My Writing process

Rebecca Gethin (Liar Dice, A handful of Water and What the Horses heard ) has kindly asked me to take part in a blog tour of writers where we all answer the same questions and tag other writers who will do the same the following week. A nice way to keep in touch and learn about new people!  Becky posted her writers blog tour last week.

I have one person to tag at the moment and this is:

• Judi Moore: 

http://judimoore.wordpress.com

Judi’s novel,  Is Death really necessary is available on the kindle. As befits the author of a novel set in 2038 Judi lives in the new town of Milton Keynes with several (hard to be specific - they don't stand still) black and white critturs in an old Tardis-like cottage.

Now for my answers to the questions:

What am I working on?

I have several writing projects on the go at the moment. Social media friends will have noticed my current pre-occupation with London’s statues and I’m working on a top secret collaborative venture with another writer. I’ve also returned to writing prose as I have a couple of characters, a  father and son who want me to tell their story. 

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I’m not sure that it does. But I do mostly write poems that are based on things that have actually happened in the past, even if I do invent a lot of the details.

Why do I write what I do?

This is a difficult question to answer because I write what I’m moved to set down and I don’t tend to examine why I’m doing it. It would detract from the writing if I started navel gazing about the whys. That said, many of the poems in Convoy were about the stories we are at risk of forgetting. So there was an element of capturing lost stories and as I was writing the collection it felt as if I was doing it for all the merchant seamen who are the unsung heroes of the second world war.

How does your writing process work?

I wait until I can hear the character’s voice or the voice of the poem. But I wouldn’t want it to sound as if I sit around waiting for inspiration to strike. You’d never get anything written that way. I’ve discovered that you can put yourself in the right place, usually just by sitting down with a blank page.

I’m just about to go off to North Wales for a writing retreat and based on previous experience I know that I will get lots written away from the distractions of home and the day job.

The Year in Books Part Two

I spent the summer and autumn reading and re-reading Wilfred Owen’s poetry, again in company with friends on Good Reads. Gillian Clarke puts it much more eloquently than me writing on the Magma Blog  when she says “Owen’s words, read once, are unforgettable almost a century after he wrote them.”

The on-line Getsparked project allowed me to introduce Traci Robison, someone who had never read his poems, to his work and she produced the most gorgeous painting inspired by Dulce et Decorum est. I ended the year of reading with Dominic Hibberd’s Wilfred Owen: The Last Year.

An unexpected delight of the year was Samuel Pepys. One of the reads for my local book group was Claire Tomalin’s magisterial biography. With one of those touches of serendipity that the universe is fond of I discovered at the same time that Caroline Gilfillan’s collection of poems, Pepys which capture the spirit of the man.

If you put water or anything to do with the sea into the title of your book then there’s a good chance I will pick it up. So no surprise that Rebecca Gethin’s A Handful of Water was one of favourite reads of the spring. In case you’re wondering I do occasionally read novels as well and during April I read Charlotte Rogan’s The Lifeboat back to back with James Hanley’s The Ocean. The set up for both novels is the same – a group of people who was ship-wrecked and end up together in a lifeboat. Rogan’s is a compelling page turner of a read. I had only picked it up in the bookshop to admire the cover and found myself unable to put it down after reading the first few pages.

The Ocean was first published in 1941, my copy was the Harvill Press re-issue published in 1999. The contrast with The Lifeboat is profound. Hanley, like my grandfather was a seaman. Born in 1901 he was a near contemporary of my taid and Hanley spent nine years at sea and how it shows in the writing of The Ocean. There are only six of them who make it onto the lifeboat in panic of getting off the Aurora when she’s torpedoed just after midnight. One of them, Crilley is killed immediately when the lifeboat is machine gunned and he protects the water keg from being holed. The main character Joseph Curtain explains p12 “When they machine gun a boat like this there’s always a chance of them drilling holes in your water supply. These days they don’t kill you directly, but if you plug a water keg with bullets then you kill everybody…” I don’t know if Hanley was ever on board a ship which was sunk but his novel reads as if he may well have been. He is someone whose work I want to read more of in 2014.

Having read The Stalin Organ in 2012, (another War and Literature choice) I read Gert Ledig’s second novel, Payback in the summer. Both books are based on his own experience as a German soldier in the Second World War and are important albeit searing accounts. Payback deals with a night in which an unnamed German city is bombed by the Allies with appalling consequences. I have Alexander Voinov to thank for persuading me to take Payback out of the ‘to-read’ pile. Voinov has written two books, Skybound and Unhinge the Universe from the German point of view in the last world war. These are romances and far gentler reads than Ledig. Ledig published a third novel, Faustrecht in the late 1950s which has yet to be translated into English. So I shall have to blow the dust off my rusty German to read it.

One of the pleasures I rediscovered this year was being read to. In this day and age that means audio books and Chris Patton reading Josh Lanyon’s Adrien English series. How very American he sounds I thought on listening to the first, then realising that in my head I’d given Lanyon’s characters English accents. An absolute treat was discovering Anton Lesser reading Wilfred Owen’s poems which was a very early Christmas present to myself.

Another of my page turning reads was Michael Crawshaw’s To Make a Killing, a thriller, a whodunit set in the City of London where one by one bankers are being killed. This pulls off the neat trick of making you see them as ordinary human being rather than the hate figures they’ve become in the popular media. Crawshaw worked in the City so he knows his stuff including the difference between a banker’s bonus and  a lock-in payment. Mike is a friend. We meet up every summer with our children at a family camp in Derbyshire but this was the first year when we each realised how seriously the other takes writing. So proceeds from the book go to support the Hands Together project in Nepal.

I dipped into Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman in the early autumn. I’d registered for an on-line course on Modern and Contemporary American poetry only to realise life was too busy with work, family and my own writing for me to keep up. I did make it down to Brighton for the launch of Vanessa Gebbie’s Half Life of Fathers. Having seen this collection take shape it was one of my poetry collections of the year. Another which I frequently took down off my shelves was John McCullough’s Frost Fairs. I discover another favourite poem in it every time I re-read it. Thanks to Anne Ystenes I’ve been introduced to the work of Olav Hauge, a Norwegian poet. His work is available in translation in the UK and US by luminaries like Robert Bly although I’ve enjoyed rather reading Anne’s careful word for word translations alongside the original Norwegian. His poems are full of hjarta (heart) and havet (the sea, the ocean).

During the year I got into the habit of carrying around poems in my bag. The first was Antoine Cassar’s Passaport which looks quite like a passport although it’s not so much a poem as a project to make us all think about borders, boundaries, immigration and emigration. I even had the temerity to offer it to a UK Borders official on my return from France in October. He did reach for the unofficial passport first, puzzling over it before deciding he did really need the one with all the stamps in it.

Thanks to Sabotage Reviews I discovered Sarah Hymas Lune – a foldout poem about the sea at Morecombe bay which has people coo-ing over it whenever I produce it out of my bag.

So here’s to lots more poetry in 2014.

World Poetry Day Giveaway

I’m giving away a copy of Rebecca Gethin’s A Handful of Water in celebration of today. Just leave a comment saying why you’d like to read it.

Rebecca Gethin's A Handful of Water

Today I’m delighted to welcome to my blog, Rebecca Gethin, whose second collection A Handful of Water, has just been published by Cinnamon Press. I enjoyed reading this so much that I asked our mutual publisher, Jan, to put me in touch with Becky so I could ask her a few questions. Becky lives on Dartmoor. Her first collection, River is the Plural of Rain, was published by Oversteps Books in 2009. Her novel Liar Dice was the winner of the Cinnamon Press Novel Award 2010 and was published in 2011.

Your poems cover a range of topics, the first world war, the lives of contemporary prisoners and the natural world so do you consciously look for subjects for poems or do the poems come to you? In short what inspires you?

I think ideas for poems come to me. I find them as one would notice an interesting pebble on a beach or an insect one hadn’t seen before. I never consciously look for subjects: it’s just a feeling or a thought that comes over me in odd moments often while doing something else (i.e. not writing). I remember Don Paterson saying at a poetry reading “Whenever you think you think that that would make a good poem, it won’t.” Well, I have lots of those. Usually any poem is sparked by just a small idea or a single phrase or a feeling and I just write about what presents itself to my mind. I carry a notebook in my jacket pocket and try to keep one beside my bed. I forget lots of so-called “good ideas” so that might be a good thing! You see I have this almost –permanent feeling that I must pay attention carefully or I might miss important things. If only I were less busy, impatient or grouchy and were more perspicacious and empathetic I would be able to notice things more clearly.

How long did it take you to put together this second collection. How did you decide upon the order of poems and were there any which had to be left out?


A Handful of Water took me years. I have found that I do need time .... not many of my poems are written under pressure and in a short space. And, in the end, lots of poems were inevitably left out. I’ve heard some poets keep themed files and when they complete a poem they decide which file to put it in so they are at work maybe on various collections at any one time. I admire that hugely. I found the order of this book extremely difficult at first and wanted someone to come to my rescue and find the golden thread running through the dog-eared pieces of paper. Until I realised, with horror, the only person who could do that was me, and that there was no golden thread except that of my own psyche. I wondered and wondered what should go in and what shouldn’t. The bundle of poems I had stored away seemed to have become a sort of closely-packed forest and eventually I saw that there were all sorts of interconnections between the poems’ roots, twigs and branches. I hadn’t been able to see this till I entered the job of trying to make them into a collection: couldn’t see the wood for the trees perhaps? I approached this particular task with A Handful of Water as though I were taking a walk over terrain where there was no visible path between the trees and I could only make progress by putting one foot in front of the other and hoping the next foothold would present itself – looking for something, (image, atmosphere, the underlying feeling) that linked one poem to another. A Handful of Water thus made, emerged as a rather different creature – more edgey and nerved – than the pile of paper from which it emerged.

There is one poem in particular which intrigued me and that was All at Sea i.m. John Hasemore 1893-1916. Could you tell me more about him and how you came to write the poem?


I am very interested in how to write political poems, especially poems about experiences like war when I haven’t been there myself. I was researching for a character who is a conscientious objector during World War One for my next novel (called What the horses heard) in the Quaker Library in Euston. I read about John Hasemore there and his plight captured my imagination. I wanted to write it as starkly and unemotionally as possible. So I am glad you were intrigued by that poem. It really happened like that and his court martial was indeed transcribed in pencil. I used the exact words he gave as his futile defence. Reading about people with scruples against the War in that library was an eye-opener. Those shelves were full of poems I could’ve written. (For your information, the poem called Tribunal was read out by the Peace Pledge Union at their Armistice ceremony in Bradford a couple of years ago and I felt very honoured.) But not all the World War One poems do come from there.... for instance, I found going to the Somme battlefields a terrible shock. And the plaque to a young man in our church says so much by saying so little.

Tribunal
He had no words for what grew between
him and his father down in the garden shed
with its smells of stored apples, potatoes in a sack.
Intent on the objects they were mending on the bench
they passed pliers or chisel one to the other –
large, furrowed hand – soft, marked hand –
a blackbird singing outside, spiders weaving webs,
and cabbages growing in soil they kept hoed,
while the feeling in his vitals formed into shape,
recognised itself, crystallised in the No
he said to the recruiting officer at the desk
in the town square. At the tribunal they asked his age –
You’re not old enough to have a conscience,
next case, next case

And my final question is about an issue that many of us wrestle with. What are your strategies for making the time to write?

Refining as much as possible the art of “No-can –do”..... ruthlessly.


You can find out more about Rebecca from her blog including information about the artist, Lydia Corbett, whose painting is on the cover of A Handful of Water


A Handful of Water is available from Cinnamon Press or Inpress Books