Deadlines

Perhaps most writers are like me - galvanized into action by a looming deadline! The Gloucestershire Writers Network Competition closed yesterday and I was inundated with last minute submissions. We have certainly had a bumper crop of both poems and short stories this year, so my weekend has been wall to wall collation. Now I'm facing a deadline with some proof reading and also a submission of my own ... hence the paucity of recent posts and the brevity of this one!

"The Hill"

We have walked on Leckhampton Hill, just outside Cheltenham, countless times with the dog - but only yesterday evening did I get a real feeling for "The Hill" in all its manifestations. We were at the launch of Angela France's new poetry collection (published by Nine Arches Press), a wonderful almost encyclopaedic examination in poetry of  the flora and fauna, the geology, the history and the people of this amazing area which has held a special place in the hearts of locals since protesters stood up for their rambling rights over a century ago when faced with an intransigent landowner who tried to enclose the hill.

Angela's readings were accompanied by film and voice-overs based on verbatim archive material - the speech by the "King of the Common", Walter Ballinger, who led the protesters, letters to the local paper, solicitors replies. It was a fascinating tour around time and place. As Claire Crowther puts it in her review "This magical book shows poetry can still perform its ancient task of recording history memorably." And even if you're not local and not conversant with the protesters' story, there is so much to enjoy in the poems - you'll meet foxes and farm workers, Good Friday revellers and Roman snails, dry stone wallers and teenagers up to what teenagers get up to away from adult eyes. Well worth a good read.

Angela signing copies of "The Hill"

Words, words and more words ...

At the moment I feel I'm drowning under a deluge of proof-reading! I'm still working my way through the copy edit of "Digging Up The Family" and at the weekend an anthology to which I'm contributing arrived in my in-box too. So there's little progress being made with any new work just now.

But by way of diversion I've had two interesting evenings out. On Thursday I was at a fascinating talk in Monmouth by Bella Bathurst, the author of Stories of Hearing Lost and Found, in which she describes her personal journey from hearing to deafness and back again. If you haven't read the book, I can highly recommend it; it gives tremendous insight into the realities of living with so common an impairment. And yesterday evening I was at Buzzwords here in Cheltenham for a workshop and readings by the poets Anna Saunders and John Row - very different styles and approaches, but both stimulating and enjoyable.

But now it's back to the proofs ...

Hearing voices

I was reading an article about Jodi Picoult yesterday in which she talked about her inspiration and her approach to writing fiction. No, it wasn't the plot that came to her first, she said - it was the characters. And she "got to know" those characters by living with them for a while and listening to them; from that a plot would fall into place.

It was something of a relief to read of other writers "hearing voices"! For both fiction and poetry I often find that voices "speak" to me in different settings. Products of a fertile imagination they may be, but it's from "listening" to them that I get both ideas and enthusiasm.

A few days ago I was walking in Bishop's Knoll in Bristol. Now owned by the Woodland Trust, this area was the site of a large house with extensive gardens well into the twentieth century; the grounds are now slowly being opened up again, although the house was pulled down some time ago. But during the First World War it was owned by a man who had made his fortune out in Australia. Many Anzac troops were fighting in Europe alongside their British counterparts and, in gratitude for what Australia had done for him, he decided to open up a hospital in his home for their wounded who were evacuated back to this country. More than 2,000 passed through the house in the four years of the conflict. And I "found" a couple of them walking in the gardens, wanting their story told a hundred years later ... and very insistent they've been too. How could I not oblige them?! Great material from which to write.

Woods still echoing with
Aussie voices ...