Write Everything Down
i.m. Lisa Ratcliffe
Writers write things down. Attempt, in some cases, Lisa’s case, to write everything down. The things that the writer writes down are the objects of the world, including the people who have ideas about it, and that includes the writer. Lisa wrote everything down well before she came to formal higher education at Edge Hill University, where we presumed to teach her to write, but where, in fact, we granted her permission to continue. The writing Lisa was doing before, gifted her two of her great autobiographical themes: her life in Covent Garden among itinerant, bohemian, street performers; and her life in Spain, among musicians and horses, a foreign language amid alien landscapes.
Coming to university comparatively late not only meant she had arrived with all these written-down things to re-write, but that she attacked her studies with a ferocious, consuming, perhaps self-consuming, energy, very rewarding for her tutors, and also slightly overpowering. When under the pressure of the job you gave 90% to your teaching, Lisa would demand that other 10 you couldn’t quite conjure – not in the consumerist way of modern students demanding their money’s worth, something about which she herself as an inspiring but underpaid part time lecturer later had strong words. (She also rightly had strong words about being underpaid.) No, she wanted that extra because she needed to know, a compulsion she could not comprehend the lack of in other writing students. After all, these are the things you can – must - write down. One of the things you write down is your self-identity as a writer. It is worth remembering that one of Lisa’s undergraduate reflections is reprinted in a widely-used Creative Writing textbook, as a model for others, but also is testimony to the interrogative energy she expended thinking through her own writing.
Her grades for the MA were astonishing, but her work passes a more exacting test to my mind: I can recall it clearly years later. Her depictions of the demi-monde of Covent Garden are crisply realised and should still be published. Her story about a young woman’s experience of ritualised afternoon tea at the Ritz with a rich boyfriend and his even-richer, dominating mother is unforgettable, particularly when a bunch of Scousers on a hen-party arrive, and she shows us – rather than tells us – ‘rule’ one of Creative Writing – much that is pernicious in British class society.
Her research student work was supervised mainly by my colleague Ailsa Cox, who shares my high opinion of Lisa’s writing. In the last few weeks Ailsa has assembled a considerable amount of Lisa’s finished pieces, which again should be published. This includes work posted on her blog: at first, reflections on the art of writing – poetics – dealing with writer’s block, for example, which in her case was a necessary caesura of self-adjustment in order to discover the proper focus upon the things she had already written down about Spain. And to put into perspective her third theme – adoption – about which she and I confided early, after I rather shyly told her that I too was adopted, a fact in my experience with which I didn’t quite know how to deal. Lisa did: it was one of the things you wrote down! But the blog also became a mode of reporting and reflecting, day by day, upon her illness, and there can be no doubt that the things she wrote down about this – and they are some of her very best writings - reached many hundreds or thousands of people, including many of us here today. In her last months her visitors were expected also to be her readers.
When Ailsa and I visited Lisa last week, it was as admiring readers of her recent writings, online and off. Lisa spoke animatedly – optimistically - about all of these pieces, surprised I think, at the amount of material. Our purpose was to arrange this work so it could be recognised in some way by Edge Hill and others, and this is still our aim. She was one of our most remarkable students – no, she’s more than that: she is one of our most remarkable writers. Therefore, we must remain her readers.
Professor Robert Sheppard
Edge Hill University
8th February 2009
