Salt, Neruda and Ten more years

To help keep Salt Publishing's head above water there's the Just One (more)Book campaign, which is simple enough: browse and buy one book. Recessionary times have been incredibly tough on publishing: more so on poetry! There are some great books there, and if you've been promising yourself a book from Salt, now's the time.

But there's also a 'flashmob' gathering in London today - er, just now - at the Southbank Centre, at 3pm London time, to celebrate ten years of Salt Publishing with a mass public recital of Pablo Neruda's "Ode to Salt."

To get you in the mood:

Ode to Salt

This salt
in the salt cellar
I once saw in the salt mines.
I know
you won't
believe me
but
it sings
salt sings, the skin
of the salt mines
sings
with a mouth smothered
by the earth.

by Pablo Neruda

Much more here at this link

Nude Makes Landfall in Dundalk

Got your attention, haven't I?

Today, I am delighted to welcome Nuala Ní Chonchúir and her wonderful new collection of short stories, 'Nude' from Salt Publishing to my humble blog. I have to say, I've read them very quickly, because I was pulled into them very easily. Always a good sign, when you can't tear yourself away from a book.

Born in Dublin in 1970, Nuala Ní Chonchúir lives in County Galway. Her third short fiction collection Nude was published by Salt in September 2009. She is one of four winners of the 2009 Templar Poetry Pamphlet and Collection competition. Her pamphlet Portrait of the Artist with a Red Car will be published in November. Nuala's website is: www.nualanichonchuir.com

Pull up a comfy armchair there Nuala, here's a very large mug of strong writer's tea and some homemade scones & blackberry jam (freshly picked from the Cooley Peninsula on Sunday!). Tuck in!

Hi Barbara and big thanks for having me here at your blog. I know and admire your own work, so I’m honoured to be here.

Thank you Nuala, now down to questions: firstly, how and where do characters come from, for you? Do you find characters re-visiting you or is it the other way around, do you like to tease out other nuances of them in related stories?

Gosh, that’s hard to answer because, in a sense, there’s no one way that characters ‘arrive’ to me. Sometimes I have a sense of someone or a relationship between two people and I want to write about them. Take Magda and Jackson in the story ‘Jackson & Jerusalem’. She’s an older woman artist and he’s a teenager who models for her; I liked the idea of that dynamic – a friendship across generations/sexes. I based the physical descriptions on my own son when he was a bit younger. Magda isn’t based on anyone but she’s very real to me. She’s also featured in the story ‘Madonna Irlanda’ as a younger woman; if I like a character, it’s irresistible to write more about them.

Other times characters arrive like a voice in my ear – I hear their voices and I work from there.

How do you delineate so well between older and younger characters, such as Jackson and Magda in 'Jackson and Jerusalem'? Do you find it hard to switch between the headspace needed to make each character live and breathe in the rounded manner that they do?

I’m glad you think I do it well...I was one of those children who preferred the company of adults; I loved listening to their conversation. I had my poor neighbours plagued as a child, always in their houses talking to them. I find younger people harder to relate to but having kids myself has given me some understanding of what makes them tick. All of that knowledge gets ploughed into fiction, I guess – into my characters.

My stories are generally from one POV so there isn’t really a problem switching headspace. I’m not sure that I find it problematic anyway. It’s fun to get inside the heads of people who are nothing like you; I enjoy that escape thoroughly.

Have you ever experienced great difficulty with a story - say for example, getting the ending right, or losing your way through the story? I ask this, because I find your stories are so absorbingly complete and well-imagined, that I can't imagine difficulties!

Yes, lots of difficulties! I don’t plot so I never have a clue what’s going to happen next. I used to almost fear endings but I’m more relaxed about them now.

And I suppose only the stories that work get into the book. I start, and then abandon, lots of stories – some just don’t lift off the page. I’ve written plenty of what Richard Ford calls ‘minor aesthetic nullities’. I’m rarely happy with anything. There are a handful of stories in Nude that I really love – the rest I just like, in whole or in part. But it doesn’t matter what I think – it’s impossible to be objective about your own work – I just hope that readers enjoy them.

Are you compelled to write or can you save ideas for work, for later on when you get the chance? Which method works better for you?

Writing is a compulsion for some people and I’m one of them; I’m always in writing mode. Henry James said, ‘Be one of those people on whom nothing is lost’. I think I am one of them – I seem to notice a lot and, as I notice things, I’m writing a narrative in my head. I presume all writers are the same.

Lately though, with my new baby and with promoting Nude, I’m too tired and busy to write anything more than the bones of a few poems. I want to be writing above all else, but the headspace is just not there. So, instead, I take notes!

Thanks so much for having me here, Barbara, and for your great questions. Next week my virtual tour takes me to Petina Gappah’s blog in Geneva, via Zimbabwe, which is where Petina is from. Do join us!

Thank you for coming by, Nuala, it's been a pleasure and I hope that Nude garners the attention it deserves.

Books Received - and a Cabbage!

I've gotten a few books in the recent past, so I thought I'd better give them a shout out here.

From Throckmortons Bookshop in Warwick, I received the new journal on the block, Under the Radar, Issues 1 & 2 published by Nine Arches Press; On Warwick, by Jane Holland, Lady Godiva & Me, by Liam Guilar and The Terrors by Tom Chivers.

From Salt Publishing, I've got The Opposite of Cabbage by Rob Mackenzie, The Ambulance Box by Andrew Philips and another Jane Holland collection, Camper Van Blues.

And dainty of dainties, I just received Ben Wilkinson's The Sparks, published by tall-lighthouse (and which I'm quite excited about -but I'm excited by them all!).

So, why am I not talking about them yet? Because I am knee-deep in Denis O'Driscoll's epistolary biography of Seamus Heaney - far too interesting a book to rush...

In the next few weeks, I intend to fully explore Rob Mackenzie's collection The Opposite of Cabbage, with the intention of reviewing it, because Rob is paying us a virtual visit on his Decabbage Yourself Cyclone Tour which is currently whizzing around the blogosphere. I think I may put cabbage on the menu that day - a nice green York cabbage with leafy green and plenty of heart, as we say here.

One of my favourite poems from this collection so far is White Noise, which you can read as well on this sample of his work at Salt. Why do I like it? Because it isn't obvious - you read it and then you read it again and then you go off about your day and you have a little 'ping' moment, and you come back and you read it again: it makes me think of choirs of angels, but mucky angels, ones a little like us flawed humans. It makes me envious!

Salt's Innovative Campaign

Save Poetry Now! Well, that's the tenor of the campaign that Salt publishing are running at the moment. Having come to the end of a three year stint of development funding that would have seen Salt upping it's game and raising it's profile, the deepening recession came along and knocked the stuffing out of their previously healthy sales.

Just One Book, was Salt's response. If everyone who was into poetry, went along to their website and bought just one of their many titles, enough cash-flow could be raised to smooth them through a bumpy few months and stabilise their publishing list for 2009.

So, if you've been reading about their poets or writers, and wondering what that particular book was like, now is the time to act on that impulse. Only one book - that's all it will take to show support and keep the business viable.

If you're in the UK, or if you're here in Ireland and have access to BBC2, you might watch Newsnight Review this Friday, to see Chris Hamilton-Emery elaborate on Salt's predicament and the Just One Book campaign. Look out for the Manchester Evening News too.

I've put my money where my mouth is, and invested (yes, that's what I call it) in some Salt books that I've wanted for a while. Go on, you know you want to!

Next To Nothing - Launch

Well, it was as expected, it was an emotional launch last evening, at Chris Agee's reading from Next to Nothing, from Salt Publishing. Even the weather seemed to suit the sombre mood, being close and rainy.

John F. Deane, gave a very considered, close reading of the text, as an introduction to the reading and then Chris Agee read from Next to Nothing. The collection's pretext is that it records a parent's grief after the death of a beloved small child. And the only poem in the collection written before this incident is "At Bethlehem Nursery," a gorgeous poem set on a morning when there's been a very hard frost and the narrator is taking the child to playschool. It opens the book and it also opened the reading last night.

Most of the poems are dated, so that the reader can trace the trajectory of grief. I listened with attention as Chris read from them, but was particularly taken by the brief slips of poems in the sequence, "Heartscapes." They are the very distilation of the moments they describe, no more and no less heartrending for what they represent.

I know that Chris did falter once or twice reading last night showing even now, how making a piece of art like this helps to keep the evocation of his daughter, Miriam, still fresh to mind. I spoke to Chris afterwards, while he signed the copies I purchased, and he told me that every reading is different, he doesn't know when he might get a catch in the throat. It is a brave thing to take on something so close and set it into art like this, constantly re-evoking the spirit of someone so loved, so gone. It is a fine book, with the poems pared right back - no sloppy emotional sensationalism: the poems do what they should and evoke the emotion in the reader.

Here is one small example from the Heartscapes section:

I wish


to live
near
the coffin
of small details.

Chris Agee - Next to Nothing

There was a heart-felt review in the Irish Times Weekend section on Saturday 11th, this weekend, for Chris Agee's new collection, Next to Nothing. The reviewer, Thomas McCarthy, describes how Chris approached the huge chasm of grief for a beloved young child, and explored this subject in this collection with deftness and skill.

Chris's book,published by Salt, will be launched this Thursday 16th April in the Unitarian Church, Stephen's Green, Dublin at 6.30pm. John F. Deane will introduce it.

I hope, luck be willing, to see some of you there :)