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Episode 226: Edward Parnell's In Search of a Haunted Country in 'Ghostland'
138 Plays4 years ago
Edward Parnell (@edward_parnell) comes by the show to talk Kurt Vonnegut, birds, grief, and his book "Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country." It is published by William Collins.
Keep the conversation going on social media @CNFPod across the Big 3.
Be sure you head over to brendanomeara.com for show notes and to sign up for my monthly newsletter. First of the month. No spam. Can't beat it.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Guest
00:00:02
Speaker
Well hello there, wayward CnF'er. What a pleasure it is to be riffing with you. You ready for some Edward Parnell?
00:00:10
Speaker
I think as he, I kind of discerned it in that he just seemed quite a lonely person. And I'm not saying I'm necessarily a lonely person, but it was a quality that I could empathize with. Oh, that's right. He's the author of Ghostland in Search of a Haunted Country. It's published by William Collins. It is out in paperback. And what better
Creative Nonfiction Podcast Overview
00:00:29
Speaker
book than with the title like Ghostland on this eve of Halloween. So you know the drill, trick or rif.
00:00:43
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. I'm Brendan O'Mara, and this is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I talk to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories.
00:00:54
Speaker
You're going to want to keep the conversation going on social media. The, the, the great social medias at CNF pod. Head over to Brendan O'Mara.com for show notes and to sign up for my monthly reading recommendation newsletter. It goes up to 11. That's right.
Community Engagement and Social Media
00:01:14
Speaker
11 goodies. And this month there might even be a zoom link for a CNF and jam sash.
00:01:21
Speaker
You ready for that? Bring whatever you want. You can build it. We could just have a little chat. Anyway, it's about community, right? I mean, that could be fun. Right? Maybe?
00:01:35
Speaker
Go and give the show a kind review on Apple Podcast. Subscribe to the show. Maybe tell a fellow, see an effort. I make the show for people like you. So let's beam it to our people. People like Edward. Edward Parnell is at Edward underscore Parnell on Twitter. You can find them at Edward Parnell.com. In this
Edward Parnell's Writing Journey
00:01:56
Speaker
episode, we talk about a lot about curve on it. Hey, birds.
00:02:01
Speaker
this this intro is turning into a real exercise and how not to have a very polished intro for that I apologize and I don't think I will rerecord okay also keeping the fun in writing and writing with the heaviness of grief so we talk we talk about that we talk about uh you know just his wonderful book if you want my parting shot it's at the end of the show because I don't want to delay this any longer here's my conversation with Edward Parnell
00:02:36
Speaker
I think I always, I always like writing stories. At school that was, they were my favourite thing to do. So in English lessons, I mean particularly I think when you're at kind of primary school, when you're really young, you get lots of opportunities to write stories about monsters and haunted castles and things. And then obviously as you kind of get older and you're into
00:03:01
Speaker
secondary school, high school. It's all about essays about the books you're reading, isn't it? But I do remember that you'd occasionally with a couple of my teachers, you'd get to write the odd short story. And that was always my favorite thing. So I think I had a sense that I was quite good at it as well. And I suppose that
00:03:20
Speaker
when you think that you're reasonably good at something or it's less hard
Influence of Kurt Vonnegut
00:03:24
Speaker
work than doing science and things, that that's an attraction in itself. So I think I was always kind of drawn to that. And I ended up doing lots of jobs where I was writing for my living in a certain way. So I was a
00:03:41
Speaker
a press officer, a communications officer for various different organisations. I worked in television as well, so I wrote a few scripts for some pretty low-grade documentaries and things, and a couple of better ones and a couple of popular history series, so quite varied stuff. I think with that I was always a little bit frustrated in that
00:04:06
Speaker
Obviously, you were always were writing to a brief and it wasn't your own stuff. So I did always kind of harbour this urge to actually be a novelist and to go and write a novel. And I think that was always my kind of escape clause that, you know, I would I would give the job up one day and go and do that. And of course, I'm sure I had. And that is something I eventually did when I got a place on a creative writing
00:04:30
Speaker
MA degree in the University of East Anglia, which is one of the most prestigious courses of its kind in the UK. It's a bit like the Iowa one, I suppose. So I got a place on that and gave my job up. And yeah, that was that was kind of I was I was doing it for real then because before that, I think I was just sort of dabbling in my own writing. And then I actually had to kind of produce stuff. But obviously, what what I hadn't kind of realized at that point is then the
00:04:59
Speaker
but the nitty reality of then trying to be a writer afterwards and earn a living from it. So, you know, you're balancing those two different worlds, I suppose. But yeah, in a very long-winded answer, I think I always kind of was attracted to writing. I also kind of, I think maybe I could have gone in a different way. And I perhaps, I suppose I probably really wanted to be a film director, but I didn't really know how to go about doing that and, you know, kind of missed the boat with that one. So, yeah, writing kind of seemed a better option. And I remember
Keeping Writing Enjoyable
00:05:29
Speaker
something that Kurt Vonnegut says in one of his kind of books where he was advising his students who wanted to kind of go into film that, look, I'm paraphrasing him here, but essentially the stuff you write will end up being filtered through thousands of other people, whereas if you're writing something, that's going to be pretty much your own creation that you get to put out there, give or take a bit of an input from editors and people.
00:05:55
Speaker
When I kind of finally, having done a little bit of dabbling in that TV work, when I finally got to write a couple of my own books, yeah, I can see that. And absolutely that's, I think now I'm a bit of a control freak. So being able to just write my own book and, you know, those are my words. I can't really hide behind anyone else. That's good, I think.
00:06:15
Speaker
I'm so glad you brought up Vonnegut. I have him in my notes from reading Ghostland. He's the top three writer for me and very influential. I love his style. I love his humanity and his humor.
00:06:32
Speaker
and the simplicity through which he writes. And of course, it's deceivingly simple how he writes in pretty pared down sentences and vocabulary that's very approachable for most readers.
Creation of 'Ghostland'
00:06:43
Speaker
And what was it about or what is it about Vonnegut that is so attractive to you as a writer and a reader? I think it's you've
00:06:52
Speaker
hit the nail on the head with it's his humanity really it's it's his warmth and yeah he's kind of got that he's got that kind of haunted quality that I think I'm always attracted to in writers so a lot of the writers I talk about in Ghostland of I kind of discern some sort of hauntedness in their own lives and you know Vonnegut's definitely got that with
00:07:12
Speaker
the stuff he witnessed at Dresden in World War Two and a lot of things that happen in his own life and kind of family tragedies. But just the way he kind of conducts himself in relation to that and isn't really bitter and is kind of, well, he's such a great guy to try and make sense of this chaotic universe and this chaotic world. And I mean, it would be
00:07:34
Speaker
It'd be great if he was still around. I hate to think what he would, he would think of our current situation, but I'm sure he would actually, he'd be a comfort in it. That's the one thing I think I know for sure. Yeah, and my favorite, I've read almost all of his novels and I probably say my favorite is, oh my goodness, Mother Night, that one, I love Mother Night, Sirens of Titans, of course, Slaughterhouse Five.
00:08:00
Speaker
Bluebeard, it's just on and on and on. He just seems to hit. I sometimes call him the first blogger in a way because so many of his chunklets and his paragraphs are very short, 100 to maybe 300 words long, and it just has this very snackable quality to his reading that just keeps you wanting to turn the page.
00:08:23
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, some of those paragraphs and sentences, they're just so quotable on their own, aren't they? But you know, you can you can just kind of instantly, you can just read those and just take great delight in them. I mean, I think
00:08:35
Speaker
probably Slaughterhouse-Five, I'm guessing, I think would be mine overall. But I've got a real fondness for Galapagos as well and all of its environmental messages that just seem so prescient. I mean, just everything about him seems kind of ahead of its time. I mean, I mean, the other thing I suppose that I was attracted to when I first read him, I must have been just blown
Thematic Significance of Birds
00:08:56
Speaker
away by the stylistically by, you know, all those pioneering postmodern things that he was doing and all that kind of intertextuality and all of that stuff.
00:09:05
Speaker
And that was great as well. But I think I first read Slaughterhouse Five before I kind of studied Vonnegut at university. So before I formally knew what he was doing, it still worked for me without kind of being able to pick it apart. So yeah, I think it's just ultimately, I think it's that warmth, but that warmth that also acknowledges this kind of chaos of life really.
00:09:33
Speaker
Yeah. And I remember, this might've been year 99, 2000 or so. And I went into a Walden books in Massachusetts where I grew up. And I remember walking down the bookshelves and I was just like, you know, I'm just going to kind of randomly pick a book off the shelf. I don't even know, you know,
00:09:56
Speaker
where I am basically here in the bookstore, but I'd like to just try something new without any prefix. And I happen to be in the Vonnegut section and I just reach for a book and I grab the new Slaughterhouse-Five.
00:10:07
Speaker
And I had heard of Vonnegut at that point, but I hadn't read him yet. I'm like, okay, well, this is good. I've heard of this title. And I read it in the whole, this whole being Unstuck in Time, the Tralfamadorians. And the fact that this book was in many ways autobiographical yet, it's just fantastically weird. And it was just like one of those things. And it's like, oh my God, like this is one of those weird instances where a book kind of reached out and grabbed me. It was so weird.
00:10:34
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I think my introduction to it, my brother bought it. So it's probably another reason why I'm attached to it. Cause my brother bought, bought me a copy of slaughterhouse five for either my 17th or 18th birthday. And I don't think I read it for a while. I think, you know, he gave it to me. I was all right. What's this? Cause you know, I hadn't heard of it. It's not, it's probably not. Such a kind of such a big book in the UK as it is in America, I suspect. Um,
00:11:01
Speaker
So I got it and I was, oh yeah, this looks good. What is it? And he probably described it as a bit of a sci-fi book, knowing that I'd kind of earlier liked sci-fi. But he said, well, you'll like it. And I put it aside for a while and probably read it six months later. And yeah, I was just blown away by the difference, really, the different things that were going on in it. And the humor, I suppose,
Exploration of Haunted Places
00:11:24
Speaker
as well is such a big part of it, that kind of crazy absurdist humor.
00:11:29
Speaker
Yeah, I love Vonnegut. I managed to shoehorn him into a book about completely different kinds of writers. But I think that kind of haunted quality that he has, that kind of looking back, that really resonated with me as well for this book. So when you were studying Vonnegut, I swear we'll get off Vonnegut eventually.
00:11:50
Speaker
But when you were studying, I just love him. I've never really tried to deconstruct what he does. I just love him for who he is and the writing he does. But when you're studying him, what is the thing that you're noticing when you're cracking him open in a more academic sense? Well, I think, if I remember rightly, that it was the big thing that
00:12:16
Speaker
was pressed on us was that kind of intertextuality and that kind of self, the way he appears as a character in his own works and all those kind of clever things that are quite filmic that we've probably become a lot more used to seeing.
00:12:32
Speaker
I think he was quite pioneering in that stuff. And, you know, I just love things like Kilgore Trout, you know, the the the pulp sci fi writer who appears in so many of his books and all of that stuff who actually then I think Philip Jose Farmer ended up writing a few books under the name Kilgore Trout and there was probably some kind of legal action or something and I did at one point buy one of them. But yeah, I think all of that stuff really that is just
00:13:01
Speaker
He was kind of formally doing different stuff, and certainly when he first did it, it was so fresh and interesting. And just the kind of, I think, the kind of layout of the books. I mean, you look at something like
00:13:14
Speaker
time quake or hocus hocus pocus i think that's written on these kind of purportedly written on these little scraps of paper or something yeah yeah um it's they're just kind of they're just interesting and clever and the narrators you know that Galapagos is narrated by a ghost a million years into the future but the fact that there's that kind of unit so i think that Galapagos which is one of my favorites is narrated by Kilgore Trout's son but dead son um
00:13:42
Speaker
you know so all these characters kind of they kind of go through the books and they they appear kind of briefly in other things but as do things like the you know the trough medorians and who i'm sure were kind of you know probably when he initially kind of came up with them thought oh that you know that sort of amusing idea and then they kind of became became a thing so his i guess there's this there's this great internal logic to his own kind of universe of writing really
00:14:09
Speaker
But I do, I don't remember now all the different points, but I remember in a lecture on postmodernism that, you know, that the lecturer just going through kind of point by point all these different kind of key postmodern tropes that that Vonnegut was going through. And yeah, that kind of that was probably it was it was interesting to see what he was doing. But actually, you don't really need to know know that all that's happening. I think I think it's probably more enjoyable if you're just reading them.
00:14:38
Speaker
in the course of writing professionally,
Writing Amidst Personal Grief
00:14:41
Speaker
how have you maintained that a sense of fun and whimsy with the approach to writing so you don't get too bogged down or burned out and you can still approach the work in the way that you can and the way you did with, of course, your novel, which I haven't read yet. The listener has been, of course, Ghostland, which I have read. So how have you maintained that sense of fun in play so you can do the work and do it well? I think when it's your own project, you've got
00:15:07
Speaker
you've got to pick a project that you are going to enjoy and that's one of the things that I find sometimes holds me back. I mean I've not been very prolific and I don't think I'm ever going to be a particularly prolific writer but I think part of that is because I probably over obsess about the idea really and I need the idea to be really right before I begin with it or at least I think I do so I kind of probably end up
00:15:34
Speaker
not pursuing things and just seeing where they go because i i kind of want them to be more fully formed so but i suppose part of that is that i you know i want them to be i want to know i'm going to enjoy it if it's if a book's going to take me a year to write or you know two years as in the case of ghostland then i don't want to i don't want to get halfway through it and start to become bored with it i mean when you're for a living i was writing stuff that was
00:15:59
Speaker
And I still you know do write the odd article of things when you're writing those that they're not taking so long So if you do get a bit bored with it and think God, why did I say I'd you know, I'd do this article You know, it's not gonna it's not gonna take you that long to finish it You're gonna be doing it for a few days or a week or something But yeah, once you're starting that book, it's it's gonna be a life for such a long period of time So I think there's definitely
00:16:22
Speaker
there's that kind of selection process, because you want to have the right project. But yeah, I think inherent within that, if I'm a bit panickety about starting something, and probably there's things that
00:16:35
Speaker
I guess I should probably just start writing and see what happens with them and see if they do engage me. But I'm always a bit wary of that. And I think that's probably a mistake. I'd be better off to try it for two months. And what would be the worst that could happen is I'd write for two months and think, yeah, I don't really want to be doing this and abandon it. But there we go. That's kind of just how I am, I suppose.
00:16:59
Speaker
And with Ghostland, what was the journey that you set off on and the journey that you were on maybe externally and internally? So in terms of
Preserving Memories and Familial Responsibility
00:17:12
Speaker
the practical way that it came around, and this might be kind of, it was quite unexpected. So I was casting around trying to think of ideas for a new novel because it had been about
00:17:28
Speaker
It had been three or four years since the listeners had come out. And I was just visiting, I went to visit a location, a weird little village in the heart of the English countryside, where one of my favorite writers, M.R. James, the Victorian born master of the ghost story form, where he spent his childhood, because his dad was the local vicar there in the church.
00:17:52
Speaker
And I went to this strange village initially with a friend of mine who'd made a documentary about it. And I'd never been before. And I was obviously always into ghost stories and things. And he offered to take me because I'd been kind of talking about it and show me around the place and the weird old churchyard. And there's a strange kind of quite a haunted sort of landscape and this weird lake. And it's just a really atmospheric place. So I went with him and afterwards I
00:18:22
Speaker
for me quite rarely I wrote, I've lost the inspired enough to write a blog post about it and took lots of kind of what I hope were atmospheric photos and didn't really think very much more of it. I mean, one of the reasons for going was that I wanted to get a bit of a sense of M.R. James the man and where he grew up because I was half thinking that he could be a bit character in this new novel I was thinking of just starting to develop in my head.
00:18:51
Speaker
So a couple of months after that, I got an email from an editor at HarperCollins out of the blue who'd read this blog post I'd done asking whether I'd ever thought about writing a nonfiction book about people like M.R. James and other kind of Victorian Edwardian ghost story writers and some of the kind of odd kind of weird offbeat films that both of us it turned out had grown up watching.
00:19:19
Speaker
So I went and met with Tom who was to become my editor and we bonded over this love of these weird old writers and
Literary Influences and Connections
00:19:27
Speaker
actually we probably talked more about kind of quite crappy old films from the 70s, quite kind of trashy kind of hammer horror films and things like that that we were both big fans of.
00:19:40
Speaker
Yeah, I then kind of went away thinking, well, okay, so Tom's quite interested in the idea that I might write a nonfiction book about this. And I'd never, it wasn't something I'd considered before. So at that point, I had to go away and think about whether it was something I could do. And of course, I think at that point, one of my fears was, well,
00:20:01
Speaker
I'd be interested in doing it, but what qualifies me to do this? There's lots of academics who, even though I'd been interested in ghost stories and horror films and had a genuine knowledge and love about them from quite a young age, I didn't feel that kind of academically I was particularly qualified to talk about it. And you always, as a writer, I think you're always, or at least I am, always worried that someone else will sort of come along and
00:20:27
Speaker
you've got that kind of imposter syndrome. So I was thinking, well, if I do it, well, how would I do it? And I guess I came to the conclusion that were I to, I'd want it to be quite a personal book. And the more I thought about it, the more I kind of could see the connections between some of these writers and places that had a resonance in my own life and
00:20:53
Speaker
know, from childhood holidays and perhaps places I've been to with my parents. And that all kind of tied in with my family story, because this wasn't too long after my brother had died. So I was kind of, you know, I think that was one of the reasons why the new novel wasn't really rushing off the rushing out of my brain, you know, because I was I was dealing with all that kind of grief. So I suppose this allowed me to think, well, okay, if I'm
00:21:20
Speaker
There is a story I can tell here and it's kind of as well as the story of all these writers and artists and filmmakers. It's my story and the kind of story of my haunted family. So once I kind of had that idea and could suddenly see a structure in which I could kind of cover both bases,
00:21:39
Speaker
I was a lot more confident of pitching that idea because I thought, well, you know, no one else is going to do this. And yeah, if I'm worried that someone else will have more to say about these stories or these writers, well, at least the way I'm doing it is going to be original. And yeah, no one else is going to.
00:21:56
Speaker
beat, even if somebody beats me to it, and a similar book comes out, you know, as is, as I was convinced would happen, you know, three months before mine comes out, I always think of those two Robin Hood films that came out at the same time, the Costner one, Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, and whatever the other one was. And I didn't want to be like that, really. But I thought, well, you know, if I'm if I'm kind of writing
00:22:19
Speaker
apart memoir as well, then if that happens, so be it. At least my part of the story is going to be fresh. So so
Themes of Loneliness and Nostalgia
00:22:26
Speaker
I went away and pitched it and it got commissioned. And I suppose that was another thing I wasn't used to, because as a novelist, a fairly low grade novelist, what happens is you write your novel and hope that somebody, once it's finished, that you're if you've got an agent, if they'll be able to sell it or
00:22:43
Speaker
you know, or you'll kind of hoick it around yourself. But this was suddenly I had a commission to write this as well. And, you know, a bit of an advancing theme. So that kind of probably altered the, altered the creative process for me as well, because I knew that the end of it, this book was going to come out, which was really quite freeing. And I think probably another thing with another reason for me being slow to at that point to have written another novel,
00:23:07
Speaker
is because I was kind of thinking, well, you know, I'll get to the end and I'll finish it. And even if I'm happy with it, there's that kind of that whole rejection process that you run the gamut of. And it's quite long winded as well. And I'd been through that with the listeners. And it took a long while for it to get published. And I suppose that's not a massive incentive to make you want to write something if you're not sure that your book's going to actually see print at the end of it.
00:23:33
Speaker
And you write in the book too that digging up the past can be a dangerous pursuit. Yeah, it was difficult because obviously I was delving into lots of, I wouldn't say they were exactly buried memories. I mean, I think some of them were some of the kind of saddest stuff, kind of thinking back to kind of lost family members and stuff that was, that was hard to, to focus back on. And those kinds of memories aren't things that you, you
00:24:02
Speaker
that most people
Final Reflections on 'Ghostland'
00:24:03
Speaker
I don't think it's not healthy to kind of be focusing all day on that stuff. So you there's lots of elements like that in your life that I think you end up kind of putting into a box or parking. So I suppose I was I was going back to look at those but I think I was at the point where I really wanted to as well because these were things I hadn't really thought about other than in kind of fleeting moments or you know, sometimes in the middle of the night when you kind of wake up and or
00:24:31
Speaker
you've had some old fragment of a dream or something, it was time to kind of look into this stuff again and to try and reconstruct, I suppose, some of those moments and to try really, and I think I thought that it was the moment, now my brother was no longer around, as well as losing him, I'd lost our kind of shared remembrances of our parents as well.
00:24:57
Speaker
it was an opportunity to try and kind of breathe some sort of ghostly life, some sort of spectralness into their sort of forms and their lives and the lives that kind of we all had together, you know, sort of from some 20 or 30 years before. So that was really what I wanted to do. So yes, it was it was painful to think about it, but it was also it was also kind of quite uplifting as well, because
00:25:20
Speaker
as well as the kind of the sadder memories that might've come from it. I was also thinking of happy memories and good times as well. So that was, overall, it wasn't a miserable process. There'd be moments where it would be upsetting to write it and it would be difficult to write it. But then there were other moments where I was just kind of pleased to think about it. I mean, I guess the sadness was that, and the difficulty was that I couldn't, when writing about my parents say,
00:25:51
Speaker
I couldn't ring up my brother anymore and kind of talk to him about this stuff. But then that was kind of the point of the book that I was in this place where that wasn't really an option, open to me anymore. So yeah,
Conclusion and Personal Reflections
00:26:05
Speaker
no, it was an interesting process, but I'm glad that I did it.
00:26:10
Speaker
Yeah, and it's in a sense in the context of the book, and this can be interpreted in any number of ways, but it's almost like, you know, the, you know, you're the last member of your family who's your nuclear family that who is alive and in a sense, like they they are haunting you. But in a sense, too, it's like you are in a sense the ghost of like haunting the past family as well. Like you're both kind of traversing these kind of worlds and bridging these
00:26:37
Speaker
these worlds and what we consider the living and the dead. I don't know, it just popped into my head as you were talking, but there is that ghostly connection between you and your family. I think I felt a sense of responsibility as well, and that was a real driving force. That was one of the things that it felt quite a privilege to have been commissioned to write the book, given that they obviously knew that it was a part memoir as well as
00:27:07
Speaker
cultural history and part travel book, part psycho geography, call it what you will. But, you know, I had this responsibility that, you know, if I didn't tell this story, then no one else was going to tell it. And obviously, once I kind of popped my clogs, then no one else is going to tell it either. So it, it really felt like
00:27:28
Speaker
Yeah, you get on and write this because, yeah, if you don't, no one else will. And it's an interesting story I hope to tell. But I also genuinely think it kind of tied in with the other themes of the book, really. Part of the book that is always of a big through line through the whole book are birds. And yeah, maybe you can speak to the importance of birds and ornithology and why that was kind of a connective tissue between your whole family and specifically your brother.
00:27:56
Speaker
Yes, so we grew up in quite a rural area, a really flat part of the country, a farming area, an arable farming area. It's probably like the Midwest or something. I wouldn't say now it's a particularly attractive area, but I think it has a sort of bleak
00:28:15
Speaker
open beauty at certain times of the year in the middle of the winter you know those those kind of empty fields and you know it has a certain quality that's also a little bit kind of ghostly as well and is quite attractive to writers of the kind of weird in the area as well so mr james actually where he where he ended up as a academic in cambridge that's not too far from where i grew up in those this kind of flat fennland landscape um but as as well as
00:28:42
Speaker
that sort of atmosphere of the place. I do remember my mum used to, we'd go on sort of drives after school or at the weekend and my mum would take myself and my granddad who sort of grew up farming that land
00:28:59
Speaker
working on it and she'd take us on drives around kind of along the local river bank and things and we'd be looking for owls, barn owls and short-eared owls and swans and things on the river and all these kind of farmland birds that we'd go on these drives looking for so that became a thing kind of quite an early age this kind of looking for owls and things and I really like that and as I got older
00:29:24
Speaker
I certainly always did have that attraction to looking for wildlife and then my brother who was six years older than me got kind of much more seriously into bird watching when he was in his late teens I suppose so me being the kind of younger brother who hero worshipped him a bit I kind of ended up probably annoying him but
00:29:46
Speaker
tagging along a bit and then bird watching became a hobby for me as well. And we'd end up driving quite a lot around the country looking for rare birds as he got a bit older and things. So I suppose the birds are in there because they're a link to that kind of my earliest memories and they're a link to times with my brother and also my mum and my dad as well to an extent.
00:30:11
Speaker
So that's something that links us. I mean they were also though a way of with that later sort of travel around the country visiting different bird watching spots and looking for you know these different lost birds that were were blown in and things that also got you that I think that actually contributed to my
00:30:29
Speaker
um good sort of geographical knowledge of the country and I was I was probably a lot better traveled than many of my peers who didn't have that kind of slightly strange not very not very trendy hobby of being a bird watcher but it had meant that I'd travel around a lot of Britain and I'd been and obviously birds tend to be in you know quite out of the way atmospheric places so
00:30:53
Speaker
a lot of those places tied in with places that also attracted these Victorian Edwardian ghost story writers or some of the filmmakers who made later adaptations of their work. So that kind of, that was a useful tie in for the book. And then I think there's also, and I'm not sure if I was conscious of this when I was writing it, but chatting to people kind of subsequently, I think there is
00:31:17
Speaker
In lots of these stories, so particularly in M.R. James' stories, you've got these kind of lone middle-aged male protagonists who are usually academics who are sort of going off on their own, poking around country churches or along a desolate ruined coastline, looking for these bits of arcane esoteric information or trying to uncover some hidden treasure or some old secret or something. And the thing they're looking for is
00:31:47
Speaker
by its very nature elusive. And that in itself is a little bit like birdwatching, where often you're going somewhere, you're driving an hour to the coast.
00:31:56
Speaker
to look for this little bird that's come in on an easterly gale from Scandinavia and of course you're walking around this woodland looking for it and your chances of seeing it are next to zero and it's a bit that felt a little bit like some of the characters in these stories who are you know these lonely guys walking around a wood or whatever looking for it that seemed a similar thing and then I think you've also got the kind of you do have these kind of I suppose more spiritual
00:32:26
Speaker
connotations with birds. They're something that maybe bridges, they kind of bridge the land of the air and the land itself in that they can fly above us and there's obviously biblical connotations and all the rest of it. So that wasn't hugely in my mind, but I think it was there that these were kind of quite ethereal creatures as well that I was looking for. And in that regard, they feature quite kind of heavily in
00:32:53
Speaker
in my novel as well. Actually one, it's a bigger theme in that novel where one of the characters is this young naturalist and actually I think he's without, he's kind of, it's a book that's set in 1940 and it's really documenting, loss is a big theme of that book but one of the ways that the savvy reader will
00:33:16
Speaker
will note that is in the lots of the wildlife that I'm describing is stuff that's really virtually vanished from the British countryside in that intervening kind of 60 or 70 years due to, you know, changing farming practices and things. So that was kind of, I think that loss as well, even going, you know, visiting some of these places that I hadn't been back to since I was a kid. I was also noting all these birds aren't there anymore or
00:33:45
Speaker
you rarely see those, or there's some different birds that have now appeared that have colonized. So that was an interesting other kind of side element to it as well. And there's something to be said about the fact that the book, you're going in between worlds and memories, and birds are by their very nature migratory. So they're going from one place to another.
00:34:12
Speaker
And they appeal to the senses in a different way too, because before you see them, you often hear them. So you're, so it's like, there's an, you know, so you know, it's there, like, very much like a ghost, you might feel the presence or hear the presence before you actually see the presence. So I think there's, there's something there with the birds that certainly I felt. And then hearing you talk about it, that it's like they are so,
00:34:37
Speaker
It's such an integral connective tissue from the natural world to the supernatural, if you will. Yeah. And actually, one of the birds I talk about, and we're going back to Kurt Vonnegut, but there's this particular, quite a rare bird, a golden aureole that only really nests in one little, there's one little population that, the point I was writing a book that was still clinging on in Eastern England, there were a few pairs of them. They're much more common on the continent.
00:35:05
Speaker
And they're this beautiful bright yellow bird, not really like any other bird we get in Britain. But they're incredibly elusive because they live in these, at least in my part of the world, they lived in these big tall poplar plantations that are very dense and difficult to see into. And they like going in the canopy. And you can go and stand for hours and not see them.
00:35:31
Speaker
you do hear their call and they've got this really fluting ethereal call and I likened it to the
00:35:38
Speaker
puta wheat that Vonnegut describes the birds making, you know, that he hears that that's the kind of the sound he hears after the, after the massacre of Dresden and the, you know, the only thing that it's the only kind of response that you can have to such horror. And that just struck me as, you know, that's kind of that, that became fixed a while ago, actually, in my head, is that that's kind of was a good representation of what this bird, the golden aureole makes. And yeah, that just kind of
00:36:06
Speaker
that really fitted in really well actually and that's going on but on that whole lost theme that's a bird that's now since I wrote the book they no longer occur in Britain as a breeding bird so that they've vanished as well so that that was kind of quite poignant and that you know makes their kind of their other sad call even sadder I think.
00:36:26
Speaker
Yeah. Is there a particular bird that you connect with in a way or something that transcends merely being like a favorite bird, but is there one that just through its own animal behavior, connects to you in a way like, oh, when you see that, that's kind of like your, it just connects to you on a different level.
00:36:47
Speaker
I think barn owls are something that do that because they're so tied in with those drives when I was six or seven with my mother and my grandfather driving in the afternoon on a Sunday afternoon along this desolate stretch of river in the hope that one of these things would flit out in front of us at dusk. And they're not a common bird in Britain. And I don't see them very often now. I saw one the other week. And my heart always kind of lifts when I see one.
00:37:17
Speaker
it does kind of take me back to those moments but they're also just they're just beautiful and silent and they are ghostly as well and they're yeah they just appeal to they have all the qualities really that appeal to me I think but I'm sure nostalgia is one of the big things that I can't help but I can't help but really kind of think back to earlier happier times really whenever I see one.
00:37:41
Speaker
Right. For me, I love catching just a lone great blue heron out in the marsh hunched over. They just kind of look like old wizards to me. And they're just kind of there. And then their call, which is just this almost ghastly croak. It's just so creepy. I don't know. I just love them. I love just the way they comport themselves, hold themselves, their posture. And then, of course, that.
00:38:11
Speaker
that grows croak yeah that they're up there for me to not the great blue because it's we get a over here we get a very it looks very similar it's a gray heron um but it's it's quite hard to tell from a great blue heron
00:38:25
Speaker
But they were another bird that yeah, on those kind of childhood drives that we would go along the river counting them. And you know, if you saw three or four of them, that would be fantastic. So yeah, I know exactly where you're coming from with those. I also love the red busted or red breasted nut hatch, which is just a little tiny bird that usually climbs down trees to eat bird, eat bugs.
00:38:46
Speaker
And it just, its call is almost like a laugh. It just sounds like it's laughing. And I'm always kind of charmed by that. That would actually, because that weirdly, there's been one of those has turned up in Britain, like a lost vagrant that got blown across in some autumnal gales. And I think it was 1989 or 1990, but I saw that bird with my brother. And yeah, the thing that,
00:39:14
Speaker
It was a bird we'd never really heard of before. We get another type of nuttatch here, but it's not as pretty as that one. But the thing when we were sort of reading, well, what is this red-breasted nuttatch that's turned up? It sounds made up. But I remember at the time, in the field guide that we got it, it referred to its call sounding like a tiny toy trumpet. And indeed it did, because it was there in this big wood and thousands of people went to see it. But it would be kind of piping away. It was incredible.
00:39:44
Speaker
And with – there are any number of ways you could have written this book, I think. You probably could have just tripled down on the memoiristic quality and just hinged it on your family like I think a lot of writers would. But you definitely chose to…
00:40:02
Speaker
use those personal, the personal memoristic things as this grace note throughout the whole grace notes throughout the entire book. And it's also, it profiles a lot of these, you know, these, these haunted writers in movies that were important to you just over the course of your life and in profiling them and unpacking that that as well. So
00:40:25
Speaker
you know, when did that strike you as a particular, I don't know, just a method to tell the story? In terms of the approach I took, I think I was kind of thinking of my novel writing background, because I think I'd consider, you know, this came at a point where I would consider myself as a primarily a novelist, you know, that was the book I'd written before. So I was, I was trying to think of, well, if I'm writing a book that's
00:40:55
Speaker
that's surveying some of these writers and movies, then obviously, where's the kind of narrative in that? And I realized that, well, that's going to be the family story, and I want to thread that through it. And I think early on in it, I think I read a quote from M.R. James, where he was kind of describing his methodology for how he would write one of his ghost stories. And I've got the quote here in front of me, actually, because this sort of became a little bit of a mantra for me.
00:41:26
Speaker
It goes, let us then be introduced to the actors in a placid way. Let us see them going about their ordinary business, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings. And into this calm environment, let the ominous thing put out its head unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently until it holds the stage. And I thought, yeah, that's what I can do with this. I can hint at
00:41:51
Speaker
can hint you'll you'll pick up the book and fairly soon think that there's a subtext here there's something else going on you know these in these kind of allusions to to his childhood there's there's there's a bit more going on here than he was just an odd little kid into reading ghost story books and i but i wanted to gradually let that unfold and then i constructed really the the journey and the
00:42:16
Speaker
the order I kind of dealt with these writers and I suppose that came around really in the order that I wrote about the places that I'd visited because I wanted to save the places that had the most emotional resonance really to the memoir part of the book.
00:42:33
Speaker
save those to the end. And that was when this ominous theme could finally emerge from the ground, as it were. So that was really, I guess, that was my modus operandi in a nutshell. I mean, there was other stuff going on as well, but that was how I wanted to... And I think I always knew that that was how I wanted to approach it.
00:42:58
Speaker
What parallels and commonalities did you notice in your research with these writers that you admire? Was there anything that you saw in common with yourself and them? I think there's an element where you start to project your own kind of thoughts and feelings onto them a bit. So I'm well aware that I'm probably doing that. So I mean, that's not a huge part of the book.
00:43:23
Speaker
massively trying to psychoanalyze these people. I mean, it's as much I'm talking about the fiction, I'm talking about the stories as much as their own lives in many places. But certainly with somebody like M.R. James, I think it was this overall haunted quality that I kind of felt I had an affinity with, in that James is an interesting one in that he hadn't
00:43:52
Speaker
really kind of other than he'd not really lost people I don't think other than you know he was born in the 1860s and obviously people wouldn't live as long although I think his parents got to a decent age and things so he he had none we shared none of that sort of early kind of family trauma or anything but I think as he I kind of discerned it in that he just seemed quite a lonely person and I'm not saying I'm necessarily a lonely person but
00:44:20
Speaker
It was a quality that I could empathize with. And actually, it might be that the more you read about him, lots of his friends would say what a jolly character he was. But he never married. There's lots of speculation that he might have been gay and kind of closeted. That's always a controversial subject. We don't really have any evidence of that. But certainly, he was much more comfortable in the company of men.
00:44:48
Speaker
And that seemed to be a thing with quite a lot of these writers of that period as well, which may have just been the social circumstances they were in. So with James, there was just that sort of sense of wistfulness almost, I think, that's also in his stories, as well as the kind of playful terror of them. Because he essentially wrote his stories just to amuse his peers, really,
00:45:17
Speaker
pleasant terror as a, you know, as a Christmas time entertainment to read these stories out. But at least that's what purportedly he said he was doing. I think there's a kind of existential dread in them as well. And some of these other writers that I might have talked about, somebody like E.F. Benson, who was a contemporary and acquaintance of James, he's definitely someone who ended up a bit like me as the
00:45:42
Speaker
the last of the Benson's standing, and one of the stories I talk about, Pirates, which is one of my favorite stories, that seems very autobiographical and documents, really, the protagonist coming back and having this kind of ghostly rendezvous in his former family home with all of his lost siblings.
00:46:01
Speaker
So I think I just kind of I was probably I was looking for an atmosphere, I think, and I discerned within lots of these writers, you know, a lot of who were writing around the around the time of the First World War as well. So there was all these huge societal things going on. But and lots of sad morbid times going on. So I could I was just discerning within them something that kind of fitted the mood of my book, I think, really.
00:46:32
Speaker
And I love towards the end of the book, too, where you write – you're writing a little bit about Virginia Woolf, and then you end this chapter, Trouble of the Rocks, by saying, it's not the house that is haunted. It's me. And I want to be. I have to be. Because if I give them up, if I stop looking back, everything that ever happened to us will cease to exist.
00:46:52
Speaker
and you know what did you ever find over the course of writing this book and maybe in the prelude to writing it that um that you felt you know a heavy pressure or a heavy a heaviness that you are the one bestowed with the memories and that if you don't capture them um you know they will they will flit away yeah absolutely that that felt like a real sacred responsibility that you know i've got to get this down because if i don't no one else is going to and okay that ultimately
00:47:22
Speaker
in the universe, would that matter if I didn't write the stories? Well, it would matter to no one else but me, I suppose. But that still felt a compelling enough reason to do it. And hopefully, yes, it's the story of, it's my kind of haunted family story. But actually, one of the nice unexpected things has been I've had a lot of correspondence from people who've been
00:47:44
Speaker
you know, three similar things or were just in the process of, you know, they just lost a parent or something who were writing to me saying that they'd actually, you know, they'd got quite a lot of comfort from the book because it had, it sort of mirrored what had been happening to them or what had happened in the past to them. And they could kind of see it as this
00:48:04
Speaker
celebration and love letter really to this kind of lost family so I think one of my fears when I was writing it was that I don't I didn't want to write a kind of maudlin mournful book that was just sad and depressing so I was really heartened when I when I did get some emails about that and that people actually seem to seem to get something positive from it because I was hoping that would also be the case and also you know it's about the it's about the the
00:48:32
Speaker
transformative power of literature and film and I suppose birdwatching it in my case as well but it's how these other things help us to get through kind of more difficult times.
00:48:42
Speaker
Fantastic. Well, Ed, I want to be mindful of your time and thank you so much for coming on the show and of course writing this wonderful book that just, I don't know, it's kind of a travelogue of the mind in a lot of ways and of course into your family. So great work with it. It's out in paperback now. Where can people find you online and get more familiar with your work? My website is edwardparnell.com.
00:49:11
Speaker
Um, I'm on Twitter as well, which I think is Edward underscore Parnell or something like that. It's search for you'll find me, I'm sure. Let's see a little, I'll pull it right up. Yeah. Edward underscore Parnell. Yep.
00:49:37
Speaker
Shabby, right? I love talking to those folks from the UK. I mean, there's Edward there. A while ago, Jonathan Green, Beth Roars, Lindsay McRae, Paul Willets, and Alexandra Norman. There might be others. It's always a pleasure for that accent to land on the air.
00:49:56
Speaker
I think so. In any case, you're gonna want to go check out Ghostland and you're gonna want to spend some time with it. It takes you places you don't think it'll take you. It's good stuff. We're at CNF Pod of course on the socials and I'd love to hear from you. What's on your mind? What are you working on? I really want to know.
00:50:18
Speaker
I'm not entirely sure how to pivot to this thing in my little parting shot here. So I'll just dive right in. Had myself what I would consider a pretty sustained cry today. Ugh, I know.
00:50:33
Speaker
I got word from my sister that my 81-year-old mother had a really terrible senior moment. She drove to a doctor's appointment and while on the road apparently got real confused as to where she was going.
00:50:49
Speaker
She pulled into a dollar store, had directions, or had the address to her doctor's office in her hand. She asked for directions to the doctor's office and the clerk was trying to help. And then my mom got really flustered and more confused and she said, just had to go home. And so it was, I guess, a real mess. So the clerk calls 911, brings my mom to ER. She was discharged with a note, said some delirium stuff of that nature.
00:51:19
Speaker
So my sister, when she picked her up, asked what happened, and my mom was now somewhat lucid, didn't really remember a thing, and just broke into laughter that this is like the beginning of the end. And my sister checked my mom's refrigerator at home, and it was all but empty, which it's always full because she likes to have things there in the rare event that people come over, like her grandkids, my nieces and nephews.
00:51:45
Speaker
My sister checked my mom's cupboard, which is also always full with just processed garbage the way You know the kind of food that my mom always kept in our house because she always wanted me to open it up and see any Anything in there that me or my friends might want and so that was empty So who knows if she just went on some sort of a weird purge of her things. I don't know
00:52:12
Speaker
So, I mean, perhaps this could be an isolated incident, a one-off, but I think we all know that's probably foolish and naive to think it's likely to slip further and further down this terrible road.
00:52:27
Speaker
I texted her shortly after I found out this news to let her know that I loved her and missed her from my remote part across the country, thinking that maybe if I didn't at that moment, I might never get the chance for her to read it again and have it really sink in. Thankfully, a couple hours later, she wrote back later saying she loved me too. And I'm so happy I at least got that down and on the record as a journalist, you want these things on the record.
00:52:58
Speaker
I mean maybe it won't devolve for a while or perhaps tomorrow could be the day she picks up the phone and I'll tell her my name and she might say I don't know anyone by that name or I don't have a son and that'll be that and maybe I'm being too dramatic maybe it'll be okay but I had some
00:53:22
Speaker
I had some Adele playing, and I might have cried quite a bit into my hands today with Adele in my ears. I might even be crying a little bit right now, and I'm more embarrassed about the Adele than the crying, but whatever. Because it was like my mom and I, growing up with my parents, split up. It was me and Jerry.
00:53:51
Speaker
against the world. And, you know, while she's still here, I will, of course, do my best to keep in touch. And, you know, my mom, she knows as well as anyone and would likely tell me, Ryan, because my family calls me Ryan, my middle name. She'd probably be like, Ryan, if you can't do interview, sing it.
00:54:40
Speaker
you