You MUST read this book...

Nik started a great book recommendation meme yesterday, and Benjamin Judge joined in. AND BOTH RECOMMENDED ME! Thanks guys.

And to add my pennyworth, here are five poetry books I've read and loved this summer:

1. Furniture, by Lorraine Mariner. I came across Lorraine's work first when she read last during a packed Oxfam reading. Packed with readers, that is, and I'd heard some good things but to be honest I was a bit jaded by the time Lorraine stood up. Not for long though. The minute she started a poem about Stanley, an imaginary boyfriend, who has to go because 'nothing in our relationship has ever surprised me', she had charmed everyone in that room. I rushed to buy her book after the reading but she had already sold out. Even if it wasn't for the fantastic series of poems in the narrative voice of 'Jessica Elton', this collection would still be on my favourite shelves.

2. I wrote about Simon Armitage's Seeing Stars here and I have been coming back to it again and again this summer in admiration and yes, envy.

3. Human Chain by Seamus Heaney is my newest acquisition but I've already read it three times. A lot of the poems are dedicated 'i.m' but the whole book feels 'alive and living' in the best ways. I am sure there are a lot of references here I'm missing, but the joy of it is that it makes me want to read more, rather than just making me feel stupid. And in the meantime, the words are so beautiful I am enjoying just tasting them. In fact, I could almost lick every page of this book like 'Lick the Pencil':

'Lick the pencil' we might have called him
So quick was he to wet the lead, so deft
His hand-to-mouth and tongue-flirt round the stub.

4. Source, by Mark Doty is a good accompaniment to Human Chain, in that both seem to focus on what is left of the human being when the material elements are stripped away. Where is our place in the world? And how do we learn to see things through our own eyes rather than other people's? There is a lovely 'Letter to Walt Whitman' here that I read twice before I realised I was holding my breath each time. And then I raced to the page myself, wanting to write as directly as Mark Doty does here.

5. Not a poetry book but a book for poets that I have come to very late, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers has made me look at nearly everything differently this Summer. The book describes Wabi-Sabi as 'a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete,' and is a practice rather than an end result. The tension it describes between the meanings of Wabi and Sabi is perhaps the most exciting one thing I've read for a long time.

And now I'm off to add a few of the books recommended on other blogs to my reading list. Good idea, Nik!

A PROUD BOOK-GODMOTHER

This is obviously the time of the year to make lists of your favourite books. But allow me a little self-indulgence here because I want to tell you about the FOUR BOOKS I've been lucky enough to put my name to this year, each of them is a little gem and I couldn't be more proud and grateful to the authors and editors for asking me.

1. Black Boxes by Caroline Smailes. This is a real roller coaster of a book, and Caroline's second novel. What I loved most about it was the quality of the voices, she managed to get the young girl's so absolutely perfect that I really believed every word, and the raw pain Pip feels acts as a lovely contrast to the increasingly dreamy mother who slips away as the book continues. Not the lightest Christmas read but really worth adding to your bookshelf (and leaving space next to it for Caroline's next book which is due out in the Summer.)

2. I'm really interested in novellas. I love the intensity, the way they allow us to focus on one strand of the story and enjoy a breathless one night of true love with them. Elizabeth Baines's Too Many Magpies did all this for me. I'm thrilled she's been getting so many good reviews because it deserves every one. I'm interested that the word used most often is 'haunted', there's definitely a lasting quality to this book.

3. I had a guest story in the Birkbeck MA anthology last year, but this year I was pleased to give a quote for issue 6 of the Mechanics Institute Review. I've loved this collection, and read it again and again. It's exuberant and funny and there's more than one writer I'm sure will be hitting the big time soon. But most of all, it felt confident. Proof, if anyone needed it, that writing MA's no longer need to justify what they do. At last. At last. Please now can we lay to rest the very vexing (to some people) question whether writing can be taught or not?

4. And last but not least, A C Tillyer's An A-Z of Possible Worlds is just a drop dead brilliant idea. I'll admit that the minute I got the proof I was overcome with raging jealousy. WHY HADN'T I THOUGHT OF THIS IDEA? Anyway, one saving grace is that it's done so very well here - a beautiful box containing 26 short stories for each letter of the journey - all taking the reader to a different place in the imagination. It's a treat.

I'm making no apology for bursting above with godmotherly pride. These are great books - one of the best things that's happened to me this year is that I've been allowed to have my name on them too because it allows me to shout even more about liking them so much. I love the fact too that these are from two of our more adventurous independent publishers - Salt and Roast Books.

I've put them on my amazon store for ease, and to keep them together, but please don't feel you have to buy them there. They're also available at The Book Depository, Salt Publishing, Roast Books, and Bookstore.co.uk. Plus, of course, all good bookshops.

Read more:

* Blurbing

BEST WRITING BOOKS

I've just opened a 'store' on Amazon so that I have somewhere to point people for all the writing and inspiration books I love and use for my own writing and teaching. It's got five parts:

THE CLASSICS

These are the books I pull down from my shelves the most often. Examples are Bonnie Friedman's Writing Past Dark which addresses many of the issues - jealousy, fear, self-belief - that writers don't often admit to, even amongst themselves, and Stephen King's On Writing - forget the autobiographical bit, his insights into the writing process are predictably brilliant!

INSPIRATION KICK-STARTS

I think this is going to end up being the biggest category. Even seeing these books together like this makes me smile. Here are the books I've scribbled over, adapted for my writing and teaching exercises, and most of all - and probably most important for me - sat back and just admired the writing and the writer. The best books let us look inside someone else's brain, and I like what I see in here!

GRIPPING DOCUMENTARIES

A relatively new passion for me, but here are the DVDs I've watched open-mouthed and open-journaled. Partly the subject matter, but also the discipline, new ways of thinking, and connections made in these films make me want to do better, write better, think better. What I Want My Words To Do To You is American format only but is an inside look at how teaching writing in a prison setting can bring people back to life again. It's moving and most of all, human. All writers should watch Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth at least once, if only to see how Star Wars was structured!

HOW TO READ AND WRITE POETRY

The shortest category so far, but these particular books are already dog eared and much much used.

WRITING MEMOIR AND ESSAYS

This is definitely in progress because it's the area I'm working in most at the moment. Watch this space!

On refusing to choose

Last month, I posted that I had just got a copy of Barbara Sher's book, Refuse to Choose, and promised I'd let all others out there who also want to do EVERYTHING know what I thought about it.



KEY POINTS

So these are the key points I took from the book.

Sher says that some people are just 'genetically wired to pursue many areas'. She calls us Scanners. We're not doing anything wrong apparently. And we're not quitters. It's just that we are looking for something different from a project than the outcome most people would expect.

Sher elaborates on this idea throughout the book. She says, 'To Scanners, the world is like a big candy store full of fascinating opportunities, and all they want is to reach out and stuff their pockets.' Sounds great, but apparently we're starving there, because we don't want to have to make the choice about which sweetie or candy to eat.

BARBARA SHER'S TOOLS

The first tool she suggests is the Scanner daybook. Everytime we think of a new idea, we spend some time writing it in our daybook. Then we go back to what we were doing, feeling safe that the idea won't go away. I've started to do this - I like the idea that it's almost an extension of my mind, and do you know what? I'm starting to feel proud of all these different ideas I have! My daybook is like some kind of weird novel in itself.

Another way of using the daybook was to go round the house and make a note on all the projects we find there. From those we've only just thought about, to those started. Make no judgments, just record. This was extraordinary - one thing I realised was that I would be a super-human if I did all those things I've been beating myself up for not doing. BUT also that I have some great ideas and I can get other people (experts) to finish some off for me. Upholsterers etc. I can still be creative that way.

And thirdly, write down a list of your achievements, big and small, even if you didn't finish what you set out to do, or it was just a plan. Write down the idea. I haven't done this, but could see it would be useful to stop all the 'but I never actually do anything' voices!

QUESTIONS

But there's something else that this list would be good for, and which I have done with other projects, and that is to ask two questions of each project:

a) What was the most exciting or interesting part of the experience?
b) Why did you stop when you did?

Sher says you may start to see a pattern - it might be you want to find out how to do something, or you are more interested in self-expression rather than commercial gain, or you like getting new information, or the learning experience.

And this is why you set out to do the project. When you get what you started it for, you stop. It's not that you've quit but that you've succeeded.

There are lots more similar type exercises - wrapping up all your unfinished projects with a label and putting them on a bookshelf to celebrate them, writing a list of 1,000 things you want to do before you die (like the books 1,000 Places To See etc), inviting friends over to show them the projects you're working on and hearing what they're working on.

BEST BITS

One thing I'm going to be taking away is her idea of splitting the day up with a school-type timetable. Instead of 40 minutes of Maths, I'm going to allocate that time to a particular project. And then when the metaphorical school bell rings, I'll swop to another project. With huge dollops of the timetable put over to the job and other paid work, I should still have time to fit in other projects. Forty minutes at a time ...

Another thing I liked was her suggestion of getting about 20 three-ring binders and project boxes to keep the information separate, moving from one to another and just concentrating on the file that is open, putting everything away at the end of the time spent on it. Also adding to each binder or box anything on each project we find or think of as we go along.

WHAT DO YOU WANT?

All the ideas seemed to be at heart about looking at what we really want to get out of the projects we take on. One thing I realised is that I like to learn new things - and I like to tell other people about what I've learnt. Once I have the hang of something it's not so interesting to me so I tend to leave it to one side. Other people might like the materials involved, rather than the actual doing. Others want to create for themselves, turning a hobby into a business spoils it for them even if everyone is telling them that's what they should be doing until they believe it themselves. Sounds so simple, but it explains why I enjoyed journalism so much. A new subject to learn about every week. So now, with bigger book-size projects, I have to work out ways that allow me to keep learning and teaching. This may take the form, as Sher suggests, of new projects that I take on in the break-times of my school timetable!

And so what if I go slowly this way? At least I'll get more done than rushing round wondering what I should be doing and feeling guilty for what I might be missing.

Barbara Sher has a website here.

My books of the year...

Of course it's daft making such predictions in February because who knows what the next ten months will bring, but I can't imagine much beating the very different books I have on the go at the moment.



Twyla Tharp is one of the great choreographers in America, and her book, The Creative Habit discusses the lessons she's learnt about creativity. Even the design of the book seems to let the light in - it feels inspiring just to look at. I've been thinking about space and writing a lot at the moment. I keep wanting to cut open up my sentences and breathe. In The Creative Habit, there are so many paragraphs and sentences I've underlined and marked throughout that it's obvious it deserves a post of its own soon. I always scribble on my favourite books, I treat it as a compliment to the writer - (provided they are my own books, of course) but it made me laugh when about half way through the book, Twyla Tharp said: 'you have written on this book, haven't you?' It summed up the feel of the book for me, like having a conversation with the kind of wise mentor you dream of.

My second book is All We Know by Ciaran Carson, which is not just a 'novelistic' sequence of poems, it is one which - and I'll take this from the blurb - gestures 'towards a conventional sonnet sequence - the poems consist of fourteen lines, or multiples therof, in lines of fourteen syllables.' And if that wasn't enough, it references film noir, Cold War thriller, fairy story, and the art of the fugue. Best of all, you can forget all of the above when you're reading it and just enjoy it. This is one of the best books I've read recently about everything to do with love. Trust me.

And of course, there is this one, which just keeps getting better and better and more frightening and funnier as I read on.