Gathering writing, and what I'm reading

A new story I started isn't going along so well—seems lifeless—so I'll leave it for a bit. Certainly I'm lagging on the new writing front, though I am revising and reworking the existing pieces I am gathering together.

Last year I took part in StoryADayMay, which produced some of those short pieces, but I don't think I'll do that again this year. I have signed up, at the same website (storyadaymay.org) for their warmup. Plenty of resources regarding keeping track of ideas and websites, most of which I won't use, though I'll check out some (more!) websites. The thing I am finding with websites is that it takes a fair amount of trawling to come up with a few that really offer something I want. Stands to reason, of course, how many books are exactly the book you want? The first actual exercise was to write a twitter story (a story in 140 characters or less, including punctuation and spaces). Here's mine:

When I met my husband he was married to my sister. Family gatherings at Christmas are so twentieth century. (108 characters)

On a recent visit one of the Spinifex publishers, (www.spinifexpress.com.au) Susan Hawthorne, left us a pile of books including My Sister Chaos by Lara Fergus, which I have just read. It's a strangely compelling tale, about twin sisters from a nameless country that they left as it was breaking up in turmoil. Only minor characters have names. One sister is a cartographer and is obsessively mapping the house she rents. The arrival of her sister disrupts this process. An original and disturbing novel about obsession and trauma. I recommend it.

I'm still collecting phrases from Dostoevsky's The Idiot with the idea of trying to write a story "in the style of". Phrases like, "said impatiently and wrathfully," and, "with a strange ardor." Hmmm. One of D's preoccupations is that we appreciate life only when we know we are close to losing it—only when we have some kind of death sentence do we appreciate that we have life. I don't agree with this myself. It goes along with another concern of his that if one doesn't believe in an afterlife, a crime such as murder, especially when one is close to death, has no consequences. I can’t wear this; it may have little consequence for the perpetrator but does for others, and our humanity demands a regards for others, even when we are about to die. (If we have no regard for others we cannot expect them to have regard for us and our well-being, which would make for a very sorry world.) For an online  group reading Dostoevsky see http://projectdblog.wordpress.com/

I often have a non-fiction book going at the same time as I am reading novels and at the moment it is Alex's Adventures in Numberland by Alex Belos, with the subtitle, "Dispatches from the wonderful world of mathematics." The jolly tone of the title is largely absent from the text, thank heavens. At about halfway through I am enjoying his explorations of areas like tesselations, equilateral triangles, the history of number systems, pi and so on. I'm enjoying it. I imagine it is too basic for anyone who has a real mathematics background, which I do not.

Re-reading The Price of Salt by Claire Morgan (aka as Carol by Patricia HIghsmith) after about thirty years is proving more of a treat than I expected. I'll say more about this in a later post. 

Truth, writing, reading, rejection

"The paradox of the arts is that they are all made up and yet they allow us to get a truth about who and what we are or might be." Seamus Heaney in Finders Keepers, Selected Prose 1971—2001

A conversation with my son has me thinking about truth-telling and how a poem, a song, a story, can carry truth that has not much to do with relating a string of events. I think maybe it's more than a paradox, it's a glory of the arts that they "allow us to get a truth." Like a truth of the tragedy of my sister. The week in which this conversation took place had been a medically dramatic one, culminating in my having a pacemaker inserted; hence, in part, the gap between this blog entry and the previous one. All, as they say, is now well.

Writing, however, has flown out the window and left behind a dearth of ideas and inclination. Fortunately, I believe both will return, and to help them along I have gone back into my journals of the last couple of years to see what I have recorded from what I have read and what notes and observations I have made. That's where I found the Seamus Heaney quote. I've pulled out Heaney's book of prose writings to re-read.

As I read Dostoevsky— currently near the end of Part One ofThe Idiot—along with an internet-based reading group led by Dennis Abrahms (http://projectdblog.wordpress.com/) I wonder about Dostoevsky's overblown prose and characters who seem to stand for ideas or aspects of Russian society and life. He is such a contrast to my own pared-down writing about characters in their everyday lives that, in my mind, stand only for themselves; examples of the human condition, if you like, rather than exemplars. I'll have a go at writing a few Dostoevskyian paragraphs, paragraphs that are unlikely to ever see the light of day, but I might learn something from at least trying to write in such a different way.

Here's how my reading goes sometimes, in a process I really really like. I'm reading Dostoevsky, along with DA and co, and in a London Review of Books see a review of a book called The Possessed: Adventures with Russian books and the people who read them By Elif Batuman, of whom I have not previously heard. So now I am reading that and enjoying it a lot and wondering about having a go at reading one of her subjects, Isaac Babel, who I have never read before. I'll try a library copy first.

I've had three rejections from publishers I have submitted my novel to. The last one was a clearly non-standard letter. It stated clearly they wouldn't publish my book, said they don't give feedback and suggested three other publishers (I've already been rejected by one of those.) It was a good letter; straight-forward, with a tone that was neither patronising nor dismissive. I appreciate that.

99 Ways Into New Zealand Poetry - the book

This book is written by Paula Green & Harry Ricketts and Published by Vintage, 2010. I've been trying to figure out why I like it so much. It's got range and depth of knowledge of the field (NZ poetry), it's well written, it looks beyond the canon for examples, it's sensibly and interestingly organised … I could go on, but there is something less tangible here, something that really gets to the "ways into" poetry aspect of it.

The combination of thematic and chronological works well. Here are the sections: Poetic Forms, Poetic Contexts, Poetic Features and Effects, Poetic Identities, Rites of Passage, Ways Into Writing (New Zealand) poetry. (This last in ten excellent pages, including a splendid two-page Tool Kit.) Within these sections, chapters (up to fourteen) toss out ideas, examples, opinions and so on in an entertaining and informative fashion.

The first section, Poetic Forms, is my favourite, maybe because I grapple with writing poems, (though I wouldn't call myself "a poet"). If I was looking for a form to carry a poem idea, a ballad, say, or a sestina or sonnet, I could come to this section—via the excellent index—and find out about it without being turned away by demonstrations of superior knowledge. Paula Green and Harry Ricketts certainly know much more of these subjects than I do, that's what makes them interesting. They present their knowledge in a friendly, "come and join in" sort of way, emphasising the usefulness of knowing a form and the freedom in contemporary poetry to adopt it, adapt it, or experiment with it.

The whole book is nicely laid out, with break-out paragraphs defining some of the key ideas — modernism for example — plenty of boxed poems to demonstrates points made, and a number of statements by poets about how a particular poem that is included in the book came to be.

My quibbles are physical; the book is a hefty three kilos, on shiny paper that is hard to read in some lights, especially the boxed poems, which are in faint print. And the cross-referencing parentheses are so conscientious as to becoming annoying at times.

If you like the following two sentences—the first is from Paula Green, the second from Harry Ricketts', you'll enjoy, as I did, the way this book is written.

Wedde has neither abandoned nor cauterised the motivation of the odes that preceded him, but daringly challenges the reader to accept the ode as a vessel for what might, upon first glance, appear oxymoronic, 'the sublime commonplace.' (page 55)

… many … recent New Zealand poets are 'tough,' difficult, but not impenetrable, provided the reader remains unafraid and is prepared to work away, following the poem's arc of thought. (page 420)

There's a history of poetry in New Zealand in here, and an exploration of canon-building in ten pages. The writers have done a pretty good job, as far as I can tell, of including the "left-outs" (Maori, women ……) and acknowledging the canonical (Baxter, Stead et al) throughout the text, in special chapters and in the full poems they have included.

I think what makes me delight in this book is the pleasure the writers take in their subject, the scope of their considerable knowledge and that, having read it, I am even more inclined—and better equipped—to read poetry. Read it, buy it, make sure your local library gets a copy, recommend it to your friends.

Here's a poem of mine that was published a few years ago in a Poetry Society anthology.

Family

My mother’s name was Margaret.

She disapproved of Lauris Edmond.

I gave her a copy of Hot October

because they had both lived in Ohakune.

"Oh," said Margaret with her special, disapproving

sigh, "What a run-around she gave that poor

husband of hers. And all those children!

He was well-liked, you know, a good headmaster".

Margaret was, however, loved and respected

by all four of her grandchildren.

She treated them like real people, they said,

listened to them, and sent money

instead of judgements when they were students

or unemployed and it was a cold winter.

We became a thin family, cousins,

and aunts driven off by that disapproving sigh.

Death, sudden, did the rest, punched holes

in the threadbare family fabric.

Margaret, widow, 78, herself died alone,

probably painfully, likely from choice,

before the daughter who chose her own end

and the grandchild who succumbed to

smoking and bronchial pneumonia.

Lauris Edmond, 75, died the other day.

In an obituary she is described as, ‘the great

New Zealand poet of parents and children.’

Books, books and a new project

On the subject of querying publishers, things are proceeding slowly. Various life events have intervened, including a dead internet connection for three days. Four queries have been sent off, there are three to go. Each one takes about three hours, by the time the synposis, letter, bio and so on are adapted to each publisher's requirements. It's a shade less aversive than marketing/promoting an actual book, so I am doing it, and will continue to the end of my list.


I'm still reading 99 Ways Into New Zealand Poetry, by Paula Green and Harry Ricketts and still enjoying it and continuing to be most admiring of how much they know and how they put it together.

The great birthday pile (see photo above) is as exciting as ever and promises much excitement and many treats. An early one is The Torchlight List: Around the world in 200 books by Jim Flynn. This is a small attractive book that takes a thematic look at how to get an education about the world, through reading great literature. Some extracts from his opening:

"I want [people] to be able to understand the world, rather than just be swept along … with no real comprehension of what is happening to them. … you need to know something about science, and nations other than your own and their histories, and the human condition."

The 200 listed books are supplemented by sublists. Counting from just the 200, I find I have read 39. Is that good? Or bad? I don't know, and it doesn't matter. It is illuminating to see where my gaps are - I have read few books about Spain, Portugal, South America, for example. Jim Flynn gives pithy descriptions of the books he lists and his own candid opinions of them. It was fun to read.

Now I'm onto my next writing project, which is gathering together short pieces I have accumulated over the years that I may be able to shape into some kind of collection. I fancy having 60 in total, which means writing some new ones, but I'll do the gathering first and see what I've got. Here's an early draft of what could possibly be the first piece in the collection:

An Opening

He was twenty-two when he died, a soldier in another country’s army fighting a different country’s war in yet another country, felled by support fire from a friendly gun. A full military funeral was called for, and held in the country of his origin, though that country was none of the earlier ones mentioned.

Family members flew around the world to bring his body home and his coffin sat in his parents’ living room for two days.

“I thought they usually had the coffin open,” said someone.

The funeral was a stage-managed affair on all fronts, at all levels. His sister bought some expensive high-heeled shoes in bright yellow, especially to wear with her short black skirt and tight black top. The family is well-connected. The army is well-connected.The funeral was in the cathedral. Joint ops. Lies were told about the man who died. Well, not outright lies, but that combination of exaggeration and omission that make someone look better than they were.

A woman was there who had no business being there, except she cared about an extended family member who would be there and perhaps sidelined. As one who did not believe in any god, she had not been to the cathedral before and admired the colours in the stained glass windows. Between the karanga calling in the coffin and the trumpet playing of the last post as it was carried out on the shoulders of slow-marching soldiers there was no tangible emotion, except for a stranger sitting beside her, who sobbed quietly throughout and appeared to know none of the family.

During a reading of verses from Ecclesiastes, widely known through a Seekers’ song, a gentle pop in the mind of the woman who had small business there turned into an idea for making a whole bunch of her short writings into something real and formed; “stones gathered together.”

A query is not a pitch

Oh dear. I gave my last blog post the wrong name. I should have said “query,” not “pitch” in the title and in the plog post itself. In my rambles around the internet I stumbled upon the blog of Janet Reid, literary agent (http://jetreidliterary.blogspot.com/2011/01/difference-between-pitch-and-query.html) and discovered the following:

"A pitch is short (VERY) and verbal.

A query is short (250 words, but not 25) and written.

A pitch is face to face.

A query is not.

A pitch requires some set up: my novel is finished; it's a historical romance; it's 78,000 words.  That helps your listener get ready to hear your pitch.

A query starts with the name of the main character and what problem or choice he faces.

A pitch is about 25 words.

A query is 250."

So now I know. And so do you. I am querying publishers in New Zealand re my novel. Seven of them. Each wants something different: a different length synopsis, more or less sample chapters, and so on. Have posted two, and have two more nearly ready. Response times vary between two and four months, and by all accounts (the extremely low percentage of unsolicited mss that get accepted) are most likely to be negative. Why am I doing this, then? I guess I want to try out the system before I grapple with knotty problems like confronting my own inabilities in the marketing area, the pros and cons of print on demand, ebooks and so on.

I am reading 99 Ways Into New Zealand Poetry, by Paula Green and Harry Rickets. It’s a fabulous book, a “how to read poetry” with oodles of examples and a mass of cross-referencing. It’s also an overview of New Zealand poets and poetry and the various ways they have clumped, or been clumped, together over the years. And the writers give poets who are women their due place and comment on ways they have been denied this place in the past. And there are useful short breakouts which are definitions of things like modernism and romanticism and some lovely covers from poetry books and photos of poets and pieces about their poetry by some of the poets and all in all it is a stunning cornucopia. I wish it wasn’t so heavy and the paper was less shiny, it’s hard to read in bed and/or some lights. Otherwise, it’s an education in a book.

A  novel that’s been on my to-read pile for a while that has just made it to the top, is The Housekeeper + The Professor, by Yoko Ogawa. She’s written a lot of novels in Japanese, some have been translated into English, some into French. A charming story involving a single mother and her son and the professor with a memory problem she housekeeps for and maths. It’s built around the excitement of numbers. I loved it. It didn’t matter that I didn’t understand the bits about baseball — which incidentally involves pitching, which we all know I am not doing.

Pitching

I've made a decision about the-novel-known-as-Ann. Actually, I've made two decisions. One is that, for now anyway, the title will be Where The HeArt Is. (The capital A in the middle of HeArt is deliberate.) I need a title because I'm going to offer it to some publishers. Not with any great expectation of success, but because it seems closer to what I want to do than self-publishing, or publishing it as a ebook only, which are the other options I have been thinking about.

So, I've been reading the internet about "making pitches" as it seems to be called and have written a "hook" and a synposis and am working on a "query letter." Most publishers' submission guidelines ask for these plus the 2 or 3 opening chapters. I have identified seven publishers in New Zealand that I will send to, carefully following the (different) guidelines for each. Most want printed, not emailed, submissions: for their "slush pile," which is publisher-speak for unsolicited manuscripts. Here's the "hook":

In Where The HeArt Is (52,000 words), forty-two-year-old New Zealander, Ann Williams, has intimate encounters with art treasures as she travels in New York, Washington DC, London and Paris, after losing her partner to another woman and her university job to redundancy. In the first three cities she is visiting relatives, at the instigation of her mother.

During an extended stay in London to help the family of her cousin, whose twins are two years old and whose wife is pregnant and afflicted with day-long 'morning sickness', she has an intimate encounter of a different kind with a librarian. The librarian, Suzanna, is a black citizen of the UK and insists on a 'present tense' affair — no sharing of past histories, no future planning. All the while, Ann seeks answers to her own questions about who she is and how she will determine her future when she returns home to New Zealand.

I am also going to send a "pitch" to an agency firm in the UK. I think my novel is more suited to the UK than to the US, and I liked the website of this outfit. I've never had an agent, but I gather to get a book published overseas you need one, so I'll give it a try.

Why aren't I including the names of the publishers and the agent? Because I found them in relation to my particular novel, and I think that is a useful thing for everyone to do, seek out publishers etc specifically for their own project. The website at http://publishers.org.nz/ has a list of members with plenty of information about each one.

So, that's the next couple of days' to do list. Here's where I'll be doing it:

Writing Dilemmas & Reading Pleasures

At the beginning of a year I tend to go back and read the notes I made the previous year on what I had read. One of my reasons for doing this is a very bad memory for names. Another is that I like to record quotes from the book that struck me when I was reading it. These are not necessarily  what I would note if I was doing a critique of the book, more things that remind me of something, or relate to an idea I’m thinking about, or even something I am writing.

This was brought home to me as I re-read Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, which I first read a year ago and which is our reading group choice for January. The things I noted a year ago, and the things that struck me second time round are distinctly different from each other. The Lacuna stood up well to re-reading and I recommend it.

I have completed another revision of the-novel-known-as-Ann and made a list of all the poems, writing and art works that are quoted from or referred to in it. Now I will give it to a new reader, someone who hasn’t read any of the earlier versions and who has a perspective on an aspect of the story that I am keen to get input on. And nervous about.

So, deciding how to go about getting it out there, so to speak, is looming. I’ve been published by regular publishers, and self-published, so I know my way around. I’ve also kept reasonably up-to-date with what is happening in the epublishing world. So I know about the options. All have their pluses and minuses. I don't expect to sell a lot of books/ make money; I write about the lives of people to whom big, dramatic events don’t happen, although personal trials and tragedies do, and my protagonists are lesbian.

The biggest downside of any form of self-publishing, for me, is marketing and publicising, because I hate it and so don’t do it. It’s not that I can’t do it, more that I am overcome with resistance and fatigue whenever I set out to.

Watch this space as I figure out what I will do.

I don’t have another novel idea in mind, but I do have a lot of short pieces, some short stories, others shorter than that, which I will do some work on and gather together and see if they make something. If an idea for a short story or poem or novel comes along, I’ll go with that, too.

Whatever else. I’ll keep reading. Here are some of my favourite books from last year’s reading:

Burnt Shadows  by Kamila Shamsi. (She was at Writers & Readers)

Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

Re-born Early diaries of Susan Sontag, edited by her son David Rieff

The Graveyard Book & American Gods by Neil Gaiman (he came to Writers & Readers too)

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

The Collected Short Stories of Lydia Davis

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

Room by Emma Donohue

Evidence of Things Unseen by Marianne Wiggins

How To Live: A Life of Montaigne By Sarah Bakewell.

The Montaigne book is a real treat, and I strongly recommend it — one of those biographies that looks at the man and his work as a whole. I gather it will be out in paperback this month (I read a library copy). Two fairly random quotes from it:

“Montaigne … Saw himself as a thoroughly ordinary man in every respect, except for his habit of writing things down.”

Montaigne thought “that the solution to a world out of joint was for each person to get themselves back in joint: to learn ‘how to live,’ beginning with the art of keeping your feet on the ground.”