What Lies Beneath What Lies Within

I am delighted to welcome Tom Vowler back to the blog today. Tom is another of my immensely talented writer mates, and he was here a few years ago when his first book, the short story collection The Method, was published (Salt), talking about writing & place. Tom's second book, What Lies Within, a novel, was recently published by Headline, an enormously intriguing and powerful book, a very moving meditation on family, trauma and pain, with a very interesting structure. Here is a little about Tom:

Tom Vowler’s debut short story collection, The Method, won the international Scott Prize in 2010 and the Edge Hill Readers’ Award in 2011. Now an associate lecturer at Plymouth University, his debut novel What Lies Within was published in April 2013. Tom is also Assistant Editor for the literary journal Short FICTION. In 2008 he graduated with an MA in Creative Writing and is now studying for a PhD, looking at landscape and trauma in fiction. More at www.tomvowler.co.uk

Here is the wonderful book trailer for What Lies Within:


I decided to chat to Tom about something I've been thinking about for a while: where do we writers get permission from in our writing? I blogged about this here. Tom gave us some insight into his writing and his novel in particular:

Tania: So, I'd like to carry on the discussion I was having on my blog about permissions - who or what has given or gives you permission in your writing, and especially to do what you've done in the novel, which has such an interesting structure? Other writers, teachers, other people's books/stories/poems, other art forms? 

Tom: Hi Tania. Thank you for having me at your aesthetically gorgeous blog. Your question is a wonderfully refreshing one, worthy of pause and consideration. Focusing on my novel, the concept of permission is, as you’ve discussed below, related to a sense of risk, and in my case this resides particularly in the decision to narrate almost all the book from a female perspective. Firstly, there was the question of whether I could pull this off, capture fully the nuance of voice and behaviour across 300 pages. But also, as you’ve reminded me, I thought long and hard about the right (permission if you like) to do so. Of course as writers we frequently inhabit characters who are wildly disparate to ourselves; why should a switch in gender be any different? I suppose because I needed Anna (the main character of What Lies Within) to carry the heft of the entire book, its themes and motifs, the pace and narrative all had to emerge from her, including several aspects of life my own gender preclude me from. Fortunately I have several good female friends who were happy to share the vagaries of their lives, from seismic happenings such as childbirth to the more mundane aspects. And yet it was Anna’s inner world, understanding her reaction to the beautiful and terrifying things that happen to her that proved hardest.

As for permission, this was a question I had already resolved before the first draft. Most of my fiction emerges from a single event, often a piece of news that both appals and fascinates me. This becomes the book’s fulcrum, the driving force for its story and characters. And so without offering spoilers, once I’d found my subject matter (or it me), I had little choice. Hardly permission, but then I realised the fact I’d found great abhorrence with Anna’s terrible situation and its subsequent contrails, left me feeling I would tell her story with sympathy and respect. Likewise during the research for the novel, hearing the terrible things some women had to endure instilled in me a fierce desire to get it right, to respect not just my characters and readers, but these wonderfully brave women also.

 As for permission to write in its wider context, my hand was forced a little by a long illness that saw me unable to do little else. I worked as a journalist, and although my love affair with books was late to blossom, I soon realised the dark art of storytelling was for me. Permission at that time was more closely aligned with inspiration, and I was desperate to mimic the impact certain fiction was having on me in my own work. So whereas richly lyrical prose, compelling characters and concept-driven stories were important to me, I quickly became interested in the tone and texture of the novel, one of the main reasons I set the book on the uplands of Dartmoor. In this sense the brooding, menacing landscape became a character itself, alive and capricious, the reader investing every much in the tors and valleys of the place as the people of the book. As you mention, the novel’s structure carries its own risk as well, but it too was driven by my research and the need to tell Anna’s story fully and with compassion. But then it’s one of the first things I tell my students – to take risks. Learn from what’s gone before, understand why it works, but do it differently. To borrow some words for a change: risk nothing, risk everything.

 As for other writers who give me permission to take such risks, I think this occurs, for me anyway, on a subconscious level, or at least a level that sits just below the surface during composition. I love much of what Julian Barnes and Sebastian Faulks have done in this regard - especially the deployment of unreliable narrators in their recent work - but with such impressive oeuvres behind them, I imagine it feels less like risk-taking to them. Two books that have had an astonishing impact on me recently for their linguistic and emotive brilliance are Sarah Hall's short story collection The Beautiful Indifference and J.A. Baker's memoir The Peregrine, the latter hugely influential on the novel I'm currently writing. Permission here, I find, is bestowed on an emotional level by the feelings aroused in me when reading them. This is not restricted to books, though; my own sense of aesthetics comes as much from film (for example the work of Mexican director Iñárritu) as it does from the literary forms.
 

Thank you so much, Tom, I find all that you've talked about to be really fascinating additions to this ongoing discussion about permission and risk. And the "risks" you took most definitely paid off here! I highly recommend you all get your hands on both What Lies Within and The Method, both of which you can find more about on Tom's website. But wait! Tom has very kindly offered a free copy of What Lies Within to one of you, my lovely blog readers. So, if you'd like to win a copy, leave a comment and tell me and Tom what's given you permission - in any way at all - recently, and that way we can extend this discussion and Tom will pick someone out of the proverbial hat. Thank you for stopping by, Tom!

More permission...

Following on from the previous post about permission & taking risks, two things have occurred in the past two days that I want to talk about in terms of where I get permission from. Now, I did stop for a moment and wonder about writing this, since it may just come off as boastful self-promotion, but it's an important part of my writing life and my career as an author, and that's what this blog is supposed to be all about, so I decided to do it.

What occurred were two absolutely amazing reviews of My Mother Was An Upright Piano: Fiction, published both published on Friday. Before I go into that, I want to first say that even now, after quite a few years of having short stories and other work published in literary magazines, after having two collections published, I still think it's quite miraculous that the result of the bizarre workings of my mind, the combination of words I've put on a page, in any way connects or speaks to anyone else, anyone outside of my mind. And, as I mentioned in the previous post, thanks to the permission gifted to me by other writers' work, I have been taking more risks in my own, and to me my stories have been getting odder and odder.  (My mother is in the habit now, when I send her a new story, of saying "Darling, I really enjoyed it, even though I had no idea what was going on.") Even more surprising then that anyone "gets" what I think I may have been trying to do (which I don't always know, either).

So, you can imagine that the fact that these two reviewers did is incredibly moving to me. Here is Martin Macaulay writing for Sabotage Reviews, who shortlisted my book for their Saboteur awards short story collection category:

Hershman writes with a lyrical precision that slices apart what it is to be human... My Mother was an Upright Piano is more than the sum of its parts. The book is structured into seven groups of six and two groups of seven, bonding this collection together as tightly as a chemical compound. It’s a solid, unbreakable and inspiring collection. Hershman creates worlds with depth and heart. She shows us lives soaked in loss; some with glimpses of hope, others dystopian.

And here is Kerry Shadid in her review in World Literature Today:

Her presentation of the tragedy and the oddity of our human lives is the typed equivalent of a performance artist at MOMA: strange, unfamiliar, captivating. ...The universe’s dark energy palpitates on Hershman’s pages; she gives emptiness form. Characters struggle to communicate, to make themselves known to others. Hopes for the world to be other than it is are met with silence. Longing blankets the text. Sentences stop before they reach their conclusion, words omitted by the author in sympathy with the reticence of her fictional creations. The unsaid contains both dagger and salve, and Hershman’s silences both break and heal the heart. 

It's hard to tell you how I feel just re-reading these two excerpts. It's like I've been heard, at a very deep level. It feels like a blessing, to be read so closely. And what's also wonderful is that they both feel that the book - whose stories were all written with no thought of being collected - works as a whole, somehow.

I had said to myself when the book came out that this time I wouldn't read reviews. Because whatever they say, they stick in your mind. Generally the less positive bits! But I couldn't help myself because I think, with these stories more than those in The White Road, I didn't always know myself what it was I was writing about, I had let go of that knowing, thanks to permission from others. And so I was curious to see what others think they are about.

I didn't think that these and other reviews would give me permission to keep doing this - and to take it further. But they do. Especially references to things I consider very odd, like leaving sentences unfinished. That's okay, says this review. And not only that, it actually means something.

Of course, there is the flipside to this, because there is no guarantee that every review will be favourable. I was delighted to be reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, thrilled beyond belief, but the reviewer seemed to be telling me what my stories are not, and I wasn't entirely sure what to make of that.

Right now, though, I am feeling very "permitted", these two reviewers have given me a great gift, an unexpected gift. I want to thank them, and everyone else who takes the time to read my book and share their thoughts. I don't take that for granted. I will never take that for granted. Thank you.

Risky Business

I was asked by the wonderful folk at Writers & Artists (yes, the people behind the excellent Yearbook) to write a blog post about taking risks in writing, following comments I made when awarding the prizes in their short story competition last month. The article, Risky Business, is here, and here is a snippet:

....Why should writers take risks? Well, I would argue that it's not just for the benefit of a reader or a competition judge. What are we doing this for, this writing thing? For me, it's about trying to make sense of the world in some way, and uncertainty is an inherent quality of existence...

There is no comment facility on the article but I'd love to hear about your experiences of permission and risk, do leave a comment here!