Blog Her Award - Shoes, Stones and Triumph

Thanks very much, Rachel Fenton, for presenting me with this blog award ! Some of you will remember that I met up with Short Fiction prizewinner Rachel Fenton in Soho last November for a brilliant Wagamama lunch where we both motor-mouthed for hours. Oh and we also read our stories at the Short Fiction launch at the Plymouth Book Festival. A great time was had. Thanks Rachel!

 

- Where do you usually write/create?

In my music room/library downstairs which is full of bookshelves and African sculptures and a big gilded mirror and a black piano. It’s my favourite place and I don’t even like people coming in here.

- Describe your ideal writing/making day.

I drop off my son at the bus stop at 6.30am and make a big cup of green tea and shut myself off to the world. I’ll stay there as long as I can.

- What are you really enjoying working on at the moment?

I’m halfway through my second short story collection and things are heating up! I love writing stories, for me it’s a druggie thing. I need to do it. I’ve just had my first piece from the new collection accepted by a review so I’m pushing ahead.

- What, if anything, stops you from writing?

People, family, worry, work, bills to pay. Just like everybody. Sometimes the house is a tip and I really have to wade my way through, or the fridge has been empty for a week. Or I need to recharge and I run away to the Dolomites for a ski or to Venice for a rainy walk.

Blogging is time-consuming but must be done. Also book promotion falls into my hands. A writer's work is never done..

- If you could choose a writer to be your mentor (share work with, chat about the process) who would it be? 

Gosh. George Saunders. I think he would be a great teacher. Or Nam Le. Sarah Hall. Cate Kennedy. I’d probably be too daunted to say a word though.

- Do you believe in writer's block? If you get it, how do you overcome it?

Somebody once told me a story was a wheel or a merry-go-around and you just have to hop on at the right place. I think this is true for me. Sometimes I have to wait to think up the right place to begin. It can be a waiting game. But I just go away or do something else, or work on a list of other themes for stories. Beginnings are so important.

- Tell us a good thing that happened to you today.

A lovely man sent me a beautiful song.

- What's the first thing you do in the morning?

 Like everybody, I check my email. Then I let the dogs out.

- What's your most listened to song?

Mmmm. Overall, it might be ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ but Isaac Hayes or ‘All Along the Watchtower’ by Jimi Hendrix. Lately I’ve been listening to Patti Smith’s Horses in the car to empty my head. I’ve also been listening to Haydn’s piano Sonata no. 53 because I am studying it.

 

- Who would play you in the movie of your life? 

Isabelle Huppert. She is my queen!

- What would the title of your autobiography be?

I haven’t a clue. This needs some thought.

Apparently I have to pass this on, and the five nominees I've chosen are:

Sylvia Petter - Merc's World

Kimberly Sullivan

Alison Lock 
Jane Telford – Indulge Divulge

Downith –Write it downith
Lisa Chiodo - Renovating Italy

Yvonne - primerascanciones

Ingrid Christensen dreamlifeofmine

Nominees - if you choose to accept the award, here's what you need to do:

    Thank the person who nominated you, and post a link to their blog on your blog.

    Display the award on your blog — by including it in your post and/or displaying it using a “widget” or a “gadget”. (Note that the best way to do this is to save the image to your own computer and then upload it to your blog post.)

    Answer 11 questions about yourself, which will be provided to you by the person who nominated you.( I only wrote six.)

    Provide 11 random facts about yourself. (Again, I only wrote six. I don't want to bore you!)

    Nominate 5 – 11 blogs that you feel deserve the award, who have a less than 1000 followers. (Note that you can always ask the blog owner this since not all blogs display a widget that lets the readers know this information!)

    Create a new list of questions for the blogger to answer.

    List these rules in your post (You can copy and paste from here.) Once you have written and published it, you then have to:

    Inform the people/blogs that you nominated that they have been nominated for the Liebster award and provide a link for them to your post so that they can learn about it (they might not have ever heard of it!)

These are my answers to Rachel Fenton’s questions and my random facts/new questions follow below:
Who or what motivates you? 

Words, a deep love of words

If you weren’t doing what you do, what would you do?

A gardener. A set designer. A pianist.

You’re on a desert island, what have you taken with you?

A man! A big hat and lots of sun cream.

Describe in one sentence your work area.

My office is my nest, my warren, my theatre, my angst, my (shaky) triumph.

What are the barriers to your creativity?

Money. Time.

What’s your definition of success?

Good reviews. Okay sales. A lasting connection with others of this crazy writing tribe.

 

Here are six lightweight random facts about this skinny writer.

1. I live in the middle of vineyards.

2. I once fell in love with a man because of one word he said. 

3. I love to dance.

4. My first published story was called 'Elton John's Mother'

5. My shoe collection is sublime.

6. I collect stones from Corsica.

And here are my six (slightly more serious) questions for the next set of Liebster nominees:

*Do you think blogging helps or hinders your writing/creative efforts?

*Do you ever regret choosing to write?

*What had been your biggest creative triumph so far?

*Your biggest disappointment?

*Are you working hard enough?

*Who do you share you work with?

Hop to it!

When I grow up I'm gonna be a cowgirl

I know it's a leopard

What did you want to be when you were an impressionable innocent young thing? A lion tamer like me? Impressionable and Wild Kingdom-lovin' young Cat decided she wanted to be nothing less than a lion tamer after going to see the Moscow Circus somewhere in central Sydney in the 70s. Why that idea flew into her head and blossomed, I'll never know. I think she watched Wild Kingdom too much, which if anyone remembers had an old dude talking about lions and so forth in Africa. Having lived on the continente for quite a few years and even having gone on a safari in Kenya where we saw nothing but Karen Blixen's house, I now realise that there was not a single African person in that television show. I don't remember park rangers. I don't remember villagers. Trips to collect water. Shanty towns. I don't remember Africa being portrayed as anything but a great big lion park, where I wanted to go to buddy up with lions.

Anybody remember Born Free? Elsa and her cubs? The Adamsons in Kenya?
Born free, as free as the wind blows
As free as the grass grows
Born free to follow your heart..
Later I learnt that both Joy and George were both murdered by locals in different circumstances and Elsa died of a tick bite(!)


Despite my love for lions I never had a cat and instead had a crazy cocker spaniel who for some reason made me want to become a vet. This desire dwindled when the hot Australian summers aggravated poor Cindy's (yes I watched the Brady Brunch) continuous ear infections, which meant endless cleaning out of poor Cindy's floppy painful ears. End of veterinary career.

And then? It becomes even more silly. After reading the entire set of Trixie Belden mysteries, over two dozen Agatha Christie books, Seven Little Australians, Charlotte's Web and various other little girl books, I decided that I, too, wanted to write. I remember I even began producing a book at twelve - it was a convict story! I think I was as interested in the drawings and cover and layout as I was in the story itself. And I do believe there was a whiff of sex suggested somewhere. The earliest blogger out there, with a twist.

Marguerite Duras, L'Amant, India Song

During university this desire really kicked in and I remember declaring that I was going to Paris to write books. I had pored over Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Jean-Paul Sartre, a bit of Hemingway and Henry Miller and Anais Nin, and I wasn't going to miss out. Sometimes I think of Paris not as a city but as a home. Enclosed, curtained, sheltered, intimate. The sound of rain outside the window, the spirit and the body turned towards intimacy, to friendships and loves. One more enclosed and intimate day of friendship and love, an alcove. Paris intimate like a room. Everything designed for intimacy. Five to seven was the magic hour of the lovers’ rendezvous. (Anais Nin, Diaries Vol 3, 1939-44)


I even remember my first story written in my au pair's garret, 'The Camel Hoop Earrings'. Never published. Better that way.

So lion tamer or writer? I also had a stretch of studying graphic design, languages and history, and wrote freelance newspaper articles for a Sydney newspaper, but my heart was in the novel. The short story. Katherine Mansfield. Christina Stead. Patrick White. Stendhal. Tolstoy. Turgenev... Man, the girl was thinking big.

I've stuck to my (much smaller) guns and - foolishly! - am still doing it. But I swear there are many days when I wish I would throw my writing aspirations out the window, along with the computer. And I think I should have been something more simpler, more remunerative, less soul-bashing. A dental nurse who leans over and smiles and has facial piercings and black dyed hair and lots of tattoos. A back-up singer with big frizzy hair who has all the moves and a gravelly voice. Why me? Why do I have to be a writer? How pretentious is that?

And what of you? Have you realised your childish dreams? And what about your kids? Have you had any wild ideas appear in the house? What would you say if you child wanted to be a cowgirl? An opera singer? A ski instructor? A writer???


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It's - ho-hum! - Valentine's Day, I've heard. As a BIG TREAT The Divorced Lady's Companion to Living in Italy is a Kindle Countdown Deal for the next few days.
10-12th Feb 99p on Amazon.co.uk & $0.99 on Amazon.com
13-16th Feb £1.99 on Amazon.co.uk & $3.99 on Amazon.com
(offer ends 8am 16th Feb GMT)

A gift copy for your divorced cousin/sister-in-law/BFF/mother/daughter who needs an Italian escape hatch??

How did I get here? (This is not my beautiful wife)

Gertrude Stein by Pablo Picasso

I've always been attracted to the author in exile. The 'other' or outsider. Gertrude Stein in Paris, James Joyce in Trieste, David Malouf in Italy. I've always thought that from far away, you can write closer to the essence. Your sense of place will be crystalline because it will not suffer gusts of unrefined normality, your dialogue will not be tampered with by things you overhear, your mission will be clarified and seamless from the outset.

Oh, really ?

Yeah. But what happens when you move country seven times in nineteen years? When each home is a part of you, and a part of you is dissolved in another culture each time. Sure, there is home. There is infancy and childhood and language and the wonderful cradle of family, but when you spend most of your adulthood in another mindset and language your grasp on your original writing material gradually slides. You realise there are disconnected decades where you don't know what was happening in your birth country - what bands were big, who was Prime Minister, which authors were must-read. You knew more about Mitterand than Paul Keating. You knew more about Siad Barre and Jerry Rawlings than John Howard. These days, you know more about Silvio Berlusconi than Tony Abbott.

You've spent years adapting, learning languages, getting the twang out of your accent, being misunderstood... eventually not giving a stuff and dressing like a chic hippie anyway. You accept that you will always be an outsider. Probably that is what you felt in the first place, and are now putting it into practice, living it through and through. Year after year, getting on with it.

In fact, you are so far down the exile road (I hate the word expat, makes me think of fetes and bazaars), that you don't know where to point your telescopic lens and train your exacting vision. Where is home? Where was home? What on earth do I talk about? How did I get here?

You can't write about Australia (although you set short stories there when they come), because it feels a like you are pretending a bit. You can't write about Somalia because the place has overturned since you were living there and it is so dreadfully far from the city you used to walk through with a friend at night. You've written stuff set in Brussels, and Berlin, because stories came into your head from there. But there's a limit to the amount of stuff you can write set in Ghana because you are no longer living there and, well, there are plenty of Ghanaian writers who can take care of that.

The Divorced Lady's Companion to Living in Italy was the book I wrote when I put aside another novel (set in Ghana!). I never felt equipped to write anything set in Italy, and in this book the main character is also an outsider. In Pelt and Other Stories I tackled much more challenging subject matter and put myself into the hearts of a diverse set of characters, hoping that I could pull it off. Gay blokes from Sydney, a pregnant Ghanaian mistress, a medical student in Brussels... I worried that strings and pulleys might have been visible sometimes, or that I had drifted into places that were over my head.

It is so hard to let go, assume the role, trust your material, scatter doubts, pull through to the end of the story. I'm working on it. Sometimes I feel I will forever be borrowing sets or places, peopling them with dingbats who come into my head, but then I remember the striking words of the great writer Patrick White, who said he always felt like a magpie, snatching up glints here and there, stashing away material. A thief like me (I wish).

This week I am reading Flannery O'Connor whose material is steeped with local characters and sizzling colloquial talk. Apart from pure envy at her language, characters and endings, I wish I had the right to use straight-talkin' vocab like this: 'See theter notice,' Enoch said in a church whisper..He's done murdered somebody, Enoch thought.. (from 'The Heart of the Park, Complete Stories)

But I can't. I'm not Flannery O'Connor and I don't live in the Deep South in the 1950s. I'm a chic wandering hippie with a writing fixation who is going to have to find her own way to knit together truths and words and places, who probably wanted it this way in the first place.

In fact, I know how I got here.

Take it away David.

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself
Well - How did I get here?

(Once in a Lifetime, Talking Heads)

The Paris Hat

This writer wears many hats. Shoe devotee, novelist, classical pianist (who doesn't practise enough), gardener, cook, cleaner, short story writer, taxi driver, lover, mother, pet owner, swimmer, translator, English teacher... We all do, don't we? But one of my favorite hats is the Paris hat. Twice a year a fashion designer friend transports me from these soggy Veneto plains to the grey rooftops and tiled metro tunnels and exotic foods of one of my favourite cities in the world. Oh forget cranky Parisians and stiff monuments, this is buzzing mercurial Paris of colours and styles and energy fusions. All big cities have it and this country scribbler has had a giddy few days.

Anyone who scans ahead may be forgiven for thinking Catherine has been living it up in Paris at a four-day long rave. That's one way of looking at it. But these shots don't really show the difficulties in dragging racks of clothing up several levels of escalators, trying to write down orders in Italian while being spoken to in French and half-thinking in English, standing in heels all day (a personal and masochistic choice), living on peanuts apart from lavish Asian meals at night, staying in French Psycho Motels along the A6, drinking horrific French coffee and driving a van over the alps (in light snow) with windscreen wipers like oversized flippers.

They do, however, indicate some of the things that happened this week. For example:

Spending time with unexpected new friends (met up with some old ones too)

Being silly

Watching wild dancing from sparkling youth until there were tears in my eyes

Meeting entrancing people with weird talents (Yes this is the Etch-A-Sketch Princess who reminded me of Emily Dickinson in a way)

Oh and fashion, ho-hum, I didn't photograph any of that. Having had so many sneaky people sliding past trying to take surreptitious shots of Ale's clothes, I wasn't going to prowl the joint snapping people's work!

And here is the golden key, btw Downith, the famous BUBBLE CARD that made the three of us glow, giggle and trip sometimes.

 BUBBLE CARD = ENDLESS GLASSES OF CHAMPAGNE


And now - shock! horror! - I'm back at the farm. Another hat. A big woollen beanie. It's raining miles and the heating is bung. And Paris is where she is. Noble, dirty, full of poverty and power, bright kids and snappy ladies. Paris, je t'aime toujours.

Divorce in Top Gear

How do you roll? What are your wheels like? 

Do you think cars are for guys?

Well, just because I love heels doesn’t mean I can’t have a thang for cars. I was brought up that way. My Dad is a petrolhead and we always had a dashing family car. Anybody for some Starsky and Hutch? I thought our car was a copy of their flared 70s set of wheels. I am a freak for the 70s and never was this gal prouder than when her cool daughter confessed, Gosh Mum you’re sooo lucky to have grown up in the seventies (That was after a full indoctrination with Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, Jimi Hendrix, Earth Wind Fire – usually to drown them out when I was driving.)

In Australia we learn to drive early. I still remember walking up the front driveway on frosty mornings in my school tunic, to my driving instructor called Greg in an orange Datsun. We drove up and down the suburban streets. Greg put his hand on my thigh. I was very shy and just looked at it. 

I failed my first driving test when I drove straight into a massive intersection bringing a big semi-trailer to a screeching halt. The examiner turned white.

my blue citroen and a crazy property choice

Now that I’ve been driving for decades I’ve clocked up a few miles and much more confidence. At twenty-one I hired a car in Paris and was swept around the Arc de Triomphe not having a clue what was going on. I drove south in the spring and ate strawberries in fields and stopped at towns with cathedral facades rising above the rooftops. Vézélay, Poitiers, Tours, Carcassone, Albi. I had little money and slept cramped in the back seat – I’d drive till the late dusk then put up a towel in the window and curl up. Is anyone else thinking I was nuts? One night a tinkering started in my dream and it was a guy trying to break into the car. I sat up in shock and the poor thief ran for his life!

I lost all of my photos of that trip in Mogadishu, where we left everything. I wonder what Somali soldiers might have thought of photos of cows and cathedrals, markets and my pale feet and shins in laced-up espadrilles.. 

the open road in east Africa

Later I drove in Africa – a lot. From our first trips outside Mogadishu to my long voyages from Accra to Ouagadougou and Bamako. Once I took a wrong turn at Ouaga and drove over sixty kilometres of sand. At the border we came upon a Swiss couple on a tricycle - my view of the Swiss swivelled at that point. We drove over the moonlit Dogan highland in Mali and the long stretchy roads to the Niger. We had a beaten Nissan Patrol with holes everywhere – after the desert we were all covered in fine red dust and belonged to a new race. Red eyelashes, red hair, red noses.

In Mogadishu my ex had his sunglasses snatched from his face when he was caught in traffic. A policeman friend was paid and the prescription glasses were retrieved from the market.

In Brussels a woman sneezed and ploughed into the back of our old Citroen when I was nine months pregnant. I had my baby Omar the next morning. (Beware of Belgian drivers!)

In the Dolomites I learned to put on snow chains on my long slithering Merc station wagon in less than five shivering minutes - in a T-shirt.

Don’t we spend so much of our lives driving? I’ve gone through half a dozen cars, none of them Top Gear material, and these days my long drives are where I’ll think over my stories in silence, unless of course a teen has headphones plugged in and I have to listen to the fuzz of rap music.

moosecat

And have I spoken about driving in Italy yet? Do I really need to? You of course know that big cars take precedence, pedestrians are disregarded and cars can veer across the road when a driver is sending a message. And here in the country the old men wear hats driving and must be dodged. And if you lose control at the rulebreakers and put up the finger beware of a big Audi breathing down your neck.

And I’m also a veteran of the car breakdown. I’ve had gazillions of breakdowns. To the ex I once said, You know that this crappy car is going to lead us to divorce. He didn’t believe me. That year I was driving a made-in-Nigeria Peugeot with the air-con fitted in Ghana. I broke down out of town on a hillside and limped home. I broke down on the way to the doctor’s with a very sick kid. It was endless. Reliable cars can help marriages.

This month I’ve finally managed to bring a new, safe reliable car into this household. It’s already mud-splattered and the cats go pattering across the hood. For us, it’s a new chapter. I can listen to Jimi Hendrix with two speakers. I’m no longer terrified the engine will pike out in a winding mountain tunnel. I’m now no longer spending more money on fuel than food! It will take me an age to pay it off, but this divorced writer is sailing along in Top Gear.

Any wheels stories ladies?