Vincent van Gogh and Experimental Writing

June 30, 2023June 20, 2023 ~ JacciGoodingAuthor ~ 1 Comment

As you may have seen on a Twitter post from me recently I was lucky enough to visit the Vincent van Gogh Immersive Experience in Shoreditch and see for myself what all the excitement was about. And exciting it was.

I can’t honestly say I’m a fangirl of ol’ Vincent’s, but I do love a bit of art. Any art. The exhibition covered his life and premature death, his friendship with artist Paul Gauguin and the love of his brother. Did you know van Gogh originally wanted to be a priest? Me neither. You could say lucky for us that he failed in that respect.

The use of colour in Gogh’s work has often been discussed by those who discuss such things, and reading from the information sheets at the exhibition it seems that the conclusion drawn is that van Gogh may have suffered from xanthopsia, a condition which causes the sufferer to see in yellow more than any other colour. It’s not until you see so many of his hundreds of paintings together that you realise how much he loved his yellow. Think you know his sunflowers? Think again! He painted over 500 images of sunflowers, some of which you’ve probably never seen or even knew existed. It’s those big blousy ones in the vase that get all the attention. Drama queens.

Much of his work seemed to my untrained eyes very experimental – but then I’m no artist so what do I know – but according to the exhibition he had been told by one who knew so little, not to bother painting. He ignored such ill-founded advice and forged ahead.

Many of his preliminary sketches were on display and they put me in mind of a writer producing that scrappy first draft – you know the one – all puff and fluff, ideas and inspiration rather than proper prose and sentence structure.

How many times have you started with the puff and fluff, the idea and inspiration, to get fifteen minutes in declare it rubbish? That is not the way ahead my friend. Keep your puff and fluff, it could reap fantastic rewards a few months from now, because amongst the puff is the kernel of an idea that you had, and that must have some merit. Just because your whole story/novel/poem/essay isn’t formed yet doesn’t make it valueless.

Don’t be put off by that little niggly voice in your head telling you that what you’re writing isn’t any good. It might not be perfect – yet – but take a page off of Vincent’s canvas and stick with it.

She Said, He Said…

April 17, 2023April 17, 2023 ~ JacciGoodingAuthor ~ 3 Comments

Overheard in a supermarket recently;

‘..so I told him straight, I wasn’t putting it anywhere near him…’

Fret not dear reader, I resisted the urge the hurl my trolley round the corner and follow the orator stealthily through the salad aisle in the hope of discovering what it was she wasn’t going to put anywhere near him, but I can tell you, the urge was incredibly strong. Instead, I distracted myself with the lack of cucumbers and pondered instead on what she could possibly have been talking about and how I could fit it into a short story. Was she reassuring him that she wasn’t putting the crocodile/the broken bottle/it anywhere near him, or was she refusing to put the crocodile/broken bottle/it anywhere near him? Alas it will always be a mystery to me as she disappeared down the cheese aisle still chatting on her phone and by the time I caught up with her in the bread aisle the call was complete. I had no way of knowing. Her poker face offered nothing. Brown or white bread seemed to be her only concern. We parted ways in the rice and bean aisle and by the time I got to the wine aisle a story had formed. The next hurdle was remembering it without writing it down. Well you can imagine what the outcome of that was.

Needless to say I returned to my office later that day and set about dismembering my 500 word short story which has been slowly growing and transmogrifying into a completely different story to the one I originally started writing. Gone were two of the main characters and in their place was a soldier and a man who might turn into a milkman at any given moment. I think I may have lost the plot temporarily. I was keen, you see, to implant, somewhere, my newly over-heard dialogue. The fact that it didn’t fit in to any of the story didn’t faze me. It should have done of course as I wasted another two and half hours trying to insert a sentence into a story that had about as much right to be there as a spider in a fridge.

You can imagine how it all ended. The short story was re-written for the 110^th time and the sentence only made it as far as this blog. Well, as a fan of recycling and reusing, I can’t see any problem with that. But even so, I wish I knew what she’d been talking about…

A Landscape with Birds by Beth Brooke

January 25, 2023January 24, 2023 ~ JacciGoodingAuthor

This wonderful collection of short verse from author Beth Brooke is poignant, clever, and expressive. Beth brings the landscape to us, presses us to acknowledge we are linked to it, part of it, draws out of us our unacknowledged place in the world today. Simple lines can hit the mark and make us think of places we would rather be. In Ploughing, April 2020, we are on the sidelines watching a farmer plough a field, seagulls diving toward the turned earth. Yet in an instant we leave the rich winter field, those seagulls transporting us from the bucolic to the ocean in six simple words. We are there, we can feel the salt on our skin and the tang in the air because we know what it’s like to miss the sea, somehow we understand that intangible desire the sea arouses in us to be near it. And it is the much maligned seagull that takes us there.

Beautiful imagery, like a classic film or an assortment of incredible art, plays throughout this collection, pushing to the forefront birds and their landscape, from the opening poem Jackdaws (and you know it’s true!) to the feathery, flitting, daring nonchalance of sparrows and the oh so sad kauai o’o bird. Every poem demands a second read – sometimes a third – and returning to the book a month or so later, you’ll find yourself wanting to read them all again at once.

We Take Our Son to University is a lovely lovely poem, so neat, so gentle, touching. And you can see that red kite, skimming across the page as you read the words. In Betrayal, the flight of ravens articulates the words that cannot be said; they speak for anyone wounded by duplicity.

If you like birds, nature, the landscape all tied together in beautiful poetry, then I would recommend a read of this book. It’s not a big book, coming in at only 31 pages, but each poem is patiently observed and crafted. An absolute gem.

A Landscape with Birds is published by Hedgehog Poetry Press, Bristol.

http://www.hedgehogpress.co.uk

How To Create A Literary Festival Part 2

August 18, 2022August 17, 2022 ~ JacciGoodingAuthor

For those who read my previous blog regarding starting a lit fest with just a will and a thought and a maybe, here’s part two to let all you lovely readers know what’s been going on since July. Lists, mainly. Over the weekend I constructed the most recent To Do list, put it aside on Saturday morning to scrape up something red and sticky one of the SWLF cats had gifted me, only to find said list had made it’s way through space and time, reappearing down the back of the sofa on Monday evening. Not far short of fantastical I’d say. Maybe a goblin had squirrelled it off the table when I wasn’t looking and got up to mischief with it, ramming it between the cushions and the soggy Christmas peanuts just for lols.

What? You don’t have goblins in your house?

In between writing the list, losing it and then finding it again, lots of things happened at SWLF HQ. Emails were sent and received. Freebie pens were designed and paid for. A dodgy looking map was created for the back of the festival programme. The merits of cooler weather were discussed with the postman. Twitter posts were written and discarded, then written again and scheduled to hit the twittersphere sometime this week. A surprised ewe was found wandering the village, questioned, cautioned and returned to the flock. Wednesday was spent gawping at the rain and wishing out loud ‘Go on, GO ON!’ as the lightning cracked the sky. And now here we are, Thursday, and back to the list.

Here are just some of things I’d written down:

Write Press release
Contact radio stations
Contact local newspapers
Update Instagram
Comfrey leaves
Finish copy for festival programme
Try for sponsorship again

Now…nothing very unexpected there apart from item 5. Comfrey leaves. Did I mean something else? Comfy sleeves perhaps? Between trying to write a press release and updating Instagram I am now confounded and sidetracked by my own very obvious comfrey leaves citation. Pick them? Boil them? Make them into a hat? You tell me. Perhaps it was a note that had slipped off my other list about compiling the guidelines for a writer’s group short story competition and somehow landed itself on the SWLF list.

What ever its meaning – which is now unknown to me – I hope I don’t get to the morning of September 24^th and hear myself say ‘Oh!!!!!! Comfrey Leaves!’

What’s In a Name? Everything.

April 20, 2021April 22, 2021 ~ JacciGoodingAuthor

As TS Eliot correctly acknowledged, the naming of cats is a serious matter. As is your main character, or indeed a home, the place where all the action happens. Manderley for example. Serious action going on there. The House at Pooh Corner – not quite the same but still notable literary history, plus the added bonus of imparting a geographical location sans gps – just as long as you know where Pooh Corner actually is I guess.

On my Covid roamings my ever-observant eyes have paid more attention to local house names – apple anybody? – and the history-loving part of me mourns the death of Orchard Cottage (not an apple in sight), The Oaks (treeless), The Old Post Office, The Old School, Rose/Jasmine/Lavender/Yew Cottage. Scattered across the country are countless Blacksmith’s Cottages, Station Houses, and Old Mills, all a wonderful nod to the past and how lives were lived. But that was then and this of course is now. Where are the new names? Couldn’t we do with an I.T. Terrace perhaps, or a Broadband Bungalow? Or maybe Seeseeteevee Lodge, or simply just Renewables for a new housing estate on a windy site? As if someone had been thinking along the same lines as me, I did see one modern terraced house recently with a quaint 21^stcentury millennial ring to it: it was named Tiny Box. True. The new owner was clearly being sardonic/humourous/notworriedaboutsellingit and it made me smile. Surely, as we stride ever forward, our achievements, as the industrious creative humans we are should be recognised in the naming of our homes? Holme Delivery? Still At Home With Mum & Dad House? (bit long for any on-line form, that one) or (and I promise this is the last one) Can’t Really Afford It Cottage. Where house names once reflected our jobs or the natural world perhaps in the future they’ll reflect the socio-politics of the time. Perhaps they should. Anyway, just a thought. A thought that brings me on to the importance of other names; our characters. Yes, like many a writer my path always returns to the plot, the people, and that pesky protagonist.

A question for you dear reader. What do Harry Potter (pick an installment) Hamlet, Rebecca, Matilda (know where this is going?) have in common? Exactly. Each novel is the title of the main character. Yes yes I know that in the case of Rebecca ***SPOILER ALERT!!*** she’s not exactly there, being dead an’ all, but you know what I mean. It ensures that we’re not likely to forget them in a hurry doesn’t it? Leap forward some decades and ask yourself if you can remember the name of the protagonist in a book you read three months ago. Or the book before last. But seriously – what better way to get your work into the psyche of your readers? Nail the name and the rest should come, surely?

Hunton Gurney. Top lawyer. Privately educated. 21^stCentury Guy. London apartment, cottage in Cornwall (Fisherman’s, probs), expensive car, almost married to another high-flier. Or Hunton Gurney, 18^thcentury labourer – no – let’s make him a blacksmith (and we all know where he lives), back already damaged from hard work, four living children, two others already dead from consumption, married to the exhausted but determined Rose. Or…Hunton Gurney, a small, mysterious village off the A436 somewhere between the Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire border.

You decide.

Reading Writing Reading Some More

October 12, 2020October 12, 2020 ~ JacciGoodingAuthor

A little late to the party with this one, (15 years), I picked up John Banville’s The Sea recently because I wanted to know what made a Man Booker prize winner. And I wasn’t disappointed. A phenomenal read, it is so easy to relate to, to understand, to actually read, with language that is both lyrical and straightforward at the same time. I have to confess, this is the only book that actually took my breath away as I read the last page.

Mourning the recent loss of his wife, protagonist Max Morden returns to the seaside village where he and his parents would stay during the summer holidays – in the cheaper holiday accommodation on offer – and where he met wealthier brother and sister Chloe and Miles. As we journey with Max in real time on his road of grief, we are also given retrospective insights into his growing pains as a boy, of lessons learned but not understood until many years later, of the slow yet steady crossing of the threshold from boyhood to early manhood. In The Sea Banville gives us intelligent observation, humour, grief, understanding. Oh, I realised as I finished the book, that’s what makes a Mann Booker prizewinner. Breathtaking. So if you get the chance, give it a read.

Another couple of books that have kept my sanity levels from dropping off the scale have been And Nothing Remains and Somewhere This Way, both short story collections from The Fiction Desk. Both books have a lively mix of stories, each author’s voice coming through loud and clear, but IMHO, Thirteen Wedding Dresses in And Nothing Remains is by far the quirkiest, sweetest, most unusual story, written by Scots author Douglas Bruton. As it’s a short, I won’t give too much away, other than to say a wedding dress has gone astray before the big day…

All this reading has perhaps returned to me the urge to write again. Who else out there found themselves floundering at the keyboard as every go-get ‘em idea withered and died before the end of the sentence? Who else has taken the opportunity to look through all those WIPs and bin the Doesn’t Stand A Chance & I Have NO Idea Why I Thought It Would files? Although.. maybe… they were just ideas…prompts if you will… perhaps I should retrieve them after all…

But for now, I shall take pot luck and browse the hundreds of books on the shelves of charity shops and see what else I can find. I know. A Man Booker winner ending up on a charity shop bookshelf. Kinda puts everything into perspective doesn’t it.