The Wheel

The pithead used to dominate the town.
My dead forefathers came and went,
were buried in the shadow cast by it.
I passed it on my way to school,
heard its revolutions in the night.
If the pit head was the place’s heart
the great wheel was its soul.
And then there was the slow dismantling.
The slag heap was grassed over. It became
an innocent green mound where cattle graze.
They hauled the winding gear away
and sold the chain for scrap
then took the giant wheel and clamped it down.
They did this to remind us where we came from,
what we did and who we were –
a monument of rusting metal spokes
that radiate from hub to rim
for kids to climb on, questioning.
Some day we’ll come with picks and dynamite,
Dislodge it from its concrete plinth.
We’ll drag it from the valley…

Let’s get something straight about writing, writing is a job, a vocation, a way to pay the bills; just like an entertainment’s manager, a roadie, a bar supervisor, a bar server, a till jockey, a shelf stacker and a labourer (all of which I have done in my life).

Why am I bringing this up now? There is a self satisfying stance when it comes to the arts and humanities by this government that we are somehow not worthy of funding or even fighting for funding. I mean, Theresa May must have a book in her and BoJo surely can crap out a master between his waffle on those bad people in the EU. David Davies now has more time on his hands so I expect a really big sculpture of an arse entitled, ‘Self Portrait #1’. Michael Gove after stripping education back to all the soulless shit that in…

The other night I watched Salma Hayek in Frida, a biopic of the life and death of Frida Kahlo, and though the film did not cover everything about Frida’s life and infidelities; I also found it disturbing that some of the facts were altered to make Frida seem more of a nice person but that is Hollywood for you, nice people are nice, bad people are bad, and cripples mustn’t be too conflicted. You see what draws me to Kahlo (and not Salma Hayek as my wife often points out) was that she lived with spinal pain. It is often hard to get across to people what it is like to have such pain. Some days are good. Some days are bad. Some days are conflicted. All you know is that part of you that should be there is missing. You live with pain everyday, sometimes you tune it…

There are times when we all think that we will be discovered. That the game will be up. Surely anyone can write? Yes, the old adage that everyone has a novel in them dilutes a vocation that takes years to perfect and a lifetime to develop. No one ever says, ‘You know, everyone has a heart bypass in them’ neither do they bark, ‘Everyone has a good old killing in them, stabby-stab-stab’. They don’t even say, ‘Everyone has a painting in them’ but as an art, or profession, everyone can do our job; certainly most taxi drivers think they can judging by what they tell you and tell you loudly so you will write it. I have always been amused that everyone thinks they have a novel in them, they probably do but a good 99% of those novels will be shit. Sorry but a lifetime ago I spent workshop…

Let’s talk reading, I never read for pleasure, all reading to me is research. The act of discovery. The act of learning. The art of pleasure is something very different. When I read I step through a door into worlds that I could never imagine. Reading can make me think of things, ideas pop out of the ether and drown beneath the eddies. Reading for me was in full flow at a tiny library in a year my teacher branded me a ‘retard’ (oh, yes that word was still very much in use in the 1980s by some teachers). Why was that word used? The simple answer was the teacher in question, a substitute who revealed why some teachers never get tenure, still believed that to measure a child’s reading age was to make them stand on a chair and read in front of a class. This weekly torture resulted…

What type of writer are you? There are two distinct variations on the writer (this includes the poet too), the planner and the doer. A simple way to test this is to do the task, a mad dog in a coffee house. Ask a group of writers to imagine this scenario and write about it, that is all. You do not embellish or add to it, you don’t even share the image above, just the word ‘imagine’ is enough to release that mad dog among writers. Twenty minutes later and you will have a group that will be split asunder. There will be those who have written, it will be sensory, it will have moments that are wonderful but there will be no main character or story yet. Just a wonderful tapestry of sounds, smells and maybe how the dog felt but nine times out of ten they will have developed the wrong or…

As a writer you have to get a balance between writing, reading and research. When I committed last year to #ayearofwriting this meant that I sometimes spent much of my time reading and writing (yes, you can class reading as research) but sometimes this meant that I was often left in the air unable to get back down, like a dirty trick that kids do to each other on a seesaw. You remember those games? You’d be sat at one end and as you went up another person would pile on the end that hit the ground so that you were stuck up in the air, holding on for grim death because that drop as a kid seemed endless. Sometimes writing can feel like that. Speaking recently with Simon Crump, the novelist, I asked about craft books and we discussed how we both wrote. We had similarities in how…