Rippling Pages: Interviews with Writers

Jennifer Lucy Allan and CLAY: A HUMAN HISTORY

"I'd done a lot of clay-making...you can spend a lifetime and only get good at one technique!"

Jennifer Lucy Allan joins me to talk about her second book, CLAY: A HUMAN HISTORY (White Rabbit Books). After Jennifer's exploration and writing about sound in The Foghorn's Lament (White Rabbit Books), Jennifer has, quite literally, turned her hand to a more physical and enduring substance in clay. From Japanese Tea Ceremonies, to humans making their own image, to life on Mars, clay is seemingly everywhere. Jennifer is also a presenter on BBC Radio 3's Late Junction. 


Rippling Points

1.20 - How Jennifer’s early experience with clay led to her enchantment of it and then writing this boundless history

6.04 - How the book on clay differs to Jennifer’s previous book on foghorns

10.30 - Ephemerality of sound and permanence of clay - the writing challenges.


13.40 - Clay: its history compared with human history

15:15 - Who is Marija Gimbutas, and why is she important

21:15 - Language and touch

24.40 - Climate change and how it's revealing more about clay

28.00 - How clay becomes an object


Reference Points

Marija Gimbutas.
Ladi Kwali
Maria Martinez

 

 

Bruce Omar Yates and The Muslim Cowboy

"This book is begging to be written...It has this a frontier-ness to it..."

Bruce Omar Yates is here to discuss his upcoming novel published by Dead Ink Books, THE MUSLIM COWBOY . 

In a contemporary and entertaining novel set in aftermath of the Iraq war, a man who is obsessed with old Western movies dresses in double denim and roams a lawless landscape in search of his own Western story. 

Rippling Points

1.32 - Bruce's family and how these fed into ideas about a 'muslim cowboy'
4.30 - Nameless and speechless: playing with the archetype of the cowboy
6.20 - Song writing in Nashville to writing this novel
8.40 - Iraq as the setting for the novel
12.00 - Removing binaries around what is good and not good
17.33 - A camel and child - the other characters
20.53 - The novel as a sandbox
25.30 - The act of making his characters watch westerns

Reference Points

Aladdin (1992. Dir: John Musker and Ron Clements)
David Foster Wallace
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes 
Lucky Luke - Goscinny
Once Upon a Time in the West (1969. Dir: Sergio Leone)
The Road - Cormac McCarthy (2006)
Shane (1953. Dir: George Stevens)
True Grit (1969. Dir: Henry Hathaway)
Zadie Smith

Claire Carroll and The Unreliable Nature Writer

"The smotheringly neutral voice"

Claire Carroll is here to talk about her new and debut collection of short stories THE UNRELIABLE NATURE WRITER. A truly candid insight into the workings of craft and being a writer from one of the most exciting and upcoming fiction writers today.

THE UNRELIABLE NATURE WRITER is published by Scratch Books - more here

Rippling Points

2.00 - Claire's dreams and reading.

4.55 - The different personal and impersonal voices in Claire's work

10:37 - Being a writer and knowing or not knowing answers

13:12 - Unreliable narrators and what they mean to Claire

18:00 - How and why Claire writes about animals.

24:30 - The challenge of having 'authority' on the climate crisis

28.40 - Giving the stories a sense of wonder

30:00 - Claire's book tour!

 

Reference Points

Franz Kafka
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
Ben Pester
Saba Sams
Samantha Walton - The Nature Cure

 

Marchelle Farrell and By the River

"The garden is a co-author"

Marchelle Farrell is here to talk about her essay in a new anthology from Daunt Books, BY THE RIVER: ESSAYS FROM THE WATER'S EDGE. I've wanted to talk to Marchelle since the publication of UPROOTING: FROM THE CARIBBEAN TO THE COUNTRYSIDE - Canongate Books), so it was great to have her here when she's part of an anthology featuring the likes of Caleb Azumah Nelson and Tessa Hadley.

Marchelle, a consultant psychiatrist as well as a writer, often blends personal history with reflections on how colonial history has shaped the world and behaviour

Rippling Points

1.25 - The rivers that Marchelle writers about in her essay, 'Memory River
4.06 - the noise of the river and how it infiltrated Marchelle's dreams
7.08 - A sense of renewal and writing about childhood
9.00 - The pain and joy in revisiting childhood
12.34 - Marchelle's belief on balancing both pain and joy in life.
15.04 - The story of Marchelle's family and forgotten stories
18.23 - Can anything ever be permanently erased?
20.22 - Leaving space for the reader to make interpretations.
22.13 - The river and its links to colonial history.
25.22 - How the 'English' garden isn't so English.
28.20 - What is play and why is it important

Reference Points

Jo Hamya
Amy Key
Donald Winnicott

Marianne Brooker and Intervals

"I wanted to be talking choice in a way that was routed in a social context, and that was true to the particularity and intimacy that I shared with my mum at the end of her life."

Marianne Brooker is here to talk about her Women's Prize for Non-Fiction shortlisted essay, INTERVALS, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Marianne talks about her life and living with her mother who was diagnosed with primary progressive multiple sclerosis. The book is a blend of memoir, philosophy, literary criticism, and politics. 

It's a tough but incredibly beautiful read. 

Rippling Points

2.05 - When Marianne decided this story about her mother was going to be a book

3.40 - 'Trying, circling, avoiding' - setting down to write a book like this

4.30 - How Marianne would categorises this book

7:00 -  On planning or not planning the book

8:44 - When Marianne's mother developed primary progressive multiple sclerosis

10:20 - Finding a voice and coming up with a 'vocabulary'

12:20 - The 'forces' in the book and Marianne's mother

16:10 - Marianne's relationship with her mother.

20:00 - What primary progressive multiple sclerosis is.

22:20 - Marianne on 'choice' 

25:21 - When Marianne found a video of her mother.

Reference Points

Writers

Roland Barthes
Annie Ernaux
Clarissa Pinkola Estés - Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype 
Saidiya Hartman
Alice Hattrick
Sophie Lewis
Sam Mills
Margery Williams - The Velveteen Rabbit

Filmmakers
Chantal Akerman

Dawn Garisch and Breaking Milk

"That whole question of the invisible life...that there's something going on we cannot see that determines our health and the future of the planet."

Dawn Garisch, one of South Africa's most pre-eminent writers, joins the Rippling Pages to talk about Breaking Milk, published in the UK by Heloise Press. Shortlisted for the prestigious Sunday Times South Africa/CNA Literary Awards '21, it finally lands on our shores.

Dawn is also a doctor and a CEO of the Life Righting Collective, a non-profit organisation aiming to provide creative practice as a low-cost resource for humane, responsible and compassionate attitude in institutions and society as a whole.

Find out more here: https://liferighting.com/

Rippling Points
1.40 - Who the narrator (Kate) of this novel is, and why Dawn chose to write about her at this point in the narrator's life.
7.00 - Why Dawn spent some time making cheese for the book
8.40 - what separates us from our parents and other people
11.43 - Kate's former job as a geneticist
14.26 - The voice of the inner critic
17.54 - The benefits of the life writing collective
21.00 - Kate's husband, the other writer in the book.
27.30 - Dawn's work as a doctor.


Reference Points
Christa Wolf - Accident: A Day's News
J.M. Coetzee Disgrace
Dawn Garisch - Eloquent Body
Bessel Van der Kolk - The Body Knows the Score
Jaakp Panksepp
Donald Winnicott
Virginia Woolf - Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf - A Room of One's Own.