The Importance of Place
This is a rough written version of my talk to Swansea Writers' Circle on 1st July 2020.
Many years ago, I found a book called 'Evans Above' in a second-hand bookshop in Cardiff. I hope that you have never read it because it is terrible. It is the story of a police officer in Snowdonia and it is written by an American author who I can only assume visited Snowdonia and decided that it would be a good place to set a book. I started to wonder how many books were actually set in Wales.
You do, of course, also have Welsh characters in books written by English people. If you have ever read "Ambition" by Julie Burchill, then you know a good example of this as the main character's best friend is Welsh. We know this because every time she appears in a chapter, she says 'Bora da' [sic].
Why is this important? When I read "Tess Of the Durbevilles" I was living in southern Hampshire and I realised that I recognised the description of Winchester High Street in the final chapter and I enjoyed that recognition. As I writer, I want Welsh people to enjoy that same recognition. However, this is more than a sentimental attachment to places, I believe that it is important that we tell our stories.
The New Wales Review runs an annual competition for stories 'on a Welsh theme'. This is a good contribution to encouraging writers to tell stories of and about Wales. However, this year the winning entry went to an account of Welsh speakers ... in Japan. Why do Welsh writers feel this urge to write about countries other than our own?
"Me, I'm Like Legend, I Am" was awarded its 'Highly Commended' award at an event at the Hay Festival in 2019. Before the awards, there was an introduction from the sponsor of one of the awards. He was a former diplomat, who had spent most of his life as the UK's ambassador to Finland. He had now retired and returned to his native Wales. He noted how similar the Finns and Welsh were, especially when it came to culture. Someone once told him that they had written a story, but they were agonising about 'how Finnish' it was. He said that he thought that only the Welsh could have a similar agony. Perhaps it was something about centuries of domination by a larger neighbour, but Welsh writing seemed to come with insecurities about its own legitimacy.
I was recently asked to provide some 'local colour' to a newsletter in my workplace. I added in some of the stories I knew - Mount Everest was named after a Welshman named George Everest, who disliked the honour as he had had no role in its 'discovery' and that the greatest of all Caribbean pirates was the Welshman Barti Ddu whose crew were fearless, effective and respectful of the Sabbath, when they would refrain from piracy so that they could do Bible study. Those are just two examples, but my point is that we are important and if we do not tell these stories then we will not know that, let alone anyone else.
In 2019, I undertook a challenge to travel to somewhere that started with each of the letters of the Welsh alphabet. I managed it, but it made me think about writing a book detailing a similar 'A to Y' of Welsh places (there is no 'Z' in the Welsh alphabet, people should never make 'A to Z' lists in Wales). Years ago I wrote a blog about an area near Briton Ferry called 'The Giant's Graveyard'. I had imagined that it was a place of great mythical significance, but it turned out that this was where huge ocean liners were taken to be broken up once upon a time. If we do not preserve these stories, they could be lost.
I also believe that Wales has a high number of these stories per kilometre. It could be that England is similar, but my impression in Wales has always been that small distances make a huge difference. I once ran a youth work centre in Swansea and we had a youth worker from London visit us for a week. At the end of the week, he said to the group of young people who were there, "It's been so good to meet young people from Swansea!" One young lad shouted back, "I'm not from Swansea, I'm from Skewen!" The Englishman was confused, as most people who do not live in Swansea would probably be. We know though that Skewen to Swansea is a huge distance, psychologically if not geographically.
I mentioned that "Me, I'm Like Legend, I Am" was highly commended in th NWR awards and its back cover starts with the words, "Why is the last survivor of the apocalypse always in New York or London?" This was the original question I asked a former girlfriend of mine as we sat watching "I Am Legend" some years ago. The question is still valid and MILLIA was intended to be the first novella to set a story of the apocalypse in the Vale of Glamorgan.
Why not? For those of you who have ever travelled on the road between Cowbridge and Llantwit Major, you will recognise the description of Old Beaupre Castle in the story, but if you have never seen it, you will still understand that part of the story. This is what we need, Wales as the setting for the story but not the story. Our stories are important and so is setting them in the places that we know.
The same principle extended to my next novella, "The World's First Female Time Traveller". It is a book about time travel and it is based in Aberdare. Again, why would time travel not be about Aberdare? You can make this argument for any genre - why not a romantic comedy in Tenby, a Victorian drama in Aberystwyth and so on ... As an example, in TWFFTT, the main character moves from Aberdare to Cardiff and you see the subtle changes to her accent and her circle of friends once she is those few miles away from where she grew up and she is the only one who she knows who went to university. This is not a uniquely Welsh phenomenon, but it is unusual for it to be explained against a Welsh background.
If I had time tonight I was going to read you a couple of sections from both novellas, but I will read you one sentence from the end of a sequence of TWFFTT. Our hero, Demi-Lee, has left Aberdare to study 'Chronological Studies' at Cardiff University (the joke, of course, being that if there is one adjective that does not apply to the life of a time traveller it is 'chronological'). In the university, her PhD supervisor warns her against the temptations of time travel and the belief that you can change history. He makes her promise that she will not try to go back and stop 9/11. Demi-Lee narrates -
"I will not try to stop 9/11," I replied truthfully. I was a valleys girl. Of course I was not going to try to stop 9/11! I was going to stop Aberfan.
One of the reasons for writing this was that the week before I had been on a training course in the north-west of England. The episode of 'The Crown' which dealt with Aberfan had just been screened. Along with the praise for the episode and the shock at the tale of the events portrayed, I heard English people ask, "Did that really happen then?" We need to stop assuming that anyone will know anything about Welsh stories unless we tell them.
To conclude - what genre should you write? All genres. We have the people and the places to write about here on our doorstep and we owe it to them and to ourselves to tell those stories. We need to stop portraying excitement and drama and interest and something that only happens beyond our borders. If Welsh writers are not writing about Wales, then who else is going to do it? Americans who have taken a holiday in Snowdonia? We know that we can do better than that. We know that we must do better than that.
