THE OLDER I GET, THE MORE I PREFER ISOLATION

As I roll happily into my seventies, I see isolation as necessary for my well-being – and as something that enhances my ability to write.

Yes, yes, Janet and I love living together and spend relatively little time apart. We have four daughters and a son, ten grandsons. We have money enough to pay the bills and to indulge our obsession with West Bromwich Albion at home and, as often as possible, away.

I don’t mean isolation is necessary in a physical sense, although pottering about doing jobs on our smallholding, looking after hens, pigs, woodland and a four-acre field can mean spending hours alone in whatever the weather might throw at us.

I don’t mean isolation from the news either. I want to know about Palestine, Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen, what’s happening with the state of the planet. I want to know what the ‘leaders’ of the world are saying, even though I understand they’re just performers on a stage, mostly anxious to protect their own power. The reality of the misery of the victims of their actions or in-action is of little consequence to them, unless it causes their wealth to be de-stabilised. The world is as mad as it always was.

Politically, the older I get, the more radical I get, the more intolerant I get of the lies or half-truths (the half that suits them) politicians tell as a daily routine.

No, the isolation I’m interested in is the healthy isolation of being a writer. With a very few exceptions, I have no friends who write – anything, let alone poetry, or something close to it – and seek out none. It’s not a case of banishing people to the fringes of life as it rolls along, just an increased need to write free from the influence and society of others.

Yes, there are occasional, welcome email conversations that are a result of what is published here, or what others publish on their blogs, but these days that’s about the limit of it.

Years ago, when Janet and I had the responsibility of the iota poetry quarterly and Ragged Raven Press, which published collections and anthologies, I was happy being sociable, going to readings, open mics, talking poetry with anybody and everybody. I don’t think it restricted or enhanced my own writing to any great degree. Life was just different. I worked full-time, which involved writing every day, travelling, socialising, working in groups. It provided plenty of material for poetry – and it earned us a living.

Now, however, not having those responsibilities means none of that is required – and in turn that means a different type of life, necessarily less sociable. And because writing is what I choose to do, it means more time to explore it in a new way. I stream-write more, have at the same time more doubt about and more confidence in what I’m trying to do. Perhaps I forgive myself errors a little more easily than in the past, when so much was thrown away. I try to write something that uses words in a different way to how I used them in the past. I’m happy to abandon some things as unfinished and leave them to be available to anyone who wants to read them. And some things, inevitably, overlap with the way I used to write, are maybe tighter, more controlled and conventional.

I haven’t sent anything off to publishers of magazines or collections for years because, emotionally, I don’t need the approval or validation it brings. I don’t want a feeling of belonging. If anyone were to publish a collection of my work, I would also feel the need to help them by getting back in the social whirl in order to help sell it – and I doubt I could do that, so I don’t waste people’s time by sending work to them. It is also true that as we get older, with a few exceptions, we become less marketable. Perhaps make ourselves less marketable.

I wrote a novel a couple of years ago that I shelved, partly because I had no confidence in anyone wanting to publish it, and partly because it dealt with a life that began in the marshlands of north-western Ukraine – as the war there began a few months after it was written, it felt the wrong time to be peddling it about. Now time has passed and I have, for the sake of having made the effort, I suppose, sent it to a couple of agents. One has rejected it, one has said if I don’t hear back in a certain time frame, take it that they don’t want it. It’s the way it is. Agents need to take their 15-20% of a reasonable advance or it’s not worth their while. Literary merit isn’t that relevant if you’re trying to make money. You might invest in a young writer who shows promise, but an old writer who doesn’t do a great deal of social media? Why would you?

I wrote a second novel in seven weeks between September and early November, have tinkered with it, a couple of people have seen it and had their say, Janet has done some fine editing work on it, while at the same time writing her own, entirely different and probably much more marketable novel. And so what do I do with this one? Send it out? Maybe. Probably not. Is it any good? Maybe. Maybe not. Does it matter?

The point of this egotistical ramble is to say that isolation, as a writer at least, as we get older is perfectly normal – and brings with it so many possibilities. I don’t write every day, I certainly wouldn’t paint every day even though I enjoy it, because there’s too much ordinary living to be done, but at the same time the lessening of external commitments means there is more time to be solitary, to explore thought without the chaos of other voices, and if it works out that way, to explore writing for the sake of what it might bring out from the recesses of my strange brain.

In the end it’s what I do, have done since I was a teenager in the 60s and at the turn of the 70s. And as long as I am left alone to do it, I can think of no better way of responding to the madness of the world, even though as we all know, it makes precious little difference.

Thank you. Enough. More than enough.