Mslexia

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New Writing

Interview

Guest editor Kathleen Jamie introduces her pick of poetry and prose in Issue 17 ◊ Apr/May/Jun 2003

Interview. The very word makes the heart sink. Think – jobs, police, headmasters. Answering questions you’d rather not. Promoting oneself or judging others. It was not a promising theme, and by the paucity of the submissions (many fewer than usual) – it made other people’s hearts sink too. In fact, before I opened the not-so-fat envelope from Mslexia, I had convinced myself that the interview was the enemy of literature. I mean, if we are ‘creative’ writers and interviews are designed to eliminate all personality, all foibles, all interaction and fluidity of conversation, what are we left with? So I was quite prepared to be generous (I’ll be mean later). Under ‘interview’ are included conversations, interrogations, encounters and consultations – in fact, all of human intercourse.

Of course, I’d reckoned without the ingenuity of Mslexia writers. Although the theme stumped a lot of people, those who did manage to bend it to their own ends did so in a variety of devious ways….

What the theme did enable was interesting. Time travel, for one – some writers talked to the dead. Beatrix Potter, Grace Darling, Virginia Woolf, were amongst those who spoke to us. Only once was a job interview mentioned. Maybe people thought it too predictable. Or maybe we are all ladies of leisure? There was a lot of interest in what academics call the ‘Other’ – imagined meetings with murderers and nasty folk, people who are very definitely Not Us, but fascinate us. The idea of an ‘interview’ gave legitimacy even for imaginary encounters. And I did notice a lot of authority figures – doctors, social workers and such like. Without exception we were on the receiving end, so to speak. We were never given the encounter from the doctor or psychologists’s point of view, which is quite revealing. And there were a lot of ‘fallen’ figures – immigrants, homeless people, single mothers. So the idea of ‘interview’ offered a licence to hold conversations with people we may not otherwise find ourselves able to approach. Sometimes this led to some prosaic writing, but almost without exception the pieces were empathetic. In all of these encounters there were next to no difficulties or hostilities. We can only conclude that Mslexia readers are nice, liberal and generous. Maybe just a tad too nice? I think an interview or encounter wherein two people really locked horns, or skirted around each other might have been challenging.

As I say, there were fewer submissions than usual, and proportionally, fewer successful pieces. Those which have been chosen were pretty various. I didn’t deliberately seek variety, but I’m happy it worked out that way. From formal interviews to short stories, a sonnet and a short play. They are, as you would expect, full of characters; it’s quite a ‘noisy’ selection, lots of speaking voices.

I’m sorry to say the poetry was poor on the whole. It didn’t work for several reasons – the major one was that many pieces submitted were not poetry, but chopped up prose. Either underwritten (limp and uninteresting), or overwritten (flamboyant, wordy and without apparent meaning). Poetry works through image and language. I was looking out for rhythm, for a deft simile, for a sign that the author was listening to the stresses falling, to the assonance and consonances. And attending also the silences – poetry is built of lines and tiny silences, but I was disappointed. Reading is the answer. Get yourself some books of modern poetry and read’em. Listen to them. Having said that, there were interesting things done with this theme. Many poets sought to incorporate direct speech into the poem. This is hard to do: the rhythm of the speech might jar with the rhythm of the poem, but it does enliven the piece. Once you’ve got speaking voices, of course, you’re tipping into drama. And furthermore, if you have a good interview, you can shrink the interviewer, let the interviewee do all the talking and hey presto – dramatic monologue. Oh, and class, do, do attend to your punctuation.

I chose five poems. Two were meetings with people already dead. I enjoyed Pam Thompson encountering Virginia Woolf, in a lift, ascending to heaven. Or are they ascending to a book launch? Is heaven, in fact, a never-ending book launch? In a nice touch the interviewer (who is embarrassed by the banality of her questions) had to get off a couple of floors below the sainted Woolf.

The location pleased me. Location! As I say to my students: in this world Everything Happens Somewhere. Be it poetry or prose, ask yourself as you’re writing, where is this happening? Remind the reader now and again where we are. A tiny detail is enough: ‘the lift bell dings’. This hooks the writing back into the world. If the piece of writing is located, it’s got less chance of floating off into self indulgence and meaninglessness.

I chose Mary Cookson’s ‘Circulation’ because Harvey is an unusual choice of subject, and I liked his archaic language and the way he spoke in scientific wonder about the heart, its ‘pure quality of containment’. She catches the movement out of the old beliefs of the ‘humours’ and into modern science. The poem unfolded in an unhurried, controlled manner.

An encounter of a different kind was Anna Woodford’s ‘Extract’. A neatly crafted poem about the painful difficulty of conversing with someone who is ‘not there’ – maybe because of old age, or illness. The line-endings are well judged, the punctuation could be better attended to, and the syntax made more lively, but the ending makes the poem a little mysterious, which is fine.

Katherine Gallagher’s ‘From the Sahel’ is the richest poem in terms of language. She has written a praise poem to a woman she encountered only in a newspaper article. In doing this, Gallagher pushed the theme of interview beyond the obvious. Her poem began as something she read in the paper, but she made it her own through imagination and attention. I like the play of question, and, cleverly, the absence of the woman Aicha. Aicha does not speak directly, but we know about her and her work, and the poet’s generous response to it.

Our only formal piece of work is Lisa Matthews’ ‘On being a small man’. Though it repeats a bit, ‘man’ and ‘feel’, and is more of a discourse than an interview, it read as a finished and thought-through poem with a nice sense of closure.

Now let’s move on to the prose work in all its varieties. Despite the theme, only two straight, newspaper-type interviews were chosen. Maya Angelou, interviewed by Olga Kenyon, was the only celebrity. Angelou comes over as a consummate professional – certain, generous, and giving, and well-rehearsed. Again (location!) I’d liked to have known where the interview took place, what Angelou was wearing – that kind of thing. Maybe it’s the want of imagery that makes many interviews, for me, tedious to read.

I liked Frances Gapper’s interview with Kay Stirling, co-founder of Sisterwrite. The interview gave us a very rounded sense of a life – and of a voice, but also of an era in women’s publishing. Gapper presents Stirling as a very real person, and though I don’t know her, I felt as though I had met her. Isn’t it a relief to read an interview with someone who’s effective and different and not a Hello magazine celeb?

Of all the characters I encountered in my reading, I think I admired most the brass-necked Blanche DuBois in her glorious hauteur. This story, ‘Blanched’ by Bethan Roberts, is possibly the most enjoyable of our choices – and one of the few pieces where the interviewer is developed as a character, too. Maybe it’s because it’s fiction that allows this move. It would be seen as improper or intrusive in a ‘straight’ interview. The story reads as that, a story, fully realised, located (yes!) in a coffee bar and it had an air of completeness. This piece has the elements of a successful short story: It’s driven by character, not action, it’s firmly located (‘support-underwear’ indeed!), there’s lots of dialogue, and there you are, a wholly pleasurable read.

Hazel B Cameron’s ‘The Wife’ uses the interview theme cleverly. The interviewer, a reporter, is hardly there at all. She just nudges the story along. We are allowed to understand what has happened, as the voices of husband and wife unfold. Catherine Jiggens’ is an odd piece, if she doesn’t mind my saying so. An interview within a drama. I liked the (yes!) location – out on a moor, and I liked this weird object, the sculpture with its whirling pom-poms, which became a character in itself.

Rita Nell’s prison story ‘The Interview’ I chose as runner-up for its strong, nervy writing, its shifting focus and dialogue. In the end though, these are the very things that frustrated me – it was dynamic, but just too oblique.

So, not the easiest or most obvious theme. Congratulations to those who have work published, and thank you to all who submitted work. 

KATHLEEN JAMIE was born in Renfrewshire in 1962. As well as a travel narrative about Northern Pakistan, re-issued as Among Muslims (Sort Of Books 2002) she has written several collections of poetry, including Jizzen (Picador 1999) and Mr & Mrs Scotland are Dead (Bloodaxe 2002). Winner of a number of prestigious literary awards, Kathleen Jamie teaches on the Poetry MLitt at St Andrews University. She lives with her family in Fife.

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...if you have a good interview, you can shrink the interviewer, let the interviewee do all the talking and hey presto – dramatic monologue.

KATHLEEN JAMIE