A470 Articles and Debates

Talgarreg poet Gillian Clarke joins in the payment–for-authors debate…

Robert Minhinnick, in comparing the performance fee a writer is paid in Wales with the pittance paid for writing, has opened an important debate. Should we pay writers proper fees for their performance, but far less than the minimum wage for their writing?

First, the Writers on Tour scheme has much to be said for it. It puts literature into classrooms and clubs, money into poet’s hands and increases book sales. It helped win the decades-long battle for the respect of the academic and teaching professions, and inclusion in the WJEC syllabus. Listening has returned many people to reading poetry. But writing is solitary, and not all writers are suited to the extrovert activities of giving readings and workshops.

The problem applies especially to poetry. Some of our finest poets still earn next to nothing for the work for which we revere and will remember them. Successful fiction sells. Poetry doesn’t - at least not in large enough numbers to recompense poets. Apart from a tiny few, even the best poets must measure their worth in glory, not cash. Even someone like Ted Hughes was surprisingly hard up for a long time after the publication of his fine first collection. Yet we need literature. Somehow the best writing must be fostered, and writers kept going.

Robert asks a provocative supplementary question. "How much of the money" he asks, "that notionally goes to ’writing’ is instead passed on to charlatans who call themselves ’storytellers’ and phoneys who claim to be ’poets’."

I don’t know what¹s to be done about phoney poets - let’s hope they aren’t invited twice - but storytellers? Charlatans or vituosi, are they paid from the budget for Writers on Tour? Yes, they are. Why? How much? What percentage of the budget? For which language? In Wales, five writers work in English to every three who work in Welsh. For storytellers it is nine to one. The average fee per gig for a storyteller is far more than the average for a writer, almost 25% more than the average poet (editor’s note: this is largely because the average storytelling gig is a whole day at a school, rather than an evening reading, therfore the average renumeration is higher for storytellers because the gig is longer). Yet they’re not writers. They draw on, as actors do, creatively, inventively, sometimes dazzlingly, our stories. (A few also write, but that’s a separate issue.) Storytelling is performance, like dancing, acting. Now that the Academi administers the budget for literature, it is very odd that storytellers, not qualified to be Academi Members, are able to draw on the Writers budget.

The budget was set up by the Literature Department to meet writers’ problems. The sums were calculated as partly pay for the day, partly buying time, partly copyright. The money was intended for those who write books, laying down a recorded literature. If you love books, it’s the very words you carry with you, not words that vary from speaker to speaker. Books are private company, essential nourishment, crucial growing material, the stuff of education.

On a fine July day this summer I visited, for the first time, Beyond the Border, the International Festival of Storytelling at St Donat’s. It is a successful festival drawing an enthusiastic audience. I was invited to give a talk on the use of Welsh mythology in contemporary Welsh writing, and to hold a poetry workshop on the use of story in poetry. We all tell stories. Our lives are stories. My poems are usually true stories. I gave a poetry reading that included an account of how my father told me the Mabinogi as if it were the gospel truth. In the workshop people used the myths of their own lives, as people in workshops always do.

In between my sessions I listened in walled gardens to snatches of stories being told. Some were compelling. Some were poor. Some of the language was powerful, some clichéd. I was struck by the fact that, apart from two storytellers from Wales, I knew nobody, and the occasion was hardly Welsh at all. It wasn’t common ground with Hay-on-Wye, the Eisteddfod, Academi’s Festival of Literature. With exceptions, storytelling and literature seem to have quite different audiences, and one does not appear to be leading to the other. Even those attending my reading and workshop looked strikingly different from most of those attending the storytelling events.

Good storytelling deserves appropriate payment, but not from a budget designed to serve writers. The percentage of the writers’ budget going to storytelling is rising. It is a historical accident that responsibility for storytellers was given to the Literature Department of the Welsh Arts Council, and thence to the Academi, where they benefit from the free-for-all that is the Writers on Tour scheme.

I propose we argue for a budget dedicated to storytelling, perhaps administered by the Drama Department of the Arts Council, a protected budget for writers, administered by the Academi, and a gradual shift of emphasis from pay for performance to pay for writing.