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Of course I think the invasion of privacies is an awful thing. It is why splits, in relationships, marriages and so on can become a war zone of loyalties, especially over friends. It was also one of the reasons I had such difficulties with a ‘best friend’ and author when, among an arena of friends, he started breaking my personal confidences. Everything is context, and any author is obliged to have a public profile, but when you hear things about your private life being discussed too, from your own agent, when you had held privacies and tenderness rather deep, you can suddenly find yourself in the most awful place of personal invasion, with no defence whatsoever. It can be rather terrifying, as imagination runs riot, and I was always too prey to judgements and opinions. Some defence of that deepest, most wounded place can become ferocious. Others may gloss any seriousness, in terms of ‘oh we’re all going through it’, when I didn’t know what they were going through, and perhaps that is humanly true, but rarely do people know the hinterland, or can actually stand in other’s imaginative shoes. What may be water off a duck’s back for one person, can become emotional life or death for another, and shame is a real mark of failure.

Very much without any angry search-light of blame, a book, especially fiction and fantasy, is also a place of potentially massive personal invasion. Because a writer is putting themselves into their work, putting themselves on the line emotionally, and hopefully any real judgement or exposure of that only comes on finishing a writing journey, and testing it on ‘the world’. In fact, no author can afford to ask for too much help from any editor, because no editor should be expected to carry the weight of getting any book right. Trust, yes, guidance yes, a good sounding board, but not too much responsibility. It is why a writer cannot really drop the ball, but also why the right flow has to be in place at the very start of a project, in either the hope or knowledge that an author can get through. Sometimes things are actually just situational, without being anybody’s fault, but what is really worth doing at all, without peace, without happiness all round, without the right spirit? There is also considerable difference between an almost completed work and a commissioned work too, but blocked energy, personal or creative, can and does spill out in many ways. Many very wrong ways. Yet equally, people can in fact lose a capacity for relationship, for very particular reasons.

Martin Amis called a novel a physiological act too, not just the assumption you will or even can deliver the goods, ‘we paid the money now where’s the product?‘, and sometimes it can be a rather dangerous exercise. Perhaps there are no exact rules, but surely any author of standing, or especially experience of big books too, is the very person who knows or hopes for the right conditions needed. ‘Gnothi Souton’ was the prescription over the gates of hell though, ‘Know Thyself’, and anyone of real responsibility does hold their life, work and reputation in their own hands. For writers poised between living to the full, and living outside experience, so commenting too, it can be awful if the waters of life flow away and they just don’t know why or how to stop it, but watch in horror. But as grief is a journey inside, forcing a difficult communication with the outside world, and often making people drop every day responsibility, so too is a novel a journey inside, sometimes deep into ‘the past’, or possible futures, a journey through everywhere. I know how a project can consume completely, making my life jumble around me, until it’s done and balance is restored.

If the journey of Phoenix Ark Press, so grandly headlining itself The Storyteller’s Publisher, is a kind of story, or if a blog is a kind of published book, even happening in realtime, hopes, feelings and intentions change, as they change for all of us. There are other writers here, if I ever coax them back, but perhaps a danger is a blog becomes like a novel written into the wrong place again. Fiction must be careful of getting too close to fact, because fiction is a vital translation of ‘reality’. The first advice I always gave to younger writers though was be ambitious, and the greatest drive of inspiring fantasy is surely towards very happy or startling endings. But it does take love to write a book, balance, safety, good energy and the right intentions, so always begin again, and again, with good and inspiring intentions, if you can. I never used to talk about myself much as a younger man, very selfish business anyway, while a great lesson for me is to put my command of language and scope of feeling into good books, while really learning how to be silent, straight and peaceful in reality. But there’s something else Jonathan Franzen said about writing, namely write as if you are just talking to a friend. Perhaps I’ll add a friend you are allowed to be angry with, sometimes, but wish you had never lost. I now understand the seriousness of the frown on the face of a powerful publisher I met in New York once, at a party, yet think nothing is inevitable and perhaps we also create the culture as we experience it, in fear, forgiveness, generosity or in courage.DCD

There is rather a good little novel, by the ferocious AA Gill, ex alcoholic, squeaky voiced wordsmith, Master of The Sunday Times and fielder of ‘The Blonde’, called Starcrossed. It is about a failing poet, who has had enough, and goes for the sexy offices and warm thigh-ed success of a famous Celeb. The problem is, as the writing at times rises to real poetry, or real literature, in trying to be a best-selling money spinner, it exemplifies the very thing it half bemoans, and is the failure of poetry. Come the modern world, the tie-in and the careful brand. Martin Amis did it just as cleverly in his little short story satire about a writer making a fortune selling Sonnets to Hollywood, while a sci-fi author is struggling with his heart, mind and soul in his impoverished garret. He ended up moving to France, in disgust at ‘culture’. There is no money in poetry, and there was, or certainly glory, look at pop star Byron, but there is always positive work for the struggling soul! Maybe a singer will come along and let me write lyrics.

The ceremony in the Memorial Garden in London, for the 67 British Victims of 9/11 was wonderful. The simple reciting of names, real lives, not the terrible, frightening image of burning or falling towers, real families, laying single white roses. One name recited in the name of Allah too, the playing of Auld Lang Syne and The Last Post. The reading too of Henry Van Dyke’s poem inscribed in the Memorial Sundial.

Time is..

Too Slow for those who Wait
Too Swift for those who Fear
Too Long for those who Grieve
Too Short for those who Rejoice
But for those who Love
Time is not.

Auden lived in Greenwich Village, but like everything the village had changed when I went and all the writers had shipped to Brooklyn. I forgot how many here still linked to that generation, one removed from mine, think Auden was a scoundrel because he left for America on the eve of European war, and his face turned into a version of a very well lived in poodle, but Some Like it Hot and nobody’s perfect. His famous younger man’s take ‘love one another or die’ he later changed to ‘love one another and die’ though, to express a certain harder faced reality. He may have underestimated the importance of why perhaps myths are created and repeated, raised above the level of ordinary storytelling to become universal guides and warnings. Carl Jung, when he had walked beyond his own understanding sat down to play again, and rediscover his personal myth. Oh dear, don’t drift into the appalling snow, and ‘love’, such a simple thing, is just the good door to a well lived life and to equally vital sources of happiness – making things happen – money, success, friendship, creativity, meaning and being useful. As for Auden he could be very bleak, not a person remaking the world, but he was a phenomenal poet.

As I Walked Out One Evening
by W. H. Auden

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

Deep in the bowels of the 1949 offices of the Adams Family, a Company Tea party for favourite authors has gone down a storm. Tea has been drunk, cupcakes eaten, prizes awarded and the severed-handed Thing is leafing mournfully through a lone copy of Fell, since all the rest have long been incinerated as works of Evil, or is that Good, which is of course atrocious to a favourite and ogerish cartoon family. The Thing is bored though, because Fell is a love story he has heard time and again, part of the long sorrow of the heart, people and published books, and besides, he doesn’t have a body, eyes or a brain, like everyone else in the family. Uncle Fester is snoring in the corner, Lurch is watching Il Postino, and trying to pronounce ‘metaphore’ and ‘Biatrice Russo’, without sounding like a character from the Sopranos, and Morticia Braces is, as ever, absent, silent, vengeful but living happily ever after and defining company policy. Blissfully unaware of how agonising it might be for other semi successful authors to be denied the joy of their own Company Tea Party, and placed inside a ‘Satelite Tour’ orbitting Pluto.

Meanwhile, in his powerful Manhattan offices, Company CEO and Leader-of-Men Jake Mitechlob has been spending too many late nights as number one fan of the Phoenix Ark Press blog. Perhaps the only one, although he will never know. He has established a psychological profile of the former author Clementi-Dowsing too, that he learnt off watching endless repeats of CSI and Prison Break, and receiving a sudden fax, slaps his desk manfully and bounds into the room next door, to join the happy, insane, Company Tea Party. ‘”Buddies,” he cries, to the defenders of art and literature, truth and humanity, ‘it’s fantasmic.”

“Huh?” mouths Chad Betterperson, making for the fizzy designer wine and wishing he worked in interior design. “Dowsing. He’s finished, Betterperson. We’ve rendered him speechless by wrecking his career and having him Renditionated by the Celestial Intelligence Agency to Guantanamera Bay, for a rest cure, some R and R, and a spot of healthy emotional surfboarding.” “Waterboarding, boss.” “Right, Betterperson, Waterboarding, and skateboarding too. It’s fun, but over for him, so America and Morticia Braces are safe and free once again. God Bless Amex. And me.” Nobody applauds.

“But wasn’t he just in love?” winks Jasper Wells-Fargo, sweeping by with a publicity poster, “and risked so much for it, but contracted here, after six years, with three books too, and an entire future?” Everyone blinks because Jasper does not say such things. “And didn’t Harold Reeves-Tale tell him he was not only a great writer, but loved at Family Adams?”, adds Betterperson. “Silence, Jerks,” screams Mitchelob, turning puce. “You’re not to mention Reeves-Tale, ever, because I have most of the Company shares, and I haven’t read any Chaucer. Besides, Davidov Clementi-Dowsing was being sense-of-humored as a madman, and is a Terrorisor, worse than the Binned, Dead Bin Larden, capable of shaking a once proud and honest nation, not to mention a whole family, with fear and loathing in Las Vegas. Besides, our official Company Policy was always to pretend the past was finished, so never allow him to answer the whys or defend himself, prior to his moment of maximum bad, but still hold it illegally over his head, to mask the nonsense that went on inside a department, even if it might have reflected an entire atmosphere inside American companies. Hey, can any one sense fear in NYC, a strange kind of fear, both real and unreal.”“Nonsense?” screams a harsh voice, and Susan Van Winkle sweeps into the room, surprised a CEO could quote Phillip Roth, but intimidating even Jake Mitchelob, now she is the Family Vice President, and has given up unserious editing. “That Evil jerk Dowsing challenged my all powerfulness, and called me a bad version of Velma from Scooby Doo, when I pushed an edit at him, so must be Renditionated, annihilated and wiped from the face of the Good American earth, with all his books and all our contracts.” “But he lives in a mythical land far, far away, in the U of K, ,” says Betterperson, with a hiccup, wondering why grown ups are so nasty, “and didn’t you call him a good person, when he apologisated, and asked for help on a book? Then told him he was not evil?”

“Silence Jerk. I told him he was not evil because I did not want to hear what he told me our own holy Patroness Saint Morticia Braces said to him, before we really began torturising him under contract. What I could not put on company note paper. Don’t you know nuffing about loyalty, truth, politics and good business partnerships?” Even Jake Mitchelob blushes. “Don’t be a weak sap, Mitchelob,” hisses Van Winkle, “We work in children’s Books and fairy tales, and our profits are enormous, so torturising our author is a perfectly valid way to fight the real war.” Jake Mitchelob, confused as ever, nods sagely and wishes he worked in the Military, it’s far nicer than publishing, and besides, girls really can be more frightening than boys.

“Er, wasn’t it rather evil,” says Jasper Wells-Fargo, “to see him so blocked personally, obviously in an emotional hell, then to block any say in his own work, any open dialogue about his own books, refuse peace, threaten a wall of negativity to keep a secret, and have an unspoken and unanswerable but virtually criminal charge hovering in the background, while you telephonated to have a chummy chat with his soon vanishing agent? So did we not renditionate him without trial long ago to Gauntanamera Bay?” Steam starts to spew from Van Winkle’s ears. “YOU are not paid to think, Wells Fargo, and a company is not a republican democracy, idiot. Dowsing is evil and mad, a stakeriser and Terrororisator too, and I did my best for the ungrateful jerk, even if I did use his evil novel The Sight to get my job with that sorry Reeves’ Tale. Besides, to get to the top it was essential he had to be thrown to the wolves he writes about.”

“Wrote about,” hiccups Betterperson, “You said his fans would love another wolfee book, before you offered to swap a new one for his silly book about Pimples, designed to address the general atmosphere of terrorisation, for that pointless though money-spending generation, that you also once told him was good.” Betterperson dusts some cupcake crumbs from his trousers, as he rememebrs that Van Winkle told Dowsing ‘We are willing to bring happy memories into the future only if you shut up about the Patroness’ and wondering if that was not repudiation of contract, or duress, in the circumstances, not to mention callous about his own happy memories, harmed by their major representative, now masked as a faceless and irrelevant employee.

“Fans down the pans, like his books and contracts! ,” snaps Van Winkle, “You talk too much, Betterperson and the only thing I know, the top fact I have learnt in my terrible life trials, is never to open your mouth, truth or embarrassisation might come out. I bought it to help him, and I could not be seen to be too loyal. Then he was with our Patroness Saint, so on our side, until he was lost in enemy action. I warned him ‘we will protect our girl’, though loyalty is a tricky thing. Sure I may have held it for two years, and held his career in the Sleepy Hollow of my Hand, but life’s fun and no friend of his ever told me in London to look after him, for being a little special. No one is special, except the Patroness, that idea is evil, and only I have talent and can make the right decisions.”

Jake Mitchelsob nods furiously, but decides to soften the company culture, if he can, and hold no more Tea Parties, they are too expensive, too Republican, or too Democratic, he is not quite sure, like everyone else. All he knows is these days all American values are under attack from everywhere, well, probably China, but nowhere so grave as from the mass murderer, Terrorisator and bad author, Clementi Dowsing. Mitchelsob has enough man in him, and has been reading psychology books, to know love can be a hard wound, especially for a man rejected in front of a small group of people, he worked with so well, and got so close to, during two very intimate years, as well as years before, and needed professional support from, even for a time emotional support, not invasion or professional threats, under contract, while he was so invaded and disrespected among friends in London too. Even able to imagine it can be a horrible thing not even to be allowed to speak of two happy years, as if that too had been some terrible evil.

But Van Winkle is right, life is a win or lose game, especially the Patroness’s, and literaturality, or how you get to good, award winning books, is irrelevant. Don’t ask the author how they work or create, what atmosphere might help, cut them adrift and cross your fingers he gives you another Firebringer, to solve the crisis when the muse got ripped away, and he literally found for the first time ever he could not write. Sending a sexy photo to the Patroness or anyone in a US firm was rightly a sackable, and imprisonable offence, for yeah, the Patroness also said pornography is evil, and actually it probably is, as she was informed of the new arts of Compassion. He is not sure that making the hounded, mortified and fragile Morticia Braces the family Patroness Saint is quite right, though it was once, but hell, show weakness and humanity and you know what happens in New York City.

“Hey,” says Betterperson, “I head the truth about a three-year past, or a rumour. About having to fight, even on tour, to see a partner of two years. Pretty odd someone could be so one-sided and callous, even as a Company Representative, who of course never, ever had any responsibility or duty of care as such, because we made Dowsing the disrespected company mascot. Of his openly telling Our Patroness he would fight for her, even if the jerk got it wrong. Of having every reason to expect and hope, when he told a person he was sorry for a temper, and that he ‘thought of her as his wife’, and getting the answer ‘that cut through me like a knife’. Of proposing on the phone, but not even getting an answer, in a wall of passive aggression at the heart of his own effective work place, then flying to our great city and the Patroness telling him ‘I give myself permission to change my mind’. Of her taking the advice though of another friend of his up the road in London, who knows nothing of adult relationships, that they could not even be friends, because she talked like an adult and walked like a teenager. Of months talking, more invasions and no space given, and our patroness then even warning she would change a number, difficult company politics always in the frame, throughout. He clearly lost his own plot, out of two years together, a life partnership talked about, perhaps company politics always in our Patroness’s emotional frame too, in their brittle and absolute reactions, despite their once promising to be careful of each other over previous hurts, and the past being…”

“SILENCE,”scream Family Adams, even The Thing, though he never had a mouth, like Dowsing, ” and MOVE ON. Mention truth or the past and you will be branded a terrorisator, made to sign a Kafkaesque ‘agreement’, attempting to publish with no contact with the author, and sent to the Bay to be Skateboarded and White washed with Dowsing, and the whole of Inhuman Resources. Any truth of the past is an absolute assault on the personal privacy rights of our Patroness Saint, as enshrined in the Oldee European Chaterisation of Human Rights, we do not subscribe to because we have read The Shield of Achilles, and are top publisher in The Super and Super Awful Power. The Law here is we break his privacies, but reeespect our own. We are brave, we defend girls from big, bad, evil wolves, and we believe in freedom, books, and …” The Adams Family look at each other, “We believe in truth and…” The Family looks at each other. “We believe…” Meanwhile it is elevenses and everyone stops for the School Bell, and to swear allegiance to the flag, hoping Morticia Braces will return to defend and bless everyone soon, as Jasper Wells Fargo, longing for heroes, is seen climbing out of the window in a SpiderMan outfit, to go and find out if anyone, anywhere, actually believes in anything brave, decent, just or true.

The scene closes happily with a rendition (that is a pun) of Guantanamera, and Suicide is Painless, it brings on Many changes.

This is a work of Satirisation, and probably Saturation too, and only the reference to Davidov Clementi Dowsing as David Clement-Davies has any resemblance to anything or anyone recognisable, including innocence, happy memories, a livelihood, love, art, talent, a future or career, so there.

The Helgra are the warrior tribe in Fell and, even if unread at the time, where it most vitally should have been, it had great meaning in a real and fictional journey.

“Out of time, the Heglra come, loving spear, admiring drum,
Knowing, from the depths of night, how the heart must praise the fight.
Life’s a journey filled with pain, teaching loss in snow and rain,
Death is sure the mortal’s way, change the law of night and day,
Yet the heart must never die, raise your voice and break the sky.
Like the wolf on mountain clear, howl it out through bitter tear,
Everything that lives and dies, longs to find the real prize,
Longs to know what made this place, longs to touch a gentler face,
Fears its nature in the dark, loves the song of rising lark,
Turns to darkness in its pain, shames to feel the sun again,
Knows the finest place of all, proud in sunlight, standing tall.
Search the mountains and the sea, for the truest way to be,
Honour all that marvellous horde, even as you raise your sword,
Men and women know your worth, lest you fail the striving earth,
Then in union bring again, bursting joy from falling rain.
Free your children with your song, teach with love the right from wrong,
Teach them what the poets know, that in loving all things grow,
But that human bonds can make, chains that every thing would break,
Feel instead in brook and stream, how the earth itself can dream,
And that power that passes through, greater than the works we do,
Let it hold you safe and strong, like a hand with tender bond,
Breathe a breath so deep and calm, that no thing may do you harm,
Lest the harm that’s done to you, comes like sorrow in the dew,
And the canker of the earth, robs this lovely life of worth,
Sing this song from heaven sent, thank the world as you lament.”

This month receipts tripled for Phoenix Ark Press, tiny figures it’s true, but still alive, so perhaps there is some way to snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat. I and the website may go down, but your cannot kill the spirit of a Phoenix, that’s its whole mythic point! I don’t think people should buy books out of sympathy, only for their own quality, but if, somehow, Phoenix can be associated with the true spirit of artists and writers, good and committed ones at least, in a world increasingly lost in noise, branding and marketing, then something has been achieved. A Pyrrhic victory so far in terms of my personally wanting to earn, to be well published, to have many readers worldwide, but some voice beyond the usual cynicism too, and with a desire to tell the truth, even when difficult. I wanted to throttle someone who, when I was trying to raise investment, snapped back the old mantra, ‘what’s your USP?’. In business speak it means unique selling point. I thought of writing a play about the whole, strange, sad tale called DANGER USP, punning on the old BBC series about unexploded bombs, Danger UXB. Any good author, like any good human being, is their own ‘Unique Selling Point’, but the machine so often kills the human. I suppose Phoenix’s USP is a true story, a battling spirit, some fine articles from others, the generous support of readers who have heard, and some not half decent poetry too. If I had got that needed financial backing, you would have seen energy and ideas explode out of this place like a tornado! DCD

FOR THE POET’S SWEATSHOP

THE NEW WORLD

Then I’ll speak to you of love,
And sight,
A love so deep it might burst everything.
Or heal a wider wound,
The emptiness of air,
Beneath unhearing heavens.

Rearm in silence.
Creep away.
The world apart is like some plashing tear drop,
That should be a globe of shining, spinning light,
Connected,
Filled with a sea of rising waters,
To souse the dryness of our cracking earth.
Then in right falling tears, of love and joy,
Right seeing,
There comes the flower,
And all our quenching.DCD