Bewilderbliss is a magazine for new Manchester writers. In order to increase the ways Bewilderbliss supports them we will be conducting interviews with established local authors. We will ask them questions that are of interest to new writers and put all their great information and advice on here.

Jackie Kay

To coincide with Issue #2 of Bewilderbliss, in which Jackie Kay’s work features, Bewilderbliss editor, Willow Hewitt, has conducted an interview with her that probes into how and why she writes:

• I’ve just recently been re-reading Trumpet and the thing that really stood out for me was the part where Joss can’t go to Africa because it would disrupt his imaginary landscape of it in his mind. Do you have any experiences that you feel that way about yourself – that you don’t want to do?

 

No, I don’t really.

 

• And you didn’t feel nervous about going to Africa yourself because it would ruin what you were thinking about that?

 

No, I didn’t feel like that at all, but I know that a lot of people do. But no, I found it really exciting to go. And I found Nigeria a really, really stimulating country. There’s lots of things wrong with it, but I found it a really exciting, visually exciting, and emotionally stimulating place to be.

 

• Did you get a lot of writing done when you were there?

 

Well I was on tour because I was doing readings. So no, I didn’t do that much writing. I tend not write if I’m on tour. I take a notebook with me and I jot things down but I don’t seriously write. I try not to do that when I’m travelling, because otherwise I find it frustrating and I just end up with a load of rubbish. So I have writing times and travelling times. I carry a notebook and I always jot things down and that then goes towards something. I think it’s always good to have a notebook on you at all times wherever you are. Even if it’s in your back garden.

 

• I’ve got about four scattered around the place, I can never find what I’m looking for when I want to find it. Do you have that problem?

 

Yeah that’s the problem, you’ve got to remember what you’ve written in which book. If you’ve got several things on the go at the same time it’s good to keep separate notebooks for them. But then sometimes you can get that mixed up and have something in one notebook that’s supposed to be in another. So yes, my notebooks are probably quite jumbled.

 

• The other thing I’ve noticed about Trumpet, and also in your poetry anthology, Darling, as well is that there are lots of autobiographical elements. Do you have to make a conscious decision about what you decide to reveal and what you don’t reveal – what you keep private to yourself?

 

Yes. I mean, yes and no. I don’t think that it’s so much a conscious decision that you sort of sit and say right I’m going to keep that from people and I’m going to reveal that, it’s much less deliberate and thought out than that. I mean obviously I wouldn’t reveal people’s secrets so I do have some sort of line that I’d like to respect. I don’t think everything’s just up for grabs when you’re a writer, or just because you’re a writer you can utilise them to expose people or break their hearts. But I do think you have a moral obligation in some sense to tell the truth, whatever the truth is as you see it – tell the authentic truth of your own experience. And so I think these two things can clash and sometimes it’s a matter of working out what is right, what feels right, what is ok to write about and what’s not.

 

• And do ever write things and just think that’s gone too far and have to scrap it?

 

What I do is I write for myself, whatever I like, without censoring myself at all. And then I might read it over and decide not to publish it. So, what I write is really up to me and I’ll never be stopped writing anything. But the question is really whether to publish what you write. So sometimes I decide not to publish things, yes definitely. I think most writers have had to decide not to publish some things, or at least an awful lot of them.

 

• And once you’ve shared your experiences with the world, do you ever feel differently about them afterwards?

 

That’s an interesting question. Yes, in a way, yes because something that’s happened to you that could have been hurtful that you’ve managed to make into something for other people to share, you’ve already given it a certain amount of distance by doing that, by sharing it with complete strangers. And that then can affect how you feel about it so you might actually be less hurt by it because of that. So in that sense I don’t think that it’s so much that writing is therapy, and I don’t think writing is therapy at all, but I do think that there’s a catharsis that can happen when you write about something that triggers things for you and can be and was something that had upset you and just the business of being open about that in your writing can make changes to how you see it, definitely.

 

• I was looking at the story of Billy Tipton and its quite different to the story of Joss Moody. It’s kind of a combination of that and your own story. Did you decide right at the beginning that you weren’t going to tell Billy Tipton’s story?

 

Yes, absolutely. I was sparked off by Billy Tipton’s story, so it was my inspiration. But I didn’t want to write a biography or even a fictionalised biography. I didn’t want to be biographical about it at all. So I just took the idea from the Billy Tipton story and ran with it in a completely different direction. Also I wanted my character to be black and Scottish, because I do like inventing black Scottish people, because if I don’t then who else is going to do it? And so I didn’t want to write about a white American jazz player, because I was just more interested in trying to create a black Scottish trumpet player. So I had to leave Billy Tipton behind. And I think that if I’d added America into the mix of that story, that would have made it less believable, because I don’t know how authentically I could have done that kind of voice. That’s one of the drawbacks for me as a writer is that I feel that I have to get voices completely right. And so then that sometimes limits what you can write about, and it certainly limits you being able to be black on the page, if you like. Because I’m black and Scottish, there isn’t an easy way of the reader telling I’m black, other than the subject matter itself. I don’t have an easy African slang or Caribbean dialect or whatever to use in a confident way.

 

• You have got an interesting background that you use a lot. Do you think that it’s necessary for writers to have an interesting background or interesting experiences for their writing to be interesting?

 

Yes, I think it is. I think it’s good. I think it’s not necessary but it’s good, it’s something that helps. I think if you’ve already had in your background some experience of being an outsider, and not quite belonging to the place that you grew up in. I think that helps. It might not help as a young child growing up, but it definitely helps once you’re a writer. I think that a lot of writers have something in their pasts – they might have had a mother die young, they might have been ill a lot and therefore have been out of school – but often writers, you’ll find something that’s made them feel different to the people immediately around them. That’s so true of so many writers that you could reel off a long list.

 

• I went to the reading you did at the university of Manchester and you were very funny there, and that somehow manages to translate into what you write very naturally. Does it just come that way or do you try consciously to be funny and represent that part of yourself?

 

I think there’s two different things. When I’m doing gigs, yes I do want to be funny – not always funny and not just funny – but I think if you’re writing about quite difficult things that are emotional and upsetting for people, it allows them to hear them if you’re funny before hand, in a funny way. I think that tragedy and comedy live in the same house and so I think that the way I write it like that too. Often people will tell me that they’ve laughed out loud when they’ve been reading and then they’ve cried, and that for me is the best combination. I just want to make people laugh and cry – big reactions to things are good. That’s what you want from the reader. You want to have moved the reader in some way or you want a reader to have some sense of recognition, and humour is one way that we all recognise things because it’s a kind of joint landscape that we can as an audience share something that we all are finding funny – perhaps in different ways, but we’re all laughing. So I think that’s quite a nice thing to have. People often say to me that I should be a stand-up comic, but I wouldn’t like to be a stand-up comic and I don’t think I would do very well in that way because I’m only funny in a sense because people aren’t expecting me to be so. I think if I went into comedy routines I wouldn’t be that funny because people are expecting you to be completely different and I’m not really interested in that. But I am interested in what makes people laugh, because I am interested in what makes people tic generally and what makes people laugh and what makes people cry are quite burning questions I think.

 

• Part of your background is quite overtly political and I read in a previous interview that as a teenager your poems were quite polemical. Is that something that you feel you need to suppress in your poetry now or do you just work it in a more natural way?

 

I think that I am political, and always will be and have been. I think that these are your eyes and that’s the way that you see the world. But now I’m more subtle about that world view. I think it’s still there very much so and I still think my writing is political, I think everybody’s writing is political, even those people that say that it’s not, because I think everything’s political. But it depends if you mean political with a capital P or a small p. I don’t think its very useful or sophisticated to preach to your reader and I don’t think that’s what a reader looks for in a book – somebody to tell them what to think, because then they would just go and buy one of those new-agey ‘how to be happy’ books….self-help books. I think that readers are very sophisticated and complex and we all have quite multi-layered lives and now that I’m older I’ve found a more integrated way, hopefully, of writing.

 

• Do you ever write those ranty polemical poems and keep them for yourself still?

 

No, because I don’t really think in that way anymore, I must have grown out of them in that way. I still write things that I feel very strongly about and these poems I always think of as political, like ‘The Lamplighter’. That was only published last year, and that is very political and has lots of information in it. So, yes, I still write around issues even, so it’s not so much that I’ve stopped writing about things that are burning issues, like slavery or violence against women or Alzheimer’s or some theme that I might find interesting that might be different.

 

• In your writing there’s a lot of writing about music and I read somewhere you previously said that you want your writing to sound like music. Do you actually listen to music when you write?

 

No, not when I write. Well, it depends what I’m writing so when I was writing Trumpet I listened to the trumpet player Clifford Brown the whole time. I’ve got everything by him – he was the trumpet player that I felt sounded most like I imagined Joss would sound. And so then I just listened to him over and over and over again while I was writing. But most of the time I don’t while I’m actually writing, because I find it slightly distracting. But it just depends what I’m writing. When I was writing ‘Sonata’, a short story of mine that’s based on Janáček’s Kreutzer sonata which is itself based on Beethoven’s Kreutzer sonata then I listened to both of those, Beethoven’s and Janáček’s over and over. And I just wrote this story recently called ‘First Lady of Song’, it’s about a woman that’s stayed alive for 330 years, and I listened to lots of music while I was writing that. So yes, it depends – if the thing that I’m writing is overtly musical then I might just listen to music. It just depends, for me there isn’t just the one way, I adapt to suit what the thing is that I’m writing at the time, and each book that you’re writing sort of almost demands a new practice, or encourages one.

 

• I’m working at the John Rylands Library at the moment cataloguing the archive of Elaine Feinstein, and she writes a lot of different types of things – novels, poems, biographies, plays etc., much like you do. Elaine Feinstein has said that poetry is by far her favourite, and novels are just for fun. Do you have a preference?

 

I would never describe novels as fun, the writing of them. Never in a million years. I think that writing a novel is a hideous experience. I’m about to embark on writing another one, but to me writing a novel is a bit like having a bad lodger in your house and they take the stay much longer than you thought they would and they stay in the bathroom for hours and every time you want to use a room of your house they’re in it. It literally takes over. So when I’m writing a novel it’s very different to write poetry too, it crowds the poetry out. I find the short story form my favourite form to write, it’s the one that I feel the most natural in, because to me it exists somewhere between the novel and the poem. Poems, I feel that I’m kind of alright at writing them, but I don’t think I’m particularly good at them, and I feel I’m a bit better at writing short stories and I don’t feel I’m particularly good at writing novels either, compared to other novelists that I admire. So the short story, I feel that I can carve some sort of territory out. I feel I kind of know – not know what I’m doing – but I feel like I can allow myself to explore and not be sort of scared with the writing of it, whereas some forms can scare you, and I find the novel quite scary.

 

• I’m finding my work at the archive really inspiring and I feel like it’s going to be my new go-to place when I’m stuck for ideas. Do you have people that you read or places that you go when you’re stuck for inspiration?

 

I never really seem to get stuck for inspiration. I’ve never had writer’s block. My trouble is that my life is too busy so I don’t have enough time to write, and that’s my big, big problem, is creating the space, because I think that you need proper space to write – I don’t mean physical space, I mean space inside your head. And I think if your head’s crowded out with doing this gig or that gig or running around judging this competition or that competition, then you sort of dwindle away some of your writing energy and space. So, that’s my battle as a writer, is trying to give myself enough room to write. But yes, I find that I walk every day, I’ve got a dog, so I walk every day, on the Chorlton Ees area, or across the meadows by the river Mersey, through the woods. That’s a massive area, you could walk all the way to Liverpool if you wanted to, or all the way to Didsbury. And I walk there at least probably an hour a day when I’m home, and I find that very inspiring. I just find being in any kind of…you know trees and plants and flowers very inspiring. And also I find being in barren landscapes inspiring, you know like somewhere like Yell in Shetlands, I could live there for six months of the year and just write. I’d love that, I’d love to just be in a barren empty landscape. So that’s the kind of thin that I do to order my thoughts. A lot of writing is actually just thinking, and a lot of writing is actually being quiet, being silent. And you don’t necessarily need to feel as a writer, I don’t think, that you have to be busy, busy, busy all the time writing. But if you do want to write you should give yourself the space to do it.

 

• Do you find teaching creative writing inspiring? I think a lot of writers are divided on that issue.

 

I don’t really like people that moan about their teaching, because I just think, well get out of it then. I find being a teacher very inspiring in the sense that I really like my students and a lot of them are really talented, and you can bounce off ideas. And at its best it’s like being in a really exciting writing group, because you’re part of your own class, just like you’re your own first reader. I don’t sort of separate myself from the other side of things, if you know what I mean, so when I’m a writer I’m also a reader and when I’m a teacher I’m also a student because I’m also learning a lot from my students. And at Newcastle University we have a really vibrant and exciting English Department, there’s a lot of other writers there. I think we’ve got more writers per corridor than many universities in the country. So that’s really nice – there’s a kind of writerly community there. The downside for me is that it’s three hours from Manchester on a train, and I don’t particularly want to live in Newcastle, so I do do the travelling back and forth, so that’s the side that I probably would moan about, the travelling.

 

• What’s the most important thing that you try and pass on to your students?

 

To find authenticity, to not make your writing ever smell of the whiff of the workshop. I don’t like writing where I can exactly see what kind of workshop exercise somebody might have done or how they might have arrived at what they’ve done. So in a sense to write in a multi-layered way to cover their tracks, because there’s a structure that a reader can see, but there should also be an invisible structure, that the reader is picking up on but isn’t necessarily aware of – you know, an underneath idea, an underneath theme. So I teach my students how to try to do that. But the main thing is to not be too self-conscious as a writer and not get all hung up about whether you’re using first person intimate or first person removed or whether you’re using third person distant. I try to tell them not to get too hung up on technical terms for what they’re doing and just find ways to do it. So I teach quite organically, because there are other people that teach them technically and in a technical way and I don’t really feel like teaching that way. But then I think they get all really screwed up about it. And I think actually the most talented people have it and they don’t know exactly what it is they have, and if they analyse everything that they have or are too academic about it, they’ll lose it. I feel quite superstitious that overtalking what you’re trying to achieve as a writer is bad for you, that’s why I never really read interviews that someone’s done with me, or I never read the PhD theses on my work, don’t read any of those things because I don’t want to become too self-conscious. I pass that on to my students – not to write with a big ‘I am’. I lot of writers that I really love, I start to not like them once I sense that they’re writing with they’re every second sentence ‘I am so and so, so and so’. I’m not going to mention and names, but there’s a lot of writers that do that.

 

• One final question, I saw the interview in the Poetry Archive where you said that Alasdair Gray told you that you were a writer when you were sixteen. But then it was another fourteen years before The Adoption Papers. What was the process you went through to becoming published?

 

I had written The Adoption Papers, and I had it for years actually, I finished it when I was about 27. So it was four years before it was published after I’d written it, and that was just because it got rejected. It got rejected by about six or seven publishers and then finally Bloodaxe said that they would publish it, so that was really good. Before that I wrote plays, I think that the first play that I had performed was in 1985, so I was fairly young then – fairly young to have your first play on. I’d written about three plays or four plays before The Adoption Papers came out. And I did a lot of other studying, so I was a student till I was 21 and then between 21 and when the first play was on it was only about three or four years. I wrote a lot and was in different anthologies, I was in an anthology with three other black writers called A Dangerous Knowing, that was published I think in 1985. So I think that was it. I think actually if you’re published in your thirties, which I was, that’s pretty young still in publishing terms, because you have to develop your voice. I don’t think it’s particularly good for people to get published in their twenties, I think it places such stress on them, particularly if they’re actually very successful with the first thing they do. I think it can really, really screw them up for the future because they then feel this burden of expectation and I think it’s really, really difficult for them, for writers that have say runaway successes at 22 or 23. So I think it’s ideal to be published for your first book in your thirties and then gingerly make your way and nobody much notices you till you’re in your forties or fifties, I think that’s great. Toni Morison didn’t publish her first novel till she was actually in her fifties and I think that’s brilliant. 

 

 Jenn Ashworth

The following interview is with Jenn Ashworth. She recently completed the MA in Creative Writing at Manchester University and has gone on to publish A Kind of Intimacy.

Jenn does a lot of work with new writers, including teaching her own creative writing courses and working with the Preston Writing Network. The PWN do a lot of great stuff for new writers including Word Soup, a live lit night. Bewilderbliss will be taking part in the September Word Soup.

As well as her blog, where Jenn puts details of all her readings, she also has a website where you can read ‘deleted scenes’ from her novel and read about the making of its cover.

She’s given us some really thoughtful and helpful answers, so read on to find out what Jenn has to say to our editor Willow Hewitt:

 

• Congratulations on your recent novel, A Kind of Intimacy. You’ve mentioned to me previously that you’d finished a draft of it before you started your MA in Creative Writing. I’m interested to know why you decided to do the course and what you feel you’ve gained from it?

My main motivation for doing the course was the chance to get some funding from the AHRC so I could stay at home and write for another year – my daughter was nearly one and it was either that, or start work. In the end I did get my funding, and was able to use that year to more-or-less completely write. What I gained, and didn’t expect to gain, was a small group of friends who know my writing, know me and have offered a lot of support during and since the course, and that is something I’d like to think I am able to do for them too. There’s also the way doing a course like that turns writing from a hobby into a kind of work in your own mind – dignifies that silly thing you spend so much of your time doing, I suppose. 

• Lots of people have mixed feelings about taking a creative writing course; do you think that they’re for everybody?

No, I don’t. There have been writers I’ve met at all stages of their careers that have no interest in getting feedback from other people – they aren’t at all interested in the effect their work is having on a reader. That’s one way of writing and it isn’t a bad way, but it isn’t mine and I do think to get the most out of a course or a workshop or a mentoring arrangement you need to be open to feedback that you might not like hearing at first. And I think you develop as you go along, so after a while you get to know which kind of feedback to ignore. At first though, you need to be open and not everyone is. 

• I know that you teach creative writing yourself, how do you find the balance between being prescriptive and inspirational?

It is difficult. I find it hard to be anything other than myself, although I’m lucky that so far I’ve had such interesting and talented students, and ones that have come with an attitude of openness to my method, and to each other’s. If I’m teaching something that might sound like a ‘rule’ I try to give examples of commercially or critically successful novels that have broken that rule, just so they know that it’s fine to do things your own way. We talk about process a lot, rather than the finished product. Not everyone is going to or even wants to write something that will be published, but I think everyone can learn to be a little bit better at what they do than they are at the moment, and to enjoy the process of doing it a bit more. That is my aim.

• What’s the most useful thing you could say to a new writer?

Read a lot, write every day and try to talk to other writers about what they are doing, how they do it and how they feel about it. But mainly, just read a lot. Get rid of the telly.

• Do you believe that everybody can write?

No, I don’t. For a start, most people don’t want to. It takes a lot of time, and you sacrifice a lot of things you’d otherwise be doing in that time. Might take your whole life before you write something you’re pleased with. I don’t think everyone can sign up to that and feel good about it. But everyone who wants to write can have a go at it, and can do things to improve their work.

• Your creative writing classes are associated with the PWN, what else does the network do to assist writers?

Yes, the classes are part of a writing development programme I’m putting together for the Preston Writing Network. We do lots of other things, all aimed at getting people who are writing out of the woodwork and talking to each other – developing the literary culture of a place that hasn’t had much of one up until now. We’ve just had our first Bloggers’ Meetup and there are monthly live lit and poetry slam events we’ve called Word Soup nights. The network also has plans for a summer community writing project, and right now I’m gathering support for a Preston Reading and Writing Festival – a bit like a literature festival, but with more participation from us, rather than just authors coming to read. Although we’ll have that too. I’m really excited about everything that’s planned and if any of your readers want to get involved, they can contact us about it via the blog.

• Do you think that there are enough resources out there to help new writers?

I think as far as writing courses, websites, forums, blogs, mentoring and appraisal services, we’re very well provided for. One part of the work of Preston Writing Network is letting less experienced writers know that these things exist, which is a bit of what we do with the blog. But what writers at the beginning of their careers really need is time, and you don’t get the time to write unless you’re prepared to live on a very low income – and for parents like myself, that just isn’t possible. So what I recommend is a couple of years funded by a big slab of hard cash from someone or other, so you’ve got the time to read and ruminate and write a horrible first draft, and learn to be a writer. If it wasn’t for the AHRC funding I got to do my MA I don’t know if I’d have been able to finish A Kind of Intimacy.

• You’re a successful new writer; I’m interested to know the story of how you got your novel published? Did any part of the process surprise you?

The novel was published in the usual way – I have an agent and he sent the novel to some editors he thought would like it. I learned a bit about the process from books, and during the MA course, so I wouldn’t say anything was too surprising, apart from the fact that there were a couple of editors who said they loved the book, but it was just too dark for them. And then it gets this Guardian review saying it’s such a funny story. I think it’s a mixture of the two, but I didn’t think it was possible that editors wouldn’t want to publish something because they didn’t think it was cheery enough. Maybe they were just letting me down gently. Who knows?

[link to the guardian review]

• What’s your next writing project? Is there another novel on the way?

I’m working on a novel now – it is going well, but slowly, because I have a day job now and lots of other responsibilities. It’s going to be about two teenage girls who were best friends during their last year of school. One grew up, one didn’t and it’s about the one who didn’t grow up from the perspective of the one who did. That’s the one that’s got a squid in it too, although there’s less squid now than there was in the first draft. The next one’s going to have something about a call centre in it, and a canal, and a fridge. I’ve got a sketchy plot and some characters. The one after that hasn’t arrived yet. I want to write text adventure games too, or those game books – real exciting ones, for grown-ups.

• What do you do when you’re stuck for inspiration?

If you mean an idea for something to write, that doesn’t happen often. If I don’t have an idea for something, then I don’t write it. If you mean something like the muse, or a feeling for writing, then I don’t subscribe to that way of thinking. It is work. I have lazy days, but even when I’m feeling a bit empty, I can usually sit at my computer and force something – just as most people do with their jobs. 

• And finally, I’ll end with what should be known as the Colm Toíbín question: Do you actually enjoy the process of writing?

I don’t enjoy not being able to write because other responsibilities are getting in the way, or not being able to write as well or as quickly as I wish I could. I’m less keen on the promotional and publicity aspects than I probably should be – although I do like doing readings. I don’t like staying in on my own all the time, always feeling slightly inadequate, most finished projects being disappointing in some way, and although I haven’t had a bad review yet, I’m sure when that happens I’ll hate that too. But the writing itself, I love.