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As part of my interview series Writers on Research, I spoke to author Roz Dineen on the research process behind her novel Briefly Very Beautiful (Bloomsbury, 2024).

Briefly Very Beautiful imagines a future that feels, at times, at such proximity with our present world that we might tip into it at any moment. Before delving more deeply into how and why that story is told, I’m curious about the more formal aspects of research that might have informed your composition. You cite, for example, the IPCC’s 2023 report on climate change as a source, and I’m interested to know how you handled the materials of climate science in creating the imagined near-future of the novel.

The research was a process of submersion and then a putting away. For a couple of years, before I began to write the book, I read quite obsessively around climate change and its societal effects. And then I put all that information down and almost forgot about it. It’s hard to get into the flow of writing fiction if you are constantly stopping to refer to facts and statistics, so I did the mental equivalent of leaving the data, the evidence, at the bottom of a drawer. (Hilary Mantel said she did something similar when writing historical fiction.) The climate emergency was the setting for the novel, but I wanted the characters to be the drive, the main event. If I delineated the climate science too precisely, the world of the novel wouldn’t feel real; the characters must be allowed to take their reality for granted, they rarely have the chance to stop and comment upon it. The climate breakdown is the air they breathe; they know it, and suffer it, but do not stop to analyse it. There is some description of the societal breakdown in the book, but I think most of the work of conveying this is done by describing the effect it has on the characters’ bodies, their senses, their hypervigilance and speech patterns.

By denying myself access to the science during the writing process, and relying on my memory, I found that two things happened: firstly, the bits I could recall naturally from the research were the most salient, evocative facts (eg. A&E waiting rooms see more patients suffering from schizophrenic episodes during a heatwave; after a wildfire, tree roots continue to burn underground like ovens and the air smells of plastic); and, secondly, all the information I had read had formed itself into a pretty cohesive web of understanding in my mind, which I could rely on. There is a quote from that IPCC report you mention that stayed with me throughout, ‘There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all (very high confidence).’ I had that one learned by heart. That one’s pretty memorable even after you’ve put all the research in a drawer.

Connected to that, I’d love to drill deeper into how the broader concerns of the climate emergency – particularly predictions around its effect on human behaviour – helped to build the narrative of Briefly Very Beautiful. To what extent did predictions around the development of, for example, border securitisation or societal collapse inform the characters you created and the challenges they would face throughout the novel. Does the novel itself constitute ‘a prediction’ or ‘speculation’?

Rather than a prediction or speculation I thought of the novel as a realistic exaggeration (if that’s not too nuanced a distinction to make) – taking things as they were in the current moment and turning the heat up by a degree or two. There is nothing in the world of the novel that has not happened somewhere in the real world, internet outages, terrorist groups, wildfires, shortages, draconian border controls, I just put all these circumstances in one place and increased the heat a tiny bit. This did not inform the creation of the characters too much, they are who they would have been if this story had been told without the climate apocalypse at its heels. I wanted to create people who you could imagine walking among us now, in terms of attitude, and feel how they have adjusted to their changing circumstances. They sort of straddle the now and the near-future setting of the book. In a lot of cli-fi, the characters are a few decades, or even a generation or two, into the devastated world. In The Parable of the Sower, for example, the cast of characters have lived a long time in their destroyed society, and therefore there is a new kind of person in the world of that book. But I wanted to imagine people who knew the world as we know it, now, and had not had a great deal of time to adapt. The climate / societal breakdown in the book has happened very recently, and it was quick. When I was writing, I was taking all the news stories I’d read and running them gently to their logical conclusions. It’s amazing how quickly and plausibly everything falls apart when you do this.

I suppose this realistic exaggeration gave me an opportunity to see what Cass (the protagonist) is made of. And I think I was trying to divine what sort of characters a ‘New World’ would require. It was interesting and surprising to me find that the ones who survive are pretty ‘low-key’ (as my kids would put it). The ones who survive are quite quiet, they are not in the business of advertising anything about themselves to anyone. They are collectively-minded rather than staunchly ambitious; any self-realisation or actualisation they acquire goes in service of the group.

I was particularly drawn to the way the novel connects the climate crisis with themes of motherhood, particularly with the tension between parental instinct and society. Specifically, I think Briefly Very Beautiful posits a direct challenge to the idea that we, as social animals, have the ability to retain trust in each other while being forced to protect ourselves and our families from catastrophe. I’m curious to know how your perspectives on motherhood may have fed into the novel, and whether that tension between instinct and society is something that resonates with you.

While I have never stated this belief so directly, it is in the novel, and in me, so I might as well come clean: I do sort of believe that when you centre the mother in society, and by that I mean, when you remove any tension the mother may feel between her instinct and her society, you might achieve something that could save and benefit us all. Today, mothers, particularly young mothers of young children are pulled in two directions between instinct (I will protect these cubs at all cost, they are the centre of my focus, nothing else matters) and society (I will please and be pleasing and raise these children in a way that society – a society that often shows evidence of profound sickness – approves of, in order to guarantee my safety). I think if society puts the needs of mothers and young children first, and society aids rather than abets the mother’s instinct to protect the cubs first, then a lot falls into place. You want to create a society that puts nurture before exploitation. I think what I was getting at in the book is that  society’s attitude towards mothers, and beyond that, our attitudes towards each other in our intimate relationships, has been, can be, deeply exploitative. And there is a parallel between how we can treat each other – as resources – and how we have treated the earth – as a resource. We often try to maximise the productivity and efficiency of our resources, rather than collectively nourish and keep them. We can and should be able to trust our society to protect and nurture our better instincts.

Another highly-charged theme throughout the novel is that of masculinity and its relation to power. It seems to me that the two male-led communities in the novel – Gaia’s incel terrorists and the entropic utopia of Eigleath – both incorporate forms of what we might understand as toxic masculinity, supported by and facilitated by the structure of a cult. I wonder if that framing of cults as providing an opening to toxic masculinity is a purposeful one, and how far the individual behaviours of men like Arthur and Nathaniel can be attributed to the opportunities provided by community-without-accountability.

This is a very interesting question to me because I never actually considered ‘toxic masculinity’ as I wrote. Behind the two main male characters, Arthur and Nathaniel, lies a pretty toxic mother (one who most definitely overrode her better instincts). These two men are only doing what it takes to survive her. They are only doing the best thing they can think of to make themselves feel safe (and are unable to see that their version of ‘safety’ is often contingent on another’s suffering). They don’t have the resources to do anything else. I think the most devastating thing for both of them is that they were afforded so much power (one as a respected, educated, privileged-white, rich doctor; the other as a good-looking, court of chaos landlord and drug-dealer) before anyone could attend to the fact that they are deeply injured people. They should have received more care before they were offered the keys to the world. Maybe this is what ‘toxic masculinity’ means. I think I’m trying to say that the most ‘toxic’ man in the book (arguably, Nathaniel) is not affiliated to a cult and would probably disdain such things. He also has very little community. But he does sort of seem to think that he should act without accountability. So rather than the framing of a cult offering Nathaniel community-without-accountability, I think he has been offered life-without-accountability and maybe this is due to a bigger, capitalistic cult of which we are nearly all members.

I suppose the eco-terrorist group in the book, Gaia, is a cult, but I thought of it more as a grass-roots movement. Rather than toxic masculinity, I actually saw in Gaia something quite sweet and loving. Gaia forms because some Incels (the Involuntarily Celibate) realise that Mother Earth can be their perfect women. They no longer have to be locked out of partnership. It’s lovely; they can adore Mother Earth, they commune in her nature and feel her, their lover, giving back to them through the trees and the hills and the few remaining natural landscapes. But then they realise they must protect their lover at all costs, particularly against the procreators and children, whom they identify as a plague. And because so many of these Incels have felt on the outside of society, they find it easy to dehumanise young families. So they become an anti-humanist movement, but the steps they took to get there were a plaintive love of Mother Earth, not a suppressing of emotion (as in toxic masculinity), and their violence is one of fierce protectional devotion, not a desire to dominate (as in toxic masculinity).

I think Gaia came about because I wanted to explore the idea that we don’t really want a situation where people can say, the only nurture I have ever felt is in nature. We don’t want to detach the beauty of the earth from the beauty of the beings that inhabit it. We need connections. But to have true connections with people (and with Earth), you have to put down any notions of the power that you wield.

To loop back to the question, I think the book traces a couple of toxic relationships, and perhaps also suggests that cultish thinking can give people an easy out from having to deal with nuance and complexity. This wasn’t necessarily an intention. As with most of the book, it’s just what happened when I put a young mother, alone, with three children, in a world that is as psychologically dangerous to her as it is physically dangerous.

To close, I’d like to circle back to climate change. While reading Briefly Very Beautiful, I was reminded of Amitav Ghosh’s idea that ‘the great, irreplaceable potentiality of fiction is that it makes possible the imagining of possibilities. And to imagine other forms of human experience is exactly the challenge that is posed by the climate crisis.’ I wanted to ask whether you feel fiction has a role in both imagining and combating the climate crisis. Is fiction a useful forum for not just imagining possible futures but in eliciting present behaviours, for changing the course? Is the novel well-placed to have that kind of impact?

Writing the novel allowed me to explore firstly, what type of person a climate apocalypse might create, what effect it might have on us, and then, what type of person a post-apocalyptic world, a New World, if you like, might demand and require. So, yes, I think fiction is a rich place to explore what might become of us and how we might cope and who we might have to become. I can’t think of another medium that would have allowed me to explore this so deeply.

Fiction can of course play a role in combatting the climate crisis, perhaps by drawing our attention to what we are anaesthetized to. But I reckon few readers come to fiction to be lectured at. The best fiction, in my opinion, is about the complexity of character, and the inescapable inevitabilities of character, and the utter inconvenience of these for all involved. And it’s about the details that someone other than you might notice. Some of the best fiction often has very small ambitions. ‘Changing course,’ is a big ambition.

I was reading today about Donna Haraway’s theory that stories, especially heroic stories, will not necessarily help us. Not everything, she says, is a problem that can be solved by the Hero’s Journey. There is no key to averting climate change, no riddle or grail. It’ll be something we adapt to and adapt with, like grief. I think she would argue that we need stories, not of how the knight slayed the dragon, but of how he learnt to live with it. I think the novel is well-placed to, as Ghosh puts it, ‘imagine other forms of human experience,’ but I’m not sure it will kill any monsters.

Roz Dineen is the author of Briefly Very Beautiful which was shortlisted for the inaugural Climate Fiction Prize. Formerly, she was an editor at the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) for twelve years and the Robert L. Bartley Fellow at The Wall Street Journal. Her writing has appeared in the TLS, ArtReview, and LitHub, among others. Her second novel is forthcoming from Bloomsbury.

Joe Bedford’s interview series Writers on Research is made possible with National Lottery funding via Arts Council England.

I’m thrilled to say that I’m now represented by the wonderful literary agent Charlotte Seymour at Johnson & Alcock. It feels great to make this kind of step and I’m so grateful to everyone who has supported me over the past few years. Here’s to 2026! Link to agency website below.

Bedford, Joe — Johnson & Alcock

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As part of my interview series Writers on Research, I spoke to author Harry Whitehead on the research process behind his novel White Road (Claret Press, 2025).

Before honing in more closely on the research behind White Road, I’d like to ask a broader question about the relationship between fiction and ecotage. As a novel which acts partly as an expose of the physical and political structures of oil extraction, it strikes me that White Road comes close to being an act of ecotage itself. There are other novels which, perhaps, do the same, but I’m curious to know what role you feel fiction has to play in the climate catastrophe (for better or worse) and whether there is any proximity there to direct action.

A great question, thank you, which I’m going to answer via some of the research holes I went down. I have to start with Andreas Malm’s book How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Its call to direct action, citing the sabotage arms of the suffragette and South African anti-apartheid movements as evidence, is both convincingly argued and, to a writer of fiction, appealing for its dramatic imperative. And it’s here that a writer – well, me, anyway – has to ‘fess up. Ecotage makes for great subject matter – it’s dramatic, violent, but comes with a kind of moral imperative that a polar bear hugger like me can get behind. Who doesn’t want to blow shit up – at least in their imagination? I had to learn how to blow up an oil rig (properly, a ‘drill ship’ in my novel – same general thing). That’s not something you Google, obviously: the men in balaclavas and assault rifles will come shinning down ropes to take you off to a quiet room for intimate conversation. I spent two years just learning how they’re built until I finally had a conversation with an oil engineer who gave me a useful steer.

I also spent a long time reading about the Earth Liberation Front (ELF – the Elves), who conducted a series of acts of ecotage through the nineties and early noughties and were mostly nabbed by the US authorities. The FBI named the ELF the number one domestic terrorist organisation. These hippy direct-action types who set fire to SUVs and logging franchises, while they never injured anyone at all physically, ended up in supermax prison cells next to the instigators of 9/11. Certainly, they were taken seriously, then. But did they actually bring about positive change? Many non-violent environmental activists hated what they were doing (and XR didn’t like Malm’s book at all). And many of the Elves themselves came to believe they’d not done anything more than alienate many normal people who might otherwise have supported the Green Movement.

To answer your question… Me? Fiction writer? Ecotager? A novel cross-examines the subject matter. So I sit on the fence, hold both points of view in my mind equally. Okay, that’s not entirely true – I’m with Malm that most major freedom and change movements have had their necessary sabotage arm. You both galvanise support through dramatic acts while putting the wind up the bad actors. And, certainly, it does make for fascinating fictional subject matter. Is my novel a form of ecotage? I’d love it if it was. But Kate Rigby asked whether artists are just involved in ‘idle chatter’ (channelling Theodor Adorno) or whether we act as – the rather grandly titled – ‘eco-prophetic witnesses’. The trouble is your art is rarely disruptive because it’s consumed by the “usual suspects” – those already green-aware, trying to do right by the environment. I’d love to think that, by writing a thriller, I might reach a little further. If I made one or two people think differently, even behave slightly differently, well, that would honestly be more than I could hope for. I’m one more voice shouting. Trying to shout as loudly as I can but like a scaredy-cat from my desk up in the attic. If I had more courage, I’d like to think I would be out there blowing shit up. But I don’t. And if the book were to inspire someone to blow up an oil rig (an end point of your question, in some ways)? Malm tells us we should and we must. The human fallout would be more than my bourgeois sensitivities could handle, most likely.

Beyond the potential importance of ecotage and climate fiction, I wanted to ask a more formal question about your approach to research. There are indications of your research methods in the novel’s Acknowledgements and in the Bibliography you’ve made available online, but I’m most keen to know what personal experiences may have fed into White Road. To what extent did building such a complex and specialised world rely on the kinds of research that can’t be conducted through books, if indeed it can’t?

Honestly, it can! I wrote my first novel, The Cannibal Spirit, on Floor 3 of the British Library. Actually, I’m being disingenuous. It’s set in the temperate rain forests of British Columbia in 1900. I did visit the region and I got lost on a walk one day with a spirited retiree. We ended up stooping along a low path we found through the dense vegetation. Then we walked smack into a bear den. Luckily no one was at home, but that sense of the sheer viscerally imposing vastness of the temperate jungle all around played a large role in my novel. But the fifteen years of research did more…

White Road began in two seemingly unlikely ways. First, I was fascinated by the oil business and wanted to write a book about it. The black blood flowing through all our veins. The epic scale of its technology. I’m still entirely enamoured of it, even as I’ve written a novel about tearing it down. The technological innovation required to extract oil from under the ground, beneath the ocean, is stunning. I’ve fantasized often about me in an entirely opposite guise, growing up and studying engineering and working on these giant tech projects. The excitement of it.

Meanwhile, I’ve also long been fascinated by the Arctic, its geography, adventure narratives, the other-planet sense of it. I’ve never visited. I probably shouldn’t – the environmental impact of travelling there with no direct scientific or environmental purpose seems wrong nowadays, doesn’t it? But I read everything, stole every great quote and description I could find into a great long tome of quotes, all of which fed into my own writing.

The point is I used to imagine myself aboard an oil rig in a storm or imagine  myself walking the pack ice alongside Nansen, a polar bear loping toward me. ‘The child that books built…’

So I had these two amateur fascinations. Then The Deepwater Horizon tragedy happened in the Gulf of Mexico (That’s MEXICO, Mr President!). Even as I watched in horror the catastrophe unfolding, the nasty little fiction writer in me was thinking, How cool-stroke-horrifying would it be if this happened in the Arctic? Visually incredible. Etc. No one said writers have to be nice people…

So I started to research oil extraction in the Arctic. And I learned there remains no known way to deal with a subsea oil spill if it happens under ice. Yet still we are doing it. That seemed just incredible to me. Then I happened to be watching a video about one of the only women ever to become a rescue swimmer. She talked about the brutal misogyny she had to face. I grew up in a matriarchy – the children’s home my mother ran. I’ve always been interested in the way women deal with and overcome male centres of power. I was intent on having a female protagonist in the next thing I wrote very much from personal experience.

My imaginative and personal interests somehow came together until I had my basic story – an oil rig disaster in the High Arctic and a female rescue swimmer at the heart of it all.

Of course, then I found myself having to do some proper research so many subjects, from Arctic exploration to the history of oil extraction, from oil rig and drill ship design to Coast Guard procedures. From polar bear diet to climate change impact. And on and on it went. But once the story is leading the research, honestly, it doesn’t matter. And the stories I write always make of their environments a quasi-character. I have to kind of exist within them until they – at times even visually – overlay my day to day life. I’m in both places. I got to play oil rig engineer and polar adventurer in this novel. I’m a kid playing with a toy oil rig and a stuffed polar bear, basically.

The extent of the research you undertook for White Road is also revealed by the wide use of industry-specific vocabulary throughout the novel. I would argue that the use of this vocabulary (so extensive as to be supported by a closing Glossary) makes White Road almost a kind of petro-procedural, in that we are fully immersed as readers in the language of Arctic oil extraction. I hoped you could speak on what choices you made when considering how to incorporate that language (as well as the languages of Arctic rescue and ecotage) and how that may have influenced your approach to the novel’s composition.

I love ‘petro-procedural.’ But if you think that now, you should have read the first draft! It was thirty-five thousand words longer than the final version – half a book. The kind of detail I went into, particularly aboard the drill-ship, to justify how I blow the damn thing up, and what everyone does about it, meant it was really only intelligible to me and a rig manager. My agent and then my editor set about it with flensing knives. Stripped it out until, to me, it felt like some kind of homeopathic water – once upon a time it’d contained technological substance, but now it was all leached out. I lamented, but then realised they were, of course, right. And it wasn’t nearly as absent as I thought, of course, as your questions shows. That’s where it’s vital for a writer to have good readers…

A principle of my fiction is that authenticity is key. Be true to how your characters would actually be. The kind of exposition dialogue where people say, ‘Let’s activate the Blowout Preventer, you know, that thing on the ocean floor that shuts off the oil well if there’s a problem’? Oh most horrible. So everything has to play real in the first draft, and then you get clever about how you reveal meaning in later drafts so a reader isn’t flailing around, at least too much. It’s a complicated process, getting it right. But being true to the scenario is more important than a reader understanding every word. We just roll along with things, don’t we, when it feels ‘true’. But so far no one who’s read it told me, ‘Harry, I didn’t have a clue what you were banging on about.’ So, with much help, maybe I struck the balance.

Connected to that balance, I’m interested in how White Road relates to representation. I was intrigued both by your use of multiple perspectives (including rescue workers, oilmen, Inuvialuit characters, etc) and, most interestingly, by the way that the Arctic itself seems to constitute a discrete character, as you alluded to earlier. Again, I’m curious as to why you chose to share the narrative voice of White Road and what challenges and opportunities that might have created.

I mentioned earlier that a fiction writer interrogates a subject. At first I wanted to write the novel from the point of view of an eco-activist. But I found, thinking it through, that it became too ‘on the nose’. Too obvious, too biased and opinionated. All a bit worthy. I even had Carrie, early on in my mind, as someone who cares greatly for the environment. But she was far more interesting as someone who doesn’t give a shit about much. Her essential goodness is only revealed through crisis.

But I also wanted to show the world of oil extraction. I played with strapping, men-being-men characters. But, again, too obvious. So Ross came into being – small, bad-leg, morally compromised and weak, but bottom line a nice guy. In time of crisis, in fact, brave and stalwart – much more than he knows or believes of himself. That the Inuvialuit guy, Amaruq, came to have his own point of view and a key role to play, was something that grew up organically as the novel progressed. It’s their land, their world being desecrated. But, again, making him an oil worker with complicated views on things, felt a much better way to play the story. I didn’t want to write some cuddly narrative. I wanted to show myriad opinions, myriad real interests, a complex reality. That said, The Morning Star still called the novel an ‘anti-capitalist eco-thriller’, so I guess my ultimate sensibility showed through.

Which brings me to the Arctic itself – and I’m so grateful you felt it was its own discrete character. The anthropologist Bruno Latour talks about the need for a ‘Parliament of Things’ – a place at the global political table, not just for people and nations, not just for the animal kingdom, but also for aspects of the natural world as they are impacted by human activity. The North Sea is currently one such being test-cased, so it’s not pie in the sky. I didn’t read about this until after I wrote the novel, but it’s at the heart of how I write, I think. I tried to do the same with the Canadian rainforests in The Cannibal Spirit. I’m more overtly doing it with Himalayan water in the novel I’m currently writing. And the Arctic is so powerfully an entity on the planet, so identifiably something in and of itself, it deserves the justice of such clear identity when I’m corralling it into my fiction. I worked hard for it to become an over-arching presence, to inhabit Carrie despite herself. If I’ve achieved that, then the book works.

I think it does, and it’s that over-arching or big-picture quality that brings me to my final question. While reading the novel I was reminded of an idea from the environmental writer Rob Nixon. In his book Slow Violence, Nixon argues that one of the representational challenges facing climate fiction is the need to move beyond the spectacle and towards the systemic – to represent not just the explosive but the underlying ‘slow violence’ of a building catastrophe. I feel as though White Road echoes that sentiment, using the spectacular to foreground a systemic critique of Arctic oil extraction, and I wonder if (as a novel driven by action and adventure) White Road constitutes one method of delivering the systemic through the spectacular.

That’s rather better put than I could have been thinking at the time. But essentially, yes. Many cli-fi novels – though far from all – go with the big event as representative of the whole. When you’re writing a story you’re just trying to get the first draft onto the page, see where it goes. Alain Robbe Grillet said that when we ask the writer why they’ve written their book, they have to answer: ‘To try and find out why I wanted to write it.’ But still, I knew that a hundred thousand tonne drill-ship on fire in an Arctic storm made for a hell of a symbol of the potential risks of Arctic offshore oil extraction. However, honestly, the biggest moment of the whole book for me was not that. It was when Carrie, alone and lost on the polar ice pack in the winter dark, is confronted with the realisation that, a few inches beneath her feet, beneath the pristine white, a vast oil slick is slowly killing all before it. It’s quiet, dark, sinister, intractable, rather than wham-bang spectacular. It still makes me shudder thinking of it now. It’s the book’s dominant metaphor of what’s happening to our planet. But I guess that is still writing the spectacular, in its way; the violence much faster and more direct than the type Nixon’s talking about. Art picks a thing to represent some-thing larger, even universal. White Road blows up an oil rig. Not exactly subtle!

I’m an adventure story fan, really. I’ve been keeping a list of all the books I’ve read for the past fifteen years or so; at least half are thriller-esque in one way or another. Like many children used to do, I hid myself in books from the adult violence all around. And that sensibility lingers on. Many of those stories were, and still are, adventure narratives. I mentioned how when I’m up and running with a novel (I’ve published two but written four and a half) I can often literally see the world of the story overlaying the real. I have a breathless sense of its existence constantly on the edge of my vision. And with that in mind, maybe, I’m drawn to the dramatic, the visually arresting, the heart-stopping, the otherworldly, the uncanny even. The spectacular. My books almost all have sections that may or may not be supernatural, or else they are the lived experience of the character’s consciousness – which is to say it’s all the same thing anyway. The spectacular is my trip.

The spectacular stirs us – even if the spectacular is just the stirring way in which a particular writer imagines the ordinary, even if it’s the breathlessness of reading fabulous prose. So fiction is always spectacularising the systemic, maybe. Or turning up the contrast button. The systemic may represent the factual, unfolding world. The spectacular, maybe, can summarise it in a moment in time, or a moment in prose. I do wonder whether it will only be something entirely spectacular, and horrific, that makes us wake up to the environmental emergency. Or maybe we’ll just blank it out as we’re doing to the current crises in our human world.

Harry Whitehead is a novelist and an academic at the University of Leicester, where he works on climate change and the arts. He directs the Centre for New Writing and the annual free literature festival, Literary Leicester. White Road is his second novel. His first, The Cannibal Spirit (Penguin), was reviewed as ‘powerful, brave, ambitious’ (The Globe & Mail), ‘a unique work, compelling, complex, thought-provoking and impressive’ (Quill & Quire). He’s published short stories, reviews, essays and more in a variety of genres. He used to work in the film business.

Joe Bedford’s interview series Writers on Research is made possible with National Lottery funding via Arts Council England.

As part of my interview series Writers on Research, I spoke to author Lara Haworth on the research process behind her novel Monumenta (Canongate, 2024).

Monumenta is an exceptional study of historical memory as explored on the level of the personal, the internal, the reflective. Specifically, the novel deals with the phenomenon of historical memory in modern-day Serbia, with characters reflecting some of the complexities of the ex-Yugoslav diaspora. I’m curious to know what drew you to this place and its history, and how you navigated your own proximity to the subject, either as a researcher, a writer or as a person.

It’s strange, isn’t it. If I had gone into the writing of Monumenta aiming to excavate a study of historical memory on the level of the personal, I would have probably failed. The task would have seemed too grand, too daunting. Luckily, I entered through a smaller, less fancy side door, where the specifics of what is remembered are mixed up with heartbreak, other disasters, and what to have for dinner.

I was drawn to setting Monumenta in Belgrade by my dearest friend, who is Serbian, and her family, with whom I have spent a lot of time throughout my life. The house in the novel is fictional but is also my friend’s grandmother’s house. The sale of this house in 2019 leaked into a parallel and difficult feeling, which was of the loss of my own grandparents’ house. I started to think about the loss of political homes and realities as connected to the loss of familial homes and realities. Monumenta is the first part of a project that takes in the whole of Europe, from east to west, but I wanted to start in Belgrade as the arguments over historical memory and memorialisation there are peculiarly fresh. Perhaps because I’ve spent a good deal of time there, hanging out, speaking to people, I have, over time, ingested some of its ways of thinking and doing about memory and the past without realising it. This enabled a kind of lightness when I was writing that felt a bit freer and a bit more able to stash the heavier parts of the research I had conducted. Mostly into massacres. I also wanted to show readers a longer history, one that goes beyond the wars of the ’90s, which I think, for many in western Europe, occlude the place’s deeper realities.

Tied to this is the theme of memorialisation (and the difficulties of memorialising the past) that underpins the novel. As various characters consider how best to memorialise Serbian history, your character Misha poses a core problem: ‘“There is a fine line,” said Misha, “a very fine line. Between memorialisation and erasure.”’ (p. 55). I wondered if you could expand on that relationship for us. In what sense is society’s memorialisation of itself in danger, sometimes, perhaps always, of also facilitating an erasure of historical trauma?

For me, Misha’s line speaks very particularly to the problems and failures of monuments. We could, I guess, go further into it and say that every time I remember something I exclude something else, which is, in a way, how writing works, but in the case of Misha’s line, I really did mean for a consideration of architecture. First, there’s the question of who decides who to remember, who commissions, which inevitably excludes. Just look at all the dead white men on horses in Whitehall. And the remembering itself is always contested, and changing. Other stories and histories come to the surface, and the monument takes on new meaning. Winston Churchill’s statue on Parliament Square has become a locus of this type of change. For some, an embodiment of racist imperialism in bronze, for others, a war hero in need of legal protection from vandalism (which he duly received). And in a way, the monuments themselves become places to register and sort through this change, which ironically makes them relevant again. And while I think that so many monuments do fail, and do forget, and do enrage and hurt, I also think we still need to try. They are important; they have a vital civil function as emotional architectures. Good examples of this are the ad hoc Covid memorial wall on the Embankment in London, and the Stolpersteine, or stumbling blocks, in Berlin.

Adjacent to themes of memorialisation, another way that history and the present day interact throughout Monumenta is through hallucination, fantasy, memory loss and nightmare. I was particularly struck by the fantasy of your character Danilo, who imagines that, like the murdered King of Serbia, he is missing his right hand. I wanted to ask about your approach to memory as a literary theme, particularly its relationship to nightmares and the repressed. What is it about that subject which is so conducive to literary drama?

I’m so pleased you noticed this. I enjoyed very much the kind of wild freedom in being able to convey a historical reality through the medium of fantasy. For me, this is very much how memory works. I am flung to different continents and time zones, with people both alive and dead, all while having a meeting with you, or writing this. So it made sense to me to articulate parts of Belgrade’s history this way. As a kind of explosion. The past into the present. For me, literature is memory: it has the unique ability to show consciousness, to show thought and recollection, which is also fantasy, nightmare, and the record. And there is the drama: a character remembering one thing (her ex, let’s say, at a moment of betrayal), while having dinner with her current girlfriend. It’s perfect, it’s all there. The nightmare can spring into the present at any moment, and the novel is the form that can articulate this in the truest, clearest way.

Memory and trauma is further reflected in the central theme of family, with the family home serving (to various degrees of success) as a memorial to the family. In this sense, the motif of a family reunion feels like a purposeful method of evoking questions of family trauma, particularly through the long-kept, sometimes poorly-kept, secrets that bubble up throughout the novel. Again, I’m curious to know whether you feel fiction has a special aptitude for dealing with this theme, and to what extent Monumenta might serve as a monument to your own experiences of family.

Family, yes. Always. If I’m arguing that memory is the primary theme of literature (which I seem to be doing), then family is next, perhaps because for many of us, our earliest and first serious memories have to do with family. Again, I think the doubling of inner consciousness with outward appearance that the novel can do makes it uniquely able to show how it is to exist within a family. The way the power moves, who carries the secrets, who sublimates themselves and who keeps the show on the road. I realised early on that I was writing Monumenta, in part, as a response to the grief of losing my grandparents, their house, and therefore an entire world. My experience of family is inevitably there, too, but shattered between all the characters, only detectable in pieces. There is a scene in Monumenta towards the end, ostensibly it’s a quiet scene, between Olga and her children, Hilde and Danilo, as they prepare food for the party the next day. And yet, internally, for all three characters, it’s very loud indeed. It took careful rewriting to sift and sift the scene and find the balance between the interior and the exterior, the ways in which they let on, or don’t, how they’re really feeling, and where and why their interactions and private grievances might enable shifts in behaviour and affect and grudge-bearing and love.

Finally, I wanted to ask a practical question about your use of multiple points-of-view. The narrative of Monumenta is refracted through several characters, each of whom retain a distinct perspectives on the world while operating broadly within the third person present tense. Could you illuminate some of the opportunities that working with this unfixed POV might have allowed, as well as some of the challenges? Did it feel comfortable? Could the novel have been written any other way?

I had never written from multiple perspectives before, and I had this weird feeling that I never would. Why, I have no idea. Perhaps I was scared. But as soon as I started writing Monumenta, the narrative insisted on it. Demanded it. Came to life in a din of voices. And once I operated from a position where any of the characters could have an inner world, some of them practically knocked me down (I’m looking at you, Karl) and ran off with it. And what I had thought would be a fiddly, difficult process actually became a very fast-moving, instinctive one. The novel could not have been written any other way. Because I think to grapple with the competing voices of family, of memory, and of historical record, it couldn’t really be told any other way.

Lara Haworth was born in Brussels and raised in South London. A recipient of a Bridport Prize and a Café Writers Award, her poetry and short fiction have appeared in Extra Extra, Field, ACME and Feels. Her debut novel, Monumenta, was published by Canongate in July 2024 and has been shortlisted for a Nero Book Award and the McKitterick Prize. A German edition, Das Abschiedsmahl, translated by Stefanie Ochel, will be published by Kjona Verlag in August 2025.

Joe Bedford’s interview series Writers on Research is made possible with National Lottery funding via Arts Council England.

As part of my interview series Writers on Research, I spoke to author Karen Stevens on the research process behind her collection Brilliant Blue (Barbican Press, 2025).

I’d like to start by asking about place. Most of the stories of Brilliant Blue emanate out from the Duncock Estate: a fictional council estate in Hampshire. The estate works as both a focal point for the drama but also as a kind of binding agent for the collection, melding the stories of Brilliant Blue into a beautifully-observed evocation of a specific (if fictional) social environment. I hoped you could share how the idea for Duncock came about and how your broader experiences of similar real-world environments may have fed into that.

The stories in Brilliant Blue were originally written as standalone pieces to submit to competitions. Over the years, I’ve accumulated quite a collection of stories, and one afternoon I decided to lay them all out to see what they revealed to me. I didn’t fully realise at the time, but I now see that this was a semi-conscious attempt to develop a sense of writerly identity. It was valuable because it helped me to see my preoccupations more clearly as a writer. I’m very interested in the British working-class system, and many of my stories unfold in working-class settings, exploring what it means to feel, connect, and cope in a world that’s anything but equal.

Fortunately, I had some objectivity when I began sifting through everything, since I’d written some stories years earlier. That distance allowed me to see which pieces were weaker, which covered territory that was too similar, and which had a different mood from the collection I could sense was emerging. The pieces I picked had a common thread – people going through tough times, weighed down by their histories, and caught in relationships where real connection was missing – but the collection needed something more, to make it cohesive. The binding – or glue – was definitely missing at that point.

I decided to do some research and re-read the short story collections that I love, with an eye on how other writers create cohesion. Colin Barrett’s collection Young Skins made a real impression again (oh, the joy of re-reading!). All of his stories are set in the same fictional Irish town of Glanbeigh, and the opening piece skilfully uses setting to establish a tense, edgy atmosphere and to illuminate the lives of his characters – listless and stuck, some lurking on the edges, others pushed there.

I love writing setting because it’s more than just the time and place of a story – it’s a way to shape mood and meaning. So, like Barrett, I set about developing a unifying setting, which became the Duncock estate: a fictional location loosely inspired by a sprawling housing estate I know well, and where a relative still lives. My aim wasn’t to faithfully recreate this place through description, but rather to evoke an atmosphere I experience whenever I visit. I wanted the physical environment to create a mood that reflects the mental landscapes of my characters. I really enjoyed working the stories with this in mind. I think writers are often drawn to creating fictional places that feel recognisable – Thomas Hardy’s Wessex springs to mind – because the imagination can move more freely, unburdened by the friction between reality and invention.

Tying in with that idea of using place as a binding agent for the collection, several of these stories feature recurring characters who appear and reappear at different stages of their lives. This brought to mind other collections of locality like Joshua Jones’s Local Fires and Louis de Bernieres’s Notwithstanding, in which disparate characters fulfil different roles in other characters’ stories. Could you expand on how you handled these recurrences? What creative choices did you have to make in re-employing characters, and were there opportunities or challenges involved in balancing their presence in other stories?

I really enjoy reading short story collections with recurring characters, and my first experience – about thirty years ago now – was the collection Come to Me by Amy Bloom. It’s a brilliantly nuanced collection, in which several stories feature characters who reappear in different contexts or are connected to one another. I found it fascinating to see different facets of these individuals, and so it felt like a natural decision to have my characters recur – walking in and out of each other’s stories – because they’re united by their shared location.

Practically, I needed to develop relationships – connections and disconnections – crucial in fiction. I began by deciding that the central characters in three stories would be family members: Andy, Gina and Emma. Andy’s story would come first in the collection. In it, he chooses to remain a bystander when his good friend is involved in a violent event, prompting him to reflect on his position in his troubled marriage to Gina. In the later stories featuring Gina and Emma, we see how this incident has plunged Andy into full-blown depression, and we witness how it affects them as they navigate their own crises. Gina may seem abhorrent from Andy’s viewpoint in his story, but her own narrative reveals the depth of her frustrations. Similarly, Emma might appear to be a selfish teenager in Gina’s story, but we come to understand how her parents’ preoccupation with their own lives and their fractured marriage has impacted her – leading to an illicit liaison with an older man.

These three stories – placed at the beginning, middle, and end – provided a useful structure for developing connections between other characters in the collection. This helped me determine whether a particular character should appear as a bit-part, a secondary figure, or a more integral presence. This process was by no means a quick turnaround. Yes, I had already written the stories, but weaving connections between individuals required extensive writing, reshaping characters and situations in new and often unexpected ways. It took a good few years. I had to be patient.

In Gina’s story, a young man Bez – part of Emma’s teenage gang – was originally just a secondary character, but I couldn’t get him out of my head. He’s not entirely comfortable in his environment, and is politically-minded. I gave him one line in the story that reveals his stance on class, when he’s refused a match to light a cigarette by the landlord of a local pub: ‘You lot, eh? … You posh lot. Keeping everything to yourselves and fuck the rest of us.’ That line – ordinary enough – stuck with me, and I found myself writing Bez’s story at the point when I thought the collection was done. I removed another story to make room for him, and it took me ages to write. A challenge? Absolutely, especially as I was eager to get the collection out into the world. But for a long time, I couldn’t work out what I wanted to say through Bez. In the end, the challenge became an opportunity: Bez evolved into a working-class lad who ends up at university, passionately voicing his views on the British class system while working a summer job in his local DIY store. He became a mouthpiece for my own preoccupation with class, and I had a lot of fun with writing his story. It brought a different tone to the collection – which I liked.

In the end, I hope the use of recurring characters prompts readers to fill in the narrative gaps between stories – something I particularly enjoy in short story cycles – and serves to unsettle their initial impressions and moral judgments. I wanted readers to recognise the complexities and contradictions we all carry as we navigate our paths, because it’s hard to walk a straight line in a wobbly world.

Throughout Brilliant Blue, the links between characters are often fraught, and I think these dramatic tensions come partly from the fact that they are connecting, or perceive themselves to be connecting, across cultures and class boundaries. Evidently, culture, class and social mobility are some of the key drivers of the collection, and there are moments in which these divisions seem by turns vast or insurmountable and then paper-thin or imaginary. I wonder if this liminal quality comes from a personal place, and whether you’d be happy to share how that may have fed into your creative approach.

I grew up in a poor working-class household, and in the mid-1990s, education offered me the kind of social mobility that Tony Blair envisioned when he entered Downing Street in 1997, with his belief that wider access to Higher Education would be the great social leveller. I suppose I’m living proof of Blair’s vision, having built a career in academia. But I don’t feel middle-class – and if asked, I would defiantly define myself as working-class.

The impact of this ‘in-betweenness’ (as I call it) is that I often experience imposter syndrome when engaged in predominantly middle-class environments, yet also feel distanced from my working-class roots. My feelings aren’t unique. In The Uses of Literacy (1957), Richard Hoggart wrote about the ‘uprooted and the anxious’ – the working-class scholarship boy of post-war Britain who sought self-improvement through education, only to become ‘the odd man out’: no longer able to fit into his working-class community and too self-conscious to feel at ease with his middle-class peers. Much of my writing explores this psychic tension. Indeed, the stories in Brilliant Blue pivot around moments when class lines are crossed or blurred, and people become more acutely aware of their power and powerlessness (whether real or imagined) within the hierarchies of class relations. It sounds heavy – but there’s humour in these moments too. I love a book that makes me laugh, especially at important moments when it feels inappropriate to do so.

Connections between characters are, of course, not all incidental; many of the characters are dealing with difficulties within their families or, often, extended families. These families are also, in many cases, changing in character – family members are leaving or returning, relationships are breaking down or repairing, structural changes are taking place – and many of these changes form the collection’s most epiphanic moments. Again, I’d love it if you’d be happy to share how your own perspective on family helped you to imagine these family dramas.

I don’t know anyone who lives – or has lived – in the ‘perfect’ family set-up, where everyone gets along brilliantly and life unfolds like a fairy tale, happily ever after. It seems there’s always some kind of tension, from minor irritations to long-standing grudges, and sometimes a tragedy or the revelation of a secret can tear a family apart. Personally, I’ve had a fairly dysfunctional upbringing, and my experience of family is that it’s a dynamic in constant flux, shaped by differing personalities, choices, and changing circumstances. In life, these variables inevitably lead to either emotional outbursts, or they’re internalised. The stories in Brilliant Blue explore the internalised – the ‘hidden’ psychodramas that arise from incidents and circumstances that bring about change, in some way – offering the reader (hopefully) a more complex, varied and individual insight into how different people respond to love, loss, duty, societal pressure and more.

Tolstoy captures it perfectly in the opening line of Anna Karenina, when he writes: ‘‘All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion’ (Penguin, 1978). In this, he encapsulates what we seek from fiction, as readers: stories are about struggle – we don’t crave equilibrium. The best stories are in motion, and I think this is especially true of the short story, where there’s less room for ‘easing in’ or preamble. A short story must begin on the cusp of change – when things are in flux, disarray or conflict – in order to bring about a profound moment of realisation for the central protagonist.

All of this brings me to a quote from the final story in the collection, ‘The Real Deal’, something that really struck me. To paraphrase an observation from your character Gavin: ‘This might seem unreal to you, Emma – a cliché, even… But it’s never cliché, is it – when things happen in real life to real people’ (p. 81). For me, this encapsulates how deftly Brilliant Blue brings threads of so-called melodrama (via class, family, etc.) into a personal, realistic literary context. I was reminded of the various nods to soap operas throughout the collection, and I wanted to ask if you feel, as I do, that the collection is doing something to treat working-class characters (in particular) less like functionaries in a melodrama and more like real people ‘in real life’?

I write and think about the world from a working-class perspective because this is where I come from, so it was never a conscious decision to write working-class characters who feel ‘real’. The goal of all writers is to craft characters who are complex, flawed, and emotionally authentic. But I suppose the challenge of writing working-class characters is that the label ‘working-class fiction’ tends to conjure two opposing, and somewhat cliched stereotypes: lazy, insular and brutal individuals, or honest, hardworking people who value family and community.

When I read Andrew Cowan’s novel Pig, I was completely blown away by how he transcends the usual stereotypes. It’s a beautifully crafted and sensitive story, in which an adolescent boy’s dreams are set against the harsh realities of a town in economic and post-industrial decline. In a similar vein, the people in my stories live where they live and are busy working through their problems and aspirations – just like anyone else. I think this is what lies at the heart of Gavin’s line about cliche and real life: we’re so accustomed to reading middle-class narratives, and seeing middle-class drama on telly and in films, that other lives can seem less real or substantial, or are reduced in our imagination to cliche. The people in my stories may be living in more precarious financial situations, but their loves, losses, hopes, and trials are just as unique and valuable as anyone else’s, regardless of class.

Karen Stevens writes short fiction and has been published in a variety of anthologies and journals, including The Big Issue, Fish Publishing, Salt Publishing and Valley Press. She was runner-up for the prestigious ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award in 2023. Her edited collection of essays Writing a First Novel: Reflections on the Journey was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014. Her co-edited collection of short stories High Spirits won a Saboteur Award for Best Anthology in 2019. Karen is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Chichester and lives in West Sussex. Brilliant Blue is her first collection of short stories.

Joe Bedford’s interview series Writers on Research is made possible with National Lottery funding via Arts Council England.

As part of my interview series Writers on Research, I spoke to author Giselle Leeb on the research process behind her short story collection Mammals, I Think We Are Called (Salt, 2022).

I wanted to start by exploring a phrase you use at the very beginning of the collection, which I think encapsulates one of the major themes of Mammals, I Think We Are Called. In your story ‘The Goldfinch Is Fine’, you introduce the idea of ‘the new natural’ (p. 5) – a contemporary idea of ‘the natural’ that encompasses aspects of nature, culture, technology, animal consciousness, artifice and the uncanny. I wondered if you could expand on how challenging or expanding ideas of what is ‘natural’ might have fed into your work on Mammals, and whether you feel ‘the natural’ is still a useful or meaningful phrase.

I was inspired by ‘the natural’ when I had stories in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and Reckoning Magazine (a journal of creative writing on environmental justice), alongside non-fiction pieces by Christopher Brown, who I then interviewed for Reckoning. He talks about how our very concept of the natural shows our separation from nature, and how wild animals are becoming habituated to the urban environments where he lives. It’s a kind of new natural, or perhaps a recognition that we can’t get back to how things were before and must grapple with the current climate crisis starting from where we are now.

After reading Sapiens and then the mind-blowing The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (the latter after my book was published), I think differently about the world, how society and nature change radically over time. My story ‘Drowning’ is about this change and the human incapacity to comprehend such enormous shifts in their environment. This is not to say I’m letting humanity off the hook for the disastrous environmental situation we are in. The fact that things do change so much also means that we can change them. If we grapple more with what’s happened before, we’ll be better equipped to do something about our current situation.

In ‘The Goldfinch Is Fine’, ‘the new natural’, besides being about the changing climate, is also perhaps an (unconscious) poke at the conventional idea of normality, something I’ve wrestled with my whole life, being split between wanting to belong and liking non-conformity. A very human dilemma as we are social animals. Every definition of the unnatural implies there is some absolute standard of the natural or normality. I haven’t found one yet! In describing his acceptance of his sexuality as ‘the new natural’ the main character plays on and counters this. I love the word ‘unnatural’ in horror because it sounds so very Lovecraftian and uncanny, and often funny too.

I’m curious there about how you connect the ‘natural’ and the ‘personal.’ I suppose attached to that are the ways we respond emotionally to this new state of nature, particularly to nature as encompassing the climate emergency. One of the prevalent responses in Mammals is that feeling of numbness or paralysis in the face of unfolding disaster. You describe this feeling succinctly in your closing story ‘Barleycorn’: ‘[The student] can’t quite acknowledge the feeling that there is no easy answer to the failure of humans to act on the environment. All that money, all that poverty, and the earth collapsing, while new strides are being made towards commercial travel to other planets. What is the point of studying? What is the point of theory?’ (p. 209). I’m curious as to whether you’ve experienced this kind of despondency in yourself or others, and whether writing Mammals helped to work through that kind of feeling.

I’ve definitely experienced despondency about the environment. The task of changing things seems so overwhelming and it’s difficult to know how to take on huge corporate players and politicians. Oddly, like with many crises at the moment, a lot of people I know don’t even talk about it, except to briefly express the impossibility of doing anything about it. Possibly both of these things are a sign of our times: a focus on the individual and a feeling of powerless about taking on the establishment, as if the battle has already been lost.

I’m not sure about working through the feeling by writing. For me writing is more a reflection of how I’m feeling. I often have no idea what I’m feeling until I write something down and think: oh, so that’s how I feel. The one way I’ve found to feel better is to take action, no matter how small. If you imagine all the protest movements, all the people doing something about the climate or corrupt governments, imagine how much worse things would be without them. This gives me hope. There is an effect.

As a creative response to changes to both the climate and to our idea of ‘the natural’, I’d argue that Mammals belongs in the tradition of speculative and hyperrealist fiction which attempts to tackle the themes that realism cannot. In my reading, while the collection remains grounded in tangible emotions, it consistently swerves reality and in Doing so opens up the stories to possibilities that are arguably beyond the scope of the realist/‘everyday’ short story. Does this resonate with you at all?

It does. I’ve naturally (that word again!) gravitated towards speculative elements in my stories, although I’ve also written (almost, mostly) realist stories. Kelly Link, one of my top writers, describes the fantastic as an intensifier of reality, creating additional space for emotional resonance in a story. I think that rather than swerving reality, my stories are representing it in a different way, hopefully incorporating new aspects of how we think and behave, by which I mean our less conscious aspects, rather than just our conscious selves.

The unconscious is important to me because that’s what got me writing, and I’m fascinated with the language of dreams and symbols. It’s also where fantasies and fairy tales come from. Angela Carter came up with a brilliant phrase to describe fantastical literature when she said that she was writing a ‘social realism of the unconscious’.

I wrote an article about representing reality in fiction for The Word Factory: The fantastical, fabulist, surreal, slipstream, literary mode of writing

Other than the broad themes around nature and climate, one of the other themes that I found pervading the collection was that relating to medicine and medical ethics, particularly to the process of monitoring typically involved with treatment. In several of the stories, medical professionals or scientists monitor patients, test subjects and animals. It seems like a theme which is aptly built to deliver and explore ‘the uncanny’, and I hoped you could speak to why that feeling of being monitored, particularly in a medical sense, is so conducive to unsettling drama.

I think the connection is to do with authoritarianism, power and powerlessness, both in people’s personal lives and in society. The feeling of being watched and controlled with no agency is perfect for dystopian and uncanny fiction. It feeds on fear, that some powerful and unpredictable outside force could strike at any moment, and is a direct threat to the integrity of the self.

I grew up in apartheid South Africa, a police state, and witnessed the attempted dehumanisation of most of the population by the government, and the general lack of freedom of speech and action. The protagonists in ‘Scaffolding’ and ‘Are You Cold, Monkey? Are You Cold?’, relate the abuse in their personal lives to doctors and science respectively. The latter story is particularly disturbing as the experiments, based on Harlow’s psychology experiments on baby monkeys, are being conducted to help humans. In the former, the doctor is an authority figure who seems, at first in any case, to be distant and unconnected to the patient. They do briefly connect, but the chance at changing their power dynamic is lost when they switch roles. In ‘Pain Is a Liar’ this sense of powerlessness is taken further to a dystopian nightmare where people are tortured for fun by a privileged class. In ‘Dividual’ the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ becomes a split in the self.

Medicine, while incredibly helpful, also induces fear, a potential invasion of the body while in a weak state. Like much of science, the average person does not know much about it, and must put their trust in a complete stranger, the doctor.

I have ambiguous feelings about doctors. Some are lovely and empathic, but I’ve also had experiences where they operate from a position of power and snobbery and perhaps became doctors for the wrong reasons.

Finally, I wanted to move away from these more central themes to ask something about your creative responses to the place you were born. In your story ‘Drowning’, South Africa is centred for the only time during the collection, evoking both the desert landscape of the Karoo and the conurbations of Durban and Cape Town. I wanted to ask how it feels for you to write about South Africa, particularly as I know you’re working on a memoir of your childhood there. What does it mean for you to write about South Africa? What does South Africa mean when you write it?

I’m still finding out as I write the memoir… Writing about South Africa feels like home. It’s background, a part of me that is just there without me having to think about it. It is indirectly in my writing, in the themes of some stories, for example authoritarianism. When I write directly about it, like in ‘Drowning’, a lot of visceral details come up, landscapes vividly experienced through the senses, and strong emotions. I think partly because of the intensity of childhood, but maybe also because it was a country where you had to deeply examine everything, and yourself in relation to it.

Giselle Leeb’s debut collection, Mammals, I Think We Are Called (Salt), was longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2023. Her stories have appeared in publications including Best British Short Stories 2017 (Salt), Ambit, Mslexia, The Lonely Crowd, Black Static, and Nightjar Press.
http://giselleleeb.com
@giselleleeb.bsky.social

Joe Bedford’s interview series Writers on Research is made possible with National Lottery funding via Arts Council England.

As part of my interview series Writers on Research, I spoke to author Rosie Garland on the research process behind her collection Your Sons and Your Daughters are Beyond (Fly on the Wall Press, 2025).

I wanted to start with a general question about flash fiction and its relationship with research, primarily because this series hasn’t covered the form as widely as novels and longer short stories. I’m curious to know how research fits into your process, if at all, and whether you feel as though flash fiction encourages a different approach to research than longer forms.  

Great place to start… as I’ve never been asked about how I research flash fiction. I get asked it all the time about my novels! Maybe there’s an assumption that, because flash fiction is short, it doesn’t need the same level of care and craft as a novel. I disagree. I research my historically-themed flash as carefully as for my historical novels.

I don’t overload the reader, however. The way I see it, the art of good research is when the reader barely notices its presence, only that everything feels right. Personally, I don’t care if an arrow is fletched with swan feather, eagle feather or magpie feather. I want to know who is shooting it, who dies, and why I should give a damn.

Whether a novel or a flash, what’s core for me is the emotional heart of the story; the way the characters interact with their world, whether that’s Ancient Egypt (‘Irt-irw’ – more on her below), the Bronze Age (‘Under the Water, The Dead are Still Moving’) or the present day (‘Your Sons and Your Daughters are Beyond’).

Before circling back to research as a practical part of the writing process, I’d like to focus in on the sense of the uncanny that pervades Your Sons and Your Daughters are Beyond. Many of the stories feel like nightmares, not just because of their surrealness and unease but because they so often depart from an otherwise intact logical base – things are going right, and then suddenly, for reasons beyond our understanding, things are going very wrong. I wonder whether this reading resonates at all, and whether the uncanniness of nightmares has informed your writing.

Rather than nightmares, I link my interest in the uncanny and the unusual to my earliest experience of story. A very early memory is of my grandmother reading folktales and fairy stories complete with magical dragons and talking beasts. I plunged into impossible elsewheres and elsewhens where the magic just happened.

Without leaving the safe harbour of her lap, I could travel far from my isolated childhood rural home. From fairy tales it was a short step to Alice in Wonderland and Edgar Allan Poe. From Asterix to Beowulf, science fiction to science fact, I explored new worlds, learned new things, thought new thoughts. Enchanted and yet everyday at the same time. It rooted me in a sense of the extra-in-the-ordinary I’ve never lost.

It’s why you’ll find animals – talking and otherwise – appearing in unexpected places in many of my stories, such as ‘What business has a horse to look down on me?’, ‘Love measured in rabbits’ and ‘An eel can produce its own body weight in slime to wriggle out of a tight situation’.

Setting the uncanny aside, there are, in my reading, a few other dominant motifs that give Your Sons and Your Daughters are Beyond cogency even amid its diverse themes. One which I was particularly drawn to is the motif of astronomy – stories about stars and stargazing – and the broader scientific motifs which also pervade the collection. I hoped you could tell me what it is about astronomy that may have inspired some of your work, and whether you had a perspective on why the stars seem to have elicited so much human creative endeavour throughout time.

A great place to start is to write to your passions, and my writing springs from a variety of interests and obsessions. Despite failing science quite heroically at school, I have a lifelong fascination with astronomy. I fly to the moon and play amongst the stars in stories like ‘The Astronomical Menagerie’ and ‘The Names of Stars’.

My creative imagination is sparked by the question What If? The received wisdom is that stars are infinite and uncountable. I asked myself What if someone had the job of counting the stars? The result was the story, ‘What becomes of the night when there is nothing left to see?’.

As always, I’m seeking the universal themes… that which unites us. There’s an old saying, As Above, So Below. In my hybrid piece ‘Perihelion is the closest a comet gets to the fire before managing to escape’, I imagined a comet travelling around the solar system, shuttling from brief moments in the sun before hurtling back into the cold. I reflected on times in my life when I’ve felt like that: going round in circles and never getting anywhere. I have a suspicion that might resonate with a lot of people…

Yes, I think so. Beyond the thematic, I’d also like to ask a more practical question on tense. The predominant tense of the collection is present tense, which some writers attribute to immediacy and intimacy, and which sometimes feels like the ‘natural’ tense for flash fiction. I hoped you might be able to share your insight into the opportunities and challenges that using present tense offers, and whether it really does feel like a natural fit for the form.

I do use present tense in a lot of my flash fictions (longer fiction as well). You’re right, it does engender a sense of immediacy. It’s one reason I use it for a character from the distant past (for example in ‘Under the Water, the Dead Are Still Moving’), in order to bring them up close and personal to the reader.

However, I play with past tense too, especially if the character is someone who is stuck in the past and unable to move on with their life. For example, there’s the fox in ‘An Eye for an Eye’ and the protagonist in ‘Good with Words, Bad with Numbers’.

This choice of tense goes hand-in-hand with the choices I make when it comes to point of view. Flash fiction is a great opportunity to experiment and play with point of view, for example second-person ‘you’. It’s tough to sustain for a novel (though a few brave souls have tried), but is well-suited to flash. It creates an intimacy, especially important when the character is unusual in some way. It’s why I chose it for ‘Happy Ever After with Bear’ and ‘Self-possessed’.

To close, I’d like to hone in on a particular story. In the forwarding note to ‘I am Irt-irw, Daughter of Pedamenope!’, you introduce us to the mummy of Irt-irw, which is on display at The Great North Museum in Newcastle. The story, written from the first person perspective of Irt-irw, is a compelling imagining of an ancient voice lingering through time. What is it about the mummy of Irt-irw that inspired you, and how did you approach writing about a real historical figure, both practically and perhaps (in an age in which some human remains are being removed from museum displays) morally?

As mentioned above, I write from my passions. Another of my enduring fascinations is for the people and history of Ancient Egypt. There’s another saying, The past is another country, they do things differently there. I disagree – to me, envy feels like envy and love like love, whatever the era.

In ‘I am Irt-irw, Daughter of Pedamenope!’ I did careful research (including a visit to the wonderful Great North Museum in Newcastle), but as mentioned above, I wanted it to be a background hum. Far more important was to reach back through the millennia and take the hand of Irt-irw as a real person, capturing her emotions and desires. To draw her close.

Whether from the past, the present or the future, I’m interested in creating people who are generous and greedy, curious and silly, cantankerous and mean, nurturing and disobedient, courageous and cowardly. Characters with unrequited desires because of guilt, self-denial, or fear of social condemnation. In short, living and breathing people, just like the reader.

Rosie Garland writes long and short fiction, poetry and sings with post-punk band The March Violets. Poetry collection What Girls Do in the Dark (Nine Arches Press) was shortlisted for the Polari Prize 2021. Her latest novel The Fates (Quercus) is a retelling of the Greek myth of the Fates. In 2023, she was made Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Val McDermid has named her one of the most compelling LGBT+ writers in the UK today.

http://www.rosiegarland.com

Joe Bedford’s interview series Writers on Research is made possible with National Lottery funding via Arts Council England.

As part of my interview series Writers on Research, I spoke to author Chris Parker on the research process behind his novel Nameless Lake (Salt, 2023).

For me, one of the most immediately striking things about Nameless Lake is its structure, particularly in terms of how the story content is broken up into such small, discrete chunks. I wonder where your inspiration for that fragmented structure came from, and whether you feel as though fragmentation, even temporal fragmentation, is perhaps a wider quality of modern life or at least of memory.

I find it very hard to start a story at point A and work my way through to Z. My mind just won’t let me do it. I was also interested in the idea of creating small, significant paragraphs without intent – things that seemed important in and of themselves, without considering how or if they would turn out to serve the over-arching story. Some years ago I found out about the working methods of the brilliant Eric ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar‘ Carle, and to me it seemed like he had the most exciting approach to creativity I had ever heard of. Some days he would wake up and work on the text of a story. On others he would create his illustrations by cutting out and layering pieces of painted tissue paper. But sometimes he would spend the day simply painting solid colour onto sheets of paper, then leaving them to dry – creating the material for future illustrations without having any idea how or when they would be used. I can’t explain why this is so extremely appealing to me, but I love the idea of breaking down the writing of a novel into these different kinds of work, depending on what you want to do that day. I spent a huge amount of time not writing, exactly, but arranging the paragraphs I had written, sometimes moving something from the beginning to the end, or vice versa, or throwing out whole sections completely. I found it massively enjoyable, working with this material I had created, solving structural problems that I hadn’t wanted to consider earlier, because I just wanted to let the writing come without bending it to fit a particular shape.

I’m also very interested in the way writers seem to have an affinity with particular units of information. For instance, some writers seem to think in terms of chapters, or long strings of connected paragraphs. In my case, it’s the short paragraph, and when I realised these could be isolated, with plenty of white space in between, and that you could jump around in time and subject matter, that was a huge revelation to me. Reading Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill really electrified me because it gives the reader so much room to think, it doesn’t feel the need to rush around cramming every corner with detail. It doesn’t lead you from nighttime to breakfast time the next day, it forces you to make your own connections. And most crucially, it also gives space to observations and feelings that would go unrecorded in a traditional narrative, where there is an obligation to thread one moment to another in the interests of creating the illusion of time moving forward smoothly. If you give way to that kind of unimpeded forward momentum, lots of things that really preoccupy human beings have to get jettisoned in favour of simulating one day following the next. I believe we’re all shaped by little comments, half-understood stories, odd details that snag on our brains and crop up again and again at the core of our emotional lives, without reference to chronology or logic. I tried to be true to that when writing Nameless Lake.

At the centre of Nameless Lake is a controlling and abusive relationship hiding in plain sight, and I wanted to re-think the way stories often place the psychology of the perpetrator at the centre. I wanted to side-line the perpetrator, to focus single-mindedly on the person he has tried to obliterate, to examine the many facets of her life through the eyes of her friend. It seemed there was no other way to do this besides shattering conventional story structure into countless pieces. So the urge to remember the past by the narrator, Emma, to assemble it like a mosaic, becomes an attempt at restoration and rescue.

Leading on from that aesthetic approach, one of the repeated motifs of the novel is photography, with references both to its practice and history. Was this a consciously chosen motif, perhaps a reflection of that ‘snapshot’ structure, and do you feel there is a relationship between photography and fiction more generally?

I’m interested in photography because it takes root in the passive act of watching and grows into something very active, even aggressive. Photography seems to me an attempt to exert a kind of control over things and people by giving them implicit meaning which may or may not have any basis in reality. In that way it’s very much like writing fiction. As a writer, I couldn’t resist the story-within-a-story effect of introducing photos into a novel, the way it gave me another set of windows to look through. I also think photos are every bit as slippery as fiction. Just as words have an illusory kind of authority, images seem to be fixed for all time. But their meaning is not and it evolves according to the perspective of the viewer. As time elapses, it seems we read more and more into photographs, so they come to stand for what can’t ever be known. Nameless Lake is largely about trying to piece together the past in the aftermath of a traumatic event, so photographs became a way to externalise the power we ascribe to memories.

Another preoccupation within the novel is insularity, and the inner experience of the individual as potentially difficult (or impossible) to communicate. I know your professional background is writing for television, so I’m curious to know whether this opportunity to work outside of the visual-aural medium fed into the sense of insularity within your characters.

Yes, definitely. I think the gap between life as depicted in drama and how it is really lived is getting wider by the day, because of all the time we spend in our heads. We can’t escape the reality that life is re-orientating itself away from face-to-face encounters. The mental gymnastics of trying to second-guess what another person is thinking or feeling seem to take up more of our energy, and there’s so much about the structure of digital communication that builds in these moments where self-doubt can fester. Think of the time that can elapse between sending a WhatsApp message and getting a reply. As for the mechanics that make drama tick, the idea of extended families gathering in a room and speaking their thoughts has started to feel as fantastical as science fiction to me. There’s also this question that every screenwriter is confronted with, and dreads: “do we need this?” Which means, can this piece of dialogue or action be cut, does it impede the efficient and frictionless delivery of the story to the viewer? For me, there was always a kind of shame involved in receiving this note. It’s like you have failed to observe the commonly-agreed hierarchy of what matters and what doesn’t within a story – as if this is something decided by public consensus and fixed in stone. And this imbeds itself pretty quickly in your mental landscape, so you begin to police your writing for anything that might be considered extraneous to the main narrative. You do a lot self-editing and over time you begin to think, well, what kind of story am I not telling, by pruning away these unwanted parts that nevertheless feel massively significant? What if all these orphan moments are the story? Screenwriting is like operating a dam, knowing when to open and shut valves to generate power, but a lot of creativity can’t or doesn’t want to be used in this controlled way and you can’t stop it leaking over the edges.

Nameless Lake feels to me like a very European novel – not in the sense that it is European in character (although I think comparisons could be drawn with authors like Robert Musil and others), but in that its geography is widely spread throughout the continent. I would go as far as to call it something like a ‘city break novel’, though that this too glib, in trying to characterise how freedom of movement and tourism form a kind of natural backbone to the novel. I wonder if that was consciously done, and how you feel about freedom of movement more generally.

Well, I began the novel in the peak Brexit years and finished it during the second Covid lockdown, so I’m sure at some level it was shaped by those tensions. I haven’t travelled a massive amount in my own life, but every time I’ve found myself in an unfamiliar place, the experience has driven my thoughts inward. I think it’s the mild shock of seeing ourselves in a different context, the way it forces to you to consider how your life might have unfolded outside your home surroundings. I’m also inspired by European writers who seem able to combine essayistic elements with their fiction without sacrificing forward momentum, like Jenny Erpenbeck, Patrick Modiano and Antonio Muñoz Molina.

Finally, I’d like to touch on what is perhaps the central theme of the novel, that is the move from our adolescent to our adult selves. Simply put, when you look back on yourself as a teenager, as your narrator does throughout Nameless Lake, how do you feel about what has changed? How do we, as adults struggling through modern life, reflect healthily on what has been gained and lost?

I’m going to answer that obliquely by saying that writing this book has caused a profound change in the way I look back at myself and things that have happened in my life. The book is in no way autobiographical but, perhaps inevitably, many of the situations grew from tiny spores of memory and lived experience. And a lot of what motivates me to write comes from trying to unpack the reasons why these things have stayed with me while others are long forgotten. Before I wrote the book, I think I may have been hoarding and guarding these fragments, because I had an insatiable desire to know more about the wider context of the times I grew up in – the 1970s and 1980s. This urge, and the desire to look back at my own life, has completely left me. I wonder if all novelists experience this shift in focus. I now find myself obsessed with both the distant past and the near future – which is in its own way even more unsettling.

Chris Parker has written for television shows ranging from EastEnders and Coronation Street to Bedlam, a Sky drama series he co-created for Red Production Company. He is also a prolific animation writer, with credits including Peppa Pig, Bing and Clangers. Nameless Lake, his first novel, was published by Salt in July 2023.

Joe Bedford’s interview series Writers on Research is made possible with National Lottery funding via Arts Council England.

As part of my interview series Writers on Research, I spoke to author Glen James Brown on the research process behind his novel Mother Naked (Peninsula Press, 2024).

It’s my understanding that the initial concept for Mother Naked came from an entry in the Durham Cathedral archives, referencing a public performance by someone named ‘Modyr Nakett’, is that right? I’m curious as to how you came across this record, and how it inspired you to create a piece of novel-length fiction.

That’s right. I grew up in a town some seven miles outside the City of Durham, and all my life the Cathedral has had this magnetic pull. In 2021, I was clicking around on the internet, reading about the place, when I stumbled across the Records of Early English Drama North-East (REED-NE). This is a research project in conjunction with Durham University, part of an international organisation based at the University of Toronto, which aims to document medieval and early-modern English performance. That’s where I came across the reference to the ledgers of the Bursar of Durham Cathedral. At the time, the church was Durham’s most powerful landowner, and the Bursar recorded all monies going into and out of the cathedral, including that spent on entertainment. The 1433-1434 ledger said one Modyr Nakett (Mother Naked) had performed there, earning for his troubles a single groat, or four pence—about a tenner in today’s money. This was the lowest sum in over 200 years of surviving records. Mother was likely a gleeman—basically a minstrel—and REED-NE speculated the low sum was because Mother’s performance was lewd or disagreeable in some way. We’ll never know because after that one line in the ledger, Mother Naked vanishes forever.

I mean, how can you pass up something like that? The name alone is incredible, the circumstances even better. The whole book suggested itself almost instantly—a monologue set over the night Mother tells his story to his audience, a tale which does indeed become disagreeable. I love Ottessa Moshfegh, whose first novella is called McGlue. She said its genesis came from chancing across a New England newspaper article from 1851, written in ‘one long run-on sentence’ whereby a sailor called McGlue was acquitted of stabbing a man to death in the port of Zanzibar on account of being blackout drunk and insane after hitting his head falling from a moving train several months earlier. There was the whole book right there, Moshfegh said, the character, the plot, the deformed language. I felt like I’d struck gold. (Ottessa Moshfegh, BOMB Magazine). For me, finding that reference to Mother Naked was the same, and the first draft poured out fast. I’ve always been sceptical when a writer says their character ‘comes alive’ and starts dictating the story. This wasn’t that. More, I’d learned about Mother at the exact moment I was most receptive to learning, and things instantly became very simple. If I figure out how to replicate this experience, I’ll let you know.

In terms of historical research, I was most intrigued by how you capture a sense of the class divides within fifteenth century Durham, and how those divides are drawn out with references to everyday life and routine (such as the ploughing of a field), rather than (or adjacent to) larger ‘society-defining’ incidents. Is it fair to say that the most notable historical events of the time feature largely in the background (ala Austen, for example), and if so, was it a conscious choice to foreground the everyday?

The short answer is because the aftermath is often more interesting than the event itself, and the daily reality of peasant life was far more complex than how it is usually portrayed—as the toil of toothless simpletons covered in shite.

The story Mother tells his rich audience is about peasants, a class subdivided roughly into three: villeins, freemen, cottars. Villeins were bonded serfs, unable to leave their manor. They could own land, but also had to work up to 150 days—sometimes more—on their lord’s land for no payment, which seriously limited how much of their own holdings they could turn to profit. Then you had freemen who, as you might guess, did not belong to the lord and owed no work. Freemen could roam wherever they pleased, could buy and sell land and property, however it didn’t guarantee wealth—savvy villeins could be wealthier than freemen. Cottars were also free, but owned nothing and lived day-to-day in rented cottages that left them most exposed to the whims of landlords and market forces. Now, let’s imagine them out in the fields—a bonded villein working land for his lord, his freeman neighbour working his own land, and his cottar tenant working for a meagre day’s wage. All three of them sweating shoulder to shoulder, doing the same graft for very different payment and purpose. How would they feel about this? To me, that’s a very interesting question, especially in the aftermath of those society-defining—or reshaping—events you mention.

Two events reshaped Mother Naked’s society: the Great Pestilence of 1348 (renamed the Black Death by the Victorians), and Wat Tyler’s 1381 Peasant Revolt. The two are linked in that the Pestilence killed off most of the workers local lords and landowners needed to work their land. Population numbers took generations to recover, which put labour at a premium and gave workers the upper hand. Rulers didn’t like this, so laws were enacted to keep wages at pre-Pestilence levels, meaning those who survived—and their offspring—had to work harder for the same pay, even as inflation spiralled in the decades following. There were also other factors at play, but the result was a royally fucked-off peasantry. What followed is a fascinating period of tension between the poor agitating for more rights and rulers trying to maintain the status quo. Mother Naked takes place during this time, and explores how individual identity was a key tool in the battle for progress. The church’s narrative was that God ordained what station of life you were born into. He made you a bonded villein, meaning to complain—to agitate for something better—was not just disagreeing with one’s neighbours or lord, but tantamount to defying one’s very Maker. In that sense, the metaphysics, politics and socioeconomic forces unleashed by the cataclysm of the Plague are Russian-dolled into the most minor daily events. Each swing of the scythe, every seed sown, contains an almost Tolstoyan battle of opposing forces.

To get all this across, I had to get specific with the reality of fieldwork and rural peasant domesticity. I researched the cycle of the seasons, what work is done in which months, the names of the tools and how they were used. How ale was brewed and foodstuffs traded. How, when your cow as sick, you paid a priest to write the opening of Saint John’s Gospel—Verbum caro factum est—on a piece of parchment then tied to an udder. Rural peasant life is an endlessly fascinating but under-represented in contemporary literature about the middle-ages, which often focuses on court intrigue, royalty, the grand sweep of warring nations. The poor are usually background characters—servants, fieldworkers—in stories about the machinations of their rulers. Yet the poor were by far the largest demographic, and their potential for human intrigue is as compelling as any highborn narrative.

Connected with that, I’m interested to know how you developed the narrative voice for Mother Naked. How did you approach the challenges of composing or replicating fifteenth century cadence and vocabulary, and more broadly, how did you handle the possible tension between providing ‘authenticity’ and/or readability?

The book takes the form of a monologue—Mother telling a story to his audience, so his voice has to suck you in from the start. He’s speaking in the year 1434, not long after Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Initially, I thought I’d see if I could approximate that language, but soon realised I’d need to (a) get a PhD in Chaucerian language, and (b) write something else because I’m not getting a PhD in Chaucerian language. Once I had given up on literary fidelity, I was free to read an array of 15^th Century texts, and, well, piece Mother’s voice together from whatever sounded cool.

I did magpie from Chaucer—how can you not?—but also The Book of Margery Kempe, and surviving bard tales such as the chivalric romance Sir Cleges. I tried to match the rhythms and cadence of the sentences, which I know also reflect the translator and the period of their translation. As I read, I squirrelled words and phrases (don’t complain about something—grutch; don’t run out of money—wax scant). I even raided bits from medieval cookbooks (don’t chop that turnip—smite it to gobbets!). I’m a grammar nerd, so I went deep on the archaic auxiliary verbs and second-person singular possessive pronouns. In all cases, I went with my gut; with what felt and looked and sounded readable. So didst was out, hast was in. I leaned into Durham dialect and slang, and reflected Mother Naked’s oral format with the phonetic alveolar plosive /t/ at the end of regular past-tense verbs (kissed becomes kiss’t). All told, it’s quite a lot, so I allow the reader to settle in via gentle repetition and careful contextualisation.

Pronouns and conjugations were tricky due to what they evoke. For example, thou art makes you think Shakespeare, right? Because even though thou art was in use in the 1400s, Shakespeare came along 200 years later and made it indivisible from himself. So I was careful to stay away from grammar that conjures the Elizabethan era. I was also careful with etymology, but did pepper the book’s language with some words and phrases that nuzzle into Mother’s future. I did this for the reading experience, but also because I see Mother Naked as a contemporary novel. I’ll get into that a little further down.

What does this all mean for readability vs authenticity? I think the best course of action is to write a book where the reader is so absorbed that the question simply never occurs to them.

When it comes to voice and language, I’m inspired by writers who swing for the fences: Russell Holban, Fernanda Melchor, Anthony Burgess. There are some incredible contemporary novels set in the medieval / middle-ages, all of which deploy language in various ways. To Calais in Ordinary Time by James Meek, The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth, Victoria MacKenzie’s For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain, Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. Each of them chooses their language to reflect that time. Some are more ‘accurate’ than others, but all excel precisely because they are constructs in service to their creators’ singular vision. Mother Naked is my contribution. Life for travelling gleemen like Mother was precarious, a sustained balancing act. Getting his voice right in the book—maintaining it throughout—was a similarly fraught performance. One I hope never even occurs to the reader.

Regarding plot, I feel as though Mother Naked functions in many ways as a historical crime novel, particularly in the unfolding mystery that underpins the narrative. I wonder how the choice to use mystery as a story engine came about, and whether any traditional or contemporary texts fed into that. (For various reasons, I thought of Chinatown, especially in the way its twists lead the reader in and out of the corridors of abusive power.)

I never imagined a book set in 1400s Durham would evoke Chinatown! But I see what you’re saying—that film is about the power structures which enable the elite’s unfettered greed, to the detriment of the poor, and Mother Naked is also very much about that. There are two main types of text which inspired the book’s structure, the first of which is indeed contemporary crime. Mother unravelling the mystery of a local legend to his audience—the destruction of a rural village some 40 years earlier, some say by a ‘walking ghost’ with broken arms—provides a throughline with a tight, satisfying ending. All the moving parts snapping shut like a trap. But in order to stop things feeling mechanistic, I wanted to pay homage to the shaggy-dog nature of early modern storytelling. In weaving this way and that, Mother’s tale feeds into the reader’s sense of dramatic irony—this palpable sense there’s a method to his madness, and an even bigger mystery is at work, culminating in a final oh shit moment that alters your perspective of everything that came before. At least, I hope!

The second textual inspiration—and I know I was just distancing myself from the era—are the Revenge Tragedies of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, The Dutchess of Malfi by John Webster, and The Revenger’s Tragedy by what scholars think is Thomas Middleton. Shakespeare, too, of course, especially Hamlet. No prizes for guessing these plays are about people taking revenge on those who have wronged them, but what interests me is there’s often a meta-aspect of a play-within-a-play which functions as the delivery mechanism of the revenge itself. Sometimes there’s a supernatural element, the vengeful ghost narrating the play. Mother Naked very much carries on the tradition.

From Mother’s 1434 perspective, Revenge Tragedy theatre and contemporary crime both lie in the future, but as with my use of language, taking inspiration from them was a conscious choice to enable Mother to speak out from the past, and so comment upon the present.

Finally, perhaps the biggest influence on the book’s structure and content was how I approached the research itself. Before Mother Naked, I spent four years writing a novel that didn’t sell. It was set in the present day, but was incredibly research heavy and in hindsight I realise how I approached it wrong. I had a story I wanted to tell, so was researching to support my preconceived ideas. To anyone reading: DO NOT DO THIS. It meant I was often looking for historical facts / precedents that didn’t exist; I was reading whole books only to learn I didn’t need to have read them. Or I’d chance across something that invalidated a chunk of the novel I’d spent six months writing. And as I wasn’t sure of the boundaries of the story, the research sprawled endlessly. I’m not saying the book failed for this reason, but nor am I getting any younger, so with Mother Naked I took a different approach to research. Above, I mentioned my initial lightning bolt after learning about the existence of Mother Naked. This gave me the character, core premise, and a hard-to-put-a-finger-on emotional resonance. What I didn’t have was enough knowledge of the 1400s to write with confidence. I needed to research but didn’t want a repeat of last time. So, I went about it in the following way:

I selected key research texts, each one about a different facet of late-medieval life: entertainment, medicine, life in a rural village, agricultural-cycles, the pre-Reformation church, the feudal class-system and its slow transition into the land-lease model, folklore, rural justice systems, the Plague, orphan guardianship, medieval slander and defamation (which was incredible btw). Later, I deep-dived additional texts on these subjects if I needed to, but I strictly ring-fenced the parameters of research so even if something was fascinating, I would ignore it if it didn’t serve the core premise.

Once selected, I read these texts with ZERO AGENDA, making notes on whatever I found interesting. For example, I learned that when someone was going to die—say from serious illness—a priest would give them final rites. However, if they were given rites but somehow survived…they couldn’t have sex again for the rest of their lives! When I came across this, I just knew I was going to have a character afflicted in this way. Late-medieval life was just so weird like that, and stuff was jumping out at me from almost every page. By the time I was finished, my notebook was full and the world, characters, and skeleton of the novel had already suggested themselves.

This really let me plot organically. I’ve never plotted scene-for scene before, but I’d just come off the back of four years of floundering. Because the world and characters were so vivid and organic and emotionally alive in my mind, the plot beats came very easily. My plot-outline document was about 8,000 words, really detailed, but left wiggle-room for the Eureka moments which could come at any time and change the direction of things. Crucially, though, because I’d approached the research and plotting in the right way, those Eurekas only changed things within the framework of the plot I’d already built.

Only once all this was done did I start writing. As I say, the first draft came fast. I mentioned earlier that I’d let you know if I ever figured out how to replicate the experience. Well, I still don’t believe characters take over and write a book, but, to a great extent, I let the research write Mother Naked for me.

That is a fascinating breakdown of research as a process. To close, I’d like to tie that back to voice and plot with a look at a quote I was drawn to from page 175: ‘We tell tales of what lurks out in the dark so that we need not acknowledge the truth lurking within’. In my interpretation, the character of Mother Naked acts as a kind of ‘holy fool’, by which I mean someone who is able to speak truth to power by virtue of their ‘foolish’ performativity, someone who holds up a crazed or comic mirror to power. Do you feel there is an extent to which contemporary society also relies on the fantastical, whimsical or ‘mad’ to reflect stories otherwise too dark for us to assimilate? And might Mother Naked itself feed into that tradition?

It’s my feeling we’ve always used stories to make sense of ourselves, and that nothing is too dark for our species. I don’t mean to be edgy—there is, of course, still much good in the world. A major point I wanted to make in Mother Naked was that life was not unrelenting misery for the poor; they didn’t all spend their brief spans hating their lives, and each other. I wanted to convey the powerful sense of community in rural life, of shared burden but also joy. They worked together—albeit at different purpose—but also celebrated feasts, births, marriages. They played games with insane names like quoit and mumblety-peg. And this collective spirit extended into the next life, as the community would join together in pray for their dead in order to speed them through the torment of purgatory and into heaven. I find that very moving.

This love and kindness still exist. But our wider political and economic systems are increasingly geared towards a zero-sum game of acquisition that is putting incredible pressure on those bonds. This isn’t new. While researching Mother Naked’s economic, social, and political power structures, it was quickly apparent that Mother’s world was not so alien. Then, as now, the rich owned the land, rivers, forests. Labour was exploited. Prices were controlled and inflation kept artificially high, with the poorest bearing the brunt, just as they—like Wat Tyler and his Peasant Rebels—were punished most harshly for protesting against it. The rich dodged taxes, took advantage of loopholes. In my novel, it is the resultant privation and poverty from all of this which turns the poor against each other, something the ruling classes were—still are—only too happy to encourage. The Body Politic was one of the middle-ages principal concepts, which envisioned society as a metaphorical body with the monarch as the head and the poor as the feet—unable to be anywhere other than in and of the muck. Who benefits most from that narrative? In the book, Mother is a storyteller, and one thing the novel addresses is how stories—narratives—are wielded, by who, and to what purpose. That line you mention, We tell tales of what lurks out in the dark so that we need not acknowledge the truth lurking within, is said in relation to the central mystery of the plot. Who is to blame for the destruction of that village, those peasant deaths? Is it those external forces and narratives…or is everyone—rich and poor alike—complicit?

In Mother Naked, the poor were told society cannot change because that was how God made the world. Now we’re told our political and economic system is synonymous with our nation’s ‘values’—whatever they are. But each fresh injustice reveals this for the lie it is. One thing that became clear to me while researching and writing this book is that we have always been struggling for a way to take back what has been stolen.

Glen James Brown was born in County Durham. His first novel, Ironopolis, was shortlisted for the 2019 Orwell Prize and the 2020 Portico Prize. His second novel, Mother Naked, is out now. He lives in Manchester.

Joe Bedford’s interview series Writers on Research is made possible with National Lottery funding via Arts Council England.