Perfect Ten

Way, way, back I was a member of an online writing group. I’d had a few things published but, as someone who’d never had any formal writing training, had never been to university, had no writing friends, and generally didn’t know too much about the writing world, joining that group was invaluable. This was 2004 or 2005, I think and, over ten years on the lessons I learned there are still with me. As is the constructive (and, on occasion, not so constructive) feedback. And the friends I made there are still with me too (and it’s such a lovely thing seeing so many of them doing so well).

Which brings me onto the brilliant Jacquline Ward, a fellow alumni whose book, Perfect Ten, is launched very, very soon and it’s a real pleasure to have her here to talk about it and her route to its publication and to hear her singing the praises of a group that helped so many of us, some time ago.

Writing groups, difficult decisions and publication

I am not a group person. I write alone and I’m one of those people who like my own company. Which is why I was completely surprised when, in 2007, I joined a writing group. I had just written and submitted my first novel and an agent had asked to see the full manuscript. Seasoned writers will be rolling their eyes at this point, because this rarely happens, and even more rarely comes to fruition.

I am the eternal optimist and, completely naive to the publishing industry, I truly believed that this was the making of my writing career. I searched online for a writing group and found WriteWords. I joined and I was very excited to see that the group was a mixture of established authors such as Emma Darwin and Clodagh Murphy and novices just like me.

I joined the chick-lit group, because that’s what I thought I was writing. The novel, I see much more clearly now, was semi-autobiographic and truly awful, but the group were kindly and constructively critical. Over time I realised that I had inadvertently stumbled across the loveliest group of people, including Nik who has kindly let me borrow his blog today, who have a wide range of writing knowledge.

The agent I sent the full manuscript to never got back to me. This is where Write Words came into its own; everyone was supportive and encouraging and helped me to see that it might take a little longer to get my novel published.

Then I was invited to a book launch by one of the group members. Keris Stainton’s first novel was published and she was having a book launch – in London! I was thrilled and a little bit star struck. I met many members of WriteWords that evening, and forged lasting writing relationships and close friendships. We met up for meals in London and Manchester. Even when I became interested in screenwriting and attended BAFTA sessions, I was never alone. There are always WriteWords people there and always chat and drinks afterwards. I have attended book launches and other valuable networking meetings that would not have been possible without this community.

This all makes writing sound very easy to negotiate, but there have been some difficult decisions. After some success with a speculative fiction novel and many disappointments I decided to try hybrid publishing, and entered Kindle Scout, a US based ebook first programme. My writing colleagues were honest and some questioned this, but still supported me. It was a great success for me and led to a crime series that sold well. But I knew that I still wanted a traditional books deal and this was looking less and less likely.

Fast forward ten years since I joined WriteWords, and I sent out a psychological thriller I had been working on for some time to agents. During that time I had already secured and agent, but this did not work out and I was back a square one; my writing friends, many of them very successful published authors by now, were still cheering me on. It was a difficult decision as I was worried about getting back into the submission/disappointment cycle, but I did it. I checked my emails only hours after sending out to agents to find requests for full manuscripts. The next day, one agent, Judith Murray, tracked me down to my day job and requested and immediate meeting.

We met, she was wonderful and loved my novel, and she sold it in weeks to Atlantic Books. I finally had a book deal! When I announced it congratulations flooded in from those people who know how hard publishing is, how difficult the waiting is, how long hours in front of a screen hurt your eyes, but also the pure joy when something like this happens.

The trade paperback of my novel, Perfect Ten, is released on the 6thSeptember and I have been overwhelmed by the love and support I have received from writing friends over the years. We are all at different stages in the publishing process and many have moved on from WriteWords itself, but there is one quality we all have in common – perseverance. We all stuck at it and learned from each other. Now it’s my turn for a book launch, in Manchester, not London, to bring publishing North, and of course, everyone is welcome!

So thank you, WriteWords, for bringing together this unique group of creative people that I am very proud to belong to – maybe I am a group person after all!

 

 

 

Secure Your Own Mask

Time flies. Nine years ago I invited Shaindel Beers here to talk about her first poetry collection, ‘A Brief History of Time‘ – those of you who’ve been around me for the best part of that decade will know how much I loved the book and how HA has been a favourite poem of mine ever since I first heard it.

And Shaindel’s back. Nine years and two more books later (her latest is Secure Your Own Mask). And I’m delighted to her have her here to talk to us all about what’s changed for her in writing over this past ten years. So, Shaindel, what has changed…?

 

 

I think the biggest difference between being a writer with one book out (when you first interviewed me) and three books out (now) is having a different level of confidence. It’s not that I necessarily feel that I’m a better writer (though I certainly hope so!). It’s more that I don’t feel so desperate to get work published anymore. I’ve learned that if a poem is really good, someone will publish it. If a manuscript is worthy, it will turn into a book eventually. It’s an incredibly privileged position to be in, so I’m really hoping your readers aren’t swearing right now or chucking their laptops out a window.

As a young writer, it’s easy to feel that nothing will ever happen. That no one will ever read your writing. That you’ll never have one of your books out in the world. The important thing is to keep writing. Keep trying. Keep sending work out. In a lot of ways, it’s a numbers game. If you throw spaghetti noodles at a wall, some of them are bound to stick. With that being said, be open to improvement. You’re still learning. If an entire workshop group doesn’t understand your poem, or thinks a plot is unbelievable, it probably needs work. The willingness to change is what leads you to grow, what leads to better writing. So, back to that metaphor. The spaghetti noodles need to be boiled first. Make sure they’re boiled. Follow the directions on the box. See what other writers before you have done.

Once you’ve reached a position as an editor or an author with some sort of “prestige,” you have to give back. Read the first-time authors who submit work to you. Look over a poem a young writer emails and give them encouragement and a word of advice. I think that that is the biggest change. Ten years ago, I was a young writer who needed help, and now I’m happy to be of service to new writers. It’s like that adage around social media, “Be the adult you needed when you were a child.” Be the writer you needed when you were a new writer.

 

 

Shaindel Beers is author of the poetry collections A Brief History of Time (Salt Publishing, 2009), The Children’s War and Other Poems (Salt, 2013), and Secure Your Own Mask (White Pine Press, 2018). Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is currently an instructor of English at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon, in eastern Oregon’s high desert, and serves as poetry editor of Contrary. Learn more at http://shaindelbeers.com

On Prophecy and Time – Jonathan P Taylor

Jonathan P Taylor has a new poetry collection out, Cassandra Complex, so I thought it would be a marvellous thing if I were to invite him over here to talk about it. And here’s the man himself, talking poems, prophecy, and time…

On Time Travel, Poetry, Prophecy and Cassandra Complex

 

I’ve always felt that poetry has a special relationship with time, which is what partly marks it out from other arts. It’s the art-form which, I think, finds it easiest to hold in balance different moments in time: one poem, in a very small space, can move easily between different moments, different histories and memories, between past, present, and future. Poems often superimpose, montage and juxtapose different scenes, creating non-linear, fractal, cyclical models of time. Maybe this is partly because of the way poetry is read: you often have to re-read a poem, or a line, or read it in a particularly intense way, so the experience of it is circular, static or non-linear.

This is not to claim that other art-forms cannot do similar things – just that they do not bend time quite so easily. Music often includes repetition, cyclical forms, refrains, but obviously it is experienced in a linear way – listened beginning to end; novels, which grew up in the wake of Newtonian physics, are naturally causal, linear and chronological in their mode of storytelling, and the ghost of such chronology haunts even the most experimental of longer fiction; short stories can generally encompass only one or two scenes; painting and sculptures are usually frozen moments in time. Of course, all sorts of artists, writers and musicians have complicated and challenged these characteristics of their art-forms; but poetry is the form which, from its earliest days, moves most smoothly, even naturally, between different time-frames. Homer’s Odyssey– to give one early example among many – manages to hold in balance three or four narratives and chronologies. Poetry is – or can be – a kind of temporal palimpsest, or counterpoint.

Perhaps it is this aspect of poetry which has lent it to prophecy and fortune-telling. In Percy Shelley’s famous words, poetry is ‘the trumpet of a prophecy,’ and poets themselves ‘the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.’ Again, this association goes all the way back to the earliest poetry: from Ancient Babylonia, the tablets Enuma Anu Enlil(When the Gods Anu and Enlil…) represent at once a remarkable work of poetry and of prophecy. In my new poetry collection, Cassandra Complex (Shoestring Press, 2018), I set out to explore the overlaps between poetry and prophecy. I wanted to explore these overlaps in historical, political and also personal ways – so there are poems about moments of (apparent) prophecy in my own life, alongside poems about modern forms of prophecy (in the form, for instance, of economic forecasts, medical prognoses, and job adverts), alongside ancient and historical prophecies. Of these latter, Enuma Anu Enlilis one of my starting-points in the collection:

 

 

From Shumma Alu: Everyday Omens

 

If the outside of the house is decorative

it will be deserted.

 

If the outside of the house is beautiful

it will not stand long.

 

If the house keeps changing outside

so will its keepers inside.

 

If the house is ugly or in shade

all inside will be happy.

 

If the house’s exterior looks ordinary

its keepers will grow old together.

 

 

Perhaps there is something inherently poetic about trying to look into the future – language becomes imagistic, symbolic, poetic when it is stretched and distorted across time. Certainly, omens like those inEnuma Anu Enlil are poetic images, and are stretched across three different moments simultaneously: they are addressed to readers in the present, telling them about the future, implicitly interpreting signs based on past experience. In that way, they are not so different from the predictions of modern science – which are similarly based on extrapolating the future from past patterns, for the benefit of the present.

There are even more complex examples of temporal counterpoint – for instance, where historical predictions are reinterpreted in light of intervening events (sometimes called ‘hindsight bias’); or even where historical pseudo-prophecies were actually written after the events they seem to predict (sometimes called ‘retroactive clairvoyance’). In Cassandra Complex, I wanted to explore all these different kinds of prophecy and pseudo-prophecy. Some of the poems, for example, embody forms of retroactive clairvoyance, whereby past prophecies are revisited to address and defamiliarise what’s happening now:

 

 

Teleology II

 

The refugees from an Apocalypse yet to happen

are flooding through the time-gate in bloodied rags,

 

marked by the Antichrist, trembling from earthquakes,

scorched by stars and planets crashing to earth,

chewed and spat out by dragons with various heads,

nibbled by locusts.

 

Tens of thousands have already perished en route

and most who reach their past are denied sanctuary:

after all, it’s their fault they weren’t among the Elect.

The future can hardly be blamed on us, can it?

 

A select few we save, those who bring with them

knowledge of soon-to-be-discovered technologies,

oh, and the plumbers.

 

The others – the godless, hairdressers, poets –

are shoved back,

whingeing they can’t win on either side of history.

 

Afterwards, if you press your ear against the door

and listen carefully, I have heard it said,

you can hear trumpets, distantly, from the other side.

 

 

This poem aims to mix the age-old language of prophecy, apocalypse and Revelations with modern political rhetoric about refugees and immigration. Hence, the mingling of different time-frames in a poem can also be a mingling of languages: different voices, registers and discourses from past, present and future can overlap, merge and clash in poetry.

In that sense, poetry can be a kind of linguistic time travel. In fact, I think poetry is – at least up till now – the closest we have to time travel, in its ability to move seamlessly between different time-frames. William Wordsworth claimed something similar, when he said that ‘poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.’ In other words, poetry retrospectively revives the past and relives it as if it is now.

In poetry, perhaps everything is now, everything is happening at once – past, present and future. There’s a wonderful poem by X. J. Kennedy, inspired by Einstein, called ‘The Purpose of Time is to Prevent Everything From Happening at Once,’ which is about this very subject. In a poem, though, time does not and cannot always prevent everything happening at once – and the final poem in my collection collapses time, so that past, present and future seem simultaneous:

 

 

Time Travel

 

Through an open door you’re watching an old self

holding someone else’s hand and you’re trying to say:

Please don’t let go. Please don’t move away.

Please please please don’t leave the room.

 

But something like the future is stuck in your throat

and the warning only comes out as a raven’s croak

so the old self lets go, moves away, leaves the room,

walks through you as if it’s you who’s the ghost

 

as if it’s you who’ll be stuck here forever

with the someone else who stays in the chair

whose hand you’re unable to touch

and who says confidently to the old you:

Goodbye, see you soon. See you very soon.

 

About the Author

Jonathan Taylor is an author, editor, lecturer and critic. Cassandra Complex (Shoestring, 2018) is his second poetry collection. His other books include the novels Melissa (Salt, 2015) and Entertaining Strangers (Salt, 2012), and the memoir Take Me Home (Granta, 2007). He directs the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. Originally from Stoke-on-Trent, he now lives in Leicestershire with his wife, the poet Maria Taylor, and their twin daughters, Miranda and Rosalind. His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk.