Snow....

The view from my front door

I have a love/hate relationship with snow. I love the beauty of it and the inspiration it can provide. I hate the way the UK grinds to a halt with a bit of snow. I hate it even more this year as I can't risk falling and it is making me feel very old and trapped in my home.

Many years ago if it snowed when you were at primary school suddenly all classes were adapted. Everything was changed to accommodate snow related exercises. You would be given the chance to write about it. Now as we are older I think sometimes we forget about that joy, so for my students, who couldn't get to class on Friday as the university was closed and the snow fell out of the sky, I sent them an email asking them to write about the snow. I wonder what they will come up with. Maybe today I will write about it too.

In the meantime a good friend sent me this poem via her over heated environment and it is just so beautiful I had to share. It is 'Snow' by Gillian Clarke:

We're brought to our senses, awake
to the black and whiteness of world.
Snow's sensational. It tastes
of ice and fire. Hold a handful of cold.

Ball it between your palms
to throw at the moon. Relish its plushy creak.
Shake blossoms from chestnut and beech,
gather its laundered linen in your arms.

A twig of witch hazel from the ghost-garden
burns like myrrh in this room. Listen!
ice is whispering. Night darkens,
the mercury falls in the glass, glistening.

Motorways muffled in silence, lorries stranded
like dead birds, airports closed, trains trackless.
White paws lope the river on plates of ice
in the city's bewildered wilderness.

It appears in her collection Ice which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, 2013. How fabulous are some of those images - 'ice is whispering' for example?

This post serves no purpose other than to celebrate wonderful writing and snow.

A former student posted this piece of music and suggested you looked out of the window at the snow as you listened to it and then try and write something. Be inspired. A good exercise I think. The music is Balmorhea's Winter Circle

Books that silently follow you....

The love of books

A colleague's Facebook status made me stop and think. They had been to see a play and they were saying how good it was it had been silently following her several days afterwards. How many times can you think of books that have done that to you? You finish reading them but yet several days later they still come back to haunt you - in a good way. They make you ask questions of yourself and your surroundings perhaps. Or have just wrapped their metaphoric arms around you making you feel warm and wonderful.

Lots of books used to do that to me when I was a child. I was an avid reader. I used to love escaping into their worlds and then creating my own. Books like Noel Streatfield's Ballet Shoes was one, Nina Bawden's Carrie's War, K.M.Peyton's Fly-by-night, Philippa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden and, of course, Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, all had that sort of impact. And even now if I go back to them I can get that same feeling of being at home and being thrilled by the story as they silently follow me still decades later.

As you get older it seems that not quite so many books have that impact and silently follow you. I have read many, many books over the last few years as part of my academic career. Some books have left me cold (and probably unfinished) and others I have enjoyed but they haven't stayed with me. Some books have stuck out though, books like: Louis Sachar's Holes, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, Once by Morris Gleitzman, The Sky is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson, Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses, Meg Rosoff's How I live now, Tabitha Suzuma's A note of madness.and Sophia Bennett's The Look. This is not an exclusive list but they were the ones that first came to mind. I have just started reading David Massey's Torn and I get the feeling that is going to be another book that silently follows me.  

To a certain extent that is the disadvantage of leading an academic career. I can read so many books that even though they may be fantastic and do live with me silently for a few days they don't stick in the mind. I think it is T.S Eliot who said every time something new is written all the authors and writing beforehand have to shift along a bit to make room, it sounds like a huge bookshelf to me and it is something I find when I am having to read so much. Some things must inevitably fall off that metaphorical book shelf. I just need to remember to go and pick them up again and put them back on the shelf, ready to be read at a later date.

What are the books that follow you silently?

Seems appropriate to listen to Simon & Garfunkel's 'Sound of Silence' for all those books that follow you silently and, with regard to my previous post, allowing your brain to be silent so you can listen to the answers. I was lucky enough to see them perform back in the early 80s.

Rewriting in the New Year

It is the beginning of January of a bright, spanking new year. Many people have been turning to lists of resolutions, or not, in my case. If I do have a resolution it is to write every day. Since September I have been trying to do some rewrites that I have been asked to do by a publisher but life and work keep getting in the way. I thought I would have them done by now but I still have quite a way to go. In a way doing the rewrites is harder than facing a blank page. The pressure to get it right is enormous.

I have recently come across two excellent blog posts for writers. One is a brilliant list of 25 things a writer should stop doing - I could empathise with almost all of them! And the other is a post on meditation increasing creativity - something I might try.  I need all the help I can get! Making decisions about which words are the right ones can be so difficult at times. We all know the quote from Oscar Wilde who claimed he spent all morning adding a comma and all afternoon deleting it.

I know so many people who are currently rewriting work and we are all struggling the same things - getting the words in the right order - but we all know that writing is all about rewriting and there is no short cut.

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.
– T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets


Good luck to all rewriters out there!


And here is something to listen to whilst doing that rewriting. Mumford and Sons have had a brilliant idea of having gigs in book shops. This is called Winter Winds and for those who live in the UK it couldn't be a more applicable title.