[Interview] Deborah M. Plummer

Deborah M. Plummer is the author of books that include: Helping Children to Improve their Communication Skills (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2011); Helping Children to Cope with Change, Stress and Anxiety (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2010) and Anger Management Games for Children (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2008).

Formerly a clinical lead therapist working within the NHS, Deborah Plummer now lectures at De Montfort University, Leicester and runs workshops and short courses on the uses of imagery and issues of self-esteem.

In this interview, Deborah Plummer talks about her work:

What are the common causes of stress and anxiety in the children you work with?

For the last 15 years or so of my work within the NHS I specialised in working with adults and children who stammer. Although public awareness about the complex nature of communication difficulties is certainly improving, children who stammer still often experience a considerable amount of anxiety related to their speech, sometimes to the extent that communication becomes something to fear and avoid.

Many of the children I saw for therapy were also susceptible to other sources of stress. Teasing and bullying are perhaps the most publicised of the stresses faced by children with speech and language difficulties but there are other factors such as low self-esteem, coping with difficult family circumstances, coping with change, problems with friendships, hypersensitivity to exam stress, or a drive for perfection which can cause great frustration and anxiety.

Working with these children highlighted two important points for me - that stress is an inevitable part of every child's life, although the degree to which each child will experience stress will, of course, vary; and that children are remarkable in their capacity to adapt to stress and find their true potential if they are offered appropriate and timely support.

Can you describe one of the coping techniques featured in your new book?

The main emphasis in this and my other books is on fostering mindful interactions. We need to be very aware of the impact that our own ways of communicating can have on how a child views himself and on how he views the world.

So one technique is to help children to formulate their own solutions by pointing out the little successes, capitalising on their strengths, using solution-oriented language, praising appropriately and so on.

The other main orientation of my work is imagework.

What is imagework and how does it help with building self-esteem?

We tend to live our lives guided by the internal 'images' that we create about who we are and how the world works. The term 'imagework' was created by Dr Dina Glouberman, who leads imagework training courses internationally. It literally refers to 'working with images', although it is often image 'play' rather than 'work'! I think this concept of play is especially useful when we are helping children to utilise their imagination in a constructive way.

In relation to healthy self-esteem, let's say a child has a fear of 'being on show' and getting things wrong. If I asked this child to draw a picture that would show me what it's like to have such fears he might draw a time when he has experienced the fear or he might draw an animal or an object or just use colours to represent the fear. This is a fairly common strategy.

In imagework I would then help the child to explore the nature of the image in more depth. For example, I might encourage him to make up a story about the image and its 'opposite', and to explore how someone (or something) might move from one towards the other.

When a child comes up with an image that represents how he feels about a situation, he is tapping into something that goes way beyond logical thought processes. And when he realises that he can 'play' with these images and be creative in forming new images, then he can begin to take more control.

Imagework often triggers insights and shifts in perspective which may not come through logical thinking alone.

Children are naturally imaginative - it seems a waste not to use this capacity to support their emotional wellbeing.

What do you find most satisfying about the work you do?

I am currently devoting the majority of my time to lecturing and writing.

I am enjoying the opportunity of sharing concepts and strategies learned and developed over many years of working with adults and children in a therapeutic context.

I find it immensely satisfying to be able to engage students in exploring the psychological aspects of health and illness in a wider context (I teach students on health studies and public and community health degree courses as well as speech and language therapy students).

Frequent or prolonged periods of stress and anxiety can have far-reaching effects on physical health and emotional wellbeing. Practitioners working with children, young people and families therefore need to be skilled in assessing needs, addressing stresses and promoting resilience.

Occasionally I hear from social workers, teachers or parents who have used one of my books and they tell me about a breakthrough that they have had with a child - that is incredibly satisfying for me too - I love to hear how people are adapting the work for different needs and different settings.

You are currently working on a PhD proposal involving your titles what do you hope to find during your research?

The central theme of my books is that there is an identifiable set of criteria which will allow adults to maximise the potential for effectively supporting the emotional well-being of children. My thesis will be an exploration of these elements and will include an evaluation of how people are using the books in a variety of fields.

I am designing a questionnaire which will be available on my website. I am hoping that as many people as possible will take time to respond to this. Responses will be used to examine whether or not there is a specific or 'favoured' aspect of the approaches adopted in the books which practitioners find helpful, or if there is a certain combination of factors that appeals.

What are you currently reading in your spare time?

I am rediscovering books by James Hillman (e.g. Re-Visioning Psychology) - he has influenced my work for some time and I am thoroughly enjoying devoting time to re-reading some old favourites - his work with images and his love of language and metaphor are so incredible. I find new inspiration each time I read his work.

I am also reading Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin - an amazing book about the humanitarian vision of one man and his belief in the power of education to promote peace. Children are our hope for a more community-minded, peaceful future - we should be nurturing their imagination and emotional well-being in every way that we possibly can.

(c) Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2011


This article was first published in the Jessica Kingsley Publishers Social Work Newsletter in February 2010

Related Articles:

• 40 million children live in 'healthcare deserts', By Sarah Boseley, The Guardian, July 20, 2011
• Movement teaches parents to deal with anxiety from raising children, By Pooneh Momeni, The Daily Texan, July 17, 2011
• Chris Taylor [Interview], Conversations with Writers, June 27, 2011

[Interview] Pam Inder

Leicester-based writer and former museum curator and university lecturer, Pam Inder is the co-author of seven books.

The books, which she wrote with Marion Aldis, include:  

• The 1844 Diary of John William Sneyd: Muskets and Mining (Churnet Valley Books of Leek, 1996);  
• John Sneyd's Diary 1815-1871: Thirty Pieces of Silver (Churnet Valley Books of Leek, 1998);  
• Finding Susanna (Churnet Valley Books of Leek, 2002);
• Susanna's Cookery Book: A Culinary Adventure in Staffordshire (Churnet Valley Books of Leek, 2003);  
• Finding Ralphy (Churnet Valley Books of Leek, 2006), and  
• Staffordshire Women: Nine Forgotten Histories (History Press, 2010).

In this interview, Pam Inder talks about her writing:

How did you decide you wanted to be a writer?

I didn’t really have much choice about writing – I worked as a museum curator and writing catalogues, articles in journals etc was very much part of the job! However, the sort of writing I now do came about rather differently.

Back in the early 1990s, I did an MA in English Local History and became friendly with one of my fellow mature students, Marion Aldis, who was very interested in 19th century diaries. Some months after we finished the course – by which time I was working at Staffordshire University in Stoke-on-Trent – I helped a colleague with a local history project she was doing with a group of students which involved them in looking at original documents.

One of the sets of documents they were given to work on was a collection of diaries (in Keele University Special Collections Library). The students hated them – they were quite difficult to read – so I spent quite a lot of time helping them with that part of the project and realised that the collection was actually enormously interesting – and no-one else was studying it. I contacted my friend – and we embarked on what became a 12-year project tracing the history of these North Staffordshire diarists. Fortunately for us they were an eccentric, quarrelsome bunch so their lives made interesting reading ...(I can talk about this at length!)

Fairly soon we realised that the material was worth publishing and set about looking for a publisher. We wrote to a number of national publishers – none of whom were interested – then we heard about a publisher (now retired) in Leek and he published five books for us based on the diaries.

How would you describe the writing you are doing?

We write ‘popular history’ – for people who are interested in the same sort of things that interest us – the everyday lives of ordinary people, especially women, in the 19th century.

We both read a lot of history but I’m not sure there are many direct influences on our work. In some of our books – notably Finding Susanna, we incorporate quite a lot of the story of our research projects and our personal stories. Research is a form of detective work and the way we uncover information can sometimes be quite quirky.

We also have a lot of fun – we are both married women, not as young as we’d like to be, and going off on research trips together is very enjoyable, very different from the lives we lead as wives and mothers.

What are your main concerns as writers?

I suppose our main concern is, first of all, to do our research properly. What we write is always as factually historically correct as we can make it. The second concern is to try to make our subjects come alive – without relying too heavily on our imaginations. And the third is to write in a lively, approachable style. So much modern history is written in jargon.

Writing as a pair does help – we are quite critical of each other.

Do you write everyday?

I, personally, don’t have any particular process for writing. I’m busy – I write when I have the time, while dinner is cooking, while the kitchen floor is drying – whatever. I certainly don’t write every day.

How many books have you written so far?

• The 1844 Diary of John William Sneyd: Muskets and Mining (Churnet Valley Books of Leek, 1996) 144pp. Transcript of the diary with an introduction and a lot of illustrations.
• John Sneyd’s Diary 1815-1871: Thirty Pieces of Silver (Churnet Valley Books of Leek, 1998) 264pp. Edited transcripts of some of his 50+ diaries with chapters describing the major events of his life. He was a clergyman who lost the family fortune in ill-advised mining speculations, had a fellow clergyman imprisoned for slander, quarrelled irrevocably with his eldest son. He was a charismatic, able, but deeply flawed man.
• Finding Susanna: the Story of Mrs Susanna Ingleby, née Sneyd 1831-91 (Churnet Valley Books of Leek, 2002), 379pp. A biography based on her diaries. The most colourful event of her life was that she married in 1860 to an abusive husband and left him after a mere six weeks. Thereafter she was a social pariah and ended up as housekeeper to her widowed brother (the one who was estranged from their father) bringing up his only child, her nephew, who grew into an extremely strange and eccentric adult. She was, however, the only member of the family who was remotely capable of managing money, and she spent her time bailing out impecunious relatives – including her youngest brother who was a clergyman who impregnated a teenage aidservant and was the subject of a Consistory Court hearing.
• Susanna’s Cookery Book: A Culinary Adventure in Staffordshire (Churnet Valley Books of Leek, 2003) 128pp. A collection of Susanna Ingleby’s recipes together with comments from local people (some of them her descendants) who tried the recipes out for us.
• Finding Ralphy (Churnet Valley Books of Leek, 2005), 288pp. The biography of Susanna’s nephew. He had a private museum, was a self-styled Knight of the Round Table, became Chief Druid for Staffordshire, conducted eccentric religious ceremonies in his private chapel, was a competent artist and a truly appalling poet – and totally eccentric.
• Staffordshire Women: Nine Forgotten Histories (History Press, 2010), 126pp. Very much the same sort of thing as I’ve described for Norfolk Women. Subjects included a pottery paintress, an heiress who endowed a school, a nail mistress, a housekeeper in a stately home and a factory owner.
• Our 7th book, Nine 19th Century Norfolk Women (title not yet decided) goes to press at the end of next month. To be published by Poppyland in 2011

How would you describe your latest book?

The current book is about 19th century Norfolk women and it takes the form of nine single-chapter biographies of ordinary women who led successful lives within the parameters of their social class. None of them are in any way famous – we aim to shine a spotlight on the lives of ordinary people. One was a governess who went to the Ukraine, one was a lighthouse keeper, one a fishmonger, one the matron of a lunatic asylum, one a farmer, one emigrated to Canada – and so on.

How long did it take you to write the book?

Its always hard to say how long something takes. The research for each chapter probably takes about a month – or it would if you could work at it consecutively – but that’s not how research pans out.

We got the commission for this book in October and it goes to the publisher at the end of July – but we’d already done some of the work in another context. So you could say it took 10 months – or three years – or twenty years if you include learning how to do what we do!

How did you choose a publisher for the book?

Poppyland, our publisher specialises in books on Norfolk which is why we chose him – but in the real world publishers do the choosing, not authors. The only disadvantage so far is that he is based in Cromer which is rather a long way away – time will tell what other (if any) disadvantages present themselves when he actually gets the mss!

What were the most difficult aspects of the work that went into the book?

There are always all sorts of difficulties – for this particular book we have had to discard several of our subjects either because someone else was working on them or because their descendants didn’t like us writing about them, for example.

My biggest difficulty probably this time was finding illustration of a particular small town in the Ukraine – you’d be amazed how difficult that was.

You deal with problems as they crop up - they are all different so there’s no simple answer.

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

Single biggest achievement? Well, I suppose getting fairly esoteric material published at all was quite clever – let alone having (so far) had three separate publishers.

Most of the people we studied with write and do research – few of them have published.

Related articles:

• Summer Reading Challenge, Tamworth Blog, June 22, 2011
• Four must-read local history books - if you can find them, By Chris Upton, Birmingham Post, January 30, 2011
• Brian Wainwright [Interview_1], Conversations with Writers, February 1, 2008

[Interview_1] Brian Wainwright

Novelist Brian Wainwright made his debut as an author with the publication of The Adventures of Alianore Audley (Jacobyte Books of Australia, 2002), a humorous story about an intelligence agent in Yorkist England.

Alianore Audley was followed by Within the Fetterlock (Trivium Publishing, 2004), which tells the story of Constance of York, an English princess who lived in the reigns of her cousins, Richard II and Henry IV.

In the first of three interviews, Wainwright speaks about his writing.

How would you describe your work?

Historical fiction. Within that there are two strands, the serious HF and the comedy projects. My two published novels demonstrate these two sides to my writing.

My main focus so far has been England and Wales in the 14th and 15th centuries. I think this will always be my main area of interest, if only because I know the period so well and so don’t have to run around doing masses of new research every time I write a paragraph.

However, one of my current projects is set in 11th century Spain, and I don’t rule out the possibility of doing some contemporary writing in the future, especially if there’s demand for it.

Who is your target audience?

To be honest, anyone who’ll buy the books! Probably they will be people with quite a serious interest in history who don’t need everything spoon-fed to them.

From feed-back, I gather that the majority of my readers are women, so I do have to bear that in mind. Women tend to like strong heroines -- fortunately so do I. I try to make my leading medieval women strong (as they often were!) but without any anachronistic feminism.

How do you define feminism?

I would define feminism as a philosophy that believes in the complete equality of women in all spheres -- political, personal, economic, employment, education, whatever. This movement can be traced back to Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote a seminal work, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, in the late 18th century.

In the middle ages, why would feminism have been anachronistic?

Medieval women did not have access to this philosophy, or indeed any other aspect of Enlightenment thinking, and lived in a society which, I think, it is fair to characterise as deeply conservative. I sometimes read historical novels where the characters seem to be much like modern people, with modern attitudes, in fancy clothes, and for me, at least, that does not work.

There was however an early ‘feminist’ writer, Christine de Pisan, who came from Italy but lived most of her life at the court of France. She was pretty much a contemporary of Constance of York, and the first woman, certainly in the West, to make a living from writing.

Christine’s works emphasise how women can do more within their particular sphere (she mentions various levels in society) to fulfil themselves and add more to the world. However what she never does is question the social hierarchy -- if anything she emphasises a woman’s duty to defer to and obey her husband. Had she done otherwise I suspect she might have been accused of heresy, since the whole social structure of the middle ages, including family relationships, was underpinned by the teaching of the Church.

However, this does not mean that medieval women were china dolls. Far from it. Depending on their position in society they influenced politics, managed great estates, ran convents, operated businesses -- sometimes on their own account -- or laboured endlessly, like many Third World women do today, to feed their families.

They nearly all ran a household of some type or other, a much more complex business than it is today. You couldn’t nip out to Tesco if you needed (for example) some extra salted fish to get you through Lent. You had to order it at the right time and in the necessary quantity.

Constance of York’s daughter, Isabelle Despenser, Countess of Warwick, ran her husband’s estates for years on end while he was away fighting in France. This would be the equivalent today of a woman in her twenties acting as Chief Executive of a major farming and property conglomerate. (And she wouldn’t have had the advantage of an MBA course before taking it on!)

What motivated you to start writing historical fiction?

A deep interest in the middle ages. Novels seemed the way to go, as I’m not qualified to write academic history. In addition, the beauty of novels is that they can ‘answer’ the unsolved questions that serious historians can’t.

An example, of one such question is: the fate of the Princes in the Tower. All the novels about Richard III have to answer that, one way or another. Sometimes Richard kills them, sometimes he puts them somewhere safe, sometimes they die naturally, and so on. No historian can tell you absolutely what happened to those boys, it’s just a matter of opinion. A novelist can ‘solve’ the mystery. Of course the reader may or may not be satisfied with the solution, but that’s another matter.

My spur to write about Constance of York was that she did something that was -- to say the least -- exceptional for a medieval princess. Basically she busted two noble boys out of royal captivity and tried to take them where the king couldn’t get them. I had to explore her motives for that, what led her to do it, to solve that riddle if only to my own satisfaction. That’s what lay beneath Within the Fetterlock.

I’m passionately interested in history, and I suppose one of the things I am trying to do is encourage similar interest in others. A lot of people come to history via fiction -- it’s a more accessible route than to dive straight into heavy textbooks, many of which are really aimed at post-graduates. I try to show the human side in my serious work; how events hit people, and impacted on their lives.

What drew you to the middle ages and to fiction about the middle ages?

You must remember that I grew up in an age when the children’s TV channels were dominated by things like William Tell, Richard the Lionheart, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Ivanhoe, and Knights of the Round Table, while cinema output included El Cid, The Vikings, Cleopatra, and The Fall of the Roman Empire.

History was also taken seriously at school, and along with English, was one of my favourite subjects.

When we went on holiday we often visited Wales, where I was fascinated by the castles. I started reading about history for pleasure, because I wanted to know more than school taught me. I think the very first historical novel I came across was The Wool-pack by Cynthia Hartnett, read to us at primary school by the best teacher I ever had, Miss Margaret Mackie. When I got a little older and found there were such things as adult historical fiction novels, I think I pretty much devoured the entire library offering!

The more I’ve learned about the middle ages there more fascinated I’ve become; and to be honest, there’s always more to learn. Some people think of me as an expert on the subject, but frankly I never cease to be amazed by my own ignorance of particular topics.

Related articles:

• Brian Wainwright [Interview_2], Conversations with Writers, February 4, 2008
• Brian Wainwright [Interview_3], Conversations with Writers, February 6, 2008