Old Woman, Crazy to Write…

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British Museum, Hokusai

Recently, Elizabeth and I visited the Hokusai Exhibition at the British Museum.

Widely regarded as one of Japan’s most famous and influential artists, Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) produced work of astonishing quality right up until his death at ninety. Indeed, he believed that the older he got, the greater his art would become, considering that he hadn’t painted ‘anything useful‘ until he was seventy. He even added his age as part of his signature: the self-styled Old Man Crazy to Paint: Gakyo Rojin.

The Exhibition displays his work from the iconic Great Wave, to the delicacy of a minuscule frog hiding among the leaves of a flower. And being accompanied by a lady who lived in Japan, speaks the language, and was able to give me her own insights as we walked round was an added delight.

I am enthused by Hokusai’s conviction that age can be an advantage in creative efforts. Writing has parallels with painting, surely? Which means that I have decades ahead in which to keep up my pursuit of that elusive agent…

Tickets to the Exhibition are selling out fast, but if you aren’t able to snaffle one BBC4 is showing a programme on Hokusai TONIGHT, at nine o’clock. Well worth watching, or recording.

Ninevoices Summer Competition

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Endangered words, Nature

Last month a Times article highlighted the dwindling use of certain words associated with nature. Featured in a sidebar were eleven such words as follows:

Owl-light Twilight
Roarie-bummlers Fast-moving stormclouds
Shivelight Lances of light cast through a woodland canopy
Petrichor Smell of dry earth and rock that comes before and during a rainfall
Glashtroch Incessant rain
Gludder Fleeting sunshine between showers
Neptunes-uouue Sea mist
Smeuse Sussex dialect for a hole in a hedge left by the repeated passage of a small animal
Landskein Weave of horizon lines on a hazy day
Stravaig Scots and Irish for wandering aimlessly
Nurdle East Anglian dialect for wandering aimlessly

Ninevoices challenges our followers to write a story (not a poem or piece of descriptive prose) of between 99 and 199 words using one or more of these words in a manner organic to the story. For stories of equal quality, your chance of winning will rise if you’ve used more than one of these words or introduced another such word (defined in a footnote outside the word count. The title is also excluded from the word-count).

The deadline is 31st August 2017. The entry fee is £5 payable via PayPal. The prize is £100 for the best story. Entries should be sent to ninevoices@ymail.com.

Any profits above the prize amount will go to the charity PMRGCA-UK

 

—HOW TO ENTER—

Please send each entry separately to ninevoices@ymail.com.

Stories should be sent as Word documents or pdfs.
In the email, tell us:

• Your name
• Your phone number (including country code if not in the UK)
• Your writing name (which is what will be shown if we publish the story)
• The title of your story

—PAYMENT—

Please pay us £5 per entry.

For multiple entries, please pay as separate transactions.  It would help us if you could mention the title of the story in the notes area.

Pay here:

 

 

 

 

The joy of words – en français

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French, Kenneth Williams, Où est la plume de ma tante?, Petula Clark, Sasha Distel

Seeing Kenneth Williams’ party piece Ma Crêpe Suzette on TV last week I thought it deserved another outing, for the sheer fun he has in putting the words together.

I’m old enough to remember Petula Clark and Sasha Distel’s greatest hits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTlmeBBFLXg

I’d love to hear the French/English version.

Brexit can win you £300, plus a free dinner

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Brexit, Czech, Slovak, the EU, Vietnamese, Writing competition

Brexit – that’s the suggested (but not compulsory) theme in this year’s British Czech & Slovak Association’s writing competition.

Last year’s was the EU, and that resulted in a winning entry describing how a Referendum Night party turns sour for a Czech girl living in England. In 2015 it was migration, and the winning entry put you in the place of the Vietnamese minority in the Czech Republic today.

So let Brexit rip – at least in your imagination, for or against – and go for the £300 prize, the free dinner you get when it’s presented to you at the Association’s annual dinner at a hotel in London’s West End, and the publication of your piece in the December 2017 issue of the British Czech and Slovak Review.

The second prize is £100. Entry is free.

Fact or fiction – both are welcome.  The first second prizes will be awarded to the best 1,500 to 2,000-word pieces of original writing in English on the links between Britain and the Czech/Slovak Republics, or describing society in transition in the Republics since the Velvet Revolution of 1989.

There’s still time – the closing date is 30 June.

For further info go to http://www.bcsa.co.uk/the-bcsas-2017-writing-competition/, or approach the BCSA Prize Comp Administrator at prize@bcsa.co.uk, or at 24 Ferndale, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, TN2 3NS, England.

Dame Hilary Mantel on Writing Historical Fiction

The 2017 Reith Lectures by Dame Hilary Mantel (long sold out) will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 over five weeks from Tuesday 13 June at 9 am. Their subject will be:  ‘whether there is a kind of truth only fiction can tell‘.

I am a huge fan of Wolf Hall (see my earlier post of 21 March 2015 Don’t Get Hung up on Your Beginning) and have already put the details in our family diary.
The Lectures will be available as podcasts and there will be accompanying content on the Radio 4 website.

Would you like to become a literacy volunteer?

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Beanstalk, News

 

There are few moments more rewarding than when a six-year-old looks up at you in boggle-eyed amazement that she’s just managed to read a whole page without a falter.

Or when a smiling teacher tells you that the little girl you’ve been helping to read all year has unexpectedly passed her English SATs.

I’ve had several moments like this – and they are, quite simply, thrilling.  I’ve also had a lot of fun as, twice a week, I go into a primary school to listen to six- and seven-year-olds read, then play literacy games with them.

If you think you might be interested in doing this too, then the charity Beanstalk (www.beanstalkcharity.org.uk) would love to hear from you.  They are always looking for new volunteers. They provide a short training course and lots of books and games.  Most reading helpers go into a school twice a week and work with three children one-on-one for half an hour each. They usually work with the same children for the whole year.

If, like me, you’re writing fiction for children, this has a huge side benefit: you find out what your audience really enjoy reading. But the real value is that a child who might otherwise have very little one-on-one help receives it twice a week from someone who really wants them to succeed.