"Too Close" and Ann Alexander

Besides my own life as a writer, I do like to use this blog as a forum for conversations with other writers. I'm amassing a terrific list of these dialogues which I have held and posted over the years. They use to be listed under interviews over there on the right of your screen, but I've changed the heading to Great Conversations because that's really what they have all turned out to be.  Today's is certainly no exception.

Ann Alexander is the first poet to have a collection published by Ward Wood and with the publication of Too Close she has set an exceptionally high standard.  Ann narrowly avoided the Second World War by being born in bombed-out Coventry in 1946. She worked as an advertising copywriter in London for many years before absconding to Cornwall, where she now lives. She has published two previous collections of poetry (Facing Demons, Peterloo Poets, 2002 and Nasty, British & Short, Peterloo Poets, 2007). She took first prize in the Frogmore, Bedford Open, and Mslexia competitions, came 3rd in the BBC’s poem for Britain (2003) and 3rd in the Peterloo poetry competition. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, on various websites including BBC2, in a wide range of poetry magazines and on Radio 4. She is married and has one daughter. After a working lifetime in advertising and journalism she admits to an obsession with news as it is reflected in the media, and the inspiration for many of her poems comes from there.
  I want to show you an example of her work, but first here is the conversation we recently had:
Sue: You used to live in London, but now you live in Cornwall - two very different environments. Has that change affected your poetry?
Ann: I lived in London for about 20 years, working as an advertising copywriter. All our friends lived similar lives. One day, almost on impulse, we decided to move to Cornwall - lo and behold, we found ourselves in a huge farmhouse in the deep countryside, a stone’s throw from the sea and 300 miles from our friends and family. The farm was in the heart of Iron Age country and I discovered standing stones, fogous (underground chambers), a roundago (a little round Iron Age field), a two-thousand year old track across the moor - all within five minutes of the house. Shortly after our arrival, I became pregnant with my one and only child, who seemed like a present from Cornwall, and helped us to integrate. These wonderful life-changing events released something in me and changed the way I looked at everything. I started writing seriously then, and have not stopped since. We have been here for many years, but I still don’t feel Cornish - just an incomer who loves living here. And I still love London, and find inspiration there, too.

Sue: You often take the news as your inspiration. But I find your poems very personal, almost like interior monologues. Do you find you would rather write about the personal life than about nature or politics, or does it just turn out that way?
Ann: My poetry is about connections. The personal, the political, the emotional, the abstract, are all intertwined. I write poems about those I love but I would never publish any of them, because I can’t believe it’s really interesting to anyone else. I love the wider world and what’s happening in the world and I love the media. There’s enough information in one edition of a decent newspaper to keep a poet occupied for years. But of course, it’s the world seen through my eyes, and so it’s all very personal.

Sue: How did you train? Did you study poetry in a programme or with one teacher, or are you self-taught?
Ann: My first published poem is best forgotten and happened when I was about 15. But it encouraged me to think I could be a writer. At first, I wanted to be a journalist, but by chance I was offered a job as a copywriter which paid twice as much, and I was stony broke. I think my copywriting years were great training to be a poet. Advertising writing is concise, never wastes a word, uses alliteration, word play, repetition, tries to make a direct connection with the reader and elicit an immediate response. On the other hand, of course, advertising has no soul: it is all about selling things, in the manner of a market trader. Poetry is, of course, the fine art of writing; copywriting is poetry’s wayward, streetwise younger brother.

Sue: You have been very successful in competitions. Do you like competitions and submitting to them, or do you see them as a necessary evil, or neither?
Ann: As soon as I began to write poetry seriously I entered competitions. I was very lucky and won a few quite quickly - I saw that for me, isolated as I was, competitions were a great way to get noticed. I also took out several subscriptions to leading poetry magazines, and entered poems for publication there. I found a publisher quickly. Peterloo would never have published me if I hadn’t won a prize or two, and one thing led to another. I became a little bit obsessed with competitions, and loved winning or being commended. This gave me an internet presence, and led to invitations to read. My third collection, Too Close, the first from our excellent new publishing house, Ward Wood, would never have happened without the internet and for this I am very grateful. My advertising background meant that I was never shy about marketing myself! Connections again.

Thanks to Ann for this conversation.  And now here's a teaser.  If you love poetry, then I urge you to buy Too Close. It is a collection full of poems that make you drop the book into your lap, stare into space and nod with wonder and admiration.

Last meal


There will come a time
when they say in their kindly voices

What would you like for your last meal?
You can have anything, anything at all -

Trembling beneath the shadow
of the metaphorical rope, I will reply:

Best make it chicken -
a chicken’s life is short and pointless.
Like me, it spends its little time
pecking its neighbour, scrabbling in the dark,
without a thought for what the dark might be.

They will ask, anxious to please,
Breast or leg?

And I will say:
Give me the wishbone, only that -

and I will wish for all of it again,
the short and pointless life,
the neighbours with their claws and beaks
and the unknowable, unimaginable dark.

She Speaks!

As an adjunct to my post about marketing, here is something new I've been fooling around with -- the audio clip.  Using the not-quite-as-straightforward-as-it-seems software called Audacity (good name, though) I was able to record a short clip from A Clash of Innocents.  This really was quite difficult.  First of all, you have to make sure you remember to silence your environment -- turn off the telephone, all the little dings your computer makes, move away from the rolling chair etc. It does work best when you use a headset. Putting the thing on made me feel like that old Lily Tomlin sketch (I'm really showing my age now, but...)


     But I digress......the point is that I managed to make this audioclip and it's now time to figure out what to do with it.  It's on my website here and now it's on my blog.  What do you think?

April by Sue Guiney

Just in case, here's the link.

A Weekend of Music

The orchestra that I play with, The Kensington Philharmonic, has it's first concert of the season tonight at Chelsea Town Hall in London.  That meant a two hour rehearsal with the soloist yesterday, an afternoon run-through today, and then the concert tonight  at 7.30.  It takes a lot of energy as well as time, but I have been thinking lately how these concerts and being a part of this orchestra is actually more important to me than ever.  I've been wondering why that's so.  After all, I've been a part of them for over 17 years - hard to believe, but true.  I've always loved playing with them, but honestly, there have been some concerts and honestly, many Monday night rehearsals over the years when I just couldn't be bothered.  I've always gone and I've always enjoyed it once I was there, but there were plenty of times when I had to drag myself and my violin out of the house.  But that hasn't been true at all over the past few months.  Maybe because, as I get busier with my writing life and have less time to myself, I appreciate playing with the orchestra all the more.  But I think it's more than that.

I've come to realize that the only time my head isn't full of words -- be they fiction, poetry, dialogue, emails, interviews, conversations, whatever -- is when I'm playing music.  When I am actively playing my violin is the only time my head isn't overwhelmed with words.  More and more, I find that as much as I need all those words, there are now more and more times when I need to escape from them as well.  Thank God for music, and thanks to my mom for never allowing me to quit violin even after spending years of not practicing!

Tonight's concert has Wagner's Flying Dutchman Overture, Sibelius' 2nd Symphony (which I love), and Rodrigo's Concerto de Aranjuez for Guitar.  Now that is a fantastic piece and I love playing it.  Playing with a guitar soloist, and Milos Karadaglic is terrific, presents all sorts of  demands on an orchestra.  A guitar can only be so loud.  We have to be especially sensitive.  Hopefully it will go well.  Not as well as the excerpt below, alas, but well enough.

The Dreaded M Word (marketing)

Fellow blogger, Lauri Kubuitsile, led me to this excellent article, "Should I Tweet?"  It's not specifically about Twitter, but it is about the importance of marketing within the literary world.  Let's face it -- the job of a writer today is twofold: (1) write the best damned book you can and (2) become a marketing whiz.  I think anyone who has ever written a book and gone through the incredibly difficult process of actually getting someone to publish it will tell you that that job was easy compared to finding a way to market it. 

This article really hit home and I urge you to read it.  To be honest, it didn't tell me anything I didn't already know, but it did confirm it.  And it assured me that, actually, this marketing hyperactivity really is nothing new.  It has always been this way, from Dickens to Walt Whitman.  But I have spent most of the past few months marketing A Clash of Innocents as fast as my little fingers could type.  It always feels like an uphill battle.  Nonetheless, I've come to know that regardless of how wonderful and proactive your publisher is -- and Ward Wood is wonderful and proactive -- it is the writer who must ultimately sell his/her book.  The fact that the two jobs require such divergent skill sets is unfortunate, but it doesn't mitigate the truth of the situation.  We all know what it takes to write.  But what does it take to market? Here's my list:
    * Creativity: Be as creative in your marketing strategies as you are in your writing
    * Nerve: Don't be afraid to talk to strangers and don't be shy about putting your work into the hands and under the eyes of everyone you can meet
    * Computer Literacy: embrace the internet and all its networking functions  They are the wave of the future, not to mention the present
    * Time Management:  Decide what works most efficiently for you and spend most of your marketing time doing that rather than using the scatter gun approach of doing a million little things
    * Realistic Goals: understand what you can realistically expect from your publication, in terms of money, career advancement, professional development, and then learn to be happy with it
    * Energy: It will take lots of it.
    * Honesty: Both with yourself and others. Be who you are and do what makes sense for you, as much or as little as that may be.  Everything else will then fall into place.

Can you add to the list?

(PS the photo above is me at the London Book Fair '09)

From Cambodia and Back Again: The Movie

Over the past month, I have been working with a wonderful writer/activist art filmmaker, Nancy Boulicault, to create a sort of trailer for A Clash of Innocents.  But it's a bit different.  This short, 2- minute film  isn't really about the book. It's more about the story behind the book and the journey that my novel and I are taking together. Here it is (If the streaming gets a bit hesitant, I apologize. But stay with it - it will catch up with itself):


A Clash of Innocents Goes Back to Cambodia from Nancy Boulicault on Vimeo.

Poetry, Thank You

Yes, yes. I am in hyper-promotional mode. I've been spending my days setting up events, scheduling talks and workshops, pitching articles.  All the stuff a writer has to do these days to get her stuff up and out.  Don't get me wrong - I'm more than happy to do it.  More than happy to have a book to promote in the first place.  But it is pretty full on and it's easy to forget why I'm doing this at all.  Then I get a day like yesterday and it all blissfully comes back to me.

So let's talk poetry.  I know I've been talking mostly lately about writing prose. But a teacher once said to me - and I have liberally repeated it over the years as if it was my own thought - that everything is poetry. I do believe that.  Anything I write aims to be poetry, in one fashion or another.  So although it may seem as if I sometimes stray far from the poet's path, I'm never really far away.  But even so, yesterday did feel like a coming home.  For the first time in a long time I spent the day at a Poetry Workshop, led by the wonderful and most generous Ruth O'Callaghan, and attended by four other talented and sensitive poets. We spent the day studying and writing poems of all sorts, all around the theme of loss.  Despite the difficult theme and some very personal moments, there was a great deal of fun and laughter and we all turned out great work.  Imagine being told "Okay, you have 10 minutes. Write a poem." Sure, I've done that sort of thing to kids I've taught over the years, but hey - they were just kids. This was us, adults, and man, it was hard.  Hard, but exciting.  So now I know I have at least three new poems that I want to work on some more, that may actually get to a point at sometime when they can be released out into the public to find their own ways in the world.  It feels like a new beginning for me and my poetry, and this leads me to some great news that I hinted at a while back.

    Ward Wood has recently agreed to bring out my poetry collection, Her Life Collected.  To be honest, I knew I could count on them to consider it - after all, that's what Ward Wood is all about, namely providing a home for the work of its authors.  But they would actually publish it, of course, only if it is up to a high enough standard.  And with Ward Wood's first poets being the talented and award-winning poets Ann Alexander and Mike Horwood, I was not at all sure my collection was up to snuff.  But I'm thrilled to say it has passed that high barrier, and we hope to have it out in February 2011.  A novel and a poetry collection both out within six months of each other.  It's all too wonderful to believe and a bit embarrassing to have so much to boast about.  But I also know that I'm no overnight wonder, and although it all seems to be coming together for me at the same time, it was indeed a long time coming.

    More information about the collection will be coming soon, but I can see this post is already getting too long, so I'll leave you, this Remembrance Day, with a heartfelt hurray for poetry, and a heartfelt thank you to those who have gone before us. 

Historical Novels: When is History?

In yesterday's Guardian, Tessa Hadley wrote a piece which she said was "in praise of novels set in the present day." She asserts:
     In a few hours - or tomorrow - the words of the rest of this piece will be written, that don't exist yet; by the time anyone reads it another day will be present instead...So that a novel set in the present day can't ever be exactly that; it's always yesterday, or the day before yesterday.  In a sense all novels are historical.

Well, that got my attention.  This is something I've been thinking about for a long time.  Most recently, I  have been writing many promotional pieces about my new novel, A Clash of Innocents.  I have happily discovered that it is one of a very few novels written about Cambodia in the post-Pol Pot era.  And so I try to make that point clear.  Sometimes I say it is set in "modern day Cambodia." Other times I say it is set in "the present day."  But I am very much aware that neither is completely true.  The novel is set in one specific year, 2007.  It uses the real life events of that year as it's backdrop.  So, present day? Well, not really. But then again, what does "modern day" really mean?  When does history start?

I am now starting to research and outline my next novel.  I have the characters, themes and (hurray!) even the plot in my head.  But when does it take place? I would prefer, I think, to set it in what I call the generic present.  But if there  are to be any specifics of place or music or art or popular culture or anything, then the "generic present" won't work. The present flies by too quickly.  Plus I decided that there will be some overlap of characters from the previous novel to the next one. But if time has moved on and a character who was, let's say, 17 in 2007  turns up as 20, then the book can't be set in anything other than 2010.  And if I'm writing the book in 2011, then 2010 is in the past and therefore, a part of history.  On the other hand, I can't write about when that character is 25 because that would mean it would have to be set in 2015 - a time which hasn't happened yet. That would turn it into a sort of science fiction piece, wouldn't it?

For me, this is not just a question of semantics.  It raises an important technical issue. It also makes me wonder why, as a writer, do I feel the need to write pieces that are so firmly settled into a specific time? I think that's why writing historical fiction as one is used to thinking about it is so frightening to me.  It seems to me that the longer ago something took place, the more likely there are to be well accepted facts surrounding it, and facts, quite honestly, worry me.  Facts are much too easy to get wrong ( a concept I try to keep out of the writing of fiction, anyway), and I'm not so sure I believe in facts (but that's another issue).

Hadley continues:
     Writing about the contemporary present sometimes seems like a more ordinary effort, besides the  huge difficulty of writing about the past - or about the future, or about imaginary worlds. When it fails, it's probably duller...When it works, it's at the heart of what the novel does. From whatever small corner of the world a novel starts, it opens its whole attention towards its present day, soaking up the qualities and minute particulars of an unrepeatable moment...


I have friends out there who write historical fiction. I've always been a bit in awe of them. But maybe all of us who use details from the reality around us in our work are all writing historical fiction. What do you think?

Gareth Calway: the Masked Man of Many Genres

I know Gareth Calway's work from his novel, River Deep Mountain High, which I loved. But he and I share a stubborn refusal to limit our work to novels only. So when I discovered that he was beginning a tour of masked theatrical events about Boudicca and King Arthur, I seized the opportunity to ask him about them:

Gareth, can you discuss how this project came about and how you decide which genre is appropriate for which idea?
Excellent question.  I was thinking about it in a café in Bristol recently when a chorus of early season colds had me fearful for the hygiene of my breakfast and apprehensive about the season of flu and yellow phlegminess. A phrase came into my head ' staccato coughs and sneezes in an October cafe/ opening exchanges in an imminent Great War' and it occurred to me that when I was a kid, I would have grabbed such a line and used it as it was - an image (or complete imagist poem) dramatising, somewhat portentously, my separate existence. Most of my ideas - if they're any good -  still bleed out of me first as poems. It's just that with the distance of age, and the confidence of publication in various genres  - I would now consider whether this line is better dispersed in a narrative (quite a few of my early poems were really stories crammed into lyric.) Given to a character in a novel, or even (if appropriate) to the narrator, (both of whom would be revealed by it) this same line would have a different - because more distanced - meaning. If it was given to a character in a play, it would have to be - with the extra exposure of a lit stage - a very marginal and portentous character whereas in a novel, even as the narrator,  he is only a prism for filtering a narrative. He is not the narrative itself.

Applying all this to your question, both Arthur and Boudicca were born - out of a long painful love-labour and yet 'as natural as leaves to a tree' - as a narrative sequence of poems. There was never any question that they could be novels. They each tell a bardic story, using all the persuasiveness and word-lyricism of poetry declaimed on the air to a live audience (with props and large masks  to support but not limit the burden carried by the words.) Yes, reception theory shows that readers recreate novels as they read but a live and present theatre audience takes this one stage further. If the narrator of a novel is legitimately dead - his work handed over to the reader - the bardic storyteller is very much alive, because the reception is present at every recreation. Any actor will tell you how an audience response shapes the telling and performing. If the audience is shocked or excited, my written for speaking rhythms will pick up on it, if they're laughing, my consonants and vowels will laugh with them. This is a very naked but exhilarating experience. But that edginess fits these stories.  The verse lines, alliteration, assonance, drum beat/heart-beat metres - as well as the epic, archetypal masks - of One Man and His Masks are designed to evoke, in and for a live audience, the heart in the mouth, tongue in the throat primal stories - breath-taking stories at the living root of Britain - that I want to tell.

It's the oldest trick in the book - it even predates the book. The Greek poets wrote plays and the Celtic bards told stories to happen like this in the divine, enchanted, primitive and yet mystical, performance space. And as far as I am concerned, unlike the Celtic drum I use to punctuate my battle lines in both shows, you can't beat it.

Amazing.  Now tell me about this play.

It's two 45-minute shows, actually:  "Never Mind The Testosterone" and "Here Comes Boudicca." Boudicca's revolt is told as a punk rock tour and Arthur's story uses the invasion games, flags and bunting of sport. The same props are used for each of the two shows - eg a wheelchair for Boudicca's chariot becomes Arthur's throne.  The shows are very visual and theatrical - combined-arts verse storytelling, one man, two masks, a wheelchair, three flags, a rattle, a megaphone and a drum - taking a lively and modern approach to early British history. They are 'alternative' in foregrounding the Celtic and matriarchal side of Boudicca's story (in addition to and as opposed to the more standard Roman view) and in exploring the Celtic/ West country roots of the Arthur legends (in addition to and as opposed to the Norman English retellings.)



    Here are some of his tour dates for 2011, but I urge you to learn more about it all if you're interested here.

Tues Feb 22: 11am King's Lynn Museum: part 1 Boudicca
Weds Feb 23: 11am Thetford Ancient House Museum: part 1 Boudicca
Weds Feb 23: 7.30pm Norwich Puppet Theatre: part 1 Boudicca

Fri Aug 5- Saturday Aug 27 inclusive (not Sundays) 8 pm The Surgeon's Hall, Theatre 3, Edinburgh:
part 1 Boudicca and part 2: Arthur on alternate nights.

The End of the Blog Tour?

I have really loved spending this month visiting other blogs, meeting other readers I otherwise wouldn't have known, and talking, talking, talking.  We've covered a wide range of topics that lead from A Clash of Innocents itself then onto my own life, then meandering around this crazy obsession of writing and back again.  I am actually making one more stop right now down in Botswana with Lauri Kubuitsile.  Lauri and I are both expats, born and bred in the US, who have chosen to make our lives outside of our native country.  It is a challenging, sometimes confusing, but ultimately rewarding choice to make and so I'm glad that we have had a chance to talk about what it means to be an expat and how it has affected my writing.  There's also a great discussion about writing in 1st vs 3rd person, something that I would very much like to talk more about.

But this blog tour has hit on many ideas and themes. Feel free to check out the discussions if you missed them before:

with J.D. Smith about writing in different genres and why Cambodia
with Sarah Salway about the writer as entrepreneur
with D.J. Kirkby about the story of the book and a quick quiz
with Glyn Pope about being a writer or being a "woman writer"
with Nik Perring about routine and my targeted reader
with Elizabeth Baines about war and violence
with Mike Horwood about planning and method
with Lane Mathias about letting go and staying focused
with Deb Carr about the road to publication
with Tim Atkinson about parenting and the role of music
with Debi Alper for a bit of showing and not telling

Now, on to Botswana...