One of the student’s on my MA course is Isabel Ashdown who has just had her first novel published, called Glasshopper – I haven’t been able to read it yet but I’ve heard all good things from everyone that has read it! It’s sitting on my bedside cabinet and as soon as I have finished my dissertation, this book will be my first treat to myself!

 It’s also there as inspiration – I wish I could be half as talented, motivated and driven as this author!

 So if you’re looking for a good read by a new author – this has to be it!

For more information about this author please go to www.isabelashdown.com

Sarah Churchwell's book published in 2004

I had a wonderful evening last Thursday – I went to see Marilyn Forever Blonde for the second time (and can’t wait to see it again!) The second time round, the play was equally as breathtaking as the first, and Sunny Thompson’s performance as Marilyn Monroe was faultless. (If you would like to see my review of the play please go to www.lovingmarilyn.com)

To add to the excitement, not long after we had taken our seats, I became aware that Dr Sarah Churchwell (author of The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe) was sitting directly behind me! Now this should have been a moment of utter glory, a little dream come true, I have read this book cover to cover approximately 3 billion times! However, I was frozen to the spot with embarrassment.

The reason for this was a very simple one; I had previously made a total fool of myself by writing to Ms Churchwell asking her for advice! You see, I have all this Marilyn knowledge, stored up over thirty plus years and a great need to do something with it and foolishly I had the idea I could lecture in the life and times of Marilyn Monroe…. The only other person I knew of that did this, was Sarah Churchwell who is Senior Lecturer at the University of East Anglia.

Well, needless to say I never received a reply, and how could I have ever imagined in my wildest dreams less than a year later I’d be sitting directly in front of her at the theatre!

I can only console myself with the fact that Alan Parker replied to my letter when I was thirteen years old, asking him question’s about Bugsy Malone! You can’t have everything can you?

I had the great joy and pleasure of attending the revival on Saturday – what an event! There is something there for everyone and for all ages. We had a few problems before arriving, we were intending to dress up in 1950’s clothes but our friends let us down – long story, so we ended up going in our usual clothes – although we would very much have liked to have been dressed for the experience – we still enjoyed every minute of being there! 90% of people were kitted out in vintage – from the 1940’s through to the ‘60s I could have just people watched all day long! So many people had made such a huge effort to enter into the spirit of the occasion.

Goodwood Revival 2009

It was wonderful to see all the old vehicles, the air display and the racing but my most favourite thing was the vintage market! So many stalls selling vintage clothing and accessories – it was totally vintage heaven! The atmosphere was happy and relaxed. Sitting down for coffee and something to eat I watched so many strangers become friends as they shared tables and chatted in their costumes – which were of course a great conversation starter and talking point! The food was very expensive but not a surprise, we paid £14 for tea, coffee, a baguette and a sandwich, which wasn’t too bad but our friends were charged £9.50 each for a small takeaway salad and of course there were the usual queues to contend with for food and toilets! Other than that, all I can say is… I can’t wait for next year’s revival!

Sunny Thompson plays Marilyn Monroe in her one woman show Marilyn Forever Blonde which has previously toured the United States and Canada to much acclaim, picking up numerous awards along the way for outstanding performances.

As a Marilyn fan I’m always excited to hear about new Marilyn shows but so far the shows I’ve seen have fallen far short of my hopeful expectations, however, I’ve heard so many wonderful things about this production from other Marilyn fans whose opinions I value immensely. 

This week I heard that the show is coming to Europe and the U.K. I knew this was something I just couldn’t miss and so I have my tickets already! If you’re interested in going to see the show too please check out my website for details www.lovingmarilyn.com or go to www.marilynforeverblonde.com for more information!

“Poems like mine – I don’t call them confessional, with that tone of admitting to wrong- doing. My poems have done more accusing than admitting. I call work like mine ‘apparently personal’ or in my case apparently very personal.” Sharon Olds

Writing poetry for me is an intensely personal process. I have a stash of my pre-pubescent out pouring in a purple box in the loft that has never been shared. Cringingly I can still recite my first love poem off by heart, it was a way of expressing feelings that overwhelmed me and were so immense they needed an outlet and poetry was the answer. Through the MA I have come to realise that poetry is still the answer, and it was whilst reading the work of poets like Sharon Olds and Dorianne Laux that I recognise that I am happiest and most fulfilled writing honest poetry, something that comes from life’s experiences and is important to me.

Writing poetry is like a search for identity, for meaning to you life. One concern about writing life poetry, has been a fear of letting go ‘if I write that, what would my mother say?’ or ‘what would Kim, Laura, Stuart, Tessa… say?’ During a session at university with guest speaker the poet Jo Shapcott I was relieved to hear her express similar anxieties regarding writing about people she knew. Another poet Vicki Feaver also discussed this complex issue; one of her ways round this was to use mythology as a vehicle to carry her more personal poetry, which was a real revelation to me, I had not thought along those lines before.

In ‘The Practice of Poetry’ on page 104 Sandra McPherson talks about writing poetry that scares you, saying: ‘…the poem needn’t be about atrocity, it need only scare its writer. Write it with your spine as audience’  The accompanying poem was written by Dorianne Laux titled ‘What My Father Told Me’ I was both horrified and fascinated by this poem, stunning in its simplicity, which made it all the more shocking and effective as it began:

‘Always I have done what was asked.

Melmac dishes stacked on rag towels.

The slack of a vacuum cleaner cord

Wound around my hand. Laundry

Hung on a line…’

Describing with plain ordinary everyday tasks and then the poem continues further on:

‘I do as I am told, hold his penis

like the garden hose, in this bedroom,

in that bathroom, over the toilet

or my bare stomach…’

A no nonsense, unsentimental honest narrative of the terror of sexual abuse at the hands of a father. This horrifying story, so beautifully executed in poetry lead me on a quest to find out more about the poet Dorianne Laux who calls herself ‘a poet of personal witness’ further reading of Laux’s work completely entranced me. Like Sharon Olds, Laux has the ability to take personal poetry and make it accessible and even if you can’t identify with the theme you can identify with the emotions. It is interesting to note that ‘What My Father Told Me’ was initially rejected, the magazine Laux had sent it to wanted to print the poem but suggested that she tone it down. Refusing to do so, she sent it to another magazine that accepted it and printed the entire poem in its original form.

Laux also said that:

‘We keep records, diaries, logs, news reports, pictographs, paintings, photographs. But it’s poetry that informs us of what we felt while those times and events rained down, and it’s poetry that recalls us to our selves. It’s our emotions that are in danger of being left out, and it is poetry that accounts for, is responsible to, the human element.’

This is pertinent to the poetry I am endeavouring to write, ultimately, I want to convey the emotion of the event, without hysteria but in the same unavoidable and honest tone as poets such as Olds and Laux. I hope to continue writing and improving my poems and being able to produce a collection as strong and demanding as possible, that brings together all the elements that have made an impact on my life and have shaped me.

 “Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t. I want blood” Dorianne Laux

Life has taken on an extremely hectic pace of late! I should have been writing at a ridiculous rate of knots… however, apart from updating my website www.lovingmarilyn.com I’ve come to a standstill. At the beginning of June my eldest daughter who was pregnant with twins found out that she had pre-eclampsia and was admitted to hospital 37 weeks pregnant. They induced her labour and she spent three days in complete agony but not moving any nearer to giving birth. I was there just before midnight on Sunday 7th June when the consultant declared an emergency caesarean would be necessary – and within an hour and a half my daughter was delivered of two beautiful babies, a girl weighing 5lb 3oz and a boy weighing in at a very respectably hefty 7lb 11oz.

My daughter’s partner was in theatre with her whilst I waited in the empty delivery room, I felt in total fear and very alone. I grabbed a pen from my bag and my notebook and tried to make some sense of my feelings – I filled a page with goodness knows what as I had to abandon the whole thing, I knew I wasn’t making sense and I couldn’t find the words to express how I felt at that moment and I was to scared to write what I was thinking and fearing. I’ve not looked at it since and although I wrote very little, being able to write at that time did give me a brief sensation of comfort, someone to talk to, even if it was just a blank page!

Jai and Skye born 8th June 2009

Mother and babies are now doing well and I thought that was enough trauma for a while – how wrong I was!

Last Thursday I decided it was time to be more productive – as I have gotten into quite a bad habit of putting jobs off, be they writing or more physically active things such as housework, washing the car, working on the garden, anything really that requires moving! My youngest daughter was here and I decided that I should go and wash my car. I’ve owned it for around eighteen months and washed it twice in all that time, so Thursday was the day… It was a tough job, as I washed the wind blew across showers yellow flowers from nearby trees. The minute yellow petals and pollen sticking to the car leaving a powdery yellow paint on the wet black surface, spoiling the shimmering sheen I was aiming for. A forty-five minute job ended up taking two full hours. Once I’d finished all I wanted was a nice cup of tea and I’d resolved by then never to wash my car again.

My daughter’s friend owns a car wash locally, so I made her phone him for an estimate £10 for a wash and wax sounded like the bargain of the century!

Sitting with my cuppa and chatting to my daughter, my little white cat Marilyn ambled casually in from the garden. Marilyn is very much a house cat – during the summer she’ll sit in the back garden but she never ventures further than that, unlike Wilf and Molly who love nothing more than an all day adventure, Marilyn is more cautious. I have a fourth fur baby called Mabel and she’ll go a little further than Marilyn but not much – a friend recently found it difficult to work out how I could have four cats, two of which went out and two staying at home – he asked me if the two that went out got ‘security passes’ I quite liked that! Anyway, Marilyn had come in and Vicky, my daughter, had noticed she was breathing quite heavily. If I’d have been on my own it’s unlikely at that point I would have taken any notice as Marilyn’s a snorer and a very vocal cat, she’ll often have a chat with me – I’m used to her being noisy. She also seemed a little lethargic, and appeared to be having difficulty swallowing. I thought she had a fur ball, so still I wasn’t unduly worried. Despite not feeling anxious about this I did think maybe she needed to go to the vets so I phoned and made an appointment for two hours later.

The very moment I put the phone down on the vet I looked at Marilyn and absolutely knew something more than a fur ball was going on. I threw the phone back at my daughter and told her to ring the vets to tell them we were bringing Marilyn in as an emergency, whilst I went into full panic mode looking for the cat carrier which was in the loft! All this happened within minutes – we both struggled to get Marilyn into the carrier but managed. We ran to the car and I headed the two miles or so to the vets – whilst Vicky watched her she began to choke and bring up clear phlegm. We were both still expecting a long sausage of a fur ball to appear, so though we were panicky we weren’t thinking life or death at this point. Isn’t just the way it goes when you’re in a hurry every driver in front of you is about 96 and driving at 15 miles an hour in a 30mile an hour zone! Eventually we arrived at the vets and ran inside with her – the vet had his door open and was fiddling about on the computer, he must have been entering the details of the last client. By now we’re both screaming at the receptionists and the vet “she’s choking, help her” Marilyn’s eyes were the size of saucers, her mouth wouldn’t close and she looked horrific. It felt like everyone there was running on a different time line to us.

We eventually got her on the table and out of the carrier; she jumped off the table and flew down to the floor gagging and spurting blood from her mouth. The vet said she needed oxygen and needed to be transferred to the room next door and that we should put her back into her cat carrier. Well at that point I wanted to punch him squarely in the face – I couldn’t understand why we couldn’t carry her next door in our arms but he was adamant. So we squashed the distressed Marilyn whose white fur was now red, still with her eyes wide and her mouth open and bleeding, back into the carrier. When they got her next door she had gone blue, but they managed to stabilise her enough to get a vet and nurse to take her in the vet ambulance to the animal hospital.

We were sent home to await a call. I feared the worst and could not stop crying all the way home. Some people may find it difficult to understand how you can get so attached to an animal. I’m aware she’s a cat, and I understand the priorities of life but for me, she is high on my list of priorities as are all my cats. I can’t see the point in being a pet owner if you can’t give the animal in your care 100% love and attention. They rely on you for everything, and it’s your duty to deliver! I cannot ever understand people that treat animals badly, they are vulnerable and we have the power to choose to care for them or to harm them, there should only be one choice and it should be instilled into children from the start, teaching them to love and respect animals. I was appalled recently to read about the cat that was shot with an arrow from a crossbow and was fortunate enough to survive. I just feel completely at a loss to answer the question ‘why’?

People often baffle me…

Well, eventually we got the call to say she’d been transferred to the hospital, had been x-rayed but everything looked normal, except for the fact that her throat had swollen and that’s what was preventing her from breathing. They couldn’t find any foreign objects, they had expected that she had swallowed something or taken a fall and injured her throat/neck area. The following day after she had calmed down and had a comfortable night, they began more investigations under anaesthetic but still nothing showed up. They couldn’t find a cause and had to presume it was anaphylactic shock caused by an allergen such as a bee sting etc. We were allowed to collect her that night, and were sent home with a supply of antibiotics and a £500 vet bill!!! I’ve got to take her back tonight for a check up. The check up was scheduled for yesterday afternoon but when she saw her cat carrier she went totally wild and wouldn’t go near it! So… we went out and bought a new carrier (£35) which is wire and a top loader – hopefully I’ll manage to get her in there tonight!

Marilyn recovering 21st June 2009

Time to grow it! During  a huge thunder clap yesterday, I realised just how important it is as a writer to toughen up the epidermis.

Having added an article about facebook something happened that made me withdraw the entire piece. Maybe I put 2+2 together and came up with the inevitable 5, maybe my sensitivity and intuition was in full swing and I was picking up the correct vibrations… whatever it was, yet again in my life I let self doubt speak louder than confidence. Note to self… I can’t afford to do that anymore!

I was asked to take some architectural photographs today of a 1930’s church which is no longer in use and will soon be undergoing some considerable alterations and building works. 

The experience was so calming, I’d gone in there just expecting to get as many photos as possible for the purpose of  ‘before’ shots but I was overwhelmed by the sense of the history and culture the place. It was amazing to think of how many major life events would have taken place there, christenings, weddings, funeral services, events that have changed lives, brought joy, happiness and sorrow. 

Surprisingly (to me!) I feel inspired to go back before the builders move in with a notebook and maybe spend some time in there writing or just taking notes. It made me also realise how we can find inspiration in the things that we walk/drive by in our local area, day after day.

I’m so excited and inspired by the news that Carol Ann Duffy is the new Poet Laureate – about time too! Everyone is so thrilled because she is a woman – however… I’m not interested in the gender of a poet, politician etc for me it’s the voice that counts and Carol Ann Duffy’s voice is one that I find I can lose myself in for hours at a time!

Most people have to write – it’s a compulsion – one way or another. If I’m not physically in the act of writing I’m normally thinking about it! Most people are writers now – who doesn’t write an email? A message on Facebook/Myspace? A text message? A birthday card?

This blog is intended as an online journal and a motivation tool to keep me writing – procrastination being my middle name! So – welcome and I hope you find something that interests you and something that makes you want to revisit!

As a huge fan of Marilyn Monroe I also have a website – please feel free to have a browse!