PUBLISHING IN THE TIME OF CORONAVIRUS: Julia Beaven on gardening, jigsaws and the changing world

The next entry into our staff diary series on working in publishing in the time of coronavirus features Wakefield Press editor Julia Beaven, talking about being at home while the world changes around her.

I don’t iron much but I’m ironing now. Why is it making me sad? It could be Roberta Flack on Spotify, or that deep sense of nostalgia – a sort of grief, really – for how things were a month ago, or last week. But I think it’s the realisation I won’t be wearing these clothes, the ‘good’ clothes that I iron, because I’m not going anywhere. That my safe, relatively small world has shrunk to my house and garden and the occasional venture out for food and exercise. That living under the flight path is no longer a nuisance; that the newsreader on Radio National no longer says, ‘And now for sport’ – the bit I listened to most closely. That I can’t hug my girls, barely see them at all.
 
We’re scrambling for safe paths, reassurance, home-based activities. I spent yesterday afternoon on hands and knees scrubbing the bathroom floor (strangely satisfying and ensured a good night’s sleep).

The spiders are too terrified to weave their webs in my house. I’m dusting off pastimes. I’ve bought wool and I’m going to knit something colourful and slightly misshapen. I’ll be setting up a table for a jigsaw. I’m impatient for the autumn rains to fall so the weeds can grow and I can plant myself in the garden and plunge my hands into the soft dirt.

 

And I’ll keep editing, considering each word, deleting and replacing, polishing sentences until they gleam, checking facts and spelling and consistency. No threat to anyone here except the careless author. Getting books ready for those looking for comfort and distraction and escape during the uncertain weeks ahead.
All Wakefield Press staff are working hard, some from home, some scattered through the near empty rooms at Mile End. We’re producing books and promoting our old classics and our exciting new releases. Ensuring our e-books are available.
The biggest challenge is finding a market in the absence of events. But surely people will keep buying our books. Online or from bookshops. Physical books to hold in your hands and savour, ebooks delivered straight to your device.
I will keep working on the soon to be released The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine, an explosive book revealing the manipulation of research by Big Pharma; or sorting Victor Trumper from The Don in Ashley Mallett’s latest collection of cricket gems. And at other times, perhaps in the garden with the radio going and dirt up my nails, I’ll be railing against bad grammar – ‘It’s number of people, not amount!’ I’ll mutter. Or I’ll grumble about the purpose of the future tense when someone says, ‘We’ll be doing this moving forward.’ And when I get completely disillusioned (and impossible to live with) I’ll calm myself with a poem or two from from our wonderful poets, Ali Whitelock and Kate Llewellyn, feisty wise women sharing soothing balm for the times. And I’ll go chat to the magpies, blissfully unaware.
 

Now old, beauty no longer makes me cry.
Instead, from time to time, there are
glimpses of what else matters
and a chance to act.
Kate Llewellyn, from Harbour

 
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