Kathleen Jones Diary

The end of the Writing Course and the beginning of Summer

Kathleen Jones — Mon, 24 May 2010 12:46:00 +0000

The writing course is finally over, bags packed and loaded into taxis to go to the airport. In a couple of days it will be just a memory. We wrote a lot, ate a lot, drank a lot of Italian wine, and talked. Maybe that’s the best part of it - the sharing of experiences. Sometimes I think that these intensive courses are most useful in giving people confidence to believe that they can write and providing a supportive environment in which to do it. Self-belief is everything if you’re a creative person. And then there’s the skill sharing - everyone brings something that they can share with the others. For the two tutors it’s a lifetime of writing for a living - the techniques of the craft, as well as the experience of publishing and editing. This time there was a variety of life-experience among the participants - a painter, an ex spy, several women with successful businesses and three people with a background in the performing arts. There were Australians, Americans, English and Irish. We laughed a lot, surprised each other, and were moved to tears on more than one occasion by what was written. In the evenings there was some energetic guitar playing, singing and dancing in the bar.
After everyone had gone, I walked up to the ruined tower. Summer has finally come to Tuscany, after a cold, rainy spring. The buds that have been forming for weeks have suddenly popped and the walls and pathways are bright with flowering plants. Small animals and insects are gleefully making the most of the weather too. I pressed my nose into a pink rose growing up the wall of the house, to sniff the perfume, and an indignant brown and orange monkey spider jumped out at me!
Under the olive trees there are meadows of wild barley, corn cockles, small orchids, Canterbury bells and other flowers that I usually have to buy for my English garden. Round the base of the tower, wild clematis is writhing through the tall grasses and the broom is covered in big yellow blossoms. But among the familiar plants there are others I haven’t seen before. These ones looked as if they came from an alien planet.

Writing in Peralta

Kathleen Jones — Tue, 18 May 2010 09:36:00 +0000

I’m at Peralta again, tutoring a residential writing course. Ten people, mainly from England and America have come to spend a week eating Tuscan food, drinking Tuscan wine and spending blissful free time just writing. They are all eager, passionate, all with different reasons for being here, but a common ambition - to put words down on paper and pick up as many tips as they can from professional authors.
My co-tutor is Mary-Rose Hayes, a British novelist who lives and publishes in America. She also teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. It’s an interesting combination, but I’m discovering that creative writing is taught in much the same way on both sides of the Atlantic. My approach is looser and more concerned with motivation and inspiration, sharing rather than ‘teaching’, but we both have the same respect for the ‘tools of the trade’ - narrative technique, the structuring of a plot, the creation of vivid characters.
Today I’m doing a workshop on life-writing, and it’s interesting for me to have to reflect on and analyse what I do for a living. My love of biography is easy to explain - I’m fascinated by people’s lives. But autobiography - or ‘Me-moir’ - is something I’ve always shied away from. Writing a blog is the nearest I’ve come to writing about ‘me’.
I know that I should - my grandfather wrote about his Irish family, passing on stories from far back into the 19th century, as well as keeping a World War I diary until he was blown up at Ypres and invalided home. Back in England, as a war hero, permanently disabled, he found it difficult to settle. Eventually he married my grandmother - another Irish immigrant family - and their first home was a small two room cottage in the old workhouse.
My father, when he came to write his memories down, wrote vividly about the elderly inmates, remnants of the old system, who stayed there until they died and the workhouse was bulldozed to the ground.
So I know I should be continuing this tradition of family history. One day, I keep telling myself, one day …. But maybe I should start soon? And why this reluctance to write the ‘I’ word?

Mahmoud Darwish: Unfortunately, it was Paradise

Kathleen Jones — Sun, 09 May 2010 11:30:00 +0000

It’s been a significant week for political dates. This weekend was the anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe and the subject of much celebration. But not in the middle east, which was subsequently carved up by the victorious allied forces and land apportioned in ways that have led to most of the conflicts of our recent history - most fundamental of all the partitioning of Palestine without any safeguards for the Palestinian people, twenty per cent of whom are Christian.
May 6th wasn’t just the election, it was the last night of the Palestine Festival of Literature - an amazing event that celebrates the poetry and prose of the middle east, as well as including a number of British and American authors. The line up included Ahdaf Soueif (brilliant short stories as well as the Map of Love), Henning Mankell, Michael Palin, Carmen Callil, Deborah Moggach and Claire Messud.
Palestine has, over the years, produced some brilliant writers and poets including Kalil Gibran. Right at the top would have to be Mahmoud Darwish who died in 2008 and was regarded as the poet laureate and international voice of the Palestinian people - ‘a poet sharing the fate of his people, living in a town under siege, while providing them with a language for their anguish and dreams’. But he always declined to be involved with any form of extremism, deploring the excesses of Hamas. Mahmoud was born in Galilee in either 1941 or 42. Six years later the Israeli army occupied the area, bulldozing over four hundred Palestinian villages with their tanks. Mahmoud’s family were among those who fled over the border into Lebanon to escape the massacres that followed. When they returned, a year later, they discovered that because they had not been there to be ‘counted’ among the survivors, they were illegal immigrants into their own country and became what were described as ‘internal refugees’.
Mahmoud Darwish began writing poetry while still at school, though he was banned from reciting it. Eventually, like so many, he left for a life of permanent exile, stateless and therefore without a passport.
‘All the birds followed
My hand to the barriers of a distant airport.
All the wheatfields
All the prisons
All the white graves
All the borders
All the waving handkerchiefs
All the dark eyes
All the eyes were with me
But they crossed them out of the passport.
Deprived of a name, of an identity,
In a land I tended with both hands?’

But his poetry also celebrates the way that art can transcend oppression - the founding principle of the Palestine Festival of Literature. Mahmoud Darwish is always optimistic, always looking forward.
‘I have witnessed the massacre
I am a victim of a map
I am the son of plain words
I have seen pebbles flying
I have seen dew drops as bombs
When they shut the gates of my heart on me
Built barricades and imposed a curfew
My heart turned into an alley
My ribs into stones
And carnations grew
And carnations grew.

Darwish grew up reading the poetry of the Israeli poet Yehuda Amicai, and there is always an acknowledgement of the shared cultural and historical heritage of the Israeli and the Arab. They all came originally from Mesopotamia, and all acknowledge Abraham as their ancestor. The old testament is an account of shared history. In Darwish’s words:
‘We travel in the chariots of the Psalms, sleep in the tents of the prophets, and are born again in the language of nomads’
And he can ask, in the voice of the murdered Abel (a story which is also told in the Koran), ‘Brother… My brother! What did I do to make you destroy me?’

His latest collection is ‘Unfortunately it was Paradise’ published by the University of California Press. It’s a joint translation by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche and I don’t like it as much as the earlier translations by Abdullah al-Udhari. These new translations are less lyrical, less true to the spirit of the arabic originals. There are infelicities, such as ‘This is my language, this sound is the twinge of my blood.’ But the message always comes through.

In his journal of a visit to Ramallah ‘A River Dies of Thirst’ he writes: “Hope is not the opposite of despair, it is a talent.” And in this poetry, written after he had experienced the first of the series of heart attacks that would eventually kill him, there is a fervent affirmation of the existence of hope.
‘What does life say to Mahmoud Darwish?
You lived, fell in love, learned, and all those you will finally love are dead?
In this hymn we lay a dream, we raise a victory sign, we hold a key to the last door,
to lock ourselves in a dream. But we will survive because life is life.’

On the PalFest website there are a number of author’s blogs written by the visiting writers. Most were shocked by what they found and the way that they were treated as they tried to get into Palestine under the auspices of the British Council.
Carmen Callil writes:
Everywhere there are checkpoints and Israeli soldiers, many of them young women, young girls really, all of them draped in weapons, smoking in our faces as they grudgingly allow our bus of writers to proceed from A to B. ….Everywhere we see Jewish Settlements crowding out the old Palestinian towns. There are new settlements and the beginnings of hundreds more. Curfews, roads blocked, areas where only Israelis can go. Towns and villages closed off and hacked to pieces by road blocks, checkpoints and walls. Labels, tickets, permissions, queries, intermittent water, constant harassment and constant questioning’.
Follow the link here for more and for a wonderful, moving video of the final event of the festival, where writers gave short readings.

I’m a great fan of a singer called Reem Kelani - British, but the child of Palestinian refugees. She is also a musicologist who has travelled the world collecting the traditional songs of the Palestinian diaspora. She performs often with Israeli musician Gilad Atzmon and his Orient House ensemble and she often sings settings of the poems of Mahmoud Darwish. There is quite a lot of her music on YouTube.

The Need for Electoral Reform

Kathleen Jones — Sat, 08 May 2010 14:44:00 +0000

The photocopied paper notices on the wall outside say it all. Inside the village hall - which doesn’t have a telephone - there are a few elderly people behind a trestle table (one is aware of a sub-text of knitting, thermos flasks and sandwiches). When you approach, one takes your name and checks it off the list, another writes your name down on a sheet of paper alongside the number of your ballot paper (no secret votes in England) and another tears off what looks like a strip of raffle tickets. The booth is a rickety fold-up plywood affair. There’s a blunt pencil stub attached with string and a tattered print-out pinned up that tells you not to vote for more than one candidate, but nothing to show you whether to tick or cross or otherwise mark your ballot slip correctly.

It is all gloriously amateur and redolent of Miss Marple films of the thirties and forties. No one asks me to prove my identity. I could tell them I was Mrs W.W. from number 34 and they wouldn’t be any the wiser (unless she’s already voted). It’s frightening.

So, given this atmosphere of complacency, the lack of stringency and antiquated procedures, it’s not surprising that there were severe electoral irregularities, or that officials couldn’t cope with large numbers of people turning up after work to exercise their democratic right. In our constituency, people were turned away because the local council hadn’t processed their registrations in time (They have had since March 20th!).

The problem is that we still think we have a proper modern democracy in Britain. But what kind of democracy allows a quarter of the population to vote for a party that then has only 10% of the seats in Parliament? We live in a country where large chunks of legislation never go through Parliament at all, but are simply signed into law by the Queen as ‘Orders in Council’, after being put in front of her by the Privy Council (well named as it’s an unelected private club chaired by Lord Mandelson). We live in a country where you can be arrested and imprisoned for years without trial, without even being told what you are supposed to have done, and without the right of appeal or Habeus Corpus. You can thank Tony Blair for that one. It’s supposed to be justified by the threat of terrorism, but has caught many innocent people. We live in a country where half the Parliamentary body is unelected and consists of hereditary peers, and life peers created by successive governments. Our judiciary is appointed by the government and we don’t have a constitution - simply a hotch potch of traditions and ‘gentleman’s agreements’ that have developed over the years.
It’s time for a change - for real democracy in Britain, or, shamefully, some third world countries are going to be able to say that they are more democratic than we are.

Loweswater

Kathleen Jones — Wed, 05 May 2010 07:02:00 +0000

Even on a cold May-day bank holiday the beauty of the Lake District is hard to beat. Spring is arriving here slowly and painfully, blossom by blossom. The oyster catchers have arrived up river to breed, and their distinctive shrieks mean that winter really is over now. They sit on the stone walls in their black and white evening suits, wielding vicious orange beaks, daring anyone to mess with them!
Loweswater is one of the smallest and least known of the lakes. That means it’s quiet and unspoilt and an absolute delight for lovers of solitude. Not quite at its best in cloud, but beautiful in any weather. The blackthorn is just coming into bloom - the star-shaped white petals are really vivid on the bare black stems. Some of them were furred by lichen.

There are also some wonderful trees around the lake - gnarled by age and shaped by the violent weather.

The Lakeland Book of the Year and Self-Publishing

Kathleen Jones — Sun, 02 May 2010 09:35:00 +0000

Just as well that I love books! The submissions for the 2010 Lakeland Book of the Year awards have just arrived - three boxes of fiction, non-fiction, travel, cookery, children’s literature, poetry and memoir, all piled up on my dining table. So that’s my reading taken care of for the next month or so.
There aren’t many regional book awards in the UK - the Yorkshire Post is, I think, the only other prize like this. Hunter Davies (who is married to that other famous Cumbrian writer Margaret Forster) founded the prize just over 25 years ago to give a higher profile to Lake District authors. The third judge is television presenter and author Fiona Armstrong. It’s great fun to be one of the judging panel; the sheer diversity is a challenge. I read everything - from military history to books on sheep breeding and mining technology.
I’ve noticed, over the past six or seven years, that there is an increasing proportion of self-published books. This seems to be a trend and I think, with the parlous state of publishing at the moment, that this is going to increase. Self-publishing is a good thing - someone described it as the ‘democratisation’ of publishing and I agree. But many self-published books are so shoddily produced it gives the whole process a bad name. It makes my heart sink when I take a book from the box that looks and feels thoroughly ‘amateur’. However good the content, if the book doesn’t look right and isn’t easy to read, no one is going to pick it up.
If you’re self-publishing you need to get a book designer to design a beautiful jacket AND the inside pages. Many self-published books are printed out as cheaply as possible, with the maximum number of words that can be squeezed on the page - narrow margins and tightly crammed lines. They don’t look right and they’re difficult to read. You need plenty of space around and between the text and a font that is easy on the eye. Book designers know how to do it. If you can’t afford one, take a page from one of your favourite books and show it to the printer, telling him/her that you want your book to look like that.
But however beautifully produced, if the content isn’t right you’ve wasted your money. Every author - even the most famous - needs an editor. I despair when I read book after self-published book full of typos and grammatical errors. You can’t copy-edit your own work - your eye sees what it expects to see and you won’t pick up your own errors. And it’s not just the copy-editing that’s been omitted. A good editor will challenge what you’ve written on every page - do you need this sentence? Couldn’t this have been worded better? They will pick up the continuity errors - characters sometimes have blue eyes on p.1 and brown eyes on p.178. They will also tell you that sections of the narrative don’t work and need to be re-drafted.
It’s this process of critical analysis that is most obviously lacking in self-published books (particularly fiction). It doesn’t cost much to use one of the available editorial services (a quick google supplies a list), and it’s money well spent.
If your book is worth publishing at all, it’s worth publishing properly.

The Hemingway Book Club of Kosovo: Paula Huntley

Kathleen Jones — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 08:09:00 +0000

It’s an irresistible title, and it’s a much better book than I expected. Paula Huntley went to Kosovo with her husband when he was posted there after the Croatian war, as part of the rebuilding process. She lived among the Albanians of Prishtina, teaching English as a foreign language, and it exposed Paula to the harrowing life stories of her young students. Some of them had been in concentration camps, or hidden in bombed out buildings in order to survive the Serbian death squads, others had watched relatives executed or raped, most had eventually become refugees in neighbouring countries before returning to what was left of their homes. They are all desperate to learn English in order to better their lives and help to support their families.
Among the squalor and the dereliction, the violent reprisals and the black-marketeering, Paula begins to run a book club, obtaining material from America, and their first book is Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. At first she wonders if the book is too culturally alien to be understood, but the students identify with the old man’s struggle against adversity and the book club becomes a great success. Paula kept a journal of her daily life to send back to friends and family, and the journal eventually became the book.
It’s interesting to watch Paula’s perspective changing with her experiences. The view of the world that she had learned in America becomes radically different. Soon she can write about
‘…the ignorance of Americans. We are, by the world’s standards, wealthy, and we have virtually unlimited access to news and books and magazines. We can travel, we can learn. But we are an island, cut off from the rest of the world not so much by geography as by complacency, by a lack of curiosity, by arrogance, perhaps. We are worldly, but we know little of the world.’
I’ve been reading quite a lot of Balkan history recently, because I’m thinking of using it for a narrative I’m working on. The story of what happened in the old territories of Yugoslavia is so appalling, it can hardly be credited in modern Europe, or that we allowed it to happen - not once, but again and again. It’s no coincidence that both the first and the second world wars were triggered by events in the Balkans. Its history is one of reprisal and counter-reprisal, conquest, colonisation and division. The nineteen forties was a particularly terrible period, yet, despite what was learned in Europe in 1945, our governments stood back and watched genocide, and we allowed them to. That is going to be a big blot on twentieth century history.

A Floating Vote

Kathleen Jones — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 08:20:00 +0000

One moment you’re up to your ankles in compost and the next you’re staring out at the river Thames and London Bridge from the Glaziers’ Hall where the Worshipful Company of Glaziers usually hang out. The building is relatively new since the original was burned down in the Great Fire of London, but the Company was established around 1328 and has its historic charters displayed on the walls - beautiful calligraphy with wax seals the size of dinner plates. There’s a great sense of history here. The tower of London is visible (just) from the bridge if you know where to look, almost swamped by high rise buildings housing financial institutions.
The occasion is the 90th birthday party of one of Britain’s leading Communist party members - Tony Farsky, a contributor to the Morning Star, and a leading peace campaigner, still active in his 10th decade, campaigning for better education, and social equality. He is currently chair of the Southwark Pensioners Committee, lobbying vigorously for pensioners rights and an end to ageism.
Tony is also a great lover of Jazz and his sponsorship has helped a lot of small promoters. The birthday bash had a fantastic line-up of British Jazz musicians, including the great Don Weller, Alan Barnes and David Newton. Several of Tony’s contemporaries put us all to shame jiving and Lindy-hopping - I hope I can do the same if I ever become a nonogenarian.
Among the guests were people from the Jazz world, various peace movements, C.N.D., the communist party, and other political groups. Lib Dem Simon Hughes, fresh from News Night, was one of those who made a speech and caught my attention when he began to talk about the all party committee he chairs on ‘Conflict Issues’. This parliamentary group seeks to reverse political thinking - by focussing on identifying areas of conflict and trying to defuse situations by non combative means.
Having sworn not to vote Labour again after Tony Blair dragged us into the Iraq War, I’ve been very cynical about the state of politics in Britain. But the closer the Big Three get to each other in the polls, the more interesting it becomes. After listening to Simon Hughes, I’m seriously considering voting Liberal Democrat. I liked it when he asked ‘Why are we selling arms to countries who can’t afford to feed their own people?’ I’m aching for a blast of common sense in politics - straight talking, real convictions rather than politic-speak.
I was very impressed by Nick Clegg’s intelligent stand on the Trident missile system during the leaders’ debate. Civilised countries such as Sweden and Denmark don’t feel the need for a nuclear submarine, yet they seem perfectly safe in the world. In Europe, France has enough nuclear weapons - and submarines - for all of us! The billions that Trident will cost would buy an awful lot of much needed health care and education. We are no longer a super-power - we are part of Europe whether we like it or not - a small country, whose national debt is frightening. Do the government seriously, honestly, believe we can go on competing with the USA, Russia and China?
We’ve interfered in the world too much and for all the wrong reasons. Not humanitarian (we stood back and watched the slaughter in Rwanda) but economic reasons. If you’ve got oil or valuable commodities, we’ll send the troops, if not, sorry mate, there’s nothing we can do.
I can’t describe myself as a pacifist because there are things I would probably fight for if there was no other way, but I am a peace lover and a socialist believing passionately that everyone is born equal and has the right to live and bring up their children in peace with a roof over their heads and enough food to keep them from starvation and someone to pick up the pieces when things go wrong.
I won’t be voting Communist, Labour or Conservative next week, but I just might think about voting Lib Dem.

Dan Brown: The Lost Symbol

Kathleen Jones — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 16:28:00 +0000

It’s become very fashionable to knock Dan Brown’s novels - more from envy of his success than anything else I suspect. How can such mediocre trash sell so many copies? authors ask, wishing they’d been lucky enough to tap into this unsuspected lode in the geological strata of reader interest. DB’s blend of historical fact and fiction, flavoured by scientific mumbo jumbo, has caught the mood of the moment.
I read the Da Vinci Code, (which kept me up all night) and I’ve just read The Lost Symbol. Whatever you may think of the prose, or of the sheer commerciality of instinct behind it, you can’t deny that this man knows his craft as a writer and there are a lot of other authors out there who could learn a lot from it. He knows how to make a reader turn the page. There are a lot of ‘literary’ writers out there who can compose a beautiful phrase and make you weep over a paragraph, but you don’t necessarily stay up all night to finish the book. Dan Brown is a master of the Narrative Hook.
He also makes you believe - or at least suspend your disbelief - for the length of the novel, because his background research embeds his fiction in a matrix of fact and scientific detail. In this case, it’s the masonic movement, just sufficiently secretive enough to be intriguing and mysterious to the rest of us, and the new para-psychological sciences. The heroine is engaged in using new technology to measure the weight of (and therefore prove the existence of) the human soul. I’m quite happy to believe that people are doing things like this.

DB’s action and pace are very similar to the James Bond novels, with similarly unbelievable sequences where the hero is drowned, shot, endures 24 hours of sleep deprivation, but still manages to fend off twelve armed and dangerously fit SAS trained security guards single-handed. No one is who they are supposed to be and it all works out in the end. These books are stylish, amazingly well crafted and I can forgive the cliches and the odd heavy handed line for a bit of compulsive light reading.

Earth Day

Kathleen Jones — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 16:13:00 +0000

Spring is a month late in Italy this year, but even later in Cumbria. The magnolias have already wilted in Tuscany, but my beautiful Magnolia Stellata has only just begun to open its star-shaped, fragrant petals. Yesterday was Earth Day and, appropriately, I spent as much time as I could in the garden which is suffering from six months of neglect and the ravages of winter. Because the river bank floods so frequently during the winter months, it isn’t possible to do anything to the garden between October and March. If the soil’s disturbed it gets washed away when the water levels rise taking plants and nutrients with it. So I’ve learned to leave the flower beds alone while they’re dormant and plant only things that are water resistant. This year it’s the garden fence that has been demolished and will have to be replaced.
The river also brings gifts - most of them unwanted; plastic bags and bottles, and a plethora of weeds. Every year there are miles and miles of ground elder roots to tease out of the ground. It’s the Genghis Khan of weeds, choking everything in its path, and immune to every attempt to exterminate this ubiquitous Green Strangler. Digging it up is the only way to get rid of it.
There’s something totally satisfying about getting your hands into soil. I feel absolutely right with my wellington boots in the mud and my fingers round the roots of a plant. It also frees my mind to think and whatever I’m working on keeps on running inside my head while I dig.
But I also wonder if this compulsion to grow and nurture things is genetic. A primal urge to connect with my ancestors.
My father’s family were the children of small farmers, horse dealers and cattle drovers, who came over from Ireland to settle in the city and try to make a better life. My grandparents were delighted when Dad won a scholarship to the grammar school (you had to pay in the nineteen thirties) and hoped that he would become a teacher or a civil servant - something respectable to eradicate every trace of the Irish Tinker.
Unfortunately Dad hated the city and was crazy about horses. He used to get up at 4am to cycle out to a farm and help the owners with their milk round before he went to school. When he was fourteen the farmer offered him a job as a hired lad but my grandparents were scandalised and refused to allow him to leave school. So, one day, he simply got up at 4am, put his belongings in a backpack and cycled out to the farm leaving a note for his parents. He used to tell people, with a laugh, that he had run away with the milk-man!
The land was in his blood, and I think it’s in mine. I loved being brought up on a farm and if I’d been a boy I suspect I would never have left. I often wonder how different my life would have been but for that accident of gender.