How to save yourself and your sisters

In Richard E Grant's fun programme on the Arabian Nights, academic Mona Mikhail quotes Scheherezade as saying "I am doing this to save myself and my sisters", casting Scheherezade as a feminist heroine who saved herself and her sisters (and cured her husband of misogyny) through imagination, words and also strategy; the early stories reinforce the king's view of women as fickle and untrustworthy, but once she's got him hooked, Scheherezade promotes values like mercy and wisdom and an acceptance of women's sexuality (and, yes, at times, she gets racy).

In this 1969 illustration of Scheherezade telling the stories by HJ Ford, the king seems almost incidental; she is telling the story to her rapt sister.

I'm about to read the stories again, as research for a new play. I'm excited.

Going back to Green Gables...and becoming non-squelchable

I've just re-read Anne of Green Gables; I'm going to re-read all six. (Actually, LM Montgomery wrote even more, but I stopped at the end of Anne of Ingleside, when Anne was forty, then an unimaginable age; in the later books, she apparently gives up her heroine status to her daughter, and I wasn't so interested in that).

I was worried about re-reading it. I read the six books seven times each when I was little, and I loved Anne. I loved the fact that she went from eleven to forty—where other books left girls on the brink of womanhood, LM Montgomery had the gumption to see her girl through. I loved that she had green eyes like me, except hers went grey in some moods and lights whereas mine were and are just green. I loved that she never pretended to be stupid, even in front of boys, but that she'd still rather be pretty than clever. I loved that she smashed a slate over Gilbert Blythe's head when he teased her. And I loved that she used her imagination to make any situation better.

To my huge relief, I still love all this. But even more, I think what most appealed to me about Anne, though I could never have articulated it at the time, is that the book champions romance and imagination and poetry, but also gently suggests through the character of Marilla, who reluctantly adopts Anne (they'd expected an orphan boy, to help out on the farm, but a mix-up means they get Anne instead) that all these things have to be leavened with a bit of sense and practicality. And by the end of the book, stern Marilla, who has, says her oldest friend "got mellow." Margaret Atwood has argued that the real heroine of the books is Marilla, who learns to love, but I'm not sure I totally agree. It's Anne who teaches her to love, after all. And I think she does it by never relinquishing her dreams; she works hard and tries to be kind and good, and she starts getting what she wants...even on this grown-up re-read I cried when she got her puffed sleeves. There's a very pleasing guide to how to look like Anne on the Penny Dreadful Vintage blog; I'll have to restrain myself from buying every single item on the list.

I was a too-dreamy girl, terrified of witches and ghosts, just as Anne is scared by her own imaginings of the Haunted Wood. I too often got so wrapped up in romantic imaginings that I ignored the poetry of what was happening right in front of me. And maybe reading Anne's adventures over and over was a way of waking up to reality while not giving up the magic. I think maybe this is why Montgomery wrote the books in the first place; Atwood says Montgomery's own life was full of disappointments. Like Anne, she lost her mother when she was 21 months old; her first memory was of seeing her in her casket. She had a lonely childhood with her strict grandparents, and her long-awaited reunion with her father didn't work out as she didn't get on with her stepmother. Her love life was so troubled that in her thirties she gave up utterly on romance and looked after her grandmother. When she finally married, it was rocky; her husband had "religious melancholia" (he was probably bipolar), she lost one son, another son was deeply troubled, and she herself struggled with depression. Three years ago, Montgomery's granddaughter revealed that she may even have taken her own life. She was, it seems, writing as escape, as wish-fulfilment, but also perhaps because she wanted to believe that her values were right, that living well could lead to happiness. In her journal, she wrote a letter to a future great-great-granddaughter in which she says:

I lived a hundred years before you did, but my blood runs in your veins and I lived and loved and suffered and enjoyed and struggled and toiled just as you do. I found life good, in spite of everything... I found that courage and kindness are the two essential things... 

Also in the journals, she writes about how important imagination is, even if it makes you unhappy...

One cannot have imagination and the gift of wings, along with the placidity and contentment of those who creep on the earth's solid surface and never open their eyes on aught but material things. But the gift of wings is better than placidity and contentment after all.

Which still makes me want to shout YES!

And, finally, she writes about reading a poem to her father and his unenthusiastic response which...

squelched me for a time; but if the love of writing is bred in your bones, you will be practically non-squelchable. 

I can't wait to get on with the rest of the Anne books.

Don't wait till you know who you are to start making things

I admit, upfront, this is stolen. From writer-artist Austin Kleon, who's most famous probably for his Humument-esque newspaper blackout poems which are wild. He's just posted an amazing liberating piece on the creative process called How To Steal Like An Artist and 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me (thus sort of making it ok for me to steal one of the nine things). It's so true. You find things out by making stuff. If you're a writer, you learn you who you are by writing. I once spent one school holiday writing a female version of Oliver Twist and though the results were worse than terrible, I don't remotely regret spending that summer ducking and diving through Victorian London. I worked out loads of things about myself and I got essentially a free, time-travelling masterclass from Charles Dickens. And I hate the idea that an artist has to be perfect and finished and all-knowing; who is, for a start? And anyway, we don't. We have to be brave enough to jump in the water anyway. Actually in France, just now, I swam (very briefly; it was still, just, March) in a river. They said there might be pike. I fear fish with teeth. And also I fear pike because they're scary and subterranean and have bulgy eyes. They said it would be cold. And yes, it was. But it was exhilarating. I'm diving into a new play at the moment. I don't know where I'm going. I like that.

The writers' drug

People call walking the writer's drug, and certainly I find if I really can't solve a problem at my desk I can sometimes do it on the move. Recently on a retreat in France, I started taking a dictaphone with me so I could record without having to stop and get out a pen and paper. I've used a dictaphone before when I felt too seizurey to sit up and write. This was different. I'd forgotten how good it was. You don't have to break rhythm; you just have to look like a numptie talking into your dictaphone. But in the middle of the Loire Valley there was no one there to notice. Just those birds' nests. And this earth and sky.

Crying wolf

Vladimir Nabokov:

Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental. But here is what is important. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature. 

For obvious reasons, I love it.