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Tuesday, 8 September 2009

Meet at the Gate

So, I was interviewed recently by the lovely Fflur Dafydd for Canongate's 'Meet at the Gate' series of authors interviewing authors. You can read the original here:

www.meetatthegate.com

Or read the transcript below. News of new releases and events coming soon.

FD: Let's start perhaps with the obvious question. You were the inaugural winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize, the biggest financial prize in the world for a single work (£60,000); a prize only open to writers under 30. When the announcement was made, it was evident you weren't expecting it at all! Am I right in saying that this prize changed the course of your writing career? Tell us about some of the exciting things that have happened to you since then.

RT: I certainly wasn't expecting it. Being Welsh, and therefore paranoid and extraordinarily self-doubting, I was sure I was the token Welsh contender, there only because the Dylan Thomas Prize was based in Wales. That alone would have been enough to change my career. For the first time ever my work was being reviewed in The Times and The Independent, and being read for the first time, I'm quite sure, on the other side of the Severn Bridge. Actually winning it was completely bizarre. Accepting the title came with a residency at the University of Texas in Austin. Sitting down and discussing my work, until that point obviously all set in Wales, with students who grew up in the USA, but who identified with it, was a totally exhilarating experience. It took a lot of that Welsh paranoia away and gave me the confidence to start believing in myself simply as a 'writer' rather than a 'Welsh writer'. I spent a month in the States at that time and married my fiancé in Vegas, so it changed my personal life too.

FD: Another surprise perhaps was the fact that your book, Fresh Apples, which is a short story collection, managed to see off stiff competition from several novels. Do you think that in many ways the short story collection allows the writers to show the breadth and depth of their vision, and perhaps to show their versatility, even more so than a novel?

RT: Well a novel and a short-story are two very different art forms. I always like to say that a novel is a bonfire whereas a short story is a firework. For me, it takes at least two years to write a novel so it's a little like dragging bits of wood and debris from here there and everywhere and building it into a structure that will burn for quite some time in order to keep your reader interested, and obviously that takes an amount of patience and effort. A short story however is a short, sharp, shock. It's quick and you can write it quickly but it has to be brilliant from beginning to end or you'll lose your reader immediately. If the Catherine Wheel doesn't light first time, everyone looks away. In terms of presenting your abilities, a whole collection of fireworks is much more effective than one long bonfire, because you're presenting a substantial range of characters and scenarios, themes, ideas and settings. The second winner of the prize was a short story collection too, The Boat by Nam Le, so I guess that sort of proves the theory, but short stories shouldn't just be seen as a way for young people to communicate their talent. I think short story writing is a real skill and I can't wait to get started on a new collection now that I'm over 30 and hopefully won't be constantly referred to as a 'young writer' any more.

FD: I use your short stories a lot in my creative writing classes at Swansea University, and these are the kinds of stories that make undergraduates wake up from their morning coma and actually listen. I think one of the reasons for this is because of the unique combination of the dark subject matter and the startling, lively nature of the language in your stories, which often pulsates on the page and gives us arrestingly original descriptions. Is this an intentional contrast in your work; the often despondent nature of your characters versus the vibrant nature of the language that surrounds them?

RT: I was reading one of the stories to a group of disadvantaged sixteen-year-olds at Bridgend College very recently and as soon as I finished it, one of the girls at the back sat up and said, 'Oh my God! I thought some boring old bitch was going to come in here and go on and on about something totally shit, but I really liked that.' It's pretty much the best review I've ever had because to impress someone who doesn't ordinarily read literature is much more satisfying than impressing someone who does. Another girl asked me if I was rich and when I told her about The Dylan Thomas Prize purse, she said, 'I don't want to be a footballer's wife anymore. I want to be a writer.' I thought she was joking but as I was leaving the lecturer told me that the girl spends her evenings hanging around Ninian Park football ground. The contrast between the dark subject matter and the bright language isn't intentional at all. It's a very naive feature of my work, or perhaps I should say organic. The characters and plots are amalgamations of people and things I knew growing up in the Rhondda Valley. I was dragged up, pretty much, and was dirt poor, and knew all about desperation in every sense of the word, so that was my life experience and that's what I draw on for inspiration, but I've always loved words and reading and song lyrics, so at an early age I learned to become very inventive with language and learned to use it evocatively. It's a sort of happy accident that I naturally manage to blend those two facets together.

FD: You recently visited the wonderful European Short Story Festival in Croatia. Can you tell us a little about your experiences there? How important do you think it is to have such a festival, and what did you as a writer gain from it?

RT: The Croatian short story festival was the third and best short story festival I've attended. I also previously did The Frank O'Connor Festival in Cork, and the Wroclaw Festival in Poland. Being a writer I spend a lot of time sitting in front of a keyboard and thrashing ideas around in my own head, so sometimes just popping into the local for a drink can be a bit of a culture shock. It's always wonderful to spend time with other writers, especially writers from other countries and cultures and as a writer it's always important to travel to other countries, and so doing both at the same time is always good for the soul. I discovered an Israeli writer called Alex Epstein who has yet to be published in English, but whose short stories are utterly sublime, and made me feel privileged to be sitting in the audience listening. It's so inspiring. Unfortunately for me, I feel like I've read the stories in Fresh Apples to death which is why I'm so keen to start work on a second collection.

FD: Do you feel that each published work contributes something to your technique when writing the next? Your next published work will be a novel. Did Fresh Apples or Dial M for Merthyr (your non-fiction) teach you anything about writing in the meantime, which you then passed on to your latest novel?

RT: Each piece of work published or otherwise absolutely contributes to my technique when I sit down to write the next. Fresh Apples in particular taught me a lot about story writing. My first novel In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl was to a large extent autobiographical so there was no plot or planning involved, it was just a matter of extending or limiting the truth. To a certain degree, all fiction is like that; I sometimes say that writing is editing the truth. But the short stories taught me to manipulate themes, work with metaphors, and create completely fictional characters by fusing aspects of many different people together. I experimented for the first time with different ages and sexes so I learned to use a variety of voices which I realise now is essential for a writer of fiction, but that was a big stumbling block for me between the publication of the first and second book. Like actors who can't watch themselves on screen, I find it very difficult to read my first novel because there are so many improvements I could make now. Every book is a learning curve and Fresh Apples was a steep one. That's what makes writing exciting. You are constantly trying to better yourself.

FD: Can you tell us a little bit about the content of your next novel Sixteen Shades of Crazy? Does it connect to your other works? Do you feel that this is an important milestone in your journey as a writer?

RT: Sixteen Shades of Crazy is a novel about an English drug-dealer who arrives in a small Welsh village amidst a six month drug drought. To the young people in this very insular and downtrodden area, he is the epitome of exoticism. He is also a shameless womaniser who quickly sets about seducing the women of the village. The story is told in three voices, those of three young women who over the course of a year fall in love with him, and whose lives are changed irrevocably because of him. The story obviously involves narcotics, which connects with many of my short stories, in fact the novel is based very loosely on one of my short stories, but it is mostly a cautionary tale about the dangers of obsession and the confines of community. It is definitely an important milestone in my career because it's my first proper full length work of fiction. It's been five years in the making because I had to keep putting it down to work on other things, the commission to write Dial M for Merthyr for example, so I'll be very happy to see it finally published in May next year. It's also a big two fingers in the face of one particular London agent, who after reading the plot summary seven years ago, told me to put it in a drawer and forget about it.

FD: Your new publisher for this novel is Blue Door, a new imprint of Harper Collins. As Welsh writers I think we always feel a little bit displaced or disorientated when our readership expands or when a bigger publisher takes an interest in us! Has this been your experience in moving from a smaller publisher to a much bigger one? And do you feel that writing about Wales to a global audience is important? Do you see yourself as carrying any cultural responsibility as a Welsh writer, or is the 'Welsh writer' tag sometimes a burden?

RT: Luckily much of my work has already been translated and In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl and Fresh Apples were particularly successful in Australia and New Zealand, so after reading a few rave reviews in The Sydney Herald, (I think the publishers hid the bad ones), moving from an independent publisher to a major doesn't seem to be the huge leap it would have been otherwise. I'm really excited about it because as a writer I think it's natural to want to reach the biggest audience possible. Blue Door is a small imprint. It only publishes twelve titles a year and I have a very good relationship with my publisher. Yet it has the full marketing power of HarperCollins behind it, so it is the best of both worlds. There's no guarantee that the book will be successful. Obviously the print run is enormous compared to what I'm used to but I'm looking forward to giving it a shot. What is very strange is having Leonard Cohen and Prince Charles as label mates. I couldn't have dreamt that one up. Wales as a nation is unfortunately quite inward-looking, which makes us very bad at presenting our talents to the outside world, which is a terrible shame, so I do think writing about Wales to a global audience is enormously important. While I've always tried to give my writing a proper sense of place, I've always been very careful not to alienate non-Welsh readers. Scottish and Irish writers are able to garner a global audience so why can't we? The village in Sixteen Shades of Crazy for example, could be a village anywhere in the world. The human condition always transcends nationality, so I do find the 'Welsh writer' tag a burden. All tags are burdens to writers. I think my responsibility as a writer lies in exploring as many different cultures as possible, rather than limiting my horizons. When you live in Wales there is a tendency to forget that it's a very small country. When you live in the UK there is a tendency to forget that it's a very small island.

FD: You've achieved quite a lot in a short time as a writer. Do you have books inside you that you're perhaps not ready to write yet, but would like to have a go at in the future?

RT: Of course I have many ideas in my head and I'm just waiting for them to trickle out. I'd prefer to call them ideas because they may well become plays or poems. I've already done some preliminary work on my next novel which is set in America. It's a love story between and told by an unlikely couple; a former prostitute from North Carolina and a young Jewish man from a Hasidic community in Brooklyn, New York. I know that on paper it sounds as though I'm just trying to write the most controversial novel imaginable but it's actually a very tender tale about love being able to conquer the tribulations caused by dysfunctional upbringings. Obviously, having spent most of my life in Wales, my knowledge about Hasidic communities, and prostitution for that matter, is very limited so I'm off to New York next year to do a substantial amount of research. Since studying Irish history and politics at Limerick University I've always wanted to write something about the Troubles, probably a novel and not politically charged in any way, just an account of how it effected and continues to effect the average family in Northern Ireland. And obviously being Welsh, and of Cornish descent, my history is steeped in mining, so at some point I'd like to write the antidote to 'How Green Is My Valley;' all very big ideas that will take decades probably to implement. So please don't expect too much, too soon.

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