Biographers Club in London

Reading INK can lead you down all sorts of roads.  

Marfé Ferguson Delano’s 2011 post  on Biographers International Organization (BIO)  led to my joining the group, and recently in London, took me to Mayfair and the Savile Club......

 

......for the February meeting of BIO’s UK counterpart, the Biographers Club. 

Helen Rappoport, British historian and biographer,  spoke on 'The Search for a Subject: New Ways of Looking at Old Stories.' Defining biography as “exploring human lives against a background of human events,” Rappaport presented a lively illustrated talk using her own and others’ works to present novel approaches to writing a life. Most of the following books are British, but are also published in the U.S.

Objects as a Way In

• Paula Byrne has put a new spin on an old subject in her new book, The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things, giving us Austen through everyday objects she lived with: a portrait, a shawl, a barouche (a sort of carriage.) These are the port-keys to personal, social, and even political history that impacted Austen’s life and work.

• The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund de Waal, tells his family’s history on two continents over a century, through the lens of their collection of netsuke, small Japanese carvings.

Begin the Story from a Different Perspective

• Rappaport’s No Place for Ladies: The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War, reflects the author’s penchant to “look at the little people,” in this case, the soldiers’ wives who followed their men to war. She had to describe the war itself – the Big Event – in order to interest a publisher, but she told a new story within that context.

Create a Countdown

To create dramatic tension, structure a biography around a single day, week, month, or year and keep the calendar in focus as the climactic event approaches.

• Rappaport focused on two weeks for Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs, which ends with the murder of the Imperial Russian family.

• James Shapiro’s A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599, recounts nearly daily happenings of that year. I jumped for joy when I discovered this book, just at the time I was writing All the World’s A Stage: A Novel in Five Acts, a middle grade novel about WS & Co., set in that very year.

• The Day Parliament Burned Down, by Caroline Shenton begins at 7am on October 17, 1834 and ends at 6am the following day. Not a biography as such, the book uses the dramatic device of a single day to present a wide picture of contemporary British politics and society.

Private Domestic Life

• In Lenin in Exile, Rappaport wanted to tell the story of the women who traipsed around Europe with Lenin as he plotted the Russian Revolution.  She knew that their stories alone wouldn’t sell the book, so she centered it around Lenin’s activities as she revealed the relationships with his wife, mother-in-law, mother, and mistress.

• Frances Wilson’s The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, brings to light the Muse of her famous brother. True, it is Dorothy's relationship to a famous man that makes her story publishable, but it is a story worth telling.

True Thrillers and Crimes

• INK’s own Steve Sheinkin has unearthed some thrillers and true crimes to tickle our fancy.  His Bomb:The Race to Build and Steal the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon, the cover of which is littered with well-deserved medals, is a group biography of scientists, spies, and scientist-spies. His latest, Lincoln’s Grave Robbers, promises just as many dastardly villains and cliff-hangers.

• Kate Summerscale's Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of the Victorian Lady, describes a divorce trial of an alleged adulteress. (I wonder if Simon and Garfunkel knew about this Mrs. Robinson.) Summerscale couches the scandal in a discussion of Victorian double standards and crackpot theories about women’s sexuality.

Bits and Bobs
Helen Rappaport ended with a quote from Hilary Mantel, double Booker Prize winner for her Thomas Cromwell novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies.  I googled the quote and found a whole interview. 

Mantel says, “Nothing touches me so profoundly as the traces the dead have left; it’s an intellectual fascination but also an emotional pull….I actually like the constraints, enjoy solving the narrative problems that arise when you have strict guidelines of fact....You can’t change the facts of an incident, but you can change its whole feel and meaning by the angle from which you report it.”

Just days later the Guardian newspaper published The Art of Biography is Alive and Well . Press on INKsters!

The March Biographers Club meeting included a delicious lunch at another posh Mayfair venue, Corrigan’s. 

Neil McKenna spoke about his new book, Fanny & Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England. Their “crime?” Cross-dressing, but since that wasn’t actually a crime, when they were arrested, the court dredged up the seamier sides of gay Victorian London that "outraged public decency and corrupted public morals." (Spoiler alert: they were acquitted.) 

McKenna sees his subject as larger than the “doom and gloom, crime and criminality” of gay history. He wants to reclaim and reveal the “joyous, happy, effervescent” gay subculture that often created “pretend family relationships” to support a group that was victimized by the establishment. 

This reminded me that however poor and/or oppressed a group may be, they find joy and love in the midst of hardship. In writing their stories, I want to balance their struggles with their comforts and pleasures.

Upcoming CCSS Workshop

The Children's Literature Council of Southern California is holding a workshop called "“Embracing Your Core: Libraries Literature, and the New Common Core State Standards" on May 11, from 9-12 in South Pasadena, California.  Speakers are Roger Sutton, Editor of Horn Book, and Kristin Fontichiaro of the University of Michigan. Click here for more information.

Report from London 2: Being an Account of the London Book Fair in General and the State of Children’s Nonfiction in Particular

I went to the London Book Fair last week, the UK’s equivalent of BEA.  Some things were the same – cavernous convention halls, loads of booths and meeting areas, crowds of people, and a full calendar of interviews and panel discussions. 

But some things were different.  Every year a foreign country is featured and this year it was China and a group of 21 government-approved writers. Chinese publishers abounded, along with various exhibits including one that explained how the Chinese had developed movable (clay) type long before Gutenberg. This being England, there had been numerous op-eds in the newspapers protesting the focus on China since its censorship ministry is alive and well. 

Another difference: though I picked up a lovely carrier bag at the entrance, expecting to fill it with the usual freebies found at US book fairs, there were none!  No free pens and bookmarks, no ARCs (advanced reading copies,) not even any Hershey’s kisses in fishbowls.

CHILDREN’S NONFICTION – US v UK

I was pleased to find a full complement of panels on children’s literature, including one titled The World Into Words: Why Reading Nonfiction is Vital to Children. [Note to London Book Fair organizers: Children’s lit is a hot topic! Don’t put us in the smallest meeting room next year. We overflowed the room and much of the corridor outside.] 

Nicola Davies and Vivian French, both prolific nonfiction authors, were moderated by Jake Hope, Reading Coordinator for the Lancashire County Council. He began by asking why they were drawn to writing nonfiction. 

Viv French discussed her desire to share information about what she finds exciting. She praised her grandfather for answering all her myriad questions when she was a child, and in fact brings such a grandfather into her book T.Rex.  For French, the best books come from a passion to answer questions and to lead readers to more exploration.

Nicola Davies wants to share her life-centering passion for the natural world. She writes to excite her readers and to engage them in a dialogue with the world: to be in the moment, watching, and making connections.  For Davies, Story is a carrier bag for information.  Story makes that information easy to remember and makes connections between a child’s inner and outer worlds. The information is a rope that you pay out gradually to readers with pacing, tension, and drama. A prime example is her award-winning Ice Bear.

Davies has found a prejudice against this sort of narrative nonfiction from teachers and librarians.  They want information books without the narrative. Both French and Davies praised their UK publisher, Walker Books (owner of Candlewick) for being a champion of their kind of narrative nonfiction. Each author had a name for straight ‘information books.’ Davies called them “tile-grouting books” where a photo – the tile – dominates the page with bits of caption and text – the grout – surrounding it.  French called them “gobbet books” with no story. [gobbet, according to the Cambridge dictionary means “a small piece or lump of something, especially food.”]

As in the US, UK teachers are forced to teach to tests these days. (The UK has a national curriculum.) Davies lamented that because of this, children often don’t get the chance to read for pleasure, and teachers can’t engage them in open-ended learning. All this makes publishers more cautious about publishing narrative nonfiction.

FINAL SCORE: US 3 – UK 0

Davies and French agreed that things were better in the US.

1) While we complain about the lack of children’s books reviews in the press, they say it’s much worse in the UK and that nonfiction books never get reviewed. 

2) They praised all the nonfiction awards given in the US, because they have none in the UK. Davies rallied the troops, asking nonfiction authors to demand more publicity.

3) The authors perceive that American teachers are more open to their kind of books than UK teachers, but partly blamed that on UK teacher education courses. They pleaded for more time allotted to children’s literature in teacher training classes, which they believe happens in the US.

NEW TECHNOLOGY: NO TWISTED KNICKERS, PLEASE

French and Davies both love new technology. Viv French writes for very young readers and savors the prospects of add-ons to her books. Nicola Davies herself indulges in all forms of communication – books, i-Pad, kindle. “Don’t get your knickers in a twist about technology,” she warned booklovers. 

Technology can encourage reading. 

Things aren’t sorted out yet, and the next few years will be like a washing machine tumble, but we will figure out how to combine quality material with new technologies, keeping an authorial voice in the mix. And kids need to watch television and use the internet, because that’s the modern world. French saw an ideal future where kids read books for concentrated information, then go to the internet for further research.

 

Moderator Jake Hope, discussed budget cuts in schools and loss of school libraries. He encouraged schools to work with public libraries, and proposed bringing together librarians, teachers, parents, publishers, and authors to address the issues of libraries, schools, kids, curricula, and books. Davies described the merging of library and school services and fabulous reading programs in her home in Denbighshire, North Wales. French praised her new local Edinburgh, Scotland library which offers the interaction between books and computers that she favors.

Last words from Viv French: write letters to newspapers to demand more reviews of nonfiction children’s books.

Nicola Davies: keep libraries open and support children’s reading for pleasure.

MISCELLANEOUS QUOTES HEARD RECENTLY

David Hockney: “What technology needs is imaginative mad people to start using it.”

Howard Jacobson, winner of the 2011 Booker Prize: “Literature is the solvent of ideology, so never ban anything.”

Jacobson again: “What we think is very boring. People are banal in what they think. Only in art are we truly interesting. Literature dramatizes: that’s why I attach so much importance to it.”

Banner ad on London buses: "Some people are gay. Get over it."