The magazine Booklaunch has spurred me on to record us reading, in turn, an extract from our memoir, The Garden of The Grandfather, Life in Greece in the 1960s. I’ve also recorded an extract from my recent novel, Greek Gold. Fun to do with Mark of Styles Recording Studio, Exeter. See what you think.
Greece
Do cobblers sell shoes?
The Garden of The Grandfather, Life in Greece in the 1960s is now available, ahead of the local launch in September. Click on the book’s title on the menu, or this link
http://susanbarrettwriter.com/pencross-books
Some people are natrurally good at business, making sales, engaging in public relations and publicity. Others are not so good. Generally speaking, artists and writers loathe the business of selling their work.
At least, with the internet, I needn’t stand behind a stall shouting Book! Book! Come and buy lovely book!
Proof checking fever
It’s almost like an illness, the state you can get into checking proofs. Is there anyone out there who doesn’t get feverishly anxious about the commas that have been missed or over-added, the mistypes and mis-spellings? Yesterday I fell into a dither over the inclusion or omission of an e in Acknowledgements. There’s a town nearby which I’ve learnt to spell Bridgwater without an e although I always want to spell it Bridgewater, like the surname of a childhood friend. In our latest book together, I had Acknowledgments without an e until this was queried. This led to panicked googling and more questions and indecision: whether to be old-fashioned or up-to-the-minute, Anglicised or Americanised, and — confusion growing by the minute — which spelling belonged to which option.
In the end, the Acknowledgements on the last page of ‘The Garden of the Grandfather, Life in Greece in the 1960s” has an e, and the whole thing, warts and all, is in the hands of the printers. Any errors still remaining are necessary oblations to the gods in acknowledgment or acknowledgEment that there is no perfection this side of paradise.
How do writers maintain morale?
A good level of morale is essential, I find, for writing. It’s like petrol in an engine. It fuels the hope, if not belief, that what I write will be read by more people than just my husband (he has to) and a few friends (depending on their good will). When morale drops, I sink into a “what’s the point?” attitude. Then I have to re-fuel with memories of previous successes.
A car we’d bought secondhand in Stuttgart in 1962 had no fuel gauge. When the tank was empty, you could flick a switch on the floor of the car to get petrol to flow from a reserve tank. That would, if you were lucky, get you to the next garage.
In my writing life, I’ve frequently had recourse to my reserve supply of morale. This morning I’m hovering near that floorboard switch. Will our second book on Greece ever see light of day? Will I get a positive reply from one of the many agents and publishers I’m approaching? Fifty years after my career began, I am back where I started – without an agent.
If I link this post to LinkedIn, will it be read by a literary agent? There must be one or two out there who would like to be involved with “Life in Greece in the 1960s”.
A new writing experiment
Aged 18, I decided that the first step on the way to becoming a writer was to learn how to type. So I did a secretarial course at Plymouth Technical College. We sat in rows in front of the epitome of a perfect secretary (grey-haired, retired and precise) and clacked away on tall and ancient typewriters. Each machine resembled the auditorium of a theatre in miniature: 1234567890-+~ in the Upper Circle, down the rows to \zxcvbnm,./ in the front row of the stalls. Clickety clack clack, at increasing speeds over the months, punctuated with the satisfying ding! at the end of lines, signalling the need to push the lever on the left to make the paper roll up a notch on the cylinder. Who remembers this?
Typing was easier to learn than shorthand. But the puzzles of shorthand held one compensation. There were wonderful letters in the book of exercises: polite but pained requests for attention, addressed to clearly recalcitrant Dear Sirs, referring to orders not fulfilled. The writers awaited the dear sirs’ earliest attention. I found that, even when I couldn’t read my squiggles, I was able to compose a letter from memory. This served me well when I was taking dictation from one of the editors of Thames and Hudson. “Did I really say that?” he would sometimes ask, with a quizzical eyebrow raised.
Unlike shorthand which I’ve never since used, the ability to type fast without looking at the keyboard has stood me in good stead. Even if I don’t need to glance at it, I find a keyboard is still vital for getting words from the brain onto paper via a screen. I cannot abide the virtual variety on smartphones and tablets. I watch with amazed admiration people who can hold a phone and pump out messages, using their thumbs like manic grasshoppers.
Although I’m not at home with phones, I’ve kept up with the developments in typing. In the mid 1980s I invested in something called a Screenwriter, which was a Rolls Royce of a typewriter which had basic word-processing capability built in. I found it useful for writing the text of the book Peter and I did together about the landscapes, flora and fauna of Greece.
Then came the Amstrad. In my memory it sits on my desk in our house in Papingo, north western Greece, looking like a squat, extra-terrestrial creature, blinking green messages from a screen the colour of butterscotch. During the 1990s, my writing tools became more sophisticated as computers developed. I’ve written on a series of desktop computers, as well as laptops taken to New Zealand and France.
My present desktop I’ve had for many years. Its box – tall and black – hums beside me, holding a labyrinthine memory of all my wild goose-chases. It’s recorded everything I’ve written since the 21st century began. I rarely bother to back things up. I print out any work I would hate to lose. Now I’m experimenting with a new way of writing in parallel with the old way. Each time I complete a section I print it out. I also copy and paste that section onto a page on my website. The text of my present book – The Garden of The Grandfather – is mounting up on a Page of that name on my site. As yet, I’m not sure how this will work out.
I can see the dangers. It is a first draft, so perhaps it shouldn’t be shared publicly like this. (But who’s going to read it? Just a few special friends. I don’t expect my website to be found and followed by many). Another risk is that I can never run my eye over anything I’ve written without wanting to make it better. That means that my website copy may not be exactly the same as the one on my computer or the one I’ve printed out. All this could lead to an unholy mess. But never mind – all can be corrected when I’ve arrived at the end of this piece of writing. Whether it will ever be traditionally published is a question with a large question mark. I’ve been writing too long to be really bothered about that. What I have in mind as an end product is something interactive – something that can be played, read, listened to, looked at. A new kind of book. That is my new experiment.
A creative hot-spot
The Garden of The Grandfather
I’ve never delved deeply into ley lines. Today I’m wondering how people with creative energy might kick off extra creativity in themselves and others at particular points in the compass; that is, over and above the usual energy that’s generated between creative people when they meet. This thought comes from a recent coming-together of three people – Yiannis Angelopoulos, Peter and myself – in Lourdata, Cefallonia. The conjunction of the three of us on one particular spot set something exciting in train. Here’s the triangulation. Peter found something he wanted to sketch. Yiannis video’d Peter sketching. I was hooked by the sign on the gate of the garden Peter was sketching.
The sign gave me the title for the book I’m working on: The Garden of the Grandfather. This will be a picture of Greece in the 1960s, a narrative of our life there illustrated by black and white photographs. Conversations with Yiannis have expanded our ideas to include colour – Peter’s work in oils, ink, and watercolour. Yiannis’ video is now on youtube. Something good to share publicly must surely come out of this triangle of ideas.
p.s. I have now added a page on the site for the first 10,000 words of the book.
http://www.youtube.comwatchtime_continue=2&v=awD0DGJEAcs
Brainwaves in the sea
The Garden of The Grandfather
While gently floating in the Ionian sea – or was it in the midst of a nighttime dream – the title of our present Greek book came to me.
The Garden of The Grandfather
These words – Ο κυπος του παπου – are written on a sun-bleached sign hanging from a padlocked gate behind the beach in Lourdas Bay. Beyond lies the garden, a fenced-in enclosure where an old man grows potatoes, tomatoes and green peppers. At the far end there’s a small, white-painted shelter on stilts with a magenta-coloured bougainvillea framing its roof against the backdrop of Cefallonia’s Mount Enos. Peter sketched the scene and I began to write in my head the introduction to our book of Greek life as it was in the 1960s.
This morning, at ten o’clock on July 11th 2017, I am at my computer in Devon. But in my head I am overlooking the bay of Kamares, Sifnos, in 1963. I am summoning up memories of the summer when I wrote my first attempt at a novel and Peter painted large canvases in oils built up with sand from the beach. These were exhibited at the Drian Galleries, London. (I want to track down the catalogues of his four exhibitions at the Drian. Can anyone help?)
The workings of the brain and the memory are in a world of their own, very hard to grasp. I plan to re-read “The Human Brain, a guided tour” by Susan Greenfield. I used my brain in an attempt to understand what she wrote. My memory of the details of her book is hazy. Yet I know I took in her expositions and they inform my views. This brings me to consider the difference in Peter’s memories and mine of the same events. I remember, if not the exact details, then the general drift: the atmosphere of a scene or the personality of a person. The way I remember is, I think, more typical of a female, but it’s also a writer’s way. Peter’s memory works in a masculine, fact-focused way. Being an artist, his memories are also visual. These differences work well together as we remember our life in Greece in words and pictures. The eventual book, I hope, will evoke that delicious, sad-happy feeling of nostalgia, appealing to lovers of Greece of any age: the past still visible in the present.
Now back to ‘The Garden of the Grandfather’, not the actual one in Cefallonia sketched by Peter this summer but to our work-in-progress. Back to Sifnos and lighting oil lamps at dusk in 1963 …
The lone monk of Toso Nero, Sifnos, 1963
We’ve been looking through the photographs Peter took in the early 60s when we were living in Greece. They record a way of life that we witnessed which has long since disappeared. We are thinking of making a record in words and pictures of those times.
