Gill Oliver

Author

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Launching in lockdown

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2020 will go down as a bad year for Napoleonic plans, but a great year for taking up qigong, and in particular, learning to shift your weight without falling over.

 Anything which involved putting a date in a calendar, or contacting public and private bodies, or  even putting physical objects in physical places, has been doomed and we’ve been thwarted time and again in our plans for the publication and launch of Joe Faber and the Optimists.

We finally gave up waiting for the time to be right for that cosy book launch at Winstone’s bookshop, Sherborne, with friends, fizz and a few posh nibbles.   A couple of months ago, we launched the paperback version of Joe Faber and the Optimists via Zoom.  Yes, I know, yawn… it’s not the same is it?

Extract from book launch interview, September 2020

How did this novel come about?

Including a few words from my husband Terry. Interviewer Susan Elderkin.  Event organised by Liz Gordon from Brilliant Fish 

HOWEVER it did present some opportunities we wouldn’t otherwise have had. It made it possible for friends and family from far and near to come together. My Shetland family for a start; my naughty little sister was the inspiration for Nell in the book, so it was great that she could be there.  Two wonderful writers,  members of my reading panel whose editorial comments were invaluable, were involved – that’s Juliette Adair in Uplyme and William Davidson in York – as well as writing colleagues from here and now. The lynchpin, responsible for introducing us all in the first place, was   Susan Elderkin, who conducted the interview with such poise and insight. It was wonderful to see friends from Wales and Herefordshire in the same ‘room’ as the Dorset / Somerset gang.  So it made for quite a celebration.

Zoom also allowed the event to be recorded. Armed with the conviction that iMovie is designed to be used by children, I’ve started editing some short  extracts, which I’ll be posting here.

2020 has blocked our route more times than I care to remember but it’s also led us down some unexpected paths. 

Let’s hear it for optimism!

Recent reads: Girl, Woman, Other – Bernardine Evaristo

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Bernardine Evaristo: Girl, Woman, Other (Hamish Hamilton, 2019) 

Twelve characters, twelve identities. There’s a lot to say, and a lot has been said, about this novel which won  the Booker Prize, so this is a brief personal reaction.

I love the way Bernadine Evaristo shows us conflict and then encourages us to believe that conflict can be resolved. (Mr Loverman gave a masterclass in bringing your story down to a smooth landing.) This was very marked for me in this novel, with its broad sweep. Amma really did rhyme with hammer, and as a white northerner I read the first pages with my shoulders up round my ears; fair enough, I thought, I have to hear this, this is a book I ought to read. Once we met her student daughter Yazz, though,  I was seduced by the wit of the writing and the sharpness of observation. There’s a spirit of generosity here which comes from all these very different points of view across generations and life experiences.
Very appropriate, too, to have minimal punctuation. There’s no beginning to the story of identity, so it makes sense not to have capital letters to mark the start of a sentence; and this is a book where the full stops really do bring you to a stop. One of those novels that opens a window.