FLY

Once a year, the professor who convened the first literature module I ever taught organises and executes the week-long Festival of Literature for Young People, or FLY for short. There are speakers and workshops and games for kids of school age, and it seems to be both madly popular and madly successful - my housemate remarked when he got in yesterday evening that half his school seems to have been signed out for it. 

UEA being what it is, a fair number of the volunteers are from its hallowed halls, including the workshop teachers. And since, when the email went around six months ago asking for teachers signing up seemed like a good idea, I got to field a batch of sixth formers this afternoon.

Under normal circumstances this wouldn't have born reporting, but I haven't taught in months now, and I haven't been in Norwich in weeks. Which means that I didn't get around to planning until yesterday, and even though the session wasn't until the afternoon I had to get to campus immediately post-breakfast so that I could wait in the medical centre for an hour to eventually be told that all seemed well and see you again in six months. So it should surprise no one but me that, immediately after being told I was healthy and skittering off to the postgrad cafe to drink coffee and wait for my teaching slot, I realised that not only had I forgotten to bring the bag full of random items necessary for my three favourite writing exercises, but that I'd completely forgotten that such a bag needed to be put together. 

I live a thirty minute walk away from the university. Today is one of those strange days you seem to get in England, where it's hot enough that one sweats, but too cool for shorts and sleevelessness; it's sunny enough to burn, but too cloudy to tan; every time I take my jacket off it starts raining, and every time I put it on it stops, and there's so much ambient moisture that all of that sweat just sits on your skin, like an oil slick. Also, I haven't been in Norwich for a while, so only my teaching clothes seem to be here. Teaching clothes bought intentionally for Norfolk winters, when I usually find myself teaching. Which explains why I wound up running from school to home and back again while dressed head to toe in black, and might begin to explain exactly how all-fire uncomfortable that was. 

An aside for foreign readers: aircon isn't a thing here the way it is in the U.S. 

The actual teaching went better than I hoped, at least. The students were a bit reticent, but they wrote, and they seemed to like the exercises I gave them. The best part for me, as always, was getting to hear some of the things they came up with; there wasn't a dud in the bunch.

Book Festivals

Now that the programmes have been finalised I can say that I'm going to be at both the West Cork Literary Festival and the Edinburgh Book Festival this summer!

On Saturday the 23rd of July I and Horatio Clare will be on Whiddy Island as part of the West Cork Literary Festival, reading from our work and most likely talking about our shared preoccupation with the ocean. As far as I can figure it should be the last event that I'll be doing about The Shore, because The Lauras comes out on August 11th, and it seems that most people are interested in the latest thing. I'll be glad to get a chance to read something different, though I'll miss being able to say 'thang' in public and still seemingly be taken seriously.

On Thursday the 25th of August I'll be in Edinburgh with Jenni Fagan, where we'll both be talking about our second books, The Sunlight Pilgrims and The Lauras. I recently met Jenni Fagan and was struck dumb by her awesomeness, and may have missed a deadline because I couldn't stop reading her first book, The Panopticon. So while I never feel comfortable insisting that I'm worth listening to, I feel more than qualified to say that she is.

Missing in Action

At the moment I'm sitting in a surprisingly large hotel room in Morristown, New Jersey, trying to find the will to sort my suitcase out, because it's going to have to be dropped tomorrow morning into the trunk of a car that's not mine and transported to the airport. I'm naturally going with it, but since nobody is going to be weighing me on arrival I require much less sorting.

Yesterday afternoon I presented the paper that I dropped off the face of the earth a few weeks ago to write as part of a panel dealing with censorship in public education. The room was surprisingly full, the questions were interesting and answerable, and I've finally met another human being who spends a horrifying amount of their time looking at textbooks. And since I presented on the first day, I got to spend today actually enjoying other peoples' papers instead of trembling in the corner with nerves. Even with the trembling, it was wonderful to finally feel as though I'm a part of an academic community; my research doesn't have much in common with that of the rest of my cohort, so a lot of the time I feel like the madwoman in the corner, pegging away at something that no one cares about. Meeting even one person who already gets it, let alone over a dozen, was worth the distance travelled.

This is probably the most productive trip I've ever been on: about two weeks ago I flew into DC and bribed my younger sister to drive me so that I could do a final round of location research for Belief, then spent nearly a week harassing relatives about their memories of their misspent youths, also for Belief, then dragged myself several states north for the conference. And now I get to skedaddle back to England to do something with it all before too much time passes and I can't understand my own notes.

And, of course, get back to helping organise a conference at UEA for this December. I'm sure the other plotters are just thrilled with my recent inability to answer email.

Marshalling the Forces

Besides writing a thesis, PGR students are supposed to hit a bunch of smaller benchmarks in order to be considered to have successfully finished the program. Some of them are stupid easy, such as earning the requisite professional development credits, which most of us do completely by accident and without plan. Others are more difficult, such as getting an article published in a reputable academic journal, which sounds like it's tough even for the professionals who have been playing this game for years. My personal Waterloo on that front has been finding a conference. I've run into ones on law, politics, education, childhood, but none of them had calls to which I could tailor my critical work enough to have a dream of getting accepted. The thing that made it even more frustrating was that they all seemed to be held places like Hawaii, Mauritius, Japan - the kinds of places that I'd kill to have a legitimate work reason to visit. 

So imagine how ecstatic I was when I finally found a conference for which my work was suited. And imagine how much more ecstatic I was when they actually accepted my paper proposal. 

So, what's the catch?

It's in New Jersey.

Not even old Jersey, but New Jersey, where approximately 80% of my relatives live, where I've been dragged for weddings and christenings since before I was old enough to realise that even the people who live there aren't exactly crazy about the place. No offence to anyone, but I hate New Jersey. I can practically hear the gods laughing. 

Now that I have a place to give a paper, I actually have to write it. They only allow presenters twenty minutes apiece, so it isn't going to be that long, and it is delivered verbally, so the usual rhetorical stylings and five-dollar language goes out the window in favour of clarity and simplicity. You'd think that would make it all easier. For some reason, the mere idea of getting started is terrifying me. Maybe my Everest of secondary sources has something to do with it.

Yes, that is a blackbird. Yes, he is hanging upside down. I don't know why, ask him. 

As things go, the timing is really fantastic. Annual Review has just been, and the major decision made therein was that I'd hand over a full draft of the critical thesis in September. Which means that I need to sequester myself over the summer and write it. And what better way to get into the groove of writing a thesis than by writing a smaller, simpler, more straightforward portion of one of its main arguments? The secondary sources (pictured above; probably overkill) have been gathered, the calendar has been cleared, the outlines have been drawn up. There is absolutely nothing stopping me from hammering out both conference paper and critical thesis.

It probably means a lot that instead of actually beginning the paper, I pulled up a web browser and wrote a blog post. 

Somebody send reinforcements.

Slouching towards the finish line

This weekend, by the power of coffee, the page proofs were sent back to Random House all squiggled up with little blue pen-marks. The changes I made were extensive enough that I'm now a bit nervous about the fact that anyone is going to see the bound proofs, which consist of the pre-final edit text. Which means I should either learn to lighten up a little or push myself to be more ruthless with the things that I know I need to change but don't have the will to change yet when it comes to the earlier revisions. The final edit mostly consisted of metaphorically bouncing every word against the table to hear whether it rang true, and messing with the ones that thudded, so I'm less of a basket case than I was on the day I finished the structural revision and realised that I was essentially done writing the novel. 

And while I've been tweaking the insides, other people have been tweaking the outsides:

There should be a little box of bound proofs turning up on my doorstep any day now...

And now that that's mostly done and dusted, there's nothing keeping me from locking myself in my flat in Norwich and writing up my critical thesis.

Oh, dear...

Page proofs and covers

Last night Penguin books held a little social gathering (as they seem to frequently do) for people who either write about books or select the books that go into shops. It wasn't until I found the private club where the party was being held that I remembered that I haven't really left the house since December and have therefor completely forgotten how to act at these things. And I'm starting to suspect that final edits isn't a good stage during which to go out and be charming about books, because it seems that a project is only truly done when I've completely given up on it. The whole reason I get invited along is to be charming about books in the general direction of the people who can influence how many people read them; the reason I say yes is that it's a rare chance to meet writers who aren't products of Norwich. This time I was especially lucky in that I got to gush to Carys Bray over how much I loved A Song for Issy Bradley and The Museum of You, and got to meet Jenni Fagan well in advance of doing Edinburgh Festival with her later this year.

Jason also happened to be there, and in what felt both old-fasioned but appropriate to the fact that we were drinking wine in a private members' club in Soho, he gave me this:

Page Proofs! It should surprise no one that I have pens reserved specifically for the job of marking these up.

This should be the last batch of corrections, which makes me a little anxious because the revision process has been too quick this time for me to second-guess myself on anything. But I've three times regretted writing the book at all, which means that it's very close to being finished.

Over the course of the night it came out that I'm practically the only person who hasn't gotten to see the cover yet, because they haven't made up their minds and they don't want me to fall in love with a cover that gets binned. But it's only a week until the bound proof comes out, so Jason was easily convinced to hand them over:


 

Most of them are out of the running, but I like seeing all of the iterations. They look nothing like what I imagined they would, but they all fit the book very well.

Now all I have to do is learn to pronounce the title clearly enough so that people know what on earth I'm saying.

Invasion

So my parents have come to visit. Their only other trip to England was for the wedding a year an a half ago, so this is the first time they're experiencing the place as itself, rather than the ground zero of a major life decision. And this is the first time I've experienced them out of their native habitat without being completely preoccupied with the logistics of herding relatives.

I'd forgotten all of the cultural differences between here and Virginia; they all come rushing back every time I watch my father amble up to someone - usually a barista - and begin what sounds like an in-depth conversation about the meaning of life as a preamble to ordering coffee. We've gone into nearly every grocery store in Reading and Norwich for the purpose of reading all the labels and then buying the most alien items - Saturday it was pate, steak-flavoured crisps, millionaire shortbread, and a single pork pie. My father zipped into the Poundland and bought a case of Coleman's mustard while my back was turned. It took the better part of an afternoon to explain to my mother why UEA is a brutalist monstrosity rather than the Oxbridge-esque Gothic confection that she and everyone back home has apparently been imagining. They both seem to be enjoying everything we're seeing, but what they really want to do is find the key to our garden shed and spend the week getting the back yard in order, with an option on more steak crisps.

But in between all of that the copyeditor's queries have been dealt with, tuition has been paid, work has been done, and it would appear that the only people who have noticed I'm not actually working are the two compatriots with whom I'm supposed to be organising a conference for December.

Oh, my sister's here too. But this is her third trip over and she's the only person on the planet who does exactly what I ask her to do the first time I ask, so it's easy to forget she's there because she doesn't require watching, just intermittent feeding, like a pet snake.