The first
author I'm delighted to interview for the new ‘featured writer’ section on my
blog is multi award-winning poet, short-story writer and now novelist, Geraldine
Mills. Galway-native, Geraldine has been a poet and short-story writer for
many years and has already published several books.
Gold is her first
novel, and her first book for children.
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| Gold by Geraldine Mills - see below for a list of stockists |
1.
Hi Geraldine, thanks for taking the time for this interview. There is a
popular perception that when poets aren’t writing poetry they are doing
something else. As someone who is perhaps primarily known for poetry, and is
now moving from short stories to the novel, can you tell me about how you see your
identity as a writer changing with this move toward the longer narrative?
For me, story
comes first; I am constantly looking for what is hidden behind an image, a
piece of dialogue, a phrase that comes my way. I then have to be faithful to
the genre that gives the greatest scope to that idea.
A writer must
always be growing and developing, wherever that may take them. Otherwise they
die. I have written novels before but they never saw the light of day and are
now being worked over by worms in the compost bin. Gold is the first one
to be published. Writing a novel, when you are not sure what you are doing,
certainly moves you out of your comfort zone. The longer narrative is more
demanding simply because of its size but when a writer is given the gift of an
idea, it behoves him/her to tell it in the best medium possible. Gold had
to be a novel; once I heard the voices of Starn and Esper that is what the
story demanded.
One obvious
difference I have seen since publication is that I have become more visible.
Poetry has a much smaller audience and can often alienate rather than draw
readers in. There is the misconception that it is a loftier calling, that a
poet’s work is hermetically sealed and not accessible to them which is a great
pity and not the case at all. People are happier to engage with me on the
novel rather than they ever did with poetry. And of course, children now engage
with me in a way they didn’t before. I am having a real adventure talking to
schools, libraries and children’s book clubs. They are not afraid to ask why
the story goes in a certain way or if I based a nasty character on Mr Trump.
While my next project will be the longer narrative, there is a sequence of
poems waiting in the wings as well as a number of short stories, crying out to
be heard. Like the chameleon I will shed my skin and change genres depending
very much on where the Muse sends me.
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| Geraldine Mills |
2. That's
an interesting insight, and sad, that poetry can be perceived as a 'hermetically
sealed' space... Theme for a whole other discussion there I think... You marry digital culture, or the suggestion of it, very
effectively with the natural world in the book in ways that many young
adult readers will be able to identify with. For example, Esper and Starn
‘cloud-grab’ stories for their ‘E-pistles’, etc. Writing for a young adult
audience for the first time must bring with it some unique challenges. Can you
tell us something about how you prepared for engaging with young adult readers
and for tapping into their particular frames of reference? What drew you
to the Young Adult fiction sphere?
The only
preparation was having already developed the discipline to go to the blank page
and put one word after the other. Of course, 50,000 words is a longer piece of
string than a haiku but I approached it in the same way as I do most of my
writing by diving straight in, legs flapping, mouth and nose filling with
water, not knowing what on earth I am doing but splashing away anyway. I see Gold
more as a preteen story rather than a young adult though all ages seem to be
reading it. I was interested in working with a plot-driven story rather than a
character-driven one and therefore ‘what happens next’ played a huge part in
the unfolding of the narrative. The idea chose me rather than the other way
around. I live on the edge of Connemara and one year a gorse fire on the
mountain became completely out of control, burning everything in sight. When we
walked those hills months later it looked like that little part of our world
had been involved in some cataclysmic event. I tried to imagine the outcome if
something more powerful hit us, something even more calamitous than the
volcanic eruptions of Iceland that, in 2010, had forced our skies silent.
I had an
abandoned children’s novel from about ten years previously. I played over and
over again the possible scenario of taking the two boys in search of adventure
from that unpublished story and time-travelling them into the future imaginary
world of no trees or animals. When I got the image of the twins in
pollination suits the plot began to take wings and I just followed.
Once I was on
that path I started to read children’s books. I wasn’t sure if what I was doing
was ever going to engage with my young audience. But I never let that stop me.
I just got completely involved in the boys’ lives and went with it. The fact
that children and adults like the story is a great joy to me.
3.
There are many potent images in your book, like 'wand-swishing
pollinators', that rise up like mini poems. There are also a few nice nods
to the poetry universe; I would love to be able to spread 'Pindar' on my own
bread - it might help with my odes! I also notice that themes of
weather, the environment, travel and flight occur in your poetry collections
too. Did the story and images in Gold arrive as poetry initially or did
you know from the outset that you would write a longer narrative?
There are a
whole number of elements at play here. My love of nature and the environment
are certainly themes that run through my work. But this never started out as a
poem. All of those images were born as I was writing. I suppose by osmosis the
poetic language seeped through. The most important task for me was to create a
believable world: that of Orchard, something that was familiar to the boys but
not to me, while the reverse happens in Part Two, The Islands, where my
familiar world is alien to Starn and Esper. There was a certain amount of
research as well as inventiveness needed to create that world.
There is no
greater fun than to be the inventor of words and giving them a new meaning such
as E-pistle and Visage or discovering harran bread which was used in the
seventeenth century and is a mixture of barley and peas. There is
also, as you rightly point out, the play on Pindar. It was great fun to
discover that ‘pindar’ is also another word for peanut as is goober so I was
able to bring that in. I was almost having too much fun with it all. Where I
couldn’t find the word to describe what I wanted, I just made it up. One young
boy who read it said that he liked not knowing straight away what a word meant
but waited for it to reveal itself as the story went along.
Other parts
of my research included visiting a cave, studying wolves in a reserve in Spain
and taking a ride in a hot air balloon over Albuquerque. One day I was in
Wooden Heart Stores in Galway and came across a cardboard kit of boys with
parachutes. I bought it and made up two of the boys and hung them from the
ceiling. That way I could visualise them as I was writing the flight scene.
4.
Oooh lovely idea! Wooden Heart is certainly an inspiring shop.. As
a poet moving into the larger space of the novel, can I ask about how your technique
developed? For example, how did you find the experience of crafting
dialogue and threading the narratives together? Was it similar to the way
you approach your poetry or was it an altogether different process?
I forget who
said that you write a novel in the same way you eat an elephant: bite by bite.
This was a very different process; here I was working with a plot-driven
structure as opposed to the character-driven narrative of a short story or the
developing levels of a poem. Without the expert guidance of Siobhan Parkinson
and Gráinne Clear at Little Island, it would not be the book it is today. I was
working in the dark, some passages were too long, too poetic, structurally,
there were big holes in it. Siobhán and Gráinne held my hand and got me to
write and rewrite until it was more cohesive, the tone and the pace balanced
and the dialogue was doing its job when it needed to by moving the story along.
And then something magical happened and it all came together. That’s the
alchemy of writing that give me the real buzz and keeps me going as I wallpaper
the bathroom with rejection slips.
5.
There are interesting examples in Gold of self-reliance, critical
thinking, resilience and hope winning out over antagonistic forces. For
example, Starn overcomes much adversity with the help of his tiny talisman,
General Yacobe, and the memories of his mother’s advice and his father’s
kindness. He resists becoming brutalized and keeps his promise never to inflict
harm on another. Do you think there is a need now, perhaps more than ever, to
inscribe a note of hope and to offer positive perspectives in YA fiction?
Social
realism in YA fiction is something that has really taken off in the last number
of years with such hard hitting themes as racism, discrimination, disability.
Because I wanted to reach a younger audience, I was writing an adventure story
rather than a social commentary and any issues of hardship that come through in
the story, I wanted to be hinted at rather than being the main nub of the story.
I also wanted it to have the elements of a classic adventure story where things
come good at the end.
There should
always be hope. I would have found it very difficult to have written a
completely dystopian story as I always look for the chink of light in the
bleakest of situations. A child who is resilient will overcome all
obstacles. Of course I didn’t deliberately build in those tenets but they came
from the characters themselves. I also believe in the innate goodness of the
human spirit and that is why the story goes from the darkness of Orchard and
the Sagittars to the light of the islands. In my poetry collection Urgency
of Stars, published by Arlen House in 2011, the very last words in the book
are: ‘It all comes down to light’. I want to keep that burning in the hearts of
all readers.
6.
Yes, I completely agree with you about the need for hope. Lastly, on a totally different note now, it’s desert island disc time. Can you name a few
of your favourite writers and tell us what you enjoy most about their work?
Beloved by Toni Morrison that continues to haunt me years after reading it.
Anything by
Colum McCann but especially Thirteen ways of Looking.
It must be
something to do with hauntings, Michael Mc Cormack Solar Bones, a
beautifully written book, mature and full of risk-taking that works. Deserving
of being shortlisted for the Goldsmith Award.
The Book of
Embraces
by Eduardo Galeano, a gift from Alan McMonagle and I love its magical realism
and the use of drawings that give the pages wings.
Thank you
very much Geraldine and I wish you every success with Gold!
My great
pleasure, Emily. It is you I should thank for taking the time to prepare all
these questions.
