Rippling Pages: Interviews with Writers

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.

Rachel Mann and Eleanor Among the Saints

"Wounds, whilst they open us to the world...they can be points of infection." 

Welcome to 2024 and a new episode of the Rippling Pages. Rachel Mann is a poet, scholar, novelist and Anglican priest. She is Rachel Mann is here to talk about her new collection, Eleanor Among the Saints (Carcanet), which takes inspiration from the life of Eleanor 'John' Rykener. A trans woman, seamstress, embroider, and sex worker who lived in medieval England.

More info about the book here

This is Rachel's second collection after Kingdom of Love (also Carcanet - and which I reviewed here!)

The book is a Poetry Book Society recommendation and you kind find tickets to her launch here.

Tickets to the Carcanet launch of the book here: https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/events?showpage=913


This show comes with a content warning - we do talk about some sensitive topics, such as domestic violence, so please do take care of yourself when listening.

Rippling Points
5.05 - Poetry and embroidery
8.03 - What Eleanor's story,  and Rachel's poetry, tells us about embodiedness
11.45 - Society and Eleanor's story
14.54 - How details about Eleanor's life helped in writing the collection.
18.30 - 'Violence' in craft and the writing process.
21.45 - How themes of violence and the body converge in Rachel's poems.
28.20 - 'Fear' of working with heavy and sensitive topics

Reference Points

Gilles Deleuze
Umberto Eco

Jo Scott-Coe on the Life and Death of Kathy Leissner Whitman

"Kathy had a documentary impulse that is teaching us now."

Jo Scott-Coe returns to the Rippling Pages to talk about her latest book, UNHEARD WITNESS: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF KATHY LEISSNER WHITMAN (University of Texas Press)

Jo is a previous guest of the podcast, joining us in Series 2 to discuss MASS (Pelekinesis), an account of Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower Shooter. 

Listen to that episode here: https://ripplingpages.podbean.com/e/jo-scott-coe-on-mass/

Now she returns to discuss a follow-up to that book, the story of Whitman's wife, Kathy Leissner Whitman.

This show comes with a content warning - we do talk about some sensitive topics, such as domestic violence, so please do take care of yourself when listening.

Rippling Points

• Returning to the story: where the last book left us (2:30)
• How Kathy's letters tell the story: Being with Kathy's 'intimate testimony' to tell her powerful and painful story (19:30)

Reference Points

• Sylvia Plath
• Evan Stark
• Jane Monckton-Smith
  
  

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