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2008-06-11

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Of mongrel ancestry? Megan Hall may think so, but poetry lovers certainly don't!

Photo: Stephen Lamb

Megan Hall was born and grew up in Cape Town and studied at the University of Cape Town. She has worked in the publishing industry since 1995 and is currently publishing manager for dictionaries and school literature in English at Oxford University Press Southern Africa.

Her poetry has appeared in various local journals since 1991, as well as in the school anthology Worldscapes. A short story was published in Botsotso 14 and an essay of hers was included in Leaves to a Tree, edited by Robin Malan. She has also edited poetry and fiction for New Contrast and taken part in both Young Voices (the 2004 South African Online Writers' Conference hosted by LitNet) and the 2005 Crossing Borders programme, a British Council-sponsored writer's mentorship. She lives in Cape Town with her partner, daughter and cat.

Megan, tell me something of your family origins and what you were like as a child.

I have the usual mongrel ancestry: my father’s family came to South Africa in the late 1800s from Norfolk and settled in KwaZulu-Natal. My mother’s family are mainly from Scotland. My grandmother grew up on a farm in New Zealand with her adoptive family.

Till I left home when I was 19, I lived almost my whole life with my grandparents. I went to live with them when I was a few months old, after my mother committed suicide. My dad lived close by and visited most evenings, and his sisters, who both lived overseas, visited every couple of years. That was the extent of the family that I was really aware of, although I also heard a lot of stories about my grandfather’s parents and siblings, and his uncles and aunts – old family history that was still alive in my grandparents’ memories.

As an only child mainly in the company of adults, I was probably indulged and certainly received an enormous amount of attention, as my grandfather was retired and my grandmother left her full-time job and took a part-time one to look after me. Most children seem to develop a sense of themselves as children separate from or different from adults, but I don’t think I really did, as I spent so much time with adults so very much older than me, and there were no other children in our household or in the family living in South Africa. It probably took me till my mid-20s to really feel comfortable with people my own age.

I didn’t much enjoy high school, apart from English classes with one or two teachers, and some sport. Although I’m glad I went to a co-ed, I found the environment annoyingly sexist, and of course, as a government school of the time, it was all white.

What did you read as a child? Who were your childhood fictional heroes and heroines?

I read everything I could as a child. The bookshelves at home were filled with an odd assortment of Reader’s Digest condensed books, books on the Zulu wars (my great-grandfather supplied the British forces), on rugby and on George Rex. My grandmother took me to the library assiduously and I fell in love with the stories, and particularly the illustrations, in Brian Wildsmith books.

I had lots of books of fairy tales and animal stories. When I dug them out of the shelves at my dad’s house recently to read to my daughter, I was surprised at how strongly I remembered the pictures, and the different styles of illustration.

My dad also bought me books, usually a bit left-field, and sometimes comics (Beeno, Archie, Casper the friendly ghost), despite my grandmother’s ban on them. He introduced me to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (although Gollum in the then film version scared me so much I hid under the seat and had to be taken home in the middle of it).

I also plumbed both my primary and high school libraries, and became attached at different times to boarding-school stories (Chester House Wins Through!) and Anna Akhmatova’s poetry. The depth of my attachment actually made me consider stealing both these books, as they weren’t available to buy, though I didn’t do so in the end. (I always planned to recompense the library …)

I don’t recall having heroes, but perhaps I did and I’ve forgotten. I know I did listen avidly to the stories my grandmother and my dad told me at bedtime, not out of books. My dad’s were usually exciting, but slightly inappropriate, about his old girlfriends and their various teenage escapades, while my grandmother’s were brilliant embellishments, often comic, about her school days. She also had a wonderful stash of poems off by heart (Longfellow, Masefield, Barrett Browning and others popular in the late 1920s), and those sank in happily.

While growing up, what did you believe about your future?

I don’t think I thought about it much, unfortunately. Other people did, though. My grandmother used to point out UCT on the slopes of Table Mountain and tell me that I’d go to university there one day (I did, having failed to apply to any other). And my dad, in the way that fathers seem to do, used to say that there’d be clusters of boys hanging around the gateposts when I got to be a teenager (there weren’t).

How did the silence surrounding your mother's suicide make you feel?

Differently at different times. It was awkward at primary school trying to explain to curious friends where my mother was, and why she was dead. I had a picture in my mind at this time of her gently fading away, all in white, from some delicate but fatal illness. I don’t know where it came from, but it didn’t really help answer my classmates’ questions.

At high school, it was unmentioned. Most of my new classmates didn’t already know that my mother had died and I lived with my grandparents, so some of them had to be told. I certainly didn’t have the words to tell them that she’d committed suicide, so I think I just said that she’d died soon after I was born and hoped they didn’t enquire any further.

As a student I wanted to know more, and my dad gave me my mother’s diaries and wrote his memories of what had happened, and his understanding of why. A bit later, in my early 20s, I talked about it with my grandmother, trying to make her understand that I had lost my mother, although I’d never known her, in a similar way to how she had lost hers (who had given her up for adoption as a young child).

I think a lot of families respond to suicide with silence, fewer now perhaps than when my mother died, but still too many. The poem “The disappearance of the dead” explores my feelings about this silence in our family and the difference between people’s responses to other kinds of death and to suicide.

At what age did you start to write poems? What drew you to poetry?

The earliest poems I have were written when I was six or seven. I wrote the odd poem at primary school, mainly as schoolwork, and started writing more in high school. I don’t think I ever thought too much about what I got out of poetry; it was just something I did sometimes at the end of the day in bed. I suppose it was a way to process the day or create something from it. Poetry had never seemed particularly elevated, but rhythmical and companionable, based on the kinds of poems that my grandmother had been saying to me at bedtime, and it continued to be more or less that.

Which poets have inspired and influenced you?

In grade 11 or 12 my dad gave me a copy of the Norton anthology I would need for English 1 and I ploughed happily through chunks of that in an indiscriminate sort of way. Unfortunately, this meant that poems rather than poets stuck with me, which is probably still the case. So, I loved Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We real cool” and used it as a party trick, learning it off by heart, together with the lyrics to “Are you lonesome tonight?” with its great spoken bridge.

At varsity I became familiar with a broader range of poetry by taking as many poetry options in English that I could. The poets I enjoyed most were Atwood, Plath, Seamus Heaney, Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare, Stevie Smith, Patrick Cullinan, Jeremy Cronin, Tony Harrison. Later, I enjoyed and admired particular poems by Hopkins, Edna St Vincent Millay, Auden, Larkin, Wendy Cope and Craig Raine. I wish I had more of a sense of some of these writers’ development, but for that you really need the original collections or a good Collected Poems, not a Selected Poems or an anthology with three or four of the best-known pieces. And of course, some chunks of time to read and absorb them …

I don’t know who amongst this mishmash has influenced me, apart from being aware that an early poem of mine attempted to imitate the style of Akhmatova. I do know that when I was putting together Fourth Child, I was quite aware of some singers who were doing something like what I wanted to do. There are songs that by a particular combination of music and voice and lyrics convey emotion in a visceral but controlled way, grip the listener for the duration, then release them with a feeling of catharsis. It was this effect that I was after, more than something I’d seen in other poems and wanted to copy.

On a more technical level, I have been struck by how Tony Harrison uses line breaks, and I also implemented some of the suggestions from my Crossing Borders mentor, Steve Waling, especially about contractions and about reading poems aloud to check they work that way.

Thinking about this again, I remember reading a biography of Anne Sexton years ago, and how impressed I was at her organised doggedness at submitting her poems to journals. She would get a rejection in the post one day, and send the poems out literally the following day to another journal. This impressed me no end, especially as she was intermittently in and out of mental institutions at the time.

You studied English at the University of Cape Town. What did you enjoy studying most?

I enjoyed the poetry most, partly because I felt I had a critical vocabulary to use on it, which I didn’t really have for short stories or novels. I also really enjoyed courses presented by particular lecturers: among others, David Schalkwyk had an engaging approach to almost anything he taught, from Pope to South African prison literature. And I'm grateful to Ian Glenn for introducing me to Tony Harrison.

But I think the course I got the most out of intellectually was in fact Linguistics 1, which I enrolled for as a “mature student” at 26, after taking voluntary retrenchment from my first job as an editor. I loved being at university again, I sucked in everything I could, and I would have liked to continue studying – but then a job beckoned, and I’ve been at Oxford ever since.

You were also a Latin student. Has your knowledge of Latin informed your understanding of word structure and your use of words?

The Latin thing is probably a bit of a red herring. Latin gave me a lot of fun technical words like litotes and spondee, and an understanding of scansion (most of which I’ve probably forgotten), but its influence on my writing is pretty small. It didn’t hurt as training for an editor, though.

Has your understanding of South African poetry and the direction it is taking changed over the past few years?

It’s probably got murkier, I’m afraid. I mean, I can see obvious trends like performance poetry and the increase in readings and venues for poetry and a resurgence of politically engaged work, but I don’t read or go to events enough or consistently to have a good sense of things. It’s as much as I can do most of the time to work a little on my own writing, read or attend the odd thing, and follow what engages me when I can. I do love to attend Durban’s Time of the Writer – the best festival of its kind that I’ve been to. It injects freshness, new names and controversy into literature in a delightful way, it gets people talking, and it often includes some wonderful foreign writers that I would never have come across otherwise.

In 2005 you were invited to participate in Crossing Borders, a programme sponsored by the British Council. Tell me a little about the experience.

It was brilliant. I was so pleased finally to be able to take part, as I’d applied the previous year, but too late. There was a general meeting of participants at the beginning and the end, and it was wonderful to meet such interesting and engaging people, all writing. This is where Colleen and I connected properly, although we’d known each other a bit beforehand. I also met Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, who published a book of poetry last year, I think, Zachariah Raphola, whose novel-cum-short-story collection came out from Jacana, also last year, and Greg Fried, whose (unpublished) novel I’m still hoping to read more of, amongst other people.

The programme consisted of a number of self-chosen assignments, which were due every six or seven weeks. Each participant was assigned a mentor, and we communicated with them by email. The mentor gave detailed written feedback on each assignment; this was so valuable – writers are rarely able to get anyone skilled to pay this level of attention to their work. It was then up to each participant to respond to the suggestions and comments – the work wasn’t formally revisited by the mentor. For me, this structure and approach worked very well. The assignment deadlines made me set aside time (usually a full day over a weekend, sometimes a bit more) to work on my writing in a concentrated way, and enabled me to feel comfortable and overt about doing so. The process was also very much driven by me, so I knew that I had to make an effort to make it worthwhile.

You're a new mother. Has being a mother made you feel differently about yourself? Has it changed your perceptions of motherhood? How do you juggle the demands of motherhood and writing?

At present, I juggle the demands of looking after our 6-month-old daughter with sleeping and with my job. I scribble the odd thing down, as I always have, but I think it’ll be a while before any serious time for revision comes up.

Being a parent has made me feel considerable admiration and empathy for other parents, but I find it reassuring that it hasn’t really changed the way I feel about myself.

Do you find you have to be disciplined about setting aside time for writing? Where is your favourite place for writing?

I’m not disciplined about setting time aside. I’m tempted to say that wouldn’t work, but the Crossing Borders experience shows that it can work very well for the revision process, but not for the initial impulse. For me, anyway.

I’m not fussy about where I write, though I do need quiet, both for the initial stage and for the revision. And for the revision stages I need my laptop, some desk space and a decent chair.

What is the physical act of writing like for you? Do you write first drafts in longhand or type them directly on to your computer?

I nearly always write first drafts by hand, as they sneak up on me, and it would be impractical to wait until I had a computer handy. I’m not fussy about what pen I use, the book or paper, as long as I’m reasonably sure I won’t lose what I’ve written. The revision stage is going back through my notebooks and whatever scraps I’ve slotted in, and capturing on computer what I think might work, then reworking, listening and reworking again.

How do your ideas for poems come to you? Do you begin with a visual image, an idea? Can you explain your writing process?

The process usually happens so quickly that it’s hard to say what comes first. I suppose that there’s often an idea or a question, a feeling or an image, but a poem happens only when that is almost instantaneously followed by a phrase or line that I hear, and that I then repeat to myself in my head, and try to hear what comes next. I don’t try writing anything down until I’ve got a chunk, as writing it down tends both to kill it off (I struggle to hear and write at the same time), and keep it safe (if I don’t write it down soon, it floats away and I forget it).

How do you feel when you're in the act of writing a poem?

I’m trying to concentrate so I can go on hearing the poem, but it’s a kind of loose concentration, so as not to become too self-conscious or aware. It’s like trying to have a conversation on the phone when there’s a lot of noise around you – I have to try to focus and make the best of the situation I’m in – try to eliminate noise and distractions, as far as possible.

What part of a poem is usually the most challenging for you?

Getting it published.

How do you decide the length of a line? Does it have to do with the way it looks on the page or how many syllables it has?

It’s not about syllables. It could be about stress and rhythm, but usually it’s a combination of how it looks on the page and, more importantly, what the lineation does to which words get emphasised when it's read aloud. I like to play with line breaks where they’re sometimes not expected, and use them to create emphasis and rhythm.

How do you know when you have finished a poem?

When somebody else likes it enough to publish it, or when I no longer feel any ability to tinker with it. Not being able to tinker with it any more usually takes a very long time – often several years – as it means that I can’t connect with the poem any longer – the distance is too great.

Is there anyone you feel comfortable sharing your work with when it's in draft form?

I’m not great at this, but I did read some draft poems to the Lansdowne Local group, which I used to go to. I found the responses very useful. I also read some unpublished stuff at Off the Wall a couple of times, and most recently at the Franschhoek Literary Festival. Otherwise, it has tended to be post-publication only, but maybe that will change now, with Fourth Child being published.

Do you abandon some poems because they aren't working or don't meet your standards? Do you sometimes think that it may be the last time you write a poem?

So far I have never thought that something would be the last poem I may write.

I am bad at abandoning things – I like to “use” everything by getting it published, partly because my output seems so small compared with that of some other writers, so I feel I haven’t got any to waste. That’s a bit silly, I know … I have abandoned some poems when other people consistently failed to respond to them, over a fairly long period.

Last year Modjaji Books published your poetry collection Fourth Child. How would you describe the collection?

Fourth Child is a collection of poems that explores and explains how I became my grandmother’s fourth child after my mother’s death. It moves from poems about this loss (“Suicide notes”, “Gunshot”) through to poems of resolution and release (“Wanting”, “Wedding”). In between, there are other strands: love poems, poems about losing my grandmother, poems about failed relationships. But my aim was to mesh these things together, to create a coherent story; after all, very little happens in isolation and I wanted the book to reflect that.

How did the title come to you? Was it an easy choice?

It wasn’t an easy choice, although it was one of the first possible titles that I thought of. Robert Berold (the editor) and I bandied around a number of other ideas, some mine, some his, but I didn’t like any of them more than Fourth Child. The more the collection cohered and the closer to being finished it got, the more it seemed that Fourth Child was the most appropriate and best title.

How did you go about arranging the poems in the collection? Did you work closely with Robert?

Robert and I worked closely together with the draft manuscript, which was quite a lot longer than what was eventually published. He suggested some cuts of weaker poems, but it was really the process of putting the poems in order that helped to identify what should stay in and what should be left out.

I did a draft order, noting down in a kind of shorthand the “theme” of each poem, and trying to see the movement of theme through the collection. This I then sent to Robert, found he agreed with most of what I’d done, debated a few bits and pieces, made some minor tweaks late in the process, and then it was done.

This process was so important, though, for my sense of the collection as a creation in itself and not just a bunch of poems lumped together. I think it’s important to realise that although the collection is meant to be read as a coherent narrative, a story, the ordering isn’t actually chronological – in other words, the collection’s narrative is an amplification, a creation, as much as the poems themselves are, individually.

What do you like about your own writing? What are your favourite poems in Fourth Child?

I like what writing does for me – how it makes me feel, how absorbing it is. I like reading the poems in public (although I get nervous), because I think they are different on the air and the voice than on the page. I like the response from people at the time, the interaction between me as reader and other people as listeners. It can be quite an intimate, even powerful, interaction.

In terms of favourite poems … I think I have poems that I’m no longer particularly excited by, like “Face”, or even “Darning”, mainly because they’ve been around for a long time and they don’t feel fresh to me any more – they don’t give me a scary feeling any more!

Then there are others (most of those in the book) that I still feel pleased with having finally finished, and am still happy to do readings of. Some of these are still scary to read.

When editing the poems about your mother's death, how conscious of a need for restraint were you?

That’s a tricky question. With “Gunshot” and “Suicide notes”, which were started so long ago, I think I felt the need for control, rather than restraint, in terms of tone more than anything else. I deliberately didn’t think of making these poems public, for a long time, as I thought it would skew my ability to work on them.

It was only with “The disappearance of the dead” that I struggled, mainly because it wasn’t in nearly as finished a state by the time I started preparing the book formally. Robert made some suggestions for cuts, as I was considering leaving it out of the collection altogether, but during the book’s editing period I gradually got it to the point where I felt okay about including it.

There’s a delicate balance for a writer to be free to make what one needs or wants to, but also not to pretend that this freedom automatically trumps anyone else’s feelings.

Some of your poems refer to dance. What significance has it had in your life?

Dancing pops up in various places and times in my life, like a motif. My grandparents met at a dance, and both of them liked to dance, although they didn’t do much of it in my lifetime, certainly not together. My parents also liked to dance: I have a lot of my dad’s old dance records of the time, like Bill Haley and the Comets, and the Everley Brothers, and, later, George Harrison.

I’ve always liked to dance, right from school discos when I was twelve, through a period of learning the tango and other Latin American dances with a group of friends, and later taking part in some very amateur performances with a studio called El Cacha.

None of this is unusual, of course, but dancing does seem to be so closely allied to pleasure, to an expressiveness for which the opportunities so often seem to be missing from our lives, that I do value it quite highly. And of course it doesn’t often come without music …

You mentioned that the poems in the collection were written and revised over a period of seven or eight years. How do you feel your writing has changed over this time?

I think I’ve managed to find a tone that I’m happy with for what I want to write about. That was quite difficult. I’ve probably also loosened up in terms of form as well as learnt to use it more flexibly. And writing has also become a much more public activity for me (although it’s still by no means public!) compared with then, when it was very much secret, as well as private.

What feeling would you like readers to experience after reading your collection?

I hope that readers would feel a small sense of catharsis, that their emotions might have been stirred. I hope they then turn to the beginning again, and reread the poems that speak to them most.

Are you happy with the reviews and the public response you've received for the book?

I’m happy with the comments on blogs and so on that we’ve received so far, from Arja Salafranca, Richard de Nooy and, on the back cover of the book, Rustum Kozain and Robin Malan. I do look forward hopefully to other formal reviews, and to any other feedback that people might want to give me. I was pleased by people’s response to the reading at the launch, and later at Off the Wall.

Where has Fourth Child been distributed and how can one get hold of a copy?

It’s available in Clarke’s, Kalk Bay Books and the Book Lounge; it can also be ordered from any bookstore. Should any of these routes fail, people could contact the publisher.

Could you name a few of your favourite books? Why are they important to you?

Different books for different reasons. The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins and McElligot’s Pool for reading to my daughter. Baby Love for telling me what to feed her and how to get her to sleep. Sophie Kinsella and the like for mindless romanticism. Collections by Margaret Atwood, Seamus Heaney, JM Coetzee, Milan Kundera for great literary essays. Pride and Prejudice for humour, pithiness and a keen insight into the economics of marriage at the time. The Buried Soul by Timothy Taylor for being surprising and lucid about cultural attitudes to the dead. Unity Dow’s novels for being shocking and for opening up a world in Botswana that I had no understanding of. Jonathan Kaplan’s The Dressing Station for humour, war-zone reporting and sentiment. Etc etc.

What book has recently surprised you?

I was surprised by the recent edition of Carapace dedicated to Indian women writers: the range was really interesting and the poems were very worthwhile reading. I also enjoyed the edition of Carapace with the Fookish version of “The Jabberwock” – that was lots of fun.

And, although it’s not recent, I still feel surprised and very impressed by Michiel Heyns’s The Typewriter’s Tale – accomplished, absorbing, well-made.

What are you currently reading?

I’m always currently reading the London Review of Books and the weekly newspapers. Aside from that, I’ve been dipping into Jonny Steinberg’s Notes from a fractured country, although it’s rather gloom-inducing. And I’ve just finished reading a new novel by Kagiso Molope, so far unpublished (though probably not for long!). I don’t have much time for anything else at the moment.

Where to from here? Are you working on something new?

I’ve done half a trawl of my notebooks and started the revision process on some new poems, mainly because I wanted to read something new at the Franschhoek Festival. Maybe I'll tackle a story sometime, but I’m not holding my breath …

Do you have any advice for aspiring poets?

The old advice is still the good advice: read a lot of other people’s poems and try to understand how they work. Read more of what you like, whatever it is, without being close-minded. Go to open-mike sessions and/or submit your work to journals. Listen to criticism. Keep on writing and submitting and revising if it really matters to you.