trying to respond to routine activities of every day. I seem to be writing these alternately at the moment, I am not sure why, but it works.

I’m also preparing some poems for magazine submission, which means spending time editing old work, sometimes surprisingly rewarding.

 Reading Week

Still reading Vikram Seth, well it’s a very long, but fascinating, book. The reading group I belong to met last week, here at my house, to discuss Ann Enright’s The Green Road. We all loved it, and those who had read it twice loved it even more. It is so beautifully written and a real page turner.

Hare in the Headlights

Two events coming up:

I have been invited by the post graduate Creative Writing students at Lancaster University to give a half hour interview for their radio programme, The Writing Life. I am recording the interview at the end of this month, so watch this space where I will post a link so that you can listen to the interview once it is done.

I have also been invited to read some poetry at a slightly late celebration of International Women’s Day on the 19^th March, at the Gregson Community Centre here in Lancaster at 8 o’clock. I understand I am to be early on in the programme so if you want to hear the poems get there in time!

That’s it for now.

My writing life

If I really get on with this, I’ll have done two blog posts in January. I aim to do four every month, but what with the floods, the power cuts, Christmas and a delayed birthday party, I have needed some recovery time.

Anyway, enough excuses, the writing life has been trotting along this week, plenty going on, which has its down side, as that always means not enough time for actually writing anything. I only managed a tiny poem for writing group.

On Wednesday, sort of on the way to writing group, I went to a book launch at Waterstones in Lancaster. The book was The Gathering Tide by Karen Lloyd. Karen is a member of Brewery Poets, which I have just joined, and I met her there last month. Her book launch was crammed with people and very interesting. We listened to her reading extracts from her book of essays which is described on the cover as ‘a journey around the Edgelands of Morecambe Bay.’ She read, among other passages, very moving extract about the tenth anniversary commemoration of the cockling tragedy, an event I attended myself.

I was especially interested in this book launch, as the collaborative project I am involved with is entitled Ways of Exploring Morecambe Bay and looks at this amazing place through poems and photographs. The poems and photos will start to appear on this website later this year, so watch this space.

I wasn’t quite sure whether to put the museum here in my writing life, but I will, if only to start to say what I want to say about it. Yesterday it was back to the British Museum again, this time to see The Celts: Art and Identity a truly beautiful exhibition which I have only just begun to digest. No poem yet, but I have a feeling that there will be… We’ll see. It ends today, the 31^st January, but it scheduled to be in Edinburgh later on in the year. Go if you can.

Reading Week

First the online article from Writers and Artists’ latest newsletter (which I get online) by Elizabeth Gilbert, an extract from her new book, Big Magic. Truly the funniest article about writing I’ve read in a long time. It was so good I‘ve bought the book!

Currently ploughing, and that is the right word, through Vikram Seth’s gigantic novel A Suitable Boy, set in the 1950s in newly independent India, after the separation from Pakistan. It is a page turner but it is also enormous and I’m going to be with it for some time. I’ll have to read lots of poetry in between to keep this slot interesting.

Hare in the Headlights

Well I’ve rewritten some of my children’s book and the new section looks good, according to my resident critic and muse, so I’m going to plod on with that this week.

The Morecambe Project has had to be scaled down as both I and my collaborator felt we were being too ambitious, given how much else we have on the go at present. Now it is considerably less scary and will take the form of an online exhibition on my website, where you can read the poems and browse the pictures at your leisure.

That’s all for now.

My Writing Life

Now is the time of year when everybody sits down and plans the next bit. I’m not a person who does resolutions (I broke the one about getting up early each day, on New Year’s Day), but I do like to have good intentions for the next year.

They are:

The rewrite of my children’s book, science fiction for 10 to 12 year olds.

The submission of poems to magazines and starting a collection for submission.

Working on the next stage of my collaborative project with a stained glass artist and photographer.

I have been deliberately a bit brief about these as I intend to blog about progress on all of them in the coming months. So watch this space!!

At the end of this last week I boosted my poetry inspiration with my first visit to Brewery Poets in Kendal and yesterday I went to the second of Kim Moore’s workshops in Barrow. Both have certainly given me energy for getting started on all the above projects and continuing to write poetry, of course.

Reading (Holiday) Week.

Over the last few weeks, trapped indoors by the ceaseless rain, I have re-read Ann Enright’s The Green Road for my next reading group meeting. I’ll report on that later. Suffice it to say it was very much worth a second read. I have also read Anthony Doerr’s All the Light we cannot See a wonderful retelling, from the perspective of a young blind girl and a young German soldier, of the occupation of France during the second world war. It ends sadly and a bit bleakly but is beautifully written. I have also enjoyed Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread , her latest, and to my mind the most successful, of her recent novels.

Hare in the Headlights

Looming large on the scary horizon is the forthcoming attempt at re-writing my children’s book (will I think it’s rubbish after all this time?), and the whole business of getting the collaborative project out there and happening.

Till next time

Last blog of 2015

my Christmas poem for this year

In These Times

In these times, when brutal armies are on the march
When the rich live fearful, behind locked gates, and the poor
Have nothing to eat and nowhere to go;
In these times when there is so much food in the shops
And so many people go hungry, when the days are dark
And the nights darker. In these winter times
There are still those who collect toys for children,
Who give away the money they do not need,
Who eat Christmas dinner with prisoners.
 
In these times when occupying armies
Send everyone back where they came from,
To where there is nowhere to stay, or keep warm,
There are still those who find shelter for a pregnant girl,
Who bring a blanket for her child new born.
There are still those who travel to visit with gifts and hope.
In these times, in these hard winter times
There are still and always, good people.

Elizabeth Hare
© 2015

See you next year!

My writing life

This blog is going to be posted a bit late as I have been very busy over the last 10 days. I have done two readings, one at Lancaster Library and one at Ambleside Library and sold about 10 copies of my book, so I am pleased with that. The readings went well with small, but very attentive, audiences.

I have also been working on the poems I started at the workshop in Barrow a couple of weeks ago. (See previous blog, on a winter’s day). At the workshop Kim Moore, who was leading it, mentioned the idea that a poem needs a ‘turn’ a change of idea or level of meaning. Two of the three poems I came away with have worked in this way but this week I have been struggling with the third, the final version of which I read at Writing Group last night. I had shared the idea of the ‘turn’ with the group the week before and it was pleasing to be able to bring a poem, worked on, and now including, the idea of a turn. The group met way out in the country last night beyond Bentham and the poem was very appropriately called Dark. So thanks Kim: once more for a great idea to work on.

I’m an inveterate planner. This week one of my blog readers emailed to exclaim ‘you’re so ORGANISED’, (her capitals not mine). So I’m already thinking about my writing life for the New Year. I have a few projects in mind and a new group, the Brewery Poets in Kendal to go to. My poem Dark is really about SAD which I suffer from at this time of year and nothing cheers me up like a bit of forward planning!

Reading Week

I have just finished Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread, shortlisted for the Mann Booker prize 2015. I loved every page. This is Anne Tyler at her best. If you would like to know more there is a good review in the Guardian.

I have always been a fan of hers since reading her Dinner in the Homesick Restaurant in the 1980’s. This new  book brings her writing right up to the present and then takes us back into a family’s past. I found the section about the depression in the 1930’s in the USA particularly moving.

Hare in the Headlights

I’ve survived two lots of HIH moments this week as I always get stage fright before a reading. (Who doesn’t?) However I also love reading my poetry and sharing it with others, so it’s worth it.

My writing Life

This week started well as I was able to finish off my poem Waiting and take it to the writing group on Wednesday. On Thursday there was a meeting of our local Stanza group and we had been asked to bring a newly discovered, or long remembered, favourite poem to discuss. Although there were only three members present, we had a lively discussion. One person had brought an extract from Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy which led to many political parallels with our contemporary experience. I took Hannah Lowe’s Self Portrait, Before Me, as she is a new, and wonderful, discovery for me.

Yesterday, Saturday, I went to Barrow- in- Furness, on a cold train, with a sore leg, on a filthy wet day, to a workshop led by Kim Moore. After waiting for a taxi for 20 minutes at Barrow station, the taxi driver got lost and I nearly gave up. I’m glad I didn’t, as the workshop was very worthwhile, introducing me to new work and new poets and I got three poems to work on out of it. The journey back was equally miserable as the weather, was, if anything, worse, and by then it was dark, and the train was again cold, and full of people getting steadily very drunk before a night out in the clubs in Lancaster. Don’t tell me I don’t suffer for my art!

Looking forward this week to my reading at the library in Lancaster on Thursday 19^th at 6 pm. Hope to see you there!

Reading Week

At Kim’s workshop we looked at a poem by Choman Hardi a Kurdish poet, who has written about women in the conflicted areas of Kurdish Iraq and Syria and whose website is worth a visit. Kim brought one of her poems to the workshop on Saturday.

Hare in the Headlights

Preparing for my reading this week, hare in the headlights questions arise as follows: Will anyone come? Will the library be quiet enough for me to be heard? If anyone does come, will they like my poetry?

Anyway, I say to myself it’s worth a go.

My Writing Life

I haven’t written anything for a couple of weeks; this could just be a fallow period, frustrating but not fatal. It has been very interesting to observe myself in this ‘writing inactive’ state.

After a day or two of not being able to think of anything to write, and time therefore filled with displacement activity, little bits of poems started rumbling about in my head.

I have had to do a lot of waiting recently, mostly in N.H.S. waiting rooms. They are full of bored people, waiting, and exhausted staff, run off their feet. Rather than write a rant about the inadequacies of funding the N.H.S. I let a poem about the whole experience of waiting  form itself slowly as I sat on a series of plastic chairs in grey rooms plastered with leaflets ranging from the mildly admonishing to the truly terrifying. All my hours of waiting have resulted in a poem written today which I think will work. It seems that the creative juices having been swirling around somewhere in my subconscious.

Reading Week

This week, stuck in waiting rooms, and at home with my leg up, has given me lots of time to read. Like you do when you’re not well, I have been reading thrillers, namely Denise Mina’s trilogy Garnethill. It’s a real page-turner, a fabulous read for when you are not feeling great and a fabulous read anyway.

However, I have also been reading the poetry of Hannah Lowe, whose work I have not encountered until recently. Her book Chick was recommended by a friend from the North of Ireland who had heard her read over there. Lowe’s poems paint a rich picture of her childhood and particularly her relationship with her father. They are deceptively simple, and they touch deep feelings.

Hare in the Headlights

Thank goodness, nothing to report this week! I’ve had enough to deal with!

My Writing Life

I use to think, and still do, partly, that the reason that the Lake District has always attracted  poets was because there are so many good tea shops and lovely cakes to be had there. In our house the Lake District is sometimes called the Cake District for that reason!  a regional supermarket has cottoned on to this and I am now the proud owner of a shopping bag that says ‘Cake District’. However, I shall leave my discussion of the connection between poetry and cake for another time…

Last Tuesday the drive up to Ambleside offered me a different answer. Each week since early September, as I have driven up to teach my workshop, I have noticed the trees on the roadside all along the journey and on the hills as you approach the Lake District itself, slowly changing colour.

Tuesday was a perfect and glorious autumn morning and just before reaching Ambleside where the traffic builds up outside Waterhead, driving slowly, waiting in a queue, I got a chance to see a great stretch of Windermere off to my left. The traffic paused and I looked out across the lake. It was absolutely still mirror reflecting the blue sky, a little paler than summer blue, with somehow a hint of the changing season. Across the hills in the distance, hanging above the lake, was a thin line of mist and in the lake the reflection of the shoreline of trees and hills glowed in every shade of red and green and gold and brown. As the sun was, at that time of day, still low in the morning sky to our east and so the whole picture was lit with an intense light. I have to resort to cliché and say it took my breath away, because it did.

I have actually seen Windermere in the autumn many times and it’s never been the same twice, and I’ve never written a poem about it. When something happens like last Tuesday morning I understand why people come here to write, how can you not when you are surrounded by the kind of beauty that makes you weep?

I am so lucky to live nearby.

Reading Week

It’s been a very busy week at home so most of my reading has been in preparation for my workshop on Tuesday which is to explore the theme of the sea. So I turned to a lovely anthology of women’s poetry about the sea published a couple of years ago by Grey Hen Press called Running before the Wind, (edited Joy Howard 2013). It is a richly varied collection and has provided good resources for workshop discussion.

Hare in the Headlights

No particular writing scares this week, but no doubt they are saving themselves up!