A week has gone past with no writing. On Sunday I heard that I did not get the grant I was hoping for, and it was hard to focus after that. Today, though, I know I must start again and I am glad to see there is blue outside the window, so I go for a walk in the park. This is what I do first because it settles my mind.

I think about The Party. This is the story I’m reworking using original notebooks, written in Cuba a few years ago. There is the static ‘final’ version I’ve produced, which seems to have no soul, and a lot of ragged material from the time. I can’t find the way in. How to connect the two?

Yesterday, I went to hear Biblical scholar Avivah Zornberg speak. She looked into the text and asked, how do we find our voice?

Moses, it is said, had a speech impediment, and when God asked him to talk to the people, Moses replied: ‘I can not be heard. The people are not going to believe me. They will not listen to my voice.’

‘But,’ said God, ‘it does not matter that you have not the eloquence of Aaron - he could not get my message across. I want you to speak for yourself.’

In the act of writing, Avivah said, we accept our own otherness, rather than rejecting it. And the reader, encountering this otherness within the work, meets hidden aspects of themself. Reader and writer create one another, as did Moses and God.

Aaron was eloquent, but communicated nothing. Moses, who stammered and stuttered, was the one people heard.

I put my two versions of The Party side by side. As the story stands, there is little indication of the tension between the narrator and her surroundings. There is nothing to show her distance from Charo, the Cuban friend who has brought her to the party, and his family. I’ve smoothed it all out. Only one paragraph expresses her (mild) estrangement:

“I took a rest on Ramón’s lumpy bed and, shivering in the chill wind of the dusk, covered myself with the yellow candlewick bedspread. Charo brought me meat and lemonade. I curled into a ball on one side, hands in front of my face, but could not shut out the fretful, insistent shouting of the guests. It seemed to be coming from only a few feet away – outside the window and just beyond the bedroom door.”

But what I wrote originally about that night was much rougher. Here are some extracts from my notebook:

I decide to retell The Party in this voice. My narrator will still observe the life around her, but will also report the life within herself. I’m going to try weaving segments of writing from the notebooks into the narrative I already have - and see how the patchwork turns out.

It’s not so much that I want to write ‘the truth’ of that night, but more that I want to find the stammering emotional centre of the experience, and return this to the work.

In Notting Hill Gate
sun brightens the stucco walls.
A new month begins.

I am going to start with The Party. This is the first short story that I ever wrote. Living in a small, dark room in Havana, I decided to write. I read Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande, and she said that anyone could write stories, so long as they paid attention to their life, and didn’t get too fancy. And I saw her point. I didn’t understand how anyone could invent anything. The core story, the emotional one, is always true of its author’s life. It’s always their voice, small or unheard, one they may never dare express, embodied in the work.

Bakery in Vedado, Havana. The words read: Por la dignidad de la patria, movilizacion cederista - For the dignity of the homeland, local mobilisation

I am disappointed with The Party. It reads as if I took the best, raw, bits of writing from the notebooks at the time, and polished them into what I thought a short story was supposed to be. I wanted to remove myself from the work, but in doing so threw baby out with bathwater, so that the story had no point of view - or a ghostly narrator about whose feelings we know little, with whom we can not emotionally engage.

What I thought when I re-read source material in my notebooks for The Party. They contained much that was left out of the final draft

I need to go back to the source material and experience that party again. I was a stranger there - overwhelmed and bewildered in Alamar, a Havana suburb, with no other foreigner for miles around. Nothing made any sense and I was writing to escape from overwhelming claustrophobia in a poor town where I understood little, and could not make myself understood. Each point of reference dissolved. Cross-purposes, my broken Spanish, the order of the day. This is the core of the story, and I realise that so far, I have lied: The Party is serene and the ‘I’ who narrates a calm and happy woman, unaffected by events. For honesty’s sake, I must get the dissonance back in.

Two sourdough loaves
cooling on a wire tray.
A short snow flurry.

Rushing out to squash
soaked to the skin on our bikes.
New balls and partners.

The poet Jacqueline Saphra invited me to take part in Accident & Emergence, a project that teams writers with visual artists. I am working with the printmaker Alan Cox. Yesterday we got together to talk about the collaboration.

Litho inks.

Alan lives and works in an old cabinet maker’s workshop in the heart of Hoxton. The studio is full of print machinery and paper.

All the ink, rollers and proofs reminded me of my first job as an editorial assistant at a reference publisher on Pentonville Road. I used to sign off camera-ready copy and occasionally visit printers who showed you hot metal presses. The publisher had a design studio where people cut and pasted up pages with hot wax onto gridded pages from great long galley proofs.

Upstairs in his kitchen Alan and I talked about how the project might take shape. Having read Open Notebooks Alan suggested I write out poems by hand.

I was worried that my handwriting might not be ‘good’ enough, but actually, I just remembered that ‘being good at English and having nice, legible handwriting’ was how I got that first job in publishing. That and knowing the marketing director…(some things never change).

Rather than do something where poem + picture = print I think I want to do a series of illustrated prints that explore one poem in depth. So each print might represent a verse, or a couple of lines and then use this method to reinterpret the form. Key phrases or ideas might surface. Each limited edition print will have the text then a line drawing overlaid, and Alan will hand colour each print at the end. So they’ll all be unique. I’m keen on the single poem book, but binding costs might be prohibitive. This way there’s a sense of continuation and perhaps it’s something that could be bound later…

I’ll be blogging the process and pasting up our work in progress. Stay tuned.

A game of Spot The Poem.

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Having arrived in San Francisco not long ago I sat in a diner and wrote about my first impressions.

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…I’m waiting for two things: one for the baby to arrive - today is my due date, and two, to work out how to upload my feet at dawn video entry that contains lots of stop frame feet images shot at dawn.

In the meantime I’m sorting through old notebooks and trying to find a stashed away but accessible place for them…I found this rough note along the way that I thought I might work more on.

The dark was so dark it had hands that pinned me to the flattened mattress and stuck a knee in my solar plexus. Outside starlight stiffened me like a starfish chucked in a bucket on a tumbledown pier. I did not struggle. A whole night where I tried not to tug at the edge of the madness. The Irish guy who had stayed an extra five days and still could not sleep at night. Days haunted by a purple cartoon of a motorbike accident, pages whipping open on it in the wind as sand blew round our ears and overtly muscular cats clawed at fish bones at our feet and spat hunger at each other.

Then this note from Anne Sexton:

‘Sometimes my doctors tell me I understand something in a poem that I haven’t integrated into my life . In fact I may be concealing it from myself, while revealing it to the readers.’