Someone coming to your work for the first time is likely, don’t you think, to be struck by a certain focus on the past. It’s there is your poems, but more especially in your prose. Do you agree?
Of course, yes. How could I not? I’m fascinated not by the past per se (otherwise I might write historical novels) but by our relationship to it. It’s a kind of ‘one-sided’ relationship in that while we can’t do anything about the past, it can still influence us enormously. Can and does. All those things we’ve learned and experienced contribute to the compound and complex people we have become. Indeed, the people we are continually evolving into. In a way we are never finished being ourselves; there is no one point at which we arrive where we can say “I am finished, this is me” — because who we are tomorrow will be subtly different from who we were today, ad nauseam. And the past has a role to play in that continual evolution.
Is that a problematic relationship then, the one people have between their pasts and presents — and futures — because many of your central characters struggle with just that?
Many of them do, yes. For me the key is in the processing of the past; how we rationalise it, accept it, decode it. All those things. Most of my main characters have something in their history with which they struggle one way or another, and my novels and stories try and explore how they resolve what can, for some, be very difficult.
Difficult?
In the sense that the situation — the ‘thing’ in the past — was challenging, or difficult to accept, to parse, to move on from. And of course when something happens in the ‘now’ that instantly becomes the past too, and so feeds into the whole cycle. Owen in “17 Alma Road”, Liam in “The Opposite of Remembering”, Neil in “On Parliament Hill”, all four characters in “Tilt”, all of them and many of the others are struggling to process something in their pasts (or the ‘now’ which instantly becomes their past) and resolution in whatever form is what they strive for. Sometimes they are successful, other times they aren’t — which is just like life isn’t ?
Indeed. Perhaps to be more specific and drill-down a little, are all of these fictional incidents parallels to what you’ve experienced in your own life? Isn’t what you are trying to do in your novels and short stories — even in your poetry to some degree — a reflection of what you have always struggled with yourself i.e. processing your past? Or if not always struggled with, do your narratives reflect in some way your own preoccupations?
To a degree, yes. How can they not? All we have to go on is our own experience of the world and in the world; and that’s a massively vast smorgasbord of people and incidents, of good fortune and bad. Our lives — both the direct and indirect of them — provide a treasure trove for a writer, and an inexhaustible one at that. People hear that old maxim “write what you know” and assume it relates to something concrete like knowledge of nuclear reactors or what it’s like to work in a hospital, but it’s not; it’s both more than and simpler than that. We’ve all been children, grown up, fallen in and out of love, seen and heard things, had good luck and bad etcetera. All of that, that’s what we know and what we might write about. I don’t know, maybe there’s a growing realisation of that — which is why we’re seeing more and more people turning their hand to autobiography.
To understand the past?
Partly. But also to leave a record; to prove they have existed.
But to come back to my last question as to your fascination with the influence of the past on your characters. Is that a reflection of your own personal interest? Obsession even?
Maybe not obsession, but I’m certainly not going to deny that I have a tricky relationship with my past.
‘Tricky’? In what sense?
I don’t know. In the sense that it was difficult at times, particularly early on; and later, populated with regret or missed opportunity perhaps — though I certainly don’t claim to be unique in that! Our lives are filled with inflection points where we might do this or do that, turn right or left. Or do something or do nothing. Whatever, I am drawn to the lives not lived, the story not told. What would have happened if I hadn’t gone to work after university but instead stayed in further eduction? What kind of person would I be today? What sort of life would I have lived? What relationships would I have had? What would I have written?! All those things I can’t know, of course — it’s a specious question — and yet I find the questions endlessly fascinating. And unresolvable, obviously. I think there is some of that longing in many of my characters, though there I often given them specific incidents and events to focus on, to ‘move on’ from: death in the case of Owen, Neil, Charles E. You have to keep the scope narrow to fit the narrative into a book! In many respects “An Infinity of Mirrors” is my most ambitious work in that these past-present-future dilemmas are faced by Mark, the main character, plus his father (whose biography Mark is writing), and the characters in his father’s own work and who we are exposed to also — he was a writer you see…
But personally? Maybe the most ‘near the knuckle’ examination of my own past is in my poetry. A few years ago I tried starting an autobiography but didn’t get very far; partly because I wasn’t confident enough in terms of fact and date accuracy, and partly because I couldn’t see who would be interested in reading it. But it was more than that. I didn’t really start writing about my past — in particular a difficult childhood — until maybe five years ago. The result — my collection “The Homelessness of a Child” — contains some pieces that are accurate depictions of incidents from my very early years. They weren’t too hard to write as I recall; perhaps the distance from when they occurred was finally great enough.
A little while ago I suggested your novels reflected your preoccupation with the past etcetera. Following on from that, do your main characters also have something of you in them?
Probably. Some more than others. And in some cases they too carry the burden of wish fulfilment i.e. in some way maybe they are living a kind of parallel, my examination of lives arising from having turned right rather than left.
Though there are clearly characters you wouldn’t wish to be, even if they do contain elements of you?
Absolutely! Some of my main characters — a minority, hopefully — are not particularly ‘nice’ nor very likeable. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be written about or created in the first place; if I only wrote about nice people I’d be delusional, denying how the world worked. So while I’m not Tilt or Neil or Lawrence (whether tangibly or otherwise) there must be some small part of me in them mustn’t there?
I suppose when I’m exorcising and unravelling all these fictional characters they are helping to work their magic on me too. It’s a kind of symbiotic relationship, I suppose: I create them, they help me understand the world and my life. And when I said that our lives are made up of experience, incidents and encounters, I include writing in that too — the good and the bad of what we produce. When I get up from my desk having written a thousand words or drafted a new poem, I am — microscopically maybe — not quite the same person I was when I sat down to do so. How can I be? When I tell people that '“no writing is wasted” I usually do so from the point of view of honing the craft; but writing’s also a foundational element in the challenge to understand ourselves — and if that’s true then all creative writing clearly has a value.
“Writing is a never-ending apprenticeship”. That’s something else I tell people. If you think about it, the same is also true of life — so is it any wonder that the former reflects the latter?
Spot on!