Authors Electric

Recipes from My Garden This week author Nadja Maril released her collection of f lash prose, poetry, and essays inspired by her kitchen, garden, and family memories. I sat down with Nadja to ask her some questions about the book, and her process. It's interesting to note that Nadja comes from an artistic background: her late father Herman Maril was an artist, and his painting is the cover of her book. I have enjoyed Nadja's poetry and flash fiction for many years now, and I am very excited for her book! Dianne Pearce (Dianne): What inspired you to combine poetry, short form, gardening, and cooking in one book? How did these different forms of expression come together?   Nadja Maril (Nadja): In January 2020 I’d just completed an MFA (masters in fine arts) in creative writing from the low residency Stonecoast Writing Program at the University of Southern Maine and was in the midst of moving into a 100-year-old house. My husband Peter and I were the General Contractors. Both th...

I have the urge to write about adaptations today, because some of the various meanings of this word have been on my mind lately. The fact that football, general elections and Glastonbury have been taking up a lot of airtime has caused me to abandon live tv for now and to watch too much Netflix in the evenings instead, and that in turn has caused me to announce to my son, the only one who would listen, that in the extremely unlikely event that Netflix offered me a million pounds for the screen rights for my novels, I would turn them down. My son didn't think I'd be able to resist an offer like that, but I hope I would stand firm. There have been cases where I've been pleasantly surprised by adaptations, particularly the classier BBC ones which stick fairly closely to the original material - the iconic 1995 Pride and Prejudice, for instance, or the Joan Hickson Miss Marple series. I also very much enjoyed a new version of Agatha Christie's Murder Is Easy. On the other han...

Deep mid-winter... That was last month, January. And ( above ), the footprints of our resident wood-pigeons mingle with mine. They'd come down to trample the snow right outside the kitchen door because they were tired of waiting for us to put out seed. Now it's February and, like gardeners the ledth and breangth, I'm starting to think about seeds. Tomato seeds and sweet-pea seeds especially, in trays, on the kitchen windowsill. Seed potatoes in old compost bags. Leaf mould. Mulch. I think gardening takes up more of my time and energy these days than writing does. My garden is the usual grey, dreary, untidy, depressing winter mess -- but here and there are snowdrops and cyclamen. And big, fat green buds on the narcissus. A slightly nibbled Christmas rose. But then, being nibbled a bit is what this garden is about...  A wood mouse, who lives under the bonsai apple tree. Some of the nibblers come and impatiently knock at the kitchen door.  Look at the grump on that face. ...

'Telling Tales' by Susan Price I was on the track down of an elusive and prolific beast -- one that's common but camouflages itself so well that you can be staring right at it and not see it. I knew that no matter how dedicatedly I hunted it, no matter how many hours or days I spent on the trail, I would miss many of the pestiferous things. So I asked my friend, Karen Bush,   an ex of this blog, to help and she bagged quite a few of the critters, having an expert eye for them. Using Karen's spotter notes, I culled all she discovered – but in the process found a whole lot more of the pests. They breed, I think, as soon as you turn a page. Because I'm talking about typos, of course. I've been proof-reading my latest self-published book, Telling Tales.   There are several breeds of typo. They can be mistaken spellings. I know to be wary of any word containing 'ie' or, indeed, 'ei' because I seem incapable of learning which way round they go in any...

 As I write this, at about lunchtime on Sunday, I'm trying to listen to part of an online conference run by a Facebook group I'm part of. On Friday I took in an online discussion on publishing at Edinburgh Book Festival. This morning, between washing my hair and having lunch, I tuned into a family history conference on Zoom. A hot tip from this one, by the way,  is not to try to style your hair while wearing headphones! Tomorrow I'll spend much of the day watching a folk festival online. One of my friends has alerted me more than once to the availability of various theatre productions online too, although I haven't got round to watching any of those yet, having spent much of my down-time viewing old television series I didn't get round to watching the first time round. There does seem to have been a glut of online conferences and festivals just this weekend, which is a bank holiday weekend in much of the UK. But at least there aren't any work meetings at weekend...

This is the view from my kitchen door.           About three years ago, I was idly watching a tv programme which showed a view of a perfectly neat, ordered garden, divided by a straight path with neat, straight-edged beds of flowers neatly arranged on either side with perfect symmetry. The presenter asked, 'Doesn't everybody want a view like this from their back door?'           My answer, instantly, was NO!           I had been wondering what to do with my garden, which made me feel dull every time I looked out at it. I hadn't any ideas until the TV asked me that question. Instantly I knew, and strongly, that I did not want a neat garden. I did not want plants growing in neat straight lines. I did not want geometry or symmetry. Such gardens can look wonderful, that is certain, but it was not what I wanted to see when I drew the curtain back in the morning.       ...