A real treat in store today, and my thanks to William Fiennes as he settles down in the virtual armchair, and I suggest you might want to settle down too with a nice cup of coffee and a pile of biscuits to just enjoy this and be ready for a great reading list at the end. (The Escher print, by the way, was my bookmark whilst reading The Snow Geese.)
William, a very warm welcome to the virtual armchair and now that I've read both The Music Room and The Snow Geese I
feel as if I have journeyed with you through two very important times
in your life. I wonder if you could talk us through where the books
came from, what compelled you to write them ...in fact can you tell us
everything as usual, you know us here.
I don't know if I'd have written The Snow Geese
if I hadn't fallen ill. I'd had Crohn's Disease since I was eighteen or
nineteen, when I spent a year teaching in the north-east of Brazil, and
the symptoms had flared and receded in phases all through my time at
university. And things got pretty bad again in my mid-twenties, when I
was studying as a postgraduate at Oxford, doing an M.Phil and then
starting a D.Phil, my head full of English sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century literature. But then came hospital, surgery,
complications, and a long convalescent period at home, at the house I'd
grown up in, a place I loved above all others, where my sense of
belonging was unambiguous.
So I thought a lot in those days about the
idea of home, the idea of return, the power of that longing to find our place in the world, to belong in
where we are, or in what we do, or what we love. And I thought about
how our longing for the familiar, the known, exists alongside our
appetite for the new, the undiscovered, and how we all have to
negotiate a way through those contrary impulses.
At the same time, I
was getting more and more excited about natural history.
I'd always
been an outdoorsy person, a walker, but now I wanted to know the names
of things - birds, trees, plants - and I was reading lots of
books about evolution and ecology, books by Richard Dawkins, Matt
Ridley, Richard Fortey, Jonathan Weiner, Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard.
And sitting outside our house each evening, watching the swifts scream
overhead on their exhilarating vespers flights. And dreaming of a
return to health, independence, freedom of movement.
And then coming
across Paul Gallico's The Snow Goose, which got me curious
about geese, and imagining a journey, an adventure, a quest...
So now I
can see how the book was born out of the confluence of several
different streams of thought and experience - home, illness, recovery,
poems, nature, science, love of language, and a great longing to drink
down the world in gulps after such a period of deprivation. But it was
only really when I started writing that I began to think I'd found a
form in which to convey such ideas - a sort of poetic form, in which the images would do most of the talking...

I don't need to tell you, Lynne, that it took me a long time to get from
The Snow Geese to
The Music Room...
That gap wasn't for want of trying. I started about three other books -
novels - but gave them up, despairing. I don't mean to sound grandiose,
but to me there was a sense of rightness about
The Snow Geese,
as if there'd been a hole in the universe the exact size of that book,
waiting to be filled. Perhaps many writers feel that about their first
book, I don't know. But nothing I tried afterwards had anything like
that feeling of necessity. They say that everybody has one book in
them, and I thought that maybe
The Snow Geese was mine; I
started thinking about alternative careers, and even applied for a
couple of proper jobs...
What was I thinking?!
I was a bit lost,
really. Then I suppose I recognised that the problem with those
abandoned books was that I didn't really care enough: nothing
was at stake; nothing seemed to matter. Of course, this may just have
been a failure of imagination on my part... But I wanted to write out
of strong feeling. So I asked myself what I did care about. And
immediately that took me to my

brother Richard, and the way my parents
had looked after him, and the strange magical scenes of my childhood...
I didn't think I was writing anything like a "family history" or
"memoir" - it felt much closer to a poem, or a song, or a novel in
which everything happened to be true, and which also happened to
introduce you to the history of neuroscience, and the principles behind
our understanding of the brain... As with The Snow Geese, I didn't really think about the question of genre. I just wanted each book to be as perfectly itself
as it could be. And again I hoped that the images would do the talking
- that the right images would have more power than any amount of
explanation or commentary. At first it came in a bit of rush, but then
I got all knotted-up with fears - that it was too tender, too personal;
or that nobody would be interested; or that it was really embarrassing
to admit we lived in such a big house... And of course I worried that
it might be painful for my family to relive some of those moments, even
though I was writing from love, and, despite everything, in
celebration. But as I went on, I began to realise that I wasn't just
writing about Richard, or about our particular experience. The moated
island was a microcosm, a little world, in which love and beauty and
wonder coexisted with difficulty and violence and loss. So there was a
vision of life, inside that ring of water. And at the heart of it was care
- of parents for their children; of people for the places they live in.
So my desire to sing a little bit about my brother led into these wider
currents...
We
love to know about a writer's writing day because we're completely
inquisitive here too so can you tell us about that and what the process
involves for you?
Well,
I wish I could say that I was supremely disciplined and single-minded
about the whole thing. I know that I've been most productive, and had
my best periods with both books, when I've settled into quite strict
routines, the structure of one day identical to the one before...
Ideally I want to have the same breakfast, the same lunch every day; I
want to work all morning; in the afternoon I want to walk or swim; I
want to have tea and cake, and then I want to work again as it gets
dark... I've had periods like that, and they've been really exciting
and fulfilling. But too often my life's been too unsettled, or I've
been too ready to prevaricate and dither, or I've been too frightened
of the empty page, or simply too lazy to pitch myself into that
fruitful pattern... Both my books have involved a lot of time in
libraries, learning about ornithology or the history of nostalgia or
neuroscience or epilepsy, and over the last ten years I've spent months
in the Bodleian in Oxford, or the British Library, the London Library,
the Wellcome Institute, or the neurology library in Queen's Square,
following some thread of curiosity that seems part of the book's larger
inquiry... I dream of having my own study, and one day I'd like to turn
the attic of my small house into the perfect writer's room (the kind
they feature in the Review section of The Guardian on
Saturdays...), but for now I have to make do with the kitchen table, or
desks in those libraries if I'm getting cabin fever... And once I get
into a piece of writing I can sit hunched over my computer for hours,
nothing moving but my hands on the keyboard, and I end up with all
sorts of aches in my shoulders and down my legs, and because I sit so
still I get really cold, and in my dream attic study I'm going to have
some kind of brilliant high-tech underfloor heating... I always have a
notebook on the go - not quite a diary or journal or commonplace book
or image-cache but a mixture of all those things - but otherwise I tend
to write directly onto the laptop, in part because most of my writing
is rewriting: I go over things again and again; I love what
Tobias Wolff calls "living at the level of the sentence" - the whole
business of tweaking, planing, whittling and rejigging until the rhythm
of the phrase, paragraph, passage or chapter sounds satisfying and
somehow inevitable to the inner ear... And then I give about two days a
week to teaching, and time to First Story, and I listen to lots of
music and fantasize about being a musician, and I go for lots of walks,
and I watch a lot of films, and (don't tell anyone) I really like TV,
and then of course I want to read good books, and all of this is more
of a disruption to that ideal writing day... But I think some of this
belongs to the next question...
I'm
now adding an extra degree of inquisition because I think we'd like to
know what writers do when they don't write, what interests you and
fills your non-writing days?
For
a while now I've been Writer-in-Residence at the American School in
London: I teach there every Tuesday afternoon. And I'm Director of the
charity First Story (
www.firststory.co.uk),
which I set up with a teacher called Katie Waldegrave in 2007. Katie
was teaching at Cranford Community College in Hounslow, and when she
heard about my job at ASL she invited me to come to Cranford to do a
similar thing. I started visiting the school every Wednesday afternoon,
running a creative-writing class for about fourteen sixth-formers. I
enjoyed it so much, and the students seemed to get so much out of it -
not just in terms of their literacy skills, but also their self-esteem
and self-confidence - that Katie and I thought that we should try and
spread the idea to other schools.
We focus on "challenging" secondary
schools - schools with at least 30% of students eligible for free
school meals, and/or less than 25% getting five A-C grades at GCSE -
and this year First Story has arranged and paid for fourteen writers to
work as writers-in-residence in fourteen different schools in London
and Oxford. The student writers give readings of their stories and
poems, and at the end of the year we help them publish their work in
anthologies - proper books that they can give to their friends and
families, and that the students and their schools can be proud of. I
used to do quite a lot of journalism - mostly book reviews and travel
pieces - but for the last few years that other portion of my working
life has been almost entirely taken up with school things.
Teaching
full-time would knock me out, but I find the amount I do very
rewarding. And I suppose it answers to some appetite in me to be doing
something alongside writing, and to be working with other people, getting out of the house, engaging with the world. A sort of counterpose, as a yoga teacher might say, to writing's necessary inwardness and solitude. I'm remembering that passage in
The Music Room where
I talk about the rooks and the herons that haunt the moat, and how they
seem to suggest two different modes of being - the rooks talkative and
gregarious, the heron solitary and contemplative. I've always wanted to
have room in my life for both those birds.
Who must we read? Which authors and books would you urge us not to miss?It's
a wonderful question to be asked, because you know it's been asked out
of love for something and you can answer it out of love for the same
thing... Chekhov's stories are a sort of holy book for me. Try the
recent OUP selection called About Love, edited and translated by Rosamund Bartlett, or Granta's The Essential Tales of Chekhov, selected and introduced by Richard Ford. And Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. And War and Peace:
I used a bread-knife to slice the Penguin Classics paperback into four
sections and then it was much less intimidating... Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March. Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March. George Eliot's Middlemarch. I go back to all of these. The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard. Desperate Characters by Paula Fox. Cloudstreet by Tim Winton. Les Murray's verse novel, Fredy Neptune. Lorrie Moore's stories. Seamus Heaney's poems and essays and the thrilling autobiography-in-conversations called Stepping Stones. The Iliad and The Odyssey
in the translations by Robert Fagles. John Cheever's stories,
especially "Goodbye, My Brother" and "Torch Song" and "The Swimmer" and
"A Vision of the World", and his extraordinary Journals... Poems by Ted Hughes, Paul Farley, Don Paterson... Cosmicomics and The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino. The Sportswriter and Independence Day by Richard Ford. The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. Primo Levi. Tobias Wolff. James Salter's Burning the Days. John Updike's Rabbit novels, with Nicholson Baker's U & I as a spritzy chaser. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. Edward Hoagland's essays. Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter. Moby-Dick - one of the books that made me want to be a writer. Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.
And not forgetting the wonderful essays by Joseph Mitchell, hard to get
hold of in the UK, but collected in a Vintage (US) paperback called Up in the Old Hotel.
He is one of my heroes. Oh dear - I know that as soon as I dispatch
this list to you I'll think of a dozen other things I should have added
to it. But I hope this will do for starters...
You said a book every seven years...can we know, will I really be sixty (and a bit...) before the next one?

Did
I really say that? Perhaps it was just a way of protecting myself... I
do remember saying, at Dartington, that I'd learned I wasn't exactly
Barbara Cartland... But I do hope it won't be as long as seven years...
Because although I find the task of writing quite hard (run through
with fear and anxiety, so that the whole enterprise can feel at times
little more than an arena for self-criticism, etc) I really like the having written - I mean, I'm glad that
those two books exist; I love feeling the miraculous leap of images
from mind to mind that books make possible... Oh but I shouldn't
pretend I don't relish moments in the actual writing, when some figure
of comparison flies in out of nowhere, and the right combination of
words makes both the language and the thing it's describing new
somehow... And something to do with salvaging and consecration... But
one of my problems is that I'm not very good at making things up; I'm
not a natural yarn-spinner; I don't have a story-tap I can turn on and
off at will - so instead I seem to have to wait for a book to float up
in the sort of confluence of streams I was talking about earlier...
Right now I do have an idea, a project, but already I'm aware that it's
unlikely I'll be able to write something as whole-hearted - as Rich
- as
The Music Room. Or
The Snow Geese, for that matter. So it'll just have to be different. And actually I'm quite looking forward to finding out how it's going to be different...
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