The word family is usually reserved to describe a group of people connected by blood and living together in the same household. There’s the nuclear, the dysfunctional, the modern, the royal, the single-parent, the double-income, the “one big happy”, and so on. There are also those groups of diverse people who are not blood related but who come together through a shared system of values and beliefs and who discover a natural affinity with and for one another.
The Fleck family in my latest novel Edith & Oliver are travelling music hall entertainers who find a new family among the cohort of performers they tour with. There’s Harry Gardner Eccentric Comedian, Arabella and her Dancing Chickens, Gordon McGregor The Famous Foot Controller, Whistleologist Dickie Mitchell, Mlle Sabine and her flock of Performing Cockatoos and of course Nellie The Cripple With the Angel Voice.
This disparate group connect in the novel through their difficulties, their catastrophic failures, their joys and successes, at a time when cinemas begin to crowd the high streets and the world of the music hall entertainer fades, changing forever.
Similarly, I have a close affinity with two writing friends, although that’s as far as the comparison goes as none of us can whistle or have ever performed on stage with cockatoos (not that I’m aware of anyway). Together we could call ourselves a group, but we could also call ourselves family.
We were not consciously teaching each other anything. What we were doing was being present for one another and paying attention
We all share a similar background in theatre. Myself and Hilary Fannin first met at drama school in Dublin in the eighties, and embarked on our professional acting careers together. On one particular production for the Abbey Theatre we were joined by Maureen White, a softly-spoken Canadian (though aren’t all Canadians softly spoken?) who had worked as an actor and playwright in her home country and had moved to Dublin.
We continued to work together on and off over the years in varying capacities with different companies on both established plays and new ones, sometimes as performers, sometimes as directors, sometimes as writers.
But there were also the years when we were out of contact too, periods spent working in London and travelling and raising children. That said, by the time we had come to form our writing group – sorry family – we had already developed a deep relationship with language.
It came about in the simplest of ways. After one such long stretch of not seeing each other, we met by chance one day in town and went for coffee. We caught up with each others’ lives, talked about marriage, children and work. Creatively we had moved in different directions. Maureen was working as a dramaturg and teacher, Hilary as a columnist and playwright, while I had persevered in the same self-flagellating profession, trying to make the best of what TV, film and theatre could offer me – concerned mother of teenage, drug-abusing son, concerned mother of self-harming anorexic daughter, wife of Guard, woman making tea, woman carrying bucket across the stage, etc. etc.
We chatted about what good plays and films we’d seen, and what good books we’d recently read. The conversation naturally, but somewhat tentatively, led to the confession that we’d each been writing something of our own. No, not a play this time, but prose. There was a long pause. We all realised that we felt we could possibly write prose reasonably well, but we didn’t know. Because you don’t really know until you do it.
Then Hilary said, as cryptically as though we were all characters in a John le Carré novel , “I think we should get together and support each other’s writing”. I looked at Hilary then at Maureen. Maureen looked at me then at Hilary. Hilary looked at Maureen then at me. We nodded. We understood.
We decided to meet at regular intervals. We had a loose template. Bring work. Read work out. Discuss work. This was important for it meant having work to bring in the first place. We listened to, assimilated and responded to each other’s writing at whatever stage it was at. We pointed out where we felt the language to be unclear, cliched, lazy. We talked about form, structure, tone, style, dialogue. We enabled one another to give whatever subjective content we were exploring in our heads some kind of objective form, and helped move those internalised notions out into a shared space.
Gradually we began to get a clearer critical understanding of our own processes. After listening and discussing and dismantling we would then go off separately and see how each of us could put our own work back together again – only better. But we were not consciously teaching each other anything. What we were doing was being present for one another and paying attention.
No matter how much we had doubted ourselves before each meeting, we always left ready to continue the work. Within the first year of meeting regularly all three of us were published
It would be disingenuous of me to suggest that the primary concern of our group was solely to get our work published. That idea, of course, was hugely relevant for I was writing with people who cared as deeply about the process as I did. But perhaps more importantly, we understood that what we needed was to be able to offer each other shelter for the literary values we realised we shared, a safe haven, a place where we could be vulnerable and make mistakes.
And as the weeks and months passed there was something we began to notice: it seemed that no matter how much we had doubted ourselves before each meeting, we always left the group ready to continue the work. Within the first year of meeting regularly all three of us were published.
Like the Fleck family in Edith & Oliver there is a need in all of us to connect with groups of people who share our experiences and values, who make us feel that we belong, who listen to us, support us, but who also challenge us and encourage us to dismantle our firmly-held ideas in order that when we rebuild them they – and we – are better for it.
Edith & Oliver by Michèle Forbes is published in trade paperback/ebook by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, priced £13.99/£7.99
