Signing Off, for Now

It's the end of July. I've spent a few weeks here in my quasi-summer, doing a lot of work, seeing some family and friends, eating seafood, making occasional trips to the beach, all the while continuing to worry about London real estate woes and future events. In a couple of days I'm heading back to London for a week to move out of our family home, the place we have lived for nearly seventeen years, the place where we raised our kids. The sale has been months-worth of nightmares, but we believe enough that this present deal will happen that we are making our move. Everything will go temporarily into storage and then, after returning to the States for our August holiday, we will -- please God -- come back to London and our newer, smaller, funkier flat by the river. It's all very exciting and, as you can imagine, exhausting.

August will be its usual time of family-feeding (in all senses of the made-up word). Augusts are always very busy chez Guinee, and this one will be no exception. I know I will also be trying to continue to make headway on novel 3, but I think I better not promise any more blog posts until September.

But here's what I'll be thinking about, and what we can look forward to during the next year of my writing life:
    * a completed first draft of Novel 3...not to mention a title!
    * a Playwriting Workshop at the Ham and High Literary Festival in September
    * two September readings in Dublin with other Ward Wood writers - details to follow
    * the beginning of my position as Writer-in-Residence at The University of London's SE Asian Department of SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies)
    * a short book tour of the East Coast of the States in October
    * participating in a panel discussion at Cambridge University's Festival of Ideas  - details to follow
    * another stay at my beloved writing retreat, Anam Cara, in West Cork, in November
    * a reading with Peter Phillips at the Toriano Poetry Reading Series in December -- again, details to come
    * then looking ahead: a month in Cambodia working with the kids of Anjali House, starting mid-March, while (hopefully) doing edits on novel 3

Phew! I 'm exhausted just thinking about it, but happy to think that after all these years of "wishing and hoping and dreaming and praying" so much of the writer's life, good and bad, is mine.

Wishing everyone lots of fun, sun and relaxation in August. See you on the flip side.

Love,
Sue

The Intersection of Painting and Writing

I love it when writers respond to other art forms. Over the past few years I've seen exhibits and books which show the interplay between painting and poetry, stories and photography, plays and music. Any art form can be used successfully as inspiration and it shows me that the creative impulse is the same, no matter what you do with it.

I have done this with my own work. There is a poem I wrote specifically for my latest collection, Her Life Collected, in which I took myself on a field trip to the National Gallery in search of some painting I had never seen before by a painter I had never heard of. The result is a poem called "Arresting Colours" which responds to a painting by Pierre Mignard, 1691(you can read it below).

But what I want to talk about today is how I have created a new ritual around my novel writing.  While I was writing my first novel, Tangled Roots, I came across a painting by a young Martha's Vineyard artist, Kara Taylor. The painting was a collage of sorts of rural landscapes embedded with physics equations, of all things. It seemed to have been painted for my book, so I bought it. It hangs in my writing shed now. And it hangs above a second Kara Taylor painting which I found just as I was in the midst of writing A Clash of Innocents. I couldn't believe then that there, yet again, was another Kara Taylor image which so clearly evoked the ideas that were percolating in my head, waiting to become words. Two novels, two paintings. So when I set down to work in my shack on novel 3, I knew something was missing. I needed a new painting and I hoped I would find another one by Kara. And of course, there it was -- charming blue skies above a gnarled and troubled depth. Perfect! So now I have three novels and three paintings and a tradition of finding art that somehow represents my work and which I can sit beneath and respond to as I write.  For me, that's an entirely new intersection between art forms, more of an interplay than a response. I love the whole idea of it, and I love the paintings. Here they are (sorry the photos don't really do them justice):

for "A Clash of Innocents"

for "Tangled Roots" above, for novel 3 below

And here's the poem for Mignard:

Arresting Colours

After “The Marquise de Seignelay and Her Two Sons”

by Pierre Mignard, 1691

Why does she look sad?
Her skin is so white, her cheeks red,
her brown hair inviting.
The youngest looks up at her with pleading adoration,
naked in his yearning, with silver wings.
The older stares beyond to a charcoal sky,
pinches of disdain wrinkling his lips.

Pierre Mignard: who is he
that he captures these colours so --

that unearthly white of one boy’s hand on electric blue,
violent red slipping off the baby’s flesh?

How dare he cross generations to arrest me here
in this pass-thru gallery with its paintings of no interest,
Christ again dripping on that cross?
How dare he capture my unsuspecting heart with his
deafening browns, cold golds, sheltering mauves,
deceitful greens?

I meant to pass by on my way to the café

but these colours drag me into his painting
and now all I can see is eyes: one child’s full of love,
the other’s of impatience, the mother’s
drowning in resignation. They stop me on my way,
make me sit on this polished bench,
swallowing the black of a sigh.

Punching the Time Clock on the Beach

I'm thinking about time, as I always do when I'm on this island. I've spent as much of my summers here as possible over the past 30 years, and in all that time, some things have changed but much hasn't. Every now and again a favourite shop or bakery closes or a new one opens up. Some summers see more or less sugar snap peas, earlier or later tomatoes. But I think what changes the most from year to year is me.

Staying here for the summer means I'm not really on vacation, but rather I've just moved my life from one continent to another. There were many summers when my days were organized around trips to camp instead of trips to school, and late afternoon visits to the beach instead of music lessons. Sure, very different, very summery -- but still, the life of a stay-at-home mom, with me squeezing in stolen moments to write whenever I could.

But now my life is all about work rather than childrearing (not that that isn't work!), and with that comes its own time constraints. My mornings are struggles between writing and email correspondence, my afternoons full of decisions about which chores I really have to do, and which I can put off. But hey, I'm sitting here typing this in my bathing suit, and I'm thinking, after my 3.00 conference call I just may well make it to the beach.

One rediscovery of this working summer, though, is the joys of my writing shack. I had it built -- or rather divided out of the garden shed -- several years ago, and for a while I was in there all the time. But for the past few years, now that I don't have a houseful of kids hanging around, I've neglected it, choosing to write in the quiet air conditioning of my house instead. But this summer, real estate craziness back home plus trying to set up two new book tours for next year has made my otherwise peaceful home a horror of ringing telephones and dinging computer in-boxes. So I've been going back into my shack -- and I'm loving it.

In past years my shack was solely an escape. This year, though, as I'm writing the first draft of novel three, it's a sort of transporter. It gives me a place where I am able to transport myself from the relative affluence of the American east coast, to the troubled poverty of last year's Cambodia. I walk into the shack, stare into space for a few minutes and then -- poof -- I'm there. And then the next thing I know, two hours have gone by. How lucky am I to have it! And I wonder, do other writers need specific places to go to in order to be transported, or can some of us do it simply in our own heads? I'd love to hear from you...

Titles

Titles are hard. Very. They have to do so many things at once. They have to give an idea of what the book is about, without giving too much of an idea. They have to show what genre the book falls into. Have you ever noticed how different genres have different sorts of titles? They also have to keep up with the latest fashions, or consciously decide not to. Remember when the wonderful novel was published called The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time? For a year or so after, a book had to have a long, multi-claused title to make it to the shelves, or so it seemed.

I actually like coming up with titles. It's a bit like playing scrabble with your eyes closed. You come up with words that go together but you try not to be too editorial about it. And very often one possibility interlocks with another.  Although I've talked in more detail about how the title "A Clash of Innocents" came into being here, here's a little list of some of my titles' evolutions:
  my first novel: An Unlikely Guru + A Variable Constant became Tangled Roots
  my play: Table for One became The Bistro Down the Road
  my second novel: An Everywhere of Innocents became A Clash of Innocents
  my play: Touch became Touch Me There became Touching Joy
  my poetry collection: Tripartite became A Woman's Life became Her Life Collected

I'm thinking about all this now because I am about a third of the way through the first draft of my wip and usually by this time I am amassing a list of possible titles. Or at least I'm getting some ideas of sound, structure and emphasis. But so far, I've got nothing. Nothing. I keep telling myself not to worry, the title will just pop into my head when I least expect it. One day I'll be staring out the window, like I was when writing A Clash of Innocents, and BOOM - there it will be, the titular lightening bolt. I'm actually staring out the window right now and....wait a minute....how about......

Summer Reading

I love the way summer makes me think of books as much as beach. The whole idea of summer reading reminds me of childhood exploration and the realization that an entire new world could exist within a collected sheaf of papers. I remember my first really great summer reading experience.  I think I was about 8 or 9. I used to watch my older sister and my good friend lying on chaise lounges with books instead of running around or swimming and I used to wonder -- what's the point of that? My God, how boring!! But then, my mother took me to the library and said, "Go ahead, pick out whatever you want and it will be your summer book." I don't remember the title, alas, but I remember the story. There was an adorable little alien creature who had an adorable little spaceship and he traveled around making adorable little friends. A classic! But even more, I remember the feeling of lying on my own chaise lounge, just like my sister, and reading and reading and reading in the shade, in my bathing suit, with a glass of lemonade on the ground beside me and my mother coming by every now and again to smooth out my hair and give me a kiss. Reading was calm, quiet, safe. I found happiness in books that summer, and I guess the rest, as they say, is history.

I was also reminiscing with a friend the other day about reading to your kids aloud during the summer. I always read to my kids when they were little. But Number 2 Son and I got into the rhythm, over 4 summers, of taking a longer amount of time, mostly in bed at night but sometimes in scattered times throughout a lazy summer's day, to read together. I remembered that these were long adult books that I read to him. Not the kids' picture books you think of when you imagine reading to your kids in bed. But aging brains being what they are, I couldn't remember what books they were. It was over a decade ago, after all. So I emailed my now grown-up busy son hundreds of miles away and asked him what we had read over all those summers. Now, Number 2 Son has many wonderful qualities, but timely email answering is not usually one of them. But on this occasion the response was in my in-box in less than ten minutes.  It said: "the entire Tolkien Trilogy. Plus The Hobbit." In the immortal words of Maurice Chevalier, "Oh yes. I remember it well." But even better, clearly so did he.

And this year, summer reading has taken on yet another meaning for me. This week I did the first of a group of events  around my books at a local public library here on Martha's Vineyard. I read excerpts from A Clash of Innocents, showed the slide presentation of photographs by the kids from Anjali House that goes with it, led a fascinating discussion about Cambodia, and even sold a bunch of books. Here are some pictures:

A member of the audience brought along this amazing quilt she created from photographs she took during her own trip to Cambodia ten years ago. I wish you could see it in person. It's beautiful and haunting!

Summer reading. What does it mean to you? 

I'm on Bookersatz

A quickie today.....the lovely and uber-energetic writer, Helen Hunt, has asked me to write a little something for the book review site Bookersatz. Her wish was my command.  Please do go check it out here. Without giving it away, I'll just say it's about a book that came out a few years ago and is a must read for anyone interested in novels or writing in general. 'Nuff said.

Drinking to Write

I'm not sure what sort of a post this will turn out to be. I'm jet-lagged to beat the band, and the trip eastward coming on the heels of lots of stressful nights due to our real estate wars has made me feel...well...pretty discombobulated. You know how sometimes you get so tired that you just can't sleep? So tired that although your eyes hurt they just won't stay closed?  Well, it feels like that. I know that the change of scene will eventually calm me down and I'll start feeling normal again, but for now, the world seems two giant steps off to the left, somehow. I feel, as the Americans would say, disoriented (rather than disorientated -- when in Rome.....). But there is one good thing that comes from this feeling. I've noticed that I become awfully creative when I feel this way. It also happens when I find myself eating in a restaurant alone, having had a wee glass of wine.  Feeling out-of-it, slightly paranoid, like an observer rather than a participant in life helps me to write.  Maybe that's not such great news, but it's true.

Over the past week or so I've been stuck in my writing. I had written a scene in novel 3, and although I knew exactly where I wanted to be with the next scene, I couldn't for the life of me get myself there. Five characters were having dinner in a restaurant. Two of them got up to leave. Another two needed to move onto a bar where the next scene, an important one, would take place. But that last character wouldn't get lost. She kept wanting to tag along and neither I, nor my other characters, could figure out a way to ditch her.  It was infuriating. No matter how much I thought about it, I couldn't find an elegant way to do it. I had sat down to write that transition a few days ago but I had to abandon the attempt. I had to get up and walk away from it, and that rarely happens to me. But after a sleepless night followed by a six hour flight crossing five time zones and then dropping onto the back seat of a car for a two-hour drive to the ferry, I was sufficiently out of it to have something click.  I was staring out the window like a zombie and then suddenly the solution came. I figured out how to ditch the unwanted character and approach the transition between the two scenes. Plus, despite my proclivity to car sickness, I took out a piece of paper and wrote it, right there in the car. Presto. And it's a good thing, too, because I absolutely must get work done on the novel over the next three weeks. I've put myself on a tight schedule and although the pressure is coming only from me, I do believe it's good for me at this stage in my writing career to feel that pressure and learn how to deal with it. And I already know that, from a writing point of view, August will be a wash out.

Now, I'm not urging people towards insomnia or drunkenness in order to write. But that sense of being out of kilter, hazy, unsteady in the world does make you see things differently. There is an unlocking which takes place and that really can make a huge difference.  I'm just saying....

A Whirlwind of Poets

I've been thinking all week about whether I wanted to write a post or not about the latest upheaval among the members of the UK's Poetry Society. I purposely try to steer clear of things political on my blog because my readers are from all over the globe, they span lots of genres if they're writers at all, and yes -- because I tend to be rather non-confrontational. I'm not a great believer in facts, to be honest, and so I'm always afraid to voice an opinion too stridently just in case there is some other element I'm not aware of.

But it's hard to be too timid on this one. Basically, the leadership of the Poetry Society has resigned quite suddenly and in a bit of a huff. But although there are all sorts of rumours out there about the whys and wherefores, the Society itself has said nothing to its membership and was seemingly intending to just go about its business (whatever that is), hiring new staff, adding new Trustees, without a word or comment to those of us who have paid our dues year in, year out. Over ten percent of the membership has now signed a petition asking for an Extraordinary Meeting (legally speaking), not to complain or put forward an agenda, but just to ask "what the hell is going on?" I signed the petition, too.

Many poet bloggers have written about this, but I'd like to point you in the direction of this excellent post by Jackie Wills. She seems to be speaking my mind for me. And if you want to sign the petition yourself or otherwise get involved, you can email Kate Clanchy at gmail dot com, who is spearheading the whole thing. Ahh, poets. You can't live with 'em, you can't live without 'em.

PS I know the image of the Poetry Society logo has come out a bit fuzzy up above, but somehow that feels appropriate....