100 words a day project with J

100 words a day project with J

Last week I challenged one of my students to write 100 words a day for a week. To encourage him I decided to set myself the same challenge. Here are the results of my own 100 words a day challenge. 

I think it makes an interesting snapshot of a lockdown week.



Day 1 Wednesday 18 November

Today I've challenged J, one of my students, to write 100 words each day for the week. Next Wednesday morning I'm expecting to see seven 100 word texts written by J. I'm also going to write 100 words each day to share with him over the week.

I’m going to have to be quite careful what I write to him because J is only 11 years old. But I’m really hoping that writing a hundred words every day will give me inspiration for writing lots of poetry and other stuff.

I waited ages to get connected to J this morning.


Day 2 Thursday 19 November

This evening I had my weekly online meeting with my friend David. We meet to play music to each other. We decide on a music project then aim to meet once a week to listen to the music. Sometimes we can’t meet but since lockdown, we’ve been meeting regularly. This has been going on for ten years. Since the first lockdown in March we’ve been meeting online.

So we meet at 8.30. At first, we talk about the week that’s just passed. Then David plays the first half of the music. We have a break and talk about the music.


Day 3 Friday 20 November

Today I’ve spent the morning reading and the afternoon writing poetry. I’ve set myself a big reading challenge since the end of October. The T. S. Eliot poetry prize is a competition to find the best poetry collection published every year. The winner is announced every January. They announce a shortlist of ten books in October. The winner will be one of the shortlisted collections. Most years I buy as many of the shortlisted poetry collections as I can and try and read them all before the announcement. This year I’ve bought seven collections. I’ve read five collections so far.


Day 4 Saturday 21 November

Since the latest lockdown, I’ve ordered all our food shopping online and get it delivered. It’s a new way of shopping for us. A few times a week I log on to our online shopping account and I add to our shopping basket. On Saturday my wife and I sit down at the kitchen table and discuss what we’re going to eat during the week. Then we check to see if we’ve got the ingredients. If we don’t have the ingredients we add it to the list. I’m writing this and waiting for delivery. It will be here soon.



Day 5 Sunday 22 November

We’ve watched the last episode of series one of The Bridge. Since the first lockdown in late March watching television has been an important part of our everyday routine. We usually settle down to watch television after 8.00 and before 9.00 every weekday evening. We hardly watch terrestrial television so we’re not limited by schedules. We watch BBC iPlayer, Netflix and Amazon Prime.

The Bridge was originally broadcast years ago but now it’s been put on iPlayer we can watch it when we like. There’re ten episodes in series one and we’ll watch the whole series in about two weeks.



Day 6 Monday 23 November

This morning I went for a cycle ride. It is the first time I’ve taken the bike out for a week. I’ve not been out much over the last month or so. My aim, since I bought the bike, is to exercise regularly, for at least three times a week. But I’ve not been able to establish a good routine. During the first lockdown, I did very well. My daughter came to stay for about two months. Every two or three days she jogged and I cycled along with her. We got into a good routine but she’s gone now.


Day 7 Tuesday 24 November


Every morning I get up at ten to seven. I go into the kitchen and I make a cup of coffee for my wife and a cup of tea for me. I take my wife’s mug of coffee to her in bed and leave the coffee on a bedside table. Then I take my cup of tea into the sitting room. I put the tea on a side table then open the blinds. I settle down in a big armchair and I recite three poems aloud to the empty room. I’ve learned these poems by heart. It’s fun.

Douglas Stuart wins Booker prize for debut Shuggie Bain by Alison Flood

Scottish-American wins £50,000 for an autobiographical novel about a boy growing up in 80s Glasgow, which is ‘destined to be a classic’

Douglas Stuart’s Booker win heralds the arrival of a fully formed voice

Douglas Stuart describes himself as ‘a working-class kid who had a different career and came to writing late’. Photograph: Martyn Pickersgill

by Alison Flood

The Scottish-American author Douglas Stuart has won the Booker prize for his first novel, Shuggie Bain, a story based on his own life that follows a boy growing up in poverty in 1980s Glasgow with a mother who is battling addiction.

Stuart, 44, has described himself as “a working-class kid who had a different career and came to writing late”. He is the second Scot to win the £50,000 award after James Kelman took the prize in 1994 with How Late It Was, How Late, a book Stuart said “changed his life” because it was the first time he saw “my people, my dialect, on the page”.

Shuggie Bain follows Shuggie as he attempts to care for his alcoholic mother, Agnes, whose descent into alcoholism coincides with her youngest son’s growing awareness of his sexuality. The novel is dedicated to Stuart’s mother, who died of alcoholism when he was 16.

Upon learning he had won, Stuart tearfully described himself as “absolutely stunned” and thanked his mother, who is “on every page of this book – I’ve been clear without her I wouldn’t be here, my work wouldn’t be here”.

He also thanked “the people of Scotland, especially Glaswegians, whose empathy and humour and love and struggle are in every word of this book”.

Stuart, who has already written his second novel, titled Loch Awe, pointed to Kelman’s Booker winner behind him on his shelves. “When James won in the mid-90s, Scottish voices were seen as disruptive and outside the norm. And now to see Shuggie at the centre of it, I can’t express it,” he said. “Young boys like me growing up in 80s Glasgow, this wasn’t ever anything I would have dreamed of.”

He said he would now become a full-time writer, and joked that his winnings would be spent on settling his bet with his husband that he wouldn’t win. More seriously, he said he might use the money to return to Glasgow.

Margaret Busby, a publisher and the chair of this year’s Booker judges, said the work was “destined to be a classic”, describing it as “a moving, immersive and nuanced portrait of a tight-knit social world, its people and its values”.

“It is such an amazingly emotive, nuanced book that is hard to forget. It’s intimate, it’s challenging, it’s compassionate,” she said, describing Shuggie as “an unforgettable character”.

“This is dealing with tough subject matter, with characters who are not having an easy time,” said Busby, who was joined on the judging panel by the writers Lee Child, Sameer Rahim, Lemn Sissay and Emily Wilson. “It’s not a story where everybody lives happily ever after … but this is a hopeful read in a different sort of way … anybody who reads it will never feel the same.”

Shuggie Bain was rejected by 30 editors before it was picked up by publishers Grove Atlantic in the US and Picador in the UK. Stuart, who was born and raised in Glasgow, moved to New York at 24 to work in fashion design after graduating from the Royal College of Art in London.

He has said writing about Glasgow from the US “brought clarity, but it also allowed me to fall in love with the city again”, describing it as “a city of reluctant optimists by default”.

“How would we have survived otherwise?” he asked. “When you don’t have the comfort of money, then you are forced to deal with life on the frontlines, and sometimes love, humour, optimism is all you can bring to a bad situation.”

Shortlisted authors, (top L-R) Douglas Stuart, Diane Cook, Avni Doshi, (bottom L-R) Brandon Taylor, Maaza Mengiste and Tsitsi Dangarembga speak at the 2020 Booker prize ceremony on Thursday evening.

Shortlisted authors, (top L-R) Douglas Stuart, Diane Cook, Avni Doshi, (bottom L-R) Brandon Taylor, Maaza Mengiste and Tsitsi Dangarembga speak at the 2020 Booker prize ceremony on Thursday evening. Photograph: David Parry/PA

Stuart was one of four debuts among the six novelists to be shortlisted for this year’s Booker prize, whittled down from 162 novels. The final six contenders made up the most diverse lineup in the prize’s history, with Stuart beating the US writers Diane Cook, Avni Doshi and Brandon Taylor, the acclaimed Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga and the Ethiopian-American Maaza Mengiste.

After last year’s judges provoked controversy by flouting the rules to choose two winners, Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo, this year’s judges’ meeting was “unanimous and quick”, said the Booker’s literary director, Gaby Wood. She added that “guidelines” had been added to the prize so that if the judges were split again, the majority vote would be honoured.

“There were no tantrums, that’s for sure,” said Busby, revealing that the final meeting took around an hour. “But it’s not easy to make a decision when you start with 162 titles and you’ve got to end up with one. The shortlist is full of some wonderful writers but in the end we all came together behind Shuggie Bain. I thought of breaking the rules and saying let’s have six winners this year but …”

Normally announced at a formal dinner in London’s Guildhall, this year’s prize was announced in a BBC broadcast from the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, north London, with the shortlisted authors joining in from their homes around the world.

The ceremony was moved forward by two days, ostensibly to avoid a clash with former US president Barack Obama’s memoir, A Promised Land; last week, it was announced that Obama would be taking part in the Booker ceremony. In a pre-recorded message, Obama offered “my congratulations and admiration” to the nominated authors, citing Marilynne Robinson, Colson Whitehead and Bernardine Evaristo as past Booker-nominated authors who had offered him “a brief respite from the daily challenges of the presidency”.

The Booker has been criticised for having opened up entries to any author writing in English in 2014, with the British literary scene fearful the rule change would lead to dominance by Americans. This year, apart from Dangarembga, all the shortlisted writers were from the US or held joint US citizenship.

A Little Late - Eavan Boland

From The Irish Times
Eavan Boland obituary: Outstanding Irish poet and academic
Boland broke the mould of Irish poetry by making women’s experiences central to her poems

Born: September 24th, 1944    Died, April 27th, 2020

Poet Eavan Boland in Dublin in 2018. ‘In my generation,’ she once said, ‘women went from being the objects of the Irish poem to being the authors of the Irish poem.’ Photograph: Barry Cronin

Eavan Boland, the outstanding Irish poet and academic, has died suddenly following a stroke.

Boland, who was professor of English and humanities and director of the creative writing programme at Stanford University, broke the mould of Irish poetry – and drew new audiences to the form – by making women’s experiences central to her poems.

She was the author of more than 10 poetry collections, an award-winning essay collection, prose writings and an anthology of German women poets (Princeton, 2004). Boland’s collections, In Her Own Image (1980), Nightfeed (1982), Outside History (1990) and Domestic Violence (2007) explore historical and contemporary female identity.

Her collection, In a Time of Violence (1994) which merged political and private realities, won the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize. Her collection, Against Love Poetry (2001), was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and her heartbreaking poem about Ireland’s 1847 famine, Quarantine, was one of the 10 poems shortlisted for RTÉ’s selection of Ireland’s favourite poems of the last 100 years.

Irish secondary students know her poems well from their English curriculum and the public identify greatly with such poems as Child of Our Time – in memory of the youngest victims of the 1974 Dublin bombings and Nightfeed – an evocative celebration of feeding her infant daughter under the cover of darkness.

Boland won the Pen Award for creative nonfiction for A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet (2012). In 2014, many of Boland’s best-known poems alongside her own photographs of Dublin were published together in A Poet’s Dublin (Carcanet Press) to celebrate her 70th birthday. In 2016, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. And in 2017, she received a lifetime achievement award at the Irish Book Awards.

Boland often said that she was a feminist but not a feminist poet. In her memoir, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet of Our Times (1995), she wrote how Irish poetry had objectified women as passive metaphors, emblematic muses and decorative motifs. In Eavan Boland: Is It Still The Same, the 2018 RTÉ documentary, she spoke about the “dull floating debate about what is the legitimate subject matter” for poetry and how it is “easier to have a political murder in an Irish poem than a washing machine”. Yet, Boland was adamant about not editing out the everyday experiences of motherhood and family life but instead to weave them into bigger truths of human fragilities, strengths and volatilities, history and mythology.

She was also a teaching poet who generously mentored new writers, encouraging them to put in the hard work that creative writing required. She also threw light on lesser-known historical and contemporary poets. Throughout her long career, she taught at various universities in Ireland and the United States and was writer in residence at both Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin and at the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin to mark its centenary in 1994.

In 1991, she took a strong public stand against the exclusion of women writers in the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991) even though her poems were included. At the time, she said, “the extraordinary levels of exclusion of women [in this anthology] disfigured the national literature”.

Since 1996, Boland was professor of humanities, professor of English and director of the creative writing programme at Stanford University in California. During the coronavirus pandemic, she had returned home to be close to her family and continued to teach students remotely from Dublin.

Eavan Boland was born in Dublin, the youngest of five children of Frederick Boland, an Irish diplomat and Frances Kelly, an expressionist painter. The family lived in Leeson Park, Dublin 4. Her mother, who had left school early yet won a scholarship to study art in Paris – where she met her future husband – was a huge influence on and support to the young Eavan. When Frederick Boland was appointed the first Irish ambassador to the United Kingdom, the family moved to London and then later to New York when he was appointed permanent representative to the United Nations.

Boland wrote about the loneliness she felt like a five-year-old Irish girl in London in An Irish Childhood in England, 1951. She didn’t settle well in New York either and returned to Ireland to board at the Holy Child School in Killiney.

Following her secondary school education, she studied literature and classics at Trinity College Dublin. While there, she became involved in the Women’s Liberation Movement. She also began a lifelong friendship with Mary Robinson then Mary Bourke who quoted from Boland’s poem The Singers in her inaugural address as Ireland’s first female president in December 1990: “As a woman, I want the women who have felt themselves outside history to be written back into history, in the words of Eavan Boland, ‘finding a voice where they found a vision’.

Boland cherished married life in the new Dublin suburb with its view of the Dublin mountains and often included references to nature in her poetry

As a young woman, Boland was appalled by what she called “signal injustices in a society” which included the marriage bar [which prevented women from working in public service jobs after marriage] and the ban on women on juries. She never lost that radical impulse to fight for women’s voices to be heard. She published her first poems while still a student and graduated with a first-class honours degree in English literature and language in 1966.

Boland met novelist, Kevin Casey in the late 1960s. The couple married in Dublin in 1969 and bought a home in Dundrum where their two daughters, Sarah and Eavan, were born and grew up. Boland cherished married life in the new Dublin suburb with its view of the Dublin mountains and often included references to nature in her poetry.

In 2018, Boland was commissioned to write a poem commemorating women winning the right to vote and casting their first ballot on December 14th, 1918, by the Government of Ireland Permanent Mission to the United Nations and the Royal Irish Academy. That poem is Our Future Will Become the Past of Other Women.

She was editor of Poetry Ireland Review for the last three years and in her final editorial, she wrote “the life of the poet is always a summons to try to set down some truth that was once true and will go on being true. No poet should have to worry about public respect, to the lack of it, in which this art is held."

Her latest collection of poetry, The Historians, will be published by WW Norton in the US and by Carcanet for the UK and Irish market in autumn 2020.

Boland is survived by her husband her daughters, grandchildren, Ella, Jack, Julia and Cian, brother, Fergal and sister, Nessa. Her sisters, Jane and Mella pre-deceased her.

Click here to read the article in The Irish Times

Forward Poetry Prizes 2020

 

Forward Prize for Best Collection (£10,000)
Caroline Bird The Air Year (Carcanet)

Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection (£5,000)
Will Harris RENDANG (Granta Poetry)

Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (£1,000)
Malika Booker ‘The Little Miracles’ (Magma)

Click here to watch the Forward Prizes for poetry 2020 from the Brish Library