Blog seventeen: novels of the New World

A Literary Map of America. Image courtesy of National Writers' Series.

As I’ve changed my route, I thought I’d plot another “… map of America”. I’ll have to redraw the line for my musical map soon but thought I’d do a new one and offer you my books map of America for each of the states I’m visiting.

New York, as the city where I start my trip, is a place of many novels, and so I couldn’t limit to myself to just one here. Even two is ludicrously insufficient—but I’ve gone for two classics: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Twenties trailblazer The Great Gatsby, following a cast of characters living in the fictional town of West Egg on prosperous Long Island in the summer of 1922, and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, which isn’t about playing baseball in a wheat field, rather Holden Caulfield recounts the days following his expulsion from Pencey Prep, a private school. After a fight with his roommate, Stradlater, Holden leaves school two days early to explore New York before returning home, interacting with teachers, prostitutes, nuns, an old girlfriend, and his sister along the way

There’s always a debate about Washington DC and its inclusion and non-inclusion on states lists, but I’ve gone for it and the classic All the President's Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein – immortalised in film with Clint Eastwood.

For Illinois and my visit to Chicago I’ve picked Native Son by Richard Wright. It tells the story of 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, an African American youth living in utter poverty in a poor area on Chicago's South Side in the 1930s. While not apologizing for Bigger's crimes, Wright portrays a systemic inevitability behind them. Bigger's lawyer, Boris Max, makes the case that there is no escape from this destiny for his client or any other black American since they are the necessary product of the society that formed them and told them since birth who exactly they were supposed to be.

Next on my itinerary is Iowa City (our sister City of Lit) and the Iowa-set Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, which won both the Pulitzer prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2005, is my next pick. Gilead is the first in her trilogy about the eponymous town of Gilead and centres on Reverend John Ames, an elderly Congregationalist pastor. It’s a wonderful tale of aging, legacy and the American Mid-West.

A Death in the Family by James Agee is Tennessee’s selection. The novel is based on the events that occurred to Agee in 1915 when his father went out of town to see his own father, who had suffered a heart attack. During the return trip, Agee's father was killed in a car accident. The novel provides a portrait of life in Knoxville, Tennessee, showing how such a loss affects the young widow, her two children, her atheist father and the dead man's alcoholic brother.

I’m off to New Orleans next and Louisiana’s book is A Kind of Freedom by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton. Sexton’s wonderful debut novel traces a family through three generations in New Orleans—from a star-crossed romance in the 1940s to the crack epidemic of the 1980s to the unfathomable changes wrought by Hurricane Katrina. Injustice, hope, ambition, and the history and truth of New Orleans are the underlying subjects of this novel, explored through the stories of these well-drawn characters.

In Texas, you can’t escape Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. It is the first published book of the Lonesome Dove series, but is the third instalment in the series chronologically. The story focuses on the relationship of several retired Texas Rangers and their adventures driving a cattle herd from Texas to Montana.

I’ve picked two books for New Mexico: Mornings in Mexico and Etruscan Places by our own Bert (DH Lawrence) and The Milagro Beanfield War written by John Nichols. I felt it was a bit unfair on NM’s native writers to just pick the man from Eastwood, but couldn’t leave him out either. Mornings in Mexico is actually set between New Mexico and Mexico itself, and has some beautiful vivid descriptions of the pueblo people who his host Mabel Dodge-Luhan introduces him to. Nichols’ novel by contrast is a more comic affair which tells of one man's struggle as he defends his small beanfield and his community against much larger business and state political interests.

Arizona brings us Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko - A marvellous tapestry of narrative and voice that tells multiple stories from multiple times but more or less centres on contemporary Tucson, and the woman who is translating what may be an apocalyptic Aztec prophecy. Drug-dealers, shamans, revolutionaries, deviants, psychics and crime-lords cross and re-cross one another to create a grim cacophony of Native American history, experience and anger.

For my final state, it has to be John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on the Joads, a poor family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, agricultural industry changes and bank foreclosures forcing tenant farmers out of work. Due to their nearly hopeless situation, and in part because they are trapped in the Dust Bowl, the Joads set out for California. Along with thousands of other "Okies", they seek jobs, land, dignity, and a future.

Maybe this will give you a few ideas for some post-holiday reading and I’ve got a few recommendations go catch up with too - Almanac of the Dead looks especially good!

Blog sixteen: a route manouver

My new route. Image courtesy of Google My Maps.

As I said in my blog two weeks ago, I've been refashioning my travels in the US around the increased research and personal realisations around what I know now is already known in Nottingham and finding new, exciting and eccentric ideas around engaging children and young people in literacy learning!

I'm going to stick to the original plan up to Iowa City (New York, Washington DC, Chicago, Iowa City), which completes my first two weeks in the US, however from that point I think I may have to diverge from the original plan.  I now plan to head south to St Louis and look at the work done by the amazing Little Bit Foundation and I can also give it a touch of Judy Garland when I meet anyone... Plus, I have a personal link to St Louis, with my mum's cousin (who I've never met) living just a few miles north over the Illinois border in Alton. I'm really looking forward to meeting her and it'll mean the world to my granddad (who is another Notts resident, living up in Collingham).

Having been talking to Cllr David Mellen, who has been a huge support in the work I do with the local authority in his role as Portfolio Holder for Early Intervention and Early Years, I'm then planning on hooking back east toward the Volunteer state. I'm planning to head across to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, to hook up with the world-wide HQ of the Dolly Parton Imagination Library, which has been such a huge success in Nottingham and given books to hundreds, if not thousands of under-5s in the city.

From here, it's another long bus trip, with a quick stop off in Atlanta, to The Big Easy, New Orleans. Here I'll visit the the soon-to-be 826 New Orleans, which is ghoulishlyghost themed! Seeing an 826 project in the process of setting up and perhaps offering my support to them in doing this for a day would, I feel, be invaluable to anything we perhaps plan to do when I return. Plus, I can't wait to sit on a tram and read Tennessee Williams' opening stage direction to Streetcar in the city. That will be a very, very special moment.

Next stop: Texas and I'll be bussing over to Houston - not because "we have a problem" but to link up with the awesome iWrite organisation before flying across the Lone Star State to Albuquerque and Taos, which will remain the same as before in my planning and I will excitingly get to go and visit the DH Lawrence ranch! I've always found Texas a fascinating place so Houston will be my first experience of it, but hopefully not my last as I'll want to return in the future.

From Albuquerque, it is the old itinerary in reverse stopping in at Tucson and their Raising a Reader programme, San Diego and their national leading summer reading programme Read by Design (not dissimilar to our Summer Reading Challenge), then up the Pacific coast of California to 826 programmes in LA and San Francisco plus Reading Partners in Oakland.

That should keep me busy for 5 weeks! Please, if you think that this research and development trip and the implementation of the things found in America that are working to improve children's and young people's engagement in their literacy learning are important, please consider supporting the Crowdfunder which will help me do all of this. Thank you!

Blog fifteen: locating our local outlaw

Errol Flynn as Robin. Image courtesy of Warner Bros

As Nottingham synonyms go, there are few better than Robin Hood. The outlaw of Sherwood Forest: a brilliant shot with the longbow, who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor and romanced the beautiful Maid Marian, with his band of Merry Men. But who, what, where, when, why, how was Robin Hood. Someone of whom very little actually exists to document beyond hypothesis despite being, after King Arthur, the best-known legendary hero ever produced by the British Isles.

Robin Hood is a part of our popular culture, and has been for over 600 years. This outlaw of medieval England has seemingly appeared everywhere, and his wide appeal led to brief mentions in various texts. Scholars have long searched for the origin of Robin Hood, for an identifiable, historical outlaw in the Sherwood or Barnsdale area.

The earliest balladeers sang tales of Robin Hood long before they were written down, and audiences through history have all had different ideas of what Robin Hood was like in word, action, and appearance. Every writer, film maker, and poet ever since the first tales were spoken, has adapted the outlaw figure to fit their own imagination. 

In 1225 a man fled from justice in Yorkshire. He was recorded as Robert Hod, fugitive. He reappears in 1227 called “Hobbehod”. Could he be our man - spending his days robbing travellers through Sherwood Forest between Nottingham and Yorkshire? From the mid-1200s the nickname Robin Hood was given to known outlaws. As an example, William, son of Robert the Smith, was outlawed in 1261. He reappeared in the records in 1262. But by this time the royal official had changed his name to William Robehod or “Robinhood”.

In 1323 King Edward II passed through Nottingham on his tour around England. Amongst his servants was a man named Robin Hood, employed as a porter. Some early historians thought this might be the original Robin Hood, but now we know of earlier ‘Robins’.

The earliest mention found (to date), of the name Robin Hood appears in the poem The Vision of Piers Plowman, which was written by William Langland in c.1377. A long ballad, Piers Plowman was a protest against the harsh conditions endured by the poor in the Fourteen Century. It includes the line:

‘I do not know my paternoster as the priest sings it. 

But I do know rhymes of Robin Hood and Randolf, earl of Chester.’

Then, in around 1450, we begin to see the earliest written tales of RH: The Little Gest of Robyn Hood, Robin Hood and the Potter, Robin Hood and the Monk, Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar, Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne, and Robin Hood’s Death.

Later, after the Wars of the Roses, The Tudors revived the stories of Robin Hood. He was more popular then than he is now. Tudor documents are littered with mentions of Robin Hood’s all over Britain. For example, in 1497, a man called Roger Marshall styled himself on Robin, and lead a riot of 200 men in Staffordshire. In 1509, ten Robin Hood plays were banned in Exeter by the city council, as they had become a public nuisance. Robin Hood’s most famous Tudor fan was Henry VIII himself. In fact, apart from hunting, eating, and getting married, Henry’s favourite hobby was acting. Sometimes he dressed up as Robin Hood. The king would wear a mask, and his audience suspended their disbelief to see the king cavorting in the greenwood on the stage!

In 1521, Scottish historian John Major published his Historia Majoris Brittaniae, the first version of the legend to assign Robin Hood to the time of Richard The Lion Heart; Major also suggested that Robin not only avoided robbing the poor, "but rather enriched them from the plunder taken from the abbots.” During Elizabeth I reign, Robin was gentrified by Anthony Munday, in his two plays The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntington and The Death of Robert, Earle of Huntington (both 1601) – the first time he receives a title as an earl and again sets the action in the time of King John! Also, in William Shakespeare's As You Like It, written around 1600 it is said of the exiled Duke:

They say hee is already in the Forrest of Arden, and a many merry men with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England: they say many yong Gentlemen flocke to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world.

This is my first of two blogs on RH so come back in a few weeks and we’ll go from Ivanhoe to Russell Crowe in part 2!

Blog fourteen: moving the goalposts

Batman's Superhero Picnic at Wollaton Hall - an event with razamataz. Image courtesy of NCC.

Since I started my scholarship I’ve been reading, researching, learning, emailing and meeting people for coffee about literacy in the UK and the US. It’s been a journey and a half already and I haven’t gone much further than Strelley yet – trips to Eastwood, Rotherham and Hoxton in North London are in the pipeline before I jet off in just over two months. This process has given me time to look at what we’re already doing in Nottingham, good practice in other parts of the UK and the exciting and unique way some projects in America are dealing with low literacy levels in specific areas and communities. With all this in mind, and the open ethos of the Roosevelt scholarship to allow your research to develop away from your initial idea, I’ve been able to move the goal posts a bit with what I’m going to be doing in America and how I hope it’ll benefit Nottingham!

First things first – less school. Schools and teachers don’t need me going off to the States to tell them how to do the amazing job they’re already doing. Teachers may need a conduit to share directly with literacy leads in school the latest guidance from the NLT or EEF, CPD opportunities or projects that school can get involved such as the amazing work of the Literacy Volunteers, Reading Recovery or Switch On, which is working really well in the county – and part of the implementation of the research when I come back could involve this being something we implement. They don’t need a jumped up, non-teaching trained clod telling them that what they’re doing isn’t what they do across the pond. Good classroom practice may be encountered in schools but I think it has to be in-school support programmes and community engagement that is my real focus – certainly this is where all the work that I’ve done in my education work in arts, outdoor and literacy fields. I think it just took me the time of looking at it all to realise that this is something which is valuable and can engage with young people in a way classroom based work can’t. I hope one day that these strands will stand as equals and innovative approaches are recognised as hugely beneficial in developing skills and, super importantly, confidence.

I’m writing this after a day back working at the BrockleHigh Centre in Bilborough running their out of school holiday club and I spent much of today (between making rounds of toast for hungry young people and defusing the bust ups you inevitably get when children are thrown together in any context) surreptitiously asking the kids attending today whether they’d brought a book with them - none had; whether they liked reading - none did; and what they thought of “literacy” at school - “boring” was the standard response. Despite this, these were intelligent, articulate young people aged from 8 to 15 who in the group of about 60 included some bi-lingual in French, Portuguese, Polish and Russian, yet to talk to them about books and a switch is tripped. This study has to be something which genuinely engages the switched off and, as someone with a theatre background, I think that this has to be via razamataz (technical term). 

In the stocks at Nottingham Castle, exactly where I wanted to put some of the children today!  Image courtesy of NCC.

Looking at projects that have this wow factor and jazz hands approach in the States has given me far more food for thought about what we can do and achieve in Nottingham than just visiting schools and asking them what works. With this in mind I’ve re-jigged elements of the trip, although it broadly follows the same route, to refocus onto this. Of course, I’ll still connect with the folks in Iowa City (our sister City of Lit) and Taos (where DH Lawrence lived for a while) but my trips to discuss playwriting at universities on my trip has taken a firm back seat and my time in school might be just a day or two on each week stop as I focus on community settings, organisations that go into schools and projects which use means other than overt literacy to get kids reading. I’ve also been struck by something Sandy Mahal from City of Literature said to me a while ago about the ambitions of NCoL around young people’s literacy, which was “every child a reader, every child a writer” and I think it’s daft of me, as someone who probably identifies more as a writer than a reader, to neglect one in favour of the other. I will neglect the other R of ‘rithmetic but that’s because I’m rubbish at it.

This also all neatly ties into one of the most inspirational projects I’ve discovered/been told about by many people, although the sagacious Rick Hall was the first – the 826 network of stores selling esoteric things (from Blackbeard to Big Foot) as a social enterprise around literacy projects for under-resourced areas. On my trip, I plan to visit the New York (Superheroes), Washington DC (Magicians), Chicago (Secret Agents), LA (Time Travel) and San Francisco (Pirates) 826 programmes, plus London’s ACE funded Ministry of Stories (Monsters) and Rotherham’s new Grimm and Co. (Magical Alchemists) before I go. I really hope that as part of the report I deliver after the trip can include recommendations to make our very own version of this – perhaps themed after our own famous outlaw…

Children from Rufford Primary, Bulwell on residential at Newstead Abbey.  Image courtesy of Rufford Primary.

I also want to build on what Nottingham is already doing well at such as Outdoor Learning, with Bulwell being a national leader in Key Stage One Residentials (potentially blowing my own trumpet as I worked on this project but whatever) and green spaces with Nottingham named “the greenest city in the UK”. With projects like the Hoodwinked Schools’ Literacy Trail hopefully starting in the new school year around the exciting sculpture trail that the city will be having in 2018 and Dolly’s Imaginarium Library continuing, we have amazing things already happening and it might be remiss of me to not pop in to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee to say hello to Team Dolly. Looking at how we can use existing schemes, strengths and resources, such as those created by Nottingham City of Football, is my third adaption and I’ll be looking much more closely at Nottingham over the next month to really see where I can find allies and catalysts for any future work. I’m already speaking with University of Nottingham, the City Council, 1Nottingham, the City of Literature, Ignite! And Literacy Volunteers – plus have leads on a few others, but if you think of anyone, drop me a line.

All that this leaves me to say is thank you to everyone I’ve spoken to so far, everyone I will speak to over the next just over two months, all the children and young people I’ve hassled over their reading habits and the teachers about literacy strategies, to Nigel and Sandy who I’ve harangued for a bit of top up funding, to the scholarship for having faith in me pulling this all off and, as always and most importantly, Cáit for putting up with me – she really is the best.

Blog thirteen: Eastwood "Bert" in New Mexico

Bert and Frieda in Taos, New Mexico circa 1922.

Ahead of my visit to the Taos ranch in the autumn/fall (dependent on which side of the Atlantic you’re on), I met with Dr Andrew Harrison from the DH Lawrence Research Centre at the University of Nottingham to talk about “Bert’s” time there (both in Taos and his brief time at University College Nottingham between 1906 and 1908), his output whilst in New Mexico and how this differed from the writings he produced in other periods in his career in other places. Andrew is a thoroughly committed Lawrence-ite and even lives in the writer’s home town of Eastwood, where he is still remembered mostly as the man who wrote the mucky books (Lawrence, not Andrew).

I’m not going to dive into a biography of Lawrence, a very good one can be found here, but instead explain his coming to Taos. Lawrence had to be enticed, somewhat begrudgingly to New Mexico by the wealthy Mabel Dodge Luhan who, having read some of Lawrence’s writings, wanted him to come to Taos and capture the spirit of the place and the native population in the way he had for the peasants of Italy in his book Sea and Sardinia. A woman of considerable means, Mabel sent Lawrence a series of letters filled with native herbs (which he remarked tasted of liquorice) and a necklace from a local craftsman for Freida, although this was lost in the post. He arrived with Frieda in late 1922, but after numerous disagreements with Mabel and her husband, Tony, they left for Mexico in early 1923.

They returned in 1923 and disagreements started again, when Mabel proposed that they give the Lawrences the Kiowa Ranch, some 20 miles from Taos, now known as the DH Lawrence ranch. While the couple spent a relatively short time there, the ranch became the only property that they ever owned during their marriage and it became a place of rest and relaxation, where Lawrence wrote much of his novel, St Mawr and began The Plumed Serpent, during five months of the summer of 1924. He also wrote his short stories The Princess and The Woman who Rode Away in this period. Aldous Huxley is known to have visited the Lawrences at the ranch.

By October 1924, Lawrence and Frieda left for Mexico and it was while they were in Oaxaca that he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. The couple returned to the US with Lawerence wearing rouge on his cheeks to disguise his illness from American immigration officials, and by April 1925 they were back at the Ranch where they spent the summer, Lawrence continuing work on the novel which became The Plumed Serpent. However, with his better health and their six-month visa about to expire, Lawrence was determined to return to Europe. They left Taos on September 11, Lawrence's 40th birthday, and settled again in Italy.

It was great to tap Andrew for this information as elements like the necklace going missing, the taste of herbs or the rouge on Lawrence’s cheeks to hide his TB (not to mention finding out that in New Mexico he had a pet cow called Susan) was invaluable as this colour to the story makes it so much more real. We then talked about the archive holdings that the university has around Lawrence, including his palette, shoes and poncho from his time in Taos. I want to bring over something of Lawrence and his time in Nottingham to Taos as a gift from us here and we chatted about looking through the archive for some early dialect poems which we could reproduce and frame. Andrew and I have an idea which one but we’re not saying yet!

PS: after writing this, in a coffee shop in Nottingham, I wandered down to Castle Gate and took a snap of this where Lawrence worked when he was 16, which is next door to where I did my two weeks work experience when I was the same age! Spooky!