Tom Denny and Ivor Gurney in Gloucester Cathedral

It was Aunt Mary who introduced me to Tom Denny. ‘Here,’ she said, thrusting the Yorkshire Post into my hand almost as soon as we were through her front door, ‘you’re interested in stained glass. What do you think of this new Millennium window in Bolton Percy Church? We could go and have a look at it while you’re up here.’ I took the paper from her, and read the piece. The name Denny meant nothing to me then; fourteen years later, it means a great deal.  I now believe Tom Denny’s stained glass to be the most exciting achievement in recent ecclesiastical art in Britain, and I'll always be grateful to Aunt Mary for alerting me to it.

‘Stained-glass’, Denny has written, ‘is a medium ... where at first one can be strongly aware of colour

 and light as a kind of musical language, a ‘humming’ of colour, a riverine movement of light. And then there is room for the development of whole worlds of narrative and detail.’* Today you can see his work in cathedrals, colleges, abbeys, parish churches and tiny chapels. His largest, perhaps most spectacular window, is in Durham. Often his windows come in pairs, as at Gloucester, Tewkesbury and Malvern. Don’t expect to see saints and biblical scenes in them, though, at least not as such scenes traditionally appear. Denny’s windows mix the abstract with the allegorical, and his figures sometimes seem to be disappearing into a landscape, rather than emerging out of it.

Landscape indeed is one of his hallmarks, and the scale of these vistas may be wide-angle (as at St. Christopher’s Warden Hill) or miniature. Hereford Cathedral has a pair of small two-light windows, in the Audley Chapel, celebrating Thomas Traherne, the 17^th century visionary and poet, born in the city. Here Denny’s sense of the importance of place is focused both on the cathedral itself, with swifts wheeling ecstatically around its tower, and on the local countryside through which Traherne walked as an act of joyous communion with the created world. These are windows to be enjoyed up close and at eye level: the patination of the surface, the varying thicknesses of the glass, even the character of the leadwork, invite us to engage with the materiality of stained glass in a way rarely possible elsewhere.

And later this month there is a new Denny window to be dedicated, again in celebration of a local writer – though, as with Traherne, another writer who is by no means to be pigeon-holed by his local identity: Ivor Gurney. Gurney already has one memorial in Gloucester Cathedral, a discreet plaque describing him as ‘composer and poet’ and ‘chorister of this cathedral church’. His new memorial is equally discreet. In a chantry on the north side of Gloucester’s Lady Chapel, Tom Denny has part-filled two Perpendicular windows, each of which has four narrow lights, and each divided by a transom: the upper halves now contain the eight panels making up the whole. In the top section of each are fragments of 14^th and 15^th century glass, and Denny has designed his own glass to complement these fragments, even using lead-work to signal the continuity between old and new.

Physically the chapel housing this Gurney memorial is dominated by the C17^th effigy of Bishop Godfrey Goldsborough; and, for the time being at least, one has to look at the glass through the mullions of a stone screen separating the chantry from the Lady Chapel. This is not inappropriate. It reminds us that for the last fifteen years of his life Gurney was himself partially hidden from view, housed in a mental hospital far away from the Cotswold countryside he had longed for as a soldier in France, and which he constantly evoked in his music and poetry. The title of his first volume of poetry was Severn and Somme.

What Denny has done is to reflect across the eight panels aspects of Gurney’s life and art. Each panel echoes one or more of Gurney’s poems. In the first light of the left-hand window, for instance, a man walks away from us over a curiously pitted, ancient landscape (there appears to be a Neolithic hand-axe lying on the ground at the foot of scene). He strides towards distant May Hill, ‘that Gloster dwellers / ’Gainst every sunset see’. (I have written about May Hill’s significance before: see In Gloucestershire.) But in the last light of this window, the same man gazes plaintively from behind a hedge at the leafless willows lining the Severn in winter:

And who loves joy as he

   That dwells in shadows?

Do not forget me quite,

   O Severn meadows.

‘There are strange Hells ….’ It would be impossible for a window memorialising Ivor Gurney not to reflect his life as a soldier, but this Tom Denny does in a wholly unexpected way. In the first panel of the right-hand window, abandoned boots and helmets strew the ground in front of a flooded shell hole. Look carefully and you will see the ghoulish faces of drowned and drowning soldiers in the water. A hand and perhaps other limbs break the surface of this Stygian pool: it is a vision of hell. And then on the crater’s far bank a spectral army stands: Gloucester soldiers with their backs turned away from the nightmare of No Man’s Land – turned away, too, from the Gloucester tailor’s son who had fought alongside them:

There was not one of all that Battalion

Loved his comrades as well as I – but kept shy.

Or said in verse, what his voice would not rehearse.

War memorial windows from the 1920s onwards have occasionally depicted the battlefields of France and Flanders. I have never seen another that represents such a scene of horror and overwhelming loss as Denny has created here. I don’t know which specific poem or poems prompted this landscape of despair, but the lines that come to my mind are from ‘Farewell’, a poem Gurney wrote in 1924 in Dartford asylum and which marks him out as one of the most remarkable of all the war poets: a man who hoped that comradeship and the physical effort of soldiering would save him, and yet who drowned in the end, not in a flooded shell hole but in his own mental distress:

Dear Battalion, the dead of you would not have let

Your comrade be so long—prey for the unquiet

Black evil of the unspoken and concealed pit.

The Ivor Gurney memorial window will be dedicated at Evensong in Gloucester Cathedral on Saturday 30th April.

Adrian Barlow

[See also my succeeding post: Short Measures (vi): Ivor Gurney and George Herbert]

* Tom Denny, ‘A note on the window’ in Wisdom’s Call: a new stained-glass window at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge (published by the College, 2012)

[Quotations from poems: the description of May Hill appears in ‘The Fire Kindled’, and ‘Only the wanderer knows’ comes from ‘Song’; both poems first published in Severn and Somme (1917).  ‘There are strange Hells’ are the opening words of the poem ‘Strange Hells’, and the lines addressed to his ‘Dear Battalion’ come from ‘Farewell’. Both poems are quoted here from Oxford University Press’s new anthology, Poetry of the First World War, edited by Tim Kendall .

[illustrations: (i) the newly installed Gurney memorial windows by Tom Denny in the north chantry of Gloucester Cathedral’s Lady Chapel; (ii) and (iii) details from the Traherne windows in Hereford Cathedral: Traherne running, and swifts around the tower ; (iv) and  (v)  details from the Ivor Gurney windows. All photographs (c) Adrian Barlow

Venice inscribed (iii): Ruskin and E.M. Forster

Ruskin has dominated my reading for the past few weeks: The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice, in particular. These are books I have known and owned for years; but I’ve not re-read them so intensively, nor alongside each other, before.

This re-reading was prompted by a lecture I gave last week on ‘Ruskin and Venice’.  I enjoyed describing how Ruskin, standing with his back to the lagoon and gazing up at the façade of the Doge’s Palace, declared ecstatically that it was ‘the central building of the world’. I then asked my audience to imagine the Great Man (still only in his early thirties) turning around and shuddering in disgust at the spectacle of Palladio’s San Giorgio Maggiore across the water:

It is impossible to conceive a design more gross, more barbarous, more childish in conception, more servile in plagiarism, more insipid in result, more contemptible under every point of rational regard.

This duly provoked gasps and chuckles of astonishment. (It’s always reassuring when your audience react as you hope they will.)

I first encountered Ruskin and Venice when I was sixteen and reading E.M. Forster’s Howards End for the first time.  In Chapter 6, Leonard Bast returns to his drab flat after his day’s work as a lowly insurance clerk, finds tea ‘that still survived upon an upper shelf’ and devours ‘some dusty crumbs of a cake’; then

He went back to the sitting-room, settled himself anew, and began to read a volume of Ruskin.

            ‘Seven miles to the north of Venice …’

How perfectly the famous chapter opens! How supreme its command of admonition and of poetry! The rich man is speaking to us from his gondola.

‘Seven miles…’ This is the opening of Ruskin’s celebrated description of the island of Torcello. Now observe (as Ruskin is always saying to his readers) the cunning of that last short sentence. Whose voice? Forster’s, or his narrator’s – the two are not the same – or Leonard Bast’s, or even a combination of all three? This seems like straightforward free indirect style; but are we, Forster’s readers, included in that ‘us’? Isn’t it just Leonard fantasizing about belonging to the cultured elite who go to concerts at the Queen’s Hall and read Ruskin after dinner? Then there’s the ambiguity of ‘his’ gondola: are we – again, Forster’s readers, not Ruskin’s – meant to join Leonard in thinking of Ruskin as ‘the rich man’ who, because he is rich, can afford his own gondola? Surely (we’d like to think) it’s only poor – literally poor – Leonard struggling to improve himself and his prose style by imitating The Stones of Venice, who betrays his envy of Ruskin ‘the rich man’.

The rich man at his castle,

   The poor man at his gate:

God made them high and lowly

   And ordered their estate.

Leonard’s echoing of the notorious verse from All things bright and beautiful (1848) creates a subtle sense of bathos: no matter how hard he tries to improve himself, his lowly estate is fixed. Ironically, there is also bathos about Forster’s first encounter with a gondola, which took place not in Venice but at the Empress Hall, Earl’s Court.  Although he had travelled widely in Italy during 1901-2, he had not been to Venice. Then, in May 1904 he visited an Italian exhibition that was to prove the hit of the summer. In distant Western Australia, The Kalgoorlie Miner described the show’s highlight, ‘Venice by Night’ thus:

Here by the light of innumerable lamps and the aid of gondoliers, who have under their charge a fleet of thirty-six genuine gondolas, the Londoner can travel the canals and ‘see’ the sights of Venice in miniature. There is the Doge's Palace, the Campanile (now a ruin* in real Venice), the Palace Dario, the Churches of St. Mark and St. Maria, and the Bridge of Sighs, the Rialto Bridges, and the Three Arches. There is three-quarters of a mile of canal, and Italian love songs float across the lagoon.

Forster loved ‘Venice by Night’. He found it ‘absurdly moving and touched in me loves for Italy hitherto unimagined.’ He took a gondola ride, gliding along the three-quarters of a mile of canal ‘between pasteboard walls in water 18 inches deep, by a canvas panorama of the Piazetta [sic] and Doge’s Palace.’  Ruskin would have despaired. Forster, too, acknowledges the kitschy make-believe:

But the gondola was real, and so was the gondolier, who allowed me to move myself by the sound of my own voice speaking Italian. He was young, incompetent, and a little drunk. For a moment the place was real, just as a poem is real.

But it was only for a moment.

Writing Howards End five years later, Forster finds Ruskin a troubling figure. For while Leonard is trying to model his writing on Ruskin (‘he understood him to be the greatest master of English prose’), Forster is trying to expunge Ruskinian mannerisms from his own writing. And, in so doing, he seeks to parody Ruskin’s seductive prose and his noble sentiments as no more authentic than the canvas panorama that had briefly, if absurdly, moved him at Earl’s Court:

And the voice in the gondola rolled on, piping melodiously of Effort and Self-Sacrifice, full of high purpose, full of beauty, full even of sympathy and love of men, yet somehow eluding all that was actual and insistent in Leonard’s life. For it was the voice of one who had never been dirty or hungry, and had not guessed successfully what dirt and hunger are.

But Forster has not done with Ruskin yet: this chapter of Howards End closes with Ruskin himself, in an extraordinary post-modern turn, being allowed the last word on Leonard. At the end of the dismal evening, when Leonard gives up his Arnoldian aspirations (‘To see life steadily and to see it whole was not for the likes of him’) and is forced to abandoned The Stones of Venice altogether, the novelist puts into Ruskin’s mind the thought that perhaps he is reluctant to articulate in his own:

Ruskin had visited Torcello by this time, and was ordering his gondoliers to take him to Murano. It occurred to him, as he glided over the whispering lagoons, that the power of Nature could not be shortened by the folly, nor her beauty altogether saddened by the misery, of such as Leonard.

Adrian Barlow

* The original Campanile in St Mark’s had collapsed in 1902. It was rebuilt and re-opened in 1912.

[References: Ruskin’s denunciation of San Giorgio Maggiore will be found in his ‘Venetian Index’ at the end of The Stones of Venice, vol. III. His evocation of Torcello opens Chapter 2 of vol. II.  Incidentally, Forster is a little less than fair to Ruskin, imagining him ‘gliding over the whispering lagoons’ after leaving Torcello. Ruskin’s next stop was Murano:

But it is morning now: we have a hard day’s work to do at Murano, and our boat shoots swiftly from beneath the last bridge of Venice, and brings us out into the open sea and sky. (Ch. 3, § IV.)

Forster’s account of visiting ‘Venice by Night’ is quoted by P.N. Furbank in his excellent and still definitive biography, E.M. Forster: A Life (1977), p.116. All quotations from Howards End will be found in Chapter 6, which begins, ‘We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.’

[illustration: Gondolas by the Church of the Miracoli, photo copyright the author.  

*     *     *

Here are some of my previous posts on Venice:

Venice inscribed (ii): Joseph Brodsky

Venice Inscribed (i): Donna Leon

Venice at the Edges

World and time: In Venice - La Biennale

World and time: (still) in Venice

In defence of the War Poets

“It seems to have become much easier to understand the Great War as poetry than as history – and as anti-war poetry at that.” Thus Jeremy Paxman, writing in his recent book of his TV series, Great Britain’s Great War.

The centenary of the First World War is now truly upon us, and I sense a real danger of centenary fatigue before we even get to August and the anniversary of the opening hostilities. This week sees the start of a TV debate between two opposing historians, Max Hastings and Niall Ferguson, each presenting their contrasting answers to the questions, should Britain have joined the war in the first place? And, having done so, was it worth it? As it happens I heard both Paxman and Hastings at the Cheltenham Literature Festival last autumn, the one hectoring, the other Churchillian in his delivery. Both, however, were anxious to debunk the ‘myths’ about the Great War – lions led by donkeys, indifference of the generals to the loss of life, the ‘lost’ generation, misery of life in the trenches, the futility of it all, etc. Both were keen to blame one tiny group of people for having propagated these myths in the first place, and having thus distorted the ‘reality’ of the war in the minds of young people for more than half a century.

Let me take a roll-call of this tiny group: Owen, W; Sassoon, S; Graves, R; Blunden, E; Aldington, R; Rosenberg, I; Gurney, I; Jones, D; Read, H. I have limited the list to those ‘trench poets’ who wrote about what they had experienced, first-hand, on active service on the Western Front. Hence no Edward Thomas in this list, and no Rupert Brooke. Do you recognize those last two names?  How many poems written by all of the above can you remember – even their titles: Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, ‘Strange Meeting’ and ‘Futility’; Sassoon’s ‘The General’ and ‘Glory of Women’, perhaps; Rosenberg’s ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’ and ‘Returning We Hear the Larks’?

It’s a frequent complaint that these poets, and the poems they produced, are quite unrepresentative of the vast quantity of poetry written during and after the First World War, by women as well as men, by those who served in the Navy and the Royal Flying Corps as well as in the Army, and by those not fighting at all. Yet it is these few poets and these few poems that have generated what Max Hastings calls ‘the poets’ view of the war’, which he so deplores.

Nearly a year ago, I posted a blog entitled ‘What larks? Birdsong, the Great War and cultural memory’.  In it, I spoke of the Conference I am helping to organise for the English Association, which is to be held in Oxford in early September this year. Although its title is specifically ‘British Poetry of the First World War’, the keynote speakers, Edna Longley and Jay Winter, and the presenters of papers come from around the world, the United States to Japan, Ireland to India. And the range of poets to be discussed goes far beyond the trench poets I have named above, seminal though they are; so the debates and discussions at the Conference are likely to be enlivening. They will challenge (I am sure) some of the growing number of myths about the culpability of the war poets for the ‘myths’ that obscure the ‘truth’ about the Great War – its causes, course and consequences.

It seems strange to admit that, now perhaps more than ever, war poets need friends, and it is good that most of the groups, societies and associations linked to individual poets or to groups of poets will be well represented at the Conference: the War Poets Association, the Wilfred Owen Association, the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship, the Friends of the Dymock Poets, The Ivor Gurney Society, among others. Like all good conferences, this one won’t be all work and no play. One highlight will be a celebrity recital by the baritone Roderick Williams, with a programme of songs, many of which are settings of poems by the war poets. Another will be the Conference Dinner in the Great Hall of Wadham College, where the Guest of Honour will be Professor Jon Stallworthy, without question the doyen of war poetry studies.

Sassoon, Graves and Blunden, survivors all, published memoirs of their Great War experiences a decade or so after the Armistice. These, too, have led to some disturbing attacks. Here, for example, is a distinguished historian of war, Professor Jeremy Black of Exeter University, in The Great War and the Making of the Modern World (2011):

The standard images of the war, both literary and visual, have been ably criticized by military historians … who have pointed out the problems created by a very selective reading of a misleading literary legacy, notably of works published in 1928-30. Memoirs are often unreliable as history, but they are what the public and the media tend to rely on for their history because they offer triumph over adversity, as well as futility and pathos as themes, whereas straightforward scholarship is considered too dull. (p.220)

I have a list of adjectives to describe this paragraph: ‘condescending’, ‘peevish’, ‘dismissive’ will do for a start. More measured, but no less troubling, is the stance adopted by Professor David Reynolds, of Cambridge, in his recent book The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century (2013). He argues that “we need to think more critically about the now ‘iconic’ war poets” and claims it is “surely bizarre that more words should have been written about a score of war poets than about the 4 million non-white troops who fought for the Allies during the Great War (p.431).” I think it is surely bizarre to propose such a false antithesis. Nearly all the words written about the war poets have been written about the poems as literature, not as history, and have been written by poets, critics, teachers and scholars. If not enough has been written about the non-white troops who fought for the Allies, the responsibility for this lies, I would have thought, with those whose job is history, not poetry.

Much of David Reynolds’ book I have found illuminating. But I allowed myself a wry smile when, after reading how he believed the war poets had had too much influence on the way we now understand the war, Professor Reynolds ended the book first by citing Isaac Rosenberg, then by quoting - with approbation - Ivor Gurney and finally echoing - without attribution –Siegfried Sassoon (pp.433-435). Perhaps after all, historians, too, need the war poets.

Adrian Barlow

For full details of the English Association’s Conference, British Poetry of the First World War, including the complete programme and booking forms, click here.

[Illustration: Detail from a First World War memorial window in the Town Church, St Peter Port, Guernsey, Channel Islands. Photo © the author.

David Lodge: Lives in Writing

A new book by David Lodge is a cause for celebration. Lives in Writing is officially published today, but I’ve already read it. Arriving early for my train to Paris yesterday, I saw the book’s eye-catching cover in Foyles at St Pancras; started to read it before I had even checked in; nearly missed the train because I was already deep into Lodge’s essay on his friend Malcolm Bradbury, and carried on reading all the way to Gare du Nord. On the Metro, I only just remembered to get off at Place Monge in the Latin Quarter, and have since read happily through the night in the garret room on the sixth floor of the friendly hotel where I always stay, in the rue Lacépède.

This is a book of essays, all but one originally published in journals such as the New York Review of Books, the Guardian Review or the TLS. It’s one of Lodge’s great virtues that he has always been an academic who believes in writing to be understood and enjoyed by readers outside as well as within the small world of academic Eng. Lit. In this he acknowledges himself a Kermodian: when he quotes admiringly the late critic Frank Kermode’s assertion that criticism ‘can be quite humbly and sometimes even magnificently useful’, he immediately adds Kermode’s comment that it must also give pleasure. This describes Lodge’s own criticism beautifully.

‘These essays,’ writes Lodge, ‘variously describe, evaluate and exemplify different ways in which the lives of real people are represented in the written word.’ Describing, evaluating and exemplifying – three words precisely defining the function of criticism at any time and of the role of a teacher of literature at any level. David Lodge is, in the best sense, a teacher of literature, and Lives in Writing proves the truth of the old maxim: ‘we teach what we are’. One of the things that makes this book so engaging is that, running through its thirteen essays - on writers as various as Anthony Trollope, Muriel Spark and Terry Eagleton – there is a fugitive memoir of David Lodge himself. He too, like all but one of his subjects (the exception is Princess Diana) has had a ‘life in writing’; and the reader of Lives in Writing can reconstruct a narrative of Lodge’s own life, his career as an academic and preoccupations as a novelist from the way in which he features as more than the implied author of every one of these essays.

For instance, he begins his essay on John Boorman (originally a TLS review of the film maker’s memoir, Adventures of a Suburban Boy, 2003) by explaining it was Boorman’s film Excalibur that had given him the structural key to his own most successful novel, Small World. Deftly and affectionately he explains how Boorman’s childhood in the world of semi-detached suburbia was later re-imagined in his memorable film about a boy in wartime, Hope and Glory (1987). He does this affectionately both because he clearly admires Boorman greatly and because his own life, as it emerges in glimpses throughout these essays, could also be summed up as the adventures of a suburban boy: Boorman and Lodge both south Londoners born in the 1930s, kids at school during the war (Lodge’s own childhood memoir is called Out of the Shelter).

I was delighted, incidentally, to be reminded of Hope and Glory, a film I much enjoyed and whose screenplay I sometimes used in my own teaching. During the war young Bill who is the film’s hero – based on Boorman himself – is sent to Thames-side Shepperton, to stay with his grandparents. I still recall each frame of the episode in which grandfather (Ian Bannen) teaches Bill to punt and warns him, with great solemnity, ‘Never give up the punt for the pole, my boy: that’s a lesson for life.’ Not many people realise, but this is one of the finest punting scenes in the history of British cinema. There aren’t many, it’s true.

There is, inevitably, a valedictory tenor to several of these essays: Lodge's reflection on the public reaction to the death of Princess Di; his discussion of Trollope contemplating his own exit in his final novel, The Fixed Period; the desperate heroism of the playwright and diarist Simon Gray confronting so many terminal illnesses that the arrival of prostate cancer was, his consultant assured him, nothing to worry about; all of these together could have made for melancholy reading. But Lives in Writing is far from melancholy. It is a book not just of evaluation, but of re-valuation – an attempt to do justice to old friends and old friendship. David Lodge is not a man for settling scores.

Unlike Kingsley Amis. Lodge’s long essay on ‘The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of Kingsley Amis’ does more than justice to the writer who, with Lucky Jim, wrote the first of the new wave of campus novels, of which Lodge and Bradbury would become past masters. (Talking of which, I’m excluding CP Snow’s The Masters: this, though published in 1951, is set in 1937.) In a revisionary move characteristic of the book as a whole, Lodge describes how in one of his own early essays, ‘The Modern, the Contemporary, and the Importance of Being Amis’ he had admired Amis’s early work but had been relieved that One Fat Englishman had appeared too late for inclusion. Lodge had disliked the novel and its corpulent hero, Roger Micheldene, not realizing until much later in life that the eponymous anti-hero is partly a self-portrait and an exercise in self-disgust. Now he revisits the novel, reading it both more critically and more sympathetically. Finally, in a post-script to the essay he circles Amis one more time, balancing criticism and sympathy again, this time in the light of Philip Larkin’s embittered comments about Amis in the recently published Letters to Monica (ed. Anthony Thwaite, 2010). What interests Lodge here is the flow and ebb of Amis’s friendship with Larkin. As Lodge puts it,

There is always an element of rivalry in a friendship between artists in the same field, and Larkin found he had helped Amis to achieve a level of success and income neither of them had anticipated. (p.48)

Rivalry in friendship is the unexpected theme of the first essay I read yesterday. Everyone knows that Lodge and Bradbury were close friends and collaborators - ‘the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of English letters’ as Lodge suggests with wonderful self-mockery - and this essay is a testament to that enduring friendship. But with candour and regret, Lodge admits that there was also an element of rivalry, and he wonders how his friend must have reacted to seeing Lodge’s novels fare better than his own after the publisher Martin Secker took him on – at Bradbury’s own recommendation. ‘I think,’ he concludes,

we both wished to avoid getting too close to each other’s work, perhaps being influenced by it through knowing too much about it, and thus encouraging the people who insisted on pairing us together or confusing us with each other  … As Mikhail Bakhtin observed, all writers glance sideways at their peers as they write, and it was Malcolm whom I most often invoked as imagined reader and critic, to test the quality of the work.’ (p.186)

If there is a sense of loss running through this book, there is also a tremendous sense of gain. I closed the book at some absurd hour early this morning feeling I had just enjoyed a master-class in autobiographical critical appreciation. For what David Lodge says of Alan Bennett in ‘Alan Bennett’s Serial Autobiography’ describes exactly how I feel now, having been lucky enough to get my hands on Lives in Writing a day early:

Again and again in this book he demonstrates that almost anything that happens to a person can be interesting, moving and entertaining if you write about it well enough (p.94).

Adrian Barlow