Keeping Your Spirits Up

Sometimes its a surprisingly small world, out here in blogland. A while back a friend of my family got in touch because she’d found my blog and had one of her own. Our parents have been friends almost all their adult lives, although I hadn’t actually seen Sarah for about thirty years! Then it turned out she was writing a book and I was fortunate enough to get a pre-publication look at it. As anyone who visits this site knows, I’m particularly interested in all aspects of our well-being and self-development and Sarah’s book, entitled Keeping Your Spirits Up offers a fine practical guide to negotiating the roadwork zones of working life. To celebrate its publication, I invited Sarah to answer a few questions about her work, the book and the experience of e-publication.

 

1. For the benefit of my readers, could you tell us a bit about your profession?

I’m an occupational psychologist and coach. What this means in a very broad sense is that I am interested in almost anything to do with people and their experience of work. More specifically, I have gradually specialised over the years to deal with well-being at work, and – through the coaching work – in supporting people on an individual basis to make good decisions for themselves and their organisations, especially during times of change and uncertainty.

Most of us spend a great deal of our adult lives either at work, trying to find work, trying to escape work, wondering whether we are in the right job or talking and thinking about work. This may include paid or unpaid work. For this reason, I am particularly interested in our relationship with work: how we do it; what makes us productive (or not); how we recover from it; how we succeed in it; how we balance it with other aspects of our lives. Work can have a big impact on our mental health, for good and ill.

 

2.  What led you into that kind of work?

I did a degree in psychology when I left school but then went into accountancy, alongside so many graduates back in the eighties. I qualified but knew that I was a bit of a square peg in a round hole and eventually decided to go back to university to do a masters in occupational psychology.

My experience in the audit world wasn’t wasted though. The business understanding, as well as having met so many people in so many different organisations and jobs, was invaluable in fuelling my interest in what makes people and organisations tick. It’s certainly not always money – although finances do play a role of course in all our lives.

 

3. We all get stuck in ruts from time to time – what kind of circumstances are the best ones for consulting a coach? When can it really make a difference?

Firstly, it has to be when you are ready and when you want to address the issues you face. Being encouraged to go along by someone else, however well-meaning, will probably backfire as you may not really want to work on what might be troubling you. I find a sign that you might find it helpful to talk to a third party is when you realise you are repeatedly having the same, often circular, conversation with family and friends (and possibly round and round your head internally too). They’ve suggested every solution they can think of, you’ve wracked your brains – and you feel totally stuck in an uncomfortable situation, seemingly with no way forward or back.

Most of the clients I see are in mid-career, of middle-ish age (a wide and sweeping definition!), usually with some professional success behind them, but may be facing a great deal of change and uncertainty at work (and maybe elsewhere) and are wondering how to deal with it and whether to change direction. Or they may be forced to change direction by circumstances. And if so, how do you decide what direction is the right one? They can often feel a bit like rabbits (very hard working ones) in the headlights, frozen in the face of so much going on and overwhelmed by things to do on all fronts.

 

4.What made you decide to write a book?

I’ve always enjoyed writing, and have done a few creative writing courses with the Open University. I also wrote a very rough first draft of a novel through the “nanowrimo” scheme (write a novel in a month, which runs every November) – great fun and it got me past that self-conscious stage of weighing up what I was writing rather than just getting on with it. I had also started writing short articles (“Food for Thought”) to support my coaching programme, Creating Focus. These were intended to give people some pointers towards books or theories I thought might be helpful to them whilst they were doing the coaching programme.

Over time, I realised that writing a novel was going to be a very long shot to bring to fruition, given the amount of time I could realistically devote to it, with a business to run and teenage children to care for. So – I had something of a flash of inspiration whilst having a coffee in the sun in my favourite spot in Nottingham (outside Nottingham Playhouse), in an escape from the builders who were in residence in our house at that stage. I put together a plan for a book that would build on those articles and enable me to write some illustrations and case studies that would satisfy my more creative side. That was nearly two years ago, and I’ve spent the intervening time – well – getting on with it.

 

5. And what prompted you to publish direct to ebook rather than find a traditional publisher?

I hit a real low spot with the whole project around Christmas time. I’d written a full draft, but was struggling to work out who to approach re publishing, or how to do that. I have no track record, no affiliation to big university or company, no friends in publishing. I was chatting to a friend who writes fiction, and she suggested Kindle. I don’t own one, I knew nothing much about them. But she told me that a friend of hers had published his short stories that way, for free.

As the other aspect for me was that I had a budget of more or less nothing, this appealed, and I decided I had nothing to lose and at least it would mean I got the book finished rather than left as a well-intentioned pile of paper under my desk.

As I got closer to finishing I then discovered the whole world of print on demand which was a real revelation. Again, this means that self publishing on a virtually non-existent budget becomes possible.

 

6. Would you like to describe your book in a few words?

It’s a practical reminder, based on evidence, of what we can all do to boost our resilience, morale and energy. I hope it reflects the reality of busy lives rather than preaching an idealistic lifestyle in perfect balance, which is simply not realistic for most of us (and would probably be pretty boring if it was).

 

7. What did you learn during the writing process that really surprised you?

Two things.

Firstly, writing it has made me pay attention to my own balance of activities and ways of thinking to help me keep my own spirits up. For example, yesterday I signed up to do a local half marathon. Nordic walking I must hastily add, which is far less daunting than running (apart from looking a bit strange which leads to all the “you forgot your skis” comments, but there will be a few of us to promote some solidarity). In the chapter on exercise, I look mainly at all the barriers we experience and ways of overcoming those. Signing up to an event is one such strategy and I suddenly realised I was taking my own advice; which can be a rare experience.

Secondly, sticking with it through to completion (and even managing to meet my own deadline) was a really satisfying experience. I found I enjoyed writing more as I went on not less which is what I had expected. And a tangible, finished book is very pleasing to the part of me that wants to tick things off a list as “done”.

 

8. How did you find the self-publishing process – what advice would you give to others considering that option?

I’ve written a bit about this on my blog but the main things would be to invest in design (I was very fortunate in working with Kate Ferrucci of http://www.quartodesign.com with the Kindle design being something of a showcase project for her – maybe you can explore whether design students can help if the budget is an issue, although this is the most important bit that’s worth paying for I think); get feedback on the writing, not just from family and friends (possibly not at all from family and friends, they are often not objective enough); get enough support and cheerleading (I (rather sparingly) used a mentor for some of the initial draft writing – Eileen Parr of
http://words-for-you.co.uk
) to keep you going.

 

9. What plans do you have for promoting it?

This is another big learning curve, and I am only at the beginning I suspect. I have sent review copies to a whole variety of magazines and potentially interested people; I have been asked to do a book launch event locally; my local paper are going to cover it; and I am very happy to write articles for blogs or magazines where possible. I’m also exploring working with a local university as to whether the marketing can form the basis for a student project. If anyone has any ideas or suggestions, please do get in touch!

 

10. Are you tempted at all to write another?

Yes, if anything this has led to me enjoying writing more than ever. I am planning to write something about women coming into their own in middle age and beyond – so if you want to stay in the loop on that one, feel free to sign up to my (fortnightly) newsletter or follow me on twitter or facebook or whatever new-fangled means come into our disposal as the years go on

Sarah Dale CPsychol MSCP

<http://www.creatingfocus.org/?page_id=847> Keeping Your Spirits Up

Beautiful and Damned

Scott and Ernest

One day, when Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald were staying at a villa on the French Riviera with friends, Scott played a prank on Ernest Hemingway that nearly killed them both. They had been spending the afternoon on the beach, when Scott went and sat in his car and called out for Hemingway and another friend to join him. When they were all in the car, he drove it up to the cliff top and headed straight for the edge, braking only just in time to prevent them from going over. The friend, Archie MacLeish, described how Scott ‘jumped out of the car and looked round at us; his face was very flushed and red, and he laughed like a mad-man, almost uncontrollably, for several minutes. I was petrified; I still couldn’t believe that it had happened; it had all taken place so quickly, and Ernest, beside me, was white as a sheet. Ernest was a very brave man, but he hated stupid risks such as Scott had taken, and it was probably well for Scott that he was so shocked and pale.’

I’m interested in tipping points, which in the case of the Fitzgerald’s marriage would be the moment when fun and hi-jinks began to turn into something purely vindictive and insane, and it seems to have been sometime around now in 1926 or so, not long before Hemingway and his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, would eclipse Scott Fitzgerald as America’s finest young writer. The Fitzgeralds had earned their celebrity status by acts of outrageous behaviour, often ones that hovered on the borderline of being unpleasant or dangerous. Leaping into the fountains of New York, boiling up all the handbags of their dinner guests in a vat of tomato sauce, waking up friends in the small hours telling them they were heading abroad the next day (when they weren’t), perplexing people they had just met with bizarre or shocking questions, and always drinking far more than they should. They were regularly thrown out of hotels and the homes of friends because of their rowdiness, and yet for many years they managed to make this all seem entertaining and scintillating and very much of the era of irresponsibility in which they lived.

Young Zelda

Scott Fizgerald was drawn to Zelda because of her daredevil character. She was adventurous and spontaneous where he was fundamentally timid, and he recognised in her a wonderful source of creative material. He transposed her character and her antics into his novels and stories, and needed her to keep it up so that he would have something fresh to write about. Zelda was drawn to Scott because she loved the thought of being married to a famous and successful writer (she refused to marry him until copies of his first novel were on the shelves of the bookstores). It seemed enough for her initially to ride on the crest of a famous husband, and she was, in any case, wary of the demands of ambition. As the marriage progressed, though, she began to long for a creative outlet of her own. Zelda said herself that she relished the thought of having more natural talent than other people, which she could carry on thinking if she didn’t put herself to the test. But as their marriage soured, so that began to change, and Zelda was deeply conflicted by her desperate desire to prove herself, and a tenacious fear of doing so.

It’s easy to dislike the Fitzgeralds and see in their fate the inevitable reward of narcissism and lack of self-restraint. Scott in particular seems to have been a difficult character, controlling and possessive of Zelda whenever she tried to break out on her own, and with a really mean streak that alcoholism exacerbated. How much can we exonerate with his difficult childhood? His mother lost two toddlers just before he was born and another baby shortly afterwards, so it is unsurprising if she coddled and spoiled him. His father was a failure in business and a broken man. Scott grew up a poor boy in rich schools and unpopular, haunted by his father’s lack of backbone and afraid he had inherited it: ‘I knew I had no real courage, perseverance or self-respect.’ When he turned to drink it was out of a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure.

Zelda grew up beautiful, half-wild and popular, indulged by her parents, particularly her mother who felt her own chances had been lost. She was a one-note song of recklessness, and knew only how to exchange folly for admiration. Early in the marriage she grew restless and bored whenever Scott was writing and plunged into attention-seeking behaviour. A friend commented: ‘If she’s there, Fitzgerald can’t work – she bothers him – if she’s not there, he can’t work worried of what she might do.’ When they married they were so alike in looks that they could be taken for brother and sister, and there is an odd symmetry to their relationship too, one in which they admired the same qualities and magnified each other’s weaknesses. And yet as is so often the case, it was Zelda who was probably the most damaged by the marriage, descending into madness in the early 1930s and diagnosed with schizophrenia. Scott Fitzgerald died first, though, drinking himself into an early grave.

Scott and Zelda

I can’t quite decide whether the Fitzgeralds are truly interesting or not. Generally I love the stories of artists and their marriages, even if they are disastrous. But Scott and Zelda seem simply to be a cautionary tale, a reminder that creativity is by no means enhanced by madness, that it requires discipline and respect to get the most out of it. Although Scott Fitzgerald is a fine example of an implausible genius, a brilliant writer emerging out of the mind and body of a weak, irresponsible man. As a couple, they fell in love with each other’s grandiose image; a recipe for chaos, when there is no place for all the ordinary but inevitable parts of life, like failure, sorrow, boredom, disappointment. It proved dangerous to the mental health of both to privilege the fantasies they preferred over the reality they had to live. Their mutual possessiveness was a negative bond, a dramatic and artificial substitute for the genuine and generous love they didn’t know how to give each other. Essentially, they both wanted to be the cherished child of the relationship, neither wanted the role of the sensible grown-up. But to try again to be kind to them, they were also brilliant, beautiful, over-sensitive people to whom the world seemed to offer a promise it couldn’t keep. They grew up hypnotised by the glittering prizes that ought to be theirs for the taking, and found that once they had taken them, the longing was not in the least assuaged, only made hungry for more.

Not So Happily Ever After

I expect most people are aware that there’s been a royal wedding taking place today. There were fairy tale carriages and splendid guards on horseback and kings and queens and cheering crowds and the palely gorgeous Westminster Abbey, an ‘intimate’ venue for 2,000 guests. If we still have our monarchy in the UK, it’s probably because we have all these excellent props and it would be a shame to see them go to waste. Plus, all our broadcasters get to use the word ‘pageantry’ a lot, and it’s a very good word. My favourite moment in the whole thing was a camera shot of the world’s religious representatives, all sitting side by side against a wall. In my imagination I couldn’t help but see a banner unfurl above them, on which was written ‘Special Edition. Collector’s Set’.  Weddings make me uneasy – they are such a performance of optimistic fantasies; all that pomp and splendour around promises that can never be perfectly kept in complex, difficult reality. On the one hand, we need that level of hope to get us through life, but on the other, no one tells you quite how much tolerance and flexibility you need to get though marriage. The Bishop of London gave a really rather good address, in which he said marriage was an important step in becoming the selves god wanted us to be, and that it was a chance for us to overcome our basic human selfishness. I thought that was a very astute way of putting it; a successful marriage really does need each partner to find proper, loving altruism towards the other, and the difficulty of that spiritual task should not be underestimated.

It may seem a tad out of keeping with the spirit of the day to be reviewing a collection of short stories by the American writer, Michelle Latiolais, entitled Widow. But it is a) a truly excellent collection of short stories, the best I have read in a long time and b) it is excellent precisely because it has so much to say of interest about long-term partnerships. Out of 17 stories, five concern what must, I think, have been a real-life experience of the author of being unexpectedly widowed after 18 years of a happy marriage. We are not told until the final pages how the husband died (the circumstances are shocking), instead we are right up close to the absurd process that is the continuation of life within full-blown grief. Although that sounds ghastly and miserable – and it is clearly no fun at all – these are not depressing stories. There is an emotional vitality to them, a clarity of insight, a sense for the ridiculous and the poignant that make them simply truthful and engaging.

They are surrounded by what looks at first glance to be stories covering a wide variety of situations and concerns. The story about a woman’s trip to a male lap-dancing club that I liked so much is here; there’s a story about the wife of an academic, saying goodbye to his students who’ve been round for a social evening and realising her husband might be having an affair with one of them; the story of a young woman being chatted up by her writing class teacher in a way that she really doesn’t appreciate; the story of a wife deeply in love with her husband who is persuaded by him (in the interests of his academic research) to go to Africa and eat the same diet as chimpanzees for a month; the story of a woman doing the ironing and reflecting on the differences between cotton and linen and synthetic fibres, how the former protect the skin and the latter – especially in the case of fires – endanger it. They seem at first glance disparate. And yet as I read, so I began to feel there was an underlying interest in our profound sensitivities. We are sensitive in so many ways, more than we ever give credit for – sensitive to what we have against our skin, sensitive to people who do not think the way we do, sensitive to the diet we grow accustomed to, sensitive to tiny clues and gestures in the body language of other people. Our being in the world takes place in a myriad of interactions between skins, minds, fantasies, and more often than not, those interactions rub us up the wrong way and make us uncomfortable.

So this is where the long-term partnership fits in because here, when it works, we find ourselves cradled and soothed. Even the partnerships that don’t work have the blessing of familiarity about them, enough harmony and coordination to give us a sense of comfort and safety. When we lose a partner, we lose the body that fits against ours, the mind that choreographs with our own, the routines and the habits that smooth the rough edges off of life, the place where we can be at peace and at rest. Our partners are our literal human shields, and the effect when they are removed is akin to brutal exposure to the elements once again. The narrator’s grief in her widowhood is portrayed in a series of stories that show her sense of vulnerability and isolation, and the insufficient attempts she makes to bolster herself in the world. But these are not melancholy stories, as I said; they are courageous and honest. The cover, which I think is particularly beautiful, is taken from a fifteenth century tarot card depicting the Queen of Swords, representative of widowhood, separation and mourning, but also the woman who is wise through suffering. These are indeed wise, beautiful and evocative stories that reveal the intricacy of our inner lives with delicacy and restraint.

Top Ten

Top Ten Books I Absolutely Had To Have – But Still Haven’t Read

I saw this meme a while back over at The Broke and The Bookish and thought it sounded very me – except of course it’s too easy, and I could give you a list of the top 200 books I absolutely had to have and still haven’t got around to reading. But here’s a handful that standout:

Booker shortlist 2009

I often ask for the Booker shortlist for Christmas, particularly since one of the UK book catalogues offers the set at a very economical price. But this list that year was so good – Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt, Summertime by J.M. Coetzee – that I couldn’t wait for Christmas to roll around and I ordered them as soon as the offer appeared in October. I lay in wait for the delivery van every day, and finally they arrived and I was thrilled! Only by then, the announcement of the winner was days away, the blogworld was flooded with reviews of the shortlist and suddenly the impetus had gone out of reading them. I’d read so much about them all online by that point, I felt I almost had read them. I’m still looking forward to all six shortlisted novels, just waiting for the right amount of time to elapse.

pre-Christmas 2010 fantasy and magical books

In the run-up to last Christmas I ordered myself a special batch of reading, all of it fantasy and fairy tale and so on, designed to inject the festive season with a little alternative spirituality. I ordered the works of Hans Christian Andersen, Michael Ende’s Neverending Story, Here Lies Arthur by Philip Reeve and The King Arthur Trilogy by Rosemary Sutcliff. Then the snow fell and the books took so long to arrive that Christmas was almost upon us when the travel-torn packages finally came. I squeezed in the Rosemary Sutcliff but after that the moment seemed to have passed and I didn’t feel like fantasy reading any more. Oh well, their time will come around again, no doubt.

Colette in Pleiade editions

It’s a convention of the university that if you write a dissertation on a French author and the work exists in the Pleiade edition, that is the one you must reference. Pleiade produces all canonical French writers in these special hardback editions – embossed covers in slip cases, thin, gilt-edged pages, a wodge of references, notes and secondary material at the back almost as big as the works themselves. When I wrote my thesis, three-quarters of Colette’s work had made it into Pleiade edition and none of Duras’s. Did I mention how expensive these books are? Each of the three volumes I bought cost me around £60. They are beautiful in their way but no fun really to read, with paper too thin for margin annotations, and tiny type and all those endnotes. They are my red badge of courage for submitting a thesis, and shelf ornamentation.

Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

This time last year I had a blockbuster-fest and the book that provoked it was Gone With The Wind. I can’t recall now why I decided I wanted to read it so much, but it was the first on my list to buy and the first I intended to read. And then, somehow, I ended up reading Valley of the Dolls and The Thorn Birds and Sidney Sheldon and without really meaning to, relegated poor old Margaret Mitchell to the last in the queue, by which point I’d had enough of 700+ page novels. I still very much want to read this novel – probably the summer will see me in blockbuster mood again.

Noah’s Compass – Anne Tyler

I so nearly bought this in hardback. I am a huge Anne Tyler fan and have read pretty much everything she’s written.  But I held myself in restraint until the paperback came out and then finally I bought it. And now I’m still holding myself in restraint because Tyler is a reliably good read and there are times when only a book by one of my favourite, reliably-good authors will do. I’ve saving it up for one of those times.

Cleopatra – Stacy Schiff

Now this one I did buy in hardback, although not that long ago – January of this year. I heard it had won the Pulitzer, fell for the subject matter and the rave reviews and just succumbed to pure book lust. I still want to read it, only I can’t see myself fitting it into my schedule before about May. Where does the time go?

Narcissus and Goldmund – Hermann Hesse

Another recent purchase, and one I had intended to read the moment I got my little paws on it. However, once I had it, it actually gave me a real yearning for the Hesse novels I had read already. Somehow the desire I felt for this novel swerved away onto Siddhartha, which I read a few days ago, and Steppenwolf, which I feel sure I will now have to reread before coming to this one. I have no idea why this should be; it just is.

Skating to Antarctica - Jenni Diski

It must be a couple of years now since Dorothy read and reviewed this memoir. She made it sound so good I knew I had to have it. I found a cheap copy from an amazon marketplace seller and was pleased to receive it. It’s about Diski’s dysfunctional upbringing, featuring a mad mother, I do believe, intertwined with a journey she makes to Antarctica. I bought it just at the end of a long period of reading about motherhood, and it turns out that the vast majority of mothers who star in memoirs are mad and dysfunctional. Not that I mind adding another to my list, they are always worth reading about, but I haven’t felt that sharp twist of need that accompanies picking up a book and that says, yes, this is the moment to read another story about x or y. But I’m still looking forward to it very much, and the moment will undoubtedly arise.

Mentors, Muses & Monsters – edited by Elizabeth Benedict

Another blogger recommendation here from Stefanie, who posted glowing, delightful accounts of this book until I could stand it no longer. It’s a lovely volume, a hardback again, with untrimmed pages. The problem here is that I keep promising myself this book in conjunction with a writing project. I’ll be reading that book, I say to myself, when I write that article about writing I keep assuring myself I’ll do. Naturally the project keeps receding over the horizon, and so does my reading of this book. But I DO want to read it.

The Lacuna – Barbara Kingsolver

I can’t quite recall now why this book got so much coverage last year – it was in conjunction with a prize, wasn’t it? The Orange Prize, perhaps? Anyway, I waited until the copies online were cheap and bought one, and then it so happened that a whole bunch of very uncertain reviews came out in the blogworld and I read them all. They weren’t the kind of reviews where someone loved the book and another person hated it and so one feels persuaded that at least an interestingly provocative reading experience will occur. No, these were all reviews that just felt lacklustre about the novel, and those reviews are more offputting than any other kind, I think. I need to wait long enough to forget them, or until another bunch of reviews come out that show it in an intriguing light again. It will happen, and in the meantime, it’s not like I don’t have other books to read……