In Conversation With Jenny Alexander...

          Sue Price: Jenny, when we’ve talked before, it seemed that we were approaching the same place from opposite directions.

Your experiences made you sensitive to dreams and your unconscious life, and in exploring that, you moved towards writing... Whereas I started in a sceptical place, denying any such nonsense as 'the subconscious' or 'meaningful dreams' but, in writing more, was forced to acknowledge both the power of the subconscious and the truth often found in dreams.
          Would you agree with that? - and could you tell us more about how you began your dream-work and writing?

       Jenny Alexander: Yes, I would absolutely agree, Sue - it was an interesting conversation!

          All through my childhood I wanted to be a poet or an artist - writing and painting were my passions.

          But I finally yielded to pressure to apply for university rather than art school, and gave up my artistic ambitions. After a while at uni, learning to dissect a text with brutal efficiency, I gave up on writing too.

          Sue Price: That is so sad! It must have been torture!

          Jenny Alexander: At that point, I had a series of nightmares about killing myself. I would put my finger in a light socket and flick the switch, or turn on the gas fire in my student room and not light the gas.

           These dreams felt totally real and terrifying. One night, in my dream, I climbed out onto the ledge outside my room, and sat looking down at the cold concrete four floors below, gearing myself up to jump.

The Royal Holloway College

           I woke to find that I really was there. I had opened the sash window and climbed out in my sleep. Shaking violently, I somehow managed to clamber back in.
     (That's a picture of the Royal Holloway, right, where Jen had this terrifying dream.)

           Later that morning, I told my doctor, 'I think my dreams are trying to kill me.'

           I felt that I had no choice but to engage with my dreams, and over the next two decades, I became thoroughly familiar with my dream-world, so that when I was ready to think about becoming an author again, there was no anxiety or self doubt, because I knew I had inside myself this abundant, continuous flow of stories and images, and I knew how to capture them. 

           Could you say a bit about how your writing became an opening into the dreamworld, as I call the unconscious mind, for you?

          Sue Price: Your dreams were trying to kill you!

           That strikes a chord with me, because there was a time in my life, when I was denying that ‘other’ in my head, when I think my subconscious very deliberately worked against me, although it wasn’t as murderous as yours!

           For instance, I would say something quite innocent to someone – something like, ‘How are you?’ -  and hear myself saying it in a way that made it insulting. I had absolutely no conscious intention of insulting anyone, and would be as astonished as the person I’d just offended. But what could I say? I’d just bitten their heads off for no good reason!

           It was impossible to explain that it wasn’t me who’d said it! They’d have thought I was mad. Occasionally, I thought I was mad.

           I was at logger-heads with what I now call ‘my daemon’ because I was refusing to acknowledge that it existed. It fought me all the way. I’d be writing something and would decide to make some change to the plot. The ‘daemon’ would object, but I didn’t recognise its voice and took it for a mere passing thought, which I’d ignore because I had my plan. I was certain there was only one voice in my head: the ‘I’ voice, which I would now call ‘the editor’.

           The daemon took revenge by withdrawing. The piece of writing I was working on would fall over dead. I had to learn that with writing – or, I think, any art – the daemon does the real work! The Editor may make some great improvements, once the real work is finished, but shouldn’t be allowed to interfere with the daemon.

           A vengeful, spurned daemon is a dangerous thing, I think – especially yours! Mine not only stymied my efforts at writing, it played those tricks to embarrass me. It was ingenious at finding ways to make such remarks as, “Yes, please,” or “I’ve heard of that,” nasty and cutting.

           I had to learn that talk of ‘muses’ and ‘daemons’ was not the arty-farty nonsense I thought it, but a way of talking about something that we don’t quite understand, and don’t have an everyday vocabulary for. I began to deal with writing-problems by saying to the daemon, ‘Solve this for me.’ And it did! The more I trusted it, the faster and more inventively it solved the problems.

           I started to give way to it. If it insisted that a particular character should – or shouldn’t – die, I no longer argued, but humbly worked with it to make it so. I discovered that the more I trusted the daemon, the friendlier it became. It stopped playing those tricks on me!

           So I paid more attention and ‘heard’ it more clearly. I saw how a piece of writing I’d ‘made up as I went along’ had sub-texts planted in it, and other subtleties that ‘I’ hadn’t planned – so who had? And then I read Kipling’s description of his ‘daemon’ and knew what he was talking about right away.

           It seems that your ‘daemon’ was so furious at your moving away from your art – or so despairing – that it wanted to kill you. That’s frightening.

           Do you think it was drawing and writing again that made your peace with it?

          Jenny Alexander: Well, that was not what I expected, Sue! All my struggles with the daemon were fought within the inner world of dreams, in a quite elemental way, long before I came back to writing at the age of forty. So I hadn't imagined what it would feel like to have to learn to stop fighting and 'humbly work with it' through the process of becoming a writer.

           I knew that must happen, and I've watched other writers struggle to let go of the ego position and begin to trust in the ‘somewhere else’ where the real movement and growth of the story happens outside conscious control, in its own time and at its own pace. But I hadn't imagined it, and your description conjures it very vividly, and also the taming of the 'I' in the outer world by these dark forces pushing through and disrupting things.

           I met my dark forces in dreams. That's where I learnt the language of symbols and stories, and developed a relationship with them which turned out to be the perfect grounding for a confident and happy experience of writing, and that is certainly how I would describe my career so far. 

           Thinking about your story, I'm wondering whether this awareness and conscious working with the daemon, which started in the outer world and continued into your writing, is continuing to carry you towards new ideas and ways of being?

          Sue Price.  I am always amazed by how many ways there are to write! I had no idea I was letting go of the ego position. It felt – and still feels, often – as if I’m listening to another voice, or being handed an image and ordered to write about it, or almost physically nudged towards an idea. Or pushed away from one! Very much like the voice which all but spoke to me as I woke and said, ‘Make a Green Man mask out of papier-mache.’ I’m obediently making it and I still don’t know why! I’m enjoying it, so I carry on.

           But is it carrying me towards new ideas and ways of being? I don’t think so!

          For all this talk of daemons and ‘voices’, I continue to be as spiritual as a brick. I am essentially, I think, pragmatic. If something works, use it. I wanted to write, so I used whatever seemed to work, but without, if I’m honest, ever thinking very deeply about it. Unlike you!

           I am fascinated by your struggles and fights in the’ inner world of dreams.’ This sounds so much like what I read about shaman’s spirit travels and I imagined for my Ghost World books. It’s quite startling to hear someone talking matter of factly about fighting battles in dreams.

           I think we’re out of space for now – but I would love to hear more about this inner world and the battles you fought, if you wouldn’t mind talking about them. Perhaps we could continue this conversation another time?

           Jenny Alexander: Absolutely! And in the meantime, how about being 'in conversation with' that Green Man? It would be interesting to know why he's come and what he wants...

          Susan Price: There's a thought! I'm not sure I'd get an answer - or if I'd want to hear it if I did!

          Jenny Alexander is a highly respected author for children, as well as an expert dream-wrangler! Her website can be found here. 

          Her excellent blog, about dreams and creativity, can be found here.

          I apologise for the failure of the blog last week. This Blott would have been nearly topical then! But I post it, because I like it.

          It demonstrates the dangers of excitable and uncontrolled daemons/muses! 

 

Post-Haste

          I've got to be brief this week, as I'm the middle of various work deadlines, and also, am not feeling too well. Like a lot of other people, I've a bit of a cold, a bit of sore throat, bit of headache... And it's Davy's birthday meal-out this weekend, too, so I'm saving myself for that.
          First, I'd like to share this short film with you. I've copied it from YouTube, where it was posted by the BBC Wildlife Trust, but it was filmed and sent to the BBC by a friend of mine. I'm not saying where it was filmed, for fear that government sharp-shooters get to hear of it, but it was somewhere in the deep, dark depths of the West Midlands concrete wilderness.

So there's hope that even if the government stupidly persist in killing one of our oldest native species, despite very little evidence that doing so will stop the spread of TB in cattle, badgers will simply join foxes in our backgardens. This one already co-exists with a family of foxes and several cats.

          And then there's this lad:- 

 Not the best photo, I admit. He now has a frost nibbled maple leaf in his crown - an English maple, Joan, sorry - and oak leaves sprouting from the corners of his mouth in best Green Man style. A bird of a species unknown to science has built a nest against his right cheek. There will be eggs in it, but at the moment the glue's still drying and I don't want to add extra weight.

          I spend as much time looking at him and thinking as I do adding anything. I'm thinking: apple-blossom above the nest, and an apple against his left cheek, opposite the nest. Too obvious? Maybe. But then, the seasons are pretty obvious. Not much point trying to be original about them.

          As soon as I get my hands on some paint - couldn't find any in my local poundstore, Madwippet - I'll add some colour, just to make it easier to tell what I'm doing.

 

 

Clowns and Green Men

         Did nothing this week, except the usual noodling around with blogs, emails and so on. Well, did write the beginning of a new story that I promised my agent.
          I thought I'd put up the clown mask I've been playing around with. I partly painted it with white acrylic, but as I don't have much paint and no brush (I used my fingers) things haven't gone very far. The lips are coloured with a felt-tipped pen, but I'm not happy with them. Acrylic would be better, but I was so overwhelmed with the choice of paints that I ended up not buying any. The clown is based on portraits of Grimaldi - I wanted to avoid the Ronald MacDonald look - and his hair should be blue. There should be bright red triangles painted on his cheeks too. I don't know if I'll bother to finish him.
          I started playing around with the Green Man too. My 'studio is one corner of my kitchen table, and while I'm waiting for the kettle to boil, I seize bits of paper and card and work on it for ten minutes at a time.  It started like this - 

A cheap plastic mask of tragedy, which I coated with vaseline. After lots of paste and torn paper, it turned into this - 

This detail of the top left hand corner shows the cardboard holly leaves, and a crumpled paper sycamore leaf,

It's all made out of old newspapers, cardboard boxes, unwanted junk mail. At the moment I'm trying to make a small bird's nest by layering paper around a small (greased) measuring cup. As I want to keep the whole thing light, I'll have to find something I can model acorns and hazel-nuts around. I am looking at household objects and bits of rubbish with a speculative eye.

          From Green Men to Blue Cats...

As He Would Draw It

 '...He falls to such perusal of my face

As he would draw it.'

The mask former

          Starting with a quote from 'Hamlet', eh? Sure to knock 'em dead.
          I was very struck by those lines when I first read 'Hamlet' as a teenager.
          I spent a lot of time drawing then, often from life. I knew that, although you might think you were closely observing something, you never really looked at anything until you tried to draw it. The relationships of one part to another, the density of a shadow, the texture, the angles, the precise delination of a curve...
         The curves of the Oseberg or Gokstad ships will break your heart. I know: I've tried to draw them.

The Oseberg Ship

          Was Shakespeare an artist, then, as well as a playwright?
          But what really brings on these thoughts is my Green Man project. I wrote here some months ago that I'd woken up one morning - without ever having any such thought before in my life as far as I can remember - thinking: 'You should make a Green Man mask out of papier-mache.' And then my brother posted that he'd had much the same thought at about the same time.
          Those sort of things tend to stick in your head.
           I've been busy, and haven't actually ripped up one bit of paper for the Green Man, but I have been thinking about him a lot. A lot. And one happy side-effect of this has been an increase in the intensity of my observation. When I go out for a walk now, it's not just a bit of exercise in the fresh air - it's research.
          I'm perusing things as I would make them.
          I'm noticing the different veinings and textures of leaves. Some have plump, pillowy leaves with grooves between the veins. Others are flatter and smoother, but grained. There are pinked edges and smooth edges. Hazel leaves are almost circular, not 'leaf-shaped' at all.
          I'm noticing the different ways they spring from their twig or stem; how they grow in rosettes or spirals.

          I'm studying, with great interest, the dead stalks and seed-heads standing in the hedgerows. I've always enjoyed the brilliant red berries, but now I'm seeing how many different shapes of them there are.
         I imagine botanists and gardeners enjoy this pleasure in just looking all the time. Perhaps people fascinated by other things do too - people who're enthralled, say, by the study of beetles and other small cattle. But it's a pleasure I'd mislaid somewhat since, all those years ago, I used to stare at things, pencil in hand, hard enough to bore a hole in them.
          Whether or not I can reproduce any of these leaves and things remains to be seen - but even if I can't, I'll still have enjoyed this renewed pleasure in just looking. Dying leaves, lemon yellow with splotches and spots of green. Bramble leaves of a deep, glowing maroon red, that you'd think could never be natural, but is.

          In the meantime, I'm approaching the Green Man with due caution, by having a trial run at something else, just to see what I can learn. I'm using a cheap plastic mask (top) as a form. Can you tell what it is yet?

          The big news of the week, as far as I'm concerned, is that my agent says that she's enjoying Sterkarm 3, and will be in touch soon, with notes.

          She also says she found it confusing, in parts. It's not just me, then. I'm hoping she'll figure it out, and explain it to me.

          And Blott's back! So's Ashteroth...

By Bitter Sterkarm...

          This will be a short post, as I have taken an oath.  By Oak and Ash, and Bitter Thorn, I will finish Sterkarm 3 and have it ready to send to my agent - or will have sent it - by September 1st.
          I know I said it was almost finished, but...
          I had to round up those loose hounds... Well, it turned out, they weren't as hard to round up as I'd feared.  But while I was looking for them, I found a lengthy passage that needed rewriting.  I'd brought in two minor characters to do something that - I suddenly saw - would be much better done by one of the more important characters.  But that means rewriting that scene and surrounding scenes...
          And the ending.  Endings, of course, are a beach.  I am feeling my way through this scene by my fingertips.  There are several characters.  The revelations of the scene must be made bit by bit - but every character must behave in character, and speak like themselves - and it all means going back and forth, rewriting, scrapping, moving lines about...  It's slow and head-nipping.
          And so much of my time is being taken up by other things - e-publishing my back-list, blogging, tweeting...  I could see it all going on for months.
          But I'm a member of an on-line writers' group called Flatcap. We 'meet up' on line most days, to report to each other on what we've managed to get done, and encourage each other.

The Ghost Wife

          I was grumbling on Flatcap about how it was all taking such an age, when another Flatcapper, the witty Joan Lennon, told me to take, myself, the same advice I would give to a novice writer in the same situation.

          Why don't you, Joan sagely asked, set yourself a deadline?
          Well, this is just what Flatcap is for.  So I am taking Joan's advice and setting myself a deadline.  September 1st - no later!

The Wolf Sisters by Susan Price

    I am also coming round to the idea of A Sterkarm Embrace as the title - though I may have to write in an explanation of what a Sterkarm embrace is.
          I have two more e-books out - Wolf Sisters and The Ghost Wife.  Another is pending, but it will just have to pend until the Sterkarms are done.

            Nor have I forgotten the Green Man.  I have got as far as buying a mask for a former, and cutting the side off a large cardboard box to make a working surface.  I've covered the cardboard in clingfilm, so the papier-mache (when I get to that stage) won't stick to it.  When I have finished the Sterkarms - by September 1st! - I will allow myself, as a reward, to have a go at the Green Man.  My brother suggests using cardboard tubes, like toilet roll and kitchen roll innards, to help with the curl of leaves.
          But, on with the Sterkarms...
And Blott, of course... 

Fighting the Green Man

Canterbury Cathedral's Green Man

          I was going to write this week about how busy I was last week with various business trips - but now that they're all done, I can't find any enthusiasm for blogging about them.

          Instead I’m going to write about an idea that has unexpectedly taken over my mind.  It keeps nudging in when it isn’t wanted, and won’t go away.

          I woke up one morning a couple of weeks ago, thinking about it.  You ought to  make, it said, a Green Man face out of papier-mache.

          But why would I want to?  While having nothing  against Green Men, I don’t want one.  I didn’t know I wanted to make one.

          But the idea won’t go away.  When I’m trying to concentrate on other things – like writing a blog, or finishing the Sterkarm book  – it sidles in.  You could use, it says, one of those cheap plastic face masks as a former… Where did that come from?  I hardly even knew those masks existed  - though there they are, on Amazon, 99p

          I dismiss the whole notion.  It’s a waste of time.  But it won’t go away – The leaves could be different colours, it says, as I wake on another morning.  As if the year was turning: some bright green and spring-like, others yellow and red.  There could be berries.

          But I don’t want to make it!  It would take a long time, it would be messy – and what would I do with it, even if I finished it?  It would be big, and heavy and utterly useless.  I couldn’t sell it: I wouldn’t even want it myself.

          But still the idea won’t go away.  Try, it whispers.  See if you could do it.  You’d have to look at different leaves – it’d be interesting, something different.  Go on…

Norwich Green Man

          My aunt laughed when I told her.  The Prices are all the same, she said.  They just want to be making something.  Don’t care about it when it’s made – they only want to make it.  Your grandfather, she said, when he worked at the brickyard, used to make animal figures out of clay and fire them along with the bricks –  and then would give them away. He wasn’t interested in them when they were done; he just wanted to see if he could make them.  Look at your brothers, she said, always drawing, painting, modelling, carving... Can't help themselves.

           But where do these ideas come from?  Why are they so insistent and hard to dismiss?  Why are they there waiting when you wake up?  Why a Green Man, of all things?

          So that’s where I am at the moment – trying to finish the Sterkarm book that might make me some money, trying to publish my backlist as ebooks, and trying to fight off a Green Man…

          I also blog over at Do Authors Dream of Electric Books?

          And if you love books, and have an e-reader, you might like to rummage through this goodie-bags of books.