Lumb Bank Diary

A writing workshop in Yorkshire with Judith Barrington and Mimi Khalvati...

Day One: Saturday

Well, I got all disasters out of the way before getting to the airport -- dead washing machine, Khaly oversleeping and arriving only after I'd placed frantic calls to everyone I know in San Francisco for transport plan B. Fluffy little Nettie killed a mouse. Let me rephrase that -- she caught a mouse but had not applied closure the last time I saw them, as I was sprinting upstairs with the last of my packing. Here I'd been heartlessly ridiculing her attempts at becoming a productive member of society, an honest-to-God mouser, and she turned my mocking phrases into ashes as she carried her squeaky trophy into the house. I hope she ate it -- though if it escaped, it would be something to keep her occupied while I'm gone.

Khaly slouched in and took his final instructions laconically enough. He dropped me at the new International Terminal, which is quite lovely, but feels like the end of civilization, since it's so much larger than the amount of people using it.

There's a lot of great hair on this flight, that's all I can say -- as I stood in line waiting to check in, it was row upon row of crimped bronze tresses. Then I noticed a bag that didn't have anyone attached to it. And I was the closest person to it. Hmmm.

The Alitalia operative was all over it when I mentioned it. My civic duty done, I wandered down to Gate 12. As I was standing in line to go through the metal detector, I watched an eerily familiar black man in fedora surrounded by suited men carrying walkie-talkies... Yep, our great Mayor was headed to Harry Denton's for a drinkie-poo.

More modestly, our heroine bent her steps to a cafe for an almond croissant. While I was dreaming over it, an older man asked if he could share my table. Inquiry gradually elicited that he was a retired South African army officer, coming back from an aviation medicine conference in Reno. In his retirement, he gives physicals to airline personnel and does his own research into improving airline safety. We talked about genetic engineering and the changing face of librarianship and how many g's a human body can take before disintegrating. When they called my flight, he gave me his card and hoped I'd drop him a line in Johannesburg.

We got off about forty minutes late, but tail winds are making up time fast. I do admit that as we were rattling down the runway, the words "Italian driver" sprang unbidden to mind.

The flight crew, both male and female, is lithe of wrist and plump of calf, in very smart, snug little uniforms -- remember the dream sequence in Lair of the White Worm? Captain Romeo manages to make altitude readings sound indecent. In a haze of hopeless lust, I settle into my aisle seat and make the acquaintance of my neighbors, a nice couple on their way to vegetate in Portugal. The woman is reading Corelli's Mandolin.

The meal was pretty good, all things considered, though none of us could take an oath on which of God's creatures constituted the meat of the "meat-or-fish" dyad. A daunting heap of smoked salmon appears in the role of antipasto, and the woman and I speculate on what the nummy pasta/quiche-like substance could be called.

Settling down for the night, I cock an eye at the insane Australian animal guy on the television. As direct a contradiction of every principle your parents ever taught you about approaching strange animals (speak softly, move quietly, don't look them in the eye, keep your hands to yourself), I watch him relentlessly overstimulate a honey bear cub, grin inanely while a German shepherd knocks a baby lion off its feet some dozen times, rejoice over the birth of tiny rattlesnakes who, he informs us, will be released "somewhere where they won't come into conflict with humanity -- the vast reaches of Englund Air Force Base."

My plane book, The Count of Monte Cristo, is so far turning out to be not much of a page-turner -- you have to remember who is not using his proper name, and who was prematurely anti-Bonapartist. But it does contain this exquisite line:

"And finally, it must be admitted that death in the bilge of an open boat at the hands of a gendarme struck him as ugly and grim."

Day Two

Well, here I am, snug in the Heathrow Hotel Ibis, watching the BBC's annual award show.

It was a long trip. Drifted and dozed, but didn't quite sleep -- we were back by the bathrooms, and there was a lot of ongoing trample. We got into Milan about noon. My lungs closed up instantly. The airport is everything you'd imagine from it being named "Bad Thoughts." After a couple of hour’s layover, we trundled onto the flight to England and made it here without incident (unless you count that weird cream and ham sandwich in the "snack" as an incident).

By the time I got my bag and got through Customs, I had been up 24 hours and was so tired, I felt like the earth was trembling under my feet. I got currency and went to hunt for the hotel shuttle.

...Which they'd cunningly named, in that fake cockney that gets them so often reviled by the civilized world, the Hotel Hoppa. If it had been less whimsically named oh, say the Hotel Hopper, one might not have dismissed it as the shuttle of a hotel named Hoppa and watched several buses go by until being enlightened.

Then I discovered I needed change to purchase a ticket from the automatic kiosk, which meant I had to haul me and my chattels back into the terminal and buy a lukewarm iced tea. Kindly souls walked me through the ticket purchase -- would it have killed Heathrow to write "push green button first" anywhere on the machine? At last, my Hotel Hoppa appeared.

We made various stops around the terminals. If I'd been a hair more adventurous, I'd have a London bus of my own now, after the driver left me alone with the engine running when he went for a smoke with his mates.

The Hotel Ibis is being renovated, and that's the best I can say about it. The rooms and halls are decorated with the Hotel Ibises of the World painting collection -- I boast the Hotel Ibis Lucerne. The weather is muggy, and I can hardly tell that the AC is on. I couldn't get the telephone in the room to call internationally. After surveying the cafe menu in the elevator -- gammon steak and faux filet grills -- I decided to pass on a formal dinner and stayed in my room to eat goldfish snax and Andes mints. The shower stall proved a death trap -- I've seen ice rinks less slippery -- so I had a much-needed bath instead of a shower. I washed out my stinky sweater -- oh please oh please oh please, may it be dry before tomorrow. Then time to settle down with the BBC.

First up was Boot Sale Challenge -- a heady combination of Antique Roadshow and Iron Chef. Two teams of two nebbishes in rain slickers are given one hundred pounds each and sent out into a flea market like the Portobello Road to look for bargains. Their bringings-back are analyzed for value, and a winner is declared. Very entertaining.

Then what to my wondering eyes should appear -- Lily Savage's Blankety-Blank, a transatlantic version of Match Game, only the Gene Rayburn role is filled by a drag queen in a tight blue satin gown and Dolly Parton wig. Sian Phillips plays Brett Somers. The winner was a werewolf gynecologist -- remember, look for the single eyebrow! -- named Rowan, who vanquished the dapper little retiree Nat Shine, who entertains the Alzheimer's patients at his local convalescent hospital with the same joke every week.

I fell asleep for a bit during an unnecessarily grim documentary on pelican chicks murdering their nest mates -- using far too many pelican-eye perspective shots -- what I called "PeliCam." Woke up again to watch some of the BBC awards show -- everyone beautifully dressed and modest and delighted and expressing well-phrased gratitude. I'm impressed by how English the English are.

Day Three:

I made it to my destination with no amusing mishaps. No mishaps at all, as a matter of fact. Just a note on the countryside, though -- the midlands are ridiculously beautiful. Before I arrived, I kept saying to myself, "It isn't going to be the way it is in the movies, it isn't going to be the way it is on TV..." But it is.

I have to admit I like the northern landscape better, though -- darker, damper, more heavily wooded, houses of stone instead of brick, pushed up high and narrow. The hills higher and steeper too -- that good old Romantic irregularity. Today, the weather is cool, overcast and moist -- not quite raining, but almost.

Returnees claim that the house is much improved, but it still has a heaping helping of character. Floorboards creak, the toilet runs for ages, the beds are chunky with springs. There is no opaque covering over the bathroom window.

Downstairs is a lovely sitting room with fireplace, a long narrow kitchen, a well-stocked library and a handsome dining room with stone floors. There are three bedrooms above, with the menfolk in the attic, and then some scattered single bedrooms in the Barn next door.

The tribes gathered slowly through the late afternoon. The usual pattern of people starting out shy but gradually opening up as points of mutual interest arrive. It's a nice mix of folks -- varied backgrounds and levels of experience, folks in a "what the hell" frame of mind, without agendas. Astonishing number of health care/mental health workers -- two art therapists, one mental hospital nurse, two special needs teachers. Everyone very shocked that I'd come all the way from America for this week. There are two other Americans -- Greta, my roommate, who is traveling and a former Flightie, and Penny from Wisconsin, who lives here with her Belgian husband. There are some folks who have been here before -- one woman, roundly pregnant, who first came here as a teenager twenty years ago -- and some who know each other, and Judith and Mimi.

There's also a workshop cat, Tigger -- the sleekest of black girl cats, who views every lap in the world as her rightful patrimony. We had a lovely first meal of chicken, salad, vegetable strudel and strawberry trifle, prepared by Tim and Anna, the Center Directors. Then we had our first session in the sitting room -- there's only thirteen students, so we fit there quite cosily -- going over the general ground rules, formally introducing ourselves and doing a little exercise.

First, draw a floor plan of the room. (Scratches of pen on paper, tongues out of the sides of mouths.) Divide up the floor plan into 10 sections, numbered. Turn to the person on your left and give them a number from one to ten. Look at the section numbered for you. Write for ten minutes about something within that space. Some people struggled or were embarrassed by what they wrote, but a lot of good things came out -- moving from the specific to the universal. I stayed specific, with a body in a trunk in the corner.

Day Four:

It's a damp, overcast day -- not exactly raining, but if you walk across any grass, your feet are soaked instantly. My shoes are reposing in front of the radiator.

Today was our first full session -- Mimi Khalvati doing poetry, all of us sitting around the dining room table after breakfast. We started each getting a noun -- trumpet, window, spiderweb, pulled a la Lucky Dip, and writing its definition, then passing the noun to our right. Some hilarious juxtapositions. We did this until we each had three definitions. We then got an abstract noun like simplicity or music, and had to fashion a poem for it using what came up in the three definitions. Then Mimi asked us to change it to first person, if we hadn't already, then write a statement about ourselves to tack onto the end or beginning. Some quite astonishing things arose -- I really liked Sara's "Violence" -- "I hated being Violence," she said. I completely messed mine up by over-cerebralizing it, so I circled back and redid it much closer to the original material. It was "Loneliness," and I was kvetching internally until I added the tag line "Once my mother died, no one could make me cut my hair." Then it was about the most intense loneliness one can feel. Anyway, I think most everyone found it a productive session.

A lunch of leftovers, then we were left to our own devices for the afternoon, after signing up for a short one-on-one -- or rather two-on-one -- tutorial with Judith and Mimi. I went for a walk along the Colden River at the bottom of the valley, which was delightfully damp and boggy. The water rushes by, dirty and foamy, but earnest and energetic. The rock rises up in stacked layers alongside. There are these enormous black patent leather slugs -- very handsome I can think them, my garden being thousands of miles away. I went much farther than I thought I would -- my legs are feeling a trifle wobbly, but I'm trying to ignore them. It felt very good. The air is so clean and good.

Mimi and Judith were holding their tutorials in a tiny room below the main house, dubbed "the interrogation room", from its barren tininess. We didn't have much concrete to talk about, but they were both kind and enthusiastic. Jo and I had a lovely long chat in the sitting room over tea -- oh god, what wonderful tea there is at all hours of the day and night.

Day Five:

Sun! Glorious sun! The instant lunch was over, I ran upstairs and washed my hair. Now I'm sitting on a quiet bench in the farthest part of the garden, basking. The bees don't know quite what to make of me -- "I smell rosemary, and I smell Rachel Perry lip balm" -- but we've decided that there's room enough for all of us. The songbirds are warbling their lungs out. You couldn't ask for a prettier English spring day.

Circling back to the remainder of yesterday -- while waiting for dinner, Sara and I talked about illness and writing. She has lupus, and overheard me talking to Jo about my mystery illness. A very fruitful conversation. After dinner, we trundled over to the Barn and slouched into chairs varying from comfy to treacherous, to hear Judith and Mimi read -- intense and harrowing, we all dragged off to bed.

It took me a while to wind down -- Greta felt the same, so we chatted about Flight of the Mind, the workshop Judith and her partner used to run in Oregon on the McKenzie River. We'd both talked to Judith earlier, when her partner Ruth called in to say howdy. It's a shame, but one understands what a huge investment of time and resources it was for them to run. We knew it was a special event, but only really appreciated it later after experiencing less stellar workshops.

Today was Judith's turn to take the driver's wheel, so to speak. After some introductory remarks, she set us to telling a familiar, often-told story from among your friends and family. I started "Night of the Golden Weasel." There wasn't nearly enough time to get it all down. Then she had us write a paragraph or two stepped back from the action of the story, telling background information or speculating about other interpretations or perspectives. The result was the story got larger.

Sara and Lesley read smashing pieces, while others were still working to get there. It's hard to say where the energy of the class was, since I think more of them are poets then memoirists, and it may have been a more unfamiliar hat to wear. I'm pretty happy and hope to get something worth reading at the student readings later this week.

Jo, Penny and I had kitchen duty that night -- roast chicken and vegetables, salad, asparagus and poached peaches. We settled on a variation of papal chicken (because it's infallible), though they were a bit dubious at first. The quantity meant that it took longer to cook than they expected, and there were some frantic cutting up of half-cooked chickens and putting them back in the oven close to zero hour. However, we had lots of fun -- we got into the dinner wine a bit early, and everyone pulled in tandem. The only fly in the ointment was that I burned myself on the oven while pulling them out to baste. It didn't hurt at the time -- thank you, Ernest and Julio Gallo -- but I had to look up one of the center administrators for a dressing. She suggested honey, and such was its magic that I haven't felt any pain at all -- though it may scar. Finally dinner was on the table... a resounding success.

Our guest reader, Amir Hussein, is a Pakistani writer. I hadn't heard of him before. He read a memoir in the Barn. I have to admit I didn't connect with it too deeply -- the lost love Madeline, a pretty European girl, it didn't speak to me. And I was pretty wiped out after kitchen duty anyway -- four hours straight on our feet.

Greta had had difficulty with my light being on after she went to sleep, so very diffidently, she asked if I'd be willing to try reading with her headlamp. Merriment as she showed me how it worked and I settled in for my new coal mining existence. "Look, I'm a movie premiere!" as I thrashed my head back and forth. It worked well as a light for reading ghost stories (I've abandoned The Count of Monte Cristo for MR James) -- very campfirey.

Day Six:

Everyone very sleepy and quiet Thursday morning. Mimi worked with that by giving us a lovely poem by an Arab poet, "We love life wherever we can" and asked us to write things around it as readers -- who we were before, during and after the poem. I latched onto the phrase "wherever we settle, we plant fast-growing plants" and homesickfully listed out all the fast-growing plants in my garden, blooming away without me. Strangely enough, whenever I tried to put in a not-fast-growing plant, it wouldn't take. Anyway, it was a success (though Judith said I must have made most of the names up). Most folks wrote darker images, though it seemed to me that the poem was weighted toward hope.

After lunch, Greta, Sara, Jan and I walked to the village, Heptonstall. It was a big pull up the Lumb Bank drive, under cloudy skies. Sara later said she thought the climb was going to kill her, though you wouldn't have thought it to see her charge upwards. We went to the village shop/post office where I snatched up postcards for the multitudes at home. We then went wandering around -- the village map promised us a dungeon nearby, but we couldn't find it. "Probably someone's basement..."

The church and churchyard were easy enough to find. We came into the old part of the graveyard, where hunched old black Victorian stones tell us that Margaret Greenwood, aged 6 years, fell to sleep 16 April 1865. They were almost stereotypically lugubrious, jumbled together in such a close-knit quilt, it was impossible not to walk on them.

The church itself was abandoned, mossy and roofed only by sky. Its openness to the elements felt very holy and quickening to me.

After a bit, I left the others and crossed over to the new part of the graveyard, where we were told Sylvia Plath was buried. The sky was darkening, and we needed to be back by 3pm for Mimi's versification session. I set forth to find the right grave. "This is stupid," I thought as I tramped through the long wet grass, scanning gravestones mechanically. "You're pushing yourself to set up a particular scene, and not enjoying this graveyard as you normally would. Be happy with the graves you have, and don't go pushing forward so."

So I abandoned the idea of finding Sylvia, and just wandered wherever my eye pulled me. I came upon a recent grave with lots of paraphenalia and after perusing it, stood up... and right behind, there was Sylvia.

Some people have talked about the grave being a disappointment, but I liked that it was obviously a work-in-progress. Plants have been planted at different times -- one dry and half dead, one tender new green shoot. People had left letters and photos under stones. Sara and Greta caught up to me. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Large splots dabbed our jackets. We waited for a whiff of brimstone.

But not very long -- we dashed out of the village, down the lane and settled down in the sitting room for versification... which turned out to be a pretty general session. Not many of us had specific questions, and Mimi didn't have anything prepared. (It should have been her afternoon off -- it was so good of her to be willing to work with us at all.)

Before dinner, I went out to one of the little garden cabins -- just room for a desk, a chair and a window -- and practiced reading aloud my piece for the evening. We were to read a bit of someone else's writing that we liked. I found the Granta that had the True History of the Kelly Gang excerpt, and found an excerpt of the excerpt that stood on its own. The cabin feels a bit silly to get into, but once you're there, it's a nice, tiny, undistracting space. In mine, the desk had a drawer full of interesting rubbish from workshops past. "I want this baby. I want this baby," said two fragments. The world is full of these little morsels of three-volume novels.

Deadlines loomed. The workshop anthology had to be done today, so after the reading, which was cosy and fun in the sitting room, many of us rushed off for a late night or early morning session at the computer. I finished a draft of "Night of the Golden Weasel" around midnight, and typed it up on the library computer in the morning.

Day Seven:

Our last memoir session. After discussing general topics about memory and imagination, we had a half hour to write about the first time something happened, but pulled back through time. I did my first cataloging project... "no, wait, that wasn't my first cataloging project, that was my first cataloging project, no, wait...", back to babyhood and clearing out my parents' bedroom bookcase, but Judith called time long before I got there.

People read some smashing stuff. Michael read something very funny about a dyspeptic music teacher, and Sandra had a brief, subtle gem. We wanted to hear more of most everyone. Greta's one about her parents' wine making in the Sierras was great too. After the session, we planned the evening reading of student work. I was chosen to lead off, "We need someone with a good speaking voice, confident and fun, to get the evening started and everyone relaxed." I was just as glad to get it done with and enjoy the rest of the evening.

Judith and I had a last one-on-one in the interrogation room after lunch. Very sportingly, she'd agreed to read my fiction, the ubiquitous Chapter One. It was a lovely session -- she was very enthusiastic and complimentary, with only a few copy-editing-type nits. "I don't feel I have a lot to give you, you're doing all the right things." I asked a few questions about this and that, and everything she said boiled down to "This is a great beginning, and you just keep doing what you're doing, because it's an amazing job." I really needed to hear that, because all this week I've felt like such a lumbering beast -- like a bear trying to operate an electric coffee maker. It was good to be reminded that I'm good at some form of writing, and that I can take up a project where I have some mastery. "I look forward to reading more," Judith said, and I believe it wasn't just a conventional compliment. So I go into the reading tonight energized and renewed.

We had a lovely final dinner of salmon and roasted veg, with delicious profiteroles to follow. All the food has been fabulous. We gathered in the Barn at the appropriate time for the reading, getting our copy of the workshop anthology, which Margaret kindly spearheaded. I led off -- I could tell people liked it, but few people laughed aloud -- those reticent Brits. But Mimi was in stitches, which pleased me, and told me as I came off, how wonderful the piece was. The work was generally quite good. Greta had smashing stuff, as did Jo. And Lesley's piece simply blew us away. Everyone read, even Tim and Anna, the center administrators, both quite good. Once it was over, no one wanted to move, to break the spell. We drifted back over to the main house and had wine and hot toddies in the sitting room. One by one, folks were overcome by sleepiness and shuffled off to bed.

Day Eight:

I got up earlier than I expected, and went downstairs for a little breakfast. The sitting room was still a mess, with wineglasses and teaspoons and sucked lemons everywhere -- it didn't seem fair to leave Tim and Anna with so much to clean up, so I picked up and did some washing up. People came in and said their goodbyes. I walked around the place a little, to say thank you. Sara, Jan, Greta and I were sharing a cab into the train station at Hebden Bridge. When it arrived, we had the hardest time tearing away. Judith was there and gave me a big hug, and reiterated how much she wanted to see me next time she was in the Bay Area and how I ought to come up and see Soapstone, their writing retreat. Finally we piled into the cab, kissed our hands to Mimi washing up in the kitchen window, and were whisked away from Lumb Bank.

Lesley had called in from the station, to let us know that there were no trains going along the Manchester-Leeds line that day, and instead we'd be bussed out to the nearest functioning terminus. So we weren't surprised to see her and Marcelle perched on their baggage when we drove into the station lot. We got the latest information on what was happening from the station master, and I posted my postcards. Greta and Sara wanted me to go into Manchester with them, but I wouldn't have ended up with such a convenient Underground connection. So instead I went with Lesley and Jan to York. Jan and I traveled down to London together, and parted with embraces.

I hadn't eaten any lunch, so I was pretty wiped out by that point. I made my bedraggled way out to Heathrow and re-checked in at the Hotel Ibis, where much to my chagrin, I found that the restaurant wouldn't open until six. In the meantime, I washed my hair and took stock of things and watched a little telly. The buffet was by way of being execrable, but at that point I would have eaten a clown. By steering clear of any meat or meat-like substances, I managed to cobble together something to keep body and soul together -- though that leathery little creme brulee was a strategic error.

Got back to my room just in time for a documentary called "Are You Captain Corelli?" about a guy who survived the massacre of Italian soldiers on Kephalonia, which was nice to watch as I was trying to wind down. Another nature program lulled me to sleep.

I got up on time for getting my cab. No interesting details about this bit of transit -- all connections have worked smoothly, no interesting characters have emerged. So I think I'm allowed to close this up. I'm headed home.