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.

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

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.

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 ...