Four years ago, I wrote a blog post for Writers & Artists on the subject of "permission" - a very important word to me, in writing and in life. I've just written a new post for W&A, a follow-up, talking about the new permissions I needed to move from short story writing into poetry, something that scared and daunted me! An excerpt:
This year sees the publication not just of my
third short story collection, but also my first poetry collection. POETRY. When
we last met, I was not a poet. Don’t tell anyone, but I didn't like poetry. I
didn't understand it, I liked my words to stretch from one margin to the other.
Line breaks? Why would anyone want to do that? How do you read them? What is a
line? Where are my sentences?
So, how did I get from that to complete adoration of the line break, an insatiable
appetite for reading poetry, and even to calling myself a poet?
Very
slowly. And with many shots of permission along the way.
Permission
to write poetry came differently from short story permission. I had always been
writing prose (I never called it “prose” until I started hanging out with
poets, for goodness’ sake!). I read stories as a child, so I knew roughly what
one should look like on the page. After a few years, though, I needed
permission to take myself seriously as a writer – and then the largest
permission injection to propel me to my next stage: taking risks in my writing,
experimenting...
It's been a very long time since I've been moved to post about an interview with a writer or poet, but this video interview (and reading) by poet Alice Oswald - whose new collection, Falling Awake, just won the Costa Prize for Poetry - is utterly wonderful and inspiring, I think, to those who write prose as well as poetry, especially her thoughts on rhythm and on length. Here are a few quotes I posted on Twitter:
As soon as you say that you do one thing, you end up wanting to do something else
A poem could be a..sonnet until the last minute when I just find it's too polite & suddenly I'll smash it
A short poem has to last as long as a long poem. That's what I love. It has to be infinite in the same way
If you haven't ever seen her read, the first 30 minutes are a joy, less of a reading than, as the interviewer says, some sort of invocation. And then there's a Q&A. I went out after watching this and have been thinking about what she said about her own poems and her writing - and rhythms. She says: "The stronger your rhythms, the more disturbing things you see...You can navigate around your own brain by means of rhythm". This speaks to me because I have tended to write my own poems aloud - they are both a bit song-like, to me, and also a completely physical experience. I always read my short stories aloud too, but getting them on the page happens first. Rhythm is always important to me, and I will be thinking for a while about what Oswald has said about rhythm and my brain - and perhaps rhythm and the reader/listener's brain!
I feel she has also has given me a shot of permission - something I will always need as a writer but especially as a quite new poet - in terms of the legitimacy of the short poem. I love short poems, but wondered (perhaps an echo of the battle I had to fight over flash fiction and its place in the world) that they seem unsubstantial. Yet look at this short poem I just read in the New Yorker, which is sublime, and would you want more? It's about allowing me - and perhaps you? - to say what I need to say in as many words as I feel I need to say it.
I also like what Oswald says about not wanting to be called a "nature poet", which she very very often is.
"I think it's important not to sit too comfortably in a category, and that's why I get annoyed when people call me a nature poet. I mean, it's so tempting to be a nature poet. Then you know what you are writing about, you know what you think, you just do it and roll it out. For me, it's important not to know what kind of a poet I am, and each time I write... could be a science fiction poem. It hasn't yet been, but it could be!"
This gives me another shot of permission on the road I have been travelling for a while now, of not labelling anything I am writing - poem, flash fiction, prose, story, non-fiction... I like her twist about how tempting it would be to feel comfortable under one label! But do we want to be comfortable? I don't think that's where the real work gets done. What do you think?
Just to let you know that you can hear a podcast of the permission-themed short story event I chaired with the wonderful Jon McGregor, Lucy Wood and Eliza Robertson - hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed the evening!
I'm getting excited now about this event I am chairing next Wed - here are the details! Any questions you'd like me to ask them - about permission in writing, in particular?
Short Story Evening with Jon McGregor, Eliza Robertson and Lucy Wood
chaired by Tania Hershman
Date: Wednesday 25th February Time: 6pm for 6.30pm. Ends 7.45pm Place: Bloomsbury Publishing, 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP.Click here to book
Tania Hershmandelves into the imaginations of three wonderful Bloomsbury short story writers,Jon McGregor,Eliza RobertsonandLucy Wood, asking them about the weird and fabulous worlds they create in their short stories - from underwater husbands and memories entangled with catfish to how to trap hummingbirds, relinquish drams gracefully, feed raccoons without getting bitten, and fenland creations of things buried and unearthed.
Jon, Eliza and Lucy will reflect on the risks they take in their stories and on what and who gives them permission to try new things. They’ll discuss how they write these clever, surreal and minimalist short stories that ask the reader to play a part in their creation, as well as their own personal taboo topics, why they write and what it unravels for them.
‘Each time I find a new short story I love, it cracks open a window and lets fresh air into my own writing’ Tania Hershman
‘McGregor is the contemporary master of lives lived in what the Irish call a small way, and the belief, which is literature’s, that we are all poetic’ Linda Grant, Financial Times
Jon McGregoris the author of the critically acclaimedThis Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, So Many Ways to BeginandEven the Dogs. He is the winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Betty Trask Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award, and has been twice longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He was runner-up for the BBC National Short Story Award in both 2010 and 2011, with 'If It Keeps on Raining' and 'Wires' respectively. He was born in Bermuda in 1976. He grew up in Norfolk and now lives in Nottingham.www.jonmcgregor.com@jon_mcgregor Eliza Robertson is the author ofWallflowers, her debut short story collection. She was born in Vancouver, Canada in 1987 and grew up on Vancouver Island. She studied creative writing and political science at the University of Victoria and then pursued her MA in prose fiction at the University of East Anglia. While there she received the Man Booker Scholarship and the Curtis Brown Prize for best writer. Robertson is now a highly celebrated short story writer; in 2013, she won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and was a finalist for the Journey and CBC Short Story prizes. She currently lives in Norwich and is working on completing her first novel. @ElizaRoberts0n
Lucy Wood is the author of a critically acclaimed collection of short stories based on Cornish folklore Diving Belles. She has been longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize and was a runner-up in the BBC National Short Story Award. She has also been awarded the Holyer an Gof Award and a Somerset Maugham Award. Lucy Wood has a Master’s degree in creative writing from Exeter University. Her debut novel,Weathering, is published this January 2015. She lives in Devon. Book tickets here >>>
I'm delighted to unveil Writing Short Stories: A Writers & Artists Companion, co-written and co-edited by Courttia Newland and me, and with 20 VERY FINE guest writers in the centre. It's all about writing and all about short stories, from so many angles and perspectives, and with no "shoulds" and no "rules", and perhaps a little ranting (by me) about the "shoulds" and the "rules" that tried to deny me permission in the past. Permission. Something to be given. Yup.
Anyway, to celebrate, I'm going to give away a copy and all you have to do is comment here (by Jan 1st) and tell us who or what gave YOU permission, in some way, in your life. Am happy to post anywhere in the world. Dang, I'm feeling generous!
The book is published by Bloomsbury, and on Feb 25th in London, I'll be interviewing three AMAZING Bloomsbury short story writers - Jon McGregor, Lucy Wood and Eliza Roberston - about that very subject, permission and risk, in their own writings, so do come along, share your stories with us. More information here.
I'm reading at Loose Muse on Wed Jan 14th, at the Poetry Cafe in London, would be lovely to see you there, too!
Don't forget to comment to be in with a chance of winning a book...
I am delighted to welcome Tom Vowler back to the blog today. Tom is another of my immensely talented writer mates, and he was here a few years ago when his first book, the short story collection The Method, was published (Salt), talking about writing & place. Tom's second book, What Lies Within, a novel, was recently published by Headline, an enormously intriguing and powerful book, a very moving meditation on family, trauma and pain, with a very interesting structure. Here is a little about Tom:
Tom Vowler’s debut short story collection, The Method, won the international Scott Prize in 2010 and the Edge Hill Readers’ Award in 2011. Now an associate lecturer at Plymouth University, his debut novel What Lies Within was published in April 2013. Tom is also Assistant Editor for the literary journal Short FICTION. In 2008 he graduated with an MA in Creative Writing and is now studying for a PhD, looking at landscape and trauma in fiction. More at www.tomvowler.co.uk
Here is the wonderful book trailer for What Lies Within:
I decided to chat to Tom about something I've been thinking about for a while: where do we writers get permission from in our writing? I blogged about this here. Tom gave us some insight into his writing and his novel in particular:
Tania: So, I'd like to carry on the discussion I was having on my blog about permissions - who or what has given or gives you permission in your writing, and especially to do what you've done in the novel, which has such an interesting structure? Other writers, teachers, other people's books/stories/poems, other art forms?
Tom: Hi Tania. Thank you for having me at your aesthetically gorgeous blog. Your question is a wonderfully refreshing one, worthy of pause and consideration. Focusing on my novel, the concept of permission is, as you’ve discussed below, related to a sense of risk, and in my case this resides particularly in the decision to narrate almost all the book from a female perspective. Firstly, there was the question of whether I could pull this off, capture fully the nuance of voice and behaviour across 300 pages. But also, as you’ve reminded me, I thought long and hard about the right (permission if you like) to do so. Of course as writers we frequently inhabit characters who are wildly disparate to ourselves; why should a switch in gender be any different? I suppose because I needed Anna (the main character of What Lies Within) to carry the heft of the entire book, its themes and motifs, the pace and narrative all had to emerge from her, including several aspects of life my own gender preclude me from. Fortunately I have several good female friends who were happy to share the vagaries of their lives, from seismic happenings such as childbirth to the more mundane aspects. And yet it was Anna’s inner world, understanding her reaction to the beautiful and terrifying things that happen to her that proved hardest.
As for permission, this was a question I had already resolved before the first draft. Most of my fiction emerges from a single event, often a piece of news that both appals and fascinates me. This becomes the book’s fulcrum, the driving force for its story and characters. And so without offering spoilers, once I’d found my subject matter (or it me), I had little choice. Hardly permission, but then I realised the fact I’d found great abhorrence with Anna’s terrible situation and its subsequent contrails, left me feeling I would tell her story with sympathy and respect. Likewise during the research for the novel, hearing the terrible things some women had to endure instilled in me a fierce desire to get it right, to respect not just my characters and readers, but these wonderfully brave women also.
As for permission to write in its wider context, my hand was forced a little by a long illness that saw me unable to do little else. I worked as a journalist, and although my love affair with books was late to blossom, I soon realised the dark art of storytelling was for me. Permission at that time was more closely aligned with inspiration, and I was desperate to mimic the impact certain fiction was having on me in my own work. So whereas richly lyrical prose, compelling characters and concept-driven stories were important to me, I quickly became interested in the tone and texture of the novel, one of the main reasons I set the book on the uplands of Dartmoor. In this sense the brooding, menacing landscape became a character itself, alive and capricious, the reader investing every much in the tors and valleys of the place as the people of the book. As you mention, the novel’s structure carries its own risk as well, but it too was driven by my research and the need to tell Anna’s story fully and with compassion. But then it’s one of the first things I tell my students – to take risks. Learn from what’s gone before, understand why it works, but do it differently. To borrow some words for a change: risk nothing, risk everything.
As for other writers who give me permission to take such risks, I think this occurs, for me anyway, on a subconscious level, or at least a level that sits just below the surface during composition. I love much of what Julian Barnes and Sebastian Faulks have done in this regard - especially the deployment of unreliable narrators in their recent work - but with such impressive oeuvres behind them, I imagine it feels less like risk-taking to them. Two books that have had an astonishing impact on me recently for their linguistic and emotive brilliance are Sarah Hall's short story collection The Beautiful Indifference and J.A. Baker's memoir The Peregrine, the latter hugely influential on the novel I'm currently writing. Permission here, I find, is bestowed on an emotional level by the feelings aroused in me when reading them. This is not restricted to books, though; my own sense of aesthetics comes as much from film (for example the work of Mexican director Iñárritu) as it does from the literary forms.
Thank you so much, Tom, I find all that you've talked about to be really fascinating additions to this ongoing discussion about permission and risk. And the "risks" you took most definitely paid off here! I highly recommend you all get your hands on both What Lies Within and The Method, both of which you can find more about on Tom's website. But wait! Tom has very kindly offered a free copy of What Lies Within to one of you, my lovely blog readers. So, if you'd like to win a copy, leave a comment and tell me and Tom what's given you permission - in any way at all - recently, and that way we can extend this discussion and Tom will pick someone out of the proverbial hat. Thank you for stopping by, Tom!
Following on from the previous post about permission & taking risks, two things have occurred in the past two days that I want to talk about in terms of where I get permission from. Now, I did stop for a moment and wonder about writing this, since it may just come off as boastful self-promotion, but it's an important part of my writing life and my career as an author, and that's what this blog is supposed to be all about, so I decided to do it.
What occurred were two absolutely amazing reviews of My Mother Was An Upright Piano: Fiction, published both published on Friday. Before I go into that, I want to first say that even now, after quite a few years of having short stories and other work published in literary magazines, after having two collections published, I still think it's quite miraculous that the result of the bizarre workings of my mind, the combination of words I've put on a page, in any way connects or speaks to anyone else, anyone outside of my mind. And, as I mentioned in the previous post, thanks to the permission gifted to me by other writers' work, I have been taking more risks in my own, and to me my stories have been getting odder and odder. (My mother is in the habit now, when I send her a new story, of saying "Darling, I really enjoyed it, even though I had no idea what was going on.") Even more surprising then that anyone "gets" what I think I may have been trying to do (which I don't always know, either).
So, you can imagine that the fact that these two reviewers did is incredibly moving to me. Here is Martin Macaulay writing for Sabotage Reviews, who shortlisted my book for their Saboteur awards short story collection category:
Hershman writes with a lyrical precision that slices apart what it is to
be human... My Mother was an Upright Piano is more than the sum of its parts.
The book is structured into seven groups of six and two groups of
seven, bonding this collection together as tightly as a chemical
compound. It’s a solid, unbreakable and inspiring collection. Hershman
creates worlds with depth and heart. She shows us lives soaked in loss;
some with glimpses of hope, others dystopian.
Her presentation of the tragedy and the
oddity of our human lives is the typed equivalent of a performance
artist at MOMA: strange, unfamiliar, captivating. ...The universe’s dark energy palpitates on Hershman’s pages;
she gives emptiness form. Characters struggle to communicate, to make
themselves known to others. Hopes for the world to be other than it is
are met with silence. Longing blankets the text. Sentences stop before
they reach their conclusion, words omitted by the author in sympathy
with the reticence of her fictional creations. The unsaid contains both
dagger and salve, and Hershman’s silences both break and heal the
heart.
It's hard to tell you how I feel just re-reading these two excerpts. It's like I've been heard, at a very deep level. It feels like a blessing, to be read so closely. And what's also wonderful is that they both feel that the book - whose stories were all written with no thought of being collected - works as a whole, somehow.
I had said to myself when the book came out that this time I wouldn't read reviews. Because whatever they say, they stick in your mind. Generally the less positive bits! But I couldn't help myself because I think, with these stories more than those in The White Road, I didn't always know myself what it was I was writing about, I had let go of that knowing, thanks to permission from others. And so I was curious to see what others think they are about.
I didn't think that these and other reviews would give me permission to keep doing this - and to take it further. But they do. Especially references to things I consider very odd, like leaving sentences unfinished. That's okay, says this review. And not only that, it actually means something.
Of course, there is the flipside to this, because there is no guarantee that every review will be favourable. I was delighted to be reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, thrilled beyond belief, but the reviewer seemed to be telling me what my stories are not, and I wasn't entirely sure what to make of that.
Right now, though, I am feeling very "permitted", these two reviewers have given me a great gift, an unexpected gift. I want to thank them, and everyone else who takes the time to read my book and share their thoughts. I don't take that for granted. I will never take that for granted. Thank you.
I was asked by the wonderful folk at Writers & Artists (yes, the people behind the excellent Yearbook) to write a blog post about taking risks in writing, following comments I made when awarding the prizes in their short story competition last month. The article, Risky Business, is here, and here is a snippet:
....Why should writers take risks? Well, I would argue that it's not just for the benefit of a reader or a competition judge. What are we doing this for, this writing thing? For me, it's about trying to make sense of the world in some way, and uncertainty is an inherent quality of existence...
There is no comment facility on the article but I'd love to hear about your experiences of permission and risk, do leave a comment here!
I just got back from the most wonderful week tutoring a short story course, together with the fabulous Adam Marek, at the Arvon Foundation's heavenly Totleigh Barton centre! There is always something magical about an Arvon course - after so many years they just have the formula right, the combination of a small group, a focussed five days of workshops and one-to-one meetings, the constant supply of food, including dinner cooked by a different quartet of participants each night, and the remote setting with gorgeous views!
But this time there was an extra special dash of fairy dust - maybe something to do with the group being particularly serene, creative, curious and willing to do any of the crazy things Adam and I asked of them! Many many new stories were begun last week, by the two of us too. And the staff - Claire, Olly, Steph, Eliza, Bridget, Caroline, Huxley - making us feel so at home. And the luminous Helen Dunmore, our special guest, talking to us so candidly about her life and work.
Adam's written a brilliant blow-by-pasty account of our week here, (how did I miss the pasties?) so I won't go over that, but I wanted to talk about one concept that kept coming up during the course: Permission. Permission to write about anything you want, in any style you want. And where does that permission come from?
I have seen this in my own writing career - I can almost pinpoint other people's work that has opened my eyes and allowed me to try something I'd never tried before. Never thought of before.(All Over, a short story collection by Roy Kesey, was a revalation in 2007).
And it really hit home to me, how important this is - and, thus, how vital it is to read everything you can get hold of - when I was talking to undergraduates at Bath Spa Uni, my old alma mater, recently. I talked, of course, about using science as inspiration for fiction. Someone put their hand up and said, "So, do you think it's okay to use anything as inspiration, science, or maybe history?" I said Yes, I do, I think everything is up for grabs, and it wasn't until afterwards that I realised that perhaps I had just given that questioner permission he might have needed, that he hadn't just taken it as a given that a fiction writer can scavenge from anywhere. That really made me think.
This came up in an article in this weekend's Guardian review, a profile of Gerard Woodward:
At the same time, he was encountering the two authors whose work would
mold the tone and temper of his own. "I was reading Updike and Nabokov
for the first time. Updike showed me it was possible to write in a
realist way, with a poetic approach. I'd never come across his blend of
poetic sensibility and prosaic imagination in realist fiction before.
Nabokov blew me away for the same reasons; not quite as down to earth,
but he has the same qualities of poetry and playfulness. I found reading
them both incredibly liberating, and permission-giving for what I
wanted to do. They were the presiding spirits when I was writing August
[the first novel in the trilogy]. Everything fell into place, after
years of struggling both with novels and autobiography in poetry. I
thought, at last I've found a way of writing about autobiographical
material that works for me."
What has given you permission in your writing? Care to share? A person? A book? A film? A TV show? I'd love to have a discussion about it! The flipside of permission is taboo, and I planted this thought in our Arvon participants' minds on Day One: What wouldn't you write about, whether it's something that society considers taboo or it's personal? And what might be a taboo for you in how you write? No writing from the opposite sex, for example, or the 3rd person plural?
Jon McGregor
