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!

My writing life

Well, what do you do?

You could tear it up and throw it out of the window and go into a decline.

You could throw your computer out of the window and go into a decline.

You could go under the duvet for a week muttering that you are a rubbish poet.

Or

You could read it, as it stands, to someone else and see what they think.

I had a poem this week that just wouldn’t work, and although I felt like doing all three of the above things, I didn’t (partly because my computer is brand new!), I read it to someone else in order to try and find out what was the matter with it.

I am still not sure it will ever work, but the feedback was useful. Among other things I decided that it is either two poems, although I don’t want it to be, or one rather long one that is going to take a while and a lot more work to get right. So now it’s on my pile of poems to revise and revisit and it’s going to stay there for the moment.

The poem I did write was triggered by a conversation which in turn brought back a memory. A few weeks ago someone asked me what was the most worthwhile l thing I thought I had ever done. I replied that many years ago, when I was a primary school teacher, I taught lots of people to read, and I felt that that was a very useful thing to have done. This conversation in turn, brought back a very clear memory of one little boy who struggled to read and I wrote the poem about that. This is a new topic for me and takes me back to a time in my life I have never written about when I was in my twenties. It could, and I hope it will produce more poems. We’ll see.

Reading Week

More Carola Luther this week; these poems deserve reading slowly and so far I have managed to keep up my intention of reading some poetry every week. The book, Arguing with Malarchy, is in three sections and I have just finished the first one, entitled Cusp. This in itself is a lovely collection of poems about a variety of topics. I particularly enjoyed the long poem about Iceland, and the way that in short sections the poet captures the enormous variety and strangeness of the place. I remember when I went there back in the 1980’s thinking it was the first time I had been in the true wilderness, and that it was an alien environment,  and gave me a feeling of otherness that was really disturbing at the time.

Hare in the Headlights                                                                          

Nothing too scary this week that I recall, it’s been busy but there haven’t been any moments when I felt as though I was caught in the middle of the road and not sure what to do.

A friend, who really loves hares, told me she had seen a hare in the headlights for real once, and that it had turned and moved away and she had followed it. Is there a lesson to be learned from that, about going with the things that scare us?

My Writing Life

Lots of good news this week:

Firstly, I now have two readings booked for:

Thursday 19^th November at Lancaster Library at 6 pm

Tuesday 24^th November at Ambleside Library at 3 pm

I hope that all the people who couldn’t make it to my launch will be able to come and enjoy hearing my poetry. So pop the dates in your diary and tell your friends.

Secondly, my book Gardening with my Father is now on sale at the Lancaster Tourist Information Office and will shortly be on sale at Fred Holdsworth’s Bookshop in Ambleside.

And last, and certainly not least, I am now able to announce that my poem, Visiting the British Museum, was shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize 2015. Come and hear it at one of the above events.

Apart from all that, it’s has been a good week on the writing front. I have managed to start three new poems, and even if two of them don’t go anywhere I love the feeling that I have something to work on. Every few weeks, I try to return to the poems I have written and aired at my writing group and do some editing, based on the comments received. This is a good discipline for me as I find it hard, for some reason, to revisit recent work. So apart from writing new stuff that’s my task for next week.

On Thursday I attended one of the highlights of our poetry year here in Lancaster, April Poets. This group of dedicated writers organise a poetry event twice a year in April, (hence the name) and in October. The events are always well attended and always feature great writers. This Thursday was no exception, with reading from Lindsey Holland, David Borrott, Hubert Moore and Kim Moore, as well as music from John Woodward, a fine classical guitarist. Because I know David and Kim, I particularly enjoyed their readings and it was really good to hear poems from David’s first pamphlet, Porthole. There were also readings from the group of six poets who started these events in order to celebrate that this was, in fact, the 10^th April poets; and long may it continue!

 Reading Week

This week our reading group met to discuss Awakening by Stevie Davies. It is an absorbing historical novel focusing on the lives of two sisters caught up in the mid 19^th Century religious Revival in the borders of Wales. We had a very lively discussion. As I only finished reading Awakening on Thursday, while waiting for the plumber to come, I haven’t had much time for poetry reading. However, I intend to share more of my thoughts on the books by Mimi khalvati and Carola Luther, as I continue to enjoy their work at a leisurely pace.

Hare in the Headlights

Not too scary a week really, but I had to pluck up a lot of courage to go into the libraries and enquire about doing readings, and an awful lot of courage to go into the Tourist Information Office in Lancaster, and the bookshop in Ambleside to ask if they would sell my books. Everyone was delighted to help and couldn’t have been more positive, thank goodness!

Till next time

My Writing Life

Well, it’s certainly been a week for poets and poetry lovers. My week has been one of lots of different and exciting poetry experiences.

First there are three programmes available on Radio 4 Listen Again from last Thursday 8^th October which was National Poetry Day(NPD). These were Woman’s Hour, Ramblings and We British: hopeful romantics. Lots of poetry and good discussion to enjoy and share.

I’m having to listen again to all of the above as on Thursday I was in Edinburgh for a very special occasion, the highlight of this week. Well, actually I must admit I picked Thursday to go and visit a friend without realising it was NPD. My friend is a film maker and had recently filmed an exhibition called A Poet, a Potter and a Painter at the Edinburgh festival. This exhibition featured the poetry of Elizabeth Burns who lived in Lancaster and was at the heart of our poetry community here, sharing her poetry at readings and her skills as a teacher in poetry workshops and groups. Sadly, Elizabeth died in August and never got to see the exhibition.

In celebration of NPD the Scottish Poetry Library chose poems written by five Scottish poets and put them online asking the public to vote for which one should be put on a huge banner on a building in Canongate on NPD. One of Elizabeth’s poems, Spiral, was selected and won the competition. My friend was filming the opening on NPD and she and I went to see the banner after lunch. The poem was read by the Edinburgh Makar, Christine de Luca, and members of Elizabeth’s family were present.

Either side of this event, other poetry highlights for me were the weekly meeting of my writing group on Wednesday night, only three of us this week but, as ever a nourishing and enjoyable occasion, and on Thursday the meeting of local Stanza Group here at Lancaster Library, which takes place on the second Thursday of each month. I am not surprised that I haven’t had a lot of time to actually write anything.

Reading Week

However, on the train to Edinburgh I settled down to read Arguing with Malarchy, a collection of poems by Carola Luther, published by Carcenet in 2011. I met Carola as she led a residential workshop with Kim Moore at Abbot Hall last April and I very much enjoyed the experience of working with her then. Her poetry demands and rewards careful study and slow reading. So, I am going through it very slowly, and so far particularly like the poems Vernal and The Lamb.

Hare in the Headlights

A very big Headlights moment this week as on Tuesday morning I set off at the crack to drive to Ambleside to give my first workshop for Learning Plus. It’s always nerve wracking gong into a new teaching or facilitating situation, but the workshop went well and I found that after about half an hour I really enjoyed it. I really love teaching creative writing and I hope this is going to be a great experience.

So off to prepare the next one now, till next time!

My writing life

What a night! At about 7pm on Saturday 26^th September people started to arrive at the Storey Institute in Lancaster to attend the launch of my recently published pamphlet, Gardening with My Father.

I read a wide selection of my poems, some from the pamphlet and some other more recent ones. The themes of my pamphlet are my family and reflections on their characters, and my relationships with them; my interest in gardening and in travelling, especially in former Yugoslavia, and a few at the end from a current collaborative project with photographer Sid Barlow called ‘Ways of Exploring Morecambe Bay.’

One of the really great things about a poetry launch is that it can offer other writers an opportunity to showcase their poems. Two of the three poets who read with me were local. Elaine Trevitt, coming from a medical background, writes funny and touching autobiographical poetry and read, among others, poems from her pamphlet Caught in the Net. Angela Christopher’s book The Memory Tree was published last year. As a visual artist, Angela writes wonderful descriptions of places and people. Yvonne Boyle came all the way from Coleraine in the north of Ireland to read. Yvonne’s poetry is sharply evocative of a country and a countryside she loves and expresses her emotional relationship with it.

The evening was made even more special by the lovely Celtic harp music from local musician, Celia Briar. The Nice cafe at the Storey provided food and drink and we all had a fantastic evening. Poetry, music, food and wine, could there be a better recipe for celebration? And the poets even sold some books as well.

As with all poetry publications this one has been a while in the making. The process started more than a year ago when Joy Howard, the editor at Grey Hen Press, agreed to publish. From then on it was hard work as the editing process is detailed and meticulous, but I found it most enjoyable. It was lovely to have someone else scrutinise my work in this way.

After weeks of planning and preparation I found that on the day I was relieved it was actually happening and surprisingly nervous. Mind you, I have always suffered from stage fright and on the whole I think it’s a good thing. However, once I got started I was fine and everyone was very appreciative, and as the evening wore on I became more and more relaxed.

Since last Saturday I have received cards and messages of appreciation and congratulation from many people who said they enjoyed the event. I now feel well and truly launched!

I cannot conclude this account without saying that without my partner, Pat, who was the M.C., and helped me so much with all the organising, and my friend Vanessa, who ran the bookstall, it would not have gone so smoothly.

Reading week

As you can imagine I haven’t found much time to read in the last week, so here are two forthcoming reading intentions. I am going to buy two books of poetry. Yvonne brought over with her the poems of Hannah Lowe, whom she had heard reading at the John Hewitt Summer School this summer, and whose collection is called Chick. I haven’t bought it yet, but I went to The Poetry Archive and listened to some of her recordings. Try it and let me know what you think.

Secondly I discovered that one of my favourite poets, Mimi Khalvati, has just published a new collection The Weather Wheel, also on my must have shopping list.

Hare in the Headlights moments

Lots this week…but here are the two most scary:

Arriving at the Storey on Saturday to find no wine had appeared for my guests! (Don’t worry it came!)

Ready to start the evening and the harpist had not arrived. (Don’t worry she did! The traffic is dreadful in Lancaster.)

Till soon!