‘A race of fighters, workers and singers…short, dark featured men… and women doing men’s jobs’ From this terrific […]
Category Archive: Inspiration
Two years ago today, on May Day, suitably – having got a top notch agent to represent it but no deal – I self-published my novel about the women in the 1984 miners’ strike, The Gritties.
A couple of nice friends wrote reviews, but then nothing…. I looked at authors’ twitter streams where the content was endless pleas to ‘buy my book’ and thought that was not for me. I would have to be more inventive. Having a grandmother a market trader meant I loved selling when customers were interested, but just to hassle people endlessly and mindlessly? Well, life felt too short…or maybe I was just too chicken.
In case you missed it, there was a wonderful championing of Dylan Thomas by Owen Sheers on BBC 2 over the weekend.
And for writers, it reached the core of the poet’s genius, his obsession with language, the most apposite word and making the words do exactly what he wanted them to.
We heard poetry professor Paul Muldoon say there was much ‘banging and sawing’ in how Dylan made poetry, his results being ‘clinker-built marvels’ of
We love this essay on hiraeth from the Paris Review.
Here’s an extract to whet you:
‘So hiraeth is a protest. If it must be called homesickness, it’s a sickness come on—in Welsh ailments come onto you, as if hopping aboard ship—because home isn’t the place it should have been. It’s an unattainable longing for a place, a person, a figure, even a national history that may never have actually existed. To feel hiraeth is to feel a deep incompleteness and recognize it as familiar.
Mae hiraeth arna amdanot ti. There’s a homesickness on me for you. Or, if we’re mincing words, I miss you. That’s fair, too. But the deeper, national hiraeth is something you don’t have to go away to experience. You can feel it at home in Wales. In fact, that’s where you feel it most.
I’m American, but I have a hiraeth on me for Wales.
Writing Investigations 