A week spent creating the books that will belong to the wonderful people we have been working with at the care home.
I’ve just finished my third book – such an intense experience. I’ve come at the project very much as a writer, gathering material to shape into art. There is an ambiguity in this – the books I produce have multiple states of being. They are art. They are advocacy. But above both of those things they are an ethical engagement with another human being. As such they are a portrait, and carry a moral weight that is different to creating a work of fiction.
And yet… As with fiction, the material creates its own aesthetics. All good writers know that the mother lode is the moment that a piece of work starts talking to itself. This is, after all, why we create, to deal in a medium that is not simply an expression of quotidian thought. As I say to students, the fiction you create, if it is art, will be wiser than the writer, funnier, deeper, more intelligent, and will investigate problems that are not present at its conception.
With each of the books I have experienced this moment. D is an anecdotalist, he carries a world of knowledge and expands his stories outwards, changing them, working as a shaman to adjust bare facts to present concerns, and so his book speaks in prose and accepts loquacity, repetition, nuance. A speaks in short sentences, speaks with limpid resignation, drops jokes in at a slant to the conversation, and wants to remember, to get her bearings. She is a poet to me, and her book becomes poetry.
And DC, the singer, bursting into song, bursting into laughter, speaks in short verses, and gives me of his wisdom with a shrug. Many of his poems end with ‘thank you’. Thank you for listening. Because he knows there is no gift like conversation.
This week has been hard, not talking to my friends. I have missed them terribly. I hope I have done them justice.
Peter Salmon
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