Show Notes
May 2021’s online live event brought together two writers whose books are rooted in the Midlands, Emma Purshouse and Lisa Blower. In conversation with author Kit de Waal, they discuss their latest novels
Dogged and
Pondweed, making space for more working-class writers and characters in contemporary fiction and capturing a variety of Midlands dialects on the page.
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website
www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit
https://writingwestmidlands.org/Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Series 2, Episode 10: Lisa Blower and Emma Purshouse
Intro
Welcome to the second series of the
Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast. We are really excited to be back for a second season and to continue to connect readers and writers in the Midlands, and far beyond.
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook
@bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website
www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
May 2021’s online live event brought together two writers whose books are rooted in the Midlands, Emma Purshouse and Lisa Blower. In conversation with author Kit de Waal, they discuss their latest novels
Dogged and
Pondweed, making space for more working-class writers and characters in contemporary fiction and capturing a variety of Midlands dialects on the page.
Kit de Waal
Hello, everyone, its my pleasure this evening to introduce you to two friends and two great writers, two great women, who both have books out - these two books - which we're going to hear a lot about this evening as well as more generally talking about accents, dialect and snobbery in literature, which obviously is one of my pet subjects. Just to introduce who we're talking about this evening, first of all, we've got Lisa Blower. Lisa is the author of the short story collection,
It's Gone Dark Over Bill's Mother's which came out in 2019 and a contribution to Common People which was the anthology of working class writing that came out the same year. Her fiction has appeared in
The Guardian, Comma Press anthologies,
New Welsh Review, Luminary Short Stories Sunday on Radio 4 and her debut novel
Sitting Ducks was shortlisted for the inaugural Arnold Bennett prize and longlisted for
The Guardian Not the Booker prize. She's also a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Wolverhampton University. Emma Purshouse left school in the early 1980s at the age of 15. She's got an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Met and her passion is writing about working class communities she's lived in, often making use of Black Country dialect within her work. In 2017, she won the international Making Waves Spoken Word Poetry competition, she's also Poet Laureate in the city of Wolverhampton and she's also one of the writers in Common People, the anthology of working class writing, and she teaches poetry in schools and community groups. Hello, both of you. We've all got the short vowels tonight, which I'm very happy about it, so to speak to you, and speak to you about two very, very funny books. First of all, it's such a comfort to read these books, because it's about worlds that are so familiar to many of us. And I just want to talk to you, Emma, first about
Dogged. And I don't believe I've ever read a book before that revolves around a win on the bingo, which I love. I mean, it's just so fantastic to read. In fact, you tell us, what is the book about and who are the main characters?
Emma Purshouse
Like you say, it's sort of about a bingo win initially and the two main characters are women in their late 70s. You got Nancy Maddox, and you've got Marilyn Grundy, and it's Marilyn who has this bingo win, but nobody's quite sure how much it's for. And really, the idea behind the book is about how Marilyn has to protect the bingo winnings. And then Nancy gets enlisted into this and it's the adventures they have as they try to protect the bingo winnings, which are stashed in a shopping trolley.
Kit de Waal
And so not only have you rooted it very much in the working class, but you've rooted it in an area, you've rooted it in the Black Country. How does the Black Country feature in this story and more generally, in your work?
Emma Purshouse
I think in this story, it's where it's set, but they're ingrained in the landscape. Everything's kind of, you can’t have one thing without the other. And when the dialect comes in, it's as much a part of it as the characters in the landscape. They say, write what you know, it's what I know. So that's why I've set it there. In my poetry, again, it's what I'm living in so I kind of want to respond and show people what it is and talk about it and share it because I love it.
Kit de Waal
What I think that does come through both of these books is a massive sense of pride and no apology about who we are and where we're from, there's a real sense of pride in this. Do you want to just read us a bit Emma.
Emma Purshouse
I’ll read the prologue which kind of introduces the two women really.
‘Nancy stands on the step. Her shoulders have been aching all night. Years of scrubbing quarry tiles up at the Dartmouth are taking their toll. She rolls her shoulders forward and twists her head to peer over towards her back. A lump has started to form under her overall. “Wot now? If it ay one thing, its summat else.” As she watches, the lump starts to bulge, move, and rupture the skin. She hears Mr. Maddox’s voice.
“If God’d uv meant uz to fly, e’d uv givun uz wings.”
The voice is accompanied by the sound of a trickle of whiskey being poured into a glass.
Her emerging wing - just the one - unfurls itself in a grand gesture and then flails against her back. It is large and black. It is oily, tarry, nicotine-stained, and the feathers are stuck together. It hangs like wet washing in a back yard on a windless day. “Sort of bost,” says Nancy. “Shit!” she thinks, as Marilyn comes out onto her step and waves. Nancy tries to wave back without showing her new wing.
“Is that…?” says Marilyn screwing up her orange lips into the shape of a cat’s arse.
“No!” says Nancy, cutting her off in mid question. “It ay!”. The conversation is ended.
“Bloody dreamin agen,” she thinks as she awakes.’
Kit de Waal
Oh, that's great, that's good. It's absolutely great. Thanks, Emma. I mean, it just sets the scene so, so wonderfully, that image of wet washing on a windless day. Fantastic. Lovely. And Lisa, now, over to you. So, your book spans 11 days and a couple of hundred miles, from Stoke to Wales. And I know that you said that if you had a pound for every time you've driven the Pondweed journey, you'd be a millionaire. Tell us something about the genesis of this book, and why you wrote it or how you came to write it?
Lisa Blower
Well, it begins with family legend. We all have them don't we, we've all got those stories in our families. And it's based on the fact that my great granny Gladys was standing at the bus stop in Wem, which is this little town, little village just outside of Shrewsbury, and gets talking to this elderly gentleman. And as they get talking, they realize who each other is and it turns out that they were each other's first childhood sweetheart, and she thought she'd lost him to the First World War. But he was actually back in Wem, he was living back in Wem, and he was quite a poorly man at that time and they became friends and in the end, he said to her, he says, ‘you know, Gladys, I think I'm going to need someone to help me.’ And my Granny Gladys had always worked in service, so she said, ‘well, I'll tell you what, I'll move in with you. I'll be a housekeeper.’ I mean, she was 84. And so, she moves in with him and because they didn't want folk talking, they got married. Honestly, I just think this story is so lovely. And it's always been one of those stories that I've thought I've got to somehow write about them. And I think what I always tend to do when I write is that I kind of, you know, like you Emma, I write a little bit what I know, but I always imagined it as otherwise. And I started thinking about that. And I started thinking about all those journeys that we used to make when we lived in Stoke. But it's also that idea that you don't really go anywhere. I mean, how I grew up in Stoke, the people there didn't really go anywhere. And you know, I mean, when we kind of emigrated to Shrewsbury, as my Nan said, people in Stoke would always say ‘oh, we’ll come when it's warmer’, you know, as if we had no central heating, you know, and it's that idea of these roads less travelled by people, you know, this idea that they're not really going anywhere, but then they're coming back to where they started, which is exactly what happened with Charlie and my granny Gladys. And at the time when I started to think about this story, as well, I was commuting from Shrewsbury to Bangor where I used to work so I was going along the A55 following a lot of caravans, lots of pimped up caravans and they’d always be this, you know, like retired couple in the front and I started to think well, where are you all going, you know, and this idea that everybody's looking for something or looking for this destination, this ultimate destination, which is I suppose in a way retirement is. And so began the novel.
Kit de Waal
It's so interesting how those seeds, very often for all of us writers, those seeds of a story turn into things, you use it and you plant it and this grows. Can you read us a bit from the book?
Lisa Blower
Yes of course I can. Of course, I'm going to read from the start. And I'm going to begin with how my version of Charlie and Gladys - Ginny and Selwyn - how they first met.
‘We all whimper at the faint whiff of romance yet it is such a grub. I met Selwyn Robby in the garden centre. Almost fifty years had lumbered by since we’d parted ways and then he was right there, in the aquatics franchise selling garden ponds. I heard him before I saw him. He was talking intently to a couple about pond liners as if they might repair a doomed marriage. ‘The most durable in the world with a lifetime guarantee,’ he was saying. And there it still was: that Welsh borders accent with its fat and thick vowels that used to soothe my mother like a dose of laudanum, and no doubt doing that thing he used to do where he pinches his nostrils together and sniffs ‘This is top quality Swedish Butyl rubber. One hundred per cent watertight, even in swell.’
For the size they wanted – ‘Because you must consider the edging excess for the expansion during water fill’ - this particular liner was going to set them back £85.99 a square metre, and this was apparently without underlay, which was going to cost them another fifty quid per square metre if they went with the tight-mesh he was recommending with hand sewn trims. The couple looked as if they were having to share their lottery win with a family they despised. This was a little out of budget for them, they said. They were only in a retirement new-build with a lawn the size of a postage stamp. Not that this mattered to Selwyn. He pattered on: told them that Swedish Butyl rubber comes with its own ecosystem, assuring an ecological balance that would filter rainwater and siphon off the right nutrients, as it would with any uneaten fish food. ‘It's the effect of a million tiny teeth chewing on algae,’ he said solemnly. ‘On my mother's grave, you will never find a suffocated fish if you line with this beautiful tarp.’
Impatience had got the better of me - I'm the same with sweets: I’m a cruncher not a sucker – and I’d inched myself forward enough to see who he’d become.
Yes, I’d thought. It could only be you. You: from next door who’d count my hiccups through the wall. And me. Just sixteen then, and ripe as a bowl of apples. Now - happening upon one another again, and it was just as we were, as if time hadn't passed and he still took three sugars in his tea. Though I could tell straight away that the world had pushed him to one side, as it had with me, as it does with those of us born on our bones. And his left hand then, smoothing down his hair at the back before placing it on the man's shoulder. ‘I’m wondering,’ he’d said, ‘if you've been considering a submersible or external surface model?’
The man looked at Selwyn as if his affair with a submersible model had just been exposed, and his wife clamped her hand over her mouth and gasped that she’d not given it a thought either. ‘There is so much to think about,’ she explained. ‘It's like a whole new world.’
Selwyn lead the distressed couple to the pond pumps where he got them to cradle each one as if choosing a new born.
And he doesn't know about her, I kept thinking to myself. I'm going to have to explain, show him a photograph and hope he won't mind. Understand, I shall have to ask. Please. You must understand. I watch the couple spend over five hundred quid at the till without buying a single fish.
He won't understand.
He will never understand.
Except that's when he caught sight of me, and not a bit of me but all five foot nine of me: just another one of those women who’s standing behind you in the supermarket queue and dressed as if applying for a job in a department store that will let me down gently.
You couldn't have counted a blink between us as he swam up to me. A musty aftershave, boots laced with military precision, and that smile. God. I remember that smile: I’d thought only freshwater habitats could bring that sort of smile to the hoover parts of Selwyn Robby's leathered face; flagellating moss on the manhole; a soft boiled egg.
‘You remember me,’ I’d said, which wasn't the thing I'd wanted to say having had so much to say over the years and thinking about this moment, should it ever happen, and practicing what I would say, which would not have been it's been, ‘It’s been so long I thought you'd have forgotten me.’
He dropped down on one knee and said, ‘Marry me.’
Kit de Waal
Oh, that's great, that's fantastic. What a voice for that character. I mean really, really located in that place, you know, that's a very particular person. And I know that in Sitting Ducks, for example, so wedded into the fabric of Stoke, and It's Gone Dark Over Bill's Mother's. Tell us what your region of the Midlands means to you and how it informs your writing?
Lisa Blower
Well, I think like any writer, I didn't really think about it at the time, you know, when I first started out, and then the more I've kind of written about it, the more I've realized that nobody else really writes about Stoke, nobody has since Arnold Bennett, and he couldn't wait to get out of there. He wrote most of his literature from London looking back, which I suppose in a way, that's what I'm kind of doing. For those of you who know, it's a place of six towns, so it kind of exists with no centre, you know, it's that kind of de-centred city. And so, it has this almost like facelessness about it, even though you've got these six towns with very separate identities, loyalties, traditions, histories. And I always kind of think about it that to the outsider, those six towns probably look one in the same, but actually to the insider, are very, very different. And, you know, obviously years ago, they were all kind of circumscribed by the pot banks that were working there at the time. So, they’re all kind of are a meshed with their own geography, and also that sense of conflict. Do you have that as much in Wolverhampton Em, where you have parts of Wolverhampton that are kind of in conflict with each other?
Emma Purshouse
Certainly, I think the Black Country’s similar, with those little kind of centres that are famous for different things. People lump it all together but different bits are so different even within a few miles, so I think we’ve got that as well.
Kit de Waal
Yeah, I can remember saying to someone, oh, you know, you're from Tipton, aren't you? And he said, I'm not from Tipton, I’m from Langley. They're so different in their identity.
Lisa Blower
And I think, you know, having read Dogged and your work as well Kit, what I think we're all trying to do is write less with what I would call that kind of Orwellian tourist lens, that's always rushing past which, you know, invariably, most people do via Stoke on Trent, they're always rushing past on the M6 to either get to Manchester or Birmingham. And I think the other thing with Stoke is that it is almost too south for the North, but it's too North for the Midlands. So, it's got all this kind of disharmony about it. But this rich tapestry that is very much embedded within its people. And I think that's where I write, you know, that's where my stories are at the heart. It's about the people.
Kit de Waal
Yes, absolutely. I mean, both of your books are so strong, and with such strong women in it and older women, you know, not the frilly, fluffy sense at the side of the of your life but that sense where you really are your own person, you're a strong woman, you haven't let go of your loves and desires. And it's that time where you're going to drive on through. And both of your accents, and the phraseology I suppose, is so strong in both of these books. But you know, here we are three different Midlands accent, completely different. How important is it for you to use that in your writing? I mean, did either of you think about not having any sense of dialect, and any sense of accent in your writing?
Lisa Blower
For me, as I say, I don't think I ever really thought that I was writing in an accent, you know. My motivation or my intention has always been to write these stories so you can hear the voices as I hear them as authentically as possible. So, I've never really been mindful of what that dialect is. It's only when somebody else really reads it and they almost kind of look at it, and then they start looking at things, particularly from a tense point of view, because in the Potteries, no one talks in the present tense, they always almost talk as if it's everything's happened in the past, you know. And they also make up words, you know, if they can't think of words, they just make it up. I mean, talk about portmanteaus, Stoke on Trent is full of them. And it's wonderful, and it's gone dark over Bill's mother's, you know, all these wonderful phrases, that's what defines the people. And so, because I hear the voices, first, I hear them in dialogue with somebody else, I hear them in conversation. So, I write that down. And then that allows me to attach it to a body which then puts that body in a place. So, before I know it, I've actually bought that Potteries voice without really thinking about it. It's a very organic process, I suppose.
Kit de Waal
Because there's different ways of rendering an accent in a book. You can do it phonetically, very much as you have done Emma, actually, by changing word structure. Or you can do it through the sentence structure and the vocabulary like you just said, and made up words. You know, Irvine Welsh does that doesn't he in Trainspotting, and lots and lots of other people do. But Emma, you chose Nancy, mostly, to be the person in your book who you render in dialect in a very sort of, you know, phonetic way. Why did you choose her?
Emma Purshouse
She's a character that keeps recurring in my work. She's appeared in poems as well. And as Lisa was just saying, she talks in my head like that. So, to render it in that way means that somebody could pick it up and also, you know, when they're reading it, try and speak in that manner, and get under it and understand how it works. I was also bought up reading lots of Black Country comedy poetry, and things like that. And that's rendered in that way. So, to me, it wasn't particularly an odd thing to do. It's just the way that things when I was little reading stuff was done, when it was dealing with dialect and accent. So really, that was why I did it like that, so that somebody could pick it up and have a go at it.
Kit de Waal
It's so funny. I think that comedy of the Black Country, there is nothing like it. It's so rich, and it's so sharp. It's absolutely pin sharp and subtle, you sort of laugh about it 10 minutes later, when you just, you know, dwell on it. How do you approach teaching this, Lisa? So if your students say I want to do this, do you say there's any danger in it? Or how do you approach dialect and accent?
Lisa Blower
The first piece of advice I always give them is don't shy away from it. Don't be afraid of writing in the voice you were born with, I suppose more than anything, you know, which I know sounds quite profound. But you know, you can't write about particular places without representing it through voice and it's no good having somebody who is born and bred in Stoke on Trent, that speaks very PC, because that is just not the case. So, I do encourage them wholeheartedly to you know, write it as they can hear it, you know, practice it, hear it, spell it, spell it as you would hear it, play with those phonemes. Because what that then allows them to do is to play with that kind of rhythm of language, with the intonation, with that tone of voice, so we don't need those qualifying adverbs in the dialogue. He said shiftily, she scoffed, you know, because if when you're writing an accent and dialect, it's doing the job for you. One of the other things I'm very encouraging of is to pick up on that humour, that very self-deprecating humour, which I think circumscribes the whole of the West Midlands, doesn't it? It's one of those things that we all use as that public mask, don't we? For a lot of things.
Kit de Waal
I went to a Penguin thing, a Penguin do in London once. And I was speaking to this girl, and I said something about Birmingham and she said ‘I’m from Nuneaton’, and I felt like saying you’re not. That is not a Nuneaton accent. Well, there's Nuneaton and there's the Nuneaton countryside, I suppose. But I can remember thinking either you've got rid of it, as many of us do, and many people do to get on or, you know, you're from a sort of gentrified area of Nuneaton, but there was no Nuneaton there. Which brings me neatly onto snobbery in publishing. So, do you think there is a place in the publishing world for this? I read a lot around it, you know, coming up for this interview, and so many people have been councelled out of it by editors and publishers, like don't do that because people don't like it. People won't read it. Have you come across that? Do you think there is that issue in the publishing world?
Lisa Blower
I often look at it from the point of view that if you look at Scottish, Welsh, Irish literature, they are incredibly kind aren't they to their parts, to their accents, to their dialect? It's almost part and parcel I mean, look at Trainspotting, look at what a success it was, but you start to use the many dialects, you know, there's multiple dialects that we have across England, you know, for want of a better phrase with it. And rather than celebrating it, it's almost seen as a challenge, you know, don't challenge the reader too much. If the reader can't understand it, then they're going to put the book down and I don't think that is the case at all. Because I think Trainspotting proved that. I'm halfway through Shuggie Bain at the minute and its doing exactly that same thing. So, you know, I think I've been asked a lot to tone things down but I've kind of gone through that treadmill now. Probably become quite belligerent about it and thought no, this is about the story. This is the politics of place and it needs to be written like that. But you can still get into those arguments, you know, as you were talking previously, when we were having a preamble before about Mom, you know, rather than Mum. And it's exactly that same thing when you put things in the Potteries accent and people will pick it up and say, well, that should be in the in the present tense and I'm saying, well, no, that's not how it would be said. So, I'm all for trying to get that authenticity but there is still that barrier isn't there.
Kit de Waal
Yeah, totally, by the gatekeepers who, let's be honest, perceive that they don't have an accent. Of course, they have an accent. You know, RP is an accent. Emma, is it any different - I mean, I know it must be different in spoken word because so much of spoken word isn't supposed to be read, it's supposed to be listened to, it's supposed to be performed. Do you find there less snobbery, less exclusion around the spoken word?
Emma Purshouse
Yeah, definitely. Because you know, you're on a stage, they get what they get. And usually people are, like, really responsive and interested. And I've always found, wherever I've gone in the country, I've gone up as far North as Orkney and done Black Country stuff and people get it, they're interested. Sometimes they might just like the sound of it, and then they'll come talk to you about it. There is an interest in dialect and accent but in publishing, it seems that there is that snobbery. And I know from my own experience, I had chance to pitch having got shortlisted for the Mslexia Short Novel Prize a few years ago. And I was talking to people and it was hard, I didn't enjoy the event at all, I found it really out of my comfort zone. But afterwards, I did get chance to send some stuff to people. And they were all saying now you need to lose the dialect, you need to lose the accent stuff, forget it. And that kind of put me off, really for a bit. I mean I carried on writing my own thing, but I just thought well, it ain't gonna get out as a novel, which is kind of why I do more spoken word really.
Kit de Waal
Yes. I mean, you do get more freedom there, don't you? But I suppose one of the other issues is that whenever you speak about writing in dialect, writing in accent, its immediately equated with being working class, it's only working-class people that are going to attempt that. Obviously that isn't true, because I know that Hardy wrote, when he was writing about Dorset, he often had, I mean they were working class people, but he was writing, you know, in dialect for a lot of people. And so, do you think we come under pressure as working-class writers, sort of forced into that and people feeling like it's not authentic because we're not speaking in dialect.
Lisa Blower
My argument with it, I think more than anything, is that I think class and voice and that sense of identity that comes with how we speak, I suppose, and how we present ourselves, how we react to situations and when we're doing it through characters as well. All that slang, those colloquialisms, I think, it's all coming back to that sense of authenticity, isn't it, but at the same time, it is a kind of poetry that people are speaking. It's not necessarily a class thing. It's part of the region. That's what I'm saying, it's like that politics of place. But I suppose in a way, because a lot of slang in particular and a lot of dialect, very specifically, particularly in the Potteries because it was shouted across a very noisy factory floor, it's associated with the people that work there, which makes it a class issue. But, you know, some of the broadest Potters that I know, are perhaps not working class, you know, and I suppose that's where that snobbery comes in that because somebody speaks in the dialect, it's almost like part of that marginalisation and therefore other kind of pigeon-holing starts to come into the mix. And then it's that darker underbelly of the class system that publishing then expects, rather than what we're actually celebrating, which is based on people and good stories.
Kit de Waal
Absolutely. And it would be really nice wouldn't it, if just occasionally, we had a middle class or upper class accent rendered phonetically. I was talking about my husband, who's very upper middle class, who used to talk about going into the room. And I used to say to him that’s a double o, there’s a double o in room, and yet he had made it, because he was so posh, the rum, which is rum and coke, Bacardi rum. And I used to always comment on it because he has got an accent and if you're going to talk about rendering accent, that's an accent to render, there is an accent there. It's not only work class people that have them. One of the things I did, knowing that I was doing this, I put out a call on Twitter. I said, tell me about what you think about accents and dialects in literature. And one of the interesting ones I had was somebody who spoke about Natasha Carthew, who talks about writing in West Country dialect in her book, All Rivers Run Free. And this person said, ‘it makes it deeply moving to me because it cannot be fake and there's such a sweet relief to hearing my people on the page.’ And I think that's what it is for all of us, isn't it? You get that connection. I know that when I hear a Brummie accent, I very rarely see that Brummie accent rendered on the page, but if I'm anywhere physically, and I hear it a Brummie accent, it's a connection that you have. Do you find that Emma, you go somewhere, and you hear on the airwaves or someone in a restaurant talking, do you sort of immediately have that connection with them?
Emma Purshouse
Yeah, if you hear a bit of Black Country when you're out of place, you zoom right in it on it don’t you. Yeah, cuz it's your tribe.
Kit de Waal
Absolutely. It is your tribe. That's what's lovely about it. We’ve already covered this, but somebody else had mentioned Mom, the proof-reader had said to them, take them all out, because it's supposed to be Mum. And Liz Berry, who writes so much in dialect, she says, ‘I think when the writer knows the voice deep in their bones and has a respect for it, then it can make the writing feel beautifully vivid and alive. I'm thinking of the wonderful poems of Kathleen Jamie, Malika Booker, Katrina Porteous and Kei Miller. Do you know any of that work Lisa?
Lisa Blower
Oh, yes, I do. And I mean, I suppose in a way it comes back to what I was once told that, you know, accent and dialect was far more palatable in a work of short fiction than it was for a whole novel. And occasionally having that in the back of my mind, you know, when I am writing. But then it's the same with a work of poetry, because you're playing with language, because you're playing with rhythm and syntax and those kind of lexical organisations, it's almost something that's much more acceptable. But to put it in a work of prose, where the reader is not necessarily looking at the accent or that dialect use for the image that it represents, it's part of a voice, it’s part of a character, it’s part of a place. For some reason, I don't know what it is, but it just seems to make it a little bit more of a challenge, or that level of interpretation is required. Whereas in a poem, you know, as you were kind of saying Emma, when you're performing it - you have that wonderful poem about people with allotments giving you courgettes – and the reason that poem works so brilliantly is because you deliver it in a black country accent. It just has that humour, it lifts it, it gives it that different dimension. So yeah, I think it's a wonderful thing to do.
Kit de Waal
And Frank Cottrell Boyce mentions Liz Berry’s, he calls it wondrous and beautiful phrase, ‘wench you’m the colour of our town.’ And I remember the first time I heard Liz Berry read a poem, and I'd never heard anyone read in the Black Country accent before. And I mean, just because you've got more consonants, you know, more beats on the word and so you really can play with it, make it so beautiful. But I think for a lot of us, it's drilled out of us at school. It's not allowed, you know, that there is a way of pronouncing things and there's a way not to pronounce things. Did you have any of this sort of smacked out of you at school, either of you?
Lisa Blower
Well, I did, because I spent the first half of my childhood in Stoke on Trent and then, as I say, we emigrated to Shrewsbury and had certain instances where, you know, Mums used to tell kids to stay away from me and my sister because they thought we were Scousers - sorry to any Liverpudlians. But I mean, it is that thing, isn't it, when you move to somewhere else and you know, people can hear you dropping your vowels or not being as PC, or using words that people aren't familiar with. I always remember my mom saying something to a friend of mine, ‘what you firking in the bin for?’ And they looked as if she, you know, had sworn at them. And you do, I think, as you go through school, the education system starts kind of discouraging, don't they a little bit, and the other thing I suppose as well is that they're not reading anything on the curriculum that actually represents the language that they speak. I mean, if you look at the curriculum now it's, well, that's a completely different conversation. But I mean, you know, it's not representing multiple voices, certainly not in those kind of contexts.
Emma Purshouse
It’s a shame that it doesn't. When I do stuff in community venues…I was working with a girl, I think she was dyslexic, she could barely write, but I finally got her to do some poetry and played a bit of Liz Berry to her and her face just went…she’s speaking like me! And they've made a film of her. And then she started writing, because she didn't bother about how it sounded and I think it's important, I think should be on the flipping curriculum.
Kit de Waal
Absolutely, it should. I'm going to read, I was going to save it to the end, but it fits in so well here. James Kelman said, ‘my culture and my language have the right to exist and no one has the authority to dismiss that.’ And it's very much about respect, isn't it? For people's experiences, and for the richness of people's experience and the richness of a culture because it is a culture, it is, you know, it's a culture, and it's a language and, you know, you mentioned before that Scotland and Ireland do it so bloody well. Why do they do it so well? How is it that that's acceptable? And then you come down to England, or you come across to England, and it's not acceptable. And yet, I know that some people have spoken about, when you're writing in an accent phonetically, you’re spelling words phonetically, it can detract too much from the story, so that you're spending your time working out what people are saying, and it's pulling you out of narrative. And someone on Twitter said writing ‘accent is walking a tightrope between authenticity, and accessibility.’ What do you think about that, walking that tightrope?
Lisa Blower
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's like what I've said before, don't challenge your reader too much, I suppose, because they want to still be engaged. And as soon as they start feeling that they've got to work hard to understand it, it's this kind of distraction and this detractor, when actually, it's at the heart of story. It's the heart of the characters. But yes, you're absolutely right. And I think the way that I manage it, is that I will include it in the dialogue, or if I'm working in a first person, like I am with Pondweed, I can use it almost anecdotally, in general, in the way that Ginny story tells, because that's what she's doing, she's storytelling all the time, she's kind of going over her past in that kind of ontology kind of way, in order to move forward. But then using other parts of that narrative body, where that accent isn't as prevalent, but it's very much shifting. It's about shifting, plot shaping the story so I know that I can still maintain that reader engagement. So, I am very, very aware of its pitfalls. And I think I'm aware of them through trial and error, and having, you know, a lot of knock backs from publishers as well because of it. So, learning to walk that tightrope, but at the same time, you know, still being very flat footed on that tightrope.
Emma Purshouse
I think that, for me, having Nancy be broad, but in the third person narration, it comes into it because it's me writing it, but not over the top on that. And then the younger characters aren't as broad, but I was trying to represent our language and dialect changes and shifts anyway. So, I was doing a lot of messing about without thinking about how people sounded from different generations. So, I think the broader bits, it’s not the whole novel that’s that. So, I think that's how I walked the tightrope on it, really.
Kit de Waal
And on that point, I think we have to leave it there. I’d just like to say, such a great conversation. I never get tired of hearing you two speak, reading your work and most importantly, authentic voices. I think may we have many, many more of them. And I hope this session has inspired anyone that's listening who's thinking about writing in dialect to have a go and to be true to who they are. And absolutely their work. Emma, anything else you'd like to say to your many fans that are here?
Emma Purshouse
Not really, thanks very much for coming along.
Kit de Waal
Lisa, any final words?
Lisa Blower
As they say in Stoke ta duck! Ta-ra.
Kit de Waal
Absolutely. That's a very Brummie thing. Well, thank you, everybody that's come along this evening. And thank you, everybody that's sent us a question. And we hope we've answered the questions and given everybody something to think about and also something to celebrate. Thank you all very much.
Outro
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