Zulus fighting in the flowerbed

This post is mostly about Preston and South Africa and Crail and some dead people who were once alive in those places.

Last week I finished the last two first year portfolios for my MA; the Writer with the Writerly Name’s Creative Writing Workshop portfolio, and the Agreeable Doctor’s Creativity and Marginality in Contemporary Writing portfolio. There’s a dissertation to write now; and a year to complete it in. As ever, I was just one day short of having enough time to finish those last two pieces nicely and I was up until three on Friday morning compiling them.

A few hours later Ian hefted me weightily into the car, folding my legs and arms in after like an inexpertly doubled deckchair and we set off for Crail, via the Humanities Office to hand in the assignments. The Humanities Office was locked and deserted; but I can’t talk about that yet. It’s enough to testify that the kind lady from the Ceremonies Office took the portfolios from me and gave me a receipt, and a hug.

There is an assignment drop box but how I feel about assignment drop boxes is: what about the bad person with the lighter fuel and the lit match? That’s all I’m saying.

On the way to Scotland the Radio 4 play was Ken Blakeson's Bearing the Cross which tells the story of Rorke’s Drift. This is an Amazing Coincidence because there’s a flower bed in Avenham Park in Preston that’s designed to mark the 130^th anniversary of Rorkes Drift (*thinks* 'maybe that’s why Ken wrote the play too').

The 1964 film, Zulu, depicts the Battle of Rorke's Drift. It was a terrible fight between the British Army and Zulu warriors. Preston are observing the event because the padre, George Smith, became the chaplain at Fulwood Barracks, here in Preston, on his return from South Africa and is buried in New Hall Lane cemetery (that was after he died, obviously).

Apparently one hundred and thirty-nine British soldiers successfully defended the garrison at Rorke’s Drift against several thousand Zulu warriors (reported numbers vary). Eleven Victoria Crosses were awarded to the defending soldiers; the largest number of VCs conferred to a regiment for one action. George Smith received the Zululand medal and clasp for gallantry; only soldiers can receive the VC.

I felt ill at ease when I saw first saw the Avenham Park flowerbed a few weeks ago. I know the soldiers were brave and doing what they were employed to do, but it somehow seems out of place to be commemorating the defeat of native people who were defending their stolen land; just as Victorian Prestonian warriors would have defended Avenham Park, armed with fettlers and yard-brushes, if Zulu pastoralists had rolled up and set about grazing their cattle on the sward. Ken Blakeson's play reinforced my disquiet.

Crail is in Fife, across the Tay from Dundee. I tipped my hat groggily to Kathleen Jamie as I was driven by Newburgh. Jamie wrote Findings which was one of the Agreeable Doctor’s set texts. She also wrote the poem Arraheids in which arrowheads in museums,

‘thon raws o flint arraheids
in oor gret museums o antiquities’

are likened to the sharp tongues of Grannies who cannot stop themselves from putting you back in your place;

'ye arenae here tae wonder,
whae dae ye think ye ur?'

We’ve all met one of those Grandmas.

Crail is a picturesque fishing town (see above) fixed in another time and place. Like the Isle of Man, I suspect it isn't there if you’re not looking.

As you know, I spend a lot of time in graveyards, stealing names, admiring Shap Granite headstones, looking for dead babies; I can add looking for the headstone of an Army padre to that list now.

The graveyard at Crail Parish Church is the best yet. It has the oldest and most elaborate range of monuments I’ve ever seen. Tombs that would temp one to be buried alive (as was said of the mausoleum at Castle Howard, I forget who by).

I’m tired and emotional now, thinking about assignment drop boxes, kind administrators and displaced Zulu warriors who're reduced to fighting in a flowerbed. I’ll tell the tale of mural memorials, body snatchers and mort houses next time.

Carol Ann Duffy, Myra Hindley and the Prize. Wednesday 13 May 2009.

This week we looked at Carol Ann Duffy’s World’s Wife. The Agreeable Doctor pointed out some other bits of knowledge that should have been bleeding obvious, even to me; titles matter and collections of poetry have a form. Duffy’s collection seems so proceed from her girlhood through to her feeling about her own daughter.

Duffy based a poem on Little Red Riding Hood and called it Little Red Cap – I’d thought, ‘that’s funny,’ and left it at that. I might have thought, ‘maybe that’s what Americans call the story.’ The girl character in the animation Hoodwinked! was called Red after all.

(I’ve just looked at Hoodwinked! on IMBd and found out about the Rashomon effect; boundless potential for me to waffle with that).

But of course Red Cap has been named for a purpose. One friend suggested it’s an updating; nobody wears riding hoods anymore but the hepcats do wear caps.

Little Red Cap acknowledges sexuality in adolescent girls (which just made me think of another thing the title might allude to). The line,

‘what little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf?’

reminded me of a recent episode of Coronation Street. A grown-up character speaks about being seduced by a friend’s father at 14. She admits that she liked him; looked forward to seeing him when she came to the house. I was impressed with the courage of the scriptwriters for including such candid dialogue.

As mentioned I entered two creative writing competitions. I was a sickly-mix crippled by self-doubt and plagued by what I’d do if I didn’t win. Worse still - how I’d cope if someone from my class won.

I was awarded joint first in the Andrea Pendlebury poetry award and joint second in the Helen Clark prose award. Book tokens and wine (artfully arranged above); very nice. The last time I receive a wrtiting prize was in 1968.

(THIS is being said in a surly, mean-spirited, little inner voice, not for consumption by the polite, generous spirited reader. Still reading? Right. I didn’t really want to be a joint winner. I know that makes me a peevish person – despite my claims to the contrary. And I didn’t want to be awarded joint second; as my so-called friends pointed out, ‘If the prose award had joint firsts too, then joint second is like fourth. And maybe there were only four entries.’) Well.

I know, I know, even just thinking that in my nasty little inner voice is bad karma – even if you don’t believe in crap. And this time next year I’ll be wishing I could get a mention never mind a half-second; I know that.

Oh, and it was someone from my class who was awarded joint first for the poetry award. Well done, I actually am pleased for you, because you are a proper poet who can write proper poetry. I still don’t really get it; sometime I catch myself - wondering if it isn’t actually all a hoax…

My poem is the one about the dead baby, the first poem I wrote, and is called Long line of times, if I can figure out a way of making a link to it I will. (I've done it but not sure if it's a good way.) I still feel hesitant about this poem, because it seems exploitative and calculating, but it is sad, and it was sad

The friend who presented on a genre this week focused particularly on Duffy’s The Devil’s Wife, a poem about Myra Hindley. She was brave because it’s an uncomfortable poem – but one that I keep being drawn back to as well. Duffy never mentions her subject but the reader immediately senses who is being written about. It feels as if the screenplay for the recent television drama about Hindley was taken straight from the poem.

A couple of photos of the bad squirrel who would eat all the bird nuts as a snack, and wreck the feeder, if I didn’t hang them on the pricky monkey puzzle tree. Here he is being shifty, first looking one way then the other way before he tries to scamper up the tree wearing some quilted mittens (just kidding about the mitts).

Creativity & Marginality, exploiting your family and being a pretend writer. Wednesday 29 April 2009.

First session of Creativity and Marginality in Contemporary British and Irish Writing with the Agreeable Doctor. We’ll 'look at key trends and tropes in diverse generic forms; and consider different ways of reading contemporary literature.'

If it wasn’t for heft which is at present featuring in everything I write, trope would be my favourite word. Trope is like paradigm and meme; I want to use them but I’m not exactly sure what they denote and I don’t want anyone to laugh. For a long time I thought scatological meant messy; which I suppose it does - but not in the way I was using it. My friend struggles to remember what phlegmatic means; I don’t use phlegmatic, it sound green-spitty.

Each week of the new module one of us will deliver a presentation looking at different genre: life writing; poetry; short story; novel; creative nonfiction of place. My friend and I are presenting on contemporary place writing on 8 July; a date so reassuringly distant that’ll it’ll probably never happen; what with the credit crunch and other badstuff.

This week we looked at Julie Myerson’s Lost Child. Because of the press furore I would neither have bought nor read Lost Child if it hadn't been required reading (and it’s still in hardback and it's only on order at the library!). I didn’t find much to detain me in the book; it felt rushed and sloppily edited and I was only really interested in sections about Myerson’s son, Jake, and his drug use. I was scarcely caught up in her research into the life of a young woman who died in 1838 at all (and I like old things). I did feel infinite pity for Jake’s cat though; left imprisoned without food and water in his flat after one of Jake's unsuccessful attempts at independence. Myerson’s son accuses her of writing ‘short snappy sentences,’ and the book feels journalistic and self obsessed. I’m preoccupied by trying to be truthful (as apposed to accurate) when I write. The Lost Child feels explicit but disingenuous.

In contrast the other life writing title we looked at is John Burnside’s A Lie About My Father which is so fine I’ll feel denuded when it’s finished. I'm rationing myself so I don’t get to the end too quickly. Burnside examines an uneasy parent-child relationship without sensation or self-pitying censure. To be fair Myerson is still living in her bad time and Burnside’s father is dead; I could see that detachment would make it easier to be reflective.

I tend towards Myerson-type short sentences and fact marshalling but I aspire to write thoughtfully like John Burnside.

One unsettling aspect of the new module is that the Agreeable Doctor defers to us saying he’s ‘not a writer’ which causes a sort of almost audible cog-shifting inside my head; like the realigning staircases in the Harry Potter films. The inference of ‘I’m not a writer’ is that we are writers. Whoa AD! I’ll need to see the certificate before I'm able to presume like that

Had a very poignant mention in Preston's Poppies on Every Day I Lie a Little this week. Thanks Jenn.