WRITING

So, my manuscript has gone back and I have a little time (ha!) to work on the chapter book I’m submitting for both Bath Children’s Novel award and Chicken House/The Times competition. I have also discussed writing a YA novel with someone rather wonderful I met through discussions of all sorts (including writing books) on twitter. I also, chancing my arm, submitted feature pitches to ‘Mslexia’ and ‘The Atlantic’ – both were about mental health and writing.

READING

I read – as I tweeted to him – the whole of James Dawson’s This Book is Gay in one chomp. As an exploration of sexuality FULL STOP this is an excellent book. It’s comprehensive, funny and wise; I hope it will get used in PSHE in schools – and I say this with my day job hat on: as an English teacher and one who used, like James, to teach PSHE. PSHE is the starting point, I think, for teachers: do it well and students may come and find you at other times to talk things over. For the digital natives, there is a great deal of LGTB* support online – but this book is an essential for bookshelves: for young people, for their teachers and for their parents. I have already looked at the book with one of my boys: with my almost twelve year old because he saw the cover and was, of course, intrigued (my fourteen year old saw it and ran away. Make that two copies for this household  – I’ll leave it by his bedroom door).

Other reading…I’ve almost finished John Carey’s The Violent Effigy, his fine exploration of themes, images and symbols in the work of Charles Dickens, just started Ian McEwan’s The Children Act, which I think I will stay up late reading tonight as I am already, as you could predict, hooked by its first characters; I want to know what the dilemmas are; I want to know about the first protagonist and her husband and what the consequence will be of his so unapolagetically announcing an affair with Melanie who wears heavy amber beads…I want to know about the legal papers in a fan on the floor and about the title of the book and whether I am to read ‘act’ as both noun and verb.

And it has been the morning of the em dash, of writing to Catherine Camus, daughter of Albert, for literary permissions and of doing the draft bibliography of my debut novel, Killing Hapless Ally. Why the bibliography? The book is about, shall we say, unusual methods of staying sane; of being less alone; of not being terrified in a home of desolate proportions. Bound up with that is reading and the novel does refer to and quote a good number of books. Some are in the acknowledgements section, which houses Kavanagh, Camus, Larkin, Plath, Auden and Dorothy Rowe. Here are the (draft) others!

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I have referred to, used very brief paraphrase, or quoted where the text is out of copyright from the following and I hope my book has piqued your interest in some of those which follow. I have listed the editions I own, but where these are out of print, I have given an obtainable alternative. Albert Camus: The Outsider, (Penguin, 2000, translated by Joseph Laredo), ‘The Myth of Sisyphus‘ (Penguin, 1975, 2000, translated by Justin O’ Brien); Louis MacNeice: ‘Thalassa’, ‘The Sunlight on the Garden’ and ‘Autumn Journal’ from Collected Poems Louis MacNeice (Faber and Faber, 1966, 1987), Simone de Beauvoir: Force of Circumstance (Penguin, 1987, translated by Richard Howard); Jean Paul Sartre: Nausea (Penguin,1966, 1986, translated by Robert Baldick) and Annie Cohen-Solal: Sartre. A Life (Heinemann, 1987); Sylvia Plath: ‘Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit’ from Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (Faber and Faber, 2001) and the poems ‘Lady Lazarus’,‘Cut,’ ‘Daddy’ from Sylvia Plath Collected Poems (Faber and Faber, 2002); Dylan Thomas: A Child’s Christmas in Wales (New Directions, 2009); T. S. Eliot:‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ from T. S. Eliot Collected Poems 1909-1962 (Faber and Faber, 2009), Michael Ondaatje: The English Patient (Bloomsbury, 1992, 2009); Samuel Beckett’s ‘Happy Days’ and ‘Waiting for Godot’ from The Complete Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett (Faber and Faber, 2006); and his Collected Poems (Grove/Atlantic, 2015); W. B Yeats: ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ from The Collected Poems of W. B Yeats (Wordworth Poetry Library 2000); Andre Gide: Fruits of the Earth (Penguin 1970, translated by D. Bussy); Dolly Parton: My Life and Other Unfinished Business, (Harper Collins, 1995); Peter Hogan: Shirley Bassey. Diamond Diva (ReadHowYouWant.com LTD, 2013); definitions of disorders are as given on the NHS website on its mental health and associated medication information pages and from the DSM-5. [An abbreviation of] The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Fifth Edition (Various. Published by the American Psychiatric Association, 2013); Robert D. Hare: Without Conscience: The Disurbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us (The Guildford Press, 1993) and his site, www.hare.org, which is devoted to the study of psychopathy; Charles Dickens: Great Expectations and David Copperfield, (Gerald Duckworth and Co Ltd, 2005; this is the Nonesuch Dickens six volume collection); Frances Hodgson Burnett The Secret Garden (Vintage Children’s Classics, 2012); Helen Bush Mary Anning’s Treasures (Puffin, 1976); Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories (Dover Publications, 1997); John Skelton: ‘On the Death of the Noble Prince King Edward the Fourth’ from John Skelton. The Complete English Poems edited by John Scattergood (Penguin, 1992); Walt Whitman; ‘Song of Myself’ from ‘Leaves of Grass’ (Penguin, 1986); Andrew Marvell: ‘A Horation Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’, from The Complete Poems of Andrew Marvell (Penguin Classics edition, Penguin, 2014); D.H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers (United Holdings Group, 1922); William Empson: Seven Types of Ambiguity (Pimlico, 2004), John Keats: ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ from Collected Poems of John Keats (William Ralph Press, 2014) and John Keats. Selected Letters (Penguin, 2014), Kenneth Graham: The Wind in the Willows; Robert Browning: ‘The Pied Piper of Hamlin’ from Selected Poems of Robert Browning (Penguin, 2004); Matthew Arnold: ‘Sohrab and Rustum’ from The Poems of Matthew Arnold (Oxford University Press, 1922); Moliere: ‘Tartuffe’ – the title of which is sometimes translated as ‘The Hypocrite’ (NHB Drama Classics, 2002, translated by Martin Sorrell); Duncan C. Blanchard: The Snowflake Man. A Biography of Wilson A. Bentley (Ohio, 1998); W. A. Bentley and W.J. Humphreys: Snow Crystals (New York, 1931); Father Ted: Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan for Hat Trick Productions and Channel 4. The poem (my own) you find in chapter one contains the first line of Richard Lovelace’s ‘To Althea. From Prison’ from The Poems of Richard Lovelace (Clarendon Press, 1963) and the rest of the poem is a pastiche of its form, with a hint of its theme of confinement. The story about Eric Newby’s A Book of Travellers’ Tales (Picador, 1986) being found in Kolkata, as signed by the author, is true and the book is on my shelves at home. The story of meeting Johnny Cash in a lift is also true and happened to my husband; as with the Newby incident, I took it for the book. Signposts you see.