Sunday 29 March 2015

Cyfaredd 3: Alan Garner Talk

Helo Pawb

On Wednesday I drove to Cheshire to hear a talk by the man once described by The Independent as ‘The most important author working in the UK’. The title of the talk was ‘Powsels and Thrums: The Loom of Creation’. The setting was The Wolfson Auditorium, at Jodrell Bank, the site of the Lovell Radio Telescope. The author was Alan Garner, who lives at Blackden, a 15th century timber-framed house just three fields over from Jodrell Bank. He moved into the house he calls ‘Toad Hall’ in the same year the telescope was established.

The Lovell Radio Telescope at Jodrell Bank
I first encountered Garner years ago when, as an adult, I read The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, his first novel, published in 1960 when he was 25. I don’t remember much about the book, probably because I was in my Tolkien phase, though others I know, who came to it when they were teenagers, were so enthralled by the story they re-read it a number of times.

The edition I first read
 Then I journeyed to Britain in 2013 to attend a conference in Oxford and to conduct research for my dark ages novel. One of the people at the conference, when he heard about my novel, suggested I come and stay with him in Manchester so he could show me Alderley Edge, which had a Merlin legend associated with it. This legend figured heavily in Weirdstone, and so I became interested in reading more by the author. I spent much of last year reading all Garner’s novels and anything else of his I could find, and was blown away by his writing: his stunning use of language, including Cheshire dialect, his evocation of the Cheshire landscape, and his weaving of the everyday and the mythic, what I have come to call ‘mythic realism’. So, when I found out he was giving this talk, the last he will ever deliver, on a date I happened to be back in the country, I endured the six-hour round trip to hear it.

Alderley Edge: One of the candidates for the Black Gates,
behind which the Sleeping King and his Knights might be found
An Attempt at a Glossary of Cheshire Words defines ‘Powsels and thrums’ as ‘dirty scraps and rags’. Garner’s definition, however, took on the personal: what a weaver ancestor of his would refer to as the off-cuts and discards of materials used for the weaving or having come from the woven materials themselves. For Garner, the phrase becomes an image used to express his understanding of creativity: ‘the bringing together of disparate things and combining these in new ways’. Art ‘makes connections between entities that have not been seen before’.

Alan Garner, photo by Gary Carlton
from the Jodrell Bank website
Garner is a brilliant speaker: witty, sarcastic, poignant, stimulating and provocative. He is a storyteller trying to evoke for his audience the way of creativity, not an academic dissecting and analysing the psychology of creativity or the meaning of creative works. He uses stories, anecdotes, quotations from other writers (mainly Dylan Thomas, from that poet’s Introduction to his Collected Poems) and song (a rendition of a Danny Kaye song from a childhood experience at church). He also uses props: an ancient stone handaxe and a bronze age polished axe head he once put on Sir Bernard Lovell’s desk to emphasis his point that the telescope started with it, an early artefact of ‘the questing ape’.

One story, which illustrates his idea that ‘Artists magnify the land…through intensity of vision’, was of a bricklayer he once observed making a wall. When the man had finished, he stood back, studied his work, and tore the wall down. When Garner asked him why he had done this, the man replied that the lower course of bricks was ‘half a brick out’. This course was below ground level. ‘But no one would see that,’ Garner said. ‘I would,’ the bricklayer replied. Intensified vision, even in the everyday work of craftspeople who exemplify the two precepts Garner’s grandfather, a smith, gave him and that Garner has lived by as a writer ever since:

One was always take as long as the job tells you to take, because the job will be there when you are not, and you don't want people to say, what fool did that? So I'm a very slow worker. The other precept was if the other chap can do the job, let him. In other words, do only what is uniquely yours. (‘Interview with Alan Garner’, Raymond H Thompson, The Camelot Project, 1999)

And, yes, Garner is a slow worker. He spent seven years writing Red Shift, which recounts 1,000 years of events through three intersecting narratives, and 12 years writing Strandloper (which some consider his masterpiece), a book about William Buckley, who came from the Cheshire region Garner celebrates in his work and who spent 32 years with aborigines after being transported to Australia. Much of his writing time is taken up with research and the actual crafting of language and incident.


As an example of this process, for his book Elidor: ‘I had to read extensively textbooks on physics, Celtic symbolism, unicorns, medieval watermarks (and) megalithic archaeology…’ (Times Literary Supplement, 1968, quoted in ‘Wild Magic: Alan Garner’, Fabulous Realms website).


But back to the talk. Here are some other gems (scribbled down in my notebook in the dark of the auditorium):
  • Creativity is risk, play and intuition.
  • Creativity is not a job, but a state of being…in service to something else.
  • Art makes people feel.
  •  Intelligence observes immensities [as in the observations of the radio telescope at Jodrell Bank], and imagery [the work of art] translates the observations so they provide emotional understanding.
  • Imagery/art informs science, and the reverse.
  • Creativity is prayer…and prayer is a dialogue with the numinous.

After the talk, I lined up for his signature on my new copy of his latest and last book, Boneland, the novel that completes the story began in his first two books, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath. While these first two novels might be seen as YA fantasies (though Garner has always said he never writes for children), this last work, as with the novels since Red Shift, is adult and mythic. These later books may be difficult, ‘reader-unfriendly’ one critic asserted in a review of Thursbitch, but the joys of language and the rendition of the numinous await those who persevere.


After gaining the signature and chatting briefly with his wife, Griselda, about ‘the Australian book’, I drove back, with care, to Corris in my own ‘mythic realism’ experience—late at night, through mountains on a winding road, in rain that formed a tunnel in the headlights, and with temperatures just above zero—eager for the warmth of my studio and another encounter with Alan Garner’s rich, evocative, resonant writing.

By the way, I overheard someone say the talk will be published in one of the UK newspapers. When I find out more details, I’ll let you know.*

Until next time.

Pob Hwyl

Earl

(* The lecture can be found here.)

Tuesday 24 March 2015

Cyfaredd 2: First Days in Corris

Helo Bawb (Hello Everyone)

Two weeks ago I arrived at my residency in Corris. The weather here, being further north, is colder than it was in Bridge. On the second and third nights I froze so much I had to wear my thermals under my t-shirt and tracksuit, along with thick woollen bed socks. A day later, Veronica, who runs Stiwdio Maelor, told me about new snow on the mountains between here and Dolgellau, apparently a beautiful sight—no wonder I was so cold. The weather hasn’t been so bad since. We even had a few days of spring sunshine, so much so that people were sun-baking in bikinis, apparently, on the beach in Aberystwyth. From what I know of UK weather, I suppose the people here grab what sun they can get, even if the temperature is barely above ten degrees Celsius.

Anyway, just a little about the arrangement here. I have a bedroom and a writer’s studio, which has a desk, a comfortable office chair, a reading chair and footstool, and a small table on which I’ve stacked research books I’ve brought with me or have been borrowed from the local university for me. Also, three of Veronica's artworks for inspiration, if the landscape fails me. For your interest, here are some photos:

The view from my bed when I wake up.
The view from my desk. Forestry pine trees on the mountain.
My studio space
As for my routine, my days are filled mainly with ‘bum-on-seat’ as I try to nut out this next draft. I spent part of the first week on structural editing issues, prompted by my discovery of this editing framework a month or more ago: www.storygrid.com. However, I knew I had to get into the guts of the story eventually, so on the Friday of that week I started the actual re-writing/re-drafting. The going has been slow, because those issues I mentioned required me to go back to early chapters I had re-written back in Melbourne. I have also had to create some new chapters to fill in story holes I didn’t know I had till I started looking at structure. Only in the last day or so do I feel the work is picking up pace.

When I’m not in my studio, I go for walks, attend the Tuesday morning Beginning Welsh group I discovered in my first week, go shopping in the bigger towns nearby, or go to the pub next door, The Slaters Arms, to use the Wifi and chat with locals.

Some more photos, from some of my walks:

My first walk, up an old forestry track.
Bare trees, but tons of moss and fern further up the track.
Lower Corris, nestled in hills
View of Cader Idris. If you spend the night on the summit,
you come down either mad or a poet. Too late for some of us!
The only real annoyance here is that planes, helicopters and transports (from the RAF base on Ynys Mon, or Anglesey in English) roar low over the valley almost every day. The first time I heard one of these planes, I was shocked by the noise; by the end of the day, however, I became used to it. As someone fascinated from an early age by planes I have enjoyed watching the fighters bank and turn, plumes of engine exhaust trailing behind them, but generally I ignore the noise and get on with whatever I am doing.

Although I am concentrating on fiction during this residency, if poems come then I work on them. At the moment, though, I’ve only been gifted several haiku. Here’s one, prompted by a view out my studio window, after the sun came out for a while one morning, but the rest of the day was misty with a light rain:

mist drips
from beaks of jackdaws—
ticking water heaters

That’s about it till next time. As always, comments are welcome.

Hwyl (Bye)
Earl



Monday 16 March 2015

Cyfaredd 1: Visit to Bridge

Hi Everyone

Now that I have settled into my residency at Stiwdio Maelor in Corris, North Wales, I thought it time to report on my first few days in the UK, where winter is verging on spring.

Crocuses, one of the first signs of spring. 
Before I do that, just a word about the title of this posting. I have now been to this part of the world four times: to the USA, UK, Ireland and Europe in 2007 (with Jo); to the Yeats Summer School in Sligo, Ireland, in 2009; to England, Wales and Scotland in 2013, for a conference and for research; and now to the UK again, to visit the same three countries. As some of you know, I handwrite all my first drafts, whether of poems, stories, articles or memoirs, and then enter them into the computer afterwards. Whenever I’ve typed up the notes and journal entries for my previous trips I’ve given the project a name. The one I’m using for this trip is the Welsh word for enchantment, cyfaredd. I feel this word sums up what I hope to experience in England, Wales and Scotland as I work on the next draft of my novel, continue to research settings, and re-connect with what I see as my spiritual homeland.

Gracie (Mrs G), Simon and Lise's cute cat    
Now for my report. I arrived at Heathrow early on the morning of Thursday, 5 March, and headed straight down to Canterbury, then on to the little village of Bridge to stay with friends for a few days. I suffered a little from jetlag, but the many walks and inspiring conversations I had with Simon and Lise over-rode any tiredness I felt.

Unlike where I live in Melbourne, I can leave the house at Bridge and within a few minutes I am in the country. The one thing I like about walking in Britain is the use of right-of-ways. People have been walking alongside and across fields for centuries and it is illegal for farmers to block such common law tracks. And so we walked across fields filled with the song and ascending flight of skylarks—the first time I had ever heard or seen them—and past other fields where the first lambs hobbled on thin legs as they chased after their mothers and once there knocked at the teats to get a drink. Walking by another field, we watched a kestrel hover high above, waiting patiently for something small and tasty to make a sudden dash to safety. And at another field we saw a young fox break out from scrub, its square-like head (or so it seemed from our perspective) out of proportion to its red, black and white lean body.

One of the surprises about Bridge is the number of esoteric, literary, artistic, and historic associations either in the village itself or in surrounding areas. The co-designer of the Rider-Waite Tarot, A E Waite, lived his last years in the village and was buried in a nearby graveyard. Joseph Conrad lived for a time in the ‘Oswalds’, a house not far from the village. At the pub The Duck in Pett Bottom (what a wonderful name, though not as vivid as Lynsore Bottom), Ian Fleming wrote You Only Live Twice. And the sculptor Henry Moore lived for six years in a house in nearby Kingston.

The house in Bridge where A E Waite lived his last years.

The ‘Oswalds’, where Joseph Conrad once lived.

The Blue Plaque on the wall of The Duck.
The Blue Plaque for Henry Moore.
Given that one reason I am in this country is to experience the historic and mythic landscape I wish to evoke in my novel, Bridge also offered appropriate omens. Just outside the town is Old England’s Hole: a hollow in the landscape that is reputedly the site of the last battle between the British and Caesar. Naturally enough, it really should be called Old Britain’s Hole, the English (Angles, Saxons, etc.) not arriving on these shores until several hundred years after Caesar’s time. And nearby is a ridge that holds an Anglo-Saxon cemetery.

Old England's Hole. You can just see the lip of the hole.

The ridge that is the site of the Anglo-Saxon cemetery

A movie I took of the location of the 'hole' and the cemetery.
That’s about it for now. I hope you enjoyed this little tour of Bridge and environs. Any comments would be most welcome.

Pob hwyl (Welsh for ‘Bye’)
Earl