Category: refugees

Five, twelve, fourteen. The day after the brexit vote

by Anna Vaught, posted in anxiety, books, childhood, children, depression, mental health, refugees, Uncategorized, writers

FIVE, TWELVE, FOURTEEN

June 24th 2016. The day after the Brexit vote.

Here is how it went.

I had my first texts very early and a phone call from a friend in tears. I’d thought, as she, that the vote would be close but the other way round. The previous day, we’d looked, together, at the ‘Vote Leave’ balloons strewn about in the centre of our small town and thought, ‘Ha’— but still I was restive and feeling depressed; the atmosphere did not feel good. In the week before the vote, I had felt miserable and angry that many people in my own extended family were posting union jacks on Facebook with a ‘Remain’ shout. I was furious that people, some of whom I knew pretty well, did not appear to understand where some of the funding for new building had come from in the places where they lived.

‘What have they ever done for us?’ I heard someone say in Merthyr; in Newport, ‘It isn’t fair that these immigrants come over and are immediately given a council house!’ and I began to argue but was told I was soft and it was alright for me. I am not having a pop at Wales here; it’s where my people are from and I speak of it only because this is where I was in the pre-Brexit week; I rounded off this week in an idyllic valley in the Black Mountains and heard talk of how it was too crowded shortly before I walked a mile and half up the valley to the next house to deliver a get well card. On the way I saw only a dead badger. And then in a local town, I heard the word ‘darkie’. It is not that these sentiments are not thought or exchanged, just that it made me tremble to hear such things expressed more openly and with such vigour. When I got home I was so rattled by some of the papers’ coverage that, topping up with petrol just down the road from home, I turned the offenders round. It was not my place to be a censor, but I couldn’t help it, with all that inflammatory talk.

Yes, that Pre-Brexit week was a tough one. You remember the bus? The Bus. The Bus that Couldn’t Do Maths? I hated that bus. Where is it now and what do you suppose it says? ‘It’s what THEY WANT you to think! But seven is NOT a prime number!’

I had listened, as The Bus That Couldn’t Do Maths chugged on, to people talking about British sovereignty and purity which enraged me with its confident stupidity. ‘I hate it when you can’t hear any bloody English being spoken!’ said one. That was in Asda. WHAT IS MORE it was Asda in West Wiltshire, which is not exactly heavingly multi cultural. I was very close to doing the thing called Having a Go. I was minded to be right in there with words on celebrating the polyglot, the verbal texture, the joy, the fun, the life; to speak about how—the same person was also talking about preserving the English language—the English we speak was not suddenly born—Pop! Huzzah! It is English! It is a pretty, pure thing for local people only!—and added to with cultural reference and dialect; that it was, instead and like us, a series of graftings: Anglo Saxon words, Latin, Norman French; you know. I was about to go for it with other words: with jamborees and bungalows and pyjamas and…you get the picture. But I didn’t. I was too upset. And also, I did understand the importance of the vote for people. Because many of those people felt disenfranchised and that their voices were not heard by those in power, by a perceived ruling elite. It was only the other day that MP Jacob Rees Mogg spoke of how one problem in government was that there weren’t enough Etonians. Meanwhile, a house nearby had pages of statistics pasted on its windows: the costs of the EU. This fellow had also helpfully pasted up statistics on immigration with lists of dubious figures on their cost. Like teaching them to speak a language that everybody understood, say. We racked up loads in costs for language courses and teaching them English customs and gifting them five bed council houses because Johnny Foreigner has loads of children.

But back to Brexit the morning after.

The early texts. Miserable. I’m moving away from this wretched place. I’m moving to America (almost funny in retrospect; should add that I am married to an American); I am buying an island as far away as possible. There was one two plane rides away from Fiji for twelve grand apparently. I’ve searched it up.

The school run.

I have three boys, then five, twelve and fourteen. Smallest too small to grasp; Twelve thought the whole thing was just appalling (although one of his friends said the result was good because it meant we kept the pound) and Fourteen, I think, thought it was just typical of these grown ups to be not particularly watchful about something and then grouse. Or wail, in my case.

I left the house to take Five to school and two minutes down the road there was a triumphant woman assailing me. “It’s Independence Day!”

‘What does that funny lady mean?’ said Five. I tried to explain and he said, ‘But France is very nice and especially the train you put your car on.’

‘We got our country back!’ she hollered. Alarmingly similar in wording to Donald Trump’s comments in Scotland later that day, when congratulating them on voting for Brexit…

The rest of the run (I was snivelling by now) was full of moribund parents and I knew it was going to be a long day. It wasn’t even the voters I was cross with. It was, after all, their right to vote and, as I said above, I was entirely mindful of how opinions may have born of feeling eclipsed by a bossy elite. Maybe by bossy Oxbridgey Guardian readers like me, although I like to point out that I am actually very common and come from Welsh farming and mining stock for absolutely forever. Where the fact I have written novels is always going to be eclipsed by the size of Dai’s barbecue and the fact he is now a connoisseur of meat as well as a fan of Cameron, who GOT THE COUNTRY BACK ON ITS FEET. I did point out—that,you know, I’d hardly been head girl at Roedean; I was a bunker offer and swore with a passion—a couple of times in those early hours and days; for example, when someone called me a bad loser and said it was alright for me in my poncey house. I said, ‘I bought that as a semi derelict and washed up in the bath for four years and I am common. Yes, a right Chav. Yeah, okay I read all the time but…’ and I thought, ‘What nonsense am I even saying?’ and stopped in mid flight. My co-combatant smirked at me and, yes, I was a bad loser. I had conversations and made comments I should not have; that were divisive and snarky. I’m worrying I’m doing it now. Also, you saw my comments, above, about novels and the size of your barbecue. I realise that I am sliding more towards an exegesis of a dysfunctional family, but to tell you the truth, the familial schisms and the lies and the crazy rattling stuff that have gone on for decades, well now, they were melding that morning with Brexit ranting and Farage’s frog face and Boris’s snuffle-waffle-heffalump sounds. It was awful to feel so at odds with people who had been there a whole life, love them as I did, as I do. A beloved auntie just told me about how Theresa May is just what the country needs; my father in law is a Trump voter. God: WHAT A YEAR. How has that ‘renewal’ thing been going for you? Maybe TM will be out by the time this has published; I’d bet more on Trump, but I digress.

Around me, it felt—had been feeling for a while—like one great collective breakdown, that squalid summer. I wasn’t sure if I was actually okay. If anything was. Yet, I felt that I should not be smug about why I thought the vote was wrong. I had a secure home and had enough to keep me, us, safe and warm and it is plain as day that this is not the case for many, too many in our country. In some places and for some people, this will have inspired their choice of vote. You can’t go round jeering at others’ opinions when you have not walked in their shoes or heard of what was in their hearts. But I had read and thought a great deal and could not see any pressing reason to pursue Brexit. And as I said, it was those whom I felt had played fast and loose with facts and sums and hugely emotive topics that I was mad at. Well, and the Jingo woman on the school run.

And the fucking Bus That Couldn’t Do Maths.

24th June. Why did it have to be sports day? I felt it would be too sad to watch 421 primary age pupils while wondering how a decision we had made would impact on them. Fortunately, I didn’t see the Independence Day hullabaloo lady again, or I really would have done some very sweary public things, but when we were lining up, just after lunch, oh—people were miserable. Disconsolately dishing out squash for the kids and finding out where their eight year old was currently racing. All that week (I teach at secondary level) I went on to listen to angry teenagers, just not quite old enough to vote, bemoan the idiocy of what happened as more information and non-information came out; as Farage dismissed his endorsement of the facts on The Bus That Couldn’t Do Maths. It wasn’t that anyone was saying the EU had covered itself in glory, but mostly we were just confused, sad and, sometimes, a bit frightened—mostly, in my experience, because we witnessed a sense of empowerment from those holding views we found repellent: on the them and the us; the them you can’t trust; who take from us. I do realise I am simplifying, but I think that sense of witnessing loathing and suspicion and long held resentments coming to the fore was terrifying for people not used to dealing with it regularly. I should add that it is all very well for me to say; white; moreorless middle class enclave. Now I had to learn just a little of the kind of resilience that others are compelled to build every day.

Others. Yes. But us. We. Society is, should be, a we. Not us and (tick) other. Shouldn’t it be so? There I go again, worrying about semantic fields. But the words you use are important.

On Facebook ranting and hand wringing went on, as you’d expect. I blocked Independence Day lady. I should have known. She’d previously been posting that egregious thing about how we should be giving our funds to injured servicemen rather than the immigrants. That was a feature of those weeks. A sort of relegation to the back row of any sort of maths that made sense. If we don’t give the Polish bloke who runs the deli and works 100 hours a week a leg up, lazy sponger that he is, we will have funds for our lads. It’s The Bus That Couldn’t Do Maths, isn’t it? End our involvement in the EU and it is perfectly clear: straight swap with NHS funds and let’s get to Granny’s hip op and an end to the postcode lottery on, say, Tamoxifen. Anyway, the person with the sums was also joking about how she was playing ‘Spot the Brit’ while in the supermarket and titillating herself with the hilarity of someone asking the ‘foreign couple’ in front if they wanted help with packing their bags. HAHAHA I THOUGHT WE’D ALREADY TOLD THEM TO DO THIS.

Me: block. Pull plug. I cannot look. Oh look, though: she’s a good person because she’s put up another poster about hospices. Julie Burchill once wrote that shallow people cry very easily. Like at Bambi when mother deer gets it. I’ve found that racists do too and that they often like puppies and sick kids and doing their bit. I’ve always thought this is a bit like the Krays: they were ON IT when old ladies had their bags snatched or someone was mean to a defenceless kitten—and they probably contributed handsomely to the whist drive—but they still ran the firm and I wouldn’t have trusted them with my bread knife. There it is: I sound like a smug Guardian reader, I bet.

But back to sports day. Five smiled and waved and then up came the big cry. It was because I was thinking about what we might have taken from these children in terms of friendships made and bonds created; in terms of possibilities for living and studying and understanding. And I felt a dark and clawing sense of enclosure; of things drawing in around me. So I went into the toilets (I had to crouch down, obviously, because these things are built for small people) and I did the ugly cry, up from my toes. I probably wasn’t the only one.

It has been a strange year, summer 2016 to 2017, oh yes. My greatest cheer has come from the emboldening and charity of the young people I work with. The tears we have shared, even. I do believe we are seeing a generation becoming more alive to change and possibility and to the merits of political activism. And as I am fond of saying, it’s the parents you have to worry about. So thank you, thank you so much to all of you. But I worry about the young people and the children, of course. Mine; yours. I do not believe, as so many do—and they are broadcasting it on social media —that the world is now a terrible place; I don’t believe that. Or rather I believe that it has always been full of terrible things, but that I am optimistic, believe in the kindness of strangers and, to quote J. B. Priestly, that we ‘are one body’.

But we didn’t live in Merrie England until the spring of last year. Or at any time in the past. Speaking to some and listening to many, you’d think that’s what we were after. A return to a golden age; an Arcadia. Perhaps many Elizabethans may have had a whale of a time on all those junkets and national holidays; in gadding about round the maypole and sucking up mead in the days before twitter trolls and pesky plurality, but I’d argue it didn’t compensate for wars, poverty, pestilence and losing lots of your children. Perhaps The Bus That Couldn’t Do Maths needed a twin: The Bus That Made Up History. Well, something like that.

I do feel that, at this point in time, we, even we who perceive ourselves to be the original inhabitants of Albion (I am sorry; that was definitely a bit snarky of me), are tempest tossed and I hope, for all our children, that we—do you know, I am struggling with the word ‘we’ here; fretting that it is ethnocentric—are beginning to take stock and that, with clear thinking, proper information untainted by angry cant or prejudice born of sadness in these ‘alternate (sic) reality’ and ‘post truth’ times, with kindness and imagination we can make it to dry land. Off this rough journey out. You know, for the children.

For Five, Twelve, Fourteen.

Or should I say now, Six, Thirteen, Fifteen.

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)

Patrician Press Anthology of Refugees and Peacekeepers

by Anna Vaught, posted in refugees, Uncategorized

‘We are all from an island or a foreign sun and every one of us uncertain; alone—

the human condition isolates us; our experience, our very world

blunted by language of a raggedy drum, our faith sharp and clear

or not so, as we cry out our unbelief, our refugee song,

but together.’

Today, a beautiful and timely book will be published: Anthology of Refugees and Peacekeepers from Patrician Press. Donations from any profits go to http://www.helprefugees.org and I am proud and delighted to be in it. The publisher has given me permission to include my offering, below.

I feel so passionately about the texts in the book – particularly because of the events of the last few days with the Trump administration pursuing (chaotically, I might add) its aggressive path and watching the egregious sight of our own Prime Minister appeasing Trump.

What unites us is strong; what separates – or rather what we choose to allow to separate us  – can embitter us and will degrade us – if that is the path we choose. Get on twitter: look at the protests, marches and campaigns going on; see what you can do. You may have seen the crowds at Dulles, JFK; watched the people turn out in Boston. Maybe you are going to be outside Downing Street tonight or at the Bristol event. Our family is Welsh-American; we are doing what we can, both sides of the Atlantic: it makes me cry to see how heartbroken my American mother in law is by what she sees. And yet: out we go here and out I know she will go, too. Don’t lose hope and let’s keep the momentum going.

Who is ‘Emigre’ below? Is he or she a refugee? Well, yes. But he or she is also you. You, Trump,  May, Bannon…

                                                            Émigré

I was far from home. I stood on the grey street corner.

I was far from home and stood at the mouth of the sea, ivory curls around my feet.

I was far from home. I stood outside the stores and restaurants at night;

sat in the hotel room, the train compartment, the gimcrack coffee shop;

watched the dark frontiers fade out as the yellow jack of the gas station made midday;

I traced the sad cars on the motorway and my eyes hurt from the strip light.

Memory seared and I drank sour coffee and ate a chocolate bar.

I was far from home; an outsider—tossed up as motes from some former life,

composed of Eros, intellect, memory and uncertain dust.

But I was you and I was me. Everyman; foreigner; flâneur; such longueur: étranger—

And did you care? Did you stare? But did you know?

We are all from an island or a foreign sun and every one of us uncertain; alone—

the human condition isolates us; our experience, our very world

blunted by language of a raggedy drum, our faith sharp and clear

or not so, as we cry out our unbelief, our refugee song,

but together. We beat our palms against the past, each a piece of the continent,

a part of the main: our love tremulous in our hands, like water that shall spill.

The book is a collection of poems and short stories from a wide range of writers. Robert McCrum described it as ‘A gripping, rare and brave collection of new work written in extremis, the classic source of truly original poetry and prose through the ages.’ It has a deeply moving afterword by the jazz musician, Ian Shaw, who volunteered for a year at the Jungle in Calais and two fine epigraphs; one by the poet George Szirtes, on seeing refugees camped in Keleti railway station in Budapest, and the other by The Bishop of Barking, on seeing the refugee children trapped in the Calais Jungle camp. (There is more on the plight of the children at this camp in Ian Shaw’s afterword; I struggled to read this but insisted I did: conscience dictates that we know.)

Do please comment and share. x

(So, you can order it here at Amazon, https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0993494560/ref=cm_sw_r_fa_api_2xRByb1ZJV3FV or go here, to the press site http://patricianpress.com/ or to bookshops where it is on sale; if it is not, you can, of course, order it from them, its ISBN is 978-099349-456-7.) The book is available in both paperback and kindle versions.

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.

Patrician Press Anthology of Refugees and Peacekeepers

by Anna Vaught, posted in books, bookshops, patrician press, poems, poetry, reading, refugees, Uncategorized

From the Patrician Press blog (below) earlier. (I am published in this splendid new anthology with ‘Emigree’). You can buy this book through the publisher’s site http://patricianpress.com/ or, you know, the usual outlets. Few bookshops will stock books from smaller presses but they can always order!

I am proud to say that my dear friend, Susie Freeman, who has been such an encouragement to me in my writing, novels one and two, entered the associated writing competition run by Patrician and the judges (I wasn’t one, I should add; Susie’s just awesome so they noticed her) picked her poem as a winner and have subsequently included it in this anthology. CONGRATULATIONS SUSIE AND I LOVE YOU SO.

I quote from the blog…

This year has been horrendous in many ways but at least on the publishing front we have some good news: our lovely Refugees and Peacekeepers anthology has been sent to the printer today. We are happy to report that as well as quotes by George Szirtes and the Bishop of Barking in the foreword, the back cover contains a quote by the wonderful Robert McCrum. We are hoping to have advance copies in time for our event at the First Site art gallery in Colchester on Saturday 10th December from 12-3pm. All our books will be on sale with a combined raffle. Various pieces of artwork by our cover artists will be the main prizes, as well as some consolation prizes.

We will be in good company as the retrospective exhibition on at the time is by Gee Vaucher:

http://www.firstsite.uk/whats-on/gee-vaucher-introspective/

A fine new anthology to come

by Anna Vaught, posted in books, bookshops, Contemporary Small Press, editing, emma press, Fitzcarraldo, Galley Beggar Press, goodreads, killing hapless ally, patrician press, peace-seekers, poems, poetry, reading, refugees, short stories, Short Stories, Uncategorized, writing, writing competitions

 

Patrician Press Anthology of Poems and Short Stories

Patrician Press Anthology of Poems and Short Stories, by Anna Johnson, EditorPublished February 1st, 2017

Prices
£3.99 (e-book)
£8.00 (print)

ISBN
9780993494543 (e-book)
9780993494567 (print)

By Anna Johnson, Editor

This anthology of poems and short stories is the result of short-listed works from a competition Patrician Press ran in 2016 on the themes of Refugees and Peace-Seekers. The entries were judged by Joceline Bury, Anna Johnson, Emma Kittle-Pey and Petra McQueen.

The selected works are now included in the anthology. Further contributions from Patrician Press and other authors are as follows: Emma Kittle-Pey, Petra McQueen, Suzy Norman, Robert Ronsson, Sara Elena Rossetti, Anna Vaught, Kenneth Steven and more. Some of the latter works are much more loosely connected to the original themes.

The collection is edited by Anna Johnson who has also written the introduction.