Last week I was fortunate to have the opportunity to meet Annie Barrows, who was a co-author of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Her new book, The Truth According to Us is set in 1938 in the fictional West Virginia town of Macedonia. It looks at how stories create different versions of the truth, and how the past is mostly stories that have been told over and over.
Annie talked about how, when she studied writing, there was a lot said about an author’s voice – on finding what it was about the way you told a story and the stories you chose to tell, that was unique.
Of course, she threw that out the window when she came to complete the story of Guernsey – she had to tell the story the way her aunt would have told it. As she’d grown up with her aunt and her mother telling her stories , that was something she could do, and do so seamlesly that readers can’t unpick where Mary Ann’s storytelling stopped and Annie’s began.
This got me thinking … you can read a lot about an author’s voice and the cultivation thereof. About how it needs to be originl and authentic. How it should have authority and a distinctive style.
But I think if I sat down at a keyboard to write, while consciously thinking about my voice, I would silence myself. Overanalysis would equal writer’s block. The books that I’ve read, the things that I’ve seen, the people that I’ve known – all of that influences the stories and the way that I tell those stories – but not consciously.
Could I tell someone else’s story their way?
It’s an interesting question. Annie’s experience of finishing her aunt’s book made me wonder if I’m close enough to anyone elses fictional heartland to write with their voice.
I don’t think I could, and that made me admire even more what Annie Barrows has achieved with her writing.
Month: August 2015
Too cool for school slam poetry
The night before last I attended the slam poetry competition at my son’s school.
It was awesome.
The kids were awesome.
There’s nothing more inspiring than being in a room with people who have a passion for words and who let those words out. Huge kudos to Mark Buzolic, the Varsity College teacher who got this idea on its feet and has made it happen now for three years. He’s a big inspiration to his students and leads by example with writing and performing poetry. Thanks also to local poet and performer Louise Moriarty who helped widen out the world view on where poetry might lead you.
The theme was “too cool for school” and the poetry went to some pretty interesting places with that as a starting point. I went home with my head buzzing.
It’s been a lot of years since I wrote any poetry, but I woke up the next morning with the first eight lines of a poem, on the theme, that really needed to be slammed.
The rest just kind of followed.
So, here it is. *
A problem with school
Don’t ask me a question,‘cause you won’t like my answer,
Yes, sir, no, sir, yeah, I got a plan, sir –
Sliding through school by the seat of my pants, sir.
Not learning, just burning with frustration like a cancer
And ridden by yearning for sensations that’ll answer
Why we’ve hidden all the meaning in a puzzle that won’t fit;
Why we’re bidden to wear muzzles so our teacher won’t get bit.
Plus, the problem you’re posing’s not the part that needs solution,
It’s your model of mendacity that calls for revolution.
It’s the certainty of surliness when authority is questioned,
As you tug the leash that lashes our attention to your lesson.
Your didactic pedagogy’s like a bullet to my brain,
Your regurgitated data runs like refuse down the drain.
I’m not learning, just rehashing –
Aimed at earning, that’s the fashion.
“Get on track, with the agenda!”
Disgorge facts – return to sender.
‘Cause my passion and my thinking’s not required,
Just neuron-shrinking, soulless, uninspired
Standardisation, in our schools and in our nation:
“Learn this data, toe the line, get a job and you’ll be fine,
Work from 9 to 5 and then – repeat, repeat, repeat again.”
Drink a beer, watch the screen, numb your brain. It is obscene.
Trudging through a slow accretion of life’s tedious secretions,
Piling up the lies they’ve told me,
All the ties and binds that hold me.
Parents, teachers, priests and leaders,
Taste the pap they try to feed us:
“Be quiet! Be attentive! Be upstanding! Be retentive!
Be obedient and passive!
Take your medicine!” It’s massive
Doses of a numbing poppy,
A barbiturate for happy hordes of factory slaves,
Worked from school into our graves.
“Never question! Don’t complain! Sit up straight! Do it again!”
Should I be a lotus eater, stuck in amber like a fly?
A bloated bottom-feeder, mucking out their stinking sty?
A corporate dream-believer, buying slices of the lie,
And then pass and work and rut and spend and gorge until I die?
No!
If that’s the dream you’re selling, then I don’t want to buy.
And all the lies you’re telling can’t convince me I should try
To play the game, and be the same, and lie and cry and die.
So it’s time for the rhyme that calls your paradigm a crime.
‘Cause I’m sick of the hating, all the waiting, anticipating
That it’s gonna get better when it only gets worse
So instead of a letter, I’ve said it with a verse,
Like a twisted vendetta, tied up with a curse:
Take your learning and your earning –
Shove it where the sun don’t shine.
I can think and read and love and learn with passion, I’ll be fine.
And while you’re ticking boxes
And banging square pegs in round holes,
I’ll be living life outside the box and nurturing my soul.
*being too cool for school does not, necessarily, reflect the opinions of the management, you know what I’m saying? But I had fun constructing a slam for the affirmative side in the notional ‘are you too cool for school’ debate.
So, written any poetry lately, or, you know, in the last decade or so?
Happy trails and horses as characters
If I had a horse, today would be the day that I gave it cake. So, happy birthday horses of the world.
I don’t know a great deal about horses, not practical things, never having had anything much to do with them, unless you count reading a lot of horse adventure fiction when I was 9 or 10. Which I don’t. I’m making that sneery ‘you’re kidding me, right?’ face at myself right now.
I think horses rate high on the aesthetics of form chart and I adore the words that are associated with all things equine – fetlock, snaffle, currycomb and withers – as well as all the different words that only get used to descibe horse gaits and horse colours and, of course, different breeds. A whole lexicon in itself.
But, while writing historical fiction, if one wants to get one’s characters from point A to place B then one needs, quite possibly, a horse. And while I think the idea of naming a car is vaguely ridiculous, a horse is a character and needs a name. And a personality. And a description. And a relationship with its person.
And so my main character’s horse went through four name changes because, frankly, I think you can tell a lot about a person from what they choose to name their companion creatures and how they interact with them. Quite early on I had settled on Argus for my main character’s hound, because he is a rangy, spotted dog and, obviously, Greek mythology has both the multi-eyed giant and Odysseus’ faithful Argos.
But that ruled out another mythological or Classical name for the horse.
A virtue name, perhaps? It was 1832, after all. But, no, it’s not really the sort of thing the character would do.
An everyday kind of person name? No, not quite right either.
And then I saw a photo of a beautiful black and white horse, which didn’t really look like a funny little seabird, but something about the white blaze and white chest reminded me of a puffin. And so Puffin got her name.
Which was fortuitous, because it provided an unforced, lightly jocular piece of dialogue when some of the characters were getting to know each other. And even though she’s not real, still I wrote her so she is kind of my horse, so happy birthday Puffin!
Any suggestions on great horse names very welcome…