Season 2, 008: Scenes from our reading lives: What books (given, lent, lost, found, shared, annotated, more) - or memories of reading/being read to - are at the heart of our own stories?
Loved following your voice, your mind, through this piece, Jo. Synchronicity has been one of my own greatest teachers too - bringing my mentor and most of the books that have most deeply informed my work. You describe so well here the in-flood of colour, relief, gratitude that comes when the right people/words find us after a long stuck time. And now you have, in turn, brought Harjo's poem to me and others who will read your piece over the on the story archive (I've included a link to the poem in it). Here is the link to your words over there:
I will always be glad to see more pieces from you, Jo. And thank you for your kinds words. I'm not sure what I will doing work-wise after the end of 23, which is when my last guaranteed book and writing teaching money finishes being paid over. But I know I will always keep this community going for the long-term, even if my weekdays are back in an office once more after this strange and wonderful seven years of full time art and writing!
Monique, every time you contribute words to this project, I am filled - all over again - with a sense of your huge and bright spirit. You really do shine through screen as person who really believes in things, and takes risks in the realm, the service, of human connection. In the stories you share, but also how you read and support others here.
And its a special delight to see you describing a book which also means a great great deal to me. It's not one that I reference explicitly in my own book (the way I do with Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Thoreau and others) and yet you will now from reading my story how I struggled with my double love - all that it surprised in me: shame...but also abundance, and absurd joy and hope where guilt should have been.
That book by Greene gets closest to the strange grace of love that doesn't fit into the places and roles it should. It doesn't dodge the pain and hurt of that.
Your description of it means I'm adding it to my travel bag now for the time I'm about to spend down with my mother before returning home to my husband and children just before Christmas. At the end of my book's publication year, this feels like the right book to keep company with. Thank you.
Here is your link to your words in the story archive:
I've spent time redesigning the landing page for the all the stories, and each of the story pages themselves, to better showcase all of your words. I'd love you to take a look...
And in the new year I'm going to redesign the whole website, again with the aim of making your stories stand out still further. The paperback in April has as its final page an invitation for readers to join our story-sharing community - so I'm hoping many more hundreds of people over the coming years will be reading you!
I agree, also felt overwhelmed, so hard to choose. I'm intrigued and want to read this now, another one added to the list. Always so fun to hear what books meant so much to others.
Dear Tanya, the last time I stirred my quill and scratched some words in response to one of your prompts, you kindly accommodated my absence from Substack by taking them in by email and cutting them into the archive. But here I am now, in the right place at the right time ... a prompt to write about reading. Perfect. Quick question, sorry, do I just submit the words as a comment here. I probably haven't been paying attention! Happy Friday, Barrie
Perfect. The sun is shining so I can’t justify sitting inside until I’ve done some potager chores and sorted some logs for the pile. But really looking forward to writing something this evening. Baked Camembert, crusty loaf, red wine ... and writing. My perfect evening. Bx
Barrie. Wow! So much wild and wondeful energy in your piece. Absolute pleasure to add it to the story archive. I've got a move on with creating this month's webpage so you can include your piece in your newsletter. I'm going to add the other stories that have already come in now, and so by the time it goes out later there will be several there. On your name in the pullquote, I've linked through to your new substack...
There were no books in our house. No, that’s not correct, there were books, but they were locked in the bedroom of the random uncle, and that meant I wasn’t allowed even to see them on their shelves.
The random uncle had been swept up with us when our house in the East End was slum-cleared and we were moved to the red-brick housing estate box. The books he brought with him glittered in my imagination, I knew I wanted to read, the picture books at school were already dead weight. There was treasure behind that bedroom door.
Then the RAF accepted him and he was no longer part of our family. I was the youngest but the complications of gender, relationship and noisy nightmares meant that I was moved into his room. I held my breath as I followed my bedding through that door for the first time, the books were still there! Instantly, in that golden moment, my world expanded 5…. 10…100 times.
There was nothing here that would be considered a childrens book, the uncle was a frustrated traveller, here were foreign lands, strange places, people with different coloured skin. Yet the greatest joy was that there were no librarians to send me back to replace my choice of books on the shelves because they were ‘too old for me’, the ongoing battle I had at the public library.
Nights became adventures, I saved precious pocket-money for torch batteries, I took flight from that unheated bedroom, landing softly (don’t let parents know I’m not asleep) in Africa, Canada, Australia. In the morning I went richer to school, knowing my teachers for what they were, they wanted to ground me in Sunderland. I tolerated their leaden feet, come nightfall, I could journey once more.
Love this, Geoff. The sense of anticipation, the dream realised ... and then the 'travel' to untold shores, broadening the mind, preparing your escape. Was it Laurie Helgoe who said "Reading is like travel, allowing you to exit your own life for a bit, and to come back with a renewed, even inspired, perspective"? Evocative writing. Barrie
Geoff - what a compelling piece this was: in itself like the colour-plate in one of those books: that sort of magnetism (that I remember too: my reading was likewise found material in my grandparents' house, relics of an uncle who'd moved out just before I arrived!). And then that last paragraph - how you invert the roles of student/teachers: stunning.
So touching, how hard you worked to feed your curiosity, "that golden moment." I felt myself cheering you on. I love how everyone takes these prompts and is able to tell a complete story of themselves in so few words and yet leaves the reader longing for more.
Thanks so very much for taking the time to respond so positively Sheila. I find these prompts are a great opportunity to take one small memory and give it the words it might deserve (I've just finished a book-length memoir and if I gave every memory this attention it would be a long book indeed!)
In the past, I was always reading the wrong books.
Before the first year of secondary school, I could be found in every saloon bar of the Louis L’Amour books on my Dad’s bookcase, tossing back the hard spirits, going all in on 5-card stud, and wondering what the girls did in the upstairs rooms with cowboys freshly washed in copper baths.
Take any collection of dead poets’ musings offered up by first and second form English teachers and toss them aside. You’ll find me in Middle Earth battling orcs and relishing the poetry of made up languages instead.
I’d rather Kill a Mockingbird than sit down in Bleak House to study my O level texts. What the Dickens were they thinking of. Keats … miserable blighter. I spent those days ignoring the official book list, wishing instead that I could be wandering Lonely as a Cloud. Did I even know what words were worth? Seek me out in wartime tanks brought vividly to life by Sven Hassel. Reading, I’d say, no hassle. Before he started writing Bourne novels, the appropriately named Eric van Lustbader was corrupting my teenage years with ninja stealth, my flickering torch under the covers revealing explicit storylines that widened youthful eyes.
The wrong books.
Always, the wrong books.
Coleridge sailed into view for A levels but I was more interested in finding a ‘stately pleasure-dome’ than considering the plight of an old sailor who brought misfortune on himself due to his carelessness with a crossbow. I suspect the novels of Wilber Smith were more thumbed than the reading list presented by Brian Watson my long-suffering English teacher.
The world of work loomed into view. But the whole business of ‘air publications’, Queen’s Regulations, and weighty tomes on the net explosive quantities to be stored in reinforced buildings blew the doors shut on any curiosity I might have had to read more widely. Roll on 15 years and the hero of this dime novel is selected to study with the future grown-ups. But, not for me the serious business of the Suez Crisis and the Six-Day War, or the relative merits of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. I could be found in the 8th row of the impressive lecture theatre in a race with a colleague to finish ‘The Goblet of Fire’ before drowning my evenings with goblets of wine. Tell me to read, I won’t. Show me the Essential Reading list, I will ignore it.
Fighting. Always reading the wrong books. And not very many of them, if the truth be told.
Roll forward, a late-blossoming realisation. As Stephen King said: “If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
And I want to write. I so want to write. Perhaps a self-set reading challenge then. Fifty-seven books for my 57th year. Catching up with books I should already have read. Picking the titles myself. Nothing is prescribed or proscribed. No-one mutters ‘you’ve read that before’. Anti-heroes pace the streets of Edinburgh; late-blossoming writers create instant classics; Bond, I am shaken and stirred; vicarious adventures with Jenny, she’s Tough; going analogue with Alex Roddie but keeping a tally digitally.
The floodgates open. Reading is no longer a chore. It is a pleasure that unlocks a writer’s words. These words.
In 2003, my partner and I arrived in the high, thin air of Mexico City at the start of a year long adventure. The culture shock was massive, a combination of altitude, the bustle of 10 million people, unfamiliar food, smells, faces and so much noise. The hostel overlooked the Zocalo, with its Spanish colonial buildings sitting on top of an aztec temple, the main square of the city. I felt homesick, shocked and disoriented and searched for the familiar. We travelled lightly and the hostel had a shelf full of books left by travellers coming and going from all parts of Central America. I found a battered copy of McCarthy’s Bar by Pete McCarthy, a story of his travels around Southern Ireland. I took it with me when we hopped on the bus south to the Mayan riviera and read it cover to cover on the 20 hour journey imagining the green fields of west cork as we drive along the parched Mexican highways scattered with cacti and dust. Arriving in Playa del Carmen in Yucatan with its turquoise sea and blazing white beaches and another hostel, I swapped my book for another battered novel and lay reading in a hammock. That carried me on to a jungle traveller village in Guatemala with an open air jungle canopy bathroom and howler monkeys in the trees as I sat reading on the loo. And so it went. I read, I passed my book on, I swapped and shared battered books with global travellers all the way through Belize, through LA and onward to Fiji, on campsites and hostels across New Zealand and Australia. The comfort blanket of novels and autobiographies and books I never dreamed I would read. Adventure, poetry, classics. Anything that was there- I was open to it all. I have never read so widely and prolifically even during my literature degree. I had no expectations, no requirements, I just read what was available and there for me. No judgement. My final swap was in a hotel on the Khao San Road in Bangkok after winding our way through south east Asia. I ended my journey and flight back to London with another story of travel, another story of wandering in Ireland. The books carried me, were my blanket, my thread, my familiar, my safety in a year of absolute freedom and uncertainty.
Helen, this was fascinating to me who has so rarely travelled. It gives me a whole new perspective on how it might be to go so far beyond my comfort zone, by using books as a blanket. But I love that even as they provided you with safety and continuity, the actual book in hand was always contingent upon whatever had been left behind by a previous traveller.
It's also simply a gorgeous piece of writing. Have you considered sending it to an online travel magazine or approaching a newspaper travel section with a pitch on this?
In the meantime, here is a link to it in the story archive (happy to add you last name if you confirm here via reply)
Thanks so much Tanya. This is such a lovely safe space to try out a bit of writing after many years and I am really enjoying it (and the anonymity at the moment but that might change as I feel more confident!) - the themes and the surprising things that come to me under those themes has been really exciting! Look forward to more and thanks for creating and curating it xx
Oh my - good point about anonymity! I was feeling a little too bold earlier to be using my full name... I may rethink that as my writing becomes more personal.
Ah! I'd just tweeted asking for Twitter magic to find a replacment - but I've deleted instantly as the link has your name in it!
Do you want me to remove your last name from the story archive listing for it?
I quite understand the need to get used to having your words on the web - several contributors don't give last names (yet/ever) for that reason: it's enough for them to get used to seeing their words presented in a public place at a little distance from them. They often - as you did - see their words in new ways too once they're published. This is true of all writers - however hard I proof read, I only ever see some errors the minute it goes to my editor!
I can't undertake to make lots of editorial changes for style post submission because of the volume of pieces I edit and publish: I can only make change if a big misspelling or formatting problem is spotted...
But I can change your name straight away. On this platform it doesn't get indexed on search engines, and most subscribers don't read all the subcomments on threads...
Oh no, that's absolutely fine! I think I want to do it this way. I just hadn't really considered it. I have now, and please do send that tweet out onto the world. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to waste your time. Thank you!
Loved this, felt taken along to places I've never been, always admire people with your sense of adventure, so touched by all of the book sharing, a link around the world.
Your piece is so rich and evocative. It's reminded me of the years i travelled myself and picked up a book - that story unfolding as your own travel story unfolds, running alongside one another. A double story so rich, like a bit of life twice lived, really loved reading this x
Thanks Louise! It’s funny as I think the tradition of passing on books as we did as travellers isn’t so common anymore as everyone travels with kindles- seems a shame really!
I often search the Internet for a particular edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But all I really remember is that it was chunky, yellowish with grey lettering and illustrations, so finding it will be pure luck. For years I refused to buy another copy, longingly waiting to come across that edition I used to own, hoping to restore it to my library and alongside the book regain something else lost a long time ago too: a sense of home. My budding library, 30 books at most, was thrown away when I was 19 by people who just wanted me and my meagre possessions out of the flat I had lived in all my life. Thirty years on, I can say that losing all my books then was more traumatic than having to leave that flat, because already at that point in my life my books were my home.
I was the only reader in my family, and yet I have been shaping my life around books ever since I could read. I began with the very few books within my reach, but when I started to really want to choose what I read public libraries were not enough – I became very greedy about surrounding myself with my own books. My family was disintegrating, and my library became something to hold on to. As most young teenagers, I had very little money of my own. That copy of Huckleberry Finn was in English, bought from the British Council in Lisbon, imported and expensive. I probably spent all my monthly allowance on it. It became the cornerstone of my library and of my life as I wanted it to be, in a way. That is why it meant so much to me and why I am still looking for it.
This is such fine and deeply moving writing by you, Maria, making me glad all over again that you applied for Ilkley mentoring this year, and that I chose you. And it's a special feeling to have you join this writing project now with this piece, given that this month's prompt was decided upon after our conversation, after hearing you speak of your younger-self's library being destroyed.
And if you'd be happy for me to share a link to your beautiful words on Twitter, we might get lucky and find that hive mind, and Christmas spirit, leads you to the book? I will only do that if you say I might!
I do hope other prompts interest you to write for, as I'd like our writing conversations and connnection to continue now long past the funded one that brought us together this month!
Thank you so much, Tanya. Rereading it, I think the word 'books' is in there a few times too many! Funny how I only noticed that when reading it on the archive page though.
I love the challenge of keeping the piece to 300 words, it's such a good writing exercise and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Tentative steps. Please do share it on Twitter. Thank you again for your generosity, and for creating this wonderful platform and community. I hope to become a valuable part of it and, yes, to continue our writing conversations and connection. Maria x
The first shock was the cover. I’d remembered a series of small images, mini-lino prints, of everyday scenes, domestic scenes. In fact there were only eight images, and two of them were of a whisky bottle and a glass. In the others, figures were disembodied: legs, arms, the back view of two people in a car. The faces that could be seen had harsh black slits for eyes, for a mouth.
And then I opened the book, and memory went awry. I’d written a date on the fly leaf: May 1985. I was 25. This couldn’t be. I’d convinced myself I’d bought this book when I was at university.
I left university in 1981.
I read a few lines of the first story. The language is spare, sparse: a waitress describes serving a very large man in a restaurant. I remembered reading it in 1985: my amazement at what the simplest language could achieve. The lack of similes, of metaphor, made the emotional impact of the stories even more intense. This was real. This was true. I believed every word. Nothing was wasted. I absorbed the stories as if by osmosis, and wondered how he did it. The stories were perfect. His words described the quiet desperation of the characters in a way I had never seen before, the loneliness, the alcoholism, the despair.
1985. The year I had my first abortion. The year I lost my job. The year I woke up in many strange beds around the city, wondering if I had the money in my pocket to get home. I never made the connection between the life I was leading and the stories I was reading.
Many things have changed.
But looking back, it can sometimes seem as if, in that year, I was sleepwalking: a bit part player in my own life. Like a Raymond Carver character, hungover, staring into space.
We didn't touch on Carver in our wonderful mentoring conversation - so it's a thrill to find a shared love and awe for his work here, now, through your own spare and very powerful prose. I thought when I first began reading your work - in your mentoring application and then your first few pieces here - that you are in the lineage of Lessing, Duras, Ernaux: those women who write the full range of emotions and experiences, but with an economy of language. Now, too, I see that what I prize in Carver in part of what you bring to story-telling too.
I love how you used the prompt here to reflect on his writing, your life.
This is wonderful, seems ripe for a longer piece. The paragraph that starts: 1985. The three short sentences then the two longer ones, spare but says everything, palpable.
Tanya think you so much for your comments. I can’t express how much your words mean to me…and you love Raymond Carver too!! There were so many writers I could have chosen for this prompt but it just had to be him..x
Have you read his essay in the mixed collection Fires? About how he began as a writer around the crushing pressures of being a young father on low income? And his second wife Tess Gallagher's essay about the end of his life at the end of his Collected Poems? Oh oh oh. Both achingly good... xx
It was during the summer of 1977 that I read Siddhartha, a novel by Herman Hesse based on the early life of Buddha, I believe. I had just finished my final school exams and the results were not due out for two months. Plans to escape Ireland and spend a few weeks cycling and busking in Brittany were afoot, but first I needed money to get me there.
Between Troubles in the north, and control exerted by the Roman Catholic church in the south, Ireland was a dark place for youngsters growing up. The economy was also weak but I got a job as a lifeguard in a small, city centre sports club for men. Why the management employed a 17-year old girl, with no qualifications, to save men who got into difficulties in a swimming pool, is curious, but thankfully my limited skills were rarely called upon. Instead I spent hours listening to water sploshing against the blue mosaic walls, and reading.
My brother, who was leading the kind of exciting life that I wanted, lent me Siddhartha. One of the central characters is a river and, from observing its behaviour, Siddhartha learns that time is an illusion which distracts us from living, and that all time, past and future, exists in the present moment. Having come into this world stained with original sin, and lived a life as a child, predicated on the righteous actions of the nation’s forefathers, these ideas exploded my thinking. There, seated on my battered metal stool in a cloud of chlorine, I could see the words gliding from the pages of the small paperback, dancing across the glittering water, splashing onto the concrete surround, and feel them transform, flowing back to pirouette inside every cell of my body.
And so, with fingertips tingling, the next stage of my life began.
It was during the summer of 1977 that I read Siddhartha, a novel by Herman Hesse about a young man seeking enlightenment. At that time in Ireland, a combination of Troubles in the north, and control exerted by the Catholic church in the south, weighed heavily. Having just finished secondary school, my friends and I talked of escaping to London or Europe where we could support ourselves by busking, chambermaiding or fruit-picking. First, though we needed money to get there.
I got a job as a lifeguard in a small, men’s sports club. Why the management employed a 17-year old girl, with no qualifications, to rescue men from a swimming pool, is curious, but thankfully my limited skills were rarely called upon. Instead I spent hours enveloped in chlorine fumes, reading Siddhartha, lent to me by my brother.
As water sploshed rhythmically against the blue mosaic walls, it felt appropriate that one of the central characters of the book was a river. I read how Siddhartha learns, from watching the water, that time is an illusion which distracts one from living, and that all time exists merely in the present moment; to live fully one must give attention to the present.
For me, these ideas were revolutionary. I had arrived into the world with a soul blackened from original sin and much of my life had been predicated on the actions of our forefathers. Fleeing into freedom had seemed like the best option but suddenly I was not so sure. There on my battered metal stool, my feet damp and clothes stinking of chlorine, I felt the words gliding from the pages of the small paperback, dancing across the glittering water, splashing onto the concrete surround, flowing back to pirouette inside every cell of my body.
And so, with fingertips a-tingle, the next stage of my life began.
I've never read Siddartha, even though it's been on a shelf downstairs for years now! This by you means I will be reading it over Christmas.
And I love what you've done with the prompt here: how you've set the book in your own time/cultural moment, and shown how it became interwoven with your thinking about that in such a daily, sensorily-charged way. It reminds me that books were always that for me until the smartphone/social media age - always fusing so completely with the day/a life stage... I think the winter of 2018 when I went up onto Firle Beacon in my car for a term, reading the Nobel Laureates while sitting out my shame and heartbreak: that was the last time books so fully interfused and also coloured life, in the way you describe here with such power.
What I love about this project - over and above the receiving of good writing - is how often now I change something in my life for the better after reading a piece like this... Thank you.
Thanks so much, as ever, Tanya. In this piece I was trying to find words for a visceral experience, the feelings and images of which I can still recall decades later. It's hard to find those words. But what a treasure that fusion of life and books is! I look forward to re-reading the piece you describe in The Cure for Sleep. I'm also interested to know how you balance reading books, which you clearly so love, with smartphone/social media activity - they're both such immersive activities, and so different in many ways. You offer us such a wonderful opportunity here, to see our words outside of our heads - and then there's your wonderful encouragement. Thanks so much again, xs
Oh now there's some good stuff to be talking about all together tomorrow, Sheila!
The deep interior time, that reading alchemy, you describe so vividly in your piece...and how to join a community of creatives and find an audience, we need sometimes to leave that place and be in another one. I'm trying this season - this project and my work til next October as a co-tutor on Sharon Blackie's online Hagitude forum aside - to retreat a little from my now-habitual scrolling and reading of fragments online. It's hard but I see it as repairing my concentration. I don't plan to leave social media as so many good people are met through it - you and me talking here an example of that! But I'm yearning for the kind of deep reading life I describe in the book from my early twenties, and such as you have written about here. xxx
Dancing magical letters on a page – my Nan's description of going from confused symbol onlooker to avid reader. ‘One day it clicked’, she would demonstrate finger to thumb. I heard the story many times, often as I gripped my little blue readers journal ‘cause for concern’ scratched within it.
It must have confused my parents, because we traveled many places via book spines before bedtime, my shyness had got us all into trouble. The issues remained non-the-less; salty streaks of heat as I stood on a plastic brown chair, unable to spell rhinoceros with a horrified small faced audience. Still it haunts me. Even as the results from my Bachelor’s degree pinged into my inbox, subject: English language & literature, I shivered at the memory of words once twisting unpleasantly.
But there was one person who always made sense to me, with lyrics like spinning tops and sparkling sweets in my mind; Edward Lear. Complete Nonsense & Other Verse for breaking through to sanity. To me and my stoic friend (Rosey bear); lots of honey wrapped up in money was indeed the best way to escape reality. And, as an adult living in a canal boat, a pea green boat is definitely the best vehicle to get there.
I keep a second-hand copy. It is a brilliantly insane yellow at my bedside, just in case my dreams run quiet and the night grows tall. Limerick is often dismissed as a writing structure, but if possible, you shouldn’t turn away a smile. Poetry is self-aware, offering extra space to the reader, add some fun and it’s freedom. Edward Lear twirls you in and creates movement in your mind; happiness bubbling the brain.
So, my Nan was telling the truth, because Lear’s words, they danced - by the light of the moon.
Jen! So happy you've joined the project - and what a wonderful, dancing first contribution: so poignant & full of precisely-remembered sensory detail. And I love how you have it by you now in adult life. A pleasure to have this in the story archive, and here is your direct link to it:
Michael had a penis named Ralph and none of the moms knew about it, these moms who trusted Judy Blume because of Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret? and Tiger Eyes. But my seventh grade friends and I sure knew about Ralph. We read and reread Forever, the story of first love and lost virginity between Michael and Katherine. Love starved, nearly knock-kneed skinny, told by an uncle that I looked like Olive Oyl, by others that I was a carpenter’s dream: flat as a board and never been nailed. (Every decade has its own version of 7th grade awful.)
I was sure a boy would never love me the way Michael loved Katherine. Filled with longing, remarkably insecure, intrigued by sex, overruled by terror, craving a tenderness that I wasn’t sure existed. Nice men narwhal-like, heard of but ever so rarely seen. My early efforts at trying to attract my own Michael were laughable: I bought a one piece bathing suit with plunging neckline and leopard skin print to wear while prancing around the Apollo Pool, gnawing on my Charleston Chews and picking the red remainders of Swedish fish out of my braces, always hoping that when I came up out of the water nothing came out of my nose. Lying on my towel, waiting to be adored, flat enough to be mistaken for African safari roadkill.
Looking back now at 54, it would be easy to be sad that this was something I wanted at that age and sadder still that it was something I thought didn’t exist. Instead, a kind smile for that girl whose aches made her foolish and clumsy. She learned to write her own story.
Gorgeous! I loved that book so much, although it had slipped from memory until this by you. Your physical description of young you - unsparing but so vivid! And this 'nice men narwhal-like' - yes, yes. Then the last line, which I've now come to anticipate keenly with each new piece from you as it always leaves with me a physical sensation of changed perspective. Thank you as ever - and also for the generous way you're reading others' work on here. It's so appreciated by me as well as those you're responding to. All my very very best for the holidays.
Tanya, It was so hard to choose a book...I almost did A Tree Grows in Brooklyn since that was also a favorite of my youth, and then became a favorite of my daughter which made it all the more special, could go on and on here. A special thank you as we near the end of the year. I first heard you on the Wintering podcast and knew I must read your book, hands down one of my favorite books ever, searingly honest, beautifully written, inspiring, affirming of all the humanity within us. So wonderfully strange how something so random can be truly life changing. Then this platform with all of the generosity you offer each one of us allowed the journey to continue. When I first saw the word limit, I thought, no, that's not for me, I cannot do that. Then, I did! I really believe that I have become a more confident and better writer through the word constraints, it really made me think about what could be stripped from the writing. My very best wishes to you as this year ends and a new one begins and my hope for you is that all of the love you have given us through the year is felt returned in kind. So grateful.
I missed out on Judy Blume, having my head buried deep in Silver Brumbies (Elyne Mitchell) (little did I know that one day I would be emigrating to the land of these beautiful horses!), so I really enjoyed this post and the effect her writing had on you!
Reading and I have become estranged, and it picks at my peace of mind.
My earliest memories were of bedtime stories read by my mum. Her mouth topsy turvy as I stared up from my pillow, her lips kneading and spilling words that toppled down to my ears like confetti. From the age of 6, my little life became nestled snug in the corners of wild and whimsical stories. Illicitly, at night, I would snake a desk lamp into my wardrobe, closing the door so only a chink of light betrayed me and curl up beneath the dress hems and shirt tails to scuttle between pages. When I was older, I would traipse over the fields to find a tree beneath whose boughs I could read for hours in peace.
I did my A-level paper on Iain Banks’s the Wasp Factory. My mother bought me tickets to see him talk. She had dressed up with due reverence for those ‘intellectuals’ who would surely be in attendance and was shocked that he held forth in a dingy pub, populated by eclectic fans of his science fiction writing; he was fabulous and kind, a seismic imagination in wool and corduroy.
My 20s, leading a vagabond and often solitary life, a book would be my companion for a few short weeks, then left on trains and buses a gift to a new home as my backpack could hold no more.
Now, in my 40s in my own home, the walls are so full of books, but they are not mine. My small collection minimal, drowned out, lingering neglected on the nightstand. My husband’s reading is dominant, voluminous. Mine, intensely private and small - but insistent – tapping on my heart like a grief until I carve a space for it once more.
Louise - this is simply stunning writing. How much you have done in so few words...
There is that concentration of childhood experience that gives me the same sensory pleasure I get from C S Lewis and Laurie Lee ('Illicitly, at night, I would snake a desk lamp into my wardrobe, closing the door so only a chink of light betrayed me and curl up beneath the dress hems and shirt tails to scuttle between pages.')
But then you also manage to say something deeply affecting about your adult experience, right now. Particular to you, but true (in that way of good writing) to something so many of us experience - when we are with a friend or partner whose efforts or interests somehow (often without any intent on their part) crowd out or diminish our own.
And then that very last line which gave me the same mix of disquiet and hope I get from Dickinson.
Wow. It makes me want to have a long writer and reader conversation with you. But as we aren't in the same town, I wonder if you can say a little more here in comments about that small collection on your bedside table - of what composed?
I'm also moved by your piece not only by its beauty but by the synchronicity of it: After reading constantly, deeply, widely my whole live I have found myself in a paradox in this publication year - what made me want to become a writer (that deep, sensual flow got from reading) has retreated from me in a long season where I've often had to respond at short notice to requests to blurb books, give talks, travel to events. It's all been a privilege...and yet I no longer feel myself. On Friday night and all day Saturday I read whole Hardy's Return of the Native which somehow (how?) I'd never read. It was mind-blowing. To regain my whole concentration in the act of reading about imaginary people from hundreds of years ago as if they were absolutely real and their situation urgent to me. And yesterday I began rereading a biography of Hardy first read in my twenties, but different now that I've been published and reviewed both well and badly myself...
All this a long-winded way of saying: I, too, have lost the habit of reading often and deeply and intend in this coming year to place it at the soul and centre of any free time I have.
I'd love so much to know whether reading returns to you and how. And what that is. Using this thread for that? I get notifications on any new comments, however deeply nested in the main thread those be...
Thank you for this truly fine piece of writing. Your link to it as follows:
Thank you so much Tanya for your amazing words and for being so generous with your own story. So interesting to hear that a version of this has also happened to you and that I too have found my lack of reading has caused an uneasy sense of straying from, and not feeling, myself.
My husband read my short piece and suggested I make a private reading den just for me away from him! His books are hardback tomes on wars and great leaders, a religious user of the bookmark, he treats his books with reverence, read, displayed and every word remembered. Mine are well-thumbed paperbacks, pages turned down and spines cracked - my act of reading more visceral and interactive. After being read my memory is of feelings, colours and landscapes, and of the time and place where I first immersed myself- with names, dates and facts, which my husband asks for, often forgotten. I think the difference and my comparison of this has shamed me into non-reading, which is completely unintentional on his part. In contrast to him I feel a careless reader but as you say it is the ‘act of reading about imaginary people from hundreds of years ago as if they were absolutely real and their situation urgent to me’ that is magical for me. It reminds me of a book I read last year, James Meek - To Calais, in Ordinary Time.
As for my reading pile, I should say that The Cure for Sleep has been on it for some time, though I finished it today. I think I knew it would require something deep and difficult from me, which was why I simultaneously bought it and avoided it, only dipping in and out when I felt I could. This platform together with your book has stirred in me a need for bravery and first steps, your profound and unwavering honesty, a liberation for me in so many ways, thank you.
Also on my pile is David Mitchell’s Utopia, Phillippe Sand’s The Ratline and Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (given by a friend) and a special one - Emma Harding’s Friedrichstrasse 19 – written by an old school friend who I am so very proud of, a phenomenal knowledge and quiet talent whose debut novel I hope to read next.
I'm aware that the noise and distraction of the outside world also plays a part in my lack of reading and your safe space here to write has given me an opportunity to explore this and gently find my way back, perhaps in a new way? A recalibration of the second half of my life that is needed before I can return to reading with a new sense of self and desire. I am willing myself to crack a new spine in the coming days, perhaps a little braver in heart and inching further down the path to a new hope and desire for my future…I’ll let you know how I get on xx
Louise - how strange. I was sure I'd replied to this...but see now that I've instead been in ongoing conversation with you/your words in my thoughts! Our exchange here really has moved me. I read your piece, my response, your reply to my husband as an example of what wonderful things are happening on here. And it led to another great conversation between he and I about reading. Thank you.
Please do keep writing for us here, and I am fascinated to read whatever you want to share about your 'recalibration'.
Since we last exchanged words here I've gone on from Return of the Native to Hardy's biography (just finished) and now I've cracked open a much-sellotaped copy of Tess of the D'Urbervilles that I've had since university but never read because of how often tutors and classmates called me her, on account of my rural accent. I see now, so late, how I turned away from my rural heritage into a study of the modernists simply because I resented being characterized by others. But lost a lot in so doing.
It's lovely to feel there's a group of us all recalibrating in our different ways. xx
Louise, I hope you can find your way back. All those worlds are waiting for you, as is your new world. I barely read for years when my kids were little, and now I'm back, it's like getting to know my self again. Have fun x
A bookless space in childhood I can relate to Geoff. I think the lack of pages to inhabit when young encourages a boldness of curiosity to fill that space until it's overflowing with a keen edged eye awareness that much ,much more is out there to discover.
I love the pictures you paint in words of your book journey.
Loved following your voice, your mind, through this piece, Jo. Synchronicity has been one of my own greatest teachers too - bringing my mentor and most of the books that have most deeply informed my work. You describe so well here the in-flood of colour, relief, gratitude that comes when the right people/words find us after a long stuck time. And now you have, in turn, brought Harjo's poem to me and others who will read your piece over the on the story archive (I've included a link to the poem in it). Here is the link to your words over there:
https://thecureforsleep.com/november-issue-reading/#joregan
Tanya xx
I will always be glad to see more pieces from you, Jo. And thank you for your kinds words. I'm not sure what I will doing work-wise after the end of 23, which is when my last guaranteed book and writing teaching money finishes being paid over. But I know I will always keep this community going for the long-term, even if my weekdays are back in an office once more after this strange and wonderful seven years of full time art and writing!
Monique, every time you contribute words to this project, I am filled - all over again - with a sense of your huge and bright spirit. You really do shine through screen as person who really believes in things, and takes risks in the realm, the service, of human connection. In the stories you share, but also how you read and support others here.
And its a special delight to see you describing a book which also means a great great deal to me. It's not one that I reference explicitly in my own book (the way I do with Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Thoreau and others) and yet you will now from reading my story how I struggled with my double love - all that it surprised in me: shame...but also abundance, and absurd joy and hope where guilt should have been.
That book by Greene gets closest to the strange grace of love that doesn't fit into the places and roles it should. It doesn't dodge the pain and hurt of that.
Your description of it means I'm adding it to my travel bag now for the time I'm about to spend down with my mother before returning home to my husband and children just before Christmas. At the end of my book's publication year, this feels like the right book to keep company with. Thank you.
Here is your link to your words in the story archive:
https://thecureforsleep.com/november-issue-reading/#moniquekennedy
I've spent time redesigning the landing page for the all the stories, and each of the story pages themselves, to better showcase all of your words. I'd love you to take a look...
And in the new year I'm going to redesign the whole website, again with the aim of making your stories stand out still further. The paperback in April has as its final page an invitation for readers to join our story-sharing community - so I'm hoping many more hundreds of people over the coming years will be reading you!
https://thecureforsleep.com/beyond-the-book/
Txx
I agree, also felt overwhelmed, so hard to choose. I'm intrigued and want to read this now, another one added to the list. Always so fun to hear what books meant so much to others.
Love this x
Ah! Thank you! And thank you too for the many good people from your Substack who joined me here after you recommended me. Xx
Dear Tanya, the last time I stirred my quill and scratched some words in response to one of your prompts, you kindly accommodated my absence from Substack by taking them in by email and cutting them into the archive. But here I am now, in the right place at the right time ... a prompt to write about reading. Perfect. Quick question, sorry, do I just submit the words as a comment here. I probably haven't been paying attention! Happy Friday, Barrie
I was hoping this prompt would tempt you! Yes, just paste into a reply on this thread & I will then move it into the story archive! X
Perfect. The sun is shining so I can’t justify sitting inside until I’ve done some potager chores and sorted some logs for the pile. But really looking forward to writing something this evening. Baked Camembert, crusty loaf, red wine ... and writing. My perfect evening. Bx
Barrie. Wow! So much wild and wondeful energy in your piece. Absolute pleasure to add it to the story archive. I've got a move on with creating this month's webpage so you can include your piece in your newsletter. I'm going to add the other stories that have already come in now, and so by the time it goes out later there will be several there. On your name in the pullquote, I've linked through to your new substack...
Tan xx
https://thecureforsleep.com/november-issue-reading/#barriethompson
That's so lovely to hear, Tan ... it's always amazing to see our words published like that. What a treat. Thank you. Bx
(PS ... can I be super cheeky ... if you can take the 'p' out of my name, that would be fab (I'm a Scottish 'Thomson'))
Whoops! Corrected both on the page and in the link...
https://thecureforsleep.com/november-issue-reading/#barriethomson
Thank you! Sorry to be pesky
There were no books in our house. No, that’s not correct, there were books, but they were locked in the bedroom of the random uncle, and that meant I wasn’t allowed even to see them on their shelves.
The random uncle had been swept up with us when our house in the East End was slum-cleared and we were moved to the red-brick housing estate box. The books he brought with him glittered in my imagination, I knew I wanted to read, the picture books at school were already dead weight. There was treasure behind that bedroom door.
Then the RAF accepted him and he was no longer part of our family. I was the youngest but the complications of gender, relationship and noisy nightmares meant that I was moved into his room. I held my breath as I followed my bedding through that door for the first time, the books were still there! Instantly, in that golden moment, my world expanded 5…. 10…100 times.
There was nothing here that would be considered a childrens book, the uncle was a frustrated traveller, here were foreign lands, strange places, people with different coloured skin. Yet the greatest joy was that there were no librarians to send me back to replace my choice of books on the shelves because they were ‘too old for me’, the ongoing battle I had at the public library.
Nights became adventures, I saved precious pocket-money for torch batteries, I took flight from that unheated bedroom, landing softly (don’t let parents know I’m not asleep) in Africa, Canada, Australia. In the morning I went richer to school, knowing my teachers for what they were, they wanted to ground me in Sunderland. I tolerated their leaden feet, come nightfall, I could journey once more.
Love this, Geoff. The sense of anticipation, the dream realised ... and then the 'travel' to untold shores, broadening the mind, preparing your escape. Was it Laurie Helgoe who said "Reading is like travel, allowing you to exit your own life for a bit, and to come back with a renewed, even inspired, perspective"? Evocative writing. Barrie
Geoff - what a compelling piece this was: in itself like the colour-plate in one of those books: that sort of magnetism (that I remember too: my reading was likewise found material in my grandparents' house, relics of an uncle who'd moved out just before I arrived!). And then that last paragraph - how you invert the roles of student/teachers: stunning.
Here is your link in the story archive:
https://thecureforsleep.com/november-issue-reading/#geoffcox
Tan xx
So touching, how hard you worked to feed your curiosity, "that golden moment." I felt myself cheering you on. I love how everyone takes these prompts and is able to tell a complete story of themselves in so few words and yet leaves the reader longing for more.
Thanks so very much for taking the time to respond so positively Sheila. I find these prompts are a great opportunity to take one small memory and give it the words it might deserve (I've just finished a book-length memoir and if I gave every memory this attention it would be a long book indeed!)
Wow! Good for you. Best wishes with that!
No Such Thing as The 'Wrong' Books
In the past, I was always reading the wrong books.
Before the first year of secondary school, I could be found in every saloon bar of the Louis L’Amour books on my Dad’s bookcase, tossing back the hard spirits, going all in on 5-card stud, and wondering what the girls did in the upstairs rooms with cowboys freshly washed in copper baths.
Take any collection of dead poets’ musings offered up by first and second form English teachers and toss them aside. You’ll find me in Middle Earth battling orcs and relishing the poetry of made up languages instead.
I’d rather Kill a Mockingbird than sit down in Bleak House to study my O level texts. What the Dickens were they thinking of. Keats … miserable blighter. I spent those days ignoring the official book list, wishing instead that I could be wandering Lonely as a Cloud. Did I even know what words were worth? Seek me out in wartime tanks brought vividly to life by Sven Hassel. Reading, I’d say, no hassle. Before he started writing Bourne novels, the appropriately named Eric van Lustbader was corrupting my teenage years with ninja stealth, my flickering torch under the covers revealing explicit storylines that widened youthful eyes.
The wrong books.
Always, the wrong books.
Coleridge sailed into view for A levels but I was more interested in finding a ‘stately pleasure-dome’ than considering the plight of an old sailor who brought misfortune on himself due to his carelessness with a crossbow. I suspect the novels of Wilber Smith were more thumbed than the reading list presented by Brian Watson my long-suffering English teacher.
The world of work loomed into view. But the whole business of ‘air publications’, Queen’s Regulations, and weighty tomes on the net explosive quantities to be stored in reinforced buildings blew the doors shut on any curiosity I might have had to read more widely. Roll on 15 years and the hero of this dime novel is selected to study with the future grown-ups. But, not for me the serious business of the Suez Crisis and the Six-Day War, or the relative merits of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. I could be found in the 8th row of the impressive lecture theatre in a race with a colleague to finish ‘The Goblet of Fire’ before drowning my evenings with goblets of wine. Tell me to read, I won’t. Show me the Essential Reading list, I will ignore it.
Fighting. Always reading the wrong books. And not very many of them, if the truth be told.
Roll forward, a late-blossoming realisation. As Stephen King said: “If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
And I want to write. I so want to write. Perhaps a self-set reading challenge then. Fifty-seven books for my 57th year. Catching up with books I should already have read. Picking the titles myself. Nothing is prescribed or proscribed. No-one mutters ‘you’ve read that before’. Anti-heroes pace the streets of Edinburgh; late-blossoming writers create instant classics; Bond, I am shaken and stirred; vicarious adventures with Jenny, she’s Tough; going analogue with Alex Roddie but keeping a tally digitally.
The floodgates open. Reading is no longer a chore. It is a pleasure that unlocks a writer’s words. These words.
In 2003, my partner and I arrived in the high, thin air of Mexico City at the start of a year long adventure. The culture shock was massive, a combination of altitude, the bustle of 10 million people, unfamiliar food, smells, faces and so much noise. The hostel overlooked the Zocalo, with its Spanish colonial buildings sitting on top of an aztec temple, the main square of the city. I felt homesick, shocked and disoriented and searched for the familiar. We travelled lightly and the hostel had a shelf full of books left by travellers coming and going from all parts of Central America. I found a battered copy of McCarthy’s Bar by Pete McCarthy, a story of his travels around Southern Ireland. I took it with me when we hopped on the bus south to the Mayan riviera and read it cover to cover on the 20 hour journey imagining the green fields of west cork as we drive along the parched Mexican highways scattered with cacti and dust. Arriving in Playa del Carmen in Yucatan with its turquoise sea and blazing white beaches and another hostel, I swapped my book for another battered novel and lay reading in a hammock. That carried me on to a jungle traveller village in Guatemala with an open air jungle canopy bathroom and howler monkeys in the trees as I sat reading on the loo. And so it went. I read, I passed my book on, I swapped and shared battered books with global travellers all the way through Belize, through LA and onward to Fiji, on campsites and hostels across New Zealand and Australia. The comfort blanket of novels and autobiographies and books I never dreamed I would read. Adventure, poetry, classics. Anything that was there- I was open to it all. I have never read so widely and prolifically even during my literature degree. I had no expectations, no requirements, I just read what was available and there for me. No judgement. My final swap was in a hotel on the Khao San Road in Bangkok after winding our way through south east Asia. I ended my journey and flight back to London with another story of travel, another story of wandering in Ireland. The books carried me, were my blanket, my thread, my familiar, my safety in a year of absolute freedom and uncertainty.
Helen, this was fascinating to me who has so rarely travelled. It gives me a whole new perspective on how it might be to go so far beyond my comfort zone, by using books as a blanket. But I love that even as they provided you with safety and continuity, the actual book in hand was always contingent upon whatever had been left behind by a previous traveller.
It's also simply a gorgeous piece of writing. Have you considered sending it to an online travel magazine or approaching a newspaper travel section with a pitch on this?
In the meantime, here is a link to it in the story archive (happy to add you last name if you confirm here via reply)
Tan x
https://thecureforsleep.com/november-issue-reading/#Helen
Thanks so much Tanya. This is such a lovely safe space to try out a bit of writing after many years and I am really enjoying it (and the anonymity at the moment but that might change as I feel more confident!) - the themes and the surprising things that come to me under those themes has been really exciting! Look forward to more and thanks for creating and curating it xx
Oh my - good point about anonymity! I was feeling a little too bold earlier to be using my full name... I may rethink that as my writing becomes more personal.
Ah! I'd just tweeted asking for Twitter magic to find a replacment - but I've deleted instantly as the link has your name in it!
Do you want me to remove your last name from the story archive listing for it?
I quite understand the need to get used to having your words on the web - several contributors don't give last names (yet/ever) for that reason: it's enough for them to get used to seeing their words presented in a public place at a little distance from them. They often - as you did - see their words in new ways too once they're published. This is true of all writers - however hard I proof read, I only ever see some errors the minute it goes to my editor!
I can't undertake to make lots of editorial changes for style post submission because of the volume of pieces I edit and publish: I can only make change if a big misspelling or formatting problem is spotted...
But I can change your name straight away. On this platform it doesn't get indexed on search engines, and most subscribers don't read all the subcomments on threads...
Oh no, that's absolutely fine! I think I want to do it this way. I just hadn't really considered it. I have now, and please do send that tweet out onto the world. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to waste your time. Thank you!
And that's such great insight, about proofreading and missing things. Thank you again.
Loved this, felt taken along to places I've never been, always admire people with your sense of adventure, so touched by all of the book sharing, a link around the world.
Your piece is so rich and evocative. It's reminded me of the years i travelled myself and picked up a book - that story unfolding as your own travel story unfolds, running alongside one another. A double story so rich, like a bit of life twice lived, really loved reading this x
Thanks Louise! It’s funny as I think the tradition of passing on books as we did as travellers isn’t so common anymore as everyone travels with kindles- seems a shame really!
I know! Your piece bought back lovely memories of books handed down and handed on, undertaking travels of their own!
I often search the Internet for a particular edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But all I really remember is that it was chunky, yellowish with grey lettering and illustrations, so finding it will be pure luck. For years I refused to buy another copy, longingly waiting to come across that edition I used to own, hoping to restore it to my library and alongside the book regain something else lost a long time ago too: a sense of home. My budding library, 30 books at most, was thrown away when I was 19 by people who just wanted me and my meagre possessions out of the flat I had lived in all my life. Thirty years on, I can say that losing all my books then was more traumatic than having to leave that flat, because already at that point in my life my books were my home.
I was the only reader in my family, and yet I have been shaping my life around books ever since I could read. I began with the very few books within my reach, but when I started to really want to choose what I read public libraries were not enough – I became very greedy about surrounding myself with my own books. My family was disintegrating, and my library became something to hold on to. As most young teenagers, I had very little money of my own. That copy of Huckleberry Finn was in English, bought from the British Council in Lisbon, imported and expensive. I probably spent all my monthly allowance on it. It became the cornerstone of my library and of my life as I wanted it to be, in a way. That is why it meant so much to me and why I am still looking for it.
Yes, they are! Thank you, Monique. x
This is such fine and deeply moving writing by you, Maria, making me glad all over again that you applied for Ilkley mentoring this year, and that I chose you. And it's a special feeling to have you join this writing project now with this piece, given that this month's prompt was decided upon after our conversation, after hearing you speak of your younger-self's library being destroyed.
Here is your link to it in the story archive:
https://thecureforsleep.com/november-issue-reading/#mariasimoes
And if you'd be happy for me to share a link to your beautiful words on Twitter, we might get lucky and find that hive mind, and Christmas spirit, leads you to the book? I will only do that if you say I might!
I do hope other prompts interest you to write for, as I'd like our writing conversations and connnection to continue now long past the funded one that brought us together this month!
Txx
Thank you so much, Tanya. Rereading it, I think the word 'books' is in there a few times too many! Funny how I only noticed that when reading it on the archive page though.
I love the challenge of keeping the piece to 300 words, it's such a good writing exercise and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Tentative steps. Please do share it on Twitter. Thank you again for your generosity, and for creating this wonderful platform and community. I hope to become a valuable part of it and, yes, to continue our writing conversations and connection. Maria x
So touched by this....could this be the book? If so, I'd be happy to send along.
https://www.amazon.com/Adventures-Huckleberry-SeaWolf-Illustrated-Classic/dp/1953649807/ref=sr_1_5?crid=19I3R5T4HQ0KS&keywords=adventures+of+huckleberry+finn+book+with+illustrations&qid=1670793612&sprefix=adventures+of+huckleberry+finn+book+with+illustrations%2Caps%2C84&sr=8-5
Thank you, Sheila. Not this one - but thank you so much anyway! x
The stories of Raymond Carver
The first shock was the cover. I’d remembered a series of small images, mini-lino prints, of everyday scenes, domestic scenes. In fact there were only eight images, and two of them were of a whisky bottle and a glass. In the others, figures were disembodied: legs, arms, the back view of two people in a car. The faces that could be seen had harsh black slits for eyes, for a mouth.
And then I opened the book, and memory went awry. I’d written a date on the fly leaf: May 1985. I was 25. This couldn’t be. I’d convinced myself I’d bought this book when I was at university.
I left university in 1981.
I read a few lines of the first story. The language is spare, sparse: a waitress describes serving a very large man in a restaurant. I remembered reading it in 1985: my amazement at what the simplest language could achieve. The lack of similes, of metaphor, made the emotional impact of the stories even more intense. This was real. This was true. I believed every word. Nothing was wasted. I absorbed the stories as if by osmosis, and wondered how he did it. The stories were perfect. His words described the quiet desperation of the characters in a way I had never seen before, the loneliness, the alcoholism, the despair.
1985. The year I had my first abortion. The year I lost my job. The year I woke up in many strange beds around the city, wondering if I had the money in my pocket to get home. I never made the connection between the life I was leading and the stories I was reading.
Many things have changed.
But looking back, it can sometimes seem as if, in that year, I was sleepwalking: a bit part player in my own life. Like a Raymond Carver character, hungover, staring into space.
We didn't touch on Carver in our wonderful mentoring conversation - so it's a thrill to find a shared love and awe for his work here, now, through your own spare and very powerful prose. I thought when I first began reading your work - in your mentoring application and then your first few pieces here - that you are in the lineage of Lessing, Duras, Ernaux: those women who write the full range of emotions and experiences, but with an economy of language. Now, too, I see that what I prize in Carver in part of what you bring to story-telling too.
I love how you used the prompt here to reflect on his writing, your life.
Here is your link to it in the story archive:
https://thecureforsleep.com/november-issue-reading/#kerrywhitley
Txx
This is wonderful, seems ripe for a longer piece. The paragraph that starts: 1985. The three short sentences then the two longer ones, spare but says everything, palpable.
Tanya think you so much for your comments. I can’t express how much your words mean to me…and you love Raymond Carver too!! There were so many writers I could have chosen for this prompt but it just had to be him..x
Have you read his essay in the mixed collection Fires? About how he began as a writer around the crushing pressures of being a young father on low income? And his second wife Tess Gallagher's essay about the end of his life at the end of his Collected Poems? Oh oh oh. Both achingly good... xx
Have read the Fires one but not the other one...will seek it out. 🙏
It was during the summer of 1977 that I read Siddhartha, a novel by Herman Hesse based on the early life of Buddha, I believe. I had just finished my final school exams and the results were not due out for two months. Plans to escape Ireland and spend a few weeks cycling and busking in Brittany were afoot, but first I needed money to get me there.
Between Troubles in the north, and control exerted by the Roman Catholic church in the south, Ireland was a dark place for youngsters growing up. The economy was also weak but I got a job as a lifeguard in a small, city centre sports club for men. Why the management employed a 17-year old girl, with no qualifications, to save men who got into difficulties in a swimming pool, is curious, but thankfully my limited skills were rarely called upon. Instead I spent hours listening to water sploshing against the blue mosaic walls, and reading.
My brother, who was leading the kind of exciting life that I wanted, lent me Siddhartha. One of the central characters is a river and, from observing its behaviour, Siddhartha learns that time is an illusion which distracts us from living, and that all time, past and future, exists in the present moment. Having come into this world stained with original sin, and lived a life as a child, predicated on the righteous actions of the nation’s forefathers, these ideas exploded my thinking. There, seated on my battered metal stool in a cloud of chlorine, I could see the words gliding from the pages of the small paperback, dancing across the glittering water, splashing onto the concrete surround, and feel them transform, flowing back to pirouette inside every cell of my body.
And so, with fingertips tingling, the next stage of my life began.
Big apologies Tanya, but is it possible for me to edit this or resubmit? Just realised I sent the wrong version! Best wishes, Sheila
Of course! I’m not able to put it in archive til this evening. Txx
Thanks a million, Tanya. Here goes! xs
It was during the summer of 1977 that I read Siddhartha, a novel by Herman Hesse about a young man seeking enlightenment. At that time in Ireland, a combination of Troubles in the north, and control exerted by the Catholic church in the south, weighed heavily. Having just finished secondary school, my friends and I talked of escaping to London or Europe where we could support ourselves by busking, chambermaiding or fruit-picking. First, though we needed money to get there.
I got a job as a lifeguard in a small, men’s sports club. Why the management employed a 17-year old girl, with no qualifications, to rescue men from a swimming pool, is curious, but thankfully my limited skills were rarely called upon. Instead I spent hours enveloped in chlorine fumes, reading Siddhartha, lent to me by my brother.
As water sploshed rhythmically against the blue mosaic walls, it felt appropriate that one of the central characters of the book was a river. I read how Siddhartha learns, from watching the water, that time is an illusion which distracts one from living, and that all time exists merely in the present moment; to live fully one must give attention to the present.
For me, these ideas were revolutionary. I had arrived into the world with a soul blackened from original sin and much of my life had been predicated on the actions of our forefathers. Fleeing into freedom had seemed like the best option but suddenly I was not so sure. There on my battered metal stool, my feet damp and clothes stinking of chlorine, I felt the words gliding from the pages of the small paperback, dancing across the glittering water, splashing onto the concrete surround, flowing back to pirouette inside every cell of my body.
And so, with fingertips a-tingle, the next stage of my life began.
I've never read Siddartha, even though it's been on a shelf downstairs for years now! This by you means I will be reading it over Christmas.
And I love what you've done with the prompt here: how you've set the book in your own time/cultural moment, and shown how it became interwoven with your thinking about that in such a daily, sensorily-charged way. It reminds me that books were always that for me until the smartphone/social media age - always fusing so completely with the day/a life stage... I think the winter of 2018 when I went up onto Firle Beacon in my car for a term, reading the Nobel Laureates while sitting out my shame and heartbreak: that was the last time books so fully interfused and also coloured life, in the way you describe here with such power.
What I love about this project - over and above the receiving of good writing - is how often now I change something in my life for the better after reading a piece like this... Thank you.
Here is your link:
https://thecureforsleep.com/november-issue-reading/#sheiladecourcy
And look forward to meeting you and your fellow coursemates on Thursday!
Txx
Thanks so much, as ever, Tanya. In this piece I was trying to find words for a visceral experience, the feelings and images of which I can still recall decades later. It's hard to find those words. But what a treasure that fusion of life and books is! I look forward to re-reading the piece you describe in The Cure for Sleep. I'm also interested to know how you balance reading books, which you clearly so love, with smartphone/social media activity - they're both such immersive activities, and so different in many ways. You offer us such a wonderful opportunity here, to see our words outside of our heads - and then there's your wonderful encouragement. Thanks so much again, xs
Oh now there's some good stuff to be talking about all together tomorrow, Sheila!
The deep interior time, that reading alchemy, you describe so vividly in your piece...and how to join a community of creatives and find an audience, we need sometimes to leave that place and be in another one. I'm trying this season - this project and my work til next October as a co-tutor on Sharon Blackie's online Hagitude forum aside - to retreat a little from my now-habitual scrolling and reading of fragments online. It's hard but I see it as repairing my concentration. I don't plan to leave social media as so many good people are met through it - you and me talking here an example of that! But I'm yearning for the kind of deep reading life I describe in the book from my early twenties, and such as you have written about here. xxx
The Nonsense of Edward Lear
Dancing magical letters on a page – my Nan's description of going from confused symbol onlooker to avid reader. ‘One day it clicked’, she would demonstrate finger to thumb. I heard the story many times, often as I gripped my little blue readers journal ‘cause for concern’ scratched within it.
It must have confused my parents, because we traveled many places via book spines before bedtime, my shyness had got us all into trouble. The issues remained non-the-less; salty streaks of heat as I stood on a plastic brown chair, unable to spell rhinoceros with a horrified small faced audience. Still it haunts me. Even as the results from my Bachelor’s degree pinged into my inbox, subject: English language & literature, I shivered at the memory of words once twisting unpleasantly.
But there was one person who always made sense to me, with lyrics like spinning tops and sparkling sweets in my mind; Edward Lear. Complete Nonsense & Other Verse for breaking through to sanity. To me and my stoic friend (Rosey bear); lots of honey wrapped up in money was indeed the best way to escape reality. And, as an adult living in a canal boat, a pea green boat is definitely the best vehicle to get there.
I keep a second-hand copy. It is a brilliantly insane yellow at my bedside, just in case my dreams run quiet and the night grows tall. Limerick is often dismissed as a writing structure, but if possible, you shouldn’t turn away a smile. Poetry is self-aware, offering extra space to the reader, add some fun and it’s freedom. Edward Lear twirls you in and creates movement in your mind; happiness bubbling the brain.
So, my Nan was telling the truth, because Lear’s words, they danced - by the light of the moon.
https://compasskeen.wordpress.com/
Thank you💗
Jen! So happy you've joined the project - and what a wonderful, dancing first contribution: so poignant & full of precisely-remembered sensory detail. And I love how you have it by you now in adult life. A pleasure to have this in the story archive, and here is your direct link to it:
https://thecureforsleep.com/november-issue-reading/#jenratcliffe
I do hope you'll enjoy trying out some of the other prompts. All stay open for contributions with no deadlines.
Tan xx
Thank you so much - and for this great project which I will be happily reading next to my fire over Christmas xx
Judy Blume – Forever
Michael had a penis named Ralph and none of the moms knew about it, these moms who trusted Judy Blume because of Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret? and Tiger Eyes. But my seventh grade friends and I sure knew about Ralph. We read and reread Forever, the story of first love and lost virginity between Michael and Katherine. Love starved, nearly knock-kneed skinny, told by an uncle that I looked like Olive Oyl, by others that I was a carpenter’s dream: flat as a board and never been nailed. (Every decade has its own version of 7th grade awful.)
I was sure a boy would never love me the way Michael loved Katherine. Filled with longing, remarkably insecure, intrigued by sex, overruled by terror, craving a tenderness that I wasn’t sure existed. Nice men narwhal-like, heard of but ever so rarely seen. My early efforts at trying to attract my own Michael were laughable: I bought a one piece bathing suit with plunging neckline and leopard skin print to wear while prancing around the Apollo Pool, gnawing on my Charleston Chews and picking the red remainders of Swedish fish out of my braces, always hoping that when I came up out of the water nothing came out of my nose. Lying on my towel, waiting to be adored, flat enough to be mistaken for African safari roadkill.
Looking back now at 54, it would be easy to be sad that this was something I wanted at that age and sadder still that it was something I thought didn’t exist. Instead, a kind smile for that girl whose aches made her foolish and clumsy. She learned to write her own story.
Thank you very much. I wasn't sure if she was popular outside of the states, glad to hear she resonated with you too, just loved her.
Oh my, yes! I read those too.
Gorgeous! I loved that book so much, although it had slipped from memory until this by you. Your physical description of young you - unsparing but so vivid! And this 'nice men narwhal-like' - yes, yes. Then the last line, which I've now come to anticipate keenly with each new piece from you as it always leaves with me a physical sensation of changed perspective. Thank you as ever - and also for the generous way you're reading others' work on here. It's so appreciated by me as well as those you're responding to. All my very very best for the holidays.
https://thecureforsleep.com/november-issue-reading/#sheilaknell
Txxx
Tanya, It was so hard to choose a book...I almost did A Tree Grows in Brooklyn since that was also a favorite of my youth, and then became a favorite of my daughter which made it all the more special, could go on and on here. A special thank you as we near the end of the year. I first heard you on the Wintering podcast and knew I must read your book, hands down one of my favorite books ever, searingly honest, beautifully written, inspiring, affirming of all the humanity within us. So wonderfully strange how something so random can be truly life changing. Then this platform with all of the generosity you offer each one of us allowed the journey to continue. When I first saw the word limit, I thought, no, that's not for me, I cannot do that. Then, I did! I really believe that I have become a more confident and better writer through the word constraints, it really made me think about what could be stripped from the writing. My very best wishes to you as this year ends and a new one begins and my hope for you is that all of the love you have given us through the year is felt returned in kind. So grateful.
Hi Sheila
I missed out on Judy Blume, having my head buried deep in Silver Brumbies (Elyne Mitchell) (little did I know that one day I would be emigrating to the land of these beautiful horses!), so I really enjoyed this post and the effect her writing had on you!
Thank you
Tracey
Thank you so much Sheila...I am indeed thinking of a longer piece.
1985 was quite a year, but a lot happened in the rest of that decade too ..
Reading and I have become estranged, and it picks at my peace of mind.
My earliest memories were of bedtime stories read by my mum. Her mouth topsy turvy as I stared up from my pillow, her lips kneading and spilling words that toppled down to my ears like confetti. From the age of 6, my little life became nestled snug in the corners of wild and whimsical stories. Illicitly, at night, I would snake a desk lamp into my wardrobe, closing the door so only a chink of light betrayed me and curl up beneath the dress hems and shirt tails to scuttle between pages. When I was older, I would traipse over the fields to find a tree beneath whose boughs I could read for hours in peace.
I did my A-level paper on Iain Banks’s the Wasp Factory. My mother bought me tickets to see him talk. She had dressed up with due reverence for those ‘intellectuals’ who would surely be in attendance and was shocked that he held forth in a dingy pub, populated by eclectic fans of his science fiction writing; he was fabulous and kind, a seismic imagination in wool and corduroy.
My 20s, leading a vagabond and often solitary life, a book would be my companion for a few short weeks, then left on trains and buses a gift to a new home as my backpack could hold no more.
Now, in my 40s in my own home, the walls are so full of books, but they are not mine. My small collection minimal, drowned out, lingering neglected on the nightstand. My husband’s reading is dominant, voluminous. Mine, intensely private and small - but insistent – tapping on my heart like a grief until I carve a space for it once more.
Louise - this is simply stunning writing. How much you have done in so few words...
There is that concentration of childhood experience that gives me the same sensory pleasure I get from C S Lewis and Laurie Lee ('Illicitly, at night, I would snake a desk lamp into my wardrobe, closing the door so only a chink of light betrayed me and curl up beneath the dress hems and shirt tails to scuttle between pages.')
But then you also manage to say something deeply affecting about your adult experience, right now. Particular to you, but true (in that way of good writing) to something so many of us experience - when we are with a friend or partner whose efforts or interests somehow (often without any intent on their part) crowd out or diminish our own.
And then that very last line which gave me the same mix of disquiet and hope I get from Dickinson.
Wow. It makes me want to have a long writer and reader conversation with you. But as we aren't in the same town, I wonder if you can say a little more here in comments about that small collection on your bedside table - of what composed?
I'm also moved by your piece not only by its beauty but by the synchronicity of it: After reading constantly, deeply, widely my whole live I have found myself in a paradox in this publication year - what made me want to become a writer (that deep, sensual flow got from reading) has retreated from me in a long season where I've often had to respond at short notice to requests to blurb books, give talks, travel to events. It's all been a privilege...and yet I no longer feel myself. On Friday night and all day Saturday I read whole Hardy's Return of the Native which somehow (how?) I'd never read. It was mind-blowing. To regain my whole concentration in the act of reading about imaginary people from hundreds of years ago as if they were absolutely real and their situation urgent to me. And yesterday I began rereading a biography of Hardy first read in my twenties, but different now that I've been published and reviewed both well and badly myself...
All this a long-winded way of saying: I, too, have lost the habit of reading often and deeply and intend in this coming year to place it at the soul and centre of any free time I have.
I'd love so much to know whether reading returns to you and how. And what that is. Using this thread for that? I get notifications on any new comments, however deeply nested in the main thread those be...
Thank you for this truly fine piece of writing. Your link to it as follows:
https://thecureforsleep.com/november-issue-reading/#louiseratcliffe
Thank you so much Tanya for your amazing words and for being so generous with your own story. So interesting to hear that a version of this has also happened to you and that I too have found my lack of reading has caused an uneasy sense of straying from, and not feeling, myself.
My husband read my short piece and suggested I make a private reading den just for me away from him! His books are hardback tomes on wars and great leaders, a religious user of the bookmark, he treats his books with reverence, read, displayed and every word remembered. Mine are well-thumbed paperbacks, pages turned down and spines cracked - my act of reading more visceral and interactive. After being read my memory is of feelings, colours and landscapes, and of the time and place where I first immersed myself- with names, dates and facts, which my husband asks for, often forgotten. I think the difference and my comparison of this has shamed me into non-reading, which is completely unintentional on his part. In contrast to him I feel a careless reader but as you say it is the ‘act of reading about imaginary people from hundreds of years ago as if they were absolutely real and their situation urgent to me’ that is magical for me. It reminds me of a book I read last year, James Meek - To Calais, in Ordinary Time.
As for my reading pile, I should say that The Cure for Sleep has been on it for some time, though I finished it today. I think I knew it would require something deep and difficult from me, which was why I simultaneously bought it and avoided it, only dipping in and out when I felt I could. This platform together with your book has stirred in me a need for bravery and first steps, your profound and unwavering honesty, a liberation for me in so many ways, thank you.
Also on my pile is David Mitchell’s Utopia, Phillippe Sand’s The Ratline and Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (given by a friend) and a special one - Emma Harding’s Friedrichstrasse 19 – written by an old school friend who I am so very proud of, a phenomenal knowledge and quiet talent whose debut novel I hope to read next.
I'm aware that the noise and distraction of the outside world also plays a part in my lack of reading and your safe space here to write has given me an opportunity to explore this and gently find my way back, perhaps in a new way? A recalibration of the second half of my life that is needed before I can return to reading with a new sense of self and desire. I am willing myself to crack a new spine in the coming days, perhaps a little braver in heart and inching further down the path to a new hope and desire for my future…I’ll let you know how I get on xx
Louise - how strange. I was sure I'd replied to this...but see now that I've instead been in ongoing conversation with you/your words in my thoughts! Our exchange here really has moved me. I read your piece, my response, your reply to my husband as an example of what wonderful things are happening on here. And it led to another great conversation between he and I about reading. Thank you.
Please do keep writing for us here, and I am fascinated to read whatever you want to share about your 'recalibration'.
Since we last exchanged words here I've gone on from Return of the Native to Hardy's biography (just finished) and now I've cracked open a much-sellotaped copy of Tess of the D'Urbervilles that I've had since university but never read because of how often tutors and classmates called me her, on account of my rural accent. I see now, so late, how I turned away from my rural heritage into a study of the modernists simply because I resented being characterized by others. But lost a lot in so doing.
It's lovely to feel there's a group of us all recalibrating in our different ways. xx
Louise, I hope you can find your way back. All those worlds are waiting for you, as is your new world. I barely read for years when my kids were little, and now I'm back, it's like getting to know my self again. Have fun x
Thank you Amelia! I think I'm slowly getting there and you are so right, it does feel like I'm getting to know myself again!
A bookless space in childhood I can relate to Geoff. I think the lack of pages to inhabit when young encourages a boldness of curiosity to fill that space until it's overflowing with a keen edged eye awareness that much ,much more is out there to discover.
I love the pictures you paint in words of your book journey.