XXXII: Interview with Inés G. Labarta
Inés G. Labarta is a queer fiction writer and immigrant currently living in the northwest of England. She has published a collection of middle-grade novels – Los Pentasónicos (Edebé, 2008-2010) and two novellas – McTavish Manor (Holland House, 2016) and Kabuki (Dairea, 2017). Her forthcoming novel, The Three Lives of Saint Ciarán, (Blackwater Press, 2024) was described by Toby Litt as ‘exciting and provocative’. Her short stories have won awards like the Autonomous University of Madrid Short Story Prize, and have been published in places such as Toasted Cheese Literary Journal, Oranges Journal and the Lancashire Short Stories anthology. She has an MA and PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University and after working at the University of Wolverhampton and the University of Plymouth she came back to Lancaster University as a Creative Writing lecturer. She is the co-founder and director of The Wandering Bard magazine and podcast.
To find out more about Inés’ work: https://inesglabarta.com/about/
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Let’s start with a three parter-1) tell me about your most recent book; 2) what is the most surprising way it relates to the rest of your oeuvre, you’ve noticed; 3) if you had to write a direct sequel to The Three Lives of Saint Ciarán but about a different Saint and a different genre, what might that look like?
My most recent book is The Three Lives of St Ciarán, a queer retelling of the legend of a sixth-century Irish saint. It explores the cultural connections between Ireland and Spain (two places I have lived in) and blends in different genres including epic fantasy, dystopia and magic realism.
The most surprising thing about The Three Lives of St Ciarán is that this is the first time I attempted to write a piece with three different timelines (actually, the project started as a trilogy of novellas linked thematically). It was very challenging to write because I had to completely change gears (plot, character, voice) every time I moved to a different timeline. I don’t plan to do anything like that in the future, but it was fun (even though it did drive me a bit mad).
Funny that you ask about a direct sequel to this book… I’m not sure I could go back to the theme of Ireland and Spain as of now (I was deep in research to write this book for four years; it was part of my Creative Writing PhD). But right now, I’m writing a new novel that is definitely dark and twisted, and very much gothic which also features Catholic saints (which wasn’t premeditated in any way, the idea just emerged as I was working on the plot). These saints are all women, actually, the only seven female saints to be mentioned in the Catholic rite of the Eucharist apart from the Virgin Mary. I’m not Catholic myself but Catholic culture seems to be an endless source of inspiration. My claim to it is that I was brought up in Catholic culture in Spain and educated in its mythology and lore by my Yaya, my maternal grandmother.
As a mountaineer, describe in one or two lines the feeling of being at the foot and at the summit of a mountain?
It’s a religious experience. It’s seeing the world around you on a completely different scale as if you were a bird.
Travel seems to be a recursive means, theme, and outcome in both your life and work. What journey have you made that you wish you hadn’t and which journey do you feel you need/want to make?
Travelling is a big part of my identity – I have been moving around non-stop since I could legally do so on my own, pretty much. I don’t regret any travel I have ever taken but I do recall a difficult journey to Ireland once (even though I love Ireland, as you can see by my writing and my research work). I was nineteen at the time and suffering from a terrible bout of panic attacks (I have been struggling with panic attacks for many years now, I find it hard getting into tight places like trains and planes to travel, which is ironic, as I take so many of them every year because I do love traveling… talking about paradoxes!). On this trip, it got to a point where I couldn’t even leave the hotel room. I had been in a panic attack for days. I was very close to booking a plane home right there but the therapist I was seeing at the time called me and convinced me to get on to a train to Belfast (the next leg of my journey). I did. After about an hour or so of traveling on the train and trying to convince myself that I could survive the experience, the train stopped in the middle of nowhere and we had to evacuate it. Basically, they had received a bomb threat. This was 2012, the time of the London Olympic Games. We had to wait for ages in the middle of nowhere until buses came to take us to Belfast! So yeah, that was an experience.
A journey I’d love to take is visiting the Himalayas. I love mountains and I’d love to see the highest mountain range in the world. I don’t want to climb them (I know my limits). I just want the experience of feeling a speckle of dust in their presence.
What role does history play in your life and work? Is the past, as Spike Jonze writes in H.E.R, just a story we tell ourselves? If so, can both the past and the future be reset in meaningful ways?
This is such a deep yet interesting question. I think I could write another PhD thesis trying to answer this but I’ll do my best.
History is very important to me because, like the quote you mention here, it is formed of stories that we tell ourselves and shape the reality we live in, for better or worse. For example, the ‘story’ my parents were told about the Spanish Civil War when they were growing up is very different from the ‘story’ I was told when I was growing up, or the ‘story’ I read about in books such as The Spanish Labyrinth by Gerard Brennan (yes, an Englishman wrote one my favourite books about the Spanish Civil War).
It’s also interesting to consider that history is full of gaps, because not everyone got to be written in the canon, or maybe they were taken out, or maybe others didn’t even think they had stories that were worth being recorded. Those gaps are often a source of inspiration to writers. For example, I’m a queer woman – if I look at the history of the place I was born, or the place I live in, there are barely any people like me – but that doesn’t mean they never existed. So I think that using fiction to explore these gaps, through meaningful research, nuance and empathy can be a very powerful thing. Growing up, reading books with characters who were a bit more like myself would have completely changed my sense of identity for the better. For example, the first real lesbian stories I read were Carol by Patricia Highsmith and Fingersmith by Sarah Waters – and that was when I was already eighteen years old. I remember thinking – wow, there are things here that ring so true! It was revelatory.
When it comes to representing the future in fiction, engagement with history and politics is also essential to imagine different possibilities and ways to exist in community. I’m currently very interested in the concept of ‘thrutopia’. Writer Mandy Scott defines it as such, ‘We need stories that tell us about the thousands of people within our system who are striving to change it for something that works much, much better. We need stories of ways we could shift our political and economic structures to ones that are regenerative by design: where the economy is based on values that ensure people and the planet thrive whether or not the baseline numbers grow – as opposed to the current one, where the number has to grow even though people and planet are manifestly not thriving.’
It seems cliché, but stories are powerful – look at the way political campaigns work, for example, to unite different demographics and convince them that a particular person is the best to lead them, or that a particular group of people (often immigrants, often those who don’t look British, or Spanish, or insert here whichever nationality we are talking about) are the enemy. I am personally more interested in stories that bring us together as a community, stories that give power back to the collective instead of relying on just one person, one hero, one saviour. And history plays an essential part in that because to see where we could go, we need to reckon with where we came from.
What’s the best thing about being liminal/the liminality of being?
When you don’t belong anywhere you do have a certain freedom to simply exist and experiment with boundaries without feeling that you have to fit in a specific mold until you bleed. It’s also good that this liminality of making you feel quite inquisitive of some so-called ‘fundamental’ identity constructs around national identity, gender (understood as the binary of ‘woman’ and ‘man’) and language (understood as something fixed that should adhere to a set of immutable rules.
Is beginning again a privilege or a curse?
I think it’s both. Moving to a different country or place to live demands a reinvention, a reason why many people (myself included) can find it so empowering. To me, there is nothing like learning to live in a different culture and a different language to expand your mind and the ways you see the world. I think everyone should try it, even if for a brief period – to understand that the idea of ‘normal’ of what is ‘sociably acceptable’ is incredibly fluid.
But it’s also a curse because leaving where you are from and embracing a different culture displaces you – you enter that liminal space we were talking about – not quite there but not quite here either. Leaving the comfort of your mother tongue and of social and cultural constructs and norms you can easily understand and relate to. And, most importantly, leaving family and friends behind. I still have some family in Spain, mainly my mother and an aunt I am very close to. But sometimes I wonder if I will still feel Spanish when they are not there – what will bring me to the land, apart from memories? And are memories enough? Will that ‘Spain’ I remember still exist? No.
What is civilization’s - let’s call it for sake of ease here ‘the West’ - worst open secret?
Not sure I have an answer for this – so I’ll give a suggestion – their dependence (or perhaps even obsession) with binary thinking.
For example, as I researched gender fluidity for my work, I realized there were very few examples of it in the West. One of the things that have had the most influence on gender and how we see it, at least in Spain, is the Catholic religion – and I’d be inclined to suggest that is very much the same in many other areas of Europe heavily influenced by patriarchal religions. I was able to find some potential examples of gender fluidity in the Apocrypha (namely, The Gospel of St Thomas) which is a book that collects the sayings of Jesus, and in some of these, he makes allusions to the idea of gender fluidity (‘when men become women and women become men’) and links it to the idea of spiritual enlightenment. But apart from that, it is clear to me that the West is very much obsessed with polar binaries: man or woman. Dark or light. Nature or humans. I mean, during many, many centuries in the West only men (note, not women, not animals and so on) were believed to have souls! So perhaps this Western binary thinking is linked as well to anthropocentrism (which I also find problematic) – and when I say anthropocentrism I mean something more akin to androcentrism I suppose, that this, a strong focus on men and maleness as a measure for everything in our Western culture. And see where that’s taken us – climate collapse, and inherently unfair societies in which very few hoard all the power because of that ‘us versus them’ mentality instead of understanding we are all part of a much larger (fluid) continuum.
What’s the most surprising form that redemption has taken in your life and work?
I’m going to cheat here and answer the ‘work’ part first. Writing The Three Lives of St Ciarán felt redemptive at times because I consciously pushed myself to write characters in a more empathic way. In the beginning, there were characters I didn’t like (because they did things I found disgusting, or because their worldviews were so different from mine) and the writing suffered because of that. For example, in the first drafts of my 1930s timeline in Spain, the Fascist soldiers I wrote were very cliché. Carmen – one of the two main characters – was also presented as a basic villain, someone who had no qualms about using others to enrich her artistic process. But the fact that I was writing these black-and-white characters was pointed out by my then PhD supervisor, Jenn Ashworth. She kept asking very interesting questions – how did Carmen see herself? How did her husband, who loved her, see her? And so on. She was asking me to consider the many sides (sometimes even contradictory ones) that make a single person. So I went back and did more research. Which brings me to the ‘life’ part of this question. Suddenly I discovered that my own maternal family were Franco supporters (including my Yaya’s beloved father, my great-grandfather, Lorenzo, who always featured as a hero in her stories of the war). I mean, as a queer person that very much supports the idea of Spain as a republic, this was hard to reckon with, because I’d have technically been someone my own family would have been very much against if I had lived at that time. Yet this also made me realize that it’s not useful to think in binaries (such as Fascist=bad, republican/liberal=good). In the case of Carmen, my character, she’s someone who struggles with her gender expression after a hysterectomy – my mother went through something similar when I was a teenager and writing Carmen with more compassion actually brought me so much closer to my own mother and her experiences – while also reminding me that it is important to honor the experiences of those women who feel they are failing at ‘womanhood’.
It seems to me that whether done well or poorly, being an author is one of the most dangerous things anyone can aspire or end up becoming. Aside from Saint Ciarán, what is the book you’re a) scared and b) need to write about?
I’m doing a lot of reading about gender fluidity and gender in general. I’ve become fascinated by the work of authors like Maggie Nelson, Olivia Laing, Lars Horn, Myriam Gurba, Hannah Silva, Erin Riley and the incredible Spanish philosopher/author Paul B. Preciado (who I wish more people knew in English, he’s truly doing very important and thought-provoking work). I’ve been playing around with this in my writing in the form of non-fiction too, trying to untangle my feelings around belonging (or 'unbelonging') to a gender, a language, a nation. But it’s scary to write about these things, even though I’ve been thinking about them (especially gender) since I can recall. Maybe I’ll write about this one day. Or maybe not. We’ll see.
What is it about hagiography that surprises and terrifies you the most?
It surprises me how openly bizarre and, to be honest, gender-fluid some of these texts can be. They are not serious at all, many times, which I find so entertaining, because my perception of Catholicism in Spain has always seemed as something so stilted, proper, and, to a point, quite prescriptive. It terrifies me what some of these stories do tell; for example, the stories of the female saints are often full of misogyny – these women are often martyrs who don’t do much else than die – but then again, Jesus is also such a passive figure (he let himself die, didn’t he?). The way I approach these stories is with curiosity and playfulness – I’m interested in how I can change and expand some of the symbology to create different myths.
What are some of the most interesting ways that the lives of saints and immigrants elide?
They are both outsiders. When studying the real life of saints for my novel – namely, saints from medieval times – I found that they often stepped out of society to commune with God – Irish saints like St Columba would get to extremely remote areas, like tiny islands in the rough seas. I remember walking around Inis Mór when I was doing research for my PhD and finding all these small medieval chapels – minuscule structures made of stone, barely a room – supposedly built by these saints on the edges of the land, like the top of a cliff. Immigrants also have to step out from their own cultural and societal context to enter a new one. And this often means that they will have to alter some belief systems or ways of seeing the world. They say that Saints would often find enlightenment – and I think being an immigrant also enlightens you in many ways – even if that’s not what you are necessarily seeking when you move to another country.
Generically, possession is such a recursive and often gendered theme. What about possession is it you think people find so fascinating? Which do you think would, for you, be the more interesting (understood broadly) experience: to be possessed or to possess another (doesn’t necessarily have to be another human)
I pondered this question for a long time before answering – because I was thinking of possession as demonic possession in Catholic terms and of course, there are other many ways of possessing people (that are equally terrifying and much more real). I personally find the idea of being possessed by an external demonic identity absolutely terrifying. And to be honest with you, this is one of the horror tropes that scare me the most – (yes, thank you very much, Catholicism!). This idea of possession also resonates with those of us who have been brought up as women and are being hammered again and again with ideas such as our bodies being something dangerous, tempting, or dirty that needs to be possessed by others (namely, men, and even the state). To me, feeling like a woman often feels like being dispossessed of my own body (especially in these times where rights to things such as abortion are being questioned or banned).
Paradoxically, some of the most precious moments in my life are those when I felt possessed by the natural environment I was in. This is that feeling of feeling small that I love so much when I climb mountains. So I’d say there’s also a joy to be found in being possessed and that currently interests me much more than possessing others.
We had the briefest of exchanges about Rose Glass’s Saint Maud-that and You Won’t Be Alone are two films I would like to write about to round out a hopeful trilogy of essays about contemporary depictions of witches and nuns (and later, I wanna write about School of the Holy Beast and Benedetta). What is it you like about that film and why?
Again – I could write a whole essay only on this! But I’ll try to be succinct. I’m very interested in the figure of the nun – I’ve always been – and there are various nun characters in my most recent novel because of this. To me nuns have the potential to symbolize a sort of third gender in Catholic culture – something that is not a man, that is not a woman either – because nuns are not mothers – and motherhood has intrinsically been connected to womanhood in Catholic culture to the point that being a woman is also being a mother, one doesn’t exist without the other, which I’ve always found so troublesome and, frankly, terrifying. It’s the same with the idea of ‘witch’ – a ‘witch’ in the Western canon at least is a woman with her own agency, a woman who can take fate into her own hands (instead of delegating power to a male partner, or husband). The word ‘witch’ has also been used to describe women who were considered to fail at this constrictive idea of ‘womanhood’ (note that the witch is often represented as an old, ugly woman, because of course beauty is another label that, as motherhood, it seems that it must always stick to the idea of a woman).
What I like about the movies you mention is how they twist ideas around gender and around the role of women as quiet, beautiful, caring individuals whose sole purpose is to live for their partners and the children they have together. So much horror out there is so outrightly misogynistic – and it’s incredibly refreshing for me as a writer to see some female directors out there like Rose Glass engaging with the horror genre, breaking and reinventing so many of its tropes.
You’ve lived and written in England, Ireland and Spain. What are the strangest similarities and differences between the three in your experience as an immigrant, an artist, and a scholar/educator?
Ireland and Spain share lots of interesting similarities: in the twentieth century, both countries had civil wars and struggled with terrorism. There’s also a strong Catholic influence in their culture, society and history. And of course, there’s also linguistic tension as these countries have different official languages, some of which have been historically banned and repressed.
England doesn’t have a recent civil war in its past, which of course is a great thing – a civil war is one of the most terrifying and traumatic experiences I can imagine a nation going through – I know this from my own family – you are literally not safe anywhere, anyone could do horrible things to you, your siblings, your parents, your best friend, all of a sudden, based on an idea. I think this is why England has such a strong insular identity.
A strange difference between England and Spain is literary culture – I love the time and care the English dedicate to books and literature and the pride they take in it. It’s great for a writer like myself to live in this place. For example, it wasn’t until I got an Eccles Visiting Fellowship with the British Library that I realized anyone in the UK can get a reader’s pass and go do research there and access these beautiful rooms to read and work at. We don’t have anything of that scale open to the public in Spain.
I mentioned being interested in the theme and experience of intensity when we spoke. For you, how has intensity manifested in your life these past 10 years?
Positively – in how my relationship with nature has improved by living in the UK. Here I have learned to endure the harshness of the weather and really appreciate the changing of the seasons. And the warmth of the sun never feels more magical than after weeks of stormy weather and heavy rains. The UK also has natural landscapes I’m very fond of, especially the Scottish Highlands and the Lake District (which is literally thirty minutes away from where I live, something I don’t take for granted).
In more challenging ways, in the last ten years, I had to care for a very important family member as they died, a process that took a few days and strangely, happened over Easter (a period of resurrection in Catholic culture). Staying so close to death changed me, as I witnessed very troubling family dynamics. I come from a family where love is often understood as the endurance of abuse, which I find difficult to reckon with. Pondering where I’m at in that regard, and where I really want to be, has also been quite intense.
The UK is an interesting and complex milieu of sociopolitical and indeed cultural issues and debates concerning identity, race, and gender. How has your time in Plymouth and Lancaster informed your understanding of the challenges and opportunities in these and intersecting areas of experience?
I could start answering this question and never end, because obviously becoming an immigrant and coming of age at the same time challenged many preconceptions I had around identity, race and gender. For example, when I was sixteen me and my friends were chased and beaten up by a neo-nazi gang who saw our ‘Spanishness’ as something to hate. This experience taught me what it feels like to be in danger only because of the way you look or the way you speak. In the UK there have also been times when people have treated me unfairly (consciously or unconsciously) based on my looks and my accent. I try my hardest not to do the same to others. Being an immigrant also makes me passionately defend every human being’s right to move around the world to improve their life conditions – especially after Brexit happened and the anti-immigrant rhetoric in the UK became habitual. I’m very weary of concepts such as nationalism and having rules about who belongs or who doesn’t to what land – a reason why I love Gary Budden’s concept of Landscape Punk, a literary genre that challenges such concepts. I mean, I have genuinely been asked by my colleagues at a job whether I received special payments from the government for housing just because I’m an immigrant (I don’t, these don’t exist). It was also in the UK that I was introduced to the concept of ‘olive skin’ to define me as someone who was born in Spain (I was told, again, by other colleagues, that I wasn’t white, because to be white, you need to be ‘rosy white’). To me, all of this sounds like tales we tell each other to reinforce our sense of belonging to a group by othering another group.
In terms of gender – the UK has a somehow less overtly sexist culture when compared to Spain, which is something that I’ve always found liberating (and one of the reasons I stayed here). I really like that the English language is not as gendered as my own mother tongue – and as such it has allowed me to explore a more fluid idea of gender in both my work and my personal life. I have no idea how things are in Spain now at university – since I have never taught there – but in the UK I feel really proud of my students who have no issue in embracing their queer identities – and use them to inform their work. This was not the kind of environment I studied in when I was at university in Spain – so some things seem to be changing for the better.
The short narrative form has, for many, a reputation or infamy predicated on difficulty. First, do you find the form harder than other narrative formats? Second, why do you think it is so for so many?
Yes, definitely – I’m of the opinion that short stories are more difficult to craft than novels. Generally, novels are more forgiving as a form, no one expects a novel to be absolutely riveting on every single page, we understand that the tension will rise and fall and stay flat and then will rise again and so on. But short stories… you are in and you are out, so I’m forever in awe of authors who manage to create a whole world in very few pages, such as Mariana Enríquez, Carys Davies, Samantha Schweblin, Ted Chiang, and Ali Smith… to name a few.
For short stories, you have to distil them – I generally get an idea for a situation, a character, even a theme, and then I patiently rework them, slowly – sometimes I have to wait for a while – until they acquire a form that fits in the much smaller receptacle of the short story. The beauty of the short story, for me, is that it suggests a wider world, a wider plot a character that may have even more sides to them. One of my favourite short story writers is Ted Chiang, – he’s well-known for having won every award there is to win in science fiction and fantasy in the English-speaking world – and every one of his short stories feels as complex and vibrant as a whole novel.
Do you have a favorite 1) Japanese, 2) Spanish phrase or idiom?
In Spanish I love ‘En casa del herrero, cuchillo de palo’ – (at the firesmith’s home, knives are made of wood’). It’s like – we are in the place of someone who works with metal for a living and yet they have knives made of wood – which is not only strange but ridiculous. But often being an expert at something doesn’t mean you act like it in every aspect of your life because we humans are twisted, contradictory creatures.
In Japanese, I love 猿も木から落ちる (even monkeys fall from trees). It means that we can all make mistakes, a lesson I need to remember as perfectionism has definitely proved to be more of an obstacle than a virtue when it comes to my creative work.
Speaking of narrative formats, what are your favorite image-text formats and what would you say are your three favorite comics and why?
In terms of image-texts – I love graphic novels, and I read lots of them. They are such an interesting insight into the author’s world and vision – as they are often written and drawn by the same person. There’s a really fascinating tradition of self-made art in graphic novels too, thanks to zines. As an artist, you can create a story and then bring it into the world easily and (more or less cheaply) by printing it and then selling it for a little bit of money. (Yes, I have definitely used printers at the various jobs I’ve had in offices to print my own comic zines!)
Favorite comics / graphic novels… ah, this is a hard one. I’ll tell you my three favorite graphic novels as of now, with no guarantee that the list will change tomorrow!
Roaming by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki – which is a story I read recently of three friends who are nineteen and visit New York City for the first time (they come from Canada). It has such a particular style – and it represents so well that time in your life when you are not a teenager anymore but you are not an adult either. Something I love about this work is how all the characters are created with so much empathy – it’d have been very easy (and tempting) to showcase one of them as a clear villain and still you feel tenderness for her all the way through.
Into The Woods by Emily Carroll – this is a collection of horror short stories in graphic form. Many of these started as online comics (some of them you can still read on the author’s page). I am in awe of Caroll’s whimsical and terrifying style, and I really like the (dark) way in which she sees the world.
Are You My Mother by Alison Bechdel is also one of my favorites – what I love about her work is how she blends graphic narrative with psychology and literary criticism – I didn’t know you could do those things in a graphic novel until I read her work.
Special mention to On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden because I just love Walden’s art style – her obsession with grand, desolate landscapes full of massive, abandoned buildings really resonates. (Also, this was a comic that also started online, and it’s still available for free here).
Another special mention to Firebugs by Nino Bulling and Stone Fruit by Lee Lai – two queer graphic novels I read recently and adored. The first one captures the queer experience of questioning your gender and knowing you don’t quite fit in the binary so powerfully – it also has a very interesting art style. The second one is a beautifully rendered story about grief and family from a queer lens.
It seems to me that the key to any praxis is consistency and time management. Could you give me your views on how you try and maintain both in a sustainable, healthy way?
It’s hard to maintain consistency and time management in a sustainable, healthy way because we have a lot of systems working against us – I say this as someone who experienced burnout during my PhD. For example, our workdays are definitely way too long and also demands placed on us (to grow, grow, grow no matter what, capitalism anyone?) are ridiculous and, frankly, end up breaking us. Some books that really helped me to see this were Laziness Does Not Exist by Devon Price, Work Won’t Love You Back by Sarah Jaffe and Burnout by Emily and Amelia Nagoski.
Even in my literary career, I often feel like I need to be writing way faster than I am, and publishing more, and it has to be ‘good’, whatever that means. Part of it is that publishing is a requirement of my job as a university lecturer, and also essential so far if I want to make a living on my words eventually and focus solely on my career as an author.
At the same time, some authors publish a single book every ten years (if that) like Donna Tart, and still are very much revered. I do enjoy her work (even though she’s not one of my favorite authors) and I admire the ‘slow’ pace she has embraced (although we could also talk about privilege here, and if Tart dedicates those ten years to writing I’d be curious to see how she earns a living or maintains herself and so on).
Something I learned through burnout (which may seem obvious) is that the creative practice is not always ‘on’. It’s a cycle, and to write you also need to be inspired, which means that there needs to be periods in your life when you rest and focus on being ‘receptive’ to ideas rather than ‘producing’ them.
At some point in my life, writing every day was very empowering. I still try to do so – I’m part of a brilliant group of writers – hosted by my incredibly inspiring and generous friend Yvonne Battle-Felton – that meets every morning online at 5.55am to write. It may seem a bit too much but it’s a way of claiming our time (from work, mostly) to do what we love the most first thing of the day. Yvonne was inspired by Bernardine Evaristo’s Manifesto – a great writing memoir, by the way – in which she claims that writers need to make their practice a priority no matter where they are in their careers. I resonate with this – I need to write to feel good, and it’s as important to me as eating, hygiene, and doing regular exercise. And I know many creative people feel this way.
Tell me a little bit about your upcoming 3rd year module-what inspired it, and what do you hope to achieve in and through it? If I was a student with little experience writing (but a consistent praxis and output) or creating visual art, but was a voracious reader, what would you ideally like for me to take away from your class?
Haha, the student you have described is literally the best kind of student. I suppose I’d feel honored to introduce them to many of the possibilities within the graphic novel form.
Something I’d love for my students to take away is that you can literally create a graphic novel with paper and a pen. You don’t even need to know how to draw ‘well’ – a graphic novel can be so much more than the drawing style (as shown but incredibly powerful but artistically ‘simpler’ works such as Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi).
In your international, multisector, multifaith experience, what is it you find that makes community so difficult to establish and, far harder it seems, maintain in our time?
Communication, I think – which is funny to me, because, as a writer, I spend so much time thinking about how to communicate themes and ideas. I wish communicating with others – and creating space for different points of view and ideas – was something we all learned as children like spelling and calculus. I think we also need to have a stronger sense of a community – meaning, a community of humans on this planet living alongside animals, plants and other life forms. It’s only by communicating (and listening) that we can connect and in turn create and maintain networks. I think our society values individualism far too much – in a time when we all need to stand together against a handful of individuals making decisions that are hurting most of us. I'd say that mainly that's what I love about writing – opening new avenues of communication, playing with different possibilities and understandings, and hopefully bringing different people together.
