No More Drama

My Brilliant Career

2012-01-26T14:27:00.000Z

A few tips for approaching Parthian with your manuscript here.

Reports

2011-12-08T18:23:00.001Z

2011 commenced with an end. Three happy years over at New Welsh Review. In the trenches during a recession – and, in many ways, having among the very best times of my professional life. It’s rare I’ve left behind anything positive – and when I was relatively fulfilled. But it was an empowering move – and necessary, too. Poems have been written. Some still abide, in the shadows. More importantly, there was all that thinking, that sense of freedom. A beautiful artists’ book – aptly titled Uncertain Territories – came out in March, the product of a collaboration with artist Mary Modeen. It’s a deluxe book, and you can’t buy it on Amazon, alas; Mary and the master printer who worked it up to its extraordinary loveliness are the reasons why it deserves to sell at a premium, rather than the efforts of this humble poet. I've been proud to be a part of some great events. I've continued my quest to become First Great Western's (first ever) Gold Card Holder. (Only a few more years!) I've seen patient, splendid people receive, at last, the acclaim they deserve. Teaching is inspiring, I remember. I've taught some truly talented new and lovely poets – who've reminded me, once again, what it's really all about: magic, romance. And now, close of the year, and I have something I've wanted for a while – a list. We've exciting plans for the years ahead at Parthian. Great times, and I hope you'll come and share them with us. Our final title of this year is out now: Dannie Abse's autobiography Goodbye, Twentieth Century. It's brilliant, moving, hilarious – richly detailing an eventful life in Dannie's stylish prose.

****

My grandmother died. But while it hurt like hell (we were close, so close), one understands the ol’ river that is life. We hear it, we hear it – when we’re not busy ignoring it. And after the grief comes the staggering gratitude for all the luck, the crazy luck of it all. And one can say, ‘It was all gravy, wasn’t it? For us. And all that time.’ But it isn’t always so.

Our friend, Kelly – the wife of my friend John – was an extraordinary person. Firstly, let me tell you now – somewhat shallow of me, I know – that she was a true Irish beauty, a knockout: long dark hair, a wide smile... But she also possessed an interior beauty. Witty, clever, eccentric, steel in her strength. She was genuine loveliness and true grit. And there in her eyes, something deeper again: the record of a pilgrim soul. We met her when she fell in love with John. They enjoyed marvellous interplay. John’s incredible sense of humour was matched in an ideal partner. They adored one another. But Kelly discovered, not long into their marriage, that she had cancer. She approached her illness with great dignity and courage. I remember her – kindly, but very firmly – swatting my emotion when we shared coffee and pastries one day. She had no time for such saccharin. A true fighter, she kept her paws up. But cancer is no respecter of love or value, and, tragically, in July of this year, Kelly lost her battle. The order of things seemed disturbed. It was incredible that someone young and utterly gorgeous and productive and so important to so many could be lost, and lost so ruthlessly. But it happened. I knew Kelly for too short a time. But she made a big impact. Such is the power of the rare person. You rocked, Kelly.

****

Let’s live our lives, friends. And live them well, and full.

Happy Christmas.*

*Signing off until the New Year.

Poetry at the Royal Scottish Academy

2011-11-14T16:01:00.000Z

Any readers based in Edinburgh or Scotland way, the Poetry Beyond Text project is now being exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy. My contribution to the project is a selection of poems presented in an artists' book, with images from my wonderful, remarkably talented collaborator (and curator of the exhibition), Mary Modeen. Other work features splendid contributions from poets including Robin Robertson, Deryn Rees-Jones and John Burnside. Find out more here.

Work and Days

2011-11-07T16:23:00.004Z

I am delighted to say that I was appointed editor of Parthian at the beginning of this month. I'll be joined by Jon Gower as associate editor. Jon is a noted broadcaster, as well as a superb fictioneer, and I am so pleased to be working with him on what we hope will turn out to be another great chapter in Parthian's ongoing success story.

We are currently welcoming unsolicited submissions. If you're interested in finding out more about what we publish and/or how to submit, please visit the About Us section of the website, take a tour of some of our authors (ranging from Niall Griffiths to Stevie Davies to Rachel Trezise and so many more), and then carefully read our guidelines. Along the way, you might find you want to pick up one of our many award-winning and critically acclaimed titles as a winter warmer.

This blog will, of course, keep going; it always does. But if I am occasionally quiet, please bear with me. I am probably reading a great book. And you know where that can lead.

Sadeness (Part 3)

2011-10-15T12:31:00.005+01:00

I went to see Melancholia last night. What follows contains ample spoilers.

Melancholia is billed as 'a beautiful film about the end of the world'. Its opening sequence admittedly contains some ravishing and manipulative dreamscape tableaux: birds fall in slowmo from a hyperreal sky, electricity courses from the fingertips of hands raised to the universe in offering, a bride floats like Ophelia in a river. Add to that the overture from Tristan and Isolde cranked up to the max, and, for a moment, the disarmed viewer may be fooled into thinking that what will follow will be something of substance and great artistic commitment. But this opener is really nothing more than a money shot, a premature ejaculation – exploiting our tendency to fall for the bait and switch. It's an abuse of the cinematic contract.

'Part 1: Justine' has drawn unfavourable comparisons with Festen. That criticism seems somewhat unfair. Much of the tone appears to me to be borrowed, instead, from the marvellous and underseen Rachel Getting Married. But this latter film, with its intelligent and unstinting exploration of the seething hatred and passion within family life and its study of a personality in crisis, should have been enough to discourage von Trier in his attempts. If, indeed, he has seen it at all. For, unlike most great directors, von Trier seems to me to be anything but a cineaste.

Justine (Dunst) is, on the face of it, as we watch her and her new husband (Alexander Skarsgard) giggle in the back of their limo, an uncomplicated and beautiful bride. In a clunking metaphor for life, their gigantic white limo cannot negotiate the slender and steep incline of the dust road that will take them to their wedding reception at her sister's house. After many comical attempts at manoeuvring, they abandon the car and walk the road. Dunst, appearing bare foot at the venue, is roundly dressed down by her sister Claire (Gainsbourg), an apparent control freak who doesn't even bother to enquire what has happened to the couple. It is the first indication the viewer gets that Dunst is somehow trouble, and apparently a victim of circumstance with whom the viewer, at least, should side.

What follows amounts to perhaps the most boring wedding ever to be committed to any film I've seen. The cliches, and their offensiveness and triteness, come in short order: the loveable, but roguish father (Hurt) and the gimlet-eyed, toxic bitch-mother (Rampling), now divorced and simmering in their bile; the portrait of Claire, whose normalcy is really a cover for her neurosis; the long-suffering brother-in-law, John (Sutherland), who appears to hold everyone in contempt; the sweet little nephew who seems to be the only person Justine can reach out to. Unpleasant speeches are given.

Justine keeps disappearing from the proceedings. First for a cruise around the estate in a golf buggy. Then for a pee on the golf course. (She's sad, sad, sad.) Then for a heart-to-heart with her new husband who shows her a picture of a young apple orchard he's bought for them. (She's sad, sad, sad.) He tells her that when the trees are matured, he'll sit her under them. Maybe he'll build her a swing, too. No wonder she's depressed. 'Let's just wait and see what happens,' she tells him. Smart move. For, perhaps a moment too late, she seems to have realised that the two of them don't appear to belong in the same film. Things roll on. And on. She takes a long bath. She's back to cut the cake. Floating lanterns celebrating the young couple are sent out to the sky. Eventually, Justine's back on the golf course again – it's a magnetic pull for her, clearly. She's followed out by a new recruit to her advertising firm. His pursuit of her is a piece of pointless plotting that is not worth the outlining, save for the fact that it allows the hypocritical von Trier to insult the advertising industry which he has exploited to his great service time and again. Anyhow, back to this recruit. Justine throws him down to the ground. She mounts him and, enthusiastically, the two copulate. Off she goes, back to the house to moon over her onion soup and tell her boss (Stellan Skarsgaard) how much she utterly despises him. Shortly before dawn, her new husband, rather discomforted that Justine is underwhelmed by his apples, tells her he's off. And, just like that, the longest and shortest marriage in modern cinema is over.

Then we're on to 'Part 2: Claire'. (Are you still with me?) Now we see things from Claire's perspective. And mostly we see them from the house's terrace. But they are not much different. Time has elapsed. Justine has had a nervous breakdown. She is deeply depressed. We know this because she's chopped her long locks into a bob, won't bathe and declares that Claire's meatloaf 'tastes like ashes'. A planet is on its way in a fly-by – Melancholia – that has been hiding behind the sun. It's been hiding a long time. Father and son are excited about it. But Claire gets anxious about the planet. Despite her husband's assurances, she wonders whether it might actually collide with earth. Living in a world where there appears to be no TV or Radio, she is forced to look it up online. On a computer that looks rather like an Amstrad. And on a very early internet. While Claire is surfing and quietly freaking out (she stops washing her hair), Justine is perking up considerably. She begins making appearances on the terrace in cut-off jeans and sexy casual tops; she wanders off, naked, in the middle of the night to lie down on some rocks and circle one areola, basking in the blue glow of Melancholia. This is just one of the more tasteless and leering moments dressed up as credibility in the film, which also uses a depressive's resistance to being bathed to score von Trier a lingering shot of Dunst's breasts. Did Dunst think this was art?

The fly-by happens. The earth is still here. Claire's relieved. But watch out! It's behind you! And it's coming back! We discover this in an unintentionally laugh-out-loud moment, articulated by Sutherland's facial expression with all the subtlety of a Covent Garden mime artist. His certainty and rationality in tatters, he takes Claire's stash of 'suicide' pills, and goes off to die in the stables. Claire is remarkably calm when she discovers him. She covers him with straw and goes back to – where else? – the terrace. High Priestess Bore Justine lectures the now broken Claire, both of them mostly ignoring Claire's young son. 'Life is only on earth – and not for long'; 'The earth is evil – no one will miss it.' On and on she goes. Claire wonders what might be the right way to meet the end of the world. A glass of wine on the terrace, she suggests. But Justine is having none of it. Instead, she spends her last hours building a wigwam. Without a canvas. The trio sit in it and hold hands, as the CGI comes rolling towards them. The End.

This is not a beautiful film about the end of the world. It's an ugly, nasty film. It's filmmaking of the most juvenile kind possible. It's indulgence at the highest level. Von Trier has spoken openly about his battles with depression. Let's be clear: this film celebrates the condition of the depressive. It's an insult to anyone who has endured the bite of the black dog. It seems to suggest, even to the extent of endowing Justine with psychic powers, that depressives are special, an elect. It claims that depression is empowering. It says that depression is good and real. It glorifies the type of oblivion that most of us left behind long ago in our teenage room. But the problem is more than that. I don't believe for one moment von Trier believes any of it. He's making films, after all.

The dishonesty doesn't stop there, either. When Kubrick took Strauss's Blue Danube for 2001: A Space Odyssey, when Visconti took Mahler's Adagettio from his Fifth Symphony for Death in Venice, there was a sense of artists meeting across time, enriching and enhancing each other. A relationship. When von Trier takes one of the most beautiful pieces in the history of western music, ripe for the cinematic picking – the overture from Tristan and Isolde – he does so to lend ballast to his lightweight efforts. He uses – and abuses – Wagner to distract us from the pretentious emo twaddle he's dishing out. He gives us art, all right. But it's not his to take.

Where you come from

2011-09-21T13:43:00.007+01:00

I've worked out the problem with getting older. For a while, I thought it was the difficulty that wrinkles presented. Could I be a feminist and realistically contemplate getting a jab of Botox? Did I still have the right to enter the changing rooms of Topshop? But this year, it's all become so very clear. The problem with getting older is that people suddenly start dying more often. Great people.

This past weekend, my grandmother passed away. She was our family matriarch. She was also hilarious; much of that hilarity, it dawns on me now, more intentional than I had previously supposed. It's a kind of disenfranchised grief, in a way, losing the elderly. People are keen to pass off the death of those who enjoyed a long and relatively healthy life. It's as if you are meant to carry on regardless. If I once hear the old rejoinder 'She had a good innings,' I will not be responsible for my actions. The fact that someone is old or has 'lived their life' changes the selfishness of the bereaved not a jot. We want those we love to be with us forever. We fool ourselves until they are not there that they always will be. We want them to protect us. And this world is so replete with a lack of acceptance that their entire acceptance of us is worth more than any kind of success you can achieve in this world. I wish I'd noticed that earlier.

My grandmother did not have a grand life. Not in the way I used to think was grand. She went into service as a girl – yes, the world was really like that, and not so very long ago. She went on to become one of the best landladies in Wales. She loved the man in her life until he left her a widow in her 60s. She loved her daughter. In my father she found the son she never had. She adored her grandchildren. She worshipped her many brothers and sisters. But, of course, as we go through life, we recognise more keenly that great lives can often be small and small lives can often be very great indeed.

My grandmother's time in service led to a curious situation in which she was the only one of our clan ever to have lived in a stately home – Blenheim Palace, no less. She was evacuated there during the war, along with the upper-class girls who were schooled there and whose lives she made comfortable. 'They were lovely and so good to me,' she said, much to my class-conscious teen fury. We went back there in the 1980s, and she lovingly went through every room, remarking how little it had changed. Yes, she went back – as if it was yesterday, recalling her many duties with no hint of self-pity, but, instead, pride. She could explain more about the place than the guidebook we bought. It is with amusement now that I note that, during her period there, the yanks had also landed in the grounds and set up their camp. Nan viewed the era as a golden one in her life.

She married my grandfather, after he somehow managed to charm her, despite his enduring mischief – they met when, behind her in the queue, he exposed her ration fraud to a shopkeeper. They entered the pub trade and she became landlady of The Greyhound (a pub I re-imagined as The King's Head in a poem of mine). Neil Kinnock was a young radical, supping regularly. They both thought him a mouthy and disrespectful fake and later keenly pointed this out every time he appeared on the news, roundly mocked by commentators, in the 80s. My grandfather sacked Tom Jones and his then band (Tommy Scott and the Senators) from their appearances at the pub, thus freeing up the Welsh Pelvis's schedule, and allowing a bit of rock and roll history to happen. 'Tom Jones can't sing,' they both insisted. Many great people passed through their hours there.

But she was special to me because she was such a committed personality. Intractable in her beliefs, always exhibiting outward strength in times of great despair, unwavering in her devotion and loyalty to family and all that that meant and obligated one to. She was the perfect, textbook Welsh woman. Her support of me was enormous. She took great pride in my achievements, especially when I received my degree. And she could be quite uniquely ingenious in her magpie hunts around Swansea, once turning up a vintage issue of Poetry Wales she discovered in some car boot sale or other, just as I was starting to write my own poetry. 'It's perfect,' I told her. And it was. But not every discovery was quite so successful. The whole family found themselves regularly gifted with eccentric objects, most pretty useless – and she converted her living room, after my grandfather's passing, into a cave of bizarre delights. 'It's like santa's bloody grotto in here,' my brother once dryly observed. She laughed. She was impossible to offend and unconcerned with conformity.

There was no one quite like her. It's such a sad thing to lose someone who knew you and loved you your whole life. It's almost like a part of who you were then has been taken with them.

But here she is as a young girl, in a photo weathered through the time travel. She was remarkably pretty. And her good looks lasted her entire life. She was always very pleased about that. She was incredibly and amusingly vain. Perhaps her only flaw. Along with her bingo habit. And we loved her for it, and for everything.

Poetry and Places

2011-09-14T18:59:00.000+01:00

I've not updated that regularly over the last month or so. It's been an incredibly hectic time, with new projects and various secret missions. I intend to get back into my groove very, very shortly. And I have a review to post, too...

In the meantime, I've noticed that A Poet's Guide to Britain is currently being repeated and can be viewed on iPlayer. I contributed to the latest to be re-screened, on Lynette Roberts. It was a pleasure to be involved in the series, and Owen proved to be a terrific presenter. There's also a few other episodes still live on the Beeb website, so grab them while you can or buy on Amazon. You can also buy an accompanying anthology.

More soon.

Chief Executive of Literature Wales

2011-08-30T11:55:00.000+01:00

Following the departure of our gifted Chief Executive since 1998, Peter Finch, Literature Wales is now seeking to appoint a new leader to carry the organisation forward into an exciting and ambitious future.

We are seeking an individual with a raft of energy, creative and entrepreneurial flair, and the ability to provide a truly inspirational and visionary leadership which reaches out to all sections of our literary community and general public. This is a rare opportunity to lead literature provision, programming and appreciation at a time of great renaissance in the two literatures of Wales. The ability to speak Welsh is essential for this post.

For further details on the job description and how to apply click here.

Today

2011-08-08T16:54:00.003+01:00

Back from Spain, where there was gloriously nothing to do – except to swim in the Med, read, let Sangria warmly rise to the head in a lovely tapas bar and play cards on the terrace. All this while the waves rushed and retreated. I think I am coming to understand the true purpose of holidays more and more as time passes.

So, safely returned, if somewhat depressed.

And then, at about 4am on Sunday morning: sirens. Around the corner from us, the local boyz were tearing up the neighbourhood. Some even apparently brought along shopping trolleys, clearly wedded to Baden-Powell's dictum: Be Prepared! Chief in their sights: JD Sports and our local, remarkably enlightened HMV, which does a good line in more specialist fayre (I once even discovered not one but two copies of the Director's Cut of Reds) and has a wonderful staff straight out of Kevin Smith central casting (and I mean that in the best sense). The boyz apparently went for the trainers first and the XBoxes second. That makes sense. They also managed to cover most of the high road in coat hangers and mannequins from H&M and further attenuate the fortunes of local independent shopkeepers on their way home. Your intrepid reporter, it must be said, did not get out of bed as witness, but, instead, refreshed on Twitter from safely under the duvet. The future of all news reporting. The next morning, I awoke with the strangest dream fresh in the mind: it was 1980-something and I was in love with Mickey Rourke and the country was in tur–... Well, there's no place like home. And sometimes, home is, indeed, so sad.

In other news, I am delighted to be joining Parthian Books as an Associate Editor. I've long admired Parthian's style and substance; as discoverer of some of the finest fresh talent around, Parthian has published authors who have gone on to major wins and shortlistings for some of the biggest prizes, including Wales Book of the Year, the Betty Trask, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and The Orange Futures Prize. Great to be a part of a visionary indie that fuses the contemporary line with tradition (in the shape of the Library of Wales series) and the homegrown with the international (as a notable source of quality fiction in translation). I'll be working on a number of projects for the publisher, including a new poetry series. More details on the Parthian website and this blog at the end of the month.

Tomorrow

2011-07-19T13:03:00.000+01:00

This one goes out to Rebekah Brooks. Like Simone de Beauvoir, she studied at the Sorbonne; unlike Simone de Beauvoir, she didn't complete her studies. I should add that the song has nothing whatsoever to do with Simone de Beauvoir or, indeed, Rebekah Brooks. But this is my inch-raised platform. I have found yawping the following keywords over the original track an aid to pleasure: Chipping Norton, Cheshire and Cameron.

I am off to get a suntan at the end of the week. But I'll be back with the usual in a few weeks, and I'll also be posting a review of Tamar Yoseloff's The City with Horns, which I have been meaning to do for ages. A very fine poet, so she is, and I'll explain why I think that in August.

Mañana.

For Once

2011-07-14T10:29:00.000+01:00

Last Saturday I went to see Tim Price's For Once at the Hampstead Theatre. Tim's a young playwright and screenwriter (TV credits including EastEnders and his award-winning drama for S4C, Y Pris). He's been making waves as a talent in Wales for some time – and has also been making his own unique contribution to its theatre scene with the highly successful Dirty Protest company, which brings together new and established playwrights showcasing spanking hot-off-the-keyboard work in a... Mongolian yurt. Yes, a Mongolian yurt. For Once marks the first in a trio of major premieres of his work, including The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning – which has recently been commissioned by National Theatre Wales.

For Once is a three-hander study in provincial despair; a play meditating on the difficulties of access to communication, honesty and love from those we need the very most. The play's starting point is the aftermath of a car crash, as Sid, the lone surviving teenager among his best friends, struggles with guilt – while his parents April and Gordon scramble to recapture a normalcy for him and for themselves that none of them, we discover, ever really possessed in the first place. As well as highlighting the stark reality of interplay, that extreme events tend to expose rather than derange existing human relationships, the play's complementary theme is the difficulty of being young in the apparently idealistic setting of villages or small towns. Denied excitement in controlled environments, there is nothing to do but drive fast and drive dangerously, to nowhere. Mr Cameron, are you listening?

If this sounds bleak – well, at times, it is. The static set of a kitchen-diner area holds the characters suspended in their own frustratingly separate and yet united existences, and, in what is surely a fond nod to Osborne, an ironing board on which April rhythmically steams away at her husband's shirts in anger and sorrow almost becomes a fourth character. But the play is distinguished by a rich humour, too. For even in tragedy – and sometimes especially in it – there can still be levity. Laughs about a labrador dog called 'Neil', middle-aged women who wear wooden jewellery and ludicrous middle-class pomposity all add to an impressive mix.

Comes highly recommended. For Once runs to 30th July. Visit the Hampstead Theatre website for more details.

Wales Book of the Year announced

2011-07-08T14:44:00.000+01:00

The Wales Book of the Year 2011 was announced last night. The gong went to Parthian author John Harrison – a remarkable travel writer – for Cloud Road, a book recounting his adventures walking the great road of the Incas, the Camino Real. John's a very nice man as well as being accomplished. This recognition of his work is pleasing indeed – and it comes with a £10,000 cheque, too, which is always handy for a writer. Also on the shortlist were Alistair Reynolds, for his SF novel Terminal World, and the unique Pascale Petit, for her arresting verse biography of Frida Kahlo, What the Water Gave Me – a poetry collection from 2010 which I've especially admired.

It was heartening to see such an intelligent but varied collection of books and genres from the judges – from the longlist right through to the shortlist. Francesca Rhydderch, Jon Gower and Deborah Kay Davies have done, I think, a very fine job of producing a list of books from Wales or with Welsh connections that reminds us all of the leaps and bounds our literature has made since the renaissance that began a decade ago.

I should add that the Readers' Choice Award went to Tyler Keevil for Fireball. If you haven't read it yet, then do. It's a wonderful, gripping, moving, coming-of-age novel, with echoes of Hinton's The Outsiders, King's The Body (later made into the iconic film Stand by Me) and Nicholas Ray's star-making Rebel Without a Cause. In a wonderful twist on our open and international nation, Tyler's a Canadian, the book is set in Vancouver, and he's published by Wales's Parthian Books. I interviewed Tyler last year, and it proved to be one of the most enjoyable conversations I've ever had with an author about their book. He knows what he's about and what the work is about. Good luck to him with his future projects.

So: congratulations to the winners. And congratulations to all those who made their way onto the longlist in such a vintage year.

You can find out more here. And to discover more about Literature Wales which administers the Wales Book of the Year, among many other crucial activities in promoting Welsh literature, click here.

Is the future Google+?

2011-06-30T12:48:00.000+01:00

So: currently being rolled out on limited trial is Google+ (what creative genius hit upon such an utterly marvellous name?), a new networking site that claims to offer greater ease at interface and greater ability to control how we share, and how much, to various individuals in 'circles of our lives'. 'Circles of our lives' sounding remarkably like a line from 'The Windmills of Your Mind'.

Facebook's current privacy controls are a darned nuisance. It's all or nothing, basically – which presents us with sticky situations as regards the way the personal, professional and, sometimes, political tend to all converge these days on Facebook – a problem only likely to further complicate, rather than simplify, our lives. We may want close friends to share in last night's escapades, but we may not want others in our lives to be so well informed. On the other hand, we may want everyone to share our joy in winning Employee of the Year. Facebook, at present, only gives us the ability to share or not share updates. Period. Sharing photos to select groups will also, apparently, be far simpler than on Facebook. So it may be an end to the inner critic and the inner censor. A good thing? Erm. Discuss. But I can see the potential attraction of Google+ – particularly for the younger generation. Also for those, like myself, who seek to increasingly use social networking as a one-stop shop: a way to maintain their friendships – but also stay connected to people in their workplace or in their field (this latter objective unsatisfied by LinkedIn).

The worry, for those who love social networking but also fear disclosure (well, paradoxically, don't we all?), is that Google+ will encourage more information sharing, albeit to different 'circles' of our lives, than ever before. A feeling that you're 'safe'. Of course, you will be safe from certain people in your life knowing The Last Detail, but Google+ will know all. Google's start-up mantra was 'Don't be evil'. But how many still believe that? And then there's the option, rather strangely lauded and welcomed by Google+, to not use real names. We know that this happens on Facebook, but it is important that it is against Facebook's T&C and can get you booted off. Just seeing the headmaster's ruler on the table can be a powerful thing, sometimes. I can see avenues lined with sleaze and cans of spam in such a lax approach to user management. And what about online harassment?

Google+ also offers solid, additional features that I've been long looking for in Facebook's evolution – but which have so far failed to materialise. Better and tailored streaming, for instance. And video chat would help me dispense with the need for Skype. Like Facebook Chat, video chat on Google+ will allow you to create controls for your availability to other users. And you can even group chat. I certainly actively use Facebook at present to keep in touch with friends in this great world, at home and abroad. I'd like to see their faces, too. I'd like to talk. And update. And comment. And like. All at the same time.

Or perhaps, on second thoughts, I wouldn't.

At present, I can't tell you how it is. I am not one of the gilded selected to try and to feed their experience back. But it's coming soon. And, as we speak, Zuckerberg's geeks are locked in a little room somewhere in Menlo Park, with beer bombs and the clock ticking. A piece on it here.

Update: I now have an invite, so I will report anon!

On Meetings with Great Men

2011-06-28T17:42:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I met with Dannie Abse. It was business. But it was also a very great pleasure. Despite my dealings in the literary scene in Wales, Dannie and I have never before met.

Dannie has special significance for me. Way back in 1999, then a journeywoman poet (which I still am, which I always will be), a close friend had gifted me Dannie’s Twentieth Century Anglo-Welsh Poetry, an anthology containing many names regrettably no longer with us. I devoured the book, and it became my springboard to enter a poetry I had had little acquaintance with at school, save for, of course, the ubiquitous two Thomases. It's a remarkably balanced anthology. R. S. and Dylan do not dominate, for one thing. And some great women poets to be found. In those pages, I formed my first friendships with certain poets who later became friends in person. And I discovered the work of the late, Swansea-born John Ormond, a poet I remain tremendously affected by and one responsible for two marvellous poems that have stayed with me since a first reading: the witty ‘Cathedral Builders’ and a celebration of Eros in marriage, ‘Design for a Quilt’. (A Collected of Ormond’s work is, incidentally, forthcoming from Seren, edited by Michael Collins – and I am glad to hear this.)

Later, Dannie would become important to me again. For he was instrumental in the foundation of Seren (in its early days, Poetry Wales Press): the press had initially operated out of a room at his house in Ogmore-by-Sea. And Seren became my home in 2004.

That summer following publication of my first collection, I went up to The Wordsworth Trust to read with Welsh star and friend Owen Sheers (though that was our first encounter). He was poet-in-residence at the time. We were both, I think – if I can speak for him, too – slightly starstruck to see, there in the audience, the great man Michael Foot. Michael, through the 80s, had been an early hero of mine. A maverick who had possessed a mind the size of some gigantic, as yet undiscovered planet, and who, it is whispered, was the only political sparring partner that made the Iron Lady frightened in debate. I had loved him and defended him passionately from detractors at school and later at university. So there we were. I took to the platform, six months pregnant and utterly terrified. I tried not to look at Foot, who looked up, politely, attentively. But there he was. And there I was, declaiming in front of one of the greatest political orators of the twentieth century. It was, shall we say, a tough gig. I am not sure I was equal to the task.

Later, at dinner, I found myself sitting next to him. We chatted. He told me that he liked my work. I was grateful for his kindness, but I suspected that he was putting the trembling young woman at ease. Then, a month after the reading, I received, through the post, a copy of his Uncollected Michael Foot, forwarded by The Wordsworth Trust. It’s a fantastic book. Michael had written as inscription: ‘For Kathryn Gray: August 2004. Good luck. See P.353.’ I was touched to tears that he had, given his enormous health difficulties at that time, taken such particular care and kindness with an insecure young poet. I made a mental note for the future – if the future ever happened to me. Action really is character. I turned to the page. It was a typically brilliant review he had done for the Observer back in 1997 – of Dannie’s Twentieth Century Anglo-Welsh Poetry. Title: ‘Wales to the World.’ Perhaps the phrase I’ve been repeating as a mantra ever since. How funny, I thought then. I took it as, somehow, meaningful for me – such is the arrogance unavoidable in youthful ambition, made worse by a sense of inadequacy, deep down. Now, I see it as meaningful for us all. The correct interpretation, my friends. But you knew that already.

Meeting Dannie yesterday, I was struck by his cheer and his informality and interestedness. He’s also tremendously witty. Here was one of the elder statesmen of literature, a man who has been friend to them all – and we chatted as if we had known each other years. But, I thought, this is how you become a true success. Not by prizes alone, though, as we know, Dannie has collected many over the years. But by the way you are. By the grace. By being kind to great and small. By surviving the slings and arrows of the literary world – or in Michael’s lifetime, and perhaps even more challenging, the political world – with your integrity and your heart intact.

Dannie is 87 but shows no signs of slowing. Parthian, as part of the accclaimed Library of Wales series, will republish his incredibly engaging, moving and often hilarious autobiography Goodbye, Twentieth Century in the autumn of this year, which will also include a generous epilogue, taking in a momentous past decade. Look out for it.

When great things happen to great people

2011-06-23T16:04:00.000+01:00

Today I enjoyed a wonderful lunch at the offices of Faber & Faber to celebrate poet Kona Macphee's award of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Fine food, convivial company, and some familiar, lovely faces. I was not the only person present to comment: 'Why can't we do this every day?'

Kona joins a distinguished list of poets who have won this coveted prize (it alternates between poetry and fiction), including Seamus Heaney, Hugo Williams, Tony Harrison, Alice Oswald, Paul Muldoon, John Burnside, Michael Hofmann, Geoffrey Hill, Don Paterson, Kathleen Jamie, Greta Stoddart, Glyn Maxwell, and my late, great teacher Michael Donaghy – Obi-Wan Kenobi of an almost entire generation of younger poets. Kona received the prize in recognition of a splendid second collection, Perfect Blue.

Kona and I go way back to 2001. The two of us appeared together in the anthology Anvil New Poets 3. It is difficult to convey now my joy then when first I held that anthology in my hands – oh, how clever I am! – or my shame when I leafed through and happened upon two devastating lines: 'He grips the gather of her waist / and pours her like a ewer into dance.' At the foot of the page, the poet's name: Kona Macphee. I was so utterly incapable of such concise, entirely apt and beautiful imagery. The sophistication was staggering. Reading further, the depression simply grew. Kona Macphee, I thought, you are just too annoyingly talented. But, as with all true talents, Kona is a terrific person, with humility, generosity and a rich sense of humour.

Kona published a first, acclaimed collection, Tails, in 2004. And, in 2010, she followed this with Perfect Blue. I published some poems which later appeared in the collection in New Welsh Review, so I had an indication that Perfect Blue was going to be a book of incredible quality, integrity and maturity. And so it is. I am thrilled that Kona has won this award, which will push her to the front of things – where she belongs. Buy the book!

What happens to the past

2011-06-20T15:04:00.000+01:00

Technology. Double-edged. As someone who works from home, it's true that I find Facebook, for example, indispensable. It connects me; it makes me feel part of a community, now that I'm far from the watercooler moments of office life, the beautiful communal suffering of the morning-long meeting, the quips around the kettle. It has its downsides, too. Facebook means that you can never quite run from the past. Vexations to the spirit you've long since wisely dispensed with In Real Life linger there, reminding you of Bad Things, like being angry. Being angry with the past. I spied, recently, by accident, a friend that I'd parted ways with some time ago. There they were, their reckless happiness beaming out. They had wronged me – terribly, irrevocably, without apology. But there they were, happy and living their life! The noive! And then there's the shock of one particular friend suggestion: the boy who took me to Rain Man in 1988, whose reaction to my sensitively conveyed decision not to take our non-relationship any further resulted in some choice malicious slander that went on for years and years. I didn't think much of the film, either. Is he still the person he was then? I take no chances – with his psychic stability or his taste in cinema. Block! And yet, there he is: on the block, on ice. He's still there. Life goes on – or does it?

But, once upon a time, we did want to go back, we really did – even as we were in the moment. Affordable home filmmaking. A revolution of the 70s that has preserved us as we were, as we will always somehow be. My old schoolfriend Rich posted this wonderful video of his fifth birthday. I can be spotted in the opening frames, the chubby little girl sitting on the sofa to the left, wearing a fetching maxi party dress, staring off into the middle distance and then spontaneously jumping, as was my wont. I can subsequently be identified as one of the first in line for the scram. Life was so simple then: behold on the table, a plate of Pink Wafers!

Ends

2011-06-15T00:00:00.000+01:00

So now: the human heart.

One of the finest intellectual and social experiments of my life was when I went up to read German, way back in the day, at Bristol University. I was a wide-eyed Swansea girl – all too plain and noticeably brunette against the ponytailed young blonde goddesses who strode along Woodland Road, chased by young men inevitably called Toby. I also wore a lot of tie-dye. So it was an intimidating experience at first, particularly when one friendly girl in halls – with a foghorn voice that would give Celia Johnson a run for her vowels and a physique on her that assured me that I would prefer a climb in the Andes over a hockey match with her – confessed one evening that she couldn't understand me very well. I can't remember if it was that night or the night after that my accent began to accommodate. Whatever, the unsuccessful result is that when I go home to Wales I am considered English and when in England I am considered Welsh... And wherever I am, I don't know what accent I do have, exactly. But I made some terrific friends at Bristol, across the social spectrum. It was one of the happiest times of my life.

And I was fortunate to have entered an academic department that was simply fantastic. I've never forgotten the great tutors I had during those formative years, who genuinely helped to shape my ambition and my values, and who made it very clear to me that you didn't require a fee-paid secondary education to excel with them. Among these was an academic, Professor Frank Shaw. Frank was one of the two people who ignited an improbable and lasting passion for Medieval Literature in me. He was a kind and generous man, and one who combined an outstanding erudition with patient compassion for the lesser mortals that passed through his dedicated life, such as myself. He encouraged me greatly, once taking me aside to tell me I should go on to study in the field following a paper I had given. As an insecure young woman back then, it felt like permission. And, of course, it was. I set my mind to it.

I did go on to study in the field, but I never did become the academic of his example. I found, as we do in life, that I had wanted something different after all. And, it seems, I may have found it. But I never forgot his influence. He occurred to me especially this evening, and I thought that I might drop him a line, on a sentimental whim. Not sentimental after all, it turns out – but too long overdue. For I found that he had unexpectedly passed away in the spring. He was a true Mensch. I owe him a lot. We'll settle the balance, I hope, in the great hereafter, over a glass of wine and the Nibelungenlied.

On the Thought of Frivolous Things

2011-06-10T17:16:00.000+01:00

I have been away. I have been here, there and everywhere. Moving furniture behind the scenes. Metaphorically speaking. Of which, I can say no more. I would sleep, but there is still more work to do. It is exciting work. So I cannot complain. I'll update this blog with some bits and bobs of the usual persuasion soon. But that is for week commencing 13/06/11. Monday.

I will leave you with this thought. Behold my most treasured of shoes! I fondled them earlier. Couldn't help it. I do this periodically.

See how forlorn they look without me in them, dancing. But their time will come! I'll take them to Paris, and we'll stay up late – listening to bad acid jazz, drinking Ricard. I am just not sure when. For the time being, there is hope, love and always, always books.

Happy Weekend! And more next week!

A roll in the Hay

2011-05-31T11:45:00.000+01:00

Wonderful events at Hay this year; I enjoyed the company of Reza Aslan, Dinaw Mengestu and Mohsin Hamid. Three writers who, in their various ways, tackle difficult subject matter with courage and true style.

One of the most remarkable things about Hay is the sense of intimacy, the lack of grandeur. Offstage, Mohsin and I chatted about his great mentor, Toni Morrison, and how his contact with her gave him a sense of belonging and ownership of his talent. But it was a tribute to his real class that he seemed as interested in my life as in discussing his own. His charisma on the stage was mesmerising, as he talked candidly about controversy, hash and the realities of contemporary Pakistani life for the young. If you haven't read his books, then do. Moth Smoke, which we were discussing, is a gripping noir, with corruption and an infernal, eternal triangle at its heart. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which was Man Booker shortlisted, is a monologue that challenges the reader's own ideas of justification and reasonableness, and tackles the post 9/11 world with a personal history – though not, I should emphasise, Mohsin's own.

Mohsin was reading and talking to a packed-out audience alongside Ethiopian-American author Dinaw Mengestu. Dinaw's first novel was Children of the Revolution, which garnered prizes and critical admiration galore, and took the Guardian First Book Award in 2007. He was humble, softly spoken and ailing terribly with a sore throat. Our wonderful young steward was trying to hunt down some Strepsils, to no avail. Sans Strepsils, Dinaw nevertheless went on stage and floored the audience with a superb delivery of excerpts from his haunting novel How to Read the Air. A must-read book, and one that has true reach. While the legacy of immigration anchors the narrative, this is a novel that is of interest to anyone who has ever thought about how their parents' pathology repeats within their own – or how they are fugitives from it – and one that considers the use and abuse of fictions in our lives. The wind repeatedly struck our tent, but it only seemed to contribute to the atmosphere and the themes under discussion.

The night before, I discussed Reza Aslan's superb anthology Tablet and Pen. Reza is an intellectual giant, but one who is also in possession of a large heart and a fantastic sense of humour. Anyone seeking po-faced worthiness would have been disappointed. Our event was full of optimism, mixing the seriousness of this activist enterprise with a welcome levity. Knowledge and education were great, Reza noted, but without the arts cultural understanding and the sense of a shared humanity would always elude us. He regarded his anthology as another hopeful step along the way towards establishing the literature of the Middle East in the canon of world literature. Sample highlights under consideration were the hidden histories of women poets, fatwas, the truth about the green revolution in Iran, and the future of East-West relations.

Meanwhile, in the Green Room, I might have missed Mr Rob Lowe, having arrived an hour too late to deconstruct St Elmo's Fire (regular readers of this blog will have noted my passion for the film and for Lowe's place in it), but I swooned over one of my favourite maverick directors, none other than John Waters. Impossible fangirl, I couldn't muster up the courage to speak to him. A missed moment to file under 'Regret'. I bumped into friend Tiffany Murray – brilliant novelist and brilliant person, to boot. Henning Mankell, Scandinavian king of noir and creator of the Wallander mystery novels, was one of the highlights of the day, and sat quietly, with super-charged charisma. Owen Sheers had just enjoyed a fantastic event with Don Paterson. And noted journalists drank lots of coffee. There was much laughter.

At breakfast on the last day, in my pretty lodgings, I sat around a table with the distinguished author, journalist and co-writer of The King's Speech (book of the film), Peter Conradi, and the marvellous Polly Toynbee. Both were charming, down-to-earth and very witty. Another example of the many surreal and wonderful moments I've experienced at Hay over the years. And to think, I might have become a medievalist. Praise be for the road not taken.

Returns

2011-05-23T13:53:00.000+01:00

I've not updated recently. Unfortunately, eleven days ago, my MacBook's hard drive decided to preempt The Rapture and is, as they say, outta here. The geniuses at the Genius Bar in Regent Street have replaced it with a new brain. A new brain that now needs to be trained. This is my third Apple désastre; as they go, I'd rate it a 3/10. So that's some improvement. I've been relying on my iPhone to maintain contact with the outside world. Needless to say, where once I had a right hand, I now have a thrawn claw. But am I smiling? Why, yes!

It's all been happening in the meantime. Or has it? Well, The Rapture didn't. But given that the failed prophet went by the name of Harold Camping, you'd have thought more questions would have been asked ahead of The Time, even by the impossibly gullible. No win, then, for Camping. Or for his disciples. But a big win for the insurance companies offering Post-Rapture Care for Pets.

In other news, a storm in an egg cup has broken over Carmen Callil's retirement from the panel of judges for the International Man Booker Prize, in protest at Philip Roth's win. Callil has since pronounced that '[he] goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It's as though he's sitting on your face and you can't breathe.' Is this, though, not the quality of every great writer (though striking the sit on my face image, to spare Jane Austen's blushes)? You may now turn over your paper and begin. The public jury is out whether or not silence is golden, and whether or not Callil's retirement from the panel was sufficient to register her clear annoyance at Roth's honour. In any case, the issue goes on. And on. Social media has much to answer for.

Being apart from the Mac over the last eleven days has had its definite upside. For one thing, I've been able to lose myself in a truly engaging, beautiful and challenging anthology that records the twentieth century in the Middle East through literature. Edited by noted writer, scholar and activist Reza Aslan, Tablet and Pen is a remarkable and handsome book from Norton that takes the reader away from the hackneyed and so fatal view of the Middle East as a uniform, extremist region and towards a sophisticated and often enlightening vision of a rich political, social, cultural and artistic mosaic. Of particular note is the role women have played in the latter part of the twentieth century in shaping the literary landscape. I'll be talking with Reza this Saturday evening at the Hay Festiva l about the anthology, its contributors and their various contexts, and the power literature has to build bridges across cultures, to help us locate a shared humanity and to keep us clear of the easy backslide into prejudice. Do join us if you can.

Girls and Boys

2011-05-07T15:38:00.000+01:00

Hard on the heels of the female character tropes flowchart I am so keen on: a recent study on gender imbalance regarding characters in children's literature, reported by the Guardian. There are all sorts of counter-arguments, of course. Most pertinent would be the degree to which male characters in young children's fiction act as default, factory-setting for efficiently involving both girls and boys at the same time. Boys seem to care a great deal about directly identifying and appear to require a male lead to ensure involvement. Girls are less fussy in this respect, which is perhaps just as well if they wish to grow up sane. I'm not saying it's right.

In fact, in film, too, the pattern remains and seems to persist into adulthood. There is, of course, one notable exception to this: the horror genre. Carol J. Clover's classic research has told us a lot about the way we view horror when it incorporates the final girl. It was once assumed that the final girl trope amounted to an eroticised form of violence against women. But Clover knew there was something wrong with that line. Final girls triumph. They often humiliate the killer in the process, as well as managing to top him by some creative means and often with some sort of phallic symbol. Clover discovered that men seemed not only to identify with the female lead, they actually seemed to identify more strongly than the female viewers did. Although initial identification seems to be with the killer (typically reinforced by camera angles of view), a transition occurs. The male viewer starts to connect with the female in peril (again, typically reinforced by camera angles of view). And he cheers for her.

Of course, in order to achieve this, final girls come with their problems. They are usually christened with a unisex name or even a name more commonly associated with a male. They do not drink, take drugs, party or seem to have any fun at all; meanwhile across town all the bad girls and boys are living it up – before they are brutally felled. They are always virgins, with the strong suggestion that sex terrifies them. They can therefore almost be thought to represent a virtually pre-sexualised male in some respect and perhaps even a distorted, funhouse mirror of self-objectification and gender exploration, rather similar to the questing boys of Medieval romances (it's no coincidence that Clover is a medievalist). Final girls offer a way for men to own terror, disempowerment and sexual anxiety in a safe place. Action films, by contrast, do not function in this way: they tend to embody, in very explicit ways, wish fulfillment. Horror films exhibit the traits of the nightmare remembered. They end in victory but with a sense that resolution and relief are only temporary (as long-running horror franchises seem to confirm). Even in victory, there is a sense not of optimism – but of loss. A kind of trangression has taken place on film and within the audience, and, for now, all must return to normalcy.

But I digress. Forgive me. Back to the original point. It may well be that in young children's fiction the gender imbalance is troubling and plain disappointing. But girls get it good eventually. We can claim the heroines of Anne Shirley and Jo March as our own final girls: true survivors and role models both, and not a chainsaw in sight.

Only Troping

2011-05-04T11:12:00.000+01:00

I have a weakness for popular culture – specifically, popular culture through the media of film and TV. For a time, I walked in secret shame. Discovering David Foster Wallace was a revelation. And you can imagine my relief at learning that his posthumously published The Pale King references, of all things, my favourite female buddy trope of all: Laverne and Shirley.

So, tropes. Shorthanding set-up and character, they're the stuff that crowds and flows on whiteboards of the stressed-out writers' room for hit shows from Mad Men to Grey's Anatomy, that distills story for the Hollywood execs who want to know what it's about in less than three minutes (a satire on which style is inelegantly provided in Reservoir Dogs, where the group consider the meaning of Madonna's completely obvious hit single Like a Virgin). Tropes are life represented to us as we are happy to see it, and how tropes are brought together in their magical arrangements explains why Friends was a cultural moment and why Joey, its spin-off, tanked. They also show us why so many TV series lose their mojo the minute that the potentially romantic leads get theirs on. In a wiki that would seriously impress Vladimir Propp, TV Tropes brings together the stock devices in plot and character; it's an amusing read, but it's also an insightful one, whether you're interested in screen – or whether you're a fictioneer.

My more recent discovery of another site, Overthinking It, has led me to the wonderful female characters trope flowchart. It's tremendous fun. But it also gives food for thought. Try it out on your favourite females from film, TV and fiction, and see for yourself how hard it is to land on 'Strong Female Character'.

Batuman on The Russians

2011-04-25T10:37:00.000+01:00

The Better Half does much of the work online – so I don't have to. Wired up to Twitter, bookmarked to the max and frantically paperchasing his way through the library of the net, he's constantly editing out the bad in the virtual world. He's a kind of literary-political Kevin Flynn from Tron.

His latest, lovely discovery is Elif Batuman. Her 2010 US bestseller The Possessed is a personal and intellectual exploration of Russian literature. It should, therefore, be right up my street and appears now in a handsome UK edition, published by the always imaginative book wing of Granta. Batuman has a witty piece in the Guardian on how life changes – and stays the same – after a bestseller, including an amusing fangirl anecdote about an encounter with Jonathan Franzen. She also has this great blog, fizzing with sparkle, smart and irreverence.

Canned

2011-04-20T09:42:00.000+01:00

Just recently, I received the latest in a series of poems from some chap more persistent than Jessica Walter in Play Misty for Me. I should add this is not professional, paid business. I should add, too, that this man is not my friend. And we have never even met. No, he's my Facebook friend. With only the most tenuous of links with me. Don't judge me. Keep sharing. But wait until you've finished reading this.

Anyhow, along comes this poem. You're probably familiar with the type. A poem that seeks to make The Waste Land look like a lyrical bus stop epiphany or the sort of thing you trumpet after a Sunday roast. Everybody knows that the way one goes about this is by using densely packed abstractions over many, many lines. And then, what you do, you Facebook message this poem to everybody on your Facebook friends list. C'mon! Don't be shy. I mean EVERYBODY. And then, what you do, you email them Part II. Because what they don't know is – there is a PART II. The true spirit of 'I'll show you mine again and again, don't bother to show me yours – for I am not interested!' virtually animated.

I scrolled to the end of Part II (for he had followed the counsel above with Ice Man precision): 'What do you think?'

I paused. I realised this was not part of the poem. A gut feeling. So I thought about it. And I thought. 'Shit,' I thought.

But I didn't have the heart to tell him. Facebook implicates one in the strangest ways. For example, to do this would be to admit to myself that I had accepted his Friend Request in the first place out of some strange concoction of illogical pressure, idiocy and cowardice that some therapist would probably ascribe to object relations theory. And that I should feel duly soiled as a result. Mind you – cowardice can be useful. Yeah! I could report him. He'll never know! One click is all it takes! That'll learn him! But no. I didn't have the heart for that either. The world is out there, and we all call to it. Sirens are the tragedy – not the sailors. Even as I type.

Fortunately, there is always one who nails it: 'You stink you spam. Reported.'

On Loving Children of a Lesser God (1986)

2011-04-19T11:45:00.000+01:00

Children of a Lesser God is only the second film ever made by mainstream Hollywood to consider the experience of deafness in an often hostile world. The first was Johnny Belinda, made in 1948 and starring Jane Wyman. Both films examine the conflicts between assimilation and difference, and both challenge the patronage – and tyranny – of the hearing world over the non-hearing. In both films, the female protagonists live through extreme sexual abuse. But there the pictures diverge, with Children of a Lesser God offering a complicated, funny and often very moving portrait of a spirited and tortured heroine in Sarah Norman (Marlee Matlin).

When speech teacher James Leeds (William Hurt) takes up appointment at a school for the deaf in a remote part of New England, he seems, for the moment, the stereotypical trope made flesh: maverick teacher with a heart of gold who will come up against authority and transform lives. On a first viewing, one's heart initially begins to sink. But we will learn there is more to him, and there is much more to the story than that. Certainly, James believes in the empowerment that the spoken word offers. He is an evangelizer with unorthodox means. He teaches his young charges to speak through engaging them with the popular culture they enjoy but feel marginalised from, he teaches them how to chat up the opposite sex, he freely encourages a vocabulary liberally sprinkled with Anglo-Saxon, and, with the aid of enormous sound speakers cranked to the max, he teaches them to sing. I mentioned that sinking heart. Well, we soon come to see that as much as James's warm approaches to the beauty of speech and to helping his young deaf students make their way in the hearing world may be good things, they may spell wrongness – and selfishness, too.

Early on, in the school canteen eating lunch with other staff, James sees a beautiful young woman having an altercation in the kitchen with a chef. She is letting go of profanity after profanity with wildly gesticulating hands (one of many poetic and witty depictions of the beauty of sign language). James is intrigued. He learns that she is Sarah, a former student of the school, who, despite her clear intelligence, stayed on after graduating and well into adulthood to become the cleaner. James initially – albeit good-naturedly – sees her as a project. Several times he attempts to engage her in lessons. He wants to teach her to speak, to assimilate. She rejects his patronage and turns the tables, mocking his relatively poor signing skills. She even initially manages to con him that she cannot read lips. And this aspect of Sarah's brilliance against his limitations is perhaps one of the most triumphant techniques of the film. James is so rusty he must speak out loud her rapid signing to process it – he is on the back foot and is shamed by his lack of ability, his laziness in not developing. And so are we. We watch Sarah sign and long to connect with immediacy. But we are shut out from her world, just as she is shut out from ours. Except that we have a choice.

Sarah is constantly angry, bitter and sarcastic. James becomes increasingly bewildered by her power over him, his growing sexual and emotional attraction towards her. He perceives her hurt. He wonders why she is so removed from her family. Their strange tango leads to a revelation. In fury, to shock him and drive him away, she tells him her secret: that as a young teen she was abused by her sister’s male friends, who queued up to have sex with her. Her sister was, essentially, the junior madam. ‘They didn’t even take me out for a Coke first,' she remarks in a scene so sad it is almost unwatchable. What is interesting is that Sarah herself doesn’t classify this as rape, which, of course, it is. For her, it is distilled into her disempowerment and perceived de-humanisation by other(s) (all, of course, essential components in rape). The able world violates the perceived disabled. She expects James to be disgusted, charging that he thought he was being kind to the young virginal deaf girl. Afraid of dependency on another, she thinks this will end his interest. Instead, James now finds the attraction has become love.

His eventual declaration comes in one of the most beautiful scenes in modern mainstream cinema. Walking the streets in the rain, he knows he cannot go on. He strides to the swimming pool in the school, where Sarah spends many an evening alone. He stands at the edge of the water, she knows he is about to declare his feelings. Afraid, she swims away. He makes a joke out of it and falls into the pool, swimming toward her. They kiss, and she pulls him under – and into her silence. It is the only moment in the film where we see the two apparently united: physically, emotionally and psychologically.

For one of the great aspects of this film is that, unlike most pictures where desire is exhausted the moment the couple get physical, this film shows that desire is a lot more complicated than sex. It’s about the need for closeness, completeness, harmony, and for feeling understood. It's about the distances between people. And this is where the couple run into trouble.

Once their relationship is established, James takes charge and moves Sarah into his house without even bothering to ask her how she feels about it. Their cohabitation quickly illuminates the difficulties and dangers of their dependency on one another. No matter how hard he tries, and for all his promises, James wants Sarah to speak – lost in the moment he asks her to cry out his name during sex, with terrible results. He wants her to share his joy when he listens to Bach, and this need eventually means he can't enjoy the music without her. Sarah tells a dismayed James that if she had children she would want them to be deaf. Sarah, partly through his love, comes to rightly wish to assume her independence – even from that love. She wants to do something with her life. But she also does not want to assimilate to the hearing world’s expectations of how she might accomplish that. When she meets a successful, deaf female scholar who does not speak at a dinner party, Sarah wonders whether she too can become something in the world herself and yet maintain her integrity and her dignity. The incident prompts her flight from James – and an important and overdue confrontation with the mother who rejected her in favour of normalcy and the wider world that Sarah feels did the same.

One of the laudable aspects of this film is that deafness never becomes reduced to mere metaphor for the difficulties of relationships. Central to the film – adapted by Mark Medoff from his stage play – is a challenge to a society which seeks to marginalise the deaf (a society that includes even James and the kindly, if patronising, headmaster who cares for his students and adores Sarah). But, of course, the film benefits from a wonderful Oscar-winning central performance from Marlee Matlin: the first depiction of a fully sexual, brilliant and politically conscious female deaf person ever in mainstream film. She is aided by a quizzical William Hurt as a teacher who thinks he has all the answers – and realizes he is not even sure what the questions are until it is almost too late. The film's complementary meditations on intimacy and alienation – and on idealization and pragmatism – attracted a wide audience.

How do we negotiate the way we wish to be accepted, loved and desired with the way others wish to accept, love and desire us? Can we and should we compromise? Is another’s vision for us perhaps better than the one we anticipate for ourselves? Can we be true to ourselves and be in the world? We have to give in here and there, whoever we are, if we want society – but, suggests the ending, we must first fight for our rights in order to understand what it is we can live with losing.

Cusk on Modern Motherhood

2011-04-03T12:24:00.000+01:00

On Mother's Day, Rachel Cusk writes – to serve up a hackney on rye, cliché on the side – this thought-provoking review of Rebecca Asher's Modern Motherhood and the Illusion of Equality. It also serves as a useful reminder of Cusk's brutal and beautiful memoir of maternity, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother – one of the most honest accounts of this strange and ambivalent business of mothering I have ever read. It was a useful book for me, as I pored over its pages in between feeds in the first months (yes, months) of my daughter's life. When I wasn't throwing it across the room, I was sighing That's exactly how it is. If you're on the hunt for a last-minute Mother's Day gift, you could do worse.

Making Hay

2011-04-01T16:25:00.000+01:00

Next month, Hay rolls around again. I've been at Hay for several years now. It's a festival that's truly charmed me – seeming to effortlessly combine style with substance. Despite its high values, it remains an intimate occasion, characterised by camaraderie and, above all, pleasure. Most of all, it lacks pretension: the cognescenti mingle with the booklovers, the curious chat away with the clued-up. You'll find literary heavyweights, as well as celebrities with stories to tell that are frequently stranger than any fiction. Everyone feels welcome. The food is always great. And the festival takes place in one of the loveliest and most unspoiled settings to be found in the UK.

This year, I'll be chairing two events:

Saturday 28 May 2011, 8.30pm • Venue: Elmley Foundation Theatre

Tablet and Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East

A mesmerising selection of the best Middle East-Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Urdu writers – from the famed Arab poet Khalil Gibran to the Turkish Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk. Kathryn Gray in conversation with Reza Aslan.

Sunday 29 May 2011, 11.30am • Venue: Elmley Foundation Theatre

Fictions: Strangers and Lovers with Mohsin Hamid and Dinaw Mengestu

Moth Smoke, by the Man Booker-shortlisted author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, is a story of love and estrangement set in Pakistan; How To Read The Air shares the Ethiopian-American context of Mengestu’s brilliant debut, and winner of the Guardian First Book Award, Children of the Revolution.

I hope you can join us. Tickets are now available for the full programme if you're a Friend. General release of tickets goes on sale, I believe, in around a week. Visit the website here to find out all that's on offer this year. And you can also follow Hay Festival on Twitter for news.

On Loving Das Brot der Frühen Jahre (1955)

2011-03-07T13:16:00.000Z

Das Brot der Frühen Jahre (The Bread of Those Early Years) is a remarkable novella by one of the twentieth-century grandmaster German fictioneers, Heinrich Böll. Narrated by its protagonist, Walter Fendrich, many years after the fact, the novella takes us through the single most important day of his life – one that will transform him and redeem him.

When we meet him, Walter is a young, feckless, self-centred, nihilistic washing machine repairman living in an economically depressed and condemned post-war West German city. He has been through many apprenticeships prior to his current role – and given them up. He has a seemingly insatiable hunger for bread with all its literal and figurative meaning. He is a bad son. He is in a superficial relationship with his boss's daughter, Ulla. He loathes his current job. But, then, change is coming. He has received a telegram from his father, asking him to meet a young girl, Hedwig Muller, who hails from his hometown, off the train. She has come to the city as a trainee teacher. Walter's father wants him to look out for her and help her find accommodation. Walter, of course, does not relish a task that will take him away from his own self-interest. Like all great heroes in potential, he seems initially to reject the very experience that will be central to the fulfillment of his heroism. But go he does. On meeting Hedwig, his entire life and its attendant values are questioned in an instant. In her green coat, with her innocent beauty, she embodies everything that he lacks. She transcends the era of material and spiritual deprivation. She symbolises growth and new life. Walter is ashamed of himself next to her; he already dimly understands his moral corruption – but now it is no longer acceptable to him. And, more to the point, he finds himself immediately in love. With Hedwig and with a new direction she promises.

The novella traces Walter's journey from initial fear at the emotions and examination that Hedwig has prompted in him to acceptance of love and the assumption of the challenges to the self – to subordinate one's interests to another and to become the person that you can be. From latency to possibility. But it is so much more than that again. In Walter we see the embodiment of a place and an era, and Böll's hopes for his nation: redemption, self-esteem and the rejection of slavish materialist values in favour of spiritual, social and emotional connectedness and authentic empowerment. During the course of the novella, there is flashback within the flashback – drawn with rich colour symbolism of yellows, blood reds – as Walter remembers his school days, the death of his mother, the endless quest for bread on the black market, and shame, always shame. The past is continually punctuating Walter's present, as he struggles to come to terms with a terrible legacy that he inherited, rather than participated in. But the future, with Hedwig, stands before him. The past can teach us, but we must never let it master us – beautifully and so wittily played upon in the novella's concluding paragraph.

Das Brot evokes an era of quiet horrors, hypocrisy, humiliation and malaise. Despite its brevity, it is one of the most powerful records in fiction of that crushing time and, for all of its direct and indirect criticism of the people struggling to survive it, one of the most compassionate. Those looking for plot twists aplenty will not find it here. This is a tale of inner life. But it is also one which focuses on and valorises epiphany. The moment when. It is not what Walter does after he changes that is central to this novella, which, indeed, takes us only as far as the moment when. It is the fact that he found the opportunity and courage to change at all. And it is presented to us, by Böll, as something of a miracle – for the self and for society. A common miracle, maybe, but no less extraordinary and affirming for that.

Blessed by doubt

2011-03-05T13:20:00.000Z

So, I've been collaborating with Mary Modeen on an artists book. This was a first for me. Previously, I've only collaborated on film – with a series of film poems for the BBC, other poets including Owen Sheers and Gillian Clarke. That was an interesting process. Plus, it scored me welcome and rare kudos points with non-poetry enthusiast friends of both sexes, the poems being read for the screen by Matthew Rhys and Eve Myles.

These film poems for the BBC were a laudable attempt at pushing poetry into the mainstream audience, propelling poems into the homes of many who felt poetry had nothing to offer them. The films appeared in a feature-length documentary and also, occasionally, before or after EastEnders. The theme was rugby and cleverly used the Welsh passion for the sport to indoctrinate in the nicest possible way. I knew nothing about rugby; I've made it a point of never watching a single event in totality. But as a poet, I know a lot about games, because poetry is all about games – and, in teaching, I am at pains to stress this to students. Moves, strategies, victories, (mostly) losses. Falling and getting up again. I fought the poem and the poem won... But I am a stickler for research so I asked friends and colleagues about the rules of rugby. I was subjected to the complex and breathless ins and outs, a litany of examples of the beautiful violence of it. I realised, with not a little depression, that I already knew a lot about rugby. Perhaps too much.

The film poems seemed to go down well with viewers. And that pleased me. Convincing people around me that poetry has something to say to them, deprogramming them from all the dreadful practical criticism clap-trap that they had to endure as children at the hands of people who knew nothing about it, trying to assure them that having the feeling before the meaning is not only acceptable but to be positively encouraged, taking away that performance anxiety as a reader or listener – projects all close to my heart and, very often, a catalogue of futility. Education – when it's executed in the wrong way – is remarkably difficult to shift, not just from the mind but from the soul.

This artists book collaboration was obviously going to be a new direction for me. And not simply because I was working with an artist. When Mary contacted me to tell me she wanted to work with me, I was first delighted but then there came a degree of magical thinking. Mary's work centres around landscapes, around people and belonging – that fugitive thing, home. These were concerns of mine in my first book, The Never-Never. Largely, I suppose, coming from my own sense of not quite fitting. But now, those concerns had taken on a new aspect, as I came out from behind my wall of silence. It was no longer a matter of cultural belonging, but rather of belonging to my writing again – or not. I saw how we could make this work in a new way. Mary thought we should explore territories. We both agreed these should be uncertain. There would be no categoricals. This would be the consecration, as it were, of doubt. Ah, doubt! That blessing. And at the centre of all doubt there is loss, actual or anticipated. Unsurprisingly, losses therefore figure highly in the poems and are accompanied by Mary's haunting, exceptionally beautiful prints of landscape. These losses are no bad things, however. Quite the contrary. I'm grateful for them.

The product of our collective labour arrived by special delivery last week. That was fitting, for it was my last week at New Welsh Review. The new life out there. Uncertain territory indeed. But one I chose for myself and that has made, well, all the difference.

It's a handsome book – luxe edition, produced in limited edition copies by a master printer in Australia. His craft is a wonder to behold. Opening out from hardback, concertina-like, Mary's prints and my poems can be read from all angles, but each angle essentially denying full impression of the other. A trade of the eye. Footholds gained and lost. Wholeness, and then the incompleteness. The sheer quality of this book – with thanks to Mary and Pharos Editions, and their quite special care – reminded me of what a powerful object in and for itself a book can be – and should be. In my hands, it had that kind of heft. Signing each of the books for the exhibition was a strange thing. I've signed books before. But this time, as they say, it's personal.

You can find out more about the project and the touring exhibition, which also features other poets, here.

Poetry Beyond Text

2011-02-23T11:28:00.001Z

I've been collaborating with artist Mary Modeen on 'Uncertain Territories', a series of poems and images as part of the Poetry Beyond Text project at the University of Dundee. This work will be exhibited, along with other artists' collaborations with poets – including John Burnside and Robin Robertson – at Dundee Contemporary Arts this March, before it goes on to the Scottish Poetry Library and the Royal Scottish Academy later in the year. More details on this to follow, for any Scotland-based poetry/image enthusiasts.

On Loving Moonlighting (1985-1989)

2011-02-19T12:06:00.000Z

When ABC commissioned Glenn Gordon Caron to write a boy/girl detective pilot back in 1984, Caron was reluctant. Besides, he was despondent. This was to be the third pilot he had written for the network – neither of the previous two being picked up and turned into a series, despite his hopes for them and belief in their quality. Caron had had form with the 'tec series, however. He had written for early episodes of the hit Remington Steele. But he felt, nonetheless, that he had neither a feel for or an especial interest in the genre. Friendly persuasion was applied, and he ran with ABC's suggestion. The result was a wonderful pilot that mashed comedy, drama and sexual tension – the first episode of what was to become one of the most inspired, creative and, as it turns out, influential series ever to come out of a network: Moonlighting.

The show would feature a boy/girl detective dyad, sure enough. But this was to be no Hart to Hart. And it wouldn't be some simple derivative of Remington Steele, either. It would pair an odd couple, whose differing opinions on just about everything complicated their business. They would bicker incessantly and would be secretly first hot for, then in love with, each other. The show would fashion a unique product from the melding of the best Hollywood traditions: 30s screwball comedy, noir, slapstick, rapid-fire wisecracking in the Hecht/MacArthur mode – and would honour and make fun of them all, with a liberal helping of knowing postmodernity.

Cybill Shepherd was cast in the role of Maddie Hayes, a now broke, former high-fashion model who ends up being forced to turn her life around financially – after she is cheated by her accountant – by running her only asset: a detective agency she had used as a tax write-off, Blue Moon Investigations. The role cleverly played on Shepherd's own circumstances. She was a former model, who had gone into film with roles in The Heartbreak Kid and, most iconically, The Last Picture Show. It was on the set of this latter film that she fell in love with the director, a married Peter Bogdanovich. The relationship did not make things easy for Shepherd in Hollywood when he left his wife, producer and screenwriter Polly Platt, for her, and took charge of her career with disastrous results. Further roles in film and a TV series followed but each vehicle tanked. By the time she was cast in Moonlighting, Shepherd was just thirty-five years old – and in the agonising position of being a very recognisable has-been. She badly needed the break, but never imagined that the series would be a defining point in her career and, in fact, offer her a role of such status that it would even eclipse that of Jacy in Picture.

Caron needed to find a smartass, cool fool to spar and spark with her. The character would neatly subvert the noir laconic – he would be a man of very many words, and one who could deliver them like a machine gun. Bruce Willis was an unknown thirty-year-old, out-of-work actor when he read for the part of detective and 'manager' incumbent of the agency, David Addison. Willis's career looked like it was going nowhere, fast. But when he and Shepherd read together, their interplay lit up the room and the sexual chemistry was apparent to everyone – most especially Shepherd, who felt that he was not only playing David, but that he was David. Willis couldn't believe his luck and, at least initially, his gratitude for his big break was felt by all who worked with him.

Alongside the often ludicrous but brilliantly crafted plots the two unravelled, the principal architecture of the show was the pair's dialogue and eternal tango. They would interrupt each other, often delivering their monologues in overlap, becoming so wound-up in the process that it looked like it would end in violence (which it did, on a few occasions). They would slam the doors of their respective offices. Maddie would stomp off, her clutch bag at oxter, her immaculately groomed hair bouncing in the LA sunshine – David would chase after her like a schoolboy: mocking, absolutely desperate for her attentions. Much of the warmth we felt towards the characters was that they were essentially two lost souls and, emotionally-speaking, teenagers. And, then, they were not what they appeared to be. Maddie seemed to be the quintessential ice maiden, a Hitchcockian fantasy in her Halston dresses, with her baby blonde locks. A sort of modern-imagined Grace Kelly. But as we know about ice maidens, they do tend to melt. Much humour comes from David's constant ridicule of Maddie's uptight, WASP principles and insistence on control – and her absolutely volcanic eruptions in response. David appears to be a laid-back guy who sees fun as the sole mode, but, during the course of the series, is revealed to be intense, complex and vulnerable under all his play-it-lite. It is something the viewer recognises but Maddie does not, until much later. It makes her hectoring of him seem all the more comical and poignant. Be serious, she always seems to be saying. But we know he already is – and, more to the point, he's already serious about her.

At the agency, the pair are joined by a rhyming receptionist in the form of Agnes DiPesto, whose surreality was made completely believable on account of her kind-hearted, wide-eyed personality. Later, she develops a crush on and then goes on to enjoy a romance with new recruit Bert Viola. That pair offer relationship advice to the warring would-be lovers, Maddie and David, and pastiche the buddy/buddy trope from TV and film. The firm also has an inordinate amount of seemingly eternally underemployed caseworkers, despite the always parlous financial fortunes of Blue Moon. They enjoy limbo contests, sing soul classics, play wastepaperbasketball; the fun only stops when they fret that they are going to be fired on account of their inefficiency, which they occasionally are – before being rehired by the essentially good, socially paranoid, eager-to-please Maddie, who fired them in the first place. They function as a sort of low-rent Greek chorus, offering commentary on and dissent to the leads. They are also an incredibly smart joke. For it is with these figures that Caron is almost certainly poking fun at the paralysis of the TV writers' room behind the making of so many hit shows. It is a kind of happy purgatory.

The on-screen attraction between Maddie and David became so involving and plausible that viewers wondered whether it was matched with an off-screen love affair. But, behind the scenes, Shepherd and Willis became enemies as the series progressed. He realised that he was growing into a true star in his own right, and beyond the show. He had ambitions to break into film. She struggled with perfectionist Caron's last-minute rewrites and the punishing hours of filming. Some believed that Willis was provoking her prior to key scenes, in order to make her reactive and to improve their engagement. If that is true, it appears to have worked.

As the tension in their relationship on- and off-set cranked up, the production team were faced with a dilemma: to give the audience what they seemed to want or to hold it back. They went with the former, and Maddie and David slept with each other towards the end of the third season. The next morning, Maddie has both doubts and post-coital tristesse. And so do we. In consummating their relationship, the producers delivered what is known as the Shipping Bed Death. Our interest waned and, as the show continued to be dogged by off-set tension between the stars and their respective circumstances, it limped on for a further two seasons and bled audience – and critical – ratings, before the light that had already gone out went out officially.

Bruce Willis, as we all know, went on to become a major star, although, with the exception of John McClane in the Die Hard film franchise, he has never occupied a greater role. Cybill Shepherd enjoyed some success with a sitcom, Cybill, loosely based on her own life, before that ended and she took to guest and cameo roles in other hit TV series, such as The L Word. Despite a less than glorious end to such a hitherto glorious series, Moonlighting spawned countless inheritors – of its self-consciousness, its hyper-cultural awareness, its breaking of the fourth wall, its dream sequences, fantasies and parodies. Much imitated, yes, but never bettered.

On Loving St Elmo's Fire (1985)

2011-02-17T15:02:00.000Z

When it was released back in 1985, St Elmo’s Fire was a film the critics absolutely loved to hate. The story traces the fortunes of a group of freshly graduated, tight-knit friends who, on entering the real world of work, grown-up relationships and responsibilities, are presented with crisis, conflict and changes that they are ill-prepared for by a failed society that has, essentially, groomed them for failure. The film was criticised for presenting the very worst of eighties values – or, rather, lack thereof – and the characters were seen as self-absorbed, spoilt and essentially unsympathetic: products of their time and, besides which, their age.

When we meet the gang, they do intially appear thoroughly in love with themselves – and each other. Alec (Judd Nelson) is a preening, right-on young Democrat, with a smart apartment and the affections of the lovely architect, Leslie (Ally Sheedy), who he has dated since freshman year in college. Jules (Demi Moore), a materially spoilt but emotionally abandoned beautiful little rich girl with a taste for men and coke, is Leslie’s best friend and has landed a prime job in banking. Kirby (Emilio Estevez) waits in the bar the group have frequented since their happiest days in college, St Elmo’s, and is saving his tips for law school. He lives with Kevin (Andrew McCarthy), who sees himself as a great American writer in waiting, but is currently occupied writing obits for a newspaper, and who is Alec's best friend. Billy (Rob Lowe) is the former frat-wildster and musician, a Peter Pan who, despite his immaturity, has found himself with child and with wife – neither of which he can afford financially or emotionally. He is mothered by Wendy (Mare Winningham), a rich girl who lives at home with her parents who are in the greeting card business, and who longs to break free from their conventionality – she has taken a job in social services and is thoroughly infatuated with the unsuitable Billy.

The film’s first scene is a shot of the group in their graduation gowns, and then we are in the present – the sound of a car crash. An unsubtle but entirely apt metaphor for the group’s journey during the course of the film. Billy has been driving Wendy’s car and, under the influence, totalled it. The gang rush to the hospital to help the pair; both are uninjured. While at the hospital, Kirby spots a girl he idolised at college, Dale (Andie MacDowell) – he took her out for a date once several years back but nothing came of it. Later, we discover that they saw a Woody Allen movie, but she will misremember that it was a Mel Brooks movie. Kirby is intent on winning her – and much of the film’s most embarrassing and heartfelt humour stems from his obsession with the sheer unreality he has created of her. The group go to the bar after Billy is bailed. We come to learn that the feckless Billy has lost another job that Alec has set up from him. Alec is furious and, indicating the lack of maturity he has, for all his patriarchy of the group, flushes Billy’s head in the toilet. Later, we see Alec and Leslie at their yuppie love nest. Alec is pressurising Leslie to get married and attempts to encourage her not to use protection when he begins getting amorous. They will be married soon enough, he declares – though she has yet to say she will marry him. She is reluctant as regards both marriage and baby. She’s a career girl and is one of the few in the group who appears to recognise her own immaturity and need for self-identity. Jules turns up with a bottle of vodka, berating her dying stepmother ('stepmonster'), and interrupts the moment, delaying the tensions between the couple.

We see Jules again, this time in her apartment. Kevin, who she has invited over for a drink after a group outing, wonders out loud how she has afforded to redecorate her place so lavishly. Jules changes the subject and, in a very amusing scene, accuses Kevin of being gay and in love with Alec. She recognises Kevin’s burning love under his cynical and sombre exterior – but applies it to the wrong person. He leaves, but not without feeling unsettled that something so wide of the mark is, in fact, so very close to it. Kirby has not forgotten his encounter with Dale and has embarrassed her – we feel, but do not see – into a date. He has selected a fancy restaurant and he rings Jules for advice on the wine menu. During their conversation, it is revealed that Jules is advanced on her pay by months – her flamboyance has come at a price and she has money troubles. Dale turns up, but the hospital rings and she leaves, frustrating Kirby’s seduction. We learn more of the dynamic between Billy and Wendy when he meets her after work and she takes him to her grand family home, and, afterward, the two attempt to get physical – an encounter ruined by Billy’s insensitivity to the virginal, body-conscious Wendy. She gives him a wad of notes to pay his rent – we now understand that she has been bankrolling him. The scene hints at near-prostitution, people as commodities. He leaves the money and the house, ashamed of his behaviour and of his life.

When we next see the group all together, it is Halloween. Wendy has become temporarily estranged from Billy, who is playing in his band at the bar. She has a new car, bought for her by her father – he's hopeful she will become engaged to nerdy Howie, who he selected for her as a prospective match and who she has brought as a date. The car is a bribe and she has, for now, accepted it. Jules is having an affair with the boss of her banking firm, who she approached to beg for a further advance – and ended up sleeping with. Alec discusses his struggle with his libido with Kevin – his random infidelities revealed earlier in the film to his best friend. For all Alec’s conventionality and wisdom, he is still a boy, much like Billy, who he despises as much as he loves – and, as his moonlighting for a Republican senator has already demonstrated to the others, he’s a hypocrite, too. Billy is tormented when his wife arrives at the bar with another man, fawning over him. A fight ensues. Wendy is aghast when, outside the bar, with passion, Billy and his wife kiss. They cannot live with each other but they cannot seem to live without each other, she recognises.

As the film moves towards its climax, the characters are forced into decisions and unhappy truths. Alec declares that Leslie and he are engaged – without consulting her – before a crowd, at a party Kirby is hosting in the hope of impressing Dale (he has taken up work for the mysterious Mr Kim as a house-sitter in his mansion and believes – wrongly – that this show of apparent wealth will influence Dale's affections). Leslie is furious – and her anger, rejection of his proposal and accusations make Alec convinced Kevin has revealed his infidelity, but she had simply guessed. He attacks Kevin, tells Leslie to move out of their place, and Kevin and Leslie end up at Kevin and Kirby’s apartment, where Kevin’s love for her is exposed, and where, in confusion and hurt, Leslie ends up having sex with him. Kevin assumes his fantasy has at last become a reality – but Leslie will later reject coupledom with him, too. Dale does not turn up at the party and Kirby pursues her, discovering her with her boyfriend at a weekend hideaway. He is humiliated and spends the night at their place. Next morning, he asserts himself and passionately kisses her, leaving her bewildered, somewhat smitten – and his ego triumphant. Meanwhile, Wendy asserts herself with her father, rejecting her car, Howie and, finally, his conventional dreams for her. Jules – jilted by her boss, jobless, and in financial ruin – cracks up in her now empty apartment, and the group, divided because of the Alec-Leslie-Kevin triangle, go to save her. The moment is a turning point for them all. Her breakdown reflects the breakdown in their relationships and also in their hopes for the start of their adult lives, but it is also an ending that offers better, more realistically grounded beginnings, epitomised in the ultimate growth and assumption of responsibility of the least seemingly rounded and mature of their group, Billy – who goes on to consummate, tenderly, his love for Wendy in her newly-acquired apartment, pay her back the money he owes her, allow his wife the divorce she wants and fresh start she needs, and move to New York to seriously pursue his musical talent. He leaves his friends, and his younger self, behind him.

The film is far from perfect. Joel Schumacher’s direction is often heavy-handed (such as Jules's princess in tower scene, complete with wind machine and chiffon curtains) and some running gags (Jules’s stepmonster’s burial and the group's booga booga cheer among them) outstay their welcome. Self-satisfaction in the leads does not always appear to be acting. And the characters, who have been mostly driven to their positions by the illusions of the society they have been brought up in, do not appear to adequately explore or fully reject its values and conventions by the end – apart from Wendy and Billy.

But what this film does so very well is reveal the fissures that abide in all group dynamics of this quality and which threaten their continuation, as well as provide them with impetus – hidden desires, envy, jealousy, pecking orders, role-playing, resentment and latent angers. And the film brilliantly captures themes that go beyond its time and place, and which travel well and which we all recognise: the agony of propulsion into the serious world of adulthood; the obvious yet so often postponed realisation that so much in life must be compromised to make money; the mythology of conventional success; the lack of certainty over career and relationship choices often made too soon, too young; the terrible shock of learning one’s lack of specialness, after all. Schumacher would return, years later, with a film that would radically address many of these problems from the middle-age perspective with Falling Down.

The film’s poignancy also rests in what would turn out to be the fate of many of its young stars. The group became confused with their roles and were christened by journalist David Blum as 'The Brat Pack' – a name that stuck and came to be applied to other stars of films in the youth genre. However, the group never appeared all together on screen again. Sheedy, Nelson and McCarthy soon evaporated, for all their magnetic screen presence. Lowe, whose inspired and witty turn as a complex Billy was delivered at just twenty-one years old, would soon crumble under the pressure of fame and fall into disgrace for years – before he was rehabilitated by Aaron Sorkin’s hugely popular The West Wing. Estevez, who here exhibits brilliant comedic talent, ended up making endlessly forgettable films throughout the 80s, and even more forgettable ones after that. The most enduringly successful pair were perhaps the least likely: Demi Moore and Mare Winningham. Moore’s turn in St Elmo’s is, though amusing, one note throughout and her options seemed limited, despite her beauty – but, for many years, she was rivalled by only Julia Roberts for her pick of the cream roles from Hollywood and was eventually to strike box office platinum with the saccharine Ghost. Winningham, who offers the most understated and sensitive performance, carved out an award-laden career as a TV movie actress.

On Loving The Way We Were (1973)

2011-02-16T16:19:00.000Z

The Way We Were is the classic 'oil and water' love story. Katie Morosky (Barbra Streisand) first encounters Hubbell Gardiner (Robert Redford) in the 1930s when they are both at college. Katie is a Jew and a student activist, with a considerable amount of Marxist views. When she isn’t studying or handing out leaflets, she’s working at the local hamburger joint. She’s awkward, all prickles, unfashionable and something of a plain Jane. Hubbell is an affluent WASP. He’s gifted, likeable, athletic, handsome – a blue-eyed boy with blonde hair and an incredible smile. He sets her pulse racing – despite her apparent contempt for the lifestyle and ideology he represents, and the people he surrounds himself with – when he is also revealed to be, during their writing class, a formidable talent.

Despite the fact that he is dating the beautiful Carol Ann, a series of episodes demonstrates that Hubbell also finds himself, on account of her wit, passion and commitment, drawn to Katie. He is mesmerised when she speaks powerfully at a peace rally, only to be first disappointed by, then irritated at her lack of humour when a prank is played. Later, on the night that Edward marries Wallis Simpson, Hubbell is sat outside a bar, drinking a beer on his own. He is celebrating his first publication – he has sold a short story. His friends are nowhere. Hubbell is clearly uneasy with his talent and achievement – he feels he can’t share this serious side with his flippant group. But Katie sees the significance of the occasion. She is both envious and admiring. They share a kindred moment. He criticises her for her lack of humour. She rebuffs the critique. He persuades a reluctant, uptight Katie to take a sip of his beer. He tenderly does up her loose shoelace. She leaves. In the final moments of their time at college, they share a brief dance at Commencement, before he walks off through the crowd: leaving Katie suspended in time and place, idealising him.

Years later, New York, and Katie is working at a radio station. She is still an ardent activist. Hubbell is in the navy, on shore leave. They meet, by coincidence, at a bar – he’s very drunk, so she takes him back to her apartment. He staggers into bed, where she discovers him – naked. She gets into bed and they begin making love. But Katie is aware that he doesn’t know it’s her he’s making love to – she doesn't care. He has lived in her memory until now. The next morning they share an awkward moment, as Hubbell, hungover and seemingly in denial, is keen to get away. She implores him to contact her if he can’t find accommodation in the city when next on leave. Eventually, he does get in contact. It’s clear to her that the decision to call was purely pragmatic when he makes plans to go out that evening. But she won’t leave it at that – she’s too committed – and faces down all resistance with a promise of good home cooking. They end up talking after dinner about his first novel, which he had recently published to little notice. He is initially touched that the brittle Katie who he knew from college has engaged with his writing, but then he becomes enraptured by her intelligent and penetrating critique of it and his gift – and her insistence on his great potential as a major writer. The two become lovers that night, but Hubbell warns her not to be too serious. It is a remark that not only relates to their relationship at this point, but also to her intensity – which scares as much as it attracts him. He is aware from the outset, as she is not, that the differences that threaten their connection are not merely social or political, but temperamental.

They become a steady couple and Katie is reintroduced to his friends who she met at college and despised. Carol Ann, his college sweetheart, is now married to his best friend, JJ. They are, as Katie supposed they would be, seemingly much unchanged. They make tasteless jokes, are self-satisfied and view much of life in trivial terms. They seem, to her, to be untouchable and – though it is never directly addressed – anti-semitic. But, when Carol Ann comes on the receiving end of Katie’s barbs, she hints that Katie might be projecting her sense of difference onto their feelings about her. As much as she is an outsider, Katie reinforces her marginalisation with her fixed attitudes and, just as she does when talking about her political stance, denies others the possibility of their complexity and voice. Although a wit and strong thinker, Katie's self-defence mechanisms detract from these natural talents. Po-faced, she is all hectoring and sulks. Hubbell breaks the relationship off after Katie has a tantrum at a party, lecturing the room on Yalta. He loves her, but realises that she cannot change – and he really doesn’t want to change himself. But Katie will not give up: she has invested too much in her dreams. She persuades him to come to her apartment and he is drawn back in. Her ardent belief in who he is, her need to believe in who he might be, one day, and his desire for her belief, amounts to co-dependency.

When JJ gets Hubbell a gig writing scripts in Hollywood, Katie does not want to be part of the machine. Katie wants him to stay with her in New York, be true to his gift and produce substantial novels, writing that will last. But she must not lose Hubbell, and so, when he insists, she goes with him. They live in Malibu and enjoy wealth. Hubbell leads an empty day-to-day on the studio lot. Then McCarthyism hits them and their fragile romance cracks up. Katie is pregnant and protests the blacklist. Hubbell sees that Katie’s beliefs will not be cowed by anything, even the risk to their unborn child – and, even more so, his reputation and place of safety. Nostalgic for his golden days at college, he has an affair with Carol Ann, now the ex-wife of JJ. Katie discovers the affair and the two agree to apart, Hubbell promising to stay with her until the baby – a girl – is born.

When they do eventually meet again, Katie is out on the streets of New York, where the two spent their happiest time together, handing out Ban the Bomb leaflets. Hubbell is in town, making a sitcom for TV. He spots her and the two engage in small talk. They farewell. In a mirror of their on-again, off-again love and attraction, he cannot leave it at that, and comes back to her moments later. They speak of their child, who he has not seen since her birth. Hubbell wants to know whether her new husband is a good father. And he is. She informs Hubbell that she is a ‘very good loser’. To which Hubbell replies: ‘better than I am’. And we believe him.

The film has been criticised for its sense of incompleteness, its lack of integritas. The McCarthy era is reduced in the film to mere minutes (much of this due to the fact that a great deal of footage landed on the cutting-room floor). The film, which was originally conceived with a much more overtly political message by writer Arthur Laurents, became focussed almost completely on romance, one which used politics as a device to highlight difference between two complex, extreme characters. There was tension between Laurents, director Sydney Pollack and lead Robert Redford on set. The end product can sometimes feel as if the audience is intermittently being introduced to another film altogether. And we are. The Way We Were was, and is regarded as such by many involved in the making of it, a failure.

But the story of Katie and Hubbell remains urgent and resonates with its audience, nonetheless. Why? The audience shares something important with its leads, something less common than one might expect from a Hollywood studio. One-time lovers only realise much later how much was illusory and how much narcissism. Although the title song hints differently, and although tragic romance is often depicted differently, this is not a film about consecrated, perfect, lost love (the film might more aptly be titled The Way We Weren't) – this is a film about two people who come to know that they got it wrong from the very beginning. And, despite their passion, that so much was folly. Beautiful – but folly, nonetheless. In Katie, Hubbell sees someone who recognises his potential – and the difference between himself and his friends who, despite his allegiance to and defence of them, he nonetheless feels, because of his latent talent, superior to. And, then, she offers him the one thing life hasn’t bestowed and which he cannot generate within himself: drive. His life has been pure good fortune; like the character in the story that made Katie fall in love with him, things come too easy to him. Katie offers resistance, difficulty. She challenges. But she also strokes his ego. In Hubbell, Katie sees a way to possibly realise her own dreams by proxy. Insufficiently gifted to be the writer she wanted to be once and to say things which could make a difference to the world, her fixation on his writerly efforts are not without considerable self-interest: it is anticipated gilt by association. And although Katie is strident in her political views and seemingly comfortable in her identity as a Jewish woman, her vitriol towards the WASP lifestyle – with its attendant surface mainstream simplicities – very often comes off as an ego injury, rather than politics. She rejects the world that she has been rejected by already. Her winning of him seems to, provisionally, ease her pain – although it ultimately brings her greater suffering.

Their match is tragic because both parties entirely lack moderation – he has no conviction, she is all passionate intensity. But, on a more straightforward level, their basic story is one which we can all relate to, and this only compounds the sense of tragedy – its inherent ordinariness. They are simply incompatible with one another, despite (and because of) the attraction. While they may feed each other's egos in direct and indirect ways, neither will ever be able to give way in order to develop a lasting union – and yet they meet and fall, nonetheless. So goes romance – and how many of us know that at personal cost.

In her insistence on the need for an uncompromised life, Katie shuts out others and their voices, too. Her radical tendency to idealise in all matters makes Hubbell a better and more capable man than we – almost immediately – know he is. In Hubbell's insistence on an easy, comfortable life and narcissistic supply, he fails his own gift, runs away from responsibility and loses his daughter – and the one person who saw in him, however misguided she may have been in so many things, what was, what we do know, real possibility.

Love endures, but all romances end. And this film is, if nothing else, a great romance.

On Loving Anne of Green Gables (1908)

2011-02-15T09:49:00.000Z

Anne of Green Gables is Canadian author L . M. Montgomery's well-known tale of a rara avis, who enters the staid, conservative, rural community of Avonlea on Prince Edward Island and, along the way, transforms people’s lives – including her own.

Anne Shirley is a red-haired eleven-year-old who has lived her life in and out of orphanages, punctuated only by stints as slave labour in unhappy homes: cooking, cleaning and looking after infants. When ageing brother bachelor and sister spinster Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert decide to take on an orphan boy to help Matthew work their farm, Green Gables, Anne is sent to them by mistake. What begins as an unfortunate error turns out to be positively providential. Despite Marilla’s initial insistence that Anne be returned to the asylum, she eventually reconsiders this – frightened that Anne will end up in another household, working for the unpleasant Mrs Blewett – and reveals that beneath her stern exterior lies a compassionate heart. She decides that she will allow Anne a trial period at Green Gables. Despite a series of entertaining episodes that threaten this uneasy arrangement, including Anne’s insulting of the town matriarch, Rachel Lynde, and an ill-advised hair dyeing experiment that leaves her titian locks a shade of green, she is allowed to stay. What follows next is Anne’s chaotic journey from dreamy, accident-prone young girl to blossoming young woman with a mighty heart – and a mighty intellect to match.

Despite the tragic circumstances of her early life, Anne is a fighter and a true survivor. Her challenges have not diminished her appetite for life or her indefatigable quest for happiness and a true home. She possesses a sparky personality and a tendency for the dramatic – she is all vim and vibrancy, and she knows no middle ground. Anne refuses to submit to her misfortunes or her allotted role in life as stigmatised outsider. Most of all, she is no conformist. It slowly dawns on the reader, as we see her landed among her peers in Avonlea, that the first eleven years of her life, for all their troubles, have gifted her something very precious. Placed on the margins of society, she has escaped many of the strictures the society imposed on its children, particularly females. No one has ever expected Anne to amount to anything or to make a good match in adulthood, so they have never trained her to satisfy society, beyond the ability to complete household chores. As a consequence, she is sassy, has developed a rich interior life – the by-product of a youth spent turning to books to assuage her perennial loneliness – and talks too much, often dishing up truths that, while others may find them unpalatable, are still truths all the same. She finds authority difficult to deal with and often, rightly, identifies illogic and unfairness in it. Montgomery cleverly places Anne at eleven. Anne is young enough therefore to be realistically finessed – as she is, through the novel’s charming progression – but too old to have all her wonderful uniqueness and splendid non-conformity completely ironed out of her. She is her own person as a young girl and, for all the perceived improvement others identify in her, she remains her own person as a young woman. Her tough start in the world leaves her ambitious to make her own way, and she soon understands that her great intellect is a tool she can turn to her advantage. Montgomery is telling us that our darkest hours may eventually contribute to the making of our finest ones – it’s all in the attitude.

One of the most interesting aspects of the story is that Anne’s rise in the community from prejudiced-against misfit to much-loved and respected young local also has as much to do with the changing attitude of those around her as it has to do with her own gradual refinement. Anne changes much less than we might first be tempted to assume; indeed, as subsequent books in the series demonstrate, Anne never completely conquers her flaws. Rather, she stimulates the romantic and big-hearted approach to life that she possesses in others – one of the many reasons this book is such a tender and engaging work. Her placement at the Cuthberts turns out to serve them as much as it does her. They have been living lives of quiet desperation since their own childhood. Anne revitalises their existences and offers them a renewed sense of purpose. She is also the cause of event in their life, from the highly amusing to the downright annoying. Matthew recognises the worth in her instantly. Her talkative nature and comical affectations win his heart, as does her candour, particularly among the hypocrisies of rural life – something he respects. Marilla resists but, confronted with a wilful girl who turns out to mirror her own lack of conventionality, she eventually submits. She recognises kinship when she sees it. For Gilbert Blythe, the most handsome – and cleverest – boy in school, Anne is a revelation. Everyone adores him – but Anne refuses to moon over him. He is enchanted by her otherness. It is no coincidence that, longing for just a scrap of attention, any scrap, he chooses to tease her about her red hair – earning a smashed slate over his head in the process. As time moves on, Anne proves that her unusual appearance is equalled by further qualities – which the other girls in Avonlea so clearly lack: her manifest intelligence, quick wit, boldness, independence and romantic spirit. Gilbert loves her for her the very reasons polite society would deem her unlovable. Her negative chemistry with Gilbert is both the cause of much humour and incredible reader-frustration. Like Darcy and Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, his mistake in slighting her eclipses her understanding that, perhaps above everyone in Avonlea, including Matthew and Marilla, he is the one who most fully appreciates her: mind, body and soul. She breathes life into the proper and somewhat less bright girl she selects to be her ‘bosom friend’, Diana Barry, and introduces both Diana and the other girls in her class to something they’ve not paid much attention to – their imaginations – with the aid of some Tennyson. Along the way, she saves others from crushing normalcy – and quite literally saves a life when she nurses Minnie May, Diana’s sister, from the croup.

This would make the novel one long ‘tastes like diabetes’ trope, were it not for the fact that the harsh realities of life – random injustice, death and bereavement, breaks in friendship, cruelty, loneliness and bigotry – are directly referenced, and Anne experiences all of these. Life is never easy and this novel, despite its optimism, never pretends it is or holds the view that it should be. Even the novel’s conclusion refuses a wholly happy ending, despite reconciliation between Anne and Gilbert, who selflessly steps in to help her when she needs him the most. Anne must compromise her own dreams in order to save Green Gables – and Marilla. Ties of love and society involve personal sacrifice. In Anne of Green Gables, difficulties are never far away, even amid the picturesque surroundings of Avonlea. Where much emphasis in Alcott’s Little Women seems to be on taking steps to avoid future difficulty by becoming good, with Anne Montgomery is telling us that we can never hide from difficulty and nor should we, but what we must do is insist on being true to ourselves.

As well as the novel’s underscoring of the trials involved in an engaged life, it offers us a heroine that couldn’t be more different from Pollyanna, despite the joys she engenders in others. She is far from perfect. And far from modestly reconciled to her imperfections. Despite her disappointment in her red hair, freckles and gawky physique, she is incredibly vain. She holds a grudge, with genuine spite – Gilbert is shut out of her life for almost all the novel as a result of his childish teasing. She can be haughty, snobbish and pretentious – her armoury against a world that has sought to rob her of her dignity and has good form in keeping her down. She possesses a furious temper and finds it difficult to accept critique. She is sensitive and deep, but has a tendency toward the superficial, as noted by her deference to Diana – who Anne seems to rate largely for her good looks. In her focus on her imaginative life she often misses the very obvious things right under her nose – whether mistaking currant wine for raspberry cordial and getting Diana stinking drunk in the process or her failure to recognise Gilbert as the great friend and, in subsequent books, lover he will come to be. Anne is a heroine indeed, but, above all, she is entirely human. And her mistakes make her.

For many years, Anne of Green Gables was viewed in simplistic terms. But it is increasingly gaining interest for its feminist themes – anyone who has ever read it might wonder why it has taken so long to be appreciated in this context. The novel praises and prizes the development of the intellect through reading and study, advocates careers, cheers on resourcefulness, admires individuality, postpones romance in favour of self-discovery, and encourages the potential to break out of the roles assigned to us by life – and by gender. It is a little wonder of a book, with some major, utterly contemporary, statements.

On Loving My So-Called Life (1994-1995)

2011-02-12T17:10:00.000Z

Back in 1994, way before Dawson’s Creek, before The OC and One Tree Hill, there was a little gem of a series called My So-Called Life. It was the beginning of the teen-series explosion. It remains the original and best.

My So-Called Life traces the trials and tribulations of the awkward, wide-eyed, soulful, fifteen-year-old Angela Chase – completely unaware of her loveliness – as she grapples with who she may or may not be. Romantic about her newly-acquired rebellious friends, Rayanne (who will ultimately betray her in an act of self-sabotage) and Rickie (a tender-hearted, openly gay latino), obsessive over dim-witted dreamboat Jordan Catalano, scornful towards her parents, cruel to her desolate childhood friend Sharon who has lost Angela’s affections, and mocking to her neighbour Brian Krakow.

From the outset of this 19-episode series, you could tell this was something out of the ordinary. It had all the best values of a John Hughes picture, but without the occasional misfires and over-simplification that so often punctuated his otherwise exemplary work. The most interesting touch was the authority it conferred on its protagonist, while also demonstrating her limitations and misapprehensions: Angela narrates us through all but two of the episodes. Her voice carries us through her experiences – stopping and starting, lurching from the comically banal to the sublime and poetic. Just like a true teenager. In episode one, we see students walking the halls of her high school, each wearing their respective uniforms of self-identification – grunge, jock, cheerleader, prep – Angela observes that ‘School is a battleground for your heart’. And so it is. Later, she notes: ‘My parents keep asking how school was. It’s like saying, "How was that drive-by shooting?" You don't care how it was, you're lucky to get out alive.’ Amid such genius, her eloquence when talking to others is frequently interrupted with her sheer inarticulacy, as she bites her lip and stumbles over what she thinks she wants to say: ‘I…no…I…I…listen’

Her friendship with Rayanne and Rickie is the source of much tension in her life – but is also a release from another sort of tension. Rayanne and Rickie do not see Angela as a fixed point, as her parents, her friend Sharon and her neighbour Brian do. For them, she is a work in progress, she is growing and developing. At Rayanne’s encouragement, she dyes her light brown hair ‘crimson glow’. It is a powerful statement of distance and rebirth, and for several of the opening episodes, is a fixation of her parents, the preppy and conformist Sharon and the geeky Brian. They understand its significance and it terrifies them. But, despite her hair dye and her fashion restyle, she is never completely assimilated to Rayanne and Rickie. She may wear her grungy over-sized check shirts, but she retains her very conventional red hooded jacket. She remains divided, despite herself, between the old world of childhood and the new world of self-discovery.

This theme of division also extends to her parents and Sharon, in particular. She devalues their conformism, but, at the same time, she can never completely reject it. Sharon, though for much of the series condemned to the periphery of Angela’s life, remains nonetheless a strong presence and one who, as time progresses, demonstrates that she is changing, too. Introspective Angela comes to slowly understand a truth: that she has acknowledged the changes in herself – but denied others their right to evolution and its recognition. Angela’s discovery that the prim Sharon is enjoying frequent passionate sex with her popular jock boyfriend, Kyle, leaves her reeling. Angela and Sharon gravitate towards one another again as their understanding of each other’s hidden depths transmutes into something more authentic: a grown-up relationship, with both pleasant and unpleasant truths. In one of the most poignant scenes I have ever seen in a TV series, Angela speaks to Sharon following Sharon’s father’s near-fatal heart attack. Sharon denounces Angela for not comforting her, observing that everyone else was there for her – even her rival, Rayanne. But Angela explains that she felt, given the break in their intimacy, that she didn’t have the right to own her compassion for her oldest – and, in reality, dearest – friend. In a reference to a childhood memory shared between the two, Angela asks Sharon to squeeze her hand ‘as hard as it hurts’. The two gaze into each other’s eyes like star-crossed lovers, surrounded by the girly, childlike paraphernalia of Sharon’s room – a neat contrast to Angela’s own indie den. The scene is a reconciliation. But it is also a reminder that knowledge involves pain and great losses along the way.

While Angela struggles with her angst and developments – or lack of – in her social, psychic and physical life, she remains largely unaware of the similar conditions assailing her own parents. Her father, Graham, is a romantic dreamer, with nostalgia for his younger days at Grateful Dead gigs. He longs to become a professional cook but, for the first half of the series, he is condemned to a humdrum life at the family printing and copying business managed by his wife, Patty. During the series, he contemplates adultery twice, despite his love for, and attraction to, his wife Patty. It is a tribute to writer Winnie Holzman that he remains a good man, despite this. People are complex and can be many things, all at the same time – a point traditionally missed by US series. While Graham feels his life is passing him by, Patty is dominated by the dyad of her own parents, from whom she has inherited the business. As she is ever more controlled by them, the more effort she puts in to controlling Angela. She is a former high school beauty who has hit forty and is starting to notice the lines on her face. She feels the changes in her relationship with Graham but does not know what to do about them or how to express them to him. Mirroring her daughter, she has her hair cut short in an effort to revitalise her image and reignite surprise in Graham. He does not like her new look. Behind her façade, Patty has much in common with Angela, which she largely holds back from revealing to her daughter – frightened that disclosure will damage her authority, that familiarity will breed contempt (something she keenly perceives after noting the lack of boundaries in wild Rayanne and Rayanne's mother's relationship). While she disapproves of Rayanne, when Rayanne overdoses on alcohol and ecstasy at a party, and Patty and Angela rescue her, Patty reveals to Angela that she once had a friend like Rayanne who she adored – and who died in similar circumstances. She tells Angela to go into the house when they arrive home. Despite this revelation, she is unable to fully reveal the crack it has left in her and sobs, alone in her car, for her dead friend.

The series is peppered with misunderstandings that Austen would approve of. Despite Angela’s intelligence, she is swept up in her passion for Jordan Catalano. Much hilarity stems from Angela’s projection of her own beauty and wisdom onto his vacancies. A common enough practice of young girls with their first infatuations. One memorable episode has Jordan playing Angela a song he recently composed: ‘Red’. Angela assumes this paean is intended for her, a reference to her dyed red hair. The episode sees her ponder this breakthrough in their relationship with great excitement and apprehension. In fact, it emerges that the love song is a tribute to his red car.

While Angela obsesses over Jordan, Brian Krakow obsesses over her. His geeky exterior belies the passionate heart that beats beneath his science projects and A grades. The two bicker like Maddy and David in Moonlighting. At one point, they become so heated that Brian moves in and almost kisses her – but not quite. His love for her has authenticity and maturity, because it involves true sacrifice. His need to make her happy sees him eventually playing Cyrano to Jordan’s Christian – the only upside being that it offers him the release of expression. The final minutes of the series, when it hits Angela, finally – what everyone, including her parents, has always known – that it is Brian who loves her, needs her and is the one who matches her soul, are crushing. Angela leaves him standing on the pavement and gets into the car with Jordan. She stares out at Brian, who stares back at her. The audience is left with our own surprise. Angela has not got into the car because Jordan is the one she loves. She is running away from Brian because she knows that he is real and the situation has depth and reality. After all, she is just a kid.

My So-Called Life enjoyed a sizeable audience during this series – but not large enough to persuade the network to carry on into series two. Claire Danes, who played Angela with pitch-perfect skill and luminosity, also wanted to break into films. She has never been better than she was in this series. Youth is wasted on the young, they say. So is this series – that can be enjoyed as a grown-up, with both a sense of relief and a nostalgia for the time before you knew who you were and when every moment was a matter of life and death.

On Loving Local Hero (1983)

2011-02-11T11:12:00.000Z

The story of someone who goes to a place and a people so different from his/her own, usually in self-interest, and, in the process, discovers something surprising: themselves. Serendipity. A very familiar cinematic trope that we’ve seen over and over, from the ridiculous (Pretty Woman) to the sublime (Local Hero). It’s called ‘the fish out of water’ trope.

Local Hero ranks for many – critics, cineastes – as one of the finest films ever made in Britain – or indeed anywhere. Its heart and complexity, its clever crafting of stereotypes and personalities that are so brilliantly subverted, make it a far harder film to pin down than a fish…Well, out of water. Like many of my favourite films (The Godfather, The Wizard of Oz, The Philadelphia Story, It Happened One Night, The Graduate and Roman Holiday, to name a few), despite its humour, Local Hero's central theme is the serious, dangerous and moral challenge that we all face from our first awareness of socialisation: whether to conform or to embrace non-conformity. And, when we’ve settled, as most of us do, on conformity, will anything come along to condemn our choice and destabilise our place of safety? We spend most of our lives part wishing for it, part dreading it.

Those films above have happy endings and unhappy endings. Some have the halfway house of compromise with some degree of salvation (The Philadelphia Story, The Graduate). But most films of this type have, unsurprisingly, unhappy endings. (For this is not just reel life, you understand, this is also real life.) Perhaps none more so than The Wizard of Oz (and you thought I might say Roman Holiday or The Godfather). Salman Rushdie has written superbly on Wizard for the BFI Film Classics series – it’s a modern mini-classic of a text. He points out that, ultimately, Dorothy not only rejects the life of Oz (understandable, to some extent – we all have to come down eventually), but that she also rejects the zany but, finally, crucial life lessons that Oz had to offer. She settles for the black and white life of Kansas, on the farm, infantilised and condemned to a place where nothing will ever happen to her, declaring that if she ever needs ‘to go looking for my heart’s desire again, I'll not look further than my own back yard’. The technicolour journey of independence, self-reliance, courage and ingenuity has all been for nought. Just what kind of mentor was Glinda, anyhow?

But I digress.

Without any serious spoilers: Local Hero is the story of Mac, a Houston yuppie, working for Knox Oil and Gas. By night, through the windows of Mac’s fancy apartment, we see the lights of Houston twinkle. He’s work-mad. He has failed relationships with women and colleagues, such that they either never appear on screen or are barely aware of his existence in the flesh. He’s an alienated man in a synthetic landscape. He’s a plastic man, with a contrived Scottish name to disguise his Hungarian roots. It is from his very plasticity that his journey begins. The boss of his corporation, Happer, assigns to him the role of purchasing the picturesque Scottish village of Ferness. The company wants to situate an oil refinery there. Happer is convinced that Mac’s heritage will enable him in the art of friendly persuasion when brokering a deal with the inhabitants. Astronomy-crazed Happer also wants Mac to monitor the night skies above Ferness, telling him that he must pay particular attention to the constellation Virgo (virgin).

Mac doesn’t want to go, of course. But, being a man of work, go he does. He is met at the airport by the local Knox Oil and Gas rep Danny. En route, they run over a rabbit in the fog. Mac takes the injured rabbit into the car (it is our first indication of an authentic humanity) and together the three continue on to Ferness. There they meet Gordon. Gordon is a man of many trades. He runs the pub, the hotel and is the village’s accountant. Unlike Mac, however, his roles do not amount to any masquerade but, rather, pragmatism. And, in his roles, he becomes something of a symbolic character of liberation, non-conformity. He will not be pinned down. And, again unlike Mac, he enjoys a rich emotional and sensual life, enjoying regularly, as he does, the affections of his beautiful and sexy wife Stella – and loudly.

Mac is, by turns, initially appalled, frustrated and confused by those he encounters. Most tellingly, the villagers do not conform to expectations (Bill Forsyth, director, playing with us as much as he is with Mac). These are not the sentimental, one-dimensional characters prejudice and cinema would usually dish up. No. They are resolutely unsentimental. Gordon cooks the rabbit that Mac not only feels pity for, but also a peculiar and yet plausible kinship with, and he serves it to Mac and Danny. The inhabitants of Ferness, far from being reluctant to sell, are only too keen to cook up a scheme, hoodwink Mac and Danny, and get the very best deal that they can for the village. They are aided and abetted by Gordon – and the local priest.

But something shifts in Mac. Against himself, he finds himself becoming infatuated with the people, the place and the pace of life. While looking up into the heavens at Happer's request, he witnesses the aurora borealis, a stark contrast to the man-made light of Houston. The beautiful beach and sea that surround him amount to the direct other of the arid, urban jungle of Houston. These are not subtle contrasts, granted, but as a lack of subtlety goes, I do wonder whether it has ever been managed to such wonderful effect. Meanwhile, Danny changes, too, from a nerdy 'yes man' in a suit to a man who embraces his sensual and sexual side, when he meets a real-life mermaid in the shape of web-footed marine biologist Marina, who is hell-bent on protecting the beach and its ecosystem.

What happens next? Well, you’ll have to watch the film. But one clue: Happer turns out to be a much better mentor than Glinda ever was.

Who, exactly, is the hero of Local Hero? Is it Gordon, who seems to have managed a life of practicality, but also freedom and love (one that Mac, smitten with both Gordon’s lifestyle and his wife, recognises when, drunkenly, he puts it to Gordon that they might trade existences: ‘I’ll make a good Gordon, Gordon’). Or is it Happer? Who has somehow, impossibly, married a life of conformity with the life of a dreamer? Or is it Ben Knox, the old man who lives on the beach in a shack, who, it turns out, holds all the cards and may just save everyone from themselves? All are, in their own way, heroes of life. But none more than Mac, who is, after all, an everyman. Mac is most of us. Dorothy returns to the farm in Kansas and rejects her life lessons. Mac arrives back in his apartment in Houston and is haunted by his. He is proof that people can and do change. But will the world accommodate them? Perhaps, like me, you’re asking yourself the same. Somewhere in Ferness, a phone is ringing, unanswered.

Women, Wales, Publishing

2011-02-07T13:00:00.000Z

Next month, I’ll leave my role as editor of New Welsh Review. I’ll be succeeded by a woman. ‘Another woman in the role! Things are beginning to come on fantastically for women in Wales, aren’t they!’ a colleague recently exclaimed to me.

I pondered it afterwards. After all, the three major English-language literary/cultural journals have been in the hands of women for quite a while now. Poetry Wales since 2008, edited by Zoe Skoulding; Planet from 2006 – 2010 edited by Helle Michelsen (herself an Assistant Editor prior to that), recently succeeded by Jasmine Donahaye; New Welsh Review, edited by Francesca Rhydderch from 2002-2008, myself (a former Poetry Editor of New Welsh Review) from 2008-2011. New Welsh Review’s founding editor back in 1988 was a woman: Belinda Humfrey. Planet has enjoyed the skills of women who have gone on to become central figures in the literary-cultural life of Wales over the years, including Francesca and Gwen, and retains the talents of Emily Trahair as an Associate Editor. Cambria Magazine, which straddled politics, lifestyle, literature and more, was edited by Frances Jones-Davies. And let’s not forget that Gillian Clarke was a co-editor of the mighty, erstwhile Anglo-Welsh Review. If we take a look at the Welsh-language magazine scene, we see young talents Angharad Blythe and Sian Melangell Dafydd – editors of Taliesin – who succeeded two women – Manon Rhys and Christine James – when they took the helm in 2010.

Meanwhile, at the English-language publishing houses, Penny Thomas at Seren has been picking up some of the finest and most various new fiction from Wales, deserving a special mention for blending the old school with the quirky with sensitivity and style. Also at Seren, Amy Wack has edited a list of award-winning poets for many years with panache and considerable nous, and was also once an excellent Reviews Editor of Poetry Wales. At Richard Lewis Davies’s Parthian, Lucy Llewellyn has led the fiction list onwards with vibrant and unusual titles, and developed the Bright Young Things series from young, urgent, first-time authors Susie Wild, Wil Gritten, J.P. Smythe and Tyler Keevil. Jan Fortune-Wood is the founding editor and publisher of Cinnamon. Hazel Cushion is the founder of the successful Wales-based indie, Accent. And, last but not least, there are the industrious women at Honno, who have reprinted a back catalogue of once-forgotten women's writing we all might otherwise have missed, and who are discovering new, exciting contemporary female writers even as I write.

So it’s less a case of sisters doin’ it for themselves, but rather the case that sisters have been doin’ it for themselves – for quite a while now. And they’ve been doing a pretty good job of scooping up talent, and shaping a robust and original output, as it happens.

A sense of novelty can, of course, afford a sense of excitement. Now, I’d never want to deny excitement in publishing at a time when people should feel excited about the scene in Wales (yes, Wales, in particular) – now more than ever, recession or not. And I’d never suggest that those who have noted with interest the rise in women in publishing in Wales have been anything less than supportive, welcoming and complimentary. So why am I troubled by the novelty attached to our dominance? I think novelty can be reductive. It can lead to the key becoming the mere curiosity. It can encourage a notion of chance rather than circumstance – and deny explorations of why and how women have entered into the culture in this way. Novelty is misleading. Encouraging a view of exceptions. It denies our momentum, forgetting a tradition of women as capable, very often inspired, editors in Wales along the way – front of house, behind the scenes. A tradition that I want young, literary- and culturally-minded women growing up in Wales now to see as something they can aspire to being a part of themselves, one day – in total seriousness and to be taken totally seriously. So, I just want to assure: we’re not new. We’re just news that stays news. Not quite the same thing.

Year's beginning

2011-01-01T14:21:00.001Z

When it comes to New Year’s resolutions I’ve always resolved to loathe New Year. The forced gaiety. Having to pay a tenner for the privilege of sitting in your local, charmless boozer. Random embraces conditioned by drink and the sheer untruth of intensity. The awful greyness of New Year’s Day which follows, which can always be depended upon, as you crapulently shiver on the sofa, wondering what the hell happened over the last twelve months and, possibly, your entire life... Am I depressing you? Sorry.

This New Year, however, was different for me. 2010 proved to be one of those years that come around so rarely you’re surprised to encounter them again. I’ve tried to do some calculation of it. I would say for me they average out at putting in an appearance once a decade. (This is a strike rate some way below the seven years self-renewal theory that some theorist once theorised about.) It’s been a time of tremendous professional activity and a feeling of real achievement (something that perfectionists don't experience that often) – and that might, superficially, account for the sense of a year that truly feels like an event and a consolidation of sorts. But this year has become one characterised by the kind of purpose that only ever comes from personal revelation. Through a glass, darkly. Indeed. Best and worst of times, until I reached its end and realised that it was, in fact, all gravy. Ah, yes. The present torments us, the past enlightens. And how. So, this year’s crossing over: gratitude for my lot. I should like to reveal more but it will all have to wait for the memoirs, which hopefully won't have to be self-published.

Thank you so much for reading my occasional musings. My meter tells me that you come and you linger. I am glad of it. I promise to update more regularly in 2011. 11: lucky number of resolve and unity. Here’s hoping for us all.

I want to wish you a Happy New Year. Blwyddyn Newydd Dda!

And now: to poems.

A Slight Return

2010-12-07T17:42:00.000Z

What year is it? It’s 1998 and winter.

I lived in Streatham back then. In a place that not even the most skilled lettings agent might bluff as a studio flat. It was a bedsitter. You know the type: straight out of central casting. Grim curtains, some beige cabinets with their doors straining at the hinges, the tick-tick of the meter. The Larkin deluxe suite. When I’d moved in earlier that year, several opened packets of rice were left by the Mini-Belling, and I found one shoe in the wardrobe, with a bloodstained sole. It was all very mysterious. Next door to me lived a young Scottish woman who would periodically sob of a late night. I understood. The next flight up lived people I never saw, although I knew their movements intimately as they padded across the other side of my ceiling. In the attic room, right at the top of the house, lived a young man who, when we ran into each other in the hallway, always appeared to be either on his way to the swimming pool or just back from it. There was singing, sometimes, somewhere. I could never trace the lyrics. This was the film Polanski never made.

The winter was especially cold that year. Or maybe now I like to have it that way. Or perhaps it was just the fact that the building had learned over the years to keep its cold to itself. It was somehow always colder than outside. I had a little heater that ran, like all other appliances, from the meter that seemed to swallow up my coins with alarming proficiency. At work, I used a word processor to type up my poems neatly. At home, this home, I used an electric typewriter. In many ways, I think now, the best way to work. No easy delete. No shaky hand to decipher. No split-second self-censorship. It taught the discipline of holding a poem in the head before committing to paper. If I remembered lines an hour or two on, here was something. And, then, when I rushed onwards anyhow, it often turned out that the mistakes were the diamonds. I would sit in bed with my socks on and the duvet wrapped around me and think, and read, and type into the early hours. I would even write when I came in from a night. Sometimes that involved some lubrication. One morning I awoke to find one line set out against the white: ‘You are you you know are you are.’ But in poetry, like drink, there are no accidents. I recall pondering this portentous missive to the crapulent self for the whole day. Many nights I would type out chunks of Frost or Wilbur to get me going. Typing or writing out by hand the work of the greats has an uncanny way of allowing their artistry to inhabit you, for their rhythm to discipline your own heartbeat, for their line to walk you fully there.

That winter, my little bible was Eavan Boland’s modern masterpiece, Object Lessons. I read sections over and over. Through the years, I’ve come to affectionately nickname it Abject Lessons. Nothing to do with the content, which, even when one comes to disagree with quite a bit of it (which I did, I did, dear reader), is a rich and quite brilliant piece of work. But, rather, reference to the humble beginnings Boland sketches as she takes us through her early years of grappling with a voice and a space with which and in which to be a poet and a woman and Irish. Woman. Poet. We had that in common at least. But we also shared that notion of space. Literal and metaphorical. Boland in her small flat, me in my bedsitter.

What I personally got most from the book was not Boland’s take on feminist or, of course, Irish poetics. It was, instead, compelling to hear a contemporary poet tell their life through – and of – a journey into poetry. To play out the arguments of what it may or may not mean for an individual to become a poet of their time, against an indifferent world played out before them. From the year zero of how that begins and what it takes, and what it will ultimately cost – a constant self-examination, abiding dissatisfaction, a marginalisation. And what gifts and, ultimately, strange liberations such things could actually be. This spoke to me directly and immediately. It affirmed me.

Boland and I, green girl that I was, shared a sense of that space. What we did not share, of course, was how we regarded it. Years ahead of herself, Boland was able to place herself within that space and bring to both a sense of symbiosis and, well, enchantment. It is, of course, a fiction. Of the true variety. In the present, that winter, I saw my space as accident and sentence, something to escape, as I flew furiously through the canon and began to find my beginnings. I know better now. We never fully own our moments. When we are in them we are too busy with the business of living them and, therefore, paradoxically, we are never quite present. And when they are beyond us only then are we truly there. Either way, something is lost. Which is just as it should be.

My Block or 'The Wall'

2010-10-19T17:01:00.000+01:00

Ten years ago, I wrote a poem called ‘Joyrider’. Of all the poems I’ve ever written, it probably means the most to me, approaching a talisman of sorts. This was the first poem I finished that felt completely realised. Most established poets could probably tell you of their moment and their poem. When it happens, at last, after all the reading, after all the misfires, it is as if the doors of the world have been flung wide open.

I had started it in my lunch break and completed it mid-afternoon. It was another life, then. I worked for HM the Queen. Deep in the bowels of the Civil Service, where the sun never shines and there is only ever more paper. Later, I would work my way up to the tussle and excitement of Whitehall. But for this now, here was a job depressing in its structure and regimes, an infinite filing cabinet of protocol and towing of lines. An antithesis to freedom and creativity, and joy. This made it absolutely ideal for writing poems in your lunch time or the empty hours between 3 and 6. Seemingly, I was not the only one. I am particularly fond of one apocryphal tale that recounts how, in one similar department, the server collapsed under the weight of so many civil servants working on their novels and poetry collections. It is not literally true. But, in another sense, it is the only truth about the Civil Service you need to know.

Anyhow, that first poem. I walked home that evening after work feeling heady. It was like first love all over again. But an altogether grander interpretation. Love is common enough. Art is the sublime. Oh yes, it’s hubris alright. I had tapped into something. I was elevated. For the first time in my life, I felt…What was it? As if I had been given a second life. And this one was definitely going to be special. (The tragi-comedy of this in hindsight is not lost on me, in case you’re wondering.) And, after that, the poems seemed to come relentlessly, easily. As if they clustered around this one true thing. I liked for many years to believe that all the poems that came were good. But, recently, before taking an Arvon course, I fished out a dusty first draft of The Never-Never. I was astonished about how much I had weeded out, changed, added. How very bad some of it was. I gave out copies to the students to look over. It became an exercise in recasting, shaping a book, recasting. Aiming for that elusive beauty: integritas. But it also served as a timely exercise in mortification, an assault on pride. Don’t believe the hype you dream up to peddle to yourself.

Still, what it did show was how that first poem had definitely set in motion the thing most vital to all writers: a sense of release. A letting-go. A sense of brashness, of dancing like no one’s looking. 'Joyrider' had given me the confidence to believe that I could write. Better, that I could trust my instincts. And it introduced me to my voice. Or what I prefer to think of as a ‘personality’ to the text. I felt buoyed and purposeful. The Never-Never was published in 2004. It did quite well. And for that I am forever indebted to the fickle fortune that ignores or garlands poets at whim. I was lucky. Some are not. So it goes.

And then something unexpected happened. I ran into a wall. Yes, a wall. You know, they call it a block. But it’s not. You can walk around a block. It’s a wall. A high, high, wide, wide wall. It has no ends. There is no point trying to walk it with a rope and scramble over. On the other side of that wall, there is the wild blue yonder of possibility you once knew. Being on the wrong side is rather like hearing next-door neighbours making love with abandon while you lie in bed alone. To say to a non-writer that it is an agony sounds like so much idiocy, probably not without justification. But it is agony. And cold-sweat fear. And uselessness. And crying without tears.

What was to follow would prove curious. On the one hand, I had just given birth to a daughter. For several years my life to come would be a coaxing of first steps and words, of play and epiphany. It was a time of wonder. On the other hand, the creativity and ambition of my new daughter served as a brutal reminder of my own stasis, my own wordlessness. At the time, it felt I had lost myself. Turns out I had.

A period of, shall we say, readjustment followed. I attempted to string a stanza together. Old ground. Old texture. Old escape routes. Me. But not me. The old me. And it rang completely hollow. Delete. Delete. Delete.

Part of the problem had been, of course, the prevailing conditions that make a first book. The fine poet Maura Dooley once memorably noted that the genesis and completion of a first collection is as if the whole of one’s life to date has been poured into the shape of it. I’ve always loved that. The idea of fluidity. That a book is not a thing of and for itself, but rather a vessel for something that has been years not only in the writing, but the living. And it chimes well with what I know some other poets I have spoken to have experienced following the publication of a first book. It is at once a spectacular fulfilment and yet a devastating depletion. It is as if life is a great water tank building up, until at some point, miraculously, it is full and cannot be contained. And then it is empty again.

Where was I? Oh yes. Never writing a poem again. I made pains to stay wedded to the writing business. Not poems, no. But readings, editing, teaching, journalism, creative non-fiction, reviews. The thing we poets do when we’re actually being non-poets. Through it. I discovered something surprising. That I loved writing beyond myself, my words on the paper. I began to come to terms. And then one day I was at terms. I had had my moment. I was done. But the muse is a bitch. Just when you’ve got over her, burned her letters, stopped reading her horoscopes, in she walks, lovelier even than the memory. Here you go again. I began to write once more.

My second collection is coming along. It’s so utterly different from that first book, it might be written by someone else entirely. And, of course, it is. I am surprised by the new direction. And excited about it. I’ve ironed out the creases and the swagger has given way to a kind of, well… modesty and uncertainty. What will it all amount to? The making of a good poet always begins with their unspoken admission ‘I don’t know.’ And, you know, I really don’t. So maybe I am on my way, at last.

It's a wonderful job

2010-09-28T15:08:00.001+01:00

In the thick of production here and annual reporting, to boot. Sometimes it seems that the panther-like stalk that administration has on me will never end. I am also in reflective mood. Just two more issues of New Welsh Review – including the forthcoming one – and I move on in spring 2011. It’s startling how fast time has gone since I started the role. Truly.

I’ve been wondering what I’ll miss – and what I’ll be glad to leave behind, despite the inevitable difficulty of letting go of such an intense working life. Perhaps my observations will prove useful to my successor. Perhaps not.

So, the highlights.

Sending out an acceptance letter to the fair unknowns – those writers that you just know are going to go somewhere. Being among the first to discover them is a privilege and has never ceased to excite me. Completion of production hell. If I was Tina Brown I’d probably toast it with a dirty Martini. I’m not, so a modest glass of Pinot (paid for by my own purse) usually suffices. The arrival, four times a year of the outcome of the blood, sweat, tears and the odd sleepless night: the magazine. I would say it’s like Christmas each quarter. I touch it, turn it over in my hands – though it’s a gift unopened. For one, I know the contents by rote and for another, if I did, I would be sure to open the pages and happen upon the typo that eluded me. That’s the unwritten law of all publishing for editors. Never open it once it's arrived back from the printers. Creating and promoting something that so few people in this world now care about or value: the literary magazine. It’s humbled me. Humbled me likewise, the people who do care and stop to tell you so with a kind virtual or in-person word at precisely the moment when you wonder what lunacy ever possessed you. So: there is light in the darkness – where I’m usually to be found, whistling. All the talented authors I’ve met in person and via email. Their commitment and dedication to their art. How nice and modest so very many of them are and how pleased I am that so many still value being a part of literary print magazine tradition in the twenty-first century. I think their antecedents would be pleased, too. The wonderful events I’ve been a part of, watching new writers and more established ones play to a crowd that appreciates what they do in this disposable culture that seems to dominate now. Being the steward of something that will outlive me and, maybe, forget me. That's the humbling part again. And a useful check for someone who's also a writer. The excitement and the pressure. The show must go on.

I can't say I'll miss the rejection letters. It's rather like breaking up with someone you never even met. The pain on the other end is similar. I know – I've been there, too. And: I've been depressed at the way people send out to a magazine without ever having picked up a copy. Other editors moan about the same thing all the time. A great deal of anguish and frustration could be spared writers (and editors!) if they did and a lot more success prevail. So many people forget that the talent is in the choices. Do your research. Find a place where you belong or, better still, be ambitious and find the place where you want to belong, someday. I should know – I learned that myself the hard way when I was starting out. I now have a badge for it which possibly qualified me to write this.

Recently, in the middle of a minor crisis, one of those fair unknowns I was talking about contacted me to let me know that their showcase in the magazine had led to something bigger for them. Their journey was now really beginning. Sometimes, it feels good to be George Bailey at the Building and Loan with your suitcase full of NWRs.

Kathryn Gray in conversation with Tyler Keevil

2010-09-12T17:15:00.001+01:00

I'll be in conversation with the brilliant young novelist Tyler Keevil, discussing his debut from Parthian Books, Fireball, at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre on 21 October at 6pm. Please do join us if you can for an evening that promises lively chat, readings and, of course, the obligatory launch party Pinot.

Poetry School Course – 2011

2010-08-17T10:01:00.000+01:00

I'll be leading a course on beginning to write poetry, starting January 2011 in London. This is an ideal starter kit of tools and inspiration for those who wish to get to grips with the fundamentals of writing poetry within a supportive environment. We'll be looking at developing technique, form, subject matter, finding a voice and, along the way, we'll be reading and discussing some of the finest contemporary poets now working in the UK and beyond. Booking is open now. For further details click here.

Readings, Courses 2010

2010-01-12T11:32:00.000Z

Saturday 27th and Sunday 28th February 2010

Academi Conference 2010: New Narratives
Gellifawr, Pembrokeshire

Poetry reading with Gillian Clarke, Joe Dunthorne and Carrie Etter (27th February)

How Short is short?
Kathryn Gray looks at the current trend of shorter and more immediate fiction. This is the short story vs. Nano-fiction. With Deborah Kay Davies and Holly Howitt (28th February)

Visit www.academi.org for booking details.

12th April – 17th April 2010

Arvon: Working Towards a Full Collection
The Hurst
Tutors: Michael Symmons Roberts and Kathryn Gray
Guest: Siân Hughes

Visit www.arvonfoundation.org for details

29th May at 1pm

Guardian Hay Festival 2010, Elmley Foundation Dream Stage
Small Wars and Laughter: Dmitry Bykov and Rachel Trezise talk to Kathryn Gray

Living Souls is a comic masterpiece set in a futuristic Russian dystopia. Sixteen Shades of Crazy imagines a contemporary South Walian Stepford-Llaregub.

6th June at 5.30pm

Guardian Hay Festival 2010, Elmley Foundation Dream Stage
Intimacy: Trezza Azzopardi and Jon McGregor talk to Kathryn Gray

The Song House is about language and music, memory and place; Even The Dogs is an intimate exploration of life at the edges of society; littered with love, loss, despair and a glimpse of redemption. Chaired by Kathryn Gray.

26th July – 31st July

Ty Newydd: Weaving the Line
Tutors: Daljit Nagra and Jo Shapcott
Guest: Kathryn Gray

Visit www.tynewydd.org for booking details.

New Welsh Review

2010-01-08T12:10:00.000Z

I am now editor of New Welsh Review .

This blog will shortly be up and running again but largely only to provide details on readings or courses I am giving. I'll also occasionally update on two works-in-progress that are currently on the boil. Do feel free to have a look at some poems from my first book that are still uploaded in the meantime.

And I do hope you take a look at New Welsh Review, a magazine packed with brilliant writing from Wales and beyond. Click here to visit our website and take a look at what we do and who we are. You can also read, for free, some examples of the great writing New Welsh Review has published and championed over its twenty-one-year history in our online virtual yearbook; find out who's in it; find out how to maximise the chances of appearing it in yourself with our guidelines; and, of course, get the lowdown on the science bit: 'How to subscribe'.

We also maintain a blog with news, views and guest contributors. Click here to read the New Welsh Review Editor's Blog.

Biography

2010-01-08T11:00:00.000Z

Kathryn Gray was born in Caerphilly in 1973 and raised in Swansea. She studied German and Medievalism at the Universities of Bristol and York. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2001, and her poems and reviews have appeared in leading newspapers and journals such as The TLS, The Independent, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Planet, Agenda and Stand. She was nominated for the Poetry Society's New Poet of the Year Award in 2001 and in the same year was included in Anvil New Poets 3. Her debut collection, The Never-Never, was published by Seren in 2004. The Never-Never was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and for the 2004 T.S. Eliot Prize. She is currently writing her second collection of poems and a creative non-fiction work. She is a member of the Academi Board and the editor of Wales's leading literary journal New Welsh Review.

A few poems from The Never-Never

2004-12-17T10:57:00.000Z

The Wardrobe

This wood is not about the old wives and the oak
or the ash that separates a summer from a soak.

And that afternoon when a sky turned dark,
though it might have been the Ark

itself as twelve men in Sunday drink had shouldered it
from the house of the last widow left

on Beaufort Hill, this is not about the front step,
the angle, lift and give, the driving curses of their stoops;

not even how, at a loss, they took at it with the axe
and nailed it by bits back; every loving cuff and coax.

Or how for years the doors would fall open
as if it was - loosely speaking - a lopsided heaven;

how it proved by the burning it was only wood,
as much this felled as when it stood.

And last with every man now decades gone,
singing, I push them down the Taff to Avalon,

the river become rain or a spread of that fire.
No. these are the stories. This was the weather.

Saint Anthony of Padua

My only saint, O hear now the prayer of raw knees,
of dowsing palms under brown settees,
all commonplaces of fivers keys and things misplaced,
itching back to the anonymities. I call upon the grace

of faces pasted to pissed-up walls of the coach stations,
your cult of tired tourists moved just clear of salvation
and geriatrics dribbling for the name of their daughter,
the flare's phosphor bronze over that body of water.

Not even a clock, the sameness of and unused days
can trouble or escape the kind tragedy of your gaze.
And when I miss and drop like this, I'll prove you near
to the soul and the sock, my sad career.

Buy The Never-Never at

www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1854113658/qid=1105545667/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl/202-7201234-0619853

Praise for The Never-Never:

'Kathryn Gray's poetry is delightfully accessible, intelligent, full of deftly rendered detail and attractive cadences. Somehow or other - through sheer talent and instinct, I would say - she has established a convincing and utterly contemporary balance of fragility and assurance.'

Douglas Dunn

'Gray has an intense sense of the deconsecrated which together with the equestrienne snap and snuffle of her poems make this an original and thoroughly twenty-first century debut.'

Maurice Riordan

'A winner'

Peter Finch

'A spirited performance...mysterious...chilling.'

Alan Brownjohn, The Sunday Times

'[The] hallmarks of Gray's style are there: the eye for detail, the panache...These poems swarm with (often dazzling) effect...this is attention-grabbing stuff.'

Poetry Wales

'Kathryn Gray's The Never-Never manifests an intelligence and an outward interest especially refreshing in a first collection...poems employ dense yet sinuous lines in such a way as to render a moment lush in its emotional fullness...an intelligent emotional complexity. The Never-Never brings together an array of accomplished poems, remarkable in their singularity of style and interest and that is to be applauded.'

Carrie Etter, New Welsh Review

'She finds beautiful imagery in surprisingly familiar places...a taut, chilling narrative...shows up Gray's talent for giving a rare poetic voice to twentysomething anxieties.'

Clare Pollard, Magma

'Formal relish and exuberance'

Poetry Review

'Kathryn Gray clearly has talent and in this, her first collection, she puts it on display in poems which are, by turns, clever, witty and formally accomplished. 'The Collect' - the Never-Never of the collection - construes a land of childhood that has to be paid for, though 'when they'd come/we, all grown up now, would never be home'. Kathryn Gray, in contrast, does pay up, with interest.'

Greg Hill, Planet

This is a debut collection of poems bursting with vitality. Each poem takes us into a different world, as they twist and turn with rich language and form, and each works as a whole, unique piece every time. The atmosphere of every poem shines with a quickness and liveliness of its own, from the upbeat feel of ‘Joyrider’ – ‘Come, hot-wired from the city, down a one-car lane, over the keystone bridge that cannot take the headlong rush’ . . . to the more sad, slow ‘Or Nothing (after Williams Carlos Williams)’ – ‘Or nothing, a pious wish to whiteness gone over, a cluster, flower by flower, white desire, empty, a single stem.’

Kathryn Gray captures the reader’s senses and emotions with sparkling skill and wit throughout. She has been shortlisted for the 2004 T.S. Eliot Prize.

Clare Maynard, Welsh Books Council (www.gwales.com)

Contact me

2004-07-14T12:45:00.000+01:00

If you'd like to contact me, please do. You can email me at kathrynlouisegray [at] hotmail.com

Please note that this is not my private email address and all spam, expletives, high-jinx, hawking and/or trading will be deleted immediately.