• The Tom Walsingham Mysteries
  • Clara who?
  • Stories
  • Contact

Scribblings

~ Clara Giuliani, storyteller

Scribblings

Category Archives: Stories

Margaret Skea: Turn of the Tide

18 Thursday Feb 2021

Posted by la Clarina in History, Stories

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

audiobook, Dave Gillies, Margaret Skea, Munro Saga

For the first time in ages, I’ve listened to an audiobook. No, really – audiobooks and I… I absolutely love the idea in principle, only I find myself easily distracted by details. I begin to wonder about the exact lie of the land, the pigments that would have been used to dye a particular kind of silk, the sort of face this or that character would have… and by the time I come back from my wanderings, the narrator has gone ahead.

And this is why I usually regard audiobooks the way I would a tiger: fascinated but wary – from a safe distance.

Then I had this email exchange with Margaret Skea, who told me about having her Munro Saga turned into audiobooks, and described the fascinating process of choosing a reader and working with him rather in the way a stage director would… I was so taken with the whole that, when Margaret very kindly sent me a copy of Turn of the Tide’s audiobook, I was more than ready to face my tiger… Continue reading →

Sometimes it is the small things

28 Thursday Jan 2021

Posted by la Clarina in History, Scribbling, Stories

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Historical fiction, murder mystery, Sapere Books, Sir Francis Walsingham, Sir Henry Cobham, writing

 

They stopped Walsingham and Paulo, my Italian, whom they seemed resolved to rob [… and] another Englishman in his company, called Skeggs, as I remember.

On the twelfth of November 1581 Elizabeth’s Ambassador in Paris, Sir Henry Cobham, wrote to the all-powerful Secretary of State – and spymaster – Sir Francis Walsingham . It was almost in passing that the ambassador slipped in this bit of information about the misadventure of Sir Francis’s much younger cousin, nineteen-year-old Thomas, riding as a diplomatic courier between London and Paris. Continue reading →

Dickens’s Christmas Tree

10 Thursday Dec 2020

Posted by la Clarina in Stories, Things

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Charled Dickens, Christmas, Christmas traditions, Christmas tree

I don’t know about your corners of the world – but hereabouts these are days for trimming the Christmas Tree.

As a matter of fact, most people in Italy seem to do it on the 8th of December, a Marian holiday and, usually, a first taste of Christmas vacations. Others do  it on the 1st of the month, and I have a friend who used to hold that a Christmas tree should, by definition, be trimmed of Christmas Eve, and taken down the day after the Epiphany. Now he has two young daughters, though – and the tree goes up as early as the girls can wear down their parents’s patience. In my family, for some old reason no one quite remembers anymore, we keep a tradition of trimming our trees on the Eve of Saint Lucia, on the 12th – the day after tomorrow. Continue reading →

A tall and freckled wench – or, the (French) R in “character”

05 Thursday Nov 2020

Posted by la Clarina in History, Scribbling, Stories, Theatre

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

characterisation, characters, Charles Nicholl, distance learning, playwriting, shakespeare, the lodger, writing

Teaching in the Covid era – even teaching playwriting in a drama school – means that we are back to distance learning, these days. My corner of Italy is shut down again, and last night’s class happened on Zoom.

It was all about dialogue, you see, and using it to either forward action, or enhance characterization. Well – both, ideally, and all the more when writing for the stage, where dialogue is one of only two tools the playwright has to tell a story, the other being action.

But as we discussed ways to use dialogue to build character, I was reminded of a bit in Charles Nicholl’s The Lodger. Now, The Lodger is wonderful nonfiction, focusing on Shakespeare’s time as a lodger with the Mountjoys, a family of successful tyrers (or wig-makers) of French origins.

Shakespeare managed to get himself embroiled with a lawsuit between Christopher Mountjoy and his son-in-law, and let us say that the Bard doesn’t cut his finest figure – but that’s hardly the point. The point is the Bard’s landlady, Marie Mountjoy, who went from Huguenot refugee to tyre-maker to Anne of Denmark, no less. Well, at one point Marie, a wealthy businesswoman and perhaps an adulteress, goes to see astrologer and physician Dr. Simon Forman, in the hope of recovering a couple of lost ring and some equally lost money. It was a common practice, at the time, and Forman was a man of huge renown in the field. The good doctor used to take copious and detailed notes of his cases, and his notebooks have largely survived, to provide us with a treasure trove of details. Details like the very short list of Marie’s suspect thieves – one being Margery, a servant in the Mountjoy household. A tall and freckled wench, in Marie’s words.

These few words, jotted down by Foreman as he listened to Marie, have always given me the shivers – in the best possible way. It’s a bit of a voice from four hundred years ago, unphiltered by the conventions of literature, law or ritual. It’s a small window thrown open across the centuries to show us, to make us hear this long dead woman… Nicholl loves it just as much as I do, and goes a step further: Whenever I try to conjure up a sense of Marie, he writes, I imagine her while she pronounces “freckled” with a French accent.

Try Nicholl’s little game – and here is Marie at thirty, leaning forward in her seat in the flickering light from a pair of candles, with a disapproving frown, and pursed lips, with her hands folded in her lap, and her French ‘r… So vividly alive, after four hundred something years, and all because of five words told to an astrologer. Five words that keep a trace of her origins, her mindset, her beliefs, her voice, her personality. Five words.

It goes to show how a few well-chosen words of dialogue  can go very far in creating a voice and a character – whether history kindly provides them, or we make them up ourselves.

Malamud and the Quote Found

20 Thursday Aug 2020

Posted by la Clarina in Lostintranslation, Scribbling, Stories

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Bernard Malamud, Israel Shenker, Stories, story, storytelling, writing

Yes, yes – in the end I found it.

We talked about that quote of Bernard Malamud, didn’t we? The one about stories, stories, stories, the one I was sure I’d jotted down and never found again – not in old notebooks, not in the Web… That one.

Well, as was bound to happen, I found it in the end. Continue reading →

Where are the elephants?

13 Thursday Aug 2020

Posted by la Clarina in Books, History, Stories

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

elephants, Frederick II, Hannibal, Jean de Brunhoff, Mark Shand, Rudyard Kipling

Don’t you think that literature has far too few elephants?

I mean elephant characters, with a central place in the story and a definite personality. You see, yesterday I was discussing Elephant World Day with some friends, and at one point the conversation veered on the literary aspect of the subject – and there was surprisingly little. Surprisingly, when you consider what wonderful, intelligent and meaningful creatures they are – and yet, when you discount those elephants that are merely extras or window dressing, that have nothing to say for themselves, that just walk through the forests, crash into gardens and are hunted, I can think of only a handful of literary elephants. Continue reading →

Writing Obsessions

23 Thursday Jul 2020

Posted by la Clarina in History, Scribbling, Stories

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

History, meme, metafiction, obsessions, writing

Ages ago, I was dragged into one of those meme things… I must confess I always go very reluctantly about those. After all, why would anyone want to know ten things about me, or what music I have on my iPod, or where would I like to travel…

This one, though, was about writing – and when it comes to writing and reading, we’ve long established that I have no control whatever. So I did the meme on my Italian blog. It was about writing obsessions – those recurring themes one writes about again and again, intentions, obdurate passions – half guiding lights, half Trade Winds… we all have a handful of those, right? Continue reading →

A Long Game of Make-Believe

02 Thursday Jul 2020

Posted by la Clarina in Stories, Things

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Louisa May Alcott, make-believe, Michael Ende

Am I very wrong in thinking that make-believe must be the most universal of all childhood games? We all traveled to far-away worlds, didn’t we? And made-believe to be this or that in castles, jungles, and star-ships? With or without dolls, toy soldiers or plush animals, alone or with other children, recreating stories heard, or making it up, rehearsing work, motherhood, war, fear, society – always halfway between a technical test of life and unbridled What If… Continue reading →

The Tale of the Lost Book

18 Thursday Jun 2020

Posted by la Clarina in Books, Stories

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Books, Poetry, serendipity

This story was told to me years ago, one summer afternoon, in a centuries-old library in Mantua. It was whispered by an elderly scholar, as we took a short break after hours of patient, careful philological work…

It begins with a boy of eighteen, the shy, bookish sort, with the kind of passion for Ancient Greece that makes one court girls by lending them books of Greek poetry. Continue reading →

The way of dealing with ghosts

14 Thursday May 2020

Posted by la Clarina in Stories, Theatre

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

ghost stories, M. R. James, Stage adaptations

A few days ago, on the phone, Nina the Director asked how how I would like to adapt for the stage a certain, very famous ghost story.

“Oh,” I said. “That one. I’ve had it on my Kindle for ages, and never quite mustered the courage to read it…” Continue reading →

← Older posts
Newer posts →

Seek and Find

♠ THE TOM WALSINGHAM MYSTERIES

Available on Amazon
Available on Amazon

The Copperfield Review’s first anthology – containing Gentleman in Velvet

Recent Posts

  • January Blues
  • Guest-posting at The Writing Desk
  • The kids
  • All those words!
  • One of those weeks…

Popular Scribblings

  • Turnus
  • He Was Born with a Gift of Laughter...
  • Londons
  • "Come live with me and be my love," quoth he...
  • Dante's Manfred

Categories

  • Books
  • Eccentricities
  • History
  • Lostintranslation
  • Poetry
  • Scribbling
  • Silents
  • Stories
  • Theatre
  • Things
  • Uncategorized

Enter your email address to get a messenger on horseback... er, an email will reach you by email when a new Scribbling is out.

Join 1,698 other subscribers

RSS Feeds

  • RSS - Posts
  • RSS - Comments

No Blog’s an Island

Sapere Books

 

IBA

International Bloggers' Association

I tweet on Twitter

And I pin on Pinterest

Senza Errori di Stumpa – my Italian blog

Blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • Scribblings
    • Join 311 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Scribblings
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...