| In conversation with Isobel Dixon |
Janet van Eeden
 You grew up in what seems like a very happy family, in the heat and dust in the extremely harsh climate of Graaff-Reinet in the Karoo. I grew up in the hot, dusty Free State town of Odendaalsrus. Unfortunately it was much less attractive than the historic Graaff-Reinet, but we did share those exceptional night skies. Do you think there is something about such an apparently inhospitable climate (as well as lack of easy entertainment such as television) that throws one into deeper contemplation about life? Do you think this aspect of introspection is what you miss most when you return to the UK?
The expanses of the Karoo – the plains and the wide night skies – have been an inspiration for many writers and artists, and yes, I do often long for that space and silence. But one can be as thoughtful or unthinking in Graaff-Reinet as in London, or Jo'burg, or Tokyo. Contemplation is a choice, whatever your environment.
Growing up in a small town, in a book-lined home without television, and spending every holiday on my uncle’s farm near Hogsback (with no Eskom, just a generator for light in the evenings), meant that my sisters and I found our entertainment in books, nature, and one another. Being part of a large family also instilled a desire to withdraw at times, retreat from all the activity into that world of books, find hiding places to read and make up stories – and possibly also try (usually unsuccessfully) to avoid some onerous household chore.
But to come back to the second part of the question: there are many things I miss when I return to the UK, but introspection isn’t one of them. I make sure there’s enough space in my life for contemplation: on the train, in my study, when I go running. I don’t think you can write if you don’t make that space.
Your poem below from Weather Eye (2001) and also in A Fold in the Map (2007), for example, hints at one’s life’s blood being drawn from one in the gentler and more apparently hospitable country of England:
Back in the Benighted Kingdom
I’m sorry to see
my mosquito bumps fade:
the love bites of a continent,
marks of its hot embrace.
If anything is dark,
it’s this damp island
with its sluggish days,
its quieter, subtler ways
of drawing blood.
So to complete my question: In what way does England sap your spirit?
The poems of Weather Eye, some of which are repeated in A Fold in the Map and expanded on in the new context, were written in the first five years of living in the UK – first as a student in Edinburgh, then living and working in London and Cambridge. I missed my family and my boyfriend and was desperately homesick at times. but also exhilarated at the new experiences – though it’s the homesickness that got into the poems most. It’s the darker emotions which spur one most to expression, and it’s of course much easier to make loss and longing interesting to a reader. In the old adage: “Happiness writes white”, or as Clive James says, expanding on that notion: “Contentment has either no need of artistic expression, or few resources for it.”
Which is not to say that I was content. It may be that I’m happiest when I have just booked a ticket somewhere, have just boarded a plane, or stepped from the platform on to a train. But to return to "Back in the Benighted Kingdom": what all my love of travel couldn’t prepare me for, and all the cultural treasures of Edinburgh couldn’t compensate for, was the inexorable darkness of the winter, and those horrifyingly short days. The leaching of light, and its chemical impact on your mood. That’s the main impetus behind the poem, though there’s something in there too about English reserve versus the directness of Africa.
This closing stanza from your poem "The Growing Gift" from Weather Eye, which also appears in A Fold in the Map, deals with your sense of South Africa being part of your essential self. In the lines below you compare the sap of proteas as being part of your spine, part of your very marrow, as my grandmother would have said.
… So,
in the night, scented with roses here,
I feel the tug – those ancient stems,
breathing a fragrant sap,
come reaching down my spine.
There is a love for your homeland which comes through your poetry very strongly. Is this something which you believe would ever fade if you continued to live in Britain? Or if you lived in South Africa all the time, do you think the familiarity with this country would lead you to become as jaded as the rest of its inhabitants usually are?
No, I don’t think that will fade. It’s part of who I am, a complex love bound up in family, friends, landscape, language and more. I feel very connected anyway, going back twice a year as I do, and constantly reading its literature, in English and Afrikaans – the South African writers I work with help to keep me engaged. And as far as writing about the place is concerned, while I think that distance from a place can enable you to see things in sharper focus, I don’t think that staying rooted in your native country means you would love or write about it less, or less effectively. Possibly the opposite – I think, for instance, of Robert Frost’s memorable scenes of rural New England. Or from this part of the world, Ted Hughes on the English countryside, or the contemporary poet Michael Longley’s work, often so rooted in the flora and fauna of Ireland. Or Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie, much acclaimed for her nature writing – though she has also written poems set in Istanbul, Jerusalem, Tibet, the Karakoram Highway … And being fascinated by place, your source, isn’t just about nature of course: I went to a reading in London recently where several of the poets present have written poems that celebrate London, or Liverpool – Tobias Hill, Simon Barraclough, Eleanor Rees, Tim Dooley … the list could go on and on.
It is, after all, the poet’s job to make the familiar fresh again – "to give us new ways of thinking and feeling on trampled ground", as Tess Gallagher says in her introduction to Raymond Carver’s Collected Poems. And, if you are feeling jaded, then you should find a way to write a damn good poem about just that.
You won the Sanlam Literary Award in 2000 for the unpublished manuscript for Weather Eye. Did winning that award change your life in any significant way? And did it, as Tatamkhulu Afrika told a friend of mine after she won an award at a very young age, bring the jealousy of fellow writers to the fore?
It was an affirmation of a body of work, rather than just individual poems, so yes, it was of great significance to me. It also led to Gus Ferguson's offering to publish Weather Eye, and I think any writer’s first published book is life-changing. All sorts of different things flowed from that. For instance, I met Lynne Stuart, who Gus commissioned to design my book with its lovely moth-on-screen-door cover, and the motifs inside that I’m very fond of – bathroom, nest egg, windmill and wave. That led to Lynne's designing the two pamphlets I’ve produced with poet friends in London – Unfold and Ask for It by Name. We’re as proud of the look and feel of these as we are of the poems.
And then I met other poets through the book, some who reviewed it, like Tim Liardet, and Clive James, a man of phenomenal energy and intellect and great generosity to younger artists and writers. He read Weather Eye soon after it was published in South Africa and added some of my poems to his website. It’s an exciting showcase of visual artists and poets, and is developing all the time.
More personally, it was a particular joy to me that Weather Eye was published while my father was still alive, though he wasn’t well enough to travel to Cape Town or Grahamstown for either the reading or the launch events.
As for jealousy, if there was any, I never felt it. It’s been said that competition and feuding among poets is so fierce precisely because the stakes are so low – but I also think you get along the lines of what you give, and I’ve found more comradeship and support among poets than otherwise.
This award was followed by the Olive Schreiner Prize in 2005 for the published volume of Weather Eye. You have been quoted as saying that the Schreiner award was very special to you because it was named after Olive Schreiner with whom you felt an affinity. Was this affinity based largely on your both coming from the similarly harsh landscapes of the Karoo and the Eastern Cape?
I read The Story of an African Farm as a teenager and was absorbed – fascinated - by a book that was not just a classic, and about women, but was by a woman who grew up close to my own small home town, and who wrote about the landscape I knew. Never mind Kidnapped, Jane Eyre or Anne of Green Gables – it was possible to create literature from the platteland.
I loved, too, the fact that she was a woman who made her voice heard against the odds, and (though she initially published under a male pseudonym like many other female writers of her time), she didn’t just keep her own name when she married, her husband took hers, becoming Samuel Cronwright-Schreiner!
The majority of poems in A Fold in the Map deal with your love of your father and how you deal with watching him die. You seemed to have had a wonderful father: a minister and an icon of sorts to you. He comes across as almost godlike in "Crossing", where you imagine him holding up his staff to still the noise in London. At the risk of sounding like Mrs Kumar at number 42, tell me a little about your relationship with him.
My father was both a minister of the church and a school teacher, and his white beard earned him nicknames like Father Christmas and Moses from the children in the various schools where he taught – in Graaff-Reinet at Union High, and at Nqweba; and in Umtata and Butterworth (Gcuwa). I play on those images in some of the poems, like "Crossing". But it wasn’t just his prophet-like appearance that made him a much-loved figure in town – he was a man of the cloth, but also a science teacher, a man who loved astronomy and music (being a minister allowed him to play the organ and lead the singing at services as well, and he delighted in both); a man who could converse interestingly on a huge range of subjects from history to geology to theology, but was just as content sitting on a bench watching the clouds, thinking his own thoughts. He was equally happy on his own or in company; when reading or when teaching. He liked learning, and he liked answering people’s questions. What I miss most is the chance to ask more of those questions.
The day he died, a friend of the family who had come to his church and Bible study for years, arrived at the front door with a cooked meal for us (in that wonderful small town tradition). I remember her heartfelt: "He taught me so much!" I think it was true for a lot of people, not just his daughters.
In your poem "Kudu Watch" there is a lovely evocation of the long Karoo road at night-time. Is this the Laingsberg road which is notoriously straight and has an unnaturally high accident rate?
Actually, though I know the Laingsburg road well from years of driving between Stellenbosch and Graaff-Reinet, or Umtata, during university holidays, in this case I was thinking of the Willowmore road, with its legendary ghostly hitchhiker, who loomed large in my imagination as a child.
This extract below from the moving poem "Meet My Father", about your father’s slow demise, encapsulates the awfulness of watching a person once mighty and strong decline into feeble dependence.
Meet my father, who refuses food —
pecks at it like a bird or not at all —
the beard disguising his thin cheeks.
This, for a man whose appetite was legend,
hoovering up the scraps his daughters couldn’t eat.
Was this your first experience of death at such close quarters and have your dreams which you write about given you much comfort in your loss?
I’d been close to the deaths of my paternal grandparents as well, though not actually with them when they died. My father was an only child, but sailed off across the world to follow his calling, leaving his parents behind in Scotland. My Yorkshire grandfather (who was a science teacher like his son after him) and my Scottish grandmother came out to Graaff-Reinet to be close to their only family when my grandmother was in her eighties and my grandfather in his nineties (if I remember correctly). A brave journey for them, I always think, from Edinburgh to those searing Karoo summers. My father’s grave is beside theirs.
You thank Jan Morris for the title of your volume A Fold in the Map. Please explain why you chose this title and how it enhances the poems in this collection.
In her book Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, Jan Morris speaks of Trieste as an in-between place, and of travellers, who are also in a kind of in-between state, as being on "the fold in the map". I like to think the collection reflects something of that, both in its form and in its content.
As a writer, do you find it easier to deal with writers who submit their manuscripts to you? If so, how? And if not, why not?
Ever since I learned to read, I wanted to write things too, so I can’t imagine how I would approach my work as an agent without this sensibility. Though my poetry also occupies a somewhat different space from the work I do for my writers – I’m not a novelist or non-fiction writer, and I don’t represent any writers who are exclusively poets (because commission on most poets’ incomes wouldn’t feed a grasshopper, and also because building up to a collection is a very different process from having a novel or biography published).
When it comes to assessing manuscripts for representation, the brutal statistics are that I take on less than one percent of the work that is submitted to me. More like 0,1 percent. So I spend a great deal of time saying no and having to disappoint people. Not the best bit of my job. As a writer I’m aware of how much rests for people on their creative work, but it can’t change the fact that most of the agency’s time has to be spent on furthering the careers of the writers who are already our clients, rather than on those seeking to become clients. The commercial reality of the publishing business has made most publishers, and even many agents, cease to look at unsolicited work. We still try to look at everything, try to reply to everything, but the sheer volume – especially in the age of easy word-processing and email – can make it seem like a Sisyphean task. So while I understand the frustrations of the hopeful writers who want feedback they’ve waited ages for, and not just a standard rejection letter, and am sometimes frustrated myself that I can’t spend more time nurturing some promising manuscripts that still have some way to go, I know there are editorial services and workshop groups and other agents out there for the really determined. And I have my share of anonymous rejection slips too … I could wallpaper a room or two with those by now.
As for the writers who are my clients – well, their combined talents are pretty intimidating, but also inspiring. Working with amazing authors who nevertheless can sometimes take a while to capture editors’ imaginations – and chequebooks – is a lesson in creative perseverance. And those among them who burn the midnight oil and get up before dawn to write on either side of busy office days or in the midst of demanding family lives are great reminders of the resolute industry that transforms a flash of imagination into something enduring.
Finally, as a fellow writer I am always interested in other writers' creative processes. Please tell me a bit about your writing process. Do you have a set place where you write every day or do you write sporadically? Is it easy for you to find inspiration? And do you have to write every day?
I don’t have a particularly set routine for my own writing. It happens in odd gaps and interstices in between my work, which itself seeps into many of the day’s waking hours. I carry a notebook with me always, for endless To Do lists, for notes on manuscripts and meetings, and I also scribble down observations, memories, phrases and ideas for poems – some which grow, and some which don’t. The train provides good thinking time, particularly in the evenings – I try not to look at my email, but to read a manuscript most of the way back to Cambridge from London, and some nights I may work on a poem for the last stretch. Saturdays, over a couple of cups of coffee in my study, I might get a longer run at turning the scribbles into something shapely. And then there are the miraculous mornings when the poem arrives almost fully formed on my half-hour walk from our house to the station – as though it had been crystallising overnight. Those are good days.
A Fold in the Map is published by Jacana and is available in all good bookshops.
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