The year gets underway

A voice from the other side on my radio programme this week - a book dealer rather than a book writer for a change. I can never pass a secondhand bookshop without diverting in and, living not too far from Hay on Wye ("the town of books"), I'm rarely short of an opportunity to indulge myself. Joanna Chambers from Broadleaf Books in Abergavenny provided an interesting perspective on the life of a bookbuyer / seller; she spoke of the challenges new technologies and shopping habits have brought but also very engagingly of the enduring hold that physical bookshops still have over so many of us. 

My second guest on the programme this week was John Murray from Newport U3A Creative Writers. Again I was struck by the wealth of life experience that older writers bring to bear in their work; John's personal journey has encompassed life in an orphanage (narrowly missing designation to the child migrant scheme), fifteen years in the armed forces, work in a variety of different capacities, building his own home in a remote area of Scotland. So much from which to find inspiration, from which to conjure real and imagined tales - and John's were certainly captivating.

It was good to have such an enjoyable programme on Thursday after a less than successful day on Wednesday! With the weather forecast quite promising for early January, we'd decided to start the Usk Valley Walk, the 48 mile trek through some beautiful countryside that we'd been thinking of doing for some time. No problem for the first few miles other than slightly hazy visibility (see the above photo); then we hit Wentwood Forest. Fond memories of childhood picnics there will now be forever overlaid by far from happy ones of useless waymarking and (this may sound familiar to some readers) an intransigent partner insisting they were taking us in the right direction and getting us thoroughly lost. The light fades early at the beginning of January ...

But the whole episode certainly reinforced how the setting of a story becomes a character in it. No wonder so many chilling tales are set in dark, silent forests - the sense of isolation, the absence of sound and orienting features as night falls and envelops you in an alien environment, the shivers of fear that the close set trees engender. Not that on Wednesday I thought much of the potential for writing - how we reached civilization and in one piece is quite another story - but when I can review the situation more coolly (and feel more charitable towards my partner!) there's certainly some potential there.

Ring in the new ...

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by
moonlight and his punishment is that he sees
the dawn before the rest of the world.
Oscar Wilde

I was listening yesterday to the wonderful, late Sandy Denny singing "Who Knows Where The Time Goes?" and who knows indeed - 2018 passed in a flash. Watching the dawn rise this morning I was very aware of so many possibilities in the virgin territory ahead of us in 2019 - some to be grasped with both hands, some to be avoided like the plague! But, knowing my tendency to be overly optimistic in my resolutions, and how annoyed I am with myself if I don't keep them, I've resisted making any. Let's just live in hope and raise a glass to a good, healthy and productive year for us all.

Season's Greetings

Hard as it is with so much awful international news and the forthcoming car crash scenario our own country faces, as a damp, mild Christmas Day dawned here and I got underway with the usual chores (and cooking is a chore for me!), so many fond memories of past Christmas Days came to mind - and fervent hopes for brighter times to come. If your year hasn't been great either, if this season isn't your favourite time - I hope it can be in some way positive for you, that you can find something in it to celebrate, to hold on to, to take forward. Here's to a better future for us all.

Christmas is coming ...

Call me Scrooge, but I can't be doing with all the Christmas hype from the beginning of December - and much earlier still in most of the shops this year. As a child I was used to the tree and the decorations going up on Christmas Eve, a tradition I continued with my own children (despite their plaintive objections - "Everyone else has got theirs up!"). But this year my nearest radio broadcast to Christmas was on the 20th so I broke the habit of a lifetime; I played Christmas tracks and read Christmas stories and poems just those few days earlier - and the sky didn't fall in and I actually enjoyed it!

I hope my two guests enjoyed it too. Tony Lawrence and Andy Phillips joined me from Newport Writers, a very active group who meet at the Riverside on the banks of the Usk on Saturday mornings. They brought with them a couple of great stories - one about an unexpected Father Christmas proposal to a lonely woman and another about a young boy transported back to the 1914 Christmas truce on the Western Front. It was good to welcome them to the station and we hope to have more input from the group in the next few months.

For my "Book of the Week" for the programme I'd chosen "Christmas in Wales", an anthology edited by Dewi Roberts. I'd discovered it during the Christmas holiday last year - it's a lovely collection of poetry and prose from the country's leading writers, both past and present. If you're still looking for a present for someone who really enjoys a good read - especially someone who has an affection for Wales - this might be just the thing. It's published by Seren. (And make sure you have a quick look on page 79 at the excerpt from Kilvert's Diary about his Christmas Day bath in 1870 ...!)

Andy Phillips

Tony Lawrence

Let's hear it for the oldies!

So often now I'm meeting writers who, like myself, have taken up the craft in later years - perhaps having dabbled in their youth, perhaps having written "professionally", but only coming to being truly creative in later life. By which time, of course, they (we!) have so much more to write from - years of experience of work, family life, people, places, the everyday and often the extra-ordinary too. And often I find the realisation of a shrinking  time frame focuses the mind sharply - let's get on with it whilst we have the time to do so! I've read many authors who have been prolific in later life and who have enjoyed commercial success too; Mary Wesley was well into her sixties before she started to write fiction and she became a best seller in her seventies. A great role model for all of us "oldies"!

U3A's (Universities of the Third Age) around the world have become focal points for many retired and semi-retired people in recent years and often have very active creative writing groups. This morning I had four members of Newport U3A Creative Writers as my guests on The Writer's Room at NHSound - Pam Cocchiara, Ian Lumley, Glyn Sutton and Martyn Vaughan. The group recently published 'Musings', an anthology of their work, which I'm much looking forward to reading. Their contributions today included poems that had us laughing out loud and short stories that prompted much deeper thought.

I do hope our visitors enjoyed their visit as much as the listeners and I enjoyed hearing about their lives and their writing and listening to some fascinating work - it was a very interesting morning.

Pam Cocchiara

Ian Lumley

Glynn Sutton

Martyn Vaughan

Keep up the good work!

You can do it ...!

We're nearly two thirds of the way through the month and I'm delighted to hear from writing friends and colleagues how many of them are still going strong with NaNoWriMo. With fairly challenging personal circumstances just now, I've absented myself from the undertaking this year - it really is a mammoth task, especially for the majority of people who are juggling home and work commitments alongside their writing at the best of times. But for those still in the game - you've broken the back of it now, good luck for the next ten days!

Understanding your narrative

An interesting morning yesterday at The Peak Arts Centre in Crickhowell - a workshop run by Helena Attlee, intriguingly entitled "Understanding your narrative". Helena is a largely non-fiction writer and a consultant fellow of the Royal Literary Fund who offers training to a wide variety of different groups. Our group yesterday saw a mixture of writers and artists - textile specialists, sculptors, painters and photographers - taking time out to look at their work and to consider how best to write about it.

Inventive exercises to focus on projects already underway or still at the planning stage were certainly useful - "If this work was an animal, what would it be and why?", "If it was a meal, what would it be and why?; but an important part of the workshop for me was listening to and gaining some understanding of people working in other creative disciplines. Many of the challenges and problems discussed appeared to be common to us all. Writers often spend a lot of their time with other writers; I feel I learned a lot from getting even a small insight into how other creative artists function - perhaps more joint ventures would prove beneficial all round.

Helena Attlee