Rachel Trezise

Lemon Meringue Pie

2008-09-02T17:10:00.017+01:00

At 2:15pm on Wednesday 3rd September, you'll be able to listen to my play 'Lemon Meringue Pie'. Tune to BBC Radio 4 (94.3 FM) or listen online:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4

(You'll be able to listen online for up to seven days afterwards).

Rachel Trezise's play is set in a Welsh valley. Katie Davies is 16 and in love, or possibly lust. Her mother would have a fit if she found out the identity of her suitor, but Mrs Davies has a secret all of her own. Here's what the Observer had to say when they made it Radio Choice: 'a painfully convincing story of accidental pregnancy with Welsh teenager Katie taking multiple tests in the naive belief that the first one was wrong because it was cheap. Dovetailed with Katie's trauma is that of her mother, who in her own quiet way is just as desperate.' (Stephanie Billen)

Katie ...... Stephanie Parker
Ryan ...... Liam Harries
Bronwen Davies ...... Sara McGaughey
Tudor Davies ...... Morgan Hopkin
Callum ...... Michael Aubin
Luke ...... Matthew Aubrey
Schoolteacher ...... Rhys Jennings
Hospital Receptionist ...... Megan Roberts
Art Teacher ...... Elin Phillips
Nurse/Receptionist ...... Amy Morgan

Directed by Kate McAll.

Jack on Radio 4

2008-07-09T10:58:00.003+01:00

One of my short stories, 'Jack,' based on the original 'I Sing of A Maiden' monologues will be broadcast on Radio 4 at 3.30pm on Monday, July 14th, read by Pobol y Cwm actress Shelley Rees.

The story is part of a series entitled 'Urban Welsh' that runs until July 18th. Writers include Bridget Keehan and Tristan Hughes. Actors include Ruth Jones and Matthew Rhys. The producer is Kate McAll who is also producing my forthcoming full length play 'The Lemon Meringue.'

The Eagerly Awaited Novel

2008-06-27T20:03:00.004+01:00

Finally I'm pleased to announce that I have signed to Harper Collins, and my novel in progress which goes under the working title of 'Sixteen Shades of Crazy' will be published in Spring 2010. The book is the first signing to a brand new commercial literary imprint, Blue Door, created by former Transworld supremo Patrick Janson-Smith. (I like to think of it as the literary equivalent of the Stereophonics signing to Richard Branson's V2).

From the Bookseller: 'Sixteen Shades of Crazy by Dylan Thomas prize winner Rachel Trezise, will be published in early 2010. Blue Door paid a five-figure sum to Broo Doherty at Wade & Doherty for UK and Commonwealth rights. Janson-Smith said that the 'tremendously witty' book would examine the underbelly of society in Cardiff. 'This will do for Cardiff what Trainspotting did for Edinburgh,' he said. 'There will be a bit of drugs, a bit of sex and a bit of drinking?good underbelly stuff.'

Stuff that's going down - spring 2008

2008-03-24T11:11:00.006Z

I say spring, what I mean is some kind of climate-change fuelled ice-age. Anyway, it being Easter Monday, and me having nothing better to do, I thought I'd tell you a little bit about what has and will be happening over the next couple of months.

If you haven't already got hold of the Spring 2008 edition of the New Welsh Review (No.79), go and get it now. Aside from some of the beautiful photographs by Maciej Dakowicz and excerpts of work (including a bit of Tristan Hughes' forthcoming novel and Charlotte Greig's memoir) it's got me interviewing Patrick Jones, and a lovely exploration by Sarah Morse into music in new writing from Wales, cannily titled 'She Sings of a(n Iron) Maiden.' Some of the books she concentrates on include Dial M for Merthyr, Fresh Apples and Clare Potter's 'Spilling Histories.' www.thenewwelshreview.com

My first novel 'In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl' is currently being translated into Danish by the excellent Forlaget Aronsen who published Aeblesmag (Fresh Apples) last year. It's also about to be published by Text Publishing in Australia and New Zealand, who also did a thoroughly fantastic job with their version of Fresh Apples last year.
www.forlagetaronsen.dk
www.textpublishing.com.au

At the end of May 'The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth,' will be published by Serpent's Tail. Edited by Peter Wild, who also masterminded last year's brilliant 'Perveted by Language: Fiction inspired by The Fall,' it includes shorts by Emily Maguire, Kevin Sampsell, Matt Thorne, and me, and you can pre-order it now from Amazon.

'A ghost makes a friend. Ulla Shooks is testifying, ladies and gentlemen, countering the wicked with the godly. The powers-that-be are trying to kick in Nikki's door as she, like, struggles against the shackles of conformity? Melissa gets high and dreams of an oblivion that won't make the E! Channel news. Patty Hearst is watching the apocalypse on TV. All this and more is waiting for you in The Empty Page: Fiction inspired by Sonic Youth.'

Finally, it's going to give me great pleasure to take a break from my play and novel writing duties to perform at the Laugharne Weekend 28th-30th March 2008. Other performers will include Patti Smith, DBC Pierre, Lionel Shriver, Niall Griffiths and Will Self. My first play (co-written with Charlotte Greig) will be showing at the Millennium Hall at 7pm on Friday 28th, and I will be reading from Dial M for Merthyr, at 3.30pm on Sunday 30th at the Rugby Club, along with Helen Walsh. Apparently all tickets are sold or close to selling out, but you shouldn't let that stop you. If last year was anything to go by (I managed to meet Nick Kent, sit feet away from Pat McCabe as he read from 'The Butcher Boy', and get eyed up by Rhys Ifans, I think), a good time will be had by all.

www.thelaugharneweekend.com

In the meantime, I'm off for a spin in my new Ford Puma. See you soon.

Mr & Mrs Writer

2007-12-02T16:29:00.000Z

(From a feature published in The Western Mail on November 24th 2007)

Last weekend, award winning Welsh novelist Rachel Trezise had a dream come true when she got to meet her rock star husband - sorry, hero. Only this time, she didn't have to win a kids' competition to do so, she says.

Eight years ago, one year before my debut novel was published, I was sitting in my brother's passenger seat, in a car park in Stroud, while he bought parts for his motorbike.

It was a regular fortnightly journey.

He wanted company and usually I had nothing better to do. When he was in the shop, I sat outside, smoking his Benson & Hedges until I turned dizzy.

I'd been there for almost an hour, watching raindrops whipping on the windscreen when I opened the glove box and found a Mars Bar he'd bought at the Cardiff Gate garage.

On the wrapper were details of a competition the company was running, something about collecting five tokens and writing a small paragraph on why you deserved your dreams to come true, for the grand prize of having your dreams made true.

Aware that it was designed for eleven year olds with terminal illnesses, but twenty-one and bored as hell, I tried to deduce what my big dream was, and it was obvious; to meet Kelly Jones. Five minutes with the front man of the Stereophonics and he was bound to fall for my inimitable charm. We'd get married, I'd get published, everything would fall into place.

The band's debut album, Word Gets Around, had been released two years earlier, a life affirming collection of songs about growing up in the big mental hospital that is the south Wales valleys. I empathised with every lyric, not to mention the whole handsome spectacle of a pretty man strumming the life out of a cherry red Gibson SG. A little later came their second contribution, Performance & Cocktails, about the world they witnessed from a tour bus window, out of the Cynon Valley and into the world.

I was an Erasmus student living in Ireland, meeting people from Europe and America, and listening to it continually.

Our lives were cycling in tandem, Kelly up ahead, splashed across the pages of the music press, me behind, still unpublished, still unknown, but eternally hopeful. Together, we could have been a Welsh uber-couple, a writing partnership. We could have run the world. The extent of my obsession sent me home to the Rhondda where I bought five more chocolate bars and wrote and posted the little paragraph. To no avail.

A few months later I met my husband, and immediately knew that he would eventually become my husband. It was a bit of a predicament, trying to work out where my so far unrequited relationship with Kelly Jones was going to fit in.

When the new beau asked me where we should go on our first date, I answered with a fairly unrepentant 'Cwmaman.'

I'd decided, in my then usual neurotic fashion, to personally go looking for Kelly Jones. There was only a mountain between us after all. If I couldn't find him, I?d marry the beau. So on a Monday night in January 2000, we sat in a pub called the Boncyff, near Kelly's parental home, underneath a plaque which said 'Millionaire's Corner,' erected in honour of the local lottery winners.

I stared at the door all night, waiting for fate to deliver my jackpot. And nobody came. Fast forward seven years, three books and two literary prizes, and I have married my boyfriend, but he has always lived with a threat hanging over his head; my constant belief that I would one day catch up with Mr Jones, because if my life has taught me anything, it is that when you arm yourself with as much ambition and determination as I have, dreams do have a funny habit of coming true, with or without Mars Bar wrappers.

When you want something enough, the whole world conspires in helping you to get it. In the summer I met a man called Martin Davies, designer of Red Dragonhood street wear. He asked me to model a T-shirt because Charlotte Church had pulled out. I said yes. I liked the T-shirt. I like all his T-shirts.

He arrived at my house one day with a bag full of them. After the photographs were taken, he told me, with no knowledge of my Kelly Jones fixation, that Richard from the Stereophonics was also a Red Dragonhood model, that they lived in the same neighbourhood, that they were good friends.

'As a thank you,' he said, 'I'll introduce you to the band.' That's how I came to be standing next to Kelly Jones this week in an after-show party for the Pull The Pin World Tour, celebrating their sixth studio album, my husband standing cautiously in close proximity, everything fallen neatly into place.
'If you?re on your fourth book now,' Kelly says, 'You're catching up with us.' More than he'll ever know.

No Sleep Til Wroclaw

2007-10-26T14:49:00.000+01:00

Wroclaw, pronounced something like 'Rozzlafft' is Poland's fourth largest city on the south west side, close to the Czech border. After leaving home at 1am on Thursday, I arrived there at around 6pm. At 7pm I stood in a dark theatre on the other side of Rynek and read a short story. The whole audience was squinting at me. Half way through the story I realised it was because they were reading the Polish translation on a large screen behind me. How do you translate 'Fear and poo and death, bach,' into Polish, I wonder? When I finished, moderate applause and a cheque for 280 Euros. Unfortunately, Poland still deals in Zloty's so I used a beer token to buy a pint of Heineken. I hadn't eaten for a day, hadn't slept for two, and it totally wiped me out. I went to bed having learned three Polish words - 'Alkohole' - Booze, 'Woda' - Water and, 'Wodka' - Vodka, of course.

Next day I woke at 4pm and went for a walk along Kielbasnicza, the main shopping bar and restaurant area. I'd made the mistake of wearing heels, and the ground was cobbled, so I was tiptoeing precariously and looking down, when I heard somebody crooning Oscar Hammerstein's 'Some Enchanted Evening.' I recognised the voice. In June I'd been sitting in Waterstones in Abergavenny signing copies of 'Dial M for Merthyr,' when the manager started cursing the street entertainer outside. 'He can't even sing,' he said. I looked up. It was him, the busker, standing in front of a bank, covered in dirt, bellowing into the hail, in Wroclaw. Go figure.

The Box Isn't Utterly Evil

2007-10-01T17:53:00.000+01:00

I don't usually watch much television. It rots your brain, doesn't it? I've got one though. A 42" flat screen HD ready effort which dominates the living room. (My husband tricked me into buying it with my Dylan Thomas prize winnings by unplugging the speakers on our seventeen year old Sony and telling me the sound was knackered. Bad news: I only use TV to play Rock Guitar Hero II and listen to the Kerrang channel from the bathroom.) Anyway, during an unusually long bout of flu, two weeks and still counting, I've been watching quite a lot. And I'd be lying if I told you I wasn't impressed.

I watched 'It's A Free World,' Ken Loach's first film for television in six years; a drama about the exploitation of EU immigrant workers. Ken Loach, if you didn't already know it, is one of the best things in the film world; motivated by politics, class and otherwise, who makes deeply humanistic works devoid of propaganda; unassuming and unpretentious, didactic and conscientious - everything that as a writer I aspire to. Here he decided to give voice to a gang master. No, not a misogynistic middle aged fat cat but an entrepreneurial single mother with a retired shop steward dad. How wonderful to witness such a startling slice of social realism at a time when seemingly three quarters of the population are engrossed in Pop Idol (or whatever it's called) and TV audiences need clich� and stereotype in order to save them having to think.

The other thing I saw was the adaptation of Alexander Masters' best-selling book 'Stuart - A Life Backwards.' I'd never read the book so I didn't really know what to expect. It turned out to be an admirably delicate piece of television with a vastly generous performance by Tom Hardy as protagonist Stuart Shorter. He was a homeless man who tried to behead his next door neighbour and held his wife and son hostage with a knife before trying to set fire to his house whilst still inside it. He was also sexually abused at the age of nine by his older brother, sexually abused by a care worker at the children's home he begged to go into and was suffering from a literally crippling form of muscular dystrophy. As somebody remarked on the myspace bulletin board immediately afterwards, 'selfish and judgemental people should be forced to watch it.' Homelessness is a subject close to my heart because I've spent some time sleeping on cardboard in the doorways of various cities. Next month I'm going to be the guest speaker at the annual general meeting of The Wallich, a homeless charity whose aim is to help and support the most vulnerable of homeless people; people whom other agencies are unwilling or unable to help. There are many reasons why people become homeless and usually they're complicated and not easily solved. Rarely they're because the person in question is inherently lazy, and yet I still hear very stupid people telling Big Issue sellers to 'get a job.'

Homelessness is a social problem that many people choose to edit out of their consciousness. Stuart is the kind of person many people like to edit out of their consciousness and with it, books about people like him. So the image of the writer running into a bookshop and replacing copies of Dan Brown's 'The Da Vinci Code,' with 'Stuart - A Life Backwards,' is a suitable one which played out towards the end of the programme. (I do this with my own books every time I go into a bookshop, most writer's do. Once, a sales assistant in Llantrisant Borders caught me throwing copies of 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,' into a cavity behind a bookcase. By the way, will everyone stop asking me if I read Harry Potter? Do I look like someone who gives a shit about magicians who go to boarding school?) Most of the criticism I received for 'Fresh Apples,' and the title story in particular, was from people who didn't want to believe that Matt, the sixteen year old protagonist, would consider having sex with a thirteen year old girl with cerebral palsy in order to appease his more sexually experienced peers, or that he'd use the word 'fuck.' One person, a former schoolteacher from Hertfordshire, told me that I was typecasting the teenagers of the Rhondda by putting expletives into their mouths. God help whoever his students were.

The Rhondda Valley is an economical wasteland, rendered ugly by the arrival of industry and left crushed by its untimely departure. I'm not as interested in the coal mines or the politics surrounding them, as I am in the people who are affected by those things. My work is about the trial, tribulations and survival instincts of the ordinary working class people who still live there. As someone who was born and brought up in the area it is unnatural for me to patronise or typecast my characters. I know that when the chips are down, life isn't really as simple as good and evil. People will do their very best to survive in all kinds of difficult situations and my job is to help readers understand their journeys and their locale, rather than demean characters, or area, for the sake of a good story. And when you look at life that closely, fairies and happy endings are few and far between. But I don't believe it's a negative thing to examine the darker side of life. What's far more negative is to pretend things like homelessness and rape and people who say 'fuck' do not really exist. I am absolutely delighted that a group of television executives decided to show 'Stuart - A Life Backwards,' at 9pm on a Sunday night, even if he did throw himself under a train in the end. The box isn't fundamentally evil after all, it seems.

Shame then about 'The Secret Diary of A Call Girl' in which Billie Piper plays posh working girl Belle De Jour. Whilst trying to explain the reason for her career choice, she says 'I know you won't believe me, but I enjoy the sex.' Dead right I don't believe you. I mean, I enjoy sex. Most people enjoy sex. But most people wouldn't if they were doing it with a stranger solely for the sake of funding a crack addiction or paying the flipping rent. If Billie Piper was playing a street hooker who gave blow-jobs to put new track marks in her arm, audiences would be outraged, but she doesn't, does she? She calls her madam her 'agent,' talks with a nice accent, and enjoys the sex, which seems to mean it's alright. She's got a lovely wardrobe too. I can hear the cash registers at Agent Provocateur ringing as I type. Maybe some sixteen year old in Hertfordshire is asking her mummy if she'd be able to study prostitution at Oxbridge, or maybe it's another kind of sixteen year old who's thinking the sale of her body might actually be acceptable now, the kind who can't afford to go to University, the kind who's mother is nowhere to be found.

www.thewallich.com

The Pram in the Hall

2007-08-28T19:33:00.000+01:00

It was in 1938 that Cyril Connolly said There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall. And he was a man. So what if you're an artist and a woman, and you're newly married and you're fast approaching thirty and your husband's ten years older than you? Bank holidays and Christmases always make me think of children. Bank holidays and Christmases are the only time I miss not having any. For people with no children, Bank holidays and Christmases are just excuses to go on three day benders.

Great, you might think, but it's not actually. Being quite an imaginative person, I can find an excuse to go on a three day bender any time of the year, and on Bank holiday weekends and the run up to Christmas, pubs are always full of amateur drinkers who become obnoxious and/or violent after two pints of lager and vomit on their shoes after three. What I really want to do with my state approved time off is cook good food and read stories to the kids.

Of course, there are no kids, because I've spent the past ten years of my life worrying about my precious career. I'm not remotely sorry about this. I've never wanted children. I've had a very straightforward attitude towards reproduction since I was a child myself. The world is over-populated and there are millions of orphanages bursting with unwanted offspring. Where's the sense in making more?

Then suddenly you're twenty eight and your body clock just started ticking. Your husband starts designing an extension with a room called 'The Nursery,' in it. He puts a new set of railings around the patio, surreptitiously or unconsciously childproofing your abode. Your mother-in-law starts showing you the cute little outfits she's bought for your niece and you respond by saying, 'Awwww!' Increasingly, you start to fantasise about the beautiful, bright, humanitarian progeny you and your husband are capable of creating. (I think my husband was responsible for the origin of this, when he said, 'we have to have kids because the world is so full of pricks we need some good people to counterbalance them.') Finally, you find yourself listening to Radio 4 on a crisp Christmas morning, suffering from a biblical hangover, trying to entice the cat into playing with the wind-up plastic mouse that came in her cat-stocking and you think; this isn't really enough.

However, being an artist, I'm not sure if it's fair to the kids to have them. My friend Clare Potter has a poem in her debut collection called 'A Pram in the Hall.' I have not stroked my belly/imagined you in sun slats/kicking in my extended arms/I've worried where I'll put you when I write/I can't clear space for your arrival/imagine that smell they talk of/the joy I'm supposed to feel/ I can't see your little feet/the, apparently, button nose, only blank panicky pages. Precisely what I'm worrying about, even before I've given up on contraception. It seems wholly implausible that I'll be able to have a child in the next two years. I'm half way through my fourth book, in the middle of marketing campaigns for the European and Australian translations of my second, in the middle of recording the audio version of my third and will be spending the best part of 2008 in America, without my husband, researching my fifth. Where would a baby go?

Tabloidesque stories about celebrities who have it all only confuse matters. Look at Kate Moss being a successful mother whilst still living a completely unaffected life, i.e. snorting a few fat lines of coke now and again and singing backing vocals for her on/off boyfriend's band. That's not possible without live-in nanny's, and if you're going to rise to the challenge of having children, who really wants a nanny? (After I won the Dylan Thomas Prize I seriously considered hiring a cleaner. That idea lasted all of three minutes, ruined by an image of myself frantically tidying up before the cleaner arrived, in case s/he thought I was lazy.)

The other thing which is telling me to stall, just a little longer, is the book I'm currently reading. It's called 'They F*** You Up,' a case study by psychologist Oliver James on how the way we are cared for in the first six years of our lives has a crucial effect on the adults we become. That Philip Larkin poem, 'This Be the Verse,' opens the book. 'Man hands on misery to man/It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can/And don't have any kids yourself.' I've always really liked that poem.

I'm reading the book because I'm trying to work out which neuroses I can blame on my parentage and which ones I can blame solely on myself. Proof enough, I think, that I'm not mentally stable enough to have children yet. Very Liberal in most areas of my life and lifestyle, I have severely Conservative views on the rearing of children: I'm absolutely certain, for instance, that if I had a fifteen year old who owned a gun, and had just used it to murder an eleven year old, I'd know about it, and would have reported it, but I never would have a fifteen year old who was a gun owner or a murderer because I would have brought them up to have respect for human life, at least. Which begs another question; when, then?

Another writer friend, Charlotte Greig, whose debut novel about an unplanned pregnancy was published recently, said in last weekend's Western Mail, 'It's just as na�ve to think you can plan everything, as it is to think you don't have to plan anything.' There is no right time to have a baby; it'll turn your life upside down whatever age you are, and that maybe a good thing. There's an addiction to overcome first; smoking. The smoking ban has only succeeded in making me even more stubborn, because I'm no State bullied quitter. But long before the ban I'd promised my lungs untainted oxygen before I hit 30. Got a feeling the fags will be with me until the 11th hour though. And perhaps then I can pack in the contraceptives as well.

Clare E Potter Spilling Histories (Cinnamon Press, 2006)
Oliver James They F*** You Up (Bloomsbury, 2007)
Charlotte Greig A Girl's Guide to Modern European Philosophy (Serpent's Tail, 2007)