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Episode 234: Lamorna Ash Goes Out to Sea in 'Dark, Salt, Clear'
147 Plays4 years ago
Lamorna Ash (@LamornaAsh) is the author of Dark, Salt, Clear: The Life of a Fishing Town (Bloombury).
Her background in anthropology served her well as she immersed herself in the fishing town of Newlyn.
Keep the conversation going on social media @CNFPod and consider being a CNFin' member on patreon.com/cnfpod.
Support for this show goes to Wudan Yan and Jenni Gritters of The Writers' Co-op Podcast.
Show notes can be found at brendanomeara.com.
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Transcript
Introduction to The Writer's Co-op
00:00:01
Speaker
Hey, if you enjoy this podcast, you may also enjoy The Writer's Co-op, hosted by Wudan Yan and Jenny Gridders. The Writer's Co-op focuses on the business side of running a freelance writing career and concurrently building a life you want. Wudan and Jenny are candid about talking about freelance pay, contracts, saying no to work, and more. This season, they're interviewing freelance writers on how they make it work.
00:00:30
Speaker
Guests so far have included Maya Kozov, Aurora Almondroll, Daniela Zaltzman, and Matt Vellano. Hey, listen wherever you podcast, man. You dig? Good. At this point, lacerated all over with scratches and twigs in my hair.
Introducing LaMorna Ash on the CNF Podcast
00:00:52
Speaker
Ho, ho, ho, CNF-ers. That's LaMorna Ash, the CNF in Wonderkind and author of Dark Salt Clear, The Life of a Fishing Town. I'm your skipper, Brendan O'Mara, and this is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast.
00:01:14
Speaker
A funny thing happened on the way to the studio here at HQ. A first. It is a very first thing, and it's a little embarrassing. I wasn't even sure if I would bring this up, but I'm going to anyway.
Audio Mishaps and Redubbing Efforts
00:01:29
Speaker
Turns out, when I was recording with LaMorna Ash in my Zencaster program, the app I use to record these interviews,
00:01:37
Speaker
I forgot to select my good microphone and rig this one right here, Heil PR40. I was in a mild panic and figured, well shoot, I might as well just tell you that the audio is pure garbage and I apologize.
00:01:55
Speaker
What was happening was it was my laptop speakers and microphone picking up my voice and it's bad to begin with. Coupled out with that was about three feet away from it because my boom arm is all the way over here. And then the microphone is obstructing my voice even more because I'm talking into it like I am right now. And so you can imagine how bad I sounded.
00:02:18
Speaker
Oh, you know, why don't I just give you a little taste of what you might have had had I not been so ingenious as to redub my questions. Here, just take a listen. Very nice. Well, thanks for carving out time to do this on a Sunday evening for you. I appreciate it. Woof, right? And I suspect even LaMorna was experiencing that, though she had no issues understanding what I was saying. But you get the idea that it was terrible. Terrible.
00:02:49
Speaker
And I was just gonna apologize and say, stick around anyway, I hope. But in the edit, I decided to redub my questions. I listened to the questions and the, dare I say, convivial riparté that LaMorna and I had. And I reenacted my questions on my good microphone. And if I didn't tell you, I doubt you'd even notice. So why am I telling you? I don't keep secrets here, CNF-ers.
00:03:15
Speaker
And if that tugs on your heart, consider leaving a kind review wherever you podcast, but especially Apple podcast takes, I don't know, two or three minutes of your time to do it. It's a big ask. I mean, I ask a lot of you and I'm asking even more, but it goes towards validating the entire enterprise.
Patreon Membership Pitch
00:03:34
Speaker
So the way we're seeing effort can see our lighthouse off in the distance and say land ho.
00:03:42
Speaker
Next step in the real big ask, of course, is encouraging you to be a CNF member at patreon.com slash CNF pod. For as little as $4 a month, you get hand-delivered transcripts from the moment of your first payment onward. And you are subscribed to the exclusive audio magazine. Issue one is free for all. It is up. It is isolation. Five grade essays. It's good stuff.
00:04:11
Speaker
At the current rate of Patreon or member enrollment, we might not even have a magazine for issue two or after issue two. I put out the call for submissions for issue two, so I'm going to follow through on that. But going forward, if there's no more Patreon enrollment, then I'll probably just pull the plug on it, realize that there's not enough demand that people want to
00:04:40
Speaker
I have high hopes for the magazine, but I need people on board to support the production, support the artists, and make a product that will sit nicely on your audio shelf. Issue 1 in terms of production is a little rough around the edges.
00:04:57
Speaker
But I know how to really iron out those wrinkles for issue 2 and beyond. The goal with the AudioMag is to give yet another platform out there for people to showcase their true stories. Provide you with 2 in 2021, hopefully 3 the following year and 4 after that. Every year make this maybe a quarterly jam.
00:05:19
Speaker
Every dollar you kindly offer goes towards the work. Not to mention there's other exclusive goodies like behind the scenes videos, special podcasts and blog posts that I only make available and don't really advertise to members. They're just kind of like these little things that just kind of show up. There are four tiers and when you break down the actual dollar amount, trust me, you come out ahead.
Social Media and Interview Start
00:05:41
Speaker
Ping me on social media, at cnfpod or at Brendan O'Mara, across Twitter and Instagram, Facebook too, but nobody seems to ever see what I post there and I'm not about to post, boost posts and play that game. It did that for a little bit and it just didn't amount to anything except leaving my wallet a hell of a lot lighter.
00:06:02
Speaker
So again, LaMorna Ash is here. She's the author behind Dark Salt Clear. It is published by Bloomsbury. She was tons of fun to talk to really smart and kind of
00:06:16
Speaker
and just smart and kind and like all the people I get to speak to from the UK, just lovely on the ear. In this episode, we talk about her deep anthropological dive into the fishing community of Newland in southern Britain.
LaMorna Ash on Pandemic Life and Writing Process
00:06:33
Speaker
Her time on fishing boats, being the only woman on a boat of unfamiliar men, other artistic media that help inform the writing she's trying to do,
00:06:43
Speaker
and just a lot more, you know that. She's LaMornaAsh on Twitter, at LaMornaAsh, and she's coming in hot. Stay tuned for my parting shot at the end of the show, but in the meantime, here is LaMornaAsh.
00:07:11
Speaker
How have you been coping with the coronavirus and the pandemic over in London? Well, sometimes I've been coping very badly and the other times a bit better. But I think the thing that's made it easier is that I live with two close friends who are also struggling in their own different ways. But we get along so well together that it's sort of like for the first time, I'm 26 now, I feel like I've properly made my friends into a home or made my friends into family. So actually,
00:07:39
Speaker
living with friends and being at home all the time builds like a really strong type of friendship. So I think that's what's got me through really. And of course, the other thing is lots of TV and lots of reading. What are some programs and books that have been a lifeline for you during this time? Oh, so many good things recently. A film I watched yesterday that I thought was incredible that I actually tried to watch the first lockdown in the UK.
00:08:08
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but was found it too stressful and then went back to was Uncut Gems which came out I think last year and it's a film by the Safdie brothers and it's this it's got the most incredible soundtrack and it's it's both like anxious and bizarre and kind of mystical
00:08:25
Speaker
And yet for some reason I actually felt much calmer after it. I think it feels like a really good escapism kind of film. I'm looking at my bookshelf now, thinking of what I've read. Something to, usually I'm probably, I'm reading some new fiction at the moment. So a book by an English author called Chris Powers, which is lovely, called A Lonely Man. But then, and I also started reading, I thought, why not? It's time to get into philosophy. So I was reading Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy.
00:08:51
Speaker
And I found it so exciting the way he was 28 when he wrote it and he later said it was a complete mess and he shouldn't have written it and they got it all wrong. But it felt to me so hopeful and exciting to try and understand the whole fabric of tragedy and the way that music can express this like feeling of abyss and loneliness that we all experience. For some reason, I found that really comforting to read. At the moment, having time to get really excited by what you're reading and watching
00:09:17
Speaker
and then sitting with it for a while, you know, rather than running off to the next thing you're going to do. It's been kind of lovely to luxuriate and just really good quality storytelling. As a writer and a creative person, how do you go about structuring your day? I'd love to have found a concrete method that works for me, but I definitely haven't yet. But for Dark Soul Clear, I went to Cornwall and I did all my research, I did all my interviews.
00:09:46
Speaker
So I knew that the entire body of the book existed in my notes in the various journals where I was doing drawings of how to cut fish as well as what I was experiencing. And these very long recordings I have at sea in pubs all over the place walking around Cornwall. So as soon as I got back to London, in, to be honest, not in an especially healthy way, my whole life just became turning that into a book. I felt, it felt a bit like being possessed that I knew I just had to get this all out and I had to get it all finished.
00:10:16
Speaker
So I'd actually, I don't think I slept very much. And I just constantly be transcribing and trying to build it into a story that had some kind of narrative structure, despite it being nonfiction. And I think the best time that it happened was that I managed to, I actually, I had a flu. This is about maybe February last year, so way pre pandemic. And it was for two weeks I could barely get out of bed. I felt so awful. And
00:10:43
Speaker
It was only then that I started to actually get a sense of what I wanted the structure of the book to be. For some reason, just by lying still for ages, I was like, oh my God, this is what it should be. And then in terms of trying to now build better routines, I've started, I like to start the day now with a really kind of rapid and a bit chaotic running, some sprinting, some very slow running, loads of like panting. And I think that often makes me feel at least if I've achieved a nice run, I can then sit down and write for as much a day as possible.
00:11:14
Speaker
getting that physical exertion, breaking a sweat or throwing around heavy weight, it's just so important. So you don't feel so sluggish and it really sparks creativity. I just find it so important. Yeah, definitely. And I think it's Mary Oliver, the poet who always would walk whilst writing and she felt she couldn't write unless she was walking. Those two activities are related.
00:11:43
Speaker
I suppose particularly if you're writing about the natural world. And I think sort of similarly, something like a walk, something that has a duration and you're seeing different things actually really helps you write rather than being seated and static. Sometimes I find that my thoughts can get more stuck if I'm just staying in one place. Oh yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So where did you grow up, Lamora?
Influences and Childhood Experiences
00:12:06
Speaker
I grew up in London. So I lived here for my whole childhood.
00:12:12
Speaker
only in London I would kind of think of this as different but I grew up in West London which is a bit more leafy and a bit more suburban and then I moved to North London which is where Hampstead Heath is and where I live there's a big Turkish community and I think it's just by nature of being slightly different from where I grew up I always think that North London is a more exciting buzzy place than West London. I was I think first of all I was a very precocious kid I from
00:12:40
Speaker
I have much older brothers, but apart from that, I basically grew up as an only child and I definitely spent more time with adults and lived in a bit of a fantasy, was constantly creating worlds for myself. And then age 11, I became a much more quiet child. I had lots of panic attacks and I think I went into myself more. And then very slowly started to come out of it. And I think during that time I started writing lots.
00:13:05
Speaker
And then as I got older, that became the kind of the way of escaping or the way of coping with most things was through writing. So I still find little bits of dialogue that were often just like very close relations to what I was actually experiencing. That was just me trying to work through those feelings and in play form. Was there a particular moment that triggered the anxiety and the panic attacks? I was thinking about this a lot recently because I have a little niece now who's nine.
00:13:34
Speaker
and she's been having panic attacks. And I'm not sure what it was, but I think it might have been. I know that when I was 11, a friend of mine's father unexpectedly had a heart attack and died. And I don't think I'd ever really thought about grief or death, mortality in general before. And I think it just really triggered in me this terrible fear of mortality.
00:13:58
Speaker
And I just kept thinking that I was having heart attacks and I had to go to a hospital and they'd say, I think it was before we properly talked about anxiety. It was about, you know, 2000, 2003 or 2004. And I just, I just couldn't get past the fact that I was going to die. I don't know. It was, it was a strange, it was like maybe becoming more self-aware and that triggered something strange in me. I think so I, until October, I worked full-time at an education charity for the last two years. So I'd sort of,
00:14:25
Speaker
edit writing early in the morning or after work, but my prime career was just working with kids. And we've done so much at the moment before I left about managing trauma and how to talk to kids about it, because that thing of mortality that has never been more real for them than it is now of kind of constantly hearing these statistics and knowing that they might be carriers and that they might put their grandparents at risk. And I think this is going to stay in the kind of
00:14:53
Speaker
a cultural memory of kids for a long time. I think it's really going to impact the way that they're going to grow up now, having lived in this pandemic. So as you're growing up and developing, going to school, what are the things you're reading at the time that are starting to pique your interest? What were some of those things that were just really interesting to you?
00:15:17
Speaker
Ooh, there's so many different ones. So one that I, well, okay, now my first experience of reading an adult book was reading Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier when I was 11. And I cried because I was so upset that that's what adult books were. Because to me, having, I was obsessed with kind of fantasy things. So the books that are probably still the most important books to my upbringing are His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. Also, I was like a really good age for Harry Potter.
00:15:46
Speaker
and loads of other, there's an Italian writer called Penelia Funke who wrote these incredible kids books as well. And suddenly I had to do an adult book and it just seemed so, the magic within Rebecca was so much harder to get at and was so much more gloomy and I was devastated. And then it took me a few more goes to get into adult books. And then I think the kind of, the first time I was really astounded by what literature can do, and this is such a cliche and maybe an obvious one,
00:16:15
Speaker
I read Virginia Woolf's The Lighthouse, and the lighthouse that it's based on, though it's set in Scotland, was the lighthouse that Virginia Woolf could see from Cornwall, where she'd go every summer. And I could see that same lighthouse from my granny's house in Cornwall when I'd go and stay in Cornwall as well. And that book, it has this second section in sort of typical modernist style that totally departs from the way that time is expressed in the first part.
00:16:41
Speaker
suddenly time goes very quickly and it happens to the house and not the people. And I just didn't know you could do that with literature. I didn't know you could break form and do something entirely different. And I was so excited. And so I think that really, for me, feels a kind of foundation bit of writing for learning how much you can play with language and the way that it can create a mood or tone or shift the way you think about characters. So yeah, that was a big one for me.
00:17:06
Speaker
It's really cool to hear you unpack this book that was so influential to you, these kind of books that can turn on the light, books that we will imitate and emulate, and then eventually you settle into your own groove and your own voice. So it's just really cool to hear you talk about a book that turns a light on for you. Yeah, no, I think it was really exciting. And it still is to go back to that book. I think I still go, oh, wow.
00:17:36
Speaker
And it's still such a pleasure when you find books that do that for you now, just now and then. I've been reading a lot of short stories and I read one recently, Camille Baudas, and it's a New Yorker story called The Presentation of Egypt. And it does this thing where it swaps perspective about a quarter way through. So you get to know this character, and then that character disappears and another one comes in. And now and then, it doesn't happen as much as you get older, because I guess you become accustomed to
00:18:05
Speaker
all of the different literary tricks, but it still can be so exciting to see that there's other ways of doing things and people are still coming up with these new innovative ways that show you a little bit more about humanity or a little bit more about the world through the characters.
00:18:20
Speaker
And in terms of form and breaking form, and we kind of alluded to this earlier with the uncut gems, but what are some of the things that you're consuming, whether it be podcasts or movies or music, and how are you maybe cherry picking some of the things that those are evoking so then you can kind of apply that to your own work and say, try to elicit that kind of thing on the page?
00:18:46
Speaker
Oh, that's such a good question. And I think I'm thinking about that a lot at the moment because I'm still feel very much the beginning of my career as a writer. And what I'm trying to do at the moment is, well, I do quite a lot of journalism as well, which I guess is like a sort of straighter, clearer way of writing. And then I'm also trying to write short stories, which feels like a whole new world to me. So I am being influenced by a lot of the things from other medium like TV and music and film and seeing how I can put that in. So one of my best friends and I were talking about
00:19:14
Speaker
this idea of like, again, if, so what Nietzsche said was that the music and the chorus of a Greek tragedy is like the only way of understanding the eternal tragedy of being human or the universe almost. And I was like, how can you get that feeling in writing that sort of like takes you into another world? And we were talking about how you could translate a scream into writing without just saying, ah, over and over again.
00:19:42
Speaker
And someone who does that so well is Jenny Awful in Department of Speculation where someone asks the character, how are you? And she just replies so scared over and over again for a whole page, just so scared, so scared, so scared. And I think that's such a cool way of thinking. That's a feeling transmitted so well into writing because sometimes those feelings do feel like just like endless repetition. So I was thinking about how, yeah, how could you do screaming or how could you do
00:20:11
Speaker
a screaming of tragedy within writing. And then, sorry, it's a roundabout way of doing this. When I was watching Uncut Gems yesterday, there's parts where it just zooms in to this black opal that the story's about. And it goes through this opal and you suddenly see the inside of the opal, which is a universe. And I was thinking, how can you do that in writing? How can you suddenly take the reader away and put them into another world and give them a complete different feeling? And there's that from really detailed writing
00:20:42
Speaker
like in the way that a song, a part of it can completely shift. I don't know the answer but it feels exciting to constantly be trying to do new things with language at the moment that I often am influenced by other forms.
00:20:55
Speaker
I think what really comes to mind too in terms of just a weird form is even though it got raked over the coals critically is Charlie Kaufman's I'm thinking of ending things and it's just so weird and wacky and unsettling and then you just realize that it ends up being the projections of a dying man. Oh yeah I love that.
00:21:16
Speaker
Yeah, and it was just like, I don't know, it was just such a weird dissociative experience. It's one of those things where I'd love to get my hands on that script so you can kind of read it and see how the written thing is being translated onto the page.
00:21:36
Speaker
I don't know, just you're kind of getting at it, but I just really like what would it be like to see how he's moving those levers from the page to the to the screen? Definitely, because I know it's based on a book as well. And I know that when Charlie Kaufman previously did so his some adaptation where the script is sort of notoriously nothing like the book and that he's able to do that way. He takes the feeling of a story.
00:22:04
Speaker
and then translates that rather than trying to tell the story in the same way, in the same sort of like narrative structure or like in the same, with the same linearity. Yeah, I'm thinking of anything, I just always think about, I just think it's so cool the vignette of the dog that just continually is shaking itself dry and that you see that again and again and that every moment getting stuck. And yeah, I think that film so well shows you a feeling
00:22:30
Speaker
I don't know, you feel different at the end and that's such a powerful thing. I think he said, Charlie Kaufman in like a big BAFTA speech, he said that he doesn't mind like what kind of film you make, but if you make something that moves him, then he will listen and he will be interested. And I think that's such a great sort of foundation want with any piece of creative thing is that to make something that moves people.
00:22:57
Speaker
And to that point about doing things that are so outside the norm, I really love that ballet scene at the end, right? Because it's like this idealized version of himself and the real version of himself and they come together and ultimately it's the real version of himself that murders
00:23:21
Speaker
the idealized version. So it's just like reality, you know, just kills what he was hoping for in the end. Me too. And I guess that's also just the choice of doing that in dance. That is saying like, this will be expressed so much better in a different kind of medium. I have a friend who works in theatre and there's a list of things that you should do in theatre that this director said that things like you should have a moment, a dance or a bit that is a kiss or something that
00:23:52
Speaker
like making the most of each medium do something that doesn't quite fit in that medium to kind of push it further and give people more of an interesting experience.
00:24:00
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm just, with respect to the dancers too, like I'm not a dancer, I'm far from graceful, but what they were able to do physically, and then the monastic dedication to that craft, it's so moving and so inspiring to know the rigor and dedication that goes into it. And I just really admire that, and that's such my big allure towards dance in general.
00:24:28
Speaker
I'm completely with you. And I had this horrible thought the other day that perhaps I'm never going to know almost definitely I'm never going to master a
Fishermen's Identity and Brexit Impact
00:24:36
Speaker
craft. And I have friends who have this singular ability to get into something. And I realized, and this is probably a cop out that the thing I'm interested in is other people's obsessions. And I think that was part of what I enjoyed. Yeah, it's but I think, you know, I think it's valid as well that you can, it's so exciting to get into someone's world. I always find this if you start
00:24:56
Speaker
and say dating someone new that you suddenly get to see the world in a slightly different way and learn some else's passions. And that's the most exciting thing. And I think to write about, I've been, well, writing a couple of different pieces, but writing a piece, talking to someone who's gone back into drug dealing after a long time out of it, because during the pandemic, there's just been so few opportunities to make money. And this person has like an encyclopedia knowledge of pharmaceuticals, and that's their passion.
00:25:25
Speaker
The way that anyone's ability to learn a huge amount about something and make it say something about their lives, I think is so compelling. And is that a big reason why you were so driven to this fishing community in Newland? Because once these men, once fishing gets into their blood, it's already kind of in their DNA, it's hard to get out and they do have that sort of singular obsession and identity with fishing. Yeah, absolutely.
00:25:54
Speaker
It's funny, I've spoken about it a lot recently because the incredibly boring Brexit talks in Britain is still happening. And the sticking point is fishing. Because not because fishing is important to the UK economy, but because it's important to the UK identity because we're a small island nation. But fishing, for some reason, means so much more than a job. As you know, for loads of reasons. So the guys who I met in Newland, it's literally a town of fishermen.
00:26:23
Speaker
they look at the sea every single day, their grandparents, their great grandparents were all fishermen as well. And it's such a difficult job and you have to go out to the sea and spend seven days out on the water and it's hard and people die. So you almost have to turn it into something bigger than just a career because otherwise I don't see how you do it. And I think the way the men talked about the sea and that kind of monastic experience of being away from the world and having no wifi
00:26:50
Speaker
for these long periods of time and obsessing over what you were catching. Yeah, I did. It was kind of magnetic to him to talk about that for sure. Well, maybe you can speak to this. What is that feeling or that claustrophobic feeling of being out at sea on a relatively small boat with really nowhere to go? Maybe you can give us some insight into what that feels like.
00:27:17
Speaker
Well, it's funny because it feels like you ought not to feel claustrophobic at sea because it is vast. And it's the only time when your eye constructions see all the way to the horizon in all directions. But I think it's so mood dependent. So I went on two different trawlers. And the second one I went on, so this was just before I turned 23, I think. I thought it would be like the last trawler, which had Wi-Fi and I had my own separate cabin pretty much.
00:27:45
Speaker
And then I got on this trawler and it was old and rusting and I was sharing a cabin with the other four guys who I didn't really know. And I'm someone who has had different kind of, I guess, like bouts of depression and all sorts of anxiety things. And I, when I feel that it completely consumes me and I know that things like walks will help me or things like looking at art or calling friends and suddenly to not be able to do any of those things.
00:28:13
Speaker
it did feel like the boat was the smallest thing and it felt like everything about it was suddenly the smells of the sort of cigarette smoke and the smells of fish just became so overwhelming. It was almost like a wall of smell and the kind of gruffness of the men became so grating and I thought it was directed at me and not knowing that there was no escape yet, it just felt incredibly claustrophobic. And then also the other side of things is
00:28:40
Speaker
you start to get a little bit seasick as well and you're taking off in seasickness pills that are kind of numbing you as well because they're really strong, almost like sleeping pills. And so I kind of just felt lost within myself and kind of disassociated as well and not able to be finding the sea beautiful anymore. So I think that's how the claustrophobia really felt.
00:29:01
Speaker
Yeah, you write that you had accumulated a range of methods to cope with an undefined sadness that comes over you. And being out at sea, not having those lifelines, that must have been in so many ways, almost panic inducing. Yeah, definitely. And also, again, it had been people I didn't know that well. And I also felt like a burden because I was a young girl, they'd agreed to take out on their boat and
00:29:27
Speaker
I wanted to show them that I was tough and that I could do this. I didn't want to be a passenger. I spent every time they were out there gutting with them, learning how to gut these fish. But when I felt awful, I just felt even more like, what on earth am I doing here? And yeah, what do I think the point of me being here is? And I'm probably frustrating these guys. And Dawn, who is the incredible skipper of the Philadelphia, actually the boat,
00:29:54
Speaker
sadly, and has died to death now. He's a skipper of a different vote. But he tried to get me out of feelings that I think by shocking me to come up behind me and just slap the table really hard or slap the wall. And rather than that making me feel kind of, you know, pulling me to like, I don't know, shocking me back into who I was, I just found the whole thing like quite an aggressive physical act and I didn't know what to do about it.
00:30:20
Speaker
And it was only later when I thought through it, I thought he wasn't trying to intimidate you. He really was just trying to find a way in his non-verbal way of expressing things, of kind of waking you up and reminding you this is silly and this is okay and tomorrow you'll feel better. When you're doing this kind of immersive journalism, and I know you might not identify as a journalist, but basically what you're doing is immersive journalism, is you kind of swoop in, you do this thing, you shadow them, you try to honor their story, but
00:30:50
Speaker
Ultimately, you're going to leave and you're going to leave and go back to your life and you're going to leave them to theirs. So I don't know. Sometimes I wrestle with that. Did you wrestle with that at all? You know, this feeling that, you know, you're swooping in taking notes, but ultimately you're going to leave them behind. Absolutely. All the time. And I think I'm trying now to see that
00:31:18
Speaker
feeling of fear of taking people's stories and getting people wrong. I'm trying to find that to be a useful starting point because if you're thinking a lot about how am I going to take these stories without stealing something from people and how am I going to do it fairly and kindly and put their lives on paper in a way that they're not going to say, how dare you take that much of my life or you've got me wrong, then hope that I'm less likely to get people wrong. But I think
00:31:46
Speaker
When I got to Newland, they're quite used to it. There's been a few documentaries about the fishing community. There was also a book before me about Newland fishermen. It's called The Swordfish and the Star. And according to the fishermen, it's a load of rubbish and it was very sensational. And it was all about how, and there is some kind of like drug dealing and there is definitely like depression and difficulties in the Cornish fishing industry.
00:32:12
Speaker
There's been some illegal fishing activity in the past, but this guy only spoke about that. And people felt done wrong. They felt it was incredibly unfair, this portrayal of them. And one fisherman told me that if this guy ever came back to Newlin, then they'd throw him over the harbour wall. And I was like, oh God, I don't want them to throw me over the harbour wall. And also I got it wrong. I guess this is what makes me not a very good journalist in that I really built bonds with a lot of people there.
00:32:41
Speaker
and the couple I stayed with, I adored. And as I was writing, I was writing for them, it's dedicated to them. So I really felt like I both left that place and went back to London, but I left a little bit of myself there.
Emotional Bonds and Authentic Portrayal
00:32:54
Speaker
And I don't know how I'm gonna, I don't know if it's possible to make a career where you keep going and leaving a bit of yourself in places, because I think that's gonna be quite a hard, painful thing. But I also, I don't know how to write about things without falling in love with them a bit as well. So it feels like a tricky negotiation.
00:33:11
Speaker
The first review I got for the book, which made me cry because it wasn't very nice, was someone saying, I finally got a bit more of a tough shell about this kind of thing. But someone had said that I hadn't learned how to betray people yet. And that was like a problem in my writing. And it made me think, God, I hope I never learned to betray people. I don't think that's what makes a good writer, learning to take advantage of people or stealing their stories from them.
00:33:37
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, really strange thing to want from a writer. And I guess my background is anthropological. So anthropologists in a really good way, because it has a dark history anthropology as being a kind of colonial handmade, it gets called. It's now a very anxious discipline where you constantly have to think, why am I the right person to tell this story? How is my subjectivity getting in the way of what this place is actually like? And if you can put that into writing,
00:34:06
Speaker
you're less likely to get people wrong because you're not claiming to be a universal or like an omniscient voice. And so you can say, my thing with Newland was I turned up there and I thought, actually, I'm going to stay here forever because I don't feel like I belong in London. So I'm going to make this place my home because I'm a bit Cornish. And as soon as I got to Cornwall, I thought, oh God, I'm not Cornish. I'm definitely a Londoner. My voice sticks out so much and I can't force this place to be mine. I can't make myself from Newland.
00:34:34
Speaker
I can just learn to appreciate it and get to know it as a friend, maybe. And that's kind of the most and the best that I can hope to do. When you do this kind of work, of course, you don't want to necessarily write a love letter. You want to write a very true and honest account. But to betray people into that is a skill to somehow to be honored. To me, that really bothers me because
00:35:00
Speaker
You know, you can't betray them because ultimately even when you leave, you know, they're left behind so that that is just so Unsettling that that that would be you know a skill worth having to betray the people you're writing about Yeah, there's a difference between honesty and cruelty like that You can you can be honest about honesty doesn't mean that you're showing them for the dark underside truth that like, you know There's so many truths operating at once and that that means that you know
00:35:27
Speaker
I did feel it was important when I spoke about Union to touch on the strain of depression amongst people and sometimes the xenophobia against other places in the UK and the drinking culture there, which can destroy lives. But then there's always so many more sides to it than that. And with that community, there's also a kind of loving closeness and understanding
00:35:53
Speaker
of different kinds of people of kind of misfits that I'd not seen in another place and a way of looking out for your neighbors that I hadn't seen in another place. So it feels very exciting to stay somewhere long enough to start seeing it. It's many different sides.
00:36:09
Speaker
And in your background, I can definitely tell that you are really drawn to this particular subculture of fishermen just based on your anthropological studies because you really immerse yourself in a culture so you can best, you know, write what is in essence an ethnography about it. So it makes a lot of sense that you weren't so drawn to this community and maybe in particular this kind of nonfiction.
00:36:36
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. When I, because I went to Cornwall, first of all, it was to write my anthropological dissertation for my masters. And I was looking at the way fishing shaped community and I was looking at sort of like the anthropology of time and kind of what I love about anthropology is that it has this kind of beautiful philosophical, theoretical part to it that's like big concepts. And then it has reality, which is messy. And you're constantly trying to fit concepts on top of reality.
00:37:04
Speaker
and recognizing the fact that those won't fit together, that you can't force those things to align. But it's kind of brilliant to try and to acknowledge the impossibility of doing so. So I was looking at the way fishing seems to shift the way time works because you spend this time away and you're connected to sort of tidal time and the cycles of populations of fish as well.
00:37:33
Speaker
it just felt like a really exciting way to start like that and to start with these big difficult anthropological concepts with things like ontologies that and phenomenology and all these difficult words to say and then step away from that or like rub out those workings and then see what you're left with in terms of like a kind of more understandable, ordinary style of writing about a place. And I just think without those kind of that tougher
00:38:02
Speaker
more critical analytical thinking that I did first and then got rid of when I was writing the book. I don't think it would have been as strong. Take us to the moment when you come across the Elizabeth Bishop poem where she writes, dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free. Well, that came to me really late in the game. So I struggled so much with naming my book and it makes me think I don't understand how anyone ever names children when they're born because
00:38:32
Speaker
I just think anything being given a single name is so difficult. And I honestly had this sleepless night. I was living in a very ramshackle flat at the time that was sort of constantly falling apart. And I didn't think I slept very well because I was on the ground floor right next to the road. And I'd sit there and I'd make on my phone notes of different possible names. And I'd just be like putting together words, compounds with word blue or anything to the sea.
00:38:58
Speaker
or to do with oil skins. And I kept coming up with these terrible titles that didn't work. And I'd send them to my editor, who's brilliant and really blunt. And he'd be like, oh, no. Oh, no. No, no, no, no. Each time I sent something through. And then my friend had actually given me Elizabeth Bishop's collected poetry when I went to Newlin because she writes so much about the sea and everywhere she lived was always nearby the sea. And I was rereading at the fish houses, which is
00:39:26
Speaker
the poem from which that line's from. And it felt like such a brilliant expression of what both the sea was like. It's what she thinks the sea and knowledge are, dark salt, clear and moving, utterly free. And in that poem, there's like fishermen just smoking their lucky strikes, but also the beauty of that industrial scene. And I thought it managed it so perfectly that I thought that could be it. And I loved the way it was both saying
00:39:54
Speaker
what the C is, but without being too explicit about it. And I also, I think I struggled with the idea that the title would be my words. I just didn't know that I could come up with something good enough. So it actually felt like a relief to be like, here's someone else who I really think understands it so well. And I think those words are evocative and poetic. So I think that should work. But I still don't think it's the perfect title. I still have no idea how to come up with a really good title.
00:40:21
Speaker
Give us a sense of the character and maybe the personification of a given fishing boat. Oh, okay. So I guess fishing boats or most boats are all female. And I thought of the Philadelphia, the trawler that I was on, as I thought of her as an old lady. So she was made in 1969 and she'd had loads of new bits done to her.
00:40:50
Speaker
So in my head, I saw her as like an elderly woman with quite a large elderly woman who'd have loads of Botox. But there was still all these parts falling apart of her. And she smells quite bad because the men smoke all the time to kind of like as a kind of break in the monotony, which is constantly rolling your cigarettes. And everything's got this funny little blue carpets on different parts of it. And
00:41:17
Speaker
These are really small down below areas where you'll sleep in this pink room and you're meant to have wall hinings so that it kind of like modesty curtains over your little cubbyhole bed, but mine didn't. And so you kind of throw your towel across it. And I think there's so many different parts of a trawler. So then the galley is this lovely section where you cook with a very small kind of like two bits of a hob and a very small oven and a little TV on over the top of the door.
00:41:45
Speaker
and you all sit there and everyone continues to smoke there. And then you go out into the open deck and it's sort of like loose bits of rope everywhere and old legs of starfish and other types of fish that were brought up in the hall and then they tried to wash them away because they can't keep those bits of fish. So it's funny, everything is a bit dirty and old and layers of smells. It's an incredibly sensory experience, to be honest, all about.
Challenges on the Fishing Trawler
00:42:15
Speaker
Maybe you can give us a sense of what it was like to be the only woman on a boat with men, and especially early on, unfamiliar men, and just being in that kind of a foreign environment as the only woman. I don't want to put any words in your mouth, so maybe you can just let us know what that experience was like. I think I don't think much in advance. I'm not a very good... I don't have much foresight.
00:42:42
Speaker
So I think when I found out I've gone to a boat, all I thought was great. I'll make sure I get my wellies in my sleeping bag and then I'm ready to go and I'll just jump on board. And then it sort of slowly dawned on me as we were heading off. God, I don't know these guys. And I never felt any sense of threat about that. It was more just this, you know, this might be a difficult experience and we might not get along. And I think I was talking about this recently when you moved somewhere and knew that
00:43:10
Speaker
It's very exhausting, it's not the same as being with friends you know well where you're at ease and you're not having to try and show the parts of yourself that you want to because they know all the parts of you. And on the tour that I wanted to show them that I was tough, I wanted to show them that I wasn't just some wordsy posh girl from London who just thought about education. So I really wanted to get involved with them. And I think as soon as I was able to do that and starting to learn gutting and also starting to have a laugh with them, I think that was so important, then we did all actually
00:43:40
Speaker
get along with each other quite well. And there are moments of connection because what's great about a fishing boat is when you're on watch, it's just you sitting there for say three or four hours and making sure the boat is constantly checking that you're going in the right direction and checking on all the gear to make sure that everything is in its right place. And those are amazing times just to sit and talk. So you'd get to know people in a completely different way where you're both just sort of staring out at the sea.
00:44:09
Speaker
And one of the fishermen, so despite being all guys with very different backgrounds to me, he was also, I think he was 23 and I was 22. And we could talk about getting too drunk and GCSEs are their English school exams and parents and nightclubs in Cornwall versus London. So it was kind of this like actually equivalence between us. But then on the other side of things, he was actually about to become a father.
00:44:36
Speaker
and he had a full-time job and it was going to be the career for the rest of his life. So he both seemed my age and then much older as well in other ways. But I did, I got on well with all of them and because there's no one else around you and because there's none of those markers that keep you in your ordinary identity and there's no one texting you or emailing you or calling you to say, oh, that's funny. There's no one you can kind of step outside of that experience and talk to in your normal way.
00:45:06
Speaker
So in a way they become your family really quickly because there's no interruptions. It's just the group of you trying to get along in this difficult cold environment where you're aware that you're missing your family. And so when we got off the boat, I immediately felt this absence, like I really missed them from my life.
00:45:22
Speaker
Can you speak to the experience, maybe the challenge of getting the women to talk about their experiences when their men go out at sea? And then when they come home, oftentimes they're still out at sea. And it was a tough egg for you to crack. And I was wondering if maybe you can speak to that experience and how hard that was to get people to talk about that as a subject.
00:45:52
Speaker
Yeah, I think it must be so difficult and maybe with COVID I've been thinking about it that like what it means to not know when you're going to see people again or to only be able to speak on the phone that you are missing a huge part of them. And I definitely think that there's, so one of my close friends from Newlin, his dad was a fisherman and his dad spent weeks, months at sea and fishing in the North Sea. And he came back one time and Isaac, my friend,
00:46:22
Speaker
was about four or five and I finally ran away crying because he just didn't recognize this bearded man who'd been out of his life for a month or so. And so I think it does make families, it's so difficult because you do suddenly get this exhausted fisherman who turns back up in your life and is suddenly at home and like a stay at home dad. And that's a really hard thing to negotiate. And I think after that, Isaac's dad then became a dayboat fisherman. So just going out each day instead. And that sort of made the family relationship easier.
00:46:51
Speaker
But there's definitely not a point when you get to switch off. I don't think you leave your work behind in the way that you do in an office where you turn your emails off because you're constantly thinking, if I was out now, would I be making more money from fishing? And if I don't go out tomorrow, maybe there'll be storms next week and I'll miss that back trip out as well. And so I think it is so hard because, you know, you marry someone or you get together with someone knowing that it's such an important part of their life and probably loving them for it.
00:47:19
Speaker
but also finding that one of the most difficult parts of their personality as well, that they're always going to be a little bit out there. And it's not a world that you get to join in with. And that it's also a very dangerous job, I think. Yeah, I think it was a really hard thing. I think that's why women didn't want to talk about it so much and don't want to glamorise it in the way that sometimes their partners do.
00:47:42
Speaker
In terms of structure, about a third of the way through the book you have this really interesting sort of set piece or sketch of what a typical fisherman looks like and acts like. And I just wonder maybe some people might have opened a book about a fishing community with that as kind of like their set piece.
00:48:02
Speaker
But this comes at a third of the way through. And I was wondering maybe what was the thinking behind that? Not that it's right or wrong, but it's just an interesting point of structure. And I would love to hear your process about how you arrived at that. Oh, that's such a cool question. I think a lot about how the way I ended up structuring it, I knew that I wanted, actually it took me a while to realize that I wanted the trawler to thread through.
00:48:30
Speaker
the seven days I spent on the trolley, just to give it some kind of linear narrative and progress. And then it was a matter of writing down all the different chapters on pieces of paper and constantly rearranging them on the floor to give a sense of flow. And what I tried to do was things like mood. So there's a, when I found the day the hardest, this kind of difficult Thursday, I wanted the writing around that, the different chapters around that to express more
00:48:57
Speaker
the sadness of fishing and the difficulty of it and the people who are lost and the depression experienced by some of the men. And I think it's one of those chapters where I want to describe the way that fishermen always look, like they have this sort of far away look that part of them is always there, just like at the edge of their vision is always the sea. And so you can never quite get through to them. And I think that you need to have, or suddenly I didn't know that until I'd spent a lot of time with fishermen.
00:49:28
Speaker
I didn't quite understand what that distant feeling was, maybe until I'd almost caught a little bit of it myself. So I think for me, it made sense to bring that in later as it was dawning on me, maybe.
00:49:41
Speaker
And still speaking to structure, you opened the book talking about John Steinbeck's Cannery Row. And I wonder if that might have been kind of a North Star book for you in terms of the tone you were looking to strike and maybe even structurally. Sometimes these books really sort of inform the things we want to do. I was wondering if maybe that one was especially important for you while you were doing this one.
00:50:08
Speaker
Hmm, I know that was so there was a different prologue to begin with it was actually I first of all started it The moment that I was on the trawler going out to see and just like a brief Moment of that and then went into the first chapter and I think that was cinematically influenced I think it's really cool when a film begins with a shot that's from late I can't think of an example now but begins with a shot from later in the film and then you lose that but then it means that you've got this this
00:50:36
Speaker
shadow or that memory of that moment that hangs over the rest of the film until you get to that point. But for some reason it wasn't quite working. And I was just thinking about how difficult I was finding writing about a place. And I sat down and I thought about these drawings I'd done whilst in Newlin. I went to a life class a couple of times and how difficult it was to sketch a person. And then I thought about the way that
00:51:04
Speaker
I love Cannery Road by Steinbeck and I looked again at that, so yeah, the prologue of that and the way that he talks about like, how do we transform places that are built up of so many difficult contradictory things into a piece of writing? And then I just weaved those two ideas together and I thought, actually, this could work as a prologue as a kind of almost like methodology of what I'm trying to do here and why it's not entirely possible and how you can let stories kind of crawl onto the page.
00:51:34
Speaker
I think something I hadn't realized before writing, which is how important all the different editors and that process of editing is, and all the people who help inform the structure of your book. And I think one of my line editor is this incredible woman called Kate Johnson, who's from Cornwall herself. She was so good at showing me how to shift narrative structures that make it easier for a reader to navigate. And the best thing she said was that when
00:52:04
Speaker
the reader first goes onto the trawler. I only had, I had a chapter on the trawler and then a chapter off the trawler and kind of kept repeating like that. And she said, you need to actually start with two chapters on the trawler because it's so important for the reader to get used to a place like that. So you can't just take them away that quickly. And I thought, oh, that's such an amazing thing that I wouldn't have realized on my own about structure.
00:52:26
Speaker
There's a part in the book, too, in the Misway chapter that really pitted you against the sort of objective fury of nature. And you get yourself into a little bit of trouble. So I was wondering if maybe you could speak to that and kind of talk about that in terms of maybe the abject terror you were feeling when you found yourself sort of between a rock and a hard place, if you will.
00:52:56
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. I still do that so often. I still always find myself getting lost on walks that I really shouldn't get lost on, and it's suddenly becoming dark. I just don't think I'm very good at being alone in nature, and it's a shame because I really like it. But I decided I didn't want to go the boring tourist route over the top of the cliffs to get to La Morna Cove, which is the cove that I'm named after. And so I went down
00:53:25
Speaker
onto the rocks and the tide was coming in. And I was sort of scrabbling over these rocks that were increasingly slippery with the water becoming increasingly close. And I just thought, oh God, I actually don't know. If I slip down that next rock, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to make it either back up the rock I came or onto the next rock and I'm going to be stranded. And I just kind of terrified myself. So I then did, and again, I just don't, I'm not very good.
00:53:51
Speaker
I'm probably the worst person in something like an apocalypse or any kind of panic situation. I can't think. My brain goes nuts and I do very stupid things. So I started almost like rock climbing, grabbing onto bits of like a tree and branches to climb up this very steep cliff side. Instead of going back, at all times I knew that it was a possibility that I could just go back the way I came, but that just felt so cowardly. So I clambered up.
00:54:21
Speaker
and was at this point lacerated all over with scratches and twigs in my hair. And I found this like small path jutting out of the cliff and went along that for a bit. And then I saw in the distance a hammock and it was dark and even though it was daytime, it felt so dark in the undergrowth. And for some reason, I just, I had a really sort of horror film moment of thinking that there was someone in there
00:54:48
Speaker
and I was completely alone and I didn't want to disturb this person and I felt like I was trespassing. So then I quickly clambered back down, went all the way back up and around and then took the cliff path and looked very foolish as I was walking along thinking I should have just done this in the first place. But it felt like one of those kind of stupid London person or city person misunderstandings of how dangerous it can be being by the sea suddenly.
00:55:17
Speaker
What was really amazing that I wrote this in the book is that after I had that experience, I called my poor parents who I'd often call, there's this beautiful walk from Penzance to Newland along the promenade. And when the sea, when it's high tide, the waves crash against the promenade and you have to sort of run out the way. And I always call my parents then to catch them up on what was happening to me in Newland because it did feel, every experience felt so big whilst I was there. I guess it felt like a kind of coming of age
00:55:48
Speaker
level of life-changing experiences and I told my dad about getting stuck below the cliffs and he was first of all like you idiot and then he also said that that happened to me that with with your granny and it turns out that my granny had actually written a piece for Woman's Hour which is a BBC Radio 4 programme in the UK that's been running for ages and
00:56:13
Speaker
She had written about the time when she and my very young dad and his sister got stuck in Cornwall with the tide coming in and had to clamber up a cliff. And the kids just couldn't make it. So she had to leave them there and run and go get the fishermen to come and help pull her kids up and over. And she said that she'd completely underestimated the power of the sea and taught her children that this will not happen again. You don't need to be frightened. You just need to learn.
00:56:41
Speaker
and understand the tides and take the sea seriously. And then my dad spent a lot of his teenage years and 20s on boats and sailing and kind of working on different kinds of boats. And so I think he really did take that to heart. And it was just amazing to see this parallel story about someone in my family who I didn't know because she died when I was quite young, having a really similar encounter with the sea.
00:57:07
Speaker
Given how deeply immersed you were in this, being in nature and of course in these fishing communities, in these markets that were, or ecologies that were overfished and now we're dealing with warmer waters and climate crisis, how has your relationship to nature deepened or changed as a result of your experience writing and reporting this book? The thing that
00:57:37
Speaker
worries me about myself is that I often think about climate change in relation to a kind of faith but if I'm not sure what what my faith is but I know that people who believe in God it's not just like a light switch and then you believe it's like a continual act or practice and it takes effort and I think remembering and thinking about the planet and climate change takes effort and when you're right beside the sea
00:58:02
Speaker
or in a place that is properly sustained by something else living, like the fishing industry depends upon fish, obviously, but you become much more aware of the impact that we're having on the world.
Environmental Awareness and Climate Change
00:58:18
Speaker
And then actually, really, when you're back in the city, I found that it faded quite quickly where I went back, I said that whilst I was in Cornwall, I suddenly didn't think of fish as this commodity.
00:58:29
Speaker
I thought of the chain of lives that link together in order for me to get to eat that fish and the difficulty of it and the fact that loads of this fish gets wasted and often it has been overfished in the past and there is so much rubbish in the sea that we'd pull up and have to end up throwing away somewhere else instead. And it worries me that I haven't actually thought about that much for a while. I guess in the same way that during the pandemic suddenly
00:58:55
Speaker
when there's a more pressing concern, we don't think about conservation as much. But a thing that I found that was some of the older fishermen, I think their response, I found disappointing in that they would just chuck their rubbish over the side of the boats and they didn't care that much about bycatch or the fish that they had to throw back in beyond the fact that it would lose the money. But then younger fishermen seem much more environmentally conscious and they tend to be dayboat fishermen. So that has an almost minimal impact
00:59:25
Speaker
on the environment because you just can't catch as much and you're also not dragging along the seabed and disturbing those of ecosystems. And they were talking to me about the way that the type of fish they're seeing in Cornwall that is shifting, like you're getting things like tuna up by the Cornish coast because the water's warmer. So I think those people who are continually having to face the sea and, you know, noticing weather changing as well are much more attuned to it than you are in a city which is designed to seem
00:59:54
Speaker
stable and almost like you're heating when it's cold and we have all these different ways of not noticing as much the way that the environment's shifting.
01:00:08
Speaker
There's a moment in the book too where you write about when you're journaling that you find it hard to write about difficult moments and go on to say, I tend to leave out sadness from my diary for fear of crystallizing those feelings and allowing them to seek into other memories. That really spoke to me because I've kept a journal for so many years and I always want to be honest and raw in there, but I found through my own negative self-talk, I was just calling myself,
01:00:34
Speaker
You know just you know bad things just a loser very self-deprecating things that don't serve me But I also want to be honest but like writing it down does seem to kind of crystallize it and make it more real and I don't know I just maybe you can if you can speak to that because certainly what you wrote there, you know spoke to me in a way that uh It just it really spoke to me and resonated with me on a level that uh that really meant something
01:01:03
Speaker
Yeah, it's something I'm still navigating because I definitely have written, I still journal a lot and I think I have realized that I'm quite an obsessive cataloger and if big things are happening, it's almost like they're not real until I have put them into text in somewhere and it's becoming increasingly chaotic and I have about three different journals and then different Google Docs that I write on as well. But I just somewhere I need there to be a record of a thing that happened.
01:01:30
Speaker
And I don't know, and I suppose it must shift the way I think of that thing because I'll go back and I can see that memory written down. So I think that does scare me that if I wrote down negative things that are fleeting thoughts, then what if I do get stuck with that? And I don't know if I've worked it out yet because I think that is also a fear of vulnerability that crosses over into other parts of my life that
01:01:56
Speaker
I don't want to tell people I'm sad or I don't want to tell people if I'm cross with them or hurt because I'm scared of ruining things. I often really want to keep seeing things in a really positive way when I'm not necessarily actually experiencing them in a positive way. And I think I'm trying now to be more honest about those vulnerable, difficult things and seeing that actually it's so important to have both and
01:02:24
Speaker
you can't you can't be sort of thrilled and delighted by everything in the world all the time and it's very exhausting to be in that way so I think potentially my diary now is actually more of a mix than it was then and I think that's why I did the audiobook for Dark Salt Clear in February this year and it was really strange reading it out loud because it did even though it was only a couple of years earlier it felt like the writing of someone younger and that's why I think of it as sort of coming of age because
01:02:51
Speaker
I was working out so many different things and it feels like a lovely thing to have this written down memory of what it was like to be 22, 23 and desperately trying to find your place in the world and trying to be amazed by everything. And I really love that I have that but I know now that I'd probably write in a different way and probably would be more space for sadness and more space for a different kind of reflection than there was at the time.
01:03:17
Speaker
Given that the experience of this book was a letter of a young woman at a certain place at a certain time, so how do you see yourself in the world now after the experience of having gone through this book? I see myself as still thinking that the thing I like about myself most is that I'm interested and that I'm open to different
01:03:47
Speaker
kinds of experiences. So like, I really like the fact that I want to go to places and just stay in them and just let them wash over me. And I think that Dark Sock Clear was the first time I got to do that. And it's not a skill necessarily, but I found it, I was kind of excited that that was something I could do. I could sit with people and let them explain things to me and then I could share that somewhere else. But I think that's something I learned from it, but I think
01:04:15
Speaker
What I'm all selling now is more to sit with difficulty and sit with complexity and the stuff I've been writing more recently. I think hopefully it feels clearer and a bit sharper than the way I was writing then. I think I want to be able to look around things more and not be afraid of expressing the harder things about places.
01:04:41
Speaker
But it's still with kindness. I think always that's kind of the thing that I always want to keep in my writing at the same time is that it's It it's got enough parts of it to express how everyone is built of lots of different things In the spirit of being mindful of your time LaMorna Maybe you can tell people where they can find you online and Get a little bit more familiar with their work if they're not already familiar with it
01:05:09
Speaker
Um, yeah, I mean, I'm the only place I'm on is Twitter, uh, as LaMona Ash. And I haven't worked out how to use Twitter in a healthy way either, but I try and catalog my writing on there a bit and the things I'm reading and the things I'm thinking. Um, and I love seeing other writers recommendations and that kind of thing on there. Um, so that's, that's where you'll find me. And I think I'm dark sort of clear is out in America. And I love, I was meant to be in America this year. I was meant to be in, in Texas in April, which is where my grandfather's from.
01:05:39
Speaker
I didn't get to go, so hopefully at some point I'll get to come to America as well. Well, it was great talking to you, LaMorna. Thank you so much. It's been really lovely and just like, it's really nice to think about things, so many different things and that your questions were also interesting, so thank you. I always love talking to writers from the UK.
01:06:06
Speaker
This year alone, we had Beth Roars, Edward Parnell, Lindsay McRae, and now LaMorna Ash. And I'm probably missing someone in there as well. But isn't it nice to listen to that beautiful UK accent?
01:06:21
Speaker
It's like Great British Bake Off up in here. Speaking of that, me and my wife were watching one of the latest holiday editions of Bake Off, and we noticed this incredible sweater that Paul Hollywood was wearing. It had what appeared to be, well, it was a blue sweater, and it had what appeared to be a silver wolf on there. And we're like, wow, that's really cool. And then it dawned on me. I said, Melanie, it's a silver box. She was like, ew.
01:06:49
Speaker
And that ruined the sweater. And what was the deal with that Dairy Girls Bake Off crossover bullshit? Come on Netflix, it actually made me not want to watch Bake Off or even check out Dairy Girls even if they're doing good work over on that program. I have too much work to do anyway so you did me a favor Netflix in Bake Off.
01:07:13
Speaker
This podcast is a product of exit 3 media and was produced edited in everything by me Brendan, America Hey, I had a free business consult with someone last week about launching my podcast company and Content arm journalism marketing and it was eye-opening in a bit
01:07:34
Speaker
and a bit scary. I'm doing a pro bono narrative podcast for a great animal shelter in town to kind of beef up the portfolio a little bit. Getting into producing one for a gym back east for a good friend of mine. So we're looking to make cool podcasts and tell great stories for brands that I admire and align with.
01:07:58
Speaker
The hope in the long run is that it can subsidize some of the journalism I want to do as well. I want to extricate myself from the day job, be able to call my own shots, make my own schedule, build something that nourishes me and you guys, too, you know? But it's 50 bucks to register the name, which I'm going to do right after I get off of this. Then you have to set up an LLC, and I think that's about 100 bucks a year. I hope it's a year, and I didn't miss hear it, and it was a month.
01:08:28
Speaker
And then meet with an accountant to set up these things. I'm terrified of getting audited at every turn. It's tricky and scary and complicated and makes my chest seize up a bit because it means you can't just coast. Like this enterprise.
Business Challenges of Podcasting
01:08:43
Speaker
This does its thing. But I make zero dollars and I make it to serve the audience and of course it nourishes me on some level.
01:08:51
Speaker
but it definitely not to make money it actually cost me hundreds and hundreds of dollars a year to make the show not to mention the time it takes me to put together an episode which in essence cost me thousands of dollars per year in free labor
01:09:07
Speaker
But when you start filing for employee ID numbers, registering the business, suddenly the stakes become really high and very terrifying. And I want to retreat into the comfort of doing it merely for the love as a hobby. But I know I'm just running away out of fear. And for some people, business is like a second language. Maybe the way how comfortable I am writing and even approaching books or long projects. Like to me, it's just not that daunting. It's the thing I do.
01:09:34
Speaker
And for other people businesses are just a thing they do and they're really excited about it so simple but for me it's just like terrifying and I just want to run away from it. So I think I kind of have a more empathic understanding for people. Who have a hard time getting their head around writing a book or a long essay.
01:09:52
Speaker
in where that fear is maybe they don't they don't even know where to start and it's really daunting and overwhelming and that's really how i feel about this sort of business venture even though i've always felt like i've been entrepreneurial by nature but those nitty-gritty things of doing things right so you don't get the irs knocking on your door or if they do
01:10:10
Speaker
You have the paperwork and everything to back it up and you're good. It's just, like I said, it's a fear thing. I'm hiding here in my studio in the comfort of my routine. I'm 40 years old now and halfway through that year pretty much.
01:10:27
Speaker
Maybe this whole act I've been putting on was cute at 30, but now it's time to level up and be on the hook and serve you and other audiences with the urgency that comes with having the ball in my hands, staring down the batter, you know? Plus in my freelance work, if I send invoices from accounting at exit three media editors will be like, I think I got to pay this dude. You know, it's just like, whoa, that's kind of formal, right? I don't know.
01:10:58
Speaker
Well, hey, you gotta check out the newsletter, CNF-ers, book giveaways, blogs, podcasts, and the secret decoder ring that grants you access to the monthly CNF and Happy Hour. Check it out. I'm working on getting a special guest for the Happy Hour for January. He's down to join us for the CNF and Happy Hour, so you might want to come by.
01:11:21
Speaker
No schlap. It's not confirmed so I'm not gonna drop the name now. She's been on this podcast before and I'll just say this, she's hilarious and just a categorical, unequivocal badass newsletter.
01:11:39
Speaker
Once a month, no spam. Can't beat that, can you? If Christmas is your thing, Merry Christmas. And I asked my wife if she'd listen to my podcast this week with the hopes that she'd share it with her friends. Women didn't want to talk about it so much and don't want to glamorize it in the way that sometimes their partners do. I will see you right here next year. Stay cool, CNFers, and fuck 2020. See ya.