LOOKING FOR GUINEA PIGS....

WE WILL DO FOOLISH THINGS, BUT WE WILL DO THEM WITH ENTHUSIASM (Colette)



It was a bit like Ernest Shackleton's famous expedition advertisement, except with more reward and less danger, but just over a year ago, I put up a tiny post on here asking for people to do the Artists Way with me.

It was my first taste of an internet writing group and to be honest, I wasn't sure how it would work or whether it would work at all. But it did. And I hope that everyone who went on the journey with me found it as inspiring, amazing, extraordinary, surprising and useful as I did - and those adjectives refer to the work and talents within the group as much as the benefits I personally received from doing the exercises.

So now, I'm trying something new again.

I'm working on a new book and workshop idea, and I'm looking for guinea pigs to try out some of the exercises with me. Like The Artists Way it will be 12 weeks long, it will start in September, be internet based, will involve writing but you do not have to be a writer at all at all. We will concentrate on writing and working with your family stories, and hopefully writing new ones.

You can join in wherever you live, whatever age you are, however much talent you think you have or don't have, and whenever in the day you have time to do the exercises, join in the discussions etc.

PLUS IT IS FREE!

However there are conditions. As Molly says in my novel Tell Me Everything, "there are always conditions."

My conditions are:

* That you will do your very best to participate in and finish the 12 weeks
* That you come with an open mind to at least try the exercises
* That you do a brief email interview with me afterwards about how it goes
* That you will be prepared to share some of the work that comes up during the 12 weeks - with full approval of which pieces and the context in which they will be used
* That you will think about using your real name for this, although pseudonyms can be given if necessary
* That - apart from the interview and the pieces agreed for possible publication - you will keep the exercises, discussion and other participants in confidence to ensure a safe place for everyone
* That you think, despite the above, this sounds interesting and fun!

So anyone up for it? Either leave a comment or email me on sarahsalway @ gmail . com (but without the spaces!) - all I'm looking for at the moment is an expression of interest, but I will be limiting the group numbers-wise rather than making it a free for all so don't leave it too long.

SEEING STARS BY SIMON ARMITAGE

I've been sharing some of my favourite new poetry books recently, so as soon as I read Simon Armitage's SEEING STARS I knew I wanted it to be my next choice up here.



It's a series of dramatic monologues, speaking direct into your ear and conjuring up such pictures in your mind. As the blurb says 'Here comes everybody: The man whose wife drapes a border-curtain across the middle of the marital home... an orgiastic cast of pie-worshippers at a Northern scultpure farm ... a Christian cheese-shop proprietor in the wrong part of town."

As that may suggest, some pieces made me laugh out loud...

At the annual Conference of Advanced Criminal Psychology, Dr Amsterdam and myself skipped the afternoon seminar on Offending Behaviours Within Gated Communities and went into town to go nicking stuff...

(From The Delegates)

But others were more dreamy...

When you ask me what time it is, it's purple. And when the alarm goes off in a morning it's a sort of metallic, minty green, like the noisette triangle in a packet of Quality Street - a particular favourite of mine but hard on the teeth. And when you say you love me, and whisper your love for me, personally, into my inner ear, it's custard-yellow embossed with a bold red heart, lie a door I once saw in an otherwise dried-up town on the side of a hill near Salamanca.

(From The Overtones)

To be honest, I'm still not quite sure what Simon Armitage is writing here - poems, or prose poems, or even flash fiction. They are nicely eccentric though, and by about half way through I felt fiercely and strangely protective of them. I think this book is going to spawn a whole new generation of copy-cats but if that's so, I hope they manage to keep some of that perfect balance of extraordinary imagination and empathy.

Then slowly but slowly I opened my fist to the unknown. And out of the void, slowly but slowly, it came: the pulsing starfish of a child's hand, swimming and swimming and coming to settle on my upturned palm.

(From I'll be There to Love and Comfort You)

I couldn't find any clips of Simon Armitage reading any of his poems from Seeing Stars on Youtube - but I did find a video of him deconstructing The Smith's "This Charming Man'. I'm not putting it up here because it may just put you off him for ever, but if you're interested look here, but don't say I didn't warn you...

Better still, read this book instead.

THE CURE - A FIFTY WORD PHOTOSTORY

She is so determined to overcome her fears that she swallows the mixture the local so-called witch sells. It’s made from unicorn’s tears and grass stains, tastes like a rainbow, is called fairyheart. She’ll do anything to get more of it now, even the most frightening things in the world.

You can read more fifty word stories here

THE WAR OF ART - STEVEN PRESSFIELD

As a writer, I like to think I come in peace.

I shy away from books or websites or teachers that talk about things like War or Battles or Bootcamp and especially Hard Work.

But I was persuaded recently to look at Steven Pressfield's The War of Art, and hey, I loved it.



Now Steven Pressfield is a bestselling author, but this book feel so authentic you can tell it hasn't been all easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy-let's-just-write-and-make-money for him. The chapters are small but hard hitting. And they do hit hard - right at the smelly dark secrets most of us think we are hiding in our writing process.

Here's a flavour:

Are you paralyzed with fear? That's a good sign.

Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do.

Yes! Punch those fists in the air right now. Oh but then, he brings me back to earth with the following quote. How does he know what I am thinking, and why isn't he being nice any more?

We get ourselves in trouble because it's a cheap way to get attention. Trouble is a faux form of fame. It's easier to get busted in the bedroom with the faculty chairman's wife than it is to finish that dissertation on the metaphysics of motley in the novellas of Joseph Conrad.

Oooo... now, of course, I've never actually been busted in the bedroom with the faculty chairman's wife, but I do recognise that feeling of 'actually, I'm a bit bored, I might just start an argument with someone' or getting myself into a little bit of a panic that I can 'share' with friends, or God forbid, twitter.

The WAR in this book is against resistance, and he's right. Resistance isn't our friend. In writing or in anything else. And he pin points exactly - for me - the places where I might be giving into it, albeit unconsciously. I found it so useful, and know I'll go back to it again and again.

But if there's one thing about this book I could love Steven Pressfield forever for, it's this:

In the hierarchy, the artist faces outward. Meeting someone new he asks himself, What can this person do for me? How can this person advance my standing?

In the hierarchy, the artist looks up and looks down. The one place he can't look is the place he must: within.

March on!

MY FANTASY MUSIC FESTIVAL

Hugh arrived back from university on Friday bringing with him a good game - to design your fantasy music festival. Three days. Rules include no dead people, but you can have bands that aren't currently together.

No dead people? (Of course this led us into subsidiary thinking - were some musicians we wanted to include dead or alive? - useful site here for such questions)

So here is mine - line up changes possible, but more or less my fantasy music festival:




Friday:

Headliner: Radiohead

The National
Pulp
Frank Turner

Blitzen Trapper
Mumford & Sons
Dixie Chicks
The Streets

Saturday:

Headliner: The Smiths

Blondie
The Ramones
Curiosity Killed the Cat (original)
Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Elvis Costello
Roxy Music
The La's


Sunday:

Headliner: Leonard Cohen

Frightened Rabbit
Tom Jones
Catatonia

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
The Verve
Saint Etienne



So there you have it. Finish on LC, and we all go home depressed but full of poetry and soul.

So, would you come?

There's also going to be lots and lots of poetry, Nigella will demonstrate cake making, we may do some river swimming and we all get to grow some of our own vegetables.



Do not just snipe at my choices, btw. Would love to find out your fantasy music line ups.... It's much much harder than you think. And funner too.

TWITTER WRITING PROMPTS

Here's a selection of the daily writing prompts I've been putting up on Twitter. Take one day by day if you like, or use them all in one piece (I'd like to see that!), or give yourself ten minutes for each one and have an hour writing marathon, but most of all enjoy!

* Today she will swim to work....

* Early Girl, Cherry and Big Boy fight it out in the tomato patch...

* Two or three things I know for sure (D Allison)...

* The worst pun I have ever heard...

* She has decided to get her life sponsored ...

* Ice cream stick art...

Dark - a 50 word photostory

Her friend Tanya has a night-light.

When the dark comes, a lit-up ladybird keeps Tanya safe.

Susie’s mum is cross. Susie should grow up and not be scared of everything. And stop telling stories.

Every night Susie lies alone, watching the light disappear. Listens out for footsteps. Says nothing.


This story is exactly fifty words long. It's part of a series of 50 word stories I've been writing to accompany photographs I take. Sometimes the photos and stories are a direct match, other times there's something about the photo that sparks off an idea. I'm not sure why I started doing them, but I know they have helped me to look a little bit harder. To take the kind of frame Anne Lamott talks about in Bird by Bird and apply it to bits of my life that I wouldn't otherwise notice.

You can read more 50 word stories here.

MY NEW WRITING MASCOT

IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a writer in search of a good muse, must be in want of an elephant...



So let me introduce you to SALWAY THE ELEPHANT, amazingly made for me by Kay Sexton.

Kay put in an absolutely perfect mini-self for the Science museum project, and I was so impressed I hinted (actually begged) for her to make something for me.

The strange thing is that Salway the Elephant (you have to call him by his whole name otherwise he gets upset) does help me write. Finding a place for him to sit every day helps with the settling before I get down to the business. And now I can't wait for my next reading and hoping for someone to ask me the question, 'Do you have any writing rituals?'

Well, I'll say, there is this pink elephant...

But actually, since we're on the subject, do you have any writing rituals?

And does anyone else out there have a writing mascot they would be prepared to share?


If you're interested in what happened to all the mini-selves at the exhibition, Stitch London have been recording the whole thing on their blog. An amazing enterprise. I do like the cider drinkers, although disappointingly mini-Rachael and me have been "very well behaved", apparently.

I am in awe of this particular teacher, who still remains in control of her mini-class:



Can't you just tell she is the sort of teacher those children will remember fondly for the rest of their lives? There only needs to be one.

BOOKSHELVES

I stole the video above from Alex's marvellous Blog on the Bookshelf. I don't know why I like watching it so much, but maybe because it's like a game I don't even have to play myself. It's curiously mesmeric. Perhaps it's hypnotising me into alphabeticising my bookshelves?

MICHELLE LOVRIC'S BOOK OF HUMAN SKIN...

... is just a brilliant novel. Honestly. Read it this summer, and then get yourself along to the Wellcome for one (or both) of these events...

SKIN EXHIBITION

Wellcome Collection | 10 June–26 September 2010

Michelle Lovric will present a lecture about her Venice and Peru-based novel,
The Book of Human Skin, at the Wellcome Collection on Saturday July 3rd at 2.30pm.

She will also lead a personal guided tour of the exhibition on Wednesday July 28th at 2pm.

Admission to both events is free, but it is advisable to pre-book an e-ticket for the July 3rd event:

http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/events/skinbound.aspx

HE JUST LIKES ATTENTION - A 50 WORD PHOTOSTORY

There’s nothing wrong with the boy, his mother says, apart from liking attention.

So they ignore his dresses, the songs he screams, even his self-inflicted injuries. But when he replaces the faces in every photograph with his own, they worry.

He's deserves a better audience, says his mother.

MOVE OVER FRANKENSALWAYS...

So here are Rachael and me....



No really! These are our little stitched selves for an exhibition coming up at the Science Museum, and they are looking for YOU to put yourselves in too. Find out more here.

There's still time to make an exhibition of yourself. Just. But if you do, please send a picture - would love to make a collage of stitched blog readers.

And in case, you're wondering, Rachael does really have lips, but I rubbed her lipstick off. Hmmm, teenagers nowadays.

Here's what we really look like.



Not much difference really....

ANOTHER POETRY BOOK TO TRY...

There were some great comments to help find new poetry, after my last post about it (here), and here's another book to try...



Bodywork by Dilys Rose.

Thanks to Catherine Smith for this recommendation, because although I came across Dilys Rose's work when I was living in Edinburgh (she's a fantastic short story writer too), I hadn't heard of this collection.

The poems here all focus on the human body, and many are fresh takes on particular, very particular, illnesses - Baker's Itch, Mat Hatter Syndrome, Beethoven's Ear, Grace Darling's Lungs, Weaver's Bottom, Clergyman's Throat, Sailmaker's Palm (all of which have notes at the end to explain more. Weaver's Bottom for example is a form of bursitis, often caused by long hours of sedentary work. Shouldn't that be Writer's Bottom?)

But through a series of persona poems, absolutely perfectly drawn, often with real humour but never cruel, a whole world is created, both real and imaginary. It's like reading a mix of Jane Austin and Neil Gaiman. Perfect!

Here are some of my favourite lines:

her name was whatever you fancied
her eyebrows a twin-peaked cliche
her mouth was a magnet
her tongue swung between sweet chariot and Uzi
her throat was a tool of the trade

(from Obituary)

and...

Hers isn't a bit like those she's seen
in grand old paintings of her namesake -
all pale and quivery on a plate
like junket or blancmange;
a sweet treat at the end of a feast.

(from Aggie's Boob)

And here's one of the poems from the Collection, and another here.

Enjoy!

THE BRISTOL SHORT STORY PRIZE

How could I not love the Bristol Short Story Prize?



Most of the pictures on their website are of people writing and reading short stories on benches!



So it's a particularly thrill to be invited to speak at their prize presentation this year.

You can find out more, and read an interview that I did with the talented Ellen Grant, a writer and student at Bath Spa University here. I particularly liked her last question: 'And finally, would you rather be re-incarnated as Samuel Taylor Coleridge or Samuel L. Jackson?'.

However, nothing really beats an interview I once did in America during which I was asked, 'what sort of cake are you?'

WISH YOU"D GONE TO RHS CHELSEA FLOWER SHOW THIS YEAR?

Well, this won't tell you much about it, but it made me laugh. Cleve West, Joe Swift and James Alexander-Sinclair take us round the show their way (but don't do the pirate speak I thought they were promising. I'm very disappointed about that, ooar me hearties. Maybe next year....?)



James has a good blog here btw, and he also can sometimes be persuaded to organise coach journeys via Twitter. Follow him and demand tickets. It's about time we had another.

TOO MUCH TO DO?

I've been working with the Teuxdeux to do list website for some weeks now and it's just perfect. It even looks pretty. Can't recommend it enough, apart from the fact that it doesn't get through my tasks itself when I'm doing other things.

Or make coffee.

ON KNOWING WHAT NEW POETRY BOOK TO BUY....

Further to yesterday's quote about trying new things, I'm going to start putting up my thoughts here about the poetry collections I've been reading.

I was at a talk at Sussex University a couple of weeks ago by Chris Hamilton-Emery of Salt Publishing and he was talking abut how many people are writing poetry as compared to reading it at the moment. Then I got (from the excellent Happenstance Press) a copy of the useful How (Not) To Get Your Poetry Published which makes a similar point.

So I got all hot under the collar about this, until I was talking with a friend who made the point that actually it's very hard to find out what kind of poetry you might like to read. There are novel reviews, even short story collection reviews, by the dozen but not that many actual poetry collection reviews. Or mainstream ones anyway. You can't even browse in your local bookseller because most - although not all - have limited selections, and these are mostly the popular anthologies. So how do we know where to even begin if we're not going to poetry readings, talking to poets, and reading literary journals? And let's face it, not all of us are. I'm not as often as I'd like, for starters.

Hopefully you'll all write in and prove me wrong, and that would be great because I can start a list of places to go to find out new poets to read, but in the meantime, I'm going to start putting up here some of the collections and poets I've been enjoying - or not enjoying - recently to give you a flavour of what's out there. Please do let me know your suggestions too - and why - so again we can share the good news, and even those of us who write poetry can read some more too.



First up is Caroline Bird's Trouble Came to the Turnip, not because it's my favourite ever collection but to be honest, because it was the first from my 'special shelf' that came to hand. The fact it was on that 'SS' in the first place though shows I value it!

Caroline is disgustingly young, born in 1986, but has already won masses of awards and written plays for the Royal Court, stories for the BBC etc etc. She also runs workshops in schools, and there's an enthusiasm and vitality here that I can imagine the kids loving. I did too. She's a prime example that accessible poetry doesn't mean dumb poetry.

Even the titles make me smile - 'The Leprechaun Thinks It Matters', 'A Gentlewoman's Pornography', 'My Lovely Legless Acrobat', 'The Fairy Is Bored With Her Garden', 'My Love Made Me a Hat', and of course the title poem itself, but this is a book of more than just titles. Listen to some of the images:

It has been scribbled in the stars,
we will all trade our brains for lava lamps.
The ones with the thinnest eyebrows will survive.
(It will come to Pass)

or

The mementos start off small.
The jelly baby that you never ate
that's gone all hard and statuesque.
(Remains)

Once you stop playing with the pencil on her website (and be warned it took me a long time to get over the novelty of it but then I'm easily pleased), you can read some of the poems from this collection here, and here, or listen to Caroline read a poem here ...

TRYING NEW THINGS

Try a thing you haven’t done three times. Once, to get over the fear of doing it. Twice, to learn how to do it. And a third time to figure out whether you like it or not.
Virgil Thomson

SANCTUARY - A 50 WORD PHOTO STORY

But what do you do in there? Melissa asks.

Think, he replies.

Don’t be ridiculous, she says. You can't think without me to tell you how to.

He doesn’t say he disagrees. Later though, in his shed, he thinks about how she’s wrong. He swears the shed moves slightly. Nodding.


This story is inspired by Shedworking, the book.


More 50 word stories here.

A SHED OF YOUR OWN...

And for the second day of our Shedworking celebration, here are just some of the famous people who have created beautifully in their sheds.