Last Thursday, a bar in Deptford hosted the London launch of Glyn Brown’s book Dancing Barefoot. What was it like? Why would an author put themselves up on a stage in front of an audience? Did the kazoo make an appearance? Answers to all this and more are in this blog, written for us by Glyn. Make yourself comfortable and read on….
Don’t know if it’s the same for any writers reading this, but I write, when I do and when I can, partly to hide. Clearly, it’s possible to hide without writing; I could just go into the bedroom, where my desk is, and get under it. Unless the cat’s there, because that’s his place and he’s a big animal. But writing’s my sanctuary. Even when, as a journalist, I write features for newspapers, which comes with its own nervy energy, I get lost in the job and feel I’ve disappeared. (I realise there’s a case for counselling here.) Creative writing is like that but more so. A place to go, in the quiet of dawn and without a deadline, and think and lose yourself. No part of me wants to be on a stage in front of people.
But obviously, perversely, I want to get my work published. I tried for ages, always knocked back. Gave up, started another new thing, and eventually found the best publisher you could want: intuitive, humorous, encouraging. But if I hoped people might read the book I felt so strongly about, they needed to know it existed – and that meant public readings.
I’d done a reading of Dancing Barefoot: How to be Common already, in Whitstable in Kent, where I live. It was short, a brief introduction and five minutes from the book. Because I assumed I’d be too nervous to initially get my voice out I brought my kazoo (like all rock critics, I play an instrument) thinking I’d kick off with that. I did, to astonishing effect – people didn’t just stop talking, they went rigid.
This time we were headed to south-east London, a funky bar in filthy, newly-cool Deptford, near where I used to live. I was even more convinced I wouldn’t be able to speak. Before my husband and I packed the car with books we hoped to sell and set off down the A2, I shoved the kazoo in my bag.
We’d set off late because of my dog-walking job – one of the dogs, hefty cockerpoo Sammy, was dragging his feet so badly I had to pick him up and carry him. In the car I was beyond tense. My mobile pinged: the hotel we’d booked that night in London had a gas leak and was closed. As we stopped for the fifth time in solid traffic I called friends – with two hours to find a room in July, you could forget other hotels. Our closest pals said, ‘Come to us – now Ted’s left home, you can squeeze into his single bed. We can move that dismantled computer he’s left on it.’
I think this moment tipped me beyond panic into a no-go zone of timeless static. As we sat unmoving, while police cars and ambulances wove through stationary traffic to the poor sods who’d had the accident, everything became calmly transcendent. We reached the bar, owned by another friend and rented to a Spanish guy who was turning it into a vegan eaterie. It was ramshackle but light and jungly. The floor was covered in kids’ toys and children gaily did cartwheels across the floor. I shrugged. We dropped off the books, went to our mates’, and I lay down for five minutes, trying to get my heart rate back to normal. Then I washed, changed, and we walked back to the venue. We spent fifteen minutes lugging tables and chairs about and then another friend, the author and critic Erica Wagner, arrived, and it was wonderful to see her. Erica and I sat on the stage (four pallets covered with carpets) as owner Richard sorted our mics’ sound levels. Kick-off time. No one was here, even though I had emailed people (repeatedly), sent out flyers, Tweeted like a boss and gone on Facebook so much I was sick of myself. A few people wandered in. I knew that Erica, who is also a lecturer and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, was used to big halls, but she remained positive. She told me a funny story about reading her own work at a bookstore in the mid-West (she’s a native New Yorker), to eight people. When she’d finished reading they looked at her, screwed up their faces, and left.
Erica had a transatlantic flight early next morning. As minutes ticked by she murmured, ‘Shall we?’ And I thought, well, I said I didn’t want to perform. I will barely have to. And then I thought, my book is full of heroines from history. They were dauntless. They would throw themselves into a situation like this. Added to which, the people who’ve come deserve a good time, if I can provide one.
I took out my kazoo, thought, Glyn, you cannot do this, and played Patti Smith’s Dancing Barefoot. I got right into it. There was stunned silence, then laughter. I began to say the words I’d rehearsed on dog walks so frequently that Sammy must know them by heart. I asked Erica if she had a kazoo, and she took it from there, saying things about the book that I couldn’t believe. I began my reading, resting the book on my knee because my hands were shaking, and when I looked up, because I know you need to, I noticed the room was full. Erica asked how I’d found the heroines I wrote about and I said it wasn’t easy – their lives had been buried because despite their glittering achievements, they were working-class and so of no interest. I got so annoyed for playwright Aphra Behn, who was endlessly criticised, that I slammed my book on the table; explained how tiger trainer Mabel Stark controlled her feelings like tigers in a cage; how gorgeous Elsa Lanchester remained buoyant; how artist Suzanne Valadon was fearlessly passionate…
A sound by the door – so many people here now that Richard and my husband Mike were having to bring in the chairs from outside and borrow more, people were sitting on bar stools, the place was heaving. People had their hands in the air, asking fascinating, thought-provoking questions – I leaned over so far to hear someone at the back I nearly fell off my pallet. I saw my friend Pinball Geoff Harvey, who I’d met 25 years ago when we were struggling to pay the rent in Hackney, and he still sells pinball machines as well as being in a band and appearing on TV’s The Repair Shop (two people asked him for autographs). I saw my pal Brian Francis, working in Southwark and at night painting accomplished portraits, which have so nearly got into the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition but just miss. The trick for all of us is if you want to do it, you shouldn’t give up. Doing it is what matters.
And later, people said they’d been moved by the book – it had made them laugh, inspired them in ways I couldn’t have anticipated. It made them want to grab life, or change the way they thought. And of course I’d written it partly to try to change the way I thought. It had been cathartic self-help.
That night, I clung to the edge of the tiny single bed, and my husband said, ‘This is the life! It’s like camping!’ Part of what he said was true, and not just the camping bit. This IS the life. However long a moment lasts, however scary things might seem, you really don’t know what could happen unless you grab it.