It's the feels you're looking for: an interview with Matt Goodfellow

in , ,

Matt Goodfellow’s powerful yet accessible novel in verse The Final Year, illustrated by Joe Todd-Stanton, won the 2024 CLPE Children's Poetry Award, and the hearts of readers of all ages. Nate is facing down the dreaded Year 6 – SATS, friendship struggles, anger and all – when his little brother falls ill and his world, already chaotic, spins off its axis. He finds lights to guide him, though, including friendships old and new, a perceptive new teacher and reading and writing.

Nate felt so real to me, and we can see from the book’s success just how real he felt to young readers, too. I asked Matt how difficult it was to achieve such an authentic child’s voice.

“Everything I write is inspired by a combination of three things: my life, lives that I've seen, and things that I make up. I taught as a Year 6 teacher in East Manchester, where the book is set, and Nate is a combination of lots of different young people I taught, kids that I've met doing events around the country, and stuff from my life.”

Matt’s editor, Charlotte, also comes from a teaching background, and their hard work getting the accent and dialect right and creating a setting that felt true to life has paid off.

“As a teacher, I didn't see lives like Nate's represented in literature. And we’re saying: this is a story to be told, and these lives are important. Your cultural heritage matters. Your accent matters. We’re trying to get teachers and young people to understand that an expression of self in the voice that you've grown up with is really important. It’s about identity.”

The dire warnings about “knuckling down” and “stepping up” issued to students in The Final Year struck a powerful chord both for my daughter – who has just navigated that year of SATS and stress – and I. Nate benefits from the wisdom and sensitivity of new teacher Mr Joshua, who became a mouthpiece for some of Matt’s feelings about the educational system and poetry in schools.

“There’s an undeniable pressure to do things in a certain way, and it does push creativity out, and it does stop things like poetry creeping in. Schools bump out young people disenfranchised by poetry because of the way teachers are forced to teach it. My son's nineteen, and his dad's a poet, and he still left high school thinking poetry was nothing to do with him. But the first thing he does when he leaves school is put his headphones in and listen to rap and rhyme.

No writers write the way that teachers are made to teach writing in school. So poetry can become this fluid space where things can be done differently – but because a lot of the teachers won’t have had training in teaching poetry, it can become self perpetuating that everybody's frightened of it.”

Nate uses both the public library and the school library as places of refuge, seeking out new reading experiences. But Matt says that wasn’t inspired by his own experience – “I rebelled against reading, mostly because I was an idiot” – but rather his years seeing the book corners and school libraries that dictate what young readers have access to.

“Although there’s a movement within publishing to reflect everybody, there’s still not a lot of lives like Nate’s being seen, so I think it's important that people can go and find those stories.”

I’m so grateful to Matt for putting David Almond on my radar. His children’s classic Skellig threads through the book: comforting and inspiring Nate and giving him a new sense of the possibilities of storytelling. “David writes with a beautiful sense of place about the northeast and there's real life in it, but there's also a magic that he does so uniquely. When I became a teacher, I’d wanted to be a rock star. I didn't have kids yet. I knew nothing about kids’ literature. And in my second year of teaching, I had a year 5 class, and I read Skellig and I thought, this is one of the best books I've ever read. I just didn't know that kids’ writing could be that textured.”

The idea of writing something with the same power for children had taken root, but songwriting was in the rearview mirror, and Matt saw his future in education. Then, author Tom Palmer came into the school, and – as Matt organised more school visits, focussing on poets he admired like Wes McGee, Brian Moses and Jan Dean – another path appeared for him.

David Almond loved The Final Year. And when Matt talked to him about it after publication, he realised that after a gruelling year, much of Mr Joshua’s encouragement to Nate was a way in which Matt was talking to himself. “And David said, “You only find out what they're about after you've written them.” Genius.”

I wondered whether Matt had had a similarly inspiring teacher, but he says, “I went through primary school easily but moving on to high school, when my behaviour changed a bit, nobody really took the time to say, let's unpick this. I started writing songs when I was about thirteen, and the idea that you could write and talk about yourself came from there, not from any teachers.”

He adds, “And I was nowhere near as good a teacher as Mr Joshua is. I wanted him to be at the start of his career because he's not tired. I needed him to really want to be in the classroom, to really care about the kids. He spots that Nate has something to say, and I did try to do that when I was a teacher because there's noisy kids, there's quiet kids and there's kids in between. And quite often, kids can fall through the gaps, and teachers are so busy. It does feel like he's there speaking to the readers who don't have that teacher.

And maybe Mr Joshua is the teacher that I needed when I was a kid, and that's why I wrote him like that.”

The Final Year has been justly praised for Matt’s authentic, sympathetic handling of fear and grief, as Nate’s little brother falls ill. He draws the realities of the way in which children are kept at a remove from crises, the need to blow off steam and the way kids offer each other support in pages so deft and true, I’m sure I wasn’t the only reader reading through tears.

“There’s always been sadness in my life and I knew I wasn’ t the only one. The music I listen to and the stuff that interests me is generally about articulations of sadness, which some people think is weird. But the stuff that happens in the book, happens. And quite often, we don't talk about it. I've had a lot of emails from parents and kids thanking me for writing about it. Young people live lives in which people die and sad things happen, and if we pretend that they're not because it's difficult for us to talk about, it’s very unhelpful.

Some teachers said they wouldn’t read The Final Year to their class because it's too close to the bone. It’s not my job to tell any teacher what to do in their classroom, but those are the young people that I wrote the story for, to let them know that they're not alone. But in general, the reaction to this book has been so brilliant, from kids and teachers. There’s been a lot of response from adults because, hopefully, it's written on a number of different levels. I work really hard to make space for any adult to read the book because it's about life. It’s about grief, and it ultimately, it is about hope.”

I was thrilled to hear that Nate will return in a sequel, The First Year, to be published by Otter-Barry Books in April 2025. Matt says, “I’m never interested in writing the same book twice, so it's a very different sort of set of issues.” Readers will be able to follow Nate’s transition to secondary school and the new challenges he’ll face.

In the wise words of Mr Joshua as he ignites Nate’s passion for writing: “It’s the feels you’re looking for.” Reader, you’ll find them within the pages of The Final Year.

This interview originally appeared in Books for Keeps.

Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy

in

Oh, this book. This extraordinary book. It has floored me. It hurt and it healed.

The vertigo and grief of realising, too late, that you have crossed the border into that new world — Liz Berry’s Republic of Motherhood. Without meaning to, you have left home because “all along I had believed I was equal, when all along I was not, because all along I had been treading towards this great crevasse called motherhood, and now that I was at the bottom of it looking up at the world through my brain fog, I could see that to have presumed Empire and patriarchy were dead was naive at best. Not only were they alive and well: they had won… the fear that gripped me… was not a fear that I had experienced before, having never been weak before, nor injured, nor incompetent. I was now too stupified to find my way back to my old life. That girl was gone and all I could do — indeed all I did do — was cry when you weren’t looking.”

Competence. It seems a basic thing, but when it’s stripped away we are left reeling. Soldier, Sailor is so good on the moment when the trapdoor opens and you plummet out of your life, shambling and leaking and weeping and raging. There are many areas of life in which I am not a competent person, including — but not limited to — parking, assembling furniture, maths above Y5 level and absolutely any sporting endeavour other than riding a bike. A friend said that new motherhood felt like being plunged into a deeply physical, 24/7 job for which she was unqualified, untrained and, she often feared, unsuited and I felt this so deeply. This book expressed that panic and frustration so lucidly — oh, the mini-meltdown at the supermarket checkout! I used to be a capable adult, you know. I once accidently shoplifted a pack of reduced-price casserole vegetables because I’d slung them under the buggy and was so, so tired. Sorry about the swede, Sainsburys.

I viscerally reacted to the portrait here of the thousand near misses every day, occasions that I still tremble and sweat about, that flash across my inner eye: the sharp stone steps, the reachable knife, the road darted across, the playground vanishing… There’s one involving dismounting from a train without having fastened the pram straps properly that haunts me now, eight years on, pretty much daily. Look at a mother and you are looking at someone who is going about their life with lurid catastrophe reels looping in their minds hourly. How can the world hurt you? Let me count the ways. How bright those bloody pictures are at 4am. I’m a decade into this and I know that although the content will change, there isn’t an off switch. Soldier, Sailor reminded me how astonishing it is we can put one foot in front of the other, dogged by such fear.

Claire Kilroy is so good, too, on the rage and resentment. It blazes. And explaining, even to those who share your life — but haven’t offered theirs up on this altar, not to the same all-consuming degree — feels like returning from the Western Front, ravaged and ragged, and trying to talk to a provincial gentlewoman who has been knitting for the boys in a tranquil parlour with tea. She brought all this back to me.

But the love.

She is incredible on the love.

Would I have wanted to read it during those lunatic nights? I’m not sure. (I lost the ability to read almost entirely for about a year anyway.) It took me back to those early days: running to get nowhere, a million things to do every second, always teetering on the edge of a scream that shreds you, and nothing to show for it but the miracle of them, which is everything, but where are you? A me I’ve since shed felt seen and scorched. I loved it and I bawled. This is a brilliant, brilliant book.

Soldier, Sailor by Claire Kilroy is out now in paperback.

What To Read in Paris

in

My daughters and I had a fantastic trip to Paris this Spring. On the itinerary: the Ifle Tower [sic], the Mona Lisa and lots and lots of chocolate croissants. Of course my thoughts also turned to reading material. Here are a few of my favourite Parisian page-turners, which I shared in my free bookish newsletter, but I’d love some recommendations for new books set in the city, please?

My beloved Beasts of Paris is out in paperback at last and I made my book club read it so I’m getting a cheeky re-read in! If you like epic historical fiction, beautiful evocations of the City of Lights, strong women, forbidden love stories, big cats, candlelit cafes in snowy streets, characters finding a place in a world that doesn’t understand them, drama and peril… this is for you. It’s wonderful.

It’s decades since I read The Hare with Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal’s gorgeous biography of his family, but I loved it. Inspired by his great uncle’s collection of netsuke — intricate Japanese carvings — he embarks on a voyage of discovery through his ancestors’ often turbulent stories beginning in 1870s Paris.

Little by Edward Carey is a strange, beautifully written fictionalised history of Madame Tussaud, following her from the eerie workshop of lonely Doctor Curtius to the Monkey House in Revolutionary Paris and even a cupboard at Versailles. Fascinating, often gruesome (the horrifying heft of a head!), frequently moving and always intriguing.

I might have loved Katherine Rundell’s Rooftoppers even more than the kids did. I fell hard for eccentric Charles Maxim, who takes Sophie in after a shipwreck, and the cast of characters with whom she gallops over Paris rooftops. It’s moving, wry, brilliantly plotted and beautifully written, like everything Katherine does (I am a huge fangirl!)

It’s years since I read Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety but I spent an entire beach holiday in my twenties in Revolutionary Paris. She brings all her mastery of character and place to this bloody and turbulent era and it took me over. Plus, I learned a lot about a period I only vaguely knew about. Terror, humanity, corruption and drama - this has it all.

OK, The Final Revival of Opal and Nev is largely set in America, but the section in which rock star Opal Jewel — such an iconic character — moves to 1970s Paris is one of my favourites, and I never miss a chance to recommend this banging read. Dawnie Walton brings the city’s culture to vivid life and even features a sparkling fashion show held at Versailles.

The Madwomen’s Ball by Victoria Mas, translated by Frank Wynne, is a slim, atmospheric novel set in the Salpêtrière women’s hospital and the beau monde of 19th century Paris. Patients were subject to public exhibitions of hypnosis, and an annual ball was held during which curious Parisians could encounter the women. These extraordinary historical details inspire this gothic tale of inconveniently strong-willed women, social rebellion and the supernatural.

Rediscovered in a suitcase after Irène Némirovsky’s tragic death in Auschwitz, Suite Française is an astonishing testament to its author’s spirit. In the first half a group of Parisians flee the invading Nazis in terror and chaos, but the novel also offers poignant notes of hope, love and nobility.

French Exit stars spoilt, hilariously acid Frances, her childish, inept son Malcolm and Small Frank, a cat who Frances believes is the reincarnation of her despised husband. It’s a fizzing, absurdist tragicomedy. I loved Frances and Joan cackling in their pyjamas together (goals), the cloying and very funny neediness of Mme Reynard and everything about Small Frank.

Compelling and energetic, but Vernon’s not for the faint-hearted: Virginie Despentes (translated by Frank Wynne) takes us tearing through Paris’ skanky underbelly with a cast of rickety, often unpleasant characters. There’s sex, drugs, violence, a flashlight shone into murky psyches and a look at what happens when party kids start ageing, but there’s pathos here too. Raw and riotous. I have my eye on her brilliantly named new novel, Dear Dickhead, too.

I loved Anna Mazzola’s atmospheric and gripping The Clockwork Girl. The filth and splendour of eighteenth century Paris and reeking, glittering Versailles leapt off the page. I was absolutely gripped by the stories of the women forced to play dangerous games to navigate this treacherous world — if you like this, you’ll also love Lucy Jago’s A Net for Small Fishes — and the gothic touches were brilliantly handled.

Season's Readings: Autumn Reads

in

I have hardly blogged at all this year. I love it, but life has been incredibly insane. So apologies if you subscribe to my newsletter as this is adapted from one I wrote a couple of years ago called Season’s Readings for the Tea-Hugging and Jumper Swaddled… (and if you don’t, and you like this sort of thing, it’s free and there’s more every few weeks - the sign-up link is at the bottom.)

We’re always told how disconnected we are from the natural rhythm of the seasons in our increasingly digital world, but I don’t think anyone’s told the bookworms. My own bookish corner of Instagram is populated by jumper-swathed introverts who have been counting the days until autumn, season of mists, artfully photographed hot drinks and riotously coloured leaves, begins. We are ready to hibernate! Give us dark nights with rain lashing the windows as we curl up with a warm cat and a big book! Where are my slippers? (Trick question: they are ALWAYS on my feet, who would go unslippered? My toes curl just thinking about it.) How many jumpers is too many jumpers? Can I bring myself to like those weird photogenic teas?

A few years ago I worked on the publicity for a glorious book that acknowledges our need to read seasonally: Francesca Beauman’s The Literary Almanac. Fran is behind Persephone Books in Bath, so she is especially brilliant on undiscovered mid-twentieth century books by women and her infectious enthusiasm and superb writing meant my reading list had tripled in length by the end. Her October recommendations include The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (YES), Lincoln in the Bardo and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, the latter two of which are on my wishlist, and inspired me to gather a few of my own favourite reads for the darkening evenings.

Burning Your Boats by Angela Carter

This collection of short stories presents us with familiar fairy tale heroines and their counterpart beasts, but these are fierce and thorny rewrites. Material reality slinks incongruously into forests and ocean-moated castles: a vampiress hospitably dispenses after-dinner coffee, and the emergency garage’s number awaits the Beast’s stranded guest. A perfect read for dark nights.

The Passage by Justin Cronin

If you need a book to utterly consume you, this epic speculative novel will do the job. The world-building is extraordinary and the tension brilliantly built. It features an apocalyptic vampiric virus, so it might bite a little deeper now than it did when I first read it pre-pandemic.

The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton

What a fiendishly talented man he is, and I use the adjective advisedly. The voyage of the Saardam is apparently haunted by a vicious demon named Old Tom but with such a scurvy crew and so many intriguing secrets aboard all is probably not what it seems. If you like this, Jess Kidd’s The Night Ship has two timelines, with something evil possibly writhing in the hold of the Batavia in the historical one.

The Lighthouse Witches by C. J. Cooke

This couldn’t have been more up my street: generations of women, witch trials, mysterious disappearances, the gothic setting of a Scottish lighthouse. Take my money! Oh, you have. I loved that it was rooted in the real histories of women persecuted as witches in Scotland and it’s tense and creepy with flashes of folk horror.

The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry

I am the publicist but also a devotee of Elizabeth’s writing! When Thomas Hardy’s wife Emma died in November 1912 he was stupefied with surprise grief and gripped by too-late love. They had lived apart at Max Gate for the preceding twenty years and this elegant, atmospheric novel takes us into Hardy’s shattered heart and gloomy house as he remembers the early days of their marriage.

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

Oh, wow, I just loved this. A beautiful, sprawling fantasy with quests within quests and stories coiling within stories in glimmering lamplight. It gave me the feeling I got reading The Neverending Story aged eleven, and I didn’t think a book could do that for me after all these years. I greatly approve of books about books, books about books about books, cats and booze and this book is stuffed with gorgeous writing on all of these.

On my list to be read for the first time this autumn (limiting myself strictly to volumes already in my house):

I’m halfway through The Fraud by Zadie Smith and predictably utterly hooked. She is such a brilliant, brilliant writer and storyteller and historical fiction is perhaps my favourite genre so this was a completely risk-free hardback investment for me.

More historical fiction in the shape of The Drowned City by K. J. Maitland. Set around a real flood in Bristol in 1606, this thriller in which a prisoner infiltrates the network still at large following the Gunpowder Plot sounds completely amazing.

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff. I couldn’t help myself at Sevenoaks Bookshop recently - it’s signed, and Matrix is a talisman to me. She is a marvel and I can’t wait to dive into this.

The House of Dudley by Joanne Paul for Non-Fiction November: a much-praised deep dive into the Tudor court through the fortunes of the Dudley family. And that cover! Would wear the dress.

Amy Jeffs has written a version of Storyland for children! I’ll be reading this to the kids this autumn and winter and have been very restrained not to devour it myself while we finish our current read together (The October Witches, for more seasonal goodness and a giant pumpkin in a starring role.)

I’d love to hear what’s on your spooky season reading list as the nights draw in…

Poems for Christmas

in

For me, the greatest gift of the Christmas season is time to read. The schools and lots of the offices are closed. The weather is often appalling. The nights are long and dark and seem designed expressly for the purpose of snuggling under a blanket on the sofa with the tree lights twinkling, a glass of something tempting within easy reach and a great big pile of delicious-smelling, beautiful new books. Here are some of my poetic festive favourites – all would make great gifts, too.

Carol Ann Duffy’s Frost Fair is completely wonderful, and makes me hanker after a re-read of Woolf’s Orlando. It’s so beautifully illustrated by David De Las Heras, it would make a lovely stocking filler.

Never has the exhilaration of whirling about on ice-skates been better captured than by Wordsworth, in a breathless and beautiful section of ‘The Prelude’ which I included in my second anthology, Tyger Tyger Burning Bright. I speak as a clumsy person, whose few attempts at skating have resulted in the kind of falls that elicit audible gasps from witnesses, some far from family-friendly language and truly spectacular bruising. If Wordsworth can fill me with the desire to sail across frozen lakes under a wide wintry night sky, he can inspire anyone.

‘The Journey of the Magi’ by T S Eliot has an eerie, cold magic to it, perfect for reading and chewing over on a bitter winter’s night.

I love Betjeman’s ‘Christmas’ - hear the man himself read it here, with its evocation of the pull of family even more poignant in the wake of the pandemic years of separation (‘And girls in slacks remember Dad, / And oafish louts remember Mum’) and the seasonal cheer infecting everyone everywhere – from ‘provincial public houses’ to ‘many-steepled London’.

Thomas Hardy’s gorgeous ‘The Fallow Deer at the Empty House’ is a favourite.

And Hardy’s ‘The Oxen’ perfectly captures how some scrap of childhood magic can cling to Christmas Eve and the vision of the nativity no matter what age and how agnostic I am.

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

“Now they are all on their knees,”

An elder said as we sat in a flock

By the embers in hearthside ease.


We pictured the meek mild creatures where

They dwelt in their strawy pen,

Nor did it occur to one of us there

To doubt they were kneeling then.


So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

If someone said on Christmas Eve,

“Come; see the oxen kneel,


“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,”

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.

A contemporary poem I love is one for the festive refuseniks: ‘Bah… Humbug’ by Gregory Woods. This poem is a hymn to the allure of a solitary, batteries-not-included celebration with ‘books to the left of you, / gin to the right’. This poem was included in Christmas Crackers, one of Candlestick Press’s lovely pamphlets designed to be sent instead of a greetings card – perfect if you’d like to say something more substantial than ‘Season’s greetings’.

I bought a lovely edition of ‘The Night Before Christmas’ a few years ago with Niroot Puttapipat’s beautiful silhouette illustrations and am frankly delighted that the kids insist on hearing it all year round. Due to our – frequently unseasonal – repeated readings, I am now word perfect. This confers an additional advantage: I can name all the reindeer (and, no, Rudolf doesn’t feature) and am therefore a splendid addition to any Christmas pub quiz team. Moore was a slightly unlikely Christmas poet, being an academic whose other works were heavy tomes on Hebrew. Legend has it that he composed this, his only famous poem, to entertain his children during a sleigh ride through Greenwich Village on Christmas Eve 1822, basing jolly St Nicholas on their coachman. I hope it’s true.

Also for children (though not only for children), I recommend the excellent selection of Christmas Poems edited by Gaby Morgan (who I’m lucky enough to have as editor for my Macmillan anthologies) and illustrated by Axel Scheffler of Gruffalo fame. Chris Riddell’s new We Wish You a Merry Christmas anthology is stuffed with good things. And The Night Before Christmas in Wonderland by Carys Bexington, beautifully illustrated by Kate Hindley, is another favourite for little ones with great verse, glorious pictures and clever homages to both beloved texts.

It’s not poetry, but I have to mention A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas, which I try and read every year.

Carol Ann Duffy’s collection of Christmas poems is wonderful. My favourite is Wenceslas with its mildly barbaric, magnificently medieval many bird roast. A book as warming as necking ginger wine in a hot bath, also firmly on my list of holiday plans.

Whatever you do at Christmas and wherever you are, I wish you happy reading. May your stocking be full of books and your cheeseboard always groaning.

Please note that this website contains affiliate links and I may earn a small commission (at no cost to you) when you buy through these links.

Editing a poetry anthology - how it's done

in ,

I have compiled eleven poetry anthologies including She is Fierce, She Will Soar, Wonder: The Natural History Museum Poetry Book and Night Feeds and Morning Songs. Here are some snapshots of what’s involved.

It starts with reading. I have a lot of poetry books! For weeks I will have my nose in one at all times and never travel without one, adding to my store of treasures on trains and planes, in waiting rooms and, as often as possible, outside. My editors will often share poems with me and sometimes they are in touch with poets and commission new work for a book, which is always incredibly exciting.

To ensure I don’t completely bankrupt myself and that there’s still room in the house for people and furniture and not just poetry books, I also plunder my local library – they order books in for me once I’ve exhausted their poetry shelves – and obviously I love the National Poetry Library in the Royal Festival Hall (you can borrow ebooks from them online, too).

I also hunt down poems online, which is easiest when I’m looking for poems on a specific theme. One of my favourite jobs as a confirmed cat lady was editing The Book of Cat Poems. Social media is a fantastic ecosystem for sharing poetry and I’ve discovered some of my favourite poets this way.

I make much use of Post-It Notes. I imagine there are few people alive who have used more Post-It Notes than me.

II need to be able to touch, see and shuffle the poems to whittle down the selection. I use an app called Tiny Scanner to create PDFs of the poems I want to include. These are really important as they’re submitted to the publisher as reference images, so they can check no typos have been made when the poems are typed up. Errors creep into all books, unfortunately, and in poetry changing one word or, sometimes, even moving or missing out a punctuation mark can have a huge impact on the poem’s rhythm and even its meaning. I feel a huge responsibility to anthologise accurately.

Once I’ve made my cuts, I have a nearly final selection. It’s rarely final final at this stage, because there will always be poems that have to be dropped because they’re too expensive to use, or because we’ve been unable to trace the copyright holder. In the UK, work is usually out of copyright seventy years after the writer’s death, so in 2022 a writer would have needed to die before 1952 for their work to be in the public domain. Sometimes we’re tracking down agents or even family members to ask for permission, which can mean a lot of detective work. And I will often find something wonderful at the last minute, when the book’s just about to go to press, and beg my editor to sneak it in!

I’ll then divide the poems into the chapters in which they’ll appear in the book. This was straightforward when I edited Wonder: The Natural History Poetry Book – inspired by the museum’s galleries, I had sections on Space, Mammals and Dinosaurs. I wanted reading the anthology to be like the experience of wandering the museum, with new treasures around each corner. It can be more difficult when the poems are arranged thematically, though, as poets are often talking about more than one thing at once. In She Will Soar, chapters included ‘Feeling Free’ and ‘Courage, Hope and Resilience’ and there were often a couple of sections a poem could appear in.

Once the chapters are final, I think really carefully about the order in which the poems should appear – even though I think people generally dip in and out of anthologies, and perhaps I’m the only person who’ll ever read them cover to cover! Some poems belong together, and shed light on each other. It always feels really special when I find poets writing centuries and continents apart who seem almost to be in dialogue with each other, sharing their thoughts about bravery, or loneliness, or the wind, and I can put their work side by side. I also like poems that contrast in tone or style to follow each other, to keep things interesting and varied for the reader. Anthologies are like a poetry buffet, and my hope is that everyone will find something that feeds them on offer.

Once the poems and the chapters are in an order I’m happy with, I begin work on the text for the book. Sometimes this is just a general introduction, talking about the book’s theme, and brief chapter openers. In She Is Fierce and She Will Soar, I felt it was important to tell the stories of the poets. Many of the writers from previous centuries had been forgotten or overlooked, and some of them had to vault enormous barriers to write and publish including racism, lack of education, disapproving fathers, abusive husbands, mental and physical ill health and a scornful male-dominated literary establishment. I researched and wrote their biographies, which was fascinating and awe-inspiring. In Night Feeds and Morning Songs, I begged to include some short essays about my own experiences of motherhood, and still feel insanely honoured to see my own words beside these poems that mean so much to me.

I had a real treat while compiling Wonder: The Natural History Museum Poetry Book, as I had the opportunity to do some picture research in their online archives for images to reproduce in the book. Did you know that Edward Lear, Victorian poet of nonsense best known for ‘The Owl and The Pussy-Cat’, was a talented artist who even gave Queen Victoria drawing lessons and produced a collection of beautiful paintings of parrots? You do now!

The anthology is now nearly ready! I send my final manuscript to my editor for the text to be set. It’s always exciting to see the book laid out and I’m amazed every time how much difference the font and design makes. I’ll receive proofs for checking and I always do this on a print out rather than on screen. I look at every word, double checking each punctuation mark, capital letter and indentation. (I have to confess I’ve never learned the clever squiggly shorthand editors use, so I make notes on the proofs and send pictures of them.)

I do feel guilty about the amount of paper involved in the production of my anthologies, especially since I can’t print double-sided when I’m shuffling the order of the poems, so it’s all reused by my children before being recycled. They have created their own books to stock a library in their bedroom – I even bought them a library set with tickets and a stamp – and you’ll notice that the Closed sign is also poetic…

The Production team work their magic, and the book is printed. I usually get my author copies a couple of weeks before publication and it never gets any less exciting to see a new collection. I feel incredibly lucky to work with passionate and knowledgeable editors and have such talented illustrators and designers making the books look beautiful.

My publicist will be have been working hard (as a publicist myself with my other hat on, I know just how hard!) on the campaign to promote the book from months in advance, pitching for reviews and features, interviews and events. So there’s still plenty to do once the book is finished! I write articles and blog posts, share content on social media and in my newsletter, give interviews and do events in person and online for bookshops, libraries, literary festivals and schools. I really love this part, when I get to talk directly to readers about these poems I love and send the collection out to meet its readers.

She Will Soar: Why Women Write about Escape and Freedom

in ,

My second anthology of poems by women, She Will Soar, takes as its themes wanderlust, freedom and escape – themes which suddenly took on a strange relevance as I edited the book during lockdown. I have always believed in books and poetry as magic carpets that can take you anywhere, to places past, present and future, and realms both possible and impossible. Looking at the history of women’s writing, I felt women had particular cause to long to be lifted from their restrictive or humdrum lives by the power of literature.

Women faced certain bars to writing and publishing throughout history, and women who were not white, middle or upper class, cisgender, heterosexual or helpfully connected had even more stacked against them. Leisure, learning and liberty are key ingredients for any artist, and all have been in shorter supply for women than men throughout history. Even aristocratic women were usually afforded a rudimentary education compared to their brothers, and none at all in the highfalutin subjects considered ‘proper’ literary subjects: the Classics, theology or blood-drenched battle histories. More recently, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Sharon Olds was rejected from an American literary magazine for writing about her children: “If you wish to write about this sort of subject, may we suggest the Ladies’ Home Journal”, they acidly suggested.

The role of women was to play muse, not poet. Any who dared pick up a pen themselves faced ridicule, and eighteenth century mothers fretted that their bookish daughters would repel suitors. Women faced condemnation because, in straying into the male arena of literature, it was assumed that they were neglecting their key duties as housewives and mothers. Anne Bradstreet, the ‘first poet’ of America, had to pretend that her naughty brother-in-law published her work without her knowledge, and he was at pains to include a preface insisting that Anne went without sleep to write rather than slacking in her domestic duties. I found a lot of beautiful nocturnal poems written by women from times past – and couldn’t help but wonder whether this was the only sliver of time they had to themselves, when their large families were finally asleep. It was even more shocking for women to promote their own work… so thrusting! So unseemly!

Anne Bradstreet imagined in a nineteenth century engraving

The job description of the wild and free artist popularised by the Romantics, tramping off to rugged and solitary places, was inaccessible to their female contemporaries. It was difficult to pursue such a path when your corsets conspired against you, you needed a chaperone to cross the road, and nobody had yet invented hiking boots. In the Victorian era, many women, particularly of the middle and upper classes, were almost cloistered in the home. I feel this constraint shows in the melancholy and often morbid notes of much women’s poetry from the period.

Women did write, and women did publish. Through the centuries they resorted to all sorts of strategies, and took advantage where they found it. Hannah More, born in 1745, funded her literary career with an annual pension from the man who jilted her after a long engagement. Her independence – and freedom from continuous years of childbearing and rearing – enabled her to become a noted philanthropist and lady of letters.

Hannah More

Some published anonymously, others under male or gender neutral pseudonyms. But often, even if they enjoyed great acclaim during their lifetimes, they were forgotten or fell from fashion afterwards. We know that Sappho was hailed as the Tenth Muse of the ancient world, but we have only scraps of her writing now. (It has been suggested that a pope ordered her ‘scandalous’ poetry burnt, but scholars suggest that, in fact, it just wasn’t considered worthy of preservation: a familiar fate for women’s work.)

Aemilia Lanyer, who wrote a daring epic poem that imagined the crucifixion from the point of view of Pontius Pilate’s wife in 1611, was all but forgotten by scholars until she was put forward as a potential model for the ‘Dark Lady’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets. It seems that a woman is only of interest when fixed in the lustful gaze of a man.

Aemelia Lanyer

No wonder women writers longed to spread their wings. And, in verse, they did. From the first African American poet, Phillis Wheatley, to civil rights activists and stars of the Harlem Renaissance such as Georgia Douglas Johnson and Anne Spencer, they wrote uplifting and inspirational poetry. From women as different as the reclusive Emily Dickinson and the inimitable Amy Lowell, who tirelessly promoted the cause of poetry, come poems that shout and shimmy with the delights of freedom. Suffragettes including Emily Wilding Davison write passionately about throwing open the door to a new world for women. It’s a pleasure and privilege to collect their words and bring them – I hope – to some new readers.

Anne Spencer

It is also a thrill to present the works of these writers alongside work they might surely have enjoyed from some of the most exciting poets writing today. We all know that women’s freedoms are still restricted - in some places dramatically, and in others insidiously. Girls and women in today’s world are still fighting for equal access to education, careers and independence. Here, my husband and I live in the same country, but I live under a different regime: one in which I was taught while still a child that an assailant might seize my ponytail as I walked and that, if that happened, I should shout, “Fire!” to raise the alarm because people don’t come to women’s aid. Women who don’t enjoy the many privileges I have been lucky enough to enjoy face greater barriers in every sphere. So words of both fury and the joy of freedom are still important to us. Poets including Salena Godden, Hollie McNish, Safia Elhillo, Jen Campbell, Kathleen Jamie, Sheena Patel, Caroline Bird, Carol Ann Duffy and Nikita Gill have written blazing and brilliant verses that deserve to be shouted to the sky and written in words six feet high, and it was the best job in the world to gather their poems and those of so many other amazing talents for this collection. I hope their work soars into readers’ hearts.

She Will Soar: Bright, Brave Poems of Freedom by Women is published by Macmillan and available to buy in paperback now from your local bookshop or online.

Voyages in Verse: Editing She Will Soar

in ,

She Will Soar: Bright, Brave Poems of Freedom by Women is about to take flight in a beautiful neon green paperback. It was the second anthology I edited that gathers work by women from the ancient world to the present day. The previous volume – She is Fierce – had been a general collection, designed to be both broad and friendly, and with no particular thematic focus. She Will Soar concentrates on poems about wanderlust, freedom and escape – all subjects that have preoccupied female writers, who have always operated under more constraints than their male counterparts. And, of course, the verses I gathered took on an extra resonance during the strange, locked-down months of spring 2020.

It starts – of course – with reading.

There were poems I already knew and wanted to include. To add to these, I plundered my own shelves and those in libraries, from the small but much-loved library in my home village to the British Library and brilliant National Poetry Library at the Southbank Centre (although they were closed during lockdown, they have some wonderful poetry available to browse online.) I bought second hand books, gratefully accepted bags of delights from my editor, devoured poetry publications and spent hours online. I lapped up recommendations wherever they were offered.

As the kitchen table and living room floor disappeared under the stacks of paper and books, and my apologetic intimacy with the postman deepened, I began to construct a longlist. I’m enormously grateful for technological advances that allowed me to avoid carrying a houseful of books to the nearest photocopier. An app called Tiny Scanner turns pages into printable PDFs when you photograph them on your phone. I turned my houseful of post-it noted books into towering stacks of paper, and closeted myself with them.

I always find the process of whittling down a longlist for an anthology completely agonising. It was important to me to include voices from different eras, points of view and places, so that each reader would find something that struck a chord with them, and so the anthology would have a varied music to it. So when I had two poems that expressed similar feelings, or were very like one another in tone and style, I tried to lose one of them to keep the reading experience broad and interesting. She Will Soar includes, as a result, poems from today’s spoken word superstars (Hollie McNish, Sophia Thakur), canonical big hitters (Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning), forgotten pioneers (Charlotte Forten Grimké, Edith Södergran), suffragettes (Emily Wilding Davison herself, no less), talented students (Ellie Steel, Lauren Hollingsworth-Smith), eighteenth century Bluestockings (Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu), a scandalous Victorian celebrity (L.E.L.), a ninth century courtesan-nun (Yü Hsüan-Chi) and a few national Laureates (Carol Ann Duffy, Gillian Clarke, Jackie Kay) among many others. It’s fascinating to find the same themes addressed in far flung places and distant eras by women leading such dramatically different lives.

Victorian celebrity poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon or L.E.L.

Since the anthology took freedom, travel and escape as its theme, some chapters suggested themselves readily. There were poems about journeys over land and by sea that travelled happily together. A chapter gathering poems in which birds and beasts appeared as emblems of freedom was eventually dropped, with my favourites from that section flying elsewhere in the volume to roost. I had also originally planned a chapter which looked at some of the ties that bound writers – constraints of society, gender and even dress – which became, as my wise editor pointed out, rather heavy reading. Some of these poems were cut and others placed elsewhere.

Once the whittling had been done, and the poems were divided into thematic chapters including ‘Words can set you free’, ‘Flights of fancy’ and ‘Taking flight’, I closeted myself with print outs of each chapter. I read the poems – silently and out loud, as I hope readers will do – and shuffled the order until it felt… right. I aim for variety but also a sense of flow even though I think anthologies are as often dipped into as read in sequence.

My final task was to write the chapter openings. In these and the book’s introduction I tried very briefly to say something about the particular circumstances of female writers: how limited their social, political, literary, economic and educational freedoms had been through many of the centuries covered. I researched and wrote brief biographies of each of them, and found some of the stories of women from earlier eras immensely moving. Many defied disapproving husbands and fathers, dismissive editors, enormous families, vicious critics or society’s censure. Some faced mental or physical illness, and even fled repressive regimes. At times it was considered so disgraceful for women to publish, they wrote under male names, as the Brontës and George Eliot did. We will never know how many more didn’t feel they could write, or wrote and didn’t publish. But these women wrote. Lots of them have fallen out of fashion, some of them were ignored or didn’t dare publish during their lifetimes. Now, though, I hope they will be read alongside some of the most talented and inspired writers of today.

This article first appeared on the Poetry by Heart website.

She Will Soar is still available in hardback or to pre-order in paperback. Please consider ordering from your local bookshop!

No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood: review

in

The first half of this book is a scalding critique of life online. I have lived there, in what the narrator calls ‘the portal’, and I recognise its memes and mores in ways that flushed my face with a combination of hilarity and humiliation as I read.

Twitter, in particular, has been a crutch to me in lonely times: freelancing, baby-wrangling, lockdown, homeschooling. It was a raucous and mildly edgy pub, with a table of people ready to bang their digital fists on the table as we enthused or railed about the same things, be they medieval manuscripts, cats, the government or Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

In the novel, the narrator bonds passionately with a fellow panel guest purely because they are – and I thought this sentence so clever, so telling – ‘exactly, and happily, and hopelessly, the same amount of online’.

The book is written in bite-sized chunks reminiscent of Instagram captions, a structure that cleverly mirrors its content. Patricia Lockwood is searingly incisive about the dopamine hit of going viral, and about the stranglehold over her attention and time that the portal wields. We feel – as the narrator does – the emptiness of the arch barbs, the hot takes and the fake new ways of laughing, the tickling shame of the hours frittered on ephemera. However, this blistering novel also understands the heady rush of connection in a lonely time and the glee with which we gorge ourselves on the ever-scrolling fountain of content.

No One is Talking About This.JPG

I’ve stepped back from Twitter. I pop my head round the door now and again in case anyone’s talking to me, and share things I’ve worked on or written. I feel relieved to have stopped scrolling for – my iPhone told me with pursed lips and clutched pearls – up to two hours a day, usually in increments of a few minutes here and there. I don’t miss the unedifying wormholes I descended, idly following an off-colour comment on a thread until I turned a corner in the labyrinth and came face to face with the digital equivalent of a ravenous minotaur: a nest of people who all agreed wholeheartedly that Donald Trump was a decent man.

Twitter made me friends, it kept me company in my loneliest times, it helped me forge countless professional connections and even once indirectly landed me a book deal, but the cost in time and concentration was too high. I fired it up in every spare second, and often – I’m ashamed to admit – even in unspare seconds when someone – usually one of my children, since I’ve spent much of the pandemic confined with them – was trying to get my attention in what Charlie Brooker memorably called ‘the meat space’.

Lockwood’s narrator is eventually dragged back from the portal into her real life by a family tragedy, one based on the author’s own experience. I don’t want to write too explicitly about the plot since I read this book knowing nothing about it, and I think this magnified its impact. This book spins on a sixpence from being a scalpel-sharp satire of social media to a devastating portrait of grief and love in a way that gives the reader whiplash, but it absolutely worked for me. I ended up ugly crying so dramatically I had to lock myself in the bathroom so I didn’t alarm the kids (though to be honest the little sociopaths probably wouldn’t have noticed, and they’ve witnessed me trying to read the Ladybird Classics Happy Prince before, so I have form.)

I feel you could read No One Is Talking About This over and over again and find new nuggets of brilliance each time. Terrible things happen to sardonically humorous people. None of us can hide from life, not even online, behind a blithe or facile or #blessed mask. I found this a wise, witty and ultimately devastating book, refreshingly unlike anything else I’ve read, and look forward to reading more from this very talented writer.

No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize and the Booker. It’s out now.

Please note that this article includes affiliate links, which means I earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you) if you buy through them. I only link to books I really love.

Travels in Time: Best Historical Fiction

in

I’m a great big history geek and I love reading historical fiction. I’ve found myself pulled into the past more and more over this past year and a half, looking for escapist reads to transport me from the present. Here are a handful of my favourite historical novels. (I have so many, this will probably spill over into at least another blog post… I haven’t even mentioned my boy Thomas Cromwell or Rose Nicolson here!)

Ursula Flight.jpg

The Illumination of Ursula Flight by Anna-Marie Crowhurst

I loved this stylish and energetic novel: the magnificent Restoration settings, the clever way the writing has a period feel, and the lively, formidable Ursula herself. Born under an ill-fated comet, Ursula yearns for a glittering career as a playwright but the seventeenth century is a tough time for a woman to forge a literary life. Nothing daunted, Ursula embarks on her artistic adventures and it’s a pure pleasure for the reader to follow her.

Circus of Wonders.JPG

Circus of Wonders by Elizabeth MacNeal

I loved both this book and Elizabeth’s debut, The Doll Factory – it’s hard for me to choose a favourite between them. She’s excellent on obsession and the setting – in this case a Victorian travelling circus that pitches up in Vauxhall’s gaudy pleasure gardens – is transporting, atmospheric and colourful. The tension ratchets up brilliantly and I absolutely gobbled the second half.

Ophelia Swam.JPG

Ophelia Swam by Kelley Swain

Ophelia Swam is dreamlike, poetic and beautiful, threaded through with the music of the turning seasons, rooted in sixteenth century Oxfordshire and perfumed by Sister Grace’s herbs and healing plants. Kelley asks: what if Ophelia swam? What if she washed up at an English nunnery, and had time to mend and rest and forge a new path? I love anything that peers around the corners of Hamlet, I love a Tudor setting, I love English pastoral, I love books about religious houses and women forging their own paths through a world that wants to clip their wings. So I loved this!

The Edwardians.jpg

The Edwardians by Vita Sackville-West

Handsome, headstrong Sebastian is heir to a vast and beautiful English country estate, but he wrestles with his fate as a feature in the eternal round of lavish parties, intrigues and traditions at the cold, decadent heart of Edwardian high society. This book, like Virginia Woolf’s glorious Orlando, holds a special place in my heart for being based on Knole, Vita’s childhood home, which is near where I grew up. As a woman, Vita couldn’t inherit Knole and she pours her feelings about its loss into this sparky novel that satirises the empty glamour and high society scandals of the turn-of-the-century aristocracy.

Cecily.JPG

Cecily by Annie Garthwaite

I loved this novel, in which the formidable Cecily Neville steers her house of York through the turbulent reign of god-besotted Henry VI. The female characters were brilliant, from smug, slippery Jacquetta to icy warrior queen Marguerite and of course Cecily herself. Henry – weak and vacillating, easy manipulated by his magnates with his rheumy eyes trained dreamily on God – is also fantastically well drawn. A hugely satisfying slice of historical fiction, and although I’m excellent on the Tudors I’m hazier on this period so I felt like I learned a lot, too.

The Heavens.JPG

The Heavens by Sandra Newman

Half of this excellent novel is historical, and the other half set in a dystopian near-future New York, with a mad time-travel plot zipping the reader between the two. It sounds and is quite bonkers but it works spectacularly well. In the sixteenth century sections, poet Emilia Lanyer (a real and fascinating historical figure) embarks on a love affair with up and coming playwright Sad Will Shakespeare. The writing is utterly luminous. This was one of my favourite reads of recent years.

Little.jpg

Little by Edward Carey

I really enjoyed this strange, beautifully written fictionalised history of Madam Tussaud, following her from the eerie workshop of lonely Doctor Curtius to the Monkey House in Revolutionary Paris and even a cupboard at Versailles. It’s fascinating, often gruesome (the horrifying heft of a head!), frequently moving and always intriguing.

Dark Water.jpg

Dark Water by Elizabeth Lowry

This is a book I publicised and fell so hard for! Elizabeth is a sensational writer, with whole paragraphs I had to reread just to properly savour them. Set partly on board a ship in 1833 and partly in the asylum the ship’s doctor runs in Boston after that ill-fated voyage, it is freighted with gothic atmosphere, simmering tensions and unfolding mysteries. Anyone who loved Francis Spufford’s equally excellent Golden Hill will adore this. Elizabeth has a new novel out next year so it’s a brilliant time to join her fan club.

Want more…?

If you’re hungry for more recommendations for historical fiction, I have also blogged about my some of my favourite World War Two books here.

Please note that this article includes affiliate links, which means I earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you) if you buy through them. I only link to books I really love.

Pick of the Spring crop of Paperbacks

in

As a publicist and a reader, it’s brilliant to see publications like Stylist and The Guardian beginning to carry more coverage of paperback releases. Surely that’s how most of us get our literary fix? I know they’re covetable (and I’m a sucker for a fancy finish of any kind) but some of those hardbacks would drown a person in the bath. Here are the new paperbacks I either loved or am looking forward to.

Mirror and the LIght.JPG

The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel

With grim predictability, I will probably end up buying the whole Cromwell trilogy in paperback because my set are so mismatched. Upsetting. I’m a swivel-eyed loon for her writing and this series in particular.

Small Pleasures.jpg

Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers

I so loved this wry, breezy yet heart-squeezing novel about a journalist investigating a purported virgin birth. The suburban 1950s setting, the characterisation and the writing style were all absolutely perfect. This is one I’ve given as a gift because I’m such a huge fan and the paperback is as stunning as the hardback.

Red at the Bone.jpg

Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson

This poetic and beautiful novel achieves such a lot despite its slimness, telling a multi-generational story with nuanced characters in a series of vignettes.

the Revolt.jpg

The Revolt by Clara Dupont-Monod

This vivid retelling of the story of Richard the Lionheart and his mother Eleanor of Aquitaine is beautifully translated from the French by Ruth Diver. It’s thoughtful, poetic and a useful primer on a period of history I’m a bit hazy on. I was thirteen in 1991 though, so it did make me hanker after a rewatch of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

The Devil and the Dark Water.JPG

The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton

I loved The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and was curious to see how Stuart could follow such a dazzling, original debut, but by god he delivered with this. Another intricate, atmospheric, ambitious trickster novel, this time set on board the Saardam, a ship apparently under attack from a vicious demon called Old Tom.

Our Fathers.jpg

Our Fathers by Rebecca Wait

I worked on the publicity for this book and Rebecca is an exceptional writer - one of those whose books I will always read. Tommy - the only survivor when his abusive father kills his family - and his uncle Malcolm speak haltingly to each other through grief, guilt, fear and love. The landscape of the Hebridean island of Litta - weather-buffeted, hostile, remote yet claustrophobic - is brilliantly evoked.

And a few more buzzy books that are out in paperback this spring…

Please note there are affiliate links on my website and I will earn a small commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. I only link to books I have loved.

Book Review: After the Storm, by Emma Jane Unsworth

in

I was sent an early proof for this honest and brilliantly written memoir. I came to it with no expectation, really. I haven’t read Emma’s novels - Animals and Adults - though I’ll certainly seek them out now. Also, I didn’t suffer from Post-Natal Depression. Oddly, I didn’t even experience the dreaded ‘third day blues’ on which, I was warned by other women and our NCT teacher, our milk would flood in and we’d cry all day. I suspect that this was partly because I simply didn’t have the energy to process anything at the time.

After The Storm.jpg

I had what I now consider to be an averagely traumatic first birth. There was a worry about my daughter’s heartbeat and after some toing and froing I was given an emergency c-section during which I lost two and a half litres of blood. Almost half of it, apparently. I’m forever grateful to the serene and efficient theatre team and the fact that my spinal anaesthetic meant I couldn’t see the gory floor. The loss wasn’t quite enough to need a transfusion - though I was dimly aware through my opiate high of someone ‘getting the blood guy on the phone’ - but more than enough to leave me wraith-like for some time afterwards. Often, when I first woke, I couldn’t move my legs. A day or so in, after a fierce battle to swim up from unconsciousness, I was so weak I convinced myself I was dying and calmly instructed my husband to call an ambulance because someone would need to feed the baby. Fortunately, it turned out I just needed to be fortified with some apple juice and a piece of toast, but those early days weren’t a breeze.

Despite escaping PND, though, so much of this extraordinary book rang true with me. The subtitle is Post-Natal Depression and the Utter Weirdness of New Motherhood, and I don’t think there’s any mother who won’t relate to at least some of what Emma so eloquently articulates. She vividly recalled to me how my daughter’s screaming induced pure animal panic in me, how once it started - and there were months during which it seemed it barely paused - I could think of nothing but stopping it. I remembered the well-meaning people who kindly reassured me they didn’t mind the anguished howling while I strained out a smile, inwardly screaming, “I MIND! SHE BLOODY MINDS! JUST LISTEN TO HER!” Every moment my baby was quiet I felt equal to the alien new blue-collar job of motherhood. And every moment she was screaming - so many moments, they smeared into weeks - I knew that what was being asked of me all day, every day, half the night, every night was impossible.

Photo credit Alex Lake / TWO SHORT DAYS

Photo credit Alex Lake / TWO SHORT DAYS

The section where Emma tries to join friends for afternoon tea and the civilised world literally does not fit her anymore will stay with me forever. I vividly remember those occasions: bumping a laden buggy through squeezed-together tables, muttering apologies, praying for the nap to continue, with my seeping, sweating, unfamiliar new body squeezed into weird new clothes with extra holes in. The divorce between my work, my life, my mind and what I had previously considered my self was jarring. It felt permanent, although it proved not to be. I had been prepared on some level for the fug of exhaustion and the vomit-spiked hair, but not to feel incapable of finishing a sentence even in my head.

Emma writes with humour as well as with brilliant clarity. (I, too, resented the shrill and jumped-up Upsy Daisy for having her own bed on wheels to trundle around the Night Garden.) And she expresses things here that I have rarely seen written down about disappointment, boredom, shame and rage. I’ve read and written a lot since editing Night Feeds and Morning Songs about mothers’ stories being routinely undervalued and dismissed, and about the difficulties mothers face in carving out time for their own careers and creativity. This piercing, fierce, raw and beautiful book will help go some way towards redressing that balance. It will change and perhaps even save lives.

I actually hadn’t expected to enjoy the newborn days as much as I did - I figured they’d be brutal and boring, and those low expectations were my friends whenever they were just that. But we are bombarded by images of ecstatic, subtly but impeccably groomed women, suffused with love, enjoying tranquil moments of deep connection with their beaming infants in beautifully appointed, airy, pastel-hued rooms. It’s easy to believe that hype, and the jarring shock when reality falls short - as it must do - is so, so damaging to women. It feels like ingratitude, weakness or self-indulgence to confess that we’re struggling. The scorching guilt of admitting that the deeply desired state of motherhood sometimes makes us feel stifled or furious or despairing prevents so many women from accessing the help and support they need.

The Best Most Awful Job.jpg

There has been a change, I think, in the way we talk about these things. The excellent essay collection The Best Most Awful Job, edited by Katherine May, struck a chord with many women with its truthful takes on the madness of child-wrangling, and I especially loved Saima Mir’s essay on maternal rage. This recent advertising campaign for Portal - showing a woman struggling with breastfeeding - had me in tears and time-travelling back to my daughter’s earliest days with its accuracy.

And After the Storm - this truthful, visceral, dazzlingly well-written memoir in which Emma shares her experiences of vulnerability, fury and desperation - experiences that I believe will resonate with many mothers - is an essential contribution to this discussion. I cannot thank her enough for writing it.

After the Storm: Postnatal Depression and the Utter Weirdness of New Motherhood by Emma Jane Unsworth is published by Profile Books.

Night Feeds and Morning Songs: Honest, Fierce and Beautiful Poems about Motherhood, edited by Ana Sampson, is published by Trapeze.

Please note this blog post includes affiliate links to Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookshops, and if you buy through them I earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you.)

The Best Feminist Audiobooks

in

I really enjoyed looking back on some of my favourite fiction audiobooks, so I thought I’d also pull together a list of audiobooks with a feminist flavour that I recommend.

Invisible Women.jpg

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

This was riveting and frankly horrifying. Criado Perez shows how our cities, medicine and societies are built around a model that only takes account of a default male participant and how the staggering gender data gap impacts on women all around the world. From toilets to transport, it left me enlightened and enraged and - oddly - relieved in some ways to understand to what an extent this world is not designed for me. Gobsmacking and essential.

The Handmaid's Tale.jpg

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

This is a spectacularly good audiobook, narrated by Elisabeth Moss. I read The Handmaid’s Tale when I was around fourteen but it is infinitely more chilling, on every possible level, to me now. Because: life and also: the world. I now picture the scenes of the book in a way that’s entirely informed by the excellent television series - and hearing Elisabeth’s narration reinforced that - but it was so brilliantly done I can live with that. Compelling, astute and terrifying.

The Witches.jpg

The Witches by Stacy Schiff

I am absolutely fascinated by witch trials and Stacy’s masterful non-fiction study of the events in Salem is a great deep dive (although it is long, be warned!) It’s read well by Eliza Foss and really delves into the complex power balances of the story. In a puritan society in which women were restricted and impotent on so many levels, a group mostly composed of teenage girls managed to send Salem spinning - with the majority of the trials’ victims also being women.

Why I'm No Longer Talking To White People.jpg

Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge

The chapter about feminism in this seminal book was a wake-up call for me on intersectionality. Reni offers a concise history of how women of colour have often found themselves excluded from feminist movements and underlines why feminists cannot ignore other structural inequalities, including that of race, when campaigning for equality.

More than A Woman by Caitlin Moran

Aimed squarely at middle aged mums, this hit the mark so acutely for me. There’s lighthearted stuff - I have switched to knee socks at her recommendation and it’s a game changer - but also plenty of moving and serious material about ageing and parenting, particularly about her daughter’s difficult teenage years. The acknowledgement of unseen work done by women felt both buoying and somewhat (yes, still!) revolutionary. I loved it. Sign me up for Hag Club, I say.

Difficult Women.JPG

Difficult Women by Helen Lewis

This was a really interesting listen, which filled me in on some formidable women and campaigns I hadn’t been aware of. I also found myself gasping often at how recently various shockingly oppressive laws had been repealed. Difficult Women covers marriage, sex, work and politics and it’s lively as well as informative.

Feminine Mystique.jpg

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

I was inspired to listen to this seminal 1963 book by watching the excellent Mrs America on iPlayer. The ‘feminine mystique’ was the idea sold to American women of the 1950s that their ultimate fulfilment would come from devoting themselves entirely to their homes and families. Women were actively discouraged - by legislation, social pressures, advertisers, educators and the male-dominated media - from taking up careers themselves. Some of her conclusions feel dated (the chapters on sex, especially) but it remains shocking, acute and deeply researched. It’s a very interesting piece of feminist history with elements that still feel shockingly relevant over half a century later.

She is Fierce audio.jpg

She is Fierce

Finally and cheekily, there is a splendid audiobook of She is Fierce, which I edited, read by Adjoa Andoh (who appears in my current obsession Bridgerton as Lady Danvers) utterly beautifully. Although many of the women from previous centuries wouldn’t recognise our idea of feminism, collecting these verses and those in She Will Soar felt like a feminist project to me - especially when I researched the poets and found out how much was stacked against women writers of the past, which explains what a wall to wall sausage-fest the literary canon is.

Please note there are affiliate links in this article and I may earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you) when you buy through them.

Poems for Christmas

in

For me, the greatest gift of the Christmas season is time to read. The offices and schools are closed. This year, pubs, restaurants, shops and cinemas will be off the menu for many, too. The weather is often appalling. The nights are long and dark and seem designed expressly for the purpose of snuggling under a blanket on the sofa with the tree lights twinkling, a glass of something tempting within easy reach and a great big pile of delicious-smelling, beautiful new books. Here are some of my poetic festive favourites – all would make great gifts, too.

Carol Ann Duffy’s Frost Fair is completely wonderful, and makes me hanker after a re-read of Woolf’s Orlando. It’s so beautifully illustrated by David De Las Heras, it would make a lovely stocking filler.

Frost Fair.jpg

Never has the exhilaration of whirling about on ice-skates been better captured than by Wordsworth, in a breathless and beautiful section of ‘The Prelude’ which I included in my second anthology, Tyger Tyger Burning Bright. I speak as a clumsy person, whose few attempts at skating have resulted in the kind of falls that elicit audible gasps from witnesses and some truly spectacular bruising. If Wordsworth can fill me with the desire to sail across frozen lakes under a wide wintry night sky, he can inspire anyone.

The Prelude.jpg

‘The Journey of the Magi’ by T S Eliot has an eerie, cold magic to it, perfect for reading and chewing over on a bitter winter’s night.

I love Betjeman’s ‘Christmas’ - hear the man himself read it here, with its evocation of the pull of family even more poignant this oddest of years (‘And girls in slacks remember Dad, / And oafish louts remember Mum’) and the seasonal cheer infecting everyone everywhere – from ‘provincial public houses’ to ‘many-steepled London’. I want to be in that country pub and on those glittering city streets for Christmas 2021.

Thomas Hardy’s gorgeous ‘The Fallow Deer at the Empty House’ is a favourite.

Fallow Deer.jpg

And Hardy’s ‘The Oxen’ perfectly captures how some scrap of childhood magic can cling to Christmas Eve and the vision of the nativity no matter what age and how agnostic I am.

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

“Now they are all on their knees,”

An elder said as we sat in a flock

By the embers in hearthside ease.


We pictured the meek mild creatures where

They dwelt in their strawy pen,

Nor did it occur to one of us there

To doubt they were kneeling then.


So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

If someone said on Christmas Eve,

“Come; see the oxen kneel,


“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,”

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.

A contemporary poem I love is one for the festive refuseniks: ‘Bah… Humbug’ by Gregory Woods. This year, there will be lots of people perhaps missing the jolly chaos of a family Christmas, but this poems is a hymn to the allure of a solitary, batteries-not-included celebration with ‘books to the left of you, / gin to the right’. This poem was included in Christmas Crackers, one of Candlestick Press’s lovely pamphlets designed to be sent instead of a greetings card – perfect if you’d like to say something more substantial than ‘Season’s greetings’.

Bah Humbug.jpg

I bought a beautiful edition of ‘The Night Before Christmas’ a few years ago with Niroot Puttapipat’s beautiful silhouette illustrations and am frankly delighted that the kids insist on hearing it all year round. Due to our – frequently unseasonal – repeated readings, I am now word perfect. This confers an additional advantage: I can name all the reindeer (and, no, Rudolf doesn’t feature) and am therefore a splendid addition to any Christmas pub quiz team. Moore was a slightly unlikely Christmas poet, being an academic whose other works were heavy tomes on Hebrew. Legend has it that he composed this, his only famous poem, to entertain his children during a sleigh ride through Greenwich Village on Christmas Eve 1822, basing jolly St Nicholas on their coachman. I hope it’s true.

Also for children (though not only for children), I recommend the excellent selection of Christmas Poems edited by Gaby Morgan (who I’m lucky enough to have as editor for my Macmillan anthologies) and illustrated by Axel Scheffler of Gruffalo fame. And The Night Before Christmas in Wonderland by Carys Bexington, beautifully illustrated by Kate Hindley, was a new favourite last year with great verse, glorious pictures and clever homages to both beloved texts.

Night Before Christmas in Wonderland.jpg

It’s not poetry, but I have to mention A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas, which I try and read every year. And this year I have put Carol Ann Duffy’s new collection of Christmas poems on my wishlist.

Whatever you do at Christmas and wherever you are, I wish you happy reading. May your stocking be full of books and your cheeseboard always groaning.

Please note that this website contains affiliate links and I may earn a small commission (at no cost to you) when you buy through these links.

World War Two Reading Recommendations

in

Revisiting my blog about ‘Strange Meeting’ led me to thinking about how books and poetry have brought war to life for me in a way that studying history never could, so I thought I’d gather some of my recommendations for books set during World War II. I have my eye on The Night Watch by Sarah Waters, because I love her books but have somehow never read that one, but let me know if there are other books set in the period I should look out for.

Testament.jpg

Testament by Kim Sherwood

I was lucky enough to work on the publicity for this astonishing debut novel, which won Kim the Bath Novel Prize and saw her shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. After her beloved grandfather’s death, Eva uncovers his hidden history as a survivor of the Holocaust in Hungary. It’s tender, beautifully written, humane, absorbing and deeply important. There’s a country we can almost recognise that welcomed child survivors of the Nazi camps to the Lake District to heal, and I will read everything Kim writes forever.

Life After Life.jpg

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

Not exclusively set during World War Two, but partly so, and this is one of my favourite books of all time. I could also include the sequel A God in Ruins - though it was a little plane-heavy for me - here. It’s an exquisite novel in which a baby born in a snowstorm in 1910 has the chance to live through the twentieth century again and again - a conceit Atkinson pulls off with dazzling dexterity. An unmissable book.

Transcription.JPG

Transcription by Kate Atkinson

So good I include her two and a half times! Transcription is witty and knowing and rattles along at a brilliant pace, all cigarette smoke and paranoia and lacklustre sandwiches in 1940s London. This tale of covert MI5 operations flicks between Dolphin Square and the shabby corridors of the post-war BBC. The bewildering, half-farcical web of agents all over London is entertainingly sketched - the loyalties and motivations of most of the characters (and half the passers by) are questionable at best. And the language is period-perfect, all smart, clipped retorts and elegant slang.

The Nightingale.jpg

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

It took me a while to warm up to this book - I found the opening a bit cheesy - but I ended up completely gripped and invested in this story of the fates of two sisters set in Occupied France during World War II. Aspects of the plot are based on real events and Hannah’s depiction of the horrors of war is shocking and haunting. I enjoyed it far more than The Alice Network, also set in Occupied France - partly because I am British and of a certain vintage and therefore couldn’t take an evil cafe owner called Rene seriously. (I bid Good Moaning to everyone who got this reference.)

The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe.jpg

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C S Lewis

I’m stretching a point here as obviously most of the action takes place in Narnia, but the war casts a long shadow over this book, published in 1950. As a child, I didn’t spare a thought for the parents in London whose children, like the Pevensies, were evacuated to the countryside to stay in the homes of strangers - something that strikes me as unbearably poignant now.

Our Man in New York.jpg

Our Man in New York by Henry Hemming

Another book I was lucky enough to work on, this is non-fiction so gripping it reads like a novel, telling the true history of the Fake News and cunning tricks used by MI6 to bring America into the Second World War, from setting up a Canadian forgery factory to paying astrologers to protect Hitler’s death. Le Carré meets Mad Men, this book manages to increate incredible tension despite the fact we know the ending - and there are plenty of lessons for today, as questions about governments interfering in other nation’s political processes continue to be raised.

Also recommended:

Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada - incredibly powerful story of one man’s resistance to the Nazi regime

If This Is A Man by Primo Levi - the essential, unforgettable memoir of Levi’s time in a Nazi concentration camp

Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky - an incredibly moving novel written and set in Occupied France, published after the author’s death in Auschwitz

The Book Thief by Marcus Zuzak - inventive, beautifully written and deeply affecting novel which also celebrates the redemptive power of books

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller - surreal and darkly funny, and responsible for making me think of ‘crab-apple cheeks’ every time I see a crab-apple tree

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut - powerful and strange novel with science-fiction elements about the Allied bombing of Dresden

Atonement by Ian McEwan - I love this novel, and reading it while we lived in Balham (back when Balham was much less posh) made it extra poignant

Please note that this post includes affiliate links and I may earn a small commission (at no expense to you) when you buy through these links.

Coming in your ears

in

I’m SORRY it was juvenile (as well as dating me) to use that Phoenix Nights quote as a heading but I just couldn’t think of anything else once it had occurred to me. Anyway, I thought I’d put together some audiobook recommendations - here’s some of the fiction I’ve enjoyed listening to.

The Immortalists.jpg

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin

This novel is brilliantly read by Maggie Hoffman. The four Gold children visit a fortune teller who can, apparently, predict the date of your death, and the book follows each of their stories in turn. The characters are utterly believable, flawed and loving and anxious and driven and mixed-up. The low-key tragedies of families drifting apart, disappointment and missed chances to connect are hauntingly written - I definitely had a tear in my eye a few times - but there is a humour and warmth and tenderness too. Brilliant writing, beautifully brought to life.

Maker of Swans.jpg

The Maker of Swans by Paraic O’Donnell

I LOVE Paraic’s writing and this book was brilliantly narrated by Mike Grady and Imogen Wilde. The fantastical elements of the story are utterly convincing and it’s stuffed with wonderful characters, deft touches of wry humour, intriguing mystery, tension and just absolutely delicious writing. So playful and enjoyable, it reminded me of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke - an enormous compliment in my book. Imogen Wilde’s voice is just spellbinding and I’d like her to read me a bedtime story nightly, please.

Darling.jpg

Darling by Rachel Edwards

This was such a gripping listen. The central characters - Darling and her teenage stepdaughter Lola - are so compelling, so vividly and skilfully written. This is a novel with so much to say about Britain today, about prejudice, trauma, family and about love. It also boasts some brilliant flashes of humour - the schoolfriend’s mum who ‘over-Bodens’ had me snorting - and some spectacularly mouthwatering passages about cooking (someone give Rachel a food column please!) The narration by Jaimi Barbakoff and Adele Oni is absolutely pitch perfect.

Normal People.jpg

Normal People by Sally Rooney

She’s a damn wizard. I resisted this book at first - so hyped and it sounded a bit too like One Day to me (I know, I know, everyone but me loved One Day). I was an idiotic boob, because it’s a wonderful, achingly sharp book and a great audiobook - I loved Aoife McMahon’s narration. Connell and Marianne are 100% real to me and I’ll fight anyone who dares suggest they are actually fictional characters. I was so anxious about the television adaptation but in my view they absolutely nailed it. Ooooh I could watch that again, pretty much weekly.

The Memory Chamber.jpg

The Memory Chamber by Holly Cave

Thriller, love story, sci fi - this book has everything and I loved the narrator, Isobel, voiced by Imogen Church. She’s a heaven architect, designing artificial heavens for wealthy clients in a future that feels very plausible and close. It’s so thought-provoking: I kept speculating about the sights, sounds, smells and experiences that would be in my heaven, from roasted garlic through late summer evenings and mid-90s shoegazing indie to a warm cat purring on my lap and my kids giggling. It’s such an intriguing, brilliantly realised concept.

Daisy Jones.jpg

Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

The multiple narrators for this fictional ‘rockumentary’ meant it worked really well in audio - I felt I would have got mixed up between characters in the print edition but the ensemble cast brought them all to life so well. I loved this. The concept was so perfectly executed. Though I did feel it slightly flagged in the middle, the final chapters had me absolutely spellbound. Camila and Karen forever. If you liked this, look out for The Final Revival of Opal and Nev coming in 2021.

Please note that this website contains affiliate links and I may earn a small commission (at no cost to you) when you buy through these links.