I have been attending Word Festival for few years in a row.
Still vividly remember that one afternoon in May 2007,
I was singing the childhood lullabies in the garden
when Tuckchee and Joan joined and chatted away.

The topic is on how fast the Word Festival tickets sold out.
It seemed Joan had a thick bunch of tickets in her wallets, whereas Tuckchee was jokingly complaining about how he was always late to the ticket booking.

That was literally the first time Word Festival ever came across my mind, despite the fact it had been held every May with a big displaying tent in the centre of the campus.
Later that year, the sophisticated and sweet Joan passed away.
Since then, I think I have never missed the Word festival ever since.
Participating the WORD festival reminds me Joan spirit
which is always so energetic, serene and bright.
Word Festival becomes a Joan memorial annually to me.

I remember in May 2008, I bought tickets to Dr. Janet Todd's book talk.
She was a professor in our school of literature with the specialty of ancient manuscripts analysis.
I was facinated by her project of great Jane Austen.
Therefore, how could i miss such a special opportunity to chase after a star (in my mind anyway).



janet todd.jpg

I didn't get the time to buy her Cambridge study of Jane Austen but I managed to purchase her latest production, The Death and the Maidens.
She was just so lovely to me, and I immediately fell in love with her work, her critical academy and her drive in career.

Even though it was quite a surprise to know she wasn't a pleasant customer at the in-campus bookshop (Blackwell), according to Dr. P.R. Dong's wife.
At the end, she was assigned honourably as president of College in Cambridge University and left me little fan far far behind.

I really couldn't recall what did I do in Word 9 last year, apart from sit-in John Boyne speech.
He is the author of The Boy in Stripe Pajama which was adopted into big screen and made his name a hosuehold fame in the world.
Again, too busy and too occupied otherwise before the event,
I forgot to buy his book beforehand.
I only managed to purchase his latest product - The House of Special Purposes on set.
That was a gift for Amanda, since I know how much she enjoys a good read.
Other than that, i only can recall myself staying in the other two days of the event.



John Boyne.jpg


This year, I became super wild.
In terms of the critical calendar i am keeping up, I know myself behaved very irrational.
Having the deadline only few steps apart (June2010),
I went crazy addicted to the smell of books, the patterns of words and the wisdom of the author.

This year I bought so many books
(this reflects on my old habits of book collection from I was a graduate student in Taiwan)


Word 10.jpg




I took two Haiku (japanese poetry incorporating inspired paintings): one for me, one for Andrew
one book of Angela's Ashes signed by the aunt Angie for Amanda's birthday
one poetry for myself - The Book of The Angel
and one book, Clara, by Janice Gallaway.
Before buying ticket to her speech, i googled her production list and the reviews.
Before getting into her speech, I didn't think I would be madly impressed by her attitude and personality.
Towards the end, I bought her previous work after my prolonged consideration and hesitation
between the choices of her recent or previous works.


Clara.jpg




She is originally from Dundee and her strong accent seriously reminds me Natalya (SGI Northern Light Young Women HQ leader).
Her attitude of laughing at bitter life to get over the sorrow was remarkable.
The difficult childhood definitely constructs her strong but interesting, humourous character.
Even myself is not a publish writer, I was so encouraged and inspired by her speech.
She said, "just Write! What are you Waiting For".

Also, this year we are very honoured to have three school scholars contributing their intelligence into the Scottish Opera production 15:Five.
Not only was it performed in the infamous ElephenStone Building, it is my very first opera in life.
In total there were 5 stories and each took 15 minutes.
From the first story of Japanese girl got pregnant from a traditional family and blamed the priest,
through the second story of a disturbed young mother couldn't get rid of her nightmares, and others, to the latest Jewish story in second World War,
I cried my eyes out and finishd all my tissues before reaching the interval break.
It was remarkable. I am loving it.





Scottish Mini Opera.jpg





I so so enjoy this type of literature events.
Thanks to Alan Spence, the founder of Word Festival.
Can I say that I was like a greedy bee with eyes big wide open flying around the flowers.
Well, I definitely was!!



The Guardian, Janice Galloway Thursday 20 June 2002 10.54 BST

Robert, 11th week of marriage, 1840: A quiet week which went by withcomposing and much loving and kissing. My wife is love, kindness andunpretentiousness itself. My settings of the Kerner poems is ready;they gave dear Clara pleasure as well as pain, since she must purchasemy love so often with silence and invisibility. Well, that's the way itgoes in marriages of artists! If they love each other, that's goodenough...

Why write a novel about a real person? Why indeed,especially when that person did not really say very much? Clara WieckSchumann, quite certainly the finest virtuoso pianist of the 19thcentury, wasn't much of a talker. But then again, she was never meantto be.

Clara was born in Leipzig in 1819, two years after thedeath of Jane Austen and the completion of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,and barely four years after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo.

Evenbefore her birth, her father, Friedrich Wieck, a tenaciously self-mademan and arguably the fastest, most furious piano teacher in Saxony, haddecided on his daughter's path and could see her destiny with the"clarity" that the name settled upon her was intended to show.

Hisdaughter, he decided, would become a prodigy, one whose talent andfilial loyalty would make his name and fortune by becoming "the equalof Moscheles, the finest pianist yet living". After the death of hisfirstborn, after his own struggle towards music from a family that hadlittle sympathy with such a calling, this child would be hisbrightness, his light.

It seems he never asked her what shefelt about this. From what I can fathom from exhaustive research, noone did. Given the ability that soon evidenced itself in her fingers,it was taken for granted - and by Clara most of all - that Wieck's planfor his daughter was blessed.

And so it was. Whatever was amissthat made the little girl literally speechless until the age of four(and what novelist could resist wondering what that might be?), somethings were solidly in place: a father with an iron sense of purpose,an example of maternal fortitude (that her mother, Marianne Tromlitz,had the nerve to leave such a husband, and that she played the pianoprofessionally herself seems a powerful influence) and sound; endless,non-verbal, sound.

In a childhood she called "fortunate", whenmost girls her age were being taught how to make themselves desirablein the marriage market, Clara was afforded the best piano teacher herfather could muster. In addition, he bartered lessons in theory,composition, harmony, orchestration and languages (solely those shewould need for touring: no stuffy Latin or Greek, and certainly nothingto facilitate the consumption of literature). He also began a diary forher, written in Clara's voice, etching in his own hand the legend: "Iwill never be able to repay Father for everything he has done for me."

Allher life, Clara Schumann, the rave-review prodigy of Prague, Vienna,Dresden, St Petersburg and Berlin, the mature performance equal ofThalberg, Rubenstein and Liszt, the wife and champion of RobertSchumann and mother of his eight children, the best friend JohannesBrahms ever had, never threw over this training in silence, stillness,duty.

While her father beat her brothers, or cruelly denigratedher choice of marriage partner, or deliberately tried to wreck herprofessional reputation rather than let go his control; while herhusband deteriorated into alcoholic stupors, fits of suicidaldepression or the torturing betrayals of full-blown mania; while herdearest friends died young and her body churned through relentless,morale-debilitating pregnancies, she largely kept her own counsel. Asexpected.

Who complains that a musician lacks the capacity fortete-a-tete if they manage the notes? If those notes, in turn,illuminate, entertain or educate without the assistance of language?Words, it is satisfactorily agreed, are not a musician's concern.

Certainlythere were letters, diaries - miles of them. Despite her aversion toconversational exchange, Clara certainly wrote a great deal. Touringextensively as principal breadwinner for her family, she wrote to thosewho kept her company far from home and to those who opened therequisite doors to enable further touring. She wrote to her husband andchildren, to the housekeeper who kept her household together in herabsence, to those she admired and her own fervent admirers, and screedsto friends and fellow-professionals Pauline Garcia-Viardot, FelixMendelssohn and Jenny Lind.

She also recorded contracts and thecontent of her programmes and rehearsal schedules, itineraries for herfrequent tours, packing lists and opinions as to the stupidity ofWagner's entire oeuvre. Famously, she also kept a diary of herrelationship in tandem with her husband for the first four years oftheir marriage. Lots of ink, lots of detail - and not really very muchat all.

Even reading her written words, the silences areunavoidable, the white, unspoken space between the lines seeming togrow wider with each passing year, each hellish domestic crisis.Discover Robert's "corrections" to her entries scribbled like teachers'comments in their shared diary, discover her ruthless cheerfulness inpraising his work when he is at his least healthy, his least confident,discover her relief when a suspected fresh pregnancy proves false, andit's not hard to see why.

Certainly she had a career to dealwith, fingers to keep in trim, ways to secure a contract that Robertwould not discover and fall sick in time to sabotage. But she also hadthat most old-fashioned of female priorities, love, to attend to: thedemands of family she could not turn aside from, and would not, despitethe odd flash of resentment, have wished to.

Certainly I hadheard snippets of Clara's career told in the traditional way: theglittering career, the superbly histrionic story of her rabid fatherand haunted husband, the dramatic backdrop of the Dresden uprisings andthe growth of pianist-as-cult in the 19th century with luminousshow-stoppers such as Liszt and Chopin, warty little Wagner andgolden-boy Brahms studding the field.

But the more I read aboutClara, the more I listened to the music she herself, infrequently,composed, the more it was clear these supposedly "big stories" were thesideshow. A grand and highly coloured sideshow certainly, but not thepulse at the heart of this life - indeed anyone's life - at all.

Nextto her dignity, her quiet sense of duty and care (the word most oftenused of her playing was "noble"), the conquering artistic triumphs andcrowd-drawing celebrity that Clara's father or indeed Liszt, desired,showed only as competitions, masculine obsessions of who's strongest,who's biggest, who wins. History works against the accomplishments ofmost of us that way, and against the truer accomplishments andpriorities of women especially.

Women with families prioritisedifferently, although they know their achievement will judged asharshly as a man's. And in this, writing about Clara was not merelywriting about Clara at all. It was writing about the process ofcreativity from another perspective - the female creator's perspective.

The most interesting aspect of Clara to write about - indeed ofRobert too - became the unsaids, the silences raddling the life. Theplace, in other words, where she joins the rest of us in dealing withthe everyday moral, financial and emotional struggles we call "gettingby". In this way she is the model of how a woman can live life servingher friends and families and also serve her own talents and ambitions.

Genius and what it might be is one thing, but it seems to me nothing much at all if it is separate from all that is human.

Clara,then, the good domestic woman, was what thrilled me. Her silences andher piano-playing were survival tools - she made her utterances betweenthem. The device of fiction is what permits silence to speak, to findthe edges of a psychology and bring it not only into being, butentirely close to home.

· Clara by Janice Galloway is published by Cape, priced £10.99