#things people who write like this should be taught: 1 poetry is an option and its one very different from other kinds of literature 2 you c

[ghostspies]

[thequietgryffindor]

Introducing Osric Bright, the reckless film director, screenwriter, and actor

Character Profile

Full Name: Osric Hadrian Bright

Nickname(s): Oz, Ozzie

Birthday: April 12, 1972

Age: 34 (in 2006), 52 (Currently)

Current Residence: Astoria, Oregon (perhaps he moves to California later)

Blood Status: Half-blood

House: Thunderbird (also chosen by Horned Serpent)

Wand: Ebony, Thunderbird tail feather, 14 1/4, unyielding flexibility

Patronus: Weasel

Strengths: intelligent, confident, creative, curious, charming, generous

Neutral: independent

Weaknesses: a bit cocky, reckless, impulsive, impatient

Likes: film, photography, walking through forests, exploring abandoned places with friends, reading, writing, theatre

Dislikes: asking for help, being talked down to

Best Subject: No-Maj Studies, Transfiguration, Magical History

Worst Subject: Potions

Third Year Options/Electives: Magical History of the United States of America, Native American Witchcraft

Extracurricular Activities: Drama Club, Poetry Club, SIFNIAC Club (Students in Favor of No-Maj Interaction and Assimilation of Culture) (Secretary)

Faceclaim: Johnny Depp (especially in Secret Window)

Fun (or Not so Fun) Facts:

Osric is the child of a No-Maj father and Magical mother. His father abandoned the family when he was 7 and his sister Miranda was 4, resulting in his mother's long period of depression. As he got older, he began to see his abandonmemt as a good thing because he never truly loved them.

Osric knows a lot about No-Maj technology. He is mostly taught himself since the age of about fourteen. He often helps out at the tecnology center on the Ulvermorny campus.

He can be quite generous to people he loves and is genuinely a fun guy to be around. However, people should be aware that they will be involved in his shenanigans.

Osric LOVES Halloween and goes all out in terms of decorations and costumes. He and his girlfriend Nellie love to wear couple costumes. His Halloween parties are legendary in Astoria where he lives.

Osric occasionally acts in his own films. One film stars him as a detective with a vaguely French accent. It is exclusively made for No-Majes which causes him to get in trouble with magical law enforcement who believe it violates the law that forbids showing magic to No-Majes. Osric argues that No-Majes assume they are only seeing what they believe to be really good special effects. Ultimately, the film becomes a cult classic with mysterious origins. By the way, Osric's character looks like Dean Corso from the film The Ninth Gate.

Osric is very prone to writer's block and burnout which causes him to sulk and eat a lot of junk food.

Family & Friends

Mother: Sibylla Francesca (née Shoemaker) Bright (fc: Carol Kane)

Renowned theatre actress

Drama teacher and therapist

Gives tarot readings on the side

Fully supports her son's aspiration to be a filmmaker

Father: William Jeremiah Bright

Younger Sister: Miranda Catherine Bright (fc: Linda Cardellini)

Herbologist

Embarassed of her brother's antics

Unlike Osric, Miranda is quiet, patient, and insecure.

Osric sometimes gathers herbs for his sister 💚🥰

Maternal Grandfather: Troy Everett Shoemaker (fc: Lee Marvin)

Maternal Grandmother: Eulalia Francine (née Mears) Shoemaker (fc: Piper Laurie)

Paternal Grandfather: Thaddeus Bright

Paternal Grandmother: Evelyn (née Jenkins) Bright

Evelyn occasionally calls Sibylla to check on Osric and Miranda but only started after her son William had already abandoned them which rubs Osric the wrong way.

Girlfriend: Eleanor "Nellie" Ambrosia Kingsley (fc: Heather Graham)

Actress and frequent co-star of Osric's

Fellow member of the Drama Club at Ilvermorny

Friend: Quintessa Torres (fc: Elizabeth Peña)

Fellow member of the Poetry Club at Ilvermorny

At first she creeped out Osric but then he started to appreciate her interesting way of seeing things

Pet: A tabby cat named Salem (after Stephen King's Salem's Lot)

Divider art credit goes to @adornedwithlight. Thank you!

[not-poignant]

hello pia! feel free to delete this if it’s too personal but i’d love to hear about your degree, what you learned from it, and how you think it has informed the way you write (whether it has or hasn’t!). i’m studying for a different degree, still humanities, but i’d love to hear about your degree since i.. well when i was in hs i didn’t know that it was an option. also if the above is too personal, please recommend some texts to learn abt mass comms .. thank you!

Hi anon,

I did my degree/s (Media Studies + Mass Communications majors, Scriptwriting (Drama, Film, Short Film) + Creative Writing (Poetry, Short Story, Literature, SFF) minors) back in 1999, so honestly, some of the information I learned then is out of date, and you're definitely better off looking at a university curriculum now for decent texts on mass communications. Even the Masters I did over 10 years ago, lol. I am an old.

You have to understand when I was in university for Mass Comm, the internet as we know it, and social media, literally didn't exist. And though 'Rupert Murdoch still owns a ton of Telcos' is still true, things like Wikipedia didn't exist, lol. The 'please don't use Wikipedia as a reference' didn't exist as a sentence, because Wikipedia just...didn't exist.

The media landscape has changed.

I've kept up with aspects of media studies that interest me (representations of mental health in the media, for example), but since the university texts still often cost hundreds of dollars, I can't get a ton of them every year and read them. You might be surprised what you can find in university bookstores in the clearance section, because books aren't in the curriculum anymore but are still likely to be 15 years more up-to-date than what I was taught with, lol.

I don't really know how to answer your specific questions though. There were a lot of different units within the degree, so I learned a lot from it, I don't know how to condense that down.

Probably the most important things I took with me are that media (fiction) does not have a 1:1 correlation with reality, and that we are not all mindless vessels with an inability to negotiate the media we watch (otherwise we'd buy everything in advertising ever), people who believe 'high art' is better than 'low art' are elitist ignorant dicks who don't actually understand art at all (if you've ever disparaged reality TV or soap operas, you are in this category, with soap operas giving you a side order of heavy misogyny to boot), media literacy is crucial and needs to be taught and prioritised on par (if not higher than) english fiction literacy (kids engage in more media than books, they should have more media literacy than book literacy), and that it's always important to know the politics and values of the people who own the news media you're watching (and that almost all news media is homogenised).

The biggest gift it gave me was to entirely remove my shame over watching or consuming any kind of media. I don't know what a guilty pleasure is, because guilty pleasures are a sign that you have some more work to do on unpacking your issues (often internalised misogyny believe it or not) over watching certain shows or listening to certain music etc. and finding joy in it. I feel NO shame in anything I watch, rewatch, love, get the most out of. Anon, I have done assignments on Big Brother and gotten high distinction/s for it. I've watched Misfits and gotten high distinction/s for it. I'm in the Golden Key Society because I watched a lot of Studio Ghibli and a lot of romcoms. Media studies does what creative writing doesn't - unpacks all your shame over enjoying different genres (sadly creative writing teaches a lot of that shame and can genre shame as well, it's extraordinarily outdated in many curriculums in that way).

It is so liberating to just watch whatever the fuck I want, and listen to whatever music I want, and not give a shit whoever knows I watch or listen to it. Like, I just... literally who cares. It's all art. It all means something and then I get to choose its further meaning. I get to decide what media I won't consume and why (usually around the politics and actions of the creator/s or actor/s, JKR can go to hell, or just not liking the show - I also feel no shame not liking things that everyone else likes), but it's never a choice based in shame or guilt. It is...truly, such a wonderful feeling when you realise there's literally no reason on this earth to have a guilty pleasure if you can think for yourself and understand why you've been conditioned to feel 'ashamed' for watching certain genres (surprise, it's usually racism or xenophobia or misogyny!)

Like, I did a unit called Psychology, Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Psych Psych and Cinema as we called it), which was a tremendous amount of fun and let me know that psychology is literally in everything but that representations of psychology in literally everything tends to be not great lmao. I did a unit called Postmodern Wetlands which literally analysed the relationship between swamp representation in mass media (particular horror films as relating to the monstrous feminine) and what that means for environmentalism which changed my entire relationship to my body and the environment permanently. Idk how to describe that unit to anyone who hasn't taken it, but it was literally life-changing, lol.

It definitely influences my writing style, partly because I write serials based off of like... scriptwriting techniques I was taught for television drama back then. In terms of how media studies influences it - well mass communications probably not so much, and then media studies a whole lot, lol. (Mass Comm =/= Media Studies. One focuses on telecommunications/telcos/ISP providers/internet cables even, politics and the vehicles with which we spread mass media, the second one focuses more on the analysis of the products/works/pieces of art that end up on that mass media. One is a lot more discussion of 'which television stations do China / Fairfax / Murdoch own' or 'how are those internet sea cables going and how's the terrorism around that?' vs. 'what messages does the TV on each of these stations send').

But media studies influences my writing a ton, but I couldn't tell you how anon, aside from those two units I specifically mention above lol. Oh and the fact that we had to take a mandatory philosophy unit called Critical Thinking, which should be mandatory for every degree. That definitely taught me how to think critically, which...a lot of people don't know how to do! I probably couldn't even tell you the rest of how it influenced me, if you asked me 2 decades ago when I was actively studying it. I'd like to think it just makes me a more nuanced writer, and absolutely Teflon when it comes to fanpol / antis / anti-shippers, lol. But who knows!

I still think looking at current university curriculums for Media Studies (also known as Media Analysis in some other countries) is probably the best place to find recs. But you can also check out the books on media in my Goodreads list and go by star rating.

[bensk]

Be curious. Be humble. Be useful.

I was invited to give the annual Taub Lecture for graduating Public Policy students at the University of Chicago, my alma mater and the department from which I graduated. This is what I came up with.

---

I am incredibly grateful and honored to be here tonight. The Public Policy program literally changed my life.

My name is Ben Samuels-Kalow, my pronouns are he/him/his. I’m a 2012 Public Policy graduate, and I will permit myself one “back in my day” comment: When I was a student here, the “Taub Lecture” were actual lectures given by Professor Taub in our Implementation class. I’ve spent the last nine years teaching in the South Bronx. For the past two years, I have served as Head of School at Creo College Prep, a public charter school that opened in 2019.

I was asked tonight to tell you a bit about my journey, and the work that I do. My objection to doing this is that there is basically nothing less interesting than listening to a white man tell you how he got somewhere, so I'll keep it brief. I grew up in New York City and went to a public high school that turned out Justice Elena Kagan, Chris Hayes, Lin-Manuel Miranda, among many others…none of whom were available tonight.

We, on this Zoom, all have one thing in common — we have been very, very close to graduating from the University of Chicago. I have never sat quite where you sit. I didn’t graduate into a pandemic. But the truth is that everyone graduates into a crisis. The periods of relative ease, the so-called “ends of history”, even the end of this pandemic, are really matters of forced perspective. This crisis isn’t over. Periods of relative peace and stability paper over chasms of structural inequality.

You went to college with the people who will write the books and go on the talk shows and coin the phrases to describe our times. You could write that book. You could go into consulting and spend six weeks at a time helping a company figure out how to maximize profits from their Trademark Chasm Expanding Products.

You could also run into the chasm.

What is the chasm?

It is the distance between potential and opportunity. It is a University on the South Side of Chicago with a student body that is 10% Black and 15% Latinx, with a faculty that is 65% white.

It is eight Black students being admitted to a top high school in New York City...in a class of 749.

What is the chasm?

The chasm is that in our neighborhood in The Bronx, where I’m standing right now, 1 in 4 students can read a book on their grade level, and only 1 in 10 will ever sit in a college class.

It is maternal mortality and COVID survival rates. The chasm is generational wealth and payday loans.

It is systemic racism and misogyny.

It is the case for activism and reparations.

In my job, the chasm is the distance between the creativity, brilliance, and wit that my students possess, and the opportunities the schools in our neighborhood provide.

In the zip code in which I grew up in New York City, the median income is $122,169. In the zip code where I have spent every day working since I graduated from UChicago, the median income is $30,349. The school where I went to 7th grade and this school where next year we will have our first 7th grade are only a 15 minute drive apart.

In my first quarter at UChicago, I joined the Neighborhood Schools Program, and immediately fell in love with working in schools. I joined NSP because a friend told me how interesting she found the work. I’d done some tutoring in high school, and had taught karate since I was 15. I applied, was accepted, and worked at Hyde Park Academy on 62nd and Stony Island in a variety of capacities from 2008 to 2012.

At the time, Hyde Park Academy had one of very few International Baccalaureate programs on the South Side, and every spring, parents would line up out the door of the school to try to get their rising 9th grader in. I worked with an incredible mentor teacher and successive classes of high school seniors whose wit, creativity, and skill would've been at home in the seminars and dorm discussions we all have participated in three blocks north of their high school.

In my work at Hyde Park Academy, I learned the first lesson of three lessons that have shaped my career as a teacher. Be curious. I had been told in Orientation that there were “borders” to the UChicago experience, lines we should not cross. I am forever grateful to the people who told me to ignore that BS. Our entire department is a testimony to ignoring that BS. We ask questions like, why did parents line up for hours to get into what was considered a “failing” high school? Why had no one asked my kids to write poetry before? Why are they more creative and better at writing than most of the kids I went to high school with, but there is only one IB class and families have to literally compete to get in? I learned as much from my job three blocks south of the University as I did in my classes at the University...which is to say, I was learning a LOT, but I had a lot more to learn.

I knew I wanted to be a teacher from my first quarter here. I did my research. The Boston Teacher Residency was the top program in the country, so I applied there. I was a 21 year old white man interested in education, so...I applied to Teach for America. In the early 2010’s, I looked like the default avatar on a Teach for America profile. It was my backup option. I was all in on Boston, and was sure, with four years working in urban schools, a stint at the Urban Education Institute, and, at the time, seven years of karate teaching under my belt, I was a shoe in.

I was rejected from both programs. Which brings me to my second lesson. Be humble. We are destined for and entitled to nothing. There is an aphorism I learned from one of my favorite podcasts, Another Round: "carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man." If you are a mediocre white man, like me, do as much as you can not to be. If you look like me, you live life on the "lowest difficulty setting." This means I need to question my gifts, contextualize my successes, and actively work against systems of oppression that perpetuate inequity.

Over the last two years, I have interviewed over 300 people to work at this school. There are a series of questions that I ask folks with backgrounds like myself:

Have you ever lived in a neighborhood that was majority people of color?

Have you ever worked on a team that was majority people of color?

Have you ever worked for a boss/supervisor/leader who was a person of color?

The vast majority of white folks, myself at 21 included, could not answer “yes” to these three questions. This is disappointing, but I've also lived and worked in two of the most segregated cities on this continent, so it is not surprising. By the time I sat where you’re sitting now, I had learned a lot about education policy and sociology. I'd taken every class that Chad offered at the time. I'd worked at UEI, I'd worked in a South Side high school for four years, and I still thought I was entitled to something. Unlearning doesn't usually happen in a moment, and I certainly didn't realize it at the time, but these rejections were the best thing that has happened to me in my growth as a human.

I moved back home to New York, was accepted to my last-choice teaching program, and started teaching at MS 223: The Laboratory School of Finance & Technology. I ended up teaching there for 5 years. I had incredible mentors, met some of my best friends, started a Computer Science program that’s used as a model at hundreds of schools across New York City…and most importantly, while making copies for Summer School in July of 2015, I met my wife.

All this to say — if you aren’t 100% convinced that what you’re doing next year is Your Thing, keep an open mind…and make frequent stops in the copy room.

I learned that teaching was My Thing. I didn't want to do ed policy research. I got to set education policy, conduct case studies, key informant interviews, run statistical analysis…with 12 year olds. This was the thing I couldn’t stop talking about, reading about, learning about. I really and truly did not care about the “UChicago voices” of my parents and my friends who kept asking what I was going to do next. My answer: teach.

If you look like me, and you teach Computer Science, there are opportunities that come flying your way. I was offered jobs with more prestige, jobs with more pay, jobs far away from the South Bronx. I was offered jobs I would have loved. But I’d learned a third lesson: be useful. If you have a degree from this place, people will always ask you what the next promotion or job is. They will ask "what's next for you" and they will mean it with respect and admiration.

Here’s the thing: teaching was what’s next. “But don’t you want to work in policy?” Teaching is a political act. It is hands-on activism, it is community organizing, it is high-tech optimistic problem-solving and low-tech relationship building. It is the reason we have the privilege of choosing a career, and it is a career worth choosing.

I had internalized what I like to call the Dumbledore Principle: “I had learned that I was not to be trusted with power.” This meant unlearning the very UChicago idea that if you were smart and if you think and talk like we are trained to think and talk at this place, you should be in charge. The best things in my life have come from unlearning that. Learning from mentors to never speak the way I was praised for in a seminar. Learning from veteran teachers how to be a warm demander who was my authentic best self...and more importantly brought out the authentic best self in my students. Being useful isn't the same thing as being in charge…and that is ok.

I believe this deeply. Which is why, when I was offered the opportunity to design and open a school, my first thought was absolutely the hell no. I said to my wife: “I’m a teacher. Dumbledore Principle — we’re supposed to teach, make our classrooms safe and wonderful for our kids.”

I also knew that teaching kids to code wasn’t worth a damn if they couldn’t read and write with conviction, so I started looking for schools that did both — treated kids like brilliant creatives who should learn to create the future AND met them where they were with rigorous coursework that closed opportunity gaps. In our neighborhood, there were schools that did the latter, that got incredible results for kids. Then there was my school, where kids learned eight programming languages before they graduated, but at which only 40% of our kids could read.

We were lauded for this, by the way. 40% was twice the average in our district. We were praised for the Computer Science — the mayor of New York and the CEO of Microsoft visited and met with my students. It felt great. I wasn’t convinced it was useful.

Kids in the neighborhood where I grew up didn’t have to choose between a school that was interesting and a school that equipped them with the knowledge and skills to pursue their own interests in college and beyond. Why did our students have to choose? I delivered this stressed-out existential monologue to my wife that boiled down to this: every kid deserves a school where they were always safe, and never bored. We weren’t working at a school like that. I was being offered a chance to design one. But…Dumbledore principle.

My wife took it all in, looked at me, and said: “You idiot. Dumbledore RAN a school.”

Friends, you deserve a partner like this.

The road to opening Creo College Prep, and the last two years of leading our school as we opened, closed, opened online, finished our first year, moved buildings, opened online again, opened in-person (kind of) and now head into our third year, has reinforced my lessons from teaching — be curious, be humble, be useful. These lessons are about both learning and unlearning. A white guy doing Teach for America at 21 is a stereotype. A white guy starting a charter school is a stereotype with significant capital, wading into complicated political and pedagogical waters. The lessons I learn opening a school and the unlearning I must do to be worthy of the work are not destinations, they are journeys.

Be curious

I didn’t just open a school. Schools are communities, they are institutions, and they are bureaucracies. If you work very, very hard, and with the right people, they become engines that turn coffee and human potential into joy and intellectual thriving capable of altering the trajectory of a child’s life.

First you have to find the right people. I joined a school design fellowship, spent a year visiting 50 high-performing schools across the country, recruited a founding board of smart, committed people who hold me accountable, and spent time in my community learning from families what they wanted in a school. There is studying public policy, and then there is attending Community Board meetings and Community Education Council Meetings, and standing outside of the Parkchester Macy's handing out flyers and getting petition signatures at Christmastime next to the mall Santa.

I observed in schools while writing my BA, and as a teacher, but it was in this fellowship that I learned to “thin slice,” a term we borrowed from psychology that refers to observing a small interaction and finding patterns about the emotions and values of people. In a school, it means observing small but crucial moments — how does arrival work, how are students called on, how do they ask for help in a classroom, how do they enter and leave spaces, how do they move through the hallways, where and how do teachers get their work done — and gleaning what a school values, and how that translates into impact for kids. Here’s how I look at schools:

Does every adult have an unwavering belief that students can, must, and will learn at the highest level?

Do they have realistic and urgent plans for getting every kid there? Are these beliefs and plans clear and held by kids?

Are all teachers strategic, valorizing planning and intellectual nerdery over control or power?

Is the curriculum worthy of the kids?

Can kids explain why the school does things they way they do? Can staff? Can the leader?

If I'm in the middle of teaching and I need a pen or a marker, what do I do? Is that clear?

What’s the attendance rate? How do we follow up on kids who aren’t here?

How organized and thoughtful are the physical and digital spaces?

Are kids seen by their teachers? Are their names pronounced correctly? Do their teachers look like them? Do they make them laugh, think, and revise their answers?

Would I want to work here? Would I send my own kids here?

Be humble

I learned that there are really two distinct organizations that we call “school.” One is an accumulation of talent (student and staff) that happens to be in the same place at the same time, operating on largely the same schedule.

These were the schools I attended. These are schools you got to go to if you got lucky and you were born in a zip code with high income and high opportunity. These are schools where you had teachers who were intellectually curious, and classmates whose learning deficits could be papered over by social capital…and sometimes, straight up capital.

“Accumulation of talent” also describes the schools I worked at. These were schools where if you got lucky and you were extraordinary in your intelligence, determination, support network, and teachers who’d decided to believe in you, you became one of the stories we told. “She got into Cornell.” “That whole English class got into four year colleges.”

Most schools in this country, it turns out, are run like this. I knew all about local control and the limits of federal standards on education and the battles over teacher evaluations and so much other helpful and important context I learned in my PBPL classes.  But when thin-slicing a kindergarten classroom in Nashville on my first school visit of the Fellowship, I saw a whole other possibility of what “school” can be.

School can be a special place organized towards a single purpose. One team, one mission. Where the work kids do in one class directly connects to the next, and builds on the prior year. Where kids are treated like the important people they are and the important people they will be, where students and staff hold each other to a high bar, where there is rigor and joy. A place where staff train together so that instead of separate classrooms telling separate stories about how to achieve, there is one coherent language that gives kids the thing they crave and deserve above all else: consistency.

We get up every morning to build a school like that. It’s why my team starts staff training a month before the first day of school. It’s why we practice teaching our lessons so that we don’t waste a moment of our kids’ time. It’s why everyone at our school has a coach, including me, so we can be a better teacher tomorrow than we were today. It’s why we plan engaging, culturally responsive, relevant lessons. It’s how we keep a simple, crucial promise to every family: at this school, you will always be safe, and you will never be bored.

Be useful

Statistically speaking, it is not out of the realm of possibility that several of you will one day be in a position to make big sweeping policy changes. You will have the power to not only write position papers, but to Make Big Plans. I will be rooting for you, but I hope that you won’t pursue Big Plans for the sake of Big Plans.

The architect who designed the Midway reportedly said "make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood." I had that quoted to me in several lectures at this school, and you know what?

It’s bullshit.

I am asking you not to care about scale. Good policy isn’t about scale, it’s about implementation, and implementation requires the right people on the ground. Implementation can scale. The right people cannot. We can Make Big Plans, but every 6th grade math class still needs an excellent math teacher. That's a job worth doing. I could dream about starting 20 schools, but every school needs a leader. That’s a job worth doing. Places like UChicago teach us to ask "what's next" for our own advancement, to do this now so we can get to that later. I learned to ask "what's next" to be as useful as possible to as many kids as I have in front of me.

I hold these two thoughts in my mind:

The educational realities of the South Bronx have a lot more to do with where highways were built in our neighborhood than with No Child Left Behind or charter schools, and require comprehensive policy change that address not only educational inequity, but environmental justice, and systemic racism.

The most useful policy changes I can make right now are to finalize the schedule for our staff work days that start on June 21, get feedback on next year’s calendar from families, and finish hiring the teachers our kids deserve.

I will follow the policy debates of #1 with great interest, but I know where I can be useful, and I’ll wake up tomorrow excited to make another draft of the calendar. I hope you get to work on making your Small Plans, and I will leave you with the secret — or at least the way that worked for me:

Find yourself people who are smarter than you and who disagree with you. Find problems you cannot shut up or stop thinking about. Do what you can’t shut up about with intellect and kindness. Use the privilege and opportunity that we have because we went to this school to make sure that opportunity for others does not require privilege. Run into the chasm.

Be curious, be humble, be useful.

Thank you.

[the-quiet-winds]

Make a Move Just to Stay in the Game (part one)

oh look, it’s jules, back on her au.

what can i say, i love this thing so much. @ichlugebulletsandcornnuts and i have worked so hard on it and it’s practically took on a life of its own, so here’s installment three, a bit more soft, but there is definitely some not soft in there too. featuring awesome new character!

i’m going to link my masterpost, so if you’re new, you can go back and read the whole au from the start, which is called hold onto me, you’re all i have.

so yeah! this one is four parts, all a bit short bc otherwise they’d be really long.

[Part 1: Feelin’ My World Start to Turn]

as ward of the queen, katherine was now above her former colleagues in rank, which brought its own challenges and benefits in turn. she still spends most of her time with jane, but she suddenly realises she has a lot more free time where she doesn’t have anything to do now her lady-in-waiting duties had been removed. what she also realises, however, is that she’s rather unprepared for royal life. she’s not the only person who’s noticed, either; on one day, she overhears two courtiers saying some less than pleasant things about her, mostly along the lines that she’s a stupid, uneducated girl who doesn’t know the first thing about being nobility. it hurts to hear those things about her and it sticks in her mind that evening as her and jane sit by the fireplace, jane embroidering and katherine lost in her own world.

“mum?” katherine says very suddenly, and jane glances over at her.

“yes, love?”

katherine pauses a moment before speaking hesitantly. “what kinds of things are ladies of my rank supposed to know?”

jane was obviously not expecting that question. she looks taken aback for a moment, before her brows furrow together and she looks off at the wall.

“well princesses generally have very well-rounded educations.” she thinks for a moment. “arithmetic, history, studies of trade and geography, a language of some sort...” she trails off. “why do you ask, love?”

katherine looks ashamed, but can’t bring herself to lie. “just some things some people were saying earlier.” she shrugs. “that i wasn’t smart enough, stuff like that.” she tries to sound nonchalant, but the words really did hurt. she wanted to be enough for jane.

“oh, love,” jane frowns. “you’re definitely smart enough-”

“but i don’t know a lot of those things,” katherine admits. “i don’t know any other languages, i barely studied any geography, and i’ve never had an arithmetic lesson in my life.” she shrugs slightly, looking embarrassed. “they only taught us to read and write, and things like dancing and-” she stops before she can mention music; it’s not something she wants to think about right now. “there’s so much I don’t know.”

jane can’t entirely argue with katherine. she knows that the girl didn’t have the easiest go, but she never contemplated katherine’s education, or lack thereof.

“what about a tutor, love?” jane suggests. “i’ll bring in some one in to teach you these things. there are plenty of noblemen that would-“

she sees katherine’s face change in that instant, from a curious excitement to immediate fear. it takes her a moment, but she works out the cause.

“or a noblewoman?”

jane’s last words almost take katherine by surprise, as if she hadn’t realised that could be an option. “do... do you think there’s an educated woman who’d want to teach me?” she asks, slightly shyly. jane nods.

“i’m sure there are. I can ask around; I know several of the court have connections to educated circles, and i’m sure i could arrange a tutor to come to court to teach you - if that’s something you’d like, of course. it’s completely up to you, love.”

katherine smiles, not all that confidently but smiles nonetheless. “i’d like that a lot,” she admits shyly. jane grins brightly.

“of course, love, i’ll look into it.”

jane does her thorough research, and one name comes up again and again, one catherine parr.

catherine parr is a humanist, a woman who has written her own book, and by all accounts has a kind but scholarly temperament. from her research, jane discovers that catherine parr and her husband had fallen out of favour with the king a few years back, but recently had been forgiven. by lucky coincidence her husband, John Neville (or Latimer, as most referred to him as) was at court visiting and jane manages to get a letter to him, asking for the services of his wife to tutor lady katherine, ward to the queen consort of england. the letter was more of a formality; with the latimers only just coming back into favour, they must have thought it would be unwise of them to refuse jane’s request, although jane of course wouldn’t do anything to them if they did refuse.

catherine, upon meeting the ward, gave off an air of confidence, unwavering in her sense of self.

she doesn’t even curtsy to katherine.

she bows. long and low.

“it’s an honor to meet you, lady katherine,” she says formally yet genuinely.

katherine looks confused for a moment, before returning a curtsey and smiling slightly. “likewise, lady parr.”

parr waves a hand. “no formalities needed, please.”

katherine smiles wider. she likes her new tutor already.

their first lesson is the day after parr arrives at court. katherine is slightly nervous but mostly excited; she’s always liked learning, and she’s determined to prove to everyone else and herself that she’s smart enough to be good enough. parr greets her with a smile, sat on one side of a small table, and katherine takes the chair opposite her. there’s some books stacked on the floor next to the table and an ink pot and quill next to several sheets of paper.

“today is just finding out what you know, to give me a better idea of where to start off,” parr explains. “please, remember i’m not here to judge you, and if you do not know something then you shouldn’t feel ashamed. that’s what these lessons are for, after all.”

katherine shyly nods. the edge of parr’s lips twitch up in a half-smile as katherine picks up the quill and looks to her earnestly.

“tell me all that you know about christopher columbus’ endeavor to the new world,” parr instructs. she picks up a book and begins to thumb through as katherine writes as much as she can. she fills just over one sheet before she’s finished, striking a line across and looking back to parr.

“explain what you can about the salt trade.”

this question katherine can hardly manage a few lines on; the education she’d had never taught her anything about trade. that was for men, and they hadn’t thought it necessary to tell a girl anything about it. she desperately tries to drum up anything else she could possibly think of on it but gives up with a sigh,  cheeks flushing slightly. to her surprise, parr doesn’t comment, simply asking her to write a list of any wars the english had taken part in. question after question parr asks her until the paper has been filled up and katherine’s hand is starting to cramp from writing. parr takes the papers and offers katherine a kind smile.

“thank you. you may take a break while I read your responses, or if you’d prefer you can get a start on reading this.” she takes a book from the stack on the floor and places it in front of katherine. ‘UTOPIA - by thomas more’ the book reads, and katherine flips it open curiously.

“i wouldn’t worry about the more technical elements of more’s prose yet,” parr tells her. “the first read through i just want you to understand the basics.”

“um,” katherine interrupts quietly, blushing bright red. “i’m sorry, i can’t read this.”

the book was all in a different language. katherine wasn’t sure, but she’d guess it was latin. parr looks slightly surprised.

“i wasn’t told you didn’t know latin,” she says, and katherine internally berates herself for seeming stupid in front of her new tutor, but then parr smiles. “oh, you have a wonderful time ahead of you. latin is hard work, but you’ll learn to translate the most beautiful works of poetry and prose. i just have to adjust my lesson plans slightly.”

with their remain few hours before breaking for lunch, parr begins the latin lessons. she finds herself holding back many surprised smiles as just how quickly katherine is picking up the language, finding verb conjugations and basic sentence structure a piece of cake.

just after noon jane quietly knocks and pokes her head around the door. “is this a bad time?” she asks, seeing both women hunched over their papers.

parr looks up and smiles. “not at all, your majesty, come in.”

she crosses to katherine, who had yet to look up from her concentrated writing. she jumps slightly when jane lays a gentle arm around her shoulders, but quickly relaxes into the hold.

“how goes it, love?” jane asks, kissing katherine’s forehead.

katherine practically beams with a sort of quiet pride. “good, i think!” she sends a quick glance to parr for confirmation and parr nods, laughing slightly.

“more than good, i’d say. lady katherine has a remarkable aptitude for languages, your majesty. i’ve been thoroughly impressed.”

katherine lights up at the praise and jane grins at her, pride welling up in her chest.

“that’s fantastic, love.”

parr finishes jotting down a few notes before setting down her quill and shaking out her wrists.

“that should do it for now, lady katherine. we’ll reconvene in one hour?”

jane looks at her questioningly. “won’t you be joining us for lunch, lady parr?”

parr turns confused. “i suppose i was under the impression that-“

“oh, dear,” jane laughs slightly, “you simply must have lunch with us, right kat?” the girl nods enthusiastically, standing up. jane smiles again. “besides, i’d like a full report on how my little scholarly lady is doing.” she nudges katherine lightly in the ribs.

parr smiles gently. “well, in that case, i humbly accept your invitation.”

“wonderful,” jane claps her hands together. “i’m ready to hear about everything you’ve been working on.”

during lunch, katherine is incredibly chatty, practically unable to stop talking about the things she had learnt in the past few hours. she proudly recites some verb conjugations for jane, who offers a round of applause at the end, laughing slightly at her daughter’s childish glee at learning something new. parr chips in every so often to remind katherine of something or to voice her own praises.

jane feels pride rise in her very quickly, leaving her heart so full she can barely stand it.

parr excuses herself a few minutes early to get everything ready for the afternoon, and, as soon as she’s gone, jane pulls katherine into her arms, lightly kissing her temple.

“i’m already so proud of you, love,” she murmurs. “i know you’ll just continue to impress me.”

katherine smiles into her shoulder and hugs jane tightly. “thank you,” she says softly, “for giving me the chance.”

jane pulls back slightly, resting her hands on katherine’s shoulders. “and how are you finding your new tutor? she seems very nice.”

“she’s amazing!” katherine grins. “she didn’t get annoyed at me once and she explains everything so well.”

it warms jane’s heart to hear that katherine likes her new tutor, and it amazes her how much difference jane can see from the shy little girl who became her lady-in-waiting several months ago.

“i’m glad to hear that, love,” jane says quietly.

the grand clock in the corner chimes one strong note and falls silent, and katherine looks at jane almost a little sadly.

“back to it, kat,” jane gently instructs. she kisses katherine’s forehead. the girl had grown like a weed since they had first met; katherine used to barely hit jane’s nose, now they were exactly eye level. too much longer and katherine would be taller than jane herself.

she’s snapped out of her reverie by katherine saying goodbye. jane smiles, squeezing both of her hands gently.

“go keep making me proud, love.”

katherine blushes and dashed from the room, not wanting to keep parr waiting too long.

the woman is there waiting at the table when she enters.

“ready to continue?”

[ireddeadredemption2pc-blog]

Red Dead Redemption 2 PC

Red Dead Redemption2 PC

The old west feels brand new again.

Oh Jesus Christ, what have you done? “Thomaschen 978 wants to know why a dozen carcasses and a couple of horse corpses are placed on rail tracks bordering the early industrial city and are the New Orleans stand-in St. Denis.” You killed half. village.” PC Games For Free

We are on round two of the recurring corpse pile. My poses got the idea to jump in front of the train after a few rounds of Lose Your Friends and Toss Them in the Sea in the Couple Friendly Strangers. Like GTA 5, Red Dead Redemption 2 has its own bowling minima, we explain to Chen in a roundabout way that provokes his fear. Die in the shared open world of Red Dead Redemption 2 and you’ll react fast enough to move your corpse around. Best RPGs games pc

The boy is in line with us. We should make it bigger. As the train comes around again, another pose tries to take us out. The chain defends us but does not bring it back to the tracks. He goes away screaming. Death of a true warrior.

Red Dead Redemption 2 could be the biggest, most humble videogame ball pit for an annoying story about impulsive children, the forced disintegration of the community, or simply a quiet and reflective hiking simulator. It’s just about what you need it to be, and it’s good at it.

Just hours before the corpse-bowling, I was alone through the icy forests, stepping into the long shadow cast across the snow by the rising moon. I heard a gunshot from a distance. The tracks of some wolves marked snow in the same direction. I saw them who won. Anytime I pay attention and look closely, RDR2 is the result of my curiosity. Best Racing games on pc

The mind-numbing expanse that makes up the vast world of RDR2 speaks to the creative force of a development team with an intense, obsessive dedication to realism (and all the money and time needed to do so). Like how my friends’ characters flare up when I fire a gun at them, how animal carcasses disintegrate over time, how NPCs react according to a sloppy or bloody outfit, how to stir through a doorway. Scares everyone everywhere.

It is hard to believe that RDR2 is so deep and wide and is also a harmonious, playable thing. I was already playing it for days worth the console version. This is why I am particularly disappointed that it ended up on the PC to some extent.

For every non-taught multiplayer adventure, disconnect or crash on the desktop, desktop. The rock star’s best storyline and character so far has been filmed through Frame Hutches’ slideshow and addressed over the launch weekend.

RDR2, one of the best Western games and one of the best open-world games I have ever released with enough stability issues, is recommended for the hard way until everything is completely smooth.

Morgan trail

EVERY PRETTY VISTA IS SOMETHING TO LOSE THROUGH ARTHUR’S EYES.

The story genre of Red Dead Redemption 2 follows the dying days of the Wild West. The sprawling industrial world faced the bandits and social downtrodden of Arthur Morgan’s small band, an imperfect but loyal, loving and self-reliant community.

Capitalism is reducing its value as resources to humans. Indigenous USA America is driven from the plains to make way for ‘civilization’ and commerce. The forests are brought down for timber, the hills are cut down for coal, and Morgan’s chosen family is caught in the middle, forced to flee, assimilate, or respond with violent protests is done. They do all three.

This is Rockstar’s most serious drama, and it’s really, really long. If you are running, the story ends after 40 to 50 hours and then continues for 10 to 15. The main story missions of Red Dead 2 feature distinctly rockstar fare: ride to a destination that is talking to everyone, tightly scripting though, entertaining things, riding, and chatting to the final destination.

Missions are often thrilling action sequences or artificially mundane pictures of wrench labor and trade, full of long-winded Bespoke animations, and outstanding performances. They are only hopelessly harsh, to the point where it feels like I am following the stage directions rather than playing the role of a vagabond in the Old West.

Step out of line in these campaigns and this is a failed situation. As opposed to Red Dead Online, there are very few of them that encourage players to think for themselves, each designed to advance the story. The RDR2 show is at least a spectacle of the slow pace of life in the Old West.

This is not the death and theatricality of a lifetime; My favorite missions include shoveling, drinking wine with a friend, proposing an old romance and riding a hot air balloon. Working through a greater rut, stricter tasks are considered meaningful in the end anyway, inspired by extraordinary, ambient world-building and characterization.

Side missions, minigames, small activities, and random world events — whether they hunt great guns, capture a play, or stumble upon a woman trapped under a horse — all set Arthur’s character and setting in subtle, rich ways. Please inform.

Nested in the third act of a fully animated and voice theatrical performance, something like 10 minutes, it is possible that the response button is pressed after an artist has included a telephone. Arthur would shout, “Hell with the telephone!” It is an optional activity, a long one, and an option is to react in that short window. I think most players will remember this, but this is Canad Response 1 through 3 because this is something Arthur would say, a rageless goofy set his way in the right way.

He would write complete, real diary entries about the 50-hour campaign, sketching memorable scenes and depicting the state of affairs of his chosen family, which people once knew changed their fortunes between hope and despair. It is meant to be a completely alternative reading, but a refreshingly intimate take on a masculine figure that unsettles many doubts and hopes as to the next person.

He sings himself on a lonely ride and lowers his old body in the mirror. He will have an exciting conversation with the horseshoe woman as he gives her a ride into town, both commenting on the troubles of working for wealthy, ungrateful men as a growing necessity. I feel it all. Best horror games on pc free

Hillbillies can capture him after making the camp, a couple may try to rob him after inviting him to dinner, a man with snakebite can come out of the forest by stumbling and tell him to suck venom is. These haphazard encounters portray brutal life on the fading frontier, as nature pushes back against inner poppers who want to change it. Arthur is the perfect vessel to see it

This is because Arthur Morgan is one of the darkest human characters I have played during a great turning point in American history, playing a playful, cruel and compassionate role according to differing theories.

The game world, beautiful as it is, is made more beautiful and tragic by how it is ready to play it on every occasion. Every beautiful vista has something to lose through Arthur’s eyes, power lines and train tracks, cut through the skies, and the rest of his life is slowly filling with factory smoke. Just about everyone sees a sad end in RDR2, too. This is a story that I might not sustain every moment, but I will not forget its brutal arc or the man in the middle of it all. God damn is it sad? An apocalypse that led to this.

Ren Der Reflection

Assuming that you are able to run it at high settings, the biggest strength of RDR2 is how it exquisitely renders the Old West setting on PC, drawing more attention to the nuanced details that make it. This is one of the best looking games I’ve seen and a rare experience that justifies a new GPU or CPU.

Better draw distance and a greater range of vegetation detail were added, making some vistas look photographic. Long shadows vary from walking or roaming between places to rides, to cute nature tours. Due to animal attacks, bullet holes, rain, mud, or rapid flow of blood, the markings on the clothes are caused by very high-resolution textures, which tell a very little story about your friends.

A new photo mode makes it easy to share those moments of amazement. The way the player rides on RDR2 for just sightseeing and sounds is an important feature. I am desperately trying to get an artistic portrait of my horse’s silhouette to sit against the moon, yet another self-proclaimed goal was tolerated by this ridiculously large complex game.

With 2080, i9-9900K and 32GB of RAM, I can run RDR2 mostly on ultra settings with some resource-intensive settings completely off or switched off. But some hardware combinations are proving troublesome for RDR2, leading to random crashes in some APIs and, more recently, to a hotfix, leading to hitching problems for some 4-core CPUs.

During the first weekend, I couldn’t spend more than an hour without crashing on the desktop, though Vulcan switched from DX12 (which gives me better framerates) back to static stuff. Sometimes the UI malfunctions and I cannot select a select or purchase option, the map fails to appear, or I get paged unexpectedly from game servers.

The graphics settings are almost too much as well, and probably confusing. In our test, only a handful of settings affected performance by more than 1-2 percent. Large residuals, the mapping between MSAA, volumetric lighting, and parallax occlusion, affect performance by 5 to 25 percent. Most of them don’t make a big visual difference anyway and are best left out.

The way the settings are presented is made to feel underdeveloped: a huge list with unclear presets that require tinkering to make RDR2 run in a satisfactory framerate. It is hard. The PC should be the best place to play, not the best place to play, after all, after a few patches. It’s a shame for a game to look good. upcoming pc games

Cowboy poetry Red Dead Redemption 2 PC

Like in singleplayer mode, in Red Dead Online I can make my goals reasonable and watch them. The problem is, it is basically hamstrung by a frustrating multiplayer leveling system that locks basic equipment and cosmetics behind long XP requirements that can meet hours, perhaps days,

The option is spending gold, premium currency, items and clothing to unlock them immediately. A fishing pole is not available until level 14. A damn fishing pole in an outdoor recreation game. This is not spectacular and is a terrible way to invest players.

out a basic suite of tools (fishing rod, bow, varmint rifle, nice hat, etc.), Red Dead Online opened up widely. I have largely ignored traditional matchmaking modes such as gunfights and horse races, cheap thrills, I will play much better versions in different games, to have fun. It led to the most inventive, serene, real, and sometimes buzzing echo I’ve ever had.

I once walked into the middle of a fire in Blackwater and took the player corpses one by one to the church cemetery. Some were captured and participated in the ‘burial’ of their friends. A corpse thanked me for the gesture. Later, in an extended streak of criminal activity, my pose and I caught another player and instead of killing them on the spot, we rode into the swamp and threw them into the garter infected waters. I got the idea to act like a friend. Best pc games 2017

On a less absurd note, I set myself a constant goal of earning strictly enough money from hunting to buy cool-weather gear and a fine rifle. I am going to hike in the mountains and find the best way to hide there, a wild mountain man adorned with animal skins, which almost touches the floor.

In the meantime, I’m stopping gunmen across the city by running through the streets and calling for a parley. I am participating in an eight-player ballroom. I am living the life of a normal cowboy in the best shepherd game. I hope it clears up soon.

RDR2 PC System Requirements

OS : Windows 7 SP1 64bit

Graphics   Nvidia GeForce GTX 770 2GB / AMD Radeon R9 280

Processor:   Intel Core i5-2500K / AMD FX-6300

Memory:    8 GB RAM

DirectX:   Version 11 Or 12 Support

Storage: 150 GB

[tanadrin]

(forgive me for answering these as a post again, but again I don’t think I can do them justice in the chat box)

I plan on reading the nibelungenlied because a plot description sounds good, but I thought medieval people had a black and white view of everything *because* I read Beowulf (and a couple of the things Cynewulf wrote). It's literally the same plot and main character as A Trekkie's Tale. Seeing Tolkein's constant praise for Beowulf on my dash is one of the reasons I am so reluctant to read LOTR -- what if it sucks as much as Beowulf?

until I recently heard about the Nibelungenlied, I thought Europe just forgot how to write good stories some time after the cool ancient greek stuff

(not done with your post yet)

I read the rest and I am still hung up on you liking Beowulf

Again, it's the same exact story as A Trekkie's Tale

FWIW, I didn’t say I liked Beowulf. I like it fine, for the record--but it’s not the best in Anglo-Saxon poetry. It certainly wouldn’t make my top three.

I do not think the Anglo-Saxons had an unambivalent attitude toward the hero of Beowulf (or the other characters therein). Beowulf is a complicated, complicated topic, one I probably cannot do justice to, but suffice it to say it was written during the Christian era about the pre-Christian mythic past, and like all such works in the Anglo-Saxon corpus is exploring the interplay between two very different worldviews. One point of comparison might be The Wanderer, a poem that takes the form of a poetic monologue by a possibly-pagan figure of the old poetic, heroic tradition that’s bracketed by two sections that reveal the Christian sensibilities of the poet themselves, and which attempt to, if not resolve exactly, at least explore the tension between these two worldviews.

(And I say “Christian,” but don’t mistake me: the worldview of post-Christianization Anglo-Saxon England was very different from the worldview of, say, the religious right in the modern US, which is one connotation that might be evoked by that word; so if you prefer, think of them just as Late Migration Age and Early Medieval cultural differences, because these were changes in culture conditioned as much I think by changes in material and political and social circumstances as by religious ones.)

Beowulf isn’t to everyone’s tastes (though it’s often badly served by some deeply mediocre translations, Heaney’s much-vaunted one included), and part of this may be that it is epic: epic generally deals with flatter characters and more formulaic situations than other kinds of narrative, and a lot of the things that took getting used to on a first reading of Beowulf are like the things that took getting used to on a first reading of Tain Bo Cuailinge or the Epic of Gilgamesh: it’s an affected setting, emotionally and plot-wise, and while the “realist” narratives that make up the overwhelming majority of our cultural output these days (and “realist” as a style subsumes even fantasy and SF; it’s a term here for a set of stylistic conventions, not a judgement on plausibility) is no less affected, it’s affected in different ways, and we’re much more used to it.

I will say this also, though: Beowulf is not written as an Anglo-Saxon Mary Sue. He’s not unambiguously right or good; the Anglo-Saxons didn’t endorse burying your king with all your tribe’s treasure and then disbanding your tribe, and while the model of Germanic heroic literature was still influential in their poetry centuries later, it was not something they thought you should *emulate*: it was very much an element of (to them) their pagan past, something about which they had, I think it’s fair to say, conflicted feelings. Beowulf as a poem is descended from tales created in that past, but is 100% an artifact of the later, Christian era, a work of historical fiction in a mythic tone.

On Beowulf, I will add only this: 1) an Anglo-Saxon audience (as I do) would appreciate how a story like Beowulf is told as much as if not more than the actual content of the narrative; if the narrative seems insufficient, I can only plead the case of the poetry, which, again, suffers under the hand of mediocre translators. Alas, for Beowulf, your options seem to be translations by those who don’t know much about Beowulf or Anglo-Saxon poetry, like Heaney, or translations which are very literal and aimed at helping students trying to read it in the original. 2) As with narrative structure, our tastes in characterization are shaped by culture; if you want your heroes to appear to be the underdog at first and only pull off a triumph against overwhelming odds, a lot of ancient epic is going to come off as a series of Mary Sues, I think. Tastes change! There’s a reason that there’s a big cultural divide between popular literature and old literature, and there’s nothing wrong with finding old literature not to one’s taste. But I also don’t think you’re being fair to Beowulf with the comparison: there’s... a lot going on in that poem, both culturally and narratively. But I didn’t read Beowulf until I’d already been studying Anglo-Saxon literature for three years, and it was in the context of a year-long course taught by a terrifyingly knowledgeable woman who knows more about the subject than I could ever hope to, so idk, maybe none of that comes through in any of the modern translations.

I think a lot of what makes people go “old literature sucks” is really a case of wildly different aesthetic sensibilities--if what you’re looking to get out of a story is very different, yeah, you’re not gonna appreciate Piers Ploughman or Pilgrim’s Progress or w/e. But, I issue the following challenge: I think that even for highly specific modern tastes there is some great medieval literature. If you want something in a vivid narrative style very like modern novels, I recommend specifically the Old Norse sagas: Egil’s Saga is great; Njal’s Saga is even better. The more mythic sagas, like the Saga of Hervor and Heidrek, are still a lot of fun, even if the settings is a little less relatable.

[thehandmaidstalehulu]

The Handmaid’s Tale is nominated for 20 Emmy Awards this year, after winning 8 for Hulu last year including 2017’s Outstanding Drama Series. The first season of the television show is based on the novel of the same name, set in an oppressive, dystopian future in the Republic of Gilead which has overtaken the United States.

Not only was the television adaptation a critical success, Amazon lists The Handmaid’s Tale as the most read non-fiction book on Kindle and Audible in 2017, beating ‘A Game of Thrones’ and all of the ‘Harry Potter’ books. Author Margaret Atwood published the bestselling novel in 1985 and is not surprised that the totalitarian theme of the book is resonating with audiences today.

“We live in a very anxiety-producing moment because a lot of the received wisdom is being challenged and overturned,” says Atwood in her hometown of Toronto, Canada. “The world players are moving rapidly around the stage, taking positions that we’re not used to having them take, so it makes a lot of people anxious.”

Atwood started writing The Handmaid’s Tale in 1984 while living in West Berlin on a grant that provided funding to filmmakers, writers and musicians to live and work in the West German district occupied by the allies.

“At that time it was a very dark, empty city, by which I mean there were a lot of vacant apartments,” says Atwood. “People didn’t want to live there, because it was surrounded by the wall. They brought in foreign artists to be there just so people wouldn’t feel so cut off.”

She says living through the Cold War in divided Berlin was instructive to the mood she created for Gilead in the book.

“We also visited East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland at that time,” says Atwood. “It informed the atmosphere but not the content if you can see what I mean. The experience of having people change the subject, being fearful of talking to you, not knowing who they can trust, all of that was there.”

Atwood finished writing the novel the following year in the United States, while working at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.

“When I was writing it, we were still in an age in which America was seen as a beacon of light, of liberal democracy, a model for the rest of the world,” says Atwood. “We’re not there anymore, because the rest of the world has changed and so has America. That is why I think people are seeing The Handmaid’s Tale as more possible than they did when it was first published.”

A third season of the series that narrates the life of enslaved handmaid Offred, played by Elisabeth Moss, was recently announced by Hulu. The streaming service has 20-million subscribers and doesn’t release viewership numbers, but said in May that 2018′s season 2 premiere was streamed by twice the number of viewers as the season 1 premiere last year.

Atwood is currently a consultant on the television show and notes that she has no veto, though says she is generally happy with the direction the series has taken. She says she would like to see the oppressive Aunt Lydia survive the cliffhanger season 2 finale in which she was attacked by a handmaid, and hopes to see more of Offred’s best friend Moira who escaped from Gilead, in season 3.

Atwood is quick-witted in person, unpretentious and doesn’t miss a beat. She acknowledges that the cultural impact of Offred’s story has been significant.

“It’s become an international symbol of protest,” says Atwood. “Especially in situations in which women’s rights are in question, or are being removed from them.”

Dozens of women took to the streets in Buenos Aires this month wearing the red cloaks and white bonnets made famous by the subjugated women of The Handmaid’s Tale. The protestors are in support of a historic bill to decriminalize abortion that will be voted on by the Argentinian Senate on August 8. Demonstrators across the United States have worn similar outfits to protest a woman’s right to choose in the past.

It is not just abortion rights that The Handmaid’s Tale represents. Atwood mentions fair laws, fair pay, and equal pay for work of equal value as issues that need to be addressed today. The 78-year old resists labeling herself a feminist, noting that there are many definitions of the word, but sees Iceland as a shining light in terms of women’s rights.

“Iceland is probably a country that we should be studying because they’ve gone pretty far with equality, and their happiness quotient seems to be quite high.”

The Nordic country ranks number 1 in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index. Women make up 48% of elected representatives in parliament, and a new law introduced on January 1, 2018 mandates that companies prove that they pay men and women equally, or face fines.

“Does it make for a happier society on the whole if women have more equality? That does seem to be the case. Does it make for a more prosperous economy if women are engaged in the workplace and in decision making around the economy? That too seems to be the case,” says Atwood.

Atwood herself was born in Ottawa, Canada, the middle child of an older brother and younger sister. She credits her female relatives with providing her with invaluable lessons early in life.

“They were all pretty tough in their various ways, so my image of a competent woman did not come with a negligee and a box of chocolates,” says Atwood. “Being from a country that was pretty close to the frontier experience, I would say ‘Granny on the farm’ was more of a viable role model for me. I’ve got nothing against having your own toolkit, and knowing some elementary plumbing.”

Her no-nonsense attitude led her to a B.A. at The University of Toronto and a Masters at Harvard’s Radcliffe College. One of Atwood’s first jobs out of university was as a market research interview writer. She moved back to Canada in 1964 and taught English at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and published her first book, a collection of poetry the same year.

“When I first started in Canada, it wasn’t just that women weren’t viewed as serious writers. Writing itself was not viewed as a serious pursuit. One of the things we did to overcome it was we started publishing companies, some of which are still going, and I was the founder of one of those,” says Atwood, referring to the Canadian publisher House of Anansi.

The 78-year old has since lived and written in 7 countries and published 40 books. She received a writing fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation at age 44, just before starting work on The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood is pleased to see the contemporary options now available to writers looking to finance their work, such as crowdsourcing platforms Patreon and Unbound.

“The main thing writers have to figure out to do is how to pay their bills,” says Atwood. “Patreon, they sponsor your project, whatever it is, and Unbound, they will crowdfund a book that they wish could be published. What writers need is time, and all of these things buy time. Are you going to stay up all night and have a day job? I’ve certainly done that. Or, are you going to not have to have a day job, and maybe get a bit more sleep?”

In addition to being an author, Atwood is a vocal advocate for environmental issues. The impact of climate change is a theme that runs through her work, and she notes particular concern at the state of the oceans and how food supply may impact women and children in the future.

Atwood’s Toronto-based company, O.W.Toad, states that it does not use air conditioners or purchase plastic water bottles, and when airplane travel is necessary carbon neutral credits are purchased. Publishing contracts specify that acid-free paper must be used.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood attributes Gilead’s declining birthrate on pollution and environmental mismanagement. She notes that everything that went into the novel had a historical precedence and that the producers of the television show have continued that principle in subsequent seasons. I asked her if when she was writing the book she believed the circumstances in the novel would come to fruition.

“Did I think it was going to come more true? No,” says Atwood. “But, I understood that that possibility was there.”

[danfanciesphil]

Hey, I am looking at doing the Creative Writing MA in Paris,but I was just wondering what it was like in general? Like the modules and how big the course is etc?? It sounds so so good but i'm unsure at the moment if i want to apply. Especially since I'm low on money to pay for tuition... :(

hey! ah i am so pleased to hear you’re considering it! i’ll give you a brief rundown of what the course is like below the cut.

In Term One (Sept - Dec), the modules for Creative Writing are: 

A choice between two compulsory modules:

- Fiction 1 - Poetry 1 

And a secondary module unrelated to the first. I chose to do French Cinema, but there are lots of other options to do with art, literature, and other creative subjects. There should be a module guide on the website as I can’t remember them all. 

I am not interested in poetry, so I chose Fiction 1 and French Cinema. 

In Fiction 1 you get: 

- 3 hours of taught lesson, once a week. So a three hour lecture/workshop.- A reading list of relevant novels relating to the theme of the week. It is expected that you read the novel before your class to prepare. - Each week, a different subject will be introduced. For example, in week one you might focus on character, in week two plot, and so on. - Half of the 3 hour lesson is focused on the lecture (your teacher will introduce the subject, maybe do a presentation, and then you’ll discuss the book). - The second half of the 3 hour lesson is dedicated to workshopping. On top of reading the novel to prepare for the lesson, you are expected to have read the pieces people have submitted (online) for the workshop. You take it in turns to submit something - about 3 people go each week. Everyone will read the submitted pieces, and then discuss it in class. People bring up what they liked, what they didn’t like, and hopefully give some constructive criticism. 

I cannot speak for what you will get from your second module in term one as they are all different, except that you will get:

- 3 hours taught lesson, once a week. - A reading list- Probable access to musuems/cinemas/relevant study spaces

At the end of term one, you will be expected to submit a 7,000 word assignment of creative prose. It can be whatever you like. The deadline is early January. On top of this, there will be another assignment due for your second module - obviously this will vary depending on what module you choose. I had to submit a 4,000 word essay on Feminism in the French New Wave (cinema). 

In Term Two (Jan - May), the modules for Creative Writing are:

- Fiction 2/Poetry 2- Paris: The Residency

You do not get to pick a module in your second term, they are both compulsory. (Sidenote: if you picked Poetry 1 in Term One, then you must pick Poetry 2 in Term Two. You cannot do Poetry and then Fiction or vice versa as far as I know.)

In Fiction 2 you get: 

- 3 hours taught class time once a week- A reading list of relevant novels- The same structure is in place as in Fiction 1 with half workshop half lecture, however the teachers will be different and have very different approaches (which is very helpful imo!) I learnt way more in Fiction 2 than Fiction 1 personally, but I’ve had great teachers in my second term. 

In Paris: The Residency you get:

- 3 hours taught class time once a week- A reading list of relevant novels- A homework task each week to do so that the following week it can be workshopped. Examples of these homework tasks are ‘follow a stranger for ten minutes - discreetly - watching their mannerisms, gait, etc. and write about who they might be’, or ‘try and lose yourself in the streets of the city, then spend fifteen minutes just writing all that you see and hear’, etc. - This module is supposed to be about ‘city writing’, so they want you to write about Paris, or wherever else you feel drawn to city-wise. - I will be honest with you, I really disliked this class. However, I personally didn’t like it because I came on this course to work on and complete my novel (which Fiction 1 and 2 allowed me to do by submitting different chunks of it each week for workshopping and for the assignments), and it seemed a waste of time to be writing silly things about the city each week when I could have been more productive by working on the novel. The class isn’t poorly taught, it just had no relevance to me. I also don’t really enjoy ‘city writing’ as it seems bland, but that’s just a personal preference! Not enjoying this module did not (really) detract from the overall experience of the course, so it was fine. 

At the end of Term Two, you are expected to submit one 7,000 word piece of fiction for Fiction Two, and another 7,000 word piece of fiction (city-themed!) for Paris: The Residency. Ngl, this killed me a little bit, because they’re both due on the same day haha, but I did it! And I did very well, so it is possible. 

After this, you start work on your dissertation. For anyone doing (Fiction, not Poetry) Creative Writing, this is a 12,000 word piece of fiction. It can be whatever you want, but you must pick a supervisor to meet with 3 times before the deadline (met with mine today and she was so super lovely i could kiss her) to make sure you’re on the right track. 

Other Things About The Course: 

- It’s based on a campus that doesn’t belong to Kent University, so we only take up a small section of the building. This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it does limit us as students as we aren’t permitted to use all of the classrooms and study spaces. It’s a beautiful building, but it’s very old, and in the winter it was very cold. Having no place to study (there are some but very few) can be a bit of a problem especially in those cold months. In the summer I just sit in the courtyard and work which is d i v i n e. So that’s easier. 

- It’s pretty small, and pretty far away. So, in Term One, there were maybe 30-35 students across the whole course (not just Creative Writing, I mean everyone from Kent University on the Paris campus). The faculty are lovely, lovely people but there are really only 3 of them actually there full-time (yes, really). I have no complaints about these lovely staff, however it does make one feel a little cut off from the main University at times. Frank (who I can absolutely put you in touch with if you need!) is the person to go to with any issues, and I’ve yet to see him not be able to help someone who needs it whether it’s issues with finance, scheduling, contacting staff or whatever. 

- In Term Two (important!), the amount of students studying in Paris DOUBLES in size. This is because Kent also offers a ‘split-site’ MA course in Creative Writing along with a variety of other subjects. Students that opt of the split-site MA spend Term One in Canterbury at the main Kent campus, and Term Two in Paris. This is a tricky thing to get to grips with, mostly because having a bunch of new people try and insert themselves into your established Paris life is tricky to accept. However, we eventually integrated fine, and only a few minor problems occurred. Also, it is important to note that if you were interested in doing the split-site course, there is funding for it if you apply for a Masters Loan. For the solely Paris-based course, there is no funding aside from scholarships. 

- French courses are provided (two hours a week, and you are divided up by existing skill into three different classes). 

- You receive free access to both the BNF and The American Library in Paris which is very, very important as all study material in regular libraries is obviously in French. These two places have study materials in English, which is fantastic. 

- Accommodation is almost impossibly difficult to find, and Kent will be little to no help I’m not even joking. They’ll give you a vague list of places to try, but rent is so fucking expensive here, and if you don’t speak French you’ve basically had it. I can discuss some options with you that worked for me if you give me a private chat message. 

- Don’t expect to be coddled when you get here. I’m quite an independent person, so I didn’t really mind this, but it is in no way similar to the experience I had as a fresher at undergrad. They give you a headstart, some contact information for a local gym, a local bank, etc, but then you are more or less on your own. That sounds pretty daunting but it’s also incredibly freeing and definitely gives you the chance to bond with all your classmates! I’ve made friends for life here (and found a girlfriend) so I do not think this was a bad thing at all. 

That’s pretty much all I can think of to tell you right now! If you have any more specific questions I’d be happy to answer them, and if you decide to go ahead with it let me know as I can give you some tips on how to set yourself up here. 

I wish you the best love, please don’t hesitate to ask me anything more! 

xxx

[fredenglish]

Michael Sheehan

What’s up, #FeatureFriday fans? Today, we talked to Michael Sheehan -- SUNY Fredonia’s newest professor -- about his career, his views on genre, and his hopes for the future of Fredonia!

1. Talk a little bit about your career leading up to SUNY Fredonia.

Well, my career began as a SUNY undergraduate, studying creative writing at Geneseo. As a freshman, I knew I wanted to be a writer but hadn't really been exposed to writing, had never taken (or heard of) a workshop course. I didn't really know creative writing was an option until college. Then after Geneseo, I got a Master's degree in the St. John's College Great Books Program in Santa Fe, New Mexico, both because I felt there were big gaps in my reading and knowledge, which I felt I would need to fill in to be a writer, and also because I wanted to live in the southwest. I stayed in the southwest for six years, in Santa Fe and then in Tucson, Arizona, for my MFA. After all that time in the heat, I moved to Madison, Wisconsin, for a fellowship and then to DC before heading back to the heat (and humidity) for a chance to teach creative writing in the BFA program at Stephen F. Austin. So, I've spent a lot of time in creative writing classrooms, but also a good bit of time working outside creative writing as a tutor, a technical writer, and as an editor. But ever since the first creative writing class I took as an undergraduate, I've known this is what I want to do and where I want to be. 

 2. What originally drew you to SUNY Fredonia as an institution?

I grew up in Western New York, so, for one thing, it feels like a sort of homecoming. Not one I'd expected when I left years ago for the desert, but one I'm very excited about. But beyond that, a lot about SUNY Fredonia as an institution feels familiar to me in the best sense: the place, the size, the students. My background is fiction but I have more recently been writing creative nonfiction and have taught poetry and multigenre classes, so I'm drawn to the program for its opportunities to teach across genres. I also have a lot of experience working with literary magazines like The Trident and with reading series and am really looking forward to contributing to both at Fredonia. I'm also excited about the opportunity to help the creative writing program grow and to consider its future.

 3. What are you hoping to achieve as an educator at SUNY Fredonia?

Lots of things, many of which I think I will discover as I go. But mainly I'm hoping to help expand the creative writing program and help make it a destination within the region and the larger SUNY system. Fredonia has such a great foundation already that I think there is a lot of potential to provide more for students interested in creative writing and draw in new students. I also want to find ways to connect creative writing to technology and professional skills but without losing the sense of it as an art. I think too often people see a disconnect between creative disciplines and career qualifications, and sometimes I think we view the art of writing as divorced from twenty-first-century media. But I think there is a lot of possibility to push the boundaries of the art by exploring how it fits into our contemporary modes of communication.  

 4. Do you have any advice for students who may be just entering into university?

It's hard to say what advice will serve all students entering the university, but I guess I'd just say: take your time. When you first get to college, there is a lot to learn about how the university works even before you really focus in your own discipline. You have to also give yourself time to discover what you're really interested in pursuing. To that end, it can be good to take classes early on that might expose you to something you'll want to study more. College should not be a direct career-training program, but should instead be an open intellectual endeavor. This includes self-discovery and opportunities to see the connections across disciplines rather than simply choosing one path and sticking with it. But, that said, it's also okay to enter with a plan and pursue it. Mostly I think just don't mistake the ends for the means: enjoy the experience of learning while it's happening and let it happen.

 5. What do you find most helpful, in your own experience, for effective creative writing?

Practice. I think the most important thing is just doing the work, making writing a part of your daily life. The more you read and write, the better you will become as a writer. Along with developing a writing routine, though, I think it's really important to let it be fun. As a writer, if you're writing what you'd want to read, it will be a better experience and probably better writing. There's a balance you have to strive for between doing the thing you love (which should be fun) and also really committing to the work it takes to achieve what you're aiming for (which can be hard and take time). The fun should hopefully include discovery, being open to the unknown. The essayist Naomi Kimbell says, "Write bravely," and I Iove that. Write a lot, take risks, allow the possibility of failure, welcome the possibility of unexpected success. 

 6. Do you have any specific genres that interest you as a writer? As an educator?

I've become much more interested in writing creative nonfiction, especially the lyric essay, in the past few years. This actually came out of a class I taught. I had been interested in teaching nonfiction and when I had the chance, one of the assignments was an experiential essay, for which students had to do research like attending an event, interviewing subjects, and reading relevant sources. I did this assignment, too, by going to the trial of a local environmental activist, and I basically fell in love with what the essay form could do. I started reading a lot more nonfiction and have taught more classes and written more essays. I've also been interested in writing and reading fiction that incorporates elements of science fiction. As an educator, I'm also really interested in fusions of creative writing and new media, including interactive essays and graphic memoirs, as well as the use of narrative craft for audio and video stories. So much of the information we take in on a daily basis connects text and image or connects one story or perspective to a wider vantage point. Some of the earliest storytellers wove narratives together into a larger whole, like Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Cervantes, or the 1,001 Nights and The Ocean of the Stream of Stories. I think Somadeva's title could serve as a metaphor for the internet as a great body made up of many intermixing streams of information. 

 7. You have an interest in newer, emergent mediums. What benefits do you think that non-prose mediums can give an audience?

First I should say that I love text--and print in particular--as a medium. No objections from me. But I also feel there are areas of exploration that relate to digital media, and ways we can enrich our stories and our stories can enrich our increasingly mediated lives. So, I think part of the interest is finding new ways for creative writing to tell us about us, to make sense of our Instagram-selfie selves, our social media friendships, our globally-connected community. And another part of it is opening up the elements of craft to more media than just the printed word. I don't want printed prose to go away; but digital media allow different types of interaction, different means of navigating narratives, new possibilities. 

 8. Finally: what do you believe is the most important lesson that writing can teach us?

There are a lot of things I think creative writing teaches, so it's hard to pick the most important. I think good writing teaches empathy and helps us understand even those who are not like us, who make choices that are totally opposite the choices we'd make. I think in that way, good writing can teach us that there are others who feel like us, that we are not alone. But I also think creative writing can maybe teach a different lesson. There are so many stories, poems, essays, books written across centuries of human civilization. But they haven't exhausted human experience; when we read something written in 2019, it can still feel new. This isn't because the subject has never been written about before, but instead, the way the subject is written can be newly revealing. And a poem or story or essay can resonate with my experience and show me something, even if it's a poem written six hundred years ago or one I've read many times before. I think there is something really powerful in recognizing universal themes as they exist in particular human moments. It helps us appreciate our shared context while also seeing how each individual is importantly distinct. 

[livinginlandmarketing]

By Donna Kennedy

Contributing Columnist

My 13-year-old grandson hates to write. He’d rather play Roblox Starscape online, explore Fairmount Park on his bicycle or start a monologue that begins with “Imagine that …” and ends with an idea for a futuristic device. I tell him he could be a science fiction writer.

Donna Kennedy, a features writer for The Press-Enterprise and a former writing instructor,has a grandson who’s showing writing talent. (Courtesy of Donna Kennedy)

“Bruh,” he growls. A blank screen or blank paper is a personal enemy.

This is tough on us, the writer grandparents who have raised him and his twin sister for the past eight years. His sister, by the way, dashes out her writing assignments with alacrity. They may not be as elaborate, but they are exactly what the teacher ordered.

Their required writing began with thank-you notes, a big job since their New Year’s birthdays come right after Christmas and their loving relatives are generous. We wrote the brief notes together when they were 5 and could first sign their names. “What did you like best about the toy?” we’d ask. Now they value their independence, so we don’t even read the letters, except to check addresses for legibility. We do get feedback: My cousin said our grandson drew a picture of the Lego tank that she sent. Grandma reported he’d listed every gift she gave him, and Grandpa liked his letter written on a paper airplane.

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Sometimes writing is easier than speaking, especially when an apology is needed. An “I’m sorry” note under the door does wonders for family relationships, which can be especially fragile during the pandemic (and adolescence).

The strange thing is that our grandson, when he finally gives in, writes with imagination, specific detail and a sense of humor. When we asked him to compare summer camps from 2019, he concluded:

“Each of the camps had good things, but, to my word, Camp Seely is better. You get a better sense of common sense, knowledge, and you make more friends (if you know how to). Every day you wake up to the fresh scent of forest and nature, the song of birds, and the howl of the counselors for you to wake up.”

Once he starts, don’t interrupt. He’ll write for an hour or more, turning out two or three pages instead of the required one.

Reading his handwriting is tough, though I usually can do it, given my own scribbles. To him, the first draft is the finished copy. “Why do I have to write it again?” he growls, despite his indecipherable handwriting, inventive spelling, random capital letters and neglect of punctuation.

Nevertheless, he ended his virtual seventh-grade year at Riverside’s Central Middle School in triumph, after reading his final project aloud in Language Arts:

“I wake up in a house, the walls made of a type of tree I’ve never heard of, with a fireplace and people sitting around it, like in the memory about love and holiday I had, but this time it’s different for three reasons. One, everything is real. I can tell from how everything is shaded, and how I can control where my body is. Two, I can feel the ache in my back, and my head throbbing with the pain of a fever. Last, but not least, the people sitting on the recliners in front of me look worried, or serious, and have been talking with words like “me” and “I,” which would be against the rules in my society. … ” (Our grandson’s ending for “The Giver” by Lois Lowry was slightly off-topic, but appreciated none-the-less.)

His teacher responded, “You may have the potential of becoming a writer.”

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I agree, for sometimes he dashes off a tale on his own. On a day when he was banned from online gaming—and the next book in the “Rot & Ruin” series by Jonathan Maberry had not  yet arrived at the Robidoux Library— he disappeared into his room and closed the door. An hour later he emerged to announce with some pride: “I’m writing a diary. It’s fiction. Survival during a zombie apocalypse.”

“Day 1⅔:  I woke up in the middle of the night to a high-pitched scream. It sounded VERY close. I got out my airsoft shotgun, filled with metal bb’s. There was thumping. It got closer, and closer. I was alert now. I stood up and shook off my sleeping bag. The door opened. I thought ‘Zombies can’t open doors,’ and my friend P—— came into the room.

He yelled ‘WHO ARE YOU? Oh, B—-??? Are you infected?’

I responded ‘No, why should I be? I’m not walking around gurgling, am I?’”

And there you have it, a temporary happy ending to my grandson’s latest writing project. I can’t wait for the next installment. Will he and his friends survive the zombie apocalypse? Will he keep writing? I’d bet money on it.

Donna Kennedy writes flash fiction and memoir, including “Queen of the Salton Sea: Helen Burns and Me” (Sagebrush Press, 2018), which she wrote with her husband, Bill Linehan. In the past, she wrote features for The Press-Enterprise and taught writing at UC Riverside’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and San Bernardino Valley College.

-on June 12, 2021 at 04:00AM by Contributing Writer

[limejuicer1862]

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews

I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me. I gave the writers three options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger, or an interview about their latest book, or a combination of these.

The usual ground is covered about motivation, daily routines and work ethic, but some surprises too. Some of these poets you may know, others may be new to you. I hope you enjoy the experience as much as I do.

  Kay Bell

is the author of the poetry chapbook, Cry Sweat Bleed Write (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2020). She earned a BA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing at The City College of New York (CUNY) where she also served as a poetry mentor in the Poetry Outreach program. Kay’s work appears in the book, Brown Molasses Sunday: An Anthology of Black Women Writers, and online in Moko: Caribbean Arts and Letters, The Write Launch, Pithead Chapel and various other venues. Kay is passionate about bringing the arts back into public schools and issues that affect marginalized communities. She lives in the Bronx and considers herself a bibliophile. Visit her here: www.iamkaybell.com

The Interview

1. When and why did you start writing poetry?

I started writing poetry in the sixth grade when my teacher, Ms. Nolan, introduced my class to the Haiku. I learned very quickly that I was not only fascinated with writing but with words. I was even known to have been an avid dictionary reader. Soon after sixth grade I started keeping journals. Some pages were filled with venting about my rough childhood but many pages were poems.

1.1. What was it that fascinated you about words?

I believe it was the power of words that fascinated me. I remember reading words like “rhapsody” and “exalt” and feeling what they meant before truly understanding their definitions. Words have the power to make you feel and move you to create and reimagine things. When I found writers like Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Warshan Shire, Claudia Rankine and Amiri Baraka etc. I started to realize what you could do with words. They could be shaped into messages. Important messages. Writers such as these wrote such powerful messages in their poems and for me that was empowering and inspired me to do the same.

1.2. What was it that fascinated you about words?

I believe it was the power of words that fascinated me. I remember reading words like “rhapsody” and “exalt” and feeling what they meant before truly understanding their definitions. Words have the power to make you feel and move you to create and reimagine things. When I found writers like Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Warshan Shire, Claudia Rankine and Amiri Baraka etc. I started to realize what you could do with words. They could be shaped into messages. Important messages. Writers such as these wrote such powerful messages in their poems and for me that was empowering and inspired me to do the same.

2. How aware are and were you of the dominating presence of older poets traditional and contemporary?

When I first started writing it wasn’t bad obvious but looking back I definitely see that I wasn’t exposed to that many younger poets. It’s only within the last maybe 5-7 years I have tumbled upon younger poets. I believe writers such as Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks and Amiri Baraka definitely dominated the presence of Danez Smith, Evie Ewing, Claudia Rankine etc even a few years ago in my college courses.

2.2. How did they dominate?

I guess when I think of the question of domination I’m thinking about how they get more presence on the classrooms and they’re the writers most people are more familiar with because they get more exposure.

3. What made you tightly structure Cry Sweat Bleed Write round these words and their order?

People always ask me what do I write about. This title became the answer to that question. I think it was inspired by me hearing people say they accomplished victories by blood and tears. It made me think about what I choose to write about. I realized if it makes me cry sweat or bleed it’s worth writing about. That means nothing Is off limits. I write about all my experiences.

4. Seasons are an ongoing theme within the poetry., as in “smashes her face against the seasons”, “From the borders of winter”. Why are the seasons so important to you?

Seasons represent time and change but also they help you feel different emotions. Smashes her face against the seasons shows it happened all the time. As the seasons kept changing, this situation kept happening. Winter is symbolic of death or despair. When you emerge from winter you are emerging from dire circumstances.

So using these references to seasons helps me to convey a message about time and change that I hope will encourage the reader to understand something is changing and many times that includes a change in time, and a range of feelings.

I think mentioning the seasons also helps the reader reflect. This is important because for me, poetry should make you reflect. During reflection, that’s the moment you feel the time changing, and you feel the cold loneliness of winter, you smell the spring flowers, you jump in autumn leaves and you sweat in the heat of summer. You get immersed in the poem using this type of language.

5. What is your daily writing routine?

I do not write everyday. I think about things to write everyday but unless I feel an uncontrollable urge, I usually don’t stop to write. That urge guides me as to what should be on the page. Everyday I play with words, sentences, images, ideas in my mind. When I get a good combination of those things, that is when I feel the urge and start writing. For me this process is organic. I do not like to force myself to write unless I have a deadline. I think writing is like cooking. It takes time. Food has to simmer and absorb in it’s juices. I feel as though I must simmer and absorb the ideas, words etc. I need to let the poetry marinate within me and not rush the process or the result may not be as good.

6. What is the significance of the quotes at the beginning of each section of your book?

Each quote serves as a prologue for its chapter. I wanted to show the range of emotion and the connection to the title. The quotes work to do just this. I might add for each section except ”cry” I already knew from the beginning of creating the book, what quote I would use for that section because when I saw that word that quote popped in my head. For instance, sweat. Reading Hurston’s essay Sweat early on in college stuck with me and whenever I hear that word I think of the essay.

7. How do the writers you read when you were young influence your work today?

Nikki giovanni was one of the first poets that influenced me. Her writing is practical, bold, confident and revolutionary. Her work influenced me to write in a way that was accessible to non- poets/writers and she also taught me to write with confidence and courage by boldly speaking in ways and on subjects not always well received. I also think Ntozake Shange and Sonia Sanchez played a major role in shaping the structure of my poems. They were doing things with language and structure that I had not previously seen before reading their work. I am still working to incorporate more of that in my work but I definitely incorporate it. For instance the poems Untitled 6; Magic; and Liberation all play with the structure. These ideas would have not have not materialized in my work, had it not been for writers like Sanchez and Shange.

8. Who of today’s writers do you admire the most and why?

Today I’m really engrossed in Ocean Yvoung, Danez Smith, Warshan Shire, Camile Rankine, and Terrance Haynes. I mean there are others but these authors work lie next to me on my nightstand and I go back to them when I need inspiration. I love what they do with language, form, structure and imagery. They help me to envision what I’m going to write about and then my imagination and creativity finishes it off. I also love what they are writing about: Blackness, sexuality, religion, gender, family dysfunction etc. So many raw intense often taboo subjects. I have to say that even some traditional poets are on my nightstand for easy retrieval as well: Charles Simic, W.S.Merwin, Adrienne Rich and Amiri Baraka are names among those poets. These writers keep inspiring me.

8.1. What do Ocean Vuong, Danez Smith, Warshan Shire, Camile Rankine, and Terrance Haynes do with language, form, structure and imagery that really inspires you?

They create their own rules. For instance, Ocean Vuong’s poem Aubade with Burning City, he weaves lyrics to a song throughout the poem. The lyrics gives the poem movement. I can hear the song throughout the poem and each line becomes intensified. The poem becomes the song and the song becomes the poem. There is no beginning or end to this. The song also work to help facilitate this image of a perfect world where the images of the soldiers and war carry so many ugly secrets. Terrance Haynes reimagines the sonnet. He gives it life in his book, American Sonnet for my past and future assassin. This book actually inspired my poem: Work Sonnet. It gave me the permission to reimagine the sonnet and make it my own. Camille Rankine is thought provoking, as with all these poets, but there is something about her language and imagery that makes me stop and read her poems over and over again in one sitting. I’m constantly reflecting on her ideas and language choices. One poem that stands out to me is Vespertine. She says:

I’m an acre of empty desert, anyway. A spent white flower. A pale honey scent wilted away.

I have to take it all in. I have to digest it. I ask myself what is an acre? A spent white flower? A honey scent wilted? She is sparse but always fulfilling. She sends me searching for answers. Danez Smith and Warshan do some of these same things. Provoke me with language that forces me to reflect, search for answers, and lastly inspires me to write my own stories that bare some of the same pain, courage, love and resilience.

9. There is a loneliness in these poems, the sense of being abandoned, of being misplaced, distanced from everything, and an aching.

Absolutely. I was a foster child and not having my parents around always fostered a sense of loneliness and abandonment within me. I met my dad last year for the first time and my mom when I was 11 and never had a good relationship with her. The absence of a real patent child bond has always made me feel alienated. It has also affected all of my relationships, whether with my husband or my own children. I have always felt like people don’t understand me or I’m alone and I know now that the void I felt came from not having a healthy relationship with my mom and not knowing my dad. It has cause some to ache profoundly.

10. What would you say to someone who asked you “How do you become a writer?

There is no magical way to become a writer. Becoming a writer is easy. I think the mere desire to be one places you in position to become one. But becoming a good writer develops over time. Good writers learn how to be creative, they imagine, edit/revise their work and take criticism. Both good and bad criticism is good in my eyes. Even the bad criticism you can take the meat and leave the bones: there is always something to learn. Good Writers are not magicians. They’re critical thinkers, they read ALOT and they have opened themselves to a variety of writing styles and techniques.

11. Tell me about the writing projects you have on at the moment.

Right now I am working on a novel loosely based on my experience in foster care and how that shaped my life and relationships. I have another poetry book set to be published next year, Diary of an Intercessor.  It was actually my thesis in grad school and is based on my relationship with God and shares some of my struggles and victories with religion and church. I also just finished a book of poems I started writing around the time I met my dad, called Pilgrimage.

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews: Kay Bell Wombwell Rainbow Interviews I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me.

[lodryons]

Zurich & Interlaken

The airport is really nice here. I’m already convinced we should all pay higher taxes just for that. An old man helped me get a train ticket from the kiosk. The train was very sleek and clean. It ran quietly and made me sad that nothing like this exists in America. Everything is so damn clean here. I witnessed the man who owns a bookstore near my accommodation sweeping up fallen tree leaf things (blossom tree ones not like American-style leaves).

The Swiss are all taught German primarily and of course, their English is really good too. They actually speak both German and what is called Swiss-German which I’m told is very different from German. A lot of Swiss also know a fair amount of French and Italian from what I’m told but I can’t say that for sure.

Everything here is very expensive. The minimum annual salary (as in required by law) comes out to be $53,000 a year. The currency is approximately 1:1 with the dollar so it’s quite easy to see how insanely everything is priced. A McDouble is $5. Lattes are around $5-$7 and beer in a bar can be anywhere from $8-$12 for a 33 deciliter or half-liter glass of normal beer. We did get a six-pack of beer for $10 last night so you can do just fine if you don’t go out.

The first night we went to this highly rated Thai place near us. It costed us $100 for 3 beers and 3 entrees. We then went to a bar near us and met a coy Irish guy named David. David wrote some poetry and gave it to two women near us when they were leaving. David is a chef. Other than that I cannot say what I know about David. He surmised that I was a spoiled kid and kept commenting on my hair and ears. We ended up taking a taxi to a dirty street of bars that he said was our only option on a Tuesday night. The taxi was $15 for a 5-minute drive. I spent $80 on a round of drinks. I’m making a lot of monetary mistakes here.

Today we went to a cafe called Bros, Beans, and Beats. It’s a nice cafe that has a 20% hipster vibe to it. The internet works well enough. I paid $6 for a latte. I learned that in France they do half espresso and half filtered coffee in their lattes. I finally know why I thought my latte was disgusting in the Charles De Galle airport. I hate normal coffee. I like my espresso diluted with a gallon of milk.

We walked around Zurich for quite a while. There were a lot of stores. I don’t find most stores interesting. It feels like such a waste of time to aimlessly go form store to store browsing shit you won’t be super happy owning. Every time I aimlessly browse a store and buy something I almost always regret it sooner or later and get rid of the item.

I’ve got a black swan story for you that is for the ages. Christian, Damian and I were sitting by the lakefront enjoying the sun and shooting the shit. At first, there were big ole’ white swans coming up to people looking for food. I’ve never seen a swan from behind swimming. They truly do have a caboose that is crafted for floating in the water. The efficiency of a swan gliding in water is astounding. Soon we spotted some small duck-sized black swans. The probably were not swans but they didn’t look like ducks and that’s the only two birds we really wanted to consider that day so we shall call it a black swan. After sitting for a while we noticed one of the black swans had scooped up a stick in its mouth and began swimming towards a little white boat that was docked perhaps 20 feet from the shore. You have to realize that we just got done shitting on this thing for a while and then it does a complete 180 and acts like a bird on a mission.

It begins ramming the stick between the boat and its rudder. It would inch the stick through so purposefully that we found it hilarious. What could this little guy possibly think he was doing? What was his goal in all of this? Was he trying to nest? Was this a game? We will call this damn bird Bob to inject some dignity into this story.

Bob pushes the last inch of the stick through the rudder and it shoots out the other side. Bob then swims on over, grabs the stick and again, pushes it through the rudder and again, it shoots out the other side. Bob then grabs the stick and instead of playing this boring rudder nesting game finds an inch-wide hole next to the rudder. He then pivots his body and begins ramming it up the boat hole. Bob seems to be enjoying this. Bob starts really going at it and lodges it successfully up the boat hole. We figured this was it. Bob had done it! Bob turns away and aimlessly moves back towards the shoreline bobbing with the waves as Bob loves to do.

About a minute later, Bob finds another stick. We were ecstatic!

It seems rather obvious to me now that I’m writing this that Bob was likely trying to build a nest but at the time it seemed like something much grander than that. Bob strolls up to the boat hole and begins ramming his stick in the same fashion, in the boat hole. Of course, the hole was already filled so only one stick could fit. This boat hole just couldn’t handle two of Bob’s sticks at once. Bob ends up getting the 2nd stick up the hole while losing the 1st stick. The 1st stick just began floating away. Bob then fetched the first stick, shoved it up the hole, and then, of course, the second stick would float away. This went on for a while. Eventually, Bob gave up and just swam away. This was much more fascinating yesterday.

We went to Interlaken yesterday. Interlaken means between two lakes because the city is between two lakes. Initially, we were going to go to Lucerne but Christian doesn’t care about money and wanted to go hang gliding. At $230 for a 15-minute flight, I couldn’t really justify the cost. I didn’t really put up a fight but I shouldn’t have even gone to Interlaken because the damn train ticket was $140 round trip. This is a 2-hour train ride mind you. I’m still sick and blame my lack of assertiveness on that honestly. Anyways I stopped the loss there and just watched for a few hours as hang gliders and paragliders came raining down from above me. The hang gliding company did let me have a few big beers for free so I tossed some shorts on, threw my shirt off and lounged in the sun staring at the landscape. This saved the trip for me. Afterward, we got some authentic Swiss food called Rochi (which is definitely not how you spell it). It’s melted cheese on ham on hash browns. It costed $23 which was oddly cheap to me. That is a sad statement.

There don’t seem to be any homeless people here. I seriously haven’t seen a single person that looked homeless or was just sitting on the sidewalk holding a cup in the air hoping for money.

I’m going to come back to Switzerland but with a few thousand dollars and the intention of doing some proper snowboarding and hang gliding.

I’ve been sick since about April 7th. I never get sick and even when I do it usually lasts a few days. I can’t believe people do this every 2-3 months it’s annoying as hell.

[limejuicer1862]

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews

I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me. I gave the writers two options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger.

The usual ground is covered about motivation, daily routines and work ethic, but some surprises too. Some of these poets you may know, others may be new to you. I hope you enjoy the experience as much as I do.

Karl Knights

is a freelance journalist who has appeared on The Victoria Derbyshire Show, BBC Breakfast, ITV News, CNN International and various radio shows. His prose and poetry has appeared in The Guardian, The Dark Horse, The North and Under The Radar.  He was highly commended in the Suffolk Young Poets Competition three times. He is twenty-three and lives in Suffolk.

The Interview

1. When and why did you start writing poetry/essay writing?

I imagine I’m quite unusual in that I can pin point exactly where and when poetry began for me. Poetry properly entered my life in March, 2011. I was fourteen, in Year 10. My school took a group of students to a local arts centre, and a poet called Dean Parkin (whose books I would highly recommend reading) did a workshop with us. I had written the odd thing here and there before, as a child, but it wasn’t a consistent habit. But this was the first time I’d written poetry. I wrote awful stuff, but I enjoyed it enormously. I was the only student to keep writing through the lunch break!

As for essays, they’re more recent. I had done short 800 word pieces of journalism, for the Guardian. But longer essays usually emerge when I’m trying to work something out. My most recent essay, in The Dark Horse, came about as I was trying to work out, what does it mean to write disabled poetry? Do disabled poets act differently to their able-bodied peers? Are different pressures acting upon them? How should a disabled poet conduct themselves, think about their work? And until those questions were answered, I felt I couldn’t move forward in my own poetry. So that particular essay emerged from confused, frantic notes I’d made about the disabled poets I’d come across and what kind of conditions they’d written in.

2. How aware are and were you of the dominating presence of older poets and essay writers traditional and contemporary?

I was, and am, a great information hoarder, but I was more aware of the older poets. There’s a running joke that I like my poets dead, which has a bit of truth to it, though that’s something I’m trying to fix! So certainly early-on contemporary poetry was something of a gap in my mind. All the voices I pilfered from and adored were dead poets (though still 20th century). For me, I wouldn’t say they’re a dominating presence so much as a liberating one. C.K. Williams said that some poets, like Dickinson or Whitman, are self-starting engines, who started writing something new without models. I’m not a self-starting engine at all. I thrive when I have some kind of model. Every now and again a ‘new’ poem will force it’s way through, but by and large when I have something tangible to begin from, I write more forcefully. In terms of the influence of essay writers, I’m less sure. I used to, and still do, read very widely, and essays were always a part of my literary diet. But I’m unsure what influenced me, as my essay writing is still in its infancy. In a few years I might have more to say on what’s gone into my essays. I know that generally I favour essays and literary criticism that is unabashedly personal, stuff that steers away from academic language. I really loved Eavan Boland’s criticism for those reasons.

3. What is your daily writing routine?

I often feel like a bit of an imposter, because I don’t really have a daily writing routine. But I’m always thinking about writing, or better yet I’m reading. I think the time away from the laptop can be as essential to the process and as instructive as when you’re in the chair bashing out the words. Jane Kenyon said poetry should grow in the dark like a mushroom, and I think she was right. I’ve noticed that I can write prose on demand, and if I wanted to I could write it, day in and day out, whereas for whatever reason, poetry is more mercurial for me and emerges in great bursts, where I’ll write dozens and dozens of poems in a very short space of time, followed by a barren period. I’m mostly happy to ride the process.

4. You’ve spoken of how your essays are motivated, what causes you to write poetry?

I’m not entirely sure. Usually there’s some kind of image or line or sheer sound that won’t leave me alone, and will keep me awake until I write it down. Poetry is the most economical of the arts, and often entire universes are contained in a tiny slab of words, and I love that. Poetry is often brief but you never feel shortchanged by it’s brevity. Because it is smaller but no less strong that its artistic siblings, poetry can reach places other art forms cannot. For example in my own life, I’ve had periods where my concentration has been non-existent, so novels, plays, even short stories were out of the question. But poetry remained. Poetry is wily and can reach places and people that other literary forms cannot hope to. Writing poetry is a thrill that has never waned.

5. How do the writers you read when you were young influence your work today?

I’m not sure…it seems a question better judged by people seeing my work from the outside, rather than coming from me. I often talk with poets about who their first voice was, the first poet they found for themselves. For me it was Allen Ginsberg, and ‘The Bricklayer’s Lunch Hour’ remains a favourite poem. I was an absolute Ginsberg fanatic for several years. But I don’t think you can find a trace of Ginsberg in my work. I find myself referencing Heaney a great deal, he seems to have entered my blood without me noticing. An anthology that was important to me starting out was a book called The Poetry of Survival, edited by Daniel Weissbort. The book is made up of the voices that emerged in the post-war period in Eastern Europe, who wrote very concrete, tangible poetry. It had the authority of witnessing. It seems the thing I take most from poets is their attitude, Ginsberg said he made the private world public, and I think he’s right on the money. He wasn’t afraid to make fun of himself either, but somehow he did so without sacrificing his pathos. A more recent example would be Vassar Miller. I couldn’t write what I’m writing now without the disabled poet’s from the past having come before. Miller was punk before punk, writing metrical verse about disability, faith, femininity and sexuality in the fifties and beyond! It was a bold, in your face attitude, and I hope I’ve taken that, but who knows?

6. Who of today’s writers do you admire the most and why?

Too many authors to name! If I had to pick just one, I’d say Jillian Weise. Her first book, 2007’s The Amputee’s Guide to Sex is the reason I started writing about disability at all (alongside reading the anthology, Beauty is a Verb). Weise’s new book, Cyborg Detective, is absolutely extraordinary. With each book her power as a poet has grown, the voice grows larger and larger and it’s utterly enthralling to watch. Her alter-ego, Tipsy Tullivan (which you can see on Youtube) is a brilliant satire of the casual ableism of the literary world.

7. What would you say to someone who asked you “How do you become a writer?”

I’d say, do the work. All too often I come across people who are in love with the idea of being a writer, rather than loving the actual act of writing. The kind of person who is afraid to read because it might ruin their style. Whether unpublished or published, simply by typing or putting pen to paper, you are a writer. The other thing I’d say is read, read absolutely everything you can get your hands on. If you’re a poet don’t just read poetry. If you’re a novelist don’t read novels alone. Read about etymology and the politics of water use, read poetry and history, read comics and children’s books. Read outside of your comfort zone, always. Be unafraid to borrow from other art forms too. For example, Mount Eerie’s album, A Crow Looked at Me was important to my writing life. It’s an album about the singer-songwriter’s wife’s death, and it’s completely raw but painfully beautiful as well. The album taught me that being direct is nothing to be ashamed of, there’s enormous power and urgency in bluntness. Mainly, keep your artistic antenna open to all things. Rejection is constant as a writer, whether you’re just starting out or you’re a Nobel Prize winner, so prepare for many, many rejections (maybe do what Hemingway did and pin your rejections above your writing desk). Do the work, find the right words. Keep reading. Repeat ad infinitum.

8. Tell me about the writing projects you have on at the moment.

At the moment my main task is putting together a poetry manuscript. David Foster Wallace described assembling a manuscript as ‘like wrestling sheets of balsa wood in high wind’ and that’s about right. It’s a chaotic but invigorating process, and one I’m glad to sink my teeth into. In my spare time I am organising what poems to read for a few events in 2020, which like putting together the manuscript, forces you to see your poems with new eyes. I’ve got a few essays that are being written at the moment that will hopefully see the light of day in the New Year, but you can never be sure. We shall see!

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews: Karl Knights Wombwell Rainbow Interviews I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me.

[limejuicer1862]

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews

I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me. I gave the writers two options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger.

The usual ground is covered about motivation, daily routines and work ethic, but some surprises too. Some of these poets you may know, others may be new to you. I hope you enjoy the experience as much as I do.

Roger Stevens

has published forty books for children. He is a National Poetry Day Ambassador, a founding member of the Able Writers scheme with Brian Moses and runs the award-winning website www.poetryzone.co.uk for children and teachers, which has just celebrated its 20th anniversary.  His book Apes to Zebras – an A to Z of shape poems (Bloomsbury) won the prestigious NSTB award. Recent books include I Am a Jigsaw; puzzling poems to baffle your brain (Bloomsbury); Moonstruck; an anthology of moon poems (Otter-Barry) and Be the Change; poems about sustainability (Macmillan). Roger spends his time between the Loire, in France, and Brighton, where he lives with his wife and a very shy dog called Jasper.

The Interview

1. When and why did you start writing poetry?

I can’t remember the first poem I wrote, but I was probably around 12 or 13. I was at secondary school. This would have been in the mid 1960s. I do remember making books of my poems. I would fill hard-covered exercise books with poems and then ask my cousin, who had a typewriter, to type out the best ones. At school we had two English teachers and I guess I was lucky as they were both brilliant. ‘Old Nick’, as we used to call him, looked stern and quite frightening with a shock of black hair, was a strict disciplinarian – woe betide anyone who answered him back – and taught us about classic and traditional poetry. We studied Shakespeare, Chaucer, Byron… he taught with a passion and made poetry exciting and understandable. ‘Flossie’ was more laid back. He was fun and interested in contemporary literature. It was in his lessons that I first met e. e .cummings, whom I still love. Later, the poems of Roger McGough, Brian Patten and Adrian Henri, published in The Mersey Sound in 1967, had a great influence on me. In a way they were Britain’s answer to America’s beat poets. They showed me that poems could be about anything – girlfriends, a visit to the chip shop, anything at all. Roger McGough is still one of my favourite poets. The other big influence in my teens was Bob Dylan. I was in a band (a beat group we called it back then) and he showed me that song lyrics could be so much more than rhymes about the moon and June. I always thought his lyrics were poetry, something recognised recently of course, by the Nobel Prize people.

1.1. Why do you still love e.e.cummings?

That’s a good question. I think I probably liked him as a teenager because I don’t think I’d ever read anything quite like him. I think it was his sheer audacity – writing WITHOUT USING CAPITAL LETTERS? Wow! Flossie also introduced the class to the novel Tristram Shandy by Laurence Stearn. Written in the mid 1700s – it was a novel way ahead of its time. As a teenager “experimental” writing, as I saw it then, was very appealing. After school I went to art college and became fascinated with all things avant garde. John Cage… the Fluxus school… and that was all reflected in my writing and poems at the time. None of which would be good enough to find a publisher now. And now, when I read ee cummings – it’s not just the cleverness of the style, the content means more too. Which, I guess, speaks to me as a grown-up.

1.2. What other poets do you like to read?

I write mainly for children, and so I read a lot of poetry written for children. My favourite is probably Roger McGough. He writes for children, of course, but also for adults. He writes poems that are accessible, that anyone can read. But that have so much more to them. He can do that thing where you read a poem and he tells you something that’s true – but that you’ve never thought of before. And you think – Ah yes! Of course. I love Billy Collins as well, for similar reasons. It’s a phrase you often see on the backs of poetry books – deceptively simple. But sums them both up. I like Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy… and for children’s writing Michael Rosen. I’m currently reading Stephen Dobyns, a poet that I’ve only just discovered. And enjoying his writing very much.

2. What is your daily writing routine?

I don’t really have a daily routine. I keep a notebook with me at all times and write in that most days, whenever I think of something worth noting or see something that could inspire a poem. I have been known to wake up in the middle of the night to write in my notebook, too!  Now and again I’ll look back at my notes, dig out any ideas that still seem sensible and work at turning them into a poem or a piece of prose.

But usually writing comes in clusters, when I need to spend concentrated bouts on a particular project, for example if a publisher has commissioned a book from me. When I have a deadline ahead, I will set aside a few hours each day, usually in the mornings, to work exclusively on that book. My time won’t be spent only on writing, because projects often involve research. When Brian Moses and I wrote What Are We Fighting For? for Macmillan, it involved a lot of reading about the two world wars and researching the roles played by people and animals at home and abroad. For that book I spent several weeks working all day creating the 60 or so poems that were my contribution.

I am currently working on a ‘best of’ my poetry collection, but the poems for that are already written and so at the moment I spend an afternoon or two every week trying to choose the best hundred from the thousand or so poems that I’ve had published over the years.

I have two writing projects planned for next year. One is an autobiography which will document what life was like for me and my family in the 1950s onwards. I hope my grandchildren, grand nephews and nieces and those who come after them will find this interesting. I will probably self-publish this. I am also going to write an adult crime thriller, which I hope will interest a mainstream publisher. That definitely will involve a daily routine and I will probably sit down to write immediately after breakfast, take a short break for lunch and continue until mid afternoon. The joy of writing for a living is that you can create a routine that suits you – and you’re not tied to being in one place. I can write wherever I am and, in fact, when I’m working on a big project I find I like to be at our house in France, where distractions are fewer than in England, or even away from it all in our camper van, at home or abroad.

3. What was the motivation behind What Are We Fighting For?

Well, firstly I should explain that I have to write, or make music, or create art. I don’t why this is, but I do! So the main motivation for all my work comes from within. I have written novels and poetry since my teens and have always written songs and played in bands.

But in the late 1980s I had an idea for a children’s book, which proved commercially successful. It was published in 1993 by Penguin. That was The Howen. Another novel followed, Creeper, and writing for children seemed it could be a viable career. I was teaching at a primary school at the time.

It was not until poet Brian Moses visited my school that I thought about writing poems for children. His spirited performance and the workshop that he ran made me realise this was something I wanted to do. So I wrote some children’s poems, sent them to Brian and my first poem was published in an anthology, My First Has Gone Bonkers, in 1993. That was a good year for me. From then on I had lots of poems published in anthologies, I started visiting schools to perform and run workshops for children and teachers and in 2002 my first solo collection, I Did Not Eat the Goldfish, was published by Macmillan.

By then Brian and I had become good friends. We collaborated on a book which was published to coincide with the 2012 Olympic Games and then looked for another project we could share. The reason our Olympic Games book was so successful was because the Games were held in London and the whole sport thing was really topical. Publishers like to know there will be a market for a book.

We thought there would be a lot of publicity around the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War which we could utilise and our publisher thought so too. Thus, What Are We Fighting For? was born. But it would be wrong to say our motivation was just to cash in on an event. That might have been where the idea for the book came from, but the motivation behind the poems was to convey the evils of this war while acknowledging the bravery of those who were forced to fight in it. Brian and I both had grandparents and parents who’d fought in the two world wars. As children we were keenly aware of the fallout from these conflicts.

There are, of course, some brilliant poets who served in and wrote of both these wars, but their poems are not always easily accessible for children. So we were also motivated by the desire to show the futility of war in a way that children could understand. We wanted to write poems about sadness but with humour and which gave hope for the future. I think we managed it. This was a difficult book to write – to get the tone right – and I also needed to do a lot of research, much more than for most books of poems. It’s a book I’m very proud of.

4. What do you think is the difference between writing for adults and writing for children?

They are the same in so many ways because one writes for the same reasons, no matter what the audience – to communicate ideas. There are some obvious differences, of course: When writing for children I don’t use swear words, sexual or overly violent imagery. The main differences, however, are content and place. I remember being a child quite clearly. This helps, but I was young some while ago! A children’s writer needs to enter the world of children in order to know what matters to them, what will grab them, what will mean something to them. Visiting schools, having children and grandchildren, talking to children helps me keep up to date with the zeitgeist. I also place my writing in a world that is familiar to children. Of course, a poem can be set in a forest and that context can be understood by both adults and children. But a poem about an office, for example, would not work in the same way.  Poems can be set in places that are unfamiliar to children, but the situation has to be manipulated to be meaningful to a young audience. It’s common sense really. What a children’s writer does not have to do, despite a common misconception, is to over simplify the vocabulary used. Children are generally good with words and actually enjoy learning new words. Sometimes you need to keep the syntax straightforward but, in general, when writing for both children and adults the most important thing is that what you’ve written will resonate with those you’ve written it for!

5. Have you any tips or advice for anyone wanting to write children’s poetry?

When writing, remember what I’ve said about relating to children and their world. And always try out your work on a child who will give you honest criticism. If it’s poems you’re writing and you’d like to have them published, probably the best way to start is to submit them for inclusion in anthologies.  But do your research first and find out what the editors are looking for. This year, I compiled Moonstruck for Otter-Barry Books, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first moon-landing. I was sent a lot of poems, as you can imagine.  I am constantly amazed at how many poems seem to have no relation whatsoever to the brief. I had to discard quite a few that were nothing to do with the moon! I always strive for variety. So submit long poems, short poems; haiku, ballads, rhyming poems; silly poems, sad poems, serious poems. Lastly, as an anthologist I search for originality. I was sent lots of poems about the moon being made of cheese and quite a few about the moon being like a balloon – they didn’t make it into the book. I would also suggest that would-be children’s poets read some modern children’s poetry, to get a feel for what children read nowadays, and what publishers publish.

6. Do you write for adults then?

Yes I do. I’ve one adult poetry collection published as a book and two others are available as e-books. I also have a novel e-book and I’m working on a new book at the moment, which I hope will be published in 2020. Next year I’m planning to write a crime novel for adults. I am a musician and singer/songwriter as well as a writer and have three albums on Irregular Records and this year (2019) made a jazz album. I perform in acoustic venues and folk clubs.

7. Have you any more books for children planned?

Yes! Over the years, I have had three novels and 35 of my own poetry books published, some solo collections, some collaborations and some anthologies, and my poems have appeared in about 400 books. I sometimes think about slowing down, but I have had six books published in the last two years – The Waggiest Tails (Otter-Barry ) with Brian Moses, The Same Inside (Macmillan) with Liz Brownlee and Matt Goodfellow and the award-winning Apes to Zebras (Bloomsbury), a book of shape poems, with Liz Brownlee and Sue Hardy-Dawson in 2018 and I Am a Jigsaw (Bloomsbury), Moonstruck (Otter-Barry) and Be the Change, Poems to Help You Save the World (Macmillan) with Liz Brownlee and Matt Goodfellow in 2019. So slowing down seems to be just an idea at the moment! I have only two books for children scheduled for next year – my ‘best-of’ collection, which hasn’t yet found a title, and a book of poems about robots. And I will continue to run The Poetry Zone (www.poetryzone.co.uk) where children can publish their own poetry. The thing about being a poet is that it’s sometimes challenging and can take up all your time, but it’s also incredibly rewarding and fun. So I find it difficult to call it work. And I don’t really want to stop – ever!

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews: Roger Stevens Wombwell Rainbow Interviews I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me.

[limejuicer1862]

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews

I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me. I gave the writers two options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger.

The usual ground is covered about motivation, daily routines and work ethic, but some surprises too. Some of these poets you may know, others may be new to you. I hope you enjoy the experience as much as I do.

Anthony Wilson

  a lecturer, poet and writing tutor. He works in teacher and medical education at the University of Exeter. His anthology Lifesaving Poems, based on the blog of the same name, is available from Bloodaxe Books. Love for Now, his memoir of cancer, is published by Impress Books. Deck Shoes, a book of prose memoir and criticism, and The Afterlife, his fifth book of poems, are available now from Impress Books and Worple Press.

The Interview

1. What were the circumstances under which you began to write poetry

I began writing poems because I was asked to at school. I was thirteen or so. I suppose this happens to a lot of people, but with me, I just carried on. It was homework, over the weekend, on the not very original topic of ‘Black’. My teacher Mr Borton liked what I wrote but scribbled at the bottom of it that I had spoiled quite an original poem with a rather clunky and obvious ending. Part of me thinks I am still trying to impress him. Part of me still thinks that I carried on writing poems to prove to him that future poems would be an improvement. From then on, all the poetry I wrote in my teens and as a young adult was in secret. It took me a very long time to show it to anyone, by which time I was in the final stages of an undergraduate degree at university.

2. Who introduced you to poetry?

My teachers. The aforementioned Mr Borton, Mrs Hooper and Mr Vickery. I owe them everything. We looked at John Logan’s The Picnic, McGough’s 40 Love, Dulce et Decorum Est, Ted Hughes’s animal poems, Pike and so on. The first Hughes poem I remember seeing was The Retired Colonel. Where I grew up, Northwood, on the very edge of Greater London, seemed full of them. I had even been taught by a few. That poem really knocked me over. I guess what they were doing was presenting to us language that was alive and somehow contemporary. As Seamus Heaney says in one of his essays, this literary but also very natural language began at this point to merge with the more informal poetic speech of my early childhood: hymns and Bible readings in church, my father’s Sunday lunchtime stories about Jennifer and Peter, his father’s terrible jokes at Sunday teatime, the football results on Saturday evenings, pop music and so on. I do think you need both kinds of language to get you going. Heaney, again, his idea of a ‘linguistic hardcore’ on which you build as you start to read and stretch your wings. As you get older, of course, you realise the reading part will never be complete. But the bedrock of your experience, that never vanishes. I consider myself extremely lucky to have had those experiences in my early life, and to have met that amazing set of teachers when I did.

3. How aware were you of the dominating presence of older poets?

From the moment I encountered Hughes, McGough, and Dylan Thomas (it was a very male curriculum, I am afraid to say) and the others, all the way up to A level, where I met Sylvia Plath and Hopkins, the presence of older poets has always been a mesmerising factor in what I might call my development. First as a kind of set of rules by which you play, obsessively copying, imitating and following, then as a set of elderly relations you know you have to see each Christmas but about whom you suddenly feel embarrassed. Because by then you have encountered other poets, other voices, other models, and the same cycle of imitation, obsession and rejection begins all over again. I feel as though I have now got to the stage in my life where I am holding a kind of permanent open house to whoever wants to come in. Sometimes I see Ted in the hallway, or cooking a fry up, as Peter Sansom would have it. We nod at each other. Sometimes I find Marie Howe unpacking her suitcases all over the place. Sometimes we talk, sometimes we don’t. You never know who is going to turn up. Jaan Kaplinski was round the other day. We sat under the apple tree, then it started raining.

4. What is your daily writing routine?

My writing routine isn’t really one. I do morning pages, a la Julia Cameron, first thing in the morning while the bath runs, a couple of pages of nonsense, then on with the day. I carry a small notebook around with me, into which go lists, prompts, ideas, quotes and yet more lists. I seem to be in quite a list phase at the moment. I write poems and essays and blogs and other bits and pieces -I don’t really know what to call them- at the end of the day, when the emails and the other necessary business of teaching, meeting, visiting students and feeding back to them has been done. This will be in the second golden hour of the day, late afternoon, just before cooking needs to happen and my family come home from their days. I think of it as writing in the cracks, between other things. Ann Sansom once told me that tiredness is a great state to be writing in, as it cuts through your rational, editorial defences. You tend to go for the jugular more.

5. What motivates you to write?

Being a human being.

6. What is your work ethic?

I am really prolific and scandalously lazy at the same time. I sometimes go months without writing a word. Then splurge endlessly for several weeks.

7. How do the writers you read when you were young influence you today?

As I say above, I like to think of myself being on nodding terms with them. Having said that, it has been a long time since Sylvia came round for a cup of tea, not to mention Eliot. I’ve been thinking of having another go at The Four Quartets again recently, perhaps I should? The problem of getting older and losing your first love of poetry, is that you can see the strategies that people use a little more clearly, and that can get repetitive, which can lead to cynicism. When you are young and have not encountered Theodore Roethke before you are just running round the house going Wow, look at this, isn’t that incredible, how did he do that? I liken it to being in a band (which I was, for several years, with my brother). You practise and practise and practise and gig and gig and gig and everything is all about gobbling up every experience that comes your way. Now I am in my dotage, I find I can generate just as much electricity on much less material. A line of Tranströmer here, a phrase of Janet Fisher there.

8. Who of today’s writers do you admire the most and why?

The thing is, some of these very early influences, some of whom are dead, feel very alive and ‘today’ to me more than writers who are actually with us. For personal reasons I have come off social media this year. The advantage of this is that I now have much larger headspace than I did previously, and this is good for reading and writing. The disadvantage is that I miss just about everything. I couldn’t tell you who has been shortlisted for this or that prize for the last five years. I am just not interested. I find it inimical to getting any proper work done. I make up for this by paying attention to my team. I think everyone has a team (they might not admit it, but they do), and for me these are people I know personally or have worked with and who still inform my practice. People like Christopher Southgate, what an amazing poet he is. And a great human being, so generous and kind. I am on first name terms with all of them. People I see once a century, like Jean Sprackland or Cliff Yates. They teach me so much. Peter Sansom. I last saw him five years ago, and am still meditating on what he told me each day over breakfast.

9. Why do you write?

I think I have to, really. I don’t think it is a choice. (Except, of course, it is.) I don’t go along with the idea of having something to say. I write to find out what I want to say. For me it is about discovery. Things occur to me which I want to say which I would not have said had I not started writing. William Stafford said that, and he was right.

10. What would you say to someone who asked you “How do you become a writer?”

Read. Everything. And forget about having a ‘career’. ‘You make the thing because you love the thing/ and you love the thing because someone else loved it/ enough to make you love it.’ Thomas Lux.

11. Tell me about the writing projects you have on at the moment.

My big project at the moment is silence. Staying away from the news (you know what and you know who) enough to collect my thoughts together to be present enough to recognise and become aware of the promptings that might come my way. It is getting increasingly difficult to do this (see what I say above, about social media). Having just published two books I am determined not to spend the next three years moping and worrying about not having a project to work on. To counteract this, I have started several. Not all of them will come through. But that is not the point. The point is to keep going. That is how I judge success.

Anthony Wilson October, 2019

https://anthonywilsonpoetry.com/books/the-afterlife/

https://anthonywilsonpoetry.com/books/deck-shoes/

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Wombwell Rainbow Interviews: Anthony Wilson Wombwell Rainbow Interviews I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me.