Christal
Cooper
All excerpts given copyright privilege by
Jonathan Taylor and Salt Publishing.
Jonathan
Taylor’s fictional novel MELISSA:
The Musical Problem,
The Musical Mourning,
The Musical Solution,
The Musical Memoir
This
past October of 2015 Jonathan Taylor’s fiction novel Melissa was published by
SALT.
Melissa
focuses on a community called Spark Close in Stoke-on-Trent in a cul-de-sac
where all of the neighbors experience the same musical hallucination following
the death of neighbor girl Melissa Comb, age 7, who succumbs to Acute
Lymphoblastic Leukaemia. In addition, 45
individuals who are connected with the 13 families but lived distances away
also experience the musical phenomenon.
The Comb Family does not experience any
musical hallucinations – only the death of the beloved and musically inclined
Melissa Comb.
Melissa delves into the psyche of the community, the
neighborhood, and the family of Melissa – her father Harry Comb, mother Lizzie
Comb, and her older half-sister seventeen-year-old Serena, who each go through
his/her own grief in isolation – which damages the family even more.
This
is a fiction novel, but there are many elements in Jonathan Taylor’s life that
correspond with Melissa. The most
important element is that Taylor’s life just like the life of Melissa’s family
was deeply affected upon his father’s nervous breakdown when he was ten and
leading to his father’s death from dementia almost 20 years later.
Jonathan Taylor's father
“As many people have said, writing is often produced by loss, alienation, and – indeed- the breakdown of families and communities. In some ways, it’s an inadequate attempt to bridge over loss: as the critic J. Hillis Miller remarks, ‘storytelling is always after the fact, and it is always constructed over a loss.”
J. Hillis Miller
The
loss of his father and the loss of his family unit as he knew it (both due to
his father’s death) that are the driving forces that led Jonathan Taylor to
become a memoirist instead of a fantasy and science-fiction writer he craved in
his teenage years.
Father and Son
“It’d never have crossed
my mind at the time that I’d end up writing about reality.”
Six months
after this article came out – that is, over a year after the Spark Close
Phenomenon-Miss Rosa Adler happened across it, while showing her grandson and a
local historian the “dossier” (as she called her scrapbook) of cutting about
the Phenomenon which she’d collected. At
that time, she was in bed, recovering from a fall, but still wanted to talk
about the Phenomenon, the Combs, her “dossier”; and , despite pain and illness,
she sat up when she saw the column. Her
response to it, according to the local historian, was angry, impassioned: “It wasn’t a disaster,” she declared, jabbing
a bent finger at it, and finally through it, “For me, it was just horrible and
there was nothing but “makeitstopmakeitstop’ that day;’ but I know that for
others it was different. And even for
me, you know, it wasn’t a ‘disaster.’
You know, I think all of us, we made a mistake. We got it wrong. All of us on the Close, we had our own
thought about why it had happened, what the hallucination meant. Well, at least some of us had our own thought
about it. Some of us didn’t seem to think about it at all afterwards, and carried on as
if nothing – how do you say?-‘untoward’ had taken place. But I couldn’t carry on as normal. I could still hear it, the music-noise,
pianissimo-haunting me in the corner of my head. All that horrid-old-fashionedness was still
there, so I couldn’t just carry on.
“And those of us who didn’t just carry
on, we thought it meant something. We
thought it meant something about that poor girl – you know, the Fraulein. . .
Miss Melissa, who died before the screeching and music. Maybe it was a punishment for something, we
thought. Maybe we hadn’t looked after
her enough when she was with the living.
Or maybe she was such a beautiful girl, we were being told something
from ‘up high’ about her being at peace.
After all, she liked the music, and I used to hear her singing and
humming old tunes around the Close – so maybe, we thought, heaven is music for
her. Not for me: for me it is the other
place, full of trombones and fires . .
“But where was I? Ah, yes, I was talking about the poor Fr . .
. Miss Melissa, no?”
Pages 23-25.
1.
Birthdate and birthplace?
I
was born on the 5th June 1973 in Stoke-on-Trent, a provincial city in England.
2. You describe Melissa’s childhood and family
life in Melissa. Can you describe your own childhood and
family life?
Obviously,
that’s a big question, and I suppose I tackle it at length in my memoir, Take
Me Home: Parkinson’s, My Father, Myself, which was published by Granta
Books back in 2007.
I was
the third of four children – though, many years later, I discovered that my
father had had a family before us (as children, we never knew), and, by a
different reckoning, I was actually his fifth child.
Jonathan Taylor, far right, with his siblings.
As the
third or fifth child, I escaped a lot of the pressures of my older siblings,
and spent a lot of time doing what I wanted: playing, reading, computer gaming,
and so on.
Jonathan Taylor age 9
I was
always seen as the less bright one of the family; all of my siblings are
high-flying scientists, and I just wasn’t very academic for many years. So I
escaped from some of the competitiveness that siblings usually have, and just
trundled along in my own slow-learning path.
Overall,
my early childhood was quite stable, really: I loved home life (and hence often
resented school), and my parents were very caring. I had no idea that anything
could be different, or that anything would ever change.
But as
I say in the memoir, these memories are quite distant for me precisely because
I was a younger child: the memories of a stable family life, prior to my
father’s retirement and illness, are a long time ago, almost mythically so, in
my mind. No doubt that’s the case for a lot of people, to a lesser or greater
extent.
3. What is your first memory of music?
Music
was always part of my life, as it is for most children. In many ways, I think music in the broadest
sense (and, of course, other art forms) are
life, are what it means to be human.
And the music I was exposed to as a child was very eclectic: my mother listened
to Brahms, my father anything from Beethoven to Glenn Miller, my elder siblings
1970s and 1980s rock and pop, my younger sister boy bands.
Brahms
Ludwig Van Beethoven
Glenn Miller
I
think that kind of eclecticism is very healthy, and also fascinating: some of
the modern and contemporary musicians and composers I enjoy the most mix genres
and forms in fascinating ways: George Gershwin, Igor Stravinsky, Alfred
Schnittke, for example, all do this, as do, on the other hand, many rock and
pop bands – like Queen and the Beatles, for instance.
George Gershwin
Igor Stravinsky
Alfred Schnittke
Queen
The Beatles
The
first LP I ever bought was a second-hand recording of Tchaikovksy’s Nutcracker,
when I was probably about nine years old. I didn’t find classical music any
more “difficult” than pop music at the time – and still don’t think it is. I
also had two very rebellious, teenage siblings, who listened to (what was then)
cutting edge pop and rock music.
As a
pre-teen, I came to the paradoxical conclusion that the biggest rebellion of
all was rebelling against rebellion: to rebel against their rebellious forms of
music, and get into classical music. It made sense at the time.
4. What is your first memory of literature?
As a
kid, I loved books, but it took me a long while to learn to read. I was – and
still am – a very slow learner. As a
teenager, I mainly read science fiction and fantasy – and, for many years, that
was what I wanted to write. I’d have laughed at anyone who suggested that I’d
gone on to write pseudo-realist fiction and non-fiction about my own
experiences and about Stoke-on-Trent (which I hated at the time). It would have
seemed mad to me to think that my own life, and my family, might make good
material for writing.
Jonathan Taylor (far right in orange t-shirt) with parents and siblings.
So as
a teenager, I devoured Tolkien, Asimov, Aldiss and others – and still love them
now.
Tolkien
Asimov
Aldiss
Then,
at about fifteen, I was introduced to Dickens’s Great Expectations –
which, as I say, was probably one of the first “classics” I ever read. And I
instantly loved it – couldn’t put it down. To be honest, I thought it was as
weird and wonderful as fantasy – and demonstrated to me, even at that age, how
reality and fantasy aren’t necessarily separate, but overlap in many and
various ways.
Charles Dickens
A year
or so later, I discovered another “literary” author who I loved: the
late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century writer Arnold Bennett. He came from
Stoke-on-Trent, and wrote about it in his novels – and, again, it showed me how
a place which seemed (at the time) very grim, a place I wanted to escape from,
a place I took for granted, might also be a wonderful place for fiction; that
sometimes the best stories arise in the most unexpected places.
Arnold Bennett
What
Bennett wrote about – especially in his wonderful novel Clayhanger – sounded a
bit like my life, and it had never struck me before that powerful storytelling
might arise from my own life and context.
5. Education History?
I
obtained my B.A. and M.A. in English from Warwick University (in 1995 and 1997
respectively) in the U.K., and my Ph.D in English at Loughborough University,
where I was Lecturer in English, specialising in nineteenth-century literature
and Creative Writing, until 2007.
6. Career History?
At
Loughborough University, I was co-founder and director of the M.A. and Ph.D
programmes in Creative Writing.
From
2007 to March 2014, I was Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at De Montfort
University, where I helped to set up and taught on the B.A. joint honours programme
in Creative Writing.
Jonathan Taylor at De Montfort University
I’ve
taught Creative Writing and English Literature in universities for many years and
am currently Lecturer in Creative Writing in the school of English at the
University of Leicester in the U.K.
7. Writing History
I’m author of the memoir Take
Me Home: Parkinson’s, My Father, Myself
(Granta Books, 2007), which was my first creative book.
My novels are Entertaining Strangers
(Salt, 2012) – which was shortlisted for the East Midlands Book Award, and Melissa
(Salt, 2015).
My short story collection is Kontakte
and Other Stories (Roman Books, 2013 and 2014), and my poetry
collection
is Musicolepsy
(Shoestring, 2013).
I’m
also co-director of arts organisation and small publisher Crystal Clear
Creators. In this latter role, I am
general editor of Hearing Voices Magazine, and the Crystal Pamphlets series.
I’m
editor of the anthology Overheard: Stories to Read Aloud (Salt,
2012), which won the Saboteur Award for Best Short Fiction Anthology.
I
also write and publish critically and academically – in fact, I see fiction,
poetry and critical writing as a kind of continuum, rather than separate from
each other.
I
am author of two academic monographs: Mastery and Slavery in Victorian Writing
(Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003), and Science and Omniscience in
Nineteenth-Century Literature (Sussex Academic Press, hardback 2007,
paperback edition 2014).
With
Dr. Andrew Dix, I am co-editor of Figures of Heresy: Radical Theology in English and American
Writing, 1800-2000 (Sussex Academic Press, 2005).
I’m currently Series Editor for a new
series of fictional novels and short story collections called “Stretto
Fictions” from Roman Books.
8. When did you know you were a writer?
When I
was ten, my father had a nervous breakdown and retired from his job as
headmaster of a local (very tough) school.
Over the next few years, he suffered from Parkinson’s disease and
dementia, till his death in 2001.
One
evening in 2007 I realized that the moment I first decided I wanted to be a
writer coincided with my father’s retirement and the beginning of his illness.
It’s
no coincidence, therefore, in retrospect that my first book, Take Me Home: Parkinson’s, My Father, Myself (Granta Books, 2007),was a memoir about my father’s
illness. It starts with an attempt to
locate the moment that things started going wrong for him and for us as a
family.
It
strikes me forcibly that writing, at least in the West, since the early
nineteenth century, is all about fracture, alienation, distance, loss; and that
these things are (unfortunately, tragically) necessary to create any art at
all.
Hence
why I started writing when my father had a breakdown and became ill: writing is
a sign of a stable childhood being lost; hence too why there are so many
writers from my home city, Stoke-on-Trent, who leave the city, but end up
writing about it.
Stoke-On-Trent
9. The
step-by-step process of writing Melissa from the moment the idea was first
conceived in your mind until final book form?
For many years, I’d had the idea of
writing a ‘novel” which – like Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan
Lindsay – discussed a strange ‘phenomenon’ in partly non-fictional terms.
Joan Lindsay
Then one day in early 2011, I was in the
bath (where all the best ideas come) and suddenly various memories from growing
up in Stoke-on-Trent and various historical events coalesced in my mind, and
the idea of the novel struck me forcibly.
It had spread
like a mini-tornado, in a near-complete circle.
Within a minute of Melissa Comb’s death at Number 4, Paul Higgins at
Number 6, was the first to hear the screeching, followed by the unexplained
music; a minute or so later, it had spread to Numbers 8 and 10; at roughly 2:38
p.m., Miss Rosa Adler at Number 12 was afflicted by the inner-music and, at
2:39 p.m., she dialed 999; simultaneously, Dr. Williams from the end of the
cul-de-sac heard “hellish gnashing” in his head; then, between about 2:40 p.m.
and 2:45 p.m., the musical cyclone circled round to the left-hand (or south)
side of the Close, affecting in turn Rajesh Parmar at Number 9, the Shelley
sisters at Number 5, and Lelly and Davy Lawson at Number 3; and finally, the
cyclone turned the corner again, to hit the Runtills’ household, Number 2, on
the right-hand side of the Close, next door to the dead girl. Estimates vary, but the general consensus is that
the Runtills emerged from Number 2, Spark Close at approximately 2:47 p.m.
Meanwhile,
no-one at Number 4 heard anything.
Number 4 was the silent centre of the musical storm – at this point, the
still centre of the story. No one there so
much as looked out of the window, to see what was going on in the Close. All the living who were present in Melissa’s
bedroom at the time – including two Macmillan nurses, Mr. Harry Comb, Mrs.
Lizzie Comb, and Harry’s eldest daughter, seventeen-year-old Serena – have been
asked over and again whether they experienced any aural disturbances that afternoon;
and they have all repeatedly denied hearing anything. Indeed, Melissa’s half-sister Serena has gone
so far as to testify to the neurologist investigating the case that those few
minutes were, for her, the “silentest moments of my whole life so far. When I remember those moments, it seems as if
we were kind of . . . sound-proofed from the world outside. The silent moments went on so long, I started
thinking silly things – like perhaps poor Mel had taken my hearing with her,
and I’d never hear anything again . . . or at least never hear anything right
again.”
Page 13-14
I knew
then I had to write it – and I wasn’t particularly happy about it, given that
I’d just finished one novel, and had no intention of writing another. I always want my present book to be my last,
believe it or not! I live on the
precipice of giving up writing, but never jump.
I knew from the start what the central image
of the book was to be, and its starting point:
one day, on a small street in Stoke-on-Trent, a young girl called
Melissa dies of Leukaemia.
At the
almost same moment, everyone on the street experiences the same musical hallucination. The novel – again, I knew this somehow from
that moment in the bath – would be about this bizarre phenomenon, and about the
aftermath, as the family at the center of it all struggles to come to terms
with their terrible loss.
Finally, one day Melissa said to her mother, “Can
I actually hear Seri playing the piano?”
And
her mother looked around, and said, “No, I don’t think you can.”
“I
don’t mean, Mother, that I’m actually
hearing things in my head like before. I
mean: please can I hear Seri actually
really play the piano?”
“Not
unless they bring a piano onto the Thomas the Tank Ward, darling.”
“I
didn’t mean that too, Mother. I
mean: I want to hear Seri on the piano
at home. And I want to check up that
she’s not actually, you know, poisoning my spideys – or that you’ve let them
all out again, Mother.”
“I
haven’t, but you can’t. You can’t go
home. You’ve got to stay in the hospital
till you’re well.”
Melissa
said, “Don’t be silly, Mother.”
And Lizzie said, “Don’t call me that.”
And
Melissa said, “What?”
And
her mother said “Silly’ or ‘Mother.’ All
me ‘Mummy’ like normal little girls.”
And
Melissa said, “But you are being
silly, Mother. They’re not actually
going to make me better. I’ve heard them
all whispery-whispering about it. And it
all hurts too much. I want to go home
and hear Seri play Sherbert on the piano.”
“You
can’t darling. And the whispers you
heard, they’re in your head. You’re
hearing things because of the drugs again.
The whispers aren’t true.”
And
Melissa said, “Silly-silly Mother.”
When
Lizzi mentioned what Melissa had said to the consultant, she was surprised to
find he agreed: “Yes Mrs. Comb. Perhaps she’s right. Why not.
Let her go home for – well, let’s say a little while.”
So
they took her home, for a few weeks . . .
Pages 69-70
Two girls at the piano 1892 by August Renoir
I wrote the first draft really quickly,
and then spent years editing it. The
whole project took me over in a way no other book ever has: I don’t really believe in things like ‘inspiration,’
but this particular book came upon me in a forceful way and I couldn’t stop
myself writing it.
The book was written as a kind of collage
of memories, events, experiences, and non-fictional accounts – and one of the
rewriting challenges was arranging this collage into a coherent narrative with
beginning, middle, and end.
10. How
long did the entire process take – from what date to what date?
I’ve never edited and redrafted a book so
much as Melissa. So I wrote the
first draft in a massive outpouring of words, all in about 2011. I was writing 1000 words almost every
evening. But once I’d got it all down
quite quickly, I then spent years rewriting, editing and particularly cutting
it down and down (from over 125,000 words to the final version which is about
70,000 words). Because it’s so different
to anything I’ve done before – and in, many ways, more experimental – I worked
really hard on making it not just experimental but also (hopefully) entertaining
as a read. So I finished editing it
shortly before it was published in 2015.
In the living room of the Comb household, these questions
were rehearsed again and again: “So,
what’s the arrangement for . . .?,” “remind me, who’s picking up cousin thinky
from Stoke station?,” “Did you manage to
check if Mark and Sparks do sandwiches with the crusts off?” – all in the same
tones of voice, Harry Comb’s monotone a living tick-list, Lizzie’s high notes
teetering on the edge of a precipice, Serena’s grumbling monosyllables never
quite answering the questions asked – and no-one every seeming to speak
directly to anyone else, conversations more like atonal counterpoint than human
interaction.
One
conversation which Harry had with himself over and over concerned who would play
music at the service. Everyone was
agreed, he said, that there had to be music – Melissa had asked for it. The organist would be there in the church;
but that wasn’t the point. There should
be a pianist, playing something Mel herself had enjoyed listening to. Who would, should be the pianist? Who?
Who?, he kept insisting, over and again.
“Who?”
was a rhetorical question, and no-one dared answer it. No-one said:
look, it was Serena who played the piano for Melissa whilst she was
alive, so it should be Serena who played for her dead. No-one answered Harry in
this way, perhaps because no-one wanted to upset Harry; or perhaps because
everyone had more important things to think about; or perhaps because everyone
knew the answer Harry was looking for, and simply couldn’t give it to him.
In
the absence of the sought-for answer, Harry eventually answered himself: he decided he would play.
Pages 71 and 72.
Young Man Playing the Piano by Gustave Caillebotte
11. Can
you describe the physical environment of where you did most of the writing for Melissa?
I’d like to be Romantic here, and paint a
picture of my writing in a falling-down shed in a meadow, surrounded by
nature. Unfortunately, that’s not true
for Melissa: I wrote most of it on a sofa in our living
room, sometimes with the TV on, sometimes off.
We have seven-year-old twins, so I have
to find corners of the day (for example, when the twins have finally gone to
bed) when I can write. I can’t be precious
about it – I have to write in the spaces and times I get the chance.
12.
What was the most compelling excerpt to write from Melissa and why?
I’ve never loved a book as much as I have
Melissa. For some reason – even though
it’s not a memoir, like my first ‘creative book’ – it means more to me
emotionally than anything else I’ve written.
Some of the reason for that are, no doubt, unconscious, But I certainly
fell in love with the four or five main characters, and especially Lizzie and
Serena Comb, who are at the centre of the storm, but overlooked by the rest of
the street.
Fury of the Kilns Stoke on Trent by Frederick J Elgland
In the street, Lizzie breathed in-out-in, and turned
right. Walking – even striding- towards
Number 10, Spark Close, she tried to keep her head up high, her back straight, her
posture correct. But she kept glancing
down at the cracks in the pavement; and in every crack, she seemed to glimpse
something she didn’t want to remember, further and further back in time . . .
. . . in the first crack, she remembered today,
the getting-on-with-it-morning, the meeting with the Head of Year, the
newspaper full of bare thighs, the argument with Harry.
In
the second crack, she remembered yesterday, and the day before that, and the
day before that, before she knew any of
this was going to happen – although maybe she’d sensed that the armchair-bound
status quo wouldn’t last forever, that something might be round the corner.
In
the third crack, she remembered Harry giving up work, Harry giving up
everything apart from his armchair and cheese and crackers.
In
the fourth crack, she glimpsed an eight-month-old darkness, and closed her
eyes.
In
the fifth, crack, she saw long strands of Melissa’s auburn hair on a pillow, on
the back of the sofa, blocking the plughole in the bathroom.
In the
sixth crack she saw Melissa catching spiders in jars with Simon and Serena.
From
the seventh crack Serena’s piano music, as she played to Melisa to calm down
her baby-screams.
From
the eight crack, rising up like steam, came a pre-=history, a rush of pre-Melissa
memories; and she felt acutely Melissa’s absence from those memories, as if she
were losing Melissa even before she was born.
Pages 206-207
Stoke-on-Trent - industrial
There are two or three chapters towards
the end which focus on Lizzie and Serena which are very important, and
represent my attempt to show truthfully what the physical experience of grief
might consist for them.
Stoke-on-Trent by Sid Kirkham
After her stepmother left, Serena half-wondered
if, mathematically speaking, the change would mean she was less lonely than
before: now there was only one, not two
people ignoring her at home. Surely,
mathematically speaking – surely in terms of the kinds of equations she studied
with Mr. Jenkins – that would mean that home life was less, not more, desolate,
than it had been. Loneliness should
obey an inverse-square law, she thought, whereby the further away people like
her stepmother and mother were, the less ignored, and therefore the less
lonely, she felt.
Page 220
13. Did
you listen to music as you wrote Melissa?
And what specific music and music performers did you listen to?
Yes!
The whole novel is structured like a piece of music (with themes and
variations), and a lot of the chapters centre on particular pieces of
music. I suppose, in many ways, I wanted
to show that the process of grief has a kind of musical structure – or, at
least, has lots of different structures, which might be analogous to lots of
different musical structures.
Franz Schubert
I believe that, when writing about music,
it’s important to understand the music, to write about it from the “inside.”
The kind of “musical fiction” that interests me most is the kind which occupies
the music, which comprehends it – which doesn’t just skim over the surface,
idealising it, romanticising it. A writer’s job, I think, is to understand what
he or she is writing about, and that includes music – not merely to talk about
his or her own response to it. For that reason, I listened very carefully to
all the pieces I refer to in Melissa hundreds of times whilst
writing it – and also studied the scores. I write music myself (well, at least
I did before the twins were born, after which something had to give!), and play
the piano very badly, and this helps at least to some extent.
Jonathan Taylor and wife Maria
Whereas
the emphasis in my first novel, Entertaining Strangers, is particularly
on modernist and contemporary music, Melissa is particularly about the
kind of music which a good pianist might play at home, or in an
everyday setting.
Two of the characters in it are pianists, so a lot of the
music I discuss, and listened to whilst writing – is nineteenth-century piano
music.
There
are three pieces, I think, which really haunt the whole novel, two of which are
piano pieces, and one of which has been arranged for the piano: Schubert’s
B-Flat Sonata (the late one, and particularly the slow movement); Schubert’s
two-handed Fantasia in F Minor (which forms, in a sense, the climax of the
novel); and Elgar’s Enigma Variations (which, in many ways, provides the model
for the whole structure of the novel, given that it is divided into variations,
rather than chapters).
Edward Elgar
Coming back from Rosa’s that evening, hoping wish-
ing she wasn’t right,
finding his daughter Serena in the sitting room,
looking up
at him slouching in, his shoulders drooping,
mouth sagging, putting her magazine down, getting up to help him, as one
might help an elderly man on a bus, tyring to
guide him to his customary armchair,
but he just shakes her off,
instead shuffling over to confront the piano, as
thought it is
an enemy,
taking down the Jasperware pot on top, lifting
the lid,
taking out the piano key, replacing the lid with
a scraping
sound, tossing the Jasperware pot away, so it smashes behind
him, unlocking and opening the fallboard with a
creak, sitting down on the stool, and placing his hand son the key, which
aren’t cold as he’d expected, but the same
temperature as his fingers,
resting there, right thumb on middle-C up to
small right
finger on G, left thumb on middle-C down to small
left
finger on F, doing nothing, merely touching,
ever-so-lightly,
keys hardly touched since the funeral,
Pages 243-244
14.
Were there any books or writers that influenced your writing of Melissa?
In some ways, I think you’re influenced
by everything you’ve ever read – at least unconsciously. But there were some particular texts, which
influenced me in Melissa, and especially the works of the great neurologist,
Oliver Sacks.
Oliver Sacks
His wonderful book Musicophilia was a
starting point: in it, he describes many
neurological conditions associated with music – including, crucially, musical
hallucinations.
In fact, most of my books are informed by
Sacks’s work in various ways. Modern
neurology raises fascinating questions – which I think remain under-explored in
fiction – about the nature of consciousness, ‘mental’ illness and how we
experience the world. It also affects
how we as writers – must conceptualise the notion of ‘character’: in the modern
age, ‘character’ is no longer a matter just of psychology or free will, but
also a matter of neurology.
15. Can
you describe the publishing process?
I’ve now published two books, and one
edited anthology, with Salt Publishing.
They’re really supportive and helpful, and – just as importantly –
produce beautiful-looking books (books should be beautiful things in themselves!). They made lots of good suggestions about the
final version of Melissa.
Editing is so essential – and I received
excellent feedback from the publisher and from other writers I know. Finding good editors and mentors is one of
the most important things for a writer:
you need to find people who you trust, and who give you honest
feedback. I don’t believe any book is
really ever the product of just one person.
Books – to a lesser or greater extent – are always collaborative
activities.
16.
What upcoming projects are you working on now?
I’m currently working on a critical
book about the nature of laughter, and the way in which comedy and violence
overlap. The monograph concerns the
representation of laughter in literature between 1840 and 1920. I am also working towards a second poetry
collection.
All my books mix (in different ways)
comedy and tragedy, laughter and horror, humour and violence: I suppose one of the key elements of my
‘style’ is dark humour. So I’m very interested
in the relationship between these things.
I’m also interested most in writing which mixes tragedy and comedy –
because I think that’s how we experience the world. Experiences are almost never emotionally
monolithic, even in the most extreme circumstances.
17.
What is your writing routine as of now?
I don’t have one! I wish I did – but with a full-time teaching
job, seven-year-old twins and so on, I don’t get enough time to write at
all. It’s a common problem as a
writer: how do you balance the demands
the living with those of writing? The
latter usually end up losing out.
18.
Contact info?
The real tragedy, of course, happened before the
story beings – seconds before. At 2:35
p.m. on Wednesday 9th June 1999, in Number 4, Spark Close, Hanford,
Stoke-on-=Trent, Miss Melissa Comb, a seven-year-old girl, died of Acute
Lymphoblastic Leukaemia in her own bed, surrounded by family and nurses.
Page 3.
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