Posts Tagged Authors Electric
The Undercover Soundtrack – Catherine Czerkawska
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in Undercover Soundtrack on March 6, 2013
‘Friendship, betrayal and making sense of the past’
Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative process – perhaps to open a secret channel to understand a character, populate a mysterious place, or explore the depths in a pivotal moment. This week’s guest is novelist and award-winning playwright Catherine Czerkawska @czerkawska
Soundtrack by The Corries, Dougie Maclean, Robert Burns, Liam Brennan
There’s no denying that The Physic Garden is a sad story. In mid 1800s Glasgow, an elderly man called William Lang looks back on his youth, when he worked as a gardener at the Old College of Glasgow University and became friends with one of the professors. This is a novel about friendship and betrayal, about trying to make sense of events in your past. It may not quite be about forgiveness but it is certainly a book about resolution and the getting of wisdom, no matter how painful that process might be. It is also a story about learning: about life and human nature as well as practical skills. It’s about loving and losing, about the paths we follow and the paths we regret not following, and whether we can ever reconcile the two.
Not surprisingly, I listened to plenty of traditional Scottish music while I was working. There’s a song which actually figures in the book. I call it Waly Waly but some people will know it as The Water Is Wide or even the Glenlyon Lament. Like most traditional songs, it crops up all over the place and in many different versions. It’s a desperately sad, 350-year old song about loving and losing, a song that would have been old even when my characters were talking about it.
‘Tis not the frost that freezes fell,
Nor blawing snaw’s inclemencie,
Tis not sic cauld that makes me cry;
But my love’s heart grown cauld to me.’
The version I listened to as I was writing was an old track by The Corries, a duo I was very fond of when I was young. This version seemed to me to echo most precisely the voice in which I ‘heard’ it sung in the novel.
With that single exception, however, the musician who provided the Undercover Soundtrack to The Physic Garden, whether singing the songs of Robert Burns or his own compositions, was Dougie Maclean. Let me begin with a song just about everyone will know. A contemporary composition, this still manages to evoke many of the feelings in the novel, and I don’t just mean the essential Scottishness of it. This is a song about ‘telling old stories, singing songs’, about friendship and change, about finding your place in the world, about resolution and action. It is, of course, Caledonia: but you’ll also find versions of it on various CDs and to purchase online.
There are a million recordings of the songs of Robert Burns and I’ve listened to a lot of them over the years. But it was still MacLean’s simple, beautiful, unfussy performances I went back to time and time again when I was writing The Physic Garden. Here’s one I listened to all the time: it seemed to evoke the very essence – the ‘voice’ – of William Lang, a song about love, about green and growing things, about the cares which beset us on all sides, above all, perhaps, a loving song about women.
But if I had to choose the song that could truly be said to have inspired The Physic Garden, it would have to be Scythe Song. You’ll find it on a fabulous CD called Riof. This quirky YouTube recording (there are tech problems in the middle) is a fine example of Maclean’s lovely laid-back performance. But listen to the words. I’ve used this song in creative writing classes as a perfect example of a poem and song rolled into one. It’s deceptively simple and it’s immense. Everything about it somehow fed into The Physic Garden: the relationship of a little girl with her father and of a son with his own father, the need to learn about life, the practical ways of holding and feeling, moving and judging and then, at last, you might ‘know what I know’. Even down to the Icarus imagery, which somehow found its way into the novel. This song always makes me feel exactly the way I felt when I was writing the novel.
There’s one more recording I want to mention – a reading, rather than a song – and it’s this one: Robert Burns’s Lassie wi’ the Lintwhite Locks. I’ve worked with this actor, Liam Brennan, on many productions. He’s from Ayrshire and his accent and interpretation of this Burns poem are exactly right. One of the characters in The Physic Garden is, indeed, a ‘lassie wi the lintwhite locks’. Did I have Burns’s lassie in mind when first I thought of Jenny Caddas, taking her swarm of bees? Well, maybe so!
Catherine Czerkawska is a novelist and award winning playwright. With degrees in medieval and folk life studies, she finds herself increasingly drawn to historical fiction although many of her seven published novels (so far) are contemporary stories. The Curiosity Cabinet (Polygon 2005) was one of three finalists for the Dundee Book Prize and is now available only on Kindle. Her new novel, The Physic Garden, was recently published on Kindle. Her other novels, Bird of Passage, The Amber Heart and Ice Dancing, are also available on Amazon Kindle. Catherine’s website and blog are here, she also blogs at Do Authors Dream of Electric Books and she tweets as @Czerkawska
GIVEAWAY Catherine is excited to give away a rare print copy of her prizewinning novel The Curiosity Cabinet to a commenter here. Extra entries if you tweet, Facebook, Google or write the link on the sky in jet vapour (but remember to mention it in a comment here so we know!) This is a rare edition, now unavailable, so it’s a real collector’s item.
‘Not a thing to learn inside a day’ – Catherine Czerkawska
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in Undercover Soundtrack on March 4, 2013
You may recognise the name of my guest this week. She was one of my earliest Soundtrackers and she returns this week with a novel of friendship and betrayal: a man looking back on his youth and making sense of a troubled history. It’s set in Glasgow, and traditional Scottish music gave her both geographical setting and emotional landscape: the depth in apparent simplicity, the universal condition of loving and losing. She is novelist and award-winning playwright Catherine Czerkawska; the novel is The Physic Garden and she’ll be here on Wednesday with its Undercover Soundtrack.
The Undercover Soundtrack – Cally Phillips
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in Undercover Soundtrack on February 27, 2013
‘Without the music there would have been no creativity’
Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative process – perhaps to open a secret channel to understand a character, populate a mysterious place, or explore the depths in a pivotal moment. This week’s guest is screenwriter, playwright and novelist Cally Phillips @i_ebookreview
Soundtrack by Michael Jackson, Shaggy, The Beatles, Harry Belafonte, The Muppets, Nat King Cole, David Rovics, Sam Cooke, John K and Fred Ebb, Joel Grey, Liza Minnelli, Bing Crosby, The Andrews Sisters
All my life I have made up words to songs. As a student I used to entertain my companions on the way to and from the pub by making up ‘different’ lyrics to pop songs and musicals. It was just something I did. I heard music as a soundtrack in my head all the time and used the melody to write my own version of songs. I had a love of musical theatre and sort of wished that the world could be like that, people breaking out into song in the oddest places without any provocation. Strangely, I never thought about a career as a lyricist (I didn’t know you could). When I ‘became’ a writer for a job in my late 20s I chose screenwriting because I needed to earn a living. But life takes you on all kinds of unexpected paths and sometimes all the creativity inside you just hits that perfect moment. I’m lucky. For me the moment lasted the best part of 10 years. And changed my life.
In 2003 I started working with an advocacy group for adults labelled with learning disability who wanted to learn drama. I had no experience of ‘learning disability’ but plenty of experience of practical drama. It was challenging to begin with. Most of the group couldn’t read or write, some couldn’t or didn’t even speak. However, an amazing thing happened. Music unlocked the door.
One member of the group who never spoke beyond ‘Yes’, ‘No’ and ‘Happy’ just came alive when we started to use music. He revealed a talent for singing as well as a keen memory of 50s and 60s music. Consequently I started using music to bind together our flexible scripts. I found that by changing the lyrics of familiar pop songs to suit the story we managed to create dramas that the cast could engage with and which entertained an audience.
In 2004 we did a comedy musical version of Hamlet (called Piglet!) which included ‘ghosty’ pigs doing a song and dance version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller (song starts 04:40) and Shaggy’s It Wasn’t Me alongside my adaptation of a well-known classic with one word changed! ‘Piglet, do you want to know a secret.’ This was followed up by devised musical plays around the theme of Fairtrade – Go Bananas which featured Day-oh and Wake up and Smell the Coffee which featured, among other songs You’re the cream in my coffee and a play on recycling using the title of a David Rovics song The End of the Age of Oil and built around that song. Performed at the Scottish Parliament, we opened the event with our ‘star’ singer (the man who didn’t speak, remember) singing Amazing Grace accapella. That was a high point of my life. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
Our most ambitious project was performed in 2008. Aiken Drum’s Recycled Musical was our first full musical. For the uninitiated, Aiken Drum is a traditional Scots tale which deals with how people view ‘outsiders’. It was a really political piece in many ways. We set it in a sort of fictional Industrial Revolution town called Trade Town. All the songs were adapted from pop songs. For example I adapted the lyrics of Wonderful World (song starts 0:38) –
‘Don’t know much about industry,
Don’t know much about commodities,
Don’t know much about stocks and shares…’
and my favourite line
Don’t know why you want to work for money, I don’t think consumerism’s funny.’
And we also butchered Cabaret’s classic Money Makes the World go round
‘When you haven’t any shoes on your feet and your coat’s thin as paper and you look thirty pounds underweight
My advice is get a job, get a mortgage, pay with credit, have all the luxuries you need
Cause money makes the world go around…’
We also nicked a concept from Godspell (watch this it’s awesome by about 2.20mins) engaging in a competitive sing off with Accentuate the Positive with You cannae shove yer granny aff a bus.
Having moved 200 miles north I no longer work with the group, but I have taken our experiences from that time and published them as a novel, A Week with No Labels, which includes all the ‘dramas’ I’ve mentioned and a few more besides. It includes many of the ‘created/adapted’ lyrics. Described by Julia Jones as ‘perhaps the most significant book I’ve read on my Kindle this year’, it is a tribute to my time with this amazing bunch of people who changed the course of my life and changed me irrevocably as well. Without the music there would have been no creativity. Without ABC there would have been no novel.
On the way to writing A Week with No Labels I have learned that music and creativity is for everyone. And that life can be a musical. One shouldn’t take it too seriously, one shouldn’t strive for perfection because what’s most important in life is to live and love and be creative together. The song which was always in my mind while I penned A Week With No Labels and remains there whenever I think about it is You’ve got a friend. Sung by my friend, Larry. Among other things he taught me that in our real life musicals the voice is less important than the heart. So maybe music is about more than just words.
Cally Phillips has worked as a screenwriter and playwright for 20 years and is now focussed on fiction writing. Committed to a life of creativity, she publishes advocacy work through Guerrilla Midgie Press and other writing through HoAmPresst Publishing. She writes in silence but still makes up songs, sometimes to extant tunes, sometimes recycling other melodies. Only the dogs get to hear these masterpieces. She is currently director of the Edinburgh eBook Festival and reviews for Reading Between the Lines Collective. She is also a member of the Authors Electric Writers Collective. A Week With no Labels is available in ebook format for Kindle and epub and as a paperback.Her website is here. Find her on Facebook and Twitter @i_ebookreview
‘Music and creativity is for everyone – and life can be a musical’ – Cally Phillips
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in Undercover Soundtrack on February 25, 2013
My guest this week has always made up lyrics, whether alternate versions of existing songs or not-terribly-serious inventions of her own. She says she wishes life was more like a musical, where people might burst out singing if the fancy takes them. Her deep-held belief that life should be lived with lusty vocals led to a collaboration with a theatre group for adults with learning disabilities, and, by circular means, a novel that commemorates the experience – A Week With No Labels. She is screenwriter, playwright and novelist Cally Phillips and she’ll be here on Wednesday with her very individual Undercover Soundtrack.
‘If Mozart is playing, my characters slip into wigs and britches’ – Susan Price
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in Undercover Soundtrack on November 19, 2012
My guest this week was so young when Faber bought her first fantasy novel that her father had to sign the contract. She’s more than built on that early promise by scooping the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian prize and is so prolific that in her credits she only lists her best-known works. Her imagination has ranged everywhere, from a fantasy czarist Russia to the far future – and thrilling, evocative music has been intrinsic to all of them. She is Susan Price, and she will be here on Wednesday talking about her Undercover Soundtrack.
Coming on Saturday: video and podcast with Joanna Penn
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in About, Audrey Niffenegger, My Memories of a Future Life, piano, podcast, The time Traveller' sWife on September 29, 2011
This Saturday, October 1 if scheduling works according to plan, I’m guesting at The Creative Penn. In glorious grainy Skype video, you’ll be able to see me scrunching my writerly brow as Joanna – a thriller writer – quizzes me about writing literary novels and developing a literary style. If TV on your monitor is too weird, the post will also be available as more portable text and audio.
I’ve also been out and about on other websites. You might have already seen some of these, but as this is the book’s official online home it seems incomplete not to mention them.
A Journey of Souls : Why Novels Tell The Deepest Truth – this post at Women Writers was inspired by your feedback while the book was releasing. For which – thank you.
My book is like a TARDIS – or bigger on the inside than the out. Or the impossible job of squashing 100,000 words into a few paragraphs for a blurb, as explained in my monthly column on Do Authors Dream of Electric Books.
The Making Of… Really meaty questions about the novel, its themes and the choices I made in the writing. As explained to uber-editor fiction vixen Victoria Mixon.
My Memories of a Future Life was also featured on this post by Matt Kelland, where he was very complimentary but ticked me off for chopping the book in four. Point taken,Matt; not everyone appreciated the episode format and the novel is now available in one handy shot on Kindle.
I have to thank Gary Swaby for honouring me with the first author interview ever to feature on his newly-minted blog. And finally, I have to thank my husband, the writer Dave Morris. Not because I’ve become Oscarishly soppy (although he does say some nice things in this post), but because he reveals how if I’d followed his advice and that of most editors who saw the book, My Memories of a Future Life would have been a genre potboiler.
The paperback is now on Amazon.com and they’ve even been nice enough to discount it. I don’t know how long this will last but you can get the 366-page paperback at USD$10.76, saving more than USD$4.
The price of the individual episodes will stay at the launch offer of 0.99c until 15 October, and will then go to their full price of USD$2.99. They’ll always be available, but if you want to complete your collection at the launch price, hie on over to your Amazon of choice (UK, DE, rest of world) now.