Gearing up and Down Sizing

The schools have started back and we're in that transition period where the scheduling begins, the afternoons fill with hobbies and lessons and we shuffle them around until we can manage. My morning are quieter, but without a flow yet. I am still running around and catching up on errands, so haven't found a rhythm to fit my poetry in regularly. And being a substitute I'm always slightly on edge waiting for the phone to break into the silence. My interview is also coming up this week, so it's nipping at the edge of my mind as well. 

One thing I've started this week is reviewing my poems in consideration of an A5 page size. Suna Afshan at Poetry Birmingham Journal made an off-the-cuff remark on Twitter asking those  submitting to stop formatting poems in A4 docs. It caused a flurry of tweets of confusion, ah ha moments, discussion and it got me thinking. Print magazines and collections do mostly print in A5 or a similar size, so it makes sense. Though most also seem to ask for submissions in A4 (even PBJ), so maybe the industry needs to rethink things as well. 

I do often look at potential collections from that format, but I have never considered using that size to type my poems from the beginning. So it's thrown my work in disarray. I've changed all my potential collections and my rough draft files to A5 and am looking at how it changes the lay-out of the poems. I'm not rewriting many yet, but it is making me see things differently. 

I've noticed my newer poems do run shorter and fit in A5 comfortably for the most part, but my upcoming collection is mostly older poems and is sitting at over the page limit at the moment. I need to find out what size and style of font my publisher uses. I don't mind splitting a poem over two pages if necessary, but three or four lines dangling over looks wrong. I'm unsure what to do about those extra 5 pages I've suddenly gained.

Of course, for online magazines it's less of an issue. Magazines and competitions usually specify A4 and around a 40 line limit, but my lay-out is running about 28 lines to a page (2cm margins top and bottom, 11pt Arial font for text and a 16pt title.) One of the benefits of being trained in editing at a small magazine is I learned little tricks to make a poem fit on a page, how to lay out a book so it looks good, but I won't be able to do that with my collection being published.  

It's a small thing really, but I feel better using the A5 format from now on. I'll still write my poems first in my notebook, not caring about length or format, but it will be a consideration when editing and designing collections. And, of course, I'm definitely not suggesting that poets should write to please editors and to fit publications, but it helps to know how a poem will look on the page and if we're using A4 as our template the printed product may not look how we imagined. 

I'm also trying to get back into reviewing and reading poetry collections, so I read a few poems every night before bed, the one time I can be sure I have time. I have turned back to Fiona Benson's Vertigo and Ghost which I started last year. This is one of those collections I wish I had written, but not lived. Such beautiful writing that tears me apart emotionally. Even the more gentle ones about parenthood and the poet's fears connected with raising her girls in this difficult world when other mothers are leading their children through unimaginable dangers in the hope of finding safety and shelter dig into all my tender places. But Part One which is considers the mythology of Zeus in modern terms, as a serial rapist, is more of a punch to the throat. Benson plays with the words on the page, mixing modern language with ancient stories and uses a kind of interview format to give voices to the victims, Io, Callisto and others, as well as bragging, bravado-puffed Zeus. It goes much further than Yeats' 'Leda and the Swan'. Difficult to read as it doesn't shy from blunt emotion and descriptions, it is an important voice in these times when 'Me Too' is not a thing you wish to say, but it needs to be heard. 

I've been commissioned to write a review for a poetry collection late in the autumn, but more about that later. 

I'm off to edit and later enjoy some late summer sun. 

What I'm Reading Now and Ticking Along

I'm still trying to do the daily prompt and one way I'm getting ideas is Karl Ove Knausgård's book Autumn, a collection of vignettes written to his unborn daughter about every day items. He writes about apples or jellyfish, badgers, plastic bags and labia among other things. It's a quiet, meditative book, nothing shocking or earth-shatteringly beautiful but it has a lovely reflective feel to it and sometimes the language is hauntingly beautiful and melancholic. I carry it about and read it in short bursts in waiting rooms. There's three more in the series that I might get, following the names of the seasons, but it really makes me want to read his My Struggle series which is also autobiographical.

Anyway, I'm occasionally taking the subject of one of his sections and using that as a prompt for my own writing. Sometimes I get a poem, other times I just spend the time writing with no final output. I like the fact that I'm keeping up with writing practices, not every day, but often enough that I don't feel like I'm wasting my writing time. The poems are still coming, not daily like with the course, but one or two a week which I'm happy with. 

Otherwise, it's just back to the normal writing, editing, submitting, attending my writing group. I'm only working on poetry though we had a craft week on Friday discussing dialogue. We did a short writing exercise and it reminded me why I'm not working on my novel right now. I just can't get a feel for it at the moment, the characters just feel so tangled up, I can't get a hold on them or their motivations. So I'm happy to continue on with my poetry until I see a way out. It's still percolating in the back of my head, but I'm not really giving it any paper time.  

Enjoy your week. 

What I'm Reading Now - Nordic Noir

Since I don't have as much time for writing, I thought I'd talk about some Scandinavian crime fiction I've read recently.

I don't read tons of crime fiction, but it's easy to find in most libraries, especially in a foreign language section, so I tend to binge from time to time. The sort I like have a strong sense of place and culture, an interesting main character as well as a good crime story. I especially like Donna Leon for her Venice Brunetti series and Ian Rankin for his Edinburgh Rebus series even MC Beaton's Hamish MacBeth's novels set in the Highlands of Scotland are a fun way to spend a few hours. So after reading Stig Larsson's Millenium series shortly after we arrived in Finland, I decided branch out into some other Nordic Noir novels.

I won't do an in-depth review or synopsis for these, just some background info and a quick feeling for each.

Phantom - Jo Nesbø - This is part of a popular series, former policeman Harry Hole comes back to Oslo, Norway to help someone from his past and get embroiled in drugs crime that has its fingers into all levels of the city. The writing is strong and the main character is witty, flawed, likable but also layered. This book is mid-way through the series, but you don't feel like you've missed too much as Harry's relationships with people from his past are built up again for the reader. It uses the dead character speaking, but it's well done, offering red herrings, filling in gaps in Harry's point of view and gives us a sense of the characters away from Harry. It's easy to see why this has such a wide international following. I think there's a Hollywood movie underway as well, unfortunately.

Snow Blind - Ragnar Jónasson - His debut novel is set in a remote town in Northern Iceland that gets snowed in by avalanches regularly. This plays on that overwhelming sense of remoteness, darkness of the mid-winter that is typical of Nordic Noir. I get a similar feeling every winter here in Southern Scandinavia to a much lesser extreme, without the murders, of course. There was lots of background information on the characters, maybe too much, but I didn't really gel with the lead at all, a just-graduated police recruit with a theology background. There are at least four other books in The Dark Iceland Series.

Until Thy Rath Be Past - Åsa Larsson - Set in Northern Sweden where many of the characters still speak a form of Finnish this was a part of Scandinavia I wasn't familiar with and the book delves into the impact of WWII on this isolated area  which again I didn't know much about. Another series with at least 5 books now. The main characters didn't have enough depth for me. There were two strong women leads which was nice to see but they were a bit stereotyped, an overworked mother/ police inspector and a work-aholic single prosecutor Rebecka Martinson who the series is based around who seems to get to do lots of investigating. A knowledge of Finnish gives part of the game away towards the end, but most will miss it.

Hypothermia - Arnaladur Indridason - An Inspector Erlendur novel, so again part of a series set in Iceland. As with many of these novels, the case was secondary here to the main character's angst and history, but I felt I had missed a lot of previous information from earlier in the series, so I couldn't connect with  Erlendur. Family members and old familiars pop up laden with emotional history and Erlendur's own brother's disappearance in his childhood hangs heavily over the novel, so much that I wished they would focus on that. the book was well written and I was getting a feeling for Erlendur, so I might try the series from the beginning.

The Sheriff - Reijo Mäki - Jussi Vares is a private detective in Turku, Finland and takes the hard-boiled, hard-drinking private eye to the limits of its definition. He seems to spend most of his time totally wasted with his layabout mates and occasionally goes out to solve the crime which I just couldn't get into though it had an interesting set-up. Nine of the 26 Vares books have been turned into movies, Google tells me, but I'm assuming that's in Finnish only. The novel explores sides of Finland I've not come across before, definitely its less attractive sides, but the main character and his too-merry band just weren't likable to me.

Copper Heart - Leena Lehtolainen - third book in the Maria Kallio series. I enjoyed this book, a good view of small town Finland, lots of interesting charachters with backgrounds that weren't too complicated or heavy. Some of the series is set in Helsinki and Espoo, so I'm interested in reading those as this is the Finland I know.  In this title, Maria Kallio goes back to the small town she grew up in to fill in for the current sheriff, so her past relationships come into play while she tries to figure out whodunnit. 

Of these titles, I'd probably read more of Jo Nesbo's and Leena Lehtolainen's books, but who are we kidding, I will read almost anything I can get my hand on here. Helsinki has great libraries, but their English language choices are limited, so I am reading what I can find at any branch I happen to drop into if I've forgotten to reserve titles. It's definitely widened my reading circle.

What I'm Reading Now - January

I thought I'd add something new to the blog, a book share. 

I stopped reading for a long time after having kids, the same as I stopped writing fiction. I was too tired from the broken nights and hectic days of having tiny kids. I literally couldn't read more than a few lines without falling asleep. And if I did manage to read something my mind was so foggy I couldn't retain it, so I found myself getting a few chapters into a book before I realised I had already read it, but still couldn't remember how it ended.

I sleep trained my youngest over the past few years, really slowly and we eventually worked the gradual withdrawal to sitting outside her room for a half hour to an hour while she fell asleep. Rather than stare at my phone, I tried reading again. It took a bit of training to stay awake; short, pithy crime novels seemed to help, but I was soon able read a decent amount in that time and remember it. Now that my little monster goes to sleep without me watching over her, I read in bed as a way of winding down before sleep. I don't manage to go through a book as quickly in that way, but I'm still getting some reading time in without feeling guilty that I'm not writing or cleaning or doing something else Mom-ish.

Living abroad where the first language is not English, it's difficult to have access to a wide source of new books unless you want to spend a fortune. We go to libraries almost weekly, so we tend to work our way through the English language sections pretty quickly. I also swap books with friends. As a result I'm not picky about what I read, but I like recommendations. 

A friend brought me a copy of Bernard MacLaverty's new novel Midwinter Break as a late Christmas gift and highly recommended it. Though it wasn't what I was expecting, it is a lovely touching book. My enjoyment was helped by the fact that I went to Amsterdam for the first time last year and this is where the story of the retired couple takes place and part of the story is set around a out of the way spot that I bumbled into myself.

The pace of the novel is slow and its language softly poetic, similar to his novel Grace Notes which I also enjoyed. He focuses on the couple's in-jokes, their little moments. He draws us into their routine and inner thoughts with simple, precise detail, such as their daily Ailment Hour when they discuss any illness or injury plaguing them. 

It does have an undercurrent of religious faith which is not usually a subject I'm interested in, but MacLaverty managed to cushion it within the characters' history and relationship in a way that it was not overwhelming.

Midwinter Break is short but sweet, a gentle read for a snowy winter's day.  

Last night I started Girl Reading by Katie Ward. I bought this title and I'm afraid to say, so far I'm underwhelmed. It's a collection of seven vignettes based on real portraits of a woman reading. It ranges from the 1300s in Siena, Italy to modern day. I've read the first 'chapter' and while the author has evoked the time and place well and I'm drawn into the characters, I struggled to follow the shifts in point of view and some of the scenes just didn't make sense to me. 

The section started quite slow and we were just getting to know the 3 most interesting characters when their dilemmas were just dropped, the reader left to fill in the blanks. The author finished the section with 'Many details go unrecorded' and while I don't need a happy ending, I do like a sense of finish to a piece.

I know I will enjoy going in search of the portraits after I finish each section, the first being Simone Martini's Annunciation but I hope the author gives me more time with the next characters and doesn't leave me hanging for the next 6 chapters.

Note: once I reached the last few sections of the novel, the disjointed style of the early chapters began to make sense to the overall plot of the novel. I understood what the author was doing and it was clever and well done, but to be honest, I didn't enjoy it as a read.