Still: Roelof Bakker inspires 26 writers

I'm looking at my own copy of Still as I write this - it arrived a week ago, and I've been saving it. It's a treat for a rainy day, which today surely is.

On the cover, it simply says 'edited by Roelof Bakker', but that only tells part of the story. Roelof took a wonderful sequence of photos of Hornsey Town Hall. It had been abandoned and he saw the beauty and poignancy of its empty spaces. He made an exhibition of his pictures. And then, because someone - Andrew Blackman, I think - said that there were stories in them there pictures. he commissioned 26 of us to write them. And then he set up his own press and published the book, complete with gorgeous photos. What a man!

I'm off to the launch on Wednedsay, at Foyles, and I shall be saying a huge thank you to Roelof for including me in his project - it has been a true privilege.

Roelof interviewed me about my story, by the way, so you can see the interview and the photo I chose over on the Negative Press blog.

Harold Mockford - light and dark

Yesterday I gave myself a treat and drove down to the Towner gallery in Eastbourne to see its retrospective of Harold Mockford. To be honest, from the reproduction of his picture in their leaflet, I wouldn't have bothered - and the image above doesn't do him justice either. Luckily for me, a friend told me I had to go and see for myself. Thank you Colin!

Anyway, the picture above is Mockford's When the Lights Come on, and it's wonderful. He's captured completely that feeling of an English winter, of being outside when most other people are already home, turning on their lights, making cups of tea, of looking in and wondering.

Most of the pictures I saw yesterday were painted in Eastbourne and Newhaven and on the South Downs, but they're far from provincial even though their subject is so localised. They're about a particular place, yes, but they're also about place - the energy, solidity and secrets of any where.

Mockford often paints scenes at dusk, so many of his pictures have large areas of shade, or almost complete dark - but they also shine with light. His Newhaven ferries, lamps at level crossings, moonlight on the Long Man at Wilmington pulse with energy in the darkness.

In some of his pictures, he focuses for us and paints in detail only the core of the picture, and leaves its surroundings dark, or roughly painted. The effect is discomfiting - there's something going on here that we don't understand. It's as though suddenly we have tunnel vision and stuff's going on outside our field of vision that he's not letting us see. Even where he paints the whole picture, we know there's more to it than meets the eye - these are landscapes and streets with blood running through their veins. They're vivid, alive.

I wondered as I looked what makes Mockford's pictures so powerful when landscape paintings can be so emotionally flat in less able hands. And I concluded that it's not so much technique - though that's there in spades - but gut feeling. This isn't a man who took a photo of some shapely hill, or unusual park gate, and painted it back in his studio. Mockford paints from memory because these landscapes and streets are part of him. It's like he's painting himself. What's impressive is that he can reveal it to us.

Finally, as a tribute to Mockton, I took a photo as I left the Towner. I love the way he includes arrows on the road in several of his paintings, always pointing away from the picture's apparent focus, sending us off sideways, towards something outside the painting. I hope he'd smile at this one.

I'm not much of a swan but I like swimming

On Thursday my friend Steffi Pusch's exhibition of photos opens at the Ashdown gallery in Forest Row. This isn't one of her photos - it's snap of me swimming in the Medway on a roasting hot day a couple of weeks ago.

Swimming in the river is one of my most favourite treats. We cycled up over Speldhurst and Bidborough - sharp hills both - and down to Leigh where we threw our bikes down and jumped in. It was contagious - some passing walkers flung their clothes off too and dived in to join us.

Anyway, that's a diversion. Steffi's photos of the river are beautiful . I'm really glad she's showing the sequence she took for our Old Stile Press book, The Swimmer and to help her celebrate her opening, I'll be reading from the story on Thursday night.

Instant gratification

Ooh, it's good to be appreciated!

Sending marrows out into the world is so much easier than sending stories: boy do I hate the standard literary editor's statement 'we aim to reply within three months'.

I quite understand, oh beloved publishers whom I hope are reading my stories (five out there right now, and they're good, they're good!). I know you're overworked and un(der)paid.

But frankly even live lit is easier than the wait. And giving marrows away wins hands down for that easy immediate glow.

Thank you!

The marrow of a story

Last week was hectic: the usual work stuff, preparations, briefings and meetings with new clients, an hour-and-a-half trip across country to see Hamlet, a last minute rethink and rewrite of the end of story about to go to press, a whole day on LV21 telling stories - and dinner with all our neighbours. It was great, and threatened to be just a bit too frantic.

Luckily for me, I topped and tailed the week with a day in the garden. For me that means the veg plot - it's my bit of the garden, and it's where I go for a dose of sanity and silence.

At this time of the year it's burgeoning. What a splendid word - fat and luscious with juice. And that's exactly what my courgette patch was full of - not courgettes, but burgeoning marrows which had escaped my attentions during a week of work.

So last weekend I put out a pile of ten marrows by the front path with a notice asking people to take them. All were gone by the next day.

Yesterday another ten had grown, so I took four and turned them into soup for the freezer, and put six out on the front path. This morning they'd all gone.

It makes me strangely happy to share my produce invisibly like this - to send something I helped to create out into the world - and though it may seem a stretch, it's a similar feeling to the one I felt when telling my story on LV21.

It was dark, so I couldn't see my audience, and they were silent except when one by one they came forward to drop a pebble in my metal bucket, to tell me to start reading the next section of the story. Even as I was standing there in the chain locker with my story in my hand, I knew that it wasn't my story alone any more - it was the audience's too.

When you publish a story, it leaves you. If someone picks it up and reads it, it's theirs, it's in their head and even as its writer you don't have any control over what it's doing in there.

I knew this, but being in the same space, in darkness, listening to my readers absorbing the story, was something very special. I could almost hear it moving through the air between us.

And the same went for the other ReAuthorers - Sonia Overall, Sarah Salway, Kay Syrad and Will Sutton (who took the photo above - thank you Will) - their stories flowed through the pipes and spaces of LV21 and created something really amazing. What a day.

Pebble story

In a minute I'm going to put a metal bucket, nine pebbles and nine small sheets of paper in the boot of my car, and then I'll drive to Gillingham.

I'm heading for LV21where I'm going to tell a story in the chain locker.

If anyone turns up to hear it, they'll be given a pebble (there are pebbles in the story, so it does make sense, sort of) - if they want to hear a part of the story, they put their pebble in the bucket. If they don't, they walk away.

I'll report back on whether this does engage my audience in the process of telling a story, or whether they walk out in disgust!

Oh, and this is another lovely ReAuthoring project, so there will be lots of other writers on LV21 today doing surprising things with words.

Confession: I'm a control freak

It's been quite a week, with two very different highlights.

This was me on Wednesday telling my new ghost story at the Whitstable Oyster festival ...

...and this was the GB cycling team leading the peloton yesterday on Box Hill (blurriness due to me taking the picture on my phone while cheering wildly).















Neither quite went as planned. I think my story went down well - it felt good as I read it - but it proved incredibly difficult to engage listeners who were just passing by. I'd spent hours on the story itself, and almost as many making posters and leaflets to hand out to attract an audience. But on the day, posters and leaflets weren't what was needed - I did have delightful listeners, but it was Facebook and friendship which brought them along (and the sterling work of the ReAuthoring team who brought me to Whitstable and looked after me there).

The one exception was a man who came in to the pub for a drink and (foolishly?) sat at the table next to mine - so I simply went up and asked if he'd like me to tell a story. Not at all what I'd planned, but it worked - he looked really thrilled at the end, and we had a great conversation about why stories and poems mattered to him.

Leap forward to yesterday. The GB cycling team had a plan - they'd deliver Mark Cavendish to the finish and he'd sprint over the line, just as he did in the Tour. Only it didn't work out - a load of other cyclists took the initiative and vanished into the distance, leaving the perfectly planned GB team out of the action.

We cheered anyway, and hoped till the last minute that they'd pull it off - but in the end, it was the guts and risk-taking of Vinokourov that won out and took the gold medal.

I'm off to LV21 in a few weeks to tell another story, and I'm determined this time not to plan it all to the last detail - I'll leave some ends untied, maybe, see what happens on the day. This time I'll be confident that my story will thrive no matter what the audience does. What's the worst that can happen, after all?