Being a 'Real,' Reader

Gillian Allnutt, May Sarton, Solitude and Driving Licences

This week, on your behalf, I have donated a further £75.00 to Medicines Sans Frontieres, (Doctors Without Borders) which brings our total up to £768.

Thank you so much to my new subscribers. I am intending to add to our running total in the autumn from workshop proceeds. With this in mind I’m hoping we may be able to achieve a total of £1000 this year.

Our contribution is needed more than ever, so if you feel you can afford a monthly subscription (these are easily cancelled - so it could just be for a couple of months) then I would be most grateful for your support. When I started on this journey at the beginning of the year I didn't expect to make it to £1000. And although it's not a king's ransom, I feel together we’ve contributed in possibly the only way open to us and I am indebted to you for supporting me in this. Thank you.

In my last newsletter I wrote about becoming the ‘pretend reader,’ in order to edit our own work. This week I find myself very much reflecting on the real reader: the reader I have always been who finds that all is well with the world when there are books to be read. When they sit waiting in the physical space around me, on my desk, in my study, on the shelves over my bed. If you have read my memoir, Handmade, you will know already the existential part that reading played in my childhood and in my growing up. This continues to be the case, with reading playing a dual role in my life now.

In my writing life it represents ongoing inspiration… I am sitting at the kitchen table on a Saturday morning, eating croissants taken from the freezer and baked in the oven, a cafetiere of coffee at my side. In front of me a novel I’m reading. As I read, I find myself reflecting on its protagonists, and on the protagonists in my own work in progress. Could my protagonists, like the characters in this particular novel, have met before? It becomes a ‘what if,’ question. The kind of question that is always interesting and sometimes surprising for a writer.

If my protagonists have met before then this could another layer of meaning to my text, create tension and possibly drama to what I had thought of as their first meeting. I am immediately caught up in its possibilities, and am fairly convinced there is a backstory here for me to explore.

I guess I am always reading with an eye to my own work.

I have also been back to the library in Harlow Carr, spending several hours immersed in the gardening books. What a treat that was. I only regret that it's a long way and I can't pop in and out regularly. But my reading there has led me to more reference books and I've been fortunate to find most of them available second hand online.

Now, to reading not for work but for the soul, and here it is often poetry that sustains me. I am currently reading Gillian Allnutt’s, latest collection, Lode, for which I have nothing but admiration. Victoria Moul, in the TLS says, ‘there’s no better poet alive in England, and no better poet of England, either.’

What more can I add? Allnutt is not always the easiest of poets and yet to my mind she is the most authentic. And as for difficulties - particularly intertextual references - she offers us notes which allow for greater depth and understanding. This is a collection that spoke to me of my own family history, as well as my experience of the natural world and our lives here in the North, of the stasis of lockdown and beyond. It is one I know I will return to again and again. It also took me on a tangential journey to Blake's, Songs of Innocence and Experience, as well as back to the extraordinary Journal of Solitude by May Sarton - my lodestone, my lodestar, in times of unease or more simply in times of solitude.

Solitude has been much on my mind these past weeks as I consider that I may not have my driving licence renewed due to my glaucoma. I’ve been made aware this week that it’s no longer a straightforward matter for me, and I am awaiting the final outcome. If I can no longe drive it will obviously mean I cannot go out in the world so easily. Of course I have my fingers crossed but if I do have to forfeit my licence there is no doubt that it will be a life changing moment for me, especially living in a rural area where there is no bus service. I will of course learn to live with this, and learn to ask others for help which I know I’m very poor at.

But the best of it is that I will still have my books and my writing, that I am fortunate in loving my home and in loving solitude, cherishing it even, and believing in its creative space.

I’m turning to Gillian Allnut, and May Sarton, for the last words today:

Summertime

mute or musical as morning rain
and you as always gone
how I listen to your absence to my own
to the now and then of wood pigeon
its dear inconsequential circumlocution

Gillian Allnutt

September 15, 1972, May Sarton

It is raining. I look out on the maple, where a few leaves have turned yellow, and listen to Punch, the parrot, talking to himself and to the rain ticking gently against the windows. I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my “real” life again at last. That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone…

As always, thanks for reading

Avril x