Guest week: When Jo Met Susan
'...the corn hasn’t stopped popping...'
Hi everyone,
‘Guest week’ was supposed to be last week, but after the symposium I was knocked off my feet and into bed by a nasty bout of flu – so, very little happened at all. It was more like ‘flu week’. Let’s try again!
Before we meet today’s guests, I want to quickly mention that I am considering bringing back “hybrid” publishing via our Lendal Press imprint. This was a popular model once upon a time, in which publisher and author agree on a budget and go halves on it – the author gets the full independent publishing “service”, if you will, and the publisher gets a new project to complete with only half the financial risk (and, crucially at the moment, funding for outside help to circumvent my dodgy eyes). If this sounds like something you might be interested in, get in touch via whatever method you prefer and share a few details about your project. No guarantees of course, but let’s talk!
Susan Furber is the author of two Valley Press novels, The Essence of an Hour (2021) and We Were Very Merry (2023), which long-term subscribers to this blog may remember me interviewing her about last December. Jo Brandon will be a newer name for many of you, but shouldn’t be; she’s been a Valley Press author since her debut poetry pamphlet Phobia (2012, not currently in print), and has two full collections to her name: The Learned Goose (2015) and Cures (2021). I first reached out to Jo suggesting a pamphlet just a few months after I started my career at Valley Press, so she is a true “VP OG” (as the kids might say).
Susan and Jo responded to my call, back in May, for Valley Press authors to interview each other, and were paired up without previously knowing each other – one poet and one novelist, although of course Susan loves poetry and Jo is working on multiple novels, as we’ll hear! Here’s what happened “when Susan met Jo”…
JB: Susan, I absolutely adore both The Essence of an Hour and We Were Very Merry. Can you tell us about your writing journey for your first book?
SF: When I was nineteen, I read James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls. Before reading Joyce and O’Brien, I had not known one could write about the loss of their Catholic faith and have that mirror their loss of innocence. I had had an idea for a novel earlier that year – something about a toxic female friendship – and so when I was sent home from university over Thanksgiving break with mono (or glandular fever as it is known in the UK), I set out to write my own version of The Country Girls, about two American Catholic girls growing up in the conservative society of small town America in the early 1940s.
I wrote the first draft in a month, and I revisited the book for several years, working to improve scenes and characters, particularly trying to understand the character of Lara. After living with the character for six years, I realized I had to rewrite it from scratch. So, the version you read of Essence has elements of my nineteen-year-old self, particularly in the voice of teenage Lillie, but it is based on the fully revised draft I wrote at twenty-five/twenty-six. I needed that slightly advanced perspective of my twenties to write the older Lillie who is looking back and narrating.
JB: And at what point did you know you would write a sequel?
SF: Quite early on, actually. I wrote a short story chronicling what happened to Lillie in her failed marriage a few months after I finished the first draft of what became Essence, simply because her voice would not leave me alone. I don’t think I have the original draft of the story anymore, but the first line of Merry comes from it.
The Country Girls is also a trilogy, so I was inspired by its structure to keep Lillie’s story going. And like The Lonely Girl (the second novel in O’Brien’s trilogy), I wanted my second book to be about Lillie’s second major love affair and show how she makes the same mistakes in new ways.
I did attempt to write an early draft of Merry at twenty-five while still working on Essence, trying to see if the two novels could be combined, but it didn’t work. Finally, once Essence was in production at Valley Press in the autumn of 2020, I woke up one morning and understood what would happen in the sequel. I wrote the first draft in a month.
However, as someone who is solely a novelist, I am in awe of writers, such as yourself, who can create a short story within the form of poetry. It was William Faulkner in his Paris Review ‘Art of Fiction’ interview who said:
“Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.”
At what age did you start to write poetry, and how did you first go about locating your unique voice?
JB: I really admire Faulkner’s writing, but I would probably have to take issue with his suggestion that novel writing is the least demanding of the written forms – but I do think each form ensnares its writer in different ways. Where I come in line with Faulkner’s assessment is that poetry was the first form that I had a determination to express myself through, and I loved it straight away. As a child I would wander through the woods and when lines of poetry would come to me I’d have to recite them over and over so I didn’t forget them before I got home. Poetry felt like the most natural and succinct way for me to tell the stories I wanted to tell.
There is a very specific magic to writing a poem and I think in childhood the spell-like wonder of playfully slotting words and sounds together can make you feel powerful in a way you infrequently get to feel as a child. I remember walking around my primary school narrating my day as though I was a character in a story and thinking – is this normal? As a teenager I read Orwell’s essay ‘Why I Write’ and was comforted by his description of his “making up of a continuous ‘story’ about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind”.
SF: One thing that has impressed me so much about your work, both in The Learned Goose and Cures, is how quickly you can deliver an entire scene and get into the psychological depth of your characters, particularly in poems such as ‘Catherine of Siena’, which is only 12 lines, and in slightly expanded poems such as ‘We Were Engaged in the Summer of ’56’. How do you find your way into the heart of your subject with such brevity?
JB: Thank you for the compliment! I think I am really drawn to character, so when I write about a real or imagined character (Catherine of Siena, say, or the imagined 1950s housewife of ‘We were engaged…’) there is usually some emotional truth that hooks me. I think people are such complex puzzles that it would be foolish for me to try to reconstruct them in their entirety but I can have a good go at examining a piece; an episode.
SF: On that, I did wonder, are there any poems you have written that you would like to revisit and not rewrite but reimagine, continuing the story you originally created?
JB: I often want to explore the characters in my poems more than once – particularly when they are historical figures about whom we know lots of interesting things, but I rarely do because so often it is one episode, or phrase or visual representation of them that draws me in and I find that strength of connection difficult to achieve that more than once. One exception is Mary Tofts – her story is so complex. I explored it once through a poem and once through song lyrics (I wrote the lyrics for an album called Lemon Verbena with composer and vocalist Ella Jarman-Pinto).
I do often explore particular themes over and over again from different angles. After The Learned Goose I thought I was finished with sapient animals and yet ‘I was Mr Hoare’s Pig-man, 1817’ crept into my next collection Cures. I do so much research that sometimes it takes a while for things to fully percolate, so I might think I’ve moved on to a new area of interest but actually the corn hasn’t stopped popping on my previous subject.
I was incredibly excited to hear that you are working on a third book about Lillie. Can you tell us more?
SF: The third novel is set between 1968 and 1969, and explores Lillie’s return to America after two decades of living abroad and the impact this has on her relationships with Lara and Mallory. It is also about the burgeoning Women’s Lib movement, most notably the abortion speak-outs in New York City. Like the third novel in The Country Girls trilogy, Girls in Their Married Bliss, I am playing around with both Lillie and Lara narrating the story.
I thought I would need to wait until I’m roughly Lillie’s age in the third novel to write it – as the first two novels were written when I was the age Lillie is meant to be – but I’m currently thirty-two, and it turns out I don’t have the patience to wait thirteen years!
JB: One of the things I love most about your novels is how richly you evoke the period. How did you set about this? Was there lots of research involved?
SF: It mostly comes from novels published in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, namely novels written by women for what would have been considered an intelligent middle-brow audience. While rewriting Essence from scratch, I read Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Bowen and Elizabeth Taylor, who are all British writers, of course, but they gave me a better sense of how people spoke sixty, seventy years ago, especially women. I think as a society we have this assumption that middle-class women did not have premarital sex and did not swear until the mid-1960s, and these misconceptions were corrected for me by their work. In terms of American authors, Mary McCarthy and her novel The Group largely informed my imagining of Vassar and women’s higher education at this time, as did Sylvia Plath’s journals and The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan.
You too have written about so many different historical women, particularly real ones such as Catherine of Siena as well as Julian of Norwich and Emily Brontë. What drew you to the lives of the women you have thus far written – given that they are from different times and cultures – and are there any historical women you have in mind that you haven’t yet written but would like to?
JB: I love the variety and volume of incredible stories about incredible women that there are and the knowledge that there are so many more unknown, unheard, unrecorded stories still. I think the women I am drawn to are all special, but there is also something relatable about them and their experiences too. I am often drawn to women with a strong sense of vocation and I see it as a chain of storytelling, of myth-making and record-keeping to keep these women in our memories and on our mind. I’m drawn to them because I think they’re important.
There are lots more women I’d love to write about. Sometimes I find someone amazing, then realise I’m not the right person to explore that story – but I make sure to mention them widely so they can find the right person. At the moment I have groups of women I am interested in writing about from periods of history that I think are explored less.
SF: I also wondered what research you undertake to write these historical persons? What do you think it is about the past that appeals to you as a writer?
JB: I think as writers we often have a magpie eye for shiny glints of a story buried in a footnote, or a small article in the news, or a tucked-away exhibit, so they are often my starting points. Research-wise I usually start with an internet rabbit hole for the new topic, then I raid my bookshelves to see what I already have, and then create a reading list which I buy and borrow. If I know a friend or a friend of a friend that has knowledge in that area I reach out to them; I also visit related places and exhibitions, or if it is something vaguely biographical I dig out old photos and notebooks. That immersion in a topic is a part of the writing process I really love. I am a fan of notes at the back of poetry collections and the acknowledgement pages in novels because I love gaining insight into other people’s research too. I do love the treasure hunt of following a historical figure through the written record, and I’d love to develop my research skills further.
SF: You frequently write in homage to different poets and writers, but also take inspiration from paintings and other works of art. To put a somewhat different spin on the usual question, which artists who are not writers have inspired your work?
JB: Ooooh this is tricky because so many of the artists I love are also writers like Leonora Carrington or are part of a group filled with both writers and artists and it feels like there is a mutuality there. I often get inspired by a piece of art but not necessarily the artist ,so a number of my poems are ekphrastic pieces where I’ve reacted to an artwork rather than having been inspired by the artist.
I’ve definitely been inspired by the wider Pre-Raphaelite movement, the bold visual symbolism and literary refencing, the way they in turn looked to the past for inspiration. I have been inspired by Gustav Klimt too and was lucky enough to receive a commission to write a poem inspired by his work. I am also very inspired by portraiture – the relationship of sitter and artist. The artist’s perspective on an individual. Barbara Hepworth is someone whose work makes me feel very deeply but I haven’t attempted to write in response to her work yet.
Both your books are titled after literary quotes – how did you come to choose these? It also made me wonder, which writers and books do you feel have inspired your writing?
SF: Sam Keenaghan, who was my first editor at Valley Press, found the F. Scott Fitzgerald quote. In my initial call with Sam and Jamie I mentioned that perhaps the title should come from a literary quote like Good Morning, Midnight. They both liked this idea, but it was Sam who suggested it be something from Fitzgerald as his influence on the style of the first novel was clear. She suggested a few quotes, finding ‘the essence of an hour’ from a poem he wrote while at Princeton. It instantly felt right.
With the second book, I had considered having another Fitzgerald quote, but the obvious contender, ‘the beginning and end of everything’, didn’t seem to reflect the more mature voice of twenty-eight-year-old Lillie.
Instead I chose a line from a poem by another writer Lillie admires – Edna St. Vincent Millay, who like Lillie attended Vassar and lived in Europe for many years. ‘We were very merry’ comes from her poem ‘Recuerdo’, which in Spanish means ‘memory’. I thought it fit well because Merry is a novel about memory, and Lillie’s uncertainty of whether she was happy with her husband John, but also whether other memories with Teddy, Lara and Mallory were as positive as she first thinks.
There are certain novels I reread each time I am working on a new book. These are the novels that challenge me to be a stronger writer and continue to teach me about style and voice, and how to manage characters and dialogue in relation to overall theme. It is a largely American list – The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night by Fitzgerald, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates – but also Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh and The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante.
JB: Could you tell us more about your publishing journey with Valley Press?
SF: I also work in publishing as a book editor, and any time in my twenties when dealing with a difficult and demanding author I would think, ‘One day when I’m a published writer, I will never treat my publisher like this.’ I hope I’ve lived up to this!
Valley Press is a lovely publisher that cares about its authors and considers their input while also having a firm hand. For instance, Jamie was brilliant in saying no, I don’t think the original title I suggested for the first book worked, and Jo Haywood made Merry a far stronger novel with her editorial comments and suggestions.
I also wondered how you approach arranging and editing a collection of poetry? Is the ordering something you keep in mind while writing? What role has Valley Press played in the editing and ordering of your collections?
JB: For me the ordering of a collection is really significant and I think about it quite deeply when arranging the poems. I don’t think about the order when writing individual poem,s but I tend to have quite obvious themes running through my work and I write in quite intense periods, so I often feel the poems have a clear relationship with one another and can tell another more subtle, abstract narrative through the collection. I am very influenced with how music albums are ordered too and as a teenager I would sit (in my electric blue inflatable chair) and pour over song lyrics and think about how the songs fed into one another tonally and lyrically. I have tried, probably, to replicate that with my poetry.
In terms of how I practically do it, I always end up printing all the poems out and spreading them on the floor (my drafts often have paw prints from my cat all over them). Sometimes my partner or close friends will read the collection too and give feedback on the order, which is really useful. Jamie at Valley Press is very skilled at giving feedback; we will discuss a collection via email, and have had some magical in-person meetings where we scribble on pages and quibble commas. We met once at a little vintage café in Kings Cross where Jamie suggested a different title for one of my poems, but at the time I felt very strongly I liked the one I had chosen and he let me have my head but I must confess now that Jamie was right and whenever I see that poem I think ‘Jo, you should have listened to Jamie!’ He’ll enjoy that!
Another thing I wanted to ask you about was around Lillie, who has such a distinctive voice. Both of your novels are full of whip-smart dialogue – how did you craft this? How important is the dialogue to you?
SF: When I read, my eye gravitates towards the dialogue. I also love listening to people speak, noticing their verbal ticks and turns of phrases. While I cannot imitate an accent while learning a foreign language, I do think I am good at mimicking the way other people speak when it comes to writing.
I like to show who characters are through what they say or don’t say. When writing a first draft, I tend to have a vague sense of the overall trajectory and what purpose needs to be achieved with each scene, but other than that I like to play. I tend to just put two or three characters in a room together and see what happens – what will they say, how will they respond, how will they explode, etc. In subsequent drafts, I refine and strive to have each character’s voice sound unique in terms of phrasing and sentence structure, and even the way I use punctuation.
What really strikes me about your work is your versatility. The Learned Goose and Cures certainly have similarities in terms of themes and subject matter; however, the collections also feel quite different. The Learned Goose struck me as being sparser, as though you were capturing these ephemeral images in as few words as possible; while Cures, perhaps inspired by the poetry and historical persons it references, feels more traditional in structure. How do you feel you have grown and changed as an artist, and what might you like to experiment with next?
JB: I think you’re right that each of my collections has a different character to it, and I think there are clear shifts in style. I think that comes down to a variety of internal and external factors.
Cures was written after I had my child and so there was a change for me in how frequently I was sharing my work and where I was sharing it, so I would describe those poems as leaning more heavily on the page and their being read rather than heard. I was writing my first novel then too, which is mirrored in the prose poems included. I was reading a greater mix of pre-20th century poetry too so that was also an influence.
In The Learned Goose the poems are generally shorter, but I had got obsessed with writing a longer line – to the point where it altered the design of the book which is a pleasing square shape rather than the rectangle of my other collections (and most books). I was performing the Goose poems a lot more, memorising them for sets so I suspect the brevity of some of them is influenced by that too.
In terms of how I continue to change, I hope I carry on learning and experimenting. I have become a bit more sincere in my autobiographical poems – able to be emotionally honest in a way I couldn’t have been 20 years ago, but I also get in my own way a lot more too, so I try to keep reminding myself of the playfulness and wonder of writing poetry rather than just chasing a poem I can submit for publication.
SF: I’m really intrigued to hear more about how performing your poems feeds into your creative process. How much editing happens in response to performances, for instance?
JB: I tend to edit by reading my writing out loud from the first draft. Even with prose I read it all out loud. It must be really annoying for my family but I have always just needed to hear how it sounds. Because I tend to, at least, part-memorise my poems to perform/share them it means I have a sort of rehearsal period for every poem too and I find that if there is a line I really can’t fix in my mind or I keep saying differently then perhaps that is a strong hint that it isn’t right. When I go to open mic readings or groups/courses and share drafts, hearing the poems in that shared space and seeing audience reaction really helps me work out weak or flabby bits of writing and I find that incredibly helpful. I haven’t been sharing much work recently and writing this has reminded me how valuable it is – so I will start doing more!
I have scribbled down so many wonderful quotes from your novels, but one that really captured my imagination in The Essence of an Hour was ‘you can’t choose the moments you get trapped in’. I wanted to hear a bit more from you about what that line means to you and ask whether, even if you could choose, could one moment ever be enough?
SF: It’s a line that comes originally from my teenage diary. It was an idea that was very important to me when I was the age Lillie is in the first novel. I used to think that some part of us remained physically in places of importance to us, and that we concurrently lived those moments again and again while living our lives in real time. However, I only thought about it in a romantic sense and as moments that we purposely choose to get stuck in, rather than often what happens is we remain in traumatic moments as well and experience overwhelming flashbacks. And both situations are pertinent to Lillie – she is trapped in certain moments that she keeps coming back to, such as the seemingly romantic ones – the day at the lake with Teddy in the first novel, walking around Paris smoking cigarettes before dawn, spending afternoons drinking white wine along the Seine with John – but also the traumatic ones, perhaps most importantly the attempted rape at the beginning of the first novel, the memory of her mother’s funeral and what happens between Lara and her at the end of Essence, which I won’t mention explicitly to avoid giving spoilers.
At nineteen when I wrote the first draft, yes, I did believe that one moment was enough. Now, no, especially as the moments we choose evolve as we age. What was the most precious moment to me at nineteen I would not like to live again now, and while I could choose a moment at thirty-two – I very clearly know what it would be – I am aware that this may change as well. And I think this is part of Lillie’s journey, learning that many moments exist and that memory is slippery, and even our associations with happy memories can change.
JB: As a reader I feel that Lillie has such a strong voice and an independent mind and yet she often defines herself, quite self-consciously, in relation to the men in her life. In We Were Very Merry Lillie says: ‘we needed to speak of our men, and in doing so speak about ourselves’. I just wondered if you could expand on this element of Lillie’s character?
SF: There is a quote I read when I was at university, but have no idea where, so I am probably misremembering it. However, it was something very similar to the line you quoted about how for the majority of history, women had to define themselves through the men in their lives and the work they did, so when speaking about what men they might marry, they were not so much discussing men but the options available for their own lives.
In Essence, Lillie is living in a conservative American suburb pre-Second Wave feminism, and has been taught that her duty is to marry and have children, to be a good wife and mother, and not to privilege seeking a career that will make use of her talents. She works towards having a different life, but she is still limited by her time. I think she is also afraid to overthrow the values of her Catholic American childhood completely, so while she can make bold choices and seek independence, she still believes she needs a man to open more possibilities for her.
It's such an interesting line for you to have picked up on because it is at the heart of all three novels. How can these women see themselves separate from the men in their lives; how might they dare to? And what are the ramifications on a woman’s life when she chooses the wrong man to marry, not just emotionally and psychologically, but especially at this time, financially?
JB: There is a very tangible restlessness in Lillie that I really related to and which I feel is shared by some of my other favourite literary characters, such as Jo from Little Women, Esther from The Bell Jar, and Lily from The House of Mirth. Often it feels like there is a correlation between this restlessness and their creativity. They are women that I feel leave opportunity to rewrite themselves and I wondered what you thought of this in relation to Lillie?
SF: For me, Lillie lives between chaos and structure. She is very strict about how she chooses to remember events and feelings, trying to regulate when she allows herself to recall certain thoughts and episodes. She believes that what makes her superior to Lara is that while Lara is more fluid, adapting her personality to the more dominant people around her, Lillie knows who she is, whether she likes herself or not.
And yet, I agree, she is restless. She is attracted to chaos and passion, to be constantly on the move, reinventing herself. In the second novel, she no longer wants to be defined by her upbringing and past, and so she uses her knowledge of narrative structure from all the novels she’s read to try to reshape what has happened to her.
For a character like Lillie, so much of her life is lived in her imagination and her memory. I think she would be particularly drawn to some of the women characters you write about and certainly the locations. Cures includes both ‘Crow Hill Bog Burst’ (after Emily Brontë) and ‘In Search of Heathcliff…’ Although I know you are not originally from Yorkshire, you have called it home for many years. How do you think living in Yorkshire has inspired your writing and what do you think it is about the Yorkshire landscape that appeals to so many literary-minded people, even those who have never visited?
JB: At risk of sounding like I’m on commission for the Yorkshire tourism board – I just think it is an exceptionally beautiful and varied county. It feels like home. I’ve moved around quite a bit and there is something that just settles me, like a much-needed cuppa, when I’m in Yorkshire. There are a number of places locally that just bring me instant joy and elevate my mood. Walking along the canal in Saltaire, the cobbled hill at Haworth, the expanse of Ilkley Moor, old shopping arcades in Leeds, the abundance of Georgian mansions at Heath Common.
That being said, I do have touchstone places across Lincolnshire and London too and places I’ve visited often like Corfu and Venice. Some places really seep into your bones. I do feel drawn to the rich literary legacy in Yorkshire. I studied Creative Writing at Bretton Hall, which was a creative arts campus set in a Palladian mansion in the grounds of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and it was such a romantic and inspiring place – I think that’s when my love and association of creativity with Yorkshire first started.
Being an American long-settled in the UK – are there any American authors that you feel deserve a wider readership in the UK?
SF: This is such a lovely question, and one I have not been asked before, so thank you! Carson McCullers is one of my favourites as mentioned. She writes about the pain of loneliness better than any writer I have read, but often she is ignored in favour of other Southern Gothic writers such as Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor. I think Susan Sontag’s novels are underappreciated as well, especially The Volcano Lover. Susanna Moore, Dorothy Barker, Dorothy Alison and Jane Bowles are authors I discovered mostly through browsing at The Strand in New York, and all demand to be read for their style. And Richard Yates – Revolutionary Road and Easter Parade are the novels I wish I could have written, and in many ways keep trying to write.
I want to go back to ‘In Search of Heathcliff…’ because I think it is a very funny poem, with such lines as ‘ticks do not care if you are a romantic’ and the entire last stanza, but in your more serious poems, you still find a lightness and humour, such as in ‘To Dust’ in The Learned Goose. What role do you think humour plays in your work?
JB: I think humour is a necessary bit of armour for navigating the world and I’m not sure I’d have as much courage to venture onwards without it. There’s that expression ‘if I don’t laugh, I’ll cry’ and I guess that line between the humorous and the mildly tragic is often quite fine.
The first poem I ever wrote was in response to watching the news when I was nine and I remember feeling like I had to write in order to make sense of what I was seeing and hearing. In that news segment there were some horrible bits of news and some lighter, local stories and that for me, then, and still, summarised life. It is a mixed bag. Some good, some bad and perhaps that has continued in my poetry.
Even when I’m exploring bleak subjects like death (as in ‘To Dust’) I still want there to be some humour, some beauty – just one thing that lifts rather than crushes. In real life I can be aggressively Pollyanna about things that go wrong, so my writing is the place where I do feel able to explore the bleak and the cynical; but I think I would be afraid to go all the way down that tunnel without a little light. Also, it just feels good to laugh, doesn’t it?
SF: I agree. I love finding the humour or sometimes the grotesqueness in my characters, which can also be amusing, or at the very least make them seem more human.
I was very excited to hear that you are also working on two novels. What more can you tell us about them so far? Does your approach to writing a novel differ from that of writing a poem?
JB: My first novel is about a dutiful executioner and his criminal wife set in 16th century Germany, which is written in first person from both their perspectives. It is currently called Wanderbirds and was shortlisted for the Northern Writers Award this year, which was a wonderful encouragement to keep writing fiction. The novel I am currently writing is about Medieval pilgrimage, but I am still developing the plot so I won’t say too much in case it all changes.
In terms of how the writing processes differ – I’m still learning that. With my first novel I approached it very much like I would writing a collection of poems, which caused me no end of problems because I started off writing vignettes out of narrative sequence, as and when they came to me, which meant I had a huge jigsaw on my hands at the end. With 40 poems you can spread them on the floor and arrange them in order but this is a rather more chaotic process with 100,000 words of prose!
So for the second, I have spent more time planning and trying to write in a more ordered fashion – so far it is working. In terms of how I use language though, and how I edit, these are all very similar processes for me. A lot of my poems are essentially monologues from the perspective of imagined or historical figures, so in some ways my fiction writing is an extension of that. I tend to intensely research one topic for my novels whereas my poetry allows me to move between lots of topics I’m interested in. I have found the writing stamina is very different and the points of creative gratification are very differently paced. After drafting a poem, even if it has gaps and is pretty scrappy, I feel like I have created something whole – whereas with a novel that feeling doesn’t arrive until I’ve finished an 80,000 word draft, so you have to wait a lot longer for that sense of achievement.
As a novelist, what does a writing day/session look like for you? Where do you most often write?
SF: This has taken years to get right, but for me it is down to having a semblance of an established routine because otherwise I lose motivation. I work full-time in publishing, so I do need to fit in writing alongside my day job. While my ideal writing schedule would look like writing from seven or eight with two cups of coffee until mid-morning, taking a walk, having lunch, reading, then getting back to it from around three or four until six or seven, this only possible on holidays, at least for the time being.
So, I write after work between six and eight, typically three nights each week, and dedicate about three or four hours either on Saturday or Sunday. I like to finish a draft before I go on holiday, so I can print and read through while travelling. I find this especially calming on long-haul flights to America.
I’d also love to ask you, what does your typical writing day look like?
JB: I would so love to be the kind of writer that has a fixed routine and knows exactly what they are aiming for on any given day, but just recently I’ve started to lean into the fact that I am most productive when I let myself go in any direction I need to. So I tend to write in cycles now. Most commonly it means I break my day up into an intense session of writing, reading, and brief edits of my work so far. I often get the fidgets, so I might work in my writing nook, or at the kitchen table, or in the spare room, or cross-legged on the sofa or in a café or library. If I can’t get started I usually need to move spaces.
Some ‘writing days’ I don’t write very much at all. I might read a book whose prose makes me feel motivated to write beautifully too, or research and take notes or visit a related exhibition or location. I often have a period of reading, researching and mulling/daydreaming and then everything clicks into place and I have a burst of writing and I always look forward to that moment. My writing day is often bookmarked by school drop-offs and pick ups and I appreciate having that shape to my day.
SF: It’s been such a pleasure speaking with you today, Jo, and learning more about your approach to your craft. Finally, I wanted to ask, what are you currently reading? And what books are you most looking forward to reading for the rest of the year?
JB: I am currently reading The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands by Sarah Brooks, which I bought after a really interesting author event with Sarah at the Leeds Library, and I am thoroughly engrossed. I am also reading nonfiction: A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages by Anthony Bale, and poetry-wise I have just finished Chris Riddell’s Poems to live your life by, which is a gorgeous anthology of illustrated poems. At the top of my to-be-read pile are: Ancrene Wisse: Guide for Anchoresses, The Ghost Lake by
, The Silence Factory by Bridget Collins, The Scandal of the Century: A thrilling historical biography about the astonishing story of England’s first novel by Lisa Hilton, The Tower by Flora Carr and Suzannah Evans’ latest collection Green.What are you currently reading as well? And do you have any other books at the top of your TBR pile?
SF: Currently I am reading Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Intermezzo. I find Rooney’s work interesting – particularly her adherence to the structure of nineteenth-century novels – but I don’t love it. Quite a few of my favourite living writers published new novels in September and early October, so I am looking forward to reading Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst, Our London Lives by Christine Dwyer Hickey and Small Rain by Garth Greenwell. I also have some recent Oxfam finds on my TBR pile including I Married a Communist by Philip Roth, Colm Tóibín’s first novel The South and Elizabeth Taylor’s At Mrs Lippincote’s.
Wow – thank you to Jo and Susan for setting out such a feast of great literary thinking, and for you too, for reading all the way to the end. I have three more guest posts up my sleeve, and I hope to bring you those later this week. In the meantime, take care of yourselves (and each other), and if you’re in the UK, stay warm!