Sarah Salway on Writing & Place

I am delighted to be hosting Sarah Salway on the blog today - poet, short story writer, novelist, writing teacher, blogger extraordinaire and a provider of inspiration in so many ways! Not one to stand still, Sarah has just launched a new website, Stories from the Garden: "This is a website for garden visiting with a difference. Instead of collecting plants, my garden visits are all about collecting stories – those contained within the garden, those told about the garden and those written in the garden." And you can catch Sarah talking all about "A Garden Journey" at the Canterbury Festival next Wednesday, October 17th, at 8pm (see here for more info). 

It seemed appropriate then, given that her new venture is about stories in different places, to ask Sarah my writing & place questionnaire. Here are her answers!

Where are you?

I live in Tunbridge Wells in a very old house that was once Beau Nash’s illegal gaming rooms. The builders we had swore there are ghosts here, but if there are, they feel very happy to me. I like to think of them playing poker.

We moved as a family from Edinburgh when my husband got a job in London. We had no idea where to live and so I was travelling round Southern England looking for places we might call home – a surreal experience.

Tunbridge Wells wasn’t even on the map for us, but on one of my ‘tours’ of Kent, I met up for lunch with two writer friends there and fell in love with it. Out of interest, I called in at an estate agent that afternoon and found the house we moved into just three months later.

Interestingly, one of my lunch companions, Dan Rhodes, moved to Edinburgh about a year later so you could say, we swapped.

How long have you been there?

Ten years. Whether we’ll stay here for ever, I have no idea.

Now our children have left home and we’re not tied to schools etc, I fancy moving far out into the country and becoming a hermit with chickens and pigs.

However, I also fancy moving into the centre of a really busy city and going to the theatre every night. Not sure the two are compatible!

What do you write?

I write in several genres.

I trained as a journalist straight from school, and I still love doing features and interviews – that chance to dip in and out of a subject and ask all the questions you want without seeming too nosy!

Then I did a creative writing drop-in class at Edinburgh University and fell in love with fiction. I started with the short story (perhaps because it felt the same shape as a feature?) and I was lucky enough to be asked to expand one of my short stories into what turned out to be my first novel, Something Beginning With.

I’ve now written and published two collections of short stories (one with Lynne Rees) and three novels, and this year, I’ve published my first poetry collection, You Do Not Need Another Self-Help Book.

Sometimes I worry that I’m just distracted writing so many different things, but mostly I feel lucky to be able to follow what I feel passionate about.

At the moment, through my role as Canterbury Laureate, I am working on my first piece of public site-specific writing, doing what we’re calling ‘interventions’ in four of the public parks in Canterbury – changing the municipal signs, recording monologues of park users, turning one space into a meditative spot for letter writing. It’s been a totally amazing opportunity and I think it may have changed my writing practice for ever. I have been so used to thinking of writing as something that appears between the covers of a book that I only just got over asking if this is something I’m allowed to do!

However, for the first time in several years, I do have a novel in my head that is starting to shout that it needs to be written. I’m getting rather excited about disappearing into that fictional world.

How do you think where you are affects what you write about and how you write?

That’s a really interesting question. I am originally from the Fens and recently, I have discovered that several authors I really enjoy – Trollope and the much more contemporary, Sonia Overall and Katherine Pierpoint for example – are also ‘flatlanders’. However, this isn’t made obvious in their books themselves so I wonder if it’s something in the atmosphere, or language, that I’m picking up. It’s something I’d love to look into more.

I have done three writing fellowships in America now, one in Iowa and two in Virginia, and I can spot the American influence on the work that I’ve produced there, not in terms of content, but as one friend said, ‘they’re more spacious’ than my ‘normal work’. Again, it could be all the flat lands and the skies!

I think I’m more influenced by the landscape than the people, certainly. And by the everyday more than the spectacular. Although I’ve done some epic walks, including up Kilimanjaro, they don’t appeal to me as a topic to write about. The walks I go on around town during the day though, peering into people’s houses, overhearing conversations, or just being on my own in the streets, fill my notebook.

I do write in cafes, but I love writing in libraries more. I once had a week’s ‘holiday’ writing in a different London library every day – the one at the V&A, the Wellcome Institute, the Royal Institute of British Architects. Anyone can walk in and get a day ticket, and it was absolutely fantastic. I guess my favourite travel will always be on the page! 

Thank you, Sarah! Invite me round for tea, I need to see the illegal gaming rooms! Check out Sarah's new website, Stories from the Garden, and if you are near Canterbury (or willing to travel, which will be worth it!) go and hear Sarah talking all about "A Garden Journey" at the Canterbury Festival next Wednesday, October 17th, at 8pm (see here for more info).

Sarah Salway Says You Don't Need Another Self-Help Book

Sarah Salway is a kind of Renaissance Woman: she does so many different things, and does them well - from writing novels and short stories to circus skills, garden history and climbing Mount Kilimanjaro - she's a true inspiration. I feel incredibly lucky not just to be her friend but to have co-tutored an Arvon Foundation short story course with her last year - I have no doubt I learnt as much from her as our students did. And she kept me sane with regular infusions of chocolate, and the odd drop of whisky...

Here's her official bio: 

Sarah Salway is Canterbury Laureate and Royal Literature Fund Fellow at the London School of Economics. You Do Not Need Another Self-Help Book is her first poetry collection, and she is the author of three novels (Something Beginning With, Tell Me Everything and Getting the Picture) and a collection of short stories, Leading the Dance. Her poems have won significant prizes in competitions organised by Poetry London, the Essex Poetry Festival and The New Writer, and have appeared in publications including the Financial Times, The Virago Book of the Joy of Shopping, Mslexia, Pen International and Poetry London. Sarah is the Chair of the Kent & Sussex Poetry Society.

So, this brings me to my joy at hosting Sarah here today to showcase her new book - her first collection of poetry, You Don't Need Another Self Help Book, published by Pindrop Press. Isn't the cover stunning?

Sarah is doing an audio blog tour - the first time I've hosted anything like this, and today she is reading us an excellent poem I heard her read live (at the same reading where I, with great terror, read out my first poem!)  called Love and Stationery. Listen and enjoy...

It's no wonder Philip Gross called her collection

[s]ubtly angled glimpses of love, sex, marriage, which reveal them as they really are: matters of life and death. There's a quiet sizzling underneath the surface of these poems, which can make you smile and wince at the same time.

You may not need another self-help book but you do need this one. Buy it here. You know you want to... You can find out more about Sarah on SarahSalway.net, and listen to her read another poem over at Danuta Kean's website. What fun!

Workshop with Sarah Salway: Postcards to Yourself

Thanks to Sue G for drawing my attention to this - so that I can draw your attention to it! Sarah Salway and I co-tutored an Arvon Foundation course in May so I know firsthand what a fantastic teacher/tutor/inspiring person she is. She is running a course entitled "Postcards to Yourself" together with Alison Piasecka, who runs Moving Thru Transitions, here in the UK in February, here are more details:

POSTCARDS TO YOURSELF in Othona, East Anglia  22-24 February 2012 

A 3 day workshop led by Sarah Salway and Alison:   

Wish you were … where? 

Do you want to rediscover that creative spark you thought you’d lost and have fun exploring your life on the page through a varied series of short guided writing exercises? During this course, you’ll forget the grammar police, red pens and even neat handwriting as you give yourself space to tune your unique writing voice, liberate your imagination and use language as a map to support your journey to self-discovery and growth.  You’ll write at your own pace, and with absolutely no need to share unless you want to. No previous writing experience is necessary. 
For prices and more information click here

There is only space for 10 people, and the place itself looks stunning, so I would get your skates on... (anyone snowed in today? Very bright and sunny here in Bristol!). Have a lovely weekend.

Finishing Sarah Salway's Sentences...etc...

So, I'm over at Sarah Salway's blog today, finishing her sentences.... And also in Bridport, running 2 flash fiction workshops at the Open Book festival together with Vanessa Gebbie (workshop one this morning was wonderful, thank you if you came along and flashed with us!) And thirdly, I'm thrilled to have been shortlisted, for the third year running, in PANK's 1001 Awesome Words contest, for my piece, The Tragedy of Tragic Men, to be published in PANK next February. Congratulations to all! The full list is here.

And finally, Ink Tears did a video interview with me, about short stories (of course!) and I was a bit nervous about being videoed, and then about seeing it, but Sara-Mae Tuson did a brilliant job editing it so I thought I'd share...:

Quick shout out

I had a wonderful time last week at the launch of my great friend Sue Guiney's poetry collection, Her Life Collected. There were several highlights to the event at the Lumen United Reform Church and Community Centre - the first being hearing Sue read a number of poems from the book, some very funny indeed, since she had decided to stay away from the "divorce, death and doom" poems for the night! The second thing that made it a very special event was finally meeting up with our blog friend Lauri Kubuitsile, her of the Thoughts from Botswana blog. Sue, Lauri and I had conducted a three-way blog chat about writing over the past few months, and meeting Lauri was just like carrying that chat over from the blogsphere into real life! And continue it the next day wandering around London (well really from one cafe to another one a few steps down the road...)

The third interesting aspect of Sue's launch was that it was also an open mic night, which the Lumen centre holds regularly, and I decided to take the plunge and read one of my poems for the first time. I'm quite used to reading my stories, although that was extremely scary the first few times. But poetry? With line breaks? Ok, it's a 6-line poem  - which will be published in Alba shortly, otherwise I would never have had the guts to presume to read amongst the poets. But I was really worried I'd screw up the line breaks somehow, I'd read it all wrong, even though I wrote it. Mad, eh?

Well, it went fine. Six lines, it was all over pretty quickly! And I was glad to have done it. Lauri also read, as did Sarah Salway, so short story writers were well-represented. I still wouldn't call myself a poet, but one day, maybe...

Talking about Sarah, who I had a lovely time with in London, chatting about the upcoming Arvon short story course we will be teaching in May....She and I - together with fabulous writers Elizabeth Baines, Susannah Rickards and Catherine Smith - are reading at Jay Merill's Salt Publishing short fiction event at the Wise Words festival in Spitalfields, London, on March 16th. See Sarah's blog for the info.

First acceptance of 2011

I had one day in December when I got 4 rejections in 24 hours. That wasn't much fun. I can handle them one by one, but that was a bit like being whacked... and then whacked again, and again! Well, 2011 is off to a better start with the first acceptance, sneaking in just before January ended: my poem, Moss, will be published in the next issue of Alba: A Journal of Short Poetry. So, my 5th published poem, what does this mean?

I've been reading the excellent Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry and feeling very inspired about poems that look a little like prose but aren't. Then J and I went to the TS Eliot prize shortlistees reading and I was blown away by Simon Armitage's odd and darkly humourous pieces from Seeing Stars, and Sam Willett's poems from New Light for the Old Dark (neither of whom, sadly, won). And then I bought Jo Shapcott's Costa-winning collection, Of Mutability, which is astonishing, and which suddenly taught me something about line breaks, the power of the word chosen to end a line, the word chosen to begin the next. Wow.

So I am being beautifully bombarded (by choice) on all sides by poetry, perhaps it's no surprise when sometimes that's what comes out when I write. I am remembering that as a kid it was always easy for me to makes up rhymes to impress classmates (it was the only thing I did that did impress them - my maths skills weren't really very cool). Maybe I am tapping into something that was always there? Whatever it is, I am enjoying playing around with other forms, all other forms. I am going on an Arvon Foundation course in Writing for Radio in the summer - another form that really appeals to me - and one of the tutors is Simon Armitage, so I am very excited about that! The other is Sue Roberts, executive producer for BBC Radio Drama in the North, I am really looking forward to meeting her too.

And on that note - yes, the wonderful Sarah Salway and I are teaching an Arvon Foundation course on the short story in May, and booking is now open! We'd love to meet you...!