Hi folks
This week you can pick up the summer 2012 issue of Northwords Now from the usual stockists, or tap a few keys and read the online version at northwordsnow.co.uk.
Not only is this issue packed with some great short fiction and poetry but there are also interviews with John Burnside and Iain Banks, plus a user’s guide to Scottish Literary magazines. If that wasn’t enough, the website has extra reviews, Gaelic poetry in translation and poetry podcasts. All this is TOTALLY FREE so can get your literature fix and bust the recession (sort of) all at the same time!
Cheers…Chris Powici, Editor
A couple of months ago a news item on the OU Home page caught my eye. It was the launch of a Commercial Challenge competition for researchers and research students who had come up with a business idea as a result of their work. Entrants to the competition would get training on Intellectual Property and Academic Enterprise, and could then put together a proposal for a short project to explore the feasibility of their idea.
There were two £2000 prizes on offer to research students, which would allow the winners to cover any costs incurred while they were carrying out the project. The competition was linked to the EPSRC – the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council – which might not be the first place a creative writer would think of looking for funding, but I figured I had nothing to lose by having a go.
I’m three years into a part time PhD in Creative Writing, working on an historical novel set in 17th century Edinburgh, and recently I’ve been thinking about ways of using the knowledge I’ve gained. I worked for many years in Sales and Marketing before moving into Higher Education, and I’m interested in the idea of creative entrepreneurship. I’m also a bit of a gadget freak, and am excited by the educational potential of technology such as smartphones and tablet computers. The last couple of years have seen the arrival of some brilliant iPad apps, such as Faber’s app version of T S Eliot’s The Wasteland, complete with PDFs of one of Eliot’s early drafts, annotated by W H Auden. All these elements – my research, my interest in entrepreneurship and my enthusiasm for gadgets – came together in the idea of a short Creative Writing course delivered in an app format. Because the focus of my research is Historical Fiction, I decided to propose an app specifically on that genre.
The training sessions were very useful, but it was clear that most of the other candidates were from disciplines such as computing and engineering – the areas most likely to product inventions with a commercial application. Sometimes in the Arts and Humanities we have a tendency to think that we don’t produce a commercial ‘product’ (apart from the lucky few who write a best-seller) but in actual fact there is a potentially huge market for the knowledge and expertise we all have. That’s what I told myself as I put my proposal together.
I was delighted to hear that I’d got through to the final round of the competition. This meant I had to pitch my idea, Dragons’ Den-style, to a panel of experts. Although this was a bit nerve-racking it also proved a useful process, as the panel gave me some practical and encouraging advice about my idea.
Later that day I got an email telling me my idea was one of the winners – a brilliant, if unexpected, result! I’m now about to embark on my project. My three main objectives are to map out the course content in more detail, conduct some market research to identify customer needs and work with developers to get a clear idea of the costs of producing the app. I’d be delighted to hear from anyone who’d like to contribute their views to the market research: if you’re interested in being involved please email me on Heather.Richardson@open.ac.uk
Emily Midorikawa and Emma Sweeney – longstanding friends, collaborators and OU Associate Lecturers – had a piece in The Times on Saturday May 26th. The one-page feature celebrates female writing friendships in the run-up to the announcement of the last ever Orange Prize.
As long-standing friends and supporters of each other’s work, Emily and Emma suspected that behind the scenes other women writers also shared similar relationships. But while famous male partnerships tripped off the tongue (Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald getting drunk in Parisian bars; Dickens and Wilkie Collins roaming the music halls of Victorian London; Wordsworth and Coleridge tramping the Lake District’s rugged tracks), female friendships seemed to have received less attention.
But they did unearth some fascinating collaborations between their famous female forbears, and they also discovered how writing friendships have sustained some of the best female writers around today: Anne Enright and Lia Mills, Emily Pedder and Monique Roffy, Jill Dawson and Louise Doughty.
If you have an online subscription, then you can access the article here. Otherwise you can access it for free through the OU library. Search for “Emma Sweeney and Emily Midorikawa” in “Broadsheet Newspapers” and it should come up.
If any of you know of any famous platonic female writing friendships, then please do get in touch, as Emily and Emma are hoping to continue their research in this field: e.c.sweeney@open.ac.uk.
All the best, Emma and Emily
Hi all
After the now familiar pre-print panic of stray commas, unwanted line breaks and praying to the great editor in the sky that I haven’t spell somebody’s name wrong, Issue 20 of Northwords Now magazine is now out at our usual distributors and online at
The usual flavoursome blend of poetry, fiction, reviews and articles is on view including new work from Andrew Greig, John Glenday, Gerry Loose and Heather Magruder. Also there’s a big tribute to one of Scotland’s finest writers – in Gaelic, English or Scots – Aonghas MacNeacail.
We’ve also had something of a facelift to make the magazine look even finer on the eye.
All this need cost you no more than nothing at all, which is to say it’s TOTALLY FREE.
Cheers…Chris
Smokestack Books,
the publishers of Pauline’s new verse novel, describe it as follows: ’ The fabled city of Timbuktu, once the dazzling capital of the Songhay empire, is now just another impoverished desert town on the tourist trail. From Here to Timbuktu follows the fortunes of a group of tourists as they make their way by 4×4 and pinasse (boat) across the Mali desert. Like Chaucer’s pilgrims, these travellers pass the time bickering, gossiping, flirting and falling out, eventually sharing the stories of their lives with humour and pathos. Written in Chaucer’s rime royal, From Here to Timbuktu is a book about Third World poverty and First World consumption. It’s a travelogue, a satire, an epic poem, and a four-wheel drive journey across the savannah plain.’
Pauline explains: ‘The idea for the long narrative poem From Here to Timbuktu came from taking such a holiday myself! When I came back, thinking about the experience, Canterbury Tales came to mind, in the way people behaved during the journey – bickering, flirting, getting one up on each other! I wondered if I could do something with this m aterial and as I reread the Prologue and thought I could set myself a challenge of writing about the journey in Chaucer’s rhyme royale. In my other writing I mix free/open forms with writing in form so I decided to stick with the form and see what happened. I began with a couple of characters (fictional!) and then they gradually grew in number and type. They began flirting and quarrelling with each other and the story element took off from there. I worked on it, off and on, over about 7 years, nearly abandoning it several times but in the end my stubbornness insisted on an end. Themes emerged, almost despite myself. I realise now, rereading it over and over during the proof reading process, how much is there about looking for meaning in life from the characters’ point of view.’
‘Other Than They Were’: Figures on a Municipal Ground.
(Batmans Hill, 1961-72: Poems)
When people, landscape and memory meet, the consequences are often unpredictable. Memory, however, is the lynch-pin: that faculty which occupies the border between lived experience and fiction, that allows—often requires—that imagination should supply the deficits of recall. Journalist and social commentator Ian Jack observes that ‘the present always depends upon the past, which makes the past a necessary subject of any reporter’s enquiry.’1 Any poet’s too, especially when they find prosaic aspects of their past suddenly, astonishingly, making lyrical noises.
In Batmans Hill, a themed sequence of poems, I return to certain people and places of my childhood. 
Distance, differing paths of life and (in some cases) death separate them from me now. Yet, however clearly or imperfectly remembered, they played their parts, decisive or low-level, in shaping how I look back upon the often fragmented, always misty reaches of Then.
Running from 1961 to 1972, with one poem per year, Batmans Hill is an attempt to discover how place defined people and people humanised place in one corner of postwar municipal England—and to determine, as far as possible, how the caprices of memory and demands of poetry influence that discovery. Well, I can tell myself all that now. To begin with, I had no intention of writing a sequence at all. A poem materialised (after all these years, that’s still the only term I can think of to describe how poems come about) concerning my mother and myself—specifically, the everlasting struggle between parent’s wish to get offspring out of the house and offspring’s insistence that darkened room and new Beach Boys single are worth any amount of exercise and fresh air. . . well, fresh between 11pm and 6am . . . this was the Black Country, nowadays sanitised under the name West Midlands.
Soon, however, other people started waving at me over that crumbling wall that separates recent-and-now from the days before Moon landings, the days of peril (Cuban Missile Crisis, Rolling Stones’ refusal to go on revolving roundabout at end of Sunday Night at the London Palladium), the days when adult voices dropped to a whisper to accommodate names like Rice-Davies and Profumo. Here was Raymond Earl, spotted by a scout for Wolves, who used to do you the courtesy of explaining exactly how he was robbing you of the football (‘Yer do this, then tha’, then touch of tha’). Here was Caroline Caswell, porcelain and otherworldly amongst all the black brick and factory sirens, who died long before her time. And striding out past the ‘No Ball Games’ sign on a street-end triangle of grass, Trevor Anglin, dedicated follower of fashion, whom I fondly imagined being telephoned on a daily basis by Bowie, Jagger, Marc Bolan—‘Trev, ya gotta help me . . . New Year’s Eve at the Speakeasy—Trev, what-do-I-wear?’
And there were the places, half-shiny, half-decrepit. There was the sky, still scored in faint white where the tram-cables had been. There was the Big Hilly, last patch of open ground before you got out to Gospel End Village, Wombourne and sainted Shropshire. Here, improbably, was Kilfinnane, County Limerick, where my mother’s folks still farmed: a summer-holiday interlude, a world of churns on market day, of hoarse voices admonishing tardy cattle with ‘Get out of all that.’
And here we were, Junior Two, reciting Alfred Noyes’ ‘In Lilac Time’ for a delegation of those half-friendly, half-sinister beings called school visitors: ‘Go down to Kew in Lilac Time’, raggedly chorused on a November afternoon in an uncertainly floor-boarded classroom at Holy Trinity Roman Catholic, Junior-brackets-Mixed-close brackets and Infants’ School, Bilston. Kew? Bilston? Not even the effortlessly be-glammed Trevor Anglin could bridge that gap.
In the end, it was a dramatically motley crew which allowed itself to be broken up and spread through Batmans Hill. I’d like to think that, despite what I said at the start about memory’s need for imagination, these poems owe such impact as they might possess to unexpected surges of clarity. But probably not: unlike Maurice Chevalier, I cannot blithely claim, ‘Yes, I remember it well.’ What I can remember, however, is Raymond Earl terrorising a goal-mouth amid the full-production depots and chimneys of what was—centuries ago, it now seems—the workshop of the world.
1 Ian Jack, ‘Introduction,’ The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain (London: Vintage, 2009), p. xiii.
Hi folks
The autumn/winter edition of Northwords Now (the magazine I edit) is now online at www.northwordsnow.co.uk. Though I say it myself, there’s an especially fine blend of poetry and fiction as well articles on writing & wellbeing and on publishing in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. There’s even a connection to this year’s winner of the Nobel prize for literature, Tomas Tranströmer. We’re featuring a selection of poems by his principal translator, Robin Fulton Macpherson. All this plus podcasts, reviews and Gaelic poetry – what more could you want?
Bill Greenwell’s new collection, Ringers, is published this month by Cinnamon Press, which also published Impossible Objects in 2006. It contains sixty poems which veer from the satirical to the serious, well quite serious, and from poems about childhood and death to love and depression. It also includes parodies which have appeared in The Spectator and The Independent – gently lampooning Blake, Auden, Herrick, Owen, Stevie Smith and Belloc. There is a mixture of rhymed and unrhymed poetry.
Bill, who is the arts staff tutor in Gateshead, is on the module teams for A215 and A363 (the latter of which he helped to write), has also written creative writing chapters for A150. He’s been with the OU for five years, and before that taught at Falmouth and Exeter Universities (and before that in FE). He is now back in the north-east, where he was born.
‘Most of my poetry is at least slightly surreal,’ says Bill. ‘Or downright absurd. Even the more emotional poems are interested in the bizarre detail. The collection has a recurrent interest in similarities – between people, between events – and hence the title.’ Some of the poems have won prizes or have been commended in competitions like the Wigtown (Scottish National) competition, and the Troubadour, Kent and Sussex, and Yeovil competitions. They’ve also been published in a variety of magazines, from Smiths Knoll to The Rialto.
Penelope Shuttle describes him as having ‘one of the sharpest tongues around, one of the sharpest pair of eyes, and the sharpest of hearts’, and describes Ringers as ‘a collection that sees him at the top of his game’.
You can read more about, and buy Ringers at http://www.cinnamonpress.com/ringers/.
Contrary to photographic evidence, Bill Greenwell cannot play the ukulele. But he does use it as a prop.
Ringers, Cinnamon Press, ISBN 0781907090479
Michael Stewart’s novel King Crow, published in January 2011, has been voted the winner of the 2011 Not the Booker prize. The prize is awarded by readers of the Guardian books blog, after an extended process of nominations, shortlisting and reviewing in the Not the Booker prize blog.
Blog editor Sam Jordison describes the novel as ‘psychologically adept, funny, nasty, daft and shockingly realisitic all at the same time. It’s just the kind of thing the Not The Booker prize should be promoting.’ In his review of the novel in a blog entry of 26th September, he writes: ‘King Crow is the literary equivalent of a British Sea Power album. It’s full of driving riffs and bristling with energy and menace, but it’s also often tender and lovely. Plus there’s loads of stuff about bird-watching and Kendal – oh and it’s bonkers. It’s great, in other words.’
Michael Stewart is a tutor on A215 Creative Writing. King Crow is published by Blue Moose Books Ltd. ISBN 978-0956687609
