Fool's Paradise

The illustrations for my poetry book Fool’s Paradise are prints by my friend and mentor Hannah Kodicek. Hannah produced a whole series of prints in response to my writing and it was always our plan to publish a special edition of the poem and the prints. We did not have in mind an ebook, but rather a beautifully produced limited edition paper book. But one thing stopped us: when Hannah moved back to Prague she mislaid the first quality prints (the ones I have used in the ebook being her second or third choices) and never found them again. Her death last year almost certainly means that they will never be found.

Nevertheless the ones I have chosen for the ebook do her justice. They were created by painting on a sheet of glass, often I think with her fingers, and then placing the paper on top.

Problems or opportunties in plotting

One of the things I love about writing is the way solving logistical problems in a novel can open up creative opportunities.

The underlying story of the Girl in the Glass, Love of Shadows and the, as yet unnamed, last book in the trilogy is how Anya/Judith follows in her dead mother’s footsteps to become a healer and a wisewoman. But from the word go I had a problem. Of necessity Anya’s mother is dead when the first book opens, so how does she learn the healer’s art?

a) how does she learn about gardening and propagating plants?
b) who gives her the first book on healing?
c) how does she learn to tend wounds and set bones?
d) how does she learn to distill medicines and make creams?
e) how does she learn to read and have access to medicine and herbal books?
f) what triggers her to become a healer?

The answers to each of these crucial questions are:
a) she works with the gardener in her Aunt’s garden
b) the housekeeper Marta gives her the book
c) there’s an earthquake and she works in a dressing station with the wounded
d) she works for a perfumer Elma and so learns to distil and make creams and other beauty products
e) Elma sponsors her use of the library, ostensibly to learn about perfumes,
f) Elma develops cancer and they cannot afford the medicine.

Each solution moves the story forward, often in ways I hadn’t foreseen, opening the plot and characters to more twists and depth. In my next post I will talk more about the decision to make Judith a perfumer  and its consequences.

The Gypsy Hunts

For the last two days I have been working on the third draft of my novel Mother of Wolves It’s an alternative history novel. The alternative history being that of the Romanies.

The idea for the novel first came to me when I visited a castle in the Czech Republic. As is often the case in the Czech Republic the only way to visit the castle was on a guided tour. I was the only English speaker and stood at the back of the group of listening Czechs, reading a couple of sheets of A4 that was meant to be a translation of the tour. As the tour took an hour and I read the sheets in five minutes I spent a lot of time looking in cabinets and at prints.

In one room as the guide droned on in Czech and some annoying person kept asking questions I found myself examining three folk art pictures on the wall. They were not listed in the translation nor did they have any label. The guide did not refer to them and the rest of the party ignored them. They had no significance. But as I looked I was increasingly shocked by the subject matter. They were primitive but graphic pictures of the persecution of gypsies from, I guess, the 18th century.

It is two years since I saw the pictures, but I still remember them in detail. In one a man is hanging from a branch, while in the foreground a gypsy woman (perhaps his wife) is holding a babe while blood pours from her head where her ear has been cut off. As a historian I had known that the gypsies had been the victims of persecution through the centuries and that they too had been the subject of Hitler’s extermination programme. In the Great Devouring as they called the holocaust the numbers of Romany victims varies but it seems that it was at least half a million. But as I investigated further I was shocked by the untold history of persecution over centuries. Gypsy hunts occurred in many European countries. Very simply gypsies were hunted as vermin, no different than foxes. In Jutland in 1835 a hunt “brought in a bag of over 260 men, women and children.” A Rheinland hunter recorded in his list of game for the day “Item: A Gypsy woman with her sucking babe.”

It is a sad fact that no matter how horrific a story one can devise, that reality can always exceed its horror. The tragedy of the Romany people has in some ways always been overshadowed by that of the Jews. They were/are rural, often illiterate, and poor. They also do not have and never had a state or a leadership to speak for them. But what if there had been such a leader…

A name of my own

It’s taken me several years to bite the bullet and seriously consider putting my writing back in to the public arena. When I was younger I didn’t have that problem. I happily sent my work out to publishers. I was of course disappointed when I got rejected, but enough said yes to make up for this. Even when I had a run of rejections I brushed them off and sent out the next batch of letters. I defined myself by my writing.  Had you asked what I was, I would have answered “I’m a poet.” It was that simple: Zoe Brooks was a poet. She was other things of course – a daughter, a student, an Oxford graduate, an arts manager, but above all she was a poet.

That stopped as my other roles took over – mother, wife, heritage professional and then, for the last twenty years, inner city regeneration professional. The only person who still introduced me as Zoe Brooks the poet was my friend Hannah Kodicek. I thought it quaint of her and even a little perverse. I felt sometimes she wasn’t valuing me properly. Then about three years ago I started writing once more.

“Will you publish it?” Hannah asked.

“I don’t know. I was thinking maybe I’d use a pseudonym.”

 “Mmm,” she said. “Are you sure?”

“Oh yes, I don’t think I could do it any other way. I thought maybe Elizabeth Rivers – Elizabeth is my second name and as for Rivers – Brooks/Rivers.”

She laughed. “That sounds like a cop out, it’s not a real pen-name.”

I’ve thought about it a lot since that conversation. She was right, she usually was. What was I ashamed of? Why was I trying to hide? I decided I would not be ready to publish until I was prepared to use my real name. It’s taken me months to start this blog, but I’ve done it. In a few days I plan to publish my first novel as Zoe Brooks

A room of one's own

When I was younger (in my teens and 20’s) I used to write, a lot. I didn’t just write: I was published in poetry anthologies and magazines, but then I stopped. I was too busy with working and being a mum. Maybe the writing abandoned me rather than the other way round. Maybe as Virginia Woolf put it “Every woman needs a room of her own.”, not just physically but psychologically – a creative space.And I didn’t have one.

I’d always made up stories and composed poetry, even before I was taught how to write them down. And not having a room of my own didn’t stop that process, I just didn’t write anything down. Somehow it wasn’t important enough. I needed to get away. About seven years ago I bought a farmhouse in the Czech Republic. I had intended to buy a little hut, somewhere that didn’t need lots doing to it, where I could live in nature for a while and write. Instead I bought a ruined farmhouse, one which would need lots of TLC and work. Talk about sabotaging one’s best intentions!

But the Czech house brought one great benefit – I started to blog about my experiences in “Adventures in the Czech Republic.” And I loved blogging, the feedback was great and I got to know some really lovely, interesting people in cyberspace.

A few years ago the house, although not finished (I had run out of money), was ready to be used for my original purpose. I took a deep breath and sat down with my hands resting on a computer keyboard and a blank screen in front of me.