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Let me begin by saying THANK YOU for being a paid subscriber. I hugely appreciate your support. You are one of a small band of very special people who have kindly decided to show me, in the most practical of ways, that you value what I do.
In return, I want to show you that I value you, too. I am still experimenting with ways to do that, and we’ll see what sticks and what doesn’t. I will be asking you for your opinion! Let me know what interests you.
I did this on Sunday, and Peter Hodges asked me yesterday to share my thoughts about the generous people who have helped me along the way in my career. I realised straight away that the answer was too long for a comment box.
This gave me the idea that I might do one-off mid-week posts to answer anything you might want to ask me (just for paid subscribers). So this is the first of an occasional “Ask Me Anything” answer.
Generous people who helped me become a writer
English Teachers
In order: Hilary North (mentioned in Please See Me), Bridget McAlpine, and Stephen Baines. All three of them encouraged me in my writing, but ‘Mr Baines’ as he was to me then went the extra mile. Every Wednesday lunchtime, we’d meet to discuss my poems. I handed over small books of them (I used to write one a month), and he would give me lengthy hand-written book reviews (several pages). Here was someone who really believed in me and took me seriously! And plied me each week with a can of Coke and Mars Bar because home was not a place of treats, as he might have surmised from my poems. He also set up a scurrilous school magazine run entirely by us kids, Post Mortem, and appointed me to the Editorial Board. It was hilarious and snarky, sold out every issue within 15 minutes, and got banned by the Headmaster after issue 5 or 6. He also sent a few of my best poems to Ted Hughes, who generously wrote back. I’ve heard since he was very diligent about answering all correspondence.
Ted Hughes
I met Ted Hughes in 1979, five years before he was appointed Poet Laureate. It was in a wet and windy demountable (as we used to call them: a temporary classroom, sort of like a mobile home but for 30 kids and their desks) at a school in Billericay. Mr Baines drove me there in his car. We both skived off school for the day. I was 15. I can’t imagine this being allowed these days, but there was nothing dodgy in it. We stood at the back of the room and watched the great Ted read his poems. He had this extraordinary, resonant voice, like stormy weather on the moorlands. He had a powerful magnetism, and I totally understood why two women had killed themselves after losing him. He also had, at this point, a pervasive sadness, which connected with my own (my brother had died a few months earlier). After the reading Mr Baines took me up front to speak to him, but I was awestruck, dumbstruck, unable to utter a word. He advised that I go on an Arvon course. Despite being 15, on his recommendation, I was given a place on an adult course for one week at Totleigh Barton in Devon, with the help of a grant from the Local Education Authority. The next youngest person was 30. It was my first time among other poets. It was strange, illuminating, and fun, and the 30-year-old friend I made there gave me a book of William Blake’s poems, which, of course, I still have.
Ian Dury, Tom Paulin, Fanny Dubes*
These three were the editors of Faber & Faber’s Hard Lines 3, an anthology showcasing young writing talent. They picked four of my poems. Four! I had more poems in that anthology than anyone else, and you can bet I counted. I thought I was hot potatoes and going somewhere. Faber! At only 23! I got paid the handsome sum of £10 per poem (an indication of the vast riches hahahaha of the poetic life). But forty quid is more than a week’s money when you’re on the dole in 1987. Plus, there was this swanky launch at Riverside Studios. Rock n Roll! Or New Wave, really, since the main excitement for me was being in the presence of the absolute legend Ian Dury, who I had idolised since my (now dead) brother had come home from the first Stiff Records tour in 1978 and played me New Boots and Panties, most memorably the sweary opening line of ‘Plaistow Patricia’. I couldn’t believe anyone could sing such a thing and have it recorded. And then HE (and Tom Paulin and Fanny Dubes, who they? to 23-year-old me) chose my poems, and at the launch, walked up to me, smoking, said ‘Can I have a drag?’, took the lit cigarette from my star-struck fingers, and handed it back to me. Wet. ‘Bum-sucked’, as we used to say back then. As I said, Legend.
Also, at this launch, I got my first official (non-English teacher) review. Various press reviews were pinned on a noticeboard, and one of them mentioned me by name. It said, quite memorably, “Ros Barber takes no shit.” Which I think we can agree, still holds true today.
*Fanny Dubes does not appear to exist on the internet. I don’t know who she is/was.
Celia Hunt
I can’t really overestimate how important Celia Hunt has been to my writing career. I first met her in 1987 or 1988, just after I got my first Highly Commended in the National Poetry Competition with the poem ‘Waiting for Scott’. I’d also had a few poems published in stapled-together back bedroom zines like ‘Smoke’ (alongside unknown Carol Ann Duffy) and the slightly more upmarket ‘Orbis’ (alongside unknown Simon Armitage).
I was a member of self-organised writing group at Brighton’s Zap Club (which would feed into an open mic in the evening), but after getting stalked by a member of that group and finding it was basically more of a collection of people with mental health issues than a place to get serious critical feedback, I saw a notice for an ‘applications only’ poetry group that was part of something called the ‘Montpelier Literary Society’ (sounds posh) and I applied. Celia Hunt replied and said not only could I join, she wanted me to run it. Me, 23 year old me. My first workshop facilitation gig, basically (unpaid). Intimidating at first, given everyone was considerably older than me. But I got used to it. I gave it up in 1988 when it became too much to run alongside my full-time job as a computer programmer and my part-time English Lit & Philosophy BA with the Open University.
Eight years of non-writing followed. But at the end of that eight years, I started my first novel with child number three, six weeks old, and still attached to my boob half the time. Typing one-handed but with that flurry of words that tends to come after a long hiatus, I finished in a few weeks and sent the best chapter of it to Arts Council England’s Grants for the Arts scheme to see if they would give me some money and encouragement. I was in my mum’s garden when the phone call came, saying they were giving me £1,500. It was the most I had ever earned from writing and a big vote of confidence). The person who delivered that news, South East Arts’ Literature Officer was… yep, Celia Hunt. I said wow, that’s amazing, let’s meet for coffee. I told her where I lived, and she said, ‘I drive past there all the time on the way to work’. We didn’t arrange anything.
Six months later, I rang the Arts Council office to see if I could finally arrange that coffee date. They told me she had left. I said, ‘Do you know where she has gone? I knew her years ago, we were going to meet for coffee.’ They said, ‘The University of Sussex.’ I rang their switchboard, and they put me through to her answerphone. When she rang back in response to my message, she said, ‘Actually, there’s a job going here, teaching poetry. Do you want to apply?’ That was 1997. And the beginning of the only stable part of my career, teaching creative writing.
That first gig was hourly paid, 2 hours a week, termly contracts, no job security - though I kept it until the adult ed department closed down in the early part of my PhD, about ten years later. It was Celia, also, who told me that if I wanted tenure, and proper pay, I’d need to get a PhD. The PhD that resulted in The Marlowe Papers.* So really, the entire financial foundation of my career as it stands today, both as a writer and an academic, rests on the support and generosity of this one woman.
*I have only just discovered in writing this piece that TMP has its own Wikipedia page!
I have run out of time for this week (and space—nearly the email length limit!), so Part 2 will follow next week. I hope some of your questions will have much shorter answers because I really should have been working on either my student marking or my non-fiction book this afternoon!
As you can see, any writer’s career rests on the generosity and support of loads of people, and I’m not even at the pivot point yet! If you read this far, I hope you enjoyed it.
Do like and comment as the urge takes you. If only to save me from the illusion of spending my whole afternoon writing to the void :-).
I wonder if Fanny Dubes might not be a spoof/goof name. Lucky Dube was a successful reggae artist from SA. Blowing smoke up your ass is American slang for extreme flattery.