The third series of the TV drama Mistresses is nothing like the first or second, mainly because the writers have stopped trying to be a cheap imitation of SATC, and discovered their own voice.
For me this means talking about taboo subjects like, ‘mother dares to say you have become reduced by flagging ambition and chasing your best friend’s husband!’, is quite a lot to cram into the first episode. But it works, partly because Joanna Lumley has joined the show and upped the ante, and also because it is starting to say that female friendships are more complex than swopping sob stories over a glass of Chardonnay about men!
As women we all carry so much guilt: am I good enough, thin enough, clever enough, successful enough, that our voices become compromised and, dare I say it, yes, reduced.
I want characters who not only insight me to throw 100 yogurts at the telly, but also make me question my own point of view. I don’t want stereotypes or mannequins, but real women with voices.
I was cheering Trudie on when she told her husband that it was her baking business that was supporting them financially, and that she needed his engagement not his winging. Bravo. I suppose she could have bashed a few pots and pans instead of saying that, but her words coupled with her emotion were powerful. Her voice was powerful because she was speaking the truth.
In September 2009 I was interviewed by Joanna Harcourt-Smith who founded Future Primitive, which is a podcasting website that presents intimate conversations with authors, visionaries and innovators from around the world.
I share my thoughts on the connection between suppressed creativity and illness, and how one of the keys to better health is to be fully self-expressed, and doing so from our deepest connection, what I call our soul’s songlines.
The Aborigines knew what they were doing when they followed the earth’s songlines, when they listened intently to the stories their ancestors left for them, secret pathways only they could know and find. It’s the same with our bodies. Our bodies have encoded stories, and when we know and express these, and own them, we experience a deep sense of peace and intimacy with ourselves.
Little People in the City: The Street Art of Slinkachu
The art maybe little but the voice is not.
The ‘Little People Project’ was started in 2006 by the London based artist Slinkachu.
It involves the remodelling and painting of miniature model train set characters, which are then placed and left on the street. It is both a street art installation project and a photography project. The street-based side of his work plays with the notion of surprise and aims to encourage city-dwellers to be more aware of their surroundings. The scenes he sets up, and the titles he gives these scenes aim to reflect the loneliness and melancholy of living in a big city, almost being lost and overwhelmed. But underneath this, there is always some humour. He wants people to be able to empathise with the tiny people in his works.
Book 1 I am passing on from my ‘hoarder’s bookshelf’ is Dreaming of HitIer by Daphne Merkin.
I found Daphne Merkin’s book on a bookshelf in Barnes & Noble, New York City. The provocative title was enough for me. Anyone who had the chutzpah to write about her breast reduction, fascination with being spanked, and why she was not a lesbian was going to interest me.
Revelations aside, Merkin can also write, and all the essays in this eclectic collection are funny and thought provoking.
Merkin still writes features for The New York Times, and more recently wrote about her own personal struggle with depression.
In my writing groups, ‘Dreaming of Hitler’ is the book I recommend to writers who are stuck, scared of saying what they really want to say for fear of shocking or offending their readers. Merkin has given us all permission to lift our petticoats on our own judgment and say it anyway.
I’m starting a campaign through this blog to pass along all the books I’ve read.
Seth Godin says: “a book is a souvenir and a container and a motivator and an easily leveraged tool. Hoarding books makes them worth less, not more. An effective manager hands books to her team. Not so they can be reminded of high school, but so that next week she can say to them, “Are we there yet?”
It is in this spirit that I am emptying my bookshelves of all the novels, self-help books and biographies that have been instrumental in teaching me something of value. And the point is because I have gained that value, I can pass the book along. I don’t need to see it on my bookshelf gathering dust to be reminded of this value.
Each day I will post on this blog an entry about one of the books I am passing along, a bit like an extended review. I hope to include some tidbits about each book for you. There will be a link to my bookstore where you can purchase the book. Please pass this blog link along to your friends. I truly believe books are meant to be shared and recycled, and want to also make room for the books I’m going to buy in this next phase of my life, not to mention the ones I’m going to write and publish!
When you have finished reading books from my store, please make sure you pass them along again.
I met Steph Daniels at a Roger Hamilton wealth dynamics seminar. She was softly spoken and shyly told me she had written and self-published a novel. My publishing attenae went up as I heard her say this. I’m always on the look out for new writers to interview, especially ones who have written about personal transformation, and Steph’s story sounded fascinating: a stint with the VSO in the Sudan gave her insight into how resilient women were as they stayed at home whilst the men spent many years working abroad. She spent over 10 years working in war zones as a nurse and medical anthropologist, researching how relief workers deal with the difficulties of working in such conflictual arenas, and ending with a stint in Darfur where she was in charge of an emergency surgical unit. I wanted to know more, so when she emailed me to say her book, Bendy Elephant had been published, I sat down with her for a virtual chat.
What always makes me smile is how often writing puts a writer in touch with their own story. This was certainly true of Steph. Her first attempts at writing a book failed when she tried to write about the relief workers’ experience. As a very short-term medical co-ordinator for Save The Children in Goma in 1997, she met a boy who had spent many days alone in the forest; only then did she find her portal to write about these painful experiences. I know that Steph doesn’t see her first book attempt as a failure in the traditional sense. She sees it as a practice run. Writing that book gave her valuable insights into how to write Bendy Elephant. Often we can’t get to the main story until we’ve hacked our way through the undergrowth of what is in front of us, presenting as the main story. Steph persevered with her writing, showing up every day to the page, and soon she had the breakthrough that led her to write Bendy Elephant. I admire her resilience.
In telling the boy’s story, she unintentionally exposed in her writing the traumas she had been through as a relief worker, traumas she had struggled to admit to in her writing. Looking through the eyes of her story’s character, she was able to show solutions, whereas in her first book she had found only a dark labyrinth.
I was curious about Steph’s writing process. She explained that she meditates before she starts writing, which helps to connect her to her Divine Self. Her journey to this point began as a young girl, when she dreamed of writing but was scared of writing anything down because she feared her father’s criticism. This is probably the writer’s single most debilitating issue, the inner critic that we internalize and allow to stop us. Through her own life’s experiences, Steph discovered she had more to say than she realised when she began to write directly about the traumas she’d witnessed rather than approaching these from an academic ‘relief worker’ perspective. These stories had an emotional impact that moved readers. She had crossed the rubicon and discovered her true voice.
Steph decided to self-publish so she could have more control over her marketing which she readily admits is a form of torture! However, when pressed, she revealed impressive plans for marketing which include book clubs, radio interviews and an audio version of the book. She is also a participant for “The Next Top Spiritual Writer”
Ultimately Steph’s goal is to inspire others to reach their highest potential. In the depths of countries like Kosovo, Afghanistan, Sudan and others, she discovered that resilience is a form of healing, something she is now researching and plans to return to in her writing.
Right before my beloved cat Loomis died, she gave me a message.
I woke up one morning in bed to find her curled up on my tummy. She had never done this before. Usually she slept at the bottom of my bed, or at the side of me. Initially I was startled to find her there. As she woke up, she turned her face towards me and stared deeply into my eyes. She was telling me something but I didn’t know what it was.
Soon afterwards, I took her to the vet because she had gone off her food. As I sat drinking my morning coffee on the kitchen sofa, she positioned herself directly infront of me on the kitchen floor, and quietly locked eyes with me. We sat in silence for several minutes while a transmission took place. The vet confirmed my worse fears - Loomis had a kidney tumour. We treated her as lovingly as we could, but she died.
A few weeks later, through a series of synchronistic events, I was diagnosed with a microscopic cancer recurrence. My doctor told me that I had an angel on my shoulder because it was unheard of for them to find recurrence at such an early and treatable stage.
I knew then that Loomis had saved my life.
Then I read about ‘Making The Rounds With Oscar’ by David Dosa. Oscar is a tabby who can sense when a patient is about to die. David Dosa, the nursing home doctor, was initially sceptical, but a series of spooky events convinced him that Oscar might really have special powers.
I know this to be true! Loomis was an extraordinary cat with an extraordinary gift.
Photograph taken by Annie Liebowitz for Vanity Fair
When I think about cinematic love stories, and those that have transferred offscreen, I think Bacall and Bogie, Beatty and Benning, and MacGraw and McQueen.
A lot has been written about the last two, and this month’s Vanity Fair publishes an intimate interview with Ali MacGraw who talks about her relationship with Steve McQueen.
The romance was highly charged, all or nothing, “from the start it was either great days or horrendous days and nothing in between” and although she doesn’t explicitly say it was violent, she all but does. But the interesting thing she does say is, “I was 1000% not a victim.”
Her big sin, she says, “was to be inauthentic at the beginning. I didn’t state my case: ‘You know, even though I told you I’d rather be on a motorcycle opening a can of beer, the truth is I’d rather go to Paris.’ If you don’t say who you are up front, then you don’t get to wake up two years later and say, ‘Oh, man, am I sick of doing this!’”
Interestingly, this disconnect that she obviously felt and went through enabled her conversion from model to movie star when she appeared in Love Story. More interesting though is the journey she has been on privately to live an authentic life.
Because I’m writing a memoir, I’ve been drawn to reading other peoples’, in particular, Susannah Clapp’s brilliant and mesmerising account of her experience of editing Bruce Chatwin’s books, ‘With Chatwin’.
During my reading, I became curiouser and curiouser about the relationship Clapp had with Chatwin - she had a paradoxical approach all good editors have to learn to adopt, one that blends delicacy with toughness, and the ability to impart bad news (yes, you really do have to cut that section out because it will improve the book …), what is known in the trade as, ‘to kill your darlings’, combined with the ability to listen, and to hear what’s being said off the page as much as what’s being written on it. Their relationship reminded me of a similar relationship I had enjoyed with one of my authors some years ago during my editorship at Blackwells in Oxford. He was a a big fish to land, with all the drama and ego that came with that, but he had the goods to back it up. I became a better editor because of the conversations we had during our work.
One of the reasons I decided to read ‘With Chatwin’, was to learn how she structured it. Structuring memoir is tricky, I’ve discovered, especially when the story you are telling (OK I’ll own up - the story I am telling!), doesn’t necessarily follow a chronological narrative. Where do I begin the story? What goes where? What’s going to compel me (or anyone else) to pick this up once it’s done and read through to the end? What hold’s my attention and shows that I got under the skin of my subject, etc, etc.
I’m no Bruce Chatwin, but I came to the conclusion that what I really need in my life is a Susannah Clapp, because it’s hard learning to kill my darlings.
This was originally intended to be my painting blog, but now it's also about writing, what we ache for, and everything else important.
"Your paintings are like auragraphs. You pick up the information from the person and express it through art. However, they are on an altogether deeper level - not dealing with the outer projection of ourselves, not even with the spirit, but on a soul level. They are soul reflections".
Mary Clair Kelly, Cruse Counsellor
Recent Comments