Author: Peter Coles

I first met John Harvey in the 1980’s when we appeared on the same poetry bill at Huddersfield Art Gallery. He was already a legend in the Northern and Midlands poetry circles as an author and publisher. Among other achievements, he co-founded the poetry journal, Slow Dancer, which published two pamphlets by Simon Armitage, The Walking Horses and Around Robinson, before Simon’s career took off.

John evolved into a world-renowned crime writer. His signature detective, Charlie Resnick, walked the streets of Nottingham, where Harvey was living at the time; the first Resnick book, Lonely Hearts, was described by The Times as one of the 100 most notable crime novels of the 20th century. John received the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger for Sustained Excellence in Crime Writing, and Resnick spun off into two BBC TV series and a stage play.

John officially retired from writing in 2021, though that didn’t stop him publishing poetry in The North and London Grip, and creating Summer Notebook, a collection of short poems largely inspired by his regular walks on Hampstead Heath.

We met in his home in Tufnell Park, where we ran through his astonishing career and discussed the life of a commercial writer.

Craig Smith: How did you become a writer?

John Harvey: Writing, in my case, had almost nothing to do with wanting to be a writer and practically nothing to do with having something to write about. After twelve years at the chalk face, I was looking for an alternative to teaching.

A friend, Laurence James, had been working as an editor, and later as an author, for the New English Library, who published pulp fiction. Lawrence was writing a series about Hells Angels but was busy on another project, so said, ‘Why don’t you have a go?’ After I’d submitted, with Laurence’s help, an outline and a sample chapter, New English Library contracted me to write 50,000 words for £200 plus royalties. Then, when I delivered the manuscript, they said ‘Give us another one,’ and offered £250. So I resigned as a teacher, thinking I could always go back if it didn’t work out.

I co-wrote several series of Westerns with Laurence and Angus Wells. We talked about the basic storyline and main characters, then we wrote alternate books. Over a period of five or six years, I wrote 12 or 13 books a year. You didn’t get paid a whole lot, so you needed to write a good number of books to get by.

I found, to my surprise, that if you sat at 10 in the morning and stayed until 3:30, you had a lot of words. In four weeks, I had 50,000 words, which was a 128-page paperback. As a beginning writer, which I still was, it was like being paid to practice, to learn how to tell a story, to keep the readers’ interest, to balance action against dialogue.

Eventually, I got a little bit restless, and the market for Westerns dried up.

It was remarkable that your first writing was paid.

If I hadn’t been paid for it, I wouldn’t have done it. I’ve always seen myself as a commercial writer. I write to make a living, except for poetry, of course.

CS: What did you know about cowboys or bikers?

JH: Cowboys were easy because the readers wanted a regurgitation of the myth you get in John Ford or John Wayne movies, rather than any serious attempt to write about what it would actually have been like. Biker books were Westerns on Harley Davidson.

CS: What did you do next?

JH: I went from pulp fiction into writing for television and radio. The first major thing I did was a television adaptation of Arnold Bennett’s Anna of the Five Towns for the BBC, which led, a few years later, to Hard Cases, a six-part series for Central Television about a group of probation officers and their clients. This was filmed on location in Nottingham, which gave me the idea of writing a police procedural in the same setting – hence Resnick.

CS: What did you know about police work back then?

JH: I wrote to the public relations department of Nottinghamshire police and said ‘I’m planning to write a novel about a Nottingham-based detective, could I talk to someone about it?’ I didn’t want to drive the streets in a police car at 1am, I wanted to know what the routines were. How many people were on duty, who came in in the morning, who made the tea?

Later, I worked with a serving police inspector in the Nottingham force, right through until Darkness, Darkness. He’d been involved in the policing of the miners’ strike, and had very ambivalent feelings about the way it was policed. Later still, I got to know a senior officer in the Met. At his suggestion, we did some joint sessions in London libraries, where he talked about crime and I talked about my books. After that, I would run stuff past him, as well as my Midlands contact. I’ve always had somebody that I could run my stuff by to make sure I got the procedures and the acronyms right.

CS: Were there writers you tried to emulate?

JH: I was influenced by a Scottish writer, William McIlvanney, who wrote three novels about a Glasgow-based policeman called Laidlaw, as well as the Martin Beck novels by the Swedish writers, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö.

There was a move towards what I hoped was a greater authenticity. It was social realism plus crime. Crime gives you the story, but the background is social realism. I was working toward a picture of Nottingham that was as accurate as possible, where the characters were as accurate as possible, and the storyline opened up things about living in that place, while providing a narrative to follow.

Instead of writing 12 books a year, I wrote one book, so I could expand those parts which I couldn’t linger over in the shorter stuff. I could spend more time on character, on describing place. I could have some kind of political attitude, if it fitted with the story. I could be more careful about language. I could do a lot more rewriting. There was no rewriting on the early stuff because there wasn’t time.

I had plenty of time to write the first Resnick novel, Lonely Hearts. I had time to revise it. I had a proper editor who went through it and told me ways in which it could be improved. I had an agent. I was operating on a wholly different level.

CS: Did you know it was going to be a series at the beginning?

I didn’t. But I had been working in series with the pulp stuff so it was no great surprise when the publisher suggested it.

My agent sent out the first 50 pages of Lonely Hearts, plus an outline, to the major mainstream publishers. They all turned it down except for Tony Lacy at Penguin, who asked to read more. It’s always amused me that, when he read the full manuscript, his comment was to the effect, ‘This is better than I’d anticipated!’ It was Tony who first asked if I saw it as part of a series. And, I said, ‘Oh, yes.’ Obviously, the idea appealed to me.

CS: When you wrote the second Resnick novel, what could you presume about its readership? Did you assume they carried over from the first novel, or was it was an entirely different audience?

JH: I’m not sure if, at that stage, I was too clear about it. It wasn’t until the third book that I realised that what readers responded to was Resnick’s character. Initially, I thought it might be an ensemble piece. But it became clear from readers’ and publishers’ responses that what drew them to the book was Resnick, rather than the subsidiary characters.

I gave Charlie one or two characteristics of my own. He loves listening to jazz so I could write about jazz. I gave him hobbies that suggested a rich inner life to stand against the grim work he does. I didn’t want him to be a grim man, living on his own, dealing with awful things. I thought, ‘Who’s gonna care? I’m not gonna care.’ There needed to be aspects of him that people could respond to in a positive way.

I gave him a Polish upbringing. I wanted him to be of the city of Nottingham but somehow not of it. I assumed his parents moved to Nottingham as refugees during the Second World War, and that he’d been brought up there but saw himself as an outsider. I wanted this insider/outsider thing. I tried to signal that by having him buy Polish gherkins from the deli stall in the market and making strange and ornate sandwiches.

It became evident that readers took those elements of the books to heart. That’s why they’re buying the books, and it’s why those books sell in series.

CS: Were you aware of the passage of time in Resnick’s life as the series went on?

JH: I regret not keeping 6”x4” cards with dates and names. It would’ve been a great help, instead of going back to the earlier books and trying to work out, ‘What was so and so’s name and when did such and such happen?’

I was constantly fudging it. ‘It was Resnick’s birthday, but he wouldn’t say which one.’ He was always older than the people he worked with, but not so old that he should retire. I think by the time of Darkness, Darkness, he was probably in his early 60’s. I should’ve been clear about that stuff but, having fudged it from the beginning, I carried on fudging.

CS: How did Resnick end up on TV?

JH: An independent company got a contract from the BBC to film the first two books, which we did on location in Nottingham. Each one appeared in three parts. It was Resnick: Lonely Hearts; Resnick: Rough Treatment.

CS: How did it feel to break a year’s work into three parts?

JH: I loved it. I’ve always loved adapting other peoples’ books for radio and television drama. Back at grammar school, we did something called parsing, which means you read an article say, in the Times, then created a 50-word summary in readable prose that picked out the salient points. That stood me in good stead when it came to adapting work from one format to another.

CS: And how did Resnick become a play?

JH: Giles Croft commissioned me to dramatise one of the Resnick novels for the stage and I chose Darkness, Darkness, which I thought would be the most interesting because of the way it dealt with the miners’ strike. Giles suggested Jack McNamara as a potential director. Jack worked with me from an early stage, workshopping the script with mostly local actors before the main casting. It was really hard listening to my scenes for the first time, realising very quickly which bits did not working. Jack was basically saying to them ‘What’s wrong with this scene, what are the weaknesses?’ And I was saying ‘There aren’t any fucking weaknesses, talk about the strengths, for God’s Sake.’ We argued quite heatedly at times but, in the end, I was only too happy to accept his ideas. Well, most of them.

One thing I realised I’d been missing as a writer was being in an audience with several hundred people, most of whom responded in a positive way, not just to stuff I’d written but to stuff the director and I went through in rehearsal to figure out how to make work. If I had to choose one single favourite thing from all the writing I’ve done, working on Darkness, Darkness and seeing it evolve for the theatre would be it.

CS: How did Slow Dancer come about?

JH: I met an American called Alan Brooks on an Arvon Foundation poetry course. We had similar ideas about poetry. He was living in North London, quite close to me. Our work was getting turned down elsewhere or was being published in badly mimeographed magazines, so we thought ‘Bugger this, we’ll start a magazine of our own’.

We created a nicely produced magazine containing our work and the work of other people we liked. Alan had a friend, David Kresh, who ran the small press poetry section of the Library of Congress, who suggested American writers to publish in our little English magazine that few people in the States would have heard of. And, although I applied for grants, my writing subsidised the poetry.

CS: So this was while you were writing pulp fiction?

JH: It began when I was writing pulp fiction, then continued into Resnick.

CS: When you write fiction, do you have a pen and paper at your side, ready for the next poem?

JH: I wouldn’t say one thing fed off the other. Poems occurred to me when I wasn’t thinking about writing, late at night or listening to music or out walking.

CS: Did your prose benefit from your poetry?

JH: I thought more about my choice of words. What poetry teaches you is to be selective and precise. It encouraged me to use only one adjective instead of three.

CS: How did you spot Simon Armitage so early in his career?

JH: What impressed me, as much as the actual writing, was Simon’s commitment and self-assurance. There I was, thinking I was doing him a favour by asking if we could publish one of his poems in Slow Dancer, and he’d already had it accepted by the Times Literary Supplement.

CS: What does success look like for you?

JH: Early on, it was ‘Are they going to commission three books in the series? Can we get another series going?’ I was working on four or five Western series at a time for different publishers, because working on one Western series with another writer didn’t pay enough to live on. So success, initially, was placing books with a publisher, getting them written, seeing the artwork: the same thing that goes on with any book, the excitement of seeing the finished book. Those books never got reviewed so it was a matter of self-indulgent enjoyment. The fact that publishers wanted them was how we made our living.

When I started writing for radio and television, I got more concerned about what people said and what people thought, about what the reviews said.

With television and radio, the enjoyment was watching or listening to the finished thing. Being in the studio when a radio play was being recorded was especially enjoyable, because it’s you, the producer, about three technicians and the actors. They want you there because inevitably time becomes a crucial issue. The producer’s assistant will be clocking the time and working out how much you’ve got to lose, so you’re rewriting all the way through.

CRAIG SMITH IS A POET AND NOVELIST FROM HUDDERSFIELD. HIS WRITING HAS APPEARED IN THE NORTH, BLIZZARD, AND THE INTERPRETERS’ HOUSE, AMONG OTHERS. CRAIG’S THREE PUBLICATIONS SO FAR ARE: THE POETRY COLLECTIONS, L.O.V.E. LOVE (SMITH/DOORSTOP) AND A QUICK WORD WITH A ROCK AND ROLL LATE STARTER, (RUE BELLA); AND THE NOVEL, SUPER-8 (BOYD JOHNSON). HE IS CURRENTLY WORKING TOWARD AN MA IN CREATIVE WRITING AT BIRKBECK UNIVERSITY. HE TWEETS AT @CLATTERMONGER

IMAGE: Molly Ernestine

Naomi Booth is a novelist, short story writer and academic from West Yorkshire. She is the author of two novels (Sealed and Exit Management), a novella (The Lost Art of Sinking), and an academic text (Swoon: A Poetics of Passing Out). Her short story, Sour Hall, was included in the Audible/Virago collection, Hag.

Naomi’s fiction is so beautifully written that it took me a while to spot the horror that underlies it, (even though Sealed is billed as Eco-Horror). Through her lost and drifting characters, she explores how we cope as human beings when family or community are denied us, either through personal tragedy or societal breakdown.

Our conversation trundled down numerous sidings as we discussed our shared geography of West Yorkshire and South London. And while she forensically analysed the serious business of writing fiction, we laughed a lot.

Craig Smith: Did you always write?

Naomi Booth: Yes, I did. I was susceptible to getting lost in my own stories as a young child. I had the feeling that the real world was no more real than what was happening in my imaginative world. There are a number of events in my childhood that I now find difficult to ascertain the veracity of because my mind has embellished them so extensively.  

In my 20’s, I did an MA in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of Sussex, which was when I started to think seriously that I might turn this thing I’d always loved doing into something I could produce for other people.

CS: There’s a real sense of place in your stories, a going away and a coming back.

NB: Lots of my work travels between Yorkshire and other locations, particularly London. There are well-trodden narrative paths for characters graduating from the North to the South, the coming-of-age stories that see a character leave behind what’s often characterised as insular and backwards, those stereotypes of cultural and economic deprivation in the North. I’m interested in ways you might subvert that. The Calder Valley, for instance, is a place I come back to again and again in my work. I lived in Hebden Bridge for a couple of years, and my parents now live on the moortops above Todmorden. When I was a kid from Dewsbury going to college in Huddersfield, I met a group of people who made music and danced and wrote poetry who were from the Calder Valley. It made me think of the Calder Valley as a crucible of art. I often get asked about the North and my work, and there are specific places in the North that I return to, but I’m also wary about certain constructions of the North: the Lakes and Sheffield, Newcastle and the North York Moors are wildly different places.

CS: What other northern writers do you read?

NB: I grew up with Ted Hughes and the Brontës as big literary presences in my life. There was always that sense of a landscape that I knew, that I’d walked in, having inspired literary work, and that in turn was inspiring for me. Many of my favourite contemporary writers come from the North of England, writers like Jessica Andrews, who wrote Salt Water and who works wonderful magic in getting across voice, place and character. One of my earliest loves was short fiction, and Sarah Hall made a big impact on me, especially the relationship between land and narration. I’ve recently read new work by Tom Benn and Melissa Wan that I’ve loved—and I’d recommend the recent anthology, Test Signal: New Writing from the North, for anyone who’d like to read brand new work. 

It’s been my good fortune to be published by Dead Ink, who are based in Liverpool. They’re an independent press working as part of the Northern Fiction Alliance, and publishing with them has helped me to learn more about writers and publishing in the North. These publishers are not necessarily focused on what you might first think of as ‘northern writing’. They have a global outlook. For example, People Trade Press in Leeds are the world’s leading publisher of diasporic writing from the Caribbean. Comma and Tilted Axis Press are brilliant publishers of work in translation.

CS: How do you approach dialect?

NB: I work with many students who develop writing that is true to the spoken language of particular areas, and there are lots of brilliant experiments in capturing dialect. I can think of a number of Scottish writers who do this particularly well. But capturing regional speech patterns can be tricky: English is not a phonetic language, so attempting phonetic presentation for particular characters has always seemed risky to me—the writing risks inadvertently reinforcing the idea that certain voices are the standard by which others are judged. What I tend to do is include dialect terms when a word is different, like ‘me sen’ for ‘myself’, but I don’t attempt to render accent on the page. For me, it’s about giving enough clues in the language of the kind of voice that you’re dealing with but, hopefully, without othering particular voices.

CS: Your characters walk away from community or embrace it, depending on their situation.

NB: I’m interested in where the communal fails, and in where and when characters are able to access support or communal undertaking. For me, Sealed is about the attempt to create yourself as an entirely sealed entity, using the macabre exaggeration of this particular condition, where you are literally sealed in. The final stages of the novel are about the impossibility of being able to exist as a single entity during points of crisis, of having to embrace the communal, and of that being both a possible source of horror and celebration.

I’m really interested in female relationships, particularly the way the figure of the mother is overloaded, is required to act in the way a functioning community or society might, and what happens when that isn’t possible. In my narratives, I often depict mothers who are removed or unavailable to fulfil that role for various reasons. So, what is life like with insufficient mothering? I would say that all mothering is insufficient if you haven’t got a functional social structure working around us.

CS: How do you approach research?

NB: I think of research in two stages.

The first is the idea stage, where I explore the ideas I want to bring together. Often, those present themselves to me through direct experience or through reading around certain topics. For instance, my first book, The Lost Art of Sinking, was inspired by research into the literary history of swooning, (This research became the academic text, Swoon: A Poetics of Passing Out, which was published by Manchester University Press).

There’s a secondary stage of research, where I look for the sort of detail that makes the world of the characters come to life for the reader. For Sour Hall, for instance, which tells the story of two female dairy farmers, I watched a lot of videos of cows being born, and read about milking and farming. One of the pleasures of writing, for me, is attempting to get the lexicon right, the precise details that someone would use in the world that you’re attempt to describe.

CS: At what point do you do that research?

NB: It varies from book to book. In Exit Management, I needed to learn about Hungary before drafting sections about a character who was born close to Budapest. So, in that case, there was research before I drafted, then I drafted, then I researched again. ‘Exit Management’ is a term from HR that started the idea for the book. I was thinking what a horrible euphemism ‘exit management’ is, and came up with the idea for the novel. Then I did more research into HR practices to make certain elements of the novel (hopefully) plausible. 

CS: Three of your four books use the present tense. Does present tense work well with horror?

NB: Tense is one of the final things I decide on. I’ve re-written entire novels to change the tense. Present tense is not necessarily my default. The Lost Art of Thinking started in present tense and then moved to past tense. But for horror, I think present tense has often felt like the right choice because it doesn’t give away who might survive to tell the story; it creates a sense of the end of the novel being radically uncertain.

The work I’m currently developing is mostly told in present tense but moves repeatedly into future tense. It’s actually a past tense narrative, because we know from those moves into future tense that there is a moment beyond the story being told. But it remains in present tense because there’s something about the immediacy of the experiences I’m exploring that works best in that tense. It’s a novel about obsession, and present tense is, I think, very useful for communicating experiences that are totally consuming.

CS: In Sour Hall, George pretends the boggart doesn’t exist. In Exit Management, Lauren and Callum both pretend to be something they’re not. There’s a conflict between appearance and reality in many of your stories.

NB: I’m not a natural plotter. I don’t write in a plot-driven way. I work with settings and characters and ideas. But I’m interested in the things that people conceal from each other and the things they conceal from themselves. That trajectory is in all my work: a main character or several main characters who don’t have the language to express the things that trouble them or that have harmed them. So the way that I approach plotting is often to work with what is concealed: when I’m teaching, I often find myself saying that the most interesting thing about a character will be the thing that they can’t say to themselves.

CS: But there’s a lot of hope in your stories.

NB: I hope there’s an openness in my work. I spend a lot of time editing the endings of my fiction. Because my work deals with difficult subjects, such as violence and loss, and I’m prone to pessimism, I often have to work hard to make sure my endings aren’t too hopeless. I try to find the balance between hopelessness and possibility. If you seal something off too completely, if you make something too pitiless or too desperately optimistic – first of all, I don’t think that’s true and, secondly, the ending is the place where the reader takes over, where they create a sense of what might emerge from this mess the author has presented, so you have to leave the right kind of provocation for them to take over.

CS: How do you engage with politics?

NB: Eco-politics informs a lot of what I do, grappling with how we got where we are, how we manage this collective repression that many of us – myself included – go about in our day-to-day living, as though we’re not in an emergency situation. I’m interested in animating that question of how we exist in a world that we know is full of suffering, and what kind of thinking do we do to adapt to or to challenge the world around us.  

CS: Talk me through your writing and publishing history.

NB: During my MA, I spent several years writing 2000-word short stories: for a long time, I never thought I would write anything longer than 2,000 words! But I extended my work while doing a PhD, and on the basis of my short fiction, I got an agent. The short stories were taken as an indication that I might one day work on longer form fiction.

The first thing I published was The Lost Art of Sinking, a 24,000-word novella. It was published by an independent poetry press, Penned in the Margins. Sealed was written just after, quite quickly, in about nine months, and was hardly revised. Exit Management was a much longer journey. I had a rough version that I abandoned. When I went back to it, having not read it for two or three years, I saw it with fresh eyes. I gutted it and rewrote it, and was very glad that the earlier version hadn’t ever been published. Some books take a lot longer than others to mature, and for you to be able see how to revise them.  

It’s taken me about fifteen years of writing short fiction to publish a collection of short stories. Animals At Night will publish this year. None of my original short stories have survived in their initial forms, but the ideas behind them, the very first little stories that I wrote, have evolved into the stories in this collection.

CS: Do you have a writing routine?

NB: I find that each book, along with practical constraints, dictates its own routine. I wrote Sealed in 40-minute bursts before work each morning. Early morning writing hasn’t been possible for me since I had a child, but I’m now in the fortunate situation of having windows of time to write. I teach at Durham University, and I have portions of the year where I’m able to write. Still, there are whole stretches of the year where I don’t get to write, for work and family reasons. I find it useful now to think in terms of the span of a year: what can I achieve in a year? When in the year can I work? There’s a lot of value in fallow periods, I think, when ideas can gestate, I try to take heart in that when I haven’t written for several months.

CS: What was your experience writing Sour Hall?

NB: Audible employed an eminent professor of folk law, Carolyne Larrington, to identify folk tales that were at risk of dying out, and they commissioned women authors from around the United Kingdom and Ireland to write short stories based on those tales. I was given the folktale of the boggart, which is predominantly connected to Lancashire and Yorkshire. We were given absolute freedom with regards what to do with the original source material, which in my case was a newspaper report of a farmer fleeing a boggart. Virago created the print edition, and it was great to have a publisher with a feminist history making available the work of female writers who were revitalising these folk traditions. The story was then adapted by a brilliant script-writer, Laura Kirwan-Ashman, as an audio drama, and listening to her reimagining of the work was one of the best experiences of my writing life.   

CS: What does success look like for you?

NB: It means having the chance to continue to develop my work by writing different things. The chance to learn from the thing I just published in order to develop my craft, my scope and my thinking about writing. There are similarities among the pieces I’ve written, but they’re also all quite different, so being allowed to do new things—that feels like success to me. And while I’m sure every writer wants a sizeable readership, most important to me are those experiences where you feel like you’re being read carefully, where people give your books a generous and thorough reading, through reviews, or academic work, or just in conversation.

CRAIG SMITH IS A POET AND NOVELIST FROM HUDDERSFIELD. HIS WRITING HAS APPEARED IN THE NORTH, BLIZZARD, AND THE INTERPRETERS’ HOUSE, AMONG OTHERS. CRAIG’S THREE PUBLICATIONS SO FAR ARE: THE POETRY COLLECTIONS, L.O.V.E. LOVE (SMITH/DOORSTOP) AND A QUICK WORD WITH A ROCK AND ROLL LATE STARTER, (RUE BELLA); AND THE NOVEL, SUPER-8 (BOYD JOHNSON). HE IS CURRENTLY WORKING TOWARD AN MA IN CREATIVE WRITING AT BIRKBECK UNIVERSITY. HE TWEETS AT @CLATTERMONGER

‘People go on these pilgrimages to become ‘other’ in order to become artists. I began other.’

Eileen Myles came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet. Their books include For Now, I Must Be Living Twice/new and selected poems, and Chelsea Girls. Pathetic Literature which they edited, will be out for Grove Press in November 2022. Eileen has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2021 was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters. They live in New York and Marfa, TX. 

I first met Eileen at the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2017. I was working on a queer writing project at the time and a few months after our meeting, Eileen agreed to do a short interview about their then new book Afterglow: A Dog Memoir. 

Five years after our initial meeting, it was an absolute pleasure to sit down and chat with Eileen about life, writing and their new work. 

In For Now you describe literature as a profound aspect of wasting time, which is what my writing process looks like a lot of the time. I find it difficult to get anything on the page until I have edited it in my head. Do you have a preferred writing ritual, schedule or method?

I do and I don’t. In the past it was more structured: get up, do a little reading, exercise, meditate, begin to write, and that would be the perfect version. That has worked and sometimes, if I’m at an artist colony or a very closed situation, I still do that. For a while, if I was free or found myself actually thinking about writing, I would begin then. My willingness became so tricky that if I saw the horse, I had to jump on it immediately. Lately though, I have returned to something that looks like writing as the first thing possible. It requires a little bit of caffeine, but to really not even allow the morning reading – I’ve gone through structures of getting up quite early and beginning to write before it even seems like I have a consciousness. I find that is really good, because there is actually a lot more there than I would have guessed. I do find that more than anything, consistency is the best thing. No matter when I’m writing, whether it’s first thing or later in the day, what matters is that I do it every day to stay in the world of it. I find breaks are the hardest thing; you have to become that person again.

Do you feel that your poems must be spoken/performed to be understood in the way that you intended? Does that matter or is each person’s interpretation of the words as valid?

No, it doesn’t matter to me. I mean, I think that those of us who love poetry know that you want to get the breath of the poet. If I love somebody’s work, I go out of my way to hear them because I want to put a body and a voice onto the work, but I feel like the work has to exist in both fashions – in all fashions. I think it’s so interesting that a lot of my books are now audiobooks. It’s so much fun to make an audiobook. To take something that you’ve written over a long period of time and then spend three days in the studio with somebody, reading it to them and hearing it in its entirety, it’s such a pleasure. It’s anti time in a way, because when I write a book, I do assemble it as if the person were going to read it straight through, but I know that very few do read that way. The recording is absolutely that, it is a straight through reading of it. I think that the real pleasure is understanding that your writing has become an audio file that can now be unleashed in all kinds of settings all over the world – when somebody I don’t know tells me they have been painting or creating while listening to my work, or travelling cross country while listening to my work, I feel so honoured and so delighted. As postmodern writers and artists we are doing something that’s partial. We are well aware that it is never a total work and it doesn’t fill all the pores. You’re writing in relationship to everything in the room and all the rooms you’ve been in and all the media that exists, and so to realise that your work is received in that way is so wild and fresh. 

Are there any compromises you made that you regret regarding your work? Anything you would have done differently?

I don’t think so. Writing a book is when I have that fear. Right now, I’m writing a book and I’m working on a section, and my hope is that this will be a very big book. 

I have never ‘sold a book’ in advance of writing and yet I feel like just the thought of having the gun of time to my head, in terms of somebody else’s reception and what I would get if they receive it well, that is kind of a compromise. Just today I was thinking, what if I told a publisher – actually, I can’t give you this for another year. 

I mean, what would they do? Would they take away my right to write? 

The work has to be that radical. I’m really against rushing. I write fast though that’s just a hunk of words, but then where do they go? That’s where the whole editing process comes in. I’m very effusive as a writer, but that still doesn’t mean the process is quick in any way. At least three times, I’ve taken ten years on a book. The book I’m working on now, I conceived of it in 2013 and wrote a little bit of it that year, so supposedly nine years have already passed on this book, but I didn’t really start writing it until the pandemic. It’s very glacial, my process, and that seems important. 

Being mixed race, working class and a lesbian there were many spaces I felt othered in when I was growing up. I distinctly remember feeling the class divide at university and trying to change my voice to fit in. I think the answer will be ‘no’, but did you ever feel the need to assimilate in your younger years?

You’re right, no. But I’m sure that I did in certain ways because I’m human, and you always want to get into ‘the club’, whatever it is. I feel like when I learned what people were reading, I began to read that, you know? In lots of settings, even when I began to write, I felt like I knew nothing about it. When I began to write about art, I felt like I knew nothing about art and so I felt I was very much tracing the influences and reading the press releases like, ‘ok now I have to read this.’ I don’t work like that anymore. 

The greatest way I felt my class is that I didn’t know anybody. I came to New York and I didn’t know anybody. What I slowly discovered, especially through girlfriends, is that people had gone to good schools, the same schools. These people were in New York with people they had gone to high school with, so there was a long assurance of them being talented insiders who knew people. The fact of not knowing anybody made me even more of an outsider. If anything, I think I was a little braggy. I think I did the opposite of assimilating; making much out of the fact that I worked in bars, that I was working class. 

People go on these pilgrimages to become ‘other’ in order to become artists and I began other. There was less of a sense that I had to get some dirt on me, I began with the dirt.  

Who are the lesbian writers that interest you?

Renee Gladman, I love her work, I think about it. We don’t see each other very often but I feel that there is a kinship and an excitement about her work. British poet Sophie Robinson is a writer whose work is very important to me. Birhan Keskin’s Y’ol is an amazing book about love and lovers and loss. She’s gigantic for me. Camille Roy’s recent book Honey Mine is really great. Historically, Violette Leduc’s La Batarde is one of my favourite books – but I don’t necessarily think that much about these people being lesbians, it’s more that their work means so much to me.

The term ‘lesbian’ writer brings me onto my next question. Labels. Labels such as gay, black, woman are always attached to a writer unless, of course, you’re a cis man, in which case you’re just ‘a writer’. You’ve previously been described as a Rock & Roll icon and lesbian icon – how do you feel about these labels?

The closer you get to a world that’s your own, the less they apply and exist, but it’s almost like as you get into the ‘larger world,’ they seem to thrive on those. I was called ‘punk poet’ in a review in 2000 and ever since then, I have been a punk poet. I mean, one of my least favourite phrases is ‘bad-ass’ – what does it even mean? We don’t just get queer or lesbian labels, it’s female. Men are not bad-ass, they just are supposed to be rough and strong and rowdy – well at least that’s one of the versions of what they are supposed to be. Labels are a corrective. They are always preceded by this silent utterance of ‘this is not what a lady should be’. I had a poetry collection come out a few years back and the review didn’t mention the work. It just talked about me in terms of culture – they referred to my earliest work as very ‘bad-ass.’ I was in my 60s, with my selected poems, and they were talking about things I had done in my 20s – all they had to say about me was what I looked like. It’s weird though, because labels can also mean that kids who are looking for their ‘kind’ will find us.

I think it is brilliant how you are constantly using your platform online to promote and raise awareness – most recently the dog shelter and East River Park campaigns – do you feel that with having an online presence comes a responsibility, and how do you feel about that? 

Having an online presence is akin to having a reputation or a version of fame. There are writers who are unwilling to be on social media, who regard it as a waste of time or beneath them. I think they are completely right, but for me, I think that those things (social media platforms) came into being at a time when I was getting more attention and it was very interesting to use them as an artist, first. 

I was in New York, I had a new dog who had huge amounts of energy, and we began walking. It was this wonderful experience of documenting, which lead directly to East River Park. Whereas in the past, I had gone to the park specifically to run or meet people for walks, my new dog meant that we were down at the river every single day, going over bridges I had never gone over and really exploring the park and getting to know it. I was using the camera on the phone to take pictures. I’ve always liked taking pictures but never had a way of sharing them and so using Instagram gave me this tool to show what I love and how I love. I’m a very visual writer and so for me it was interesting because it was like a consciousness working through all this different media, and it was really fun to write in pictures for the first time. Then several years later, when I realised this park that I love was endangered and I had these thousands of followers, I thought ‘we can mobilise’ and we created marches for the park. That was really amazing. 

The ways in which a city can be a killing machine of all kinds has become abundantly clear to me now: killing the underclass, killing nature, killing trees, killing animals – anything that can’t be monetised. It’s funny, I think to myself, ok, if I’ve become someone ‘famous’, someone with a lot of followers, I should be able to use that to do something. What’s interesting is, that isn’t always the case. Right up until they were chopping down the trees in the park, no magazines or papers, some of which have asked me to write about their topics, would let me write about mine. It’s been an education, but I still feel good about it. Self-promotion is the exception for me on social media and not the rule and that makes me feel excited about the medium still. 

The flip side of having social media, is the desire to get rid of it, stop it completely. I feel like that would be an anti-studio, a new place to write – a world that doesn’t have those tendrils. I think that’s very exciting and I don’t know when I’m ever going to exercise that option, if ever, but it looms. 

What are you working on at the moment? You mentioned a big project, can you elaborate?

I have an anthology coming out in November called Pathetic Literature which is something I’ve been interested in for a long time – to reimagine the pathetic. There are 105 writers in it and it’s going to be a very exciting book. 

Then I have a novel that I began in 2013 called All My Loves. I am so formed by the people I have been involved with, sexually of course, but I mean little things – like composting! My last girlfriend composted, and I had never thought of doing it, had no interest in it and now, I compost. The whole process became interesting to me. Everybody who I’ve ever been involved with is with me in some way. That idea was the inception of the book, but it’s spread into other topics too. I decided the book would be large, so decided to throw the idea of love, larger – to make it very wide in terms of what love means. I think the book is becoming a kind of cabinet for all sorts of things. The challenge will be to make this piece of furniture something that is accessible, while still being weird. 

AMY RIDLER IS  A WRITER AND ENGLISH TEACHER IN EAST LONDON, WHERE SHE RUNS THE LGBT+ SOCIETY. SHE HAS WRITTEN ABOUT HER EXPERIENCES AS AN ‘OUT’ TEACHER, MOST RECENTLY IN A CHAPTER ENTITLED ‘MISS, ARE YOU PART OF LGBT?’ FOR BIG GAY ADVENTURES IN EDUCATION, WHICH WAS PUBLISHED BY ROUTLEDGE IN 2021. SHE HAS WORKED WITH THE QUEER, FEMINIST LIVE ART THEATRE COMPANY CARNESKY PRODUCTIONS AS AN ASSOCIATE ARTIST SINCE 2009 AND CONTINUES TO BE A MEMBER OF THE COMPANY’S ADVISORY BOARD. SHE IS CURRENTLY AN MA CREATIVE WRITING STUDENT AT BIRKBECK.

TWITTER: @AMY_RIDLER

Photo by Eileen Myles.