Happy Place podcast by Fearne Cotton - Matt Haig

Since listening to series 6, episode 7 of Elizabeth Day's How to Fail podcast in which she speaks with Fearne Cotton, I began listening to Happy Place, Fearne Cotton's podcast in which she chats "to inspiring individuals who have either made a change in their own lives or who help people every day to find a different way of looking at life."

The people, (mainly celebrities) she interviews range from comedian Dawn French, to five element Acupuncture Master Gerad Kite to classical musician Ludovico Einaudi and heptathlon Olympic champion Jessica Ennis-Hill.

I have taken lots from listening to these podcasts, and despite the fact that I lead a completely different life to the people she interviews, the way Fearne talks with her guests makes it easy for them to be genuine and tap into their emotions which then make it easier for me (and other listeners) to relate to and feel a connection with. Fearne's ability to create a true rapport with her guest, whom she may have never met, is the key to their willingness to share. This talent is one that fellow podcaster Elizabeth Day also oozes, and it is because they do so that their interviewees discuss challenging experiences openly, tap into deep emotions and are able to share their vulnerabilities.

The most recent episode that I have listened to features the writer Matt Haig, who at the age of 24 experienced a panic attack that changed his life. He has since written the bestselling book, Reasons To Stay Alive, and discusses with Fearne how writing and talking about his experiences has helped him.

He discusses how he often feels like a fraud because he still experiences anxiety. When readers contact him to say how helpful his book has been to them, he feels he should be able to have used it to 'cure' him of his anxieties. 

The way he deals with this is to be accepting of himself.

He notes how we often talk about battling fighting and struggling with our mental health, but recognises that it is more useful if we talk about accepting and understanding our mental health.

Seven Failure Principles from Elizabeth Day's How to Fail Live with Reni Eddo-Lodge

https://www.elizabethdayonline.co.uk/

 Seven Failure Principles from Elizabeth Day's How to Fail Live with Reni Eddo-Lodge

1. Failure is a fact but you are not defined by it 
"Just because you fail does not make you a failure"

2. You are not your anxious brain
The brain tells us something is a danger when it isn't 
We are not defined by our thoughts

3. Almost everyone feels they have failed in their 20s

4. Break ups are not a tragedy - your ex-partner has taught you something

5. Failure is data acquisition

6. There is no such thing as a future you

7. When we choose to share our vulnerabilities is when we feel most satisfaction


A couple more nuggets of wisdom that Day shared include

When times get too tough and you feel like giving up, cling on because the biggest failure may be not finding out what will happen

Anxiety doesn't want you to enjoy life

My introduction to Words Weekend at The Sage

I spent a large proportion of the weekend at The Sage, Gateshead enjoying the inaugural Words Weekend. 

Fane Productions is behind this brand new festival;

"Words Weekend celebrates the power of words and stories with a packed programme of talks, workshops, panel discussions, music and spoken word. 40% of the 60+ events are free, and all are fully accessible and BSL interpreted. Through the power of words and stories, Words Weekend aims to unite communities and ignite imaginations."

Although I am (ashamedly) not particularly well-read (I am dyslexic and reading takes a lot of energy and time and requires specific conditions), I have (and always have) a great love for stories, both written and spoken, read or heard. In the last five years I have become increasingly interested in writing and spoken word, and I've begun to share some of my creative writing and audio work.

It was when I first read Mark Haddon's 'The Curious Incident of the dog in the night-time' that I realised that it was possible to write in a manner that echoes the way one thinks. I found it incredibly refreshing and liberating to read. At last I had found a book that was written in a way that I found pleasurable. I could easily, and relatively quickly, digest it. It did not conform to what I believed to be 'the norm' and the 'proper way'. By this I mean that I realised that stories did not have to be in prose.

This experience encouraged me to explore my own style of writing, and I have since created a couple of publications namely A lot can happen in fifteen minutes (2016) a risograph publication made in collaboration with Unstapled Press and Portion Control (2017) made for an exhibition titled REALITY CHECK at The NewBridge Project, Gateshead.

Over the course of the next few blog posts I will be posting about the various events that I went to. 

Bernardine Evaristo & David Olusoga in Conversation

Cash Carraway: SKINT ESTATE

Roisin Crowley Linton: Teenage Kicks

How To Be A Public Author: Cash Carraway, Paul Ewen, Carmen Marcus

Spotlight on Indie Publishers: Galley Beggar

Elizabeth Day's How to Fail Live with Reni Eddo-Lodge

Why we should learn to embrace failure by Elizabeth Day in The Guardian

As an artist, one has to be able to cope with criticism and let-downs. After spending hours/days/weeks/months working on a proposal for an exhibition or toiling over accurate estimates of income and expenditure for a funding application, one has to be prepared for that devastating email or phonecall offering commiserations on the unsuccessful submission. It was only last week that I was in this position, and couldn't help but feel like a failure. As often as it happens, it never gets any easier to deal with. That's why it is useful to be reminded that there is no such thing as a failure. 

The following article was published in The Guardian on Sunday 15 July 2018

Divorce, miscarriage, career knock-backs – the big moments in life often come through crisis and make us who we are, so don’t airbrush them out, says Elizabeth Day

A few months ago, I spent an evening sitting on the sofa in my flat, cropping my head out of a series of wedding photographs. It was a fairly surreal experience excising my smiling face from the pictures taken outside the chapel. It was not something I had ever anticipated, because you don’t think about divorce when you’re walking down the aisle. You don’t imagine it will happen to you. You don’t believe that one day, you will be digitally altering your wedding photographs so that you can sell your mermaid-style gown and long-sleeved lace bolero to a stranger on eBay.

And yet this is where I found myself. The dress had been hanging in my wardrobe for three years since the end of my marriage. It had been pressed up against the winter coats, shrouded in its dry-clean carrier, and although I tried to forget about it, I never could. The dress took up residence like an unwanted tenant, a constant reminder of my failure.

As I posted details of the dress online, I began to think about failure and its shadow-twin, success. If I listed the achievements of my life, on paper, without emotion, I would have to concede that on some level I am doing OK. I have published four novels. I make a decent living as a journalist. I have a good degree, a wide friendship group and I pay my rent promptly each month.

I am, I suppose, objectively successful. But it doesn’t always feel that way. I still hadn’t grown out of the habit of walking into bookshops and rearranging my novels so they were on the top of the display table piles. Surely no truly successful author does that.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that the biggest, most transformative moments of my life came through crisis or failure. They came when I least expected them, when I felt ill-equipped to deal with the fallout. And yet each time, I had survived.

Into this category I put the fact that I had got married at the age of 33, but divorced three years later. I had tried to have children, but failed despite two rounds of IVF and a natural pregnancy that ended in miscarriage at three months. I had been in and out of relationships that never seemed to last.

Professionally, too, there had been some knocks. I had written a heartfelt second novel about war and its impact, loosely based on the death of a former boyfriend in Iraq. It had been an important book to me, but when it was published it barely seemed to register. The few people who read it were kind and I got used to deflecting my wider sense of rejection with humour: “It’s a beach read,” I told tiny literary festival audiences, “if the beach is Dunkirk.”

I called that book Home Fires. When Kamila Shamsie won the Women’s prize this year for her critically acclaimed novel, Home Fire, it was hilariously ironic: in my head, the success of her work highlighted the failure of my own. But the truth was, I grew from the experience. Afterwards, I put what I’d learned about writing into two more books. The latest, The Party, became a bestseller. Was it, I wondered, that I had unwittingly become successful as a by-product of failure? Had I, to paraphrase the words of the late American playwright Edward Albee, succeeded interestingly precisely because I’d failed interestingly first?

It was a topic that interested me enough to start asking other people the same questions. In my day job as a journalist, I’m in the privileged position of interviewing a lot of celebrities whose fame is a distinctive marker of a certain type of success. Yet they all had their own tales about life going awry. The actress Natalie Dormer, 36, recently told me that her 20s had been a decade of “self-doubt and anxiety”. She said she was relieved to reach her 30s because “You’ve fucked up. When you’ve fucked up a number of times, hopefully the idea is you don’t fuck up as badly the next time when you’re presented with the same or a similar situation. I’m strong because I’ve been weak, I’m wise because I’ve been stupid.”

This seemed to me to be at the root of it: how one becomes strong because of weakness; how one is more likely to succeed if one has learned from failure. In recent years, the notion of “failing well” has gained considerable currency. Books such as Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure by Tim Harford and The Art of Failing by Anthony McGowan (which describes itself as “a chronicle of one man’s daily failures and disappointments”) have added grist to the notion that failure can be distilled into something more positive if the right alchemy is applied. Harford argues that improvising rather than planning is the way to tackle everything from terrorism, climate change, poverty and innovation to the financial crisis, and that trial and error is the best way of achieving long-term solutions to complex problems. “No plan survives first contact with the enemy,” he writes. “What matters is how quickly the leader is able to adapt.”
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It was an idea worth exploring. So I began a podcast series called How to Fail. The idea was for me to do eight one-to-one interviews over eight weeks with highly successful people about what failure had taught them.

The rise of social media means we now live in an age of positive curation, where Instagram feeds and Pinterest mood boards are designed to give the most glowing impression of our lives. In this context, failure doesn’t get much airplay. But, I thought, wouldn’t it be refreshing if we stripped back the carefully crafted layers of our supposedly perfect selves, and revealed ourselves to be vulnerable?

To my delight, people seemed to warm to the concept. Soon, I had a wonderful roster of participants, plucked from friends and contacts, including the actor and writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the novelist Sebastian Faulks, the political activist Gina Miller and the writers Olivia Laing, David Nicholls, Dolly Alderton and Sathnam Sanghera.

Before each recording, I asked my interviewees to come up with three examples in their life when they felt they had failed and that they were willing to talk about. The failures cited ranged from humorous accounts of flunked exams to the big, life-altering crises of divorce and serious illness.

It was fascinating to see how men and women had different attitudes. Many of the men I approached balked at the idea they had failed at anything. They cited lost tennis matches, unrisen soufflés and the inability to play a musical instrument. The women routinely responded that they would have trouble whittling down their myriad failures to just three instances.

“There are so many to choose from!” said Olivia Laing. “Women are so socialised to be self-deprecating, to not claim their successes… I think it’s much easier for women to say, ‘I didn’t do well at this,’ than to say, ‘I did marvellously at it.’ Which is a bit depressing really, isn’t it?”

It is. But I was touched by how openly the women I interviewed were willing to delve into their failures. Gina Miller, the woman who took on the government over Brexit and won, wanted to talk not about that victory but about surviving an abusive marriage, raising a daughter with special needs and failing to graduate from a law degree.

Coping with these twists in life, said Miller, “taught me that you mustn’t make such a rigid plan for your life that when it doesn’t work out, you’re so sad and you then just live feeling this sense of disappointment, because that ruins the rest of your life. You have to let go. It’s like a mourning. You have to grieve and put it aside and bury it and then move on, and that’s what I learned to do.”

The consequence of all of this was that she was forced to be honest about her own mistakes and weaknesses and, by confronting them, she built up the emotional resilience necessary to tackle the next challenge. Success, she explained, was not about getting things right the first time, but stemmed from being able to look at one’s past honestly and then to correct missteps or errors of judgment. That, in turn, gave her more confidence to make brave choices. “In life we’re all going to fail,” she said. “So you might as well have a strategy for how you deal with failure, and then once you’ve got that in your back pocket, you can go out in life and really take risks.”

Laing admitted that she saw the whole of her 20s as a failure – she struggled to find her way, trying out several versions of herself, as a road protester, a medical herbalist, a cleaner and the deputy literary editor of this newspaper before she left and stepped into an unknown future. Not knowing what else to do, she funnelled her distress into the proposal for a book about Virginia Woolf, weaving in elements from her own life.

That book became To the River, which was shortlisted for the Ondaatje prize, and Laing has since gone on to become one of our foremost writers and cultural commentators, who often uses her own experiences of alienation and loneliness as a means to get to some essential, connecting truth. Her failures have, in this way, become her art.

Sebastian Faulks, the author of 16 books including the international bestseller Birdsong, at first felt he wouldn’t have much to contribute to the podcast. His attitude towards failure was that it was a matter of how one perceived it, and he felt his life thus far had been blessed rather than cursed. He gave me three, deliberately playful examples of failure including “once getting out [at cricket] when I had made 98 and chipped a return catch to the bowler” and the occasion on which he came second in a prestigious Italian literary prize. It was awarded, instead, to the brother-in-law of the chairman of the judges.

“Is that a failure?” he mused. “I mean, I wouldn’t have thought so, I thought it was rather a success to be going to Milan to be celebrated in a country not your own for a book with no Italian connection.”

But Faulks had also experienced periods of depression in his life, most notably at university where he “struggled to adapt… I was extremely confused and very fragile and it took quite a lot of time to get over that. I wouldn’t say I have got over it really.”

Many of my interviewees’ failures stemmed from doomed romantic relationships, but they often credited those experiences with providing stimulation for creativity. Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who won a Bafta for writing and starring in the feminist sitcom Fleabag, found a certain “glory in failure [because] fighting so hard to be so in love with someone with all that passion in your 20s and teens and then throwing everything at it and it’s not working, or there being so much pain – that is the stuff that so much creativity comes out of. So it’s out of those painful break-ups or miscommunications – or just horrible sticky one-night stands – that you grow in those moments, and so I value them all.”

With so much of my time being spent asking other people about their failures, it was only natural that my thoughts would wander to my own.

If I had to list my three major failures, right up at the top would be the failure of my marriage. Part of the reason my marriage ended (and this will only ever be a subjective assessment) was that I think I tried too hard to please. I forgot, in the rush to appear flawless and irreproachable, that it was far more important to be real than perfect. Like many women I know, I spent my 20s desperately wanting to be loved in order to shore up a shaky sense of self. If I placed no demands on my spouse, the internal reasoning went, if I did everything right, then there would be no excuse not to love me.

It’s terrible logic and, inevitably, it fell apart. The divorce catapulted me into a different sort of life from the one I had imagined. Here I was, in my late 30s, single, without children, and navigating uncharted waters. Despite never having thought of myself as a particularly unconventional person, it struck me I was living an unconventional life. My failure to have children at the time when all my contemporaries were having babies and moving closer to good schools made me reassess what I could get from the life I already had. If motherhood wasn’t going to be part of the future I had always imagined for myself, where else would I find fulfilment?

Life crises have a way of doing that: they strip you of your old certainties and throw you into chaos. The only way to survive is to surrender to the process. When you emerge, blinking into the light, you have to rebuild what you thought you knew about yourself.

It dawned on me that I had my work. I was lucky in the sense that being a writer means you never feel fully alone – you always have the company of the characters you create. I also had my friends and family, from whom I get a great deal of love and compassion. And, actually, if I looked at the failure in a different way, it could also double up as an opportunity: I was free of responsibility. I was no longer living my life in a misguided attempt to please other people. So I could live in a more agile, flexible way. If I wanted to move to Los Angeles for three months and live in an Airbnb, then I could (and did).

I think what I’ve learned from failure is that things not turning out the way you’d planned gives your time on this earth a lot more texture and meaning. I’m now oddly grateful for all the losses – the miscarriage, the divorce, the subsequent break-up of another relationship – because without them I wouldn’t be who I am or where I am, and I wouldn’t have seen the richness in a different kind of life.

Besides, no failure is all-consuming. A nice woman in Shropshire bought my wedding dress on eBay and I put the money into funding the first couple of episodes of the podcast. As I folded the dress into a box, wrapping it carefully in layers of tissue paper, I thought to myself that this wasn’t a failure at all. It was a part of my life. I had learned from it. And now I was letting it go.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/jul/15/divorce-miscarriage-jobs-learn-to-embrace-failure-elizabeth-day

Storytelling: how reading aloud is back in fashion

Following my blog post yesterday about Jenny Richard's lecture, 'Voices and books: a new history of reading', I came across this article in The Observer, published in 2013.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/06/storytelling-back-in-fashion

At a weekly book club, Elizabeth Day has found that even in an age of social networking, the direct, oral tradition can still reach out to a new audience


"The last time someone told Thomas Yeomans a story, he was a child. Last week he wandered into a storytelling session for adults without quite knowing what lay in store. "For me, reading has become more formal over the years; it's something I do on my own," explained Yeomans, a 26-year-old artist. "So I swept into this at the last minute, not knowing what to expect."

Yeomans happened to find himself in one of the weekly storytelling sessions that I have been running over the past month in an art gallery in central London. When I developed the idea with gallerist Simon Oldfield, the premise was simple: we both felt that the tradition of reading aloud and sharing stories with each other was something that had been lost in modern times. In an era of social networking and electronic gadgetry, when friendships are conducted via computer screen and culture is increasingly savoured in isolation through a pair of noise-reducing headphones, we have neglected the pleasures of direct experience.

Many of us used to be told stories as children. But as we grow older, we seem to lose the knack. Yet there is undoubtedly an appetite for it: revenue from downloaded audiobooks has risen by 32.7% since last year, while The Reader Organisation, a charity that aims to engage people through the shared reading of great literature, now has 350 weekly shared reading groups across the country.

"What happens with shared reading is that people experience a very intense thing together, but everybody has their own personal, private, inner response to it," says Jane Davis, founder of The Reader Organisation. "A lot of people don't understand how poor literacy is in our country. For many, reading aloud gives you access to things you would simply never read otherwise."

Like Davis, it struck me that, while there had been a welcome resurgence of book groups and literary festivals over the past decade, there was little chance for adults to engage in group reading without some sort of self-improving literary discussion at the end of it, or a nagging sense that one should really be buying the author's newest work as part of an unspoken commercial transaction. Which is how I came to be reading Anne Enright's short story, Here's To Love, in the week before Christmas when Yeomans wandered through the door. "What I liked about it was that this was an informal setting and a gentle, welcoming environment where my defences were down," Yeomans said after the session. "It really pulled at my heart strings. I felt like a defenceless child again."

Helen Ervin, a 38-year-old marketing executive from New York, agreed: "There's an intimacy that happens when you get a whole bunch of people together… There was a moment in today's story where I thought I might cry. There's an emotion brought to the surface when you're reading aloud because it's being performed."

Another attendee said he had come because "the idea of reading is hard work to me. I'm dyslexic, so I prefer to listen to radio plays and things like that. I was completely sucked in today. It was really engaging."

For Doris Julian, 70, the experience "took me right back to being a child and being read to in the library. I like to listen to le Carré audiobooks and things like that, but there's nothing better than the real version. It's very descriptive and I love it. I can't think of a nicer way to spend an afternoon."

By this time I'd been running the storytelling sessions for a month and had been bowled over by the response. More and more people came in each week to listen to short stories by authors as diverse as Dorothy Whipple and Jon McGregor in a room hung with striking works of contemporary art. Local businesses were keen to get involved: Majestic gave us free wine to serve and a rug company, Bazaar Velvet, loaned us a beautiful Anatolian carpet for everyone to sit on, engendering a real community feel and invoking the true childhood spirit of Jackanory.

A handful of regulars came to every session. It seemed to tap into something – a kind of long-forgotten tradition that we still felt in our bones. Reading aloud has a noble history. Before the invention of the movable-type printing press in the 1430s, oral storytelling was a means of cementing community bonds and passing folk narratives on to the next generation. In medieval times, storytellers were honoured members of royal courts. From 1500 storytelling continued to be popular in an era of widespread illiteracy, when books were still too expensive for the common man.

"Often a neighbour would have a Bible and would read aloud from it," says Jennifer Richards, a professor of early modern literature and culture at Newcastle University. "Or there would be rhetorical training for boys at grammar school, [but] the appeal of reading aloud is not about education; it's about being social, part of a community."

In the 18th and 19th centuries, reading aloud continued to be a form of entertainment. "People didn't have recorded music or films or television, so books had to be everything; they needed to be dramatic, entertaining, comic and sentimental," explains Dr Abigail Williams, a lecturer in English at Oxford University. "One of the things about reading aloud is that you have to do it in small bits. You can't just do it for hours on end, so that brings out qualities in the text you might otherwise miss. People become the characters in a way they don't if you are reading flatly for yourself. You get more of the comedy and the dialogue works differently because it becomes the spoken voice, rather than a transcription of the spoken voice."

But none of this can entirely convey the intensity and intimacy of the experience. I was surprised by how many people who came to the storytelling sessions were visibly moved by the experience – I would glance up from the text and see someone's eyes gleaming, on the brink of tears. Others would look away, lost in their own private universe. One man came up to me afterwards and admitted that he thought a character in one of the stories was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder – a condition that he too had been diagnosed with.

It is a sensation familiar to Davis, who runs reading groups for a cross-section of society – from young doctors without the time to read, to prisoners or groups of pensioners in economically deprived areas. "These little private bombs go off in your head, something strikes a chord [because] with the shared reading experience you are not an observer or discusser; you're going through the experience with everyone else," she says.

"There are a lot of people out there whose connection to the world is through TV and things like I'm A Celebrity. Lots of people don't have a chance to have a serious, intellectual, meaningful experience, and that's what humans are for. We need that… A book provides a wonderful anonymity for personal feelings and responses."

The Reader Organisation has case studies on its website that pay testament to the power of shared reading. A woman in her 60s from Birkenhead is quoted as saying: "For many years I have had a lot of pain in my body, but when I am in the group the reading and sharing of stories helps me to focus my mind away from the physical pain and forget about it for a couple of hours... It kind of lifts you out of the pain."

A survey by the same charity of 214 people who had attended storytelling groups found that 96% enjoyed meeting people they wouldn't normally meet, while 80% left feeling "more positive" about life.

I can't speak for all those who came to our sessions, but I certainly left feeling more positive about lots of things – about the power of literature to engage, the special kind of intimacy gained from a communal experience and the ability to communicate with so many different people without any kind of ulterior motive.

We weren't trying to sell anything. We weren't pretending to improve anyone's mind. All we wanted to do was to share a story. And in the end, it was not just about reading out loud, but also about reading ourselves."