The University of the Self #15
Aboutery
Content Warning: There are a couple of swear words in this piece, which discusses some aspects of a writer’s life.
I have a constant need to satisfy my endless urge to research and respond. If I am not doing a course on which I can be taught by someone else, I must teach myself, or I quickly become bored, restless, unhappy and pessimistic about the future. My mind does not know what to do with itself. It does not like rest, or pause. Perhaps it is afraid of what might happen if it halts its non-stop progress. Sometimes it ties itself into knots. Sometimes it becomes massively over-excited. It is its own person — it does what it does and needs what it needs, and I often wonder if I am a part of it al all, beyond being the fleshly vessel that carries it about, carefully balanced like an overly full cup of tea.
I didn’t know in 2019 that I would be gifted the amazing opportunity to undertake an MA in Writing Poetry through 2020-2022. In that research-fallow time, I began to write a book. It seemed like a good idea at the time. It would keep the brain working, keep me occupied. The book grew and grew and grew, like a magical beanstalk made from essays and hybrid writing. I completed the book in August 2023, and I do not know if it will ever be published. I thought I would tell you all about it, and tell you why I wrote it. I had a mentor at the time, thanks to ACE funding, and that mentor tried to get me to say what the book was about. I couldn’t! The mentor asked me to come up with one sentence which might define the book, and oh, the hilarity which ensured at the next meeting, when they learned I had only managed to write a whole chapter about it. And I still don’t know if I managed to define it. It made us smile anyway. Here is that chapter, complete with endnotes, which became a bit of a thing in themselves. I hope you enjoy reading it, anyway.
Aboutery
An Aboutery is a quiet, plainly decorated cell where books must wait while they endure the lengthy, obscure categorisation process.
Figure 1: Diagram where random word links terminate at the word ABOUT
If you tell someone that you are writing a book, nine times out of ten
(in my experience) they will ask you, straight away,
what your book is ABOUT.
If I had a pound (£ not lb) for every time I’ve been asked this, I’d be sitting
on a beach, drinking ambrosia from a golden cup. Possibly. I certainly wouldn’t
be sweating over a hot laptop. That’s not true. Writing to me is necessary as breath.
I’d do it every spare minute even if I was a millionaire. I’d just be doing it with
a brand-new laptop that didn’t run on curse words and hope.
It’s a perfectly reasonable question. I have asked it myself. We’re interested, right?
Or are we conditioned to only accept a book if it is neatly categorised? Do we need
to be told at one glance what we wish to read? Is it the comfort we find in habit?
Is it just a whole lot easier? You can go into most book-selling areas and notice
many headings such as this —
TRAVEL FICTION NONFICTION CHILDREN’S ROMANCE
MEMOIR ART COOKERY LOCAL INTEREST BIOGRAPHY
etc., etc.
N.B. Sometimes you might discover a small, curious, cobwebby area at the back,
behind the toilets, called POETRY.
Books sell themselves! No, they don’t. It’s depressing. Books is business after all,
and many livelihoods depend on the exchange of them for money, as antithetical-to-art
as that may sound. I keep trying and failing to categorise my book. I keep putting off
the inevitable, eventual decision by simply writing another chapter instead. It’s a classic avoidance technique. I didn’t fill in my tax return, but I did bake 400 cookies, which is why
I was too busy, in the end to do the former. Honest.
I’m trying to take aboutery on board. I made myself read an article called
Shelf Savvy: How Book Categorization Helps Maximize Sales1. I’m reading this
in an attempt to respond to a task given me by my mentor — write one (just one,
mind you, O enthusiastic scribbler) sentence, beginning with ‘this book is about’.
I am reading this article in case it helps me decide on my book’s category.
I am not reading this article because I am procrastinating. Definitely, definitely not.
I will NOT be writing a whole chapter on the notion of aboutery.
Where was I? Oh.
This book is about questioning why, or if, anything you write has to be about
something specific.
Every time I have a thought that might define the aboutery of this book,
I’m going to record it. At the end of this chapter, I hope to have some kind of list.
I mention the importance and the writing of poetry a lot, throughout, so
this book is about how important the writing of poetry is to me.
Why did poetry seem to suit me and my ways of writing so much?
It didn’t overwhelm me. Was it being able to read just one page of a poetry collection
and walk away replete, for the time being, as if I have read something so small,
so amazingly complete? Was it the option to dip into its pages anywhere and instantly connect?
I often finish reading one or two pages of poetry then have to go away and have
a R e a l l y G o o d T h i n k about image, form and all that. Book books
for me, are much harder to pull away from, to dip into. They are more akin to
rolling downhill in a barrel — you are whirled and bashed all over the place
but it’s simply too wild a ride to stop, just like that. They ask a lot of you in time
and commitment, simply because (unless it’s Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems2
or some such) they tend to be so much l o n g e r.
I love the endless newness of poetry. The histories of form and their contemporary
reimagining. The quirks of stanza, line, meter, shape, and space. Every time
you visit poetry, there is something new to meet, and the wonder of it all is that
this is all happening (usually) over one or two pages. Many people try and fail
to define poetry. I love that you can only try to define what it means to yourself.
The voice you use on the page has the potential to say anything, in any way you wish.
The more I have read, the more I have written, the more I have accepted hybridity.
Instinct plays a huge part in my work. Listening to what the words want is important.
They tell you how they want to appear on the page.
I think this has been crucial in breaking down the barriers between genres —
there is no neat picket fence between them for me. The boundaries are full of h o l e s
for me to slip through. I have rewilded.
Writing for me is every kind of garden.
Words are pure, sweet, quiet, and calm.
They are free, feral, noisy, low down and dirty.
They are everything that you can imagine them to be.
They are the foxes that come at night to turn over the bins. They bite and kick.
They spit and kiss, ask you to put your hands right down into the muck.
They are light as feathers and carry your thoughts up into the sky.
I read lyric essays. I read works like John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing, and was so overcome with excitement, I almost had to lie down for a week. I jettisoned the weight of ‘normality’ I had allowed stigma and ableism to press upon me and I flew.
Being hybrid is what makes me a writer, in body, mind and heart.
This book is about falling in love with / deploying hybridity.
As you merrily transform your thoughts into thousands of actual words,
you may risk ruining your sense of achievement by allowing in the following thought —
is anybody out there actually going to read my book?
It will give you the shivers. It will make you feel incredibly lonesome. You’re on
a slippery slope now — if you’re not careful, you’ll start wondering if your writing
makes any sense. Is it complete rubbish?
You have no idea who would publish your book. You don’t even have an agent.
You don’t know how to write that all-important synopsis or cover letter.
Well, neither do I. Let’s muddle through this together.
This book is about learning to use / enjoy / endure the writer’s state of uncertainty.
This book is about realising that you are not alone.
Even if nobody reads your book (I hope they do!), you still have this amazing
achievement. Hey you! You wrote this! Nobody can take that away from you.
Only 3.5 people might ever read mine (and one of them was my mentor,
who sort of had to read chunks of it, poor dear) but I can still be proud of myself.
Maybe hundreds, thousands, millions might read your book — it might get optioned
for a mini-series. The sky’s your bird in an oyster’s bush, so don’t count your
stable door before the acorn becomes your silver lining. You will never know
unless you start down this unpredictable path. Writing is journeys.
You’ll have to start making them if you’re ever going to fill that blank page.
After the years it took to progress from NHS referral to autism diagnosis,
I felt able, at last, to begin learning myself. I felt as if I had been given permission
(there’s that word again) to write myself real. Poetry has helped me weigh and approach my thoughts and feelings upon myriad subjects for a long time.
I have battled with identity and striven to invent methods for a life lived through words — blueprint and signposts, mazes into my heart and head.
This book is about some of the methods I use to help myself write.
Ars Poetica3, by Archibald MacLeish, ends with the couplet,
“A poem should not mean
But be.”
We poets read / discuss / ponder upon this quote. We nod wisely and agree.
I got very excited. I may have misinterpreted its meaning (which would be no
surprise) when I worked out what that couplet meant to me. It meant permission
(there’s that very important word again) to do the writing first and worry about
about afterwards. Or disregard aboutery completely. Do you need specific subject
matter at all?
This book is about permission.
This book is about experiment.
Why can’t we just write because writing is good, cathartic, interesting, inspiring,
beneficial, a great learning tool, fun? Why can’t we write, then discover where writing
takes us? If you shouldn’t make sweeping generalisations about people, why make them about books?
Why can’t one chapter be about aphids and the next about buttercream,
roof slates, owls or hydraulic cranes?
If you want your book to fall into a specific category, please do not think that I am
decrying that. I’m just arguing the case for the random, the unpredictable, the wanderingbook. I think the world needs more of them. Oooh.
I just had a strange thought.
Imagine this scenario — if enough of us write our random, uncategorizable books,
then agents and booksellers will have to give them their own category. The literary world turns itself inside out, passes through a wormhole in space and implodes.
Hybrid writing causes The Backwards Big Bang. !moobaK
This book is about writing for writing’s sake.
This book sometimes feels like it’s the equivalent of a reality show,
where I monologue to camera on the topic How I Feel Today , while everyone gets to witness each error and tantrum that arises as I actually write my book. The other contestants bitch about me behind my back and I get voted off on episode three. It’s called
Authors Dancing on Strictly Thin Ice.
I’m trying to capture every thought I have before it leaves my head. I want to
show you how this book happened. How your book might happen, if you decide
that the time is right (or wrong!) to let it out. Sometimes I wonder why I can’t be
all ars est celare artem4 — why all my thoughts must speak out loud, leave everything
hanging out. This book ought, possibly, to be happening behind closed doors so that
the book it was meant to be could spring, fully furnished from its cluttered womb.
But that’s not me and it wouldn’t be true to myself.
As I write this section, I happen to be watching the TV programme,
Seamus Heaney and the Music of What Happens5, and the sheer power of words
is reinforced in me again. Words connect us to place, to experience, to history, to people. You might watch a TV programme like this and think, aaargh, what’s the point?
I’ll never be as successful / brilliant / popular / beloved as Such-And-Such or So-And-So
but to think that is to miss the true value of words and the vital part they play in our lives, our communities, our world.
Words are splendid, forceful, essential.
When writing them down, we make them, make even ourselves truer,
more hopeful, and more able to articulate our chasms, our liminal spaces,
our fears, our needs, our dreams. Writing them down makes us immortal.
I’m being honest about this in the hope that it helps. If you are like me,
you might have wasted many years assuming that some people are just naturally
gifted writers, that their books fell from them fully furnished and ready to rock and roll. Some don’t even write their books at all — it’s entirely possible that a ghost writer6 would have made a neater job of this book than me.
I lay the blame for me actually writing a book book entirely at the feet of The Essay.
The discovery of them, the reading of them — the revelation that I could write them —
has turned everything I know about writing into a giant, gorgeous, perplexing,
and addictive rabbit hole that I am avidly, sumptuously disappearing down.
What joy! You can keep on digging and never hit the bottom. Hooray!
I accidentally explained some of this book’s aboutery to myself.
This book is about the joy of discovery.
This book is about being unable to stop.
You may have noticed already that I am mentioning and quoting from other writers. I am going to be doing that throughout this book because reading and acknowledging pre-existing sources is up there with the Three Best Things You Can Do7 when being a writer. It really helps with the solitude that seems to be a writer’s lot, a lot of the time. I have almost given up writing this book numerous times but my need to write it kept outweighing my doubts.
This book is about allowing other writers’ work to nourish and inform your own.
A short while ago, I learned of a book, written by a poet whose work I greatly admire. It was a book about being, about journeying, about becoming. I had to put off the buying of the book while I completed the final portfolio for my MA and made progress with the personal methodology I was working on (very kindly funded by Arts Council England)8. As soon as I was able, I ordered the book and eagerly dived in. As is the case with so many books, it became an instant soulmate. The very first lines are
“THIS Is A Book Of being and becoming, It is about being a poet.
It is also about the long process of becoming one.” (Boland, p. xi, 2011)
The book, if you have not already guessed, is A Journey with Two Maps, by Eavan Boland (Caracanet). I am sure there are many out there taking umbrage at my considering such a legend (especially one I never had the pleasure of meeting) a soulmate. The temerity! That such luminous folk would ever be interested in you and your ramblings! That you imagine you have the right to claim kinship! As if.
Books do this to you. So do essays, articles, poems, stories, artworks. All too often, I’m floundering about in the Sea of Ideas, trying to pinpoint what I am missing, trying to articulate my thoughts, half-drowning in the worry that I’m wrong. Suddenly, during a long, intense, completely unfocused and random reading / Internet searching session, I stumble upon exactly the thing I was looking for yet didn’t know I needed. Suddenly, I’m punching the air. I’m ringing an imaginary bell.
Ding, ding, ding! Oyez! I FOUND something! Come on, admit it. It can’t be just me.
Something that rescues you so dramatically and helpfully has to be a friend, right? Sometimes these writers are no longer with us, and the fact that I could not be their friend has me grieving for the possibilities lost. If you think this is nonsense, then please don’t ask me what my idea of heaven is.9 I want to talk about these moments, but I have no-one at home prepared to engage with me on these subjects. So, I talk to the page instead. It’s got no choice. It’s a captive audience.10
You meet these writers through their books and believe in your heart that you have much in common. The more you get involved in the writing community, the more chance you have of meeting inspirational people. You might even meet some of them in the flesh. I have been fortunate to meet some incredible folk.11
Do keep in mind, however, that we are all individuals and must consider our uniqueness. We must not fall into the trap of erasing ourselves (or parts of ourselves) in an attempt to be someone else. I can never, for example, be Eavan Boland. Her journey was not my journey. Her background is not my background. Her parents weren’t my parents. The places she lived are not the places I lived. Her timeline is not my timeline. What is to be celebrated are the many wonderful parts with which we can identify. Parts which give credence, steel our nerve.
No matter who we are, we can all suffer from Writer’s Doubt.12 It’s comforting to know that you were not, are not, nor will be the only person out there questing for REASONS13 of your own.
This book is about keeping the faith.
Agents are going to chase your manuscript from their offices with a pitchfork. Publishers are going to send you a generic rejection slip that doesn’t even begin with your name. Perhaps this book is about so many things at once, it has become too difficult to define what this book is actually about (now there’s a USP for you, and probably one of the reasons two dozen publishers will sweep this manuscript from the slush pile into the bin).
But who’s to say there isn’t
a legitimate place for a book about
erm
and um….?
You’d be better off (you think) taking your manuscript home and turning into drawer-liners, or paper aeroplanes, or using it to paper the outside netty. Your writer’s group will hold a party for you at this stage, comprising of puckered balloon ghosts, weak cups of cordial, stale fig rolls, and a banner that proclaims
WELCOME TO THE WRITER’S LIFE!
It is our failures that lead us into a measure of success. How you define that success
is down to you.
I guess I shall think of this book as I think, in the end, of all books.
This book is about words simply because it has thousands of them inside it.
Accompanying Endnotes
1. Sims, Elizabeth. Shelf Savvy: How Book Categorization Helps Maximize Sales. Writer’s Digest (online) 21st December, 2018
2. Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems, Faber & Faber, 2016.
3. I read this particular poem in the anthology, The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry, (Penguin, 2nd edition). It’s a really fabulous book. I bought it at a poetry event, hosted by Newcastle University in 2015. Rita Dove, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet (and former US Poet Laureate) was delivering a lecture and a reading from her poetry book Sonata Mulattica (W.W. Norton & Co.). She was incredible. Powerful. I spent three hour’s wages on books that night. Money I didn’t have to spare but that is how important books are to me. I want them so much I lose all sense of logic, reality and control.3a
Dove, who also edited the aforementioned anthology, signed books afterwards and I dutifully waited, awestruck and starry-eyed in the queue. When it was my turn, I garbled out how much I had loved her words. I told her that I was a poet too — she may have just been being kind but she looked me in the eye and told me that she could see that I was. It meant so much. Inside Sonata Mulattica, Dove wrote “To a fellow poet”, and inside the anthology, “for Jane – This garden of blossoms…” How wonderful, that someone so esteemed and rightly famous could take the time to be so kind and generous. I have found, in almost every case, that every poet I have met has turned out to be so. There is this strong feeling that We are All In This Together. Meeting fellow writers is a great way of discovering this most important fact.
3a. Once, I took my son to watch The Savage, a play by David Almond at Live Theatre, Newcastle Upon Tyne. We had been given free tickets by someone very kind who I had met through the local poetry community. I bought a copy of Almond’s book Skellig, which was on sale there. I plopped my bank card down and crossed my fingers. It went through. I went to the supermarket the next day and my card was declined. I was so mortified, I burst into tears but it wasn’t first and wouldn’t be the last time. Books just kept getting me into trouble (along with art materials and charity shop junk). I hope I am better now. I’m probably not.3aa
3aa. My husband went to collect the post (we don’t get any through our door at the off-grid cottage we live in for most of the year). As I was typing the above confession (believe it or not — I swear on my collection of vintage souvenir dolls it is 100% true), he came back with an armful of packages for me. I opened the parcels and there were three second-hand books I’ve bought very cheaply online. In case you are interested, they are: Why I Write, by George Orwell (Penguin), If Not, Winter, Fragments of Sappho, by Anne Carson (Virago) and Shakespeare and the Countess, by Chris Laoutaris (Penguin Fig Tree). There is also a copy of the magazine Poetry Bus (PB Press) which was free to me as it is a contributor copy. See how I just dropped that one in as an almost afterthought, when inside I am squealing? I’m incorrigible. I’m a lost cause. There’s no saving me, so kick away the plank after my plunge. Save yourselves!
4. ars est celare artem means that your art is so good it entirely conceals the art that has gone into it. You know — the art art. You only show the final polished piece and not art’s blood / sweat / tears. Art that appears to have popped up in the world pure and perfect, leaving no messy trail behind it. Or writing that is so deceptively, brilliantly simple that you would never tell that there was eight years of tribulation behind it and not writing like this endnote, of which I have openly made a complete arse.
5. Seamus Heaney and the Music of What Happens is a film made in 2019 by DoubleBand Films / Lone Star Productions for BBC Arts, BBC Two and BBC Northern Ireland / Northern Ireland Screen. It’s fecking brilliant.
6. A ghost writer is someone you might use, for example, if you are a Celebrity Cashing In and are possibly too busy endorsing fast fashion / getting photographed at the opening of envelopes that you can’t be faffed to write your own life story. It is NOT a Ghost Writer, which is a visitation from the spirit world that haunts your pens, keyboards and stuff. Who can say for sure whether or not ghosts have written books? Perhaps I am a vessel and a frustrated poet from the 1800’s is venting its opinions through me, thus6a preventing me from writing my very sensible and decent book on growing cabbages. I’ll stop now, ‘cause this is getting silly.
6a. Now I have used the word ‘thus’, I thusly do feel like a proper writer. Thankyouverymuch.
7. The Three Best Things You Can Do in my humble opinion are: the one I already mentioned. The second, write as much as you can, whenever or wherever possible. Practise like it’s going out of fashion. The third, join either face-to-face or online poetry groups, for the giving and receiving of support and critiques. Find out how people respond to your work. In a nutshell, READ, WRITE, ASK & BE ASKED.
8. This methodology will appear later on in the book. It’s thanks to the work I produced during this DYCP funding period that I was able to expand from poetry alone, into lyric essays and hybridity. It’s my get-out clause — blame them for this book.
9. So you want to know? My idea of heaven involves most of the obvious stuff — no housework, no horrible neighbours, no illness, no violence or discrimination, no Tories, no need for money. Equality, plenty for everyone, peace, love and all that. On a cloud the colour of a dog’s tummy are all the writers I adore. They are sitting on thrones made from gorgeous things like shells, pebbles, cream cakes, paper, cups and moss. They all have crochet blankets over their knees. They allow me to curl like a cat at their feet. Occasionally, they reach down to pat my head, or throw me a titbit of wisdom, which I gobble eagerly down. At 4pm, every day, they award me with a PhD. I think they might even love me. I dream them into my many mothers. Well, you looked. You only have yourself to blame.
10. I always thought of writing paraphernalia as inert but lately I’m not so sure. I have a distinct feeling that my laptop is slowly deteriorating on purpose.
11. I could, if I was so inclined, perform some quite ridiculous name-dropping, in order to scatter my book with someone else’s fairy dust and you’d quite rightly want to fling a custard pie at me for doing so. If I do, it’s because the story is relevant and I wish to credit the person concerned.
12. Writer’s Doubt. A write bastard.
13. One of the best things I ever saw was a cartoon by Ryan Pequin13a. It is very simple — a black and white line drawing of a posh-looking, snooty cove, wearing a top hat and a monocle. They have a speech bubble which says, I WANT THIS BECASUE OF REASONS. I love that it is enough to have reasons, without having to articulate them all the flipping time. I have used this to justify many an unjustifiable purchase. It made me laugh like a burst drain, for ages. When I am sad, all I have to do is look at this and I can’t help but buck up a little. I change it up (with apologies to Pequin) to suit my mood. I am sad because of reasons. I am eating this cake because of reasons. I am writing this book because of reasons. Now that would save a hell of a lot of bother.
13a. Ryan Pequin, I found out while Internet searching who was responsible for the aforementioned cartoon, was also part of the team who produced Regular Show, an animated series, which deserves much credit for lightening up the dark times when I was struggling with the demands of a young child. I was struggling because of reasons. See? It explains so much and at the same time, nothing at all.
I hope you enjoyed reading my latest article. Thank you so much for spending some time here with me.
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I must add the usual disclaimer here: I am not sponsored or paid by any of the websites I link to (I do this in an attempt to help others find information, and I may or may not agree/disagree with any/some of the content) — sharing does not immediately equal endorsment. I also hope I haven’t written anyting that might offend anyone. I try very hard to be as considerate and kind as possible.
A wanderbook. A life's work. Here's to hybridity, rabbit holes and reasons that reason cannot understand.
I couldn't stop reading this Jane and read right to the end and will now disappear down the rabbit school of filling a black hole mind by checking out some of the references that are new to me. Thank you so much for sharing. I identify - as I'm sure many of us will -with so much of this, especially the doubts that come with 'enforced' categories when you are a creative that outputs whatever seems to be demanded of the thoughts that are constant running companions even when you stroll!