Swansea Review: Fflur Dafydd in conversation with award winning writer and author of Resistance Owen Sheers.

Back in June 2007, I was invited by Owen Sheers to collaborate on a project which involved creating a dialogue between different mediums – a dialogue between words and music, between prose and poetry, and also between Welsh and English, which involved translating some passages of his novel Resistance into music. This was performed both at Crossing Borders Festival in the Netherlands and The Hay Festival in Wales, and will soon be showcased at a festival in Washington DC. I caught up with Owen during his promotion tour of Resistance to discuss some of these various dialogues and their significance in terms of his writing and cultural background.

Ff: Our opening piece for the show was a musical interpretation of the opening passage of Resistance, in which the melancholic tone of the folk tune ‘Bugeilio’r Gwenith Gwyn’ was used to capture the sense of loss experienced when the women discover to find the men gone. It seemed to me to be a passage that evokes peculiarly Welsh sentiments – almost a folkloric parable unto itself, and an extremely powerful opening. Could you say something perhaps about the experience and craft of putting together this opening passage – of how you intended it to communicate with the reader and grab them from the outset?

I remember writing this opening passage very clearly, which in itself is a unique experience for me as the memory of the actual moment of writing often fades quickly for me. In this case, however, I knew I wanted to find the novel’s voice immediately in the narrative and for some reason it was through this opening passage that I worked towards it. I know I reworked the syntax and wording of the opening sentence several times. I think what I was looking for was a double temporal quality – that of the retrospective ‘narrator’s’ voice, and a more present tense sense of impending change and event. By declaring ‘in the months afterwards’ the novel is, to a certain extent revealing what will happen but at the same time doesn’t reveal the reasons, thereby hopefully creating an element of narrative enticement.
I always knew I wanted to then move from the narrator’s voice to Sarah quickly, and have the early action play out from her perspective. The sense of loss or hiraeth you mention in your question is strongly evoked here, and by describing the shape of Tom in the mattress in terms of landscape, then yes, I am ‘imprinting’ a certain Welsh cultural sentiment on the novel, but hopefully not in such a way as to be alienating to a reader who has not previously engaged with Welsh history and cultural memory.

Ff: A sense of place seems particularly dominant and powerful in Resistance and has been picked up by many critics, yet I’ve heard you say that this surprises you. Do you think that a sense of place is occasionally an accidental creation by the writer?

Was I surprised? Perhaps by the emphasis placed on this aspect by some reviewers… A sense of place is certainly important to me, but it’s also a general feature of most successful novels. I was aware I wanted the valley to ‘live’ vividly for a reader, especially its sense of isolation as the credibility of the plot in the book depends on a realistic and strong evocation of this. In the case of Resistance I partly came to the story because I wanted to write against a landscape I knew intimately. My previous prose book The Dust Diaries was set in Zimbabwe, and one of the greatest challenges in writing that story was recreating the Zimbabwean veldt back at my desk in Wales. So in a way the landscape of the Black Mountains did lead me to my story, and certainly the topography also dictates that story to a certain extent. Some people have said the valley is the main character in the novel. I don’t agree with that, as it is Sarah and Albrecht who experience the most dynamic arcs of development, and there are several other characters (Maggie) who provide the emotional engines of the narrative. All of this is, however, strongly influenced and grounded in both the physical and historical resonance of the Olchon, which although feels Welsh, is actually the first valley in England. It’s a border area and this was also crucial to the novel.

Ff: Do you feel that the writing of Resistance is motivated by your Welsh identity – that it is a means of connecting with a particular place which is close to you? Many of the titles or themes of your books, The Blue Book, for example, or Skirrid Hill are steeped in Welsh history and tradition. When it comes to writing, is it destined to be your fictional landscape? Or is it perhaps that your earlier work reflects your roots – and that forthcoming works will reflect the places you’ve travelled since?

Resistance is undoubtedly informed by my read and lived experience of Wales. The story of the Auxiliary Units and the idea of men literally disappearing underground did enable me (via David Jones in the novel) to engage with certain ideas of Welsh culture. Although I was born in Fiji and then lived in London for a bit I was raised in Wales from the age of 9 until university at 18. So it’s no surprise that when I came to write my subject matter and influences were often Welsh in origin, specifically South-Eastern Welsh an area that has, over time, seen much ebbing and flowing of influence between Wales and England. My mother’s father was also an important early influence especially as he was a Welsh speaker and a farmer who probably represented to me as a young boy a part of Wales I had either lost before I was born, or was at a distance from.
In terms of a fictional landscape, I think it’s more in poetry that I’ll keep returning to Wales. There’s something about the country that makes me want to write poetry, about anything, not necessarily Wales. In prose The Dust Diaries was about Zimbabwe and my next novels will be set in London, New York and the South Pacific. What is interesting in the distance required to write about a place. I always seem to be writing about the place I have recently been, not where I am.

Ff: The protagonist, Sarah, is another character that featured in our project in the form of a song, the stoic, quiet, yet passionate wife of Tom, who is beautifully crafted in the book. Could you say a little bit about ‘living with Sarah’; the transition of character from a place in an imagined history to a real-life experience on the page.

Sarah began as an embodiment of the men’s absence – what I mean by that was the person who could display the intimate qualities of that missing, the anger, the pain, the longing, the questioning. She really grew as a character for me as I wrote the book. I wanted her to be tough yet sensitive to experience, and certainly not just a doting wife or admirer of Albrecht. She questions Tom, she certainly questions Albrecht and, I think, towards the end of the novel hopefully leaves the reader questioning their own motivations in terms of what they know to be ‘right’ and what they want to happen in the story. Having her first person voice in the letters to Tom was a big help in ‘hearing’ Sarah for me. It also allowed me to reveal her own shaping of her own story, as she begins to edit her experience in the valley for the diary entries.

Ff: During our collaboration I also had the opportunity of translating the poems into Welsh, and we read these across one another, almost as echoes. Is this how you see your poems, as having echoes of another language?

Echoes is maybe too strong, but although I’m not a Welsh speaker I have been around the language at certain periods of my life and it undoubtedly influenced the English spoken around me too. So yes, this combined with the influence of Welsh authors and poets, I do see my work rhythmically as being shadowed by Welsh. But then all of Wales is shadowed by another Wales, I think - the Wales of yesterday, a hundred years ago and a thousand years ago.

Ff: Could you give us some idea of your next novel? How does the experience of writing and researching this novel differ from your experience with Resistance?

To me each new novel feels like inventing the wheel again. You must learn from writing a book, but at the same time you feel like an absolute beginner. The novel I’m working on now wasn’t the first I started after Resistance. There have been a number of exploratory beginnings, but I think I now have a story I want to tell. It’s contemporary, has three main characters, and is urban rather than rural, so a totally different animal to Resistance. The only similarities so far is the developing of layers in the narrative having begun with a relatively simple plot and of elements of research triggering developments in the plot. Both are, I think, pretty generic experiences in the writing of any long-form fiction. The only other shared quality is in terms of where and how I would ideally manipulate a reader, to a position where they lean towards something that is naturally against their conventional moral viewpoint

Ff: Could you tell us a little about your recent residency in New York Library, and in particular the research aspect of the work undertaken. How important is it for a writer to take part in various residencies?

The Cullman Center, where I was fortunate enough to be for 9 months, was an incredible experience and is a wonderful place. I can’t recommend it highly enough for anyone who needs research or writing time in New York. The 15 fellowships are offered to both academics and writers which I think helps a lot in achieving an atmosphere particularly conducive to work with the right admixture of support and intellectual vibrancy. I was researching the American elements of a novel that begins in the South Pacific in the 1870s and moves to and through the US of the late 19th century. In terms of the importance of these things, it totally depends on the writer and the project. I’m sure they can also distract from the real work too. The reality is that it’s incredibly difficult to support yourself even as a relatively successful writer, and residencies like these do make it possible to live and have the time you need for writing, thinking and reading that is all necessary to write a book.

Ff: you have many strings to your bow, being a poet, novelist, non-fiction writer, radio-dramatist, and presenter of various art programmes. Do you think that such versatility is almost a prerequisite for anyone wishing to become a full time writer?

See above! A lot of my diversifying has come about do to financial need, so in that way, yes, I’m sure a certain amount of flexibility is helpful in the creative industries today. But writing isn’t an industry. In it’s essence it’s a person sitting at a desk thinking hard, imagining and trying to use 26 letters to express, capture and cast light on human experience. For that to go well I really think specialising is the only way. A great poem or book is rare because they can require a life’s work to write. So, while I’ve certainly learnt a lot from writing in various forms and genres, I also aspire to a simpler creative life of prose and poetry and nothing else. The poets I’ve been making a series about for BBC 4 all share a quality of dedication and focus, and in the wake of spending time with them and their work, I’ve promised in the future to try and follow more thoroughly in their footsteps.