Greetings Readers. I have returned to the friendly familiar fold of the Mslexia blog for three months only.
Roll up.
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Read all about it.
Some of you may remember me from a year of blogging as Mslexia‘s Literary It Girl (2010-2011). This time, instead of blogging about launches and literati parties, I shall be blogging about penning my first very own One Woman Show to take on the road, and hopefully to Edinburgh Festival.
I went to Edinburgh Festival for the first time this year where I performed a few poems at a friend’s fringe gig and crammed in seeing as many shows as I possibly could. I loved it. I want to go back. Living in Cardiff, although there is a thriving literary scene, there has been a lack of spoken word solo shows and of big names including a stop in Wales on their UK tours.
Lately, though, this has been shifting, with people like Luke Wright and John Osborne being booked for Wales Millennium Centre, and Laura Dockrill, Byron Vincent and Hannah Silva crossing the border. The rise of the spoken word show is also influencing an increasingly eclectic range of events in the capital.
Cerys Matthews is a Welsh bi-lingual songwriter, solo artist, musician, performer, arranger and broadcaster. Until 2001 she was the lead vocalist of the band Catatonia and Matthews is a literary and intelligent artist with the ability to make you laugh/cry and reflect simultaneously: not an easy thing to pull off with real panache and originality.
Matthews’s love of poetry and literature have been obvious in her lyrics right from the start and while I never got to a Catatonia gig I saw her perform a stripped back set last year in my local concert hall on the north east coast of England. Her growing body of solo work is magnificent: “Through a glass” (from Don’t Look Down) and “Into the derelict night” (from Explorer) both showcase her superb voice, vocal range and style. That she’s a bi-lingual writer adds even more to admire and bearing in mind readers of this blog are writers I can say with 100% certainty that she is a writers’ songwriter. That might not be obvious to those only familiar with the radio-played Catatonia canon but if you actually listened to Catatonia lyrics back in the day then this shouldn’t surprise you at all.
I didn’t mean to write ‘genre’. I hadn’t even considered it – but when I joined my local writing class, every story I told had something supernatural in it. Magic and myth, alternative histories, witches and other worlds. What was happening to me? I hadn’t read anything like that since my teens, so was surprised to find myself writing it now.
I was reading serious novels those days; classics, Booker Prize winners, modern stories about India and child abuse. Somehow I’d changed from the girl who devoured every book in the library’s ‘Science Fiction’ section (where anything vaguely Asimov, McCaffrey or Herbert was shelved), stopped being the girl who stalked Terry Pratchett til he remembered my name*. I’d become a reading snob, and hadn’t even noticed.
Some time in the early 1970s when I was about seven years old my father drove our new second-hand Vauxhall Viva to a library three miles away. We usually walked to our local library a few streets away, where I’d sit crossed legged on the scratchy carpet reading the latest Adventures of Tintin. My father told me we had to make this special trip because this other library had just opened a new record section and if I came with him I was allowed to choose an album for myself.
He knew I’d want to go. This was, you see, the same man who bought newly released albums at the Woolworths at the top of our street. He encouraged us to listen to everything he bought. It would be Bowie one week, Schubert the next and my father introduced me to Laurie Anderson and so many other female artists. There was no TV on in the background when a new record appeared and each time an album went on the hi-fi we would listen spellbound to the sounds coming out of the speakers. I distinctly remember the gatefold edition of Diamond Dogs being opened on the kitchen table and Judy Garland’s ruby slippers shining on the cover of ELO’s Eldorado. We went to the record library for the first time on a Monday evening in the early 1970s.
Since I last wrote – ages ago, sorry – I gave birth to a ginormous baby boy who is now fattening up very nicely and not being more than usually cruel and unusual in the middle of the night.
But ten and a half pounds of newborn needed to eat an awful lot – leaving his side was cruel, like unplugging a blue whale from its krill – and I certainly couldn’t feed and write at the same time (or at least only texts to friends moaning about his milk intake), which means that my not-quite-finished novel remains not quite finished.
On balance, it’s better to have succeeded with the baby and failed with the book, but trying to do something about the latter while ministering to the former is hard. I did manage one frenzied two-hour burst of work when he was a week old (high on hormones and Gü Millionaire’s Flapjacks) before realising I was going to plunge into post-natal loopiness if I fixated on nothing but getting him to sleep so I could write.
So I did it. Just before Christmas, the first of my formerly Penguin-published books was published again by…me.
I have given it back the title I originally wanted for it, a jacket that I think is much more redolent of its theme and tone, and am distributing it on Amazon as an ebook for Kindle. And preparing it, as I write, for Createspace to distribute as a print-on-demand title.
I haven’t put it with any other retailers yet and won’t until after February (for reasons to do with Amazon marketing which I’ll explain in my next post).
It’s very early days but here’s a summary update of what’s happened so far.
1. Creative Control. Firstly, I have to say it’s enormously exciting to me to have the opportunity to independently publish and reach readers in this way. For me, so far, this has been a far more positive, creative and rewarding process than traditional publishing – and I am having more fun than at any time since starting to write and publish fiction back in 2001
Well hello everyone.
I know it’s been a little while since a member of the Mslexia staff posted here – and even longer since I did – so I thought I’d write a little post to say hello, festively.
I know you haven’t seen my name around of late, but I have been here and very busy with the blog behind the scenes, and I hope you’re all enjoying the brilliant resident bloggers we’ve been featuring – and are thinking of applying yourselves, if you haven’t already (or applying again if you have!).
So things in the office generally have been pretty hectic, as I’m sure you can all imagine, what with the redesign of the magazine, which doesn’t seem as far away as four issues ago, and shifting the whole operation forward a month. Did you notice that you’d received a December issue this year for the first time? (Don’t worry – everybody will still receive four magazines for their subscription price, and will continue to do so). We hope it’s been a nice pre-Christmas treat to have a copy of Mslexia around for the festive holidays.
Normal Songbursts operations have been temporarily suspended due to the release of a new album called 50 Words For Snow. This blog was never meant to be a review or opinion piece but I feel compelled to write about the new long-player by Kate Bush, given than in my expanded print version of this blog I stuck my neck on the line and said Bush is the greatest living songwriter of our generation. There’s not been a new album from her in some years, however, this latest work has only cemented my opinion: no one else comes close to her in terms of creativity, vision and self-determination. She’s a one-off and for me as a writer, she never fails to inspire and motivate. And when I am not having all of those creative, critical and reflective responses to her music, I can just sit back – and listen. And there’s a lot to listen to in this new and starkly stripped-back work.
In my own practice I am fascinated by the “white space” in creative writing, whether that be in performance, reading, reflecting, teaching, research and/or creating on the page. The white space subtext of writing is crucial to our success as writers and it’s an elusive thing to pin down. The next issue of The Fold, my online creativity bulletin from The/Poetry/Fold goes into this in more detail. In 50 Words for Snow the whiteness is everywhere and as a concept album it explores its wintry vista from a variety of surprising angles.
So picture me, on my night of nights, at the top of a Waterstones event room. 
My editor takes the podium as I stand to the side, trying to look modest while she says nice things about me and my writing. My index finger is holding the place in my book – my book! – from which, in a moment, I will read.
Encouraging faces smile up at me from a room full of goodwill. Many of them know how long this night has been in coming.
It has been a full three years since I signed the two-book contract with Penguin that’s brought us all here tonight.
Before that, I’d spent years navigating rejections from agents and publishers.
And before that, many more years writing the books on the fringes of work (as a features journalist), family (as a wife and mother-of-two) and study (as MA student and then lecturer in women’s studies).
But, finally, here we are. My editor finishes and announces my name. I step forward to applause and some very Irish, very unliterary, whoops and cheers. I mount the podium, open my book, take another deep breath and….
We’re suddenly plunged into darkness.
Darkness?
You know that feeling of sensing something but not quite being able to put your finger on it? Goldfrapp’s lyrics and music put me in mind of that feeling. I’m referring to a kind of emotional intuition, a strange kind of déjà vu that’s less helpfully referred to sometimes as the dreaded Writer’s Block. The block can last weeks, months, sometimes years – thankfully for me I experience something like it a great deal, but only for very short periods of time. So short are my “writer’s blocks” that I don’t even call them that. They’re just spaces where some words will go.
It’s a bit like losing someone’s name for a second, or forgetting your PIN number. In writing terms this happens to me a lot: there’s a space where an image will eventually fit – so I leave gap and just have faith that the right words will find their way there. I am mildly dyslexic so I think that may have something to do with it but I was talking about this just last week with the participants on my Poetry/Fold writing course, Strange Bedfellows: you need a specific, particular word but can’t for the life of you find it in your memory’s language store. It’s so frustrating and is testimony to the tough task we set ourselves every time we face off that blank sheet of paper, the developing stanza, chapter or section. Having an idea is one thing, finding the right words to articulate and realise that idea in a readable and engaging form is another thing entirely.
