Ellen Galford and The Fires of Bride

book cover with Celtic knotwork

For writing class we had to write about a work of a writer we like.  I  chose Ellen Galford’s The Fires of Bride for its no-nonsense style, which evokes both a down to earth pragmatism, and an as given magical realism, whether she is writing about kippers or ghosts. Galford (1947 - )writes with a sensory physicality in the present tense: to describe recent remote rural Scotland, an ancient nunnery, pagan or Viking times, with an immediacy that transports you there. Her approach is to use small practical details to create a sense of place, time, and character. She is very good at writing from a range of characters point of view in terms of their language and attitudes. Whether that be a stroppy sculptor Maria, playful blind weaver Isa, or a career driven archaeologist. Something I need to work at – getting inside different characters heads and voices. Ellen Galford's approach makes a range of cultures accessible, fun, and funny, so that you want to go there.

One of the characters Mhairi, is a nun in a scriptorium some centuries ago, learning the illustrated arts of writing as a pictorial calligrapher. To me it is a metaphor about writing generally. In part it says ‘there are 17 different shades of blue’ and then she goes on to describe some of them from calligrapher Mhairi’s point of view. This challenges me to think how I could describe each one, and how to create mood by precise creative distinctiveness, choosing each word carefully.

Galford’s narrative of Mhairi’s apprenticeship as a calligrapher under the tutelage of the stern Bloduedd who for a year only lets Mhairi trace letters others have formed, is a metaphor for me of writing as a hard task master. To begin with you may copy the forms of others, say in poetry using rhyming couplets and writing on topics dictated by teachers. As you gain confidence you may develop your own form, style, rhythm, and narrative. Writing, like all arts may require a period of apprenticeship, it continues to require discipline, dedication, creativity, patience.

In one section Mhairi collects flowers, berries and shells to make the colors for her illustrations, burns her hand on the acid of a red berry while preparing it, which leaves a scar. Hints at the power of writing to change you, not just mentally, emotionally, or spiritually, but also physically. It changes your muscles, how you hold your body, how you sit, how you read. 

As testament of the power of a book to change us, over twenty years ago the Scriptorium in which this scene is set became a kind of magical place referred to among other writers who had read the book. In honour of me going to writers school this year, a fellow writer from far away, had a sign made for my room and mailed it to me, it says: Scriptorium.

In the late 1980’s when we read Fires of Bride, a roommate made a beautiful painted coat based on one of the other main characters in the book – Catriona, a GP who paid her way through medical school by working as a fortune teller. Fires of Bride is full of such  wondrous contradictions which appeal to me. I still have this coat.

So intrigued was I by the remote Scottish Isles where this book was set, I once traveled there just to be amongst the standing stones, the people, the Gaelic, the heaving north sea, and the windswept landscape.  

I can aspire to writing words that could evoke: creative imaginative spaces; artwork; or journeys in others; and speak to the future. 

standing stone circle isle of lewis

   

PACIFIC CURLS

PACIFIC CURLS are fantastic! Wonderful musicians! They are Kim Halliday (Rotuman/NZ Scottish), Sarah Beattie (Scottish) and Ora Barlow (Te Whanau-a-Apanui/English). This trio has been together for 6 years, and play a seamless blend of Maori, Pasifik, Celtic music and instruments.

I saw/heard them in the summer and started a blog and then life ran away with me but here I am back in the blogosphere.

thumb piano

 So heres the thing, I grew up around pacific cultures and sounz, but have no claim to it culturally myself, am of Scottish ancestry, but was not raised in that culture, just in this bland english way.  Fiddle player Sarah hails from Aberdeenshire, as do some of my rellies, my great-grandma for instance.

This blend of music and cultures, YES! I never felt more complete, at home, so far from 'home'. Pacific beatz and harmonies with celtic fiddle. Who knew!?

Ora definitely leads, keeps it all together, the show moving along with her great song introductions, humour, audience participation, vocals, beat box and range of traditional instruments she plays from Nguru (nose flute) to the whirring spin of a Purerehua.

I loved all their songs, but can't get the final offering of their concert Kalimba Trance out of my head. Based around Kim Halliday's exquisite Kalimba (thumb piano) playing, which I heard like a ring of tiny bells being played in a mesmerizing circular rhythm (think didgeridoo circular breathing).  It made me want to get out my humble thumb piano (see photo) and play it after it sitting idle for years! Kim's exquisite thumb piano and ukele of a pink/blonde wood look like they may have been handcrafted just for her by the same detailed instrument maker. I once played mine for hours under a full moon on new years eve sitting at the top of a HUGE macrocarpa tree to an audience of equally large cockroaches. Yes I believe that is fizzy drink can decorations on my Trade Aid thumb piano, inventive use of recycling eh?

I was so enthused I ended up buying both their CD's, their 2008 Pacifi Celta, and their most recent Te Kore. 

You can hear some of their music online at their Pacific Curls sonicbids page where you can also keep a track of their touring dates. Go see them if they come to a place near you - you'll be glad you did!

CREATIVE WRITING 101 – writers born or formed?

In 1997 I wrote I wanted to perfect the art of writing humorous absurd tragedies about important things where nothing really happened! I think that is still a good aim, and I may be well on my way towards it.

I took a creative writing class that year, in response to my short story submitted for grading, the tutor exhorted me to publish, and wrote amongst other things that my writing had clarity and vividness, was powerful and moving, containing a dark intelligence. I am not immune to such flattery, but me and my creative collaborators of the time, T and, A, did have a lot of fun with it, spending some time debating if we should have an art competition amongst ourselves to see who could create the best image of what my dark intelligence might look like! In the end we didn't, but included above are two images of me drawn around that time by minimalist extraordinaire T, during a session in which we each drew portraits of each other in a set number of lines, in this case 5, and 7. Which illustrates what I might have looked like at the time my dark intelligence may have been in evidence! Yes I still have these things, in journals full of: writing, cards for exhibitions, tickets to movies and plays, photos, leaves, feathers, drawings - mine and others.

Before email, when living at a distance we perfected a way of sharing our writing via the telephone answering service for free. Each of us had voice mail with the same telephone company, which had only one access number for the whole country. We recorded our stories in a series of 3 minute messages on our own voice mail. Then T and A, would call up the system, enter my voice mail number and passcode and listen to the story of the day or week. I could do the same with them, erasing the messages as we went, and leaving messages in response to the stories for instant feedback.

A good 12 years earlier, I was 18, in my first year at university living on campus in the halls of residence, in small wooden room on the second floor, cluttered with posters on the wall, a purple plastic cup and saucer upside down on the ceiling impersonating a light fixture, it was the 1980's so there was some lime green and pink chiffon which were in vogue thanks to Cyndi Lauper. During a one week break from classes, I took all this down from the walls, and put up 7 of my photos of nature, one for each day of the week, along with literary quotes relating to the images under each photo. I had not quite exited christianity at this point so I believe the quotes were from the bible, the poetic parts, song of solomon, pslams, proverbs perhaps, lay me down in cool water etc.

I dragged the single bed in to the middle of the room on a diagonal, and put the desk and chair beside it, I put everything else away in the capacious built-in wooden wardrobe. I bought a hard covered journal with blank unlined crisp pages. Out the window I could hear performances of Shakespeare's A midsummers nights dream, being staged in the open-air by the university drama club. I am not a fan of Shakespeare, but it did make for a nice backdrop. For one week I wrote in to the book, the poems I had written since I was 15, from the loose leaf pages they were recorded on. Now that I would not return to my family's home, and it was safe to do so, where previously such poems had been hidden in a plastic bag in a box, on shelf, deep in the wardrobe. My mother concerned perhaps by my unexplained absence, upon driving up to visit one day looked nervously around my room, and asked if i had become a nun. No not disciple, disciplined. Which brings me to the present day, 27 years and 15 or so journals of writing later. Five of these journals are already deposited with an Archive, and the rest will be one day too, but like Janet Frame, no one gets to read them until I am long gone!

I have a high school English teacher to thank for my earliest literary encouragement. Mrs D, where are you? I had the pleasure of being in her class for two years, she really did love writing. I was one of few who actually enjoyed being left with creative writing assignments, on rainy days, when she had to leave the classroom. While my classmates gossiped, ate, threw things, I moved my desk to face the wall at the back of the class, far as I could get from the hub bub, and wrote. Whatever came into my mind, it was such a relief, creative expression, the release from strictly structured lessons. My work was always met by Mrs D with useful pointers, encouraging comments and humorous retorts to my sometimes satirical writing about the class.

She was amused by my audacity and gave me credit for originality at least on a set assignment in small groups to read part of a Shakespeare play, it may have been Macbeth. I rewrote the lines in the language, accent, slang of the present day I heard on television sitcoms. Each character in a different voice, Cockney, African American, Jewish, New York Italian, stereotyped renderings I know, and talked my group in to performing it thus, Shakespeare updated. We also had to study Aeschylus' Agamemnon, which was a bit to close to home and caused me to have a small nervous breakdown.

I wrote studious book reviews about the life of Ghandi and such like. It may have been Mrs D who was instrumental in having eight of my poems published (anonymously) in the school magazine in my final year. I will always be grateful for her literary nurturing, and recognition of possibilities, that writing had it's own value.

JANET FRAME - crazy? autistic? brilliant!

I have started keeping a dream journal. In the middle of an intriguing dream I was having about experimenting with making small sculpted letters of the alphabet out of leaves, plants, paint, yellow, red, green etc. Which spelled LGBTQI, and were to be held up by people scattered throughout the seats of an outdoor stadium. My mate from Brians an unusual name for a girl blog appears in my dream rather randomly and says "Don't you think if there is a Janet Frame award it should go to a crazy person".

What!? Which has got me thinking about the wonderful Janet Frame (28 August 1924 - 29 January 2004). One of Aotearoa/New Zealand's most famous authors. In her lifetime she published a book of poetry, a children's book, eleven novels, four short story collections, and three volumes of autobiography, which have been translated into many languages. Since her death, a novel, a book of poetry, and a collection of short stories have been published.

Janet Frame, as a child suffered the loss of two of her sisters by drowning ten years apart, grew up in poverty, infused in storytelling, spent 12 years in and out of psychiatric hospitals, narrowly avoided a frontal lobotomy in 1951, when the doctor had a change of mind after her first book of short stories, The lagoon and other stories won a literary award.

I think to myself well there probably is a Janet Frame Award, Google will provide the answer! Yep, since 2005 The Janet Frame Literary Trust Award, has been granted to 4 authors to write fiction or poetry, and to 2 Authors Advocacy Organizations. The 2008 recipient, poet Rhian Gallagher (1961- ) who moved to London in 1987, returned to Aotearoa in 2003, and as it turns out happens to be a lesbian.

After completing her first novel in 1956, Owls do cry, Janet Frame moved to London, not returning to Aotearoa for 7 years. When she was in the looney bin in Aotearoa in the 1940's her writing plans and aspirations were noted as symptoms of her mental illness, perhaps 'delusions of grandeur'. In her novel Towards another summer, written in 1963 and published posthumously in 2007, the main character Grace Cleave, expatriate novelist living in London, is holidaying in the north of England. Her host asks why she has abandoned her homeland: 'Don't you ever want to go back?''I was a certified lunatic in New Zealand. Go back? I was advised to sell hats for my salvation.'

Two previously unpublished stories she wrote were published in the New Yorker in 2008. Janet Frame did submit them for publication in 1954 to Charles Brasch of Landfall magazine, but he returned them to her with a note saying the stories were 'too painful to publish', which begs the question, too painful for who? A night at the Opera, portrays the screening of a movie in the looney bin and 'Gorse is not people reflects Frame’s determination to view reality from alternative perspectives, in this case that of a dwarf celebrating her 21st birthday. The story also makes disturbing use of Frame’s still fresh memories of life as a resident at Seacliff mental hospital.' (The Arts Fuse 2008)

Janet Frame published 3 volumes of autobiography, To The Is-Land (1982) about her childhood, An Angel at My Table (1984) about her years as a student and in a psychiatric hospital, The Envoy from Mirror City (1985)about her travels and life as a writer. All three came out as a collected Autobiography in 1989, and were made in to a dramatic film An Angel at My Table in 1990 by Jane Campion.

Like many people I read her autobiographical books in 1985. They were gripping, written in a way like no other, and to me chilling. Her writing was so important to so many of us, including close friends who had been incarcerated in psychiatric institutions, often as a result of being lesbian, or the effects of family abuse. Through her writing we knew you could survive: grinding poverty, unbearable loss and grief, torturous mistreatment, soul destroying ignorance, and misunderstanding. That somehow the will, the creative impulse does prevail. That not compromising your own creative vision was possible. That making your own way, on your own terms, was a viable option. Her books left a lasting impression on me, of what my country did to those considered a little different, it's writers and artists. For many years I kept my writing to myself, difference is defined by others and so that I could not keep to myself. I followed the example of those who had gone before me in finding an antidote to the strictures of the society they find themselves in, and left the country (some 15 years later). Like painters Margaret Stoddart, Frances Hodgkins, writers Katherine Mansfield, Witi Ihimaera, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, musicians Kiri Te Kanawa, Gareth Farr. Some for a few years, some for good, to survive, to follow creative, employment or academic opportunities.

When Janet Frame died in 2004 I happened to be in Aotearoa on Waiheke Island. I bought the Listener with the 4 page tribute by C. K Stead. Janet Frame wrote in a truly unique way, eschewing literary conventions to be true to her own inner monologue, and that of her characters. Said to possess a 'dangerous intelligence', her books won many literary awards, making her the subject of some professional jealousy. Despite her at time autobiographical writing, she guarded her privacy, wanting to lead an already life, far more interested in writing than succumbing to the cult of personality which surrounded her. I also bought at this time the more conventional weighty tome (nearly 600 pages) of a biography she had collaborated on with Michael King, Wrestling with the angel, (2000) with it's photos and dates and letters and references. We mourned the passing of a great soul. I returned home to my small collection of her books, the only collection I have of anyones work. I was fond of picking up old hardback copies of her work I came across in secondhand bookstores. Scented gardens for the blind, Faces in the water, The Edge of the alphabet....

Perhaps my friend appearing in my dream was to tell me, Janet's contemporary, close friend, and fellow poet, J.C. Sturm had just died (1927 - 2009). Jacquie Sturm whose poetry I also have thanks to my friend N (she of the write a poem a day discipline), who often sent me a book by a NZ woman poet for my birthday these past years in exile. J.C. Sturm was the wife of 'preeminent NZ poet' James K. Baxter, who I am not much of a fan of. This opinion did not improve when I discovered although she submitted poetry to a literary magazine he edited for several years he never published a single one! He went off to 'find himself' leaving her a solo parent. Had her collection of short stories The House of the Talking Cat : Stories been published when they were ready in 1966, instead of in 1983, they would have been the first collection by a Maori person, man or woman, instead this honor went to Witi Ihimaera with his novel Whanau in 1977. She was one of the first Maori women to get a university degree, in 1949.

Through the reach of the web I stumbled upon a debate raging since 2007 about whether Janet Frame was autistic. New Zealand doctor and rehabilitation researcher working in Australia, Sarah Abrahamson proposed that Janet Frame had high-functioning autism (HFA), in an article in the NZ Medical Journal October 12 2007. She based this on her reading of Janet Frame's writing, particularly the posthumously published novel, Towards another summer. Which portrays a weekend in which Grace Cleave, stays with a family she does not know well, and the painfulness of this and other social interactions for her, the divide between her inner life and outer world. There is the point of view that her artistic gift does not need to be pathologized with a diagnosis, or alternately that she can posthumously act as a positive role model for autism.

It has been suggested that her biographer Michael King and she herself did not find the autism label such a foreign idea. But as someone who fought for years to escape the the label of crazy and schizophrenia - she was later determined by doctors to not have schizophrenia, to have never had schizophrenia, but she was likely affected by post traumatic stress; she may have been reluctant to take on any label. She was leery of the 'mad-genius' mythology which surrounded her and her work. If the label of autism would have fit with her during her lifetime; or now that she has passed, we will never know.

David Cohen, journalist, father of an autistic son and author of a book about autism, A Perfect World, in an article in the NZ Listener, Autistic Licence seemed to be hedging his bets. Yet on his website about autism, humans.org.nz in a a discussion from 2007 he seems pretty convinced she was.

Pamela Gordon, niece of Janet Frame, appointed by Janet as her Literary Executor, and representative of The Trustees of the Janet Frame Literary Trust; and who has a daughter who is autistic, is adamant that Janet Frame was not autistic. This has resulted in much debate, some of it ill-willed, as evident by a January 5 2010 entry on Pamela's blog about Janet's work entitled Janet on the planet: Poison Pen letters. The entry has since been removed from the blog, but the title is visible if you Google search it.

What I was able to glean by a quick scan of the entry before it was removed, was that there are those affected by autism who are angry at the denial of Janet's possible autism. But also that Literary Executor, Pamela Gordon receives an inordinate amount of correspondence on this and other matters, personally attacking her for how she deals with her aunt's legacy. This is both to be expected given the attachment of so many to the mythology surrounding Janet Frame; as well as being completely unreasonable.

It reminds me that art historians and the media have brought us such startling revelations (not) in the past few years just by looking at the painting of Mona Lisa, that she is a) pregnant b)flushed from recent sexual activity, and most recently c) her lips reveal she was suffering from high cholesterol. A then partner of mine, upon viewing the painting of the Mona Lisa in person excitedly informed me some years ago, that I have the exact same hands as Mona Lisa. So I do know, what we see, can be, in the mind or eye of the beholder

Towards another summer, Janet Frame's novel published in 2007, based on a weekend spent with a journalist in England, and his wife, a fellow New Zealander. Widely considered to be about homesickness, Grace Cleave becomes a migratory bird. It is, but for a romanticized version of the country of origin she had left behind, as she left it and remembered it. She knew this, it is there in the damp woolly portrayal of her compatriots relative's room.

In 2008 I read from cover to cover her book of poetry published posthumously. The Goose Bath also titled Storms Will Tell: Selected Poems (2006) and then passed it on to my art collaborator of 20 years T, at a bus station, as is our wont.

Towards another summer rests on my bookshelf along with her other novels. For now Janet's biography Wrestling with the angel sleeps peacefully under my pillow.