"Which of your books are you most proud of?"
How are you supposed to answer a question like that?!
This was a question I was recently asked. Okay, it may not have been phrased in the way I have replayed it rather clumsily above, but you get the gist.
And there was a lot riding on it. Someone on the retreat at which I was mentoring was going to buy one of my books and wanted to know which one to choose. The answer to the question was going to inform that decision. I was going to choose for them.
Offering up a response was oddly traumatic.
“The next one” - that was my first non-committal answer. Unacceptable.
“All of them” - probably at least as true. But also unacceptable.
“None of them” - on the basis that in each and every case I was sure they could be better. I mean, as writers shouldn’t we believe this? Isn’t the need to improve one of the things that keeps pushing us on? Anyway, this was an unuttered response - and also fundamentally untrue.
So I had to pick one.
[As an aside, the other day someone said of On Parliament Hill that, had it been written by a ‘celebrity’, it would be a best-seller. And that it deserved to be read. How wonderful was that!]
As it turns out, I think my first answer was correct - both philosophically and practically. At the time the question was posed, ‘the next one’ was both 17 Alma Road (prose) and Grimsby Docks (poetry) - and I think these are now the books of which I am most proud.
Though even as I say that, it feels as if I am stabbing my own children in the back and then leaving them lying on the verge of a wasteland road. “Forgive me!!”
But I have reasons for making my claim.
Grimsby Docks is different for me. It is a collection of poems and photographs, linked; it edges into a new format and genre; it feels as if it has a degree of weight and purpose about it. Hopefully it is also contemporary, and a little bit political. And it’s not about me. I attended a reading the other day where a multi-volume poet said that she only wrote about herself - and I thought “what a waste of talent when there is so much to be said…” We write about ourselves and our experiences of course, poems to try and make sense of things, but surely we should also strive to reach out to the contemporary, the universal, the shared…
And 17 Alma Road? In a way this is a little different too; but I’m proud of it because of some of the feedback I have received from its early readers. And because of its style, its focus, the story it is telling. In a strange way it feels the most ‘complete’ novel I’ve written (and not in the beginning-middle-end sense of a narrative), and as such a kind of ‘launch-pad’ for whatever comes next. Indeed, I’m already finding my approach to The Red Tie has been changed, enhanced, intensified, thanks to 17 Alma Road.
I want to bang the drum for both Grimsby Docks and 17 Alma Road, but it’s difficult. In a world where we’re bombarded by too much unnecessary noise, I’m reluctant to add to it; there are already too many people shouting to be heard. And I don’t want to alienate my audience: “him again!” - followed by precious reader hitting unsubscribe… Please don’t!
I hope 17 Alma Road finds a readership. I hope they both do. That would make me even more proud…
