Book covers, and letting go.
‘Don’t go to Belchite at night,’ Manolo our neighbour says, ‘there are voices.’
It’s easy to believe there might be. Belchite is a monument to the Spanish Civil War, a village left in ruins after it was taken first by the Republicans in 1937 and then by Franco’s troops in 1938. By the end, in a deadly game of cat and mouse, any building still standing was pulverised as the Nationalists troops moved from house to house hunting down the last Republicans.
For a long time after the war the impoverished villagers went on living among the ruins, which Franco declared should be left as a monument ‘de victoria nacional’ and ‘Red barbarousness’. A new village was built alongside the old, but some residents refused to leave their old homes.
I didn’t know about Belchite except as a name in the history of the Civil War. It was only when my third novel, Albi, was published that somebody told me the haunting cover photo had been taken there. I’d asked, of course, but that’s the thing about book covers – the publisher rarely knows much about how they were put together.
It turns out Belchite is only a few hours away from the remote village where we have a house. So a month after Albi was published my husband Nick and I set off to see for ourselves.
Spain is a wonderfully earthy place and so are its guided tours. We march round the ruins with our guide Nati and a group of Spanish, most of them young. One of the girls mentions that her great grandfather came from here and Nati breaks off her spiel to discuss whereabouts he might have lived. We move off again, past the group of men tossing a section of mud-brick wall (fibreglass, it turns out – they are making a film), under a stormy sky that threatens rain.
The s
un is fitfully hot, poppies bob their scarlet heads in the meadows beyond the perimeter fence, and it’s hard to take in the enormity of what happened in this place: in less than two years nearly 5,000 people lost their lives here. It was late August and extremely hot when the Republicans drove out the Nationalists in 1937. The bodies had to be hurriedly buried in a mass grave. A year later when the Nationalists took it back more than 2,400 people were taken prisoner, many of them dying later in the labour camps.
Nati barks this information through her microphone and leads the way towards a church which looks as if it might be the one on my book cover. Nick tells her why we are here and gives her a bookmark. She holds it up in front of her – is it here? Yes, it’s here. Off we go in pursuit but no, when we get up close the shell of the church is similar but the house wall in the foreground doesn’t fit with the photo.
No problem, Nati declares, there are still two churches to go, and a convent.
The photo, of course, might be from many years ago, before the ruins subsided quite so much. It might even be a digital reconstruction of different photos. By now I am handing out bookmarks with gay abandon and everyone is joining in the debate in lively Spanish, all reverence gone. We go round the village sizing up the ruins and arguing until we get to the last church, and there it is: wall and window in the foreground with an old iron bracket that might have been for a sign, and in the background the blind façade of the church.
So that’s all right then, we’ve found it, and Nati can go back to her spiel. We become reverential again, because high on a ledge of the ruined tower of the church an un-exploded shell is visible, still lodged in the stone. History is shockingly real at moments like this and for me it is a doubly profound moment. I have borrowed these people’s history. Have I done it justice?
As for my book cover, the buildings of Belchite are only half of it. I will never know the identity of the ghostly child whose face hovers in the background and that is as it should be. We write our stories and someone else’s history becomes our own, but once out in the public arena our stories no longer belong to us. They belong to the reader.
Hilary Shepherd has lived most of her adult life in Wales, farming and making oak windows and kitchens, but during the 70s and 80s she and her family lived in Ghana and in the Sudan, which provided the material for her first two novels (Animated Baggage and In A Foreign Country)
In 2001, with her second husband Nick, she started spending time in Spain, in a remote village in southern Aragon. This is an area where the resistance fighters known as the maquis hid out in the mountains after the Civil War, until well into the 50s, and there are many stories in the village about living caught between the maquis and the hated Guardia Civil. Thinking about what it must have been like was the starting point for her third novel, ‘Albi’ (published April 2018).
If you intend to ask your authors to give talks, hold creative writing workshops, hold panels on various aspects of writing or genres, or invite publishers to put on an appearance for talks or editor sessions (always a good move and the authors will thank you!), make sure there are enough rooms. Most importantly, make sure the actual room/hall you’ll be holding the book fair in is large enough. You’ll need a fairly spacious area because you’ll be inviting lots of authors to participate… won’t you!?
Judith Barrow has lived in Pembrokeshire for nearly forty years. She is the author of five novels, and has published poetry and short fiction, winning several poetry competitions, as well as writing three children’s books and a play performed at the Dylan Thomas Centre. Judith grew up in the Pennines, has degrees in literature and creative writing and makes regular appearances at literary festivals.
Ar Awst 1af ymddangosodd clasur Cymraeg diweddaraf Honno, sef argraffiad newydd o’r nofel 
Mae Rosanne Reeves, yn un o aelodau sylfaen Honno, Golygydd y Clasuron Honno, ac awdur Dwy Gymraes, Dwy Gymru: Hanes Bywyd a Gwaith Gwyneth Vaughan a Sara Maria Saunders; Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 2014 . / Rosanne Reeves, is one of Honno’s founding members, Editor of the Clasuron Honno, and author of Dwy Gymraes, Dwy Gymru: Hanes Bywyd a Gwaith Gwyneth Vaughan a Sara Maria Saunders; Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 2014 .
How long have you been working at Honno?
Now, sixteen years later, my feminism is more often expressed in the petitions I share on social media than in my appearance, but reading feminist and women’s literature published by the presses I discovered at Silver Moon has remained a constant. I have also discovered a few more along the way including Honno Welsh Women’s Press when I moved to Wales. During a recent discussion hosted by The Women’s Equality Network Wales in partnership with Honno I began to think more about these different labels such as ‘feminist’ and ‘women’s’ and what they have come to represent in publishing.
Therefore, is a press only a feminist press if all aspects of its operations are feminist-minded? And can this only be achieved if a press remains independent? Or is it the case that the ‘feminism’ resides in the output? But then should the output be solely about feminism or can it be more broadly influenced by feminism? Should feminist presses only be run by and publish women or is feminism actually a mind-set, an approach to be actioned by individuals of any gender? If a press is subsumed by a mainstream publisher is it a compromise or a progression? Although these questions are too vast to answer here they do reveal a complexity of purpose and thought which needs to be engaged with when discussing the future of women’s and feminist presses. Since the period of second-wave feminism – when many of these independent presses were first established – the publishing industry has changed dramatically and, as a result, presses like Honno are navigating a constantly shifting landscape whilst still trying to fulfil their key founding principles.
Honno can be labelled a women’s press because it publishes only women and even though not every title is explicitly about feminism Honno is certainly motivated by a feminist agenda. For example its commitment to publishing reprints of titles by women long out of print reintroduces the writings of our ‘literary foremothers’ to the reading community. This series highlights a distinct women’s canon and provides further evidence of a history of feminist consciousness pre-1970.
Margiad Evans (1909-1958) was Peggy Whistler’s pen name. She was born in Uxbridge, but claimed the Welsh Border country around Ross-on-Wye as her spiritual home from her first visit to an uncle and aunt’s farm as a child. The Whistler family moved to a house just outside Ross later when Peggy was twelve. That is where her writing career began, the towns and landscapes of the area a barely disguised backdrop to her fiction.
hroughout her life Evans wrote incessantly. Her husband Michael Williams donated many of her letters, journals and diaries to the National Library of Wales after her death. The 1930 years are written in bound volumes; later exercise books, or scraps of paper document her frenetic emotional responses to relationships, as well as always testifying to her abiding love of nature. A picture of an emotionally intense family life emerges in the earliest entries: quarrels with her mother, sometimes bitter rivalry with her sister Nancy, spats and arguments with friends. In The Wooden Doctor (1932) the narrator’s detached but shocking comment ‘our home among the quiet fields became a cage of savagery’ neatly sums up one aspect of her family’s relations documented in her journal.
Evans expended a great deal of emotional energy on writing her final novel Creed. Her diary entries for the period of its composition have none of the fun evident in the episodes described above. Life was hard and emotionally exhausting, and it is difficult not to see some of that leeching into the fiction. Creed was never reprinted after it first appeared in 1936, so Honno’s new edition is especially welcome. It is not a polished novel, it conveys a sense of being deliberately rough-hewn, as rough and uncompromising as its characters. It takes on and challenges ideas about love, belief and wickedness, and although the rain is practically incessant throughout, the descriptions of drenched nature are acutely and imaginatively observed, powerful testimony to Evans’s attention to detail, to her imaginative and unusual perceptions, and her skill as a writer.
How long have you been working at Honno?