Category: Writing

Writing Wild by Kathryn Aalto

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

Writing Wild

3.5*

‘An exciting, expert, and invaluable group portrait of seminal women writers enriching a genre crucial to our future.’ —Booklist

Blurb:

In Writing Wild, Kathryn Aalto celebrates 25 women, both historical and current, whose influential writing helps deepen our connection to and understanding of the natural world. These inspiring wordsmiths are scholars, spiritual seekers, conservationists, scientists, novelists, and explorers. They defy easy categorization, yet they all share a bold authenticity that makes their work both distinct and universal.

Part travel essay, literary biography, and cultural history, Writing Wild ventures into the landscapes and lives of extraordinary writers and encourages a new generation of women to pick up their pens, head outdoors, and start writing wild.

My thoughts:

Writing Wild: Women Poets, Ramblers and Mavericks Who Shape How We See The Natural World is by Kathryn Aalto and illustrated by Gisela Goppel. Published by Timber Press it will be released in paperback on 1 April, with a Kindle edition to follow on 14 April 2020.

I don’t read a lot of nonfiction, but I do enjoy reading books about nature, so Writing Wild appealed to me. Kathryn Aalto’s reason for writing her book was to highlight what these 25 women writers have written, their historical significance and the barriers, biases and bullying they overcame to write. It covers two hundred years of women’s history through nature writing, including natural history, environmental philosophy, country life, scientific writing, garden arts, memoirs and meditations and does not aim to dismiss men’s contributions. Gisela Goppel’s portraits of each writer head each chapter. Aalto writes an introduction to each writer and includes excerpts of prose, poems and essays with added recommendations for further reading, plus a list of sources and an index.

Predominantly American and British, some of these women writers are familiar to me, such as Dorothy Wordsworth, Vita Sackville West, Nan Shepherd, Rachel Carson, Mary Oliver, Annie Dillard and Helen Macdonald. Others are new to me, but I would like to read several of their works, such as Andrea Wulf’s book The  Brother Gardeners in which  she explores how England became a nation of gardeners. Wulf, a design historian, writes horticultural and historical history through narrative nonfiction, borrowing techniques from fiction to make nonfiction come alive. Elena Passarello’s Animals Strike Curious Poses essay collection, which Aalto describes as written with  laugh-out-loud humour and depth of empathy, also particularly appeals to me.

One of the things I learned reading this book is the name ‘Cli-fi’. I hadn’t come across it before but of course, it is not a new genre. As Aalto points out it goes back at least to Jules Verne’s 1889 The Purchase of the North Pole. Contemporary examples including Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour. The writer she chooses to illustrate this genre is Saci Lloyd, an acclaimed writer of cli-fi, whose vivid and action packed books include The Carbon Diaries, about the effects of carbon reduction policies. They are gritty eco-thrillers featuring Laura Brown a 16 year old trying to manage life with a carbon deficit card.

Kathryn Aalto is a writer, designer, historian and lecturer. For the past twenty-five years, her focus has been on places where nature and culture intersect: teaching literature of nature and place, designing gardens, and writing about the natural world. Her work explores historic and horticultural themes with a contemporary twist. She is the author of The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh: A Walk Through the Forest that Inspired the Hundred Acre Wood (2015) and Nature and Human Intervention (2011). Her website is kathrynaalto.com.

My thanks to Timber Press for a review copy via NetGalley.

Searching for The Secret River by Kate Grenville

Published on by Margaret1 Comment

Searching for the Secret River is Kate Grenville’s account of how she came to write The Secret River. Her interest began with her great-great-great grandfather, Solomon Wiseman,who was the original ferryman at Wiseman’s Ferry. Her mother had told her stories about him, but she wanted to know more about what he was like and what he might have done when he first encountered Aboriginal people.

It is a fascinating book detailing how she went about her research into family history and how she imagined his life from facts gleaned from the records and the places he had lived.

She writes about reading. As a short-sighted child reading was her whole life:

I read in the bath, I read on the toilet, I read under the desk at school, I read up in my tree house, feeling the branches of the jacaranda swell and subside under me.

I can identify so well with this. I was a short-sighted child and read everywhere too, walking round the house, in bed under the covers with a torch when I should have been asleep, all the places Kate Grenville read, although not in a tree house – I would have loved a tree house!

She writes about writing. As a writer she couldn’t help examining how other writers went about their writing – seeing how books had been made. One book that helped her with writing The Secret River is Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje, a novel based on historical events in which some of the characters are apparently versions of real people. She had come to the point in her book where she had written lots of notes, forty-seven folders of notes!! So she made lists to try to organise her writing and then began just writing scenes and descriptions of various aspects – about London and Sydney, the convict system, and what she called ‘elements of memoir.’ But she thought that lots of her writing was dry and dead.

Reading Anil’s Ghost, however she realised that she had to take herself out of the book and find a character to carry out the search for the story of Wiseman and his dealings with the Aboriginal people. To do this she had to see the scenes before she could write them:

The hard part of the writing wasn’t finding the words – they seemed to come reasonably easily. If they started to come reluctantly, I stopped writing and began with something else. The hard part was finding the picture. Once I could see and hear the moment, I could write it.

In her first draft some parts were in the first person, some in the third person, but always from Wiseman’s point of view. The first-person point of view seemed right but then she decided that that didn’t match Wiseman’s character and there were things she wanted the book to say that Wiseman couldn’t say – about the Aboriginal culture for one thing. So, it had to be in the third person, but the ‘third person subjective’ – ‘from Wiseman’s point of view but only partly in his voice.’

There is so much in this book – the research, the notes, the descriptive passage, the numerous drafts, finding the right voices, the characters, identifying the central drama of the novel, the right eighteenth century names, developing Wiseman into a character, renaming him William Thornhill and building a picture of the Thornhill family. Then the dialogue had to be right, to be convincing. She listened to a recording of Robert Browning, went through transcripts of Old Bailey trials, looked at how Dickens, Defoe and other writers put words into their characters’ mouths.She remembered her mother’s and grandfather’s sayings, phrases and idioms. In the end she decided that she wouldn’t try

to reconstruct the authentic sound of nineteenth century vernacular. My job was to produce something that sounded authentic. … I read all the dialogue aloud. If anything hit a false note, it was obvious straight away. This was a bad one for example: ‘That bit of land, he said. Remember, I told you. We’ll lose it if we don’t move soon.’

This sounded terribly drawing-room. I muddied it up: ‘that bit of land, he said. Remember he telled you. We’ll miss out if we don’t grab it.’

She deleted large sections of dialogue.

The whole book is compelling reading, not just because it’s about how she wrote the book and the enormous amount of work she put into research, but also because in itself it paints a picture of life in London in the late eighteenth century and Australia in the early years of settlement in the early nineteenth century. I was captivated from start to finish.

Sunday Salon – Current Books

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

This week I’ve finished reading two crime fiction books:

and posts on these books will be on my blog this coming week.

I’m still reading Eden’s Outcast: the story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father by John Matteson. So far I’ve been reading about Bronson Alcott and his unorthdox ideas about educating and bringing up children.  It was quite a coincidence I thought, when I was reading the Daily Express in the coffee shop recently and came across a review of Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and their Search for Utopia by Richard Francis. The reviewer describes this book as a

… richly textured history of the life and times of a back’‘to’‘nature community in 19th-century America. It was called Fruitlands, though Fruitcakes would have been more apt.
(Read more from this review.)

I haven’t got up to this venture so far in Eden’s Outcasts. There are many entries in the index under ‘Fruitlands’ so I expect to find out much more about it. His career as a teacher was not a success and it seems that his venture into communal farming wasn’t either.

I spent other reading time this week downloading more books onto my Kindle and have read the opening paragraphs of most of them. It really is so easy to get carried away and add more books to my to-be-read lists! But I only bought one book this week, so that’s not too bad.

It’s Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose and it’s been on my wish list for a long time. I read fairly quickly and know that I often read too quickly to take in all the detail. Prose writes that reading quickly can be ‘a hindrance‘ and that it is ‘essential to slow down and read every word‘. She also contradicts the advice to novice writers ‘to show, not tell‘, when ‘the responsibility of showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language‘. Using Alice Munro’s short story Dulse as an example, she says:

There are many occasions in literature in which telling is far more effective than showing. A lot of time would have been wasted had Alice Munro believed that she could not begin her story until she had shown us Lydia working as an editor, writing poetry, breaking up with her lover, dealing with her children, getting divorced, growing older, and taking all the steps that led up to the moment at which the story rightly begins.

Most interesting, I thought.

I still haven’t got used to Kindle’s use of locations as opposed to page numbers – the extract above is from Location 409 – 12. Nor have I mastered the technique of transferring my highlighted passages and notes from the Kindle to the computer!

I’m also reading The Matchmaker of Kenmare by Frank Delaney. This is an Advance Uncorrected Proof; the book is scheduled to be on sale on 8 February. It’s the first book I’ve read by Delaney, described by the publisher as a

… lush and surprising historical novel, rich as a myth, tense as a thriller …

From what I’ve read of it so far I’d go along with that description, except for the tenseness – but it’s early days yet. It’s set in 1943 in Ireland, a neutral country in the Second World War. It’s a long book and takes its time in setting the scene and introducing the characters. It promises well.

Agatha Christie – On Writing

Published on by Margaret12 Comments

Agatha Christie managed that most remarkable of achievements in publishing more than one book a year ever since the 1920s. How did she do it? Where did she get her inspiration I wondered?

I found some of the answers in the introduction to her spy thriller Passenger to Frankfurt, published in 1970.

Where did she get her ideas from?

Her immediate response:

‘I always go to Harrods’, or ‘I get them mostly at the Army and Navy Stores’, or, snappily, ‘Try Marks and Spencer.’

Her real answer is of course:

‘My own head.’

She did relent a little to add that if she had an attractive idea she would:

toss it around, play tricks with it, work it up, tone it down, and gradually get it into shape. Then, of course, you have to start writing it. That’s not nearly so much fun – it becomes hard work. Alternatively you can tuck it carefully away, in storage, for perhaps using in a year or two years’ time.

Do you take most of your characters from real life?

Her answer, indignantly:

No, I don’t. I invent them. They are mine. They’ve got to be my characters – doing what I want them to do, being what I want them to be – coming alive for me, having their own ideas sometimes, but only because I’ve made them real.

What about the settings?

She replied:

… it must be there – waiting – in existence already. You don’t invent that  – it’s there – it’s real.

… you don’t invent your settings. They are outside you, all around you, in existence – you have only to stretch out your hand and pick and choose.

Where do you get your information – apart from the evidence of your own eyes and ears?

Her answer:

It is what the Press brings to you every day, served up in your morning paper under the general heading of News. Collect it from the front page. What is going on in the world today? What is everyone saying, thinking, doing? Hold up a mirror to 1970 in England.

Look at that front page every day for a month, make notes, consider and classify.

Agatha Christie also wrote about her writing methods in her Autobiography:

Plots come to me at such odd moments: when I am walking along a street, or examining a hat-shop with particular interest, suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head, and I think, ‘Now that would be a neat way of covering up the crime so that nobody would see the point.’ Of course, all the practical details are still to be worked out, and the people have to creep slowly into my consciousness, but I jot down my splendid idea in an exercise book. (page 451)

Those exercise books she kept have now been published – Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks by John Curran and these too make fascinating reading. But here is what she herself wrote about her notebooks in her Autobiography:

… but what I invariably do is lose the exercise book. I usually have about half a dozen on hand, and I used to make notes in them of ideas that struck me, or about some poison or drug, or a clever little bit of swindling that I had read about in the paper. Of course, if I kept all these things neatly sorted and filed and labelled it would save me a lot of trouble. However, it is a pleasure sometimes, when looking vaguely through a pile of old note-books, to find something scribbled down, as: Possible plot – do it yourself – girl and not really sister – August – with a kind of sketch of a plot. What it’s all about I can’t remember now; but it often stimulates me, if not to write that identical plot, at least to write something else. (page 451)

What a fertile mind!

The Adventure Story

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

My eight year old granddaughter is very creative. She loves drawing and painting and has won prizes for her pictures. She also loves reading and writing. She has written lots of stories on the computer and she sent me this one recently. I hope you like it. I just love those tips at the end!

The Adventure Story by Emilia 

Once upon a time there lived a girl in the mountains called Charlie. She lived in a cottage with her mum, her dad and her sister Lily. One day Charlie went off into the mountains on her own and she found a dark, scary, spooky cave. She shouted ‘˜HELLO’! her voice echoed. 

“I wonder who lives here?” said Charlie. Then she quietly wandered off into the cave.

But Charlie did not know that a witch lived in a cottage just outside the cave which she had just passed.

“Hello,” said a croaky voice.

“Hello, I’m Charlie,” said Charlie.

“Come into my cottage,” said the witch.

But in the cottage there were potions.

Charlie got scared and she just had to RUN. She ran all the way home and told her mum everything that happened.

“You shouldn’t go off on your own,” said her mum

“Yer,” said Lily.

“Don’t be mean, Lily,” snapped her Dad.

And ever since this happened Charlie had been safe.

        THE END   

Charlie’s top tips for staying safe

  • NEVER accept a letter from people you don’t know.
  • NEVER walk with a stranger.
  • NEVER go in a stranger’s house or car.

Writing et al

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

One of the promises I made to myself when I left work was that I wouldn’t be doing any housework at the weekend. What have I done today? After a leisurely start with coffee whilst reading The Poe Shadow in bed, then a quick look (well not very quick) at blogs, I started to write about Wilberforce, when I was overcome with the need to tidy the house. Old habits do die hard and I spent the rest of the morning until now tidying up, dusting and vacuuming – still got upstairs to do. Then I remembered my promise and slowed down.

Litlove recently wrote a Writing Meme . The idea is to write seven random points about writing and then tag someone else. If you fancy doing this consider yourself tagged.

Here are my seven, in no particular order:

  1. I disliked doing ‘Precis’ in English Language lessons at school. The teacher never seemed to give us enough time and it had to be done quickly. Strange that now I find myself doing something similar in writing this blog and I’m enjoying it, but of course it’s my choice and in my own time.
  2. I once set out to write a novel about life at a fairground. I didn’t get very far, knowing next to nothing about fairgrounds. I haven’t tried since.
  3. I ‘m excellent at reading books on how to write, but just can’t bring myself to do the exercises they suggest. It all seems so boring. But last year I did write ‘Morning Pages’, which is one of Julia Cameron’s ideas in her Right to Write. I tried it for a few weeks and did enjoy it. The idea is that first thing in the morning you write and don’t read what you have written. Looking back I see that I wrote about my dreams, words, thoughts on what I’d be doing later on in the day, and my childhood.
  4. After I’d read Wilfred Owen’s war poems I wrote a poem on the horrors of war and submitted it for the school magazine. It must have been awful and it didn’t get in. I still fancy writing poetry.
  5. In my previous job in local government I wrote many reports for the councillors to make decisions on various applications. This involved investgiating the claims, putting all the evidence for and against the proposals with a recommendation. This was satisfying, even if they were not always to everybody’s liking.
  6. I am usually not very satisfied with what I write and constantly revise and cut what I’ve written. This was difficult before the computer made it easy. Previously my drafts were full of crossings out, insertions with asterisks, paragraphs cut and stapled at the right place. Now cutting and pasting is so much easier.
  7. Finally a couple of quotations to add to Litlove’s:

“If you can’t annoy somebody with what you write, I think there’s little point in writing.” Kingsley Amis

“Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.” Samuel Johnson

I’ll post my thoughts on Wilberforce will be next, that is after I’ve finished re-writing and cutting it!