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Ep. 20. Michael Donkor, Grow Where They Fall
128 Plays18 days ago
In today's episode I talk to Michael Donkor about his novel Grow Where They Fall (2023); we talk about a passage from p.83 of the paperback edition.
Michael Donkor studied English at Wadham College, Oxford and then undertook a Masters in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, London. The Observer named him as one of 2018's best debut authors for his first novel Hold (4th Estate) and in 2019, he was longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. His second novel Grow Where They Fall was published by Penguin in 2024. He has judged the Betty Trask Prize, the BBC's National Short Story Award and he regularly reviews for the Guardian.
Episode references:
- Isabella Hammad, Enter Ghost
Follow the show on Instagram. Find Michael on Instagram (@m_donks) and X (@MichaelDonkor).
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Produced, hosted, and edited by Chris Lloyd.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Background
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to Books Up Close, the podcast. My name is Chris Lloyd. This is the close reading show for writers, readers and language nerds. In today's episode, I talk to Michael Donkaw about a passage from his novel Grow Where They Fall.
00:00:14
Speaker
Michael studied English at Wadham College, Oxford, and then undertook a master's in creative writing at Royal Holloway.
Awards and Recognition
00:00:20
Speaker
The Observer named him as one of twenty eighteen's best debut authors for his first novel, Hold.
00:00:25
Speaker
And in 2019, he was long listed for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. His second novel, Grow Where They Fall, was published by Penguin in 2024. He's judged the Betty Trask Prize, the BBC National Short Story Award, and he regularly reviews for The Guardian.
00:00:41
Speaker
Welcome, Michael. Hello, Chris. Thanks for having me. Of course. Lovely to see you.
The Value of Close Reading
00:00:47
Speaker
Okay, before we get into this novel, what do you think about close reading as an activity? I know you have taught in schools as we were talking just off mic and given this novel is about a school teacher.
00:00:59
Speaker
i imagine you've also taught in universities as well. Is that true? um In informal ways, but never like a full course. Sure. Yeah. So you're well versed in close reading, I imagine, or at least teaching close reading. How do you feel about it as an activity?
00:01:13
Speaker
Well, I approach the teaching of close reading as someone who really loves doing it themselves individually. So whenever I have those lessons kind of planned, they're always delivered with quite a lot of enthusiasm. And lots of my students, I think, um when they first encounter me, are often a bit overwhelmed by how much stuff I can draw out of a short passage. and how we can have spent one lesson on ah on a tiny paragraph. And then by the end of the first term of them being in my classes, they sort understand and indeed are doing the same thing themselves. So I start off with a lot of enthusiasm. And that enthusiasm is is really about so couple of things. One is because I think...
00:01:56
Speaker
when you look at language that closely with that level of intensity, there's a sort of magical thing that happens when you start to see that there's so much more to these sentences than you first thought. And I think also what I really enjoy about close reading is that it's an interpretive exercise.
00:02:17
Speaker
And so it often is the springboard for lots and lots of quite rich conversation that goes in all sorts of different directions. And sometimes getting students to see that takes a lot of guidance. So, you know, the sentence can be read like this or like this. If we think about this verb, it means this. But actually, if the focus is on this of the sentence, it might mean this. What resonates with you? it takes them a bit of a while to kind of get to that way of thinking but when they do and they can see that oh god we're having a debate about quite big ideas based on just the placement of this verb then they start to see the kind of um utility of it as an exercise a bit more Yeah, it's it's an exercise that I sort of put at the centre of my teaching, ah particularly because I think it it gets students to think more about writing as a craft and as something that involves decision-making and conscious conscious choices.
00:03:14
Speaker
And i think it often gives students a kind of healthy admiration for the business of sentence-making, whilst also enabling them to see, like, oh, that sentence feels a bit wonky in some ways. Why exactly does that feel wonky? So I think it's quite empowering in that way too.
Close Reading in Practice
00:03:31
Speaker
Yeah, that's fascinating. There's a scene like late in the book where the pupils in Kwame's class do a close reading of the end of Mrs. Dalloway, right? And it's a really, it's kind of like a funny scene in a way because they're they're like testing out all these things that the main characters kind of taught them, but kind of in their language, if you like.
00:03:52
Speaker
yeah Right. um And I think it's just like a really nice scene where they're they're really grasping for like, oh, they're noticing things in the words, right? They're noticing things in the senses, finally. And Kwame, the teacher's like, oh my God, finally. They're like, they they can do it on their own kind of. But where they go with it is very like personal, right It's really grounded in their kind of viewpoint in a way, which I think is quite a nice way of thinking about what close reading is, right? That we're bringing ourselves to it.
00:04:16
Speaker
Totally, totally. And I think, yeah, that point that you've just made about noticing is another thing that I really love about close reading because it is an exercise in noticing.
00:04:28
Speaker
And perhaps this sounds a bit bland, but I think it's really true. you know, we live in a world where noticing, that really noticing and deeply engaging with what you notice is actively discouraged, is actively discouraged.
00:04:42
Speaker
And so there is something radical and countercultural about saying to people, okay for five minutes, we're actually just going to talk about two sentences or even half an hour. We're just going to talk about two sentences. We're not going to flip between things and sort of disperse our attention in that way. We're going to train our attention on these things and see what comes from engaging with something really small.
00:05:03
Speaker
So, yeah, that that idea is very present in that scene. And what I really enjoyed about writing that scene was that Yeah, you're right. that the The text that they're looking at, so they're looking at Mrs Dalloway, becomes something that they can use to figure out how they're thinking and feeling.
00:05:21
Speaker
And also in the process, it speaks to how Kwame is thinking and feeling as well. So there's something quite unifying that happens in that act of close reading, that kind of communal act of close reading.
00:05:33
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, we talked about a couple of passages to read on this episode. And we decided on this one. And I picked it for maybe an unconscious reason. I don't know. But i it was one that I'd flagged when I'm like reading or like turn over the pages. I then and I don't always say this on the episode, but like, I pick the passage and then don't go back to it until like 10 minutes before we start recording.
Narrative Techniques and Character Complexity
00:05:55
Speaker
And that's when I make my annotations like kind of quickly in a way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I kind of noticed something that I hadn't noticed the first time I read, which is which is part of what I find exciting about this process and doing it with the author. But I was like, oh, wait, I think this passage is about something else, actually.
00:06:11
Speaker
Interesting. Which wasn't on the kind of forefront of my mind the first time, so Yeah, so this passage is from page 83. If you've got the paperback copy with you, everybody, and if you haven't got the paperback copy, you should probably buy it right now and then you can read along and think with us.
00:06:30
Speaker
And you don't really need to know anything about this passage. I think you get quite quickly what's going on. but yeah, please, would you read it for us? That'd be great. Yes. Okay.
00:06:41
Speaker
Ahmed stared at his lap. This, Kwame knew, was the moment. Now he could walk through the gap he had teased open, guide Ahmed forward.
00:06:54
Speaker
Kwame would have to lead with gentle footsteps. His directions to Ahmed needed to be prefaced with quiet self-deprecations that somehow never undermined his ultimate control.
00:07:07
Speaker
Without knowing that this persuasion was happening, Ahmed would end up noting down Kwame's sage advice. Yes, Ahmed would hear wisdom. Ahmed would hear care.
00:07:18
Speaker
And he'd eventually, yes, nod in agreement with the tasks and targets set and leave the data hub with a keenness to succeed. Ahmed mumbled something.
00:07:30
Speaker
Kwame sat forward a little to hear better. It was a thing countless student voice questionnaires noted about his teaching. It was his listening that made the difference.
00:07:44
Speaker
And he never really told anyone that he'd learned to listen and understood its power by watching Yao. When Yao talked with the Richmond court neighbours or to mummy or daddy, and especially to Kwame himself,
00:07:59
Speaker
The way Yao valued and was so curious about the words he heard made you want to keep opening and opening and opening.
00:08:11
Speaker
In the presence of his attention, all seemed possible and saying more felt important. Kwame dug his elbows into the desk.
00:08:23
Speaker
the sheets with assessment objectives and grade boundaries crunched. Thank you so much. Great to hear you read it. So I originally picked it because it was just this lovely little moment of like pedagogy, right, of teaching. And that like spoke to me and your concerns, right? And I was like, it's just like a nice little moment. And it and it brings in both Kwame as teacher, but also Kwame in the kind of past. And we won't get too much into that because we're close reading, but it brings in lots of ah concerns, right?
00:08:52
Speaker
But then rereading it today, i was like, oh, I think this is like Michael's way of like kind of staging something about what Kwame is doing, both for himself and for other people, which is like self-narrating as this ideal citizen. and mean There's something about Kwame in this book where like he's always so confused that other people might have a different opinion. Or like there's there's moments where he's just like, wait, what?
00:09:19
Speaker
Oh my God, what is this like lack of awareness that's going on? And the bit that kind of got me and it's like really early on. So you've got like Ahmed's day at his lap. This Kwame knew was the moment.
00:09:31
Speaker
And that little put like this comma Kwame knew was the moment. And the whole book is in this third person, but it's very... indirect discourse is very tight in Kwame's mind, right? So it's never first person, he's telling us things, but it's, there's a slight little distance there, right? Between the narrator and him, but we're mainly in his brain, which is interesting. They talk about Mrs. Dalloway in the in the same way, right? Like that the wolf is never letting us go completely into Clarissa's head.
00:09:59
Speaker
I mean, my early question is, was was this book always third person? Did you ever think about toying with a different narrative voice? No, it was always third person. i think i am scared of the first person voice, writing in the first person voice. I feel like when I experiment with it, it sounds a bit mawkish.
00:10:19
Speaker
It sounds too... The immediacy that is available to us when we use that voice, to me, often feels like complexity or subtlety gets lost. And that' that's to do with the way that I handle it. That's not that it's always like that and people who use are terrible and foolish and terrible.
00:10:37
Speaker
things with it but it's that I haven't found my way to imbue the first person voice with the kind of layers that I seem to be able to more easily access with a close third person narration ye one yeah yeah no that's interesting because here you kind of are using the third person to kind of bring us into Kwame's mind, but like, we don't always know we are, right? Like this Kwame knew was the moment.
00:11:03
Speaker
And like, that's him being like, yeah, I got him, right? I've got Ahmed. And you're kind of like, I get it. Like, it's a nice moment when you've got a student, but at the same time, there is something about his self-aggrandizing here, yeah right? Now he could walk through the gap. He had teased open, guide Ahmed forward.
00:11:19
Speaker
Kwame would have to lead with gentle footsteps. like lead with gentle footsteps. like well, you're still leading, right? Like you're still in the position of power, but he's passing this off as like gap, guide, gentle, like the alliteration is there, right?
00:11:34
Speaker
Yeah. His directions to Ahmed needed to be prefaced with quiet self-deprecations that comma somehow never undermined. And you realize that's not the narrator's language, right? That's Kwame's language. He's the one saying like quiet self-deprecations that somehow yeah That somehow is so like revealing that he's narrating himself to himself.
00:11:56
Speaker
Yeah, it's a very, and I hadn't thought about it like this, but it's quite a stagey moment actually. yeah And this is a slight sidetrack, but it's it's kind of relevant and interesting. But I was often, when I was writing, thinking about the performativity of teaching. I remember having this colleague when i yeah having a colleague when I was at a particular school that taught at years ago who talked about the staff room as being kind of off stage and then the class room, the rest of the school has been kind of on stage.
00:12:28
Speaker
And there were lots of moments in the staff room that kind of corresponded with that dichotomy where people were sort of like exhaling and sorting themselves out of the bathroom and then putting on their mask to then go out and say everything.
00:12:40
Speaker
And I think it's it's relevant to to this moment because, yeah, there's a contrivance, it iss not the the right word, but there's a real sense of constructedness about lots of those sentences, yeah particularly that word somehow.
00:12:53
Speaker
Yeah. um it's not it's It's not a kind of natural word that one might think very easily. It's very constructed. And so it's ah it's about Kwame thinking about his role as a teacher, as a kind of performance. yeah And indeed, more broadly,
00:13:08
Speaker
a lot of Kwame's presentation in the world is quite performative. And I suppose in lots of ways throughout the novel, he he does lots of versions of this where he's sort of calculating his next step. yeahp And one of the things that I like about this moment is that such attention is paid to his constructiveness. It's going to be like this, and it's going to be like this, and I've got to do it like this. And there's this sort of logic to the sentences that then is undercut quite quickly by...
00:13:39
Speaker
by how the student actually yeah responds. And that, it goes to your kind of earlier observation, that that's a kind of recurring motif in Kwame's presentation that he is so focused on, well, I've got to be like this and this is the reading of this situation, that's it, I've got a handle on it, that he doesn't really allow for the the reality of other people's experiences and readings of of the world. And then he's like, oh, ah okay, now what?
00:14:07
Speaker
um Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Now what? But I think in this early part, he is, you know, even that somehow would never undermine his ultimate control. Like, well as though he's confused about what he's doing, right? Like, like the self-deprecations that would never undermine his control. Like he knows what he's doing. He's, that somehow is like a play, right? To the, to the crowd, as you say, like he's throwing it out.
00:14:28
Speaker
But I think when you're, I don't know, when one is reading and you're reading for pleasure, like often, and like I am, right? My brain isn't always on, contrary to what people think, right? They're like can't you enjoy books? I'm like, I always enjoy books, actually.
00:14:40
Speaker
But if you slow down for two seconds, you're like, wait, something's happening. The narrator is... moving us somewhere, right? And actually, you haven't... no I didn't notice how quickly we were almost being trained by Kwame too, that without knowing that this persuasion was happening,
Use of Rhetorical Devices and Narrative Voice
00:14:59
Speaker
Ahmed would end up noting...
00:15:00
Speaker
down Kwame's sage advice. And I was like, oh, that's the tell, right? Like without knowing this persuasion was happening. Like that's you, Michael, using all these rhetorical devices, right? Using the short senses, then the long one, then the like little mini sub clauses.
00:15:15
Speaker
Without knowing it's happening, we're being led somewhere by the narrator and by the author. And I was like, oh wait, that's you. Yeah. yeah And I think i I enjoy those little kind of moments of authorial play.
00:15:29
Speaker
And, you know, there are lots of different ways of reading this passage. And one way of thinking about it is that it's it's kind of comic as well, because of some of the things that we're kind of drawing attention to. So Kwame's contrivance, his constructedness, the thing that happens just after is when Ahmed is is not really going to engage with this sort moment that Kwame's created at all.
00:15:50
Speaker
And the self-aggrandising quality that you're talking about is also kind of funny. There's a sort of thing here where we're, being invited to see some of Kwame's foibles and to see that even though he's the kind of centre of the story, he's flawed and foolish and a bit silly and in in some ways maybe be kind of lovable for his silliness, you know, but also, yeah laugh at him a little bit, I think, because of this. Yeah, yeah, 100%. And,
00:16:16
Speaker
Because we are locked in his mind, right? Through the narrative voice. And I mean, this is like the thing i always want people that maybe you haven't studied literature, like to know is that like, like, where are we seeing things from? We never get scenes outside of his consciousness, right? there we know We get no scenes where he's not present. yeah right Very, very few moments. Like everything is always, we're with him. We don't get to jump somewhere else for a while. yeah And therefore we're having to see the world through his eyes, whether we like it or not. And we have to kind of be careful about, wait, what do I think about this versus what Kwame? I think that's ah that's ah an important thing to focus on. And it's often something that I talk about a lot when I'm teaching creative writing, which is that for me, and this novel is a good example of it, often writing is ah is a really purposeful act of directing the reader's attention. Mm-hmm.
00:17:08
Speaker
You can see it in this moment because it's very much like this is you are with Kwame now. There's yeah actually another person there. There's Ahmed sitting that literally there, but you're not even going to get a whiff of what he's up to because the focus being very squarely placed on Kwame, Kwame's sense of self, his observations. And yeah, that's often how I see writing is is really thinking, okay, Where do I want to move the readers thinking now? What do I need to do to get them to look at this thing rather than this thing?
00:17:37
Speaker
And yeah, that kind of corresponds with what Kwame is up to as well in this moment as well. Yeah, quite. And like the next sentence, yes, Ahmed would hear wisdom. Ahmed would hear care and he'd eventually yes, double yes is hilarious, nod in agreement with the tasks and and leave the Data Hub with the keenness to succeed. Like, okay, Kwame is like now just like drifted into this full state of fantasy, right? Like this is the ideal pedagogic scene where like he would hear wisdom, he would hear care, right? Like
00:18:11
Speaker
um would he? yeah There's no sense of like, how do I communicate care? It's yes, Ahmed will hear it and feel it. Like he must do. yeah We're like, okay, the delusion is growing.
00:18:25
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's something... Yeah, delusion is quite a useful word for this moment. And I think there's a kind of, there's a fictive thing going on. He's sort creating this fantasy. And I suppose there are a couple of things that are interesting about that kind of fantastical mode of Kwame's thinking.
00:18:44
Speaker
One is that it's sort of like a relief for him or a release in some ways from the very real school day context that he's in, which is full of all sorts of demands that are so far away from that fantasy. So it's like, oh my god i'm going to have a moment of just kind of dreaming about what if. And I suppose also there's ah there's something about control. And Kwame, I think in the world, often doesn't feel that much like he's in control. I think he feels like there are lots of forces that kind of buffet him around.
00:19:15
Speaker
And so this is a moment where in his imagination, he can kind of control the situation. And yeah, again, as we were saying earlier, the comedy, or maybe even the pathos in some ways, comes from the fact that he can't.
00:19:29
Speaker
You know, he he can't try as he might. Reality is going to erupt into his fantasy and prove him otherwise. Yeah. And I think you do that at the level of the language, because after that that real kind of escalation of the rhetorical devices, right, the yes, yes, paragraph, new paragraph, Ahmed mumbled something full stop. You're like, oh, like we we crash immediately, down to earth, like immediately. And I think it's just funny, like even mumbled something is very like, like it's much more ordinary language than what we've had in in the previous paragraph, right? Or or at least in the in the grammar of those previous lines.
00:20:07
Speaker
yeah Yeah, totally. There's something much more, um i don't know, there's ah there's a kind of expansiveness about those previous phrases, imaginings, and the arrival of Ahmed is a much more contained thing in itself.
00:20:23
Speaker
And I think there's also something interesting about mumbling as a sort of... like a kind of incoherent form of communication or a form of communication that is hard to to to read.
00:20:36
Speaker
And then previously we've had this like sort of hyper articulate series of thoughts from Kwame and that yeah kind of contrast is quite jarring. And I think it sort of speaks to again, the sort of disconnection between Kwame and his student at that moment. Kwame sort of wants communicate or imagines communicating in this very sort of florid manner but the actual person that he's communicating with is not is not able to access that or doesn't want to access that register isn't interested in accessing that register and even like kwami sat forward a little to hear better like oh wait i have to move he's been no he's been so convinced that he's just gonna What's the phrase? like Lead Ahmed through this like idea, right? Through this scene of teaching that actually he has to he has to do something actually instead.
00:21:24
Speaker
But then he turns. It was a thing. Countless student voice questionnaires noted about his teaching. It was his listening that made the difference. You're okay, even the interruption of Ahmed's like real brute reality, even that doesn't stop him in his like thinking. But questions.
00:21:41
Speaker
Countless is his word, right? It's not the narrator's word. It's Kwame's word. So even though it's not first person narration, dear listeners, Countless is his language, right? Because he's like, oh, I've got Countless questionnaires that have told me this. It's just very funny that is it was his listening that made the difference. And you're like, okay, up are you listening though? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or are you listening with an ear to do something, like listening to respond, right? Which is the worst kind of listening. If you look at all the, you know, the hierarchies of active listening, listening to respond is like the bad one because you're not actually taking in the other, are you?
00:22:14
Speaker
Yeah. And I think there's there's something really important about that because, and again, maybe this is sort straying from the text a little bit, but I guess it's partly with the pragmatics of the situation in that he wants this to be over quite quickly. yeah He wants this to be kind of done. yeah And part of the fantasy is also of but rapid completion of this moment.
00:22:36
Speaker
And i think that's sort of what's going on in that moment where He's doing a ah very purposeful kind of listening. It's not like such thing exists, kind expansive listening.
00:22:47
Speaker
it's not It's not that, it's, I want to hear, to hear this so I can say this, and then off we go and shake my hand. and then Yeah. and it doesn Yeah, there's something quite curtailed about that, right? It's strategic. And yes yeah for for all of his self-narration as this like open, sensitive, thoughtful person that everyone loves and all the other teachers like him and the parents like him and da-da-da. But he's also like quite clueless in his own world, right? If you read the rest of the book. And I think you can get that from here, right? like No one is this forthright in self-narrating if they are actually full of self-doubt, right? Or questioning. Yeah,
00:23:22
Speaker
yeah and And what you do is you get this moment in the next line, and he never really told anyone that he had learned to listen and understood its power by watching
Flashbacks and Internal Struggles
00:23:32
Speaker
Yao. And there's like a quietness about that sentence too.
00:23:36
Speaker
And even like he had never really told anyone. We're suddenly now, we're back, we're still in his mind, but he's he's gone elsewhere, right? Poor Ahmed's not even present in any of this, right?
00:23:47
Speaker
When Yao talked with the Richmond court neighbors or to mommy or daddy and especially to Kwame himself, the way Yao valued and was so curious about the words, the sentence now kind of like unfolds, right? Like the scene of memory has taken us elsewhere. So much of the language has changed. The grammar has changed. He made you want to keep opening and opening and opening.
00:24:09
Speaker
So we've got repetition, we've got that tripling. Again, it's still a rhetorical device, but like it feels ah less structured, right? But that opening, like the sentence opens in the way that the memory does.
00:24:21
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And I think I really wanted with this bit, this kind of mini flashback or analepsis to kind of make it feel very different from yeah the yeah pragmatic Kwame that we've got in the moment who kind of wants get this done, that's sort of having his flight fantasy. I really wanted that to be a very marked distinction and and a sense that Kwame's sort of losing himself in the in the memory in a way that is uncomfortable for him.
00:24:49
Speaker
And that opening and opening and opening, i think there's something kind of lovely about that. I think Kwame's remembering that kind of fondly, but also there's a bit of a sense of a loss of control. The sentence could go on and on and on and on.
00:25:03
Speaker
me as the novel kind of expresses more fully is quite anxious and actually it happens in this moment is quite anxious about that idea of losing himself in the memory of Yao too much so afterwards we get this kind of moment where he comes back to the present and that's to very physically expressed by the sort digging his elbows into the table and It's just really interesting what you kind of notice when you look at these sort of tiny passages in more detail. But the the fact that he digs his elbows into the table and the thing that gets crunched up by the action is grade boundaries and assessment objectives. So on the one hand, that's sort of about, again, the actuality of teaching. Obviously, if he's there with a student and they're trying to get the student's essay up to a certain grade whatever, they'd need to have the criteria in front of them.
00:25:47
Speaker
But the fact, but those bits of paper could be anything would been bits of paper. But the fact that it's a document that is about conformity and restriction and a sort of outside observer's perspective on your performance.
00:26:01
Speaker
And that is the thing that he sort so of wrestles against, feels quite telling actually. So, yeah. where So when you say you're noticing this, as in like, you were you conscious of this as you were writing? I think...
00:26:13
Speaker
I don't think I was about the the assessment objectives thing. I think I was just focused on, yeah, I could so see it the scene in my mind's eye and I'd be like, well, if I was there, what stuff would I have with me? I'd have the i'd have the mask scheme.
00:26:25
Speaker
And, then you know, it's, yeah, it's illustrative of, I guess, in one sense, all the stuff that Ahmed has to think about. got some littleter Little all bits of apparatus around him. But yeah, now talking about it more and thinking about it more, those assessment objectives and criteria and grade boundaries and whatever are pertinent, symbolically pertinent for Kwame as a person, and as much as they are really part of Ahmed's experience as well. The kind of unfolding sentence, like when Yao, the way Yao, in the presence of his attention, like we don't get Yao in that sentence, right? It's just like his, like the him, right?
00:27:01
Speaker
Which is interesting. All seemed possible and saying more felt important. but like all seemed possible that kind of like opening of those like sounds and saying more felt important. That's like a really interesting phrase, right? I think I read wrongly the first time I was like reading it aloud, but like that even that Yao is like demanding that that he say more, right? That Yao, like there's something about his presence that means that people should express more which is funny because in this scene, like, I don't know, Kwame's not really expressing much, right? It's all internal. It's all like psychically guiding this student through it, right? Like I'm doing it in this magical way.
00:27:38
Speaker
yeah yeah he's not Like he never really told anyone that this was the thing that taught him to listen well. So he's talking about like expression, but actually he's internalized a weird message about that, right? That you don't actually know. Yeah, yeah that's really interesting. And I think, you know, so much of the thinking about voices and Kwame does talk a lot. There is a lot of dialogues of direct speech from Kwame, but actually a lot of Kwame's voice that we encounter is is internal.
00:28:05
Speaker
Yeah. And this is a ah passage where, I don't know, you're sort of got you get this sense that Yao was someone who encouraged Kwame to kind of speak up more. But actually, as a grown up person, i don't know if Kwame does that the whole time. And lots of the novel is about him sort of not being able to say the things that he probably ought to say or might benefit from saying.
00:28:30
Speaker
Yeah, and I think there's something also about this the kind of, is vagueness the right word, or kind of deliberate imprecision of the all seen possible, that kind of thing, i think speaks to what it is that younger Kwame might have said about himself, which is that, you know, oh, i' I'm a little gay boy. Yeah. And that being something that he might not want to have given language to because of all the kind of feasible fears he that might have about expressing that. So there's something about kind of head the hedging quality of the language.
00:29:01
Speaker
What is it that Yao might have drawn out of him? That has to do with that sense of repressed repressed expression. Yeah. And i don't know, this is like a little side point, but the reference to mummy or daddy, right? I have to zoom out a tiny bit for this, but the the novel is...
00:29:17
Speaker
split into two parts and you get these alternating chapters of like the present day and then Kwame as a child. And the language of mummy and daddy is like the language of the flashback parts, right? What the novel does is that like the flashback parts are kind of told from childhood Kwame's perspective. Although I don't know, I think you play with that a little bit. There's some moments where you're like, wait, where do you know that as a child? But anyway, there's like, there's a little back and forth, right? Of this blurring between like where are placed?
00:29:43
Speaker
And I think it's interesting that he continues to call the mummy or daddy here, as though like even in the memory, he's like completely shot back to that part of the world. Right. And like, i don't know, the mummy and daddy gives it gives away quite quickly how easy it is for him to like travel back to that moment.
00:29:59
Speaker
How wholesale he is wrenched from the present backwards. Yeah. yeah and And also, I guess. the way this little bit is structured so that he kind of falls into the past and then comes back into the present quite quickly.
00:30:13
Speaker
I think it does, yeah, it speaks to what I think of as a really important and wider concern in the novel, which is about how close and how far apart are the child Kwame and grown-up Kwame, because i think as a grown-up, some of his misunderstandings, some of his imaginings, some of his fear actually is quite similar to the stuff that he was dealing with as a child. yeah And in some ways, there's there's something comic about that.
00:30:43
Speaker
And again, in some ways, there's something sad about that. like what What is it that has... paralysed him has kind of trapped him in this childhood state, um even though so much of him seems grown up and all the rest of it, and the world is demanding that he be a grown up person.
00:30:58
Speaker
What is it that's kept him in lots of senses as this vulnerable, frightened, uncertain 10 year old? um And he he can't, there are quite a few moments like this where the past sort of erupts into his life. And like, oh my God, here it is in front of me. It's playing out in front of my eyes. Oh, right now i've got to do the washing.
00:31:16
Speaker
And there's, yeah, there's something about his inability to kind of free himself from that past, which I i found really interesting to play with structurally. Yeah, the the the novel is just demonstrating how the past and the present are not remotely far away from each other. that You have to keep going back and forth between them, right? It's not, you know, you can imagine the novel structured differently where you have like ah ah a swathe of like the present, then we go back and we see a whole kind of emerging past and then yeah we might come back, right? like There's loads of novels that do that. But instead, this constant shuttling back and forth, you kind of get that shuttling here too, with that's of like self, other, interior, exterior, yeah past, present, and so on and so on.
00:31:55
Speaker
Absolutely. And actually, like it's it's it's interesting because when I was drafting the novel and thinking about how is this sort of past narrative and the present narrative going to work, how are they going to work together? was really hard and I got myself to quite tangle various points. At one point I thought, well, maybe it would be easier. i thought it would be easier to have, okay, the first half of the novel will be set in 1997 and the second half set in 2018. And then I thought about what the reading experience of that would be like and what the kind of emotional experience of that would be like in terms of Kwame's character.
00:32:31
Speaker
And I thought there was so much more to be said by having sort of shuttling things, you say, moving between the two. It says so much more about Kwame as ah as a grown-up person who has this sort of, kind of so in some ways, burdensome legacy that he can't quite manage.
00:32:46
Speaker
I think if you had in those two neat sections of 2019,
00:32:51
Speaker
97, then 2018, there's almost a sort of sense of neatness and kind of discreteness about, okay, well, 1997 happened and then that's that. But I think by having that sort of shuttling thing, it it shows how alive the past is.
00:33:06
Speaker
And also, I think there's something interesting in that Kwame's parents, sort of think about how to talk about this without revealing too much, but something that happened in the past in Kwame's childhood in the 1997 bits of the novel that Kwame's parents don't really want to talk about anymore. And he talks about the fact that they don't talk about it. So for them, the past is this thing that they've sort of sealed off and parceled off.
00:33:30
Speaker
By contrast for him, it's something that is still very kind of there and sort of present for him. And you get that sense, I think, with the sort of 1997, 2018, 1997, 2018 structure. And in moments like this as well, where you have these little flashbacks within a paragraph. Yeah, that actually the past is like really formative in that way. And is is shaping how he sees what happens now. yeah And I think that's just like, you can find so many of those moments. It's really nice that that's in this little extract. yeah I mean, that might be a nice way to turn because you just talked about the difficulty of writing and figuring out the structure.
Writing Routine and Process
00:34:06
Speaker
This part of the episode is where I ask, like, what is your writing practice? Do you have one? What does it look like? What is the setup? Are you doing it by hand? All those kinds of things. Like, what you what can you tell us? Or what do you want to tell us?
00:34:19
Speaker
I can tell you loads. It's all quite scattered. um So I wish that I was one of those writers who does that kind of discipline, slightly mised militant thing of waking up at the same time every day and, you know, working for four hours and then going for a jog and then coming back and doing two hours. But I don't really write like that for a couple of reasons. One is that I have other jobs.
00:34:44
Speaker
So, you know, I need to fit in teaching or writing reviews or, mentoring around writing. yeah So that requires a bit of kind of creativity in terms of finding moments where I can sort of steal an hour or so to to work on whatever it is I'm working on that particular time. So I don't have a consistent routine, but when I have writing time, whenever it happens, the vibe is this. So usually I write by hand. So the first draft is written by hand in chunks.
00:35:13
Speaker
So At the moment, I'm working in the first draft. And what I'll do is I've got some very nice notebooks that are sort stupidly expensive. They're like one of my few extravagances.
00:35:24
Speaker
But I like the fact that they make writing feel like this special, precious thing. So I've got these nice notebooks and I write by hand and I'll write a sort of so a chunk. I'm really apprehensive about the word scene. Maybe we'll talk about that later as well.
00:35:37
Speaker
I'll write a chunk by hand. um So in this little bit, the character is going to get from a to B or they're going to talk about X. And once I've got the end of that all written by hand, I will then type that up.
00:35:49
Speaker
And when when I talk to people about this, I always say that that typing up is the first bit of editing that I do, because I'm not just kind of transcribing what I've written by hand in a sort of blind way. It's like, oh, I wrote that down, so I'm just going to type it up. there are little cuts where I'll realize that, oh, actually, that doesn't make sense. or I'll move things around or that's repetitive whatever. So a bit of editing happens. And something that I'm doing with this third novel that i'm working on, which I haven't done before, is that as I'm typing up, so i'm doing it in a Google Doc, I'm using the comments function in a way that I genuinely have not done before, where i kind of think, OK, this is an interesting thing, but you haven't quite expressed it well enough yet. Or it's sort of links with something that you saw before.
00:36:30
Speaker
Let's think about that later. And I'm sort smiling to myself because sometimes the tone of that, of those comments, it's a bit like I'm talking to a student or or so or some person that isn't me. So sometimes I'll write things like, less of this comma, please. It's like, why am I saying please to myself like that? really, or we can do better than this.
00:36:51
Speaker
odd It's a very odd voice that I use. Anyway, so that's that's what happens. I do a bit of typing up and then I'll go back to the notebook and do some more writing and then I'll type it up. And eventually i will get to a point where that whole first draft is typed up.
00:37:05
Speaker
And what I will do with this draft, with this novel, is that i will I imagine I'll try and go through all of those comments and sort of deal with them all. Then print out the whole draft and then edit it by hand with red pen, very teacherly. And go through it and make changes on screen and then print out again. And then at that stage, i think I'll start trying to make...
00:37:28
Speaker
some bigger structural changes and I'm sort rolling my eyes a bit because that bit is kind of horrendous. yeah You kind of realise, okay, the first 40,000 words are completely useless. So I know I spent six months working on that, but they gotta go.
00:37:42
Speaker
And then you have to do all of the rearranging to account for the fact that that has disappeared. And then after that structural edit process, I will send it to my agent.
00:37:54
Speaker
And then that's a whole other thing, which I can talk about or not, but that's, yeah, but there's a whole other process that goes on there. Yeah, that's a whole other world. ah But no, it's like really interesting that bit. I mean, I'm really interested in the the nice notebooks, but I've got a more specific question. Like what is the pet wp pen?
00:38:09
Speaker
I really to what pen you buy. Because if you if you care about the book, you probably care about the pen. question It's a great question. And I feel ashamed that I imbue objects with so much power, but in this case I do. So it's a Pilot V7 pen and I usually go for a dark blue. They've got a whole range of colors. They've a purple one, a green one, a red one. The purple one's really nice, but I go for a blue.
00:38:35
Speaker
And unfortunately, if I don't have one of those pens around, and there are other pens available in front of me, got a whole pot full of like all sorts of bright pens. i do it is an excuse for me to that fuss around procrastinate. yeah It might be a reason to sort of not start writing that morning. to later i I really like this particular kind of pen. Look, yeah it makes a difference. Like, if you do writing for a living, it's got to be a nice pen. Okay, now those are really useful to know.
00:39:05
Speaker
Do you have an early memory of when you first started writing? Like, could you pinpoint when you were like, this is a thing? Yeah, i i do. um so I went to a really brilliant primary school, state school, primary school in Fulham in the 90s.
00:39:21
Speaker
And i had really fantastic, like really creative teachers who would do things like for a whole morning, we would just do writing. We're just going to write for three hours. i'm going to put on some classical music and you can just write, make up some shit. It feels like, I don't teach in primary schools and haven't, but It feels like that kind of thing would just not be allowed.
00:39:45
Speaker
um And there was a lot of freedom to to do that kind of thing. Okay, this morning, we're just going to pretend that we're Victorians for 45 minutes dress bonnets. It was great. I had a great time. And in one of these like quite extended creative writing periods or classes, we were told, just yeah write a story about a journey, I think it was.
00:40:05
Speaker
And i wrote a story about three teddy bears. I think I was about eight. I wrote a story about three teddy bears who formed this band, who wanted to represent the yeah UK at the Eurovision Song Contest. And they got a place and they traveled to the Eurovision Song Contest and they won.
00:40:22
Speaker
And my story ended up being like a lot longer than anyone else's in the classes. And I remember that we all put our work on display and everyone else's was sort of like this long and mine kind of went on and on and on and on. And there was all of this like extraneous detail that did not need to be there. But I was having a really good time um inventing this world of teddy bears against the Eurovision Song Contest. which I was obsessed with as a child and still am to a certain extent now. And i think I think the things that I remember about this experience of writing this silly story, one was the sense of just, I can keep going. i can just keep going on and on. There's so much more to pull out of this scenario about these teddy bears.
00:41:05
Speaker
And also the the other thing, which is is very telling, i think, is that I was delighted by how much my teacher liked it. So when I finished the story and and presented it to my teacher, like, this is wonderful. you put this Let's put this on the wall. That feeling of I made something, it was well-received, it produced a response, it produced emotional response in someone.
00:41:31
Speaker
I found that deeply thrilling and that sense of like, oh, I can create something that is going to produce a response in someone else, I think was very propulsive for me in terms of like making me want to write more and more and more stuff.
00:41:47
Speaker
And the reasons for me writing now are different, more complicated, layered, et cetera. But I think there's still something of that. There's something that I find quite magical in the business of oh, I can kind of put some words down on the page and it's to make someone feel something.
Advice on Writing Flexibility
00:42:05
Speaker
it' but It's pretty big, but that's big. Yeah, you're not the first person to have said this on the show, that that early experience of like, wow, someone like read it, they wanted it, they wanted more. One of the other guests was talking about like they would they were writing like a serialised story at school, right? And like each week the other people were like, we need more.
00:42:24
Speaker
And that sudden demand of like the story produces something. like has like the Language has an effect. Like that's the thing that we all want, right? Are there any um creative writing exercises that you do with either, you know, in school or or else elsewhere that you would recommend to to listeners they could try? I don't know if this is a specific exercise. It isn't actually, but it's it's a conversation that I'm having with lots of my writing students at the moment that seems to be quite helpful for lots of them.
00:42:54
Speaker
And it's the idea of kind of holding your ideas lightly. And I'll sort of expand on what I mean by that. So I think often, um especially when, and understandably when writers are at the beginning of their writing journeys, or if they're at the beginning of a writing project, there's often the tendency to kind of hold on to what the novel is about, what the characters are going to do, what the purpose of this project is very firmly. It has to be like this. I've got this plan. It's got to be like this. And as I say, I completely understand that intensity and that that sort of tenacity. But I think if you can sort of be a bit more flexible.
00:43:35
Speaker
okay so this is a novel that is set in 19th century Ghana. And my sort of feeling is that it's going to be about a carpenter and it's going to be about his navigations through Ghanaian society as a carpenter at that time.
00:43:48
Speaker
I think that's what it's going to be about. But if you have an openness to other things coming up as you write, I wrote this chapter that I thought was going to be about him going to the forest to chop down a tree to get the wood. And I suddenly started thinking, I want to write about the tree's experience.
00:44:04
Speaker
If you're so rigidly focused on the carpenter, you might forget or might not look at the fact that this talking tree... has got some really interesting things to say about the ecological situation of Ghana then and now or whatever it might be. So kind of being open to what what the writing process might produce and not being frightened of the unexpected things and allowing yourself to follow those unexpected things, even if it feels inconvenient and time-consuming.
00:44:34
Speaker
Oh my God, if I write the stuff about the tree, then I'm not going to be able to finish this chapter by the end of the week, like I said I would. but Just follow those things. Don't be so um bound by, i said it was going to be like this.
00:44:47
Speaker
Especially in the first draft, which I think is the place where you just get to throw it all in, have a good time, mess around, see what happens, be incoherent.
00:45:00
Speaker
You will find patterns later on, but just like do a lot of weird shit when you're doing the first draft. And that doing the weird shit, I don't think you can necessarily do if you're so focused on it being a particular way. So holding things lightly. Yeah.
00:45:14
Speaker
No, that's amazing advice. Not a specific exc exercise, but an approach. Super useful. Super useful. Thank you. Okay.
Book Recommendation
00:45:22
Speaker
The last question I ask everyone is like, what books are you recommending? Old, new, things yet to come out. What are you suggesting? So I like this question because...
00:45:32
Speaker
I work in a bookshop. I love recommending books. I do it a lot of the time. It's my bread and butter. And I am recommending at the moment a couple of things very vociferously. Thing number one is Enter Ghost by Isabella Hamad, which...
00:45:48
Speaker
it's it's It's funny how kind of books come into your life. So obviously, I guess, was it last year? Maybe the year before was when it was kind of on lots of prizes and and it was very much in the kind of prize circuit consciousness. And so I was aware of it then, but for whatever reason, I didn't actually sort of use that awareness to go and get a copy and read it.
00:46:10
Speaker
And then earlier this year, a very close friend of mine who is an English teacher and also a writer as well, sent me this like very breathless voice note, just sort saying like you have to read this book. It's one of the best things that I've read this year.
00:46:25
Speaker
um i really want to talk to you about it. And that, I just, I love that as part of a recommendation, not because I'm a narcissist, they want to talk but because I, obviously I really like talking about books. yeah So kind of prospect of a conversation about a particular novel and like, yeah, okay, let's, let's do that.
00:46:43
Speaker
So on that recommendation, I sought it out and read quite quickly, actually, because I was just so drawn into this, that quite strange and strange in all sorts of ways.
00:46:58
Speaker
Strange because... it's a novel about a British-Palestinian actress in her mid to late 30s who has family in the West Bank...
00:47:12
Speaker
now has family in Haifa um and used to go to Haifa a lot as a child, but ah stopped going there for a number of years. And the novel follows her as she comes out of a very complicated breakup.
00:47:25
Speaker
She goes for a summer to go and visit her sister, who's still out there. And while she's there, she is drawn into a production of Hamlet that's being put on.
00:47:37
Speaker
And through the putting on of that play, Sonia, the actress, central character, discovers lots of things about herself. We discover lots of things about her past, her relationship with her family, her relationship with that part of the world, her relationship with her sister, her relationship with her sexuality.
00:47:57
Speaker
And it's it's it's all done so, so skillfully. that It's extraordinary. And that's a word that is often bandied around, but i really mean in relation novel. It's extraordinary that it's someone's second novel. I think the the ways in which it kind of anticipates some of the pitfalls that it could fall into. So, for example, the like obvious ways that one might try to map some of the themes of Hamlet onto the political kind the context of Israel-Palestine. is like kind of brushed aside quite quickly in one of the most like innovative ways I've seen done in a novel. it's really clever. The ending of the novel, and I i won't obviously say too much about it because it's spoiled or whatever, but I had come out of a run of reading quite a few novels recently where was just like, I'm just really frustrated with endings not...
00:48:47
Speaker
doing what you want an ending to do. And the ending of this novel is is is very, very brilliant. It's very brilliant and it's exactly as it should end. This is exactly the way this novel should end. It's it's a really fantastic, beautifully, interestingly structured novel um that did sort of generate a really interesting conversation between me and my friend. And the last thing I'll say about it, but it was part of the conversation that we had actually, is that one of the things we were talking about was a kind of sense of disorientation that I felt whilst I was reading the novel. So there's a lot of stuff about where exactly are the characters? They're having to go to through this checkpoint, but where are they now? And what does where they are exactly mean for different characters who might be in the same car crossing a ah boundary or whatever? And we, my friend and I were talking about maps and I was saying that, oh, you know, at one point I thought it would be interesting if there were was a map or maps at the front of the book, which is quite a commonplace sort of feature ah the beginning of a novel that is to do with place and...
00:49:53
Speaker
and so on. But then my friends and i were talking about, well, what map would it be? Whose map would it be? And those questions are like, that's at the heart of this of the novel. It's is's so good. that It's this such a fantastic novel.
00:50:08
Speaker
Yeah, I fully agree. And her nonfiction book, you can go get that as well, listeners, called Recognizing the Stranger. i think that's what it's called. Yeah. Which is a brilliant lecture she gave on narrative, but also it's about history and politics. And somehow she uses narrative as a way of explaining so much. Mm-mm. about Palestine, but also about just like the nature of like how we imagine the other. it is staggeringly good. Like, and that's really short. Like, again, i don't know how she did that. I think it's even like somehow it's even better than a novel. I don't know how, but it's just like a lecture she gives, right? But it's so precise and astounding. So definitely go get those things. That is a great recommendation. Thank you.
00:50:47
Speaker
Well, that's a perfect place to end. Thank you so much, Michael, for your time. I really appreciate it. Pleasure. Thank you so much for asking me to come and talk. I've really enjoyed myself. Thank you for listening to this episode.
00:51:00
Speaker
Please subscribe if you haven't already, leave the review and share with people you know. You can also follow the show and me on Instagram at Books Up Close and on YouTube. And if you can, please do fill out the feedback form linked in the show notes. It's really helpful to us.
00:51:17
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.