Category: Great Expectations

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.

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.

 

 

Epigraph of The Life of Almost

by Anna Vaught, posted in And other stories, books, Contemporary Small Press, Drafts, editing, emma press, Fitzcarraldo, Galley Beggar Press, genre, Great Expectations, patrician press, pembrokeshire, poems, reading, Uncategorized, writing

For Ned. Because Almost is also a love story: Seren, Mfanwy, Perfection, Mammy, the sacred headland and the mermaids. And you are my story and my song. x

This is what it says at the beginning of my next book, The Life of Almost: wish me luck, as it has gone, by kind request, out to an agent who liked the writing in Killing Hapless Ally; the ms has also gone to a press; later in October, it is going out elsewhere and, to my utter surprise, a really lovely person at one of, you know, the big five, said they would look at it just to be helpful. I said it wasn’t really, as far as I could see, a commercial proposition, but then it is the next story I had in me. I know it’s ambitious and I do know about Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs. Ah, but bear with now. This one now is comical, I hope; indebted to Dickens and to Dylan Thomas; to generations in Pembrokeshire and beyond; to the coffin hatch in my own house; to the dead, who are legion and all around; to mermaid lore; The Mabinogion; Celtic Magic, Gwyn Williams, Danny Abse, the earliest Welsh poems, the Southern Gothic I married, books on sex, embalming and death practice, John Donne and Dickens again. And don’t you want to know who or what Almost is? How mermaids love? Why a child was found sleeping on a headland gravestone? Why moss creeps and sucks at your feet as you dare to tread? How a love story happens over the embalming table and how Almost feels, when he meets Derian Llewhellin, both fear and happiness and a blurring of his edges and how it is he begins to understand what he is capable of. The story begins this squalid summer, June 2016, but oh…it is old, old, old.

 

THE LIFE OF ALMOST OR,

A LIFE OF VERY LITTLE EXPECTATION

Anna Vaught

Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction, I swear on The Mabinogion and the sacred headland. Characters in this book are fictional, although I have drawn upon the history of my own Welsh family and diaspora and many things which to me seem normal and maybe which, to you, do not. I make no apology for references to the political situation in the summer of 2016 while a cunning clown and cohorts and a tide of rage pushed through the always unexpected rain. Real places named in the book are at least partly fictionalised and the dead and undead are somewhat mixed up. But enough: don’t you want to know about Almost? He was mine; now I am giving him to you.

All poems (unless otherwise attributed, but out of copyright) are by the author.

Lewis, the Younger, who went away

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.

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

Abel Magwitch, Great Expectations, chapter thirty nine.

 

The Life of Almost

by Anna Vaught, posted in books, Drafts, editing, goodreads, Great Expectations, patrician press, pembrokeshire, poems, poetry, reading, Uncategorized, writing

Ah, I struggle with a synopsis, but here you go. THE NEXT (alongside the other stuff).

This is for you, Alex Campbell. x

Anna Vaught

The Life of Almost

or,

A Life Of Very Little Expectation

A synopsis

The Life of Almost is a re-working of the story in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, shifting its setting to a wild, mysterious and comical rural South West Wales, the West Country and the suburbs of London. Some characters are based on those found in its stimulus, but others are original —such as Evans the Bodies, keeper of the mortuary and devoted to his Dead Dears. And Muffled Mfanwy, who works with him and with whom Evans has been in love his entire life; their story in startling surroundings is a counterpoint to other love stories in the book, such as that between Almost and the cruel Seren, adopted daughter of the claw-handed spinster Miss Davies, at Clandestine House off the sea coast on the Cleddau Estuary.

Almost is a boy with poor beginnings, who begins his life shrouded by bereavement, the struggling, the bitter and 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. Many strands of the narrative I took not from Dickens but from the oral tradition of my large Pembrokeshire family, such as accounts of poltergeists throwing furniture and vases from the fireplace, gibbering dead and moss that caught your foot and sucked at you if you didn’t move quickly enough; things that enthralled and terrified me as a small child. The drownings, skewerings and disappearances that have always rattled in my imagination find form in The Life of Almost.

Almost is dragged up by his sister Perfection, both of them kept in their place from beyond the grave by their mother and grandmother. 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. For Almost is, really, an extraordinary boy.

Almost has, like Pip, a secret benefactor and a true love; he has his own convict and a cruel sister, but this re-working of the story adds more spectral, supernatural elements and more comedy in that Almost, through his story-telling develops the gift of moving through time and through form so as to come and rescue others from suffering, hardship and the loneliness of loss. It is at this point, at the beginning of the book, where we meet him, when as he appears to Catherine who begins the story, sitting, lost and stifled “in the squalid summer of 2016”.

Almost is supported by his devoted mermaids, Dilys and Nerys, who follow him, changing form (I have drawn on extensive 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!).

I have allowed some risk-taking with the novel’s form in its use of original poems as epigraphs, all of which key in to 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 in my book 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.

To keep going…

by Anna Vaught, posted in A Life of Almost, agents, books, Contemporary Small Press, depression, editing, emma press, Goldsmith's prize, Great Expectations, killing hapless ally, mslexia, patrician press, poems, poetry, reading, short stories, Short Stories, Uncategorized, Wellcome book prize, women writers, Writers and Artists, writing, writing competitions

 

I am crying a little bit here. But read on. It’s fine, really.

Do you know, I am nominated several times for ‘The Guardian’ Not the Booker prize, I am entered for the Goldsmith’s Prize, the new Republic of Consciousness Prize and The Wellcome Book Prize. I also put in a poetry pamphlet for ‘Mslexia”s annual competition.

Do I have a shot? Naaah, not really.

Well, frankly, only a tiny one, at best.

I’m small fry; I’m a newbie and pretty unrefined, still. I blundered into this in the same naive way I have blundered into most things in my life! I sort of…had a go when theoretically it wasn’t supposed to be possible with all my other commitments. I’m a hard worker because, I think, I have had so much experience compromised by mental health problems, illness and bereavement that it has made me more imaginative and keen to seize the day in case we are hit by an asteroid or I go bonkers again (which I am not planning to, obviously). If this is you too, be collected; be encouraged: you would be amazed what is possible and at the way which can be made from no way and from despair.

AND SOMEHOW

In two years, I have written and published a novel, a poetry pamphlet, guest blogged, authored ten articles or so and at this point I am approximately two thirds of the way through a second novel and have poetry and short story publication this autumn and in the spring. So HOLY F*** three kids and a day job and the volunteer stuff. I have to keep going now, don’t I?

On, blunder on. xxx

Anna Vaught's photo.

‘Yes, Mfanwy: in the midst of life we are in death and here with the Dead Dears it is fair to say that we are in love.’

by Anna Vaught, posted in books, bookshops, Drafts, editing, emma press, Galley Beggar Press, genre, Goldsmith's prize, Great Expectations, killing hapless ally, patrician press, pembrokeshire, reading, Uncategorized

From The Life of Almost as I draft it…

  And there was another book that had only been seen by its owner.

Evans the Bodies wrote poems. Often for the Dead Dears who had no-one and whose lives must, he thought, be recorded for posterity. So the timid lady from the post office, who had customers and bread but no friends and a mother who would have tossed her out with the peelings for the pigs, became a cowslip in a warm meadow and drank deep of the sun and was happy; so a coarse and crooked man, who lived in the last house before St Brides Bay and whose children hated him but sang like larks for his money, was limned as a quiet man, skimming stones on the beach and smiling into the auroras of a coastal morning when no-one knew. But Evans the Bodies was a watcher for the sad and lonely. He was a dresser of bodies, to be sure, but he also had a talent for the sad soul and the lonely. And alongside his careful stitch and suture and his eye for the sick at heart, he had always loved Mfanwy: when she was someone else’s, as she laboured for and lost her child, when both times he bought her milk-white lilies and she said, ‘Evans, there’s a soft man you are’ and he cried with his back to her, as he did when she lost her husband. He put poems in the book for her, too. Imagined he was taking pictures of her, watching her written into the world all around and, as he watched the frosty lines on the windows in his cold parlour and saw the feathers and curlicues of winter, he scratched her monogram in the frost and rime and, again, he cried, and saw himself at a window as the beautiful ship Mfanwy his Love sailed away and thus he wrote again.

I had seen the rapture and the writing called ‘Mfanwy’, of course, though he did not know. I had learned it by heart and whispered it into the Pembrokeshire night, whose kind tendrils carried it to her and caressed her, then softly laid waste to sadness and silence and made her think clearly about Evans the Bodies, who loved her and always had, just so.

The Life of Almost – and an invitation, if you’re local, like.

by Anna Vaught, posted in book groups, books, bookshops, Contemporary Small Press, Drafts, editing, emma press, Fitzcarraldo, Galley Beggar Press, Goldsmith's prize, goodreads, Great Expectations, killing hapless ally, patrician press, pembrokeshire, reading, reading groups, reading lists, The Emma Press, Uncategorized

An invitation if you are a local-ish writer or reader and would like to come for some reading and discussion of the first few chapters of the book I am working on, my follow up to Killing Hapless Ally (March, 2016, Patrician Press).

The Life of Almost is a re-working of Great Expectations, with its protagonist, Almost, roughly modelled on Pip. It has a predominantly Welsh setting, much of it being in Pembrokeshire. As such, it draws on the stories I have been listening to my whole life and so I have adapted these for the book. Stories of sailors, the strange dangers of the sea and those who love in it and on it; dark events at steam fairs; predicaments at village shows; kelp, barnacles, tough salty men, the cree of the curlew and the dead across the estuary and of how gentry moved in and spoiled all. Stories of beatings known about but hidden in plain sight; curses and vendettas; strange harpists, madness, mutism; poltergeists who threw pictures from walls and plants from windowsills and vases from above the fireplace. People who went away and never came back: stories, stories, stories. Shootings, hangings, disappearances. My idea of a picnic could still revolve around sitting by graves describing the dreadful manner in which relatives died, except I desist because I’m the mother of three young boys and I think my upbringing was definitely weird and I’m sure the kids think I’m quite peculiar, already.

So, you know roughly the story arc if you know Great Expectations, I’ve told you a little of the settings, but there’s more to it. Because, as Almost takes you through stories of his world – as he tells them to Catherine, who opens the first chapter, so tired of life – you come to realise that he is not entirely of this world and not entirely of this time: he is something more protean and unconfined; a storyteller who can shift substance in an extraordinary way and who is not compromised by, shall we say, temporal and ordinal rules…I hope, when it finds its home, that you will find the book darkly funny, maybe a bit shocking in places and that you’ll enjoy what I have done with my favourite book, Great Expectations, such as reworked Jaggers into a nasty (Ben Jonson’s) ‘Volpone’, basking in his gold somewhere off a great motorway and given you many elements of the supernatural. I did something a bit radical the other day and incorporated, euphemistically, some of the Brexit scoundrels – they are part of why Catherine, who begins the book, is so jaded and sad and thus why she has Almost come to visit. And, you know, one might question: is Almost really there at all? Or is he created by others when….they need him. Oooohhhh.

Because I stand by this and know it to be true: a story can save your life.

Like a copy of Killing Hapless Ally? Order from Waterstones, your local bookshop (Ex Libris and Mr B’s have copies in our area), the Patrician Press website or Amazon here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Killing-Hapless-Ally-Anna-Vaught-ebook/dp/B01CA5F21Y/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1468239225&sr=1-1

 

 

 

From The Life of Almost

by Anna Vaught, posted in books, Drafts, editing, Great Expectations, pembrokeshire, reading, Uncategorized, writing

 

‘So, my sea girls have always come to me when I needed them and they know about the human world because, as this old book tells you, they explore the land-ways in animal form and they wait and listen. As a doe, Nerys looked through the windows of Clandestine House and watched Miss Davies try to make her nest anew, wresting the photos from the paper and crying as she did it. Sometime, Dilys sat as a wren on the windowsill of the house and heard what Miss Davies said to Seren.

‘Break their hearts, girl. The world is too much with us, all men are cads, there is filth under the rack and the green sea is no place to sail away on. Make yourself a carapace of bitterness, Seren. Make yourself a cruel, lovely, burning star. Break their hearts.’

And Seren would cry, but she would nod assent.