Reluctance to read new work

May 22nd 2010

I suppose I expected people to read A Town Unlike Alice on my website, www.aliceworeareddress.co.uk, because having written it I was in the secret of how compelling I'd made the piece, and I was excited and wanted to share my delight, but given my own feelings of apprehension mingled with shyness when faced with an unknown unseen piece of writing, I should have gauged the feelings of a potential audience and made allowances. I tried to introduce it sexily and interestingly but perhaps that terribly dark threatening word schizophrenia put people off and they thought they were being inveigled into reading ravings or dreary complaints. Let me make clear that A Town Unlike Alice isn't shroud waving, dreary complaints about a nothing life or anything like the victim speaking in all those charity adverts or "serious" items on Breakfast News which made one feel bored, reluctantly dutiful but eager for the bits about the dead donkey to follow, it's fresh, new and exciting with plenty of rage about the way the sick are demonised but not a word of a moan or a dirge! It's not about inadequacy or things never being quite right enough for the poor victim whinge whinge, it's about someone gripped by terror succeeding in living, the kindness that can turn into detestation when the kind person feels competed with and encroached on, yet how the recipient survives detestation and cold shouldering with a small but defiant shout of triumph.

Carillon magazine gave me a very good write up all thanks to them, Fire advertised the website and featured my work, more to follow in the summer issue, several others have been interested in seeing A Town Unlike Alice printed out, not everyone is connected to the Internet, but quite a few people I've approached are interested in me reading their work, but bored to tears and reluctant when it comes the other way round. One is reminded of the student on a Creative Writing Course saying I never read poetry but here's some I've written. Then, working on the same principle, there are nameless - deliberately - editors who reject work if it looks like competition, editors who will cheerfully patronise you if you shuffle abjectly towards them being suitably subservient and will be very helpful, but send you packing if you approach them confidently as an equal, there's a website specially for survivors of mental illness that operates like that. As Thom Yorke sings: "I am not a vegetable/ I will not control my self", that's my anthem and why should I contort myself into false humility and feebly allow "good" to be doled out to me to make the dolers feel great about themselves? I've been through too much and have stood on my own two feet by myself, I have some pride.

Ah, I feel better for that rant! There's the argument that if you have a woman's name people percieve your work more critically and suspiciously, which is far from true about everyone there are some bloody brilliant editors of magazines who are far too generous and intelligent and enthusiastic to let that sway them, just the odd very few make me think that if I was Alastair not Anne I might have met more of a welcome. That's more of a sneaking suspicion on my part than the result of anything overt and as I say, the overwhelming majority either like or dislike my style and it would make no difference to them if I had green tentacles and inhabited a small but comfortable crater on the planet Zarg. So I'll sign out with best wishes, especially to kind and supportive editors who give their time and attention out of the goodness of their hearts and an abiding love of poetry!