1. How and when did you get started as a writer?

I wrote a bit as an undergraduate, and afterwards lived on the dole in Sheffield, thinking I was becoming a writer but really not working anywhere near hard enough.  Signing up for the MA at Sheffield Hallam was me taking the plunge, making a commitment – since then I’ve been steadily working harder, and realising I’m still not working hard enough.

But I suppose you really start as a writer when you start as a reader, and as for that I couldn’t tell you.  I started early, and read anything – instruction manual, toothpaste tubes. Viz. Tolstoy.

2. Where do your ideas tend to come from?

I just think of them.  That’s facetious, and of course, you listen out for phrases and stories and you note interesting things you read in books.  But fundamentally it’s about imagining.  You lie in bed at night and think of things, and if you’ve got any sense you write them down.  But the more you read and look and listen, the more ideas you’ll have.  When a piece isn’t working, when it’s inert, the way to fix it is – think of something better.

3. Are there particular ideas or themes that interest you or that keep resurfacing in your work?

Yes, but I have to be careful about talking about them.  Because I make things out of words, I have to maintain an exclusion zone around the subjects I’m interested in, and not use words too close to them unless I’m actually writing a poem or a story.  Maybe that sounds fey.  But I know from experience how ideas, whole poems, can dissipate.  All that aside, it’s safe to talk in general terms – in my poetry I’m interested particularly in place, in how landscapes shape who we are and how we experience them.  When I came to write flash fiction I was surprised because that interest didn’t translate in any straightforward way – I’m overwhelmingly interested in story, and that means people.

4. Do you plan your writing?

In poetry, yes, but it never bears fruit, or not the fruit I thought it would.  The conscious control that a plan implies is toxic to poems.  I sometimes feel that’s the difference between great poets and the rest of us: they can make a plan and then carry it out, whereas I have a plan and it holds me back for eighteen months.  Actually that’s misleading – I’m writing other things along the way, and no writing time is ever wasted.

In prose I use plans more. I have a clear idea what’s going to happen, and I think a prose writer needs that, because if you don’t know what’s going to happen, how can you make the material along the way take you in the right direction?  Of course, it’s hazy at the edges, and when I say ‘plan’, I usually don’t write anything down, anything more than a very brief phrase or a single word.  Anything more can be the kiss of death.  But it’s there.  It’s a code to myself saying what I’m trying to do.  That’s less necessary in poetry where the equivalent of a narrative is more complicated – it can be provided by the poem’s music, and of course that can’t really be planned until some of the music exists.

5. Do you have a writing routine or any ‘rituals’ that you follow?

Not really.  I snatch writing time when I should be doing other things.  It’s harder when I’ve got time set aside for it.  Better when I have twenty minutes on the train or half an hour before a meeting.  I always use cheap pens, whatever’s to hand, and the same with the paper – scrap paper or envelopes if necessary.  That’s for poems.  Prose goes straight in on the computer.  Writing longhand is too slow for prose – the physical means of recording the sentences is too slow.  For poems, I tend to go in fragments, or just a few lines at a time.  Typing up the draft is really a revision process.  Then print, and read out loud in my office, correct typos and mark initial changes.  Then put it down to read the next day.

6. Who are your favourite writers?

I don’t want to make a list, because then I’ll try to think of everyone and miss someone out.  So let’s say: the European novelists, especially the Russians.  English novels: picaresques yes, social comedies no.  American novels are a blind spot for me – none of them appeal to me, so I’ve hardly read any.  (Short stories are different.)  Any poetry, but mainly European, especially early twentieth-century Germans, for some reason.  In the English tradition, the Metaphysicals.  Auden.  Everyone.

7. Do you have an ideal reader?

I don’t think I can help it.  There’s a performing aspect of writing that means there’s always an ideal reader around somewhere – probably readers, plural.  One way I have of judging my work is to ask, ‘What would X think of this one?’ – the answer is usually surprising clear.  But you have to have more than one referent – not just X, but also Y, Z and preferably a whole alphabet’s worth.  ‘X would hate this one, but Y might like it.’  That’s one way of situating yourself as a writer, imagining those judgements (or living with them, once you’re published).

As a child I suppose I wrote for my parents – for their approval, to make them laugh.  In some sense they and my brother remain my ideal readers.  My taste grew up round theirs.

8. What are you working on now?

I’m just about to publish (July 2011) a pamphlet of poems with Nine Arches Press called All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head. You can read about it here: http://www.ninearchespress.com/alltheroomsofuncleshead.html

I’m working towards the end of a book of poems, which I hope to finish by the end of the year.  I have a lot of material, as I write a lot, but most of it’s not good enough.  I’m not a perfectionist in the sense of sticking with a small number of pieces till I have them right.  I write lots, discard lots, and keep the good ones, or at least the better ones.  Now I’m at the stage where I might be able to pull a book together, but that would mean revising the ones which are OK apart from a bad last stanza etc, and I find it easier to keep writing new ones.  Over the summer I intend to force myself to go back and revise, and see what I’ve got.

I’m also working on a new prose project – well, a novel, I should say.  It’s terrifying.  It’s so big, and it doesn’t exist.  I can’t talk about it yet.

9. What are you reading at the moment?

Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr Rosewater.  I’d only ever read Cat’s Cradle, which is frankly a bit lame, but I always thought I should try something else by Vonnegut.  Then last week I was using a colleague’s office and saw this on the shelf, so I borrowed it.  It’s ace.

I’ve been dipping into a verse translation of the Iliad.  And I started Proust the other week, and loved the first fifty pages or so, but I’m not sure I can be arsed with it.  I want something to happen.

Poetry: early Auden, John Ash’s The Goodbyes.  Alistair Elliott’s translations of Verlaine’s most obscene poems.

And Maurice Keen’s Social History of England in the Later Middle Ages.

10. What piece of advice would you give to new writers?

Read more, write more, work harder.  Make it funny sometimes.  I don’t care how you, or your characters, feel.  Tell me what happens.  Write well.  Grammar matters.  Punctuation matters.  Lose the zombies.

1. How and when did you get started as a writer?

I read ‘Little Women’ when I was about ten and fell in love with Jo March – the one who goes up into her garret to ‘scribble.’ That planted the idea that I wanted to be a novelist.  It wasn’t long before I’d filled my red Silvine notebook with a 26-page Victorian melodrama about a highwayman. It ended tragically – death, smoke, ashes.

I’ve always read poetry but didn’t start writing it until I’d spent my thirties labouring through two (dreadful) novels.  It took me several years to realise that spending an hour on a sentence probably mitigates against writing fiction successfully.  I also noticed eventually that I’m not really bothered about stories.  When my daughters were very young, a poem suddenly seemed like something that I could realistically aim for.  I was under the illusion that it might be possible to write one fairly quickly.

2. Where do your ideas tend to come from?

People often say ‘you should write a poem about that’ and it’s invariably something that I’d never be remotely drawn to, like finding a crooked sixpence. Things that happen don’t strike me as particularly interesting. It’s much more likely to be an idea, e.g. the composer Saint-Saëns calculating individual weights for each of the notes in the musical scale. Or it can be a phrase – a string of words with a particular sound or pattern that sets up a little tingle in my head.

3. Are there particular ideas or themes that interest you or keep surfacing in your work?

At the moment it’s trees and bodies – either separately or in combination.  I always seem to have a tree poem that I’m wanting to write.  I finish one and there’s a brief sense of relief before the next starts niggling.  If not trees, then orchards!

Music is something that never stops intriguing me.  I’d never listen to a piece of music and want to write about it.  (Who said ‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture?’)  I’m more interested in the patterns and forms of music – the way these can reflect our experiences or conversations or dilemmas.  The feeling you get when you enter a piece of music is something that the very best poems can occasionally get close to.  That sense of stepping into a space where there’s order and meaning.

4. Do you plan your writing?

I don’t plan in the sense of having a prescribed work schedule. I have a notebook/scrapbook where I jot things down and keep snippets from newspapers or magazines.  And I try to keep the ‘poetry space’ in my head available by reading and writing as much as I can.  Sometimes I’ll spend days and days toiling away at a poem that doesn’t feel like it can ever go anywhere.  But I don’t let myself give up because it’s often after a sustained period of misery and failure that a real poem comes along.  It’s as if the wrong poem has been keeping its foot in the door to let the right one slip in unnoticed.

5. Do you have a writing routine or any rituals that you follow?

I belong to two poetry workshops and I don’t allow myself to go along if I haven’t got a new poem. So I have to write at least one poem a month. I have a particular chair that I sit in while I’m in the early stages of drafting and I use a fountain pen that I bought with part of the advance for ‘The Floating Man’.  There comes a point when the page isn’t helping any more, so then I stand up and move over to my desk.  I sit on my dad’s old dining chair and put the bones of the poem onto the computer. Seeing the words on the square screen with lots of space around is always a good moment. Something clarifies.

6. Who are your favourite writers?

Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Larkin, Michael Donaghy, Seamus Heaney.  In prose Henry James, Evelyn Waugh, EM Forster, Penelope Fitzgerald (because she has written one of the most miraculous of modern novels ‘The Blue Flower.’)

7. Do you have an ideal reader?

I don’t think it’s helpful for a poem to be angled in a particular direction.  When you’re starting out it’s difficult not to have in mind the imagined responses of particular people you want to impress, but that’s just an interference.  I suppose my ideal would be someone who wouldn’t read a poem through once and say ‘what was that all about?’

8. What are you working on now?

I had an idea for a sequence of spring poems, odd little lyrics about things such as curlews sounding like new-born babies.  I was pleased because it seemed like a project with a bit of longevity.  With poetry you’re always sitting down to start something new, which can be difficult.  Then again, novelists might say we’re lucky to have that chance of a fresh start.  So far, there aren’t many poems in the sequence, but when I’m feeling bereft of new ideas I mention it to myself and it cheers me up a little.

9. What are you reading at the moment?

David Harsent’s latest collection ‘Night’ which contains a spectacular long poem.  It’s the sort of poem I could never envisage myself writing in a million years.   I’m also reading Richard Holmes’s heart-stopping biography of Coleridge.  It’s as addictive as opium and a salutary read for anyone who thinks that being a writer these days is hard.

10. What piece of advice would you give to new writers?

Read, read, read …  Don’t wait to feel ‘inspired’ – you’ll never write anything …  If you’re writing a poem, read what you’ve written out loud when you think it’s finished.  You’ll probably find that it isn’t.

1. How and when did you get started as a writer?

Mid-to-early 1980s. I was a weird solitary kid. I have a copy of the Rattle Bag dated 1982, given to me by my father’s mother. It was the only gift she ever gave me. I recall being flummoxed by it. But now I think what an odd kid I must’ve been, for my Gran to think it ok to give me a poetry book apropos of nothing. It wasn’t even for a birthday. I recall also that her husband, my paternal grandfather, one Xmas gave my four brothers toy racing cars and me a bag of antique marbles. Hello? Clearly, I was a weirdo, and accepted the role the older I got. I had a poem in the weekend supplement of The Irish Times at the age of 21. Downhill from there …

2. Where do your ideas tend to come from?

Language. People are always giving you “ideas” for poems, often in the form of titles: “Unlucky in Love” or “Honeymoon on the Moon”. You should write a poem about that … Poets, by and large, get stirred into poetry by words or overheard phrases. Something about the structure of the phrase is moving. I keep a list in the back of my notebook of everyday phrases that seem to have images and/or metaphors in them. Recently, for example, I wrote a poem around the phrase “to look up”, as in a word you look up in a dictionary. But also, in there, seemed to be some star-gazing. A poem is an accumulation of such phrases, piled into a little bundle like a heap of pebbles. Often, I misremember song lyrics, and realize they’re wrong and think how much better my lyrics would be, and then think …

3. Are there particular ideas or themes that interest you or that keep resurfacing in your work?

My poems keep circling back on themselves. Details from one poem surface as the subject of the other, kind of thing. I have three different poems called “The Swimming Pool”. Then I learnt to swim, and then I almost drowned. Recently, I’ve written a big sprawling sonnet about the intake of breath each line-break represents, and how that’s like swimming. It wasn’t until close to the end of this poem that I realized it represents a return to something. Other than that, borders and thresholds and exile to some extent. I read Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn lately, about a young woman who emigrates to New York and then goes back to Ireland. The point, it seemed to me, was that there is never any way back, never any return route. The life you leave vanishes in your wake.

4. Do you plan your writing?

I do plan what I will be working on over any coming year, more so since I’ve started to write and publish prose. For example, all this year will be poems only. And probably half of next as well. I plan to write 20 odd poems between now and next summer. We’ll see.

5. Do you have a writing routine or any ‘rituals’ that you follow?

I write one poem every month. I call it my “Poem-a-Month Club”, of which I am the sole honorary life member. If I get to the end of a calendar year with a dozen new ones that I’m happy with, then that constitutes a bumper year. I’m a real plodder. Other than that, I write every day. That is, at some point, for 2 mins or 2 hours, I’ll sit at my notebook and scribble something. Every day: every single day…

6. Who are your favourite writers?

James Joyce, Paul Muldoon, Elisabeth Bishop, Richard Ford, John Updike, James Schuyler, WH Auden, Philip Larkin. Mixed bag.

7. Do you have an ideal reader?

I think any reader of poetry is ideal. Do I have a reader? Show me him/her and I reckon they’re going to look pretty ideal. The notion of the ideal reader is a version of the muse, and I’ve never been very mystical. I mean I do see how it can be inspiring to have a reader out there that you want to impress, but I seldom think in those terms.

The ideal reader is definitely not the groupie, which even poets have now and then! Twice it has happened to me that a complete stranger has come up and said, “Are you … are you really …?” And both times, after the initial chuffed feelings, I have stood there listening to them recite lines of mine from memory and thought “This person is crazy”!

8. What are you working on now?

A fourth book of poems, with the working title Among Other Things. Next year or the year after … I’ve just finished a novel, but am not optimistic about getting it published. I realized, like most snooty poets, I embarked on it thinking it’d be a doddle. Then halfway through, after sod all had happened and even then not very well, I thought, “This is hard …” How do they do it, those novelists? How do they keep all those plates spinning at once? The poet Hugo Williams once termed fiction “all that Frank retorted angrily stuff” and it is true that I found myself writing lines that I would have once thought myself way too good for.

9. What are you reading at the moment?

Two very different novels, both from the old days of Harvill Press. I Could Read the Sky is a gorgeous short novel by Timothy O’Grady, with photos by Steve Pyke, about Irish exile in England. Old territory, but very poetic and very beautiful. And Heart’s Journey in Winter by James Buchan. A Cold War thriller: man tries to save the world and falls in love with a doomed Eastern European beauty and world/woman get sort of mixed up in his head. Not usually my stuff, but the guy can seriously write.

10. What piece of advice would you give to new writers?

The one piece of advice I always offer young (ie even younger) writers is to make sure you have a nice pic on the back of your first book. Seriously. Mine’s a disaster. The photographer kept shouting, “Tilt your head back, open your mouth, shut your eyes …” And I kept shouting, “Are you sure this is going to look ok?”

Other than that, the best piece of serious advice I came across was in a piece written by a guy who studied under James Baldwin. There was a bash at the end of the course, and he went up to Baldwin and said, “Give me one piece of advice before I go off into the world.” He says Baldwin thought for a bit and then replied, “Whenever you find that you can do something as a writer, stop doing it.” I think that’s an excellent, but brutal, maxim to write by.

Chris Petit is visiting Sheffield Hallam University this afternoon, where his most recent film, Content (2010), is being screened.  Martin Carter and I manage to get a few minutes with him to ask about Content, his other projects, and his collaborative work with Iain Sinclair.

Content is a film essay, according to many of the write-ups.  Chris tells us what this term means to him.

“One of the things Iain and I, in our work together, have been insistent on is an absolute refusal of definition.  We see no problem with mixing form, fact, fiction.  We’re mistrustful of objective truths.  So, you get called a film essayist.

I think for both of us, because we have film backgrounds and because we’re writers, it’s a form we fell into by default.  The way we worked, pretty sloppily, really, or on a loose and improvised basis, meant that I realized the visual material was greatly strengthened if you wrote over it: if you released yourself from being dependent on synch-sound.  Then you could actually say or write what you wanted over the image.  In a way, this is a form of essay filmmaking, and given that the word ‘essay’ means ‘to try,’ you could argue that these films are attempts at filmmaking, or attempts at finding other ways of processing information or storytelling other than the usual ways.”

Content has been described as an informal coda to Radio On (Petit 1979).  There are clear links, through the driving motif, for example, but I want to know more about the relationship between the two films.

“Content is a response to the financial crash of 2008, as much as it is, ostensibly, about more personal things.  When we made Radio On, it was the end of Callaghan’s Labour government, it was an extremely depressed country, and the film, I think, manages to show that, without having an obvious political context.   And I thought the same with making Content, could you show the mood or climate of somewhere, so that in 30 years it would make as much sense about 2008 as Radio On seems to about 1979.  Having said that, when we made Radio On, none of us had any sense that anyone would be looking at it even in five years time.

When we started thinking about Content, the crash had just happened, and I thought the economic span that started with Margaret Thatcher had lasted until 2009 and incorporated New Labour, and that you had a 30-year period.  How do you mark that with another film?  To begin with I thought you make a film about the economic crash and you go and talk to people, which I’m not very good at.  And then I started listening to the radio, and I wondered, if they’re so clever now, why weren’t they so clever before, and does anyone really want my economic analysis.   I felt the only response was a sort of silence, to take the motif of Radio On and take to the road.  It was Emma Matthews, who edits the film, who said you better get back in the car.

We bought a Casio camera, which has this slo-mo quality.  I was driving, and Emma was filming, and I said, how much have you got.  She said 50 minutes.  I said, that’s half the film.  We’ll do up and down the Westway twice.”

The image of the car, the journey, the moving landscape, all make sense, but as a non-driver, what am I missing?  I’m curious of the idea that driving, rather than being driven, is a cinematic experience.

“I think it’s very different now, but for my generation, the acquisition of a driving licence, being able to drive, seemed the last great test of one’s life.  I remember thinking I’m never going to let anyone examine me again.  The car was a metaphor for freedom.  And whoever thought of putting a radio-cassette in a car was a genius.  It was the start of that technological revolution, which is still going on, where you could programme your own music in relation to an environment.  It was the start of the Walkman, iPod culture, admittedly you had to be in a car to do it.  But you had a moving landscape and you had music.  You had the cinematic frame of the windscreen.  For me it didn’t work as a passenger.  It worked as a solitary experience, best without dialogue.

I always liked people on their own in films.  In fact, you could argue that my entire career has been an argument against the reverse angle.  Before I made a film, I had this experience that if you sit in a car it’s a cinematic experience, and if you sit a person in the driving seat and put a camera behind, it’s going to look pretty good.  For commercial purposes, you have to have a certain level of encounter.  Can you get away with having as little said as possible in the first 20 minutes?  Then someone comes in and does the equivalent of hitting you over the head with a screed of dialogue.  And he moves on.  It was pretty much worked out around that.  If you keep in the car as much as possible, you don’t have to come round for the reverse angle.  I don’t know how to do that other stuff.  I don’t understand about continuity and eye-line, so lets keep it on the road as much as possible.

The big difference between then and now is that the journey is almost entirely virtual.  You don’t have to have these encounters.  With Content, they’re all electronic, the email correspondence, the YouTube kids.  I also like this idea that there’s this silent judge, the six-year-old kid, sitting in the back, who says nothing.  Children are never shown to be thinking, or they’re sentimentalized.  He was very good at doing it, too.”

Why is the boy always referred to as the boy?  Is it related to the idea of post-cinema where there is the chance of multiple narratives and the absence of narrative through this depersonalized referencing?

“Post-Cinema was a phrase I invented for some German friends, filmmakers and artists.  They wanted me to give a paper in Switzerland, and I used the phrase, kind of as a joke.  But of the pieces I’ve written in the last five years, it’s been translated into more languages than the other pieces put together.

I just didn’t want it to be Chris and Louis.  He is ‘the boy’.  There’s a form I quite like, the objective first person, so it’s not me as me.  You’re using it as an alternative to the third person.  I suppose a lot of the comments in the film were generational, as much as they were personal, so I thought it seemed wrong to start naming people, because then it becomes about you as you.  I had to put myself in the film because I was too mean to pay an actor.  I shot some stuff in Berlin using an actress, but it didn’t work.  Doing it yourself, you don’t have to pay anyone, you don’t have to speak to them … ‘Now I want you to do this …’”

Chris tells us about the editing process of Content, how there was a lot of footage, but that it was difficult to work out how to place the material.

“There were various vague ideas.  We had that phrase occur, ‘The bleak flatlands of late middle-age,’ which was a good phrase, and that thing of the driving state of mind: you’re detached, you’re engaged, you’re passive, you’re active, you’re stationary, you’re moving.  I hadn’t seen anything that captures that state, mainly because cars are usually used as a receptacle for dialogue.  So that’s what we were trying to do.

But within that, there was no obvious structure or form.  I’d shot the YouTube kids and I’d shot the German actor.  The real problem was you could put anything next to anything.  You might have a good morning and put a run of four things together, and the next thing you’d put in would be wrong.  Not only would it be wrong, it would undo everything you’d done before.

We were also very indecisive about the order of the music.  When we got that right, things started to fall into place.  The track we begin with, ‘Let’s Make Our Own Movies,’ we resisted putting in.  We said, no, this won’t work.  Similarly, the stuff that we lead with about my father, I said I didn’t want at the front; it comes at the end.  Actually, often something that we do is put what should be at the end at the beginning, or what should be at the beginning at the end.

The cutting is quite instinctive.  There’s no paper cut.  There’s a lot of mucking about.  And on this film, it was rather like playing Patience.  You just lay the cards down and down and down, it doesn’t come out.  You lay them down again, and after nine or ten weeks, we began to know the deck, or the permutations, so well, we could say with conviction, ‘that goes,’ or ‘we move that to there’.

One of the things Emma and I have discussed is, in this country, we’re of the very few people exploring the possibilities of non-linear editing.  I remember thinking when it started out, you can do anything now.  Television’s general response to that whole technological revolution was to become even more conservative.  These companies get a pot of money, the bulk of which goes into pre-production.  They skimp on the filming, and really cut down on editing because they’ve worked out that, with non-linear editing, they can get away with something very approximate, barely more than an assembly.  The executives like it because they can say, ‘can we see it like this now’.  Television has reduced this fantastic tool to a keyboard skill.

Now I need to find a way to treat the writing in the same way, a much freer, and at the same time, edited, experience.  I’m bored with the linear form.”

Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair are collaborating through their imprint, The Museum of Loneliness, which publishes pamphlets, including The Clock, which is a series of email exchanges in relation to a 24hr video installation by Christian Marclay.  It is constructed using film clips of moments when time is expressed or displayed on screen.  So between the hours of 10 and 12 in real time, you’d see film clips that pretended to be between 10 and 12.

“Iain and I decided to, between us, see as much of this as we could and write it up.  We decided to do it as a series of email exchanges because there is that, what Iain calls, tapping on the edge of oblivion, where the way you write emails is different to the way you write other things.  It was a terrific relief to do it, a real pleasure.

The interesting thing about the pamphlet format is that people respond to it.  Communication is so easy now.  Everything we read is off a screen.  So it’s unusual when you hear about this object, and you can’t really buy it, and it’s not a book.  It’s designed to be read with a fairly short attention span; it’s like reading a newspaper article, but the definition of its format makes it more interesting.  It’s one of those accidents.  We were able to buy a laser printer for £25, so it came out of a technological development at home.

It’s quite good if you make things hard to find because everything is so ubiquitous.  I think the only interesting thing I’ve said in the last five years, is that I want to be de-googled.  There’s a sense there’s so much.  I think it’s interesting to start things in a small way, almost the opposite of viral.  You keep it very local, and you hope that at some point it will broaden.

The other strategic thing, because Iain and I did not get other projects off the ground at the point where I thought we would, I realized how jaded the executive world is, and television is so uncertain of what it wants, that however good your pitch is, it is just another pitch.  So, if you create something that is not a pitch, but something they can look at, there is an advantage.

What Emma and I would like to do is to start cutting in space rather than in time.  Is it possible to cut stuff in a way that it’s redisplayed in three-dimensional space?  What interests me about 3D space and gallery space, is that the notion of cutting, or editing, which I think is the most interesting part of film, has barely penetrated there.  You look at these installations and they hardly know what a cut is.  I think there’s a fantastic amount of work you could do, if you start raiding the image bank and you reassemble this material in different ways.  That’s what Marclay has started to do.  If you go back and look at the stuff you’ve recorded, what’s interesting is the filler bits, what ads they were showing.  There’s all this ephemera, and I think you could really have fun with this.

About two years ago, I decided to watch daytime TV for two weeks.  It’s a cultural dead zone.  I thought, are you going to find anything there, what’s the experience like.  It’s not particularly threatening.  Just mild twitches of panic.  It’s neither good, nor bad enough.  It’s pretty soporific.  I got a commission to write the piece, but that never ran.  I didn’t do very much other than describe what I saw.  That’s been turned into another pamphlet.  It’s a cottage industry.  You can do it yourself.  The relief of being out of the commissioning process is you do what you want, you provide the stuff, it’s cheap.  That was the big realization: you just do it.

So, I think 3D space is the next frontier, somewhere between 3D space and daytime TV.  They’re the parameters.”

Iain Sinclair takes the same walk around Hackney every morning.  ‘Same parkland, same grottiness.’  He travels the same route back by the canal.  He walks so he can see the same birds, the same people.  Sinclair is well known as a flâneur, a stroller of the city streets.  He’s described himself as a disenfranchised psychogeographer: ‘In London, from the first, I walked … Motiveless walking processed the unanchored images that infiltrated dreams … a means of editing a city of free-floating fragments …’

Following his walk, Sinclair settles down to write at 8:30am.  He will write intensely until lunch.

The afternoon is about getting on with business, the job of writing, emails and so on.  But today his routine is interrupted by a two-hour journey to Sheffield.  Sinclair is giving the keynote speech at a conference organized by Martin Carter and Tony Taylor of Sheffield Hallam University: Lost London: Explorations of a Dark Metropolis.  The conference is inspired by Sinclair, his career, his passion for examining London in his work and walking.

In the campus café, Sinclair’s soft voice could be lost in the clatter of cutlery.  I was still weighing up whether I could record the interview effectively, when Sinclair commented on how much he liked the idea of me just scribbling notes with pen and paper.  The idea terrified me, but he was so taken with it, I now have nothing more than my frantic scribblings by which to remember the event.

But that’s the point, that my selective hearing and writing, my making sense of it in retrospect, my mis-hearings and mis-rememberances, inform my experience of the meeting.  Sinclair’s own methods include making notes of his walks in retrospect, as, he notes in Edge of the Orison, did John Clare after his escape from Epping Forest’s High Beach Asylum, his long walk home to his Northborough cottage: ‘He lived it through his notebook.  He saw himself, once again, on the treadmill of the road: incidents from a fading fiction … Journey as metaphor’ (Penguin 2005: 10-11).

Sinclair describes his own work as generically promiscuous, the way he smuggles fiction in under the guise of documenting a lost or disappearing landscape.  ‘Make it up,’ he says to me.  ‘That’s the best way.’

I begin by asking what he is working on at the moment, not least because I want some for the next edition of Matter.  He launches into his subject with the authority and fluidity you would expect from a man whose career has spanned four decades.  ‘It comes out of the previous book,’ he says, ‘from the grand project of New Labour and lottery money, the way these top-heavy schemes are imposed down from the top …’

The last book is Hackney, That Rose Red Empire: a confidential Report (Penguin 2009). It is a record of the area in which Sinclair has lived since 1969.  He’s watched the north-east corner of London change around him, the way so many areas have become gentrified, often to the detriment of local, independent business and character.  Sinclair describes how the last of the local businesses by the Olympic Park, ‘an Italian hairdresser with no trade, stands on his doorstep waiting for the council to come and offer him compensation’.

The Olympic Park is a subject of huge significance to Sinclair, the way the land and its history is being ‘… bull-dozed for a legacy that offers little more than what was there already,’ he says.  ‘Local swimming pools, the cycle track, the football field, have been lost to fund and make way for 2012, when we will be left with stadiums nobody wants and a low level radioactivity that will take 20 years to neutralise.’  Over 7000 tonnes of low-level, naturally occurring radioactive waste, more than originally expected, according to gamesmonitor.org.uk, has been stored onsite.

The blue fence surrounding the site is covered with a utopian landscape to hide the demolition/building works.  ‘It displays a landscape that does not, and may never exist.  Construction has become an image exercise,’ Sinclair says.  ‘The brickwork across the road is, increasingly, a battleground between the intricate and bold graffitti, and the man in the yellow jacket that comes along each morning to paint over it, protecting the official narrative of the Olympic propagation of Stratford.’

This is the crux of Iain Sinclair’s vision, the official narrative of London, the face officialdom chooses to present to the outside world, and the unofficial, anti-London, the human cost to memory of the top-down grand project, the way Christopher Wren’s architectural blueprint in the time after the great fire was unable to overcome the will of the labyrinthine alleyways crammed full of people and their spaces.

This plural narrative is also the drive for his latest project, the plans for a ‘Super City,’ put forward in 2005 by architect, Will Alsop.  This was a vision of northern England that stretched from Liverpool to Hull, taking in Leeds and Manchester, a vision that saw people commuting between these locations, living at one end, working at the other, socializing and shopping in between, the M62, the spine of the project.

‘I suspected it couldn’t work,’ Sinclair says.  ‘So I took my free bus pass, you get a free bus pass when you’re old, and I boarded at Liverpool.  I changed buses 12 times along the way.  At each stage there were differences, differences in appearance and language, attitude.’  He talks about the way these schemes lead to an abandoned architecture, the Earth Centre in Doncaster, the Lower Lee Valley.

I ask if he is trying to protect a landscape he sees as under attack from a governmental notion of progress.  ‘Not protect,’ he says, ‘to retain respect, retrieve memory from government’s “cultural projects,” that sense they are trying to revise history – a cultural erasure.  I want to retrieve legends.’

Sinclair’s novel, Downriver (1991) saw a fictionalized Thatcher winning a fifth term in office and creating a one-party state.  The Thatcher trajectory attacking familiar landscape was, in Sinclair’s view, taken up by New Labour to a large extent.  I ask what he feels the coalition will mean in this respect.  ‘It’s too early to tell.  There is a sense that people are drawn to a more consensual approach, but Cameron seems so much of a PR man, used to television cameras.  I can’t get a sense of content.  We’ll see.  Do little.  That’s best.’  In general, I ask?  ‘No, not in life,’ he laughs, and takes a bite of his sandwich. 

London Orbital (2003) examines these same issues in relation to the landscape surrounding the M25, Enfield Island Village, Holloway Sanatorium converted into Virginia Park, the way historical existence is erased, and the way the landscape seeks to hold on to its past:

However meticulous the makeover, the back story always leaks, seeps through as an ineradicable miasma.  Pain, displacement.  The agony of knowing enough to know that something is wrong … Consciousness misplaced in long corridors.  Buildings slip and shift and refuse to settle on a single identity. (2003: 289)

Sinclair’s walking provides the narrative structure of London Orbital.  But walking is present in much of his writing, if not always made so explicit in the final draft.  ‘I want to see the accidents of being somewhere, accidentally finding buildings, cafés, pubs, the people you meet, the slow accumulation of information and photographs.’

I ask if he thinks the walking affects the rhythm of his writing, like the lame walk of the iambic foot.  ‘Yes.  I’m sure it does.  It relates to this open form I’m trying to do.  Like Charles Olson.’  This is the notion of poetic metre as a reflection of the poet’s breath, how sound and perception drive the writing style, rather than traditional ideas of punctuation and syntax.  Is this a conscious consideration?  ‘No, it’s quite natural.’

Sinclair’s formative work was in poetry.  The epic, Lud Heat (1975), is a fusion of prose and poetry pre-empting his concern with place as he explores the trail of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s grid of churches across East London, the dehumanization of land in order to make space for these constructs.

Sinclair still writes poetry, although this is more a private activity, not necessarily for publication, and tends to exist on the south coast, writing in Hastings, publishers in Brighton (Pighog Press).  ‘I think of the coast as relaxed time, the mindset transfers to poetry, the light, the sea creating another way of thinking.  London is prose.  London is work.’

Sinclair hand-writes his poetry, but no longer with his prose.

I couldn’t read my own writing, so I would quickly move to the typewriter, an old clunky typewriter, the ones that make those great sounds.  My neighbour says she misses that.  Then I would move to an electric typewriter, a more plasticky sound, and type up the whole thing again, cutting things out as I went.  I would literally cut up pieces of paper, move them around like a collage.  These days I go straight to the computer, redrafting as I type.  It’s a more finished form, the opposite of the uncensored free form of handwriting.

I ask if his poetry feeds into his prose style.  ‘Yes, and working in film, the focusing on one image at a time, (he mimics zooming in on my writing hand) the cut and splice, the way short sharp images generate pace.  I’ve heard it all comes into focus when read aloud.’

Perhaps this is evidenced in the film London Orbital (2002), made in collaboration with Chris Petit.  Sinclair’s voiceover paces the visual image of the drive along the M25, using that same idiosyncratic rhythm you see on the page.

Sinclair often works with others, sometimes to provide another perspective, as on his Hackney walks.  He takes artists and filmmakers along the M25 and in the footsteps of John Clare.  This is not the ‘uncorroborated account …’ (Edge of the Orison: 10) Clare put down.

When I ask about his habit of collaboration, Sinclair puts it down to his time at film school, ‘that sense of being a group.  I enjoy engaging with other people and their practice, passing the dominant narrative through different people, a better, or different, form of logging, perhaps a photographic record.  It’s fruitful give and take.  It gives balance in life.

He describes some of his collaborations: Slow Chocolate Autopsy (1997), a novel, illustrated by David McKean, about a character trapped within the spatial reality of London, but able to travel in time, ‘he’s a prisoner of London’.  And his journalistic reportage of Allen Ginsberg at the Roundhouse, with Robert Klinkert in 1967, which resulted in the film, Ah!  Sunflower, and the book, Kodak Mantra Diaries (1971).

However, Sinclair is most animated on the subject when he talks about his collaboration with Rachel Lichtenstein: Rodinsky’s Room (1999).  ‘This room was locked up, disappeared from history.’  (He sits forward and draws a sort of square, or floor plan, in the air.)

The room is an attic in a disused Whitechapel synagogue.  Rodinsky was the caretaker, ‘Mesuganer, cabbalist, spook.  Inspirer of fictions.  Retro-golem.’ (Granta 1999: 6), and Lichtenstein is an artist with ‘a gift for archival research’.

Lichtenstein’s grandparents left Poland in the thirties for the East End of London, and in Rodinsky’s Room:

She realized with a proper sense of dread, that the business of her life … was to complete whatever it was that Rodinsky had begun: to pass beyond ego, and all the dusty particulars of place and time, into a parallel state … Unbodied.  Eternally present. (1999: 4).

Sinclair clearly enjoyed this project, speaking enthusiastically about Lichtenstein and their subject.  ‘It’s a Polish-Jewish family history interspersed with cultural meditations to create something other.’  Here again, there is a preoccupation with the historical landscape and the way it is shoehorned into an official narrative:

The brown doors of the old synagogue are never open, but the building harbours vague ambitions of turning itself into a museum of immigration and false memory.  (1999: 8).

There seems a coherence of intent across many of his projects, and I’m interested in how his work remains fresh over the years.  Is it movement of place that moves his work forwards?  Is it the transition from poetry to novel to fictionalizing fact, or has something else changed along the way, something more fundamental?  ‘I’m more concerned with social issues now, more informed on a superficial level of what is going on around me.’  In his earlier work, he focused on creating a mythical sense of the city, ‘… a Blakean concern that if you don’t create your own mythology, you’re stuck with someone else’s.’

I wonder if he feels an affinity with the Romantics.  ‘Yes.  I find a strain of Romanticism appealing.  There is a good attitude of mind, I think.  That Jack Kerouac open-mindedness, a spiritual base to life.  I prefer that drama of the personal, more than the English rationalism and social satire, the comedy of class structure, such as Evelyn Waugh.’

I ask what he’s reading now, what does he read to relax.  ‘Relax,’ he says, ‘what’s that?  I’m always reading about four texts for work at the same time.  Now, for example, I’m reading two catalogues of Brigid Marlin, her portrait of Ballard, and The Kindness of Women (Ballard 1991).  I’m already looking forward to the next project about Berlin, with a collection of interviews with the German filmmaker, Fassbinder.  The last time I was at the coast, I did pick up a book by James Lee Burke, Heartwood. It just happened to be lying around, but I read that to relax.

Time is running out.  Sinclair will have to sign books for the conference-goers before his speech.  One last question, an obvious one, but one I had to ask … what advice would he give new writers.  He laughs and says, ‘Don’t.  Don’t, it’s impossible.  But of course, as new writers, you’ll ignore that, so what next?’  He leans in, ‘Be true to your own instinct.  Don’t try to calculate what will work or what is like something else.  You need to develop your own voice.  It’s a hard thing to do when you’re setting out, when you’re learning a process of techniques and reading others.  But of course, you must read widely.  You must also develop as full a life as possible outside of writing, gather material and grit.’

Is this why his employment background is so colourful, cutting the grass in graveyards, cigar rolling, labouring?  ‘I wanted to write on my own terms.  I wasn’t interested in commercial writing.  So I spent ten years learning what the city was about by taking anything and everything.  And I published anything I wanted through my own Village Press.’

Heading back to the conference, there seems a ghost of John Clare in all that’s just been said, the way Clare will forever be remembered in the same space as Helpston, in the landscape that failed to remember him when the railway came, and Sinclair’s morning walks round Hackney.  How will Iain Sinclair be remembered decades from now?  In his own words, ‘There is no advantage in any man authoring his own life … it has already been told, warped, misappropriated …’ (Edge of the Orison 2005: 25).  This is my contribution to that misappropriation, the future mythology of Iain Sinclair.

1. How and when did you get started as a writer?

I started writing stories in Primary School, stuff about soldiers being knocked over ‘like skittles’ I seem to remember.  I was going to be a prose writer and then I read Wilfred Owen when I was fourteen.  Change of plan.  My first poem was about a tank lurching across the Somme. I won the Cadbury’s National Children’s poetry award when I was eighteen which encouraged me to continue writing and think that somehow someday I might get a book out.  I went on a walkabout in my twenties – drifting through various styles and thematic territories – and only really found a mature voice in my thirties.  I tell my students I would have worked things out a lot quicker if I had took a Degree with a creative writing component embedded in it.   But it did make me think long and hard about how poems work, which I’ve tried to get across in my teaching.

***

2. Where do your ideas tend to come from?

Usually if an idea stays with me for two or three years I get round to writing it down.  I spent a fair degree of my twenties writing about ‘difficult’ men, which culminated in me (quite by accident) taking a writer-in-residence job at a prison in the late 90s.  Since 2004 I’ve thought more in terms of sequences rather than individual poems.  I wanted to write about the landscape of Sheffield so I pieced together a series of poems about the River Don.  I wrote a sequence of poems about becoming a father for the first time.  Last year I was drawn to the world of Pre-Reformation wall art in English churches and found a way of dramatizing the battle over religious beliefs in sixteenth and seventeenth century England.   I also produce commissioned pieces, or work on collaborative projects with other artists so I sometimes write to a brief as well.

***

3. Are there particular ideas or themes that interest you or that keep resurfacing in your work?

I tend to write about conflict in relationships between men.  I also compose all kinds of love poems and celebratory works.  I’m also drawn to landscapes – particularly the urban fringe where countryside and city roads/settlements rub up against each other – there’s a lot of that in Sheffield.

***

4. Do you plan your writing?

Yes, increasingly so: particularly if I’m writing a sequence of poems.  I have in mind what is going to happen from poem to poem. I usually know – before I sit down to create an individual work – how it will start and how it will end. The most difficult poems are the ones where I don’t know how they are going to conclude.

***

5. Do you have a writing routine or any ‘rituals’ that you follow?

I’ve become less precious about writing routines over time, particularly as I have three children under the age of 6 to enjoy the company of.  I’m usually at my most productive between the hours of 8 p.m. and midnight.  I’m tired and my mind begins to slip: I start making creative mistakes.  I play with language more productively in the evening. I also see the process in terms of absorbing experiences throughout the day and then the stuff starts leaking out at night – like a soaked sponge being squeezed. Basically I write now when I can get the time.

***

6. Who are your favourite writers?

I wrote my PhD on Thom Gunn.  I still enjoy dipping into his work.  There’s a triumvirate of Irish writers (and contemporaries) – Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon – that I always take pleasure in reading.  I also greatly admire Ken Smith’s urban demotic.  Elizabeth Bishop always entrances me with her technical gifts and clarity of tone.

***

7. Do you have an ideal reader?

The Safe House was reviewed by Rosie Bailey in Envoi magazine.  She was very attentive to the poems. It’s the finest review I’ve so far received and probably the most complimentary I will ever garner.  She ‘got’ what I was trying to do straight away.  So if there were a thousand or so Rosie Bailey’s out there I would be very happy.

***

8. What are you working on now?

I like the way musicians, particularly folk musicians, put two or three songs together to create a running ‘set’ of tunes.  I wanted to find an equivalent in poetry so I’ve started writing pieces that couple poems together.  I’m trying to write in a strictly metrical fashion with rhyme/half-rhyme underpinning the works.  I’m about a third of the way through creating this sequence.

***

9. What are you reading at the moment?

In no particular order: Ruth Padel’s Darwin: A Life in Poetry, Jim Perrin’s The Climbing Essays, Matthew Francis’s Mandeville, Katharine Towers’ The Floating Man, Sinead Morrissey’s Through the Square Window, Mark Goodwin’s Back of a Vast.

***

10. What piece of advice would you give to new writers?

John Gallas (a fine, inventive poet) once wrote to me: ‘Keep bloody writing.’   That’s a pretty pithy appraisal of part of the process.  Also read widely.  Always give yourself time to reflect on your work, whether that means turning a phrase over in your head or spending an hour or two re-drafting work on the page.   If someone says you are rubbish go on to prove him or her wrong.

Ten Questions with Adam Marek

Adam Marek

1. How and when did you get started as a writer?

I’ve been writing since I was a kid. When I was 11 I was highly commended in the WHSmith’s young writers’ competition for a story I wrote about a witch that lived in a cave. I illustrated it myself with gold ink. I wrote a novella for a school project when I was 13 about a boy who could turn into a dragon. When I was 19, I started writing almost every day, working on a children’s novel and short stories and scripts – I have a stack a metre high in the attic that no one will ever see.

2. Where do your ideas tend to come from?

From the meeting of new experiences with old preoccupations. I think that the more you write, the more your unconscious mind gets the idea that you want it to come up with original ideas, and so it works away at them in the background until it finds a pleasing combination of known things, which it melds to form something new and unknown. My unconscious most often delivers these very welcome parcels when I’m lost in mundane tasks – especially showering, washing up and driving. I have a crayon in the shower which I sometimes use to write ideas on the tiles.

3. Are there particular ideas or themes that interest you or that keep resurfacing in your work?

I’m very interested in perception and the mind, mutations, nature, monsters, sci-fi b-movies. There’s almost always something of my own life in my work, so I write a lot about parenthood and relationships, in combination with the themes I just mentioned.

4. Do you plan your writing?

Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. With short stories, I often just sit down and enjoy discovering the story as I’m writing it. Then I’ll plan and plot as I’m rewriting it, to make it work better. So with shorts, I’ll often come up with the raw material, and then apply structure to it in subsequent drafts. With novels, I work differently. A couple of years ago I made the mistake of starting work on a novel idea before I knew where it was going. I only had a beginning. I wrote 70k words before realising it wasn’t going anywhere and was fundamentally flawed. I had to abandon it. With the novel I’m working on at the moment, I planned it thoroughly. I know exactly where it ends up, but I’m allowing myself to explore new ideas as I’m writing it, and then replotting. It seems to be working okay so far. In one way though, every bit of work feels like the first time, and I approach it slightly differently every time.

5. Do you have a writing routine or any ‘rituals’ that you follow?

I get up at six in the morning and write for an hour every day – I have a day job and two kids, so this is the only way to get writing done. I always start writing with a fresh cup of tea (tea is the writing vitamin). I like Moleskine notebooks, and I carry a Spacepen in my pocket everywhere I go – I hope one day to actually get to use it in zero gravity.

6. Who are your favourite writers?

Haruki Murakami is the only writer whose books I’ll rush out for on the first day of release. I like Margaret Atwood, JG Ballard, George Orwell, Will Self, Ian McEwan. I have a lot of favourite books where I’ve only read one book by that author: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, Perfume by Patrick Suskind, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Watership Down by Richard Adams, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

7. Do you have an ideal reader?

Someone who eagerly awaits my next book.

8. What are you working on now?

I’m working on a novel, half of which is set on the International Space Station, so I’m doing a lot of research as I write it. Right now I’m about 50k words into the latest draft. I’m not sure how many drafts I’ll write before I’m happy with it.

9. What are you reading at the moment?

I just finished Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, which was awesome. I read and listened to it both as a paperback and an audiobook, alternately. Midnight’s Children goes straight into my top ten favourite books. I listen to a lot of audiobooks on my iPhone so I can still read when I’m driving, walking, stretching. Right now I’m reading The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham and listening to The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century, edited by John Brockman – it’s a collection of 25 essays from leading scientists about their predictions for the next 50 years in different fields of scientific study.

10. What piece of advice would you give to new writers?

Write regularly and relentlessly. Never think you’re good enough. Never give up. Don’t invest all your happiness in getting published – it can take a long time, and then right away you automatically invest your happiness in the next time you get published. Enjoy the process – its pains and its delights. Decide right now that you are a writer – it’s much easier to write knowing that you’re a writer, than trying to write as someone who wants to be a writer – confidence shows on the page, but be humble too. Enter competitions – deadlines are great motivation. Go to book festivals and see other writers read their work and talk about it. Read interviews with writers. Study their methods, then find your own. There’s a great quote in How Fiction Works by James Wood from Flaubert talking to Maupassant (and I’m not trying to sound wanky quoting Flaubert – I’ve never read Flaubert, it’s just a great thought): ‘There is a part of everything which is unexplored, because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has in it something which is unknown’. Find something unfamiliar in the familiar and show it to the world because we all want to see it.

Adam Marek’s debut short story collection, Instruction Manual for Swallowing, was published by Comma Press in 2007. It was nominated for the Frank O’Connor Prize – the biggest prize in the world for a collection of short stories. His stories have also appeared in Prospect magazine and in anthologies including When it Changed and The New Uncanny from Comma Press, two Bridport Prize collections and the British Council’s New Writing 15. He is working on his first novel. A new short story by Adam can be found in Matter 9. Visit Adam’s website at www.adammarek.co.uk 

Ten Questions with Mike Harris

Mike Harris

1. How and when did you get started as a writer?

Teaching at a Manchester Comp in the late 70s and running a big, mostly female school drama group with a colleague and friend. Lots of good girl actors, very few (none, actually) scripts with lots of good female parts so we devised and wrote a play about the militant suffragettes and took it to the Edinburgh Fringe.

2. Where do your ideas tend to come from?

The pressure to have ideas in order to sell scripts and maintain myself in the manner to which I have grown accustomed. Otherwise, from books, news events, etc., rarely if ever from my own life, which is too unutterably dull to wish to inflict on the world.

3. Are there particular ideas or themes that interest you or that keep resurfacing in your work?

Dunno. Is humour a theme? I think detecting themes and so forth is a literary critic’s job and I wouldn’t want to scab on them. Otherwise, how would they earn a living?

4. Do you plan your writing?

Yes. Planning is essential if you are working to a deadline and neither you nor other people involved get paid if you don’t deliver on time.

5. Do you have a writing routine or any ‘rituals’ that you follow?

An intricate and finely honed system of work avoidance which includes making cups of coffee, rolling and smoking fags, replying to unimportant e-mails and answering questions about my routines and rituals.

6. Who are your favourite writers?

In no particular order: Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Austen, Sterne, Chekhov, Beckett, Joyce, Dickens, Doris Lessing, Evelyn Waugh – I could go on. One of the best recent novels I’ve read is Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

7. Do you have an ideal reader?

I’m a script writer, the only people who read my stuff are editors and producers and they do not inhabit the realm of the ideal. As for audiences: the one’s who turn on or turn up.

8. What are you working on now?

A play about gang violence for a TIE company. Think ‘The Wire’ for kiddywinks.

9. What are you reading at the moment?

Would you believe Derrida’s ‘Of Grammatology?’ Well actually, I just finished it. Not unlike mud-wrestling an octopus, except what an octopus would have to say while he squeezed the life out of your brain would be more sensible. My excuse is I’m doing a part-time PhD for fun, either that or I’m certifiable. Derrida is the very opposite of what any writing or thinking should be. Mystagogic, pretentious, opaque, untrue and buried deep within its own fundament.

10. What piece of advice would you give to new writers?

Don’t listen to advice from weary old writers. But if you really must:

1. persist.

2. don’t listen to the praise or criticism of anyone you don’t trust enough to tell you that your work is crap when it is.

3. don’t give up the day job unless.

4. you instantly get a new one teaching writing part-time in a university.

Mike Harris is a scriptwriter and theatre director with something over 100 scripts broadcast or performed. These include radio drama, TV drama, professional touring theatre, theatre in education, youth theatre and large scale community plays. He teaches script part time on the MA in Writing at Sheffield Hallam and has held writer’s residency at University College Cork, HMP Wakefield and The Lemon Tree Arts Centre Aberdeen. A script extract by Mike appears in Matter 8.

Ten Questions with Alison MacLeod

 

Alison MacLeod (photo by Kate MacLeod)

Ten Questions with Jane Rogers

Jane Rogers

1. How and when did you get started as a writer?

I always wrote as a child, and had things published in school mags, university mags, and wrote for a regular performance evening at university. My first proper publication was a short story in Spare Rib magazine when I was 21. I wrote my first novel while teaching half-time; put it away for a year because I thought it was no good, then reread it and cut it by a third. I sent it to 2 agents: one rejected it and the other, Pat Kavanagh, took it on. She sold it the following week to Robert McCrum at Faber.

2. Where do your ideas tend to come from? 

It’s random – sometimes things I’ve read, or conversations; often places are important (eg. Australia in Promised Lands,  and Raasay, in Island). Often the plots of existing plays or stories or fairytales are important (again, Island, where I took ideas from The Tempest, and used a number of fairytales, and based the plot itself on the fairy-tale idea of transformation.)  History is a good source for me too – both Mr Wroe’s Virgins and Promised Lands grew out of an interest in a particular historical moment or event.

3. Are there particular ideas or themes that interest you or that keep resurfacing in your work?

Yes, although I often don’t realise it is the same theme until I am well into the novel! I guess obsessions are relations between parents and children, or between children and parents (and there often seem to be lost, abandoned, or strangely powerful children); and idealism (that is to say, the effects of idealism, or of having a set of passionately held convictions, on the world of the protagonist. Thus an interest, in at least two of the novels, in colonialism).

4. Do you plan your writing?

Of course. But the plan is constantly changing and evolving as I work, so I am regularly dumping plans.

5. Do you have a writing routine or any ‘rituals’ that you follow?

Not really, though I know my best writing happens first thing in the morning, so I try to organise my working life around that.

6. Who are your favourite writers?

Dostoevsky, Alice Munro, Charlotte Bronte, Philip Roth, J.M. Coetzee, Raymond Carver, Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Taylor; and on and on. It is a bit random – I love reading and like different writers in different moods. Currently I am discovering Flannery O’Connor and loving her.

7. Do you have an ideal reader?

No.

8. What are you working on now?

Just finished a novel, The Testament of Jessie Lamb.

9. What are you reading at the moment?

Flannery O’Connor short stories, and Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel.

10. What piece of advice would you give to new writers?

Always leave as long as possible between finishing a draft and rereading it; the longer you leave it, the more objective you can be when working out what’s wrong with it.

Jane Rogers was born in London in 1952 and lived in Birmingham, New York State (Grand Island) and Oxford, before doing an English degree at Cambridge University. She taught English for six years before the publication of her first novel, Separate Tracks. Since then she has written seven novels, original television and radio drama, and adapted work (her own and other writers’) for radio and TV. In 1994 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Work as an editor includes anthologies of new writing, and a reference guide to fiction. She has taught writing to a wide range of students, and is currently Professor of Writing on the MA course at Sheffield Hallam University. Jane lives near Manchester with her partner and two children, making occasional forays to Australia, where her family live. She published a short story in Matter 4.