Author Archives: Andrew

I Remember Bobbie Louise Hawkins

by Andrew | 16 Comments

I remember my friend Bobbie Louise Hawkins.

I remember Bobbie as one of the great teachers, and one of the great storytellers, and one of the great prose stylists.

I remember Bobbie led a long and well-travelled life: West Texas, New Mexico, Japan, Belize, Guatemala, Bolinas, England, Boulder.

I remember stories of a tough childhood in the Great Depression.

I remember she studied art in New Mexico.

I remember she was once married to a Danish architect.

I remember she studied art at the Slade. This was the 1940s. She wore old Levi’s. She must have been way ahead of her time. I bet she looked amazing.

I remember she was once married to a well-known poet who was clearly the love of her life, and the love who informed much of her most gorgeous writing.

I remember she was a mother and a daughter and a grandmother.

I remember Bobbie was a great talker, one of the great talkers. She had so many stories.

I remember that her workshops were some of the most fun we’ve ever had.

I remember her giving us exercises in acquiring overheard dialogue. We started every class by sharing the week’s haul with the rest of the group. Sometimes we went for an hour, reading aloud what we’d eavesdropped in cafes or while walking along the street. How we laughed! How we learned.

I will forever remember how Bobbie told writers to use their natural speaking voices. Such a clear and simple foundation for writing.

I remember thinking that I’d never heard anyone utter such articulate sentences in everyday life.

I remember Bobbie as a remarkable editor. She devoted time to meeting with every student, and then would ‘go in’ on your work, reading it aloud and editing as she went. You ended up with a manuscript covered with a spider trail of edits and a real understanding of the worth of revision. I’ve worked in publishing a long time now, and I’ve never met a better editor.

I remember Bobbie loved Alan Bennett, Colette, Richard Brautigan, Fielding Dawson, Camille Paglia, Lucia Berlin.

I remember she loved writers who possessed a feeling tone in their work.

I remember being her teaching assistant for the online class called The Feeling Tone.

I remember she loved a writer who wrote in order to use the semi-colon, but right now I don’t remember which writer that was.

I remember thinking that Bobbie must punctuate her spoken language.

I remember ‘connectives nearly always suck’.

I remember her saying that men in workshops often talked over their writing – reading it bombastically, and apparently disproportionately so.

And I remember her saying that women often talked under their writing, reading it aloud sheepishly and in a slump, not doing their work credit.

And I remember she recommended that such women take themselves up to the Canyon, to the top of a cliff, where they could read their writing aloud, free to shout it to the universe.

I remember her saying we should lock ourselves in our bedrooms and practise reading our work aloud.

I remember Bobbie so often said that reading aloud created a chemical shift in the body. She often talked about the chemistry and science of writing and the brain.

I remember Bobbie adored Alfred North Whitehead, and would read aloud from his work.

I remember Bobbie’s politics, her realism, her scorn for -isms and -ists and people who voted for Ralph Nader.

I remember Bobbie’s stories of living in London when she was in a relationship with another poet. She used to have lunch at the Chelsea Arts Club, then drop into the Hammersmith Library every day, starting with books shelved under A, and working her way around.

I remember her stories of the other poet!

I remember her tales of the department, and I remember the way her eyebrows raised.

I remember Bobbie’s love of gossip. And boy, how we gossiped.

I remember Bobbie’s gardens. I remember benches, and wicker chairs, and metal chairs, and tea. I remember shady spots where you could drink tea and talk for hours (and we did). I remember her telling me about a fox that came to visit.

I remember Bobbie’s houses. She was a canny investor. She always advised making sure to buy a house that looks good from the street.

I remember the garage she converted into a theatre that she named the Bijou. She used it as a classroom, when Naropa needed one. She used it as a tv room, where she adored Jon Stewart. She used it as a studio, where she made otherworldly collages from pages torn from magazines that she shaped into landscapes and abstractions.

I remember books, and bookshelves, and piles of books, and boxes of books.

I just remembered Bobbie teaching me how to make dirty martinis when I reread the inscription in my copy of The Sanguine Breast of Margaret: ‘friend, co-conspirator and drinking buddy’. She wrote the loveliest inscriptions in the books she gave me.

I remember later remembering The Sanguine Breast of Margaret was published by a small press in the UK. And I remember checking where it was based, and discovering that North and South Press was based in Egerton Road in Twickenham, which is the road at the end of my road. And I remember thinking about all the full circles and synchronicities of our lives.

And I remember Bobbie every day when I walk my dog down Egerton Road.

I remember her telling us always to align ourselves with the most intelligent person in the room.

I remember her saying that when writing about emotions ‘nobody gives a shit about your feelings’. But the feeling clearly had to be there in other ways.

I remember Bobbie’s monologues: wistful, funny, intelligent. Listen to this one.

I remember Bobbie’s smile.

I remember her beautiful voice.

I remember Bobbie’s great beauty.

I remember Bobbie was much loved – the most loved among her students.

I remember so much more.

You live in a place for a while, and you make it a home, and then you leave, and then people there die.

And then – because you’re not there, at the event of their dying – death becomes something you hear about. It’s just another form of absence.

And you have all those memories, and gratitudes – things you carry forever, things that never die. And great writers never die, and neither do great teachers, so on two accounts Bobbie Louise Hawkins is immortal.

Thank you, Bobbie, for giving us so much, and for gracing our lives with so much. You will always be remembered.

Bobbie Louise Hawkins, 1930-2018

 

www.bobbielouisehawkins.org

The Selected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins UK

The Selected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins US

A review of Selected Prose from HTML Giant

Recordings of Bobbie reading some of her work in Albuquerque in 1986

 

 

Writing Experiment No. 66: Copyist

by Andrew | 8 Comments

On Saturday I again taught my workshop Everyday Magic: The Four Elements of Writing. We started the day by introducing ourselves with a favourite book, telling the group how and why it’s left an impression on us. Much-loved books came up: The Underground Railroad, Cloudstreet, Ladder of Years, Station Eleven, My Name Is Lucy Barton, Home (twice!), Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, Palace Walk, Pride and Prejudice, A Song For Issy Bradley, This Is How You Lose Her, East of Eden, Tirra Lirra by the River, Finn Family Moomintroll.

What was evident was that all of these books had in some way evoked feeling for their readers: these books are loved. One writer talked about the book she chose simply leaving her in awe, and it’s often hard to sum up how and why the simple fact of words on a page have spun their magic.

As writers we have to read books critically as well as for pleasure, unpicking the workings of craft and identifying techniques that have, however invisibly, had an impact on the reader.

Such analysis usually requires the sort of critical thinking we might have done in a literature class, e.g., looking at the effects of word choice and sentence length on tone, or identifying actions that define a character, or finding symbols layered within the work. Francine Prose’s book Reading Like A Writer is a super guide in exactly that.

Much of my Everyday Magic workshops is, however, about not thinking about writing, i.e., not so much engaging our thinking gear (Air in the four elements), but also working with the energy (Fire), emotions (Water), or physicality (Earth) of writing in order to develop and expand our instincts and experiences as writers.

There are many ways to do this. A couple of methods that I often recommend (and that we did on Saturday) are reading a text aloud, and listening to it, e.g., listening to an audiobook, or to a writing partner reading some of your own work back to you. I’m also thinking of friends in Boulder who have a reading group where, rather than reading a book for discussion, the members gather simply to read books aloud in a group, taking it in turns to read sections or chapters. They’ve read large amounts of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf that way – and in both instances I can’t help but feel that reading aloud or listening are perhaps the ideal ways to experience certain writers.

In both instances, my old teacher Bobbie Louise Hawkins would say that the sheer acts of utterance and listening have a chemical effect on the body, and that affects how you write. The physical act of listening can slow us down and make us more thoughtful, more attentive. I certainly feel that being immersed in a good audiobook can shift my mood for the better. Reading and writing are, after all, physical acts too, so it’s worth paying attention to their somatic qualities.

This sets me thinking to another somatic exercise that I sometimes suggest: copying out text.

For this writing experiment:

* Find a memorable passage in a favourite book, and copy it out by hand on to the left hand page of a notebook – see my example of copying out ‘The Werewolf’ by Angela Carter above. When you reach the bottom of the page, continue it on the next left-hand page, until the scene is done. (Two or three pages should be fine.) As you are writing, pay attention: to word choices, to sentence length, to verbs, to punctuation, to the introduction of content, to beats within the action – but perhaps try not to think about this as you’re doing it. Just: pay attention through the physical act of copying.

* Then perhaps take things further by using the writing you’ve just copied out as a model for some writing of your own: on the right-hand pages of your notebook, write a passage that physically emulates the writing you have just copied out, roughly line by line. Write paragraphs and sentences of a similar length, e.g., using verbs in the same places as the original, adding description or dialogue where the original had description or dialogue, introducing new characters or aspects of content at similar points.

* You could also try copying this out using keyboard and screen – a different physical experience.

This is, of course, just an experiment, and I don’t necessary recommend writing a whole book this way … Not least, there might be the matter of plagiarism, though probably not if the content is different – there are ethics in acknowledging influences and models, but there are many shades of grey here too; lots of poetry uses found materials from other writing, after all.

Copying out writing is a known practice. Hunter S. Thompson apparently used to copy out The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms so that he could understand what it felt like to write a masterpiece; his biographer describes it as an ‘unusual method for learning prose rhythm’. This exercise in the somatics of writing might be a good way of shifting gear in your writing process, letting you experience in a fresh way a book that has inspired you. Think of it as echoing as a writing practice, and an exercise in listening to your body.

Workshops Spring and Summer 2018: Everyday Magic / The Craft of Revising

by Andrew | 10 Comments

I’m excited to be running workshops with Kellie Jackson of Words Away again: one we ran before, and a new one.

On 21 April 2018, we’ll run Everyday Magic: The Four Elements of Creativity, which sold out when we ran it in November – here’s a link about that day, and here’s an interview I did with Kellie about its approach. It’s designed to help writers work intuitively by using the four elements: fire, water, earth, and air. I love introducing these ideas – it’s such a straightforward concept, but one that can really help writing come to life.

On 23 June 2018, The Craft of Revising is a workshop devoted to self-editing for writers. Focusing on the ways in which we Create, Craft and Connect our writing, our approach will be intuitive and practical, challenging yet generous. We’ll start with an overview of how editors edit, talking briefly about developmental editing, structural editing, line editing, copyediting and proofreading. During the rest of the day, we’ll discuss matters of craft and intention, conduct some experiments on our own work, and in small groups share and edit samples of writing. You’ll leave with a revision plan that includes plenty of tools and inspirations for refining a work-in-progress, whether that’s a novel, a novella, or short stories; it should also be useful for writers of memoirs or other narrative forms too. We’ll conclude the day with a Q&A with Lennie Goodings, Chair of Virago Press and an award-winning editor who’s worked with many much-loved authors.

Follow the link below to booking pages and further information:

* Words Away workshops

The events will again be held at London Bridge Hive, 1 Melior Place, London SE1 3SZ.

Writing Experiment No. 65: An Archive Of Belonging

by Andrew | 5 Comments

There are lots of theories about the number of stories there are: two, eight, twenty, sixty-four. But I have a hunch that most stories boil down to just one story, and that’s about the search for home.

I’m not sure quite when I decided on this. Maybe it was when I read Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, which at its end, after all the fuss and fatwas, is about people looking for home.

Which takes me to Rushdie’s brilliant essay, ‘Out of Kansas’, on The Wizard of Oz, which reminds us all that There’s no place like home.

Which takes me to all sorts of friends of Dorothy. The logical family that forms on Barbary Lane in Tales of the City. The home created by Sue and Maud in Fingersmith. Jeanette Winterson’s story of adoption in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and the even more extraordinary true story in Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? The Moomins defending their home from comets or welcoming odd bods into the Moominhouse. When I was eight years old I was always drawing plans for my own Moominhouse. It had two verandahs.

The stranger in a strange land (the Durrells with their strawberry-pink, daffodil-yellow, and snow-white villas – which all had verandahs drawn by me too). Or: the stranger comes to town (Gatsby). A migration to a new home (My Antonia). Defending a homeland (Game of Thrones). And think of the grand narratives of the idea of home that infect public life today: ‘I want my country back,’ exclaimed the gammon-face on Question Time. Me too, love.

Even the story of someone staying in one place – say, Emma Bovary in provincial France, or Olive Kitteridge in her seaside town in Maine – can be a tale of building a home: maintaining it, facing your own reality, messing things up or holding things together. Recently, Amanda Berriman’s powerful novel Home is narrated by a homeless four-year-old who reminds us that home is not something we can take for granted.

In thinking about the idea of home, something else that comes to mind is the blog of Bhanu Kapil, where she talks about the experiences of coming from a migrant family and being a migrant herself. Please read this post, where Bhanu describes an astonishingly generous gesture made towards her family shortly after they arrived in London.

Lo: look at the light that shines out of that beautiful story. Bhanu calls this the first entry in an Archive of Belonging. In these fractious times of Brexit and Trump and school shootings, much public discourse bubbles over with rage and spite, and it’s too easy to dwell among the noises and disagreements and slurrings. So it’s lovely to read such a story of creation and celebration. It’s important, too. As Bhanu says: ‘This kindness and hospitality is somehow unimaginable in the era we have entered now, and yet, perhaps it is not.’

Home, belonging, security, the quest for wholeness, loving and being loved, acts of generosity and creation. I think of Ray Bradbury’s ‘Zen in the Art of Writing’, an inspirational essay on the work of the writer that concludes with ‘a new definition for Work‘: LOVE.

So: as a writing experiment, let yourself have a few moments of contemplation, and take yourself to a time when someone gave you something that made you feel that you BELONGED. Then write about that experience. It could be about someone else, if you prefer. It could be a true story, or it could be fictional. But fill it with people and places and telling details (such as Bhanu’s Aunty Catherine’s lily of the valley perfume). Fill it with LOVE as you CREATE something or some things that made you (or other people) feel at home.

Maybe creating entries in our own Archives of Belonging will make us kinder and more generous people too? The opposite of war isn’t peace, it’s creation, etc. (That’s from ‘La Vie Boheme’ in Rent – another story about creating home.)

Ongoing writing experiment: Continue to add to your Archive of Belonging.

Alternative exercise: Draw a plan of your own Moominhouse. (And don’t forget a library.)

And if you’d like to try some other writing: Writing Experiments.

Books of 2017

by Andrew | 1 Comment

I read some good books this year. I also thought I had read a lot of books this year until I got a holiday round-robin from my auntie Ruth, who mentioned in passing the 188 books she’d read in 2017 (this was early December), including ones in the original Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French (she read some from German and Russian in translation, she said – though she speaks those languages, and another seven too). Not so pleased with myself now, am I?!

Some of the books I mention below as read in 2017 were published during this year, some were older ones that I finally got round to, some were rereads. Some books were overrated, overhyped, execrable. But my new year resolution is to try to be positive in the world (wishy-washy if well-meaning), so (for now at least) let’s leave it at that. There were plenty of books that lie unfinished, too – some not worth finishing, or perhaps I’m simply not ready for them yet. So many books!

Off the top of my head, two novels gave me most pleasure this year. One was The Green Road by Anne Enright. Among its many strengths, The Green Road has a structure I love – slabs of narrative that the reader is left to stitch together, and that cohere with force at the end. The characterisation is also disarming – these feel like real people, with all the points of affection or irritation you’d find in family members. You feel you are getting full lives, full stories here. I also loved the saltiness of the politics in this Anne Enright essay in the London Review of Books – potent, but not at all preachy.

The other novel I really loved was Days Without End by Sebastian Barry. I knew it was set during the American Civil War, but I didn’t know other things about it, and it surprised me to the end. Barry wears his research lightly, and his narrator’s voice is winning.

Increasingly I find the short story most consistently pleasurable as a literary form, and among many stories I read in 2017 two collections stick in my mind. Kanishk Tharoor’s Swimmer Among the Stars gave me elephants and emperors and explorers and spaceships – stories with real dash and imagination, unbounded by genre or categorisation. And Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees gives us sharply drawn tales of migrants and families.

Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness was a big, baggy novel full of heart, and it was a pleasure to lose myself in it. And after that I read Zadie Smith’s Swing Time – another big novel with big themes that’s become my favourite among her books. A further summer read was one of Kent Haruf’s earlier novels The Ties That Bind – his stories of extraordinary ordinary lives in Colorado make him, for me, one of the great prose stylists. The North Water by Iain McGuire was a bloody tale of the whaling industry in the nineteenth century, and also an example of a novel that uses present tense most effectively (I have to collect examples of such things, given how often I tell people that using the past tense is probably easiest and most sensible in writing a novel).

A couple of books I loved for their strangeness. Set in the aftermath of the First World War, Xan Brooks’s The Clocks In The House All Tell Different Times takes something disturbing and makes something surprising out of it – an unflinching book. And Conor O’Callaghan’s Nothing On Earth has great mood and mystery.

Two works of nonfiction told powerful stories of gay history and current affairs: Cleve Jones’s When We Rise and Paul Flynn’s Good As You. I also gained much from Why Buddhism Is True by Ronald Wright and The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning by Iain McGilchrist. The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats is a collection of Allen Ginsberg’s lectures edited by Bill Morgan that took me back to Naropa, and it also made me think how much I enjoy the syllabus as a literary form (see also: Lynda Barry).

One of my most memorable book experiences of the year came from listening to the audiobook of Willa Cather’s My Antonia. I first read it over thirty years ago, and it was a real treat to have it read to me this time round, even if the playing fields of Twickenham, where I was often walking my dog at the time, lack the romance of the wide open spaces of Nebraska. What I particularly noticed is that it doesn’t really have a plot. It’s just very well observed. People are observed with heart, landscapes are observed with lyricism; everything changes, and everything stays the same – and there’s a point to that. I often recommend that writers listen to the audiobooks of favourites of their youth or childhood – I think we absorb a great deal when we soak up in this way a story that means so much to us. In the case of My Antonia, in fact, it had been so long that I had forgotten much of the story, though certain vivid images (a dead man in a freezing barn; a silhouette on the prairie) remained etched on my mind – or is it my heart? But I have always remembered the tone of the writing: warm, generous, wistful – a memorable experience of feeling in writing after most of the details were gone. The tone is perhaps even more alive in this audio version. (Much depends, of course, on the narrator chosen to read.)

Another great listening experience was the Mindful U podcast from my alma mater Naropa.

Coming in 2018 is Home by Amanda Berriman. What impresses me most of all: it uses not only the point of view but the voice of a four-year-old girl to tell the whole story. I know, I know – we don’t work with children or animals, but it’s wonderful when something so daring is so accomplished (plus: Watership Down – okay, books are not films in other ways too). What’s more, given its gritty subject matter, is that it has flashes of irony, even humour, dare I say. I know Mandy from various writing events, and know something of her application to learning the craft, so this makes this debut even more exciting – she deserves every success.

Another debut novelist I know professionally is Terri Fleming, whose Perception was published this year. It’s a sequel to Pride and Prejudice that focuses on the stories of Mary and Kitty, and it possesses real wit and economy, and some rich characterisation. I gave this as a gift to several Janeite friends during 2017, and everyone loved it. Some real raves.

I ended the year reading the diary bits of Alan Bennett’s Keeping On Keeping On and then Jeanette Winterson’s Christmas Days. Both have distinct voices, and both are uncompromising in their politics – sometimes directly, sometimes more subtly. Jeanette’s Christmas book was recommended to me after last Christmas, and I’m glad I saved it until this one. It’s charming.

I also reread Moominland Midwinter, and was very excited to see the Tove Jansson exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Beyond books, the revival of Angels in America in June was magical! We saw it first time round, and we loved every bit of it this year: funny, fantastic, gutsy, fierce. The Angel in this version was not what I expected, but I very much liked.

I very much enjoyed seeing George Saunders talk about writing and read from his work (along with a troupe of performers at Goldsmith’s) this year; he is a funny and generous man. Words Away salons with Monica Ali and Tessa Hadley were other highlights among events, as was the Polari tenth-anniversary reading at the Southbank Centre.

On TV I loved Big Little Lies. Christmas was a bit thin on TV offerings, though I did love the hammy Crooked House on Channel 5, which I thought was more fun (less pretentious) than the recent BBC adaptations of Agatha Christie. No one chews scenery better than Glenn Close. And we did catch up on a lot of Larry David in December too.

So: put on the spot, I guess my books of 2017 were The Green Road, Days Without End, and My Antonia.

Happy New Year!