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A room with a view (inside and out)

6th December 2007 by Helena 3 Comments  

There are worse places to spend a morning. I am at the Grand Hotel in Florence. My room looks out over the city and the Arno River. Inside it is almost more impressive. There are frescoes on three walls depicting romantic scenes from too long ago to even contemplate. The colours are faded reds, yellows and blues. The scenes unmistably Florentine. My bed has a regal structure over it which makes me feel like something out of a fairy-tale every time I look at it. There is a plush red velvet chair that is so deep, large and comfortable that I am tempted to stay in it for the rest of the week.

I am here for The 7 Arts (the head-hunters I work for) Christmas party. This is one of the advantages of having a proper job as well as writing. You get to see how people who have not spent most of their adult lives trying to be writers live.

HemmingwayTalking of trying to be a writer, I am reading a most brilliant and inspirational book called The Paris Review Interviews (Vol I). It is interviews with literary luminaries such as Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, Rebecca West and Dorothy Parker. I read last night that Capote was a horizontal writer. He always wrote lying down. Hemingway on the other hand preferred to stand up in his oversized slippers in front of a bookcase which he wrote on. This is obviously where I have been going wrong. Sitting down at my desk is not going to get me anywhere.

Happily as my adaptor plug doesn’t work properly I am writing this crouching on the floor with one foot pressed against the plug. Does that count do you think? Later on I may try penning a chapter or two while swinging from the wrought iron chandelier. That’s clearly what it’s there for.

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007


Filed Under: Italy, Travel, Work, blog -->, writing Tagged With: inside

3 thoughts on A room with a view (inside and out)

  • Graham says:
    7th December 2007 at 2:24 am

    I write sitting or leaning or standing on one leg by the window. I used to write in the pool. I once saw an opera – Les Noces de Figaro I think. The theatre stage was a bit short of space and had to use false perspectives for the decor which meant that the further the actors retreated on stage, the taller they became. And I smirked. But what did impress me was the heroine who sang a number flat on her back, in bed. That’s class.

    I have no idea how Hemingway wrote, but even if he was up-side-down from a trapeze over a bath of sulphuric acid he could not be more boring.

    At school we did Hemingway and I hated it. Every year, because the school was poor, we had the same set book from age 11 to 15. The Old Man of the Bloody Sea, and all I can remember about the book is hitting Colin Fannon over the head with it.

    Write, my dear, upright or supine, but write….

    G

  • Rupert says:
    7th December 2007 at 11:47 am

    Graham

    Just as I was beginning to think you were the one voice of reason living in Geneva, you come out with these comments on Hemingway…some of his later novels may be affected and a bit dreary, but the early stories are splendid. Almost single-handedly he turned English from long-winded periodic sentences into something clean, neat and simple. And the Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber is as good an account of married life as you will find anywhere.
    You should have hit Colin Fannon over the head with Death in the Afternoon!

  • Graham says:
    7th December 2007 at 3:23 pm

    “Cojones” said the Old One the way Old Ones do as he spat in the red dust. “Cojones, cosas de hombres”. The Old One spat again. “What does the Young One know?”. He leaned back against the wall and wiped his dirty neck with the dirty red bandana. He liked that thing with the sweat and the dust and the spit. Old Ones do. It was going to be one of those days.

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Helena Frith Powell was born in Sweden to a Swedish mother and Italian father, but grew up mainly in England. She is the author of eleven books, translated into several languages including Chinese and Russian. She wrote the French Mistress column The Sunday Times about life in France for several years. She is a regular contributor to the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, The Times, Daily Telegraph, Tatler Magazine and Harper’s Bazaar.

Helena has been the editor of four magazines, including M Magazine, a supplement for the Abu Dhabi-based National Newspaper and FIVE, a high-end fashion glossy, also published in Abu Dhabi. Helena was also editor-in-chief of 360 Life, a quarterly glossy magazine published with the Sports 360 Newspaper in Dubai, part of the Chalhoub Group.

Helena contributes regularly to UK-based newspapers and magazines and holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Cambridge. She is working on a thriller set in Sweden as well as a novel about the relationship between Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield called Sense of an Echo.

In 2022 her short story The Japanese Gardener came second in the Fish Publishing Short Story Prize. One of her stories was also shortlisted for the Bridport Short Story Prize. When she’s not writing, she works as a headhunter for the media and entertainment industry for the Sucherman Group. 

Helena, who was educated at Durham University, lives in the Languedoc region of France with her husband Rupert and their three children.

Bibliography

More France Please, we’re British; Gibson Square 2004

Two Lipsticks and a Lover 2005; Gibson Square (hardback)

All You Need to be Impossibly French; (US version of above) Penguin 2006

Two Lipsticks and a Lover; Arrow Books (paperback) 2007

Ciao Bella Gibson Square; (hardback) 2006

Ciao Bella Gibson Square; (paperback) 2007

So Chic! (French version of Two Lipsticks) Leduc Editions 2008 (also translated into Chinese, Russian and Thai)

More, More France; Gibson Square 2009

To Hell in High Heels; Arrow Books 2009 (also translated into Polish)

The Viva Mayr Diet; Harper Collins 2009

Love in a Warm Climate; Gibson Square 2011

The Ex-Factor; Gibson Square 2013

Smart Women Don’t Get Wrinkles; Gibson Square 2016

The Arnolfini Marriage; Amazon Kindle December 2016

Smart Women Don’t Get Wrinkles (paperback); Gibson Square spring 2018

The Longest Night; Gibson Square spring 2019

 

 

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