THE HAY WRITERS

With Festival time fast approaching it’s reached that point in May again when I set myself my yearly Hay Festival Poetry Challenge – HFPC for short. Last year I managed to write a poem …

Source: Hay Festival 2016 Poetry Challenge

The next selection from our anthology is taken from Watching Me, Watching You by Juliet Foster.

‘I know you are watching me, watching you.  As I opened the five bar gate on my return home, you were sliding down the roof; it was a controlled slide, delivering you with great accuracy just above the suet ball holder, which was swinging from the gutter.  Just as you were about to swing with it, devouring the bird food in seconds, you saw me standing, watching you.  You changed your plan; you flicked the holder from the gutter, and let it drop into the undergrowth, where you hid with it.  I had to stop watching you, I could not see you.’

Pick and Mix is available from local bookshops and from Amazon.

Truestory by Catherine Simpson

Truestory is Catherine Simpson’s debut novel, and hopefully the first of many.  This is Alice’s story.  She lives in a remote Lancashire farmhouse with her son, Sam and her husband, Duncan.  Duncan is not a natural in the world of farming, or in the world of fatherhood and Alice fights to cope with the farm’s failing finances and to make Sam’s life as grounded as she can.  Sam has Asperger’s Syndrome, a penchant for maps and a terror of change.

The treatment of Sam’s situation is both sensitive and well-informed.  Catherine’s own daughter suffers from autism and her view of the book is that it is a ‘really sympathetic portrait of someone with autism … and it shows we can’t turn our weird off.’  Alice’s feeling of being trapped in her situation is beautifully captured and Catherine’s writing walks the fine line between humour and the darker side with amazing poise and balance.

Truestory is one of those rare books.  It is a cracking, hard to put down ‘easy read’ which leaves you thinking for a very long time afterwards.

Sandstone Press Ltd (2015), £8.99

ISBN:  978-1-910124-59-8

Jan Newton

The first recommendation this week is from Juliet Foster.

Conversations with my Gardener by Henri Cueco:

A little gem.  This memoir is a conversation between two elderly French gentlemen; the author, who is also an artist and the other, his gardener.  Their friendship deepens over the years as they discuss their families, health and jobs amongst many other topics.  Their discussion about the beauty of a lettuce versus a painting is debated at length, as is the advantage of ageing and the removal of teeth.  ‘Soon I won’t have my of my own left.  Just the bought ones,’ says the gardener.  The gardener also tells the artist that coffee is making him feel ill.  He is advised to try tea and told they drink it in England.  The gardener responds by saying they aren’t any dafter over there than here.  As the gardener’s health deteriorates it becomes very moving.  An enchanting book that everyone should read.

Granta £6.99 ISBN 86207-739-8

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The second book is recommended by Jo Jones.

Scully by Alan Bleasdale

My first teaching post was in a middle school (ages ten to thirteen) in the Liverpool area.  Many of the children (especially the boys) could not read.  They would listen to me reading them a book, but only if they could identify with the characters in the story.  Clearly, children’s classics such as Anne of Green Gables or Black Beauty just would not interest them.

Alan Bleasdale was a teacher in a comprehensive school in Liverpool; he too had quickly realised that the boys in his class did not identify with Janet and John or Dick and Dora (popular school reading schemes).  What they wanted were stories about boys like themselves who enjoyed football, bunking off school, were always in trouble and hated Everton supporters.  Alan started writing short stories about a lad called Scully and his mates who were passionate Liverpool supporters.  These short stories became the basis for his books:  Scully and Scully and Mooey.

The characters’ home lives were chaotic, usually living in social housing in overcrowded conditions.  Scully was the youngest of seven; he had an elder sister who had got pregnant at seventeen and given birth to a mixed race baby boy who was christened Darryl Sebastian Cochise (but called Hovis for short).

Alan’s typical Liverpool humour, combined with his ability to have readers crying with laughter one minute and weeping with sadness the next makes Scully a wonderful read.  I’m sure many of you will remember Boys from the Black Stuff by the same author.

Scully by Alan Bleasdale was first published in 1977, ISBN 10:0099139201 Arrow Books paperback.

In his wonderful book On Writing, Stephen King gives the following advice:

‘If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others:  read a lot and write a lot.  There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.’

Well that’s a relief then.  The OCD-like inability to pass a bookshop, the teetering piles of books ‘to be read’ … it seems that’s all perfectly normal behaviour for aspiring writers.  With this ‘official’ permission granted, we thought it might be interesting to share our favourite reads.  Juliet Foster sets the ball rolling with her insights into a book which, as luck would have it, concerns the subject of being a book lover.

Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman

This is a book written for bibliophiles.  Anne Fadiman is an American writer who has included eighteen of her essays in this little book.  As these are essays you can dip in and out at will.  I found it fun and interesting to discover how other people’s lives are enhanced by the reading and ownership of books.  I particularly related to and loved the first essay ‘Marrying Libraries’.  In fact one can identify with much of her writing and I shall dip into Ex Libris again and again.

Allen Lane (1999) ISBN 0713993154, Penguin (2000) ISBN 0140283706

Juliet Foster