Ways With Words

All Lives Are Interesting

'But my life isn't very interesting', people often said on our Memoir Writing course. How often Penelope Lively, Julia Blackburn and I chanted, 'Everyone's life is interesting', and so it proved.  An ex-nun, a retired diplomat, an ex BBC presenter, the son of a Lancashire miner, an art dealer, a recently retired head teacher, therapists and several others gathered together in our farmhouse in the Dordogne to talk about memoirs they had read and to write their own. There was time to talk, read, discuss, have individual surgeries with the tutors and to write. Some played scrabble, swam in the pool, dozed on deckchairs too.  The sun shone for most of the time, French wine flowed, food appeared regularly: the mix of all these ingredients seems to make the course productive. Add thoughtful tutors and supportive participants and it becomes a volcano of bubbling ideas.

 

Now everyone has left for their very different home lives and taken their folders with their writings with them, clearer now about how they will develop their random memories. Many people want to write their memoirs for their children, grandchildren - and posterity. Maybe at some time in the distant future some family member will be delighted to learn about their relative's life be grateful that he/she came to France and that Penelope Lively and Julia Blackburn gave them encouragement and guidance.

"So that's how it was.......", they will say, and maybe they will see the importance of writing their own memoirs for the following generations.

Reading in the Morning

When A.C. Grayling came to Ways With Words in July he asked members of the audience whether they felt guilty reading in the morning. The communal laugh made it clear it was a rhetorical question. Everyone did. And this was a literary audience. Oh we shouldn’t, he insisted. What could be more valuable than developing our ideas through reading? Of course, being a literary audience, we all agreed.

So, with A.C. Grayling’s permission, we are spending our days reading. Each morning, here in the Dordogne, after the croissants, the deckchairs are put under the walnut trees and we read. We don’t feel guilty at all. Partly because it is our holiday and you are allowed to read in the morning on holiday. It is also hot and sunny so we can’t be expected to be more active. And also this could be considered work. We are reading memoirs because in 10 days time our Memoir Course starts here. Penelope Lively and Julia Blackburn are the tutors and each has produced a reading list for the group so we have lots of guidance. We are also re-reading their memoirs. It is a privilege to share these lives. Our holiday is an unadventurous stay in S.W. France but from my deckchair I have been in pre-revolution Russia with Nabakov, to Egypt with Penelope, Cheshire with Hilary Mantel [not quite the same].The emotional journeying has been even more extensive. Is it work or holiday? It doesn’t matter; they frequently merge for us.

Driving down to the Dordogne we listened to A.C. Grayling on Desert Island Discs. Everything he says about living a good life shakes up your thinking. I was struck by his comment that he found it invigorating to have a limited life span. It made him active and productive. So besides reading in the morning I am spending my time here making jam and lavender bags, listening to tapes to improve my French [he has something to say about this too], discovering Romanesque churches and enjoying French food and wine. It’s not productive, A.C. Grayling style. I can’t imagine Anthony sewing lavender bags, but for me this is a productive holiday, a good life. I am defying death with my blackberry jelly.

When our Memoir tutors and the course members arrive here there will be more creativity: people will write their own memories, discuss the books they’ve read, eat and talk together. I think Anthony Grayling should be coming to write his autobiography. His life story is dramatic and moving and explains partly why he is such a great philosopher but knowing the number of books he writes it may be ready for the printers already.

For those who want to chase their own immortality the Memoir Writing Course runs from September 8 – 12 in Leygonie, near Riberac.

Another Flush of the Lavatory : Another Ways With Words Discussion

I watched the first television programme in the new Andrew Marr series which shows Britain from the air. I found it terrifying: so many people, cars, houses, so much stuff in so little space. Everything was alarming. The huge computerised warehouses full of food rely on thousands of lorries arriving on time to make their collections otherwise the system collapses and the shelves in supermarkets will be empty. Considering the overcrowding on the motorways the chances of them sticking to schedules seems very unlikely. I’m surprised I can ever get my packets of muesli when I want them.

Where are the lakes of sewage that cover acres of our land? We need to know so we can keep well away. We all make jokey comments about the fact that our water has been drunk several times but here was the reality and it wasn’t pleasant. I felt guilty flushing the toilet after watching the amount of waste we create. For some time now I have felt that we all consume far too much and the planet can’t cope so I have restricted my personal consumption and given recycled presents, not indulged in new clothes, shoes [particularly difficult for me], furniture and other durable [supposedly] goods but reducing the amount I buy is one thing, cutting the number of showers I take and how often I use the lavatory is another. 

The positive side of this disturbing programme is how clever we are to keep things working as well as we do in this over crowded country. I’m amazed that when I flick a switch the light comes on, that my rubbish is collected and I never see it again, that lettuces are grown, houses built, letters delivered. Can it last?

Andrew Marr seemed full of excitement and awe at what he saw. Hopefully he’ll come to Ways With Words and tell us whether he was secretly terrified too. We’ll get Rob Hopkins of Transition Town Totnes, an expert on peak oil, to give his predictions too. Bad as I felt after watching Britain From The Air it’s all good material for a future Ways With Words event. I realised how ignorant I [and probably many others] are about how the country operates. Hopefully we can offer enlightenment and education at a Ways With Words event on the topic. It’s what the festivals are for.

Ways With Words’ next festival is in Southwold, Suffolk (6 – 10 November).
To see the full programme click here.

 

Normal Life Has Been Resumed After Ways With Words

Our farmhouse is only about a mile away from Dartington Hall so we live at home during the festival but it isn’t home life as we know it. It’s hardly home life at all; we spend about 16 hours each day on-site at Dartington flitting from event to event, checking writers have arrived, meeting, greeting and eating with the speakers. When we are here we find the house is full of family and friends who are helping at the festival so each morning starts with about 10 people round the breakfast table and ends with a glass of whisky as everyone reports back on their experiences and observations from the day. Ten days feels like six months but then it is all over for another year. The banners come down, Waterstones packs the leftover books, Van Rouge drives their Parisian fire engines away and we move our office back to Droridge Farm. When I went camping as a girl guide we were told that when we left no-one should know that a girl guide had passed that way. I feel the same about Dartington Hall. Thousands of people have tramped over the medieval stones at Dartington Hall, sat on the window sills of the Great Hall, walked by the herbaceous borders, but we try to be good tenants so that when we leave it is as if Ways With Words hadn’t happened. We remove all traces of our presence, then drive away to the seaside to have a last meal with our house guests before they leave.

“Do we feel flat when the festival finishes?” people often ask. “Do you collapse with exhaustion?” “Are you relieved it’s over?” No, no, no. Festivals can only exist for short, sharp bursts. They are wonderful when they are happening but I expect Michael Eavis is glad to return to milking his cows after Glastonbury. Droridge Farm isn’t a working farm so I can’t claim to be returning to my dairy herd but we are back in our barn; it is filled with Apple Macs rather than apples. Like Seamus Heaney we dig with our pens not with spades but there is a lot of spade work to be done before Ways With Words is buried for this year.

Eventually we start to think about forthcoming events. Ways With Words Southwold programmes have arrived on people’s mats, so in November we shall be moving East. But now we are packing to go to France to prepare for our Memoir Writing Course with Penelope Lively and Julia Blackburn. From there we shall move to Italy for our Holiday Courses in art, writing, book groups, philosophy. Mary Knott, Blake Morrison, James Long, Kate Adie and Michael Buerk will join us to run the courses in Italy.

Life can’t be all festivals but I do want a generous sprinkling of them throughout the year.

If festive living suits you check our forthcoming events on the website:
The Art of Memoir in France: 8-12 September
Holiday Courses in Italy: 27 Sept. – 4 October, 4 October – 11 October
Ways With Words Southwold Festival: 6-10 November

The Wonder of the Wondermentalist

The Wondermentalist Cabaret came to Ways With Words at Dartington. Trumpets (to give yourself a fanfare before you enter places); a guitar that played itself, like something from a children's story book; the Dead Poets' Slam; Beryl the Feral read haikus.

Best joke of the evening - "It was possible to get a good educaion at the Rudolph Steiner school. It was extra-curricular, an after-school club."

Matt Harvey ran the show with a rod of iron. It was slick, fast-moving, professional.

The topic for a collaborative poem for the evening was 'Windmills'. Rapid-fire, cut and paste poets collected lines from the audience in the interval, and this was the poem they glued together . . . literally:

Windmills… what are you like?

Do you mind how I wind the windmill will?
Gyratory, vibratory, mistral–seeking blades
Sentinel shifters of airy semaphore
Windmill nimbys, nimwill wind me, spin me
Whisking up clouds for a sunset soufflé
An un-winged plane, going nowhere fast, forever…
Turbine be forever mine
Swish, swoosh, swish, swooshhhhh!!!
Oh how revoltingly Dutch.
Wind mills – (on) tall hills – (are) modern ills – (with) fancy frills
Puffing, blowing, huffing, flowing
Ghostly forms, foolishly arrogant in your ridiculous white attire
Why do your wings wave like a waffle?
A pickled onion spinning with its stick
A Spiro-graph of air-borne flight, fights…
Wind grinding pepper-pot, slow sail stew
Scarecrow comedian making a point
A lighthouse on the land, warning of approaching corn
Making flour by wind power, takes about 59 minutes! Doh!
Big sails waiting for wind kiss, sky caress, open arms
Sail this steeple across swollen sodden swamps
Slender blades generating “power”, strong stems – 3 turning petals
She loves me, she loves me not, “she loves me”
Whooshing, whirling, wheeling
Web, windy, wild, westerly
Focused on flour or flux
Though the mills of god grind slowly, they grind exceedingly small
Revolving doors
A Mandela milling the wind 
Ranks of slim white sentinels saving our skins
No ill winds please, keep it sweet
The sails on the mill go round and round…
Who can mill the wind?
And, once ground, what kind of cake would it bake?
Something light and airy? Self-raising? Or f-air-y?
Windmills – do they always wind with time?
Do wind farms really make all the wind?
There once was a windmill in old Amsterdam
Where mice loved to dine on bran flakes and spam
The slow wave of the giant’s arms
Not waving, but drowning.

A wonderful Wondermentalist evening. One of Matt's poems ends with his father asking, "When are you going to get a job?" Let's hope he doesn't.

'And now it's your turn' - The questions audiences ask writers at Ways With Words

There's a myth often perpetuated by writers that the questions asked most frequently at literature festivals are, 'Do you write with a pen or a computer?' and 'Where do your ideas come from?' Oddly I have never heard either question asked of writers and in the seventeen years I have been running Ways With Words I have sat through thousands of talks. Maybe before my time as a festival director the idea of writing novels on a computer may have seemed like a cheat: all that cutting and pasting, it wasn't proper writing. Word processing a book after it was written was fine but surely you couldn't be creative on a computer? Now if a writer mentions on stage that they don't use a computer there's a gasp of disbelief. The writer is considered quaint, eccentric.

'Where do your ideas come from?' seems an interesting and quite profound question. I don't know why writers are scornful of it. To start with it suggests that the writer's work is idea based. No bad thing surely, though it's not a question to ask a biographer. If asked of Valerie Grove it would suggest that her biography of John Mortimer was based on speculation rather than fact. Not one for a memoirist either. On Thursday Julia Blackburn will talk of her complex Bohemian parents and the alcohol, drugs, sex, betrayal and suicide that was part of her childhood. 'Where do your ideas come from Julia?' would be an insult.

On the other hand it's a very good question for Lloyd Jones who wrote the Booker short-listed novel, 'Mister Pip'. What made him decide to write about a young girl on a tropical island and Dickens' 'Great Expectations'?

This summer's Ways With Words at Dartington has only been running three days but already many fascinating questions have come from the audience to their sitting targets. (Martin Bell, Jonathan Dimbleby, Jon Snow, Gervase Phinn, Oona King, Penelope Lively - and many more have been in the firing line so far.)

A few that bounced from reader to writer are:

To Penelope Lively -

"How does it feel when someone asks a question about a novel that reveals something you hadn't thought about?"

"Do you procrastinate or rush to get to your desk?"

To Christina Lamb and Martin Bell -

"What would you do about Zimbabwe if you were PM of England?"

"Do you have to be fit to be a foreign correspondent?"

To Oona King -

"Where did New Labour go wrong?"

"Quick psychological overview of George Galloway?"

Witty, clever and thoughtful answers bounced back.

Jon Snow even gave a considered response to illuminate the psychology of his sock choice. The woman in the audience only asked where he bought them.

Ways With Words festival of words and ideas continues at Dartington Hall, Devon until 20th July.
Still to come to talk and answer questions besides Valerie Grove, Julia Blackburn, Lloyd Jones -  A.C. Grayling, Claire Tomalin, Tony Benn, Michael Frayn, Jonathon Porritt, Roy Hattersley - and many more. 

You Are What You Wear – Or Are You?

“Is there a dress code for Ways With Words?” I am often asked both by people who come to work for us and those who are attending the festival.

“Yes there is”, I reply firmly. “It’s a festival so you must dress festively.”

This often sends people into a tizz. It worries them more than if I said they had to wear a smart suit but there is a sub-text here. “Dress festively”, is a short hand for saying, “I want you and everyone who comes to Ways With Words to enjoy themselves. Life at a festival is special; it’s not a run-of-the-mill, ordinary time. It’s like a party, only better. Putting on festive clothes creates a party mood. Your clothes say, ‘this is a different sort of day’.”

But telling people to dress festively is also saying that Ways With Words enjoys diversity. Everyone’s interpretation of festive dress will be different. (Comme la Soupe, as I wrote last time.) No uniform here, though I have seen rather a lot of linen suits on men at the festival. I generally hate uniforms, for many reasons, but one is that they deny people the chance to be creative in daily life. Getting dressed each day is like doing a picture or a sculpture. Some days not many people will be attending the gallery of your life so the art of your clothes may not be appreciated. But a festival is different. It’s like being in Tate Modern, so any clothes-creativity will be appreciated by huge crowds. No wonder people look worried when I tell them to dress festively. Really I am saying, “Create a work of art; lots of people will come to see it.”

I love putting on the morning work of art but I have never deconstructed the philosophical, psychological and social aspect of our clothes too closely . But John Harvey has in his book, called simply CLOTHES. He says of party clothes (those I call festive clothes):

“Our worries are pushed off with our workaday clothes …… Clothes ..intensify the mood of the moment…. party clothes can be freedom, expectation in the in the shape of loose unbuttoned sleeves, exhilaration in the lift of chiffon panels....”

So get out your chiffon. Unbutton your sleeves, your mind, yourselves: Ways With Words is starting this Friday and, odd as it may sound with a festival to run, I have spent the weekend ironing.

Come in your finery to hear John Harvey speak on Clothes at Ways With Words festival of words and ideas at Dartington Hall, Devon on Tuesday 15 July at 3.30pm, chaired by Kay Dunbar - of course.

This event is part of a day called THE ART OF LIVING and has talks on Deception, Wellbeing, Illness and Hunger as well.  All fascinating topics and worthy of a Blog.

Comme La Soupe

We have just finished a writing and painting course, our first ever, at our newly acquired house in the Dordogne. Our French neighbour, Christiane, came to see the ‘Private View’ ie the display of paintings and drawings produced by the art group. She was amazed that there were so many different interpretations of the same subject. The beams in the barn, views through windows, the red-tiled roof, blue shutters: all the pictures turned out totally different. As Christiane said it was ‘comme la soupe’. No two cooks produce the same vegetable soup.

The writing group created its own pot au feu. Karen (Hayes, the novelist) asked her folk to write about our village. Someone wrote as an English resident, another as a journalist, another actually imagined our house speaking. Quite an amazing potage.

And after a week the tureen of creative work was overflowing. People produced so much art and writing yet still found time to jump in the pool, read in a deckchair in the meadow, play boules in the courtyard and spend hours talking over meals.

But can creative writing be taught? We have had events at Ways With Words to discuss this familiar question. Usually teachers on MA courses in creative writing at universities say yes while other authors say no. I want to say, “But what do you mean by teach?” Ways With Words has run many writing courses and a mass of creativity takes place. What are the ingredients that produce the soupe? A sympathetic, encouraging, yet challenging tutor could be the juicy bone. He/she can create a strong flavour, help people start, move others on, get some to take a step back. Maybe the basic stock is made from time and place. Remove busy people from their everyday life, place them in a the midst of fields with a group of other people keen on words and they find quiet corners to look at the trees, contemplate the sky and think and write. Throw in good food and wine, conversation and laughter, books, music and art and everything interacts, like chemistry and cooking, to produce a new substance – original writing.

Now the house’s blue shutters are closed, the barn is left to the kittens, the swimming pool is still, the deckchairs are folded until our next visit, but I expect many of the visitors are reading through the writing they produced in Leygonie, looking at the paintings, and thinking about how they can continue to stir up the creative energy they found in France.

More Soup Making:
September 8 – 13, a Memoir Writing course will take place at Leygonie in the Dordogne, France. Penelope Lively and Julia Blackburn will provide the bones.
For more information phone: 01803 867373.

Get Your Wordsworth At Ways With Words

Years ago Ways With Words produced a car sticker that said, “Get your Wordsworth at Ways With Words”. That was before we started our literature festival in Cumbria.

Now that Words by the Water is one of our major festivals I think we should revive the sticker though I often wonder what Wordsworth would make of our festival on his home territory. Would he come? Would he do a reading? How many people would buy tickets? Maybe he’d walk the 20 miles from Grasmere to Keswick and bring Dorothy with him. Everyone is intrigued by his sister Dorothy. Frances Wilson has written her biography and at Words by the Water gave her views on the passionate relationship between brother and sister. She is coming to Ways With Words at Dartington Hall in July to do a repeat performance. What a pity though that we can’t get Dorothy to read from her journals:

    Wm slept badly. I baked pies and bread. William worked hard at The Pedlar and tired himself.
    …..Coleridge’s were very melancholy letters, he had been very ill in his bowels.

Maybe they would cancel after they had agreed to come to the festival. According to Dorothy William and Coleridge had a lot of colds and headaches and were often “nervous and jaded”. Not what a festival director wants to hear. I can just imagine the conversation.
“Coleridge has bowel troubles. William has had to take laudanum. I’m afraid they can’t come to the festival.”

Wordsworth, Coleridge, Ruskin, Southey, Beatrix Potter: all would have been welcome at our Cumbrian festival. Instead we have to make do with their ghosts haunting us and making sure we don’t neglect poetry at Words by the Water.

Dates for your diary:

Next year’s Words by the Water runs from 27 February – 8 March 2009.

Frances Wilson will speak on Dorothy Wordsworth at 3.30pm on Tuesday 15 July at Dartington Hall, Devon.

Taking Tea With Penelope Lively

This sounds like the title of a collection of poems by Wendy Cope. Well it isn’t. Nor is it a metaphor for anything; it’s just what it says. Julia Blackburn, Steve and myself had tea with Penelope to discuss a course on Memoir Writing Ways With Words is running in France. Penelope and Julia will talk about their own memoir writing and encourage and help others who want to write theirs. Lots of people do. Laurie Lee said that a day unrecorded was a day lost. It’s as if it hadn’t happened. Probably people feel like that about their whole lives: unless they leave some memoir within a generation it will be as if their life hadn’t happened.

I think memoir writing should be encouraged. We do lose lives and domestic history if no-one records them. Even a shopping list from our grandparents would be fascinating. “What’s Dolly Blue, humbugs, Liquorice Allsorts, tripe, barmcakes?” my children would probably ask. “It cost 1/11d – what does that mean?”

Laurie Lee writes too of the difficulties of choosing what to record from your past. There is so much to write about. How do you select? Every day could be a book, yet it might get tedious for a reader. Even devoted family members can feel, “I’ve got a life to lead too. Get on with it granny!”
So memoir writers have to be strict with themselves and pick out what will make interesting reading.

“Can you ever be totally truthful?” Laurie Lee wonders and decides it is impossible. All you can say is that this is how life seemed to you at the time. To someone else who was there it might appear very different. Writing about family, particularly parents, can be challenging. Julia Blackburn’s book about her parents, ‘The Three of Us’, has just been published. There have been many reviews and interviews. All full of praise for her honesty, generosity and non-judgemental approach to parents who appear wild, irresponsible, feckless. When her mother was dying she said to Julia, “I expect you will write about me now.” Her mother’s and father’s sides of the story would have been different but that’s the nature of memoirs. All material for interesting discussions in France.

Penelope has written about her childhood in ‘Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived’; she has used her grandmother’s house and its contents to hook stories of her past in ‘A House Unlocked’. This July at the festival at Dartington Hall she will look back on her long writing life – a talk that will be like a memoir. Work, interests, houses, belongings are all good topics for memoirs.

Taking tea in Penelope’s lovely, sunny, book and picture-lined living room we mused over these points and how they will be tackled in France in September.

As befits a lady of letters Penelope had an interesting list of books that all memoirists should read.

So I shall read, think and look forward to hearing Penelope and Julia speak at Dartington. And even more to having 5 days in France with them both in September.
I might even start to write my Ways With Words memoirs – instead of just a blog.

Note these dates:

Ways With Words at Dartington Hall, Devon -
Saturday 12 July, 10am Penelope Lively will talk about 40 years in books, aspects of a writing life.
Thursday 17 July, 5pm Julia Blackburn will talk about her book, ‘The Three of Us’.

Memoir Writing Course, Perigord, France, 8-12 September 2008
Tutors: Penelope Lively and Julia Blackburn
Click here for further details