I am starting an occasional newsletter, a blog of sorts. If you sign up, using the “Subscribe Now” button, you will receive it straight to your inbox. It will be free of charge, not least because I have no idea how frequent it will be, and I don’t want to make a commitment to regular updates that I might come to regret. The things I like to write about are the things I like to talk about: they include Italy, food, culture, pubs, and people.
I stopped writing ‘for pleasure’ during my mercifully brief legal career. I am now fortunate to be thinking in prose again: my PhD dissertation is no longer the blank document it was last year, and my occasional journalistic work has rekindled my interest in storytelling. My friends and family never stopped buying me the little hardback notebooks they knew I loved. I used to be terrified of writing silly things in them; I wanted to save them for ‘best,’ because I knew they were not cheap.
There is nothing more stifling to creativity than the self-imposed pressure to write only your best work, so I have tried to change my attitude to these pocket-sized books. Scribbling in them during interviews has helped me to realise that they are no different to iPhone notes, though they do come with the added bonus that, while typing an iPhone note mid-conversation looks very rude, jotting down a hand-written word or two does not.
Like the first scag on a nice jumper, christening a notebook with your first bad idea feels painful at first. In the end, however, it opens doors. A new jumper can only become your favourite jumper when it has acquired enough imperfections for you to feel comfortable wearing it on a hike in the woods, or somewhere it might get ruined by errant pizza toppings. Similarly, when you have written a few half-formed thoughts in a new notebook, you stop being so precious about ruining the pristine pages, and you can give yourself permission to write more freely. I am now filling these books up with reading lists, restaurant recommendations from friends, and brief observations that would have no place in an academic article or in a serious work of journalism.
I assumed that these little notes would never find an audience, until Rachel Roddy encouraged me to “write at length” about my time in Sicily. This is something I had already been doing in between site visits, interviews and meals, albeit in disorganised fragments, and in the rare moments of solitude that fieldwork provides. My plan is to begin by typing up some of these vignettes, tidying them up a bit, and sharing them with you.
I know I have taken some notes about restaurants, about the Mediterranean, and about one or two beautiful words or phrases that I had never noticed before. Later on, I might share a few thoughts on my day job as a PhD student, too. I have often enjoyed reading about how other people do research, and about how they go about writing. Nobody is born doing any of this, and it isn’t helpful to pretend that they are. I don’t see this becoming a place for academic work, though: I do enough of that as it is.
I am planning on doing my first proper post next week. It will be about a research trip to Palermo I started over a month ago, but that’s fine. After all, as Italo Calvino reminds us, the Sicilian folk tradition uses the phrase “lu cuntu nun metti tempu” (time takes no time in a story), in order to justify jumping over weeks or even months in the course of telling a tale. It’s the storyteller’s prerogative.
I am not sure that I share Calvino’s love of rapidità — rapid-ness, or quickness — but I have no fondness for linear time either. I could write a string of newsletters about a single eventful day (I probably won’t, but I could), or write a newsletter about last January one week and about September the next. In other words, I will not be maintaining the fiction that I am writing in ‘real time,’ because multitasking is difficult, and retrospect is valuable.
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