Festivals and Workshops: Chipping Campden Literary Festival

This month Elaine Roberts takes us to the Chipping Campden Literary Festival to chat to organiser Vicky Bennett about the event and what goes on behind the scenes to prepare for the festival.

Welcome to the RNA blog, Vicky. Can you tell us something about your festival, how it came about and how long its been running?

The inspiration for running a literature festival in Chipping Campden came from the now

internationally acclaimed Chipping Campden Music Festival founded in 2002 by Charlie Bennett. In 2009 I decided to run a six-day literature festival immediately prior to the 2010 music festival. At that time there was a small bookshop in Chipping Campden. I approached Mary Gray, who ran it for the owner, and asked if she would help me run a festival. Mary sourced the initial sponsorship. We approached authors either directly or via their publishers. The initial intention was to concentrate on fiction. Key to attracting good writers was to secure one well-known author from the outset. In 2010 our first speaker was William Boyd, followed by Patrick Gale, Amanda Craig, Michael Arditti, Samantha Harvey and Adam Foulds. So, between us Mary and I had put together a programme of novelists, gathered a group of helpers to distribute programmes, and hired venues around the town. The bookshop closed two years later. The Festival bookshop is now Borzoi Bookshop Stow on the Wold, and the Literature and Music Festival now have a designated shared office, and tickets may be purchased on line. The Literature Festival offers a fee to all authors and interviewers, and for the big venue, capacity 300+, hires a sound production company. The Festival has no public funding and relies on ticket sales, local business sponsorship, and small private donations. It is therefore imperative that we engage speakers that have a wide appeal, and audiences return year on year.

Who are your main speakers this year?

Max Hastings event

As soon as one festival ends I begin to think about the next. I try to choose a writer who will set a theme for the festival. Sometimes, as this year, a festival-goer will suggest an author. Early 2016 it was suggested that I read East West Street by Philippe Sands for 2017. As I was thinking of Crime/Justice and Forgiveness as being themes for 2017 I read the book with interest, and asked Philippe Sands to be my first evening speaker, and he accepted. He has since won the Gifford Baillie prize for non-fiction.

  I soon realised at the 2010 festival that to attract big audiences, a speaker must either have written on a subject of interest to a wide audience such as world war, historic buildings, great politicians, Shakespeare, Dickens, Jane Austen or be a novelist who has become a household name through television and film. So for 2017 my other main speakers are

Non-fiction: Adrian Tinniswood The Long weekend, Lord David Owen Cabinet’s Finest Hour, Richard Holloway A Little History of Religion, Annie Gray The Greedy Queen, Kathryn Harkup A is for Arsnic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie

Fiction: Sophie Hannah Closed Casket, Mark Billingham Die of Shame, M C Beaton Pushing Up The Daisies: Agatha Raisin. At the two latter events BBC Crimewatch broadcaster Sue Cook will be in the chair.

We also have events on Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment, Oscar Wilde, and Hamlet. At the two latter events we have well known Archers actor Timothy Watson (Rob Titchener) reading.

As our blog is for writers can you tell me how your festival would benefit our members?

Reading, meeting and listening to good authors speaking about their own work or hearing academics

talking about great writers is essential to being a good author. Additionally, Jane Corrie (whose first psychological thriller My Husband’s Wife was a 2016 Sunday Times best seller) is in 2017 running a day workshop: Expert practical advice on how to find the right idea, create characters, write realistic dialogue, get to grips with viewpoint, put the reader in the setting, and get published.

We also spread the word about other festivals and author events via twitter. Following us, and other festivals, is a good way of finding out what is happening at festivals, what is being published, and what is being reviewed. If an author emails me about appearing I always respond even if I can’t offer a space. It is essential for an author to approach me as soon as one festival is finished in order to be included in the next programme. But not to send a book until requested because it will only be read if the intention is to include it.

How about staying over for the whole event. Where can people stay? 

Chipping Campden, a bustling Cotswold market town in an area of Outstanding National Beauty, is geared up to visitors. 

There is an exceptional amount of accommodation from private B&B's to atmospheric pubs and a four-star hotel plus masses of self catering cottages. There is also a range of places to eat out, and high quality food and wine to take away for self-caterers.

What does it cost to attend?

The Printers Wayzgoose is free, film £5, poetry reading £4, main talks £7, Lunch event £29. All evening and weekend talks are free to full time students.

Do workshops/talks fill up quickly?

Some of our daytime venues are small so these talks can fill quickly. Also numbers at workshops limited. Friends of the Festival get priority booking:

Minimum donation of £25

Please make cheques payable to

‘Chipping Campden Literature Festival’ And post them to:

Vicky Bennett, Literature Festival, The Old Police Station, High Street, Chipping Campden, GL55 6HB

How much time does it take to organise the festival?

Full time for each year: as one festival ends so the next begins.

Dates for the next two years:

Tuesday 9^th- Sunday14^th May 2017 inclusive 

Dates for 2018 TBC

Link to the Chipping Campden Festival website

Email for queries: Vicky Bennett vicky@campdenlitfest.co.uk

Thank you, Elaine. This is certainly a literary festival worth visiting.

History and Love with Jenny Barden

History and Love – how can we ever unravel the truth?

Today we welcome Jenny Barden who has written about love in historical fiction.

The historical records provide evidence of events about which we are certain, but what of the feelings of those who lived long ago – how can we know how they experienced love? Consider attitudes in the Elizabethen era, when women were typically under the complete control of men, could not own property or trade (except in widowhood), and could not even protest if their husbands beat them because that was legal and expected in cases of disobedience. Women were inferior to men so how could they be loved as equals?

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Shakespeare wrote of his lover, Thou art more lovely and more temperate. In language that has resonated through time with the power of his feeling we all know how the sonnet ends:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

The words are beautiful, but it is Shakespeare’s mastery with his pen that gives his lover immortality. In this, he possesses her absolutely.

For historical novelists the recreation of emotion poses a dilemma. We want to accurately reflect the attitudes and mind-sets of the past, to make our characters convincing in terms of being true to their age, but we also want to show them experiencing emotion in a way that we can identify with in the here and now. They have to be empathetic to modern readers. How accurately can we conjure up the passion in relationships that flowered long ago? Is it possible to do this simply by transposing how we might feel now in similar circumstances within the framework of what actually happened according to historical sources?The difficulty is that while there are many accounts that deal with incident in time and place, there are few that document emotion, particularly genuine expressions of love. There is a wealth of Elizabethan love poetry, not least because declarations of love in rhyming couplets were expected of every gentleman of the time, but relatively little was written by women, and the stylised poetry that formed a conventional facet of courtship may well have had more to do with the idea of love than the reality.

 

Did Elizabeth I really love François, Duc de Anjou, when she wrote: 

 

 

                                                     …I am, and not; I freeze and yet am burned,
Since from myself another self I turned.

My care is like my shadow in the sun --
Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,
Stands, and lies by me, doth what I have done;
His too familiar care doth make me rue it.
No means I find to rid him from my breast,
Till by the end of things it be suppressed...

The lyricism is captivating, and there will be a part of any sensitive modern reader wanting to believe that Elizabeth was heartbroken when the young Frenchman, who had steadfastly courted her for three years, left England for the last time. But Elizabeth was playing a clever game of political expediency by encouraging the courtship of her ‘frog’ as she affectionately called him. For as long as the heir to the French throne was courting her, France would not ally with Spain to England’s disadvantage.

 

As Elizabeth approached her fifties she may well have dallied with the idea of sharing a bed with a man, then in his mid-twenties, who had declared her to be the object of his infatuation. But it was more fantasy than substance. Most historians consider the poem to be a sophisticated conceit, on a par with the £30,000 paid to the departing duke to sweeten his leave-taking along with bills for £20,000 more. Pricking the fiction of her love came at a price.

Yet within the measured lines of Elizabeth’s poem is there real feeling showing through; a deep sadness for the loss of a kind admirer; a recognition that she would never find fulfilment as a mother; a cry from a soul unable ever to commit to passion? ‘I freeze, and yet I burn.’

Perhaps the Elizabethans experienced love far more intensely than most of us do now, in the way that love is often heightened in wartime by stark confrontation with the fragility of life. For the Elizabethans, life was often harsh, cut short by unexplained illness, afflicted by conflict and vagaries of fortune. Perhaps they became inured to tragedy, or perhaps they loved with a depth of feeling we can only guess at in looking back.

 

Towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign, John Donne wrote The Good-Morrow in which his love transcends reality and makes the world seem like a dream.

 

 

…And now good-morrow to our waking souls,

Which watch not one another out of fear;

For love all love of other sights controls,

And makes one little room an everywhere.

Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone;

Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown;

Let us possess one world; each hath one, and is one.

 

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,

And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;

Where can we find two better hemispheres

Without sharp north, without declining west?...

 

The subject may well be Anne More who John Donne married in secret, leading to his ruin, imprisonment and penury at an early age, before he began a new career in the church. Anne died in childbirth with their twelfth or thirteenth child leaving Donne ‘by grief made wordless’. In The Good-Morrow he wishes only to be close to his love and the room around them becomes a universe beyond which all the drama of intrepid voyages to far-flung lands is insignificant. There’s little evidence here of the commonly held view at the time that men were the God-placed superiors of women who were born weak, unstable, incapable of higher levels of thought, and were typically: ‘lascivious, crafty, whoorish, theevish and knavish.’

 

 

When men and women travelled together to the

New World intent on founding the first English

colony in America could they have loved as deeply

 as Donne’s poetry suggests? We cannot know for

certain; the records deal only with their names and

the events of the voyage. But perhaps they did.

When Elizabeth locked herself in her room for days

 following the death of Robert Dudley, Earl of

Leicester, was she distraught at the loss of the only

 man she had ever truly loved or merely seeking

some privacy? Perhaps the words on the letter she

kept in her bedside treasure box for the rest of her life tells us all we need to know: ‘His last letter’.  

Quotes are from: Shakespeare’s Sonnet XVIII; On Monsieur’s Departure (1581), reputed to be by Elizabeth I; The Good-Morrow by John Donne (c1592-5); and from Joseph Swetman in The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women (1617)

 

Jenny Barden’s latest book The Lost Duchess has just been released in paperback by Ebury Press. It features a love story at the heart of the mystery surrounding the Lost Colony of Roanoke and the first attempt to found an English settlement in America.

More about Jenny can be found on her website: http://www.jennybarden.com/ on facebook at jennybardenauthor or on twitter @jennywilldoit

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thank you, Jenny for this most informative article.

 

The RNA blog is bought to you by Elaine Everest and Natalie Kleinman.

 

If you would like to write a craft article or cover a writing event for our members please contact us on elaineeverest@aol.com

HER LAST ASSASSIN - Victoria Lamb

Today we welcome Victoria Lamb to our blog to talkabout the last in her Lucy Morgan trilogy.

Her Last Assassin is the final book in my ‘Lucy Morgan, Shakespeare’s Mistress’ trilogy, and is published this week in hardback and ebook. This was my first-ever fiction series, and it’s been a steep learning curve from contract to publication of Book Three. So I thought I’d describe how it was commissioned and developed.
 

Back in spring 2010, I produced a detailed synopsis and the first 25,000 words of The Queen’s Secret, a Tudor Court novel with thriller elements. My agent sent it to Selina Walker at Transworld, who was interested enough to suggest changes. I continued to work on The Queen’s Secret for the next six months, then we formally submitted the finished manuscript to Transworld along with synopses for the next two books.

On November 17^th 2010, I headed to the RNA Winter Party in London with a group of glam writer friends. During our pre-party drinks, my mobile rang. It was my agent, telling me Transworld had made an offer for the trilogy. I was over the moon, and blurted out my good news to everyone. I was going to be a Transworld author! And it was my birthday too, by happy coincidence.

His Dark Lady was the second book. At nearly 150,000 words with four narrative characters – Lucy Morgan, William Shakespeare, Elizabeth I, and my fictional spy Master Goodluck – it is the most complex piece of fiction I have ever tackled. The action of The Queen’s Secret takes place over nineteen days: His Dark Lady spans nine years. One story strand follows the Babington Plot against Elizabeth I, and ends with the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, implicated in that conspiracy. Another deals with Shakespeare’s rise in the theatre, and the disgrace of his mother’s kinsmen, the Ardens. The plotting alone – working out fiendishly complicated character arcs and timelines - took weeks.

So we come to Her Last Assassin, the third and final book in my Lucy Morgan Trilogy. During the course of this novel, my heroine Lucy Morgan faces her greatest challenge, Shakespeare embarks on a love affair which could lead to his death, Queen Elizabeth comes under threat from a secret assassin within her own household, and spy Master Goodluck is forced to confront his shadowy past when his world begins to crumble. And the one who pulls all these strands together is Lucy.

Writing a trilogy is a difficult challenge, not least in terms of maintaining continuity and narrative tension from book to book. But I find it more liberating than writing a stand-alone novel. You can return to lost threads or answer a question in a later book, and build your world and its characters slowly and deeply, adding layers in each volume.

Now I’ve tasted trilogy writing, I’d love to write an even longer series. Meanwhile my Tudor trilogy comes to its conclusion with Her Last Assassin – rather a sad thought, but it will be exciting to start a new project!

Photo by Barbara Alderton: from left to right, Cal Andrews, Victoria Lamb and Jenny Barden at the RNA Winter Party 2010, the night Victoria 'got the call'

Victoria Lamb’s website: http://www.victorialambbooks.com/

Her Last Assassin: available in hardback/ebook on Amazon UK

Thank you, Victoria

Complied by Elaine and brought to you by the blogging team of Elaine Everest, Natalie Kleinman and Liv Thomas.

Please contact us at elaineeverest@aol.com if you wish to be featured on our blog or would like to write a craft article.