Category: Guest posts

A ballast in turbulent times: Soniah Kamal and Shikha Malaviya

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During these unsettled and unsettling times, we’ve been finding solace in the novels we’ve long loved, returning to some of those we wrote about in A Secret Sisterhood: The hidden friendships of Austen, Brontë, Eliot and Woolf. Who better to chat to this month, then, than fellow fan of Jane Austen, Soniah Kamal, whose latest novel Unmarriageable is a retelling of Pride and Prejudice set in Pakistan. Soniah introduced us to poet, Shikha Malaviya, who is currently working on a novel. The candour of their conversation made us to feel, for a moment, as if we’d all gathered in one room.

Sonia Kamal and Shikha Malaviya – long-distance friends

How did the two of you meet, and what were your first impressions?

Soniah:  Shikha founded and edited Monsoon Magazine, a literary journal dedicated to showcasing South Asian writers. I was impressed with the quality of work and submitted a short story. Shikha accepted it and gave me an editorial call in which we discovered that we had a lot in common. Even though Shikha is from India and I’m from Pakistan, we’ve both spent formative childhood years in those countries as well as in England. We’d both married young and moved to the US, and we have children, our sons the same age. We’d both grown up on similar authors and books. We bonded instantly. Because of Monsoon Magazine, I already knew that Shikha cared about literature and new voices, but she also turned out to be smart, warm and gentle, funny, no-nonsense, and honest. We laughed a lot and really connected over literature and life both on and off the page. I remember hanging up and feeling like I’d known Shikha forever. Fifteen years later, I know I was blessed to have met Shikha. I always wonder what might have happened had she rejected my story!

Shikha: I first met Soniah through her story, ‘Call Me Mango’, which she had submitted to Monsoon Magazine. In it, Soniah had subverted many of the common themes in South Asian immigrant literature and I wanted to find out more about the person behind the story. It didn’t matter that Soniah was Muslim and I was Hindu or that our countries were always at war with each other in one way or another. We talked on the phone as if long lost sisters. The week after, she came over with her kids and since then, we’ve been a part of each other’s lives through every good and bad moment, every good and bad word written. In Soniah, I found a best friend and colleague who is blunt, courageous, brutally honest, funny, talented, hard working, sensitive, and always there, despite my numerous moves. I’ll never forget how she called every single day after my father passed away, despite her being in Atlanta and my being in India, and her youngest child barely a few months old.

What do you particularly admire about each other’s writing?

Shikha: Soniah is a brilliant writer who takes no shortcuts when it comes to writing about difficult things and I really admire that about her. She often writes about things that people like to avoid or are too scared to write about. There’s a raw honesty in her work that is rare to find these days, especially so in Soniah’s essays. Also, Soniah’s psychological insight into her characters is amazing along with her ability to make connections that are unique yet very insightful. If you read Soniah’s short stories and novels, you’ll see how she is able to balance all the elements that make a good story – plot, pacing, setting, narrative arc, and above all voice. All her characters are heard.

Soniah: I was drawn to Shikha’s poetry because of her stunning imagery and her subject matter – hyphenated identities and homelands, displacement, the ability to sensitively layer women’s experiences and emotions. Shikha is working on a novel right now and what I’ve read so far is breathtaking. She’s really able to take her poetic language to write stellar character descriptions and even do some awesome things with pacing through images. She can capture an entire universe in one image; I really don’t know how she does it, but the result is magical.

Do you share each other’s unpublished writing?

Soniah: We absolutely do critique each other’s work and also offer suggestions, run ideas past one another and give encouragement on days when we get the writer blues. I have great respect for Shikha’s craft skills and tastes so trust her judgment implicitly. It’s a huge relief when I send her something and she says she likes it. We’re very upfront if something not working for us and we end up laughing about our duds. At one point, I planned to set part of my novel An Isolated Incident in a pet shop. I told Shikha, who’d already read myriad drafts, my brilliant idea, and her groan alone and ‘please don’t do that’ was enough to deter me but also I realized how absurd the idea was and it’s till a running joke.

Shikha: It’s amazing we aren’t sick of each other’s writing yet! We share things for feedback almost every week. We’ll send each other stuff and then text each other to follow up and then a phone call, which often leads into other tangential conversations. Soniah’s advice is often about me having to expand on things, and mine usually involves her cutting down. We complement each other by coming to the table with different literary/editorial strengths. We’ve learnt together and learnt from each other, and I hope that continues for many years to come.

Which female author from history or female literary character would you have liked to have as a friend? 

Soniah: Any author who sees through pretense and speaks up about it. Jane Austen of course would be very entertaining with her wit as would Ismat Chughtai. As for literary character, it’s a toss up between the speaker in Dorothy Parker’s poem ‘One Perfect Rose’ and Melia in Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘The Ruined Maid’. They’d be droll and perceptive and great fun.

Shikha: To meet an author is one thing, to have one as a friend…There are many who I would have loved to have had as a mentor: poets Eavan Boland, Adrienne Rich, Gwendolyn Brooks. But perhaps the 16th-century Hindu mystic poet Mirabai would have been a great friend – to see her world of devotion and revel in it. She lived life on her own terms in a world that was deeply patriarchal.

How have the unprecedented times we are living through in 2020 impacted your lives as writers and friends?

Shikha:  Our friendship is a constant in this turbulent time. Just before the shelter-in-place orders kicked in, Soniah and I attended the Association of Writers and Writing Programs‘ conference in San Antonio. For the past few years we had been meeting and rooming together for this conference, and with the threat of COVID-19, we knew that it might be a while before we met up again. We showed up for each other in a way.

Soniah: Except when we first met and lived within driving distance of each other for six months or so, Shikha and I have never lived in the same place, so we’re used to talking over the phone. I think what has become even clearer is the realization that life can be cut short and that brings with it an urgency to focus on the things that are important. In these precarious times, Shikha is my ballast – but then she always has been.

Soniah Kamal is the author of novels Unmarriageable and An Isolated Incident. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram: @SoniaKamal. Her website is: soniahkamal.com

 

 

Shikha Malaviya is the author of poetry collection Geography of Tongues, and publisher & co-founder of literary press The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective. You can follow her on Twitter: @ShikhaMalaviya. Her website is: shikhamalaviya.com

Mentor or tormentor – Ali Thurm’s thoughts on female friendship in fiction

Published on by Emily Midorikawa4 Comments

Back in February, before such gatherings had been put on hold in London owing to the Covid-19 pandemic, the two of us enjoyed attending the launch of the debut novel by a former student of ours.  Ali Thurm’s book, One Scheme of Happiness, is an engrossing read about the close yet unsettling bond between two old school friends who reconnect in later life. We are so pleased to feature this guest post by Ali, in which she shares some thoughts on the subject of female friendship in fiction through the ages.

I’ve always been interested in how childhood friendships influence the choices we make as adults – those moments in childhood that stand out as turning points and that we remember for the rest of our lives. Some of us want a large group of friends and many hanker after a best friend, a soul mate. We want to know how to be a good friend and how to keep these friends, how to achieve a balance between pleasing our friends and being true to ourselves. And what to do if things go wrong, if this fine balance tips over into envy or destructive hatred? As a writer and keen reader, it feels natural to me to look to fiction for answers.

Image by Benjamin White (Creative Commons licence)

In the 19th century novel female friendship is often relatively straightforward: a friend is a good influence or not.

In Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontё, we see an example of how to be a good friend. When Jane goes to Lowood School, the older Helen Burns befriends her. Virtuous, and long-suffering, Helen shows Jane how to overcome the bullying and cruelty of the school through religion and stoicism. When Jane is forced to stand on a stool as a punishment Helen walks past her, inspiring the book’s heroine with the ‘strange light’ in her eyes. ‘It was as if a martyr, a hero, had praised a slave or victim, and imparted strength in the transit.’ This is a friendship in adversity that strengthens Jane’s character.

In Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Lucy Steele befriends Elinor Dashwood. She is pretty and vivacious and at first Elinor enjoys her friendship; but Lucy is ‘a person who joined insincerity with ignorance’ and not averse to flattery and outright lying to further her marriage prospects. Austen treats her with wit and humour, but Lucy’s ‘little sharp eyes’ cause Elinor great emotional distress. She is a friend to be avoided.

Post Freud, the contemporary novel delves deep into psychology; female friendships endure and aren’t cast off with marriage or by other circumstances. They are complex and complicated. Now that women can choose to have it all, or none of it, friendships are fluid too. And not necessarily nice.

The friendship between Lila and Elena in Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, set in 1950’s Naples, is intense and often problematic. As the narrator Elena remarks, ‘Lila … immediately impressed me because she was very bad.’ Even when it is Lila who has thrown Elena’s doll into a dark cellar and Lila who constantly dares her to try more and more dangerous games, Elena is devoted to her. Having been dared by her friend to climb a dark staircase, Elena recalls that ‘Lila did something unexpected. She stopped to wait for me, and when I reached her she gave me her hand.’ After this one moment their friendship lasts for decades.

In Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye a middle-aged narrator, Elaine, looks back at childhood friendships – relationships in which her friends also became her torturers. Picturing herself back in those days, she says: ‘They are my friends, my girl friends, my best friends. I never had any before and I’m terrified of losing them. I want to please.’ Elaine never comes to terms with these negative feelings and how her childhood relationships led her to lose all self-respect. The novel focuses on these damaging early experiences and their resulting psychological trauma.

Like Cat’s Eye, my novel, One Scheme of Happiness, is driven by an adult re-evaluation of a friendship. My protagonist Helen has been influenced by caring for her acutely anxious mother, and by her own narrow reading of 19th century novels, Mansfield Park in particular. As a child she is so besotted by the glamorous Vicky that she does whatever Vicky tells her to do to retain her friendship, including  bullying other children. But when the bullying becomes sexual and turns on her, Helen drops Vicky and finds friendship with another quieter girl, Ann.  At the heart of the novel, is the shifting and game-playing between Helen and Vicky, which continues into adulthood.  Ultimately, Helen needs to find the balance between holding onto this relationship and preserving her own sanity. She will have to reappraise the life choices she’s made as a result of her complex and confusing childhood friendship.

For us, Helen’s changing feelings about her personal bond with Vicky are one of the most interesting characteristics of Ali’s novel. They are also a reminder that, despite how often the subject has been tackled in fiction over the centuries, there’s still a great deal to explore afresh in the subject of female friendship.

Ali Thurm’s first novel One Scheme of Happiness is published by Retreat West Books. You can find out more about Ali’s work at alithurm.com. She is also on Twitter @alithurm and Instagram @alithurm.

Joolz Sparkes and Hilaire

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This month Something Rhymed eavesdrops on a conversation between poets Joolz Sparkes and Hilaire, who let us in on the friendship behind their jointly published poetry collection with Holland Park Press. The culmination of five years’ research and development, part-funded by Arts Council England, London Undercurrents explores the hidden histories of London’s unsung heroines north and south of the river.
Joolz Sparkes (left) and Hilaire (right) during a guerrilla poetry reading on the 19 bus route as part of International Women’s Day

Joolz: I remember when we met at the Spread the Word workshop, (which focussed on building confidence to read poetry to an audience), that I was impressed with the stillness of your stance when you read and the economy of your words. In comparison, I found it difficult to stay still and my poems seemed more wordy. I wish I’d known then that our differing styles, on and off the page, would complement each other so well. I would’ve got in touch with you sooner!

Hilaire: …I wondered why it took you so long to email me!

Joolz: I had imposter syndrome – you were a real writer, with books out, and I hadn’t been published yet.

Hilaire: But you’d been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize!  The poem you read at the workshop, about Uluru, really struck me. The percussive quality, the rhythm… but most impressively, it dared to address the racism at Australia’s heart. Something I, as a white Australian, had never had the courage to tackle in my writing. I really admire this about you – you don’t shy away from difficult issues.

Joolz: The political nature of your poem impressed me too, tackling the subject of refugees from the perspective of schoolgirls learning French.

Hilaire: Merci! When you got in touch and suggested we go to an open mic poetry event I was peri-menopausal. Too old, I thought, to make new friends. Thankfully I was wrong. Our friendship blossomed as we egged each other on to put into practice what we’d learnt at the workshop. You seemed a natural performer, dynamic and totally at ease with a microphone – unlike me. It was ages before I realised that, like me, you feel sick to the stomach before a reading.

Joolz: I used to be the front woman for a band, but there’s something more exposed about reading poetry – and I often want to run away beforehand! Performing together has been a wonderful way to combat nerves. Once we’re in the spotlight we fly! I think that’s because we feel passionately that we have something to say, and love to feel the human connection.

Hilaire: After about a year of giving each other writing prompts, it seemed a natural progression to do a project together. I’ve got fond memories of meeting on Saturdays to thrash out ideas over coffee and cake. It soon became clear that we share a passion for London and Feminism. Deciding to write about women in our different local areas suddenly clicked into place. Back then, I was already writing with my partner under a joint pseudonym, so I knew I wanted to write as ‘me’ for our book, rather than co-author poems.

Joolz: Which felt right to me too. I think we would have found it hard to co-author poems at the beginning of our writing friendship. We were so polite giving feedback in case we hurt each other’s feelings! It wasn’t until our mentor Jacqueline Saphra encouraged us to give proper feedback, that we started editing each other’s work in the way we would our own. Final approval stays firmly with the author of the poem though. Working on a collection together has taught me lots. I feel my writing has matured, and my critical eye has sharpened.

‘Mary Kinglsey Arrives Without a Husband’ (left), is by Joolz Sparkes, who says: It’s now commonplace for women in many parts of the world to travel alone, wheelie case in hand. But for explorer Mary Kingsley the act of solo travel was an effrontery to society. I was drawn to her complex and lively character – independent, humanitarian, and driven to move freely, unhampered.

‘Lady Cyclist’ (right), is by Hilaire, who says: As someone who’s found confidence and a sense of freedom through cycling, I was fascinated to discover that more than a century ago Victorian ladies had flocked to Battersea Park to practice what was then regarded as a rather risqué activity for women.

Hilaire: Me too. We’ve learnt so much about each other as people too, including who’s best at dealing with spreadsheets, and who has enough nerve to start conversations with event organisers and booksellers! Our working relationship is truly an equal partnership. I realised early on how important fairness is to you.

Joolz: …I really struggle with the unfairness of life! So I try to bring fairness into everything I do. You do too – in a quieter way. I’m definitely the louder one! The universe did the right thing when it pushed us together on that workshop.

Joolz Sparkes, a member of the collective Malika’s Poetry Kitchen, has featured at Ledbury Poetry Festival and was a TFL Poet in Residence at Leicester Square tube station. She has been shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize, Cinnamon Press and Live Cannon pamphlet competitions. 

Hilaire grew up in Melbourne but has lived in London most of her adult life. Her novel Hearts on Ice was published by Serpent’s Tail in 2000, and in 2010 a selection of her poems featured in Triptych Poets: Issue One (Blemish Books, Australia).

Joolz Sparkes and Hilaire are co-authors of London Undercurrents published by Holland Park Press.

Betweenity, Friendship Across Miles and the Making of Mary Taylor’s Graphic Biography

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Rae Joyce got in touch to tell us that she shared our fascination with Mary Taylor, the radical classmate who pushed Charlotte Brontë to earn her living by the pen. We were keen to learn more – not least since, like Taylor, Joyce is a Yorkshire woman living in New Zealand.

I drew Mary Taylor – in truth, she drew me to her.

109 port nicholson image ref As if a great planet fell out of the sky

In early 2016, I was sitting at the kitchen table with my partner batting around ideas for a project in which I could reconcile both of my hemispheres: Yorkshire and Aotearoa. As an English woman in New Zealand, I occupy a position of privilege that doesn’t sit comfortably with my working-class roots. I had always considered myself an underdog in the UK. But I’d recently finished co-editing Three Words, An Anthology of Aotearoa Women’s Comics (Beatnik), a book that sought to redress the erasure of women’s comics history in New Zealand, which forced me to acknowledge the link between comics and colonialism in Aotearoa. The book, and my essay included in it, was something of a stick to the wasps’ nest of the dominant culture of New Zealand comics. My partner, Māori poet Robert Sullivan, a former librarian, knew better than most what I was trying to achieve when he said, “Didn’t Charlotte Brontë have a friend who lived in New Zealand?”

I had read Jane Eyre in my teens and still had my copy. I put it in the laundry room where I had a small school desk and opened my laptop. Although I had a copy of Shirley, I hadn’t read it, so hadn’t yet encountered Rose and her family whose depictions Charlotte drew from Taylor and her family. But as I accumulated Brontë biographies and articles, an outline emerged of a woman I felt a strong pull to make out. Only one academic biography of Taylor had been published, and while I waited for a copy to arrive in the post, I began to draw.

For as long as I can remember, as well as writing, I have drawn and painted. I grew up in a small South Yorkshire mining town, until I didn’t. Which is to say, when the pits were closed, the pit head gear demolished and slag heaps overplanted the way kids scribble to hide their mistakes, I grew up on the edge of a ground-down town, cut off from all but a few houses by the new by-pass road that meant nobody had to drive through the place. At night, I would look out over the whips of birch at the brown-orange haze of streetlights above and the terraces silhouetted against them and wonder why the terrace I lived in was all on its own. Stories were my imaginative escape in lieu of the real thing.

It was a shift in circumstances that drove Taylor to Te Whanganui-a-Tara, as Wellington was known to Māori before Pākehā/Europeans arrived. After the death of her father, the family woollen mill passed to her eldest brother, and with it, her home. Taylor’s father had taught her never to marry for money, encouraging her in the belief that would underpin her writing: women must work. She differed from her best friend Charlotte in that she did not pay heed to social mores that considered work for women to be degrading – she referred to the working-classes as an example for the equality that could exist between the sexes. And by working and living independent of men, Taylor lived by her words. She set sail alone. But she maintained her friendship by letter.

Like Taylor, I travelled to New Zealand to improve my circumstances and to write. I have lived in Auckland almost as long as Taylor lived in Wellington, during which time I have corresponded with my best friend via letter. When my research for Taylor’s biography took me to New York in February 2017, I met my own Brontë in person for the first time.

Unlike the real Charlotte Brontë, Loredana Tiron-Pandit migrated, from Romania to Massachusetts. She is no coward. She is also the best supporter and encouragement a woman could have, and she never baulks from telling me what she thinks (Taylor would have loved her). She also helped me draft the copy of my graphic biography with text boxes that resemble torn fragments of Taylor and Brontë’s letters, because she is brilliant at all things ‘computer’ and I am a Luddite. (Taylor had a lot of sympathy for the Luddites. What an amiable bunch we four lasses would have made!).

As I pored over Taylor’s correspondence with Brontë I could not help but reflect on the letters – proper old fashioned paper letters – I had shared with Lori, how she was my first reader; how much I valued her honest opinion; how much I had come to rely on her and looked forward to her letters the way Taylor did – my driveway is no Mount Victoria, but I climb it with no less enthusiasm to check the mail box! My friendship with Lori was my first port of call for answering my questions of ‘How would Mary feel?’ Always at a distance, always waiting for a reply. And the satisfaction of handling the paper and reading the words in my friend’s own hand – Lori was never far from my thoughts as I shaped my book.144 gomersal brier hall image ref I can hardly explain to you the queer feeling of living...

And this is how my thoughts ran throughout the whole process of researching and drawing then inking the book; it wasn’t me finding out about Taylor, it was me and Lori talking to Charlotte and Mary. Sometimes I confused us. Sometimes I wanted to shake Taylor for her part in colonising Aotearoa. And once, in the Brontë Parsonage Library, I called Brontë a bitch. Taylor found the process messed with her head. Concerned for her health, she wrote to Brontë afraid she would slip into a state of “betweenity”. Body in New Zealand, head in Yorkshire.

I empathised.

Writing as Rae Joyce, Rachel J Fenton co-edited Three Words, An Anthology of Aotearoa Women’s Comics(Beatnik, 2016) and her participation in the NZ Book Council Graphic Novelist Exchange Residency in Association with the Publishers Association of NZ and the Taipei International Book Exhibition resulted in Island to Island, a Graphic Exchange between Taiwan and New Zealand(Dala/Upstart Press). Winner of the Auckland University of Technology Graphic Fiction Prize, Rachel is currently looking for a publisher for her graphic biography of Mary Taylor, Charlotte Brontë’s best friend, which she researched and drew with arts grant funding from Creative New Zealand.

Edited by Clêr Lewis.Clêr has an MA in creative writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is  working on her first novel.

If you too have an idea for a future Something Rhymed post, please do get in touch. You can find out more about what we are looking for here.

For me she is not dead: playwright Julia Pascal on war correspondent Martha Gellhorn

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In the lead-up to Julia Pascal’s new play Blueprint Medea, running at London’s Finborough Theatre from 21 May to 8 June, she lets us into the secret influence of Martha Gellhorn on its most powerful scene.

Some of you might remember that Pascal reviewed our book A Secret Sisterhood: The hidden friendships of Austen, Brontë, Eliot and Woolf for The Financial Times, calling it ‘an exceptional act of literary espionage’. We were delighted to receive this endorsement from a writer whose stage plays we had long admired for their daring representations of female friendship.

It is a particular pleasure, therefore, to welcome Pascal to Something Rhymed.

Who has been my most important female literary friend?

Martha Gellhorn, in later life.

Martha Gellhorn.

It was 1990. I was writing a drama about the Nuremberg Trials. Someone told me Martha Gellhorn had attended them. I knew of her fame as the most important female war journalist of her time but I had no idea that she had seen the architects and perpetrators of the ‘Final Solution’.

I called her, introduced myself and asked her to lunch. I don’t lunch, she told me, I drink.

She invited me to her Eton Square apartment. Everything was white. The sofa, the carpet, her sleek hairstyle.  She immediately harangued me about my wild curls. Can’t you do something with your hair?  We drank whisky. She smoked. She spoke about war, travelling, writing. And, of course, the man she hated being associated with, Ernest Hemingway. After a few meetings, she told me that Hemingway was a lousy lover.  She talked about marriage as a terrible idea. Don’t. You end up quarrelling about the gas bills.

Gellhorn would send me postcards in those days when letters were written and stamps were bought, and I saw her intermittently as I was conducting my own difficult love affair with a man in France.  Yes, we did marry. No, we did not quarrel about the gas bills.

But in other ways I followed her lead. What did she teach me? There were forty years between us. I saw a woman who was unafraid of offending. I saw a woman in her eighties still madly in love with the craft of writing even though her sight was limited by macular degeneration. I learned from others who knew her that she was both feared and admired, and I liked her say-it-as-it-is attitude.

Julia Pascal in the early 1990s, around the time when she first met Martha Gellhorn.

In my new play Blueprint Medea, there is an unexpected female friendship. Set today, Medea, a Kurdish soldier flees imprisonment in Turkey and arrives in Heathrow on a forged passport. She works illegally as a cleaner in a gym where she meets Jason-Mohammed, the son of an Iraqi taxi-driver.  They have a similar Muslim background but their cultures and philosophies are different.  Medea, a Kurdish Muslim, has become politicised by the PKK.  She is an atheist and a feminist. Jason believes himself to be a secular Londoner but, during the action of the play, is sucked back into conservative Middle Eastern values.

When his father forces him to marry his cousin Glauke, Jason is made to believe that Medea, as a Kurd, is the ‘wrong tribe’.  Euripides’ play Medea kills Glauke by sending her a poisoned wedding dress. In my version, Medea deflowers Glauke and, in doing so, suggests that she is freeing her from the strictures of Islamic patriarchy. By placing her finger in Glauke’s vagina is Medea committing violence or freeing Glauke from the Islamic marriage market?

Did meeting Gellhorn provoke me to write this unusual scene?

Gellhorn and I did once connect in the most visceral of ways. I was at her apartment once when I felt menstrual blood seeping through my skirt. I excused myself. But before I could finish cleaning myself up, Gellhorn was forcing me out of her bathroom. Making straight for the toilet, she fished out the tiny offending tampon. As I looked on from the hall, it struck me as extraordinary that the great war correspondent was touching the tampon that had just been inside me, that she was plunging her hand into the essence of my womb.

Her aggressive yet liberating act did not mark the end of our friendship. The last of her communiqués was Come over and tell me how your career is going.

I was busy with a production and did not reply. I did not realise this was her last postcard to me. I did not know that she had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. It was years after her death that I learned this command was her way of organising goodbyes to friends before her carefully planned suicide.

No longer would I go over to her white flat, taking with me packets of smoked salmon – there was never food in her apartment. No longer would I see her watch television and shout at the injustices of the world or hear about her snorkelling in Eilat with her brother. Until long after her death, I didn’t even know that, like me, she was Jewish. Why did she never mention that?

I was brave when I met Gellhorn: her influence has made me braver. This has led to a kind of wildness in my writing of female friendships. I like to think that Gellhorn would have enjoyed Blueprint Medea and the two huge female characters I have created. I wish she were still alive to be there on the first night.

She would tell me that women don’t behave that way. She was no feminist and female solidarity was not her world. And yet, because of our friendship, my impulse to write strong female characters has intensified.

For me she is not dead.

Julia Pascal is a playwright and theatre director. She was the first woman director at the National Theatre with her adaptation of Dorothy Parker’s prose and poems in the Platform Performance Men Seldom Make Passes. She has been produced in the UK and internationally and is published by Oberon Books. In 2016 she completed her PhD at the University of York. She is a Research Fellow at King’s College, London University. Currently she is researching a new play on a meeting between American philosopher Hannah Arendt and German-Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon in France 1940.

You can book tickets for Blueprint Medea via London’s Finborough Theatre, where it will be running from 21 May to 8 June. We’ve already got our tickets, so do say hello if you spot us there.

If you too have an idea for a future Something Rhymed post, please do get in touch. You can find out more about what we are looking for here.

 

 

 

Honouring My Friend: Rebecca Mascull remembers Vanessa Lafaye

Published on by Emily Midorikawa2 Comments

Today we’re delighted to bring you an interview with Rebecca Mascull, talking about her friendship with the late Vanessa Lafaye. Writers Rebecca and Vanessa first became acquainted by reading each other’s novels. They then connected via social media and soon became firm friends. When Vanessa passed away in 2018, her final book Miss Marley – a prequel to the Dickens classic A Christmas Carol – remained unfinished, and so Rebecca completed it for her friend.

Authors and friends – Vanessa Lafaye (left) and Rebecca Mascull

Both you and Vanessa Lafaye were members of The Prime Writers, a group set up by novelist Antonia Honeywell for writers who published their first book after the age of 40. How did this shared experience affect your friendship and your approach to the publishing industry?

This writers’ collective has become incredibly important to me, as I know it did to Vanessa too. It was the first time in my career (and perhaps even my life?!) when I felt I had finally found my tribe. Here was a group of writers, all around the same age as me or older, all around the same points in our careers, who had started out starry-eyed and naïve and were very quickly learning that the writing business was pretty damn hard on writers, particularly financially. We were there to celebrate each other’s triumphs and commiserate when things didn’t go so well.

We chat everyday via a Facebook group and there is implicit trust there, that we can have a rant and it won’t go further, that we can crow about each other’s good fortune and won’t be seen as being smug! It’s invaluable to a writer, I feel, because so much of what we do is done alone in a room. I have met some of my greatest friends through this group and I’ll always be grateful to it. Also, we make each other laugh a lot, which is always good!

We read that when you were approached to finish Vanessa’s book, you said yes straight away. When you actually sat down to work, how did you find the writing? Were there any particular joys, or challenges? And what did the process of finishing entail? Writing extra chapters? Editing the rest of the draft?

You’re quite right, I did say yes straight away. I knew I would do it, that it was my honour to do it for my friend. When I sat down to write, I had already read through Vanessa’s section and scribbled a few ideas on how I thought the story should end. These were discussed with HarperCollins and agreed upon. So, I did a chapter plan first and then started writing the final chapters.

I wrote the whole lot in a few days. It really did pour out. I didn’t need to think about it too much while writing, as I’d already done the thinking in the planning. It was almost stream of consciousness. I do usually write quite speedily but this was particularly quick for me. I think, looking back, I was in just the right head-space for it at that particular moment. Our editor at HarperCollins, Kate Mills, was quite clear from the beginning that she felt nothing should be changed in Vanessa’s section and I totally agreed. All we did was tweak a couple of very minor details that needed amending, but other than that, it remained largely untouched.

When we were writing our own book A Secret Sisterhood, we were conscious of the need to ensure a single writer’s voice throughout the text. If we had read Miss Marley knowing nothing of its publication history, we would never have guessed that the author’s pen had changed hands part way through. What did you do as a writer to achieve this level of consistency?

Ah, that’s wonderful to hear! I know I’ve done my job if a reader feels that way. Thank you. When I first read through Vanessa’s section, I made lots of notes on her style of writing: imagery she used, sentence structure she preferred, key words and phrases that needed to come up again in the final section. I noticed something she and I had talked about in the past – our styles were actually quite similar already. That’s probably one of the reasons I was asked to do this.

I decided early on not to obsess over the style and analyse as I was going along, as that would be detrimental to the flow. I wanted to simply write it and worry about style later. As it happened, once I’d finished and read back through it, I felt that very little needed to change. And my editor agreed. I’ve never had so little editing done on something I’ve written in my whole career. Extraordinary really. But it was, in every way, an extraordinary thing to be asked to do.

How did your relationship with the memory of Vanessa, and also perhaps your feelings about Charles Dickens, change as a result of working on Miss Marley?

It was a lovely experience but it was bittersweet, of course. I felt very close to her during the writing and then when I’d finished, I had the usual writer’s grief of leaving that world behind, but I also felt the loss of having to leave Vanessa behind too and that was very sad. It was a privilege, though, to have lived inside her head for a few weeks while writing those chapters, as well as to walk through Dickens’s world, one of our favourite authors. So, all in all, it really was a joy to do, as I’m sure it was for Vanessa too.

The moment I finished writing Miss Marley, I felt closer to Vanessa than ever and yet, in that same moment, felt her absence more than ever. I’ll never forget doing it and I’ll always be grateful to have been asked. I’ve no idea if she’d have liked my ending or not, but the key thing was to do what I felt was right and also to allow her final work to be completed. It really was a team effort; HarperCollins did a beautiful job of the design, and the illustrations – based on Vanessa’s own – were super too. Now it’s done, it’s just wonderful to see the finished book out there in the world, Vanessa’s story charming readers everywhere.

In addition to Miss Marley, Vanessa Lafaye is the author of At First Light and Summertime, which was a Richard and Judy Book Club choice in 2015 and was shortlisted for the Historical Writers Award. Vanessa passed away in 2018.

Rebecca Mascull is the author of three novels, including The Wild Air, which made the Not the Booker longlist in 2017. She also writes historical sagas under the name Mollie Walton, and is the author of The Daughters of Ironbridge, forthcoming in 2019. You can follow Rebecca on Instagram @beccamascull and on Twitter @rebeccamascull.

Vicky Grut and Kathy Page: Writer friends with the long view

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Last month, we were delighted to feature Vicky Grut’s post on the literary friendship between Beryl Bainbridge and Bernice Rubens. Today, to mark the occasion of Vicky’s debut short story collection, Live Show, Drink Included, we bring you a guest post by Vicky and her own friend Kathy Page, author of the recently published novel Dear Evelyn.

Vicky Grut (©Bill Williams)

Vicky: We met in 1984. You came to see my degree show at Goldsmiths. I remember the person who introduced us telling my then boyfriend that you were ‘a proper writer’, which suggests I was tinkering with the idea of writing even then, though I was making video documentaries at the time. You published your first book. You learned to drive and moved away to Norwich and the UEA course with Malcolm Bradbury and Rose Tremain. We lost touch. About ten years later I found a copy of Frankie Styne and the Silver Man in a bookshop. I still have it. I wrote to you care of Methuen and discovered that you were living just minutes away from me in south London. By then I had started writing seriously. You invited me to join your writers’ group and soon afterwards I began to get my stories published. But I was quite awe-struck by you and all your achievements – I still am. Eleven books!

Kathy-Page-main-picutre-HR
Kathy Page (©Billie Woods)

Kathy: We write quite differently and I like that. I’m always interested to read what you are working on and delighted that the book is finally coming out. As I soon discovered once you joined the group, you’re a very sensitive reader, and articulate too. Also, you talk with your hands…  I’ve always appreciated your very nuanced response to my work in progress, and the way you’ll read something at short notice. Over the years I think we have become more and more attuned to each other’s concerns, aims and voices, which is mainly a very good thing, though I do think that in a way it does perhaps sometimes make it harder to see each other’s work as a stranger will.

Vicky: It was 1993 when we reconnected. Bill and I were living in a one-bedroom flat with our first child. We were desperate to move to a bigger place but everything in our price range was so cramped and ugly. One day Bill came back saying he’d seen a beautiful Edwardian flat in X road. ‘But that’s where Kathy lives!’ I said. There are more than a hundred flats in this road, but the one he’d found turned out to be right next door to yours. We moved in 1994 and we’re still living here. When Becki was born, you and Richard moved to a bigger place. In 2001 you emigrated to Canada.

Kathy: I really enjoyed us being neighbours in the nineties. The living room and kitchen areas of our maisonettes looked in on each other, and early on in that period when I was pretty unhappy I used to glimpse and overhear you and your family and feel inspired by you all getting along so well. I really think it helped me to have the vision and courage to finally ditch my unhappy relationship and find a better one. And then as a result you later got to overhear my moaning and groaning when I was in labour with my daughter.

Vicky: I was so impressed by the way you took charge of your life. You decided to choose happiness. I remember your first-date nerves when you started going out with Richard. Now you have two grown-up children.

Kathy: I was a bit worried when I handed my writing classes over to you. I was exhausted and had been doing too much teaching and I felt that perhaps it was a bit of a poisoned chalice. But I think you are a natural teacher, and it worked out well, and paved the way for us to have the opportunity to teach together later on. And here we are, seventeen years after I left the country, with our books coming out within weeks of each other! I’m very glad that we kept in touch (thank goodness for email) and that we’ve been able to see each other fairly regularly too.

Vicky: I’ve learned so much from our friendship. In the early days it was about the craft of writing itself, but also about publishing. I’ve watched your work go through a creative renaissance since you started working with indie publishers like Biblioasis and And Other Stories. Without them you wouldn’t have published those two wonderful collections of stories, both nominated for the Giller Prize. Your example encouraged me to gather my own short fiction together and to approach Holland Park Press.

Kathy: I like that ours is not just a writing friendship. We help each other through the ups and downs of the writing life and we share our stories and worries about our kids, husbands and work.

Vicky: And we have the long view. We know the road that each of us has travelled and we can check in with one another about what’s important.

 

Kathy Page’s eighth novel, Dear Evelyn, was published on 6 September 2018 by And Other Stories in the UK and  Biblioasis in Canada, and is forthcoming in Germany. You can find out more about her work at  http://www.kathypage.info/

 

Vicky Grut’s first book Live Show, Drink Included: Collected Stories is published by Holland Park Press on 5 October 2018. You can follow her on Twitter @VickyGrut. Her website is: www.vickygrut.com

 

 

Edited by Clêr Lewis. Clêr has an MA in creative writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is  working on her first novel.

 

 

 

 

Hannah Croft and Fiona Pearce: Still Friends Above All

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Comedians Hannah Croft and Fiona Pearce became friends at school, followed each other to Oxford and then on to drama school before starting to write and perform sketch comedy together as  Croft & Pearce. Their synchronicity didn’t end here – they even became pregnant in the same week!

We asked Hannah and Fiona about their experiences of writing and female friendship.

Hannah Croft (front) and Fiona Pearce (back)

What were your first impressions of each other?

Hannah: We first met in sixth form when Fi joined my school. I remember seeing a geeky-looking new girl sitting alone in the common room and thinking ‘look at that friendless loser…I think I’ve found a kindred spirit!’

Fiona: Hannah didn’t seem to have many friends despite having been at the school for five years, which was ideal for me. I remember she was very colour co-ordinated – her top matched her necklace which matched her belt which matched her eye shadow – so my first impression of her was ‘purple’.

How did you come to write and perform comedy together?

Hannah: Having discovered this new friendship we clung to it with all our might and followed each other to Oxford and then on to drama school. It was when we were trying and failing to forge our careers as the greatest classical actresses of our generation that we took a step back and began to laugh at ourselves and at the world.

Fiona: I had some friends who were running a sketch comedy night in a basement below a pub on London’s Great Portland Street and they offered us a three-minute set, which we thought would be too short and ended up being around two and a half minutes too long.

Describe your co-writing process?

Hannah: It has chopped and changed over the years as we’ve found our feet, but on the whole we each allow ourselves to be inspired by the everyday and we each make notes separately of things that have made us laugh. Then we put our heads (and lists) together and start to develop the ideas.

Fiona: We tend to come to each other with what we think are completely amazing ideas, and then work them up together and gradually realise they’re flawed, and then very slowly make them better. We improve ideas and start writing from there, either in a room together (normally with tea, coffee and cake that Hannah has made) or over Skype.

Hannah: Our benchmark for a good idea is whether it makes us laugh or not. If it passes that test we deem it worthy of being tested out in front of an audience. You get very direct feedback in comedy, so we tend to let the audience be our script editors.

How do you manage the personal and professional aspects of your relationship?

Hannah: We’ve discovered over the years that our friendship is a very powerful procrastination tool and we tend to kick off each writing session chatting away as friends until we finally give into the inevitable and begin to work, work, work, usually hurrying to make up for lost time. We never learn. But I find it such a joy to have this great excuse to spend so much time hanging out with my best friend and I prize our relationship above all else.

Fiona: Yes, we are still friends above all, which makes it all so much more fun when things are going well, and so much more manageable when we encounter setbacks.

What have been the most significant changes in your writing friendship?

Hannah: We have gradually eased into becoming much more direct with each other as time has passed. In the early years we’d try to be very tactful with each other and humour (no pun intended) each other’s less promising ideas, whereas now, with evermore projects to juggle at the same time, we’ve become less pussyfooty.

Fiona: Yes, less pussy, more footy. At the same time we’ve become more relaxed and playful with our ideas and willing to try things out that we’re not sure will work, which comes from having lots of experience with different audiences on tour.

What are your hopes for your writing and performing careers, together and separately?

Hannah: We’d love to get ourselves on more comedy writing teams – even some in LA where they have comedy writers’ rooms…hell, why not put that out there! – and the big dream is to have our own show on TV.

Fiona: Everyone says it’s hard to get a show commissioned but we are still naive enough to believe in our dreams. It was a great experience to write our own series for BBC Radio 4 and we’d love to make something for TV. We’ve been lucky to be taken under the wing of some great comedy writers already and we’d love to work with other experienced comedy greats like Armando Iannucci and Tina Fey…Hell, why not put that out there!

Croft & Pearce won a 2014 Edinburgh Spirit of the Fringe Award and in 2015 they were a BBC Next Big Thing Act. Their episode of BBC Radio 4’s Sketchorama was nominated for Best Scripted Comedy at the BBC Audio Drama Awards and this led to the commission of their first solo sketch show for BBC Radio 4, The Croft & Pearce Show, which was broadcast in March 2016. Following a Total Sell-Out run at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2016, they launched a podcast with their hit characters June & Jean, and embarked on their second UK tour.

Croft and Pearce will be taking their new show, Double Take, up to the Edinburgh Fringe this year. You can find out more about their show here.

You can follow them on Twitter @croftandpearce

Companions, mentors, fairy godmothers: Alice Fitzgerald, Margarita Gokun Silver and Nicola Prentis

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When one of Emma’s former City University students, Alice Fitzgerald, shared the good news about securing a publisher for her debut novel, Her Mother’s Daughter, we asked her to write about the female writers who have influenced her own literary journey.

It is with great pride and pleasure that we celebrate today’s launch of Her Mother’s Daughter with Alice’s post on her own writer friends. And we will follow up soon with her piece on the bond between her literary heroines Alice Walker, author of The Colour Purple, and British filmmaker, Pratibha Parmar.

If you would like to write for Something Rhymed, or help in other ways, please find further details here.

Alice’s debut novel, launched today by Allen & Unwin.

You have school friends, university friends, work friends, going-out friends, and then you have writer friends. There is something particularly nourishing about writer friends. They get you in a way others don’t. They understand the loneliness, the lows – which feel so low and so all-encompassing when they come – and the highs – just as high and all-encompassing when they (allbeit more rarely) come.

They dedicate time to reading your work, whether it be an essay, or an article, or the first draft of your novel, or the second, third or tenth draft… They are by your side, even if you don’t live in the same city any more, and are at the end of the WhatsApp group on your phone. When you get nervous and disillusioned because the writing process is so hard, and then the publishing process is equally as hard, and brings with it its very own anxiety show, they are there with an ear, and with wise words that make you feel instantly better.

I met Margarita and Nicola at a writer’s group in Madrid six years ago. I didn’t know then that our friendship would become among the most important, and most fruitful, to me. It has happened slowly and gradually. They have been my companions, accompanying me through writing and editing my first novel, then pitching to agents, then through the quest of finding a publisher. They have both encouraged me and pushed my writing in equal measure.

Margarita, particularly, has played a bit of a fairy godmother when it comes to the publication of my novel. She found my agent and pointed me in her direction, because she liked ‘dark’ writing. Later, she had a helping hand in the manuscript getting into the hands of the publisher that picked it up.

For their part, they have both continued to carve out careers as freelance writers/journalists, with enviable bylines and accomplishments. Nicola published her novel and is currently working between journalism, ELT, and copywriting (lots of strings…). Margarita’s own novel came out in the US in 2015. Since, she has written a memoir in essays and is currently burrowing away at a new project. We’ve also seen her branch out into journalism, at which she is a dab hand.

From the left: Margarita, Alice, Nicola, and another writer friend, Julia, in Madrid.

There is the personal side, too, of course. Since I’ve known her, Nicola has had her first and then second child. When I had mine, we traded stories and knowledge on breastfeeding and baby weight gain. Margarita, whose daughter is on the cusp of going to university, serves as a reminder that we must enjoy every minute. While we’re in the midst of nesting and the beauty and madness of raising young children, she finds her nest is free of its fledgling.

They have both moved cities – one now lives in Girona, and the other in Athens. But our mobile chat group keeps the line open, and our weekly call, when we talk through ideas, projects, goals, and anything else happening in our lives, is great encouragement and really eggs me on to edge forward.

And forward we go, coming together every now and then when our paths cross, for some pizza and face-to-face discussions when one may ask the other what it’s all about?, or for a glass of wine and a bout of banter – light and literary-free.

Alice Fitzgerald’s debut novel Her Mother’s Daughter is published today by Allen & Unwin. She’s on Twitter as @AliceFitzWrites.

Nicola Prentis is a double award-winning fiction writer with books for English language learners. She also writes about parenting, travel, food and the English language for various places including Quartz, Cosmo and WSJ.

Margarita Gokun Silver is a writer and artist living in Athens, Greece. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC, The Guardian, Oprah, and The Atlantic, among others. You can find her on twitter @MGokunSilver.

 

No Surer Foundation for Friendship: Sophie Butler and Miranda Mills

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We first got to know the writer Miranda Mills when she asked us if she could interview us about our book for Tea & Tattle, the podcast she runs with her best friend, academic and writer Sophie Butler. We’ve since enjoyed catching up on their other episodes, and found ourselves particularly fascinated by one discussion in which they talk about the literary beginnings of their long-lasting bond. This week, they explore this subject further in a new piece for Something Rhymed.

Sophie Butler (left) and Miranda Mills

Miranda: 
Whenever I think about my friendship with Sophie, I think of one of my favourite quotes by P.G. Wodehouse: ‘There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.’ I have certainly found this to be true.

Nowadays, the fact that we began our acquaintance as thirteen-year-old pen-pals, scribbling letters to each other that flew weekly across the Atlantic Ocean, is hard to imagine. No Whatsapp, no Facebook – we didn’t even email! But from the very first letter that I exchanged with Sophie, where we described our mutual love for the Chalet School  books by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer, I knew I’d found what I’d been searching for since reading Anne of Green Gables – a kindred spirit.

It never fails to come as a small shock to me to realise that Sophie and I have always been
long-distance friends; perhaps because it feels as though, from those first hastily torn open envelopes, we’ve never stopped talking. Books have always been a common theme in our friendship. As undergraduates, we’d plan out trips to our favourite book shops: when Sophie visited me in London, we made the rounds of Persephone Books, Daunt and Foyles. Weekend jaunts of mine to Oxford would culminate in blueberry muffins and gossip at Blackwells. Many of our favourite authors were read in sync: Jane Austen, Nancy Mitford, P.G. Wodehouse, Dorothy L. Sayers…

Today, our conversations about life and the books we’re reading are broadcast to thousands of listeners around the world, through our podcast, Tea & Tattle. I can only imagine how thrilled our thirteen-year-old selves would be if they knew.

Sophie:

Throughout my teenage years, suffering from M.E. and being home-schooled, much of my interaction with the world came through the written word. Confined to the house for long periods, my bookshelves became increasingly important, allowing me to travel anywhere from the Austrian classrooms of the Chalet School series to the country-houses of Bertie Wooster and his friends. If only I had someone with whom to discuss my discoveries!

I remember my excitement when I read the first letters Miranda sent me from America, responding to my appeal for pen-pals in a Chalet School appreciation society newsletter. Not only did she like and dislike the same Chalet School characters as I did (vitally important for a thirteen-year-old school story fan), but (what amazement!) she had read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and preferred it to Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. With such markers of good taste, how could we fail to become firm friends?

Together, we explored the works of our mutual favourite, Jane Austen, recommending biographies to one another and delving into collections of Austen’s letters to discuss them in our own. I’ve no doubt that it was through these discussions, taking place across hundreds of sheets of paper and thousands of miles, that I began my journey towards becoming a University Lecturer in English Literature.

Through these epistolary conversations, I discovered my interest in exploring a literary subject in its historical context, the fun of following up literary leads, and, most of all, the joy of analyzing literature – and so much else – with a like-minded friend. But much as I treasure my collection of old letters, I’m rather glad that Miranda and I now don’t need to put pen to paper whenever we want a chat!

Miranda Mills and Sophie Butler co-host the Tea & Tattle podcast, which celebrates female friendship and creativity. This incorporates Tea Reads, for which they discuss some of their favourite short reads (none of which should take longer than the time it takes to drink a cup of tea).

Miranda blogs at Mirandasnotebook.com. You can also follow her on Instagram: @mirandasnotebook and @mirandasbookcase.

In her work as an English Literature academic, Sophie’s writing focuses on the Renaissance period. You can follow her on Instagram:  @sophie_perdita