The Women Writers Handbook 2020

A.S. Byatt, Philippa Gregory, Anne Sebba, Sarah Waters, Claire Tomalin, Carol Ann Duffy, Ida Vitale, Emma Woolf, Madeleine Thien, Kit de Waal, Suchen Christine Lim, Jasvinder Sanghera, Jackie Kay, Jaki McCarrick, Laura Miles, April De Angelis, Bryony Lavery, Djamila Ribeiro, Kalista Sy, Fiona Rintou, Ann Sandham

• Publisher: Aurora Metro Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781912430345
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Women Authors Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

A revised edition of the publisher's inaugural publication in 1990, which won the Pandora Award from Women-in-Publishing. Inspirational in its original format, this new edition features poems, stories, essays and interviews with 30 + women writers, both emerging authors and luminaries of contemporary literature such as:

– Choices: The Writing of Possession by A.S. Byatt

– Becoming a Writer by Saskia Calliste

– Jenny – a song by April de Angelis

– Interview with Kit de Waal

– Anne Hathaway by Carol Ann Duffy

– Let the World Burn through you by Sian Evans

– Early Women Writers by Philippa Gregory

– The Creative Process by Mary Hamer

– The Writing Life by Jackie Kay

– Screen Diversity by Shuchi Kothari

– Writing Plays by Bryony Lavery

– The Novelist as Wanderer by Annee Lawrence

– Interview with Roseanne Liang

– Mei Kwei, I love you by Suchen Christine Lim

– The Badminton Court by Jaki McCarrick

– Interview with Laura Miles

– The Motherload by Raman Mundair

– The Feminist Library by Magda Oldziejewska

– Fortune Favours The Brave … by Kaite O'Reilly

– Interview with Jacqueline Pepall

– The Art of Translation by Gabi Reigh

– Conditions of Amefricanity -Djamila Ribeiro

– Inspiration: Where does it come from? by Fiona Rintoul

– Interview with Jasvinder Sanghera

– A Room of One's Own …or Not? by Anne Sebba

– Being a Feminist Writer by Kalista Sy

– Mslexia by Debbie Taylor

– My Mother, Reading a Novel by Madeleine Thien

– Interview with Clare Tomalin

– Fortune by Ida Vitale, transl. Tanya Huntington

– Interview with Sarah Waters

– Virginia Woolf…100 years on by Emma Woolf

Includes the original writing workshops plus illustrations from contemporary and vintage illustrators. Guest editor Ann Sandham has compiled the new collection.

Reviews:

The Women Writers Handbook is a superb, powerful collection of writings from 30 women that are considered to be the emerging authors and luminaries of contemporary fiction, from Carol Ann Duffy to Kit De Waal. With its short chapters, background to who the author is and with 20% of all profits going towards the campaign for a full-sized statue of Virginia Woolf, the first in the UK, it is absolutely a book to buy, read and help to highlight the creativities of women, as well as inspiring other women to believe that they can also do it too. Not only is every piece of work that is included different, well written and informative but the way that the whole book is laid out with inspiring quotes but also beautiful illustrations from women. I loved the activities that can be found at the end of the book, writing workshop activities that could be used within a group in order to breakdown boundaries, to help overcome the fears and misgivings of individuals who would like to become writers, as well as activities to help create depth in characters. I think this inclusion of interactivity, as well as giving a feminist spin on fairy tales is a cleverly unique concept....its absolutely one to pick up and for a worthy cause too. --thereadingcloset Knowledgeably compiled and deftly edited, 'The Women Writers Handbook'; by Ann Sandham (Commissioning Editor for Ladybird Children's Books at Penguin Random House) also features an informative Foreword by Cheryl Robson (the Aurora Metro Books publisher). Of special note is the inclusion of a instruction article on how to operate a writing workshop, a five page Resource Directory (compiled by Saskia Calliste), and a fun one-page Quiz. Informative, thought-provoking, inspiring, 'The Women Writers Handbook'; is an extraordinary, unique, and thoroughly 'reader friendly' in both organization and presentation. Certain to be an immediate and enduringly popular addition to personal, professional, community, college, and university library Writing/Publishing collections in general, 'The Women Writers Handbook'; is unreservedly recommended for Women's Fiction, Literature, and Writing supplemental curriculum reading lists in particular. --Midwest Book Review As a young woman both studying literature and harbouring dreams of becoming a writer myself, it seems to me that the world of writers is a great looming circle of male literary greats. Dickens, Wilde, Shakespeare, Scott, Browning the list of the most respected literary figures seems both to be endless and decidedly full of men. The whole industry seems overwhelmingly male with merely a few select women being let into this strange world governed by men. Although I have felt very welcomed and my voice heard in my studies and critique of literature, there seems to be precious few ways for me to become a meaningful contributor to the discipline. That is why it is so important that a book like this exists, giving guidance like this, telling stories like these, and using women's voices to do so. Sandham offers a helping hand to all aspiring female writers to aid them in navigating their ventures into the literary world. The Handbook offers a space to women from all backgrounds to share their stories in my favourite segment: Women's Voices. One story that stood out to me most was told by Magda Oldziejewska in The Feminist Library. Oldziejewska recounts her experience of discovering the Feminist Library; an archive in London which exists to preserve the lives, works and memories of many women. I especially liked this piece as it shows that there does in fact exist a space for women to feel not only safe and welcomed, but actively valued in the literary world. A space where we can learn about the forgotten women who came before us and ensure that the great female powers of our time do not slip into the void of lost female writers. The importance of creating access points to the literary world for women is monumental and Sandham has so beautifully created another in her making of this Handbook. The later segments of the Handbook (Writing Workshops and Workshop Sessions) give an incredible level of insight into the more finnicky aspects of serious writing with guides on Developing Complex Characters to Self-censorship. The frank discussion provided throughout the workshop segments is an indispensable tool for any budding author looking to get real and seriously improve the quality of their writing. I would recommend The Women Writers' Handbook not only to women with explicit intentions to embark on their literary careers who need some support, but to anyone who seeks to better understand both the struggles and triumphs of women in the world of literature.

--portobellobookblog

What a fabulous source book - full of inspirational essays, short stories, poems and interviews with some top female writers - about the writing process, feminism and the experience of female authors, designed to get the juices flowing for any woman who has the hankering to write. If this was not enough to make you want to grab your note book and pen and embark on a writing project, then there are also writing exercises designed to stimulate the creative impulses and a directory of resources to help you on your way! And... quotes from some of the top women writers, both contemporary, and from history, are spread liberally throughout the publication, as encouragement. If I have not already persuaded you that you need a copy of this book to hand on the writing desk you are now surely going to purchase (should you not have one already), perhaps it will help if you know that 20% of the profits from the sale of this book will go towards the Virginia Woolf statue campaign!

--Sue, Vine Voice

Thrilled to get my hands on a copy of this updated version of The Women Writers' Handbook, released to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Aurora Metro books. Edited by Ann Sandham, a fabulous collection of poems, stories and interviews from a diverse group of internationally acclaimed women. Also included are the workshops from the original edition of this anthology and there is a newly updated resources list. As well as being a good read with lovely black and white drawings dotted throughout, it's a really useful book - one I know I will return to time and time again. In addition, 20% of each sale is being donated to the Virginia Woolf statue campaign to go towards funding a statue of the esteemed British writer - the author of pioneering essays on women's writing and the politics of power, so this is very apt.

--Daisy Hollands

In aid of theVirginia Woolf Statue campaign at: www.aurorametro.org/virgini-woolf-statue

WOMEN’S VOICES

CHOICES: THE WRITING OF
POSSESSION

A.S. Byatt

The beginning of Possession, and the first choice, was most unusually for me, the title. I thought of it in the British Library, watching that great Coleridge scholar, Kathleen Coburn, circumambulating the catalogue. I thought: she has given all her life to his thoughts, and then I thought: she has mediated his thoughts to me. And then I thought, “Does he possess her, or does she possess him? There could be a novel called Possession about the relations between living and dead minds.” This must have been in the late 60s. It was the time of the nouveau roman, of the novel as “text”.

When I first recognize a thought as the germ of a novel or story, I form a shape, or file, in a corner of my mind, to which I add things that seem to belong to it, quotations, observations. At that stage this Gestalt is more like the plan for a painting than a novel. It has colour and texture, though I have to think very hard to call these to mind. The Urgestalt of Possession was a grey cloudy web, ghostly and spidery, to do with the ghostliness and connectedness of the original idea. I think it was also to do with the nouveau roman, which I still visualize in that form. I imagined my text as a web of scholarly quotations and parodies through which the poems and writings of the dead should loom at the reader, to be surmised and guessed at.

The next decisive choices came in the 1980s, when I was teaching Browning and George Eliot, and also lecturing on Henry James and his father, Henry James senior, who had been a leading Swedenborgian. I had had the idea that the word “possession” involved both the daemonic and the economic – Kathleen Coburn had pulled off a notorious coup when she bought the Coleridge notebooks for Toronto. Reading the Browning letters made me see that “possession” had a primary sexual connotation, too. I made a decision: there should be two couples, man and woman, one alive and one dead. The novel would concern the complex relations between these two pairs. My grey cobwebby palimpsest changed colour – it took on a lurid black shot with crimson and scarlet, colours of passion. I was teaching that great novel, The Bostonians, with its world of “witches, wizards, mediums, and spirit-rappers and roaring radicals” to a generation of students involved in the politics of gender, who disliked Henry James’s tragi-comic treatment of lesbian passion. It occurred to me that in the world of nineteenth-century spiritualism and feminism, possession had both its meanings at once. So there was a need for the nineteenth-century woman to be a lesbian, or thought to be a lesbian, and the twentieth-century woman scholar to be a feminist. What George Eliot’s letters added to this texture of texts to think about was the sense I always have that her real passionate self is splendidly absent from the letters kept by the people who kept them. Her love-letters, unlike those of the Brownings, were buried with her. It is the luck of an unusually devoted marriage between poets once separated that we have the Browning letters. There have been serious proposals to dig up George Eliot. There is a Gothic plot, I thought, of violence and skulduggery. The Gestalt got more lurid, purple, black, vermilion, with flying white forms.

I half-knew that the form of my novel should be a parody of every possible form, popular and “high culture”, when I was asked to review Umberto Eco’s Reflections on the Name of the Rose. I had already had the idea that Possession should be a kind of detective story, with the scholars as the detectives, when I read The Name of the Rose, which combines medieval theology, Church history, gleefully bloodthirsty horrors, reflections on the form of the novel, with a hero who is an avatar or precursor of Sherlock Holmes. What entranced me about Eco’s Reflections was his pleasure – “I wanted to murder a monk”, and his technical reflections on the fact that detective stories and melodramas had to be written backwards. If you want to burn down a library quickly and irretrievably you must make it burnable when you invent its architecture. I had been thinking a lot about the pleasure principle in art. Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction – it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing. It can do the other things if it gives pleasure, as Coleridge knew, and said. And the pleasure of fiction is narrative discovery, as it was easy to say about television serials and detective stories, but not, in those days, about serious novels.

So my novel should be a parody, not of Sherlock Holmes, but of the Margery Allingham detective stories I grew up on. It should learn from my childhood obsession, Georgette Heyer, to be a romance, and it could learn, simultaneously from Hawthorne, Henry James’s predecessor, that a historical romance is not realist, and desires to “connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us”. I added things – it should be an epistolary novel, which meant writing the letters the scholars should find; it should contain early narrative forms – Victorian women writers wrote fairy tales – and late ones – bits of biographies and critical “accounts” of what was going on.

The Gestalt in my mind changed colour and form and became delicious – all green and gold, the colours of Tennyson illustrations in my mind as a child, of dream landscapes, of childhood imaginings of a world brighter and more jewel-like than this one.

There was a huge problem. I knew that modern forms were parodic – not only Eco, but the intelligent criticism of Malcolm Bradbury had been pointing that out – parodic, not in a sneering or mocking way, but as “rewriting” or “representing” the past. The structural necessity of my new form was that the poems of my two poets, the most important thing about them in my own view, should be in this no-longer ghostly text. And I am not a poet, and novelists who write poems usually come to grief. Robertson Davies, the Canadian novelist, had written a novel with a parodic libretto in fact made up of the poems of Thomas Lovell Beddoes. I said to the poet D.J. Enright at a party that I was contemplating using the early poems of Pound that look as though they could be by Browning. “Nonsense,” he said. “Write your own.”

So I tried. My mind has been full since childhood of the rhythms of Tennyson and Browning, Rossetti and Keats. I read and reread Emily Dickinson, whose harsher and more sceptical voice I found more exciting than Christina Rossetti’s meek resignation. I wanted a fierce female voice. And I found I was possessed – it was actually quite frightening – the nineteenth-century poems that were not nineteenth-century poems wrote themselves, hardly blotted, fitting into the metaphorical structure of my novel, but not mine, as my prose is mine.

There is one further late choice I should like to mention. There are three passages in the nineteenth-century narrative which are recounted by a Victorian “omniscient” third-person narrator. These three include the Epilogue, and tell what might be thought of as the most important, beautiful and terrible moments in the lives of the Victorian characters. I still receive angry letters from time to time from all over the world, saying these passages are a mistake – that I have cleverly told the story of the past through documents, diaries, letters, poems, and am breaking my own convention incompetently. But my decision was very deliberate. It was partly polemical, for two reasons. I do believe that biographies are a kind of shadow-play, and that what really mattered is likely to elude the piecers-together of lives. (Doris Lessing endorses this view, mischievously, at the beginning of her recent autobiography.) I also believe that the third-person narrator has been much maligned in the recent past – it does not aspire or pretend to be “God” – simply the narrative voice, which knows what it does know. And I wanted to show that such a voice can bring the reader nearer the passions and the thoughts of the characters, without any obligation to admire the cleverness of the novelist. There is a nice irony about this – the writer and reader share what the critics and scholars cannot discover.

And the Gestalt now? A green and gold and blue balloon, far away, untouchable. A writer can’t think about novels that have gone away. The Gestalt of the one I am writing, about the 1960s, is a jagged harlequin pattern of coloured fragments and smoking bonfires. And there is something weak about the narrative line, or tension, connecting these, that I’m trying to deal with.

This essay was first presented as a speech at Tate Gallery, 12 January 1994 and printed in Threepenny Review, US, July 1995; also in the Independent January 1994.

A.S. Byatt

A.S. Byatt is renowned internationally for her novels and short stories. Her novels include the Booker Prize-winning Possession, The Biographer’s Tale and the quartet, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman. Her novel, The Children’s Book, was published in 2009.

Her highly acclaimed collections of short stories include Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, Elementals and Little Black Book of Stories. A distinguished critic as well as a writer of fiction, A.S. Byatt was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.

“I am out with lanterns,
looking for myself.”

– Emily Dickinson

BECOMING A WRITER

Saskia Calliste

“What do you want to be when you grow up Saskia?” Every few years, my reply would vary drastically, as did the why. “A corporate lawyer because I want a house like the dad from Clueless.” Growing up black, in and out of council estates, dreaming about more desirable real estate became a form of liberation. I was eight when I coined that particularly bizarre response that would mostly prompt a look of pity which essentially said, “keep dreaming”. From everyone except my mum, of course: in the eyes of maternal law, her youngest could do no wrong and would only ever excel in her endeavours: even despite our gipsy-esque lifestyle. By that I mean, ever since I moved to Portsmouth at age five, because of an itch to live by the sea my mum had to scratch, we moved roughly every two years.

I had been to three different primary schools by the time I was eleven. I can’t complain too much; the adapt or die instinct is instilled in me, and the older I get, the less I resent, and the more thankful I am for it.

As a child, I spent a lot of time in my head, in the movies I watched and the books I read. I wasn’t an introvert, despite the less than friendly neighbourhood racists, whose sole mission was to instill in me that I didn’t belong there. I still had friends, and I still played outside: adapt or die. I loved riding my scooter through Bransbury Park come rain or shine. It was in those moments when I had felt the freest. It was a time where I wasn’t black in a white town, and I wasn’t the fat friend of my more popular peers: I was just a little girl enjoying her freedom.

When it came to school, I was good at most things, except science. I had always dreamed about going to university as a kid, which is odd because my mum didn’t go – she got a job straight out of high school doing secretarial work and followed on that trajectory for much of her adult life. Most of my friends used to dream of just being mums, a concept I’ve never been able to grasp.

I didn’t come to the realization that I wanted to be a writer until I was well on the path to a different career altogether, despite the fact that I had gotten approximately six people into university by writing their personal statements for them. I wanted to study Fashion Communication and Promotion at Central Saint Martins. I was so passionate about it; I would study designers, photographers and stylists in my spare time; I bought Vogue monthly, finances permitting; I even created my own fashion line: “Edgy-cated”.

As a fat child, I stopped wearing kids’ clothes earlier than my peers. I got to shop in the adult section, so I got to experiment more with clothes – that’s my optimistic view of the situation anyway. I’d wear things people said fat people shouldn’t, but I’d be damned if I was going to be another fat person walking around in black trousers as if that’s all there was. “Edgy-cated” was going to be dedicated to fat women everywhere, and I was going to make them shine. I had the ideas, I just needed someone to help me execute them, and where better to find someone than to go to a university dedicated to fashion.

I had tailored all my A’ levels to achieving this, and was well into a year’s art course, per their request, so that I could study at Central Saint Martins. Art was awful. I’ve never been able to draw, and I’d never had any desire to learn. I hadn’t before been in a position where I was the poster girl for what not to do, yet there I was, surrounded by budding Picassos who could tell I wasn’t one of them. I was dangerously close to giving up.

Once, we were making 3D chess pieces based on our country of choice. I chose Japan; my rook was a ninja and my king a samurai. Having made them out of clay, they were left to set in silicone moulds in the drying area. I was slower than everybody and taking longer to clean up, so my lecturer, Paul, decided to help me. “Please don’t touch the mould sir, I made the neck too thin, so it’s very fragile.” Instructions he ignored, and right on cue, the neck snapped against his long, bony fingers. I’ve always been polite, despite my aversion to male authority, growing up with a single mother, but that day there was no containing it. I yelled, cursed; I thought I was going to combust spontaneously. I threw my sketchbook and the other half of my samurai on the floor in his direction. He jumped back to avoid being hit, looked at me in disgust and said, “Why are you even here?”

The only module I was able to ace was Digital because manipulating images on a computer and creating album covers is something I’m good at. A turning point occurred when some unsung hero added Contextual Studies to my timetab...