Something to read for the weekend? Here's a short story I enjoyed by Zadie Smith, author of On Beauty, from the New Yorker online.

How strange, after my post yesterday, to get this poem sent to me this morning! It's by Jeffrey Harrison, and I've just ordered his book, Feeding the Fire. I had to, didn't I?!!!

Green Canoe

I don't often get the chance any longer
to go out alone in the green canoe
and, lying in the bottom of the boat,
just drift where the breeze takes me,
down to the other end of the lake
or into some cove without my knowing
because I can't see anything over
the gunwales but sky as I lie there,
feeling the ribs of the boat as my own,
this floating pod with a body inside it...

also a mind, that drifts among clouds
and the sounds that carry over water—
a flutter of birdsong, a screen door
slamming shut-as well as the usual stuff
that clutters it, but slowed down, opened up,
like the fluff of milkweed tugged
from its husk and floating over the lake,
to be mistaken for mayflies at dusk
by feeding trout, or be carried away
to a place where the seeds might sprout.

So today's been a big day for me - I haven't been so excited since I got my first Girl's Guide badge for entertaining (I made my mum tea for that!). My friend Sue and I passed our canoeing certificate this morning. It's been a fantastic two months, facing all sorts of fears about going out on water, being out of control, etc etc, and today we had to make ourselves capsize into the river. That was the strange part - forcing your body and mind to do something you normally try not to! I went first because I was the most frightened, and although I nearly got stuck in the mud on the bottom and the smell had to be smelt to be believed, we both survived. We celebrated by eating a sandwich at the side of the river and just remembering how it had felt to be part of it. There have been some real highlights - being the first to canoe through about an inch thick fall of blossom, seeing fish jump, finding out a whole other world of houseboats neither of us knew existed in the middle of town, just seeing somewhere you know from another perspective and most of all, travelling so quietly and slowly. Blips - the one time I took fright, just couldn't manage to go on the water and ran away (!), but on the whole it's been a fantastic experience. And now ... have canoe, will travel! My writing prompt for today is going to be ... other ways of travelling.

I'm inspired by Mark Pritchard's interview with the essayist Noelle Oxenhandler - her book on desire centring round three wishes she made looks really interesting, and a good simple structure which allows her to layer both everyday and more philosophical musings. The link Mark has given to Noelle's essay on 'Remembering the Dead' is worth following too.

At a recent lecture on the work of Ted Hughes, Graham Fawcett read Hughes's poem about experiencing a different Paris from Sylvia Plath, and her naive enthusiasm hit home. I think I experience the 'American view' of Paris too ... and my writing prompt for today comes from an old story, but one I love. This is the man who was caught writing the word 'Amour' all round the city after he split up with his girlfriend. Apparently the police caught him, but the public supported him. Only in Paris..

A report from the BBC reveals that TIME is the most used noun in the English Language. The top ten are as follows:

1 Time
2 Person
3 Year
4 Way
5 Day
6 Thing
7 Man
8 World
9 Life
10 Hand

I'm particularly interested from a writing point of view in this comment from Angus Stevenson, project manager of the OUP who says:

"The thing that struck me when I put together this list was that 90% of the top 100 words were one syllable, and that a large proportion were actually from Old English, meaning the basic words we use all the time in basic sentences are from before the Norman Conquest," he said.

"We always put the focus on new words, changing language and words from other countries, but in reality the basic language we use has been the same for hundreds and hundreds of years."

My name is Sarah and I'm .... There's no question about it. I'm addicted to playing solitaire. I've become painfully aware recently that when I'm writing/typing/doing anything on the computer, my fingers are aching instead to move the red queen to the black king, the nine to the ten. It soothes me in a way I can't explain, but it's also far too time-consuming. I'm not sure I can go the whole way and delete the game from my computer, but I'm determined not to play today. One step at a time.
And my writing prompt for today comes from a speech last night that made me cry with laughter and it's treading the wrong red carpet.

Thanks are due to Prufrock's Page for leading me through to this thoughtful article
by Lennard J. Davis, professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, on reading and teaching Conrad's Heart of Darkness from different perspectives. He says how he underlined more and more different parts of the book as a student when he re-read it from a beatnik, anti-imperialistic and then feminist point of view, but then he had to consider his attitude towards teaching it all over again when students expressed not anger with it, but resignation and disappointment:

I found myself moving toward the decision not to teach Heart of Darkness anymore. Why should I inflict this painful work on my students? If any ethnic group announces that a word, phrase, or book is offensive to them, should I not honor their unique subjectivity? But the thought of giving up the book also created a kind of anxiety for me. Was I just giving in to the voice of censorship? Were my students’ sensibilities simply a new form of the old thought police?

This is one of the best articles I've seen on the responsibility of teaching texts - and the respect between tutor and students.

For several years, I would go through the newspapers at the end of the week cutting out articles that caught my eye and made me want to write about them - I can't remember the exact details but they would be things like how many years of our life we spent waiting at red traffic lights, how people in big cities learnt not to interact with strangers, how no one wanted to stand next to beautiful people on a crowded tube train, couples who had met in extra-ordinary ways, animal stories, obituaries, plus a lot about strange deaths for some reason. I've just started doing this again and it's as if I'm filling a deep well with so much stuff I want to write about. The cuttings are bunged in a box but just re-reading them, cutting them out and keeping them feels like I'm feeding a compost heap! So my writing prompt for today comes from this quote in today's Independent (from a column by Miles Kington) and it goes:

Talking to his wife was sometimes like going through a job interview with someone who didn't really want to give him a job.

How delicious is that as a piece of character development?!

Confession time ... up until now, I've not been really sure what Flash Fiction is. I've tried to write it a few times, but my efforts always feel more like a short story I've not finished, or a poem I've put into lines, so hurrah hurrah for Myfanwy who not only writes brilliant flash fiction herself but has put up on her blog the details of this fascinating analysis by Joseph Young of a piece by Kathy Fish. He writes:

The opportunity flash gives the writer, and more importantly, the reader, however, is to hold the entire narrative in the mind almost at once. Beginnings, middles, and endings can be appreciated more easily as a group, and we can more readily see how a middle can influence an ending, an ending a beginning.

Funny, this made me realise I'd been thinking about images rather than structure when I thought about flash, but those two sentences alone makes me want to go and try some straight away.

Writing in Different Places

OK, I wonder if anyone else has this problem, or is it me just being mad? Now that I've got myself a perfect writing room, somehow it's a little too....perfect. I can edit here, can write letters, reports, pitches, can read here wonderfully, but I need to break through to actually writing. 'Look here,' the room tells me, 'look at these beautiful blue walls, the desk you picked out so carefully, the little window... you need to write something REALLY special to do us justice.' So for my scribbles, freewriting, rough drafts, I've been sneaking off to other places just so my room doesn't see my shame. Thanks to the vole-goddess, Kate Long, for directions to this article by the scriptwriter of Desperate Housewives, Deanna Carlyle, which gives ideas for 'other places to write'. I'm going to work my way through them one by one and see which works. I particularly like the idea of writing in a hotel lobby with the canned music - I wonder if you could write in the lift - I guess that might be a haiku between floors!

And my writing prompt for today is going to be ... waiting in the hotel lobby.

Sarah and Lynne invite you to join them in celebrating the publication of their new book ....

Messages

Messages is an exciting writing collaboration between Lynne Rees and Sarah Salway. Ranging from moving to the playful, the themes of love, sex, life, death and chocolate all take their place in this unique book of 300 pieces of 300 words.

Lynne and Sarah will be reading from and signing copies of Messages at:

Ottakar's
Fremlin Walk
Maidstone
(easy parking at the new Fremlin Walk multi-storey car park)

Thursday 29th June 2006
6.30pm

Wine and Refreshments
In Store Discount

Ticketed Event - Please call the store on 01622 682042

MESSAGES, Lynne Rees's and my new book of 300 pieces of 300 words, was launched in London last week. Published by Bluechrome, I do have to say the book is very very beautiful. Good party too - thanks to Tony for this collage!

My writing prompt for today is to write about this beautiful dress by Madame Vionnet, sadly currently in the Victoria and Albert Museum and not in my wardrobe. The inspiration for this comes from the website's section on creative writing in galleries and museums - and in particular Michael Donaghy's poem here. The poem was written as part of a project which commissioned poets to pick a particular object from the museum and write a poem about it. I would have picked this dress I'm sure. When I was at Fashion College I picked Madame Vionnet as the subject for my final project, something that spoils you for Top Shop for ever more!

OK, let me come back to blogging-land with a bang. Here's the best extreme diet coke and mentos experiment I've seen, and it makes me laugh every time. Keep on watching - it gets worse! It's from Eepybird. Enjoy!

I don't know if it's the weather, my age or just a process I'm going through, but I'm turning down more than I'm accepting at the moment and just relishing being on my own. Even small things seem too much pressure and I've had all the challenges I can handle for the moment. Nothing makes me happier than an hour writing or reading, or best of all, digging on my allotment. The other day I even walked by a celebrity without noticing her because I was so interested in what my friend was telling me about the asparagus she's got growing in her garden - this is me, prime celebrity spotter! And although I do love London, I realise I'm putting off going there because it tires me out so much, and it's the opposite of that Samuel Johnson quote: 'When a man is tired of London, he's tired of life' in that I seem to be engaging with the smallest things in my life much more. I'm sure normal hectic service will be resumed soon, but in the meantime this poem by Thomas Hardy seemed appropriate!

A Private Man on Public Men
by Thomas Hardy

When my contemporaries were driving
Their coach through Life with strain and striving,
And raking riches into heaps,
And ably pleading in the Courts
With smart rejoinders and retorts,
Or where the Senate nightly keeps
Its vigils, till their fames were fanned
By rumour's tongue throughout the land,
I lived in quiet, screened, unknown,
Pondering upon some stick or stone,
Or news of some rare book or bird
Latterly bought, or seen, or heard,
Not wishing ever to set eyes on
The surging crowd beyond the horizon,
Tasting years of moderate gladness
Mellowed by sundry days of sadness,
Shut from the noise of the world without,
Hearing but dimly its rush and rout,
Unenvying those amid its roar,
Little endowed, not wanting more.

I love this story from PN Online. It gives me hope, but I'm so jealous of the prize. Imagine having a pig named after your book!:

Unknown makes the Bollinger shortlist

WHILE THE SHORTLIST for this year’s Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction is packed with famous writers – Terry Pratchett and Jilly Cooper among them – there is one author on the list who is a complete unknown. Robert Lewis, author of The Last Llanelli Train (Serpent’s Tail), is a 26-year-old first novelist whose debut title features a shambolic, alcoholic private eye.
Lewis may be young, but he’s already accumulated plenty of life experience. Originally from the Brecon Beacons, he describes himself as having been “a silver service waiter, painter, secretary, salesman, banker, web editor, yardcat [a form of night-watchman], high-voltage cabler, housing officer, mailboy, audit junior, welder’s assistant, and unemployed”. He’s now graduated from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth (where he now lives) as an English Literature mature student. His second book, Swansea Terminal, will be published next year, and he currently works as a journalist on trade paper In Business. “I made a new year’s resolution to stop working in accounts departments and that kind of thing,” he said.
Pete Ayrton, owner and MD of Serpent’s Tail, said: “It’s a darkly funny book. There’s a tradition in noir of gallows humour, and Robert Lewis has got that in trumps. It’s quite a feat to make what could be seen as a pretty depressing plot – the main character’s a complete failure – into something extremely funny.” The book was bought from Antony Topping at Greene & Heaton.
The other shortlisted titles are: Thud by Terry Pratchett and May Contain Nuts by John O’Farrell (both Doubleday); Wicked by Jilly Cooper (Bantam); All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye (Abacus) by Christopher Brookmyre; and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (Hamish Hamilton). The winner will be announced at the Hay Festival on 4 June, and will be given a jeroboam of Bollinger Special Cuvée, a case of Bollinger La Grande Année, and a Gloucestershire Old Spot pig named after the winning book.

This is my writing prompt for today - "Behind each jewel are three thousand sweating horses." (Zen saying)

Poetry Thursday!


I know this photograph is a little macabre, but two things have happened to me recently with birds, and I'm feeling fragile as I'm a great believer in signs! Yesterday, looking for tomato plants at a market garden I felt a strange blub on my head but couldn't see anything above me, although when I put my hand to my hair, yes, you've guessed it, a bird had pooped on me. It's never happened before, but my son said it was a good sign. Why, I asked. Well, apparently because it's so bad that nothing else can go quite so badly. Hmmmm, some logic there, I suppose. Secondly, and more disturbingly, I found this little bird foetus on the balcony outside my bedroom window this morning. No sign of a broken egg, nest or anything. It looks perfect but is big - about one and a half inches long - so I can't work out what it might be. It feels rather like the Great Bird Godfather has left me a 'message'.
So in an effort to appease the birds - who I love, by the way - here's a poem for Poetry Thursday from Emily Dickinson, and I'm just off to bury the little chap above in a tissue-lined matchbox as well as filling up the bird feeder in my garden.

I shall keep singing!
Emily Dickinson

I shall keep singing!
Birds will pass me
On their way to Yellower Climes—
Each—with a Robin's expectation—
I—with my Redbreast—
And my Rhymes—
Late—when I take my place in summer—
But—I shall bring a fuller tune—
Vespers—are sweeter than Matins-Signor—
Morning—only the seed of Noon—

Couldn't resist this cartoon today from Harold's Planet!