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Ep. 2. Andrew McMillan, Pity.
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In this episode, we read Andrew McMillan's Pity (2024). Buy the novel from a local independent bookshop, or via Bookshop.org.
Andrew McMillan’s debut collection physical was the only ever poetry collection to win The Guardian First Book Award. The collection also won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, a Somerset Maugham Award (2016), an Eric Gregory Award (2016) and a Northern Writers’ award (2014). It was shortlisted the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2016, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Polari First Book Prize. It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2015. In 2019 it was voted as one of the top 25 poetry books of the past 25 years by the Booksellers Association. His second collection, playtime, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2018; it was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2018, a Poetry Book of the Month in both The Observer and The Telegraph, a Poetry Book of the Year in The Sunday Times and won the inaugural Polari Prize. His third collection, pandemonium, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2021, and 100 Queer Poems, the acclaimed anthology he edited with Mary Jean Chan, was published by Vintage in 2022 and was shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards. Physical has been translated into French, Galician, German and Norwegian editions, with a double-edition of physical & playtime published in Slovak in 2022. He is Professor of Contemporary Writing at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His debut novel, Pity, was published by Canongate in 2024, and was named as one of the top 20 books of 2024 by The Independent. It has been translated into numerous languages including Norwegian, Swedish, French, German, Turkish and Slovak.
Find the transcript, the extract we discuss, and more about the episode on Substack. Follow the podcast on Instagram.
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Produced, hosted, and edited by Chris Lloyd.
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Transcript
Introduction and Author Background
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Books Up Close, the podcast.
00:00:10
Speaker
We also collaborate on a close reading of their writing, looking at a particular passage
00:00:30
Speaker
In this episode I talk to Andrew Macmillan about his novel Pity, newly out in paperback.
Andrew Macmillan's Creative Journey
00:00:37
Speaker
Andrew is the author of three collections of poetry and one novel, He Lives in Manchester.
00:00:45
Speaker
Well, thank you Andrew for joining me. Thank you for having Amazing.
The Art of Close Reading
00:00:50
Speaker
So before we get into the actual extract from Pity, um want to ask what your thoughts generally are on close reading as like a practice and an endeavor. How do you feel about close reading your work with me also today?
00:01:04
Speaker
Right. So here's the thing. Give me your definition of close reading. OK, we're turning back on me. Fine. So my definition of close reading really is the close attention to textual detail.
00:01:18
Speaker
Right. So that's reading the text in depth. It's paying attention to the words, the grammar, the structure, the form before we start pulling in any kind of context or broader issues. That doesn't mean we never pull in context. Right. But it means we start with what's on the page first. And that's what I want to kind of do in this discussion.
00:01:36
Speaker
I think it's a really interesting kind of endeavour, to use your word. um And I think it's something that's really kind of useful for, particularly for literary critics. I think that it's important as writers as well, like in that sense of reading as a writer.
00:01:50
Speaker
I think the danger is, as a practice, that to a certain extent, it's a very separate thing from kind of pure creativity. And which is why I think to hold both is really difficult, right?
00:02:03
Speaker
you know, because oftentimes, say, like, even with students, if we're doing things that are creative and critical kind of elements together within a unit, the danger is that you spend time doing that really close textual analysis of the structure of the line break, the enchantment of a poem, for example, that But then you sit down with a blank piece paper in the afternoon and have to write, but without any of that stuff in your head.
Balancing Creativity with Criticism
00:02:25
Speaker
And I often think it's also why, you know, fundamentally to reading is really the way to learn to be a writer. But you also have to be able to put all that aside because there's an element of very good writing that is purely instinctual and is oftentimes less polished because it's more instinctive.
00:02:47
Speaker
than something that would that one might kind of perform that kind of close reading on, which is why I think oftentimes the very best literary critics aren't the best writers.
00:03:01
Speaker
There are exceptions to that rule that we could all think of. Like Ian Hamilton as a poet, I think is extraordinary, a very few poems in his life, and but also a really interesting critic. But it's oftentimes the two don't necessarily sit exceedingly close together, I don't think.
00:03:17
Speaker
in that sometimes people can't get out of their own heads, I think, because they they what essentially you end up with is people wanting to close read their own work before they've written it.
00:03:28
Speaker
So they go, well, if I say this, if this character does this, if this image is in it, then a critic would be able to find this in it or this is the nuanced meaning. And that's just kind of the enemy of writing, right? That's the enemy of creativity. So, so yeah, so I guess it's something I enjoy doing. And it's something that I think is really important.
00:03:44
Speaker
It's just something that isn't an easy bedfellow of creativity. I don't think. What do you think? No, no, that's definitely why I'm interested in doing this show, I think, is to kind of bring what we do in literature classrooms.
00:03:56
Speaker
Right, which is like pull apart text and I'm interested in doing that with the person that wrote it just to see what happens. Like I mentioned maybe me seeing things in the text that you have no thoughts about or no insight into or collaborating on a reading of your text in a way that's kind of outside of you.
00:04:16
Speaker
And I'm also interested in what possible conversations can come up. Like I could easily do this where we read your book and I read it with someone else. Right. But actually, I'm wondering what our dialogue about your work adds to the discussion and whether we can learn anything from that, either as writers or critics.
From Poetry to Prose: A Writer's Transition
00:04:33
Speaker
My other question before we go into this is you've written poetry up to this point, right? And some nonfiction essays. So how did do you find the transition from poetry writing to prose writing or at least or novel writing, I guess?
00:04:47
Speaker
I think in some ways it's just a very different part of the brain. and i Read a lot more fiction probably than I read poetry, maybe. I, in the first instance, wanted to see if I could do it as a kind of challenge to myself, as a kind of competitive sense with the self of could I extend words that far? mean, Pitt is only, calling it a novel is very generous, isn't it? It's 32,000 words. It's really a novella. And that's kind of my limit. Like that was me hitting a wall. Like I couldn't do any more.
00:05:17
Speaker
and but ah But there's something about poetry that until you're doing the deep work of editing, of kind of trying to really fight with each line and word, which is what I'm kind of doing at the minute with the new collection, them until you're doing that, it can exist very much in the kind of margins of a life.
00:05:38
Speaker
So it can, you know, you could write a couple of lines on the tram on the way to work. You can, or actually also, I think as you get more experienced in poetry, you can write much more in your own head and you can carry drafts around for a long time so that by the time you come to draft something, the kind of first draft has already been written.
00:05:57
Speaker
I think to a certain extent, that's kind of impossible with prose or I don't have that kind of brain. And so the main difference, I think, is just the kind of the way that you have to live with it. The very obvious thing that to do it every day, which I hadn't realised. So I spent years trying to write a novel every so often in the way that do with poems.
00:06:13
Speaker
And that obviously doesn't work. So just the kind of deep time of every day of it, I think. But also, it's the kind of structural architecture of it that is so much bigger.
00:06:24
Speaker
So with a poem, you get to a stage where you work out how to enter it, how to leave it. If it's not working, it either just gets put to one side for years and you can come back to it if you want, or you notice it's that image. That image doesn't make sense because those other images, that line isn't quite working, the scansion's off in that phrase. Yeah.
00:06:43
Speaker
and And it's kind of like, so editing a poem becomes like keyhole surgery in that way, you can kind go, it's that bit that's not working. And then you hope by extracting that, you kind of don't kill the whole of it.
00:06:54
Speaker
But with with fiction, with with narrative, it's the a it's the entire architecture of time that's different. And so... The edits to a novel are like, oh, the entire perspective of this entire character is wrong.
00:07:07
Speaker
Or, well, the entire nature of time in this whole thing doesn't work. And so the constant, I think, dismantling and rebuilding of that is is what I think is fascinating.
00:07:18
Speaker
Structurally, kind of, the structure of it is just larger, I guess. But the structural stuff is what's actually really interesting in prose, I think, because like plots really easy, like anyone could come up with a plot, right?
00:07:31
Speaker
Like, well, this happens and this happens. And the kind of only thing to really that's really on the line in prose fiction is, well, how do you tell it? What's the structure of it? What's the kind of delivery mechanism of that story? And those things I find really interesting.
00:07:43
Speaker
they just take a lot longer than they do in poetry. They take years to kind of wrestle with and redo and rewrite it. And so you also just have to have a kind of patience with yourself, not with the work, but somehow with yourself to sit with yourself that long, right?
00:07:57
Speaker
Yeah, trying to, that constant demolition, rebuild, demolition, rebuild of it until you end up with something that you feel vaguely is moving towards what you wanted it to be, I think.
00:08:09
Speaker
That's interesting. So we're going to talk about an early part of the book, which you're going to read for us in a minute.
Reading from 'Pity' and Narrative Techniques
00:08:15
Speaker
Is there anything, if listeners haven't read it yet, is there anything they need to know about it?
00:08:20
Speaker
I guess they don't because it's like part, it's chapter two or the second section, the section second fragment. Is there any pre-knowledge they need? Not really, other we're like in a village just outside Barnsley.
00:08:34
Speaker
This is a section that I think as we go along is kind of like becomes understood is kind of taking place in the past. So it's taking place in the kind of 60s or 70s, I guess.
00:08:45
Speaker
But yeah, I think that's all we need, really. Okay, great. Thanks. He steps out into the long corridor of early dawn, the street stretching downwards, pointing him to where he's headed.
00:08:59
Speaker
It's Monday, and the weekend is still unshaven stubble in his mind. Above the sky is a solid lump of cloud, and three doors down Pat is just closing his front door.
00:09:12
Speaker
Another few doors on, there'll be Harry and then Frank. And as they all turn the corner together, Skip will already be ahead of them, and each of them will briefly consider running after him, and then think better of it.
00:09:25
Speaker
Nobody speaks. They incline their heads as someone else joins them and then keep on walking. More and more men fall out of their houses like dominoes, their faces not yet blackened.
00:09:38
Speaker
Someone whistles. Someone else coughs. Occasionally some stop and lean for a moment on the low wall of a garden, pretending they need to double check their snap tin or enjoy a long drag on their roll-up, sputtering the smoke out into the cold air and shallow breaths.
00:09:57
Speaker
Nobody waits for them, they just keep on walking, the village on their shoulder now still asleep, not watching the migration of tired bodies. One of the men once said he thought he could hear the coal ticking.
00:10:13
Speaker
Another man told him to stop talking dack. And beneath their feet, a mile down, history waiting to be hacked into chunks and pulled out.
00:10:28
Speaker
Great. Thank you so much for reading that. It's always nice to hear the author reading it, I think. And the tone and the inflections and all those kind of things. So I chose this, I think, because it feels quite different in tone and style from the first part of the novel where we kind of meet the younger men. It's definitely quite different stylistically.
00:10:52
Speaker
And I thought there was something going on here, especially about... thinking about the past and who these historical people are kind of impinging on the present of the novel.
00:11:04
Speaker
But also you do something here about the men, right? And like it's like he steps out. We're already in a world where we don't quite know who this he is.
00:11:15
Speaker
However, he's also wrapped up with these other men, right? The kind of repetition of them going together. So there's something about repetition and circularity here that I'm interested in, the kind of abstract nature of it.
00:11:26
Speaker
So I kind of want to work through it sentence by sentence, this extract, and kind of point out what I see and hear what you think about those things. Like the he steps.
00:11:37
Speaker
I want to talk about the present tense in this novel. There's, I don't know if you've heard one of the recent Zadie Smith interviews where she kind of railed against present tense narratives taking off these days, that's in quote marks, but I think she's very wrong.
00:11:51
Speaker
I think she's very wrong about a number of things, but we won't get that into that today. And she basically says that this immediacy of the present tense is like a fake immediacy. But I also think that like another novelist might have put the past sections right in the past tense, not in the present tense.
00:12:09
Speaker
And I'm wondering about how that present tense, even to describe stuff that's happening before the present day of the novel exists, kind of not flattens history but makes all of this i don't know in the same moment if you like that the past and the present are on the same kind of continuum yeah suppose i suppose maybe it should have been in past times maybe that would have meant a lot to it's too late now but i think maybe for the next one but i think there is something i guess in what you're saying about I mean, the whole underpinning of the book in some ways is about the haunting of the past and the present, right? It's all the kind of A.P. Gordon social haunting stuff.
00:12:44
Speaker
So I think there is something about the yeah, the kind of flattening of it, I guess, to a certain extent. The idea that in, I mean, to a certain extent, it's a flashback because it's totally in fragments. just kind of like these moments that are in the past. Like it's not, I guess it's not a character going, oh, he did this, he walked that.
00:13:02
Speaker
It's this kind of like odd omniscient kind of voice that holds it together, I guess. That is, whilst this moment's in the past, we're seeing it in the present. ah We're seeing it in the moment as it happens. which I think is necessary in order for the the kind of crescendo of what happens within that timeline.
00:13:20
Speaker
It has to feel immediate in order for that, i think, to potentially have impact, rather just being a historical thing. You kind of have to be there in the moment of it. I guess it is because, as you say, it's not a flashback.
00:13:33
Speaker
We're in the present moment, but a present moment that happened 50 years ago I mean, to a certain extent, like the idea of it being a false idea of immediacy. it's a novel. It's made up. It's all false.
00:13:44
Speaker
None of it's true.
00:13:47
Speaker
Yeah, I'm also interested in this part, especially the kind of, you really lean on metaphor more than some of the other parts. I feel like in rereading it anyway, like he steps out in the long corridor of dawn is the quote, you know, straight away, we're in this more literary language, if you'd like, than some of the other sections, or at least figurative language, I should say, maybe not literary, but figurative language.
00:14:09
Speaker
Which again is interesting kind of in thinking about the kind of dailiness, the ordinariness of these men's lives, right, which could easily be written, again, in a very different kind of tone and style.
00:14:20
Speaker
It could easily be something more stripped back and plain because of the plainness of the men's lives or whatever. I can imagine a different historical novel doing that, where straight away you give us that the long corridor, then a semicolon, the street stretching downwards, all that sibilance pointing him to where he's headed, the street pointing him, right? Like the street already has some kind of agency.
00:14:47
Speaker
Like the landscape has some kind of power in this scene. The men are just moving along. It's Monday. So again, that really grounding us in the present moment. It's Monday and the weekend is still unshaven, stubble in his mind. Another metaphor.
00:15:00
Speaker
Two in those first two sentences. How much are you thinking like, is that too many metaphors in like a short space of time? These feel like metaphors that might appear in your poems to me anyway. These are certainly the more poetic bits of it. They're the more lyric bits of it.
00:15:17
Speaker
I mean, the thing about the landscape is in those kind of places, so in the village that this is set, but also in places in the Northeast, you have, and this is the difference between like the industrial landscapes of ah these kind of places compared to say the Northwest, which is much more mill. so you have like the canals, mill buildings.
00:15:38
Speaker
You have in in kind of mining something that was obviously underground. So he's invisible apart from kind of slack heaps and the old undulations of kind of the grassed over slack heaps and things like that.
00:15:50
Speaker
But also oftentimes kind of architectures of villages that built around in absence. So the most obvious one that I've ever been to is Horden in the North East, which is famous for having these numbered streets. The streets don't have names, they don't have numbers.
00:16:02
Speaker
The entire kind of architecture of that village almost feels as though it comes around towards this, just that void where the pit was. So in that sense, it does have agency. I mean, these are, as you say, I guess, back to the other point, the kind of most lyric parts of it.
00:16:16
Speaker
There was a challenge, I think, in thinking about how nostalgia operates in places like Barnsley, to think about... The common misconception or the thing that people get wrong about places like Barnsley, I think, amongst many other things, is that there isn't a nostalgia or a yearning for the job itself because nobody in their right mind would want their own kid to go down the pit. Like, it's not a thing that you'd want for anybody.
Language and Landscape in Literature
00:16:42
Speaker
because it's brutal work, but there's nostalgia or a kind of longing potentially for what it was felt that job brought somewhere, which is like, you know, for money to raise a family on, stable jobs, et cetera, et cetera.
00:16:56
Speaker
and we don't have to go into all the economics of that. But the challenge, I guess, to me was, could you write about something that I think stereotypically might be written about quite harshly or quite um unpleasantly?
00:17:09
Speaker
Could you write about it really beautifully, i.e. lyrically, I guess, metaphorically, without romanticizing it and without kind of looking it through rose-tinted glasses? So could you apply ah kind of lyric language to it, an imagistic language, a language and metaphor to it?
00:17:25
Speaker
Yeah, without kind of sanitizing it, I guess. And I was just interested, I guess, in that as a the dilemma, whether that was possible to do, which is why... These moments also are quite dreamlike, I guess, just have that other, that slight other quality to them, I think.
00:17:42
Speaker
Yeah, you know, the next line, the sky is a solid lump of cloud. You've got so much that figurative language pulling through that I think after the first fragment of the book, which is very bodily, it's quite frank, it's quite explicit sexually and...
00:17:58
Speaker
is very different tonally and I think there's interesting like the moves the movements between these different sections in the novel are sometimes jarring and maybe intentionally so so that we're kind of jumping around in perspective it's more a kind of collage right as ah as a formal move rather than developmental it's more kind of moving around yeah and it seemed like I don't know, like that genuinely wasn't like a deliberate thing. Like it was just how it ended up coming out.
00:18:29
Speaker
But it is something that you have to like, and I only realized this after it came out, right Because then it's kind of in the world and people talk about it is you either stick with that you don't, which is kind of fine, right? so But you either give up after 20 pages because it just makes no sense, or you persevere and hopefully kind of gets tied together later on.
00:18:49
Speaker
And what's been interesting is we've got a brilliant audiobook edition of it. I think probably it's harder in the audiobook, or that I have heard discussion of, because you don't even have you don't have the like the markers of italics,
00:19:03
Speaker
Or even just like the page turn to signify that. so i So I know a couple of people that have struggled with the structured kind of all in that sense, like as they've been listening to it.
00:19:15
Speaker
The interesting bit to me is then like Pat is closing his door another few doors down. There will be Harry and Frank as they all turn the corner together. Like there will be the inevitability, the regularity, the way in which this could be any Monday in any year of their working lives.
00:19:32
Speaker
Right. And I think that those linguistic little moments... of nobody speaks, they incline their heads, more and more men fall out of their houses, the way in which the regularity, the circularity is kind of built into the way you're writing, not just the content of what you're writing.
00:19:49
Speaker
And I think that's something that I think is important to point out. I remember when I drafted this, I'd knocked it back and forth for my age room and then we'd sold it. And then the first editorial meeting I had, they just went like, right what is the narrative present of this novel?
00:20:06
Speaker
And I had no idea what that meant. No one had ever asked me that before. Because poetry doesn't have a narrative present. So poetry exists, or my poetry exists, in like the glimpse. So poetry has no, my I have no interest in what happened before or after the poem. It's the poem.
00:20:22
Speaker
So it's just the glimpse of something. It doesn't have time in the same way. And when this had sold and we were kind of looking at it on, like, sped out on the table, I always remember this conversation my editor was like, well, that that section seems like it takes a month, but that seems like it lasts a year, and that seems like it takes a day. So what what on earth, is where is time in this?
00:20:42
Speaker
And it seems ridiculous now, but I just had never, never occurred to me that that's how fiction operates and that's what's different to poetry. And so also that repetition becomes a way of of just marking time.
00:20:55
Speaker
Going well, if it's a week, then then each morning as they come the house, you can just use that to reset the c clock or to kind of mark that shift. And so it serves that very kind of literal structural role as well, I think, within it.
00:21:10
Speaker
Yeah, that's helpful to think about the more and more men fall out of their houses, like dominoes, their faces not yet blackened. Again, the thing that will inevitably happen ah again and again. And I think there's something about the idea of work, right?
00:21:25
Speaker
I feel that there's more of a glut these days of good novels about work, about the processes of work, about its repetitiveness. I could like list a run of books, I think, especially, you know, millennial novels about working at offices or the kind of grunt of those temp jobs.
00:21:40
Speaker
like all of the commas as well as the semicolons and you get repetition, you get listing, all of this stuff really helps emphasize that we're going back again, we're going back into the mind. And that really pulls us into the world in a particular way.
00:21:54
Speaker
Quote, then someone whistles, someone else coughs. It made me think of something actually i did when I was like five, I don't know what age I am. We had to write these stories in school, maybe I'm older than that.
00:22:05
Speaker
And I think I would always go to the abstract, never the particular. So I'd be like, oh, people are walking down the corridor. And my teacher would always write, who is, who's walking? I'd be like, the kids are eating crisps. And she would write, which children work crisps?
00:22:19
Speaker
As though, like, specificity. But here, actually, the point is that they're all together, right? They're all en masse, if you like. Like, all of the men are in this as one group. And actually, the individuality is not part of the point.
00:22:33
Speaker
is actually that they're all... anybody could be whistling. And I like that idea that we started out with an unnamed he at the beginning of the extract, and we're still in the world of the abstract rather than the particular, even though their experience is particular.
00:22:47
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. don't why, though. I mean, that's not bad advice from your primary school teacher. There's something about just like the like the soundscape of it, I guess, or the the texture of something really, kind texture of the moment.
00:23:05
Speaker
Yeah. You know, someone else, would someone whistles, someone else coughs. Also, I mean, what I was really interested in these sections was like, but how how do you talk about just the physical degradation of bodies of that labour on people without ah kind of being really obvious about that?
00:23:22
Speaker
So the cough or the shallow breath that comes later on. the drag on the road, this kind of pausing oftentimes, like they have to stop as they walk and things like that, like paying attention to the physical impact that that that being on the coalface certainly had on people, had on their lungs.
00:23:42
Speaker
Yeah, and you get that texture also through the sound, right? Like sputtering the smoke in shallow breaths, the kind of softness of that sibilance running through it. And then in the last paragraph, one of the men once said he thought he could hear the coal ticking. Another man told him to stop talking daft.
00:24:00
Speaker
That's kind of what we'd call indirect discourse, right? Where you're hearing that other man's voice in an abstract way. It's not got cut marks around it. And it stopped talking daft. That word daft is is the word that gives away vocality to me, the particular vernacular, if you'd like.
00:24:15
Speaker
I hope so. And I think the dilemma of this kind of writing, right or regionally situated writing, is whether you write in vernacular or not. I think the argument against that in Pity was that for an accent that's already kind of seen as comedic or seen as less, has less social status than others, that you what you don't want is people doing the imitation of it in their own head.
00:24:44
Speaker
And there's very it's very, very difficult to write it without stereotyping it because a lot of it is... isn't what people think, like, they kind of dropped H and E in T. So it's not like T shot, like, it's not that obvious. Like, it's quieter than that, it's subtle than that, it's softer than that.
00:24:59
Speaker
But how do you write that out in a way that is useful to the story and disrupt it? And so, as with my poetry, from it from the start of the first book, like, you're just writing what I would consider, as you say, like, just a vernacular of the town, which means that you sometimes don't get...
00:25:19
Speaker
quote-unquote kind of standard grammar I guess in but yeah so Stop Talking Daft is yeah both just that moment of introducing that voice without stereotyping it potentially yeah like I'm thinking of something like Dickens's hard times right when the narrator's voice is one thing and then you suddenly get the people speaking in quote marks and you're like oh well this is jarring in a very different tone I mean, and that's it. We have this really interesting thing with the audio book where Joe Pitts is great.
00:25:48
Speaker
Interestingly, second name Pitts, but anyway, that's not why Mr. Sticks is really good. But Joe Pitts does the audio book. um And have this really interesting conversation where the original direction he'd been given was to read the book in RP, essentially, and do the voices in accent, which would have just sounded kind of mad, I think, or just was like not the point of the book.
00:26:11
Speaker
And then, so, you know, we have really good discussions about that, but I just was like, well, no, just read it in, sort of North Yorkshire, I think, originally, Joe. And so just read it in what is his voice. And because that can be standard as well in that sense. And so that's not important as a decision, I think.
00:26:25
Speaker
But yeah, the voice of it is just the voice of the town. Like it's not, you know, they're not speaking this other thing. is dialect in it, I think. And it's also, i mean, it's interesting, like, this wasn't a question you asked, but I'll stop in a minute. Like, the thing about language that I find really interesting is that it also shifts generationally, which again then becomes really hard to write down,
Generational Language Shifts in Barnsley
00:26:44
Speaker
literally.
00:26:44
Speaker
And so the dialect or the voice that these men would have that kind of in these italicized chapters, think about like my granddad, would be much, much thicker than my dad's, which is then much thicker than mine.
00:26:57
Speaker
And so these things also have generational shift. in terms of the strength or the the different inflections of accent, ah which also, I don't know how you'd write that as dialect on a page. And so it doesn't, or how you do that in a way that wouldn't be distracting to the...
00:27:16
Speaker
the narrative, not that there is really a narrative in this book, but distracting to the ah prose. Yeah, for sure. And I think the folding it in there in that way, rather than having that in quote marks or something, another man said, quote, you know, as the voice is part of the narrative voice as well. I think that's what I'm trying to say, at least, and that that's important to the tone of the whole novel.
00:27:38
Speaker
But then in that final sentence, and beneath their feet a mile down history, and you get those commas. Like, I've talked to Sean Hewitt recently about his commas. Oh, don't get Sean's down on his commas.
00:27:49
Speaker
I talked to Olivia Sajic recently about exclamation marks. So I'm really interested in your commas here. Like, actually, really, they do slow us down here. And beneath their feet, comma, a mile down, comma, history.
00:28:02
Speaker
Which is what we're not expecting to have in that line. I don't think we're not expecting history. That's not the word we're expecting in that sentence, this kind of grand statement. Then waiting to be hacked into chunks and pulled out again. This is real back to tangible, physical, manual kind of language. It's really interesting to me to go from the vernacular to a big theoretical idea, like history is beneath them, that's then transformed to the thing that they're doing, like their labour. I'm fascinated by that, like at the end of this section.
00:28:34
Speaker
So that you're kind of like, I thought we were in this place, but actually we're in this quite different intellectual, emotional space. I do love Sammy Colum. just think they're quite fun. But also I think, and also I don't write with any punctuation in my poetry, so it's nice to kind of able to run through the fields of them.
00:28:49
Speaker
i mean, it is also like, whilst also being slightly abstract, right? So beneath their feet is history. It's also just literally true because that's kind of what coal is, right? It's kind of like crushed and condensed, like history, literal history, kind of fossils, et cetera.
00:29:01
Speaker
And so it is just literally true. And so, and the great kind of weird surrealism of that is also just true, therefore. And that's what I think is really interesting. So beneath their feet, like his history, in a kind of abstract sense, but also a literal sense, because that's what we kind of mining.
00:29:18
Speaker
in a very, very true sense as well, but also the kind of slightly surreal scape of people beneath our feet, literally. And, you know, one of the things that they kind of talk about as they go through the novel is like, well, if you knew what you're walking over, you you know, you wouldn't, you've got to go to shop and you kind of got a good end with your life. You don't you'll want to think about the people that are, you know, the bodies that are still beneath the ground from pit explosions, anything like that, that you might be walking over as you go to Morrison's that's now kind of on the site, one of the old pits in Barnsley, for example.
00:29:48
Speaker
Talking to Val McDermott at one of the events I did for this book, and she was talking about how there were mines under the sea in that part Scotland. It's even more surreal. There's kind of beneath the kind of seascape of some of these kind of mines where some of her relatives had worked.
00:30:02
Speaker
So, yes, so it's both abstract, but like literally true, which is kind of what I like about it. Yeah, I just kind of liked the, again, I guess it's back to that thing we were talking about before applying the language of poetry, applying that lyric register to the thing that people don't assume it can be applied to is also kind of potentially what's happening, I think, in and some of that.
00:30:26
Speaker
Okay, I'll transition then us from this extract into the last questions. We talked a little bit earlier about moving from poetry to prose in your writing. One thing that we could ask on top of that is, are you always writing in the same kind of place?
Writing Habits and Rituals
00:30:39
Speaker
Are you writing in the office that I'm talking to you now in?
00:30:42
Speaker
Did you give yourself daily amounts to do when you were writing the prose as opposed to the poetry? Do you have processes, talismans, rituals? No, probably should. I'd be better. I did.
00:30:54
Speaker
I think when I was doing the novel, i just wanted to do a bit every day, but I didn't have like an amount. I just wrote until, I think it was in sections. i was doing like a section a day. Eventually, like once I runside found that form.
00:31:07
Speaker
But I also think just writing until I just couldn't, which was like for a couple of hours a morning. And then just like going about the rest of the day, but feeling like I'd done something. Editing this office, I can mark in this office. I can't write here.
00:31:20
Speaker
And I often think that writers give themselves rituals in order to distract themselves from the act of writing. So i can't I can't start this until I've got the perfect notebook. The kind of fetishisation of the notebook is a kind of beautiful thing.
00:31:34
Speaker
The poem will be just as good if you write to on it on back of a receipt as it will be in that kind of book. That fetishisation, I think, of space, of time, of environment to write is a distraction from the actual thing itself, which can, to a certain extent, at least at first, as I say, until you need that deep time, can really be done anywhere, which is always the beauty you of writing. and But yeah, so do I have... Not really at all.
00:32:01
Speaker
But yeah, when I was doing the novel, had to do it every day because you'd forget what was happening. Whereas poetry doesn't kind of need that. But now I'm kind of editing this new collection of poems, so I'm sort of thinking, if I can just edit a poem a day, that will do it, I think.
00:32:16
Speaker
But yeah, if I had more rituals, I might be better. I've heard you talk about Stephen King's book on writing before, which I think is great.
Recommended Reads and Writing Insights
00:32:26
Speaker
Are there other books on writing that you'd recommend or, you know, essays on quote unquote craft?
00:32:33
Speaker
Dan Mokowski's Towards a New Poetry is really interesting. i re-found that on one of my shelves before I was re-reading that. I think that's really interesting to kind of think about craft. Mark Doughty has written incredibly well about metaphor and imagery and kind of just, and and can talk about that really well, I think.
00:32:50
Speaker
And I mean, the things I used when I was first starting out were always those Paris Review interviews, ah writers talking about their own writing, like that um horrific John Berryman one, where they talk about the idea of, says, I want God to give me the worst thing imaginable.
00:33:05
Speaker
I hope to be nearly crucified. in terms of like, it's not, you know, something we advise, but in terms that practice. And those those interviews, I always just found fascinating of kind of finding, I'm fascinated, I think, less so in general crap and much more in how writers, how artists in general exist in the world. Like, what is that? Like you asked in that question before, like what is people's day-to-day process?
00:33:30
Speaker
And just what the work is of it, I think. Like, I think it's interesting, back to that question before, It's hard when you first start out or when you first get published or when you arrive in the world as a writer and you're kind of doing stuff.
00:33:42
Speaker
So little of that is the actual work. and the the kind And it's all a distraction from the actual work. There's just the work that is you in the writing. and And been fascinated by other writers kind of do that. Like, what is their work?
00:33:56
Speaker
Salman Rushley talks about this thing of having Shakespeare's, he's got like a bust of Shakespeare as a knocker. So he says, I mock and I ask to be let into the world of it. And so people do have those kind of rituals. Like, I don't have anything like that, but I'm interested in in all those Pirate Review interviews. Like I say, like how It's people talking about how they've found space for it in the world and how they've built a life within it.
00:34:20
Speaker
And that seems to me the work. And that I think is what interests me um more than kind of how-to guides, I think. Though they can also be really useful when you start out.
00:34:32
Speaker
How did used to have a book that was called something like how to write a novel and make loads of money? It wasn't called that. It was called something like that. I used to read it obsessively when I was like 15. I thought, that's what you did do.
00:34:44
Speaker
need to write a novel and make loads of money. But it had those kind of advice that are always in those kind of books, which is things like you should know everything about your character. You should make like file of factors for each character.
00:34:55
Speaker
You should know all this stuff about them and all that, all those kind of ex exercises that you do to kind of build a hinterland of knowledge. So yeah, I used to be obsessed by that book. Okay, two other questions for you. One is that given that you do teach creative writing, are there any good or easy or useful creative writing exercises that you'd recommend to listeners to do Or people maybe that aren't in creative writing workshops that they could kind of take forward?
Creative Writing Exercises
00:35:21
Speaker
Yeah. So two that I always do in workshops that I do think are really useful. So one is a really straightforward one, which is essentially an exercise in personifying abstract nouns. So you pick um an emotion and you pick a place and you go, I met sadness in the library. i met happiness in the takeaway.
00:35:40
Speaker
And then you just describe that meeting as it was literally true and think, well, what did what would sadness wear? How would they move? What would they speak like? What would their voice sound like? If you touch their skin, what would it feel like? What do their breath smell like? Et cetera, et cetera.
00:35:53
Speaker
And beyond just being an interesting kind of exercise in itself, what it does is give you a language to talk about abstraction, because what often turns up in kind of new writing by people is things like, he walked into the room and looked sad.
00:36:04
Speaker
He walked into the room and was anxious. So what does that physically look like? But if you can really dig into the mannerisms or the kind of outward manifestations of that, then the writing can kind of really take off.
00:36:15
Speaker
it's a shortcut to kind of think about that in a way. The other thing I do more and more, like in workshops, I don't tend to run as many as I used to, but when kind of I'm running workshops, I see less and less point, I guess, in everyone sitting around and going, let's all write a book poem in the voice of this pen.
00:36:31
Speaker
And then everyone writes poem in the voice of a pen, and then they read it out. Because workshops really exist in order to nudge you into the thing that you wanted to write already. They're kind of pushing you through the door, but maybe the side door of what you wanted to write.
00:36:42
Speaker
And so more and more, talk to people about this idea of something that they haven't... found a way to write about yet that's been on their mind, something they've wanted to approach in writing, something that just keeps them awake at 2am and get them to put it at the bottom of their page rather than the top and just say, write towards it.
00:36:59
Speaker
Don't write about it, write towards it and see what happens. And so often there's that process of discovery. You find that actually the thing is down at Cul-de-sac halfway down, but it's kind of, it's over here somewhere. It's not the thing you thought it was, but that notion of writing towards it rather than about it freezes in some way from the kind of having to get it right somehow i think so they're two that i think are ah quite useful and quite fun oftentimes those are great thank you so much okay finally what book or books do you want to recommend to us maybe an old book maybe something you're reading now maybe something not yet out
00:37:37
Speaker
You know, I was just reading, they sent me Richard Scott's new book, um new collection of poetry.
Book Recommendations and Podcast Farewell
00:37:42
Speaker
so I've just been reading the first kind of section of that, which feels like this really kind of thrilling reinvention of and kind of reinvigoration of that ekphrasis. Like he's kind of working in these still lives, but kind of bringing it back to trauma and the self in really interesting ways.
00:37:57
Speaker
The book I read last year that I just thought was like possibly the best book I'll read this decade was It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over. mark and this kind of Fitz Corraldo zombie novel which really kind of sums it up it kind of Fitz Corraldo and so it's philosophical and it's difficult and it's knotty but it's a zombie novel as well and it's kind of both those things and if I love anything in this world I love zombies and I love zombie novels and I wish I got sent more Everyone just sent me, I get sent everything published by ah homosexual in this country, which is fun. And they're all stacked up behind me, but I ah enjoy a good zombie novel. Amazing. Well, if there are any publicists listening, looking after some like horror titles, please send them Andrew's way.
00:38:39
Speaker
would love it. Okay. Well, thank you so much, Andrew, for joining us. This was really enjoyable. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for having me. Thank you for listening to this episode. Please subscribe if you haven't already, leave a review and share with people you know.
00:38:54
Speaker
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00:39:06
Speaker
You can get show transcripts and more information by subscribing to the Substack. This show is made possible by an Impact Accelerator Award from the University of Hertfordshire and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.