History Is Everybody

‘History is everybody’ – not the most inspiring quote, but I was being interviewed today and the interviewer thought it was because she made sure she wrote it down then and there, even though it was being recorded and she could transcribe later. The context: she was interviewing me about ‘My Hidden Mother’, the biography I have written about Mum that, in a nutshell, tells the story of a Jewish girl from a nice middle class family growing up in a world that’s about to implode, ie 1930s and 40s central Europe. The story is all about what happens when a whole group of perfectly ordinary people are dehumanised by the system. They become a label. They are no longer people. They are unwanted, they must be discarded, disappeared. My mother was lucky in that her disappearance meant her survival – for millions of others it meant death. You can read in your history books about Hitler, but you don’t read so much (with the exception of Anne Frank) about people who were not in positions of power, despite the fact that they are the majority by a factor of millions. History is bunk? Certainly is in the text books.

This is changing, slowly. All I remember about history at school was the astonishing fact that Queen Elizabeth I had 2000 dresses. This is a ridiculous factoid. What does it even mean? 2000 dresses at one point? During her entire life? What might be more interesting, is who counted them? Was there really some lady-in-waiting who one night thought, what the hell, why don’t I count how many dresses she really has, then write it down, and a few hundred years time people will be SO grateful I did, because this is what really matters. Put like that, one can see how absurd it is. I want to know how many dresses I might have had if I’d lived then; I want to know what my underwear would have been like, I want to know how I coped with periods and boyfriends. There is one hell of a lot that would be really interesting to know if an ordinary person like me had written it all down, but nobody like me did. I wouldn’t have had sufficient education, wouldn’t have had the level of literacy necessary, probably wouldn’t have had parents who could afford to buy paper, certainly wouldn’t have had access to a publisher.

Different now. I don’t need to be able to afford paper, because I have a computer, and I can write my mother’s story and I can get it published and I can get it out there so that people can read it. And then a student from Greenwich University can come across my book and read it and love it and decide to interview me about it, and maybe she’ll recommend it to others to read, and all the tiny, enormous, everyday and extraordinary facts of my mother’s life will become known beyond the small circle of my expected readership.

We are all history, but if nobody writes it down, after a few generations we disappear.

There is a photograph of my mother with her family. She and her brother are smiling for the camera. Her parents are not. They know what’s coming. I think it’s the most desperately sad picture I have ever seen. We are ALL history.

‘My Hidden Mother’ by Catherine Edmunds

Book: https://www.feedaread.com/books/My-Hidden-Mother-9781786101747.aspx

Photos: http://s78.photobucket.com/user/delph_ambi/My%20Hidden%20Mother/story

Dhal

You know those days when you’ve been teaching until late and want something quick and tasty? Steak would do nicely, than you very much – but there’s nowt in the freezer so you have to think: what’s filling, doesn’t take too long, tastes great. Store cupboard contains a packet of green lentils, not the big fat ones, but little ones, bit like Puy lentils but not quite. They take an age to cook. Solution? Pressure cooker. So here’s what I did, and when I do lentils I think dhal, so I have no doubt there are culinary experts who can make suggestions on how to improve this recipe, but this is what I did, and it ended up surprisingly tasty.

First of all, I set the lentils going in the pressure cooker with plenty of cold water (I’ve destroyed pressure cookers in the past, and have learnt my lesson). Meanwhile, I sliced up some of onions and set them to fry in a pan with plenty of oil. I threw in some chopped up fresh ginger, plus some cinnamon sticks and a few green cardamoms, couple of cloves. While that was frying away, I ground up (in a pestle and mortar, best way) some coriander and cumin seeds, black peppercorns, dried chilli, fenugreek seeds, along with some paprika and turmeric.

I have this way of doing onions that I learnt from the Curry Club, years ago. When they start going brown, throw in a splash of cold water. This plumps them up, and means you can cook much longer without burning. So I kept on, chucking in some cold water, plumping up, etc etc, until they were rich and brown at which point I threw in the ground spices, boiled away, another splash of cold water, and so on. You need to keep an eye on it – the oil needs to get hot enough to release all the aromatics, but not so hot that the spices burn. By this time the lentils had had ten minutes or so at high pressure, so I turned off the gas and let the pressure cooker come back to ‘normal’ at room temperature. When I opened it, the lentils were still intact, but nearly done, and there was still plenty of liquid so I threw the lot into the pan with the spices and onions, boiled it away for ten minutes or so. At this point I reduced the heat and threw in some full fat Greek yogurt – the real stuff, intensely creamy and delicious. Heated it through.

Ate it, with a glass of Sicilian red left over from the weekend. It was bloody delicious. I’m writing this down, because my ‘throw-it-in-the-pot-and-see-what-happens’ recipes don’t always work, but this one certainly did, so I want to have a record of how I did it.  

Being a Writer

An email out of the blue – a student at Greenwich University asks if I’d be happy for her to interview me regarding ‘My Hidden Mother’, the book I’ve written about Mum surviving the Holocaust. I’m happy to oblige, though I point out I’m a long way from Greenwich. She however is amenable to coming up to Darlington, so we arrange a date. She knows about the book from her grandparents. She gives me their name, but it means little to me, so I ring up Mum who tells me they’re a couple she regularly meets at the bus stop.

This is so random. I was expecting them to be people she’s known for decades.

So next weekend I’m going to be interviewed, and I’m going to have to sound as if I know what I’m talking about as regards writing. I’m going to have to sound like a proper writer. This student is studying creative writing – all I have is an O level in English Language. I wrote stories at school only if they were set by the teacher; never just for the sake of it. I then wrote nothing for decades, didn’t even consider writing until I was in my forties, and then it was purely by chance, and wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t fallen in with some poets in an internet chatroom. I’ve never written a diary and I didn’t spend my teens writing angst-filled poetry. I still don’t write a journal of any kind, which is why my blog entries are so few and far between. When I’m out, I don’t have a notebook with me to jot down ideas. I don’t have paper and pen by my bedside in case I happen to wake up in the middle of the night needing to write down something incredible because I know I’ll forget it by the morning. I was never one of those people who thought they had a novel in them and who were just waiting for the right moment.

The old msn chatrooms were much like facebook today – a right old load of tosh, but with the occasional brilliant conversation. I started jotting down ideas from these conversations, invented characters, threw difficulties at them to see what they would do, and they took off, they flew – and ended up as a novel. Having never written anything longer than three or four sheets of A4 at school, I soon had a manuscript of 96,000 words. In my naivety, I sent it to a few agents. When that got me nowhere, I published with a vanity press – cost me nothing, but I was bombarded with ‘special offers’ to buy my own book at an exorbitant cost, so I sold very few. That book is now thankfully out of print. First novels, eh? Absolute tripe if you don’t know what you’re doing, and I certainly didn’t.

The writing bug had taken hold, however, and within a few years I had learnt the craft properly and had a number of traditionally published books to my name – a poetry collection and three novels.

Did this make me a ‘proper’ writer?

No. When you’re starting out, publication feels like the ultimate goal. Then you realise all you have to do is write something and send it somewhere and someone will eventually publish it. On my website, I used to list all these publications, but I’ve now heavily culled the listings as I’ve realised too many of them are embarrassments. The poetry collection and novels are fine, as they’re out with Circaidy Gregory Press, a very decent indie-press, so I keep them on the list, along with Bridport listings, Pushcart Prize nominations, Butcher’s Dog, Frogmore Papers, etc – but I keep very quiet about some of the others from the distant past before I knew better.

Being published in the right places, however, still didn’t make me a writer, it simply mades me a person who happened to write and who sometimes managed a decent hit.

I mentioned my O level in English Language earlier on. That was slightly disingenuous of me, as it makes me sound as if I haven’t studied writing at all. I have, but I’ve used the internet. I soon realised the chatrooms where people said ‘thank you for sharring’ (sic) were to be avoided at all costs. I drifted instead towards the private, much tougher forums, one of which set me on the right track. I learnt a lot there, but it didn’t make me a writer.

A few years later, I discovered Alex Keegan’s online ‘Bootcamp’, and if you can’t learn how to be a writer there you’re really not trying. I’ve been a ‘bootcamper’ for three years now, and have learnt one hell of a lot – but none of the skills I’ve picked up there make me a writer in themselves.

What makes me a writer is the fact that I’m currently writing every day – averaging around 1000 words – and I’ve been doing this for months now, not even stopping for Christmas Day. When you’re primarily a poet, that’s pretty much impossible, so much of my output at the moment is short stories. They pour out, and they’re initially gibberish, so when they go through the bootcamp mill they’re eviscerated by myself as much as anyone. I fix them if they’re fixable, submit them if they have a chance in one of the better markets or competitions. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t – but the important thing is that I’m writing them, so the idea of a student from London coming up to interview me about my writing no longer seems such a weird idea. This is not a hobby. It’s what I do.

An Important Book

So John asks me to do a review of his cancer book and my immediate (though not vocalised) thought is ‘urrgghh!’ – but I know I WILL do a review because I’ve known John a long time and he’s a fine poet, and he and I have a history of reviewing each other’s books, but this? An account of his stay at a cancer facility in New Zealand? I don’t expect it to be a laugh a minute. I brace myself.

I don’t like the front cover. It doesn’t lead me to believe I’m going to find anything other than trauma and pain inside. The back cover’s better, though I’m not sure I quite believe the claims of ‘redemption and hope’. They sound like blurb hyperbole.  I set aside a morning to read it, expecting to have to break off regularly to go and stand in the sun and look at flowers or something to wrench myself out of the harrowing account I expect to find between its pages.

And then I read it, and it’s short, only 56 pages, I get through it in, I don’t know, half an hour or so? I really have no idea. More to the point, I never stop reading; I never go and have a coffee or do some other activity that will keep me away from the text. There are many reasons for this, and one of them is the sheer joy of how the book looks, once you get away from the depressing cover art. The inside pages are a mass of colour, of joyful photos, of stunning graphic design. This is one hell of a slick publication, quite apart from John’s writing. The publisher has done him proud and produced a thing of beauty.

As for the writing itself – it’s everything I would hope from the pen of John Irvine: wry, witty, warm, happy, sad, poignant. As for the promised ‘hope and redemption’ – well yes, though these are not the words I would have used, as they suggest something a bit wishy-washy and sentimental, or worse still, ‘inspirational’. I’d have thrown the book across the room if it had been ‘inspirational’ (metaphorically – I’m reading it on a pc, so the practicalities might have stopped me).

I should also mention that it’s also a cracking good read. It’s about comradeship, about the way people touch each other’s lives in unexpected ways. It’s about the way the most dreaded of circumstances can lead you to places that you couldn’t have foreseen, and can show you precisely what it means to be human – and that is the heart of it; that is why this is an important book.   

You And Me And Cancer Makes Three

by John Irvine

Pohutakawa Publishing

ISBN-13: 978-0994115188

 

Writing Blog Tour

I’ve been handed the baton in this writing blog tour by Su Bristow of http://subristow.weebly.com/blog, so here goes.

1.     What am I working on?

I have two major projects on the go at the moment: a biography (My Hidden Mother) and a collaborative novel (The Driftwood Tree). The biography has already been shortlisted in the Earlyworks Press Biography Challenge, which is heartening. I chose to write about my mother because she might not be famous, but she is a survivor – a hidden child during the Holocaust – and her story needs telling. My other project, The Driftwood Tree is a collaborative novel with writer John Bennington, set in rural Ireland in the 1920s. As well as full length works, I also regularly write short literary fiction and poetry. I have a writing competition habit that needs feeding, and I make enough prize money to justify entering even more competitions. I am also about to start editing and writing the preface for poet Nigel Humphreys’ new translation of Daphnis and Chloe, to be published by Circaidy Gregory Press, and have recently finished the technical edit of a new edition of Michael Short’s seminal work, Holst: The Man And His Music, also Circaidy Gregory Press.

2.     How does my work differ from others in its genre?

My Hidden Mother is not just a Holocaust tale, and neither is it purely a mother and daughter memoir – it’s both, and it’s more. My mother was hidden through the war, and in many ways her background has been hidden from me, even though she was always happy to tell me about her background as I grew up. What she did not realise was that like many second generation holocaust survivors, I had an instinctive feeling that I needed to protect her from what had happened, so I never asked as much as I might have done for fear of bringing traumatic memories to the surface. Now, however, we have both realised that these things need to be told, so the book has been an exploration of what that means to both of us, as well as being a first hand account of what it was actually like to be growing up in such difficult times.

The Driftwood Tree is very different to other novels in its genre. For a start, it’s not just a novel – it is fully illustrated, and each chapter contains around half a dozen original poems. John Bennington is the ideas man. He’s in charge of the research, the setting, the plot and the characters throughout the main text – he is a natural storyteller – but I am the editor, the poet and the illustrator; the person in charge of tightening this huge sprawling text and turning it into a book. I suggest revisions as we go along, and he feeds me suggestions for illustrations and edits the poems. It’s a fascinating process, particularly as living a good 500 miles apart, we have never met – everything is done by email.

3.     Why do I write what I do?

I like to write about things that matter; that will have meaning for people. I am not interested in pure entertainment. I want my stories and poems to have resonance and to stay with the reader long after they have finished. In the past I haven’t been too bothered about genre – I have written magical realism, general fiction, science fiction, crime fiction – but now I am moving more and more into literary fiction. It’s what I read, and it’s what I want to write.

4.     How does my writing process go?

I rise early, switch on the computer, and leave it running most of the day so that it’s available for writing at any point. I never write by hand if I can help it as my writing is illegible and very slow, but typing is effortless and quick. My writing day will usually include either a poem or a piece of flash fiction, plus some work on the novel and the biography. I’m also currently studying the art of short story writing on Alex Keegan’s online ‘Bootcamp’ and have become a far better writer, editor and critic as a result, which has naturally had a knock-on effect on all my writing. I try to write as much as possible every day, whether it’s original works or critiques of other people’s work – and of course I read, and I think about what I’m reading.

Next stop on the tour is with Geoff Nelder, at http://geoffnelder.wordpress.com

Review of Nigel Humphreys' OF MOMENT

OF MOMENT

by Nigel Humphreys

Arbor Vitae Press
ISBN 9780952567950

£7.99

Nigel Humphreys’ of moment is an extraordinarily difficult book to review. Usually with poetry one can lift a pithy stanza or two to demonstrate some point or other, but with this one, it’s the whole poem or the entire sequence that’s required. This is the thing with poetry: if it’s done properly, it can’t be segmented and diced – one can’t present an elegantly turned phrase on a plate and expect it to represent the whole. I’ve opened the book at random on page 27 and have just re-read ‘leaving the scene’, an astonishingly beautiful poem in which Humphreys leaves behind the humour and wry observation that is much in evidence elsewhere and gives us instead a hauntingly beautiful poem that brings tears to the eyes without the reader ever knowing precisely how this has happened. I don’t want to analyse the poetic ‘tricks’ that have produced this effect. I might in a poetry workshop, true, but in a workshop it’s unfinished; it’s not ‘it’ until it’s ‘it’ – but in this collection, it most assuredly is ‘it’. The time for analysis is over. This is the time to savour the final result.

I’ve heard this poet read, so I know what he sounds like, but even so, I don’t hear these poems in his voice. Not precisely. The voice in my head might start as Humphreys’ but it quickly morphs into pure Richard Burton, which is handy as there are plenty of Burton’s recordings of poetry around, so anyone can look him up to see how he sounded and use that as an aural template. Burton’s voice works particularly well in the extended sequence that is the ‘Aberystwyth Odyssey’ – this is Humphreys at his most keenly observational and earthy. If you don’t know the town, you will by the end. This is a drunken romp, the pub crawl to end all pub crawls, but as our guide is Nigel Humphreys, typically enough the whole thing is written in cywyddau – a traditional metered and rhyming form that dates from the fourteenth century, if not earlier. Humphreys’ great gift with these ancient forms is to forget about being obsequious and grave in the presence of history, but rather to re-create the bawdy style that quite likely was the mainstay of the form when it was first popularised, and in this sequence he succeeds with a vengeance.

I love the London underground – for me, it’s a womblike place, full of childhood memories. For Humphreys, it’s emphatically not. The first poem of ‘The London Suite’ – City underground – gives a shivery different perspective, that’s shocking in its forthright observation of what’s really going on. Or is it? This is the thing with Humphreys’ poems. He takes you to one side and says, ‘You think you know this? Think again,’ and gives you a completely oblique and unexpected perspective that’s totally convincing while you’re in the world of the poem. Afterwards, you might think, ‘Hang on a minute. It’s not really like that. Is it?’ but by then it’s too late. You’ll never see the underground in quite the same way again.

Humphreys haunts art galleries, as I do. I’ve even been round a few with him, but I haven’t stood next to him in front of the specific artworks that have inspired some of the ekphrastic poems in this collection – despite this, I find we’ve both written about the same artworks. There is Poussin’s exquisite ‘Dance to the Music of Time’, for example, that turns up in the third of the Sisyphus poems in this collection, and which I think has much the same effect on Humphreys as it does on me. I’ve written it into a novel rather than a poem, but this painting cries out to be written more than almost any I’ve ever seen, and I was with Humphreys all the way in this poem. This makes it all the more surprising that another work we have both written about, ‘How it is’ by Miroslav Balka, affected us in such entirely different ways. I found it transcendental. Humphreys found it... and here I’m at a loss for words. You’ll have to read this utterly bleak poem for yourself. I remember talking to Humphreys about this artwork when it was first displayed in Tate Modern, and being interested in how he had a completely different take on it. That was some years ago, but I think it’s one of the most powerful artworks Tate Modern ever displayed, and the memory remains strong – now that I read his poem, I can see what he saw. He uses stark economy to produce the most chilling poem in the collection. Again, while I’m reading the poem, I am completely convinced. No question. It’s only later, as I recover, as I move onto different things that I remember how I saw this work of art. My own reactions.

However, one must not forget that Humphreys is also the funniest and most erudite of men. His mischievous take on the opening of Paradise Lost (‘Paradise Repossessed’) is an absolute joy. Scathingly incisive, this is a poem for our times like no other. Quite what John Milton would have made of it, I have no idea. Let’s just say he would have admired the craft.  

I’ve only touched on a very small number of poems in this magnificent collection. If I were to write about them all, this review would turn into an extended essay of thousands of words. You don’t want to read that – you want to read the collection. This one’s a keeper. Buy it.

Nigel Humphreys reviews 'Serpentine'

I'm absolutely delighted to present poet Nigel Humphreys' review of Serpentine. The thing about Nigel is he knows about writing, and he knows about art - so who better to cast his eye over this novel. I first met Nigel a few years ago, when the famous 'crack' was snaking across the floor of Tate Modern. We decided to take a look and were inspired - or I certainly was. A fictionalised version of this visit features in the first chapter of Serpentine. Recently I had the pleasure of going round the Manet exhibition at the Royal Academy with Nigel. Perhaps the seeds of a new novel have just been sewn.

Here's Nigel's review.

Much paint is squeezed from tubes in Catherine Edmunds’ latest novel Serpentine, the outline is sure, its canvas painted with a sable brush, characters blocked in and the non-representational landscape of conflicting emotions hung. Victoria, a struggling artist, is passionate about her art, passionate about her men and between them there writhes a serpentine crack, partly symbolised by Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth, a conceptual installation at Tate Modern in 2007. 

“‘Remember ‘Shibboleth?’ Victoria asks. ‘You have wounds, they fester, they never heal.’ The crack that ran through the heart of the building. It had been filled in . . . but the scar was still there.” 

Victoria carries the ghost of her Spanish affair with José as she tries to sculpt a relationship with antiques dealer Simon, a stranger who spilt coffee over her on a train. Yet not a stranger exactly since, it turns out, he’s known to John who is being divorced by Emma who lives in the north-east and a close friend of Victoria’s since art school. The narrative’s measured flow surprisingly allows us to swallow this coincidence without murmur as the action commutes between London and the North-east.

Victoria paints compulsively but her tragedy, if tragedy it is, is that her men don’t get her art, and therefore don’t get her. For Simon, Victoria’s abstract canvases are beyond his pedantry. Victoria paints her way through the novel in a to-and-fro of self-absorption – sometimes submissive, sometimes dominant, always impulsive. Her vitriolic relationship with a slightly unhinged Emma doesn’t help, but the women have all the fun. Unlike the bi-sexual José, Simon and John struggle for our interest at first and seem almost interchangeable. Are antiques dealers really that dull? Victoria’s initial prejudices against the profession soon change, and together with her we start to view the ‘sea of grey men’ as something very much more dynamic – dangerous even, when it comes to John.

At times the novel sets itself up as an apologist for Abstract art whereas Conceptual art in the novel is loud and symbolic. As well as Shibboleth, Miroslaw Balka’s How it is, also having its fifteen minutes of fame in the Tate’s Turbine Hall in 2010, suggests the necessity of groping in the dark inherent in Victoria’s perception of self, especially when it comes to her unco-ordinates of men.

The novel is a comfortable read, its narrative mixes prime colours of human relationships while commenting on the art world in broad strokes. Those who don’t paint get a telling glimpse of how the struggling painter makes ends meet by turning out postcard landscapes of city landmarks for a pittance. Life classes in back street studios, antiques fairs and a concert at Wigmore Hall, written so that we hear the music, create a convincing canvas for the craquelure of self-doubt which is the protagonist Victoria. Enjoyable.


Serpentine can be purchased from all the usual online stores, as well as the publisher's website here and direct from the author.