Category: Drafts

A New Year Newsletter

by Anna Vaught, posted in bluemoose, book groups, books, bookshops, depression, Drafts, editing, gothic, horror, independent press, james joyce, killing hapless ally, lucia joyce, magical realism, mental health, mental illness, mentoring, Short Stories, Uncategorized

Here is what I am up to next year. Or rather, here is what I can tell you so far. Now look, readers and writers: things have got most tricky at Bookworm Towers. It happens. But, you see, never feel that if life is difficult, if you experience illness or are bereft, your creativity will wither alongside. Take heart; nurture it and believe in it. Make things. That is what I am continuing to do. In the midst of sadness I am writing another book.

What’s coming? In April, you can read my new novel, Saving Lucia. Here she is above. The book that started with a chance sighting of that photo above – the one where the elderly lady is feeding the birds, so very tenderly. She was the Honourable Violet Gibson and, in April 1926, she went to Rome and tried to kill Mussolini, She shot him in the nose. She got closer than anyone else. Lady Gibson was knocked to the ground, put in prison and, eventually, deported; thereafter, she was certified insane and spent the rest of her life in St Andrew’s Hospital, Northampton. Later, a fellow patient was Lucia Joyce, daughter of James Joyce. What if…and do you see the other women above? That’s Blanche, Queen of the Hysterics at the Salpetriere and that’s Monsieur Charcot demonstrating what happens under hypnosis. She is most remarkably responsive. To her right is Bertha Pappenheim, a prominent Jewish social worker, whose institute was razed by the Nazis. It was not until twenty years after her death that she was also revealed to be ‘Anna O’, in Freud and Breuer’s On Hysteria. These women have an extraordinary story to tell you, so stick around. The book is published on April the 24th, but Bluemoose Books is starting a subscription service, where it will be available to subscribers from (I gather) late February. Follow all news here: https://bluemoosebooks.com/ Saving Lucia is part of Bluemoose’s all women catalogue for 2020.

Below is a gallery of images pertinent to what I have been writing about; from a bookshop of towering shelves, an old asylum window, Victorian portraits (the first one has a memento mori which has been added subsequently, but I liked it!), a devil, a baptism in 17th century Virginia, shades of grief, my late grandmother’s house on the Cleddau in Pembrokeshire (the setting for two books now), the holy well of St Non’s near St David’s and Walton West church on St Brides’ Bay in Pembrokeshire, fictionalised in the book I have just sent to my agent…(see below)…

In June, I have an essay in Dodo Ink’s Trauma: Art as a Response to Mental Health; it’s called ‘In Order to Live’ and is about reading and the imagination in my life, kid up, in the face of trauma. Reading as survival, in fact. http://www.dodoink.com/blog and – details when they are up – I also have some weird fiction in a new anthology by Unsung Stories; it’s a really interesting concept and one very important to me: weird fiction exploring mental health themes but also hopeful uplift on these themes. You will see!

In September, my first short story collection is out. Here.

famished cover-c (1)

This is already available for pre-order as part of Influx Press’s subscription service. https://www.influxpress.com/famished Hit the subscription button.

‘In this dark and toothsome collection, Anna Vaught enters a strange world of apocryphal feasts and disturbing banquets. Famished explores the perils of selfish sensuality and trifle while child rearing, phantom sweetshop owners, the revolting use of sherbet in occult rituals, homicide by seaside rock, and the perversion of Thai Tapas. Once, that is, you’ve been bled dry from fluted cups by pretty incorporeals and learned about consuming pride in the hungriest of stately homes. Famished: eighteen stories to whet your appetite and ruin your dinner.’ Oooh and ugh.

Ah but that is not all my bravehearts. I have also, thus is the way these things work, submitted a second novel – witchery in mid 17th-century Somerset and Virginia called The Revelations of Celia Masters – and a second short story collection called Ravished. And if there is news, you will be the first to hear it.

AND

I have written my first magical realism and handed my work in to the literary agency who this year signed me: Mackenzie Wolf, NYC and one of the best girls in the world, my agent Kate Johnson. I think I am allowed to say that this is called The Zebra and Lord Jones. I have been asked by a few people why I am with an American agency. This is partly because we are an Anglo-American crew at Bookworm Towers and I try to split my time as much as I can, partly because they also have a presence here and partly because of my literary interests and ambitions and where. And because of Kate. The best girl. I am desperate to tell you more about this book, set in Wales, London and Ethiopia during WWII – but I cannot. x

When we have had a meeting about it, I will tell you more about a thing which I am over the moon to be able to do: for September 2020 I am offering at least partial fee remission for an MFA (in creative writing) for a student from a disadvantaged background. I have asked if there can be a focus on someone whose life has been circumscribed by mental illness. This is because mine has been – and that’s really why I wrote a novel, Saving Lucia (back to top) about this theme, too. And I am building a writing retreat and teaching room in my garden. I do mean I am building it. With a bit of help, When I am up and running, I will tell you all.

Oh, there will be a lot to share. We will bring you events and news on Saving Lucia – here she is again and note the four windows and the bird on this beautiful cover, below – and I shall share them here and on social media and tell you about everything else that is happening. Saving Lucia is my third book, with the first two Killing Hapless Ally and The Life of Almost no longer with their original publisher and on the move. We will bring you news on this all in good time; you can find copies floating about though!

I have chosen my FREE READ for 2020. I usually do four a year, but 2020 sees all this work on top of my day job (I am an English teacher, tutor and mentor for young people) and extra care for my two eldest boys who are in exam years and have additional needs. This is going to be a rollercoaster year, isn’t it?

I hope we get to meet and I wish you a Happy 2020 and much wonderful reading, perhaps writing. Oh – and I mentioned that I was writing a new book. Here is how it started. The image is of me with the two Shirley Jackson books which are the biggest influence on what I am writing at the moment. It’s called We All Live in a House on Fire -and have a Welsh cake for knowing that the title comes from Tennessee Williams’s The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. And I can’t tell you anything about what I am writing either. Except that I am a third of the way through and very excited. It’s strange how ideas bubble up. I was upset one night and couldn’t sleep. I started re-reading We Have Always Lived in the Castle and there we were. By 4.a.m. I had started writing chapter 2. I anticipate that I will have finished this new novel by the end of March. I write quickly; it’s just how I roll. I have written all my books in 3-4 months, but I wrote my two short story collections in three crazy weeks a pop. Everyone is different and, anyway, I’d say it’s not the writing that takes the time, it’s the editing. Imagine that, when your book goes to your editor – aside of what you have done yourself – it’s about half-way there. But you may feel differently!

But for now, it’s all about Saving Lucia. I hope you like it xxx

Saving Lucia. Why this book?

by Anna Vaught, posted in depression, Drafts, editing, killing hapless ally, mental health, mental illness, patrician press, reading, saving lucia, Therapy, Uncategorized, women writers

This is an earlier post, as I finished what will be my next book, Saving Lucia, Bluemoose Books, April, 2020.

****

I have been compiling my notes, bibliography and acknowledgements for the back of Saving Lucia. Writing this book is not a therapeutic exercise, though I know someone will say that! So what follows is (partly) an account of its stimulus and of my interest in this area.

‘Part of the stimulus for writing about mental illness comes from my own jagged experience and from my own shifting notion of what constitutes sanity and who it is defined by. Society? The DSM? Is it culture bound? Sometimes, even an excuse to rid civilisation of its undesirables, whether it be from eugenics, being round the bend, up a curved drive, or having your records burned and your letters unsent so that you can be contained?

My own first novel, Killing Hapless Ally, draws on many experiences of mental health problems in my own life. I have had many different and multiple tags, from GAD (generalised anxiety disorder) to postnatal depression, to low mood, OCD, clinical depression, mood disorder, and a bipolar II query to other less specific things, such as confusion, a response to complex trauma (this from from a psychotherapist in a talking cure—thank you Bertha Pappenheim, otherwise known as Freud and Breuer’s ‘Anna O’!), and a description of poor coping skills in the face of stress. I have experienced symptoms of sustained low mood, auditory hallucinations, frequent nightmares, protracted insomnia, dissociative episodes and anxiety since childhood. I know what it is to self harm and what might lead you to try and take your own life; I also know what it is to be shamed for problems you did not choose and tried your level best to control. Families have a vital role to play here; were you to be categorised, put away or, through disgust or misunderstanding, denied what is your pressing reality, the outcome could be tragic. The last thing in that list happened to me, but had I been born earlier, I might well have been somewhere different and never got out from that place. And even now – and I hope I have expressed this sensitively, for it is not an unfamiliar world to me – where this choice and admission to hospital may be (it is not always, of course) voluntary, then as the psychologist Dorothy Rowe puts it in Depression. The Way Out Of Your Prison (Routledge, 2013), the decision to go into hospital is (still) a difficult one because once you start going down this route, it can be hard to get off it. But go elsewhere for my story, or do, please, feel that you can ask me about it @bookwormvaught or at http://www.annavaughtwrites.com if I’ve written a post you might care to comment on.

I will always be drawn to the case of Lucia Joyce. And to the cases of Violet Gibson, Bertha Pappenheim (otherwise known as Freud and Breuer’s Anna O) and Blanche Wittmann.’ As we go, I will tell you less about me and more, – so much more – about this book.

 

Anna xxx

For writers starting out. Do comment, discuss and contribute your thoughts!

by Anna Vaught, posted in A Life of Almost, At Home magazine, books, bookshops, children, Contemporary Small Press, Drafts, editing, emma press, killing hapless ally, mental health, mslexia, passerines, patrician press, peace-seekers, poems, poetry, psychology, reading, refugees, Uncategorized, women writers, writers, writing

I know there are a lot of people out there writing books and a lot of people submitting said books at the moment. I know or have met people who now have stunning commercial success, writers who are agented but yet to have their first book sold, those who work with the small presses and who are not agented, those who are what we might call a hybrid (I am thinking this is likely to be me) – by which I mean agented but also finding publication routes on their own, perhaps with a small press, those who are disconsolate because everything is a flat rejection or they have received no answer at all and those – including recent MA in Creative Writing students – who are, for various reasons, too scared to submit at all. That’s just for starters.

It might come quickly; it could take years. I do think the key thing is not to take rejection personally (while accepting that, maybe, you need to write a different book if nobody at all is biting); also, if you are floored by rejection and delay and disappointment, then this might not be for you. And that, OF COURSE, is fine. Because there is a life beyond writing.

Here’s where I am. I started writing a book, Killing Hapless Ally, a novel, which originally began life as a memoir, in July of 2014; by the 1st of May, 2015 it had a publisher and it was published in March 2016 by the small press, Patrician. I only sent this manuscript to five agents; two rejected it, three didn’t reply at all. I read an article about the press in ‘Mslexia’ magazine and I liked the sound of it, corresponded with its charismatic founder and there we go. I was, I should add, realistic about how visible the book would be, but I have relished the experience and, ever since, the bonds I have made with its readers. Is it a bestseller? Good God no, but it has been important to its readers and the engagement I have had with them has been life changing. With Patrician, to whom I now feel rather bonded, I also published a poem in Anthology of Refugees and Peacemakers (just back from an event at Essex Book Festival on that) and will be co-editor of next year’s anthology, My Europe and editor of its Tempest, which is a book, by various authors, on (Trump) America. And my poetry has been published by the brilliant indie Emma Press, too.

Way leads on to way.

Meanwhile, I spread my wings and wrote another book, a novella, The Life of Almost. I began sending this out before Christmas 2016. I’m a quick worker, apparently. Two agent rejections (one the day I sent it!), three small press rejections (but read on for that and for more on agents), waiting on two further presses and an agent so still out on submissions. BUT during this process, another agent had read a section from Killing Hapless Ally and admired my writing; said agent asked me to send what I was currently working on (as in, The Life of Almost) in partial then in full; told me they thought I was a brilliant writer but that this book was not, though they admired much about it, for them. To their taste, for example, it needed more pace. But I had also told them about my plans for the next book (I actually have four more books sketched out: is that crazy sounding?) and the agent asked me to send them the full manuscript for that as soon as it was ready because they absolutely loved its concept. This was my third text, Passerines.

Meanwhile, one of the other agents told me (having read three chapters of Almost) about how they loved my writing style. That there was much to like; it was innovative and compelling but in the end the book was not right for them. Keep sending! And of the three small presses who rejected me, one said that though they would not be taking this one, they were confident it would be placed and would I send them future work? The other told me there was some lovely writing and they were impressed, but that this text was simply too innovative for them and, on that basis, they would simply not be able to shift enough copies to make it financially viable. I do know that the small presses – whom I adore and champion, by the way – are often those who DO champion the innovative book, but clearly that is not always the case.

So you see, there’s a lot of encouragement in that pile, just as there is a lot of rejection. The rejection is part of the experience and of the learning.

I have almost finished my third novel. So that’s three books – from the first word, I mean – in three years and this is not my day job. I run a a company, teach, have three young boys and I’m a volunteer and mental health advocate, too.  I don’t have a great deal of time so I’ve got to want to do this.

Do you? Take your time and don’t give up.

I may not have hit a super stellar advance just yet and obviously I may never, but I am playing a long game. May those who find later books go back and read my first, for example. We are three years in and I have met so many fascinating people, read hundreds of books – I read a great deal anyway, but I am so much more alive to different presses and sources of reading; it has been such an adventure. I’ve made a film about mental health, presented at a literary festival, had a packed book launch at a wonderful bookshop, spoken to, had dinner with, corresponded with, interviewed and had my work read by – it is happening now – writers whom I admire. I’ve also published poetry and articles and guest blogged. To boot, I think I am a better teacher because I am a better reader and writer and what is more I am able to share my work with students. Right now, I am commissioning those in years 10-13 to write for the two anthologies I have mentioned and, through my company, I felt inspired to set up a year-long bursary so that I could help someone who had had – this is the icing on the cake for me – long term mental health problems (as I have had myself) to evolve and complete a creative writing project.

So that’s where I am now. In the peculiar position of having one book out on subs and another being waited for and…without giving too much away…being discussed. At the weekend I had an offer of publication for my second book, but I am taking my time.

And now I have to make the tea because the kids keep coming in and rooting through the cupboards. Not having the time forces me to write when and as I can and I mull at other times, which I also regard as working. If you wait for your perfect writing environment or space or time, it may never happen. So why not write something tonight and get started – even if it’s just a paragraph?

Do tell me about your experience and about how you are getting on.

Anna.

Killing Hapless Ally: Patrician Press (2016)

The Life of Almost (TBA!) and Passerines (ditto)

Passerines

by Anna Vaught, posted in Drafts, editing, james joyce, lucia joyce, passerines, psychology, Uncategorized

Here she is again, the Honourable Violet Gibson. She’s feeding the birds in the garden of St Andrew’s Hospital, Northampton. That’s where she ended her days. Because in 1926, Violet shot Mussolini. She wasn’t a great shot. She’d also previously tried to shoot herself and failed at that. She was beaten by the crowd, that day in Rome, when she shot Il Duce. She experienced prison, lunatic asylum, then deportation, not realising where she was going.

Home?

No. She was incarcerated for life.

But what if…

What if she had had help, that day in Rome? What if she had not missed, had not only grazed the nose of Mare Nostrum?

What of Lucia Joyce, similarly abandoned by her mother and brother, in the same psychiatric hospital? How would it have been if she got to do things differently; could go back and forward? Now, how would any of that be possible?

What has this to do with Anna O or Blanche? With Dr Freud, Dr Breuer, Dr Charcot? With Vienna, or the Salpetriere in Paris. And why did Violet’s father, Baron Ashbourne, meet James Joyce, Lucia’s father, before he left Dublin for Trieste? And if Violet shot and  didn’t miss, then history is changed, as well as the lives of women whose freedom was radically curtailed, whose madness was…questionable; who were abandoned,derided, or turned into exhibits.

I will publish a proper synopsis very soon, but it is one hell of a road trip, this – and what happens has much to do with the birds, the passerines…Some of this is true; some of it is imagined, but the latter for the sake of adventure and sweet liberty.

From the end of chapter one, where Violet speaks of Lucia,

‘I know that was a long sentence. I made like Joyce. Oh but Oh God and the snotgreen sea, I am determined. I’ve made her dance, just a little. And here’s a shorter sentence: so keep up.

“Come to us, passerines. Soon enough, we will come with you.” ‘

‘Where are Violet and Lucia, Nurse Archer? Are they accounted for? It’s not exactly scientific, but at my desk just now I thought…I sensed…a disturbance.’

‘They are in their rooms, doctor, and night medicines administered. Both seemed agitated; we have given extra, as per notes.’

Dr Griffith finds he cannot concentrate, takes up a bible. Remembers birds of childhood.

Let him see.

Remembers.

As a boy, turn of the century thereabouts, his father made him go to scripture memory competitions. Welsh Baptist family. Now his eyes are moist. He was good.

Psalms.

Even the sparrow finds a home and the swallow a nest.

Proverbs.

Like a sparrow in its flitting, like a swallow in its flying, an undeserved curse goes nowhere.

Down the corridors of the asylum echoes a turbulent commotion and alarms fly. This was the bit the staff heard. They’d missed the whispers, glissando of the winged helpers no louder than a heartbeat through a greatcoat; rustles of paper and scratches of soft pencil; tremendous change: you couldn’t stop it now.

*********

The Life of Almost,a breathless Killing Hapless Ally and choosing your ending.

by Anna Vaught, posted in And other stories, anxiety, book groups, books, childhood, Contemporary Small Press, depression, dorothy rowe, Drafts, editing, emma press, Fitzcarraldo, Galley Beggar Press, genre, goodreads, Great Expectations, killing hapless ally, mental health, patrician press, pembrokeshire, Uncategorized

I have written a strange little second book. I suspect I will always write strange books. Big ones and little ones. The first, Killing Hapless Ally, was placed with a small press. As such, it is not, naturally, going to fall into so many hands. And yet and yet…I cannot tell you how rewarding it has been to discuss the book with its readers.

I know it is a challenging book; it is busy and breathless and constantly allusive. It is a work of fiction, but this rush through a history, through a mind, was deliberate. Its publisher understood and supported this; loved its density and fragmenting quality: its form was part of the effect, you might say. But to other readers it will be too busy, appear too dense and poorly edited. I took a risk – and my hope with Killing Hapless Ally was always that this was a long game. What I wanted was to write at least a book a year; to establish a catalogue and, gradually, for more and more people to find it.

But back to the discussion with readers. It has been read by people suffering from mental health problems and those who seek to understand what they might look like – as such, I have had many raw and challenging conversations about the book. It has been read by psychologists and academics – very recently, one who feels it will be instructive in their work, in addition to finding it entertaining. It is, after all, a black comedy! But at the moment the thing I really like is that some of my older students are reading it, which has meant that I felt I should mention to parents the book’s graphic content. It does not flinch in its illustration of depression, anxiety, self harm, suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts. I am laying myself bare here, aren’t I? But you see, there is a foreword to the book which reads rather like a mission statement. The book is based on episodes in my own life; to my mind it reads like a memoir, rather than a novel (again, this hybrid will irritate some readers because they do not recognise the novel form in it – more on which another day) and, in telling a/my story, I said that if I were not upfront about the mental health problems I have suffered from repeatedly since childhood, then that would be “to do a disservice to those who are yet to recover or find appropriate help.”

Now, back to that second book. The Life of Almost. Who is he and what is he? Is he alive or dead? What is his purpose? Well I like ambiguity and grey areas. If a book promises a twist at the end, you can bet I’ll have guessed it on page three; I’m that sucky person who shouts out the answers not long after it starts, which is why I am bound to silence when watching films  or telly with my husband. Like a kid at panto. “It’s binary and he’s the ghost!” (Interstellar.) “It’s his sister and I bet Moriarty’s helping her!” (Sherlock Holmes). I’m happy to know the ending or not to have things promised to me. Anyway, The Life of Almost has, at present, two different endings. Casuistry. Pick one. “What do you want? What do you expect?”, to quote Owl Eyes in the library in The Great Gatsby. And also, because the book is also a reworking of Dickens’s Great Expectations, the two ending recall what happened with that book, a note of explanation being underneath. I think I can get away with setting text out here. If the book gets commissioned, this bit of the blog post might have to go!

But you know – this is relevant, I promise! –  I am struggling at the moment: depression, sadness, they have the better of me; I wake, frightened, at night; I start at noise: my mind races, thoughts collide and crash and back come the hauntings of early experience. I cannot bear bright light or loud sound; sometimes, I hear sounds when they are not there, a constant auditory disturbance; sometimes music, often quotation. This has always been a feature. No-one’s experience of depression or mental health problems is quite the same. Mine is jangling and mult-coloured; fast fast slow. But I can do this. I CAN. There is no miracle. I rebuild my mind with books and thought and friends.

I have to say that I can choose an ending here because an ending is also a beginning, isn’t it? As Dorothy Rowe would tell you, “Even the worst day does not last forever.”

Casuistry. Which ending, for Seren and Almost, would you rather? The other person in the text is Catherine, who begins the book. And it is Catherine who begins summer 2016 in a state of welling despair. That is why Almost appears, from the sea-coast, off-world, whatever you like (as I said, I like ambiguity) to begin a bitter magic.

Here.

Pick.

‘The two endings, Catherine. Listen and choose. I begin with a poem. For her. Everything is for her.

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, the county town on winter nights:

The sweets of honey bees, a view of ruby sky and amber lights—

A mermaid Terpsichore, sand-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 of memory; do not grieve too soon.

Consider this—why should we be, ephemeral and urgent? How?

And speak to me with confidence, declaim for me on cliff or prow.

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

Beyond the log pile, salt 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.

I met her out there. I felt her, thoughts carry: I always knew where she was. I walked beyond St David’s to look at the Blue Lagoon, turned back and walked and walked to Abereidy, then through the bluebell wood, by the mud and stream to the fierce mouth, Abermawr. Skimming stones into the sea, she was. Oh God, aflame. I could hardly stand her beauty. She saw me and walked slowly my way as I cupped a pebble and steadied my thoughts and tried to control my tears.

Seren. Star. Always her. A mermaid I trapped on land and who never forgave me.

She said this: ‘Boy. Always boy.’

I said, “Age does not wither her” though I knew I was lying and I saw I was fresher and new, still.

“Roland is dead. I am…I am different, Almost.”

Oh she wept and howled into and out of a fierce mouth and hurled the rocks across the breakers and I went to her and held her while she told me of her life with him; of the spite that held, the jokes that cracked and broke; resentments, brutal, scorning others just because they had a better boat; a finer cast of house or leg or anything. He hated the world and everyone in it, handsome damned man who had fooled her. I said, ‘I will find him dead and flay him for you, Seren, for you, my love’ and I meant it, brute like daddy, down under the sand in another sea and time. My howl was elemental; perverse. We clung to each other.

He, Roland, touched her wrong; he did not cradle her at night, not understand that her own beautiful scorn was from her pain, sea girl trapped, and if he had, what would it have mattered? He had her to set on his arm and place where he should and that was enough. He used her roughly; cursed her barren; not a mother, nor a soft gentle thing. He cast her out, within her home. I could not stand to hear it all and howled again and she clung and my God I cannot tell you how beautiful she was because it would be like…it would be like trying to beat the heart of a star with a warped broom; like lifting up prayers with dirty hands and biting mouths. That is something like it was.

We walked out through the woods and I gathered bluebells, pressed them upon her in a fever.

“Forgive me, Almost.”

“I already have” I said; I fell on my knees in the stream and mud and the bluebells were crushed with I and her and us together, tremendous.

Her heart was opened then. I saw it.

Afterwards, I took her hand and I knew that there would be no shadow of another parting from her. I thought, also, that one day we might find her garb, as for Derian out at Oystermouth; as for Miss Davies, somewhere in her wild garden, under the fingers of creeping moss and the care of the kind willow. There might, yet, be a way back to the sea. For her and, in growing magic or the charms of the englynion, because poems carry, for me.’

Chapter 17. Or a star dies

‘But then again, is this how it was? Catherine, do you prefer this ending?

I begin, as I often do, with a poem. This one is about endings, when we come to recognise they have arrived, that is.

So,

We climbed the downward spiral of the trail

To best the shedding fingers of the cliff;

I’d promised you, oh love, I could not fail—

I’d prove to you against our childish tiff

That there was treasure to be found that day—

Albescent moons to cradle in your hand—

Sea urchins fine, a little world to say:

Echinocardium, wanting to be grand.

But my world was not yours, you did not care

To hold the little lanterns in your palm—

The hollow globe within the greatest fair,

You did not care if such should come to harm.

So cracked the sea potato on the tide:

I knew, although I smiled, my love had died.

I knew where she was. I felt her. I walked there, out beyond St David’s, the lovely harbour at Abereiddy, turquoise of the Blue Lagoon, then through the bluebell woods to Abermawr. She knew I would find her, of course. Out there, hurling stones across the breakers and howling her pain. She did not stop me taking her in my arms, drawing time-stopping kisses from her. Too late, too late, though, Catherine.

For this is what happened.

Everything I said of Roland was true, but when he died, consumed by his own acid and pride, Seren married a quiet local man. Not rich, but comfortable, like, and they lived in a house looking out across Ramsey Sound. This is the road she had taken, my beautiful mermaid girl. And she had a child, too: how could I claim her now? Oh Catherine, do not laugh: she called the boy ‘Nearly’ and he was her joy. I could see that. How could I claim her now? She seemed old, though she was not, and greatly changed and sad.

What could I do? My heart was broken.

I reached down and picked up an auger shell, she cupped it in her hand with tears in her eyes and then she turned, picking her way across the pebble beach to the bluebell wood and she was gone.

And that is the ending, almost. Which ending did you prefer? Which shall we have? And really, all I want to ask you, Catherine is this: did any of this happen? Was any of it true? And am I really here, June two thousand and sixteen, in your kitchen. Now, what do you think?’

Then I wept, cried until I was dry, not comprehending the world. I felt his fingers brush my arm: electric. Then he was gone, too, and had ended his story.

An explanation of the two endings.

‘Because of the mystery and ambiguity of the book, the uncertainty of its endings, or rather that Catherine should have some choice in how it ends (including, I would say, in what she does about her own sorrow after Almost has passed on elsewhere), seemed fitting to me. But there is another reason. Great Expectations is very important to this book for The Life of Almost is at least a partial reworking of it and that book had its ending changed at the last moment. Edward Bulwer Foster, Dickens’s friend and a fellow novelist, had been keen that Pip and Estella were united at the end of the story. The account goes that Dickens felt his friend argued such a good case that he subsequently agreed to make a change. “I resolved…to make the change…I have put in as pretty a little piece of writing as I could and I have no doubt the story will be more acceptable through the alteration.” George Bernard Shaw published an edition of Great Expectations in a limited edition run with his preferred ending: the one Dickens had written first and which he argued was, in fact, “the truly happy ending.” Some have argued that this was a perverse argument, but I prefer the sobriety of the original and find it more fitting for the brooding, disillusioned narrative tone through the book. So,

“I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.”

OR, the former, when Pip, walking along Picadilly, is told a lady in a carriage wishes to speak to him: it is Estella:

“…I was very glad afterwards to have had the interview; for, in her face and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance, that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham’s teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be.”

But now, if you wouldn’t mind making tea and trimming up some Welshcakes but without a recipe and with one hand only, I shall offer you my last. Do you know that, sometimes, stories have two endings? Of course you do. In old books, sometimes the author wrote an ending that was too sad and his publisher demanded it more palatable; a triumph. Triumph is sometimes untrue, of course, but what would you like? What do you expect and how may I help?

Almost Derian Llewhellin, all time a room in which to roam.’

Anna Vaught, Wiltshire, two thousand and sixteen.

Passerines: some epigraphs for a new book

by Anna Vaught, posted in agents, books, bookshops, depression, Drafts, editing, genre, killing hapless ally, mental health, patrician press, peace-seekers, poems, poetry, psychology, reading, refugees, religion, Uncategorized, writers, writing

I find I vary how I write. With this book – Passerines, a series of interlinked stories about Violet Gibson, Lucia Joyce, Marie (‘Blanche’) Wittmann and Bertha (‘Anna O’) Pappenheim  and of psychiatry – I have tinkered with the beginning because it began life as a short story – and have now lunged into what is sometimes known as the ‘Frankendraft’! So I have 50,000 words to write and I will not read the book back now until it is all done. Then I will attack it with some vehemence.

BUT I have allowed myself two things to help me think. (In addition to the ongoing reading for research).

Although I have a rough plan sketched out, I have decided to write a proper synopsis, even if this is chucked out later – inspiration invariably striking not before but while one is writing. And also, it helps me to look at other books. That is, dipping into things, beyond what I might read for pleasure or research. I read all the time…but it is like magic.

There are lots of books in our house; the house is heaving with them; only yesterday, a cat was almost squished by a tumbling tower of books yet to shelve (or rather as we are waiting for Pete The Shelves to come and shelve for us). But as I was saying, I have been reading Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. It is magnificent; its beauty makes me cry – and this rarely happens – that I will find a book so affecting. And there it was: the description of boy Eugene, who is Wolfe himself, bounded in by his imagination, knowingly so, and living lonely in its country. And projecting what is required onto the world. I copied it. This is a key theme in Passerines. When you are someone else’s subject or subject to someone else, what might happen to your interior life?

Then…my hand brushed against William Empson’s Collected Poems. I’m sorry if this makes me sound like an utter tosser (‘Ooooh – my hand brushed against a book and it was the very book I needed…’), but this is exactly what happened. I was getting Some Varieties of Pastoral down because I need it for an A Level class on genre. And I suddenly thought of ‘Reflections on Anita Loos’ and its startling pairing of the girl who ‘can’t go on laughing all the time’ with the image of the tortured Christ after this mischievous villanelle. And you see, Passerines has both spirited girls and women and those same people encaged by madness and circumstance – in two cases incarcerated for life and in one almost erased from records  – and a study of both faith and imagination. It begins with Violet Gibson, the Irish aristocrat who shot Mussolini, was almost lynched, then pardoned by Mussolini (who himself drew his life as if it were the Passion of Christ and spoke of the prefuguration of his death) and then sent to St Andrew’s Asylum (as it would have been known) until the end of her life. The one picture we have there of Violet is unbearably touching: in her greatcoat in the grounds, feeding the birds, her stance reminding us of Giotto’s St Francis.

So, I realise this will not make total sense. Bear with me. I am fleshing things out. I know this is a rather a WTF sort of post. (Very literary, along with ‘tosser’: apologies.)

As I write, I’m still doing bits and pieces on mental health connected with my first novel, Killing Hapless Ally, and that has only been out eight months. I have sent my second book, a novella, The Life of Almost, out on subs to a small selection of presses and agents. Has it had rejections? Well, of course. Interest? Oh yeah. So I am a bit tense. And while this is happening, I am writing a third book, a novel, using the ‘Prolifiko’ app and setting my target to 3,000 words a day. I am told this is a lot, but if I don’t make it, the app is at least a prompt and very encouraging: a little cheerleader for me. In other news, I am thinking about applying to pitch at the London Book Fair (dependent on what happens in the next week or so, I think – as deadline’s approaching), I’ve applied for Womentoring  ( a fine free mentoring service, where an established author guides one at an earlier stage) and asked for Antonia Honeywell (am I allowed to say that?) because I feel passionately that I will find nurturing in such a project and she seems utterly delightful, a wonderful writer and frankly, I thought she might ‘get’ me, also managing a large family! Does that sound odd? And up ahead, Essex Book Festival in March to read my work in Refugees and Peacekeepers (a Patrician Press Anthology) and there’s a Birkbeck day I’d like to go to in May…

Back to the epigraphs. Synopsis follows soon: did you know there’s good money in Mills and Boon? More on which another day…I write well on hospitals, sex, Horlicks from the trolley and death. You’d be amazed at the categories extant in M&B!

‘The prison walls of self had closed entirely round him; he was walled completely by the esymplastic power of his imagination – he had learned by now to project mechanically, before the world, an acceptable counterfeit of himself which would protect him from intrusion.’

Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward Angel, 1929, chapter fifteen.

‘Love rules the world but is it rude, or slime?

All nasty things are sure to be disgraced.

A girl can’t go on laughing all the time.

Christ stinks of torture, who was slaked in lime.

No star he aimed at is entirely waste.

No man is sure he does not need to climb.’

From William Empson, ‘Reflections on Anita Loos’, 1937.

‘The bird could also be seen as a symbol of the Resurrection of Christ. A non-Biblical legend popular in the Middle Ages related how the child Jesus, when playing with some clay birds that his friends had given to him, bought them to life. Medieval theologians saw this as an allegory of his own coming back from the dead. In another legend, when Christ was carrying the cross to Calvary a small bird – sometimes a goldfinch, sometimes a robin – flew down and plucked one of the thorns from the crown around his head. Some of Christ’s blood splashed onto the bird as it drew the thorn out, and to this day goldfinches and robins have spots of red on their plumage. Like the cross that Christ wears around his neck, therefore, the goldfinch might be read as a prefiguration of his Passion.’

From ‘The Goldfinch.Signs and Symbols’, notes in web text from the Ftizwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

A New Writers’ Group (Bath area) NOTE NEW DATE!

by Anna Vaught, posted in agents, book groups, books, Drafts, editing, genre, goodreads, killing hapless ally, patrician press, reading, reading lists, Short Stories, Uncategorized, women writers, writers, Writers and Artists, writers' group, writing, writing group

A NEW WRITERS’ GROUP!

Okay then. New Writers’ group – meeting at Vaught Towers initially. Bath area and DM me for details!

Friday the 17th of February,
7.30.

Do you write or want to write fiction? It may be that you have already had a book or books published; it may be that you are just starting out and aiming to work towards publication. And by publication, I mean with a publisher, agented with a publisher or working as a self publisher. The aim of this group is that, in a supportive environment, we share ideas on one anothers’ work, offer constructive criticism and help each other along.You’d need, I think, to be happy to read your work aloud and to circulate it and to have the confidence (or fake it; I do) to offer comment and to receive it. And you’d need a ms in its initial stages or a slew of ideas for the best use of everyone’s time. I’m not thinking that there is any particular genre for us, but that this group might be best suited to writers of fiction for adults, as opposed to early readers, MG and YA.

Would you like to come along? Might be just the prompt you need to carry on carrying on and I am sure it would help me. Although I have been doing the odd bit of freelance journalism for some years, I didn’t start writing full length fiction until 2014 and then my first novel was published by a small press in March of last year. My second novel is currently under consideration with an agent (I think I may be a hybrid author) and I have begun my third (and fourth: I do know this sounds a bit mad) in addition to a poetry pamphlet and a non fiction book; I’ve also published various articles and poems over the past ten months. I am just starting out and gradually getting over feeling like an imposter. Writing is not my day job! Here’s what I read over 2016, too.

https://annavaughtwrites.com/…/…/01/my-2016-in-books-so-far/

Tea; cake; cosy chairs: writing, sharing information and opinion and encouraging each other in what can be a lonely pursuit sometimes.

Like to come? We could aim for once a month or so.
Anna.
@bookwormvaught on twitter
annavaughttuition@gmail.com

(PS – the pink and purple picture: insprired by Flickr and Instagram I once colour-coordinated my books – and there are thousands of them. Don’t do it. Led to a very ugly mutiny in our household and I couldn’t find a thing.)

Mentoring

by Anna Vaught, posted in A Life of Almost, agents, book groups, books, depression, Drafts, editing, English teacher, killing hapless ally, mental health, poems, poetry, reading, Short Stories, Uncategorized

https://womentoringproject.co.uk/

This is the link to a mentoring project about which I have heard many wonderful things. Its idea is to link women at the beginning of their writing with more established writers and also agents – and a good number of women give their time to it. It is a free programme.

And I was thinking about it earlier as I suppose I feel like I need the company and the guidance. The fire is there, alright. But I see I need to talk about my writing!

I started writing my first novel (by which I mean, the first word of the first draft) in July of 2014 and it was published in March this year; by any standards, I understand that to be a quick turnaround. Between December 2015 and very recently, I was also writing a second novel; that novel is currently out on submission. It has only been seen by a few people (in addition to some beta readers), but it has been requested in full – and I cannot, I think, write about that in detail, but I will say that it is somewhat nailbiting and yet…I continue to think about it: what might be wrong, what right. I am sure this is a funny period for anyone. Do you start a new book? Take a break?

I started a new book and have begun a third novel. I am actually about a third of the way through the first draft because I really, really want to do this. I’ve met a lot of setbacks and disappointments already, but I won’t go into those because, of course, the key is to keep writing. And if, after such things, you want to carry on, well now – doesn’t that show that it is important; this this is you: what you want?

I avoided writing for so long; or rather, I avoided submitting fiction for so long and then, one day, I took myself by surprise and just started. So, since July 2014, I have written two and a half novels (with the first published), been included in two poetry anthologies and had three national features on me; I’ve written articles for national publications on literature and mental health and I made a  (very frank) film for AXA about managing anxiety that has a huge reach. I started a collection of short stories, two of which I submitted to big competitions (don’t know how I got on yet!) and I am still raring to go.

I read all the time; that’s my greatest teacher. I run a business, tutor and mentor young people, I’m a secondary English teacher from time to time and I have three young sons, with no support from any extended family (I am saying this from a purely factual point of view – keep reading) and I struggle every day – yep; every day – with the legacy of complex trauma and mental health problems. Don’t always win, of course. I also hold down three volunteer posts, two of which I can’t write about here, and one of which is as a volunteer creative writing teacher for adults who have had long term mental health problems. So, these things on board, you see that I have proved to myself that I am able to write in pockets; to think even if there is a small chap tugging at my arm because he wants a snack or the other two chaps are punching each other. I am not going to have peace and quiet to write, but I’ve discovered that I can have a pop anyway.

I have found such rewards in corresponding with writers on social media – twitter in particular. It may not seem so from the outside, when, frankly, most of the time you are going to get rejected and, on sad days, you may have to avoid social media altogether because (well I know I do this and it is truly a bit pathetic!) you get to thinking, “They can do it!” as someone gets a splendid publishing deal or something like that…and then you think, “Oh – but not me. No – I am an outsider. I will never manage that!” But, you know, you have to get over that sort of thing. Do you want to do this, or not? Get in training, then. And what I was saying about writers: I have found great encouragement. I’ve asked questions; written to people when I have particularly enjoyed their books; had some great support and feedback and advice. I mean from both new and thoroughly established writers. And so today I was thinking.

Thinking this.

I see, through the work I do, in schools, through my company and my volunteer work, that mentoring can be extraordinary for young people. When I look back to my younger years, I know I only survived- in my health, or my floundering school work – which floundered because of the distress I was in, unspoken and scared – because there were some possibilities suggested by kind people around me who could nudge me towards the insight to carry on. A good class teacher may be a mentor, but I know from twenty years in and around teaching that the best mentor may also be a class tutor, or an older pupil and that you need to look around; eyes open. For do you know who I turned to, as a kid? A dinner lady called Evelyn who, today, is still one of the people I love most in the world. She’s 87; I met her when I was 4.

And so I am quietly looking around: mentoring for me. I don’t mean for my mental health (it is only that my extensive experience in this area shows me the power of an insightful person) but for my writing: for this career which is inextricably bound up with my deepest sentiment, values and fears. No way round that, I think! Still, I am not sure I can do this alone, as I am. Okay – moreorless alone. I feel a need a period with a guide, a teacher, a mentor. It isn’t, with a large family, a job and multiple commitments, plausible that I could do an MA in creative writing or one of the exciting-sounding courses run by, say, Curtis Brown, but I do want to see what I can do to find that mentor as I go forward with this. Eyes open, then.

Perhaps this will surprise me. Perhaps, with this second book, I will naturally meet this person as part of the process. We shall see.

Love to anyone reading this and…keep reading; keep writing. Bon courage.

The Life of Almost

by Anna Vaught, posted in agents, book groups, books, Contemporary Small Press, Drafts, editing, Great Expectations, killing hapless ally, patrician press, pembrokeshire, poems, poetry, reading, reading groups, Uncategorized, wales

On love; on writing. And welcome to the world, Almost. (You need to keep your eyes open for the last part of the epigraph, below…)

So, I have been holed up at home this week, on writing retreat, which is to say working on this novel and starting the reading, planning and drafting for two other books. I took a week off work and the lovely people in our community did the school run for the youngest of my three and took him home for playdates after school to free up time and energy for me. Ah, it isn’t straightforward, this. I have been sleeping badly for some months because of the effects of multiple bereavements, doing my level best to support others (including teenagers and other young people) in times of illness and loss and coping with some really thorny issues at the heart of my extended family which hurt me deeply and which I have had no choice but to tackle. I am exhausted. And hoorah: I still have some palsy on one side (won’t bore you with the details) so one hand is acting like a mess of sausages and won’t do what I  bid it. Typos an issue!

And yet

And yet and yet. I re-wrote a novel, started the others, looked after three kids and planned for my business – I kept my heart open and re-evaluated. Because, in the ready care that I have felt this week; in  the encouragement from my friends, new and old, and in the interest they have shown in what I am doing, I am immensely cheered and, so, stronger. The rest of it can be painful and frustrating because the cheer is not all there is. But you cannot wait for absolutely the right circumstances for happiness or to go boldly in the direction of your dreams; cannot (truly) line up each criterion and tidy it all up. That is to defer everything to fate. And for writing, as with life, there is not an ideal set of circumstances; I suppose you just…do it; make a start; carry on. One way and another, I have written around 80,000 words this week, plus other letters to publishers and just a little social media. I am not an island. Love. xxxx

The Life of Almost

or,

A Life Of Very Little Expectation.

The Life of Almost is a Welsh and spectral reworking of Dickens’s Great Expectations. Almost is a boy with poor beginnings, who begins his life shrouded by bereavement and alongside those on the run from the law and from life; he is also surrounded by the hauntings of the undead of his family and the cliff-top communities around him. He plays in the sea caves, visits graves, like Pip, sings into the sea and likes to tell stories—and telling stories is a key theme of the book. The book is the story of his life and work and of how he struggles and triumphs, is thwarted in love but also begins to understand that he has been gifted deeper and commanding powers the night he meets a ragged convict at the sea cave, for the convict is a merman, come on land, as are other characters in the novel.

Almost is dragged up by his sister Perfection, both of them kept in their place from beyond the grave by their mother and other matriarchs. Almost cries with the name his late mother gave him because he feels he will never amount to much, but gradually he begins to realise that, by calling to the world around him and by telling stories, extraordinary things begin to happen; to grasp how uncertain the edges of reality and of life and death might be when he meets the strange, ragged man (Derian Llewhellin, based on Magwitch) on the beach at the beginning of the story – and I am keen for a reader to enjoy the supernatural and mystical elements of this book; to see death and life, horror and love, beauty and brutality in one place, close by, complementary even: ‘Celtic Magic’, as Matthew Arnold expressed it.

Almost has, like Pip, a secret benefactor and a true love; he has his own convict (the strange ragged man mentioned above) and a cruel sister; he is apprenticed to a trade, but his is the mortuary, not the workshop. Almost is supported by his devoted mermaids, Dilys and Nerys, who follow him, changing form (I have drawn on mermaid lore in my research for the book), and by a number of friends in different locations. But readers of Great Expectations would recognise adaptations of characters, such as Pip’s friend, Herbert Pocket, Miss Havisham, Estella and Jaggers, the latter, for example, recast as a lugubrious but prosperous journeyman, basking in his gold and quoting Jonson’s Volpone from his gated community a long way from Almost’s Pembrokeshire.

The text is a curious and unexpected reworking of a well-known novel, and a dark comedy told, largely, by a protagonist whose state is ambiguous and unsettling. The initial narrator of this darkly comic book of literary fiction, Catherine, calls up her friend, Almost Llewhellin, of Charity House, The Headland, to tell her a story because she is sick at heart and tired of life. It is the summer of 2016 and yet an epigraph at the beginning of the tale announces that Almost Llewhellin was lost at sea, presumed dead, in 1963. So who is Almost? What special qualities does he possess and what are Catherine’s or the reader’s expectations of him? Is he there, imagined, alive or dead? And what of his cohort? Hot mermaids, longing mermen, morticians, houses that respire and a poltergeist moss that grabs your foot. A cast of family and friends drawn from sea cave, the embalming table, the graveyard and the dark Clandestine House, which respires heavily and in which time has stopped. I have allowed some risk-taking with the novel’s form in its use of original poems as epigraphs, all of which key into the themes in the novel, as they describe the dark vagaries of the Welsh landscape, which is itself a key character in the book, living and breathing and casting penumbra and surrounded by the sea. I have also offered two endings to the love story, subtly happy and sad, because I wanted to bring to mind how Great Expectations might have been radically altered in its reception, had Dickens been encouraged to use his original ending, far more melancholy that that which replaced it, but also that Almost is encouraging Catherine, the narrator, to choose her own ending. And the coda that follows allows us to know that Almost is not the only Pembrokeshire boy who has evolved magic, dead or alive, for to the door comes Muffled Mfanwy and perhaps her story can be a sequel, if only in the reader’s imagination.

Here is the epigraph to the novel:

When I was a kid, Lewis took his own life.

I heard them say he took it, but where it went,

I couldn’t say or wasn’t told. Perhaps it had

been drained, in The Sloop, with all his pints,

or thrown gladly off Stack Rocks with a shout

that he married well and was a man they liked,

but I don’t know. For once, though I was very young,

I saw a look from out the corner of his eye as he shipped

off, went laughing with the pot boys and his girl:

that look it said, I think, that Lewis wanted rescuing,

but no-one came, as the sea foam danced in Cardigan Bay.

Almost Llewhellin. ‘Lewis.’

 

“Look’ee here, Pip. I’m your second father. You’re my son—more to me nor any son.”

Abel Magwitch, in Great Expectations, Charles Dickens, chapter thirty nine.

 

‘…A tall tree on the river’s bank, one half of it

burning from root to top, the other half in green leaf.’

Peredur Son Of Efrawg (from The Mabinogion).

 

A grave at Capel Dewi, Broad Haven: In Loving Memory of Almost Derian Llewhellin of Druidstone Haven. Presumed lost at sea, with his beloved wife, Seren Davies Llewhellin, of Clandestine quay, May 1963.

The Life of Almost. My very own Pembrokeshire Estella.

by Anna Vaught, posted in books, Drafts, editing, Great Expectations, killing hapless ally, Uncategorized

 

He, Roland, touched her wrong; he did not cradle her at night, not understand that her own beautiful scorn was from her pain, sea girl trapped, and if he had, what would it have mattered? He had her to set on his arm and place where he should and that was enough. He used her roughly; cursed her barren; not a mother, nor a soft gentle thing. He cast her out, within her home. I could not stand to hear it all and howled again and she clung and my God I cannot tell you how beautiful she was because it would be like…it would be like trying to beat the heart of a star with a warped broom; like lifting up prayers with dirty hands and biting mouths. That is something like it was.

We walked out through the woods and I gathered bluebells, pressed them upon her.

‘Forgive me, Almost.’

‘I already have’ I said; I fell on my knees in the stream and mud and the bluebells were crushed with her, I me, oh -and us, together: tremendous.

Her heart was opened then. I saw it.

Afterwards, I took her hand and I knew that there would be no shadow of another parting from her. I thought, also that there might be a way back to the sea.