Making Our Own Weather

Creative buddies, bookshops, narrative non-fiction and nicknames

 Enough is enough! I’m betting that like me, especially if you live in the North, you’re sick and tired of the cold, grey, damp weather. March could do so much better if only it tried. I’ve known March days when it’s been warm enough to sit outside in the garden, anticipating blossom and the flowering of tulips in their pots. To be fair, I’ve also known March to arrive like a yeti, knee deep in ice and snow, as was the case the year my son and his wife got married, when ‘the beast from the east,’ blew in. I’m currently hankering after sunshine and tropical beaches, (though I have to admit, as I sit writing this, this sun has struggled out through the clouds, which is something I suppose). The only real salvation lies in making our own weather.

So, on a positive weather note, I had a great conversation this week with my, ‘creative buddy,’ my lovely sister-in-law Jan, who is an artist. Whenever we talk I’m always struck by the similarities in our process. Despite our different mediums, we often share the same misgivings and stumbling blocks. It’s good to talk about them. I can’t recommend finding a buddy like this highly enough. Unless you’re part of a group, creating can be a lonely and isolated place. The kind of relationship I’m talking about and that I hope we’re developing is safe, supportive and trusting. It’s about listening, about the opportunity to talk about our work at length, which is rare, as, let’s face it, not everyone wants to hear writers or artists going on about what they do!

We also send each other odd things that we imagine the other would like. Last week I sent her the definitely not to be missed, Grayson Perry, on Young Again. Radio 4. He is extraordinary in so many ways, not least in coming to terms with who he is and what made him.

Among the things she sent me was this film, worth it just to hear Patti Smith’s voice, she still absolutely nails it! Surveying Richter’s work Patti says, that when she loves or admires something like these paintings, they make her want to work.Yes!

I’m totally in tune with this. I feel the same. When I read something I really admire, it spurs me on to try and write something equally good.

On the subject of reading and also a big positive, I never stop being thankful for Collected Books in Durham, and its founder Emma. Having an independent bookshop on my doorstep has enriched my writing world beyond measure. For one thing, Emma stocks and sells my books and whenever I go in these days, it seems there are books waiting for me to sign - such a treat. Equally important for me as a writer I encounter books I would otherwise not have come across. This week it was the vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez.

A memoir thinly disguised as a novel? A novel disguised as memoir? Auto fiction? It’s described on the dust jacket as a novel, but for me, it reads less like a novel, and more like non-fiction, a reflective canvas on which she paints lockdown in New York. It made me think a lot about unnecessary distinctions. After all aren’t we always in some way or another writing our lives? This is very much a conclusion I came to when I was writing, Sometimes a River Song. Set in Arkansas in the 1930’s, it might appear on the surface to be long way from anything I’d known in my life.

It wasn’t until I reached the end of the novel though, and could reflect, that I truly realised the paradox, that in writing what you don’t know, you are writing everything you do know. Hadn’t I grown up on the Somerset Levels, that watery place close to a tidal creek? I’d lived by the river, played by the river, watched it change with the coming of the seasons just as my protagonist, Aiyana, does. Wasn’t that landscape and my connection to it one of the hardest things I ever had to leave? Then there was the prison, where I worked for many years. I spent nearly a quarter of a century working with women like Aiyana, some who could not read and many who longed for education. And education had been the thing that had most changed my life, as it does Aiyana’s.

Without little ones around, I’ve managed to get some serious work done. For sometime I’ve been resisting finding a beginning for my memoir about my mother and myself. But this week I’ve been thinking how I might frame it, how it might look on the page and how it might unfold. Now I’ve made a start, it feels like real progress.

On the writing front, watch this space for a possible collaboration with Collected Books, re: writing workshops!

For those interested in writing about their lives, here’s a post well worth reading, Finding Our True Voice in Narrative Non-Fiction, plus a great writing exercise, which I’ve met before in other guises, once on an Arvon poetry course, and which I will definitely be stealing myself. It’s all about our names, how we come to be named, what our name means to us. On the Arvon course we were asked if we had a nickname when younger. Mine was Bovril!

Thanks for reading

Avril x

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