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

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 Wales

It's the new book and coming - ever so slowly - before Christmas from Seren. The Real technique applied to the whole country. Real Wales. Full of Finch photos and Finch humour. Here's an extract, described by John Osmond, Director of the IWA, as quirky. That's what I do.

So what is this place? Grey crags and green miasma in the western British mists. A place like poetry, where nothing happens. A place of sheep and hairy men. Where is this land? Most of the world do not know. And if they do then they can rarely point us out. Wales, I never heard of that place[i]. Wales, the invisible, the lost. Wales, the real Cantre’r Gwaelod. A small island in the Hebrides. A rock off the west coast of Ireland. A hummock out there in the stormy ocean. Wales, Grassholm writ just that little bit larger. A floating land, full of birds.

The great historian Gwyn Alf Williams said the people of this place had “for a millennium and a half lived in the two western peninsulas of Britain as a Welsh people, (and) are now nothing but naked under an acid rain.” The tourist trade sells us as a place of endless singing, long yellow beaches, rugby rugby and folk in stovepipe hats. Business promotion says we are a global centre, a land of opportunity, a place to relocate to, perfect transport, weather like Bermuda. The government says we have the highest incidence of heart disease in Europe. We smoke too much. We don’t climb enough of our hills. Wales, a fake place made by Woolworth, cellotaped to the west of the midlands, useful for car rallies, and as a butt of English jokes. You are a country. You can’t mean that.

Everyone looks for Wales and so many do not find it. Either like R S Thomas they search for a Wales which does not exist, moving ever westward, in hope. Or like the academics find a new Wales right in front of them, constructed from the past’s framework, a place that changes and doesn’t simultaneously. A land of magic. Wave your divining rod. Follow your ley.

Defining Wales is rather like defining verse. For every rule someone comes up with there will be an exception which breaks it. Ultimately poems become what they are because the poet says so. Wales is like this. The bit you think of as real probably is. The Feathers in Llanystumdwy. The Greyhound on High Street in Newport. Barafundle. The power station at Connah’s Quay. Splott. The Millennium Coastal Park at Llanelli. The Spar at Flint. The writers gathered at the Vulcan in Adamsdown. The street of subscribers to Taliesin in Pwllheli. The coach spotters at Swansea bus station. Brecon Cathedral. The cairn at the far end of Golden Road. The Urdd Welsh classes for adults. The sewage works at Aberystwyth. The place up near Dyfi Junction where there’s no platform but the trains still stop. Pete Davis’ Chicken Shed at Brynamman. The left bank of the river Lugg near Bleddfa. The Codfather of Sole chipshop on Barry Island seafront. The place where Dafydd Elis Thomas parks his car near the Senedd. The steps of the National Museum and the pillars behind which John Tripp once hid his bicycle clips. The jetty at Mostyn from where the Airbus wings set sail. The bridge over the lost Roath Rail branch on Penylan Hill. All as real as each other.

In a country the size of ours it should be possible to visit everywhere – some claim to have – but there are still towns and villages appearing on the nightly BBC Wales weather maps that I have never been through. And on occasions there is one of which I’ve never heard.

Some people never bother. Cardiffians – and some of them can be the worst – live and die inside the capital. The Wales beyond is an alien land. Full of workless pits and mountains. No Asda. No Lidl. I am not going there. Why should I? What would I get out of it? I have also met a well-known north Wales novelist who claimed never to have visited Pembrokeshire. The south. Not Welsh enough. Non-compliance as a political act. For him there are three countries: Y Fro Cymraeg, Welsh Wales, an arc of land in the western reaches; Wales that might as well be England, including the capital and the north east and the southern coasts; and Y Fro Efallai where desire and actuality mix, where reality comes in like a short wave signal – Myddfai, Banwen, Merthyr, Pontcanna, Aber out of term time. Trefdraeth when the sun shines. Who is to say that his Wales is any better than mine? Or that mine is more real?

This book is about this country. A place where some imagine that no one has raised a sword in anger since Glyndŵr’s rebellion went down in 1409 and the Welsh were banned from ever owning anything outside their borders. A place where others know, for certain, that the real Wales is waiting, just round the political corner, and a new day will come. Minorities rise. Nation states fragment. It’s the post-modern way.

The real Wales may well be a place of people, a land of human intervention, of despoliation in the search for minerals, of pipelines and power grids, and roads that mesh the green like fishnet, but it is not an urban country. The city life of disenfranchisement, dislocation and alienation is not ours. Wales, land of communities, where decisions reach the surface through compromise and conciliation. Wales where power frightens and underdogs are prized. Wales where time slows and life is longer. Wales where the past actually is important and historians are honoured. Wales where highrise is feared and there is no navy. The real Wales is where people always talk about who they are, strive after roots, want fields rather than mansions, although generally have neither. The real Wales is the one I’ve gone looking for. Not sure I’ve found it all yet.

When I wrote Real Cardiff, back in 2002, I determined to write about the land as I saw it. No considered history nor topographical guide, no socio-economic handbook, nor fictional prose. As I observed it the world kept changing. The past slid from me. Those guarding it seemed to want to usher it away. What we were went underground to stay hidden or to be dug up by the disinterested and burned. Few seemed to care. The land also seemed to be secret. Full of self-contained, excluding epi-centres, places where you could only gain access if you had a key. The Cardiff of Geraint Jarman’s Welsh reggae, of Philip Dunleavy’s Castle, of Callaghan’s slum clearance, the Cardiff of Geoffrey Inkin’s Barrage and Bay. These innovations were making us a completely new Welsh city, a post-industrial capital for an incoming millennium, something out there was happening. It had to be tracked and written down.

Real Wales adopts the same approach for the whole country. The Real Cardiff books (volumes one and two already best sellers and a third out there in the hazy, not-yet-completed wings) spawned a series. Real Swansea. Real Merthyr. Real Newport. Real Wrexham. Real Aberystwyth. And more. Written by experts to the Real formula. Series edited by Peter Finch. The present volume is my look at my country. Didn’t know it was mine until I grew and went out there to see. There are many like me. Lights go on. We need to find out just who we really are.

I’ve used classic Real Cardiff techniques here. Visited places by accident, simply because they sounded interesting, or because I found myself nearby. Places determined by their importance to Wales. Places that had to be rediscovered. Places where things existed. Places where, apparently, they did not. I went on tour, doing poetry readings. I visited alone, with my partner, in the company of local experts, literateurs, odd balls, historians, novelists. I used old maps and new ones. I read local histories and national overviews. I travelled by car and train and on foot. Much of the distance on foot, for often there were only unpaved tracks.

I discovered a lot. The sheep are many. The rain is often. The light is brilliant. The skies can be huge. The past can be picked up because it is often so near the surface. The past can also never be found again because of what we have done to it. Broken it, built on it, lost it, thrown it away. And there is also the matter of the mysteries, that stuff of Wales which makes things happen, or seem to happen, of which I’ve found no evidence anywhere else. Kings sleeping below rocks. Blood in trees. Wonder in the grass. Future in the air.

Notes:

[i] conversation between the author and some picnicking black Americans on the coast of South Carolina.

Where can you get your copy? In the shops at £9.99 pretty soon.

BayLit – Shocking Enough?

Why light up the Bay? In 1999 when the Academi first came up with the idea of a long-weekend literature festival Cardiffians were rarely in the habit of venturing further south than the main rail link. The Bay was another country. And a recently renamed one at that. Cardiff was two cities: the municipal capital standing in quiet Portland stone grandeur around Cathays Park; and then the buzzing Bay, new centre of the urban Welsh universe, full of cafes, bars, restaurants, and light. BayLit would knit the two places together. A weekend of Llên y Lli, literature of the waves, would get citizens of a literary persuasion out of the back bar of Park and into a multiplicity of venues they’d never yet visited – the Sports Café, the Norwegian Church, the Baltimore, and Techniquest.

This was a risky venture but largely its worked. Over the years new Bay venues have come on line, not least the grandest of the all, the Wales Millennium Centre and, as a solemn back up, the great slate hall at the Senedd.

Some may ask why we need literature festivals at all. Aren’t books for reading? Don’t you take them home and deal with them in private? You do. But literature is also a spectator sport, a performance art and a participatory game. Public readings by famous authors are popular. Even better attended are events where the famous spill the beans about what it is or was or will soon be.

In the 2005 BayLit queues snaked around the block to hear Howard Marks, Mr Nice, talk about a life in drugs. He’d written the biographies, made the pitch, and created the books but what he did on stage was simply to talk. And the south Wales crowd loved it.

Academi has a responsibility for the whole of Wales, of course, and Cardiff is never the central focus. BayLit alternates with an Academi-supported Festival centred on Ty Newydd, the Writer’s Centre at Lloyd George’s old house outside Criccieth. Among last year’s participants were Jon Gower, Eigra Lewis Roberts, Angharad Price, and Gwyneth Glyn.

This year, however, Academi is back by the impounded waters making literature work in Cardiff Bay.

The festival runs at the Wales Millennium Centre, at Terra Nova on Mermaid Quay, at the Glyn Jones Centre opposite the Senedd, and upstairs at Brain’s flagship, the Wharf, which faces the old East Dock on Schooner Way. Outrider events are at Borders’ spanking new bookshop in the Hayes where new books have been profiled all week. Meirion Jordan’s Moonrise, Eurig Salisbury’s Llyfr Glas Eurig, Joanna Davies’ Ffreshars. Saturday at 1.00 pm it’s the turn of the multi-talented Fflur Dafydd with her Bardsey Island black comedy, Twenty Thousand Saints.

For those who want to try their own hands at things there are three workshops. The Young people’s writing squads meet with the chaired bard Mererid Hopwood creating short films of their newly written poetry. Eurig Salisbury offers a new take on an ancient form with his cynghanedd workshop at the Glyn Jones Centre (10.00 am). In the Seligman Room at the Wales Millennium Centre Yemisi Blake delves into creative blogging at 11.00.

Upstairs at Terra Nova at 2.00 pm one of Welsh fiction’s revived strands, rural writing, gets some urban exposure. Horatio Clare, Cynan Jones, Tom Bullough and local farmer Hugh Cory join Ifor Thomas to uncover the joys of the greener life.

BayLit 2008 celebrates the Shock of the New. New ideas, new writers, new forms, new styles. If things get too edgy do we still enjoy them? Is one of literature’s main jobs to administer 5000 volts every now and then? At Terra Nova at 4.00 pm novelist and Dr Who fictioneer David Llewellyn ask us what we think. Are You Shocked Yet? Tell us please.

BayLit’s big bang is at the Wharf (8.00 pm) where one-time poetry boy band Aisle 16 present their take on motorway service stations. This bizarre poetic travelogue in the footsteps of John Betjeman features new poetry, a digital lightshow, video, and beauty created from a soulless hell. Thought the M4 couldn’t be entertainment? Think again.

Fuller details are at http://www.academi.org/ and tickets for most events can be purchased at the door.

The preceding piece was pitched at the Western Mail as a promotional description of what has been an essential annual literary bash near the water.

Highlights so far:

Tiffany Atkinson at the Poetry and Film event at the Point. Having got in past the drunks outside Tiffany made memorable the idea of having one of your hands that thinks it's a chicken. Even non-poetry lovers caught onto that image.

Joe Dunthorne at the Poetry & Prose made forever real the Second Life idea of avatars coming round the corner with three symbols on their chests: name, thing in life and emotional state. John Pik left with his reading John, The Ancient World, and Deaf

Ifor Thomas for spotting that all you had to do in the poetry world was to go away for a year or so to return and find things unrecognisable.