Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott

It’s Halloween in Apple Valley, Minnesota, and each porch in the neighbourhood is adorned with fake cobwebs and carved pumpkin heads. A variety of gothic, kitsch or downright disturbing tableaux decorate the front lawns: skeletons ride bicycles, witches hover on broomsticks, child sized ghosts link hands and dance around a tree, suspended midair… It’s all rather bewildering and yet impressive to this Irishwoman abroad – the energy, quirky creativity and seriousness invested in HAVING FUN!

I never felt European until I started coming to the Midwest of America. We do things so very differently each side of the Atlantic divide. ‘How to’ books included.

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Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life is a case in point. Highly recommended by American writer friends and a National bestseller in the US, this part-memoir, part instruction manual is both delightful and infuriating. A glance at the reviews on Amazon reveal this is the literary equivalent of Marmite. Five stars abound, extolling the virtues of the book and how it speaks to the inner writer – whilst one star reviews lament its soft-spiritual centre and how much better it would have been if it remained solely instructions on writing, and left the life bit to individual writers to work out.

I have only started to read the book. I’m clearly obsessed. If not preparing to write, I’m writing, or revising, or reading about writing. I’m endlessly fascinated in how other people write, what and how they think about writing, or what moves them to write. Take this for example:

“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”                      Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.

Titanic metaphors aside, I’ve been enjoying dipping into this book. Lamott is frank about her weaknesses and weirdnesses – her perception of the process of writing is at times familiar and comforting, other times alarming and strange, but what she does well is describe how it works for her. My only caveat (apart from the spiritual soft-centre) is that this is only one way and not the only way.

Reading books on how others do it (or blogs, for that matter) can be helpful – even if it simply reminds you how each writer finds their own individual route, one which may change project to project. I prefer descriptive to prescriptive.  There are as many paths to writing as there are whorls and lines in your fingerprints – the trick is to find the processes which work for you.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=bird+by+bird&x=0&y=0

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/birdbybird/film.html

LeanerFasterStronger: blurbs, images, publicity

I have a love-hate relationship with publicity materials and the PR machine. I know production images, blurb and press releases are essential for the successful publicising of a production, but that still doesn’t lessen the pain of trying to create material that bears some relation to the content of the show, whilst also keeping artistic integrity, and not giving the game away….

I know it’s a personal predilection, but I dislike publicity material which tells me too much. I’m not interested in knowing what successful production this new one could be compared to (‘if you liked Mamma Mia, you’ll love this…’). I don’t want to be directed too much in how to perceive the show, nor do I want to know the age, inner thoughts, or inside leg measurements of the characters in the pre-show blurb. I intend to see the performance to experience all that. I want the briefest sense of what the production is about – the theme or subject matter, the company and collaborators – director and creators or playwright – and that’s good enough for me.

I’m currently travelling in North America and Canada and have been surprised by some live performance publicity which have been the equivalent of a film spoiler (I think that’s a more appropriate term than ‘film trailer’). It’s not that I need to be in a heightened ‘what’s going to happen?’ thriller-like state to go and enjoy a performance – I’m a serial-Beckett fan and so have seen multiple versions of the same plays, and will continue to do so in the future – it’s all to do with tone and being spoon-fed.

So pity Sheffield Theatres creative producer Andrew Loretto and Chol Theatre’s artistic director Susan Burns, who approached me recently about the blurb for our 2012 production LeanerFaster Stronger…

I’m fortunate in that I’ve always written or been centrally involved in the publicity material for any play I’ve written. I’ve found that this becomes a necessity when the work is disability-led, or features actors who have physical or sensory impairments – which much of my work does. I have lost count of the number of altercations I have had with journalists, newspapers and marketing departments about inappropriate or even downright offensive language used in regards to my work, or my talented collaborators.

 Several years ago I reduced the marketing department of a theatre to embarrassment and tears after I deconstructed their publicity material, revealing how it not only adhered to the Medical Model of Disability, but also reduced my feisty, outrageous, foul-mouthed crip protagonists into pathetic victims defined merely by their condition. The fact this treatment was then extended to defining some of the company members was unacceptable and much debate and consultation followed. I admired the company’s willingness to learn and make amends, but know many similar well-meaning but problematic errors are still being made, despite the many Disability Equality Training initiatives companies participate in. A disability awareness takes time to be absorbed fully into the body of a company, and until my crip  normality is if not the norm, at least relevant and valid, I’ll continue to write the blurb for my plays.

In the case for LeanerFasterStronger, I’m working with companies which are not only disability-aware, but positively disability-welcoming, and the director is a fellow viz imp. I had few qualms, then, when looking at the material they suggested for publicity. After a few tweaks we got our collectively-created blurb, which follows, below – but not yet the defining image for the production. The exploration continues. Watch this space.

Chol Theatre & Sheffield Theatres present
LeanerFasterStronger

24 May – 2 June 2012, 7.45 pm

Matinees: 2.15pm, 31 May & 2.15pm, 2 June
at Crucible Studio Theatre
55 Norfolk Street, Sheffield, S1 1DA
0114 249 6000 

image by Shanaz Gulzar

How far would you go to be the best?
What if bio-engineered body parts and medical science were on tap to make you leaner, faster and stronger?
Would you fight it; or embrace the brave new world?
A darkly humorous and provocative theatre experience which explores the limits of what human means.

Written by Kaite O’Reilly (winner of the Ted Hughes Award for Poetry 2010), directed by Andrew Loretto, designed by Shanaz Gulzar.
LeanerFasterStronger is a Chol Theatre and Sheffield Theatres coproduction.

For more information click

http://www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk/index.cfm?fuseaction=news.view&NewsCategoryID=1&NewsID=846&Archived=0

http://www.thestage.co.uk/news/newsstory.php/33939/john-simm-and-michael-frayn-to-feature-in

Withdraw the watcher at the gates: Things I wish I’d known when starting out (4)

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Further Things I Wish I’d Known When Starting Out: 

Real writers write. Would-be writers talk about it. Endlessly. Shut your mouth and get out the pen or laptop.

Write from your passion, your fascination.

Try to still the inner critic and censor. Withdraw what Schiller called the watcher at the gates, what I like to think of as the guard to the gates of the mind.

Understand it is a process. You can’t get it perfect first draft, so be kind to yourself and persevere.

Learn your craft. You need to know how to construct before you can deconstruct, know the ‘rules’ before you can subvert or break them.

Have something to say and a compulsion to communicate it.

Some of this material was taken from:                                                                                      Q and A with Kaite O’Reilly. http://www.shermancymru.co.uk/kaite-oreilly/

Creating Environment in your writing: Workshop at Everyword Festival 10/11/11

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I’ve been invited to lead a workshop at Everyword writing Festival. Run by Liverpool’s Everyman and Playhouse theatres, the festival takes place between 7-19 November, and has workshops, readings, and other events.

My workshop is on Thursday 10^th November, 12 – 3pm at the Playhouse Studio.

Creating Environment in your writing

How can your theatre work be inspired by your surroundings and conjur a strong and vivid sense of your environment?

How might you create new work in non-theatrical settings and use the landscape as your theatre?

For further information on the workshop, and this great festival’s other activities, please go to:

http://issuu.com/liverpooleverymanplayhouse/docs/live_everyword_2011a6

Revision notes (3): read your work aloud

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Some years ago I was asked what I, as a writer, actually did all day. I was in the process of revising a script, so I answered truthfully: I spent the whole day talking to my imaginary friends.

Writing can be noisy work. Performance writers are creating dynamic, pace, tension and flow. All that, plus characters, plot, aesthetic, and the world of the play is created through dialogue. Owing to this, I can’t stress enough the  importance of knowing how your words move when spoken aloud – how they feel and emerge from a living mouth – what your work sounds like when uttered in a room.

It is often only in a read-through of a script we become aware of any tongue-twisters or difficult sentences we may have inadvertently created; it is there we note if a line sounds stilted, histrionic, or chimes false. Sudden unexpected little rhyming couplets emerge and accidental puns or double entendres. It is alarming how often what we thought we knew so well can surprise us – even ambush us. Reading the dialogue aloud when you write it is one way of avoiding this.

I find I can identify sections that are ‘flabby’ or need attention simply by half-murmuring the lines when I read the play. I can also find the sentences that jar because there are too many syllables in them, or not enough – and all this impacts on the greater whole.

Plays are written to be spoken. It makes sense that we should check the rhythm and flow by saying those words aloud. It helps us to check whether the dynamic between characters moves in the speed and pace we want at that moment. I often compare writing to composing music – it’s good to check each section follows the patterns and has the energy appropriate to the atmosphere we are trying to create at any point.

I’ve worked with writers who are bewildered as to why a scene which they know should work doesn’t. They’ve honed it, included all the necessary components of plot, rising tension, good characterisation – and yet it still doesn’t have the desired impact or emotional effect. We have then edited a few lines – perhaps changed the length or rhythm of several – and suddenly, to their astonishment, the moment works.

A speedy staccato back-and-forth may undermine and destroy a tender moment, or one with tension and gravitas – but that dynamic leading up to a slower, more evenly spaced section can help heighten the moment by contrast.

Movement of text has an impact on the audience and how it receives the information. Try and ensure you use the appropriate dynamic, flow, vocabulary and interaction. Reading the text aloud will help this.

(c)kaiteoreilly 13 October 2011

Sleeping with Movie Stars – Gitanjali Kolanad and some differences between short stories and plays

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I am in Toronto staying with my friend Gitanjali Kolanad,  an Indo-Canadian writer who teaches the South Indian martial art form kalaripayattu. I’m reading her latest book Sleeping with Movie Stars, a sensual and intelligent collection of short stories about the world of Indian classical dance and music. It’s a world she has been immersed in since she was sent to Chennai as a teenager in the 1970s to become a bharatanyam dancer, her parents afraid she was being ‘corrupted by the West’.

photograph of Gitanjali Kolanad by Ashok Charles.

The work was longlisted for the 2011 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and one of the stories, The American Girl, took second place in the prestigious CBC Literary Awards, the highest honour for unpublished works in Canada.

I’m delighting in the work, tracing the life of a dancer from teens until mature womanhood through a series of linked stories. They are thoughtful and thought-provoking, quoting at one point the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his assertion that ‘the body is our general medium for having a world.’ And this is apt, for the stories are both corporeal and intellectual, involving the reader’s united body/mind in the specifics of bharatanyam form, or the soaring, ‘almost architectural precision’ of Carnatic music, coiling around an inner rhythm, where ‘..it was hard to believe that this medium was air, just air.’

There is what I would describe as ‘emotional space’ in the work which I find effective and immensely fresh – there is no heightened emotive manipulation, which as a reader I often find suffocating or formulaic. This poised, observing stance reminds me of Plath’s cool, recording eye – the ability to note an event even whilst living it. This unusual quality is also commented on in a review by the Hindustan Times:

“[Gitanjali’s] writing is urbane, unexpectedly clean of all clutter for a first-person narrative. Both native and foreigner, she maintains a cautious distance from experience. It is a curiously clever device. It allows one to appreciate the ebb and flow of her experiences without being unduly caught up in the drama of them.”  

It was this ‘distancing’ effect we began to discuss when thinking of the differences between short prose and drama. I felt at times the response to the protagonist’s experiences were left open – they weren’t interpreted for the reader – we weren’t told what to think or how to react. The situation is revealed and we respond to it as we wish, coming to our own conclusions – something good drama is expected to do. The stories weren’t ‘closed down’ or finished off too tidily, as seems to be the current fashion with some of the new writing generated by postgraduate courses in the UK. The protagonist is almost ambiguous in her response – and this is where we began probing, for in performance a performer can’t act ambiguity – she needs to have clarity and an action (and thought can be an action).

Reading is one of the most intimate of activities – often private and solitary -but the intimacy is deeper than just something done solo. The writer is putting their words inside the reader’s head, which will be ‘spoken’ by the individual’s inner voice. There is a communing, cosy, one sided conversation going on, a private narration where the reader will create greater sets than the best scenographer ever could.

Prose writers and radio dramatists write for an audience of one. Dramatists write for an audience of many. Theatre is a communal, social activity and so the form and rules of engagement differ accordingly. A play is a blueprint for collaboration; in performance, the text has already been interpreted for the audience through the imagination and skills of the director and cast. In our discussion, Gita and I questioned whether prose writing (or poetry) was therefore the more direct form. As a former dancer of thirty years experience, Gitanjali Kolanad is in a good position to know, challenge and experiment.

Sleeping with Movie Stars is published by Penguin India. The title short story is available to read at:

http://www.thedrillpress.com/tex/2006-05-01/tex-2006-05-01-sleeping-gkolanad-01.shtml

http://www.gitanjalikolanad.com/writing.html

LeanerFasterStronger: bodies in motion, extraordinary moves

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Alan Martin and Kevin Edward Turner in the motion capture lab, Sheffield Hallam Sports Science Centre. Extraordinary Moves: research week.

all photographs by Kaite O’Reilly.

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‘Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought.”  Albert Szent-Gyorgyi. Hungarian biochemist and 1937 winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

I’m in Canada, revising the next draft of LeanerFasterStronger, the Cultural Olympiad commission from Chol Theatre in a co-production with Sheffield Theatres. The project is part of Extraordinary Moves, a major strand of the imove programme, which celebrates and challenges the relationship between people and their moving bodies through a series of innovative arts projects across Yorkshire.

One of the processes I use when redrafting is to go back and revisit all the source material. I’ve found that when there is a ‘hole’ in a developed draft, or a problem to be solved, invariably the missing link is offered up somewhere in the research material and earlier drafts. So it is with delight I’m in the process of reviewing my documentation of our research week at Sheffield Hallam Sports Science Lab, organised by Susan Burns of Chol Theatre in partnership with XMoves co-producer Dr David James. I’m further aided in my revision by a documentary directed by Andy Duggan to be shown later this year at Leeds International Film Festival.

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‘Extraordinary moves celebrates human movement’, Laura Haughey said, introducing me to the motion capture lab, where performers, choreographers, dancers, directors, scientists and this writer spent a week exploring movement potential and our relationship to moving bodies.

My first introduction to sports science technology was through infra red cameras. ‘Dots’ applied to the joints and other parts of the body ‘captured’ the subject in space and reproduced the physical sequence on a computer screen as lines of movement. This in effect erased the human form, creating instead an arresting constellation of dots. When these were joined up, ‘stick’ men and women moved on the computer screen, clearly revealing how very different bodies move in space.

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Kiruna Stamell being ‘dotted up’ by Laura Haughey

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Some participants didn’t distinguish the avatar body as their own until they saw a recognisable movement trait, or an interaction with a cane, or what we coined the ‘magic carpet’ levitation provided by a unmarked moving wheelchair.

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Nadia caught between the many infra-red cameras.

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There has been a long cultural and linguistic practice of assigning meaning to the impaired body and I was particularly interested in discovering how this changed when the body was represented in such a different form. Part of my role was to facilitate discussion and reflection after the sessions, so I asked the politicised disabled performer/  dancers how they responded to this ‘new’ mode of representation of themselves.

‘I liked the experience of seeing a non-disabled version of myself’ Kiruna Stamell said. ‘It meant the movement could be analysed without social judgement of the body, without judgement of the politics… Just to see the pure movement! The judgement around my physicality is more about my physical relationship as a disabled woman to an environment I’m in, not a judgement on my body as a judgement on my body.’

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Participants included Sam Jacobs, Kiruna Stamell, Nadia Adame, Dan Edge, Nadia Clarke, Alan Ward, and Company Chameleon’s Anthony Nissen and Kevin Edward Turner.

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Other activity that week included a physical workshop led by Andrew Loretto, working with two disabled and two non-disabled dancers, working with high speed cameras to capture the subtle movements and interactions not seen by the naked eye.

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Nadia and Anthony exploring speed, status, and levels of engagement

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.’We’re interested in how people move, and what moves them’ Laura said t‘We’re interested in how people move, and what moves them’ Laura said to camera at the start of the day. What struck me was the speed and intensity of engagement –  the immediate and complex negotiations of equal bodies and space – the marked moments of tenderness, or of pure joy.

For further footage of this extraordinary research week, please view Andy Duggan’s award-nominated film at:

 http://www.yorkshiretelly.com/extraordinary-moves/

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(c) Kaite O’Reilly 11/10/11

In the republic of Poetry: Call for nominations: 2011 Ted Hughes Award for new works in poetry

As the current award winner of this prestigious award, I wanted to publicise the call for nominees for the next Ted Hughes Award:

 

“In order to thrive, poetry must always be open to the world it inhabits. This means that it’s vital for poets to engage with other art forms. A poet can learn as much about their craft from closely examining the work of other artists as they can from poetry itself.” Sarah Maguire, judge of the Ted Hughes Award 2011

Now in its third year, the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry brings into focus the many ways in which poets are engaging with other art forms and celebrates an extraordinary range of poetic work.

Alongside the many and varied collections published each year, poets are creating work for contexts beyond the page. Already in 2011, there has been a verse play which takes a contemporary look at the Mystery Plays, an aural version of the camera obscura at Manchester’s Piccadilly Station, poems carved into paving and streets in Leeds’ oldest district and a drama documentary about the murder of Sophie Lancaster, a young gap year student, told through a series of poignant poems. These are just a few examples of work produced this year which demonstrate the range and inventiveness of poetic work.

Last year’s winner of the award, Kaite O’Reilly, agrees that this “vitality and breadth of work” is something to be celebrated; and what better way than through “this innovative award, associated with two astonishing Poet Laureates, to celebrate the verve and vibrancy of poetry”.

In order to consider the fullest sweep of new poetry produced each year, the Ted Hughes Award invites members of the Poetry Society (of which there are currently a record 4000), and/or the Poetry Book Society, to recommend a living UK poet, working in any form, who they feel has made the most exciting contribution to poetry. Examples of some projects, in a range of media, that have taken place this year, can be found at http://tiny.cc/zhb97

Members have until 6 January 2012 to make their recommendations for judges Edmund de Waal, Sarah Maguire and Michael Symmons Roberts to consider. The £5,000 prize is donated by Carol Ann Duffy, funded from the annual honorarium the Poet Laureate traditionally receives from HM The Queen.

The winner of the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry will be announced along with the winner of the National Poetry Competition 2011 on Wednesday 28 March 2012.

Drama is life with the dull bits left out: Things I wish I’d known when starting out (3)

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Theatre is artifice. It is not ‘just like real life’ – even in the most precise productions using realism and naturalism it is artificial, crafted, completely manufactured. It requires thought and structure and dramatic theory put into practice.  Some years ago I got a group of young writers who were resisting this basic tenet to record and then transcribe one of their evenings when they felt their dialogue was most sparkling and rapier-swift, when they felt their concerns were most engaging and communicable to an appreciative audience, who would be eager to hear more. We began then to read this transcript in a class, until they pleaded to stop. They had learnt the hard way what Alfred Hitchcock espoused: Drama is life with the dull bits left out.

Editing and cutting is essential. Finding what to keep is the question…

Try to understand and identify the difference between what is dramatic material and what is anecdote.

Fluency and ease in writing comes from practice, not chance.

If you are serious about playwriting, reading scripts is as essential as seeing live work.

‘Writing is play in the same way that playing the piano is ‘play’, or putting on a theatrical ‘play’ is play. Just because something’s fun doesn’t mean it isn’t serious.’ Margaret Atwood.

An experiment in contemporary Greek drama.

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Ground Zero’s production of Camus’s Les Juste (The Just Assassins). Photographs by  Christos Kyriakoggonas

 

To Athens in the midst of a general strike. ‘Everywhere’ my friend Maria says, a shudder running through her, ‘the smell of catastrophe.’ Her fellow actors reassure her, change the subject, try to make her smile. ‘We have to look after one another’ Eleana says.

I’m profoundly moved by the resilience and deliberate upbeat inflection among these theatre practitioners. Too experienced to be naive, too knowing to be anything else but optimistic, they face the uncertainties of Greece’s future full-on.

‘This is a new period; we have to make change’ Savvas says, echoing sentiments I’ve been hearing in squares across Europe these past six months, discussions and interventions, experiments in democracy. ’There are few jobs. Taxes grow higher. There is no money – no money anywhere! We have to make theatre from our guts.’

The performances are made and the audience come – an upsurge in numbers since the financial crisis, with the audience instigating impromptu debates, afterwards. ‘It is as if they are looking for conversation – to talk about what is happening’ Savvas says, agreeing with my suggestion if theatre doesn’t give the answers, it helps ask the right questions.

The company, Ground Zero, have been making thoughtful and thought-inducing performances site-specifically in a former prison and Gestapo interrogation cells in Athens: Camus’s The Just Assassins, about the consequences of a bomb-making factory and Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, interwoven with verbatim text from Abu Graib. 

This repertoire is not necessarily representative of the breadth of the company’s work, but tempered by the times. For further information on the company and their work, please go to:  http://simeiomiden.wordpress.com/2011/08/16/about-the-company/

In The Penal Colony. Translation-direction: Savvas Stroumpos. Actors: Maria Athinaiou, Eleana Georgouli, Roza Prodromou, Savvas Stroumpos, Miltiadis Fiorentzis

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‘Things can’t continue as they have,’ other Greek friends tell me, directors and playwrights in the UK, practitioners in Greece. ‘Things have to improve’ they say, bitter with stories of corruption, of taxes hitting only the poorest, of peaceful demonstrations studded with police brutality and unwarranted tear gas. ‘This is the cradle of Western democracy – surely we can find a new path, a solution?’

Please follow the link below to an independent documentary about the Greek government’s inappropriate use of force against lawful demonstrations this year in Athens.

Δείτε παρακάτω ένα video της ομάδας Multimedia της Πλατείας Συντάγματος που δημιουργήθηκε για παγκόσμια κυκλοφορία.

τα καλύτερα, όμως, έρχονται…

A video created by the multimedia group of the Syntagma Square’s occupation

http://plateians.blogspot.com/