STOP PRESS for Readers, Writers & Gardeners

Don’t forget to join me this Sunday at Noon on the 3^rd June to The Writing Game  on Bishop FM where Gillian, Avril and I dig into the inspiration of the garden.

This month on The Writing Game we are making the connection between the creative processes of gardening and writing. Many gardeners are writers and many writers are gardeners. Both activities require a combination of inspiration, hard work, creativity and patience. The only way to become accomplished at both writing and gardening is  actually to do it – not think about it or theorise about it but to actually practice the art. Some people would say that in both cases you have to be willing to get your hands dirty!

On this month’s programme we visit the garden in Low Etherley of Mary Smith who is both a great gardener and a member of Wear Valley Writers. ..  – read more  at http://blogs.bishopfm.com/thewritinggame/

John McGahern, Writing Retreats & Changing Lives

I first wrote this View of Writer John McGahern’s novel  -  Amongst Women  as a guest writer for Kathleen Jones’ very special blog. We had read it in our Iconic Writing Group alongside Willian Trevor's Reading Turgenev (reviewed here last month)  and I thought the piece would fit very nicely here 


I have participated in several writers retreats and now have run a few. Something significant always happens at writer’s retreats: they can be life changing events. I am just in the last stages of completing a novel set around a fictional writer’s retreat in France. So John is on my mind.


I met the late, great John McGahern at my first writer’s retreat at Lumb Bank in Yorkshire – a great place on the side of a hill with a scattering of garden huts furnished with a chair, a bench, and a great view of the countryside. I had been suffering from overwork and a loss of confidence.


At that time I’d had three children’s books published and was hungry – not to write  a better book as I knew writing for children can be the highest part of our calling – but I felt the need for  bigger scope and scale: the opportunity to fly higher, dig deeper. So I saved my hard earned pennies and went to Lumb Bank, exhausted, clutching half a novel and shot through with that down feeling you get in the middle of a novel. ‘What have I done? Is this any good? Is this no good? This is no good.’



John McGahern was one of the two tutors on that retreat. I’d read The Dark – a masterpiece of a book – but knew little about the writer. A good tutor, he read my half-book and I shared my misgivings, my lack of confidence about it, and my sense of foolishness. He chuckled. ‘You’re surely joking, Wendy. Sure, I see you’re a great writer!’ And he went on to tell me why. He gave me the confidence to surge on and write many more adult novels. He treated me as an equal, a fellow artisan.


One morning we talk about an extract from my manuscript where a girl is walking with a basket up a bank.  She lifts up her skirt to show her friend where her brothers have kicked her, leaving boot marks on her thigh. John then talks with some intensity about how much one can render in fiction the dark things that have really happened to you.  And he tells me something so terrible it could not make its way onto even his pages which – always beautifully written – are undercut with the complex interplay of cruelty and control, love and loyalty inside the crucible of family life. 


His work is cut through with the chillingly honest view of his own difficult childhood which is a strong strand of most of his fiction, often dominated by the figure of the strong, cruel, seductive father. His fiction - emerging as it does out of his territory of rural Ireland - consistently reflects on the politics of family life where power, and even love, is wielded in subtle and brutal ways. He allows the reader access to these excesses by rendering the highly subjective experiences of his characters in a pared- back, detached style allowing the reader to infer the terrors for themselves. As well as this he allows us some rest for our emotions - with his great prose, his acute observation and lyrical rendering of time and season in rural Ireland.



Amongst Women, his 1990 prize-winning[1] novel, has at its centre just such a cruel controlling seductive father and husband. Michael Moran, an ex hero and a leader in the historical war against the British, wields total power over his family of three girls and a boy. Michael prefers family to friends and dominates his family using rituals of meals, domestic tasks and prayers as the syntax and grammar of his domination. (Brainwashing comes to mind…) There are physical aspects to his domination that have sexual undertones but the writing is too subtle for that to declare itself as incest.


Michael is handsome and has charm and is prepared to use it – as when he courts his second wife, Rose, so he can add her as caretaker and fellow-hero-worshipper to his brood of women. McGahern, though, shows Rose as the only one who, though loving Michael, holds out against his domination. This is logical. She has not been brainwashed by him since birth.


It is significant that the daughters, whom he bullies, manipulates and dominates, adore him and make excuses for him to each other and to Rose and other outsiders. And the final irony – and the brilliance of the perception in the writing – is that these women do notbreak down. At his death, around which the whole of this novel is tuned, they become their father. He has created them. He is in their hearts, in their skin, in their soul.
I have many other stories emerging from this particular writing retreat but this is the most important. 


Writing retreats, as I say, can change your life. 


And that's what my new novel The Art Of Retreating is all about ...

The Two Selves of Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

See also Lifeticetastedd ‘…every woman needs ‘a room of her own’ — not simply to separate her from husband and children but also to separate her two selves...’ (1978) echoing Virginia Woolf at Smith College USA in a speech entitled 'The Journey Not the Arrival’ : Anne Morrow Lindbergh As is the way of things, I found a battered blue hardback book on the bookshelves in my little study. It had a label stuck on the spine with faded writing. Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Gift from the Sea. It is written in my writing, so this must be my book. But I didn’t put it there. We did have a big sort out of books both upstairs and down but this book certainly didn’t emerge. Perhaps it’s been placed by the household ghost (another story there…) who is urging me to read it, despairing of my present state of being which rather resembles an over-wound clock. This book is the modest 1955 edition of a book which has sold, allegedly, over three million copies in 45 different languages. There have been many editions since and I think it is still in print. Up till this week it was never in my mind. I might have owned it but I never read it. Of course people of my generation are aware of the Lindberghs. There have been books and films … When I mentioned the name my friend Gillian said, ‘Oh yes! James Stewart! In The Spirit of St Louis’ This was the 1957 film telling the story of fold that followed Lindbergh’s 33 hour solo transatlantic flight in 1927. He was a hero of the inter-war generation. In her memoir Anne Morrow Lindberg tells us of the tall, lanky, handsome figure towering over social gatherings when she as a very young woman, fell in love with this apparently shy quite hero. He taught her to fly and she flew with him on expeditions charting new routes for airlines. They had several children but in 1932 suffered the tragedy of the world wide exposure during the kidnap and murder of their eldest son. Lindbergh, impressed technological superiority of Nazi Germany, as late as In 1938, accepted a German medal of honour from Hermann Goering and proceeded to accuse British, Jewish, and pro-Roosevelt groups were leading America into war. He was later reinstated and took active part in the anti-German effort. Anne seems to have lived quietly alongside all this surrogate adulation, fame, notoriety and drama, being the good mother and wife and writing of her own endeavours in North to The Orient, written between 1931 and 1935. But then, visiting an island, trying to find inner piece she started to write, separating her ‘two selves'. She says I began these pages for myself, in order to think out my own particular pattern of living, my own individual palace of life, work and human relationships. And since I think best with a pencil in my hand I started naturally to write.’ (Anne Morrow Lindbergh: a Gift from The Sea.) And this she did, using shells as the symbols of the progress of her thinking. The book must have hit a universal chord – particularly among women – because as I said over three million copies have been read in 45 different languages. If you are interested I have written about what Gift from The Sea says, and how AML says it, on my writing blog A Life Twice Tasted.

Kindle, CreateSpace and Great People

Instead of celebrating Mother's Day I spent my weekend with some great  people - Anne, Erica, Eileen, Judith, Martin,Joy, Geri (and Hilary and Mary in mind if not in body) - working alongside my friends and colleagues the lovely Avril, the very wise Gillian  at our  Our Room toWrite Conference Weekend. For all of us it - writing tutors and students - it was a  steep learning curve.

Our ambition was to demystify  - for keen and talented writers - the disciplines and processes of producing high quality Kindle and hard copy versions of our novels and short stories. In other words, to publish our own work to the whole world, even into cyberspace.

The challenge for Avril, Gillian and I is that we didn't just want to tell people how to do it, we wanted to show them.

So. using a laptop, projector and a screen  we showed these writers how to make a Kindle book, right  from the process of editing a manuscript to the highly prepared level neccessy for these processes, onto how to design covers, and then - actually doing it there in public (!) - to publish the book there and then on Kindle.



New Cover for Lizza

 I used a new revised and edited edition of  my children's book LIZZA as an exemplar. There was a cheer when we hit 'Publish' and the novel went up and our there. It's up there now, although it still needs a few 'nips and tucks' so I will go in and refine it when I get my breath back. (Youcan do thyis with your Kindle, which is great...)

That Kindle process took one and a half hours.   That will be my standard time in future. (The fist time I did it, myself, it took a day...)

Next, Avril - there and then - showed the writers how - using paint.net -  great covers can be designed by amateurs. I described doing the same thing -as I did for LIZZA using  Microsoft Publisher but could not demonstrate it, as Publisher was not on the laptop we had there.

Then using the CreateSpace software Avril - quite brilliantly, I think - took a manuscript of her novella  When You Hear the Birds Sing  through to the point of Print on Demand publication,  the more complicated process of creating your own paperback book on Print On Demand. She made it seem very do-able and inspired us all.

Of course what we kept saying was - you need patience and the willingness to to do and redo until you get it right. You, need patience with the process and - most imprtantly - with yourself.

We were keen that this process-experience was supported with paperwork which people could go away and put into practice everything they had experienced at the conference. I called these the Room To Write Ladybird Guides to Kindling and creating a Print on Demand Book. This was writing exercise in itself for Avril and myself - to created directions stripped of the  sometimes esoteric repetitions and misdirections in the literature.

Our students really appreciated these documents, I think. Theye went off with these to support their Kindle and CreateSpace Adventure.

Wilting a little, we spent some time of the last afternoon discussing the function of writer's blog for a writer who wanted to use this medium both for developing their own writing and for supporting her or his publications out in cyberspace. Avril, Gillian and I talked about our own blogging experiences as well as Judith, a course member has a well establishe writer's blog as has Anne. Martin, Eileen and Geri - I think! - decided to have a building their own blog.

As a tutor it's always good to know that there are concrete outcomes from your work. I have a very good feeling that several of these writers will go on to produce high quality publications and develop interesting blogs which will reflect the multiplicity of talents of these dedicated writers. They are participating in the democratizing revolution which is transforming the international world of talented writers.

I came home - as I am sure did they - exhausted but satisfied that something really happened on our Kindling Weekend. I also came home to choclates and wine and handpicked daffodils and two wonderful cards from my lovely son and my very special son-in-law. I don't know whether it was the exhaustion of the great conference or the lovely words on the cards, but I ended up in  (very happy) tears.


I will post photos of the conference when they come from writer,Geri as she has evolved now as the Room To Write Official Photographer.

Comments sent by the lovely people:

It just gets better and better – nothing could have bettered the weekend. Thanks entirely to you and Avril and Gillian. Generous is the word to describe you with your time your know-how, your friendship – and we happy few are the lucky ones and we know how lucky we are. Rest of the week cancelled to get down to the nitty-gritty! Erica

I am definitely going to set up a blog very soon.  Thank you for all your hard work.  The three of you always put so much effort into the conferences that you set up for us and I found it really worthwhile and interesting’ Geri

Thanks for an excellent weekend. I feel tired, excited, inspired but also, more important, very keen to put some of the masses of ideas that you and Avril have given us into practise. Watch out for my forthcoming Blog. Now have a rest!!! Martin

What an amazing week-end! I have the confidence now to upload my work to Kindle and create my own hard copy book on http://www.createspace.com  As ever Wendy Avril & Gillian have put in the hard work to save the rest of us time and money when learning and applying new skills. Many thanks to Room to Write.  Judith

To be in at the birth of a Kindle book was amazing. Wendy Robertson’s LIZZA emerged  red-faced yet beautiful into the Kindle World. Thanks to Avril for passing on her wealth of knowledge and expertise on creating a hard copy of our Kindled books and Gillian saw to everything else. The usual wonderful food, company and ambience at Whitworth. Fantastic Weekend, Thanks for everything. Anne O

 Many thanks for the exceptional weekend.  It was the best yet.  My thanks to you and Avril and Gillian, you worked so hard and now I'm hoping to go ahead with Kindle and also create a blog. Eileen