08 Thursday Sep 2016
Posted in Uncategorized
Do you remember the insane project about Charlotte Brontë and problem kids? It was truly insane – and you’d think I should have known to run like the wind… Continue reading
06 Tuesday Sep 2016
Posted in Scribbling
Tags
Carol McGrath, Historical Novel Society, HNS Conference, Jenny Barden, joseph conrad, Oxford, Richard Lee
So I’m home.
I’ve had three wonderful days at the lovely and impeccably managed HNS Conference. As I said, it was my first writing conference, so I have no term of comparison – but Richard Lee, Carol McGrath and Jenny Barden created something so very stimulating, well-thought and friendly… I loved every minute of it. I met all sorts of interesting people, attended great talks and lectures, learned a good deal… and I pitched my novel. Twice.
The feedback has been most interesting… Continue reading
01 Thursday Sep 2016
I’m off to the HNS Conference in Oxford – leaving tomorrow morning, for three days of talks, workshops, networking, a gala dinner complete with costume pageant, and even two pitch sessions with literary agents.
This is my first writer’s conference ever – because there seems to be no such thing in Italy (much less dedicated to historical fiction), and I’ve never had a completed novel in English I felt confident about. But now is the time: the novel is finished and polished, the conference is comparatively close by, and so here we go. Continue reading
30 Tuesday Aug 2016
Posted in Poetry
So Scribblings is three years old… And, three years ago, my very second post had to be about the passing of Seamus Heaney.
As I said then, it was a personal, as well as a literary loss – and today I want to remember him with a poem of his that I love particularly. From Human Chain: Continue reading
25 Thursday Aug 2016
Oh yes, there is another one. Same title, but a very different book. Antonia Forest was a children’s writer – and, although this is one of those children’s book that are a pleasure to an adult reader, it’s definitely lighter fare than Bryher’s novel.
The story itself is of the Runaway Boy sort: at eleven, Nicholas Marlow lives with his much older, wealthy and indulgent brother, and studies at the local grammar school… Continue reading
23 Tuesday Aug 2016
Posted in Theatre
Back in 2012 Douglas Morse directed a movie version of Kit Marlowe’s Jew of Malta. Judging by the trailer and teasers, it looks like filmed theatre, with a curious mix of period and non-period costumes and settings… Continue reading
18 Thursday Aug 2016
Some – or perhaps most – books one reads for the sake of what it say on the tin – algebra text-books for the sake of algebra, romance novels to enjoy a love story… Then there are those books one reads for… something else.
Take for instance Ngaio Marsh’s mysteries. Continue reading
16 Tuesday Aug 2016
Tags
I told you about Bryher’s The Player’s Boy, didn’t I?
Well, to this lovely, melancholy novel my Paris Press edition adds a wonderful afterword, consisting of a letter that Bryher wrote to a friend to explain her fascination with Elizabethan literature and history. It’s a charming little piece about growing up, reading, cultivating one’s imagination, finding strength in literature and history, and being slightly eccentric… It’s well worth reading in its entirety.
My favourite part, though, has to be the final musing on the historian’s perspective: Continue reading
09 Tuesday Aug 2016
Tags
Caesar and Cleopatra, George Bernard Shaw, imagination, Plays Pleasant, Saint Joan, The Man of Destiny, You Never Can Tell
When it comes to George Bernard Shaw… well, it’s complicated.
His Plays Pleasant, Caesar and Cleopatra, Saint Joan and a few more are a good part of why I became a playwright. And back in secondary school I talked my classmates into staging You Never Can Tell (not that we went far), and later directed a student production of the Man of Destiny while in College, in which I also played the Strange Lady, and bought a huge, sturdy, very heavy second-hand volume of the complete plays in Edinburgh, and lugged it around Scotland for weeks, and translated three of his short plays into Italian, and was recently startled to find out just how much Saint Joan still colours my perception of Joan of Arc – and yet… Continue reading
06 Saturday Aug 2016
Posted in Theatre
A lovely garden in a lovely summer night, things going (nearly) smooth, not messing up one’s lines, finding again the golden thread with the (large) audience, applause, applause, applause…
Colour me very happy.
Antony and the Chorus
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