Describe the place where you write/draw.

These days I have two places that are my official working spaces. Though I often get best ideas for poems, and drafts of poems, on the train to London and back (more usually on the way there, when the mind is bright and fresh, as on the way back I’m usually exhausted by the stimulus of the capital). My main official workzone is a small starter home in a quiet close just round the corner from my ‘family home’. The family home is where I’ve lived with my wife since the late 1980’s and where both of my children were brought up. The starter home is a tiny property we bought about 8 years ago when we needed a larger house for the four of us but couldn’t afford it. These days it’s like a kind of extension to our small terraced town house. It’s used by guests or by our children (now in their 20’s) when they come to visit. So I’ve adopted it as my study/office for most of the year. The other place I write is a small back bedroom in the family home. It used to be my daughter’s bedroom and has a small balcony/flat-roof looking onto a garden space with lots of mature trees. Both places are fairly quiet in the working day. The garden space is full of birdsong much of the time. I don’t mind that.

What is your most treasured possession?

I don’t much treasure possessions, now I come to think of it. I’ve always lived with a strong sense of transience, certainly since I was a student. It may have started with studying medieval literature as an undergraduate. All that memento mori stuff and charnel houses and meditations on the brevity of life etc. And then it will have been enhanced by getting interested in Hinduism and Buddhism across my 20’s. If I have to give an answer, then I might say ‘my house’, since we all need a home of some kind or other to live in, at least in Britain where it’s cold and wet a lot of the time. And since I spend my time reading and writing and I need to be fairly warm and dry and comfortable to do that. 

These days accommodation has become increasingly a problem, what with the cost of property and the price of renting. So the fact that I now (at 61) own my own house and have no mortgage makes me feel a bit more secure in respect of being a freelance writer. It’s important to remember, though, that it only takes a war or an earthquake, or even a riot (nb) to destroy a home completely. I could say that my most treasured possession is my material body, as without that I could not be. Without the hardware (my actual physical body) there would be no software (the thoughts, the feelings, the sensory experience etc). So maybe (thinking of King Lear on the blasted heath) my body must be the most treasured possession, material being that it apparently is :)

What times of the day do you work?

It depends how you define ‘work’.  The older I get, the longer I’ve been a ‘freelance writer’ the harder it becomes to define when I am and am not working. I think of myself chiefly as a poet who happens to make most of my actual income through writing verse picture books for children (something I only spend a small amount of my time actual ‘doing’). But I write my verse picture books with as much thought and care as I write my (mostly unpublished) poems. As a poet and a writer I feel my job (and my appetite, my natural inclination) is to be reading, listening, talking, writing and thinking about whatever is coming up in my life. Read the rest of this entry »

I was very taken by the blog written recently on this site by Margo Lanagan, author of The Brides of Rollrock Island. I shall have to read the novel in due course. All things Selkie have intrigued and attracted me since the 80’s when I first encountered the Selkie Tales from the northern coasts of Scotland. 

My first taste may have come from a picture book version of The Selkie Bride by Warwick Hutton, illustrator. But around this time I also stumbled across a children’s television version done as a voiceover with stills, the voice being supplied wistfully and poignantly by the actor Tom Conti. I had to know more. It is strange how at times in one’s life relevant things crop up when topical. For shortly afterwards I came across a book published by Canongate, called Tales of the Seal People, by Duncan Williamson. Duncan Williamson was a Scots Traveller in origin. These people used to live in boats that travelled up and down the northwest coast of Scotland, sometimes coming inland to make rough shelters to sleep in. Their life was hardy and their economy was survivalist. They took seasonal work and otherwise lived off the land and sea, it would seem. They had a powerful and vibrant culture of storytelling and one of the main strands of this was the tales about the selkie folk, beings who were part seal part human in form, having the ability to remove their outer seal skins to reveal a human shape that could comfortably manage a life on land. 

A significant factor often exploited by the stories is that if the sealskin is hidden the selkie being cannot return to the sea. And in some of the tales lonely fishermen use this to gain themselves a bride, a wife, a partner. Which in turn means that the children of such a union are half-castes, part selkie and part human. 

The Williamson versions are in fact transcripts, written down by his younger American wife at the time. Williamson, it is said, could neither read nor write, so his stories were all memorised in traditional storytelling style. And the versions in the Canongate volume have a curious, informal, lilting feel to them, mainly the result of this fact, I am sure. 

For a while I was obsessed by these stories. They were unlike anything I’d ever encountered in folktales. I dreamed about them, thought about them and had to write about them. Read the rest of this entry »

Well I said I’d do a blog over Xmas and I’ve left it a bit late so I’m feeling a bit sheepish about that. Apt, really, as this blog is about sheep. Yes, the real ones, the woolly bleaters. 

This autumn just gone I was up on a High Fell Farm in Cumberland, the Lake District. I’d gone there with my wife for a couple of week’s walking. Good for the back, good for the mind, the spirit, the whatnot…. etc. Generally good. Healthy. Wholesome. Hearty. You name it. 

The story I’m going to tell is less of a story and more of an amusing or surreal anecdote. I dote on anecdotes, as you may know. I am the ultimate anec-doter, you could say. Though you may prefer not to. No hard feelings. 

Well, the missus and me were warmly and drily ensconced in our rustic cot (cottage to the uninstructed). The weather those weeks was wet. You can’t get more alliterative than that and you couldn’t get wetter than we’d been on our wild, wet walks. Webbing was growing between our toes. Moss was forming in places I couldn’t mention in a children’s book zone. 

But, for the moment, we were in the dry, warm cottage and I was sitting in an armchair by the fire, gazing out at the gauze of rain drifting up in swathes from the bottom of the valley and past the farmyard to the High Fells. 

Suddenly I was interrupted from my Wordsworthian revery by a thundering sound from the steep slope behind me. I should have mentioned that the back of the cottage er….. backed onto (the very phrase!) a steep fellside (hillside to the uninitiated), so that the view from that window was less of a landscape or skyscape as a ‘grassscape’ (how many ‘s’ s in that, eh?). 

For a stomach churning moment I thought, “Avalanche! This is IT. End of life about to happen! Won’t have to cure my bad back after all….. Can I embrace death with a willing and positive spirit….? Read the rest of this entry »

Researching for writing. People sometimes ask about where ideas and inspiration come from. I know this exasperates some writers but I don’t mind. I often say that poems can be prompted by objects, by places, by ruminations, but also sometimes by other poems or stories themselves. A story can sometimes generate a kind of power for an individual. It holds the attention, haunts the mind, hangs around and calls thought back to it. As a poet I sometimes take this as a cue to spin something of my own about it. 

This spinning can take two forms at least. One form is to allow the original piece to work like a trigger, to spark off something of one’s own, so the original piece is a kind of springboard or launch-pad. The other form is to re-tell. I only re-tell if I’m particularly motivated to do so. There has to be quite a strong impetus or impulse to prompt this. Why bother otherwise? There may be several good available versions of the tale. So why add to the pile unless you can bring something special to it by a new treatment? 

At present John Lawrence has just completed his final artwork for my verse retelling of the Wayland legend. Wayland was the Norse or Northern European blacksmith and metalworker to the gods. He shoed horses, made armour and weaponry and also created wonderful jewellery and treasures of all kinds. I hope you’ll read all about it when our book is published (Wayland or The Heart Song of Wayland Smith, pub. dfb forthcoming…). The book consists of a full verse retelling of the legend, ballad style, a curious blend of traditional and contemporary. It has a coda which is a single lyric poem, which reads more fully and feelingly to those who know the story. 

Originally I showed the lyric poem The Heart Song of Wayland Smith to David (Fickling) as one of many poems in a putative collection. David liked the poem very much and was equally (& characteristically :) interested in the synoptic note that recounted some main facts from the legend, to assist a reading of the poem (I think I’m known now for unashamedly sprinkling my poetry collections with little notes to inform the reader of facts pertinent to particular poems). I’d already written many narrative verse retellings for my books with David (The Tale of Tales, The Storyteller’s Secrets, The Seal Hunter, ‘The Selkie Bride’, ‘The Woodcutter’s Daughter’) and he asked if I might be interested in using that mode to retell this story which he thought a tale of great power. My fire was lit. This was definitely a project to get me going.  Read the rest of this entry »

I had just done three busy days at the Edinburgh Festival last year (carefully working, yes, around my dodgy back). It was my last morning and I was having a lovely leisurely breakfast in the bay window of the posh (for me) hotel I’d been put in. A pleasant youngish middle-aged woman came and sat, like me, alone, at the table adjacent to mine. She was dressed very casually in a downbeat way, short hair, jeans, trainers, shirt and obviously, like me, intended to have the full English (Scottish?) breakfast.

We got chatting and rapped on about all kinds of things: our children, books (of course), what we’d read as children and in our teens, schools, education (we’d both been teachers), marriage, life (big one, that…) and it became apparent as she anecdotalised that, like me, she was a writer. Time was getting on and while I had plenty she obviously had business to attend to. She looked at her watch and said, “Gosh, I’d better be going or I’ll be late.”

We quickly swapped names and neither of us had come across the other’s work. But I’m used to that. The number of times I’ve had to say to writers, “Of course I know your name as well as the titles of some of your books. But I’m afraid I’ve never actually read you. I hope you don’t mind that.” But in this case I had to say, “Well, there are so many of us.” It was clear by then that she was an adult (ie. not children’s) novelist and, although I read adult novels I don’t ‘follow form’. I just read very selectively when individual books really appeal to me and keep me held. But I clocked her name to check out later. Read the rest of this entry »