Thursday 24 August 2017

What is truth?



In the immortal phrase - what is truth? Events are remembered in such different ways by those who took part in them. The above photograph was taken at a children's party at the Dry Dock in Newport to celebrate the Queen's coronation in 1953; sixty four years later I'm sure that if you asked any of participants about what happened on that day, you'd get as many different responses as there were children there and many would contradict one another.

Yesterday an old school friend - who is also a writer - came to lunch and we were amused to find that we are both working on a memoir which will in part cover the same time and many of the same events in our lives. I shall be fascinated to see how differently we recall and document those times and happenings, what different slants we put on them. And if we diverge widely on the actual "facts" - whose truth will be the truth?

I am reminded of work I did with older people with dementia a few years ago, helping them to write their life stories. Sometimes family members would question how the person described a time, a place or an event in their past - "No, that's not how it was - she's got that wrong."  But I firmly believe that truth is relative - relative to the person whose truth it is, especially in that situation. We all make sense of our experiences, integrate them into our personal and world view, in our own ways - which is what, for me, makes autobiographical writing such a fascinating genre.

Wednesday 16 August 2017

Journeying in words

Until I became interested in writing creative non-fiction a couple of years ago, I was not a great reader of travel writing - by which I don't mean the guidebooks that sometimes purport to be travel writing, but the works of writers such as Jan Morris, Rory Maclean and Justin Marozzi, books that take you into other places, into new experiences, that alter and enlarge your view of the world. Now they form a substantial part of my reading.

At the moment I'm lucky enough to be reading a manuscript for a friend, an account of an extraordinary journey that will hopefully be published in the next year or so and which will attract, I'm sure, a wide readership. To me it exemplifies the three components which I believe make travel writing so compelling - encounters with the landscape and the natural world, encounters with other people and - most importantly - encounters with the self. Because in making and recording journeys writers inevitably face up to their own strengths and weaknesses, have to deal with new, perhaps unexpected, situations, are in some subtle way changed by what they experience.

My own journeyings have been modest, but for all the long distance walks I've done in recent years (the Severn Way, the Holst Way etc) I've kept journals, supplemented by photographs which my husband has contributed. Several poems have had their genesis in these walks, but I'm now looking back over the journals to identify other areas of potential - and in itself the activity is providing a great opportunity to relive some thoroughly enjoyable experiences!


A stretch of the
Wye Valley Walk

Friday 11 August 2017

A Festival and "Fragments"

I'm sure we all have times when life "bites us in the bum" as a friend so elegantly puts it, and that certainly describes things here over the last couple of weeks! But today has been a good day with the style proofs arriving for "Digging Up The Family" (I'm delighted with them) and advance publicity arriving about the Cheltenham Literature Festival; full details of the programme are due out tomorrow but you may already have seen previews in today's Times. Our Gloucestershire Writers' Network event is scheduled for the evening of Sunday October 15th. It promises to be a really good evening - not only do you get to hear poetry and prose from our brightest and best local writers, our two competition judges, Roy MacFarlane and Lania Knight, will be reading from their latest publications.Tickets go on sale in the first week of September. Our event has been a sell-out in recent years, so don't miss your chance!

What with family, health and other personal issues taking up inordinate amounts of time and energy, writing has made slow progress lately. But the odd half an hour has seen a couple of "fragments" for my people watching project, which I'm hoping to illustrate with some of my husband's photographs. The project started a while ago now and has grown sporadically over the last couple of years, but it may actually be coming to fruition at last!



Moving into care
She turns out drawers,
prospecting, sifting
a life nearing completion.
What to keep,
to let go?
Specks of gold
  glisten in the mud.