Its taken me a while to come down from the Iron Press weekend. There has also been sun!! which has meant I’ve been out in the garden and not blogging or writing (well not as much as usual) I love my garden at this time of year but its glories are shortlived and I like to enjoy them while I can. Of course writing is never far from my mind. I’m currently working on a short story for The London Magazine which is an exciting commission. It will also be part of my ever developing collection of stories Millie and Bird and Tales of Paradise.
I’ve also been running workshops with friend and mentor Wendy Robertson and in the course of one of these, courtesy of Wendy, I came across the Paris Review interview with William Trevor. My Monday newsletter (it’s free and you can sign up on the right if you would like to recieve it) as well as featuring competitions etc has links to this great archive of interviews with writers.
Here’s something which set me thinking – yes, I won a big prize and I’m grateful as some good has come of that but I can’t help agreeing with William Trevor in this extract from his Paris Review Interview.
‘Some of the prizes that have crept onto the British literary scene have made rather a circus of literature. It’s nice to win them, and all money freely given to the arts is a good thing. But prizes and best-seller lists and fashion tend to tell people what to read, and it’s discovering what to read for yourself that lends reading half its pleasure. Glamor and glossiness are not what literature is about. Literature is Thomas Hardy, who wasn’t fashionable in the least. He ate his guts out in Dorset, and was miserable, and produced marvellous books; in the end, only the books matter. Nowadays, books tend to be shovelled into a chat-show wheelbarrow, more talked about than read.’
