Festival Beginnings

How ILF all began: a Q&A with First Festival Director Michael Dawson

There are many stories surrounding the early years of the Ilkley Literature Festival. The only ones who know the truth are those who were there. During a frank Q&A session, the first Festival Director Michael Dawson revealed some memorable moments and dispelled at least one myth.

It's long been thought the festival was devised during the 1971 postal strike. In fact, Michael (then Director of the Yorkshire Arts Association) and Peter Harland (then editor of the Telegraph & Argus and Chair of the Yorkshire Arts Literature Panel) had dreamt up the festival some time before the strike, although Michael admitted it had given them “a little more time to plan”. He said the myth started because of a press release he and Peter issued which used the postal strike as their hook.

During his Q&A, Michael recalled many (actual) events – here's a selection:

In 1977, French writer Marguerite Duras, upon seeing the Kings Hall before her performance, disliked the venue so much that she used some choice words and almost left before her show. One hour and a few malt whiskies later she was persuaded to stay and gave her talk (in French). Michael recalled how, a week after her Ilkley appearance, she performed at the Carnegie Hall, although this time her performance was in English.

Germaine Greer refused her invitation when she was invited to join the festival’s first ‘Women and Literature Symposium’. The reason? Jilly Cooper was also due to attend. Michael recalled: “I got an extraordinary letter from Germaine Greer saying she'd never appear on stage alongside Jilly Cooper.”

The performance of Ted Hughes' Cave Birds in 1975 was both dramatic and eventful. Michael described the event as 'excellent' and said the drama was heightened by a blood-curdling scream from an audience member. At the time it was assumed the scream was part of the show, which continued uninterrupted. It was only later people realised the woman had been distressed by the slide show and had vomited in the foyer.

Yorkshire Arts insisted Michael had to organise everything in his spare time. This meant he could only dedicate half a day a week to the festival. He relied heavily on volunteers, including his whole family. His wife Megan organised parades, street theatre and shop displays, while his children got involved in the technical side of things, helping Michael to record some memorable performances.

There were many last-minute challenges, including a blown bulb on a projector hours before a performance. Michael found himself waiting at a petrol station halfway between Ilkley and York waiting for a replacement bulb to arrive so the show could go ahead (the supplier wouldn't come any further!). He got back to Ilkley to discover the replacement bulb damaged the slides. Michael laughingly recalled fetching a screen from home which was “far too small for anyone to see the pictures properly.”

When asked if he had had a grand vision of the festival's future, Michael replied: “No, I just hoped it wouldn't fold.” As he said at the time: “I think we can do it better than Cheltenham”, but he wasn't expecting anyone as famous as W.H. Auden to appear until Eric Walter White said they should 'aim for the top' and get Auden involved. When asked what Auden's performance was like, Michael said: “He wasn't bad at reading his own poetry – it wasn't dramatic but it was good.”

Towards the end, audience members recalled their favourite festival moments, including the controversy over the Minotaur sculpture (it became a national story) and Conor Cruise O'Brien's visit (he was number one on the IRA's hit list prompting his host to answer the phone as bogus characters just in case).

To close, Michael recalled and thanked the many committee members and volunteers from the early days, without whom he said “it would have been impossible.” He said he had “many happy and chaotic memories of the festival”.

The People's Festival: from Last Chance Saloon to Soar-away Success

This year I was determined not to miss out (again) on the mighty Ilkley Literature Festival (ILF) and so I decided to do two things: a) volunteer as a steward; and b) contribute posts to the official festival blog www.pickledegg.info

This is the first of several posts about ILF which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. On this occasion I was attending as a guest/blogger...

Speaking to a full house, Festival Director Rachel Feldberg entertained us with stories from past festivals and thanked festival contributors for their efforts at the 'Making Waves' exhibition launch on Saturday 28th September. And yet, amongst the celebrations, I was surprised to learn the festival had suffered from several financial crises.

Sounds of the 70s
Finding it hard to believe such a successful festival could have experienced such hardship, I decided to investigate. Gazing wistfully at the wine on offer (why do I always drive?), I climbed the stairs of the 14th century Manor House Museum to the exhibition itself.
At the top I was greeted by the sound of the Sex Pistols' Anarchy in the UK (another surprise!). Humming along to the 70s soundtrack (including Abba's Dancing Queen, Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody and Bob Marley's No Woman No Cry) I was fascinated by displays featuring everything from the very first festival programme to the tools used to carve the Stanza Stones. Other treats included letters from authors, photos, scrapbooks and specially commissioned artwork.
As I read the story boards for each decade there it was: the North's largest literature festival had teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. And not just once. Although not the theme of the exhibition, it made me wonder not only how the festival had survived but also how it had achieved its current success.

Tough Times
According to the story boards, the problems started in 1979 when 'money was tight and the rain was like curtain rods'. By 1981 the country was in recession and the 1981 festival lost £4,000, equivalent to £13,000 today.
Trying to recover its losses, the 1982 festival was reduced to six days, while the Telegraph & Argus (T&A) cried: “Can Festival Survive the Looming Crisis?” Again the festival lost money and in 1984 the T&A ran a story entitled “Last Chance Saloon”. That same year Michael Dawson, the original Festival Director, returned as Chair and some big names appeared on the bill, including Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Alan Bennett. The festival was not only a success, but it made a £5,000 surplus.
All was well until the 1990s. In 1992, to spread the risk and improve cash flow, the festival was split into three smaller events, run in March, June and October/November. By 1996 the festival was solvent again and in 1998 the festival was awarded its first National Lottery grant. The rest, as they say, is history.

The People's Festival
I found both Rachel's presentation and the exhibition expressed the passion and dedication of the organisers and the people of Ilkley. As Rachel explained, the festival was “started and nurtured in Ilkley” and it is still “something very much owned by this town....the people embody what the festival is about.” She believes that “its roots, ideas, principles are the same as those in 1973.” And so it would seem that a combination of innovation, community spirit and sheer Yorkshire grit have made the festival the top international literary event that it is today.

Tracy Chevalier at Wakefield Lit Fest

On Saturday night I drove over to Wakefield to see one of my favourite historical fiction writers: Tracy Chevalier. The evening was so warm that it felt like the middle of summer, making it a shame to be inside, but it was worth it.
There was a definite buzz about the Unitarian Chapel as we waited for the lady herself to appear. And we were not disappointed – after a short intro by the Festival Director Tracy took the stage and gave an entertaining talk including three readings from her new book The Last Runaway. Before, during and after the readings she gave us plenty of background to her book and explained what had inspired her to write it.
Set in Ohio in the 1850s, the story centres around Honor Bright, a single Quaker woman from Dorset who has travelled to North America to join her sister and start a new life. Dealing with themes of loss and slavery, The Last Runaway is Tracy's seventh published novel. Interestingly, it's the first historical novel she has written that's not set in Europe.
Tracy told us she's lived in the UK for 30 years now and to write this book she recalled her own experiences of being an 'immigrant' (her words) - for example, the way things smell and taste differently in another country. She said that tea tastes awful in the US as the water tastes so different to the UK. She explained that being in another country makes you notice the little things rather than the big things (such as politics etc). She finds that everyday foods like butter and milk taste different, trees look different etc. Since settling in the UK she finds she misses little things as well, like fireflies.
Tracy treated us to three passages from her book – the first was when the heroine has just arrived and is noticing all the strange things about her new home. The passage included observations such as the birds being very different to those at home. As always Tracy's writing is simple yet highly evocative and I could imagine arriving in this strange new place and noticing all these little details for the first time.

One of the reasons that Tracy made her heroine a Quaker is partly related to some hearing problems she has (she can't hear the full sound spectrum when there's a lot of noise going on) which has drawn her towards seeking more silence in her life. She's drawn to Quakers as she used to go on a Quaker camp when she was a child and they would spend 15 minutes sitting together in silence every day. These days Tracy spends an hour each Sunday doing the same thing – she finds silence helps her to focus and she wanted to make her protagonist a Quaker for that reason.
Tracy said that novels are about lies, or at least about withholding the truth. This presented her with a problem as Quakers aren't supposed to lie. However, she says that her protagonist ends up lying quite a lot in the end! One of the main themes of the book is slavery – it's set prior to the Civil War, when slavery was legal in the southern states but illegal in the northern ones. However, the northern ones still bought produce (e.g. cotton) from the southern states.
At this time there were always runaway slaves - a lot of them tried to reach Canada, where they would be free. The only way to get there was to get help from the 'underground rail road', made up of people willing to help the slaves escape. Runaway slaves often went to Ohio where they would be safe as long as their owner didn't come to claim them. Honour is opposed to slavery but has never been forced to put her principles to the test.
Tracy likes her protagonists to do things with their hands – she decided that Honor would be a quilter, which meant that she, Tracy, had to learn quilting. Tracy held up a quilt she had made which had been entirely hand stitched – it must have taken her an age to do and I was very impressed! She said she likes making quilts because they are both practical and creative.
After Tracy had finished her third reading, which left us in suspense as to what happened next, she opened up to questions from the audience. I was brave and managed to get a question in at the start (often I never ask anything, but this was Tracy Chevalier of all people!) I asked her if she had any tips for aspiring authors and she gave a really in depth answer about what it's like to be a writer. She explained that not every day is easy - there are days when it's hard to get started and she just stares at a blank page and really has to make the effort to 'pull the story out of herself'. She also explained it's important to have a regular writing routine and make sure you stick to it, whether that be writing at the same time every day or at the same time each Sunday. She also said it was important to get others to read your work and to accept criticism, and to edit A LOT. She explained the first draft is almost the 'easy bit' - the real work is the rewriting/editing.

In response to other questions, Tracy revealed that she doesn't have a detailed plan when she writes, just an idea of how she'd like it to start and finish. As she's writing she tries different ideas as she goes along. She thinks that the best part of writing is not knowing what will happen on the way.
It was noted that all her novels are historical, which she acknowledged but couldn't really say why as she had never studied history. However, in her thirties she started to take an interest in her own family history. She had started to feel settled and wondered where she had come from, which she thinks might link in with historical fiction. She confessed she just can't 'do' contemporary stories and that the only way to get away from herself was to delve into a story in another time and place. She thinks that to be a 'three dimensional' person you need to be aware of the past and where you have come from.
Tracy said she spends a lot of time doing research – she researches until she feels comfortable writing about the time and place in which her story is going to be set. At the moment she is looking into how trees can be transported from A to B and so she needs to find out about tree grafting, something which she will be (physically) doing in the Spring.
She said that very often she thinks she's finished her research but it never really stops – she still has books on Vermeer that she's not yet read! Fortunately she loves learning about new subjects.
When asked if her books contained any kind of message, Tracy said no but she would like her books to inspire people to look back on the past and be aware of where they came from.

As for what she uses to write, Tracy said she uses a particular type of fountain pen to write longhand (!) on plain (NOT lined) paper and in a notebook (again, not lined) which 'feels' like her subject. For example when when writing the Last Runaway she used a notebook with a design and colours that she could imagine her heroine wearing.
And when asked whether she prefers 'real books' or e-readers, she said that although she can see the benefits of e-readers, she preferred real books every time!
With the questions over it was time for the book signing. Yours truly had stupidly left her purse at home, after changing bags earlier. Fortunately I had a copy of Tracy's first book, The Virgin Blue, in my bag and I joined the queue, noting I was the only one without a copy of the new book. When I finally got to the front and handed over my book with an apology, Tracy was very gracious about it, referring to the book as 'an old friend' and kindly signing it for me (phew!)
All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable evening with a highly talented and charismatic lady.

Festival Mania and the Return of the Wandering Muse

It's coming up to that time of year again - literary festival season! Like buses you wait and wait and...you get the idea. I'm just not sure why all the West Yorkshire literary festivals are in September and October, most of them overlapping with each other, the bigger ones often eclipsing the smaller ones. And, unless you have an infinite budget, you have to be a lot more selective than you'd like when it comes to choosing which events/workshops to attend. I try to attend at least one event/workshop at each festival - this year I'll be attending four festivals (maybe even five) - thank goodness some events are free. And for those on a limited budget there's often the option to volunteer, meaning you get to attend some pricey events and workshops for free and hopefully get to chat to authors a bit more than you would otherwise. In fact the Ikley Literature Festival encourages its workshop volunteers to participate. So, I've decided to put myself forward as a volunteer for this year's festival. I've supported plenty of events in the past so am hoping they'll take me on. If they do I'll let you know how it goes and whether I recommend it.
The good news is I've finally located Peskalia (the new name for my Muse). In fact, I've not only found her but she's been popping up day and night with some pretty good ideas. In fact, I like one of them so much I might just go for it! The idea will involve a fair amount of research, but I think it will be worth it if I can pull it off. All I'll say is that it will be an MG story involving time travel with more than one POV, plenty of adventure and lots of drama! I'm quite excited about it at the moment - I just hope I can do it justice.
Anyway, thanks to everyone who came up with suggestions on how to find inspiration - they were much appreciated! I hope you continue to find inspiration and will do my best to help if you ever get stuck - all you have to do is ask!