Show Notes
In this week’s episode, authors Sarah Moss and Megan Hunter join Writing West Midlands’ own Olivia Chapman to discuss their latest novels
Summerwater and
The Harpy. In this podcast, they discuss writing about relationships, creating unnerving fiction and the expectation placed on writers to make sense of the time we are living in.
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast brings writers and readers together to discuss some of 2020’s best books. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions
about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. Join us each week for exciting and inspiring conversations with new, and familiar, writers from the Midlands and beyond.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website:
https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
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Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Guest Curator: Kit de Waal
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Podcast Transcription, Episode 9: Sarah Moss and Megan Hunter
Kit de Waal
Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast series. I’m Kit de Waal and I’ve worked with the Festival Director, Shantel Edwards, as Guest Curator of this year’s podcast series. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. In this week’s episode, authors Sarah Moss and Megan Hunter join Writing West Midlands’ own Olivia Chapman to discuss their latest novels Summerwater and The Harpy. Both novels offer a sharply observed and unsettling insight into their character’s intimate relationships, as well as their interactions with strangers. In this podcast, they discuss writing about relationships, creating unnerving fiction and the expectation placed on writers to make sense of the time we are living in.
Aston University
This episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents… podcast is brought to you in partnership with Aston University. For information about studying English at Aston, and for further information about the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, please see their website – www.aston.ac.uk - and their social media channels (Facebook/Twitter/Instagram) @AstonSSH.
Olivia Chapman
Hello, welcome to Birmingham Literature Festival. Thanks for joining us. I'm Olivia Chapman, I'm one of the team at the festival. And I'm delighted to be talking to two novelists that I greatly admire today, Sarah Moss and Megan Hunter. Sarah is going to be talking to us mainly about her seventh novel, which has just been published this summer and is called Summerwater. It's got a cast of characters who are living, or not living, they're on holiday in a caravan park in Scotland, where it just doesn't stop raining. And it's focused on one particular day. Megan is going to be talking to us mainly about her second book, The Harpy, which was due to be out in June and has been delayed to the autumn because of the pandemic. The Harpy is one of the most unsettling and kind of got-under-my-skin novels that I've read this year, focused around one family and the relationship between husband and wife when she discovers an infidelity. So, I'm delighted for you to be joining us, Sarah and Megan. Welcome.
Sarah Moss
Thank you.
Megan Hunter
Thank you.
Olivia Chapman
I wanted to start by asking both of you – but I'm going to start with Megan – about writing relationships, writing specifically [about] a marital relationship. You both do it exceptionally well, and I very much enjoy your writing on that particular relationship. But Megan, I wanted to ask you about the dynamic between the husband and wife in The Harpy. You can tell from the start that they're not happy and it kind of goes further. How was it getting right under the skin of that relationship?
Megan Hunter
Well, it was difficult at first and it was a new thing for me, I'd written about relationships before in The End We Start From but that was written in a very particular way; almost, you could say in the form of a prose poem. There weren't very many conversations, you know. They weren't really scenes as such. And in this novel, I really was writing scenes and conversations and actually quite intimate and difficult and conflict driven sort of arguments. So that felt like a very new thing for me. But I, once I sort of got immersed in it, and I was used to it in the novel – I mean 'enjoyed' isn't really quite the right word – but I certainly became sort of used to it, became familiar with it and kind of was very engaged by it. But it was hard. I mean, over the course of however long you write a novel to write about such dark and difficult things for, you know, years on end, when, you know, you're not necessarily feeling that way yourself. That's quite difficult to keep re-entering that dark space.
Olivia Chapman
And Sarah you usually – 'cos this is your seventh novel, and I've read I think all of them – but you do tend to focus on one family or relatively few characters. Summerwater is unusual in that you have, I think, five or six different families or different cabins that you're looking at. So, they all have slightly different dynamics, but
you get to know each character and specifically the relationships between them very, very well. How was that for you to be kind of so deep with so many characters and their very intimate relationships?
Sarah Moss
It felt like a very playful book to write. I enjoyed it and I did all of it, I mean, the metaphors I come up with are to do with dancing, which I think is partly because of the way the narrative passes from one character to another. Although the themes are quite dark – though not as dark as The Harpy I think – it felt like quite a kind of, quite a light-footed book to write.
Olivia Chapman
Because you spent less time with each family?
Sarah Moss
I think because I knew that I was only with them for quite a short time. And that close third-person narration I think is easier for that than first person because you can skip: you don't really have to introduce each person because you just step into their proximity.
Olivia Chapman
So that's interesting. So it's more like you're taking a snapshot and then you kind of duck out again?
Sarah Moss
Yes. I mean, I'd hope something more mobile than a snapshot. But yes, absolutely. You pass through. You kind of haunt each cabin for a little while, but then you move on.
Olivia Chapman
Oh, I like that imagery of haunting – the writer haunting a cabin. That's a nice way of putting it. So in my day job I spend a lot of time working with writers and I always find it amazing the observations that they're able to make and that they retain, often for a very long time. So, one of the questions – and I'm not a writer myself, I should say – but one of the things that I'm always fascinated by is how you sort of collect observations. Some people collect shells and stamps, and writers it seems to me collect observations. Does that ring true for you, Sarah?
Sarah Moss
No, it doesn't feel that deliberate. And I've never been one of those writers who needs to write things down straight away or keep some notes. I mean, I do keep a notebook with me but it's for ideas and patterns rather than to kind of collect things from lived experience. I trust the patterns to form and I trust myself to remember what I need to when I need it. I mean, I forget all sorts of things all the time. But I don't feel the need to document reality as it passes. I don't take many photos. I don't use social media. I have faith in my interactions with the world to give me what I need.
Olivia Chapman
That's interesting. And Megan, what about for you?
Megan Hunter
Yeah, that's very interesting. I think, no, I don't formally record observations that often in a notebook. I do sometimes – I do carry a notebook. And occasionally I do that: maybe overheard things like conversation, maybe just a little snippet of dialogue I might write down. But yeah, I think in terms of collecting experience or memories, I think I've always been amazed by how they resurface while you write. So, when I was writing The End We Start From, you know, that particularly was a very un-deliberate kind of writing experience. And similarly, in The Harpy, as you're writing a scene, you know, a particular memory or a comparison or, you know, an observation just comes up when you're sort of in the flow of writing. That's one of the things I love about writing. But I do take quite a lot of photos but I'm not sure how much they help me to retain observations exactly. And I do use social media. Again, I'm not sure how helpful that is. But I have found a notebook helpful at times and by and large it's just that spontaneous kind of overflow of memories while you're writing that's what I've experienced the most.
Olivia Chapman
So, one of the things that I was really struck by with both of your novels is the presence of an unknown other. So, in The Harpy it is the harpy, the beast who pops up in various kind of interstitial chapters. And in Summerwater it's the rain and the animals who are affected by the rain and kind of observing what I guess would be climate change. How deliberate was it to have this sort of external, slightly unknown, slightly menacing character who was able to observe but who was also able to sometimes influence what was happening in the story?
Megan Hunter
I actually started off with the main narrative, the main story. And then I would say, towards the end of my first draft, which was a very, I'd not done this before because I'd usually written more editing as I went along. But I did in this case write a sort of rough first draft, and towards the end of that I just – this sort of creature, this image, this form just kind of emerged for me very, very strongly, almost viscerally. And as I was writing those scenes, I felt almost sort of inhabited by this creature. And so, I knew that that was, you know, strong enough that it, that it needed to be in the novel. And then, and then it was just a gradual process really, through subsequent drafts of weaving that figure in and of kind of noticing where organically, you know, there were those touchpoints in the story, and where both narratives could kind of, you know, be in dialogue and inform one another. And, you know, and it ended up being called The Harpy and that ended up being completely central. So, I think that was a really important experience for me of how something can kind of, yeah, sort of organically emerge but then be very deliberately kind of woven back in.
Olivia Chapman
That's not what I was expecting you to say, so that's very interesting. Thank you. I expected the image of the harpy to be the starting point.
Megan Hunter
Ah, yeah.
Olivia Chapman
Yeah, and I know writers don't always get terribly much say in their book covers but the image on the front of The Harpy is incredibly striking with the woman with the bird effectively as half of her face. Did you – is that what you had in your mind? Were you part of that creation at all?
Megan Hunter
Yes. So actually, when I sent, I mean when I sent the first draft off, it already had a sort of, I sent it with a cover that was like a woman with wings. I've never done that before. But it was like, from the beginning I had this very particular visual. I mean when I say a cover, it wasn't a physical thing. It was a Word document with a picture at the front, which was this sort of sculpture really of a woman with wings. So, I knew. It was pretty early but yeah; it did come after the sort of betrayal story. And I knew yes visually. It was quite a visual thing for me as well as a visceral thing. And so, when I saw that cover, and when they sent it to me, it was amazing, because it felt completely right immediately and quite important in a way to have that sort of visual, you know, touchpoint in relation to the book.
Olivia Chapman
And Sarah, with regards to Summerwater and the sort of, there's several menacing factors which kind of all weave into the ending, but the rain and the observations by the animals which are between each of the stories of each cabin. Again, I'm interested to know how deliberate that was and whether that was always going to be a very big part of the narrative of this book.
Sarah Moss
I think as for Megan, it kind of emerged through the first draft. This book was less planned than many of my others have been; I think, maybe than all of the others have been. And it really was just an experiment to see what would happen. I mean, I started it not thinking, 'This is the next book', but just, 'I wonder what happens if I try this?'. So those little interstitial bits came up – it was absolutely, 'Oh, you know, what happens if I do this? How does it look?' given that I'm thinking about climates and about bodies in weather and about water cycles. And there's a bit where one of the characters at the beginning running in the rain is thinking about the water outside her skin and the water inside her skin and the water above her head and the water under her feet. I'm very interested in that idea of bodies on land in weather as part of land and weather. So, it made sense then to be thinking about the other entities in that landscape; that the humans are not the only beings with stories who are in this place. And I just tried it to see how it went. And I was quite pleased with it and I kept doing it.
Olivia Chapman
I love that idea that even you are, you know, you're seven novels in or this is your seventh novel and you're still, you're still playing.
Sarah Moss
Yeah.
Olivia Chapman
You go into it without a plan necessarily and you're still playing, and I think there's something glorious about writing being playful for you.
Sarah Moss
I think it's a later discovery for me. I mean, I was an academic before I was a novelist, and my early novels were definitely planned and researched quite earnestly. I mean, I was never a great planner even as an academic but by my standards planned and researched earnestly. And as I've gone on, I think it's partly the confidence of middle age as well – I'm quite interested in the idea of midlife as I enter it or progress through it. There's something about being mid-career, midlife, having a certain, a certain amount behind me that makes me feel much more confident about play and experiment than I used to.
Olivia Chapman
So that brings me on to a question that I've wanted to ask because it strikes me that women writers are referred to as women writers and it's something I detest, and try avidly not to do, although I'll admit that every so often I do it by accident. But the women that you write, both of you, in these novels are the ones who hold the households together. They're the ones who are – especially the ones with kids in the case of Sarah, that not all of your characters have children that they're looking after – but the mothers are, they're holding the household together: they're planning the meals, they're working out who needs new shoes, they're thinking about cleaning, they're, you know, they're holding the household together, and they support – their existence allows for the rest of the family to exist at all. And I find that interesting when you are both mothers and writers and have other responsibilities be they, you know, family or careers or whatever. Is that deliberate, first of all? But also, is that a reflection on what you see around you where the mothers are the ones who are holding it all together, whilst doing what it seems much more than anyone else? Megan, I wonder if maybe you can answer that one first?
Megan Hunter
Sure, yeah. I mean, I think that is very much my experience in terms of what I've observed around me. It's not necessarily really particularly my own experience within my marriage. But I would say that I do, yeah, I do notice that kind of over and over again, really. And I think it's quite interesting the extent to which, you know, in many ways things have changed hugely. And in another way, there's the well, the often discussed, you know, mental load, and what that sort of consists of. And I think that's very difficult to kind of, to get away from actually, even if you are in a more sort of equal partnership. And then many people are not in equal partnerships either, you know. Women still do a much greater proportion of housework, you know – every time they do those surveys, and that's what comes out. And I think it's interesting that, well, 'interesting' in inverted commas in lockdown, obviously, that, you know, there's been a lot of stories emerging, and studies about the fact that women are bearing the brunt of the home education and the housework in that situation, even if both parents work. So yes, it's probably something I could sort of soapbox about for a while. But I was just, I was very interested in that and I suppose I was, yeah, playing a bit in the novel with slightly, perhaps slightly satirising that and perhaps slightly, you know, delving into the sort of depths of, you know, pushing it to quite an extreme with Lucy, sort of, you know, obsessive children's party planning and, you know, things of that nature where, you know, fairly trivial things actually end up sort of taking over her mind in a way that, you know, she wouldn't necessarily choose and yet she is choosing. But then is she, you know? And just exploring really the complications of that position.
Sarah Moss
Hmm, I'll join Megan on her soapbox. I think that, I mean, I agree with everything she's said really and I don't have a lot add to that. I've written previously in The Tidal Zone, with a man as the housekeeper, the cook, the one responsible for the kids. Which was interesting to write and also quite interesting to publicise and the reaction to that book was intriguing. I think there's also a narrative element about that mental load, because it's very hard to share. I mean, I too live in a relationship where things feel pretty equal most of the time. But we do that partly by having a pretty rigid division of who's responsible for what because the story of what's in the fridge is mine, really: I do the food shopping, I do the cooking, I know who's eating what, I know how much milk we're getting through in a particular week – which depends on who's growing on that particular week. There's a kind of narrative of that which is hard to share with any other narrative. And my husband will have the story of the laundry, which is who's done which sports in that week, and what the weather's been like, and how fast things have been able to dry, and if somebody had a nosebleed or fell over in the mud, or whatever it is. But I think these things are intriguing to write about exactly because of that, because there's a running story, which isn't always at all interesting in real life – you can make it interesting when you write about it. But the story of the laundry and what's in the fridge is also the story of what's happening for that particular family at that particular time.
Olivia Chapman
Yes, and I think for both of you actually, that's what I really loved with both novels was that I felt – even if you only see them for quite brief moments – I felt like I was in that character's head. And it is that running narrative that both of you do so well, which allows you to get into that character's head, I wanted to ask you both about revenge. Now this is particularly germane to The Harpy. As I say it's one of the books that I found the most unsettling and raced through when we read it as a bound proof back at the start of the year. But the issue of revenge is obviously key to The Harpy and I don't want to give too much away for those who haven't read it. But there is an infidelity and an agreement is made between the couple that revenge will be exacted by the hurt party. And it's quite sudden and it's quite explicit, and it's quite, I found it quite shocking. And Sarah in Summerwater the revenge is maybe more oblique, but it's certainly, there's a cruelty there and there's a sort of building tension of how this might unfold. So, I'm going to start with Megan but the almost literal pound of flesh that is demanded by Lucy, how did that come about? And how comfortable was it to be writing that?
Megan Hunter
Yeah, I wouldn't say it was comfortable at all. I, yeah, I think I just, I became very interested in thinking through issues of sort of betrayal, forgiveness and a certain kind of fairytale patterning and sort of almost mythical patterning that to be sort of imposed on everyday life, which is obviously much more sort of shapeless and amorphous and not something where, you know, people usually have these sorts of agreements. And I just, yeah, I just became sort of fascinated, almost, almost kind of against my will – I mean, obviously not against my will – but I was, sort of kept thinking, 'Am I really gonna write a book about this: this doesn't seem very sort of me somehow, you know?' I wrote this very sort of, well, I mean I say it's my cheerful book, my first book, but obviously it's about a dystopia so it's not that cheerful, but it's a very, it's quite a warm book about love between a mother and a child. And this book felt much, much darker. So I kind of, I felt myself almost sort of drawn into writing it. And yeah, at times it was very uncomfortable. But I sort of sensed that it was necessary for me to just, to keep going with that, and to not turn away from, you know, that which yeah, I found dark and difficult – and to kind of, and to push through that as a writer. And I mean I'm pleased that I did but yeah, it wasn't comfortable and it didn't always feel like necessarily the most natural subject choice. But, and I think, you know, when I told people about it, friends or family they always looked quite surprised. But, I think it's just such a fascinating story to me. And then, you know, hopefully to other people. Yeah, it just intrigued me to come from that premise.
Olivia Chapman
Sarah, the menace that kind of comes to a head towards the end of the novel is more subtle in Summerwater but it's equally as threatening, and it all revolves around a family who are unknown to everyone else – they're from somewhere else. I don't think from, my memory, they're never explicitly, we don't explicitly know where they're from. But their child is subject to an incident of bullying, and then there's kind of all kinds of rhetoric around how the rest of the residents on this caravan park are feeling towards them. How were you trying to portray that building up of tension? And was it as simple as you want to create an issue and you want to say something about this issue, and the feelings that these people have will all come to a head in a rather big way?
Sarah Moss
No, it wasn't that planned. I'm clearly going to keep saying that all the way through, 'this book was not planned at all'. I was thinking when Megan was talking that the idea of revenge comes from a fantasy of justice, an idea that things can be set right or that wrong can be undone or redressed in some way, and that's … And Megan you said it, it works against the model of real life, and I think that, that's really true because it's about, it's about narrative structure and the idea that there might be a satisfying ending, which of course, in real life, there isn't – I mean, there are ends but there are almost never endings. And I think in Summerwater it wasn't about choosing characters who were trying to bring about particular states, it was about the shape of the narrative itself; that the shape of story demands justice or injustice, depending on whether it's comedy or tragedy. So those are really the only options that you have. I mean, there isn't, you can't write a story which has neither, well, it's very difficult to write a story that has neither a just nor an unjust ending. Because narrative itself demands that you do that, or not even demand, but simply does it. And as I was writing, actually I wasn't sure when I was writing the first draft until quite late whether I was going towards a comedic or a tragic ending. One of the points of conflict is a household on this holiday park who have loud parties late at night, mysteriously, because it's quite remote and it's not clear who's getting to the parties or where from. And I think the way you respond to your neighbours having fun is such a fundamental question about community and individuality. Do you want to make it stop or do you take a bottle and go round? And that's really the question that everybody on the caravan park has to address in the end as this noise becomes intolerable, as you can't ignore it anymore. And some of them take a bottle and go round and some of them want to make it stop. But those are really the only two options at that point, and I think the book could have gone either way.
Olivia Chapman
That's fascinating to me that you didn't know whether it was going to be one ending or the other right up until you were actually writing it. It's interesting you use the example of the neighbours and what the neighbours are up to. Of course, we're recording this at the end of the summer. We are in some form of lockdown still; things have not gone back to normal. And obviously, we've all gone through months of various stages of lockdown. I would love to know how you as writers have found lockdown? Sarah, I wonder if I can start with you? How has this lockdown been for you as a writer?
Sarah Moss
Extraordinarily difficult in ways that I feel very ashamed of. I thought I should have been absolutely fine in lockdown – we're financially pretty secure, my livelihood is not at risk, everybody in my house gets on pretty well, nobody needs to fear anybody else, you know there was always going to be enough food. Really, we had no problems whatsoever. You know I check my privilege and it's there every single time. But I found it really hard, particularly at the beginning. And I think for me that was partly that lockdown freaked me out a lot more than COVID freaked me out. And I've been thinking about this. I mean, it's not that I think lockdown is wrong. I'm absolutely not a Trump-supporting mask-refuser. I mean, clearly, it was necessary and clearly it was the only thing to do, even though it was a terrible thing to do. But I think quite a lot about social breakdown and about authoritarian government, and I have a Jewish refugee background. And the moment when it becomes the law that you may not send your children to school, and you may not leave your house except under very strict conditions, is a moment when all the ancestral voices in my head go off. And it took me a while to realise that that was what was happening because I was very lonely in my fear of lockdown when everybody else was much more scared of COVID – which is, of course, reasonable: COVID is much more frightening than lockdown. And that didn't help me write at all. I mean, I wasn't really in a waiting phase at the time anyway. But that, the fear and the sense that my own immediate environment was fundamentally transformed by something I couldn't see was not helpful for me in any way. And I was thinking about this also in relation to what you said about the question about motherhood and responsibility for the house. I think that for a lot of women the house is not the place where you do your thinking or where you have your professional life, I think for probably for most adults, but particularly for women, the house is a place of work. And it's a place that demands endless, repetitive, not very interesting labour; and the more people are in it, the more of that labour there is, and the less space there is for the people who are responsible for that labour to do any thinking or making or reading or reflecting. So, yeah, I mean, I look around houses and I see work that hasn't been done and it should be done, not necessarily by me but certainly by me or somebody else and that doesn’t help me write.
Olivia Chapman
Megan, how have you found lockdown, both as a writer and I suppose just kind of as someone who was, well, you were due to be published in June, and it got delayed until this autumn. So how has it been?
Megan Hunter
Yes. I mean, I feel like it's had very different sort of distinct phases for me really, and it feels like, you know, in one sense obviously no time at all, and in another sense, it feels like it's been, I don't know, years and years. I mean, I was ill actually. So, I had I think suspected COVID at the beginning of lockdown for quite a number of weeks. And so that kind of really determined my initial experience of it. So, all the time when everything was so quiet and there were no cars on the road, I was just in bed. So, I was kind of out of it for the first bit. And then I sort of emerged and was kind of happy to be, you know, in the sunshine and just sitting in the garden and things like that. And then I was quite happy to be writing for a while and kind of writing in calm and quiet without, in a sense, that pressure and that exposure of publication. And it seemed like the right thing to postpone because obviously there were no bookshops open at that point. I think with the book coming out now I feel quite keenly a series of sort of senses of loss, you know, loss, and a sense of not really being caught up somehow still to what's happened; and to what has been lost. You know, I think there's a remote part of book publishing which is the same. So, you know, you write your book on your own, somebody reads it on their own, and things like, you know, social media, it's all taking place at a distance. So that's familiar. But that's always been sort of countered by yeah, the more physical encounters, the journeys. And as Sarah was saying, I think as a woman and as a mother, it's been quite important for me to go away actually, often. You know, I go to London, I see people, I go to events and I'm a different person, I sort of escape for a while. That's all completely stopped. And so, I do feel, yeah, a sort of a soreness about that and a difficulty, which I guess we're all going through. And the kind of, the quiet writing period of lockdown feels distant. And I don't know, I've been in my life quite reliant on working in libraries and cafes, similarly to Sarah mentioned about being out of the house. And so, you know, I'm thinking how I can incorporate some of that sense into my writing life going forward. I mean, in a sense I can't, but I'm thinking about maybe going to a friend of a friend's house once a week, using their spare room or, you know. I mean, I'm very lucky, I have a, I actually have a writing place in the garden. But there's something about actually getting away entirely and having that headspace, which I think is really quite important for me.
Olivia Chapman
That then brings me on to what might well be my last question. But the question is around the responsibility or the maybe responsibility's the wrong word, the reliance the rest of us have on writers to document and interpret things like, frankly, this chaotic, crazy year that we're still in the middle of, and whether you feel that responsibility, whether that feels like a burden or something that you actually embrace? So that's the first part of the question. And the second one is: how do you write? How are you finding the space or time or structure to write both at the moment and I suppose more generally? Megan, I’ll maybe start with you. You mentioned you've got a writing space in the garden, but it sounds like you've got to the stage where actually you want something different now, you've had enough of that and you need a physical change of space?
Megan Hunter
Yeah, I mean, I'll still mainly be here, and I do love it and it's got its own, you know, advantages over being in a library, for example. But I think it's just that balance between, you know – I work, I work with students a bit at the university as well and that's all now gone online. So it's, you know, it's having a balance in one's life between being in a room on one's own and being out and about. So I think it's that, I think it's, yeah, finding that balance. And in terms of how I write, I mean, we have a very strict sort of week. My husband and I share the writing room at the moment because he works from home, and so we have a very strict timetable in Google Calendar. And, you know, that is how I write because we are, we just pass the baton really like relay runners pretty much all day, every day, and that's, yeah, that's how we do it. There was another part of your question about responsibility of writing about the present moment. Initially, when everything first happened, I was writing quite a lot of, I wrote something about being ill. And I've written things about, I've written stories, which kind of have an illness theme or, you know, pandemic theme, but I'm not, I feel like it's good to let, if possible, to leave a bit of, usually, for most writers, it's good to leave a bit of time. And kind of, you know, it's okay to write those things at the time. I mean, it's good and it's, if you're a writer, then you write, and that's how often you process things and make sense of them. But I think it's good to then leave them and then come back to them and sort of see how they fare because when everything's happening, I mean, like any piece of writing, you know, you just have to let it sit for a while, don't you? And so, if you're trying to respond to the immediate moment, and perhaps publish in the immediate moment in response to that moment, I think that, you know, that can be difficult because writing needs, it needs time and space to become clear, I think. At least my writing does.
Olivia Chapman
Sarah, how do you feel?
Sarah Moss
I agree with Megan. Absolutely the point about needing to leave it, and I mean, I had COVID as well early in March. So right kind of, slightly before and right at the beginning of lockdown, and then trailing on for weeks afterwards. And during those weeks I was writing. I mean, there were a surprising number of editors asking novelists to write things about COVID and I kept thinking, 'Why don't you go find an epidemiologist? You know, what can I do with it? I don't know anything about this'. But those pieces all had to be binned as I went along because I was writing too much in the moment and too much with the strength of my own reactions, and without even the perspective that I have now, let alone that we will all come to in the months and years to come. I mean, there were exceptions, but I think broadly, that kind of writing is probably more like journalism than fiction. So, I'm not, I mean, I started a project in lockdown, which I think I'm probably not going to continue. And I'm now thinking about something else. But neither of those are pandemic writing projects. I'm sure we'll all have a lot to say about this for a very long time, but I feel much more called to try to make something beautiful that somebody can enjoy during hard times rather than make something about hard times.
Olivia Chapman
So for you it's more about creating something which can have either a contrast or a bit of an escapist element to it?
Sarah Moss
That's how I feel at the moment. I mean, I'm certainly not claiming that that's the role of literature in life or anything so general. For me just, I mean I've been saying this for a while that I want to try to make the book that you take with you when you get under the table because the bombs are falling and that book was not going to be a book about bombs, ever.
Olivia Chapman
Yes, that’s a very, very true statement. I'm delighted to have spoken to you both. Thank you both. I am very much excited by these novels. I'm excited to know what you're writing next. I will be the first person begging a bound proof from your publisher as and when the next books come out. Sarah Moss's novel is called Summerwater. It's published now. And Megan Hunter's novel is called The Harpy. Thank you both for joining us at Birmingham Literature Festival.
Sarah Moss
Thank you.
Megan Hunter
Thank you.
Outro message
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The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is curated by Shantel Edwards and produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.