Dear Teen Me

A few years ago I was invited by the fabulous "Dear Teen Me" website to pen a letter from my contemporary self, addressing the teenage me. Sadly the website no longer functions, but I'm reproducing that letter I Wrote for the site.

Dear Marc from author Marc Nash

Seeing as like the primitive tribesman you have a dislike of having your soul captured by a camera, tracking this shot down from your Gap year back in 1982 was something of a coup. Fortunately even though you have no pictures of your youth, your mother clung on to the few photographic morsels you granted her. This is you sat at the top of a cathedral either in Paris or Italy in the days you used to travel. And yes you are wearing a music T-Shirt, that of Joy Division a band who were to play a very important part in your life, not least because one of your first plays was about them and the fact that their lead singer committed suicide. But here at age eighteen, the sun is shining, you’re underneath the sky on top of the world where anything is possible ... and you’re wearing summery black!

*

1977 aged thirteen and the year of family parties sitting in marquees in back gardens talking about punk rock. Well Marc, you never did master the paltry four strings of a bass guitar and fulfill your dream of being in a band, but you did make it into the arts. You didn’t write any lyrics, but you did still compose words in the form of stage plays and novels. Even though you have still never read a classic novel other than the handful you studied at school. At the age of fourteen, it was a recommendation from one of your cool older cousins to listen to The Cure’s song “Killing An Arab” and then read Albert Camus’ novel “The Outsider” that kindled your love of modern novels, while still burning the fires for music from which you have never looked back.

Teenage years were when you finally turned your head away from the childish world centred around the home and started to think about the wider world. You discovered politics through a concern with the nuclear arms race and mutually assured destruction. That fusion of the political and the fear of death has never left you and permeates all your writing as you now approach the age of 50. Cleaning the blood up off the floor of a parent after a serious suicide attempt in your last year of teenagehood probably saw to that. Though a terrifying and brutal initiation into other people’s misery, it has set you up for not shying away from tackling dark subjects in your writing and probing the extremes of human behaviour. When you wrote about suicide bombers in “Not In My Name”, you could balance the ‘bomber’ aspect with the ‘suicide’ part like few others possibly could.

There were wars a plenty around the world while you were a teenager. On your doorstep there were the charmingly euphemistically named “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland. There was the ongoing conflict in the Middle East which was of grave concern to your family, but which you couldn’t engage with as you held an opposite point of view from them. In your Gap year Britain sailed an army halfway around the world to bafflingly fight over some barely inhabited islands against the Argentinians. That was when you realised you had a love-hate relationship with your own country, another theme you would go on to write about extensively, particularly in your debut novel “A,B&E”. Interestingly you chose to write that from the point of view of exile from Britain, even though after extensive Gap year travel as a teenager, you resolutely decided to stay in London and set your face against further travel. These days you don’t have holidays, you only write in your time off. You travel extensively in your imagination.

Yet it was a another conflict about which little was reported because journalists couldn’t gain access to the closed country, which really caught your attention, perhaps because you could not confront these other wars which were supposed to prompt your allegiances more directly. And that was the rule of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the subsequent horrors of the Killing Fields and the disastrous famine. That warzone resonated more than any other with you, but you could never find the words to express such a scale of depravity and horror. It would take you 30 years until you were finally able to write a story about it. Before then you had written on Northern Ireland and the Middle East, intricate, complex works making no judgements of the various parties involved. But your story on Cambodia pulled no punches in delivering its searing condemnation of the cult of death.

And where did this passion for writing and particular the novel develop from? Well you got into Britain’s supposed best university to further you hunger for knowledge, But your were appalled by the closed and prejudiced minds of many of your fellow students. You were also disillusioned with your History course as you felt the teachers were not really interested in teaching, only in pursuing their own research. You were on the point of walking out, when a new student theatre stage space was opened and you decided to try your hand at writing stage plays. Even then with no experience, instinctively and temperamentally you opted for some radical staging and the whole play was performed behind a wire mesh fence separating the cast from the audience. And because you had difficulty casting it, you decided to back up your words by stepping in and performing yourself. You even learned to smoke for the part and scaled the fence to confront the audience at the play’s ending. From that short 20 minute piece, you then went up to the Edinburgh fringe Festival with two new plays, which in retrospect was complete madness, but you had no fear. You were hooked by creative writing back and you also completed your degree, as playwriting kept you in college.

You knew an office job wasn’t for you, so playwriting seemed like a good way to avoid that, which of course it wasn’t as there was no money to be made. After four years you secured a job in an independent record store to pay the bills, but the number work there left the word side of your brain free to continue writing in the evenings. You kept pushing the boundaries in what you did, moving away from dialogue and more towards movement and dance. The dancers looked at you like you were mad, what need did they have of the written and spoken word? It was only cut short when your beloved twin boys arrived and you became the main carer for them. No more hanging out networking in theatre bars for you, with bottle feeds and dirty diapers to see to at the double.

So you turned to writing novels through the night, interrupted only by feeds and changes. The books you liked to read weren’t really out there in the market, so you set out to write them. Stories that pushed the narrative form into new places, books of ideas and a rigorous pursuit and examination of language. And once self-published, you started giving live readings, the closest to the dream of performing live in a band. And you put on a show live. You inhabited the characters, you dialogued with the audience through the way you staged your readings. 

So it wasn’t quite how you imagined it might turn out, but looking back a lot of the seeds were in place in the teen you. Here’s to our salute of the old age us, pen in arthritic hand still writing and challenging the status quo.

Love and respect

marc x

A Writer's Journey In Pictures

Yesterday I attended The Literary Consultancy's conference on Writing in A Digital Age conference, part of which saw selected literary agents and publishers having to do a 7 minute, 21 slide presentation & talk on their professional life and loves. I thought this was a really neat idea and so have nicked it for my blog, albeit with text rather than voice and 15 images rather than 21. But then hey, I'm a writer, although I nearly didn't choose that path...

I can't remember learning to read. I have absolutely no recollection of the process, whether it was secured through a combination of my parents and early schooling. One of my twin sons taught himself to read by the time he attended nursery school. But I don't believe he inherited that gene from me.

Yet learn to read I must have. Though I wasn't a child fan of reading. (even today the notion of Young Adult literature is utterly alien to me). I was more into playing sports in the garden. What little I did read as a child were the picture books Asterix The Gaul and Tintin. The only books I read without pictures were those I was made to read at school, all of which I have burned out of my memory other than "Stig of The Dump" and "Cider With Rosie" which I loathed.

One other thing I did read was the "Just William" series, after my Dad presented me with a family heirloom, his original 1920s editions of the books that he had inherited from a family member. I did read and enjoy these, though I wouldn't say I devoured them. I have subsequently handed them to my own bookworm son who has utterly devoured them. Sadly nearing 100 years old they are looking the worse for wear now.

If I wasn't sneaking my torch under the bedclothes to read, it was because that cache was taken up by a small transistor radio. I used to listen to DJ John Peel's radio show from 10pm to midnight as he broke punk rock and reggae to my tender ears. Books never even got a look in as even today (how very undigital of me) I can't read with music on. My first aborted novel paid tribute to this well worn adolescent prostration before the shrine of Uncle John Peel.

Music and reading finally coalesced at age 14, when an older cousin of mine suggested I listen to The Cure track "Killing An Arab" and then read Albert Camus' book "The Outsider". I dutifully did both in the quest for coolness points to spread around school, always fed to us by older brothers and relatives. I was blown away by the book and voluntarily, that is of my own free will, got Camus' "The Plague" out of the library and tore into that. Reading wise it means I have never looked back. Literally, since to this day I still have not read the vast majority of the Classics written in the nineteenth century.

Somewhat surprisingly to me even, I plumped for doing A-Level English Literature, despite my complete lack of any grounding in the canon. Shakespeare was okay, Chaucer was a linguistic chore but sufficiently cheeky to be tolerable, Milton's "Paradise Lost" was cool cos it gave me ideas about Devils and monsters to feed into being a Dungeon Master hosting games with my mates (yes we were sad pre-Geeks), but Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath and Tom Stoppard really didn't float my boat. I attained a very middling Grade B.

And then comes the great turning out. When you raise your head above the snail shell of domesticity and start confronting/engaging with the world. I got into politics, mainly through the increasing volume of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament as American airforce bases on UK soil took root and politicians talked of neutron bombs that killed people but left property standing as they blithely considered mutually assured destruction. I wanted to be in a band, not that I could play any instrument. I was going to be the singer and therefore began to write cod lyrics, protest songs about MAD and even worse poetry. But they were quite conceptual. Early seeds...

I was so disillusioned with my experience at University, I was ready to walk out. What saved me was the fact that there were lots of free theatre stages and a plethora of wannabe actors and directors among the student body. So I wrote plays and could experiment with no fear of consequence. Having written a single 30 minute play, that year I went up to the Edinburgh Fringe festival with two new plays which I'd written in about 2 months. Crazy! 

When I left college, being a professional playwright struck me as a great way to avoid the rat race. I blagged my way into an exclusive reading card for the British Library on the basis of a paper I was delivering back at my old college on the punk and football subcultures, which needed, um research. For three years or so I read all manner of material in this amazing library. Under the Cupola dome and wondering if I was sat in the same seat as Karl Marx did (hope not as he had boils and piles), this was the most conducive space for learning and research that I've ever experienced. I haven't been in the new british Library, but I can't see how they could recreate the atmosphere of learning. On a couple of occasions I ordered what were considered naughty books, (one bizarrely was a history of the Tarot) and had to go to the special Reading Room where you were under strict observation. Alexander Trocchi's book "Thongs" was another such book that sent me there. 

Where did all that research lead? To a few productions of my short plays, and particularly my week long run of my full-length play "Walking With Mr Brownstone" at the Southwark Playhouse. A play about a fetus addicted to heroin in utero, which played with notions of reality and inner and outer. I became really interested in form and movement on stage rather than the words.

I had hoped the play would get picked up and transfer for a longer run. At the time my wife was pregnant with our twins and the actress playing the fetus who did most of the show on gymnastic parallel bars also found out she was pregnant during the week run. Must have been odd for her to be pregnant while acting a fetus spinning round on the bars. End of run and when my twins came along, end of theatre career as I couldn't really spend the time hanging out in theatre bars.

After finally emerging from the fog of rearing two babies through sleepless nights, I was ready to resume my writing. But writing what? I turned to prose as I set about an idea that had been gnawing at me for a while but which could never have been done as a play (apart from one scene which actually appears in the novel as a mini stage play). I have no idea where the idea came from, but its world was derived from watching those MTV programmes through the baby-rearing night such as "Ibiza Uncovered" and "Holiday Reps". The British behaving badly when they go abroad as tourists.

I self-published that debut novel and then took 6 months off from new writing for marketing it. Part of that did in fact involve new writing as I discovered the joys of flash fiction, stories of 1000 words or less. I could find time to do one of these a week, post it to the blog and keep up some level of visibility and traffic. After a year of this, I found that I had my second book title ready made, 52 flash fiction stories. Marketing turned out to be fun and creative after all. 

When I do live readings, I like to try and work out why I'm reading that piece to that particular audience at that time. This often means dressing up in costume, or as the photo above at Art Jericho in Oxford, performing in a style that fit exactly with the work itself. Here I'm slowly covering myself in the pieces of paper with my text while lying down as the narrator in the story is. I think I have quite a dull reading voice, so I like to put on a bit of a show to make it more interesting. There's nothing quite beats reading live to people. You can feel the atmosphere in the room change with your text.

I am a self-taught writer. I have attended no creative writing classes and as shown above, have read very little in the classical literary canon. But through my voracious appetite for contemporary fiction, plus maybe with my background in playwriting, I have a different approach to notions of story. The worst thing you can say to me is you have to abide by the rules of writing. The next worst thing, is that you have to know the rules before you break them. I have some very different ideas on certain established elements of literature, around story, character, character arcs, hero and the nature of fiction itself. I'm not trying to establish these as a definitive new set of writing rules, they are simply ones I'm interested in exploring through my writing. That's the future course of my writing life. Wonder what images it will cast up.

Thanks for reading.

De-Terence #fridayflash

Terence found himself staring full flush at the navel of the colossus currently barring his admission into Club Eros. Beneath the surging silk shirt, he could see the man's effusions absconding from their pores, like the juices running free on a doner spit. The sour astringency - body odour tinctured with ammonia - emanating from the rolling flesh scarp, threatened to anaesthetise Terence.

He was unable to gaze up into the face, seeing as it was atop a trunk so vertiginous, as to be actually nestling within the vermillion 'Eros' awning. A bulbous skull, shielded within an elongated lampshade. The leviathan had acquired the perfect defence mechanism – since Terence could not credit this as being purely genetic – interjecting a huge expanse of belly flesh to render his head out of range of any cuffed fist. No matter the tale of the tape on one's reach, with Terence a mere featherweight, borderline lightweight at best. It would be like trying to bop a giraffe on the end of its snout.

He briefly weighed up a wallop to the beast's solar plexus, only it too was eclipsed by the stellar amount of flab. A rabbit punch to the kidneys also only seemed to hold out a facetious adult version of pin the tail on the donkey. Wherever Terence might opt to strike, he feared that the blow would be cushioned by the cocoon swaddling of sebaceous flesh. Moreover, not solely this disarmament, but that his hand would be instantly encased and stuck fast within unseen folds. Untold bodily secretions might then set to work dissolving the flesh of those knuckles faster than you could say "Ebola Gay".

The behemoth cracked his knuckles. Its lingering snap resounded even over the thumping report from the dancefloor beyond the closed door. The weird thing was, the monster hadn't actually flexed his digits in order to do so. Terence concluded that they might be too pudgy to enable the pugilist to form a fully rendered fist, four fingers tightly curled together, thumb locking them in place like an iron bar. There again, he may not actually have need to, since the heel of that massive hand had a greater surface area than Terence's entire face. Simple enough to have his aquiline nose driven up into the brain and therefore clinch non-entry on a permanent basis. In the light of a Bouncer's discretionary powers, Terence's own discretion was definitely the greater part of valour. Terence stepped back from the sash rope's effete apartheid. In order to regain the illumination of the neon streetlights, he had to move a half-block away from this man mountain's penumbral kill zone.

This flurry of diffuse thoughts coagulating around violence, was a far cry from Terence's former demeanour. Halcyon student demo days protesting the bomb, grappling with Policemen (before both files settled for filming each other's ranks and taking it to judicial review for violated rights). How the deterrent argument always struck him as false, since it would only take a single happenstance to disprove the theory. In which event all folk would be long past caring, gripped in seeing their skin shed itself and absorbed with blood bubbling through every gash of self.

The pity of this youthful earnestness being, that Terence was aligned against Thanatos. Rather than partying with Eros through coming to Clubs like this, as he seeks to do now in making up for lost time and failing rather spectacularly it has to be said. The irony not lost on him, seeing how he was now faced with a perfect exemplar of the deterrent argument. The furrowed brow of a no win situation clearly incised all over the man’s signet rings and gold sovereigns. Terence was finally going to be forced to concede the argument and that his years of student protest and pacifism had led him up life’s garden path. There hadn't been that one instance of a nuclear bomb being loosed off. But he had embodied a slow radioactive poisoning of his paltry half-life all the same.