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

Look at it this way ...

At school we had one particular teacher (let's call her Miss Watson) who had an unfailingly positive attitude; no matter what the problem, however poor the outlook, she would smile, take a deep breath and say "Now girls, here's a challenge for us! How are we going to deal with this one?" Later in life, when I read some "motivational" books, I could imagine her as their author, penning the relentless message to look for the opportunities in every untoward situation, to determine how to make a silk purse out of whatever pig's ear life had dumped in your lap. When I had a take-away Chinese meal the evening before last, I found a similar exhortation in a fortune cookie; after a "challenging" couple of weeks, I was in no mood to be so chivied along!

But perhaps as writers we need the odd kick up the backside, the odd reminder that we can salvage at least something from almost any venture that's gone awry - and maybe that something could turn out to be more than second best. For a variety of reasons, life has got the better of me lately, and writing plans have certainly been derailed; but rather than trying to pick up the pieces, I've left them be, as it were, and resurrected a couple of older, shelved projects. Amazing how looking at things with fresh eyes can rejuvenate discarded ideas and plans! I think Miss Watson might have been on to something after all ...

Going into orbit

We had a great evening yesterday at the Holst Museum in Cheltenham. As part of the Cheltenham Literature Festival, the "Literature Crawl" included a "Planets" poetry event; individuals and groups visited the different rooms in the museum to listen to specially written poems inspired by the composer's interest in astrology and his famous "Planet Suite". The museum proved a popular venue on the Crawl and we had a very appreciative response to the poems. My contribution was on Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age, and my friend and poetry group colleague Frances March read her very moving and thought-provoking piece on Venus, the Bringer of Peace - much needed in the present climate.

I've written before of my gratitude to my poetry and writing groups - they provide me with tremendous support and the kind of constructive criticism we all need in our writing lives. So I was delighted to hear last night that Frances had been shortlisted for this year's Indigo Dreams First Pamphlet competition, and that our poetry group colleague Belinda Rimmer had actually won the award. That's another plus point about group membership - whilst we're certainly there to commiserate with each other over rejections and setbacks, we definitely get to celebrate each other's successes too!

... and I had the Servant's Room!

Frances March, reading in the kitchen ...