[Interview] Catherine Czerkawska

Catherine Czerkawska is a poet, a novelist and a playwright.

Her books include The Amber Heart (Amazon Kindle, 2012), Bird of Passage (Amazon Kindle, 2012) and The Curiosity Cabinet (Amazon Kindle, 2011)

In this interview, Catherine Czerkawska talks about her concerns as a writer:

When did you start writing?

When I was very young I wrote poems, stories and fan fiction before fan fiction was ever invented – stories about The Beatles, especially John Lennon. I found some of them a little while ago in a box of old papers. They weren’t too bad, considering how young I was.

I think I probably wanted to be a published writer from the start. But it’s so long ago that it’s quite hard to remember. I submitted poetry and stories to all kinds of magazines and when I was still in my teens, I began to get personal letters instead of standard rejections. By the time I was at Edinburgh University, I’d had various poems published. My first biggish sale was a short story called "Catch Two" for She Magazine. (They paid well.) I was also writing plays, especially radio plays, and I sold my first short play to Radio Scotland when I was in my early 20s. I went on to write more than 100 hours of Radio Drama, some television and many stage plays.

How would you describe your writing?

I’d describe myself as a novelist, although I still write the occasional stage play. I’m an unashamed mid-list writer. Some of my novels are historical and some contemporary. I hope they’re well written (don’t we all?) but I also hope they’re good, readable stories. I write a lot about relationships, often in a rural setting, but I don’t always do happy endings. A sense of place is very important to my fiction. I do a lot of revision, a lot of honing. Maybe because I started out as a poet!

Who is your target audience?

When I’m writing, I don’t have any target audience in mind. I’m too involved with the characters and the story. At some point in the process, (but I couldn’t say exactly when) I start to think about the audience, the readers. Am I communicating this story in the best way possible? What am I trying to say? Will people understand it?

I would say I write for a ‘mid-list’ audience - the kind of readers who seem to be increasingly ill-served by traditional publishing, which spends too much time and money trying to predict the next big success on the basis of the last big success. And I don’t much like being tied to a specific genre. In some ways, I write the kind of books I like to read myself but I always love talking to readers about my novels.

Which authors influenced you most?

There are two distinct influences. The first involves Victorian novels, the Brontes in particular. In fact my novel Bird of Passage is something of a ‘homage’ to Wuthering Heights. It’s quite subtle, but it’s there. I love the way Wuthering Heights is so heartrending but by the end, past miseries are resolved in a loving relationship – balance is restored. I love that about these novels.

But I enjoy contemporary fiction too. I’m a big fan of William Trevor. I routinely think ‘I wish I had written that’ when I’m reading his stories. They seem deceptively simple, but they have untold depths and complexity.

How have your own personal experiences influenced your writing?

Obviously I’ve accumulated a lot of experience over the years. Everything feeds into the writing. People often ask ‘where do you get your ideas from?’ but ideas are everywhere, every relationship, every experience, (even the difficult ones). It’s a process of trying not to become cynical, trying to become wise instead, trying to tell the stories that might mean something to readers just as they mean something to the writer.

What are your main concerns as a writer?

Big question. I’m endlessly interested in the relationships between men and women, not just in their love stories, but in how we betray other people for all kinds of reasons, how other people betray us and how we come to terms with that.

I’m interested in how past suffering influences the present.

And – of course – as a writer of historical fiction, I’m fascinated by the attempt to recreate the past as it might have been – not as we might see it through modern eyes. Well, that’s practically impossible, I know, but if you immerse yourself in a time and place, you can make a good enough job of it.

Perhaps most important of all, I want my readers to believe in the world I’ve created. It might be a past or a present world. But they have to believe that it’s real and true.

What are the biggest challenges that you face?

Disillusionment with the process. I had quite a lot of success early in my writing life. I spent a number of years as a reasonably successful playwright but I always knew that fiction was where my real ambitions lay. Then I had three traditionally published novels, and each time I thought ‘this is it’. One of them in particular did very well. But for one reason or another – all of them to do with fluctuations within the publishing industry – I always seemed to be going back to square one and starting again. Maybe most writing careers are like that: a switchback rather than a curve.

On the other hand, I’ve developed a lot of persistence and it has allowed me to work at my craft. I think I’m a better writer now because of it. Most ‘beginning writers’ underestimate the sheer volume of work you have to produce to get anywhere.

Do you write every day?

I write just about every day but not always fiction. I do some reviewing and the odd essay and feature article. But I’m always thinking about the latest novel, and when I do get down to it, I write very intensively. I can keep going for twelve hours at a stretch!

I work best in the afternoons and in the evenings when the house is quiet. I like to stop at a point where I actively don’t want to stop – that way it’s easier to start again the following day.

I do a very rough first draft. I wouldn’t ever let anyone see it. Then I let the work lie fallow while I get on with something else. And then I revise. A lot. It’s quite a long process.

If I’m writing something that needs research, I’ll do some preliminary research, then write the first draft to find out what I don’t know. The Curiosity Cabinet consists of two stories, separated by several centuries. I wrote each part of that story separately and then put them together afterwards – printed them out and actually shuffled the pages about physically – it worked surprisingly well.

How many books have you written so far?

Novels

• Shadow of the Stone (Richard Drew, 1989): Novel written to go with my television series of the same name, first produced on STV with Alan Cumming and Shirley Henderson, all episodes now available on YouTube
• The Golden Apple (Century, 1990): A novel about a cross cultural marriage.
• The Curiosity Cabinet (Polygon, 2005): Alys visited the fictional Hebridean island of Garve as a child. Donal was her playmate. Now she has returned after a long absence and a difficult divorce. Interwoven with the story of their growing love, is the darker tale of Henrietta Dalrymple, kidnapped by the formidable Manus McNeill and held on Garve against her will. With three hundred years separating them, the women are linked by an embroidered casket and its contents, by the tug of motherhood and by the magic of the island itself.
• The Curiosity Cabinet (Amazon Kindle Version, 2011)
• Bird of Passage (Amazon Kindle, 2012): A novel about the shocking realities of state-sanctioned physical abuse in Ireland and its aftermath in Scotland. Bird of Passage is a powerful story of cruelty, loss and enduring love.
• The Amber Heart (Amazon Kindle, 2012): An epic love story set in the troubled Eastern Borderlands of 19th century Poland, this is a tale of obsessive love and loyalty set against the backdrop of a turbulent time and place.

Non-fiction:

• Fisherfolk of Carrick (Molendinar Press, 1979)
• God’s Islanders: A history of the People of Gigha (Birlinn, 2006): A well-researched hardback social history of the most southerly of the Hebridean islands – a readable and informative history of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland in miniature, just like Gigha itself.

Published Plays:

• "Wormwood" in Scotland Plays Anthology (Nick Hern Books, 1998)
• "The Price of a Fish Supper" in Scottish Shorts Anthology (Nick Hern Books, 2010)
• Burns on the Solway (Kindle, 2011)
• The Secret Commonwealth (Kindle, 2011)
• Quartz (Kindle, 2012)

How would you describe your latest book?

The Amber Heart is a love story set in the Eastern Borderlands of 19th century Poland. I think it tackles very adult themes sensitively, but there’s no denying that it’s the story of an intense physical obsession between two people, set against the backdrop of an equally turbulent time and place.

It is also the story of the ‘pancake yellow’ house of Lisko, the heroine’s beloved childhood home, and the way in which the lives of the characters are disrupted by the political turmoil of the times. It has been described as a 'Polish Gone With The Wind'. It is very loosely based on a series of extraordinary facts which came to light when I was researching my own remote family history.

How long did it take you to write the book?

Unusually for me, this one has been on the go for about 20 years! I did a lot of the research while my beloved father was still alive – I’m very glad that I did because he gave me lots of information, lots of details which would be very hard to find now. The late great Pat Kavanagh was my agent at the time and although she told me she loved the book and she was one of the best agents in the business, she simply couldn’t place it with any publisher – lots of positive responses, but they said they didn’t think they could market anything with a Polish setting. We both got very frustrated about it. I filed it away and got on with writing plays. But I kept going back to it from time to time. It’s a big piece of work, 130,000 words. Then, over the past three years, I revised and rewrote it much more intensively. I had matured as a writer and I think it’s a much more readable story now.

When and where was it published? How did you find a publisher for the book?

Last year, I took the decision to go completely ‘Indie’ and start self publishing, initially to Kindle.

The Amber Heart is my third and most recent Kindle novel.

I think like most writers of my age and stage, I had begun years earlier by looking for traditional agent/publishing deals. I was headhunted by an agent who specialised in drama after a play of mine won a major award and then the agency asked Pat to look after my fiction.

At first all went well – my first novel was sold to a small publisher, my second to a much bigger ‘mid-list’ publisher, but the whole industry was changing. That publisher, the Bodley Head, old and distinguished, was bought over by one of the Big Six and after that even Pat couldn’t sell The Amber Heart.

Much later, returning to novels after years spent on plays, I was shortlisted for the Dundee Book Prize with The Curiosity Cabinet and it was subsequently published, but although the print run sold out, the publisher declined to look at the next book and wouldn’t reprint TCC. Neither novel fitting in with their future plans, so it was fair enough But both are now available on Kindle and selling well.

For a long time, it had struck me that there was a growing imbalance for authors. Many of us were getting what my fellow writer Maggie Craig calls the Rave Rejection – ‘We love this but the marketing department says it won’t sell in big enough quantities.’ Traditional publishers were – so my agent told me – looking for an ‘oven ready product’. They were also looking for a breakthrough book right away. When I first began writing and publishing, you had time to grow as a writer. Many best-selling authors today made that breakthrough with their forth, fifth or sixth book. Now they’d be dumped after book number two. I still remember the sudden shock of hearing my later agent say ‘I won’t submit this because although it’s good, I don’t think it’s a breakthrough book and if I submit two books by you which are turned down, nobody will even look at a third.’ It was as though somebody had placed a time limit on my creativity. It was appalling.

Then along came eBooks and Amazon. I don’t have any illusions that this is a particularly benevolent industry and I don’t plan to put all my eggs in one basket, but I still wake up most mornings thinking, God Bless Jeff Bezos. This is a company which has given me the professional tools to do the job. I don’t expect nurturing – just a good businesslike relationship. Long may it continue.

Which were the most difficult aspects of the work you put into The Amber Heart?

Punctuation. Although I have a degree in English Language and Literature, I’ve spent years as a playwright. You get into the habit of writing speeches the way you want the actor to say them, regardless of punctuation. Then, suddenly, you have to get it right.

The other challenge for me was having an editor – albeit not my main editor – suddenly advise me to chop off the last third of The Amber Heart and finish it a hundred pages earlier. I enjoy working with a sympathetic editor but this was a bridge too far and I said I wouldn’t do it. When I think about it now, I see that there may be a difference between what appeals to a male and what appeals to a female reader. I felt very strongly that to do as he suggested would have made the ending of the book deeply unsatisfactory. One or two female readers agreed with me. So I didn’t follow his advice, although it did send me back to the manuscript to tighten it up a bit.

Which aspects of the work did you enjoy most?

I would have to say, writing the sensuous scenes between the hero and heroine.

Fifty Shades this isn’t, but it is a story about an intensely physical but forbidden relationship - an obsession really - between two people – one that lasts for their whole lives. That’s not all it’s about of course – but it is certainly central to the novel and the key to the whole story. I loved writing these scenes.

What sets the book apart from other things you've written?

The background, I suppose. That Polish background was familiar to me from my own childhood, in Leeds, which was where my refugee father finished up after the war, and where he met and married my Irish mother – but I don’t think I realised just how strange it would seem to others. And how much subsequent perceptions of Eastern Bloc countries might colour other people’s idea of a ‘Polish’ novel.

Essentially, The Amber Heart would appeal to anyone who enjoyed the movie of Dr Zhivago but it’s quite a challenge to get that across to potential readers!

In what way is it similar to the others?

It’s a love story with a tragic twist. So is Bird of Passage. The Curiosity Cabinet has a happier ending. All of them have largely (but not wholly) rural settings.

What will your next book be about?

It will be finished later this year – I’m revising it at the moment. It’s called The Physic Garden, a historical novel set in very early nineteenth century Glasgow. The central character – and narrator - is one of the gardeners of the old Physic Garden (the medicinal garden) of Glasgow University. He’s a very old man when he relates the story of events that happened in his youth. It’s a story about friendship and horrific betrayal. He has spent his life trying to forget it, but in old age, he has to try to come to terms with it.

What would you say has been your most significant achievement as a writer?

Two things. Finally finishing and publishing The Amber Heart, against all the odds. (It’s a BIG book and very dear to my heart.) And my stage play Wormwood which is still part of the Scottish Higher Drama syllabus. It’s about the Chernobyl disaster and I think it may be the best thing I’ve ever written. The critics liked it too.

Related books:

,,

Related articles:

• Writer's choice 300: Catherine Czerkawska, by Norman Geras, normblog, April 5, 2011
• First Word: Catherine Czerkawska, The List, Issue 649, February 1, 2010
• Wormwood [Review], by Claire L Jarvis, The Journal, Issue 18, February 12, 2009

[Interview_2] Julius Sai Mutyambizi-Dewa

Julius Sai Mutyambizi-Dewa is the author of Preaching to Priests (Timeless Avatar, 2007); Candid Narratives (i-Proclaim Books, 2010); and, Two Faces One Woman (i-Proclaim Books, 2011):

In this interview, Mutyambizi-Dewa talks about his latest play:

How would you describe Two Faces One Woman?

The story I tell in Two Faces One Woman touches on contemporary post-colonial societies, especially the crossroads that Zimbabwe finds herself in post-2000. In approaching the topic, I had to set aside my own political affiliations and sympathies and approached the topic from the position of an innocent bystander. I liked the whole idea of a Debbie Scott, a young white Zimbabwean, being the chief defender of the black government where Takubona Mapembwe, the son of a war veteran, comes out as black Zimbabwe’s chief antagonist.

What motivated you to take this approach?

I have this thing in mind that tries to get the races seeing beyond race and I believe writers have a role to play.

Readers will notice that my writing, especially where it regards the whole point of the liberation struggle and the post-colonial Zimbabwe, will be approached from this philosophy. I want to see a stronger Zimbabwe emerge which is not painted in colour and which is based on merit. We have to demistify this thing of race war in Zimbabwe. There were more blacks in the Rhodesia National Army than there were whites and we have white Zimbabweans who died fighting for the liberation cause. We also have people like Rob Monro, Professor O.T. Ranger, Jeremy Brickhill, A.V.M. Welch and others who suffered in one way or the other during UDI in Zimbabwe. Post-independence we have people like Ian Kay, Roy Bennett etc who helped black farmers in their neighbourhoods.

I am driven by this philosophy, to tell a story of integration... white, Indian, black, Kalanga, Shona, Venda, Ndebele, Tonga etc... we are all a mix of villains and saints but unfortunately we have created a society where the villains and saints are identified by race, tribe and creed not deeds. This therefore sets Two Faces One Woman apart from any story I have told so far.

The issue of racial, ethnic and religious integration will continue to define my characterisation and writing for the forseeable future.

In what way is Two Faces One Woman similar to other things you have written?

It is similar to other work that I have published and that I will publish in future because I am that same writer who never took an English literature class in high school. I believe I am original and I do not have so many literary influences speaking to me as I write. I enjoy this aspect so much as well.

How did you choose a publisher for Two Faces One Woman?

All my books are self-published. I write in genres that are very difficult to place with mainstream publishers... poetry and plays... and this has meant I have to self-publish.

I started Two Faces One Woman in 2010 and finished writing it in 2011. I then sent it to Penguin in South Africa but although they expressed interest in the idea be book, they advised that they did not publish plays as there is no market for plays. After trying two more publishers and they too expressing some doubts about a market for plays, I abandoned the project and started writing the story in the form of a novel. But something wasn’t coming out even as I tried, the idea had been a play originally and to change it would kill off the very qualities I want to maintain. I then decided to self-publish and bring the story out that way.

Some colleagues have said they will be serialising the play in an online newspaper, which, to me is welcome news.

What are your plans for the future?

I have already finished my next book, Ndimirwa, a play about a Lozwi/Rozvi heroine.

I think I have written my last play for now as I am now concentrating on the novel form.

My previous work with Mapupo Theatre Group, a drama group that I founded in 1991 in Zimbabwe may explain why I have this love for plays. However, my first piece of writing was a novel in Shona which I wrote in 1988. Those days it was very difficult to get published. It was also very difficult to self-publish. So, members of the Budding Writers Association of Zimbabwe decided that performing our work was the only way we were going to be heard and that’s why we had Albert Nyathi, Cynthia Mungofa, Nhamo Mhiripiri, Titus Motsebi and many others becoming dub-poets. To me drama and plays became a natural choice as I tended to write more stories than poems.

Related books:

,,

Related articles:

• Julius Sai Mutyambizi_Dewa [Interview_1], Conversations with Writers, May 14, 2011
• Are African governments suppressing art? By Isaac Esipisu, Reuters, May 31, 2012
• So you want to be an ebook superstar? By Patrick Barkham, The Age, June 7, 2012

[Interview_2] Christopher Mlalazi

In an earlier interview, Christopher Mlalazi talked about the effect the political environment in Zimbabwe has had on his writing.

Since then he has gone on to publish an award-winning collection of short stories, Dancing with Life: Tales from the Township ('amaBooks Publishers, 2009) and a novel, Many Rivers (Lion Press, 2010).

Dancing with Life was awarded the Best First Creative Published Book prize in the Zimbabwean National Arts Merit Awards (NAMA) and it received honourable mention in the 2009 NOMA Award for Book Publishing in Africa.

Christopher Mlalazi also received the 2009 Oxfam Novib/PEN Freedom of Expression Award for "The Crocodile of Zambezi", a controversial play he co-authored with Raisedon Baya. The play was banned by the Zimbabwean authorities.

In this interview, Mlalazi talks about Dancing with Life and the collaborative playwrighting he has been doing:

How would you describe Dancing with Life: Tales from the Township?

Dancing With Life is a collection of short stories which I wrote between 2004 and 2008.

I started writing them just after I had gone through the Crossing Borders, an online creative writing mentoring project, which was a British Council/Lancaster University initiative.

Before that I had been trying to write my novel Many Rivers, which was published this year by Lion Press (UK). I think delving into the short story genre came as a result of trying to find formula on how to tightly wrap up the novel, a thing I had been failing to do. I remember it didn’t take me very long to teach myself to do that with the short stories. Maybe it was also a result of the creative writing mentoring I had just done.

So, there I was, writing short stories as if I was possessed, and meeting with success on them. too. I remember I saw myself also starting to be invited to represent Zimbabwe in literature festivals and workshops around Africa, which was a pointer to me that I was now on the right track, that my stories were making an impact, and which writer would not like to see that happening to them?

To come back to the question, Dancing With Life is a reflection of the struggles and suffering of Zimbabwean people living in a disintegrating society with its farm invasions and our economy taking a nose-dive. I regard this short story collection as a series of snap shots of this trying period and I try to be as honest as I can in my depictions so as not to misinform readers. I try to be as near to the truth as I can get in the hope that this will leave people asking themselves deep mind-changing questions.

Are there any stories in Dancing with Life that were easier or more difficult to write than others?

Yes, there are some stories which were difficult to write, and there are some which were easy.

I would like to point out "Broken Wings", which depicts the rape of a young girl struggling to cope with her mother who is dying of AIDS, against the backdrop of the political control of food distribution and the breakdown of the health system. I remember one day when I was revising this story, I felt something tear in my heart, a feeling which, strangely, I had not experienced when I was writing the story. "Broken Wings" is so dark, it is so painful that I wonder how I managed to write it... I guess the truth sometimes can be very painful.

There are also the direct political stories, like "Election Day". These, I guess, were written in anger, when I was trying to laugh at the political machinations happening in the country and also trying to make my future audience, the reader, also take them in that light and really laugh at the stupidity of it all. We might ask, are somethings that are done for political expediency really worth doing? Is it really necessary to pick up a stone and chase an old woman for her vote?

Where and when was the collection of short stories published?

Dancing with Life was published by 'amaBooks Publishers of Bulawayo in 2008 and was launched at the Academy Of Music in May 2008 during the Bulawayo Music Festival..

In the past 10 years, 'amaBooks has risen to be one of the two leading publishers in Zimbabwe and being published by them has been an honour.

Also, 'amaBooks published my very first short story way back in 2003 and, ever since, they have published my short stories in every short story anthology they've published -- we have a long and fruitful history together. Every writer aspires to have their work published, for that is the reason that makes us take pen and paper and write isn’t it so?

Another big advantage in working with 'amaBooks is that they are in Bulawayo and it makes it easy to meet and discuss the work face to face, and also living in Bulawayo, they understand the cultural, the regional and political context of the stories.

I would also like to thank the Culture Fund of Zimbabwe Trust for funding this project because with the hyper-inflation Zimbabwe has experienced of late, the book would not have seen the light of day. Special thanks also goes to ama’Books publishers for taking up the project.

Again, I think the drive behind the need to have this book published was also an attempt by me to add my voice to the protest against the no rule of law phenomena that was gripping our country at the time of writing.

How has the book been received?

The book has been received well in literature competition because, in a space of a year, it now has one award and one mention in prestigious competitions. But I cannot say the same of the reading public, because, strangely, the reading culture in Zimbabwe seems to be dying and few people are buying books these days.

Being mentioned in awards has given me that extra drive to want to write more and better stories, and right now I am working on another novel which is almost finished.

Recently two of your plays caused a lot of controversy. Can we talk a little about them?

Both plays are political satires that question bad politics in the African continent.

The first one, titled "The Crocodile of Zambezi", tells the story of a geriatric leader who has come face-to-face with his alter-ego that is accusing him of mis-rule. This is the one I collaborated on with Raisedon Baya.

The other one is an adaption of one of my short stories, "Election Day", which appears in Dancing with Life. The short story was first published in the 2006 Edinburgh Review and it tells the story of a country on election day and the opposition leading the ruling party by a very wide margin. Everybody around the president of the country has panicked and they want to flee the country, fearing the masses whom they have been ruling badly, but the President is adamant and is insisting that he is not fleeing anywhere. When the final vote is announced, the ruling party emerges the winner and questions are raised about vote rigging.

How did the idea for these plays come about?

The plays came about through a deliberate act of reacting to the present political status quo of the country we live in.

Writers and artists are inspired by the moods of their surroundings.

Are your plays written exclusively for performance or will they also be available in print?

It is very difficult to publish in Zimbabwe at the moment because of the economic dynamics. So, for now, the plays are for stage only but we hope that one day we will be lucky and find a publisher who will take them on.

How did you and Raisedon Baya link up?

We met in arts circle. Bulawayo is such a small town and a friendship developed. We both have a healthy respect of each other’s work.

In 2006 we collaborated in a TV drama titled The King's Kraal which was flighted on national television. This was a very fruitful exercise, because it demonstrated to us that we click very well in such exercises. Then Raisedon came up with the concept for "The Crocodile of Zambezi". We tossed this around and finally came up with the script.

Raisedon did the directing.

How does the experience of writing a play with another writer compare to doing the same thing on your own?

Writing with another writer gives you purpose. You both put your all because you don’t want to appear to be the one who is slacking.

It is also exciting because you get to know a lot of new things from the other writer, like style and how far you can go on aspects or themes -- things which you, as an individual, might have considered no-go areas.

Collaborations are also good in the sense that if you both have names in writing circles, you increase your audience.

What are the challenges inherent in the exercise?

Working with a writer who is as good as Raisedon brings no challenges. You turn around the story. It’s a matter of coming up with an idea and you will be safe in the knowledge that it will be aptly treated when you toss it over to him. Besides being a good and creative writer, he is also a very brave writer.

Is this something you would do again?

Definitely. I would also like to urge other writers to invest in such exercises because we grow when we learn from each other.

Possibly related books:

,,

Related article:

• Christopher Mlalazi [Interview_1], Conversations with Writers, January 20, 2007
• Joan Metelerkamp [Interview], Conversations with Writers, December 28, 2009