The Welsh Episode with Claire Fayers - Part 2

Do you think there are untapped seams to mine, if we carry on a mining metaphor here, stories that you've thought all this would, this is new, this is different, this has been forgotten? I think they're allowed and I think it is a case of digging below the things that are known, the Mabinarian and the stories of dragons and king Arthur and so on, and actually they're delving into these these small bits of folklore and that seems what we can bring out of them because some of them are, oh, almost not even stories, it's just fragments of bits, it's like the tapas in the mind, there they are, the story in my book. I had that as probably the one I have the most trouble with because it's not really an actual story that goes with it, there's just an ocean that they are, the family folk in the mind of the world who will tap and I had to come up with something to go with it, but there are instances of that, that could just, yeah, provide great inspiration, there's actually a rock up in the hill where I live now, moved house during lockdown and I'm just outside of the avenue now and close to where I live, there's a stunning stone, it was just left over from the quarry when they close the quarry, they stuck it there as a thing to say, oh, we were here once, there's now a story around it that it was a farmer who was so cruel that his wife drung herself in the river Esk, which is the one that runs just by the village and he got turned to stone as a punishment and every midsummer's eve, he will turn back into a person again and wander along the river bank calling for his wife, who has got the good sense, never to reply, I'm happy to be turned to stone and that's why the stone is there and that one has quite fascinated me because at some point somebody, although knowing that it's just a stone for the quarry, came up with this whole thing which has then become a bit of a local legend, I mean the things like that, I mean stunning stones are a great source of inspiration of course. And I suppose in a few generations, the fact there was a quarry there, that part may be forgotten because that's every day interesting and people latch on to suicide, husband and wife turning a certain, it's much more exciting isn't it, isn't it? It's a much more interesting story. Yeah, yeah. So we've touched on this a little but in fact what you've just spoke to has really illustrated this, that folklore hasn't stopped that we're carrying on adding to it, would you say that it retains in Wales a national flavour, something about being Welsh or is it become more of sort of human-conditioned universal story? I like to think that there is a different national flavour and I think the same as there's a particular flavour for English and Scottish and Irish folklore but of course some of it is just as the populations become more mobile and you get far more of a mix of people in different places than I think the stormies become more universal in a way. Yeah, I think there's probably two, two pools. So in England, you wouldn't be saying this should say Cornish, Yorkshire, North East, you know, you'd make it quite, it would be really good. And for me, I'm living in Oxfordshire so it's the kind of world of wind in the willows and, you know, Tolkien, it's that rural Hobbit stuff around here. So our most recent folklore is probably now known as Great literature which is just the sort of I think in the willows, there's a story about the famous river down there, somebody went and sat on the bank and said, hey, you know, there was a mole. So we've got a lot of projections of our local environment that then ends up on the world stage but I've got this feeling there's lots of lots of things happening all around the place, like David Arman is great at stories about his world up in Newcastle. I'm not sure what's happening in Cornwall, I've tried to think about that other than Poldark but we're not talking Poldark. It's just me not having thought long enough about it. So what do you think of the lessons for others writers thinking about our own original work rather than as collectors of stories? I think let your environment inspire you. Yeah, but your relationship with your immediate surroundings is something that's unique to you. And so if that percolates through into the writing, it's going to give a flavour to your writing that that is all yours and that nobody else can replicate. So be on the lookout for local stories and things but also when you're walking around, look at the stone on the hill and think oh, I wonder where that came from or the the funny shaped tree or what have you and just make a habit of making up stories? I think I like the specificity of it as well. Difficult word to say. And I noticed this, it was one of the things that I absolutely adore about talking is that it's not just a general tree, it's an oak or an elder or a film and they sit down beside a particular kind of river. So it's not just they sat in the banks of the river, you know, it's got a willow tree that roots going in in a certain way and that's sort of moving out of the general fog of description to something where you feel you're there. I think it is a real art to make fantasy as convincingly real. Yes, and seeing the landscape through the eyes of your characters. So, almost as we as narrators, we'd be seeing the things who are all nice and trying to convey that but of course your characters are not you. Yes, I'd have aspects of you in them but your characters are their own individual people. So to think about how your characters are actually going to see the landscape, what they will notice, the stories that might come into their heads as they look around the things can be a real way of showing the connection between your character and the world that they're in and then taking both of them to life more. Yeah, and it's also that little one of those tips for show don't tell, you know, so if you want to introduce their idea of their religion or something or the way they believe the world was made, you can do it through them looking at a stone can or yes, you know the hill over which the sun rises, I don't know what it depends. Well, it's something that's significant to them, yes. And the things that your character will care about in the in the world and pay attention to. Indeed. So Claire, it's wonderful that you've recently joined the team of tutors for the Oxford Center of Fantasy and your inexperienced teacher of creative writing. Are any of these worlds of missing legends, things which you find useful to bring into that teaching practice? Yes, I use them a lot actually. I do a lot of creative writing classes in schools and this year a lot of it has been focused on Welsh folktales and so whenever I go to a different school, I will try and look up something that is local to that school that I can tell them and then get the kids to write a sequel to it or use it as a spring off point for coming up with their own ideas. So I will show photographs, I will get tell what are the stories I can find. I'm just use that as inspiration. I think the very local aspect of that is really key because you know, going back to where we started about looking at a library and not seeing a Welsh lady's writing up there. But if you actually say look, these are stories about what happens outside your door. I've got a version of that which is not connected with missing legends. I always talk about how you are the expert. As a younger person, it's very hard to feel the expert on anything because teachers tell you how much you don't know. Whereas that corner of the neighbourhood, that tree you swing on and make and climb, you are the absolute expert on that. That's your tree, your backyard, that's your, if you want to claim somewhere for a story. That is true, yes. I find that children become, I know as a child I would become very excited if I ever saw anything that reminded me of my sort of home area which didn't happen much in books. But the kids become so excited to find out that there are stories about their area, about their local rivers and that they've got their own stories that are worth listening to. And I think also for adults, when you're teaching adults, connecting back to that time in childhood, when you're perhaps, hopefully not treated like an indoor cat, but you're allowed to roam a little bit. If you remember the way you interacted with your local area, those memories bring back that acuity of perception, don't they? I can remember the rough ground on the sort of out the back of our house where I grew up in Essex, which probably adults would look at and think, oh, that's rough ground, a spoil of some sort of building projects. The children looked at it and we thought that's our den, that's the den of the rival group over there. We've got a height here because it was near a golf course, we've got a height here if we see any golfers. You know, it became an area of adventure and just thinking of those feelings and how you knew everything. We tell stories about what other people have done there, accusing others of doing all sorts of the various things. It's just ripe with story, a tiny little patch of love. It is, it is that, that's the end of it. It's an area where there are stories and there's a real physicality to interacting with your environment as a child, that you're clandering over things, you're feeling everything, you fall down, you grace your knees, you get back up again, which and I don't mind, you said just walk across that rough patch of ground without paying it any attention. But there's this, this is still, yeah, physical interaction with the, with the place. And the whole wealth of storytelling that the children do when they're playing. And it's, yes, that's an adult writer trying to tap back into that and bring that excitement back that your world is one where adventures can happen. And there's something special about your environment that other people don't notice. So if people are listening to this wanting a sort of a writing exercise, I think having a go at remembering somewhere like that, because I'm sure it will open doors and you'll find yourself recalling so much, because memories have a way of hooking other memories onto them. Yeah, so yeah, so it would be a good thing to have a go at. So I've been talking about you as a collector of stories, but we did also mention that you've written your own fiction books for children, something about them and the directions you've gone on, gone in as a writer. Okay, well, the first book I'm holding it up here, I'm nobody can see it, because this is a potentially, well, there will be a visual version of this as well. Okay, but the, I think, yes, the book is, it's the accidental private voice to Magical North was my first one, which I actually did as a nano-rimal book, National Novel Writing Run through Tubmans in November of the year, and I sat down and just wrote it for fun. Wrote on a list of everything that I liked to read about, or I thought it would be fun to put into a story, so it was private, magic, sea monsters, sort of fighting Swinger or Chandalee as the whole lot, penguins, because I like penguins, and I just challenged myself to see if I could put it all into a book, which I finally did, and I eventually entered it for a writing competition and won that and got the publishing contact for three books through that. What was the competition? Is it still run? In case, yes, the competition is called Undiscovered Voices, which is run by Scooby, the Society of Jordan's Book Writers and Illustrators. It's open to everyone in the UK, and you're up, currently, I believe, and happens every other year. You basically submit your first 4,000 words and this in offices, and the winners are put together in anthology, which is sent around to all publishing houses and agents. So, the year I entered, one of the judges was an agent, she contacted me straight away, and she said, I really like your opening, I think, what should you do? The most surprised person in the world, so I eventually, yes, I'm with her, and then, yes, got the contract with Millen. So those of you listening in the States, there's also a Scooby SCBWI, if you could Google it, in the States as well, which may do something similar. I suspect it does. I suspect it does. They do have a lot of competitions and help for new writers. So, yeah, if you're writing for children, I would definitely recommend having a look at it, because it's a very good, yes, it's a great organisation. Yes, well, I think, yeah, it has been a big thing, my second one is Journey to Dragon Island, so you can guess what appears in that book. Can you point that title again, so that again? Yeah, the next one, Journey to Dragon Island is number two. Is it still with pirates? It's still got the pirates, it's got the same pirate troop, but they're off to the type of film that I like watching as a child where the special effects were by Ray Harryhausen and everything would blow up. So I try to come up with my own original twist on all of the tropes of going to some sort of magical pirate islands and exploring it and finding various things there that were, yes, traps and monsters and things that they have to deal with. So yeah, they were a lot of fun to write, and there is a big theme of storytelling in them. The first one is all about how legends start and the types of stories people tell. My evil magician is not at all happy that he's been cast us the villain in all of the stories, and they do point out to him, well, if he doesn't want to be the villain, maybe he could stop acting like one. I thought it was that one. Yeah, and so yeah, I wasn't thinking about myself being well should tall in those books, so I was just writing what was in my head. And actually what you've just said is important because we're passing through a phase now of huge like focus on identity, which is obviously a reaction to the lack of representation and diversity in literature, the days of the white men with beards as you started that saying. But it also, there is a pressure now on people to somehow speak for a group, so I'm speaking for the Welsh. I'm speaking for women born in Essex for me, having to swim upstream from the Taui, the only way Essex influenced here. For those of you in the States, this into this, there's a particular program, reality TV program, which has set the image of people from the place I came from. So I'm trying to suggest it and all like that. But we end up sort of carrying the can, and my mind is less honest, but if you're somebody with a different ethnic background or gender perspective, you know, all that stuff, sometimes it's just nice just to write as yourself and not feel like I've got to be. Yeah, that's true, yes, rather than feeling that you're representing the whole group, because to some extent you can represent the group, us, and if you identify with a particular thing, I mean, I know very much identify with being Welsh, but I'm still me and maybe in Welsh is very different from somebody down the road who's also Welsh or somebody up north who's Welsh. We have very different experiences of living in the country. This is actually a very interesting book of essays that came out this year called Welsh Plural, to anybody wanting to look at Welsh culture and writing. They got some, they're great, it's a mixture of about 20, 25 different writers, just writing about their experiences of living in the country and how they perceive themselves. So, we always end, coming to the end, I suppose I've gone back to near where we started. We always end with deciding where in all the fantasy worlds is the best place for something. Because one of the unique things about Wales is its history of mining, slate mining, coal mining, gold mining, under the Romans, I think gold mines. So I thought we'd have where in all the fantasy worlds is the best place to be a miner. But as in a someone who digs things out of mines, there's lots of rubbish places to be a miner. Yes, and yes, you do not want to be a miner in Norway, the borough of to come. Yeah, after a lot of thought there's one book that came to mind, it's a modern fantasy series by Patrick Sanfair. Oh, based around a character called Mennig Thorn, who is a not terribly good mage, it's sort of like the Justin Files, but setting a high fantasy setting. And the city where he lives, the city of Agatos is built on the remains of dead gods and the body parts of the dead gods are literally still there and contain huge amounts of magical power. So if you're a miner in Agatos, you never know what you're going to be pulling up, you could be sort of digging around and suddenly come across some fingernail of a god that will make you the most powerful person in the city. So I think about that would be yes, a bit dangerous, but rather interesting. So can you repeat the name of that book again? Yes, so the series is called, it's the Mennig Thorn series by Patrick Sanfair, the first book in the series is Shadow of the Dead God. And the notion is that yes, there are bits of dead gods littering the landscape. Yes, when I set this question, I immediately sort of all the bad places to be a miner, because you know, you often think there is punishment for crimes, it seems in fantasies, particularly modern like sci-fi fantasy, mining planets where you get sent as punishment is quite a common trope. So I decided the only place I could think where it was at all a pleasant lifestyle was Snow White in the Seven Dwarves, Disney version. It's full of jewels, they're just there, you know, they're just there anything. So that's where I would pick smuggle myself in amongst the dwarves. Thank you so much Claire for telling us about that. We will put a link to your books in the show notes, the people can, if they want to expand their knowledge of wealth, miss and legends or pick up the accident, accident and iris, they'll be able to find them. And so thank you very much for joining us. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Thanks for listening to MythMakers Podcast. Brought to you by the Oxford Center for Fantasy. Visit OxfordCenterForFatasy.org to join in the fun. Find out about our online courses. In person stays in Oxford. Plus visit our shop for great gifts. Tell a friend and subscribe wherever you find your favorite podcasts worldwide.