Hi y'all.
Here's to you some inspirations 'On History and Writing'. Enjoy.
If you have any questions or comments, please email me.
Until next time - Majken xx
Thank you, Valerie!
In the late 1940s, a British woman invented the disposable nappy. Valerie Hunter Gordon was her name, she was a mother of three and - not least - tired of washing her children’s used cloth diapers (add to this picture: there were no washing machines back then!) “It seemed extraordinary that it hadn’t been done before”, she says in this video. To her, it was a no-brainer. She sat down at her mother’s sewing machine, made a solid prototype, and started producing piles of hometown nappies. She even used the fabric from parachutes, which was easy to get hold of in the sparse after-war years, and no need to say that the nappy soon became very popular among her fellow mums. Gordon sold her product for 5 shillings each and noticed an immense potential. 1948 she patented the idea and called it ‘the Paddi’. The following year, it went into production, and it is - probably - her achievement that the all-in-one disposable nappy exists today. Shout out to Valerie!
Memory Box
Going through a time of war is brutal, dangerous and scary. However, it’s also a situation where people have a daily existence. Lovers get together and are separated again; you go to fun parties, you go to boring parties, you drink a cup of coffee, the milk runs sour, and you need to get a fresh one. In the movie “Memory Box”, we see Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War in the 1980s. However, we see it through the lens of a young teenage woman. Actually, it’s the woman’s daughter who - secretly - runs through her mother’s old diaries and tapes in the present time, and we, the audience, follow the ‘project’ from the first row. As the daughter’s mother hasn’t told her very much about the time of war, this youngster is naturally curious to know some more. And about her mother, too. Flipping through the pages, she finds a story of her mother’s teenage love, who suddenly disappeared. She hears about the times when the whole family had to stay in the basement for days, hiding from bombings and shootings. Also, the diaries reveal a tragic family secret that has to do with the death of the mother’s father.
How do you talk about war? How do you share it with the next generations? I know from my own grandfather that it can be a very difficult subject to open up about, however, diaries, personal stories, and movies like “Memory Box” are good inspirations.
The movie is - most probably - available here: Blockbuster, Viaplay, Amazon Video, Google Play. If you live in Denmark, you can watch it on ‘Filmstriben’ (for free).
Writing rituals - some like it noisy, others like it silent
So, do the two writers, the Turkish-British Elif Shafak and the South Korean-American Min Jin Lee, have a specific ritual or a specific place they need to be when they write? Yup, they certainly do, and their rituals are quite different, this interview reveals.
When Shafak writes, it has to be noisy. “I find silence intimidating,” she explains, which is why you’ll find her working in crowded spaces such as restaurants, train stations, airports, etc. Also, she loves listening to music with high energy, such as heavy metal, industrial metal or death metal. “I can listen to the same song on repeat, maybe 70 or 80 times,” she says, “and that transports me into another zone, and that’s how I write."
Lee is quite the opposite. When she first started writing fiction, she read all the newspapers before sitting down and working. But it didn’t help her. She noticed that her fiction was “just dreadful”, as she puts it, because, she thinks, it was so troubled by the world.
Then she read somewhere that the American author, Willa Cather, had a ritual where she read a chapter of the Bible before writing. “I thought that her prose was so crisp and had such sturdiness, there was a kind of strength to her words and sentences, and I thought, yeah, I wanna try that, why not?” So Lee got herself a Bible and read it one chapter at a time as a daily ritual. She has now read the Bible straight through seven times.
In the show, Shafak and Lee also share their view on how it is to be a female writer in a male-dominated business (it’s often males who are in the power of the (little) money that is distributed to writers) and how writing is looked at these days: on one side the writing craft is seen as unimportant (for instance many writers get a meagre pay for their work) and on the other side the words of - especially some - writers means so much that they are threatened on their lives.
Min Jin Lee: a South Korean-American author wrote two novels, Free food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a multi-generational saga following the story of a Korean family in Japan * is currently working on her third novel, American Hagwon.
Elif Shafak: a Turkish-British writer has written 19 books, most of them novels, which have been translated into 55 languages is a Booker prize finalist her most recent novel - The Island of Missing Trees - tells the forbidden love story between a Greek Cypriot man and a Turkish Cypriot woman.
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‘On History and Writing’ is a blog post from me to you in which I share historically rooted real-life stories from around the world - told in exciting and creative ways - along with thoughts that circle the creative process of writing non-fiction texts. I post an email once every fortnight. If you're not already a subscriber, you are welcome to join the list. Thanks for reading! Majken xx
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