Poet Seeks Patronage

In 1984, Karl Miller, the former editor of London Review of Books, put my face on the cover of his magazine and told me I´d be famous. He also said that Ted Hughes was his other discovery. His words were proved right up to a point. I was indeed slightly famous for a while after my first collection with a major publisher came out.

What did fame bring me? An adequate income for a while plus fans, one or two of whom were nutty stalkers. After a few years of what seemed like a successful literary career I hit bad times. No-one seemed willing to publish my creative work any longer. I foundered along with the odd article and an ever diminishing income. When you are not having your poetry books published no-one wants to hire you to give readings.

For one year I had a grant from the Authors´ Foundation. During my brief period of fame prospective publishers invited me to lunch and there were many literary parties. Some were fun, some not. They were all a chance to network. In the lean years almost all of these invitations dried up, It was in this period that I decided to move abroad. A major incentive was the fact that it would lower my living expenses. It was not writer´s block – more like publishers´ blockade. I knew I was writing as well as before but no-one else wanted to know. I comforted myself that other well-considered writers, e.g. Barbara Pym, had a similar period when they were no longer publishing.

Even the market for odd poems seems to have dried up. Yes, I could get the odd one in a magazine that does not pay. You can call me mercenary but I don´t believe that is what professional writing is about. Does being a known poet guarantee you anything? Not in my case. Few magazines even bother to reply if I email them poems. I wait a few months, but there is silence. This begs the question, where are such magazines getting their contributors from? Friends of the poetry editors, presumably. . .

What caused my downfall? It´s very hard to tell. It wasn´t an overnight thing. The late Giles Gordon was my literary agent in more successful times. When he moved to Edinburgh and started up his own firm he dropped his list of clients. It was necessary as we were contracted to Sheil Land rather than to him. He did however take on the biggest earners from his previous list. I did not fit that bill. We remained on good terms though. I couldn´t dislike him as he had a great sense of humour and I was sad to read of his death years later.

In 1995 I got married to the chess grandmaster, James Plaskett, and in 1996 we had a son, Alexander. I was never a domestic superwoman. I can cook very tasty food but I am pretty sluttish at other parts of the domestic regime. So I can´t really claim that I was spending hours a day on that. Marriage, however, did put a few more nails in my literary coffin,. I spent too much time caring about my husband´s problems and trying to facilitate things he wanted to do.

I had an easy pregnancy and a water birth. I was always prepared to write. In fact I even wrote an article for a newspaper on the birth on the very same day. I got out of hospital a few hours after the birth as I have never trusted doctors. When Alexander was nine days old, I went to London with him to be part of a mass photograph of poets – Benjamín Zephaniah, John Hegley, Hugo Williams, Michael Horovitz and many others. Alexander attended a few poetry readings with me as a baby and literary parties also. A rather tactless female aristocrat at a Times party once said: “Couldn´t you afford a babysitter?” Having a baby was no real obstacle to my writing.

In 2002, we made the move to Spain. We were in an expat area to start with which proved to be one of the most soul-destroying experiences of my life. I managed to get a few articles commissioned relating to life in Spain. It was still proving impossible to sell a book or any of my more creative work though. Much of my energy was squandered in dealing with the petty squabbles amongst our ex-pat neighbours.

The British around us were mostly enemies of culture. I think it is fair to put it that strongly. One kid even said to my son: “I´m not allowed to play in your house because it´s got books in it!” Non-bookish neighbours would not have been the end of the world. It was worse than that. Incredible as it may seem there were several men of retirement age on the urbanisation who seemed to dedicate their lives to harassing families with children or cats out of their little kingdom. Four years down the line we were intimidated out of our home by a campaign of tyre-slashing, etc.

In some ways it was a good thing because it forced us to move to a more Spanish area – one that I had been visiting for years. I had become a rock-hunter on the Sierra Minera at weekends. I was rapidly becoming fascinated by its history and its landscape full of ruined industrial architecture. I conceived the idea of writing one or more books on the area. It has not been written about in English. Everything that I could find about it was in Spanish and there is not even a huge amount of that. I would obviously have to glean living memories also as well as reading the few books and articles that were available. I would also have to visit hundreds of mines and quarries. In one of its more profitable periods there were as many as eleven hundred claims in the area.

Cartagena itself is as different to the Orihuela Costa as chalk to cheese. Cartagena is a vibrant, up-and-coming city with a thriving cultural scene. It also has an annual festival celebrating the Carthaginians and Romans whose architectural remains lie scattered through the city. It is now increasingly a destination for med cruises. There was much that I could have written about for travel articles therefore. But I was always met with refusals if I tried to sell ideas. I seemed to be the literary equivalent of box-office poison.

Occasionally I still got the odd email from former fans asking when there would be another book. I generally told them that I was still writing but was not flavour of the month as far as publishers were concerned.

I continued to write poetry and prose but I had almost given up hope of publishing again when a request for a book of poems arrived out of the blue. I had enough poems for a new collection, more or less, but opted for a Selected instead. I felt it was overdue. There was also a problem with the new poetry in that it was on three entirely separate themes – war, brothels and ruined mines. They didn´t entirely gel together. The brothel poems were related to my prose book on the red-light districts of the world. Sometimes I could cover one aspect or theme of a district better in a short poem. The war poems started as an attempt to write an epic on World War Two. This was progressing well until 911 – suddenly I no longer wanted to write about war. I salvaged what I could amongst the work in progress and keep rewriting it. There was much on the philosophy and history of war and also some touching sections on Auschwitz. The mining poems related to my hobby of mineral collecting and visiting the impressive industrial ruins in the area where I now live.

Chris Hamilton-Emery runs the independent firm, Salt Publishing. Obviously he had not heard I was on some kind of invisible blacklist. I hastily got together a Selected Poems. This was made easier by the fact that almost all my books were out of print. I combined some of my best serious poems with other lighter ones that had only appeared in magazines. Within a few months it was published. Will this be a blip in my anonymity or the start of better things? Only time can tell.

Chris seemed remarkably easy to do business with. The whole operation – even the proofs - was conducted in a series of humorous emails. I was used to books taking a year to come to publication but this was a great deal quicker. The only review I have had to date was an extremely short one in the Scotsman. The reviewer hated my book so much she repeated the same vitriolic sentence twice to fill up space. I don´t suppose it sold me any copies.

What are the worst things about fallng out of favour? The fear of penury, mainly. My son is only twelve and my husband is diabetic amd can therefore sometimes suffer health problems. For these reasons I would certainly like to feel more secure. My son knows my books exist and has read some of my poems, but he thought I was lying when I said I had been photographed by various magazines and newspapers – that is, until I produced a few clippings. These days he sees me as someone with very low earnings.

When I was better known and in favour I could suggest articles to papers such as the Independent and I could get books commissioned that I wanted to write. I regret the lack of this support greatly. That is the cruellest thing about my current state.

The only plus in this situation is that I don´t have to kowtow to anyone or play their game. I realised this in a brief moment of revelation while watching the film Hancock in Spanish with my son. The Superhero, Hancock is staying with a PR Executive whose life he has saved. One look at the PR man´s life reminded me that I was free, at any rate. Perhaps freer than I have ever been. And that, at any rate might have a positive effect on anything I write.

I was never the brownest nose on the literary scene but there must have been times when I chose to fit in. This is all behind me. I don´t have the publicity machine of the publishers I was with in more prosperous times, but I have the internet. Anyone can blog. And sometimes someone out there – like Chris Hamilton-Emery – will like what they see and contact me.

I was approached by a literary festival to read there also. Evidently Cork also doesn´t know about the black list – or perhaps that is what appeals. The Irish, God bless them, have always had a contrary take on life. I read there in February and met a few poets I had known previously. It was good to be back on the scene for a few hours, anyway.

I would have loved to have been chosen as poet laureate when the post fell vacant. In these days of email, why not an ex-pat one? I wish Carol Ann Duffy well in her tenure though. It´s good to see a woman in the post. Failing that, I would at least like a bit more work. Come on editors, I am still alive. I am still writing. Why not get me to do an article for you or contribute some poems?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiona_Pitt-Kethley
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=fiona+pitt-kethley&x=15&y=20
http://www.alibris.com/search/books/author/Pitt-Kethley,%20Fiona
http://www.libraries.psu.edu/digital/speccolls/FindingAids/kethley.frame.html
http://www.arcadiabooks.co.uk/authors.php?id=17
http://www.gojaba.com/search/qau/PITT+KETHLEY+FIONA
http://www.saltpublishing.com/shop/proddetail.php?prod=9781844714537

Salt Publishing is currently running a buy one book campaign to avert their cash crisis. Hope all their efforts pay off in the end.
http://www.saltpublishing.com/saltmagazine/index.htm