Professional Eventually

Ah money. It makes the world go round. But maybe not if you are writer. Truman Capote, I think it was him, was asked by a stranger what he did. I write, replied the great man. Good, that can be a lot of fun. But what’s your real job? “The profession of letters is the only one in which once can make no money without being ridiculous,” declared Jules Renard back in 1906. And out there among the wannabees, the beginners, the slowly rising and the retired late starters are a hundred Welsh literary creatives who do it mainly for the love and the fame. Pay money to poets? Why would anyone need to do that.

The problem, of course, is that Wales has come late to acquiring its professional literary class. Hard to grasp is the idea that writers and their products add considerably to society, help us understand ourselves, help us see where the past has been and where the future is going. That they allow us to discover how the spirit can soar and face us with the truths of life that dance music and beer often fail to deliver.

To do this, and to do it consistently and to do it well, requires a bit more from the author than simply love of literary fame. It’s not enough to want to be a writer. You need to have the talent and to have put in a bit of practice. You also need the space and support in which to work and a financial underpinning which will allow this to happen. Authors need to be professional. Good ones do.

And in Wales a number are. But we are a small nation with limited markets and finding the resource to keep all we need on the road is hard. Writers being paid for what they do is still misunderstood. What did D H Lawrence’s father say when his son reported on how much cash he’d received from writing The White Peacock – “Fifty pounds! An tha’s niver done a day’s hard work in they life.”

But then again the maker of the paper on which the book was printed got paid. So too did the printer and the binder and the delivery man who carried the stock to the bookshop. The bookseller took a cut, and so did the electricity worker powering the fire beside which the book was eventually read. Why should the creator of the work itself not also be recompensed?

There are still those out there who imagine that literature is entirely something authors can churn out in spare moments. They should get proper jobs – in factories, in hospitals, in schools. Who needs books, we’ve got TV, where paying scriptwriters is regarded, somehow, as being different. There’s a lesson here.

A version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of 21st August, 2010. #161

Garrulous Forever

Do you read these things? The ubiquitous blogger with their garrulous outpourings. Words to fill the silence, sentences to rattle in the air, verbiage to occupy every last empty corner of cyberspace. No good event goes by in 2010 without a resident blogger getting themselves attached to tell the connected world just how the thing is. During this year’s Guardian Hay Literature Festival Simon Mundy, a self-confessed total newbie, was installed as resident blog man. He was given the task of reporting daily (or more frequently if he chose and he sometimes did) on the doings of the world’s greatest literary festival. Simon Mundy’s Festival Frolics gave the inside story and did so in style.

With a certain prescience Mundy observed that blogs get consumed backwards. The reader alights on the latest instalment and then, if sufficiently roused, scrolls backwards through ever earlier entries until they reach the first. And it’s usually in this one that bloggers set out their stalls and explain what they are doing and why. Mundy’s blog was thoroughly entertaining, as one might expect. And it’s still there, out in cyber wonderland, where nothing ever gets finally erased. Bloggers take care, what you say won’t go away.

Wales has a growing stream of literary blogpersons. At Hay travel writer Tom Anderson, wrote the daily Writing Squads Blog for Academi. You’d see him in the café’s, dongled laptop before him, facing off Susie Wild who was engaged in a similar activity for Mslexia, both typing furiously.

Poet Mike Jenkins with space before him now that his teaching has finished, regularly expands his observations on the world with a pretty readable blog. The state of life in Merthyr with special reference to writing. The town has changed its name, he blogged recently, this place used to be Washingtub City of even Hooverville. Now “the town where the red flag was first flown at the Waun Fair, could easily be dubbed Tescopolis”. Too many branches of the red badged giant, complains Mike, and then follows this with a Merthyr dialect poem of his own hilarious making.

In the new 2011 edition of A&C Black’s Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook, one of the two essential author’s handbooks, there’s a pretty informative section on writing and the online world. This includes an analysis of the ebook market (67% American with 65% of world product devoted to fiction and only 8.2% to business - which differs considerably from the predictions of futurologists), descriptions of how to launch a website, and an essay on writing a blog.

Blogs, of course, don’t cost anything to set up or to visit. Out there are loads covering just about every interest area there is. How much time do you want to waste following them? Select with care.

A version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday, 14th August, 2010. #160

No Longer Quite So Anglo - Can This Be True?

One of the great things about the Anglo-Welsh in the new millennium is that they are no longer all that Anglo although it has to be said quite a number are not that Welsh either. Emyr Humphreys, eminence grise among our English-language novelists and the man who did for the slate quarries what Jack Jones did for the industrial south, was one of the earliest to take objection to the term. He was a Welshman, he declared, not an Anglo anything. RS Thomas agreed. The fact that this fluent Welsh-speaking pair chose to write in English was a matter for them. Nothing to do with racial origin.

There, I’ve used it, that difficult word, race. Does this actually mean anything these days in Wales? The flood of new books written in English flows unabated. They are Welsh books, written about Welsh things with Welsh backgrounds, set in Wales and often displaying an entirely Welsh sensibility. But their authors were not born here. Nor were their parents. They’ve arrived ten years back, forty years back, whenever. And now they belong. The world shifts. Wales changes shape. It is how nations mature.

Edward Storey, poet of the Cambridge Fens, founder member of the John Clare Society, erudite flatlander, moved to Wales more than a decade ago and has allowed our mountainous landscape to infect his verse. His Almost A Chime-Child, from the publishers Raven Books, celebrates the Welsh landscape – hill farming, sheep, the island of Ramsey, low tide at Laugharne and gardens at Presteigne fill his clear, measured poetry. Is he one of us? He is.

John Goodby, Dylan Thomas expert and re-treader of many things from the culture of Wales was born in Birmingham and has done time at English universities before settling as Professor at Swansea. His Wine Night White from Tom Cheesman’s Swansea-based Hafan Books is not for the faint hearted. Naturally not. Goodby never is. This latest fluctuating spray of verse denial takes the reader on board with care. His opening lines are almost conventional. But wine-driven winds of change soon knock all that over. Intelligence and chance. Goodby is one of the few writers in Wales who can combine both with ease.

Nigel Humphreys, is author of The Flavour of Parallel from Arbor Vitae Press (and still they keep appearing, these new small publishers, if it wasn’t for the internet this would be a golden age). He comes from Shropshire but has spent most of his life in the coastal west. He’s learned a fair bit from the twentieth century modernists but keeps his poetry accessible. Does he belong? He does.

Checking the stacks of the newly published it’s getting harder and harder to find anything that fits the old criteria. Unless, of course, we switch languages. Which takes us neatly back to Emyr and RS. So where next?

A version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail, Saturday 7th August, 2010 #159

Without a Doubt

Was the great novel you’ve just read a fluke? Could its author do it again and would the new book be as good as the first? Doubt follows writers around like a ghost. It’s worse with verse. Can the poet ever again write a new poem as decent as the one just completed? Isn’t the whole business a catalogue of chance? Writers persistently doubt their powers and always need people out there to reassure them that, yes, they should carry on.

Years back when blues singers were being rediscovered living in shacks on the Mississippi delta they were encouraged, fifty years on, to record again in spanking new studios and on first class instruments. It turned out that all they wanted to know was how they’d done today. Had the track they’d just laid down been anything like as good as the stuff they used to make? They had no idea if it had been Cripple Hard-Armed Davies playing with them on that recording of Wuppa Wuppa Blues they’d made in Clarksdale in 1928. Who cares? All that matters is now. So, too, with writers.

Doubt comes in insidious forms. It sneaks up on you. Wales Book of the Year long listees sometimes wonder if they’ve got in there by mistake. Wasn’t the novel they wrote two years back, which got absolutely nowhere, actually much better?

Why are my poems not in your anthology, a well-known poet complained to me. The book I was editing collected work originated from Cardiff. He lived in Aberystwyth. I explained, or tried to. But his doubts persisted. There was a conspiracy, out there, against him. His work was not up to the mark. I had taken against him because of that dismal review he’d written of my work and published in Planet in 1978. As time had moved on his poems had become dated. He was on a black list somewhere. Anything but the truth. I needed material about the capital. He hadn’t written any.

Recently I discovered the work of Philip Roth. I read The Plot Against America, by chance, and found it spellbinding. Why had I never read this genius before, for genius he certainly appeared. The book was a thrilling meld of history, fantasy, personal demons and ideological battle. It was written with erudition and humour and had a plot which whistled.

When done I tackled Amazon and ordered a Roth bucket-full. The Ghost Writer, The Human Stain, American Pastoral. How often in life do you discover a new writer with so much published brilliance under his genius belt? Roth, an author possessed of no doubt whatsoever. His works stretched, glowing, towards the horizon.

And how did I find them? I’m not sure yet. Has doubt arrived? We’ll see.

An earlier version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday, 31st July, 2010. #158

Finding Traffic

A little while back the sages of publishing predicted that the first thing to go in the burgeoning online world would be encyclopaedias, gazetteers and handbooks. Those textural tomes that break your wrist just to lift them. The AA Gazetteer Of Places To Stay. The Directory Of British Sub-Post Offices. The Whiskey Lovers Guide To The Scottish Islands. The Cyfansoddiadau. Wisden’s Cricketers’ Almanack. And it’s mostly come to pass. The handbook has all but vanished, although maybe not yet in the case of the last two mentioned. The Cyfansoddiadau, Wisden’s for Eisteddfod-goers, looks as if it will never fade. Wisden’s itself, however, is morphing into an all-sports compendium and has an online version beckoning.

Barry Turner’s enduring and always vital The Writer’s Handbook has just published its 2011 edition. Tome it is, too. At 766 pages it needs a desk just to be read. It’s heavier than the iPad, but just as new and vital. Amid the advice on characterisation in popular fiction, how to get ahead as a ghost writer, how to write children’s books, do your accounts, command the network, produce a bestseller, settle your accounts and handle bad reviewers sits a cogent section entitled poetry.

This is compiled by the man behind Salt Publishing, one of the great short-run phenomena of the noughties, Chris Hamilton-Emery. Among his informative and useful advice Hamilton-Emery hones in on the ten changes he expects to see in the coming decade. In the order he lists them these are as follows: Print magazines will vanish. Criticism will move entirely online. Choice will drive the reader to compile their own anthologies, set up their own internet channels, make their selections the yardstick of poetry commerce. Books as the poetry unit will fade. Everyone will become their own publisher. The bricks and mortar bookshop will disappear. Poetry will become increasingly performance based and delivered by multi-media. Verse will return to its roots, “as the shared imagination of a specific online community”. Creative writing will produce vast and participative infrastructures and almost all poets will work within this industry. Getting published will cease to be the benchmark of success. Being read, “finding traffic” as Hamilton-Emery puts it, will be the indicator instead.

Some of this sounds obvious. Already the review in hard print has ceased to be the point of judgement. By the time your reviewed book appears in Planet, for example, you may well be out there promoting your next. In Wales we have never worried much about immediacy. But instant reaction via the blogosphere is seeing an end to all that.

Other of Hamilton-Emery’s predictions, however, do push the envelope. Will performance really become the only way forward? The Writer’s Handbook 2011 is published by Macmillan.

A version of this posting appeared in the Western Mail of Saturday 24th July, 2010 as The Insider - #157

Instant Lit

How instant is this age we’re living in? A poet of my acquaintance, a pretty well-know poet actually, has just told me that his next collection, submitted to his not insignificant publishers in good time and in perfect form, has been accepted. They said it was a great book, he told me, something that would enhance his reputation. But it wouldn’t come out until autumn 2012. 2012! We could all be dead by then. The wave of tax-increases we face may well have induced mass Welsh suicide. The bomb might return and there’d be no Wales left. 2012. Three years away. By then the world’s last bookshop will have closed and literature will have been dropped from the school syllabus in favour of street-talk studies.

This is an instant world where it is expected that the email will elicit an immediate response and the text message be replied too almost as fast as it is sent. The whole population operates as if it were on caffeine overdrive. Only those who have phones “for emergencies” and never turn them on are excluded.

It once was that the advice to young poets was to write the stuff then leave it in a drawer for several months where, like cheese, it might mature. When you came back to it, a good distance now between you and the hot point of the work’s inspiration, you’d be able to tell if it actually worked. If you were onto something. Or was this, in reality, a piece of self-indulgence. Half the amateur poetry in the world actually is. No, that’s an exaggeration. It’s more like ninety percent.

What we seem to have lost in this rush of speed, scrabble for short, screen-readable sentences, and images which hit the spot as you read them is anything considered. Poetry works best when it opens slowly to reveal its wonders one by one. Not everything under the sun has to go bang. Too much of that and your ears will fail.

In the rush to contain costs many contemporary publishers have sacked their copy editors. No longer do we have someone on staff pointing out the difference between “principal” and “principle” or explaining when it’s right to say “most of her verse” rather than “the majority of her poetry”. With the aid of native wit and Microsoft the writer is expected to get it right first time. Many don’t. Take care who you copy. Just because it’s in print doesn’t make it right.

Which brings us back to the long wait until 2012. Why the log jam? All the publisher needs to do is add a cover and get the thing into the shops. And there may be the answer. How many of us actually buy? Clearly not enough.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday 17th July, 2010. #156

Real Bloomsbury

The Real series of alternative handbooks, histories and guides to the conurbations of Wales is expanding. South Pembrokeshire next. Powys soon. Then Bangor. But beyond that is another country. In preparation for the publication of Nicholas Murray’s book I’ve spent the weekend walking around Bloomsbury. Not a thing I usually do nor something, it seems, that all that many tourists do either. For a slice of central London this Georgian suburb of avenue and leaf seemed relatively deserted.

Bloomsbury is that region of London elegance stretching from the British Museum to Euston and the far end of Oxford Street to St Pancras, that new entreport for visitors from Europe. They arrive from their green French fields and their muscular German industrialnesses to gaze on what, until very recently, was the red light district of Kings Cross. Today those urban difficulties have been moved on. What remains is a sprawl of cheap eateries surreally enlivened with a statue of John Betjeman.

What I did find, specialist bookshops aside, was something we don’t see that much of in Wales – plaques. In Bloomsbury the bookshops are as diverse as they come – horses, Tunisia, the gay universe – and so too are the plaques. Circular inscriptions celebrating the fact that W B Yeats spent many years of his life writing in this back room. That Charles Dickens lived in Doughty Street for long enough to complete five novels. That the man who thought up the idea for the postal service did it while residing near Tavistock Square. That the Bloomsbury set itself – Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and Lytton Strachey – all lived, at one time or another, in the tall, beautifully proportioned houses of Gordon Square.

Back home the Rhys Davies Trust has been putting up plaques to the literary eminent for decades. John Tripp, Leslie Norris, Glyn Jones, Brenda Chamberlain, John Ormond, R S Thomas are all celebrated. More men than women but that’s the shape to which Welsh writing once conformed. But it’s slow progress. The unsubstantiated fear is that a plaque on the house will attract visiting hoards who will come to stare and trample on the tulips. As a nation we should be more welcoming.

To promote our native plaques – and despite what I’ve said there are still a fair number – visitors can use the Academi’s new interactive plaque finder web site at www.academi.org. There are also free of celebratory black and white postcards. Series one has sixteen cards showing some of our greatest including John Tripp, Roland Mathias, Raymond Williams, Brenda Chamberlain, Emyr Humphries, T H Jones, Jack Jones, Leslie Norris, and R S.

Sets are free and can be obtained by sending a large stamped addressed envelop to the Academi, 3^rd floor, Mount Stuart House, Mount Stuart Square, Cardiff CF10 5FQ.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday July 10, 2010. #155

World Leaders and Vertical Drinkeries

Cardiff is a world leader in a few things, or so it imagines. City of arcades, city of parks, youngest waterfront, greatest number of vertical drinkeries (bars where you stand up rather than sit down), more stag nights than anywhere outside Vilnius. It’s also host to one of the english-speaking world’s most popular poetry contests – the Cardiff International Poetry Competition. Founded way back in the 1980s and offering five thousand pounds prize money for a single 40 lines (max) poem. That’s an amazing sum for a single piece of unpublished verse.

When the competition started, initially on its own and without council help, entrants were stunned at the possibilities of instant wealth. Better odds than the lottery suggested one wannabe, although as there was no lottery back then maybe I imagined that.

The Cardiff Competition is run by the Academi. The idea is that entries are judged with the names of the poets removed. The fact that you may be Simon Armitage will cut no ice. The quality of the work is what gets you through.

The competition’s judges – a panel of three – are usually pretty well-known names. Gillian Clarke, Roger McGough, Ian Macmillan and Les Murray have all been on the team. Entrants come from everywhere. This is an international competition and stuff wings its way into the capital of Wales literally from the whole wide world.

In the days when communication could only be made by letter post things were relatively straightforward. Admittedly some entrants would send by special courier, or turn up themselves bearing their poems with faces full of hope. Fuss was minimal. Understanding of how the thing actually worked was commonplace.

But now we have email and entrants, some of them, and despite a rule which warns that no communication can be entered into, feel the urge to ask things of the organisers on a daily basis. Your competition says that entries should be unpublished. I read mine out at my brother’s wedding. Does this count? When you say that winners will be notified in the spring do you mean March or might you mean April? My poems are only two lines long. Do I still have to pay the same entry fee?

Instant communication has allowed the world’s litterateurs free reign. Emails arrive giving line by line justification for each poem. Explanations, amplifications, attached photos of the object being lovingly described in verse, detail on the circumstance of composition, bulletins on the entrant’s health, requests for free tickets to the ceremony, offers of house exchanges, free holidays, and drink.

As organisers the Academi have learned to ignore the lot.

Giles Goodland, a former Gillian Clark student has just won the 2010 contest. Watch this space for upcoming details of how to enter for 2011.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday 3rd July, 2010. #154

How To Make The Job Work

What happens to columnists when they’ve done six hundred and find the place where they started coming round again? If you were Tom Davies then you’d simply carry on. Tom, novelist, raconteur, reporter, investigative hack and perpetual commentator on the vagaries of life in Wales has spilled the beans in his recent Berwyn Mountain Press paperback, The Reporters Tale. Davies was for many years a columnist on this paper. He was a firecracker of a journalist who delivered news and insight as often as he did outrage, indignation and shed loads of damning with faint praise.

His life as a regional journalist making good on the London nationals and then falling from grace and returning to Wales makes for exhilarating reading. The story of his trials and tribulations is almost as engaging as the stuff on which he reported. Davies began work on the Mail in grand company. Among fellow newcomers in 1966 were Geraint Talfan Davies, later Controller of the BBC, Meic Stephens, Director at the Welsh Arts Council and Rhys David, editor of the Financial Times. The Mail, it turns out, has much to answer for.

Tom went on to work on the Guardian, The Daily Express and The Sunday Times

with episodes as a coalman and a Christian evangelist in between. In that way of wayward creatives who are never happy where they are he ended up working as a novelist. There are sixteen fat titles listed on this ink man’s bibliography. One Winter of the Holy Spirit, the story of Evan Roberts and the 1904 revival in Wales is an excellent place to start.

Herbert Williams also did time with Media Wales although it was called the South Wales Echo back then. This much loved seventy something performing poet, novelist and historian can still be found making spirited forays onto the poetry platform. Phil Carradice has pieced together his life in a Writers of Wales series critical handbook. The Williams volume tells the story of an Aberystwyth-born Anglo-Welsh pioneer who tangled with news stories as often as he wove fiction.

Like Tom, Herbert found the place he began, the old Welsh Gazette, creatively stifling. He went to work on the Reading Standard before shuttling back to Wales to scribe for the South Wales Echo, the Wales Tourist Board and then the BBC.

Novels, poetry, histories of trains, stagecoaches and monuments spun out of him.

Try Davies The Ocean, the story of the great industrialist David Davies Llandinam or A Severe Case of Dandruff, his novel about the ravages of TB to see what a class journalist can turn out when he puts his mind to it.

These two are writers who made the job work. Check them out.

A version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday 26th June, 2010. #153

The Sounds of Silence Once Again

What kind of silence do writers need? Absolute, according to some. Grahame Davies told me that even a creak on the stairs could foul up one of his couplets. Creativity only works when the world sleeps and there’s a seep of silence through everything. Not so for me, however. Unless I’ve got Miles or Jackson Browne on the player then nothing happens. Things that roar seem to occupy the part of my head that normally deals with distractions leaving the rest free to get on with the business of putting words in order.

Readers seem to find the same thing. Silence notices in libraries are a thing of the past. Bookshops fill their backgrounds with pop. It’s an age of multitasking. Many young people appear able to listen to their iPods, text on their phones and cycle on the pavements all at the same time. Do any also consume paperbacks? Allegedly they do.

Thirty years ago music and poetry rarely occupied the same slice of space time. Mike Jenkins might pull out a harmonica and do a Captain Beefheart impersonation between verses but he was an exception. Mostly music stayed on the radio. Today it’s another world. The new Welsh book has to have music at its launch. Readings without some sort of musical diversion are starting to become rare.

If it’s not Patrick Jones winding his words into his brother Nicky Wire’s sonic slipstream then it’s John Williams reading slices of his forthcoming biography of Shirley Bassey to jazzy riffs from Richard James. Llwyd Owen’s first English title Faith, Hope & Love swam into sight backed by The Gentle Good. Matthew David Scott’s Balloon events in Cardiff always mix music with text. The last time the literary scene was as musically rich as this was when John Tripp recited to the accompaniment of live music at the old Oriel Bookshop. Beer, jazz and literature made a heady mix.

Music journalist Will Hodgkinson’s The Ballad of Britain, an entertainingly written travelogue that follows the author’s treck around the UK in search of folksong, has a fair bit about Wales. Hodgkinson drives west to reach the rain-filled Dyfed triangle in the company of Cate le Bon. The eminent chanteuse is reported as having some disarmingly honest things to say about the Eisteddfod and the Welsh musical tradition. Hodgkinson also records a singing Gruff Rhys wearing noisy wellingtons in the car park of Brecon’s Green Man festival. Our heritage is enriched considerably as a result.

When the title was launched (at Laugharne, where else) the author interspersed his readings with singers. When done the audience were unsure if they should now buy the book or hunt out the accompanying CD. Do both. The book comes from Portico. The CD from Heron. It’s a new world.

Aversion of this blog posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday 19th June, 2010. #152