Have you heard Oh My God, Charlie Darwin by The Low Anthem? Maybe you'd like to.

Many of the major literary funding bodies offer a 'time to write' award, which is a lump sum of money intended to permit a writer to take time off from their normal day job in order to hack away at their novel/script/poetry collection. New Writing North, the Society of Authors and, once upon a time, the Arts council all facilitate such awards. In other words, such kindly funding bodies recognise that (a) the emerging writer most likely has a day job to foot the bills and (b) writing takes up a lot of time.

Such awards are absolutely brilliant - if you can get them. If not, you are faced with a quandary. Either find a way to juggle writing with a full time job, family etc., or don't. Women in particular are faced with this dilemma as family pressues sap time, energy, and inspiration - indeed, an alarming number of female authors have commented on the pressure to choose between 'a child or a book.'

So, how to write AND do everything else that life requires, if a 'Time to Write' award is not forthcoming? Does it really take a nomadic lifestyle with a generous patron to produce that stellar screenplay? I'd bet it helps. But there's also an argument that such stresses and pressures can be beneficial to the writing life. One author - who continues to hold down a 9-5 day job despite wracking enough booksales to focus on writing full time - swears by the rigors of an extra-literary profession to keep the creative juices flowing. An American screenwriter friend of mine found a month-long stint at a writer's retreat - during which she had nothing else to do except write, sleep and eat (a dream, right?) - shockingly unproductive. Without the ebb and flow of the daily grind, she said, her writing became too isolated, too stale. It's well known that Seamus Heaney translated Beowulf at a rate of four lines a night. I've read countless interviews with authors who profess to have written their novels during long commutes - to and from their day job. Admittedly, I wrote one book while in the bath.*

Despite what my American screenwriter friend says, I still dream about days without laundry, dishes, commuting, homework, etc etc - days that are wiped clean of every demand so that I can devote myself wholly to writing. But, by the looks of things, it ain't gonna happen for the next 25 years. That doesn't mean to say that I won't be writing. I'll be writing where and when and how I can. The discipline isn't just about seizing snatches of free time to put pen to paper - the real discipline is using time that isn't free as thinking time, researching time, filtering overheard conversations and experiences at home and in the work place to use as material for dialogue, scenes, and characters.

There IS time. Award or no award.

* That was a long bath, I hear you say. Clarification: I wrote a little everytime I had a bath.

Image credit: .: Philipp Klinger :.

Good God: look at Lyle Lovett's hair in the video for Walk Through The Bottomland - it's magnificent!

(A duet with Emmylou Harris must be a rite of passage for male country singers, I think: by my reckoning, Lyle Lovett joins Gram Parsons, Ryan Adams, Elvis Costello, John Denver, Neil Young and Willie Nelson to name but a few.)

When I tell you that I bought the first Strokes EP in a little record shop in Greenwich Village, it probably makes me sound a whole lot cooler than I really am.

Anyway, I did and splendid it was too. The Strokes went on to produce a great debut album, a decent follow-up and a not very good third album. Since then they seem to have been on hiatus, with most of them producing solo records.

But last week I was in a shop and heard Last Nite and remembered just how great it sounded.

The final one in our sequence from October Poet Mario Petrucci. I've found them terrifyingly topical, what with the resurgence of the nuclear power debate and the controversy over nuclear weapons. Makes you want to go out and join the CND.

UKRITYE
Ukritye ('The Shelter') is the fourth reactor of the Chernobyl complex.

Even the robots refuse. Down tools. Jerk up
their blocked heads, shiver in invisible hail. Helicopters

spin feet from disaster, caught in that upward cone
of technicide - then ditch elsewhere, spill black running guts.

Not the Firemen. In black rubber gloves and leather boots
they walk upright, silent as brides. Uppers begin
to melt. Soles grow too hot for blood. Still they shovel
the graphite that is erasing marrow, spine, balls-
that kick-starts their DNA to black and purple liquid life.
Then the Soldiers. Nervous as children. They re-make it -

Erect slabs with the wide stare of the innocent, crosshatch
the wreck roughly with steel, fill it in with that grey

crayon of state Concrete. In soiled beds, in the dreams
of their mothers, they liquefy. Yet Spring still chooses

this forest, where no deer graze and roots strike upwards.
Fissures open in the cement - rain finds them. They grow

puff spores of poison. Concrete and lead can only take
so much. What remains must be done by flesh.

Mario Petruccio
(From Heavy Water)

Another one from Mario Petrucci- this one should make you ponder for the week!

FENCE

This side of the fence
is clean. That side
dirty. Understand?

You must forget
that soil is like skin.
Or interlocking scales

on a dragon. Dirty
Clean - is all that matters
here. Imagine a sheet

of glass coming down
from the sky. It's easy
no? On this side

you can breathe
freely. Your cow can
eat the grass. You can
have children. That side
you must wear a mask
and change the filter

every four hours.
You ask - What if my cow
leans over the fence?
Personally I say
it depends which end. But
we have no instructions

for that. It is up to you
to make sure your cow
is not so stupid.

Mario Petrucci
(From Heavy Water)

Here's the second one from our October Poet, Mario Petruccio.

BREATHING
(Chernobyl, 1986)

They had to teach me

from scratch. Teach me

        to breathe. As though

        I had fallen out of space or

up from water and breath

was labour - each breath

        a pang to draw me back

        from the brink. In. Out. In

this world life is indifferent.

You must will it in. Will it

        out. I look at my son -

        those white cheeks that

tight frown and

I wonder how I can

        breathe. He says - Mama

        when you go to sleep to-

night please don't forget to

breathe. Please. He is

        not allowed to run. Or

        jump. Like that boy who

hanged himself with a

belt. I watch him. And he

        watches me - when I doze

        on the red sofa he rests a

hand to check the rise and

fall of my chest. Tells me he

        will teach me in his dreams -

        will teach me to breathe if

I teach him how to fly. If

you go with Grandpa he

        says - will you be able to

        breathe? He says this and

his cheeks run wet and

he runs short of breath so

        we sit once again to

        teach each other how -

deep and slow. We are

flying     I tell him. We are

        breathing    he replies.

Mario Petrucci
(From Heavy Water)

Attention book lovers of the North- tonight is the night for the October installmentof the Whitley Bay Book Group. The idea is very simple: pick your meeting, read the book and come along armed with opinions for a drink, a cake and an evening of friendly literary chat with other like minded souls. Or, if you fancy just seeing what goes on, just come along and listen!

At: The Trojan Rooms, South Parade.
Date: Wednesday 14th October 2009
Time: 7.30pm- 9pm
Book: Talk of the Town by Jacob Polley
More information: http://whitleybaybookgroup.wordpress.com/

Hope to see you there! x

In the early 1980s, film director Francis Ford Coppola was so inspired by a Tom Waits song (a duet with Bette Midler) that he decided to make a film around some of his music.

The result was One From the Heart, a film designed to be a small production after the excesses of Acopolypse Now but which went on to cost $26m and bankrupted Coppola after he insisted on filming it all on sound stages to create an air of artificiality.

The film itself is at best so-so, but there's some great Tom Waits songs on it. Midler wasn't available to do the music so Crystal Gayle did the female parts instead, with Take Me Home just the most beautiful song imaginable.

(Sorry, can't find an online version of the duet, but I have found Waits singing it on a TV show!)

It seems odd that singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman seemed so revolutionary in 1988, but after a decade of overblown excess, a woman with an acoustic guitar was a refreshing change.

Fast Car was the song that (briefly) shot her to fame when she played it at the Nelson Mandela tribute concert.

More than 20 years on, it still seems like a great bit of storytelling (as well as a cracking tune.)