Tuesday 1 March 2011

The Project

And so I start yet another blog. I had thought of just keeping a private journal but actually putting this on line increases its impact.
I have a sabbatical coming up in the first semester of next academic year. I shall be working on my novel Potatoes in Spring which gives a slightly different perspective on the Holocaust. It is three stories in one:
- the story of a young German Jewess who came to England only a few days after she knew she was Jewish
- the story of the friends she left behind
- the story of how her best friend’s family tried to help her grandmother.
I have a most extraordinary resource: the letters written between 1941 and 1943 of some early teen girls whose friend disappeared suddenly.
I’ve actually written 46,000 words of the novel. I’m now at a stage where I can’t take it any further forward until I do some more research.
I’ve written a to-do list. I need to:
apply for funding
visit the Imperial War Museums
visit the Caen Memorial
start a journal (which is what I’m doing right now)
contact Stuttgart
find out about evacuation during the war
find out about Michael Hall school
reshape novel – and I must also reread it.
contact schools
Starting this has felt good.

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