Parents, poetry, prose and the past
with Caroline Bath and Lydia Fulleylove
Today’s blog is the first example of what I hope will become a regular feature; two Valley Press authors “in conversation”, interviewing each other.
Each interview will feature a pair of authors who have written about similar subjects, and thus be able to consider each other’s work from a unique perspective. As well as giving you twice the value of a solo interview, such posts will be extremely helpful when I am snowed under with other responsibilities, as is very much still the case this week – though I have started work on a new “publishing business” post, with some research behind it, so look out for that soon.
The brave volunteers trying out this new format are Caroline Bath and Lydia Fulleylove. Caroline is the author of The Life We Make, a novel following a troubled family between 1911 and 1941, based to some extent on her own mother’s life story. Lydia’s most recent publication is Ampersand, combining her own poetry and diary entries with her mother’s from WWII, to create a unique discourse across the decades.
Whether you’ve read one, both, or neither of these authors’ works, I think you’ll find the conversation fascinating – and if you’d like a copy of either book, click the links in the previous paragraph to find them in our shop, then use code MAY24 for a 20% discount. Happy reading!
C. Do you consider your mother as primarily muse or correspondent?
L. I think it’s often both. In terms of correspondent, I suppose I wanted to find out about her young life, this other person who was both so familiar and a stranger. As a muse, her diaries offer an endless stimulus to write and material, sparking new ideas. Sometimes it was the rhythm of the prose itself, sometimes it was the sharpness of an image or a reaction with which I identified. And maybe sometimes, my responses to her entries are very close to what I might have said to her in ‘real life’.
C. The closeness of your relationship is reflected in both the diary and the poems, though it’s interesting that only you are able to reflect on your relationship with her and not vice-versa. I guess this makes the passage of time a theme throughout Ampersand.
L. Reflections ‘beyond the grave’ … What pressure – if any – did you feel while writing The Life We Make to stay as close as you could to the known facts of your mother’s life and history?
C. Initially, known facts about real family characters provided a great support and structure for my writing. However, I was conscious that they could also become a stranglehold. It was really only possible to write this book after all of the characters it is based upon were dead. That gave me the freedom I needed to fictionalise and escape from the structure of historical facts and dates I’d set myself. That said, my mother’s own research into her family history and especially a short memoir she wrote of her childhood were of great help for material for certain scenes and incidents, for example the Christmas play that Eva and her sister take part in.
L. I think it’s significant in the same way that I didn’t start to write Ampersand till after my mother’s death. So maybe for both of us we were only able to write with that curious kind of freedom that a parent’s death can bring.
C. In that state of freedom, did you find that your previous poems already matched themes in your mother’s diaries, and did any coincidences surprise you?
L. The obvious one is nature and our mutual delight in it. This has been an integral part of my writing. When I began to read the diaries I was surprised by her sheer delight in nature because as a teenager, I sometimes seemed to be at odds with her in my desire to be out of doors, walking in wild places and she sometimes seemed not to understand my passion for this. She was also very attached to different places in her life – as she shows in her diary entry about Bedford, for instance. I certainly connect to this in relation to particular parts of the Isle of Wight where I feel at ease and at home. Her words ‘Once a place has hold of you…’ inspired my poem with the same title.
Another commonality which emerges is that of depression, which affected me when I was at University; though my writing about it tended to be gloomy notes in my diary! I had no idea of her periods of deep self-doubt and despondency. It was a surprise, because the mother I remember was usually an extremely positive person.
Her entry about her close friend Lynette reminded me of how grief-stricken she was when Lynette died later in my mother’s life. I think that every poet writes about loss in some form and perhaps every poem is a kind of elegy. And more and more, poets write about our destruction of the natural world and experience a kind of solastalgia.
C. Yes, loss is certainly a universal theme for the arts and something we tend to cover up in day-to-day life, except in diaries. The themes of place and connection to place struck me deeply whilst reading – and this encompasses the natural world as well.
L. Place is clearly important in your novel too, but it is the contrast between presence and absence which stood out most for me. Would you say that these are key themes, and how conscious of these were you while writing?
C. It’s interesting that you also mention ‘presence’. I had been strongly aware of absence as a key theme and toyed with many titles which included the idea of absence. However, one of my early reviewers reminded me to emphasise positive aspects of the stories, so hence the title which stresses making one’s life rather than missing out on it (or a person). In terms of presence, I suppose that my aim was to show Eva, and also in parallel, her parents, gradually building lives for themselves, even in a time of war, rather than being defined by their mistakes and losses.
L. That certainly makes sense to me in terms of emphasis. It doesn’t deny absence/loss but emphasises how we cope and create despite change and loss.
L. Which other themes would you identify, maybe ones you weren’t aware of while writing?
C. Secrets and lies come to mind – though I was acutely aware of this as a theme. I was interested in how undercurrents in a family play out, even in subsequent generations. I also became more conscious of a feminist angle to the book as it unfolded, even though I was extremely empathetic to the character of Arthur. I put this down to growing up with my mother’s idealisation of her father and her regret that she never saw him again. My strong feelings, as I wrote about Arthur, did surprise me, especially as I never met my grandfather whom he was based on.
L. I did find Arthur an increasingly sympathetic character, while also appreciating the strength and determination of Agnes and particularly her independence at a time when this was more difficult for women.
C. Going back to the theme of place, can you say more about the theme of home in Ampersand?
L. It’s odd that I haven’t previously considered this as a theme, though of course there are many references in the diary to how she misses home and family. ‘I want to go home.’ Maybe subconsciously I was aware of this. In her entry on 21st December 1942, she writes movingly about her friendship with Nancy and how much she missed her when she was stationed elsewhere. ‘This is one of the worst aspects of the Services, the constant losing of one’s friends.’ I think that my poem in response, ‘Questions to ask the dead or gone’, is probably a key poem in the book which made me consider presence and absence in this context.
C. I guess ‘home’ is about security in the face of change and hanging onto familiar things, and by extension, the people we love. The truth is that there’s no escape from death/absence, so we have to adapt, or die ourselves.
L. This feeling must have been especially powerful when you were writing Arthur’s story and the impact of his parents’ emigration when he was so young. Such a sense of loss and loneliness emerges. And then again for Eva when Arthur disappears. This makes me wonder whose story spoke the most strongly to you in your novel?
C. I think I would have to say Eva’s, especially towards the end of part three where I drew strongly on my own character and my own wishes and desires for my mother’s life. Empathy with my mother also contributed to my writing of Arthur’s story, though I struggled to make Agnes a sympathetic character because of this. I worked hardest on Agnes’s story, though she is still disliked by many of my readers.
L. Not by me. She grew on me! I guess that as writers we will always draw on our own characters which perhaps filter into the text in different ways.
C. The dramatic backdrop of two world wars helped the characterisation in my novel. Pandemic aside, did you find it hard to match the drama of war in your mother’s diaries?
L. Good question – yes! Retrospectively, I think I would have drawn more parallels to the terrible things humanity have done to each other since the war, and perhaps especially now. I was writing much of Ampersand during lockdown and I do set my diary entries against the strictures and dramas of war in the diaries, but the shutting down of everything, the quiet skies … brought more of a sense of peace for some of us.
C. One can only hope that we don’t have the drama of the direct conflict of war to write about I suppose!
L. I was wondering how you negotiated the balance between research and imagination, between fiction and historical accuracy (especially in part 3)? Would you categorise the novel as fictional memoir?
C. Following on from what I’ve just said, as I never knew my grandfather (on whom Arthur is based) or heard much about him, his story is heavily fictionalised. In part three, Eva’s story also becomes more and more fictionalised, as I consciously departed from what my mother told me about her life. Changing her ‘real’ story gave the novel a narrative arc and positive focus. I began to write what I would have wanted for my mother, rather than what may have actually happened to her in 1941, and I drew on my own impulses far more. I wouldn’t categorise the novel as a memoir – from my point of view, it’s fiction, in terms of detailed scene and dialogue.
L. Perhaps categories are more to help publishers sell, and readers buy! Texts can be slippery beasts!
C. And revealing too! Was it challenging to reveal tensions in the mother/daughter relationship?
L. Yes, but also illuminating. With hindsight I can see how her full-time and absorbing work as teacher and lecturer in drama and my passionate concern for environment made for clashes between us. Compromise would have been useful on both sides! I guess there’s a parallel in the way the diaries show how she might respond to authority or what she regarded as ‘Fascist’ rules and restrictions.
C. Is there something here about being the child of a teacher?! I don’t share that, but my son would probably sympathise. What do you think your mother would think of Ampersand?
L. I’d like to think she would have been delighted and keen to discuss. We had always talked about looking at the diaries together, but somehow we didn’t manage this, perhaps partly because we left it too long. I am sad that she didn’t know that I wrote this book in response and yet perhaps, had she been alive, I would have found it much more difficult or impossible to write.
L. So, how might your mother have reacted to The Life We Make – and how did your family react when they read it?
C. My mother died over 10 years ago, and I had no plans to write this book while she was alive. The idea came to me much later, after I had retired as an academic. I think she would have been happy with it, and my brothers say that she is well-portrayed and recognisable. It took them a little while to adapt to the line between fact and fiction because they recognised some characters and events, but they have been happy with the novel as it is, and even complimentary, which is a relief. My main aim for the novel was to portray the long-lasting effect of family secrets and the courage it takes to expose them. In this respect, I would say that the novel has a universal theme.
C. Do you think putting diary extracts and poetry side by side gives readers additional insights that might be replicated more often – and even be considered a new form?
L. I think it offers a way of ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’ and an interplay between texts, which perhaps leaves a space for the reader to create their own interpretations. I worked like this in my previous book, Estuary, which has similar juxtapositions of diary and poems. I can’t imagine now going back to a collection which only includes poems. I’ve come across texts where the boundary between poetry and prose is very thin – Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter comes to mind. My theory is that every piece has a way of being it inclines towards and that once you discover this, the writing is able to say what it needs to.
C. I wondered if you had considered separating the poetry and diary extracts onto separate pages and what that would look like, in terms of form?
L. Well, strangely enough, initially I gave a separate page to each diary entry and each poem. I discussed this with Jo Brandon, my editor, and we decided together that letting them flow into each other gave more of a sense of a conversation between us. There’s something to be said for both approaches though.
L. I suppose a parallel in your novel might be the way you play with and contrast voice and viewpoint. Did this evolve as a conscious plan, or did the different voices emerge as you wrote?
C. I started writing in the third person but became conscious that it lacked immediacy as different character angles developed. Once I experimented with using the first person for Eva, I felt carried along by the thread of her story and that feeling then supported my writing in the third person too. I was conscious that first-person narrative is fashionable and didn’t want to use it purely to be on trend! However, I had to admit that it worked for me as a way to provide a contrasting insight into Eva’s character which then paralleled how she was portrayed in her parents’ stories.
L. The ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ view are both valuable and strengthened by the interplay between them.
C. So, do you write every day as a practice, or wait for inspiration to strike you?
L. I don’t write every day as part of my own creative work, but I certainly write every day – planning workshops, responding to other people’s writing, sometimes writing or working on one of my own poems, writing notes from my observations while running writing workshops in the prison, writing book reviews, and have just completed an article on the creative writing group within prison and the role of response. But thinking about it and being honest, there are definitely days when I don’t write!
L. What about you?
C. Well, I alternate between academic writing, prose and poetry, but am at the end of several projects currently, so in need of inspiration!
C. Poetry, prose – or another joint collection next for you?
L. I am gradually gathering a mix of poems and prose, in response to my prison work – definitely another hybrid, slipping between forms, and maybe genres. When I finished Ampersand, I did think about moving on to the next volumes of my mother’s diaries, post-war and up to my birth. There’s a lot more material there, but it felt like I needed a change – of material and person. I’m not sure whether I’ll return to this later. Perhaps what I wanted to say about my mother’s experiences and my relationship with her is complete, for now at least. I’ve worked as writer-in-residence within the prison system on and off for a long time, and I want to show the gulf between ‘inside’ and public perceptions.
C. Reading this, I immediately thought of your title Ampersand as a title that not only represents a joint work but also a hybrid format. I can understand that you want a change of subject next, but I’m glad to hear that you are still developing a combination of forms and styles.
Your experience of leading writing workshops in prisons is very interesting, in that it both gives you a unique insight into an area often hidden from the eye, but also the responsibility to support others without a voice to express their views. I’d be very interested in a book that opens up this world, though I don’t underestimate the challenge it will be to get the right balance of voices.
L. Thank you. There’s so much I could say about this world. I try to work from my observations as honestly as possible – whatever that is – and to juxtapose different kinds of ‘found’ text with my own writing. And Voice is my current working title. Do you think novels are your natural medium?
C. Well I keep getting asked to write a sequel to the novel but would prefer to do something more contemporary next, possibly set in Milton Keyes where I lived as a young adult. So concrete cows and roundabouts might be my next backdrop!
Thank you so much to Caroline and Lydia for conducting this interview, I think they really got under the skin of each other’s creative process. It was such a nice change to just sit back and read; I already can’t wait for the next one! (Volunteers are welcome, either for this format or a straightforward guest post, if you have an idea that you think would be suitable for the By the Book audience.) In the meantime, take care, and I will see you all soon to crunch some publishing numbers.