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Ten years after Versailles: Germany in the UK War Books Boom

6 October 2021 / Andrew Frayn / 0 Comments

The year 1929 witnessed a worldwide economic devastation which coincided with the tenth anniversary of the Treaty of Versailles. In the year before, the tenth anniversary of the Armistice, a number of non-fiction books were published assessing the treaty and its impact, questioning the outcome of the Great War. Hermann Stegemann openly condemns the treaty in The Mirage of Versailles: “In the wildness of its design and the glaringness of its colours it shows that the World War has not resolved the world crisis, but has ended in blind confusion” (1919, p. 18).

Questions surrounding not only the treaty itself but the war-guilt clause and accusations of Germany’s sole responsibility for the war also came to a head. The Times reported the discontent felt with the treaty by the states accused. The below extract from The Times is one example of the reaction from both Europe and the US. Whether or not Britons had as strong a reaction towards Germany’s discontentment, there was an undeniable growing interest in the German experience of the war demonstrated by the increasing demand for translated German war books. During that same year, Erich Maria Remarque’s iconic Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) was released and his portrayal of German soldiers as a ‘miserable, downtrodden pawn’ (Eksteins, 1980, p. 375) was met with a mixture of both sympathy and condemnation by British readers and reviewers. Assessments veered between seeing it as disreputable and exceptional; similarly, in Germany it was criticised from both political wings,: from the left, for not condemning war enough, and from the right, for criticising the German soldier.

Times Newspaper article of 29 June 1929 headlined "Austrian Sympathy with Germany"

“Austrian Sympathy with Germany”, The Times, 29 June 1929.

During the anniversary of the treaty and with the increasing popularity of Remarque’s German bestseller, the demand for German translations continued to grow. In the database of works of the War Books Boom that has been compiled for this project (which will be made publicly available via a DOI when a related academic article is published), 1930 sees over 50% of the translated works recorded coming from German originals; there is a steady increase in the number of texts translated from German, peaking, as with the boom itself, in 1930.

Alongside Remarque’s work, Walter Bloem’s World War I memoir Vormarsch (The Advance from Mons 1914: The Experiences of a German Infantry Officer), which was translated into English in 1930, was successful among British readers. Lieut.-Colonel F. E. Whitton claims it as the ‘most accurate war-book that has come out of Germany’ (Whitton, 1930). Similarly, Edwin Erich Dwinger’s The Army Behind Barbed Wire: A Siberian Diary (1930) was received with success, later praised for its ‘documentary style which embellished its truth value’ (Fritzche, 2012, p.111). It tells of Dwinger’s individual suffering and accusations towards the dehumanising impact of war. He writes about a dead body, stating that this man ‘is no longer a sapper from Hardberg called Meier or Muller, this winter, he is only Typhus Casualty Number 14324’ (Dwinger, 1930, p.121). The tales of the war’s devastation and trauma felt by German soldiers within these translations revealed to British readers the similarities between individual German experiences and their own.

Beth Campbell

(with edits by Andrew Frayn)

Bibliography

Dwinger, Erich Erwin (1930). The Army Behind Barbed Wire: A Siberian Diary. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Eksteins, Modris (1980). “All Quiet on the Western Front and the Fate of a War.” Journal of Contemporary History, 15. 345-66.

Fritzche, Peter (2012). “Return to Soviet Russia.” In Fascination and Enmity: Russia and Germany as Entangled Histories, 1914–1945, ed. by Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, Alexander M. Martin. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. 109-22

Whitton, F.E. (1930). “Five Books on the War.” The Bookman, vol.79, iss. 271 (December 1930), p. 223 <https://data.journalarchives.jisc.ac.uk/view?pubId=bp1000302143419301434_19301201_3089261pdf&terms=bloem%20whitton&tab=date>

Note on funding

This blog is part of a research project on The War Books Boom, 1928-30 led by Andrew Frayn. This was partly funded by Edinburgh Napier University, and funding for a cognate project came from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland. Beth Campbell’s work on this as an intern was funded by the Centre for Literature and Writing at ENU.

Project twitter account: https://twitter.com/warbooksboom

Interview with Man Booker Prize Shortlisted Author Graeme Macrae Burnet

10 May 2019 / anneschwan / 0 Comments

In February 2019, Glasgow based author Graeme Macrae Burnet visited Edinburgh Napier to discuss his Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel His Bloody Project (Saraband, 2015) with final-year students on Professor Anne Schwan’s module “Crime in Text & Film.” Following the class, he was interviewed by English & Film student Calum Rosie.

Graeme Macrae Burnet (left) with Edinburgh Napier student Calum Rosie

Introduction by Calum Rosie:

I sat down with author Graeme Macrae Burnet to discuss his novels, his influences, and his process. Burnet told me before the interview that there was only one question he didn’t like being asked, but that he wasn’t going to tell me what it was. Read on to find out if I ask it. Or rather, how soon I asked it, because of course I asked it.

CR: I thought the first thing that I’d ask you, is a general question about crime as a genre because three of your books are centred on… that is, that is the question…?

GMB: Yes.

[both laugh]

GMB: Yeah, brilliant. But no, it’s a perfectly valid question, so just ask the question.

CR: Just what is it that attracts you to that?

GMB: Well first of all with regards to His Bloody Project, although it’s a novel about a crime, I don’t really see it as a crime novel. I just see it as a novel and I think crime fiction tends to have a certain structure, whereby very conventionally there’s a crime, a mystery, usually a murder and then there’s a journey through the narrative, whereby somebody solves the crime and that forms the narrative arc called the book. His Bloody Project isn’t really like that because we know from the beginning that Roddy is guilty of the crimes. So yeah it’s a crime novel in that it’s about a crime, but I wasn’t attracted to write that book for generic reasons; it was because I was very interested in the idea of somebody who has committed these very violent acts being able to write an articulate account of the events leading up to the murders, and as I was discussing earlier this idea from the French case of Pierre Rivière. My other two books, they are crime novels and they are certainly within the crime genre, but I think they kind of play a little bit with the expectations of the genre, the expectation generally being that when you get to the end of the book the crime will be solved.

CR: Yeah.

GMB: And you will be returned as a reader to a sort of position of certainty and knowledge and to some extent neither of these two other books, The Accident on the A35 and the Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau, really fulfil the expectation of the genre. What I’m most interested in, in both these books and in His Bloody Project, is the psychology of the characters. So in the Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau it’s a disappearance first of all; it’s not a crime. There is no crime.

CR: Yeah in the end there is no crime really at all.

GMB: Yeah so it is a crime novel even though there’s no crime in it; the central event is not a crime. And The Accident on the A35 – it’s an accident. But these events are a springboard for me to explore the characters who are involved in the events and that’s what interests me most. I mean The Accident on the A35 has a structure just like a crime novel, and there are actually two investigations going on, one by the cop Georges Gorski and one by the son of the deceased, Raymond Barthelme, who are both trying to find out what happened on the night of the death of the father, so there’s a crime novel structure and bizarrely it’s not necessary for there to be a crime. So yeah I’m kind of interested in generic expectations, but I think they are sometimes there to be played with as well. Sometimes really hard-core readers of crime fiction don’t respond that well to my books, because they don’t fulfil the normal expectations. They’re just really slow. [laughs] Nothing happens.

CR: Especially in The Accident on the A35 there’s this subplot of the strangling in Strasbourg and in any other novel that would probably be the main thread.

GMB: Yes, absolutely, I mean that’s there to draw Gorski the cop in a certain direction, but that’s a kind of dramatic crime novel murder but I’m not really interested in it and we’re not really interested in who committed that murder. It’s there again because it takes Gorski into a sort of a subplot with the big cop Philippe Lambert from Strasbourg, where he feels out of depth and he gets into these scrapes, and goes to the sleazy bar you know, humiliates himself and misses a date with his wife. See I’m more interested in Gorski’s relationship with his wife than whether he solves this crime or not. So you’re right it’s very much a sub plot.

CR: You mentioned early on that the I, Pierre Rivière dossier was sort of central. What did you think about the way Foucault and colleagues responded to it?

GMB: Well I read the book in full back in 2012 and I didn’t reopen it, because it did have a central role in His Bloody Project, but I didn’t want to replicate it. So my memory of the surrounding documents are pretty sketchy to be honest, but what I remember is the competing discourses trying to make sense or create meaning from, but basically to interpret this text from Pierre Rivière. What was the meaning of the text? What is the meaning of the text in relation to the murders? Does it change the nature of the murders because the murderer is capable of writing this account? Does it change it in a negative way or positive way? My sort of overriding memory of the book was the dossier format of the book, and that’s what had the influence on me, to create a book where there are different documents and the reader can kind of come to their own conclusions about what’s been going on.

CR: How did you feel about the conclusion that I think in particular Foucault came to; he seemed like he was admiring Pierre in a way. At one point they almost try and compare crime to art. Do you think that is problematic in any way?

GMB: Yeah well, Foucault was a very creative thinker I think. You know, I am a fan of his or at least some of his work, but I don’t think you need to read Foucault and say “Well this is what Foucault said, so Foucault’s right”. I think Foucault’s a creative thinker, and sometimes he writes stuff and it makes you think. So if he compares a murder to a piece of art, that’s an interesting thought. It doesn’t mean that you have to endorse that thought, but what would it mean to think about a violent act in the same way you would the creation of a work of art. By having those thoughts it’s stimulating, but you don’t have to endorse the idea. Foucault wrote some pretty odd stuff. There’s a thing in Discipline and Punish about the scaffold and the spectacle and I think, sometimes it’s better to say something reasonably extreme and seemingly black and white because it’s interesting to say it. And if you hedge too much and qualify everything, you end up saying nothing. So in a way, Foucault is being a polemicist and that’s probably why we are still reading him and talking about him. I mean I’m not a fan of Freud; Freud was full of shit.

CR: I’d agree.

GMB: But Freud was also an amazing creative mind and you could read him as literature and read him as a character and you know some of his later work, you know Civilisation and its Discontents and so on. I find it really interesting, which doesn’t mean I think it’s the truth. I don’t believe in the Oedipus complex but it’s interesting to read that stuff as literature. So I feel pretty similarly with Foucault.

CR: So kind of following on from that, you mention the death of the author, interpretation as being key; was that one of the reasons that you, in your three books you’ve kind of presented them as… in two of them, you’re a translator, was that a way to distance yourself?

GMB: Well, with the first book, The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau, yes, I claim to be the translator, and the author of the book is Raymond Brunet, a French author who was born and brought up in Saint-Louis and wrote this autobiographical novel. And what happens is Raymond Brunet, he dies;, he commits suicide. So it is death of the author, in the book.

CR: Oh, right I see.

GMB: But yes, absolutely, it’s a great question. So what we’re doing there is, because the book, Adèle Bedeau, contains a short biography of the author, so I’m kind of inviting the reader to play that game whereby they interpret the text in relation to the life of the author. Which is not the same as the intentions of the author; that’s another strand of that very traditional approach to literature, biographical criticism. I’m now making a yawning gesture! So yeah I’m very much playing with the idea of interpreting the text in relation to the life of the author by presenting this fictional author and, when the book came out in 2014, I was obviously completely unknown and the book came out with no fanfare, small publisher. And I went down to London to sign some copies in shops, and the booksellers there, they all thought it was a French novel, written by Raymond Brunet.

CR: Oh really?

GMB: So when I went into a small bookshop in Primrose Hill and the manager greeted me with the words “Ah, the translator!”

CR: [laughing]

GMB: I was like “Eh, yeah, haha.” And he was like “Yes, isn’t it amazing how the life of the author paralleled the life of the characters in the book?”

CR: Oh dear.

GMB: And I suddenly realised that, you know, there’s no reason for people to disbelieve this. I hadn’t intended to trick anybody, but people felt that they had been tricked. And that’s really interesting because, when we read a novel, we are tricking ourselves. We are engaging with a fictional character. We’ve been having a conversation about Roddy Macrae and whether we empathise with him; we follow his journey. He’s not real.

CR: Yeah.

GMB: And you know, His Bloody Project is kind of the opposite of these other two books in the sense that I present it as a real case, and I go to great lengths to make it seem real, and probably fifty percent of readers think it’s real.

CR: My mum did, actually.

GMB: Yeah.

CR: I spoke to her last night saying I was going to do this, and she said “Oh yeah, cos he wrote about the thing that happened,” and I was like “Oh no, it didn’t happen.” And she got really annoyed actually.

GMB: Yeah!

CR: She was like “So he lied about it?”

GMB: Yes!

CR: And I thought, in as much as anyone who’s ever written any story ever, yeah I suppose he did. [laughs]

GMB: But that conversation is exactly the conversation I’ve had about… “So it’s a lie?” All fiction is a lie. And I’m drawing attention to that by presenting my fiction as non-fiction. People sometimes react just like that, as your mum, they’re annoyed. They feel like they’ve been duped. And it’s made me reflect on what we’re doing when we read fiction, and the relationship between fiction and non-fiction, and I find it all very interesting.

CR: I was wondering what, was that part of the reason, because both of your fictionalised authors share one of your names, or similar in a way, because there’s Roddy Macrae–

GMB: Oh yeah.

CR: And Brunet which is very similar to…

GMB: Well it’s an anagram. Sorry, is it deliberate?

CR: Yeah, was that kind of…?

GMB: Well, with Raymond Brunet it’s a deliberately obvious anagram. And yet, because of the French pronunciation, Brunet sounds quite different from Burnet. There are only two letters swapped around, but Brunet is a very easy French name. So, surprisingly, most people don’t notice. So that was, you know, an anagram making it obvious that this is fiction, and he’s also me, sort of thing. With Roddy Macrae, the set up at the beginning of the book is that I’m looking for some historical, some family historical records of my grandfather, whose name was Macrae, so it would be logical that within that, I would come across a document by another Macrae. So that was really the reason, I wasn’t trying to, you know he’s not my doppelgänger.

CR: Did you ever consider passing Roderick off as a member of your family, or were you a bit reluctant to?

GMB: Well I did, actually; originally, my intention was that the book, because Roddy’s mother in the book dies of childbirth and the offspring from that birth was taken away and taken care of by extended family in Toscaig. It’s alright, nobody remembers that.

CR: [laughs]

GMB: So I was going to pretend that I was the offspring of this other son, so Roddy would have then have been my great-great-great-great uncle, I think. But I decided, A) it wouldn’t have added anything to the book and B) I would have had to ask everybody in my family, “Would you mind if I create this character who is a triple-murderer, from the same part of the country as us, and then say he’s actually part of our family?” And I couldn’t, as I say it wouldn’t have added anything to the book so there was no point. But funnily enough though yes, I did think about it. [laughs]

CR: I actually know some Macraes from up sort of Inverness way.

GMB: Oh yeah? Oh right, well it’s certainly a pretty common name; you know Wester Ross where my mum’s from, Macrae and Mackenzie are the biggest names. There are so many Mackenzies up there. But I think that’s why there are so many nicknames, to differentiate between different–

CR: Of course.

GMB: You know, there’s no point saying “Roddy Macrae” because there are so many Macraes. I mean if I’d been really realistic in the book, there would have been more Macraes and Mackenzies. But in a novel you can’t do that, because you’ve got to differentiate people by name.

CR: And on the subject of that actually, you write a lot about, small, kind of provincial towns. Do you have any sort of experience with that, or is there a reason, or has it just happened to…?

GMB: [laughs] Well, I mean I come from Kilmarnock, which I guess is a small provincial town, and when I was growing up I certainly had a strong desire to leave Kilmarnock. And it’s nothing against Kilmarnock, particularly; I think I would have felt that way whether I’d been in Motherwell, Hamilton, Ayr, Dunfermline, Inverness or wherever. It was a desire, which I think is a positive thing as a teenager, to go elsewhere. And so Saint-Louis, the small town in the French novels is a real place. And I just happened to visit there, around 2000, and I went to the restaurant in the novel, and I had lunch.

CR: Oh really?

GMB: And that’s where the novel arose from that moment of inspiration, observing what was going on around me, the sense of routine, the sense of a very unremarkable town. The feeling that if you grew up there you would have this desire to escape, so in some ways I was projecting my own feelings onto this other place. I mean the way I’ve written about Saint-Louis is really unfair! [laughs] Because I’m very rude about that town.

CR: But I think you say in the afterword that it’s not justified; you kind of bring it back.

GMB: Well spotted! I did, because when I wrote the second book, I went back to do some research, and the first couple of times I’d been to Saint-Louis, it was the middle of winter and it was really grey and horrible. And when I went back to do research for The Accident on the A35, it was June, and it was 35 degrees, and there was blossom on all the trees and it was sunny, and people were sitting outside, and actually the town seems quite nice. But because I was written within the persona of Raymond Brunet, who was himself trapped in the town, I couldn’t then suddenly be nice about the town. Hence in the afterword to The Accident, I say “Saint-Louis is by no means as unpleasant Raymond Brunet says it is!” And I’m really glad I wrote that because, bizarrely, there’s a literary festival in Saint-Louis.

CR: Oh really?

GMB: And because it’s a fake translation into English, the book’s now been translated into French. Or back into its original language.

CR: [laughs]

GMB: And actually, so The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau has come out in France; I think there seems to be quite a lot of curiosity about why some Scottish guy wrote this book, which is very heavily influenced by Georges Simenon. So the books actually had quite a lot of attention in France, and I’m going to go to the festival to appear and answer for why I’ve been so rude about this town. So that will be an interesting experience.

CR: Just take a couple of pages where you’ve said nice things about them.

GMB: Yes absolutely, I’ll get it on a t-shirt: “I love Saint-Louis.”

CR: Yeah that’s a good idea.

GMB: I’ve probably done something for their tourist industry.

CR: Oh I’d think so, yeah. I’d go there.

GMB: I think, just to back to your actual question, I have a fascination with slightly unremarkable places, and I think when you’re an outsider in a place, as writer, that’s a far more productive experience. If I’m in a bar in Glasgow, I’m with my friends; if I walk around Glasgow, I don’t notice anything. But when you’re alone, abroad, maybe your grasp of the language isn’t great, so that’s kind of filtered out, I find that your powers of observation are much more heightened. And actually when I went back to the research for The Accident, this was an act of deliberate observation. If you sit in a bar, or a cafe or in a park for an hour, without your phone, without a book, without a newspaper, that’s actually quite a long time, and you see stuff. And stuff that I observed went straight into the book, and helped to shape the texture of the book, so I think people think it’s very odd, and it is odd, to have written two books about this town in France, not being French myself, but it’s that feeling of outsider-ness, which I think is really important for writers.

CR: So was Saint-Louis one of the inspirations for the story or was it just a place that happened to fit?

GMB: No I went there, I went for lunch in what becomes in the book the Restaurant de la Cloche. The original idea for the book would be that it would be entirely set in the Restaurant de la Cloche. That was too restrictive. So when I was there, there was a character who was in the restaurant, very traditional French bistro, everybody goes there for their lunch, you know office workers, people from the building site, just go in and have a three course meal and a glass of wine. Love France for that! And there was a guy at the bar, and he was wearing a suit and looked ill at ease, and uncomfortable, and I felt, he comes here every day, and these other people come here every day and they never speak to each other. There’s all these unspoken tensions. I wrote a sketch of the scene; this was about fifteen years ago, and it always stayed with me. And all I did, I took that, I started writing. I created the character of Adèle Bedeau, who’s the waitress in the restaurant, and then she disappears, and that’s the springboard event to examine the lives of the characters. And I knew nothing more, when I started writing, than that. So I just built it up as one event begets another, and then you find the characters. I knew who the character of Manfred Baumann was from the beginning, because I share some of his neuroses.

CR: Not all of them I hope.

GMB: Not all of them yes, just to be clear!

CR: I’ll put that in the official record. So what is it that made you want to start really writing it, as opposed to, I think you said you worked in television for a while?

GMB: Well I’d been writing since I was a student at Glasgow University, off and on, short stories. I’d finished writing what I would call a straight crime novel, in the nineties. It was set in a version of Kilmarnock and it was called Hard Rain. You know, proper crime novel title. But you know, I finished it and that’s an achievement. You know, get to the end. It’s easy to start. And then in the interim, I’d started about three or four other novels and got to maybe thirty-thousand words or something, and given up. And somehow this scene in this French town has just stayed with me. I mean, it was definitely ten years between starting to write the novel and being there. So, I remembered it, utterly crystal clear, but when I went back to the place, ten, twelve years later, it was exactly as I remembered it, and I had this feeling that nothing ever changed there, and what I loved was when I went back twelve years later, I had exactly the same lunch. The menu hadn’t changed!

CR: Oh wow, yeah.

GMB: So you know, I went back to it because it stuck in my mind, and I’d had these failures, if you want to call it that, or unfinished novels, and I played a little trick on myself. Actually I got made redundant from my TV job, which was good.

CR: I just got made redundant recently actually.

GMB: Oh congratulations. That’s a good life experience. And I thought right, time to write a novel Graeme, get on with it, and for some reason I plomped on that. And I told myself I was writing a short story. Just a little mind-trick. It’s like “It doesn’t have to be a novel. It could be twenty-thousand words; it could be a novella.” And because I read a lot of Simenon and other European crime fiction, and a lot of that stuff is maybe fifty-thousand words. There’s a much bigger tradition of the short, very brief crime novel. So I was kind of aiming for fifty-, sixty-thousand words, which is a more attainable goal than eighty-, a hundred-thousand words, especially when you’re starting. Maybe you’re writing yourself?

CR: A bit, yeah.

GMB: I kind of played a trick. I loved the world of the book, you know; I loved it. And I found it very easy to write the character of Manfred Baumann. I struggled with narrative; I still struggle with narrative, but I enjoyed the milieu, and that’s why I wrote the second book, because I wanted to go back to that milieu, and just be in it again.

CR: Are you planning to go back to it?

GMB: There will be one final book featuring Georges Gorski. If you remember at the beginning of The Accident, two manuscripts are delivered to the offices of the publisher.

CR: Oh, of course!

GMB: But I’m not interested in writing a series. Publishers loves series. You know I killed the author. Sometimes the big mistake of crime writers is to kill off their character, but I actually killed the author of the books. So there was a certain amount of contrivance in writing the other book, but again The Accident is far more of Raymond Brunet’s book, because it was about the death of his father, and he is writing a fictionalised account of this fictional event. Then I’m inviting the reader again to interpret how much of what’s in the novel was “true” to Raymond Brunet’s actual biography which is, of course, also fiction. I have real trouble explaining this.

CR: It makes sense when you read it, yeah.

GMB: So that’s all fun. And I think that it adds a little layer. Some readers find it a little bit unnecessary, pretentious, but that’s fine, you don’t need to read it and I enjoy it and I think it’s fun, and as a reader it’s the sort of thing I would like.

CR: Yeah, definitely. Because when you’re reading, and I think you mentioned this earlier, you don’t want to fall into the trap of “What’s the author trying to say; how much of this is true?”. These kinds of books almost let you do that, without doing it, if that makes sense.

GMB: Well, you’re invited to relate the text to the life of Brunet. And you used the phrase – you asked me earlier if I was kind of stepping back. And I suppose yes, absolutely, all the books I’ve written so far, the text has been presented as having been written by somebody other than me. And to let you into a secret, without having thought it through, I’m doing the same with my current book. So obviously there was something going on there. Obviously I’m a really shy, anti-social person.

CR: [laughs] Maybe that’s it, yeah.

GMB: But again, as we were discussing in the class, you don’t necessarily analyse everything before you do it, or do it for a rational reason. Sometimes you just do stuff because it appeals to you, or you’re going with the flow, then afterwards people expect you to have a rational explanation, and that’s not the way I work.

CR: I guess we’re taught as students to always assume that there is a reason, but there often isn’t.

GMB: Well, if you talk to twenty different writers, you’ll get twenty different answers, in terms of to what extent. Some writers set out to “explore a theme.” [he makes a vomit face].

CR: [laughs]

GMB: And that’s not the way I do it. I hate the word “theme,” but that’s something that can come out as a matter of interpretation after the text is in existence. I think for me, if I wanted to explore a theme, then I would create characters who represent different aspects around that, and my fear would be that it would be schematic, and I wouldn’t have those moments where I feel emotional engagement with the character. Because I think when we read novels, and I think it’s amazing that we are still reading novels in the world we’re in, I think people predominantly read novels because of character, and it’s character that draws people into the narrative and makes people care about the book. And so you can have all the intellectual ideas you want, but if you’re not engaging a reader on the level of character, or on the level of story maybe, then nobody’s going to finish the book. So I kind of approach it form the bottom up and if there are interesting conversations to be had afterwards, you know it’s like “oh yeah yeah, I see what you mean. Oh providence, yes!”

CR: Yeah of course, yeah.

GMB: But sometimes an idea will arise during the writing of the book, like the idea of providence that we were discussing earlier. And you might see it reappearing in some way and you might draw that out a little bit, I would say. But I don’t want to start by thinking I want to push something, on a rational, intellectual level. I want, first and foremost, very old fashioned, I want emotional engagement.

CR: So can you tell if you’re reading another book, can you be like “Oh I see they’re trying to talk about the issues”?

GMB: Well I mean yeah, it’s called bad writing.

CR: [laughs]

GMB: I mean a really obvious way that you might come across that is if you feel that the author is putting words into the mouth of their character, they’re making a little speech about something, and you feel that it’s not motivated by the character. So yes, I would say that I can tell. And I think that most people could. You know, I’m a reader, just like you’re a reader, just like anybody who reads novels is a reader. Maybe as a writer I’m a bit more aware of the techniques that people use. I’m not sure that’s true, but I think the last thing I want from a novel, or any piece of art, is to feel that the creator of that work is hitting me over the head with making their meaning overly obvious. I love Georges Simenon because Simenon never judges his character. He describes the action and locations, but it’s very much for you to make up your own mind. But if you read somebody like Emile Zola, you’re always aware of what Emile Zola thinks of his characters’ behaviour.

CR: [makes a scoffing noise to pretend he knows about the writing style of Emile Zola]

GMB: He’s a moralist. And he writes in terms where he will be condemning of their vulgar, depraved behaviour. I mean I like Emile Zola, it’s great stuff, but there’s a difference; you can see that Zola, the moralist, had a moral drive in his books that Simenon doesn’t. So I prefer the Simenon method.

CR: You see that kind of moralism a lot? Do you ever read or watch any true crime stuff?

GMB: Well, I used to read quite a lot of true crime. But I think with non-fiction it’s slightly different. It just depends on the writer. I mean I like reading non-fiction and I would like to write a non-fiction book one day. An actual non-fiction book.

CR: Do you think people would say “Hang on, is this one actually real, or…?”?

GMB: Well, that would be really fun though, wouldn’t it? I was reading this little book by a philosopher; I’m not a big philosophy reader, but I was reading this book about suicide, and he tells this story about this 14th century Italian guy who’d written a treatise on suicide. And because of my way of thinking, I was like “I wonder if he’s just made this guy up.” I could go and google him, and with His Bloody Project, many people have googled characters in the case. And in fact, with the French books, people go away and google Raymond Brunet, the author. And what’s bizarre is, a friend of mine made a trailer for the alleged film.

CR: Oh really?

GMB: Which is online. So that muddies the waters even further.

CR: That’s really funny.

GMB: The trailer is obviously fake, but it’s very well done. So yeah look it up.

CR: I will do; that’s really cool. Do you have any tips for anybody who wants to get into writing?

GMB: Yes. Stay the fuck away from all these books about creative writing. Stay away from the tips. I see a lot of it on social media, and I totally understand when you’re beginning. I’ve been there, but I think these endless lists of tips for writers, they drive me up the wall. I mean I avert my eyes. Because once you’ve read them, you can’t unread them. They stick in your mind, “Do this, do that, do it this way, don’t do it that way.” I’d say: read a lot, re-read. It’s much better to know one book well than to have read ten books in a superficial way. And there’s no substitute for the actual writing. I get asked at every event I do, at the end, someone asks, and I can see them, they’re shuffling all shy, and I say “Aw are you a writer; do you write?” “Aw yeah a bit, you know.”

CR: [laughs] Exactly what I said a minute ago.

GMB: Yeah, totally. And I understand that, we’re Scottish! And I say “What are you working on?” And they say: “Oh I haven’t started, I’ve just been thinking about this,” often for thirty years. And I’m like “Go home and tomorrow, write a thousand words.” Because if you can’t do it, you can’t do it. There is no substitute. A lot of people who are “stuck,” they say they have a desire to write; they’re the ones reading the books on creative writing. I’m not saying there’s no place for that sort of stuff, but on the other hand, I was forty-six before I published a novel. So a lot of people go “Oh my god, that’s ancient.” It’s actually about average. So you have to find your own way, absolutely, and that’s why I’m sceptical about prescriptions about how you should write. I mean I have my own proscriptions, or prescriptions, about how I go about stuff. I’m very, very strict on point of view. I will never violate point of view in my novels.

CR: Yeah.

GMB: And that’s me. I’ve just read Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls. Wow! It’s amazing; one of the biggest selling novels of the twentieth century. It’s a real door-stopper, pulp fiction kind of story, but it’s amazing. And she doesn’t care about point of view. She can enter the head of any character at any point. So that’s fine, but if you set up the rules, you’ve got to follow the rules.

CR: Yeah, because in yours, it’s Gorski, plus Manfred.

GMB: So you never know what any other character is thinking because we only ever see them through either Gorski or Manfred’s eyes. So I use the phrase “as if” a lot. Because, “as if they were doing,” because we don’t know.

CR: Oh right, yeah.

GMB: So yeah. But you just got to be doing some writing. Write stuff, throw it away. Be prepared to throw a lot away. I mean people say “Oh, I’d like to see that earlier novel you wrote” and I’m like “Yeah, no chance.” But it was a great learning experience.

CR: And you’ve got a new one in the pipeline?

GMB: I’m working; I’m getting towards the end of the first draft.

CR: Okay so a wee while yet.

GMB: Yeah, 2020 at the earliest. But yeah I just want to make sure it’s as good as it can be. It’s a struggle. But I always struggle; I struggle with narrative. Putting things in the right order seems simple, but it’s difficult for me.

CR: I guess then my last question is, if someone were planning to write an essay at university on His Bloody Project, where would you recommend they start?

GMB: I would say, read the text. The book is the text, that’s all that matters. Don’t listen to interviews with the author.

CR: [laughs]

GMB: Everything required to write an essay about any book is the book. If you’re writing an academic essay, you are required to read and cite previous sources, that’s the game, that’s fine. I don’t know how much, if anything, has been written about His Bloody Project. But I’m a big fan of primary sources as well, as a researcher. So I would say it’s more important to go and read articles about James Bruce Thompson, or go and look at some documents relating to some real life murder cases. Read the style of writing that was prevalent at the time. Read about the history, the way of life at the time. I would say reading around the subject raised by the book. There probably isn’t much criticism. You’ll know better than me if there is any. I mean the novel’s only three years old.

CR: Yeah that’s the difficulty with writing about recent things.

GMB: You should see it not as a difficulty but as being a liberation; you don’t have F. R. Leavis looking over your shoulder. Or another hefty literary critic. You can just come to your own view.

CR: When you were a researcher, did you ever have difficulty in deciding when the research stopped? And finding the balance there?

GMB: That is a difficulty. I read a novel relatively recently where the person included far too much of their research in their novel, where it was completely not motivated by the story or the characters. So it’s like, yeah you’ve done your research, you’re just showing it off. I tried to be careful with that in His Bloody Project. For example, earlier I was talking about these superstitions I came across in research. Absolutely fascinating and anybody you talk to, they go “Wow, that’s amazing,” and I’d written bits where I’d contrived use of those superstitions; I’d sort of shoe-horned them into the story. And I read it back over and I knew I’d only written it in because I’d done the research, and that’s the wrong way round. So you have to start writing at some point. The thing I’m writing at the moment is set in 1960s London. I could do endless research, but I’m at the point now where I’ve been writing and my research will be more of the kind of, not fact-checking, but I just need to find a little bit. It’s a very directed research, rather than general finding out about the milieu, kind of research. So it’s a bit of back and forth.

CR: Thank you very much, Graeme.

Early term inspiration

24 September 2018 / Andrew Frayn / 0 Comments

Our incoming students to the English programme were lucky enough on their very first day to have an inspirational talk from Siân Bevan. Siân works for Edinburgh City of Literature, which is just one of the ways she uses her many skills. She talked to first years on the English and English & Film programmes about starting at university and careers in the Arts.

Siân wrote up her thoughts after the event on her own blog:

https://sianyb.com/2018/09/10/new-chapters-and-old-advice/

There are some useful thoughts here if you’re not a first year, too!

Interview with Visiting Poet Rory Waterman by Sara Vollen, Méabh Ní Dhoibhlin and Abi Mayers

20 February 2018 / arinkeeble / 0 Comments

Introduction by Sara Vollen

On the last day of January, 2018, acclaimed poet Rory Waterman visited Edinburgh for the Scottish launch of his second poetry collection, Sarajevo Roses (Carcanet, 2017). During his visit, Waterman, who is also Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University, made an appearance as a guest lecturer here at Edinburgh Napier University.

A scholar of twentieth century poetry, Waterman led the ‘Fictions of Terror’ seminar for that week which was on Seamus Heaney’s North (1975) and Heaney’s poetic responses to and representation of sectarian violence and terror in Northern Ireland. Later that evening at Edinburgh’s much-loved radical bookshop, The Lighthouse, which was absolutely packed to capacity, Waterman read from Sarajevo Roses and discussed his work. The sold-out event consisted of Waterman reading selected poems from Sarajevo Roses and his first collection Tonight the Summer’s Over (Carcanet, 2013) as well as a question and answer session led by Edinburgh Napier’s Dr. Arin Keeble. Arin and audience members raised questions intermittently through Waterman’s reading of poems such as the ruminative ‘Brexit Day on the Balmoral Estate’ and the sardonic ‘Tuesday’. The format allowed the poet to reveal his inspirations for the poems and writing process, divulge his views on poetry as art and to discuss his personal influences, and his journey as a poet.

The next day, Waterman sat down with Méabh Ní Dhoibhlin, Abi Mayers and myself (Sara Vollen), a trio of 4^th year Edinburgh Napier English and Film students for a formal interview. We were eager to keep the conversation going and excited to hear Rory go into detail about all aspects of his work. The session was recorded and transcribed and appears below:

Abi Mayers: You mentioned you can work on a poem for up to a year after visiting a place, are you actually working on it for that length of time?

Rory Waterman: It really depends, one of the poems I read last night is ‘Ave Maria’. I wrote that whilst I was walking up (the hill); I was jotting it down on the way to this shrine. It wasn’t finished until a good while afterwards. Some others it could be a hell of a long time. I’m not looking for poems when I go anywhere, I’m not consciously on the lookout. Well I must be on some level otherwise I wouldn’t write poems, they don’t naturally occur, they’re not like fruit. It can take a long time, I can be working on it for a year, but I will be doing lots of other stuff too right? But I might start something and think that is going nowhere and it just sits in a notebook. I carry a notebook around, I’ve always got one – I have one at the moment that I just jot stuff in. I get through about three or four of them a year. I’ll go back and pick something up again, so that’s quite often how it works, for me anyway. It can take a long time. The aim is to come up with something that looks spontaneous, but it almost never is. Fabrication, the whole thing.

Méabh Ní Dhoibhlin: When did you start to write and what sparked your interest?

RW: That’s a great question because it invites me to talk about me! Like everyone else who’s literate I tried to write poems when I was a teenager. Who has not written a poem here?

MND: I used to write songs. That was my outlet.

RW: Where does one become the other? I wrote some poems at school and one of my teachers thought I was quite good and sent it off to some competition. That didn’t go anywhere, didn’t win or anything like that. I had the feeling I was quite good at playing around with words and doing stuff with words. And that would be a way I could kind of explain and navigate things. I tried to write a lot of poems in my late teens and they were bad, very bad. I found some actually, in a drawer in my mum’s house, and when I looked at them I couldn’t believe it.

MND: Cringey?

(Laughter)

RW: Then I didn’t write anything. I had a poem in a magazine actually, called ‘Dream Catcher’. I didn’t write anything else for years but then I did my degree, my undergraduate degree. And then I was doing a Masters degree. And I went to university two years later than most people would go, so I was probably about twenty-four when I wrote the first poem where I thought ‘actually this is quite good’. It is in the first book. It’s called ‘A Suicide’, and it is very short. I wrote two poems in that year that didn’t go anywhere but I thought that it was different. Then I didn’t write anything for a couple of years. Suddenly – I think I mentioned this last night – I had started a Ph.D in Leicester, I was living in Bristol in the South-West, and my mum lives in Lincolnshire about two hours from Leicester and my dad in Norwich in East Anglia, and both my mum and my dad within about two months of each other were diagnosed with cancer. My mum very seriously and my dad…well cancer’s serious right? But the prognosis was worse for my mum. They’re both fine now. I didn’t drive at the time so I did a kind of ‘learn in a week’ course and learnt to drive. I was travelling up to Leicester to do my Ph.D., I was going across to Lincoln to take my mum to appointments and doing the same with my dad. I was busy, I’ve never been more busy. I didn’t have time to sleep as much as you’re meant to, I just didn’t. I didn’t have any time to think really, and that’s when I started to write poems. They weren’t poems about that, none of them mention any of that. But they were some of the more personal poems in the first book, the ones about my childhood and that set of experiences gave them a context. It gave all of my personal history a context; it gave it a different dimension. That’s when I started writing, and since then I’ve probably written something like twelve to eighteen pages a year or something like that. That’s a long answer to a short question.

Rory’s first collection, Tonight the Summer’s Over (Carcanet, 2013)

MND: Going on from that, were there certain poets that inspired you to write such as Seamus Heaney?

RW: My dad’s a poet, he would send me stuff to read when I was a kid. I didn’t live with him. He would send me stuff, he was probably exasperated by the amount of things that he sent me that I actually bothered to read. But I knew of that world from a pretty young age. I was reading quite a lot, and poets I suppose are connected with – apart from the poets we all read as kids like ‘Revolting Rhymes’ by Roald Dahl – the first poems I kind of loved were by Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Charles Causley…so they were my first influences. My first influences are pretty broad because I like a lot of stuff, I don’t just read poetry all the time, I don’t like to think and talk about poetry all the time. That’s not to say I don’t want to be here! But there is a hell of a lot more to life than poems, and speaking to some poets you’d think they don’t realise that. I do read a lot of poems, I always have done and I don’t know what my biggest influences are. There are a number of poets I really admire from all sorts of different directions: R.S. Thomas, Alice Oswald, I could go on.

MND: Did you go for a deliberate style or did it just develop naturally?

RW: The latter really. Well, actually, it doesn’t ‘develop naturally’ in a sense because as I’ve said it’s a fabrication. If I’m writing a sonnet it’s a received form, I didn’t make it up. So a bit of both but I certainly don’t try and sound different to myself. It wasn’t about that, it was about connecting…who talked about touching someone’s heart by showing their own? You can’t do that unless you are using your own voice and that’s the highest ideal of poetry for me. That’s what I try to do.

Sarah Vollen: Last night during the Q and A you mentioned how you found writing poems to be really hard. Also – and please correct me if I’m wrong – you noted you experience an element of ‘inconvenience’ when you write, could you expand on this? What specifically do you find difficult about it and what about the process do you find to be inconvenient?

RW: So the inconvenience would come from something popping into my head in the middle of the night, or I’m driving down the motorway or in the middle of class when I’m not meant to be thinking about other stuff…. When you’re trying to find the right words and put them in the best order, and the right vehicle for saying what you’re saying, not just the choice of words but their form. There are a lot of things to consider and sometimes – the truth is – sometimes you don’t consider those things and you let it naturally occur. You follow a form that is dictated by what you’re thinking and how the words come out, to some extent. If those two things start right then you’re onto something and if they don’t it can be really hard. The French poet Valéry said ‘a poem is never finished only abandoned’ and that’s part of it, you can always do something else to it and sometimes you don’t know what that is. The title poem of this book, Sarajevo Roses, the second part of that took forever. If I’m really honest, I’m still not sure I have got it exactly right and it took forever. Well it didn’t take forever, it’s ‘finished’, but it took a hell of a long time. The last three stanzas kept being changed. They kind of rely on one long sentence that ends up at a certain position. It is very hard just getting it right and I knew I wanted to keep it, I knew that poem mattered to me. It was very hard to get it to a point where I was happy to abandon it. That’s part of the problem: you don’t know when you’ve finished. But also they just don’t turn up in my head that often and when they do I’ve just got to make the most of them. That’s part of it. Some people sit down and write every day, but I can’t do it. If I was a novelist maybe. I’ve got a friend who’s a screenwriter, Billy Ivory, and he writes stuff for telly and often when he writes he has got a commission and he has got a date. He can write seven pages a day and sometimes twelve pages a day. But he’s got a plot, he’s got an idea, he’s working towards something. With a poem if I’ve got something I am working with it can be a right pain in the arse because I can be out, walking up a hill or something and I’ll say ‘hang on a minute’ and I’ll write something down. I can get kind of obsessed, like a kid with a train set, and that is all that matters. Then I finish that poem and then there’s nothing, I haven’t got any ideas again.

SV: So you feel like you can only write when the inspiration comes?

RW: Yes, when I’ve got an idea of something and I think I’m on to something, that’s exactly right and that dominates my thought. That doesn’t mean I won’t do anything else. But it does mean it’s the thing I keep coming back to. In odd moments or for a couple of hours every evening, I want to get to it.

AM: Do you ever forget the good ideas you have if you do not write them down?

RW: Yeah, I’ll end up in the middle of the night thinking ‘that’s a good idea but I’m too tired’ and then I’ve forgotten it. Happens all the time.

AM: You said last night that a poem isn’t a diary entry, do you find that it can still be a soothing or cathartic process?

RW: Absolutely, yeah. I mean the one thing I love about poetry above everything else is the trying to find that right way of expressing something in a form that explicates. We all respond to music right? To me, music is the highest of all the arts, if I had to rank them that would come top.

AM: Have you ever tried to write songs or music?

RW: Yeah, I’ve played in bands and stuff like that. I’ve written quite a lot of songs. Let’s compare poetry and painting. It’s a bit of a facile comparison, I realise, but a painting tells you things but it doesn’t tell you in linguistic terms. But a poem is using words and language to tell you things. It is trying to use language at the highest possible level to explore something, to set up a contrast or to pose a problem, or whatever it is. And I think that’s a wonderful thing, you know, that’s its glory.

AM: But do you think there is one meaning for a poem? Say when you write a poem and you have your version of it, do you mind if other people take a different…?

RW: I haven’t got a right to, have I? If there’s a poem like, say, ‘Sleeper’, and you say, ‘oh yeah the one about fishing’, and I say no and you say, ‘it’s definitely a metaphor for fishing’, I feel like I’ve got every right to say no Abi, you’re wrong, it’s not really a metaphor for fishing. But I haven’t really got a right to tell you, you’ve got a right to your reading. That’s the thing, it’s not a diary entry. You’re putting something out there and the poem lives or dies on its own. Even if you come to me and say, ‘what do you mean by that?’, it doesn’t affect the poem, the poem is its own document. You’ve got every right to an interpretation.

MND: Can I ask about the title of the book, Sarajevo Roses, it says on the back it is about the past inscribed on the present and not meant as an overarching symbol. But why that particular symbol?

Rory Waterman, Sarajevo Roses (Carcanet, 2017)

RW: Yeah, it concerned me quite a lot because they’re memorials, resin-filled craters where people died. I mean, I was concerned about it and I asked a lot of people, colleagues I respect. No one seemed to have misgivings or concerns about it, so I went ahead with it. And they’re symbolic of what a lot of the poems in the book are trying to do really. And let’s be honest, the poems are the best poems I’d written since last time, they’re not all around the symbol. There are themes that coalesce but all the same, a lot of the poems in the book do try to memorialise or speak to preserving something and Sarajevo Roses is a very poignant symbol of not forgetting. And also, people don’t know what they are, people might have to look that up and that in itself is a reason because they shouldn’t be forgotten. Because if we forget or we ignore awful things that have happened or are happening between people, we don’t learn from them. And the only thing you can do is learn from them. So that’s another reason, and they’re symbols of hope, they’re not just genocidal symbols.

AM: So do you think you can draw inspiration from only certain things then? If you’re worried about naming the book Sarajevo Roses do you think you only have a right to write about certain topics?

RW: No, not at all and that’s what ultimately trumps it for me because I think you have a right to write about anything. We can’t have subjects that are off limits. There are lots of great ways of striving towards justice and equality but making things unavailable for people to consider is just a strange puritanism that I don’t believe in and it’s totally inimical to its aims normally. So yeah, I totally believe in being able to write about anything. The reservations were just because they are symbols of a genocide that I didn’t experience. I didn’t want it to seem vicarious, and that was my reservation. But no, of course it’s not off limits.

SV: A lot of the poems in this collection seem to integrate almost a contrasting pastoral imagery with city or urban abjection which I found really interesting. Was that a conscious choice?

RW: No, not really. I sort of wrote about what occurred to me and what was in front of me at the time. And I live in Nottingham and it’s quite small for a major city, it’s in the middle of England, towards the middle of Britain really and it’s very close to the Peak District, as well as being very close to the area I grew up in which is very flat and empty. But also, there are lots of former mining towns which are impoverished and have been sort of left to rot and die, by policy, and that’s part of that environment as well. So just thinking about where I live, all those things are what I’m surrounded by. If I’m writing about what I’m experiencing, then that’s bound to creep into it. Have you got a specific poem in mind?

SV: I actually was thinking of the poem ‘Reunion’ and how you’re evoking this very idyllic Americana imagery but as well as showing the decay of it at the same time.

RW: Yeah, I suppose that’s true. That is what I’m evoking. I mean you get all those flags don’t you? People display a flag and it’s all sort of normal and almost chocolate-boxy. I’m not really keen on perfect pastoralia. The first poem is about going up to a hill fort and it’s all very lovely in a way but it ends with finding a dead animal in the wood. There’s always a fly in the ointment, nothing is one thing or another, it’s always more complicated than that. So just evoking nature and saying isn’t this lovely, well go and have a look at it, go to a national park if you want that but a poem should be doing more than just evoking a nice scene. So if I just wanted to evoke a landscape, I wouldn’t bother putting it into a poem.

SV: So instead of paintings which are more about capturing an image, with your poetry what you’re trying to do is critically comment or think more about that image.

RW: Yeah. I mean a painting can do that, it’s less likely to but it can. But with a poem, I mean I don’t just want to evoke a lovely landscape, or a shithole. What’s the point? And I don’t want to tell anyone what to think. Quite a lot of the poems, there’s something almost overtly political. But I certainly don’t want to tell anyone what to think. They’re not protest songs. If all you can do is read a poem and say oh yeah I agree with that, or no that’s rubbish, then what’s the point? They’re not protest songs. They’re poems.

SV: So instead of forcing an answer, you want to evoke questions and make people think.

RW: Yeah. Everything’s complicated, absolutely. Subtext is there, hanging heavy all the time.

AM: With what you were saying about writing about nice things and not so nice areas. Do you ever feel a responsibility with your writing to make something a bit more positive or a little less depressing? For example, Larkin is quite morose. Do you ever want to avoid people reading your poems in the future and thinking ‘wow, that’s really depressing’?

RW: Yeah, I don’t just want to be like Eeyore with a beard. It’s always more complicated than that. If you’re just saying something is awful then what’s the point? I think you can potentially be chilling and uncanny and unpleasant in certain ways but why shouldn’t you be? Art doesn’t have to be nice but no, I don’t come here to be just death and genocide and murder, I’m not a doom metal band. So, no, I’m not interested in being like that at all. I don’t feel like I’ve answered your question. Let’s have another go.

AM: I just mean it in the sense that if you’re going to put your name on something to publish and for the public to see, do you feel a responsibility to make the subject a little less rough around the edges or appease the audience in any sense?

RW: No, I see a sort of obligation to the truth. I can imagine not wanting to publish something because it might upset someone, but if I’m going to publish something I’m not going to smooth it out because it might upset someone.

MND: Being from the North of Ireland I feel I’m more politically aware in some senses, and you were saying yesterday that you spent some time in the North and were aware of that situation growing up. Do you think that being aware of that situation made you question things politically more or didn’t have anything to do with it?

RW: Definitely the former. When I was 11, the Coleraine bomb happened so immediately he rings up to tell me he’s fine. He lived in a mainly Catholic area and he had friends in that part of town and his kids were my friends so mainly the friends that I had were Northern Irish Catholic. So they were my friends and we got on great and I didn’t understand. I mean, I was a kid from Lincolnshire so I wasn’t involved in the same way but when I was in Northern Ireland, I suddenly was at home there in a weird way. I mean I wasn’t part of the place but my friends were and my dad was and that’s where it was then. I was very aware of those sorts of things and not necessarily able to articulate them because I was a kid but yeah, very aware in a way that most kids in Lincolnshire weren’t. And I remember people saying idiotic things about Northern Ireland at school, they just didn’t know anything. I remember being in London with a friend and his parents, just after the Docklands in the mid-90s. I remember his Mum being worried about us going into London to go to a gig because there had been the Docklands IRA bomb. I just remember thinking, that this is ludicrous, you are worried about us going to a gig in London because there might be an IRA bomb? I sort of understand because it feels like a long, long way away from England. You know what the reality was like from the ground: it wasn’t like that at all but at the same time it was all very different from life at home in Lincolnshire. But another aspect of when my sort of political consciousness began was when I was… so we lived in my Grandma’s house when I was growing up, my Mum left my Dad and moved me to Lincolnshire into her Mum’s house and we lived in this little stone lodge house to an estate about a mile from the next village. A tiny little house, then my grandma died in 1997, and we thought she owned the house, but she didn’t. It was on a lease from an estate, a country estate, for as long as my Grandmother and/or her husband were alive. So a letter came through from this sort of bastard landlord, telling my mother that she had to vacate the house that now belonged to the estate, to this farming estate. That politicised me. So now I’m getting on my bike, my Mum doesn’t drive, her Mum just died, my Aunt is off to her son’s house and sort of just leaves Mum to do everything. And I’m biking around the countryside looking at council houses: you know, a 15-year-old kid and his mum, we were more or less put to the top of the list, the council housing list. So I’m biking around, looking at all this social housing the council had given us a choice to live in, then calling her from other villages saying ‘Ah, you know Mum, I think this one is alright’. But all that I have seen since then is that sort of thing be eroded, to the point that if that happened to a single parent and child now they would be put in a Bed and Breakfast or something, at a much greater expense to the state and with no dignity. Simply for being human beings. That politicized me a lot, and one time, a while after we moved, I biked over to the estate, where they’d just built these big gates with the name of the estate logo engraved, and I went there with a hammer in the middle of the night and I…. So, yeah, I’m quite politicized.

A 1950s image of The Lodge, Nocton, where Waterman grew up in the 1980s and 90s

SV: So…on a lighter note, first I have to say that your poem ‘Tuesday’ was the first poem I’ve ever read that actually made me laugh aloud while reading it.

RW: Oh, thanks!

SV: So out of pure curiosity on my part, I was wondering what inspired you to create the protagonist of Dr. Bob Pintle?

RW: So, To ‘bob’ something, is to like, you know, bob for apples and that. Pintle is sort of, well it is part of a hinge. But it was also Old and Middle English, and later slang, for a penis. So, it is a ridiculous name. If you read it now knowing that, you can see bits where ‘Pintle does this’ and ‘Pintle does that’, you can see that it is a cock joke.

SV: That just makes it funnier.

RW: There are some bits where it is just that, but what inspired it…Ok, so, there is a kind of tradition of things like campus novels and people taking the piss out of academics. Academics taking the piss out of academics too. The most famous example of it is a novel by Kingsley Amis, which you might know, called Lucky Jim. It was written in the 50s and its very good for what it is and all the rest of it. There are some universals, and there are some things that are very different now, and the poem had to capture those. Now universities are run as businesses, not always necessarily in the interests of students, and academics are doing everything they can to do the best things for students. But of course, like in any industry, you have charlatans too. Bob Pintle is a kind of pastiche cartoon version of a complete charlatan. Someone who just wants to freeload and coast, so he is actually odious. Odious enough that you don’t care about him in some ways, so that is kind of part of the point. You sort of do but you don’t really because he is just horrible. He is horrible and kind of terrible at his job as well. But he’s obsessed by things like, you know, the REF (or Research Excellence Framework), which you might have heard of.Its Top Trumps for academics, our research ranked according to stiff and sometimes inimical criteria. You have to submit a certain amount of research ‘outputs’ or items and they are rated by people who perhaps don’t really read them, or know enough to pass any judgement. Then the university gets funding money accordingly. So everyone has to plan how they are to do these things but of course he’s lazy. So he actually doesn’t want to publish any research, he is kind of hamstrung by that. He’s lecturing in ‘Creativity’, so he is just making a mockery of certain things. I mean, I am a lecturer and my job is teaching English and Creative Writing, I don’t actually hate this world but I am lampooning from a position of love. That is the thing, it is taking things too far but potentially making certain things and types of people uncomfortable. The idea that certain members of academic management, the high level administrators that make three times as much as we do, it might make them upset, I don’t mind a bit. I’m happy about that. I am very happy about making academics who identify parts of themselves with Pintle or others in the poem upset as well.

SV: So is it more like a commentary on the bureaucracy that has kind of happened with universities?

RW: A little bit, but it is not meant to be cruel. It is meant to be a cartoon pastiche with a hell of a lot of truth to it. I am glad that you find it funny, thank you, but I don’t think it would be funny if it didn’t have any truth to it. But I also don’t think it would be funny if it was entirely true. Do you know what I mean?

SV: Yes, in that you almost had to make a hyperbolic version of it create that distance.

RW: That’s exactly it, that’s a better version of what I was trying to say. [Laughs] I’ll take it.

AM: In ‘Between Villages’, it looks like youth and the promise of future. I apologise, this is a really pretentious question, but is there a bit of a comparison between your sort of younger and adult self in that?

RW: Going back to something we’ve said before, if that is what you see in the poem, then it is…

AM: But what do you see in it?

RW: What do I see in it? What was I intending to do with it? What was I hoping? What do I think it is? Yeah, absolutely. Of course, I am going back to, it’s…. Well, there are three poems in there that are for or about my friend Mike, my oldest friend who I grew up with and went to school with and the rest of it. That’s the only one that is actually dedicated to him. It’s the shortest but it is dedicated to him. It is going back to an experience that was very, very familiar but it no longer is now. We used to walk the distance between Nocton and Dunston, these two little villages in Lincolnshire. They are about a mile and a bit apart. If you go by road it is two miles. You are not going to do that: if you walk, you walk the fields and there is a little bridle path. It is just a little bridle path between the two villages and winds through the fields. The amount of times we just kind of walked over, they had a pub where we’d play pool and that sort of thing. So it is going back and doing the same experience, but all this time later. Sitting on time’s arrow and getting further away from it as well but reliving the same sort of experience.

AM: The bit about, I think you said something about ‘looking up into the sky’ or something, is that about how you can’t see the stars where you live now? Is that a country/city thing?

RW: Do any of you come from a place that is far in the countryside?

AM: Yes.

MND: Oh yeah.

SV: Where I grew up? Yeah.

RW: So, coming from a city now, you must go home and look up at the sky and are like ‘bloody hell!’. It is just that…

AB: Yeah, I thought…

RW: What the sky looked like when I was a kid. Yeah, sorry, that kind of sounds rose-tinted but that was just because of where I was. That is just what I thought the sky looked like; I didn’t know what light pollution was. It was like being in a planetarium. In Nottingham, on a clear night, there are 25 stars. It is just something that is just different, in a way that you all know.

SV: So, my final question is: after someone read this collection what would be the one thing that you would want them to take away from it?

RW: Ah, that is such a hard question…

SV: [Laughs] Sorry? [Laughs]

RW: [Laughs] I can give a very short answer that is absolutely the truth. I want them to feel like they’ve been, and I mean this in the broadest sense, I don’t mean it like a clown or something, but I want them to feel like they’ve been entertained. Right? I don’t see the point in them thinking ‘Oh damn, that is just too clever for me. It must be good because I don’t understand it’. Which is a way that some people treat poetry, that ‘I don’t understand it, so it must be good poetry’. I don’t want that but I don’t want it to always be easy. I think the second book has poems in it that are generally a little bit more difficult than the first. They play around with rhythm and time and all sorts of things, but I am not interested in completely dumbfounding and confounding the reader. I absolutely want them to be entertained but in the broadest sense.

AM: Maybe just one last question to ask… ‘It Began’, is that sort of about missed opportunities?

RW: I don’t know if there is a poem called that…

AB and RW: Oh, ‘It was’.

RW: Sorry, yeah, sorry, I was just trying to-

AB: Don’t worry, I’ve done my research…

[Laughter]

RW: Yeah, it is. I get on extremely well with my mum and that is what it basically boils down to. We had quite a difficult relationship when I was growing up. For all sorts of reasons, but one is that my dad would tell me all sorts of things about court proceedings and access and custody and how my mum had said this in court and so on. Just things that a 4 year old or a 5 year old or a 6 year old shouldn’t know. It made me very confused and angry. My mum didn’t do any of that back. So we kind of had… so it was sometimes quite difficult growing up. In ways that I’m quite sad about sometimes, but we get on extremely well now. It is about her suppose, it was her I was thinking of when I wrote that, but it doesn’t really speak to a specific experience. It is just, you know when you are with someone, who is a relative or something and you are very close to them. Close enough that you let your guard down a bit in ways that you might not otherwise and you end up thinking ‘I should have been nicer more’. That is a reminder to be nicer. A reminder to cherish things. I jotted it in a notebook, and I forgot all about it. I don’t know how long later I found it but I thought ‘That’s a poem’. I don’t know how I composed it, I think I just wrote it in one. I think it is the most naturally occurring poem I have ever written. In terms of one that I have published. I can’t remember writing it, I just remember finding it in the notebook. That is not true for any of the others. Yeah.

RW: Great questions. Thanks.

SV: Thanks!

AB: Thanks very much.

MD: Thank you very much.

Edinburgh: A City of Stories

10 November 2017 / tarathomson / 0 Comments

Last month, I had the great pleasure of participating in the Scottish Storytelling Festival, speaking at an event called ‘City of Stories; City of Dreams‘ alongside storyteller James Spence and Sian Bevan, the Programme Manager for the Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature Trust. The storyelling and discussion were followed by a walking tour down the Royal Mile and Canongate, led by poet Ken Cockburn.

As the title suggests, Edinburgh is a city with a rich literary history. It’s difficult to walk through Edinburgh’s centre without passing by the home of a great author or philosopher, or stumbling on a place that has been imagined and re-imagined across countless books, across many centuries. One of my favourite aspects of this event was its location – it was held in the recently refurbished Riddle’s Court, a 16th century building once home to enlightenment thinker David Hume and later the site of Patrick Geddes’s university summer schools.

Ceiling in the Geddes Room at Riddle’s Court, Edinburgh

Many of Edinburgh’s stories are so familiar and iconic that, no matter how old or new, they shape our experience of the city, both as residents and visitors. Stories like Walter Scott’s Waverley, Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Body Snatchers’, Ian Rankin’s Rebus novels, Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and Alexander McCall Smith’s New Town novels, beginning with 44 Scotland Street, come together in our imaginations to build an Edinburgh full of contradictions, intrigue, adventure, and beautiful majesty alongside social and architectural decay. But these are complemented by many less well-known stories, like Margaret Oliphant’s The Laird of Norlaw, and many that seem to be entirely forgotten by the contemporary imagination, like Sarah Tytler’s Lady Jean’s Son, from which I read during the Storytelling Festival event. This novel has been long out of print, and is one of many Edinburgh works my colleagues and I on LitLong: Edinburgh found through the computerised text-mining of several large databases of digitised literature in English.

The opening chapter of Lady Jean’s Son, published in 1897 but set during the Douglas Cause trial of the 1760s, describes Edinburgh’s Old Town in ways that evoke the bustle and class diversity of the 18th century city, while still carrying a kernel of the Edinburgh we now know. As the novel begins,

The Canongate of Edinburgh was lying in the full sunshine of a summer morning, which brought out in bold relief its high lights and deep shadows, its stateliness and its squalor. In its promiscuous and often incongrous life and movement, there figured freely lords and ladies; douce burghers and their thrifty spouses; learned lawyers and divines; caddies and fishwives; members of the City Guard, in their cocked hats – coats, waistcoats, and breeches of a “muddy-coloured red,” with their gruesome Lochaber axes; incorrigible vagrants and still more incorrigible randies – now a stray Englishman bewildered and scandalized, now a wild Highlander equally amazed and disgusted, but from an entirely different point of view. [1]

Tytler’s city is ‘not a dainty or fastidious Edinburgh, according to nineteenth-century notions; but it was a marvellously picturesque Edinburgh, full of strong characters, strange stories, wit, wisdom, prejudice, and passion.’ [2] This description momentarily evokes Robert Louis Stevenson’s Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes, published the decade before Tytler’s novel.

1897 edition of Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes, in the University of Edinburgh’s special collections

While both books create a similar vision of the city, each author comes at the sites of the Canongate from a different point of a view, and the more of these descriptions we take together, the more layered our imagined city becomes, like a Palimpsest, inscribed and re-inscribed across the centuries.

–Tara Thomson

1. Sarah Tytler, Lady Jean’s Son: A Novel (London: Jarrold & Sons, 1897), p. 7
2. Ibid., p. 10

Ford, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and John Quinn (lawyer and modernist collector).

Ford Madox Ford

11 October 2017 / Andrew Frayn / 0 Comments

Ford and Aldington

As you’ll have seen in my previous post, there are a couple of authors with whom I’ve become particularly associated. Richard Aldington knew Ford Madox Ford well through the London modernist networks of the early years of the twentieth century. I find Ford a fascinating author. He loved storytelling, even at the expense of fact, which makes all the more impressive the achievement of Max Saunders in unpicking Ford’s life in his exhaustive, magisterial two-volume biography.

My favourite anecdote brings together the two authors I’ve mentioned; Aldington tells the story in his entertaining and engaging memoir Life for Life’s Sake (1941). Aldington was dining with his father and invited Ford, who proceeded to regale Aldington senior with stories of his childhood among the Pre-Raphaelites (Ford’s grandfather was indeed the painter Ford Madox Brown, and much of this was true). However, the mood of the dinner took a turn for the worse when Ford started to talk about how he met Byron, who had died almost fifty years before he was born…

Ford on TV

Christopher (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Sylvia Tietjens (Rebecca Hall) in the BBC/HBO Parade’s End (2013).

You might, perhaps have come across Ford in recent years if you’re a Benedict Cumberbatch fan – the big, shiny BBC/HBO miniseries (2013) of Ford’s great war novel tetralogy Parade’s End (1924-8) was striking and successful, scripted by the eminent playwright Tom Stoppard. (You can watch it via Box of Broadcasts.) Stoppard did a good job of adapting 840 pages of four novels into under five hours of prime time TV, although necessarily some liberties were taken. For example, Ford’s ending looks forward after the Armistice to an uncertain but hopeful future, while Stoppard ends, perhaps too neatly, with the fevered celebrations of Armistice night.

Parade’s End

It was, of course, my interest in the First World War that brought me to Ford and Parade’s End; I’ve a chapter on Ford and War in An Introduction to Ford Madox Ford, and he features in my book, too. The series tells us the intersecting stories of the protagonist Christopher Tietjens, his wife Sylvia Tietjens, his inamorata Valentine Wannop, and his brother Mark Tietjens. The characters represent the push and pull in the years between circa 1912 and 1920 between insistent mechanisation and modernisation, and older moral and ethical values that are coming to seem outdated. Christopher Tietjens insists on doing what he believes the morally right thing, even despite the potential damage to his own reputation and other practical considerations.

The Parade’s End novels use a form somewhat akin to stream of consciousness, although there are multiple consciousnesses represented. The narrative moves associatively between different protagonists and moments in time; these chronological changes are highlighted clearly in the recent Carcanet critical edition, which makes following the shifts easier than in the longstanding Penguin editions.

The Carcanet critical edition of Parade’s End.

Reading (about) Ford

I’m secretary to the Ford Madox Ford Society, which has a (usually) annual conference – I was sad not to be able to go this year, particularly as it was held in Montpellier! The society also produces a number of publications, including collections of critical essays, and senior members were responsible for the Carcanet Parade’s End and other reprints by that publisher.

Parade’s End is quite difficult as an introduction to Ford. His other very famous novel is The Good Soldier (1915), but for some alternative choices, why not start with his social commentary about England and the English (1905-7) (vol. 1 and vol. 2 available for free online), or his fascinating psychological novel A Call (1910)?

Let me know if you read any Ford, or would like to write about him!

Richard Aldington

19 September 2017 / Andrew Frayn / 0 Comments

In the course of an academic career, you tend to become associated with particular ideas, topics and authors. This can often happen in part by chance – being in the right place at the right time. As many of you will know, my main research interest is in the First World War. It’s what I wrote my PhD on, and my monograph, along with all sorts of other publications.

In this and a subsequent post, I want to point you to a couple of authors who might not be familiar to you, but who I’m interested in, have worked on quite a bit, and am involved with author societies or other means of promoting their legacy.

Richard Aldington

Richard Aldington has become a figure I’ve returned to throughout my academic career, since writing about him for my MA thesis (now longer ago than I would prefer to think about). He’s probably still best known as one of the original Imagist poets, along with H.D. (who was for a time his wife) and Ezra Pound; much of his poetry is available online for free at archive.org. I was particularly drawn, though, to his First World War novel Death of a Hero (1929). Angry, bitter, and sharply critical of the British literary and political establishments, Death of a Hero is a satire so brutal that it is often misunderstood. Aldington’s position, though, was that the brutality of the war should be matched by the form of writing about it. For him, to write in a polite and measured way about the conflict was fundamentally to misunderstand and misrepresent the experience of it. I’ve recently written an overview of his war poetry Images of War (1919) and Death of a Hero for a forthcoming Handbook of British Literature and Culture of the First World War.

Death of a Hero was so confrontational and shocking that it was originally expurgated – Aldington worked with his editor at Chatto & Windus to remove sections that were thought likely to be unacceptable to a contemporary readership. The removed words, sentences and sections are indicated in the text by asterisks as Aldington wanted the reader to know where emendations were made. Sadly, the recent Penguin republished the expurgated text, which I thought a missed opportunity to demonstrate the vitality of Aldington’s prose; I’d recommend looking out for the unexpurgated version, which you’ll find in most 1960s paperbacks (published by Four Square and Sphere) and the 1980s Hogarth Press edition.

For information about Richard Aldington, you can look at the New Canterbury Literary Society Newsletter. Originally founded as a paper newsletter by the late Aldington scholar Norman T. Gates, I’ve recently “rebooted” it as a blog.

Please do let me know if you read any Aldington and want to talk about it some more!

Teaching 9/11 Literature and Culture

7 September 2017 / arinkeeble / 0 Comments

Recently, travelling home on the train from Norwich where she had been visiting one of our children, a student at UEA, my wife started chatting to an elderly woman. “What does your son study?” the lady asked. When she learned that he is reading Geography she was very approving: “a very useful subject.” The conversation continued and eventually the friendly woman asked about me. She was interested to hear that I am a Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and she asked about my research. When she heard that I work on the literature of 9/11, however, her interest quickly turned to annoyance: “arggh, why are people still so bothered about 9/11?”

Perhaps she is right to be annoyed.

We all know that in terms of loss of human life, 9/11 pales in significance compared to any number of subsequent “events” or “catastrophes” that have taken place around the world. The grossly underreported genocide in Aleppo of last year, for example.

It is also the case that the idea of 9/11 as a singular, defining moment that came “out of the blue” and “changed everything” is problematic as it tends to remove the attacks from their pre-histories and actual causes. This has allowed for the advancement of unilateral agendas and policies as was the case with the launch of the War on Terror. As David Holloway has noted, “the notion that the attacks came out of the blue was the ideological lynchpin for the war on terror” (2007).

So when I heard about the lady on the train’s response, I could understand her sentiment. But, of course, the other way of looking at this is that an in-depth critical understanding of 9/11 is important so that we can understand just how it was and is still being used. I certainly hope that my work on the literary response to the attacks does just this by reflecting on the ways in which literature has both challenged and reinforced this singular vision of 9/11.

But yet in some ways, I will always be complicit in the disproportionate attention given to 9/11. This is one of the troubling aporias of my research area. It is dangerous to ascribe so much importance to 9/11 but equally vital to recognize that 9/11 did change the world in some significant ways and that it is important to unpack the roles of culture and literature in this history.

My students have been a huge help with this.

Most of my students inevitably see 9/11 from perspectives linked to the pressing issues of their own generation and bring fresh eyes and views to the texts (though of course my mature students have their own distinct and equally valued frames of reference) . Personally I still identify with Peter Boxall’s statement, from his excellent 2013 monograph, Twenty-First-Century Literature, that 9/11 remains “part of the living tissue of the present.” But while 9/11 still feels contemporary to me – just – my students see it as an historical event through the prisms of more recent disasters linked to climate change, to the rise of Trump and a disturbing new nationalism, of Brexit, of the refugee crisis, of “post-truth,” “fake news” and the “alt right.”

In fact, through talking to students about texts like Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007); Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011), the television series Homeland (2010-) or Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge (2013), I have been able to draw more sophisticated lines of continuity between 9/11, the War on Terror and what I see as the rise of fascism in America and elsewhere

Long may these fruitful dialogues continue! I look forward to delivering my Year 4 ‘Fictions of Terror’ module again this year and launching our new Year 3 ‘C21 Literature: Writing the Unfolding Present’ module next week, where these kinds of discussions will, hopefully, keep flourishing.

Handsome man in cafe reading book. — Me, fifteen years ago. (Not really.)

Reading for Pleasure

29 August 2017 / Andrew Frayn / 0 Comments

There will be plenty on this blog about the research that the department is doing – understandably! But I wanted to share with you a few things that I read (mostly) for pleasure over the summer while on holiday. For me, it’s important to read widely, and not only in the area that I research. Reading outside the area you’re most interested in can make you rethink productively things you already (think you) know. Admittedly, I found reading for pleasure much harder when I was a student (both an undergrad and a research student), but remembering why you enjoy reading can also make studying easier, too.

Having scanned my non-work bookshelves at the beginning of the year, I’ve been reading lots of contemporary women writers in an effort to address an unconscious bias. Two that I particularly enjoyed were by Irish authors.

Anne Enright’s The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, deals with the tragically early loss of a sibling. The narrator, Veronica, endeavours to make sense of Liam’s suicide by engaging with the complex, troubled and troubling history of her family. Enright movingly depicts the peculiar closenesses and distances that characterise family life, those feelings as true in the same room as when living hundreds or thousands of miles apart. I particularly enjoyed – if that’s the right word for this moving, tragic novel – the gradual unfolding of the family’s secrets, and the subtle but accessible style.

Lisa McInerney’s The Glorious Heresies, which won both the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Desmond Elliott Prize in 2016, is an altogether different kettle of fish. Ryan Cusack is endeavouring to deal with the impact of his mother’s death, and his alcoholic father’s role as a low-level gangland pawn. None of this is made any easier by an over-attentive older neighbour, a prostitute searching for her disappeared boyfriend, and his own sometime career as a drug dealer. And none of that is helping his treasured relationship with his girlfriend Karine. McInerney’s prose is earthily authentic, pulling no punches, and the brisk pace of the novel makes it a good read.

Finally, on a more work-y note, I really enjoyed Richard Burton’s long biography of the late modernist poet Basil Bunting – all 608 engaging pages of it. Bunting led a remarkable life: a conscientious objector as he turned 18 at the end of the First World War, dissolute in Paris in the mid-1920s, a longstanding friend of Ezra Pound, a senior military diplomat in the middle east in the Second World War, and finally (re)discovered as a poet in the 1960s (and his sixties) thanks to the publication of his masterpiece Briggflatts (1965) and the patronage of the poets of the British Poetry Revival.

These were just the highlights. I hope you’ve managed to make some time to read for pleasure yourselves, too.

Andrew Frayn

International Gothic Association conference, Mexico

10 August 2017 / Emily Alder / 0 Comments

In July I had the privilege of attending the International Gothic Association’s biennial conference at Universidad de las Américas Puebla (UDLAP), in Cholula, Mexico, a place complete with its own be-tunneled Aztec pyramid and live volcano Popocatépetl which liked to greet us in the mornings with puffs of steam. I have been a member of this Association for ten years and this was my fifth conference. It’s always a pleasure to see old friends and familiar faces as well as getting to know the many fascinating new people I inevitably meet at events like this.

Mexico was a particularly exciting place to hold the IGA conference and many people at home asked me why I was going to such a sunny country for a Gothic gathering. Fortunately, it’s not an essential requirement to wear black, and personally I wasn’t aware of anyone actually crumbling to dust in the sunshine.

Gothic piñatas

Bringing the IGA conference to Mexico was a long-standing ambition of organiser Dr Enrique Ajuria Ibarra, and continued the Association’s recent efforts (2015 was in Vancouver) to tug the conference out of its European nest and help to make it truly international. The conference theme was ‘Traditions and Departures’, signalling the ways that European Gothic traditions do travel, but do not always colonise: they often meet other cultural traditions coming the other way, or may themselves become profoundly transformed. As IGA president Dr Catherine Spooner reminded us at the opening ceremony, the Gothic likes to challenge boundaries and we are a scholarly community more interested in building bridges than walls.

To give a flavour of how distinctive the Gothic in Mexico can be, conference day two ended with a screening of new short film, Los misterios de las monjas vampiras (The mysteries of the vampire nuns) directed by Antonio Álvarez Morán, who attended dressed as a vampire. Shot locally, the film begins with Aztec sacrifice, ends in wrestling, and in between is a panoply of Mexican Gothic excess, and is killingly funny (see the trailer on YouTube). In the Q&A afterwards, the lead actress was asked if she’d found anything challenging about playing her role, and won all our hearts when she replied that she had not, because ‘inside every woman is a little bit of nun and a little bit of vampire.’

It wasn’t all like that, though, and the conference programme proves that we did also get down to some serious analytical work on everything from werewolves to whales, linen to Lolita, and Scotland to steampunk.

Professor Isabella van Elferen delivers her keynote presentation

It is exceedingly difficult to make a conference presentation look exciting. While looking at this photograph of Professor Isabella van Elferen’s keynote on Gothic music, you will need to imagine that she is, in fact, playing this track VERY LOUDLY throughout the auditorium and asking us to pinpoint what, exactly, makes it Gothic. Can you?

For more, including pictures, see #IGAMexico2017 on Twitter.

Emily Alder

English at Edinburgh Napier University

Page 2 of 3

Ten years after Versailles: Germany in the UK War Books Boom

Interview with Man Booker Prize Shortlisted Author Graeme Macrae Burnet

Early term inspiration

Interview with Visiting Poet Rory Waterman by Sara Vollen, Méabh Ní Dhoibhlin and Abi Mayers

Edinburgh: A City of Stories