writing – Maddie Grigg

Book launch – save the date!

I’m delighted to announce I’ll be launching Plashy Fen on Saturday 10 October at Washingpool Farm Shop, Bridport, from 11am-12 noon.

It’s a particularly appropriate venue because one of the key locations in my new novel is a village farm shop, run by Derek and Maggie Galpin.

Like the Holland family who run Washingpool, my fictional couple started the business years ago, way before farm shops were a ‘thing’ and farm-to-plate food became fashionable.

Derek and Maggie were far ahead of the curve and worked as hard as a pair of oxen to get where they are now.

Things happen at the farm shop in Plashy Fen, an imagined Dorset village overlooking the sea.

A jar of olives get spilt on the parish council welcome pack that has been put on the counter. And a couple of hoity-toity incomers’ children scrump the apples on display, much to the annoyance of Derek’s sister, Lindy, who works there part-time.

Lindy is the glue that holds the disparate yet desperately connected village together.

She works at the farm shop part time, in between looking after grandchildren and studying for a back-to-nursing course.

The Holland family started their business in 1971, when Lindy would have been still at primary school.

When I first arrived in Bridport as a young reporter back in the early 80s, I remember the Washingpool market stall and shop in West Street.

The business has grown dramatically. Now, it’s an award-winning farm shop on the outskirts of town, with a restaurant, two holiday cottages and a caravan and motorhome site, set on a 80-acre working farm produging its own Devon Ruby Red beef, eggs and an array of fruit, vegetables, flowers and potatoes.

I’m looking forward to seeing you if you can make it on 10 October. If you’ve already bought a book (it comes out on 29 September), I’ll be happy to sign it but I will have copies available.

And just a thought, if you were thinking of coming along, you could book in for lunch…

All the best.

Maddie x

Why Plashy Fen?

The title of my new novel, Plashy Fen, came to me in the middle of the night a few years ago.

I wasn’t happy with the working title I’d given it, as who the hell did I think I was, calling it Dylan’s Wake, in a nod to the author of the wonderful Under Milk Wood, which is one of my favourite books.

And anyway, early beta readers told me they thought it was going to be about the funeral party of someone called Dylan.

I’ve been writing a column for The People’s Friend for over a decade now, after the then editor emailed me out of the blue telling me she’d seen my blog, The World From My Window, and would I like to write for the magazine?

She said (and it’s etched in my mind): ‘I think you might just be the writer we’ve been looking for! I like your ability to write with humour about the minutiae of daily life, but with a touch of emotional depth, too.’

So I introduced my village to Friend readers as Lush Places, named after the fictional newspaper column by the hapless and fictional nature writer William Boot, who, through a case of mistaken identity, becomes a war correspondent for The Daily Beast.

Boot is the main character in Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, which was published in 1938. It’s dated now and very politically incorrect but I loved the juxtaposition of a naïve, gentle writer in the cut-and-thrust world of horrid Fleet Street hacks out to make a name for themselves in a forgotten corner of the world.

I was redrafting my latest novel about Lush Places’s seaside sibling when the new village’s name – and book title – came to me during the early hours of the morning.

There is a line in one of Boot’s nature columns – ‘feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole’ – which has come to signify an affected style when it comes to nature writing.

I guess the the term plashy fen must have stuck with me. It’s become a bit of a personal joke and serves the purpose of making me check my prose style every now to make sure I’m not coming across as a complete jerk.

So that’s the story of how Plashy Fen got its name.

But the characters, well, they’re a different story…

Finding my bookish self

I’ve been out of the blogging loop lately, focusing on a writing project which is going to keep me busy for the next couple of years.

However, there is lots going on in the world (earthquake, heatwave, violent death and political farce) but I’m choosing not to obsess about these subjects and am trying (not very successfully) to stop doomscrolling on Facebook and Instagram, which is a complete waste of time and just feeds massive egos and conspiracy theories and lines the pockets of the megarich.

And news websites and a constant diet of updates and cliches are leaving me cold.

The reading is going well, but not in terms of me writing reviews. I’ve had some real duds in recent months, which has been incredibly disappointing.

I had high hopes for The Calamity Club (2026), by Kathryn Stockett, the author of The Help (2009), but it wasn’t for me. I gave it two stars out of five.

I didn’t fare much better with Under Story. I devoured an earlier Chloe Benjamin novel, The Immortalists (2018), but really struggled with this new book, which comes out later in the year.

The very science-based science fiction of Under Story is sweeping in its ambition. Set in the hostile, surreal world of Antarctica, it’s essentially a love story with two central protagonists who take their time to reconnect.

It’s beautifully written but moves forward at too slow a pace for me. I gave it three stars.

Having encountered a reader’s block with new novels other people seem to adore, I had a bit of a book break and then started reading narrative nonfiction, if nothing else but to help with the current writing project, to see how it’s done when done well.

The last bit of nonfiction I read was probably The Salt Path (2018), billed as memoir, nature and travel writing and definitely not fiction. I gave up after two chapters because I liked neither the style nor the whining presence of the author, who irritated me from the start. Well, we all know how that book panned out. Maybe I am more discerning than I think.

I’ve done a bit of research and have started giving nonfiction another go. Mixed results but I completely fell in love with the Bruce Chatwin’s groundbreaking travel writing classic, In Patagonia (1977).

Similarly, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (2023) by David Grann is unputdownable, telling the true story of what happened when a naval vessel hit rocks off the South American coast in 1740. Piecing together the story through solid historical research and strong primary sources, Grann has produced a knockout of a book. I was hooked by it.

After failing to ‘get’ an award-winning memoir that had been recommended to me (too highbrow and about a wealthy family I didn’t care much about), I was delighted to then plunge into Great Uncle Harry: A Tale of War and Empire (2024) by Michael Palin, a writer who takes a family story and turns it into a search for answers in this compelling biography, travelogue and history book. Palin is such an empathetic and kind sort of a chap and his writing reflects his humanity.

I’m now reading two novels: A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) by Amor Towles (my day book) and the beautiful There Are Rivers In The Sky by Elif Shafak (2024), which I turn to at night because I have a back-lit Kindle so I don’t disturb Mr Grigg when he’s trying to sleep.

So, you can see I haven’t been completely idle in this ennui-inducing heatwave, which is turning us all into gibbering wrecks.

More from me later in the week, I think. In the meantime, if you have any narrative nonfiction recommendations, I’m all ears.

That’s about it.

Love, Maddie x

Today is World Poetry Day

Years ago, I was shortlisted for a poem in the internationally-acclaimed Bridport Prize competition.

To be honest, it wasn’t very good but it was a pleasing accomplishment because poems aren’t really my thing. This is probably because, despite studying them quite closely, I find them tricky to analyse, decipher and I always get a bit flustered with the rules.

It’s silly really, because I love the poetry in many song lyrics – I’m thinking Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Ian Dury. I adore those lines in National Express by the Divine Comedy about the jolly hostess and her large behind…

Here’s one of my favourite Joni Mitchell numbers.

If that isn’t poetry, I don’t know what is.

I think perhaps it’s because I’ve studied poetry closely for a creative writing degree that it’s reinforced my natural – and lazy -resistance to anything that requires me to think rather than just imbibe through natural osmosis.

So I need to cast off the hang-ups and fear of getting it wrong and just enjoy poetry for its lyricism, rhythm, cadence and imagery. I should just go with the flow and embrace the sheer joy and beauty in hearing or reading a great poem.

So, on World Poetry Day, tell me – what are your favourite poems?

I like the Spike Milligan one about the worm:

Today I saw a little worm, wriggling on his belly. Perhaps he’d like to come inside and see what’s on the telly.

I like The Voice by Thomas Hardy. I like anything written by Christina Rossetti. I like this one by William Butler Yates:

He wishes for the cloths of heaven

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

But come to think of it, my favourite poem is Ithaka by Greek poet C P Cavafy. I saw somewhere that it was read at Jackie Kennedy’s funeral in May 1994.

Here it is read by the wonderful Sean Connery with music by Greece’s own Vangelis. Cheesy but profound.