Birmingham Lit Fest Presents….: Recent Episodes
Writing West Midlands
The Birmingham Literature Festival Podcast - Welcome to the very first Birmingham Literature Festival podcast, bringing writers and readers together to discuss some of 2020’s best books. Each Thursday we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. Join us each week for exciting and inspiring conversations with new, and familiar, writers from the Midlands and beyond.
On 9 July 2022, Writing West Midlands hosted its annual National Writers’ Conference in Birmingham, the first time back to a full programme of events since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Through panel events, networking sessions, informal and formal meetings, over 150 emerging writers came together to learn from established writers, producers, editors, agents and literature professionals including Kasim Ali, David Chikwe, Maeve Clarke, Lindsay Davis and Gillian McAllister.
Hosted by Jonathan Davidson from Writing West Midlands.
2021: A year in review
Welcome to the last instalment of 2021’s commissioned series of writing. Each month, across the year, we have asked writers and poets to reflect on each month as it has passed. As we say goodbye to 2021, and embrace the start of a new year, we have brought together all those pieces to offer you an insightful, searing and beautiful review of the year.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF 2021: A Year in Review
Welcome to the last instalment of 2021’s commissioned series of writing. Each month, across the year, we have asked writers and poets to reflect on each month as it has passed. As we say goodbye to 2021, and embrace the start of a new year, we have brought together all those pieces that offer an insightful, searing and beautiful review of the year.
January 2021
My name is Thomas Glave and I wrote this piece for the Birmingham Literature Festival, January 2021 Writers’ Blog.
What has this past month, partly a time of Covid-caused lockdown, been like? ‘Weird’, is how a Birmingham friend extremely fond of that word might have described it. But ‘weird’ is too vague, and doesn’t make room for all the specific moments. Moments like a walk I took one chilly dusk through Birmingham’s Brindleyplace, where, amidst all those tomb-quiet buildings, it was easy to imagine the opening scene of the zombie-apocalypse film 28 Days Later, that showed an unnervingly deserted London: ‘Hallo-hallo-hallo’, anyone could have shouted that evening, imagining the final-days echo: ‘Is anyone there-there-there?’ And what about the seagulls that flock through the West Midlands (and all the UK) throughout the year, hijacking unsuspecting people’s lunches? Didn’t they appear to be moving closer to the very few human beings out walking, as the darkness encroached and began to whisper, How’s this, you fancy this? And really, except for maybe one or two runners who darted past (and even they, so thin, might have been just birds or the ghosts of birds), there was almost nobody else about. . .nobody except a lone Brindleyplace security guard, who for a few seconds bent his head over a match’s flare to light a cigarette, before he disappeared behind one of those buildings as if he too had existed in real life only for a moment, then had been drawn back into the realm of dreams where security guards, cigarette in hand, wander alone forever, half-alive and half lockdown apparitions that melt into dusk in this city of hills and tall buildings and twisting stretching canals. . . on lockdown evenings like that one, the dusk always descended in time for the ensuing quiet to gather entirely around and wrap itself, its soft thick arms, all around your shoulders: the quiet of pandemic nights, of people gathered indoors and sometimes also isolated there, sometimes alone.
These past weeks were the unaccustomed quietness of pubs shuttered, restaurants stilled, railway stations and airports emptied, and all of us, the living and the waking, wondering what all this meant or could mean, and – often more insistently -- when it was going to end. Simultaneously, if we knew people who had fallen ill, we worried about them, prayed for them, and did all we could to ensure that they wouldn’t leave us just yet: not leave like that. Not so suddenly, so intubated. Not whilst gasping for breath behind some sterile partition, sequestered in a fluorescent-lit hospital ward. Not like that, without our hands to hold and our face to stroke, as we in turn wanted to hold and comfort them. Through it all, as we thought of them and seasonal gifts like the sorely missed brighter-than-bright Birmingham Christmas market, there was always the cloaking dusk, and then the sound of our own footsteps. Our feet that, as the season progressed, began to mutter Slow down, won’t you….please, for goodness’ sake, you simply must slow down.
And out of the slowing down, if we listened to those feet, arose a kind of blessedness as well. The kind that might have moved us to put up festive lights a little earlier in the season, aware that the increased lights and colours may have helped to cheer our neighbours. The kind that may even have moved us in an era of global stress and anxiety to speak with neighbours a bit longer when we saw them, and with more solicitous interest than usual, especially the elderly and the vulnerable. . . although hopefully always at a two-metre distance.
Our warming planet, meanwhile, began to thank us for lockdown and our decreased travel and traffic. Birds, other creatures, and every tree and bush expressed and continue to express their gratitude, from the Jewellery Quarter to Acocks Green and all the way to Kings Heath, as nature raised its eyebrows at our actual ability to step back and take a breath. Someone told me this week that I should listen carefully, in order to hear the sound of nature politely applauding our efforts. But if we can’t hear it, he said, this will be only because of the silence in between all other occurring things… the silence that assures that in spite of everything else, our hearts really are still in wonderful working order, still fond of us, and nowhere near prepared to stop.
February 2021
Hello, my name is Abda Khan and here is a blog I wrote for Birmingham Literature Festival in February 2021.
When I was asked to write about how February has been for me, I started by looking back at photos from the same time last year. It struck me that during the almost yearlong state of lockdown, not only has life changed in ways previously unimaginable, but certain phrases have evaporated from our vocabulary, whilst others have taken hold. As a writer, I am intrigued by this.
February 2020; kicked off at a packed restaurant for a family birthday, I gave a talk about my Sidelines to Centre Stage Project at Wolverhampton Literature Festival where I mingled with attendees over tea and samosas, travelled to Glasgow and sat in a mosque full of hundreds of mourners after the death of my uncle, went into Tamworth Radio to talk about my novel Razia with three of us crammed into an airless studio smaller than a boxroom, had lunch with and gave a talk at Solihull Rotary Club, visited mac at Cannon Hill Park for discussions over coffee about a forthcoming project. And there were many more everyday happenings, not documented by the click of a phone camera, all of which are now unthinkable; legal work at the office where multiple clients would attend together, meeting friends in overcrowded coffee shops, enjoying the pictures with my kids (although they tell me that firstly, no one says ‘pictures’ anymore and secondly, as the youngest is now nearly 16, they’re no longer kids).
Now, life is Zoom, and Teams, hand sanitiser, and face masks, and everyone knows what WFH means. The most exhilarating activity is my weekly click and collect trip to Asda. Hands, face, space - now, we must all “look like letter boxes”, and the PM must think it peculiar how words come back to bite you.
No more does anyone ask “what are your plans for the weekend?” or “where are you going for your holiday?” No longer are we faced with dilemmas such as “how do I get out of that works do?”, nor does anyone wish “this dinner party would end.”
The loneliness that comes with being a writer has not changed. It is a solitary pursuit, often undertaken late into the night with only silence for company. Yet, other aspects of my life as a writer have disappeared, and these I miss; interacting at events face to face, being part of the buzz and chatter that can’t be replicated in a Zoom call (which always starts with “you’re on mute”). Still, technology has been a godsend; I have continued with book club, delivered numerous talks, attended courses, taught courses, persisted with my yoga, been to parents evening, hosted a poetry event, and watched every single episode of Spooks.
Having had a nasty run in with COVID myself, I feel fortunate to be alive, to have the hope that at least February 2022 will look more like my February 2020, and that the period of lockdown in between the two will eventually seem like that experience in your life which you hated every minute of, but one from which you learnt a great deal.
March 2021
Birmingham Literature Festival Writers Blog, March 2021. Written by Michael Amherst and read by Ceri Morgan.
This March we buried my mother. She died of cancer, not Covid, something that these days almost immediately needs clarification. There is then the mental gymnastics as to the comparative awfulness of both - the pandemic that prevents victims from saying goodbye to their families or the pandemic that makes victims of other, terminal illnesses unable to live their final months or year.
There is also another mental gymnastics - the dance around the rules and the opprobrium of others. I spent my Mum's final month staying with her and her husband to help look after her. Her doctors encouraged this, in spite of the pandemic, and yet there is a background anxiety that at this, one of the most difficult moments of our lives, we will have been found wanting by others, fortunate enough not to be in this position and faced with these choices.
Her decline was relatively rapid. Even in September I think we believed she might yet recover, certainly that her illness would allow her a year or two at worst. In August she had booked a holiday for us all in a farmhouse in Wales. However she cancelled this as her oncologist advised her that contracting Covid was too great to warrant the risk. My sister and I encouraged her to cancel it - we said there'd be other times, we could do it again next year. Had we known she only had six months left, I think we would all have decided to take the risk.
The other consequence of a year lived in stasis, in which nothing feels real, or everything feels real in new ways, is that her death does not, cannot feel real at all. For much of the last twelve months my communication with her was daily phone calls. I saw her maybe four or so times, before moving in to help. Usually I'd have visited at least once a month. So her absence has, in some cruel way, already happened. What is new is the lack of her voice on the phone or her loving gestures received by post. I joke that the last year feels like nothing more than a bad radio play. We are all waiting for it to end. And yet, there are brief moments where the reality of her death can be felt, almost as though from the corner of my eye, and I want to howl. Only for it to be swept on by, lost in the last twelve months.
The greatest comfort I have found has come from an unlikely source: Joseph Frank's Lectures on Dostoyevsky, a book I bought after happening upon a review. There have been times where it has felt the only currency is a rank pessimism - to hope, to look to after this, a failure of some kind. Some people seem to relish the potential horror of this pandemic never being past. Frank writes, 'For faith, in Dostoyevsky's terms, needs (or should need) nothing beside itself. Its purity is enhanced by the fact that it is assumed freely and quite independent of all proofs and rewards.' In different ways I think we are all learning the need and merit of faith of all kinds, even as we feel incapable of it. So I've started with a belief in my mother: her life, her choices, the things she made meaningful and the meaningful nature of her last year, different as it has been from what we all may have wanted.
April 2021
My name is Sue Brown and I wrote the Birmingham Literature Festival poem in April 2021.
A year in a month: April 20th 2021, ONE person was found guilty of a crime that many thousands have been privileged to walk away from aided and abetted by the law.
May 25th 2020, the world witnessed the death of another Black man, George Floyd, by the systemised enforcement of racism. An act played out daily in various degrees around the globe for centuries.
With credible witnesses, daily protest, the sad truth is that Black Lives is the Matter, a 'Problem'… and yes, contrary to a commissioned government report, institutionalised racism still breathes today, alive and kicking even within the U.K.
The past year has presented nothing new, and once again, it was televised.
2020 started like any other year;
I was unaware that the world was on the verge of an insidious order of events that would be drip-fed by the mainstream and social media, Western Governments and scientists.
Late February, reports about a virus began hitting the news daily, although… there was a distance between it and my reality.
The West pointed fingers towards the Chinese; a plethora of conspiracy theories flowed.
As the COVID-19 crises took shape, I got a sense that something untoward was emerging. WhatsApp messaging 'ramped up' subversion with creative facts. Public health responses to the outbreaks on cruise ships belied what was coming to the shores of Britain.
Boris led the charge with; hands face space - which became one of the pandemics mantras, spoon-fed between mixed messaging, confusion, and blatant lies to the nation, directing the focus to a new world order.
Imagine my surprise when Black folks, like myself, were identified as 'highly' susceptible to a so-called 'Chinese foreign' virus. Mainstream media drew attention to N.H.S. workers dying, particularly African, African Caribbean and Asian workers. Somehow, we had become a distraction, a dangerous proliferation of the pandemic.
Diverse communities now herded into a BAME description, while the rhetoric by officials only subjugated our already marginalised identity, and blame became linked to BAME.
Government and health spokespersons 'ramped up' the campaign in trying to 'coax' the vaccine to the 'vaccine hesitant', those who reflected their lack of trust in the 'powers that be' based on hundreds of years of apprehension and suspicion.
Cultural appropriation dominated the nation, yet our voices weren't narrating our story, our experiences, our concerns, fuelling the fear that spread faster than the pandemic itself.
I felt the usual disdain, patronised by misinformation and lack of transparency in this hegemonic system.
Ultimately racism is an inherent power - driven by fear and greed for control. It's an ideology woven into a social structure subtly, savagely and ominously perpetuated only to remain an active justification of superiority.
Until we can identify the facts, the CORE of racism for what it is, and the many levels on which it operates, we will not be able to make the real change necessary for each person to live their purpose without fear of being 'Hue-man', while celebrating and expressing origins.
May 2021
Hi, I’m Maisie Chan and I wrote May’s piece for the Birmingham Literature Festival.
I’ll start this blog in a very British way and talk about the weather. May is usually ‘the summer’ in Glasgow, which is where I now live, and the hottest month of the year for us. But not this year. It’s been damp and grey. I’m feeling a little grey myself. I haven’t been able to travel to Birmingham to see my friends and family since 2019. I feel discombobulated.
However, I have to live in the present moment and May has been up and down, I won’t lie.
I’m trying to work on multiple writing projects at once which is great as I’m now a full-time writer. I am learning to juggle, however, as I have around four book projects on the go at once and I’m pitching for a children’s TV show, hoping to get my first screenwriting credits in children’s animation. I feel split down the middle with one part of me in ‘debut author’ mode and the other in drafting mode.
I’m writing a new novel, which is going very slowly and like pulling teeth. And at the same time, I am promoting my debut novel, Danny Chung Does Not Do Maths, a children’s book out in June. It’s an exciting thought to know a book I started writing in 2018 is going to hit the shelves. And I’m feeling both elated and a little scared that my first novel will be out there, for people to read and judge. It’s not lost on me that my book will be one of the very few with a British Chinese boy on the front cover, there aren’t many even in 2021. Hate crimes against East and Southeast Asians (ESEA) all over the world have increased massively and I hope that my small contribution can help make people like me more visible in the world of children’s publishing. If we aren’t seen at all, then are we real? Are we human?
I am in ‘second novel syndrome’ which according to many published authors is very real! I definitely feel it. When you write your first novel, it’s not usually under contract, so you can take your time. For the second one, however, you have a smaller time scale in which to write it (mainly for children’s novelists who churn out a novel a year it seems). It’s not been the most inspiring year, my creative well has not been filled. I’ve spent a lot of time stuck inside.
As I bid a farewell to the month of May and prepare to welcome June, with my book launch and birthday around the corner and the hope of sunny skies, I give thanks as I am going to get my first vaccination this month. Perhaps that is the most prized thing of all?
Signing off. A true Gemini.
June 2021
This is June’s Birmingham Literature Festival piece, written by Roy Macfarlane. Read by Shantel Edwards.
Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
-Adam Zagajewski, "Try to Praise the Mutilated World"
June the month of strawberries and creams and the longest day of the year, 21st June, summer solstice day. Boris Johnson tried to bring an end to the mutilated world we’re living in, having visions of Freedom Day as if we were part of the cast of Independence Day, but with a Delta variant fighting back, celebrations had to be put on hold.
Summer solstice day, solstice from the Latin word ‘sun standing still,’ the timing between planting and harvesting crops has been traditionally the time to relax. As writers we know of planting words, half written in a notebook, or a body of work in files; over the last few months I’ve been planting seeds in competitions, magazines, anthologies and commissioned work, seeing which will flourish, find their roots and blossom in the next collection. June will be the closest I’ll get to relaxing, and getting away from writing, online and social media interaction.
During this month my walks along canals with herons, coots and a gang of seagulls chilling on telegraph wires, watching me walking through their neighbourhood has been exchanged for morning jogs along the sea front where the June sun gives iridescent blue seas and a convention of seagulls, bigger and bolder than the ones from Tipton who stride with swagger.
But the writer in me can’t be quietened, I go into full rage in response to Priti Patel’s interview, encouraging football supporters to boo in response to England football players, both black and white, taking a knee in response to online racism, racism in the stands and the ongoing racism that leads to death. And yet Priti Patel’s response is no different to Donald Trump’s inciting aggressive response to Colin Kaepernick taking the knee. Also, it’s 5 years on from the Jo Cox murder, influenced by divisive, dividing words which inspired such a backlash in the lead to Brexit.
Thank god for Windrush Day, 22nd June, acknowledging the impact and importance of migration to the making of Britain. The emblematic Empire Windrush signalling the arrival of Caribbean post-war migrants to Britain in 1948; a date in the British identity as paramount as 1066, Henry VIII and all his wives, and 1966 ‘They think it’s all over! It is now.’
In Wolverhampton the unveiling of a blue plaque brought mixed emotions for many, as we acknowledged Paulette Wilson Windrush Campaigner ‘likkle but tallawah’ a reminder of how the government turned a Caribbean post-war migration dream of Windrush into an “illegal immigrants” of the state nightmare.
I’m reading Just Us by Claudia Rankine, the title taken from the wonderful stand-up comedian Richard Pryor; ‘you go down there looking for justice, that’s what you find just us.’ I guess in taking the knee, in Windrush celebrations, we are simply looking for a sun that will rise on all of us with the same warmth, same freedoms, a sun that shakes hand with the night and meets us back in the morning, alive and well.
July 2021
Hello all you lovely listeners. My name is George Bastow and I’m a freelance writer, journalist and blogger who is also a full-time wheelchair-user with quadriplegic cerebral palsy.
July 2021 has been a funny old month, although there has seldom been anything to laugh about. It’s been a month of exciting highs and abysmal lows with displays of uplifting unity and stark division that have reminded me England is a Jekyll & Hyde nation. A deeply complex country that can flip as easily as any of the coins of its realm.
At the beginning of July, I could smell optimism in the air, as fragrant and hazy as the smoke drifting from summer evening barbecues; the Euros were in full-swing and if the countless tunelessly triumphant renditions of Baddiel & Skinner’s anthem I heard daily were to be believed football was definitely coming home. In the weeks leading up to England’s history-making championship final against Italy, my heart was lifted by the widespread love for Gareth Southgate’s squad and the refreshing examples of inclusivity they were setting, from the diversity of the players themselves to their decision to take the knee in support of Black Lives Matter and Harry Kane’s rainbow captain’s armband worn in solidarity with the LGBTQIA+ Community. The whole country was inebriated by hope, progress and of course the occasional shandy as we cheered the home team towards their first piece of silverware since 1966, but the dreaded hangover kicked in sooner than anyone expected. In the moments after Rashford, Sancho and Saka missed their penalties my spirits sank as I saw the national coin flip from its shiny, positive side to its insidiously tarnished reverse. The appalling racist abuse the players were subjected to from brutally bigoted so-called fans was truly disgusting. Over the following days however, the country’s coin of conscience turned again as legions of true supporters showed their love and admiration for Saka, Rashford and Sancho and condemned the hatred from a small-minded percentage of the public.
Just as the country rejoined as one in appreciation of three footballing heroes another polarising storm cloud appeared over the horizon… Freedom Day.
Boris Johnson (a popular tousle-haired Vaudeville clown, famous for his Prime Minister impressions) announced that from Monday, 19th, all legal COVID-19 restrictions would be lifted despite rapidly rising cases of infection. For many a long-awaited return to the Old Normal is hugely welcome but for folk like me with disabilities and compromised immune systems life without masks or social distancing is a dangerous prospect. Even after receiving two vaccinations, to immunocompromised people risking exposure to COVID and the reality of new variants will prove deadly. I understand that to some wearing a mask is an inconvenience they are happy to ditch but for vulnerable communities masks are vital weapons in a daily war to maintain our health. I appreciate the people binning their face-coverings are doing so with optimistic intentions but the virus isn’t going anywhere soon, so by wearing our masks we can help stop it spreading further and save lives while we’re at it.
As July draws to a close and the coin of England’s conscience summersaults in mid-air, we must choose which side it lands on.
Is it heads for fairness, empathy and compassion or tails for intolerance, division and misunderstanding? It’s your call.
August 2021
Hello everyone, my name is Elizabeth Lee and I wrote August’s piece for the Birmingham Literature Festival.
August has been a month of sunlight and storms, both literal and figurative.
As I walk the canals and fields I’m lucky enough to live by, the air is sometimes bright and hot, sweet with pollen and busy with insects, sometimes filled with needle-sharp rain and biting winds. Always, somewhere, the shouts and laughter of children enjoying freedom from school can be heard.
On a larger scale, the news feels like a series of earthquakes. I wonder whether we will, like the children preparing for a new school year as summer wanes, at last be shaken from lethargy and compelled to act. As wildfires rage in Greece and Turkey, we are warned that this planet we are the custodians of teeters on the brink of a disaster of our own making. We watch the terrible, terrifying events in Afghanistan take place. In my own home, we celebrate GCSE results that enable the next step on a journey. Exciting times, full of possibility and hope. Nationally, more students than ever end a difficult year by celebrating good results. But there is also a growing gap between North and South, between state and private schools. Those already at a disadvantage have been further failed in the Covid crisis.
But there is also hope. Most of the adult population are now vaccinated against Covid, and we tentatively break free from the past months of isolation and fear. The world might be changed. But it is still here.
Personally, I’m emerging from a post-publication haze as my debut novel was published in April. The fulfilment of a life-long dream that still has me pinching myself, and giving thanks for every piece of luck that passed my way. Set in 17th Century Lancashire, the book is a tale of persecution and superstition, but also one of love, in all its forms. Between parents and children, between siblings, between a man and a woman. Turning my mind to a new project, similar themes emerge; a historical setting that explores the struggle of those trapped by poverty and prejudice. But there is kindness to be found in the chaos. There is hope.
These themes remain relevant, I think, to our world today. A world where women are raising their voices to say Me Too. A world that must address structural racism and respond to calls for collective action on climate change. Where Covid highlighted the danger of isolation, and the importance of community. But there is always sunlight in among the storms, there is always kindness in the chaos, and perhaps we will turn with new vigour, like a child returning to school in September, to protecting this world and valuing all that live in it equally.
September 2021
Hi, I’m Rupinder Kaur and I wrote September’s piece for the Birmingham Literature Festival’s monthly blog.
“Write the tale that scares you, that makes you feel uncertain, that isn't comfortable. I dare you...”
—Michaela Coel.
I have been thinking a lot about Michaela’s speech, she won best writer at the Emmys for I May Destroy You. Across the past two years, this pandemic gave me the time to reflect on my own life, life around me from my family to the world. As a writer what scares me the most is writing about myself, my actual true and innermost feelings. Until last year I had never written anything that is truly personal and now in my writing I always try to write what is truthful to me.
September always reminds me of new starts, new beginnings possibly because the academic year starts again in September. It brings warmth and hope that yes the year is almost over but it's not exactly over yet. I have been trying to go on my daily walk almost everyday, something which I have been doing for the past year. Connecting with nature and seeing how nature changes over the months from spring to autumn, hearing the crunchy-ness of leaves when you are walking is a sound I particularly love along with seeing the colours of orange and deep reds.
It was Mum's birthday on the 16th, so we went to the Botanical gardens. Mum's the biggest nature lover and she talks to plants, thinks they understand her. I wonder what language they actually understand or do they actually have a language. Then we had a nice evening meal at Asha’s and no, Tom Cruise was not there!
Here is an excerpt from a poem ‘Trace’ I have been working on:
There’s this dream I had where I flicked seeds
on the garden shed roof until white doves spoke
to peach trees. One peach tree was Mum.
I am losing parts of Dad from my face.
I am becoming Mum, just taller,
so I can watch the doves fly for both of us.
Over September I have been reading The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls by Mona Eltahaway and Luster by Raven Leilani. Mona quoted some of June Jordan’s poetry which intrigued me, so I went and brought her collection Directed by Desire which I have been devouring. It was also super nice to run a poetry workshop in person for the Desiblitz Literature festival! Sharing my love for South Asian poetry and teaching the basics of ghazal writing. If you truly want to understand South Asian poetry and ghazals you have to listen to music, the rhythms. Almost all poetry in South Asia has an oral tradition, it is to be performed such as ghazals, qawwalis, folk songs. To top it all off I went to Ustad Rahat Fateh Ali Khan concert. It was such a magical experience to be immersed in live qawwali music.
September has had a range of emotions and now towards the end it’s getting cold and dark. I can’t help but think about Sabina Nessa, a young Bangladeshi woman that was murdered. She was literally minutes from home. Is any part of the world truly safe for women, I really don’t know. Iconic Indian feminist Kamla Bhasin passed away this month and she wrote: “The first feminist must have been born the day patriarchy was born…”
Feminism in simple terms just asks for equality, to be understood. Until patriarchy gets dismantled across the entire world, we still have a long way to go. But I still have hope that maybe, just maybe, one day this entire world will become kinder and safer for all.
October 2021
Hello, my name is Brendan Hawthorne, I’m a singer song writer, poet, playwright and I’ve written the blog for October for Birmingham Literature Festival.
October has become a signpost month in many ways for me. New directions and opportunities have presented themselves. New challenges to keep the old mind alert and the heart full.
Creatively I have had the script of a play published, a new collection of work readied for publication and signed new commission contracts. I am also recording songs with Kerry, my musical partner, for our new CD. Written pre-lockdown, it’s only now being given performance form and life. A photographer friend has offered to take a series of Autumnal photographic portraits of me for promotional use and I’ve bought Lynn, my wife’s, Christmas present.
All good I hear you say, but, as October signals a seasonal change …
I realise the world has changed
from the world I once knew
Changed into one that appears
to be more guarded and tentative
mindful of the tragic consequences in retaining
liberty, democracy and relative freedom
Many things are now ‘considered’
The atlas shrinks again
through traffic light travel changes
to a greater global awareness
I personally love to feel the chill in the night air of the country of my birth. The way …
our homeward journey is streetlight lit
by autumnal sunsets directing
us to log burner warmth
Witness the magic of flickering shadows
that tell different stories
each time planet saving briquettes are ignited
Smokiness taints the air with comfort
atmospherically blending
with the smell of tomato soup
heated on a dancing gas ring
accompanied by warm crusty bread
fresh from the oven
Then I wonder if the cost of gas will become more than the cost of tinned soup, but for now the concept is too great to stem the flow of intoxicating relaxation.
My mom is 87 this month…
She was 27 when she brought me into the world
with the help of the NHS
A system of healthcare
that has cradled many since birth
but I wonder for how much longer?
Stories of elderly people falling
and having to wait for 6 to 10 hours
for ambulances to attend because
there aren’t enough vehicles freed up
by corridor queues in overcrowded A & E’s
With all these cuts, I wonder why queues aren’t included?
I spoke to a young police officer yesterday who told me he had thought he’d found his dream job by helping people feel ‘safe and secure’. He told me of attending drunken injuries taking 6 hours out of his shift to sit with someone waiting for medical attention. I felt his pain, his frustration and career dislocation.
I do, however, laugh at the things I’ve said to myself, expecting answers that never come. With age, does the skill of asking yourself questions become more important? I’ll let you know.
On the news today I saw a
polar bear clinging for dear life
to a tiny ice flow berg
Hugging the chill to its bones
it appeared to cry out in anguish
at its predicament
They know the importance of existence
I thought
Why don’t we?
November 2021
Seaview is a supernatural drama set in Coventry centred around a guy who lands his dream job at a law firm, only for his night of celebrations to go awry and change the lives of his loved ones, forever. The show premiered the first three episodes at the Belgrade Theatre on 10th November with further showings on the 11th – 13th November. I was hired as a staff writer for episode one.
SeaView took a chance on first timers, both in front of and behind the camera who worked alongside seasoned professionals. There was an open call for a writers' room. New writers are often told to “Apply to the BBC writers' room or 4Screenwriting. Go on the Screen Skills website. Have you tried the BFI?” All brilliant and necessary companies. But sometimes, you just want to get paid to write. Without the SeaView writers' room callout, I would still be creditless, applying for these four opportunities on loop. Or alternatively, told to get an agent to get staffed in a writers' room and we know how that catch-22 scenario goes. I doubt open calls for writers will become industry standard, but I’m thankful to the producers for making that choice.
Seaview is also proof that there is room for a TV & Film industry to exist outside of London. There should be more stories coming from across the UK. There are places I’ve never visited and will not get the opportunity to see. That’s why I want to watch stories from different towns. Despite being born and raised in Edmonton, North London and I will never give up that identity (currently at war with my fading accent), I’ve always been curious about this little Island.
The curiosity stems from my parents. They were always keen on my siblings and I travelling outside the M25. They wanted us to explore landscapes, historical landmarks, and food. Even though Mum would be up half the morning making jollof, chicken and stew to take with us “just in case”. That curiosity about other towns and cities has helped with the type of topics I cover in my original scripts.
I still have a way to go in terms of my writing skills. Because of my personality type, I will always compare myself to other’s progress. But getting the ‘yes’ after years of ‘no’ or folks just straight-up ghosting my emails, has reassured me. The fact that I got to play a small part in a project which means so much to the Midlands, is even more rewarding.
Who knows if SeaView will be the start of the norm or a blip in the Midlands cultural zeitgeist. It's a win for the Midlands, which showcases the area to a wider audience. I hope for investors, the Midlands will be unskippable. It will soon reach a point where you won't be able to hear an advert anywhere in the UK without a Midland accent penetrating through the speakers. So, in conclusion, invest or lose out...Alright, Bab?
December 2021
Hi, I’m Thomas Glave. This is December 2021 and I’m about to read a piece entitled A Keynote in Three Parts.
FALLING AND WRITING (A KEYNOTE IN THREE PARTS)
by
Thomas Glave
- Unafraid of Falling: A Dancer’s Approach
Once, not so long ago, in that part of the world far across the sea, there lived a young girl who dreamt of dancing – in fact dreamt of growing up to become someone who danced constantly, as if no other way of being existed. During those early years, she never envisaged herself as a ‘ballerina’, so to speak, but simply as someone who yearned to, and was always beautifully capable of, moving her long limbs to music, and actually surrendering herself – surrendering what she would have called her ‘soul’ – to music. This girl grew up to become the great ballerina Suzanne Farrell, internationally renowned star of George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet company, and the foremost interpreter, in the late twentieth century, of his ballets. At one point, in 1965 when she was twenty years of age and he sixty-two, she almost became his sixth wife. (Balanchine’s previous five wives had all been ballerinas.) But marriage and romance mattered far less in Farrell’s life, a life dedicated almost exclusively to her art, than her holy pursuit of dance, and to what dance critics and Balanchine himself, as well as other choreographers, began to observe and refer to admiringly, and often with utter astonishment, as her style of ‘off-centre’ dancing. In Farrell’s vision, ‘off-centre’ dancing was a means of attaining ultimate generosity and daring onstage, a supreme gift to the audience but also a gift to and from the art form itself. It presented moments in which the vulnerable performer, dancing out her heart and very being across an enormous stage, and ostensibly completely uncaring as to whether she might be taking risks that could hurl her directly into a disaster such as falling off her dangerous balances or worse, became something like a true force of nature, unrestrained by gravity or fear. As one critic familiar with Farrell’s work and Balanchine’s choreography for the New York City Ballet understood the dancer, Farrell’s off-centre dancing involved ‘astonishing pirouettes, during which...she showed not an eyelid flicker’s worth of concern over whether her partner would be there to catch her at the end. As a rule he was, though there close calls, and a few terrifying occasions when we thought that...she was truly going to pitch herself into the orchestra’.
Farrell’s wildness and even recklessness onstage, especially in startling contrast to her deeply taciturn, even aloof personality, beguiled countless people, myself included, all of whom wondered at and reveled in the utter freedom and daring of her artistry: a freedom from the self-consciousness that we all know as both writers and human beings, known and experienced by all artists. This self-consciousness includes the often gnawing fear that at some point, whilst working on this or that project, or having completed this novel or that play or poetry collection, we may end up making fools of ourselves in front of them: the people out there, actual or imagined (or both): the individuals ever ready, we often fear, to hold our work up not only to cold scrutiny but also inevitably to scorn; the people out there who will surely regard us not with the care and earnest concern for which we yearn, but with cold contempt; the people whose moist breath we can always feel just over our shoulders as we begin writing on a new blank page. What will they think, thosedisapproving faces both imagined and real. . .
Yet perhaps, like daring ballerinas and other artists, we eventually realise that our work, like the work of dancers risking everything on a stage before an unseeable audience enshrouded in darkness, always involves the greatest daring of our most secret imagining selves. In such vulnerability there can be – and there invariably is – the possibility for humility, our embracing of humility, as we grapple with the fact that such deeper giving in art always requires the jettisoning of our egos in service to the art form’s discipline and demands. A ballerina may indeed fall out of the next sequence of pirouettes or fouettés, but was she giving us all of her energy and soul when she did? We may stumble over a sentence or a stanza, or find that our hands were wrapped too possessively around a character’s throat in this chapter or that poem, or we may mis-hear the lyric’s begging us to reach for a smoother rhyme, but it always seems – at least until the final loss of our faculties or simple end of our existence – that we do have time to work and re-work, and re-work again, anticipating in calmness the inevitability of falling without engaging any fear of falling. And again, and again. We certainly have more time than ballet dancers, who daily strive for beauty and grace against the ticking clock of their aging bodies. As for the patience required for the doing and re-doing, trying and re-trying, the pandemic has impressed upon us nothing if not an understanding of the importance of patience. During the numerous hours I’ve gritted my teeth whilst thinking of the great difficulty, at least for me, in patiently working to inculcate patience, I remembered Farrell insisting that her pre-professional female ballet pupils take an entire ballet class, not only the class’s second half, wearing pointe shoes – ‘Because’, Farrell often told those eager teen-agers, ‘you don’t learn to dance on pointe by not dancing on pointe’. Like those dancers in their ballet studio or rehearsal hall, we know that we don’t become writers by not writing. Yet I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t admit that tomorrow morning, like so many of us having to face that awful blank page, I remain fearful of falling, and of what they, out there, will eventually have to say. Yet the fall itself is sometimes all we have at the outset, or at least the very best thing in a daily parcel filled with unknowable risks, but also often with surprising joys.
- The Good Fortune of Commands
Sometimes people ask you as a writer to do things: to write a keynote address, or to craft a poem; to ‘work on’ an essay or short story or even a screenplay, or even – so I have heard -- to write a novel and send it to them, as in: ‘Write a novel for me, if you don’t mind? And if you could send it by the end of whenever, that would be lovely’.
Like many writers, I’ve found these requests serve best when I turn them into secret commands, telling myself things like: So-and-so asked me to do this, so now I must. This or that person asked me to send them whatever, so now I absolutely have to do so, and will in fact have to write the thing first, whatever the thing is. And I have learnt that in these secret ‘commands’ lies great good fortune: for in convincing myself that I must do something, I – any of us -- can swiftly get to work with a deadline in mind: a deadline often a quite useful tool for sweeping aside the writer’s anxiety that can produce procrastination. How many of us have written works that we might not have begun, let alone finished, had not someone – some editor with an unexpectedly warm face – asked us to ‘do something’, which we then did? This has certainly been my experience, and the demand, as I re-imagined it, lit the proverbial fire underneath my (etc). Moving through these considerations, I return for just a moment to Balanchine: a prolific choreographer, he was known for startling his promising younger New York City Ballet dancers by unexpectedly notifying them that he wanted them soon to perform a distinguished principal role in a ballet in which they had never performed. With his legendary calmness, he would summarily advise them to begin preparing for the part. . . to which the dancer in question would almost invariably protest that she or he didn’t feel yet ready for such a demanding role. ‘Ah, well, dear, that doesn’t matter’, Balanchine would usually respond with the same unnerving calm. ‘Get ready’. The dancer, usually immediately registering both apprehension and excitement, had little choice but to prepare for the role, and ultimately to dance.
We know as writers that imagining such demands from others, and facing actual ones, can help us to write by simply requiring that we do. Yet there exists another possibility embedded in this task that isn’t always as obvious: the fact that we might not have ventured into other genres, other literary worlds previously unvisited, had we not embarked upon the pretend-demand project. I might never have written ‘literary nonfiction’, which I’d never believed I could really do, especially given that I’d not always known what it was, and am still not certain that I do know, had an editor at a literary journal not asked me years ago to write some ‘literary nonfiction’ on a particular topic for a forthcoming special-themed issue of that journal, after which I began trying to write in the strange new (to me) form, hoping all the while that the exercise inherent in the daily writing and all the attendant struggles of trying to say something that meant something that was not fiction – in short, something that made sense in the realm of this other, as-yet untried genre – would ‘work’, as people like to say. It felt distinctly odd then – as odd as it might feel to prepare a keynote address -- to write words such as ‘I think’ and ‘I believe’, as opposed to thinking about what my characters thought and believed (and sometimes taking refuge behind the greater boldness or madness or just plain strangeness of those characters: the people who so often could do and say all the things that I might have secretly wished I could do and say, not including ugliness or cruelty, but which in our real-time world of constrictions and tight ropes I felt I couldn’t dare do, or say). Yet the younger writer of that time emerged from the process somewhat unscathed, and rather astonished that I had written a piece of nonfiction. Really? But yes, some critical and editorial voices in the world whispered, some of them even with a welcoming gaze on their watchful faces; and that younger writer who was me, once upon that time and far away across the sea, soon realised that, as with the use of pointe shoes in ballet class for aspiring ballerinas, the best way to learn how to write nonfiction was simply by writing nonfiction: writing it steadfastly, accompanied and enabled by the teeth-grittedness of sometimes gruelling patience.
And so when Writing West Midlands earlier this year asked me, during one of the UK’s Covid lockdown periods, to write something about Birmingham during lockdown, I accepted the request as a command, having no idea that the city’s encroaching seagulls, grown bolder during lockdown and less fearful of humans (if they ever had been), would have much to say to me, including critiques, during their regular evening choruses over Brindleyplace and elsewhere: would I have thought to listen carefully to seagulls’ complaints and observations, and converse with them, and struggle to translate their often hilarious profanity, had this writing request-command not materialised? The request also forced me to look at the hilly, labyrinthine city of Birmingham altogether differently, thorough the twilight lens of lockdown-enforced silences and a Broad Street virtually empty of humans, especially at dusk and afterward, but wildly alive through the darker hours with windblown paper rubbish carousing, even gallivanting, in all the corners and byways where it knew no people would care, because scarcely any people -- at least not people with faces – seemed to have been there, unless I was somehow missing them between dreams and waking. Birmingham’s canals suddenly began whispering, in the snakiest of tones, Do you see now what we’ve been trying to tell you all along? – and as a fairly new resident in the twisting, hilly city, I couldn’t help but respond Yes, yes, and yes. And still I wonder how many requests-as-commands become writing possibilities for each of us: Does Pick up some milk at Tesco become a story, or Could you please walk the dog before it rains? become a novel? I remain certain that now, right now, someone is hearing the poem or the play or the screenplay (or all three) in Will you please email the Council, or Would you like to use these dishes, or Do be careful with all my cactuses. If this is true, then all that I can guarantee at this moment is that everything that the snarky seagulls promised me through all those lockdown evenings shall surely, in the languages of our deepest and most intimate dreams, also eventually be promised to all of us, everywhere.
- What You Realise You Know, That They Don’t Know
In conclusion, I wished to include some words in reference to this twisting, hilly, strangely configured city of Birmingham, in light of some of the twisted, strange remarks so many people throughout England in particular have made to me upon learning that I happily, freely chose – and was not required – to live here. What do such words teach us? What on earth can it mean when a well-meaning London-based person stammers, ‘But does Thomas really live in Birmingham? But why?’ What do we learn when we hear English people speak mockingly of Birmingham, deriding the famously constantly mocked Birmingham-area accents, even as I, an outsider to all this British baggage, would be interested in undertaking Birmingham and Black Country dialect lessons? What do we learn when we remember that although so many Londoners sneer at Birmingham, the UK’s esteemed capital and vast home of Big Ben and more is more frequently than ever in our climate change era prone to foul-smelling floods? How do we feel about the fact that London’s quasi-prehistoric rats appear to possess the very same physical and psychological characteristics as Birmingham’s twenty-first century vermin?
I believe that the examples of people’s provincialism and ignorance help those of us who know the West Midlands and Birmingham in particular understand, quickly, that we actually know a great deal that these narrow people don’t and probably will never be able to know. They won’t know about Birmingham’s sprawling neighbourhoods with their merciless hills (speaking here as a long-suffering long distance runner), nor about the gleaming domes of particular mosques, nor the windows of halal grocers’ shops that steam up on colder days. It cannot be possible for them to know about the stories within the stories within all of Birmingham’s streets and squares and alongside the murmuring canals (thinking of a story I recently heard of a skulking demon that resides in the canal waters beneath the long Curzon Street tunnel, for example). It might not even be possible for them to understand at last all their own hang-ups about social class and when and where they fit into all of it, or don’t, and who they know who does or doesn’t give a damn. In all of this not-knowing, whilst those Birmingham detractors may know of other things and places (although this possibility appears dim), they’re unable to know and engage with, embark through, these particular stories: a great loss for them. At the risk of sounding like the opening sentences of a Latin American novel, I could have no idea when I arrived in Birmingham New Street station on that fateful day six years ago that I would someday not only find myself shocked into silence by the raucous profanity of Brindleyplace seagulls, but also that I was all at once living in a region – indeed, in a country – in which a great many people often said very little that was meant to say much, whilst other people said some things that hinted at other things they knew they shouldn’t say but couldn’t help inferring, all the while ending their sentences with rhetorical phrases such as Is that okay, or Is that all right, whether or not the thing in question was indeed okay or all right. Here clearly loomed, with open hands, an offered gift: the opportunity to decipher, discern, observe, attempt to understand, and – with luck – uncover the story or stories deeper within the understanding, in the exact heart of where the person or persons existed and, like all human beings, where they yearned, dreamt, lived, perhaps loved, and where, one day, they would, like all of us, die. Moving through these worlds in our daily living and writing, our dreaming and listening, it seems clearer than ever that we need not waste time with the fear of falling, for in fact all we need do is walk. I couldn’t have said all this six years ago when I first arrived in this city of hidden stories and long hills and twisting streets – and even if I could have, I wouldn’t have remembered until exactly today, right now, that I was first told all of this and more by one of the many shadows that emerged and finally had the chance to voice their whispered stories during the spectral quietness of lockdown evenings, and our recent summer long evenings, as they will do again throughout a future autumn’s golden hours, and through every season to come. Even now I can’t remember all the words that those shadows shared with me, but I do recall their strong Birmingham accents, and the comfort that they seemed to take in the company of particular ghosts, and trees, and all the things that didn’t yet exist because all of us, through all of those twilight hours, were still working so very hard to imagine them. . .working to imagine and produce on the page every word, every breath, and every single remaining silence.
Outro
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. Follow us on Instagram, twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All information about the festival and upcoming events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org. The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
Writer and Professor Thomas Glave wrote our very first commissioned piece in January 2021, describing a quiet, reflective post-Christmas Brindley Place in the midst of lockdown. In December's offering, he reflects beautifully on that experience in a piece that moves fluidly through dancing and writing and the way that stories move us.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Newsletter Podcast Transcript: Episode 12, December: Thomas Glave
Intro
Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast and our new series of commissioned writing about 2021. Each month we are commissioning a new writer to reflect on the month that has passed, offering us moments of connection through great writing and the opportunity to reflect about what we have collectively experienced at the end of the year.
We will be bringing you a new short episode at the start of each month, with each piece read by our guest writers. You can read the pieces on our website, where you will also find information about our upcoming digital events.
Reading
Hi, I’m Thomas Glave. This is December 2021 and I’m about to read a piece entitled A Keynote in Three Parts.
FALLING AND WRITING (A KEYNOTE IN THREE PARTS)
- Unafraid of Falling: A Dancer’s Approach
Once, not so long ago, in that part of the world far across the sea, there lived a young girl who dreamt of dancing – in fact dreamt of growing up to become someone who danced constantly, as if no other way of being existed. During those early years, she never envisaged herself as a ‘ballerina’, so to speak, but simply as someone who yearned to, and was always beautifully capable of, moving her long limbs to music, and actually surrendering herself – surrendering what she would have called her ‘soul’ – to music. This girl grew up to become the great ballerina Suzanne Farrell, internationally renowned star of George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet company, and the foremost interpreter, in the late twentieth century, of his ballets. At one point, in 1965 when she was twenty years of age and he sixty-two, she almost became his sixth wife. (Balanchine’s previous five wives had all been ballerinas.) But marriage and romance mattered far less in Farrell’s life, a life dedicated almost exclusively to her art, than her holy pursuit of dance, and to what dance critics and Balanchine himself, as well as other choreographers, began to observe and refer to admiringly, and often with utter astonishment, as her style of ‘off-centre’ dancing. In Farrell’s vision, ‘off-centre’ dancing was a means of attaining ultimate generosity and daring onstage, a supreme gift to the audience but also a gift to and from the art form itself. It presented moments in which the vulnerable performer, dancing out her heart and very being across an enormous stage, and ostensibly completely uncaring as to whether she might be taking risks that could hurl her directly into a disaster such as falling off her dangerous balances or worse, became something like a true force of nature, unrestrained by gravity or fear. As one critic familiar with Farrell’s work and Balanchine’s choreography for the New York City Ballet understood the dancer, Farrell’s off-centre dancing involved ‘astonishing pirouettes, during which...she showed not an eyelid flicker’s worth of concern over whether her partner would be there to catch her at the end. As a rule he was, though there close calls, and a few terrifying occasions when we thought that...she was truly going to pitch herself into the orchestra’.
Farrell’s wildness and even recklessness onstage, especially in startling contrast to her deeply taciturn, even aloof personality, beguiled countless people, myself included, all of whom wondered at and reveled in the utter freedom and daring of her artistry: a freedom from the self-consciousness that we all know as both writers and human beings, known and experienced by all artists. This self-consciousness includes the often gnawing fear that at some point, whilst working on this or that project, or having completed this novel or that play or poetry collection, we may end up making fools of ourselves in front of them: the people out there, actual or imagined (or both): the individuals ever ready, we often fear, to hold our work up not only to cold scrutiny but also inevitably to scorn; the people out there who will surely regard us not with the care and earnest concern for which we yearn, but with cold contempt; the people whose moist breath we can always feel just over our shoulders as we begin writing on a new blank page. What will they think, thosedisapproving faces both imagined and real. . .
Yet perhaps, like daring ballerinas and other artists, we eventually realise that our work, like the work of dancers risking everything on a stage before an unseeable audience enshrouded in darkness, always involves the greatest daring of our most secret imagining selves. In such vulnerability there can be – and there invariably is – the possibility for humility, our embracing of humility, as we grapple with the fact that such deeper giving in art always requires the jettisoning of our egos in service to the art form’s discipline and demands. A ballerina may indeed fall out of the next sequence of pirouettes or fouettés, but was she giving us all of her energy and soul when she did? We may stumble over a sentence or a stanza, or find that our hands were wrapped too possessively around a character’s throat in this chapter or that poem, or we may mis-hear the lyric’s begging us to reach for a smoother rhyme, but it always seems – at least until the final loss of our faculties or simple end of our existence – that we do have time to work and re-work, and re-work again, anticipating in calmness the inevitability of falling without engaging any fear of falling. And again, and again. We certainly have more time than ballet dancers, who daily strive for beauty and grace against the ticking clock of their aging bodies. As for the patience required for the doing and re-doing, trying and re-trying, the pandemic has impressed upon us nothing if not an understanding of the importance of patience. During the numerous hours I’ve gritted my teeth whilst thinking of the great difficulty, at least for me, in patiently working to inculcate patience, I remembered Farrell insisting that her pre-professional female ballet pupils take an entire ballet class, not only the class’s second half, wearing pointe shoes – ‘Because’, Farrell often told those eager teen-agers, ‘you don’t learn to dance on pointe by not dancing on pointe’. Like those dancers in their ballet studio or rehearsal hall, we know that we don’t become writers by not writing. Yet I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t admit that tomorrow morning, like so many of us having to face that awful blank page, I remain fearful of falling, and of what they, out there, will eventually have to say. Yet the fall itself is sometimes all we have at the outset, or at least the very best thing in a daily parcel filled with unknowable risks, but also often with surprising joys.
- The Good Fortune of Commands
Sometimes people ask you as a writer to do things: to write a keynote address, or to craft a poem; to ‘work on’ an essay or short story or even a screenplay, or even – so I have heard -- to write a novel and send it to them, as in: ‘Write a novel for me, if you don’t mind? And if you could send it by the end of whenever, that would be lovely’.
Like many writers, I’ve found these requests serve best when I turn them into secret commands, telling myself things like: So-and-so asked me to do this, so now I must. This or that person asked me to send them whatever, so now I absolutely have to do so, and will in fact have to write the thing first, whatever the thing is. And I have learnt that in these secret ‘commands’ lies great good fortune: for in convincing myself that I must do something, I – any of us -- can swiftly get to work with a deadline in mind: a deadline often a quite useful tool for sweeping aside the writer’s anxiety that can produce procrastination. How many of us have written works that we might not have begun, let alone finished, had not someone – some editor with an unexpectedly warm face – asked us to ‘do something’, which we then did? This has certainly been my experience, and the demand, as I re-imagined it, lit the proverbial fire underneath my (etc). Moving through these considerations, I return for just a moment to Balanchine: a prolific choreographer, he was known for startling his promising younger New York City Ballet dancers by unexpectedly notifying them that he wanted them soon to perform a distinguished principal role in a ballet in which they had never performed. With his legendary calmness, he would summarily advise them to begin preparing for the part. . . to which the dancer in question would almost invariably protest that she or he didn’t feel yet ready for such a demanding role. ‘Ah, well, dear, that doesn’t matter’, Balanchine would usually respond with the same unnerving calm. ‘Get ready’. The dancer, usually immediately registering both apprehension and excitement, had little choice but to prepare for the role, and ultimately to dance.
We know as writers that imagining such demands from others, and facing actual ones, can help us to write by simply requiring that we do. Yet there exists another possibility embedded in this task that isn’t always as obvious: the fact that we might not have ventured into other genres, other literary worlds previously unvisited, had we not embarked upon the pretend-demand project. I might never have written ‘literary nonfiction’, which I’d never believed I could really do, especially given that I’d not always known what it was, and am still not certain that I do know, had an editor at a literary journal not asked me years ago to write some ‘literary nonfiction’ on a particular topic for a forthcoming special-themed issue of that journal, after which I began trying to write in the strange new (to me) form, hoping all the while that the exercise inherent in the daily writing and all the attendant struggles of trying to say something that meant something that was not fiction – in short, something that made sense in the realm of this other, as-yet untried genre – would ‘work’, as people like to say. It felt distinctly odd then – as odd as it might feel to prepare a keynote address -- to write words such as ‘I think’ and ‘I believe’, as opposed to thinking about what my characters thought and believed (and sometimes taking refuge behind the greater boldness or madness or just plain strangeness of those characters: the people who so often could do and say all the things that I might have secretly wished I could do and say, not including ugliness or cruelty, but which in our real-time world of constrictions and tight ropes I felt I couldn’t dare do, or say). Yet the younger writer of that time emerged from the process somewhat unscathed, and rather astonished that I had written a piece of nonfiction. Really? But yes, some critical and editorial voices in the world whispered, some of them even with a welcoming gaze on their watchful faces; and that younger writer who was me, once upon that time and far away across the sea, soon realised that, as with the use of pointe shoes in ballet class for aspiring ballerinas, the best way to learn how to write nonfiction was simply by writing nonfiction: writing it steadfastly, accompanied and enabled by the teeth-grittedness of sometimes gruelling patience.
And so when Writing West Midlands earlier this year asked me, during one of the UK’s Covid lockdown periods, to write something about Birmingham during lockdown, I accepted the request as a command, having no idea that the city’s encroaching seagulls, grown bolder during lockdown and less fearful of humans (if they ever had been), would have much to say to me, including critiques, during their regular evening choruses over Brindleyplace and elsewhere: would I have thought to listen carefully to seagulls’ complaints and observations, and converse with them, and struggle to translate their often hilarious profanity, had this writing request-command not materialised? The request also forced me to look at the hilly, labyrinthine city of Birmingham altogether differently, thorough the twilight lens of lockdown-enforced silences and a Broad Street virtually empty of humans, especially at dusk and afterward, but wildly alive through the darker hours with windblown paper rubbish carousing, even gallivanting, in all the corners and byways where it knew no people would care, because scarcely any people -- at least not people with faces – seemed to have been there, unless I was somehow missing them between dreams and waking. Birmingham’s canals suddenly began whispering, in the snakiest of tones, Do you see now what we’ve been trying to tell you all along? – and as a fairly new resident in the twisting, hilly city, I couldn’t help but respond Yes, yes, and yes. And still I wonder how many requests-as-commands become writing possibilities for each of us: Does Pick up some milk at Tesco become a story, or Could you please walk the dog before it rains? become a novel? I remain certain that now, right now, someone is hearing the poem or the play or the screenplay (or all three) in Will you please email the Council, or Would you like to use these dishes, or Do be careful with all my cactuses. If this is true, then all that I can guarantee at this moment is that everything that the snarky seagulls promised me through all those lockdown evenings shall surely, in the languages of our deepest and most intimate dreams, also eventually be promised to all of us, everywhere.
- What You Realise You Know, That They Don’t Know
In conclusion, I wished to include some words in reference to this twisting, hilly, strangely configured city of Birmingham, in light of some of the twisted, strange remarks so many people throughout England in particular have made to me upon learning that I happily, freely chose – and was not required – to live here. What do such words teach us? What on earth can it mean when a well-meaning London-based person stammers, ‘But does Thomas really live in Birmingham? But why?’ What do we learn when we hear English people speak mockingly of Birmingham, deriding the famously constantly mocked Birmingham-area accents, even as I, an outsider to all this British baggage, would be interested in undertaking Birmingham and Black Country dialect lessons? What do we learn when we remember that although so many Londoners sneer at Birmingham, the UK’s esteemed capital and vast home of Big Ben and more is more frequently than ever in our climate change era prone to foul-smelling floods? How do we feel about the fact that London’s quasi-prehistoric rats appear to possess the very same physical and psychological characteristics as Birmingham’s twenty-first century vermin?
I believe that the examples of people’s provincialism and ignorance help those of us who know the West Midlands and Birmingham in particular understand, quickly, that we actually know a great deal that these narrow people don’t and probably will never be able to know. They won’t know about Birmingham’s sprawling neighbourhoods with their merciless hills (speaking here as a long-suffering long distance runner), nor about the gleaming domes of particular mosques, nor the windows of halal grocers’ shops that steam up on colder days. It cannot be possible for them to know about the stories within the stories within all of Birmingham’s streets and squares and alongside the murmuring canals (thinking of a story I recently heard of a skulking demon that resides in the canal waters beneath the long Curzon Street tunnel, for example). It might not even be possible for them to understand at last all their own hang-ups about social class and when and where they fit into all of it, or don’t, and who they know who does or doesn’t give a damn. In all of this not-knowing, whilst those Birmingham detractors may know of other things and places (although this possibility appears dim), they’re unable to know and engage with, embark through, these particular stories: a great loss for them. At the risk of sounding like the opening sentences of a Latin American novel, I could have no idea when I arrived in Birmingham New Street station on that fateful day six years ago that I would someday not only find myself shocked into silence by the raucous profanity of Brindleyplace seagulls, but also that I was all at once living in a region – indeed, in a country – in which a great many people often said very little that was meant to say much, whilst other people said some things that hinted at other things they knew they shouldn’t say but couldn’t help inferring, all the while ending their sentences with rhetorical phrases such as Is that okay, or Is that all right, whether or not the thing in question was indeed okay or all right. Here clearly loomed, with open hands, an offered gift: the opportunity to decipher, discern, observe, attempt to understand, and – with luck – uncover the story or stories deeper within the understanding, in the exact heart of where the person or persons existed and, like all human beings, where they yearned, dreamt, lived, perhaps loved, and where, one day, they would, like all of us, die. Moving through these worlds in our daily living and writing, our dreaming and listening, it seems clearer than ever that we need not waste time with the fear of falling, for in fact all we need do is walk. I couldn’t have said all this six years ago when I first arrived in this city of hidden stories and long hills and twisting streets – and even if I could have, I wouldn’t have remembered until exactly today, right now, that I was first told all of this and more by one of the many shadows that emerged and finally had the chance to voice their whispered stories during the spectral quietness of lockdown evenings, and our recent summer long evenings, as they will do again throughout a future autumn’s golden hours, and through every season to come. Even now I can’t remember all the words that those shadows shared with me, but I do recall their strong Birmingham accents, and the comfort that they seemed to take in the company of particular ghosts, and trees, and all the things that didn’t yet exist because all of us, through all of those twilight hours, were still working so very hard to imagine them. . .working to imagine and produce on the page every word, every breath, and every single remaining silence.
Outro
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. Follow us on Instagram, twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All information about the festival and upcoming events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org. The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
April 2021’s online event featured author and journalist Sathnam Sanghera discussing his latest book Empireland. In conversation with Sara Wajid, the co-CEO of the Birmingham Museum’s Trust, he discussed the ways in which legacies of empire permeate everything from the NHS to our national museums and how the events of the past year have demonstrated the urgent need for us to understand and reckon with our imperial past.
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Series 2, Episode 11: Sathnam Sanghera
Intro
Welcome to the second series of the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast. We are really excited to be back for a second season and to continue to connect readers and writers in the Midlands, and far beyond.
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
April 2021’s online event featured author and journalist Sathnam Sanghera discussing his latest book Empireland. In conversation with Sara Wajid, the co-CEO of the Birmingham Museum’s Trust, he discussed the ways in which legacies of empire permeate everything from the NHS to our national museums and how the events of the past year have demonstrated the urgent need for us to understand and reckon with our imperial past.
Sara Wajid
Good evening, everyone. I'm Sara Wajid. I'm the co-CEO of Birmingham Museum Art Gallery, and I'm here this evening to talk to Sathnam Sanghera about his book Empireland. I'm speaking to you from Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. This is the industrial gallery. As this is Birmingham Literature Festival. No doubt many of you will recognise the museum, so I thought I’d give you this treat to be able to peek inside the museum when you haven't been able to for so long now in lockdown. As I said, I'm the co-CEO of Birmingham Museums Trust. And I'm really delighted to be having this conversation with Sathnam. He's such an important person, not just as a UK journalist, but particularly for the Midlands. And this is quite a special conversation. We were talking just now in the virtual green room about whether we've met before. And clearly Sathnam doesn't recognize me or remember me from the early 2000s but he was very much on my radar when I was a journalist, not nearly as good a journalist as him, which is why I'm now museum director and no longer a journalist. For those of you who may want to refresh as to Santhanam’s biog, he was born to Indian Punjabi parents in 1976 in Wolverhampton. He's been a Times columnist and feature writer since 2007 and his memoir, The Boy with a Topknot, a memoir of love, secrets and lies in Wolverhampton, was adapted for BBC Two in 2017. I’m a big fan. His novel Marriage Material was shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards. And he's also presented a range of TV documentaries, including The Massacre that Shook the Empire on Channel Four. Sathnam, welcome. Good to see you. Congratulations on the book, it’s a wonderful book and its been received extremely warmly. I must say I was a bit surprised to see you writing on this topic. When I first heard about the book I was like what's this, he's not a historian. You know us in the museum and history world can be a bit snobby like that, like, right, like what right does this fella have to come into our territory and start writing about this stuff? Doesn't he interview celebrities? Isn't that his domain? Then I read the book and obviously I was very impressed, which is why we're talking now. But firstly, I wanted to ask you a bit about identity. As much as this book is about public understanding of history and Empire, I guess what makes it stand out from historians is your reflections on your own identity and how Empire has shaped you and your journey in writing this book and how it's affected you. There's a bit in the book where you're reflecting on this and describe it saying ‘on embarking on this journey, I'm making an effort to decolonise myself.’ I wanted to know what you meant by that, and how it's going.
Sathnam Sanghera
It’s an ongoing process. And I guess the phrase decolonisation, you know, a lot of people are allergic to it. Actually, I was allergic to because I didn't feel like I needed decolonising because when you've had a very good education, where everyone tells you you've had the best education in the world, you just think there's nothing wrong with what you've learned and what you've looked at, and the way you've focused on certain things. But it was probably three quarters of my way through this book that I realized that actually I had been colonised. I think that what made me realise it as I was reading about the way Indian kingdoms were taken over by the British. And one of the ways they conquered these Indian royal families was by putting the children through a British education. The Sikh Empire wasn't lost on the battlefield, it was lost in a school room, where Maharajah Duleep Singh was turned into an English gent, you know, was sent off to Britain and became a kind of toy for Queen Victoria. That ended the Sikh kingdom. And later in life he realised what had happened and he tried to reconnect with his Sikh heritage, and I really related to that. And I think, at a similar age in my 40s, I realised I had been coloniSed. And I'm trying to do something about it. But you're right, in that it was a bit weird that I'm writing about this subject. You know, I did a reading about 18 months ago, to some friends in a restaurant, it was a small event. And the general reaction was one of complete confusion, because they couldn't quite work out whether it was history or memoir. And it was quite an esoteric subject then. But then suddenly, six months later, we had Black Lives Matter. And suddenly, I was turning on the news and there was, you know, a mainstream news item about how British Empire created modern notions of racism, how we exported racism to America. And suddenly, this niche thing I was writing about, became of international concern. So, it's only accidentally timely to be honest, and there was no certainty that it was going to work.
Sara Wajid
I just want to draw you out a little bit more on what you were saying there about your education. In your earlier memoirs, when you refer to your schooling, and the grammar school, I hadn't registered it as a kind of quite posh school. And that, and that tells you something, doesn’t it because I went to a minor public school, so I'm like grammar school? He's not a posh boy. But actually, when you were kind of reflecting on quite how colonial the ideologies were in your school, because you went to your reunion, and found, you know, sort of singing these super colonially school songs and all the rest of it, that really struck a chord with me. We are both Punjabi immigrants, you started school not really speaking that much English, I think I remember from your memoir, although you went off to your posh University and did your top-notch English degree, as I did an English degree too. And for me, I've been very conscious that I've been wrestling with that colonial public-school kind of education that I had, and that realisation was quite near the surface for me, that public schools are a very colonising environment, ideologically, politically, culturally, cricket, all of that stuff. And for me, in a sense, museums are very much a reflection of that. And I often think I've found myself in museums because I'm continuing this kind of Freudian like struggle of adapting or wrestling with that kind of public-school ideology.
Sathnam Sanghera
The public school system in Britain was the system that was used to produce officers for the British Empire. And I've since learned that not only was that the case, but the state school system was set up to mimic the public school system. So even though Wolverhampton Grammar School was a grammar school, you know, it was a state Grammar School in the 20th century, it became an independent school just before I joined. When I was there, it was a mixture of kids on 100% assisted places, and posh kids. And so, I didn't really think it was particularly posh. But it had that culture, you know, that traditional British culture, which goes back to the Victorian age where, you know, we sang the national anthem, and our school song talked about conquering the planet. Partly, the reason I didn't understand it is that the school song was in Latin. We were singing these words and we didn't really understand them. But I think the influence of Empire, as I tried to explain in the book, extends in so many silent ways. And so, it took quite a lot of research and thinking to realise and to trace the ways it continues to influence modern life.
Sara Wajid
It sounded a bit like that was also about your education at university as well, as I say you studied English literature. And it seems that it was a very narrow curriculum. We talk now about decolonising the curriculum but you were at university more than 20 years ago, and it sounds like your reading of someone like Edward Said, that was certainly not part of your tertiary education.
Sathnam Sanghera
No, actually Edward Said blew my mind. I mean, he wrote this one particular essay about Jane Austen and Mansfield Park, about how the Empire can be traced throughout the story and throughout the dialogue. I studied Mansfield Park for A Level, I hated it. I thought there's nothing in it I could relate to, and I had to do anyway, it struck me as amazing that actually there was loads of stuff that was interesting to me. And that was about Empire, we just didn't have the teaching to tell us that. You know, I was in my final term at university before I read a single brown author, you know, V. S. Naipaul, Hanif Kureshi, Salman Rushdie. That's incredible, I find that amazing now. So, all of my impressions of India, most of them came through British writers, you know, by Paul Scott, and Forster and so on. And I realized that my gaze, or Western gaze upon the East, it was Edward Said who made me realise that and also, I mean, the term decolonisation often attracts the criticism that it's about deleting, you know, the great white authors, I don't think it's about that at all. I think it's a failure of education, that I didn't have a wider perspective. It's completely in keeping with the academic tradition, to widen perspectives, that I didn't know that about Mansfield Park was a failure of education, you know, and I think we should, instead of using the phrase decolonising, we should use the phrase widening, because that's what this is about, you know, it's about widening perspectives. And that is entirely what schools and universities should be doing.
Sara Wajid
I also felt there was something, I suppose there was a sadness underneath that realisation. For a lot of immigrant parents, they invest a huge amount in the education of their children, as a route to social mobility. And certainly my parents’ generation, invested so much, and made a lot of sacrifices for children to have what they perceived as being the best education that the host country had to offer, because they saw it as a shield, and armour that their children are going to need, because they're already going to be on the backfoot in this country, so give them and equip them with the best that they possibly can through the education system. But that same education system, I guess what you seem to be revealing and surfacing, actually took something away from you.
Sathnam Sanghera
Yeah, I guess that was the lesson of my first book as well, in that, you know, I would never complain about my education, because it changed my life in ways I wanted it to change. But when you're socially mobile, you do lose something, you lose your connection with where you're from, you know, I became very middle class in a working-class family. And that is a universal problem, you know, and so going back to where you're from, you kind of miss it. But it happened much more profoundly, in the, in the case of Empire. I wouldn't complain about the education I had. But I think immigrants think about education as something as an economic transaction. So, they want their children to go to the best school to get the best job. What that doesn't take into account is that education changes you as a person. And that's something that immigrants don't necessarily buy into. It's something they don't necessarily want. And it's actually ultimately my education that has got me here. So, it's a bit of a paradox, isn't it? I remembered what I was saying, three quarters of the way through it.
Sara Wajid
I guess the other thing about your childhood and your upbringing, and Wolverhampton that looms so strongly throughout the book is Enoch Powell. And we're similar in age, I've got a couple of years on you. But in Powell, I remember as well very, kind of vividly from my childhood that he was almost a sort of bogeyman figure in my household growing up, even the name still to this day, gives me the spooks a little bit, you know, just freaks me out. But I suppose I wanted to hear from you about how and why you involve him and thread him throughout a book like that, and what you think he means, particularly in the Midlands, today?
Sathnam Sanghera
Yeah, I feel exactly the same about Powell. He didn't overshadow my childhood in that we weren't a political household. Like many immigrant families, the focus was just on working, getting some money, escaping poverty. And even at school, his successor, Nick Budgen, came to visit. But I had very little awareness of what he represented, but his shadow of my adult life, I mean, he was a big presence in my novel, as I was writing about the 1960s/70s experience of Asian immigrant. And I realized that, you know, he's an incredible man who kind of encapsulates the confusion we have about Empire, because, you know, he obviously is most famous for being anti-immigration. But his great ambition in life was to be the Viceroy of India. And as soon as you know that, everything else kind of makes sense because he had an imperial notion of race. The Empire had a hierarchy, right, people at the top, separated from brown people, you know, and in his Rivers of Blood speech, he talks about the black man having the whip of the white man. And for him, multiculturalism was an inversion of that racial hierarchy. That's why it troubled him so much. He went on to say some very peculiar things about Empire. He actually argued that empire never happened, which is a kind of weird, postmodern kind of argument, which I've never seen anyone else make. But I think that indicates how troubled he was by the failure of his ambition, by the way in which we ended up having a multicultural society because we had a multicultural empire. That was never part of his plan. I think that disturbed his sense of Britain, and his own sense of himself.
Sara Wajid
History seems like it's having a moment And I don't just say that as a museum director; stepping back and looking over the last year, and the focus on statues and decolonising and our reckoning with our own history around Empire, it feels within the last year. But writing this book during lockdown, I particularly wondered how it felt to situate yourself in these histories, some of which are very painful, ugly, as you particularly talk about at the beginning of the book, what did that feel like, in such a claustrophobic year?
Sathnam Sanghera
Yeah, I mean, it was hard. But it's four years of reading so it wasn't just lockdown, I was finishing the book in lockdown. But yeah, it was hard to look at some of the violence, you know, Sikhs being tied to the end of cannons and blown into pieces, because that way they couldn't have a proper funeral. You know, things like that. And obviously what happened in Tasmania, which was a genocide where native Tasmanians were hunted for sport, it's quite hard to read that stuff. And I used to stop myself from reading it after two o'clock in the day, because I found that if I read it later on, I'd have nightmares about it. But the other surreal thing about it was during lockdown, when suddenly this niche issue I was writing about became a global concern with Black Lives Matter. And suddenly, statues are coming down, people are talking about colonisation, people are talking about Robert Clive, you know, the Robert Clive statue, and who I've been thinking about for two years, and it's quite surreal. And I tried to compare it in the book to being a fan of a really obscure soul singer, and suddenly he's covered by Robbie Williams, and people are singing his song, it was a bit like that.
Sara Wajid
I mean, Empire's hardly an obscure corner of history.
Sathnam Sanghera
But it's very poorly understood. You know, I mean, I didn't I knew very little about it, you know, and I think in general, we don't know, that's part of the reason why I wanted to write the book, because it's really, we don't really see ourselves as the country that created the greatest empire in human history. We see ourselves as a country that won World War Two. And what that does, it helps us forget, because we beat the evil, racist Germans, it helps us forget that we were wilfully white supremacists for more than a century.
Sara Wajid
I noticed you use the pronoun ‘we’ there and you do in the book at times when, for instance, you might be talking about white British expats, or British attitudes, sometimes racist attitudes. And then you use the term ‘we’ almost directly afterwards when you're talking about Britishness and I felt at moments that I didn't quite buy that ‘we’. It doesn't sit right in your mouth. I don't believe you mean ‘we’ when you're talking about that, we're talking about racist white British people. Why use ‘we’?
Sathnam Sanghera
Yeah, it's very interesting, actually, when I did my documentary, The Massacre, about the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, about a year and a half ago, I used the word ‘we’ all the way through it without thinking about it. And I got loads of letters from people saying God, why do you say ‘we’ and it's like, thing is I am British, as I am Asian, the Sikhs, you know, were involved, took the side of the British during the mutiny, it was quite a thing. Sikhs fought in huge numbers in both World Wars, they took advantage of opportunities to relocate within empire for centuries. And so, for me, it's very easy to say ‘we’, I generally don't put any thought into it. The only time I thought about it is when I had the book read by a couple of historians. And they said, you know what, you should never use the word ‘we’, the first thing that happens when you go to university to study history is that your tutor tells you never to say ‘we’, you need to de personalise it. And I was like, you know what, I'm not a historian. And this isn't a history book, a conventional one. I'm going to keep the ‘we’, because I meant it. But I understand some people feel, I think it's a reflection of how British you feel. And it's a reflection of your personal experiences in this country as a child of immigrants.
Sara Wajid
I guess overall, the thrust of the book is that if we knew our history better, that we would be a happier, multicultural, cohesive society, that multiculturalism would be working better if only British people knew more about Empire and the history of empire.
Sathnam Sanghera
A lot has happened since that has made me a bit depressed. I mean, there's been a massive backlash against Black Lives Matter, amongst, frankly, the English nationalists in this government. And so, it's been weaponised by a right-wing sect of the Tory party. And so, you have Robert Jenrick writing columns about how he wants to introduce legislation to protect statues, you have the Culture Secretary saying he wants to punish you if you respond to woke campaigners. There's no doubt it's become vicious and depressing but I’ll tell you why I'm optimistic. I'm optimistic because change is happening regardless, whatever the politicians do. Young people feel incredibly strongly. First of all, they feel very strongly about Black Lives Matter. And all the surveys show that secondly, they're getting the information from outside the school room, there's so many Instagram accounts, there's films like Black Panther, nothing is gonna stop that. Nothing. And also, you gotta remember, the national curriculum increasingly isn't all, you know, if you're an academy, or if you're a private school, you don't have to follow the national curriculum. And the amazing thing I have had, since the book has come out, is hundreds of history teachers saying, you know what, I already teach that, or I'm going to teach that, and they can. And I think they're responding to the desire amongst the younger generation. So, I guess, ultimately, as young people, that makes me feel optimistic, though, occasionally, when I read the newspapers, I want to shoot myself.
Sara Wajid
And how do you feel when you're going to museums?
Sathnam Sanghera
Well museums, they’re very nice, yours looks very nice. I've not been in yours. I'm gonna do that.
Sara Wajid
How dare you, yes, make sure you come. But that's interesting, I mean, you're a person who's written a book on Empire, but you've never been to the main museum in your own region that you hale from. You talk about museums a lot in the book. But before you started reading the book, what was your relationship with museums, were you someone who went?
Sathnam Sanghera
Probably not, I mean, I've been to London museums. I think as you get older, you get more interested in history. And when you're a young person, you're not necessarily interested in the past. And also, the Midlands, when I was a young man was something I just wanted to escape. You know, even though it's become the thing I write about now, which often happens when people leave somewhere, it becomes the inspiration. So, I didn't go to Wolverhampton Art Gallery until I was about 25. And so, it's something I'm doing as I get older. But yeah, museums are a major aspect of our culture. And I think they've not faced up to the fact that they got a lot of their stuff by looting, and also, that looting was condemned at the time. That's my ultimate point. You know, I pick out Tibet and Ethiopia, two invasions we did in the 19th century, in the early 20th century. And they were, you know, we had Gladstone complaining about what happened in Ethiopia. You know, in Tibet, I think the Geneva Convention was already around, and it said no looting allowed or no pillaging, and we still did it. And there was outrage. And so, people often say, oh, you know, you can't apply modern morals, modern ethics to the past, we need to remember how unpopular it was at the time, Queen Victoria was complaining about what was done with the skull of someone from Sudan. And we need to remember what people said at the time. Another thing we need to remember is that if we gave back a few things, our museums wouldn't be empty. The British museum displays 1% of his collection. I suspect that number is not so extreme with you guys. How much of your collection do you display?
Sara Wajid
Oh, a tiny fraction. That's the truth for most museums. Birmingham Museums Trust is multiple venues and we've got up to a million objects in the collection, only a tony fraction of those are on display. But the museums that you talk passionately about in the book, and the questions of the cultural politics around restitution is increasingly contested and as you referred to, politicians are getting more and more involved in and using museums as distractions and material for the culture wars.
Sathnam Sanghera
Yeah. But again, the reason I'm optimistic about it is, you know, there's legislation and stuff in the British Museum, I think the V & A are returning things, but I don't think local museums are restricted in the same way. I think Manchester Museum’s given stuff back, and actually Oxbridge colleges are giving stuff back, individuals are giving stuff back. And this is happening internationally and there's loads of museums in Africa, ready to take these things. And so again, yeah, you can get depressed when you think about what is happening at the British Museum, what people are saying, what politicians are saying, but the real life goes on, change is happening, man. And so that's why I'm quite optimistic about it.
Sara Wajid
And what do you see for the future of museums? I mean, you talk about the difficulty of decolonising yourself; as a museum director, I wrestle with the question of whether museums can be decolonised. To some extent, it's a bit like a question about whether society actually fundamentally can be made non racist. For many people, museums are themselves so intrinsically and fundamentally a technology of empire, that they're kind of beyond hope, that they’re a lost cause, because they're essentially born out of the building of empire. And whether it's a small fraction or a large amount of the collections which have their roots in technically loot, essentially, the whole project is tainted. Do you have a view on that after all the museum people you spoke to?
Sathnam Sanghera
I don't believe that. I mean, I think our museums are an important part of our culture, and we should protect them. Also, there's a reason and there's a use in having so many artifacts from around the world in one place. But if we start returning a few contested things, and let's face it, we're talking a few, right? I think you can have amazing scholarship, you can have the final exhibition of an item that's being returned. That could be an amazing thing, you could discover amazing things, you could improve relationships with other nations at a time, with Brexit, we really need to improve our relations with India and parts of Africa. And I think you can enrich all of us, and then you can start displaying some of the stuff you've got hidden away. I often think about it, if you reversed it, say if the French during the Napoleonic Wars, took Stonehenge to Paris, and then just put it into storage. And then they were like, you know what, we're not giving it back. But equally, we're not gonna display it either. I mean, how offensive is that? I feel like that about some of the Sikh artifacts that the VNA has got, this is really culturally important stuff. And not only are they not on display, you can't even find them online, you know, they're not even catalogued properly. And so, it's just a waste. So, I think if we begin the process of restitution, it can only enrich museums.
Sara Wajid
Talking of memory, restitution, and pain, there was a story in the news today, a story about the recognition of the unequal treatment and remembrance of soldiers in the First World War. African and South Asian soldiers who are not remembered, whose graves were not marked in the way as white soldiers were. Now this is not going to come as a big surprise to most British Black and British Asian people, that the respect was not afforded those soldiers, we already really know. I guess that the news element of this story was that there was a recognition of institutional racism underlying that process and what looked like an opportunity for some restitution and acknowledgement. Reading it this morning, I was thinking, I wonder whether there's more damage and more pain in this confirmation and revelation about the actual extent of the racism behind the decisions not to mark those graves properly, or whether the healing is worth it, the healing of surfacing these stories. Now, mostly, I think the healing is worth it. That's why I'm in business. But what do you think about these questions of healing, and kind of picking at these wounds?
Sathnam Sanghera
For me, I use the analogy of therapy, or marriage guidance. Say, if you're having therapy with your partner, you might discover really uncomfortable things about them, they might discover uncomfortable things about you that might be painful. But overall, it might make you stronger. I think history is the same thing. These things we're finally confronting, can actually let us face up to the fact that we are a multicultural society, because we were a multicultural empire. And equally, we have institutional racism, because we grew out of the institution of British Empire, which was wilfully and proudly racist. And this story this morning is great. But actually, the truth is much worse in that after World War One, the government decided very specifically to delete the contribution of Black and Asian troops. It's not just that they forgot to commemorate them. They did it on purpose. And I think what that does, once you face up to that, you can then see why institutional racism still exists. Because that wasn't that long ago, you know, we're talking about the 20th century. And I think that can only be a positive thing, because it highlights the amnesia, and there's amnesia everywhere, you know, the way we remember the Indian railways, you know Tony Blair, in his memoir, talking about handing back Hong Kong to China, and, you know, not knowing anything of the history, the amnesia is just absolutely everywhere in our culture. And education can only be a good thing.
Sara Wajid
I just wanted to turn to that point, you're talking about multiculturalism and at one point in the book, you say, it’s a kind of, almost a throwaway comment. But you say, I'm not a fan of pure multiculturalism, some phrase like that, and you refer to the sort of insularity of certain communities like your own and the harm that that does to the community itself being too insular, not learning English, for example. And it sort of slightly pricked something uncomfortable in me because it reminded me, it made me think about Munira Mirza, the government advisor who's heavily involved in the recent race report, whose own background in Bradford and upbringing seems to have informed a very particular and specific take on multiculturalism, her take on that being that communities that are empowered to be themselves, that are being funded to do anything to develop a specific community, end up being divisive for society. And that actually, you know, anything that really recognizes or affirms that there is institutional racism is divisive. So, I just wondered, slightly far from history here, but I just wanted to kind of pick you up, I guess on that comment about pure multiculturalism.
Sathnam Sanghera
Yeah, I totally disagree with Munira Mirza, and she's become this right wing, culture warrior. But I mean, it's an argument I had in my first book, you know, that if communities like mine don't integrate, they suffer, you know. If people don't speak English, they can't access services properly, they miss opportunities, then there's the culture clash between generations, you know, I suffered in that respect. It took my family quite a lot of pain to get to where they are now. I would say they are happier now having integrated, and I have a sister living in Canada where they don't push integration so you have entire ghettoes, you know, you have four miles or Sikhs, and you have four miles of Chinese people, they never mix. I don't see that as a healthy thing. You know, I want a nation where everyone integrates and talks and gets things from one another. But ultimately, I believe that you can tolerate differences between us because we had a multicultural empire, you know, our differences are just a reflection of how British we are, ultimately.
Sara Wajid
The other thing that comes through really clearly is your kind of joy and excitement about some of the stories that you're learning for the first time. It's sort of, quite a lot of them are familiar to the work I do, I was quite familiar with many of the stories but it was really lovely to encounter your joy in encountering different characters who you are coming across for the first time, that shampooing surgeon, who is a bit like the sort of Mary Seacole of the, you know, British Asian History World. Tell me about that experience and who you enjoyed meeting?
Sathnam Sanghera
Yeah, I guess you know, I grew up with this vague idea that we were recent arrivals, that brown people didn't really exist, that we came without permission and we kind of imposed ourselves on the British, so it kind of blew my mind. It would have changed my life if I'd known about the fact that, you know, there were Black people in London in 1600, that Queen Elizabeth the first was complaining about there being too many Black people in 1600 or 1601. I think the first Bengali was born, Bengali boy, was born in 1614. But he’s an amazing character, Dean Mohamed is an amazing man. He came over with the East India Company, went to Ireland, married an Irish girl called Jane Daly and then came to London, opened the first curry house, was the first Indian to write in English. I think he wrote a book, but it's a terrible book, but he was the first. Then he went to Brighton and called himself a shampooing surgeon. It sounds like he was a kind of massager of some sort.
Sara Wajid
I know that's quite a vague term.
Sathnam Sanghera
It is a bit vague. And in the course of it, he manages to break someone's arm and leg. He becomes wildly famous, and he becomes a champion surgeon for the King and the Prince of Wales. But then, like so many Imperial figures, when he dies, he's forgotten. I was never taught about him. And I think it's important to remember that we are not here as a novel experiment. We've been here for centuries. It’s that famous line, isn't it? We are here because you were there. But there's a dominant narrative in this country, in our newspapers, and in our TV, that we're newcomers, we've got to earn our right to stay when actually, even in the 20th century, you know, we arrived as citizens. Being a citizen of empire made you a citizen of Britain, you know, and that's something that's forgotten, especially in relation to the Windrush scandal. Basically, we've got a scandal where British citizens were deported to a country they didn't grow up and live in. That's incredible. And then we argue about whether institutional racism exists. If we have that, I think we have institutional racism.
Sara Wajid
What do you think the Midlands has to offer the British story, not just in terms of history, but today, the particular demographic mix here in the Midlands, the unique history, the history of anti-racism and political movements. To me, it feels like a very exciting time, and that the rest of the country has got quite a lot to learn from the Midlands, but they don't actually quite yet realize it. And neither does Birmingham and surrounding areas. But there is something very special here.
Sathnam Sanghera
I think that's a really good way of putting the actually. It’s the greatest surprise of my life that I've made a career out of writing about the Midlands because I so desperately wanted to leave. And I think I’ve realised as I get older, not only is there an emotional connection, but you know, there's something about people in the Midlands, they’re unpretentious and they're funny. And also Punjabi people are unpretentious and funny. So something about Punjabi immigrants in the Midlands is very appealing. Also, you know, especially Wolverhampton, and I guess Birmingham by association, was the first area in Britain to really experience mass immigration. So, I feel like we've been through a lot of the issues that the rest of the country went through decades later. So, in that way, I think we're ahead. We're ahead of the national narrative. That's what makes it for me a really interesting thing to write about, because it's a microcosm of Britain.
Sara Wajid
Well, that feels like a really good point to pause. Sathnam, thank you very much for a really interesting conversation.
Sathnam Sanghera
Thank you. I'm going to come to the museum and I'll text you and maybe you can show me around.
Sara Wajid
Yeah, we'd love to show you Birmingham Museum Art Gallery, and all the venues in Birmingham Museum trust. It's been a real pleasure talking to you.
Sathnam Sanghera
Thanks, everyone, for tuning in.
Sara Wajid
Thank you, everyone.
Outro
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love for you to tell us about it – leave us a review or a rating and find us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest.
You can download our latest podcast episodes, every Thursday, from all the places you would normally get your podcasts and find transcripts of our episodes in the shownotes and on our website at www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
May 2021’s online live event brought together two writers whose books are rooted in the Midlands, Emma Purshouse and Lisa Blower. In conversation with author Kit de Waal, they discuss their latest novels Dogged and Pondweed, making space for more working-class writers and characters in contemporary fiction and capturing a variety of Midlands dialects on the page.
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Series 2, Episode 10: Lisa Blower and Emma Purshouse
Intro
Welcome to the second series of the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast. We are really excited to be back for a second season and to continue to connect readers and writers in the Midlands, and far beyond.
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
May 2021’s online live event brought together two writers whose books are rooted in the Midlands, Emma Purshouse and Lisa Blower. In conversation with author Kit de Waal, they discuss their latest novels Dogged and Pondweed, making space for more working-class writers and characters in contemporary fiction and capturing a variety of Midlands dialects on the page.
Kit de Waal
Hello, everyone, its my pleasure this evening to introduce you to two friends and two great writers, two great women, who both have books out - these two books - which we're going to hear a lot about this evening as well as more generally talking about accents, dialect and snobbery in literature, which obviously is one of my pet subjects. Just to introduce who we're talking about this evening, first of all, we've got Lisa Blower. Lisa is the author of the short story collection, It's Gone Dark Over Bill's Mother's which came out in 2019 and a contribution to Common People which was the anthology of working class writing that came out the same year. Her fiction has appeared in The Guardian, Comma Press anthologies, New Welsh Review, Luminary Short Stories Sunday on Radio 4 and her debut novel Sitting Ducks was shortlisted for the inaugural Arnold Bennett prize and longlisted for The Guardian Not the Booker prize. She's also a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Wolverhampton University. Emma Purshouse left school in the early 1980s at the age of 15. She's got an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Met and her passion is writing about working class communities she's lived in, often making use of Black Country dialect within her work. In 2017, she won the international Making Waves Spoken Word Poetry competition, she's also Poet Laureate in the city of Wolverhampton and she's also one of the writers in Common People, the anthology of working class writing, and she teaches poetry in schools and community groups. Hello, both of you. We've all got the short vowels tonight, which I'm very happy about it, so to speak to you, and speak to you about two very, very funny books. First of all, it's such a comfort to read these books, because it's about worlds that are so familiar to many of us. And I just want to talk to you, Emma, first about Dogged. And I don't believe I've ever read a book before that revolves around a win on the bingo, which I love. I mean, it's just so fantastic to read. In fact, you tell us, what is the book about and who are the main characters?
Emma Purshouse
Like you say, it's sort of about a bingo win initially and the two main characters are women in their late 70s. You got Nancy Maddox, and you've got Marilyn Grundy, and it's Marilyn who has this bingo win, but nobody's quite sure how much it's for. And really, the idea behind the book is about how Marilyn has to protect the bingo winnings. And then Nancy gets enlisted into this and it's the adventures they have as they try to protect the bingo winnings, which are stashed in a shopping trolley.
Kit de Waal
And so not only have you rooted it very much in the working class, but you've rooted it in an area, you've rooted it in the Black Country. How does the Black Country feature in this story and more generally, in your work?
Emma Purshouse
I think in this story, it's where it's set, but they're ingrained in the landscape. Everything's kind of, you can’t have one thing without the other. And when the dialect comes in, it's as much a part of it as the characters in the landscape. They say, write what you know, it's what I know. So that's why I've set it there. In my poetry, again, it's what I'm living in so I kind of want to respond and show people what it is and talk about it and share it because I love it.
Kit de Waal
What I think that does come through both of these books is a massive sense of pride and no apology about who we are and where we're from, there's a real sense of pride in this. Do you want to just read us a bit Emma.
Emma Purshouse
I’ll read the prologue which kind of introduces the two women really.
‘Nancy stands on the step. Her shoulders have been aching all night. Years of scrubbing quarry tiles up at the Dartmouth are taking their toll. She rolls her shoulders forward and twists her head to peer over towards her back. A lump has started to form under her overall. “Wot now? If it ay one thing, its summat else.” As she watches, the lump starts to bulge, move, and rupture the skin. She hears Mr. Maddox’s voice.
“If God’d uv meant uz to fly, e’d uv givun uz wings.”
The voice is accompanied by the sound of a trickle of whiskey being poured into a glass.
Her emerging wing - just the one - unfurls itself in a grand gesture and then flails against her back. It is large and black. It is oily, tarry, nicotine-stained, and the feathers are stuck together. It hangs like wet washing in a back yard on a windless day. “Sort of bost,” says Nancy. “Shit!” she thinks, as Marilyn comes out onto her step and waves. Nancy tries to wave back without showing her new wing.
“Is that…?” says Marilyn screwing up her orange lips into the shape of a cat’s arse.
“No!” says Nancy, cutting her off in mid question. “It ay!”. The conversation is ended.
“Bloody dreamin agen,” she thinks as she awakes.’
Kit de Waal
Oh, that's great, that's good. It's absolutely great. Thanks, Emma. I mean, it just sets the scene so, so wonderfully, that image of wet washing on a windless day. Fantastic. Lovely. And Lisa, now, over to you. So, your book spans 11 days and a couple of hundred miles, from Stoke to Wales. And I know that you said that if you had a pound for every time you've driven the Pondweed journey, you'd be a millionaire. Tell us something about the genesis of this book, and why you wrote it or how you came to write it?
Lisa Blower
Well, it begins with family legend. We all have them don't we, we've all got those stories in our families. And it's based on the fact that my great granny Gladys was standing at the bus stop in Wem, which is this little town, little village just outside of Shrewsbury, and gets talking to this elderly gentleman. And as they get talking, they realize who each other is and it turns out that they were each other's first childhood sweetheart, and she thought she'd lost him to the First World War. But he was actually back in Wem, he was living back in Wem, and he was quite a poorly man at that time and they became friends and in the end, he said to her, he says, ‘you know, Gladys, I think I'm going to need someone to help me.’ And my Granny Gladys had always worked in service, so she said, ‘well, I'll tell you what, I'll move in with you. I'll be a housekeeper.’ I mean, she was 84. And so, she moves in with him and because they didn't want folk talking, they got married. Honestly, I just think this story is so lovely. And it's always been one of those stories that I've thought I've got to somehow write about them. And I think what I always tend to do when I write is that I kind of, you know, like you Emma, I write a little bit what I know, but I always imagined it as otherwise. And I started thinking about that. And I started thinking about all those journeys that we used to make when we lived in Stoke. But it's also that idea that you don't really go anywhere. I mean, how I grew up in Stoke, the people there didn't really go anywhere. And you know, I mean, when we kind of emigrated to Shrewsbury, as my Nan said, people in Stoke would always say ‘oh, we’ll come when it's warmer’, you know, as if we had no central heating, you know, and it's that idea of these roads less travelled by people, you know, this idea that they're not really going anywhere, but then they're coming back to where they started, which is exactly what happened with Charlie and my granny Gladys. And at the time when I started to think about this story, as well, I was commuting from Shrewsbury to Bangor where I used to work so I was going along the A55 following a lot of caravans, lots of pimped up caravans and they’d always be this, you know, like retired couple in the front and I started to think well, where are you all going, you know, and this idea that everybody's looking for something or looking for this destination, this ultimate destination, which is I suppose in a way retirement is. And so began the novel.
Kit de Waal
It's so interesting how those seeds, very often for all of us writers, those seeds of a story turn into things, you use it and you plant it and this grows. Can you read us a bit from the book?
Lisa Blower
Yes of course I can. Of course, I'm going to read from the start. And I'm going to begin with how my version of Charlie and Gladys - Ginny and Selwyn - how they first met.
‘We all whimper at the faint whiff of romance yet it is such a grub. I met Selwyn Robby in the garden centre. Almost fifty years had lumbered by since we’d parted ways and then he was right there, in the aquatics franchise selling garden ponds. I heard him before I saw him. He was talking intently to a couple about pond liners as if they might repair a doomed marriage. ‘The most durable in the world with a lifetime guarantee,’ he was saying. And there it still was: that Welsh borders accent with its fat and thick vowels that used to soothe my mother like a dose of laudanum, and no doubt doing that thing he used to do where he pinches his nostrils together and sniffs ‘This is top quality Swedish Butyl rubber. One hundred per cent watertight, even in swell.’
For the size they wanted – ‘Because you must consider the edging excess for the expansion during water fill’ - this particular liner was going to set them back £85.99 a square metre, and this was apparently without underlay, which was going to cost them another fifty quid per square metre if they went with the tight-mesh he was recommending with hand sewn trims. The couple looked as if they were having to share their lottery win with a family they despised. This was a little out of budget for them, they said. They were only in a retirement new-build with a lawn the size of a postage stamp. Not that this mattered to Selwyn. He pattered on: told them that Swedish Butyl rubber comes with its own ecosystem, assuring an ecological balance that would filter rainwater and siphon off the right nutrients, as it would with any uneaten fish food. ‘It's the effect of a million tiny teeth chewing on algae,’ he said solemnly. ‘On my mother's grave, you will never find a suffocated fish if you line with this beautiful tarp.’
Impatience had got the better of me - I'm the same with sweets: I’m a cruncher not a sucker – and I’d inched myself forward enough to see who he’d become.
Yes, I’d thought. It could only be you. You: from next door who’d count my hiccups through the wall. And me. Just sixteen then, and ripe as a bowl of apples. Now - happening upon one another again, and it was just as we were, as if time hadn't passed and he still took three sugars in his tea. Though I could tell straight away that the world had pushed him to one side, as it had with me, as it does with those of us born on our bones. And his left hand then, smoothing down his hair at the back before placing it on the man's shoulder. ‘I’m wondering,’ he’d said, ‘if you've been considering a submersible or external surface model?’
The man looked at Selwyn as if his affair with a submersible model had just been exposed, and his wife clamped her hand over her mouth and gasped that she’d not given it a thought either. ‘There is so much to think about,’ she explained. ‘It's like a whole new world.’
Selwyn lead the distressed couple to the pond pumps where he got them to cradle each one as if choosing a new born.
And he doesn't know about her, I kept thinking to myself. I'm going to have to explain, show him a photograph and hope he won't mind. Understand, I shall have to ask. Please. You must understand. I watch the couple spend over five hundred quid at the till without buying a single fish.
He won't understand.
He will never understand.
Except that's when he caught sight of me, and not a bit of me but all five foot nine of me: just another one of those women who’s standing behind you in the supermarket queue and dressed as if applying for a job in a department store that will let me down gently.
You couldn't have counted a blink between us as he swam up to me. A musty aftershave, boots laced with military precision, and that smile. God. I remember that smile: I’d thought only freshwater habitats could bring that sort of smile to the hoover parts of Selwyn Robby's leathered face; flagellating moss on the manhole; a soft boiled egg.
‘You remember me,’ I’d said, which wasn't the thing I'd wanted to say having had so much to say over the years and thinking about this moment, should it ever happen, and practicing what I would say, which would not have been it's been, ‘It’s been so long I thought you'd have forgotten me.’
He dropped down on one knee and said, ‘Marry me.’
Kit de Waal
Oh, that's great, that's fantastic. What a voice for that character. I mean really, really located in that place, you know, that's a very particular person. And I know that in Sitting Ducks, for example, so wedded into the fabric of Stoke, and It's Gone Dark Over Bill's Mother's. Tell us what your region of the Midlands means to you and how it informs your writing?
Lisa Blower
Well, I think like any writer, I didn't really think about it at the time, you know, when I first started out, and then the more I've kind of written about it, the more I've realized that nobody else really writes about Stoke, nobody has since Arnold Bennett, and he couldn't wait to get out of there. He wrote most of his literature from London looking back, which I suppose in a way, that's what I'm kind of doing. For those of you who know, it's a place of six towns, so it kind of exists with no centre, you know, it's that kind of de-centred city. And so, it has this almost like facelessness about it, even though you've got these six towns with very separate identities, loyalties, traditions, histories. And I always kind of think about it that to the outsider, those six towns probably look one in the same, but actually to the insider, are very, very different. And, you know, obviously years ago, they were all kind of circumscribed by the pot banks that were working there at the time. So, they’re all kind of are a meshed with their own geography, and also that sense of conflict. Do you have that as much in Wolverhampton Em, where you have parts of Wolverhampton that are kind of in conflict with each other?
Emma Purshouse
Certainly, I think the Black Country’s similar, with those little kind of centres that are famous for different things. People lump it all together but different bits are so different even within a few miles, so I think we’ve got that as well.
Kit de Waal
Yeah, I can remember saying to someone, oh, you know, you're from Tipton, aren't you? And he said, I'm not from Tipton, I’m from Langley. They're so different in their identity.
Lisa Blower
And I think, you know, having read Dogged and your work as well Kit, what I think we're all trying to do is write less with what I would call that kind of Orwellian tourist lens, that's always rushing past which, you know, invariably, most people do via Stoke on Trent, they're always rushing past on the M6 to either get to Manchester or Birmingham. And I think the other thing with Stoke is that it is almost too south for the North, but it's too North for the Midlands. So, it's got all this kind of disharmony about it. But this rich tapestry that is very much embedded within its people. And I think that's where I write, you know, that's where my stories are at the heart. It's about the people.
Kit de Waal
Yes, absolutely. I mean, both of your books are so strong, and with such strong women in it and older women, you know, not the frilly, fluffy sense at the side of the of your life but that sense where you really are your own person, you're a strong woman, you haven't let go of your loves and desires. And it's that time where you're going to drive on through. And both of your accents, and the phraseology I suppose, is so strong in both of these books. But you know, here we are three different Midlands accent, completely different. How important is it for you to use that in your writing? I mean, did either of you think about not having any sense of dialect, and any sense of accent in your writing?
Lisa Blower
For me, as I say, I don't think I ever really thought that I was writing in an accent, you know. My motivation or my intention has always been to write these stories so you can hear the voices as I hear them as authentically as possible. So, I've never really been mindful of what that dialect is. It's only when somebody else really reads it and they almost kind of look at it, and then they start looking at things, particularly from a tense point of view, because in the Potteries, no one talks in the present tense, they always almost talk as if it's everything's happened in the past, you know. And they also make up words, you know, if they can't think of words, they just make it up. I mean, talk about portmanteaus, Stoke on Trent is full of them. And it's wonderful, and it's gone dark over Bill's mother's, you know, all these wonderful phrases, that's what defines the people. And so, because I hear the voices, first, I hear them in dialogue with somebody else, I hear them in conversation. So, I write that down. And then that allows me to attach it to a body which then puts that body in a place. So, before I know it, I've actually bought that Potteries voice without really thinking about it. It's a very organic process, I suppose.
Kit de Waal
Because there's different ways of rendering an accent in a book. You can do it phonetically, very much as you have done Emma, actually, by changing word structure. Or you can do it through the sentence structure and the vocabulary like you just said, and made up words. You know, Irvine Welsh does that doesn't he in Trainspotting, and lots and lots of other people do. But Emma, you chose Nancy, mostly, to be the person in your book who you render in dialect in a very sort of, you know, phonetic way. Why did you choose her?
Emma Purshouse
She's a character that keeps recurring in my work. She's appeared in poems as well. And as Lisa was just saying, she talks in my head like that. So, to render it in that way means that somebody could pick it up and also, you know, when they're reading it, try and speak in that manner, and get under it and understand how it works. I was also bought up reading lots of Black Country comedy poetry, and things like that. And that's rendered in that way. So, to me, it wasn't particularly an odd thing to do. It's just the way that things when I was little reading stuff was done, when it was dealing with dialect and accent. So really, that was why I did it like that, so that somebody could pick it up and have a go at it.
Kit de Waal
It's so funny. I think that comedy of the Black Country, there is nothing like it. It's so rich, and it's so sharp. It's absolutely pin sharp and subtle, you sort of laugh about it 10 minutes later, when you just, you know, dwell on it. How do you approach teaching this, Lisa? So if your students say I want to do this, do you say there's any danger in it? Or how do you approach dialect and accent?
Lisa Blower
The first piece of advice I always give them is don't shy away from it. Don't be afraid of writing in the voice you were born with, I suppose more than anything, you know, which I know sounds quite profound. But you know, you can't write about particular places without representing it through voice and it's no good having somebody who is born and bred in Stoke on Trent, that speaks very PC, because that is just not the case. So, I do encourage them wholeheartedly to you know, write it as they can hear it, you know, practice it, hear it, spell it, spell it as you would hear it, play with those phonemes. Because what that then allows them to do is to play with that kind of rhythm of language, with the intonation, with that tone of voice, so we don't need those qualifying adverbs in the dialogue. He said shiftily, she scoffed, you know, because if when you're writing an accent and dialect, it's doing the job for you. One of the other things I'm very encouraging of is to pick up on that humour, that very self-deprecating humour, which I think circumscribes the whole of the West Midlands, doesn't it? It's one of those things that we all use as that public mask, don't we? For a lot of things.
Kit de Waal
I went to a Penguin thing, a Penguin do in London once. And I was speaking to this girl, and I said something about Birmingham and she said ‘I’m from Nuneaton’, and I felt like saying you’re not. That is not a Nuneaton accent. Well, there's Nuneaton and there's the Nuneaton countryside, I suppose. But I can remember thinking either you've got rid of it, as many of us do, and many people do to get on or, you know, you're from a sort of gentrified area of Nuneaton, but there was no Nuneaton there. Which brings me neatly onto snobbery in publishing. So, do you think there is a place in the publishing world for this? I read a lot around it, you know, coming up for this interview, and so many people have been councelled out of it by editors and publishers, like don't do that because people don't like it. People won't read it. Have you come across that? Do you think there is that issue in the publishing world?
Lisa Blower
I often look at it from the point of view that if you look at Scottish, Welsh, Irish literature, they are incredibly kind aren't they to their parts, to their accents, to their dialect? It's almost part and parcel I mean, look at Trainspotting, look at what a success it was, but you start to use the many dialects, you know, there's multiple dialects that we have across England, you know, for want of a better phrase with it. And rather than celebrating it, it's almost seen as a challenge, you know, don't challenge the reader too much. If the reader can't understand it, then they're going to put the book down and I don't think that is the case at all. Because I think Trainspotting proved that. I'm halfway through Shuggie Bain at the minute and its doing exactly that same thing. So, you know, I think I've been asked a lot to tone things down but I've kind of gone through that treadmill now. Probably become quite belligerent about it and thought no, this is about the story. This is the politics of place and it needs to be written like that. But you can still get into those arguments, you know, as you were talking previously, when we were having a preamble before about Mom, you know, rather than Mum. And it's exactly that same thing when you put things in the Potteries accent and people will pick it up and say, well, that should be in the in the present tense and I'm saying, well, no, that's not how it would be said. So, I'm all for trying to get that authenticity but there is still that barrier isn't there.
Kit de Waal
Yeah, totally, by the gatekeepers who, let's be honest, perceive that they don't have an accent. Of course, they have an accent. You know, RP is an accent. Emma, is it any different - I mean, I know it must be different in spoken word because so much of spoken word isn't supposed to be read, it's supposed to be listened to, it's supposed to be performed. Do you find there less snobbery, less exclusion around the spoken word?
Emma Purshouse
Yeah, definitely. Because you know, you're on a stage, they get what they get. And usually people are, like, really responsive and interested. And I've always found, wherever I've gone in the country, I've gone up as far North as Orkney and done Black Country stuff and people get it, they're interested. Sometimes they might just like the sound of it, and then they'll come talk to you about it. There is an interest in dialect and accent but in publishing, it seems that there is that snobbery. And I know from my own experience, I had chance to pitch having got shortlisted for the Mslexia Short Novel Prize a few years ago. And I was talking to people and it was hard, I didn't enjoy the event at all, I found it really out of my comfort zone. But afterwards, I did get chance to send some stuff to people. And they were all saying now you need to lose the dialect, you need to lose the accent stuff, forget it. And that kind of put me off, really for a bit. I mean I carried on writing my own thing, but I just thought well, it ain't gonna get out as a novel, which is kind of why I do more spoken word really.
Kit de Waal
Yes. I mean, you do get more freedom there, don't you? But I suppose one of the other issues is that whenever you speak about writing in dialect, writing in accent, its immediately equated with being working class, it's only working-class people that are going to attempt that. Obviously that isn't true, because I know that Hardy wrote, when he was writing about Dorset, he often had, I mean they were working class people, but he was writing, you know, in dialect for a lot of people. And so, do you think we come under pressure as working-class writers, sort of forced into that and people feeling like it's not authentic because we're not speaking in dialect.
Lisa Blower
My argument with it, I think more than anything, is that I think class and voice and that sense of identity that comes with how we speak, I suppose, and how we present ourselves, how we react to situations and when we're doing it through characters as well. All that slang, those colloquialisms, I think, it's all coming back to that sense of authenticity, isn't it, but at the same time, it is a kind of poetry that people are speaking. It's not necessarily a class thing. It's part of the region. That's what I'm saying, it's like that politics of place. But I suppose in a way, because a lot of slang in particular and a lot of dialect, very specifically, particularly in the Potteries because it was shouted across a very noisy factory floor, it's associated with the people that work there, which makes it a class issue. But, you know, some of the broadest Potters that I know, are perhaps not working class, you know, and I suppose that's where that snobbery comes in that because somebody speaks in the dialect, it's almost like part of that marginalisation and therefore other kind of pigeon-holing starts to come into the mix. And then it's that darker underbelly of the class system that publishing then expects, rather than what we're actually celebrating, which is based on people and good stories.
Kit de Waal
Absolutely. And it would be really nice wouldn't it, if just occasionally, we had a middle class or upper class accent rendered phonetically. I was talking about my husband, who's very upper middle class, who used to talk about going into the room. And I used to say to him that’s a double o, there’s a double o in room, and yet he had made it, because he was so posh, the rum, which is rum and coke, Bacardi rum. And I used to always comment on it because he has got an accent and if you're going to talk about rendering accent, that's an accent to render, there is an accent there. It's not only work class people that have them. One of the things I did, knowing that I was doing this, I put out a call on Twitter. I said, tell me about what you think about accents and dialects in literature. And one of the interesting ones I had was somebody who spoke about Natasha Carthew, who talks about writing in West Country dialect in her book, All Rivers Run Free. And this person said, ‘it makes it deeply moving to me because it cannot be fake and there's such a sweet relief to hearing my people on the page.’ And I think that's what it is for all of us, isn't it? You get that connection. I know that when I hear a Brummie accent, I very rarely see that Brummie accent rendered on the page, but if I'm anywhere physically, and I hear it a Brummie accent, it's a connection that you have. Do you find that Emma, you go somewhere, and you hear on the airwaves or someone in a restaurant talking, do you sort of immediately have that connection with them?
Emma Purshouse
Yeah, if you hear a bit of Black Country when you're out of place, you zoom right in it on it don’t you. Yeah, cuz it's your tribe.
Kit de Waal
Absolutely. It is your tribe. That's what's lovely about it. We’ve already covered this, but somebody else had mentioned Mom, the proof-reader had said to them, take them all out, because it's supposed to be Mum. And Liz Berry, who writes so much in dialect, she says, ‘I think when the writer knows the voice deep in their bones and has a respect for it, then it can make the writing feel beautifully vivid and alive. I'm thinking of the wonderful poems of Kathleen Jamie, Malika Booker, Katrina Porteous and Kei Miller. Do you know any of that work Lisa?
Lisa Blower
Oh, yes, I do. And I mean, I suppose in a way it comes back to what I was once told that, you know, accent and dialect was far more palatable in a work of short fiction than it was for a whole novel. And occasionally having that in the back of my mind, you know, when I am writing. But then it's the same with a work of poetry, because you're playing with language, because you're playing with rhythm and syntax and those kind of lexical organisations, it's almost something that's much more acceptable. But to put it in a work of prose, where the reader is not necessarily looking at the accent or that dialect use for the image that it represents, it's part of a voice, it’s part of a character, it’s part of a place. For some reason, I don't know what it is, but it just seems to make it a little bit more of a challenge, or that level of interpretation is required. Whereas in a poem, you know, as you were kind of saying Emma, when you're performing it - you have that wonderful poem about people with allotments giving you courgettes – and the reason that poem works so brilliantly is because you deliver it in a black country accent. It just has that humour, it lifts it, it gives it that different dimension. So yeah, I think it's a wonderful thing to do.
Kit de Waal
And Frank Cottrell Boyce mentions Liz Berry’s, he calls it wondrous and beautiful phrase, ‘wench you’m the colour of our town.’ And I remember the first time I heard Liz Berry read a poem, and I'd never heard anyone read in the Black Country accent before. And I mean, just because you've got more consonants, you know, more beats on the word and so you really can play with it, make it so beautiful. But I think for a lot of us, it's drilled out of us at school. It's not allowed, you know, that there is a way of pronouncing things and there's a way not to pronounce things. Did you have any of this sort of smacked out of you at school, either of you?
Lisa Blower
Well, I did, because I spent the first half of my childhood in Stoke on Trent and then, as I say, we emigrated to Shrewsbury and had certain instances where, you know, Mums used to tell kids to stay away from me and my sister because they thought we were Scousers - sorry to any Liverpudlians. But I mean, it is that thing, isn't it, when you move to somewhere else and you know, people can hear you dropping your vowels or not being as PC, or using words that people aren't familiar with. I always remember my mom saying something to a friend of mine, ‘what you firking in the bin for?’ And they looked as if she, you know, had sworn at them. And you do, I think, as you go through school, the education system starts kind of discouraging, don't they a little bit, and the other thing I suppose as well is that they're not reading anything on the curriculum that actually represents the language that they speak. I mean, if you look at the curriculum now it's, well, that's a completely different conversation. But I mean, you know, it's not representing multiple voices, certainly not in those kind of contexts.
Emma Purshouse
It’s a shame that it doesn't. When I do stuff in community venues…I was working with a girl, I think she was dyslexic, she could barely write, but I finally got her to do some poetry and played a bit of Liz Berry to her and her face just went…she’s speaking like me! And they've made a film of her. And then she started writing, because she didn't bother about how it sounded and I think it's important, I think should be on the flipping curriculum.
Kit de Waal
Absolutely, it should. I'm going to read, I was going to save it to the end, but it fits in so well here. James Kelman said, ‘my culture and my language have the right to exist and no one has the authority to dismiss that.’ And it's very much about respect, isn't it? For people's experiences, and for the richness of people's experience and the richness of a culture because it is a culture, it is, you know, it's a culture, and it's a language and, you know, you mentioned before that Scotland and Ireland do it so bloody well. Why do they do it so well? How is it that that's acceptable? And then you come down to England, or you come across to England, and it's not acceptable. And yet, I know that some people have spoken about, when you're writing in an accent phonetically, you’re spelling words phonetically, it can detract too much from the story, so that you're spending your time working out what people are saying, and it's pulling you out of narrative. And someone on Twitter said writing ‘accent is walking a tightrope between authenticity, and accessibility.’ What do you think about that, walking that tightrope?
Lisa Blower
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's like what I've said before, don't challenge your reader too much, I suppose, because they want to still be engaged. And as soon as they start feeling that they've got to work hard to understand it, it's this kind of distraction and this detractor, when actually, it's at the heart of story. It's the heart of the characters. But yes, you're absolutely right. And I think the way that I manage it, is that I will include it in the dialogue, or if I'm working in a first person, like I am with Pondweed, I can use it almost anecdotally, in general, in the way that Ginny story tells, because that's what she's doing, she's storytelling all the time, she's kind of going over her past in that kind of ontology kind of way, in order to move forward. But then using other parts of that narrative body, where that accent isn't as prevalent, but it's very much shifting. It's about shifting, plot shaping the story so I know that I can still maintain that reader engagement. So, I am very, very aware of its pitfalls. And I think I'm aware of them through trial and error, and having, you know, a lot of knock backs from publishers as well because of it. So, learning to walk that tightrope, but at the same time, you know, still being very flat footed on that tightrope.
Emma Purshouse
I think that, for me, having Nancy be broad, but in the third person narration, it comes into it because it's me writing it, but not over the top on that. And then the younger characters aren't as broad, but I was trying to represent our language and dialect changes and shifts anyway. So, I was doing a lot of messing about without thinking about how people sounded from different generations. So, I think the broader bits, it’s not the whole novel that’s that. So, I think that's how I walked the tightrope on it, really.
Kit de Waal
And on that point, I think we have to leave it there. I’d just like to say, such a great conversation. I never get tired of hearing you two speak, reading your work and most importantly, authentic voices. I think may we have many, many more of them. And I hope this session has inspired anyone that's listening who's thinking about writing in dialect to have a go and to be true to who they are. And absolutely their work. Emma, anything else you'd like to say to your many fans that are here?
Emma Purshouse
Not really, thanks very much for coming along.
Kit de Waal
Lisa, any final words?
Lisa Blower
As they say in Stoke ta duck! Ta-ra.
Kit de Waal
Absolutely. That's a very Brummie thing. Well, thank you, everybody that's come along this evening. And thank you, everybody that's sent us a question. And we hope we've answered the questions and given everybody something to think about and also something to celebrate. Thank you all very much.
Outro
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love for you to tell us about it – leave us a review or a rating and find us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest.
You can download our latest podcast episodes, every Thursday, from all the places you would normally get your podcasts and find transcripts of our episodes in the shownotes and on our website at www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
Solihull based scriptwriter Annabel Brightling has written November's piece for the festival blog. In it, she reflects on the excitement of the premiere of drama SeaView at the Belgrade Theatre, a show she wrote the first episode of, and the need for large production companies to expand their cultural horizons into the regions across the UK.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Newsletter Podcast Transcript: Episode 11, Annabel Brightling
Intro
Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast and our new series of commissioned writing about 2021. Each month we are commissioning a new writer to reflect on the month that has passed, offering us moments of connection through great writing and the opportunity to reflect about what we have collectively experienced at the end of the year.
We will be bringing you a new short episode at the start of each month, with each piece read by our guest writers. You can read the pieces on our website, where you will also find information about our upcoming digital events.
Reading
My name is Annabel Brightling and I’ve written November’s piece for Birmingham Literature Festival.
Seaview is a supernatural drama set in Coventry centred around a guy who lands his dream job at a law firm, only for his night of celebrations to go awry and change the lives of his loved ones, forever. The show premiered the first three episodes at the Belgrade Theatre on 10th November with further showings on the 11th – 13th November. I was hired as a staff writer for episode one.
SeaView took a chance on first timers, both in front of and behind the camera who worked alongside seasoned professionals. There was an open call for a writers' room. New writers are often told to “Apply to the BBC writers' room or 4Screenwriting. Go on the Screen Skills website. Have you tried the BFI?” All brilliant and necessary companies. But sometimes, you just want to get paid to write. Without the SeaView writers' room callout, I would still be creditless, applying for these four opportunities on loop. Or alternatively, told to get an agent to get staffed in a writers' room and we know how that catch-22 scenario goes. I doubt open calls for writers will become industry standard, but I’m thankful to the producers for making that choice.
Seaview is also proof that there is room for a TV & Film industry to exist outside of London. There should be more stories coming from across the UK. There are places I’ve never visited and will not get the opportunity to see. That’s why I want to watch stories from different towns. Despite being born and raised in Edmonton, North London and I will never give up that identity (currently at war with my fading accent), I’ve always been curious about this little Island.
The curiosity stems from my parents. They were always keen on my siblings and I travelling outside the M25. They wanted us to explore landscapes, historical landmarks, and food. Even though Mum would be up half the morning making jollof, chicken and stew to take with us “just in case”. That curiosity about other towns and cities has helped with the type of topics I cover in my original scripts.
I still have a way to go in terms of my writing skills. Because of my personality type, I will always compare myself to other’s progress. But getting the ‘yes’ after years of ‘no’ or folks just straight-up ghosting my emails, has reassured me. The fact that I got to play a small part in a project which means so much to the Midlands, is even more rewarding.
Who knows if SeaView will be the start of the norm or a blip in the Midlands cultural zeitgeist. It's a win for the Midlands, which showcases the area to a wider audience. I hope for investors, the Midlands will be unskippable. It will soon reach a point where you won't be able to hear an advert anywhere in the UK without a Midland accent penetrating through the speakers. So, in conclusion, invest or lose out...Alright, Bab?
Outro
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. Follow us on Instagram, twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All information about the festival and upcoming events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org. The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
In June 2021, we hosted an online live event with author Caleb Azumah Nelson about his debut novel Open Water. In conversation with Birmingham Poet Laureate Casey Bailey, they talk about Caleb’s beautiful love story about two young artists who met at a pub and the novel’s broader discussion of race, art, masculinity and vulnerability.
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Series 2, Episode 9: Caleb Azumah Nelson
Intro
Welcome to the second series of the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast. We are really excited to be back for a second season and to continue to connect readers and writers in the Midlands, and far beyond.
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
In June 2021, we hosted an online live event with author Caleb Azumah Nelson about his debut novel Open Water. In conversation with Birmingham Poet Laureate Casey Bailey, they talk about Caleb’s beautiful love story about two young artists who met at a pub and the novel’s broader discussion of race, art, masculinity and vulnerability.
Casey Bailey
Hi, guys, I hope you're all good and blessed. I'm really excited about this conversation that we're about to have and I hope you all are too. I am Casey Bailey, Birmingham Poet Laureate and a writer from Birmingham and far more importantly than that, I will be talking to Caleb Azumah Nelson. Caleb is a 27-year-old British Ghanaian writer and photographer who is living in Southeast London. His photography has been shortlisted for the Palm Poetry Prize and won the People's Choice Award and his short story Pray was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2020. Open Water*, which we'll be discussing today, is his debut novel. Caleb, how are you?
Caleb Azumah Nelson
Good. I'm good. How are you?
Casey Bailey
I'm blessed. I can't complain. This a real privilege to be having this conversation really. The first thing I wanted to talk about and really get into is around the reception of the book. I first became aware of the book, I was on a podcast with Yomi Sode and Que from Dope Readers who I'm guessing you're aware of, and Que has done a feature on the Dope Readers Instagram page, where he had taken the book Open Water out into water, and took this like amazing photograph. And at the time, it was the first I'd heard of the book. And I thought, what a big response, like what an outlandish response to this book. And actually, it was just kind of like the seed of all of the responses to this book, because it has really taken the literary world by storm, and people are talking about it and can't stop talking about it. And the first thing I really want to ask is, how has that been for you as the author? Firstly, congratulations on writing the book, then congratulations on the book being published. And then this response, how's that feeling for you?
Caleb Azumah Nelson
It’s really something, especially in the current climate of the world, to have this sort of response and to really have the energy that I spent a good amount of time putting into work reciprocated, you know. You can really feel it when someone feels the emotions and the feelings that I put into the book like you when someone really feels the texture and when they reply, that was something that I felt, without even being prompted. Yeah, I'm grateful for it, I think gratitude is the thing, I'm overwhelmed even.
Casey Bailey
Were you taken aback by how broad that response was? It’s definitely deserved but I'm sure you know, that sometimes you feel like something is going to get that response and it doesn't quite, you know, how does it feel getting that kind of, wow, yeah, this has been heard the way that I heard it when I came up with it.
Caleb Azumah Nelson
Yeah, it's amazing. I can really see the moment when I first started putting pen to page and I'm like, in a similar process in my next work and having this going on at the same time is such a wonderful reminder of where the work starts. And it is the page, us being present and really like bringing ourselves to the page and being vulnerable and being disciplined. There was a moment when I was writing Open Water where I quit my job and that was the only thing I was doing. Like I really like gambled and really was like, I need you to trust yourself in this moment because what you need to say right now needs to be expressed. I don't know, it's not that I expected that there would be this sort of reception, but for me, the writing of the thing was the prize. I was reading this book last week and there was a sentence of it that I don't think I'll ever forget. And the guy said ‘love is both the practice and the prize’. And I think this was a real act of love. Like everything I write feels like an act of love and like the prize is the practice.
Casey Bailey
I’m kind of like obsessed with process and how we process things, how we process our emotions. So many heavy themes are dealt with in the book, and you could have dealt with them through photography, I'm sure you probably have, you could have dealt with them through poetry, through theatre. Why do you feel like this particular thing came out as a novel, had you always had this idea of writing a novel or did something make that happen?
Caleb Azumah Nelson
You know, through the different art forms that I straddle, I always think of myself as a writer, despite the fact that language can be so limiting. And we often, I know you know this, but often find ourselves like trying to like bend language to our will, it’s something that I think I'll forever just be trying to get closer to the true expression of how I'm actually feeling. I think when I started writing Open Water, I had just connected with my literary agent and she had come to help with nonfiction actually, I was writing a lot of nonfiction about photography and music and about love. And I was just consistently writing, and she was the one who was like, I think you have the voice for a novel, I think that you could write a novel and it was something that I'd always wanted to do. And I think it was that moment where it's like, okay, I can do this. It was also that moment where I asked myself - I want to write a novel, but what could the novel be like? What could it contain? I know that some of my favourite work is very subversive, or that it kind of straddles different lines, like it could be a novel, it could be verse, it could be free writing, it could be prose. So that was a question I was asking myself, what do you want this to be? Because right now, it could be anything, the possibilities are infinite, which is really scary. But I was terrified. But I think that affording myself that sense of freedom of saying this could be anything, so lean into it. But no matter what happens, like the most important thing for you to do is to try and express something honestly. For me, as long as I was doing that, I've done the work that I needed to do. And so yeah, Open Water was written really quickly. It was written over the course of the summer of 2019. So, between May and September and it came out in like one short, sharp burst. And it was because I had all this room to play with, it didn't feel like work. I was like, okay, I can do this. I'm doing this.
Casey Bailey
Wow, that's amazing. So, you know, you quoted a book, and I want to quote your book, because I think there's something really interesting, I think this was maybe a point in the book. So I read the book originally when I saw Que’s post, I had to order the book. And then I read it again, in preparation for this, and this kind of, quote, stood out to me, ‘you can't live in a vacuum. And when you let people in, you make yourself vulnerable, they're able to have an effect on you, if that makes sense’. And that quote is the photographer talking about his art, and what it means when you kind of have this label as an artist, like you're a photographer now, that you are a novelist now. And was there an aspect in that writing that was autobiographical around what you were actually doing at the time?
Caleb Azumah Nelson
I think there's definitely, there's so much, it feels so personal, the work. The events aren't autobiographical, but so many of the feelings that I was trying to explore and express were like, okay, like, this is something that I really know. And that's actually, that was my process. It was like, okay, what's the feeling that we're trying to express? Like, maybe it was a conversation that happened, or maybe it was like, something specific that happened that made you feel a certain way, and then I would work backwards from there. So I would kind of construct fictional events around those feelings. And it meant that not only was I really like inserting myself in between the lines of the work, but I was having to ask myself continually to be as vulnerable as possible, because it was me, like it is me. And it is also like a future version of myself, like I was really writing into possibilities, like what could happen here? I know, I felt this, but what could I feel?
Casey Bailey
And I think there's an element there of - I know, this is true for me and I wonder if it's true for you, and I feel like it's touched on in the book - for many of us who kind of consider ourselves artists or have this idea of art been thrust upon us, the first time we actually allow ourselves to be vulnerable is through that art form. So, you know, I was vulnerable with a pen and paper far before I would tell somebody the things I was writing in poetry. And maybe sometimes people would hear a poem or read a poem and look at me differently, because I couldn't say this to you but if you were to read the poem that I just wrote over there, you would see something in me that you can't really see. And I feel like I'm sure you probably did a lot of that within this book. What was that like? And how has that affected any kind of interactions or relationships you have with people? Do you feel like people see you differently based on the vulnerability that you displayed here?
Caleb Azumah Nelson
I think there's an expectation of that level of vulnerability all the time. And it's not even possible to be that raw and just like walking around. I think for me, I'm one of my best selves when I'm at my desk, when I have a pen in my hand, because even if I don't get to it straight away, I know I'm going to get to a point that I'm trying to make or something that I'm trying to express. But in the moment when you're in a conversation with someone, you don't get that opportunity, if someone asks you a question, they're not going to wait, like, a few days to come back or something, I asked you something, I need this now. In a way, it's encouraged me to slow down, and to actually ask when I'm asked something, when my own vulnerability is necessary in my day to day, to really take the time to try and reach that place. Like to actually say, if something is asked of me, I will get to you, but I don't have that right now. And yeah, by understanding that I have that choice, and I have the power to be like, okay, well, you know, I know I can get there, but like, I just need a little bit. That's been really transformative for me and very freeing. But I will say that, because the work is so personal people kind of expect a little bit more. And it's, it's strange to also be in that sort of realm when you're doing press and publicity, quite continuously, and so you're having to be vulnerable in those spaces because you want to be honest, I like to think that I'm being generous when I'm doing these things, when I'm doing interviews. Yeah, it's just, it's something to get used to, I think, and I think it is only beneficial.
Casey Bailey
So much of the language is so poetic. This is something that drives me wild with jealousy and rage because every now and then I read - I came into reading novels and then I started kind of reading poetry and writing poetry - and every now and then I read a novel or a longer piece of work, and there are just touches of stunning poetry that just feel like it could have been snatched from, you know, 14 lines of beautiful poetry. And they're in the middle of this wave of text. And also like the techniques that you use; so there's a quote, where in part of the story says ‘you were careful not to breach the border, except you both knew something had opened.’ And then slightly later, when the female character’s boyfriend has arrived, you use the exact same language, but you say, ‘you were careful not to breach the border, except you all knew that something had been opened’. And there's that repetition that we often wouldn't see in kind of what we might see as like traditional novels, where you know, you've told that part of the story and you're moving on. There's this really beautiful, like poetry that looks back to what's been set. And how much of that were you really conscious of in your writing, and how much of that was just you, just flowing?
Caleb Azumah Nelson
It was a very conscious thing to have that technique running through the work. But once that's there, you can't really control it, you have to surrender to yourself, and understand what needs to emerge and what needs to be repeated and what needs to be revisited. For me, it wasn't so much repetition, but it was revisiting. I'm so intrigued in this idea of - you know, I know, we're both big music heads - and I'm so intrigued by the idea of the loop and how jazz, hip hop, like any real form of black music, you could be just hearing like a loop of an instrument, constantly for three or four minutes. But each time that you have that repetition, it's like you're revisiting something. But even though it's the same, that something has changed, and more often than not, it's you that has changed, because you're not the same from moment to moment. And so, I was okay, well, you know, if I'm revisiting this sentence, five sentences later, you as the reader have changed, and I as the writer have changed between that point there and the narrative has changed as well. So that sentence takes on a completely different meaning. Yeah, and I think, so much of our daily rhythms are repetition, or revisiting, and so for me, it was just like, how can I use this as a technique to move along the narrative, because there's not an enormous amount of plot. There's like a whole lot of feeling, but there's not an enormous amount of plot and so I was just like, okay, what will keep this rhythm going? What will keep this narrative moving? It was something I was sort of testing out beforehand. And since as well, I see how the technique, at least for me, touch wood has become a bit more refined and has grown and developed. But yeah, it's just something I think I'll always be interested in.
Casey Bailey
It's written in second person, which has this kind of real urgency to it. It's written often in really quite short chapters. Were they conscious choices, or, I mean, I'm assuming they are, but what was the driver for them?
Caleb Azumah Nelson
So, the second person voice felt like the only way that this specifically was going to work because of the level of intimacy required. I think it would have been possible in the first person or third person, but the second person really allowed me to push the reader as close to the narrative as possible. You know, like, if you're reading in second person, and you read out a question in the text, you are then in that moment, both a reader and a protagonist, like you're asking yourself that question. And so yeah, you're as close as you could possibly get. And I think having those chapters short, one of the things actually, I told my agent when I first signed with her is hi, I would love to write a book that reads like an album of music, that reads like a hip hop album. And like, I wanted to have these like, what felt like - I'm a big fan Earl Sweatshirt, and some of his songs are tiny, like, 1 minute 30, 2 minutes long. I was really conscious of employing brevity and wondering how I could get to the point in the quickest way, but also in the most effective way. There's a quote right at the beginning, I’ll see if I can find it, which is a paraphrase of his work. His words are ‘if flexing is being able to say the most in the fewest number of words, is there a greater flex than love’. There was an interview where he was talking about, like, really stepping into his technique as a writer and understanding that it wasn't always necessary to have the 9-minute cut to get a point across. And he was like, sometimes it is, but most of the time, it doesn't take me long for me to say this is how I feel. And I think that was to me the pulse, both of this book and of my work generally, is how do I feel? And how can I relay that to my readers? Everything else after that is a bonus.
Casey Bailey
How much does your photography and your visual work feed into what you do as a writer? And how much does your writing feed into what you do as a photographer? How much do the two lines kind of blur when you're working?
Caleb Azumah Nelson
Writing Open Water was like the marriage of my two kinds of artistic expression. Because I think if you asked me, before I was trying to cross the line, I was trying to toe these lines, I was trying to bring them together. And I think that writing this really enabled me to like step into my strengths as someone who primarily sees first before I open my mouth. And I'm always thinking about what can I see, but also what can't I see when I see something, I'm always thinking about both presence and absence, and what narrative that absence tells us. And so, when I was writing this and something I've noticed consequently, is that so often I see, I’ll have like a snapshot of dialogue or be like, okay, well, maybe they're in a pub, or a couple of characters are sitting in a park or people are driving and I’ll have this real, suddenly strong mental image begins to assemble itself and begins to form. And then I have this snapshot, I have this singular moment where I'm like, okay, well, this is the moment I'm writing about. What are the possibilities that I can afford to these people in this moment? Like, who are they? How did they come here? And where do they want to go from here? And also, where do they need to go from it? Because the want is different from the need. And I think so often, the need is like, it's right in the depths of us, it's right at the bottom and it takes a lot of scavenging, it takes a lot of excavation work to get to what is the need. What's the true desire? And so, I think in that way, like so much of my work, both photography and writing is about desire over time. It's like what do we want? What do we need? And I think especially thinking about, my photography is mostly portraiture, is mostly portraiture of black people. And I don't really direct people in front of my lens too much. But I often am like, what space can I afford you to be yourself in this moment? What space can I afford you to be like, okay, this is who I am. And this is what I desire. This is what I want from this life that I've been given. Those are the things that really push my work as a writer and a photographer.
Casey Bailey
There is this theme that runs through the book of belonging and thinking about where we belong or where we don't belong. And there's a level of responsibility in writing a book like this, or at least I think we feel like there is, and so often we see portrayals of blackness, portrayals of black love, portrayals of black males, black females. So often we see these portrayals and it's easy to look at them and think, what's wrong with it or I wish you hadn't done that, like that. And I read things about black people and about black love with really quite a critical lens and I wish you hadn’t done that, you didn't need to say that or you didn't need to quantify that with that. And it’s just not there. I'm reading this book, and it's just not there. It just feels like, yeah, I know that point. I know that feeling. Nailed that. I get that. And the bits that don't feel like me, I know they are someone I know. Like, it's not, it hasn't been forced in, it hasn’t been shoe-horned to fake anything and it hasn't been shoe-horned to subvert anything. It’s just like this is the experience that these two people are going through. And it feels so authentic. Was it something that you were conscious of, you know, the way that these things can be received? Or did you just write it? How much balance was there between those two?
Caleb Azumah Nelson
One of the things I was really conscious of was that whatever I'm writing, I want it to be that I don't have to say anything else afterwards, whether I'm writing a novel, or a short story, or, or an essay, like, if that's the thing that we end on, I'm good. Like I left this in and this was very intentional. I think specifically with this novel where it's like, okay, well, what do you need to say? And actually recently I've been reframing it because before writing this, I didn't know if I would write another novel. Like, I knew I would write this, but I didn't know if I'd write anything else. And so like, I felt like I left everything on the page with Open Water. But recently, I've been thinking it wasn't so much like, what do you need to say but the question was, what do you need to start saying, because this really, for me, feels like the beginning of a journey and the beginning of questions that will continue to be asked in my work, and will need to continue to grow and continue to be developed as I grow as a person and as a writer. But there was real intention here in that singular moment. And I'm sure it will be the same feeling I have when I start writing what I'm writing next. It would be like, what do I need to say? And are you okay with leaving this here, drawing a line under this. With Open Water, and I think this is actually where my photography practice really helped because, you know, when you see an image or when you're told a story, there's an element of truth that's being expressed, right? Like, you know, depending on who's holding the camera or who's speaking. And then someone else might take a different image of the same thing or might tell the same story from a different lens but it doesn't make either of those expressions any less honest. And for me, I was less interested in truth, and more like, how honest can I be? Or how honest can these people be here? These lives that I'm inhabiting, how honest can I be? How vulnerable can I be, and where is the place where it might not be possible for that vulnerability to be expressed? Because so often in our lives, and on many occasions in this book, the words fail to express how someone is actually feeling or fail to express that they don't feel like they can actually express what they're feeling. They don't feel like they have those words. And that, yeah, that for me was such an intriguing idea. What can I say, but also like, what can I hold back? And what happens in that bit between presence and absence?
Casey Bailey
I think within the novel is definitely the feeling of, you know, the question that kind of drives through is what are the things that stop us from being vulnerable. And it feels like that then opens a door as we get towards the end of the novel, of the realization of the need to be vulnerable to connect. And sometimes what we feel like is the connection before the vulnerability becomes something very different afterwards. But then it kind of leaves us with now what happens if you are vulnerable? And that's a very different question. And there's a whole kind of world of possibilities in it, which I'm personally hoping to get the answers from you because we need more of this. Within that kind of framework around vulnerability, how much of you doing that did you feel was going to inform the way people look at themselves and look at things? Were you conscious of the fact that, you know, I've read that book and I wonder what would that book have done to me about 10 years ago? Because 10 years ago, I was in it, you know, 10 years ago. And I wonder how I would manage that. And now reading it, I kind of, I just can feel like, oh, yeah, I get that. And that's good. It's good to feel like, yeah, I understand that. But there were still points in it, where I could see myself there. And there's something about the you, something about the second person which, not in a harsh way, but it has like an accusatory tone, it has like ‘you said this’, or ‘you did that’ or ‘you didn't allow this to happen’ and I'm like, I know, I know, I’m trying to work it out. Were you aware that people might read this and actually go yeah, I do need to think about that, or that is something I need to consider? How much of that did you think would inform people's lives?
Caleb Azumah Nelson
It's funny, because before the work makes its way into the public forum, the work is for me, primarily that sort of accusatory tone was for me, it was like I need you to confront yourself right now. That was really what that was. And so much of this work was very emotional and was very difficult to pull out of myself, because there was this level of self-confrontation. When you're in that rhythm, and you're like, you know, 5,000, 10,000 words in, there's nowhere to hide at that point, it's just you, like you're very there, you're coming to the page. I didn't have any plans for this book but each morning I would be faced with a blank page and I'd be like, I need you to write something today, just to get something out today. But that blank page really, really did something. It really was like, okay, like, this is space. And not everything made it to final cut, but of that summer period, I would say that 90% of Open Water remains. And so, it was a very organic process and it was very much like I needed to confront myself, and I need you to trust yourself with the things that you don't always know how to say. I needed to try it. Because that's really the only thing that that we can do. And it was only really when the book started making its way out into the world that I began to understand what it could mean for someone else to read this and to say them to themselves, perhaps I too might need to confront something. And perhaps I too, might need a period where I need to just trust myself. And perhaps I might just need to try. Yeah, it's really humbling. You know, we were joking the other day in this WhatsApp group, there's no training for this. There's no way of understanding what this can do. But I will say it is very, very humbling to have people reach out to you from everywhere, that look so vastly different, and say, like, what effect something that you have pulled out of yourself has had on them.
Casey Bailey
Yeah. And I think what is beautiful about this book is whilst there is this real lens on blackness, on South East London, it's not just blackness, it's a real kind of basically what it is in the ends, in this kind of environment. But there's also so much about that is universal. Would you maybe read a little excerpt from the book?
Caleb Azumah Nelson
Yeah, for sure.
‘You say the sky has erupted and there's white ash on the ground. The dog has never seen snow before. It alternates between bounding across the icy plains and staying stock still, aside from a tiny shake in its hind legs. Your grandma had never seen snow until the year you were born, while she awaited your arrival, and those tender flakes fell in a furious storm, clumping on the ground. She got on her knees and began to pray, for herself, her daughter and unborn grandchild. On the same day, your mother was on the top deck of a bus, cowering as the man waved the gun and she emerged unscathed. You're not religious. But when you hear stories like that, it makes a man want to believe. You imagine your grandma in fervour, praying for your body barely formed, your spirit in gestation. Now her body is falling apart, or rather has already fallen. Her spirit is everywhere. You don't know if you'll ever returned and see where she's been laid to rest. But on this occasion, you do not have the strength. You're not religious, but you're praying for your own mother and father as they make their journey back to Ghana. Back home. Your knees are on hard wooden floor, frustrating at the foot of your own desires. When a dog nudges you in the back, the dog has never seen snow before. The sheet above is cloudless, lacking in form and detail. Have you ever looked at the sky at night after it's snowed? Orange glow, light caught between somewhere. Makes you want to reach up and touch. So sometimes you pray. If prayer is mostly desire from the inner self, then you're praying for a safe trip.’
Casey Bailey
Caleb, I just have to say thank you. I do have one more question and I'm going to ask you to keep it brief. So, this is horrible, remember what we said about wishing you had the opportunity to think these things over? And as you said, there's no manual to this, there's no how to guide to do what you're doing right now so you become the how to guide. So, anybody who's watching this now thinking how do I or what’s the thing that that you can tell me to further me in my journey to do this? What would you say that is?
Caleb Azumah Nelson
Feel everything. Feel the terror, feel the joy, feel the real kind of like the moments that really grip us and really shake us and feel the moments that really border on ecstasy. And just trust yourself with all that. And trust that it's okay for you to want to go to these places to express that.
Casey Bailey
Nice. Well, on that note, I want to thank you very much. If you are listening to this, watching this and you haven't read Open Water yet, I am currently judging you. I do want you to take that personally, and I do expect you to do something about it. Not for me, for yourself. You can thank me later. I'm going to thank Caleb for being here with us. And that's all we've got time for guys. Thank you very much for tuning in. Caleb, thank you.
Outro
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love for you to tell us about it – leave us a review or a rating and find us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest.
You can download our latest podcast episodes, every Thursday, from all the places you would normally get your podcasts and find transcripts of our episodes in the shownotes and on our website at www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
This week, bestselling novelist and acclaimed podcast host Elizabeth Day, talks to Sathnam Sanghera about her new novel Magpie. Join them as they talk about writing thrillers, and a novel that tells a gripping and unsettling story about power, motherhood and envy.
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Series 2, Episode 8: Elizabeth Day
Intro
Welcome to the second series of the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast. We are really excited to be back for a second season and to continue to connect readers and writers in the Midlands, and far beyond.
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
This week, bestselling novelist and acclaimed podcast host Elizabeth Day, talks to Sathnam Sanghera about her new novel Magpie. Join them as they talk about writing thrillers, and a novel that tells a gripping and unsettling story about power, motherhood and envy.
Sathnam Sanghera
Hello, I'm Sathnam Sanghera. I'm a journalist and author originally from the Midlands and I'm talking to my friend Elizabeth Day today, who's also an author and a journalist but she's originally from Northern Ireland, aren't you Liz?
Elizabeth Day
I am. Well, I was born in Epson, but we moved to the north of Ireland when I was four, but I do have a Midlands connection because I went to school there, I went to school in Malvern from the age of 13.
Sathnam Sanghera
Oh yeah, I always forget that. Anyway, I should say who you are although everyone knows who you are. You are the author of four novels and the Sunday Times bestselling memoir, How to Fail. Your debut was Scissors, Paper, Stone, which famously won a Betty Trask award. And Homefires was Observer Book of the Year. Your third book, Paradise City, was named one of the best novels of 2015 in the Evening Standard, and The Party, which was your last novel, was a Richard and Judy book club pick. You're also an award-winning journalist and you present BBC Radio 4 Open Book and the Sky Arts Book Club. And you're also the creator and host of the chart-topping podcast How to Fail. So, I feel very self-conscious, because you're a pro at this, aren’t you?
Elizabeth Day
Well, I think I'm an amateur who's learned through experience, and you were one of my first ever guests. And so, I'm so grateful to you for taking a punt on How to Fail when no one really knew what it was about. But it's nice having the table's turned, it's very nice hearing you introduce me.
Sathnam Sanghera
It's quite surreal for me, yeah, I mean I think I was very relaxed in that podcast, because I thought it would fail, ironically. And then it became a massive thing.
Elizabeth Day
You have so little faith in me.
Sathnam Sanghera
It's huge faith now, huge faith now that you're successful. And your novel Magpie, which I actually only just finished reading this morning, it's so good. You know, when people hype things, I'm so contrary, I'm inclined to believe its not true. But it's really addictive, unsettling, I didn't know what was going to happen until the last few pages, and totally original. I mean, it's a thriller, based in the world of fertility, I guess. Is that too reductive?
Elizabeth Day
No, that's absolutely what it is. And also, can I just say, thank you so much for that compliment. Because listeners might not know, the recurring trope of our friendship is that I'm the emotional gusher and you're the one who's quite cynical and sparse in your compliments. So, for you to say that carries so much meaning.
Sathnam Sanghera
Yeah, just don't ever mention it. I said it and I’m kind of stabbing my leg with a fork as I say it.
Elizabeth Day
Well, thank you. But yeah, you're right. It is a book that uses the architecture of thriller writing, without it being a kind of police procedural about a grizzled detective with a complicated personal life. And I love reading those, but I find them very complicated to write. So, I use the architecture of a book that I hope is compulsive to read. And I hope is slightly sinister, slightly claustrophobic, and you don't really know what's happening as a reader. And then there's a big twist in the middle. So that's why I'm talking in such vague terms. But the themes that I explore are fertility, motherhood, the pain and battle that can go into becoming a parent, what that does to you as a human being and mental illness and the human condition. So just those tiny, superficial topics I thought I'd put into what is hopefully an accessible and readable format, and that's Magpie.
Sathnam Sanghera
Yeah, I mean, that's a really rare skill to be able to deal with those really heavy subjects in such an accessible way. I guess your last book, The Party, your last novel, that was a literary thriller, but this feels like more of a deliberate genre thriller. Am I right or wrong?
Elizabeth Day
You're right, in the sense that I knew that I wanted to write a book with a twist because I find that enormously satisfying as a reader. And I pride myself on being able to spot most twists either in books or on screen. And so, I knew that I wanted it to be a really, really good one. And it was from there that the rest of the book came about. And so, it was a deliberate choice to have that kind of reading experience. And the other thing that I think draws together a lot of my novels is that I really enjoy, as a writer and also as a reader, the experience of a kind of unreliable narration, and never quite understanding whether what you're being told is the full truth. So, Magpie opens from the perspective of Marisa, who is a woman in her late 20s, who's had, as many of us have, the dispiriting online dating experience. And she finally meets this man called Jake, who's a bit older than her, who seems to tick every single box, who seems decent and straightforward and kind, and it moves quite quickly. And they move in together quite quickly into this house where most of the action takes place. And they decide to start trying for a family together. And at this point, Jake's business isn't going that well. So, they take in a lodger, Kate. And she seems to act in quite a kind of intimate and possessive way around the house in a way that really prompts Marisa to be quite suspicious of her and of what she's doing in their lives. And it's about what happens after that.
Sathnam Sanghera
But yeah, God, it feels so real. I mean, it stressed me out, I had to stop reading it several days in a row, I could only read it in small doses, compelling at the same time as being claustrophobic.
Elizabeth Day
That'll be my new blurb, thank you.
Sathnam Sanghera
So, what's the reaction been? I guess because this is a book that could appeal to so many people, people who are really interested in the issues of fertility, people who just want to a really amazing thriller, who do you think's reading it? I mean it's a bestseller, obviously everyone's reading it, but you do get a sense of who's really enjoying it?
Elizabeth Day
That's a great question. The reception has been amazing from my perspective, I feel incredibly grateful for it. Before the book was published, I was lucky enough to get some advance blurbs from authors that I hugely respect and admire, and Lisa Taddeo was one of the first to read it and gave me an amazing quote. And having that in my back pocket made me feel much less anxious than I normally do in the run up to publication, because I thought, you know, even if I get a one-star review on Amazon, comparing me unfavourably to a packet of cat food, at least Lisa Taddeo, and Kate Moss and Marian Keyes think that I've done a good job. And so that was really, really good to have. But I think, I mean every author says this, it can appeal to everyone. I definitely wrote it with other women who had gone through fertility issues in mind. Because as one of those women myself, I had never seen our experience accurately reflected in fiction in the way that I would have liked to read when I was going through unsuccessful IVF, for instance. And I really wanted to speak to that demographic, because I think we're so often ignored. And so, one of the great gifts seeing this book out there in the world is that I've been getting messages from precisely those kinds of people who say how refreshing it is, and how they feel really seen in the pages. But beyond that, I've been really pleasantly surprised how many men seem to have enjoyed it, again because there's this massive cliche that it's only really women who read books by other women. And it's been very nice to hear from some men folk as well. So, I think it hopefully has broad appeal.
Sathnam Sanghera
Yeah, I was thinking about that actually because not only is there that issue that so many, you know, women writers aren't read by men, or men tend to avoid them, I don't know why, but also, fertility is a subject that is always, quite often anyway, pitched as a female subject. And the really interesting thing about book is that the men in the book talk about fertility. As I was reading it, I realized that I've never really heard men talk about fertility and how it affects them.
Elizabeth Day
I’m so glad you said that, because the book is very, it's pretty feminist in outlook and in terms of narrative voice, it's weighted in favour of the female characters. And there's a reason for that. In the male characters, one of them has to be left deliberately, quite ambiguous. But it's almost like I wanted to rewrite my own history. And without going too much into personal detail, when I first started going through fertility treatment, I didn't feel supported in my relationship. And so, it was important for me to have men who did talk about it, who did engage. And also, because I'm so aware now that men go through it too. If you are in a heteronormative relationship, and you are going through fertility issues, and you are trying to become parents, men experience a different kind of grief, which I think is sometimes very difficult to process or express because the physical stuff isn't happening to you frequently. I sort of wanted to look at that as well. And I'm glad to hear from you that you think I've done a good job.
Sathnam Sanghera
Another really well drawn character in the book is the mother-in-law, a famous trope in Bollywood movies too, the difficult mother-in-law. Have you got experience with them? Did you enjoy writing it, I got the sense that you did.
Elizabeth Day
I loved writing the character of Annabel. I have an absolutely gorgeous mother-in-law, and she is a complete delight and almost the polar opposite to Annabel. Annabel is towering and fierce and cold and the epitome of a certain kind of upper middle-class woman who would never acknowledge that she was snobby. But she's the kind of woman who would categorize people as like PLU, ‘people like us’, and then the rest of the world. And I'm super fascinated by that particular segment of the British class system, partly because I've been able to observe them. So, when I mentioned earlier that I went to school in Malvern, I got a scholarship to a private school. And I, my family were living in Northern Ireland, so I became a border, a full-time border. But because I've always spoken with quite an English accent, I was immediately accepted. But actually, I didn't really know any of the rules of that cadre of society. So, I was always an observer of it, but I was always also invited into country houses, and posh parties because I sounded like I fitted in. And Annabel is someone who is ferociously protective of her son and sets herself up almost deliberately in competition with any woman who comes into his life. And I wanted to look at that kind of aspect of motherhood, where you are very possessive, but also the kind of person who, although they might be really well off and live in a nice country house in Gloucestershire is quite cheap in certain ways. So would keep chocolates that an unliked guest had brought way past their sell by date, and then serve them to someone else. And the chocolate will always be slightly coated with white because they'd aged too much. So, I did have a lot of fun with that. And I realize, having now written five novels, that one of my obsessions is the British class system, because it's one of those codes of conduct that no one speaks about. And no one knows if they're on the right side of it unless they've been brought up knowing the rules of it. And as a novelist, that's a fascinating interplay.
Sathnam Sanghera
Annabel's husband is a doctor, and your father is a surgeon. And I know it's so basic to read people's biographies into their novels - I can't believe I'm asking you this - but was it based on your father?
Elizabeth Day
No, it's not based on my father at all, although Chris is a lovely man, and he's very kind and very gentle. But I did ask my father for specific medical references and names of drugs. And I did ask him how a retired GP in this particular situation might act. And he's an incredibly useful fount of information. So, he was very helpful from a research perspective, and he really enjoys doing it. So, I give him a kind of a give him a situation, I'm like, this is what I need this character to do and this is how I need them to behave, what would be their medical diagnosis, and he's really helpful on that front. So, it's not based on him, but he was hugely informative in the shaping of that character.
Sathnam Sanghera
Yeah, I couldn't believe how basic I was being while reading it, because I did slightly read it as a commentary on your life. And yet, I know, that's the single most annoying thing people can do to me as a writer.
Elizabeth Day
I don’t mind it that much to be honest. I know, I completely understand and respect why other novelists don't really like it, particularly female novelists. I think it's often assumed that we don't have any imagination so we must just be gazing at our own navels. But because Magpie is really founded, in my personal experience of some of the issues that I explore, I don't mind talking about it from that perspective. I'm very clear that my characters bear no relation to who I am or who my family is, or who my husband is. But the themes are absolutely ones that I have dealt with. And so, I'm okay with that.
Sathnam Sanghera
I noticed hummus makes a couple of appearances. And I know you like hummus. But have people in your life ever complain, or have they complained about stuff you've written
Elizabeth Day
About hummus?! Definitely not! That's a really good question. Have they ever complained? No. With my first novel, I remember handing an early manuscript before it was published to my mother, and she read it and when I saw her next her face was drained of colour and she said, gosh, you've got very dark thoughts, haven't you? Are you okay? Yes, I'm totally fine, I just get it all out in fiction. And both she and my sister pointed out that I had unwittingly lifted a character from our real lives and plonked her in the centre of the plot. And she was only a very minor character, she only made one appearance in one chapter. But it was a friend of my grandmother's I sort of, I hadn't really realized I'd done it. So, I changed that. But that's the only time that I can think of.
Sathnam Sanghera
Well, it's useful to have a family like mine who don't really read your work. What's the secret of writing the same story from different perspectives? I guess you've done that a couple of times, I think you did it in Homefires, didn't you, those two women if memory serves?
Elizabeth Day
Yes, oh, you're one of the only people who's read that book.
Sathnam Sanghera
It’s a great book. How do you do it? Because I can't do it. I know, that's a very basic question. How do you do it? Is it, I mean, do you write a chart of the things they’ve got to refer to and then make them slightly different? How does it work?
Elizabeth Day
I don't, because I don't love planning. I mean, I do in life, I'm not spontaneous, I love planning. But I don't like planning when it comes to writing fiction. Because I find it restrictive, and I feel hemmed in by it. It's like doing revision, I don't like it. I'd much rather write myself into a character and then let the character inform the plot. So other than like noting down things like eye colour, or what t shirt someone was wearing, I think I've got quite a visual memory. And I have so much fun doing it. Because when you write the same incident from different perspectives you can show, purely from how differently people perceive it, so much about their character and about what's actually happening. And so, I'm very interested as a writer in the unsaid and the different slant that various narrators will put on the same event. I just I found it really enjoyable. So, I don't know what that says about me.
Sathnam Sanghera
I was going to ask you about that because you're very interesting. You say you find it enjoyable, but when I read it, like I said, I found it claustrophobic, also compelling, and I wondered how it affected your mood. Because I find if I'm writing difficult stuff, I almost need to stop writing at two o'clock otherwise it infects my day. What was it like writing it? Was it a pleasurable thing? Stressful? Therapeutic?
Elizabeth Day
It was all of the above, really. So, I'd written 15,000 words of Magpie before the pandemic happened. And when I reread those words, at the beginning of lockdown, when everyone I think was feeling a bit unhinged, I thought that they were the worst words ever written. I was like, well, there's just no, I mean, it's just awful. And then I went through a period of not writing because I normally like to write in cafes, and obviously that pleasure was denied me during lockdown. And when I returned to the manuscript, I had had a personal loss. So, I found out I was pregnant at the beginning of lockdown and we had a miscarriage at eight weeks, it's my third miscarriage and it was devastating. But in the aftermath of that I really wanted to write again. And I really wanted to return to Magpie, because it does deal with some of these themes. And I therefore found the routine of writing Magpie, and the liberation it afforded me to explore things that I was feeling, I found it incredibly cathartic and meaningful. It felt like I was erecting something meaningful in the space left by this loss. I look back on it now and it was such a curious time, that first national lockdown, and so devastating for so many people. And I feel really blessed that I had an empty diary and had those two hours every evening from sort of five to seven, where I could really get into the flow of the plot. And I've never really had that before. So, I found it, I think, sort of rhythmically pleasurable to write if that doesn't sound too Pornhub-y. But I think there's something about the kind of flow of the routine that was really helpful, even though I was writing about difficult things. And when I wrote about difficult things, yes, there's always a moment where there might be some emotional processing, but it always feels really good because I feel that I'm making something out of nothing. So that's quite a kind of patchwork to answer to your question.
Sathnam Sanghera
That's a very good answer. There's another plotline which - I'm nervous about not giving anything away - but involves severe mental illness. Were you nervous about writing about that? I think you've done it very sensitively, you know, as someone who's got severe mental illness in my family, I always notice when people do it badly, and you haven't. Did you do a load of research? Were you nervous about it?
Elizabeth Day
First of all, thank you so much for saying that because it means so much for me to hear that knowing you as I do. And because I know a little about your situation that, thank you, that's the best thing you could say. Yes, I was really fearful of getting it wrong, or of doing a disservice to the experience of people who live with all sorts of conditions. And I also didn't want to make it into a shorthand for monstrous behaviour because I think that's part of the issue, the kind of othering of people who live with mental health conditions. Because for me, writing about mental health and the flipside, mental illness, is writing about the human condition, I just don't see a distinction, I see characters, who might act in ways that superficially might appear difficult to understand. And it's my job as a novelist, to explain what damage they're carrying, or what might motivate them from their personal history, it's my job to make you understand that, and to remove that sort of othering that is so endemic in society. So, I didn't really realize when I started writing that I was going to be writing about mental illness. And then it became apparent that that was a factor of one of the characters. And yes, then I did research, I plundered my dad for information. And also, I just think, talking to people like you, listening, reading, I think that just really helps as well. And as a journalist, you know, my day job is as a journalist, and I get to meet extraordinary people. And as a podcaster, I get to talk to people who have been through really difficult things. And so, I think I learned a lot from that, as well.
Sathnam Sanghera
How do you balance the journalism and the books? I mean, this is something I think about a lot, because I guess I do a version of what you do, although I don't write as much fiction, and I always think that journalism is in the business of answering questions and literature is in the business of asking them and not necessarily answering them. I mean, how do you feel about that? Do you feel they compliment each other? How do they sit alongside each other in your life?
Elizabeth Day
I like that distinction very much. That sounds like a quote that will go into a dictionary of quotations, index Sanghera, Sathnam.
Sathnam Sanghera
You can have it put it into your dictionary man.
Elizabeth Day
I have felt that they are complimentary. I mean, I should preface this by saying I didn't have a choice, you know, I needed to pay the rent. And so, I needed to get a job that would bring in a regular salary. And I wanted ideally, to do a job that involved the thing that I most love in the world, other than my husband, my friends, and my cat. And that's writing. So that's how I got into journalism. And I had to fit in writing books around that, because writing books did not make me money for a very, very, very long time. And that's just a fact of life for so many of us. And I think that they can be incredibly complimentary. So, Homefires, my second novel, which you were kind enough to mention, was very much based on interviews I had done with families and parents who had lost loved ones and children during the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars, through lack of equipment, serving soldiers through lack of equipment. And I, that was something that was directly informed by my journalism. But I think on a kind of broader scale, asking questions, listening to answers, communicating something clearly to a reader who's got a minimal amount of time on a Sunday morning, whose attention needs to be engaged, all of that is so helpful when it comes to writing any book, whether it be fiction or nonfiction, because you realize that writing is as much a craft as it is an art. And it's a bit like building a dry-stone wall that you need to have the stones in, and you need to kind of keep building it and you need to not be fearful of the blank page. And having journalistic deadlines on such a regular basis is extraordinarily good training for that. And in terms of how I balance my time, I haven't quite nailed it yet. Because I think lockdown taught me that I would love to get into that flow again when I'm writing a novel or a book, I would love to have enough space in my diary to do that. And I probably need to make some changes to ensure that that happens. But at the moment, I'm in the happy position where I have a weekly column and basically, I give a day of every week over to that. And then it's a question of just seeing where other things fit in. I mean, often my diary is shaped by the availability of podcast guests, because it's when they can do the recording. And then I'll fit my other stuff around that.
Sathnam Sanghera
Yeah, I like what you said about deadlines. I always think that journalists who become writers, book writers, book authors, they don't really get writer's block because it's been instilled to them that they cannot miss a deadline. The clues in the name deadline, you're gonna die if you're going to miss it, you know, I mean, that's the way I see deadlines. But yeah, I mean, you've referred to all the things you do, podcasts, journalism, nonfiction, novels, radio and TV presenting, is there one thing you particularly enjoy? Or do you just enjoy them equally? Do you hate one thing sometimes, I mean, how does that change?
Elizabeth Day
Writing novels is my big love. Like, I cannot imagine a time in my life when I won’t. That's the thing that I've always wanted to do and that's the thing that brings me, I wouldn't say, I mean, yes, it brings me joy, but it's that lucky thing where I feel I'm doing exactly what I’m meant to be doing. When I'm writing a novel. I feel the most untangled I can ever feel on a personal level.
Sathnam Sanghera
I can't even really, I can't relate to that, on any level. I'm at my most uncomfortable when writing fiction, it’s so hard.
Elizabeth Day
That's so interesting. But you're an amazing writer, both fiction and nonfiction. How do you feel when you're writing nonfiction? Tortured? A bit better?
Sathnam Sanghera
A bit better. Journalism the easiest. But I mean, in your ideal world, would you give up everything else and just write novels?
Elizabeth Day
No, that's a really, really good question. Because in the past, I think I would have said that, but actually, I've discovered that I love broadcasting. I love the podcast, and I'm really enjoying doing Radio 4 Open Book. And I think I'm someone who needs, as a novelist, I feel like I need to engage with the world around me. I need the outside stimulation; I need other things. Because I'm sort of the anti Jonathan Franzen - Jonathan Franzen famously disables his internet when he goes in to write his 600 page tomes - and I think distraction can sometimes be absolutely necessary. Firstly, to avoid you going mad, and secondly, to ensure that you're still a player in the world around you. And sometimes I reward myself with little internet breaks when something's going wrong, you know, I like to have a little lurk on Tik Tok, and it just kind of refreshes my creative palette,
Sathnam Sanghera
Oh my God, you're on Tik Tok now, as well?
Elizabeth Day
Well, I don't create any content on Tik Tok, I just look at other people's content, because I find it hilarious and innovative, but I just don't know how you would have enough time to do Tik Toks, it's a proper editing process.
Sathnam Sanghera
Do you think this, you know, all the things you do is a reflection of your personality? Are you an introvert who likes being an extrovert occasionally? Or are you an extrovert who likes to be introverted, I mean, how does it work?
Elizabeth Day
I think I'm a high functioning introvert. So, I think I'm an introvert who's learnt how to be in a world of extraversion. And occasionally, that brings me great joy. But I do find, I have to be aware that I find I need to replenish my energy levels with time in solitude. And you know, this Sathnam, that's been one of the big juggles of my adult life is really balancing my need for hermitude, with my love for my friends. And I think in answer to your question more deeply, I think I have a lot of drive and that comes from a fundamental lack of self-worth.
Sathnam Sanghera
I was gonna get into that your lack of self-worth. Basically, you're a massive workaholic. I don't know any writer who works as hard as you. And I haven't quite worked out what drives you? Is it your, you know, your very demanding, but nice father? Is it something else? What is it?
Elizabeth Day
I was sort of joking about the lack of self-worth, but absolutely not. Like it is that I feel like I've got something to prove. And I think that that comes from never having quite felt that I fitted in as a child, because we moved to Northern Ireland when I was four, I never fitted in there, I was always a bit of an outsider. I didn't have a great experience at secondary school before I went to Malvern this is and so it was that thing of almost wanting to prove people who doubted me or who underestimated me or who were mean, to me, it was like wanting to prove them wrong. And I actually think that that drives a lot of journalists and a lot of stand-up comedians. So, I'm grateful for it, because it's given me ambition and energy to do things. But I also think, and this kind of goes back to what I was writing about in Magpie, because I don't have children yet. And because I have always wanted to be a mother. I feel that I need to leave something else permanent behind. Not to get too morbid, but there's a sense that I want to contribute in a lasting way to the world, so I want to have a book because a book lasts forever. And so, a lot of it is displacement, I think from the sadness that I feel, not being a mother, but at the same time, I'm so grateful that not being a mother yet has given me all of this time and all of this drive to do the other stuff.
Sathnam Sanghera
What do you think your 14-year-old self would make of everything you've done? Be honest.
Elizabeth Day
Now, I've been thinking about this a lot recently, because I just realized that I was stressed and sort of nervous in the run up to Magpie’s publication. And I really had to stop, take a breath, and give myself a good talking to, because I know 14-year-old me would be so thrilled, like she would be so excited to be living the life that I am. I need to remind myself, like, fourteen-year-old me would have been just delighted. I mean, my ambitions, at the age of seven, were to live in London to be a journalist, eventually to write books, to have a cat. And like, all of those things I'm doing, and I'm doing other things as well. So, I actually feel proud of myself in that respect. There, you've got, you've got me to say that thing.
Sathnam Sanghera
I mean, I feel like you've slightly overperformed, done a bit too much.
Elizabeth Day
I mean, I could probably do a bit less, I could definitely fewer things.
Sathnam Sanghera
Definitely do a bit less please make the rest of us feel a bit better about ourselves. To take a few years on, what would the writer who wrote Scissors, Paper, Stone think of your career now? I guess I'm trying to ask you, what have you learned about writing since?
Elizabeth Day
I remember being asked, I think when I published my second novel by a friend, would you rather win the Booker Prize or be an Amazon bestseller. And he is quite a bit older than me and I said I'd rather win the Booker Prize. And he was like, what? That's incorrect. You'd rather be a bestseller because a lot of people read your work, and you can make a living from it. And I think that's changed in my eyes, I think most young novelists setting out if they're really honest with themselves, have this ambition to be taken seriously, and to be deemed worthy of Booker Prize-dom. And actually, the older I've got, the more I realized that the most important thing for me is connecting with as many people as I can. And so, it's about readers reading my book, like that's what I care about. And I now care far less about accolades, because I've sort of seen inside how the sausage is made, I've now been a judge for the Women's Prize and I loved that experience, but I understand how subjective judging can be. And it's all random. Scissors, Paper, Stone era me, I'd be quite surprised, pleasantly surprised by the fact that Magpie’s been a Sunday Times bestseller, but it wasn't necessarily the way that I planned it, does that make sense? Is that a good enough answer?
Sathnam Sanghera
Yeah, it's pretty good answer. Do you think the journey is everything?
Elizabeth Day
Definitely. Yes, I do. I do think that, and I think the launching How to Fail and writing a lot about failure and asking questions about failure has really shaped my worldview in that respect. Because I now understand that some of the best things in my life have happened as a result of things not going to the plan that I had set myself or the plan that I hoped for. So, the fact that I don't have children, or the fact that various relationships ended has led me to the point that I'm at now where I'm married to an amazing man who I met through Hinge.
Sathnam Sanghera
Do they sponsor you or something, do you feel like you have to mention them?!
Elizabeth Day
They've never sponsored me full disclosure, they've never sponsored me, but I'm just so grateful to them. And I've come into contact with so many incredible people from being able to live in LA for three months, or from chatting to other women about infertility. Like, I've met amazing people who are kind of pioneers in their own field. And I'm so grateful for all of that. So, I do think the journey is everything. I actually think connection is everything so connecting with people and with ideas and with life along the way. That's what brings meaning to my existence.
Sathnam Sanghera
I agree with you, you gave the right answer, the journey is everything. But if you had to pick some things you have achieved that matter to you, which ones matter to you the most?
Elizabeth Day
Okay, I’m going to say something actually quite embarrassing, but it's the first thing that I think of, which is my degree!
Sathnam Sanghera
That's so, so pathetic.
Elizabeth Day
I know. But can I tell you why. So, I did not expect great things of myself at all academically, or when I went to university and to find that I passionately loved my degree subject and then was actually like, okay at it was nothing short of miraculous to me. I still pinch myself and I still can't believe that I got that opportunity and that I did well.
Sathnam Sanghera
I know you're too humble to say what you got, but you've got a double first from Cambridge University, it’s pretty impressive.
Elizabeth Day
Didn't you get a double first?
Sathnam Sanghera
No, I’ve got a single first. I'm a loser.
Elizabeth Day
We have to stop this conversation because it's so egregious. But I still, you know, when people have recurring nightmares, my bad dreams are all about sitting my finals and doing really badly. And so, it meant something huge to my psyche. It was the first time that I think I believed in myself, and that I kind of confounded other people's expectations of me. So that was really important to me. And then every single book I published, I'm really proud of the fact that they're published, and the podcast, How to Fail. Those are my key professional achievements. And then personally, I'm really proud that I battled on through the wilderness of online dating and found someone who I can't quite believe exists, but he does.
Sathnam Sanghera
He does. I've seen him, he does exist.
Elizabeth Day
Yeah, you can bear independent witness to that.
Sathnam Sanghera
He's got a face. So, what's next, what else is happening in your incredibly overactive professional life?
Elizabeth Day
Well, I've almost finished the UK series of Married at First Sight. So, I've been watching a lot of reality television. What's next is I'm attempting to write a nonfiction book on friendship of which you Sathnam are an integral part. So, I'm interviewing five of my closest friends, who each have something, I think, very meaningful to say about friendship, and that will provide the kind of scaffolding of the book. And then I'm doing sort of thematic chapters about what friendship means and how we approach it, because I think during the pandemic, we've all undergone a kind of reassessment of the importance of friendship in our lives. And so, I kind of want to examine that because I don't feel like it gets enough airplay. And I'll continue with the podcast. And I am in the process of again, attempting to adapt How to Fail my sort of memoir, sort of manifesto into a fictionalized TV series. So I’ve been commissioned to write a pilot and I'm sort of trying to write a script, which is really, really hard.
Sathnam Sanghera
I thought you were going to say you're adapting Magpie, because I can really see it as a TV show.
Elizabeth Day
Oh, well, I've got an exciting meeting about that tomorrow. I didn't want to adapt it though. Like, I never want to adapt any of my novels. I'm really excited to see what other people might do with it. It's just such a different skill set, isn't it? I mean, you know, this from The Boy in the Topknot.
Sathnam Sanghera
It’s so hard for anything in TV to get made, you don't want to be the reason why it doesn't get made. Yes, I think it'd be an amazing TV show. And it's a great book. Thank you for talking to me today.
Elizabeth Day
Thank you for being such a delight as ever to talk to and you have been atypically complimentary, and I appreciate that. That means for the next decade of our friendship that you can just gently troll me face to face when we next meet.
Sathnam Sanghera
Yeah, that's it, no more compliments. But no, I really enjoyed talking to you and hopefully we can meet in real life in London and then one day at the actual Birmingham Literature Festival.
Elizabeth Day
I loved doing that festival with you whenever it was, two years ago. Let's get back there as soon as possible.
Sathnam Sanghera
Yeah, that was amazing. I realize you must do that every night but that sticks out for me as a really fun thing.
Elizabeth Day
It was a really special one. Yeah, we'll do it again.
Sathnam Sanghera
She says sounding like The Rolling Stones - yes, that was really special, that gig in Denver. But anyway, thanks for your time.
Elizabeth Day
Thank you Sathnam.
Outro
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love for you to tell us about it – leave us a review or a rating and find us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest.
You can download our latest podcast episodes, every Thursday, from all the places you would normally get your podcasts and find transcripts of our episodes in the shownotes and on our website at www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
This is the Canon, written by Joan Anim-Addo, Deirdre Osborne and Kadija Sesay, is a book that aims to decolonise what we think of as the literary canon, which is all too often dominated by white authors. In this week’s episode the authors talk to writer Thomas Glave about disrupting the accepted norm, highlighting different cultures and stories and their favourite books to add to your bookshelves.
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Series 2, Episode 7: This is the Canon
Intro
Welcome to the second series of the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast. We are really excited to be back for a second season and to continue to connect readers and writers in the Midlands, and far beyond.
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
This is the Canon, written by Joan Anim-Addo, Deirdre Osborne and Kadija Sesay, is a book that aims to decolonise what we think of as the literary canon, which is all too often dominated by white authors. In this week’s episode the authors talk to writer Thomas Glave about disrupting the accepted norm, highlighting different cultures and stories and their favourite books to add to your bookshelves.
Thomas Glave
Hello, welcome to another episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents. Today we're very thrilled to have three fantastic guests discussing their new book, This is the Canon: How to Decolonise Your Bookshelves in 50 books. Our guests today are the co-authors of this title, Professor Joan Anim-Addo, who is Professor Emeritus of Caribbean Literature and Culture at Goldsmiths University, and the co-founder of the world’s first MA in Black British literature. Also Dr Deirdre Osborne, who is a Reader in English Literature and Drama at Goldsmiths University, and the co-founder of the world's first Black British literature MA. She is also associate editor of the journal Women's Writing, and she edited the Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian literature. Our third co-author is Kadija Sesay, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Kadija Sesay is a writer and editor of several anthologies, and is the founder of Sable literary magazine, and Afro poetry app. She is also co-founder of the Mboka Festival in The Gambia, and as a co-editor of IC3 published by Penguin, which will soon celebrate its 20th anniversary. We're very happy to tell you that This is the Canon is now out and available in bookshops and online everywhere. Welcome to our three guests. Thank you very much for joining us today. I'd like to start by asking you in sequence some questions just about this idea of decolonising. Starting with you, Professor Anim-Addo. What is decolonising exactly in the context of this book project?
Joan Anim-Addo
Thank you very much, Thomas. I think that decolonising has been a subject on the lips of lots of people and it's always seemed as if it's something that someone else is doing. And as readers, it seemed to us that we have a task also too. As readers, it seemed important for us to read a range of books, and insist on reading a range of books with different ways of storytelling, different characters, different rhythms from different spaces, not just Britain, for example, but to read as well as we possibly could. So, decolonising the canon, in a way opens up the way for the reader to take on that possibility, equips the reader to find a range of books to begin thinking about reading much more widely.
Thomas Glave
Thank you, Professor, very intriguing, very provocative indeed. And Dr Osborne, could you expound on this question as well? What is decolonising for you as a co-author of this book?
Deirdre Osborne
Well, I guess what's so wonderful about the book is that Joan and Kadija and I work from three very different locations in terms of perhaps how we were raised, when we were raised, where we were raised, and where we ended up living. And so decolonising is something that we have had, I think, to embrace really with all our work in literature and academia and also in a sort of literary activism that we've all been pursuing throughout our careers. And so, for me, I think it's an unquestioningly transnational idea of the capabilities of literature, that we need to open up our horizons because one person's canon, which is the sort of agreed list that gets consolidated throughout education - everyone must read these books to be an educated or learned person, which as we know, has had quite a limited framework around it - so one person's canon in another part of the world is an unknown book. And so, what we're doing with our work is to sort of make that more porous, to bring that together. So, something that might be canonical in Britain or in Senegal, and isn't in either of the other spaces, that we understand that actually, they can be read and enjoyed and also, they can serve as an inspiration to just how pluralized human beings are in the way they create and represent their experiences. So, decolonising, for me, is very much I suppose, opening up those borders of reader awareness.
Thomas Glave
Thank you, Dr Osborne. Excellent, really fascinating. Then Miss Sesay, I'd like to ask you as well. What is, for you, decolonising?
Kadija Sesay
What's been interesting, as I've just been kind of finishing up my own research for my PhD as well, which has been around Black British publishing, I actually think of it very much in a publishing context, as well. So, working with a major publisher, on such a book, when my whole work has been around decolonising publishing has been very interesting, as I'm sure you could imagine. But also, I won't go over what Joan and Deirdre have said, but I think one of the things that really, that came out of working on this in terms of an extension of thinking around decolonising, which is very easy to forget, is that this is just the first step. I think, as Deirdre mentioned, this is just a selection of books, that could be decolonising your literature, but it goes past the selection of books, it goes past showing your guests who come to dinner how decolonised you are by showing them what's on your bookshelf, it goes then to the reading, how are you reading this work and interpreting it? You have to then start shifting your mind about how you interpret it, yes, you're going to come to it from your own background and your own understanding of literature. But then you have to start thinking in other ways, as well, of how to interpret this literature. And also, from then, you know, not only in terms about how you write about it, how it's written about, and that is not just for students as well but how is this work written about, how the writer is written about. So decolonising, we've just started, this is just the tip, in terms of decolonising literature.
Thomas Glave
Thank you, I must say, as a reader of this book, one of the many things that I found fascinating about this book was its broad ambition. And its attempt, I think you've really succeeded, each of you as co-authors of this book, in showing us the vast geography and the vast possibilities of redrawing the maps, right, of how we read literature and how we experience literature. And I wanted to ask Professor Anim-Addo, if you could actually speak about this very vexing question of the canon that you are addressing with this book, like, what is this thing, this obstacle, if you will, that we call, that you are calling the canon?
Joan Anim-Addo
The real obstacle Thomas, is what we have learned, as my colleague, Deirdre has just said, is what so many people learn as they go out into schools, and then perhaps on to university, they are told again, and again, in one way or another, these are the books that they need to read. And I think as this is a beginning, we really need to say to people, actually, there is a whole range of books. And if you try a range, you're going to have a much richer experience. And you're going to be at the same time, not just widening your horizon, but you'll be able to become much more knowledgeable about the real world in which we live.
Thomas Glave
Yes, indeed. And Dr Osborne, I'm wondering, as we listen to Professor Anim-Addo expound on broadening, thinking about geography, and you've mentioned previously the term literary activism, could you speak about the geography of this book, and how, as a co-author, you came to find and decide upon these writers from these different geographies that are in this very vast, very profound collection of people?
Deirdre Osborne
Well, one of the ways in which the world gets conceived of is very much terrestrial. It’s very territory bound, whereas we decided to look at the oceans. So, oceans are points of continuity around the globe, they are points that transport people and goods all around the planet. And they're a sort of more fluid possibility for locating regions and how people move from those regions. And also, what kind of cultures grow in those regions and ended up in other spaces. And so I guess, in relation to the canon and the fluidity of canonicity, we want to say that it's very much about democratising this sort of space, democratising the canon so that people are exposed to, and can make judicious selections of, what they might want to read from this sense of continuity, this sort of framework of the ocean as a global, unstoppable presence, I suppose in all our lives, but we do have many omissions. So as Kadija said, we want to say this is very much a stepping stone, a springboard. It is definitely not the sealed off finished product at all but really the initial step.
Thomas Glave
Thank you for this. Miss Sesay, following on Professor Anim-Addo and Dr Osborne's remarks, I'm wondering if you can speak to your own particular concerns dealing with this book that, as you said in your remarks a few minutes ago, still has so much terrain to cover, this is laying groundwork for many other books to come that will address these literary inequities, if you will. Could you speak about this a bit, because again, the book has such an enormous project and I think really succeeds in many ways in this project and this ambition.
Kadija Sesay
I think one of the things that needs to be noted is this book was being discussed and conceived, I wasn't in the original discussion, but I know it was being discussed and conceived way before the situation of what happened with George Floyd. So, I don't want people to think that it's come out from that, because it hasn't, because number one, because for those of us who work in this area, this has been a constant, sore point for us and a constant thing that needed to be worked on for many years. So, you know, it just happened at that point. And saying that, yes, I think there will be a great deal of interest, more interest, around you know, looking at this now, if that's what we want to call it since then. But also, we also need to think that we know that these things can go in trends. This is not a trend. This needs to be built upon and strengthened. And not just in oh, well, we've done a little bit now around decolonising literature and yes, we've accepted that we can include some of these other texts on our lists, to have classics for the canon and leave it there, we can't just leave it there, there's a lot of work to be done. And this should not just be seen as some kind of trend. Really, I think that's one of the things that kind of concerns me in in how people will treat this.
Thomas Glave
I couldn't agree more with your remarks, Miss Sesay, just now and definitely saying this is not a trend. This book strikes me very much as a cornerstone published by Greenfinch Books. And I wonder about, going back to Professor Anim-Addo, speaking about the relationships with the writers and selecting the writers, speak about that if you could please Professor a bit in terms of the experience of working with these writers and the variations upon themes and themes upon variations and so on.
Joan Anim-Addo
Thomas, I've been teaching non canonical literature for very many years. researching and teaching in the field. It was my choice - like everyone else I grew up and went through the system learning about canonical literature. This happens even more when you are a literature student. So, I broke with that, through a lot of research and teaching around initially Caribbean writing. And of course, this was my stepping stone to a much broader literature. We're also now thinking about Black British writing and the university system has only recently recognised that there is a body of work to be thought of there. But also, as I've read more and more outside the canon myself, I've become more open to writers who are perhaps neither Caribbean nor Black British, nor from the US, but a much broader range of writing. And in a way, I think this is what we're trying to help people to do. So, the process for me has been about interest first and starting from there, I made my selection.
Deirdre Osborne
When Joan just referred now to being taught the canon, and that we all sort of swallowed whole, but not necessarily without getting indigestion, I must add, I was someone who, even from school onwards, although I knew the canon, and I read everything very obediently, I wrote on anything but the canon. And so, this was always a very tempestuous relationship I had with my educational environments, notwithstanding universities, that I didn't want to write on anything canonical, I wanted to find out that which was either at the edge or was not actually even acknowledged and bring it right into the centre. And so, my particular teaching has been armed by that kind of impetus. And I think a very important question in terms of how we selected works to, in this particular book, were the presence of indigenous peoples, First Nation people, because working from where we do in Britain, the heart of the former imperial empire, we have to ask a necessary question about what kind of knowledge is needed, reading from this context, to understand and appreciate indigenous writing, because indigenous people are writing from cultural positions or geographical locations that we physically have no contact with, and definitely is a legacy of what the imperial colonial project was, ideologically have no contact with, and colonial rule really violently foisted a vanishing act upon colonised people’s presence. And so, the beauty of being able to select work that comes from those particular spaces that is very much unknown in Britain, and for example, Australia, which is a major literary environment, the work of indigenous writers rarely gets into the British psyche. And so, the questions have to be asked why, given that they can do trade deals very well, what's wrong with bringing literature into sort of opening up literary partnership in that way. So, for me, the selection of the work was very much impelled by those sorts of regions too.
Thomas Glave
I find myself nodding in absolute agreement. Looking through this book, and looking at the ways in which these writers just completely expand our sense of the world, we did not know already about these works, right? Adding more stories to the global conversation that is incredibly important. And I'd like to ask you, Miss Sesay, could you speak about this question as well, your experience with the writers and your thoughts about differences, similarities and so on?
Kadija Sesay
Yeah, sure. I think one of the things is, in terms of talking about the differences and similarities, is the fact that, you know, we also, even though these are mainly authors from Anglophone, from British colonies, we did have to include some of those who were colonised by other nations, particularly French. So, you know, there is a Senegalese writer in there, maybe two, I'm not sure, for example, and they were colonised by France. So, we also have to consider all of that work that we haven't even really tapped into, or tapped into very minimally, of translation, especially from those who their lingua franca was, still is a European language. But still, that work is considered as part of, you know, post-colonial writings that the Anglophone teaching will look at as well, there is so much there, that that needs to be part of it. And I think people forget a lot of the time that some of the books they are reading, especially with writing that is in translation, and people imagine that it arrived in English. And we've got the same with a lot of writers from Africa and the Caribbean, and other places in the world as well. I mean, when you think of it, in the Caribbean, even though we're just looking at, you know, we're looking at islands here, how many languages are there amongst those islands, you know, already how many European languages amongst those islands, and then you've got the Asian subcontinent, and everything. So, there's a lot of literature still to be to be looked at. And will be, at some stage, will be translated some of it in English, more of that work is happening. And what we have been able to do, at least for some of this, is suggest other writers to look at, and other works to look at. And it was really great discovering award-winning writers from Madagascar, you know, which is great that they're getting a little bit of exposure, and some of the writers do their own translation. So as well, you’ve got to think of the different translations also bring about different things, and that as well can involve a certain level of colonisation because depending on who's translating, and how they're interpreting the work, they could put a different twist on it. So, it's very interesting even looking at two versions of translations in itself. So, this would be a very exciting journey. And there's different ways of looking at the book too, because it's very interesting, the way people will start from number one, and work straight through to number fifty. And how much they will gather in their knowledge about that, even if they know some of the writers. I kind of feel sure that there's going to be something in there that they didn't know about a particular writer or their work that they thought that they knew about.
Thomas Glave
I'm finding, as I think about the book again, and your introduction to the book, I'm finding I'm really arrested by the moral and ethical imperative of this project, how you each, as co-authors, have taken on a task that might have been quite challenging in the publishing world. And fortunately, you have the Greenfinch Press supporting the book. But there is a way in which this sort of work, this work from neglected and ignored populations is still neglected, ignored and side-lined. And you have done something I think eminently heroic, in putting this work front and centre, in changing the map literarily and showing, as I think at one point, Dr Osborne pointed out, the importance, again, of indigenous communities. The other thing that one notes in looking through these selections is that some of the writers in the book come from traditions that have had a very strong and very old oral tradition. So now we are seeing some of these stories and these writers dealing with words on the page and print, that is another way of preserving these very important stories that have been going on for millennia. I wonder if you could just talk, finally, each of you, in going perhaps a step beyond this book and the great groundwork that you've laid, to speaking about a book in particular that is a book that you have been fond of, that you think is germane to this conversation of decolonising and taking on the canon. Professor Anim-Addo?
Joan Anim-Addo
Yes I’ll very happily talk about - it’s not that easy to choose - very happily talk about Simone Schwarz-Bart's The Bridge of Beyond. Here's a book that was written in French and translated into English. We're very fortunate to have this as the translation, of course, and those of us who are interested in Francophone writing, for example, perhaps Francophone Caribbean writing, are always especially interested in Guadeloupe, which is quite a small island, where Simone Schwarz-Bart was born. And she tells this story of a period just after the end of slavery. Now, slavery evokes all kinds of responses, as some people feel they've heard enough, when indeed, they probably haven't. Some people want more. But what Simone Schwarz-Bart does in The Bridge of Beyond, is to quietly tell the story of a very difficult time and to actually revision that time for us, to help the reader to revision that time. It may be simple to imagine that here was emancipation and everything happened, everything changed and that was the end of slavery, and a new life began. But she points out, painstakingly, that that was a very difficult moment for those people who had endured Atlantic slavery. The black people who would been enslaved, understood only too well about the whip and how it was used, which meant that they responded with some violence quite often. The white colonisers who were still there, knew very much about power, how to exert power. So, they did, and they continue to do so. And for some people, the task was how to separate themselves from plantation existence, and Schwarz-Bart, using the Creole language that developed within the Caribbean, tells the story in that kind of voice. She’s a storyteller, and essentially, she's telling the story of her great grandmother, her grandmother and her mother. So, generations of women who have survived and in many ways what she's saying is, look, I know this island might mean all kinds of horrible things. But it’s okay, people have survived. And this is how they survived. And it's really edifying for us today because we think of the Caribbean as a tourist region these days. And so, to have a writer remind us that it's not always been viewed like that, and certainly with good reason, it's not always been viewed like that by the people, by one group of people who were brought there because, of course, the people who were left, were all mostly people who were brought to the region.
Thomas Glave
Thank you, Professor, fantastic. The Bridge of Beyond by Simone Schwarz-Bart of Guadalupe, beautiful novel. Dr Osborne, take us through a book that you feel is germane to this conversation please.
Deirdre Osborne
Well, my choice again, as Joan said, it's really impossible to choose. But as I have, I've chosen The White Girl by the Koori writer, indigenous Australian writer Tony Birch, published in 2019. Tony recently said that he does not know an indigenous person who is not damaged, in some way, and I think that what writing that comes out of Indigenous Australia really opens up is that it is still a colonial country. And that to live in a country where you are the rightful inhabitants, that your sovereignty is to lands that have never been ceded to what was originally the British invasion and then subsequent settlement. This is a book that can get your mind around the impossibility of understanding for many people, what that entails, what it entails to be an indigenous person. Tony is a climate activist. He is renowned worldwide for his work in indigenous sovereignty and climate activism. And also he is a poet. He writes short stories, he's just had two collections come out this year, and a novelist. He is the winner of the Patrick White Literary Award, which is Australia's most prestigious literary award in 2017. And The White Girl immediately tapped into the strength and courage of Indigenous women and the ways in which they protect their families and heritage against the malevolent white male violence and repressive laws. It is set in a particular period of Australia, when removal policies of children from their families decimated kinship ties and belonging on an unimaginable scale. And of course, we now recognize this as the Stolen Generations. And this novel is very much a loving tribute to these people because it's generally overlooked that indigenous people on the Australian continent have the oldest continuous culture in human history. And so, this is what we are working with and from when we engage with this beautiful book. Its set in 1960s, rural Australia, featuring a grandmother Odette Brown, who must save her 12 year old granddaughter Sissy from two threats, removal by the state because Sissy has blonde hair, and also the predatory son of the white pastoralist, who sexually assaulted her mother. Her mother, sadly, but understandably, has not been able to mother her child and fled from the area. So, Odette as Sissy’s grandmother does not even have the right to be able to raise her own granddaughter. And so, she takes action. That means breaking the law. But as Tony Birch beautifully delivers this tale, the reader is with them all the way. And so, what Tony does is bring both aspects of a very, very troubled continent, and its histories into orbit. So, we have an indigenous community, but policed by white men that grew up within that community as well and so the idea of these two very different worldviews existing alongside each other is very important in the book. And of course, we have humorous aspects in this writing. One of the things that we often encounter with work that is from an indigenous people's perspective, is that the topics can be extremely grim, but the writing is exciting. It takes us into new territories, it can be experimental, the descriptive factors, the imagery, the symbolism, that can really lift the works out of being collapsed into sort of a condition of adversity. And that's the beauty of this work. We have formidable characters who are not under the jurisdiction of state welfare. One character Millie Khan buys back land stolen from her people because she's married to an Afghani Camellia Youssef. She doesn't have to be under the jurisdiction of the state. But finally, I just wanted to say about this, that as I mentioned before, indigenous Australian literature is not easily obtainable for British readers. But the rewards gained from reading this novel offer an effective and powerful reminder of resilience, of dignity sustained in the wake of a malignant legacy. And it is very much a shared history. People in Britain share this legacy as well, even though they do not live it directly on the continent or island known as Australia. But I feel like the way in which we can gather greater understanding of tenacity and love that's come out of a lot of suffering, Tony Birch's work definitely offers this in The White Girl.
Thomas Glave
Thank you Dr Osborne; resilience, dignity, facing down a malignant history, The White Girl by Tony Birch, indigenous Australian writer, beautifully described. Finally, Miss Sesay, please do take us through your ideas and experiences with a book in particular that you feel speaks with, and to, our conversation.
Kadija Sesay
Yeah, I'm going to just talk a little bit about How to Read the Air by Dinaw Mengestu. What is interesting about how to read the air, it's quite a contemporary novel. And it's what I think some people call a slow burner. But it gives so much by the end of it, it really puts you in a position of just deep thought about relationships, whether you're in one or not, whether you've been in one or not, if you haven't been in one you're going to consider do I want to be in one. It's really, really challenging, because the protagonist is a young man who was born in America, he's an Ethiopian American, his parents are both Ethiopian, but he was born in the US and his parents arrived separately in America as refugees. And once they, you know, they've met in Ethiopia, and you know, during a really turbulent period, and a lot of protests were going on. So, they didn't really know each other. And once they arrive, once the wife arrives in the States, and they're together for a very short period of time, they realize they don't actually like each other. And the husband shows his dislike by extreme domestic abuse, I think that's one of the things I actually found troubling in a lot of work was domestic abuse. And then there's the relationship of himself and an African American woman. So he talks about these two marriages. And both of them where, the husbands are not, they're not present, or not so much not present, but the way that they are present is damaging, one physically and one mentally. And for me, by the time I got to the end, what really struck me quite a lot was the fact that relationships are so difficult, no matter how much we try, and people will often blame themselves, or blame the other when a relationship going wrong, when a lot of time, people were just damaged to begin with. And quite a lot of the time that damage is from childhood, no matter what kind of background you came from, if you had some trauma that happened in your childhood, it stays with you, and usually affects a relationship. And I just love the way he talks about that, he goes into some real detail around, especially his relationship and his wife's relationship, just really minute things which in one sense, goes to show you just how normal this relationship is. But also tells you just how there is no way it is going to survive. You know, but that doesn't mean to say they're bad people or it's a bad relationship. They're just people. So, then you start thinking of John Legend's song, you know, we're just ordinary people; we are. And we put so much on ourselves. That's why I really liked it. And I think it's challenging in that way because it does make, it should make people think, I hope it does.
Thomas Glave
Thank you very much Miss Sesay, How to Read the Air. And will you please tell us the author's name once again, so we can be sure to remember. Dinaw Mengestu, exactly. Thank you, How to Read the Air. Well, we're just about out of time. And I want to thank our magnificent panellists, Professor Joan Anim-Addo, Dr Deirdre Osborne and Miss Kadija Sesay for this fascinating discussion on this fascinating, incredible book. I want to encourage all of our listeners actually, absolutely urge you to go out and buy this book as soon as you can. It's a gorgeous book. It looks beautiful, the contents will change your life. And I want to congratulate the co-authors on this magnificent product and gift to all of us in the world who can read this book and enjoy this book. This is the Canon: Decolonise Your Bookshelves in 50 Books, published by Greenfinch Books, out now everywhere.
Outro
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love for you to tell us about it – leave us a review or a rating and find us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest.
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The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
This week’s episode brings together Birmingham born writer and artist Jackie Morris with her long-time friend, and the co-founder of the publisher Unbound, John Mitchinson. They talk about Jackie’s two new books, East of the Sun, West of the Moon and The Wild Swans, using feminist fairy tales to give voice to the voiceless, the beauty of snow and how it is impossible to draw during labour.
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Series 2, Episode 6: Jackie Morris
Intro
Welcome to the second series of the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast. We are really excited to be back for a second season and to continue to connect readers and writers in the Midlands, and far beyond.
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
This week’s episode brings together Birmingham born writer and artist Jackie Morris with her long-time friend, and the co-founder of the publisher Unbound, John Mitchinson. They talk about Jackie’s two new books, East of the Sun, West of the Moon and The Wild Swans, using feminist fairy tales to give voice to the voiceless, the beauty of snow and how it is impossible to draw during labour.
John Mitchinson
Hello and welcome. My name is John Mitchinson. I’m the publisher of Unbound, the crowdfunding publisher, and I am here today with the author and illustrator Jackie Morris. Jackie tell us where you're, as they say, calling from.
Jackie Morris
I’m in my roost, my lair, whatever you want to call it, which is a studio in an attic in a small and very tatty house which cl
ings to the cliff tops just outside St. Davids, which is in Wales by the way.
John Mitchinson
Which is in wales, and this is the room in which, people who know your work may know both The Lost Words and The Lost Spells, the two books that co-wrote with Robert Macfarlane, but also The Unwinding which we published last year at Unbound and a couple of books that are coming out later on this year that we're going to talk about.
Jackie Morris
East of the Sun, West of the Moon and The Wild Swans and all of these were created here because 30 years ago I came to St Davids for the weekend, and I’ve never been able to find my way out really. It's a really strange place that some people say it gathers flotsam and jetsam from the world and we kind of swirl around in this little microenvironment. I very seldom took a holiday, I used to live in Bath which is a beautiful city, and I came here for a weekend, and I walked down the high street and I just got this incredible overwhelming feeling, which I now know is called hiraeth, which is that feeling of belonging. Hiraeth is more a kind of homesickness, and the homesickness was recognizing that this is where I should have been always, so this is where I was going to be. I didn't want it to be a place I came to on holiday, I didn't want to live my life to go on holiday a couple of times a year, I wanted to live here, and I wanted to work here and I wanted to raise children here and that's what I’ve done.
John Mitchinson
It’s amazing and it’s a very ancient bit of the world as well that Pembrokeshire coast, isn't it? Amazing rocks and beautiful beaches and, I think, can't you see from your studio window the top of St Davids cathedral in Fishguard?
Jackie Morris
I can and when the wind’s blowing in the right direction, I can hear the cathedral bells. I can also see Ramsey Island which is a very old and spiritual place and Skomer and I can see the sea and then if you walk up the hill behind my house there's a long ridge of granite rock that bites out of the sea and then down the other sides there's an old village that used to be inhabited years ago, it's all ruins now, there's hut circles, there's old standing stones, there's beaches where the seals come ashore to breed this time of year, there are raven’s roosts, there’s peregrines, I don't know why I wanted to live here really.
John Mitchinson
Nature is all around you. You have your own menagerie of animals as well.
Jackie Morris
Yeah, I do, I have four cats that share the house with me and are destructive to many things, including the house, often to my peace of mind, but they also come for walks. They're not allowed in the studio because they’re terrible critics of my work, they like to sit on paintings and knock things over and then I have three dogs, one of which is Rosie who is my daughter's dog, Ivy the beautiful and Pie who is just crazy crazy crazy.
John Mitchinson
Let's talk about the two books that are coming out in October, East of the Sun, West of the Moon and The Wild Swans. They're both really retellings of, I think, they're both Hans Christian Andersen tales originally, old folktales, Norwegian folk tales, certainly. But you take the stories, and you completely reinvent them, don't you?
Jackie Morris
Not completely, I changed the endings really. And more so with East of the Sun, than The Wild Swans. I did try very hard to change the ending of The Wild Swans. Yeah, the plot spoiler for that one is, for some reason, at the very end of it, Eliza, who is the heroine of the book, is on a pyre about to be burned as a witch. But she is rescued by her brothers arriving as swans. She then chooses to marry the prince who had sentenced her to death, I still don't understand that really, you know, I wouldn't be quite so forgiving myself. But then if I had brothers who were turned into swans, I would just think fantastic. I've got swans now, not brothers. So, I wouldn't spend years of my life weaving shirts out of nettles for them.
John Mitchinson
Yes, I mean, and you describe weaving shirts out of nettles and painful bloody fingers and painful bloody feet for stamping the nettles into fibres. Two things that strike me about the way that you tell these folk tales is that there's a lot of very strong, visceral, sensual writing in the books. That's one case, Eliza, you know, shredding her fingers and stinging her fingers with nettles. But it's full of delicious, they're always full of delicious foods, and incredibly kind of comforting beverages to drink. And I'm just wondering, both the stories, having these very, very strong female characters, Eliza in The Wild Swans and Bernine in East of the Sun. And, as you say, Bernine’s story is, she doesn't go for the leading man in the way that you would expect a female character in a folktale to go.
Jackie Morris
Yeah, she goes her own way, really, she grows through the story. And very much did go her own way. I was trying to write her in one direction. And she had come to life so much that she refused to go where she was supposed to. Yeah, so I have had letters of complaints that the story is wrong, you've written the story wrong. But I'll take that.
John Mitchinson
I mean, they're very powerful, I think, very powerful stories for any age. They work for any age.
Jackie Morris
I hope so. Yeah. I mean, I think the character in Wild Swans who really fascinated me, is the stepmother. I think women come out of a lot of these folktales very badly, often.
John Mitchinson
Yes, and you kind of rescue them in a way. I mean, it's a very ambiguous ending, Wild Swans, that you give it where the stepmother has apparently changed. Again, I think we can talk about these things because if people are reading them for the plots, maybe they're reading them in the wrong kind of way, if there is a wrong kind of way. But she falls pregnant and then she transforms herself into a hare and then goes and leaves the King, the father of Bernine.
Jackie Morris
Yes. And why wouldn't you really because I think during the time that she was with him, she did love him, but he couldn't trust her enough to share his children with her. So, he was quite happy to marry her, but never to trust her with his children. She showed no malice at all towards anybody until her heart cracked. And then she has a wonderful time with the wild white hares, I think, in the woods, so it might be his child that she's carrying, but it might be a hare child anyway. This fascination with transformation that I have, I think, because when I was a child, I kind of didn't want to be human. You know, people would ask me what you want to be when you grow up and when I got my head around the fact that you had to grow up I would think well, you know, I want to be a bear.
John Mitchinson
And you write so sensually about the smell of the feathers of the doves or the swans in Wild Swans or the amazing bear in East of the Sun, who is obviously an enchanted character that change changes into a prince, but I feel that you rather preferred him when he was a bear.
Jackie Morris
Yeah, I always preferred in Beauty and the Beast, I was always disappointed that she'd fallen in love with this creature and then he turned into a man, and it was a bit like, oh, never mind.
John Mitchinson
The other thing that really struck me, certainly in The Wild Swans, is obviously there's a lot of dreams and both of these women have to go through a lot of loss and a lot of pain in the stories before they reach the end. But there's a particular quality to Eliza’s story where she has to not speak for a long period of time in order to restore her brothers to their human state, they've been transformed into swans. And that thing of silence is interesting, because at first, the silence works in her favour. Everybody projects positive things onto her. But then there's a malicious character who starts to spread rumours about her, which of course she can't. I just thought that was very interesting, it felt to me that you were trying to say something interesting about women and their role in story and their role in culture and their silent witness.
Jackie Morris
Yeah, it's partly about silence. But I became fascinated during that period by the idea of silence, I would actually just, I was knitting at the time. And I would take my knitting up the hill, and just sit for half an hour knitting, without speaking. Eliza does it for years and she can't say a word, she can't utter a word at all, she can't make a sound. If she does, then all the brothers will die. And there is so little silence in our world at the moment. It's really hard to find a place that’s silent, even where I live, you know, just as this podcast was beginning, the lawn mower started up in the holiday cottages next door. Most of the day, I've just been listening to the sound of raven’s wings going overhead and the sheep in the fields next door. But silence is a rare commodity. And silence with humans is very rare. Usually, I think if you don't have a voice, if you don't speak, people will say your words for you. That happens a lot with women.
John Mitchinson
There's a texture to silence you say at the beginning of the The Wild Swans, she learns the many textures of silence and she learns to listen, which is another skill.
Jackie Morris
Yeah. Well, I need that one more. I need less of the speaking and more of the listening. Always, always, I think I need to learn to throw a small question out and then sit back.
John Mitchinson
I'm curious as to why the books came as a pair?
Jackie Morris
East of the Sun I wrote and then I submitted it to many, many publishers for seven years. And I got rejection letter after rejection letter for seven years. And then I took it to a publisher, at the time I was working with Francis Lincoln. And they did picture books. They didn't do longer books, but my editor there, Janetta, she read it and she said yes, yeah, I want to publish this. So, I illustrated it. And it sold out of its first edition in about a week. And then it went into seven editions, which was rather nice. But in the meantime, the publisher had been taken over by a bigger press and my relationship deteriorated. I think the best thing I can say is that eventually I got the rights back on all my books, and then took them out to other publishers. I did take them to other people before Unbound but one of the best days in my publishing career was the day that I walked into the unbound offices with these books, and all the things that I wanted for them, and the answer was yes. And it was including, you know, everywhere I'd been people said, oh, well, we've got our own designer. And I said yes. But you know, Alison and I just, we get each other. It would be like me going to a publisher, and they say, oh, well, we've got our own writer, and I'm going yes, but I work with Robert Macfarlane, they go, oh, no, we've got our own writer who will write the books for you, you know. And I think it's so rare that people see design for what it is, which is such an integral part of a book and Alison has gone through these books word by word, and she's set the words like images in a way, as well as the images alongside each other. The pace, she allows it to breathe. So, where it needs just space, there is space.
John Mitchinson
The books, you fill them with wildlife.
Jackie Morris
Always birds. I'm really struggling at the moment because I'm doing a book of birds and birds have usually been in the background of all my books, and now they are centre stage flying through. And it's oh no, what do I put in the background? Other birds!
John Mitchinson
There's also, I have to say, some beautiful moths in The Wild Swans as well.
Jackie Morris
Can you tell that the character that kind of took over The Wild Swans was the stepmother with her crown of moths? She needs her own book at some point.
John Mitchinson
I thought that and also there's that marvellous transformation scene, which I think you write beautifully. One of the things I really like when people illustrate is that it would be very difficult to illustrate Eliza when she's been enchanted, and her teeth have been blackened. And you do that, you do it to an extent, but you don't try and make her look as monstrous as the text makes it sound.
Jackie Morris
See, I don't think of her as being monstrous. That is the look I aspire to. I mean, that's like a wish fulfilment. That's when she's at her most beautiful, most powerful, I think. But I do think, both of the books, they don't really end they kind of begin at the end. And my hope for the reader is that there's a life outside the book. So, you would wonder what happens to the stepmother? Where is she? Is she still in her wild hare form? Is she a person? What happens to Eliza and the prince? Can they kind of get over this burning scene? What's it like every time he strikes a match around her? Because I wouldn't be so forgiving if somebody had tried to burn me at the stake, I have to say.
John Mitchinson
That's a pretty shocking scene, that scene.
Jackie Morris
Yeah, and then there's also the fascination of, you know, there's the thing about people not listening to Eliza because she's silent. But also, she never asked the boys whether they want to stay swans. And her youngest brother, who has always loved flight, didn't quite dodge the shirt well enough at the end and so there is another book there.
John Mitchinson
The half man, half bird book and does he ever return to fly again. I mean, so that's a kind of, let's say, indeterminacy, that you quite like. You take that to a whole different level with your book, The Unwinding, which is the book we published last year, which is a braided together series of narratives, and reflections. I mean, it's not really a story, is it?
Jackie Morris
No. And yes.
John Mitchinson
It's many stories.
Jackie Morris
The stories for The Unwinding lived in the images for the most part. And every time you look at the images, you could make a new story, if you wanted to. The words that live alongside the pictures are almost catalysts for storytelling, really. And it was about halfway through the book, that I realized that it would be quite a good idea to remove all the words in what I call my most radical editing job ever. And have the book that runs alongside it called The Silent Unwinding, which is like a silent movie, really, it's the same book, but without any of the words. So, into that space, you can write your own words, or you can draw your own pictures, or even do both at the same time.
John Mitchinson
And people have really responded to it. People have shared online their finishing or taking of Jackie's images and adding their own illustrations and words. I wish we could say we've been incredibly clever to have thought this up as being the perfect antidote to people suddenly finding themselves in lockdown and having much more time on their own to think and reflect and to listen, all the things that we've talked about that are important, but The Unwinding became almost, for a lot of people I think, quite a talismanic book through lockdown, because it encouraged that. You say it started as a sort of a pillow book. Do you want to say what a pillow book is?
Jackie Morris
Yeah, I used to write a blog years ago. And it was partly a way for me to learn to write. And somebody said to me one day oh, your blog just reminds me of The Pillow Book of Sei Shonigan and I thought, oh, I wonder what that is, I'll go and have a look. And I found this amazing, 1000-year-old diary of - I guess its attention, isn't it, it’s paying attention to different things. The fact that her words spoke to me through a century was just astonishing. So, a pillow book is like a small collection of writing that you would tuck underneath your pillow, and maybe you would add to it yourself. Or maybe it was just for reading.
John Mitchinson
But there was a kind of a sense that there was some degree of calming solace, that it was something that would enter your dreams and feed your unconscious.
Jackie Morris
Yeah, and I think at the time I was aware that the world was quite an anxious place. I had no idea that things were going to become far more anxious over time. I live in quite a blessed little bubble in my studio and when I venture out of it, which I do less and less these days, I find the world to be quite a chaotic space so what I wanted to try and do was think of books as being a bit like theatres and I was trying to make a very small theatre prayer book, a place of calming, place of peace within the pages within the covers. A place of dreams, a place of stillness.
John Mitchinson
Which I think is what a lot of people have responded to in the book but also in The Silent Book as well, it's just there is something incredibly liberating about looking at a sequence of images, like a sort of build your own adventure. It's a tell your own story through the images that are there on the page.
Jackie Morris
Yeah, I hope it invites people in. Some people have said they couldn’t possibly write in it as it was too intimidating, but I think most people managed to. Once you start then it becomes easier, it's like everything else, you know, when you're writing a book the hardest thing to do is the first few words
John Mitchinson
We should say that, this is obviously going out under the auspices of the Birmingham Literature Festival, but you were born in Birmingham.
Jackie Morris
I was, it's very long time ago, it was almost 60 years ago, I was born in Loveday Street hospital which they, shortly after my birth, they knocked down but it was too late because I was out in the world by then and there was no stopping me really. And then there are what you called once the Hollywood years because I lived in Hollywood until I was four.
John Mitchinson
That's Hollywood near Bromsgrove.
Jackie Morris
My Hollywood was…I remember snow, baked potatoes, a cardigan with a zip on and a hood that I absolutely adored. Mostly snow, you know, rolling snowballs in the garden that were bigger than me.
John Mitchinson
It's interesting there's so much snow in your in your work.
Jackie Morris
I love snow and I live in one of the least snowy parts of Britain really.
John Mitchinson
Yes, because of that salt in the air, it's not great for it. Did you always draw?
Jackie Morris
I always did draw as much as I can remember. I think I probably came out of the womb with a crayon in my hand. When I had both my children I took my sketchbooks into hospital foolishly thinking that while I was in labour I could do a little bit of drawing and then when I was six years old I watched my dad's drawing a lapwing and I guess I didn't really think I want to be an artist because, you know, I didn't know about jobs but what I wanted to do is to be able to do that thing that I was watching him do which was like alchemy, which is taking a blank piece of paper and making a bird land on it using a pencil. that's kind of what I’ve been aiming for all my life really.
John Mitchinson
It is kind of alchemical I think watching you draw and paint. I mean I’ve watched you paint foxes live and it's astonishing. The most astonishing thing I think I’ve ever seen was watching you paint two foxes simultaneously with paint brushes in in your left and your right hand.
Jackie Morris
Yeah, I'll tell you what would be even more miraculous is painting them and then they come to life, that would be good.
John Mitchinson
Well, more of that anon because yeah, we'll talk about that in a moment, but obviously we've talked about paying attention and looking at things more closely. I mean you tend to draw from nature, you tend to draw the birds, the flowers, the moths, the butterflies, the plants that surround you in a kind of, in a very precise and an accurate way and yet you have this capacity I think to make them feel animated. I mean is that important, are you trying to capture some sort of spirit when you're painting?
Jackie Morris
I’m going for the soul really, always, and that may stem back to me once asking a vicar whether animals had souls and he said no and that was it then I was done with Christianity forever. I think everything, every painting that I do is just chasing creatures not in order to capture it but just to show it, to try to show the sacred in life, I guess. What is most important to me is that the rights of life, the rights of all life. It’s an understanding that we need to come to. If we don't, it is to our peril, I think, because everything is so interdependent, you know. I grew up at the time when the there was this kind of Christian dominance with man at the top and everything else underneath. And I think it never made any sense to me, the only way that world made sense to me was through First Nations stories where all life was equal, where there was a balance, where every action had a reaction, where you honoured the tree that you cut down, you never took more than you needed, and you tried to put back and thinking forward for generations. That's what is so needed. And more and more, I think those are the stories that we need to tell. So that's what I guess I'm trying to do in my painting.
John Mitchinson
In lockdown, though you started on a project which doesn't involve painting at all. It involves what some people might think is the kind of the opposite, it involves old typewriters.
Jackie Morris
It does yeah, it has curious roots, I guess.
John Mitchinson
It's called Feather, Leaf, Bark and Stone, so it sounds like it's a deeply kind of natural, very safe, Jackie Morris territory. But in fact, you're typing directly onto squares of gold leaf, and then photographing those.
Jackie Morris
Yeah. And so, everything that is written, there is an attention to every single word. I know, in Western culture, there's almost like an antagonism between words and images, words are seen, I think, to have a dominance over images. I hear so often The Lost Words described as Robert Macfarlane’s book, with illustrations by Jackie Morris, it's a real imbalance. Never, by the way, by Robert, he would never say that. But I think we fail to realise that words are actually just simply and only images. 26 images make the alphabet. And what fascinates me about that is that you have these 26 images, but they build worlds, they build characters that you can fall in love with, they build places that you want to go to. So, in the typing on a typewriter, it's a very different experience to typing on a computer. It is that one letter at a time, and the attention that you have to pay, especially if you're typing on gold-leaf because you can't go back and rip it out. It's quiet. It really focuses the mind.
John Mitchinson
Yeah, it's extraordinary. So, it's like a collection almost of poems or meditations. But at the end of the book, you even start typing directly onto feathers, and leaves and bark.
Jackie Morris
Well, I just started to think, you know, I had some feathers. And I thought, what would happen if I put that into my typewriter, and you know, in the age of Photoshop, where you can put type onto a feather really easily, I thought, no, I want to put it in my typewriter. And I was putting leaves from trees and silver birch bark, typing on it. Again, you know, you need to be quite accurate in your typing.
John Mitchinson
So, I guess it'll be like a collection, each one in a way is an individual, independent artwork. But they do thread somehow together?
Jackie Morris
Yeah. And I'm not really sure what it is, when asked to describe it. I'm not sure what it is. But for me, it was my new form of unwinding, and calming my soul at a time when life was very chaotic for me. I'd lost my father, my brother-in-law killed himself, it was lockdown. It was extremely dramatic. The weather inside my head was not good. And it was a therapy.
John Mitchinson
You talked about it also as navigation and one of the beautiful things you thread through the book, there are some labyrinths with precise coordinates on. Do you want to explain what that is? Because that's the stone bit of the book isn’t it?
Jackie Morris
Yeah, well, years ago, I started picking up beautiful stones off the beach, stones that have been carved over time by the sea, and the sand, all the elements and I would take them home and I would paint onto them the shape of a labyrinth which is a beautiful and ancient symbol, and then I'd take them back to the beach and I'd leave them and sometimes I would leave them above the high tide line and sometimes I wouldn't, sometimes I put them into water. That's always a lovely one if you put them into water, sometimes where people step over a stone so they would look down to see where their feet were going and sometimes I would know that they would be found and other times they just, it's giving back really. So I’ve done that for quite a long time and because I use transfer leaf you have a tissue of gold that is left, so I started putting the map coordinates of where I left them onto these traces and those kind of move through the book as a navigation. The whole thing is a navigation really like a compass. Why I do these things I don't know. I’ve recently begun painting feathers onto stones, and I love the heavy light thing, you know, the feather, whenever you hold a feather in your hand it always, you can feel it trying to get back in the sky, it has this breath of air that goes underneath that tries to lift up. So, to paint with gold-leaf, again, you have this thinness, this lightness and if you use loose-leaf as well it dances in the slightest breath of air. Put it onto stone and you have a heavy light and I rather like that as well.
John Mitchinson
So that's Feather, Leaf, Bark and Stone which is published next May that people can pre order on the Unbound site. But there's also another project which you've launched which is completely different which is painting and which we hope is going to be a huge collection of, we’re calling them accordion books because they are basically concertina eight panels and you stretch them out and it's a tumbling string of foxes.
Jackie Morris
You can't do this without moving your hands, I tend to wave mine in a zigzag line but if you think of the shape of a screen, it's almost like a folded screen when you shut it up. So, I painted using paints that are…years and years old, Colourman started to make these little paint cakes which are made of pigments, and they have honey in them, and they have gum arabic and that's watercolours. Before that artist’s had to make their own paints and these revolutionized painting and you can still buy antique boxes of paints and I have about seven now, I think. So, these paints have been asleep for nearly 200 years but you can wake them up with a little kiss of water and that's what I’ve been using to paint these accordion foxes into books and I began doing it as practice for performances that I do with Spell Songs, teaching myself how to paint the shape of a fox. I'm actually going to be in Birmingham in January at the Symphony Hall with my band, as i like to call them, Spell Songs.
John Mitchinson
And will you be painting foxes and otters live on stage?
Jackie Morris
I will probably be painting both. I have to say that when we did Birmingham Town Hall that was the biggest round of applause I’ve ever had for going on stage, so thank you very much that was fantastic, but yeah foxes and otters.
John Mitchinson
Jackie it's been wonderful talking to you.
Jackie Morris
It's been quite nice talking to you as well John.
John Mitchinson
So I should say East of the Sun, West of the Moon and The Wild Swans by Jackie, published by Unbound in October, and then if you're interested in Feather, Leaf, Bark and Stone and her first two accordion books, I think we're planning to do maybe six next year and then we'll see where we get to, but Fox and Otter are the first two and they're all available for pre order on the Unbound site. Jackie Morris thank you. I’m John Hutchinson, you are Jackie Morris and this is the end of the podcast, thank you.
Outro
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love for you to tell us about it – leave us a review or a rating and find us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest.
You can download our latest podcast episodes, every Thursday, from all the places you would normally get your podcasts and find transcripts of our episodes in the shownotes and on our website at www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
This month's piece is written by singer songwriter and Wednesbury Poet Laureate Brendan Hawthorne, reflecting on the changing seasons and the cosiness of autumn as the leaves and weather change around us.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
October: Brendan Hawthorne
Intro
Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast and our new series of commissioned writing about 2021. Each month we are commissioning a new writer to reflect on the month that has passed, offering us moments of connection through great writing and the opportunity to reflect about what we have collectively experienced at the end of the year.
We will be bringing you a new short episode at the start of each month, with each piece read by our guest writers. You can read the pieces on our website, where you will also find information about our upcoming digital events.
Reading
Hello my name is Brendan Hawthorne, I’m a singer song writer, poet, playwright and I’ve written the blog for October for Birmingham Literature Festival.
October has become a signpost month in many ways for me. New directions and opportunities have presented themselves. New challenges to keep the old mind alert and the heart full.
Creatively I have had the script of a play published, a new collection of work readied for publication and signed new commission contracts. I am also recording songs with Kerry, my musical partner, for our new CD. Written pre-lockdown, it’s only now being given performance form and life. A photographer friend has offered to take a series of Autumnal photographic portraits of me for promotional use and I’ve bought Lynn, my wife’s, Christmas present.
All good I hear you say, but, as October signals a seasonal change …
I realise the world has changed
from the world I once knew
Changed into one that appears
to be more guarded and tentative
mindful of the tragic consequences in retaining
liberty, democracy and relative freedom
Many things are now ‘considered’
The atlas shrinks again
through traffic light travel changes
to a greater global awareness
I personally love to feel the chill in the night air of the country of my birth. The way …
our homeward journey is streetlight lit
by autumnal sunsets directing
us to log burner warmth
Witness the magic of flickering shadows
that tell different stories
each time planet saving briquettes are ignited
Smokiness taints the air with comfort
atmospherically blending
with the smell of tomato soup
heated on a dancing gas ring
accompanied by warm crusty bread
fresh from the oven
Then I wonder if the cost of gas will become more than the cost of tinned soup, but for now the concept is too great to stem the flow of intoxicating relaxation.
My mom is 87 this month…
She was 27 when she brought me into the world
with the help of the NHS
A system of healthcare
that has cradled many since birth
but I wonder for how much longer?
Stories of elderly people falling
and having to wait for 6 to 10 hours
for ambulances to attend because
there aren’t enough vehicles freed up
by corridor queues in overcrowded A & E’s
With all these cuts, I wonder why queues aren’t included?
I spoke to a young police officer yesterday who told me he had thought he’d found his dream job by helping people feel ‘safe and secure’. He told me of attending drunken injuries taking 6 hours out of his shift to sit with someone waiting for medical attention. I felt his pain, his frustration and career dislocation.
I do, however, laugh at the things I’ve said to myself, expecting answers that never come. With age, does the skill of asking yourself questions become more important? I’ll let you know.
On the news today I saw a
polar bear clinging for dear life
to a tiny ice flow berg
Hugging the chill to its bones
it appeared to cry out in anguish
at its predicament
They know the importance of existence
I thought
Why don’t we?
Outro
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. Follow us on Instagram, twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All information about the festival and upcoming events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org. The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
In this week’s episode Festival Director Shantel Edwards talks to debut novelist Torrey Peters about her Women’s Prize longlisted novel Detransition, Baby. Described as ‘a uniquely trans take on love, motherhood and those exes who you just can’t quit’, Detransition, Baby follows three characters as they navigate creating a new version of family for themselves. Join us as we talk about the politics of motherhood, misconceptions about transitioning and writing complex female characters.
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Series 2, Episode 5: Torrey Peters
Intro
Welcome to the second series of the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast. We are really excited to be back for a second season and to continue to connect readers and writers in the Midlands, and far beyond.
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
In this week’s episode Festival Director Shantel Edwards talks to debut novelist Torrey Peters about her Women’s Prize longlisted novel Detransition, Baby. Described as ‘a uniquely trans take on love, motherhood and those exes who you just can’t quit’, Detransition, Baby follows three characters as they navigate creating a new version of family for themselves. Join us as we talk about the politics of motherhood, misconceptions about transitioning and writing complex female characters.
Shantel Edwards
Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast. I'm Shantel Edwards, the Festival Director and I'm really excited to be in conversation today with Torrey Peters, talking about her debut novel Detransition, Baby. Described as ‘a uniquely trans take on love motherhood, and those exes who just can't quit’, Detransition, Baby is a top 10 bestseller and was long listed for the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2021. Torrey lives in Brooklyn, and holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a Master's in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth. She is the author of two novellas, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones and The Masker. Torrey, welcome to the podcast, thank you for being here.
Torrey Peters
I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me.
Shantel Edwards
I just wanted to start by asking how this last year has been for you really, I mean, there's been a pandemic, you've released a book in a pandemic, how has it been this past year?
Torrey Peters
I mean, I think that a lot of people who released books had a pretty difficult time. And I sort of feel bad being an outlier to that, where I, in some ways enjoyed releasing a book in the pandemic, in that most of my writing career has been hyper local, like, it's been part of like a scene of trans writers in Brooklyn. And so, where we read was like, at the local bar, and I saw the same people and there was a way in which I expected this book release to be, you know, have like a two mile radius of interest, maybe around it. And instead, partly because of the pandemic, you know, I would do an event and people from the UK, from Europe, sometimes from South America, Australia, there are people coming to these events from all over the world. As a result, I think, this experience, this book launch ended up being international for me in a way that it couldn't have possibly been, if it wasn't for the pandemic. And I expect that my next book will sort of return to kind of local, you know, a local way of doing it. The book is very Brooklyn. And so in some ways, I find myself lucky. I mean, it seems horrible to say I'm lucky there's a pandemic, a global pandemic, but the timing in terms of finding readers who I otherwise wouldn't have ever come into contact with, I think it was just sort of a fluke of all these things. And there's obviously a lot of dark sides to the pandemic, but for me, it ended up having these unexpected bright sides.
Shantel Edwards
And I guess you've gotten to see the different, was there a different reaction in different parts of the world to the novel?
Torrey Peters
Yeah, I mean, you know, the United States, like, sort of even the conversations about gender in different countries and around trans issues, they're really different. And they're different in different places, like, you know, in New York, for like, kind of trans women in New York, where things are oftentimes more radical and things like that, my book was almost like assimilationist in that it was like, you know, involved with children and family and motherhood which are considered conservative in some places, you know, some scenes. Whereas, you know, if I was talking to like a book group in Indiana, it was radical, it was this wild idea that a trans woman could be part of a nuclear family, or that the nuclear family might not be working. That was like a radical idea. And then, you know, in the UK, it was much more - it wasn't particularly politically polarizing in the US, that wasn't sort of the valence along which readers approached it. But in the UK, I think it had, just in the way that the conversation is there, it was a book that was interpreted politically. And, you know, the pushback was a lot stronger, there was more kind of stereotypically bigoted responses to it. But also, there was a more, I would say, vehement degree of support, you know, the book really was important to people, because there was, I think they felt that there was something very deeply at stake politically, in letting trans women tell their stories in unvarnished ways, and that really mattered. So, the book was, the book got on bestseller lists in both countries, but it got higher in the UK than it did in the US, simply because I think people felt like they had a lot riding on it.
Shantel Edwards
I was reading about your earlier work and I think a lot of your earlier work was very much about writing within the trans community and I wondered what that shift had been like to go from, you know, writing for a particular audience who you know, is going to understand and receive the work in the way it's intended, and then shift into being, I guess, published by a really big publisher, and what that shift was like, and if you felt like there was a, I guess, almost like a lack of control about how the novel might be received.
Torrey Peters
I was lucky while I was writing it, because I didn't know that is was going to be published by a big publisher. And so, I didn't have a lot of those voices in my head where I would write a line and I would think, like, ‘oh, my God, this is gonna be read in like 11 countries’, like that wasn't a thought in my head as I was writing. And I think that that thought would have stifled me, it's something I'm worried about in my next writing is to basically write as though nobody's listening or that, so only my friends are listening. But when I wrote it, I really didn't know. So, I was like, maybe like, 11, people will hear this joke, you know, and the repercussions of 11 people hearing, you know, if two people don't like my jokes, but you know, if 10,000 don't like my joke, it's a little different. And the first two books really were kind of about, they were novellas, they really were addressing, like, sort of inter-trans stuff, stuff that was things that trans women argued with each other about. And then slowly, as I was writing Detransition, Baby, I began to think that I was writing less for a community, and more for people that I had affinity with, like, and I was writing along lines of affinity. And I realized that there's some trans people I don't have affinity with. But also, there's a whole lot of sis women that I do have affinity with. The book is dedicated to divorced cis women because as I was writing it, I was reading all these books about divorced cis women and the trajectory of divorce looked a lot to me, like the trajectory of transition where you live your life a certain way, assuming it's going to be a certain thing. And then there's this event that's like a break, your transition or your divorce. And then you have to move forward without getting bitter about having, you know, how you spent your past. And you also can't reinvest in old illusions. And so, when I began to think like, oh, actually, all these divorced women, their books have been so important to me, and how I move forward. Maybe I have something to say back to them. Maybe there's a conversation here between trans and cis women along lines of affinity, rather than identity. It sort of changed how I wrote but that as a plan is different from that being likely to have happened like, you know, when I said I wanted affinity, I still thought it was going to be a small book, in maybe Brooklyn, and then it came to fruition like far beyond my expectations. Like, you know, the fact that I found myself in book groups, with moms and in all these different states. And I was like, wow, I didn't know anyone who would take me up on it.
Shantel Edwards
I think that's such a nice way of thinking of it, though, and, affinity is something that I think we'll come back to but before we get into the book, I wondered if I could just ask you, for those people out there who haven't read it yet, if you might just quickly synopsize the book.
Torrey Peters
Sure. It starts with Reese who I like to say is sort of like Fleabag but trans and in Brooklyn, and the action kicks off when her ex, who is a de-transitioned trans woman named Ames and used to be Amy, gets his boss Katrina pregnant and then comes to Reese and asks Reese if she would like to kind of get together the three of them and see if they can raise a child in an unconventional family. That's actually just the premise, it’s just the first chapter and then actually, like learning what it takes to make a family outside of a typical nuclear family structure is kind of the drama, the ups and downs, it's also the comedy. Honestly, it's very funny to try and make a family and gender is kind of hilarious, in some ways. So, you know, all those things come together to tell the story.
Shantel Edwards
It is very funny. I've read it twice now and I liked even more on second reading, I'm going to throw that in there. So just taking the premise, you've got these three interconnected narratives, you've got, you know, Reese, and Katrina and Ames. But I've got to say, for me, Reese really felt like the heart of the of the novel. And I wondered if you’d ever thought, if that was always the plan to have these three narratives that intersect, or whether you thought about just perhaps following Reese?
Torrey Peters
Yeah, I mean, I tried it a couple of different ways. It's funny, like who people think are the heart of the heart of the novel, I've definitely had people also think that Ames is at the heart of the novel. Fewer people think that Katrina's at the heart of the novel which is fair, because I think there's a big technical difference in how I approached Katrina's voice. But initially, I was going to have all three be equal, that they were all going to have equal voice in the novel, that was my initial way of doing it. And then in the case of Katrina, who was a cis woman and she's half Jewish, half Chinese, Chinese American, I realized that there are other stories out there that told the story of a pregnant cis woman, and that in a lot of ways, that's not something I've ever experienced and I was really recreating other people's stories and so all the characters were free, indirect initially, like free indirect style, where you're inside their heads, and then I decided to actually really just focus on the two trans women because I thought that was a story that we hadn't heard. And I think there's any number of cis women who've told the story of their pregnancy really well, any number of Chinese Americans who've told that story really well and that I just would really go deeper into Ames and Reese and I think that one of the differences, I think that they get equal time but I think that Reese is just, she's a cattier, funnier, more direct person than Ames who's really more trying to figure out his gender, figure out what's going on with himself so he's a more subdued voice and just the vibrancy of Reese ends up you know, she's kind of a ham, she wants a spotlight and even though I tried to give them equal share in the book, you know, Reese sort of elbowed Ames out of the way whenever she could.
Shantel Edwards
Yeah, I really liked her. She's like, messy and complicated, and sometimes awful, and sometimes charming and yeah, I thought of all the characters in the book, she was the one that felt like she had the sort of clearest desire to be a mother, the sort of clearest idea of wanting to be a parent, but also this really complicated relationship to motherhood. And I guess I wondered, especially near the beginning, I think much less so towards the end, but more so towards the beginning, I guess I found myself wondering how important motherhood was to her gender affirmation, to her sense of herself as a woman?
Torrey Peters
Well, I think that one of the arcs that she goes through is the difference between wanting a child or to be a mother and wanting like a specific child and to be in a specific relationship. And I think that early on, motherhood was important to her in a sort gendered way. It was like, this is what womanhood should look like, this is what it means to be a valid woman is to be a mother. And it was really about, in some ways, motherhood was about her, what motherhood would give to her. And I think one of the things that she goes through, and something that I thought about is the fact that oftentimes motherhood isn't about you. It's about giving to other people. And she learns in a number of ways, like not just in terms of the biological idea of motherhood that you raise a baby but you know, the fact that the trans community itself has a number of different types of motherhood, you're often kind of mothering younger trans women, showing them how to live, where to get you know, where to get what they need, how to deal with, like, the emotional travails of being a trans woman in the world. And it really is a motherly process, you deal with these young people who are – and young, I didn't mean that in terms of age like young in sort of how recently they've approached womanhood and sort of the ways that womanhood can abrade you and can hurt. And people who haven’t necessarily developed armour and coping mechanisms and so they need help, they need mother figures and trans women are often that to each other. And so, the ways in which Reese is a mother already, and whether or not those mothering skills that she already has transfer into a kind of more framework that we think about in terms of a nuclear family, you know, how much does the mothering of the trans world bleed into biological mothering. And how much, you know, vice versa was a lot of the things that Reese had to figure out. And in the end, I think, not to give spoilers, but I think a lot of mothering is not just about the concept, but about a mother and a daughter, or a mother and most of its daughters in this book, and a mother and a child figuring it out.
Shantel Edwards
And I think you see that with Reece, definitely towards the end, that shift away from it being about her, to it being about the child, I think you can definitely see that towards the end. And she has that sort of dynamic, I guess also with Ames, which I find really interesting, you know, she's both Amy's lover, but also there's a real sort of maternal aspect to that relationship as well, right?
Torrey Peters
Yeah. And I think that a lot of us, you know, my first relationship, my first long relationship I got into when I was 19, or 20. And so I you know, pretty much left my parents’ house then moved in with this other person. And there's a way in which when we suddenly didn't have parents, we parented each other and we like taught each other how to be adults. And I think about that first relationship in my life partly is like a sort of romantic relationship, but partly, when it was over, it felt scary in the way that leaving my family felt scary, because this is the person who I learned how to be with in the world, how to take care of each other in the world. And I think that that's not just like, sort of trans relationships. I think a lot of people I know, their first relationship as an adult, they're parenting each other, they're like, okay, we'll get an apartment together, we'll give each other shelter, we'll teach each other how to cook food, you know, like these basic kind of adult things we do for each other. And so, there is a parental dynamic, I think, in a lot of, you know, by the time you're 40, maybe you like, don't really want a parent as your lover, but when you're really young, there's a kind of hidden parent, I think, in relationships.
Shantel Edwards
I feel really conflicted about Ames, because when I first read the novel, I felt really sympathetic towards him, you know, Katrina outs him awfully at that dinner, you know, Reese's ex beats him up, I felt like he was sort of lost in this dilemma of parenthood, and that he was pretty much having a terrible time with it all. But then I read it a second time. And I did feel like there was almost something manipulative about him and the way he approaches Reese. I mean, he doesn't speak to Katrina before he approaches Reese, and then just offers her the thing that she wants the most without actually knowing if he can follow through on the thing he's offering. And I just wondered what your take on Ames was?
Torrey Peters
Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, I think that Ames, there's a lot that is tragic about Ames. But Ames has more agency than he's willing to admit, you know, Ames has more ability to say stuff, a lot of what is going on with Ames is that Ames is unwilling to look at himself, because if he looks at himself, he might realize, well, maybe I'm a woman, and I really need to do something about that, or will realize that I've lost some things, and I need to work really hard to get them back or that I'm lying to myself. And so, there's a way in which his manipulation isn't necessarily conniving, but it's a way to protect himself from what he really knows. So like, even, let's say, the part where he gets beat up, and there are people who were like, you know, Ames is the victim of a transphobic attack on the street, and it's like, sure he is, but he threw the first punch, you know, and I think that part of that is playing with a little bit the narratives that we have about, you know, if you hear about a trans woman getting beaten up on the street, you think, oh, well, you know, she must have no agency and lots of times that's the case, you know, certainly there are a lot of attacks in which trans women are just victims. But in the case of Ames, I think that there's a way in which, you know, Ames is willing to know those stories and know these thoughts and deploy them a little bit, not necessarily to manipulate other people, but to effectively lie to himself.
Shantel Edwards
I was thinking about the title, and I guess the sort of hot topic of de-transitioning and how that might get used in the world, but I think you describe his journey so well, because I think you say that he doesn't stop being trans, he stops doing trans, and I thought that was such an interesting way of thinking about the rationale behind his reason to detransition. And I just wondered if you could expand on that a little bit, just talk about that.
Torrey Peters
Sure. I mean, you know, I think that there's a big difference between being trans and doing trans and that, you know, and not just in terms of, in some ways detransition is an interesting way to defamiliarize just transition itself, you know, and so I think about being trans and doing trans, not just in terms of people who detransition, and maybe they detransition because it was simply too hard to live as a trans woman, which doesn't mean that they're not a trans woman, it just means that it was too hard. And that tends to be why most every person I've ever met detransitioned, not because they're wrong about their gender, or were tricked, but because it was hard. And I can say more about that. But the other piece about it is that I think a lot about the time that I spent before I transitioned, which was, you know, I think I was trans before I transitioned, but I wasn't doing trans, you know, and it's hard to describe this, like, what is transness? Is it's something innate or is it something that you do, and just sort of naming the difference between being trans and doing trans, you know, helps people think about, you know, the differences between trans people, like you can do trans in a lot of different ways. And whatever that thing that you are that, you know, is being trans can manifest or express itself in all sorts of different ways. There's not one way of being, not one way of doing trans. So, I think that, for me, Ames, his journey was a way of talking about that distinction. And then also, sort of, I wanted to talk about detransition because I want to make it casual. I mean, the title is very casual, right? Detransition, Baby. And I think that detransition has been weaponized, you know, largely by what I would call bigots. And that actually, it's not that big a deal. Like, so a lot of people say oh, you know, detransition doesn't happen. Nobody regrets it, blah, blah. And you can say that, but to me, the more interesting question is a little bit like, alright, let's take that at face value, let's take the idea that you make a decision and you regret it. I think people should be able to do that. And I think that like, lots of us make decisions all the time that have the potential for regret, that can be life changing decisions, like, you can take a job on the other side of the country, you can sell everything, move across the country, go to a job and maybe it doesn't work out, you know, maybe that job, you really wanted the job, but it didn't work out. And then you have to like, kind of return home with your tail between your legs. I don't think that should be outlawed. I think that people should be able to move across the country and take risks, and they should be able to have regrets without having those regrets shamed. And what happened when it got weaponized is that like, sort of shame attached to the idea of detransition, that if you weren't a success the first time you transition, if it wasn't easy, and you didn't just, like, go along swimmingly, that you should be ashamed, and that the community to which you joined should be like, oh, you failed, you're no longer one of us. You know, I think that it makes everything incredibly painful. It makes it painful, not just for trans people who can’t admit when things are hard, but it makes it really painful for people who have de-transitioned to feel like they're being shunned and cast out. And that really, the danger around detransition doesn't come from within the trans community, like I don't care if you detransition, go ahead detransition, whatever you want. Do what's right for you. And I have friends who de-transitioned and you know what, they're happy, it didn't ruin their life to transition and detransition. And in fact, I just did an event with this woman, Karen Quinn, who transitioned and de-transitioned and she'll tell you, it's the most boring thing about me, you know, it's not a big deal. It didn't affect your life. And to basically just, let's take the pressure off of transition and detransition, you can try things, it can work out, it can not work out, no big deal. So, if you do that, and you make it casual, and you talk about it, I mean, even things that are painful, can be casual in certain ways. I was like let's talk about it that way. Let's actually talk about it. Let's not pretend it never happens but neither let's pretend that it's like, you know, a life altering wound or something like that, you know, it's just, you make a choice in life and then you have to make more choices. And that's what life is choices that beget more choices that beget more choices.
Shantel Edwards
I think that's such a nice note that you leave Ames on in the novel because in the last paragraph, I think, you refer to three women, there’s three women sitting on a roof somewhere in Brooklyn. And, you know, Ames has that moment of sort of saying to Katrina, we can do this, but I can't promise you I'll spend the rest of my life as a man and I think there's that really nice space for him at the end of the novel. While we're on the end of the novel, I've got a couple of questions about Katrina, but it ends really ambiguously. And I wondered, why end the novel ambiguously?
Torrey Peters
Well, I think that the journey of the novel isn't necessarily to figure out how to make a new family, I think it's to pose a question. And the thing that I was really concerned with, as I was writing it, were a lot of the ways that I had coping mechanisms and lies that I told myself, you know, like, here's how I'm going to get ahead you know, in terms of my dating life, the things that I told myself about men, which Reese, you know, Reese tells herself things about men that she has to learn sort of aren't true. Or, you know, the ways in which she sabotages herself and sabotages other people, the ways that Ames you know, is disassociated, and sort of refuses to make an honest declaration of what he wants, the ways that Katrina is looking for, like something from the outside to save her and give her meaning, you know, whether it be queerness or whether it be love or any of these things that she's dabbling in. The journey in the novel for me is to strip away all that stuff, strip away all the things that we tell ourselves, all the coping mechanisms, and then, when all that stuff is stripped away, to sit around with the people that you love and care about, and say, what are we going to do? How are we going to make a life? And I think that's a question for these characters. But I think it's a generational question as well that I'm interested in, like, trans women and cis women solving this question together, like, how are we going to find meaning that works for us, how are we going to find family structures that work for us? How are we going to have relationships that are meaningful, and that don't make us feel terrible? And I don't want to be prescriptive in that, like, you know, if I ended it, and I was like, well, the way to do it is to get a house, you know, make the first floor for this person, the second floor for this person, the kids can go up into, like, it's not a design solution, you know, and there's many possible solutions. So, I think what I was trying to do in that ending was to basically be like, I don't know how they're gonna solve that. This is for all of us to solve. I've stripped away all the things, all the veils over this question. Now as a generation, let's work together to solve that. And I hoped a little bit that I was handing it to the reader to be like, well, what would you do?
Shantel Edwards
I mean, I had written down a question that basically handed it back to you. I had originally written down a question that was like, okay, well, is there a happy ending? Does everyone get what they want? But then I stopped and I thought, well, what would a happy ending look like for these characters? So that's the question I'm going to hand back to you if that's okay. What does that happy ending, if they were to have a happy ending, what does it look like for them.
Torrey Peters
I had to solve it because I'm adapting it into a television show. And it's with Amazon, Amazon's making it a show. I mean, it's not greenlit, but it's in development. But when you sell the show, they want to know, well, what happens in season two? And, you know, generally, it's a comedy and so comedies have happy endings. You know, I would say the television shows answers aren't canonical for the book. But the answer is that they worked it out. They figured out how to raise a baby together. Because if I want to season two, they can't just all be like, this is too hard, you know, screw it. Let's all go home. You know, that doesn't make for a season two. You know, sometimes I thought, like, I need a real gut punch of ending, like just a real tragic gut punch. I think more and more as time goes on, I'm like, you know what, we're gonna figure it out. And maybe if the first one was asking the question, maybe the second season is offering a hypothetical as to how that question might be solved. And it does involve not everybody going home and giving up.
Shantel Edwards
Good, I was really hoping that was the answer that you were going to give because I really wanted Reese to get what she wanted at the end of the novel. Thinking about Reese and Katrina, you know, going back to the idea of affinity, I think you did such a good job within the novel of drawing parallels between their experiences. I mean, they both have experience of being fetishized by men in different ways and that experience of starting over after transitioning for Reese and divorce for Katrina. And there's a great line, I think you write that they're both almost cis white ladies and Katrina feels something's lost in that, whereas Reese feels like that passing is success. And I wondered about their dynamic, and I think there's a definite undercurrent in the novel about race, and I wondered what you thought the role of race played within the dynamic in their relationship?
Torrey Peters
Yeah, I mean, I think that you really, you described it very well, just now and that, for me that they both have a similar relationship to like the centre or to like, you know, what is centred in our society, sort of cis white womanhood, and like kind of middle class womanhood. And by having them in conversation, where they're sort of a similar distance from that centre, but in opposite kind of trajectories, that it brings into relief the various ways in which the stories that they tell themselves might be partial, or might only be from their vantage, you know. There's the ways that towards the end, Reese tries to weaponize trans identity and to say, like, well, you're just like a gentrifying cis lady. And I think if Katrina had been a white character, like a white cis character, that Reese might have been able to, like, sort of weaponize identity and bully Katrina into thinking certain things. And Katrina's position was basically like, no, you know, like, you're bullying me. And, you know, here's all the ways that your version of motherhood is in fact, a very white version of mother and the idea that like, you know, the right to not have a baby is like the ultimate right when so many women of colour, at least in the US, you know, it's not a given that women of colour get to be mothers, you know, we have the way that motherhood can be shamed for like, you know, anchor babies with immigrants, or, you know, campaigns of sterilization in the past, or like, you know, welfare queens is this idea that you're an illegitimate kind of mother. And so Reese's version of motherhood, in some ways, in the ways that she tries to get what she wants using identity, I think that Katrina is well equipped to push back against that stuff. And one thing that I'm interested in, you know, for me, as a trans woman, is when people call me out for being self-pitying. You know, like, when I'm like, well, it's so hard for me. And then to be given a little bit of perspective on the ways that both it is hard, to have it acknowledged with those words that it's hard, but that also, it's hard along only one vector, and that there's a lot of different relationships beyond just trans to cis that ultimately, then I think, fall away and what you had was you had two women who were individuals, each with a whole matrix of things, trying to be like, how do we be in relationship with each other. And that's really what oftentimes, I meet somebody, and there's a lot of things about identity and something that we're trying to figure out with each other. And then as we get to know each other, well, it's just sort of like, alright, how are we going to do this, like we've all got our ways that we can push and say, this is why we're this, this is why we're that, but you know, ultimately, we're gonna have to, if we want to be in relationship with each other, which I like to be in relationships with people, it takes a level of compromise and empathy and sometimes just not getting what I want, not having the power.
Shantel Edwards
Yeah. And I think there are some really nice moments like that between Reese and Katrina, the one that sticks with me is when they go to the store and the baby registry, and they have that disagreement about the crib. And then when she goes home and Reese looks, you know, Katrina has taken it off the list is the one that always sticks with me, where it feels like there's really space for that to work. And I guess I felt like the novel was quite hopeful about that. The end was quite hopeful about that.
Torrey Peters
And I also, you know, I think when I was writing, it's funny, I've become more hopeful about the novel than when I was writing it. When I was writing it, I think, I wasn't so sure there's a way in which - there's a quote by Alexander Chee, which I really love, which is ‘be careful what you write in fiction, it has a tendency to come true.’ And you know, after I finished this book about an unconventional family, I met a woman who is in a sort of unconventional family and I joined that unconventional family. And you know, now I have a 12-year-old stepson who's essentially being raised by like four adults. It's a totally different situation than in the book but for me, it was like I had worked out all of these different ways that I thought a family could compromise. And then I had to actually do it in life, I had to compromise in all these different ways and figure out different homes and who gets what when, and I realize it's doable, it is very doable, it's not actually that hard to compromise. Once you're actually dealing with a child, the difference between the idea of being a parent or raising a child, and the reality is, there's so much distance between sort of like the ideological, like, the platonic ideal of how to be a parent, and what it actually means to be a parent. And I think this is, you know, outside of even transness or cis-ness, I think there's a whole lot of books about motherhood now that talk about the difference between the expectations that mothers are put under. And when I face the reality, you know, it's like, oh, it's actually great to compromise. It's great to get more help. And, that all happened to me after finishing the novel. So now I look at the problems Reese, Katrina and Ames have, and I'm like, come on, you guys can solve this. It's really easy. It's gonna be better to have like, extra help, anyway, no problem. But it would have been a different novel if I’d had that perspective now.
Shantel Edwards
Yeah, a different novel. I still think it's quite a hopeful one. What felt slightly less hopeful to me was there are some truly terrible men in this book and some really, really toxic men. And I guess I wanted to ask about that, about the ways in which, I guess Reese in particular, engages with men, you know, the dynamics in her in her relationships with men, and whether that was a deliberate, I'm guessing it was a deliberate provocation.
Torrey Peters
Yeah, I mean, part of it for me had to do especially with transness, that there's an idea that like, trans women have to have this like perfect feminist take on relationships with men. And that it's like this undue burden that trans women labour under that, like if you have a toxic relationship with men, or if you desire things that are bad for you like that you're somehow you know, not really a woman or things like that. And you know, there's a whole lot of literature by cis women in which cis women feel validated by relationships with toxic men starting with like Sylvia Plath. I mean, it was funny, I quoted Sylvia Plath, like ‘every woman adores a fascist’, and people were like, look, Torrey thinks that every woman adores a fascist, she's clearly not really a woman because no real woman would say this and I'm quoting Sylvia Plath. This is the thing and like so many women over decades have related to this poem Daddy, and you know, but the second that a trans woman quotes it it's like this is anti-feminist. And you can read even something now, one of the most popular books of the last couple of years Normal People is about you know, is a woman who desires bad treatment from men. So, the question for me was why can't trans women also want this, even problematically. Why do trans women not get to work through their sometimes negative desires or desires that are bad for them? And to me, I was like, well, I think actually we get to because that's, like, you know, that's how people are living you know, I had to learn through my relationships with men who didn't treat me very well that the difference between being validated and treated well, there's a vast gulf between those things and the ways that messages, you know, of what womanhood is that I imbibe, I imbibe the same ones that cis women imbibe and so sometimes I come to Sylvia Plath esque conclusions, and I have to work my way past them. To expect trans women to not get to do that is to consign trans women to making the same mistakes that cis women have been making for decades and decades and decades. So, for me, I wanted to say that and I didn't want to shy away from it. So, I had Reese say the things that are supposed to be unsayable about relationships with toxic men, that sometimes a relationship with a toxic man in which your gender roles are very clearly defined, often in toxic ways, can nonetheless be affirming in certain manners. And that that's something you have to work through. And I think that Reese's journey, you know, I didn’t want to add caveats to that because Reese, when she's saying that stuff, she believes that and Reese's journey is to complicate those sorts of things in the same way that I think Normal People complicates those desires or, or any number of books complicate those. Ferrante does it, you know, and I want to be talking with Sally Rooney and Elena Ferrante, amazing writers who use sort of a full palette of experiences, I wasn't going to limit myself to things that they could do, but I somehow couldn't because it would be offensive for a trans woman to talk about.
Shantel Edwards
And also, I mean, these are some of the darkest, like very dark, but also the funniest moments of the books, I think, Reese’s interaction, or like Reese describing her interactions with men, I think are probably some of my favourite descriptions in the book. A slightly off topic question, I guess, but related to Reese, Reese refers to herself a lot in the novel as transexual rather than transgender. And I wondered why, I guess that's my question.
Torrey Peters
It's so funny, you know, this is a question that I never anticipated. Like I didn't know that people thought that transsexual was a bad word, until I published this. And it's like, you know, the New York Times called me and they're like, ‘how come you use the word transsexual?’ And the surface answer, which is a true answer, is that transsexual is just a much more fun word than transgender. It has the word sex in it. It's just a more fun word. So, if, as a writer, if you're given two words, a fun word and a non-fun word, you use the fun word. That's my writing tip of the day. But, you know, also, I think that there's a lot of political stuff where what the right word is, is always changing. I use the word transexual with my friends, all my friends use the word transsexual because we like it, it's pulpy, it's got a kind of, you know, 70s exploitation vibe to it. That's like, cool. Trans, the word transgender is not a cool word. The word transgender is a clinical word. It's a word that was taken up by the CDC, during the HIV crisis to name a category of people who were testing positive for HIV. It's a word that corporations use, it's a word that you know, sort of sanitized and an umbrella term, and that's all fine. There's a purpose for the word transgender. Is that the word that I use with my friends? No. If I told my friends like, I Torrey Peters, am a transgender woman, they'd like look around and be like, who are you talking to? Who are you addressing? And so part of my technique with this book was to talk to all sorts of readers the way that I talked to my friends, you know, not sanitize the experience, not sanitize the words that I use. And amongst my friends, I'm going to choose the most fun word. And, you know, to my readers here, you get the most fun word too.
Shantel Edwards
I love that, I mean, that's just a great life philosophy, I think, use the more fun word. I guess, and I'll make this my final question, I guess, thinking about labels and how we label things, I, you know, read quite a few reviews and interviews that you've done for the novel and noticed that it gets categorized a lot as, you know, the big transgender novel or, you know, the sort of big stalwart of trans literature, and I wondered how you felt about labels like that, whether they're useful, whether we should just scrap them. What are your thoughts on having written the big transgender novel?
Torrey Peters
I mean, it's funny because before my book, I was gunning for what I thought was the big transgender novel, you know, like there's always gonna be the next one that knocks whoever people are talking about now off the pedestal. Like when I was writing, the book that I thought was like the big book, you know, that I was competing with in my mind was Imogen Binnie’s Nevada. That was the book that like, to me set the terms of trans literature and that I was in conversation with Nevada. And sure my book did well, but I'm sure that someday there's gonna be a trans woman who publishes like Stephen King numbers and people are going to be like Detransition, What? Detransition, Who? So a lot of its perspective. You know, if you've never heard of any trans books, sure, Detransition, Baby is the biggest book but you know, I came out of a scene where there were other trans women writers who to me were sort of like household gods. They were the people you imagine that one day this writer will hear me speaking to them about the things that they cared about, you know, it was sort of unimaginable that, you know, Kate Bornstein or Imogen Binnie or that Casey Platt or you know, Janet Mock, any of these people would hear my voice. And so, you know, if I become a sort of household God to other people, that's great. But the thing about household gods is that they're, in some ways very personal and very replaceable. So, the last thing I'll say about that is that I didn't come here to be alone. I didn't come here to be on a pedestal, you know, I came here with my friends in some ways. And I'm excited, because it's a burden, also, to be the only one, you don't want to be the only one in places, then you have to represent all these other people, you have to speak for them, like I don't want to speak for my friends, I want my friends to speak for themselves. And I'm a better artist when I don't have that burden of talking on behalf of other people. I say oftentimes, if I'm making a joke on behalf of all trans women, it's often a bad joke. If it's so universal and so broad that I have to represent all trans women in that joke, there's going to be people who are like well, that's not my situation. How dare you. Whereas if I can make a joke that's really tight, really specific, it's a good joke, and it ends up, the specific oftentimes opens up into the universal. So, I often say like, I want a cacophony of voices up here, so that whatever I'm muttering under my breath in that cacophony, I can say whatever I want.
Shantel Edwards
Amen to that. Okay, so we know the TV shows come up, but what's next writing wise, have you got something else on the go?
Torrey Peters
I've got two projects. One is going to be announced next week. So, by the time this comes out, it'll be announced. I had written these novellas before I published Detransition, Baby, and they were a really, really small circulation. So, they are getting republished, the two novellas are getting republished by Random House and Serpent’s Tail, revised and republished or reissued, I guess, is the publishing term. And then there's two brand new novellas. So, it's going to be like a quartet of novellas published in a single volume, that sort of explore, it's across four different genres, spec-fic, horror, teen romance, and historical fiction, there’s one in each genre, and they're all exploring sort of the far edges of the trans experience. And so that's a collection that's gonna be out in probably a year or two, probably two years, I think. But it's Serpent's Tail in the UK. And then I'm writing what I'm calling a queer financial thriller, that's like the next novel, which queer financial thriller, those aren't words that often go together. But I'm interested in what, as trans women ascend, and trans women start having access to power, how are we going to behave? Are we just going to betray each other? Are we going to just, you know, become all out capitalists? Is there still going to be a sense of community and affinity? So, I'm writing and sort of using like, Breaking Bad, mix of Hustlers and a little Great Gatsby to talk about that question.
Shantel Edwards
I'm sold. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here today and for talking to me. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you.
Torrey Peters
I agree. This is really great. Thank you for inviting me. And I'm sad I don't get to actually go to the Birmingham Festival, but maybe one day.
Shantel Edwards
Let's hope next year. Thank you so much.
Outro
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love for you to tell us about it – leave us a review or a rating and find us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest.
You can download our latest podcast episodes, every Thursday, from all the places you would normally get your podcasts and find transcripts of our episodes in the shownotes and on our website at www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
In this week’s episode, writer Will Buckingham talks to journalist, screenwriter and broadcaster Sarfraz Manzoor about his latest book, They: What Muslims and Non-Muslims Get Wrong About Each Other. Join them as they talk about the deep divisions in British culture and the way that stories can connect us and promise a much more hopeful future.
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Series 2 - Sarfraz Manzoor
Intro
Welcome to the second series of the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast. We are really excited to be back for a second season and to continue to connect readers and writers in the Midlands, and far beyond.
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
In this week’s episode, writer Will Buckingham talks to journalist, screenwriter and broadcaster Sarfraz Manzoor about his latest book, They: What Muslims and Non-Muslims Get Wrong About Each Other. Join them as they talk about the deep divisions in British culture, the history of Muslim Britain and stories that promise a much more hopeful future.
Will Buckingham
Hello, and welcome to this Birmingham Lit Fest podcast. I'm Will Buckingham, and I'm your host for today's show. I'm a writer and philosopher originally from the UK. I'm currently an immigrant to Sofia, Bulgaria. And today's guest; I will be talking to Sarfraz Manzoor whose brilliant book They: What Muslims and Non-Muslims Get Wrong About Each Other has just been published. Sarfraz is a journalist, an author, broadcaster and he's written and presented documentaries for BBC Radio and Television and is a regular columnist for The Guardian, the Sunday Times and The Times. His first book, a memoir called Greetings from Bury Park, was published to critical acclaim in 2007. And it was adapted for the big screen in 2019 and released as Blinded by the Light which I've just added to my to watch list. Sarfraz lives in London, he's married with two children and a cat called Socks - I'm hoping that Socks will also call by to have their say in this podcast at some stage. Sarfraz’s book They is an insightful journey across and between cultures, an attempt to cut through what sometimes seems like the clamour of mutual misunderstanding and to take a long and intensely personal view into relationships between Muslims and Non-Muslims in today's Britain. So welcome on board Sarfraz.
Sarfraz Manzoor
Hi Will, good to talk to you.
Will Buckingham
Very nice to chat to you. I thought a good place to start talking about your book was about your own experience as somebody who is a living example of the complexity of identity and belonging that you explore in the book. So, the title of your book might suggest to readers that Muslims and Non-Muslims are kind of distinct blocks of people. But in reality, things are much fuzzier, more interesting and more tangled. So, I'd love you to start by telling us a little bit about yourself and how, throughout your life, you've navigated these complexities.
Sarfraz Manzoor
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, because I always think with identity, there are two sides to it. One is how you identify yourself. But there's also how others identify you, you know, and so it's interesting. So, the book title is They: what Muslims and Non-Muslims Get Wrong About Each Other, but growing up, the Muslim part wasn't really a big part of my identity. So, I grew up in working class Luton, in the 70s, in the 80s. My dad worked at the Vauxhall car factory; I went to a bog-standard comp. And if you would ask me at that point, what my identity was, it would have been Pakistani, really. It was much more about that, my dad never really talked about religion, but he talked about Pakistan, he talked about it in opposition to England, even though we happened to live in England. So, my identity was Pakistani, and then I guess it was also working class, you know, I wouldn't have used those words necessarily, because that was all I knew. But, certainly, when I went to university, I was really aware about, you know, the things that weren't available to me, the social networks that weren't available, that was all about class. So, I think class, and nationality were my identities. And I really, to be honest, didn't think about the religion stuff until other people started thinking about it for me. You know, with the Rushdie affair in the late 80s, that obviously was a big moment. And then obviously, since 9/11, as well. And that's when those identities start becoming more prevalent, and so, then you get into different sorts of lives. And so now, I would say, frankly, my identity is more husband, father, you know, middle aged man, all those kinds of things. But this is the part that I was interested in, when I walk down the street, most people still don't see those things, they still see skin colour, they still see ethnicity, they still think maybe religion. And so that's the thing is what I'm fascinated by: whatever narrative we have of ourselves compared to what others have. So, for example, you're in Bulgaria right now. Now, because of the fact that you are white skinned, if you were walking down the street in Sofia, nobody would know that you were British, would they? And so, the identity that you have of yourself, versus what anybody will see of you will be totally different. And it's only when you open your mouth that might get revealed. Whereas if you come from a background like mine, people are always projecting their ideas of what they think you are. And so that's part of the story in the book as well.
Will Buckingham
Which is, I suppose, in a way why the book is called They, because it's about that ascribing identity to other people.
Sarfraz Manzoor
Exactly. And it's also this idea about otherness that we talk about, you know, otherness is quite a fashionable word. But I'm always fascinated by what is it that allegedly binds us and doesn't, you know, and so, we can talk about the structure, but what I try and do in my book is sort of imagine I was sitting opposite an Islamophobe. And I was asking them, so what do you think Muslims are like, and I imagined that they would have a list of all these kinds of things. That they only live amongst themselves, they only want to marry other Muslims, they hate Jews, they hate gay people, their religion is extreme. And I just thought I'd go through each one of those, and start sort of examining it, interrogating it, and doing that sort of thing. But the interesting thing about that is the idea of They. I started looking into the chapter, for example, about extremism. And I was thinking, these people come from my same ethnic/religious heritage. But they've got nothing to do with me, you know. Whereas if you and I both like going to second-hand bookstores, I would think of you and me as part of the same tribe. And it's interesting to me about how fluid those things are and how much one is allowed to shift those borders, and how much one isn't. So that's also part of the story that, you know, as you said, we're more than the label that seemed the most obvious labels to put on ourselves.
Will Buckingham
One of the things I really enjoyed about the book was how the stories - we can probably talk about storytelling later - give a real sense of the massive diversity of ideas, views, practices, ways of life, within people who identify as Muslim within the UK. And one thing I am interested in is how a greater appreciation of that complexity can bring more nuance to those intractable problems of you know, we versus them?
Sarfraz Manzoor
Well, I think, the thing about that is, it's much easier to be certain, when you don't know very much.
Will Buckingham
That's definitely true.
Sarfraz Manzoor
Don’t you think? So, I just recently turned 50. And I now feel so much less certain about the things that I thought I knew than I would have done even 15 years ago, you know. Which is partly why this book isn't a polemic, you know, it's not a book, which I sort of bang out one particular opinion, and then just sort of, you know, bash you around the head with it. It is much more nuanced because I just don't feel as sure about things. And so, part of that is about what do you think Muslims are like, and it's about the fact that, actually, we're more complicated. And this is the thing about real life, people are way more complicated than the labels that we might attach to them, you know. And so, when it comes to how can that help us, well, you can help us because every stereotype that you might have about a “Muslim”, there will be stories that will challenge that. There will also be stories that confirm it, don't get me wrong, this isn't some sort of rose-tinted portrait, which suggests that, you know, everybody is enlightened, and everybody is progressive, and it's all just a media conspiracy. There are definitely challenges. But for every story about someone who tells somebody that that their son who is gay is never going to be seen again and expelled from the family, there's also a story about a very traditional Muslim mother who embraces her gay son. And so, I guess the point about that is, it makes you rethink what you think you know. And one of the thoughts that I had when I was trying to write the book is, no matter where you are on the political spectrum, I wanted there to be things in the book, which would surprise you and challenge your worldview. And that would be true whether you're a progressive or whether you're not. I just think that real life is a bit more messy than that. And I think once you start getting into the nitty gritty, and the granular details of how people live their lives, they don't fit into neat boxes, and they don't fit into neat boxes of either the liberal or the conservative side of things.
Will Buckingham
So, is part of your aim really to use those stories to dissolve that monolithic sense of “they”, so that we can actually start thinking about connecting with real human beings and real human stories a bit more.
Sarfraz Manzoor
Yeah. And don't you think? I mean, tell me what you think. I mean, one of the things I was thinking of was that I imagined my mother walking down the street, you know, wearing her dupatta and just walking along, this is back when she was a little bit more, she's quite frail now. And if you saw her, you would just think: traditional Pakistani woman, doesn't speak English, she's probably a nice person, but what have I got to do with her? But it's only if you could get to know her story that you would sort of see that this is a woman who had arrived at Britain in 1974, not having seen her husband for 11 years, because he had left 11 years earlier, and then raised four children, worked as a seamstress until one in the morning. And sort of given all of her life so that her children could be happy. And if you humanized her, then you’d think: Oh, that reminds me of my mother, it reminds me of my grandmother, it reminds me of someone. And suddenly you see her as a human being, and not as this sort of slightly othered person. But it's only by getting to know people that you can do that. So, I mean, don't you think that as well? Because it's some of the work you've done as well, isn't it, the writing you've done? But it's about humanizing people, and then you realize that you've got more in common with them.
Will Buckingham
I think it is. I mean, I think it's on first encounters with anybody. So, my last book was about strangers, Hello Stranger, just out from Granta, and about the how, when we first meet strangers, there's that often very immediate sense of fear, or unease, and how that's actually quite natural and about how you connect across that and how you can find points of connection. And those can, as you say, be in all kinds of interesting places and be found where you least expect it. So I don't know what your mother's hobbies and obsessions are, but maybe, if I got chatting to her, we'd find that there was this thing we shared, or I, in my own experience, I've travelled in Pakistan in the past. And so that might be a point of contact.
Sarfraz Manzoor
It could be food!
Will Buckingham
Or food, always food, isn’t it? And quite a lot of the stories in your book take place around tables at various points.
Sarfraz Manzoor
Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting. For example, with my wife, she's white, she's Scottish, and she's not a Muslim. But what was interesting is that she had spent a lot of time traveling around India and having spent so much time, she actually had a working knowledge of Hindi. And so, when my mother first heard about the fact that I was seeing this woman, she's put her in the “they” box, white person, what is she going to have to do with me, blah, blah, blah. It took a while for her to not put her in that box. But one of the ways that it happened is that when she started actually talking to Bridget, Bridget was able to understand what she was saying when she was speaking in Urdu and also respond not completely fluently, but enough. What was interesting is that the language bridge meant that, for that moment, my mom sort of forgot that Bridget was white, you know, because the language sort of trumped skin colour and ethnicity. She was like: No, no, she's really one of us. And the language helped do that for her.
Will Buckingham
Do you think that's part of the trick: forgetting that somebody else is different, rather than making heroic efforts to overcome difference, but just somehow forgetting?
Sarfraz Manzoor
Yeah! And I think it's interesting, because when Blinded by the Light came out, I was in New York, and we did a screening for it in New York City. And there were quite a few Springsteen fans who were at the screening, and I remember afterwards, this couple came to me, they were from New Jersey, and they were almost stereotypically New Jersey, hardcore Springsteen fans, you know. And they said that they love the film and then were going on about it. And I was like: Can I ask you a question? You know, have you spent an hour and a half, two hours ever with a traditional Pakistani family? And they were like: No, no, of course we haven’t. And I said: Isn't it weird that you have just spent that time watching this story? And the guy just looked at me. He said: Yeah, but you're just like a Pakistani version of me. What was interesting is that the fact that we both were into Bruce Springsteen, it made him forget that actually, I was British and Pakistani. So, I think that's about storytelling, but it's all about that commonality thing as well, isn't it? And I think it's about finding that, but you only find that if you actually interact and one of the things that's a theme in the book is that too often communities are not interacting. So, whether it's for example parts of Birmingham, parts of Bradford, parts of Luton, parts of Blackburn, there are these communities that are still almost living in sort of a homogenous very, very separatee lives. Or, whether it's about how many Muslims actually get to know anybody who's Jewish and have them as a friend. So, it's about breaking down what you think you know. But you can only do that if you reach across. You can only reach across if you have the opportunity to meet someone who's different.
Will Buckingham
And the book is full of lovely stories, as well as being full of terrifying stories about division. It is full of lovely stories about those points of contact. The connections between Jewish and Muslim communities in Bradford, for example, or the story, which I also talk about in my book, about the York mosque and the EDL who turn up to protest.
Sarfraz Manzoor
Oh, yes, yeah, well, the EDL came, and then the guys in the mosque offered to make a cup of tea for them, and they…
Will Buckingham
…and they end up playing football in the mosque grounds and cracking jokes. And suddenly, there's this point of contact because I think that the one of the mosque elders said: Tea, the great connector, particularly in Yorkshire.
Sarfraz Manzoor
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it doesn't mean that everything can absolutely always get solved. I'm not trying to say that, if we could all just sit around, we'd all get better. But I just feel like it might be that the divisions are actually between people who are reasonable or not reasonable, rather than between religions. It's really just about whether you can be reasonable or not, there are unreasonable people in all communities. And we just mustn't always assume or let them only have the microphone.
Will Buckingham
Is there also, I think, an element in these big issues of how we live together, of getting used to living with some degree of discomfort, because actually, people are not always like us, they're not always going to do the same things we're going to do.
Sarfraz Manzoor
Yeah, no, I think that's a really good point. And I think it's about who do we choose to feel uncomfortable around? And who do we tolerate the uncomfortableness around? You know, so a good example, I guess, is about the niqab, isn't it? So, as I say in the book, I feel a sense of discomfort or I certainly did in the past, where I would just feel: what is the message you're trying to send? Then I would start thinking there's all sorts of agendas. Why would somebody deliberately wear something like this, et cetera, et cetera. But then you sort of spend time talking to people who wear the niqab, you get some sense of a perspective of how few people actually do it in Britain. And then you think, well, I actually get discomforted by people who've got massive amounts of tattoos and piercings walking down the street. But we don't find politicians necessarily weaponizing that, but we just put up with that, you know, or we tolerate it. And so, it's interesting to me what we choose to be okay with in terms of discomfort, or what do we choose to make a big issue about.
Will Buckingham
There's a couple of things when you talk about the niqab that struck me on reading the book. One was you go to Leicester and talk to a group of women in Leicester, if I remember rightly. I lived for a decade in Leicester, and the moment you were talking to people from Leicester, I felt a sense of, Oh, well, they're okay. They're us. They're not them. And so, for me that sense of mutual belonging to a place trumped other things, but when you were chatting to people, it was really fascinating how the women you were talking to all have very, very different reasons for wearing a niqab.
Sarfraz Manzoor
They did, yeah. Just to backtrack on that a little bit. I really wanted to sort of talk to somebody because, obviously Boris Johnson had made his thing about letterboxes. And it was something that was a story in the news and it had been for a while. And I was really conscious that I actually didn't know anybody who wore a niqab. Nobody in my social circle did. But then also when I asked people within my social circle, if they knew anybody, they didn't either. And I was just like, well, what does that say about the world that I'm in. But also, you know, that's a journalistic failing for me to not to talk to anybody. So then I sort of worked harder to find people. And then I spoke to quite a few actually. And what was interesting is that wasn't one single reason. Some people believe that it was genuinely a religious thing. Other people did it because, you know, one person said to me, the more I was told that this was something that was a problem, or the more that other people pointed the finger at it, the more it made them feel more desiring and more confident and wanting to do it as well, you know. So, if you tell me that I can't, that I'm going to do it more. That sort of idea. The thing I found the most interesting about it was - I think I included this in the book - when I met them, one of the women said to me, you know, it's only because you're Muslim, that I'm wearing the niqab today.
Will Buckingham
That's really interesting. Yes.
Sarfraz Manzoor
And I thought that meant that she was dressing up for me as if like, you know, somebody who's sort of in a historical re-enactment or something. They were just like doing this because I'm writing the book. But it turned out, no, she said, if you were white, I would have been respectful of the fact that you might have found that a bit uncomfortable, and I would have worn something else. But because you're Muslim, I assume you understand my need and my want to wear the niqab. And so that's why I'm wearing it for you. And I had always just thought it was much more black and white, you either wear it or you don't. And I mean, maybe that says something about my ignorance, but I didn't realize that somebody would just decide on Monday that they would and on Tuesday, they wouldn't. Do you know what I mean?
Will Buckingham
I mean, one thing that, again, I liked about the book is the way it moves away from that sort of black and white, to plunge you into a sea of complexity and nuance and everything else. And I'm wondering what the responses to your book have been so far, because a lot of people might want clear answers, a program of action. You know, this is Sarfraz Manzoor’s program for changing the world in response to these issues. Has there been from some corners a certain frustration that you're not giving that? You're giving nuance upon nuance and complexity upon complexity. But there's no one problem and no one solution, maybe.
Sarfraz Manzoor
That's a really good question, to be honest. And there's a couple of different ways to answer that, really. One is that when I first offered the idea of the book to the publishers, and to my agent, and we sort of initially started talking about it, it was, I think, going to be more of what you've just said. Like, you know, not like a manifesto as such, but you know, there would be sort of a blueprint of how does one make things better? And I think that is what the publishers were expecting, to be honest, at the beginning. And then what happened actually was the reaction to Blinded by the Light. Because what happened when that film came out was I just started getting responses from all around the world. It's on Netflix now. You know, I'm still getting it now.
Will Buckingham
Oh, is it? Good!
Sarfraz Manzoor
Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, hardly a day goes by that I won't get somebody messaging me about it, you know, because they'll have seen it for the first time. You'll probably message me later this week after you've seen it, you know.
Will Buckingham
I will do, yes!
Sarfraz Manzoor
But what was fascinating to me was people would say, this is completely connecting to me. But they’ll be Korean, or somebody will be Mexican, or somebody will be American, or whatever. And I realize it's a bit like what I said to you earlier about the guys in New York, that they were being compelled emotionally to believe and be interested in a story because of the storytelling. You know, because of character and storytelling. That film was not a polemic about race and class, about Muslim identity and belonging, it was nothing about that, it was just storytelling, but all those things were in it. And I just thought, you know what, I want to engage people emotionally. And I want them to care about the characters, and I want them to care about individuals, and I want them to care about, you know, my journey. And I think that's more interesting, then trying to write a manifesto, you know, so I genuinely just made a decision that I was actually going to go and highlight, and foreground storytelling, and let the issues and the possible policy implications flow from that organically. So, there are some things I talk about. I talk about the importance of trying to meet people who are different, I talk about breaking down catchment areas in schools, for example, I talk about English lessons. So, there are some tangible things in the book. But I just thought it'd be more interesting to write a book where you care about what you're reading story wise, rather than the other kind of book. Now, the second part of what you're saying is, has there been any kind of kickback on that, or whatever. It's still early days, and there hasn't been so much of that. But there is a more interesting question that just flows from that, which is, do people want nuance? Do people want complexity? So, a book which says, you know, this is what you need to do to be an anti-racist, or this is what you need to know. Those books will just tell you what to think and what to do, which are very clear and bold.
Will Buckingham
So, a book that's more or less a listicle. You know, like one of those online lists.
Sarfraz Manzoor
Yeah, you know, those sorts of things, what white people need to do next, or those sorts of books. I can see the appeal of that, for somebody who wants that sort of thing, but ultimately, I just wanted to do the book that was going to serve what was in my heart and what I really wanted to do. And also, I'm kind of not that interested in a book, which is only about this moment. I just sort of feel like this is a book that could be read in five or ten years. And it will be a resource that will still stand the test of time, you know. And so the answer is, I think you're probably right, there might actually be a more commercially successful or you know, whatever book which is more of a manifesto, which is much more blunter. But I can live with that, because I wanted to tell a more complicated and a richer story. And you know, I'll take the punches as they come, whether it's about critics or whether it's commercially, because I wanted to write this book.
Will Buckingham
And just to pick up on that thing of standing the test of time. Is it - in your view - really stories that do that above anything else? Above arguments, above polemic?
Sarfraz Manzoor
I think so. I mean, what do you think? I just feel like, you know, when I think about the things I return to, I don't like being bashed around the head and being told what to think, personally. And I also just feel you're more likely to engage with people on an emotional basis than on an intellectual basis, you know. The leave campaign on Brexit, that was an emotional story, that was a piece of emotional storytelling, wasn't it? It was about the idea of Britain, the idea of past glory being returned, about control. Those are emotional storytelling, you know. That's just what interests me as well. That's just what I would like to do. I don't want to be, you know, I'm not a polemicist. I'm not a politician. This is not the world I want to go into. But the interesting thing is, I think there's a lot of nutrition in the book. It is just disguised and buried, rather than being the thing that you immediately go to.
Will Buckingham
Did working on the screenplay for the film - so just a bit of background for those who haven't seen the film or read the book. Blinded by the Light is an adaptation of your memoir, Greetings from Bury Park. And you contributed to the screenplay as well.
Sarfraz Manzoor
Well, I wrote the book and then I worked with Gurinder on the script, I work with Gurinder Chadha on the screenplay as well.
Will Buckingham
Yeah, did that shift your approach to storytelling doing that, as a writer?
Sarfraz Manzoor
It did a little bit. I mean, I've talked a little bit before about the emotional storytelling. What was also interesting about it is that it sort of tapped the universal you know. So essentially, there are certain universal things. We all want to make our parents proud, you know, most of us want to live lives less than ordinary, you know. And, and I think those kinds of universal ideas, about love, about escape, about ambition, about parental relationships, those are the universals. So, in the book, you know, there's quite a few stories about people leaving home. Like a 17-year-old girl will leave home because her parents wanted her to get married to somebody she didn't want to get married to. Like one of the things which is really fascinating to me about writing the book has been to be able to sort of imagine how my life might have turned out had different things happened. So, for example, when I was 17, 18, my dad suggested a girl back in the village in Pakistan, for me to marry. And I've written about this in the book, and it's an easy thing for people to sort of serialize and pick up on. But the interesting thing for me was, I didn't do that, I didn't get married at 17. But I was fascinated to know what it would have been like to have done that. And so, in the book, there are people who on that same year, at that same age, had their dad say to them, there's a girl who's on a plane, she's coming all the way from Karachi, or Zanzibar, and we're going to go and get a bus to Heathrow and you're going to marry her. And then they did. And it's fascinating to see how that turned out, good or bad, you know. And so, anyone can understand how that might feel or be interested in those kinds of big emotional responses. And so, I think that is one of the things I learned in the film. Just these big emotional moments because this book, I think, is full of quite big, emotional moments. Whether it's about something tragic of like, you know, somebody who ends up killing themselves, because their parents will not accept their homosexuality. Or a massive, upbeat moment of somebody being reunited with their parents after 20 years on the run, you know, those sorts of things. And so, I think that was one of the things I learned; was just the power of the big emotional peaks.
Will Buckingham
When you were talking just then about how life could have been otherwise. It does strike me the book is underpinned by a sense of the contingency of human lives with all those different stories. And how you get on the train running from Hay-on-Wye is it? And you turned right rather than left and flopped down opposite the woman who becomes your wife. And that underlying sense of how different life could have been had you turned left, I think that's one of the interesting things about stories, is they awaken you to that contingency.
Sarfraz Manzoor
Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, I've actually got chills just you telling me that. I've just got chills just thinking about how different life could be if you just want to turn left. You know, there are two children who exist in the world who wouldn't be here if I had taken left. But then also going further back, my dad came to Britain in 1963. He was the only one out of his siblings who did. So, you know, it's kind of interesting to me about like, how much we think we're the author of our own fate, and how special we are to have achieved whatever we have achieved. And you think, well, if my dad had been like his brothers and sisters, and decided, no, I think I'll stay in Pakistan, none of this would be happening, you know. And so, it is amazing, just as you say about those choices people make. But one of the things that's interesting in the book is, because I wanted the book to essentially be a search for hope, a clear-eyed search for hope but still a search for hope, there's quite a lot of moments in the book where somebody faces a decision. And then they make a decision and that changes something. So, for example, you will remember the story from a couple of years ago about the Muslim woman on the tube, who saw a Jewish guy being harassed by some, guy. She made a decision to step in, you know, and she didn't realize it was being filmed, or that it was going to go viral. But then that ended up helping change the narrative, or at least complicate the narrative around Muslims and Jews. And I spoke to that woman, Asma. So, there's a lot of those moments as you say, those taking a left or taking a right moment in the book where people make an active decision to search for something positive, or search for something hopeful.
Will Buckingham
Maybe hope is a good place to bring things to a close with a final question. So, you talk right at the end of the book about a journey towards a more hopeful land. And after these years of research, and talking to so many people, does this more hopeful land feel closer to hand than it did before? Or does it feel further away? And why?
Sarfraz Manzoor
Well, it certainly felt very, very hopeless round about 2016/2017. Which is when I first sort of started some of the work towards the book, you know. 2016/2017 was Manchester arena, London Bridge, Westminster Bridge so that felt very, very bleak. So, if it was still as bleak as that, things would be in trouble. So, the answer to that is, I am not somebody who just believes in hope, just for the sake of it, but I do feel more hopeful. And the reason I feel hopeful is twofold. One is, I've just met a lot of people whose stories I did not know. Who were just on the ground, doing good things in their own small ways, which are helping build bridges or showing that, you know, the religion of Islam can be a religion, which is about fostering better community relations and helping people and being hospitable. And they don't get the notice, they don’t get on the news. But if you just hear enough of those stories, you think, okay, that's not as bad as I thought it was. So that's the first thing. And the second reason is, you know, there's people who sort of think that everything about this subject is about politics, and is about policies and is about institutional understandings of, you know, racism, etc. And all the responses have to be institutional and political. And I don't know if that's true. I think there is definitely a role for that. But I also think there is a massive role for the people and what they do. And I think that the reason I feel hopeful is because there have been so many stories that I've read, and I've talked about, and I've included in the book, which remind me that all of us have the power in our own decision making to make things more hopeful, you know. And I think that's what's quite interesting because, in 2016/2017, I felt a bit powerless. I was just like, is this really the country I want to live in? The Tommy Robinson brigade were everywhere, it was feeling like an ugly place. And what this book and what writing this book has reminded me is that every day all of us are faced with decisions that we can make. And we all have that version of turning left or right about something. And whether that's about engaging with somebody in a shop, who looks a bit different to us who's serving us, but we have a conversation with, or whether it's about stepping in or whether it's about, you know, giving some charity, giving some of our spare clothes to the Afghan refugees who might be arriving in our town. We all have something we can do to build and shape the nation we want to live in. And so, when you're reminded of that power that one has, you can feel a bit more hopeful.
Will Buckingham
Great. Well, I've got about 120 more questions I'd like to ask you, but I think that seems a really good place to end. So, thank you so much for chatting Sarfraz Manzoor. And They: What Muslims and Non-Muslims Get Wrong About Each Other is available in all good bookshops. If you want a bit more nuance and insight in your life go and get yourself a copy. Thank you very much for talking.
Sarfraz Manzoor
Thank you so much, Will.
Outro
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love for you to tell us about it – leave us a review or a rating and find us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest.
You can download our latest podcast episodes, every Thursday, from all the places you would normally get your podcasts and find transcripts of our episodes in the shownotes and on our website at www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
Join us for a dinner party with 6 amazing women across history – plus our wonderful dinner party hosts Jo Bell, Tania Hershman and Ailsa Holland, authors of On This Day She: Putting Women Back Into History, One Day at a Time. Find out which historical figure was fond of geese at a dinner party, as we add six important figures back into a story of the past that unfairly confines women to the margins.
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
In this week’s episode we welcome American essayist, cultural critic and poet Hanif Abdurraqib, who talks to our very own Birmingham Poet Laureate Casey Bailey about his latest book, A Little Devil in America. Hanif’s book offers a beautiful insight into the history of black performance and culture in America, including cultural icons such as Josephine Baker, Aretha Franklin and Dave Chappelle. Join Hanif and Casey as they talk about the process of writing a book that combines memoir with history and that is a real love letter to black cultural art and performance.
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Series 2, Episode 2: Hanif Abdurraqib
Intro
Welcome to the second series of the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast. We are really excited to be back for a second season and to continue to connect readers and writers in the Midlands, and far beyond.
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
In this week’s episode we welcome American essayist, cultural critic and poet Hanif Abdurraqib, who talks to our very own Birmingham Poet Laureate Casey Bailey about his latest book, A Little Devil in America. Hanif’s book offers a beautiful insight into the history of black performance and culture in America, including cultural icons such as Josephine Baker, Aretha Franklin and Dave Chappelle. Join Hanif and Casey as they talk about the process of writing a book that combines memoir with history and that is a real love letter to black cultural art and performance.
Casey Bailey
Hello, wonderful people. My name is Casey Bailey. And I am blessed and privileged to be here with Hanif Abdurraqib to talk about his latest book, A Little Devil in America. Now, Hanif is a prize-winning poet, essayist, cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio, is the author of the highly praised poetry collections, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, and A Fortune for Your Disaster, the essay collection, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, and the New York Times bestseller Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest. Hanif, how are you today?
Hanif Abdurraqib
I'm good, Casey, thanks for hanging out.
Casey Bailey
It's an absolute blessing and a pleasure. So, I mean, it's great for me being able to have this conversation with you. I always joke, I've done a couple of interviews now for Birmingham Literature Festival. And I get the kind of pleasure of asking you these questions that really are just secretly things I want to know before anybody else gets to hear the answers. And hopefully they enjoy it, too. So, I'm going to kind of jump in with what might be quite a big question or quite a complex question. But it's the one that kind of circulates in my head, thinking about this book, is how would you define this book? And I'll tell you why I ask before I put the pressure on you to answer it. Having read this book, it's one of those books that instantly there are people who I know, I feel like need to read this book. And so, when I say to them, you've got to read this book and they say, what’s it about or what is it, it's actually about so much and it is so much. I wonder how do you define what you've created here?
Hanif Abdurraqib
Oh, yeah, that's very kind. Thank you. I mean, I think for me, the best way to define the book is that it's a multitudinous exploration of performance, and what performance is in the very ways of performance, the many ways that performance shows up. Not on a stage or not on a screen, or not necessarily for an audience of anyone, but an audience of the performance I'm making, which is why there are essays in the book about spades or about complicated performances of affection or these kinds of things. I want to think about every route I've ever taken to a type of performance. For better or worse, sometimes for worse.
Casey Bailey
Yeah, so, one of the things that really struck me, having read the book, I went in and started kind of thumbing through the acknowledgments and stuff. And in the acknowledgments, you credit two people in particular that I noticed. You credit Maya Millet for, you say, steering the book in - and I apologize because I'm paraphrasing – in a new or better direction. And Ben Greenberg, and everyone at Random House for sticking with the book while it shifted, I think, is the word you use. What I'd really love to know is how much of a journey has the book been on from kind of the inception in your mind to what it became? And could you maybe map out some of that journey for us?
Hanif Abdurraqib
Yeah, I mean, initially, the book was going to be about, or the book was going to at least kind of revolve around appropriation and blackface in the history of minstrelsy. But I very quickly realized that that was not a pleasurable experience, like writing about that. I was centring whiteness more than I wanted to, and I didn't really find myself too keen on centring whiteness at that level. So, I began to ask myself a better question, which is a question of, what would this book look like if I extracted that desire to kind of make sense of - or tried to unravel the desires of whiteness as its projected upon black performers and black performance. And if I did that, could I get to a more pleasureful examination of what I have loved about performing and performances and watching performances. And I think that is essentially what ended up happening. You know, that's what ended up kind of, when I sat down Maya, who edited the book with me, and we began to ask questions of who the book was for and what the book wanted to celebrate. That became, you know, a lot clearer to me. And it made the book easier to edit. And it made the book a more exciting book to write, when I decentred the actual history of whiteness.
Casey Bailey
Amazing. And I think that it's interesting that you say that process wouldn't have necessarily been a pleasurable one, or wasn't a pleasurable one, kind of looking through that lens of how has whiteness impacted, or how has whiteness appropriated what we see of black culture. But what's interesting is, even having said that, the book is not just a collection of happiness, either. It has so many sombre and heavy notes, but it's carried by, you know, this real kind of idea of joy, which really is kind of like the metaphor for what you were just saying flows through the book of these punches of real happiness. And these moments of real sadness. And I think I, you know, I can honestly say, I've read an awful lot of books, but I've never read a book that I will directly compare to this book. I think I knew that that was happening after I maybe read the first chapter, and it ends around you speaking about your mother's passing, and it feels really sharp, and I didn't expect it. And then around the second chapter, there is kind of another point of real, heavy kind of sombreness. And I wonder when you wrote the book, was there a feeling of a need to juxtapose the two? Or did that just naturally kind of occur as you went through these themes and how they impacted yourself?
Hanif Abdurraqib
Oh, I think it naturally occurred. I think that it's hard for me to look at pleasure, or joy, as one would say, and not think about it as something that is earned through a very clear understanding of grief, or what can be lost, or what is on the other side of joy or pleasure or these things. I think, I'm always kind of writing towards that understanding, you know what I’m saying? Like, I'm always kind of writing towards a very clear understanding of what I've known to be on the other side of joy, or happiness or pleasure, all these things, because it makes my understanding of joy that much clearer. And that much easier to identify, but also much easier to celebrate. Because I know that it is not promised, it's not a guaranteed thing. None of us are promised or guaranteed or even all the time deserving of anything that makes us feel good. You know what I mean?
Casey Bailey
Absolutely.
Hanif Abdurraqib
And so, you know, because of that, I think that I'm more keen to revel in pleasure when it arrives, because I don't know, I can't say for sure how long it'll stay or when it'll go.
Casey Bailey
Yeah, and I wonder…the note that I made when I was kind of trying to unpick that for myself is, how much of that - and you'll find probably throughout this, I have a thing about process - and I would think about what was the process and how did that kind of come into fruition? How much of that kind of push and pull between really personal moments and things that were a kind of far beyond yourself came down to the editing, to the process of looking through and saying, ‘is this a bit too much about me, or is there enough of me in here’?
Hanif Abdurraqib
Yeah, it was the latter. It was always ‘is there enough of me in here?’ which I'm always asking because it's a question of ‘are people able to trust me?’ Am I leading people down a path that is generous, and am I inserting enough of myself, to let them know that I'm here, and I'm here with them and I'm walking alongside with them? And that I'm not an expert. I tend to think that I have to insert myself to remind myself and others, that I am someone who has lived a life that is not like everyone else's life. And because of that, I'm not even an expert on myself. And so, you know, it serves that I am not an expert on my own corners of my own life. And so, I think that maybe makes the work a little bit more comfortable for people to approach. Because I'm not preaching, you know, I think I'm kind of wading through various modes of uncertainty. And I'm doing it very much on my own and asking people to witness it as it happens.
Casey Bailey
What I'd really love to know, is when you were coming up with the titles for chapter. Some of them, it's almost like a kind of a veil. So, I'm thinking specifically of the Beyonce, Superbowl Performance and Jobs that I Wish I Never did. I'm not actually looking at the book, the title is something along those lines. And it seems so trivial and funny. And as we walk through the chapter, it very quickly becomes very serious. And I wonder, was it a plan to create those titles? You know, as soon as I read that title, I thought ‘What, really? How do these two things tie up? ’And then you get through and you draw connections that I think, you know, a lot of people just wouldn't even see. How much did you plan to make those titles kind of enticing? Without giving away everything that you're trying to talk about?
Hanif Abdurraqib
Yeah, I think the title is really a space to play. I think my approach is that a title describes very clearly what someone can expect, or what they think they can expect. And then when you get into the piece, you can kind of bend that expectation. And so, there's a real opportunity for me in the title to be as kind of tongue in cheek as I would like to be always, but don't always get a chance to be. And I really try to take advantage of that when I can, because I don't always get to.
Casey Bailey
Another thing that really interested me. And there's a real point in the book, the chapter is called Fear a Crowd and it talks about Bernie Mac, it talks about Mike Tyson and Buster Douglas. And this was a point in the book that I knew my dad needed to read this book. Because we’re huge comedy fans, huge Bernie Mac fans, in the household that I grew up in. My dad was also a huge Mike Tyson fan, but he would always speak more about the Mike Tyson/Buster Douglas fight than any other fight. And so, for me, reading that chapter spoke so much to things that I feel like I already knew very well. And although I've explained to people why Bernie Mac says ‘I'm not scared of you’ a couple of times, I never actually knew the story that he was actually, you know, it'd been a bad day on stage and people were getting booed off stage. But anyway, I digress. How much of what you speak about in the book are things that you just knew? And how many of them are things that came to you during the process of research in the book?
Hanif Abdurraqib
So, most of them are things that I knew vaguely or knew enough about, but not always that I knew extremely well. The art of research was revelatory to me in the process. You know, with the Bernie Mac thing, I was like ‘well I know that performance and I've seen that performance, but how can I get to the bottom or see what else was happening during that performance or on stage?’ How can I find something that I did not understand before and that was a process with much of the book where it was like well, I know this thing or I know this broadly, but I got to find out more. And then when in the finding out more, there was more to find out. The more you find out, the more there is to find out, right? You know, it's sent me down some really delightful rabbit holes and I learned a lot. I’m very thankful for that process but on the baseline, I didn't know, you know, I knew the broader stories.
Casey Bailey
Yeah, and I think I'm sure I'm not the only person who has read the book and in some ways is cursing you for the fact that I am now going to go and research so many things that I wasn't going to look up. And I'm not researching them for a book that I'm writing, I'm just researching them because you wrote a book.
Hanif Abdurraqib
I told someone else, you know, like my research all comes from the excitement I got reading something that someone else wrote and then you know that research is going to help you down the road, I think.
Casey Bailey
Oh, it will. It will and even if it didn't, which I'm 100% sure it will, I know I will enjoy it. Obviously, when you're writing a book like this, you can only go so deep and you can only put so much information in before, you know, you've written too much about a particular subject. So, for me, I know there's going to be even more and little gems that probably you know, but couldn't fit in or work around in the book. That chapter also was the first point where I started to think about form in the book. Because in that chapter, I’m quite sure that that’s the chapter, where the end of each paragraph leads into the start of a new paragraph in the kind of language used.
Hanif Abdurraqib
Yes, it’s like a sonic bounty.
Casey Bailey
Yeah. You know, the book is presented kind of as a collection of essays, perhaps. But how much did you…were you conscious of playing with form?
Hanif Abdurraqib
Yeah, I mean, I was trying to be playful and thoughtful. And also keep myself engaged. And also ask myself, what the mode of storytelling needed. Because, you know, sometimes I think that the mode of storytelling is asking for a different shape. And so much of that process was me just saying, okay, well, what can I provide, that will make this a worthwhile and exciting, visual experience for a reader but also, what will make it an exciting experience for me to pursue these curiosities in a way that is as multitudinous as what I'm pursuing in the book.
Casey Bailey
I often kind of find myself getting lost in kind of moments that maybe weren't planned. And so, there's the Epilogue for Aretha, in the book. And you talk quite vividly about Aretha Franklin creating this gospel album. There's a British rapper called Guvna B, who you might be aware of, I think of Mary Mary, who obviously have made some amazing music, Kurt Franklin. And when I think of these artists, there's this thing that you touched on around how gospel music can almost be just for entertainment. And it can be just for salvation. But if you come at it just for entertainment, you can't help but be elevated into this kind of space of, whether it's holiness or spirituality. There's something about it, that takes you there and that's something that I know very well as someone who isn't necessarily a religious person. When I listen to Guvna B, or when I listen to a Kirk Franklin song, I feel that elevation. And I wonder, within this book, there is so much that is interesting. And there's so much that is entertaining, that you could come to this book and read it not necessarily wanting to receive all of the depth of this book. But you can't get away from it. And I wonder if there was an element of making this book as entertaining as it is, to pull people into: yes, you might enjoy this story about me being at the airport sharing this conversation with this man on the day that the Formation video dropped, but you're not going to get away from the fact that when I put a BLM sticker up at work, somebody felt the need to take it down. Were you consciously pulling people into something that might be deeper than they expected?
Hanif Abdurraqib
It's a by-product of the work, you know. I think it's a by-product, the way my mind works is essentially attempting to convince people. The magic trick is that some things are always happening, you know, there's always terror or discomfort happening under even the brightest moments. So, these things have to exist concurrently. They exist concurrently for me in my living and so they, by default, have to exist concurrently for me in the in the work and so you know, that feels important.
Casey Bailey
The language in this book, the use of what I would just call poetry, but poetic language in the book is so strong. And I would imagine that at times, you could probably pull certain lines from the book and represent them as a poetry collection, and you’d probably win an award for it. I found that interesting because I kind of came at this book, expecting less poetry than I received when I read your poetry collections. But how fine is that balance between being poetic and dealing with things that are very literal? I think about the end of the chapter where you speak a lot about Wu Tang, and everything starts turning into beats. How much are you conscious of the poetics? How much trust are you putting in your readers who might not necessarily read poetry?
Hanif Abdurraqib
I don't really think about it, you know, because I'm not really governed by genre. I'm just trying to kind of, I think, articulate, you know. I think there's so much stuff in my mind, that's kind of a mess, you know? Yeah, you know, kind of balance that in the work and in my own head. And so, the only question I'm ever asking is, how do I balance this efficiently? And with the most kind of thoughtful, and careful language possible? And if that language can also simultaneously approach some level of beauty, then that's a bonus, you know? But yeah, the question is always, always, always, like, how do I get to language that is both efficient, articulate, and holding some beauty within it. And if that, I think, is what people would call poetic then I'll happily take that.
Casey Bailey
Something that I really appreciate around the structure of the book is these little shorter essays around ‘On times I forced myself to dance’. And they were, you know, often really funny, still very deep in their in their content, but very personal to you. At the point when you decided to create those, I don't know how best to describe them, because they're almost like prose poems, diary entries. And it's interesting that you say you don't really overthink about, you know, is it poetry? Is it an essay? You're just writing and putting it across in the best way. When did you decide to put those into the book, and what made you spread them out in the way that you did? So, they start each section of the book?
Hanif Abdurraqib
Well, those were just writing exercises at first, in between my first and second draft, to kind of hone what I wanted the book to say, and how I want it to be said, and I had about 20 of them. And we went through and picked out the ones that felt the most interesting and most exciting. And it felt like they were kind of guiding, without even thinking about it. They were kind of guiding the themes of the sections that we landed on. And that was it. Yeah, those were all kind of just like, free writes that I was doing while editing. Because it helped me kind of recentre the book’s playfulness and the book’s kind of bending of form and presentation. But I never entirely expected it to take hold the way it did.
Casey Bailey
We end with ‘On times I forced myself not to dance’, and you know, I personally, I cried reading that chapter. And I always wonder at times like this, and it's a conversation I also had with Caleb Azumah Nelson when I spoke to him about his book Open Water.
Hanif Abdurraqib
I'm big fan of Caleb, big fan.
Casey Bailey
Yeah, that book is just stunning. And I'm so excited about what he's going to do next. But in reading that chapter, I mean, it's the case throughout this book, and I know already that is the case through your poetry but I'm interested in your take on it. How complex is it when you present that level of vulnerability on the page? First of all, how difficult is it to do that? Second of all, how difficult is it then to exist kind of in a world where everyone has seen that and taken that and sometimes want that from you?
Hanif Abdurraqib
Well, the only way that I can effectively do that is if I don't think about the needs and desires of others, right? If I don't think about what people might project onto me because of what I'm sharing. And that's really the only way that I can. Because I believe in vulnerability, and I believe in a type of vulnerable language and storytelling that helps illuminate the journey I'm on as a writer and as a person. But in order for me to really be immersed in that I do have to divorce myself from whatever expectations people might have. Or project on me, because I can't respond, I can't kind of hold all of that. If I tried to, I think, if I thought about it, if I tried to respond to all that it would make me more hesitant and more reluctant to tap into a type of openness and that type of openness and vulnerability is what I'm constantly reaching for.
Casey Bailey
Well, yeah, and I think that one of the things that I did discuss with Caleb is that kind of, once you present yourself in this way - and I always joke that I am the happiest poet with the saddest poems. And so, people meet me, and I talk to them and it's all laughs and jokes, it's like okay, so I’m coming to perform, and I go up on the stage, and I come off the stage, and those same people are looking at me very differently all of a sudden. And there's that real balance of managing, yes, I have, yes, I feel like this. And yes, I have felt like that. But that doesn't need to be the centre of every individual experience that you have with me. And I kind of wonder, then, in the writing of it, what is your process, or is there a process of getting this level of very honest vulnerability? And there's never the feeling of, you're telling me more than you need to, there's never the feeling of you're telling it for effect. It always feels very much like this is genuine and important to tell. How do you draw that line and make sure that you're being honest, and you're allowing yourself to be vulnerable without kind of performing it for people? Because you've achieved that so well, particularly in that last chapter. I would love to know if there's a way that you go about achieving that.
Hanif Abdurraqib
Yes, yeah. I mean, I think that I just have a built-in understanding of boundary, right? Like, I know, when I'm pushing myself, I always have, I know when I'm pushing myself and I know when I'm pushing myself too far, or sharing too much. A big part of this is because I live with anxiety. And so, it's important for me to understand, when I'm exerting myself beyond my comfort zone. And at this point, when I'm writing I have a switch, you know, I know when I need to turn off the faucet, so to speak. Yeah, it almost happens organically now. And that allows me to push myself to a place that I know is safe, but also revelatory. And to have that balance is really useful.
Casey Bailey
There are real moments of kind of attaching or anchoring, is probably the phrase I’m looking for. They anchor this book in your own, not necessarily upbringing, but your own kind of adolescence and your own growth. And I'm thinking specifically around the beef chapter, the James Brown, and Joe Tex, Nino Brown and the Sandman. And I'm thinking about my own growth, my own kind of process of growing up in Birmingham and in England, and so much of it connects, you know, around, being able to make somebody laugh might be the difference between you ending up in physical conflict or not. There's a part around the fact that probably most of the people you’re with could have handled the dance off very well. But why would they fix the issue through a dance battle when they can throw hands and that, like struck very much to me as something I was very familiar with. I would imagine a lot of people who read it, are not necessarily familiar with that environment. But you've still kind of anchored it so well within that environment. Was there a conscious decision that this book would kind of be rooted not just in the information and the facts about these people and their stories but about how that connects directly to how you grew up and how you came to be who you are?
Hanif Abdurraqib
Yeah, I mean, those things are all interwoven to me, I think. The way I grew up and the people I grew up alongside are really woven into the fabric of who I am and the things I've seen and survived and built into my living also kind of informed who I become, for better or worse sometimes for worse, honestly, not always better.
Casey Bailey
Yeah, I hear that.
Hanif Abdurraqib
And, you know, those things deserve space in the work too. They deserve space in my writing, and they deserve space, in the universe of stories I'm telling. In the case of if I am to be vulnerable about who I am, I need to be vulnerable also about who I was because those two things are intertwined and cannot be separated.
Casey Bailey
You know, in your acknowledgments you're gracious enough to say that all of your work is a kind of summary of what you've read, who you are, who you've been around. And I would love for you to just signpost anyone who's listening at the moment. I don't want to narrow this down to writing because I know you're a huge hip hop head, you’re a big music fan. And you clearly have a great kind of base of reference for all different types of performative arts. What would be the things that you would say to somebody you should check out? You should definitely look into this or listen to that, or whether those are current things or classic things? What would be your signposts be to say, okay, I'm feeling like I want to get my creative juices flowing. What should I be looking at? What would be inspiring?
Hanif Abdurraqib
Oh, currently, I love Dave’s new album.
Casey Bailey
How amazing is this album please?
Hanif Aburraqib
Yeah, really impressive. I think it might be better than his first album, I love Psychodrama. I think it might be better than that. You know, it's tough. Because, you know, he's so young and so gifted. And it's really hard to follow up an album, like Psychodrama which, you know, we want everything in. But most importantly, it was just that's a hard mountain to scale and he did it. And, you know, there's a lesson there, I think, in staring down one's past self, and to not think about the work as conquering your past self. But think about the work as intertwining with that version of yourself that achieves something in getting back there. I mean, I think the new album is great. So, let's say Dave's new record.
Casey Bailey
Can I just, I almost want to jump on that. Because I think there are a couple of tangents here that I'd love to explore. So, somebody said to me recently, that they feel like a lot of the songs on We're All Alone in this Together could have been on psychodrama. And they kind of said it as a bit of a slight. But you know, there's something about us pushing, and this is creatives of all different forms, that he created. For me personally, Psychodrama is such a phenomenal album. And he has now created another phenomenal album. And in an attempt to pull it down or to find an issue with it seems like well, this is just like that amazing album that you just wrote. How much are we pushed to do something different for the sake of doing something different? Rather than continue to create what is great work? What are your kind of thoughts?
Hanif Abdurraqib
The new album is a continuation of yeah, it's in a lineage of this work. I don't believe that someone has to extend themselves towards something different. I would rather see someone create, if they can, to create robust and layered work within a comfort zone that is efficient for them. That's all I want to see.
Casey Bailey
Absolutely.
Hanif Abdurraqib
And I think Dave achieved that massive achievement. So I'd say that. Adrian Matejka’s new poety book Somebody Else Sold the World is great. Ariana Brown's new poetry book We Are Owed is really great. You know, those were the three ones that I'm most spending time with. Today's James Baldwin's birthday, so people should read The Devil Finds Work.
Casey Bailey
Always. Okay, and now the kind of, maybe the penultimate question. What is going to be next? This is the worst question to ask people, right? You've just created this amazing piece of work. And really, what you probably want to do, like what I want to do, is spend some time with it, because I'm spending some time with it myself. But what is the next thing that we're going to see from you? What are you excited about that you're working on or looking towards at the moment?
Hanif Abdurraqib
Resting for a bit, it’s been a busy era. So, rest, hopefully, but you know what, in a few years I have a book, I'm writing a book about basketball, and about growing up in a golden era of basketball movies and that should be out in like 2024. And I'm currently going to pick up some work on that after I get a little rest. But resting is a big thing right now.
Casey Bailey
I feel like rest is very, very deserved. Thank you for your time. Thank you for writing the book and continuing to write because it really is a blessing. And a pleasure to be able to be like here at a time when you've written a book and I can read it and then talk to you because it's exceptional. So, thank you so much.
Hanif Abdurraqib
Thank you, I appreciate it.
Outro
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love for you to tell us about it – leave us a review or a rating and find us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest.
You can download our latest podcast episodes, every Thursday, from all the places you would normally get your podcasts and find transcripts of our episodes in the shownotes and on our website at www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
September, Rupinder Kaur
This month's piece is written by poet Rupinder Kaur and reflects on a September filled with family, poetry and inspiration from female writers. She talks about the joy of leading a ghazal poetry writing workshop and the sadness of hearing about the murder of South London Schoolteacher Sabina Nessa, who was killed on her way to meet a friend, just minutes from her home.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Newsletter Podcast Transcript: Episode 9, Rupinder Kaur
Intro
Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast and our new series of commissioned writing about 2021. Each month we are commissioning a new writer to reflect on the month that has passed, offering us moments of connection through great writing and the opportunity to reflect about what we have collectively experienced at the end of the year.
We will be bringing you a new short episode at the start of each month, with each piece read by our guest writers. You can read the pieces on our website, where you will also find information about our upcoming digital events.
Reading
Hi, I’m Rupinder Kaur and I wrote September’s piece for the Birmingham Literature Festival’s monthly blog.
“Write the tale that scares you, that makes you feel uncertain, that isn't comfortable. I dare you...”
—Michaela Coel.
I have been thinking a lot about Michaela’s speech, she won best writer at the Emmys for I May Destroy You. Across the past two years, this pandemic gave me the time to reflect on my own life, life around me from my family to the world. As a writer what scares me the most is writing about myself, my actual true and innermost feelings. Until last year I had never written anything that is truly personal and now in my writing I always try to write what is truthful to me.
September always reminds me of new starts, new beginnings possibly because the academic year starts again in September. It brings warmth and hope that yes the year is almost over but it's not exactly over yet. I have been trying to go on my daily walk almost everyday, something which I have been doing for the past year. Connecting with nature and seeing how nature changes over the months from spring to autumn, hearing the crunchy-ness of leaves when you are walking is a sound I particularly love along with seeing the colours of orange and deep reds.
It was Mum's birthday on the 16th, so we went to the Botanical gardens. Mum's the biggest nature lover and she talks to plants, thinks they understand her. I wonder what language they actually understand or do they actually have a language. Then we had a nice evening meal at Asha’s and no, Tom Cruise was not there!
Here is an excerpt from a poem ‘Trace’ I have been working on:
There’s this dream I had where I flicked seeds
on the garden shed roof until white doves spoke
to peach trees. One peach tree was Mum.
I am losing parts of Dad from my face.
I am becoming Mum, just taller,
so I can watch the doves fly for both of us.
Over September I have been reading The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls by Mona Eltahaway and Luster by Raven Leilani. Mona quoted some of June Jordan’s poetry which intrigued me, so I went and brought her collection Directed by Desire which I have been devouring. It was also super nice to run a poetry workshop in person for the Desiblitz Literature festival! Sharing my love for South Asian poetry and teaching the basics of ghazal writing. If you truly want to understand South Asian poetry and ghazals you have to listen to music, the rhythms. Almost all poetry in South Asia has an oral tradition, it is to be performed such as ghazals, qawwalis, folk songs. To top it all off I went to Ustad Rahat Fateh Ali Khan concert. It was such a magical experience to be immersed in live qawwali music.
September has had a range of emotions and now towards the end it’s getting cold and dark. I can’t help but think about Sabina Nessa, a young Bangladeshi woman that was murdered. She was literally minutes from home. Is any part of the world truly safe for women, I really don’t know. Iconic Indian feminist Kamla Bhasin passed away this month and she wrote: “The first feminist must have been born the day patriarchy was born…”
Feminism in simple terms just asks for equality, to be understood. Until patriarchy gets dismantled across the entire world, we still have a long way to go. But I still have hope that maybe, just maybe, one day this entire world will become kinder and safer for all.
Outro
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. Follow us on Instagram, twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All information about the festival and upcoming events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org. The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
Welcome to the second series of the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast. We are really excited to be back for a second season and to be able to continue to connect readers and writers in the Midlands, and far beyond.
This week’s episode features bestselling novelist Kate Mosse, author of eight novels and newly published non-fiction book, An Extra Pair of Hands, her personal story of becoming a carer in middle age. In conversation with author Alison Jean Lester, Kate talks about her experience of caring for her father through Parkinson’s, supporting her mother during widowhood and living, and caring for, her mother-in-law Grandma Rosie, as well as the need to celebrate, and better support, the 8.8 million of invisible carers across the UK holding families together. This episode supports Age UK Birmingham.
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Series 2, Episode 1: Kate Mosse
Intro
Welcome to the second series of the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast. We are really excited to be back for a second season and to continue to connect readers and writers in the Midlands, and far beyond.
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
This week’s episode features bestselling novelist Kate Mosse, author of eight novels and newly published non-fiction book, An Extra Pair of Hands, her personal story of becoming a carer in middle age. In conversation with author Alison Jean Lester, Kate talks about her experience of caring for her father through Parkinson’s, supporting her mother during widowhood and living, and caring for, her mother-in-law Grandma Rosie, as well as the need to celebrate, and better support, the 8.8 million of invisible carers across the UK holding families together.
This episode supports Age UK Birmingham.
Alison Jean Lester
Hello, everyone. This is Alison Jean Lester, novelist and author of the memoir Absolutely Delicious: A Chronicle of Extraordinary Dying. Absolutely delighted to be here talking with Kate Mosse, novelist, playwright and author of An Extra Pair of Hands: A Story of Caring, Aging, and Everyday Acts of Love. Kate Mosse is an international best-selling novelist, playwright, and nonfiction author, with sales of more than 8 million copies in 38 languages, renowned for bringing unheard and under heard histories to life. She's a champion of women's creativity. She's the Founder Director of the Women's Prize for Fiction, sits on the executive committee of Women of the World and is a visiting professor of contemporary fiction and creative writing at the University of Chichester. Her latest novel, The City of Tears, was published in January 2021. She lives in West Sussex with her husband and mother-in-law. And she's there right now ready to talk with us. Hello, Kate.
Kate Mosse
Hello, good morning.
Alison Jean Lester
Good morning to you, I am so pleased to have been paired with you and to have had the chance to read An Extra Pair of Hands. It's very close to my heart as it is to I think a lot of us in our 50s and, I think you said in another interview, you're approaching 60?
Kate Mosse
I am, yes. 60th birthday in October.
Alison Jean Lester
Right and I remember very palpably when my parents’ parents were dying, and thinking, they're talking to their friends all the time, their friends are also going through this. And my friends and I will also be going through this at the same time. The first thing that struck me in reading, very early on, right in the first pages of this book, where you said the many things that it's about, and the one that really pierced me was trying and failing simultaneously. Can you see that? Can you see that very human duality, that tension in your fictional stories as well? Or was that very palpable to you in talking about just your own life?
Kate Mosse
That's a great question, actually, Alison because one of the key things for all of us who write in different genres, is how similar the skill is for writing each different type of book. And there is, for me, it was very liberating writing nonfiction. I've written some nonfiction before, but this is by far the most personal book I've ever written. But actually, the skill and the way that I went about writing it was the same as the way that I go about writing a novel, which is you need to put characters on the page, you need to put emotions on the page. And so that particular thing about trying and failing, and succeeding simultaneously, everything existing in the moment is at the heart, I think of any human experience, in that we all are, whether it's a made-up character or us in our own lives, mostly we're trying to do our best. And often you can have that wonderful feeling that you've got it right. You know, you did the right thing, at the right time. But particularly when you're writing about care, when as you say, there is no alternative ending. The ending, if you're a carer, is almost always going to be in the death of the person you care for. You know, living well and dying well are the same story, you know dying well is part of living well, you know, and it will come to us all, doesn't matter who we are, how immortal we feel, in the end it will come to us all. So, I think that that is at the heart of what it means to be a carer. But obviously in a piece of fiction, I can decide the ending, I can change the ending, I usually finish before my characters die, you know and certainly the lead characters unless, that's part of the story. And so, I wanted to have that sense that whatever you do, will never change things. You know, all you can do is make a - horrible word and it's been much overused at the moment, I'm obsessed with the Olympics, and, you know, it's the word appears on every interview, the journey. But all you can do as a carer is make the journey, as brilliant as it can be for the person you're caring for. And by association yourself.
Alison Jean Lester
Exactly. Because you're not the doctor, you're the comforter and the lifter.
Kate Mosse
And, you know, the book is full of literary illusions and authors and writings and things like that. But you know, it's the idea that, old age, there is no cure for that, there is no cure for that. And nor should there be, I mean, you know, it's the span of a person's life.
Alison Jean Lester
Well, I'm glad you mentioned the literary references throughout, that was a great joy. And it made me wonder, clearly, reading has been a way of getting through life for you, as well as writing. So, reading must have come first. In writing this book, did you have moments where you're like, ‘oh, I remember there's a poem that fits perfectly here’. Is that what happened throughout?
Kate Mosse
Yeah, do you know in a way, I mean, you can't be a writer, if you're not a reader. The best writers are great readers. And it starts like that for all of us. And it's about expression. And reading is about reading the words of other people who are expressing things that we're feeling or excitements that we want to feel. And sometimes it's about making sense of difficult emotions, but often it's about sharing wonderful emotions, you know, it's everything, it's the full gamut. Because all of our emotions are part of what makes us who we are. It's not just the good stuff that makes us who we are, it's all of it. And so, I've always been a passionate reader. And I've always carried a lot of other people's words in me, if you like. So a lot of the poems in particular, that I quote, or songs that I quote, are, you know I had to check them that I was getting them, right. But many of them were things that I read, you know, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 40 years ago. And thought, I know that that author has put precisely what I'm feeling better than I can. So let me go and find that quotation.
Alison Jean Lester
It's people who are condensing the essence of things, isn't it?
Kate Mosse
Sure. Exactly right. And I think also that we have completely different experiences, all of us, in caring, as in life. But when we all read a particular poem, you know I finish with a Philip Larkin poem, that ‘what remains of us is love’, an extraordinary poem, the Arundel tomb. The Arundel tomb is actually in Chichester Cathedral, my home city and Chichester cathedral is a place that I love and have done many, many, many, many events there over the years. It's a place that is at the heart of the music and the school community as well as a faith community. And I didn't even realize the Arundel tomb was there until I was studying it at school, you know, half a mile down the road. And then our teacher said, you know, the actual tomb is in Chichester cathedral. But when I use that quotation, so many people have read that line, ‘what remains of us is love’. And it has meant something to them. So, it's about obviously, we are always connected as reader and writer through any book. But then when you share quotations that mean something to you, you're connecting to an even wider range of people who have come across those same words and they have resonated for them. So that's partly why I share so much about other writers because we all become a bigger and bigger and bigger community every time we say, ‘oh yeah, I love that too’. And so, I wanted to do that, because everybody's caring experience is different. And everybody's reading experience is different.
Alison Jean Lester
Do I recall correctly that sometimes you read to Granny Rosie, is that right? Or there was somebody you were reading to at the kitchen table?
Kate Mosse
Well, I used to read to my dad in the last months of his life, and in a previous time when he was in intensive care. And I'm still quite sure that one of the reasons he came out of intensive care was he couldn't bear me reading anymore. I was reading the Battle of Lepanto which goes on for ages and I was threatening the Charge of the Light Brigade. I was reading these old-fashioned gentleman's poems that he had grown up with, you know, those wonderful Oxford companions of poetry and I think my father was like, ‘oh enough now, enough of this’. But Granny Rosie, she's 90 and I'm a full-time carer for Granny Rosie
Alison Jean Lester
Let's just be clear, she's your mother-in-law. For the listeners.
Kate Mosse
She's my mother-in-law, my wonderful dad and mother lived here with us in the house that I'm speaking to you from, from 2009. And my father needed a lot of support, he was living with Parkinson's and towards the end of his life, he was very, very restricted in his movements and his life, but, you know, remained extraordinarily sunny, I suppose, you know, very grateful for care and for his life and for support, you know, he never gave into bitterness or frustration, he had that kind of temperament. And then my ma, she didn't need care but she needed company, having been widowed after nearly 60 years of marriage. And now I'm a full-time carer of Granny Rosie because she's in a wheelchair and needs that kind of help. But she is sharp as a tack. And she can remember, every single poem that she ever learned at school, every single song. And so it tends to at the end of the day, quite often if we're talking and particularly when I was writing the book, and so I was talking about quotations and I was asking her about her life and what she wanted in the book and what she didn't and all of these things. So it's more that granny will suddenly launch forth into a poem, or will say, ‘oh, what's the next line’ and of course, is still absolutely in awe of the fact that on my phone, I can look up any poem in the world, you know, because, you know, she is of the generation and indeed, so was I, you know, we all were for the last 10 years odd, where you would go get up and you would go and find that book of Oxford English verse and you would look in the index and you would you know, all of these things. So now that you can type in just a few words, and within seconds, she still finds this magic, and it is magic. So, she has all of those stories and that literature, particularly that poetry that she carries with her. And the reason that we were looking things up is that we were planning Rosie's funeral. Rosie wanted to, you know, be sure that the things that she would like read, and that mattered to her are there. So, we had a very jolly evening, far too much wine in my case and gin in her case, was drunk, going through and by the end of it, on the one hand it was devastating, because for me, because we were planning what it would be like when Granny Rosie wasn't there. Everybody calls her Granny Rosie, she's not my granny, she's my mother-in-law. But she is universally locally known as Granny Rosie. But on the other hand, that's so great, because that is about older people having agency about being part of the finishing of their life, not becoming people without a voice. And it's so important. My dad did the same. And it it was wonderful at his funeral knowing that every single prayer, every single poem, every single piece of music he had chosen, it was what he wanted.
Alison Jean Lester
Yes, and I noted that in your book, just like in mine, we're not saying this is how you should end your life or you should care for somebody. And yet I still feel like saying to people do try to allow the conversation to happen. And I think often the older person or the dying person isn't allowed to talk. I've heard off them, saying to me, I try but my kids are saying, ‘oh mom, you're gonna live forever’, you know, and they don't want to talk about it which stoppers the person who wants to have the agency.
Kate Mosse
Totally Alison, it's exactly that point that people, particularly I would say in England, and possibly in a broader sense, Great Britain, but you know, I'm speaking for myself here. There's the idea that it's somehow morbid to talk about dying. But if you're in your 90s, you are going to be nearer to that than your birth. You know that’s just the maths you know, and of course nobody wants to talk about loss and it is very difficult the idea of the people that you love not being there, but I often have to say this to myself when Granny Rosie is having, as she puts it a down day, I've had to learn because I'm by nature pretty optimistic and annoyingly perky, often and I imagine you are the same, it's very important that when Granny Rosie is having a bad day she's allowed those emotions too. And I think that's part of the same thing that all of our emotions make us who we are, so that it's not, it's not right for me to go ‘oh, come on, cheer up’ because what I'm actually saying is your sadness is making me sad and my emotion matters more than yours, but you know, she's allowed to feel really furious that she can't walk. She was, you know, a cycling champion, a riding champion. She's the granny that taught my kids to do cartwheels in the back garden when she was 65. She was incredibly physical woman all of her life. And then so to lose the ability to walk is a harder thing for her to lose than someone who was maybe a bit more cerebral. And, you know, being physical or sporty wasn't part of their day to day life, but it was for Rosie, you know, she, she was walking, everywhere doing things, walking other people's dogs until she was 86 and had a fall. And this is the very common story of care, that something happens and then out of that one thing, the dominoes fall. So, I had to learn to shut up. And not go ‘oh, you know, it's not that bad’ and just go ‘I'm really sorry, you're feeling down today, what can I do? And if that means, you know, a whiskey mac at half past five in the afternoon, then fine, you know, or if that means she doesn't want to eat anything, me going on endlessly, is not helpful. But me finding a brilliant pudding, that might be just the one thing that she could fancy, that's helpful. So, in a way, it's about unlearning some of the things that you associate with what it means to be a good carer.
Alison Jean Lester
Right, and what you associate with loving someone. Holding some space for them.
Kate Mosse
Holding some space for them. But I learned this, you know, Alison, from watching my amazing and heroic ma care for my father. They had been equal partners all of their lives and then my father needed a huge amount of support. And there are many things that are very distressing about Parkinson's, there's huge, amazing research going on from Parkinson's UK, people are living longer and better with Parkinson's. But there are also side effects. And they're also symptoms that are very, very difficult, which people will know about shaking, which means you can't necessarily lift a glass or a spoon to your mouth, the freezing, which means you might be fine, and then you fall, and they are distressing physical disabilities to witness. And it's painful to witness as well as it is obviously for the person living with it. But what I learned from my mum was that she was still her and my father was still him. And the minute you kind of think in those terms, it makes it, it doesn't change the nature of the relationship, the reciprocity, the fact that you are equals continues. Now a lot of people listening to this will not be in that position, because they will be caring for somebody who's either got a long-term disability, so it's not to do with aging or a condition, but it's just that they've got a particular illness that has been with them forever. Or more significantly, there'll be many people listening, who are caring for people with dementia, or Alzheimer's or some sort of neurological decline and deficit. And that is a completely different situation. Because when somebody is no longer themselves, then that is obviously different. And I'm very, very clear in the book and I'm very clear with all the talks I do that I am speaking about my own experience, and I have been very, very blessed that I have had many older people in my life and have cared in different ways for several, you know, three in particular, and every single one of those people has been themselves until the moment they have left life. And that is utterly different from people who are looking after people that they love but who don't know who they are, and sometimes don't know who the person caring for them is either.
Alison Jean Lester
Yes, it's interesting you touched on this, being very aware of the privilege and also you're very aware of the privilege of being a home based writer, like I am, being able to also have help caring for your parents and Granny Rosie but I still feel the rumble of concern in the background, the worry, the possibility, as you said, of the siren and the blue light that does arrive. Can you imagine after being a carer for a dozen years, being an empty nester? You will become a truly empty nester a lot later than I have, because of people in your home needing you, can you imagine being rumble free and can you imagine what that will mean for you and your writing?
Kate Mosse
Yeah, that's a lovely question. It's a very interesting one that I do kind of ask myself. I like a busy home. And at the moment my brother-in-law is living with us, as is one of my nieces. So, the household that is essentially my husband, Granny Rosie, and me and the dog, the numbers of evenings, when we are actually the only three, and the dog, people sleeping in the house are quite few. So, you're right in terms of permanent living, but I think also that my children are adults. And they both have, you know, the joy about being a parent is when your children are grown up, and they are themselves and they are living their lives. And all of these things, they, of course, come home quite a lot, I'm glad to say and bring their partners with them. And I don't deny that I am looking forward to being a grandmother, which is not on the horizon at the moment, but I will absolutely love that. But I think that one of the things about being a carer and the way that our lives have worked is to think slightly differently about what the nature of a household is. And the idea is, for me, that the household is the people who are living in it at that moment. And so, we're a five-person household at the moment. Next week, we'll have somebody staying for a couple of weeks doing some work, so then we'll be a six-person household. And I think that that is how I will cope with it. The sense that the thought of Granny Rosie not being at the other end of the kitchen table, we spend a huge amount of time together. And you know, if I'm not away working, or we're not out, I spend pretty much every evening, and certainly during the pandemic I have spent every evening in the kitchen with Granny Rosie, the idea of her not being at the other end of the table is very painful to me. But I also know that it's the flexibility of living that is important and that there will always be other people who need to be here who can be here. And it's part of the same privilege that we have space to do that. So, you know, I don't ever envisage a time when my husband and I will be, I mean not that that wouldn't be joyous, we go away to be on our own rather than do it at home.
Alison Jean Lester
Right and your home is a welcoming space.
Kate Mosse
It’s what my parents did, and brought me up to believe and both of my sisters live nearby. Nieces and nephews live nearby. And, you know, my parents had an open house policy, but never let it not be our home. And they did it amazingly. So we never felt like that we were just one of a load of people, it was always our home. But it was also welcoming to anybody else. And I was brought up like that and that was my hope that I would be in a position to be able to do the same. And as you say, because I'm a writer and my husband is a writer, we are in a very privileged position, because many people have to give up their work to be a carer and I didn't, and you didn't. So you know, that is another thing that makes all the difference, that you don't lose your sense of identity as a working person. Because you don't have to stop it. Is it, you know, the endlessness of not ever sleeping? You know, at the moment, I'm not in that phase. But that will come again, when you are caring for someone who is at the end of life or needs a lot of care in the night. The emotion of that, you know, being in a privileged position doesn't stop the painful emotions. But it makes all the practical stuff easier than it is for people who are on their own or have fewer resources and all of these things. And again, I think it's throughout the book, I hope I made that very clear that I am aware of that. Because you know, the thing that's given me great pleasure, Alison, is that I have never had such a big reaction from a book in my life. And I've had some really big reactions. But it's been very interesting, this is why I wrote the book, I wrote An Extra Pair of Hands because I felt I had a voice, I was asked to write it by the Wellcome Trust and that it was important for all of us who are in this position to raise our voices together, and not allow the fact that our circumstances are different and therefore it makes us feel that we have no right to speak for other people. Actually, we're not speaking for other people we all need to speak, there's 13 million now, unpaid carers in the UK, just in the UK. And the vast majority of those are women. And the politicians are not addressing the issues in social care. And so therefore I felt it was part of my job if you like as a carer to put my voice with other carers, and the huge numbers of emails, letters, phone calls, events that I've done, everybody has got a different experience but everybody's going ‘we all need to speak about this’. We need to speak loudly about this.
Alison Jean Lester
Exactly. And I really encourage people to read it a) for the beautiful writing and b) for the devastating statistics. Because it's a really wonderful clarion call for this and the impact on women, amidst the pandemic which has hit women differently from men as well. All of that is very powerfully put in the book. And, as you can imagine, if it hits somebody with a comfortable situation like this, then how does it hit somebody without one, it's just really, really powerful.
Kate Mosse
And that's actually part of the job of people like us who are writers but also have had these experiences of thinking about caring for people and living and dying and all of that, is that we need to look after our carers. There are some people who have not had a day off, from their caring responsibilities, you know, for 18 months because all of these care services shut down and they had to. We saw the absolute disregard for older people and people with disabilities shown by the government. And this is not a party-political point I'm making, it's the government is in charge, regardless of their political colour. This is a crisis that has been coming down the road for a very, very long time. And of all, the times when it now should be being graphed it is not and it's still not, because it will all fall to pieces. Am I saying that I don't think that families should be the primary carers if they can be, of course I'm not. In almost every case that I've spoken to people want to be the primary carers. But what about the people without any support? What about the people who are caring, you know, an 80-year-old woman who's caring for a 90-year-old man? What about the people who had a child whose child died? What about, you know, all of the what abouts. The sign of a civilized and good society is how we care for the people who need us most, not the people who make the most money. And so, our priorities around this have got very skewed. And it's a brilliant thing that our populations are living older, it's a sign of why the NHS is so extraordinary. And why it matters, that people don't routinely die in their 40s and their 50s, as in many periods of history, they did. But that does bring with it, the idea of how people live well, longer, as you know, and how we approach the business of dying and support and care. So, I do feel very strongly and you write, you know, we're not quite in the same field but we kind of are in this writing. And I think that every book that comes out, every moment that somebody who is in a position can pick up a book like yours or mine and see their own experiences reflected make somebody a little bit less alone in trying to deal with these things that are very complicated.
Alison Jean Lester
Yes. And I think it's also, partly, the connecting with people on where you are together and it's also partly opening a window on how things could be.
Kate Mosse
Exactly and I've always been a campaigner, but positively. So, like, okay, there is a problem here. What are we going to do about it? And let's go forward, hopefully.You know, and I think that's really, really important. Now, again, I'm very lucky in that because one, that is my nature. Secondly, all of the things in terms of the caring responsibilities I have, I love my mother-in-law. There are many people who are caring for people who they don't really like very much. Or who are not very nice. You know, the idea that anybody older is automatically nice we know is not true, people are themselves. It's the age equivalent of In Vino Veritas, you know, people get older, they get more themselves. And some people are not pleasant, and some people are having to care for people that did not care for them. But whereas, Granny Rosie is wonderful, you know, and it’s very interesting people's first reactions, if they don't know, Granny Rosie and they don't know me and they don't know our family and my husband and all the rest of it, when you say you care for your mother in law, people go ‘oh, no’, they automatically pull a face. Like ‘oh, I bet that’s tricky’.
Alison Jean Lester
Right. Yeah. Imagining the mother-in-law joke.
Kate Mosse
The mother-in-law joke, but of course behind that is a very deep strain of misogyny. Which I don't sign up to, in any ways whatsoever.
Alison Jean Lester
Yeah, let me speak for the writers who may be listening, who probably are listening. In all of this, how do you protect your writing time?
Kate Mosse
Well, you can't. It is as simple as that. You know, absolutely you can't. So, with one of my novels called Citadel, I was writing that when my father was dying, and looking back now I can't believe I kept going. I should have just rung my publisher and said this is not going to come yet. But the problem that everybody knows about caring for older people in particular, or equally younger people with life limiting disabilities but that you might be caring for a long time, is you never know when the significant moment is coming until it's happened. So with everybody who's a carer, there will be many false alarms when you think it's the end, and then it's not. And so, at what point do you say to your publisher, do you know I can't, I'm going to deliver this book late, I just can't do it. Because my father, you know, there were several moments over a period of about nine months where it looked like he was going to die. And then that wasn't the time, it wasn't his time. And so when do you stop. And so in the end, it was more acute even I think with my ma, who had a condition called COPD, she had been a smoker for many years, but she also had issues with her heart, she was incredibly healthy, and wonderful, except for the fact that she had this really big issue. She looked perfect and was wonderful. And there were many times when she had to go in for oxygen or be looked after, there was no sign at all that the weekend that she died, she was going to die, none at all. And I was writing and working and was due on stage to do some interviews and all the rest of it and huge, you know, work situation going on, and I was on the phone and would have to say I’m really sorry, I'm just going to have to go and call you back because the doctors here. But that was again, it wasn't any different from other times that had happened. And then suddenly, my wonderful, beautiful mother was dying. So I think that is what is impossible about protecting your writing time, you really can't, you just have to play it by ear, but be brave enough, and I was only brave enough after the event with my dad's death. When I went back to that novel, I looked on the page that my grief at his loss, his imminent loss was on every single page of that novel. And it didn't belong there. It was, it didn't belong there. And I had to say, you know, I just need to take some time. And after my mother died, I couldn't even read at all, it was the only time in my life I've lost reading. With my dad, because he was preparing to die, he had a strong Christian faith, we knew it was coming. He didn't want to leave my mother, but apart from that he wanted the next part of his adventure, he wanted to be reunited with his mother, he believed all of that. And that was a beautiful thing for us. And so, I didn't lose reading then. And I didn't lose writing. When my ma went out of the blue, I lost the ability to read for months. And that's never happened to me before and that felt like a huge grief. And I lost the ability to write for at least six months. And so, you know, the only thing I can say to people who are in this kind of situation is that if you separate the quality of your writing from the doing of it at all, that is a helpful way to protect yourself as a writer. So the fact you're writing at all, just be proud of that. Don't worry about how good it is, you can rewrite it later. But don't lose them the muscle memory that that's the only piece of advice I can give. So, if you just keep doing it. So, when after my mother died, I was supposed to be writing a novel and I just couldn't because I associated it with the loss. So I wrote a play instead. Because nobody was expecting it. It didn't matter. The timing was mine. It was private. It was just like getting back on the bike when you've had a crash. You know, getting back on the horse, whatever it is, you know, whatever the metaphor.
Alison Jean Lester
I noticed that your most recent novel is called the city of tears. Is that unrelated to your grief?
Kate Mosse
Yes. It's entirely unrelated. The series of historical adventure fiction that I'm writing at the moment is essentially a Romeo and Juliet story, a family saga, set against the backdrop of the French wars of religion. So, the first one was The Burning Chambers, the second one The City of Tears. So, its each of the four elements and it covers 300 years of the story of a family and the women of that generation going through from 1562 in France to South Africa in 1862 and the city of tears is Amsterdam. And it is that because it is the city where many of the French Huguenots, I mean obviously there are no other Huguenots except for French ones, its the word we use, but I always put it in. The French Protestants, if you like, the Huguenots after the massacre of St. Bartholomew's day in 1572, in Paris, when almost all the Huguenots leadership was assassinated. My family, as many Huguenots, fled from Paris to Amsterdam and Amsterdam was the great refugee city of the 16th and 17th century. And because Amsterdam accepted so many refugees in, it became a world power. And I love that. But of course, for all of my characters, and the real people who fled there after that massacre, it was the city of tears, because they had lost, everybody had lost people in their families, everybody had lost everything. And it was this city of water. And so for me, in my mind, it became the city of tears. So not to do with my grief. The only thing I would say that's very interesting as a novelist, is that I have written death scenes, deaths of fathers, death of mothers, of siblings of loved ones, all of my life. And it was very interesting when my father died to realize, actually, this is the extraordinary thing about reading and writing. And the joy of incredible writers that have gone before us, is that what I wrote, was how it felt. I hadn't actually experienced my father dying, but I had written the death of a father before that happened to me. And do you know, I wouldn't really change anything. And that's because of all the books I've read, and how other people have put it on the page before me, I knew in a way what to expect, what I would feel from what I had read and seen.
Alison Jean Lester
I want to talk a little bit, you’ve talked a bit about these sprawling wonderful, rich historical novels, that there's something that I noticed in An Extra Pair of Hands, in the writing style that I wonder might be special to this book, which is quite a lot of sentence fragments, almost lists, sort of bullets of this is how it runs, this is what we do, this is what we have to have. Do you think that was the experience writing itself onto the page in that style, or does that happen in your other books?
Kate Mosse
That's a really great question about craft. I would say that I write what is called narrative nonfiction. And the nonfiction I'm working on at the moment I am describing as a nonfiction novel, because I realized that actually, my writing style between the fiction and nonfiction isn't as different as some people's is. I do like short sentences, anyway. I do like the placing of a single word or three words. There are phrases that I overuse in my fiction, and I have to go, you know, the joy of search and find is like ‘oh, God, how many times is that phrase been used?’ But certainly writing this, what I wanted was to find a kind of, a language for the experience. I'm not a confessional writer. It was a big decision for me to put my personal life on the page. Because that's, that's not what I do. And I wanted to find a language that felt appropriate to that, that felt comfortable for me. And have I put every emotion on the page, not at all, I have not put anything on the page that I thought my father would not want, my mother would not want and of course, Granny Rosie was reading the script all the way through. And I would say well, I you know, it's up to you anything you don't want in the book. And of course, she was saying, you should put this in and that and I said I'm not putting that in, I think that’s too personal, she was happy, you know, warts and all. I was also very mindful of the fact that I'm writing my story of these, these times. My husband's story, my children, my sisters, they have the right to their story, which is different from mine. It's always the you know, the drawback of having a writer in the family, you know, they get to claim it, but so I wanted to find a language, a style that would feel very deliberately literary, if you like, that this is me, the writer writing a personal story, not me writing a personal story, me Kate, writing a personal story. And so these, as you say, lists, the very fragmented moments sometimes that felt like, well, sometimes there isn't an end to this sentence is just this is the emotion. And I can't, I can't put it in context yet, because I don't know. And I think you can, you can understand that because of the nature of your writing. It's like sometimes the artifice gets in the way of the integrity of the emotion. So actually, you just need to put that word down. But you know, that word contains the story.
Alison Jean Lester
We've talked a bit about what Granny Rosie remembers, her poetry and I remember very strongly, my mother, my mother who had metastatic melanoma and tumours in her brain that were changing how she thought etc, and suddenly language that she was using that I'd never heard her use before, ever in my life. Her grandparents, her mother was Scottish, but presented as English, but her grandparents were Scottish very. And she lived with them for a year when she was 10 and she just started using Scottish language. And so there were things that I learned in the last weeks of her life. And something that I want to learn from you, which I don't yet understand, is this wonderful thing about Granny Rosie ‘working in the fields of Apuldram in the summer of 1947, singling sugar beets and stucking sheaths’. What was she doing?
Kate Mosse
Yeah, well, there we are. That's absolutely, you're right. That is English rural description.
So, if you imagine anybody listening, you're on a train, you're going up through England on a train, at harvest time or in the summer, and you're looking out the window and you see a field and it has it almost looks like a tepee. It could be hay or straw or anything, it's all been kind of harvested. And it's all been put across the field in these kind of like, tepees of whatever it is that they're actually harvesting. And it's that, it's simply that, you know, that they're picking it all. And then, you know, winding it round and setting it up. And sugar beet is definitely you know, is obviously a particular type of crop that they had. So, it's just the description of the way that each of those little things. And so, people will be much more familiar with the big black, huge bales of hay. But different crops are kind of placed in the field in different ways. And then another tractor will come along and gather it all up. Yeah, because her father was a gardener. And she lived in, you know, a farming rural community. And so, everybody went out and it was all done by hand.
Alison Jean Lester
Yes, yes. And these are the old words that as writers, we can try to keep in currency.
Kate Mosse
Yeah. And I kept saying to Rosie, how do you spell that? Because it was not a word I've come across even and I grew up, you know, we live here, three miles from where Rosie grew up, you know, we live in this same community, but of course, different words. You know, the thing that always made everybody laugh about Sussex, you know, we are Sussex people. And it tells you a great deal about the nature of life is that when you get a book of Sussex dialect, which isn't seen as a dialect, and other parts have maybe a much stronger lilt. But there used to be, in the 19th century, 16 words for mud in Sussex dialect. And that kind of thought, that tells you the nature of life in Sussex in the Victorian period.
Alison Jean Lester
Oh, that's fantastic. Well, I'm enjoying this so much. And I'm afraid we have to bring it to the end. But I want to bring it to an end on these big smiles. Nobody can see us but we're smiling broadly. And I really look forward to your book, 16 words for mud. I think that will be a great one.
Kate Mosse
Yeah, well, you know, it's how it goes. I mean, my next book is a book about history, about putting women back into history. But as its spine, I'm using the story of my great grandmother, who turns out to have been a novelist, but who was kind of vanished from the record. And the idea of how easy it is for women's achievements to vanish from the record. It will be women from all over the world in all periods of history, but actually writing An Extra Pair of Hands, I really fell in love with writing narrative nonfiction. So, I'm now juggling the big new novel and the big new piece of nonfiction. So you know, hopefully I'll be back at Birmingham to talk about one or other in person, once we get back to real events full time.
Alison Jean Lester
Fantastic. Oh, well, thank you so much, Kate. I've really enjoyed meeting with you and getting to know you better.
Kate Mosse
It's been great, Alison. Thank you so much.
Outro
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love for you to tell us about it – leave us a review or a rating and find us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest.
You can download our latest podcast episodes, every Thursday, from all the places you would normally get your podcasts and find transcripts of our episodes in the shownotes and on our website at www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
Episode 8: August, Elizabeth Lee
This month's piece is written by author Elizabeth Lee, whose debut novel Cunning Women was published earlier this year. Her piece considers the juxtaposition of the hope and promise of a new school year and restrictions lifting with the terrifying news of wildfires, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and rapidly escalating climate change, ending on a hopeful note of how it felt to realise a dream and have her debut novel published in 2021.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
Intro
Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast and our new series of commissioned writing about 2021. Each month we are commissioning a new writer to reflect on the month that has passed, offering us moments of connection through great writing and the opportunity to reflect about what we have collectively experienced at the end of the year.
We will be bringing you a new short episode at the start of each month, with each piece read by our guest writers. You can read the pieces on our website, where you will also find information about our upcoming digital events.
Reading
Hello everyone, my name is Elizabeth Lee and I wrote August’s piece for the Birmingham Literature Festival.
August has been a month of sunlight and storms, both literal and figurative.
As I walk the canals and fields I’m lucky enough to live by, the air is sometimes bright and hot, sweet with pollen and busy with insects, sometimes filled with needle-sharp rain and biting winds. Always, somewhere, the shouts and laughter of children enjoying freedom from school can be heard.
On a larger scale, the news feels like a series of earthquakes. I wonder whether we will, like the children preparing for a new school year as summer wanes, at last be shaken from lethargy and compelled to act. As wildfires rage in Greece and Turkey, we are warned that this planet we are the custodians of teeters on the brink of a disaster of our own making. We watch the terrible, terrifying events in Afghanistan take place. In my own home, we celebrate GCSE results that enable the next step on a journey. Exciting times, full of possibility and hope. Nationally, more students than ever end a difficult year by celebrating good results. But there is also a growing gap between North and South, between state and private schools. Those already at a disadvantage have been further failed in the Covid crisis.
But there is also hope. Most of the adult population are now vaccinated against Covid, and we tentatively break free from the past months of isolation and fear. The world might be changed. But it is still here.
Personally, I’m emerging from a post-publication haze as my debut novel was published in April. The fulfilment of a life-long dream that still has me pinching myself, and giving thanks for every piece of luck that passed my way. Set in 17th Century Lancashire, the book is a tale of persecution and superstition, but also one of love, in all its forms. Between parents and children, between siblings, between a man and a woman. Turning my mind to a new project, similar themes emerge; a historical setting that explores the struggle of those trapped by poverty and prejudice. But there is kindness to be found in the chaos. There is hope.
These themes remain relevant, I think, to our world today. A world where women are raising their voices to say Me Too. A world that must address structural racism and respond to calls for collective action on climate change. Where Covid highlighted the danger of isolation, and the importance of community. But there is always sunlight in among the storms, there is always kindness in the chaos, and perhaps we will turn with new vigour, like a child returning to school in September, to protecting this world and valuing all that live in it equally.
Outro
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. Follow us on Instagram, twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All information about the festival and upcoming events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org. The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
Episode 7: July, George Bastow
This month's piece is written by freelance writer George Bastow and considers both the highs (the unity of sport, echoed by the unity at the start of the pandemic) and lows of July (the racism following the Euros Final and the lack of protection for our disabled and vulnerable communities after so-called 'Freedom Day'), urging us all to continue to choose compassion and empathy over division.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
Intro
Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast and our new series of commissioned writing about 2021. Each month we are commissioning a new writer to reflect on the month that has passed, offering us moments of connection through great writing and the opportunity to reflect about what we have collectively experienced at the end of the year.
We will be bringing you a new short episode at the start of each month, with each piece read by our guest writers. You can read the pieces on our website, where you will also find information about our upcoming digital events.
Reading
Hello all you lovely listeners. My name is George Bastow and I’m a freelance writer, journalist and blogger who is also a full-time wheelchair-user with quadriplegic cerebral palsy.
July 2021 has been a funny old month, although there has seldom been anything to laugh about. It’s been a month of exciting highs and abysmal lows with displays of uplifting unity and stark division that have reminded me England is a Jekyll & Hyde nation. A deeply complex country that can flip as easily as any of the coins of its realm.
At the beginning of July, I could smell optimism in the air, as fragrant and hazy as the smoke drifting from summer evening barbecues; the Euros were in full-swing and if the countless tunelessly triumphant renditions of Baddiel & Skinner’s anthem I heard daily were to be believed football was definitely coming home. In the weeks leading up to England’s history-making championship final against Italy, my heart was lifted by the widespread love for Gareth Southgate’s squad and the refreshing examples of inclusivity they were setting, from the diversity of the players themselves to their decision to take the knee in support of Black Lives Matter and Harry Kane’s rainbow captain’s armband worn in solidarity with the LGBTQIA+ Community. The whole country was inebriated by hope, progress and of course the occasional shandy as we cheered the home team towards their first piece of silverware since 1966, but the dreaded hangover kicked in sooner than anyone expected. In the moments after Rashford, Sancho and Saka missed their penalties my spirits sank as I saw the national coin flip from its shiny, positive side to its insidiously tarnished reverse. The appalling racist abuse the players were subjected to from brutally bigoted so-called fans was truly disgusting. Over the following days however, the country’s coin of conscience turned again as legions of true supporters showed their love and admiration for Saka, Rashford and Sancho and condemned the hatred from a small-minded percentage of the public.
Just as the country rejoined as one in appreciation of three footballing heroes another polarising storm cloud appeared over the horizon… Freedom Day.
Boris Johnson (a popular tousle-haired Vaudeville clown, famous for his Prime Minister impressions) announced that from Monday, 19th, all legal COVID-19 restrictions would be lifted despite rapidly rising cases of infection. For many a long-awaited return to the Old Normal is hugely welcome but for folk like me with disabilities and compromised immune systems life without masks or social distancing is a dangerous prospect. Even after receiving two vaccinations, to immunocompromised people risking exposure to COVID and the reality of new variants will prove deadly. I understand that to some wearing a mask is an inconvenience they are happy to ditch but for vulnerable communities masks are vital weapons in a daily war to maintain our health. I appreciate the people binning their face-coverings are doing so with optimistic intentions but the virus isn’t going anywhere soon, so by wearing our masks we can help stop it spreading further and save lives while we’re at it.
As July draws to a close and the coin of England’s conscience summersaults in mid-air, we must choose which side it lands on.
Is it heads for fairness, empathy and compassion or tails for intolerance, division and misunderstanding? It’s your call.
Outro
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. Follow us on Instagram, twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All information about the festival and upcoming events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org. The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
Episode 6: June, Roy Mcfarlane
In this episode, poet Roy Mcfarlane reflects on the month of June as both a time of rest and reflection, thinking about the summer solstice and sunny days alongside the ongoing issue of racism in football and the Windrush scandal as we marked Windrush Day on the 22nd June. The piece is read by Shantel Edwards.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Newsletter Podcast Transcript: Episode 6, Roy Mcfarlane
Intro
Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast and our new series of commissioned writing about 2021. Each month we are commissioning a new writer to reflect on the month that has passed, offering us moments of connection through great writing and the opportunity to reflect about what we have collectively experienced at the end of the year.
We will be bringing you a new short episode at the start of each month, with each piece read by our guest writers. You can read the pieces on our website, where you will also find information about our upcoming digital events.
Reading
Hi, I’m Roy Mcfarlane and this is June’s Monthly Writers Blog for Birmingham Literature Festival.
Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
-Adam Zagajewski, "Try to Praise the Mutilated World"
June the month of strawberries and creams and the longest day of the year, 21st June, summer solstice day. Boris Johnson tried to bring an end to the mutilated world we’re living in, having visions of Freedom Day as if we were part of the cast of Independence Day, but with a Delta variant fighting back, celebrations had to be put on hold.
Summer solstice day, solstice from the Latin word ‘sun standing still,’ the timing between planting and harvesting crops has been traditionally the time to relax. As writers we know of planting words, half written in a notebook, or a body of work in files; over the last few months I’ve been planting seeds in competitions, magazines, anthologies and commissioned work, seeing which will flourish, find their roots and blossom in the next collection. June will be the closest I’ll get to relaxing, and getting away from writing, online and social media interaction.
During this month my walks along canals with herons, coots and a gang of seagulls chilling on telegraph wires, watching me walking through their neighbourhood has been exchanged for morning jogs along the sea front where the June sun gives iridescent blue seas and a convention of seagulls, bigger and bolder than the ones from Tipton who stride with swagger.
But the writer in me can’t be quietened, I go into full rage in response to Priti Patel’s interview, encouraging football supporters to boo in response to England football players, both black and white, taking a knee in response to online racism, racism in the stands and the ongoing racism that leads to death. And yet Priti Patel’s response is no different to Donald Trump’s inciting aggressive response to Colin Kaepernick taking the knee. Also, it’s 5 years on from the Jo Cox murder, influenced by divisive, dividing words which inspired such a backlash in the lead to Brexit.
Thank god for Windrush Day, 22nd June, acknowledging the impact and importance of migration to the making of Britain. The emblematic Empire Windrush signalling the arrival of Caribbean post-war migrants to Britain in 1948; a date in the British identity as paramount as 1066, Henry VIII and all his wives, and 1966 ‘They think it’s all over! It is now.’
In Wolverhampton the unveiling of a blue plaque brought mixed emotions for many, as we acknowledged Paulette Wilson Windrush Campaigner ‘likkle but tallawah’ a reminder of how the government turned a Caribbean post-war migration dream of Windrush into an “illegal immigrants” of the state nightmare.
I’m reading Just Us by Claudia Rankine, the title taken from the wonderful stand-up comedian Richard Pryor; ‘you go down there looking for justice, that’s what you find just us.’ I guess in taking the knee, in Windrush celebrations, we are simply looking for a sun that will rise on all of us with the same warmth, same freedoms, a sun that shakes hand with the night and meets us back in the morning, alive and well.
Outro
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. Follow us on Instagram, twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All information about the festival and upcoming events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org. The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
Episode 5: May, Maisie Chan
Next month debut author Maisie Chan’s first novel, Danny Chung Does Not Do Maths, is published. In this month’s piece she writes about feeling adrift from friends and family in the Midlands, the difficulties of writing your second novel and the lack of representation of British Chinese protagonists in children’s fiction.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Newsletter Podcast Transcript: Episode 5, Maisie Chan
Intro
Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast and our new series of commissioned writing about 2021. Each month we are commissioning a new writer to reflect on the month that has passed, offering us moments of connection through great writing and the opportunity to reflect about what we have collectively experienced at the end of the year.
We will be bringing you a new short episode at the start of each month, with each piece read by our guest writers. You can read the pieces on our website, where you will also find information about our upcoming digital events.
Reading
Hi, I’m Maisie Chan and I wrote May’s piece for the Birmingham Literature Festival.
I’ll start this blog in a very British way and talk about the weather. May is usually ‘the summer’ in Glasgow, which is where I now live, and the hottest month of the year for us. But not this year. It’s been damp and grey. I’m feeling a little grey myself. I haven’t been able to travel to Birmingham to see my friends and family since 2019. I feel discombobulated.
However, I have to live in the present moment and May has been up and down, I won’t lie.
I’m trying to work on multiple writing projects at once which is great as I’m now a full-time writer. I am learning to juggle, however, as I have around four book projects on the go at once and I’m pitching for a children’s TV show, hoping to get my first screenwriting credits in children’s animation. I feel split down the middle with one part of me in ‘debut author’ mode and the other in drafting mode.
I’m writing a new novel, which is going very slowly and like pulling teeth. And at the same time, I am promoting my debut novel, Danny Chung Does Not Do Maths, a children’s book out in June. It’s an exciting thought to know a book I started writing in 2018 is going to hit the shelves. And I’m feeling both elated and a little scared that my first novel will be out there, for people to read and judge. It’s not lost on me that my book will be one of the very few with a British Chinese boy on the front cover, there aren’t many even in 2021. Hate crimes against East and Southeast Asians (ESEA) all over the world have increased massively and I hope that my small contribution can help make people like me more visible in the world of children’s publishing. If we aren’t seen at all, then are we real? Are we human?
I am in ‘second novel syndrome’ which according to many published authors is very real! I definitely feel it. When you write your first novel, it’s not usually under contract, so you can take your time. For the second one, however, you have a smaller time scale in which to write it (mainly for children’s novelists who churn out a novel a year it seems). It’s not been the most inspiring year, my creative well has not been filled. I’ve spent a lot of time stuck inside.
As I bid a farewell to the month of May and prepare to welcome June, with my book launch and birthday around the corner and the hope of sunny skies, I give thanks as I am going to get my first vaccination this month. Perhaps that is the most prized thing of all?
Signing off. A true Gemini.
Outro
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. Follow us on Instagram, twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All information about the festival and upcoming events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org. The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
The Birmingham Literature Festival podcast connects writers with readers. Join us for exciting and inspiring conversations about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues with writers from the Midlands and beyond. New episodes monthly from April 2021.
- Episode 4: April, Sue Brown
In April 2021, US police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. In this month’s piece performance poet Sue Brown reflects on the ways that institutionalised racism has come to the fore of public consciousness across the past year.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Newsletter Podcast Transcript: Episode 4, Sue Brown
Intro
Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast and our new series of commissioned writing about 2021. Each month we are commissioning a new writer to reflect on the month that has passed, offering us moments of connection through great writing and the opportunity to reflect about what we have collectively experienced at the end of the year.
We will be bringing you a new short episode at the start of each month, with each piece read by our guest writers. You can read the pieces on our website, where you will also find information about our upcoming digital events.
Reading
My name is Sue Brown and I wrote the Birmingham Literature Festival poem in April 2021.
A year in a month: April 20th 2021, ONE person was found guilty of a crime that many thousands have been privileged to walk away from aided and abetted by the law.
May 25th 2020, the world witnessed the death of another Black man, George Floyd, by the systemised enforcement of racism. An act played out daily in various degrees around the globe for centuries.
With credible witnesses, daily protest, the sad truth is that Black Lives is the Matter, a 'Problem'… and yes, contrary to a commissioned government report, institutionalised racism still breathes today, alive and kicking even within the U.K.
The past year has presented nothing new, and once again, it was televised.
2020 started like any other year;
I was unaware that the world was on the verge of an insidious order of events that would be drip-fed by the mainstream and social media, Western Governments and scientists.
Late February, reports about a virus began hitting the news daily, although… there was a distance between it and my reality.
The West pointed fingers towards the Chinese; a plethora of conspiracy theories flowed.
As the COVID-19 crises took shape, I got a sense that something untoward was emerging. WhatsApp messaging 'ramped up' subversion with creative facts. Public health responses to the outbreaks on cruise ships belied what was coming to the shores of Britain.
Boris led the charge with; hands face space - which became one of the pandemics mantras, spoon-fed between mixed messaging, confusion, and blatant lies to the nation, directing the focus to a new world order.
Imagine my surprise when Black folks, like myself, were identified as 'highly' susceptible to a so-called 'Chinese foreign' virus. Mainstream media drew attention to N.H.S. workers dying, particularly African, African Caribbean and Asian workers. Somehow, we had become a distraction, a dangerous proliferation of the pandemic.
Diverse communities now herded into a BAME description, while the rhetoric by officials only subjugated our already marginalised identity, and blame became linked to BAME.
Government and health spokespersons 'ramped up' the campaign in trying to 'coax' the vaccine to the 'vaccine hesitant', those who reflected their lack of trust in the 'powers that be' based on hundreds of years of apprehension and suspicion.
Cultural appropriation dominated the nation, yet our voices weren't narrating our story, our experiences, our concerns, fuelling the fear that spread faster than the pandemic itself.
I felt the usual disdain, patronised by misinformation and lack of transparency in this hegemonic system.
Ultimately racism is an inherent power - driven by fear and greed for control. It's an ideology woven into a social structure subtly, savagely and ominously perpetuated only to remain an active justification of superiority.
Until we can identify the facts, the CORE of racism for what it is, and the many levels on which it operates, we will not be able to make the real change necessary for each person to live their purpose without fear of being 'Hue-man', while celebrating and expressing origins.
Outro
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. Follow us on Instagram, twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All information about the festival and upcoming events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org. The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
The Birmingham Literature Festival podcast connects writers with readers. Join us for exciting and inspiring conversations about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues with writers from the Midlands and beyond. New episodes monthly from April 2021.
- Episode 1: January, Thomas Glave
This month’s piece is written by Thomas Glave, a Birmingham based writer and professor from Binghamton University in Upstate New York. He takes us on a walk amongst the silence of New Street’s squares and parks, finding birds and greenery in unexpected places and moments of peace in the quietness of our third lockdown.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Newsletter Podcast Transcript: Episode 1, Thomas Glave
Intro
Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast and our new series of commissioned writing about 2021. Each month we are commissioning a new writer to reflect on the month that has passed, offering us moments of connection through great writing and the opportunity to reflect about what we have collectively experienced at the end of the year.
We will be bringing you a new short episode at the start of each month, with each piece read by our guest writers. You can read the pieces on our website, where you will also find information about our upcoming digital events.
Reading
My name is Thomas Glave and I wrote this piece for the Birmingham Literature Festival, January 2021 Writers’ Blog.
What has this past month, partly a time of Covid-caused lockdown, been like? ‘Weird’, is how a Birmingham friend extremely fond of that word might have described it. But ‘weird’ is too vague, and doesn’t make room for all the specific moments. Moments like a walk I took one chilly dusk through Birmingham’s Brindleyplace, where, amidst all those tomb-quiet buildings, it was easy to imagine the opening scene of the zombie-apocalypse film 28 Days Later, that showed an unnervingly deserted London: ‘Hallo-hallo-hallo’, anyone could have shouted that evening, imagining the final-days echo: ‘Is anyone there-there-there?’ And what about the seagulls that flock through the West Midlands (and all the UK) throughout the year, hijacking unsuspecting people’s lunches? Didn’t they appear to be moving closer to the very few human beings out walking, as the darkness encroached and began to whisper, How’s this, you fancy this? And really, except for maybe one or two runners who darted past (and even they, so thin, might have been just birds or the ghosts of birds), there was almost nobody else about. . .nobody except a lone Brindleyplace security guard, who for a few seconds bent his head over a match’s flare to light a cigarette, before he disappeared behind one of those buildings as if he too had existed in real life only for a moment, then had been drawn back into the realm of dreams where security guards, cigarette in hand, wander alone forever, half-alive and half lockdown apparitions that melt into dusk in this city of hills and tall buildings and twisting stretching canals. . . on lockdown evenings like that one, the dusk always descended in time for the ensuing quiet to gather entirely around and wrap itself, its soft thick arms, all around your shoulders: the quiet of pandemic nights, of people gathered indoors and sometimes also isolated there, sometimes alone.
These past weeks were the unaccustomed quietness of pubs shuttered, restaurants stilled, railway stations and airports emptied, and all of us, the living and the waking, wondering what all this meant or could mean, and – often more insistently -- when it was going to end. Simultaneously, if we knew people who had fallen ill, we worried about them, prayed for them, and did all we could to ensure that they wouldn’t leave us just yet: not leave like that. Not so suddenly, so intubated. Not whilst gasping for breath behind some sterile partition, sequestered in a fluorescent-lit hospital ward. Not like that, without our hands to hold and our face to stroke, as we in turn wanted to hold and comfort them. Through it all, as we thought of them and seasonal gifts like the sorely missed brighter-than-bright Birmingham Christmas market, there was always the cloaking dusk, and then the sound of our own footsteps. Our feet that, as the season progressed, began to mutter Slow down, won’t you….please, for goodness’ sake, you simply must slow down.
And out of the slowing down, if we listened to those feet, arose a kind of blessedness as well. The kind that might have moved us to put up festive lights a little earlier in the season, aware that the increased lights and colours may have helped to cheer our neighbours. The kind that may even have moved us in an era of global stress and anxiety to speak with neighbours a bit longer when we saw them, and with more solicitous interest than usual, especially the elderly and the vulnerable. . . although hopefully always at a two-metre distance.
Our warming planet, meanwhile, began to thank us for lockdown and our decreased travel and traffic. Birds, other creatures, and every tree and bush expressed and continue to express their gratitude, from the Jewellery Quarter to Acocks Green and all the way to Kings Heath, as nature raised its eyebrows at our actual ability to step back and take a breath. Someone told me this week that I should listen carefully, in order to hear the sound of nature politely applauding our efforts. But if we can’t hear it, he said, this will be only because of the silence in between all other occurring things… the silence that assures that in spite of everything else, our hearts really are still in wonderful working order, still fond of us, and nowhere near prepared to stop.
Outro
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. Follow us on Instagram, twitter and facebook @bhamlitfest. All information about the festival and upcoming events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org. The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
The Birmingham Literature Festival podcast connects writers with readers. Join us for exciting and inspiring conversations about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues with writers from the Midlands and beyond. New episodes monthly from April 2021.
- Episode 3: March, Michael Amherst
This month, author Michael Amherst writes movingly about the death of his mother and losing her to cancer during a pandemic year. In a year when illness and death has been so much on all our minds, and spoken of daily all around us, Michael's thoughts on his very personal experience of caring for his mother reflect the heartbreak felt by families all over the region, and beyond, as we grieve with those who have lost loved ones in this past year. The piece is read by Ceri Morgan.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Newsletter Podcast Transcript: Episode 3, Michael Amherst
Intro
Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast and our new series of commissioned writing about 2021. Each month we are commissioning a new writer to reflect on the month that has passed, offering us moments of connection through great writing and the opportunity to reflect about what we have collectively experienced at the end of the year.
We will be bringing you a new short episode at the start of each month, with each piece read by our guest writers. You can read the pieces on our website, where you will also find information about our upcoming digital events.
Reading
Birmingham Literature Festival Writers Blog, March 2021. Written by Michael Amherst and read by Ceri Morgan.
This March we buried my mother. She died of cancer, not Covid, something that these days almost immediately needs clarification. There is then the mental gymnastics as to the comparative awfulness of both - the pandemic that prevents victims from saying goodbye to their families or the pandemic that makes victims of other, terminal illnesses unable to live their final months or year.
There is also another mental gymnastics - the dance around the rules and the opprobrium of others. I spent my Mum's final month staying with her and her husband to help look after her. Her doctors encouraged this, in spite of the pandemic, and yet there is a background anxiety that at this, one of the most difficult moments of our lives, we will have been found wanting by others, fortunate enough not to be in this position and faced with these choices.
Her decline was relatively rapid. Even in September I think we believed she might yet recover, certainly that her illness would allow her a year or two at worst. In August she had booked a holiday for us all in a farmhouse in Wales. However she cancelled this as her oncologist advised her that contracting Covid was too great to warrant the risk. My sister and I encouraged her to cancel it - we said there'd be other times, we could do it again next year. Had we known she only had six months left, I think we would all have decided to take the risk.
The other consequence of a year lived in stasis, in which nothing feels real, or everything feels real in new ways, is that her death does not, cannot feel real at all. For much of the last twelve months my communication with her was daily phone calls. I saw her maybe four or so times, before moving in to help. Usually I'd have visited at least once a month. So her absence has, in some cruel way, already happened. What is new is the lack of her voice on the phone or her loving gestures received by post. I joke that the last year feels like nothing more than a bad radio play. We are all waiting for it to end. And yet, there are brief moments where the reality of her death can be felt, almost as though from the corner of my eye, and I want to howl. Only for it to be swept on by, lost in the last twelve months.
The greatest comfort I have found has come from an unlikely source: Joseph Frank's Lectures on Dostoyevsky, a book I bought after happening upon a review. There have been times where it has felt the only currency is a rank pessimism - to hope, to look to after this, a failure of some kind. Some people seem to relish the potential horror of this pandemic never being past. Frank writes, 'For faith, in Dostoyevsky's terms, needs (or should need) nothing beside itself. Its purity is enhanced by the fact that it is assumed freely and quite independent of all proofs and rewards.' In different ways I think we are all learning the need and merit of faith of all kinds, even as we feel incapable of it. So I've started with a belief in my mother: her life, her choices, the things she made meaningful and the meaningful nature of her last year, different as it has been from what we all may have wanted.
Outro
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. Follow us on Instagram, twitter and facebook @bhamlitfest. All information about the festival and upcoming events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org. The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
The Birmingham Literature Festival podcast connects writers with readers. Join us for exciting and inspiring conversations about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues with writers from the Midlands and beyond. New episodes monthly from April 2021.
- Episode 2: February, Abda Khan
A year after the last full month of ‘normality’ for us all in February 2020, novelist and lawyer Abda Khan reflects on how a year of Covid-19 restrictions has impacted her and how much our lives have changed in hundreds of ways, from the major to the insignificant, since then.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Newsletter Podcast Transcript: Episode 2, Abda Khan
Intro
Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast and our new series of commissioned writing about 2021. Each month we are commissioning a new writer to reflect on the month that has passed, offering us moments of connection through great writing and the opportunity to reflect about what we have collectively experienced at the end of the year.
We will be bringing you a new short episode at the start of each month, with each piece read by our guest writers. You can read the pieces on our website, where you will also find information about our upcoming digital events.
Reading
Hello, my name is Abda Khan and here is a blog I wrote for Birmingham Literature Festival in February 2021.
When I was asked to write about how February has been for me, I started by looking back at photos from the same time last year. It struck me that during the almost yearlong state of lockdown, not only has life changed in ways previously unimaginable, but certain phrases have evaporated from our vocabulary, whilst others have taken hold. As a writer, I am intrigued by this.
February 2020; kicked off at a packed restaurant for a family birthday, I gave a talk about my Sidelines to Centre Stage Project at Wolverhampton Literature Festival where I mingled with attendees over tea and samosas, travelled to Glasgow and sat in a mosque full of hundreds of mourners after the death of my uncle, went into Tamworth Radio to talk about my novel Razia with three of us crammed into an airless studio smaller than a boxroom, had lunch with and gave a talk at Solihull Rotary Club, visited mac at Cannon Hill Park for discussions over coffee about a forthcoming project. And there were many more everyday happenings, not documented by the click of a phone camera, all of which are now unthinkable; legal work at the office where multiple clients would attend together, meeting friends in overcrowded coffee shops, enjoying the pictures with my kids (although they tell me that firstly, no one says ‘pictures’ anymore and secondly, as the youngest is now nearly 16, they’re no longer kids).
Now, life is Zoom, and Teams, hand sanitiser, and face masks, and everyone knows what WFH means. The most exhilarating activity is my weekly click and collect trip to Asda. Hands, face, space - now, we must all “look like letter boxes”, and the PM must think it peculiar how words come back to bite you.
No more does anyone ask “what are your plans for the weekend?” or “where are you going for your holiday?” No longer are we faced with dilemmas such as “how do I get out of that works do?”, nor does anyone wish “this dinner party would end.”
The loneliness that comes with being a writer has not changed. It is a solitary pursuit, often undertaken late into the night with only silence for company. Yet, other aspects of my life as a writer have disappeared, and these I miss; interacting at events face to face, being part of the buzz and chatter that can’t be replicated in a Zoom call (which always starts with “you’re on mute”). Still, technology has been a godsend; I have continued with book club, delivered numerous talks, attended courses, taught courses, persisted with my yoga, been to parents evening, hosted a poetry event, and watched every single episode of Spooks.
Having had a nasty run in with COVID myself, I feel fortunate to be alive, to have the hope that at least February 2022 will look more like my February 2020, and that the period of lockdown in between the two will eventually seem like that experience in your life which you hated every minute of, but one from which you learnt a great deal.
Outro
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. Follow us on Instagram, twitter and facebook @bhamlitfest. All information about the festival and upcoming events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org. The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
In this podcast, we’re joined by novelist Elisa Shua Dusapin, whose debut novel Winter in Sokcho was translated and published in the UK this year. In conversation with Dr Sandra van Lente and joined by her translator Aneesa Abbas Higgins, they discuss shared identities, isolation and the relationship between writing and translation.
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast brings writers and readers together to discuss some of 2020’s best books. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions
about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. Join us each week for exciting and inspiring conversations with new, and familiar, writers from the Midlands and beyond.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Guest Curator: Kit de Waal
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Podcast Transcription, Episode 13: Elisa Shua Dusapin and Aneesa Abbas Higgins
Kit de Waal
Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast series. I’m Kit de Waal and I’ve worked with the Festival Director, Shantel Edwards, as Guest Curator of this year’s podcast series. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. In this podcast, we’re joined by novelist Elisa Shua Dusapin, whose debut novel Winter in Sokcho was translated and published in the UK this year. Elisa’s novel follows a young French-Korean woman who works as a receptionist in a tired guesthouse in a deserted tourist town on the border between South and North Korea, and the uneasy relationship she forms with a French man who checks into the hotel. Joined by her translator, Aneesa Abbas Higgins, they discuss shared identities, isolation and the relationship between writing and translation.
Pro Helvetia Message
This episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast is supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.
Sandra van Lente
Thank you all for tuning in. My name is Sandra van Lente. I'm a freelance cultural project manager and academic who works on the lack of diversity in the publishing industries. I have the great pleasure to introduce you to today's guests on the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast series, Elisa Shua Dusapin and Aneesa Abbas Higgins. Elisa Shua Dusapin is a Franco Korean author who lives in Switzerland and wrote the novel Winter in Sokcho which we will be talking about today. Her debut novel was originally written in French and published by the Swiss indie publisher Editions, Zurich. Winter in Sokcho was translated into 13 languages if I'm not mistaken, among them English, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins and published by Daunt Books, and German, translated by Andreas Jandl and published by Blumenbar. Elisa has won several prizes for her novels, among them the Robert Walser prize, the Prix Alpha and the French Prix Régine Desforges for Winter in Sokcho. She has two more novels out that we might hear about more later.
Aneesa Abbas Higgins is a literary translator and translates from French to English. She spends most of her time between London and a small village in France. In addition to Elisa Shua Dusapin’s novel, she has also translated from Tahar Ben Jelloun, Nina Bouraoui and Vénus Khoury-Ghata. Her translations won several awards, for example, her translation of the Goncourt winner, What Became of the White Savage by François Garde, and a translation of A Girl Called Eel by Ali Zamir, which was published by the indie publisher Jacaranda books in 2019. Aneesa has kindly agreed to translate those of Elisa's answers that she might give in French today. Thank you both for joining us for this podcast. Can we please start with you, Elisa, and how you became an author. So how and why did you start writing?
Elisa Shua Dusapin (translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins)
She never, it wasn't that she specifically always wanted to become a writer. It was more questions that she had herself about the multicultural upbringing that she'd had being a mixture of Korean and French. So, when she was 13 she went to Korea for the first time and it came as quite a shock to her to realize that her family was not unique that there were plenty of other people in the world like her and it made her start thinking about things and it made her start to read a great deal and as she was reading she began to realise that writing might be a way of addressing the questions that she had about her own identity. So, Elisa was very lucky to have some wonderful teachers when she was in high school who encouraged her to write and she began writing - never thought about writing a novel - she was writing short texts that were to do with her French Korean identity. And it gradually grew into what became the novel Winter in Sokcho that, in fact, she wrote between the ages of 17 and 21. But she never thought about getting it published. And it wasn't published until she was 23 and that again was on the encouragement of a former teacher.
Sandra van Lente
Thanks a lot for sharing this Elisa. So, can you share with us, what did you set out to explore in your first novel?
Elisa Shua Dusapin (translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins)
She wanted to write, create a character who was something of a mirror image of herself. The opposite in a way but the same, so a young woman who had grown up in Korea, and who knew the French language through literature and studying and who also had this feeling of being a foreigner, a stranger in her own land even though she understood the culture and the language and that she had the same feeling of being out of place, but in two places also. She started writing this as she was coming out of adolescence at an age when we're thinking a great deal about our body, our relationship to our body, body image, our own image and she wanted to write something about the violence really that is done to women in South Korea in terms of the pressure to have plastic surgery done on one's face to make one conform to a certain image and how the young woman, the character in her novel relates to all of this violence and body image and pressure to have one's face look a certain way.
Sandra van Lente
Was there a character that you found more difficult to write than the others, Elisa, and if so, why?
Elisa Shua Dusapin (translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins)
The male character Kerrand was the most challenging, not so much difficult, but he was a character who she didn't first imagine that he would have to have a whole life story, a history, be a fully rounded person, she just wanted him to be there as an example of the male gaze. His function was to play the role of the male gaze so the narrator, the female narrator, could be reflected through him. So, at first all he had was a function and the rest of him as a person was something of a mystery to her.
Sandra van Lente
I would like to move on to the translation process then. Aneesa, how did this book come to you? And why did you choose to do the translation?
Aneesa Abbas Higgins
Well in fact, this was one of the books that I did find myself because it doesn't always work that way. You know, sometimes one is presented with a book and asked to translate it, but this one, I did find myself. I found it, when I'm in France, I always spend a lot of time lurking in my local bookshop, looking for interesting books. And I found the book sitting on the table there, in the recent publications. And it was a very, very hot few days, we often have heat waves, very, very intense heat waves. So, it was a very hot afternoon, I picked up this little book, I liked the title. I flicked through it, took it home and read it in one sitting and I was absolutely entranced. And I was entranced, I'm sure the fact that it was so hot, and the book was taking me to a place that was so cold, a blast of fresh air, but I fell in love with the way it was written. And I was completely seduced by the book and I thought I would love to translate this. So, I set about doing a sample and submitting it to publishers. And I was very fortunate it was picked up by the magazine Asymptote and Elisa was featured as one of their new French voices in a feature they were doing with my translation of the opening chapter. And so, one thing led to another and that led to Daunt Books finding it and asking me to translate it. So here we are a couple of years later.
Sandra van Lente
Amazing, thanks for sharing that. And Aneesa, what were the major challenges for you for the translation?
Aneesa Abbas Higgins
Every book has its own challenges, you know what you want to do is to recreate the author's voice as best as you can in English, and also to give the reader the same, or as close as possible, to the same experience that you have when you read it in French. So creating a translation is about a lot more than simply figuring out what the words mean, it's much more a question of digging beneath the images and finding how those images are conveyed. And this is a book which is full of intense imagery, some of it is quite visceral, some of it is very atmospheric. It is very visual, but it's also full of smells and tastes. And so the challenge was to convey the same images into English and to reflect Elisa's incredible economy of language, she has a great talent for using very few words to conjure something very rich and something that is so appealing to the imagination. So yes, I would say the fact that, I mean it’s quite a short book, there's quite a lot of empty space on the page. But it took a very long time because in a way it's like translating poetry, you know, every word has to be carefully weighed up not only against the French, but also against all the other words, in its little network, you know, words exist in a network, they slip and slide, the meanings and values and sounds and tones and rhythms can all change according to how you place them on the page. So, all of these things were part of the challenge and the pleasure because it is a great pleasure.
Sandra van Lente
Oh yeah, I hear you. Elisa, did you feel that you had to explain or maybe also translate some parts of Korean cultural aspects to French or Swiss readers? And if so, how did you decide what you explained in more detail and what not?
Elisa Shua Dusapin (translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins)
She never thought that she was trying to teach or tell anybody about Korean culture. That wasn't her idea at all because for her Korean culture was simply part of her life. She lived it, she grew up hearing the language spoken, eating the food, you know, it was very much part of her life. And the last thing she wanted to do was to create a novel that was in any way didactic. So really, her approach was much more that she wanted to just immerse the reader, although as she said when she was writing, she wasn't even imagining it being read, she had no idea of a reader in mind. But in a way, what she was doing was she was trying to create a universe that immerses us in the world of this Korean culture as she knows it, which I think she does very well.
Sandra van Lente
I couldn't agree more, as a reader I really enjoyed that too. And I'm asking this question, because I know that there are some other publishers who feel a bit different about that, and might maybe put some pressure, especially on debut authors to explain a bit more for different cultural contexts. So yeah, I'm glad that you didn't feel this pressure at all. Can I ask you two, how did you work together? Was it a close collaboration? And can you share a bit about that? Aneesa first please.
Aneesa Abbas Higgins
Yes, we did work together in some ways. I was, you know, I was very fortunate that Elisa was so responsive to my questions. My approach with asking authors questions, what I usually do is wait until I finish my first draft. And I think I did that this time. I hope I did. Because what I try to do is I try to keep a running track of my questions as I go through it, and some of them will answer themselves as I go along. So, I do try to wait until I've got some questions that I know are worthy of, you know, the author's input. And then I also found that as we were editing it some of the questions that came back to me from the editor, Jelke, who did a superb job, I have to say of editing. The questions that she asked me forced me to ask myself again, whether I had fully understood or whether what I had understood was, you know, the only, whether there were better ways of understanding. So, I don't think as far as proofreading, but certainly we kept on coming back to it. And she was great. She always sent me very long considered answers. And we communicate in a mixture of English and French, you know, I sometimes write to her in English and she answers me in French. And we're both quite happy with that. So yeah, and they weren't necessarily questions about specific words and details of words. They really were more to do with the ideas, underlying the images, clarifying that I had understood them in a way that Elisa…because English sometimes needs to spell things out a little more than French does, you know, in French, it is a little bit more possible to present an idea in such a way that it remains quite elusive and ambiguous. That doesn't work so well in English and sometimes one does have to pin it down a little more in English just because the language demands it.
Elisa Shua Dusapin (translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins)
She appreciated our collaboration, that I paid so much attention to the to the finer details and she did appreciate it. I’m very glad, I think the text, you know, was infinitely worthy of this. So, of course, I was going to ask all those questions, but she also said that when she was writing it, in fact, in her head, none of the characters were actually speaking French anyway, they were speaking English or they were speaking Korean. So being asked to explain in greater detail, what was meant by some of the things that were said or some of the things behind the characters sort of plunged her into an understanding that the book had, it had gone beyond her, that it could be interpreted and understood and translated in all the different senses of the word. And it was quite a revelation to her.
Sandra van Lente
Thank you very much. And Elisa do you always work so closely with your translators? And can you maybe share some of the experience you meet with different translators.
Elisa Shua Dusapin (translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins)
Elisa hasn't worked as closely with her other translators, and that the collaboration that we had was particularly rich. Her collaboration with the other translators wasn't quite as rich as the collaboration that she and I had for the English translation. For the German translation, it was interesting because that's another language she understands and she was able to follow it more closely and appreciate it more. And also with the Korean because she does understand and speak Korean but she had no contact at all with the Korean translator and she would have liked to have done and she found that reading the Korean translation, there's a feeling of strangeness because the translator stuck very closely to the structures of the French language. And the effect that that has in Korean, it makes it seem very foreign and very strange, which is an interesting point. Because it is something that, this is me adding this now, that goes backwards and forwards in the translation world, should one aim for that feeling of foreignness, because this is a translation or should one aim to give a translation which is a more authentic rendering of the effect that the book has on the reader. So that's an interesting point.
She doesn't have a negative opinion at all of the Korean translation, its just that she would have liked to have had more communication with the translator. For example, in the Korean language, the subject pronoun ‘I’ is avoided, it's not used, whereas in French, it's used quite a lot. And that Elisa's character in Winter in Sokcho, her main character is a young woman who is in fact, she's a voice in search of a body. She is a young woman who's looking for herself, she's unsure of herself, but in the Korean translation, because of the use of the pronoun ‘I’, she comes across as a much more assured person, a person who's much surer of herself which is a strange quirk, the difference.
Sandra van Lente
Thank you two very much. Now we have heard a lot about the book. Can we please hear from the book now? Elisa, would you mind starting the reading please?
Elisa Shua Dusapin (translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins)
[Extract from Winter in Sokcho]
“At the bus stop there was no one but us.
‘So you're French? From Normandy?’
I nodded to show I understood.
‘You've heard of it?’
‘I’ve read Maupassant’.
He turned to look at me.
‘How do you picture it?’
I thought for a moment.
‘Pretty. A bit melancholy.’
‘Well, it's changed since Maupassant’s day.’
‘I'm sure it has. Like Sokcho.’
Kerrand didn't reply. He'd never understand what Sokcho was like. You had to be born here, live through the winters. The smells. The octopus. The isolation.
‘Do you read a lot?’ he asked.
‘I used to before I went to university. I used to love reading. Now it's more of a chore.’ He nodded, tightened his grip on the package he was holding.
‘What about you?’
‘Do I read?’
‘What do you do for a living?’
‘I draw. Comics.’
The word comics didn't sound right coming from him. It conjured up images of conventions, queueing fans. Maybe he was famous. I didn't read comic books.
‘Is your story set here?’
‘I don't know yet. Maybe.’
‘Are you on holiday?’
‘There's no such thing as a holiday in my line of work.’
That evening, he wasn't there again at dinner. Feeling emboldened after our walk, I took him a tray of food that was less spicy than the meals served to the other guests. He was sitting on the edge of the bed. His stooping figure silhouetted against the paper wall. The door had been left ajar. Pressing my face to the doorframe, I could see his hand moving over a sheet of paper. He placed the paper on top of a box on his lap. The pencil between his fingers was finding its way, moving forwards and backwards, hesitant, searching again. The point hadn't yet touched the paper. Kerrand began to draw with uneven strokes. He went over the lines several times, as if to erase and correct, etching the contours into the paper. The image was impossible to make out, branches of a tree or a heap of scrap metal perhaps. Eventually, I recognized the shape of an eye, a dark eye, beneath a tangle of hair. The pencil continued in its path until a female form emerged, eyes a bit too large, a tiny mouth. She was perfect. He should have stopped there.
But he carried on, going over the features, gradually twisting the lips, warping the chin, distorting the image. Then, taking a pen, he daubed ink slowly and purposefully over the paper until the woman was nothing more than a black misshapen blob. He placed a sheet of paper on the desk. Ink dripped down onto the floor. A spider scuttled into view and started to run up his leg, but he made no move to brush it away. He looked down at his handiwork. In an instinctive movement, he tore off a corner of the sheet and began to chew on it. I was afraid he'd see me. I put the tray down silently and left.”
Sandra van Lente
Thanks a lot Elisa and Aneesa. If you want to read it in full now, Aneesa’s translation of Elisa's novel, Winter in Sokcho, was published this year by Daunt Books. And maybe as a last question, what are you currently working on Elisa and can you share something about your new book?
Elisa Shua Dusapin (translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins)
Elisa's third novel has just been published this August and the title is Vladivostok Circus. And it's a story about a trio who perform the very dangerous discipline of the Russian bar. They are creating a new act. They're based in Vladivostok and the novel is told from the point of view of a young costume designer who comes to Vladivostok from Switzerland to work with them, and who gets to know them and has to work with them on the level of trying to understand and get inside this vitally important bond of trust that has to exist between the three performers, for them to carry out this extremely dangerous circus discipline. So that's what that novel is about. Apart from that, Elisa has been working on the cinema adaptation of Winter in Sokcho. And she's also been creating a young adult play, which will be being performed in January. When she has finished a novel, she needs to do something else for while, she writes in other areas too in order to distance herself from the novel that is completed before she can begin on the very long task of creating another novel.
Sandra van Lente
Thank you very much Elisa and Aneesa for participating in this podcast and for sharing so openly. I hope you two get to work together on the next translation too, I know there are many people looking forward to it. Thanks a lot. And goodbye.
Elisa Shua Dusapin
Thank you very much.
Aneesa Abbas Higgins
Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
Outro message
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love for you to tell us about it – leave us a review or a rating and find us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. You can download our latest podcast episodes, every Thursday, from all the places you would normally get your podcasts and find transcripts of our episodes in the shownotes and on our website at www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org . Details about our full programme can also be found on our website. Until then, happy reading!
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is curated by Shantel Edwards and produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
Today’s episode brings together 3 Midlands women, authors Mandy Ross, Abda Khan and Roz Goddard, in conversation about the importance of literature in creating connections and fostering empathy. As members of interfaith organisation Nisa Nashim, Mandy and Abda run a monthly book club that brings together Muslim and Jewish women. In conversation with Roz Goddard, they talk about the intersections of faith and feminism and the power of literature to provide space for exchange and connection.
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast brings writers and readers together to discuss some of 2020’s best books. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions
about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. Join us each week for exciting and inspiring conversations with new, and familiar, writers from the Midlands and beyond.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
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Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Guest Curator: Kit de Waal
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Podcast Transcription, Episode 12: Roz Goddard, Abda Khan and Mandy Ross
Kit de Waal
Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast series. I’m Kit de Waal and I’ve worked with the Festival Director, Shantel Edwards, as Guest Curator of this year’s podcast series. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. Today’s episode brings together 3 Midlands women, authors Mandy Ross, Abda Khan and Roz Goddard, in conversation about the importance of literature in creating connections and fostering empathy. As members of interfaith organisation Nisa Nashim, Mandy and Abda run a monthly book club that brings together Muslim and Jewish women. Each month they read a book written by a Jewish or Muslim woman, finding within the pages, and their discussions, more things that unite them than divide them. In conversation with Roz Goddard, they talk about the intersections of faith and feminism and the power of literature to provide space for exchange and connection.
Sponsor message: Birmingham City University
This episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast is brought to you in partnership with the School of English at Birmingham City University. Visit our website at www.bcu.ac.uk/english for details of our undergraduate, postgraduate and research degree programmes.
Roz Goddard
Hello, and welcome to the Birmingham Literature Festival. My name's Roz Goddard. I'm a poet living in the Black Country and seem to have embraced Zoom as my home office. I'm delighted to be hosting this podcast from my loft, where I'll be in conversation with Abda Khan and Mandy Ross. They're the founders of Nisa-Nashim, an interfaith book group based in Birmingham. Nisa-Nashim is also a national Jewish Muslim Women's Network working to promote interfaith understanding. So first, introductions. Mandy Ross has written over 60 children's books and also poetry and plays for adults. With Ronne Randall she co-edited [For Generations:] Jewish Motherhood, published by Five Leaves Publications. This year Mandy is the Tree Whisperer: Poet of the Woods for the Ledbury Poetry Festival. A member of Birmingham Progressive Synagogue, Mandy has worked in many interfaith settings and has a longstanding interest in using reading to explore cultural identity. Abda Khan is a lawyer turned writer, her published novels being Stained (2016) and Razia (2019). She's currently writing her next novel. Abda is also a project creator, campaigner, volunteer, mentor and Lloyds Bank Women of the Future Ambassador. Abda was highly commended in the NatWest Asian Women of Achievement Awards 2017 and won British Muslim Woman of the Year at the British Muslim Awards 2019, and most recently shortlisted for the Law Society Lifetime Achievement Award. Welcome to you both.
Mandy Ross
Thank you.
Abda Khan
Hi Roz.
Roz Goddard
Hello. To Abda then first of all to get us started. Could you tell us something about the background to Nisa Nashim and how you and Mandy came to collaborate and develop it?
Abda Khan
Mandy and I met at an event that we both attended as speakers. So, it was the Writing West Midlands National Writers' Conference. And we just got chatting. And when we got chatting we just started talking about, you know, a lot of the issues that we were interested in. And then Mandy mentioned Nisa-Nashim as an organisation. And she said, 'Oh, you know, we've got this organisation, Nisa-Nashim; I don't know if you'd be interested in us – just Jewish [and] Muslim women getting together, talking about and dealing with certain issues'. And I said, 'Oh, yeah, just, just pop me on your mailing list and then that'd be great'. So what happened then was, Mandy emailed me and said – it was actually Mandy that set up the Nisa-Nashim book club, I have to say, but obviously, I jumped in. And then she emailed me and she said, 'Oh, I'm setting up this Nisa-Nashim book club. Would you like to come as a guest author, and come speak about your book, Razia?' So, I attended the first meeting not as a member of the book club, but as somebody who just went along to speak about her book. And actually, it was just such a lovely environment. And the women were so, so nice. And I think that there was just this lovely sort of camaraderie and this exploring of common themes and common ideas, common issues, common problems. And I just enjoyed it so much that I then joined it. And then from there it's just been great. It's been developing throughout this year. It's been wonderful getting together initially in person but, obviously, later on now it's been through Zoom since COVID. So really it was just this kind of friendship we struck up at an event. I had nothing to do with Nisa-Nashim, which just shows you how you can just come together when you've got things that you find out are in common. It's just that human touch, isn't it? It's just that human aspect of talking to somebody and then actually realising that you've got so much in common – okay, I'm Muslim and Mandy's Jewish but through literature and through exploring books and themes we just realised that me and all these other women and Mandy together we actually have so much that, you know, kind of unites us, and we find out so much about each other and even ourselves. And that's kind of how the book group has developed.
Roz Goddard
And isn't it incredibly fortuitous when we meet someone as you did with Mandy and you realise that there is that underlying connection, that rapport that can be developed? And that's the very best way to start. Yeah, so thank you for that. Really lovely background info there. Mandy, could you give us a flavour of how the meetings are organised and actually how books are selected?
Mandy Ross
Yes, well, as Abda said, we met in person at the beginning and we had a really big attendance: we had about 18, 19 women. And we were careful, we wanted to make sure that we had a fairly balanced group with, you know, roughly equal numbers of Jewish and Muslim women. And we did. And we took a pause during lockdown and then have found a way to start by meeting online. And the books are chosen, at the moment Abda and Karen Skinazi are chairing the group and they've been choosing the books. And I think it's been a great selection of very different books, a great range of different kinds of books that bring all sorts of different questions for us. And we find common ground; we find things that resonate sometimes unexpectedly. We've recently read Kaaterskill Falls by Allegra Goodman, an American-Jewish writer. And she's written about a super-Orthodox community living in New York and spending their summers upstate in this little town, Kaaterskill Falls. And it's a very, very Orthodox community: there isn't an equivalent in Birmingham. And for me it was like reading almost a different world from my experience of the Jewish world that I'm in. And yet when we read it together, we could see that some of the Muslim women were finding resonances and echoes that were closer perhaps to some of their experience than it was to mine. So I suppose what I'm finding as we're reading is that there are differences within our own communities, and subtleties and nuance that you wouldn't be aware of in the other group. And finding out where the similarities and where the differences are within our communities and between our communities.
Roz Goddard
Absolutely. I can really understand that. And I think it's going to be fascinating for us to talk about how you feel literature can be a vehicle for creating better interfaith and cultural harmony. So it would be nice to, I think, dig into the text a little more. Would you like to perhaps read us an extract from Kaaterskill Falls?
Mandy Ross
Yes, okay. It's a novel that weaves several family stories together. And I'm focusing on Elizabeth who's a mother of five children living with her husband, and her children are becoming … the littlest one is able to walk and they can go to children's activities. And she has, suddenly, a glimpse of freedom and space and time for her to think about something other than being a mother. And being a mother in both our cultures is, and in every culture, I guess, is really important. But she's thinking about what else can she do. And what is she able to do within this very Orthodox, very devout community. What will she find that she's allowed to do and be free to do? She talks about at 34, after all the five pregnancies and babies the constant responsibility: “it's like waking from a dream, an exhausting, beautiful dream. But on waking Elizabeth doesn't feel relieved or peaceful. She's ravenously hungry, she needs something to do.”
And what she decides she wants to do is to open a store to sell the kosher food that the community needs. But to do that she needs her husband's permission and support. And she needs to go with her husband to ask the Rabbi, Rav Kirshner, who is the authority, his authority runs the community, really. And so she has to find a way to persuade her husband, who at first is cautious and uncertain whether this is something that she should do, that he should support, and eventually he comes round to support her. And she needs that support from him otherwise it wouldn't be possible for her. So she's discussing with her husband:
[Extract from Kaaterskill Falls]
“Isaac,' she says. 'I can do this myself.'
She's talking about wanting to open the store. She says the words in anger, knowing they are untrue. She couldn't go on if he refused. She couldn't oppose him in that way, and of course, the Rav [the rabbi] would never give her permission for her alone to open this store. He wouldn't even see her if she came to him alone. The Rav doesn't really speak to women, not women outside his family, not women with business propositions.’
So I think that gives us a flavour of how the book is exploring how women's lives can unfold within the kind of community that she lives in. And finding a balance really between what women want within a community of faith.
Roz Goddard
Yes, yes, absolutely. And I wondered has fostering a spirit of exploration and curiosity been an important aspect of developing your discussions around what can be quite sort of tender themes, where people might have very strong views? Could you perhaps say something about the way that the discussions have developed?
Mandy Ross
Well, I should say that I've been in a Jewish reading group for about 20 years, a really long time. And in that group we've been exploring our sense of identity by reading our literature and it's really given me a feel for my cultural heritage. And I suppose when we set up the book group what I wanted to do was to be able to share that exploration of reading our culture and reading your culture, Abda, and sharing it and finding out where we overlap and where the differences are. And being able to hear each other and being able to ask the questions that can be difficult to find a place to ask those questions. And as you say, Roz, there are, you know, there are differences between us. I've said it sometimes feels a bit like belonging to a big family, where we know that there are differences and very uncomfortable issues between us. And almost like being in a family where there's a row or a feud or the Yiddish word is broiges. And yet we're finding a way to meet and to speak and to listen to each other. And to raise you know, the difficult issues around Israel-Palestine, around how Jews and Muslims are seen in the wider world, and to hear what each other has to say and feels about some of those difficult issues. And the fact that we can come together and hear each other feels like a small but very important connection and bridge between our communities.
Roz Goddard
Thank you. And so, Abda, say a little more if you would please about what you discovered about your own faith from the discussions that have emerged in the group. And also, perhaps talk to us about another book selection that you've recently read, which is Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie. Could you say a little about that, too?
Abda Khan
Yeah, yeah, of course. So, Home Fire is the book that I chose and that's the last one that we discussed as a group. So Home Fire is a really interesting novel, which revolves around a family, the Pasha family. Three siblings, they're orphaned and the eldest sibling, Isma, looks after the younger twins. And they have a bit of a difficult history because their father was a jihadi who died in his, you know, cause. And the twins, the brother and sister, the brother, Parvaiz, is groomed by someone who convinces him to follow his father's footsteps. So then there ensues the issue of trying to get him to come back when he realises he's made a big mistake. And his twin sister starts a relationship with the Home Secretary's son. And now, the Home Secretary is Karamat Lone, who has kind of rejected his Muslim background and his heritage in an effort to feed in his career. So then, you know, that sort of travels along from there, and it's not a great ending, to be honest, for the Pasha family.
But, you know, it's an interesting book because there's so many themes in there that we realise are quite common to us. You know, first of all, things like your identity, your loyalty – your loyalty to the state or loyalty to your family. And we found that discussing, you know, even the Israel-Palestine issue: where should your loyalty lie – to your family, to your state, to your people? And also, and I think I found Karamat Lone a very interesting character because hadn't really thought about sort of sacrificing your own identity or your heritage in an effort to do well in the world, do you know what I mean? And I think that, you know, a couple of the women when we discussed this said, 'Oh, we don't see a Jewish Prime Minister in our lifetime'. And I said, 'Well, I don't really think there'll be a Muslim Prime Minister in my lifetime, to be honest'. And we all kind of agreed that, you know, this is something that we don't often think about but it's probably more common in our thoughts then we probably realise. And somebody like Karamat Lone is probably more common than I realised because I hadn't really thought about it before, about people who kind of go out of their way not to identify with their heritage or their religion. But when I actually thought about it, I realised I've met lots of people like that, but hadn't really sort of, you know, picked up on it at the time. So, you know, it's just really interesting how all these different issues, you know, sort of, were common between us all; and I actually realised that, you know, going back to Kaaterskill Falls, what Mandy was saying that, you know, about the super-ultra-Orthodox community that was very insular. And I found that actually, I could relate to that more than Mandy could because I felt as though the Muslim community and the Pakistani community that I come from, in the past and even now have tried so hard to hang on to their culture and heritage and their religious values, that they actually became very insular because they're so afraid of sort of losing that connection with their own identity.
So, there's lots of issues that I think came out of this book for all of us. It was a fascinating read, it really was, and I can read a little extract, actually, that I can relate to, and it's near the beginning of the book and Isma is leaving England to go study in the States because, you know, her twins are finally grown up, and she feels that she can leave behind that responsibility. And it's interesting when I used to wear a headscarf, and every time I used to go through Birmingham Airport I used to get stopped without fail. And I used to get stopped and asked lots of questions. And then one day I decided that I was going to take my scarf off or just put it around my neck and see what happened. And I didn't get stopped. And every time after that that I did that I didn't get stopped. So, when I read this extract it kind of reminded me of my own experiences. So Isma is trying to fly out to the States and she gets stopped by security. I'm just gonna read a little extract of what follows. And the perception or the idea that Muslim women can't be successful or can't have aspirations – it's coming back to a little bit about Elizabeth and Kaaterskill Falls because, you know, there's all these expectations about what women should do what they should be like. And so likewise in this novel it explores the expectation of what a Muslim woman is supposed to be like or what she's supposed to do. So, I'm just gonna dive straight in.
[Extract from Home Fire]
“So the officer finally reached for the designer label down jacket Isma had folded over a chair back when she'd entered and held it up, one hand pinching it shoulder.
'This isn't yours,' she said. And Isma was sure she didn't mean because it's at least a size too large, but rather, It's too nice for someone like you.
'I used to work in a dry cleaning shop. The woman who brought this in said she didn't want it because we couldn't get rid of the stain.'
She pointed to the grease mark on the pocket. 'Does the manager know you took it?' 'I was the manager.'
'You were the manager of a dry cleaning shop, and now you're on your way to a PhD program in Sociology in Amherst, Massachusetts?'
'Yes.'
'And how did that happen?'
'My siblings and I were orphaned just after I finished uni. They were 12-years-old twins. I took the first job I could find. Now they've grown up I can go back to my life.'
'You're going back to your life in Amherst, Massachusetts?'
'I meant the academic life. My former tutor from LSE teaches in Amherst now at the university there. Her name is Hira Shah. You can call her. I'll be staying with her when I arrive until I find a place of my own in Amherst.'
So, you see, I think there’s this idea that, you know, she can't possibly believe that this woman is not gonna to be a terrorist. She must be going over to cause some trouble. Obviously, she can't be going over to study a PhD in Amherst, Massachusetts so. And that kind of reminds me of my Career Adviser when I was about 15 years old and going in for careers advice. And I remember she asked me what I wanted to do. And I said I'd quite like to go to university and study law. And she said, she just looked at me and I'll never forget the look, and she said, 'Girls like you don't study law, do they? Girls like you don't go to university. So perhaps you might think of something else'. And I think that, you know, this passage struck a chord with me for that reason. So I think yeah, I think the meetings have proved that, you know, we have so many issues in common that we can explore through the medium of literature.
Roz Goddard
Yes. Just on that point – I mean, I was very struck and moved by Isma's experience of interrogation en route to Boston, and the many accommodations, you know, that she's learned to make to pacify officialdom. And what struck me was I don't think I would have been as moved by a news report of that incident. But somehow through the writing we're invited to step into her shoes and to develop some empathy. And that does bring us to this question of how both books with their real narrative drive and nuanced portraits of characters, how they do enable us to step into another's shoes. Have you found that, Mandy, has been a developing part of the group, this large open-heartedness, this empathy, this quality of listening?
Mandy Ross
Yes, I think so. And Abda has talked very, very clearly about fiction as a vehicle to allow you to explore a story. But you do, you inhabit a character when you're reading them, and then you're experiencing or you're getting closer to experiencing something that you haven't experienced in your own life. So I think it does give you insight, I think it allows you to imagine how a different life might be. And that's been a real privilege. And I've also been aware – we've been reading a book by a Jewish author next – and this time as I've been reading it I've been thinking, I'm reading this, I'm imagining these Jewish characters, and I'm also imagining the Muslim woman reading alongside me and what they're making of these Jewish characters that they're reading about. Abda, I'm sure you've got more to say on that?
Abda Khan
Yeah, I think it's a really unique experience, isn't it, to actually sit and look at each other as though you're a mirror, you know? And you're kind of like, you're seeing yourself almost reflected in the Jewish woman who's opposite you because you see things that are in common. But then you also discover things that you didn't know before. And you also find a way to kind of like, through the characters, look into issues that you might never have thought about before: issues that didn't really concern you, or, you know, you just didn't have the motivation or the inclination to think about or dwell on before. So I think fiction, it such a fantastic vehicle to bring people together. I am so passionate about this, I feel as though these kinds of community book clubs should become compulsory because I feel as though communities can come together when they explore things, matters, problems, issues, ideas through fiction. Fiction is a great way because it's not real so you don't have to talk about reality almost. But, because it's fiction that deals with real issues, it gives you licence to talk about difficult things without it being really, really personal. So, you know, we have touched on Israel-Palestine. I mean, you can't ignore Israel-Palestine, that that issue is there, you can't ignore it. But it just shows you how you can have that friendship despite the fact that there is this massive issue. And you're sensitive, I am sensitive and I am aware that I mustn't say something that can be misconstrued and be offensive. And that's quite important. And vice versa. I think feelings of the Jewish women are really, really sensitive about, you know, the fact that we feel passionately about Palestine as well. So, I just think that, you know, if Jewish and Muslim women can do this with this massive, huge issue like Palestine, imagine what other communities can do. We know there's a lot of hatred in society at the moment. We know there's a lot of hate crime. We know that, you know, there's a lot of infighting in communities. Community book clubs like this are a real tonic and a real positive way to deal with problems that we are facing that we can't really hide from.
Roz Goddard
I think you touch on there a really important point about the way in which we communicate with each other. And in the Buddhist Sangha, which I'm part of, which is the spiritual community, there's a strong precept around 'right speech', that's to say we try to be truthful, kindly and harmonious even in disagreement. So, really, yes, to both of you: you know, have you found that when disagreements arise that they are handled with tolerance? And how have you handled strong feelings if they arise in the group? How's that sort of communication angle dealt with as it were?
Mandy Ross
I feel as though we're just beginning to find our way with how to hear each other, and to recognise that there are very different, strong emotions on both sides, and different narratives, and we haven't necessarily heard each other's narratives truthfully. And so, I feel that it's a long journey that we're setting out on. And the trust we need, we need to be able to trust each other, to hear and to listen and to bear things that feel very difficult to bear. And I feel there's another mirror there, which is that I recognise that for both Jews and Muslims we are held sometimes almost personally responsible for the actions of others who are members of our faith group, who we don't necessarily agree with. And yet those subtleties are sometimes not recognised. So again, it's a chance to recognise those difficulties. And to – I keep saying – to be able to speak and to listen to each other.
Abda Khan
And coming back to what Mandy was saying about being held responsible for what people in our faith community do: I think that's a really important point because being Muslim you always seem to be making excuses for, or explaining, or offer reasons how you're not part of terrorism and, you know, you do disown terrorism, you do denounce it. And it feels like you're forever, kind of like explaining to people that you're not that person. And I feel as though the Jewish Muslim thing, I feel as though we understand each other on that level because, you know, we don't always agree with what other people and even leaders in our communities in our faith groups do. But sometimes it's difficult to get your voice heard out there, it's always controversial things that get heard, it's never the happy, the peace-loving, the positive stories that can always, you know, make a breakthrough. So it's nice to have our group where we can actually share those ideas and say, you know, it's great to be somewhere where we can talk honestly about these things and say, 'You know what? Hey, I'm just a Muslim, you know. I'm not part of this or that. I've got free thought and I want to be perceived like that'. So, I think it's just such a lovely safe space in which to do that.
Mandy Ross
And I would add as well that there may be conflicted feelings, bonds that you feel despite disagreement within your faith group, I think. I feel it's a very complicated series of connections that we, as Abda says, we're able to begin to unpick and explore together in the group.
Roz Goddard
And isn't it absolutely crucial that we're having these conversations, and that these creative conversations are starting to happen more and more? For example, I'm part of a race affinity group at the Birmingham Buddhist Centre. And I've found in discussions that we have that sometimes I feel words get stuck in my throat because I have this fear of causing offence, being clunky, not knowing the right form of words. But the brilliant thing is that the conversations are happening and we are moving forward. We're being heard together. And it sounds very much as if that's what goes on in your group.
Mandy Ross
Yes, and I was going to say, Abda referred to an incident in South Birmingham in July, where one of our members spotted a horrible piece of anti-Semitic graffiti. I've never seen something like that close to home. And she told about it in the group, in our What's App group, and Jewish and Muslim women came together to stand together beside this piece of graffiti and call the police to remove it. And my rabbi, our woman Rabbi, Margaret Jacobi, came and our MP came for the constituency. And we stood together against that anti-Semitic graffiti and we made a new sign that said that we were Jewish and Muslim women standing together against hatred. And I feel very sure that should it be necessary, and I hope it won't, that if there were anti-Muslim graffiti we would go and stand together against that kind of hatred. And in these times when yes, it can feel as though hatred is rising – and there are many groups who are vulnerable to hatred for race or for their faith or ethnicity or LGBT groups – it's really important that we can stand together rather than allowing ourselves to be picked off individually. So that's been a very important part of the group in action.
Abda Khan
So you can never underestimate the ripple effect of having interactions like this in a book group so. I think if anybody's listening out there and they're thinking of setting up a book group based on whatever, you know, whatever kind of ideas they've got, please go ahead and do it because you can never underestimate that the ripple effect of everybody sort of going home and talking to their family, and perhaps the child talking somebody at school. And this is the ripple effect. When you learn something about somebody, a person from a different community or faith or background or colour, whatever it might be, that you didn't know before, and that helps you to understand them better; and you know, you're inevitably gonna talk about it with your work colleagues, your friends, your family, and then that has a ripple effect. And I feel as though the ripple effect can't be underestimated because that helps, you know, improve relations within society generally.
Mandy Ross
Yeah, definitely.
Roz Goddard
The 'ripple effect' – how wonderful! I thought it would be lovely for us to finish this podcast with a very short extract from both books that show Elizabeth and Isma in their strength and dignity. So perhaps, Abda, if I could turn to you first.
Abda Khan
Yeah, I'm just gonna continue with the previous, because I feel like the listeners might want to know what happened after my previous little extract. So, we just got to the bit where she's explaining she's going to be in Amherst, Massachusetts. And the reason I want to read this extract, it just shows how dignified she is even in a situation like this where she's being interrogated and humiliated almost. So, I think I'll just continue reading that if that's okay.
[Extract from Home Fire]
“'You're going back to your life in Amherst, Massachusetts?'
'I meant the academic life. My former tutor from LSE teaches in Amherst now at the university there. Her name is Hira Shah. You can call her. I'll be staying with her when I arrive until I find a place of my own.' 'In Amherst?'
'No, I don't know. Sorry. Do you mean her place or the place of my own? She lives in North Hampton. That's close to Amherst. I'll look all around the area for whatever suits me best. So, it might be Amherst, but it might not. There are some real estate listings on my phone, which you have.'
She stopped herself. The official was doing that thing which she'd encountered before in security personnel: staying quiet when you answer their question in a straightforward manner, which made her think that you had more to say, and the more you said, the more guilty you sounded.
The woman dropped the jacket into the jumble of clothes and shoes and told Isma to wait. That had been a long while ago. The plane would be boarding now. Isma looked over at the suitcase. She'd repacked when the woman left the room and spent the time since worrying if what she'd done without permission constituted an offence. Should she empty the clothes out in a haphazard pile or would that make things worse? She stood up, unzipped the suitcase and flipped it open so its contents were visible. A man entered the office bearing Isma's passport, laptop and phone. She allowed herself to hope but he sat down, gestured for her to do the same and placed a voice recorder between them. 'Do you consider yourself British?' the man said.
'I am British.'
'But do you consider yourself British?'
'I've lived here all my life.' She meant there was no other country of which she could feed herself a part, but the words came out sounding evasive.
The interrogation continued for nearly two hours. He wanted to know her thoughts on Shias, homosexuals, the Queen, democracy, Great British Bake Off, the invasion of Iraq, Israel, suicide bombers, dating websites. After the early slip regarding her Britishness, she settled into the manner that she'd practised, with Aneeka playing the role of the interrogating officer, Isma responding to her sister as though she was a customer of dubious political opinions whose business she didn't want to lose by voicing strenuously opposing views but to whom she didn't see the need to lie either: 'When people talk about the enmity between Shia and Sunni, it usually centres around some political imbalance of power, such as Iraq or Syria as a Brit I don't distinguish between one Muslim and another. Occupying other people's territory generally causes more problems than it solves.' This served both for Iraq and Israel. 'Killing civilians is sinful. That's equally true if the manner of killing is a suicide bombing or aerial bombardment or drone strikes.'
There were long intervals of silence between each answer and the next question as the man clicked away.”
Roz Goddard
Thank you, Abda. Mandy?
Mandy Ross
Yes, I've chosen a passage towards the end of Kaaterskill Falls, which I feel is exploring how to reconcile a feminism, a woman's wish for independence and the authority – a very masculine authority. And we haven't talked about that, about how our book group is a place for women's voices both as writers and as readers in two cultures that have been traditionally predominantly very male run. So here we are, this is about the Rav's authority, the rabbi's authority in the community. And to Isaac, Elizabeth's husband, it's not a matter of politics, following the Rav is and always will be for Isaac, an issue of aspiring to the best life.
[Extract from Kaaterskill Falls]
“Elizabeth had been innocent like this but curious. She envies her husband his devotion. She wonders even now what her daughters will inherit and discover. Whether they will shake themselves and venture out, even if only to touch the larger world – the city with its thousand neighbourhoods and businesses, its traffic, its steel bridges pointing to far places. Whether they will take exotic paths, researching in libraries or entering law school, learning languages; and she doesn't know what else. Or whether, like their father, they will absorb themselves in the life and turn heart and mind toward the khilh, the community.”
So that feels to me like the heart of the book, how to balance being part of a devout community with what women can aspire to.
Roz Goddard
Mandy Ross and Abda Khan, thank you both so much for being part of this fascinating Birmingham Literature Festival podcast. And long may Nisa-Nashim thrive! Thank you.
Mandy Ross
Thank you.
Outro message
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love for you to tell us about it – leave us a review or a rating and find us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. You can download our latest podcast episodes, every Thursday, from all the places you would normally get your podcasts and find transcripts of our episodes in the shownotes and on our website at www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org . Details about our full programme can also be found on our website. Until then, happy reading!
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is curated by Shantel Edwards and produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
In today’s podcast, we welcome debut author Elle McNicoll in conversation with Dr Melanie Ramdarshan Bold about her first novel A Kind of Spark. Join Elle and Melanie as they discuss the importance of representing neurodiversity in children’s
fiction, inclusive publishing and recognising buried histories.
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast brings writers and readers together to discuss some of 2020’s best books. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions
about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. Join us each week for exciting and inspiring conversations with new, and familiar, writers from the Midlands and beyond.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
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Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Guest Curator: Kit de Waal
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Podcast Transcription, Episode 11: Elle McNicoll
Kit de Waal
Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast series. I’m Kit de Waal and I’ve worked with the Festival Director, Shantel Edwards, as Guest Curator of this year’s podcast series. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. In today’s podcast, we welcome debut author Elle McNicoll in conversation with Dr Melanie Ramdarshan Bold about her first novel A Kind of Spark. Elle’s novel follows 11- year-old Addie as she campaigns to fund a memorial to commemorate the witch trials that took place in her Scottish hometown, drawing nuanced parallels between the ignorance surrounding Addie’s autism and that which fuelled historic witch trials. Join Elle and Melanie as they discuss the importance of representing neurodiversity in children’s fiction, inclusive publishing and recognising buried histories.
Bournville Book Festival Sponsor Message
This brilliant episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast is brought to you in partnership with Bournville Book Fest, Birmingham’s book festival for children.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
Hello, and welcome to the Birmingham Literature Festival. I'm Melanie Ramdarshan Bold. I'm an Associate Professor of Publishing and Book Studies – dream job – at University College London, and I am utterly delighted to be speaking to the lovely debut author, Elle McNicoll today. Elle is the author of the delightful, warm and funny Middle Grade novel [for readers between the ages of eight and 12], A Kind of Spark, which is about Addie, an 11-year-old autistic girl campaigning for a memorial for the witches trials that took place in her Scottish village. I had the absolute pleasure of teaching Elle during her Publishing MA at UCL, and it has been a joy to see her career blossom over the last year. Elle, hello.
Elle McNicoll
Hi.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
I'm so excited to speak to you today.
Elle McNicoll
Oh, that was surreal having you introduce me.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
It's so weird, isn't it? But lovely.
Elle McNicoll
Yeah, really nice.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
So I'm so delighted to see, you know, the reaction to your book and you as an author over the last few months. Why don't we start by speaking a wee bit about your route into authorship?
Elle McNicoll
Yep. So like Mel just said, I was doing a Publishing MA and I was doing that MA with every intention of going into publishing as, you know, an editorial assistant or, you know, someone working on the production of books, not as an author at all. I don't recommend Publishing MAs if you want to be an author, although UCL was phenomenal, and allowed me to do all the research that I needed for this book, which was the reason I went. But I wasn't, you know, I wasn't planning on it, and I set up a meeting with Knights Of, who are the publishers of A Kind of Spark (and I think we'll probably talk about them a bit more later on). But I set up a meeting with them purely to kind of offer my services as a graduate saying, 'if you ever want a neurodivergent book on your list, you know, I've got a lot of research on it; I've got my own experience as an neurodivergent person; I can do any sensitivity reads, proofreading, editing – wherever you need.' That was the intention of the meeting. And somehow it got turned around to, 'have you written a book?' to which I stupidly said 'yes'. Even though the book was, you know, had about 2,000 words left to write of it - I've not told anyone this actually - I went home and wrote those 2,000 words that day. And it's purely by accident Kind Of ended up in the publisher's hands that way. I was looking for a job, I wasn't looking for a book deal.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
Well, you got a job as an author at the end, and that's so fortuitous. And I love that idea of Knights Of, you know, sort of seeing the potential and developing that potential.
Elle McNicoll
I hope so. I hope that's what it was. I think David, who's the co-founder of Knights Of [Media], and who's the person that I took the meeting with, I think he's very, just sort of, 'Have you got a book? Anyone got a book?' He's just that way, he's very inclusive and encouraging to people. And I think it's very that much the belief that everyone kind of has a book in them. And, you know, I'm just very lucky that he asked, and I don't know why I said yes. But if I hadn't, we wouldn't be here, so.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
Delighted that you did say yes. So you talked a wee bit, obviously, I know, you've done the Publishing MA, and you have developed sort of skill sets and experience and knowledge of the publishing industry, not only over the course of your MA but before and afterwards as well. So how would you say that your publishing experience and that experience and knowledge has played into your writing?
Elle McNicoll
Well, I don't know how it played into the writing. But I think it definitely played into your kind of business mindset as an author because nowadays authors have to kind of have that marketing sort of mindset as well. You know, it's only a small few who are privileged enough to kind of lock themselves away and be creative and not have to do any kind of PR or marketing or self-promotion. So I think the MA really helped me kind of hone an idea of where the industry is at the moment. My research and the MA 100 per cent gave me the confidence to say where the gaps in the industry are (and that's a whole other conversation). But, you know, it gave me that kind of data and analysis to be, you know – and I'm not an academic writer. Like please, people listening, do not think I'm in any way academically talented. I'm not but I had the data.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
Very modest. I marked some of her assignments. She's being very modest.
Elle McNicoll
No, no that is a fib. But I had the data and I had the kind of information to be able to say, well, this is a gap in the market. And I don't think it's a gap in the market for a good reason; I think it's a neglected audience. So, it gave me a lot of confidence in that respect to go into a lot of rooms and say, 'I don't think you're publishing enough books about disabled kids; I don't think you're employing enough disabled people', just purely from the work that I'd done in the MA. So, it was a huge benefit to me as a – not as a businesswoman, I don't call myself a businesswoman – but from a kind of non-creative point of view, from a business point of view it was, you know, it was invaluable.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
So, can you tell us a wee bit more about the research that you undertook?
Elle McNicoll
I took over 200 books that had been published in the last sort of publishing cycle in Middle Grade, and I collated them to see how their disability representation was. And the results were not good. It was very inspired by the Reflecting Realities report, which obviously Mel knows a lot about. And I recommend reading.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
I really love CLPE [Centre for Literacy in Primary Education]. Everyone should read their reports [Reflecting Realities: the CLPE's survey into ethnic representation in UK Children's Literature].
Elle McNicoll
But I also learned doing that, that Middle Grade was in really good shape story–– like creatively. There was a lot of exciting stuff being done. It just was excluding this huge proportion of readers. So yeah, I did a lot of reading, which wasn't hard, it was a great part of the process. And while I was doing that research I started writing Spark. So, I was writing them in tandem. My dissertation and Spark were both being written side by side. And I think that they really inform each other a lot.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
I didn't know. I didn't know you were writing them in tandem. That's lovely. So, you've touched upon the fact that you write for Middle Grade, which is – although we're obviously against age banding – it's aimed broadly at 8 to 12 years old. And this age is obviously a critical period in academic development, and one
where there's often a decline in children reading for pleasure. Why do you write for young people, particularly this Middle Grade audience?
Elle McNicoll
So, I agree with the age bracket thing. I like to say that it's a Middle Grade book but it's for eight and up. So, there's no kind of upper age limit––
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
Well, it was one of my favourite books this year and –
Elle McNicoll
Yeah!
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
––I'm not in that age bracket.
Elle McNicoll
I know, I've been so lucky with how many adults have written to me about how much they like it. But yeah, I write for that age group because that was the age that I really came into my own as a reader. Before that what I liked to read was dictated a lot to me, it was very much prescribed to me. And that was the age where I started to choose my own reading. And there was a lot of Jacqueline Wilson. I mean, I was an addict of Jacqueline Wilson's, I blew through her books.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
I mean, she is a queen.
Elle McNicoll
She is, she's unparalleled. And so yeah, I think that's why I write for Middle Grade. I'm also a big YA [Young Adult] fan, but I just love where Middle Grade is at the moment. And I just have such a visceral memory of being 10 years old, and being a reader and having all these problems at school, but having solace in reading and so I think I write for those kids that were a bit like me.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
Yeah. I mean this is a difficult question to ask, and it's probably one you might not be able to answer but what would a book like Spark have meant for you as, you know, a Middle Grade reader?
Elle McNicoll
it would have been life changing. I mean that was partly why I wrote it and had confidence writing it because it just would have made everything easier because I used books almost as tools. You know, I would use them to kind of make sense of a world that did not make a lot of sense to me as a neurodivergent child, you know: social rules and situational kind of everyday hazards. The books were very much tools of how to navigate those things. And so to have a book like Spark, it would have been life changing. And I'm very, very adamant that Spark is a story first and foremost and it's written to entertain, and it's written to engage, and it's written to reflect a neglected reader. But it is also in some ways a little bit of a toolbox. And I got the most gorgeous message last night from someone saying their eight-year-old niece has read it and is now fully accepting and ready to proceed with diagnosis because they, finally, they've been resisting it but because they loved Addie so much they're now not afraid, and they don't see anything wrong with it. And that is, I mean, I'm getting emotional saying it now. That is huge.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
That's mind-blowing Elle, that’s incredible.
Elle McNicoll
That's kind of the dream and yeah, so it would have been huge for me.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
And that, you know, that's the power of inclusive and representative literature really, isn't it?
Elle McNicoll
Absolutely, yeah.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
And I suppose, obviously, I'm a huge fan of the lovely Knights Of and I think they're doing incredible work. And I was so delighted when you, you know, that you're publishing with them. You've told us a wee bit about how David sort of encouraged you to publish with them. What has your experience been like, just the whole publishing experience, but also publishing with Knights Of in particular?
Elle McNicoll
Oh, it's been incredible. Like I always like to say to people that my experience as a published author probably isn't very universal because it's been a very special publisher. But it was just incredible not to – even in the pitch process of the book, which was like I said earlier very off-the-cuff and not prepared – I
didn't have to explain to them why it's important that autistic children see themselves in books; why it's important that 'Own Voices' books are in the Middle Grades age bracket. I didn't have to explain any of that. And that was kind of radical because I've been in a lot of rooms where people were, you know, a bit sort of like, 'Well, I don't know if those people read, so I don't think we should––' you know. And I didn't have to do any of that with Knights Of. I didn't have to explain why, you know, why the book needed to be written and they were just always making sure that everything was accessible. And they brought in a team that were also neurodivergent, which is kind of mind blowing, you know. My incredible illustrator and cover designer is neurodivergent. The second editor that came in to do kind of final checks, Anna, is neurodivergent. It was unbelievable and I don't think another publisher working at the moment could have done that. And I really, if Spark has any success right now it is purely down to the K.O. team and the wider team that they work with because they have just fought for this book so much.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
Yeah, I mean they've done an amazing job on social media, and obviously, the response has been incredible as well. Okay, so I gave a very brief outline of your book earlier. It's so lovely to learn about how you wrote it in tandem with your dissertation. But how did the idea for Spark come about?
Elle McNicoll
So, the main premise of the book is this girl who's campaigning for a memorial for the witches in her village. And that's been an idea I've been playing with since I think my last year of university. So, when we had to do a kind of major project, I was like, 'I want to write a book about someone campaigning for a memorial'. And
there was a very early draft way back then. It wasn't a Middle Grade and the character was a lot older and absolutely nothing to do with Addie. And it just wasn't working because the character was very cynical and very stand-offish and just had a massive chip on their shoulder. Which is, you know, nothing wrong with that – that's me, you know, it was basically just me. But it just didn't seem to work with the story. I was like, 'Why would this cynical, defeatist negative person be campaigning for this thing?' And it just wasn't working. So, I just put it down and didn't touch it again. And then back, you know, last year – it was probably a year ago now – yeah, just over a year ago now, when I was writing the diss., I just started from scratch again. And put Addie, who came fully formed, which is quite unusual, put her into the driving seat and suddenly everything clicked into place and it all made a ton of sense. And, you know, I think that's the advice I would give anyone if you're struggling with a draft or something's just not clicking, it could be that the protagonist - I think the protagonist is the absolute core of the book – and the minute Addie showed up, kind of ready to work, then everything was easy.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
And how did she come to you?
Elle McNicoll
She just appeared. I mean, I think – and I can say this to you, Mel, because you kind of understand – I think when I was sitting on all that research and I just was reading all these books, and reading the same kind of protagonist over and over again and, you know, trying to find an academic way of saying, 'Well, you know,
this isn't great for this demographic of kids'. I just kind of created the character that I wanted to see in all of these books that I wasn't seeing. So, she kind of came as this – not an anti-hero – but just appeared as what I really wanted to be reading.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
What I loved most was the relationship between Addie and Keedie.
Elle McNicoll
Yeah.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
And actually, just the dynamics between the three sisters in general.
Elle McNicoll
Oh, it's such fun to write the three of them. I love writing Keedie and Addie together. Their relationship is the heart of the book. But Nina is, once Nina's in the mix, it's actually a lot more fun because she's so, she's such an obstacle to the two of them.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
So were these based on any kind of relationships you've had in your life, whether it's friends or family?
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
Probably. I haven't psychoanalysed it deeply enough. But I think Keedie is kind of the person I wish was in my life when I was Addie's age because she has a lot of the answers to things that I didn't have the answer to at 11 years old. She has a lot of knowledge and a lot of wisdom that she kind of imparts to Addie because (for anyone that doesn't know) Keedie is also autistic. They are both autistic sisters. Nina is the only one that isn't, which is unusual. So, they have this bond and this communication that I think I really wanted as an 11-year-old. So, I think she's kind of aspirational in some ways. She's grounded in reality as well, and she has her own arc going on in the story. I can't say who Nina's based on without getting myself excommunicated from the family. But I think she's a little bit of some people in my family.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
And can we see any aspects of your personality in any of the characters?
Elle McNicoll
I mean, Addie has been so well-received by readers that I have to believe there's none of me in her because everyone just keeps saying how great she is. So, I think I'm a little bit, I mean, Mel taught me at university. I'm a bit like Keedie because she's not the most academic, even though I think she has things to say, and she's very, you know, she's got ideas, but just the university environment is a little bit sort of difficult for her. So, I think there's maybe a bit of me in her. But I like to tell people – I get asked a lot - people say 'Which sister are you?' and I like to say, 'I'm the woman that lives in the woods, like I just want to be left in the woods on my own'.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
Why do you think young readers will be attracted to Addie's story?
Elle McNicoll
Well, it kind of touches on what we said earlier. But I truly believe that there are a lot of kids like Addie out there. And I think a lot of them find their peace and their entertainment in books because books are not as overwhelming in a sensory fashion as some other things. Because I was that kid; I don't think I was unique or special. I think there's probably a lot of kids the same way I was out there. And I think the book really is
kind of like a hand on the shoulder saying like, 'I see you, I've been there, I know exactly how it feels'. But it's also an engaging story and it's about, you know, Addie doesn't have a superpower, she's not the chosen one, she doesn't have a magical wand. Everything that she achieves in the book, without giving away the ending, she does by just being persistent and just getting up each time, every time she's kind of pushed back down. She just keeps on going. And I think that's a very relatable message. And I think there's a lot of power in that. And, and I just wanted to tell a story about, you know, there is no magical cure, there is no magical intervention; sometimes you have to really, really work and people are going to doubt you, but you just have to keep on pushing. And I think especially in today's world, a lot of people can relate to that.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
Absolutely. And so obviously, witches and witchcraft play a central role in the book, and the link between the treatment of the witches and Addie's fears about being ostracised because she's autistic, was really well done. Can you tell us a wee bit more about the origins of that idea?
Elle McNicoll
That was actually, along with Addie kind of appearing, that was when the story clicked into place because, like I said, it was always about a witch memorial. But it wasn't until – there was an intern for the, I think the archives in Scotland that uploaded all of this information about the witch trials and about people who were accused of witchcraft, and she did it by location. So you could click on locations and it would tell you the specifics of the trials and the cases.
And I was reading all these cases in my area, and I was reading each one and it kept saying things the document, in the court documents, in the notes, things like, 'Would talk to herself. Would ask for money on the street. Was not sociable. Was not communicative.' And it just kept using this language. And these are primary sources. These were notes made at the time. And it just kept using this language and I was like, 'I think a lot of these people had disabilities. I think they were, had neurodevelopmental disabilities', because the way they're being described, and the behaviour that's being described, is very similar to the behaviours that people sort of are uncomfortable with and shunned today. And I've been kind of sold a story about witches, that they were all sort of beautiful, empowered women that the neighbourhood just couldn't handle. And that's why they burned them at the stake. And while I'm sure that was, you know, there was an element of that there's something very vulnerable about all of the cases I was reading. And I just thought, 'You know, that's probably what it was, you know, the same people that a lot of society pretends they can't see today, I think that's who they were'. And that's when it kind of clicked into place. I was like, I recognised, you know, a lot of my younger self or my more vulnerable self in some of the court descriptions and I just thought, 'Oh, goodness, you know, would I have been hounded in those days just for, you know, not conforming to, or not being able to mask well enough. So that's where it came from. It came from the archives.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
Yeah, I'm so terribly embarrassed by Scotland's role in the witch trials. Weren't more witches killed in Scotland than anywhere else?
Elle McNicoll
Yeah, I think Germany maybe was matching us. But yeah, it's between Scotland and Germany.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
Yeah.
Elle McNicoll
A lot of people think, Salem, Massachusetts, but really, we had a much higher, yeah.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
I suppose witch hunting is probably an extension of the Protestant Reformation?
Elle McNicoll
Oh definitely, yeah. And a lot of the courtroom docs also said, you know, 'Practising a different religion' or like there was, yeah.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
Yeah. And King James was obviously terribly religious. And I'm just recalling Standard Grade history here. Wasn't he super religious and terrified of witches?
Elle McNicoll
Yes he was, he was always I think. There was a trial in North Berwick because he was convinced that a storm had been, you know, cast by witches to try and kill him. Yeah, he was very paranoid about witches, which is why they're in Macbeth. Fun fact.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
And I suppose this takes me to my next question. So you mentioned, you know, this idea of witches being, you know, glamorous and, you know, and they have been glamorised over the years. I certainly remember watching The Craft in the 1990s and wanting to be a witch. And of course, She Who Cannot Be Named has catapulted witches and wizards into the spotlight as well. So, my question is, who do you think is more misunderstood – sharks or witches?
Elle McNicoll
I think sharks. I think – oh, see, gotta be careful getting me started about sharks. There's a lot of sharks mentioned in the book and this won't make a lot of sense if you haven't read the book. But if you have, then you'll know. You know, I don't want to bring down the podcast on the Birmingham Literature Festival but we kill millions of sharks every year. And they're such incredible animals and they're so important to the ecosystem. And I don't know how many more sort of tacky remakes of Jaws we need to see. Like, it's the same story over and over again, about these animals that really do not want to kill us. So yeah, I think sharks are still deeply misunderstood.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
I was thinking about this, that sharks are completely maligned. So, I was thinking about popular culture and I was thinking, you know, all these really glamorous portrayals and cool portrayals of witches and wizards in popular culture, and I was thinking, 'Where are sharks? You know. What are positive - and the only shark that I could think of was Bruce in Finding Nemo.
Elle McNicoll
And even he – sorry to be a nerd – but even he, when he smells a bit of blood turns into this kind of––
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
That's right!
Elle McNicoll
––dangerous. It's like, I remember that. Oh, Mel, you don't know what you've done! I was watching that when it, when it came out in the cinema as a kid, and I remember thinking, 'Yes, someone's finally, you know, they're not giving into that old tired trope'. But nope, 10 minutes in and he smells blood and he's off.
So yeah.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
So, what we need is a series of, a series of books and TV programmes that centre sharks.
Elle McNicoll
Reclaiming the representation of sharks. I'm on it.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
Well, I'm very excited about that. I'd love to read more about Addie, particularly seeing what her and her pals get up to next. Is there any chance of a sequel?
Elle McNicoll
I'd love to write - ultimately, I'd love for it to be a trilogy, like The Juniper Trilogy. I would love to write a sequel with Addie and Audrey, where maybe Addie goes and does like Scottish Youth Parliament or something a little bit more big city, so that they have to get out of the village. But I'd love to have a sequel that's just really joyful and wholesome and kind of just not so focused on the neurodivergent aspects that the book has because I don't want to write the same book over and over. I'd just love to have a sequel where Addie goes on to kind of live her life a bit. I'd love to write a prequel with Keddie because I just think that there's a lot of stuff to tell there. So yeah, ultimately, I'd love to write three in total. It's completely up to the publishers. But I'd love a sequel with Addie who, when she's a bit older, like maybe 14, maybe like a bit of a teen book, because there's just so much to talk about when you're a teenager who's neurodivergent, you know. It's just, it's a different way of telling that kind of early adolescent story. And I'd like to write something kind of fun and joyful, and after the year we've all had.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
Yeah, I mean, I found that Spark was really fun and funny––
Elle McNicoll
Yeah, so do I, but you know, a sequel without the villain that's in this story hanging over Addie the whole time, yeah.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
So, I will start a petition because I would love to read this three, the series. And I think, you know, from what I've seen the book has been beautifully received. What is your experience about the reception, especially at the kind of age range that it's been aimed at?
Elle McNicoll
Well, like I said, I get messages like the person who let me know that their niece is now excited about diagnosis, which is just unbelievable. And I get letters from parents saying, 'Oh, my child doesn't like to read fiction, this is the first fiction book they read and they really like it and they're on their third read'. And, you know, that's incredible. And I get teachers saying, 'You know, this has taught me more than any course I've been on and now I have kind of an understanding of how to, you know, adapt my classroom'. It's been phenomenal. Librarians, teachers, parents, kids, like everyone has been so fantastic. And you know, the book came out in June when book shops were closed and yet booksellers just rallied around it and we're so supportive and it did have its kind of its debut even with all of the restrictions and so that I can't really express how incredible the response has been. It's been overwhelming.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
So, what has it been like being, you know, being a debut author during lockdown, particularly since an aspect of your jobs would have been school visits?
Elle McNicoll
Yeah, that's hard. It's been very hard. Like, I don't like to talk about it too much because there's so many bigger things going on. I don't want to be sort of like, ‘waah, I can't go and meet readers'. But it is hard not being able to see readers face-to-face. Social media, you know, thank goodness. I know people talk about the evils of social media a lot but I've just, it's been a lifesaver for connecting me with readers and giving them a way to sort of, you know, give them my email address if they want to write and it's just, it's been a lifesaver. But yeah, it's been hard not being able to see people face-to-face. You know in general, not just in terms of promoting the book. But, you know, I haven't seen any of, you know, I've been lucky enough to see my editor but I haven't, you know, seen any of the team. I've not met my illustrator face-to-face. I've not met my publicist face-to-face. It's been all done through technology. And it's, and you just kind of want to see everyone and celebrate, especially when the book's done quite well. But there's so many bigger problems going on that you just go, oh, you know, get a grip. It's not a big deal.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
It's still tough though.
Elle McNicoll
Yeah. But I've met with my editor face-to-face to talk about the structural changes for my second book, which is in the works at the moment. So that was lovely. So, you know, thank goodness for technology for keeping us all connected. But yeah, it's been hard.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
Are you allowed to tell us what you're working on now?
Elle McNicoll
It's a completely different book in every way. Eishar, my editor, who's the Editorial Director of Knights Of has forbidden me from talking too much about it. But it's a Middle Grade again, it's a neurodivergent heroine, and I like to kind of describe it, it's like a pre-dystopia.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
Kind of like where we're living at just now?
Elle McNicoll
Yeah, kind of like contemporary fiction.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
So you're basically an author now. That's very exciting. What would you say your favourite thing is about writing?
Elle McNicoll
Writing? I actually really like it. I think a lot of authors sort of talk about how much they hate writing. But I really like it, I find it really a great way to kind of switch the brain off. And, and yet also just engage everything you have and forget the world for a bit. I really enjoy writing. And it's lovely when people like what you've written, that's always a great feeling. It's a terrifying feeling when someone tells you they're about to read your book, that's probably the worst part of it. But no, I really like writing. I'm really glad I get to do it for a job.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
It's amazing, I'm really proud of you. So, you talked earlier about the magnificent Jacqueline Wilson and how she was an important part of your childhood reading. Is there, you know, a book from Jacqueline Wilson or any other book from your youth that still resonates with you today?
Elle McNicoll
Yes, there are two books that really resonate today with me. One would be Anne of Green Gables, which was written a long time ago, but I still just love. And I like to say that with Spark I tried to write a sort of neurodivergent Anne of Green Gables, where it's about a girl in her community. But with Jacqueline Wilson she wrote a book called Secrets, which has two protagonists, one from a very deprived background and one from a very affluent background. And it's about their relationship and their friendship and the ups and downs of their lives. And I just loved that as a 10-year-old and I would describe it to my parents and they were like, 'What do you like about it? What is fun about this book?' But you can't really put your finger on why Jacqueline Wilson books were so good but I just loved it. And she didn't hold any punches and I just yeah, nobody has written a book in my eyes that has touched me with two protagonists the way Secrets did, you know. Now when I read books with two different viewpoints I'm like, 'Ugh, Secrets was better'.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
Okay, well, thank you so much for speaking to me today. I think everyone would love to hear a passage from your book. So, do you have one picked out?
Elle McNicoll
Yeah, I'm just gonna read the beginning nice and quick if that's okay?
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
Of course.
Elle McNicoll
Chapter one.
'This handwriting is utterly disgraceful.'
I hear the words but they seem far away, as if they are being shouted through a wall. I continue to stare at the piece of paper in front of me. I can read it. I can make out every word even through the blurriness of tears. I can feel everyone in the classroom watching me: my best friend, her new friend, the new girl. Some of the boys are laughing. I just keep staring at my writing.
Then suddenly it's gone. Miss Murphy has snatched it from my desk and is now ripping it up. The sound of the paper being torn is overly loud, right in my ears. The characters in the story I was writing beg her to stop but she doesn't. She crumples it all together and throws it towards the classroom bin. She misses. My story lies in a heap on the scratchy carpet.
'Do not ever write so lazily again!' she shouts. Maybe she isn't even shouting but it feels that way. 'Do you hear me Adeline?' I prefer being called Addie. 'Not ever. A girl your age knows better than to write like that. Your handwriting is like a baby's.'
I wish my sister was here. Keddie always explains the things that I cannot control or explain for myself. She makes sense of them. She understands.’
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
Thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure to speak to you today.
Elle McNicoll
Oh, you too. This was lovely.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
And I can't wait to read your next book.
Elle McNicoll
Thank you.
Outro message
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love for you to tell us about it – leave us a review or a rating and find us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. You can download our latest podcast episodes, every Thursday, from all the places you would normally get your podcasts and find transcripts of our episodes in the shownotes and on our website at www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org . Details about our full programme can also be found on our website. Until then, happy reading!
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is curated by Shantel Edwards and produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
This week’s guest is Birmingham’s own artist and political commentator Cold War Steve. In this week’s episode, Steve talks to writer Kit de Waal about the ways his work tells the story of Birmingham and the Midlands, the power of art call
out fascism and art as therapy.
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast brings writers and readers together to discuss some of 2020’s best books. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions
about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. Join us each week for exciting and inspiring conversations with new, and familiar, writers from the Midlands and beyond.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Guest Curator: Kit de Waal
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Podcast Transcription, Episode 10: Cold War Steve
Kit de Waal
Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast series. I’m Kit de Waal and I’ve worked with the Festival Director, Shantel Edwards, as Guest Curator of this year’s podcast series. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. I am very excited to introduce this week’s guest, artist and political commentator Cold War Steve; interviewing him for the Birmingham Lit Fest podcast was a career highlight for me as a long-time fan of his work. Cold War Steve is a Birmingham born and based artist who specialises in surreal, satirical and hilarious collages originally made on his phone and iPad. Since 2016 Cold War Steve’s Twitter account, with almost daily posts commenting on current social and political issues, has been a lifeline to many in these dark times. In this episode we talk about the ways his work tells the story of Birmingham and the Midlands, the power of art to call out fascism and art as therapy.
Kit de Waal
The first question I want to ask you is, do I call you Cold War Steve or do I call you Chris?
Cold War Steve
Well, you can call me either, really, but I think at the moment, I get called Steve, probably 50% of the time and then Chris, the other 50%. Even my wife and kids start calling me Steve as well, so it really doesn’t matter.
Kit de Waal
Well, I'm gonna call you Cold War Steve because that, for me, encapsulates who you are. What a privilege for me to get to interview you, I have admired your work. In fact, when did you start these pictures? How long ago?
Cold War Steve
It was March 2016.
Kit de Waal
Right. And what made you start doing them?
Cold War Steve
So Cold War Steve, my alter ego, began in March 2016. I'd done quite a few different parody type things on Twitter, just for something to do really, then that time, February, March 2016, was a quite a low point for me. I had, you know, suffered with pretty poor mental health most of my adult life, but that period was, you know, I was hospitalized. And then coming out of hospital, part of my new focus and therapy really was to channel more of my anxiety and stuff into just creating these images, quite crude at first just putting Phil Mitchell in a famous Cold War scene and just uploading it on Twitter and seeing what happened, but it got really popular really quickly. And it really, you know, that gave me something that I could focus on that was positive. And it certainly helped me enormously with my mental health and it kind of grew from there really and it didn't start becoming the kind of satirical thing that it is now, until the Brexit referendum happened. So, none of my pieces were particularly political or satirical. But then the night that the result came in, it was, you know, just felt so crushing for me. And I've diverted my anxieties into more and more satirical pieces and it's just grown from there, the more inept the government have been, the more material I've got, and it's kind of grown hand in hand with their ineptitude.
Kit de Waal
Absolutely, I can remember that I saw an interview that you gave, I think it was just after Brexit, but before the pandemic, and before the abomination that is the present government, the reincarnation as it is now and you said, yeah, you know, we'll have to see what happens, I don't think I’m going to run out of material. You could not have predicted how bad things would get because, you know, obviously, I know, so many of your pictures that were very Brexit focused, but you could actually lift some of those, you know, motifs that you've done there and it would apply to the current chaos.
Cold War Steve
Oh completely, yeah, it's just, it's almost seamless because Brexit happened, and I was always gonna keep shining a light on the government, regardless, but a lot of people were saying, look, it's done now what are you gonna do and then bang, pandemic arrived. So I was, how do I deal with this?
Kit de Waal
You couldn't have predicted that it would be this catastrophic.
Cold War Steve
And you're right in saying that it's, you know, the parallels between the two, it's almost like you've got the same people that were, you know, lying to people about getting the Brexit vote and pro Brexit and everything. They've all now moved on to being disastrous in managing you know, the country's responses to this pandemic. So, a lot the pieces are, you know, I sometimes just retweet one from Brexit days and people go, ‘oh, yeah, so on the money’ but that was like a year ago.
Kit de Waal
Yes. And it's amazing that they’re at least as much, at least as applicable now as they were then. And I saw the other day one of the tweets that you’d done, which said, ‘I've just spent an hour blocking fascists’ and a couple of choice words, which I completely applaud, which I won't say. But tell me about being attacked online by the fascists who clearly can feel the power and strength of your work.
Cold War Steve
Well, thank you for saying that because, initially when I first got people sending not particularly nice things. It was always Brexiters or Tories and stuff. And the first ones are quite jarring because I get lots, you know, I might get hundred that say ‘oh that's brilliant’, but then just one that says, you know, lefty this that and the other and it seems to have more power and it really, you know, I’ve found it quite difficult. But then I thought no, it's not going to stop me. The person I detest probably more than any in the world is Nigel Farage and what he’s done and what he continues to do and these things where he’s going out in his boat in the channel, you know, infuriates me. So, I was doing pictures that obviously send up that, and compare him to fascists of history. And then obviously, each one I do of that I know that I'm going to go through the comments and there's going to be some problems. But the weekend, I think I did one, I can't remember what, I think there was a picture of Farage sort of reclining on the grass by the coast looking out to sea in his kind of shirt tucked into his shorts. And I did him admiring sort of Nazis marching past. And from that, it was just, you know, loads of positive stuff, but then some really quite worrying accounts. So, I just went on a blocking spree. I think someone said, ‘how'd you know they're fascists’, because they've got a swastika in there, as their avatar. They've got, you know, Oswald Mosley as their avatar, and they’re, you know, they're not hiding it. And then it's like, @nationalist, and there are actual, in this day and age, people living in Britain, people that that refer to themselves as being a fascist. It's just utterly staggering.
Kit de Waal
I was gonna say it's amazing that they're offended, why they offended by that picture. They should be applauding the fact that you recognize something that they believe in, but I mean, I do suppose, it shows the limitations of their understanding.
Cold War Steve
Oh God. Yeah, yeah.
Kit de Waal
How long does a piece typically take you?
Cold War Steve
It depends. Some of them, you know, the big epic, sort of Hieronymus Bosch, Bruegel type ones, they can take a few days. And it can be quite draining because I'm having to look at all these horrible people that I'm cutting and pasting. But they can take ages. But then some of them, you know, the one that did last night, for instance, it was just a quick half an hour of putting it together and finding, a lot of it comes from just trying to find the right backdrop and the right pictures, really, and then putting it together and seeing if it looks right and then going back to it. But some of them, like Benny's Babbies, for instance, which you'll be aware of, that took days and days, but it was enjoyable, because it was nice people.
Kit de Waal
Yes. Yes. And it was your hometown of Birmingham, applause, applause, applause. And some of them, I mean, clearly, you have, you definitely have a knowledge of classical art just by some of the compositions that you put together, and some of the very classical works that you've referenced, where does that knowledge come from?
Cold War Steve
That's just a love of art, really. I did go to art college after school where I wanted to pursue a career in art somehow, but that never happened. But it's always been something that I've read and watched, loved going to galleries. So, it's been a passion that I've had and that you know, it seeps into what I do now, sometimes I just out and out reference famous or not so famous artworks and use them as backdrops, or bits of them, and sometimes I’ll use the, you know, the layout and the character formation or the dialogue between the characters, you know, or I’ll have been influenced by, you know, Bosch or someone like that. So, it is very important, and it's not something I've consciously done, I think it's just because each picture I do, you know, I don't want to do just a quick throwaway picture. Each one I do I want to look like it would be, you know, a picture in its own right really, you know, on someone's wall. I mean that would help for print sales, but that's not the only reason, you know, I want it to look, it's not just a quick Photoshop chucked on Twitter, you know I want it to be a composition in its own right.
Kit de Waal
And have you considered, or have you had an exhibition, or are you going to have an exhibition of your work?
Cold War Steve
Yeah, the first ever one was at The Social which is a bar and music venue in London. And that's where I met my now manager/agent type person Karl Gosling. And that was, we didn't know what to do. And basically, we just threw up about 100 of my pictures off Twitter on the wall with blue tack in the bar. It was quite ramshackle. But it was fun. And it got quite a bit of attention. And that point really spring-boarded me up in people's consciousness, especially in the art world. And I've done, I did a talk with Jeremy Deller at the National and I’ve had a small exhibition at the Whitworth in Manchester. And the Birmingham gallery is one that I always wanted to, because other people getting in touch, I thought ‘come on Birmingham, please!’ And then they got in touch and said they'd love to do something. And I was really, really thrilled and they were brilliant. They basically gave me free rein to do whatever I wanted really, as long as I was using some of their archive, but it is something, the art world is… it's a difficult thing to crack and get into. And I don't properly feel that I am in it at the moment, because I'm coming from such a new unique way really, I don't know whether actual serious artists would consider what I do to be art or not. But that doesn't bother me, really.
Kit de Waal
Well, as you know, when I knew I was going to do this interview, I put a call out on Twitter and I said I'm going to be interviewing Cold War Steve as a pinnacle of my literary career. And have you got any questions for him or comments. And the overwhelming comment I had was from people saying thank him for us, for articulating how we feel and for putting into words, things that you felt that didn't even know how to express, that’s certainly how I feel. I'm so horrified by the present government. And then I see, like, for example, the one I love, and it's one of your most simple, where it's Dominic Raab in a mastermind chair. And I was like yes! Or the one of Boris Johnson and Cummings in prison…we can only hope. And Boris Johnson in a Wetherspoons. And so, some of these pictures really sort of give, for people like me and I know for your thousands and thousands of followers on Twitter, they give us hope that other people think the way we do and in fact, I mean, that is the function of art. The function of art is to give voice to thoughts and feelings and to have this connection with people. So, from me, I can tell you, you're a proper artist and you're in the art world, Steve. So in your collages, there's two groups of people. You've got the recurring people like Steve McFadden and Cilla and Bungle, I think you put him in one, who I absolutely adore. And then you've got, obviously, the others, the large, large group of people that are you know, running our country at the moment into the ground let's just say. Tell me about those two different groups of people. So first of all, tell me about Steve McFadden and Cilla and why you've chosen those people to appear again and again in some of the work that you do.
Cold War Steve
Yes, so Steve McFadden. I mean, that's where it comes from, Cold War Steve, it was Steve McFadden, playing Phil Mitchell, that I was placing into these historical pictures of the Cold War. So it was just a one joke incongruity of having a drunk Phil Mitchell sat with Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev or something. And then, as I evolved and got more satirical, I've kind of kept him there. So, he's gone from just being an incongruous comedy type inclusion into actually representing me in the pieces now. Or, if not me, then people, you know, of a similar mind set to me, which is why he's more often than not either looking incredibly anguished at what's going on around him or angry. Or just bemused by the whole thing. So, I've kind of kept him in there just as a constant really, because people say, ‘oh, you should watermark it’, you know, or put @ColdWarSteve across the bottom of the picture because people might share it and, you know, make it out as their own and stuff like that. And I said I don't need to do that because, you know, I've got Steve McFadden in the middle and that's kind of authenticity of where it's come from.
Kit de Waal
Yes, it’s like your signature.
Cold War Steve
Yeah, so he's there. Cilla is a different thing. I mean I initially included her, it's a photo that was taken by someone I met on Twitter called Ben Cogan, and he booked this restaurant table with his friends and sat in his seat was Cilla Black. And he asked her if, you know, he said, ‘look, I have reserved this, is it alright if you move’, and she didn't, she refused to move and just looked at him like that. So, he took a picture of her. And it's a great picture of her. And I started including it in because she's looking at camera, she's almost looking at the viewer, as if to say, you know, what's happening. So, it worked really well. And then someone grassed me up to him, because I didn't know who he was the guy who had taken the picture, and said ‘look, he's using your thing’, and I was like ‘oh no!’, but you know, he turned out to be really, really nice, exactly in the same wavelength as me about everything. And we've actually become quite good friends on there. So, I can use it, you know, as I want. But her inclusion, I started to make her smaller and smaller, and then it was hiding her. And that came out just as another little thing for people to do really, trying to find out where she is, but also because I can't stand her. I can't stand putting her in pictures. And I've long, long, long thought shall I just leave her out, which I virtually do sometimes because she's barely visible, you know, you might just see a shadow of an eye or something. And I thought about getting rid of her in case it detracts you. I'll do a piece that takes hours and hours and hours. And then the only comments I get are ‘where is she?’, ‘oh, there she is’, and things like that. And I’m like, ‘no, look at the art, not Cilla!’. But actually, people clearly get some joy from that fact, people can do both, you can spot Cilla and sort of look at the overriding message of the piece I'm trying to make, that's not a problem. But I got a lovely message from someone who said his wife, who had a brain injury, she loves looking at my pictures and trying to find Cilla and they spend kind of hours doing that and looking at it, it’s so sweet and nice I thought I'm never gonna be able to get rid of her.
Kit de Waal
The other group of people, shall we call them the government broadly speaking, or supporters of the government. I'm just going to talk about two pictures that I particularly love/hate. Dominic Cummings taking a shit on the Code of Conduct and wiping his arse on the Bill of Rights, which was absolute genius. And the other one is Blind Date where you have Cilla sitting with Boris Johnson, and choosing from the three candidates who are Trump, Harold Shipman, and Putin. And they are absolutely great. And I think Phil’s the cameraman in that one. Have you had, they’re hard-hitting pictures and they are absolutely on point, have you had any sort of legal action threatened against you. Do you know what the response has been by the government to any of these, they must be aware of them.
Cold War Steve
I hope they're aware of them. I've not had, touch wood, any legal things brought against me. When I did my first book with Thames and Hudson last year, it was only then really, that I and Carl and other people started to get a bit twitchy about potential legal action that someone may or may not bring against me. So, I took out, I have got some insurance for that, for purposes of that, but then I've often thought, well, you know, if someone like Nigel Farage wanted to sue me, then brilliant, you know, bring it on. It's fantastic if he did, but no, and it's not something that I'm gonna worry about. To be honest with you because the positions that they're in and the job and stuff that they're doing to the country and to human beings, you know, I think me putting them in a picture, no matter how scathing or whatever, is nothing compared to what they're doing to people so, you know, that’s what I think.
Kit de Waal
Has your work translated beyond the UK? Is there any sort of market, do people get it for example? You know, everybody that sees your pictures that's from the UK, and certainly those of us of a particular political persuasion understand completely what you say. But does it work anywhere but the UK and Ireland, presumably.
Cold War Steve
Yeah, Ireland, it works really well. But I think it does, to certain extent. You know, a lot of feedback from Brits abroad and things like that. But, it is, especially the Brexit stuff resonates, seems to resonate well in Europe, the Netherlands and Germany and places like that, which is really great. And which I've loved because I wanted them to see it. You know, look in Britain, we're not all like Nigel Farage. You know, it's important. America is obviously somewhere that I'd love to break, because it's there for the taking, you know. I mean, we've got it bad with our prime minister and everything like that, but Donald Trump is just something else, you know, beyond any kind of wild nightmare fantasy. So, I do keep poking the stick with sort of US themed ones, there’s humour in it, and observations is still very much what I do. But I think they do. I'm hoping they do anyway. We've launched the Trump scape, jigsaw, which was done specifically for a US audience. And that's a big hellscape type one with Donald Trump and American celebrities and things like that, in an effort to try and tap into the, especially, you know, later this year, there'll be the presidential elections and things like that. So, it's an area that I am chipping away at, and hopefully can break through.
Kit de Waal
And do you find yourself very much keeping up to date with the social and political ideas of the day in America? Presumably, that must take you a lot of time anyway, to try and get into that, to understand enough to be able to comment satirically on it.
Cold War Steve
Yeah, I have always followed the news anyway, but especially now I'll be looking out for different stories and things like that, listening to the radio, and just picking up on bits and pieces that come through. But it's a never-ending supply of material, isn't it, at the moment?
Kit de Waal
As you say, at the moment it's going from bad to worse and nobody could have predicted the absolute mess that this country would have been in and America and indeed the world in lots of ways and the lurch to the right. Is there anyone that you are absolutely dying to put in a picture and you're just waiting for the moment?
Cold War Steve
No, I don't think so. I think I've covered them all, pretty much. I don't think there's anyone. I mean, there's some that I've always said I wouldn't, you know, people like Katie Hopkins and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon a.k.a. Tommy Robinson, because I don't want to give them any publicity or any oxygen or anything, even if it is to rip the ‘p’ out of them. I just don't want them anywhere near what I’m doing really. But other than that, there'll be new ones that come along. Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary, is making more appearances now. So, as the news unfolds, there'll be more characters coming in, and then some falling by the wayside.
Kit de Waal
Do you have really quick responses to some situations like, for example, the A Level results, which is really very current at the moment. Did you think, the minute it struck, I know the picture I'm gonna do because I absolutely love that picture in the classroom, it was fabulous. Does it come to you straight away? Or do you have to spend some time working out what you're going to do?
Cold War Steve
A bit of time, there’s a bit of thought going, you know, A Level results are happening in two days’ time, and then picking up on bits of information that it's going to be a mess or disaster. So, I'll have sourced a background and have an idea and done a few sketches of what I want to do. So then, on the day itself, it's sort of ready to go and then I've checked the news, yep they haven't disappointed me, it's a disaster, send it off.
Kit de Waal
So, some of it is you anticipating… I love this idea. It's you anticipating what mess they're going to make, and actually getting your work ready. That is fascinating, because I'm not there, I'm still, you know, reactive and horrified when it breaks, but I like that you're horrified a week before. So, have you anticipated the next disaster already?
Cold War Steve
No, I don't think so. You know, I've got hundreds of pictures where I'm just literally getting an idea and just quickly, cobbling something together. And I'll go back to it and think, no, that's not really worked or maybe that's a bit far.
Kit de Waal
Hang on, let me just go back to that. You’ve actually got pictures that you think I've gone a bit far? They are the connoisseur collection, I really have to see these.
Cold War Steve
They’re for the anthology in, you know, 10 years’ time. I mean, going a bit far, there’s some I’ll look at and think, you know, if I send this…and I um and ah and more often than not, I'll just send it anyway. The one I did last night, which is Priti Patel on the beach looking down at a drowned woman and baby, I did it earlier in the day obviously reacting to the news that unfortunately a refugee migrant had drowned in the sea, and then Priti Patel and the government, you know, their culpability really in it and their attitudes towards these human beings that they keep referring to as illegal, you know, completely dehumanizing them. So that's something I'm angry and upset about. And I did the picture, which is really stark, and bleak and I thought, wow, this is getting the message across that I want to get across. It's not funny in any way, shape or form, you know, it’s very matter of fact, is it going to be a bit much. So, I sat on it for a bit. And then just before bed, I looked at it again, and then looked at it again and thought, I don’t know, bam, press send. I just pressed send.
Kit de Waal
I mean, it's fantastic and terrible.
Cold War Steve
Yeah, yeah, it's, you know, really hard hitting I think and that's one that I won't look at the comments because I know there's going to be, you know, but a quick scan through this morning and actually, it was, again, a lot of people echoing what you said earlier in that it’s what people have been thinking and to see articulated in quite a simple way, really, in the form of picture, and how powerful that can be. So that's really, you know, what I get most from it is when people send things like that, that it's something that they were thinking, but couldn't articulate as such, but they can see it in a picture. And I feel really thankful and appreciative that I'm in that position that I can now channel the anger and anxiety into something like a picture. Whereas before, I'd have struggled, ranting or I don’t know what I’d do, something unhealthy probably in dealing with it. But now I can channel it into something like this, which I think is quite a powerful thing to be able to do.
Kit de Waal
I think so. And I also know that it enables a sort of… healing might be a bit too strong, but just a way of people, you know, seeing something and just knowing that other people think the same, and that this is an absolute travesty. I know that when I saw that picture, and I know so many people have said about that picture, that it was your best yet. Because it was, you know, really commenting on the callousness of the government towards the most vulnerable people. Which is what makes it so powerful. Where do you see your work going in the future? Do you think you are going to remain an online satirical commentator? Or do you see yourself moving into different areas of art?
Cold War Steve
I think I’ll remain where I am. Sometimes if I've had a commission or something, I'll have to stay off Twitter for a while, while I focus on, you know, doing the work that I need to do. But then I'll come back to it, because that's the area that I enjoy most. I just love to get the feedback and the reactions and the comments and I would miss that if I didn't have it. So, you know, there'll be different projects that I'll be doing. And I won't be able to spend as much time. I mean, the lockdown, for instance, I was churning them out, you know, I’ve gone from doing one or two a week to doing two a day, almost. One it was lockdown, so what else could I do? And also, because obviously, the news was just unfolding and disaster was playing out before us. And it was just the material was there, I had the time and I could do it. So, it may be that, you know, I won't be doing as many online, but it's certainly something that I'll continue to do.
Kit de Waal
I know that one of the comments that you made during the lockdown, I think or just after the lockdown, is that your wife works in a dementia care home and you were very horrified at the way Boris Johnson had claimed to be so protective of them, which we know is absolute bollocks, pardon for swearing, but that's the mildest I can put it. And you yourself worked for the probation service. Are you still working for the probation service or are you doing this full time now?
Cold War Steve
This is full time now. So yeah, I did work for them. I took a year's break when everything started getting quite busy just to see if I could make a go of it. So, that's been over a year now, so this is my full-time job. They were lovely, but I don't think I'd be able to go back anyway because it's classed as a civil servant job, so I've definitely breached the Code of Civil Servants in not displaying impartiality. But yeah, so I worked probation and saw and experienced first-hand what the Conservative government did to that, you know, Chris Grayling privatized half of the probation service, you know, decimated the whole profession. And I could see first-hand working with the people that have been affected by austerity, you know, I could go in and literally see the harm and damage that was being done by these, you know, friends of billionaires.
Kit de Waal
Yes, absolutely, which as we know, is still going on. By the time this podcast comes out, we’ll no doubt have several more disasters that you will have commented on. And please never, never, never stop. You're definitely one of the reasons I turn on Twitter every day. And from the many, many people that have contacted me asking me to say thank you and don't stop and what's next, we send you our love and thanks. And thank you for being part of the Birmingham Literature Festival.
Cold War Steve
No, it's an absolute honour. Thank you so much.
Outro message
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love for you to tell us about it – leave us a review or a rating and find us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. You can download our latest podcast episodes, every Thursday, from all the places you would normally get your podcasts and find transcripts of our episodes in the shownotes and on our website at www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org . Details about our full programme can also be found on our website. Until then, happy reading!
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is curated by Shantel Edwards and produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
In this week’s episode, authors Sarah Moss and Megan Hunter join Writing West Midlands’ own Olivia Chapman to discuss their latest novels Summerwater and The Harpy. In this podcast, they discuss writing about relationships, creating unnerving fiction and the expectation placed on writers to make sense of the time we are living in.
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast brings writers and readers together to discuss some of 2020’s best books. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions
about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. Join us each week for exciting and inspiring conversations with new, and familiar, writers from the Midlands and beyond.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Guest Curator: Kit de Waal
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Podcast Transcription, Episode 9: Sarah Moss and Megan Hunter
Kit de Waal
Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast series. I’m Kit de Waal and I’ve worked with the Festival Director, Shantel Edwards, as Guest Curator of this year’s podcast series. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. In this week’s episode, authors Sarah Moss and Megan Hunter join Writing West Midlands’ own Olivia Chapman to discuss their latest novels Summerwater and The Harpy. Both novels offer a sharply observed and unsettling insight into their character’s intimate relationships, as well as their interactions with strangers. In this podcast, they discuss writing about relationships, creating unnerving fiction and the expectation placed on writers to make sense of the time we are living in.
Aston University
This episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents… podcast is brought to you in partnership with Aston University. For information about studying English at Aston, and for further information about the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, please see their website – www.aston.ac.uk - and their social media channels (Facebook/Twitter/Instagram) @AstonSSH.
Olivia Chapman
Hello, welcome to Birmingham Literature Festival. Thanks for joining us. I'm Olivia Chapman, I'm one of the team at the festival. And I'm delighted to be talking to two novelists that I greatly admire today, Sarah Moss and Megan Hunter. Sarah is going to be talking to us mainly about her seventh novel, which has just been published this summer and is called Summerwater. It's got a cast of characters who are living, or not living, they're on holiday in a caravan park in Scotland, where it just doesn't stop raining. And it's focused on one particular day. Megan is going to be talking to us mainly about her second book, The Harpy, which was due to be out in June and has been delayed to the autumn because of the pandemic. The Harpy is one of the most unsettling and kind of got-under-my-skin novels that I've read this year, focused around one family and the relationship between husband and wife when she discovers an infidelity. So, I'm delighted for you to be joining us, Sarah and Megan. Welcome.
Sarah Moss
Thank you.
Megan Hunter
Thank you.
Olivia Chapman
I wanted to start by asking both of you – but I'm going to start with Megan – about writing relationships, writing specifically [about] a marital relationship. You both do it exceptionally well, and I very much enjoy your writing on that particular relationship. But Megan, I wanted to ask you about the dynamic between the husband and wife in The Harpy. You can tell from the start that they're not happy and it kind of goes further. How was it getting right under the skin of that relationship?
Megan Hunter
Well, it was difficult at first and it was a new thing for me, I'd written about relationships before in The End We Start From but that was written in a very particular way; almost, you could say in the form of a prose poem. There weren't very many conversations, you know. They weren't really scenes as such. And in this novel, I really was writing scenes and conversations and actually quite intimate and difficult and conflict driven sort of arguments. So that felt like a very new thing for me. But I, once I sort of got immersed in it, and I was used to it in the novel – I mean 'enjoyed' isn't really quite the right word – but I certainly became sort of used to it, became familiar with it and kind of was very engaged by it. But it was hard. I mean, over the course of however long you write a novel to write about such dark and difficult things for, you know, years on end, when, you know, you're not necessarily feeling that way yourself. That's quite difficult to keep re-entering that dark space.
Olivia Chapman
And Sarah you usually – 'cos this is your seventh novel, and I've read I think all of them – but you do tend to focus on one family or relatively few characters. Summerwater is unusual in that you have, I think, five or six different families or different cabins that you're looking at. So, they all have slightly different dynamics, but
you get to know each character and specifically the relationships between them very, very well. How was that for you to be kind of so deep with so many characters and their very intimate relationships?
Sarah Moss
It felt like a very playful book to write. I enjoyed it and I did all of it, I mean, the metaphors I come up with are to do with dancing, which I think is partly because of the way the narrative passes from one character to another. Although the themes are quite dark – though not as dark as The Harpy I think – it felt like quite a kind of, quite a light-footed book to write.
Olivia Chapman
Because you spent less time with each family?
Sarah Moss
I think because I knew that I was only with them for quite a short time. And that close third-person narration I think is easier for that than first person because you can skip: you don't really have to introduce each person because you just step into their proximity.
Olivia Chapman
So that's interesting. So it's more like you're taking a snapshot and then you kind of duck out again?
Sarah Moss
Yes. I mean, I'd hope something more mobile than a snapshot. But yes, absolutely. You pass through. You kind of haunt each cabin for a little while, but then you move on.
Olivia Chapman
Oh, I like that imagery of haunting – the writer haunting a cabin. That's a nice way of putting it. So in my day job I spend a lot of time working with writers and I always find it amazing the observations that they're able to make and that they retain, often for a very long time. So, one of the questions – and I'm not a writer myself, I should say – but one of the things that I'm always fascinated by is how you sort of collect observations. Some people collect shells and stamps, and writers it seems to me collect observations. Does that ring true for you, Sarah?
Sarah Moss
No, it doesn't feel that deliberate. And I've never been one of those writers who needs to write things down straight away or keep some notes. I mean, I do keep a notebook with me but it's for ideas and patterns rather than to kind of collect things from lived experience. I trust the patterns to form and I trust myself to remember what I need to when I need it. I mean, I forget all sorts of things all the time. But I don't feel the need to document reality as it passes. I don't take many photos. I don't use social media. I have faith in my interactions with the world to give me what I need.
Olivia Chapman
That's interesting. And Megan, what about for you?
Megan Hunter
Yeah, that's very interesting. I think, no, I don't formally record observations that often in a notebook. I do sometimes – I do carry a notebook. And occasionally I do that: maybe overheard things like conversation, maybe just a little snippet of dialogue I might write down. But yeah, I think in terms of collecting experience or memories, I think I've always been amazed by how they resurface while you write. So, when I was writing The End We Start From, you know, that particularly was a very un-deliberate kind of writing experience. And similarly, in The Harpy, as you're writing a scene, you know, a particular memory or a comparison or, you know, an observation just comes up when you're sort of in the flow of writing. That's one of the things I love about writing. But I do take quite a lot of photos but I'm not sure how much they help me to retain observations exactly. And I do use social media. Again, I'm not sure how helpful that is. But I have found a notebook helpful at times and by and large it's just that spontaneous kind of overflow of memories while you're writing that's what I've experienced the most.
Olivia Chapman
So, one of the things that I was really struck by with both of your novels is the presence of an unknown other. So, in The Harpy it is the harpy, the beast who pops up in various kind of interstitial chapters. And in Summerwater it's the rain and the animals who are affected by the rain and kind of observing what I guess would be climate change. How deliberate was it to have this sort of external, slightly unknown, slightly menacing character who was able to observe but who was also able to sometimes influence what was happening in the story?
Megan Hunter
I actually started off with the main narrative, the main story. And then I would say, towards the end of my first draft, which was a very, I'd not done this before because I'd usually written more editing as I went along. But I did in this case write a sort of rough first draft, and towards the end of that I just – this sort of creature, this image, this form just kind of emerged for me very, very strongly, almost viscerally. And as I was writing those scenes, I felt almost sort of inhabited by this creature. And so, I knew that that was, you know, strong enough that it, that it needed to be in the novel. And then, and then it was just a gradual process really, through subsequent drafts of weaving that figure in and of kind of noticing where organically, you know, there were those touchpoints in the story, and where both narratives could kind of, you know, be in dialogue and inform one another. And, you know, and it ended up being called The Harpy and that ended up being completely central. So, I think that was a really important experience for me of how something can kind of, yeah, sort of organically emerge but then be very deliberately kind of woven back in.
Olivia Chapman
That's not what I was expecting you to say, so that's very interesting. Thank you. I expected the image of the harpy to be the starting point.
Megan Hunter
Ah, yeah.
Olivia Chapman
Yeah, and I know writers don't always get terribly much say in their book covers but the image on the front of The Harpy is incredibly striking with the woman with the bird effectively as half of her face. Did you – is that what you had in your mind? Were you part of that creation at all?
Megan Hunter
Yes. So actually, when I sent, I mean when I sent the first draft off, it already had a sort of, I sent it with a cover that was like a woman with wings. I've never done that before. But it was like, from the beginning I had this very particular visual. I mean when I say a cover, it wasn't a physical thing. It was a Word document with a picture at the front, which was this sort of sculpture really of a woman with wings. So, I knew. It was pretty early but yeah; it did come after the sort of betrayal story. And I knew yes visually. It was quite a visual thing for me as well as a visceral thing. And so, when I saw that cover, and when they sent it to me, it was amazing, because it felt completely right immediately and quite important in a way to have that sort of visual, you know, touchpoint in relation to the book.
Olivia Chapman
And Sarah, with regards to Summerwater and the sort of, there's several menacing factors which kind of all weave into the ending, but the rain and the observations by the animals which are between each of the stories of each cabin. Again, I'm interested to know how deliberate that was and whether that was always going to be a very big part of the narrative of this book.
Sarah Moss
I think as for Megan, it kind of emerged through the first draft. This book was less planned than many of my others have been; I think, maybe than all of the others have been. And it really was just an experiment to see what would happen. I mean, I started it not thinking, 'This is the next book', but just, 'I wonder what happens if I try this?'. So those little interstitial bits came up – it was absolutely, 'Oh, you know, what happens if I do this? How does it look?' given that I'm thinking about climates and about bodies in weather and about water cycles. And there's a bit where one of the characters at the beginning running in the rain is thinking about the water outside her skin and the water inside her skin and the water above her head and the water under her feet. I'm very interested in that idea of bodies on land in weather as part of land and weather. So, it made sense then to be thinking about the other entities in that landscape; that the humans are not the only beings with stories who are in this place. And I just tried it to see how it went. And I was quite pleased with it and I kept doing it.
Olivia Chapman
I love that idea that even you are, you know, you're seven novels in or this is your seventh novel and you're still, you're still playing.
Sarah Moss
Yeah.
Olivia Chapman
You go into it without a plan necessarily and you're still playing, and I think there's something glorious about writing being playful for you.
Sarah Moss
I think it's a later discovery for me. I mean, I was an academic before I was a novelist, and my early novels were definitely planned and researched quite earnestly. I mean, I was never a great planner even as an academic but by my standards planned and researched earnestly. And as I've gone on, I think it's partly the confidence of middle age as well – I'm quite interested in the idea of midlife as I enter it or progress through it. There's something about being mid-career, midlife, having a certain, a certain amount behind me that makes me feel much more confident about play and experiment than I used to.
Olivia Chapman
So that brings me on to a question that I've wanted to ask because it strikes me that women writers are referred to as women writers and it's something I detest, and try avidly not to do, although I'll admit that every so often I do it by accident. But the women that you write, both of you, in these novels are the ones who hold the households together. They're the ones who are – especially the ones with kids in the case of Sarah, that not all of your characters have children that they're looking after – but the mothers are, they're holding the household together: they're planning the meals, they're working out who needs new shoes, they're thinking about cleaning, they're, you know, they're holding the household together, and they support – their existence allows for the rest of the family to exist at all. And I find that interesting when you are both mothers and writers and have other responsibilities be they, you know, family or careers or whatever. Is that deliberate, first of all? But also, is that a reflection on what you see around you where the mothers are the ones who are holding it all together, whilst doing what it seems much more than anyone else? Megan, I wonder if maybe you can answer that one first?
Megan Hunter
Sure, yeah. I mean, I think that is very much my experience in terms of what I've observed around me. It's not necessarily really particularly my own experience within my marriage. But I would say that I do, yeah, I do notice that kind of over and over again, really. And I think it's quite interesting the extent to which, you know, in many ways things have changed hugely. And in another way, there's the well, the often discussed, you know, mental load, and what that sort of consists of. And I think that's very difficult to kind of, to get away from actually, even if you are in a more sort of equal partnership. And then many people are not in equal partnerships either, you know. Women still do a much greater proportion of housework, you know – every time they do those surveys, and that's what comes out. And I think it's interesting that, well, 'interesting' in inverted commas in lockdown, obviously, that, you know, there's been a lot of stories emerging, and studies about the fact that women are bearing the brunt of the home education and the housework in that situation, even if both parents work. So yes, it's probably something I could sort of soapbox about for a while. But I was just, I was very interested in that and I suppose I was, yeah, playing a bit in the novel with slightly, perhaps slightly satirising that and perhaps slightly, you know, delving into the sort of depths of, you know, pushing it to quite an extreme with Lucy, sort of, you know, obsessive children's party planning and, you know, things of that nature where, you know, fairly trivial things actually end up sort of taking over her mind in a way that, you know, she wouldn't necessarily choose and yet she is choosing. But then is she, you know? And just exploring really the complications of that position.
Sarah Moss
Hmm, I'll join Megan on her soapbox. I think that, I mean, I agree with everything she's said really and I don't have a lot add to that. I've written previously in The Tidal Zone, with a man as the housekeeper, the cook, the one responsible for the kids. Which was interesting to write and also quite interesting to publicise and the reaction to that book was intriguing. I think there's also a narrative element about that mental load, because it's very hard to share. I mean, I too live in a relationship where things feel pretty equal most of the time. But we do that partly by having a pretty rigid division of who's responsible for what because the story of what's in the fridge is mine, really: I do the food shopping, I do the cooking, I know who's eating what, I know how much milk we're getting through in a particular week – which depends on who's growing on that particular week. There's a kind of narrative of that which is hard to share with any other narrative. And my husband will have the story of the laundry, which is who's done which sports in that week, and what the weather's been like, and how fast things have been able to dry, and if somebody had a nosebleed or fell over in the mud, or whatever it is. But I think these things are intriguing to write about exactly because of that, because there's a running story, which isn't always at all interesting in real life – you can make it interesting when you write about it. But the story of the laundry and what's in the fridge is also the story of what's happening for that particular family at that particular time.
Olivia Chapman
Yes, and I think for both of you actually, that's what I really loved with both novels was that I felt – even if you only see them for quite brief moments – I felt like I was in that character's head. And it is that running narrative that both of you do so well, which allows you to get into that character's head, I wanted to ask you both about revenge. Now this is particularly germane to The Harpy. As I say it's one of the books that I found the most unsettling and raced through when we read it as a bound proof back at the start of the year. But the issue of revenge is obviously key to The Harpy and I don't want to give too much away for those who haven't read it. But there is an infidelity and an agreement is made between the couple that revenge will be exacted by the hurt party. And it's quite sudden and it's quite explicit, and it's quite, I found it quite shocking. And Sarah in Summerwater the revenge is maybe more oblique, but it's certainly, there's a cruelty there and there's a sort of building tension of how this might unfold. So, I'm going to start with Megan but the almost literal pound of flesh that is demanded by Lucy, how did that come about? And how comfortable was it to be writing that?
Megan Hunter
Yeah, I wouldn't say it was comfortable at all. I, yeah, I think I just, I became very interested in thinking through issues of sort of betrayal, forgiveness and a certain kind of fairytale patterning and sort of almost mythical patterning that to be sort of imposed on everyday life, which is obviously much more sort of shapeless and amorphous and not something where, you know, people usually have these sorts of agreements. And I just, yeah, I just became sort of fascinated, almost, almost kind of against my will – I mean, obviously not against my will – but I was, sort of kept thinking, 'Am I really gonna write a book about this: this doesn't seem very sort of me somehow, you know?' I wrote this very sort of, well, I mean I say it's my cheerful book, my first book, but obviously it's about a dystopia so it's not that cheerful, but it's a very, it's quite a warm book about love between a mother and a child. And this book felt much, much darker. So I kind of, I felt myself almost sort of drawn into writing it. And yeah, at times it was very uncomfortable. But I sort of sensed that it was necessary for me to just, to keep going with that, and to not turn away from, you know, that which yeah, I found dark and difficult – and to kind of, and to push through that as a writer. And I mean I'm pleased that I did but yeah, it wasn't comfortable and it didn't always feel like necessarily the most natural subject choice. But, and I think, you know, when I told people about it, friends or family they always looked quite surprised. But, I think it's just such a fascinating story to me. And then, you know, hopefully to other people. Yeah, it just intrigued me to come from that premise.
Olivia Chapman
Sarah, the menace that kind of comes to a head towards the end of the novel is more subtle in Summerwater but it's equally as threatening, and it all revolves around a family who are unknown to everyone else – they're from somewhere else. I don't think from, my memory, they're never explicitly, we don't explicitly know where they're from. But their child is subject to an incident of bullying, and then there's kind of all kinds of rhetoric around how the rest of the residents on this caravan park are feeling towards them. How were you trying to portray that building up of tension? And was it as simple as you want to create an issue and you want to say something about this issue, and the feelings that these people have will all come to a head in a rather big way?
Sarah Moss
No, it wasn't that planned. I'm clearly going to keep saying that all the way through, 'this book was not planned at all'. I was thinking when Megan was talking that the idea of revenge comes from a fantasy of justice, an idea that things can be set right or that wrong can be undone or redressed in some way, and that's … And Megan you said it, it works against the model of real life, and I think that, that's really true because it's about, it's about narrative structure and the idea that there might be a satisfying ending, which of course, in real life, there isn't – I mean, there are ends but there are almost never endings. And I think in Summerwater it wasn't about choosing characters who were trying to bring about particular states, it was about the shape of the narrative itself; that the shape of story demands justice or injustice, depending on whether it's comedy or tragedy. So those are really the only options that you have. I mean, there isn't, you can't write a story which has neither, well, it's very difficult to write a story that has neither a just nor an unjust ending. Because narrative itself demands that you do that, or not even demand, but simply does it. And as I was writing, actually I wasn't sure when I was writing the first draft until quite late whether I was going towards a comedic or a tragic ending. One of the points of conflict is a household on this holiday park who have loud parties late at night, mysteriously, because it's quite remote and it's not clear who's getting to the parties or where from. And I think the way you respond to your neighbours having fun is such a fundamental question about community and individuality. Do you want to make it stop or do you take a bottle and go round? And that's really the question that everybody on the caravan park has to address in the end as this noise becomes intolerable, as you can't ignore it anymore. And some of them take a bottle and go round and some of them want to make it stop. But those are really the only two options at that point, and I think the book could have gone either way.
Olivia Chapman
That's fascinating to me that you didn't know whether it was going to be one ending or the other right up until you were actually writing it. It's interesting you use the example of the neighbours and what the neighbours are up to. Of course, we're recording this at the end of the summer. We are in some form of lockdown still; things have not gone back to normal. And obviously, we've all gone through months of various stages of lockdown. I would love to know how you as writers have found lockdown? Sarah, I wonder if I can start with you? How has this lockdown been for you as a writer?
Sarah Moss
Extraordinarily difficult in ways that I feel very ashamed of. I thought I should have been absolutely fine in lockdown – we're financially pretty secure, my livelihood is not at risk, everybody in my house gets on pretty well, nobody needs to fear anybody else, you know there was always going to be enough food. Really, we had no problems whatsoever. You know I check my privilege and it's there every single time. But I found it really hard, particularly at the beginning. And I think for me that was partly that lockdown freaked me out a lot more than COVID freaked me out. And I've been thinking about this. I mean, it's not that I think lockdown is wrong. I'm absolutely not a Trump-supporting mask-refuser. I mean, clearly, it was necessary and clearly it was the only thing to do, even though it was a terrible thing to do. But I think quite a lot about social breakdown and about authoritarian government, and I have a Jewish refugee background. And the moment when it becomes the law that you may not send your children to school, and you may not leave your house except under very strict conditions, is a moment when all the ancestral voices in my head go off. And it took me a while to realise that that was what was happening because I was very lonely in my fear of lockdown when everybody else was much more scared of COVID – which is, of course, reasonable: COVID is much more frightening than lockdown. And that didn't help me write at all. I mean, I wasn't really in a waiting phase at the time anyway. But that, the fear and the sense that my own immediate environment was fundamentally transformed by something I couldn't see was not helpful for me in any way. And I was thinking about this also in relation to what you said about the question about motherhood and responsibility for the house. I think that for a lot of women the house is not the place where you do your thinking or where you have your professional life, I think for probably for most adults, but particularly for women, the house is a place of work. And it's a place that demands endless, repetitive, not very interesting labour; and the more people are in it, the more of that labour there is, and the less space there is for the people who are responsible for that labour to do any thinking or making or reading or reflecting. So, yeah, I mean, I look around houses and I see work that hasn't been done and it should be done, not necessarily by me but certainly by me or somebody else and that doesn’t help me write.
Olivia Chapman
Megan, how have you found lockdown, both as a writer and I suppose just kind of as someone who was, well, you were due to be published in June, and it got delayed until this autumn. So how has it been?
Megan Hunter
Yes. I mean, I feel like it's had very different sort of distinct phases for me really, and it feels like, you know, in one sense obviously no time at all, and in another sense, it feels like it's been, I don't know, years and years. I mean, I was ill actually. So, I had I think suspected COVID at the beginning of lockdown for quite a number of weeks. And so that kind of really determined my initial experience of it. So, all the time when everything was so quiet and there were no cars on the road, I was just in bed. So, I was kind of out of it for the first bit. And then I sort of emerged and was kind of happy to be, you know, in the sunshine and just sitting in the garden and things like that. And then I was quite happy to be writing for a while and kind of writing in calm and quiet without, in a sense, that pressure and that exposure of publication. And it seemed like the right thing to postpone because obviously there were no bookshops open at that point. I think with the book coming out now I feel quite keenly a series of sort of senses of loss, you know, loss, and a sense of not really being caught up somehow still to what's happened; and to what has been lost. You know, I think there's a remote part of book publishing which is the same. So, you know, you write your book on your own, somebody reads it on their own, and things like, you know, social media, it's all taking place at a distance. So that's familiar. But that's always been sort of countered by yeah, the more physical encounters, the journeys. And as Sarah was saying, I think as a woman and as a mother, it's been quite important for me to go away actually, often. You know, I go to London, I see people, I go to events and I'm a different person, I sort of escape for a while. That's all completely stopped. And so, I do feel, yeah, a sort of a soreness about that and a difficulty, which I guess we're all going through. And the kind of, the quiet writing period of lockdown feels distant. And I don't know, I've been in my life quite reliant on working in libraries and cafes, similarly to Sarah mentioned about being out of the house. And so, you know, I'm thinking how I can incorporate some of that sense into my writing life going forward. I mean, in a sense I can't, but I'm thinking about maybe going to a friend of a friend's house once a week, using their spare room or, you know. I mean, I'm very lucky, I have a, I actually have a writing place in the garden. But there's something about actually getting away entirely and having that headspace, which I think is really quite important for me.
Olivia Chapman
That then brings me on to what might well be my last question. But the question is around the responsibility or the maybe responsibility's the wrong word, the reliance the rest of us have on writers to document and interpret things like, frankly, this chaotic, crazy year that we're still in the middle of, and whether you feel that responsibility, whether that feels like a burden or something that you actually embrace? So that's the first part of the question. And the second one is: how do you write? How are you finding the space or time or structure to write both at the moment and I suppose more generally? Megan, I’ll maybe start with you. You mentioned you've got a writing space in the garden, but it sounds like you've got to the stage where actually you want something different now, you've had enough of that and you need a physical change of space?
Megan Hunter
Yeah, I mean, I'll still mainly be here, and I do love it and it's got its own, you know, advantages over being in a library, for example. But I think it's just that balance between, you know – I work, I work with students a bit at the university as well and that's all now gone online. So it's, you know, it's having a balance in one's life between being in a room on one's own and being out and about. So I think it's that, I think it's, yeah, finding that balance. And in terms of how I write, I mean, we have a very strict sort of week. My husband and I share the writing room at the moment because he works from home, and so we have a very strict timetable in Google Calendar. And, you know, that is how I write because we are, we just pass the baton really like relay runners pretty much all day, every day, and that's, yeah, that's how we do it. There was another part of your question about responsibility of writing about the present moment. Initially, when everything first happened, I was writing quite a lot of, I wrote something about being ill. And I've written things about, I've written stories, which kind of have an illness theme or, you know, pandemic theme, but I'm not, I feel like it's good to let, if possible, to leave a bit of, usually, for most writers, it's good to leave a bit of time. And kind of, you know, it's okay to write those things at the time. I mean, it's good and it's, if you're a writer, then you write, and that's how often you process things and make sense of them. But I think it's good to then leave them and then come back to them and sort of see how they fare because when everything's happening, I mean, like any piece of writing, you know, you just have to let it sit for a while, don't you? And so, if you're trying to respond to the immediate moment, and perhaps publish in the immediate moment in response to that moment, I think that, you know, that can be difficult because writing needs, it needs time and space to become clear, I think. At least my writing does.
Olivia Chapman
Sarah, how do you feel?
Sarah Moss
I agree with Megan. Absolutely the point about needing to leave it, and I mean, I had COVID as well early in March. So right kind of, slightly before and right at the beginning of lockdown, and then trailing on for weeks afterwards. And during those weeks I was writing. I mean, there were a surprising number of editors asking novelists to write things about COVID and I kept thinking, 'Why don't you go find an epidemiologist? You know, what can I do with it? I don't know anything about this'. But those pieces all had to be binned as I went along because I was writing too much in the moment and too much with the strength of my own reactions, and without even the perspective that I have now, let alone that we will all come to in the months and years to come. I mean, there were exceptions, but I think broadly, that kind of writing is probably more like journalism than fiction. So, I'm not, I mean, I started a project in lockdown, which I think I'm probably not going to continue. And I'm now thinking about something else. But neither of those are pandemic writing projects. I'm sure we'll all have a lot to say about this for a very long time, but I feel much more called to try to make something beautiful that somebody can enjoy during hard times rather than make something about hard times.
Olivia Chapman
So for you it's more about creating something which can have either a contrast or a bit of an escapist element to it?
Sarah Moss
That's how I feel at the moment. I mean, I'm certainly not claiming that that's the role of literature in life or anything so general. For me just, I mean I've been saying this for a while that I want to try to make the book that you take with you when you get under the table because the bombs are falling and that book was not going to be a book about bombs, ever.
Olivia Chapman
Yes, that’s a very, very true statement. I'm delighted to have spoken to you both. Thank you both. I am very much excited by these novels. I'm excited to know what you're writing next. I will be the first person begging a bound proof from your publisher as and when the next books come out. Sarah Moss's novel is called Summerwater. It's published now. And Megan Hunter's novel is called The Harpy. Thank you both for joining us at Birmingham Literature Festival.
Sarah Moss
Thank you.
Megan Hunter
Thank you.
Outro message
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love for you to tell us about it – leave us a review or a rating and find us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. You can download our latest podcast episodes, every Thursday, from all the places you would normally get your podcasts and find transcripts of our episodes in the shownotes and on our website at www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org . Details about our full programme can also be found on our website. Until then, happy reading!
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is curated by Shantel Edwards and produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
This week’s episode brings together journalists Natalie Fiennes and Lynn Enright to discuss their books, Behind Closed
Doors: Sex Education Transformed and Vagina: A Re-education. In conversation with Birmingham Literature Festival director Shantel Edwards, they talk about the politicisation of women’s bodies and sexual desire, the importance of sex education and the impact of the porn industry on our attitudes towards sex and our own bodies.
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast brings writers and readers together to discuss some of 2020’s best books. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions
about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. Join us each week for exciting and inspiring conversations with new, and familiar, writers from the Midlands and beyond.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
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Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Guest Curator: Kit de Waal
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Podcast Transcription, Episode 8: Lynn Enright and Natalie Fiennes
Kit de Waal
Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast series. I’m Kit de Waal and I’ve worked with the Festival Director, Shantel Edwards, as Guest Curator of this year’s podcast series. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. This week’s episode brings together journalists Natalie Fiennes and Lynn Enright to discuss the politicisation of women’s bodies and sexual desire, the importance of sex education and the impact of the porn industry on our attitudes towards sex and our own bodies. In conversation with Birmingham Lit Festival director, Shantel Edwards, this episode continues the conversation about sex, intersectional feminism and gender started by the authors’ books, Behind Closed Doors: Sex Education Transformed and Vagina: A Re-education.
Shantel Edwards
Welcome to the Birmingham Literature Festival podcast. I'm Shantel Edwards and I'm the Festival Director and I'm really excited today to welcome writers Lynn Enright and Natalie Fiennes to the podcast, and to join them in discussion about their books. I'm going to introduce them both and their books to you, and then we're going to dive into a wonderful chat about their work and all the ways their books are challenging our ideas about sex, women's bodies, intersectional feminism, and last, but most certainly not least, vaginas. Our first guest is Lynn Enright and she's a journalist who has written for Vogue, The Irish Times, the Guardian and BuzzFeed, as well as many other publications where she writes about feminism, current affairs, women's health, fashion, the arts, politics, and pop culture. The book we're here to talk about today, Vagina: A Re-education, is her first book, and it provides people with information that's often obscured about the female body, confronting taboos and the patriarchy in the process. Our second guest is Natalie Fiennes, a journalist and film-maker who writes for the Guardian and the Independent. She makes documentaries and has taught sex education and consent classes in schools, universities and youth centres. Behind Closed Doors: Sex Education Transformed is her first book, and it offers a manifesto for an inclusive sex education that offers young people an honest insight into sexuality, whilst identifying the varied and layered inequalities that currently stand in the way of sexual freedom. A very warm welcome to you both. Thank you for being here.
Natalie Fiennes
Thank you for having us.
Lynn Enright
Thank you.
Shantel Edwards
I loved both of your books. I thought they were really compelling reads and I came away from them feeling like I'd learned a lot. And when I was reading them it really felt like there was real passion and impetus behind them. And I wanted to start by asking you both – and perhaps we could start with Lynn – about what had inspired you to write them?
Lynn Enright
So I was working at The Pool, which is now defunct but was a website aimed at women. And it was a place that kind of covered a broad array of topics, and I was Head of News and Content there. So commissioning stuff about politics and feminism, but also, you know, kind of film or books or, you know, really everything. But when we did, when we covered subjects about women's bodies, and about kind of taboo subjects like fertility, infertility, miscarriage, childbirth, post-childbirth, vaginas, all of that kind of stuff, there was just a real response from the readers. So that got me thinking and, you know, I could sense that and I wanted to do something with that. And then also around that time #MeToo had happened and the Repeal the Eighth movement in Ireland was underway – so the push for free, safe legal abortion in Ireland, and we'd never had legal abortion in Ireland but we were on the cusp of it then when I started to write this book. And so I got to think about how the basics of biology and the fact that so often just the basics about our bodies are obscured, whether that's in sex education or even in the way we're spoken to with a sort of woolliness and a lack of clarity around the way we speak about our own bodies and the knowledge we actually have available to us. So I got to think how that's connected to then these much wider concepts and problems. Like, you know, like what we saw with #MeToo, so like sexual assault and sexual abuse, and like the fact that, you know, abortion wasn't legal in Ireland until two years ago. And I think that that was connected to our discomfort around biology. So it was kind of bringing those two subjects together was how this book started.
Shantel Edwards
Thank you, I think you can really, you can really feel that in the book as well. As I was reading it I certainly felt like I could see the intersections of the ways all those things were working together. And the same for your book as well. Natalie, I thought you did a really good job of showing the ways that women's bodies in particular are the intersection for a lot of those things. The same question to you really. Was there a particular moment that led to you writing the book?
Natalie Fiennes
Yes. So I was also working at a magazine called Consented magazine and we used to kind of publish these pieces on an array of different topics. But we also used to go into schools and teach classes and lead workshops. And I, with a kind of a few other people, and we were attached to this kind of activist collective called Resist and Renew, started teaching consent and sex education workshops in schools. And for us the focus was always around, you know, not just providing like the practical tools of sex education, but also trying to teach young people or show them how these issues are often so much more connected to wider political, social structures. And I found going into the schools like really, really rewarding and incredibly inspiring. And since then I kind of, afterwards I started writing about it and realised, you know, in lots of ways quite how far young people had come in terms of their sex education. The same as Lynn, it was also a similar time that #MeToo was all coming out, so lots of the young people were discussing the implications of the movement, and what it meant for them in terms of their own experiences with sexual violence and feminism, and so on. And there have been some really fantastic resources that are now available online. But in lots of ways it also hadn't come along that far, and it made me reflect on my own sex education and how bad it was, which you know, really motivated me basically, to turn those articles that I was writing into something a bit more sustained, which is where the book came from.
Shantel Edwards
Thank you. I think reading both of your books it did also really make me think of my own sex education classes in school, which were also terrible. So, it's nice to know that we've at least all shared that terrible experience. I think what really struck me about both of your books is the ways in which women's bodies and sex and sex education are all political issues. I think that came across really well, specifically the female body – so that seemed to be like, a very specific political site. So thinking, you know, the cultural refusal to properly name the vulva, and you know, anything from that to the sort of the overwhelming fixation with the bodies of trans women and girls. And I was wondering whether you think that now that we are sort of in the aftermath of #MeToo, and those sort of really great moments of activism, whether we're starting to move away from these oppressive ideas about women's bodies? Maybe if we start with you, Natalie?
Natalie Fiennes
Yeah, I think, I think there's been, you know, in particular, since the outpourings that came about, since the #MeToo movement, but more generally, I guess, since like the birth of social media, and how much more available information can be online about body positivity, you know. Dispelling some of the myths around diet culture, you know, tackling some of the norms we have around race or ableism, or, you know, the kind of bodies that we were told growing up that you have to look like because they were plastered all over the magazines, and they were in all the films and everyone looked exactly the same. So yeah, I think in lots of respects there's been a huge backlash against some of those, like, norms. And I think you see that within the kind of commercial sphere as well. So, you know, like, products, the companies that sell products have now realised that there's this movement for inclusivity, or challenging norms around beauty, particularly for women. And there's much more like diversity in advertising, which in lots of respects is very good. But I think, you know, these, as with everything, these norms around beauty and these norms around the way that women are supposed to look, or people generally are meant to look do come from somewhere, and they come from systems of oppression, which in lots of ways haven't, the material conditions of those systems aren't necessarily being as challenged. So even though it's really fantastic that you see these kind of norms around beauty standards being criticised, you know, sometimes it would be, it'd be really great to see those connected to kind of more broad movements that are kind of really challenging, really radical, and putting forward a different, a different way of viewing bodies and, and beauty.
Shantel Edwards
Yeah, thank you. I can see that it does, it does feel like maybe a more superficial empowerment but the underlying foundation's still the same. Same question to you really, Lynn. Do you feel hopeful about the way that we're moving in terms of the way we view women's bodies?
Lynn Enright
Yeah, I am hopeful and I think, you know, that things are changing all the time. And that, you know, I sort of, Natalie's book came out and my book came out and lots of other books came out – it was, you know, this weird year, I think, where a lot of books relating to the vagina came out, Dr Jennifer Gunter's book came out. And, it felt like it, it was, you know, even when I was doing the press for the book, it felt like magazines and newspapers were really open to it and really wanted to talk about it. So it was there in the media. But at the same time, when I was doing the research for my book, I sort of realised – and I think that this is just what happens to every feminist along the way – you realise, you know, people have done this work before. I mean, literally for centuries, women have been doing this work to educate each other about their own bodies. And, and then very specifically, people were doing very similar work in the 70s and 80s. And I feel like just before I was born (I was born in 1983) and just around then, you know, there was a real movement of educating women about their bodies and talking about the vulva and looking at the vulva. And that was all happening. And yet I feel by the time I sort of became an older child or a teenager 10 to 15 years later, I didn't feel like that was present in the way that I was taught or in the conversations I had, or in the media. So it almost is like, we do all the work, and then we forget it and we don't, it's not passed on to the next generation. And so I think we need to watch out for that. And we also need to watch out for the fact that we do all this work but it's kind of simultaneously happening alongside labiaplasty being on the rise, and, you know, lots of other quite harmful stuff. So yeah, like Natalie said there's, you know, there are these movements in advertising, but the wider structures remain. And so I think you're always balancing, trying to be happy about what's good and what progress has been made, but be aware that the job isn't done, and that the job may sort of never be done in a way that you can just sign off on.
Shantel Edwards
Yeah, so cautiously hopeful.
Lynn Enright
Yeah, well, that's a nice way of putting it, yes.
Shantel Edwards
There's that really nice moment in your book where, you realise you'd never asked your own mother about her experience of the menopause. And I guess, thinking about hope and things changing going forward, do you think that now we're of – I guess, I was born in 88 so we're a similar generation – now that we're slightly better at talking about those things it will be slightly easier for the generations that come up afterwards?
Lynn Enright
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I look at friends of mine who have children and definitely I think the way they speak to their kids about their bodies is different to the way my parents. My parents were so lovely, so open, but you know, but Irish and Catholic, and we didn't really speak about our bodies very openly, and now my friends who're bringing up kids do. And so there's just more of a, more openness and I do think that will lead to, yeah, more openness about menopause, or more openness about abortion, or miscarriage, or pregnancy. And I suppose, you know, I guess with all of this stuff you have to think that a lot of it is very depressing because of the sort of history of it, but also, you know, a lot of it is unpleasant, you know: period pain is hard, abortion is hard, miscarriage is hard and traumatic and horrible. But then there is joy. And so you want to be open about that joy as well, and open about the joy of sex and, and open about the joy of menopause, you know. I think that even when we do speak about the menopause now, it's either in a really kind of jokey way, so it becomes the butt of the joke and the woman who's experiencing it is also sort of the butt of the joke, or its about how terrible it is. And it’s really important to talk about that, but it's also important to talk about the fact that it can be really empowering for some people, and it can mark the beginning of a really positive change for some people. And I think that, you know, I want us to be more open about both sides of everything: about how hard it can be to have a vagina sometimes but how brilliant it can be too.
Shantel Edwards
Yeah. Thank you, that's a really nice way of putting it. What struck me, from both of your books really is that there is a real sort of cultural silence around these issues. We don't talk about sex and we don't talk about periods and all of these things. And I wondered, if I might come to you first Natalie, and just ask what you think the consequences of that cultural silence around women's experiences and women's health might be?
Natalie Fiennes
Yeah, I mean, it's a really important question. You know, I think its part of the reason why I definitely wrote this book and I imagine why Lynn wrote her book and why all these other people write books about sex, in a way that we hope is progressive and transformative. And I suppose, in the void, you know, when there's an absence of conversation or discussion. You know, you almost get an amplification of the norms around these issues, whether that's, you know, body image, or if that's around sexual violence, or the expectations of gender, or the kind of the fluidity of sexuality, it's in the silence where, you know, really strongly held traditions are maintained and continue to exist. It kind of reminds me a bit actually, and perhaps we’ll come on to talk about this, but you know, at the moment with COVID and young people aren't going into schools, and there's a whole group of people who are going to miss out on their sex education because of the pandemic because there's a global health crisis. And there's particular age groups in particular, like year five and year six, where it's really important that there's an intervention made by educators and by parents and by supporters and their friends, because it's in those years in between primary and secondary school where people kind of come into puberty, and they're learning about sex and sexuality. And, you know, in the absence of a good education or an absence of conversations around these topics, you know, the research shows that people then go on to secondary school of an age where they're slightly older, you know, with really entrenched views around like LGBTQ rights or about feminism or about relationships. So you know, we do literally see in these instances, and all the research shows that when we don't talk about sex, and when we don't talk openly about relationships and the body, and feminism really, these norms prevail.
Shantel Edwards
Yeah, and I think that's a really interesting point. And actually, one of my questions was, because you both mentioned in your books that the education framework around sex education was due to change, I think next month, and I wondered if either of you knew – and Natalie, I don't know whether, you know – if those plans to change are, are still going to go ahead now that we're in the midst of this global pandemic?
Natalie Fiennes
Yeah. So I think basically, the government, the Department of Education has said that schools can implement the new sex and relationship education curriculum if they want to but it's no longer compulsory. So they'll intend to make it compulsory next September, September 2021. You know, which, in lots of respects, kind of does make sense. Like, as we know, schools are under an enormous burden at the moment. There's a huge crisis in education what with the A-level results and with, you know, ensuring that young people have the right education tools. And even though it does make sense it's still, it's still a great tragedy when you think about all the education that people are going to be missing around sex and sexuality. So, there's a huge question on what we can do after COVID or when things calm down, when things open up. There's going to be quite a big job I think to be done for sex educators and for teachers to see how we can move forward. And, you know, both reflect on the period but also fill in the gaps.
Shantel Edwards
Yeah, completely. And I think one of the ways that you both talk about those gaps being filled, I guess, is, through porn and the huge rise of the sort of cultural normalisation of porn. And I was hoping to ask you both about that and the way that you think its impacted on young people's ideas about sex and our relationships with our own bodies. And I wondered what you thought the long-term impact of that, of growing up with porn being such a normal part of our culture really, will be?
Lynn Enright
Yeah, I mean, I suppose it, it just feels like, I think I say in the book, that the cat is out of the bag, you know. If you're an 11-year-old and you want to see porn you can find it. And if you're doing that in a family that isn't open about sex, in a culture that isn't open about sex and an education system that isn't open about sex and sex education, so there's a vacuum around sex education but simultaneously, you can access porn whenever you want, you know, I think that's a problem. And I think that, you know, you're not getting the education that you need to be able to contextualise that. And that's how you end up with a situation where, you know, young girls are requesting labiaplasty because the labia sort of, is absent from our culture, you know. We don't really know what the labia looks like, you know. I think that, that most straight women don't really see other labias besides their own very often. And then if they do see it in porn it's likely to look quite different either because the porn performer has had labiaplasty, or if it's a still image, perhaps it's been photoshopped. Or, you know, porn performers, will happen to have very sort of symmetrical labia and that's why they have been recruited into the industry or that's why they'll have you know, that's why they have chosen to get into it. So, you know, I think that that's just a clear example of how you can look at porn and if you don't have the right context, and that's your only way of seeing something, it can be really harmful. And so, I think, you know, sex education has been, it's been so outdated because, you know, it was eighteen years or something between the last guidance and the most recent guidance. And in that time internet porn had happened and, you know, something like that should have been a wake-up call or should have been a clarion call to action, you know. If suddenly something happens that disrupts how porn is
distributed, which internet porn did, then of course that should have been addressed in sex education. And I think it's really important that, that we do it now.
Shantel Edwards
And you mention in your book, Natalie, you talk about – Erika Lust I think her name is – who is the feminist, she makes feminist porn. And I guess the same question but also a slight add-on of as to whether you think there are ways in which porn can be used as a resource?
Natalie Fiennes
Yeah, I think. I mean, it's such an interesting question. And I really agree with Lynn that, you know, in the absence of a proper, good, rigorous sex education porn does become the sex education for many people, certainly for, you know, most people that I know. But, you know, something I write about in the book is like how porn has existed, as far as we know, you know, for thousands of years. Like humans have always created objects or visual representation as erotica, basically. And I think when we talk about porn today what we mean generally is the kind of mass-produced, hyper-commercialised, really deregulated straight porn that most of us think of when we imagine it. Which is, you know, as we all know, riddled with problems, riddled with unrealistic expectations, both on women, but on men, around body, around performance, around sexual expectation and all of this stuff. But there is, you know, a group and a growing part of the industry which kind of calls itself feminist, or which follows principles around, you know, particularly around the politics of work. So paying performers properly, making sure that they're safe, that they use contraception. You know, and in many cases, that they have some input into the performance and the production of the films, you know, which means also that consent is right at the heart of any of these kinds of, new sort of parts of the industry. So there is, I think there's a growing movement of porn, which is sort of challenging some of these norms around it, which I think is really exciting. But still, the vast majority porn is, you know, free, it's often degrading for women and so on.
Shantel Edwards
Just, I guess, changing tack slightly. I think what really struck me when I was reading your books and then thinking about your books was the way that language seems so critical, both in the sense of the words we use to describe women's bodies and the way, you know, we say 'front bottoms' instead of 'vulvas'. But also in the ways that words associated with women's bodies are almost unspeakable. So you were saying Lynn that, you know, we don't talk about miscarriage and we don't talk about menopause and periods. And I think both of your books are really excellent contributions towards helping us vocalise these things in ways that we haven't been able to before. But I wondered if you, if you felt like that was changing in society more broadly, if we're becoming more open and, I guess, feeling less shame about our bodies. Do you think that's the case, Lynn?
Lynn Enright
Yeah. I do, I do. I think it's the same thing: cautiously hopeful. And the same thing about looking at friends of mine who have kids and, you know, and calling a vulva a vulva. But at the same time when I was promoting this book and going to bookshops and literary festivals often, you know, people would ask the question, 'Well, what, you know; I have a daughter and what do you think we should call it because there isn't a good name because, you know, front bottom I know is a bit ridiculous but there's nothing else'. And you know, I just went, 'You can say vulva'. So, I think there is still a bit of hesitancy about using the word vulva. I think it's got a sort of, I don't know, a bad reputation or something. I feel like – and I say it in the book, because the book is called Vagina: A Re-education. And when I started to write the book, I kept referring to the whole thing, the whole area as vagina, because I thought, you know, well, that's what we call it. You know, I know that it's not biologically correct, but it's what you know, colloquially, we call that area, the vagina. But then, as I did more research, I realised, you know, what a disservice we're doing the vulva by calling it the vagina, and by not using the correct term, the vulva. And again, that's something that, you know, feminists were talking about in the 70s and 80s, the importance of the word the vulva and I think that we're still a little uncomfortable about that word, because I think the vagina is, you know, it's the birth canal, and it's where if you're having heterosexual, penetrative sex, it's necessary; whereas the vulva is, it feels more sort of, I think it does feel a bit more like a feminist word because it exists on its own not to give birth and not to be penetrated but its its own thing and its own sort of pleasure. And I think we're still a little bit awkward about that. And I think, yeah, it's an interesting point that we're sort of awkward about the very basics of the vocabulary and then awkward about the experiences and what happens and, you know, we're not good at talking about any of that. You know, about sexual assault, about miscarriage, about anything that doesn't go well, I suppose, you know. And even if it does go well, you know, I think that people – I only realised when my friends started to have kids how different each birth story is, because even birth, you know, this absolutely triumphant and brilliant experience and everybody's so happy, you know 'Babies, everybody loves babies', and it's a really happy time and people, you know, everybody wants to talk about it. But they don't want to talk about the birth story. And I just thought birth was kind of the same for everybody. And I thought that, you know, whether or not you got painkillers was because, was a personal decision, rather than the facts of each birth being wildly different. And so you know, I think we are really bad at talking about almost every aspect of sex and anything that can happen to the vulva and vagina. So hopefully, we will get better but we're not quite there.
Shantel Edwards
No, I completely agree. And I still find myself, even though I've read both of your books and I know it's the vulva, I still find myself saying vagina, and I do try and check myself now for like, slightly like – your voice is in my head, Lynn, every time I do it. So thank you for that! I guess the same, similar question for Natalie because I know you work with a lot of young people. Do you feel like that's changing for them? Like they have a better language to talk about their own bodies and their experiences?
Natalie Fiennes
Yeah, I really, genuinely do actually. I always come away from these workshops I do in schools feeling really hopeful and inspired by the level of knowledge that exists amongst so many young people. And I think that is testament to the fact that there's so much more information out there. You know, since writing my book, and, and I guess Lynn's coming out as well, Sex Education, the series was released on Netflix, which has been huge. And I think it's absolutely fantastic that something like that is out there. And I really wish that when I was younger, I'd had something that was so, you know, honest and frank and candid about the language around our bodies. But also funny. It kind of comes back to what Lynn was saying earlier about the joys of sex and the joys of our bodies that we also need to remember and that is so often missing in some of these kinds of conversations around sex and relationships. But no, I really, I think having been into schools I feel very optimistic about the next generation, you know. And that's not to say there aren't problems. There’s a worrying trend amongst some young men around, you know, being anti some of these feminist discourses, which I've definitely noticed in a lot of schools. And I think that's the kind of darker side to the internet that exists, and perhaps, is kind of inevitable when you've got a really strong liberation movement, from a marginalised group that there's going to be pushbacks from, you know, those that hold power. I don't, I mean I'm not sure what the kind of, the anti-feminist stuff is about, but it's definitely there as well as the progressive stuff. But on the whole, I feel, I think we've come a long way, and particularly from, you know, in comparison to when I was growing up. We never spoke about our bodies, you know. We never spoke about masturbation, we never spoke about our periods. When I first got my period, I didn't tell anyone for about six months. I didn't tell my parents, I felt so much shame about my body. And I think, yeah, I think we've come a long way which is brilliant.
Shantel Edwards
In your book, Natalie, you talk about the origins of the birth control pill, and the ways in which obviously, it gave these amazing new options to women, but it was actually quite steeped in racism and prejudice. And I wondered if you'd just tell us a little bit about that?
Natalie Fiennes
Yes, it is an interesting and quite troubling history. So I think it was in the early 60s or late 50s when the pill was being developed, and as with many medical trials around that time, and I suspect still today, it was first tried out on very, very poor American women with devastating effects, I think. Quite a lot of women died. A lot of people experienced some of the more extreme side effects of the contraceptive pill. So, they weren't allowed to test it any more in America. So they moved it, they moved it out of the [United] States to, to try it on Puerto Rican women, and to exactly the same effect with lots of women who died, lots of people had blood clots and were very, very sick, and had mental health problems. And they changed the composition of the pill so what we have now is quite different to what it was then. It's much weaker. But, you know, there is a very troubled history with contraception and, you know, with a lot of these topics. I mean, the fact that the bodies of poor American women, and also the bodies of women of colour, poor women in the global south were considered much less important, you know. So there is, when we talk about the liberation of women, and the pill when it came out was hailed as the symbol of the sexual liberation of women. But, you know, you have to ask at what cost and which women are we talking about? And it's many of the same questions that we need to be asking in all different aspects of feminism. Its which women are benefiting from these movements? And what demands are we calling for? Is this cis women? Is it trans women? Are we being intersectional in our politics? Are we being aware of class differences? So yeah, I think, you know, when we think about contraception we do always have to consider – and lots of these topics – we have to consider the kind of differences between women. It's not that all women are the same.
Shantel Edwards
And do you know, Lynn, who the audience for your book has been, because I was thinking that as I was reading it? Do you know who readers are?
Lynn Enright
Well, I always say that I think it's probably aimed at people in their late teens and 20s. And I just always presumed that it would be girls and women but actually, it's been way broader than that. I think, you know, women in their 30s and 40s and 50s have enjoyed it too because, like we've discussed, you know, there are gaps in the knowledge, even you know when, even after you grow up, you know, the sex education hasn't been done. And you sort of spend your life catching up and getting information as you go. But also men – cisgender, straight men and gay men – have been much more interested in it than I thought they would be. And that's, I think that's really heartening, actually. I remember going for a coffee with somebody who, he's a gay man and he doesn't know very much about vaginas. But he had read the book and he was really pleased about having read the book because he wanted to sort of be able to understand what his sister went through. He said that his sister experienced really heavy periods and period pain and that reading the book was really helpful for him to understand that for her. I've heard that a few times. I actually just got a message from somebody today, from a man, about having read the book and enjoyed it and he found it worthwhile. And that happens much more than I would have thought it would happen
Shantel Edwards
You talk specifically, and explicitly, in the book about your own experiences with things like thrush and period pain and abortion and masturbation. And I wondered how important it was for you to include your own experiences and what that was like to be so open?
Lynn Enright
Yeah, it's a weird one because I think that it's quite important to say that I don't think that women should have to tell their stories in order to get human rights. It became a hot topic with #MeToo as well because, you know, women were telling their stories and presenting their stories, and that was the only way to be listened to. But then we did see how powerful it is. And it was similar with the Repeal the Eighth. So, when there was the campaign to legalise abortion in Ireland women came forward and started to tell their stories. And I wrote about having had an abortion. I wrote about it in Vogue magazine. And I hadn't, you know, I told my parents about the abortion before I published the piece, but I hadn't told them about it previous to that. And I think there were a lot of people having that same experience in Ireland at that time. And it was a sort of, it was painful for so many people, but I think it was really, really useful. And there was a piece of research done that – it was just a survey at the end, after the referendum – but it asked people what had made the biggest impact on deciding how they would vote and people said personal stories, that came out at the top. And I think that's so telling. And so, I suppose I feel like, for me, I'm quite privileged, you know. I'm a freelance journalist most of the time so I don't have an employer who would be, you know, I feel like it's almost good for my career to be able to speak out, it doesn't harm my career. I have a very supportive and loving family and husband. And, you know, it's quite easy for me to tell my story because also I enjoy creating narratives or I enjoy thinking about experiences as a kind of narrative, so that for me is an easy thing to do. And so, I think if it's an easy thing for you to do, or it's a thing that you want to do, then it's useful and good. But I don't think that it's ever something that you should feel that you have to do. So, I feel like I can do it because it's not that big a deal to me, so I may as well.
Shantel Edwards
Thank you both so much for your books and for being part of this year's Birmingham Literature Festival programme. It's been a pleasure to speak to you and participate in such an important and engaging discussion. Thank you both again.
Lynn Enright
Thank you very much.
Outro message
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The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is curated by Shantel Edwards and produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
In today’s episode, journalist and author Sam Baker talks to fellow writer Kate Spicer about her latest book The Shift. Join Sam and Kate as they discuss the cultural silence around menopause, the invisibility of women past child-bearing age and the
freedom, power and confidence of life after menopause.
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast brings writers and readers together to discuss some of 2020’s best books. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions
about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. Join us each week for exciting and inspiring conversations with new, and familiar, writers from the Midlands and beyond.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
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Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Guest Curator: Kit de Waal
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Podcast Transcription, Episode 7 – Sam Baker in conversation with Kate Spicer
Kit de Waal
Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast series. I’m Kit de Waal and I’ve worked with the Festival Director, Shantel Edwards, as Guest Curator of this year’s podcast series. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. In today’s episode, journalist and author Sam Baker talks to fellow writer Kate Spicer about her latest book The Shift. Part memoir and part feminist manifesto, The Shift redefines the narrative around menopause and makes visible the lives and experiences of women over 40. In this podcast, Sam and Kate discuss the cultural silence around menopause, the invisibility of women past child-bearing age and the freedom, power and confidence of life after menopause.
Kate Spicer
Hello, and welcome to the Birmingham Literature Festival. My name is Kate Spicer and I'm here with Sam Baker. Sam started her career in journalism and was the editor of some very significant British women's magazines including Just 17, Company, Cosmopolitan, Red. She went on to edit an internet magazine called The Pool, which was multiple award winning and generally recognized as changing the way women's journalism was done online. She's also written five novels, and now is the author of The Shift her first nonfiction book and a podcast of the same name. This is an extraordinary book and I would expect no less from a woman who was once my editor. It is very deep, very wide, it bears her soul, her guts, and also, I should say, her vagina.
Sam Baker
Thanks Kate!
Kate Spicer
It’s one of the most extraordinary books I've ever read about the menopause, because it is so incredibly fearless, and also refuses to get too boring on the technical stuff. Sam, can you start, can we start with a reading?
Sam Baker
Yeah, we can start with a reading and hopefully one that doesn't mention my vagina. I'm just going to read from the very beginning of the book.
‘It dawned on me that something wasn't right around the time I was 46. It could have been earlier, but after a lifetime of gynaecological chaos, I didn't pay much attention when my periods dribbled more or less to a halt. My confidence crashed. Not ideal when you've just ditched a high-profile job to start a business that depends, at least in part, on your capacity for self-belief. And now you're standing in the kitchen howling that you're a failure and resigning was a terrible mistake. Where once I would have bulldozed straight on, confident on the outside, if not inside, now I simply couldn't see a way through. On top of that came the depression, which was less a matter of highs and lows than a case of lows and lowers. I had less than ever to be depressed about I just was. Then came the sweats. Oh Lord, the sweats. I'm not sure which was worse. The hot flushes during the day when you could at least feel them roaring in and try to get to the nearest loo to lie down, body pressed to the cold and inevitably vile tiled floor until they passed or the night sweats. Often, I’d wake in a puddle, skin-soaked, hair slicked to my body, sheet and duvet drenched. I seriously worried I’d started wetting the bed. What the hell was going on? Then my good friend the flesh duvet moved in and decided to stay. Indefinitely. Of course, I had a suspicion, but I couldn't bear to accept it. I wasn't old enough was I? I was 46 going on, I don't know 30. I looked young for my age people always said. I felt young, wasn't menopause something that happened to old people? Was I old?
Despite the countless blogs and Facebook groups and self-help books, I didn't really know where to turn. None of my friends would admit to being perimenopausal yet and seeking help on social media felt like a public admission of aging, which sounds ridiculous now, but then, only a few years ago, when no one would even whisper the word menopause, it felt like a huge deal. Eventually, unable to carry on in the body and brain of someone I hardly recognised, I barged into the office of the gynaecologist who's helped me with my endless problems yelling “help give me all the drugs!” Brushing aside her futile attempts to talk me through a leaflet that explained the link between HRT and breast cancer, I left triumphant with a prescription and the leaflet. I never did read the leaflet. Right then I didn't care about the potential risks or side effects. All I cared about was taking a magic pill to bring me back to me. I took it and lucky for me, it worked. Slowly I started to re-emerge. As months passed, I began to be able to identify other women with that faintly deranged “what the fuck is happening to me” look in their eyes, and a tendency to suddenly overheat. It didn't happen overnight. After all, it's not as if you can go up to complete strangers and say, “oh, I noticed you were looking a bit hot”, and at work I was surrounded by women who were up to 20 years younger than me. Their conversation was all about whether they would ever be able to afford to buy a flat and if or when to start trying for a baby. Why would they care about someone so ancient that their eggs, and plenty of other bits, were drying up? If I'd known then what I know now, I would have approached the whole thing totally differently. I wouldn't have spent precious hours hunting down other women who looked a bit hot and irritable and kept tugging uncomfortably at their clothes. Instead, I would have developed a radar for the rare, relaxed older woman you see very occasionally in the streets, in cafes, at work dos. Rumour has it they're more plentiful in certain parts of America but in the UK, you have to look pretty hard to spot them and, on finding them, I would have begged them to share their wisdom. How did they get there? And what was it like on the other side? How did they shift from hot, flabby, depressed, confused, and convinced they had early onset dementia, to calm, radiant and in control, with an indefinable air of togetherness, and an ability to rise above the whole shit show? Journalists tend to romanticise or demonise menopause. It's a time when you supposedly either stop caring about the shape of your jeans and start wafting contentedly along beaches in wide leg linen trousers, sensible sandals and floppy hats, or become the plate smashing heroine of revenge of the menopausal woman. Unsurprisingly, the reality is not a lot like that. You’re either judged for taking HRT, or judged for not taking it, for giving up or living in denial, for Botox-ing or not Botox-ing. The list of things you're doing wrong is endless and let's face it, that list was never short, just ask a pregnant woman, or indeed any woman. Plus, everyone is suddenly an expert, especially the berks on the internet. But in reality, nobody knows enough about the menopause and that includes the bulk of the medical profession. But don't despair. This book is here to show you that on the other side of menopause, there is a whole new life, and an opportunity to discover a new, unexpected version of you. A body, mind, attitude and sexuality that is recognisably you but different, a you who is not ruled by your fertility, or lack of it. It's called the shift.’
Kate Spicer
Fantastic. I love your book, Sam. And it's quite astonishing, in the number of different elements you've got in there. For a start, it's a romp of a read, you know, you can get lost in it. But you know, you have a very strong feminist sensibility and there is something of a feminist manifesto in there. It's an extremely brave memoir and you go through things that you probably didn't need to address in this book, but you have and it's all the better for it. And we'll talk about that a little bit later, why. It’s a polemic for sure and it's a polemic that needed writing, it is not because you're an angry menopausal woman, it is a polemic that needed writing and it is a self-help. I did find myself quite sort of nourished and nurtured at the end of reading it. I actually don't know where to start. It's a real cracker. I'm gonna start and ask you, firstly, how are you now?
Sam Baker
I'm great now. Seriously. And that sounds facetious, but no, I really am and that was what made me decide to go there with the book. Because, you know, my menopause was really grim. I mean, really, really grim and, you know, it's worth saying that, not everybody's will be. You know, some people just sail through it and personally, I don't want to know them or talk to them, but, you know, some people just don't even hardly notice it. But mine was terrible. And when I came out the other side, and I felt, I mean, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say I felt completely different. Certainly, psychologically and I just thought, how would it have been to have, you know, for a book to have existed that said, you know, it might be terrible, and these are the things you might go through. But actually, on the other side, is a whole new thing. It's like, I think there’s a tendency to think that menopause is like, it's the end, it's the end of the story, full stop. And it's not, it's just the end of a chapter and there's a whole, there are loads more chapters.
Kate Spicer
I mean, it's quite, in a way you’ve sort of written it in a big sisterly way. It's like, you know, read this, don't suffer like I did.
Sam Baker
A swear-y big sister.
Kate Spicer
Yeah, the best kind, but you, I mean, you interview a lot, a lot of women, very wide ranging and you've also clearly done your research and you've read a lot of the existing material. If you were to give your menopause marks out of ten, where ten is that poor woman in the vaginal, here we go, how many times can we say the word vagina in this podcast?
Sam Baker
It will end up with a big E on the end of the title of the podcast for explicit.
Kate Spicer
Yeah, like an NWA album. But, if you were to give your, because there's a lady in your, Jane, in your vaginal atrophy chapter, which I actually quite enjoyed I liked reading bits out to my boyfriend. There's a lady in there who clearly has the most horrific menopause, if we put her at say 10, and the woman who sails through that none of us want to know at zero, where do you think you sit?
Sam Baker
There were moments when it was probably a seven, or maybe an eight. I mean Jane, the woman you’re talking about, Jane Lewis, who's written a leg cross inducing book called Me and My Menopausal Vagina, about her experience of vaginal atrophy. I mean, she, what that poor woman has been through is incredible but no, I would say I probably netted out at about a seven.
Kate Spicer
Right, that's a tough one. And how long did that last?
Sam Baker
Oh, God. Well, like I said I started, I kind of became aware that everything wasn't right when I was about 46. But I wasn't really aware of what, what wasn't right at that point. Because I think that you're, you know, we're all aware that, oh, yeah, menopausal women, they get hot, and they get a bit kind of like padded, and they’re kind of like the butt of jokes on TV. And that's about it. So the mental health symptoms of menopause are massive, and so many, and they're the most common symptoms. But I just, when I kind of started having massive anxiety attacks, my confidence was through the floor. You know, it was just horrific. And then also the brain fog. I didn't know. I didn't know what that was. So, it probably took, I don't know, maybe took me 18 months, couple of years to even work that out, what that was, so probably all in all, it lasted about five years. But that's not hugely long. And by that, the end of that I was, you know, taking HRT and working through other stuff, and, you know, so it was not five years of unmanageability, probably two years.
Kate Spicer
It's funny, my mum, my mother, I mean, we're roughly the same age. I'm 51. And you are 54?
Sam Baker
Yeah.
Kate Spicer
My mum never really talked to me about periods in the kind of 80s. So, they were a bit of surprise when they came and I have to say she didn't talk to me about the menopause, either. And that, you know, like, exactly like you say, you know, it's a kind of, it's a stereotype, a cliche, like a cartoon type understanding we have of something that's going to profoundly change our bodies and our lives, because we're not taught anything about it. And so I, you mentioned early onset dementia, that was the thing that in the end made me realise I might be menopausal, is that I just kept, I actually thought I had dementia, I was so frightened. But I didn't mention it to anybody because I was so paranoid. And it was then I had this bizarre reaction to eating raw onion and my face swelled up and it was like anaphylactic shock. And I went to my GP, who, thankfully, was middle aged, as you say, in your book, middle aged female GPs tend to be a lot more sympathetic than the other female GP I went to who told me, oh, you'll be fine, you’ll sail through it, very few people have a bad time.
Sam Baker
And how old was she?
Kate Spicer
Oh, she was like, 30, she was a child. But yeah, and so this anaphylactic shock, and this early onset dementia turned out to be the menopause and I went on HRT, and I was like, whoa, my life’s back, it was the most kind of wonderful thing. Anyway, we're not here to discuss my menopause, but it has been a real relief to have seen it written about in so much detail. And also, with such great humour, it's a really good read. Just a little bit about your process before we go more into the nitty gritty of the material. You know, how did you start? Where did you start?
Sam Baker
Um, I think one of the reasons I really enjoyed, I mean, I can say, I enjoyed writing it, I mainly enjoyed writing it, was just, I was just a journalist about it. You know, I just did journalism. So, I did loads of research, all of the kind of, you know, reading all the menopause books, realising in the main that this was why I had never read any menopause books.
Kate Spicer
Why what were they like?
Sam Baker
Well, they're either extremely dry, or, God, every word has a connotation. [Laughter]. Every word has a connotation now, but they are extremely dry and academic, or they're a bit, you know, ooh take this vitamin with your guava juice. And I'm not that person. But there is actually one great book, which I will give a little plug because it's, it's quite something. It's a book called Flash Count Diary by Darcey Steinke. And I quote from it a few times in the book, because it's the only other book that I've read that made me think, yeah, that makes sense to me. So, I did, I did the book learning research, and started doing face to face interviews. But I also, I mean, my favourite bit of the whole process really was I did a shout out on social media for women to volunteer to tell me their stories. I was really conscious that, you know, I am a straight white cis woman. You know, I come from a working-class background, but I've lived a middle-class life all the time I’ve worked in media, so my experience is limited, you know, so I wanted to speak to as many women as I possibly could. Then lockdown happened, I was about halfway through. So a lot of the conversations then took place online or on social media. So, I did, I did a journalism approach and basically did all the research and then I sat down to write it. And I always planned for each chapter to be kind of memoir, and then other women and then, you know, and then social and political context, and all of that, but I hadn't really quite envisaged some of the memoir working out quite the way it did.
Kate Spicer
Yeah, I mean, there’s some incredibly intense moments of memoir in there, which really surprised me actually. Because I mean, having worked for you on the ill-fated but incredibly brilliant Minx in the late 90s, you are an honest person, but you don't go into a lot of detail about your life. And I wouldn't have called, I wouldn't have expected to see these moments of memoir that are, that are very intense.
Sam Baker
Are you trying to say I've overshared?
Kate Spicer
No, I'm not trying to say you’ve overshared, I also wrote a memoir that could be called endless amounts of oversharing. I don't think it's oversharing at all, it just surprised me for you. And I wondered how hard it was for you to go into those moments of intense memoir where you discuss, you know, your repeated sexual abuse as a teenager. I mean, less surprising, you discuss having to deal with lots of horrible men who, let us know that the feminist cause still has a long way to go. You talk about your eating disorder, you know, you do really, really go there. Can you talk me through that process? Did it surprise you? Did it just happen? Did you sit and consider it? Did you think about how much detail to go into? Was it cathartic?
Sam Baker
I didn't sit and consider it. If I’d sat and considered it, there's certainly a couple of chapters that wouldn't be there. I think, once I started it, there are two things really, I mean, it's not disingenuous to say that, a couple of chapters, especially at the end when, I kind of find writing a book, when you get towards the end, it's almost a bit like riding a bike downhill. The rest of writing the book isn't like that, it's like a big uphill slog. But with every book I've ever written, there's been a point where you turn the corner almost and then you're just typing, typing, typing frantically and it all comes spewing out and certainly, a couple of chapters at the end were really like that. And the bravery chapter in particular, it wasn't the chapter I intended to write when I sat down and wrote it. But you know, I wrote it very quickly. And then I went and said to my husband, oh, I think maybe you need to read this. Tell me what you think. And he went, whoa, I didn't know you were gonna do that and I said, no, nor did I. But actually, you know, one of the big drives of the book for me is that, I just think that if we all talked about it more, if menopause was just a thing that we talked about in the way that young women now talk about periods it just wouldn't be the issue that it is. And I think it would start to address a lot of the societal problems around the way older women are treated. So I got to that point and I just thought, in order for this, sorry for the writers’ speak, for this narrative arc to make sense I need to tell the truth about the resolution that menopause gave me and that meant I had to, I felt I had to write that bravery chapter. It made everything make sense and that's, it's definitely one of the reasons why I feel so much better within myself than I ever have because instead of spending my life fighting against the mixed, well, mixed emotions would be something of an understatement, that that abusive relationship gave me. I dealt with it and I dealt with something that had taken me 30 years to deal with. So, I felt like it was really, really important to say that. I mean, ironically, sorry, the vaginal atrophy chapter, that didn’t bother me at all writing that. I mean I felt a bit conscious of my mum reading it, poor woman, but it didn't bother me. It's more the emotional stuff that was a little more stressful.
Kate Spicer
You quote Simone de Beauvoir and Germaine Greer, both kind of more or less saying that actually, it's a good time, the postmenopausal period is a really good time. And I was going to see, this is rather embarrassing, a shaman once and he, ugh he, said to me, this is a great time for you, you're about to come into your power, but you know, because of your menopause, and I was like you what mate, I’m on HRT. But the book is about the physical and mental shit that we will go through but also the mental stuff that we need to go through, exactly what you were talking about there. Do you think part of confronting the menopause is not just about HRT, do I, don’t I, and the old vaginal atrophy and hot sweats and this that and the other, but is it about confronting the demons in our lives? Does menopause ask us to confront our demons?
Sam Baker
I don't know whether I would have put it like that. I think the thing that I found when I was talking to women when I was researching the book was that what I think it does is it, it gives you permission to put yourself first. And that's, whether that's because of the drop in oestrogen, you know or whether it's something to do with that or whether it's to do with life stage, whether it's, for women who have children, with the children having left, but every woman I spoke to, almost without exception, had reached a point in her life somewhere between 45 and 55 in the main, where she had gone enough. Enough. I am not putting up with this anymore. And whether that was psychological, whether that was a relationship, whether it was work, every single one had reached that point which I found absolutely fascinating.
Kate Spicer
I was talking to a psychotherapist the other day, he said that, I mean, he was generalising, but he said, around middle age, men tend to narrow their focus and shut down. Whereas women's focus really widens out and they look to the world for adventures, whereas men can really, they're just all about their telly and their rituals and their routines.
Sam Baker
So many of the women I spoke to said that about relationships. I mean, actually one of the most fascinating chapters to write was the one that was about sex and relationships. And you know, the number of women who, I would say 50% of them had either left their partners or wanted to leave their partners. And of the ones who didn't, you know, several of them I mean, there’s one, I can't remember which one it was, but one of them saying, you know, basically he's a nice bloke, he's a good dad, he's a perfectly good husband. But you know, all he wants, really wants to do is play golf, have a pint on the way back and eat kung po prawn and then do it all again tomorrow. And that's not what I want. And there was another woman who'd left her husband of 24 years once her children were more or less older. And she said that most of her friends just couldn't accept that she hadn't left for someone else, that she'd left for her. And she went to see a therapist, and they said, this is so common that you know, at this age, women leave their husbands and it's very, very rare. I mean, I keep saying husbands, but it was mainly in a heterosexual context. That it's very, very rare that men leave just to leave. They, you know, almost always leave for someone else which I thought was fascinating.
Kate Spicer
The book is very well researched, although you wear the research very, very lightly, as I say it's quite a romp. But there was some really interesting stuff in there about an increase in eating disorders in menopausal women and higher rates of suicide. Talk me through some of the things that you learnt, I mean, I have to say when I was reading some of the things, it was a bit of a penny drop. When I started becoming menopausal, I became really fascinated by fasting. I don't necessarily think it was a bad thing, but I did get slightly into a kind of obsession about eating and stuff. But talk me through some of the things that you discovered that surprised you. I mean, because I've also seen menopausal women really get their shit together when it comes to looking after themselves and you actually have a chapter about that, about women, you know, realising they’ve got to look after themselves because this, you know, this is the only body they’ve got, talk me through some of the surprising things you learned about.
Sam Baker
Well, 50 did seem to be a real, real turning point for loads of women in terms of fitness. And, you know, it was weird, last week, I went out for a drink with some friends and a guy was there and he's like, oh, you know, my wife, she couldn’t come because she's gone kayaking. And I was like, kayaking. She's probably, in fact she's, I think she's exactly my age she’s 54. And so, I asked has she always been sporty and he was like, no it started when she was 50. And I think it's partly to do with like, you've got one body, use it or lose it. But it's also that point when you realise your body is changing, and it feels out of your control. You know, in the way that in adolescence, your body changes. And that, you know, when most young people, young women develop eating disorders is at that point, that point when their body starts to spiral out of their control. And I think it's really interesting that that kind of almost recurs. The more I read, the more it makes perfect sense to me that menopause is almost like a reverse puberty. And it's like all the kind of maelstrom of going through puberty but with the additional, you know, responsibility and grown up-ness, allegedly, of being 50. And it was that, when, like you say, when that penny dropped, I just thought, well, yeah, because, you know, puberty is all those hormones rushing in and menopause is all those hormones rushing out. And we are programmed to think, society's programmed to think that that's a bad thing. But why? Just because, you know, in what world, are we still in a world where women are only useful if they can have children?
Kate Spicer
Well, I mean, this leads me to another big thing that you go into. I mean, without putting any fine point on it, it's the loss of your fuckability. I can remember, there was a picture by-line of me in Minx and I'm just wearing like, the most ridiculously boyish un-sexy clothes. And I look at that picture and I think, oh, why didn't I look more hot? But like, why do I even think I should look hot?
Sam Baker
Yes, yeah. Why did you even? Because that’s still, you know, that is still the way that young women are judged. I mean, they're still expected to kind of pay their rent, if you'd like, in society by looking and behaving in the appropriate way. Even though a lot of them are pushing back against that I think it's still, it's still a really, really big thing. Well, there's that brilliant Kristen Scott-Thomas Fleabag quote, isn't there, the Kristen Scott Thomas quote which I use at the beginning, and which was a real kind of lightbulb moment for me in writing the book. I mean, she said, ‘The menopause comes, and it's the most wonderful fucking thing in the world. Yes, your entire pelvic floor crumbles. And you get, sorry so many swears, you get fucking hot, and no one cares. And then you're free. You're no longer a slave. No longer a machine with parts. You’re just a person. It's horrendous. But then it's magnificent.’ And that's, that's how it feels. You're a person, you know, what the book is about really, is about that. For me the journey through, that menopause was the link through to finding this was my old identity and this is my new identity. And I think identity is completely the right word. It’s like who am I now? That's who I was then. And I’m like do I still want to be that person? If I do, then great. If you do knock yourself out to keep being that person, but I'm happier in the new identity that I found. And I think that's, you know, what a lot of this is about, you know, anti-aging treatments and, you know, all your clothes suddenly not suiting you, all of that stuff. It's all about, it's not that they're different, it's that you are and this process is about well, okay, who am I now and who do I want to be.
Kate Spicer
One thing, one place you do not go, is death.
Sam Baker
I can’t believe you’ve found one.
Kate Spicer
One thing menopause really made me confront, and I think its part of what you were talking about, you're talking about who do I want to be. And one of the things I had, I didn't want to make this all about me, but it is effectively all about us women who are going through so I felt like I wanted to share, the menopause for me really made me realise I've only got a few decades left. And I really had to sit with death and the pandemic’s helped with that. But I've really had to sit with death and my own death. And nothing focuses your mind like considering the end. And I was like, whoa, I need to sort my shit out. So, I can really enjoy the next however many decades I’ve got. I hope its decades. Did you consider that at all?
Sam Baker
I don't think I did, you know, I think, I would say for me it was, I think it's the second chapter I talk about kind of a sense of an expiry date and feeling moribund, which is the worst word in the world. And so I think I didn't really think about death, other than to think about the fact that while I was writing this book, there was a four week period where three women who were my age, you know, bright, intelligent, successful women all died of cancer in the space of one month, and that really concentrated my mind, I wasn't really thinking so much about my own death as I was thinking, what are you moaning about? You are here. You are comparatively really, really healthy. You know? And that's, you know, as Nora Ephron said, ‘consider the alternative’.
Kate Spicer
Yes. Rest in peace, Nora Ephron included. As a writer, I have to ask you about your process, and your routines. I'm so fascinated by all of that. What is your writing routine? How is your discipline? As you know, I always get my copy in late. Do you write to a kind of incredible, get up at five, write for three hours then get on being, you know, a world-famous editor? What is your process Sam Baker?
Sam Baker
Well, I haven't really got one, I'd like to say I do. I've been really all over the place actually, for the last couple of years. So, I mean, this book, I did the research really, by way of procrastination, and I tried, I tried to keep a structure because for most of my working life, I've worked in an office, and I've commuted and, you know, it was nothing, it meant nothing to me for my working day to be between 12 and 14 hours. And so, really, I've been going through a process of adjusting to not having to work stupidly long hours and that kind of presenteeism, I must be a good person because I'm working really hard. And no, I tend to, I'm a bit of a, you know, like, I was the person who revised the night before exams. I'm the person who writes the feature the day before it's due, not like you the day after its due, but literally the day before. And that's how I wrote the book really, I got to the point where I’d done all the research, and I couldn't put it off any longer. And then I wrote it in, I pretty solidly just got up every day, did it, went to bed, got up every day, did it. So I don't, I'd love to be one of those people, like, who gets up at five, does three hours, gets the kids off school, goes to the gym, does another three hours, I'm just not, I'm not that person, you know?
Kate Spicer
Yeah, I read once that Caitlin Moran wrote How to be a Woman by getting up at five o'clock every morning and writing for a couple of hours. And I've just, I'm waiting for that moment to kick in for me. Do you plot out your books? Do you get graph paper and chart it out and put in key events that you think are really important? How does all that work?
Sam Baker
Well, with all the fiction, I did plot it out, because when I was writing those, I did have a full-time job so I was writing, you know, all weekend, every weekend. And if you put something down for a week, and then you go back to it, you need something that helps you easily pick up where you left off. But with this, the way nonfiction works is that I had written an enormous proposal and the book was sold. So, the proposal was probably 15,000 words.
Kate Spicer
Did you have sample chapters in there?
Sam Baker
Yeah, there was, there weren't whole chapters, they were probably the first couple of thousand words of two or three chapters to show the variety of content. There was a great big structural breakdown, there was a chapter breakdown, and then the introduction of the book, pretty much was the pitch document. So, it was all mapped out. And so, then I just went off and researched, read all the material, broke it down into the subjects and then did all the interviews to pad that out. So, I mean, it's quite different to writing fiction, it’s much more like a great big journalism project, whereas writing fiction is much more, okay, I've got all my stuff on the wall, and this is this character, and that's that character, and you just have to sit down every day and do it, whereas I didn't approach this in the same way at all.
Kate Spicer
So, fiction versus nonfiction, it's a structural difference or do you engage emotionally differently with the project?
Sam Baker
Yeah, I mean, this project was obviously for me very personal, as well, but I think it's, you know, fiction is, it's very solitary. I mean, so I think it's really strange being a fiction writer in you know, today's climate where you have to spend so much time selling your book, but the rest of your time is spent like sitting at your desk or in your bed just writing in your head with made up people. Whereas nonfiction is much more journalism and I think it comes more naturally to me to do it. I like writing fiction but I'm always really grateful when it's finished.
Kate Spicer
And with writing, when did you first realize that you wanted to be a writer and was writing books about feeding that need when you were an editor because actually editors do bugger all writing really don't they?
Sam Baker
Oh, no writing at all apart from the dreaded editor’s letter which you spend the entire month avoiding writing. I wanted to write stories when I was little. And I remember when I was nine we were set, it was really hard project for nine year olds, we were set this project where we had to write a 40 page story, and only two of us in the class finished it and in fact, I didn't get 40, I only got 30. And I remember the teacher saying to me you need to keep this because you'll look back when you're a bit older, and you'll see why I'm laughing. And it was all like, you know, here's this character and he's three foot six. But then I went, you know, the school I went to it wasn't a school where kids got to do anything like that. You know, I remember going to a Careers teacher and saying I want to, I had a new obsession with Smash Hits, and saying to the careers teacher, who asked what are your plans, I was like, well, I want to work on Smash Hits, I want to be a journalist. I want to be doing that. And he just looked at me and went girls like you don’t do things like that, you can be a nurse or a teacher. And both of those jobs are incredibly important, good, valuable jobs but that was what I was told, to get out and go be a nurse or a teacher.
Kate Spicer
Wow, Sam girls like you don't, that's quite an extreme kind of trigger I imagine when you go into, I imagine the managing director of a publishing company to apply for the job of one of Britain's premier high fashion titles and the guy tells you girls like you don't get jobs like this.
Sam Baker
Do you know what, it was only when I said that just now, when I said girls like you don’t that I thought, oh my god, you know, I've written that whole book, this is not the first interview I've done about it and I just thought and that was the point when I realised that's what happened. So, I've literally had a revelation live on air that that's what happened. When he said that to me, when he said you don't come from the right background to do this job, now it makes perfect sense to me that that literally did push me right over the edge. And that was it. For me, that was it. I was like no going back from here.
Kate Spicer
Reading your book really recharged my feminism. I'm not as good a feminist as you are, you know, I think you've read the books and you’ve walked the walk and talked the talk, but it did make me realise we’ve still got a long, long way to go. The semaphores from our culture about femaleness are still really so negative and so narrow. And I've got a niece of 11 and I'm so inspired by her, I think that generation are going to be awesome and I hope I'm around long enough to see how they work with it, but we, our generation are still living in a very sexist culture. And you really re-lit that fire and that fury in me, actually, because I think, especially when you're in a relationship, everybody can just settle down into their roles, doesn't mean I don’t feel like throwing the bloody laundry basket through the window sometimes.
Sam Baker
And I think that has really happened hasn’t it, it's really happened through lockdown, it's like the number of people who used to say, of my friends, who said their relationship was equal and now you know, they're the ones worrying about home-schooling. And, you know, they were the ones, suddenly they found they were the ones doing the cleaning. And, you know, I think there's a lot to be done, but feminism also, it needs to be more inclusive, it needs to, you know. It's like all areas of society, it's not just about people that look like you, it's got to go wider than that. It's got to be if you're, I mean, I don't want to get all you know, patriarchy, blah, but if you're, you know, if the job of feminism is fighting misogyny for the want of a better way of putting it, then, you know, all sorts of all women are subject to misogyny, you know, trans women, black women, working class women, you know, we're not all in it together, because some people have a much worse experience than others, but I think it's really important that we’re fighting for all of them.
Kate Spicer
Well, you've done a great job with this book to open big, wide sisterly arms and make us all feel, if not fuckable, then just fucking fantastic in our own lives. Tell me what's next.
Sam Baker
Oh god, I don't know really. I mean, I'm just kind of waiting to see. The books out 10th September, and I'm just waiting to see how it goes down really, it's had a good response so far. There’s a podcast, which is just really about celebrating women who are north of 40, also called The Shift and that launched on Tuesday, and that will run, you know, the plan is for that, it will definitely run weekly until Christmas and I hope I'll be able to make it pay enough just to keep going.
Kate Spicer
Who have you got on?
Sam Baker
So the first season, the episode that's out is Tasmina Perry. Next week its Marion Keyes, JoJo Moyes, Sara Collins, Caroline de Maigret, Jo Wiley, you and then I've just started filming the next season, which so far is the lovely Meg Matthews, Jodi Picoult, Denise Mina and loads more lined up. So yeah, it's really exciting, it's just so fascinating talking to loads of women between you know, roughly 45 upwards, just about their experience of it and the completely different conversations that you have.
Kate Spicer
Cool, well, good luck with the book. I loved it. I'm gonna buy a couple for a few friends of mine. And it's lovely to see you again. And I will see you soon.
Sam Baker
Yes, thanks Kate.
Kate Spicer
Sam Baker. Thank you so much.
Outro message
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love for you to tell us about it – leave us a review or a rating and find us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. You can download our latest podcast episodes, every Thursday, from all the places you would normally get your podcasts and find transcripts of our episodes in the shownotes and on our website at www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org . Details about our full programme can also be found on our website. Until then, happy reading!
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is curated by Shantel Edwards and produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
In this week’s episode author Kit de Waal talks to fellow writer and novelist Paul McVeigh about Supporting Cast, her first short story collection that focuses on the lives and loves of ordinary people including some familiar characters from her
earlier novels. They talk about writing character driven fiction, amplifying the voices of working class writers and dealing with rejection, alongside 2 readings from the book.
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast brings writers and readers together to discuss some of 2020’s best books. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions
about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. Join us each week for exciting and inspiring conversations with new, and familiar, writers from the Midlands and beyond.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
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Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Guest Curator: Kit de Waal
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF 20 Podcast Transcription 6: Kit de Waal and Paul McVeigh
Kit de Waal
Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents...podcast series. I’m Kit de Waal and I’ve worked with the Festival Director, Shantel Edwards, as Guest Curator of this year’s podcast series. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. In this week’s episode I talk to fellow writer and novelist Paul McVeigh about Supporting Cast, my first short story collection that focuses on the lives and loves of ordinary people including some familiar characters from my earlier novels. We talk about writing character driven fiction, amplifying the voices of working-class writers and dealing with rejection, alongside 2 readings from the book.
University of Birmingham Sponsor Message
This episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents... podcast is brought to you in partnership with the University of Birmingham College of Arts and Law. We explore what it means to be human in historical and cultural contexts, within ethical and legal norms and through languages and communication.
Paul McVeigh
Hello everyone and welcome to the Birmingham Literature Festival. My name's Paul McVeigh and I'm here to interview Kit de Waal, novelist and short story writer, and currently screenwriter as well – and we'll hear more about that later on. Kit was born to an Irish mother and Caribbean father, was brought up among the Irish community of Birmingham in the 60s and 70s. Her debut novel, My Name is Leon, was an international bestseller, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, long listed for the Desmond Elliot prize and won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year award for 2017. That was followed by The Trick to Time, which was long listed for the Women's Prize [for Fiction], and her young adult novel, Becoming Dinah, is shortlisted for the Carnegie CLIP Award 2020. Kit has had also huge success with the Common People anthology. But mostly today we're gonna be talking about Kit's short story collection that's a mixture of short fiction and flash fiction, and it's called Supporting Cast. And Kit's actually going to start with a reading from the book. Kit, hello!
Kit de Waal
Hello. It's great to be here in my hometown podcast because it's always great to be at any Birmingham event. The story I'm going to read is from Supporting Cast and it's a short piece of fiction. It's actually flash fiction. And the title of it is ‘Edith Paisley-Jones (Woman in a Flowery Skirt)’, and it's a character from My Name is Leon and she's a passing character, a woman at the allotments and it's set in 1981.
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‘She hung on, love ready, until her hands were weathered and rust-spotted. She stayed hopeful and optimistic until the light went out and the horizon disappeared. Her heels became square and sensible, her coat cut to keep out chills and disappointment. She wore thin lips and crept into loneliness like ivy through a tree.
Then he came along, and eyed her like an unclaimed prize.
She began to disregard her slip and umbrella. She found herself with him on piers, at funfairs, kissing him quick. She began to laugh again and leave windows open, became forgetful and blasé with recycling, a whistler, a lier-in, a gatherer of shells. Raising her head, she always found him there, waiting and dry-footed on the shore.
He took her hand, drew his shape on her life and on her plans. He was reliable and true. Then he became indispensable, necessary and she wondered how she would live without him, and when he spoke of permanence and years to come, she began to suspect his sudden appearance and question her good fortune. When she had been eager and would have been grateful, he was elsewhere, loving someone else. So she told him he came too late.
Now, she was near-sighted and content, she weeded her plot with rough hands, with knuckles too thick for rings. She became busy, practical, grew box hedging down the path and phallic gourds in pots. She cut her own hair, silver, fly-away, untameable. At weekends she studied maps and drove hours to deserted coves and dangerous walks he wouldn't dare. She covered miles of beach in stout shoes and concentration.
He never followed. They never met by chance.’
Paul McVeigh
That was lovely. When I was reading the collection, I often found myself in tears. You're a writer of what I call emotional fiction. When I read your work it just engages with my heart. And I wonder, when you're writing are you aware of that? Is it an intention of yours, and do you feel as emotional as we do when we're reading or listening to you?
Kit de Waal
To be honest I only really write what I can write. I don't, you know, I'm not trying to, to use any sort of devices or anything, I think I'd find it really hard not to write that way. If someone said to me, 'can you write something cold where you don't engage the heart?' I'd find it almost impossible. It's just, literally, you know, it's not like I've got a box of tricks and I can bring them out. I'm just sort of writing who I am, I suppose. Very occasionally, when I'm writing I've got a lump in my throat. I can remember when I was writing a particular scene in My Name is Leon when he meets his mother at a Family Centre after a long time. And when I wrote the end of that chapter, I remember thinking, 'oh my God, this is terrible' and I was genuinely upset. I knew it was a true scene and it had to happen. I certainly do know when I've struck the right tone and when I've got the right note because I'm moved. And I think you have to move yourself just the same way as if you're a comedy writer you need to find your own jokes funny, you know, otherwise, you haven't got a sense of it. So, I think I do know what I'm doing, but I don't know how to not do it, if you see what I mean?
Paul McVeigh
Yes, yes. And it just reminds me that I was reading recently about My Name is Leon and we're going to see it on television. Is it this year or next year?
Kit de Waal
Well, I think it was going to be October before the virus struck. So, I should imagine with a few months out it will probably be January or February [2021] now. But they've gone into pre-production of it, I think. I mean that sounds like I know what I'm talking about. Pre-production is something like where they are gathering the cast, they're working out locations and stuff like that. So, it's definitely happening. And they have apparently cast Leon as we speak. You know, they've got a boy. They’ve found the child, which is fascinating.
Paul McVeigh
Oh wow! And it's Lenny Henry's production company.
Kit de Waal
Yes. It's a production between Lenny Henry and the BBC.
Paul McVeigh
And he's in it, isn't he?
Kit de Waal
Apparently, yes, I mean, I was told he was going to be in it. I don't know what character he's playing. I think he is probably going to be playing one of the guys from the allotment. But I don't know, don't know which one. Can't wait to see it.
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Paul McVeigh
Yeah, I can't wait to see it. I'm sure there's a lot of people out there that can't wait to see it. I want to go back even before you wrote, My Name is Leon. And I think the first time I met you, is it London Short Story Festival, is that right?
Kit de Waal
Yes, yes. That's right.
Paul McVeigh
And you were writing short stories before you wrote your novel?
Kit de Waal
Yes.
Paul McVeigh
Because obviously now the collection's come out after two novels and some YA novels as well. You know, that actually, it looks like, oh, she's now turned her hand to short stories, but actually, you were writing them right from the beginning, if not before your novels, is that right?
Kit de Waal
Totally. Yeah, I was writing these before my novels.
Paul McVeigh
So where did that love, how did that originate, do you know? Was that something from reading short stories when you were a child? Or was it your first attempts at writing? Where did that all come from?
Kit de Waal
My first attempts at short stories were actually flash fiction. And they were flash fiction because they were bits of homework that I had from doing my creative writing MA. And also, I mistakenly thought that short stories were easier than novels. You know, I just thought, oh, you bang those out – you know, you've only got to do a short story – you've only got to do 2,000 words, not knowing that it's an absolutely different skill completely. It's also harder, if anything, because you are constrained, certainly if you're entering, if you're writing a short story for a competition, you really are constrained by a word count, which you aren't in a novel. So yeah, it was, it was definitely a mistake because I thought that this was gonna be my route into novel writing, not knowing that it's a completely, completely different discipline. Like playwriting is, like screenwriting is. Of course, it's all writing and storytelling, but actually the skills and the structure and the stuff that you've got to know and appreciate and be able to do are just different skills to novel writing.
Paul McVeigh
Was My Name is Leon your first novel, by the way, because often writers have a couple in the drawer that they didn't send out, or didn't make it to publication. It was your first novel?
Kit de Waal
Oh, no, no. So, I had two novels before My Name is Leon. The first one was called Blue in Green. And that was about, it was set partly in the 80s and partly in the present day, and that I nearly got published. I say I nearly got published: I got an agent and I had a publisher that was interested, but he couldn't get it sold to the rest of his group. Then I wrote another one called Tomorrow, which was set in Birmingham, which is about an Irish man and a woman. And that was, my agent at the time just said it was rubbish. And then, and I was absolutely gutted both times. I mean, I often see people on Twitter or elsewhere saying how disappointed, you know, 'I'm really upset, I'm really upset'. And then you get somebody saying, 'oh, you've got to keep going', you know. Just this sort of blasé dismissal of the gut-wrenching disappointment of not having your novel published. It's such a hard thing. I always really feel sorry for people. I feel like saying, 'no, you know, be angry, be upset and let that settle before you sort of dive in, oh, it doesn't really matter. You know, I'll just write another one’. You know, that's two years sometimes, five years sometimes. And I can remember when Tomorrow didn't get taken, in fact my agent, like I said, my agent said it was rubbish and I wept. I mean, obviously, she actually brought me - I have to say this is not my current agent, but she actually got me to go down to London to tell me that. And then I had to go on the train home, and I was so upset. I was, you know, I cried for days.
Paul McVeigh
Well, oh I can understand that. But I'm just gonna change the tack of that because that has an amazing upside to all of this because then that brought you to My Name is Leon, which was this amazing success, and got you this incredible deal which this collection is all part of, wasn't it? So how did it feel, you know, after coming through what you just came through with two rejections, which obviously affected you and, well, devastated you, but you know, then to go from that to the kind of dizzying heights of My Name is Leon, which is, you know, a massive deal and huge acclaim and, I mean, what extremes, you know.
Kit de Waal
Yes, complete extremes. And also, when it happened, and when I was, you know, my book went to auction so I was going to all these publishers, who were trying to say, you know, sign with me, sign with me, and I'd gone from no one wants to read your work, you're crap, to oh my God you're wonderful, come to us. And I didn't believe it. I remember just saying to my then agent, what's going on because I couldn't get anyone to read anything before, and now everyone's telling me I'm the best thing since sliced bread. And it was, it was – I wouldn't say it was hard, I mean, it was bloody great – but it was weird. It was a very, very weird place to be in from going from nought to sixty and everyone telling me my writing's fantastic, but a couple years before my writing was rubbish. So, it was an odd thing it really was.
Paul McVeigh
Yeah. And then, of course, you had, then you had The Trick to Time, which did really well as well and got fantastic reviews. We're going to talk about Common People, a little bit later on, but just to follow this through then, so you have these two novels. And this is a fascinating concept for a short story collection. I think short fiction is a good phrase actually for it, isn't it, because of the mixture of lengths. So, could you just tell us a bit about where the idea came from for this quite unique concept?
Kit de Waal
Yeah. So, I would consider myself a character-driven writer, so all of my stories always come from a person or people. And consequently, my novels are riddled with characters that I just didn't think I'd finished with, people that I, that appear in both of my novels. And to me, they're real people. They appear in my novels and then they go off and live their lives – they aren't devices that are just inserted into the book and then sort of disappear and go into the ether. I feel, and I always have felt that they're real people that I can, I know so well and I could visit, and they'd talk to me. So, with this collection I wanted to give the spotlight really – if it was in a theatre, they'd have the spotlight on them for a moment – where they would just tell their story, tell a bit of their story. So, you know, ‘after I was in My Name is Leon this is what happened to me', or 'before I was in The Trick to Time this is who I was'. So, I just took those characters and, you know, gave them a little bit of airtime, told their story. Sometimes it's way before the book started and sometimes it's 20 or 30 years after they've appeared in the book. And it was an absolute joy. It was a joy to go back to these people and say to them, 'what have you been doing?' Or 'who are you?'
Paul McVeigh
Yeah, and a great title for the collection as well, Supporting Cast, because that's exactly what, who they are in those books. And did you find that when you went back to choosing those characters, or was it a case of it was the ones who didn't leave you alone? Because obviously, not every supporting character is in there. So how did you go about choosing those characters? Or did they choose you, if you know what I mean?
Kit de Waal
I mean I had to cut it down, I could probably have done another 20. Some of them I knew, I knew they were going to be in there. Some of the work on the short stories had started as character studies before ever this collection started, character studies I’d done when I was writing either of the novels. There were certain people that I knew had to have their story told, like Castro who died in police custody. And there were other people who are so transitory in the book. So, for example, there's one woman who doesn't even get a name check in My Name is Leon – she's just a girl that is running up and down the corridor. And no idea why I wanted to talk about her but I just felt the girl running up and down the corridor in the Family Centre with a mom who's not very good deserves to have her story told; what's going on for her. So yeah, I could probably do another two or three collections. If I had my way, I would. Yeah. It'd be fantastic.
Paul McVeigh
Do you have favourites?
Kit de Waal
Castro is one of my favourites because it really came from a very deep place. A black man dying in police custody. But I do love, I love them all. Pestilence I particularly love. She's an Irishwoman living in Galway. I mean bits and pieces of everything, of every story.
Paul McVeigh
Yeah. And I loved the last one as well, ‘Big Tom Fallon’, isn't it, the wedding story.
Kit de Waal
Yes.
Paul McVeigh
It's just so, again, very moving. And that was written for Radio 4, was that right?
Kit de Waal
I wrote it for the collection, but Radio 4 recorded it. And they actually, I said, look, I'm absolutely happy for you to read this story but you have to have an Irish narrator – there's no way an English person can read this story. And they actually found an actor from the village that the story, the town that the story is placed in, which is Skibbereen in County Cork.
Paul McVeigh
Get out of town!
Kit de Waal
And so it's completely, the recording is bliss. It's so authentic and it's exactly the sound that I had in my head when I was writing it. It's a fantastic recording.
Paul McVeigh
And is that on, still on iPlayer, do you think?
Kit de Waal
I think it is. I think it is still on iPlayer. And I have it, obviously. I have the MP4 of it.
Paul McVeigh
Yeah, yeah. So, you can go and check that out, see if it's still on the BBC iPlayer there. And I was thinking about your recent scriptwriting. And I know that you write screenplays and scripts with your brother.
Kit de Waal
Yes, that's right.
Paul McVeigh
And I was just wondering – you've just got something on Sky?
Kit de Waal
It will be on in September; it's called The Third Day. It stars Jude Law and Naomie Harris and it's, you know, for a first-time screenwriter it is the dream commission. You know, somebody very famous, a theatre writer called Dennis Kelly, got in touch with my agent and said, 'would Kit like to write a couple of episodes?'. I mean, come on, you know, that does not happen!
Paul McVeigh
Nope.
Kit de Waal
So yeah, I wrote two episodes with my brother of that, and since that's happened, obviously, we've got lots of other commissions to write things for the screen. Hopefully, a film about Malcolm X, his visit to Smethwick in 1963, which is, we're looking for a director for at the moment. So yeah, it's a completely different skill, and it's still me writing about the things I care about, basically, you know. I'm still writing about people and characters, just the different people of the world and the unexpected.
Paul McVeigh
Yeah and you recently also wrote some theatre monologues, is that right?
Kit de Waal Yes, yes.
Paul McVeigh
Can you tell us a wee bit about that as well?
Kit de Waal
So, about a year ago, Maxine Peake got in touch with me and asked me to write a monologue –– well, she didn't say it had to be a monologue. She's so great. She's another heroine of mine, hero of mine. And she said, would I write something for 100 years of suffragettes. And it was basically about, you know, women getting the vote. And I'm just never gonna write historical anything, so I wrote a monologue, a 15-minute monologue [Imagine That] about a woman today who's decided not to vote because the votes don't make any difference and I've got better things to do. And it's her really talking to herself and saying, why should I vote? And through the things that have happened to her, traumatic things that have happened to her in her life, she decides, yes, I do. I do want to vote. And by the end, she uses her vote in a very particular way, and for a very particular reason. And recently, during the first weeks of the COVID lockdown I was asked by the Abbey Theatre in Dublin to write a monologue again, called Dear Ireland. And it was really a love letter to Ireland, how I felt about Ireland, not particularly to do with the crisis, but just where they were. And again, I could choose the actor, which I chose Peter Gowen, who's fantastic. And, that was called The Three Irishman and it's about all the different ways that we are Irishmen. There's Irish people who are born in Ireland; there are refugees that become Irish people; and there are children, black children that are born in Ireland who become Irish. And it's just about those three different ways of being Irish. But it's written from a very, if you like, a very malevolent point of view of this bloke saying, ‘that's, you know, I don't agree with that'. And then again, talking himself into how that is right and how that happens. It's about a man who's been affected by the refugee crisis.
Paul McVeigh
So you've written flash fiction, short stories. You've written for radio. You've written monologues for the theatre. You've written screenplays for a television show and a screenplay for a film. Is there anything, anything at all that you don't do?
Kit de Waal
Yes, I will never write a play because that is a real talent and I just don't think I could ever write, you know, a proper play for theatre. That's not my thing, I don't think. And also, I've seen really good playwrights and I'm not up to that. So, I'm never going to go into playwriting at all, but I love monologues because monologues are like flash fiction or short stories. So yeah, I won't do that. I don't think I'll ever write jingles for adverts or anything like that.
Paul McVeigh
Oh, great, great. So, we could add to that long list that you also write YA books, which is again a different skill, that's different from writing short stories or different from writing for adults. So how did you find that shift? Was it an easy shift? Was it a shift that came naturally? Or was it something you had to really look at and to learn some new angles and new skills of storytelling?
Kit de Waal
It was different. It definitely is a different skill to write YA. People that read YA, particularly the YA audience, expect a very, you know, a very specific delivery, if you like. They expect to read things and have a certain emotional response to that writing. The same way as if you, if you pick up a crime or thriller, you expect certain things to happen and to be delivered in a certain way. And YA is a genre. And it did, it was, you know, it was a learning curve for me. I don't think I've got the first or second drafts right at all. But I did have, you know, a lot of help. I had a really, really good editor, somebody called Helen Thomas. And she, you know, said to me, 'that's, you know, that's not going to hit the mark for this audience'. And in the end – I mean, it [Becoming Dinah] was a joy to write because Helen told me that I could write, I could choose one of the classics and reimagine it for a feminist YA audience. And so, I took the book that had the least women in it [Moby Dick], and then just put this, this young girl at the centre of the story and made it her own. So she, there is an Ahab, a Captain Ahab, if you like, and it's about her relationship with him on a road trip in a VW camper van. And again, it was just a great thing to write. Really great experience.
Paul McVeigh
That's done very well as well and up for an award this year. So good luck with that! And I was still thinking, I mean, as well as all of this, you then have this sort of other job that goes alongside your writing, which is one as a sort of bit of a lioness, I think really, you know, fighting the corner for marginalised writers, working-class writers. And, you know, through your, when you got this great deal, you know, you set up a scholarship at Birkbeck, wasn't it? Was it Birkbeck University?
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Kit de Waal
Yeah.
Paul McVeigh
And then you also you came up with the idea for Common People, which was an anthology of working-class writing that had, I think, 16 commissioned, famous writers from around the UK that you wouldn't necessarily know were working class, for example. Some you would, some you wouldn't. And then found 16 new writers to champion, and that was a huge success. And now, there's the sister version of that happening in Ireland with people like Roddy Doyle and Kevin Barry. And, I mean, that's obviously something that's very important to you, alongside your writing and being an artist, that you want to be there to leave that trail of breadcrumbs for those that come behind.
Kit de Waal
Yeah, I mean, I don't have a working-class lifestyle now. I think I'm very privileged in the way that I am able to live now. But my identity completely was formed as a working-class person, as a working-class child. In fact, I wouldn't have said I was working class when I was a child because the working-class people I knew and grew up with were posh to me. We had a lot less than working-class families. But then when people speak about working classes it includes people that were brought up the way I was, and it's, you know, a word that we don't use anymore, I was poor. We were poor children and a poor family in a poor area. You know, I grew up with, with not enough to eat, not enough to wear, in a cold house, blah, blah, blah – we've all heard the stories. But when I became, when I got published, I was really surprised to find how exclusive publishing is and how there are not enough people working in publishing from the background I come from, and not enough stories told about the background I come from, and that background includes lots of backgrounds – working class is not a big homogenous group. My doing Common People was really my way of saying, you know, are you joking? There's all this talent out there that cannot get, you know, any attention from publishing, that cannot get these stories told. And I very much wanted to give back to communities like mine a helping hand and a step up. And that sort of thing happens for middle-class people all the time: networks are extended, hands that are extended backwards, you know, a friend of a friend of a friend said you could do this. Well, that's the sort of network I'd like and I am trying to make for working- class people so that there's a route in, someone's gone before and kicked the things out of the way and kicked the door open and said, come on, you know, let's all go through. So that was really my intention, both to showcase the amount of talent that there is in working-class communities, unseen talent, and also to say, you know, do something about it to the publishing industry. All of these great authors, unknown authors and known authors, and it was really my way of paying back, I think, my community, helping communities I come from. And similarly, with the Irish one, and class is a very, as you know very well, class is a very different beast in Ireland. It doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It's not like it is in the UK but it certainly exists in that working-class people in Ireland, north and south are disadvantaged in many, many ways that has an impact if they want to get into a creative life. So obviously, with your help in fact, driven by you and edited by you, there will be The 32 [The 32: An Anthology of Irish Working-Class Voices], which is an exploration of working-class writing from all the different communities, working-class communities in Ireland. And I literally can't wait to read it. That's going to be a fantastic thing.
Paul McVeigh
Yeah. Well, we're all excited here. And having taken the mantle on from you and all your amazing work over there. And I want to ask you to read another story from your collection if you would.
Kit de Waal
Of course. This one is called ‘Becky Finch, Staff Canteen, Morrisons, 2016’. And this is the girl that was running, so in My Name is Leon when Leon goes to the Family Centre to meet his mom he has to wait in a hallway. And in that hallway, there is a woman who is a mother with a broken arm and she's in a state, and she's not taking care of her daughter. And her daughter is running up and down wildly in the corridor and Leon notices her. And that's all that there is about her in the book. And this is her story told many years later.
‘Becky Finch, Staff Canteen, Morrisons, 2016’
‘It was the lunch break and I was stirring my soup in the staff canteen. The girls came in and they all started at the same time.
We'll get a sleeps-eight aparthotel in the town, they said. And then we can walk to all the restaurants in Torre del Mar. Linda knows all the best places.
And then shopping the next day and then a swim in the ever-so-blue Mediterranean because if you don't, you haven't lived, they said.
They said at night the temperature’s in the twenties so don't need to pack much and you can get away with carry-on, and for thirty euro they do this trip out on a boat to try and find the dolphins, but even if the dolphins are hiding, you get a hot dog with sangria, which is the best way to get over a bad head.
Then in the daytime, they said, you can just sleep and fry on the lilos because it's so hot you can't even walk on the grass and anyway it's too sharp and prickly, not like the back gardens in England and not like the wet, grey skies hanging like death itself over Milton Keynes.
Come on, they said. Come with us. There's always loads of blokes out on the piss or a stag night. You can meet them on the plane and swap numbers.
Linda will do your hair for you before you go, get rid of the grey.
We're not going for six weeks, they said, and if you go on the South Beach Diet you could drop twenty pounds in that time, thirty if you don't eat fruit.
Holiday money? We'll have a kitty, they said. Linda looks after it because she doesn't drink, do you Linda?
They said, we know you miss your mum, love, but it's not like it was a shock, was it? Didn't you say she'd been in and out of rehab since Noah put into port? You said you were half expecting it and you were right.
Then they all looked at me and I told them what social services said, that it was a miracle she'd lasted this long and it was only that I'd looked after her so well for so many years that she'd had a half-decent life.
I couldn't help getting choked up. And then it was like the floodgates and I told them what it had been like for me putting her first since I was six years old and never knowing what I was going to come back to, and I told them about the time she came at me with a knife but she thought it was a hairbrush, and that she kept falling out with the neighbours and they'd have a go at me and tell me they'd call the police on her and I'd have to move us again, and that before I got this job shrink-wrapping bacon joints at Morrisons with the best bunch of girls on the planet, I'd never had a proper home so I'd never kept any friends, and my sister married someone from abroad and doesn't keep in touch and wants to act like she's posh and forget about me. And all the girls rubbed my back and said, ‘Bless.’
Then they started again. Bring a beach bag, they said, and don't bother with sun cream because there's damaged bottles out the back and when we asked Nigel-New-Manager-Retro-Flares what would happen if they disappeared he said it was like a butterfly landing on a branch in Peru – if he doesn't see it, it hasn't really happened.
And we're drawing lots, they said, to see who asks Nigel for us all to have our holidays at the same time. Linda can't because she always goes red because she fancies him. Don't you Linda? Come with us, they said.’
Paul McVeigh
You read so beautifully. Is there going to be an audio version of the collection?
Kit de Waal
Yes, there is an audio version. And I chose, before the lockdown, I chose all the people, handpicked every author. Some of them – every author, every reader - and some of them were authors, some of them were friends of mine, some of them are actors. And then the pandemic struck, and I couldn't get them, so Penguin arranged for some great readers. And I've listened to them all and I've made sure the Irish ones are Irish and the black ones are black. So, it's great, I love the audiobook. It's really good. Really works.
Paul McVeigh
When's that coming out? I can't wait to hear it, is it out now?
Kit de Waal
It's out, it's out already. Yeah, it came out about a week ago, yeah.
Paul McVeigh
Brilliant. Well, I'll definitely be checking that out. So, you've got this, you've got your collection out at the minute and what can we expect next from this sort of multi-genre-bending author, Kit de Waal? What have you got coming up?
Kit de Waal
Two things. One, I'm working on a novel, which I adore, and which is very hard. I'm stuck right in the middle of it when every writer just goes, what am I doing? How can I make this work? And that's where I am. I also want to write a memoir. I'm hoping to sort of start that simultaneously and do much more screenwriting and also trying to have a life. I have zero social life, and I am determined to try and have some kind of good time alongside having a very, very busy career.
Paul McVeigh
Well, I'm in for that if you want to go to the disco sometime or something like that. And listen, Kit, thank you so much. It was lovely talking to you.
Kit de Waal
And you.
Paul McVeigh
And I hope everyone goes out and buys Supporting Cast, which is published by Penguin. And if you haven't read any of Kit before you can also check out My Name is Leon and The Trick to Time, her two novels and her TV shows as well. Thank you to Birmingham Literature Festival for inviting us to do the interview, I hope you’ve enjoyed it. And please do check out some of the other podcasts for the festival.
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Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents...podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love for you to tell us about it – leave us a review or a rating and find us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. You can download our latest podcast episodes, every Thursday, from all the places you would normally get your podcasts and find transcripts of our episodes in the shownotes and on our website at www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org . Details about our full programme can also be found on our website. Until then, happy reading!
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is curated by Shantel Edwards and produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
Thank you to Birmingham Literature Festival for inviting us to do, to do the interview. I hope you've enjoyed it. And please do check out some of the other podcasts for the festival.
Today’s episode is brought to you by the READ ON project, a scheme supported by the European Union’s Creative Europe fund. The READ ON project gets young people reading, writing, and interviewing authors, both in their own country and across Europe. In this week’s podcast, two of our young presenters, Amy Webb and Tanita Patel, interviewed bestselling author Louise O’Neill about her latest book After the Silence, discussing the cultural preoccupation with true crime and stories about young women, feminism and the urgency of the climate crisis.
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast brings writers and readers together to discuss some of 2020’s best books. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions
about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. Join us each week for exciting and inspiring conversations with new, and familiar, writers from the Midlands and beyond.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
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Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Guest Curator: Kit de Waal
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Podcast Transcription, Episode 5: Louise O’Neill in Conversation with Amy Webb and Tanita Patel
Kit de Waal
Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents...podcast series. I’m Kit de Waal and I’ve worked with the Festival Director, Shantel Edwards, as Guest Curator of this year’s podcast series. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. Today’s episode is brought to you by the READ ON project, a scheme supported by the European Union’s Creative Europe fund. The READ ON project gets young people reading, writing, and interviewing authors, both in their own country and across Europe. In this week’s podcast, two of our young presenters, Amy Webb and Tanita Patel, interviewed bestselling author Louise O’Neill about her latest book After the Silence, discussing the cultural preoccupation with true crime and stories about young women, feminism and the urgency of the climate crisis.
Amy Webb
Welcome to the Birmingham Literature Festival 2020 and to our podcast with the writer Louise O'Neill. My name is Amy and I'm part of a project called Young Presenters. I'm from the city of Birmingham in England and I'm 16 years old. In September I am due to start at University College Birmingham studying health and social care.
Tanita Patel
My name is Tanita and I am also part of the Young Presenters project. I'm 16 years old from Wolverhampton and about start Sixth Form in September to study psychology, RS and English Literature.
Amy Webb
Over the last three years Young Presenters have trained young people to run events at the Birmingham Literature Festival. The project is part of Read On, a scheme supported by the European Union's Creative Europe fund.
Tanita Patel
This year's Birmingham Literature Festival is being run online. And we are so pleased to be here to interview the writer Louise O'Neill. Louise, welcome to the Birmingham Literature Festival.
Louise O’Neill
Oh, thank you so much for having me.
Amy Webb
Louise, we have quite a few questions for you. But before we start, could you please tell us a bit about yourself and your writing?
Louise O’Neill
Yeah, well, I'm from Ireland, I'm from a small town called Clonakilty in West Cork, which is in the south of Ireland. And I have been writing for, I’m trying to think how many years now, I think it's seven years. And so, my first novel was called Only Ever Yours, and that was published in 2014. And that's a dystopian novel, set in a world in which women are no longer able to have daughters. So they can have sons, but their bodies have sort of naturally evolved to reject a female foetus in the womb. So faced with the extinction of the human race, a decision is made to create these schools where girls are bred for their beauty and then trained to be subservient to men. My second novel came out in 2015, and that was called Asking For It. And that was about a young woman called Emma O’Donovan, who is the victim of a brutal sexual assault. My third novel was for adults, so we probably won't be talking about that here, but my fourth book was a feminist retelling of the Little Mermaid for young adults, which was called The Surface Breaks. And, actually, my fifth novel is due to be published next week.
Tanita Patel
Thanks Louise, that's really interesting. However, our first question isn't actually about your writing, we would both like to know, what have you been up to in lockdown?
Louise O’Neill
Oh, God! Um, that is a very good question. And I really wish that I could tell you that I, you know, was emerging from lockdown clutching a piece of art in my hands. But I am not. I think when Taylor Swift came and said that she had written and recorded an album during lockdown, I felt immensely guilty. And just a great deal of shame about my lack of productivity. But I think to be honest, when it was called, when everything happened at the beginning, I was really just scrambling. I felt incredibly
anxious, I think it was difficult not to pick up on the anxiety and the fear. That was just so like the atmosphere was thick with it really. So, for the first month, I think I just felt completely paralyzed. I was unable to, to write I was unable to read, I couldn't even watch Netflix. So, I think it took me a little bit of time to come out of that fog in a way. And just try and adjust and try and kind of, and I hate using the term the new normal, but I suppose trying to adjust to this new way of living and figure out a way of doing it that felt, I don't know, comfortable I suppose, for me. So that's kind of been what I've been doing with my lockdown is just trying to adjust to the madness.
Amy Webb
Definitely. I agree with you there, a lot of people have struggled in similar ways and we've got to try and accept the new normal. As you mentioned earlier, you have a new book just published called After the Silence. Could you please introduce the book for people who have not read it?
Louise O’Neill
Yeah, of course. Well, it's going to be published on September 3, so it's only a week out. And it is set on an island off the coast of West Cork called Inisrun. And an incredibly glamorous wealthy family called the Kinsellas have set up, a world-renowned artist retreat centre on the island. And the youngest Kinsella son Henry has married a local woman called Keelin. And it's at Keelin’s 36th birthday party that this violent storm engulfs the island, you know, the power goes out and it's completely cut off from the mainland. And the next morning, the body of a young girl is found. No one can get on the island. No one can get off the island. So it has to have been someone on Inisrun who did this. And then 10 years later, the murder of the beautiful Nessa Crowley still haunts the Irish people. And so, a team of documentary makers have arrived on to the island to find out exactly what happened on Inisrun that night. So that's it, After the Silence in a little nutshell.
Tanita Patel
Thank you for that great explanation. Whilst reading it, I thought it was really powerful book. Are there any experiences or stories that have influenced your writing of this book?
Louise O’Neill
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's interesting, I suppose. For me, one of the primary things was that so many of my friends were becoming really obsessed with true crime. And, you know, I suppose since Serial, the podcast that investigated the murder of a Korean American teenager, was released in 2014, I think there has just been a spate of documentaries and podcasts that you know, are investigating true crime. And I suppose I found it really interesting, because so many of the victims of these crimes are also women, but the audience for this genre seems to be primarily women. So I think I was really interested in that. And then there was a podcast that I was really fascinated by, which was called the West Cork podcast. And it was, I suppose the reason why it had particular resonance for me is because I'm from West Cork, and it was about the murder of a French woman called Sophie Toscan du Plantier in 1996. When you grow up in an area, you know, in the countryside, where, you know, we didn't even lock our front doors, you know, the crime was just non-existent at that time in the 90s. So, for something like this to happen was just so, so terrifying. And, and I think when I was listening to the podcast, and so much of it, the primary suspect, who's
never been charged by the way, but has, I think, has really carried this with him. He was an English man and I suppose I was really interested as well in that kind of very uneasy tension that often results between English and Irish people, because of so many years of oppression and colonial rule, and I suppose, you know, Ireland has only had its freedom for 100 years. And so, there was just a lot of things that I thought, God, this is so interesting, and I really wanted to, to look at all of that. And, you know, the book also deals with coercive control, which is, I suppose, a form of domestic abuse that is not as commonly understood as physical abuse. You know, coercive control is when someone tries to manipulate their partner, you know, whether that's through financial means or sexual means or emotional manipulation. And I wanted to, I suppose, use this book as a way of looking at this subject. And with so many of my novels, what I'm always saying is that I'm trying to start a conversation, particularly about topics maybe that aren't as commonly discussed or looked at in our society. And I suppose, for After the Silence, this felt like a really important, relevant issue that I wanted to address.
Amy Webb
That's really interesting and it's interesting to hear the history of Ireland. There are a lot of strong characters in this book, which do you relate to the most?
Louise O’Neill
You know, it's interesting, I think, this is my fifth novel. And I think, with After the Silence, this is probably the one where I don't think I relate to any of the characters and I think, you know, and how I'll explain that is that with, with the three novels for young adults that I've written Only Ever Yours, Asking For It and The Surface Breaks, those were all with teenage protagonists. And you know, they were dealing with issues like body image, and eating disorders, and sexual violence and slut shaming and sexuality and, you know, first love and all of those things. And I suppose I, you know, I have been a teenage girl, I have experienced so many of those issues, so while those characters weren't based on me, I could really empathise with their experience and I suppose I channelled quite a lot of maybe my own pain or, you know, my own trauma or my own difficulties into those characters. Whereas I think with After the Silence, this is the first book that I've written with a protagonist who is older than me. Keelin is 46 in most of the novel and then in the flashback, she's 36. So I think it was actually really interesting to, like as a creative exercise for me as a writer, to write a book with a main character that I really didn't feel, I suppose, that she was an echo of me or that I was kind of channelling something of my own through her that she was just a creation. And I actually really enjoyed it, and I suppose as well, you know, you can't, I suppose as a writer, you know, you can't keep writing the same sorts of books over and over again. And because of that, there's going to come a time where you have to start writing stories and characters that are completely outside of your, of your own experience. And I think After the Silence definitely was that for me.
Tanita Patel
As you've just briefly mentioned and having heard your short descriptions on some of your other books, and even reading some myself, it seems like, this book is quite different to your other novels. And I'm wondering, what made you decide to write this sort of psychological thriller?
Louise O’Neill
I mean, I will say that, you know, all of my other books have actually been different genres, you know, Only Ever Yours was a dystopian novel, Asking For It, and Almost Love were contemporary novels, and The Surface Breaks was a fantasy novel. So, I'm not necessarily defined by genre, I tend to have the idea for a book, and then try and figure out what the best way to tell that story is. And I think very early on with After the Silence, it became very clear to me that this was going to be a psychological thriller, just, you know, it's about secrets and the lies that we tell ourselves and other people in order to survive. And so, I knew it was going to be, as I said, a thriller. And I suppose when you look at my novels, no matter what the genre is, there is a thread that connects all of them, and I suppose that thread is if you want to call it feminist, if you want to call it, you know, just being a woman in the world, navigating the world and a female body, and how that manifests itself, I think
that's a thread that kind of connects all of the novels. But I will say that with After the Silence, even though it definitely was different, and it was a, it's a departure for me, it felt like a really good fit for me as an author. And I, you know, I really enjoyed it, I really enjoyed looking at how to make it as compelling as possible. And pacing is really important in a psychological thriller, and just, I suppose, how to make it as gripping as I possibly could. So I really enjoyed that creative challenge.
Tanita Patel
In After the Silence and Asking For It the media seems like a central part to the story. Why do you think media is drawn to stories about young women?
Louise O’Neill
Such a great question. You know, that was something, I suppose, I was really, and I agree with you that it's in both novels, I mean, I think I was, maybe trying to grapple with it even more in After the Silence, because, you know, in the last few years, I think, and I'm sure you feel the same way. And I feel like, you know, your friends probably feel the same way. I think there has been just this awakening of consciousness around inequality in the world, particularly pertaining to race, to sexuality, to gender, to ethnicity, to religion. And I suppose, for me, you know, I am a white Irish woman who grew up in a very monocultural society, and who didn't really have to think about any of these things because everyone around me looked like me. And I think that, you know, I moved to New York, in 2010 and I suppose that was the first time where I was really beginning to think about these, these subjects. And I suppose we've seen it time and time again, you know, that when it's the murder, or the rape, or the abduction of a white woman, or a white child or a white girl, that that is given a great deal of attention in the media. Whereas if it is a black woman, or a woman of colour, or you know, a child of colour, that it just isn't afforded the same sort of importance. And I think that's so sad, and really telling of the fractures in our society. And I suppose, a case like the Madeleine McCann case would be a really good example of that. And, you know, it's not that I begrudge her family that because it's every parent's worst nightmare. But you know, I suppose you have to think well, what about the, you know, the black girls who were taken and why, you know, why is the media not reporting on that? Why are we, you know, why is there not money still being poured into that fund. And I suppose, when I started to think about these topics, I really wanted to look at, I suppose, the way in which the media sometimes can, and certain facets, you know, my partner is a journalist, and I think that like journalism is a really important profession. And I think that the freedom of the press is an important thing to uphold. And I'm not criticizing all facets of the, of the media I suppose it’s more tabloid culture, and just the kind of fetishization almost of beautiful women, and then when beautiful women go missing or when beautiful, you know, when they're murdered, just the way in which that is portrayed in the media can often be quite unsettling. And, you know, there's this line where the two documentary makers are speaking to a police officer. And, you know, he says, you know, it's interesting, who we decide, which women or which girls we decide we're going to care about, and, and he says, you know, it helps if they're pretty, and I just think there's something really broken about that I suppose.
Amy Webb
That's really insightful and quite saddening to know that societies become this way. You've already touched on this quite a bit before, but as the victim Nessa Crowley is viewed as beautiful by the media and the characters, do you think her beauty affects the way the characters and media feel and handle her death?
Louise O’Neill
Yeah, absolutely. And I suppose, particularly because the way in which Nessa, who is this very beautiful, you know, young woman, the way in which she is portrayed is so different to the way that Keelin who is Henry Kinsella’s wife - Henry Kinsella is the man who is suspected of murdering Nessa - the way in which that they are treated by the media, but also the way that they're pitted against each other in this idea that there can only be one woman that is the winner. And, you know, that winner will be judged upon their physical appearance. And I think, you know, we saw it with Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie when all of that came out with Brad Pitt in 2005. And, you know, we've seen it recently with Megan Markle and Kate Middleton, it's like that we can't allow two women to coexist happily, it's like the media has to create rivalry, it has to pit them against each other, and it has to judge them on their physical appearance. And it's really, it's just, it's so exhausting. And it's so harmful to women's mental health and I think it's especially harmful to younger women, who are coming of age and who are watching all of this unfold. And I suppose the message that they're internalizing as a result of that is, to my mind, you know, a harmful one.
Tanita Patel
Following on from the last question a bit, the murder of Nessa Crowley takes place during a party and in one of your other books, a party is also a very important factor. And I’m wondering what is it about parties that can be useful for a novelist?
Louise O’Neill
I suppose I mean, that's such a good question, these are really good questions. And I, I suppose there is, especially when there is drink, and there's drugs involved, people's inhibitions are lowered, and people will say things and do things that they might not ordinarily do. And I suppose from a narrative point of view, that's always really, really interesting. And it also seems like, a good time, I think, for secrets to be revealed. And, and for, you know, people to speak their truth and to tell
someone what they really think or how they really feel about them. And so it kind of feels like there's this slightly explosive energy. And it's actually interesting that you say that, because with Asking For It, and I haven't put this together but now that you've said it, it's just made me think of it that in Asking For It there, the heat is really oppressive, you know, that they are having a heatwave the time of that party. And they're sweating, and they're sweltering and they're kind of waiting for the weather to break because it's too hot and it's kind of that sense of almost like things are ready to boil over. And then obviously, with After the Silence when the party happens, there's this really violent storm that is just you know, whipping the island. And again, I suppose, it's that sense of things being out of control. And, and just really overwhelming and so I suppose it's that kind of idea
that, that the parties are wild, but the weather outside is kind of matching it.
Amy Webb
That is really interesting to hear. And I like the take of parties because it kind of links all the novels together. Are there any important themes you write about, for instance, Keelin and Henry's daughter is very concerned about sustainability. Is the climate crisis important to you?
Louise O’Neill
I mean, I don't think you can be alive today and not be concerned about the climate crisis. And if you are, I think you're either very optimistic or wilfully ignorant. It is very frightening. And I think, for so many of us, I suppose it was like, I remember as a child, you know, we were, when I was a child it was the ozone layer, the whole of the ozone layer was sort of the big environmental crisis that everyone was worried about. And there was always this sense of that it will be fine in our lifetime, but that you would take these measures for your children's children. And I suppose what has been very confronting over the last number of years is that the rate of climate change, the progress of it has increased exponentially to a point where, you know, this isn't our children's children, this is in our lifetime. This is my parent’s lifetime. And I think that that has been very frightening. And I really feel sorry, for younger people, you know, like teenagers, like the two of you who haven't, you know, have had no hand in this, you know, you have had no hand in creating this crisis. And yet, you are the ones who are going to be, I suppose, left dealing with the consequences. And I just think that it is time for radical action with this, and governments, you know, across the globe, their inefficiency, and their just reluctance to move on this issue feels to me much more motivated by political and financial interests, rather than what is, you know, for the good of this planet. And it reminds me of this old proverb, I think it was a Native American proverb that my dad used to say, when we were kids. And he’d say when will the white man learn that you can't eat money? And I probably completely butchered that now but I think there is something so true about that this greed, this insatiable greed for more, for more money, for more wealth, it's like, I'm not sure what these people think they're going to do with all of that wealth, when the world is uninhabitable. So yeah, to put it mildly, yes, I am very concerned.
Amy Webb
You have also supported the Black Lives Matter campaign. Could you say a bit about why this issue is important to you?
Louise O’Neill
I mean, it's important to me because I am a human being, and I want to see other human beings being treated with the same respect, and decency that I would hope to be treated with. I've spoken a little bit about growing up in a predominantly white culture, and then when I moved to New York, it was the first time that I had very close friends who were people of colour. And it was very eye opening, actually, because, you know, I thought that racism couldn't exist in a city like New York, because it was such a melting pot. And, and this kind of, I suppose, post racial utopia, and then to hear from black friends about their experiences with the police and their fear of brutality and I suppose just racial profiling and discrimination that they experienced on a daily basis was, yeah, I mean, the only way I can describe it was just an awakening, of sorts. And then I think that when the Ferguson rising happened in 2014, I mean, that really brought it home, because I suppose, and, you know, I think it was Will Smith said that, you know, racism isn't getting any worse, it's just getting filmed. And I think that's actually really important because for white people, if you haven't experienced it, when you're being confronted with this irrefutable, like evidence of exactly how unfair and unjust and just like, God, just devastating, this kind of brutality is, you can't unsee it, you know, you can't look away, it's a human rights atrocity. And I think that if you're in any way of a decent human being, then you can't, you just can't allow that to continue and I suppose, as a white person, you know, it's very much looking at how my skin colour has protected me and how it's benefited me and in ways maybe, that I wasn't even aware of. And I think also understanding that the dismantling of that is going to take, like a lot of work. And I think it has to be, I mean I know it has to be, it has to be white people doing that work. And, you know, being prepared, I suppose, for that to be uncomfortable and for that to be difficult, and maybe to lose out on jobs or to lose out on, you know, speaking on a panel that you really wanted, because they're like, no, we're having, you know, two black authors and two white authors. And so I think it's understanding that like that, this is necessary and this has to happen because I think until all of us are equal then none of us are. So it's something I suppose, like I just had, I think a lot of people are like this, I'm not saying that, you know, I'm not trying to sort of big myself up or whatever, but I just think I have, injustice in any shape or form just really burns. And I think that when you see these images, or you hear these stories, or you watch these videos, it's just, it's so horrifying. And I think, I suppose I just want to try and do my part in in dismantling that and whatever that will be, I suppose.
Tanita Patel
You mentioned in a few of your social media biographies that you're beginning to learn Irish. How important is the Irish language to you?
Louise O’Neill
Well, you know, it's interesting, I really want to and I suppose, obviously, in After the Silence there's quite a bit of Irish sprinkled throughout it and a very close friend of mine, Trailoch is a native Irish speaker so he translated it for me. And I've just always wanted to speak it. My uncle married a woman who came from the Gaeltacht, her family spoke Irish, like her mother would be quite a hesitant English speaker which would be quite rare nowadays, like most people from Gaeltachts would speak to English and Irish pretty much interchangeably. So, they would have been very much, you know, native Irish speakers. And it just felt like this secret language, you know, that they could talk to each other in and it just sounded so beautiful. And obviously I studied it at school and it was in the same way that I think so many subjects are taught at school, it's how do I learn enough to do well in my exams, rather than how do I learn enough so that I can have a decent conversation with people if I go to Dingle or if I go to Ballyvourney, or you know, any of these Gaeltacht Irish speaking areas in the country. And because we've all been stay-cationing this summer, because no one can, well, most people aren't traveling abroad, I you know, was down in Dingle and I was in Cape Clear, which is an island off the coast of West Cork, these places are, you know, they would be native Irish speaking areas. And I just keep thinking, God, I really wish I could just, even if I had like a five-year- old grasp of conversational Irish, I just thought it would be really lovely. So, I am planning on taking a course, this autumn. So, the next time you speak to me, hopefully I'll be like half fluent.
Amy Webb
That is really amazing and very inspiring. And it's nice to be able to speak your home language really.
Tanita Patel
Throughout the novel, there are references to the recent #MeToo movement. Would you call yourself a feminist writer and how have you responded to sexism you've come across?
Louise O’Neill
I mean, I don't think that Keelin the main character in the book probably considers herself a feminist, but I am a feminist, I have called myself a feminist since I was 15 and it is a very integral part of who I am and my identity as both a person and a writer. So I would 100% agree that my feminism informs my writing. And I suppose the issues that I am drawn to that come up again, and again, in my writing, whether that's body image or violence against women, or you know, or sexual violence, and eating disorders, and the beauty myth and the pressure that's put on young women to be beautiful and sexy and gender politics and relationships, you know, I suppose it's all of these things that I'm grappling with, in my real life, that I think spills over into my work as well. When it comes to sexism, like, in general, I just try and call it out. And sometimes, the way that I call it out has to be done differently. So if it's an older person, you know, let's say if it's an older family relative, I'm obviously going to call it out in maybe a more gentle, explanatory way than if it's in the middle of a radio interview, or, you know, or if it's someone who's being really aggressive online, or, you know, I think that the manner in which I deal with that is going to be different, depending on the circumstances and the person that's involved. But I think at the end of the day, it's just really important to call out any incidences of sexism or misogyny, that you see whether those are directed towards you or whether they're directed towards someone else.
Amy Webb
Definitely. I think women have been used to being discriminated against because of their gender and it's important to call things out like that. Many of your books deal with domestic violence and abuse of women in different forms. Why is it important for you to tell these stories?
Louise O’Neill
Well, I think it's important to tell these stories because these stories are happening, you know, these stories are real, and they are reality for millions, billions of women across the world on a daily basis. And I suppose I really want to live in a society in which that's not true, you know, I want to live in a world in which, which is safe for women and for children. And, you know, safe from terror and rape and abuse and manipulation and violence. And I think, you know, we all have to do, we all have to play our part and for me, as a writer, my books, and what I'm putting out into the world in that way, that is my contribution, I suppose, to this conversation. And we, we all have different talents and we all have different abilities. So I suppose the way in which someone else contributes to that conversation might look different to mine. But this is the way that I, that I feel like I can do that.
Tanita Patel
One of the documentary producers in After the Silence, Jake, has also suffered as a result of an abusive father. I wonder, why did you decide to give him that backstory?
Louise O’Neill
I felt like, I suppose when you're looking at all of the characters in a book, you want to make sure that they all have their own motivations and their own reasons for their actions. And when I was looking at the two documentary makers, I was like, well, why would they be interested in making this documentary, and one of them, I felt like would have Irish heritage, that, you know, his family would have been from West Cork, and he would have heard about this story from them and that's why he'd want to do it. And then I think I thought that the other character would have had personal experience of abuse, and would be using his career as a channel to tackle abuse, to try and I suppose, to look at this subject or to bring it to light. And for me, I suppose, that character was going to be Jake. And I also knew that Jake and Keelin were going to have this very strong bond, that that was going to be a part of the story. And, I think it made sense to me that they would connect over something like this. I just wanted to highlight that it is not just the survivors of abuse, you know, that are impacted by it, you know, whether that's male or female. Innocent children who are caught in the crossfire as well and who are brought up in a culture of fear, and silence, and abuse, and the long term impacts that that has on those children is so devastating. So, I suppose in the character of
Jake, I really wanted to, to present that side of the story as well.
Amy Webb
It's amazing that you advocated for these kinds of issues. In the book Keelin studied counselling and worked with a domestic violence organization. Did you have to do a lot of research to write about her experiences with domestic violence in the book?
Louise O’Neill
Yes, I did a lot of research. And you know, I did a lot of research for Asking For It as well. But I'd had experience of sexual violence myself, so I was able to bring that to it, whereas I hadn't, I had no experience of domestic abuse, either personally, or, you know, within my immediate family and I wanted to make sure that I did it justice. So I read so many books about it and I also was in close contact with a charity here in West Cork called the West Cork Women Against Violence Project. So they asked some women who were coming to the centre would they be interested in speaking to me, and I spoke to, I think it was around 10 women, some in groups and some individually, and I just asked them to tell me about their experiences, to tell me about how it started and how it escalated and the impact that it had on them and it was a very, it was a very humbling and harrowing experience to hear those stories, to hear what exactly happens behind closed doors for so many people. And I felt very privileged to be given that access, and to be trusted with those stories, and I carried them with every word that I wrote, and I hope that I did those women justice.
Tanita Patel
That's amazing to hear the work you have to put into behind the scenes of making this novel. Your novel really shows how complex the issue of domestic violence is. Keelin leaves her first husband, after he physically assaults her, but doesn't seem to realize how controlling and abusive Henry is. Is it difficult for you to write about characters with such distressing lives?
Louise O’Neill
I mean, sometimes it is. I didn't find, I have to say now, Asking For It, again, I think it was probably that Asking For It was quite close to me, whereas, because I was able to have some sort of emotional distance between me and Keelin, I didn't identify with her as a character, you know, she didn't, like she wasn't a part of me, I suppose, in a way, it felt easier to write that character and to maintain some sort of emotional distance. So that it didn't, the research was difficult. And listening to those stories was difficult. But the writing of the book itself, I didn't find it difficult, I have to say, I mean, no more than any book is obviously, you know, there's, there's difficulty involved. And there's some days where you'll think, why on earth did I choose this career and why on earth did I begin this book. But no, I think, as I said, the ability to write it, and then to be able to walk away from it that day, and sort of leave it on my desk, you know, to leave it there with my computer. I'm not sure if that's age, I'm not sure if that's because this is my fifth novel. I think maybe I've just gotten a little bit better at being able to separate my work and my personal life.
Amy Webb
That's amazing and that does contain some great tips for aspiring authors. You have written books for young adults and adult audiences. Do you approach writing differently depending on the audience you are writing for?
Louise O’Neill
Hmm, no, not really because writing a book is, for me, anyway, is the same no matter what age category it's aimed at I think, and it's, you know, sometimes I'm not even necessarily thinking about the audience, or you know, or what age the audience is going to be. I'm very much concerned, particularly in that first draft with, what is the story? How am I going to tell it? And what is the best way that I can tell it? And so those are the issues I suppose that I am focused on. And those are the same whether it's a novel for adults, or whether it's a novel for young adults.
Tanita Patel
We know this question gets asked a lot, but we would love to know what is next for you? Are you working on something new?
Louise O’Neill
I am about to start working on something new, and which I've sort of been working on just the idea and coming up with the concept. So I'm, to be honest, I'm so excited about just starting a new project, I think this year has been so strange, and unsettling for everybody that I think working on something new will be a really great distraction from all of the just chaos that's going on. And just, it's just, I mean, I feel very privileged because obviously, you know, I didn't lose my job, and everyone in my life is healthy and well. So I don't want to, I suppose take that for granted. But I think even for those of us who have ostensibly been very lucky, you know, this has been a trying year. So for me whenever things are difficult, or when things prove to feel overwhelming, I think getting back to my desk and getting back to my work has always been the best antidote. So I'm just really excited about starting this new project and just getting it out into the world as soon as possible.
Amy Webb
It's nice to hear you've got that idea of calm after what we’d call the storm. Can we finish Louise by asking what advice you would give to anyone who wanted to become a writer? Did you always want to be a writer and are there any secrets you can share about writing a novel?
Louise O’Neill
Well, no, firstly, I didn't always want to be a writer, I wanted to be an actress. But actually, funnily I think they're quite similar in that it's taking a character that is very different to you, and trying to inhabit them and trying to understand their motivations and why they behave, the way that they do and bringing that character to life, whether that's on stage or on film, or on the page. And so I suppose I can see the similarities now. And I think that for anyone who's listening who wants to be a
writer, I wish that I could tell you that there's like a secret. But I think really, the only secret is that you just have to sit down and write. And I think that a lot of people become very overwhelmed because they start, they think, oh, I can't write an entire book. And no one can sit down and write an entire book. But what everyone does is they sit down, and they write 500 words, or they write for an hour, and then they do that three times a week and then in a year, they have a novel and it's honestly, it's as easy and as difficult as that. Because I think you have to tackle your own self-doubt and the criticism and that inner voice telling you that you know, you can't do this, because you can do it. And the thing is, is that if you want to write that desire is not going to go away. So sit down at your desk, turn on your computer, and just start.
Amy Webb
Thank you very much to everyone who's listened and thank you Louise for joining us. We love After the Silence and we want everyone to read it! And please come back to Birmingham.
Louise O’Neill
Oh, I'd love to come back. Oh my god, once we're able to travel again.
Tanita Patel Thank you.
Outro message
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents...podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love for you to tell us about it – leave us a review or a rating and find us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. You can download our latest podcast episodes, every Thursday, from all the places you would normally get your podcasts and find transcripts of our episodes in the shownotes and on our website at www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org . Details about our full programme can also be found on our website. Until then, happy reading!
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is curated by Shantel Edwards and produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
In this week’s episode we welcome Candice Brathwaite, author of the bestselling book, I Am Not Your Baby Mother. In conversation with fellow bestselling author Dorothy Koomson, they discuss the urgent need to redefine motherhood, the silencing of black women’s pain and the experience of publishing a book in the midst of a global pandemic and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests across the world.
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast brings writers and readers together to discuss some of 2020’s best books. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions
about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. Join us each week for exciting and inspiring conversations with new, and familiar, writers from the Midlands and beyond.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
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Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Guest Curator: Kit de Waal
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Podcast Transcription, Episode 4: Candice Braithwaite in conversation with Dorothy Koomson
Kit de Waal
Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents...podcast series. I’m Kit de Waal and I’ve worked with the
Festival Director, Shantel Edwards, as Guest Curator of this year’s podcast series. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. In this week’s episode we welcome Candice Brathwaite, author of the bestselling book, I Am Not Your Baby Mother, in conversation with fellow bestselling author Dorothy Koomson. Candice’s book, part memoir and part social commentary, offers a brilliantly observed guide to life as a black mother in the UK and an urgent call to recognise the diversity of motherhood. Join them as they discuss redefining motherhood, the silencing of black women’s pain and the experience of publishing a book in the midst of a global pandemic and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests across the world.
Dorothy Koomson
Hello, my name's Dorothy Koomson and today I am talking to the wonderful Candice Brathwaite – I have to say that properly. And I actually listened to her book rather than reading it because I wanted to get a sense of who Candice is. And so I know how to say her name properly. So yeah, Candice Brathwaite is something of a powerhouse in the social media world and in, naturally, the real world. She has helped to transform the lives of millions, and I do say millions because she has touched so many people: the lives of millions of mothers everywhere by showing them that mothers don't all look one way and they don't all have to have shiny hair and a certain amount of money in the bank to be good mothers who love and care about their children. And she's a top-tier influencer. And it was from her experiences on the differing ways of being a mother that led her to found Make Motherhood Diverse, an online initiative that Candice describes as aiming to encourage a more accurately representative and diverse depiction of motherhood in the media. Basically, to show us all that all mothers don't look the same, they don't have the same experiences and we are all different but all good parents.
Candice has two children, Esmé-Olivia, and Richard Junior known as RJ, and she lives with her husband Bodé in Milton Keynes. Her book, I Am Not Your Baby Mother, published earlier this year, really lifted the lid off what it means to be a black mother in our modern world. And she describes her experiences and the experience of so many other black women in all its dangerous, humorous, scandalous, humbling, empowering and beautiful glory. Candice is talking to me today about her book, life and of course, ice cream. And I say ice cream because my first question to you, Candice, is going to be, What's your favourite flavour of ice cream?
Candice Brathwaite
Um, Cookie Dough.
Dorothy Koomson
Cookie Dough?
Candice Brathwaite
Yeah, specifically a bit of Ben and Jerry's.
Dorothy Koomson
Ben and Jerry's.
Candice Brathwaite
I don't wanna advertise to them but ... Ben and Jerry's Cookie Dough. It's up there. It is up there.
Dorothy Koomson
You see, I can't eat that, unfortunately, because I'm gluten free, and so I'm gutted when I see other people eating those things. It's just – oh, okay. Well, now I know that, see, we've started on a good footing. You've got a good flavour of ice cream up there. So, my second important question to you was going to be, What's your favourite flavour of baby food?
Candice Brathwaite
Oh, baby food? Oh, gosh!
Dorothy Koomson
I bet no one's ever asked you that before.
Candice Brathwaite
I'm a bit stuck. Yes, never! I'm like, you know, anything appley if that makes sense like. And this is the thing: so you know my background is Caribbean and my husband's background is Nigerian so even like the idea of baby food that comes in jars – that's so foreign to us.
Dorothy Koomson
I know.
Candice Brathwaite
You just like, yeah, you just mash down what you're eating and give it to the baby.
Dorothy Koomson
Yes, I know. That was why I wanted to double-check. You see, I wanted to double-check on you. I was checking up on you in a different way, see.
[Laughter.]
Dorothy Koomson
So I should follow that up by asking is it plantain or jollof. Which is your favourite out of those two?
Candice Brathwaite
Oh, plantain! It's not even up for a competition with me.
Dorothy Koomson
Okay, all right. So I’m gonna be serious now, yeah. So how is your lockdown been? Because I know it's, we're coming out of it apparently. I'm not, I'm still distancing and stuff. But how's it been for you?
Candice Brathwaite
Do you know what? Lockdown was, was really difficult in, in, in a lot of ways. You've got, I've got two underage kids at home. It's hard to explain, especially to a two-year old, why he can't go to his childminder. And, you know, you're spending all of this extra time with a family you really do love but you need some space. And then it was, there was another layer of difficulty. My first book was published during lockdown, which I was really, really nervous about because I'm a debut author anyway. I'm gonna be nervous: I don't know how this works. And you could have millions of followers on social media. If you want to be taken seriously as a writer there is, I had an idea in my head about getting to meet my readers, about being on a physical book tour. And to see dates just get erased from my diary, I was like, oh, okay. I was even saying to the publishing house, like, I think we should delay this and luckily, they, you know, they had faith that it would be okay. But it's been really, really hard because – you would know better than me – writing a book is one thing, promoting it is a different beast.
Dorothy Koomson
It is.
Candice Brathwaite
And yeah, the, the work of promotion, the interviews, the talking. I was like, I, I wasn't ready for it, I don't feel. And being at home and only doing these things in a digital manner took a toll for sure.
Dorothy Koomson
Yes, but you like to meet people. I mean, I had a book out in lockdown as well. And bookshops are closed, then there's all the events – we were planning a tour as well. And so we had to cancel all of that because of the lockdown and stuff. But your book's done fantastically well. It's been amazing. And I've seen it everywhere. And it deserves do amazingly because it is a fantastic book.
Candice Brathwaite
Oh, thank you. You know, I'm just taking it all in my stride because me and I, I guess, as the writer, and you've got way more experience than me. But it was new to me to feel so nervous and so disconnected and really understand that, okay, I've written this book, but it doesn't actually belong to me. So, like, I started to really get that, say the first week it was out. And you're just hearing all of these opinions and all of this talk and all of these reviews. And I suddenly understood that I'm like a surrogate mother to this message that's now just gone out into the world. And that was really nerve wracking. And I'm always quick to remind people that I – of course, I think it's a good book – but there is a lot to be said that the book gained traction really quickly because of the murder of George Floyd. And I don't think we can overlook that moment, you know?
Dorothy Koomson
Your book came out with the resurgence of Black Lives Matter in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. And people started to talk again about Breonna Taylor and things like that. How did that feel because your book is so relevant, it's so of the moment it's actually quite spooky? It's almost like you had second sight, but you obviously didn't because that stuff's never gone away. It's been, we have been talking about it for years. But now everyone else is talking about it. So how did that feel to find that, that everyone, that everyone else was talking about the stuff that you'd been talking about for a long time, and the stuff you wrote about?
Candice Brathwaite
Really ... I'm going to take a leap of faith and be confident for a moment and say, really I felt really confident. That's the word. Because I was like, actually, this isn't new to me; this isn't new to the people that I would class as brothers and sisters, who have always been here doing this work in one way or another; this is not a new conversation. So, I knew in that moment being called on to the news, or people using the book as a tool for anti-racism, which is not what I was thinking when I sat down to write it. That bit didn't make me nervous because I was like, if there is one place where I am qualified it is in the black British experience. It's in understanding how racism has affected my life and my grandparents' lives and so on. That bit I was fine with.
What made me nervous and I wasn't so confident in was seeing my book being pulled into these ginormous lists of tools. Now, you know – 'You have to read Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race, you have to read Natives by Akala, and you've got to read, I Am Not Your Baby Mother' – that bit took my breath away because at that point the book had been out seven days. I was like, hold on, hold on, guys, hold on a second, these books have had years to marinate; they've been the kind of books that you have on your bookshelf for a while – for at least three, four, some five years. And it was like watching a newborn being forced to go to uni. I was like, this book is really new. Why are you guys putting a cap and gown on it? Like, I don't understand. But then when I started hearing the feedback and rereading my writing from a different perspective, especially a chapter like ‘Young, Gifted and Stabbed’, that was like, ah, okay, I do get it. And it was, it was me having a moment of being like, yeah, were you having a vision when you wrote this? because you could not predict, I don't want to use the term 'perfect', but that's the only word I can find. It was just such perfect timing.
Dorothy Koomson
Yeah. It's and it's also really sad timing that was the thing. I mean, how did it ... I know what you've just said, but how did the whole experience of that time take its toll on you emotionally? Because for me I spent a lot of time really hurt, I suppose, with people's responses to it because ... And that's why I ended up writing my letter, open letter to the public to the industry. Because we've been fighting this fight and talking about this stuff and doing what we can all this, all these years. And suddenly everyone was like, 'Oh, yeah, we've been doing this, we understand this, we've been here.' And I was like, no, you haven't. And it really ... You know, my husband and I were both really like, it's exhausting and tiring and upsetting and, and I got really angry sometimes. And I just felt bereft a lot of time. And it did help talking to other people. But how did you get through it?
Candice Brathwaite
Yeah, I was really tired. And I think I got to the two-week mark and I, I was like actually, no more TV interviews, none of that nonsense, because that's how it feels. We have a moment like this twice a year, once a year, and then they call on the same black speakers, the same black voices to come back and almost, like, argue racism with white people on national TV. And I was like, yeah, that's no good for my soul either. I'm really about activism from a joyful perspective. So, your media tells me that all black men are in jail, and that all black women are baby mothers who are on like the nineteenth floor with a lift that doesn't work, and they, they can't pick the dad out in a line-up. So, I'm purposely going to come on this internet every day and stuff a black nuclear family down your throat, just so I can be like the antidote to this constant false stereotype of black people being a certain way. And that's what got me through. And when I saw my social media platforms start to grow, I turned on something which meant that new people couldn't comment, they couldn't speak. And I was like, listen, you guys, you new people – you're gonna have to acclimatise for about a month. I don't want to hear from you because you've probably come to follow me thinking that I'm going to be your one way out of your racist thinking. Or, you know, I'm going to help you solve your white privilege. And it's not that ... This space is actually first and foremost for black people who want to see themselves depicted in a positive light. But the time was so heavy, I would say, you know, borderline depressing, actually. It was a really difficult time. Because also we cannot overlook what seeing someone murdered being pushed to your phone does for your psyche if you're a black person. Some of these videos of George Floyd didn't even have like a trigger layer on them. It was just there.
Dorothy Koomson
It was just there.
Candice Brathwaite
And I, yeah. And I feel like we are way more respectful of white bodies and trauma.
Dorothy Koomson
Absolutely. They would not show half the stuff they showed and in its, soaked in its glory, as it were that – 'glory' isn't the right word. And, you know, it was just there. I couldn't, I didn't actually watch the whole thing but I started. I saw it come up on my feed a few times and I was like, this is just horrific, I can't watch this. I mean, I cover my eyes when anything comes on Casualty, so can you imagine trying to watch in real life something as awful as that? It's really, really ... You're right. That's the thing is people are much more respectful of white pain. And, you know, and it doesn't seem, it doesn't seem to be as fair as it were, you know. We [are] kind of like thrown, this stuff is thrown at us, and we are having to look at it and then comment on it and then move on from it.
Candice Brathwaite
Yeah, and act unaffected, you know, or––
Dorothy Koomson
And allow people to tell us that it's, that it's nothing to do with race.
Candice Brathwaite
Yeah, he had a, he had a $20 bill that was counterfeit, okay. But I've seen images of that white kid who shot up that church a couple years ago. They escorted him out of that church not even handcuffs.
Dorothy Koomson
He got a takeaway as well, let's not forget.
Candice Brathwaite
I know. He got Maccy D's, I think. But oh, it does, it really ... ! Again, I can just feel myself getting hot just thinking about it.
Dorothy Koomson
I know, I know. I think let's just move away from that, Candice. Let's move away. Let's go back to ice cream. But why did you, why did you decide to write the book because, I mean, the book it goes, it goes to lots of different places and in a very specific and because I listened to the audiobook I kind of felt like I got to know you. I mean, I don't know you, I'm not a crazy from the internet who thinks they're your best friend. But I did feel like I got to, to know you a bit and, and how you speak and how you enunciate things. And so, why did you decide to bring what was a lot on Instagram and on your blog into, into a book?
Candice Brathwaite
Do you know what, I'm not gonna sit here and lie – that decision was made for me. Before the proposal for this book, there were five others that got turned down. And so, I just felt like that the, the common, the common themes in being turned down were stuff like, 'Oh, we really love your writing, but we think you should go away and grow your social media profile first'. I kept hitting that. And then a week later they'd email my management and be like, 'Oh, but if she ever, would she ever consider writing about motherhood?' and I was in a really difficult position. Although people saw me as a mummy blogger, I speak really frankly when I say I find most mummy blogger books to be abhorrent and not filled with much. And in a month's time you're going to use it as like, a coffee coaster, you're not gonna keep that in your library forever.
So, for years I was like running away from motherhood. I was like I'll write about anything but that because I don't respect that genre when it comes to writing and reading, I don't. And I remember writing this proposal in like 45 minutes. I think the title I threw in there in that 45 minutes as well. And I said to my management, don't ever talk to me about this proposal again, 'cos I no longer care. And two weeks later I got a call from Quercus. They were like, 'Oh, this is really good and we want it now'. And I was like, and I thought, you know, I thought being like so off the cuff with it would call people's bluff. So, I pushed a little further. I was like, yeah, but I bet you're gonna call me into your office and you wanna dilute what I want to say, and I bet you find the title too abrasive. And they were like, 'No, we want it all'. And I was like, okay, fine, then we go. And then I found through writing it I, you know, I found that a lot of me not wanting to write this book was ego based, I have to admit that. There was an idea in my head about what it meant to be a respected writer and I was, I've been proved very wrong in writing this book because it's what people have wanted for a very long time, but I tried to run away from it. And now reading it back I'm like, oh, you could not have begun your writing career with anything else, that is very clear.
Dorothy Koomson
It's funny. What in your head was a respected writer?
Candice Brathwaite
Oh, just ... Okay, so this is really funny. It's so funny how they would tell me to grow my social media profiles. In my head a respected writer's not on social media because they're busy writing and going out into the world.
Dorothy Koomson
I know what you mean. I'm joking with you. I'm messing with you.
Candice Brathwaite
It's not the be all and end all ... I just found some of these [publishing] houses to be obsessed with like followers and engagement. And I'm like, okay, so are you a publishing house, or are you ... because the lines have become so blurred. And I'm like, you know, there are wicked authors with 100 followers on Instagram. And I'm like, so why does it matter? So, in my mind a respected author was not an influencer or a blogger. It was someone who has always enjoyed reading and could string a sentence or two together. Because that's another thing, again I can't lie, lots of these bloggers have ghost writers. Lots of them are only offered a deal because they have a million followers. It's not because they can write, you know. And so, I found it, for a long time I found the process of trying to become published really heartbreaking. And like, I just, I realised a lot of things during that period. I really learned how publishing first and foremost is a business. And more often than not, many of these houses are willing to put numbers before actual talent. And that's really scary, you know.
Dorothy Koomson
In the book you're very open about your feelings. And as you know, you're a lot more open than most black people are about, particularly about personal stuff and mental health and the things that go wrong. So, has being that open helped you, empowered you, do you think or held you back or harmed you in any way?
Candice Brathwaite
I think a bit of both. I think off the top I will say I think, aside from mental health, and cancer, I think one of the biggest killers in the black community is secrecy. And I know so many black women specifically, that will just take the craziest things to the grave, or just like the maddest level of abuse. And, you know, they'll live till they're 90 and it's not until they die that certain things are coming out. Or we, we start to understand them as 3D humans because we hear the truth about how they were treated in life. So, I would say that I'm a unicorn in my family for sure. I think I'm the baby that came out with a glitch. And there are so many people in my family who are like, wow, why doesn't this one just ever shut up? Like, I have family members who, no matter this book's success, they have gone and told everyone that I've bought maximum shame to the family. They're like, 'Oh, my God, do not read this book, she's embarrassed us so greatly. How dare she put our’ – it's my business, but my business is their business apparently – ‘how dare she put our business in the streets like she's the scum of the earth'. Hand on heart that has been the reaction from the bulk of my family.
So I would say behind closed doors it's not worked in my favour, but publicly it's a sword that I will always fall on because this is why we have 8, 10, 15, 16-year-old black girls not saying when their uncle is sexually abusing them, not talking about when, you know, they're older when a man is hitting them, not talking about feeling less than for things because of colourism and skin tone. It's because of this, this inbred silencing we seem to have within the black community, which from an empathetic standpoint I get because we've always had to struggle. And so, I think it's easier to pretend that we don't have issues in our own community because other communities do that really well on our behalf. But all I'm thinking about are the young girls who are being abused or don't like the way their life is turning out because they feel like they can't be honest. And so ... And I also remember I've got a six-year-old girl watching my every move. And the reason why I know what I'm doing is working – when her Nigerian grandfather came to stay with us he had dinner and then he called her to remove his plate and she turned to him and she said, 'Granddad, I'm not doing that, because there's nothing wrong with your legs'. And I swear––
Dorothy Koomson
I'm sorry, I'm laughing because, you know what, my family are West African, my goodness ...
Candice Brathwaite
| ... You felt the earth shake, like! I felt, like, planet Mars has just spin on its axis. | You know, he just then went
into Yoruba about disrespect and 'Oh, my God, what's got into kids these days?' And then Esmé's dad came down and like and backed it for her, and that was important also. He was like, 'Dad it's a different day and it's not that she's not respectful; it's just that we train especially our girl child to have a voice and have an opinion'. And what it made it equally as interesting is a week later I had just eaten, and she came to me with no hesitation and she said, 'Oh, mum, should I take your plate to the sink?' So, it wasn't about respect. It was about: 'You're asking me to do something that I don't feel like doing'. And I feel like in the black community another thing that has us in a chokehold is respectability politics. It's like, oh, I should just do what this adult's asking because they're an adult. No, sometimes the adult is asking you to do something dangerous. And so I feel like me being so open, even though it's been heartbreaking to literally lose family over work like this, I've gained a different kind of family in the women that message me, and email me literally saying like, 'You, you've made me leave an abusive relationship’, or ‘finally stand up to my toxic family.' Like, that's a big deal.
Dorothy Koomson
Yeah. And that's what I was gonna ask you because I know on the, on the flip side, I've had over the years, I've had so many emails from women who said that your book has changed my life or it has helped me and I realise that I'm not alone and that, you know, black girls can feel like this. And black girls can be the hero or the love interest. You know, we don't have to be, look a certain way. So, I was gonna say, you must have had so much of that because your book is so detailed and it goes into so many different places and so many different ... I mean, you don't have to be a mother to sit, to understand or to, to experience some of the stuff that you talk about in it. So, you must have had lots of contact from other people, you know, who've made up for it. And I know family is everything. But when you do lose them in those circumstances have you, you must have had other people who've stepped into that breach?
Candice Brathwaite
Oh, completely. And, you know, my granddad who I love dearly and he raised me, he has this saying where he says, 'I will love you without hiccup'. And he means to say like, I'm gonna love you regardless of the worst thing you think you've ever done. And I find it really shocking that there are strangers that love me without hiccup. There are strangers that email me and are like, warts and all we really appreciate you and the work you do. And I was watching this recent documentary Oprah did and she was talking about, you know, how disconnected she feels from family. But she then said, 'For 25 years the Oprah show has been my family, that audience', and I really felt that in my chest. I was like, yeah, my readers are really now standing in for actual family. They are filling that gap. And they're reminding me that, they're also reminding me – and I think it's because I'm in therapy that I'm just trying to see this with a softer gaze – that actually there is so much that maybe certain friends and family are not ready to deal with that, that's why that relationship can't go on. It's not necessarily a battle. Perhaps in my writing I just hold up a mirror and people don't like the reflection. They're like, yeah, I'm not ready to deal with that so you're now, like, the annoyance in my life. And that's cool. You know, I have to make peace with that side of things.
Dorothy Koomson
That's the important thing I think, you know, was it ... Did it feel therapeutic writing the book or did it just feel like, you know, you're dredging up all the things that have happened to, to expose?
Candice Brathwaite
It felt a bit of both so, and – trigger warning for anyone listening – there is a chapter where I discuss sexual assault and I don't just want to dive into that. But that, that specific couple of paragraphs were submitted after I'd submitted the finished book. Because as I was writing it, there was a part of me that was like, yeah, but you're not telling the whole story, and you know what, holding this bit back, if you put it in there, what could it do for others. But I just wasn't willing to go there because with a paid therapist I haven't been there yet. And I was like, so now you're really gonna just tell these bits of yourself to strangers, and you've not worked on some things in your private space. And so it did feel really cathartic because there's so much in that book that maybe some of my nearest and dearest didn't know about me or didn't know about my situation. But I'm, I've, I'm becoming – because I'm not there yet – but I'm becoming one of these writers who's willing to leave it all on the table. Because, especially with non-fiction, I can feel when a writer's not done that. I can feel in a, in a story, I'm like, something's missing here. And I didn't ever want to be a fraud. And that feels like a wrong thing to say because it's my business and I shouldn't be perceived as a fraud for not sharing something. But I just think sexual assault specifically is such a problem in my community that if I didn't put something like that in there it, it wouldn't be the same book. If I didn't speak so openly about abortion it wouldn't be the same book. Because these are the things that are specifically thrown on young black girls as, like, cloaks of shame.
Dorothy Koomson
Absolutely. And you know, and that's, that's one of the things that we need to kind of address. And I do, when I write a book, I do try and be as honest and authentic and tell people's stories. And it was, it was very refreshing to read a – I know you say it's not a biography, it's a memoir more than anything – that is, that deals with it and is very open about it. And you know, and the way you discuss the sexual assault and abortion and stuff, and you're very open as like, if you can't deal with it, then you need to put this down. You know ... what made me laugh about your book a lot is stuff that I could just see myself, hear myself saying things like that, and I could just see my husband's face thinking, Oh God! Oh, that woman. And it really made me laugh. I'll tell you one thing that really made me laugh was when you were talking about the travel system, and I knew what you were talking about before you named it, I knew what you were talking about, I knew it. I was laughing to myself about that as well. There's so many bits in it that are really funny. And then there are bits of it that are really heart-rending and, you know, that can bring a tear too. I'm not just talking about the things like the, the chapter on, on stabbings and stuff like that. I mean, just the little things like the schooling chapter, or why you decided to set up Make Motherhood Diverse, those things: they kind of are heart-rending as well because you kind of see where they came from and how alone you felt out there and how alone other mothers must have felt before you started it, before you, you came and decided to push forward and keep doing it. And, and then and that's kind of very empowering. Like I say, you don't have to be a mother to read this to, to get something from it. I mean, I love your analogies, like the pyramid and the Kentucky Fried Chicken and things. They're very poignant and very, very insightful. I don't want, I wanted to try and avoid talking too much about what's in the book 'cos I want other people to go and read it and experience it like I did. But I want to keep going but you remember that bit that really made me laugh, that bit? I have been there. But the thing, I mean, one of the things that was very important about your book was bringing up the fact that black women, black mothers are treated so badly in the healthcare system. We know we can pretend that they're not, we can pretend that, you know, they go into it and it's equal and we're all treated the same but we're so not, we're absolutely not. And your story pre- and post-birth was very affecting, I found. How did it feel writing that down?
Candice Brathwaite
That honestly, that one was the easiest chapter because by the time I handed that manuscript in I had been on so many podcasts, I'd, you know, spoken to so many news outlets about that. I just feel like, if it was in the reverse, and this were white women the NHS would have been called to public task by now. And there would have been a massive inquiry and a shake-up. And I feel like because its primarily black bodies being discarded or black women dying, this is why it's taken just so long to find a way to stop this. And I mean, I also started a petition to get the government to discuss this, and they had the cheek to respond in their petition with data about the fact, you know, that you know that black babies are more likely to die than any other baby in their first months of life. I thought, wow, this is your response: it's so, just the entitlement, the way the black life really doesn't matter in a situation where the structure is based in white supremacy. I was like, this is so mind blowing to me. And the fact it has now had enough signatures, but that petition was stagnant for months, for months.
Dorothy Koomson
I remember, I remember, sharing it on my Facebook, my Facebook page, and I had several people sign it, but I had several people going, 'Oh, it's because you know, sometimes they don't know how to speak up.' I was like, don't talk nonsense to me. Don't, don't talk nonsense to me. Because I mean, I try to avoid arguing with people in public. It's one of my things I try not to do. So, I was just like, you know what, I'm gonna block you because I can't, you know––
Candice Brathwaite
Do you know why that doesn't make sense? It's because on another day black women are loud and angry.
Dorothy Koomson
Oh, yeah ... None of it makes sense.
Candice Brathwaite
So, when we're in, when we're in the most pain physically possible, what – we just fall mute? It's just, and it's the fact that people even want to argue that data or find any other reason for it than to be racism and racial bias. No, it's not that it's gestational diabetes. No, it's not that they eat too much dumplings. No, it's not that. It's like, come on, stop! You know? And when I had Esmé I was the healthiest I've ever been. So, for me to fall so ill, and really genuinely come that close to dying, I think yeah, this could have ended so differently for me. And it's not until that data was available that then thousands of other black women come out the woodworks and they're like, 'Well, I didn't die, but they've left my child paralysed from the neck down’. ‘Well, I didn't die but I was given a cut from my front to my back with no anaesthetic.' And I'm just like, are we in cavewoman times?
Dorothy Koomson
Well, exactly.
Candice Brathwaite
The stories you hear, they just, they're really distressing. But it was important that that chapter was in there just to remind people what we're dealing with, you know. You can tell me that knife crime is a black issue when it's black on black crime, you could tell me that I'm lying about the story about my kid, but are you really gonna argue with data that the NHS themselves have provided? That was the point of that.
Dorothy Koomson
I know. It's, it's heartbreaking that we have to constantly argue, to be seen, to be, you know, to be even noticed, let alone taken seriously. So, what sort of advice would you give to someone who wants to do what you do, because you know, what you do is quite unique at the moment. I can't, can't think of anyone else who does all the different things that you do.
Candice Brathwaite
You know, it's sad but you've got to go into this career, which has so many different layers to it, but you've got to go in it prepared for people to want to mess you up at every step of the way. And that's such an unfortunate thing to lead with. But I came into it just really like a young bushy-tailed kid, like, I wanna to be friends with everyone, and if I meet this person, I'm going to tell them what I fan I am of their work and, you know, and then time and time again, people would be mean to me; time and time again, I'd get trolled. And I'd literally physically cry in my bed and say to Bodé, like I don't mean anyone bad, like, I always go out with the best intentions. And then him and my friends will be like, yeah, but in a lot of ways people see you as a threat. And I'm like, me? The me that could barely afford at the time to get the bus to wherever I've been, or the tube to see this person or go to this event? I'm the threat? Like, it just felt so silly. So I would tell people: prepare in, in every area for people to see your light before you do, and to want to out it. And so that way, when people do try and trip you up, you know, sometimes it's not the actual falling that hurt me, it was the fact that I didn't see that someone was gonna do that. I'm like, I don't mind falling, I don't mind shame –whatever that means – or being embarrassed in public. What undoes me is when that has been brought on by someone that I considered a friend or someone I trusted, and that's a hard ... finding people you trust in any industry, but in an industry that's so public, is really difficult.
Dorothy Koomson
I absolutely agree, you know. I'm sorry to jump in. But, you know, it's funny, because my husband said almost exactly the same thing to me recently. I mean, I've been doing this job for a long time, but I discovered the resurgence of Black Lives Matter brought all sorts of people out the woodwork. And a lot of them discovered, you know, a lot of people who, because I was a bit like you in the, in that I try to help everybody out that I can, you know: authors want a quote or they want people to read their work, I try the best I can to help. And I did discover that people over the years haven't even picked up my book because it was written by a black person.
Candice Brathwaite
Wow!
Dorothy Koomson
And this is people you respect. And I was like, wow, so basically all this time it's not because you didn't like my work, it's because you didn't even bother to pick it up. And, you know, like you said, I was really like, really hurt. And like you say, it's being tripped up. And I felt really silly that I hadn't realised this sooner. But my husband said something similar to your husband, you don't realise that people might see you as a threat.
Candice Brathwaite
Yeah. Yeah. When you're just so focused on doing the best you can do for yourself and others I'm not looking for potholes, or for people to be like the Tasmanian devil and be a few miles ahead making those holes, I'm just like, oh, I'm trying my best, I'm being a good person. But some people don't see it like that. And it's been hard, you know, I'll be very black and say, that has been the wickedest lesson of my life. I just feel like I have been spun out by the levels that people will go to, especially when they see what they perceive to be a successful black woman. Oh, no.
Dorothy Koomson
Yeah.
Candice Brathwaite
Oh, how dare she? How dare she, you know? Being a bit more light-hearted, and I know, this is so cliché, but just remember no one can be you. I think in like the early days of, especially social media, I was like looking at what other people were posting or saying and working really hard to replicate that. And my life didn't start to open up until I owned all of me, all of it. I think especially dark-skinned black women we think we can only own sections of ourself at a time, right? I'm mum here, I'm this here, I'm that here. Oh, you know, my skin's this complexion so maybe if I wear my hair like this. I don't follow any of those rules. I show up in every room with very dark skin and a close-shaved head and the gap in my teeth. And I skin them the same! I'm just like, and everyone's like, wow, like, 'How are you so confident when on paper the world is saying it's women like you we really shouldn't be checking for?' I'm like, I don't know, I don't know. But clearly that energy has helped propel my career forward. So, I would say to anyone just remember to be yourself because what the last year or so has shown me especially on social media is that those who are playing nasty games behind the scenes, they do have their moment where the spotlight comes on them. And you don't ever want to be that person. So, if you're always being yourself you've got nothing to worry about.
Dorothy Koomson
I’ve followed you for quite a while. But some of the stuff you posted that has been obviously really painful and the response has been in the main really supportive. People have really supported you. And I think that's because of the authentic, authenticity in everything you do.
Candice Brathwaite
Yes, completely. Like when I, genuinely, when I feel like my back's up against the wall and I have to post something. And that feels really silly because I'm like, I'm not Beyoncé. So, the fact that I even have to make a statement of sorts, it does remind me how then how people might see me as a threat, because I'm like ... Also, why would you make a scene of any little thing that I do? I don't know why I'm that important. But I have to lead by example. And I think, yeah, if I'm gonna be like, love yourself, own everything, including your flaws, like I have to lead with that too. It’s one of the hardest things to do but also once it's done you just bring such a sigh of relief, because no one is, is not gonna make a mistake. No one's gonna live a perfect life, like we are these nuanced beings. But I know how higher the stakes are when you're a black woman. I know that. I know that. I know that we feel we can't get away with what someone else would get away with. Or you may feel like your career can't come back from a certain thing. But you have to trust the people that's chosen to engage with your work.
Dorothy Koomson
Yeah, and, and also you have to trust yourself to do the right thing. Yes. So are you going to write another book?
Candice Brathwaite
Oh, that. Do you know what? Because I was gonna be like all secretive. That conversation is happening right now. I didn't think I would want to. But I Am Not Your Baby Mother has shown me that I've got so much more to say that couldn't fit in that book or was left on the cutting room floor, and I'm not precious about the editing process. I'm like, oh, we need to get the word count down, well, whack that bit out, whack that bit out. But what's been whacked out is really good and still really helpful to someone else. So, I think there might be another two or three books in me yet. But again, I'm always gonna, because my career has come in like... almost backwards, so I've grown my social media following first and then brought out books. I don't know, I think I'm gonna feel like I'm playing pretend for a bit because I still do, like when people solely say, oh, the writer Candice Brathwaite, I do screw up my face a bit and I'm like, oh, really? I've only had one book out, don't push it. You know, anyone can write one book.
Dorothy Koomson
They really can't though. They really can't. No, they can't. I'm telling you they really can't.
[Mutual laughter.]
Candice Brathwaite
I think ... again, black women we're our own worst enemy sometimes because the bar in my head is so high. I'm like, okay, maybe you can say that and I'll feel confident in that on the fifth book. But right now, I'm still like, oh, it could have been just a fluke. I don't know if people will read anything else. Let's see.
Dorothy Koomson
Take it for someone who's done it 16 times, to do one book and to be, to have it be so successful and so loved is a real achievement. So please don't ever take anything away from it.
Candice Brathwaite
You're right. I'm working on that, too. And you're right, I'm trying to, when people praise it, I'm just trying to feel good with that. I'm like, thank you. I'll hold on to that. Because this, it's a rhythm. I love this bit now. But if you know, I know that when I'm writing my second, I'll doubt myself again. And I'll have days when I don't wanna sit at my computer because I don't know what I'm doing. So I'll hold on to the good times for now for sure.
Dorothy Koomson
Absolutely. And just keep, keep going. So how is it working with your husband now?
Candice Brathwaite
Oh, you know, I'm probably gonna annoy people, but it's bloody brilliant. And I wish he'd quit years ago because the ability to just get more done and for life to feel smoother now that we work in the same house. Yesterday, he just looked at me and he was like, 'You know, we would never be able to do the stuff you've done in the last three weeks if I was still going to a nine to five.' And I was like, dude, you're telling me! I've been trying to tell you this for a couple of years. But also, from like an ancestral spiritual perspective I'm really excited and encouraged because I just want to build something that, you know, the grandkids or great-grandkids I'll never meet are like, I'm able to do this because grandma and grandpa started this business. And it's a black couple doing something which I think you don't get to see enough. That's not to say that we don't cross words. But for the most part it's been the best decision we've made this year for sure.
Dorothy Koomson
So, what's next then apart from possibly a new book? Are you going to do a fashion line or something?
Candice Brathwaite
Oh, my gosh, you're being too spooky now. Do you know what, because someone approached me and they
were like, oh, we'd love to work with Candice. I thought, no, it's time to shoot my shot and I told my management, could you ask them if I could have like my own lipstick range or a dress line or something? So hopefully. And do you know why I'm gonna say that publicly because I feel like white women who do what I do would have asked for that ages ago, or they would have done it ages ago.
Dorothy Koomson Yeah, absolutely.
Candice Brathwaite
And so I, sometimes I do think, oh, you're being too cocky or you're asking for too much. And then I do my white girl litmus test and I'm like, no, you're not. You're not asking for nearly enough. Like, I would love to do something like that, but might be a black thing, more of a moral thing, I'm not in the business of selling people rubbish. So, it would have to be done really well. But fingers crossed.
Dorothy Koomson
Absolutely yeah, yeah. Something with your name on has got to be done well.
Candice Brathwaite
But fingers crossed that's the next thing hopefully.
Dorothy Koomson
Okay. I've got to keep my fingers well crossed for you. And don't you dare quit or stop. You know what? It's really important what you're doing, really important, really important to show a black nuclear family and to show that, you know, a black girl, dark-skinned black girl can be, you know, confident and can talk about fashion. And can you know, talk about all sorts of things, not just the sad stuff or the hurtful stuff or anything, you know. You keep going, please keep going.
Candice Brathwaite
I will, I promise.
Dorothy Koomson
We sound like we're like a support group, aren't we? And I think we are. I think there's nothing wrong with setting up a support group in this sort of way. But really, I'm, do you know, congratulations. Really well done, you've done so amazingly. And I'm really, ... I feel like saying I'm proud of you, but I can't really because I'm not like your mum or anything but I do feel like I'm proud of you for all you've done.
Candice Brathwaite
Thank you. Thank you so much. Like I said, it's been hard because I've not even heard that from family, you know. It's been the... great opposite, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep trucking along. I think I'll do all right. I'm gonna keep going, I promise.
Dorothy Koomson
Well, thank you so much. If you want to pick up I Am Not Your Baby Mother it's through all the usual outlets and it's a fantastic read. I think everyone should read it. I do actually believe that. I'm not just saying that because I love Candice. I actually think it's a really, really insightful read and a really insightful look at what it means to be a black woman in the modern world. So, thank you so much, Candice. It's been lovely talking to you.
Candice Brathwaite
Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you to everyone listening. It's been awesome.
Outro message
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents...podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love for you to tell us about it – leave us a review or a rating and find us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. You can download our latest podcast episodes, every Thursday, from all the places you would normally get your podcasts and find transcripts of our episodes in the shownotes and on our website at www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org . Details about our full programme can also be found on our website. Until then, happy reading!
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is curated by Shantel Edwards and produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
- https://www.makemotherhooddiverse.com
In this week’s episode, artist and cultural critic Gaylene Gould interviews debut author Paul Mendez about his novel Rainbow Milk. Join Paul and Gaylene for a fascinating discussion about the rich history of black British writing, representing
the Black Country accent on the page and the intersections of identity, alongside a wonderful reading from the novel.
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast brings writers and readers together to discuss some of 2020’s best books. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions
about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. Join us each week for exciting and inspiring conversations with new, and familiar, writers from the Midlands and beyond.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
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Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Guest Curator: Kit de Waal
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
Kit de Waal
Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast series. I’m Kit de Waal and I’ve worked with the Festival Director, Shantel Edwards, as Guest Curator of this year’s podcast series. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. In this week’s episode, artist and cultural critic Gaylene Gould interviews debut author Paul Mendez about his novel Rainbow Milk, a coming of age story that starts in the Midlands, via Jamaica, and follows ex-communicated Jehovah’s Witness Jesse McCarthy as he grapples with racism, the legacies of the Windrush and his sexuality. Join Paul and Gaylene for a fascinating discussion about the rich history of Black British writing, representing the Black Country accent on the page and the intersections of identity, alongside a wonderful reading from the novel.
Gaylene Gould
Welcome to Birmingham Literature Festival. I'm reviewer Gaylene Gould here with debut novelist Paul Mendez to talk about his book, Rainbow Milk, which made this year's Observer top 10 debut list. Hi, Paul.
Paul Mendez
Hello Gaylene, how are you?
Gaylene Gould
Good, thank you. Good, good. Yeah, great to actually kind of meet you virtually. I reviewed this book for Front Row, and I was saying how like, that can be quite onerous, you know, because you have to read a whole book and then hopefully like it and I really loved it. So, it's really wonderful to get to meet you. So, Rainbow Milk, it's a semi-autobiographical novel, following the journey of a character called Jesse McCarthy, who's a 19-year-old, de-fellowshipped Jehovah's Witness from West Bromwich. And we follow him as he moves to London and explores his sexuality through prostitution, amongst other things and through to becoming a burgeoning writer. So, there's real shades of James Baldwin here, and Giovanni's Room is indeed referenced in the novel. So, tell us a bit how this story grew in you.
Paul Mendez
Well I have a different answer now to what I would have said in answer or in response a couple of weeks ago, even because I've just re-read Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, which was Baldwin's fourth novel, published in 1968, just after the start of his political downturn, his unjust critical downturn as far as I'm concerned, because I think his later novels are pretty much his best work. But I read Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone when I was 20 years old. My trajectory was very different from Jesse, Jesse was disfellowshipped at 19 and then move straight to London, whereas I was disfellowshipped at 17. And when I was 19, moved to Kent to study an engineering degree at West Kent College, a partner College of Greenwich University. I didn't stay on the degree course for very long, I think I quit after about nine months. But in the summer of 2002, I was living with some fellow students or photography students, actually not engineering students. And it was sort of my first time living away from home, it was the first time living with creative people and one of them pushed Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone into my hand and it was the first time I've ever read a book by a black author. It was the first time I'd ever read a book by a black queer author, focalising a black queer protagonist. And it had a huge impact on me, but one, which I sort of put down, put to the side and forgot about, but it's only when reading it back now, 18 years later, that I realized just how much of an impact that book had on me in terms of my life choices, in terms of you know, I studied acting very much like the protagonist, Leo Proudhammer, he studied acting with a method school and becomes a successful Off Broadway actor in New York. I became a waiter and sort of, you know, expanded my sort of social kind of contacts, I suppose, and social environment through working in restaurants, and samplings and cuisines and just meeting you know, a whole cast of different people, and of course, explored my sexuality. So, Leo Proudhammer, the protagonist of Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone is bisexual, or identifies as bisexual and I came out as bisexual I think a year after reading, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone. And so even just in terms of the subject’s dealt with, but also in terms of the way the book is written, the way Rainbow Milk is written, the different sort of devices I use in telling the story, so much of it reflects back to that book. So I think, it just goes to prove how important books are, and reading is, to a formative mind. As I said, I put that book down, forgot about it and some 5 - 10 years later started reading other Baldwin novels, such as Giovanni's Room and Another Country, which I've referenced briefly in Rainbow Milk, but I think the most important of his books to me was Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone.
Gaylene Gould
So that's a great answer. And also, like you're saying, it really shows how novels and books work, that they have a slow, transformative process on you, you know, and you really kind of get a sense of that in this novel, that there is something that is kind of, there is a journey, there's a journey that's taken not just through the character, but that you take us on, getting us to sample our own journeys, I guess. So, the book spans miles and time so it's predominantly set this century, in the 2000s, but it begins in the last, particularly the 1950s with the arrival of Jesse's ancestor, Norman Alonzo and his wife Claudette from Jamaica, arriving in Bilston, in the West Midlands. So why was it important for you for the book to start there?
Paul Mendez
So what we think of as the Windrush generation now they're dying off, sadly, you know, the Windrush itself, that famous disembarkation in June 1948 at Tilbury was 72 years ago now, and so many of those people that have passed on, and I think it's incredibly important for us to be retaining those stories and retaining that history, a lot of people from the Windrush generation, you know, when I say a lot of people I'm only really talking about, from my grandparents perspective, that's what I can know for sure. But they came to the UK to start a new life, to leave behind Jamaica and the Jamaican way of life, and to start a new way of life here in England, and one which they hoped would foster new opportunities for their children and grandchildren. And, you know, it was all about looking forward rather than back. So, when I asked my grandparents, when they were alive about the past, they were very circumspect, they either said that they didn't remember or changed the subject. And I don't know whether that, you know, being a Black British person, I kind of understand the sudden sort of sensibility in terms of avoiding certain subjects, because they're traumatic. So I'm kind of wondering whether that was the case with them, whether they were suffering trauma, so didn't want to sort of reflect back on their, on their lives in the 50s, 60s, 70s, living as black people in the UK and being trail blazers in terms of, you know, being the first black people to, in huge numbers, and all over the country live here amongst white working class people. You know, I grew up in the Black Country as well, born in the early 80s, and suffered lots of racism. And that's, you know, me being a third-generation immigrant. So I'm kind of wondering now, like, what did the first generation have to deal with, and we have examples in the fiction of Andrea Levy, Sam Selvon, George Lamming et al but I think every generation needs to find out a fresh what it was like to be a Jamaican or Afro Caribbean, or African immigrant to the UK in the 1950s and 60s, because it was just a completely different world. And it just seems like what we've seen happen this year in the United States, for example, and with Black Lives Matter, sort of freshly at the top of the agenda all over the world, it does seem unfortunately, that each generation needs to find out a fresh why, or you know that white supremacy exists, that racism exists and is as strong and as is as insidious as ever. So, you know, just in terms of retrieving and rehabilitating the experience of people in the 1940s, to 60s, so that we can learn from that, and so that we can sort of see over two or three generations, what has changed and what hasn't changed, it really just sort of does explain Norman’s story in the 1950s, really, I think does explain a lot of what Jesse's experience subsequently is 50 years later.
Gaylene Gould
And there's also something around, just hearing you say that, respond to that, it's making me think about the way in which shame played a part in both, in all of those generations, you know, and that sense of like, you were saying, the characters who arrived in the 50s, that there was some kind of circumspect relationship to the past. And was that to do with trauma? And was that to do with shame, and there's something there's a kind of echo of that, that kind of shrouds the whole novel, there's almost like a colonial shame, you know, that all of the characters in a sense are experiencing, which is quite, quite interesting. Yeah.
Paul Mendez
Yeah, I think so. Um, yeah, you know, Jamaica, in my research, I discovered was in a really sort of bad state in terms of the economy, in terms of prospects, you know, this is pre independence. Nobody knew what was going to happen if Jamaica became independent from Great Britain. It was sort of devastated by so many hurricanes as well over the course of the 1940s and 50s, I think the 1944 hurricane in particular was incredibly damaging. And that's something that Norman would have lived through. And that's indeed something that Norman mentions that sort of devastated the crop of the island and it sort of put the economy back five years, rather like what we're going through now, I suppose in terms of the Coronavirus, but obviously, you know, Britain being a much more sort of advanced capitalist, I suppose state. But Jamaica just had such an unenviable intersection of issues at that time, that perhaps, it did foster a sense of needing to escape in people and because of the colonial education that Jamaican children receive, you know, they look at Britain as being, you know, almost utopia or paradise, you know, the sort of Jane Austen-isation of the British education system in the colonists fosters this kind of this feeling that, you know, the mother country is the place to be the person that you want to be. And yeah, I mean, that just sort of makes the disappointment that they found when they got here, just even more profound, really. And I think, because of the sort of situation of this kind of colonial imposition and the education system that affects Jesse, and that affected me, you know, I grew up in a very sort of white working class area, the BNP was very sort of prominent in my area, during the time that I was growing up, you've got this sort of toxic situation where, you know, Thatcherism is kind of choking the Black Country of its livelihood, the indigenous industries have been crushed, the unions have been put down. People are out of work and people don't necessarily have the empowerment to change, to find new industries and new reasons to be, and that then reflects back on the racism that I grew up receiving. But at the same time, like I said, at the top of the conversation, my education was based almost entirely, or actually entirely on the writing of dead white men. And as someone who was raised with the Bible, and someone who was, you know, very literate from a very young age and very interested in books and writing, it again, sort of adds to this sort of sense of shame of being actually a black person. But if I'm not seeing black people writing anything, who do I think I am, you know, and so it's kind of very complex, and sort of something that I'll probably be unpacking for a long time. But there is a sense of shame that is imposed on us as black people, that we have to apologize for our blackness somehow, that our blackness is somehow if not wrong, then it maybe is unhelpful to us, let's say. And then it's something that we need to overcome before we can learn, before we can express ourselves creatively. And that's what I've tried to sort of expand on in the book.
Gaylene Gould
And I think it that's, again, another great kind of way of framing Jesse's journey, you know, from the East, the West Midlands, I say, the East Midlands, because that's where I'm from, and had a similar upbringing to yourself in terms of, you know, what you describe is exactly what I, what I've experienced, which is rarely documented, you know, in Black fiction. So, it's often this sense of kind of urban, the urban centre of London, which is, yeah, which basically kind of presides over the whole of the black experience. So, I think there was something very special about you documenting that historic presence of black people in different parts of the country. So, let's speak a little bit more about that, I mean, you really, there's lots of things that I think that those people who aren't from the Midlands will be able to pick up and grasp. And one of those things is the delight in the language, the vernacular, and I think your ear for spoken language, spoken word generally. So that's, I had to read lots of passages in your book out loud, because the way in which the characters spoke that and you've got, you know, people from West Midlands, from the Caribbean, from Australia, from Europe, and you capture it completely, you've got such a great ear for it, so I wondered whether you could read something, possibly that kind of helps the audience get a sense of that sound?
Paul Mendez
Sure. Um, yeah, I mean, there's probably no better place to read from then, I guess, the very, very beginning of the book. So yeah, the first section of the book is narrated in first person by Norman Alonzo who, as we've outlined, is a Jamaican immigrant to the UK. This is July the 20th 1959. And he just, to give a tiny bit of background, is a fit ex-boxer, he is now 33 years old, he has two infant children Robert aged almost three, Glorie almost 10 months and he is at home looking after them because he cannot work, he has come across an unexpected illness which has rendered him disabled yeah, that's all I need to say by way of introduction. So, July 20th 1959.
This the best summer since we come to England three year ago. It hot, not hot like Jamaica but I don't feel a cloud pass the sun today, and no rain has fall for a long time now. I stand on my front lawn and breathe. The bush are strong with plenty of fragrant roses. My son Robert love to totter round with the watering can, that almost as big as him. I can hear how much water he is pouring on each root. I don't know how he can’t feel the cold water dribbling on his foot. Strong little man. He is going to be tall; already he is quite up to my knee. Glorie want to help but she's too small, and I have to listen for her all the time in case I trip up on her or she scratch herself on the thorn.
‘Not too much, son,’ I say to Robert when I can hear the water start to puddle. ‘Move to the next one.’
‘Allo, little man, am you helpin’ ya dad water the garden?’ Mr Pearce, my neighbour, make me jump as he walk up his path.
‘Say hello to Mr Pearce, Robert.’
‘Hello,’ he say, all quiet.
I say ‘Good afternoon, Mr Pearce. How are you today?’, knowing he will just go on and on about his ailment.
‘Oh, I int too bad, you know. Same old aches and pains. Me arthritis ‘as been playin’ me up summat rotten but I can't complain. Ethel int well herself, with her legs. Cor wait til your lad’s big enough to run down the shops for we. Anyway, it's a bit hot for me in this heat. It's alright for you, coming from the West Indies.’
‘Not really,’ I say. ‘My body used to the cold now.’ I have hardly any sight left but I know Mr Pearce never leave his door without his flat cap, old work coat and boot, though he must have retired from the gas work ten year ago.
‘You must’ve heard all that that's been happenin’ down London with all them White Defence League rallies. We was ever so sorry to see they’d painted them Keep England White or whatever it is on your door. Me and Ethel was talking about it the other night and we both agreed that we don’t mind you being here at all. We’m all the same, int we, white or coloured or not. I should not be still here in the sun, like what the doctor said, because my head start to throb and darkness falling on my eye, so I step closer to the house, into the shade.
Gaylene Gould
I can catch you on audio later, and you can read it the whole thing to me, sounds amazing, amazing. There is something though about, you know, you never hear, it's rare to hear England presented in this way. And it's you know, the majority of England is quote unquote, regional, right. The majority of England is made up of communities that’s really eloquently described in your book. The other thing that I think is really interesting in your book is that it spans 60, 70 years and along the way it's punctuated by these major global and political milestones. So, Jesse's sexual awakening comes on September 11, the Twin Towers come down and through to Brexit as well. So why was the backdropping of the book against those global markers important for you?
Paul Mendez
Well, again, my trajectory, personally, was different to Jesse’s. But I wanted Jesse to, obviously we all know where we were and what we were doing, who we were with when the story broke of the September 11 attacks, and I look back at my life and I kind of wonder whether I would have left the Jehovah's Witnesses’ if it wasn't for an external situation happening that sort of caught me off guard and that I didn't sort of know how to respond to, know the way I should respond to it. And I wanted to give Jesse a jolt and a shock, and I don't know that it would have come without him seeing something like 9/11, something that was so completely out of his frame of reference in the home of a gay couple. And that would have been his first experience of gay men, of sort of time being in their company. And I think they just would have blown his mind completely, and I think it would have just made him sort of see a completely different reality. And that would have been very much on his mind, sort of five days later, when he meets up with another brother in his congregation, and just has a completely sort of different take on things, you know, Fraser’s from South London, he's moved up to the Black Country with his family, his dad's a doctor he’s got a job as a GP in a Black Country surgery. And he doesn't really know why he's there but actually, in the event has found, because he's dyslexic, and likes to work with his hands, he's found a job as a fabricator. And so he's sort of quite sort of relaxed and comfortable there. But much more sexual than Jesse is used to from a Jehovah's Witness. And so you've got this kind of like cocktail, I suppose, of provocations, to Jesse's sensibilities. And it just sort of makes it so much more appealing to the reader as well, if, you know, we can, like I said, we can all identify with, with 9/11 being this thing that we all remember, this thing that sort of sticks out to us, this thing that sort of provoked us, this thing that changed, all of us, none of us were ever the same again, after seeing 9/11. And I think, the fact that Jesse saw the Twin Towers come down at the same time as seeing two men hold on to each other, and affirm their love for one another, their need for one another, for comfort and support, I thought that it would just be a really, really great way to sort of show Jesse actually, that the heteronormative idea of love that he's been raised with isn't necessarily for him, because of what he is inside. And that it is okay, that he will one day, find someone to love and to be loved by. And so, it was just an interesting juxtaposition as far as I was concerned, and hopefully it comes off.
Gaylene Gould
It certainly does. And also, what you draw in Jesse as a character is, he’s a kind of, I mean, you're rooting for him the whole way and you're completely, I felt this great sense of protectiveness towards him because you see someone who's yearning, really, and he is yearning for this tenderness and he is yearning for a kind of love that he's not getting from home and is not getting from his faith. And it's only when he comes out into his full sexuality, and begins to explore that, do you see him yearning in another way. So there's something, there's a real bravery in the writing of this book, one being able to reveal the inside of a faith like Jehovah's Witness, which we rarely get to explore, for those of us outside the faith, but also through this very intense, you know, sexual series of sexual experiences that Jesse has, especially as he enters the world of prostitution. So, I'd love to know, there's a question I often ask artists and writers about how you prepared yourself in a way for that, especially the fact that you were a Jehovah's Witness yourself. What did you have to do to prepare yourself to go, I'm going to be as honest as I can about this experience.
Paul Mendez
Rainbow Milk was something I was challenged to write as a novel after spending 10 years or more, just writing sort of life writing, I suppose for myself. So I'd spent 10 years just being absolutely honest about my experiences of how my upbringing, upbringing as a Jehovah's Witness and subsequent journey into sex work, how that affected my mental state. I feel like I mean, someone asked me yesterday, did you ever do therapy. And while there have been occasions that I probably should have done therapy, I'm probably alive today and I'm probably happy today because I've had access to language and I've always written and I've always been able to explain things to myself, you know, I can write very quickly, and I can just ask myself 100 questions. I can sort of write about how I'm feeling, and I can be absolutely honest. There's one moment about sort of seven or eight years ago, while I was kind of maybe going through quite a tough time, and I sat at my laptop, and I wrote for about 15 minutes, I am such and such I am such and such, I am such and such, and it was this long, huge outpouring of anger, frustration, upset, fear, and sort of self-loathing and all of these things, but it just made me feel so much better to just be that honest about myself. And so, I guess when I'm sort of translating all of those feelings and processes into the art of fiction, I'm not thinking about an audience in particular, I’m not thinking that I'm being courageous or being brave in front of anyone, I'm only writing for myself. Because, you know, it's, that's the language that I've sort of created for myself, to have myself as my own audience. I think, Toni Morrison said, you know, I don't write for an audience I write for myself, and I think I'm a good reader. And I sort of take that from her really, but, you know, I mean, as you said, you know, there are so few instances of infection of regionality, of Jehovah's Witness culture, of sex work from a black, queer perspective, black male, queer perspective, you know, these are all sort of, you know, pretty much almost firsts in British writing. So, you know, I have to just be honest, and it's not even really, you know, in a sense, I've been preparing myself for it, unwittingly, I guess for over a decade, but it has been couched in sort of self-care. I mean, the original reason for writing in the first place was to chart the mental processes, emotional processes I went on from being baptized at the age of 16, I was baptized at Wolverhampton Wanderers Stadium, Molyneux Stadium in 1998, and it was the International Convention of Jehovah's Witnesses, there were over 23,000 people in attendance, you know, delegates from Nigeria, Norway, you know, all over the world, as well as the, the local district of congregations. And I got baptized in a pool in front of all of these people are on a bright, beautiful summer's day and that's where I was at 16 and I thought that that was going to be my future, I thought that I was going to be a Jehovah's Witness for my whole life, and that I would see Bible prophecies being fulfilled, etc, etc. A year later, I was disfellowshipped and thrown out on my ear and not allowed to communicate with or be communicated with by any Jehovah's Witness anymore, I'd lost my entire centre of gravity at the age of 17 and had to find a new path. And then five years later, at the age of 22, I find myself living in London, I've had to quit drama school because I can't afford to pay my fees, because I've sustained an injury in a sexual assault, because I'm a rent boy. And I’m like well, how the hell did that happen over the course of six years. And it was only through writing that I was able to explain all of that myself and see what the processes were, and also to write a new path for myself going forward so that wouldn't make the same sort of downward spiral of mistakes that, that had bought me there so yeah, writing Rainbow Milk, you know, I've left a lot out, I haven't gone into you know, it's not a primer for what it is to be Jehovah's Witness or a primer for what it is to be a sex worker. It's a fast narrative thread that in 350 pages, takes in as you said, like over 70 years of history, takes in so much of British society, of Black British society, of cultural London, etc, etc. It does so much. And, you know, in order to sort of preserve this sort of speed of narrative and the sort of freshness, there are certain things that I had to leave out. So in the end it, you know, it was a joy to write this book, it was a joy to write it as fiction, it was a joy to sort of create a framework through which lots of subjects could be spoken about lightly, but profoundly enough so that they have a little bit of weight and gravity, but nothing with more weight or gravity than anything else. That's what I hope to achieve anyway.
Gaylene Gould
It's also a really interesting exploration of black masculinity, and of course, black masculinity, sexuality, you know, and the thing that I really learned as a black woman reading this book is how tortured it is, tortured it can be in terms of a space of desire, and also this idea of a kind of counterfeit identities. You know, like, Jesse is called, at one point, a black boy trying to be a white boy trying to be a black boy by a group of Asian and white boys who are trying to be black boys, you know, so this kind of concept of, this sort of layering of this performative, these performances that are going on, but also, you know, the kind of, the deep insecurities that also comprise the exploration of that identity. So, I don’t know if you can speak to that a little bit in terms of your kind of, whether, again, that was a conscious journey that you were taking in this book to explore black masculinity in a very particular way or whether that was just part of Jesse's identity, therefore, his journey.
Paul Mendez
I think, the latter, you know, it's always something that's going to be at the top of my, almost everything I say, will be filtered through that tension in terms of being a black male, looking in the mirror and seeing a black male, but not really fulfilling other people's ideas of what a black male should be. And that's something that I've lived through my whole life. You know, like I said, earlier, I grew up in a white working-class area, where the British National Party were, it was a stronghold, Sandwell was a stronghold for the BNP until the early 2000s. And I was sent to a secondary school. First of all, I was head boy, my primary school but despite, you know, despite is a strange word, but you know, being one of only two black boys in the whole year, you know, it was 60% white, 40% Asian, and then me and this other black boy, but I was chosen as head boy. And I think, at that age, you know, I saw Steve McQueen’s Year Three, and I've read in an interview that he’s saying, you know, year three, when kids are sort of seven, eight years old, that's when they start to become aware of race and class and gender, and all of those sorts of things. But, you know, being 10 years old, and being appointed head boy, you know, for me, you know, people could have said, you know, you're not privileged or underprivileged, because you're black, and I'd be like, well, actually, I'm head boy, so, you know, that doesn't make any sense. But then my parents sent me to a secondary school that was failing miserably, that had the sort of worst reputation for expulsions, teenage pregnancies, you know, violence amongst students and violence against staff. And you know, the worst exam results in the whole borough of Sandwell which is already a very troubled and very deprived area. Simply because four other Jehovah's Witness kids were starting the same time. So I had to sort of conquer a lot of, of, you know, racism, overt and covert institutional, you know, from being you know, top of the class at primary school, from being head boy I was suddenly sort of seen as a black boy, a teenage black boy. And because my parents have both grown up, in similar situations, as well as, as second generation, West Indian immigrants, for them, I feel now and I'm aware now that they exhibited internalized racism in the way that they raised me. So both my parents are black, the adoptive father, kind of white adoptive father character in Rainbow Milk is an invention by me to explore in a more sort of easily digestible way for readers in terms of explaining how difficult it is for a black child to be raised in this country, in this still majority white country, and that's still a very majority white working class area, how difficult it is for a black child to be raised with a black male identity and to see and trust himself as a black man. Especially when, like we've said, the education system prioritises an exclusively white male idea of life. You know, all of the literature I studied at GCSE level for English, Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, JB Priestley, Tennessee Williams, F Scott Fitzgerald. You know, the poetry was all you know, Seamus Heaney, and Coleridge and Wordsworth and Byron and Shelley, you know, these are all pure, pure, pure, pure dead white men, you know. So, again, you know, you're just not sort of empowered as a black child to, to feel like, you know, you have a legitimate place in life and so you ingratiate yourself to whiteness, and to white masculinity in particular. And Jesse also is obviously Jehovah's Witness and all 10 elders in his congregation are white men. You know, whether they're bricklayers or whether they run a stationary firm or whether they’re a painter and decorator, they’re still elders. And so as far as he's concerned, they’re the intermediaries between himself and God and so he feels the need to, to ingratiate himself to them, he feels the need to want to become like them or to become one of them. And I think as he grows older and realizes that that's impossible, that he's never going to be a white man, the only way to sort of ingratiate himself is to become, is to be sexually attracted to them and to be involved with them sexually. And that sort of feeds back into the level of honesty, and explicitness in the sex scenes, you know, Jesse's not a normal, in inverted commas person, you know, he's been through so many things, he stands at a very unique intersection. And we've not seen sex like that before, they we don't see in films or on television, young black men, from that background, having sex with older white men, it's just not something that we have the visual apparatus for, so it is necessary. As it is necessary to sort of write you know, about what it's like to be a waiter in a restaurant, you know, we didn't see that even. So, it just sort of became very important to explore that in detail. But again, like I said, at the top of this answer, this very long answer, that will be something that I will always be writing through, like this idea of black identity and how it is a black masculine identity and how it is so often dictated to by the, you know, what bell hooks would say is the white supremacist, imperialist, capitalist, patriarchal lens.
Gaylene Gould
Yeah, and I think, it's interesting where Jesse ends up on that, because it is it's really uncomfortable following him, because you can see what's happening. And, and black people who have grown up in this country, on some level have been complicit in that, because for all of the reasons that you say, we've had no choice but to be complicit in that. And you're very honest, in the presentation of that, but it's quite interesting where he ends up when he goes to Somerset. I don't want to give away too
many spoilers, but he ends up at the house of Nicholas St. John, who's the editor of a character called Owen in the book. And I think at that point, you see, this is for me, where I begin see this maturation in Jesse, in terms of having really honest conversations about his relationship to white men, but also the complexity of that, you know, there's a character who talks about the rage and the anger that that can bring up in you. But then Jesse's honest, and he says, yeah, but, you know, how can I hold both of these things? How can I? How can I hold my race and also hold my attraction? You know, and actually there's been a lot of love and care that I've had from white men in my life too, so there's a kind of, there's a wonderful kind of place, I think that the book arrives at, which is about going it's complex, you know?
Paul Mendez
Exactly, yeah that’s very interesting, you know, part of me thinks that Jesse should fall in love with a black man at the end and that that would be some sort of validation, or some sort of, I suppose that would be the Hollywood resolution, that Jesse, or like an ideal Hollywood resolution, that Jesse sort of comes to terms with his blackness and the way he demonstrates that is by entering into a loving relationship with a black man, I really wanted to do that. But then I noticed, I didn't know what else to do with the character of Owen, once they've had, you know, Jesse and Owen have this long, and sort of very romantic engagement, which comes to a, you know, I don’t want to sort of give anything away, particularly, but it comes to a break and I just thought it was so sad to sort of leave it like that. So I sort of resolved it in the way that I've resolved it, but I think what Jesse sort of achieves as a person who's now in his, early to mid 30s, is a sense of belonging within a community that is about art and literature, and not necessarily about sexuality. I don't think Jesse would find more affirmation within an exclusively black queer environment than he does within a mixed gender, mixed sexual orientation environment where everyone actually is creative and invested in, you know, their place in cultural history. Yeah, so whilst having probably a much more acute sense of dismay at white supremacy and, you know, the domination of white masculine culture that continues into the 21st century, whilst being very aware of that, more so than ever, he's also much more aware as a grown man, that it's important to feel loved. And that's what Jesse realizes at the end of the book. And that's what, you know, a black woman character tells him at the end of the book, that it doesn't matter who you're with, it's whether you feel loved or not, whether you can love and, and again, that I think that is, that is the important thing. You know, we can all sort of read books, and learn about, you know, we can all do the work in terms of learning about black history and learning about colonialism, sort of empowering ourselves as black people. But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what the identity of our partner is, as long as we feel loved. And I think that's what Jesse, that's the conclusion that Jesse comes to and I think that’s how he sort of resolves this, this pain, I suppose that he's had to live through all his life, based on his racial and gender identity.
Gaylene Gould
And as a reader, I'll happily let you know that for someone who felt very protective and worried for most of the book about Jesse, I didn't at the end. I felt he was in a really, exactly the way that you describe, a really loving place and the complexity of that loving place, like you were saying, it's cross gender, its cross race, it's cross age, it's all kinds of people in there who have somehow offered him something that's real, you know? And so, yeah, it's definitely not a Hollywood ending. I mean, I've got a couple more questions, one is about family because this is very much a book about family, actually. And there is again, not to give any spoilers but there is a there is a lovely returning in the book, to home, to home in some sense in returning back to the West Midlands. And I think it does, in a way kind of counterpoint these two experiences of family, the kind of generous experience of his creative family, but also how brutal the family that he came from, was for him from his experience. And I wondered about that I felt like the character of the mother, particularly who embodied this, this kind of abusive brutality, and I wonder about, from my experience reading the book, there was a sense that, I felt that some of the generosity given to the other characters wasn't necessarily given particularly to her or that sense of home. So, I wonder what you thought about that?
Paul Mendez
Well, the ending was supposed to be Jesse returning to his parent’s house, to show them the person that he's become, despite the way that they raised him, but I just knew that it wasn't going to end well. And, you know, there's something to be said, I think, for not automatically appeasing abusive people, for sort of coming to a place, like I think Jesse comes to place where he is happy, comfortable, confident, and feels loved. And so why would he go back, and risk being rejected again, I just didn't want him to do that. I didn't want to go through that as a writer, I didn't want to write that down, I didn't want to because, you know, I just felt that the conclusion would be inevitable. One thing I didn't want to do with Jesse is to make him sort of like rich and successful, and you know, having done all this stuff, he still works in a restaurant, albeit a nice, good restaurant, you know, but he’s, you know, he’s comfortable, like, he shares a tiny flat with his partner with no air conditioning, that’s kind of, you know, fetidly hot, almost like today, in the summertime. You know, it's kind of, it's not the sort of rags to riches story, necessarily. But inside the person that he feels that he is, is just someone who is successful, because they've found love, and because they have found purpose, and because they are now sort of thinking creatively, and they've shaken off the shackles of this kind of very strict religious upbringing that was so hypocritical to his finding, and he, you know, I think he wants to go home to just kind of maybe reconcile with them. But then I think he probably thinks if they didn't want me before, or if they didn't think I was good enough before, why should they now and I don't want people to, I didn't want to legitimise this idea that people needed to become rich and successful, in order to gain their parent’s approval or the approval of any important people from their youth, because it's really, the only sort of validation that one needs is in oneself. And in the minds and hearts of those who love him, who he loves. So, yeah, I just don't feel in life that we should be appeasing people who have abused us, and people have told us that we're not good enough. Because when we, you know, because we are good enough, because we are good enough now. I don't think people who have told us that we're not good enough deserve that, that validation from us. And so, I mean, it's, I felt bad about writing, what we would sort of, in one sense think of as a stereotype, a black female stereotype. So often we see in fiction and in films, etc. black women portrayed as bad mothers as abusive, as emotionally abusive, and manipulative, etc. And that's exactly what I've done and I'm very, very sorry, that that's the case but that is the experience that I've had. That is the experience that Jesse had. And so, we need to look beyond the sort of fact of how this person is behaving, and actually look at the reasons why the person is behaving like that. And I haven't been explicit about it in Rainbow Milk, but, you know, I think that the inference is there, that the world in which we live in that is so disdainful of the black female experience, generally can cause and, you know, I'm not trying to mansplain here, but can cause black women to internalize that misogynoir, and to sort of, to behave in a way that is abusive and irresponsible. So, I can't forgive my mother, I can't allow Jesse to forgive his mother until she recognizes that. And that's something I feel that I've been privileged to recognise in terms of being able to give myself a wide education and to read a lot and to invest myself in that. That's not something that my mother has been able to do and indeed, being a Jehovah's Witness has allowed her to forget about all of that. And it's, again, very, very easy for my parents and for Jesse’s parents to turn around and say, well, you know, were raised in what they call the truth and you decided to reject that and live your own
life, you know. That's your choice and it's the wrong choice, you know, we raised with the privilege of knowing the truth, but you turned your back on it. And so, there's absolutely nothing that I can say, to change their mind. Nothing. You know, doesn't matter how happy I am or how in love I am or how successful I am. I'm still, until I come back to Jehovah, I'm still living against the principles that I've been privileged to have been raised in. And so, it's just, you know, for want of a better phrase, it's just bad for my mental health. And I just won't sort of engage myself in that conversation and so I didn't want Jesse to go through that either.
Gaylene Gould
I think that felt right actually. It felt right at the end of the novel, that he didn't, again, that would have been the Hollywood ending. It felt right that he didn't take that journey back to his parent’s house for sure and I think there is a kind of joyous and soothing and cathartic kind of reunion at the end of the novel that isn’t that. My final question, unfortunately, because I'm loving this conversation is, you know, this has been already a celebrated debut novel and we’re all very excited as to what might come next.
Paul Mendez
Do you know what, I think being a Black British writer, novelist now, I think the possibilities are endless because so much of our history has been written by other people. I'm really excited about the second year of my MA, which starts in October, I'm studying the MA in Black British Writing at Goldsmiths, the first course of its kind in the UK, and I'm just learning so much about authors I've never heard of before, people like S.I. Martin, and, you know I'd never even heard of Buchi Emecheta before and, you know, I'm in love with her now. There's just so much to learn from, and I think, I’d be very interested in writing about the Black British experience of the Black British experience. Because, you know, we've been here as post Windrush, Black British people for up to 70 years but then you've got a generation before that, you know, people like C.L.R. James and Una Marson, who came over here in the 1930s and were sort of working for the BBC and starting Caribbean Voices and sort of really kind of entering into a dialogue with one another that inspired the writing of the Windrush generation. And I found out recently that, during the what we call Windrush generation, so sort of late 40s to early 70s, over 70 books were written by Afro Caribbean authors that were published here in the UK. So, I'm just very, very interested in that sort of the mid to late 20th century literary world, black literary world in this country. And I don't know where that's going yet, I sort of have ideas for characters and even a family but what form that will take, I don't know, it's just very, very early days.
Gaylene Gould
Really, really exciting. And it's, it is really exciting, Paul, I think, to have this conversation with you and to know you're in the world, to know you're making work from someone who's a second generation, Caribbean person, Caribbean-British person, because I think there is something about how this story, this story progresses, how our story progresses here and I think it feels like it's in really, really safe hands with you so I'm really, really happy for that. So, thank you so much for taking the time to connect with us today.
Paul Mendez
You know, Black British writing I think is in a very, very good place right now. You know, we've got the Black Writers Guild that's just started. And you know, that's a huge coterie of over 200 writers and literature professionals, all of whom are dead set on increasing that number manifold. And yeah, just creating much more space for ourselves to reach audiences and to write about Black British life and culture, and just to write about anything that we want, but as black writers, and I think that's incredibly exciting. So, I think audience members should put their seatbelts on and get ready for an amazing journey into Black British cultural history being made.
Gaylene Gould
Definitely. Paul, thank you so much.
Paul Mendez
Thank you, Gaylene. Take care of yourself.
Gaylene Gould
Yeah, you too.
Outro message
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love for you to tell us about it – leave us a review or a rating and find us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. You can download our latest podcast episodes, every Thursday, from all the places you would normally get your podcasts and find transcripts of our episodes in the shownotes and on our website at www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org . Details about our full programme can also be found on our website. Until then, happy reading!
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is curated by Shantel Edwards and produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
This week's episode brings Liz Berry, Romalyn Ante and Rupinder Kaur together, three powerhouse poets from the Midlands.
Featuring a series of wonderful readings of the poems from their collections Rooh and Antiemetic for Homesickness, Rupinder and Romalyn join Liz for a discussion of their work, the importance of poetry during a pandemic and the power of poetry to connect us.
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast brings writers and readers together to discuss some of 2020’s best books. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions
about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. Join us each week for exciting and inspiring conversations with new, and familiar, writers from the Midlands and beyond.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
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Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Guest Curator: Kit de Waal
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
Kit de Waal
I’m Kit de Waal, writer and Guest Curator of this year’s Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast. Today’s episode brings Liz Berry, Romalyn Ante and Rupinder Kaur together, three powerhouse poets from the Midlands. Featuring a series of wonderful readings of the poems from their collections Rooh and Antiemetic for Homesickness, Rupinder and Romalyn join Liz for a discussion of their work, the importance of poetry during a pandemic and the power of poetry to connect us.
Sponsor message
This episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents… podcast is brought to you in partnership with the University of Wolverhampton. Visit their website at www.wlv.ac.uk for information on January 2021 enrolment.
Liz Berry
Hello, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us across the miles for this very special Birmingham Literature Festival podcast. I'm Liz Berry, a poet and patron of writing West Midlands and I'm delighted to be introducing you to two of the brightest rising stars on the poetry scene: Rupinder Kaur and Romalyn Ante. These two wonderful Midlands poets bring us what's best and most exciting about contemporary poetry – true heart and deep feeling; a meeting of gorgeous, lyrical languages; and an engagement with the stories and experiences which transform us. I'm going to introduce both the poets to you and then we'll hear their poems and chat about their work and the importance of poetry in difficult times.
My first guest, Romalyn Ante, is a nurse, award-winning poet and editor. She was born in San Sebastian in the Philippines, where she lived until she migrated to the UK at 16. Romalyn's poems have won many awards, including the prestigious Poetry London Prize and the Manchester Poetry Prize. Romalyn was the co-founding editor of Harana Poetry journal, a journal for poets who write with English as a second or parallel language. This summer Romalyn published her first full collection with Chatto [an imprint of Penguin], Antiemetic for Homesickness, and it's already received rave reviews and acclaim, being named an Observer Poetry book of the month.
My second guest is the wonderful Rupinder Kaur. Rupinder is a Birmingham Punjabi poet, performer, workshop facilitator and creative curator. Her debut poetry book, Rooh (2018) was published by Verve Poetry Press. She's been awarded a DYCP grant from the Arts Council to work on a next poetry collection. And is currently a BBC New Creative developing an audio piece with Rural Media.
Rupinder and Romalyn, welcome! Thank you both for joining me. I wish we could all be together having a cup of tea and chatting about your poems in front of an audience. But as this has been a really different kind of year, we're just going to imagine instead. We're going to pour our virtual tea, get comfy on our virtual sofa. And Romalyn. I'd love you to start us off by reading a poem, please.
Romalyn Ante
Thank you. Thanks so much, Liz, and thank you for that wonderful introduction. The first poem that I'm going to read is called Names. And it has an epigraph which I will read before I read the poem.
In the Philippines I grew up with an absentee mother. So my mother worked abroad as a nurse in order to provide a better chance in life for us. But that experience was not unique to me. So in 2018 nine million children in the Philippines were left behind by their parents. And I guess this first poem attempts to explore what it means to be exiled through employment, not only through physically but also emotionally, and what it means to find a sense of belonging and a sense of knowing in the names that are given to us.
Names
‘We are nameless, and all names are ours’
EMMANUEL LACABA
My mother’s name is Rosana, but when she left,
I had other mothers. Rowena, Jimboy, Alma.
I was named after
the first syllables of my parents;
I will always have them with me.
My mother says not all names have meaning –
Riverside. Manila. London. Kurba.
And someday I will forget
all the commands I did not heed –
like the time I did not spin the plate clockwise
before my father left for work
even if it would deliver him from accidents.
Not all destinations are found
in the junctions of your palm lines.
Say better life, say better life.
And God knows I am repenting.
Say airbus-something, say one-way ticket, keep following the sunset. Clouds are the closest things to my mother.
Say United Kingdom, say the queen, NHS. Does winter always mean – ?
Listen – can you hear it? The loneliness of stretchers along A&E corridors.
And the strongest part of me
is the scar I hide underneath my fringe.
My mother
hides in the staff toilet
to make long-distance calls
Someday I will realise
the woman lonely in her mansion
is not my mother
but a future version of myself.
I will chop bitter gourds
on the galaxy-glimmer
of her worktop.
Shall we shorten your name on your name tag so it’s easier to remember? Say Yes please, Sister.
Say Please, Sister, can I take this call?
Say Arnold, Marcus, Harold. Say septicaemia, alcohol poisoning, hernia.
Say Jason, Darius, Vernon. Say cancer, myocardial infarction, query schizophrenia.
Hides in the toilet.
And I have the first syllables
of my parents' names,
that is why I am not scared.
A boy sticks out his tongue
and says I do not have a mother.
I punch him in the face. The sanctity of blood. I am not scared.
Because my mother has followed the sunset, because she has burnt her lips on mash and gravy in a three-minute lunch break.
Because she calls me Anak – my child, my baby. She asks, What do you want for Christmas? for your birthday?
1990 remains stuck on the other line.
Say Please, Sister, can I take this call?
My breasts blossom,
she can call me only by my name.
I have the first syllables of my parents' names, that is why I am not scared.
I can trek the mountain of Makulot,
my father's rifle hanging from my back.
I can carry myself
not how someone carries
a cytotoxic drug
but how my mother hooks
with her finger, a drain bottle
with blood clots the weight
of gemstones.
Liz Berry
Thank you for that beautiful reading, Romalyn. In Kate Kellaway's Guardian review of your wonderful book, Antiemetic for Homesickness, she speaks of how a poem can be a bridge and describes you as the skilled bridge builder. And I noticed in the notes for your book, you tell us that in your home culture in the Philippines a bridge represents both connection and separation. And I wonder – is that how you see your poems?
Romalyn Ante
Thank you, Liz. That's a very wonderful question. I think yes, to some extent poetry is a bridge. It is a bridge that connects distant places, distant people when two people are too far away from each other. And I mean it literally and figuratively and body language is restricted. I think words are all we have. So the poems in Antiemetic for Homesickness is[sic] quite tricky because the speaker always remains on the bridge. The speaker is never really here nor there. And I tried to show that fractured self throughout the book.
But to me, poems are more powerful than bridges. In certain folk beliefs, words are used to ward off bad spirits, or to bring down towering trees, to eradicate life. Language is used to heal, to preserve life. So, for example, in one of the poems in the collection, ‘Respecting the Nuno’, the speaker is warned by her grandfather that if she twists a bud of a twig without the Nuno's consent, her feet will bulge like an elephant's. The Nuno is a folk tale mythical creature that could be good and could also be malevolent.
And I believe that's how powerful and sacred words are. Poetry to me personally is like incantations or invisible intravenous lines, delivering medicine that could either heal or harm you. And I think that's what it is for me.
Liz Berry
Thank you. Rupinder, thinking of your poems in Rooh, I wonder if that idea of the poem as a bridge between self and others, languages, cultures, generations – is that an idea that feels meaningful for you?
Rupinder Kaur
I so loved what Romalyn was saying, how language is more powerful and how words are powerful as well. I really love that idea. And I think my poems are bridges or the in-between-ness, I would say, between myself and others – bringing the influences of languages spoken in my home, such as Punjabi, Hindi and Urdu, followed by the rich Punjabi culture. And in Rooh, the poems often do call out to poets of the past, followed by interactions of bringing the past into the present.
Liz Berry
Rupinder, I wonder, would you treat us to a poem please?
Rupinder Kaur
Yeah, sure. So this poem actually follows on what we were just saying, which brings the past kind of into the present. And it came about when I was listening to a Punjabi song actually from the 70s or 80s, ek meri akh kashni which is written by Shiv Kumar Batalvi, a poet who I adore and … While writing I began thinking about how again the past comes into the present looking at the women in my family, my mom, my Nani Ji, my mom's mother and my Daadi Ji, my dad's mother. So this is a poem.
Putting my salwar on
I play Surinder Kaur's
ek meri akh kashni
written by my favourite poet
Shiv Kumar Batalvi
that carries too much language
that can't be translated.
As I put my kameez on
it lines my body's curves
coming down with Lahore and Amritsar
a bit like my mother's salwar kameez
from an old photo
where she stands in-between
as she is the middle child
that has the worry of all.
The photo brings old Delhi where poetry lingers
and Sanskrit-Latin origin washes away –
no foeticide or qurbanis.
I remember my Nani Ji holding me,
calling me a ray of light – Kiran.
I see my Daadi Ji looking at me
through the mirror smiling –
she lost her husband so young
yet she remained so strong
and raised two sons by herself
working day and night.
And as I place my dupatta by my side
I feel my ancestors next to me
travelling through two worlds
of life and death
coming at the platform of reality.
And I stand between two parallel lines
bringing a fusion of language
from every mohalla, area
that they set foot on
from Lahore-Delhi-Amritsar
And finally Birmingham.
Yes, sometimes I write for myself
but mostly I write for my mother.
I write for my ancestors
that spill ink in every poem.
Liz Berry
Beautiful, thank you. Wow, what a way to start with those two gorgeous readings. And that wonderful reading, Rupinder, leads me on to something I love about both of your books. And it's the way that you both, as poets, move between your languages in this wonderfully fluid and irrepressible way. Romalyn:
vibrant Tagalog bursts out in many of your poems, and Rupinder, talking about Rooh you said – Rooh was the Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu, Arabic and Farsi word that means soul: it's free, there's no border, just like my writing. How wonderful!
And so I wanted to ask you both, and I'll ask you first, Rupinder. Do you make a conscious choice to include your multiple languages in your poems? Or is that something which just comes intuitively to you as you write?
Rupinder Kaur
I think for me I would say it just comes naturally, I mean. I do have poems where I don't have words from Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu and it's just purely English, but it kind of comes naturally or subconsciously, you could say. Sometimes I don't necessarily know what the exact word is in English so I just use the language that it is originally in. And I think it's 'cos as I've grown up I've also always mixed kind of having Punjabi, Hindi and English. And actually, when I was younger my parents would say to me, 'Just speak English because you mix everything together and sometimes it doesn't even make sense'. So I think that's what kind of comes into my poems as well.
So this is just a few lines [extract from the poem For the Origin]:
when the tiger begins to fly
when the bulbul wears a blue kameez
sits on the rooftop of Noor Mahaal
and sees hundred women
all with the same orange-mustard kameez
and purple salwars but have no shoes
disappear into the clouds
with two lovers on the grass.
So, like here are a few certain words which just makes sense being in the original language.
Liz Berry
Beautiful, thank you. Romalyn, can I ask the same question to you? Do you make a conscious choice to include both your languages? Is it something that comes intuitively to you? Is it a political choice for you?
Romalyn Ante
I think I feel very similar to Rupinder. When I write generally Tagalog comes intuitively. And I think that's because I'm a Tagalog native speaker. So I arrived in English as my second language. And there are also some descriptions that I think only Tagalog can give justice to. And as I edit my poems even I get to, I get to feel the sound; how a line or a phrase sounds, or how a certain syntax feel[sic] like. And I feel that in some lines and in some syntaxes[sic] Tagalog should be there because that's the, that's the truest to the poem.
However, when I was working on Antiemetic for Homesickness since 2017 I made a conscious choice that I want to include Tagalog poems – sorry, Tagalog words in them. And I think it's because I knew that I was writing from a perspective of a migrant – migrant nurse, migrant child, migrant woman – and not to include Tagalog words in my poems would be, would be a fakery somehow. So I have to, I feel that I have to be as truthful to the speakers of my poems as I am truthful to my work as a whole.
Liz Berry
What a wonderful answer. I love that idea of, of being true to the poem and true to the speakers of the poems. And that's something we'll come back to in a little while. But first, I wanted to ask you a bit about the influence of oral culture upon your work. Romalyn you've spoken before about how important oral culture was to you growing up: your grandfather and the stories and songs you'd hear as a child in the Philippines. And I'm curious, is that how poems started for you? Were you reading poems when you were growing up in books, or did the music of words and poetry come to you through the ear first?
Romalyn Ante
Growing up I didn't really read any poetry books. I came from a family who couldn't really afford any literary works. Our socio-economic background in the Philippines was quite, quite poor. So I didn't have that, I didn't have that history in me. But what I had was my parents' and my grandparents' folk tale narratives. What I had was a community of people singing together, playing their guitars at night. And what I had was my mum's stories of her life abroad.
And in my poems, particularly in Antiemetic for Homesickness, I wanted to create speakers that aren't only important to me, but speakers who can also be important to the world. And I remember when I was writing this, I remember Li-Young Lee who's one of my favourite, favourite poets, he said that poetry is like a score for the human voice. So I'm trying to recreate or create that sense of human voice in my poems, and in Antiemetic for Homesickness there are notes inside the balikbayan box; there are tape recordings from a left-behind child or mother; there are indigenous poetic forms from the Philippines, like the uyaya or the tagai. And it's important for me, it's important to know not only to whom, or for whom those voices are speaking, but also where they are speaking from.
And I guess in a way, my answer to your question is that poetry finds me because there is a voice that wants to speak from a certain place, from a certain position, whether that position is from a migrant position from
9
a position of a left-behind child, from a position of a mother who left her children to work abroad. And I think I'm quite fortunate that I'm quite attuned to that voice, so I can write for that voice. That's the fun part. But then, of course, the more technical stuff follows after, you know: the polishing and editing and choosing the right words, or is this poetic form, the actual perfect form for this?
Liz Berry
Do poems begin for you, even now do they begin with, like, a phrase in your head or a voice in your head that you feel then you're sort of transcribing down and turning into a page poem?
Romalyn Ante
Yes, definitely. It begins with a voice in my head. It begins as if there's a voice from a speaker that is quite important to the world. And I feel that and that, that's not necessarily my voice, that could be the voice of the speaker of the poem. And I feel that that voice has to speak otherwise the world would be quite sad, in a way. So I guess my poems are quite narrative in a way because they begin with a voice that wants to say something And then later on, that's when the technical stuff follow[sic].
Liz Berry
And how about you, Rupinder? How did poetry first find you? Were there poets or singers or storytellers that inspired you to start writing?
Rupinder Kaur
I'd say I've always been around poetry but I never knew it was really poetry because music kind of had a really big influence on my work, especially Sufi music and ghazals, which are actually poems but sung. And I think that's what really influenced me. My mom would always play these ghazals whenever she'd be cooking. And I used to love just sitting in the kitchen shelf and just watching my mom cook, and she would just sing along to the songs. And then sometimes she would even recite some of her favourite poems. But I never really realised how, how it wasn't influenced to me till, I think, recently. And I would say it's the music definitely,
Liz Berry
I love that image of you being a little girl or a teenager sitting in the kitchen watching your mom cook and hearing these poems and songs. That's such a beautiful image. And when you're writing now, does a poem start off as like a phrase or a line in your head first and then you build it from there?
Rupinder Kaur
I would think so, yeah. I agree with what Romalyn said, as well. I think it's something in my head; it's a voice or sometimes it could be from a song that just triggers me to write something. Like I really, really like some of the folk tales, the Punjabi folk tales. And recently, I've been looking at them in a lot of depth and just wanting to explore the different narratives between them. And it's always, I would say, a voice as well.
Liz Berry
It seems to me that in the past few years poetry's had a real flowering, a real opening up in all sorts of different ways. And it feels like a great time to be a new poet with so many exciting new voices coming through. A really great time to be a reader.
Now, Rupinder, in interviews you've spoken so powerfully and eloquently about how important you feel it is to explore and represent your culture and community in your work, not so much as in your poems, but your performances and your collaborations. And I loved your line, 'If you can't find the representation become the representation'. That's so inspiring. Would you tell me a little bit about that?
Rupinder Kaur
I mean, I personally feel instead of waiting for change, it's important to make the change you want through your work. And also now I feel there's so many young people that are thinking about creative careers, something which I feel was still difficult for my generation. But now, you know, there's so many amazing poets and so many in the field of arts, which makes many youngsters more hopeful. And I think it's, it's just about seeing one person like you, like I remember when I was in high school, I think I was in Year Eight, and Bali Rai came into our school and he writes teen fictions. And he's written books which have central Punjabi characters, which are about Punjabi youth in high school and all their drama cases, their problems with their boyfriends and girlfriends. And I hadn't really seen anything like this before; it was very contemporary and especially the fact his central characters had Punjabi names. And I remember just reading all the books that I could find of him in the school library. And I think I've still got a copy of his Rani and Sukh [2004], I think. So I feel like you never know what will help and spark a young person to think that they can do this as well.
Liz Berry
That's a lovely example. And I think it's so true that you never know who's out there just needing to see somebody like them reading poems and writing poems and performing, perhaps using the languages they use at home with their family.
I wonder, Rupinder, would you read us short poem?
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Rupinder Kaur
Yeah, sure. So this poem is called ‘Jugni’, which is a word used in a lot of Punjabi folk songs actually, to describe... It's used as a metaphor I would say to kind of travel but also as a travelling firefly. I mean, the literal meaning is 'firefly' but there's various metaphors for it. So this is how I've kind of interpreted jugni for me. And it's from Rooh.
Jugni
o mereya jugni, jugni
o mereya jugni, jugni
jugni travels from Delhi to Amritsar
across to England
jugni; the essence of life, the spirit of life
comes inside my rooh
jugni comes and dances in my dreams
jugni makes me fly
jugni takes me across borders
taking me to Lahore
jugni removes the Radcliffe line
and I see my five rivers flowing together
jugni sees me read and write poetry
jugni tells me to light the candle
jugni watches me apply kohl
jugni watches me paint my lips
jugni looks at me and smiles
jugni tells me to fall in love with myself
jugni is no kafir or fakir
jugni is azaad, jugni is azaad
and jugni makes me free
jugni sets my rooh free
the jugni becomes me…
and the jugni becomes me…
Liz Berry
Wonderful! Thank you, Rupinder. Oh, I could listen to you for hours.
Romalyn, just thinking back to what I was just chatting about with Rupinder. I wonder if that's something that resonates for you too, this idea of representing or exploring the stories of your community? And thinking about the poems in Antiemetic which explore and celebrate the stories of migrant workers, especially nurses like you and your mom, those – you call them 'the invisible women', 'the goddesses of caring and tending'. And they're, they're characters, they're individuals whose experiences we seldom find in poetry. Was it important to to explore that world and those stories?
Romalyn Ante
I could definitely relate to what Rupinder was saying about how important it was to, to find someone, whether it's in poetry or in novels or other stories, someone who looks like you, talks like you, someone who is similar to you. And my experiences are quite difficult in a way that I am not only a nurse, I came from a generation of migrants. So technically, I'm 1.25 [one point two five] generation migrant. I grew up in the Philippines. My formative years were spent in the Philippines, and I came here in the UK to reset the life that I had. And for me, that's, that's quite difficult.
In the UK there are 40,000 Filipino nurses. In the US there are around 150,000. But little is known about Filipinos. And I'm, I'm not speaking from my nursing perspective, or I'm not only speaking from a nursing perspective, but from the perspective of a Filipino. I feel that nurses have always been in battlegrounds yet they are always in the background. This year, there are concerns about a disproportionate number of deaths amongst Filipino healthcare workers in the UK.
In America Filipino nurses have always helped during crisis. So, for example, in 2012 a Filipino nurse
help[sic] transport infants when New York had a power cut from Hurricane Sandy. And she devised this plan to carry 20 babies down eight flights of stairs with only cell phones to light the way whilst her home was flooding. So there are quite a lot of stories from the Filipino backgrounds, from the Filipino culture. Filipino nurses, migrant labourers, people from the working-class backgrounds, and I find that very little is known about them, very little is written about them. And for me, when I was writing Antiemetic for Homesickness I wanted to shed light, not only on the career, but also on the culture that I love so much, that I am very proud of – maybe not as a voice that necessarily represent[sic] them, but as a voice that, that is amongst them.
Liz Berry
Romalyn, I'd love to ask you, sort of, what's been the reaction of the Filipino community say, just in the Midlands or in the UK, to your poems? Have you, have people written to you? Have you heard from listeners and readers?
Romalyn Ante
I am very thankful. And I'm very lucky because I feel that my book has been welcomed and accepted by the Filipino community. And that's very important to me. Like I said, when I was writing the book I didn't necessarily try to represent them. But the comments that I was getting was, 'Oh, finally, somebody is writing about my experiences', or 'I really love this nurse now because she can, she can explain what I'm feeling at the ward or at the hospital'. So I'll get tweets and tag, tags from Filipino nurses, from migrant nurses. And that is something that – that really is the power of poetry for me, and that's really the reason why I write.
In Wolverhampton we have quite a strong Filipino community. And I'm quite surprised that they really, really supported the book considering that nurses here in Wolverhampton, they don't, they don't really read poetry, to be honest. They're like, 'You know what? Somebody was telling me, I don't necessarily read poetry, but for you, I'll buy your book'. And once they bought the book and they read it, they were quite surprised that it, it was so welcoming. And it was so … The comment that was often said to me was, 'I understood it'. And for me, that's something – that poem … that poetry opens the room for them. And that's what I like about poetry. That's what I attempt to try in my poetry for it to opens[sic] up the room. Whether you're someone who came from the non-literary background or whether you're an academic, that's what I try to do.
Liz Berry
Rupinder, do you feel part of a poetry community in Birmingham, like a Punjabi Brummie poetry community or a wider Birmingham community?
Rupinder Kaur
I feel like I'm part of a wider Birmingham poetry community. I mean, two poets that I'm quite close with, who are also Verve poets, Nafeesa [Hamid] and Kamil [Mahmood]: we kind of share poems. And we recently actually started Gully Collective. And we've actually received funding from Transforming Narratives to create our first sign. And it's just a space for South Asian creatives, for us, created by us, where, you know, sometimes I feel it's hard to find a starting point. I mean, I found that very difficult. I wasn't really unsure how poetry works or has, how it is. So I feel it's just nice to give something back to the community as well.
And there are a few Punjabi poets but I haven't come across poets in, in the UK that write in Punjabi, which is what I love reading the most. But I am connected to a few poets in, back in Punjab that do write in Punjabi. And one of my favourite poets is Nirupama Dutt, she's a contemporary Punjabi poet, also a translator and me and her are quite well connected. And she also shares poems, and I share poems to her and we talk about the past kind of poets, and how the scene's moving forward as well. So it's nice to kind of have those connections as well.
Liz Berry
I wonder if, Rupinder, as a result of your work and your book and your readings actually you might start to see other young women poets from your community writing, sharing, being part of your events. You often find it flowers like that; it just takes one person to go first, start doing brilliant things. And it opens the door up for everybody else.
We've had such a hard year in 2020. It's been a really fractured and frightening year for so many of us in so many different ways. And I wondered what poetry's meant to you through those difficult days? And whether you both feel that poetry can be something which can heal us or can bring about change? Romalyn, what do you think about that?
Romalyn Ante
Yes, I think, I definitely agree with you. For me, even before the pandemic, poetry has been my own antiemetic; poetry has been my solution and help, and the elixir to everything really. I think, for me, despite all this that's happening in the world, and despite all the experiences that we as unique individuals experience and plough through, I think beyond all this, poetry has the power to connect us again, to make us feel as if we are connected, and we can relate to each other again, and we can touch each other again,
and we can celebrate together again. So definitely poetry is an antiemetic and a healer for me.
Liz Berry
Rupinder, how about you? Has poetry been something for you which has, feels like a healing thing or something that can bring about change?
Rupinder Kaur
Yeah, definitely. I agree with everything that Romalyn's said. Poetry has always been there for me, you know. Poetry has a lot of power to make you feel and understand things, whether you're writing or whether you're reading poetry. And listening to poetry, especially something that I also love. I love getting my mom to read me Hindi or Punjabi poetry. I just prefer it when my mom reads it to me because I, I take my time joining all the letters together because I'm not as fluent in reading, but mom just reads it, like, straight away. And it's just listening to it just makes me feel really happy. It gives this warmth feeling, which I don't really know how to explain. And the same way when I read new poems and how they make me feel and think different emotions, so I definitely agree there's a lot of power in poetry: that can be very healing.
Liz Berry
Two beautiful answers. Two really hopeful answers. I'd love the chance to hear another poem from both of you. So I wonder if you'd be kind enough to read to us again before we part? Romalyn, would you read first, please?
Romalyn Ante
So the next poem that I'm going to read is called ‘Eponym’. When I was writing about this poem I was thinking about nurses and nursing, although this poem is not about nursing. It's actually about a special pearl which was found in the ocean of Palawan in the Philippines. And when it was found it was named after a different person. It wasn't named after a Filipino who found it. It wasn't named after the Philippines or anything related to the Philippines.
And I was thinking about nursing in a way that: nurses have always mechanically worked in the background, and they are seldom acknowledged. For a little while, while we were in lockdown, we had this clapping, clapping thing for the nurses but suddenly it's gone now. So for me, sometimes, it's not really about who society forgets, it's more about who the establishment choose[sic] for you to remember. And I think that's what I'm trying to explore within this poem.
Eponym
Legend says a disciple slipped a clam
into a jade amulet and it persisted to grow –
the Pearl of Lao Tzu. Its lustre spilled over
the valley and peeled the sky with the peal
of Yuqing bells. Perhaps the pendant was flung
in a fit of fury from a delayed enlightenment
or as a gift to calm the Great Ocean's upheaval.
Millennia later, an American called Cobb saved
a datu's child. He was rewarded with a pearl as heavy
as an infant. Resembling the shape of a prophet's
turban, it was then renamed the Pearl of Allah.
I'd like this poem to take you somewhere else
but all I've got is the song of my grandfather
about a fisherman's son whose arms shone
in the bloated glow of the goddess of the moon.
Tides divide at his skull – he swam down to a cathedral
of corals. Sometime, somewhere, there was a diver
who hoisted the Pearl of Whoever.
He sat at a table with his wife or – maybe – on his own,
shoulders studded with brine. Sometime, somewhere,
there was a fisherman's son who found the world's
largest pearl and we'll never know his name.
Liz Berry
Beautiful. Thank you, Romalyn. Rupinder, would you read for us before we part?
Rupinder Kaur
Yeah, of course. Thank you so much. So I'm going to read another new poem which explores the word aurat, which means 'woman'. And it was actually inspired by a poem which Tiffani Yankee in a collection wife does to the word wife how she just broke the word down into its different meanings. So here it is, ‘Breaking the Root’:
Breaking the Root
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aurat / meaning woman /in panjabi/ in hindi / in urdu/ the origin is persian and arabic /meaning imperfections/ genitals/ nakedness/weakness /woman/ skipped being girl/ with
the opening of fingers in raspberry jars /and homemade scones / baked in the heat of sweat/collecting fresh ripe raspberries/ to become filled with aurat-ness/other words/ babe/bird/
bitch/ chick/gal/ gyal/ goddess/man eater/ mistress/nymph/ queen/ seductress/slag/ slut /vamp /wild witch/ ugly/ beautiful/ aurat /also sometimes/daughter/ granddaughter sister/
girlfriend/ ting/ side chick/ wife/other woman/ mother/ grandmother /or nothing/ just aurat/ the orange and red in the flame of fire/ medusa / kali/ aphrodite/ tilottama / free/
garden of aurat /writing their own story / before the men came/ there was aurat/ shakti /power/no lost history /bulbuls sing songs/ aurat danced in joy /in her island aurat
Liz Berry
Romalyn and Rupinder, thank you so much for joining me today. And thank you for those exquisite readings and your generous chat. It's just been a pleasure to listen to you both. I know lots of listeners will be really keen to hear and read more of your work. So you could find Rupinder Kaur's Rooh published by Birmingham's own Verve Poetry Press. And Romalyn Ante's Antiemetic for Homesickness is out now from Chatto books [Penguin imprint].
So thank you, dear poets, and thanks to you all at home too for listening to this podcast and supporting the ever-brilliant Birmingham Literature Festival and the work of Writing West Midlands. We might not be together in Brum this year but we're always together in our love of good books. Thank you.
Outro message
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love for you to tell us about it – leave us a review or a rating and find us on instagram, Twitter and facebook @bhamlitfest. You can download our latest podcast episodes, every Thursday, from all the places you would normally get your podcasts and find transcripts of our episodes in the shownotes and on our website at www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org . Details about our full programme can also be found on our website. Until then, happy reading!
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is curated by Shantel Edwards and produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
18
This week’s episode brings together 2 of the UK’s most established broadcasters and journalists, Stuart Maconie and Pete
Paphides to discuss their latest books, The Nanny State Made Me and Broken Greek. In conversation with writer and poet Jo Bell, they discuss the personal and cultural importance of music, their deep connection to the Midlands and what it is like to have a life so different to that of your parents.
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast brings writers and readers together to discuss some of 2020’s best books. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions
about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. Join us each week for exciting and inspiring conversations with new, and familiar, writers from the Midlands and beyond.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Guest Curator: Kit de Waal
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast
Episode 1: Stuart Maconie and Pete Paphides
Kit de Waal
Welcome to episode 1 of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. I’m Kit de Waal, writer and Guest
Curator of this year’s podcast. This week’s episode brings together in conversation 2 of the UK’s most
established broadcasters and journalists, Stuart Maconie and Pete Paphides to discuss their latest books,
The Nanny State Made Me and Broken Greek. In conversation with writer and poet Jo Bell, they discuss the
personal and cultural importance of music, their deep connection to the Midlands, redefining our
understanding of the ‘Nanny State’ and what it is to have a life so different to that of your parents.
Shantel Edwards
This episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents… podcast is brought to you in partnership with Dains
Accounting. Visit their website for more information about their services at www.dains.com.
Jo Bell
Hello, and welcome to Birmingham Literature Festival. You'll be used to recordings by now from all kinds of
different places, so if you hear the slight creaking of timbers, that's because my part of this podcast is being
recorded on a boat. I'm Jo Bell, I'm a poet who has often been a guest of this festival. And today I'm
speaking to two men whose recent books have a lot in common. Pete Paphides' Broken Greek and Stuart
Maconie's The Nanny State Made Me are both funny, they're thoughtful, they're what you might call lyric
histories telling the story of a personal life and looking at a larger world through the rear-view mirror.
Stuart Maconie's book looks at the impact of the welfare state through its framing of his own life. And Pete
Paphides shows us what it was like to grow up in Birmingham during the 70s and 80s as a secondgeneration Greek through the records that saw him through childhood and adolescence. So hello, both
where are you today? Stuart, where are you?
Stuart Maconie
Hi, Jo. I'm in a almost completely deserted BBC MediaCity studio. I've been incredibly the … we were
designated my show and Lauren Laverne's show on [Radio] 6 Music were designated 'key workers' at the
beginning of this, at the beginning of this crisis. And so I've been working, I've been coming here every
weekend and although there's been a slight increase in busyness, pretty much still … It's slightly weird. So
I'm in a deserted studio in Salford at the moment.
Jo Bell
Wow, wow! Thanks. Where are you Pete?
Pete Paphides
I'm – slightly less romantically – I'm in the shed at the bottom of the garden. I've sort of commandeered,
which is my daughter's office usually, but I've, I've ousted her. And so me and the dog are just sitting here.
But I do like … Stuart situation sounds quite romantic. I quite like being in radio studios when they're mostly
empty. They have, there's a certain kind of romance about it, which I dare say, probably wore off quite a
long time ago.
Stuart Maconie
No, it is. I do … You're right, you're absolutely right. There is a strange kind of feeling. It's like radio studios
in the middle of the night, people who do those kind of shows where you go, “Hi, it's coming up to twenty
to 4 a.m.” you know, that kind of thing. It's, it is quite romantic. Yeah, but, and I can see Winter Hill from
my window. So it's all quite nice,
Jo Bell
Fantastic. Ian Macmillan told me once that he had been at Radio 4 when the shipping forecast was on and
how he imagined that the whole station was just switched off like a light switch at the end, and he said,
“And it was just like that; it was just like that – they finished the shipping forecast and and then they turned
it off Radio 4 went to bed”.
Stuart Maconie
My favourite entry in the BBC Duty log, which used to be … it's probably all online now. It used to be when
people called up with complaints and stuff, they used to put it in what was called the Duty log. My favourite
complaint was, “Shipping forecast too fast”.
Jo Bell
It's important. I mean, you are, you're all doing important work for the nation. And no one is perhaps more
important than they should be focused, especially to those of us who have no real idea what it means. So
we're here today to celebrate your two books, which I've re-read and enjoyed, and I've listened to Pete's as
well as the Book of the Week on Radio 4. And it strikes me how much they've got in common and, of
course, how separate they are. So what I'd like to do is to hear an extract first from Stuart's book, and a
couple of questions for Stuart, and then we'll repeat that process with Pete, and then we'll bring you both
into a conversation together.
So I'm going to introduce Stuart first. For those of you who don't know him, which can't be many of you,
Stuart Maconie is a music journalist, a broadcaster, and author of broad-ranging social histories, which
often start from pop culture but they go much deeper; they go much wider. And in the words of the Daily
Mail – Stuart Maconie, do you want to hear this, Stuart, what the Daily Mail said about you–
Stuart Maconie
Yes, please. What did they say?
Jo Bell
They said you are “a lefty – but he's not one of those hectoring ideologues who stands astride social media
bellowing at people”. So Stuart, could you please bellow or otherwise a few words from your book, The
Nanny State Made Me?
Stuart Maconie
Okay, this is from the very short – this is the opening page or two – it's from the very short prologue, that
sort of scene setting.
“London's skyline bristles with towers old and new, bloody and sleek, monuments to kings and to
commerce, from the giants of the City's swampy money jungle, to the high-rise canyons of Camden, visitor
and native steers and orients by them, lifting your eyes from your book or your phone or your feet as the
train exhales into Euston as the bus crests Muswell Hill, as you jostle through the West End. Whenever I
pace the narrow lanes of Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia, I look up, fly favourite, a Grade II-listed building, more
human and generous than the monstrosities of Canary Wharf. It's had many names, and many lovers. It
looms over works by Ian McEwan, the Goodies, Alan Moore, Harry Potter and Doctor Who. It is part of our
shared national iconography. It is a symbol of something – but what? I think I know: glamour, vision,
adventure, the future that was coming. Early in the 21st century, just as we were realising that that future
wasn't coming for most of us down below, I had lunch at the top of that tower in the restaurant that used
to revolve, the restaurant of failed dreams, with a man who helped to build it. I was filming an interview
with Tony Benn, the grand old firebrand of the Labour movement about the tower's history. In 1966, along
with the holiday camp magnate, Billy Butlin, he opened what was then called the GPO or General Post
Office Tower. He was Postmaster General, and the tower was designed by the architects of the Ministry of
Public Buildings. Neither of those positions or organisations exist now. With the coming of Margaret
Thatcher's new, changed Britain, the tower as part of the privatisation of the Post Office, the first of many,
it became first the Telecom and then the BT Tower. And as we sat in the restaurant eyrie, closed to the
public for decades on the vague and spurious grounds of it being a terrorist target, I could sense the
mounting anxiety of the slick besuited PR man, eventually, he came over to our table.
'Hey, I can't help noticing guys, Stuart, Tony, that you're referring to the building as the GPO Tower,' he
laughed indulgently. 'Now, it's not been that for a long, long time, guys. Can I just remind you, it's the BT
Tower – as in British Telecom – who own it.'
Benn fixed him with a stare that combined pity and scorn. 'Excuse me, I commissioned this building. I built
it using British labour and skills with the money of the British people who paid for it with their taxes. It
belongs to them. And it always will. Margaret Thatcher took it from them and gave it to you when it was
not hers to give. This is not your building. It is theirs.' And he pointed to the streets below and the rushing
crowds. 'It was stolen from them.'
The PR guy, crushed, moved silently back into the shadows, then turned to me, rolled his eyes and winked.
At that point the seed of this book was planted. This is my story, your story and how it was stolen from us.”
Jo Bell
Brilliant, thank you. Tony, Tony Benn nailing his cards to the table as usual there.
Stuart Maconie
Yeah.
Jo Bell
And, and you laying out yours as well. Partly, one of the things that strikes me through reading this book is
how important individuals are in all of our lives – but in shaping the world that we live in. And I briefly met
Tony Benn because he came to my school and spoke to us with that same truth to power, uncompromising,
starey-eyed “Listen here!” attitude that framed us all. And you, in, in framing the book in that way you set
yourself up as a provocateur deliberately. What is the nanny state? And who calls it that?
Stuart Maconie
Well, it's interesting. I mean, when we first had the discussions, when I had the discussions with my
publisher, Penguin Random House Ebury about this, and I said, I want to call it The Nanny State Made Me
they came back to me and said, “We're not sure; it's kind of negative, isn't it, the nanny state?” And I said,
“Well, that's kind of the point – I'm trying to reclaim it, you know”. And they said, “It feels a little bit
downbeat”. And I said, “Well, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race is quite negative, you
know, but that's, that's … and I think they eventually they came around, and they saw that what I was
trying to do was take this term, which is a bizarre term …
I did a programme with Michael Rosen about language in which I talked, I tried to try to unpick, as it were,
that phrase, 'nanny state'. It is used as a shorthand by people who wouldn't know what a nanny is. It's used
by, you know, builders, and shop workers who've never had any experience of a nanny – a nana maybe, I
mean. But they've, they've, they've taken it on board as this is this terrible, pejorative description of … And,
well, my point of view, my point in the book is, well, I suppose firstly, because the point of view … What are
governments for, if not to look after their people? I mean, that's my that's my starting point. We alone
almost in the world – well, us and the Americans arguably at the moment, the two most potty countries on
earth. Us and the Americans alone in the civilized world seems to say, 'Oh, no, governments, we don't want
them to do anything'. Well, that's fine, that's fine if we don't want the government to do anything: I'll stop
paying taxes then. But as long as we do pay taxes, and we have a civic shared responsibility, that's the point
of a government to do stuff for people. And it seems that we now think that's anathema in this country.
And I do, as I say, it's a glib joke, but it's, it's one with a kernel of truth – as I say early on in the book, the
people who moan about the nanny state are the people who had nannies. It's people like Jacob Rees-Mogg,
etc., etc., etc. And I find it, I find it extraordinary. And so I mean, as you can tell, I'm kind of, I'm kind of
angry about all this but I hope it's not an angry book. I hope it's more of a … I hope it's funny and fist bump
on the table as it were.
Jo Bell
It is, it is all of that. And actually, it has, it has a quality which I can only remember Richard Dawkins bringing
about in me before, which is that it made me furiously angry as I read it, because I agreed with every word
of it.
Stuart Maconie
Right!
Jo Bell
It, you know, it made me laugh out loud. It is very funny. There are so many anecdotes and, and personal
starting points. And, of course, you frame it in terms of your own life. But it is also a book and the title
brings me back to that; it is also a book in which the title is that clear statement. It sits alongside Why I'm
No Longer Talking to White People About Race or Kit de Waal's Common People or Akala's Natives*. And I
think Pete's book does this as well in a very different way – that you're, you're putting your cards on the
table and saying: 'Right, this is what this book is about'. And sometimes, as with Natives or Common People,
the phrasing of the title is reclaiming that which we have been called.
Stuart Maconie
It is, it is a polemic. But it's a, it's a polemic and it's got interviews, it's got travel in it, but it's obviously, it
has an element of memoir, in which – not, not as strongly as Pete's does – but I think it challenged initially,
when I learned that Pete and I's books were coming out around the same time. I mean, I was keen on is
doing some events together, which I'm so glad we're doing this together. Because I did think that although
they're coming from different angles, they have quite a lot of, there's quite a lot of shared, there's a
commonality about them I think, so …
Pete Paphides
No, I just totally agree. You know, there were so many sorts of things that I, I, you know, Stuart's … What I
liked about Stuart's book is obviously, there is a lot of anger in it, but it's actually, it's a very celebratory
book as well. And it wears it lightly in a way that, you know, I loved the almost incidental way that there are
certain kind of parts of Birmingham that I found very beautiful as I was growing up in a completely, you
know, in a way that you don't analyse because you're young. And, and I really loved the way, the way Stuart
kind of celebrated those same places and, you know, in the, the Central Library and, you know, just, just
the, just the, his use of the word 'planter' when the bit where he's sitting on a planter. That alone just
evoked such a rush of warm feelings for me because planters to me with these beautiful things that I could
kind of, like, line up my toy cars on. And, you know, the, you know, the, the, the, the new town, the kind of
the optimism, optimism of new towns. Yeah, I loved all of that. Sorry, carry on – this isn't my bit.
Jo Bell
No, it is, it's a really, it's a joyful reclaiming of the public and the municipal, which are often sneered at and
considered second rate in some way. And your chapters, Stuart, have titles like 'I am born', 'I go to school',
'I have fun' and 'I travel'. So it sounds almost like a Ladybird children's book: Stuart Maconie has fun.
Stuart Maconie
It was kind of, yes, it was deliberate, it was deliberately meant to echo those and, you know, those kind of
picaresques like Tom Jones, where they say, like, 'In which our hero goes to school for the first time'. And it
was meant to … You and Peter absolutely right: one of the real points of it was it was a love letter to those
things that are routinely sneered at when people go, 'Oh, new towns, those soulless monstrosities! Oh,
council estates, that soulless monstrosity!' And I go: I grew up on one and it was great. I loved it, and you
know, and I just wanted to reclaim for the vast majority, 'cos that's the thing, it's for the many not the few.
The people who say these things are a tiny minority of people who really say, 'Oh, new towns are ghastly!'
you know, it's, it's …
Jo Bell
No I'm, I'm reminded of that. It's that whole idea of public libraries, for instance, as a place which are
scorned, but which have been taken for granted by many of us until they disappeared. Sorry, Pete, what
were you about to say?
Stuart Maconie
What were you punching the air at, Pete?
Pete Paphides
I was punching the air as you go off to Cumbernauld.
Stuart Maconie
Oh, yes.
Pete Paphides
Where Gregory's Girl was filmed. And you know, God, I so wanted to just jump into the television screen–
Stuart Maconie
Oh my God!
Pete Paphides
–and experience a Cumbernauld sunset as, as this kind of plaintive saxophone music kind of piped up and
you see Gregory kind of lying on the ground dancing with Clare Grogan.
Stuart Maconie
That's exactly right. I mean, Bill Forsyth's film, that film, what I loved about Gregory's Girl is he doesn't at
any point in that say, 'Look at how these people live in their extraordinary and benighted way'. It's just
presented as normal life. And, and, and as it was for millions of us, you know?
Jo Bell
Yeah. And likewise, both of your books are very non-metropolitan, you know, they are unapologetically, of
course, celebrating that which is not London, that which is perfectly normal. It's not like, of course, Wigan
was fascinating at the time, but now I've outgrown it. There is a deep affection for the places from which
you began and in some ways have come right back to.
And one of the things I want to ask you as you as you look at those, that interface between the personal
and the political, the larger environment is – your personal anecdote about Birkenhead and its parks, public
parks, you were talking about as places of recreation. And along the way you tell us about the relationship
between Birkenhead and Central Park. Tell us about that.
Stuart Maconie
Well, yeah, this connection was pointed out to me, unexpectedly, but brilliantly by Nigel, the lead singer
and chief songwriter of Half Man Half Biscuit, who I've seen described as Britain's greatest living satirist,
and I think that might be true. And he, he's a history buff. He comes from Birkenhead. He's very proud to
come from Birkenhead, he's a history buff. And he told me this, and it is indeed, I mean, it's an
extraordinary story. The man who designed Central Park was on a walking tour of the North West,
apparently, and popped into tobacconist's. And, and the tobacconist said, 'What brings you round here?'
And he said, 'I'm having a, I'm on holiday. I actually design public parks for living. And I'm going to design
one in New York. And the tobacconist said, 'Oh, you want to have a look at ours, mate, it's great.' And he,
and he had a look and said, 'This is wonderful. I'm going to base it on this. And I don't know Central Park
that well in New York, but those people who do say, 'Yeah, it's modelled on it.
And it's interesting, the fortunes of Birkenhead Park, like a lot of the things in this book are malleable, like
libraries and schools – the fortunes of it are sort of Britain in miniature, launched in the heyday of great
civic pride, and then, you know, then recessions come and wars come and go, and then Thatcher comes
and the public realm is kind of put on hold and, and as happened. And, I don't know whether we will
emerge from all this crisis with any new public and civic energies. I hope we do. I'm not holding my breath.
But yeah, those things like municipal golf courses, municipal libraries, municipal swimming baths, the
neglect, the rise and fall kind of reflects our rise and fall I think, as a properly grown-up country.
Jo Bell
And I wonder if some of that disdain for the nanny state comes from that opposition, perceived opposition
between aspiration and community, you know, that when you talk about the, the rising importance of the
individual as a rather selfish thing – a sort of me, me, me generation rather than an us, us, us generation
perhaps.
Stuart Maconie
The last chapter was incredibly prophetic I now realise… It talks about Eyam in Derbyshire, where they
isolated themselves from the plague, and I wouldn't for the life of me––
Jo Bell
Excuse me, speaking as a Derbyshire native, that's [pronounced] 'Eem'.
Stuart Maconie
It's 'Eem?' I do apologise.
Jo Bell
I just have to say that, I have to say that on behalf of the Peak District population.
Stuart Maconie
Okay, I didn't know that. 'Eem' in Derbyshire, thank you, is that, you know, I wondered aloud in the end of
the book, 'Would we do this now?' Well, we got the chance to find out, didn't we, about three weeks after
the book came out about isolation and things like that? But what I, just I wonder aloud at the end of the
book, and I do say – whilst I totally understand that there has been a move towards individual
empowerment and what loosely gets called 'identity politics' in the last few years. Whilst I totally get that
to a degree, I also think that it will only take you so far. And there are times when the good of the whole of
us is more important than unfettered individual expression. I do believe that.
Jo Bell
Brilliant. And the subtitle of your book is A Story of Britain and How to Save It. So no pressure there.
Stuart Maconie
I'm not sure that I, I came up with that subtitle. I think someone else did, but I thought, 'Well, it's
provocative, I'll stick with it'.
Jo Bell
Well, exactly. So who, what I'm, what I'm interested in is: who do you hope will read this book? Is it? I
mean, I cannot pretend to be an impartial observer here, because I pretty much agree with everything you
said. But who do you hope will read it? Will it be to confirm the experience of people like ourselves? Will it
be for younger people or for people from a different perspective altogether? And what do you hope will be
its effect on them?
Stuart Maconie
I don't know who [will] read it. It certainly wasn't a partisan political book because I wrote the book at the
time of deep disenchantment with the Labour Party, so it was not a partisan political book. I think it could
appeal to people really across the political spectrum because, don't forget that the Toryism says that
there's no such thing as society is a very small brand of Toryism. It isn't, you know, there plenty of people
on the soft right who do not agree with that, who may not vote like I do, but who do think that the public,
the public realm is important. So I'm hoping it kind of re-energises people a bit across all, you know,
perhaps people who may have forgotten about the poetry and loveliness of … Caitlin, Pete's wife talks
beautifully and lyrically in the book, Caitlin Moran, about, you know, the, the loveliness of a public library,
the beauty, and how sad she was to go back and see Wolverhampton Public Library reduced to a shell of its
form. So I hope it just gets people to think: 'We should be proud of these things'. You know, I mean, in a
romantic way, but you … Clapping for nurses only goes so far. But I mean, it would help if we started to,
start to look around us and say, 'Hang on, we've been worshipping and venerating the wrong kinds of
people and the wrong kinds of things for 40-odd years'.
And just before, just before Pete comes in because I know Pete's book is hugely about music, and about the
powerful force music's been in his life and my life. It is not 'I do not want the state'; it is not a Maoist blue
serge suit wearing book. I do not want the state, as I say early on, to make my curries or to make my pop
music. I'm fully in favour of private individuals and private enterprise to a degree, but I don't think they
should be running our schools, our hospitals, our reservoirs, our jails, etc., etc., etc.
Jo Bell
Yeah, no, that's very clear in the book. And it is joyful, I mean, we've discussed the sort of political
framework of it. But it is a joyful celebration of those things which have surrounded us and been the literal
built fabric around our lives, and I was going to come to – so you've spared me the effort of coming to
those musical references that you naturally populate the book with that you mentioned: Richard Hawley
and Jarvis Cocker from my hometown. You mentioned Caitlin, you mention Danny Boyle and Maxine Peake.
And there's a feeling of a book populated with cultural figures who are very non-metropolitan, very vibrant,
who are telling of an authentic experience. And I just wanted to end before I move on to Pete's book with:
is pop culture, which is the thing that the two of you have always written about, is pop culture, the
opposite of high culture, or is it a close relation?
Stuart Maconie
I think it's, I think it's a close relation. I think what Pete and I share is a love of popular music in all its forms.
I don't think either of us, I think we both in our writing down the years have always railed against snobbery
in it. And I think we love its commonality. I think we do love the commonality of it, that it is, it has been for
many years. It's less homogenised now so you don't get the whole nation falling in love with the Beatles or
the Spice Girls or whatever. I think it's more fragmented now naturally because of the nature of the beast,
but I think we love its commonality and the fact that it has been something that we measure our lives in,
which it would have, of course, that is much more beautifully and directly addressed in Pete’s …
Jo Bell
It does strike me, thank you very much, it does strike me that, that, that counterbalance between the
individual and the community is what you're both looking at in your different ways. And that brings me to
Pete's book. So just to introduce those of you who haven't heard of it or who haven't read it yet, Pete
Paphides' book, Broken Greek, is a life story told through pop music as it might well be because Pete is, as
we know, a rock critic and music writer. And one critic said that this book is “drenched in sentiment, yet not
in the least sentimental,” and that describes it neatly. It's again, funny, it's touching, it's horribly truthful
about the embarrassments of any UK childhood. But it's also a story of two cultures meeting in one person.
Pete Paphides' parents are Greek and Greek-Cypriot, which makes him maybe a Greek-Brummie. And like
Stuart's book, he's telling his own story and simultaneously the larger story that he's a part of, a story that
we can all identify with even if we aren't quite so keen as him on Dexys Midnight Runners. So, Pete, I
wonder if you could kick us off please by reading us a short piece from Broken Greek.
Pete Paphides
Okay, just to set things up. This is a, I sort of chose this because it echoes a lot of the sentiments of Stuart's
book and it's about The Jam's 1980 album Sound Affects. About three paragraphs in there is a 'Takis' which
is referred to. That is what, what my parents called, that's my real, my sort of real Greek name as it were.
So anyway, here we go.
“Sound Affects was, in its way, as psychedelic a record as the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper or the Moody Blues' Days
of Future Passed. As with those albums it ensured the surrounding streets would never be the same once
you'd seen them as these songs saw them. In interviews, Paul Weller hymned the beauty of electricity
pylons, caught somewhere between William Blake and Colin MacInnes, he set about making the suburbs
sparkle. It was a record which sought to reassure you that, even though life could be tough, you controlled
the magic. It was right there in Pretty Green, the tune which oscillated at a perfect point of tension
between the innocent release of spending your wages and the shit you have to go through in order to earn
them. It also had a hook so catchy I remember Jed, the teenage girl who lived next door, singing it a few
days previously before telling me what the song was about.
'He's singing about pound notes, Takis. I've got a pocket full of pretty green. I've never heard them called
that before. It's clever, isn't it Takis? Don't you think it's clever?'
It was clever. But it wasn't the cleverness that forged that afternoon into my memory. Aki and I frequently
fought in the way that brothers do. But in the simple act of taping this record for him so he could listen to it
in hospital, I missed him terribly. There was a space between the world as I saw it, and the world as Aki saw
it. Paul Weller's songs caught between childhood innocence and the looming obligations of adulthood
occupied that space.
For Monday, he set himself the challenge of, as he put it, writing a love song about the least romantic day
of the week. In my head, a fairy-tale ideal of love was swiftly supplanted by a new one. Monday ached like
no other Paul Weller song had ached. It ached like your first 7 a.m. start in a strange workplace when all
you want to do is be with your sweetheart. And perhaps, most incredibly, Monday took all of this and made
it aspirational. The character in the song was anything but a victim. His hardship was fuelled for the
promise of what the weekend had in store: 'a sunshine girl like you / it's worth going through / I will never
be embarrassed about love again'.
Writing to John Peel in the late 60s, David Bowie said that out in the suburbs of Kent, he could be found
'dancing a furious boredom'. The same could be said about Sound Affects' most universally adored track.
That's Entertainment glistened like a wet Cortina under a streetlamp – a sonic simulation of eventless days
in unloved conurbations. He knew because this was where he came from. Almost any other writer would
have removed the line as mundane as 'Watching the telly and thinking 'bout your holidays'. But these were
the details that authenticated the entire thing, setting everything up for a final verse whose bittersweet
intimacies would emotionally blindside me for decades to come: 'Two lovers kissing masks a scream of
midnight / Two lovers missing the tranquility of solitude / Getting a cab and travelling on buses / Reading
the graffiti about slashed seat affairs / that's entertainment'. 'Slashed seat affairs', a perfect three-word
encapsulation of the top-deck trysts forged by fumbling teens on every night bus between town and
terminus. Every moment of joy described on Sound Affects was a sweet steal from a world in which
romance and wonder were busted currency.”
Jo Bell
Thank you. And you go on to demonstrate in every word of the book that romance and wonder are not
busted currencies because, like Stuart's book, this is a love story with more than one, 'lovee' as it were. It's,
it's about Birmingham, it's about music, it's about your family, and one of the focal points of it is growing up
in Birmingham as the son of immigrant parents. Have you found that that life story chimes with other
readers who come from very different backgrounds at different times?
Pete Paphides
Yeah, I have. And it's a huge source of relief that it did, because obviously, you sort of hope that it will. And
I thought, you know, there might be some kinship with some people that maybe come from Indian families
or Italian families or families from Hong Kong and so on. Because, you know, there is a sort of tension, and I
totally understand that tension, I totally see from, you know, my parents' point of view, because, you know,
this was the first time that, you know, huge amounts of people had come over to Britain, and not really sort
of thinking through because it, you know, it was a relatively untried experiment, what kind of children they
would be bringing up, if they were bringing up those children in a different country to the one that they
grew up in.
So I think that as I, to be honest, when I was writing the book, I didn't think that that story was going to
loom as large; I thought it was probably going to be about 75 per cent a book about music. But I sort of
realised–– When I really tried to sort of, when I started to think about why the music I loved made me feel
the way that I did, I kind of real––, I realised there was a lot of guilt there. And as I sort of explain––, you
know, that guilt exists for a variety of reasons. First of all, well, the big reason was 'cos I was, I was sort of
turning into something that was very different to my parents, and I knew what that meant, and I kind of
thought that that might be a disappointing outcome for them. And also early on I felt guilty because I
decided not to talk to anyone for three years, almost any, anyone between those three years, the ages of
four and seven. So yeah, people, people, but I think people do feel, you know, any young person will feel
confused. You know, childhood is 70 per cent confusion, I think, you know.
Jo Bell
Only 70?
Pete Paphides
Well, exactly, thank you. Because adults have got no time. Adults certainly in the 70s didn't have time to
explain all this stuff, you know, certainly not before dishwashers were invented.
Jo Bell
And do you think that music filled in some of those gaps? I mean, it's clear from, from listening to you
speaking about The Jam, or when you write about Bowie or about, particularly Boy George and Karma
Chameleon, and I remember too that experience of seeing Boy George and like everybody else's father in
the whole of Britain, my father said, 'She's got a nice voice'. You know, we, we learned some of those things
about gender or about politics or about shared frustration perhaps through music. Was that part of it that
that they were articulating what you literally, literally couldn't articulate in your case?
Pete Paphides
Yeah, it was a sort of a proxy. It was a proxy space in which you know, all this stuff could be decanted; and,
you know, the, sort of intense emotions you were feeling about certain songs were partly predicated on
things that you were watching happening around you. I mean, I really do think that's the reason why we
love a lot of the songs.
Jo Bell
So it's clear that in, in very deep and meaningful ways music populates and furnishes life. But at the same
time, you tell us that little Jimmy Osmond was a threat to you. And I'm interested to know why that was.
Pete Paphides
He was a threat to me, you know, he was on the television an awful lot. And you know, he was this very,
very obliging, sunny, all-singing, dancing, outgoing, sort of best-case scenario, what it was to be a, to be a
child – at least, that's how he came across to me. And by this time, I'd stopped speaking to everyone, apart
from my parents, and sometimes a teacher, you know, there were no children in, in, in earshot. And the
reasons for that were sort of partly, I think, to do with the fact that we, we'd been, we were preparing to
move to Cyprus, and then the, the partition of the island happened, and it was too dangerous a place to go
back to. My dad, my dad couldn't go back to his home, go back to his home village. So I was very
discombobulated. And I was turning into something very quickly that I knew my parents didn't want me to
turn into. And so Jimmy – I'd sort of hide behind the sofa every time Jimmy Osmond came in on the
television. And it would, like, very deeply upset, you know, uncontrollable crying, and, you know, he was
like a bogeyman to me. The thing is, you don't have the words at that age to really explain what it, what it is
that you're feeling. But if you can remember the emotion, then you certainly do have the words sort of
later on in life. There are a lot of situations like that where I could, I could very easily go back and sort of
put words to something that I would have struggled to put words to at the time.
Jo Bell
Yes, and I'm struck by how, how many people will recognise that experience that music articulates
emotions. For me, the equivalent was poetry, I think. That poetry expressed large emotions in a way that I
couldn't possibly articulate in my own speech. And music, of course, goes further and speaks straight to the
gut, doesn't it in many ways? You actually say, 'Do you sometimes feel like the music you're hearing is
explaining your life to you?' And I think that makes, that will make perfect sense to a lot of readers,
including perhaps Stuart Maconie. Is that, does that phrase make sense to you, Stuart, that the music
you're hearing is explaining your life to you?
Stuart Maconie
I think, I think at various pivotal points … I mean, sometimes I think you like music, because you don't know
what it means. I like a lot of music that I simply find I don't know what it means, you know, and I don't know
what it's saying to me, the sheer mystery and strangeness of it gets me. But I think, I mean, a case in point
would be, and this is a cliché – this is not a purely original thought – but even as in my late teens with the
Smiths, for the first time in my life, I remember, and I think this was shared by a generation of people
everywhere, particularly in the north, that suddenly you went, 'Oh my God! This is, you know, that he's
singing about my life. He's singing about being on the dole in Wigan. He's singing, he's making romantic all
the things that we have been told are terrible about our times and our life. And I think that's why they
instantly struck a chord with so many people.
Jo Bell
It was the prosaic and the mundane and that, that so many people like Joe Jackson were doing the same
thing. You know, 'Don't you know, that it's different for girls?' was something that, that chimed with me.
But yes, you have a Broken Greek playlist on Spotify as well. Can you … If you tell us some of the things that
are on that, that may well give us a sense of the timeframe that we're talking about and what the
soundtrack was for the younger Paphides.
Pete Paphides
It starts with things like Sugar Baby Love by the Rubettes and, and, you know, Waterloo by ABBA. You
know, ABBA are sort of the Greek chorus really in a way to the whole, the whole story because, you know, I
would sort of, I would, I would see aspects of my parents' situation in a, and sort of revealed back to me in
ABBA lyrics, and there just seemed to be an uncanny kind of parallel – certainly in my own mind, maybe not
in real life to what was happening between my my parents and ABBA?
But yeah, the thing about the playlist. I'm so happy you know, that, you know, it's great that the book is out
in 2020 because, you know, the technology allows me to do this. You know, I like the idea of people kind of
ping-ponging between the book and the playlist, and sort of reminding themselves of certain songs, or even
hearing them for the first time. And the thing about the playlist, it's not, like the book it's not, it's, you
know, there's about 600 songs on it, or something, you know, colossal like that. And a lot of them, they're
not very good, at least to a lot of people. I mean, I've got a lot of affection for most of them, but I don't
really sit around listening to The Barron Knights these days, you know. But the thing is, every song
mentioned in the book is on the playlist. And so, so that's, it's just to give you a sense–– … to allow you to if
you wanted to immerse yourself further in the book as you're reading it, because it's hard enough to
explain the concept of The Barron Knights, you know, anyway,
Jo Bell
Yeah, I remember The Barron Knights perhaps too vividly. And it strikes me that you're doing the same as
Stuart is doing and that to explain my mystery: 'My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun'. You're not just
saying, 'I love the welfare state', 'I love Birmingham', 'I love pop music', but in order to acknowledge that
love, you have to say, 'but it does have a wart on its nose', 'you know, it does have these features that
aren't all that great', and I know about that too, 'but I love it in spite of that'. And that the, the, the sort of
passing musical fads, or the comic music things are just as much a part of our wallpaper as the greats.
But I noticed that you also speak unapologetically about listening to a Beatles album as great art. And that
pop music is entitled to that claim. It's not a guilty pleasure for you, it's a common culture. Is that right?
Pete Paphides
Absolutely. I mean, I do understand why people have felt the need to invent guilty pleasures, because, you
know, Stuart and I are music journalists and, you know, we, you know, we appear to have acquired a
modest amount of status so that when we say we like something uncool, we're probably not going to get
lynched. In certain situations, you know, if someone might be shy or, you know, not very confident, then I
can see why someone might sort of, you know, so you know, if they're talking about a song by, I don't
know, Barbara Dixon as I do at some point in the book, I might say, well––
Jo Bell
Elkie Brooks you mention as well…
Pete Paphides
Elkie Brooks, yes. Someone might say, 'Well, Pearl's a Singer, get of your bike!'. That's a bit of a guilty
pleasure for me. And then there are people that come along that say, 'Well, I don't believe there's any such
thing as guilty pleasures; you just like what you like, and you know, you shouldn't really be sorry about it.
But I sort of think that these things, if someone went to the trouble of thinking the term 'guilty pleasures'
that it has to be doing some useful lifting somewhere, it has to, it has to exist for a reason. Otherwise, it just
wouldn't have, the term wouldn't have caught on. And I think guilty pleasures are a kind of quarantine area
for, for low art that we are, that is in the process of reappraisal and if enough people enjoy guiltily or
otherwise, then it gets, then it gets moved out of this quarantine area into an area where people can just
say, 'Oh, it's good'.
Jo Bell
Perhaps that's part of what you've both done as, as, as music commentators, perhaps what both of you
have done is give people permission to like either the arcane, peculiar music, which is not in the
mainstream, or the music, which is super, super mainstream, which people were quietly liking all along, but
not really daring to say so until one of you says, 'No, really, that's fine'. So I certainly found in both of your
books permission to acknowledge the things that I loved about the welfare state indeed, or about pop
music of the 1970s. You know, for me, it was David Dundas' Blue Jeans, 'I put on my blue jeans', which was
just a soundtrack––
Stuart Maconie
Great record …
Jo Bell
–– to where I was living as a kid at the time. And, you know, and for me, 'Oh, now you see, it's all right for
me to like that now, because you said that's okay'. But as it is it's a part of my soundtrack, that it's a part of
what you've done in your books to, to make us own and reclaim those parts of our lives, which we either
took for granted, or which we kind of, we didn't, we didn't know if it was all right to feel that strongly about
it. And that's a great part of what writing can do, what any book can do in making the reader acknowledge:
'Yeah, I feel like that too'.
The spirit of generosity that you apply to music in that way you also apply to your mum and dad and to
their experience in a way, which I haven't often read before. That, of course, your mom and dad are big
characters in your childhood and big characters in every page of the book. But there's a very generous
understanding of, for instance, the experience of your mum, and how she might have felt belittled by the
experience of putting flour on fish, and how hard she worked to make school jumpers to order when the
family needed more cash. And that acknowledgement of their experience. I wondered if the book has
changed or reframed your relationship with them at all?
Pete Paphides
I think they didn't know what form the book was going to take. And, there was no point in me really
explaining it to them because I felt like almost I would be scaring them if I explained to them what I was
sort of trying to do with the book. And you can't really give people a choice in that way as to what you
choose to write about or not write about. You just have to sort of take that leap and hope that they
understand that, you know, that they feel you contextualised their experience fairly. I think what I wanted,
what I was very careful to try and do was to convey that this was, they were a very, sort of, quite typical
couple of their generation and culture. And a lot of kind of slightly idealised romantic notions about that we
as people in modern relationships have about what it is to be a couple, were not necessarily the norm then,
you know. And I think certainly amongst, you know, the working classes in previous generations, you didn't
marry someone expecting to be madly in love with them 30 years down the line. So this harsh view that we
take of, sort of sitcoms from the 60s and 70s, which, you know, rightly so in some ways, but, you know, the
kind of the depiction of a man and a woman kind of grinding their way through their marital duty, you
know, the woman's a bit of a battle axe, the guy, the bloke's sort of down the pub and all of that. Marriage,
I think, the shadow of duty loomed larger over the definition of a marriage. Which is why, you know, I
wanted to reference Fiddler on the Roof, in the book, because I think that was more what it was like, sort
of back then. And so it was a lesson … in time so, and the work was harder. So you know, there are things
like, you know.
There's a scene where my dad visits my mum in the hospital. She's just had an operation. And I wanted to
and, you know, I remember at the time thinking that he behaved a bit, sort of insensitively towards her. But
looking back now I can sort of see that he was a man who couldn't really express his emotions very well.
And he was very, very scared. And he didn't know how to express those things to a woman who was lying in
a hospital bed, you know, having just had major, major surgery. And so to answer your question, they've
been, they've actually been fantastic about it. I was quite sort of frightened as to what their reaction might
be, but they've come to understand. My mum got it straight away and I think it took my dad a bit longer,
but I think he sort of understands.
Stuart Maconie
Was there any sense, Pete, I wonder, was there any sense at all, when you were writing – and tell me to
mind my own business if you like – but was there any sense, Pete, when you were writing it in which you,
almost, even if they didn't read it, but in some way it was you trying to explain yourself to them?
Pete Paphides
Yeah, I think I felt that, I think I felt that I had to just sort of put it out there, and then worry about it later,
because I certainly wasn't able to explain myself to them at the time. And, of course, if I had done, when
you're a child, you're an unfinished story. We don't know what the outcome of that story is going to be.
And you know, so when, especially with Greek parents, I think this is the case with a lot of parents, you
know, people who have children in a country other than their own, you know, you lay down a lot of kind of
rules that you think will, that you're laying down really because you can't really control what kind of an
adult you're going to bring up. So oh, you know, 'Only marry someone of your own nationality'; 'Don't get
into that scene', 'Don't move to that city', 'You only do this kind of job'. But of course, you're an unfinished
story. And so if I try to answer your question – which is great question, by the way – I think if I tried to
explain that to them at the time, then they would still have been worried because they would still have felt
a sense of peril as to what the outcome of my story was going to be.
Stuart Maconie
Yeah.
Pete Paphides
But I can do that now because I'm, you know, I'm 51 now, and, you know, hopefully, nothing really bad was
gonna happen to me. You know, when I moved to, when I finished my degree I moved to London, I just got,
been offered a couple of small reviews in Melody Maker, and so I moved to London straight away. My
parents were expecting me to move back to Birmingham to maybe, like, you know, like take over the chip
shop, or maybe, you know, I could sort of, you know, train to become an accountant or something. And my
mum, I got a kind of bedsit, I moved into a bedsit in Stockwell which was really, really grotty. And they very
kindly offered to kind of move my stuff down. And my mum basically had a panic attack when she saw it,
and she just couldn't stop crying. She just said because I was opposite, I was opposite a slightly less lovely
example of the brutalist estates you describe in your book, Stuart. That was like the view from my … And
we moved my stuff and there was barely any room in my room for anything more than a bed and a chest of
drawers and a record player. And anyway, they made their way home and I called my mum, you know,
about three hours later to make sure they'd got back okay. And she was still crying. She literally hadn't
stopped, she hadn't stopped crying, all the way from Stockwell to Birmingham.
Jo Bell
It's unbearable. And, and actually the passage that you speak of, Pete, in your book where your mum is in
hospital, and your dad basically says, 'Well think about me, you know, there's no one in the fish shop to do
the frying and so on'. You manage to, to strike a perfect balance there between the immense shock of that
insensitivity as it must have hit you as a kid, and at exactly the same time, the understanding of him now as
a grown man, looking at how he was actually deflecting and paraphrasing what he was actually feeling. And
so there's that balance between the power of the moment and, and the sort of reframing of it as a situation
that you now understand better.
So I want to draw us 'peacefully to a close' like the life of George VI. But, but I wanted to think also about
what the two books have in common and what they say about unity and division in particular, because I do
see them both as sitting in this, this slew of fantastic books now which are coming out telling corners of
social history, or broader parts of social history that we haven't examined closely enough, like Why I'm No
Longer Speaking [Talking] to White People About Race or Common People or Natives. And they seem to me
both to sit as brilliant stories full of laughter and joy, but also as telling that larger story through an
individual prism. They're super powerful for doing that. And I wanted to ask you a final question, really,
which is: are we becoming more divided nowadays, as is commonly said? And if so, what can unite us?
What can we do to bring ourselves together a little more?
Stuart Maconie
The current crisis – I mean, if you remember, it would be interesting to chart our reactions to it. At the
beginning, there was this feeling of: 'We are going to emerge from this a better, you know, a better nation'.
And I was kind of slightly swept along by that, thinking, 'Well, I hope in future we start to realise who the
real good guys are and who the bad guys are'. That it is underpaid nurses and cleaners and people, and not
the sort of, the sort of people we put on Dragon's Den and The Apprentice, and I, but clearly, that's not
panning out. It's not panning out quite like that. It's become much more nuanced to think about. And I do, I
do hope there'll be a genuine social change after this or a change in attitudes. But it's not quite been it's not
quite been as straightforward as it seemed, I don't think because we've realised that after initially me
thinking, 'Oh, my God, you know, the Conservatives have become one nation party again, and they're
paying out money to people and all this'. And now, of course, they're showing themselves again in their
truer colours.
But I do think, but I do think there might be some kind of change, I don't know, it's difficult. It's difficult. It’s
difficult to say. I think what both our books have in common in their different ways, if that makes sense, is
that I think we are not celebrating the ordinary but celebrating the overlooked in a way. That we've
become very keen on the individual as super special. I think we've been very keen on this idea that there is,
you know, that I am, I am utterly unique and there's no one like me. And maybe my book more than Pete's
… I think, you know what, we've actually all got quite a lot in common then I realised, you know, Pete's
experience, my experience on a council estate in Wigan is different from Pete's experience in Brum and
slightly, slightly years apart. But so much of it struck a chord about, just about the little things that affect us
all – the little family dramas that affect us all, the, you know, friendships and lovers and music and stuff like
that. And I think that we, I just hope we start to think that the things you know – we have more in common
than we have apart really. And that's, we've been, we've stressed … Understandably, we've spent a lot of
time in the last few months thinking about our differences. But thinking about our similarities is quite, is
quite a nice thing to do as well, I think.
Pete Paphides
Yeah, I think that, you know, I think just to echo Stuart's point, I think that one of the great things about
Stuart's book is, it's the characters that populate it. And, and, you know, I was reminded, you know, there
are some characters that sort of populate my book as well, which sort of reminded me of characters in his
book, especially … Stuart … Obviously, I grew up in Birmingham and Stuart spends an awful lot of time in
Birmingham. And, and, you know, there's a certain kind of, when Stuart's talking about a kind of tenor, a
kind of, sort of grain of the British working-class character that existed in the post-war years, I got a real
pang of nostalgia for a lot of the adults that surrounded me: a lot of my teachers. A certain kind of very
unshowy, unsoppy warmth that existed in working-class life and was absolutely ubiquitous, it was
absolutely widespread. It was just there was a base level of decency that you didn't sort of show off about,
it was just sort of soaked into you, partly as a result of maybe what had happened not only during the war,
but in the years after the war and the values that were reflected in the creation of the welfare state. And
you just saw that in people… and libraries were a part of that and self-improvement. There was an ethos of
self-improvement that was also a part of it. And I really hope that we can find a way to sort of build that
into the infrastructure of political life. I don't know how that could happen. I'm not sure there's much of a
will for it to happen at that political level at the moment. But God, if we lose that we lose so much.
Jo Bell
I think what connects both of your books perhaps is the single word I've just jotted down which is
'togetherness' – that sense that collectively we can value and honour one another. And that, that comes
across very clearly both of your books with the way that you acknowledge and talk about all the different
people who come across your path. No matter how minor a role they play, they're all honoured: sometimes
with a joke, sometimes with a rather touching story. But they are fantastic books, they truly are. You can
get both of these books, by the way, as audiobooks read, I think – Pete is your audiobook …? Have you read
that yourself?
Pete Paphides
Yes. Yes, I did.
Stuart Maconie
I read Pete's and Pete read mine [laughter].
Jo Bell
You read Pete's and Pete read mine. Well, that makes my experience of listening to you for four hours on
my allotment last week very disconcerting. You kept me company as I planted the potatoes …
Pete Paphides
You'd have really got the thin end of the wedge, Stuart, if you'd had to read mine. I think it's 18 hours long
in total.
Stuart Maconie
Oh, my God! Yours is a hell of a lot longer than mine, Pete. Bloody hell! How long were you in there for?
Jo Bell
They are both fantastic books. They are both completely characterised by a strong sense of what is decent
and fair, the importance of simple pleasures and the company of people who share your experience of life.
And they're both in their own way love stories, they really are. And it's been a very great pleasure to read
them both and to talk to you about them both. So thank you very much to Birmingham Literature Festival
for having us and to Stuart Maconie and to Pete Paphides for talking about your books.
Stuart Maconie
Thank you, Jo. Thanks, Pete. I hope to see both of you in the flesh before too long.
Pete Paphides
That'd be really nice. Thank you. Thank you.
Outro
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. If you enjoyed
this episode, we’d love for you to tell us about it – leave us a review and a rating, find us on Instagram,
Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest and take a look at the rest of this year’s digital programme on our
website at www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org. You can download our latest podcast episodes, every
Thursday, from all the places you would normally get your podcasts. Until then, happy reading!
The Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast is curated by Shantel Edwards and produced by 11C and
Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.
- Common People: An Anthology of Working-Class Writers edited by Kit de Waal
**Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire by Akala
Author and guest curator Kit de Waal introduces Birmingham Litfest presents... The very first Birmingham Literature Festival podcast.
The Birmingham Literature Festival podcast brings writers and readers together to discuss some of 2020’s best books. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions
about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. Join us each week for exciting and inspiring conversations with new, and familiar, writers from the Midlands and beyond.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Guest Curator: Kit de Waal
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands