On Creative Reading

I was recently invited to give a keynote talk as part of a symposium on creative reading and writing with young people. The following is the text of that speech.

Good afternoon.

My name is Sam Ruddock, and I am a reader. (And also some other things including a blogger, a book critic, a prize judge, a husband, a cat father, and a Programme Manager at Writers' Centre Norwich where I produce our events and reading programmes).

Basically, I love reading. I love stories that take me on a journey I don't ever want to end, with characters it feels as though I have known for ever. I love reading that makes me think, that introduces me to new ideas, and that is all about the creative use of language. Reading is pure imagination.

I know I’m a bit excitable. But I make no apologies for being over-the-top enthusiastic about reading. Especially where it comes to young people. Because literacy has never been so important. There has never in human history been so much reading and writing taking place as there is now. The mass spread of the internet and social media has changed how we behave: where people once interacted with the world predominantly verbally, we now do so more and more through words on a screen. A young person’s life chances today depend on literacy: if you cannot read or write, you cannot succeed in this world. Literacy is to be the single most important thing we do for our young people.

Reading isn’t a tool for anything, but if it is, its a basic tool for literacy, which is a basic tool for life. But one of the ways that we will best encourage literacy, is to focus on reading for pleasure.

(When we talk about reading for writing, we essentially create a hierarchy where everything leads to writing. I’m not sure it is this way around. The Booker Prize winning author Eleanor Catton recently set up a fund in New Zealand to grant young writers money to cover time to read. It’s an amazing initiative – imagine being paid to read! But it has a serious and laudable intention, too. She felt reading was getting forgotten in the drive to write, to create, and to express oneself. And she felt that writers who didn’t read were likely to produce less interesting work than writers who did read. I share this as a challenge for us all – reading should be at the heart of our engagement with young people, not as an afterthought.)

There is only one way we will get people reading: if they enjoy it. If it gives them something they want or need. If it is rewarding.

I read to relax. And to escape from myself and the world around me and all the interconnectivity of technology. And I read to dive headfirst into the world, to learn about other people and the world around me. I like to read in the bath. It is a sanctum if you will, where technology frazzles and drowns and my imagination can billow steam-like around me. About 5 years ago I decided to rename our bathroom ‘the pub’ so that I felt less anti-social about the time I spend reading and now when I go home in the evening and say to my wife ‘I’m going to the pub’, it makes reading feel cool. And I like that, for even an enthusiast like me sometimes feels apologetic about reading.  I need to read. If I don’t find time to read, I get stressed and frantic, I get grumpy, and I get self-involved. And what is interesting is that research increasingly shows that this is the case for many people.

• In a series of reports and studies over the last decade, reading has been shown to be of huge personal, social, health, and economic benefit. Reading has been shown to have all sorts of impressive qualities including:

• Enhancing people’s life chances, civic and social engagement, employment prospects, and quality of life;

• Busting stress and providing real health benefits such as delaying the onset of dementia;

• Reducing cases of reoffending in prisoners and those on parole;

• Improving theory of mind, a common measure of empathetic ability.

One of the things that interests me most about reading is that it is both retreat from the world, and the most active engagement with it. There is nothing I do in my life that so enables me to inhabit other skins and see the world through other eyes. Reading matters to me because it puts me inside the heads of other people, other lives, other cultures, other ways of thinking. Reading helps me see things differently, it makes me think differently, it complicates my point of view. I am a far better person for reading. Why not be enthusiastic about something like this?

I’m also fascinated by what reading does for people. So fascinated in fact that earlier this year I set out to interview readers across the UK about their experience of reading, what it gives them and why they do it. I want to get beyond the scientific research to uncover the personal stories about readers and reading, and I want to give readers a voice to tell their own stories.

There is a campaign I admire called 53 Million Artists. Like all great campaigns its mission is deceptively simple: to 'unlock the creative potential of everyone in England.' I recently spent some time with the founder of 53 Million Artists, a ridiculously talented woman named Jo Hunter, and asked her whether she considered reading an artistic activity. She thought for a minute and I could see her wondering how to say that no she didn’t. We kept talking, and she eventually set out the four linked activities that they encourage people to do when being artistic.

• The first is having an idea.

• The second is doing something. Reading is doing something. In reading we are co-creators of a story. But now it gets interesting...

• Number 3 in the approach to being an artist is thinking about what you are doing. This is really important. Thinking. Reflecting. An artist isn’t just someone who creates. An artist is someone who thinks about what they create. A reader artist is someone who thinks about what they read.

• And the fourth is sharing it with others.

I turned to her at this point and said: ‘okay, so readers are artists when they think about what they read, and share it with others’. And she agreed. When we think about creativity we often instinctively think about making things. We so rarely think about consuming something. But I believe absolutely that reading is active and creative engagement in the art of literature, and that great reading is an art to be developed. It is an art so long as we think about what we read, and share that with others.

So how do we get young people reading? It starts with how we think about and talk about reading. I have three tips:

1.   Be enthusiastic. Break down that inner critic who says you need to call the bathroom ‘the pub’ in order to make reading cool. If you are that apologetic about reading, no-one is ever going to enjoy reading. John Waters has a great suggestion and language for this, he says: ‘If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them. Don’t sleep with people who don’t read!’. A little judgemental, perhaps. But interesting.

There is a quote I love from Roald Dahl’s My Uncle Oswald, a not particularly successful novel he wrote in between The Enormous Crocodile and The Twits.

“I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. He taught me that if you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it at full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be”

Useful advice at any time and for anything you love! But even more so when it comes to reading, an activity that society and formal education strives to tell young people is dull, boring, and only for school. Too often we are embarrassed to talk to young people about loving reading. We fear it may lose us their interest. We think it is easier to give people a pen and piece of paper and ask them to express themselves. That they will find that more fun. But this is our fears being projected; our failing not theirs. We cannot hope to change other people’s perspectives if we don’t change our own.

2.   Don’t try to control reading. Reading is freedom. It is an adventure, and no adventure is any fun if you know where it will end. It doesn’t matter what a reader is reading now, only what they may go on to next. The best reader engagement projects don’t lecture readers about what they should and shouldn’t read, they create the space and framework and let readers run with it.

This is what Writers’ Centre Norwich has done with Summer Reads (in partnership with Norfolk Libraries) over the past 6 years. Each year we recruit a jury of everyday readers (this year there are over 90!). We give them a longlist of books (this year there were 150) and ask them to read. They read the books and review (ie THINK ABOUT) them. We gather all the reviews together, hold meetings for them to discuss the books (ie SHARE WHAT THEY HAVE DONE), and slowly work the longlist down. At the moment there are 60 books we are considering. Come January we will select the 6 that we promote during the programme. It is amazing to see how reading habits change given this space and encouragement, and in an environment where reading is cherished. We will receive more than 1000 reviews this year. In some ways, it is a more rigorous process than the Booker Prize.

So successful has Summer Reads been that we were recently awarded a large amount of money to evolve and grow in partnership with libraries in Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.

I’ve long harboured ambitions to run a similar programme for young people, working with school libraries and English teachers to build a network of engaged young readers. I’d love us here today in this room to consider whether there is a way of making this happen.

There was a great project that the Orange Prize ran a few years ago, to celebrate its fifteenth year. They wanted to conduct a poll to find the ‘best of the best’ of the previous 14 winners of the Orange Prize. But instead of employing the usual collage of writers, critics, and academics, they turned to young people. Six teenagers were recruited through Penguin’s Spinebreakers website, an online book community run by teenagers, for teenagers that has sadly recently closed. Those readers met, discussed the books, and eventually chose a winner: Fugitive Pieces by Ann Michaels, a truly brilliant book.

And this brings me on to my third suggestion for getting people reading:

3.   Never ever undervalue readers, young or old. Never assume people don’t read and don’t want to read. Never talk down. Encourage up.

Had you asked me before this to guess which of the 14 titles would have most appealed to a younger audience, one of my last choices would have been Fugitive Pieces. It is lyrical and non-linear, it is challenging and distressing. But when you put your faith in people, when you give them the opportunity to try and to think and to share, they so often surprise you. This has happened again and again in my experience of Summer Reads.

    And if you want to make reading fun, make it dangerous! There’s a great story I once heard about a mother who, when she was pregnant, built a shelf in her bedroom and placed all her favourite books there. When he daughter was young, she told her that she could read any of the books in the house, except for those books on that shelf. That was all. Years later, when the daughter was fully grown they were talking about reading, and the daughter said to her: ‘of course you know I read all of those books I wasn’t allowed to?’ and the mother turned to her and replied: ‘Of course! That was the point all along!’ She had succeeded in making great reading dangerous!

I love that story.

So, in summary:

• Reading is fundamental to modern life. More reading is done now than ever before. Never forget that when people say that reading is no longer cool.
• Reading is fundamental to writing. But it is valuable enough, enjoyable enough, in and of itself. Never try to squish reading into other outcomes lest you lose what is great about it.
• Don't think it is easier to give people a pen and paper and encourage them to write than it is to give them a library card and encourage them to read. And if it is, think about what that says about how you are talking about reading.
• Be passionate. Otherwise, why should anyone believe you?
• Support exploration. Take a journey together. Reading is an adventure.
• Don’t dictate, empower.
• Never ever underestimate people.

Reading is not elitist. Great reading is and should be for everyone. And it is creative and artistic. Do not hide from your responsibility to share the joys of reading with others.

And share it with me too. For there’s a dirty secret at the heart of this talk. This year has been my worst reading year since I’ve been an adult. I’ve really struggled to find time and space to read. I need you to tell me about the books you’ve loved, to recommend to me, and then to recommend to everyone else here today.

Thank you for listening. And happy reading.

Now... come with me...

Guest Book Review - Raptors by Toon Tellegen (Translated by Judith Wilkinson)

Each year I have the pleasure of working with a group of readers to collectively select the books that will feature in a reading programme, Summer Reads. Between August 2013 and January 2014, the Readers' Circle will work through a longlist of more than 150 books to find the 6 titles that we fall in love with and want to recommend to other readers. And throughout that period I'll be posting some of the reviews here on Books, Time and Silence. 
*Thanks to the publisher for providing review copies of this book.

Guest review by Julia Webb

Raptors is the work of Dutch author Toon Tellegen. Tellegen is one of Holland’s most well-loved authors and has written a series of award winning children’s novels, as well as adult fiction, plays, and over twenty collections of poetry, although Raptors is only the second collection that has been translated into English. Until recently he was also a GP. 

I read this book earlier this year after it was recommended to me by a friend who had heard the translator read from it at Poetry-next-the-sea festival in Wells. I knew I would love it as soon as I read the author’s preface – it is without doubt one of the best prefaces that I have ever read. It begins:

'Years ago I invented someone whom I called my father.
    It was morning, very early, I couldn’t sleep any more, I remember it quite clearly.
My father didn’t seem surprised at having suddenly appeared out of nowhere and, in his turn, invented my mother, my brothers and myself. He even, that very same morning, invented the life we should lead…'

With an opening like that I knew I was in for something unusual and special and I was not disappointed. 

Raptors is one long poem made up of a sequence of poems, each of which can also stand alone. Each poem begins with the words “my father" and each poem also starts off with a statement – like a small proverb, about the father, often using common sayings from popular culture: e.g. “My father did not let sleeping dogs lie…” Each poem is like a miniature portrait or a small scene in which the father is the pivotal character. It quickly becomes clear that this fictional father is a tyrant, but that he is also a complex and multi-faceted character. Individually the poems might be short but each has many layers, and as a whole they build into a kind of verbal crescendo. I found I needed to read just a few of them at a time, and then digest them for a little while before coming back for more. 

Tellegen is a master of language and plays with the reader in a very clever way. The poems work on our psyche on many levels. Tellegen uses the idea of the family as a framework and constructs and deconstructs it. He tells us stories, and those stories often conflict with one another. In effect each poem in the sequence is recreating the family stories of the narrator in the same way that we recreate stories of our own families in real life. Speak to ten members of any family and they will all have different memories and opinions of particular family events, or of family members − and who can say which, if any, version is true?  Perhaps there is an element of truth and fiction in all of them. Or like with most families there might be different layers of truth. Tellegen uses this premise to take us on an exciting and surreal journey, and one that often left me, the reader, with conflicting emotions. Sometimes I detested the Father, but at other times I felt sorry for him. It certainly made me think a lot about family dynamics – and, coming from a somewhat dysfunctional family myself, I could definitely relate to some of it. 

Tellegen has managed to make the language both emotionally loaded and playful, which is quite a feat to pull off. He also juxtaposes the everyday with the surreal to marvellous effect:

'My father,
there was a gaping hole in him
in which my mother and my brothers
entertained themselves

they sat at a table,
they laughed, played dice
and cheated

and the hole in my father grew bigger
and bigger,
and shots were fired in my father,
people screamed
and were arrested

a car stopped on the edge 
of my father,
my mother and brothers got in…'

The playfulness and surrealism of the imagery put me a little in mind of poems in Homage to the Lame Wolf  by Serbian poet Vasko Popa or the work of Charles Simic, but there is something almost Biblical about this collection too. This is also a very masterly translation. I imagine it would not have been an easy book to translate and Judith Wilkinson has done a great job. I found this book moving, disturbing and inspiring all at once. It was a joy to read and it reconnected me with my love for language. Reviewer George Messo said “It takes a book like this, seemingly hurled through the ether, to crack us on the head and wake us.” I couldn’t agree more − I imagine this is a book I will come back to again and again.

Raptors was first published in the UK by Carcanet in 2011. ISBN: 9781847770837; 96pp

Julia Webb is graduate of the MA in Creative Writing at The University of East Anglia. She is a poetry editor for Lighthouse literary journal, has had poetry and reviews published in journals and online, and in 2011 she won the Poetry Socity's Stanza competition. She lives in Norwich and teaches creative writing.

Worlds - A Guide for Readers

Worlds (a Writers' Centre Norwich gathering of writers) takes place in Norwich from Monday 17th-Friday 21st June 2013

Every year for the last decade a unique and wonderful gathering of writers has been taking place in Norwich. The Worlds Salon is an open space where writers come together to discuss the art, craft, and profession of literature, share ideas about what is happening now and might happen in the future, and develop friendships that inspire and influence their writing for years to come. There’s an impressive list of writers who have been involved, including J.M. Coetzee, A.S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, and Xiaolu Guo, alongside many other internationally celebrated authors.

And yet, few people really know what Worlds is. It is often called a festival but it isn’t. Not really. A festival is a gathering dominated by public events, where audiences encounter literature and ideas and there’s a buzz of excitement that comes from a shared passion. Books are bought, reading adventures begun. Authors pop in for a few hours before heading somewhere else.

But Worlds, the heart of Worlds at the Salon, has no audience. The discussions necessarily take place in private – it frees participants to explore together, try out ideas, debate in substance and be wrong on occasion: all fundamental aspects of the creative process – and even though there are brilliant events around the edges these often have little to do with the core purpose of Worlds.

The fact is: Worlds isn’t about readers. It is about writers. Some of you may have noticed that I can be a bit bolshy about the way readers are sometimes sidelined from the processes of literature, treated as passive consumers of whatever is dangled in front of us rather than active participants in the art of literature. At the Edinburgh World Writers Conference last year I got so frustrated about this that I threatened to create a rival readers conference, and I hope to do this in the next couple of years. Readers must and will lead the transformation ourselves. But the truth is that I don’t feel angry about Worlds. It is one of the most incredible weeks of my year. And readers benefit from what happens there.

The best books I read are those that are original and exciting. Great writing comes from writers being enabled to write what they want, to push boundaries without worrying about whether a publisher, politician, or anyone else thinks it is something they should write about, or something that readers want to read. There is so much writing out there that failure shouldn’t matter to readers. If a writer takes a risk and it doesn’t work, so what? If a writer takes a risk and it pays off, we all have a book that will be loved for decades to come. Creativity cannot be constrained. If we readers want to have access to brilliant writing across forms and genres and from around the world, then events like Worlds are imperative to making this happen.

Furthermore, Summer Reads was created in 2010 to open Worlds up to readers. Some of the best books we’ve featured in Summer Reads including The Longshot by Katie Kitamura, The Tall Man by Chloe Hooper, and After the Fire, A Still Small Voice by Evie Wyld were discovered through Worlds. Had it not been for Worlds I would never have read them, and all the wonderful conversations we’ve had about them would never have happened. And even though Summer Reads has grown so that it can now feature great writing wherever we find it, regardless of the authors availability to come to Worlds, that facility of introducing great writing from around the world to readers remains at the heart of everything we do.

I first encountered Worlds in 2006 when, at Waterstones, a couple of colleagues got to meet Andrey Kurkov (author of Death and the Penguin – one of my favourite books at the time) at an outdoor event that also featured Steven Fry as well as two authors, Aleksandar Hemon and Shahnush Parsipur, that I’ve since read and loved. I gave them my books and wished I were there with them. The next year I made sure I was there and in the coming couple of years I followed the public programme like a groupy, planning my days carefully and making sure I could see everything it was possible to see. I sold books and discovered amazing writers from all corners of the world. In many ways, it was my on-the-job training for world writing. I still remember the thunder storm that halted Sheila Hancock in the middle of a Norwich City of Refuge reading at the Cathedral, the feeling of worlds opening upon hearing the masterful poetry of Adam Zagajewski and Kei Miller, and the sense that the world had been turned on its head as I sat behind one of my favourite writers, J.M. Coetzee, at an event about climate change at the Playhouse.

That I now work at Writers’ Centre Norwich is largely because of these experiences. I loved Worlds and I wanted to be a part of it. Over the last five years that dream has become a reality and I’ve been fortunate to have sat in on these discussions at the Worlds Salon. The flash of ideas around the room never fails to inspire and excite me. I tweet like a maniac, desperately trying to keep up with the pace of discussion and share some of the topics with those not in the room. Last year conversation revolved primarily around the relationship between truth and imagination in writing, and some of the thoughts remain with me to this day. A participant described fiction as being ‘a lighthouse that guides us towards truth, or something resembling truth.’ Another talked about the process of writing as ‘letting fascination rule language’, and a third said that: ‘literature sets out to add to the enchantment of the world.’

Three are beautiful, idealistic, wonderful phrases that catch glimpses of why I love literature. I can’t wait to see what this year’s Salon will bring. Our theme is Ways of Writing, Ways of Reading, an exploration of the ways that technology is changing how we write and read, and the possibilities this opens up for cross-art collaborations. It promises to be an amazing week.

But it saddens me that more of my fellow readers have never had a chance to discover the wonders of Worlds, and will miss out on all the conversations taking place, for they impact upon what we will read in years to come. But it doesn’t have to be that way. So here, friends, is a short guide to getting the most from Worlds.

Watch or listen to content from the Worlds Salon. Each one kicks off with a 10 minute provocation to get the discussion flowing and these are recorded and shared through the Writers’ Centre Norwich website promptly. In the meantime, why not look back through the annuls at some of the great provocations already delivered. I particularly love American poet C.K. Williams on Nature and Panic which takes in his sometimes regret at having to hold the unimaginable panic of The Road by Cormac McCarthy in his consciousness, no matter how wonderful it is, and his clarion call that ‘beauty saves us, beauty will save us, the beauty of art, the beauty of spirit, and most fugitive of all, the beauty of hope.’ I also love Gillian Beer on The Reader Resists from last year, in which she wondered what the role of the reader is in engaging with the written word.

Attend events. There are afternoon readings every day featuring writers you have probably never heard of before. They are free and amazing forums for discovery. Come along if you can. Evie Wyld will also be launching her second novel, All The Birds, Singing, at a Granta Best of Young British Authors event on Wednesday – don’t miss that!

Join the Conversation - If you are on Twitter, follow #Worlds13 for live commentary throughout.

Read reports from the Writers’ Centre Norwich marketing team throughout the week.

Come on. Get involved in Worlds. And start your own adventure today.

On Bibliodiversity and A Light Song of Light

I was delighted to be asked by Carcanet Press to write a short piece about Summer Reads. The following appeared first at www.carcanetblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/sam-ruddock-bibliodiversity.html where it is accompanied by the largest picture of me I've ever seen.Apologies for that!


Bibliodiversity. What a mouthful of a word.

‘…a Maroon / of a word and a word so silent / it is the opposite of song.’ So Kei Miller describes another word in ‘Twelve Notes for a Light Song of Light’, the title poem in his third collection A Light Song of Light. If there is a central focus of that book, it is that poetry should communicate with the directness and universality of a song, and carry a similar emotional resonance.

And yet when I first heard this word used last month – unwieldy as it is - it had the feel of poetry. It was one of those moments where all of my beliefs about reading fell into place.

Say it with me: Bibliodiversity.

Reading is more than a hobby; it is active participation in the art of literature and should be supported as such. I believe that reading broadly is more important than the specific books we actually read. That by reading across forms and genres we expand our horizons, break down the barriers that constrain our thinking, and avoid the supermarket ‘pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap’ sort of bookselling that increasingly determines how readers discover new books. In its own way, I think bibliodiversity is as important to a healthy literature as biodiversity is to a healthy environment. And I’m fascinated by the idea that a reading revolution centred around bibliodiversity could have as much of an impact on the way we write, publish, sell, buy, read, and talk about books, as Fairtrade has on how we shop.

Readers love discovery and readers deserve as much support in developing the craft of reading as writers have to develop their writing. Given a little support readers – me included! – regularly surprise ourselves with the sorts of books we enjoy. Tearing down the barriers that make us uncertain about our capacity to engage with a particular book or genre can be a wonderfully enabling process.

It is these thoughts that led Writers’ Centre Norwich – a literature development organisation interested in both the artistic and social impact of creative reading and writing – to launch Summer Reads. Each year we gather a group of keen readers together to work through a longlist of over 100 titles and select 6 books to feature in a reading campaign throughout the summer. Summer Reads acts as a guide to some of the most exhilarating writing and storytelling from around the world and a focal point around which to create networks of bold, confident, and adventurous readers.

This year the six books we are promoting include A Light Song of Light by Kei Miller as well as works of fiction, non-fiction, short stories, novellas, work in translation, and uncategorisable mash-ups of all the above. It is a veritable feast! Whatever your usual fare, why not head over to www.summerreads.org.uk and discover something new.

Book Review: Of Mutability by Jo Shapcott

Too many of the best cells in my body
are itching, feeling jagged, turning raw
in this spring chill. It’s two thousand and four
and I don’t know a soul who doesn’t feel small
among the numbers. Razor small.
‘Of Mutability’

In her essay ‘On Being Ill,’ Virginia Wolf describes the effect that being ill has on one’s perceptions. She talks about the ‘horizontal view of the world’ that comes from spending so much time on your back, the different ways of seeing that it inspires, and the way it opens up the sky.

In 2003, Jo Shapcott was diagnosed with breast cancer. Seven years later, the cancer beaten, she published Of Mutability. Although not specifically about her battle with illness – cancer is never mentioned for instance – that experience of ill health and the different ways of seeing it enabled, provides the topography upon which the collection is built. As the title suggests, these are poems about transformation, mutation, mutability, in the body and the world around it. Shapcott presents this mutation as sometimes liberating, sometimes destructive, full of possibilities and yet ultimately a symbol of just one terrifying inevitability. There are shifting territories and permeable boundaries, where pavements ripple beneath feet and fingerprints dent hillsides.

Of Mutability loosely follows a narrative arc from diagnosis through all sorts of mutations towards a resolution and all-clear. There are also nods to the artwork of Helen Chadwick, which two of the poems respond directly to, and Percy Shelley’s ‘Mutability’ with its clarion call: ‘Nought may endure but Mutability.’

That is certainly the feeling here. Mutability is the single consistency around which uncertainty orbits and transience passes. The first mutation, that of cells that leads to a diagnosis and the title poem is wild and unbounded. The year is 2004 and the world is tearing itself to shreds through war and climate change, leaving the narrator feeling ‘razor small’, everyone in skins they feel uncomfortable within. In ‘Era’ the reader is placed into a dangerous world where magpies squabble, fountains splash ‘chemical bubbles’ and traffic swarms ‘round Vauxhall Cross, like crazy fish, with teeth’. Later in St Bride’s we have an even clearer vision of war, where internal transformation and external conflict mirror each other, leaving ‘the smell of print and ashes in my nose.’ In ‘Night Flight to Muncaster’ the reader is transformed into an owl, flying free over the landscape and taking a trip to the seaside. But it ends on a sour note, as the owl’s senses enable it to hear things other can’t: ‘You can hear clouds creak, droplets hiss’.

This is an unhappy world being transformed against its will. Much later, in ‘Viral Landscape’, and ‘I Go Inside A Tree’, the mutated internal and external landscapes come together, permeable, liminal. And yet, around this, there is a calmer, sensual, more mystical view of mutability taking place. In ‘The Oval Pool’ a woman turns to water, and watches the pain of those around her. Yet she remains defiant: ‘there will be no evaporation.’ In ‘Abishag’ a couple seeks to mutate together so that they are sponged down as one, the borders between them vanishing as she licks the sweat from his skull and feels ‘his mind through my tongue’.

There is humour, too, a black humour in some, but genuine humour elsewhere. In ‘Hairless’, Shapcott questions whether physical transformation changes who and what you are, the poem starting with the line ‘Can the bald lie?’ and ending with a roar against the dying of the light. In ‘The Deaths’ she imagines walking with death like ‘two drunkards’ before she implodes ‘like a ripe mango’. One of the most enjoyable poems is ‘Somewhat Unravelled’, an imagined conversation between Shapcott and her auntie whose experience of the world has similarly been transformed by dementia. Their intimate words fill spaces, their promises of straight talk and ‘a meal so wholesome and blimmin’/pungent with garlic you will dance on it and/eat it through your feet’ a guard against further mutation.

There are series of poems that mythologise mutability, others that map the gradients of permeability and a series that reflects upon trees, those bastions of strength that yet ‘respond to everything, everything else’ just as everyone does.

Towards the end, the register again changes, uncertainty, hope, gratitude creeping in until, in ‘Procedure’, all the worries literally go up in the steam of a cup of tea, the narrator putting all the ‘blood tests, and cellular madness’ behind her and saying ‘thank you thank you thank you for the then, and now’.

Yet, ever playful, Shapcott ends on a different note, a postscript to the mutations. In ‘Piss Flower’, one of two direct responses to individual pieces of Helen Chadwick’s art, we finally see a limit to mutability. Now all clear, Shapcott is no longer so mutable, she become a man and produces ‘a golden parabola’, but she can do tricks of her own, in her own body and without any transformation. Perhaps other things may endure beside Shelley’s mutability.

The theme of mutability is so ubiquitous that it can even be applied to the structure of the poems themselves. Almost all start as one thing before transforming before your eyes, their implications shifting with one surprising line or dissonant ending.

In June 2012, Jo Shapcott spoke in Norwich and referred to life as ‘vertiginous, multi-layered joy’. That seems to me a perfect description of Of Mutability. But these layers are not separate, they leach into each other, they mutate, they contain within them near limitless possibilities. Of Mutability is a collection that looks mortality bullet-straight in the iris, but does so without fixating upon it. It is self-knowing and vulnerable. These poems are highly intelligent and yet entirely unpretentious, each word carefully weighted yet retaining an accessible clarity. The collection is playful, frequently humorous, and quietly powerful. It rewards multiple readings and careful consideration but has a visceral power that captures you immediately and doesn’t let go until the last word.

Ultimately Of Mutability is a book about the euphoria of survival. The notion of Per ardua ad astra – ‘through adversity to the stars’ – runs throughout this collection, an open mouthed appreciation of the spectacle of life, even when mired in earthly troubles.



Of Mutability is one of five books featured in the Writers' Centre Norwich Summer Reads programme. For more information and resources that include an extract, video content, and links to other reviews, see www.summerreads.org.uk

Book Review: All That I Am by Anna Funder

“When Hitler came to power I was in the bath. The wireless in the living room was turned up loud so Hans could hear it in the kitchen, but all that drifted down to me were waves of happy cheering, like a football match. It was Monday afternoon.” 

All That I Am opens with history on a knife edge. The Golden Era of the Weimar Republic – artistic, progressive, intellectual, experimental, permissive, excessive, - is passing and a new one of extremes about to dawn. So well trodden is this history that we think we know what will follow, but one of the outstanding things about Anna Funder’s debut novel is that it reveals a side to the history hitherto largely uncovered: the early years of the Nazi’s terror, the persecution and expulsion of political opposition, the extent to which other countries were desperate not to antagonise Hitler, the long arm of the Gestapo reaching out further than anyone dared believe. As she did in Stasiland – a reportage collection of personal stories from behind the Berlin Wall that won the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction – Funder casts a fresh and vibrant eye on forgotten stories. All That I Am is another marvellous book.

 

 The characters here belong to that Weimar generation: they are the World War One survivors who vowed that war could never be allowed to happen again, the political reformers who saw progressive social democracy as the antidote to imperialist conflict, the artists and journalists who captured the atmosphere of the 1920, the teenagers inspired by the language of the future.

All That I Am is narrated alternately by celebrated German playwright Ernst Toller in New York in 1939 as he seeks to re-write his memoirs, and an elderly Ruth Wesemann in 2001, who receives the recently rediscovered memoirs in the post. Reading these memoirs unlocks her memory and events come flooding back and soon overtake her. Between them, Ruth and Toller bring the unremembered – Hans Wesemann, Dora Fabian, Berthold Jacob, Mathilde Wurm (all whom existed though are here sometimes linked in ways they were not in life) – back to life. Their story is of bravery and conviction in the face of history, of desperate opposition to the reprisals that followed the Reichstag Fire and subsequent exile in London. There, powerless and with threats against their lives growing and the UK government turning a blind eye, they continue to struggle, desperate to warn the world against what is happening before it is too late.

The extent of Funder’s archival research is impressive, and her decision to novelise the events a wise one. It allows her to marry the personal stories of her characters with a broad brush stroke approach to history. Fact, interpretation and biography form the framework for All That I Am, but it is the fiction that makes it a great book. Funder imagines the characters back to life in vivid detail; readers will be quickly engrossed in their milieu, standing alongside them in terrified defiance.

This is white-knuckle storytelling. Through the personal narratives, Funder explores the experiences of the characters, the driving forces behind why and how people are able to be brave, and the results of that bravery on their lives and those around them. She adeptly explores the paradoxical mix of fragility and strength that can sometimes be the make-up of great people.

This is particularly the case with the heroine, Dora Fabian, a ‘sort of German de Beauvior: less sex, but more political”. She is driven by conviction in her cause, self-sufficient and no-nonsense. Ruth and Toller are each enthralled by her – ‘We were the two for whom she was the sun. We moved in her orbit and the force of her kept us going.’ – and so is Anna Funder. In an interview with The Scotsman, she describes the experience of coming across Dora’s story as leaving her ‘thunderstruck and irrational and besotted and intrigued.’ She is a compelling character and it is apparent that, for Funder as well as her characters, this book is a act of love, of recording her courage and self-sacrifice, celebrating and remembering her life.

The same desire to resurrect and testify to those past is apparent in the character of Ruth, whom Funder met in Ruth’s later years, and whose stories first turned her on to the possibility of this book. Ruth is the compassionate core of the novel, an unobtrusive observer of those around her. This personal sympathy could easily turn All That I Am into sycophantic fiction of the worst kind, but Funder impressively maintains a rounded warts-and-all view of her characters. Compassion is a constant theme and one feels that it is the challenge of doing justice to these figures that drove her to write. ‘Imagining the life of another is an act of compassion as holy as any’, says Ruth at one stage, ‘once you have imagined such suffering, how can you still do nothing?’

By presenting humanised stories, and enabling readers to experience these vicariously through the characters, fiction has amazing power to change our understanding of the world and compassion for others one person at a time. Funder and I appear to share this idealistic conviction. All That I Am is an exercise in proving the validity of this conviction. But more than this, it is a wonderful read.

The plot starts slowly, with more set-up than feels necessary, but builds and once the characters come into their own it swiftly becomes an involving, compassionate and wonderful novel of love, friendship, courage, espionage, and betrayal. It is both a page-turning thriller and a considered investigation of courage and conviction. The characters are tested at every step, and they respond in varying ways. Some turn, some break, none is perfect. In the end, as Wystan Auden notes to Toller: ‘All that we are not stares back at all that we are.’


All That I Am is one of five Summer Reads, presented by Writers' Centre Norwich. For more information, see www.summerreads.org.uk

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Read an extract
Anna Funder in conversation at the Melbourne Writers Festival

In Conversation with: Joseph O'Connor

When Joseph O'Connor came to Norwich earlier this year, I was lucky enough to get the chance to chat with him about his latest novel, Ghost Light, and the Irish literary history that inspired it. He's a great interviewee - you feed him a question and he tells you an anecdote - and a wonderful storyteller.





Interview conducted on behalf of Writers' Centre Norwich as part of the Summer Reads programme that I manage.

In Conversation with: Simon Armitage

Earlier this year I had a quick chat with Simon Armitage about his latest collection, Seeing Stars, as part of the Summer Reads programme I work on at Writers' Centre Norwich.

Book Review: Seeing Stars by Simon Armitage

There is a scene in Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme in which Monsieur Jourdain, an uneducated but wealthy tradesman determined to improve his social standing, returns from a lesson with his philosophy master utterly entranced with a new discovery. He has, he pompously informs his wife, spent his life speaking prose! Prose! His more grounded wife counters that the only thing she has heard him speak recently is “total rubbish” but he departs more self-satisfied than ever. It is a hilarious scene in which Molière ruthlessly mocks Jordaine’s pretentious predilection for fancy notions over substance.

I start this review with this anecdote because one of the responses I hear most often in relation to Seeing Stars, is that it “isn’t really poetry, is it.” Such nonsense! As if form were more important than content! As if Jourdaine could become a gentleman simply by knowing the form in which he speaks. Whether Seeing Stars is conveyed in a form that more closely resembles poetry or prose is largely irrelevant. What matters is whether it has an effect on the individual reading it, and Seeing Stars is, for me, a collection of rather wonderful and moving vignettes that its author, or rather one of his collage of narrators, handily refers to as ‘story-poems’. These story-poems combine narrative drive and plot twists with awareness of language, pacing, and the impact of an odd transgression mid-line. In this hybrid form, Armitage excels.

There is a performance quality to the work. Armitage debuted many of these pieces at readings for a couple of years before publishing Seeing Stars and that gently lulling Yorkshire accent is apparent even when reading on the page. If there is a focus, it is on the substantial over the stylish, the meaningful over the meaningless. Armitage has a sneer for those “critics, sponsors, trustees, rich benefactors and famous names”, for whom art is canapés, champagne and glamorous receptions. Seeing Stars is their antithesis: an intimate and memorable chorus that suggests that often the most meaningful things in life are the least dramatic.

The title itself, and the works contained, conjure connotations of awe-struck wonder at the majesty of life, of punch-drunk shock at things gone wrong, of the flat disappointment that comes with encountering a celebrity who turns out to be just like everyone else, who cannot transform everyday monotony into something spectacular.

Seeing Stars is gritty, surreal, tender, and often hilarious. In ‘Last Words’ a woman who has been mortally wounded by a spider makes a last phone call and finds herself conversing with a similarly dying man stranded at sea. In ‘The Christening’ a sperm whale sites ‘finders keepers’ as justification for the British Crown continuing to own the Elgin Marbles and in ‘Seeing Stars’ an injudicious remark by a pharmacist to his customer results in a nasty altercation that leaves him reeling. One of the more poignant passages comes in ‘The English Astronaut’ when the narrator follows an astronaut to a Little Chef on the A1 and watches him stare out of the window at the busy road, never at the sky.

 “…And his face was not the
moon. And his hands were not the hands of a man
who had held between finger and thumb the blue
planet, and lifted it up to his watchmaker’s eye.”

In many ways, Seeing Stars most closely reminds me of a collection of Murakami short stories, where the fantastical and the mundane exist together, overlapping and interpreting each other and emotional states are elucidated through grandiose experiences. However, where Seeing Stars differs is in the liberal use of satire and farce. These reverential experiences are never allowed to become too heartfelt before Armitage’s wicked, pen cuts them down a peg or two. There are many laugh-out-loud lines, and some exemplary first lines:

“I hadn’t meant to go grave robbing with Richard Dawkins
but he can be very persuasive.”
‘The Experience’

“I fear for the long-term commercial viability of the new
Christian cheese shop in our neighbourhood.”
‘Cheeses of Nazareth’

How could you not wish to read on after these? Armitage casts an absurd eye over various aspects of life that might otherwise become too heartfelt. In ‘The Delegates’, he lambastes consumerist waste, in ‘Bringing It All Back Home’ he turns the cult of celebrity on himself, recalling Googling his own name and imagining participating in the Simon Armitage Trail, a guided-tour of his life where the turnout is ‘woundingly low’. Family interactions, Thatcherism and the perception of Yorkshire in the wider world all intwine.

This is an entertainment rich, content conscious collection that works on many levels and provides a satisfying reading experience. In substance it is full of ideas and humour and wry glances into the sort of poignant, absurd, contradictory lives we live and have always lived.


If this review has whetted your appetite, you can read three of the poems here, or listen to Simon Armitage read from them here.
Seeing Stars is one of six books selected for the Norfolk-wide Summer Reads campaign, run by Writers’ Centre Norwich. For more information, see www.summerreads.org.uk

Seeing Stars was first published by Faber and Faber in 2010. The edition shown above is the paperback edition, published in January 2011. ISBN: 9780571249930, 74pp

Book Review: The Lessons by Naomi Alderman

Read: April 2010

The Lessons in one Tweet-sized chunk:
An uncomfrotably familiar tale of youth, and how the lessons in life often come too late. 

“We could, you know, hara-kiri, right here in the kitchen.”…

“Why would we do that?”…

“Because our lives are over, James. This is it. The end. We will never have a time like this again.”

These words, spoken by the erratic Mark Winters as his university course draws to a close, sum up one of the attitudes Naomi Alderman seeks to dispel in The Lessons: the pervasive and destructive notion that one’s university years constitute ‘the best days of your life.’ That saying, and all that it encompasses, is the raven perched perpetually upon a chamber door screeching “never more” at the characters, and as its words grow louder, so the desperate mania drives them on, tension building, towards something ominous.

James is a first year student at one of Oxford’s illustrious colleges. His older sister has told him how to get the most from Oxford but now that he is there he feels isolated and falling behind the pack. And when he injures his knee slipping on a patch of ice he finds that he can no longer keep up. Oxford, it seems, has broken him in one semester.

But things change for James when he meets Jess, a warm and generous girl who seems to like him. She introduces him to the wealthy and charismatic Mark Winters and his bright world of decadence, parties and love affairs quashes the blankness enveloping James. Together with Jess and a few others, James moves out of the college dorm and into Mark’s crumbling Georgian mansion, to share his charmed life. There they reside, a small group of close friends living on food delivered from Fortnum and Mason. But no matter how hard they seek to hide from it in the sequestered grandeur of that hidden house, life eventually catches up and when university ends they find that all their studying and parties have not prepared them for the difficulties of adult life.

The Lessons begins with a wonderfully vivid image of waste and excess, in which a feast has been cast into a swimming pool, with the greens and reds of a panettone’s crystilised fruit dissolving in the water. And throughout, there is a feeling that something terrible is going to happen, that all the wealth and excess, all the stretched taut tensions will result in tragedy. Without being particularly sexual, it is full of with desire laden undercurrents that make it intensely erotic, and keep the reader turning the page compulsively.
There is a sense that Naomi Alderman, who received her first degree from Oxford, has experiences to exorcise from her time there, delusions about Oxford to challenge, and this comes through into the prose.

“What is Oxford? It is like a magician, dazzling viewers with bustle and glitter, misdirecting our attention. What was it for me? Indifferent tuition, uncomfortable accommodation, uninterested pastoral care. It has style: the gowns, cobbled streets, domed libraries and sixteenth-century portraits. It is old and it is beautiful and it is grand. And it is unfair and it is narrow and it is cold. Walking in Oxford, one catches a glimpse through each college doorway, a flash of tended green lawn and ancient courtyards. But the doorways are guarded and the guardians are suspicious and hostile.”

Oxford does not fare well. Yet one of Alderman’s greatest achievements in The Lessons is that even with the very vivid descriptions that bring Oxford to life, she manages to convey a more universal depiction of university. The student’s attitudes, the mentality of newly won freedom clung to lest it evaporate in thin air. At times I felt that she was writing the words I had felt but not articulated, and this was incredibly powerful.
Just as Oxford’s spires loom large over the characters, two celebrated novels dominate The Lessons: Brideshead Revisited which has become almost a caricature of Oxford, and The Secret History, a tale of power and self-destruction in a similar closely knit group of students. With the former, there are a number of close plot and character resemblances.  James and Mark are essentially Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte, and their homosexual undertone is brought into the foreground. Like Charles, James is a passive character, drawn to the powerful Flyte-like Mark, a troubled character for whom a wealthy and privileged upbringing has resulted in a dangerous lack of self control. His Catholicism, which he clings to fervently, has given him a world view of glorious suffering, of saviour and sacrifice which is reflected in his relationships with the surrogate family he gathers around him.

It is this surrogate family that most recalls Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. The characters of Jess, Emmanuella, Fran, Simon, James and Mark bear resemblance to those in The Secret History as does the texture of their interaction. Their group dynamics are familiar; there is an atmosphere in which independence and freedom are careering dangerously out of control. And, just as in The Secret History, the narrator is driven by an obsession with beauty. “Beauty is a lie, but it is so hard to spot,” mentions James, as he thinks back not only to Oxford, but the lustre of wealth that so beguiled him. Like Richard in The Secret History, his fatal flaw is “a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs” and each of them, drawn to a picturesque, emotive world they never dreamed of belonging to, sacrifices much of their selves in the process.

Yet while the resemblance to both Brideshead Revisited and The Secret History is apparent, the latter is a slightly false one, for the characters in The Lessons pale in comparison to The Secret History. Emmanuella, particularly, seems lost to plot and narrative, but Fran, Simon and most frustratingly of all, Jess, lack a voice of their own. Of course, to a certain extent this is due to James’s obsession with Mark which prevents him seeing anyone else as a real person, but it is frustrating, nonetheless. They are massively undercooked, cardboard cut-outs to stand in the sidelines and tell us something about Mark and James, rather than fully rounded characters. James is a blank slate who seeks out a strong personality in whose reflection he can define himself. He’s similar, in many ways, to Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, with Mark playing the life of the party Gatsby-esque hero. But neither fully convinces. James is too blank, and Mark’s appeal is not always clear to the reader. Most of the time he comes across as a foolish rich boy without respect for anyone around him.

Similarly, while the roughly fifteen year scope of The Lessons is a virtue that allows it to introduce wider themes of university and life, the plot is not dense enough to surround the reader within it, and the narrative too short so that the tension and austere sense of place that builds up within the first half at Oxford gradually dissipates thereafter.

For this reason The Lessons is inherently flawed. The weak characters let it down and I felt it tailed off towards the end. It’s one of those novels that flatters to deceive, and as such doesn’t quite achieve all that it sets out to. Yet despite this, there is an ominous sense of impending doom which, combined with a well judged portrayal of the expectations of life which are contained within universities, make it a compelling and readable novel in which the lesson, in the end, is one of self discovery.

“What is it that one learns from life? I had always supposed that I would accumulate some wisdom as my life progressed. That, as in my progress through Oxford, some knowledge would inevitably adhere to me. I suppose I hoped that love would teach me.
But the very question is redundant. It is ridiculous to think we can learn anything from so arbitrary an experience as life. It forms no kind of curriculum and its gifts and punishments are bestowed too arbitrarily to constitute a mark scheme. There is only one subject on which the lessons are in any way informative.
The man in the mirror is me, I thought. For good or ill, that’s me.”

7 out of 10

Viking, April 2010, 9780670916290, 280pp

This book is one of six Summer Reads chosen by Writers’ Centre Norwich this summer. For more information see www.summerreads.org.uk