When I worked closely with Penguins as a children’s bookseller, there was a category known as ‘difficult author’.
I suspect that most authors are ‘difficult’ to their publishers. It is, after all, a difficult business. More so now, as the money bags call the tune from the penthouse atop.
Here are my books, none of them difficult and all published by delightful men who know how to respect the diggers deep down at the coalface.
Hear our Silence
Unveiled, an intriguing book with brilliant shy nun blushing on front cover. Mary Loudon had got ‘nuns talking’, and the marketing hit the religious jackpot. HarperCollins badly wanted their riposte. My friend Shirley du Boulay (biographer of Teresa of Avila, Desmond Tutu, Bede Griffiths, Abhishiktananda) passed the slip catch in my direction.
Collins editor wanted men, monks: the girls had played their match.
I strode in telling my editor that the Carthusians were the only guys on the block. After all, they had been at it 900 years, ‘never reformed’. And there is only one Charterhouse in England: Parkminster.
So I telephoned. ‘I wonder if they will answer,’ mused my Jesuit friend who had kindly vouchsafed their sacred number.
I went and was admitted - for two weeks I lived the rhythmn of their life. Summoned by the midnight bell to Matins, psalms chanted between two choirs like an etherial tennis dual. Physical, but intensely spiritual.
Morning mass, mostly in dense silence, for this is their way. And so they taught me how to pray. To receive all that is on offer, deep within each one of us.
Hear our Silence a portrait of the Carthusians (151 pp. paperback) £10
That was a start, my first book. When from the Red House I had sold so many great stories to children. Help, now it was my turn to tell a tale or two…and here was I, plunged into the midst of these strange silent monks.
I had tried it before myself. With the Jesuits, thirteen years before the mast - never ordained. Just bucked out in time. Now I was into the deep end once more. And this was for real. These men whom I met in the depths of each night, plodding their way to their God, taught me so much.
About prayer, about attention to life, about relating. The Jays were never too hot on that…relating.
More books by John Skinner
A REVELATION OF LOVE Julian of Norwich, translation into modern English £8.00
SOUNDING THE SILENCE - an introduction to the Prayer of Silence £8.00
WISDOM OF THE CLOISTER - a selection of monastic writings across the centuries arranged as a daily reader £12
Please add 10% P & P
order by email : Wordman@HearourSilence.com
