When Women Come Together

When women come together things happen. Big things. Significant things. To paraphrase an expression shared by a writer colleague over the weekend, in turn paraphrased from Mrs. Margaret Thatcher at the height of her powers: When something has to be talked about, call a man. When something has to be done, call a woman.

Last week I took part in the ninth edition of the Women's Fiction Festival in Matera, in Basilicata in southern Italy. Founded by international translator, writing powerhouse and successful author Elizabeth Jennings, the Festival must first of all be described as the only one of its kind in Europe.

Most internationals will have seen stunning glimpses of the Unesco Heritage site borrowed by Mel Gibson in 'The Passion of Christ', but for Liz and many of the other people involved in the extensive organisation of the event, the dramatic setting has been casa dolce casa for decades. Add to this a keen understanding of the isolation of most writers, the current leaps and bounds of the publishing industry, and an ardent wish to bring experts face-to-face with both dilettantes and authors with numerous novels under their belts, and you have the ingredients that have spurred on Liz, Mariateresa, Maria Paola and Giovanni in their orchestration of this year's enriching experience.

Matera Centrale, Piazza Moro. I step out of the train station into a regular modern Italian square. Apartment blocks, bus stops, parking lots. I know my way as I was here two years ago. The flight down from Venice to Bari was bumpy so I am glad to have my feet on the ground. I begin dragging my trolley down a normal street until at the end of it the centuries fall away. Carved out of a porous local stone called tufo, tiers of houses and villas and arched terraces and knotted stony paths cling to a wide crevice in the land. No modern constructions, no traffic. Just a wide sky, cascading music practice from the central music conservatorium, and this warm stone panorama. Bliss!

By some quirk of the internet I have booked myself a huge apartment where I had expected a vaulted cave as most bed-and-breakfasts provide. I realise I will be living large. Marble, leather, gilt. A breakfast that ranges from potato foccacia to ricotta and chocolate cake. Bring it on! This porridge-eater with an empty family-ravaged fridge is not afraid!

Leggo di Gusto. A taste for reading - is perhaps one way of translating the Festival strapline for 2012. Food and wine experts are providing extra courses this year, and I know there are also pasta-making classes with a local expert. But the main event - Publishing is a Button - is what many writers are here to learn about. Digital publishing, digital rights, maximising Twitter, crowdsourcing, the importance of having an agent, self-publishing. Liz has assembled an impressive range of American, English and European speakers who keep the audience taking notes. Talks are in English and Italian, and offer glances at the publishing climate in different countries. Liz's expert translating colleagues also provide simultaneous translations from both languages - so that the vaulted ex-convent sala looks like something of a UN session!

The afternoon programme involves one-on-one appointments with international industry 'gatekeepers' - agents and publishers - to whom authors may pitch their projects. That means: ten minutes of trying not to ramble or shove your synopsis into a publisher's face or sweat too hard or go hoarse or lose your silly straw hat. I'm interested in finding European publishers for DLC before she flits off to the Frankfurt Book Fair. So many people have wailed Why isn't it published in Italian yet?.

On Saturday night I join a panel of two Italian authors (Paola Calvetti, 'Olivia' and Patrizia Violi 'Affari d'amore') and journalist Cinzia Leone in the stunning central piazza. Nervous, trying to hide behind my rich ruby Chanel lipstick, I gulp down some wonderful red wine beforehand. I wonder if Toni Morrison ever had to do that? Somehow, I manage to raise a few laughs in italiano. Did I really talk about whips and linguistics in the countryside? It's scary, what can happen between your brain tickling and that fuzzy-topped microphone. Fortunately, the town is dotted with bars to celebrate afterwards.

But python heels on cobbles, crooked steps and semi-darkness, and several more wonderful drinks... I think an angel took me home that night.

Gestation

You have sex. You conceive a child, a new life inside of you. You throw up. You eat mushroom pizza for weeks, then die when your man brings the smell of mushrooms through the door. Not mushrooms!

You have a prawn in there, they point. Then a frog, then a fish. A wriggling fish. Two hearts within your skin. Two brains ticking. Two souls? That's tricky.

You are glowing. It feels so good. You are horny as hell. Sexy to boot. Then you get big, that's troublesome. No Guinness for nine months. Humph!

You give birth, over and over. It gets easier. It does, yes. There's a good reason why it's called labour.

You are skinny again. Other ladies broaden but you are whippet thin, wishing you were more womanly. You know, curves. It's not your fault.

Your children grow up around you. Now they have their own points of view, their temperaments, different tones of voice for other people, private things. Sometimes you see them in their tinier incarnations - jumping off jetties, asleep in a plate of spaghetti, wearing a bow tie at a birthday party. Other times the years feel so long, so long, and so many of them. The moving houses, the flights, the trees planted, the new snow, a bag of small ski suits to give away. So many many years.

You hear your daughter singing Handel from where you are parked in the street. You pray her singing exam will go well. You've seen her go from The Little Mermaid to Mozart. Her singing just makes you weep.

On audition day you both have dry-mouth.

You park well and are dressed in mother-mode in a slim skirt grazing your knees. Not too hip, your daughter says, Otherwise what will they think. She is so keen she wants to sing first.

But her name hasn't been added to the list. The adjudicators send her off for the paperwork. They won't let her sing.

You go to the office people. The people behind thick glass who say We can't help you. Whose eyes say, Get lost. Whose explanations are obtuse and heartless.

You step back from the glass telling yourself Don't swear, don't lose it. Don't erupt into the flaming foreigner slamming Italy. Explore all avenues. Be dignified.

You make an appointment with the Director, whose book you translated years ago.

You hold her sobbing in the street. Big wracking sobs. You are so freaking mad you can save your tears till last.

Literary Giants

Lately I've been in good company. Inspiring company. Daunting company. For the first time in the nine kid-muddled years that I've been in Italy I managed to drive to Mantova's September Literary Festival, a mere 100kms from this house, where a hive of local and international literary luminaries speak to enthralled audiences. I booked tickets. Toni Morrison. Aimee Bender. Nathan Englander. I warned teenagers there would be no taxi-service, few meals and zero rave parties at the house. They were warned. (That didn't stop me receiving random phone calls - Are you picking me up from singing? Do you have the email of that woman I'm working for next week?)

I escaped. Drove into the fields. Past Verona. Over Mantova's seedy lake along the spit towards the tapestry of Gonzaga castles, turrets and cupolas.

I parked. I rushed. I hobbled over cobbles the size of oranges. First, in front of Alberti's famous Renaissance cathedral, I saw the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o sitting in a bar. My heart began to thump. Three of my insolent teenagers studied this man's 'Devil on the Cross' for their IB exams, bringing scribbled-on copies to the table, talking about how the imprisoned author wrote his novel on scraps of paper - toilet paper! - while persecuted for his words.

I wanted to rush up. Sit down and talk. I've had a story accepted by a British review that has Ngugi on the Editorial Board, a story that took two years to go through their channels. I thought of the six degrees of separation theory from that film. Now there were none - between me and a world-famous writer!

** (Read my post Abuse, over on my short story blog)


Many years ago I went to Rome to visit a friend. She was huge with her first child. I was running circles around my toddler. It was so hot in Rome. She wore pigtails and we drank coffee.

She said to me some time later, when our boys were pre-teens and not too fond of each other. But how can you write? How can you write when you read the brilliant things that real authors write? The big ones? Doesn't that put you off?

It paralyses me, she said. She said she severed her writing dream because she knew she would never write like the writers she admired. Gave up. After that, I felt phoney and third-rate.

This week I remembered my friend's words. Her paralysis. Perhaps this is the risk you run when you are made tiny in a crowd swooning to Toni Morrison's words. You cannot help but think, Me? Call myself a writer? What on earth could I possibly have to say when there is this? These books? Already written and to be savoured?

I listened to Toni Morrison who is luminous and wise and I wanted to rush up and give her a hug. I listened to Aimee Bender with her views on craft swimming alongside the flux of magic on the page. I listened to Italian writer Ermanno Cavazzoni who said that a short story is 'qualcosa che meriti' - something that you deserve because you have put yourself in a position where you will be delivered a voice, a miracle. I listened to Nathan Englander and his stringent views on revisions.

Ah! It was almost too much. My paltry efforts, compared to their weighty words. I watched the Italians push up to have their translated copies signed, I watched beaming Ms. Morrison look out from beneath her hat rim at all the faces, all the hands, all the feathery open books.

How do you write? she had been asked earlier.

To write you must find out what you need. Do you need a sandwich? Do you need music? I find I need solitude. I don't like beautiful views, I don't want to be distracted.

All I need is a pencil and a yellow legal pad.

Glowing Reviews

Catherine McNamara's 'The Divorced Lady's Companion to Living in Italy' is the best thing since sliced bread. It has changed my life. It thrilled me from the first kinky words and I walked into elevators and doors gripping my copy. In bed I laughed like an insane woman – I just couldn’t get enough; I didn’t want it to end.

Catherine's book resounded with meaning for me: it has made me love prosecco and the Dolomites and the Italian language. It has improved my relationship with my children. Now, when I look at the High Gothic Duomo of Milan, I whimper. Thanks to Catherine's saucy characters and liberating vision of older women, I have realised that - if I really want to - I can wear purple and wield a whip.

Buy this divine book and you will find love, culture and prosecco in dizzying amounts...


Whaat? Where on earth did I find this review?

The truth is I wrote it ten minutes ago and think I could improve a few things.

This morning, having my Daily Mail hit, I read that crime writer R.J. Ellory has been caught out writing glowing Amazon reviews for his novel. Not only that, he has been mean and nasty about books written by his other authors in his field.

Catherine McNamara’s book is a sleazy, entirely non-feminist rant that leaves me wishing she would just shut up. I didn’t laugh once. Her ideas are disturbed, her dialogue sucks, she should be arrested for her syntax and lack of understanding of Italian culture. Not only that, she must be an irresponsible person who couldn’t cook to save herself, and probably slaps her children around and has a drinking problem. Definitely has a drinking problem. I would pay you not to read this book.

Mr. Ellory! Shame on you!

His reply: Everybody does it. Do they? Is this something I am not in on? Sure, I have asked friends and readers in a nice voice, And if you wouldn’t mind popping something up on Amazon or Goodreads, even if you hated it.. And one friend did reply, Well, write me a review and I’ll post it..

But naahh! I know there is huge competition out there. That writers can be slimey and buyers just show no good sense (50 Shades of WTF – thanks Downith!). But is this where it’s at these days?

Have you ever written yourself up in a review? Or tried to pull the others down a peg? Huh??

On Zadie

I don't have a lot in common with Zadie Smith. Zadie finished her university education while I am a drop-out who ran off to au pair in Paris. Zadie published her first novel to great acclaim while mine is still sitting in a cupboard, typed up on yellow paper and smelling of moldy house. Zadie has acquired a broad-based and supportive readership, some nitpicking detractors, and has won awards for her work, allowing her to build a career in teaching writing at a university level. She also writes delicate articles with a punch in reviews no less glorious than 'The New Yorker', dealing with issues dear to her heart. She is doubtless a hard worker with much talent, and has just published her fourth novel, already receiving glowing reviews.

Phew! Just taking a breath as there is so much to admire here.

And here's an even bigger difference. Zadie had her daughter in her thirties, while I started reproducing in my mid-twenties while I was a young diplomat's wife in Mogadishu, and then, ahem, continued my output over the next twelve years. Much has been said about having a career versus being a stay-at-home home. (Whose children are more intelligent and well-adjusted? Whose bunions are bigger?) But how does mothering affect creativity, that daunting endeavour?

In this week's 'Guardian' (which I feel less and less like reading for various reasons, not least of all the fact that they haven't reviewed my novel there!) I read an article accompanying a review of Zadie Smith's new novel 'NW', which struck a very familiar chord.

According to the newspaper, Smith said that 'motherhood had changed her in an extreme way', especially by nibbling away at her time and concentration. She says: 'I wasn't interested in 80-page chapters any more - I couldn't stay in that mindset for that period of time.'

And even more tellingly, she spoke about being shoved off the writing cliff into the freefall of childcare: '..there's no down time. I would stop writing and would have no chance to think about the book at all, nothing. Then in the morning, it was as if someone else had written it.'

Has anyone else ever felt this? After the school run, the escaped dog, the tipped-over rubbish, the maths homework lies, more washing, a missed train, stolen wallet, unpaid telephone bill, broken dishwater, nagging ex, unwatered plants, the odd fever... YOU THINK I CAN SIT DOWN AND WRITE ANYTHING MEANINGFUL NOW?

It's all about brain twisting, if you like. Gymnastics. Focusing. Not always easy, not ever easy.

What is interesting is that Smith then spins this brutal detachment into an advantage, saying that it also gives the writer essential distance, a crucial objectivity that is difficult to achieve when one is bathed in the work.

I do like this one. I am clinging to it.

* * *

I have an interview about my publishing experience up with Brit Writers!
www.britwriters.com

Une Femme en Corse

Every morning you swim out to the farthest buoy. A little afraid of sharks, having watched way too many documentaries with great whites exposing their gnashing teeth. The water is green-blue and barely tossed, although on some days grey and glassy like milk. You swim thinking of other bodies of water, stuff you should be doing for work, ideas for lunch, naughty things you'd like to do and have done to you. You backstroke in to shore then head out again, over and over. Every morning you nearly collide with the guy in checked boardshorts on that stand-up canoe. Every morning you hear the old cranky man cleaning the wooden planks of the cafe with a leaf-blower.

Then, before the crowds come with their tumbling kids and teensy bikinis and umbrellas and tribal tattoos and suncream, you sit awhile in the sand, invisible, contemplating coffee, hoping to dodge last night's dishes. The wind comes up.

Before lunch there will be pastis most days. (For those who haven't tried one yet - a cloudy aniseed aperitif, you keep on adding water until your jug is dry.) On a bright red table in a village. Or in the piazza at the nearby town, a hot clifftop hike away (involving naked swims on the way back).

Or in a cafe high up above the coast in a village with lavender shutters and winding paths and massive agave with bent blue arms.

Then in the afternoons you might have a nap, read a novel, or tickle your revisions; set out to a faraway and breathtaking beach.

Or a mountain village you never, ever want to leave.

A Divorced Lady in Cornwall

Now that I am typing with a fan on my back and it is 40 degrees outside, my trip to the Penzance Literary Festival seems to have happened in another universe. A cooler, windier one where where socks were worn and a trench coat was contemplated.

I set out from Victoria Station in London on - my friend couldn't believe this Euro-punishment choice - a National Express coach. It was long, 10 hours long. Are these the sacrifices poor writers have to make? That thought niggled as I bobbed sleeplessly in my seat.

Dawn came sweetly however, over postcard villages of stone houses and boats dozing in rivers. Cornwall, I had been told, doesn't like to call itself a part of England. I know that feeling, coming from a dusty hinterland of the empire. I wondered how early I could ask for a pint without seeming, well, indecent.

First up on Day One was Festival Patron Patrick Gale, whose most recent novel, 'A Perfectly Good Man' had been tucked in my handbag over the previous week. Patrick read beautifully from his elegant work, although the more I looked at the crowd around me, the way all faces were turned up and expectant, and the more I studied Patrick himself, a seasoned performer I saw, but still sweating slightly under the yellowy lights, the more I wanted to run away and catch the next bus back to London.

I haven't done a lot of public speaking in the years since I was a debating nerd in school. I've also developed blushing into an art form. A friend called it charming once. I wanted to slog her. Since the book has come out I've had to speak at the launch and do a few readings and book club meetings, phone interviews with journalists and a radio interview in Italian. I've had to Man Up. A strategic drink can help, and I confess I've done one telephone interview in a my pyjamas sitting on a bench outside, stroking my cat. Not so chic, hey?

Last week I was given some essential advice from a friend at the receiving end of my deranged texts. She reminded me that I am the person who knows my book the most, and that I should own these public speaking moments because I have worked so hard to produce and publish this silly book. Doesn't that already make you feel lighter, hardier?

On Day Three at 2pm in the Acorn Theatre I met Sarah Duncan ('Kissing Mr. Wrong') and Liz Fenwick ('The Cornish House'). Both lovely ladies who immediately set me at ease. We moved onto the stage. The lights were turned on. Jugs of water appeared. We all crossed our legs in the most lady-like way.

The session went swimmingly. Not a full hall, but a warm one. Our topic was 'How Did I Get Here?'. Liz was billed as 'a much travelled mother who divides her time between Dubai and Cornwall'. And I was 'an Australian who ran away to Paris at the age of 21'. I managed to not talk too much about silly things such as food-in-Italy, men-in-Italy, shoes-in-Italy. I think. And we also touched upon vital subjects such as method, inspiration and of course '50 Shades of Grey' and the E-book phenomenon. Sarah was a wonderful host and Liz a great speaker. I can honestly say I enjoyed myself more than I could ever have imagined!

And I didn't blush, trip or splutter!

I could indeed write a lot more about the thoroughly inspiring series of events organised by the charming Peter Levin. The theme of the festival being Journeys, there were authors whose work is set all over the world; there were technical sessions about the business of writing; poetry readings and appearances by young adult writers. And in the evening the Acorn Theatre became alive with music - such as the original and talented Bookshop Band who write haunting songs recounting characters and book themes.

Though I confess I never tried a Cornish pasty, I think I've fallen for Penzance. I hope my publisher doesn't mind me playing around with my cover. This was an unscripted Iphone photo that was too kooky to let go.