MY CITY - NORWICH, UNESCO'S NEW CITY OF LITERATURE

This blog was originally published on 3rd June 2012

Norwich is named as England’s first

UNESCO City of Literature

‘Do different’, they say here. There is a stubborn independence in the Norfolk character, born from centuries of invasion by Romans, Danes, Vikings, Angles and Saxons. This low-lying county, once home to Boudicca and the Iceni people, has over one hundred miles of coastline. It is a wild place of heath, flint and big skies. In some parts of Norfolk you can drive for miles without seeing a house.

Burnham Overy Staithe

And in the middle sits Norwich, the most easterly city in the UK. This former seat of the Saxon Earls of East Anglia became the capital of what was the most populous region in Norman England. By the fourteenth century, the walled city of Norwich covered an area bigger than London. With more medieval churches than any city north of the Alps, Norwich became one of Europe’s great seedbeds of religious art and architecture. As Nicholas Pevsner wrote: ‘Norwich has everything'.

Norwich Cathedral the most complete Norman cathedral, 
founded in 1096 and boasting 1000 bosses in the cloister, 
the largest in the country

It was here that, sitting in her anchorite cell on King Street, Julian of Norwich penned The Revelations of Divine Love, the first book written in the English language by a woman. The medieval Christian mystic was a contemporary of Chaucer. And close by lived the medieval Hebrew poet, Meir ben Elijah.

As you approach the city by road, you’ll see the Norwich sign with an image of the cathedral, and underneath it the famous quotation by the seventeenth century writer, George Borrow, ‘A fine city’. And it is a fine city – a city on a human scale that you can cross on foot in half an hour passing flint churches, Tudor merchant houses and the massive Norman castle. My family, on both sides, has lived here for generations and I have a sense of deep local pride.

Norwich Castle: the most elaborate Norman Keep to be constructed in England 

and the first English castle to be built on a mound 

And I would like to share its success with you – for Norwich has strengthened its place on the world literary map. On 10^th May 2012, Norwich was accredited as England’s foremost literary city by becoming its first UNESCO Creative City of Literature. It joins an elite network of cities comprising Edinburgh, Dublin, Iowa City, Melbourne and Reykjavik. The accreditation provides international recognition to Norwich’s literary heritage, its contemporary strengths and future potential in the field of literature and all the literary arts.

So why Norwich? Think of this provincial city and Nelson, the Canaries, the Norfolk Broads and Colman’s mustard will probably flit through your mind – but Norwich has a sensational literary past. It’s a place that makes a difference.

People sometimes refer to Norfolk as a slow-paced, staid backwater, but throughout its history it has been associated with poltical dissent, radical politics and Nonconformist religion.

Robert Kett, our very own Robin Hood, led the Peasants' Rebellion from Norwich in 1549. Thomas Paine, whose book The Rights of Man influenced the American Constitution, was born near the city. In 1713, the UK’s first provincial psychiatric hospital opened on Bethel Street – hence the word ‘bedlam’. Elizabeth Fry, the Quaker prison reformer and philanthropist who features on our £5 note, was born in Norwich. So, too, in 1796 was the UK’s first-ever black circus proprietor, Pablo Fanque, immortalised by The Beatles’ song, ‘Being For the Benefit of Mr Kite!’

 

Norwich also has a long reputation as a city of refuge. In the sixteenth century a large influx of Dutch, Flemish and Walloon refugees brought weaving skills, which helped to build the city’s wealth and influenced its architecture. It was the Flemish who brought the canary, later adopted at Norwich City Football Club’s mascot.

 River Wensum

Until the Industrial Revolution, Norwich was the capital of England's most populous county. It vied with Bristol as the second city. By the eighteenth century, Norwich was already on the cultural map. The country’s first provincial newspaper, Norwich Post, was published in 1701. Sir Thomas Browne, the great polymath scholar, medical doctor, philosopher and encyclopaedist lived in the city. Luke Hansard, the printer who published parliamentary debates was born here. In 1758, the Theatre Royal, the country’s first provincial theatre, opened and is still the most successful today. And in 1772, Norwich was home to the first arts festival in Britain.

A century later, the local Quaker writer, Anna Sewell, published Black Beauty. Her story, which aimed to induce an understanding treatment of horses, became an all-time bestseller with sales of over 30 million books. As Sewell helped to put Norwich on the literary map, John Crome and John Sell Cotman put it on the artistic map with the Norwich School of Artists, founded in 1803.

It also has its share of heroes: Admiral Lord Nelson was schooled in Norwich. Edith Cavell, the nurse and local heroine who was executed by firing squad in 1915 for helping hundreds of allied soldiers to escape, was born near the city.

As you might expect, Norwich was one of the first cities to have a library in 1794. In 1850, it was the first municipality to adopt the Library Act. Today, the Norfolk & Norwich Millennium Library, housed in The Forum, is the most successful library by far in England, with over one million visitors and users a year.

 The Forum, which houses the Norfolk & Norwich Millennium Library 

and BBC East, as well as restaurants and conference facilities

Norwich is also home to the country’s first – and now leading – course in creative writing. In 1971, Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson founded the MA Course in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. There have been some luminary graduates including Ian McEwan (its first student), Kazuo Ishiguro, Rose Tremain, Anne Enright and Angela Carter.

So what will the City of Literature status do for Norwich? In 2016, Writers Centre Norwich, which put forward the UNESCO bid, will open a £7 million International Centre for Writing. The aim is to create a world-leading centre for creative writing. The flagship project is a partnership between WCN and the University of East Anglia, and will be housed in a building granted by Norwich City Council.

No doubt there will be more writers coming to the city. Ask any local about Norwich and they’ll tell you the old adage: ‘Norwich has a pub for every day of the year and a church for every Sunday’. We may soon be able to add, ‘And a writer a day for every coffee bar’.

 Elm Hill, Norwich

And if you are a writer living in East Anglia, you might like to join East Anglian Writers. We are a group of 240 professional writers affiliated to the Society of Authors and a jolly bunch.

On this Diamond Jubilee Day, I give three cheers to Her Majesty and three cheers to Norwich – our new City of Literature!

And if you haven't yet been to Norwich, then please visit. It's a lovely city.

My thanks to fellow EAW member John Worrall for supplying the photographs 

for this piece. http://www.anglianimages.co.uk

Sheridan Winn is author of the Sprite Sister books

 Salthouse, North Norfolk

JOURNALIST-AUTHOR-PUBLISHER-BOOKSELLER

This blog was originally published on 3rd August 2012

I had never realised my writing career would require so much multi-tasking and so many changes of direction. But perhaps that’s just life: it has a habit of throwing curve ball when you least expect it. There’s a Spanish saying, ‘La vida es corta, pero ancha’: life is short, but wide. Or it could be translated as ‘free’.

You feel you have an innate talent. You learn the skills to apply that talent; work with as much determination, energy and focus as you can muster. Then it is down to the choices that you make – for there are always openings and opportunities to be seized, or not.

I have always believed that there’s an element of luck in every successful person’s life. I also believe that there is a lot more ‘luck’ out there than we realise – and that it is not just about spotting an opportunity, but knowing how to act upon it. Are you making the best decision? The way may be clear at the start, but there are brambles ahead: it may be better to turn down the contract they are waving at you.

The trick is to know when to act and which path to take.

Ah, would that life were so clear! As a birthday looms and another year of my ‘short’ life bites the dust, I am changing course again. It’s not a complete change – more a development of what has already preceded. But have I made the right choice? There’s the rub.

People with concurrent multiple careers – who, presumably, want their lives to be ‘wide’ – often adopt a ‘hyphenated’ professional identity. So we have the ‘teacher-painter’ or the ‘doctor-potter’.

I am, now, a journalist-author-publisher-bookseller. It’s all getting a bit complicated. As I wrote in my May blog, Bits, Bits, It’s All In Bits, I have agreed the reversion of rights in my first five Sprite Sister novels. In doing so, I have bought up the remainder stock from Piccadilly Press. There are now 2000 Sprite Sister paperbacks in my garage – all waiting to be sold. There are e-books to be published.

It was Charles Handy, Britain’s foremost management writer, who mooted the concept of the portfolio career in his book, The Age of Unreason, in 1989. Handy described ‘portfolio working’ as a lifestyle in which the individual holds a number of jobs, clients and types of work, all at the same time. He argued that, even if the portfolio worker made less money, his or her life would be freer and more interesting – and thus richer.

So how does this prepare me for my new role as a bookseller? Despite academic qualifications several aeons ago, everything I have learned, professionally, has been on the hoof.

I have chosen to take the leap. Now I have to quickly apply the skills I already have and learn the ones I need, to translate my decision into future success.

Experience has taught me that things and people turn up in my life as I need them. Not as I want them.

So, readers and book buyers, commissioning editors, foreign rights managers and film producers - come forth! I await you!

PS And please hurry up, as my life is whizzing by and I will soon be too old for all this dashing about.

Half a ton of books arrive

In the garage with my 2000 books

Hope the mice don't eat them

The new edition of The Circle of Power

Sheridan Winn is a freelance journalist specialising profiles of national and international business leaders; the author of the six Sprite Sisters book, and publisher of two of them. She has just launched the first book in the series, The Circle of Power, as a print-on-demand paperback and as an e-book. 

Find out more about her at http://www.sheridanwinn.com

CHAPTER FIVE AND THE PAINFUL TRUTH ABOUT WRITING

‘What’s it like being a writer?’

‘Are you disciplined and start at the same time each day?’

‘Do you listen to music when you write?’

‘How many words do you write in a day?’

‘Where do you get your ideas from?’

It’s wonderful and awful; no; absolutely not (words have their own rhythm and music interrupts the flow); anything between 50 and 5000; and, I have no idea, they’re just there when I need them, I reply.

 How does one explain that writing is as excruciating as it is exhilarating? Sometimes, you explain, the words creep along the page, sometimes they tumble out and, sometimes, if you’re really lucky and get ‘in the zone’, they will fly.

‘So what’s your typical day?’ they ask.

 This is how it often is.

10.00am. Coffee, strong and black, or a large pot of gunpowder and mint tea with some honey; either will guarantee I will need to go to the loo umpteen times in the next hour or so.

Necessary preparation

Ready to roll

10.10am. Upstairs to my office on the second floor, I create a new Word document for Chapter Five of ‘Magic at Drysdale’s School’.

The blank page

 This chapter is from my seventh Sprite Sister title. I know my characters by now. I know what peril I intend to place them in. The stories are fun to write; this should be easy. Off we go.

11.00am. Two trips to the loo, no words on the page. Go downstairs for a piece of Green & Black’s Milk Almond Chocolate and another mug of herb tea.

Well, it's necessary

11.10am. Climb the 26 stairs back up to the second floor and sit down at my desk. Get up and open the window to adjust the airflow, then go to the loo, again.

But why did I drink all that coffee?

 11.15am. While I’m in the bathroom, clean my teeth to get out the almonds in the chocolate that are sticking in my ancient, receding gums. On return to my desk I find there is still one bit still stuck and which is annoying me. Return to the bathroom and start the procedure again, this time with floss.

Distraction No 23

11.25am. Teeth now free of bits. Check my email and smart phone (this is done regularly through the day). Adjust the window again.

The worst distraction

 12.00pm. Answer the ringing telephone in case my aging parents have collapsed, only to find it’s a friend wanting a chat. If you have a lot of friends and a big family, you can be guaranteed frequent interruptions when you are trying to concentrate.

12.30pm. Stare out of the window. Stare at the keyboard.

Speak to me

2.00pm. 165 words now on the page. I will never get this written … Where are my characters going? I’ve had umpteen interruptions and my mind feels all over the place. 

 2.30pm. Time to go for a walk. Lie flat out on the grass and do some cloud watching, then sit under a tree and wait for inspiration. Now do I know what happens next in the story, I wonder, as I return home?

I should be able to clear my mind here ...

4.00pm. Refreshed, though still undecided, I stare at the computer screen. Remind myself that I am writing this book because I want to: nobody is making me. I am enjoying it, really I am. Check my diary again. 

Do the crossword.

I should be writing, not doing this ...

 5.00pm. Lie on the bed.

My back hurts

5.30pm. Back at my desk again.

Not to be beaten

5.35pm. Stare at the note I placed on the wall in front of me, some weeks ago. ‘Magic at Drysdale’s School – deadline end July 2012’, it says in large black type. Oh heck. Why didn’t I see that earlier? Four weeks and around 47,500 words to go.

Arghh.... hurry up, hurry up

 In that case …  Go back down to the kitchen, get a glass of cold rosé and come back up to my seat at the computer.

 6.00pm. As the day winds down and my neighbours return from their work, my mind settles and I know what my characters will do next. That’s the key – writing is easy when you have your plot clear. Within a few minutes, I’m away and into the zone. Time stands still, the noises outside the house recede and my concentration is absolute as my words zing onto the page. I'm on my way at last! 



Sheridan Winn is the author of the Sprite Sister stories. The sixth title, The Boy With Hawk-like Eyes, is available as an e-book. The first title, The Circle of Power, will be published as an e-book later this month and the other titles will follow.