Oh Lordy, I’m only just making it with a January newsletter. Happy New Year, I hope there is some happy for you at the moment.
So far this year I have done a lot of daydreaming, reading, pondering and not enough writing. I think I’m wintering. I’m taking everything very slowly. I have even replaced our electric kettle with a stove top one because it’s unhurried. I am completely embracing this gentler pace of everything and loving it.
What does one do when wintering? Well for me, alongside watching Call My Agent wrapped in a blanked on the sofa eating chilli chocolate, I’ve been reading lots of Virginia Woolf, listening to all the podcasts about her I can find (this BBC one is lovely) and imagining the dinners with friends I can’t have. Once down this rabbit hole I started thinking about female writers, who have passed, who I would want to have dinner with.
I have a table that seats six, it’s a bit cosy but enough room for a good afternoon of chatter while feasting on roasted winter vegetables, hunks of wholewheat bread and brie, I am suddenly obsessed with brie.
I know you want to know who I would have at my table? Well, Virginia Woolf would of course be here. Apparently, she wanted to grow old in Greece, so we have a lot to talk about already - the olive groves, the lemongrass, the white bean stew. And I’d like to thank Andrea Levy being my inspiration, for her whole cannon, for writing the stories of black Caribbean heritage women and for leading me to my job at the National Theatre. If the NT hadn’t put on Small Island I wouldn’t have applied for my role. Even though she had passed I knew she would not have allowed the NT to bring her book to the stage if she didn’t trust them. Her trust in them was good enough for me. Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou each get a seat at either end of the table, I don’t need to explain their invitations. And the last seat at this literary lunch would be Lucy Maud Montgomery. I have a 1976 print of Anne of Green Gables, which I’ve had since I was about 12, but to my shame I’ve never read it.
I only realised Montgomery’s brilliance last year when watching Anne With An E. On seeing the dramatization of the book was not at all what I was expecting I’ve done my research. If the Netflix version is true to the book I have no idea, but my copy is coming off the bookshelf and onto my reading pile. I thought Montgomery was a stuffy over privileged writer with no concept of working for a living, but I was wrong. She was a working woman, a teacher who didn’t like teaching but did it to pay the bills so she could write. How many women work a job to do what they love? Too many, and I have nothing but respect for women who create space within the mundane of everydayness to live out their dreams. It’s taken me a long time to realise it’s not either or, it’s both, parallel lives that intersect and stay separate and it’s much easier to embrace this than fight it.
The more reading and listening I’ve been doing the past few weeks the more I’ve learned that early twentieth century writers like Woolf, were confident enough to talk about working jobs and running businesses to pay the bills so they could write. Of course we know and expected Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou to be holding down jobs to raise their families and start their writing careers. But these days so many writers like to present themselves as earning a full income from their writing but only the most successful do. Yes, there are lots of women who have partners to pay the bills which affords them the financial freedom to write, and there are those who seem to be very good at swooping up writers grants but it feels like we’ve turned a corner. Working women are no longer embarrassed to say they work a job, which hopefully they get lots of fulfillment from, so that they have the head-space and financial security to write. This is amazing. I hope this honesty and ridding of shame helps make it easier for working women to take up space in publishers meeting rooms without feeling like they have to ‘fake it till they make it’. My, wouldn’t it be great to retire that saying!
Back to lunch. I think a trifle for dessert while I find out if, even though we may often consider these women as free-thinking feminists, if they felt they had the freedom to write what they wanted to say?
How censored were they?
Have we correctly interrupted their words?
I’d also like to know how these women view patriarchy in 2021 – has progress been too slow to honour the impact they made and legacy they left?
With lunch done and the dishes in the dishwasher, I’d ask my guests about poetry, because I’ve been invited to judge entries for a competition later in the year. I know nothing about poetry but I know what I like, I know what stirs my thoughts, my emotions and what stays with me.
I guess, in my intersecting life, I just need to embrace that I have been asked, said yes, and trust that the organisers know what they wanted.
Stay well friends, and if you enjoy the random thoughts out of my head I’d love you to share my newsletter.