Michelene Wandor, "Orfeo's Last Act"

 

Michelene Wandor is a playwright, poet, fiction writer and cultural critic. She has taught Creative Writing for over three decades, currently as tutor on the Distance Learning MA at Lancaster University. Her most recent poetry collection is Travellers (Arc Publications). She is editor of the anthology Critical-Creative Writing: Two Sides of the Same Coin. Her new novel is Orfeo's Last Act (Greenwich Exchange, 2023). Her website is here.  

About Orfeo's Last Act: A Novel in Two Parts

Set against the backdrop of seventeenth-century northern Italy in the Golden Age, Orfeo’s Last Act brings the magic of Mantua, Florence and Venice to vivid life.

The Gonzaga Duke objects to the violent ending of Monteverdi’s opera, Orfeo. With the help of Jewish composer, Salamone Rossi, Monteverdi supplies a new happy Act V. The original ending is lost.

In twenty-first-century Britain, amateur musician, Emilia, discovers a faded musical manuscript in an East Anglian stately home ... Across the centuries, harmony and discord vie for resolution in a story which thrills and shocks.

A triumphant debut from the poet and critic, Michelene Wandor, Orfeo’s Last Act is a must read for anyone interested in historical fiction or classical music.

You can read more about Orfeo's Last Act on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an extract from the opening of the novel. 

From Orfeo's Last Act, by Michelene Wandor

One

The mist mixes with spatters of mud, the stench of shit and sweat, wet and warm, mud drops on my arms, my face and round my eyes, till I blink and breathe water, human and animal detritus, the fertile muck of the fields. It reminds me of the rains of 1599. Mutazione di secolo. The end of the century, or the end of the world.  

I climb up the bank from the lake, skirt the Castello di San Giorgio, and walk round the Cattedrale di San Pietro. I stand for a moment: across the Piazza di San Pietro, I see the Palazzo Ducale. 

I walk along the side of the piazza, thinking I must be careful not to tread on any of the cracks in the cobbles. If I do, the ground will heave and throb under the sucking impact of my soft, silent shoes, and I will be sucked down into the marshes until there is nothing left of me but my voice.

I know this is ridiculous. First of all, the cobbles are so small, that I can’t help treading on the joins between them, and nothing happens when I do. Anyway, it is a long time since the marshes threatened anyone at this end of the island, this fiercely covered and protected end. The marshes have long been drained, filled in, built upon. 

There are still canals, remnants of the many rivers and waterways which criss-crossed the island. And yet, I am safer here than in Venice, where canals haunt at every turn, where it is easy to disappear in the middle of the black night. I am safer here than on the hills of Florence.

Michelene Wandor, "Critical-Creative Writing: Two Sides of the Same Coin: A Foundation Reader"

 

Michelene Wandor is a playwright, poet, fiction writer and cultural critic. She has taught Creative Writing for over three decades, currently as tutor on the Distance Learning MA at Lancaster University. Her most recent poetry collection is Travellers (Arc Publications).

You can read more about Travellers on Creative Writing at Leicester here. Below, you can read about her new book, Critical-Creative Writing: Two Sides of the Same Coin.

About Critical-Creative Writing, by Michelene Wandor

Critical-Creative Writing: Two Sides of the Same Coin is a unique Reader, bridging the gap between Creative Writing (CW) how-to handbooks, and anthologies of Literary and Cultural Theory. This ground-breaking collection reveals the historical roots of many of the pedagogic concepts which underlie the critical study of CW. 

Graven images from the Old Testament are echoed in classical disquisitions on mimesis, which, in its turn, resonates within nineteenth-century realism and naturalism, all presaging one of CW’s most familiar mantras, ‘write what you know.’ The twentieth-century development of literary criticism travels alongside, and into, the philosophical and linguistic foundations of Literary and Cultural Theory, exploring received concepts of text, genre and point of view.

This is an indispensable text for CW lecturers, under- and post-graduate students. The Reader shows how seminal writers and thinkers have, over the centuries, considered imaginative writing: Aristotle, Plato, Montaigne, Milton, Sidney, Shakespeare, Pope, Browning, Wordsworth, Keats, Kant, Burke, Wollstonecraft, James, Ruskin, Quiller-Couch, T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, Woolf, Barthes, Bakhtin and many others provide a roll-call of searching, sometimes contesting, voices.

Michelene Wandor, "Travellers"

 

Michelene Wandor is a poet, playwright, broadcaster, musician and teacher of creative writing, the latter on the Distance Learning MA in Creative Writing, at Lancaster University. She has written original plays and dramatisations for radio, many nominated for awards. She has written two books relevant to Creative Writing: The Art of Writing Drama (Methuen), and The Author is not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else: Creative Writing Reconceived (Palgrave Macmillan). Travellers, published by Arc Publications, is her seventh poetry collection. You can read about it, and a sample poem from it, below. Michelene's website is here. 

About Travellers

Michelene Wandor's new poetry collection travels in many directions, through Europe, the Middle East and beyond, with travellers as various as Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, Isabella d'Este and Lucrezia Borgia. Thematically, the poems alight at Greek mythology, gender, and the evergreens of love, anguish, power and tragedy. The first and final touchpoints lie in the language itself, which is both guide and sustenance. Lyrical, narrative and startlingly evocative, the words and poetic shapes travel down and across pages and spaces, and continue to resonate in mind and memory. 

You can see more information about Travellers on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a poem from the collection. 

From Travellers

San Miniato

a divebomb at night
my right arm
something made out of nothing

A Tuscan hillside. A monastery. I sit

alone at a round table in Miravelle, the

local restaurant. Andrea, the drama

teacher, arrives. He bows a punctilious

flicks back a thick, caressing wave

of black hair over his temple, and sits at

another round table. He is an artista. 

 

I am the poet     I sit alone

overnight, my inner right arm is
angrier than a mosquito 
 

Andrea runs the summer course. He flirts

with the young women, slippy straps on 

shoulder-bare camisole tops. He wears a

black leather jacket, carries a black 

leather bag. He checks his hairline

carefully each morning for signs of

flecked grey. 

 

I am the poet     I sit alone 

the pharmacist tells me
I have very sweet blood
oil of lavender
sharp on the skin
 

Andrea opens doors for me, a code

rusted from centuries of chivalric

use. He calls it courtesy. I say they are

not the same thing. 

that night
I talk to the mosquito bite
upper inner arm red field spreads
the mosquito cannot buzz in English 
 

The acting exercises are like leather. 

Smooth. Soft. Malleable. The cool

monastery room smells of rosemary

anchovies spring to mind. I watch. 

 

I am the poet     I applaud 

bread olive oil and salt are cake
bright yellow duck egg dense omelette
hot yellow
ham and formaggio are cake
I am born into taste at my round table
white bread in olive oil
salt hits my palate
sweet and sharp
outside it rains
jasmine and eucalyptus and oleander
in the cool air my arm cools
 

The leather factories are in Ponte a Egola. 

Bus, train, TV aerials. The scent of 

tanning fills the air. Soft leather curls

round the nape of my neck, a soft black

leather jacket, loose and cooling. It fits as

if made for me. I buy it and it is made for

me. My leather lover.  

 

I am an artista 

mozzarella di bufala and basilica
red white and green
 

The end of the week. Andrea joins me at

my round table. The slippy-strap students

wave to us. Blasts of cool air from barred

windows. Outside a leaf floats, a bell, a

bird in a mirror in yellow, red and black. 

you have sweet blood
whine mosquitoes in the night
 

I wear my new black leather jacket, my

dark hair streaked with grey. Drama and

poetry. There is a buzz in the monastery

room. Listeners look out across a green

valley streaked with houses.

the mosquitoes buzz
 

we are artisti

we make something out of nothing 
 

© Michelene Wandor, 2021