Quite honestly, on a day to day level I do the same as lots of other people – answer emails, go to meetings, catch up on admin.  But more interesting and relevant to this site is the bit of my job when I sit down with the manuscript of a book and a pencil and try to offer something constructive to say about the words on those pages.  Without wishing to sound self-important – and, let’s face it, I’m editing books, not saving lives – it does feel a privilege.  That manuscript might be the product of years of hard labour.  I might be one of the first to read it.  And the author in question is obliged to at least listen to my opinion, and more often than not the book will be altered – sometimes subtly, sometimes less so – as a result of it.

Perhaps I should explain the difference between the different kinds of editing in book publishing.  Commissioning editors commission the book in the first place of course, with a view to how much money it might make and how it will sit together with the other books being published around the same time.  They then often do a structural edit – or they hand this bit over to people like me.  Structural editing can be anything from ‘The ending falls flat’ and ‘That character is too obnoxious/ see-through/ unbelievable/ irritating, etc’ to ‘That paragraph/ sentence would work better over there’ or ‘This word jars’ or ‘Can we trim this section down a bit?’  The next stage is copyediting which is, strictly speaking, preparing a manuscript for typesetting, so correcting typos, punctuation, checking for inconsistencies (so that the girl with blue eyes in Chapter 1 still has blue eyes in Chapter 10), and marking up the manuscript with directions to the typesetter about how to lay out the text.  Sometimes copyediting and structural editing are done in one go by the same person, provided nothing really major is required.

I’m going to publish some unpublished poems about place and this is the first one. This poem below was written when I lived just behind Portobello Rd (See previous post on Notting Hill v Hillingdon.) At that stage I was already into writing novels that fused fiction and poetry and rarely wrote free-standing poems. This one, however, was written during a week at the Arvon Foundation at Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire. Around 2002, I think. I was teaching a course and the students were mainly female and older. I remember feeling quite annoyed that the poems most of them wrote were so rural, so pastoral, as if cities and the 21st Century did not exist. Arvon’s four sites are set in the most beautiful landscapes, which unfortunately affects what people choose to write about.

My reaction to this proliferation of poems about flowers and rolling hills and babbling streams was to write a poem about where I lived. Once the poem was written, and read aloud to the group (I took great delight in this), I had no further use of it. It was a poem written for a specific purpose and moment and that moment passed. It is a portrait of a place, and it doesn’t get any deeper than that. This is why I’ve never published it.

My lovely desk is 9 feet long. It cost £150 from Ikea and is actually a dining table. As soon as I bought it I realised I needed two of them. One to keep completely clear and the other to cover with the papers of writing/office life. It takes up about half of my study.

Another best buy ever. My gorgeous 24 inch iMac. Long Live Apple! About 18 months old. Before then I had a very old, very noisy, very slow Toshiba laptop that was too heavy to be a laptop. I did write two of my books on it, however. When I bought this computer I realised how much I had suffered with the old one. I spend my life in front of the computer but I was working on an old crock. Doh! This is my desk in its ideal state but within minutes of working it’s covered with papers. A work-physio visited me when I had mild RSI to adjust my seating etc and she recommended this keyboard and mouse. It works.

Economic factors aside – would you rather live here where the houses are tall, old and grand?

Or here, where they’re not?

Here, where the houses are flamboyantly self-expressed?

Or here where they’re not?

How about a sheet of colourful metal under the Westway?

Or would you like to live where there are hundreds of deserted alleys in between gardens and parks
that are perfect for blissful cycling?

Would you prefer living somewhere where graffiti artists leave their mark and are not considered ‘hooligans’?

Or perhaps these sensible shoes rock your boat in the only shoe shop on the high street?

A drink in St. George’s Pub? (When I first moved here the outside was festooned in Union Jacks. For international visitors, our national flag and the St. Georges flag have been co-opted by Birtish fascists, the British National Party.)

Local demographic No 1. Would you fit in here?

Local demographic 2. Or here?

I think you can work out which photos are of Notting Hill, W11, and which are in the London Borough of Hillingdon.

It’s been suggested that I do some kind of workshop with kids who are out of education. Perhaps the local school, which is literally ten seconds away from the allotment might consider this scheme. There were two girls in the garden yesterday when I visited and their presence really changed the atmosphere. I think adults go on their best behaviour when kids are around.

(This is the last post for a few days, I swear!)

I thought I’d add some links to a few things I’ve seen recently which I thought might be of interest to the resident poets and people visiting the site.

Booktrust has their first poet in residence.  You can follow his journey at: http://www.booktrust.org.uk/show/feature/Home/Writer-in-residence

Poet Yemesi Blake wrote a piece on the creative art of blogging which is up on the Literature Training website:

http://www.literaturetraining.com/metadot/index.pl?id=40306&isa=DBRow&op=show&dbview_id=2323

Also, I just read this piece on the Guardian website about regional accents and I wondered if any of the writers had thought about poetry, place and dialect?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/mar/26/regional-dialect-british-english

Geraldine

I’ve just arrived back from Texas physically exhausted but utterly energised.  One of the reasons for this mental upbeatness is this photo  – it’s a scene from my notebook written in one of the many seminars I went to at the SXSW Interactive Festival.  It’s made me even more excited by the aims and potential of My Place Or Yours and creating online places to share to understand our work together.

It’s been a great week for digital innovation and literature at SXSWi.  The company Six to Start won best in show for their online project with Penguin – http://wetellstories.co.uk/ – Six writers commissioned to write digital fiction that could only be told online.

In the panel session Six to Start were hosting, I said how pleased I was that literature had been championed on this platform and that I would take this achievement back to the community I work with and celebrate.  So in writing this post I am keeping my promise.

It’s about connecting and collaboration.  During my time at SXSWi, I’ve learned more about the possibilities and potential of interactivity for performance poetry and also working with other interactive genres and specialisms who are asking themselves similar questions regarding audiences, infrastructure development and creative opportunities.

The delegation I was part of were asked to blog our experiences of the festival, and they certainly did.  The huge amount of blogging from the group was fantastic to read.  The posts included so many different approaches to style, opinion and analysis.  I won’t deny that blogging is a relatively new thing for me and it was great to be around people who were very comfortable with this way of working. It gave me more confidence to blog my thoughts and comment on others in a more immediate way – to think of the conversation and not the statement.

In light of this, I thought I’d share with you some of the conversations that have happened this week, here is a link -  http://www.ished.net/projects/sxsw/?page_id=2

I’d be interested to see what you think and how it might connect to you.

This week I’ll be off on a plane to Austin, Texas for the SXSW Interactive Festival.

http://sxsw.com/interactive/

It’s going to be an opportunity to talk about My Place Or Yours and performance poetry.  I’m going with a delegation of people from the UK.  We all come from different places and do different things and that’s exciting to me.  We’ve met up a couple of times and as I get to know them better I’m fascinated by our similarities and the connections we’re making.

Texas is somewhere I’ve never been and when I talk to people about it they ask – what will it be like?  Is it cowboy country? Can you bring me back a stetson? – and it’s got me thinking.

I actually have no idea what Austin is like, its history, culture or politics.  How do we talk about places and the people in them?  One of the reasons I’m going to Austin is to make links with pioneers in digital technology and create connections on behalf of writers as well as explore the interactive possibilities.  But I don’t think that the people who live in Austin are necessarily who I’ll be meeting.  Instead, they’ll come from all parts of the world.  The common denominator is interactivity.

So I’ve made a poetry robot… well it’s an interface – that is a device which connects audiences and artists without the artist being physically in the space.  The words are Byron’s and the technology is Neil’s from Greyworld.

I have lots of questions… from different perspectives – producers, artists and audiences.

How do you communicate quality?  How do you navigate interactivity?  How do you connect with the online community?  How do you build audiences in a digital environment?

I’d be really interested to know what your questions are and your thoughts on the ones I’ve just asked.

I think that’s it for now.  I’m packing for the journey and I look at my book shelf for something to read on the plane.  I pick up The Other by Ryszard Kapuscinski.  It’s a series of lectures that deal with the concept of otherness in a globalised world.  It kind of fits.  I’ll add it to the other things I’ve chosen to be important – my newly bought iphone, digital camera, specially bought notebook and pen for the occasion and the poetry robot/interface that I’ve made with Byron and Neil.

How do you put a city into words? Synthesising the vastness, the complexity and the contradictory; conveying the multiplicity of voices as if they could ever be perceived as a single sound; showing one moment in the life of a place that stretches back into many histories…

I’ve been looking and listening out for words that capture a sense of place, and in particular cities.  Halfway through Eureka Street, Robert McLiam Wilson’s brilliant and powerful novel set in Belfast after the ceasefire, he pauses in his alternating character narratives to spend a chapter showing the reader his Belfast.  it is a place where ‘the streets smell stale and tired [...] Time seems passing and passed.  The city feels how it feels to grow old’ but where there is magic in the ghosts of whispered stories.  It is a city that can ’stick to your fingers like Sellotape’.  It becomes a living, breathing entity.  Over six pages McLiam Wilson manages to capture something of the life of this city, and perhaps something of the truth of all cities.  I wanted to share this:

Cities are simple things.  they are conglomerations of people.  Cities are complex things.  They are the geographical and emotional distillations of whole nations.  What makes a place a city has little to do with its size.  It has to do wth the speed at which its citizens walk, the cut of their clothes, the sound of their shouts.

But most of all cities are the meeting places of stories.  The men and women there are narratives, endlessley complex and intruiging.  The most humdrum of them constitutes a narrative that would defeat Tolstoy at his best and most voluminous [...] And in the end after generations and generations of the thousands and hundreds of thousands, the city itself begins to absorb narrative like a sponge, like paper absorbs ink.  The past and the present is written there.  The citizenry cannot fail to write there.  Their testimony is involuntary and complete.

I love the idea that a city expresses itself in the millions of stories that comprise it.  The vulgar, the violent, the moments of unexpected beauty.  I want to find this where I live.

Please suggest similarly brilliant evocations of city-ness!

A last word:

“In Belfast, in all cities, it is always present tense, and all the streets are Poetry Streets.”

That’s my advice to Plymouth, the city I currently call my (physical) home. We have an ambiguous relationship, Plymouth and I.  The claim it has on me is conditional.  When some people talk about home it’s like family, a loved thing that’s longed for and easily forgiven.  Me and my city, we’re a bit more distant. I’ve lived and worked here for years and I love the moments when it makes me proud, but if I’m honest my top two most frequently invoked emotions are embarrassment and disappointment.

I think one of the problems is that Plymouth isn’t good at telling stories about its present or its future. It doesn’t know where its going. Attempts at self-promotion come across as bluster and bravado –  it just gets it a little bit wrong. Case in point: one of the most recent rash of empty shops* is plastered in slogans of positive affirmation, presumably trying to inculcate some civic pride and engage Plymouth’s citizenry in…what? Some sort of public consultation exercise.  Phrases like ‘£250k invested in Christmas Lights’ cover a huge, decaying shell emptied by the economic downturn and the new mall, open 2 years and already hosting ‘to let’ signs.

‘Invested’ in Christmas Lights?

Anyway, having been inspired by the sideways looks that all the My Place poets are taking to place I’ve decided to look sideways at my own city and see if we can develop a more, er, functional relationship.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

*the old Virgin Megastore in the city centre, where I wasted many hours and pounds