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	Sunday 29th January 2012 A stroke of luck a couple of weeks ago when I was watching a programme on Sicily, for the art critic and the chef who were presenting it, went into a museum in Sicily to look at a sculpture of Demeter. She was absolutely beautiful with a wide serene face and lovely eyes. She’d been retrieved from the Paul Getty museum in America, handed over because the Sicilian museum was able to prove she was made of a certain kind of stone found only in that area of Sicily. It was luck because one of my favourite poems is BAVARIAN GENTIANS by D.H.Lawrence and, of course, Demeter is in that poem. I have never pictured her before so seeing her statue was wonderful. Now when I read the poem, I see Demeter’s calm and lovely presence lying in it. I have a book, TWENTY CHINESE POEMS by Clifford Bax that Lawrence read. Not this copy of mine, obviously, but simply to know that he had read this book makes my copy of it so much more precious. I know he read it because in 1912, on the 15^thMay, he wrote a letter to Walter de la Mare saying, ‘Commend me to Edward Thomas, and the 50 or so Chinese Poems man’, which is Clifford Bax. The copy of the Chinese poems I have has written at the front in most attractive writing, ‘Ada M Smith, February 1918,’ and I wonder about Ada. Lawrence had a sister called Ada and they were very close. When I was walking through our local national park, I was thinking about Lawrence’s blue gentians and because I was, all the little blue things around me made themselves known, so much so, I wrote a poem called, ‘Small Blue Flowers’ which is in my Faith poetry section. You never know when you’re going to come across these brilliant writers but when you do, you get such a warm sense of recognition almost as if they’re a family member. For instance, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Letters, writing to Mrs. Turnbull, he mentions Lawrence, hoping her son, Andrew, has not been caught up in his net but is concentrating on the set writers he should be studying. F. Scott Fitzgerald is another writer I love. What a gift it is to know their work. And how fortunate I was to see that sculpture of Demeter on television.

		Saturday 3rd December 2011 WRITERS AND CHRISTMAS One of my all-time favourite books is ‘THE DUD AVOCADO’ by Elaine Dundy and a passage that resonated with me was when heroine, Sally Jay Gorce, remembered a Christmas vacation spent largely in a Library where people kept mistaking her for a Librarian. To be a Librarian was her ultimate horror but that was where she finally found herself. Over the years of working with children, I have been so impressed by Librarians and the way they rise to every occasion. They dress up, ferry people about, meet trains, provide quiet places for workshops and a hundred and one other things, and I have often wondered if they knew what they were getting into when they started their careers. When I was a girl, I used to want to be a Librarian more than anything and flick through Library cards and stamp books, so I made cards for my own books and stamped them with my Lilliput Printing Set when I took them off the shelf to read! December of 1961 was when brilliant poet, Anne Sexton, wrote a prose piece called ‘The Last Believer’, memories of past Christmas mornings when Anne, her sister and mother made belief they saw Saint Nick. It always feels a privilege to read this difficult and complex woman’s work. Then E.M. Delafield’s ‘Diary of a Provincial Lady’ where the Christmas day of 1929 is “festive, but exhausting” and the family ate turkey and plum-pudding cold in the evening to give the servants a rest. My plan exactly minus the plum-pudding and the servants. In ‘The Dud Avocado’ Elaine Dundy prefaces one chapter with words from Tennessee Williams’ ‘Camino Real’ - “Make voyages. Attempt them. That’s all there is”. That’s what I’m doing just now, doing a final edit and rewrite of a book that’s been waiting for ages and is, I suppose, what most writers are doing most of the time. An exceptionally lovely short article by Ernest Hemingway was written about Christmas in Paris 1923. It opens with, “Paris with the snow falling. Paris with the big charcoal braziers outside the cafes, glowing red”, and closes with, ˜It was their first Christmas away from their own land.” Published by The Toronto Star Weekly. Happy journeying, everyone.

Tuesday January 17th 2012

Giving a Talk is always a challenge. The first challenge is to decide what to talk about; the second is to make it interesting. I remember the first time I heard the word ‘challenge’ used as a substitute for ‘difficult’. It was when I went to a really tough school and the Head told me they had a ‘challenging’ school. It was, but two minutes into my first workshop, it was clear everyone wanted it to succeed.

This Talk, however, was to older people so I settled on the influence of my home town on my writing. I’m always amazed at the good nature and courtesy of groups that listen and get involved in what you’re saying, even if, as with this group, many of the people did not come from the town itself.

Anyway, I spoke about how small things in any place can highlight really big things. The first small thing was a row of cottages, one of which had hollyhocks in its garden and how, one morning, after my Dad had died, I was walking past these cottages and saw it was hollyhock time again. That set me to writing a poem about my Dad. I wrote it whilst I was standing at the bus stop waiting for a bus home. My Dad had a brother who looked very like him and I remember seeing him that morning and my heart just about missing a beat because, for a second or two, I thought it was my Dad.

That poem, WHEN YOU WERE HERE, is alongside.

Next, I spoke about how PRIVATE-KEEP OUT, published in 1978 and still in print, was loosely based on my family, the town and the people around me. In this book, I have 3 brothers and 2 older sisters but, in reality, one of my sisters died when she was 6 months old and my other sister was 8 years younger than me. But that’s what being a writer is all about. You make up stories. I used many parts of the town that were familiar to me and loved. The sand quarry – the streets – the shops. Nothing spectacular. Just places that become important because you love them.

I used a former Chapel I knew well for my short story SPRING-HEELED JACK and later, there was a ‘looking back’ piece in our local paper that spoke about the Spring-heeled Jack who had actually been known in our town fifty years ago – which would have made it about 80 years ago or so. The reaction to this real Spring-heeled Jack was just as I’d thought it would be.

The very old Priory church in the town I used in BONNY STARR AND THE RIDDLES OF TIME. When I was a girl, I knew there was an unguarded well in part of the church yard – just a round hole in the ground. It’s gone now but it was really important to this book.

There was much more and I enjoyed sharing the influences of the town on my work.

WRITERS AND CHRISTMAS