This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The Leech House’ by Rhiannon Hooson from her forthcoming collection Goliat.
Goliat is the second collection by Rhiannon Hooson, a follow-up to her Wales Book of the Year nominated debut, The Other City. An intelligent and beautiful book, Goliat offers absorbing stories of a precarious world on the brink of climate emergency. Employing startling imagery and a deep sense of history, these poems explore the irreplaceable beauty of a wild world, and the terrible damage that humans might do to each other and the earth.
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Join us at 7:30pm at Chapter in Cardiff on National Poetry Day Thursday 6th October to see Rhiannon launch Goliat at Seren First Thursday alongside Hilary Llewellyn-Williams. If you can’t join us in person, we’re also streaming via Facebook live. Find the details on our website.
To celebrate publication of her new short story collection Scar Tissue, we interviewed Clare Morgan about her inspiration, writing process and work teaching creative writing.
Scar Tissue is the enigmatic new collection of short stories by Clare Morgan, a follow up to her newly reprinted collection An Affair of the Heart. As we travel from Wales and the Marches to places as far away as India, Paris, New England, Scandinavia and Spain, these lyrical, evocative and searching stories unflinchingly explore the darker and more challenging aspects of emotional, sexual and familial relationships, while simultaneously celebrating the joys of being alive in an unfathomable world.
You founded Oxford University’s creative writing programme and are director of the course. Before we discuss your new book, tell us more about the connection between being a writer and teaching creative writing. How do they inform one another? Do you have any advice for someone thinking of studying creative writing?
I came to teaching creative writing rather by accident. I find that working with eager and able writers who are keen to explore and really take their work forward is stimulating and enriching. Our students come from a rich and diverse range of backgrounds and locations around the world, and the mix of voices and approaches this offers is unparalleled in helping to hone any writer’s ear and method. Working with other writers provides a community of comrades with a shared purpose. Addressing the challenges they face helps a writer to refresh and reinvigorate her own approaches. As to advice: I’d say, look around carefully at what’s on offer; think very carefully about why you want to study creative writing in a formal setting. It’s not right for everyone, but can – in the right circumstances – be a life-changing experience that you’ll continue to treasure, whether you achieve significant publication or not.
Scar Tissue is separated into five distinct sections: Space; Home; Away; Nowhere; and Somewhere. What was the reason behind structuring the book in this way and what do each of these headings imply within the context of the book?
The stories fell naturally into these divisions. The first story – ‘Breathing on the Moon’ uses the concept of space and space travel as a metaphor for life experiences. The ‘Home’ section focuses on stories set in the Welsh Marches – a very distinct borderland between countries and cultures.. ‘Away’ places its characters in various locations around the world – the U.S, India, France – and explores the search for some kind of belonging. ‘Nowhere’ equally uses foreign settings (Scandinavia, Spain, a transatlantic flight from Washington), to consider lives in motion between different ways of being; while the final section, ‘Somewhere’, comes to rest in a medieval farmhouse in Snowdonia, where past lives co-exist and enrich the present, posing more questions than can ever be answered, and disturbing the veil between ‘then’ and ‘now’. Like scar tissue in the flesh, the collection as a whole looks at where things divided and where – and if – they have grown back together. It looks at what is and what might have been.
There is a strong sense of place in the stories in Scar Tissue. What does the concept of ‘place’ mean to you and how does it influence your writing?
Place is fundamental to who and what I am.It was a defining feature as I grew up in the Welsh countryside (rural Monmouthshire) and remains so. My paternal forebears were from Cardiganshire and Aberdare. My maternal family from the Marches – Pembridge Castle, Shobden, Symond’s Yat, Monmouth. Place to me is about belonging, or the absence of belonging. It has always been interlinked with history and time, and family, in complex ways.
You write often of relationships and their complexities. What draws you to this subject and how does it relate to other themes in your work?
Relationships are fundamental to who we are and how we survive in the world. I believe they are infinitely complex and impossible ever to understand fully. The affections co-exist very often with their opposite. Goodness and morality in all of us are countered by darker actions and instincts. My characters enact these endless oppositions and counter-tows, as they are buffeted by the equally complex and conflicting tides of life and circumstance. I think short stories have always explored these aspects of being human, from de Maupassant onwards through Raymond Carver and to George Saunders today.
You often switch between male and female narrators in your work, and many of the stories in Scar Tissue are written in the third person. How do you approach characterisation and narrative voice in your stories?
The stories speak to me in terms of who their central character is, and this influences the voice in terms of gender, and in terms of first, third or second person narration. I’ve always been comfortable writing from a male character. It just depends on who the story emanates from, and who I see and hear in my head. I often approach stories quite obliquely, and the third person allows plenty of room for manoeuvre in moving indirectly from the start point to the crux of the story.
The stories in Scar Tissue and your previous collection An Affair of the Heart are set in a wide range of geographical locations, although the characters in these stories aren’t always from those places. What drew you to each of these locations as settings for these stories?
I’ve visited or worked in all the locations I write about. Being away from a usual environment enables a very different perspective on things in that being ‘other’ offers a detachment that fosters observation and reveals previously unrealised aspects of people and things.
In Scar Tissue American novelist Henry Miller and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche frequently appear, and elsewhere writers such as Virginia Wolf have featured in your work. How have these figures and other writers influenced your writing, and in particular the stories within Scar Tissue and An Affair of the Heart?
Nietzsche and Woolf were characters in my novel A Book For All and None and have exercised a strong influence on my writing, as characters and as thinkers. Nietzsche’s writings on time, redemption and alienation are reflected in particular in some stories in Scar Tissue, while Woolf’s approaches to writing, and her contribution to the Modernist aesthetic, resonate throughout my work. Henry Miller is a key aspect of ‘Breathing on the Moon’ the first story in Scar Tissue, where he exercises a strong influence on the life and emotional approaches of the young central character.
In the story ‘Special’ you choose to write in second person. What difference does this make to the story and why did you make this decision?
The second person allows a writer to simultaneously occupy closeness and distance of voice and perspective. This give the almost hallucinatory quality of recollection that I was seeking in ‘Special’, where a young girl is at a turning point in her life and in her family’s fortunes.
Over twenty years have passed between first publication of An Affair of the Heart and your new collection Scar Tissue. How has your writing process changed during this time?
I think a constant has been the battle to carve out time to write, or at least substantial enough blocks of time to enable the intense concentration needed for a longer work. I used to write by hand initially, always in pencil. Now I tend to type onto my laptop, although I revert to longhand if I get stuck, or am writing in the middle of the night. Composing on my laptop still involves multiple drafts and sub-drafts (just as by hand) and I usually work with many windows open simultaneously, mimicking the pages of a A4 ruled writing book.
The last piece in Scar Tissue brings us inside your own home. What is the significance of ending the collection with this piece?
The medieval farmhouse in Gwynedd where the last piece is set does offer a kind of permanence to set against the transient and fast-paced aspects of contemporary existence. Time appears to operate differently and there is a rootedness that doesn’t seem available in more recent settings. There’s a silence, too, through which it appears you can ‘hear’ the past and perhaps feel a connection to it that isn’t obvious elsewhere. It’s an illusion, no doubt, but perhaps a comforting one, and that has allowed me to suggest a kind of concreteness through being ‘Somewhere’ as opposed to ‘Nowhere’.
This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Fish. Oh. Fish’ by Judy Brown from her forthcoming collection Lairs.
Lairs brings together something primal and secret – the lair as haven for a wild or feral animal – with the poem framed as a mathematical equation. In these terms, the ‘lair’ is a kind of nest, a beautiful accumulation of dense detail. The poems are introspective, by turns mocking, fearful and analytical. Judy Brown’s use of language is innovative, while maintaining moments of vulnerability and moving self-awareness. In these exquisite poems, the lair is both the community at large and a dark and intricate interior space where something wild still survives.
This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The meaning of employable’ by Bryony Littlefair from her forthcoming debut collection Escape Room which will be published on National Poetry Day.
Escape Room is the long-awaited debut collection by Bryony Littlefair. This is a collection exploring the possibilities of freedom, goodness, meaning and connection under late capitalism. Can we escape the imperatives of money, gender and human fallibility to freely construct our own identities – should we even try This complexity is balanced with a resolute joy, humour and irony. If you’ve ever grappled with ‘a desire you could not understand / like wanting to touch dark, wet paint’, had an identity crisis at a corporate away day, or just not known what to do with your Sunday morning, the Escape Room is open for you.
This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Prayer’ by Grahame Davies from his collection Lightning Beneath the Sea.
Lightning Beneath the Seais the first collection of poems in English by Grahame Davies, featuring the work that he has honed over the years as he has read them at literary festivals, conferences and events world-wide. Well-known for his prize-winning Welsh-language poetry and fiction, and for his scholarly non-fiction, he brings a native warmth, an intimate, conversational tone, and a raised civic awareness to these poems.
This week’s Friday Poem is ‘[ search ]’ by Sammy Weaver from her pamphlet Angola, America which won this year’s Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Prize.
Angola, America, winner of the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Prize 2021, takes its name from a prison in Louisiana in the southern United Sates. In these strikingly original, thoroughly contemporary, and deeply moving poems, we are immersed in the world the inmates must endure. From the first poem, when we witness a home-made tattoo and understand that this scarring and incision is a “map in the connective tissue of pain and loss”, we are drawn into this world in a way that is carefully observed and beautifully empathetic.
This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Navigation Points’ by Emily Blewitt from her collection This Is Not A Rescue.
In This Is Not A Rescue we are introduced to a poet whose voice is fresh and striking, who writes both forcefully and tenderly about refusing to be rescued, rescuing oneself, and rescuing others. This book is about finding love and keeping it, negotiating difficult family and personal struggles, and looking at the world with a lively, intelligent and sardonic eye.
The Little Hours: New and Selected Poems is a landmark volume which collects key poems from the career of Hilary Llewellyn-Williams, one of the outstanding poets of her generation in Wales. In addition to the classic sequences ‘The Tree Calendar’ and ‘Book of Shadows’, the book also includes new work, including ‘The Little Hours’, a new sequence arranged according to the traditional monastic hours. Llewellyn-Williams is one of the earliest environmental poets; her response to nature always profound, passionate and keenly observed. The Little Hours will remind readers of her many strengths and beauties and shows new readers the breadth and talent of a writer whose eye for vivid imagery and startling detail has always astounded.
This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The Park in the Afternoon’ by Dai George from his collection Karaoke King.
Dai George’s confident second collection Karaoke King, addresses the contentious nature of the times. Always deeply thoughtful but also alternately ebullient, angry, curious, ashamed, the poet moves through urban and digital spaces feeling both uneasy and exhilarated. There is a feeling of history shifting, as a younger generation confronts its ethical obligations, its sense of complicity and disappointment. Ecological crisis hovers in the background. Karaoke King also contains numerous reflections on popular culture, culminating in ‘A History of Jamaican Music’, a sequence at the heart of the volume speaking to urgent contemporary questions of ownership and privilege, pain and celebration.
This week’s Friday Poem is taken from Witch by Damian Walford Davies. This continuous narrative poem conjures a thrilling portrait of a Suffolk village in the throes of the witchcraft hunts of the mid-seventeenth century.
With the narrative pull of a novel and the vibrancy of a play for voices, the poems in this collection are dark spells, compact and moving: seven sections, each of seven poems, each of seven couplets, are delivered by those most closely involved in the ‘making’ of a witch. The speakers authentically conjure a war-torn society in which religious paranoia amplifies local grievances to fever pitch. Damian Walford Davies’s Witch is a damning parable that chimes with the terror and anxieties of our own haunted age.
![[ search ]
In the beginning the guard’s gloved hands
pat you down, searching for weapons,
his touch is weaponized, the muted duty
of his movements smooth along each of your arms.
Soon the guard’s touch is the only touch
from another
and you think of your mother
after bath time, the harbour of her chest
against yours, the rough-love of her towelling
you dry, reaching into all the nooks
and crannies, no cabbages behind the ears
she says. And yes, I guess searching the body
is another way of saying the body is a trove
of treasure and your touch a torch.](https://serenbooks.files.wordpress.com/2022/09/search-sammy-weaver.png)
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