Mulling about The Novel

Good meeting with my Novel Group last week. We get together around once a month. Mail out our work a week beforehand (ideally! - mine went out three days beforehand, but the others were very patient and managed to find time to read it). Then give each person between half an hour and an hour of discussion time. The theory is that the person whose work is being discussed doesn't say anything but just listens and sifts through what is being said by their 'readers'. We don't manage to hold to that rule very well, but we do seem to manage to avoid the position where the writer passionately defends their work from 'criticism'.

There was some very interesting discussion around the work of a member of the group who has just started a new novel. We were all very excited and intrigued, and immediately began to weigh in with suggestions and feedback. Then our wise old bird said 'don't listen to any of this, just keep writing and enjoy yourself. Finish your first draft and work out what you want to do and then test it out against what other people suggest'. Good advice about an early idea. So much better to play, experiment, write and write, until the idea has formed itself, rather than presenting the embryo to the crows!

In this meeting we had a lot of discussion about structure too. The need for the novel to progress not though 'brilliant' writing but through a shape and logic that is apparent to the reader. I find it hard to hold a sense of that as I write, which is why I always start in longhand. It seems to be easier to be critical of sprawling pages of green ink, and edit and streamline them, than to do the same with neatly typed pages on the screen that the computer has laid out and made sense of in all its digitally pre-programmed ways. And of course having a group of faithful readers in the Novel Group who are willing to say - 'this is a digression, this doesn't make sense, I didn't understand what you were trying to do here......'

Read/writ/er

they are very entwined
it is a great excitement to play the interactions and complexities that connect them

Members of the group are: Alan McDonald,http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/writers/mcdonald/ ,Brighid Rose, Katie Jukes, Terry Simpson, Gail Bolland, Mandy Sutter http://www.mandysutter.com/
Char March http://www.commapress.co.uk/?section=authors&page=marchpage

Frantic Assembly's 'Othello' Lowry Theatre Salford 2nd Oct 2008

Frantic Assembly performed a heavily edited text that was cut right down the the bare bones of the story and did it in a very physical style with lots of dance or mime around the action.

The setting was a very seedy working men's club or pub, and they played on the ideas of gang (army) culture and race. The acting wasnt very good but the production overall was very pacy and visual and full of blaring music so it was fun and the students that we had taken liked it. Clearly well targetted at the 14-19 yr olds who seem to be the main audience for Shakespeare. School and college 'trips' are keeping most of these companies alive and the canny ones know it well!

The set was the big star. There was a leather banquette, a pool table and a fruit machine by the entrance to the women's loo - lots of play around who came and went out of that door! And then finally in the intimate scene between Emilia and Desdemona the set turned around to reveal them sitting on the loo seat sharing a joint.

The walls of the set moved steadily inwards as the action went on, so it became more and more stiffling, with no exits. When Iago got Casio drunk, they span the pool table round and round, and the walls undulated. Very dizzying. And when Othello finally staggered back from Desdemona's dead body, he took the walls of the set back with him, so the whole space exploded outwards. Very dramatic.

I missed the power of the language though. The text was so heavily cut and the acting so fast paced, highly choreographed and stylised that there was no oppotunity to luxuriate in the richness of langauge. Shakespeare for a visually literate, but linguistically deafened culture.

Maggie O'Sullivan's Reading at The Other Room Manchester Aug 6th

Maggie began by thanking the organisers for inviting her and saying that it was the first time she had read in Manchester. How can that possibly be true? Maggie is one of the very best and most innovative poets working in the North of England, and she only lives a short train ride from the city. It is an outrage, and thank goodness it has been corrected.

The reading was a great pleasure. I particularly enjoyed the extracts from A Natural History In 3 Incomplete Parts and from red shifts. It would be just perfect if she could somehow read with the texts projected behind her, as they are as visual as they are aural. I loved listening to her voice working through the changes, patterns and repetitions of the work.

It was like being underwater, underlanguage, listening to the stream rush past. Lots of fragments, debris, other organisms, all of them half glimpsed. Immersed in transformation and movement. I would recommend anyone who gets the chance to go and hear her read.

Stuart Calton was a good contrast. I found myself chuckling as he read. His work is political, sassy and satirical. What a good night it was!

Lee Harwood

I came to Lee Harwood's poetry unexpectedly, at a reading at Edge Hill. It wasn't the first time I had heard him read. There was another flustered and tense occasion when I arrived late, with my partner, at rather an intimate reading in one of those posh rooms in Cambridge. I couldnt find anything to latch on to at all, the long, hot journey and the self consciousness of arriving late talked loudly over his quiet, complex voice. The reading at Edge Hill was quite other. I heard the poetry for the first time and was touched, moved and challenged by it.

The context had changed, I had changed. The words sank in and stayed with me. I loved the collisions in his gentle, uncompromising and subtle voice. I began to understand more of the context of his work. And then I read The Long Black Veil. It made me cry. And has continued to fascinate me.

You can hear Johnny Cash singing the song that the poem refers to on You Tube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28uW2E9p6Pk&feature=related
I spoke not a word/thought it meant my life/for I'd been in the arms/of my best friend's wife............Nobody knows/nobody sees/nobody knows/but me..... which echoes a key idea in the poem; what happens in secret between illicit lovers. The poem is in the form of fragmentary 'Notebooks' and uses a range of clever technical devices to keep working round that point. Nobody knows but me.

I have reviewed the Selected Poems for Chroma.
http://www.chromajournal.blogspot.com/
You can get Lee Harwood's work from:
http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/authors/harwoodA.html