A Reading Life, A Writing Life, with Sally Bayley

Sally starts the podcast with a brief poem by Philip Larkin, a complex poem of springtime, grief, and renewal. The trees all around the boat take Sally’s mind back to the horse chestnut tree of her youth, where she and her brother used to play, and which became a companion to her as she started to read books. A hunt for a pack of pesky wasp invaders, headed by an indignant Queen, ends up with Sally pruning the nearby hawthorn and willow trees, in whose branches the neighbourhood water vole has been spotted, and listening to the chirruping of the birds. She turns to a work by novelist John Fowles – who, just like Sally, grew up feeling deeply connected to trees, drawing on them for creative inspiration. Arguing passionately for the importance of preserving nature in its wild state, Fowles felt connected to trees all his life, from the orchards of his childhood to the woodlands of Devon and Dorset. Fowles published his autobiographical book The Tree in 1979, describing nature and writing as interconnected,  “siblings, branches of one tree”.   The book is considered to have created a new genre, “nature-as-memoir”, taken up later by authors including Richard Mabey, who Sally mentions towards the end of the episode. Mabey, born in 1941, is a pioneering nature-and-culture writer, someone who did a huge amount to bring to public attention the networked, social nature of trees, writing books such as Nature Cure and The Ash and The Beech. The interconnected roots of trees, the way they can communicate with and support each other, has also been explored in books such as The Hidden Life of Trees (by Peter Wohlleben). The Trees one of the best known poems by the leading 20th century poet Philip Larkin (1922 to 1985), can be found here: https://poetryarchive.org/poem/trees/ The producer of the podcast is Andrew Smith: https://www.fleetingyearfilms.com The extra voice in this episode is Emma Fielding. Thanks to everyone who has supported us so far. Special thanks go to Violet Henderson, Kris Dyer, and Maeve Magnus.

Sally reads Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Frost at Midnight, and reflects on the importance of finding ways to escape, now and again, from a stressful world - to find a place of tranquillity, where we can think and create, connect with ourselves and with the natural world. It's a fundamental need, but very hard to achieve. So Sally outlines a plan - to create a "retreat", a way to provide our listeners with a temporary but meaningful respite from the world. As Sally explains, we are thinking of creating a longer form of A Reading Life, A Writing Life.  It will be recorded, edited and produced in exactly the same style as the podcast, but it will be made over an extended period of time, and it will be much longer - perhaps about six or seven hours - instead of the usual 20 or so minutes. We are thinking of it as the audio equivalent of a writer’s retreat - a journey we can take together, created by words, sounds and music, a journey to a place of calm, quietude and deep reflection. We are calling the concept an “audio retreat”. The aim is to produce a mental space which you are invited into. It will be a place to hear Sally's thoughts on her reading, and how it relates to her life, how she is inspired to create, and how she writes, in extended, close-up, multi-layered detail. Our audio retreat will be a meditative experience, a way of disconnecting from the distractions, the clutter and mess of daily life. We hope it will help you unlock your own creativity and explore the corners of your own mind. And of course, as is usual in the podcast, Sally will continue to recount the joys and difficulties of living on a narrowboat as the seasons pass, while providing an eclectic, idiosyncratic and joyful guide to some of her favourite books and authors.  The audio retreat will take many hours of production, so it's something we can only make if at least some of our listeners are interested in supporting it.  So we want to ask you, the listeners, what do you think about the idea of "A Reading Life, A Writing Life  - An Audio Retreat"? Please do let us know! You can message us through Twitter  - @SallyBayley1 Or email us at sally.bayley@ell.ox.ac.uk or readinglifewritinglife@gmail.com The producer of the podcast is Andrew Smith: https://www.fleetingyearfilms.com The extra voice in this episode is Emma Fielding. Thanks to everyone who has supported us so far. Special thanks go to Violet Henderson, Kris Dyer, and Maeve Magnus.

The podcast discusses Sally's upbringing in a slum area, her memories of her granny and Mum, and the event that changed their lives involving her baby brother David.

Sally reads from The Wind in the Willows and discusses its characters and themes with her friend. She reflects on her university days and her exploration of 'Sexual Personae' by Camille Paglia. Sally also discusses her fascination with snowdrops, the inner life of British female painters, and the significance of ivy.

In this episode, released on the anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine, Sally reads the works of great Ukrainian writers and poets of previous generations. Her thoughts turn to the novelist Joseph Conrad, who was born in a region which is now part of Ukraine. She reads passages from his masterpiece, Lord Jim, about the tangible presence of evil in the world. In a lighter vein, she reads an extract from her own fictional essay about the joys and freedoms of walking. Further Reading Sally’s fictional essay - on the theme of a childhood walk - is called ‘A Curvy Road is Better Than a Straight One.’ It was published in Where My Feet Fall, edited by Duncan Minshull, in March 2022, published by HarperCollins. https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Duncan-Minshull/Where-My-Feet-Fall--Going-for-a-Walk-in-Twenty-Stories/25944755 It can also be read here: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f730ffd0bf1d6070e5deca8/t/62498d352ac7771421325dcf/1648987447229/Sally+Bayley.pdf Taras Shevchenko (1814 –1861) was a poet, writer, artist, and intellectual, who advocated Ukrainian independence at a time when the Tsarist Russian Empire directly ruled the country. His works are considered to be the main foundation of modern Ukrainian literature, giving a dignity and literary heritage to the Ukrainian language. He also wrote in Russian (nine novellas, a diary, and an autobiography). Shevchenko was convicted in 1847 of explicitly promoting the independence of Ukraine, writing poems in the Ukrainian language and ridiculing members of the Russian Imperial House. Marie Bashkirtseff  (1858 to 1884) was born into a Russian family near Poltava, in a region which is now in Ukraine, She moved to Paris to become an artist, creating a sizeable body of work in her short lifetime ,as well as becoming known as an intellectual. Her diary was posthumously published in 1887, only the second diary by a woman published in France to that date. It recounts her life, work and her relentless struggle with the tuberculosis which eventually killed her, aged 25. She wrote: "If I do not die young, I hope to live as great artist; but if I die young, I intend to have my journal, which cannot fail to be interesting, published." The diary made her famous in literary circles, being rapidly translated into English too, and has often been used as a model by other diarists, including Katherine Mansfield and Anais Nin. Joseph Conrad was born in 1857 in Berdychiv, which was then part of the Russian Empire but is now in Ukraine. He was Polish in ethnicity; although the vast majority of the surrounding area's inhabitants were Ukrainians, almost all the countryside was owned by the Polish nobility. Conrad spent nearly 20 years of his life working as a sailor with the British and French merchant navies while nurturing ambitions to become a writer. Remarkably, he wrote some of the finest novels in the English language despite only becoming fluent in the language in his twenties. Conrad published Lord Jim as a serial from October 1899 to November 1900. Its central character is a sailor who lives in disgrace and travels the world seeking redemption. The novel deals with existentialist themes, personal responsibility in an uncaring, cruel universe, and the nature of good and evil. Nostromo, a story of imperialist exploitation and revolt in South America, was published, again in instalments, in 1904. The producer of the podcast is Andrew Smith: https://www.fleetingyearfilms.com The extra voice in this episode is Emma Fielding. Thanks to everyone who has supported us so far. Special thanks go to Violet Henderson, Kris Dyer, and Maeve Magnus. If you would like to support us, please visit - https://gofund.me/d5bef397    

The speaker reflects on their experience on Ozney Island, witnessing the aftermath of a flood and a heartwarming baby deer rescue. They delve into the impact of reading on writing and discuss Kafka's 'A Country Doctor' and Woolf's 'To the Lighthouse'. The chapter explores a detailed description of a wound, personal experiences with the medical profession, and draws inspiration from William Blake's 'The Sick Rose'. The speaker shares a fable-like story and invites listeners to create material within their own world.

This podcast delves into the themes of loneliness and yearning for connection in the book 'Pond Life'. It explores the influence of films like 'Brief Encounter' and examines the transformative power of novels. The protagonist's creation of a pond in her garden adds a whimsical touch to the story. The disappearance of a character raises questions about the management of history.

Sally takes time off from trying to unblock her sink to conduct a creative writing lesson with her student, Evelyn. They discuss a single sentence in a short story written by Katherine Mansfield, the modernist writer who died 100 years ago this month. After Evelyn leaves, Sally settles down to read Mansfield’s diaries, immersing herself in her scribblings both funny and profound.   Further Reading: Katherine Mansfield was a writer, essayist and journalist who primarily wrote short stories and poems which explored existential anxiety and issues of sexuality and class. She was born in New Zealand in 1888, travelling to Britain aged 19 with the initial intention of becoming a professional musician. She became a well-known figure in bohemian London, befriending members of the Bloomsbury Group, publishing short stories in literary magazines and hanging around with writers such as DH Lawrence. She became a close friend and rival of Virgina Woolf; Woolf said of her, “I was jealous of her writing. The only writing I have ever been jealous of.” Some critics consider Mansfield to have been a major influence on Woolf’s work. Like Woolf, Mansfield suffered from ill-health. She was left devastated by the death of her brother Leslie Beauchamp in France in 1915, killed by a faulty hand grenade.  She wrote in her diary: “Yes, though he is lying in the middle of a little wood in France and I am still walking upright, and feeling the sun and the wind from the sea, I am just as much dead as he is”. She died aged 34 of pulmonary tuberculosis, with much of her work unpublished. Two volumes of her short stories (The Dove's Nest in 1923, and Something Childish in 1924); a volume of poems; The Aloe; Novels and Novelists; and collections of her letters and journals were all published posthumously. The story Sally and Evelyn discuss, The Garden Party, was published in 1922. Jacob’s Room is a novel published by Virginia Woolf in 1922, the same year Mansfield published The Garden Party and the year before Mansfield’s death. It tells the story of Jacob who, like Woolf’s brother-in-law and Katherine Mansfield’s brother, was killed in the First World War. In a radically experimental form, Jacob’s story is told almost entirely through the recollections of those who knew him. Jacob keeps an old sheep skull in his room, a classic memento mori symbol. Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life, is one of the most famous novels in the English language. Published in instalments in 1871 and 1872, it was written by Mary Anne Evans under the pseudonym George Eliot. Although Virginia Woolf described it as "the magnificent book that, which with all its imperfections, is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”, she was one of its few fans at the time; the novel was little read and was underappreciated until at least the middle of the 20th century. The book follows the stories of a vast canvas of characters in a town and surrounding villages, with at least four main plots and many other narrative strands, which intertwine to create a complex whole, which often confounds the reader’s first reactions. The American fiction writer Michael Gorra has written of Middlemarch: “If you really read this novel, you will learn about yourself; if you listen to her, if you let her sentences penetrate, you will find out things about yourself that you didn’t and maybe don’t even want to know. Each page is a lesson in how to be honest with yourself.” The producer of the podcast is Andrew Smith: https://www.fleetingyearfilms.com The extra voice in this episode is Emma Fielding. We are currently raising funds to pay to keep the podcast going. If you would like to support us, please visit - https://gofund.me/d5bef397 Thanks to everyone who has supported us so far. Special thanks go to Violet Henderson, Kris Dyer, and Maeve Magnus.  

Sally takes a trip on her shiny blue electric scooter to Oxford Public Library, where she picks up a novel by the iconic British modernist writer Jean Rhys. After a disturbing experience at the hospital, she seeks refuge in Rhys’ existentialist narrative of rootless but indomitable women, who eke out a living on the margins of society while searching for love, beauty and a sense of belonging. Further Reading: Jean Rhys was born in 1890 and brought up on the Caribbean island of Dominica. She was sent to England to further her education at the age of 16, but was continually mocked for her accent and her foreign birth. Unable to become an actress, she became a chorus girl, and, like many of her protagonists, earned a precarious living travelling around provincial England and the poorer parts of London. From the 1920s onwards, Rhys produced a string of short stories and novels based on her experiences, featuring outsider figures often dependent on alcohol, living hand-to-mouth, with no fixed income or permanent relationships. Rhys has become recognised as a leading modernist writer, her stories treasured for their interiority, experimental qualities and stream-of-consciousness techniques. She published Voyage in the Dark, the novel which Sally reads, in 1934. The Second World War seemed to mark the end of her writing career and she disappeared from public view; it was even reported that she was dead. After a quarter of a decade, she re-emerged in her seventies to publish Wide Sargasso Sea. The novel is a revolutionary re-imagining of Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre, telling the story from the perspective of Bertha Mason, Mr Rochester’s so-called “madwoman in the attic”. Rhys re-writes the character as a woman sold into marriage, exploited, tortured and incarcerated. An exposure of racial and sexual exploitation, the novel has been widely hailed as a post-colonial and feminist masterpiece. In her first memoir, Girl With Dove, Sally describes how Jane Eyre was a pivotal book for her as she grew up. You can find out more about Sally’s own books here: https://sallybayley.com/ When Sally calls her visit to the hospital “Kafkaesque”, she is of course referring to Franz Kafka, the German-speaking author born in Prague in 1883, now seen as one of the most important writers of the 20th century. His works explored the plight of individuals trapped in strange, often surreal situations and nightmarishly complex bureaucratic systems. The term “Kafkaesque” has entered the English language and is often used to describe an alienating, illogical or absurd experience. Kafka died in obscurity in 1924 and his works only became famous after the Second World War. The producer of the podcast is Andrew Smith: https://www.fleetingyearfilms.com The extra voice in this episode is Emma Fielding, and the music is by Simon Turner. We are currently raising funds to pay to keep the podcast going. If you would like to support us, please visit - https://gofund.me/d5bef397 Thanks to everyone who has supported us so far. Special thanks go to Violet Henderson, Kris Dyer, and Maeve Magnus.  

Temperatures on the narrowboat dip below zero, so Sally takes the advice of Virginia Woolf and stays in bed to read poetry. She immerses herself in The Child’s Story, by the Oxford writer Elizabeth Jennings, a poem about the fear and the potential of love. Sally reflects on the connectivity between learning, teaching and love, and the regenerative possibilities of a New Year.   Further Reading:   Elizabeth Jennings was born in 1926 and studied at St Anne’s College, Oxford. She lived in the city for the rest of her life, becoming a familiar sight in local cafes where she wrote poems and chatted to the other patrons. She wrote more than 20 books of poetry throughout a very difficult lifetime, which often saw her struggling with depression and doubt. Her poetry collections Recoveries (1964) and The Mind Has Mountains (1966) dealt with a nervous breakdown and its aftermath. Jennings was initially identified with “the Movement”, a group of poets including Philip Larkin and Thom Gunn, but she increasingly became recognised for her own, very individual voice. Her poetry, described as her “outlet for a tumultuous inner life”, became very popular at the end of her life, even as she fell deeper into poverty; the tabloid newspapers gave her the unkind nickname “the bag lady of the sonnets”. Jennings, who was a lifelong Catholic, once said: “Sometimes I feel that an act of the imagination is more use than an act of faith.” She died in 2001. In 2018, the American poet Dana Gioia wrote of Jennings: "Despite her worldly failures, her artistic career was a steady course of achievement. Jennings ranks among the finest British poets of the second half of the twentieth century. She is also England’s best Catholic poet since Gerard Manley Hopkins.” You can find The Child’s Story here: https://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=5801 Sally previously spoke about Virginia Woolf’s 1926 essay, On Being Ill, in the first episode of this podcast. Woolf prescribed poetry for those who were feeling ill; she suffered from ill health and depression throughout her life. You can find the essay here: https://thenewcriterion1926.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/woolf-on-being-ill.pdf Jack Frost is a figure of myth and folklore who may originate in Anglo Saxon and Norse winter customs. He's traditionally said to leave frosty, fern-like patterns on windows on cold winter mornings. In the modern world, window frost has become far less commonly seen because of double-glazing. Hannah Flagg-Gould's 19th century children's poem "The Frost" personifies him as a figure creating beautiful ice paintings on windows but, upset at the lack of gifts, uses the cold to break and ruin things. https://www.storyberries.com/poems-for-kids-the-frost-by-hannah-flagg-gould/ The producer of the podcast is Andrew Smith: https://www.fleetingyearfilms.com The extra voice in this episode is Emma Fielding We are currently raising funds to pay to keep the podcast going. If you would like to support us, please visit - https://gofund.me/d5bef397 Thanks to everyone who has supported us so far. Special thanks go to Violet Henderson, Kris Dyer, and Maeve Magnus.