The Questions I've Most Been Asked at Author Events - and their answers
The Questions I've Most Been Asked at Author Events - and their answers
Plus podcast news and future author events
News in Brief:
I was super excited to be a guest on
Podcast: Resilience Rising. It was such a lovely, easy chat about survival, exploration with a small e, being resilient. You can listen here:
My next in person gig is a local one. Come along to Gristhorpe Village hall 7pm on November 4th - it’s free
And my next bookshop gig is with the wonderful Pickering Book Tree book shop on November 6th 7.30pm. You can book a free ticket here: Tickets
My nature/landscape memoir, The Ghost Lake has been out a few weeks now and I have had the absolute pleasure of getting in front of audiences at festivals, bookshops and bookclubs. There is something very special about having that live conversation with audience members.
Here are the author questions I most get asked at events. They tend to fall into two categories: questions about the themes in the book and questions about the writing of the book.
About the Book
Do you still have more to write about Paleolake Flixton and The Ghost Lake site?
Right now I feel like I’ve written enough about the area and said what I wanted to say within the context of memoir and belonging etc, but I have no doubt I’ll write more about the area in the future. I’d like to write more non fiction about some of the fascinating stories of the Yorkshire Wolds. One of the themes in the book is ‘exploration with a small e’ - knowing your own landscape personally and finding the stories there. That is still very much what I see myself doing in the future.
How did you navigate what to include of family and friends, did you worry about offending people you knew?
If you are writing memoir, then you are always walking a tightrope between being authentic with your own story, and making sure that the people you love, and the people who are in your life, are protected from the burning eye of the reader. Right from the start I knew I wanted to present people in a positive way, even those who had hurt me (The Unsuitable Man!) I wanted to make sure that the book was nuanced, and I tried not to express anger or bitterness about events that had shaped my life, or people who had shaped my life, while giving myself permission to be angry and bitter as a natural response to some of those events and people. You feel a huge responsibility, when writing memoir, to manage the emotional reaction of other people, but at the end of the day you are telling your own story, and your greatest responsibility is to do that story, and yourself, justice.
How did you decide on the subject of your book?
I think the subject chose me. The Ghost Lake of the title is an extinct glacial lake that drained slowly over thousands of years. All you can really see of the lake now are the villages that ring its long gone edges. The area, despite its very ordinary face, has a huge and fascinating history, from the mesolithic site of Star Carr, through all points of history, with myself on the far end, trying to connect to the people who came before me. I have lived here all my life, and it felt like while I was approaching my mid forties, after a series of events that had changed my life (the death of my daughter, a career change, discovering neurodivergency etc) I was also an interesting history beneath my plain exterior. I cringe when I present the idea like that, because what is interesting about me?
I didn’t just want to write about myself, I wanted to use myself as an example of the nuances of feelings around belonging and what belonging can mean. It made sense then to use the area that I am still circling daily in my everyday life, this working landscape, this place of rituals and wagons, farming and spirituality.
Was writing the book cathartic?
‘Cathartic’ is a word that gets thrown about a lot. I don’t believe that writing memoir should have to be more than an exploration of self, not necessarily as the cure of ‘self expression’. Having said that, the book, the journey depicted in the book, the ‘pilgrimages’ were a genuine part of a pro active move towards forgiving myself - for all the things I felt made me a bad person - and under that umbrella of badness were times when I felt I hadn’t fit in, or had failed, or had been somehow a terrible person in a way I could not understand or fix, but that other people could see and react to. I went around the lake finding older versions of myself and exploring the reasons behind those feelings, and placing my current self over them, not as a new shiny improved version of myself, but as a whole person, accepting those areas and also accepting that I was never really a terrible person, just someone who most likely is neurodivergent and needed a bit more support to navigate the world. So in that sense, yes, it was cathartic. I did what I needed to do to root myself in my landscape, in my self, and the outcome is The Ghost Lake.
What is the role of the nature writer in education of those who can’t or don’t connect to nature?
I come to the idea of being a nature writer as someone who lives and has lived rurally all my life. That is the nature in my writing, that it has always been in my background, that I automatically reach for nature to describe all other areas in my life. Therefore, I don’t set out to directly educate through my writing. I am pleased when people do learn something from it - especially about archaeology etc - but I don’t feel I need to take on the responsibility to educate others. There has to be some accountability, some responsibility for the connection to nature. The role of the nature writer, perhaps, is to open a window onto the experiences of those who do feel connected, so that the individual can ask themselves, how can I feel connected. And it isn’t about hiking, or exploring the rolling wolds, (though it can be!) it is about opening your door and stepping outside and seeing where nature is pushing up against your own life.
About the writing of the book
How long did it take you to write The Ghost Lake
There were versions of the idea of this book that stretch back about seven years. But the book as it is now really started to take shape when I had been shortlisted in the Alpine Fellowship Prize with an essay about the area that I live. I then put a genuine pitch together, wrote a chapter as if it was part of a longer book and entered it into the Nan Shepherd prize, was long listed and then began to seriously pitch to agents. That was part of the writing of the book. But the actually sitting at my desk and writing took about three years all in all. The Ghost Lake was a big part of my life for a very long time.
What advice would you give a young working class writer who wants to be successful?
Nobody will open the doors for you, you have to be ready to kick and kick. You will not be coming to the arts world with people who can slide you into roles, into positions, people who will be able to give you a foot up. You will not be coming to the arts world with the sort of nest egg that allows you to work for a year as an unpaid intern. You will not be coming to the arts world with the foreknowledge of how any of it works. Be prepared to be rejected. Do it anyway. Get noticed - competitions, magazine acceptances, blogs etc. If you are a poet, get into anything poetry related on offer - anything your school organises, anything your library organises, anything your community organises. There seem to be two different levels of poetry in the UK. The fantastic grass roots poetry - magazines, events, open mics etc and the academically led poetry world. The two cross over occasionally. There are poets that seem to inhabit both worlds with utter joy and an ability to just see poetry as poetry, wherever its roots are (Kim Moore is such a good example of this) but there is a bit of snobbery in the poetry world too. As a fiction or non fiction writer, the same rules apply. Remember, always, that the work comes first. Believe in your voice as valid.
How did you decide on chapter lengths?
I became completely overwhelmed with the idea of writing the book early on. I had got my first little bit of advance, had planned it all out and was ready to just write and then…nothing. The terrible fear of all writers was coming true. I navigated it by breaking it all down, I even made a word count goal chart (highly recommend) to get me moving. I broke the book into chapters of a certain length, then broke those chapters down into a daily word count. The chapters in the end were not as even as that, the Star Carr chapter in particular is a long one, but mostly they were between 4000 and 6000 words, because that was the length of a good sized essay, and I knew I could definitely write a good sized essay, even if I couldn’t write a 90,000 word book.
How do you, as someone with an anxiety problem, deal with promotion
I set myself a certain amount of weeks after launch in which I will give myself over to it, go wherever I am asked, do whatever I am asked to do. Because there is an end point I feel I am able to do the thing. I still struggle very badly with travel, with not knowing where I’m going, with not knowing who I’m meeting - it regularly has me in tears. After any event I usually need a day in bed to recover, because I find it exhausting. That’s the reality of it.
What will you write next
Taps nose knowingly. I am already working on my next project, but don’t want to say anything yet. However, my new poetry collection, Blackbird Singing at Dusk will be launched in November with Nine Arches Press and that will be my focus until the end of the year.
Until next time
x