Day 3 of my alphabet – a gift for you, all about looking after ourselves. The letter C – for comfort

The Snowflake Man

by Anna Vaught, posted in Uncategorized

Although I am currently working on Killing Hapless Annie, I do have something else simmering away. I am not yet sure if this is something which will – or, in fact, should – come to fruition, but I am enjoying thinking about it. To start me off, I wrote a draft – very DRAFT – synopsis of what it was I thought I wanted to write; then, to begin exploring its subject, I wrote a handful of poems. I’m sure this is an unorthodox method, but think of it as scribbling. Much of it will get crossed out. The thing that is so very different from Killing Hapless Annie is that, there, I wrote about what I knew; here, I am writing about what I want to know. Does that make sense?

Anyway, may I introduce one of my heroes? He appears in Killing Hapless Annie (he’s one of Annie’s, the protagonist’s, imaginary friends), but because he’s shy and apologetic that he’s not a man of letters or for company, he gets a room of his own.

The Snowflake Man

In 1898, a young boy called Wilson Alric Bentley began watching the snow fall around the family farm in Jericho, Vermont; he watched it with an unusually rapt attention. He thought about its composition, about where it came from – about its auspices in both meteorological terms (although he was likely unaware of that word just yet) and those more divine: how could it be that something so pretty should fall so casually? Was it part of a conversation with God and creator – a dialogue which we could not translate and construe? The young Bentley also watched rainwater, seeing it composed in rivulets and torrents, looked at dew as it settled in exquisite beads and watched as frost formation drew delicate shapes across windows of ferns and feathers on the windows of his farm. But it was with the snow that Bentley was most in love: he wanted to understand how and what it was and to look at it more closely. That journey of discovery, separate and loving, is the story of The Snowflake Man. Times came and went; others laughed, but Bentley kept on watching the snow – and he remained the devout watcher of the skies until just before his death.

Bentley’s mother understood her boy’s fascination; his father thought him foolish and possibly unmanly for finding some diversions when, on the farm, there was much practical work to be done. That boy wrote, fifty five years later, that everything he was and had ever done, he owed to her – because she saved and showed considerable devious acumen in presenting her son, aged seventeen, with a microscope and then a camera. Over the next few years, Bentley, working alone in the woodshed, developed the science of photomicrography as he learned to connect the camera to the microscope and photograph the tiny snow crystals on his slides. The results were exquisite and remain, to this day, the fullest and most extraordinary collection of stunning snow crystals – of a myriad filigree stars, strange tiny pillars with hexagons at either end; things possessed of an inchoate beauty and, as Bentley wrote, ‘no two snowflakes are alike.’

When Bentley wasn’t photographing and cataloguing the snow crystals, he made fine studies of the frost formations and patterns of dew – looking at its beads strung along spiders’ webs; tying down a grasshopper atop a blossom overnight so that he could photograph the creature bejewelled with the dew. All this he did while remaining a farmer, playing his trumpet, providing holidays to city folk of slender means: he quietly became a world authority on snow crystal formation and, through his articles and published copies of his photomicrographs, became known as ‘Snowflake Bentley’ – or sometimes just ‘The Snowflake Man’. He saw and entertained worlds others merely glanced at: he was a humble, absorbed genius.

In The Snowflake Man, the reader is made an offer: we have the extraordinary images of the snow crystals he recorded; we have some letters and the transcripts of some interviews and the texts of articles he wrote for meteorological journals as his work became known. But here is the story that remains to be told, because we do not, yet, really know him. The Snowflake Man offers you a story of his life as he sat for fifty winters, alone, in silent thought and study. It explores intriguing questions: who were the three impressive women in his life – one ‘Mina,’ for whom he once scratched ‘Window frost monogram, Mina’, a beautiful but timid declaration of love to the girl the neighbours called ‘sassy’? The story ponders how does an individual can sustain, over a lifetime, a brilliant interest in something others – even his own father – called foolish? Bentley saw in the snow crystals a numinous, spiritual quality: he saw them as a metaphor for heavenly life. The book unfurls a tale of a boy mocked, an interest passionately abided by, of loneliness and love lost and found and celebrates in its story that it is Bentley who is also a metaphor – for those who were laughed at, chided or mocked for what they believed: the Snowflake Man never gave up and the book that is named after him seeks to introduce a greater number of readers to him for the first time. For his is an extraordinary story.

Four poems for Wilson A Bentley (1865-1931)

Horae

How beautiful it is to see

The eye trained on a telling shape –

Which seems to say, “I am the first

You are the last, to see me in my perfect form,

The only man to sit and wait

For what this moment must become.”

The snowflake falls; he catches it

On worsted cloth of deepest black:

It takes a place – but not alone,

For, ferried from beloved sky,

The crystal specimens collude

To give a pattern to a world

Through Vermont’s still and patient man.

For fifty years he sits and holds

The architecture through his glass:

Dendritic crystal, needle fine,

A bullet, hexagon or flower.

He does not mind if they should laugh

At Sisyphus in snow and ice.

So all is well, but glances ask:

The man with camera, microscope –

With evanescence in his heart,

Is he lonely, sat out there,

With slide and board for hours and hours?

A splint of broom to hold each one –

The snowflake man who gathers up

Each tiny plan to hold it dear:

It will not come again to us.

The horae, hours of prayer or joy,

But not with words, this silent man:

His goddesses the six point stars:

He sits and worships, reverent still,

A lucent world and what it tells.

He checks the hoar frost and the glass

To see the curlicues of line –

The ivy leaf or comfrey stem,

The miracles of build that come.

He  does not care to go, for now,

Beyond the cloth, the hands that serve

To show us all a myriad frames

Which coalesce within his grasp.

How beautiful it is to see

The eye trained on a telling shape

Which seems to say “I am the first,

You are the best to see me in my perfect form.”

“Window frost monogram Mina”

Mina, as you were: bay window, a side light and a black background.

Then as you were again: middle room – direct front light. I was specific.

Mina – I was precise; exacting with the fall of dark and bright: I wrote it down.

Mina, as I hoped you were. But you smiled and went away, sassy girl.

I sat for hours as the shadows fell, knowing what night must still portend: my craft.

I drew a nail across a pane and scratched your name, invisible to others as

The evening settled in. I knew that morning brought a monogram in window frost

For you to see and I to know: I showed you how its feathered lines and confidence

Spoke truth to us – that you could stay.  The frost had crept along the span

To show you how this foolish man had said the most that he could say. And then

I spoke – and ruined all. A foolish joke:  my love; my one;

My word –oh mono gramma, mina gramma. Hush – a clumsy, unschooled man.

When I essayed another length to keep you here – pellucid worlds for us to share,

Yet how I knew what I had done. You cared not yet for crystal casts,

The shapes recorded day by day. The metaphor for heavenly plan

Was lost for you in my thwart hands – and so I scratched and tried to show

A simple script, its blazon – you. I fell and fell and no-one knew.

Oh sassy girl, why should you stay or want an artless snowflake man?

 

In Jericho

If I should fall, then say to me the reason clouds form as they are,

Why ice should seed along a scratch, why I should love my six point star.

I do not know or care to see the smiles that fall in brazen line,

But innocence and clearest eye embolden me to make her mine.

I speak of love and quiet worlds, of Jericho on winter nights:

The sweets of patient maple taps, a sugar house and amber lights

Of unctuous syrup mixed with snow, auroras made of rosy glow,

My borealis blood red sheen – if I should fall, then make me know.

When I am not and you are here, beholden to this dusty room,

Be gentle with the tenuous forms; please do not break the splint of broom,

But hold the snowflakes page by page, arranged as I have left them now;

Consider this – why should they be, ephemeral and urgent? How?

In nature’s fragile crystal frame I see a world beyond the hill,

Beyond the log pile, brook and shed; behind our eyes when we lie still.

And when I fall, then say to me you read its language, pure and keen –

And set my records on my desk and light my lamp: make them be seen.

Mother: snow queen

My mother in her housecoat grey;

Her deep set eyes and sunburned face

Were set against the world that day:

A year of  stringent, creeping grace –

She would provide by hook or crook

A camera for her foolish boy

By winter next. If all forsook,

That should not vex her, seeing his joy.

My father laughed and thought me weak

To study crystals, quite unmanned;

My brother saw me fey and meek:

We must provide and work the land.

But Simple, gifted with such hope,

Sought fine connection, lens to slide –

With camera and microscope

The flake and image to elide.

The photomicrograph crept through:

I tweaked its edges; sharpened; limned.

Arranged it with five thousand new

And held my breath as beauty dimmed.

Still father mocked, but mother saw

The useless craft would last a life;

She saw her boy as metaphor

For human spirit; outpaced strife.

And she could see the shapes I held –

My inscapes in that freezing cage;

And she could know the transient meld

I had transported to the page.

So inchoately grasp the words

Formed by the boy who took her name,

Let us release them – free as birds:

No two snowflakes are the same.

Editing

by Anna Vaught, posted in Uncategorized

An issue presents itself, as I suspected it would: that it might be better to start Killing Hapless Annie in the second chapter as the first chapter starts at the end – or near the end – of the story. It’s a device I tend to like in books and I really don’t mind if, at the beginning, I know the end. Or rather, some of the end, because I don’t yet know what happened on the journey or how I got there! I will, of course, bow to my expert editor and publisher, because they have a much clearer idea of market and also – of course – how it reads for someone else.

So, it might be the difference, then, between these two first paragraphs:

‘Shall we start at the end? Friend; sympathiser; co-conspirator: read on.’

And,

‘The girl is standing on a soft bank in a spring breeze as the laundry blows high above her there in the orchard. The breeze blows cold, but there are currents of warmth about her legs as the day decides whether it will whip or kiss.’

I like the semi colons in the first line; I like its relative economy and the direct address to the reader – which is an important part of its construct; Mr Vaught prefers the third person placing of the second option; he likes the setting and the slight frisson of alarm in the whip or kiss bit. I suspect he also feels that I use too many semi colons. It will be interesting to see what my book group thinks next week. What I learn about editing I will use with all the writing I do now.

Already, the title of the book has been truncated; the chapter headings, rather long and deliberately, ironically formal and slightly archaic, have been snipped. For example, chapter three is currently sitting under, ‘The Fucking Caravan’ where before it had languished under, ‘In which there are scary ordinary things. And a Fucking Caravan.’ I had in mind, all along, the terrifying in the everyday, but I don’t need to exhaust readers with a long chapter heading. And they can work out that the everyday things in the book – the dentist; a ballet teacher; grandmother’s cooking; terminally ill Hazel upstairs on Tyneside with the sound of Countdown piping up the stairs – ‘Please get me some more morphine Terry!’ ‘Hang on pet; I’m trying to decide between vowel and consonant at the minute’ – were terrifying. Well, they might not be everyday for all – but this is how I saw them and how the narrator sees them. The fact that the caravan is ‘Fucking’ also hints quite enough at the horrors within: caravans, as well as places where reside monsters and vampire ladies, can be (quoting the late Angela Carter – on a vampire queen, not a caravan) ‘the place of annihilation.’

So I am snipping and following sensible advice. It’s a bit painful sometimes, but it has to be done.

If you love him

by Anna Vaught, posted in Uncategorized
I wrote this quickly a little while ago: it was my answer, in a short story and in allegory, to a friend’s deliberations: ‘I am not ready.’ ‘How do I know if he’s The One.’ You get the picture. I said before that I see metaphor in everything; I’ve noticed I have a habit of using allegory when problem solving. I’d better add that ‘he’ didn’t look like a duck. And he didn’t waddle. But if he had, the same rule applies…..
                                                      IF YOU LOVE HIM
Walter looked a little like a duck. His nose was beaky, he had an unattractive gait which was more of a waddle really. For a man, he was short, but he compensated for it with good cheer. Always good cheer. In Walter, there was not a whiff of arrogance or the slight bitterness one sometimes sees in those who have a chip on their shoulder due to perceived misfortune. He woke, comfortable in his own skin. Mostly.
And there was one more thing: Walter was very, very funny. He had the sort of timing which would cause his friends – and he had many- to double up; to have painful sides. He was also articulate, without being showy, for Walter loved words: he felt them in in his mouth like something smooth and minty (a humbug) or experienced them as something rough and to be handled carefully; with a firm, dexterous hand: he kept his words in his word hoard. He visualised it like that: a compartment containing treasures set on an orient carpet of etymology and variant. Just occasionally the words made tenebrous sounds; he couldn’t shake them off. Because sometimes they said,
 ‘You are lonely, Walter: you are lonely.’
Walter’s mother loved him dearly; to his father, he had always been a bit of disappointment: he wasn’t a man’s man, but a boy who fell in the scrum. A boy who didn’t. Walter was flatfoot clumsy and, in a person who did not know him, he might cause giggling – or perhaps the the foolish scorn of those who really should know better but don’t. Walter, also, had never had a girlfriend – but he lived in hope. Waddling on through and making people laugh, but seeing the eyes of the women pass to another man.
That day, on his way to work  – Walter restored fine musical instruments and his hands were a beautiful picture as he worked in detail, where nothing fell or was broken  – he had an odd sensation that today was different; an inchoate feeling – not of dread, but of a sort of warmth spreading up through him. One might say a new kind of happiness. There was a woman waiting for him at the shop; she carried a cello and was tall and willowy, with the gentle flush of the English rose and strawberry blonde hair; she wore a white coat. Almost, he dared say, a little like a swan. Walter didn’t mean to look a little too intently, but then she was, to his eyes, heart-meltingly lovely. The words became entangled and he said, in a rush,
‘Yes, yes, of course. I can restore your cello to health. It will take this long; these are the procedures I am likely to follow and yes – it is a truly fine instrument which you’re so right – so so, ah, so right to treat with reverence and want to bring back to its former glory.’
He was avoiding her eyes for fear of blushing, but, when he looked up, she was staring intently at him. There was an awkward silence. Now or never. He wouldn’t die if she laughed in his face. Of course she would laugh in his face. He was the boy who fell in the scrum; the boy who didn’t. But she said,
‘I have a break at about 11. I wonder if you would like to come and have coffee with me. At the new shop over the road?’
Well now. They were both blushing. Later they drank their coffee and talked and talked and the next day, too. Like him, she loved to play with words; to handle them and feel their heft. And Walter worked on the cello until he had brought it back to clear, resonant notes and a burnished beauty; she struck some notes right there in the shop and he almost cried. But the willowy creature stopped him, right there, with a kiss and the world around went silent. And he was the boy who did.
Yes, they do make a funny-looking couple, the swan and the duck. But they laugh constantly and make the kind of music that reverberates long. They hear – and, I should say, feel –  the grace notes: those notes between notes which are taken in on a visceral level. There are three little ducks or swans. They have their mother’s grace and their father’s waddle – a curious combination, but a good one.
So, my friend, if he looks like a duck, but he makes you double up laughing. If he can nurse something tired and jaded back to life. If he talks and his words do not enervate but buoy you up. If he smiles at everyone and there is no tiring bitterness about the man, and if, together, you hear and feel the grace notes, then kiss him and be transported. You know I’m right.

Short stories, a book to buy, a food blog – and people interested in my ridiculous colour coded books as described in the first item!

by Anna Vaught, posted in books, colour-coordinated books, cornerstones, juliet mushens, short stories
First of all, this is what happened at our house when I decided to colour block the books. And I mean thousands of them
                                                    The Bookshelf

The online photo archive, Flickr, is awash with people who colour code their books. Such a cohort had, Annie noted, given them cheerful, jubilant  titles such as, ‘cornucopia of books’ or, ‘rainbow books.’ It appealed, so she had a go at doing the same. Thus orange began by making towers of Penguin texts. And then – serendipitous!- she saw that the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanacks were already done. With a frisson of excitement, she turned to other colours.  Hmmm: a subtle change: how might one grade and sequence pink and purple books? Let’s have a look. So, we ended up with William Faulkner next to a googly-eyed children’s book on strange birds (actually: now I look at this shelf in the picture – I am almost charmed by the company books keep in our house – author) and texts by Sylvia Plath and William Empson. Annie felt niggled, though. The shelves and their arrangement did not have the neat appeal of the rainbow books on the Flickr gallery. But she ploughed on, breathing in a shallow way; pushing onwards too fast: the whole process was tinged with anxiety, but once started, she could not stop.

On came the Black books. Penguin Classics, naturally, for the most part, but Annie observed with pleasure that a few others would fit in here. Malory’s Morte D’Arthur next to the late Benazir Bhutto’s first autobiography, Daughter of the East. The pleasure was quickly soured by the memories of a myriad love affairs gone wrong, with only the book for company.
  ‘That first one – the Malory – captured me when I was twenty one. Then I got chucked by a brilliant man, a medievalist, and couldn’t look at the knights again. That second one was read in Pakistan, after I’d got chucked in the foothills – and I spent new year alone and snivelling under a scratchy blanket in Muree. Spoiled memories. I spent a lot of time getting chucked by clever man and sat there shivering, for the loser I was.’
  Now, Annie was running out of time and put the rest off until tomorrow. Twenty shelves were done. Productive work, though a shame about those name-calling memories of being ditched and dumped and laughed at.
  Later that day, Annie’s friend Susie happened to come into the study.
  ‘That thing with the books. We’ll have to get you out of that: it makes you look like you’ve lost the plot’, she said.
  Not, then, ‘What lovely colours! Let me join in the rainbow adventure!’ Instead Susie sniggered quietly and left the room.
  But our book shuffler was determined to stay on top of things; such arrangement of hue and tinct made the environment seem controlled; coordinated – despite nothing being quite as neat as the blueprints offered by the internet rainbow artists.
  Then Dixie Delicious came home; he looked but said nothing. He looked again. And said nothing very loudly.
From "Rainbow over Bengal" comes this amusing post, "The [color-coded] bookshelf" -- The blogger expresses (at the END) pretty much my thoughts on "the keepers of the rainbow books." (Said opinion was apparently also held by those occupying the house with her, as evidenced by this "dark purple book [that she did not place there] in the midst of a sort of sea colour melange.") More photos at click-through.Colours Melange, Rainbows Book, Purple Book, Sea Colours, Dark Purple, Bloggers Express, Amusement Post
And the following day, there it was. A dark purple book in the midst of a sort of sea colour melange (because, as she went on, the urge to think in areas of the colour spectrum rather than pure tones became more compelling). She had not put it there, a book by the Southern author Robert Penn Warren, against a diary and a book on Methodism; cocking a snook, she thought, at the green of Lord of the Rings. It went on.
  He said, ‘I cannot fucking find anything.’
  ‘But don’t you think they are ….pretty?’
  ‘No. Are you trying to get chucked again and spend new year snivelling under a scratchy blanket?’
  She stood back. It was true. No-one could find what they were looking for. You don’t go to bed thinking, ‘I’ll read a pink one tonight.’
  And thus it was that a lesson was learned. If you have a lot of books, adopting this approach is not befitting. It’s also not, as a general rule, clever, funny or remotely sexy. With apologies to the keepers of the rainbow books, it is not for Annie – however much she might like it to be so: because dusty,  stacked up, higgledy piggledy books are what slake a thirst and animate a life.
  The colour is within.

———————————————

Here are links to various pieces of writing. It’s a fair range!

http://calcuttascarlet.blogspot.co.uk/

http://calcuttascarlet.blogspot.co.uk/p/media.html

http://rainbowoverbengal.blogspot.co.uk/

http://www.blurb.co.uk/b/1996514-rainbow-over-bengal

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/175218241726254687/

The title of the new book and some snow crystals.

by Anna Vaught, posted in Uncategorized

Looks like the title of the novel is going to be Killing Hapless Annie. For various reasons – but mostly those of style and aesthetics.

Killing? Who got killed? Well, I can’t tell you: you’ll have to read the book, but it wasn’t, I can tell you, a tidy and easy process. And there were other people there, too. And in the room there were a flip chart, a desk and an efflorescence of artificial flowers in fake water. Come read  my book – next year, that is.

I have started planning the next one, in the full knowledge that I may start, scrap and try something else. But it’s called The Snowflake Man and it is based on one of my heroes: W A Bentley, the Vermont Farmer who watched the snow fall all the winters of his life and concluded that it was exquisite: he took photomicrographs of the snow crystals for forty four years. And no two snowflakes are alike. You will have heard that phrase. It’s his.

Here: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=william+bentley+snowflake+pictures&espv=2&biw=1024&bih=677&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=oK5kVeWhG4GwUdDcgKgO&ved=0CCAQsAQ

I am going to tell his story. Dolly Parton is not in this one.

Keeping going!

by Anna Vaught, posted in Uncategorized

I thought I might write about how I got to this point. Where someone actually said they would publish my novel.

I know, from talking to lots of people, that so many want to write or feel they have a book in them. I know a number of people who have tried many times to get the attention of an agent. Here’s how it went for me. I’m mostly an English teacher and I read all the time. Three books a week sometimes. Does this confer on me the ability to write a fine novel? Well, ummm, no. (I will return to this in future posts.)

A year ago, on days when I had some childcare and when I had some gaps between lessons (as GCSE and A level classes fell away in exam season), I started to write. I’d written as a freelance journalist before and I’d written a couple of self published texts; one was a kitchen diary (that ran out of steam!) and the other the result of a sponsored short story marathon. Good practice, I suppose. But this new project was different. It held me in a a hot fury: I had this story I wanted to tell. It was based on my own life and experiences. Not that I thought I was a particularly interesting individual, but I did have a notion that the story of how an individual, Annie, manages adversity and mental illness with a host of imaginary friends (including Albert Camus, Dolly Parton and Frieda – the brunette one from Abba) and creates an alter ego, Hapless Annie, whom she later has to squish…..might provide an intriguing tale. I also wondered if a number of experiences I could delineate might be, shall we say, unusual.

So I wrote. In a great big splurge. Between lessons; when everyone had gone to bed: sometimes I hid in the shed and sometimes I wore earplugs and bribed the kids with refined sugar. After a few months I had 60,000 words. I edited. I thought I was writing a memoir at this stage, so I entered it for ‘Mslexia”s memoir competition and wasn’t placed. I cried a lot. Told myself the book was rubbish and put it away. Then I decided that there was fire in this Celt, so sat up straight and re-wrote. I began to see its flaws more clearly. Re-wrote. Read the many words of all those who had been repeatedly rejected by agents; of those famous and not so: folks who sat on slush piles for years. I sent my work to three agents. One wrote back. I cried again.

I heard about Cornerstones Literary Consultancy and decided this was a good place to start. They looked at a sample of the ms and told me there was a lot to like, so I approached this discussion as if it were the beginning of an editing or creative writing course and went for a full ms review. It was to be part of study, for me. My work with them provided the turning point and my editor was the wonderful, warm and supportive ‘Chick Noir’, creative writing, non fiction and editing specialist, Alison Taft. She was clever, insightful and so kind to me, but she was also teaching me, being frank about what perhaps didn’t work  – the bits which were so complex as to be befuddling; where it was not entirely clear who the protagonist was; those sections where there was too much  that was passive when it should be active – and what might.

I went on to combine what I was learning from Alison with the self editing material Cornerstones gave me. Within a few weeks, I’d had a substantial ms report, a long conversation and a sense that I was getting somewhere. I did a big re-write and also tweaked it to fiction (which had been a thought since my earliest conversation with Cornerstones) because it gave me a little more artistic licence, allowed me to make more of the most intriguing situations in the book and, to be blunt, gave me a more marketable book: memoirs are extremely hard to sell as an unknown.

I considered my next move.

I got a subscription to ‘Mslexia‘ magazine; saw the lovely Joanna Barnard talk at the Bath Literary festival (then read words of encouragement on her blog), listened to the agent Juliet Mushens at the same event, read this by Juliet…

http://www.torbooks.co.uk/blog/2014/05/27/juliet-mushens-on-how-to-approach-an-agent-dos-and-donts

….and thought, ‘I think I am really learning things now.’

I entered the Bath novel competition. I wasn’t placed. First thought was, ‘That’s because my book is rubbish.’ I was sitting in a car wash at the time. As you often are. I also reflected on how I’d been told so often, growing up, that I was rubbish and that this was part of my internal narrative. But frankly, I’d had enough of it (by now, the NHS had given me permission to have had enough of it) and I thought, ‘By the time I get out from under the blower, I’m going to have changed my mood. And I’m not going to give up. This is only the beginning. And if I can’t place this book, I will write another one.’ It was a bit like CBT (not that this had worked on me – actually: you can see that through Annie in the book), but for nascent authors. In a car wash. Then, I was laughing, the sky hadn’t fallen in and I’d decided I needed to have another go. The car looked pretty good, though the back wiper had now been torn off by the bristles. This might have been a metaphor. I see metaphor in everything.

I had read that Jessie Burton’s stunning debut, The Miniaturist, had sat on slush piles. I knew from Joanna Barnard’s blog that many a year had passed between the beginning of Precocious and publication – that she had considered whether entering the Bath Novel competition might be a last move before putting away the ms. Hmmmm. I wasn’t aiming to be a big author. But I felt – in a truly passionate way – that there were stories I absolutely had to tell. Just had to tell. I couldn’t not. Reading elsewhere, this seemed to be a good sign. Anthony Horowitz said so!

I went home and read Francine’s Prose’s Reading like a Writer. It was an extraordinary book. Here, said she, are your teachers. She introduced me to or reacquainted me with a myriad fine authors. Look in these books – this is how you learn. I rewrote some more.

I went home and read my new copy of ‘Mslexia’ magazine and I decided to try something new, which was to contact an independent press. The magazine was my starting point for information about this; it was full of encouragement and ideas: here was one now. Try contacting an Independent press. I had been learning about such a thing: a small publisher. That something is small, I had concurred, does not necessarily mean it is endowed with less. I looked around and did some finding out and discovered something and somebody I really liked. But would they like me?

I wrote to Patrician Press, a small and vibrant publisher, which produces fine books that are also (does this sound old fashioned?) the most beautiful objects. I had written a funny, quirky book; a black comedy, with some stark and potentially shocking content. I wanted to entertain, but I also had a sense of vocation tied up with this book: I thought, ‘I survived. It was unorthodox, but I’ve done it. How would it be if others could read this book and feel encouraged? Is it even possible that this book could be useful for someone who is a health professional, with its accounts of therapy and response? As a sort of book a bibliotherapist  might mention: “Look, here is an example of how someone has been comforted and restored by reading – by words?”‘ Patrician Press responded warmly to the book, even seeing immediately that an important part of it was, as I said, ‘..as a paean to the NHS!’ And I suppose my book didn’t sit so comfortably in a genre: it was important, as Alison Taft had counselled me, to find the right person for this one.

And so here I am. Now, I work about twenty five hours a week. I have a lot of other commitments. I’ve three boys, aged four to thirteen – and I’ve spent big chunks of my of my life at least partially scuppered by mental illness. It isn’t theoretically possible that I should have time, energy – or perhaps even faith enough to write a book. Except I just did. And It’s coming out in 2016. I’ve even asked two people prominent in mental health journalism and in psychiatry to write the foreword. I gather I might be a bit naive, because apparently that doesn’t usually happen if you’re, you know, a rookie like me.

And so if you have a story you must, absolutely must tell, start writing and when you feel discouraged, get back up and scribe. xxxx

Hapless Annie TO BE PUBLISHED 2016

by Anna Vaught, posted in Uncategorized

THIS BOOK WILL BE PUBLISHED IN 2016. I AM SO EXCITED

The Timely Death of Hapless Annie – a synopsis

This is a tale of an individual grappling for sanity and identity; a black comedy in which we discover how Annie, its curious protagonist, conceived in childhood an alter ego called ‘Hapless Annie’ in order to present a different, more palatable version of herself to her family and to the world beyond. She carried on acting this role until very recently, in adulthood, when she was able to slough her off and be plain old Annie, who had always been trying to break through. Ominously, the alter ego had even begun to develop autonomy: you learn how Annie had to deal with that. It is not very pretty. But perhaps it is ingenious.

‘Hapless’ comes into the world because Annie, from earliest memories, has always been told by her mother, the blessed pillar of the community Santa Maria, that she should have been left in a bucket at birth: this child is a superfluous and unlovely thing. So, Annie creates a bouncy, funny, accident-prone lively little girl who might, she hopes, survive, be loved and thrive. To maintain this act over four decades is painful, confusing and psychologically costly; such a peculiar person, though, takes you on a roller coaster ride of bizarre comedy, unusual observation and journeys in the risible hinterland of socially lauded but cruelly dysfunctional families – all while she tries to keep her head straight. Annie possesses two further troubling things: a little black thought that nuzzles in her palm and then periodically grows exponentially and an embolus of fear – always there, waiting to dissect.

The death of the title does not come quickly in a satisfying epiphany and a great big shove; instead, demise begins gradually: there are adventures with psychologists and psychiatrists, long hard thought and a myriad medication. Process completed, however, you are promised a flourish and a very real stifling. Annie’s goal is, ultimately, to be free. All she had ever wanted was to, ‘go out, other than apologetically, or in disguise, hurry-scurry along the wall.’

The book is about serious matters: fear, confusion, dark days of depression and breakdowns. But it is a book intended to be darkly funny: madness and its environs are. Annie recounts the stories of relatives whose lives and actions are stranger than fiction, such as the eerie folk who live at The Hill, Terry the Fat Controller and morphine-dazzled Hazel, love affairs with an impressive range of men and some really terrible strange deaths of a skewering and squishing sort. She takes you on some truly, terrifically horrible holidays with a most odd family, such as sojourns in The Fucking Caravan; offers you trysts with hot, sooty, French blacksmiths, a seat at comical funerals, a spot on a sofa with Pentecostalists, the true horror of boiled cabbage and spotted dick and very dead aunts opining, ‘Thou Shalt Not’ from a wall. Moreover, Annie has always had a great range of imaginary friends with whom to talk, survive, laugh and learn. There’s Frieda (the brunette one) from Abba, John Keats, Mary Anning the fossil collector, Sylvia Plath, Shirley Bassey, Dolly Parton, W.A. Bentley (the farmer who photographed snow crystals for forty winters and became known as The Snowflake Man) and, for comfort, erotic adventures and a first orgasm, there’s the French writer, philosopher and critic, Albert Camus: her ‘Godfather’. Annie has a busy time and a busy head.

The book is inspired by how an individual copes, imaginatively, with bonkers; in this way it is based on personal experience and its pages populated by people its author has encountered or with whom she has lived. But how does it all end? The protagonist’s approach to survival has been unorthodox, but at the end of the book she is still standing, – now just plain old Annie, laughing and taking a bow for Albert Camus. Ultimately, the tale, while it might make you laugh, wince, shudder or even tut at its inappropriate social comedy, also carries with it a timely message to anyone poleaxed by mental illness and its attendant discomforts – or any reader interested in the windings of such things: you can, like Annie, survive and prevail. Ah: but how would you do it? Now that is an interesting question.

New Adventures in Mental Health

by Anna Vaught, posted in Uncategorized

This is the text of an article I recently contributed to an online journal for careworkers. Please be aware that its content is pretty frank.

BY HOOK AND BY CROOK.

Some adventures in mental health.

Anna Vaught.

I have just finished the first draft of my book about my many years of managing anxiety and depression. Although writing the text was not a therapeutic exercise – and I am currently tweaking it so that it reads as fiction, not as memoir –  it certainly made me aware that I have learned a great deal about support provision for those with mental health problems. I also discovered that some avenues of help led, for me, to very little. I know that it is not a case of one size fits all and also that, without the forceful intelligence and deep compassion of those in the mental health team in my area, I would either be unable to function or I would be dead. They fixed me, all the while empowering me, prompting and encouraging with the notion that I would be able to find the answers myself and, in time, bed them down so that I could approach life, stress, fears and difficulties in a more manageable way. The text is called The Timely Death of Hapless Annie: it’s about saying good bye to the old self – the one who was suffocating you: ‘Hapless Annie’ was the alter ego of ‘Annie’ – created, by her (and me), to provide an evolving, more palatable version of self: we all have different methods!

Originally, I had intended to set out and analyse what it was that made my year or so of CAT – cognitive analytic (or analytical) therapy – so effective. Then it struck me that the narrator of my book had already done this, so I’ve given some areas of text, below. I had a complex set of things to disentangle: I had been a self harmer since childhood, had twice (not very competently) tried to take my own life; I had persistent, terrifying nightmares which featured both things I thought I had caused – such as terrible harm to others – and things that had been done to me. At the point when I met the therapy that was truly life changing, I suffered from low mood, panic attacks, ruminating thoughts I couldn’t slough off and the sort of anxiety that could leave me laid-out tired. I was becoming convinced that my whole life had been a disaster and what I felt was compounded by the intense guilt at not being the sort of parent I wanted to be for my three young boys.

The initial diagnosis was that this was post natal depression and I was offered CBT; I did not excel at it. I am not disparaging CBT, but it felt like we were scratching the surface. Fortunately, I had a GP who was prepared to try again. I was able to communicate that, inside me, there was a stew of complex and stoutly held beliefs: I felt sick in just the way I had since childhood, cutting and head banging now, as then, to diffuse it. If my GP hadn’t acted then, I doubt I would be here now. How can that be? Because when you get to a trough of despondency, you can see no way out and the thought that you should die is a response both to that and what seems like logic to you then: I should be rubbed out and not inflicted on others. It would be better.

To anyone who thinks depression is something you should be strong minded about and just get over by not wallowing in it, think again. I didn’t have time to wallow: I was clawing my way through teaching and writing and parenting three young kids. But in my head, the response to everything was instinctive; quick as a flash. You’re all wrong. A disaster. You’ve done terrible things. They hate you. You deserved what you got – from beatings with punch and slap to the beatings which ring and reverberate in the mind: mess-up; maggot; we never wanted you; you’re disgusting; can’t do anything: look at you, you, you. That is what it sounded like in my head. All the time. That’s what it had sounded like for a very long time. The point was that it was getting louder. And that’s when the CAT came in: some CBT-type stuff; some analysis – awareness of patterns. You get to talk a lot; eventually you get homework. I wrote to my mother and to my brother; my therapist wrote a letter, half way through, to me; she wrote again when we finished. I wrote back to her. It was detailed, nerdy, sturdy stuff and it fitted me. And the really important point was that it was the gentle humour, warm invitation and incisiveness of “Dr Crook” and “Dr Hook” that brought it out. Their carefully phrased comments. Their determination to get me well. I could see it in their eyes. I am not saying this is all lovely and tidy. I have to be vigilant and I have to use what I have learned. Turns out you can teach an old dog new tricks.

So this was me (well, ok, Annie, in the book):

“In the first CAT session, your writer – Annie – felt obliged to perform in order to present a more palatable version of self. It took her little time to realise that the person she was with, Dr Crook, was hugely skilled and had seen through such a performance straight away and had thus raised a hand to stop it. Her patient sat back in her seat, caught in the act and embarrassed. “You do not have to put on a show for me.” Dr Crook wrinkled her nose and her eyes twinkled like Santa’s – should he ever be a knowing and insightful clinical psychologist.  “I’m sorry” said Annie, and drifted off into a place where, for walking down the street, she would be tarred and feathered. Abominable; hateful; no-one wants you. Look! They are all laughing at you. They always knew it was you, you you…..

“Shall we interrupt that chain of thought and then perhaps you can tell me what it was about?”

See, that’s the skill isn’t it? It’s all in the delicate lexical placing of “Shall” and “perhaps.” The direction is clear enough, but it is issued like an invitation not an imperative and the “perhaps” sows not seeds of doubt but seeds of possibility. Annie was awestruck by this fine woman and immensely comforted because Dr Crook didn’t look like she was about to tar and feather. Or just point and laugh.

So they were off. There is little in what Annie said to Dr Crook that she would not have said to some others, in strange silent rooms or to the darkness before sleep. But it was clear certain themes were going to come back again and again. There were buckets, where Annie should rightly have been left at birth, lilies on dead fathers, mothers dead in armchairs; terrible dreams for years and years. “He did nothing to you. Silly girl. My bitch-daughter. It’s all in your dreams.”

There were vituperative holidays in rickety caravans with parents spitting “you are not here through choice” and rough sex with men who hated her and shame. Up came the embolus of fear: horrid dreams of hands and arms being on her where they should not have been. There were people who laughed, people who spat and people who pointed; the strange family homes of childhood and adolescence, with their sepulchral cold and damp – and frightening eyeball pickles in grandma’s pantry.  Annie saw Nativity Baby Jesus and Crucifixion Jesus from the years she had tried to make God want her: one Jesus was screaming and the other was yelling, but both were insistent in what they communicated: “Go away, Annie. We are for others; we are not for you – dirty girl, rot, maggot!”

Also there were the People of God who spoke in tongues and the people of church who rightly saw the nasty blot of the true sinner: the child murderer, parent murderer, bad mother, poor wife screw-up. It was ugly and raw and exhausting. And the poor Doctors Crook and Hook had to disentangle this lot, with its crazy hops between incongruous images. Sometimes Annie was so lethargic, sentences came laboriously and missing a subject, object or predicate; now, she was all flapping hands and extreme – almost joyous nervous energy. 

They met  most weeks and then Annie also became acquainted with Dr Hook, new GP still on rotation and, as Dr Crook had it, particularly insightful of, of…err, “Nutters?” interjected Annie.

Both seemed to their patient to be able to see the world clearly. Dr Hook was giggly and quite outspoken and when questioned “How do you know?” by Annie, she would look her square in the eye and say “Because I just know.” Annie never doubted her. Dr Hook, too, had the gift of careful placing of words. Words matter. And so does knowing how to do things with words. She issued invitations and  Annie accepted. This other good doctor had the quiet, smiling confidence of the clever and generous: for the patient it was a winner; a panacea; a cure. And, over the year or so, Annie learned really useful things. She learned about ‘Traps’: the striving trap; the trying to keep things in perfect order trap; the trying to be a certain way around others trap. She had spent a lifetime so far trying to impose some order on her messy and precarious world; it was truly helpful to unpick some of it and find that the sky had not fallen in.

Once, when Annie returned home from a vigorous session at the House of Fun (as we shall call it), some words of Dr Hook reverberated in her head – in the car, out through the window and into the world around. “How do I know I haven’t damaged my children with my ups and downs and my instability?” Dr Hook wrinkled her brow and told Annie that, despite her wobbles and the mad bowling match in her head, a doctor would have no doubt that her children would have the best chance to be happy and healthy individuals.”

“But you can’t know that. You haven’t seen me with them.”

“Oh, I just know that. I see many, many people. I see you. So I know.”

It didn’t sound very scientific, but she was firm and it looked like she must have compelling evidence from somewhere. Perhaps they both had a kind of psych-cam in Annie’s house. And Dr Crook and Dr Hook did something else. As a duo, they both assured her, this time with bookish proper scientific evidence and a firm look – despite the screaming and blue murder that was coming out of Annie’s mouth and the blood on her palms as they did it – that she had not and could not have killed a girl, however wrong her actions, age five.

“The day they said I pushed the girl; my mother said it could have made her die and ten years later she did. A fear – an embolus of fear, waiting to dissect and kill – held for thirty years, in cold silence.”

Setting that out into the room was terrifying, so long and so tightly had it been clutched. They told her, instead, that she was “lovely” and Dr Crook added that she was a model patient, engaging and grappling as she did with what was laid on. It was an avalanche of compliments.  Annie  was both delighted and mortified. She could only look down and shake her head. Then Dr Hook said, “You are a fully functional human being. You just need to know that.”

Annie  sat looking at Dr Hook and crying and shaking and saying “Oh thank you thank you are you sure thank you thank you but are you sure?” Dr Hook met her insistent, questioning look with her limpid chocolate-coloured eyes. “Oh, I am sure.” Annie had heard it – but now something in her was open and she could begin to feel it – feel all of it –too. And this is called happiness.

 And so I want to say, don’t give up. A life can be saved or changed. Press for help that works for you, – or your loved one, patient or service user – if you possibly can. I might be naive, but I am living proof that help’s out there. And, also, these days I’m just plain Annie – not so Hapless any more.