The upcoming release of Lee, Kate Winslet’s film about photographer Lee Miller, got me thinking about how much has changed for women in the past century. And how little.
Lee Miller was one of four women photojournalists accredited by the United States armed forces in World War II. Among the many striking images she created, Miller photographed the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau: indelible evidence of Nazi atrocities.
She was one of four women allowed to shoot the war.
The issue of Vogue with Winslet on the cover, promoting Lee, also featured a profile of Karine Jean-Pierre, the first Black person and first openly gay person to hold the post of US Press Secretary.
Why, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, are we still tallying firsts?
Progress, such as it is, is non-linear, unpredictable and subject to reversal.
In 1997, I started my BA at University of Pennsylvania.
It was only the 64th year in the university’s 257-year history that women were allowed access to a full-time, four-year undergraduate degree program.
In 1998, I became a Daily Pennsylvanian reporter. The first woman permitted to join the illustrious school newspaper did so in 1962. Her name was Sharon Lee Ribner. Ms Ribner (later Mrs Schlagel) had a long, successful career in journalism. She passed away in 2022.
It boggles my mind that my opportunity to become a journalist hung on the balance of 35 years. And that the pioneering female journalist at Penn and I shared a lifetime.
Education is the essential ingredient, here. An untrained mind is a disorderly mind. A mind unaccustomed to effort is a aimless and ineffective.
While education is not a panacea, or substitute for social justice, it is a vital tool for individuals waiting for the moral arc of the universe to budge.
One of the many reasons I’m passionate about teaching writing is that it is yoga for the brain (no Lycra required). Writing hones logic, burnishes imagination and creates structure. And you can do it anywhere.
Structural inequalities are huge barriers to success. We need to dismantle those barriers. We also need to equip individuals to work around them. Writing is a skill that promotes individual success and provides a means to tackle unjust systems.
Native English speakers only need to learn around 9,000 words to read proficiently (Nation, 2014; Qian & Lin, 2019). This, out of a lexis of over 170,00 words (and growing!)
Hence most of us walk, eat and talk on a daily basis rather than shuffle, feast or murmur.
We’re creatures of habit. The words we use frequently become top-of-mind, and therefore likely to be used again. Our routine vocabulary shrinks like a puddle in the sun.
One way to prevent, indeed, reverse, this trend is to play with words.
Reading, crossword puzzling, etc., can build our word banks but having a fine working vocabulary means being able to summon novel words and express ourselves in new ways. Like play piano, or basketball, this skill requires practice.
The following drills are designed to be pen-and-paper; no reference to outside sources required. Use the back of an envelope, a napkin, scribble on your hand like a teenager, draw in sand on the shoreline.
The goal is to tap your linguistic aquafer. If you feel inspired to augment your vocabulary through reading or dictionary browsing, all to the good, but no pressure.
Straightforward: choose a prefix, root word or suffix and list as many words containing it as you can.
Prefix suggestions: ex, dis, im, dis, pre, un
Root suggestions: auto, corp, derm, lum, tele
Suffix suggestions: ism, ity, ment, ness, tion/sion
Word transformation
This is a game I designed to improve upper-level ESL students awareness of parts of speech (POS) and the flexibility of English vocabulary. It’s simple, take a noun or verb, then come up with all the permutations of it you can, including words that contain it, collocations or sayings.
It works best when you think systematically about POS. Let’s use like as an example.
Verbs: to like, to dislike
Nouns: like, likelihood, liking, dislike
Adjectives: like, likeable, likely
Adverbs: like, likely, unlikely
Preposition: like
Conjunction: like
Collocations/sayings: eat like a horse, go over like a lead balloon, off like a shot, like water off a ducks back, look like a million dollars, etc.
Here, the goal is to list informal language terms that either
contain a particular word (as in the example above)
relate to a particular subject (e.g., work, money, travel)
Take ‘time’ as an example. The first category might include
time and tide way for no man
a stitch in time saves nine
once upon a time
time is (not) on their side
time out of mind
The second
to take a rain check
down to the wire
from here to eternity
jump the gun
Rome wasn’t built in a day
Single-word prompts
This drill was the result of being bored of my journal. Left to itself, my squirrelly brain chews over the same topics like its storing fat for winter. So I wrote a random word at the top of each page then, each day, wrote something inspired by it.
Try this for five, seven, 10, 14 days. See what fun your mind has.
Alphabets
Another fast, fun list drill. Jot the alphabet vertically on a sheet of paper then fill it in with words from a given category: adverbs, cities, animals, desserts, compound nouns.
Warm up with a big category like plants or household objects then get esoteric: can you complete the alphabet with shades of blue, pre-20th century literary heroines or 80s song titles?
What do you see?
Prior to writing my novel Ibiza Noir, I wrote 700 words of pure description a day for 30 days. No attempt at narrative, simply drew the most vivid word-pictures possible.
Set a time or word-count goal, e.g., write for 10 minutes without stopping, or write 500 words.
Choose an object of reasonable complexity, a flower, or your living room, and describe it in as much detail as you can muster. Imagine you are describing it to an artist; you want their rendering to be as close to reality as possible.
Challenge yourself to apply this descriptive writing practice to real-world scenes. Go sit in the park, or on a bench at the mall, and write your allotted words. But remember, no narrative, just images.
Write a lede (the first sentence or paragraph of a news article) that contains all 5Ws.
Example:
You went to the dentist and got your teeth cleaned.
When: 11:30AM, where: dentist office (43 Main Street), who: hygienist David, what: tooth cleaning, why: six months since last appointment
Lede: At 11:30 this morning, dental hygienist David Smith faced off with a six-month old plaque formation on Patient X’s right rear molar, a struggle that resounded through the office at 43 Main Street.
Bonus game! #semanticfieldgoals
Yes, I just wanted to write #semanticfieldgoals.
It’s also a good game.
A semantic field is a set of words related by meaning, for example colors, plants, foods, senses, etc. For the sake of this drill, any category will do.
Choose a category
List all the words you can think of related to that category.
Choose one of those words as the starter for a new list.
Life never ceases to be difficult, to paraphrase Rilke. Amidst its slings and arrows, there is often little to comfort and guide.
Without generous writers, there would be almost nothing.
Among recent difficulties faced by myself, or someone I love: bereavement, major surgery, significant medical diagnoses, divorce, conflict with parents, conflict with children, unemployment.
These are not remarkable events, statistically. Yet, to the individual, they are as life-altering as Krakatoa. If anything, the cognitive dissonance of knowing the event to be universal versus the all-consuming personal experience of trauma makes it harder to cope.
We need wise friends to walk these dark halls. But unless we’re lucky, and our friends unlucky, we are not likely to find the necessary wisdom in our immediate social circle. Shared experience can as easily drive a wedge as forge a bond.
Into this gap step writers whose words offer perspective without judgment, comfort without reciprocity and infinite patience. They sit at our bedside in the small hours, walk with us, accompany us raging, glum, drunk, frustrated or frightened.
Their generosity lies in a willingness to delve into the most difficult parts of their lives and, through grit and creativity, distill their thumb-screwed wisdom into something readers can use.
Imagine being lost at sea on a leaky boat. Most of us would consider feel heroic merely staying alive. But a writer would be thinking: how can I help the next person who finds themselves out here?
They would be jotting notes about tides and winds, describing how to make a fishing line out of dental floss, giving tips on bailing and load-balancing.
The following are seven books that exemplify this generosity: all by women, whose emotional work is routinely undervalued, on the page and elsewhere.
Seven Generous Books
The Elements by Kat Lister
Most couples in their 30s are settling into their first homes, thinking about kids; Kat Lister and her husband, Pat Long, did those against the ticking clock of his brain tumor, which was discovered before their wedding. They lived the few years they had together with uplifting, illuminating grace. When he died, Lister was left to navigate the anachronisms of young widowhood, a trial by water she recounts here with bold, Didion-esque honesty.
Generosity is not constrained by genre. While we may assume that memoir has the most to teach, the ruthless craft required of good fiction offers equal — or even greater — opportunities. This novel, which begs to be described by its titular adjective, unpicks grief, addiction, survivor’s guilt, and the complicated strands of rejection, assimilation, belonging and othering woven into immigration, racism and religion.
Perhaps the only thing more appalling than the death of a partner is losing a partner in mind, not body. Thomas’s memoir invites the reader into the Kafka-couldn’t-dream it surreality of life following her husband’s traumatic brain injury (TBI). Along with grief, come care decisions, guilt, frustration, and no one to share the challenges.
Why be Happy When You Could be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson
Read this with its fictional counterpart, Winterson’s debut novel, OrangesAre Not the Only Fruit, to fully appreciate her generosity and courage. By the time she wrote this memoir, Winterson was a revered literary figure and bona fide success story. To admit, from that height, to the haunting power of childhood trauma could have seemed an admission of weakness. Her vulnerability is potent and empowering.
Nomadland: Surviving American in the 21st Century by Jessica Bruder
Please read the book; the film (brilliance of Frances McDormand notwithstanding) does it no justice. Nomadland exhibits another form of authorial generosity: the willingness to put one’s life aside to bear witness to the lives of others that would otherwise go unrecorded. The crushing, mechanistic cruelty of late capitalism comes to vivid life through Bruder’s painstakingly reported account of life on the dusty, bald-tire fringes of the so-called American dream.
Every time I pick up A Manual, I wind up reading it all the way through. Berlin’s autofiction is enthralling, terrifying, devastating on multiple levels. The writing is almost too sharp and bright to look at (forget window pane, this is prose as emergency flare) which is necessary magic given the gut-punch tales it tells. Stuff that in lesser hands, or played straight, would be unendurable, is transmuted into stories that soar and hover on the thermals of your mind.
Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage by Heather Havrilesky
It is one of life’s slipperiest tricks that the things we’re taught to crave and cherish are (surprise!) headaches too. Marriage, at least happy marriage, is perhaps the quintessential sacred cow; the immutable good thing one should pursue without question. Thank goddess, then, for Havrilesky who seems to operate from the position that sacred cows are best served medium-rare. Her brave assertion of the inconvenient truth that true love and explosive exasperation are not mutually exclusive is a pinpoint of light in what might otherwise be a suffocating dimness.
Imagine my delight when editor John Clarkson gave me the nod to write about Suede on the occasion of the band’s 30th anniversary and mind-bendingly good LP, Autofiction.
Writing this brought me joy. May reading it bring you joy.
(Below, an excerpt. Full article here. Photos are illustrative, not of Suede.)
In 1998, I walked into a record shop on Philadelphia’s South Street to return a damaged Bush Sixteen Stone CD.
No refunds, the proprietor said, pick something in exchange.
Crouched on the wooden floor, I scanned the bottom shelf. The London Suede rang a bell. I studied the androgynous/ambiguous nude puddled in ghastly underwater green. On the back, the name ‘New Generation’ popped (it was on a mix CD from my brother). Sold.
This was the start of a semi-obsessive love affair, a fact I offer as an excuse for my inability to present a concise career appraisal of Britpop’s most reckless proponents. This will be a true hagiography, with the irrationality and ellipses that veneration of a saint implies.
Suede shook my foundations the same way some people have: not love at first sight, exactly, but recognition – an undefinable, undeniable, life-altering entrance into the presence of one who is known and knows in return.
Brett Anderson was the first person I heard pronounce ‘mascara’ mass-kah-rah; I had no idea what a pebble-dash grave might be nor, for that matter, an estate car. But Suede stirred my emotions and imagination long before any first-hand experience of strobe-lit nightclubs, ecstasy-blown pupils or the grey lassitude of Home Counties Sunday mornings.
It is hard for me to see beyond the moments of delicious chaos to which Suede was the soundtrack to consider its oeuvre. Nevertheless, stepping back so the wheat field emerges from the golden streaks, yields an equal reward. Suede’s motifs are plainer at arm’s length; Brett Anderson’s lyrical fixations and vocal affections more obvious; but they are the beloved particularities of an old friend.
Listening to the albums chronologically, it is striking how well Suede wire walks between internal consistency and rote predictability. The Suedeness rarely drifts into play-by-numbers or self-parody. While contemporaries like Blur and Oasis lean on nostalgia or WWF-style public spats to generate attention, Suede stormed into its 30th anniversary year with the irresistible Autofiction and a tour that had the oft-contrarian music press singing from the same hymn sheet:
“Brett Anderson is absolutely mesmerising. You can’t take your eyes off him” (Taylor, The Mancunion).
“If this really were an unknown new band with no reputation to trade on… you’d tell your friends they’ll go far” (Lynskey, Guardian).
“Perhaps it’s possible to will a transcendent experience into existence, but this Suede concert fulfilled 25 years of dreaming” (Harris, Spectrum Culture).
Suede (Nude) 1993
That Suede managed to live up to the hype preceding its eponymous debut is impressive; as is the fact that the curse of the Mercury Music Prize has yet to catch the band, three decades on.
Suede invited its audience into a claustrophobic, chemical-laced neverland built on the post-Thatcherian ashes of Britain’s social contract. There is no overt politicking; the lyrical bleakness speaks for itself: ‘in your council home/he jumped on your bones’ (‘Animal Nitrate’) to ‘in the car he couldn’t afford/they found his made-up name/on her ankle chain’ (She’s Not Dead’).
Brett Anderson embodied a sleazy-sexy interface of frustration and hedonism, offering a Wildean aestheticisation of ennui, deprivation and dead-ends that is as hypnotic – and apropos – in the 2020s as it was in the early ‘90s. ‘The Drowners’ is an apt term for the generation coming of age to Brexit, Covid and Toryism. As a debut single, ‘The Drowners’ is also an effervescent blast of indie power-pop that, for its four-minute duration, erases everything except what matters: sex and music.
Like Wilde, Anderson intuited that power aligns against truth, beauty and self-expression. Defiance ain’t much, but sometimes it’s all you’ve got. Hence the avant-garde sexual ambiguity, charity shop-chic shrunken white shirts and midriff-baring pleather and gilt pirate hoops framing diamond-cutter cheekbones. Live performances from 1993 (check out ‘My Insatiable One’ from the Casino de Paris; ‘Animal Nitrate’ from Brixton, London) are fresh and daring. (It is hard to imagine that The 1975’s Matty Healy doesn’t owe at least some of his hyper-emotional, dissolute, sexually fluid stage persona to Anderson.)
Track after track, Suede rings true, powered by Bernard Butler’s starry guitar, bassist Mat Osman, drummer Simon Gilbert and keyboardist Neil Codling. From the wistful ‘Breakdown’ (‘if you were the one/would I even notice, now my mind is gone?’) to the menacing glam stomp of ‘Metal Mickey’ – a song that deserves to be danced to in gold DeHavillands if ever one did – it retains a zest and urgency that belies its age.
Dog Man Star (Nude) 1994
This was my gateway Suede album; ‘New Generation’ on repeat, chasing the dopamine rush of its glittering opening riff (cherish those riffs – this was Butler’s last proper album with Suede; nobody did it better). ‘New Generation’ is the highlight of a record that suits melancholic adolescence but, to my adult ears, could do with rigorous editing. Or, perhaps, it would be more accurate (fairer) to say that the range of situations in which Dog Man Star’s emotional tenor feels relevant and urgent has narrowed with age.
The excellent ‘Heroine’ is more than a track, it’s an atmosphere. Anderson’s drug use has been chronicled ad nauseam, so I shan’t bother, but chaos and indulgence cast distorting shadows over tracks like ‘Daddy’s Speeding’, ‘This Hollywood Life’ and ‘Asphalt World’ – the latter a sublime four-minute ballad that meanders for more than nine minutes. (Nick Duerden called the album, ‘the most pompous, overblown British rock record of the decade.)
When restraint is exercised, the results are timeless: the raw snarl of ‘Introducing the Band’, whose Winterland reference introduced me to a seminal moment in punk history; ‘The Wild Ones’, a downbeat beauty that sound-tracked a number of my heartbreaks; and the hauntingly sweet piano lament ‘The 2 of Us’, which makes you want a broken heart, just to enjoy it properly.
Considering it appeared just 18 months after Suede’s debut, Dog Man Star attests to the raw brilliance of a band that was driving with both feet on the accelerator and only the occasional hand on the wheel.
…
Autofiction (BMG) 2022
The image of a nude with back turned to the viewer is a throwback to Dog Man Star but there are important differences: the lens is closer so the body fills the frame; the lines of muscle and bone are clear and vigorous; instead of awkwardly bent, the arms hug the torso in a gesture of comfort or reassurance. Instead of disaffection and despair, the black-and-white shot evokes vulnerability tempered with strength; containment rather than dissolution.
Suede’s ninth studio album delivers on the implicit promise of its striking cover: intimate, strong, self-contained, vulnerable, bold. Opener and first single ‘She Still Leads Me On’ took a few listens to worm into my neurons; it is now embedded there and generates the same dopaminergic kick as vintage favourites like ‘New Generation’ or ‘Killing of a Flash Boy.’
True to form, the next two tracks keep the intensity at a killing pitch: ‘Personality Disorder’ is a cocky, raucous snarl that pulls off the not-easy feat of wedding spoken-word verses with an arena-sized chorus. Then Anderson snaps into ‘15 Again’ with the whip-crack lyric: ‘Nothing is as bad as the time we kill/ sitting in the bathroom in kitten heels’.
Praise be. The band is back, as and how and when we need it most: dripping sweat, spitting defiance, yielding and pushing, feeling with us how it feels ‘on the black ice with no headlights/ with our hands off the wheel’ (‘Black Ice’).
From the soaring ‘Shadow Self’ to the full-throated stomper ‘That Boy on the Stage’ to the pensive ‘Drive Myself Home’ the album flows between moods and moments with cohesion and conviction. If the first act of adulthood is renouncing childish ways, the second is realising that the kid inside never goes away; maturity is integrating all the aspects of self without apology.
Anderson and co. have done so and created a truly mature album, buoyant with the shimmer and swagger of youth yet sober with the wisdom of years. ‘I’m not the kind of person who never feels uncertain/ so many ways to do what I do wrong’, Anderson muses (‘The Only Way I Can Love You…’) but – however many ways there are to do what he does wrong – he does none of them here. Autofiction is, quite simply, a triumph.
After spending several weeks immersed in Suede, two things remain to say: 1) if Autofiction were the last album, it would be the pièce de résistance of a luminous career; 2) I’m pretty sure it won’t be. And that is good news.
What’s the band that changed your life? Share in the comments!
‘I asked my teacher how long the essay needed to be and he said, “how long is a piece of string?”‘
‘Wait! You can start a sentence with ‘but’?’
‘What is the process for answering an essay question?’
These students attend good schools. They are above-average smart and capable. Yet somehow, despite towers of assignments and torrents of instruction, they lack basic writing skills and confidence.
Reflecting on my own experience and writing practice, this isn’t a huge surprise. The only explicit writing instruction that stuck with me was my seventh-grade teacher’s spiel on five-paragraph essays and, several years later, the guidance of creative non-fiction professor, Paul Hendrickson.
In between times, I was blundering much like my current students: writing without a clue.
In the end, I learned to write in the newsroom, not the classroom. Not because the student editors of the Daily Pennsylvanian were literary geniuses (though some likely grew into such) but because they worshipped at the altar of structure.
Head.
Subhead.
Lede.
Byline.
Pyramid.
The discipline of x-point headers and y-column inches taught me that writing is 95% organization.
However brilliant or clever or downright earth-shattering ones ideas, they are meaningless until organized and presented in a way that makes sense to a reader.
Put another way: to write well, one needs an audience, a reason to address them and strategy for delivering the message.
Based on my students’ comments, what they are getting, instead of practical, actionable teaching, is either prescriptive nonsense (‘don’t start a sentence with “but” or “and”‘ — er, why not?) or no meaningful guidance at all.
This leads to problematic assumptions, such as ‘you’re either good at writing, or you’re not’ or ‘it doesn’t matter if I write well because nobody is going to read it’ or, worse, ‘I’ll just ask ChatGPT.’
Problematic because students who do not learn to write all too often do not learn to think.
What students ask, day in day out, class after class, are not sophisticated technical questions about writing, but questions answerable with basic reasoning and critical thinking.
How do I find evidence in the text?
How do I know what a character is like?
How can I write more about this topic?
How do I explain this example?
How do I know what the theme is?
What students need are blueprints and tools: structure.
In the newsroom, there is a basic means of getting information: the interview.
There are then standard, structured ways to render that information into articles.
Neophyte reporters were drilled in whowhatwhywherewhen. We learned our opinions were unwelcome without hard evidence behind them. We were taught attribution and verification; how to search archives and read microfiche. To my mortification, we were taught to go back and ask the same questions again, and if we got yelled at or told ‘no comment’ to write it down, because that was evidence too.
With due respect to my graduate school writing professors and peers, I learned a hundred times more in the newsroom than in the classroom. And it is no coincidence my most significant writing teacher was, yup, a journalist.
Not all students want to spend time in a newsroom, which is fine.
But every student deserves a classroom that gives them an equally fine set of tools.
‘[Language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish,’ George Orwell argued, ‘but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.’
To reverse the process requires a more structured, disciplined, logical approach to teaching writing.
It is a process in which the good writing produced is one-tenth of the iceberg; the crucial nine-tenths is intangible critical and creative thinking skills.
As an educator, I am committed to continuously developing more effective, engaging, efficient ways to teach students to think and write. Their future success — and the health of our societies — depends on it.
What thinking and writing skills are most important in your classroom? Share in the comments!
Welcome to ‘Between the Lines’ – interviews with teachers, writers and writing teachers on specific aspects of their craft.
All photos courtesy Michael Downs
Light filters into Michael Downs‘ basement office, as if it were underwater.
Twin decorative dragonflies, backlit on a windowsill, and a red goose-neck lamp stretched into a honk, heighten the effect of a numinous natural space. It is, he says, the best writing room he’s ever had.
And he’s had a few to compare.
Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Downs rode economic currents with his family, first to Vermont then Arizona. After graduating from college, his journalism career took him back to Hartford for a spell; he met a woman and fell in love, moved with her to Montana; later, they moved to Arkansas, where he attended grad school, then to Baltimore in pursuit of work.
Downs nods in recognition at the mention of the 1960s-70s cadre of hard-drinking, fly-fishing Montana writers: ‘Tom McGuane, those guys, sure.’ Though a former sportswriter, Downs doesn’t need to prop his ego with tales of a trout [this] big.
His body of work reveals someone who lets nuance speak for itself; someone who illuminates and distils the details, then leaves them to do the work.
As befits his journalism background Downs, now a professor of English literature and director of the Master’s Program in Professional Writing at Towson University, regularly publishes short stories, essays and reportage. As befits a scribe, he also turns his hand to ghostwriting and editing.
Gathering words
The TV Guide, cereal boxes, the Bible, historical romance novels, Of Mice and Men, comics: ‘I read everything,’ Downs said. ‘I loved words; wanted to understand them.’
His precocious reading meant he struggled to keep pace with their sounds. ‘I’ve learned so many words just by reading that my pronunciation, throughout my life, has been terrible. “Inchoate” — is that in-ko-ate or in-cho-ate? I can never remember, but I know what it means.’
There is something to be gleaned from this primary engagement with writing as text. Technology has gifted the writer, or would-be, many ways to engage and construct, but there is power in being able to seed words on a page and watch the lines grow into a riotous harvest
Downs relishes the labor of it, the physicality of writing (more on that in a moment). His most influential teachers were the ones who, ‘demanded more of me than I thought I could do. And did so unapologetically. That helped me understand my capacities.’
The purpose of literature
Exploring his capacities took Downs to the University of Arkansas MFA program in the late 1990s. This was his grounding in Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Don Quixote, and teaching. ‘I wanted my tuition paid,’ he says with a grin. ‘But it was a wonderful thing for a variety of reasons.’
Foremost, teaching (as any teacher who gives a damn will tell you) demands the kind of close study many students elude. ‘I had to break down stories, novels, sentences; I had to do the craft aspect better than I would have otherwise.’
The process of deconstruction facilitates a deeper understanding of construction; clever writer/teachers seize opportunities to teach authors they love, or genres they want to better understand. Downs, for example, taught a historical fiction course while writing a historical novel.
Teaching writing is about more than just craft, though; Downs increasingly focuses on a less-discussed aspect of literature:
This generation has had a lot to deal with. It’s clear in their stress, their anxiety, what they talk about. What I want to do is use literary work – either the writing of it or the reading of it – to help them understand that the world is worth it, that it’s beautiful, that the unexpected doesn’t have to be dread inducing. The unexpected can also be the reason you get up in the morning. I spend more time now talking about beauty and how to use literature to help yourself get along in the world.
For all the joy he’s found in 30-odd years of education, Downs is transitioning to full-time writing. ‘I’m rich in former students, but I’m not as rich as I’d like to be in books.’
During his recent Fulbright Scholar year in Krakow, he encountered a quote by the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski stencilled on a staircase: ‘it is not time that is lacking, only focus’.
‘Like so many other writers, especially writers who teach, I say things like ‘I don’t have a lot of time, I’m trying to find the time to write, etc.’ he says. ‘I read that quote and thought, ‘I need to change my focus.’ My focus has been students, for decades. I’ve been grateful for teaching at a university and having the summer to write, but I’m old, I’m a slow writer, and I want more.’
Part of how Downs accesses ‘more’ is through what he playfully refers to as ‘method writing’. He was kind enough to share examples and insights on this element of craft.
On Method Writing
Q: Why is it important for writers to get out from behind the desk and get their hands dirty?
A: Emily Dickinson didn’t do that, and she pulled off some good stuff. So I don’t want to say it’s a moral imperative, but for some writers, young writers especially, it’s important to get out of your own belly button. There is a world out there, experiences, things that are tactile, not just in your head. We take in experience through our five senses, then meditate on them. If you don’t have experiences, you don’t have stories. You can have think pieces, but you don’t have stories.
Q: What is your first memory of tangible experience that led to, or was integral to, a piece of writing?
A: When I was an 8th grader, I had a paper route. A stray dog used to follow me. I’d stop at a convenience store, buy some food, share it with the dog. It followed me for weeks, until it followed me across a road one morning, as the sun was rising over the mountain. Someone came along, driving fast into the sun, and hit the dog. And it fell to me to pull the dog off to the side of the road – still breathing, but clearly dying, and to stay with the dog.
Some time later, I went to a writing camp for kids, and a college professor told us to explore stories by writing about the parts of our lives that confused us. And I went back to that moment. It was a successful story, because I remembered the weight of the dog, what it felt like to touch it; that it was still breathing. That was the first time physical experience worked itself into my writing.
Q: How does tactile experience operate as a research mode in fiction versus non-fiction?
A: When I’m doing narrative non-fiction, I’m experiencing the world as me, so paying attention to my five senses. When I’m doing it in fiction, I’m trying to be someone else. So if they have experiences that I haven’t, I have figure out how to get close to those experiences. I try to save my imagination from doing too much work, or from getting it wrong. The imagination isn’t always right.
When I was writing about a woman who was burned in the Hartford circus fire, I drew from this wonderful Red Cross pamphlet about how people were treated after that fire, because it was groundbreaking. But also – I‘m going to sound a little crazy now – I needed to know what it felt like to be burned. I put my hand over the gas ring [on my stove], and held it as close as I could, for as long as I could. I did not hurt myself, but I got an idea of the feeling of a sustained burn. And that’s what I wrote.
If I hadn’t held my hand over that fire, I could not have imagined how it felt. It was cold.
Q: How do you incorporate method writing into second or third person POV?
A: It’s about coming to a place of focus where I can combine my engagement with the world and my imagination to say. If it’s working, it becomes transcendent. The words end up there; I don’t know exactly what brought them, but they are right, and I could never find those same words again.
Q: How do you know when to stop experiencing and start writing?
A: It’s always time to sit down and start writing.
It’s time to start experiencing when – in fiction – I don’t know what the character is experiencing. The character is in a situation and it’s time to figure it out. When working on the Horace Wells novel, I was struggling with the fact the main character wasn’t an enjoyable person to be around. He wasn’t super successful, he was whiny, he wasn’t that bright. I had to figure out a way to make him palatable.
How it happened surprised me. I went to a museum that had his tools, his notebooks, his death mask. They brought out the death mask. I put on white gloves and picked it up. His face was small, surprisingly small. I started touching his face. And I decided that his wife had touched his face. That though he betrayed her, and made her life difficult, she loved him. And if she loved him, I could love him through her. That changed him as a character, from a nebbish to a person who was loved by his wife.
Q: What is a rookie mistake writers make when attempting this?
A: To think their experience is how the character would have experienced it. John Keats said that Shakespeare possessed this amazing quality of self-nullification; he could stop being Shakespeare and be someone else. That’s how so many [of his] characters are who they are.
I encourage students to work at not being themselves. As a writer, your job is not to ask, what would I be doing if I were them? You have to become that character and know. Andre Dubus talks about studying Zen and becoming the word as he writes. It has to do with focus.
Q: Which writers do this particularly well?
A: Andre Dubus, absolutely. He was a man who wanted to be out there in the world, make stuff, experience stuff. Alice Munro, you know she’s out tromping the fields. Louise Erdrich, a favorite of mine, she doesn’t just sit behind a desk. Joan Didion, of course.
Q: What is an assignment or exercise you use to teach this to your students?
A: A terrible thing happened near my campus more than 100 years ago, before campus was there. A black teenager was lynched. I wanted the students to write about it. We walked to the site and sat for an hour; looked at the trees and the jail, which is still there, and touched the walls, looked at the sun. I wanted them to imagine how it was then, and see how it is now.
Downs Recommends
The piece of writing that changed your life before age 18?
The Lord of the Flies. It completely freaked me out. I hadn’t know that boys could be so cruel. I was a shy, awkward boy who wore glasses. I could have been Piggy.
The piece of writing that changed your life as an adult?
William Kennedy’s Ironweed, a profound and magical novel. Kennedy – a former journalist who never stopped thinking of himself as a journalist – wrote a novel set in a small north-east city, Albany, NY, that nobody paid much attention to. I wanted to write about Connecticut, about a small town no one paid much attention to, and this [novel] gave me the blessing.
A classic you love to teach?
‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ by Flannery O’Connor and ‘Sonny’s Blues’ by James Baldwin. If I could only teach two stories for the rest of my life, it would be these two.
I love what Baldwin writes about art in that last scene; he’s writing about music, and Sonny’s blues, but … I’ll blow the quote, they were doing it at the risk of their own lives, but they had to do it, because we need those stories, and we need to make them new. It’s a gorgeous description of why we need stories.
‘Good Man’because it is such an inexplicable story. Students have no idea what’s coming. Their mouths drop open. It’s a perfect story for proving to them that you can’t say what a story means.
A work you love to teach from 21st century?
Lydia Davis Varieties of Disturbance – she blows up the idea of what a story is, disregards everything anybody says. There’s a novella in it, which purports to be a sociological studies about get well cards written by a second grade class; it is just heartbreaking, funny, and reveals so much. She also has one-sentence stories in the book. Literally one sentence.
A book about writing every writing student should read?
Colum McCann’s Letters to a Young Writer.
A book + film adaptation combo you love?
The Good Lord Bird by James McBride, which was turned into a TV series with Ethan Hawke.
A living writer you’d love to hang out with?
Olga Tokarczuk.I’m fascinated by the concept she discusses in her Nobel Prize speech of the ‘tender narrator’ – a new approach to narrating fiction. A different point of view.
Your perfect writing space?
If space and time are related, it’s more about the time than geography. If I create the time, the place doesn’t matter. I can be on a park bench, a balcony, a windowless room, sitting in the front seat of my car.
What are you working on now?
I’ve written about six essays and would like to write another four to six and put together a collection. I have some ideas that have been – there is no other way to say it – that have been strong in me lately. They are wanting to come out.
This is an article I wrote several years ago, based on interviews with three brilliant, inspiring writers. It is worth revisiting.
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“It is impossible to become a writer without reading,” says Paul Hendrickson, writing professor at the University of Pennsylvania and award-winning author of numerous books including Hemingway’s Boat.
There is a relationship between quality of reading and quality of writing. And a distinction between reading for pleasure and reading like a writer. The difference involves attitude, approach and appreciation. Michael Schmidt, poet, professor and author of The Novel: A Biography recommends reading, “with eyes wide open, full of anticipation.”
With this in mind, here are seven ways to read like a writer:
1. Compulsively
“You can’t be a writer unless you have a hunger for print,” says Nick Lezard, Guardian literary critic and author of Bitter Experience Has Taught Me. “I was the kid who sat at the table and read the side of the cereal packet.” In Nick’s case, the lust for literature paved the way for a career as a book reviewer. But regardless of the genre or field to which you aspire, all writers are readers first. And “it doesn’t matter whether the medium is the side of the cereal packet or a screen,” Nick says.
2. Slowly
Cereal-packet readers tend to wolf words like they do breakfast. This is a trait writers should train themselves out of – at least sometimes. Paul defines reading like a writer as slow reading: dawdling on the page, delving, soaking in the style and rhythm. Don’t read everything this way, though. “I don’t read the newspaper ‘like a writer’,” he notes. “I don’t have time. Nobody does.”
3. Broadly
Time is of the essence for the reading writer, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore everything apart from the classics. There are, to borrow Orwell’s term, good bad books. Nick mentions Ian Fleming as an example of compelling though less-than-literary fiction. Paul gives a nod to Raymond Chandler, saying writers can learn from his “hardboiled, imagistic lines.”
4. Selectively
That said, don’t make the mistake of reading widely but not too well. “Reading crap is no good for the eye or ear,” says Michael. “Read only the best, and read it attentively. See how it relates to the world it depicts, or grows out of.”
Nick, who has read his share of bad books as a reviewer, concurs: “If you just read books like 50 Shades of Grey or Dan Brown, you’re going to wind up spewing out a string of miserable clichés.”
5. Attentively
You get the most out of good writing by reading it with real attention. Michael advises writers to pay heed to metaphor, characters’ voices, how the author develops those voices and how they change. He recommends Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children as a rewarding subject of attentive reading: “There is a strong sense of development, nothing static there. I can think of no better pattern book for a would-be writer.”
6. Fearlessly
Reading like a writer means going out of your comfort zone. When Nick was in his teens he tackled James Joyce’s Ulysses. “It was a struggle,” he recalls. “It took me a year or two. But that’s how you [learn] – you find stuff that’s above your level.”
7. Imaginatively
Reading above your level is valuable, in part, because it challenges your imagination. Paul talks about savoring the terse beauty of poetry and imagining “everything that’s between the spaces of the words, the spaces of the lines.” By observing the work of your own imagination you gain insight into how writers evoke images and emotions.
You don’t have to read every book (or cereal box) like a writer. But the more you immerse yourself in words and cultivate these seven skills, the better your writing will be. “If you are writing a potboiler, imagine how wonderful it will be if the work you produce is actually a proper novel,” says Michael. “Read the best, and read the best in your elected genre.”
As mentioned in a previous post, I have written for online indie zine Pennyblackmusic for the better part of a couple of decades. One of my recent projects was a series of interviews about my fellow writers, which concluded with one of my fellow writers interviewing me. As my editor, John Clarkson, put it:
“For the last two years in her ‘A Life in Music’ column Cila Warncke has talked to several of our writers and photographers about how music has affected and influenced them. We were interested in finding out in ‘A Life in Music’ what ignited a bunch of obsessives’ passion for music, and discovered that much of our team had lead lives that were just as fascinating as many of the bands. Now that column is coming to an end, and in the last in the series we have turned the tables on Cila and Nick Dent-Robinson has spoken to her about her ‘Life in Music’.”
This may well be the first time I’ve been interviewed in print so thought I’d share.
Cila Warncke: A Life in Music by Nick Dent-Robinson
Cila Warncke is one of the earliest contributors to Penny Black Music magazine, having started writing for them more than two decades ago. Penny Black founder and editor John Clarkson recalls that Cila’s first interview for the magazine was with Cinerama about their “Disco Volante” album. She was the magazine’s first female writer and, as John Clarkson says, he is proud that Cila paved the way for many more excellent female music writers in Penny Black Music over the coming years – as rock music writing was notorious for being too much of a “boys’ club”.
As a professional journalist, Cila says she was attracted by the scope for originality and independence (and lack of male chauvinism) at PBM – and she has produced a fascinating range of articles over her time there. Although she left Penny Black Music in the early 2000s and worked on the glossy London-based music magazine, ‘Q” she was welcomed back in 2012 and has been a regular contributor since then. She has written about the impact of the pandemic on those working behind the scenes in the world of live music, about the eventual demise of ‘Q’ magazine and she wrote a very thoughtful piece about Marilyn Manson. Plus she has produced excellent articles on so many other diverse topics.
Cila also originated the ‘A Life In Music’ series where she probed fellow contributors to PBM about their musical tastes, background and aspirations. – All done with great tact, sensitivity and diplomacy plus insight – key hallmarks of Cila’s style. That series is now drawing towards its conclusion – but not before we turn the tables and seize the opportunity to ask Cila about her own ‘Life In Music”’
Born in 1980 and raised in a small town in Oregon over on the West side of the USA, in her late teens Cila moved to the East Coast to study English at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia – an esteemed Ivy League institution. Subsequently she moved to London to undertake further studies at King’s College before becoming a journalist. She thrived in the UK, enjoying all the many cultural opportunities available just after the turn of the millennium as well as the proximity to Europe. She and her fellow-American husband Chris Hall, a production audio technician in the world of live music, have travelled widely and have now made their permanent base in Valencia, Spain. Cila was at her home in Valencia when I started to ask about her ‘Life in Music’.
What are some of her earliest musical memories?
“Well, my parents weren’t musicians and because my mother was an Evangelical Christian, anything that wasn’t a hymn or soft God-rock was not too popular. It was a cool, rebellious thing to listen to anything other than that. My sister and I would listen to local radio, though and so I got some of the sound of late 80s/early 90s rock and pop culture through that. But my brother – who is around 6 years older than I – loved The Smiths, The Cure and some of the other British post-punk/new wave bands. I enjoyed that sound and I recall some of the record sleeves up on my brother’s wall – brilliant images which made a lasting impression.
The first (non-Christian!) record I remember buying when I was 13 or 14 was Sting’s “Fields of Gold…Best of: 1984-94” and my sister (who was 8 years older and much cooler, always) bought me Green Day’s ‘Dookie’ – which I still think is a great record!”
Teachers, like writers, should show not tell (as much as possible).
As a writing teacher, it is imperative that I set an example as a writer.
My first gig outside of the university newspaper was Pennyblackmusic.co.uk — an independent online music magazine and shop that has outlasted countless best-selling, robustly funded publications.
Though not continuously, I’ve written for Pennyblackmusic for more than 20 years. In slow, desultory fashion it’s become a modest but valued body of work, and a chance to keep my journo skills sharp.
One of the regular features is called ‘Ten Songs That Made Me Love…’
Here are my contributions to the long-running series:
“Some bands are linked to an event or time in life; others, to a person. Echo & The Bunnymen entered my consciousness when I was about eight, via an album cover pinned to my brother’s bedroom wall. ‘Echo & the Bunnymen’, their eponymous 1987 album – was to the right of U2’s ‘The Unforgettable Fire’ and above Depeche Mode’s ‘Some Great Reward’. In grainy black-and-white, Ian McCulloch’s inkwell-explosion hair, eyes downcast beneath thick brows, gave a general impression of dark wool and wind-chill. Yet the music encoded in that vinyl dazzled. It made sense that my brother, the coolest person I knew, bought an overcoat and grew his hair. Who wouldn’t want to be them?
My brother moved out when I was 12; for the next few years we saw little of each other. I bought Sting’s ‘Fields of Gold’. Possibly in despair, he compiled CDs for me. Those songs – Echo, New Order, Depeche Mode – were the basis for a new relationship. More than siblings, we became musical co-conspirators. These 10 songs, only a sliver of Echo’s expansive oeuvre, encode a deep friendship. Apart from their personal significance their freshness, verve and originality make a case that Echo were the seminal New Wave band. Let’s run with those dancing horses.”
The first time I saw Patti Smith it was like seeing a flesh-and-blood human after a lifetime among holograms. In a world where everyone is obsessed with image Patti is always, ever and gloriously who she is. Poet, rebel, musician, mother, artist, crusader, writer, warrior, deity of rock’n’roll and inventor of herself, Patti never wanted to be anyone else, never pandered, never tried to please.
Her music reaches deep places because it is born from an authentic self, and that’s why it will last.
“It’s not chocolate boxes and roses/ It’s something darker/ Like a small animal that only comes out at night”. Jarvis Cocker’s memorable assessment of the titular emotion in ‘F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E’ (surely one of the Top 10 most awkwardly titled songs pop history) is a perfect epithet for the bands’ oeuvre.
The magic of Pulp is the mingling of sharp, danceable guitar pop with lyrics that veer from cynical to downright sinister. Their most radio-friendly hits are rife with violence (‘Joyriders’ “Mister, we just want your car/ ‘Cos we’re taking a girl to the reservoir”) and voyeurism (“I wanted to see as well as hear and so I hid inside her wardrobe,” in ‘Babies’). Love songs in Pulp world include lyrics like: “You are the last drink I should have ever drunk/ You are the body hidden in the trunk” (‘Like a Friend’).
Studying the arc of their career, it’s clear ‘Different Class’s’ arrival in Cool Britannia was coincidence; the subsequent lumping of Pulp with Britpop a music journalists’ convenience. Pulp never shared Blur’s mockney smuggery nor Oasis’ apolitical performance of working classness. Pulp was on a different trajectory: one that began in Sheffield in 1978, contained more than a decade of obscurity, and survived Britpop notoriety to deliver an acerbic welcome to the new millennium.
Its curve is marked by a rare, unflinching insight into the human psyche. Pulp takes love as a subject but, unlike most pop confectioners, doesn’t sugar-coat it. Cocker sees love as a slippery amalgam of baser needs: status, self-worth, revenge, amusement, actualisation, to see the darkest parts of ourselves reflected in another. Attraction doesn’t lead through flower-dappled fields at sunset but down gnarled alleys stale with fag smoke, booze and latent violence.
Rarer still, Cocker understands that society is an echo chamber of our dark hearts: it isn’t just individuals who behave in warped, self-defeating ways, but our whole culture.
Ibiza, October 2016: What was left of my library was stacked on a slat-wood shelf awaiting collection; the clothes worth taking were crammed into a scuffed purple nylon suitcase; my car was one signature short of belonging to my ex-boyfriend, who was also adopting my cat.
In a few days I would embark for Memphis, Tennessee, a city I best knew as home of Sun Records. To pass time, I was reading ‘Respect Yourself’ (a loan from my Memphis-based boyfriend).
Robert Gordon’s meticulous account of the rise/fall/slip/slide of Stax Records was the history of an alien land and culture. ‘(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay’ rang a bell, maybe ‘Shaft’, but my knowledge of Memphis soul ended there. Embarrassment at this ignorance was a welcome distraction from more immediate anxieties.
Those anxieties faded but the embarrassment clings; as a born-and-raised Yankee, a music journalist no less, it is shaming to have been oblivious to one of the richest seams of my country’s musical culture. Shaming because – as ‘Respect Yourself’ and history report – it is no accident that Black musicians have been, and remain, ghettoised, denigrated, alienated.
That’s not why anyone should listen to Memphis soul though; not to pay tribute or broaden horizons. Listen to be immersed in music that grabs your gut and nether-parts. Listen to the sound of something at stake. Listen because, as the following 10 songs prove, it’ll turn you on and take you higher.
The following is an excerpt from a feature I wrote for Pennyblackmusic aboutCovid’s devastating effect on the live music industry. You can read the full feature at Pennyblackmusic.co.uk
“When COVID-19 mushroomed into a global pandemic, production work disappeared almost overnight. It is impossible to predict when it might return, or grasp the full repercussions for crews, artists, venues or fans. This article attempts neither to summarise nor forecast, but to reflect on the early days of this crisis in the hope we can look back on it from a better place.” -excerpt from ‘Production Crew Confront Coronavirus’, Pennyblackmusic, April 2020.
Photo: Cila Warncke
2021
London: 11 February, 10:30AM Matt ‘Tag’ Tagliaferro adjusts his Airpods. Wet snow clings to the pavements outside his north London home. It is three degrees Celsius above freezing. “With these, I can get something done while I’m on the phone,” he says. “My screen time is way up this past year.”
Memphis, Tennessee: 5 March, 11:00AM “It felt good to have a break for a minute, but that got old.” Matt Brown gets up to refill his blue ceramic mug, and clears his throat. Later, he’ll strap on a parachute, grab a camera and follow tandem jumpers out of a plane, trying to hold the student’s awed face in frame as gravity hauls them all down.
London: 8 March, 10:00AM The phone screen shows him smiling, an old WhatsApp profile picture. “January was particularly hard,” Will Paterson says. “There was no sign of a return. Even the most motivated people had hard moments.”
Phoenix, Arizona: 13 March, 5:50AM The paper Holiday Inn coffee cups are stamped: “Start Fresh”. Chris Hall is trying. In half an hour, he’ll walk into the hotel conference room for the final written exams in his truck-driver training course.
There are two things that all these people have in common: They used to work in live music production. They never expected to be where they are now.
A year ago, we daydreamed that Covid-19 would vanish with the summer sun. What vanished instead was hope of a quick fix. Optimism became synonymous with magical thinking. The industry shutdown persisted like tinnitus.
According to trade publication Pollstar, the live music industry lost $30 billion of revenue in 2020. In Britain, some 10,000 people worked in music production, says Andy Lenthall, general manager of trade body the Production Services Association. In the United States, there were millions of such jobs. In the UK, the US and around the globe, most production workers lost their livelihoods.
The Lows
“When it first happened, I felt numb, panicked. I watched the news all the time.” Nevertheless, Brighton-based publicist Nikki McNeill told her clients, which include Serbia’s Exit Festival, the Amsterdam Dance Event, Secret Solstice in Iceland and the Netherlands’ Lowlands Festival, that she would keep working with them, budget or no.
After the initial blow, ripples of Covid distortion kept spreading. “So much of life has changed,” Will Paterson, head of sales for several London music venues, reflects. “Nobody would have thought we’d curtail our lives the way we have.”
Tagliaferro, erstwhile touring guitar tech, and his partner split up, “a Covid casualty, I guess.”
Audio technician Matt Brown says: “The biggest challenge is boredom. I’m still learning to write code, trying to stay busy.”
Another audio tech (and my partner), Chris Hall has put in his share of 200,000-mile travel years. Suddenly, the world shrank to the distance to the nearest grocery store. Mundane tasks became big deals. His neck and back locked up in the winter chill.
“Some people found purpose in spending time with their partners and kids,” Lenthall says. “But being at home is a problem for people who aren’t used to being at home. There are a lot of single people in the business, a lot of people who are always on tour. Their flat is where they repack their suitcase.”
Photo: Cila Warncke
A Different Beat
Odd pockets of production work still exist: Brown kept his job at local church which started streaming its services. Photographer Andy Cotterill has spent more than two decades shooting music royalty. His portfolio runs from Public Enemy and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry to Jarvis Cocker and Vivienne Westwood. Yet surviving Covid required other skills: “I was a top-grade student in woodworking at school so I did a few projects. People loved it. Someone asked me to do their kitchen, then a loft conversion. Before, if I’d done something else, I’d have felt like I failed at photography. I don’t think like that any more.”
Tagliaferro carried on fixing guitars. People who had guitars but never played them wanted them strung and tuned, bands stuck in London who’d started making new music, musicians whose prized instruments were in warehouses or shipping containers dug out beaters for an overhaul. “North London seemed to have a musical renaissance,” he says. “People wanted to do something productive and creative. It got to a point I couldn’t do it in my kitchen, so I rented a little space, built a few workbenches and fell into business, much like I fell into [touring] 15 years ago.”
This can-do, will-do attitude is characteristic. “You don’t want touring crew on the job market,” says Lenthall. “They are tenacious, hard working, they will get the job before you.” Delivery and logistics have absorbed a lot of bodies. “I’ve had groceries delivered by a lighting guy I know,” Lenthall remarks. “We have world-class production managers coordinating vaccination centres. [Telecom company] Openreach has production crew tackling its fibre optic installation backlog.”
Paterson has spent the past year overhauling everything from venue websites to internal communications to plumbing. “It has been a split,” he says. “Those who’ve had stuff to do – well, work helps. People who couldn’t work, like the operations staff, have done all sorts of things that have nothing to do with music, just to give themselves a purpose.”
Photo: Cila Warncke
Patchy Safety Nets
Many cannot step into new roles, though, whether for health or other reasons, and driving a delivery van doesn’t come close to replacing tour wages. Government support has not been universally sufficient or effective. “Through multiple technicalities, I don’t qualify for anything,” says Tagliaferro. “I’ve never heard the phrase, ‘sorry, you fall through the cracks’ so often.” He reckons half the industry people he knows don’t qualify for assistance.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Paterson says half the people he knows have left music.
In the US, aid is on a state-by-state basis. Brown got a small grant, about enough to cover three months’ rent in his neighborhood. He was on unemployment, briefly, until Tennessee reinstated a work-search requirement, with no exceptions for those whose industry had vanished. “What was I going to do? Work at the supermarket? Those jobs were already taken.”
Like so much related to Covid, a lot came down to chance. “I was lucky. The way my company is set up meant I qualified for government grants,” says McNeill. “I have friends who do the same thing but are excluded [from help] because of how they set up their business. It’s hard.”
Cila Warncke Writer 