A Reading Life, A Writing Life, with Sally Bayley

Almost Being Said

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.

A Retreat

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.

Baby David

Sally starts by telling us the tale of the Boiler That Went Bang in the Night, and the Bird That Never Was. She’s preparing a zoom class for some schoolchildren which draws on her first book of memoirs – or anti-memoirs, as she prefers to call them – called Girl With Dove. Sally pulls out the book's manuscript and we hear about her upbringing in a slum area on the south coast, and her earliest memories of her granny and Mum, growing roses on a scrubby patch of land. She tells us about her baby brother David, and what happened to him; an event which changed all their lives.
 
Further Reading
There’s only one book referred to in this week’s episode – Sally’s own book, Girl With Dove. You can find out more about it here:
https://sallybayley.com/girl-with-dove
The producer of the podcast is Andrew Smith: https://www.fleetingyearfilms.com
The extra voice in this episode is Emma Fielding. A number of the music tracks were composed and performed by Simon Turner.
 
We have been able to launch and continue to run this podcast thanks to the kind help of donors, to whom we are profoundly grateful. Any new listeners who might be willing to support us, please do visit our crowd-funding site - https://gofund.me/d5bef397
 
Thanks to everyone who has supported us so far. Special thanks go to Violet Henderson, Kris Dyer, and Maeve Magnus.
 
 

The Wind In The Willows

Sally does her washing on the narrowboat, and with spring in the air, her thoughts turn to the past. She reads from an old favourite, the children’s classic novel, The Wind in the Willows, and discusses its characters and themes with her friend from next door, Maeve Magnus, who is reading it for the first time and sees close parallels between the book and their own lives on the river. Sally recalls her fierce search for meaning and direction of her university days, and how she plunged into the writings of the American scholar Camille Paglia; then she reads an illuminating passage written by a former student, the writer, art critic and academic, Rebecca Birrell. Sally ends by reflecting on her desire for privacy and space, and the adoption of literary and artistic personae, reaching back to the masks worn by actors in ancient Greece.
The Wind in the Willows is a children's novel by the Scottish novelist Kenneth Grahame, first published in 1908. It details the story of Mole, Ratty, and Badger as they try to help the excitable, impetuous, swaggering, but hapless Mr Toad. The novel was based on bedtime stories which Grahame, a successful banker and financier, told his seven-year-old son. The book's impressionistic descriptions of the English countryside and its mythic search for moments of grace have made it an enduring read for adults as well as children; while the setting of the book partly drew on the author's experiences of living beside the River Thames, south of Oxford - not too far from where Sally and Maeve now live.
Grahame died in 1932 and lies buried in Oxford’s Holywell Cemetery.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, which Sally read avidly at university, is a 1990 book about sexual decadence in Western literature and the visual arts by scholar Camille Paglia. The novel draws on the conflicts of Greek drama and demonstrates their continued relevance in its comprehensive study of Western art and literature, from Botticelli and Leonardo daVinci to Shakespeare, Goethe, Coleridge, Emily Brontë and Oscar Wilde.
This Dark Country: Women Artists, Still Life and Intimacy in the Early Twentieth Century by Dr Rebecca Birrell is published by Bloomsbury Circus. It is both biography and art critcism of 10 female artists, including Dora Carrington, Vanessa Bell and Gwen John. It was the Guardian Art Book of the Year and shortlisted for a number of other prestigious awards.
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 Devil Lives Among Us

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
 
 

A Country Doctor

In this special, double-length episode, Sally leaves her boat to seek refuge at a friend’s house on another island in Oxford, as the rains have flooded the meadow of her narrowboat community. Returning to the boat as the waters subside, she reads a poem by Elizabeth Bishop, then settles down to study a collection of essays by Will Self. The essays lead Sally to reread a chilling short story by the surrealist writer Franz Kafka - and a striking phrase reminds her of one of her favourite sentences in all of modernist literature. Sally’s musings are interrupted by a visitation from her seven-year-old neighbour, Maeve Magnus. They discuss why we read, the value of sad stories, and reminisce about trips to a local café for communal reading and ice cream. Sally's reading makes her think of her own medical treatment, and she announces plans for the future of the podcast.
Further Reading:
Elizabeth Bishop (1911 –1979) was an American poet and short-story writer. She was effectively orphaned in early childhood and suffered all her life from ill health. In reaction to the then-prevalent confessional style of American poetry, her works reveal very little of her private life. She published the poem Crusoe in England in her collection, Geography III, in 1979.
In the poem, Crusoe has left his famous desert island to return to his home island, but ironically feels more displaced and lonely than when he was a castaway.
Robinson Crusoe is of course the hero of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 eponymous book,  often claimed to be the first novel published in English. It’s probably based at least in part on the story of the real-life castaway Alexander Selkirk, and was a huge success in its day, with many readers initially fooled into believing that it was a work of factual autobiography.
Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886) lived most of her life in virtual seclusion. She wrote deeply private, radically experimental poems, which she hid in her room and were never published in her lifetime. After her death, her sister found her cache of poems and she’s now considered one of the greatest poets in the English language
The Dickinson poem which Sally riffs on was published posthumously in 1891 in a collection entitled Poems, Series 2. The poem seems to celebrate her position in life, estranged from society and fame, finding communality with similar outsider figures. It reads in full:
I’m Nobody! Who are you?Are you – Nobody – too?Then there’s a pair of us!Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!How public – like a Frog –To tell one’s name – the livelong June –To an admiring Bog!
Will Self’s collection of essays, entitled Why Read: Selected Writings 2001 – 2021, was published in November 2022 by Grove Press UK. It’s packed with advice for readers - what to read, how to read, and discusses why we read; it also features insights into some of his favourite writers, including Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Joseph Conrad, W.G. Sebald and William S Burroughs.
A Country Doctor was written in 1917 by the German-speaking Czech writer Franz Kafka. Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 and died in 1924. His best known works are The Metamorphosis, The Trial and The Castle; his writings are frequently surrealistic, bizarre and unsettling, exploring themes of  existentialism, absurdity, alienation and guilt.
To The Lighthouse was written by Virginia Woolf in 1927 and is perhaps her most highly regarded and radically innovative novel. It deals with loss, subjectivity, the encroachments and damages of time, the nature of art and the problems of perception. The sentence Sally discusses is a pivotal moment in the middle section of the book, as Woolf speeds up her account of her characters' lives as if they are caught in a fast-forward film; so the death of Mrs Ramsey, a central character, is dealt with in one almost-throwaway sentence.
Maeve Magnus is reading Michael Morpurgo’s collection of short stories, Best Mates, published in 2015, which includes the story The Silver Swan. Beware spoilers!
Ronald Stuart Thomas (1913 - 2000), published as R. S. Thomas, was a Welsh poet and priest. Throughout his life, he moved to increasingly isolated parishes to escape what he considered to be the materialism of the modern world and the creeping influence of English culture. Throughout his life, he wrote poems of breathtaking spirituality and insight, combining a love for the Welsh landscape with a grittily realistic portrayal of the people who inhabited the landscape. 
The Sick Rose is a "poem of experience" which William Blake published in his extraordinary collection, Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Blake (1757 – 1827) was born into the London working classes and worked as a printmaker, set apart from the literary establishment of the time, composing, creating, illustrating and printing his works himself. A visionary and wholly unique figure, considered by some to be verging on the insane, he was largely unrecognised in his life, but is now seen as a trail-blazing figure in the Romantic movement, celebrated both for his poetry and his visual art.
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, who makes her debut appearance in this episode.
 

Pond Life

Sally wakes up at dawn and thinks about the book she's currently writing – Pond Life, a fictional biography of two women who live on the south coast of Britain in the years after the Second World War. The book addresses themes of loneliness, disconnection and the consolations and snares of film, art and the imagination. Sally consults her own memorandum, a note to herself and the reader, about the composition of the book; and she reflects on the need for calm, away from the distraction of screens, in the creative process.
Further Reading:
Pond Life will be Sally’s fourth book in her series which follow autobiographical themes and which she prefers to call “anti-memoirs”. The other books are Girl With Dove, published by William Collins in 2018. No Boys Play Here in 2022, and The Green Lady, which will be published this summer. You can learn more about her writing here:
https://sallybayley.com/books
Brief Encounter is a 1945 British film directed by David Lean from a screenplay by Noël Coward, based on his 1936 one-act play Still Life. Starring Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard, Stanley Holloway, and Joyce Carey, it and was hailed as a breakthrough in modern realism. It is now widely seen as one of the greatest films of all time, with its depiction of frustrated love in a repressed and class-ridden society.  It features Piano Concerto No.2, composed by Sergei Rachmaninoff between June 1900 and April 1901 during a period of creative release, following some years of depression and a devastating writer’s block.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria was published in 1817 in two volumes. Coleridge was a key figure in the introduction of the discipline of psychology into British intellectual life, and his work outlines his theories on imagination, the creative mind, perception, and poetry. He writes:
The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.
Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown is an essay by Virginia Woolf published in 1924. A furious rebuttal of Arnold Bennett, who had written a critical review of her book Jacob’s Room, it rejects the writers of the Edwardian generation and announces the arrival of modernism. Referring to the revolutionary exhibition by Roger Fry, Manet and the Post-Impressionists, she declares: "in or about December, 1910, human character changed". Modernism, she says, has changed "religion, conduct, politics, and literature"; criticising contemporary ideas of realism, she writes: “What is reality? And who are the judges of reality?"
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.
 

Evelyn

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.