by Maria McCarthy | 24 Jul, 2014 | Uncategorized
There are some songs that I have to dance to. One of these is Neil Young’s ‘Rocking in the Free World.’ I’ve heard this several times in the past two weeks, one of these played live by Neil Young. It went on and on, with several false endings before rousing the crowd to another round of singing, arm-waving and punching the air. I heard it on the radio a few days later, turned it up loud, danced and sang around the kitchen.
Then, a few days later, a local band played it at a community event. As tired as I was, I leapt out of my fold-up garden chair and rocked out. In quite a reserved way, I thought, since no-one else appeared to be joining in, beyond a slight swaying. I held back from punching the air, for instance.
After the band finished their set, I went up to tell them that I had seen Neil Young perform it live the week before. I’d been noticed from the stage, and the singer, plus a bystander who joined in the conversation, called me an ageing hippy. I’ll forgive them their use of cliche, but ageing? Hippy? Really?
Poster by Jeremy Deller
I’m 54 and have no problem with being this age. I’m looking forward to turning 55 – 5 is my favourite number and see 55 as an excellent age to be. But I was too young to be hippy the first time round; therefore too young to be an ageing hippy. Is it really so unusual to see a woman of my age rocking out?
It’s not as though I am stuck in ’60s and ’70s music. I love Arcade Fire, their crazy theatricality on stage, their simple but meaningful lyrics, which have brought me close to tears at times, often when listening to them on my iPod on public transport. Their anthem ‘No Cars Go’ is such a perfect song; I always listen to it twice. I am just as happy to bop to Pharrell Williams, the Jackson 5, to my favourite folk supergroup Bellowhead, or to Blur’s ‘Song 2’. My poor body is unable to pogo to the last of these in the way I used to, but I pogo in my mind whenever I hear it. For those too young to remember pogo-ing, ask your mum. Or your gran.
So I’m not an ageing hippy. I couldn’t do the drugs for a start. My one attempt at smoking dope sent me to sleep, then I was violently sick all the next day. Nor am I a rock chick, the other cliche that has come my way. I used to follow a band in my teens, going to all their gigs that I could and waiting afterwards to speak to the band. But this comprised chatting about their music and, well, stuff. I did fancy one of them. I later found out he was gay. So no sex or drugs, just the rock and roll.
So before you apply your lazy stereotypes to me, I am not an ageing hippy or a rock chick, I just like music.
Here’s a piece about the Neil Young gig at Hyde Park by Peter Cook, who was my companion for the day. Read Leadership Lessons from “the Young Ones”.
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by Maria McCarthy | 14 May, 2014 | Friends' Gallery, Resolutions, Uncategorized
Breaking news: I don’t have a poor sense of direction; I quite like having my photograph taken. This is news indeed, as I am letting go of two myths about myself that I have believed for most of my life.
When I was 17, I got lost in Norwich. I went into a shop and, when I came out, could not remember from which direction I had walked there, and so where to meet my family. I must have found them, regained by bearings. I was just disoriented for a moment, and that one moment became a myth I believed for the next 37 years. I have worried about travelling, about finding my way when I am driving. I have planned my routes with maps and timetables, handwritten instructions annotated with buildings of note, monuments, parks, how many left turnings to count before the one I needed. All because I believed I had a terrible sense of direction, and the worst thing in the world would be to lose my way.
I returned to Norwich this year (for the first time since the great getting-lost of 1977), and noticed that it is a confusing city of one-way streets, side roads and alleyways. When I was 17, I was in a strange place and temporarily lost my way; I do not have a poor sense of direction at all.
My thinking has also been changed about having my photograph taken. When I was a child, Ted Gale, family photographer, would visit once a year and group us on the sofa like the Simpsons. I hated it so much that I once hid behind the rabbit’s cage in the garden so I wouldn’t be in the photo. I was found, picked up and placed on the sofa and told to ‘watch the birdie’ and ‘say cheese’. They could drag a child to the sofa, but they could not make her smile. My hunched shoulders and scowl were captured for posterity in a picture too horrible to reproduce here.
Those occasions when photos were obligatory – first Holy Communion, graduation, weddings and so on – became endurance tests. I vetted the results, found fault with my image, hid photos (they were too expensive to destroy).
So why did I, a photo-refusenik, embark on my Friends’ Gallery, a project to have my photo taken with as many friends as possible in 2014? What’s more, I am delighted with the results. Could it be that I like having my photo taken?
Perhaps this is about control. I was forced to have my photo taken as a child, dressed in frocks that felt uncomfrotable, told to sit there, stand like that, to look happy, to smile. It was a false image, the family gathered together as one smiling, functioning unit. The reality was that my father was rarely in the same room as the rest of us. He was either working, travelling to or from work, in the pub or the bookies. My mother was mostly angry at him, clashing around in the kitchen, making meals that he often didn’t come home to eat, shouting at her children when she was really angry at my dad.
The prints on the wall framed family lies – the way my mother would have liked us to be; the image she wanted to show the world. No wonder I was a photo-refusenik; I wanted no part in those charades. No wonder this continued into adulthood – hating the formal pose, the posing on demand.
The photos for my Friends’ Gallery are at my own volition, and the friends in them having mostly been willing participants. Some have actually asked if they could be included. Only two have not been keen, one only agreeing to it as long as I do not share the photo online. I respect her point of view – the loss of control when your picture appears on Facebook, the issues over who owns those photos. Perhaps it is true, that tale about your soul being captured in a photograph, it no longer belonging to you.
Jenni and Maria
As for me, I am happy to have a record of my friendships, an audit of the people I count as friends right now. Some are new, some go back more than 30 years. I can reflect on the stories of how we came to know one another and the things I value about them. There’s Anna, who I met at Swale Sings community choir and who likes cats and poetry as I do. There are my friends I met through writing: Anne-Marie, Maggie, Sarah, Patricia and Fiona, the last of whom I first met at the launch of my poetry book strange fruits, and has become my co-bargain-hunter on charity shopping trips . And there’s Jenni, who I first met at Thames Polytechnic in 1978. She was carrying a placard saying ‘We Need a Nursery’, having just returned from a protest march. We look similar in this photo – have we grown to look alike, or did we see something that day we met in 1978 that drew us together?
I don’t look for faults in recent photos. I used to comment that I looked old, wrinkly, fat. The ones I like best are funny, offbeat, and my favourite of all is one where the old me would point out my double chin (all right, I did notice it!). But the new me sees the joy in my expression and that of my daughter, Rachel. We are sitting on a sofa, holding hands, and in between us is my new granddaughter Caitlin, just 3 weeks old. A new generation of sofa photos, but no-one will be forced into best clothes, to smile against their will (or not), or to look at any offending photos framed on the wall for the rest of their lives.
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by Maria McCarthy | 12 Apr, 2014 | As Long as it Takes, Chronic illness
When I updated this website a few months ago, I decided to remove my blog page on living with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I don’t want to be defined by my illness – I am a writer who happens to have an illness. The writing is the most important part. But today, I have been struggling. I am perhaps still recovering from an event last Saturday where, ironically, I spoke about writing my way through chronic illness.
At this talk, I spoke of often failing to follow my own good advice on managing the illness. Have I done that this week? Whether or not this is the case, I am just feeling plain fed up of having to manage it at all. As someone said to me this week, someone who also has a debilitating illness, ‘In my own head, I think I can rule the world,’ but we can’t, and it’s bloody frustrating.
The temptation is to do nothing, but doing nothing just makes my back hurt and makes me feel depressed. So I try to do something, and to remember what helps. Today, that was getting out for a little while with my husband, for a coffee and a brief look in a couple of charity shops, but not being tempted to stay out too long. I was rewarded with a cute new pair of blue suede shoes (£5), which will be just right for a couple of new outfits, one of which is a silk dress I bought for a fiver on another such trip. Then, on the way back home, I had a craving for fruit, so nipped into Sainsbury’s for one of those ready-prepared pots of exotic fruit. I don’t usually buy fruit this way, but a quick fruit hit was needed. Sometimes the guilt of hurting the planet by buying things with too much packaging has to be outweighed by helping myself.
I laid down on the sofa as soon as we got home, and asked my husband to get the lunch, battling my usual urge to soldier on, unpack the shopping, unload the washing machine etc. We had good food, when junk food would have given me a quick rush and then a crash, so I was thinking well. And then, a sleep under a duvet on the sofa, the cat curled up at my side, followed by writing this post.
All those things have helped – getting out, being in company, not overdoing it, small treats, asking for help, eating well, rest, but most of all the writing of this post. There, I’ve shared it. It’s out of my head and onto the page, and now I don’t feel so bad.
Another thing that has cheered me is Pauline Masurel’s review of As Long as it Takes for The Short Review, which you can read here.
I shall go back to resting now – promise!
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by Maria McCarthy | 12 Mar, 2014 | Chronic illness, Short stories, Wise Words
I am giving a talk … in a yurt! I am wildly excited about this, having experienced the Wise Words’ yurt as a punter last year. A Few Wise Words is a mini-festival of words, music and film on the weekend of 4-6 April 2014, with most events taking place in a yurt in Greyfriars Franciscan Gardens, Canterbury.
My talk is Low Energy, High Creativity – discovering writing through chronic illness. It takes place on Saturday 5 April at 11.00 a.m. Find out more and book tickets at £5 on the Wise Words website.
I was at the Save As Awards in Canterbury on Sunday, and was pleased to come away with 3rd prize in the prose awards for my story ‘How Beautiful’. This is available to read on Writers’ Hub. All the shortlisted stories and poems were of a high standard and truly diverse. It was a happy evening, listening to the other writers, plus readings from judges Sonia Overall and Abegail Morley.
I was, however, surprised to hear a comment to the writer of one of the shortlisted stories, ‘I hope you are going to develop this into a novel’. A short story and a novel – you might as well compare an elephant to a pencil sharpener. Short stories are not novel extracts, or the beginnings of novels; they are complete in themselves.
In many ways, writing short stories is harder than novel-writing (this is me speaking as someone who has tried and given up on novel-writing, so I am sure novelists will put me straight). I share below some quotes on the short story, which I gathered for a workshop I delivered on the short story at the Canterbury Festival in 2013.
‘A story is a way to say something that can’t be said in any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.’ Flannery O’Connor
A short story is ‘fundamentally about character. The plot of a short story is nothing more than an unfolding of character, or perhaps the unfolding of a couple of characters. That’s the beauty of the form, the terrific sense of intimacy it can offer us.’ Alison Macleod, from ‘Writing and risk-taking’, Short Circuit, a Guide to the Art of the Short Story (Salt Publishing, 2009)
‘In his essay “A Short History of the Short Story”, William Boyd suggests that its defining feature – namely its length – is the source of its curious appeal. Its virtue is its brevity and its pull. There is no time for the gentle build; the writer’s chance to display his or her gift is as brief as that of the TV talent show contestant … [Boyd] likens Woolf’s comment about the deceptive ability of a photograph to enhance the picture of life to the short story’s capacity to enlarge our view of the world. “This gives us, I think, a clue to the enduring power and appeal of the short story – they are snapshots of the human condition and of human nature and, when they work well, and work on us, we are given the rare chance to see in them more than in real life.”’ Mariella Frostrup in The Guardian, 21 September 2013
I’d also like to add a few words about how a good piece of writing differs from a short story.
A short story has: A BEGINNING, A MIDDLE, and AN END. It TELLS something: it has a point – why the story is being told.
A short story has a SHAPE – it starts with CONFLICT, builds up via a series of complications to a CRISIS, then a RESOLUTION and a falling away.
Watch this wonderful video on You Tube – Kurt Vonnegut on story shapes.
Join the mailing lists of Thresholds and of Short Stops who are ‘getting excited about short stories in the UK and Ireland’.
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by Maria McCarthy | 6 Mar, 2014 | As Long as it Takes, Books, Friends' Gallery, Uncategorized
A month on from the publication of As Long as it Takes, and it’s been a whirlwind of events, press attention ( the Sittingbourne News Extra, no less), signing and stuffing books in envelopes and taking them to the post box. Oh, the glamour! Read the news article, by Andy Gray, on how I came to write the book: here.
I have been delighted by the responses to the book and to my readings. Here is one:
The world you build is complete with its own unique atmosphere, partly, I think, as a result of the some of the same characters recurring at different ages throughout the book. I also found that I could completely relate to the feeling of living in a place that can never be home.
I found the last story, ‘Combing out the Tangles,’ utterly heart breaking; in fact, all the stories are written with a restraint that adds to their emotional power.
And another, from a former creative writing tutor, Patricia Debney:
There’s so much sex in it, Maria! And so much nylon underwear!
This was in response to my comments about the fates conspiring against me for the book launch at the University of Kent. There was wind, rain, and closure of the M2 due to a sink hole appearing in the central reservation. People were cancelling; it was doubtful whether I could get there, since all the M2 traffic had been diverted past my front door. Setting up a tea trolley by the side of the A2 seemed a good idea, as that traffic was going nowhere fast.
I said to Patricia that God was punishing me for writing about my family. Her response was that it was to do with all the sex in the book. Before you get too excited, the sex is mostly of the disappointing teenage variety, and there was a lot of nylon underwear in the ’70s.
There’s a lovely blog piece from Sonia Overall about the launch. She describes it as ‘more Tipperary tavern than literary salon’, due to the musical input of my talented brother, Jamie McCarthy, who sang and played violin as well as riffing with me about the Irish Catholic childhood that we shared. Read it here.
From a university to a shopping centre in Sittingbourne – the next event was at the Swale Arts Forum pART project, a temporary shop displaying the work of local artists and inviting people to take part in art. Until last Saturday, I had never performed at a shopping centre, and it was a totally different experience from the university. I like to mix things up a little, so the event had music as well as my story readings and guest poets, as well as an open mic. Some people came especially for the event; others walked in out of curiosity. By the end, we had a Police Community Support Officer in attendance (drawn in by Andy Wiggins‘ singing) and 94 year old Florrie who recited a poem by heart at the open mic.
And so to my favourite comment of the afternoon from an elderly woman who popped in with her shopping trolley just as I was reading. She was reacting to a reading from my story ‘A Coffee and a Smoke’, about Maura, who has one child after another – the lot of the Catholic woman in the 1950s and ’60s. She said that it was like that in her family, that her father worked away and whenever he came home, her mother ended up with another baby. And then she said:
Alan Titchmarsh writes stories like that.
Until that point, likening my poetry to that of Pam Ayres had been my least favourite comparison.
Val Tyler, Barry Fentiman-Hall, Fiona Sinclair, SM Jenkin, Maria, Mark Holihan, Andy Wiggins and Sienna-Janae Hoilhan
I have been adding many photos to my Friends’ Gallery – too many to share here. The group photo shows many of my friends who took part at the pART project.
The next event is at Jittermugs coffee shop, Preston St, Faversham, on St Patrick’s Day, 17 March, 3.00 – 5.00 pm. I shall be signing books and reading stories on request. There will be some St Patrick’s Day goodies to eat and drink.
Florrie recites her poem at the open mic
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