Vanessa Gebbie is the author of the short story collection Words from a Glass Bubble, forthcoming from Salt Publishing on March 1, 2008. Having written as a freelance journalist for years, she started writing fiction seriously in 2003. Her work is widely published in print and on the web. Her competition successes include placings at both Bridport 2007 and Fish 2007 short story prizes, and her novel in progress won a first at The Daily Telegraph novel competition 2007. She is founder/editor of Tom’s Voice, an ezine for writing from those who struggle with addiction, and those whose lives have been touched by the addiction struggles of friends or family. Vanessa also founded the online writers’ collective The Fiction Workhouse. Visit her website and her blog.

Since your short story collection will be out in three days, let’s start by talking about Words from a Glass Bubble. Your book blurb states the following. What can you add?

This passionate new book gathers together for the first time many of Vanessa Gebbie’s award-winning stories. Described by Maggie Gee as ‘a prodigiously gifted new writer’, she is a natural storyteller; her narratives unfold with a deceptively light touch, exploring with compassion what it is to be human and flawed. ‘Words From a Glass Bubble’ is about coming to terms with the cards we are dealt. The stories pivot around the recognition that those who seem powerless can prove to be the strongest catalysts for change, both in themselves and in others. Vanessa Gebbie never shies away from difficult subjects, creating an intensely emotional and at times distressing world, but it is never totally dark or despairing. Sparks of the unexpected and flashes of humour light the whole collection with an indefatigable optimism.

I am so lucky. Salt Publishing is a very strong independent publishing house. In 2007 they started publishing a few single author short story collections, and ended up with five of their first flush on the longlist for the Frank O’Connor prize.

Maggie Gee’s endorsement is extraordinary. I still can’t quite get my head round it. She is not only the first female Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, but also a sparklingly good novelist who explores many of the same themes I do. I couldn’t ask for more, could I?

I’ve been lucky enough to win or be placed in several good literary competitions, and this collection brings many of those together. The title story placed second at Fish and is ‘about’ an Irish village postwoman striking up a friendship with a plastic statuette of the Virgin Mary. It’s really ‘about’ both women coming to terms with the loss of their sons…

Working with an independent publisher is great fun. You are involved every step of the way, and they have become good friends. It’s great to be involved with decisions about what’s going in, what’s coming out, what to put on the cover, whether to stick with paperback or go for hardback. In the end they decided to do Glass Bubble in hardback. A leap of faith, and I’m working hard to make sure it wasn’t a leap in the wrong direction!

It’s been a rollercoaster too. As it was going to print, we discovered we couldn’t use the cover that I loved. We had a mad few days while the publishers worked fast on a new cover and they came up with a cracker. I actually prefer it.

I’m now working on doing my bit for the book. Planning readings and so on. I’ve been invited to read in July at the West Cork Literary Festival, Ireland (home of the Fish Short Story Prize) and to run a writing competition for them during the week. I’m reading in London when I get back from Ireland. I shall pretend I’m dead famous, on a book tour and hang the cost! Got some other readings sorted. Scotland, Sussex. Doing the rounds of book groups. Taking lots of workshops.

Big launch party in London.

Do I sound like I’m happy? You betcha.

How can we get our hands on your book?

The usual suspects, Amazon and so on. Foyles online. But there’s 20% off list price (£12.99, that roughly $25) if you go through the Salt website, so that’s probably the best way!

Recently, you had a collection of flash fiction accepted for publication. Congratulations! Do you have a title yet? A publication date?

Thanks for the congrats! Yes… Salt Publishing is bringing out a collection of my flash fiction in mid 2009. It’ll be called ‘Mood Swings’ and be a light/dark collection. And even better, most of it is already written. It’s just a case of choosing what’s in and what’s out.

I love flash fiction. I love the process of writing suddenly, not planning. It is such a great thing for breaking a ‘block’, for unlocking new voices, ideas. I use it all the time, and not just for short pieces. Some of the best paragraphs in the best work I’ve done have been written using flash process techniques. It never fails to surprise me…and as some guru said, ‘if your writing doesn’t surprise you, it sure as hell ain’t going to surprise anyone else..’!

Are you under contract for a novel, as well? What’s the book about?

I have been working on a longer piece for a while now, and was lucky to have two UK competition hits in quick succession last year with one small part (Daily Telegraph and Bridport Prize). That gets you noticed, eventually. So yes, I now have an agent and have agreed to work towards a decent first draft by the end of the year. Not sure that’s being ‘under contract’. That sounds like a Mafia hitman is waiting outside the door with an Uzi…!

What’s it about? Oh Gaad. I knew you’d ask.

Weeel. It won’t be a standard narrative structure, for starters. And it’s loosely based in the town in South Wales where I spent most of my childhood. A dying pit town, in which people are losing any sense of things spiritual. And twelve men in this town have their lives changed in a single afternoon…Thomas, James, Matthew, Peter, Judah…. see a pattern emerging?

Don’t ask me any more… I don’t know the answers. I have never plotted anything I’ve written, and as each piece comes out, it’s informing the whole.

Besides which, I’m such a natural short fiction writer, I am kidding the brain cells that this is short stories. So don’t tell them it isn’t…

It all sounds very grand, having an agent, especially ones like A M Heath and Co. They were George Orwell’s agents and are still in the same building. I felt very small standing in that hallway, I can tell you! It is great, and again, I am lucky. But. I am under no illusions. I have to deliver something good.

I was delighted to meet and talk with them at length about my writing. They wanted to know what my plans were. I’d submitted no formal manuscripts to them, no synopses. They’d read all of three short stories, one in the Bridport anthology, and two I’d emailed. I was signed on the strength of those.

So don’t listen to anyone who tells you that short fiction won’t get you anywhere. It will.

You’ve never plotted anything you’ve written?! How do you approach a story? Do you have a beginning in mind? A middle? An end? Or do you just wing it? How do you pull it all together in the end?

I am hopelessly disorganised as a writer, and work unsystematically. I do a hundred other things as I write a story, constantly flipping to The Workhouse, reading emails, going for walks, reading another short story. Phoning mates. Helping with son’s homework or revision. Popping into Zoetrope Virtual Studios (I have regular arguments with SmokeLong Quarterly editor Dave Clapper, which I enjoy, hope he does!… I do some flashing in The Flash Factory now and again… have some pixel ‘friends’ here.)

So it’s really hard for me to explain… but I’ll try.

It’s usually that a character will pop up and start whispering. Maybe I’ve read something, seen something that has made my own feelings bubble… and the character has something to say. But not immediately. I wait. Grab too quickly and you get a yarn, not a strong story. Maybe there’s stuff going on in the waiting time, maybe the mind slots together the connections that will work for this piece? (Nietsche’s ‘active forgetting’ I expect).

I don’t know the theories, Kelly. I have no formal qualifications in writing. Never managed to finish half of the one low-level University course I started five years back! Stultifying, prescriptive. Aaagh.

All I know is that when it’s ready, it comes, piecemeal. Usually when I am doing something else. A paragraph on the train to London, written on the back of a chequebook. A thousand words written on a restaurant menu. And sentence by sentence, at home on the computer. Dashing to and from the ironing, making the supper. Daydreaming about being twenty again…

I find it far far easier to write when I am away, and go two three times a year to a writers’ retreat in Ireland.

But plotting, no. I ‘see’ tableaux’, sometimes. I know that there will be a scene where, for example, an old lady fishes with a shrimping net high on the sooty walls of a disused railway tunnel. And if I ‘let go’ and write that scene, no matter how ‘stupid’ it seems… it will lead on to something else, which will lead on to something else… I will discover what she is looking for. When I started to write it, if you’d asked me ‘what’s this about?’ I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. (That was the story that won $2000 at Bridport last year.)

But once it is written it is so ‘correct’, so inevitable… it couldn’t be about anything else.

I have written prolifically for years, never used much of the stuff, but there are hundreds and hundreds of snippets on the computer. Often my mind will flip back to something, an image created years ago. Even complete flashes will suddenly ‘fit’ and mean something in a different context.

It shapes itself, in a raw way. And will be loose, wordy, full of loose ends that need trimming. Then I edit.

I have always found editing the toughest part, as it’s the hardest work. I am the archetypal lazy writer! But I am starting to enjoy it. Watching something become polished is fun of a different sort. Also reading work out loud, listening to sounds, beats, rhythms, has become very important.

The writer’s retreat sounds wonderful—Anam Cara Writers’ and Artists’ Retreat on the Beara Peninsular in Ireland. Describe it for us.

I love this place. And I love Sue, the American writer, editor who runs it. And the ducks, the hens, the dog, … Here is an article from the Irish press that describes both the place, and the routines.

As it says there are five rooms, so there are up to four other people working. Each time I have visited I have had the company of some very interesting writers, poets, artists. Last visit I met an American poet, John D Smith, who was a recipient of a US Arts Endowment grant of $20,000 and had chosen to spend some on a month here. Lucky bugger.

The routines lull you and you spend hours at work. You share creative talk over breakfast (and the breakfasts are renowned…), and supper and you meet in front of the fire after supper to share what you’ve done, if you want to.

Or, there are workshops. I first discovered the place when I escaped to a workshop intended to reawaken jaded creativity in June 2005. It was run by American poet Karen Blomain. The workshop was fine, but I had such a tug to the place itself. The landscape, the air. The way people are. Their acceptance and expectation that you are a writer, or a poet, a singer, can play an instrument, can sing, dance, recite, paint, take photographs. All seems not only possible but necessary It’s as though they have retained something we have lost in my part of the UK with its competitive frenteticism.

When I come home to the South of England, (where let’s be honest, not many people in the pubs play the penny whistle or the fiddle for joy,) I miss it. Terribly. It’s more and more like ‘going home’.

I wrote “Words From a Glass Bubble” from inspirations gleaned there. A prizewinner. And last November, I wrote a section of the novel: “Silver Leaves for Judah Jones”… which has just done OK as well, pared down into a short.

I’ve been a fan of Tom’s Voice for a while now, and was surprised and delighted to find out you were behind it. When did you start the journal? Will you tell us about the work you do that inspired its creation?

Thanks Kelly, and thank you for your support in Issue 6. That was a wonderful piece of writing.

I can’t remember when I started the mag… 2005 I think.

I used to take Creative Writing sessions in a tough residential rehab for drug and alcohol abusers. Did it for three years, give or take. Most of the residents had been in and out of prison most of their lives thanks to funding their habit. It’s a funny thing — I was there to help them change their ways — but the men and women I worked with changed ME too.

One man, Tom, one of my first students, a bloke in his forties, was very damaged by heroin and alcohol. He wrote really interesting, idiosyncratic poetry. Not immediately… but he blossomed, grew in confidence. Started writing in his own time, turning up with reams and reams of poems. Utterly beautiful, strange. Strong voice.

The rehab was the first in a series of three, a progression, aimed at complete rehabilitation into the community by the end of nine months. But instead of going on to the next rehab, Tom left and went home. Sadly, no, tragically, he was found dead of an overdose a few weeks later. BUT he’d carried on writing. And he’d left a poem by his side; his own version of ‘To Everything There is a Season’.

It hit me then. Hard. That in those last few months, he’d had a voice, and he’d used it. And I could DO something.

Easy, isn’t it? I started a place where writing by his mates would be read, not stuck in filing cabinets. Not just his mates. Anyone whose lives had been touched in any way by addiction struggles. Whatever they had to say. Fiction, or not.

I run it, pay the web bills, and a friend does the uploading. She doesn’t charge me for that and I’m eternally grateful.

I know I come over emotional abut this stuff. I care, madly. I care when people say that they take drugs to write. I want to say, Hey!! In our heads and our hearts there is such magic anyway… You don’t need that stuff.

I’ve wondered about this—the emotional aspect of editing such a journal. How do you maintain your distance, your composure, your sanity? Is it ever too much?

I don’t find it emotionally draining at all. It’s a privilege to be doing this. Remember, the writers come to me, not the other way round… they give me gifts. That’s not stressful at all.

I do have a deep sense of responsibility, a knowledge that in many cases people are telling the world stuff they have kept to themselves for years. But they can do it in safety… not revealing their identities, if they don’t want to.

I always suggest anonymity if people seem vulnerable at all. Example… in Issue 7 there is a moving account from a mother who coped with the addiction struggles, the peer pressure versus parental pressure fights, of her daughter. It’s the first ‘parent’ article I’ve had.

She was unsure about writing it at all… but once she was given the option to just be called ‘Tom’, and told she could call her daughter what she liked… bam. I had a brilliant, articulate, meaningful article that will hopefully bring a sense of recognition and empathy to other parents…

Other writers are happy to be themselves. As you were yourself. And sometimes the lucky breaks happen… I’ve ‘met’ J Aaron Goolsby here… a guy who seemed to be taking some flak, and I wasn’t sure why. Long story short, he is writing on regular basis for me, and his first piece, a look at why a generation turned to drugs, is a highly articulate eye-opener.

So nope, at the moment it’s not too much.

Teaching at rehab was. I stopped after two and a half years. It was coming home with me…

Retaining my sanity? Kelly, I lost that a long time back. That’s why I’m a writer!

You are also an assistant editor at Cadenza Magazine. What type of work does Cadenza publish? What else should we know about the magazine?

Cadenza is a small press print magazine based here in the UK. We carry good punchy literary short fiction and poetry, reviews and occasional articles on writing. The editor is freelance writer Zoe King.

We have a separate editor who deals with submissions of poetry. Cadenza is not funded by any grants, and exists thanks to two short story competitions per year. The entry fees come close to covering the prize money and printing costs, but the editor/owner is usually out of pocket. That’s the norm with these little magazines.

Subscriptions don’t cost much, and could make the difference between existence and not. The website’s here.

As if two collections, a novel, and editing for two journals isn’t enough, you also run The Fiction Workhouse. What’s that all about?

The Fiction Workhouse is an online collective for intermediate writers. People who have already started amassing decent publishing and competition credits. It’s just a place to perch. But a place where quality critiquing of short stories (or recently novel excerpts and poetry) is at the centre.

I was taught to write better than ‘just OK’ on Alex Keegan’s Bootcamp. Lots of discipline, lots of buzz, but the motivation was a group thing. When I moved on I was completely at sea for a long time, couldn’t find anywhere to replace that sense of involvement, of community. Writing is a very lonely occupation at base and it was a tough time.

So, 18 months back I decided to create The Workhouse. The name is a nod to the other place. But there is absolutely no ‘teaching’, just a group (up to 35 now, I think) of writers who are passionate about what they do, sharing work, giving considered in depth feedback, discussing anything and everything to do with writing. We’ve got a few editors, a few people who’ve judged competitions, a lot of serious writers, a few journalists, reviewers. There’s lots of sparks, now and again. I like that. It makes you think, challenges you.

I was taught to critique work systematically, objectively. I am sure that is a foundation for improving your own writing. Also, we don’t put our names to work being critiqued. It’s all set up so work appears anonymously.

One of the founder members was writing colleague Tania Hershman who has since founded the Short Review. It’s taken off like a rocket! Lots of us review for that. She’s also got a collection coming out later in the year through Salt Publishing, as has a third member of the team. Three debut collections from one small writing group; completely coincidental. Gives a sense of the standard of work there, I think

It was not intended for any single person to ‘run’ The Workhouse. I saw it as a collective. So many places can become more ‘about’ the personalities than the writing standards and I didn’t want that. Unfortunately, the reins have to be held by someone, and it was my baby if you like, so I fell into the role of quasi-boss. With techie support from a friend, Rob Jacobs.

That’s fine, but now I have a deadline to work to I’m taking a back seat and learning to let my baby go her own way. Not easy! But as it has functioned more or less as a collective, people seem happy to start initiatives, just get on with it. In the current ‘critique round’, there are fifteen stories. Me standing back has encouraged a huge burst of energy!

How do you become a member of The Fiction Workhouse, or is it invitation only?

People usually email me, or one of the other members, to ask about it. If they are working at the right level, then they come for a visit, see if it’s for them. If not, no sweat. Some writers stay a few months, then life gets busy, they move on. That’s fine. Some stay, period.

The whole idea was to have a place where your sightlines were level or higher. Where you could work with those who were at or near the same level as you. Not be focusing way downwards. A place where the only pressure is what you bring to your own writing.

Alex Keegan’s Bootcamp is very controversial. Tell us a bit about the program, and why it worked for you.

I gather it is. And it is not for every writer. You need to be pretty tough. It is certainly not for wilting violets.
I studied there when I first started writing fiction and left three years ago, so what I recall may be out of date. Bootcamp is/does/was exactly what it says on the box.

You worked fast and hard. Critiqued systematically, using a grid system. Not unlike the Zoe system at base but far far more complex. It enabled critiquers to stand right back and analyse how much each craft element worked for or against the fiction as a whole.

You were taught techniques for opening up your creativity. Ways of letting go. Accessing the stuff that mattered to you in order to create stronger fiction.

But if you didn’t listen, or said the wrong things in the wrong ways, you got bawled out. Publicly. Excoriatingly. That hurt. You posted first drafts, and they were critiqued by everyone extremely harshly if they were not good, which first drafts rarely are. That hurt. But once I got used to that, the bloody-minded side of me kicked in… and the ‘I’ll show the bastards’ response. And the writing got better and better. And first drafts got better and better. But for a lot of people that would put them off. I know that. I just didn’t give up, I suppose.

When I was there it was all ‘literary’ fiction. Now they seem to be into a broader mix, speculative work as well, but the common thread is that it will be well written. There’s usually a good trickle of competition successes filtering in, but again, I’m out of touch. The best person to ask is the man himself.

I admit, when I was there, and for a good time afterwards, I had no concept of how much I had assimilated. It is only in looking back that you see how far you’ve come, and now from three years’ distance, I see how much that teaching underpins what I do. . It’s an attitude, as well as craft skills. It’s not putting up with second best when you know you can do better. It’s not telling someone their work is ‘lovely’ when privately you think it’s crap. It’s never sitting back and being complacent. Thinking you know it all. Because you never, ever do.

But the greatest thing I learned was how vital it is to identify the themes that run through you as an individual, which if used as the ‘ink’ for creativity married to a serious appreciation of writing craft, will help you produce strong work. My time there changed me from an OK writer who told yarns to a stronger writer who told stories that meant something.

But I have to say, I have seen comments like this open up furious responses from people who do not agree with the methods. I understand that. It IS controversial. But there’s a place in the world for all sorts, I hope. Places to suit every sort of writer. From airy fairy sweetness and ‘everything is roses’ writing groups through a wide spectrum to tough.

All I can say is, however much it hurt at the time and for a while after, it worked. I send people there, occasionally. Occasionally, they stay.

Plus, you teach, right?

I’m a freelance, but belong to writing organisation called New Writing South, and am on their education committee. We are a team of professional writers who are contracted to go into schools and colleges to work with kids, to buzz them up about writing. A mix of playwrights and prose writers.

I’m currently working with 14/15 year olds at Gateway Academy, Tilbury, a vast state school near London. A fantastic project that’s been a year in the planning. I’m also working with 17 year olds at Brighton College, one of the best Independent schools in the area. Very very different places… one very privileged, one not. But know something? So far the writer who excites me the most is a dyslexic boy at Tilbury. He struggles. But I recognise the fire.

I’m also booked to work with University academics on retreat, helping them open up creativity in their academic and personal writing.

I’m running a flash writing workshop for another organisation. That one’s been oversubscribed so I’ve just heard they want me to run another one. I took a private group for a flash writing session last week. I had these ladies lying on the floor within the first few moments, to break the ‘norm’, to make them laugh, to be wacky. I don’t think anyone had written before, but they were all well read. The results were astounding. The trick is to do the unexpected, always.

I also mentor a young writer called Jo. In the last year or so she’s done fabulously well… lots of flash publications, a public reading slot in London, a few competition shortlistings and a print anthology credit. I’m proud of her. It’s like keeping orchids… she thrives on benign neglect.

I love all this… it’s buzzy, and I should have been a teacher. In another life…

But the best teaching I do is with the homeless, drug addicts, alcoholics, users of the mental health services (I stand in for a friend who runs a specialist writing organisation), the elderly. I love it.

A couple of years ago I went and saw a woman in Ireland who tells you your life gifts depending on what stones you select. No I’m NOT a daffy crystal new-ager. I don’t understand that stuff. This is part of the ‘theatre of life’ in that part of Ireland. I picked this stone… and she said, “You will light people’s paths. A natural teacher. Some people will ignore it, but carry on. You’ll change people’s lives.”

I dunno about that, bless her! I think people change their own lives. But it’s nice to be a catalyst.

Your teaching of the homeless has led to anthologies of work being published, correct?

Yes… the first one, Roofless, a mix of words and photography, came out of a series of workshops run by a community publishers in Brighton, QueenSpark Books. I was co –tutor, two of us working with our own groups of ‘homeless’ students. A tough assignment in many ways. The group shifted about for obvious reasons. The book complemented an exhibition on homelessness staged at the local museum. Roofless was fine and good…but the exhibition (not organised by the publishers) sent me spitting flames. It was sanitised for the good denizens of the parish… and gave no real hint of what homelessness is actually like.

Did they know or care that one writer died on the streets before seeing the exhibition, and another died after a mugging a year later?

Then I worked with refugees and asylum seekers for the same publishers, wheedling out the stories behind the journeys of many people fleeing war zones, great deprivation, inter-tribal violence. The little book that resulted is called Refuge. True stories. An elderly Iranian poet who had been imprisoned and tortured for writing poetry. A Congolese lady who had been gang-raped by the militia, her disabled daughter silent under the bed. A Chilean woman who had seen her father’s body cut up and thrown into a river when she was a child. All anonymous. But they wanted their stories told.

Both books are published by QueenSpark Books, Brighton.

And it’s worth saying here, before anyone asks. No I would not dream of abusing the trust of anyone I work with, face to face or as editor, by writing their stuff into my stories.

But on a lighter note,… a couple of ‘marginalised’ writers I worked with on another course a year back, have just had work commissioned by Per Contra. And they are getting paid for something they can do themselves, well. That could be life-changing.

And you write freelance articles? Sheesh!

Not many, now. I was a journalist specialising in education issues for years. That was neat, a regular income. Fiction doesn’t do that so well. But I do have an article in the current issue of a magazine called The New Writer, about writing for competitions. And Per Contra commissioned an article on Tom’s Voice which will go out sometime this year. Both of those paid. Good old non-fic!

You have an interesting background. For one, you were given up for adoption at birth, only to find out later your birth parents subsequently married and had other children. How has this colored your life? The stories you tell?

Yup. I’ve always known I was adopted. It feels odd, always has. Can’t explain any better. I’ve never felt like ‘Vanessa’. But it’s not anything special, being adopted. Lots of writers are; it’s a strange thing.

However, a few years back I decided to find out what name my birth mother had given me on my original birth certificate, as they almost always do, apparently. Long story short, my certificate was blank. Lots of info, but no first name. That usually means (according to my social worker at the time) that the birth was the product of incest or rape.

Oh shit? Exactly. So I went on uncovering as much as I could. In the process, I found that my birth parents (perfectly ordinary people, thank heavens, she a student nurse from a well-off family, he a travelling salesman) actually married three years after my adoption.

Things were different back then… to get pregnant outside marriage was a dreadful thing. But yes, they then had three other daughters. And no, I haven’t turned up on their doorstep. I thought of asking a private detective to take photos. It would be nice to know who I look like. But I haven’t.

How does it colour the stories I tell? I’m not sure. That knowledge hasn’t changed me as a person. I still feel like an amputated limb, but now at least I understand why. Somewhere, I have all their certificates. Bits of paper recording my parents’ marriage, my ’sisters’ births, my grandmother’s death etc. In a drawer, somewhere. I have nieces, nephews. In the drawer.

People are very quick to advise when they know nothing. ‘You must contact them’. ‘They’d love to see you…’. That is so bloody intrusive. I don’t care what the parents would feel; I owe them not much. But my ’sisters’, who have probably been told nothing, ever… suddenly finding out their lives have been based on a bit of a lie? It’s not something I would feel proud of.

But I have my own children, and have been happily married for a long time to a long-suffering good bloke. We have sons, thank God. I don’t relate well to many women face to face. Must be displaced anger, I guess. Pixels are better.

In many of my stories there are ‘powerless’ people with strength. I have always had a deep sense of anger at the way society sometimes treats vulnerable people…hence my passion about Tom’s Voice, I suppose. But I also believe that some of those we call ‘vulnerable’ hold huge strengths; they can teach those who call themselves ‘normal’ how to be.

Overall I’m grateful for the experience of being who I am. Would I have things to say as a writer without these experiences? I would not not not want to just ‘tell yarns’. To me, fiction has to communicate something, not just entertain for a couple of minutes. There’s usually a thread of displacement, loss, bewilderment in my work. But it’s married to a good wacky sense of humour. Whoever I inherited that from…thanks. As someone once told me, without realising the irony, “You are one lucky bastard, V.”

You should write something about these certificates, these nieces and nephews, in the drawer.

Should I? That sounds like Creative Non Fiction to me. I’ve always found that sort of writing an interesting conundrum. How to do that stuff without sounding self-obsessed? I read it sometimes and think, ‘Shit. This writer actually sat down and thought consciously “the world must be fascinated by me!!” Aaagh.

I think it is also very very hard to incorporate close fact into fiction, unless you are a seriously gifted writer. It weighs it down.
But yeah… the image of a paper family in a drawer… now that’s something I could cope with, in a flash for Café Irreal maybe!

You climbed the highest mountain in Wales—Snowdon—in heels?! I have to know more!

Ha! I spent much of my childhood in South Wales, and went to a boarding school in North Wales (It’s achingly beautiful… do visit). We had this tradition of walking up Snowdon every Summer term. The last term, at eighteen, we decided to walk up in high heels and short socks. And were all wearing school uniforms, naturally. I gather that garb is the stuff of male fantasy. It gave me blisters. (There are several paths up Snowdon, and a train… it’s not as tough as it sounds!)

I love mountains. I love all remote places. No people. Best holiday I had was to Spizbergen. I love the mountains in Assynt, West Scotland. Climbed Cul Mor last year, so I can still do it… although not in heels. (Mountain-walking, I mean…!) We’re planning on going to Antarctica in a year’s time. And The Falklands. I love battlefields, they are great places.

But it was a brilliant place, that school. Dreadful teaching for the most part, but a formative place. An English teacher who told me I would write when I was ready. A fantastic Head who instilled in us that we were better than no one else on this planet. And no worse either. To live life straight. That we are all given gifts, NOT for ourselves, but to share. That we all have our own journeys, and no one else walks the same path or climbs the same mountain. (Even in heels…), Sometimes, I think the writing community might benefit from that advice.

That’s what I believe. There is no point in being competitive…we’re all on separate mountains, with different climbing equipment. It’s good to share our experience, the ups and downs of being a writer, but in the end, as in all things, we are on our own.