In Person
Wednesday, May 28, 2003
Sudden Collapses In Public Places has been launched. It was a fantastic party, with strawberries in glasses of champagne, and singing and violins, and loads of bubbly people. I really enjoyed myself. Sometimes parties are rather stressful, but this one wasn't. It was great to see people there from all kinds of different places; from the hospital, the medical school, the theatre, the university, and writing groups. There were old friends, other women who have had breast cancer, new friends, poets, children, some babies, healers, people's mothers, artists, scientists...etc etc. And it was quite short, which is always a good thing I think. So now the book has set sail and I can let it go. I like the look of it very much. I think ARC have done a wonderful job.
I am doing the final tweaks on the script for the TV sitcom based on the play 'Attachments' which is being filmed in July. I have managed to cut the original play by twenty minutes, but the wierd thing is, the story is still more or less intact. The stage play now seems like a big baggy thing. I think alot of things could do with a bit of fierce cutting (my hair?).
Thanks to recommendations I am now reading The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. It's very readable, although I feel I need a good stretch with it somewhere, like a deckchair on a shady beach. I long for that feeling of being completely absorbed in a book. Life has been too fragmented lately for much lying about. I am like a wound up thing...I get more and more busy until I whiz out of control and have to do nothing for a while.
Thanks everyone who got in touch after listening to POSTIES on the radio. It's great getting feedback after radio things!
Posted by julia @ 09:58 PM GMT
Monday, May 19, 2003
It's Monday morning. I am in my writing room with the radio on about to listen to POSTIES. It's funny, listening to things when they are ON AIR....like being part of a huge invisible audience.
I spent the weekend in Leeds, having a break, with my mum. We stayed in a hotel called Quebecs that had very squashy beds and raspberries for breakfast, which I still think of as a luxury fruit. It was interesting being a tourist in a Northern city. I mean you could become a tourist at any point couldn't you, just by stepping out of your life, putting on a hat, walking slowly and hanging about art galleries and craft shops. I am going to do it in Newcastle. Anyway, we went to odd places, like a small independent cinema in Hyde Park with ancient seats and a red dust screen curtain. Before the film we sat in a cafe called Bakara (I think) where students drank mint tea and smoked medicinal hookahs in low sofas. Everywhere we went people were incredibly kind and helpful, telling us how to get to places and giving advice. We also went to the City Art Gallery which is full of sofas and comfey places to sit. There was a model of Anthony Gormley's 'brick man' which is a large angel of the north type sculpture which hasn't yet been made. I was doing a project taking photographs of my thumb in different settings, so I have photos of my thumb in a hotel bed, in the markets, in the gallery and so on. This is my latest idea for a writing workshop...you write postcards from parts of the body in different places ie my Shins in Spain!
This week I am working on the script for the tv thing. It's taking shape now, and is no longer a stage play at all.Posted by julia @ 10:04 AM GMT
Thursday, May 8, 2003
I am obsessed with Brazil. I like saying the word to myself. This is because I am taking my fictional characters on a journey in this next novel. Luckily, it doesn't cost too much taking fictional people on holiday! So I've been reading about Brazil, meeting Brazilians, eating Brazil nuts, learning salsa dancing, drinking juice. This takes up plenty of time.
I am also making a stage play into a tv piece which is an interesting process, thinking about the small screen and what we see. It's hard to let go of words though. Nice to be able to get up close to people's faces. I have never had anything on television before, so I feel like a fumbling person who doesn't know the rules. This is a pilot episode for a comedy series, based on the play Attachments that was on last year. It's all about hoovers and artificial insemination. The play was too long so I'm cutting about half of it.
Otherwise I'm growing sunflowers and nasturtiums, and inviting people to come and raise their glasses at the poetry press launch on May 27th. I've been writing poems about salsa dancing and teenagers, and working on the synopsis for the new novel, although I'm not sure what will happen until I have been to Brazil. Everything is growing incredibly fast....
My reading has lost direction at the moment. I have about eight novels on the go and I'm not absorbed in any of them. Tomorrow I have a long journey on a train, so maybe I can get myself immersed then. I am going to Deptford to see an exhibition called INFALLIBLE (In Search of the Real George Elliot). I'm going to write a story for the exhibition's website. I like things like this, that introduce a different element to writing. I especially like working from visual art.
Must go....I have to have my photo taken next to a postbox (again!).Posted by julia @ 01:42 PM GMT
Thursday, May 1, 2003
Happy May Day!!!
I got a new poetry anthology of socialist poetry in the post called Red Sky at Night, edited byAndy Croft and Adrian Mitchell. I haven't had time to read it properly yet, but it has a beautiful cover and I like the title too. Poets are doing their best to be useful lately, and I was pleased that the poet laureate has been so vocally opposed to the war. I suppose that in times of crisis people need poets to put things into words and to show how everything matters. The poet David Constantine was talking about this at a recent reading here in the university...how the same things happen to poets as happen to everyone...sad things, moving things, worrying things, but poets are compelled to write about it, and to try and communicate their experiences to others. More and more it seems that poetry is being promoted as first aid. There are poems to keep you sane, poems to help you stay alive, anti war poems, survival poetry. I have certainly used poetry as a way of understanding my own experience of cancer. Actually, it would have been very strange to have not had a creative outlet while I was having all that treatment. Where would all my worries and fears have gone??I spent yesterday lunchtime having lunch with the panel of the city of culture. We had Newcastle Brown ice cream ! In the end I forgot about trying to enthuse about Newcastle, and I had a very pleasant chat with two of them about novels. We were sitting in a room that overlooked everything...the river, the bridges, Baltic, Gateshead. It must be wierd going around all these cities and having people talking to you about their achievements all the time! Still, although I am very fond of Liverpool, I think Newcastle/Gateshead is READY to expand and stretch its steely wings. It doesn't feel like a nostalgic city any more. It feels like a bouncy young person with loads of enthusiasm. I was thinking how we have changed so much in the time I have been living here. We know how to be ironic. We can have twenty balls in the air and not drop any of them!
Otherwise I'm busy on the next book. I am going to take my fictional characters to Brazil. So far I have been getting to know them in Newcastle, but we are going to go to Central Brazil and have an adventure. I am working on poems too, and trying to go into the space where poems are made every day. It's such a relief when one gets there, but very hard to open the door!
Posted by julia @ 01:55 PM GMT
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