You’ve won and been shortlisted for lots of awards. Do you still get that buzz when a nomination comes through? 

Oh, well, I should be so lucky to call it ‘lots’. It’s true I’ve been there, I suppose. I think it’s very, very sad that the Whitbread prize – which became the Costa – recently folded. Now the only really big one is the Booker, which ridiculously is shared with America. That reduces your chances of being nominated, but I live in hope. That said, I think I’m much more commercial, If I pray for something, it’s to make it into the top 10 best sellers, not just because in practical terms it repays you far more than a prize, but because it shows your readers love your work. 

As well as your books, you’re an avid screen writer too, right? As well as adaptations of your novels, you’ve written screenplays for the BBC, Angela Pope, Fulcrum TV and Great Western Films. 

Yes. It’s something I keep my hand in, and it comes and goes. The trouble with screenwriting is it’s largely speculative. The people who hire me are usually producers trying to put together a film or a TV show. In order to do that they need a script. But I’m very aware that that script is just a tool they will then use to try to raise the money and get some actors, and it may then go nowhere. So it’s fine. The money is good. It’s very good, considering, but what you write usually won’t see the light of day. It’s different with a novel; I know it’ll see the light of day. Luckily for me, I’m in that happy position. 

Interestingly your first two books were published at the same time. 

That’s right, but it’s not as exciting as it sounds. It actually happened because my publishers didn’t want me and were getting rid of me. It was back in the in the late 80s, when a lot of big takeovers were happening in all industries, including publishing. The long-established publisher that bought my first two books was bought by Penguin, who didn’t want me. So they published both books on the same day just to sort of sweep me off their shelf. But it did me a favour, because it got me far more reviews and attention than I deserved at that stage. It was so unusual for an emerging novelist to have two books published on the same day, so it was a gift to a publicist. Plus I was young and pretty back then, so that helped, I guess. 

So given what you know now, would you recommend that as a strategy for an emerging novelist today? 

Publishing two books on the same day? No, I think it’s quite wasteful. I just got lucky and those two books were very slight and very short, so they could take that that kind of treatment. I think if you write more than one novel, you should pace them out, so that they each have a good share of the market.  

Great advice. So, going back to your early years… what do you think made you a writer?  

Reading. I think writing and reading are the same thing, weirdly. They’re so intimately linked, I can’t really separate them. I grew up in a very, very bookish household. Everyone read. There were always baskets of library books around the house and you were allowed to read anything, pretty much, although I have quite a bossy older sister who was very clever and steered me in my early literary consumption. I’m quite aware that my first books were ones she’d passed me. I was an early member of the Puffin Club, which was Puffin Books’ brilliant way of marketing: Direct Marketing to kids, I totally swallowed it. All my pocket money was spent on Puffins. But I never thought I’d become a writer. It just seemed to emerge organically, first out of all my reading, and second from my studying English at Oxford. I was actually trying to be an actor, and writing was just something I was doing for fun, really. It still doesn’t really feel like something I should be paid to do. It feels terribly self-indulgent sometimes. 

So you wrote when you were studying English Literature at Oxford? 

Actually, that’s about the one time I stopped, mainly because I was too busy writing essays, but also because of the critical atmosphere that surrounds an English course. The Oxford Course is not one with any creative writing involved. And I wouldn’t have dared try to submit something creative, I don’t think. But I was always thinking about it. I had friends who wrote plays and things like that. I even acted in one of my friend’s plays and that kept me aware of the possibility of writing.  

Things are changing these days though as so many universities have creative writing degrees, or modules you can do. If I was teaching English literature, I’d want all my students to have a go. It helps you understand why the good stuff is so good and how hard it is to be that good. When I think back to the Oxford English degree – which probably has barely changed since I did it – they didn’t teach you about the creative process at all; you just covered everything from Anglo Saxon to the 1960s in three years. It’s not really feasible to get a deep understanding in that time. I think if they’d taught us about the creative process all those writers had gone through, we might have gotten a deeper understanding of their work. 

Thinking of your own work… Do you read reviews of your books? 

I think it’s important to look, but I think the same time I’m very aware that you’re kind of hearing it too late. The time to listen to criticism is when you’re still editing. That’s why I like having a really full-on edit; I like my editor to be very careful not to hold back and to be quite blunt if need be, because that’s the time you need the criticism. You need them to say when they’re bored, you need them to say when they don’t understand. I never understand novelists who don’t like being edited – but there are plenty out there – who’d literally their hand their book over and say, ‘not a word is to be touched’. I think that’s arrogant. And foolish.  

So are you able to talk through your writing process, from idea generation to completion? 

Well, usually the basic story is something that comes before anything else. And that will be kicking around in my head for two or three years. Often, while I’m working on another book, or more likely, while I’m touring, promoting a previous book, I’ll be thinking all the time about this next one. The book I’m working on at the minute has been cooking up for a long time – years! It’s a sequel to a novel of mine called A Place Called Winter. It’s set in the 1950s and every character is a blood relative of mine, because it’s basically about my grandparents and my parents, all deceased. Despite that, it’s still very intimidating. Because I’ll need to make some stuff up.  

So the idea brews. And then inevitably, especially with a historical novel, I need to do a lot of research before I can write a word. I have all these books kicking around my writing room about Saskatchewan, where the new novel will be set, and boxes of old letters my ancestors sent and received. I’m very lucky that my mother and my grandmother wrote to each other at least once if not twice, or three times a week, especially during the period when this novel is set. So I’ve got this fantastic way in a very direct way into their private selves. Once I’ve done all the reading, I have to push it to one side and just kind of tell the story. I have to make a structure – I’ve never been one of those writers who just sits down and writes. Perhaps it’s my music training. I like to have a form, which I get down in longhand, because that’s how I like to work. 

So once you’ve hand-written the structure, you’ll then start typing up the novel? 

No, no, then I’ll then write the novel all in ink. I love not having distractions, so I like to be able to have the computer switched off, and just sit on a chair and write. I tend to work from two ends of a notebook simultaneously. So I’ll take notes at one end. And I’ll just start writing from the other. But every now and then I’ll go back and make notes at the other end of the book. Once I’ve written everything out in longhand, I then type it up. 

Do you not go through a period of being terrified you’re going to lose that notebook with your whole novel in it? 

It becomes like an extension of my arm. I know where it is at all times and in the latter stages I take it everywhere with me. Just in case though, my writing room has an insurance policy all of its own.  

Once it’s typed out, which is – in effect – a second draft, I’ll print it in really big spacing so I can then make lots of notes, ready for another draft. All my really creative work is done with a pen in my hand. 

When you’re writing up each novel, what computer program do you use? 

I just use Word. I know lots of young things love Scrivener. I tend to rely on big fat dictionaries. There’s a brilliant book I recommend to every aspiring writer, which is the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors. It’s fantastic; if you pick any page, I guarantee there’ll be stuff you didn’t know. So it’s really good at categorically telling you if a certain word only has a hyphen in America and not in English. But also it can give you explanations of stuff that you might not otherwise know. It’s just really good. So I often consult that throughout a book write. 

Then, I do another handwritten draft, using the notes on the typed/printed draft, then I usually try to have some time off. I think time is a really good editor. You come back and, thanks to the distance, you can see a way to fix things you weren’t entirely pleased with before. 

How long a break would you take from a piece at that stage? 

Maybe only two or three weeks. A short break often is all it takes. What’s especially handy is if you have a different job, or a different bit of work you have to get on with and you can just shelve the novel. My editor is very, very patient. My current book’s a year late already!  

Finally I will do a neat, typed up version, incorporating all the changes. And at that point, send it to my editor and my agent. 

What do your editor and agent do when they receive a draft of your book? 

They each give me feedback. Assuming the book is under contract, they might try to sell foreign rights or screen rights. My editor and agent really get on, so they speak to each other about the manuscript, but my editor would then give me very detailed feedback. She’ll then do a really detailed line by line edit. And in parallel to that, usually around this point, you get a copy edit, which is very different thing. You really, really need a good copy editor. And I quite often insist on paying somebody independently of my publishers because I’m so judgmental about it because basically a copy editor is looking for things like factual errors. Especially with historical novels, it’s so easy to get things wrong. And to have somebody doing something they couldn’t possibly do, like leaving for Liverpool from Kings Cross instead of Euston or something like that. And it’s just invaluable to have those mistakes corrected.  

Do you have a copy editor that you use all the time?  

There’s one I want to get back to using who’s brilliant. He’s very old school, but really kind of obsessive. That is a problem in publishing, because publishing is getting very, very young. Lots of the old school editors have just left and it’s getting younger and younger and younger, which is fine, because young people have fantastic energy and new ideas and all that. But when it comes to copy editing, I think you need someone who’s quite mature because often the mistakes they’ll notice are things that younger people just wouldn’t notice. If you’re writing about the 1950s, you ideally want somebody who vaguely remembers the 50s, or at the very least has watched lots of old black and white films. So it’s, it’s a point where age is actually quite crucial. 

And then you do a final, final draft? 

I wouldn’t call it a final, final draft, because it will then go to print and I’ll get a set of digital proofs to correct. Normally you can only make a certain percentage of corrections at that stage before the author is expected to pay for changes. It’s very rare that happens. But that’s how publishers cover themselves in case you suddenly throw a hissy fit and say, I want to change lots. It’s just too late to do that, so you correct your proofs and I would usually do my damnedest to find somebody who hasn’t read the book or knows anything about it to correct a set of proofs. Because again, a new pair of eyes will see stuff others haven’t seen. And usually around that point, you start having to talk to the marketing department, or the design department about how the book will be packaged. How the publicity campaign they plan for it will work etc. 

How much input do you have to the marketing of your books? 

I make sure there’s a lot of input from me. I have very strong feelings about it. Book jackets are notoriously easy to get wrong and I’m not a designer, so I always have a very open mind. But I’m always very reassured if the editor wants to talk to me about ideas, and usually they will. The editor will bounce five or six ideas off me, having already in-house weeded out a whole load of others. I enjoy that process, I think because I’m a very visual thinker. I respond to imagery, and I like working with them on that. The publicity is a tricky one because that tends to involve a whole other element: public appearances; going to book festivals and so on. It so happens, maybe because of all the acting I did, that I’m very happy to do that. Some authors are really shy and their idea of Hell is getting up on stage and performing. I’m very lucky in that respect and I think I’m quite confident at it. I certainly get booked by a lot more festivals than most, one of which is my hometown’s fantastic Penzance Literary Festival.  

You’re a fan of literary Festivals? 

We’re so lucky in this country. In America, they don’t have anything like what we do here in the UK. Publishers are damn lucky because it’s a great way of selling books. And it’s particularly lovely to have it happen all over, not just in London. Cornwall, for instance, is actually a very poor region but we have some great literary festivals. Despite all the wealthy second homeowners, the basic economy of Cornwall relies totally on tourism. Book festivals are a great way of bringing money into a town or a village. And it’s not just about making money for authors – they don’t actually make that much money for authors – but they do feed into the local economy because people will be buying meals, they’ll be doing shopping on the side. They won’t just be buying books. They’ll quite often come for the weekend or for a few days and will stay in a hotel, so there’s a real benefit to having a book festival. Plus they’re fun and each one has a different identity. 

the Penzance Literary Festival, I think, is really interesting in that, as well as having some big-hitting names, it’s bold about also hosting events with writers who aren’t yet published, or with writers who are not yet well known or writers who are very local. It’s a huge contrast to the North Cornwall Book Festival, which has to be rigorous about money because the festival is held in a place that isn’t really a place, there’s no identity to it’s location. The main venue is a marquee hired as a bookshop. All the authors have to be put up in places that need to be paid for, so the financial outlay is tremendous compared to doing a festival in a town. It means programming authors who are fairly sure to sell out. All real big names!   

What are your top book recommendations for aspiring writers? 

My main advice about reading is keep doing it. Sometimes I go and talk to creative writing students, young, creative writing students and I ask them what they’re reading, or what have they read and they often haven’t read much. They’ve watched lots of TV. But they haven’t read. I think unless you’re lucky enough to have done an old school English Literature degree, there is that incredible treasure trove of 19th and early 20th century literature just waiting for you to discover it. People like Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Taylor – who is completely out of fashion now – but actually, her books are like little jewels.  

One novel in particular had a huge influence on me. Nobody has ever heard of it or the writer; I suspect it’s now out of print. I worry the writer stopped writing or died – it’s called English Weather, by Neil Ferguson. It’s the most ingenious, moving novel about a man’s life story. But it tells it in about eight different voices. So what you get in each chapter is somebody telling their story in which that man plays a part. It’s kind of like a jigsaw, and the different narratives build up a composite picture of someone. It’s really quite extraordinary, wonderful. Every time I recommend it, I think I must reread it. It’s a really good example of a very bold experimental structure. I think it’s a useful novel for people who are about to embark on their first novel, and are feeling really intimidated at the thought of writing something big. Because what you can do – and I’ve seen a few novels when people have done this – is to write a series of short stories then string them together like in Olive Kitteridge .  

So you’re a short story fan? 

One of the reasons I hardly ever say no, when I’m commissioned to write one is it sharpens things, a bit like flash fiction can. It sharpens your tools. When I’m writing a novel, my note to myself, my constant note to myself, is to make every chapter satisfying in itself, the way a short story should be. It’s difficult because in every novel, a long novel, you will always have bits where you’re treading water slightly, or bits where it’s a bit tedious, kind of on purpose, because that’s how life can be. It can’t all be at this pitch. But I think it’s really important that every chapter sings for itself. 

You mentioned earlier that you have an idea rattling around in your head for a couple of years before you start working on it. But you’ve written about subjects varying from the Kindertransport to mental health, and you’re currently writing something about Canada. Can you pinpoint where the ideas come from? 

I really have no idea, but they just seem to arrive. And sometimes they don’t stick around, sometimes they carbonise. For two or three years now, I’ve been cooking up an idea for a novel about a garden. I’m a kind of obsessive gardener. I think that’s born of having spent 26 years developing a garden from scratch. I’m thinking about a plot to do with a garden and a family and somebody dying and what will become of the garden, or what the future of it might be. That probably isn’t the book I’ll end up writing, but somewhere in there will be that germ of an idea that will have stuck. 

So do your ideas generally come from something real in your life? 

Yeah, usually either something that’s happened to me or that’s happened to a loved one or just something I’ve seen going on. The last time it was about Charles Causley. That was sort of in my life because I was working for the Charles Causley Trust. I just found I was getting obsessed. I had to write the book in order to get the obsession out. Sometimes you have to try to write something just to get it out of your system. Usually the initial idea will be very broad, and cover many decades. And the idea that I actually end up writing is really kind of drilled in, focussed. So a novel of mine, Take Nothing With You, is about a child whose life is changed by learning the cello – the original plan for that book was virtually the whole man’s life, not just his childhood. What I ended up writing was almost entirely about the childhood, seen through the lens of him as an adult.  

Once you decide, ‘right, I’m going to write this story’. How long does the writing take before you give that final draft to your editor and agent? 

Between a year and a year and a half. Not that long. All the thinking has gone on beforehand. I liken it to taking dictation: when I get to the stage where I’m actually writing it, if I feel I’m making stuff up I’ll stop and go back to the research, because I like it to feel as if I’m just being accurate. The story has to be so vivid to me that I’m just portraying something that’s there. That’s real. Otherwise, I feel the artifice and the effort will show in the storytelling. 

Do you think that’s sometimes a downfall of less experienced writers that they just want to finish a draft too quickly? 

I do. And I think quite often, they’re hungry, you know, they want to write a book they want to deliver, they want to get some money. And God knows, but you don’t get much money for a book. So the pressure is on. But I think time, for me, is what’s changed. When I look at my early novels, they frustrate me because they’re very, very short. I’m not actually drilling down into the story at all. I’m skating over the surface. And if I was to retell those, if I had to write a book now using the same plot, as those early books, there will be probably a lot more darkness. They’re all comedies, but they’re comedies about painful things. I had a breakthrough moment when I acquired a fantastic editor, a legendary editor. She was really hard on me. Emotionally, she was very astute. She got to know me quite well. And she realised I made jokes to avoid discomfort, and that I was doing the same in my writing. She didn’t want to stop me being funny occasionally, but she said, ‘You’ve got to notice what you’re avoiding writing and write it.’ So she made me put the pain in that had been missing earlier. I’m so grateful to her.  

With your short story collections, how did you decide on the structure of them? Were all the stories already written and you just kind of arranged them? 

For Dangerous Pleasures they were already written, I didn’t write any specifically for it. It was when I came to the second collection, Gentleman’s Relish that I had most of the collection already, but I wrote two or three, especially for the collection. I wanted it to be very dark and rather enjoyed doing that. There’s something quite dark and sinister in a lot of my short fiction, and I wanted to emphasise that. 

Tell us about your radio short stories and how young writers trying to find a place for their work might go about getting something published/aired. 

I mean, it’s not easy. Now, I mean. We’ve never had a short story tradition in the UK in the way America does, thanks to the New Yorker. 52 stories a year doesn’t sound like much, but when you look at the readership of that magazine, it’s a hugely influential thing. So in America, it’s possible for a collection of short stories to be a best seller. In this country there are very few notable commissioners of short stories, but one of them is BBC Radio Four. Unfortunately, they commission such short stories. I mean, they’re 12 minutes long, by and large: that’s very few words. It doesn’t lend itself then to being published in the same way as a proper length story. I find that very sad, because it means that we very rarely do see collections of short stories on the bestseller lists. We don’t have a major prize for short stories.  

Publishers hate short stories, because they can’t make their money out of them. They always say, ‘oh, they don’t sell.’ But writers love writing them. And so what often happens, and it certainly happened with me, is the short story collection is a bit like the slightly dodgy gospel album, pushed through on a two album deal.  

I record audio books myself, which is great fun, and I’m very lucky, I get commissioned to do it. But in the process, I’ve discovered how incredibly easy it is for any writer to record their own work. And to release it, just as you can get your books turned into ebooks. It’s a very, very cheap way to get them out there. I think, as a whole, the young generation of writers are much more alive to blogs and podcasts. So I think the great hope of the short story in this country is probably through podcasts and short stories and I I wish somebody would come along and start doing a British equivalent of the New Yorker, but as a podcast to encourage the stories to be of a good length because the joy of it is they don’t have to be a specific length – they can be as long or as short as you like.   

Do you write five days a week, nine to five? 

I try to. I make it as much like an office job as I can, otherwise it would just never get done. I get too easily distracted. It was a breakthrough when we were able to make me a separate office at home. I can at least come to work, physically leave the house and come to work. 

I think we all have cycles in our days and some people are good in the morning and some people are definitely not. I tend to be at my best in the morning until about two o’clock. And then there’s a definite trough and then it picks up again in the evening. So if it’s a rare occasion where I’m going away on a writing retreat or my partner, Aidan is off to do an ultra marathon somewhere, I will write at night and get quite excited by the work I do then. It’s silly but it feels very unsociable if we were both at home and I was writing at night. 

Last question: best bit of advice for upcoming writers? 

Get it done. And then do something else. People always ask me how they can publish their first novel and I always say, ‘Just don’t forget to write your second novel.’ Don’t wait, because the process of finding a publisher or an agent can be so slow, you need to get on with another, just to remind yourself that you enjoy doing it. If you put all your focus on that one piece of work and it gets turned down – which it will do by two or three, maybe twenty people before getting accepted – it would be completely soul destroying if you weren’t also working on something else. 

We love the way The Granite Kingdom weaves together in-depth research into geography, history, art, landscape and travel literature with on-foot research and a warm and entertaining vein of personal reflection! How did the idea for it develop and what were your favourite – and least favourite! – parts of the research process? 

Thank you! I’m glad that you appreciated that wild mix of components! The idea to write something about Cornwall, addressing themes of history and culture, had been around in the back of my head for years. For a while I considered writing a more straightforward narrative history, perhaps with each section hinged around a particular place within Cornwall.

But that wouldn’t have given me the flexibility to jump backwards and forwards in time, to make indirect links between topics, or to bring in the reflective personal elements. In the end, I realised that making it a travel book would give me the perfect structural foundation. That’s the great attraction of travel writing: it provides a solid organising principle for all sorts of disparate elements. 

The most exciting moments involved stumbling across an individual story from the past, and then chasing down the details – the transatlantic voyage of the Cornish farmer James Hoskin, for example. I also loved the journey itself – a 300-mile walk from one end of Cornwall to the other. But there were definitely times, slogging along with blistered feet at the end of a long hot day, when I wasn’t enjoying myself!   

You’re from Penzance in Cornwall, a place which is so rich in history, legend, and myth. When you were growing up, did you have a favourite mythic story, traditional tale, or local legend? 

I was particularly fascinated by Carn Kenidjack – a granite outcrop on the moors near St Just. There are various creepy stories about it collected by 19th-century folklorists. I wasn’t properly familiar with those as a child; but the place definitely still had a vaguely sinister reputation, and the devil and the headless horseman were rumoured to be at large in the vicinity. We spent a lot of time wandering around near Kenidjack as kids, and it was a great place to give yourself the heebie-jeebies on a foggy day. 

Really, though, the stories that most caught my imagination weren’t from folklore; they were the stories my dad told me from his time working as a deep-sea fisherman, especially the ones involving sharks, conger eels and killer whales – monsters just as thrilling as giants and spriggans and piskies. 

Your career has varied from your time as a professional chef to studying journalism to teaching English, tour guiding, and now writing and academia. Did you always dream of doing what you do now, or does it feel like the unexpected culmination of a series of adventures? 

In a way the answer is yes to both! I wanted to be a writer, from a very young age, and somehow always assumed that I eventually would be. But I had no real idea how to go about it. Throughout my late teens and early twenties, while I was working as a chef, I wrote story after story, tried to write novel after novel. But I never really made any serious attempt to do anything with them; most went straight into a bottom drawer. I didn’t even know that “creative writing” was a thing you could study. Looking back, I think that was a very healthy approach: I was learning my craft without the distraction of pursuing publication. It was when I was working as an English teacher in Indonesia in my mid-twenties that I started publishing things – newspaper and magazine features, mostly travel-themed. And then, within a few years, writing had become my main occupation.  

The one thing that I definitely wouldn’t have foreseen at the outset was my academic career. I had no interest in going to university at eighteen, and I was quite hostile to formal education in general. But now I’d say that I’m doing my dream job, analysing texts and teaching writing and literature.  

Along with all the books you’ve published, you write short fiction, including your brilliant story, ‘On the Border’, anthologised in Cornish Short Stories: A Collection of Contemporary Cornish Writing. How does your approach to writing a short story differ to that when writing non-fiction? How does it feel to move between more and less factual forms? 

For a long time, I had a conviction that a story – or a poem – should always be about something: people in a scenario that speaks to a theme, even if that theme is never directly mentioned. I think there was a bit of a Hemingway influence going on there. I wrote lots of pieces like that when I was younger, and my short stories came from a very different place to my nonfiction. But these days I’m much more inclined to blur the line between “essay” and “short story”, to play around on the border between fiction and nonfiction. Sometimes these are ideas that arise in my nonfiction book projects, but that are more readily explored in shorter forms. 

In your writing, external journeys of travel are intricately interwoven with internal journeys of thought, empathy and discovery. Do you find that physical journeys unlock particular forms of writerly discovery? 

Absolutely. As I said, the physical journey provides the narrative core of the book. But it’s much more than a structural device. During any journey, you encounter the unexpected: incidents, accidents, detours, places that were nothing like you expected, conversations – the unplanned. When you set out on a journey as a writer, you have to accept a certain lack of control: you are going to write about what happens along the way, but you don’t know what’s going to happen! The other important thing about a journey – especially a journey on foot – is that you spend a lot of time inside your own head, distilling vague ideas, picking at problems, working things out, and that’s a very important part of the writing process. 

You write about Cornwall with such compelling curiosity, insight, humour, and affection. At one point, you ask, “do we need the gazing outsiders to tell us that our place is special?”, an observation that evokes an intrinsic tension between travel-writing-about and belonging-to a place. What observations do you have about writing about a somewhere you’re discovering vs. somewhere you’re from? 

Tim Hannigan reading from The Granite Kingdom at St Just Library, photo by Peter McAllister.

It’s much, much easier to write about somewhere you’re not from. Writing about travel is, inevitably, also writing about the self. But place and self are far more clearly separated when you write about somewhere that’s foreign to you. When you write about where you’re from, the dynamic is far less stable. Everything is ambiguous – including the identity of your readership. Are you writing first and foremost for others from the same place, or for outsiders? And there’s also a danger – especially if you’re from a place like Cornwall – of slipping into a kind of chippy nativism, of writing against outsiders. I’m not sure if I got it right, but I did my best to embrace the anxiety and uncertainty of the process, to make it a part of the story. 

As well as being an author, you’re an academic who teaches creative writing at universities. What do you love most about teaching creative writing, and how do your writing and teaching processes influence each other? 

I teach both creative writing and literature, which is the best of both worlds as far as I’m concerned. The formal study of creative writing, for me, is about understanding and articulating the writing process – being able to say what you did in a piece of writing, and why you did it and how you did it. Engaging with that – whether as a student or a teacher – makes you a more controlled and methodical writer. But it’s actually the literary studies, rather than writing practice, that I most enjoy teaching. Engaging with critical theory and working on close analyses of books that have little to do with my own creative practice makes me a more attentive reader – and being a reader comes before being a writer. 

What are you reading at the moment and what are you writing at the moment? 

I’ve been teaching a module on literary modernism for the first time this semester, which has been a great excuse to reengage with a whole lot of authors – Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield and others – that I haven’t read for many years. I’m also reading a lot about Irish history, and especially the history of the way land in Irish has been controlled and contested. This is for my current writing project – which will be another book blending travel writing with history and all sorts of other things. It’s at a very early stage, but there will be another long journey on foot later this year.  

Finally, what advice could you offer to writers who have recently started out? 

Read, read, read – and read widely. Don’t restrict your reading to your own preferred genres; read everything and anything you can get your hands on. 

Can you tell us a little about your writing process, please? Where do you write from? What’s that space like? How do you approach each day of writing?  

I write mostly from home, onboard a converted herring trawler moored on the Penryn River. It’s peaceful, if a little wet. My nearest neighbours are birds, fish and seaweeds.  

I’ve been lucky all my life—I’ve always wanted to write and don’t have to force it. I don’t exactly enjoy the process, but I find it necessary, like breathing or paying the bills. If I’m going hard at a project, there won’t be too many breaks between morning and evening. New material to start the day. Notes on future chapters wherever I happen to be—up at the university between classes, or at night, down at the pub. I’m a tinkerer. I revise until I can’t see the print for the page. For me, writing also involves giving way. I often stare mutely at the latest batch of seaweeds, waiting for their inevitable intervention. 

You write a mixture of novels and short stories. Do you have a preference for one? What do you get that’s different from writing each form? 

I like both forms. Flannery O’Connor said that short stories should have no less meaning than a novel, with nothing essential left out. I guess a story and a novel require roughly the same urge to create something from nothing. The only difference is estimated completion time. Stories start out as little excursions and stay there. City breaks, say. If they swallow up your brain for months instead of weeks, they can become novels. Settings get granular. The small digression becomes the extended subplot. You start preparing for a long road trip with your characters, many of whom you don’t like or trust all that much. Some of them will take over by the time you arrive.    

Place/environment is a major focus in your writing, one which really heightens the experience we have with your characters. How do you choose, describe and leverage your settings so well? 

‘Leverage’ is an interesting word with regard to setting. I’m not sure I think about it that clinically, but maybe I do unconsciously.  

How setting develops for me: I start with a protagonist, in a Poe-like predicament, then the right location suggests itself. I build the world out and return frequently to the minutia of place, the scene of the original sin. I tend toward making a postage stamp reality rather than some Kafkaesque Nowhere-land. My early stories were set in the Willamette Valley of Oregon because that’s where I partly grew up. Lately I’ve been setting my work in West Cornwall. Tomorrow, who knows? Could be the hometown of whoever buys my next pint.  

As well as a published writer, you also teach Creative Writing at the University of Exeter. How do you feel these two professions work alongside each other? 

University life and writing fiction make for good companions. I’ve got a pet peeve: all the writers who draw their salary from a university, then scrub their jobs from their identities to somehow appeal to a wider audience. What a joke. Own your world. Teaching is an honour. Teaching is a career triumph.  

If selling insurance (Wallace Stevens), or being a medical doctor (Anton Chekhov), or driving a bus (Magnus Mills) can ‘work alongside’ writing, why can’t teaching? The world has become too precious about the supposed nature of the artist. It’s a myth! Since the beginning of time, artists have shared their work for feedback, support, guidance. That’s what happens in a creative writing workshop. I learn from my students every day. If you can’t say that, I’m sorry, you’re probably a shit writer and a shit teacher to boot.  

Who are your favourite short story writers and why? 

John Cheever: the familiar place, the broken estate, the fateful moment 

Flannery O’Connor: divine grace, dark humour and a love for the unforgiven 

Anton Chekhov: a prosaic day in the life becomes a portrait of life as a whole 

JD Salinger: economy of line, character propulsion, oblique dialogue 

Xiaolu Guo: precise admixture of situational absurdity and philosophical depth 

We’re proud to be publishing a piece of life-writing that you’ve produced for INKFISH called ‘Why I Write and Why I Drink.’ It gripped us from beginning to end. To what extent does your fiction feature elements of your life experience? 

Boy, that’s a loaded one. To be honest, not a whole lot. I seldom follow the maxim of writing what you know. Maybe it says something about me that I prefer to experiment with each piece. That said, every artist projects elements of themselves into their work, even if unconsciously.  

Many of my Silt, Oregon stories feature episodes from childhood—like Second Skull or Farm Tennis. My novels serve as personal laboratories for the exploration of ideas. The Gravedigger is how I imagine romantic love in the face of death. Scorper is my vision of Ditchling, Sussex from the other side of the Atlantic. Seaweed Rising is what our planet will look like if algae continue as advertised.  

What are you working on at the minute? 

I’m on the final draft, God willing, of a novel called Carrick Roads. The setup is an American caught in Cornwall. He inherits a ridiculously large boat and can’t escape. Maybe I’m writing my life experiences after all. 

What advice can you give to other writers trying to ‘make it’ today? 

First of all, don’t be shy about identifying yourself as a writer. Carry a notebook and ignore anyone stupid enough to think it makes you pretentious. Don’t gum yourself up with doubt. Play close attention as you make your way through the world.   

Nurse your grievances. ‘Leverage’ them, if you must. Write in response to each setback or betrayal. Play into your strengths: if you’re poetically inclined, allow your language to veer into metaphor. If you’re good at plot, devise a few unexpected twists. Work on your weaknesses: if you have a tin ear for dialogue, eavesdrop without shame. Take detailed notes: each situation is a potential story, each person a character.  

Most importantly—and this shouldn’t come as a surprise from a proudly out academic—read, and read widely. Read fiction for structure as much as for content. Survey the genres: historical, detective, sci-fi, fiction in translation. Study nonfiction for how certain narratives get communicated. Skim the baby books for character names. Read teaching manuals, conference proceedings, newspaper articles, your grandmother’s love letters. All material can be woven into your story’s fabric. Develop a distinctive voice and revise until you’re blue in the face. Then submit, and keep the faith as the rejections roll in, because one day you’ll be published, and skipping off to the pub for a well-earned pint and the strength to push on.  

Tell us a little about where you live.  

I was born and grew up in the far south of New Zealand but now live near Truro in Cornwall in a small, quiet village close to the River Fal and lovely places like Roundwood Quay and Coombe. It’s part of an old woodland on a ridge of high ground above steep valleys. Although quite close to a city, it retains a wonderful sense of wildness. Much of my work is inspired by the natural world, and my garden and the area around where I live is on the edge of a beautiful, protected stretch of the Cornwall National Landscape.

I work at an old oak GWR desk with a southerly view of roofs, an ever-changing sky and cloudscape, trees and passing birds. As it is midsummer, the window in front of my desk is obscured by a large buddleia bush with deep violet flowers providing food and cover for birds, insects and butterflies. At this time of year the sun is too high in the sky to shine in through the window, so I write in the midst of leafy shade. People, cars, vans and horses pass by on the road a few yards away, hidden from view behind our overgrown hedge. At the end of the road is the remains of an old playing place, where mystery places were staged during the middle ages, as the area lies on the ancient pilgrimage route to St Michael’s Mount.

Read Emma Timpany’s

‘Gift from the Sea’

Which short story writers have influenced you the most and how? 

So many writers have influenced me. The New Zealanders Katherine Mansfield, Patricia Grace, Owen Marshall and Kirsty Gunn were early influences, as were the Australian writers Helen Garner, Patrick Holland and Tim Winton. Claire Keegan’s collections Antarctica and Walk the Blue Fields affected me because of their absorbing visual sense, attention to detail and humanity. Andrea Barrett’s collection Ship Fever about science and the natural world has long had a place in my heart. I return to masterpieces like Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’ and ‘At the Bay’, Cheever’s ‘The Swimmer’ and Baldwin’s ‘Sonny’s Blues.’ I am always reading and rereading short stories as they grow in richness over time.

Further influence comes from the creative approach many contemporary short story writers have to the form. In recent years, I’ve been impressed by the Scratch Books anthologies, Reverse Engineering and Reverse Engineering II, which combine great contemporary short stories with author interviews. Another excellent title from Scratch is The Poet and the Echo containing short stories inspired by poems. Standout pieces include Yiyun Li’s exquisite and heartbreaking ‘All Will Be Well’, Irenosen Okojie’s ‘Filamo’, Chris Powers’ ‘The Crossing’, Sussie Anie’s ‘Maintenance’ and Leila Aboulela’s ‘To Enter the Garden.’

We are very excited that you’re contributing a beautiful short story to Inkfish! What inspired your piece?  

The visual is very important to me, as is colour. I’ve always been interested in art work and artists – my husband is a visual artist as are many of my friends. ‘Gift from the Sea’ came out of this engagement with art and the reading of artist monographs, catalogues and biographies. My hometown of Dunedin is rich in creative activity and communities and has long provided inspiration for all kinds of art and Cornwall is exactly the same.

After the publication of Cornish Short Stories and my novella Travelling in the Dark in 2018, I experienced a long, difficult dry spell for 18 months. During May 2020 lockdown, each long, hot afternoon, I retreated to a room overlooking the garden hoping to find my way back to writing. At first I wrote down whatever was on my mind spontaneously; after a week or two, this mental clearing-out made space for my imagination to begin working again. Daily writing (of any kind) remains necessary to me as that is usually how my ideas arrive. The more I write the more likely ideas are to appear – writing begets writing.

‘Gift from the Sea’ was the first story that came to me after that fallow period and reflects some of the frustration I was experiencing at the time. However, whatever I was going through was nothing compared to what was happening in the wider world – perhaps that is why the story is set on a beach with dangerous currents and unforgiving tides, and one of its themes is life’s unfairness. Its conflict occurs in the dynamic between opposite forces: creation and destruction, anger and release, wounding and healing. It has become the starting point for a new collection of short stories.

Looking back, I can see that the stories written after 2020 differ from those published in my two previous short story collections The Lost of Syros and Three Roads. The fallow period marked the end of a phase of my writing which lasted from 2008-2018, and I’ve now entered a new stage in my journey.

What feels different about writing short rather than long?  

The short story has a reputation as a challenging form because of its intensity. Its brevity means that readers are aware of the writer striking a wrong note much more easily than in the longer novel form. The reason I find short stories compelling is that their intensity lends them a power which is somehow, rather magically, more than the sum of their parts. The best ones continue to reveal themselves over time and grow in richness with rereading. The greatest combine truth and compassion alongside a gem-like perfection and symmetry and linger, in their entirety, long in the mind.

I began writing short stories in quiet moments when my young children were asleep or at nursery school. In those years, it was challenging to find the time or concentration for longer work, although I have always written novel-length fiction alongside short stories. Travelling in the Dark began life as a novel but became a novella after its final edit. With longer form fiction, I have learnt that it helps me to have some initial plan or idea of the story’s overall structure whereas, with short stories, there is no plan – I follow the story wherever it leads. My writing practice is to make many small revisions to my stories to bring them to their final form over many months.

Is there an anecdote you could share about your research process?

I’ve always been interested in small details such as how the meanings of words change over time. For example, the title story of my second short story collection, Three Roads, looks at the mythology surrounding the Roman goddess of the crossroads, Trivia, whose name means ‘the place where three roads meet’. In Roman times, all children wore an amulet around their necks to protect them from harm, and, upon reaching adolescence, girls dedicated their amulets to Trivia and boys to Mercury at altars on the crossroads. I was interested in how the meaning of Trivia had changed over time to mean a gutter or common place and then has, after further changes, eventually come to mean something of little importance. I always collected these little bits of knowledge (trivia?) because they interest me, and then, often years later, they find their way into my stories.

You’ve edited some amazing collections featuring the short fiction of Cornwall-based writers! Could you tell us about the process of gathering stories and constructing a collection? What do you enjoy most about your work as an editor?

I have been lucky enough to work on two short story anthologies, Cornish Short Stories, which I co-edited with the writer Felicity Notley, and the very recent collection Botanical Short Stories. The anthologies were published by The History Press in 2018 and 2024 respectively and in each case, the contributors were chosen through an open call for submissions. Choosing stories to form an anthology is a rewarding and difficult process as the stories need to work together as well as be excellent standalone pieces. Having to turn down high quality work is the hardest part of the process as, inevitably, more good stories are submitted than will fit into a book with a limited word count. 

When putting my own short story collections together or working on anthologies, I create an outline which includes a little basic information about each story such as the title, a one sentence synopsis, the word count, point of view, tense and one word which encompasses the theme.  The next step is to experiment with the placement of the stories until they become a resonant whole. Although time-consuming, I enjoy this aspect of the editing process as I find it creative and intriguing.

My favourite part of the creating the anthologies is the opportunity to work with other writers. Writing can be a lonely occupation, so there is a special joy in bringing a group of voices together and building creative connections. The importance of including new writers alongside emerging and established writers shouldn’t be underestimated – it’s always a pleasure to see writers take their first step into publication. And it is much easier to edit other people’s stories than my own because I’m not familiar with them.

What are you working on now?

I’ve been caught up in the publication of Botanical Short Stories and am also busy with my own writing. I’ve completed a first draft of a new novel about three families living as neighbours in a small community in New Zealand. My third short story collection is also taking shape. As mentioned earlier, ‘Gift from the Sea’ was the first of these new works to emerge. I have written or have drafts of nine stories. Some are inspired in whole or part by artworks and many are set on the edge, in the liminal space between land and sea. 

Tell us a little about where you live.  

I live in Lostwithiel, which has a very old bridge and river much like the one in the story. I’d like to say though that the story’s Lostwithiel is definitely fictionalised. I’ve lived here for just a year, and after a childhood nearer the north coast have come to appreciate the river—I love that it’s a tidal river as it feels so connected to the sea, with such rich differences between low and high tides.

Are there local stories, myths, legends that inspire you?

Yes, growing up in Bodmin, I think especially I was fascinated by the idea of the beast of Bodmin moor roaming wild, and also the ancient stones—like the myths that they’re people turned to stone. These kinds of myths have been retold and reimagined in so many ways, as I came to see much later when researching my book Rocks of Nation: The Imagination of Celtic Cornwall. So for example short stories by writers like Donald Rawe depict such stones as living entities that reject incomers, and much as I share a wish to ban second homes and appreciate the very serious housing crisis going on here, I think some of these “nationalist” writers may go too far in using ancestry as a basis for who belongs and who should be excluded.

Read Shelley Trower’s
‘Lostwithiel’

One thing I wanted to do in ‘Lostwithiel’ was invert that kind of narrative by having the land itself as a living entity that in fact welcomes strangers. I want to resist the idea that you can only truly belong to Cornwall, or be Cornish, if you have ancestral connections or are born here; people can belong in all kinds of ways. In the story the new arrivals know the language better than some of the locals do.

Which short story writers have influenced you the most and how?

I’m mainly a novel reader but I do enjoy short stories too—and especially I’ve been influenced in ‘Lostwithiel’ by local stories as I’ve already mentioned. There’s also stories set in Cornwall by writers who travel here, and I read a load of these too for Rocks of Nation. In stories by E. F. Benson and others there’s typically a white male narrator who travels to Cornwall, seeing it as an exotic region or country full of myths and superstitious people. In ‘Lostwithiel’ the London-based narrator carries such assumptions about the locals like farmer Jago, and again the story totally upends that; he turns out not to be the provincial racist she thought he was but far more open and progressive than she has been.

We are very excited that you’re contributing a beautiful short story to Inkfish! What inspired your piece?  

Thank you! The main inspiration for it was visiting my parents-in-law, and our children playing in the river. Lostwithiel felt like a peaceful, safe place for me. Moving here has felt like an incredible privilege. My story is a kind of dream that it could be this way for people in need of refuge from other places too, especially considering how it is countries like the UK that have done the most to cause climate crises and other growing problems across parts of the world that have done the least to cause them, meaning there are ever more refugees. I’m also aware that many local people can’t afford to live here, and again second homes contribute to that problem.

What feels different about writing short rather than long?  

Well I’ve been grappling with my first novel draft for a couple of years now – it feels like quite an unwieldly beast. I’ve drafted a second too, which I’ve found much easier but there’s some considerable way to go yet. So it’s a pleasure to turn to something that can be published within a few months instead of years, if ever! Also I don’t seem to plan my short stories. I just get an idea and start writing to see where they take me.

Is there an anecdote you could share about your research process?

For this story it’s got to be finding the Old Cornish word for Lostwithiel. I was doing a project for The Writers Block to gather peoples’ ‘Stories of Stuff’ in the library, and an ex-farmer as it happens told me about the local history section where I found this old spelling. I love Cornish place-names like ‘Lostgwydeyel’ and ‘Tywradreath’ (deriving from ‘Ti War Dreath’, meaning house on the beach).

You’re an academic as well as an author, and you’ve written some fascinating non-fiction books. Could you tell us about how your scholarly process influences your creative work? How are the two kinds of writing different/similar? What do you enjoy most about academic work?

To start with a similarity: I think that academic writing can be creative. There’s times when you have to solve something, find a way forward, reach a higher level with your work – whether that’s for an academic book or fiction – and you have to allow your mind to drift along the linear path of your narrative and its various future possibilities, to almost float around it in a focused kind of unfocused way that I’m finding hard to articulate! It’s maybe a state of ‘negative capability’ (a term I picked up when teaching Keats’s poetry): dwelling in a state of openness that tolerates uncertainties and doubts without ‘irritable reaching after fact and reason.’

There’s definitely differences too though, like in the research process. My creative writing so far tends to draw on my own experiences, so rather than having to go and read a ton of books I can go to the river, say, and turn my attention to how that exists as a sensory experience, and how I might convey that in language.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on two novels. Ghost Snow & River is about a Professor of History haunted by her own past. As the title indicates, it’s also centred around a river that keeps flooding, driving the plot forward – kind of ghost story meets climate crisis. The second is Star, following a heavily pregnant woman living on the streets of London’s West End as it grinds and sparkles through the month of December. I’m wanting it to tell an alternative Christmas tale.

Tell us a little about where you live.  

A small bohemian town in Devon that’s twinned with Vires (France), Salfit (in the West Bank) and Narnia. It shuns chains, Tories and once had its own currency.  

 Are there local stories, myths, legends that inspire you? 

The land here is riddled with folklore, Dartmoor in particular, where I’ve set a novel and a couple of short stories. So many of its spaces feel liminal, portals to ancient events and times, which you can hear on the breeze if you listen hard enough.  

Earlier this year, your story ‘Voyagers’ won the V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize. In it, the moors with their “pale grasses” and kestrels form the backdrop for a brilliantly written, heartfelt tale of female astrophysicists tripping on magic mushrooms. How does the landscape around you infuse your writing?  

Those were other moors, but all my work tends to braid story with landscape, the two inseparable for me. We’re not mere inhabitants of the land, but products of it, shaped by its vagaries and textures. That story is of course about a journey, temporal and emotional, one that invites speculation of deep ecology, time and psychedelics.  

You’re a passionate advocate for the short story. What feels different – more compelling – about writing short rather than long?  

I think I tend to root for the underdog. But also it’s clear to me that some human truths can only be explored in this form, owing in part to the obliquity of its approach, the ineffable subtext permeating the surface narrative. A good story is always about something other than it seems; it defies classification. To borrow from Ben Okri, aside from the sonnet, it’s the most demanding literary form. 

We are very excited that you’re contributing some beautiful flash fiction pieces to Inkfish! What defines flash versus longer short fiction? Does planning and writing a flash piece feel very different to writing a short story?  

Short fiction’s attendant qualities (ellipses, irresolution, obliquity, precision) are even more heightened in flash. Someone once likened the novel to a marriage, the short story to an affair. Perhaps flashes are one-night stands. Initially, I have little idea what a piece will become, but it lets me know soon enough. There’s a brutality in revising a flash, stripping it down to the bone, and beyond. I feel there’s this greater connectivity with the reader, the contract insisting they do much of the work.  

You’ve emphasized the importance of the “felt” over the “known” in short stories, saying “I want to feel flayed, my mind or heart colonised for twenty minutes or so.” How do stories flay us? Why do good ones leave us with “more questions than answers”? 

I said that?! You should never trust a writer in interviews. I suppose I want a shift to occur in me that, as with a poem, I’m not entirely certain why or how it’s achieved its goal. The best stories undo us, change small parts of us, so we’re not quite the same after reading them. We’ve witnessed their brilliance and have forever become disciples to the form. I recently read of the short story that a good one is like spending time with a friend’s cat, stroking and befriending it, only to get home and realise it’s scratched you. Stories should scratch us. 

Short stories, flash, prose poems, novellas-in-flash feel like such current forms, like works in progress. What risks might writers take to push the envelope and what do you see short stories evolving towards?  

Nobody – editors, agents, readers – wants to read the same tired old stories again and again…and if they do, it’s the writer’s duty to challenge this, remove their comfort blanket. I’ve such admiration for those who play with form, embrace hybridity, take the creative path less trodden.  

Something you said that I especially loved was to “mine your biggest fears” when writing. If inhabiting a fictional psyche is akin to acting, what’s your method for transmogrifying your own fears into a character’s? 

If we’re to truly explore and present resonant characters, we are obliged to look inwards, inhabit uncomfortable territory. Perhaps this is the closest writing gets to therapy. How can we understand our characters’ fears if we have no insight to our own? To write is to be vulnerable, open to all that may rise from the primordial swamp of our emotional, psychological lives. Like moths, we must flutter close to the flame. I’m deeply mistrusting of veneers. 

Staying with fears for a moment, your novels, That Dark Remembered Day and What Lies Within, are compelling literary thrillers that explore “the darkest corners of the human heart”. How much do you find yourself gazing into the abyss as you write? Does it gaze into you?     

I think that phrase is more a marketing gimmick than anything, a cover blurb. I’m interested only in storytelling; this is my one duty – to the narrative. To my best ability to construct a story that in some way leaves the reader not entirely the same person they were at the start. I’m not much interested in entertaining, and perhaps in this regard I’m drawn to the more crepuscular shades of human endeavour. Observing the genocidal behaviour of many of our leaders, it would be disingenuous and neglectful of me to occupy overly palatable, bathetic ground. 

What’s the most dangerous, weird, or just plain “out there” anecdote you could share with us about your research process? 

Obviously I can’t share that one! I did once ask a friend to punch me in the face as hard as he could, so I could capture it in words. He really took to the task. 

 When you gather stories for a collection, how do you select and order them? 

I guess I try to manipulate readers’ emotions, who likely take their revenge by not reading them in chronological order. 

 What are you working on? 

A memoir and being a better person. 

Tell us a little about your work and where you live. 

I work on the high moorlands, the seashores and all places between – trying to capture a sense of place and time in both the big views and the small details. Working in sketchbooks I make visual and written notes. Not everything can be painted, birdsong, a snatch of conversation, the passage of time through the landscape.

Sometimes I paint on the spot and sometimes the sketches are worked up in watercolour, acrylic, inks and charcoal back in my workshop. I produce sketchbooks for publication as well as handmade artists books for galleries and commissions. Teaching has become a large part of my life. There’s nothing to match the ideas and energy in a room of creative people hard at work.. and nothing to match that feeling of a long day in the workshop trying to achieve something close to the picture I have in my head.

How did you start making artists’ books?
I started making books over 20 years ago after meeting Rachel Hazell, a bookbinder.  She came  into my gallery on St Martin’s, Scilly, and we started chatting. Later in the year, she returned to run a bookbinding class for me and some friends. I got hooked from the very first book I made, and have carried on ever since.

My family and I moved to West Cornwall in the late 1970s, growing our own food and keeping goats. That was when I started teaching printmaking at Newlyn School of Art in Penzance, selling my etchings through a London agent. I started making a series of books about places in the West Country after meeting a publisher on St Martin’s. They were a return to the sketchbook habit I learnt at art school; a sideways look at well known places like Penzance and Newlyn. I made a centenary book for the Isles of Scilly Steamship Company and a book about the building of the new Cornwall Records Office: the second of those may sound boring, but I loved working in a huge building site, recording the old brewery buildings being incorporated into a beautiful new building, with lots of scaffolding and men in hard hats and yellow jackets!

Can you tell us a bit about your process?
Bookbinding ranges from traditional techniques to ‘anything goes’!  The materials are very simple: a bone folder, bookbinding thread and needle, craft knife, paper, card, book cloth and good glue. I love to make artists’ books in part, because it gives me a chance to play with papers, shapes and stitches. Whatever book I make, it inevitably includes an interior world of paint, collage, and text. What’s produced becomes a portable and personal art work which takes on its own character. Every book takes on its own character during the making process.

What inspires you in the everyday?
I’m inspired by the landscape and the natural world, the changing seasons; by words, ideas and storytelling.

What do you love about teaching workshops?
I love teaching workshops  because making books is within the reach of anyone. The process is simple and the finished result convinces lots of people who thought they weren’t creative that they are. Bookmaking is a shared activity. Inspiration and ideas are passed around the room, which fills with energy and the hum of conversation. Age doesn’t matter and neither does artistic ability. There’s something so special in the atmosphere of a room of people with hands busy, ideas flowing and chatting and laughter going on. Through all that, beautiful artists books are being made by people who would never call themselves artists. Friendships are made, worries untangled, and problems solved.

What are you working on at the moment?
Lately, I’ve been working on some longer term projects including a large illustrated map and a book created with the Cornwall Heritage Trust as part of the outputs for a year’s residency. On my days off, I play with different book structures using mixed media – which is an arty word for tearing up failed painting and giving them a new life as artists’ books!