Category Archive

In 2000, having written two novels for children and having had one accepted by a small Scottish publisher, I registered for an Arvon course on Writing for Children in Moniak. I was terrified, as up to that point I had been writing in isolation and had no contact whatsoever with writers of any description. Indeed  the last time I read anything out that I had written was as a schoolgirl. To cut a long story short, the Arvon week proved formative. Not only did I get the opportunity to talk to professional writers for the first time and pick their brains (the brilliant Cathy McPhail and Theresa Breslin) but I had an opportunity to read an extract of my embryonic novel for Young Adults to a critical audience and to receive impartial feedback and constructive criticism. Those days at Arvon utterly galvanised me and now, eight years on and twelve novels later I am a professional, full-time writer.

I would recommend an Arvon course for ANYONE who wants to write. In a nurturing and supportive environment, new writers can try their wings. Michael Morpurgo is right: there should be a thousand Arvons. Visit my website.

Arvon recently hosted the lovely Chroma Journal. Our pre-Domesday thatched manor house, Totleigh Barton, was completely enchanted and entranced by magical minds, words and thinking. Thank you to Chroma - who are running their exciting new competition this year. Get your poetry and short stories in by 1 September 2008 - there are Transfabulous and Flash Velvet Fiction Prizes to boot!

He speaks in gunfire English and  has an accent from Utah. Professor Reynaldo is head of Literature and Linguistics at the Roman Catholic University in Sao Paulo. His teaching staff are committed and loyal. They beam with a missionary zeal to teach.

“We have no money” he says. “There’s pressure on us to have as many students as possible to get money for our university. But we have managed to keep the numbers of students in our language classes down. You can’t teach a language with 100 pupils which we have in our other classes.”

They love the message of Arvon: that by freeing the imagination you can find your way in words and new literature and voices will grow. They want to jump on the first plane and visit our houses, but they can’t afford to  visit us as a group. But Brazil has a culture where everything is paid for in instalments – including air travel. The national airlines allow you to pay off their airfares monthly spread over a year.  There might be individuals who can afford to come because of this, Reynaldo explains, so we will spread the word, but why doesn’t Arvon come here?’

It is a question which comes up time and time again here in Brazil over my 8 days. Arvon is going to open a franchise here in Brazil says Malu firmly. She’s swiftly  become the business brains, and Liliane the saleswoman. Liliane is starting to know my descriptions of Arvon so well, that she can recite it without me ever opening my mouth. We are a  team with a mission: we want to make literature happen even more here and find a way of crossing the gulf of money, geography and tradition. We know we can do it. We see everyone ablaze with the idea.

The car spins us into the courtyard of one of the hundreds of buildings which belong to a private university founded by an American donor. It has 30,000 students and a campus which is like a town in itself. It also has 6 other branches throughout Brazil.

“We have a house in the mountains. That could be a place to work with you.” Arvon in Brazil suddenly becomes an unexpected  possibility.  They love the idea of cooking and eating together too, which is also a surprise I hadn’t reckoned with. In Brazil, even the very poorest household will have a maid who prepares the food. At Munira’s maids had flitted like shadows in the house bearing steaming dishes of chicken curry and pasta. The past is very much present.

A girl with great sweeps of black hair floats on the ceiling. Arms spread wide,  she is a suspended angel, her white gown spread around her like clouds. Look closely and you realise that what seems above is below you, what seems to be visible is invisible. You are looking in a mirror.

Patricia Osses is one of Brazil’s leading young artists. She works mostly with photography but trained as an architect. Not surprisingly, her obsession is space – the way we occupy it and our relationship to it, even when we have left a particular place.

The work I am looking at was made in her grandmother’s house in Santiago in Chile, where she comes from.

I wanted to make the house where I would live for the rest of my life,’ she explains. Then my cousins said – here is your grandmother’s house. Do what you want with it.’  It’s been untouched for 15 years since she died – waiting for this moment for her grandchild to set foot in it again.

The photographs are a collision between past and present. One shows a curtained room, with azure wallpaper and a mound of belongings: a television set, numerous unrelated chairs, books all piled high  – the debris of a life abandoned by the frailty of the flesh. Peer closely into this dark room, and in the curtains by the window you may glimpse a form. It is Patricia  - a ghost in her own presence.

Patricia turns over her portfolio and shows another photograph.

‘This is the last supper’ she explains. It’s the last supper my grandmother ever had.’ Patricia’s family sit, with her father at the head of the table. But what makes this so extraordinary is that it is in the middle of a shop – a general store with wire mesh shelves which reach to the ceilings – replete  with cleaning products and cans of beans and tomatoes – everything a household could need.

The last supper is an intervention in this space – it used to be the dining room in her grandmother’s house but since she died, it was bought and turned into a shop.  Patricia is reclaiming the space for this one last supper. Like everything she does, it is touching and extraordinary – emotionally thought through. No wonder I am so keen to welcome her to an Arvon house next year as part of Artists Links – an innovative ongoing project in which Brazillian and British artists travel to each others countries and engage in each other’s work. Imagination is moving.

The project Patricia wants to do in Britain is  wonderful too: she thinks every house is like a book: It tells many stories and has many pages which you must turn. She became aware of Britain through reading books, like Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. She has mapped in her imagination a country she has never seen, thanks to the pages of the books she has turned. Now she wants to encounter it for real.  She wants to stay in writers’ houses and make work based on these encounters. She shows me a photograph which started this whole idea. It is of the side of a building torn away,. I  can see the traces of where the staircase was, the delineation of walls like tears on the building, the ghosts of where pictures hung and a doorway once was. This is the map of this buildings’ past : its walls are worn inside out.

Patricia has stencilled huge words onto its walls in Portuguese. This is a house which is a book with many thick pages. Turning, turning, turning…I hope she comes to the Hurst and turn the pages of one angry young man into a house of artful destinies. A Brazillian in John Osborne’s house for whom the ceiling knows no bounds.

The underground station disgorges the cities travellers into an open space, which resembles an aircraft hanger. The noise is deafening here. The clatter of activity  is intense.  People are dancing, rehearsing,  writing, clapping, reading,  shouting, workshopping and running here. But what makes it so different from anywhere I have ever been, is that you not only hear it all happening, you can see it all too. Every space – whether it is the theatre, the library, the centre’s administration, the garden, the rehearsal spaces – is open for everyone to see.  The walls are made of glass.  Even a whisper is amplified. It feels astonishing that  you can’t also hear people think. This is the Cultural Centre of Sao Paulo. A glass heart  which beats with imagination in the  depths of the city.

Last month, they held a partnership with the city’s planetarium. Audiences came and were handed telescopes to gaze at the night sky, whilst poetry was read and music played. This  is a place from whom many could learn. It shows how public space can engage  and stimulate cultural activity, and be alive with it. With a new visionary as its director, Martin Grossman, it embraces the urban chaos with an imaginative zeal. It has been called a city in itself – travelling like a ship on a journey.

Have you read Roland Barthe’s ‘How to Live Together’ asks Gui, a visual artist who only started work in the education programme here three weeks ago. ‘It reminds me of the Arvon Foundation. How you have to live together in a retreat like a monk to be truly individual and listen to your soul.’

Everyone here is struck by the Arvon message of imagination freeing you. But how will it translate into this intensely noiseful space? We start a conversation which is still just beginning – and somehow I know it will lead somewhere unexpected, unusual and special.

‘Then on to give another lecture. This time it is a double act about New Writing in the UK,  with Julie Ellen at SESI which is running the Nucleo project. Julie is awe inspiring, the work she has done for the Playwrighting Studio of Scotland in just 3 years is astoundingly  impressive.

The questions we field are  from committed and engaged young drama students . They ask intensely about how theatre can engage with politics and perhaps even replace journalism.
Students come up afterwards, asking more questions.  And then an injection of reality. All the time during this 7 day visit, I am intensely aware that I am seeing a slice of Brazillian life which is so privileged it bears little resemblance at all to what the majority of people in this country experience.  A young student comes up to me. ‘I don’t have a question for you. I just have this.’ He thrusts a sheaf of papers in my hand. ‘This is what life is really like in Brazil. This is how my son really lives. It’s written in Portuguese which is our language. Read it and see.’

There is one other moment in my 7 day trip when the same reality cuts through the verneer. In the converging lanes of traffic at the entrance to Sao Paulo airport, a young girl stands, hand on hip. She has long black  hair lank with neglect, a lost face, and is dressed like a school girl in a black skirt and top, with shoes.  There is no light in her eyes: they  are deep black caves. All that is left of this 16 year old girl is a body stranded yet still standing in the tides of traffic -  a girl who has nothing to live for, except for the  car door which will be opened to let her in.

Arvon Director, Ariane Koek, was invited by the British Council to visit Brazil in her capacity as a literature development leader in the UK. We asked Ariane to record her time away. That record is published here, on the Arvon Blog, for the first time.

Sunday – December

When a helicopter parks on the roof opposite your hotel room, you know you have landed in a different world. What seems like pinpricks of blood in the night, are swarms of private helicopters buzzing across the skyline of Sao Paulo.

Founded in 1554, with over 10 million inhabitants, Sao Paulo is one of the largest cities on the planet. It is also one of the most violent. Cars with smoked windows snake through the streets, traffic jams last for hours and there’s a body guard posted on every corner. No wonder Sao Paulo’s privileged take to the air like in a Fellini film. The rich are so extremely rich that the city boasts the world’s second largest civilian use of helicopters. The buildings are so tall and square you feel as if you are in a Second Life New York, replete with mini Empire State buildings. Some of the high rise flats boast names like Lexington Avenue and Time Square to make your cultural confusion even more complete. They are bold columns holding up the sky, uniform in their height, their squareness and aspiration, but each building is also resolutely individual too: one has vermillion glass; another is embraced by black marble balconies; and there are a multitude of roof gardens spilling tendrils. . The message is pure Brazillian – individuality is for the masses. 

I’ve just had my first day here. I landed at 8am and was determined to seize the free time ahead of me. Julie Ellen Creative Director of the Scottish Playwrighting Studio is here too on this mission for the British Council to encourage the growth of a creative writing culture in Brazil. In an oral culture, in which music is highly advanced and literature plays second if not third or fourth fiddle, it feels like a responsibility neither of us can quite gauge.

So we take to the streets before the work begins and head towards the heartbeat of the city – Ibirapuera Park. It’s a huge green open space of over 2 million metres square, with two lakes, three museums and unusual architectural wonders. Like every Sunday in South America, the park is pure holiday: families feeding the giant carp which gasp for air in the 34 degrees heat; muscle bound men in micro shorts on rollerskates; balloons and candy floss festoon the air. And in the middle of it all, in this sweltering heat which sits on your skin like velvet, is the most unexpected sight of all: a skyscraping Christmas tree with baubles and a shining star. Size matters in this city where the small and tiny get swallowed whole.

A giant pink tongue licks the sky. It’s brazen and cartoon like. This is the famous auditorium, built by the great Brazillian architect Oscar Niemeyer who celebrates his 100th birthday on December 15th. The auditorium stands at the far corner of the park. From the back, it looks like a white concrete warehouse and promises nothing. Turn the corner, and the blank warehouse turns into a space ship, with Niemeyer’s trademark curves inspired by the mountains of his beloved Brazil. A yawning mouth invites you to step inside: and the enchantment doesn’t stop there. The interior dances too. Red sweeps of colour and light  bounce off every surface, it’s bewitching.  This is architecture is of  such intensity and sensuality that I feel as if my eyelids are being kissed…then licked.

Jump cut to later in the evening, and Julie and I are on the rooftop of the Unique Hotel. It’s a gigantic slice of water melon supported on either end by two columns. Built by Rhuy Okhtake a half  Brazillian, half Japanese architect who admires Niemeyer, it marries Oscar’s love of modernist curves with a Japanese restraint and purity. Niemeyer’s exuberant sensuality is held in check, but the building is no less powerful for it. Look up in the reception to the skylight 100s of metres above you, and you will see a glass ceiling on which water flows. The effect is magical.  Below, you are caught in ever changing rivulets and patterns of dancing watery light. If you then take the lift to the 17th floor to the Skye Bar, the skyline of Sao Paulo is presented as an infinite vista of skyscrapers and strobes. It has to be the most beautiful city scape I have ever seen, a panorama of jewel-like lights, studded by a panoply of high rise buildings and towers, alive with helicopters above and  humming with cars in the streets below. A crimson red swimming pool runs down the length of one side of the rooftop and appears to fall off the edge. Only when we look closely do we realise that we are not perching recklessly on a flat roof open to the world before us. There are huge glass panels holding us in: we are gawping goldfish in a bowl. And then we see the inescapable: the giant Christmas tree dominating the city with its winking baubles and  the star on top which is now a searchlight piercing the night sky in sweeping lighthouse rotations. You can go to the other side of the world and be in sweltering heat, but Christmas will always find you, wherever you are.

Dear Philip,

Will you please pass on my heartfelt thanks to the team at Arvon —  everyone who was instrumental in donating the first prize in the Arthritis Care creative writing contest. What a wonderful prize it has been, from the choosing of a suitable course, through the tension of selection, to the course itself. This prize has made my summer and autumn quite memorable.

I have just returned from a week at The Hurst in Shropshire. The two tutors on this course, (selected, advanced fiction 8-13 October), were Jacob Ross and Maggie Gee. Both eminent and prolific writers, they proved to be outstanding tutors too.

Their generosity with time and commitment was staggering — they were on call from breakfast to bedtime, fitting in many extra sessions as personal tutorials and ensuring they used social occasions to continue with instruction and advice.

I feel very privileged to have spent these days in such a beautiful setting and among such inspiring people. Thank you for all of this.

As you know, at The Hurst, one is pretty well incommunicado unless one’s very determined, so it was not until I arrived home that I heard I had also been named runner-up in the Guildford Book Festival’s short story contest, judged by Adele Parks. With that and Arvon coming in the same week, I feel I am a real writer!

Visit editorialgirl’s experience at the Hurst - thanks to Editorialgirl for the picture above, taken at the Hurst in September.

The Arvon Blog has been visiting some interesting web pages of late. We sat in on A N Wilson fuming about smoking and books. Then there’s the latest YouGov research that reveals we all want to become writers. Well, Arvon knew that forty years ago. There’s a couple of articles of interest on this topic: Visit Michelle Pauli at the Guardian for the facts (it turns out under-35s want to become sports personalities) and read John Crace for slightly more cynicism and regret. What are the 100 top books of all time? It’s old news, but in 2002 a list was compiled that told us just now. Do you know your Knut Hamsun from your Alfred Doblin? Check out how many you have read! Faces & Places is British Council’s new literature programme to introduce Polish readers to a range of British authors and artists - not only those well-known and established, but also emerging talents like Tash Aw or Gautam Malkani. Sounds good to us. The good people at The Book Depository have linked to us (well, we did ask them to) so it’s a big thank you from us to them. The Book Depository are interesting, and tantalising, the online book world - with their meaningful slogan, All Books Available To All, and new technologies to help find our books in the most speedy and cost-effective way. But let’s not always buy books, let’s use our libraries! How to use a library. Though it’s worrying where our libraries are going. Rachel Cooke sums up the latest political machinations. Tim Coates helped set up Waterstones, back in the day, and now writes a very impassioned blog about libraries. Please note: some people are reclaiming the bookshelves.

Baroque in Hackney (a blog written by a poet and siren) recently posted in her usual glamorous style about Elizabeth Bowen on writing. Writers on writing. Marianne Moore opened one poem, “Writing is exciting” (she was being momentarily very clear). Every week at Arvon we feed and house and listen to and work with and learn from writers, who write and read and talk and cook and eat and walk in our houses and gardens and landscapes. Every week - writers on writing.

Writing about writing. Here’s Elizabeth Bowen on plot:

“PLOT: (Essential. The Pre-essential.) Plot might seem to be a matter of choice. It is not. The particular plot for the particular novel is something the novelist is driven to. It is what is left after the whittling-away of alternatives. The novelist is confronted, at a moment (or at what appears to be the moment: actually its extension may be indefinite) by the impossibility of saying what is to be said in any other way. He is forced towards his plot. By what? By ‘what is to be said’. What is ‘what is to be said’? A mass of subjective matter that has accumulated - impressions received, feelings about experience, distorted results of ordinary observation, and something else - X. This matter is extra matter. It is superfluous to the non-writing life of the writer. It is luggage left in the hall between two journeys, as opposed to the perpetual furniture of rooms. It is destined to be elsewhere. It cannot move until its destination is known. Plot is the knowing of destination.”

“Plot is diction. Action of language, language of action.”

“Plot is story. It is also ‘a story’ in the nursery sense - lie. The novel lies, in saying that something happened that did not. It must, therefore, contain uncontradictable truth, to warrant the original lie.”

“Plot, story, is itself un-poetic. At best it can only be not anti-poetic. It cannot claim a single poetic licence. It must be reasoned - only from the moment when its non-otherness, its only-possibleness has become apparent. Novelist must always have one foot, sheer circumstantiality, to stand on, whatever the other foot may be doing.”

“Plot must not cease to move forward. The actual speed of movement must be even. Apparent variations in speed are good, necessary, but there must be no actual variations in speed.”

We share Baroque in Hackney’s delight in thinking about writing about writing, or writing about thinking about writing. Here’s some signposts if you’re plotting to plot.

Don’t Ask Me What I Mean

How I Write: The Secret Lives of Writers

Reading Like A Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and Those Who Want to Write Them

Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

The Notebooks of Henry James

A Novelist’s Guide To Being A Novelist

The Paris Review Interviews

Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, A Spot of Bother) has written a very lovely piece about Arvon on his blog. Mark has been an Arvon student and tutor and even says that a great deal of the structure of Curious Incident is indebted to Kathryn Heyman, with whom he tutored an Arvon course:

“She was talking to the students about story structure, the way narrative tension is built up and released by turning points that speed you towards your destination then whisk you off in another direction altogether. As she was speaking I saw the clouds open, a shaft of heavenly light fell into the room, angels sang and I had to slip out to the kitchen to scribble down some very important notes about the placing of Christopher’s mother’s letter.”

Thanks to Mark Haddon for your support - you’re an Angel!

Is it possible to be a vegetarian and a food writer? I felt I should raise the question before signing up for the course. I live in the real world and I know that there are people ‘big in food’ who would think I was wasting my time. How can you write about food when you refuse to eat so many things?

But I was never interested in food at all until I turned vegetarian. It was then that I started to cook, to explore fresh new tastes, and to realise that vegetarianism is not just an ethical standpoint. True, there are some who seem to adopt a restricted diet as some kind of  masochistic gesture. But I’m a foodie, and proud of it. And whilst I know a vegetarian diet can be chosen for health reasons, in my book, if it tastes better with lashings of cream, then let’s lash.

I did need to defend myself a bit on our first inebriated evening in the communal barn at Totleigh. But once everyone had realised that I wasn’t there to pass judgement on them, we all relaxed into a week dedicated to writing and cooking. Surely Totleigh’s ancient kitchen had never seen anything like this. Eschewing the standard veggie lasagne recipes and jars of pasta sauce we were offered, twelve enthusiastic female cooks took over the kitchen, chopping, marinating, roasting and toasting. Never a harsh word, and I’m proud to say I did it all in heels. Fellow participant Jenny did a lot of it in original fifties cocktail dresses, a wooden spoon in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. Fabulous.

Alastair and Sophie were immediately friendly and genuinely interested in each of their students. We all brought very different experiences to the table: a top-level nutritionist, a textile artist in love with Borough Market, a local delicatessen owner, an advertising copy writer, a Cordon Bleu trained chef… all of us with our own ideas and enthusiasms. Listening to other people’s writing was fascinating and I was very surprised when my rather downbeat account of a visit to a local market was received with laughter and applause.

I went to Totleigh looking for a peaceful space where I could think about nothing but writing for a precious week. It was far from peaceful – it was raucous. It was great fun. I put on pounds. I also wrote, and came away with new dreams and aspirations. Special thanks to John, Huib, and to Sophie’s little dog, Bobby, who settled himself on my lap during supper on that first evening and made me feel safe and at home. 

Thanks to Jane for writing this (so well). If you’ve been inspired by Jane’s writing, join us on an Arvon food writing course in the future. Sign up for a brochure on our website at www.arvonfoundation.org

‘I have the best view in England’
John Osborne, playwright, on the view down the Clun Valley from his garden at the Hurst in Shropshire

On Saturday June 23rd and Sunday 24th from 2pm to 6pm visitors to Clun Gardens Open will be able, for the first time, to see for themselves John Osborne’s ‘best view in England.’

For the last eight years of his life, the author of Look Back in Anger, enjoyed the elevated view down the Clun Valley and other delights of his 30 acre estate. Peter Salmon, centre director of The John Osborne Arvon Centre said “We are very happy and privileged to be joining with 14 other gardens in and around Clun. Naturally, I think The Hurst has something special to offer. The woodland here is very fine. We have a splendid tulip tree which should be in bloom and a very fine stand of Wellingtonias which must have cost a fortune in the 19th century.”

Each year nearly 1,000 established and would-be writers attend the many courses at The Hurst. “We have devised two trails that take the visitor past the house, around the gardens, through the woods, to Osborne’s view” said Peter. “Outside the house one of us will be telling racy anecdotes from John Osborne’s life here. In addition we have selected twenty or so quotations from garden and countryside poems, which add a touch of I-Spy to the walk.”

“They can take a cup of tea and a cake by the pool before having a look at the picturesque Dingle. Week after week we get the chance to see how people are inspired by the surroundings here, I’m sure our garden visitors will feel the same.

It’s fitting that Clun Gardens Open is in aid of St George’s Church, as both John and Helen Osborne are buried there.”     

The Hurst (Clunton, Craven Arms, Shropshire, SY7 0JA) is approached up a private drive off B4368 Craven Arms to Clun road, one mile before Clun. Tickets from The Hurst and other gardens on the day. A ticket for all gardens is £4, one garden only 50p. Call Dan on 01588 640658 for more details about the Hurst and our writing courses at John Osborne’s former home.

The web is a writer’s friend. Let’s take a spin. Start with separated by a common language - an entire blog devoted to the sharp linguistic eye of “Lynneguist”, who specialises in spotting differences between American and British English. And so while we’re thinking of American English, here’s one of its poets - Frank O’Hara - but put to music and made into a short poem-film on You Tube. It seems appropriate to the style he pioneered - personism - which was all about writing that was addressed to somebody. Have you got a case of the fantods? Do you know how to honeyfuggle? Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words is a never-ending delight of word play and history. You can fill your novel or poems with amazing words thanks to him (and get email updates when Mr Quinion has new material).  But he doesn’t help you pronounce words however - best leave that to this interesting Wikipedia page. For all your disputed pronounciation needs. Now, moving on, and literally moving on, let’s go for a walk. A modern kind of walk. Download the audio file onto your mp3 player and start at the special location in London for your marvellous literary iTour of Subversive Scribes. (Talking about scribes, you can join Arvon Friends as one. Joining Arvon Friends supports Arvon’s social mission to extend amazing and fulfilling creative writing experiences to young people and adult groups who wouldn’t ordinarily be able to participate.) John Sewell donated a new poem of his to Arvon Friends Online and the first ever online bookshop-in-residence, The Little Apple based in York, continue their Gilbert White-style musings on life without 3-for-2s.

Ever noticed how nature’s colour coordinated? Neither had we…until now that is.

In early spring flowers tended to be yellow which showed an amazing fit with the colour scheme around Easter. Coincidence? I think not… And then suddenly, as if the wizard of Oz has decreed a colour change, purple is all the fashion. We can’t wait to see what colour will be the next flavour of the month.

But it’s not all flowers we are keeping a close watch on, this is the time of year our own produce demands attention so we are looking for the best spot for our tomato and chilli plants, we are tidying our herb patch and we are even trying to grow some artichokes which will hopefully bear fruit next year. We are especially keen on our edibles this year because we are expecting a group of foodies this summer on our food writing course (2 – 7 July) who will be making the most of our vegetables to try and impress Sophie Grigson and Alistair Hendy. For a week Totleigh will be turned into a foodies paradise with a strong emphasis on fresh, organic and local food. We have already put in the application for a Michelin star.

Huib Boekelman
Centre Director, Totleigh Barton

Sometimes life becomes so surreal, pinching yourself just won’t bring you back to earth. I had to go to a takeaway to remind myself of normality, amongst the debris of cardboard plates, plastic cups and discarded smiles.

It all started at breakfast - with a beaming smile attached to twinkling eyes and a white beard encircling the round jolly face of the man opposite.

“ G-day’ he said with that unmistakable down under twang “I have been belly dancing on the fringe all night.” Quite an opener when I am staring at a raft of English breakfast on the plate in front of me, trying to decide which saturated fat felon to cast away. I love first conversations - they always lead to new places and people and lives.

“You belly danced?”  I ask.

His roar shakes the room, and his twinkling glances off the  silver cutlery. He’s all llight and merriment and sharp observation and joy - this breakfast companion from the other side of the world. There is something other-worldy about him too. He looks as if he could have stepped out of Lord of the Rings.

“No, no. I merely observed. It was  the welsh women. They belly danced. And can they belly dance. My…” He is all appreciate chuckles as he spoons his muesli.

I ought to explain that I am  in Wales for the Guardian Hay Festival 2007. As Director of The Arvon Foundation, I am chairing four  writers’ events: Esther Freud and Rupert Thomson talking about their novels Love Falls and Death of a Murderer; Charles Leadbeater about his wiki work We Think; a discussion about the Myth and History of the Second World War with Owen Sheers, Justin Cartwright and Ben McIntyre; and then a conversation between the quirky american film maker and performance artist Miranda July and Marina ‘Tractors’ Lewycka. It’s pure joy  to read their books.

There.  So perhaps you get an idea of why I am here, in this beautiful Georgian house, with this wise gnome-like man eating breakfast and laughing.

But you only have part of the picture.

Another man comes in. Long and langurous with his beautiful wife. They sit down too.

“Ariane and I would like your royalties Sandy!’ roars the Lord of the Rings down under. ‘All of them. Make no mistake.”

The new breakfast companions have the same love of laughter too.  And two new people join us with the same belly aching senses of humour. By now the breakfast table is rocking. The room is aglow with words and ideas.
Breakfast at 7am will never be the same again. In your wildest dreams, breakfast with Thomas Keneally and Alexander McCall Smith and James Naughtie never happens. But this is Hay, and as Thomas K gnomically says later in the day, “at Hay dreams come true.”

The Festival is now bigger than ever. There’s a new site, which is sophisticated with wide white marquees, duckboard walkways which have canopies over them to protect you from the inevtiable Hay storms of wind and rain. But wellies and walking boots are still needed. This is Hay at 20 years old - sassy, smart,  committed, sparkling, intense and bigger. Writers are the superstars and the venues are packed with people eager to meet the writers, ask questions, jostle with ideas and just be together to appreciate literature. It’s the herd instinct gone wild - and it’s literature which has rounded  about100,000 people together over 10 days from all parts of the country and the world. Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian writer who is one of Arvon’s patrons gives a key lecture called Writing on the Wall of Silence - about freedom of expression. The American writer Dave Eggers  talks with Valentino Achak Deng  about the book they have written together inspired by Valentino’s experiences in Sudan  and Ethiopia to a packed audience of 1200 plus people. Superstar art historian Simon Schama bounces and cavorts his way through his presentation on why television and art are natural partners.

It’s showtime with substance - and people buying, holding and reading books.

Who said the book is dead when there can be so much life in them-there hills? Hay rocks. 20 years old and Hay rocks on and on.

Ariane is reading
Justin Cartwright - The Sing Before it is Sung
Esther Freud - Love Falls
Miranda July - No One Belongs Here More Than You
Charles Leadbeater - We Think
Marina Lewkcya - Two Caravans
Ben McIntyre - The Zig Zag Agent
Owen Sheers - Resistance
Rupert Thomson - Death of a Murderer

Ariane is listening to
Seth Lakeman - Freedom Fields - again and again and again!
need to get the new Rufus Wainwright soon too…

Ariane is watching
Jan Svankmeyer - Lunacy

Ariane is looking at
Anthony Gormley at the Hayward Gallery

Ariane Koek, Director of Arvon, asked me to write up some of my experiences from a recent trip to San Francisco.

“Imagine an Arvon writing house in San Francisco,” I thought as I walked around North Beach with Arvon writer and tutor, Julia Bell. San Francisco has had its fair share of big names in the world of words - John Steinbeck, Allen Ginsberg, Alice B. Toklas, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Frost, Jack Kerouac. Now it has Julia Bell and look, there’s Danielle Steele’s house! We walked for what felt like days. The hills in San Francisco are quite something to behold. You have to walk down them by stepping sideways, Julia said. Signs advise drivers how not to runaway with themselves. Hummingbirds fly around the parks, all hectic and uppity and beautiful. The fog is like an anti-duvet that the city pulls over its back, not keeping us warm.

Julia Bell wrote Dirty Work (Macmillan, 2007) to much praise. It’s not an easy topic, teenage sex trafficking, and I chatted with Julia about the quality of sex education in the UK, about writing for young adults and the need for greater conversations and openness to tough subjects. (Julia is tutoring our Writing for Young Adults course in October with Tony Bradman and Kevin Brooks.) We were sitting outside an internet café, It’s a Grind, on Polk – an eclectic, buzzing, typically San Franciscan street which, with long outstretched arms, manages to scoop around a hundred different types of shop and person. We’d just been into Polkadot Variety to buy an original Roosevelt-head pencil sharpener from the sixties. We’d seen it in the window. The woman behind the counter seemed sad, somehow, to be selling it.

Later in the week we stared up, in a large, close-knitted crowd, at a slightly anxious Miranda July (pictured above), as she climbed her way up a bookshelf in Modern Times bookstore. The place was heaving, the windows were all fogged up with book breath, faces peered through from the street. Sat in her chair on top of the bookshelf, Miranda July read two stories from her new collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You. She admitted that she herself didn’t like being read to.

A few blocks down this street is Valencia 826, a writing centre for young people in San Francisco. (“Imagine an Arvon writing house in San Francisco!”) At the front is a pirate supply shop selling eye patches, pirate dice, flags, treasure and message-in-a-bottles. There’s even a mini-cinema with a fish-tank and cinema seats. You can just watch the fish with the big eyes for days. And if you were uninformed, or uncurious, perhaps you’d think that was it – another quaint boutique in San Francisco with random fish-cinema.

But Valencia 826 is Arvon in San Francisco. Because if you peer round the back, behind the till, through the hanging beads, you spot something like home, something very recognisable to anyone who’s been to an Arvon writing house. (Anyone can go on an Arvon writing course: we run a grants scheme to ensure that.) And what is that? A long wooden table, of course. Just like the long wooden tables at Arvon where the writing takes place, where the food is shared and eaten, where two people might bump into each other and have a life-changing conversation, where plots are twisted and new metaphors discovered. And look further still and you’d see the schedule of writing classes, the education outreach programme, the tutors, the 8-18 year olds writing, writing, writing! Valencia 826, set up by a contemporary of Miranda July’s - Dave Eggers, is one of six writing centres in the USA, working tirelessly and glamorously with imaginative flair and big respect for young writing.

I had to have another quick look at the fish.

Philip Cowell
Arvon Friends Co-ordinator

p.s. Miranda July is appearing at the Guardian Hay Festival on Sunday 3rd June 2007, in conversation with Marina Lewycka and Director of Arvon, Ariane Koek

Costa del Lumb Bank eh?  Here at Moniack Mhor, we too are enjoying el scorchio weather with the added package holiday ambience of droning diggers and radios blaring out music of the dance, trance, or prance ilk.

This, I hasten to add, is actually good news and, as we have no courses at present, not a problem.  Our next course is a month away – Poetry with Ann and Peter Sansom – by which time all will be Highland tranquil again with the trill of skylark and plaintive kee of buzzard the only distracting sounds.

Our tutors will be delighted to hear that from now on they have the luxury of en-suite bathrooms in the cottage.  We have also increased parking space (previously we only had room for two cars and a sheep) and now have vehicle access to the front door of the main house which should help those with walking difficulties. 

Now, it’s away from the musings on the benefits of change and back to dealing with the needs of the best builders in the world – ever!

Looking forward to a long, warm, happy summer – best wishes from a tired and dusty Andrea.

Hugo Williams, poet, travel writer and Freelance column writer in the TLS, wrote about the Arvon writing course he led with Greta Stoddart last week at Totleigh Barton in Devon. One of the course students was Jerry Hall, who wrote a piece in the Independent just before coming on the course.

Read Hugo Williams’s Freelance column in the TLS

Read Jerry Hall’s article in the Independent

Arvon Friends has been bounding with optimism and enthusiasm for Arvon ever since it was set up spontaneously thirty years ago. Arvon Friends care about writers and literature. They support Arvon’s work to provide creative writing experiences to as many people as possible. If you have a passion for words, want to help support the provision of unique creative writing experiences, are a writer, join Arvon Friends to ensure others enjoy the magic of the written word as well.

And just because Arvon Friends is over thirty years old doesn’t mean it can’t be forward thinking and adept at new media! Arvon Friends Online is the special creative writing and reading space for Arvon Friends to keep in touch with Arvon wherever they are. When you become an Arvon Friend, you receive a username and password - your unique key into your online blue notebook. From there you can read more writing, specially picked for you, and you may even be able to upload writing (if you are a Laureate or Angel). There’s competitions too, and the website will also act as an archive for Arvon Friends’ rich literary past. Currently on the site we have Judith Barrington on the art of writing memoir as well as Hugo Williams, Robert Macfarlane and Jacob Polley.

Even though it seems we might be revelling in our postmodern condition in this age of new media (somewhere between the fax and robotics), Arvon Friends can’t help themselves from still using, and enjoying to use, pens and paper. Our Arvon writing houses don’t have wifi, but they do have writing huts. You open the door, mind a few cobwebs, sit inside and look out through the window, let yourself be swallowed up by the hollow sound of calm. And you write. For all the blogs, for all the pdf files whirling about, for all the things we can do online these days, we’re going to be with books (and for books) for a long, long time. We’ve even started to sniff them.

Philip Cowell
Arvon Friends Coordinator

p.s. Arvon Friends can currently get a discount on Theatre with David Eldridge (Market Boy) and Robert Holman (Holes in the Skin), as well as access to a special Arvon Friends Writing Retreat this year at Lumb Bank, Yorkshire, November 5 - 10 (for a reduced fee of £350, call Ilona on 01422 843714).

Totleigh Barton prepares for a long hot summer.

After the last three weeks of August weather we are strangely relieved to find ourselves in the traditional April showers this week. It is not that we don’t appreciate the slice of mid summer we’ve been given. It’s just that we want to make sure this part of the world is at it’s greenest this year as we will be piloting the food writing course with Sophie Grigson and Alastair Hendy this summer and some rain now will make sure we have the best and finest Devon produce come 2 July. So bring on the rain, but not too much please…

Last week we had a group of mad writers who had come to do the screenwriting course tutored by Paul Fraser and Lucy Scher. The Friday night was used to show some short films as they were shot that afternoon. It was amazing to see how they had managed to capture Totleigh Barton, putting the spotlight on the remoteness in a hilarious short about a woman trying to find a mobile phone signal which, and this should surprise nobody who’s ever been here, she hopelessly failed to find. Truly a great week with a fantastic party afterwards, can’t wait for the next one.

And we have just welcomed the next group who have come to do the fiction course with Jane Harris and Richard Beard. We’ve just served our Monday night dinner and The Arvon magic has already turned all the individuals into a group that is excited about their stay at Totleigh Barton, eager to talk to Richard and Jane (and us) and looking forward to the rest of the week. They seem terrified about the cooking though but I’m sure we will still end up with a good meal every night this week. I’m sure. Well, fingers crossed anyway…

In short, it is good to be at Totleigh. Very good.

Huib Boekelman, Centre Director
Totleigh Barton, Devon

First course of the year and everything you could ever want on a course at Lumb is coming to pass. Unnaturally Mediterranean weather, lovely, lovely tutors (Mark Illis and Louise Doughty), inspiring guest reading from double Carnegie medal winner Berlie Doherty (celebrating the twenty-fifth year since publishing her first book) and best of all an interesting , hard-working and delightful collection of emerging writers.

And then today we got a message from someone who was on our journalism course back in September telling us that a piece he began here has just won him Computer Science Writer of the Year.

Vindication for everything that we do here.

Stephen May, Centre Director, Lumb Bank

As ever, it’s a bright blue sunny day here at the Hurst, made lovely by the presence of golden daffodils, budding azaleas, dappled things of all make and main, and the delightful presence of our current phalanx of poets - tutored by Patience Agbabi and Patricia Debney - wandering about and capturing the speech rhythms of delirious nature in delicate, limpid verse or brusque, urgent quatrains.

Yes, spring has come to the Hurst, and with it those merry-makers of the English language, the poets. We’ve got a terrific group this week – we have a terrific group every week at the Hurst – who have grasped the Arvon bull by the horns, and are churning out poems by the fistful, as well as cooking up a storm, engaging in exciting debates about issues of import, and having a quiet drink at the end of a long day to celebrate a job well done. Then a quick dip into the dream world of the unconscious, before another day behind the mule that is poetry.

Last week – playwrights, under the wonderful, entertaining tutelage of Tim Fountain and Natasha Betteridge. It was our first open programme week of the year, crowned by a final day of performing plays by all 14 participants, in perhaps the most epic day of theatre since Euripides pulled up stumps, took his bat and ball home, and declared the Greek Empire decayed beyond the reaches of satire.

We’ve got more theatre coming up, of course, with David Eldridge and Robert Holman spending the week with us from May 7 to 12. The guest will be Dominic Cooke, Associate Director at the Royal Court Theatre, who will be joining us in a week famous in theatrical circles for the first performance of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger on May 8, 1956. And as we’re in Mr Osborne’s lodgings, we were very excited when Dominic accepted our invitation.

So if you have the next Look Back in Anger lodged in you and you just can’t get it out, why not join us in early May? The daffys will be on their last legs, but that’s only because they have to make way for the rhododendrons, blue bells and, you know that flower that’s sort of pink, but kind of white? The thingy-whatsit? Lotsa them, too.

Right, back to the garden to pound out some unsprung villanelles.

Respect.

Pete

(Peter Salmon, Centre Director, Hurst)

Is the Hurst (The John Osborne Arvon Centre for creative writing) some sort of TARDIS? No, there’s surely been a mistake - we’re smaller on the inside!

The Hurst seems to have been at the centre of some sort of time warp for the last couple of weeks.

Kerry and Peter (our new Centre Directors) dashed off to London last Monday (as usual with just enough time to catch their train) for the initial programming meeting of 2008 whilst I spent a few days in the company of Paul Warwick and Ed Collier. “Not THE Paul and Ed?” I hear you cry. Yes the very same - Ex-Centre Directors and lifetime Hurstmen. They’ve hired the centre lock stock and barrel for the Dark Room, a development project for devising theatre companies (now in its third year) and settled into the office as if they had both put on a comfortable old pair of slippers. They commandeered the phone, complained about the heating, and unplugged all the network cables. Once logged into their fancy IMacPod Lap Arts Council funded thingies they adopted that familiar hunched stance emerging from their collective trance only to answer (in bullet point form) my inane questions about the state of their careers/relationships etc.

It’s a pleasure to have Ed and Paul back and the first two weeks of their visit seem to have gone off swimmingly. Once they have impro’d their way back to the big smoke, we will welcome Kings School for a week of prose and performance poetry from Lynne Bryan and Marcus Moore. Our old friend, teacher, committee member and general good egg, Katie Adam has engineered this course with her usual precision. Even though it looks unlikely that she’ll be here in person, I have no doubt her considerable organisational skills and passion for all things creative will shine through. Katie knows the centre so well, we sometimes ring her for advice on repairing the boiler and unblocking the dishwasher…

And then to the open programme, kicking off this year in mid April with a Playwriting course in the capable hands of Tim Fountain and Natasha Betteridge. Following hot on their heels - with Freedom in Form - will be Patience Agbabi and Patricia Debney. We will then be in the midst of a run that will last until December, with the centre resembling anything but a Dark Room..

Editor’s note - We can confirm that the Hurst is not a TARDIS (a Time And Relative Dimension In Space) - the blue police box made famous in Dr Who, and invented by BBC screen writer Anthony Coburn, after he edited C. E. Webber’s script of the very first Dr Who show. The TARDIS was conceived out of budget restrictions - the Doctor needed to travel in something but finances required the vehicle to be simple and cheap to make. The word TARDIS is now commonly used to refer to something that is bigger on the inside than the outside.

And in this respect perhaps, after all, Arvon is very TARDIS-like.

Best wishes
Dan Pavitt
Administrator
The Hurst

The picture was taken by photographer Matthew Anderson at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. The installation is Rachel Whiteread’s EMBANKMENT - an enormous art piece that comprises 14,000 casts of different sized boxes.

Imagine you are in an  white open space so endless that it unrolls like a blank page, as far as the eye can see. Would you have the words to fill this wilderness? You’re at the place where the global climate is born and where 900,000 years of history lies beneath your feet as you cross the snow.

This is precisely how landscape artist Chris Drury describes Antarctica where he’s living and working for 3 months in his  daily blog.   Go to his blog and you can see how he’s  recording in words and photographs, literally his impressions on the landscape: that’s how Chris describes his work - as making marks in the snow and ice. You can see a fingerprint whorl made by dusting snow off the blue ice with a dustpan and brush. Or a wind vortex made by the blades of the skidoo in fresh snow. This white wilderness offers an endless landscape of creative possibilities.  

As I sit reading his blog, it seems a million miles from what we do at Arvon. But is it? In a way, what Antarctica is offering is the ultimate extreme of the Arvon dream: the space and time to create and write.  Without space and time – you can’t write, let alone explore your imagination and creativity with the freeplay they deserve and demand. Creativity is dependent on these twin dimensions: Einstein must have realised this when he inspired physics to take a creative leap into new ways of scientifically describing the world. 

But creativity is also inspired by constraints and adversity  too. Chris’s time at Antarctica will have to end. You will have to finish your course. The day will end. We all have no choice but to accept our limits and then find freedom within them. Every  morning for the past 2 weeks I have been waking up and the first thing I do  before coming to work here at Arvon HQ is read a chapter from a book by Robert Harbison called Eccentric Spaces.  

It’s inspiring, extraordinary and challenging – crossing all the boundaries between poetry, philosophy, architecture and fiction. I am trying to make an art piece inspired by it – I won’t divulge what just yet. The book sets my imagination racing, as I cycle to work, blown by Robert Harbison’s words and thoughts which I then have to push aside when I get down to work here. At weekends, I squirrel time to think about his writing more and see where it leads me. 

But Robert’s book, like Chris’s work, or my musings, are limited and driven as much  by constraints as well as by freedom too. Eccentric Spaces was written when Robert was alone in America, friendless, without a publisher or a job and money.  He was told his book was unpublishable. In the end, it is the dream of freedom, which we can never attain, which drives us all to stretch our wings creatively. That’s what brings us real freedom. 

With my best wishes to you - Ariane Koek, Director/Arvon

  Ariane is reading/listening to/watching…

        Non Fiction  Eccentric Spaces by Robert Harbison   
        Poetry  Decreation by Anne Carson 
        Theatre  Faust by Punchdrunk Theatre
        Film  Babel 
        Music  Ys – Joanna Newsom

Once upon a time, way back in September 2005, we ran a Writers Retreat at Totleigh Barton.  The participants got so much from the experience and also made such good friends that they asked whether they could hire Totleigh Barton for a week to get together again and carry on writing.    So they came back the next January, then again in June and recently in January this year.  The group is ever-changing: when some writers can’t make the dates, other writers – people met on other Arvon courses and contacts made through writing networks – are invited to make up a full house. 

The DIY Group has gone from strength to strength and Totleigh Barton is a place where they all love to meet up and work, play and cook up fantastic food in the Totleigh kitchen!  This is so much what Arvon is about: likeminded people getting together and having an audience for their work and benefiting from peer feedback during the week. 

Time to write, talk, read and walk. 

DIY folk are an eclectic bunch and their writing encompasses Poetry, Prose, Writing for Children, Theatre, Radio and Screen.  One of the members of the group, Anne Greer, was pleased to announce that a short story she had written had been accepted and was to be broadcast on Woman’s Hour the very week that DIY were with us, and so we were all privileged to tune in to Radio 4 with our friend, the author!  Can’t get much better than that!

With best wishes from Arvon’s pre-Domesday thatched cottage in Devon, Totleigh Barton
Huib and Esther (Centre Directors) and Julia (senior administrator)

As ever it’s been a busy time at the Hurst Shop – we had open courses right up to the middle of December, and then leapt straight back into things on January 22, with a terrific partnership week with Princess Royal Trust for Carers. They spent the week in the esteemed company of tutors Ian Marchant and Jemma Kennedy, with Jo Shapcott featuring as our guest reader. While any number of aesthetic goals were reached, for us the highlight was to find that one of the participants had not been to the pub in sixteen years – a duck she broke on the Tuesday. And the Wednesday. And the Thursday…As a reward for rejoining the fray, she was awarded our first Champagne Moment of 2007.

Meanwhile we’ve been girding our loins for the start of the Open Programme (all our courses advertised in this year’s Arvon brochure). The bookings have been thundering in, and everyone who has booked seems really, really nice, so I’d encourage you to join their number. Space prohibits a list of highlights, but I’m sure you carry your Arvon Course guide with you wherever you go, and have the Arvon Foundation as your home page (Google is so 2005), so I’m sure you’re up to speed.

Before the Open Programme begins we have a number of School Weeks, which are always a highlight. If you’re a teacher and you haven’t brought a group to the Hurst, then you’re obviously insane. Check out the young people pages at www.arvonfoundation.org for more details.

Aside from things writerly, scrumping fans – and who isn’t a scrumping fan? – will be excited to hear that our local committee member Keith Pybus recently selected a number of apples from our orchard for dating and identification. It seems most of the trees were planted in the late 19th Century, and that one of the varieties – called a Curl Tail – is a rare apple, first recorded in Woking in 1872 and not before recorded in the Marches. So if you visit us during October/November next year, and are partial to rare and strange apples, you’re in for a treat.

Finally, congratulations to all at Pentabus Theatre, who were nominated for a South Bank show Decibel Award, which recognises work which contributes to the development and promotion of ethnic diversity in the arts. The nomination was for White Open Spaces, a theatre piece developed at the Hurst in November 2005.We look forward to seeing you here soon

Peter & Kerry, Centre Directors, and Dan, the Administrator