Authors Electric

The poet M R peacock has talked about the creative process as arising from that part of the brain where dreams are made, and she suggested that calm and quietness are prerequisites for both. That seems to me more like day-dreaming than the dreams that come in sleep: day-dreams, the slipping of a cog in the brain towards unfocussedness,   letting thoughts drift as they will. I’ve found that story or poetry ideas sometimes float through in that pleasant, what-looks-like-idle, state. They may just be fragments that float off again and never make it into wholeness, but occasionally they grow and settle into something worth working on. My children’s story Goose Anna came from that out-of-focus state on a long motorway drive (I was a passenger, I hasten to add) with a soft-toy goose on the back seat, and picture book The Crows’ Nest formed from a chilled-out evening (with wine) in a friend’s garden, half-listening to crows gossiping in nearby trees. Days out in the wi...

I’m in a terrible flat spot. I got to poem 38 of the 52 poems challenge and just came to a stop. I made notes for the next two and wrote one verse but just couldn’t go on. For all these past weeks, I’ve just fiddled about with old stuff – poetry and prose – but have not been able to be creative at all. It’s a familiar dilemma, but doesn’t usually last this long. Often in the past, walking somewhere beautiful starts the process going and recently, we’ve been in the Lakes, in glorious sunny weather. Blue skies above just-turning autumn leaves reflected in the water. The roar and magnetic pull of a waterfall in spate. Saddleback blueish in the distance. Evenings around a log fire. A squelchy walk from Pooley Bridge to Barton Church to rescue a wren that might have been trapped in there (it wasn’t). Everything, in fact, to gladden the heart and get the creative juices flowing. Except they didn’t.  This is a lake, not a story    At one point I put it down to...

At the beginning of January, we were in Turin for a few days. On the first evening, through the (closed) hotel window and the traffic noise, I heard someone singing. It sounded awful. ‘There’s someone out there murdering ‘La Vie En Rose’ , I said.      We came across the singer the next night. An African woman, crouched on the ground with a paper dish for contributions in front of her. Without the previous evening’s distortions, she sounded wonderful. A powerful voice with a Piaf-style raw edge to it. She was still singing the same song, and after she ended with ‘Alors je sens dans moi mon coeur qui bat, la la la la la la,’ she began all over again. We stopped to chat and make an ‘offering’. She spoke only French, no Italian, and we talked about Piaf and how much we had enjoyed the song. We parted with lots of blown kisses from her and ‘Je vous bennisse.’      We heard her the next night too, but didn’t see her. She was still singing La Vi...

Parents, teachers, friends and casual acquaintances have, over the years, noticed how untidy I am, and failed, with all their well-intentioned comments, to change me.  I LOVE chaos. I do! I’m averse to order and routine, especially that imposed by other people. I dislike plans and ‘organised’. It feels anti-life.  By the side of my armchair, my nest, is my ‘pile’ of stuff. Books, notebook, diary, address book, photo albums of my grandchildren, sweets, aspirins, knitting, the stuff of me.   Upstairs in my office, it’s the same : desk, shelves, floor, piled high with stuff, all of it precious chaos. My notebooks the same, my mind the same, a mish-mash of untidy thoughts, memories, anxieties, plans, regrets, what ifs and shoulds, as  well as those magical random moments, those beautiful experiences, usually for me in my garden, the flash of a goldfinch,  a new flower, a party of jays on the lawn. Are all writers the same? To begin with my books are extrem...