Rippling Pages: Interviews with Writers

Lucy Caldwell on writing transcendent psychic moments and finding meaning in life

Oh wow! It was my pleasure to have a coffee with and speak to the writer Lucy Caldwell about her new short story collection, DEVOTIONS (published by Faber and Faber).

That's right, we were live and in person having a coffee talking about Lucy's new collection

I revelled in a theatre troupe performing a choose your own version of Hamlet; I had a wry smile watching Christopher Plummer ponder on whether he really did love Julie Andrews, and among the many other stories, continued to marvel at Lucy's capacity to meditate on death, existence, light and love.

Lucy is from Belfast. She lives in Kent, but we had our conversation in London. 

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Chapters
2.00 - is 'master' the right word?
7.15 - Devotions forming a single whole
9.15 Lucy's relationship with her editor
12.50 - writing in real-time 
16.50 - Choose your own adventure stories.
18.10 - Hamlet.
21.10 - Writing about love
26.05 - Devotions easter egg!
28.35 finding meaning in the here and the now. 
32.20 - Patreon shoutouts!
33.50 - inspired by James Joyce
37.26 - writing great psychic movements.
42.00 - Special writing from Lucy. 
46.45 - Finding meaning in the darkness
51.25 - Suffering as a portal. 

Reference Points

Sebastian Barry

Elizabeth Bowen

Willa Cather

Anton Chekhov

Dante

Ram Dass

John Donne

T.S. Eliot

Anne Enright

Wendy Erskine

bell hooks

Kazuo Ishiguro

James Joyce

Claire Kilroy

Rosamond Lehman

Louis MacNeice

Alice Munro

Cardinal Newman

Edna O’Brien

Frank O’Hara

Rumi

Helen Simpson

John Updike

Sylvia Townsend Warner

Virginia Woolf

W.B. Yeats

Lucy’s Work

Being Various: New Irish Short Stories (edited by Lucy, Faber, 2021)

Multitudes (Faber, 2016)

Intimacies (Faber, 2021)

Leaves (Faber: 2007)

Where They Were Missed (Faber: 2005)

Plays

Hamlet

Music
Ludwig van Beethoven

Van Morrison

Taylor Swift

Films

The Sound of Music (1965: Robert Wise)

 

Bonus! Why a letter knife told Leon Craig everything she needed to know about her characters’ desires

Welcome to this bonus content with Leon Craig. We’re talking about how Leon found an old letter knife in a shop which helped her understand her characters desires. PLUS! You’ll hear Leon talking about plagues, the pandemic, and why she left the UK to write her novel about the UK.

 

Leon was here to discuss THE DECADENCE (Sceptre), a novel about a group of friends who find shelter in an old abandoned home, but encounter more than they bargained for. Leon Craig, whose previous collection of short stories, PARALLEL HELLS, was also published by Sceptre, is a graduate of the Birkbeck MFA Creative Writing course. Her work has been published by Hazlitt, the Sunday Times, the London Magazine and others and is forthcoming in Nulla magazine and Berlin Babel anthology.

 

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Leon Craig on misunderstanding ghosts and getting what we want

I’m looking forward to diving into the crumbling and the haunted this week with Leon Craig. 

We’re discussing Leon Craig’s THE DECADENCE.

And you the listener picked Leon as one of the rising stars of literature that you wanted me to interview.

Have you ever walked past an old abandoned house and wondered what kinds of lives were lived there? Have you ever dared to explore one? Perhaps you wanted to escape and hide in the house. Or perhaps you wanted to use it for something a little more nefarious.

Leon Craig, whose previous collection of short stories, PARALLEL HELLS, was also published by Sceptre, is a graduate of the Birkbeck MFA Creative Writing course. Her work has been published by Hazlitt, the Sunday Times, the London Magazine and others and is forthcoming in Nulla magazine and Berlin Babel anthology.

 

Get exclusive subscriber benefits from the Rippling Pages. 
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Check out the Rippling Pages Bookshop and buy all the books featured on the Rippling Pages:

https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/ripplingpagespod

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https://www.podbean.com/ripplingpages 

Episode Chapters

1.30 - rising literary stars poll
3.30 - The crumbling haunted house
6.30 - the ensemble cast 
7.25 - early hauntings. 
10.10 - misunderstandings and humour 
11.50 -embracing imperfect characters.
14.25 - secret passageways 
16.05 - sexual elements to hauntings. 
19.10 - colonial legacies and trespassing
22.55 - Rippling Pages Patreon
24.20 - on beauty  
27.00 - getting what we want. 
29.50 - desire and disgust 
32.00 - The country housegenre
37.15 - Leon’s next novel

 

Reference Points

House of Leaves (2000, Mark Z. Danielewski).

Saltburn (2023, dir. Emerald Fennell)

Beowulf

The Great Gatsby (1925, F.Scott Fitzgerald)

White is for Witching(2009, Helen Oyeyemi)

Brideshead Revisited (1945, Evelyn Waugh)

Ana Schnabl on using childhood locations and memories in stories about unpleasant people

We’re going to the Slovenian coast this week during the final years Yugoslavia with Ana Schnabl. 

Dunja has finally launched her literary career, but the shadow and spectre of her brother’s death haunts both her and her family. What happens when she returns to investigate her brother’s death? And what happens when the truth becomes stranger than the fiction she writes?

Ana Schnabl’s novel is published by Divided Publishing. Ana is a Slovenian writer, and this is her second novel to be translated into English, by Rawley Grau. Her first novel to be translated into English was The Masterpiece, that time by David Limon. In Slovenia, she is a winner of Slovenia’s prestigious literary prize, the Kresnik award. She’s also a regular contributor to the journal The Guardian, writing on Balkan politics and culture.

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Episode Chapters

1.30 - Ana's based in Slovenia
2.35 - Fake crime novels
3.50 - Djuna's relationship with her dead brother.
5.30 - Why has Djuna returned?
7.30 - Family dynamics. 
9.00 - Rockstars and the Slovene transition
10.35 - Michael Jackson
13.30 - a fake crime novel
15.00 - Rippling Pages Bookshop
16.00 - Not liking modernist novels
19.45 - Writing cerebral characters
21.00 - Sentimental feelings about home
24.15 - Ice cream and the Adriatic coast
27.30 - Not believing in legacies.
30.30 sitting with unpleasant people.
31.50 - who helps Djuna.
33.45 - Smoking

 

Reference Points

Agatha Christie 

Marcel Proust

Virginia Woolf

Eva Meijer live in Leeds and panoramic crisis fiction based on personal experience

What a lovely time I had speaking and sitting with Eva Meijer, the Dutch Author, in Leeds to discuss their novel SEA NOW. 

A government who seems slow to respond to a rapidly encroaching crisis. Marketing executives exploiting ways to make quick cash. A missing Prime Minister. Leavers and remainers conflicted about the right course of action. It all sounds like a playbook for our recent political crises. But when the dams start bursting in the Netherlands and the country rapidly begins to flood and be subsumed, what happens when people are faced with the unthinkable in this new waterworld. 

These are the questions at the heart of Eva Meijer’s, SEA NOW, translated by Anne Thompson Melo, and published by Peirene Press.

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https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/ripplingpagespod

Interested in hosting your own podcast? Follow this link and find out how:
https://www.podbean.com/ripplingpages 

 

Chapters

2.25 - what is the novel about
4.25 - a human and animal story
7:45 - how people respond to the crisis in the book
11.15 - is the novel represent human experience
13.45 - widescreen viewpoints
17.45 - why is the sea so powerful
21.20 - the Rippling Pages Bookshop
23.10 - why do characters stay?
25.40 - is there hope in the novel
27.15 - endings and new beginnings and grief 
30.30 - objects of influence 
36.40 - Patreon subscriber shoutout!

Reference Points
Don DeLillo

Bonus - Madeleine Dunnigan and Farah Ali on their favourite books and writing beyond the surface

Happy New Year!

I’m delighted to bring you some more unedited and bonus content from my Christmas and New Year special with Madeleine Dunnigan and Farah Ali. There was just so much good stuff in our craft and curation special, that I wanted to bring you a little more to start the year. 

These books are going to be spoken about in literary circles in January. 

In Pakistan, a young woman grapples with a strange, indefinable illness against a backdrop of political upheaval. In England, a teenager tries to make sense of his intense emotions during one hot summer at boarding school.

Farah Ali’s TELEGRAPHY, published by CB Editions, is her second novel. Originally from Pakistan, Farah has been anthologised for the Pushcart Prize and is the reviews editor at Wasafiri.

JEAN is the debut novel by London-based writer Madeleine Dunnigan, published by Daunt Books. She was a Jill Davis Fellow on the MFA programme at New York University.

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Reference Points

Tom McCarthy 

John McGahern

Gerald Murnane