Jon Blake's Blog - Posts Tagged "cardiff"
I do not live in England
I've just had to correct a Google Books profile of me which asserted, without apparent evidence, that I live in England. There have also been a few reviews of The Last Free Cat, similarly, that claim my YA novel is set in England. And funny enough, we did a house swap with a US expat in Bavaria last year, and saw on her calendar the word ENGLAND! over the dates she was to be in our house.
All of this perhaps stems from the illusion, particularly common in the USA, that the names "England" and "Britain" are interchangeable. This is not the case. England is one nation in a group of nations which make up the nation of Great Britain, the others being (contentiously) Northern Ireland, (possibly not for much longer) Scotland, and the country in which I live, Wales. Wales has only partial sovereignity through a devolved national assembly; while the Welsh are highly unlikely to vote for total independence, no-one questions the fact that Wales is a bona fide nation, with, besides anything else, its own language, increasingly popular as the medium by which children in Wales are educated.
I am emphatically not a Welsh nationalist. I came to live in South Wales over a quarter century ago largely because of the area's internationalist and socialist traditions, which sadly have withered with the destruction of the coal and steel industries. But I certainly do love living in Cardiff, and am annoyed as anyone when Wales is marginalised or patronised.
The landscape of The Last Free Cat almost entirely derives from Wales. But I rarely use specific places in my stories, which perhaps explains why I am less well known here than literary figures who have sold a lot less books. Then again, I'd never call myself a Welsh writer. Anyone who reads '69ers' will be well aware of my origins. But just to make it doubly clear, I do not live in England now!
All of this perhaps stems from the illusion, particularly common in the USA, that the names "England" and "Britain" are interchangeable. This is not the case. England is one nation in a group of nations which make up the nation of Great Britain, the others being (contentiously) Northern Ireland, (possibly not for much longer) Scotland, and the country in which I live, Wales. Wales has only partial sovereignity through a devolved national assembly; while the Welsh are highly unlikely to vote for total independence, no-one questions the fact that Wales is a bona fide nation, with, besides anything else, its own language, increasingly popular as the medium by which children in Wales are educated.
I am emphatically not a Welsh nationalist. I came to live in South Wales over a quarter century ago largely because of the area's internationalist and socialist traditions, which sadly have withered with the destruction of the coal and steel industries. But I certainly do love living in Cardiff, and am annoyed as anyone when Wales is marginalised or patronised.
The landscape of The Last Free Cat almost entirely derives from Wales. But I rarely use specific places in my stories, which perhaps explains why I am less well known here than literary figures who have sold a lot less books. Then again, I'd never call myself a Welsh writer. Anyone who reads '69ers' will be well aware of my origins. But just to make it doubly clear, I do not live in England now!
The fight against illiteracy and the Cardiff Children's Literature Festival
When Cardiff Council asked me to launch their Reading Power literacy campaign, they almost certainly did not know how much of my life had been dedicated to the battle against illiteracy. I was brought up in a largely impoverished area of Southampton where there was an entire class of my primary school (the sinisterly named 'Remove') dedicated to the functionally illiterate. I was part of a small minority fortunate enough to have high literacy skills, and though I was happy to trumpet my abilities to anyone who would listen, I was equally happy to help out others with spelling or grammar.
In the 1970s I studied English and Education at York under the radical educationalist Ian Lister. Here I came across the work of Paolo Freire, with his emphasis on the necessity of teaching relevant and empowering words to the peasantry of Brazil in order to combat illiteracy.
After a couple of years as a secondary English and Drama teacher, I went to to teach what FE institutions euphemistically called “Communications” to YTS trainees, some the product of custodial institutions. Unable to make any progress with them through conventional methods, I started recording their life experiences, typing these up, and reading them back to them. Immediately these reluctant students began trying to read their own words themselves: I can still remember the glee in their eyes as they did so.
Crucial to this process was a lack of censorship. I wrote exactly what they told me, including stories of violent fights at borstal with snooker balls hidden in socks. It was crucial that they understood that the world of words did not have to mean the imposition of an alien culture.
There was an irony in this for me. When I look now at the stories I first wrote it's clear to see the horrible imprint of the bourgeois children's books I was reading. I also had to learn to speak in my own language.
My style had certainly changed when I got my first story published in 1984. My model was the informal, iconoclastic first person narrative of Huckleberry Finn. Just as my working-class mother would warmly welcome guests into her home and make them feel at ease, I wanted my books to be friendly and accessible to all. If anything I bent the stick too far and sacrificed aesthetics and calm consideration to energy and conversational manner. But I always sought out the reader whose intelligence was not always matched by a skill with words – a Billy Casper of Kes, that great 70s example of how to write for the disenfranchised.
Since that first story, over a near thirty year career, I have written for many audiences, but my concern for the reluctant reader has been a constant. A number of publishers, particularly educational publishers, produce what they call HiLo (high interest, low ability) books, and writing these naturally attracted me: plays, short novels, graphic novels, all geared at motivating those of limited reading ability to read. On the strength of this workI was asked by the OUP in 2003 to devise a series specifically for boys. Whether they expected Antony Horowitz style boy detective novels I don't know, but if so they had asked the wrong person. I wrote Stinky Finger's House of Fun, an iconoclastic, absurdist story which they duly rejected but which went on to sell 20,000 when published by Hodder, spawning five more novels which, just as planned, have engaged boy readers who had never previously shown enthusiasm for reading (as many school visits and Amazon reviews have testified).
I am proud of my back catalogue. My novels have not sold as well as those produced by the top fantasy writers, or whoever writes those stories about fairies, but I aim to write books which children and young adults find empowering and eye-opening, stories which stand against a tide which over the past thirty years has become increasingly conservative, geared not to change young people's view of themselves but to keep them in their place.
As Freire observed so long ago, you cannot combat illiteracy without changing self-image. And this has been the watchword of the community arts work I have practised alongside my writing career. The projects have been too numerous to mention but a key example was the work I did for Sgript Cymru alongside Angharad Blythe in Merthyr. We opted to work with a class of adults with learning difficulties, teaching them to write short plays. What was eye-opening from the outset was that these people had never been encouraged to be creative in any way. Exhaustive attempts had been made to improve their writing, but the students were simply repeating a lifetime's experience of failure.
It was not an easy task to get these plays written. Simply naming a character seemed a Herculean task to these students. Slowly, painstakingly, however, we got a few lines of dialogue from them and at the end of each session acted these out. An experience of success, of potency, is vital in motivating people of such little confidence. Gradually that confidence grew until we had a playlet from everybody, and then came the coup de grace: a staged performance in the college hall, using professional actors (thanks, Hijinx), in front of friends and family. Sadly this wasn't filmed, but if it had been, everyone would have witnessed the thrill in the eyes of the new writers as their words came out of the mouths of the actors. Now the door was open. Now we had the possibility of moving forward, cementing the students' new view of themselves, improving their basic skills - given the funding.
Tragically one of the legacies of Thatcherism was that the arts projects having the most revolutionary effect on the working class had their arteries cut. I was fortunate enough while teacher training in Barnsley to see Red Ladder theatre performing a play about the steel industry in a working-man's club. I saw people recognising their own lives, making sense of them, being urged to defend themselves against the attacks to come. Four years later the Miners Strike began: we all live in the aftermath of that tragic struggle.
Which brings me to the present day, a time in which the Arts Council and its offshoots are increasingly the handmaiden of those commercial outfits which dominate literature and the other arts. How my heart sinks as I view the brochure of the first Cardiff Children's Literature Festival and see a celebration of Rainbow Magic fairies, the question where is the Welsh Twilight, novels celebrating king and country, and the usual obeisance to he-who-cannot-be-gainsaid, the sworn enemy of everything progressive, Roald Dahl. But what irks me most is that this event is being justified as being in some way significant in the war against illiteracy. Really? Do book festivals attract the semi-literate? I can't pretend to be an expert, but I have presented at Hay, and I can't say it was the most proletarian event I've ever attended.
Even in sending authors to schools the organisers' plan is ill thought out. If the event is aiming at combating illiteracy, why pull the names of the participating schools out of a hat? At least the launch of Reading Power took place at Kitchener Primary, a school with a high population of children of parents who do not speak English.
During my nineteen years as a resident of the inner city area of Adamsdown, years in which I acted as unofficial lending library to a host of neighbours surprised to find an author in their midst, I came to have great respect for the teachers and heads in the educational front line. In return I did what I could, getting funding for a range of projects, always looking to motivate the ones who most needed it. Together we did some great work, including the Adamsdown Song project which brought this small area to the attention of people the other side of the world. I wonder how many of the organisers of the Cardiff Children's Literature Festival have shown such commitment? If so, perhaps they would not employ such glib talk about literacy to promote their event.
In the 1970s I studied English and Education at York under the radical educationalist Ian Lister. Here I came across the work of Paolo Freire, with his emphasis on the necessity of teaching relevant and empowering words to the peasantry of Brazil in order to combat illiteracy.
After a couple of years as a secondary English and Drama teacher, I went to to teach what FE institutions euphemistically called “Communications” to YTS trainees, some the product of custodial institutions. Unable to make any progress with them through conventional methods, I started recording their life experiences, typing these up, and reading them back to them. Immediately these reluctant students began trying to read their own words themselves: I can still remember the glee in their eyes as they did so.
Crucial to this process was a lack of censorship. I wrote exactly what they told me, including stories of violent fights at borstal with snooker balls hidden in socks. It was crucial that they understood that the world of words did not have to mean the imposition of an alien culture.
There was an irony in this for me. When I look now at the stories I first wrote it's clear to see the horrible imprint of the bourgeois children's books I was reading. I also had to learn to speak in my own language.
My style had certainly changed when I got my first story published in 1984. My model was the informal, iconoclastic first person narrative of Huckleberry Finn. Just as my working-class mother would warmly welcome guests into her home and make them feel at ease, I wanted my books to be friendly and accessible to all. If anything I bent the stick too far and sacrificed aesthetics and calm consideration to energy and conversational manner. But I always sought out the reader whose intelligence was not always matched by a skill with words – a Billy Casper of Kes, that great 70s example of how to write for the disenfranchised.
Since that first story, over a near thirty year career, I have written for many audiences, but my concern for the reluctant reader has been a constant. A number of publishers, particularly educational publishers, produce what they call HiLo (high interest, low ability) books, and writing these naturally attracted me: plays, short novels, graphic novels, all geared at motivating those of limited reading ability to read. On the strength of this workI was asked by the OUP in 2003 to devise a series specifically for boys. Whether they expected Antony Horowitz style boy detective novels I don't know, but if so they had asked the wrong person. I wrote Stinky Finger's House of Fun, an iconoclastic, absurdist story which they duly rejected but which went on to sell 20,000 when published by Hodder, spawning five more novels which, just as planned, have engaged boy readers who had never previously shown enthusiasm for reading (as many school visits and Amazon reviews have testified).
I am proud of my back catalogue. My novels have not sold as well as those produced by the top fantasy writers, or whoever writes those stories about fairies, but I aim to write books which children and young adults find empowering and eye-opening, stories which stand against a tide which over the past thirty years has become increasingly conservative, geared not to change young people's view of themselves but to keep them in their place.
As Freire observed so long ago, you cannot combat illiteracy without changing self-image. And this has been the watchword of the community arts work I have practised alongside my writing career. The projects have been too numerous to mention but a key example was the work I did for Sgript Cymru alongside Angharad Blythe in Merthyr. We opted to work with a class of adults with learning difficulties, teaching them to write short plays. What was eye-opening from the outset was that these people had never been encouraged to be creative in any way. Exhaustive attempts had been made to improve their writing, but the students were simply repeating a lifetime's experience of failure.
It was not an easy task to get these plays written. Simply naming a character seemed a Herculean task to these students. Slowly, painstakingly, however, we got a few lines of dialogue from them and at the end of each session acted these out. An experience of success, of potency, is vital in motivating people of such little confidence. Gradually that confidence grew until we had a playlet from everybody, and then came the coup de grace: a staged performance in the college hall, using professional actors (thanks, Hijinx), in front of friends and family. Sadly this wasn't filmed, but if it had been, everyone would have witnessed the thrill in the eyes of the new writers as their words came out of the mouths of the actors. Now the door was open. Now we had the possibility of moving forward, cementing the students' new view of themselves, improving their basic skills - given the funding.
Tragically one of the legacies of Thatcherism was that the arts projects having the most revolutionary effect on the working class had their arteries cut. I was fortunate enough while teacher training in Barnsley to see Red Ladder theatre performing a play about the steel industry in a working-man's club. I saw people recognising their own lives, making sense of them, being urged to defend themselves against the attacks to come. Four years later the Miners Strike began: we all live in the aftermath of that tragic struggle.
Which brings me to the present day, a time in which the Arts Council and its offshoots are increasingly the handmaiden of those commercial outfits which dominate literature and the other arts. How my heart sinks as I view the brochure of the first Cardiff Children's Literature Festival and see a celebration of Rainbow Magic fairies, the question where is the Welsh Twilight, novels celebrating king and country, and the usual obeisance to he-who-cannot-be-gainsaid, the sworn enemy of everything progressive, Roald Dahl. But what irks me most is that this event is being justified as being in some way significant in the war against illiteracy. Really? Do book festivals attract the semi-literate? I can't pretend to be an expert, but I have presented at Hay, and I can't say it was the most proletarian event I've ever attended.
Even in sending authors to schools the organisers' plan is ill thought out. If the event is aiming at combating illiteracy, why pull the names of the participating schools out of a hat? At least the launch of Reading Power took place at Kitchener Primary, a school with a high population of children of parents who do not speak English.
During my nineteen years as a resident of the inner city area of Adamsdown, years in which I acted as unofficial lending library to a host of neighbours surprised to find an author in their midst, I came to have great respect for the teachers and heads in the educational front line. In return I did what I could, getting funding for a range of projects, always looking to motivate the ones who most needed it. Together we did some great work, including the Adamsdown Song project which brought this small area to the attention of people the other side of the world. I wonder how many of the organisers of the Cardiff Children's Literature Festival have shown such commitment? If so, perhaps they would not employ such glib talk about literacy to promote their event.
