Enjoy and thanks for listening.

Emma joins us at Circle of Misse April 12-18, 2010 to lead a Get Writing! Boot Camp.

Her teaching and writing career has taken her as far a field as South East Asia, Japan and India. She lectures in Creative Writing at New York University - London, and at the Open University.

Emma has won various prizes for her writing including an Arts Council Award and a Royal Literary Fund Bursary. She was also a recent Byrdcliffe Artist in Residence, and has been short-listed for various prestigious awards including the David Wong Fellowship, the International Fish Prize and the Asham Award (Britain’s foremost short story prize for women writers).

Meryl leads "Creativity Jumpstart: Seeing With A Poet’s Eye" and "Poetry Boot Camp: Discovering New Territory" at Circle of Misse in July.

Meryl is a Jerwood/Arvon Young Poet, was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship and short-listed for the New Writing Ventures Poetry Prize. She has led writing workshops in museums, schools and prisons and was selected to participate in both the Jerwood/Aldeburgh Seminar, “To and From a First Collection” and the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Masterclass in 2009. Her work has appeared in the anthologies: Entering the Tapestry (ed.s Mimi Khalvati and Graham Fawcett, 2003, Enitharmon) and Reactions 5 (ed. Clare Pollard, 2005, Pen and Ink Press). Reviews and poems have been published in various magazines, including the Guardian and most recently New Welsh Review and Poetry Review. A pamphlet collection, Relinquish, was published in 2007 by Arrowhead Press.

As always, if you like our theme music, it's called Acclimate from the album Cool Aberrations by General Fuzz. You can download it at www.magnatune.com

Enjoy the podcast. Thanks for listening.

Emma offers advice that is applicable for those considering longer creative writing courses, such as an MA, as well as those considering a shorter course like the week-long Get Writing! Boot Camp she will lead at Circle of Misse 12-18 April, 2010. For those interested in that course, Emma offers some specific details of what she has planned and her ideas and inspirations for the week.

As always, if you like our theme music, it's called Acclimate from the album Cool Aberrations by General Fuzz. You can download it at www.magnatune.com

Enjoy the podcast. Thanks for listening.

Paul leads a novel writing course at Circle of Misse 20-26 Sept. 2010.

Jan Woolf is the Harold Pinter writer-in-residence at the Hackney Empire, where her play Porn Crackers (about her past job as a film censor) was produced last year. Her fiction has appeared in literary magazines including Libbon, and her short story “Moving On” was short-listed for the Asham Award. She leads the ‘Writing the Visual’ workshops at the Hackney Empire, for writers whose fiction engages with the visual arts.

Jan returns to Circle of Misse in April to kick off the 2010 season of writing, cooking and painting holidays with a five-day course designed to jumpstart the creative process and get people writing.

If you like our theme music, it's called Acclimate from the album Cool Aberrations by General Fuzz. You can download it at www.magnatune.com

Enjoy the podcast. Thanks for listening.

Most of the time, I'll podcast from the Circle of Misse where there's lots of writing and creativity taking place. I've already recorded a few shows with visiting writers sitting under the arbour in the kitchen garden. Those will post shortly. 

Watch this space.

Meanwhile, check out what we're up to in Misse.

The novel is a fascinating, complex, and textured exploration of what happens when one women wonders if she made a mistake by giving birth. Maybe she's not cut out to be a mother after all. She acts on this notion, leaves her young son and husband, and escapes to Las Vegas where she meets another women struggling with her own doubts. Her journey takes her back to her childhood and her mother's past in an attempt to understand her actions.

Kate and I discuss how she came to write about this often taboo subject, and about the dialogue, and subsequent backlash, generated by the discussion in the media about 'the perils of parenthood.' 

Also check out Kate's cool award-winning digital literature project Inanimate Alice. Enjoy. 

Billed as "the only bookstore located directly on the San Andreas Fault," it's a real gem of an old-style village bookshop.  The knowledgeable and spirited owner interrupted our chat to call the restaurant across the street and tell them to tone down the live music so she could talk to her customers without shouting. The music softened immediately. 

We could have spent all afternoon there, but we had to get back on the snake of a road.  I picked up a copy of Patricia Unterman's wonderful San Francisco Food Lover's Guide and walked across the street for a latte from the Espresso cart before climbing back in the car.

It's the kind of place where you can browse, find something you've been meaning to read for years, or stumble across something completely new.  It has that personal vibe and genuine enthusiasm for books so sorely missing from most mega-chains. Odds are the person at the register can chat with you about your purchase and suggest other books of interest.  (Can't tell you the last time that happened to me at one of the biggies.)  Then you can order a coffee, take a seat and read for a while.  I bought a copy of Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire (a brilliant read) and did just that.

Anti is English, quiet, asthmatic; risk averse. He lives the typical expat life with his parents. Fabian is Ecuadorian, charismatic, always up for an adventure and reckless. Orphaned by a car accident that killed his father and his mother (although her body was never recovered,) he lives with his equally flamboyant Uncle, who entertains the boys with outrageous stories of shrunken heads and adventures in the countryside.  

The boys acquire his passion for outlandish tales and soon begin conducting their relationship entirely through the medium of storytelling.  The stories grow more imaginative, and although they think they know the boundaries between reality and fantasy, those lines begin to blur, especially as Fabian's buried pain over his mother's assumed death rises to the surface. The boys decide that she is in fact alive and at an amnesia hospital on the coast, for those who have lost their memory. That's why she hasn't returned. They set out to find her. On the journey the boys meet many fascinating characters, including an innkeeper who rents rooms in exchange for a good story.  As they become further enthralled in their imaginative world, dangerous consequences await them.

James and I discuss the ideas in the novel, how the story came to him, and the role Ecuador itself plays in the book.

We met on one of the hottest days this summer in London, near London Bridge. Because of the heat, we had to keep the doors open and the fans running, so the strange noises you hear are trucks rumbling past on the street below. Last time it was planes. I'll see what I can do to get train noises in the next one.  Enjoy.

Watch Me Disappear tells the story of Tina Humber, a British-born marine biologist now living in the U.S. with her husband and daughter. Her life appears ideal. Then, after a long absence, she returns home to the Fens for her brother's wedding. Surrounded by the hauntingly flat, dark fields of her childhood, an underground river of forgotten, and often ambiguous, memories burst forth.  She begins to relive, in trickles and then torrents, the disappearance of her best friend Mandy during the 1970s.  She turns her scientific eye to these recovered facts hoping to assemble a true report of what happened. But memory doesn't work that way she soon learns as she begins to probe her past, confronting the complexity and contradictions in her dead father's life, her adolescence, and the lies adults tell children to explain the inexplicable.

Inspired by the recent Soham murder case, which occurred not far from the novel's setting, Watch Me Disappear is an important and compelling book that provides a richly perceptive gaze into female adolescence, sexual awakening, and how we talk about (or don't talk about) sexuality, death and violence.

The Fens is also home to an RAF base.  You can hear jets overhead at various times during our conversation.  We ignored them. I hope you can too. I did what I could to minimize the planes and other background noise while editing, but I wanted to maintain the naturalness of the conversation and realness of the setting as much possible. I think that's what makes this conversation so wonderful and interesting. Sound editing is always a compromise, especially for a newbie. You may hear
a faint tinny background noise like a mad scientist's laboratory if you turn your volume up too high. The upshot is that if you set the volume at a moderate level our voices should be front and centre.

We begin the conversation with Jill reading a short excerpt from Watch Me Disappear and then move into the first part of our discussion about the novel. This is a two part conversation. I'll post part two in Mid-June.

Thanks for listening.