On Being a Writer

Rejection, cyber-style

2010-11-11T09:37:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, journalists would pitch their ideas for articles in a nicely written letter and send it to the editor of the most appropriate organ for consideration. Most newspaper editors wouldn't bother to write back if they didn't want it, but some would phone, or, in the case of The Daily Telegraph, send a nicely written letter back, detailing why it didn't fit. It was a genteel affair, far from the streets of shame and the myths of newspaper hackery.

That was about 10 years ago.

Since the internet ramped up the speed at which we all work, journos now tend to forward press releases to our super-stressed editors with a 'fancy a feature?' in the subject box and are then gutted with what seems like the cruelest of blows; 'no thanks!' How could he/she be so callous? Does he/she not realise how sensitive (read 'paranoid') we journos are?

'More haste, less speed', my mother would advise from her celestial position, and I think she may be right.

Eat, Pray, Love, Write

2010-10-24T03:21:00.000-07:00

So I'm waiting for the kids to emerge from Saturday morning pictures, just as kids should, and I'm writing this on my iPhone and marvelling at 21st century comms. They'll be in with Selena Gomez and chums for another two hours and there's nothing to do other than read 'Eat, Pray, Love' and wonder how come someone else wrote my story.

From the breakdown in a relationship to the hedonistic freedom of newly single life (although in London rather than Rome) to an ashram - and spookily, that exact same roof scene - the flagellation over the monkey mind, and then to Skyros (my Bali of 1994) for the final permission to love again, 'Eat, Pray, Love' is my (and probably 10 million other women's) story. Mine would probably be called 'Drink, Pray, Love' though. Yes, there's a bit of envy as I read Liz Gilbert's observations of so many of the exact same things as I went through in so many of the same places, and for the same reasons. I too met Texan Richard, although he had a different name and nationality, but Swiss Philippe did the same pushing and prodding, just as thousands of Texan Richards/Swiss Philippes have done and will do with newly single woman in search of everything. I too sat on a metaphorical beach afterwards, spending time with medicine men with no teeth and wisdom and compassion to burn. I too turned down the perfect man while he waited patiently until I ran out of reasons to make myself unhappy.

Why I didn't push to write what I wanted to write back in 1995 instead of extracting only the tantric sex bits that the publisher was interested in is part of my story too. That brief window of opportunity, which only the very few stop to look through, takes a long old time to clear, and I wasn't anywhere near a new view back then. What amazes me about Liz Gilbert is that she was, armed with a few books, gurus and a hell of a lot more time that most of us will ever have. Oh, and an advance from the Gods. But hats off to her; the act of writing is often what speeds the process, and the weaving together of her story no doubt wove her together faster than any meditation could. Yes, I wish I'd done it, both for me and for my bank account, but instead I shall dream of going back to Bali one day where I too first spotted perfection.

One of the smiley Wayans who played host to me and my backpack in 1985 told me that God had taken a while to create the perfect human being. When he baked his first batch, he left it in the oven too long and the humans came out burnt. He tried again. This time, they were pale and undercooked. The third time, he got it and presented the world with the golden, smiling Balinese.

Steiner Stories

2010-05-14T06:35:00.000-07:00

Finding Jeff Olson, Steiner mentor and former class teacher at Brighton Steiner was easier than I thought. I hadn't been looking for him specifically, but when I saw that Paul Levy's Critical Incident event as part of the Brighton Festival included a session on storytelling, I was thrilled to find that Jeff was the man. And that it was all about Steiner.

I went to see him last week and, over a bowl of nachos and salsa and gin and tonic (at 5pm? Don't you love these alternatives?), he told me how rhythm is entrenched in Steiner teaching.

Steiner teachers take their class from Class 1 (age 6) all the way through to Year 8, and some even further. Jeff explained how in Class 1, he would tell the same Grimm's fairy tale over and over again - telling, not reading - until the children knew it by heart. Sometimes one story would take a week to read through, but the kids would be rapt, and each time it was told, it was identical, word for word. Jeff told me that sometimes he would change a conjunction (how hard must it be to remember if you'd originally used 'so' instead of 'then'?) and immediately there would be a sharp intake of breath from the children. If a wrong word or one that's out of place causes them to flinch, would they then understand the rhythm of a sentence better than a child who hadn't experienced such riches?

After a year of telling, the children would be asked to copy the story they'd been told, punctuation and all. As they inhaled the words and watched them come to life at the end of their pencils, did the placing of the comma mean more to them than it might to a child who hadn't had this experience? The problem is how can I know? No-one, as far as I know, has measured this in Steiner kids. Jeff told me that about 1/3 of the class by Year 8 were writing with perfect grammar, 1/3 so so and 1/3 were having difficulties. I bet any teacher could say that. I wonder if Jeff is still in contact with his class.

The question is; do those who do grasp it quickly now use it effortlessly (Jeff's class would now be 20), or are they just as likely to drop a capital and use a comma instead of a full stop as the school kids who I filmed in March? Does grammar reach deeper into the subconscious through Steiner -style storytelling or are traditional lessons just as good?

Or..... is language evolving so quickly that a new form is emerging which is bypassing punctuation. (I need to find Lynn Truss, hold hands and SCREAM.....)

A corner of England votes Green

2010-05-13T08:38:00.000-07:00

BBC World Service came to Brighton to see what kind of city elects the first Green MP.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p007hcc2

Zu. You Can Come Too

2010-04-04T03:01:00.000-07:00

There's life for those of us for whom the last minute text invite to a secret party in the middle of nowhere has lost its allure. Last night in, well a secret location, we danced with pixie-pretty women and gypsy-handsome men in what felt like a Midsummer Night's dream despite the cold April downpour outside. Artists, writers and film-makers were draped over old sofas swathed in exotic throws while fire dancers and singers took to the 'stage'. Love Punch replaced pints of lager and raw chocolate was the deepest of the sins as people talked about real stuff and danced with their eyes closed to the Polka, Tango & Gypsy Swing of The Bohemianauts…

I can't tell you more. It's a secret, passed on in whispers but I like to think of Zu as the love child of the Love Lounge, Brighton's finest party nights (and Lady Love herself was there last night, older, wiser and more beautiful than ever). Maybe it was conceived in one of those Love Lounge boudoirs that used to scare me as much as they thrilled me. I also like to think it's the wayward cousin of The Sussex House Party, just as Bohemian but maybe a little naughtier.

Authors for Dinner

2010-01-26T01:49:00.000-08:00

Now I remember why we do author dinners. It was worth getting soaked as I cut the spinach from the allotment, still just tender enough despite the snows, and why I ran, head down against the driving rain to Bill's for the best mixed leaves in town - only to find that they'd run out. I must have looked as crestfallen as I was drenched because someone was despatched to the kitchen to get me my leaves. Heaven is a kitchen on a Saurday afternoon, and with the organic beef from Colbrans slow cooking in red wine and roots all day and infusing the house with the smell of Sussex, I almost forgot about the guests.

It's been a few months since the last author dinner, but the words spilled along with the wine, and jaws dropped as beautiful thoughts and imaginary characters became as real as the guests who created them. Vanessa Gebbie was as practical as she was inspiring, mixing top tips with the alchemy of imagination, practice and confidence, and the smiles broadened as the evening eased into night.

Look out for Michael Gould's 'Filfy O'Durr' (http://www.filfyodurr.co.uk/), and thanks Vanessa for kicking off the winter season with a wonderful feast of ideas for our little community of writers.

Isabel Losada

2010-01-26T01:48:00.000-08:00

Isabel Losada has confirmed her place at the Sussex House Party dinner table on Feb 20th. Her books include: 'The Battersea Park Road to Enlightenment' (which explores our personal happiness by looking at a wide range of new age beliefs and practices), 'A Beginner's Guide to Changing the World; For Tibet, With Love' (which looks at how one person can make a difference outside themselves for any cause about which they may be passionate) and 'Men! : Where the **** are they?' (which examines the growing social phenomenon of the lack of straight single males). Should be a good night. The Sussex House Party for more....

More authors on their way

2010-01-06T08:55:00.000-08:00

Did I mention that we'll be among the Bohemian ghosts of Vanessa Bell and her Bloomsbury sister, Virginia Woolf on Feb 26th when granddaughter/grand-niece Virginia Nicholson dines with us at the Sussex House Party? The winds of Charleston will be wafting those pink gossamer curtains of ours while we tuck into our local lamb, and the wine and the words will flow...

And I'm waiting to confirm Isabel Losada
(http://www.isabellosada.com/who has made it all the way from the Battersea Park Road to Enlightenment (which I still think is one of the best book titles I've heard of) to Tibet with love via a Bridget Jones style search for Men. It'll all make sense when you meet her, honest.

Sussex House Party - events a go-go

2009-12-29T03:05:00.000-08:00

The great thing about ecards at Christmas is that people respond immediately, and before you know it, the chat about what you're each doing will result in a promise, a meeting or, as in the case of the writers I send to, an event. So as I take a break from the Sri Lankan turkey curry, crumbling Stilton and head towards our candle lit New Year's Eve, I'm booking dinners with authors for January that will thrill the souls of writers in Sussex and beyond. Look out for Miranda Glover whose "The Leap Year" is the first collection from The Contemporary Women Writers’ Club (http://www.queenbee.co.uk/section346302.html) and started, as all good things, around a kitchen table. And Vanessa Gebbie, whose kitchen is almost too small now to house all her awards, will be inspiring a little flash fiction.
http://vanessagebbiesnews.blogspot.com/

All info on http://sussexhouseparty.ning.com/ as always.

The Magic of the Group - Again

2009-12-04T07:10:00.000-08:00

I've said it before, and I bet I'll say it again, but there's a magic that happens every time I lead a creative writing group that blows me away. The younger students are lovely, and when they begin to open up, it's a treat to get a glimpse of what those young buds might grow into, but give me someone who's older any day. Give me someone who's blocked and broken after years of writing stuff she hates in a voice that someone has told her is better than her own. Give me a man who, when asked to tell us who he is, hides behind a list of adjectives without daring to peek at what they really mean. Show me a business man who has never thought of himself as a time of day and then watch the colour seep into his press release when he finally does, leaving the whole group breathless.

I never know what it is that makes people so poetic in those workshops, but every time I'm mesmerised by the way they take my metaphor exercise, try it on for size and emerge, as if in an episode of Mr Benn, as the person their inner poet has always wanted them to be.

It's always the members of the group who show each other a glimpse of what they could be if they only took that leap of faith, but I get to witness the magic every time. Roll on next Friday...

Inspiration

2009-11-24T04:25:00.000-08:00

I'm writing a lecture for a creative writing class at University of Brighton tomorrow and came across this in the wonderful Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones. I just had to share it...

Her friend, Russell Edson writes 10 short pieces of writing at any one sitting, and finds that when he comes back to re-read them, it's the ones that have the best first lines that work. Here are a few of his favourites:

"A man wants an aeroplane to like him"
"A beloved duck gets cooked by mistake"
"A husband and wife discover that their children are fakes"
"Identical twin old men take turns at being alive"
"Like a white snail, the toilet slides into the living room, demanding to be loved"

Maybe I'll set them this exercise tomorrow...

Postscript

2009-11-24T03:45:00.001-08:00

I've just stumbled across my tribe. I didn't know that it even existed, and when I arrived at a big old manor house, deep in the Southampton countryside on Friday for a NAWE annual conference on creative writing in education, it certainly wasn't what I expected to find. But there were hundreds of them, all writing, all teaching, all sharing ideas about how to build a sustainable career as a writer.

The huge majority were poets, novelists, experts in the short story or flash fiction, and part of what Academia calls a 'community of practice' to which I had never felt I belonged. But after two days of scribbling ideas to use with my own students as well as my own practice, swapping stories at the bar and spotting some serious talent to invite to The Sussex House Party, I'm changing my badge. If my identity as a writer has always been defined by not belonging to the communities that I longed to be invited into, I'm treating myself to a makeover. I might not even have noticed the opportunity if one of the delegates hadn't asked me what on earth I was doing here if I wasn't a proper writer. Ok, so that wasn't quite what she said. But it is what she meant; non fiction isn't proper. And for the first time, I absolutely knew that she was wrong.

From here, the family tree stretches deep and wide, inspiring, sharing, connecting, retreating. It feels like one of the episodes in "Survivors" when all those who didn't get the fatal lurghi begin to emerge into the sunlight. Or maybe it's just me who's emerging; maybe they've been basking in the warmth all this time. I just hope they haven't got knives hidden in their poetry books.

Finding a Family

2009-11-24T03:31:00.000-08:00

Being part of the University after years on my own as a writer is a weird old feeling. It makes me think about communities of practice I've belonged to and reacted against; the BBC community 20 years ago for example, and that sense of being initiated into a way of being that had an identity, a membership and a quality to it that was almost tangible.

I got into BBC’s Greater London Radio (GLR) by the back door after spending my first five years in the media as a freelancer picking up my skills as I went along. It was like that in those days; you’d learn on the job and hear of the next work through a camera-man or sound guy. But when I first listened to GLR, I was determined to become one of the people who were making that kind of radio. As a listener, it felt like my mates had all gone to a party and forgotten to invite me. At that age, I was still super-confident to think that it was just an oversight, and that it was just a matter of my popping down there to join in. I was so convinced that this was my place, that I talked my way in and shadowed one of the producers. When he was off for a couple of weeks with a particularly bad cold, I was the first to be called. Once in, I wasn’t going to leave, and as soon as a researcher’s job became available, I applied and got it.

There’s a certain kind of person who works at the BBC, and at the time, I felt I was one of them. It wasn’t that I was particularly brilliant as a researcher, although I was bright and self motivated which counts for a lot in radio where you’re expected to multi-task and pick up the reins as soon as they’re dropped. This was an unusual station in that it was small and very deliberately allowing a new generation of radio talent (Chris Evans, Chris Morris, Nigel Barden and a little later, Fi Glover) to experiment with all the ingredients we’d brought with us, so although it was a little more experimental, the foundations were pure BBC – solid, reliable and very good at crossing the Ts. I was trained up and given more opportunities than I have ever been given since, and yet it was the pub after work where the seams were sewn and the feeling of belonging zipped so tightly that 20 years on, many of us are still in contact, both through work and socially. Understanding the collective ‘ways of knowing and thinking’ of the group seemed to happen by osmosis over a glass or two.

That mix of social and professional cohesion is what I have in my head when I teach my students, although I haven’t experienced it since leaving it for the far less tribal world of TV, and then writing (from home, where I am utterly alone – apart from the dogs). From that cosy world of BBC radio, TV was a draughty one in which as one of many freelancers on a fixed term contract, the ghost of Christmas Future was always poking me on the shoulder, pointing out that if I didn’t watch where I was going, I would be the only one out of a job in a few months. The gravitational pull was not towards a community of practice but into the good books of the execs responsible for renewing the contracts. One of the companies I worked for was Planet 24 , apparently so-called because its production team barely left the premises in a bid to show its loyalty. Exploitation was the name of the game and the self worth pumped through the air vents of the BBC’s ‘community of practice’ was replaced by anxiety and one-upmanship in TV. I ran screaming.

I spent the next 15 years making my own way, bumping into other ‘communities of practice’ such as the world of food I write mostly about, and for my foray into publishing with the Juicy Guide to Brighton, the ‘architects’ of the city in the widest sense of the word, the people who made Brighton Brighton. The books were even designed to help relocators to make a home in the city, with information on the schools, restaurants and bars helping them find their tribe.

But while this move away from a specific community of practice has left me without one of my own, it has given me a mix of skills that are essential for anyone working in Broadcast Media these days. There are very few jobs for life in the industry and even that cosy BBC world is packed with freelancers looking over their shoulders now. They may come from newspapers, but newspapers no longer offer jobs for the boys either and a new mix of entrepreneur and story-teller, social butterfly and reliable workhorse is what we have to teach our students to be if they are to become fully functioning members of the community of Broadcast Media.

This new community of media freelancers talks to each other while quietly parading its wares in social networks, and is less likely to make each other a coffee than to meet for one in a bid to hop onto the next rung of the ladder. There’s less time for Lave and Wenger’s ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ on the job as there was when I was passing a fellow researcher the splicing tape and studying how he was doing it; God forbid that you try to get into TV these days without a degree film behind you or that you apply for a job in radio without already knowing how to edit a programme. Perhaps it’s the shared experience of knowing that once they’re out in the real world, it’s everyone for themselves that is the new glue.

Etienne Wenger described this ‘community of practice’ in 1991 as ‘a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression’ and although times have changed, I do still encourage this in class. The difference is that I do it less for their well-being and more to train them up as a better catch than the next person.

Threshold, Portals and Liminality

2009-10-27T00:35:00.000-07:00

Li-min –al. What a lovely word. I’d never heard of it before the University’s Creativity Day when Professor Ray Land of the Centre for Academic Practice & Learning Enhancement at Strathclyde University presented his theories. Liminality, he said was the space in which you could try out a new way of thinking before being spat out the other side, transformed forever. It was the rite of passage, the Office Christmas Party after which nothing will ever be the same again, the time out of time where anything is allowed.

It’s so much nicer a concept to chew on than the mathematical equations he and co-writer, Jan Meyers use to illustrate much the same idea in their article Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge: Linkages to Ways of Thinking and Practising within the Disciplines. Don’t you think?

It seems to me to be much the same idea as Land and Meyer’s ‘threshold concept’ (2003) (which they also discuss in the Higher Education article, Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (2): Epistemological considerations and a conceptual framework for teaching and learning.) Applied to my teaching, it’s the two hours a week my students commit to diving head first into the ‘conceptually difficult, counter-intuitive or alien’, a step into the portal, that dark space of ‘troublesome knowledge’ that Land and Meyer refer to in their article.

Passing on knowledge to our students is what most of us do during our working week, although I see it more as cutting a slice into the sky, a Pullman-inspired leap of faith into somewhere new. Lyra and Will may pop in and out of their parallel universe but they never go back to where they started. It’s the same with deconstructing a radio or TV programme; you can watch the news all you like but once you’ve taken it apart, you’ll never see it the same way again. Those absences that Land and Meyer refer to in their discussion on deconstruction are precisely what we’re looking for.

That leap is what I think creativity is all about. Ok, so it’s not exactly hang-gliding, but by providing students with a formula for deconstructing stories over and over and over again, encouraging them to pick them up and try them out in different forms (the magazine show item, the news item, the documentary, the film), the baby steps do slowly but surely turn into confident strides towards the edge. Once they’re there, anything is possible.

If creativity is to be the most important tool of the 21st century student as Land argued on that University Creativity Day, we, the lecturers need to know exactly what it means, what it’s for and what we need to do to find our own. Its paradoxical elements mean that it’s about tension and release, about letting go and being lost, a big deal for 19 year old students who have yet to find themselves in the first place. Unless, that is, we use words to give them a soft landing. Words like ‘liminal’ and ‘space’. And with words come the pictures, and with pictures comes the context, and with the context come the boundaries.

The rite of passage and the threshold concept are inextricably linked, and although university is where our students dive into it, it’s everywhere. I crossed a threshold myself with Professor Land that day. Suddenly my terrifying maiden paper at a conference the next day found form. Jamie Oliver, the culinary crusader of British food culture who was my presentation subject, became Odysseus ploughing through waves of complacency and cynicism towards his dream of a new discourse. Jools was the faithful Penelope with Daisy Boo, Poppy Honey and whatever the new one’s called, a composite Telemachus, sharpening their kiddy slings and arrows against whatever outrageous fortune might throw at their dad. Television was his trusty vessel and that mountain top above the Amalfi Coast where he sat with his (ship) mates sipping beer on the eve of his 30th birthday, his liminal space. The letting go of the ego, the lapse into chaos, the ‘what’s it all for?’ moment before rising again, this time to enter a new dawn in TV food. Transformed, radically changed, he was ready to fight a new fight. The question is whether TV is ready to offer the new discourse.

But what we witnessed was true creativity. According to Land, it necessarily involves the risk of failure, the exposure of weakness and instability, and from that baptism of fire emerges the true hero. Without wanting to burst into song, therein lies the point. It’s in all of us. And it’s up to us as lecturers to offer the winkle pickers. And the tissues.

My workshop on automatic writing with my fellow lecturers which followed Professor Land’s morning session, offered a pink flip flop, a bottle of black nail polish and a marble among a myriad of story-nudgers I had brought from home. Picking one each, we grabbed our ten minutes and dived into liminality, pen glued to paper and arms aching as thoughts we didn’t recognise as our own coursed through to the page.

After our ten minutes of writing, we all emerged refreshed, changed in some way, slightly shocked and more than a little embarrassed at finding that someone we hadn’t known had been camping deep inside us. And in that perfectly British way, the welcome was immediate as we offered it a helping hand, and a place further up our consciousness. I think Professor Land would call it a 'new conceptual terrain'.

Lecturing: The Art of Being Heard

2009-10-22T04:29:00.000-07:00

As part of my Post Graduate Certificate in Education, I'm supposed to muse on what a lecture really is. But I’m not sure that I can remember learning anything in any lecture I’ve ever been to. Obviously I must have done; how else would I have got my degree? But maybe therein lies the answer. According to Gibbs in his rant about lecturing (1981) it’s not in the lectures themselves that we get any really useful information, but in the discussion groups and personal study where we can explore who we are and what we think that we really begin to grow.

I’m racking my brains to think about any lecturer who ever grabbed my attention. Professor Tara Brabazon at Grand Parade certainly did last year with her black evening gown, long silk gloves, blond beehive and heels stomping to T Rex as she set up her powerpoint and waited for us to take our seats, but I couldn’t tell you anything about her inaugural lecture, “Google is White Bread for the Mind”. Maybe it’s me. Of the charismatic lecturers of my own uni days, I can only remember the one with whom my house-mate was having a not-so-secret affair. I can still see the look on his face as she eased herself past him to take her seat, just late enough to hush the hall.

I can remember watching films in lecture time and thinking how incredibly cool it was to be watching a Douglas Sirk film on a Wednesday morning. I don’t remember the lecturer’s input at all, but somebody must have told me about the relevance of Melodrama in McCarthy’s America. Compared to three hours of dictation on semiotics, it was a dream of a lecture.

So when I started teaching last year, I also showed films to my first years. They had never heard of the great documentary film-makers or ever really thought about content, and I felt it was a legitimate use of our time. Maybe it’s not so cool these days; most of them either texted their friends throughout or fell asleep. They woke up pretty sharpish when I told them about the reflective essay they would have to write for their ‘homework’.

This year, my teaching time has been reduced from three hours to two, so it’s impossible for me to put on a film even if I were to ignore the clear evidence of its failure to teach. I can show brief examples of what I think students should be watching but they will have to do the rest themselves. Will they organise a group screening? Will they borrow the DVD from the Uni library and watch it at home? It’s too early to tell, but if the snoozers of last year are anything to go by, it’s much harder to get students to study outside a lecture than inside – even if that means simply watching a film. I’m going to assume that they won’t. It may be harsh, but don’t tell me I’m not watching the signs.

But after reading The Stanford Handbook, I’m not so sure that what I do could really be called a ‘lecture’. I prepare a powerpoint, turn on the projector and the computer, and while they’re warming up, I arrange the tables and chairs for 25 in a vague class room arrangement so that everyone can see me at the front. But once they’re all busy signing the register and leafing through the papers for news stories, chatting with each other to discuss their spin on their stories, we’re already dispensing with what would normally be called a lecture. Standing on a lectern reading some lofty thoughts on how to make a documentary isn’t really my style, but more importantly, it doesn’t give my students a chance for their ideas to be heard.

If the “best way to 'awaken critical skills' is to practice using the canons of criticism” (Bligh 1972), then deconstructing the news is surely the best way for broadcast media students who may have never read a broadsheet to sharpen their thinking. So each week we turn a news story from the papers into a different broadcast genre – a documentary, two minute news item, magazine show item etc and within a few minutes, I’m leaning over their shoulders to see the stories they’re playing with, walking from table to table and only going back to my ‘position of authority’ (Gibbs) to set the next task. We role play for much of the session; I’m the ‘news editor-in-chief’ while my team of ‘researchers’ and ‘reporters’ pitch their ideas to ‘producers’ and then to me. On Monday my students will even find themselves miraculously transformed into Philip Schofield and Holly Willoughby as we deconstruct the magazine show format. Gibbs was right about that one; any anthropologist looking in on one of my lectures would find the whole thing completely bizarre.

I think they do learn in my 'lecture'. We go over and over the 60 word 'pitch', learning from each other's disasters and refining the practice until we've got it right. They continue to do so in their weekly essays as part of their assignment, but without the 'lecture', I can't imagine how they would be able to get the same results.

Gibbs and Bligh take their examples from lecture halls of a different era in education, and maybe a lecture means different things to different people these days. But let’s say that getting a bunch of students into a closed room for two to three hours and hoping that they come out at the end with at least five new facts (Stanford 2007) in their exercise book is called a lecture. Is it any use? Yes; I think that it provides a cohesive learning experience, an opportunity to share the learning and enjoy university life more fully. School leavers feel more secure with the clear boundaries of a lecture, while mature students feel embraced by the experience. Even any negativity they may feel can provoke a discussion in the café afterwards about the content that could move their learning on. But if it doesn't offer the chance for a student to hear his or her new ideas for the first time, what's the point? If a lecture is as Gibbs says, a 'symptom of self-importance', then we've lost any opportunity for inspiration which is where, for me at least, education really starts.

If the word 'inspiration' comes from the Latin inspirare meaning 'to breathe in','education' comes from educare meaning 'to lead out'. And that's what I think lectures should be all about.

Critical Thinking and Thinking Critically

2009-10-13T05:19:00.000-07:00

‘Critical’; it’s a word so laden with meaning, so packed with finger wagging and self torture that I have to steel myself in a lecture-hall packed with vulnerable first years and try to reclaim it as a positive activity.

As my module is designed to develop students’ thinking about media content, I do use the term ‘critical thinking’ in my lectures even though the word ‘critical’ is not even mentioned in my module descriptor. I explain to them from the very first lecture that in order to create content for Radio, TV and film, the first step is back. Reading a news story, for example, is about deconstructing it, critiquing its structure, its intention and its outcome. We take it apart to look at what we can learn from it, and then step back again to assess what we would do to put it back together again. Of course, they’re more interested in doing that with themselves and each other at the moment. It’s hard for them to become critical friends when they’re still eyeing each other up.

I set the students an essay each week in which they have to reflect on how critical thinking applies to various broadcast genres. The resulting portfolio of work, which is their formal assignment, will be assessed on evidence of the development of their critical faculties. I explain to them that this is the mark of a graduate, that university is their training ground where they move from passive to active learners, exploring issues, evaluating information and supporting their findings based on evidence they have discovered themselves.

Barnett (1997) writes about critical beings graduating into the workplace; as media practitioners – radio or TV researchers or producers – our media graduates will have to critically assess every idea and contributor before taking it to the next research stage and negotiate their way though a minefield of ethical issues and well as practical ones. Will the idea work? How will it contribute to the overall hypothesis of the programme? How will the contributors’ lives be affected by the process? Is it even worth it? If the Marxist notion is a world constructed through action, I would argue that in the media, it’s constructed through thought, intention, responsibility and respect. And that starts with reflection and critical thinking.

Creativity comes from chaos and I’m constantly weighing up just where the line between safe space and unfathomable gulf is in order to allow the students to explore their own. In our first Active Learning Set, some of my fellow lecturers blanched at the idea that I ask my students to publish their inner thoughts on a blog. I’ve written about why I do this already, but with a new batch of first years mostly doing what they’re told, I’m now more interested in looking at those who don’t use the space to become critical beings. What makes them freeze? Why wouldn’t they want to see who they are?

Being in my lectures probably doesn’t help! Yesterday, for example, in a lecture on news narrative, I played the role of the news editor in the morning meeting and asked each student to pitch their news stories to me. The idea was for the class to feed back as critical friends, but this is a tough assignment for news virgins and some of their critical antennae were still turning inward. This was only week two, and of course most of them failed miserably to get their heads around how a newspaper story might develop and translate into an item for Drivetime on Radio Five or One. Of course I tried to show them how their mistakes were the best teaching aids – not just for the individual student but for the whole class. I do hope that the humour of their hopelessness avoided any self flagellation. I hope that they value the chaos of their young minds which Nietzsche says will give birth to their dancing stars. Looking through the blogs today suggests that they’re on the way.

Denial
Do you always know what you’re missing out on? Sometimes you do and you wish it was different but there is nothing you can do about it or maybe want to do about it. Maybe it’s stubbornness but when something triggers a little thing in your head saying this is what you’re missing but here’s your chance to grab it, you have to do it; it has to be done. Don't miss out on chances to get what you've maybe secretly always wanted - and possibly even needed.

Do I create a safe space? I don’t know. I really don’t. With the news yesterday of the suicide of one of our second years on her way to the first day back last week, I realised that those critical antennae can be unbearably sharp. Was she too self critical? Was that what tipped her over into the unfathomable gulf? I checked her blog when I got home:

Maybe the first step is getting on with the work and stop being too analytical.

And then, the leap into the void.

Sometimes it is nice to just chill out and not think of anything in particular. Not think about what's going to happen tomorrow or happened yesterday, the day before or even years back. It is nice to just live in the moment. This is what I am doing right this second. And I feel free.

Going Fishing

2009-09-28T05:01:00.000-07:00

The subject I teach at University is tricky.. I teach students who have come to learn to make films, radio and TV programmes how to write, but with so many creatives on the course, there’s a high proportion of dyslexics and more visual learners, and that combination of impatience to get their hands dirty and the fear of the written word can mean that I can often face a reluctant class. But I tell them that their future lies in their ability to communicate what goes on in their gut rather than their heads, and there’s only one way to do that. They have to leap into the void. And that makes me very scary…

The dive that I ask them to do at the beginning of every class is performed through automatic writing, the practice of putting pen to paper for a specific amount of time without looking up, without stopping, without thinking and gives them – and me - a direct line to their nuggets of gold. It bypasses any notion of surface versus deep learning and takes all of them straight off the edge.

Last year, after a couple of weeks of letting them find their feet (and being rather pleased with what they found in themselves), I cranked up the challenge by telling them that they would be publishing their musings, making public their ramblings as part of their assignment in a blog. What Atherton suggests are the ‘deep learners’ were happy to explore the panoply of new emotions, while the ‘surface learners’ froze, and either posted a few words on neutral issues every now and again, or “forgot” completely.

I’m exploring the findings in a series of articles, and I thought it might be an appropriate way of exploring the academic questions about surface and deep learning (and strategic, but that’s another story). I fully admit that the way the assignment was marked last year couldn’t possibly approach any of the issues that arose with the ‘surface learners’. They simply lost marks for not applying themselves to the task. The success of the project makes me tempted to do it again this year, but how to engage those not so eager to show themselves will be a new challenge.

I’ve adapted the article here to show what happened with the 'deep learners' to see if it can throw up any ideas of how to engage the minority of ‘surface learners’.

..................................................

Automatic writing is for most people over the age of ten, like learning how to play again. And that can be really hard. When I first told my students that they would be unleashing the chaos of their recent dreams, moods, suspicions and fear on to a piece of paper, they looked as blank as their pages. Mostly 18 year-olds fresh from college, these young people were still stuck in the straitjacket of school essay writing. They had never written down their dreams; many of them had never even thought about them. They wanted facts and figures and were wary of a module called “Writing for Media”, preferring to press buttons and make radio programmes. For a generation that doesn’t read, what’s the point of writing?

The tight, write-to-impress language of first year student essays is why. Finding their own voice in automatic writing, they tentatively dare to explore what they really think, a revelation to most coming up for air for the first time since mainstream education. But the loosening of the fingers usually starts with the crossing of the arms. “What are we supposed to write about?” asked a slouching, recalcitrant nay-sayer. “Anything that comes into your head”, I suggested, knowing more than he did that there was something there. A sea of blank, glassy eyes looked back at me. “By the way,” said one distracter pointing to a camera battery pack, “what’s that thing on the table?” “There you go”, I said to the class. “Ten minutes on ‘what’s that thing on the table?’”. The results were extraordinary: The juxtaposition of inappropriate objects; the texture of heavy black plastic; the adventure of a battery pack, forgotten and abandoned by its camera crew.

The students were thrilled at what they had found in their soggy, sleepy brains. Yet when I asked who might like to read their work out to the rest of the class, they froze. The fear of judgement by their peers – and by me – was petrifying. Imagine how they felt then when I told them that as part of their assignment, they would have to splurge their thoughts publicly, that a blog would become their new creative home.

Like most people, they had always thought of blogging as an online Speaker’s Corner, new technology’s vox pops providing fresh meat for newshounds. Blogging is a public space where anyone can comment on your innermost thoughts, see through you, hate you or love you, stalk you or ignore you. It’s a place where most of them would never be seen dead.

But in time, I knew it would become for them what it is for me, a place of solitude in crowded space where no-one notices you getting away with murder. Tip-toeing into the blogosphere, inhibitions secreted in a Harry Potter invisibility cloak can be as exhilarating as walking unnoticed into a Burlesque party where the air is thick with liberation. It’s a playground where the very fact of being published, sharpens your game.

For creatives, there’s nothing like moving into a zone of severe discomfort to get the juice flowing. But as the blog became part of their daily routine, it was more than that. It became a “strange”, “transforming”, “weird world”, “as comforting as a cup of tea”, as they reported in their blogs, and as addictive as a night out; one student wrote how she hadn’t even taken her coat off before settling down to blog at 6am after a particularly wild night on the town. The blog as a landline to her increasingly fluent thoughts had become her best mate in the space of a few posts. Another wrote how, still in dressing gown, he stole into the corridor of his Halls to find a signal on his phone. Holding its precarious position while he painstakingly texted a new post, he refused to be beaten by the failure of his internet connection.

Never really done anything like this before. It seems weird that within this space I can write anything I want... It doesn't have to be cohesive, or make sense... weird. I plan to write on this once a day so long as I can get a chance.

When Williams and Jacobs forecast the potential for blogs as ‘transformational ….learning spaces' for students within higher education (Williams and Jacobs, 2004), they noticed that blogs encourage ‘personal reflection” and give a platform for “students' 'unique voices', empowering them, and encouraging them to become more critically analytical in their thinking”. It has certainly proved to be empowering for one of my students whose identity had always been defined by the panic attacks and behaviour issues linked with spending his childhood in care. Blogging for him has sent his inner demons into head to head combat.

It was gonna end like that.

There's a seething pain I get and it's now starting to really piss me off.

Nope matey, that's your gall stones and you just gotta put up with it.

Oh for God’s sake, you're so bloody literal sometimes. All the time. I could be talking about that, sure, but there's a pain that weedles its way in from time to time. It feels like it's getting into every pore of mine. It's taking away who I am, each time moving that little bit faster, working that little bit harder whilst the who or what I am is becoming less.

Jesus Christ, you're fuckin’ odd sometimes. Listen to what it is you're saying. In fact I'm sure I've read that somewhere. Why doesn't that surprise me?

Why should anything surprise you? I'm trying to explain myself and all I get from you is bloody shit.

Why do you feel like you gotta explain yourself? I don't.

No, you don't and look where that's got you.

Brave. Very brave of you

Another, whose first language is not English, used the space to explore his nascent English poet;

And the rims of her eyes are black.

Like slimy balls rolling out of their holes.

Already marked from last night.

They look old.

“50 isn’t old yet.”

Alice mumbles to herself.

And that might be right.

She isn’t old, but she feels like it

while she is listening to the radio:

“…drowned at noon today…”

And this feeling,

this anxiety,

having left behind life’s joys

has led to today’s feeling

that everything goes bad.

And she,

having brought her old body in front of the mirror,

to stare at herself,

is repeating the same question

over and over again:

“Why the fuck is this happening today?!”

Mortensen and Walker in 2002 suggested that a blog ‘forces students to confront their own opinions and contemplate how their views might be interpreted and reflected upon by others’: I suggested my students use their blogs to review films, music, books in the hope that they might drop into each other’s blogs, or even spread the word among their friends that their opinions were up for discussion.

There’s a lyric in a song called "Zero" by the Smashing Pumpkins which reads "Intoxicated with the madness, I’m in love with my sadness". I love the band, and that line makes me think...A lot of people do or at least have at some point in their life been happy to be miserable.. and feel that melancholy feeling, and are almost romanced by the notion of being upset...It is a strong emotion.

Others are cannier. Somehow knowing that the girls are watching silently, anonymously, one of my first years, once that slouching, recalcitrant nay-sayer, used his blog to parade his cerebral plumage as a cleverly seductive ploy.

This exercise has given me a way to vent my frustration, and in some cases, for people to look within my mind. Don't look too closely; it’s a dark, dank place filled with broken dreams and scarred images”.

The girls fell at his feet.

Ferdig and Trammel (2004) believe that blogs are more successful in ‘promoting interactivity that is conversational; a mode of interaction more conducive to improved student and teacher relationships, active learning, higher order thinking, and greater flexibility in teaching and learning more generally”. This interactivity of the blogosphere where friends and strangers can pop in for a look around your psyche is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the blog as tool for creative development. Being seen is scary yet after a while, my students were popping in and out of each other’s blogs, posting pictures and comments as easily as they might into each others room in Halls. Their creative thoughts had become part of who they were as broadcast journalism undergrads.

Will it translate into their projects by the time they graduate? It’s early days, but they’re walking taller in what Brad DeLong of University of California described as an ‘Invisible College’ a place where, ‘thanks to the wide open roads of Cyberspace, you can bump into people who will nudge those opinions and sharpen those brains, internetworking and creating super-contacts’. They’re reflecting, growing into creative, individual thinkers.

And for the former child in care whose panic attacks were part of his signature, blogging has put him out there to explore the infinity of potential.

All is good.

I'm happy.

Contemplative?

A little.

I can remember some things.

The rest is lost somewhere.

Do you really need to remember everything?
Does anyone?

We'll see.

Pulling on the Shoots

2009-09-22T03:02:00.000-07:00

It's a long old road from where Education first dropped me off to where I am now - beginning a second year as a university lecturer as well as my Post Graduate Certificate in Education. Soon, if all goes well, I'll be decked out in gown and mortar board and tottering down the Dome steps clutching a scroll, a Fellow of the University of Brighton.

But it wasn't always going to be like this, and it's an essential part of the PgCert to sit back and reflect on the various roads that got me to this point. Taking any conclusions into a room full of school-leavers next week is part of the magic of teaching.

I watch my own kids now and marvel at just how engagement and encouragement are all that it takes to be good at schoolwork, and how resistance, control and childish stubbornness are what stands between the bright and the dull. Years spent watching small children investigate the world, picking it up and exploring it with their mouths at first, their thoughts later proved to me that it's education itself that sorts kids into those who can and those who can't. Creativity, the keen insinctive desire to know and grow is in everyone until it's knocked out by streaming and target levels. How different would school have been for me if my teachers had remembered that. Learning how best to tease it out of the recalcitrant and applaud the energy in the already shiny without skipping a beat in my teaching is what I need to do now.

But maybe the first thing for me to do is to recognise the rhythm of a learner. How many artists have I heard recently admit to being 'observers' at school now that their thoughts are cooked and dished up so elegantly for us all to try? I was one of those, and I have a 14 year old version sharing my roof right now. Watching her sit on the sidelines, much the same was as I did, just taking it all in, is not as simple as 'lack of engagement', 'shyness', 'laziness', 'recalcitrance', 'teenage behaviour'; it's perhaps more about taking time for all the ingredients of life to steep.

I was a slow-cooking student. School for me was a long sleep over party, and college pretty much the same. I was conscientious and did what I was supposed to and on time - unlike most of the brighter sparks around me - but only because I didn't trust all those chaotic thoughts to come out with anything of any substance. Relying on any creative brilliance or original thought that might be the result of a morning deadline and a night full of caffeine was just too much of a risk. There were the bright kids, and then there were the drones like me who slogged and did just fine. Nobody then showed me what sparks really looked like. Most of the teachers who stood in front of me for all those years would be scratching their heads now - if they could even remember my name.

If I'd only known when I was at school, at college, at the BBC, where Oxbridge was the elephant in the room, that some of the brightest, most creative people take their time to come to the boil, I would have enjoyed life so much more. It didn't feel to me like I was simmering; it was me that put myself on the back burner. Paranoia, defeatism, constant judgements - on me by me became chips so heavy that I was weighed down throughout my twenties. I hid myself away and watched all my 'brighter' friends taking risks, trying things out, doing well. Being seen. I was vicious then, mentally lashing myself for not blagging my way into being a radio producer like Clare, for hiding under the duvet while Al sashayed her way through the music business, for just not being an operator like Charlotte, Phil, Carolyn and Mark. For being me.

And now, here I am twenty years later with more ideas than a saucepan full of popping corn. Of course there were a lot of crossroads and many wrong paths along the way, but where I am at 46 is where I could only dream of being when I was 26. Simmering my little pot of life, finding more ingredients along the way, increasing the quality as my palate becomes more refined, and stirring it all up every now is what slow cooking is all about. And any cook will tell you that the quality of your curry is down to how long you cook your onions....

All In The Mind

2009-09-10T03:58:00.000-07:00

Madeleine Bunting's article in The Guardian made me realise that there's something going on here... All those books I've been reading over the last six months, all those strange and spooky moments of serendipity, those contacts and like-minds.... There's a wave that I need to surf.

Here it is in all its glory - prepare to feel giddy.

It was browsing in a bookshop that got me started. I was confronted by a bank of bestsellers on the brain: how it works and how we think. There were the books which have attracted huge attention, such as Nudge and Blink, but there were others popularising the new insights of a range of academic disciplines – social sciences such as evolutionary psychology as well as neuroscience – which are radically challenging the most fundamental assumptions on which human beings operate.

Perhaps that sounds a little overblown, but it's not. Who, dear reader, do you think you are? Do you think your mind is capable of independent judgment and largely directs the course of your life? Do you think that most of your decisions in life have been the product of your rational, conscious self? Do you believe you are in control of your life? Do you cherish ideas such as self-expression, a sense of autonomy and a distinct, self-authored identity? The chances are that, albeit with a few qualifications, most of your answers are yes. Indeed, given a pervasive culture which reinforces all these ideas, it would be a bit odd if you didn't.

But the point about this new explosion of interest in research into our brains is that it exposes as illusions much of these guiding principles of what it is to be a mature adult. They are a profound misunderstanding of how we think, and how our brains work. They are fairytales, about as fanciful and as implausible as goblins.

This is such dramatic stuff that Matthew Taylor at the Royal Society of Arts, which has pioneered public engagement with this new research, argues that we are on the verge of a new Enlightenment. He argues that the 18th-century concept of the individual self has run its course and that a new paradigm of human nature is emerging. Given that assumptions of an autonomous individual underpin every aspect of how we order society and our political economy, educate and tackle social issues, this kind of Big Idea tends to make you feel a tad dizzy.

It's not an accident that many of the biggest bestsellers in this territory are about decision-making – Blink, Nudge and The Decisive Moment. The image which comes to mind is that they are all sticks of dynamite dug in to explode the great sacred mythology of our time: namely that individual freedom is about having choices, and that progress is about the constant expansion of those choices.

Read these books and you discover that people are useless at making choices. We are lazy, imitative, over-optimistic, myopic, and much of our decision-making is made by unconscious habits of the mind which are largely socially primed. We are "not exactly lemmings, but we are easily influenced by the statements and deeds of others", according to Nudge's bleak view of human nature.

The thesis of Nudge which has attracted such keen interest from the Conservatives is that this information can be used to prime better decisions without compromising freedom of choice. Nudge has appeared to offer a neat alternative to state intervention for all those intractable areas of private behaviour – from obesity and smoking to energy use and recycling – which have such damaging consequences. It's intriguing how much attention the thesis has attracted from many parts of the political establishment, such as policymakers in pensions, health and the environment, because often the gains from nudging seem pretty small – it is fanciful to think it can solve the environmental crisis.
This humbling evidence of our hopeless decision-making exposes consumer capitalism as not being about millions of independent decisions of individuals expressing unique identities, but about how social norms can be manipulated to create eager shoppers. Or take the idea of introducing choice into public services; some bizarre consequences will result, such as the popularity of a hospital being determined by whether it has a car park, not the skill of medical staff.

There are two other areas of this new brain research which are arguably more important. First, we have much underestimated the social nature of the brain: how primed it is to recognise, interpret and respond all the time to the input of others and how that lays down patterns which govern our behaviour. We are herd-like animals who show a strong tendency to conform with group norms; what makes our brains so much bigger than other primates is this remarkable capacity for social skills such as empathy, co-operation and fairness. Instead of the old metaphor of individuals as discrete entities like billiard balls, we need to think instead of them as nodes in a relationship network.

The second area of astonishing discoveries is in the plasticity of the brain. We talk of "hardwiring" (computers have generated many misleading metaphors for the brain) but in fact, the brain can be changed. Parts of the brain can learn entirely new tricks. Neural pathways are not fixed, and even much of the damage done by deprivation in childhood can be repaired with the right circumstances of example, support and determination. We can shape our own brains to create new habits that we might have thought we were not capable of – it's a long, hard process but it is possible.

This all may seem remote from politics, but it's not. Jon Cruddas has a habit of startling audiences by arguing that the regeneration of the left requires a convincing new account of what it is to be human. Are human beings self-interested creatures or are they collaborative? The right's argument for market capitalism is rooted in the former but the research on the social brain supports the latter. Put crudely, we are social creatures with an inbuilt tendency to co-operate and seek out each other's approval and that is probably more important in determining day-to-day behaviours than narrowly conceived self-interest.

In a thought-provoking pamphlet on the implications for politics to be published early next month, Matt Grist, who runs the RSA's Social Brain project, concludes that both the right and the left have lessons to learn. The rightwing emphasis on the individual's capacity to triumph over their environment through willpower is undermined by the research which shows how childhood deprivation leaves such scarring on the brain. While the challenge to the left is to recognise that the myopic tendencies of the brain to privilege the short term has been held in check by institutions and traditions which can safeguard longer-term interests. Perhaps that requires greater understanding on the left of how such institutions operate and a revision of assumptions about why they restrict individual autonomy.

To add one more element to this potent brew of extraordinary ideas: what has been left out of the UK debate so far is how much of this new research maps on to Buddhism. In the US, a group of researchers has been involved in an ongoing dialogue with the Dalai Lama to deepen understanding of the correlations between the new research and Buddhism. Here is a system of thought which has maintained for several thousand years that the idea of a separate individual self is an illusion, which urges a set of practices to increase awareness of the processes of the mind in order to transform them and cultivate ethical habits such as compassion or courage.

Apologies if by now you are feeling giddy. This is the kind of stuff which challenges almost everything you're used to thinking about yourself

Brain Noise

2009-09-01T04:24:00.000-07:00

And that was the summer. A long, glorious expedition into what happens if you quieten the 'brain noise' as my http://www.mummywhisperer.com/pal calls it.

This year, I did much the same as I've done for the last few - took the kids swimming in rivers and seas and guided French teenage girls out of their Gallic conservatism and into their wild imagination through creative writing walks where forests were red with blood and murderers lurked behind trees. The difference was that this time, there were no balls in the air. Juggling, I have decided, is for mothers who worry too much. And while before, I worried that they all might be, at varying times, hungry, bored, over stimulated, under stimulated, cold, homesick, pissed off, this time I let them be. And of course they weren't. Too rich to swim in rivers? I don't think so.

Brain noise; the shoulds, supposed tos and why aren't Is? that had me in a vice of guilt simply vanished into a gentle flowing river or a wave surfed by dogs and kids. Did I write less? No. Did I achieve less? Did I earn less? Actually, no. But did I enjoy myself more, read more, discover the magic of being in control of my own angst? God, yes. Roll on next summer...

A Little Tibetan Meditation

2009-07-21T05:47:00.001-07:00

Ok, here you go; the secret to life, the Universe and everything. Shall I make this my first lecture next term?

1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk
2. When you lose, don't lose the lesson
3. Follow the 3 R's; respect yourself, respect others and take responsibility for all your actions
4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck
5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly
6. Don't let a little dispute ruin a great friendship
7. When you realise that you've made a mistake, take immediate steps to put it right
8. Spend some time alone every day
9. Open your arms to change, but don't let go of your values
10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer
11. Live an honourable life. When the time comes to reflect on this, you'll enjoy it even more the second time round
12. A loving atmosphere at home is the foundation for life
13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situations. Don't bring up the past (yeah, Jed...)
14. Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality
15. Be gentle with the Earth and respectful of the seas and the rivers
16. Once a year, go somewhere you've never been before
17. The best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other
18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it
19. Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon
20. Love as if you've never been hurt

Thanks to Nick Owen's "More Magic of Metaphor" for reminding me of these.

The Magic of the Group

2009-05-12T01:17:00.000-07:00

It's a funny old thing. Getting a group of mates around a table for dinner is my preferred night in; it's entertaining, relaxed and life-affirming and although I can pretty much predict what kind of conversations we'll have, I almost always go to bed happy after they've gone. But this weekend, we did the opposite and the result was electric.

The first of the creative dinner parties under our retreat banner, The Sussex House Party took place around that same dinner table on Friday night with a bunch of people we had never met. Bar one; Liz Whiter whose book, The Animal Healer I worked on last year. She heals my animals and we go on strange meditational journeys into places I don't normally go to and I love the fact that she's not like any of those mates I have around the table most weekends. The others were a mix of academics and their friends, Pagans drawn to our key guest, chief druid, Philip Carr-Gomm and people interested in getting out more and nibbling at their own personal expectations. And Philip himself, a curly haired, radiant character whose sheer enthusiasm for life was enough to inspire the entire world order of druidry.

Over the course of the next five hours, we stayed focussed on the subject of magic, spirituality and druidry, touched on personal beliefs and talked a lot about writing. The discipline, the space/time debate, the sharpening, the polishing, the effect of fear, it was all laid out and picked at long after the Madhur Jaffrey spread had been cleared away by my teenage daughter and her friend.

But what was it that created the magic? I've witnessed it many times now and I still can't work out what happens. Can it be something as rare as being honest with a bunch of strangers? Trusting them with the stuff inside your soul? Will it happen when we have a posse of journalists around the table discussing media distortion and climate change? What about the porn-writing night? All I know is that giving people an opportunity to talk beyond house prices, new shoes or gossip at work strikes a match somewhere deep enough in us that makes the whole evening glow.

No-one wanted to leave; it was Philip's wife who rang to remind us that we were heading into the witchy hours and that he should have been home hours ago. What we needed were the bell-tents, a warm evening and a camp fire so that what bonded us around the table could develop into words on paper, plans for books, films, plays.

The summer is coming and with them the bell-tents, the camp fire and more, much more magic.

Creating a Brand

2009-05-06T03:01:00.000-07:00

Ces Loftus at www.creativelyminded.com has a different approach to building a brand image. I thought you might be interested in seeing a work in progress.

Questionnaire for The Sussex House Party Brand Image

Creatively Minded
What is the The Sussex House Party brand promise?
The core value proposition of the The Sussex House Party brand and the over all experience your clients will receive from your brand. A summary of your brand personality.
Identify the brand promise elements which apply to your different target market groups.

Sussex House Party
The Sussex House Party is where your muse is begging you to play. Relaxed, informal and aching with inspiration in the middle of really rural Sussex, there’s nothing to do but eat, drink, write and play.
We’re about welcome, wine and whatever comes along.

CM
What is the The Sussex House Party brand mission statement?
The integrity and core character of your brand. What you will achieve and how.

SHP
We’ll teach you to relax and to write
We’ll introduce you to people who inspire you
We’ll get your juices flowing
We’ll publish your work on our site and hook you into a community of people you want to be like

CM
List the The Sussex House Party services. Explain the need/desire your client may have and how you can fill that need.

SHP
Space, time, good food, writers, arty people.
Life’s too busy, too formulated, too heady for words. We give you the time and the space to remind yourself of who you are, who you were and who you want to be

CM
What is the The Sussex House Party brand strategy?
Regarding your brand position in the market. Tell us how you want the The Sussex House Party brand to be perceived and recognised. Planned applied branding, PR/Marketing to help you achieve the market position you want.

SHP
We want to be known as the new Bloomsbury Set, a network of arty people who love to play and to inspire each other. We want to be spread by words - of mouth and in the press. We want to be associated with new ideas and creative takes on life and business. We want to help business people remember their unique personalities and to take them back to the workplace to make their work and their lives better. We want to be the ones who make people who have fallen asleep at their desk wake up and remember what they can do.
We want them to come to us. We’ll cuddle them back to life.

CM
Who are your target audience? Describe the people you want to help. Their industry genres, character and the specific need/desire you can provide for. Please clarify the industries / job titles / likes / dislikes / feelings of your target market - identified as their separate groups. Think about emotion and what they are lacking that you can provide plus how they will feel having experienced your brand.

SHP
Marketing, PR, copywriters, brand managers, creatives, academics, people who write all day but have forgotten how to have fun with words.

CM
Describe your Niche market / specialist angle.

SHP
Rural, professional, academic, experience, chilled out, tried and tested, genuinely relaxing, wearing the t-shirt…

CM
Describe your Credibility, why should potential clients come to you?

SHP
See above

CM
Any colours, symbols and styles that you want to be considered. For example key words such as Bold, Modern, Simple, Professional, Forward Driven and so on.

SHP
Colours: nature – green leaves, berry reds, cherry blossom, apple white, purple skies, firepit orange

CM
Any colours, symbols and styles that you want to avoid?

SHP
Black, white, magnolia

CM
How do you want your target audience to feel after looking at your Brand Image?

SHP
Refreshed, smiling, inspired

CM
What would be the ideal response and result from your target audience?

SHP
Booking a retreat, telling their friends, hiring a party here, spreading the word into their workplace

CM
How do you want your clients to feel after taking up your service?

SHP
Inspired, ready to change the way they work, passing it on, inspiring others

CM
Who do you see as the main competitors for the The Sussex House Party brand?

SHP
Arvon Foundation

CM
List any web sites / brand images of main competitors.

SHP
http://www.arvonfoundation.org/p1.html

CM
Do you have a slogan / tag lines, or a key benefit message you would like to communicate through a new slogan?

SHP
See above? ‘Where your muse loves to play’

Getting on

2009-04-27T06:09:00.001-07:00

If I die tomorrow, I will have known what it is to be truly happy.

It's not just Jed, the kids, the dog, the cats, the pigs, sheep, chickens and the goslings either. It's taken a while, but it's true; the older I get, the more I realize that squeezing myself into tight boxes and trying on uncomfortable versions of myself was just about laying the hardcore of what I'm only now really beginning to understand. All that experience - good and bad, all those books I've read and films I've watched in skived afternoons and (not so often, but just as thrillingly) late night flea pits were the edges and blue sky of the jigsaw now falling into place; all those courses, workshops, mentors and gurus, pains in the backside, energy vampires and moments of pure inspiration are all now fluttering down to produce a picture of my life aged 46. And it doesn't look bad.

Stumbling into The University of Brighton, laden down with my rucksack of life experience, propelled me into classrooms of raw, uncarved genius and reminded me how jaw-droppingly beautiful it can be, particularly when its owner trips over it at the same time. Pulling those students, not always willingly, into the darkness of their own soggy minds means taking all of us into unfamiliar territory, and how refreshing that can be. Then, tentatively at first but increasingly with more spontaneity and confidence, reaching into my bulging bag of tricks, I've helped them find gold. What will it be like when I use those exercises on the scientists, the maths students, the business students? And then into Big Business with my academic research, suitably fellowshipped-up to make me 'proper'...

The Sussex House Party's creative dinner parties start next week with Philip Carr-Gomm on magic and spirituality, and with them, the launch of the writers' retreats here in the most beautiful house in the world, with its giant gossamer curtains turning the rain pink.

And the synchronicity of it all is what makes the incessant rain seem like a glorious garden sprinkler rather than a heavy downpour, and reminds me what it's like in the slipstream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily...

Easter eggs

2009-04-13T04:30:00.000-07:00

How creative can Easter be? When Linda invited the kids over to "paint some eggs", I dropped the kids off at her house, went visiting and came back to this...
One of Linda's singing students had taught her how to make Faberge inspired eggs last year and so this year, she decided to pass it on.

Tom showed Loulou that even a 10 year-old can make them...
. ... which made her very happy...

Meanwhile Linda showed Ellie how to carve her goose egg...
and turn this into this
Intergenerational, skill-stretchy and completely unique, an Easter to remember just what happens when you believe you can do anything.

Recession, shmecession

2009-03-05T07:04:00.001-08:00

(Photo courtesy of http://www.belltent.co.uk/)

I'm so excited. I've just spent the day with Vicky Smallholder and we've hatched a much more exciting plan than getting a £120k loan for a barn conversion. Who needs 29.4% interest rates when you've got that amount of sheer creative genius a landrover ride away? The woman deserves a TV programme.

As Freud said, "Every crisis is potentially a stimulus to the positive side of the personality and an opportunity to start afresh." So instead of eight bedrooms, think eight bell tents nestling under the plum trees in the paddock with rugs of reindeer hide and beds of local feathers, woodstoves by day and firepits by night, and our retreaters writing by the light of the moon on ancient wooden tables discarded from old Sussex farmhouses.

They do say that the summer will be hot this year too.

Landing in Paradise

2009-03-04T01:46:00.000-08:00

Well that was some month.

Remember that little exercise of putting your vision in a bubble, letting it go and if it's meant to be yours, it will scoop you up and drop you down where the land is verdant and milk and honey is on tap? Well, welcome to a place which is currently flooded and the taps are covered in dust as the kitchen wall is carted off to a pile in the woods before becoming the foundations for the tennis court. The vision however, is clear.

If it sounds posh, think again. This is where hard core is used rather than dumped (the tennis court)and where bartering reminds us what life was once like. This is where architect trained small-holders swap their skills for mine in order to get our planning permission for the barn to become the writers' retreat of our dreams, where recession-fuelled loans at 29.4% stimulate seriously lateral thinking about the summer's income, and where local and seasonal food is so local, you can hear it bleat. Leftovers are traded with the chickens for their eggs, although Bertha the pig didn't quite have time to nosh our potatoes before feeding the hoards of guests we've had in the two weeks of being here. But the sweetness of her belly makes me think that she would have been glad to have been of service.

So now, the uphill task of getting the barn done. Freecycle works with our vision of junk chic and I can't wait for the farmers auctions where bargains are rich pickings according to lovely Vicky Smallholder. Eight bedrooms, a snug and a writing room, with Charleston inspiring the garden design and props from Glyndebourne hopefully finding a resting place under the hundreds of trees will take creative thinking rather than relying on hard cash, but what better way to give birth to The Sussex House Party's creative retreats? After the Community, the thought of so much planning is breathtakingly liberating; shall we have a plum tree or shall we plant an orchard by the tennis court? And no-one to care but us.

And then there was the death of Aunt Lily. What a privilege to watch someone die, to be able to spend her last hours holding her hand, quietly planting visions of a handsome boyfriend rowing her gently down the stream as she struggled for so long and so hard with the demons that plagued her life. May your journey be more peaceful now.

Fighting the Flab

2009-02-09T02:20:00.000-08:00

Watching the BAFTAs last night made me think about what it means to be lean. Ok, so not all of those bodies lining up to get those awards were what the industry would call beautiful; the brains that sit all day in edit suites were just as lardy as the rest of us who spin words and visions around all day, but for the sake of the argument....

The Brads and Angelinas and Kates and Devs were all there because they work harder than I do. They put their energy in the right place and their bodies and their BAFTAS are testament to it. Ok, so there's the whole thing about what the media requires from its leading actors but that's not it. Getting off your backside shows. Like exfoliation and abstention from mid-week boozing, so doing the daily automatic writing rather than simply telling all my students to do it, works. Dead skin shed, liver perky and brain stimulated is the difference between doing it now and doing it tomorrow, doing it well or being half-hearted about who you are.

At 45, when exactly am I going to be the lean, mean, writing machine that I could be if not now? Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, I've decided; it's the measure of being in tune with my inner self.

Blogging

2009-02-06T04:13:00.000-08:00

Damn. Those students of mine are showing me up.

Back in October, they were fresh-faced, straight from college, all swagger and smiles and up for a laugh. I taught them the art of automatic writing in the expectation of them dipping their toes in a freezing sea before running screaming from the waves that rushed to greet them and pull them out into the deep where they would sink or swim. I checked their early blogs occasionally, nodding to myself at the lack of punctuation and spelling errors in confirmation.

But after a week of marking their first semester assignments, I'm floored. Ok, so some of them - many of them - are what I expected, but others are really, really not. If I coached them to unleash the chaos of their dreams, moods, suspicions and fear back then, they have gone further to explore style and dialogue, even firing their inner demons into cyberspace in head to head combat. Poetic, original they play with language in a way that only generations raised on multi-culture can.

I'm excited about teaching again.

Networking

2009-01-14T04:10:00.000-08:00

Once, in a less humble period of my life, I was one of the top five women networkers in Brighton, according to a local paper. I think it was due to my appearing at the opening of a fridge at the time. It didn't do a thing for my business bank account, but that was largely because I was rubbish at business and brilliant at going to parties. Now I'm a grown up and am trying again.

But internetworking is a different beast and I have to admit to being quite addicted. I've tried the Facebooks and UK Press List and while they're useful, UKP in particular, they're not quite as dynamic as Ecademy. I spent three hours looking for writers in the London area to network with the other day and I already have over a hundred people in my contact folder as a result! I'm nowhere near that with Facebook. I wouldn't know how to begin.

So, my questions about how to market the writers' retreats are already getting answers and by the very people who may well come and join in. How cool? as my teenager would say.

A New Year Wish

2009-01-12T01:58:00.000-08:00

A new year and a new life is tantalisingy close while we wait to exchange.

Already, my attention is on creating The Sussex House Party in its new bigger, more Bohemian home. I even have the time; I'm just about to wrap up the University teaching until the autumn so can set to work on creating the retreat that will have people flocking to our door, inspiring each other (and me), and reminding us that this is one of things we do best.

Leaving here is harder than I thought though; packing boxes while members of the community drift in and out to check the heat metres, share a bit of gossip or a cup of tea makes me well up. It's special place and I would have loved to have been part of it for longer. But then an email swipes at me with that familiar disregard and I long for the peace and autonomy of Three Acres and know that we're making the right decision.

I can't deny the sense of mourning, not just in me but in people we love here. Taking friends and dogs for a walk down to Three Acres yesterday reminds all of us that it's only an hour through glorious woods or 20 mins on a mountain bike along a muddy path, but a world away too. The teenagers will (hopefully) use it as their second home but maybe we should get one of those French style cheapy swimming pools in to secure the deal.

But first, we need to exchange. Our lovely buyer, Shazzie is also good at visioning, so she and I have sent our most potent visions of an exchange early this week into the universe. If I promise to take the best of the community spirit with us, let's see what comes back to launch the birth of The Sussex House Party.

Careful what you wish for

2008-12-05T06:05:00.000-08:00

Guess what? It came back.

Think Bloombsury Set 2009 with gentle artists and fiery poets joining singer songwriters and Glyndebourne musicians dining on local wood pigeon around the firepit by night. Those gardens will soon be a riot of colour with bees from our own hives feasting on home-grown purple-flowered echinacea and vibrant reds and oranges of fresh marjoram and marigold.

Ok, ok, so we haven't even exchanged yet, but without a dream you get nothing...

Jed always wanted ducks.

Magic

2008-12-02T07:02:00.000-08:00

I learnt a trick once. If you put something that you really wanted and then lost in an imaginary bubble and let it go, it will come back if it's the right thing to do.

I did it with the Nigella book. I had been offered the job when a biographer dropped out at the last minute and I was seconded to meet the pressing deadline. But, as my pen was poised to sign the contract, the editor's boss dashed my dreams and put his own favourite writer in place. I was gutted. I had dreams of dining with Nige and Charles, plates of her mother's roast chicken balanced on our knees in Tracy Emin's bed as we watched reruns of The West Wing. So when the phone rang and my would-have-been- editor told me I'd lost the gig, I dragged the kids out into the garden and told them to imagine me and Nigella arm in arm. We adjusted the view until we were both fondly smiling at each other, chatting happily about our mothers' favourite recipes and then I ordered them to put the vision in a bubble, close their eyes and repeat the mantra.

Refusing to let the rejection get me down, I decided to email the would-have-been-editor and ask her to meet me to discuss other projects. If she had liked my writing enough to give me the job in the first place, she should like me enough for another. She invited me for a coffee.

When I arrived, she was smiling almost the same smile as Nigella had done in my bubble. She told me that she was taking me to lunch, that the other writer didn't feel she could cope with the deadline and a small child and that if I wanted it, the job was mine.

I can't say, but I've just put something else I really, really wanted and lost in a bubble. I'll let you know if it comes back.

A different view

2008-12-01T01:15:00.000-08:00

I've taken a bit of a different direction since the catastrophe of the Jamie book launch. I've been wondering what it was all about in a way that has given me a new path. Yes it was fun to write, but how many people will read my book? How many will grow their own food or buy local as a result? What was it all for? The amount I spent on acupuncture when my back gave out at the end - as it always does after a book - just wasn't worth it. The money I spent on the train fares to the food festivals that I arranged still hasn't been reimbursed and I've yet to hear, after three months, of any press coverage other than in Heat magazine.

After the inevitable existential angst (maybe that's the role of the modern publisher; if you can't sell a book, you can at least get the writer to question the whole point of writing. It must save a fortune on rejection letters), I've swapped seats to see what it looks like from the rear window. It's not that I'm leaving it all behind, but that I'm driving off into the sunset to have a look at what the next horizon has to offer.

Writing, I've realised, is about much more than selling books. I teach one day a week at a local university and waft through the corridors of dubious excellence as a visiting lecturer on others. If this is where the next generation of writers is being trained, being at the helm (or lectern) gives me a kaleidoscopic view that informs my own future as a writer.

My students are a rich blend of British youth; there are those who are straight from school or the street and can barely spell, but whose thoughts, occasionally pure and beautiful, can blow the cobwebs off their stereoptypes. There are the victims for whom no deadline, coaching, handouts or advice will ever prise them out of their self-loathing and who throw their petulance at me as pointedly as my 13-year-old does. But even they reveal a depth in their blogs and occasional essays that makes me proud and I wonder what I was ever doing ploughing all my energy into a book that no-one would ever see.

And then there are the nice middle-class creative writers whose modules take them from literature to language and send a new band of PRs and publishers, book reviewers and language teachers polishing their phrases into the workplace. What a breath of fresh air do these well-educated, nicely behaved young people provide. For now at least. But will they write for a living? Yes, probably, but will it be books they write? They're more likely to sell writers like me. I've seen the future and these nice girls with their dolly shoes and long legs are the ones who won't read the books they have to then sell and who will apologise on the day of the author event for failing to get any press and who will then put the phone down and bitch about the writer who's just so demanding. It's not their fault. It's what they'll be taught to do.

And then there are the writers who emerge from our retreats with a new sense of awareness. The writing exercises they do while they're taking time out to feed their souls might not make professional writers out of them but the process is profound. And that, maybe, is what writing is for. It gives us all a clarity of thought, a focus that a chat over a glass or two with a mate just can't compete with.

My friend, Andrew Clover has written a wonderful book called 'Dad Rules'(Penguin 2008)which documents his adventures in having kids in a way that I haven't seen before. Horribly honest and very, very funny, he reminds me of those moments that I know that all middle class parents go through but which are only given form in the telling. Writing gives him licence to think about them deeply rather than cracking open a bottle of mother's ruin when the toddlers finally go for a nap. He grabs the moment in a way that would make any Zen master spit with envy. And ok, so his book is a great success,and I'm sure that he'll go on to write brilliant books on parenting pubescent teenagers too but it seems like it makes him happier too.

What I get from the writers I teach is the moment. And in a publishing world which is all about tomorrow's sales and next year's figures, I think it's probably a far more satisfying thing to do. So rather than pitching book ideas, I'm going to get a little Zen this winter. I'm going to write every day like I tell my students to do, and blind myself with realisations of what's happening in my own mind. We'll move house to a place where The Sussex House Party will really come into its own with its acres of space - and a calmness that living in a community could never quite allow -and invite artists and poets and singers and songwriters to feast with us while our eyes water at the beauty of those moments that only writers produce.

And I'll be back in the Spring with another book launch. This time, it's with a different publisher. And maybe, just maybe it'll be different this time.

What The Hell...

2008-10-17T01:38:00.000-07:00

I've been so careful while writing this blog. I started it to chronicle the life of a writer, the ups and downs and ins and outs for whoever may need to know. But with a blank screen in front of me and a maelstrom of inactivity around my latest book, I've found it really hard to say what's really going on - both inside my head and the dark world of bread-and-butter publishing. What if the marketing people were to read my blog? (Yeah right; if they can't be bothered to read the book they're supposed to be punting, they're hardly likely to read this). What if it sounds too negative? What if it affects my future relationship with the industry? What if...? What if...? What if...?

Publishing is an industry that puts all its efforts into the top 20 authors on its list. That's it. Ok, ok. So, the result is that the rest of us haven't a hope in hell of getting the marketing people to read our books before they fling them like mud at the wall they call a press list, to think laterally about tying it into any major TV series featuring its subject which might magically and, some may say, spookily come out almost exactly at the same time. Nor may they think that perhaps the local press supporting every other event in its annual food festival might actually be interested in an interview with a visiting author.

Look, it's no great surprise that I'm just going to have to do it myself. In fact I've had lots of fun already. Ok, so the publishers didn't actually get any books to Ludlow, Glynde or Abergavenny Food Festivals (my current and former home towns for God's sake)but The York Food Festival was a hoot. And getting the press coverage was a matter of a couple of last minute phone calls by the event manager and me. BBC local radio rarely turns an author down. And once the publisher's PR girl got over her spluttering defensiveness , I think we realised that we're on the same team with this one.

So what else do I need to do? My mate, Ralph Blum whose best-selling The Book of Runes is launching a 25th anniverary edition this year, ploughed through a book of booksellers which he borrowed from a mate in publishing sales when it first came out. With a (very good) mate (on shared royalties), they rang just about every major bookseller in America to give them a personal rune reading over the phone. So blown away were they by the runes' oracular advice, they became his own sales team. Result: a best seller.

With The Jamie Oliver Effect out there while Jamie's Ministry of Food on Channel Four revoltionises Rotherham's eating habits, the sun is already shining on my little contribution to the food debate. But will I personally ring every bookseller in the UK to remind them? Will I go into every bookshop I pass and sign copies, raising the value to the reader? Will I organise more literary events with my new chums who I collect on my way? Well, maybe, yes. Kate Lock, author of Confessions of an Eco-Shopper with whom I shared the York literary dinner and I already have a plan. We shall feast (locally and seasonally of course) around the UK, wining and dining our eco way into the public's hearts, and selling a few books along the way. It's not such a hard life, is it?

In Perpetuity

2008-05-26T01:33:00.000-07:00

The difference between being a writer and being a journalist is what happens to your words. You might want to argue that it's about intention, purpose. But the bottom line is whether or not you become dismissed, even by the fish'n'chip shop, after a quick glance.

And so I was rather thrilled that my eldest's first go at copy writing, aged nine, should be displayed on a very different medium, the Brighton bus. In what I thought was a brilliant promotional campaign for public transport which celebrated the richness, eccentricity and diversity of our fine city, I was invited to be one of the first to be featured.

Ok, so the truth was that I was doing my usual rant, this time to the MD of the bus company about his previous campaign which had a load of pensioners inviting us to join them on a charabanc trip rather than encouraging parents to leave the 4WDs at home and hop on board, and he called my bluff. "Come on then," he said. "You do it!"

'It'll be fun', I told the kids, as Ellie hid behind the sofa, fine-tuning the wording on that letter to Social Services she's been writing since she first could put pen to paper. LouLou, as always, was a pushover.

A couple of weeks later, we were in a photographic studio and I was holding a carpet bag while the photographer, Jerry Lebens, made LouLou and her Ellie look-a-like mate, Danielle fly. The link between Mary Poppins and getting the kids to school on the bus wasn't all that clear until the prices went up a few weeks after the campaign was launched.

Job done, Ellie was spitting. 'LouLou gets to do all the fun stuff', she sulked. 'Go on then', I goaded. 'You come up with the slogan and then your words will be as big as her face. We're on the bus....because....?' 'Dunno', she muttered. 'Because ...going to school... er.... on the bus is...mmmmm.. cool?'

Genius child.

And for three years, we pumped our little eco-message around Brighton and Hove, even though we had already left it long ago for our eco dream in the country. Until now. We have been repainted, wiped from Brighton's history in favour of this year's message - "A month's bus travel for the price of a tank of petrol". It doesn't even scan.

I Was Wrong

2008-05-13T05:13:00.001-07:00

Guess what? They agreed.

Publishers

2008-05-12T01:26:00.000-07:00

Hmm. So the clock is ticking and suddenly the rush to get the manuscript off into the whirlwind of bookmaking is getting in the way of making it something that people might want to buy. The title is not what we agreed and there's no time to change it. The endorsements I've lined up from influential chefs are now an irritating obstacle on the home run to the printer and I'm in danger of becoming one of those people who publishers hate; the writer who cares.

An art director once told me that authors are barely mentioned in publishing meetings, and if they are, they are referred to as such rather than given a name - unless they are one of the hallowed few.

So what can I do? The sales team think they know best and perhaps they do. But if writing is about gut instinct, as it mostly is, do I hand over the feeling in my gut to someone else's stats and groupthink? I know that a book about Jamie O which looks anything like a biography will have the food magazines shunning it because they don't want to upset their hero and cover star, while an observation about his effect on British food culture would be timely as his new series comes out, and an interesting angle on the local, seasonal, sustainable food agenda.

But maybe I'm being too harsh. It's Monday morning and the world hasn't yet begun at Publshing Central. Maybe my "firm" email of Friday afternoon will fall on open minds on this gorgeous May day.

I shall open mine too and start the first page of my next book, believing that publishers want to sell books too, that the machinery can't operate without clever sales people.

How to Sell A Book: Part 2

2008-04-17T07:14:00.000-07:00

I've been working in a business for the last 15 years without a clue how it works. Like those drones in Marx's theory of alienation, I've no idea what the right hand is doing while my left hand gets on with its commission. I've simply written my books , loads of them, without any idea of how they were going to get onto the bookshelves. In the early days, I even handed in a manuscript on paper, printed off an early Amstrad, and imagined a printing press of little elves magicking it into a real life book. I didn't talk to the publicist, the UK or foreign rights people about making it into a best-seller. I didn't even know their names.

Always a sucker for a party, I organised the launch myself, borrowing favours from some of the chefs I'd written about who, also suckers for parties, were happy to wow my mates and a few journalists with their canapes, and I thrilled the bookshop into supplying the drink. Everyone went home happy and with a book in their bag from that launch - and every one I've organised since.

But publishing is about more than a party, and if I want my books bought by people who like them and pass the word on rather than cynical journalists or bored netheads, I need to think again.

It was at a Society of Author's seminar last month that I decided that I should finally wise up. Sitting around the table with 10 other authors who had had a similar experience, we concluded that if publishing was about pushing top 20 authors, the rest of us would have to do it ourselves. And no, it doesn't make sense as an industry, but are we going to sit around and moan, or are we going to use our nouse and contacts and get our work out for people to see?

So I asked the publisher of my Jamie Oliver update if I could meet their entire sales team, along with editorial before this year's London Book Fair and guess what? They want to sell it too. They haven't got time to read the thing of course, so they were more than happy for me to tell them about it. A new title, a new jacket and a new pitch, shedding the biography that it never was and repositioning it as the book about the Jamie effect on a food revolution, and we're finally singing from the same dust cover.

As I sat there with the Head of Uk Sales, I wondered why this isn't part of the signing process as it is for Hay House UK, surely a truly enlightened publisher. But, more importantly, I wondered where on earth my head has been for the past 15 years...

The Cupboard Was Bare; Recipes for the Tighfisted. 1. The Supermarket Refusenik

2008-04-14T02:45:00.000-07:00

It's not that I'm a miser of a cook. It's not that I'm even particularly thrifty when I'm shopping - let me loose in Borough Market and watch my purse bleed. It's just that since I've moved to the middle of nowhere, I've spent more of my time writing about peak oil and have begun to see supermarkets as the greatest evil of the modern world. So popping out to Tesco to get something nice in for the kids' supper simply never happens, although I can occasionally be spotted sneaking into Waitrose on a Sunday morning if I've forgotten to get the organic chicken or South Downs Lamb from the local butcher the day before.

All this means that I've never got anything in. But I've always been able to create something from nothing, and I think that maybe it's a skill that not everyone has. So, here for you in Blogworld, are some of my daily recipes from a bare cupboard, filled only with staples such as lentils, pasta, rice and potatoes, a few stock cubes and a couple of tins of tomatoes. With my weekly veg box (£12.50) and the occasional ice pick through the freezer, I shall whisk up a bevy of treats and spend little more than £15 a week.

There are no home economists in my house (although my 12 year old is more up on these things than I am), and we don't believe in measuring. But for a family of four, I think we do rather well. We'll be growing our own veg before you know it, and sharing recipes with other tighfisted supermarket refuseniks, showing anyone who cares to notice that food can be delicious without costing a fortune and as quick to cook as a TV dinner.

The Cupboard Was Bare; Recipes for the Tighfisted. 2: My Fried Rice

2008-04-14T02:44:00.000-07:00

This is one of my favourite something-from-nothing dishes, a sure fire winner in my college days when I seemed to be among the very few who could cook. You can add anything to a wok full of rice, steamed gently in a chicken stock, poshed up or dumbed down. Kids love it, it's the perfect accompaniment for a simple dinner, a splendid curry or Chinese feast. And it costs next to nothing.

The key to fried rice is the time you spend on your onions. Chopped and tossed into a wok of hot olive oil, it should get sweaty before glowing a gorgeous honey colour.

Add the basmati rice - 1/2 a cup per person. I usually use basmati but last week I found some Italian short grain at the back of the larder which gave off a slightly sweeter taste and more of a risotto feel than the fluff of the Indian equivalent. The oil will coat the rice, making it translucent, the cue to add any spices before the stock. Cumin seed is delicious with rice but this is where I raid the cupboard. I've got some gorgerous doukha at the moment, a sublime blend of Egyptian spices and it means I need very little else with my rice.

My veg box comes on a Friday so by Wednesday, its contents, now in the bottom of the fridge, are all looking rather droopy - perfect for fried rice. As it's all seasonal, I'll add what's on offer; broccoli, red pepper, leeks are my early March fare.

A chicken stock cube in twice as much water as the rice (1 cup per person), a tight lid and an occasional stir, and about 10-11 minutes later left to stand, lid still tight to steam for a moment, and we're almost done. Time to look in the fridge for anything else with a dodgy shelf life.

A bit of salmon we bought for pescatarian daughter (9) who scampered off for a vegetarian lasagne at a mate's house at the last minute is lurking at the back of the fridge. Steamed in a fish kettle for 5 minutes, it's now perched on my doukha fried rice, opening at the centre to reveal a delicate pink centre. Mmmmmm.

The Cupboard Was Bare; Recipes for the Tighfisted. 3: The Rainy Day Cook

2008-04-14T02:43:00.000-07:00

Lunchtime on a stormy Monday, rain and hail lashing the windows and high winds hurling wheelbarrows and watering cans across the road outside. The News is full of the devestation of our coastal towns, and I'm seriously worried about the rabbits. You think I'm going out to buy lunch - or indeed dinner?

So, to the fridge. Yesterday's lunch for 3000 has (again) cleared it out, but there's a potato, a couple of leeks, a manky old carrot and a sprouting red onion. To me, that's a steaming vegetable soup within the hour.

The man from Geeks on Wheels is busying himself with my router so I can legitimately take time off from researching the updated Jamie Oliver book I've got to finish by the end of the month and whizz up that onion, Nigella styley.

Actually, I don't know why she whizzes everything, other than to avoid the tear-jerking process of chopping. I suppose it releases the sweetness before the oil crisps the onion, and as I've run out of cinammon sticks, I'm going to need as much natural sweetness as I can get. I won't tell the kids that I've sullied their favourite toy when they make their after-school fruit smoothies.

So, the potato, unpeeled (all that insoluble fibre) and the garlic (two cloves a chilly day keep the colds at bay) is chucked into the now golden onion and its glug of olive oil, gently heated. Add the leek, chopped and washed, and jam on the lid to my heavy-bottomed Le Creuset (£10 for the 5 pan set from a charity shop) to sweat the lot while I boil the kettle for the stock.

Of course I should have made the stock from yesterday's roast chicken, but I didn't. So it's Knorr again with all its MSG. (Note to self: find an MSG-free stock that tastes as good as Knorr)

Chuck in a bay leaf (the little tree looks at me forlornly from the garden while I choose the pot of dried from the herb shelf. Those winds are 70mph, for God's sake) Add the dregs of the cinammon stick pot, season and simmer until the Geeks on Wheels man has done his thing and I can sit down in front of Jamie at Home and dream of the veg plot that I'll have when the March winds die down and the April showers put a spring back into my cookery.

The Cupboard Was Bare : Recipes for the Tighfisted. 4: Sharing Lunch

2008-04-14T02:41:00.000-07:00

Still raining, still researching Jamie, fridge still lonely but a friend is coming for lunch. Luckily the kids turned their noses up at yesterday's lovely soup so I'll bake it with some Atlantic cod fillets I've excavated from the freezer and serve with my mate's fresh basil from her polytunnel. A bit of olive oil and a dash of fresh ground black pepper and the ciabatta she's bringing, warmed with squashed tomatoes and garlic. Mmmmmm

The Cupboard Was Bare : Recipes for the Tighfisted. 5: Comfort Food

2008-04-14T02:39:00.000-07:00

Did I mention that while I might be tightfisted with my shopping, my husband isn't? So after two weeks of eeking out the rations into rather gorgeous meals, I eventually went to Waitrose on Saturday to stock up on organic apricots and that lovely tagine paste they do, split peas and all those other things you can't get at the local shop. The cats will even eat tonight.

On Sunday, Jed went missing. "He's taken Jet to Homebase", offered my eldest, referring to the magnificent black lab we're looking after until our rescue dog arrives this week. And you wonder why we're the first call for so many of our mates looking for dogsitters?

Hours later, they returned, stocked up with Tesco bags filled to the brim with apricots, tagine pastes and cat food. And some Markies for Jet. "Well, we needed some spaghetti" he said to my look of betrayal, as if he hoped that somehow the non-sequitur would throw me off the scent of the bags of fresh vegetables he'd bought only two days after the Bill's veg box arrived.

So today, grumpy and with sore thoat and leaden head after a heavy weekend, I'm wading through the packed fridge in search of something sweet to lessen the foreboding of my imminent Jamie O deadline.

Fresh double cream! He bought me cream! (He hates cream.)

Grabbing a banana from the Bill's bit of the fridge (shipped from the Caribbean, it's less of a footprint than half the contents on the Tesco shelf in our fridge), I fork the cream and sugar into the mashed banana, squish it on the roof of my mouth and dream of the seventies when shopping was local and daily and when mothers made mashed bananas for their sore thoated daughters.

And tonight, I shall bash those stale digestives at the back of the larder(ok, they're not stale, but there's a theme here..)and mash more bananas from the Caribbean with Cornish double cream and the kids will marvel at the mother who can make something out of nothing. I just won't mention the bit about Tesco...

Tugging on the Shoots

2008-03-20T02:18:00.000-07:00

It's a weird old world, the media world. Everything is so rushed, everyone's working to a deadline and the rules of common decency are crushed in the race to get that front page laid out. Phone a newsroom in a newspaper office or a radio station and you'll generally get some junior newshound answering the phone with an urgent "News!" as if your call is jeopardising world security. In another world, that kind of tone would be met with a swift reprimand and sent to bed without supper. And what happens to that news he or she (the women are often worse) is putting to bed while you're trying to sell your story or get an email address? It's used to light your fire or clean up the puppy's latest mistake.

Yet it's time, I realise at the grand old age of 44, that makes the greatest stories. I'm updating my book on Jamie Oliver at the moment for a second edition and while once, not so long ago, the idea of my writing a blog/morning pages/having another coffee instead of stressing about meeting my deadline, would have sent me into headspin, I realise now that the less time I write and the more I let the ideas simmer, the better they are.

The book, when it came out, was sold by the publishers as "the unauthorised biography", intimating, while not exactly promising, a tittle tattle of a tale. Most of the people I wrote it for would have dismissed it without even reading it; 'if Jamie didn't authorise it, we won't read it because he's our best cover star/he writes recipes for us/we're his fans'. And the many who did would have been looking through for the dirt on Jools, and found a melting pot of foodie superstars telling a very different kind of story.

Two years on, I get the chance to add another couple of chapters, bringing Jamie's role in our food revolution up to date and folding in my own messages, the authorial voice that I was too scared to raise back then. Time will make this book a better read.

But it's not the content of the book I need to rework. Two years on, I know more of the pitfalls of publishing. I know that I have to sell this book, that if I can get sales and marketing, rights and editorial talking to each other and to me at this stage in the game, we've got a chance of a single message emerging from the project. And would the world end if I didn't get it in bang on next Friday's deadline in order to make that meeting happen?

I'm 45 on April 7th, and it's such a relief. Time is teaching me to breathe a little more often, to slow down and consider what's really important. I've learnt that there's no point in tugging on the shoots in Spring, that once the soil is dug, the compost mixed in, the seeds sown, the only course is to water them reguarly, and to sit back and watch them grow.

On Being a Film Maker; The Sequel

2008-03-20T02:11:00.000-07:00

This is the newly elected West Sussex Youth Cabinet going through their paces at a residential in Pulborough in February 2008. The film is part of the Beacon Youth Support Programme I'm working on which aims to encourage harder to reach young people to get involved in their own communities.

On being a film maker

2008-02-21T03:17:00.000-08:00

My first youtube film! The gorgeous music is by Dirk Campbell.
The new Green Baby cafe site is now up and running too at www.greenbabycafe.co.uk

Last night a guru saved my life

2008-02-20T03:17:00.001-08:00

It's a funny old game, being a writer. Opportunities to do the most extraordinary things are very often dangled under my nose, and I'm left wondering what to do with them. Last week I found myself in a stately home with a viscount and a roomful of sceptical hospital caterers, chewing delicately on the front end of a South Downs lamb. Monday night was spent filming a crimson sun setting over West Sussex as 60 local kids gave up their half term to gen up on their roles as elected members of the Youth Cabinet. I'm so often inspired by the commitment of others to what they believe in that I'll travel miles just to sit in their company.

So as I sat on the train to Victoria from Brighton yesterday afternoon, musing gently - but not much - about what might happen when I met my first real life guru that evening in a posh address in Bayswater, I didn't realise that my life was about to change.

I try, as much as a journo can in a cynical old world, to enlighten. I write about the simple things of life, food from the land, parenting, green tips, and all, I hope, in a jolly kind of style that might just inspire people to think twice about the choices they make. That both my kids are vegetarian at the moment may prove just how rubbish I am at this, but hey, they love chocolate, don't they? (see latest entry for Eating Sussex.)

And I've been in the company of enlightened folk before; I've even written books about them - go on, try telling me that Jamie Oliver is not a blessed communicator - but last night, a tiny group of us sat in front of a man who knows nothing and everything, and I was floored. Ananadagiri, 32, spreader of something called Deeksha for the last 18 years (of which I know nothing and am not even going to Google) was telling us that all we need is love. Oneness, connection from small child to its parents, lover to lover, workers to means of production, human to universe, if experienced by a mere 70-90,000 people, he told us, could save the world.

Ok, now I know that that seems mad on a frosty February morning back in Sussex, but not because it's wrong. Everyone wants to feel connected to each other. That primal rip from the source/mother is profoundly traumatic and most of us never recover. Fear dominates us for the rest of our lives, keeping us from ever feeling that connection again in case... in case what? In case it's taken away again? I imagine a world in which we genuinely care for each other, where life means something, and suddenly a vaseline lens appears to have veiled my view. But it didn't stop me feeling something quite lovely last night. Utopia? Perhaps.

Anyway, who says that energy can't raise the vibrations of the planet, affect global warming, crime rates and interpersonal relations? It's a story for another time, but I've experienced the energy of a connected mass of people (hasn't anyone who's been to a football match, rave or wedding?)and I'm convinced. But even though society is changing and beginning to think again about the way we live, the oil age is not yet done, and the Culture of the Self is just too entrenched right now to find itself in the presence of a Deeksha-giver.

John Peterson, one of only 200 futurists in the world, was also there last night. His job is to advise big business and governments about the various disasters whose convergence by 2030 will be apocalyptic (global warming will kill vast numbers, artificial intelligence will be way smarter than any human, and we shall be mere servants in its mission, oil will be no more, fundamentally reframing our entire existence - you know the kind of thing). But, he also works with what he calls "wild cards", and having been Deekshad, he is a believer in the power of energy following thought.

One wild card, he says, could be the kind of spiritual uplift that Deeksha people can bestow by the placing of their hands on our heads in what looks like a blessing, but feels more like cranial osteoapthy. I'm convinced my lobes were moved. It's a lot of people to bless, but maybe, just maybe, it could be done.

Chatting to my fellow blessed ones afterwards - people who run the media, influence government and radicalise the communication of new ideas (no, not telling..) - I felt like I was back in Essaouira circa 1990, marvelling at the lightness of my hands after a particularly strong rollup. Something happened in that blessing and I'm not sure what.

I'm up for having my consciousness played with, but I've always stopped short in the past of putting it into my work. In the cab back to Victoria, I asked the blissed out man from The Guardian if he would write about it. "You're joking", he said. "I'm not that brave".

The question is, am I?

The Capacity for Delight

2008-01-10T04:59:00.000-08:00

Embarking (again) on the excellent Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, a book which steers the blocked creative through 12 weeks of rediscovery, has reminded me that all those Glums who came my way last year, all those people who squashed my enthusiasm and took away the joy from my great moments, are my gift for 2008. Spotting them as blocked creatives, furious at my apparent free wheeling, has not only sparked a concise note to self to cycle a different route but made me step up a gear. And what do you know? Doesn't the landscape suddenly open up and offer a whole new view?

I know I'm not alone; The Glums are energy vampires who tend to drag on most people's energy until the moment when we realise that it takes two to tug. In your limp towards that moment, let me offer you one of Cameron's golden nuggets: "The quality of life" she tells us "is in proportion to the capacity for delight".

Getting out more

2007-12-21T09:13:00.001-08:00

I've sat at my desk since September 18th writing about climate change, peak oil, food education, food policy, food... and when did I last taste, smell, salivate over what I was writing? It's all very well trying to save the planet, but when did I last write about chocolate?

Well, today I went shopping. My youngest and I scooped up our presents in a record 25 minutes and then cruised the North Laine with all the time that comes from the first day of the holidays. Which means that when we were offered some chocolate and a story, I didn't gasp at the outlandish idea of enjoying myself in Infinty Foods, I simply accepted.

Home-made in Hove, flavoured with cardamon, chili and cocount or just good old milk, it was delicious. "You can check out my blog" said Choco Holly and we were off, blog-chatting, and before I knew it, I had the subject for my next article for Eat Sussex. I knew I had to get out more.

Christmas is Coming

2007-12-20T05:46:00.000-08:00

September 18th? Is that when I last wrote? That can't be true. I've certainly thought about writing my blog most days between 18 September and now, but, well I've been busy. I've written half a book, umpteen articles, campaigns and bids, research documents and speeches since September 18th but blogging? Such a treat, such an act of unadulterated hedonism. The idea of writing for... what? I can barely write the word.. pleasure? It's just so 1997.

It's not that I'm unaware of the potential of the blog; I ghost blog, I've told my students to write a blog, damn it - I even gave a friend a copy of the Artist's Way for her birthday which, with its opening exercise of writing every day, I'm convinced began the blog culture in the first place.

I've done deals with friends who have begun to blog that I would blog them and they would blog me. I've told them about feeling like being Bloggy-no-mates when no-one comments, and of being secretly watched as the number of anonymous visits inches up, but can I spare the time to go blog visiting? It's a spooky, lonely world in here.

Write about what you know (part 5)

2007-09-18T07:28:00.000-07:00

It's two weeks since we were coming home from a week in Marrakech, bodies bronzed and brains shimmering with ideas for articles and projects. The people we met, the places we saw, the air we breathed (both foul and crystal clear according to the mode of transport - spluttering old Merc taxi or mountainside mule) were just the inspiration I needed after a summer of teaching. (Did you know that 'inspiro' is Latin for 'I breathe in'?).

Two weeks on and my mind is crammed full and I can do almost nothing with any of it.

How does that work? Surely digging for oil is the best way of finding it (if it hadn't run out) rather than sitting around chatting about it. But with writing, it doesn't seem to work that way - which is why our writers' retreats will be more of a house party than a Jungian excavation.

If I were to turn off my PC, shut the office up and walk around my neighbourhood, I bet the chat I'd have over a bottle of wine (yes it's 3.30pm. And?) would produce more than I could achieve on a keyboard today.

Rule #37 in the Gilly Smith Writer's Handbook: When the words don't come easy, take it easy. Or something like that...

How to Sell a Book

2007-09-12T02:12:00.000-07:00

Did I mention that I've got a book coming out on Friday? Maybe not, because I thought the publication date was the 30th. But hey, it was orignally supposed to be out in May...

So, next week, I shall be doing the rounds of radio, TV, newspapers as I've done pretty much every year for the last 13 or so with launch of a new book. Then there's the bookshops, both to check that the book has been ordered in the first place and then to organise a signing.

What do you mean you thought I meant being on the radio, Tv and in the newspapers? This is 2007! Publishers only sign big names and people with contacts. Without your own press list, you're not likely to get past the first PA's slush pile.

Relax; there's more to being a writer than networking your way around Groucho's on a sleazy Tuesday night. Think like an entrepreneur; you want your book to do as well as it possibly can? So sell it. Yes of course the publishers should sell it for you. They should also send it to all the newspapers, magazines, radio and TV outlets and they probably will. But they might not quite get around to chasing it all up. They've got zillions of other books to sell after all. So ring. Check with your local Borders, WH Smith's or whatever your biggest national bookstore is and simply ask if they've got it. If they haven't, tell them why they should have it. The big chains order centrally, but if you get enough of your friends to ring and ask about it, they'll get the message through the local store soon enough.

Certainly ring your local independents. And while you're there, ask about a signing. Most local shops love an event. Some will even provide the wine and nibbles if you can provide the punters. A party in a bookshop is a great gate-crashing opportunity, and bookshop owners love nothing more than a browser who wants to join in over a glass of wine. He'll have ordered in enough copies to sell to your crowd, and will encourage as many others to join the party. And remember, once signed, those books can't be returned either.

So next week, we'll be travelling across the country to the towns where my co-author's baby products sell like hotcakes, and we'll tell the local papers and radio that she'll be in town signing books. Shouldn't this be the role of the publisher's press officer? Of course it is, but we consider this more of a, shall we say, collaborative process. Wish us luck!

500 words a day keeps the block at bay

2007-09-10T02:09:00.001-07:00

One of the things that we shall teach on our retreats, and which I am only now promising myself, is the discipline of writing every day. Splurging your dream-state onto a messy bedside diary is the best of course, a kind of Dumbledore's 'Pensieve' in which he stores all his extraneous thoughts. But only for one short period in my life was I able to set the alarm early enough, ignore the dog's, the cats' and the husband's morning cuddle needs and write for 10 minutes. Ok, 5. Within a week, the guilt and time stress of a mother on a school day morning trying to do something for herself (godammit) had snatched away any possible pleasure, and my creative discipline had to find a new whip.

Right now, it's 10.16am and although the kids are at school, husband at work, dogs walked, horses in paddock, cats cuddled, hamster cage back in one piece, rabbit cage moved to new grass, I'm stricken with guilt as I try to put my daily words down. The toll of the email reminds me every few seconds that there's work to be done before I go into town to help reshape my eldest daughter's school food policy (you never know where these voluntary opportunities will lead; go out, meet interesting people, pursue your interests and then write about it all says the writers' bible forming on my Writers' Retreat business plan...)

Of course I could turn the volume on my PC down, refuse to help with the school, put off my work and simply write all day. 500 words? Do they even have to be 500 good words? Not according to the experts. It's the habit of putting one foot in front of the other that most writers need to learn if we're to avoid the block which stops most of us doing what we want to do for a living. 500 ok words today means 500 better words tomorrow. By Christmas, so the theory goes, my words will be zinging off the page.

Back to work, says my muse at 10.30am. You've got a mortgage to pay. So what's wrong with 368 words? Who's writing this bloody writer's bible anway?

Writers' Retreats

2007-09-07T05:48:00.000-07:00

My head is buzzing with the idea of our writers' retreat(s). We shall take our charges to write about food in Tuscan villas, music in the desert around Fez and travel in the olive groves in Marrakech. Our firepits and parties will become legendary and inspiring to writers just dipping their pens for the first time and old hacks finding our welcome enough to remind them why they began to write in the first place. Friends will be made, marriages mended, careers carved and saved.

Jed (http://jedski1.blogspot.com)will regale our students with tales from the front page of Newspaperland and I will show them how one litle germ of an idea can become an industry. There will be kids on some and none on others. We'll organise slow travel packs and find the best places to stay along the way, and, when the green planes are invented (soon, soon), we'll find the most heavenly places and people on all sides of the world.

And did I mention the fact that people have found their true loves at our infamous weekend house parties? Slow down, slow down; we'll be ready for business soon...

What I Did On My Holidays

2007-09-05T09:37:00.000-07:00

So there we were, trying out the tent for our first ever family camping holiday on the same strip of Welsh sand as I used to sift between my toes as a child, when a job comes in from an inflight magazine. Damn. I had vowed that I would fly no more,leaving carbon footprinting for the much more childish who just won't take responsibility for their role in climate chaos. But with the prospect of free flights to Marrakech and another week of rain - at least - on the Gower Peninsula, it only took a couple of nights of tossing and turning before I gave in.

I tried to offset before we even left home. My pitch for a "green column" in the inflight magazine went down well initially. "As long as it's not worthy", the editor warned. So I wrote about flying less, choosing locally owned accomodation, eating small but real, keeping the cash circulating - you know the stuff - and all in a jaunty, flyaway style. This, I was sternly told, might remind the reader that the very act of sitting on that plane while browsing through the magazine before take off, had already committed him or her to planting a boot sized carbon footprint on a precious, collapsing planet. "No", said the Ed. "No".

Hmmm. Ok, I would still write about slow travel, but for another paper. The thing about freelancing is that the minute you open the door, the world is your palette. I didn't have to limit myself to the inflight mag flying me there. Salving my sweating conscience, I tried to sleep. And couldn't. I deserved the neck ache.

But Marrakech is a lascivious, naughty town, and it quickly invites you to indulge in its spicy offerings. I can't believe how quickly I was able to put the flight behind me and head to the hammam to steam off any remaining guilt before heading straight for the pool in a country so desperate for water. Massage Madame?

Even the utterly kosher Kasbah du Toubkhal, with its co-ownership between British entrepreneur and local chief and funding of a school for Berber girls with Western Trekkers' cash, couldn't quite give up old habits. One of the joys of the place is that it gives back. Even one of its tour operators, responsibletravel.com has arranged for water filters to be fitted in the kitchens to limit the number of plastic water bottles we tourists thoughtlessly plough through and which can't be recycled. But the Moroccan way is to serve, to welcome, and as we made our way up the mountain side in the dust and heat, mule carrying case and kids, we were met with not one but two chilled bottles of water. It really wasn't the moment to launch into an eco spiel.

Finally though, we found our spiritual home. It took a couple of Americans, Maryam Montague and her husband Chris, to dream up the first green guest house in Marrakech, and we left the kids at the pool to head out into the surrounding countryside to talk insulation and under floor heating. By the time it opens, a whole new building team will have been schooled in environmental housing, handy really as Marrakech is bursting at the seams with construction sites.

And what did we do as we left, congratulating each other on our squeaky clean eco creds? We organised a writers' retreat there next year. But wait; maybe we could start the course on the train from Waterloo, honing our travel writing on the boat across from Spain to Africa and graduating under the stars by the light of a Moroccan firepit. You see - you open the door and the world is your inspiration...

On really being a writer

2007-09-04T00:22:00.000-07:00

I've let you down. I promised you the highs and lows of being a writer and I've hidden away all summer, nursing my creative bruises, shielding myself from that passive aggression known perhaps only to the freelance writer.

The non-response email, the reply to my pitches so heavily not in my inbox with its heartless menace, its threat to my entire way of life - and its mean disrespect for my defenceless muse - has ruined my summer. It has left me sweating through the August nights, tossing and turning between brilliant new ways of making money while staying at home (funny how I can't remember them in the cold light of day) and pondering my place in the family as the horror of an office job threatens my children's emotional stability. Do they need me? I never see them between the daylight hours of the holidays anyway as Sassy or Stephie or Sophie dump on my plans of strawberry picking with the far more alluring offer of sliding down the stairs in the new sleeping bags (again). The thing is that they might miss me. And for that, I have continued to email my thoughts to the cruel, quietly mocking computers in Medialand. And to receive a deafening silence.

"We've just run a piece on the inherited psycho-trauma of genetically fat legs, thanks"; "What a shame that your offer of a piece on the future of play for our parenting special came just as we sent our own hack off to that convention on toys of the future. Thanks for the tip off, by the way"; "We loved your idea for a green column in our inflight magazine but could you make sure that you don't mention carbon emissions please?" Any of these would be better than the weight of nothing. Instead, I'm offered the usual viagra, Rolexes and Gucci handbags but also the free trips for two to Paris on Eurostar and even a John Deere tractor, all of which which makes me even more paranoid considering the secret shopping list inside my head. Maybe it's those young pups in Medialand who are spending their lazy August days spewing out the best spam they can think of for a 44 year old mother of two trying to write for a living in a rural Sussex summer.

I look through the few auto-responses - that are as chilling as a Chardonnay on a warm summer night - as I pull myself into a cooler, more focussed shape for September. "I am basking by the pool of my Italian villa until September 4th. In the meantime do call my 20 something assistant who won't remember your name and won't pass your message on anyway"; "I am so highly paid as a section editor of a national newspaper that I have taken the entire summer off. Why don't you freelancers take on French students until I get back?" "It's the summer, for God's sake; what the hell are you doing at work, you saddo?" I write a quick pitch linking Jeremy Paxman's attack on the working life of the BBC and Anna Ford's fabulous dissing of the TV industry's lack of basic manners with the role of email etiquette in freelance work culture. I get the auto-responses, but hey, it's only 9.16am.

A Passion for Meat

2007-06-08T00:42:00.000-07:00

Write about what you know. That's what the experts tell fiction writers, but journos often have to write about what we don't know, taking our readers with us on a journey of discovery. It helps if we have an interest in the subject - preferably a passion. Mine is food.

But writing about green issues over the last year has put my interest in food onto a new plate, jostling for space with transport, housing and waste as climate change and peak oil threaten to change the way we use and view each one of them. So I've thrown myself right into the centre of the Transition Town project, often blindly leading the food and communications groups in Lewes into new, uncharted territories.

Since Wednesday night, I've been planning a party of enormous proportions in just one month to celebrate the mighty passion of local Lewes folk and their role in an energy descent plan for the county town. Installations showing off the arty potential of recycling, surgeries on housing and business, local bands with (almost) zero carbon footprints and a cornucopia of slow local food to feast on are all on the programme, a celebration of English summer at its creative best. It's ok; I've done huge parties before, but interestingly, I've stumbled at the first hurdle into a dark world I know little of.

A spit roast at the heart of a British feast is, I think, where old England meets New Britain, but not according to the vegetarians putting 7th July in their diary as the date Transition Town Lewes gets unplugged. The very idea of a pig slowly roasting as a centrepiece of a British fayre is an anathema to them, while being the very thing that, I think, would lure a stream of locals, Bisto-style, to the party.

Vegetarians believe that a greener world is a world with less meat. Methane produced by cows is supposed to emit more greenhouse gases than a community of brightly lit homes, and a diet of pulses is the responsible way to eat. But what about the poor old farming industry that has had more than its fair share of disasters over the last 10 years? Should we be promoting a meat-free society in the interest of becoming carbon neutral or promoting increased consumption of local meat in order to reduce shopping and food miles? And what on earth do we do at the party? What are we celebrating - organic Sussex pig farms or a meat-free future? Several veggies have referred to the "smell" of roast pig, but it's only a male pig's smell that is so intense, and I happen to know that the one we'll have is a girl. I asked the butcher.

The party is run by committee, so do I have to try to persuade them of the rights of meat eaters to sniff their pig? Or do I bend to the sensitivities of a minority group? Do I scream "thought police alert!" or acquiesce to a new British way? But hang on; my take on the new British way (and what I love most of the Jamie Oliver inspired drive towards meeting the meat) is the re-emergence of slow food, promotion of good animal husbandry, proper-job farming and an understanding of its place in the greater scheme of things. Without pig farming, we would have no pigs. Cows, lambs - they'd all be gone without a market of meat eaters.

In my book(s), it's not cruel to breed cows or pigs or lambs, to feed and treat them properly in organic free-range farms, and at 30 months or so according to their species, take them to the local abbatoir - perferably a mobile one - so that up until minutes before their end, they couldn't have wished for a better life. Am I being ovely romantic? Did I believe Hugh Fearnley-Whittinstall when he told me about the calf called Lovely who was adopted by his young son after being rejected by his mother, and raised lovingly for those 30 months before being taken to meet his maker? Yes, I did. That's what rural life is all about, and how it plays its part in our world. Do vegetarians believe that we should do away with meat farms altogether? If not, why not eat meat in the most salivatingly celebratory way I know - a spit roast?

Research

2007-05-24T03:08:00.000-07:00

A lot of my mates spend this "down time" sitting on the beach, in the park, even going on holiday, and put it down to research. But they tend to be the fiction writers for whom simply going out of the front door can inspire a new idea for a story. So, although humble non-fiction write I may be, I'm training myself to get out more, to leave Google alone and search for new ideas for an article or book over a cup of coffee.

I try to justify it to myself; getting out of the house is tricky enough with my work ethic, but making a plan to meet someone who knows more than I do will almost always lead to earning enough out of the conversation to cover the petrol, car parking and latte bill. A writer's job is to tell the world what people are up to, so indulging your passion, meeting the people who spend their lives immersed in your subject doesn't have to be an act of pure hedonism on a Wednesday morning.

This week's coffee was with someone who has spent the last ten years doing what I want to do in food and who, in the space of an hour, swapped enough information and contacts to help me pitch for a report (with funding), an article - or even series of - and a mass of ideas for the book currently out with my agent. Let's hope that the breath of fresh media air is something that can help her in return.

Report proposal written, all I have to do now is wait for feedback, pitch for funding (a research job in itself) and then wait some more. Or I could see who else might be up for a coffee.

Pitching for a new book

2007-05-22T07:30:00.000-07:00

This is the time I hate most. The waiting game. One book in with the editor, having its i's dotted and its quotes cross checked ready for delivery to the book shelves and the media scrutiny in September, and the other currently in the post from agent to publishers.

It should be the best time; the hard stuff is over, the sun is shining. I could even go and ride one of the horses if my ankle didn't still ache from falling off the back deck last month with an armful of washing. My protestant work ethic eats away at me, demanding that I create more opportunities to pay the mortgage (we've just bought a house with a frighteningly large one), and so I go to meet people in cafes to talk about ideas and all the while wish I could find some teensy bit of hedonism to be able to chuck it all in, let the mobile take the calls and play tennis. Or take the dog for a walk. Instead I sit here, computer speakers turned up for the toll of the email alert, and check the American spam as it begins to roll into my hot and stuffy afternoon.

The kids will be home soon. That'll distract me. That's a worthwhile thing to do. It doesn't pay the mortgage, but it's useful. Time ticks. Email tolls. Energy festers.

On Being a Writer

2007-05-18T04:54:00.000-07:00

I'm a writer. I spend my days writing and, just about often enough to get the mortgage paid, I earn money from it. We're a rare breed, those of us who do it for a living, and I think that this is a fairly rare blog in telling it how it is. If you want to be a writer, or if you're a writer doing what you do and want to blog about it, this is your space.

The image of a writer is of a blissful lifestyle, and, if you don't need to earn enormous amounts of money, be famous or inflate a flabby ego, it is. I don't sit in a shed at the bottom of the garden, although I do look over a beautiful meadow in the heart of Sussex, nor do I sit here and dream up stories that fly off the shelves all over the world. I write non-fiction; biographies and articles about food, people who do amazing things with food, and people who change the world - including children. And I love it.

www.gillysmith.com will tell you more, but this blog is about what it's like to be a writer, the ups and downs, the challenges and how I meet them, and what it feels like when I don't. A writer's life can be as exciting as it is lonely, as self disciplined as it is in the lap of the gods and an endlessly creative, dull as ditch water, high as a kite, cliche ridden whirlpool. It's the best place in the world (a meadow in Sussex) and the darkest place in the Universe (my head after a rejection).

For those of you who want to be a writer, being a successful one is largely about making the right kind of contacts or being in the right place at the right time. You'll need to be able to write, and that falls into two camps - and only two. You either can, or you can't. Forget the courses - if you're working in non-fiction at least; it's either in you or it isn't. It'll be the thing that burns away at you while you're sitting in the wrong job, or the only way you can express yourself. Sit in front of a blank screen and see what happens. I bet that within two minutes, you'll have the answer.

But being a writer is a different story altogether. For a start, can you sell yourself as well as you write? Chances are that you won't have a clue. I know writers, mainly in fiction, whose confidence is staggering, and they really can. But for most of us, learning how to pick up the phone to an editor we've never met to pitch an idea for an article is a challenge that would make most Buddhists tremble. Tripping through the etiquette of email submissions, sending your best ideas into the ether and into a newspaper culture which is based on sticky mud, can be soul destroying, especially when there's no-one to moan with by the photocopier. But there are tricks to getting through all these, and I hope this blog will show how writing can be the best job in the world and a great life lesson.