Wring out the old

Sorry this is a long one, I usually like to keep things snappy! Note the vicar - he was on the news recently. Google St Matthew's in the City! - Andrea at Rainbow notebook, I'll try and get a front shot in another time!


2009 was a whirlwind of a year for me, both personally, privately and for my writing. You could say I've been through the wringer! Done a brief inventory and discovered something pretty unbelievable - I wrote (this does not mean they are "finished") fifty poems in 2009, thirty poems in the month of December alone! Would love to post them up here but I'm going to overcome my submission fear and send them out to some ezines and journals etc when they are right.

As well as the poetry there was the flash and short fiction (and some of my flash merges with my poetry but I keep it separate): I wrote fifty stories and gathered together what I hope can become my first collection - no news is good news, right? Plus, I sent a couple of things to competitions. I even managed to make myself cry with a couple of stories!

I also wrote a novel. Back in May/June I wrote a novel set in my old home town - to exorcise it I suppose and allow me to move on. It's a good story and an easy read with a linear narrative and a lyrical style and a funny protagonist. It's also an allegory. It took me four weeks to write 80,000 words (and no, it isn't a load of hits) and almost killed me! The bones of the story had been with me for some time and allowed me to do a chapter by chapter breakdown of the plot and, essentially, write a chapter per night. At weekends I would work on it for twelve hours per day and it was both the easiest and hardest thing I have accomplished. It served it's purpose. I no longer have any urge to revisit any aspect or elements of my home town in a novel! I am cleansed! What it also "taught" me, however, was that I want to write more complex novels. My first novel was/is quite complex and I think my lack of success with that had put me off a little, made me think I should go more mainstream, but you know what, I am who I am and I write what I write and so I'm back to writing just for me: and it feels good. It feels very good.

As soon as I decided that a stack of books lifted off my shoulders and left me with a spanky new dust jacket.

I'm going to take my time with my latest WIP - not because I think I've earned it (incidentally, I do think I should have some sort of holiday - offers on a postcard!) - but because I want to savour it. I want the words I commit to it to be the very best I can for the words' sake as well as the narrative's. It's proving to be a challenge, in every sense, to me. I am struggling with a lot of numbers on a weekly basis and I, as I've blogged before, am not bedfellows with numbers. And that brings me to another point...

...For the past year I have been writing on my bed! Since my son became active I haven't been able to leave my writing laying about all over the place and have had to decamp to my bedroom (oh, to have a bigger house - come on agents, make those publishers buy my books!). It's not ideal: it's not even comfortable (really, you should try it: the sheer perversity of being on your bed and not sleeping....), and my back aches and my bottom gets nins and peedles far too frequently.

I wanted to go into 2010 with a more balanced approach to writing, less like a learner driver - gas/breaks/gas/breaks ... - I may not be able to change my personality but I have got more defined and realistic goals, ones which don't put so much pressure on me to be a writing machine, don't need so much grease or un-clogging, and allow the words to sparkle.

Part of me will always talk to that kid who was kicked, spat on, followed home and pushed in the gutter and had her clothes drawn on, and part of me will listen to her telling them, the kids that did that to her "thanks - you made me", but there's another part developing, one who doesn't need the mother of the past. In 2009 I cut the umbilicus.

I started blogging in May to present myself to the world as a writer. I felt like a bit of a fraud, after all I had nothing published. Looking back at how much I have written, however, I think I can call myself a writer now.

Nothing is as it was at the beginning of 2009 but for one thing; last year my resolution was to find an agent and get published. This year it's the same. You still up for a ride?



PS I can't swim and I failed my driving test six times! I can also hum the theme to Black Beauty whilst tongue galloping! - Bet you thought I'd forgotten - or maybe you had?
PPS - why did no one tell me I had missed the "a" out of beauty? Some critics you lot are! Ha! Changed it now. Must remember to spell check more!

Elf issues

Tis the season for typos - click on the picture to enlarge. Shame they've since corrected it!

Happy New Year to all my bloggers - thank you to everyone who has offered advice, support and encouragement in all its myriad forms - wishing you and yours a very elfy 2010!

Christmas eve's special

Image coordinated by blogger, TFE.

It's Christmas Eve and I have a very special visitor: a visitor with a smashing red vehicle - perfect for the festivities - what's that - a sleigh? Neigh.

This visitor is coming about a portrait. Now, my studio is all decked out with canvas and more canvas and all I need is -

- Oh, before I forget: do you remember the last portrait I painted? It was of Nude - the collection of achingly good short fiction by Nuala Ní Chonchúir.

Well, this portrait is of the artist: Portrait of the Artist with a Red Car. It's just pulled up. Hang on a mo -

-Yep, park it right there!

Picture copyright of Nuala Ní Chonchúir.

Surprise! Nuala's here again! Yippee!

Come on in and have a mince pie! Actually, have several - I made way too many this year - don't they look cute with the little stars on top? Yes, I brushed them with a little milk and a sprinkle of sugar to brown them. Please, stop, you're too generous with your compliments! Eggnog?

Right, have a sit down, I've got lots I want to ask you about your winning poetry collection, Portrait of the Artist with a Red Car.

It's great to have you back after your last virtual book tour, that time it was your short fiction collection Nude doing the posing. I'm thrilled you've returned with your poetry. And I have to say that Portrait of the Artist with a Red Car feels like a very natural progression from Nude, a poetic sequel almost. There are a lot of themes, motifs, (what would you call them?) shared by the two collections and I wondered which came first or were they simultaneous, were you even conscious of the connections as you wrote them or were they indicative of a series of long standing obsessions? (Sorry – bit of a cluster bomb of a question that!)



Hey Rachel – thanks for having me back again. It’s odd to have two books come out back to back but they are from two different publishers. The poems are actually all rather recent. The pamphlet Portrait of the Artist with a Red Car in its entirety was my (winning) entry into Templar Poetry’s pamphlet competition. I had entered in 2008 too so I decided to enter a completely new set of poems this year.

I think poetry like short fiction is about the personal obsessions of the writer and so there are themes and motifs that re-occur a lot in all my writing: fertility, pregnancy, pregnancy loss, children, sex, relationships, the break-up of relationships, art. These are all things that occupy me and fascinate me, so inevitably that spills over into my writing.

So, to answer your question about timing, the stories were written first (2005 – 2008/9) and the poems came after, (2008 – 2009) but the same themes are with me even now.



In “When You Are Ready” you begin with a line about Narcissus:

"You are no ordinary Narcissus.

There is no pool that could

reflect back all you are

and keep you there, gazing."

They are key lines, I think, to understanding how the poems are so successful, especially when one considers the title of this collection. Portrait of the Artist With a Red Car, a nod to Joyce's semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, reads as both an intimate portrait of you – the poet (the artist), and a mirror: you leave the reader enough looking space to find themselves between your lines. Reading your poems had me a Narcissus, only, instead of staring at a pool, my reflection was on the surface of a glass slide, under a microscope, and as I read I was dissecting myself. And I remember when you toured here with Nude I asked you how much you considered the readers of your fiction as being participants within the fiction, not merely readers, and I wondered how much you think that your poetry in this collection is open to reader projection, how much is poetic persona and how much is you?



To be honest, it’s mostly me. My poetry tends to come from a personal place. Some people talk about ‘confessional poetry’ as if it’s a disease or something. For me, as a poetry reader, I’d rather read a personal, moving poem than an impersonal treatise. Some of my poems are persona poems (I’ve never danced with poet Paul Durcan, for example!) but mostly the poems come from my life and the lives of women I am curious about. I’m a feminist and that can’t help but spill over into all my work. Readers can – and will – take what they like from a poem; once it’s out there people will put their own spin on what a writer means by a poem.



I am going to ask you about your reference to Paul Durcan (poet and author of “Golden Mothers Driving West”), your dance with him, and if the “three Polish boys” in the title poem of your collection are a nod to Durcan's own poignant tribute to motherhood?



The Durcan poem is a bit of whimsy. I invented the encounter with him in The Winding Stair, which is a favourite book shop of mine in Dublin. I’m a fan of the man and his work; I love his style of reading and the diverse and very Irish voices in his poetry. I’ve only met him once and I just gushed briefly about his general wonderfulness. He smiled and nodded sagely.

The Polish boys in the title poem were nothing to do with Durcan. There are a lot of Polish immigrants in Ireland and watching them with their crap car, as I sat in my own crap car, got me wishing for better cars for us all. That thought process led me in the poem to me and my first husband’s car crash and I had my poem. I didn’t know where the poem was going when it started. I never know where any of my writing is off to when I step into it; that’s the mystery and fun of it, I guess. And I love that. On a slight tangent, it struck me lately that writing is the one place where I allow myself to be chaotic – I’m intensely organised in all other parts of my life.



I can't help thinking back to Nude again and how after I had interviewed you I was struck by how odd it was (to me) that I hadn't asked you about the art references in there and I'm not going to this time either, but I am going to thank you for coming all the way over here - here's a box of shortbread I made earlier, car shaped and iced in red - I'll take a photo before...oh, they're tasty, eh?. Readers, you'll have to imagine what they looked like!

Rachel, thanks again for having me over. It’s always a pleasure and I’m delighted to be here again.

If people want to buy the pamphlet it costs €6 (about NZ $12) from Templar Poetry here: http://www.templarpoetry.co.uk/publications/portrait-of-the-artist-with-a-red-car.html

Thanks again, and thanks TFE for the great tour logo.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all!

--
www.nualanichonchuir.com
http://womenrulewriter.blogspot.com/

Just tin

I have just had a loss of appetite having read this which has resulted in the following spontaneous burst of poetic criticism:




Carry On

Had they driven all this way
to come face to face
with the head
of a fat soaked
beast and a slick

of indeterminable
intestines whose hosts
were unidentifiable
in the thick of it.
Was this the Styx,

bloodied and carcass
strewn? Had they
crashed, head long, into
hell? Their own
bodies mingled with

the mangled
formless parts:
lungs, hooves,
limbs, livers or hearts:
none could determine

in the horror as they
clambered from the
wreck of it. Merged
by-products of human
nature; the wish

to consume slips over
the tarmac, the verge,
the wayside: wasted.
The road is closed,
only for now.

Two posts for you this week - I'm going AWOL from blogging for a couple of weeks as I need to sort out some issues I am having with my WIP so please be patient with me: I'll try and keep up to scratch with comments on my blog but I may not be as visible in the rest of blog land for a while. Thank you. Your comments are, as always, very much appreciated.

Dead tiered

Bradwell Edge, Derbyshire Peak District, UK. 2007

Is it me, or is everyone blogging about death lately? Every blog I've read recently has mentioned it and, as I've mentioned before, I don't deal with it very well. Here's my take on it - I wrote it on the eleventh of the eleventh this year. I suppose it is customary to be miserable at this time of year.

Home


This is death: the slow shuttering up of the drive to achieve
or the need to be desired. When all of my lines
accumulate and can be read "I don't care","I'm tired",
this is death. A dry stone wall in disrepair
for want of the stonemason
who built me. A monument:
all that remains of me.
A cairn: the weight of
living upon me. Stone,
not carved: cast.
Marked
naturally;
deliberately.
This heap of me.
Ruins
in want of a roof,
a lifetime in want
of a shelter;
eternally.
This is
death:
take
me,
please,
piece
by
piece.

Glad I wait or not?

Last post I used this image. I didn't give you the full picture.

I'm glad I waited to post this.

Todays post is bigger than I wanted it to be.

Have you ever had one of those dreams where it seems really, well, real? And then you wake up, at least you think you have, and realise that the dream hasn't ended? And then, hopefully, in the real world and not in some straight to tv horror film, you actually wake up. Phewsh! What a nightmare!

There's nothing worse than doing battle in your dreams only to wake and have to do it all again - and you ever realise how rubbish you are at fighting in dreams? All that pre-experience doesn't do you any good whatsoever because, when the real event happens, all you know how to do is lose - that or wake up, and you can't wake up again if you're already awake.

Still following this?

Well today I woke up...hang on, first things first. Remember that poem I was writing about bugs? Well, I had another bash at it (oh, pardon the pun - I don't often bash the wee beasties, not often, thankfully...for me...). Here's what I have so far, not a draft as such, more a collection of associated phrases indicating something of the movement and imagery I'm interested in pursuing, or was when I wrote it:

Un-homely.

There are three in jars on the sill: insects.
You'd have to hear them to know what they are.
Mute: I have captured their identity
but the fear they infect me with cannot be kept
or even held. Reduced to a pencil tap I collect
their facts, memorise their features through that
which is featureless. You can see
their difference more clearly through the safety
of a jar. They have travelled the equivalent
of miles around a glossy ellipse: each one slips
as it tries to scale the side, all those legs and not
one can get a footing. I've never liked them
and to think I came all this way to find a fear
with features I recognise only by my reaction to them.
Window ajar: I return them outside, lesson learnt,
to butt noisily against the pane (still
ignorant of my sensitivity), or silently wander.

I used Jim's starting point and went from there. What I was aware of, as I wrote this, was that there were several things going on in my thoughts and that it was the clash of these which was one cause in my poem's non-communication. Firstly there was the noise. The first poem I posted was entitled "Cicadas": it isn't merely their buggyness which frightens me, it's their noise, and for several months of the year it is constant through the day. However, at night we have crickets - similar you would think? Yes and no. I like crickets. I can hold crickets in my hand, if I'm feeling brave. I like their sound. I detest cicadas. At some point I'm going to work on the cicadas alone.

Secondly, there was the feeling of alieness - not only of the bugs being alien, but of my feeling alienated in a place where these bugs are at home. I wanted to capture (oops) the feeling I had, often still have, of being not-at-home: an un-homely feeling. This in turn leads on to ideas around heimlich and un-heimlich and touches on the gothic, the surreal and the notion of things which are all too familiar being at the same time most frightening. I want to write a poem with these elements in.

Finally, there is the realisation that different senses react differently to different aspects of buggyness. There's a lot of difference. Certainly it all results in the same fear but the individual elements deserve distinction.

Now, shall I begin at the beginning or at the beginning of the end and work backwards - what works for you?

I woke up with the breeze from the open bedroom window blowing my hair across my cheek. It was just a dream, phewsh, here I am in my own bed with a gentle breeze to cool my perspiring brow. I sat up. My hair was still blowing the same way, only the window wasn't open.

Back a bit. I had gone to bed after checking my blog (for what, blog bugs?) and drifted off into a fitful sleep. I had a dream about a hairy spider - specifically a hairy spider in the bathroom which someone (my husband?) flicked into my face.

I woke up and felt a sense of calm rationality sweep over me when I thought of the last image I had observed closely:

The moth "eyes" - and I laughed at how funny it was that I had cropped off the part which scared me - see the little furry critter in the left hand corner ("LITTLE" USED HERE TO SHRINK FEAR TO MANAGEABLE PROPORTIONS).

I looked at my husband who was looking at me and I saw an expression register on his face which I felt ought to have been on mine. Especially considering the fact that my hair was still travelling towards my eye.

A flush of adrenaline had me flick my hair from my face. I felt nothing. I saw nothing. I did the thing they do in horror films when you shout "NOOOOOOOOOOoooooo"!

I peered over the edge of the bed and saw:

five little diamonds, twinkling in the sky

which one did I pick? Go on, click the link - I dare you.

I want to say that I rushed to grab my trusty bug hoover and carefully disposed of this fellow to hoover up some spiders of its own (white tails are unusual in that they only prey on other spiders - veritable gladiators of the bug world).

The End.

P.S. Sleep tight, mind the bugs don't bite! Oh, and the scale...it's all wrong, the one on my head was much bigger, about five centimeters across, bigger than my eye in any case, or in my head!

Short story newsflash - there's a competition over at the Tomlit blog if you're interested. Get your entries in quick though, deadline is December 14! Think I'm going to enter.

Highlanded here

This is where it all began, except that it didn't really. This picture was taken at a secret location in New Zealand's South Island. P.S. It's a secret because it's also the setting for my novel in progress. Shhh!


I recently had a second story/poem up at Ink, Sweat & Tears (remember The Fish Wife?) and for any of you who didn't see it, you can read it by clicking on the moth below. As I mentioned in this post, I am going to tell you what inspired this piece, which I called "Your Favourite Colour".


Insects photographed in Dunedin airport.

These pied, pseudo-eyed lovelies were pinned onto five sides of a foam cube in Dunedin airport. Imagine my joy when I saw them - no really, I was completely fascinated by them! I may be frightened by most bugs, (and moths and butterflies, if large enough, do flutter at the periphery of this phobia) but I do find them captivating and spend a lot of time looking very closely at them - in books/jars/cabinets. More on the critters later: I am still working on the bug poem I posted a couple of weeks ago. I began drafting it two weekends ago but it turned into an 8000 word story - oops! Last weekend I typed that story up, as well as doing more research reading for my WIP and a little writing for that, also. I'm as busy as a bee...enough of the creatures for a moment...and am currently decorating my daughter's room. No intrigue yet?


Image taken from "Homes & Antiques" back issue.

Well, it was whilst thumbing through old "Homes & Antiques" magazines and paint colour charts with a view to finding my daughter's favourite colour - you see, it's coming together now - that I came across this image, above. I wasn't sure what it was but it looked to me like a seat cushion made from old papers. What do you think? And I thought the blue looked very soft and worn and lovely. But I also remembered watching this Ted Talk on colour and illusions:



Remembering this, I took a second, closer look at the blue and noticed how the fibres were breaking away and that the seat was in fact made up of many different shades of blue, and that the blue only appeared that shade of blue in relation to the other colours in the picture: the neutral shades - the warm tones which accentuated the blues - and then I played around adding different colour cards to see how they would alter my perception of the blue seat.

Image from "Homes & Antiques".

And something started to tingle in my brain and I got excited knowing I was growing a story. You can call it inspiration if that works for you but for me it is like hundreds or thousands (or some other too big to actually bother to count number) of flash cards which are all electronically tagged. Anything which makes a connection to an existing thought or memory in my brain jumps into place like the opposite poles of a magnet and I know I'm onto something.

Image from "Homes & Antiques", plus Dulux colours of New Zealand - funny: looks just like yellow and blue to me!

I flicked through some more pages and there was an article about a Scottish castle, I don't remember where exactly it was but I've been to Scotland a few times, most recently the west coast and the Highlands four months before I moved to New Zealand, and I had seen old stone buildings, like the one featured in the magazine, there. I had a real connection and an emotional response to the images I was looking at - a good sign.

Image from "Homes & Interiors" - again.

I had real interiors in response to the ones in the magazine and photographs of beautiful scenery to prompt my memory. I thought of "The Fish Wife" which, although I didn't mention it when I blogged about it, I had actually set in Mallaig on Scotland's West coast. From there I remembered Arisaig, Ardnamurchan, Ben Nevis, Ben Lawers, and lochs and those funny little pine tree filled islands you see in the centre of the lochs, all of which I have photographs of. However, I still had a "proper" reason for looking at the magazines and I continued to browse for the perfect shade of blue.

Image from "Homes & Antiques", a really old one, about four years old - I had them given, alright?

While the Highlands were wiring themselves into some sort of story in my head I saw these frosty images and, again, noted how the blue was more attractive for being beside the neutral warmth of, in this instance, wicker.

You guessed it - "Homes & Antiques" - yes, I do have other interiors magazines and no, I didn't buy any of them, and yes, they are all old ones!

And here, the path sets off the frosty box hedging. Hedging reminded me of walls and I had a complete setting.

Image from "Homes & Interiors", bla, blah, blah.

I remembered a conversation I had with my host in South Island, asking me if I thought the scenery there reminded me of Scotland. It did and it didn't. I was, however, splicing the two places together in my head when I thought of ways to describe the neutral shade and the fibres of the blue seat (which had now become a crushed velvet - like moth wings).

The rabbits I had read about in the museum on my South Island trip, the hunting also, plus I had masses of similar imagery archived in my memory, as well as our own pet rabbit. There were deer farms in South Island and we saw a dead doe with a chunk of flesh bitten out of its rear: tufts of its fibres breaking free and blowing in the breeze. Old buildings had shingled roof tops.

All of this, and more, went into "Your Favourite Colour" but the really interesting part is, I wasn't conscious of any of this until after I had written it. What actually happened was:

I was flicking through magazines looking for a shade of blue I liked for paint. I felt a story coming on. I started writing and what I was writing reminded me of "The Fish Wife" and I thought, wouldn't it be nice if this were a sort of sister for that piece. The words came out automatically, I barely had to think, aside from researching a suitable moth, and when I read the "finished" story/poem - for it came out as is, with no redrafting - I had a realisation of where every element in it had come from and I thought you might be interested to know that.

I also want to thank Andrea, at Rainbow Notebook, for giving my story a special mention on her blog. Head over there if you really want some inspiration!

(On a side note - I'm having pc trouble and links are not working properly - am on to it!)