literature – Nastasya Parker

Never Said That Before

This Week’s Bit of String: Another Year 11 group flies the nest

“Miss, what are you going to do without us, when we’re on study leave?” It’s the last English lesson with bottom-set Year 11s, and a particularly loquacious boy is curious.

I assure him the Year 10s will keep me busy, and he nods sagely, “More grey hairs for you, then.”

I had worked hard with this little fellow, insisting he can absolutely pass, if he focuses. Many times per lesson, redirecting him toward tasks he’s somehow oblivious to, reminding him to face front and stop making silly faces for attention. I joked last week I’ve named a couple of my grey hairs after him, and I guess that made him proud.

*Some unique and sometimes broken pieces*

“Will you sign my shirt on leaving day? And write about the grey hairs?” he asks.

Sure, kiddo. So long, and thanks for all the grey hairs.

We have another seven hot and tiring weeks of school left after the half-term, but the Year 11 low-set English class I’ve supported for the last two years will only be in for exams, and a couple of revision sessions.

It’s been a journey. There’s still a way to go before most of them reach a destination, but progress comes in many forms. And they are who they are, each with very distinct personalities, strengths, and stresses. The exam results won’t be stellar, but hopefully they’ll take some encouragement with them and I’ll certainly take some tales with me.

At the beginning of their Year 10, I had to request of one boy: “Please don’t stick my highlighter up your nose.”

Note the personal pronoun here. He had refused to produce his own equipment, I loaned him some of mine, and he treated it like a preschooler might.

However, during our final English classes in Year 11, several students used borrowed highlighters and pens and classroom glue sticks to build towers and balance them. This was while the teachers were imparting strategies for taking exam papers, but hey. Personal growth!

This is the class with the Trio of Fortitude. One member of the Trio came into school every day but one this term, while up till now he averaged two days off per week. Again: progress.

Breaking Records

One of my dad’s most famous sayings is “I’ve never said that before.” He relishes using it to mark life’s many unexpected encounters.

To me, this is a fun way to notice stories. It can denote unusual occurrences, or different ways of looking at the everyday.

*It was a particularly stressful term in various respects. Here’s some medicinal purple I found.*

Each year group I work with spawns plenty of things I’ve never had to say before. It can be exhausting, but on the bright side it means my job continues to be interesting. It’s 11 years now since I was helping a group revise for GCSEs and had to dispel a 16-year-old’s notion by saying, “Women don’t get pregnant from dildos.”

In one of my revision groups just this past week, I worked with our semi-reformed partial attender from the Trio of Fortitude. He’s a clever but uninspired boy, all scrawny angles and tattered uniform and imperious glances. Also in the group was a mischievous, elfin, blue-haired girl who has been a selective mute for her entire school career.

They kept kicking at a chair between them until she managed to trap his legs against the table with it. He complained of having his bones crushed, so I wrote on the whiteboard: No bone-crushing allowed.

“It’s official now. You’ll have to stop.”

She let the chair go with a disappointed sigh. The boy said, “What if she amputates my leg next?”

So I added to the board: And no nonconsensual amputations. I’d never said that before. Hurrah for some more special memories.

Progress is as Progress Does

For one of the very last lessons on Friday, the teacher brought the group out to the field to play rounders. I sat in the shade with a few others, including a particularly childish fellow who didn’t want to play sport, but was clearly bored.

He complained about the dewy grass. “Miss, my bum’s wet. My bum’s wet, Miss. Miss—”

*I do believe they’ll all find their path eventually.*

“I heard you the first time. Thank you for keeping us informed.”

Maybe there should be a category of “I never wanted to hear about that” to go with “I never said that before.”

Less than ten minutes before the lesson ended, on his last day of secondary school, this same 16-year-old came out with: “I should probably learn to tie my shoes.”

There was something I might help with. I spent 2 years trying to help his class remember themes from Lord of The Flies and identify personification, and remember the Poor Law of 1834 which motivated Dickens to write A Christmas Carol… The whole time we worked on that, this boy and a few others could still barely construct sentences. Standardised exams leave no time to teach basics.

But on the damp grass while others hollered over rounders hits, I helped him with his laces and he did seem to get the hang of the first knot.

They know they’ve annoyed me sometimes, but that I always try to help, and in that way perhaps we’ve both achieved something. They learn to open up a little, and I am reminded to count small signs of progress.

What are some ways you’ve made progress lately? Have you had occasion to say something you never said before?

The Deal-Breaker

This Week’s Bit of String: An empowering walk to work

After a not-entirely-fun Bank Holiday weekend, I set off to work Tuesday morning with a mix of Mika, sea shanties, and Noah Kahan playing on my earbuds.

Exams start in less than a week, equating to hours of sitting next to my SEN student while she attempts to answer papers designed for only half the population to pass. In a month, my parents will move out of their home after 37 years, a huge task which I can’t help with from overseas, but in my house I’m clearing out my son’s things and some of my own. During the long weekend, I spent hours going through school notebooks, birthday cards, crafts, story drafts, sheet music, and a few tiny little outfits and stuffed toys. I feel wrung-out.

I’m also doing lots of agent research, and the book I started over the weekend, Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, was not proving enjoyable. I’ve heard her name a lot, and literary agents mention her.

But this book is full of dense, page-long paragraphs cataloging every thought the characters have, and the minute actions of their daily routines. Also the characters are of the relatively privileged, but miserable ilk.

While I walked to work that morning, I thought: What if I just didn’t read the remaining 300 pages of Intermezzo?

And I knew it was the right choice because beyond relief, I felt liberated (which is hopefully how I will also feel, instead of mournful, when boxes of Bear’s old things go to the charity shops). I felt MIGHTY.

There’s a lot I can’t control. But I AM a loving mother who’s just recycled half her precious child’s finger paintings and 95% of their schoolwork. I frequently scythe through passages of my short stories and chapters of novels to make them more readable. I am capable of ruthlessness and this was an opportune, low-risk situation in which to wield it.

A Rare Relinquishment

I’ve only left one unfinished book in recent years, and that was Murikami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles. It had one of those male narrators who thinks everything is about sex and all girls want to sleep with him. Not a lot seemed to be happening, and I decided to use my time better.

*Is this the sort of display that will impress an agent?*

During my education, I read plenty of classics and plenty of books about unfortunate souls. From Hawthorne’s the Scarlet Letter and Bronte’s Jane Eyre, to James Joyce’s Dubliners and Kafka’s entire oeuvre, I put in the time and have relished the majority of those works.

But here I am, looking through agents’ requirements and all the preachy advice. At every step, writers are told to “Show, don’t tell” and to cut everything not indispensable to the plot. Where then does Ms. Rooney come off narrating (through her prematurely midlife-crisisy characters) every single thought in these interminable paragraphs with no differentiation for dialogue?

Nope, I was done. A couple weeks ago, I read a fun “romantic” genre novel to enjoy myself, and there are plenty of literary books I can enjoy too. If they, you know, have a plot heading somewhere at a decent pace.

Part of the Job

My target is to read 3 books this month, and I still can fit them in. After my fateful decision on my walk to work, and then the manic workday, I visited the town library and checked out an Anne Tyler novel. I’ve loved what I read of her before. She’s brilliant at “showing.” She’ll describe a character’s physical appearance in a pithy way that reveals their life philosophy as well. Yes, sometimes in her books she’ll walk you through each step of a protagonist’s actions as they execute a task, but she’ll do it in a revealing way. There’s a Raymond Carver-esque quality to it.

It’s also useful for me to read another Anne Tyler novel because I have been citing her family sagas as a comparison title to The Gospel of Eve. So, it’s research as well.

*The great bit of the long weekend: we celebrated our 22nd anniversary with an evening walk to a local garden centre to eat pasties, drink ciders, and listen to live music.*

There’s no doubt that reading is an important part of a writer’s work. It’s good for everyone to read a range of stories, but at more taxing stages in our lives/ creative endeavours, it’s best perhaps if reading doesn’t feel like a chore.

As fatigue accumulates and I feel often on the verge of tears, I’m working on fewer writing projects at a time to focus on querying, and I’m prioritising exercise and fresh air. I will take a week off from the clearing-out project too because there’s only so much ruthlessness I can stand.

Maybe if I’d picked up Rooney’s book at another time–perhaps when my child was still right here, running around me and telling me stuff–then I wouldn’t have minded it so much, and would have persevered. For now, Intermezzo has joined the ranks of the many books I’ll be donating to the charity shops.

What are your deal-breakers with a book? How far do you think we should push ourselves in our reading?

Labels: Friend or Foe?

This Week’s Bit of String: A heart-wrenching question

In a back corner of the school library, I’ve begun daily reading sessions with one of our Year 10 SEN boys. There are multiple clues in the book he’s reading that the narrator has autism. I asked him what he noticed about that, and he responded by asking what autism means.

*Paths are important, but sometimes it’s nice to stray from them…*

Then he asked, “Does that disability help them get good grades?”

He is very concerned with criteria of success. He considers career paths based on how much money they might provide. And he assesses circumstances by how they might affect one’s grades and prospects.

He worried, “Do I have a disability? Or am I just stupid?”

It’s heartbreaking to see students who, despite various strengths, feel so defined by their struggles that they long for the justification a diagnosis provides.

Judging a Book by Its Genre

Labels are useful because they give our brains an easy path to follow. We think, “Ah, something is this, therefore I know what to do with it.”

If a student has learning difficulties, we might provide literacy and numeracy support. If someone is neurodivergent, we’ll ensure they have spaces available to re-regulate when routine is disrupted.

Book publishers and, one assumes, readers alike appreciate genre labels because they give us an inkling what to expect. Is the read going to be gritty or cosy? Genres can help with that.

Labels can be limiting too, though. That happens for students with disabilities and in a more minor way, can happen with books. We tell ourselves we’d never dream of reading something from that genre.

*I loved this book. Don’t knock it unless you’ve tried it.*

Since I’m in a couple of critique groups, I send work to different writers every month or two. I read all sorts of pieces that come to me, and I comb through each with a view toward maximising potential, and provide detailed feedback. But every now and then, I receive a comment on my work saying, “I don’t usually read this genre, so I can’t comment.”

This happens to the opening of my novel retelling the Creation myth from Eve’s point of view. I think of it as Commercial Fiction, a sort of catch-all. Madeline Miller’s Circe was a massive hit after all, Disney has been re-filming the Percy Jackson series, Margaret Atwood and AS Byatt and Stephen Fry have all retold myths with great success.

But maybe some people dismiss it immediately as fantasy, or women’s fiction. I should work up my courage and ask the next person, “What genre do you think it is, exactly?”

“What Do I Have?”

Somewhat like my student anxiously asking, “What do I have?” while I showed him his EHCP to explain that he’s not, in fact, stupid, I do rather wish someone could just tell me what genre my book is instead of me trying to work it out. When querying agents, there’s no room for a mistake; they won’t give you a second chance.

But it is a bit rubbish, the genre system. Lots of books combine elements. Last week, I participated in the Women Writers Network discussion on women writers who blend genres, while this week, I’ve interviewed Lindz McLeod. She’s an incredibly hard-working writer covering speculative fiction, short stories tinged with horror, and also dabbling in retelling versions of Jane Austen. Truly, her imagination seems limitless and her appeal should be, too.

Stephen King has said that every book is a mystery. I agree with that. And even books without romance have relationships.

*Now I want to visit all the crumbling stately homes and eat all the cheesecakes.*

After my busy Easter break with the emotional roller coaster of traveling to the US and back, I returned to work. During the first couple weeks, I had a few writing commitments including the interview, while at my day job we gear up toward GCSE exams. I needed a fun and “easy” read so I picked a Milly Johnson book out of my TBR shelf. Her books are classed as Romantic Fiction so I hadn’t gone out of my way to read one before.

The Perfectly Imperfect Woman was the perfect read for me that week. A rollicking pace; clever, piquant descriptions; a well-rounded, super-relatable protagonist more on a journey to come to terms with a torturous past than to find romance. Oh, and there was cheesecake, and great big mysterious manor houses. There were multitudes contained within the genre label.

The idea of being “perfectly imperfect” is resonant to many of us, I suspect, and it’s the kind of attitude I want to foster in students. While understanding there will always be struggles, to work out the purposes worth struggling for, and the right support.

Do you have any theories or assumptions about genre fiction? What’s a book that impressed you from a genre you don’t usually read?

Rounding Out Characters

This Week’s Bit of String: A sunset softening

When they were in infant school and then through most of junior school, my little Bear had a rather questionable friend. I’ll call the friend Jack. Jack would steal from Bear, and if bigger bullies came round, Jack would either abandon our Bear, or join in the bullying.

I had been mistrustful of Jack since Bear’s first session before infant school. Jack was a tester. I watched him wriggle to sit next to Bear and start poking them, to see what they’d do about it.

Yet when they became friends, they had fun playing together. Once I walked to the playground with the boys, who must have been around 6 or 7 at the time. It was evening, and tough little “Jack” couldn’t help crying out, “Look at that beautiful sunset!”

*Juxtaposition… I took this while helping with a GCSE mirror photo shoot.*

So despite the confusing torments to which he sometimes subjected my Bear, I was mindful that Jack had some reverence for beauty within him.

His dad was a veteran and a magistrate, a firm and strict man who appeared uninterested in children. Jack’s older half-brother had behavioural issues so severe, he boarded at a special school. Jack must have suffered from a lack of empathy around him.

Knowing some of a person’s challenging backstory, combined with a glimpse into a softer moment, helps me summon sympathy and patience for them. Semi-consciously, I use this to triangulate characters too: one point flaw, one point misfortune, one point unexpected kindness.

I wonder, though: does this become a bit formulaic, a bit facile? What fully qualifies a character, and indeed a real human being, as well-rounded?

Basic Binaries

It seems the instinct when creating characters is to allow for juxtaposition. If it’s a really nasty character, make sure there’s a streak of goodness. Any nice character needs a flaw. But binary opposites don’t draw a complete circle.

Then there’s the element of surprise. Let’s endow each character with something a little unexpected. Preternaturally mature thoughts from a young character; impressively trendy observations from an elderly one. Again, these examples fall into binaries, which are simply opposite points on a single line.

This makes characters entertaining and makes plots interesting. But when I look deeply at it, I’m not sure how enriched these methods are. The main character in Me Before You by JoJo Moyes, for example, is quite charming and we’re rooting for her, but I never felt convinced she was fully rounded. She was given a quirky dress sense and a shockingly sad episode in her background, plus a chatty demeanor. From that assemblage of characteristics, I didn’t feel I understood who she was, if that makes sense.

I come up against this a lot if I think deeply about characters, whether created by successful writers or by myself; whether it’s classic writing from centuries ago, or current. It’s like if you try to remember someone’s face in its entirety, but can only summon eyes and maybe the smile. Or if you look at a word too long and the way the letters fit together ceases to cohere, and you question how they could possibly belong in that absurd order and what business do we have assigning them any meaning in the first place.

I’m not sure we can ever fully round a character, because how can we ever grasp a human being in their fullness, when we are forever developing our understanding of ourselves?

Bursting Bubbles

The best way to fill out our own personalities is to take in diverse perspectives through various forms of media, and then reflect on them. In some ways this is made easy for us because more voices are amplified and represented now. On the other hand, this can feel like an intimidating cacophony, and we retreat into our own corners with people who share our opinions and backgrounds. We risk shallowness.

After a GCSE English lesson this week, my colleague approached me with concerns about a special needs student. ‘It’s…thinking,’ my fellow TA explained. “She avoids any thinking.”

That’s true of a lot of students. True of a lot of people. Watching particularly our year 10 boys, who don’t take anything seriously and won’t accept any responsibility, I suspect they’ve learned this not just online but from their parents.

We hear the phrase “living in a bubble” especially pertaining to social media. However, bubble is an unrealistically soft word for this. Sure, it feels soft and cushioning to us. But we’re actually sharpening our edges when we rub against the same opinions and beliefs again and again. Repeated agreement flattens our character.

One of my projects last month was a short story about Issy, whose teen brother became radicalised online by right-wing misogynists, so she runs away and hides out in the Charles Dickens Museum. She reads his classics and observes tourists and sometimes reflects on how one-dimensional everyone seems “these days.”

While creating Issy’s story, I explored with her the idea of flat versus rounded characters. Throughout human history, most have been forced to focus almost exclusively on survival. Even in the ever-so-civilised British Empire when Dickens wrote, thousands were starving and neglected; disease and dismal sanitation conditions were rampant. How many had the privilege of being well-rounded?

So it’s important we use our relative privilege to expand our horizons, and I guess sometimes that means not judging so harshly when people seem narrow-minded or flat. In fiction, though, I will continue to ponder what really makes a well-rounded character. How would you define it?

2025 Reading Round-Up

With minimal ado, here are my favourite books out of all I read this year. These are truly the 10 best of my best, because there were a few more which I rated with the full 5 stars.

What were your favourite reads this year? Have you read any of these books yet? I know I’m a bit late to the party on some, and I’d love to hear what you thought if you read some of these before.

The Women by Kristin Hannah

An epic tale of an Army nurse in the Vietnam War. She also has to cope with re-entering civilian life, particularly challenging with her upper-class family. They serve as a contrast to the strong, unconditional friendships she formed with other Army nurses. Truly an eye-opening read.

“Time and friendship had done exactly as promised: pain and grief had grown soft and malleable in her hands, almost pliable.”

The Lives of the Dead by Fiona McKay

I joined a book group specifically reading novellas-in-flash. It’s been exciting to explore, and I found this one particularly powerful. Each very short chapter is a mini-story, alternating between episodes in a new wife/ mum’s suffocating life, and stunningly retold fairy tales.

“It’s the kindness that does her in, that releases her long-held tears, that leaves her to walk back, red-eyed, along the line of women when she’s done; kindness, the essential vitamin missing from her supplements, the one she didn’t know she was lacking.”

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

I love ensemble pieces, where a quirky range of characters are thrown together. In this case, it’s at an apartment viewing which then goes wrong due to a desperate, bungled burglary. It’s funny and warm, the sort of thing to help survive a Scandinavian-level winter.

“Our hearts are bars of soap that we keep losing hold of; the moment we relax, they drift off and fall in love and get broken.”

Love lay down beside me and we wept by Helen Murray Taylor

I know Helen from the Women Writers Network, so I have been looking forward to her mental health memoir for years. She focuses on when she was sectioned in Glasgow following a breakdown. Helen reveals the contradictions we might hold in our minds at our lowest point and still she invites you in with humour.

“Trying to describe love was like trying to stroke Schrodinger’s cat.”

The Given Day by Dennis Lehane

I love Lehane’s books, especially his snappy dialogue. This novel is set in Boston just after WWI and deals with racism, poverty, immigration, labour rights, and even the tragedy of the Boston Molasses flood. It made me appreciate that the USA has come through incredibly tense times before, and we may yet make it.

“Time and again what was renounced as treasonous was merely a man standing before a crowd and demanding he be treated as a man.”

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Short and searingly beautiful, this Booker Prize winner is a wondrous read. It takes us through one day in the lives of six astronauts on the International Space Station, describing the many juxtapositions of what they see below on their various orbiting paths, and lyrically weaves in the astronauts’ backgrounds and aspirations.

“He has an idea that if you could get far enough away from the earth you’d be able to understand it—to see it with your own eyes as an object, a small blue dot, a cosmic and mysterious thing. Not to understand its mystery, but to understand it is mysterious. To see it as a mathematical swarm. To see the solidity fall away from it.”

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

A great book about totalitarianism and war, with breathtaking depth of character. Both protagonists were so incredibly rich in background and passion for their interests, Marie-Laure with her Verne books and her understanding of how to get around without her sight, Werner and his machines and radios.

“She feels the great granite fist, sunk deep into the earth’s crust, on which Saint-Malo sits, and the ocean teething at it from all four sides…She hears the bones of dead whales stir the leagues below, their marrow offering a century of food for cities of creatures who will live their whole lives and never once see a photon sent from the sun.”

Home Bird by Fran Hill

*A reading verandah! Found on a* *walk in small town New Hampshire.*

If you’ve read Fran’s Substack–and you really should–you’ll know she excels at writing humour. But I love her detail selection even more. Her plots advance quickly through the specifics her narrator includes, bringing out the nuances of relationships and recreating the period of her novels.

“She knocked on my door, saying, ‘There’s Bakewell tart going spare,’ but I said, ‘It’s not the only one,’ and she left me alone.”

Still Life by Sarah Winman

A true feast of a book, celebrating art and travel and food but most of all friendship, the abiding kind that’s more like true love. After World War II, an unlikely band of Londoners, united only by happening to drink at the same pub, move to Florence and discover worlds both old and new.

“‘We’re embarking on a world of new language and new systems. A world of stares and misunderstandings and humiliations and we’ll feel every single one of them, boy. But we mustn’t let our inability to know what’s what diminish us. Because it’ll try. We have to remain curious and open.’”

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

This book is about the creative process, relationships, grief, negotiating differences in ethnicity and sexuality… oh, and videogames. I loved it so much. The section about the NPC (non-playable character) is the most gorgeous and heartbreaking that I have ever read.

“Memory, you realised long ago, is a game that a healthy-brained person can play all the time, and the game of memory is won or lost on one criterion: Do you leave the formation of memories to happenstance, or do you decide to remember?”

Finding a Door

This Week’s Bit of String: A dark and stormy night

One rainy evening out of several rainy evenings this week, our cat Oberon got restless. He was hanging around the hallway, so I opened the front door in case he wanted to go out.

*It’s all a bit much when you’re a small scaredy cat.*

Named for the prince of the fairies, Obie does have a microchip-activated catflap in our double-glazed back door. It’s complete with fixed metal platforms in and outside the door for him to step up to the opening and then down, most daintily. Whenever possible, though, he naturally prefers a door to be opened for him.

When I opened the front door that night, exposing the wind and rain, Obie hissed immediately. That’s a no, then.

He lives in hope that the front door, actually at the driveway side of our semi-detached house, will reveal a different world from the one he sees out the back door into the garden, or the front windows onto the front garden and the cul-de-sac.

For us humans, opening our own front door rarely brings surprises. We expect most deliveries and don’t receive many guests. With Remembrance Day just passed, I consider the days when a knock at the door could bring devastating news. Now we have much tinier rectangles that do that for us.

Story Portals

Last Saturday, before the sun retired into indefinite hibernation, I spent the day wandering around Stroud for the Book Festival there. I went to Alice Jolly’s book launch for her new novel, The Matchbox Girl. It sounds excellent, a story told by an imagined adolescent neurodivergent girl who collects matchboxes and spends time in the Vienna Children’s Hospital, where she gets to know Dr. Asperger.

Jolly told us about the Children’s Hospital, and its workers who resisted categorising children, viewed each patient as gifted, and simply believed the deficiency lay in adults who hadn’t learned to understand a child’s differences yet.

Mock exams started this week for my poor SEN students, so let me tell you, that sounds pretty awesome.

*Seasonal front door reflections, Woodstock, Vermont*

Unfortunately, The Matchbox Girl is set in 1934 and the ensuing years. So, things didn’t go so well in the lovely Vienna Children’s Hospital after a while. Dr. Asperger was revealed in this century to have collaborated disastrously with the Nazis.

Jolly explained that she was researching Dr. Asperger and the hospital, but didn’t know how to write a novel about it all until she had the idea of the matchbox-collecting Adelheid.

She said, “When writing a novel, you must never go in through the front door. You must find a way in the back.”

This edict pierced me. I’m always seeking to improve my craft and when a talented writer, who teaches Creative Writing at Oxford no less, issues a proclamation about how stories work, I immediately inventory everything I ever wrote. I suspect I’m not the only one?

Anyway, I was thinking, “What is the front door to each of my individual projects, and which is the back? Have I been heavy-handed and just crashed through the front, is that my problem? Why don’t I immediately understand what my novel’s front door is, is that my problem?”

Head and Heart

I meant to submit my novel The Gospel of Eve to more publishers and agents this year. But I was wrapping up an edit and more dauntingly, a synopsis rewrite, when I became so busy with critiques and a new project and work and family, I sort of forgot. That’s a major goal for 2026.

But Eve in herself is like a pre-fabricated back door, isn’t she, relegated as such for millennia? In my new project, I suppose the front door is the whole relentless mess of trying to appear good, while the back door is the comparatively straightforward (but still quite messy) task of fixing up a New England resort and cabins. Each banging cottage door reveals not just the renovations needed inside, but further internal turmoil for the new owners resulting from past relationships.

While at Stroud Book Festival, I also attended an interview with Elif Shafak regarding her latest novel, There are Rivers in the Sky. I’m excited to read this book as well. It spans history through a single drop of rain and incorporates the epic Gilgamesh poem.

Elif Shafak is passionate and graceful, and she spoke about the difference between information, which we have in overabundance; knowledge, which requires sustained commitment; and wisdom, which engages the heart.

I don’t want to worry so much about front doors and back doors and such, so that the heart of my project goes the way of the sun recently, obscured by my deluge of thoughts. It’s been such a long time since I actually started writing a novel from scratch—my Eve novel started as a short story—that I’m constantly questioning myself. Were my previous drafts this rough?

But after receiving very positive feedback about the first 3000 words, I started to feel better. It takes time to find a story’s heart, front door, and back door. Now that I know someone wants to read more, that gives me strength to keep discovering.

Have you been to any literature festivals this year? What great books have you discovered, and what insights did you gain into your own creative work?

Dreaming Spires

This Week’s Bite of String: Noise in an Oxford museum

While I was admiring Japanese cloisonné vases in the Ashmolean this half-term week, a family came along. They had a couple of primary school-aged girls shining cheap little laser torches everywhere. The slightly older of the two girls was quietly singing to herself, but the other was shouting and running around.

“Beatrice!” her parents kept saying in upper middle class tones, ever surprised at unconventional behaviour. “Beatrice, you’re getting silly… Beatrice, we’re in a museum. It can be quiet and peaceful…”

“It CAN be quiet and peaceful,” retorted Beatrice, without slowing down a bit.

Gotta love a girl no more than 6 who’s already dismantling arguments on semantic grounds.

The brief clamour enhanced my experience. I was on a solo overnight trip, and spending the afternoon in the massive Ashmolean with only myself to set the pace was a treat. I’d browse a couple of galleries, then sit and scribble about my finds, then repeat. Favourites were the ancient Assyrian and Babylonian exhibits, complementing the several Nimrud temple panels at Dartmouth’s Hood Museum in my home region of New Hampshire, and examples of Islamic and Indian geometric patterns and art.

There are exhibits predating those civilisations, and it inspires me to see how early humans, too, were compelled to preserve and create beauty. Feeding my brain on such exhibits felt rejuvenating, certainly unlike revising for standardised GCSE exams. But feasting on snippets of real life conversations thrills me, too.

Rest and Change

People like to say, “Change is as good as a rest.” It’s not strictly true; I think change enables us to push ourselves further without rest which we may need. Long-term, it’s possibly not of equal restorative value.

*A little bit of reading time, Worcester Shrub Hill station*

That said, it felt as if changing up my brain’s intake for a day or two rejuvenated me. In addition to visiting the museum, I read Mslexia magazine on the train rides, wandered along the canal in Worcester during a stopover, explored both the busy streets and the tranquil parks of Oxford totalling 43,000 steps in less than 36 hours, and enjoyed a theatre production of Little Women.

Seeing the literary classic on stage was the main purpose of my journey, which I learned about thanks to well-targeted Facebook ads. It was a terrific show, with energy and heart. They made use of birch trees as set pieces, and seeing those made me feel connected to New England from afar.

After the play, I went hunting for ice cream, as is my late-night, post-show wont, and I didn’t go to bed till midnight. But I didn’t leave my hotel for the next day’s explore until 10:30, and that is pretty luxurious for me.

Spending Time Well

So I took a bit of the morning to recuperate, and keep up with my daily scribbles. I have some novel-planning to work on, but I didn’t get to it; didn’t even read much. As usual when I travel, making the most of the experience involves a lot of walking and a fair bit of writing down what I want to remember.

Before visiting Oxford, I’d made an effort to put all my new novel work into a Plotting Table, with columns for each character and rows for each chapter. The Plotting Table is super helpful for seeing where stakes may need to be raised for some characters, and so forth. I wanted to print this out and pore over it on paper while out of the house, undistracted by chores.

But our printer is at least 10 years old and is suffering memory loss. It no longer recognises paper. I’ll be poking pages into it and it insists said pages do not exist. Or it will pick up a sheet of paper (or heck, two or three at once), load it an inch, then suffer a fresh bout of amnesia and say it’s out of paper anyway.

I had to give up on printing my Plotting Table. I had nearly 2 miles to walk to the train station, with my rucksack of overnight necessities, and I couldn’t risk missing the train. Turns out I was a bit busy, anyway.

Like Beatrice at the Museum, I would say vacations CAN be quiet and peaceful—but they certainly don’t have to be. Just this once, I think I struck a decent balance.

Have you given your mind any change lately?

Cracking the Code

This Week’s Bit of String: Letters on on ancient platform

As someone who reads everything around me practically without thinking, I instinctively attempted deciphering signs on our recent trip to Athens. My knowledge of this lettering comes from Russian more than anything else. In 2000, I visited Russia and wandered around staring at buildings and signs.

I identified the letter pi from a movie poster for The Patriot. While out for a meal, my Moscow friend said to me, “The waitress has a name like yours: Natasha.” And I could then spot the symbol for the “sh” sound.

One of my problems was confusing P, D, L, and G. They’re all sort of mountainous little shapes. In Greece, I spent time noting the differences. Other letters came clear through signs for pharmacies, using the phi and the mu. There were inscriptions, such as the mural behind the ionic pillars of the University building. Above marble steps strewn with empty cans and KFC rubbish, the mural portrays the academic subjects as robed women approaching a throned man. Physics, Mathematics, History, with Rhetoric and Poetics gossiping in the rear. Each figure had her subject name stencilled above, presenting me an opportunity to work on understanding the Greek letters.

What really struck me, though, was a votive from 400 BCE displayed under the Acropolis. It was dedicated to Hermes and Aphrodite, with their names carved into the stone in ancient lettering. EPMOY, said the stone. The day before, we’d walked up and down Ermou Street, and I hadn’t realised it was named for the Messenger God. It’s one thing for pillars to stand over a couple thousand years, and really something else for letters to do the same.

Countdown

Translating Greek letters bit by bit is like building a story from “pieces of string” gathered from daily life. It was nice to have a little extra time to contemplate the pieces, being on holiday. At work, we’re running out of time. My year 11s, regardless of special needs, will sit exams starting in just over a week.

For some, reading and processing the questions will be most difficult. I think of the times I’d look at a sign in Greece, work out what the letters meant–and still not know the word because it was too far removed from the English equivalent. Our students with severe dyslexia expend their energy decoding letters, but still have to understand the question, and write essay answers.

For other students, a main challenge is mining the deeper meaning of a text. It’s particularly difficult with poetry. One student on the autism spectrum was upset with a recent mark for poetry analysis. He had worked hard thinking what to write about the poem, and had interpreted it literally.

I told him poets often speak in code. They use symbols to represent bigger ideas. Blake’s “blood running down palace walls” in “London” represents cruel rulers, and Hughes’s terrified hare in “Bayonet Charge,” which I thought was metaphorical until just a month or so ago, a way of describing the hopping, chaotic sparks–this represents innocence harmed in war.

“We’ve got to crack the code,” I told my hardworking, frustrated student. “We have to tell the examiners what the writer might have really meant.”

Beneath the Surface

*Perhaps a bit less left to interpretation here, or perhaps not. Street art in Athens*

The word code comes from caudex, “tree trunk,” early books made of wooden tablets. These would be used to establish rules in writing. So books are essentially code, and whether wittingly or not, some translation will be involved. From the trunk of any volume we read, the meaning might branch out and strike different people in different ways.

Books are a code to the writer’s intent and context. At least, for the purposes of English exams they are. Heavens forbid anyone read or write anything for fun. Another student on the autism spectrum lamented having to revise Jacobean history for Macbeth, and Victorian for A Christmas Carol. It’s a lot to remember, none of which today’s students find clearly relevant.

“We have to know the circumstances around the writer in order to understand why they wrote and what they wanted to teach readers.” I explained, “It’s a good skill because everything we see people post online, they might have a purpose that isn’t obvious.”

“I never do that,” she said. “I just tell it like it is.”

I’m not sure any of us are so upfront all the time though. I’ve certainly seen her excuse herself from class claiming she needs the toilet, while sweeping away with phone in hand. Deciphering the code of an individual person is never fully possible, because our circumstances change and we constantly evolve.

It’s still worth trying, though. An open mind and willingness to take a little time puzzling out another human being is maybe the best reason to hone our interpretation skills. How do you keep yours sharp?

Mythology and Me

This Week’s Bit of String: Candles on a motorbike

At nearly 11 pm on Easter Saturday, the taxi driver from Athens airport told me about the seasonal traditions in Greece.

“From the execution Friday until midnight when it turns to Sunday, many people will not hammer, or cut, eat meat, or do anything with violence. It’s out of respect because of the crucifixion.”

*Inside the Byzantine Panagia Kapnikarea on Easter Sunday*

Then, at midnight, there are fireworks and prayers, before family feasts on Easter Sunday. Freshly arrived in Athens for a city break, my husband and I wandered out at midnight. Down a narrow street we saw the bobbing lights of a candlelit crowd, and we heard the prayers chanted in a nearby Greek Orthodox church. People poured from its marble steps carrying lit tapers—all manner of people: goths, senior citizens… One middle-aged woman came out with a bouquet of 5 lit candles, and climbed behind a man on a motorbike and they rode off.

Not everyone participates, I’m sure. As Iakovos said, “It depends what you desire.”

And of course there’s the other side of the coin, be it Euro or drachma. He told me how much he loves being a driver, especially for tours when he takes people to further ancient sites, such as Delphi or Mount Olympus.

He has particular praise for Mount Olympus. According to him, there’s a spot up there known as the Throne of Zeus, where no wind or snow or rain ever strike, as if it’s divinely protected.

“It makes you think they really knew something,” he says of the ancient Greeks.

Building a Religion

How we interpret such things and act upon them does, as he said earlier, depend on our desire. How often do we believe something we really don’t want to?

When we first learned about Greek myths in school, I was in 8th grade. That’s a lot older than British students learn about them, and maybe for that reason, I did not enjoy the subject. To me, the gods seemed selfish, not to mention cruel and misogynistic. My opinion hasn’t changed much on that, to be honest. I had to read lots of ancient Greek play in high school and college, and I like the genre of modern retellings, but the original stories don’t appeal much to me apart from being cultural references.

*Gorgeous weathering on these pillars from Hadrian’s Library*

I do think myths have huge value in what they might tell us about the people who believed, maybe even created them. What does it say about people that they would make sacrifices from their own, struggling lives to such seemingly callous deities?

What we found breathtaking in Athens were the monuments made by people. The stunning Propylaea, the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, the Porch of the Maidens alongside the Erechtheion. How incredible that parts of the Pantheon still stand after almost 2500 years of invasions and natural disasters. And the beautiful little Byzantine church the Panagia Kapnikarea, nearly a millennium old. These are marvelous places, designed and built by humans with much toil and cooperation. Yet they make me wonder about a presence even more powerful.

I guess that’s what art can do, inspire you to believe in something greater, even if it’s just a previously unimagined hope for the future.

Likeability Vs Relatability

Looking down at the city of Athens through the Propylaea above, or through the Roman arches behind the Odeon, we had a stunning view over the chaotic crush of buildings, the worn, aged mountains, and the sea beyond. I imagined ancient people coming up here to sacrifice, worship, or be entertained, and wondered what their view was like. Maybe that was enough to keep them worshipping.

Raised in a Christian family myself, we were always deeply attuned to the suffering that Easter springs from, and I like the Greek orthodox idea of acting on that seriousness by refraining from aggressive activities for a couple of days. Maybe my upbringing contributed to my complete horror and aversion of anything execution-related. I am still mystified how Christians sit with the belief that an innocent deity suffered and died for their sins personally, and don’t constantly agonise over that.

*Getting the right balance… Porch of the Maidens, Erechtheion, Athens*

I once wrote a novel scene between American educators preparing for the 7th grade mythology unit. The Christian teacher describes the Greek gods as “petty and selfish—no better than people.”

On the other hand, he says, “Jesus actually became human, and that’s as accessible as it gets.”

But He never sinned, thinks the teaching assistant. Being human would be a cinch without guilt.

Could it be that ancient Greeks appreciated having dieties with lusts and impulses that reflected their own?

Conveying a religion must be like the constant political tussle over how to best message people. Meet people where they are, or urge them to strive for better? And as writers and creatives, we work to establish that same balance: creating characters who are likeable and also relatable, events that are dramatic and also recognisably everyday. It’s getting that juxtaposition between majestic ancient ruins and the settlements below; the prayers on loudspeaker and the candles on motorbikes. Our ability and taste for this will vary, one might say depending on our desire.

What do you think of the classical myths? Do you find the supernatural accessible?

A Flaw-Finding Mission

This Week’s Bit of String: A 30-year-old reading list

Last week when I couldn’t sleep, I invented a new game: Trying to remember which books we studied each year of high school, back in the mid-1990s. This joins other such spectacular entertainment forms as How Many Second Grade Classmates Can I Remember? and Recall the Layout of All the Holiday Cottages I Used to Clean for a Living.

One of my British secondary school system gripes is the paltry amount of books read for English. Two whole years studying nothing but Lord of the Flies, Macbeth, A Christmas Carol, and 15 war poems is such a drag.

On the other hand, we read quite a few books in our slightly deprived rural American high school. In 9th grade alone, we read Romeo and Juliet, Animal Farm, Of Mice and Men, and I think some form of The Odyssey. We also read Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, which I didn’t like much, and Cormier’s The Chocolate War, which I detested. It seemed clear he’d written it, with masturbation references and stupid boy behaviour, to impress his teenage son. Not my demographic.

*“Everyday Use” is about historic quilts–whether to display them, or use them. These quilts are part of the annual show at Billings Farm, Vermont.*

In 10th grade, we read Macbeth, Lord of the Flies (sound familiar?), Old Man and the Sea, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I was not a fan of the latter. We also read a volume of memoir essays and short stories, the first things I loved reading in high school. My favourite was an Alice Walker story, “Everyday Use.”

If we hadn’t been required to read such a broad selection, I might not have connected with any of it. I’m glad I didn’t lose interest, because the curriculum had terrific offerings in our junior and senior years.

I don’t remember what I was reading for fun during the first two years of high school, or if I bothered. I had plenty of homework, and my own made-up story-world I constantly nursed. Maybe that was why I resented certain assigned books. I preferred my own stories, woven around my experiences.

So at 3 in the morning a few days ago, I realised: my adolescent self was a narcissistic reader.

Inconvenient Truths

I see it in a couple of my students. Simon Armitage’s war poem “Remains” is great for spotting narcissistic readers. It’s written clearly in the vernacular, sometimes using collective pronouns which almost make you feel complicit. Most of the chatty girls and fidgeting, shouting-out boys stop and fall under the spell.

But one boy from our Trio of Fortitude has to always be the victimliest victim who ever victimmed, so he slouches through the succinct tale of war, PTSD, and substance abuse. This boy can’t pick up a pen because he has a cut on his finger, or his stomach hurts. He is cross that no one has helped him during class with his homework yet, and he might get a detention because obviously he’s not going to do it in his own time.

Now, as a teen I generally behaved myself in class and did the work, mostly on time. Ish. But I wonder if I had it in for Maya Angelou because at the age of 14 I, too, fancied myself the victimliest victim.

For at least a couple years of my adolescence (I think I got better), I was limited in my ability or desire to truly support other people. I became painfully aware of this years ago. I hadn’t realised that maybe this self-centeredness affected my reading. I just kept assuming the books weren’t very good.

Ready or Not

I’m a big advocate of reading for fun. So I won’t begrudge adolescent me for being self-involved 3 decades ago. If we’re honest with ourselves, we all have phases even as adults when we don’t have the strength to read certain things. It’s useful to remember that’s not the books’ fault.

Against the backdrop of negative news in my native country, I like to read books of plucky individuals banding together. I probably won’t attempt rereading Maya Angelou’s memoir of tribulation at the moment, but I do know now that I actually like some of her poems quite a lot.

*These caged birds were painted on a Glasgow wall, 2019.*

While there are always plenty of reading options to suit any mood and even, I daresay, any impending apocalypse, what to write can be a conundrum. I had this issue during the pandemic as well. When the world is suffering severe pangs, and we don’t know what it will give birth to, how do I bring forth a new big project? If I plot and start a novel referencing the current situation, that’s going to change by the day. If I start penning a contemporary novel without referencing current circumstances, is that callous? Does anyone even want to read more about the present chaos, after exhausting ourselves with the news?

Considering all this, I’m setting my next project in a place I love, and I’ve decided to set it during the first Trump election and administration, 2016-2017. We still had the “Not My President” fig leaf that he’d lost the popular vote, and we thought some people just didn’t realise how greedy and racist and misogynistic and authoritarian he was. This parallels the journey of my characters, as they wrestle with learning that maybe they’re not as kind and upright as they have tried to present themselves.

Which brings me back to my discovery about myself. Recognising our own flaws opens us to appreciating more outside ourselves, and I feel as if starting with my characters’ flaws makes me a little less protective of them, a little more open to the courses their journey can take. They say we should never judge a book by its cover. We shouldn’t judge by our adolescent opinions, either.

Have you encountered any books you ended up really changing your mind about?