BBC – Anglesey writer, 82, lands three-book deal

An 82-year-old teacher and theatre director has been given a three-book deal after writing her first novel.

The Great Lie, the start of Myrrha Stanford-Smith’s trilogy, is a fictional look at William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe’s rivalry.

The Brighton-born grandmother from Anglesey said she was gobsmacked to be offered the book agreement.

She decided to seek a deal after positive feedback to a children’s story she sent to BBC Radio Wales.

She said she was unprepared for the reaction from publishers Honno, however.

“I had to put the phone down and ring them back as I was so taken aback by the whole thing,” she said.

Good for her. What a hoot!

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Sequoia National Park, via

Rock art in the Tassili massif of Central Sahara

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Who was she? The credits say “Mulatto ex-slave in her house near Greensboro, Alabama, May 1941”, and I’m not sure why they have told us that she is mulatto, but then this “colorism” business that still grips and poisons didn’t come breeding alone out of the earth, more like it was cultivated, nurtured with far more attention and care than the lives it crushed underneath as if they were the weeds.

Did she make the quilts? Crabbed and scarred hands pulling the threaded needle through scraps of this and that, I’ve seen these old women (and young) place each piece with meaning, and some with none at all beyond that the shape or the colors fit. No bright hues here in the photo that became a work of art as soon as she sat her old bones down in the rocking chair and competed for focal point with the bright, insulating newspapers with the little blond boy front and off-center.

Who put them there? Did she paste them one on top of the other whenever she got some to keep out the cold that was always finding a new way in, is that how it works? or did she or someone spruce up the walls for the photo shoot and whose idea was that, anyway?

She’s looking to the side or maybe just not at the camera, almost not there except that of course she is, she is, but it reminds me of that look we get sometimes when we’re in a situation that we don’t want to be in but have to endure for whatever reason, maybe because of a power that might have nothing to do with us or little for us that decides for us whether we want whatever they are offering or not.

I don’t know but did you notice the dingy patch up on the wall toward the ceiling? Maybe it couldn’t be reached or paper ran out or time like when someone comes to the door when you are not quite ready to let them in. But sometimes they come in anyway.

She is beautiful and as art it works, this mulatto woman who was an ex-slave sitting in her bedroom and sitting room with the bright new contrast to her old wood slat bed and old quilts and old body and old chair – oh,  is that dingy patch on the wall maybe a small, stubborn rebellion? – a picture taken in 1941 when she had a designation and a color but apparently still no name, it’s a shame I can’t just enjoy it, I wanted to do that, but I can’t help it I just have questions, questions, questions.

Like – in this carefully cleaned and appointed room, why is there a padlock sitting on the empty chair?

That’s my plan, though I am not under any illusions that it will be easy. Good news des not always jump into your face like bad does. Necessary, though, for me. Blogging about politics or news events is often, if not depressing is at least um… well, depressing. In the other meaning. Not particularly buoyant to the spirits, I guess.

So I figure that if at either end of the writing day I deliberately turn my mind to looking up, seeking out the positive, being downright sappy or woowoo if that’s what it takes, it’ll help to mitigate whatever other effects events have left behind.

Now when I sat down to write this I didn’t have anything positive in mind – until I reread the first five words: wake up in the morning.

Well, there we go – it’s a start, yeah? Even if it’s the evening or afternoon, waking up at all, even to dreadful circumstances, is a good beginning.

Or can be. I know some would rather not wake up at all if what is ahead is what they’ve left behind, but I guess I’m a subscriber to the “where there is life there is hope” school of thought. Easy indeed for me to say, never having faced an unimaginably bad day.

Then again, what is “unimaginably bad” is relative, I suspect. Some of my (thankfully past) days would send others completely around the bend.

Anyway, for me, today, waking up this morning into my imperfect and sometimes very annoying life is my positive, hopeful thing of the start of the morning. Some of what happens throughout the rest of the day is beyond my control; most everything else is up to me.

There. Kinda scary but still positive, no?