Avril Joy

Postcards from Agde

 

Looking though my photographs I feel I am not quite ready to leave Agde behind  and leaving is always difficult - so here are just one or two postcards by way of  my au revoir

1. The narrow, medieval streets of the old city, in which we lived, where neighbours are almost within touching distance

          2. The trompe loeil - painted by artists from Marseille - which we passed on our way down to the river.

 

      3. The Herault River where it opens up on its way to the sea - I cycled here most mornings (when I wasn’t  falling  off my bike) along the cycle path to Grau D’Agde and the Mediterranean

 

4. The kitten we all fell in love with in the restauarnt at Minerve

 

5. The sea which always seemed hazy in the heat - didn’t go in but paddled with Angus

 

6. A simple roof terrace picnic - bread, cheese, pizza and wine. The food improved considerably when Sean and Debora arrived (not surprisingly)

 

7.The canal was always the most peaceful of places but especially in the early evening

 

                          8. The French love fireworks!!

Au Revoir Agde!

Reflections on a Writer’s Gift

 

 

 There were so many things about Agde that were a writer’s gift, not least the sheer uninterrupted time in which to do nothing but WRITE or think or talk about writing. Already, although it is wonderful to be home I find there are so many things that distract - some of these, most of these, are good things, enjoyable things as well as the chores but all take up time and take time away from the writing.

I miss the way time was in Agde - the way the only thing I had to be was a writer.

As well as this gift of time Agde also offered up the gift of the new - the way that being somewhere new and exotic floods your senses and sharpens your thinking, the way it makes you look. There is so much looking and seeing and that it is good for a writer.

Being somewhere for two months also brings new knowledge and a growing sense of  the different communities who live there. One may only observe from the edge but in time one begins to feel a sense of belonging - of being a small part of this place - still guessing but learning all the time.

I came away from Agde knowing much more about it than when I arrived

I know…where to buy the best croissant and how the price of cherries alters according to the day -  where to eat moules frites and delicious plat du jour …  the clarity of the light, the way it falls on the water and beneath the trees …the roads the fisherman cycle home after a day on the canal…the fields where the bee eaters live… how to find the shepherds hut, the oreilles’ wood… the way to the sea past the banks of thistles… the walk to La Guingette and how good their house cocktail with coconut tastes… the girls who serve in the cafes, the postman, the librarians, the swifts that fly at the window… the roof terrace with plants and naked man…how the one way system works, where the kerbs are too steep to lift your bicycle onto the pavement…. where there is a dog with three legs… how the voices of the Gitane echo through the narrow streets… where a bike is being slowly dismantled, a wall built, the architect lives… where a barge is moored that sailed from England, a beautiful house by the river with roses and jasmine in the garden… where to buy the bargains on the linen stall on market day …the colours of the shutters and doors… the silence of the afternoon…the way the language sounds but only some of what to say…that one day I will go back

But most of all I came away from Agde knowing that I was indeed a writer and maybe even a poet - after all who else but a writer would go off for two months and come back with 80,000 words?

The Abbaye de Valmagne

 

 

 

Today we visited the Abbaye de Valmagne. It was founded in the year 1139, and was once one of the richest abbeys in the south of France. It is also among the most ancient Domaines in the Languedoc - the Cistercians being expert in wine growing.

- Every summer the Abbey hosts a music festival.

 It was a beautiful and contemplative place having something of the Alhambra about it. These are some thoughts/sketches from my visit, which in time with the help of my photographs ,I will use to write a poem to add to my growing Laungedoc collection

 - In the Abbaye de Valmagne a ghost hung on my shoulder, shadowing me in the pale  light of the cloisters, dipping its fingers in the icy spring pool and smoothing the velvet moss that dripped from the fountain.Together we stepped in pools of buttery light under rose tinted stone. 

In the long high nave we whispered of cool places where candles flicker and splutter in the east winds.In the garden we touched quince and cardoons, held lavender, honeysuckle and bay under our noses.

 In the evening we sat by pink geraniums in green urns, and …tous les vendredis de l’ete  we drank Domain de Valmagne and listened to Chopin and Gershwin

 

 

The Seduction of the Screen

 

As our two month sojourn in France draws to an end so does the first draft of my novel.

I now have 80,000 words and it seems amazing to me that I could have written so much in these two months. It is down to what I like to think of as the writing heat of France. But it is also about a departure from my normal method of working which is to write in a notebook and then transcribe onto the laptop.

 Here I have done something very different which is to work directly on the screen. It wasn’t particularly intentional, it just happened, perhaps because I’d already done a lot of thinking about this novel before I wrote my first words. Working on the screen like this is fast and it is different. What I have now, is virtually unedited, absolutely first draft, whereas normally when I transcribe it means my work on screen has already gone through a major edit.

 I have really enjoyed working on the screen like this but only because I’ve given myself the freedom to write fast, without putting on my editor’s head, so that what appears still has, I hope, that first glorious creative splurge.

 The danger of course is that once something gets on the screen it looks more perfect than it is!

 So how to avoid the trap of thinking once your work is on the screen it’s good enough? My advice is make it strange!One thing that works quite well for me is using zoom. In the first place I took to using it to help my eyes which tend to get tired but I also discovered that when text is zoomed up to say 130% it is difficult to see it as a page in a book. You cannot scan it in the same way and you are forced to look at what you’ve written line by line.

 I realise of course that for many writers working directly on the screen has always been their preferred method of working and it works well and successfully but I still think there is something to be said for maintaining a certain caution -

- and guarding against the seduction of the screen that, Lavinia Greenlaw describes when she writes about poetry - ‘I do not write on a computer as I like to see what I have crossed out. A computer offers the seductive image of printed text. You may forget that what you have on your screen is a rough draft. The ease with which you can move, delete and revise your words can be deceptive and disorientating. Try to stick for as long as possible with paper and pen.’

I think the advice about sticking with paper and pen is particularly true of poetry and I have definitely experienced the disorientation of moving the words in a poem around so much the only thing I can do is start again - and not on the screen but in my notebook!

In case you are struggling to read the words on my picture of the screen - here they are - from Chapter 3 of the new novel:

It was five forty five, an hour before the club opened. It was an hour before anyone would appear on the other side of the glass, before they would sit down and before a voice, sometimes confident, sometimes pale; occasionally brash, would fall from the shadowy face and ask her to begin. Or perhaps not, maybe they would wait for her to ask what it was they wanted; what it was they would like to see. Sometimes they were snarling and abusive and the heat of their anger seeped through the glass.

             But the glass was shatter proof.

             Mostly they were quiet and contained, half seen but rich, at least rich in Gina’s world. It cost to see Gina.

The Field Where The Grass Burns Yellow…

 

 

The first time I saw a bee eater was over thirty years ago, on a beautiful tropical morning near a beach, now sadly part of a war zone - on the east coast of Sri Lanka, near Trincomalee.

   We were newly arrived on the island and had made a hasty retreat from the capital Colombo which had proved too much of a culture shock. From Colombo bus station we fled across the island on what proved to be a magical, if decidedly uncomfortable ride, into the dense jungle interior, through the rich greens of palms and giant ferns, past small lakes and rice paddies where the white egrets perched on the backs of the water buffalo and kingfishers flashed turquoise.

  We ended our journey at Uppavelli on the Indian Ocean and that is where the next morning on our way to the beach we saw the bee eaters - sat on a wire fence. They shone like jewels and I thought that they were the most exotic creatures I had ever seen.

  Imagine how I felt then when Alan and Nira asked me casually if I’d seen the field where the bee eaters were nesting  (bee eaters nest on the ground - I didn’t know that).

 I had not! Alan duly drew me a map not only showing the bee eater field but also the wood where the golden Oreilles could be heard, although rarely seen as they are very shy birds.

   I set out one blisteringly hot morning to the bee eater field, just out of town, behind the garden centre along a single track road. When I got to the field it was all furrows, dry earth and small mounds like hives - the nests. I saw the bee -eaters then high up on the telegraph wires, silhouetted against the sun.

  I sat in some scratchy grass under the shade of an olive tree and waited for them to fly. Seen in flight from beneath their wings are like amber, translucent in the sun. Their backs flash bright copper like goldfish and there are glimpses of the emerald and turquoise. I wasn’t as close as I had been all those years ago in Sri Lanka but I was knocked out by just sitting, watching them, in a field of Van Gogh yellow, shimmering in the heat.

And on my way home I heard the Oreilles in the wood.

 I very much want to write a poem about the bee eaters - about them, but also about the passage of time and how one’s response to the world, in this case the natural world -alters - how things are lost, how gained.

 I’m still working on the poem. I found it very hard to get started but I did what I think all learners should do - I thought of the first line of a contemporary poem that I really admired and I used its rhythm and the way it began by the simple naming of the place, as my model - it gave me the confidence to go from there

 The first line of my poem is - The field where the grass burns yellow…

La Guingette *

 

 

I may have talked about Sundays on the roof terrace here in Agde, I know I’ve talked about Sundays long ago when I was a child and what difficult days they sometimes were but now I must tell you that I have discovered the perfect, the best, the only way to spend Sunday and that is at La Guingette - a riverside cafe on the canal at the bend of the Herault (just off the road to Marseillan)

 How do I know about this wonderful place? Alan and Nira of course! What is more on our wild riverside walk to La Guingette (no roads for us) we met Nira en route on her bicycle, and we had café together when we arrived. A wonderful conversation ensued about women who enjoy spending time alone and of course about books - in particular Margaret Forster’s Good Wives - which Nira has kindly loaned us and which I am very much looking forward to reading

 

 

La Guingette is my kind of place, where nothing quite matches but the whole is a beautifully stitched quilt. The profusion of pot plants: rubber, avocado, bougainvillea, trailing spider plants, agapanthus and geraniums, blur the café’s edges with the liquid green of the water and the tracery of the plane trees overhead. Here, at tables set on a rough floor of gravel and dried leaves, beneath canopies of bamboo and a myriad of umbrellas you can enjoy a bottle of chilled rose and a delicious Roquefort salad, with aioli, (umm) and all at a leisurely pace - perfect for Sundays and we find, perfect for people -watching as the families arrive for lunch and the café gradually fills with the murmur of conversations.

 

 

Being at La Guingette remided me so much of the travellers haunts I frequented with John in India and Sri Lanka in the early eighties: makeshift huts, bamboo ceilings, pot plants, palms, and seas, rivers or mountains all within reach. Old hippie that I am, I was in my element at La Guingette and I am already planing to return  to spend my soon to be celebrated birthday there.

 For the romantically inclined there are bouquets and single roses for sale - it’s a romantic kind of place. It’s a mix of Renoir, in all its vibrant colour and its couples dancing by the waterside, which I’m told happens, and wait for it!  Dennis Quaid (a favourite of mine)  in The Big Easy - well, there is live music here sometimes and as we walked in I definitely heard the strains of the accordion played in that very soulful French/ Louisiana way. I hope there’s dancing on my birthday!

 

*A Guinguette is a popular drinking establishments in the suburbs of Paris and other cities in France. Ginguettes might also serve as restaurants and, often, as dance venues. The origin of the term comes from guinguet, indicating a sour white light local wine.

Every Word Counts

 

 

Since coming to France I have been writing a lot more poetry. I’m not sure why this is, but I think maybe it’s about having the time and distance in which to explore my writing.

Because I have been writing both prose (my new novel) and poetry I have been thinking a lot about the parallels between the forms. In my attempt to learn more about poetry and to improve what I write I have been struck by how often advice that is given to poets applies equally to the novelist. Take for example the problem of over writing or too much description - it is a problem many writers, including myself, come up against particularly when they are starting out and are writing their first novel - we are in love with our words, we can’t help it!

But too much description, no matter how well done, will hold up the narrative, slow the pace and can bog down the reader.

Lavinia Greenlaw who I think offers some of the best advice for would be poets says -

‘Every word should count - for its meaning as well as its music. Every image, however fantastical, should make complete sense within the context of the poem. If something you have written particularly impresses you, question it all the more.‘  

Charles Simic says, ‘Some of the greatest poems in the language are sonnets and poems not many lines longer than that, so don’t overwrite.’

It’s sometimes very hard to edit out words or phrases that we particularly like and I have been struggling with this in my poetry. However I know I am beginning to learn that sometimes, although I may think the words are great, they have to be sacrificed because they do not have a place in the poem -or perhaps because they obscure rather than promote clarity - and in a poem every word has to count.

Sometimes of course they are good and can stay! We have to be careful not to throw out what is good -or sometimes they work somewhere else in the poem or as part of a title.

It is of course different with the novel’s more expansive form but there is a similar need for caution when using description - the maxim more is less comes to mind (see earlier post)

 

So now to some poetry - this is a poem I began not long after I came and I have been working on it for a few weeks now. It started off being a lot more complicated. It began to form in my mind after I saw a man, a vagrant, on the canal path. I started thinking about him and what his life might be like and how I really knew nothing about him

 Like any poem it is a work in progress, something to come back to after time, after it has rested - to be improved, changed.

 

Presumption

On the thin pathways of the

morning I see him

by the canal, sometimes the bridge -

two dogs, two ropes, two bags

one on his back

two pairs of trousers one cut

above the other -

 

in the thick green soup of the

afternoon I see him

by the river sometimes the boats

two broken-backed boots,

ankle high and slow

moving to the lazy paddle

of the flat black turtle

 

two coats and matted hair

dogs hair matching I see him

sit in needles of light

beneath the roosting pigeons

that coo the voices of regret

and the presumptions

of sorrow

 

I see him step aside

give way and kneel,

in the hollows of courtesy

to the confusions of belief,

while around him the

nightingales call to prayer

 

in the quiet silver light of the

evening - I think I see him -

lying curled between his dogs

in the olive groves.

 

For more discussion on description in your writing and some good sound advice for writers you might like to  go to Writing out West

The Feast of Pentecost and The Orange Prize- Celebrations!

How great to hear the news from Charlie, librarian at HMP Low Newton, that he has been interviewed by the Guardian newspaper about the Orange Prize for Fiction reading group at HMP Low Newton - the article should appear on Wednesday, (tomorrow) the day the winner is announced. So don’t forget to buy your copy and take a look.

Update - for a link to the article and fab picture http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/jun/03/prison-book-club

 The original idea was brainwave of Writer In Residence Wendy Robertson - and last year a very successful group which included, inmates, librarians, learning shop staff and governors read the short list and picked their winner, it  turned out to be the judges choice too -The Road Home - Rose Tremain.

 That Charlie has continued to nurture and develop this unique group is a cause for admiration and for celebration too! These things are not easy to do in prisons. It’s brilliant and I look forward to reading all about it.

 While I’m on the subject of celebration, this weekend Agde celebrated the Feast of Pentecost with its third annual ‘reconstruction historique’ - music, dance, a medieval fair, circus acts, battle enactments, plays - it was all happening Saturday through to Monday. Sometimes it was tricky knowing what century you were in!

The town was full of ladies in satin gowns with lace parasols, men in frilled shirts and ribbons, Napoleonic soldiers on horseback, milkmaids, pirates and courtiers wandering through the town.

 This morning  while drinking my cafe in The Plazza I saw a man in doublet and hose pop into the Tabac, now how surreal is that?

 The French love and celebrate their history and it seems they love dressing up too. Growing up with a mother who was a dressmaker: to the sound of the treadle, the dust of tailor’s chalk, the laying out of cloth - being spoken to through mouthfuls of pins and acting as tailor’s dummy - I spared a thought for the dressmakers of Agde and their daughters too.

 

 

A Day Off

 

 Today I decided to take a day off from writing (well apart from this!). I suppose you could say it was a kind of celebration, as yesterday I reached 40,000 words which is half a novel by anyone’s standards!

 Danny Beck my somewhat reluctant Private Investigator is no longer reluctant! He is up to his eyes in it and beginning to think he might be quite good at this investigation thing. Newcastle looms large in the novel, so I will be taking a few trips there when I get back with David who knows the city well and I hope to The Cluny club with Carole  - (you’ll be pleased to know Carole, that Beck has already been there looking for a journalist who is heavily into the blues.) I think Beck has an eclectic taste in music- so some blues, jazz,(haven’t managed any French jazz yet Warren but still hoping - sure that gets in your soul too)  classical, folk, (Miles of Aisles yes John!) rock - bit like me maybe.

 The novel moves on at a pace I could only have dreamed of and Beck grows with it - I am getting very fond of him, he’s a great guy and the more I write, the more I am convinced that taking time-out to write is one of the best things you can do for your writing. This is the principal on which RoomToWrite was founded (by Wendy, Gillian and myself) - it is about attending to what you do and giving it the space to develop. It is also about being in the right surroundings with the right people.

 

So, tomorrow it will be back to work. But what to do on a Thursday off in Agde? My recipe is as follows:

 - begin with a wander through the market and pick up any bargains -got a great man’s   shirt today for 4 Euros

 - buy flowers, cheese, olives and delicious apricots

 -have coffee and croissant at the Café Plazza and people watch - so much to look at on market day

 -hang out at lunchtime (or anytime for that matter) in the Café Capitaine in the Place de la Marine, down on the waterfront and drink wine. This is my favourite café, run by a lovely lady - its friendly, laid back, stylish, a cool breeze coming off the river, dappled shade of the plane trees and children playing in the square - excellent food too..

 - take a siesta in the quiet of the afternoon

 - eat fresh pasta and salad then follow it with an evening stroll by the waterfront or the canal - and who knows another glass or two of wine?  And a lot of talk about writing of course.

What Are Sundays For?

 

 

What better way to spend Sunday than on the roof terrace reading the Sunday papers - Duck Island meltdown and Bob Dylan - his most revealing interview - when did Bob Dylan ever reveal anything he didn’t want you to know ? - Still it was worth the read and I of course I needed to catch up on the latest in sleaze.

 I enjoyed my chocolate lolly too.

After the papers I got down to some writing - not easy on a laptop in the sun, despite umbrella. Any tips please for using a laptop out of doors?

On Sunday I left Beck driving west out of Newcastle towards Weardale on his way to meet a cop he knows, to help identify a body dumped on the roadside - 34,000 words (38,000 now!) Then before retiring to the cool of the kitchen I had a quick blast of the man with the golden voice -Leonard Cohen - another poet like Dylan.

So many brilliant lines - my favourite from Sunday - And I can’t forget, and I can’t forget, and I can’t forget but I don’t remember when… (or was it ‘what’? can’t remember)

Let me know your favourite - or maybe you don’t like Leonard - so favourite other lyric -ANY - I’m easy.

To round off a perfect day I took a cycle ride.

You will be pleased to know I have not abandoned la bicyclette pink despite both the chain and me falling off on my very first ride. I’m feeling more confident now and I especially love cycling the small back roads between the meadows of corn and poppies.

The early evening light here lays itself across the land like silver, so that you could be forgiven for thinking that a dew had fallen or a mist had risen above the corn.

 

 
Whatever time of day on the canal, light sparkles up at you from the water, and down through the trees, like a crystal confetti.

I don’t ever remember being in so much light for such a sustained period, apart from my travels in India, and that was a long time ago now.