A Painting Artist

I often wonder what Virginia Woolf would be writing about today. I wonder what direction she would be taking, how she would adapt to this digital age of publishing. How the Hogarth Press would respond. I like to imagine myself reading Woolf’s tweets! I miss her style of writing that captures “the under-layers of consciousness”.

Did Woolf’s fear of being judged contribute to her mental breakdown as Tess Hadley suggests in her review of Virginia Woolf by Alexandra Harris?

All writers fear judgement from some quarter. Judgment of critics, readers, family, friends, but mostly themselves. Maybe for Woolf, “no matter how defiantly Woolf invented her own more flexible forms of life (and writing), some painful fracture seemed to endure in her.”

The whole book writing process is a process of healing the fracture, of bringing to form and life something that is hidden. To seal up the cracks, and at the same time to expose the rawness and bloodiness of the wound. This is what the publishing process is like from conception through to publication. The writer must be ruthless – to meet deadlines, to cut unnecessary words from the text, to challenge the status quo, to rummage through the ordinary and find the vintage meaning. To be both inventor and reformer.

Writing is like parenting. In the role of the writer there is a need to be both the creative artist who imagines and conjures up a new world, and the disciplinarian who organises and manages the material. Sometimes the job is a joy, you find the word you are looking for that sells the prose. Other times facing the page feels like an impossible challenge because you can never say what your imagination sees, hears, feels.

Some days all the words look jumbled, and meaning is hiding out, and the truth is not on the page but in your head. Those are hard days.

Finally, the app that will introduce Harold to a new audience of readers!

Taken from 'Harold and the Purple Crayon'

Honouring Cancer Survivors in a 24 Relay Walk

Congratulations to my friend Jon, Chair of Relay for Life in Australia. Over 50 teams and 1025 participants raised $117k for cancer research.

Relay For Life is an overnight event that gives your community the chance to celebrate, and remember those who have been touched by cancer while raising funds to support vital research into all cancers.

Thank you for publishing my survivor story in the Relay programme.

I am proud to post my survivor story during ovarian cancer awareness month:

I Am A Survivor

Survivorship is a daily act of remembrance. I remember to listen to my body, and to express my voice. And I remember gratitude. I’m grateful to be alive, well, and in a good place in my life. It wasn’t always that way.

My diagnosis of ovarian cancer in 2002 came 3 months after my 40th birthday. I thought it would be the year I celebrated having a baby but that wasn’t meant to be. Years of work-related stress, IBS, and fertility drugs had a domino effect on my immune system. Doctors didn’t connect the IBS to ovarian cancer (it is a symptom), nor did they inform me about the connection between fertility drugs and cancer. I discovered these connections and their meaning through working with healers, complementary therapists, and a painting and writing process called healing art.

I was treated by the world renowned oncologist Dr Peter G. Harper. Nothing prepared me for how low I would feel after that first chemo session, but it got easier as I used complementary therapies to counterbalance the toxic side-effects. My husband and family were my rock, and instrumental in my recovery. I could not have got through those difficult chemo and post-chemo months without their love and support.

Prior to my diagnosis I left my corporate publishing job, and set up my own literary agency representing first-time authors. I started to paint with an art therapist, and found this helpful as I began to express my feelings for the first time. This was a safe place for me to begin exploring some of the trickier questions I was facing: will I survive if I push my body even further and do IVF? Will my marriage survive if we don’t have children? What is the point of my life post-cancer?

The painting process was inspiringly messy and unstructured, and I set up a home studio so I could paint during the night when I couldn’t sleep. The answers came the more I painted, and I deepened my awareness of the importance of using my voice as a writer, and creating a life that was in balance. As I regained my stamina and my hair grew back I was able to face closing the door on having children. When the time came to make that decision I chose life, my life.

In June 2010, I reached a tipping point when I celebrated my 5 year cancer clearance. My husband and I fulfilled our dream and moved from our busy city lifestyle in London to a country lifestyle in Stamford, Lincolnshire. We are enjoying creating a new life together that includes my dream of publishing my book about survivorship, and many good Pub lunches!

I have learnt that surviving was a choice. Sometimes the choices were hard but as I look around me they were worth fighting for.

If you or a woman you know is struggling with this disease, contact Ovarian Cancer Action

Ian McEwan, courtesy of The Guardian newspaper, Photograph: AGF / Rex Features

Ian McEwan has replied to pro-Palestinian writers who have accused him of accepting the “corrupt and cynical” Jerusalem prize for literature by insisting on his right to engage in dialogue with Israelis across the region’s political divide.

Ian McEwan: ‘I’m for dialogue, engagement, and looking for ways in which literature … can reach across political divides’.

Words and books are cheaper than bullets.

A meeting of the board of directors at Faber, March 1944. From left to right TS Eliot, Morley Kennedy, Geoffrey Faber, WJ Crawley, Miss CB Sheldon and Richard de la Mare. Photograph: Picture Post/Felix Mann and Kurt Hutton/Getty Images

This Guardian article champions what I believe: finding and expressing your unique voice.

…Must we always be transparent? Remember when TS Eliot was asked what he meant by “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree”, he said: “I meant, ‘Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree’.” I have no idea what that means, but I am glad it didn’t get edited into “Mrs, there’s three wild animals under that shrub”. (taken from Jeanette Winterston’s quote in the article).

If you are looking for a book editor there are some industry biggies here.

I finished reading this memoir by Emma Forrest in one sitting. A masterclass in memoir writing: raw, insightful, heartbreaking. I hope the movie will do it justice … but until then, we have the book. Congratulations Emma.

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.

Still not sure?

Listen to my Future Primitive interview

And tell me what your experience has been.

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.

Like Woody Allen, I’ve done some time on the couch.

Unlike Woody though, I didn’t stay supine. I came to the conclusion that I could either spend the next decade analysising my life or, I could get out there and live it!

Allen has always maintained that his own analysis has enabled him to be more creative, not less, which is kind of interesting, and maybe says something about the type of relationship he had with his analyst, a view that was confirmed yesterday at the ICA, who hosted a viewing of Allen’s film, Deconstructing Harry, followed by a Q&A panel in association with The Institute of Psychoanalysis.

To some extent, Allen’s prolific productivity – a film a year, speaks for itself. Either way, I don’t think it’s cut and dried. Working issues through in analysis does give you a deeper and clearer meaning, sometimes even a changed perspective, and occasionally, a revelation. At it’s best for me, analysis did just that.

But at some point, doesn’t the artist have to step out from behind the shadows of the analysis, and put pen to paper, rather than pouring it all out on the couch or, does the couch enable you to generate more ideas for the page, the canvas?

Allen’s body of work seems to suggest that it’s a mixture of the two, and that his deconstruction of ideas is working just fine!