You
can’t live in Oxford and not be aware of intersecting circles of literary
activity. As the year rolls round to spring again, so the gargantuan Oxford
Literary Festival swings into action. I’ve mentioned in previous years how I
attended the very first OLF back in 1997, when it was a weekend affair held at
the Oxford Union. Since then, it has grown, just a bit …
This
year I attended David Grylls interviewing Tracy Chevalier about her career and
her latest novel, in the Divinity Schools of the Bodleian Library. Here’s the
thing about OLF - the locations are a great draw in themselves, regardless of
who’s speaking. Over the years, I’ve sat in the Oxford Union debating chamber,
various rooms in Christ Church and Corpus Christi, the Convocation House …
History swirls around you as words fly up and lodge in arches and carvings,
dart under oak doors, swirl down stone spiral staircases …
The
Divinity School beckons you to crane upwards at its remarkable stone hammerbeam
ceiling, studded with shields and angels, or out through its many-paned windows
to the Sheldonian Theatre looming just outside.
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| Tracy Chevalier and David Grylls |
Tracy Chevalier, meanwhile, discussed
her career trajectory, talking about being supervised by Rose Tremain at the
start of her career, about being an American living for many years in England,
about how her career has developed without any rigid plan: ‘I never really know
what I’m going to write next’. She focused on the importance of research – ‘It
triggers the story’ - and how research methods have changed from hours in the
library to the treacherous ease of the internet: ‘I’ve learned what I can trust
and what not’. She then gave a reading from The
Edge of the Orchard, which is set
in 19th century America, and features the Californian gold rush.
(Tracy Chevalier will also be appearing at the Historical Novel Society
Conference here in Oxford, 2 – 4 September. See www.hnsoxford2016.org)
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| Exeter College Chapel |
Historical
fiction was also the theme a few days later: Paul Blezard interviewed three HF
writers in the no less glorious surroundings of Exeter College Chapel. Once
again I found myself gazing up and around at the general gorgeousness while the
three novelists answered questions about their work and about HF in general.
Robyn
Young, who has written about the Crusades and about Robert the Bruce, is
embarking on a new series set in the 15th century, starting with Sons of the Blood. She talked about ‘method
writing’, meaning that she learns skills like black-powder firing to bring the
history to life – she could describe the ‘mad, fizzing noise’ of the powder in
the barrel of an arquebus, adding ‘How can you put it into a book unless you’ve
experienced it?’
Antonia
Hodgson sets her work in the 18th century, a period often overlooked
by readers – her latest, The Last
Confession of Thomas Hawkins, is a sequel to the very successful The Devil in the Marshalsea. In the
debate about whether historians are justified in looking down their noses at
fiction-writers, she reminded us that ‘every historian is writing a story as
well’. For her, research ‘triggers the story’ because something in it ‘will
just resonate’, but that ultimately the research must be ‘put to one side’ for
the story to thrive.
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| Jason Hewitt |
Jason
Hewitt’s second novel Desperation Road
is set at the end of World War Two, which he regards as ‘a huge vat of
stories’. He walked two thirds of the route his main character takes in his
search for identity. For Jason, to be exhausted and ‘folding in on’ himself was
‘inspirational’ and far better than just sitting in the British Library. (I
knew Jason already from his appearances at Short Stories Aloud in Oxford and
I’m looking forward to reading Desperation
Road, one of several purchases during OLF week.)
Clare Armistead chaired a discussion the art of short story writing at Jesus
College – the location this time a less romantic modern lecture theatre. I was
particularly interested as I’m teaching a Fictionfire workshop on writing short
stories on May 7th. Helen Simpson described her process of
composition as a slow accumulation: ‘they build up like a coral reef’, the
stories often triggered by a situation where ‘someone is uncomfortable’.
Frances Leviston is a poet now making the ‘journey’ from poem to story and finding
the ‘discomfort’ of expanding, having to force herself to be relatively
‘long-winded’. As you’d expect, both celebrated the precision of observation
and the economy of composition the form demands, while highlighting the
problems of readers assuming stories are autobiographical or inhabit a
peculiarly feminine sphere. They also compared short stories with novels,
describing how ‘the mundane is freighted with more than it is in the novel’ and
how readers are more forgiving of a novel, implying that there’s more effort
involved, paradoxically, in reading a short story, precisely because of that
weighted quality. They both talked of the discipline of editing: Frances said
‘nothing on the page is sacred’ and that you should experiment with how much
you can take out.
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| Worcester College |
Finally,
dear reader, I appeared at the Festival this year. I’ve been a member of local
organisation Writers in Oxford (www.writersinoxford.org) since the 1990s: this year we were offered a
spot during the festival to promote how we can be of use to local published
writers. I was one of those volunteering to give a short talk and reading at
the free event at Worcester College.
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| Barbara Lorna Hudson |
We
were delighted by the numbers who turned out to our event and the Q & A
session afterwards was a lively one. My fellow writers Marcus Ferrars and
Barbara Lorna Hudson gave readings – and Barbara later also gave a reading at a
free event in Blackwell’s Marquee. She has just published her novel Timed Out and her reading went down very
well – and the book was a sell-out! She was accompanied by fellow WiO member
Sylvia Vetta, whose Brushstrokes in Time
was recently launched at Blackwell’s. The intersections of literary activity
have been working brilliantly lately. A couple of weeks previously, I’d chaired a
Writers in Oxford panel on the book-retailing industry at Waterstone’s, with
representatives from local independent bookshop The Book House and Blackwell’s
giving us detailed feedback from the bookselling front. They were quite
optimistic about the current state of book-retailing. People, it seems, still
read and love books and booksellers have become ever more imaginative and
resourceful in the way they sell books.
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| Blackwell's Marquee at the Festival |
In
OLF week, our local newspaper, the Oxford
Times, included in its Limited
Edition magazine an article on Oxford as a city of inspiration to writers –
the feature included contributions from Robert Bullard, the chair of WiO, and
from me.
Coming
up:
Literascribe
interviews with novelist Paul Cranwell and book cover designer Jane
Dixon-Smith.
Fictionfireby the Spires: Get into Character weekend workshop/retreat takes place May 21-22 2016! You
can come for the full weekend or on a single day basis: still time (just) to
book! Four workshops will help you create and develop believable and engaging characters, there's delicious food throughout and you'll have time for your own writing too. Find out more at
Two Saturday afternoon workshops in May:
How
to Write Short Stories: May 7th
How
to Edit your Submission: May 14th – details of these are at http://www.fictionfire.co.uk/focus-workshops
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