Something to celebrate

Publication day. Now that’s a day to forget. Throughout my years in publishing it’s always struck me as the oddest thing. From almost the moment a book becomes a glint in the editor’s eye, the date of publication accompanies talk of higher, more literary concerns. But when the date does come round it’s strangely uneventful, and no more than the little bundle of numbers it was in the first place. Meanwhile, of course, the words have been written (the biggest feat of all), the covers have been made, the ink has dried, and the finished books have been sent out into the world. So time has been filled, and a whole host of people have been busy. But on publication day itself? Nothing much happens, unless it’s just that I haven’t been invited.

But today I’m sitting at my desk and looking at six beautiful books which over the last few months have been crossing my desk in various stages of undress. And today they’re in full livery and ready for the world. Each one is a short, sharp hit of wisdom from one of six very wise (and very dead) thinkers – Nietzsche, Hobbes, Freud, Byron, Bergson and Kierkegaard. But the best thing about these books is that six very clever (and very living) writers – John Armstrong, Hannah Dawson, Brett Kahr, Matthew Bevis, Michael Foley and Robert Ferguson – have made it their mission to make sense of that wisdom and apply it to the messy reality of life. I’ve always known philosophy – and poetry and psychology – were relevant to me, but these little books have reminded me why. And they’re most definitely something to celebrate.

A new interest in life

I’ve always thought marriages work best when duties are clearly divided, with as little grey area in the middle as possible. Or rather that’s what I’ve thought since living with my husband (which, for logistical reasons, came after being married) and having to negotiate shared responsibilities. So for a while now – and despite the fact that we’re very modern in amost every other way – I’ve done most things to do with the house, and he's done most things to do with the garden.

But a little while ago, back in the spring, I got involved in a gardening venture, and – lo and behold – there’s a garden full of flowers outside the window. Instead of looking out of the study onto a slumped concrete driveway and the back end of the car, I now look out onto a patch of cornflowers, corn marigolds, corn chamomile, corn cockles and poppies. I’m sure there’s been an extra spring in my sentences with this new backdrop to my working life.

We've had no end of people stopping to admire the view. And apparently I had a hand in this, or so I'm told. Gardening, I’ve decided, beats doing the washing and paying bills, and I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long to realise that.

The dead of night

I’ve just finished my official Spread the Word mentorship (if such a word exists) of Cityread's Young Writer in Residence 2013, Jay Bernard. Jay is primarily a poet – and a very good one at that – and I’m neither a poet nor an editor of poetry. I’m much more comfortable when sentences follow each other in an orderly and linear fashion. But apparently Jay specifically wanted an editor rather than a poet, and I didn’t need to be an editor of poetry. I just needed to be an editor, full stop.

And what Jay really needed was someone to hold her to account. So we plotted a timetable to confer structure on the amorphous business of her writing. Jay is a last-minuter by nature, but she’s a woman of her word, and bang on schedule – though in the dead of night when I was asleep and Jay was still at her desk – an email would come through with a new chunk of words, just as she’d promised.

Of course we talked about those words, too, and from my perspective it wasn’t just a case of setting deadlines and expecting them to be met. I attempted to give her a sense of her readers (and especially of new readers she should be reaching out to) and how to keep them very much in mind and on her side. Writers and their words are all very well, but both need readers. And of course poets really do need readers, and could do with a lot more of them.

But our deadlines – mine to set; hers to meet – were what really made the mentorship a worthwhile endeavour. And now, unofficially but just as authoritatively, we’ll continue. We have three more dates in our diaries, and Jay knows exactly what she’s doing and when. And meanwhile I’m feeling moved to sing both the praises of Jay’s work (her long poem about the severed heads of London Bridge will be ready and published very soon) and of those ill-named, oft-maligned and rather dreaded things called deadlines.

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A chance to wander

I rarely enter competitions. But then I’ve never come across a prize as unlikely and as promising as this one: a summer wandering around the ancient pathways of Britain with pen, camera and money in hand. If it weren’t for the fact that my summer is already booked up with responsibility and purpose, or that it’s a Penguin prize and therefore feels a little too close to home, or that I’m still a little shy of social networks, then I’d be abandoning my usual anti-competition stance and I’d be off. Anyway, it’s obviously not for me. But here’s more about it in case you think it’s one for you.

Confessions of a recovering editor

It was just over two years ago that I emerged from under a pile of manuscripts. I can date it back to my last day in publishing proper, the day that I pushed my keyboard to one side, drank champagne or its equivalent, said goodbye to everybody and left. Since then it's been a case of leading a relatively normal life. I say ‘relatively’ because I’m still implicated behind the scenes, but what I mean is this: I now read normal books.

I couldn't quite remember what it was like to pick up a book in a bookshop and think ‘I'll read that’.  Or what it was like to read just for twenty minutes before switching out the light. Or to find the perfect book for the morning train ride. Instead, it was a case of bringing home piles of words that would follow me around, weighing me down both literally and metaphorically. These were years of finding long elastic bands in the bottoms of bags long after the manuscripts they’d embraced had found their way into recycling, and then, when gadgetry took hold, of letting small – but still clumsy – machines lighten the load.

Whatever their consistency, words demanded my attention in a way that normal words – words already published and secure in the knowledge that they existed – never would. These were insecure words, unpublished words, words that tugged at me until I had to read them. It was a tough life for them and a tough life for me.

But now it's not my job to be sifting, judging and bearing the weight of all that. I’ve single-handedly changed my job description and gradually, over the last twenty-something months, spread my reading wings.

So now I can go into a bookshop without feeling (quite so much) the tug of personal attachment. And I’m happy to have an opinion along with everyone else rather than ahead of them. In fact, I allow myself the privilege of judging a book by its cover because, for once, it already has one. And, perhaps most shockingly of all, I’m happy to pay good money for a good book. Because that’s the sign of a real reader, I’ve discovered: the chance to hold a book in one hand, £7.99 in the other and weigh up the real worth of words.