Interview _ Kathleen Bell

Kathleen Bell is a lecturer in English and Creative Writing at De Montfort University.

Her poems, micro-fiction and short stories have been published in magazines and journals that include PN Review, New Walk and Under the Radar and in anthologies that include Welcome to Leicester (Dahlia Publishing, 2016); Over Land, Over Sea: Poems for those seeking refuge (Five Leaves Publications, 2015) which she co-edited with Emma Lee and Siobhan Logan; and A Speaking Silence (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2013).

Her poem, "Testament: in an Embankment Garden" won the Nottingham Poetry Society’s 2016 Open Competition which was judged by award-winning poet Liz Berry, and her poetry chapbook, at the memory exchange (Oystercatcher, 2014) was shortlisted for the Saboteur awards.

In this interview, Kathleen Bell talks about poetry, micro-fiction and Journeys in Translation.

How would you describe the writing that you do?

I can’t remember a time when I didn't write so I suppose that writing is a way in which I need to respond to the world around me and to interact with it.

I write both poetry and prose fiction and sometimes the border between the two is pretty blurred. For instance, I’m not sure whether "Waiting", in the anthology, Over Land, Over Sea, is poetry or micro-fiction, and the same is true of another piece, "In The Tunnel" which was published as a poem in the Eyewear pamphlet, Refugees Welcome. I've never cared too much for borders so the definition doesn't trouble me much.

Apart from that, I do a huge range of writing.

In poetry, I like working in strict form when it suits the subject but I’m also happy to work in a more allusive and fragmentary way – I like to have a repertoire of methods. And, as well as short stories, I've written two unpublished novels which are still in need of yet another edit. I think novels are more different from short stories than short stories are from poetry, so that’s another kind of writing ... And then there are reviews, academic essays, Facebook statuses (and rants), tweets and other odd forays …

Who has had the most influence on you as a writer?

I assume by this question you mean other writers. As a reader I’m pretty omnivorous and I’m still learning – I hope I never stop.

I wrote my PhD thesis on Auden so of course he influenced me, as did the Greek poet Cavafy, and various Latin and Ancient Greek authors including Sappho whose surviving fragments do so much in so few words. I had a phase in my teens of being influenced by the satires of Alexander Pope.

Another day I might come up with a different list – and I’m carefully avoiding mention of any living writers. There are also many I admire who don’t influence me as a writer because I know that they do something that is very different from the ways in which I write. At most, I might observe a useful technique in a single poem and find it helps me years later.

Kathleen Bell's poems have been featured in anthologies that include Over Land, Over Sea: Poems for those seeking refuge (Five Leaves Publications, 2015) and Welcome to Leicester (Dahlia Publishing, 2016).

How have your personal experiences influenced your writing?

I grew up assuming that writing was a natural and normal way to respond to the world.

My parents encouraged me and my brother to enjoy all kinds of reading and cultural experiences, without the sense of hierarchies that middle- and upper-class people impose. So, we went to the theatre (in the gods, as we called the gallery benches) to see everything from Shakespeare to musicals and read all sorts of things from the popular magazine Tit-Bits to Plato and Borges. This isn't what people expect of working-class families in council estates but it’s what my family was like. I still remember Mum coming home with a Penguin of Borges’ Labyrinths and telling us that we must read it because it was amazing, and my brother and I, both in our teens, loved it. We also shared an enthusiasm for the volume called The Last Days of Socrates and I was very excited when later, at about 17, I found I could struggle through the beginning of Socrates’ speech in his defence in Ancient Greek. So, that kind of learning has infused my writing.

I don’t think of myself as someone who writes directly out of personal experience, on the whole, but of course there are traces of personal experience in my writing. It took me a while after completing it, to realise that my sequence of poems about stage magic was also about ghosts and bereavement.

Even when I do write more directly from personal experience, the experience is changed in the writing.

The fragments in the sequence "They Come For You to Buy and Sell" refers obliquely to events at the time when my father died in London and my mother’s dementia worsened, to the relation I had with memories which surfaced out of those circumstances, and also to a walk in Morpeth when I listened to people’s recollections of the past. I thought at the time I was writing that sequence just because I was compelled to do so and with no thought that anyone would read it so I was surprised when it found its way into my Oystercatcher pamphlet, at the memory exchange.

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

As a writer, I think there are only two achievements that matter. One is when a piece of writing does what you set out to do, and does it as well as possible. And the other is when the writing takes you on a journey and you end up somewhere you didn't expect to be at the end of the writing.

The latter is the one I like best because writing becomes a process of discovery ... in addition to all the important craft considerations, the music of language, the play with words, and so on.

How did you get involved with Journeys in Translation?

That’s all Ambrose Musiyiwa's fault. It started when he suggested a book of poems in response to the refugee crisis in a Facebook post and then posted his poem "The Man Who Ran Through the Tunnel" which made me see a news story differently.

I thought that poems might achieve two things: getting people to see refugee stories differently and raise some useful money. So I volunteered to co-edit what became Over Land, Over Sea: Poems for those seeking refuge.

Which were the easiest aspects of the work that went into both Over Land, Over Sea and Journeys in Translation?

The easiest thing was getting the poems for the anthology – because people cared a lot.

There was a lot of goodwill connected to the project. I can’t speak highly enough of Ross Bradshaw and Pippa Hennessey at Five Leaves who put masses of hard professional work into the book: design, type-setting, proofing, etc. Martyn Poliakoff, who wrote the introduction, did so at about 24 hours’ notice and I seem to recall he sent the text to me shortly before midnight so that the volume could get to the printers. And then there were many people who hosted events or invited poets to read.

Journeys in Translation build on or stems from Over Land, Over Sea and encourages people who are bi-lingual or multilingual or who are learning other languages to translate 13 of the 101 poems from the anthology into other languages.

Also, my poem/micro-fiction "Waiting" is one of the 13 poems that is being translated into other languages.

Kathleen Bell's poem, "Waiting" from the anthology, Over Land, Over Sea: Poems for those seeking refuge (Five Leaves Publications, 2015) has, so far, been translated into Bengali, Finnish, Italian, Shona and Spanish as part of Journeys in Translation.

Which were the most challenging aspects of the work?

With the anthology we were working in haste in the intervals of our jobs. The roles I took on included sequencing the poems, and sending proofs to poets and responding to their comments.

I’m glad I did this. But I recall staying late in the office trying to work through the proofing amendments and muttering "Bloody poets" under my breath. This is a comment on my tiredness at the time more than anything else because, of course, every poet cares passionately that the layout is correct and that everything, to the last comma, is in the right place. It was therefore very important to get it all right – but very exhausting too.

In retrospect I’m really glad that the poets and I did this work of proofing. But it made for some long days.

It was also sad to reject some pretty good poems for the sake of the anthology overall. We wanted a variety of poems and some were just a little too similar in themes and images. I know that some of the poems we rejected found good homes elsewhere and I was pleased to see that. I think all the poems submitted spoke with real feeling and concern for the situation of refugees.

What would you say is the value of initiatives like Journeys in Translation?

I think that translation is a means of opening the door to new possibilities. Language is a wonderful thing but it’s only ever an approximation to perception, thought and feeling. This means that ideas and impressions work differently in different languages. So, when a poem exists in more than one language, its possible meanings are extended.

My poem/micro-fiction "Waiting" has been translated into several languages so far and I’m not competent in any of them. However, I noticed that the Spanish word for waiting includes the concept of hoping, which I hadn't considered when writing the poem. I rather like that ... though it remains unclear what the woman in the poem waits and hopes for, just as in the original it’s not clear how long she will wait and what will happen in the end.

Of course, the other important thing about Journeys in Translation is that it helps us all move across the borders and barriers of language. Here speakers of different languages are brought together in a shared project. Translation is about finding what we have in common as humans ... and in this project, it’s about sharing a common concern for fellow human beings.

Editor's Note:

Journeys in Translation aims to facilitate cross- and inter-cultural conversations around the themes of home, belonging and refuge.

The project encourages people who are bilingual or multilingual to have a go at translating 13 of the 101 poems from Over Land: Over Sea: Poems for those seeking refuge (Five Leaves Publications, 2015) from English into other languages and to share the translations, and reflections on the exercise on blogs, in letters and emails to family and friends, and on social media.

So far, the 13 poems that are being used as part of the project have been translated into languages that include Italian, German, Shona, Spanish, Bengali, British Sign Language, Farsi, Finnish, French, Turkish and Welsh. Currently, over 20 people from all over the world are working on the translations. More translations and more languages are on the way.

In Leicester, Journeys in Translation will culminate in an event that is going to be held on September 30 as part of Everybody's Reading 2017. During the event the original poems and translations will be read, discussed and displayed.

Over Land, Over Sea: Poems for Those Seeking Refuge (Five Leaves Publications, 2015) was edited by Kathleen Bell, Emma Lee and Siobhan Logan and is being sold to raise funds for Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Leicester City of Sanctuary and the Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Refugee Forum.

Copies of the anthology are available from Five Leaves Bookshop (Nottingham).

More information on how Over Land, Over Sea came about is available here.

Interview _ Pam Thompson

Pam Thompson is a poet, performer, reviewer and university lecturer.

Her poetry has been published in a range of small press magazines and her publications are: Spin (Walden Press, 1998), Parting the Ghosts of Salt (Redbeck Press, 2000), Show Date and Time (smith|doorstop, 2006), The Japan Quiz (Redbeck Press, 2008), and Hologram (Sunk Island Publishing, 2009).

She is one of the organisers of WORD! at The Y Theatre in Leicester.

In this interview, Pam Thompson talks about poetry and Journeys in Translation.

How would you describe your writing?

Very varied. I supposed a lot of my poetry is disguised - or not so disguised - autobiography. I experiment formally a lot and I enjoy it when something unexpected arises from those experiments.

I agree with the poet C. D. Wright who said: "Poetry is a necessity of life, it is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so.”

Poetry is about connection too. I like the fact that writing poetry you immediately establish yourself within a wider community of poets. There is something very comforting about that.

Who or what has had the most influence on you as a writer?

There have been so many influences. I read a lot of poetry and I have written it since my early teens and was encouraged by certain teachers. Poets who particularly influenced me back then included Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, T. S. Eliot and Ted Hughes.

I began to enter competitions in my late twenties onwards and had some successes, and began to get published in magazines. I can't speak highly enough of certain Arvon courses and my tutors on them -Michael Longley, Carol Rumens, Simon Armitage, Glyn Maxwell, Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke. Since then I have been on many courses and have attended - and run - writing workshops.

Being involved in organising WORD! at The Y in Leicester has been an enormous influence too because it demonstrates the strong hold that poetry and its public expression have on people's lives. It reinforces the need for a safe space for people to read their work and a supportive community to receive it. That's why we are thrilled to be nominated for a Saboteur Award - if we won it would help us enormously to develop WORD! even more.

How have your personal experiences influenced your writing?

Greatly - I think it's inevitable that this will happen with any writer. They are often disguised though and filtered through other voices.

What has been your most significant achievement as a writer so far?

I was pretty thrilled to be a winner of the Poetry Business Poetry Competition in 2005 with my pamphlet Show Date and Time, judged by Simon Armitage. Also winning the Magma Poetry Competition Judges Prize, (judge - Jo Shapcott) in 2014/15 and, recently, 3rd prize in the Poets and Players competition, judged by Michael Symmons-Roberts, was pretty special. They are all poets whose work I really like.

I have recently passed my PhD in Creative Writing (poetry). That is probably the toughest thing I have ever done writing-wise.

Pam Thompson's poems have also been featured in anthologies that include Over Land, Over Sea: Poems for those seeking refuge (Five Leaves Publications, 2015) and Welcome to Leicester (Dahlia Publishing, 2016).

How did you get involved with Journeys in Translation?

My poem 'Dislocation' was included in the wonderful anthology Over Land, Over Sea: Poems for those seeking refuge. Subsequently, it was one of the 13 poems offered for translation and, amazingly, has been translated into Italian, Spanish, German, Shona, Chinese, Finnish, Bengali, French, Turkish and British Sign Language, no less!

How did "Dislocation" come about?

It was part of that group project ... of poets responding to a humanitarian crisis and taking action to encourage artistic responses and to find a means of publicising these, and the cause, more widely.

Writing about a humanitarian crisis is necessary but the results will always be inadequate. I’m not undergoing the pain of ‘dislocation’ like the people in the poem. I can only try and empathise in a way that is as honest as possible without misappropriating other people’s trauma and being untruthful to it. I hope the poem has done that.

My poem is relatively short, stark, imagistic. It’s title suggests both 'displacement' and being 'out of joint'; people are being painfully wrenched from their homelands.

I wrote drafts of it within one day and over a week re-drafted it until it found its present form

The poem was selected for the anthology and is now reverberating by means of all these other translators and their languages..

The fact that the poem has been translated into so many languages suggests that its spare, imagistic form has lent itself to this process and so I would say it has been received favourably.

Pam Thompson's "Disclocation", Over Land, Over Sea: Poems for those seeking refuge (Five Leaves Publications, 2015) p. 120, translated into British Sign Language (BSL) by Elvire Roberts. 

What would you say is the value of initiatives like Journeys in Translation?

Most importantly, it consolidates and expands the Over Land, Over Sea collective project and publicises it further via cross- and inter-cultural conversations.

It emphasises the power of words to transmigrate across languages and cultural borders and the poems continue to reverberate in all the many forms they are taking via written and spoken word, performative gesture, in the environment and online. The initiative counters any wrongheaded opinion that “Poetry makes nothing happen.”

Editor's Note:

Journeys in Translation aims to facilitate cross- and inter-cultural conversations around the themes of home, belonging and refuge.

The project encourages people who are bilingual or multilingual to have a go at translating 13 of the 101 poems from Over Land: Over Sea: Poems for those seeking refuge (Five Leaves Publications, 2015) from English into other languages and to share the translations, and reflections on the exercise on blogs, in letters and emails to family and friends, and on social media.

So far, the 13 poems that are being used as part of the project have been translated into languages that include Italian, German, Shona, Spanish, Bengali, British Sign Language, Farsi, Finnish, French, Turkish and Welsh. Currently, over 20 people from all over the world are working on the translations. More translations and more languages are on the way.

In Leicester, Journeys in Translation will culminate in an event that is going to be held on September 30 as part of Everybody's Reading 2017. During the event the original poems and translations will be read, discussed and displayed.

Over Land, Over Sea: Poems for Those Seeking Refuge (Five Leaves Publications, 2015) was edited by Kathleen Bell, Emma Lee and Siobhan Logan and is being sold to raise funds for Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Leicester City of Sanctuary and the Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Refugee Forum.

Copies of the anthology are available from Five Leaves Bookshop (Nottingham).

More information on how Over Land, Over Sea came about is available here.

Interview _ Cynthia Rodríguez

Cynthia Rodríguez is based in Leicester and regularly performs at spoken word events that include Anerki, WORD!, Find the Right Words and House of Verse. She had also performed at Poetry is Dead Good, Too Deep for a Monday, Write Minds Wiff Waff, QTIPOCALYPSE at Rough Trade Nottingham, Coventry Pride, The Chameleon, and the LGBT Laureate night at The Phoenix in London.

In addition to spoken word, Rodríguez has collaborated with musicians such as David Dhonau and the BootLeg Jazz Trio, and has performed as a featured act at Moonshine Word Jam, the jazz and spoken word evening hosted by Mellow Baku and Lydia Towsey.

Her work has been published in zines that include the Mouthy Poets Queer Zine edited by Dean Atta; the anti-xenophobia Do Something edited by Selina Lock; and Anerki and Sean Clark’s Interanerki. In late 2016, two of her poems were included in Welcome to Leicester, edited by Emma Lee and Ambrose Musiyiwa for Dahlia Publishing.

Rodríguez is also a singer and a songwriter at the queer noise girl band ANATOMY, where she plays alongside singers and musicians, Adrienne Jones, Emily Rose Teece and Leonie DuBarry-Gurr.

In this interview, Cynthia Rodríguez talks about poetry, writing and Journeys in Translation.

When did you start writing?

I started writing when I started learning how to write.

It started a bit like private street art, writing the name of my celebrity crush on my living room wall when I was two years old. When I was four, I started to write and tell short surrealist stories about the people and places I knew or imagined. I would write, for instance, about a girl coming from Mars who ate bolts and screws and used apples as petrol for her spaceship. Like my now deceased aunt Adriana, there was a time I would write calaveras ... rather morbid poems about living people and the ways they would meet The Ripper, a Mexican folk tradition for Dia de Muertos.

Since then, I’ve been dancing between short story and poetry/songwriting, but been more steady on the latter for the past 18 months.

How would you describe the writing you are doing?

Intersectional and interdisciplinary. I tend to write about the experiences people live from the margins and at the crossroads. Identity plays a huge part in my work, particularly as a queer fat foreign brown woman with mental and chronic conditions.

Recently, I’ve been playing around with more artistic disciplines as well as writing, such as film and music, and I have been exploring the musicality of the spoken and written word.

Cynthia Rodríguez performing at Anerki, a spoken word, poetry and music event that is held monthly in Leicester. Photo by David Conrad Dhonau.

Who or what has had the most influence on you as a writer?

Life and art. My life, the lives of loved ones and those around us. Art, in its audiovisual and performative ways. People like Laurie Anderson, Penny Broadhurst, Pete Um and Saul Williams. Spoken word and interdisciplinary collectives in the East Midlands such as Anerki, Mouthy Poets, House of Verse and FAG. The spirit of the times.

How have your personal experiences influenced your writing?

A lot. No two life stories are alike, so it is necessary that we tell our own stories and perhaps find a common ground.

English is my second language and I still enjoy exploring it and setting myself challenges to learn and expand. Britain is still quite new to me even if it feels like home, so writing is a bit like trying and testing plugs and taps around a fully furnished house I’m still paying mortgage for, stumbling upon a loose wooden tile under the carpet and discovering a neverending basement underneath full of positive and negative surprises.

What has been your most significant achievement as a writer so far?

Discovering an extensive network of people who love writing and art as much as I do. It has been amazing and truly, emotionally and professionally rewarding getting to know these people, sharing words of advice, collaborating, learning, performing together and even making strong and enduring friendships.

Getting published has also been good.

Cynthia Rodríguez's poems have been featured in anthologies that include Welcome to Leicester (Dahlia Publishing, 2016) and Do Something (Factor Fiction, 2016).

How did you get involved with Journeys in Translation?

A couple of my poems were selected for Welcome to Leicester, the poetry compilation co-edited by Ambrose and Emma and published on Dahlia Publishing. Ambrose found out I spoke Spanish and we talked about Journeys in Translation, and I was more than happy to help.

Which were the easiest aspects of the work you put into the project?

The main messages were pretty easy to translate. I think it was because they are international and necessary in every country and language.

Which were the most challenging?

Keeping metrics, shapes and messages in certain poems. For instance, Rod Duncan’s “but one country”. Not only did I have to keep the shape aligned, but I had to find a clever way to keep the original message and its alternative readings forwards and backwards. For this, I took liberties with commas and signs. It may not be entirely grammatically accurate, but the message is still there.

What would you say is the value of initiatives like Journeys in Translation?

Telling stories from different experiences we hadn’t thought before. Travelling not only geographically, but through language. A lot of the subjects and authors from the original project already had to do their personal journeys in translation by learning and practicing a different language to survive, so it enhances the experience and shows it to people who perhaps have never needed to go through said journeys.

Rod Duncan’s “but one country”, Over Land, Over Sea: Poems for those seeking refuge (Five Leaves Publications, 2015) p.123. Translated into Spanish by Cynthia Rodríguez.

Editor's Note:

Journeys in Translation aims to facilitate cross- and inter-cultural conversations around the themes of home, belonging and refuge.

The project encourages people who are bilingual or multilingual to have a go at translating 13 of the 101 poems from Over Land: Over Sea: Poems for those seeking refuge (Five Leaves Publications, 2015) from English into other languages and to share the translations, and reflections on the exercise on blogs, in letters and emails to family and friends, and on social media.

So far, the 13 poems that are being used as part of the project have been translated into languages that include Italian, German, Shona, Spanish, Bengali, British Sign Language, Farsi, Finnish, French, Turkish and Welsh. Currently, over 20 people from all over the world are working on the translations. More translations and more languages are on the way.

In Leicester, Journeys in Translation will culminate in an event that is going to be held on September 30 as part of Everybody's Reading 2017. During the event the original poems and translations will be read, discussed and displayed.

Over Land, Over Sea: Poems for Those Seeking Refuge (Five Leaves Publications, 2015) was edited by Kathleen Bell, Emma Lee and Siobhan Logan and is being sold to raise funds for Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Leicester City of Sanctuary and the Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Refugee Forum.

Copies of the anthology are available from Five Leaves Bookshop (Nottingham).

More information on how Over Land, Over Sea came about is available here.

Interview _ Tony R. Cox

Novelist and short story writer, Tony R. Cox was a reporter at the Derby Evening Telegraph in the 1970s, and a Business Editor at the Nottingham Evening Post in the late 70s before moving to public relations and running his own business-to-business consultancy.

He is the author of the crime thriller novels, First Dead Body (The Choir Press, 2014) and A Fatal Drug (Fahrenheit Press, 2016), both of which are set in Derby. First Dead Body has been described as encapsulating "the life of 1970s reporters when lunches were often long and liquid and it was the norm to meet contacts in pubs like The Dolphin, The Exeter Arms, The Wagon and Horses." While in First Dead Body, the action takes place in Derby, in A Fatal Drug, an investigation into the discovery of a mutilated body reveals a spiral of gangland drug dealing and violence that stretches from the north of England to the south of Spain.

In this interview, Tony R. Cox talks about his writing.

When did you start writing?

I was editor of the school magazine; a regional journalist for 15 years; 25 years in public relations, mainly writing for newspapers and magazines nationally and internationally.

In 2010, after I’d decided to semi-retire, it was suggested that I write a memoir of what I used to get up to in the early 70s when I was heavily involved in rock and jazz music reviews and everything that went with it. That formed the kernel of an idea for a novel. I self-published First Dead Body in 2014, basically because I didn’t want the hassle (and ignominy of being rejected) of finding a publisher. After my first novel came out, I vowed never to self-publish (I’m a writer, not a salesman) and researched potential publishers. I approached Fahrenheit Press as they seemed like a good fit and was taken on. My second novel, A Fatal Drug, was published in 2016.

How would you describe the writing you are doing?

I write crime thrillers with a historical (1960s and 70s) slant. My protagonists are journalists who are drawn into the action; the police are present, but these are not ‘police procedurals’.

I hope my books appeal to anybody who enjoys crime fiction.

I was told a while ago: “Write about what you know”. I hope my knowledge of the early 70s and newspapers is interesting.

I was in my 20s all the way through the 70s, and memories are vivid. I also lived in Pakistan in the very early 60s; and then worked as a journalist during what I believe were the last great days of regional newspapers.

Which authors influenced you most?

All crime writers help, but I try and follow the characterisation and description that is accomplished so brilliantly by people like Ian McEwan, Alan Sillitoe, James Joyce and, of course, the maestro, Ian Rankin.

Simon Jardine, the main protagonist in Tony R. Cox's thriller novels, is a crime reporter on a regional newspaper whose investigations, in A Fatal Drug, reveals a spiral of gangland drug dealing and violence that stretches from the north of England to the south of Spain.

What are your main concerns as a writer?

Cadence and coherence, mainly. I believe every book must capture the reader and lead them through, gradually as the pace quickens.

What are the biggest challenges that you face?

Getting it right! Money is not the prime objective, nor is becoming a best-seller, but I want my books to be accepted as well-written.

Do you write everyday?

No way. I write frenetically to get the plot down and this can be a base of about 50,000 to 70,000 words. Then I stop; put it away; go and re-visit the locations; immerse myself in the people. After a week or a month I go back and start the heavy edit, which is basically re-writing the novel from scratch, but with a structure already in place.

In addition to novels, you also write short stories. Do you use the same approach to short stories as you use when you are writing novels?

One of my short stories, "Under a Savage Sky" was published by Dahlia Publishing in Lost and Found in mid-2016. Another, "A Cup of Cold Coffee and a Slice of Life" was published by Bloodhound Books as part of the international anthology Dark Minds, with all proceeds going to charity.

Short stories and novels are very different and, for me, require a different approach. With novels, I find that the reader must be ‘captured’ early on and then gradually drawn through, their attention being maintained, a series of literary undulations leading to a constantly hinted at climax. With short stories, setting the scene and introducing vivid characterisation is vital. The plot is reasonably straightforward from the outset and is developed during the story; the finale needs to have a subtle, or even dramatically obvious, twist. A sort of ‘Agh!’ moment.

Tony R Cox's short stories have also been featured in the short story anthologies Lost and Found: Stories of home by Leicestershire writers (Dahlia Publishing, 2016) and Dark Minds (Bloodhound Books, 2016).

How would you describe A Fatal Drug?

A Fatal Drug follows the newspaper journalist's hunt for a front page lead through murder and torture, drug smuggling and the bid by villains to established a drugs supply business. The book was plotted in 2015, but then went through a very severe re-write, then an extended edit.

It was published by Fahrenheit Press and is available on Amazon as an Ebook (April 2016) and a paperback (September 2016).

Why Fahrenheit Press? What advantages or disadvantages has this presented?

Fahrenheit Press do things differently. When I approached them they were digital only and based their operation on Twitter ‘storms’ and a ‘book club’. The small stable of authors appealed in terms of genre (all crime fiction).

There were two initial disadvantages: Firstly, A Fatal Drug would not be printed, but be an ebook; and, secondly, it would not be on sale in high street shops. The first of these was handled after they’d read my manuscript and decided it would be printed; the second, I had to take on the chin, but the novel is still available – and selling – as a paperback through Amazon.

Which aspects of the work you put into the book did you find most difficult?

The time factor is not as easy as I first thought. Clothing styles were never of any interest, so I had to read books of that time and absorb magazines of that era.

Which aspects of the work did you enjoy most?

The fact that my main protagonist is a reporter on a regional newspaper allows me the opportunity to have him doing things that I could only dream of. I really enjoy creating my characters – many of whom are amalgams of people of that time.

What sets A Fatal Drug apart from other things you've written?

This is the second in a series. I hope it is a development of characters and plot.

The main protagonists and locations are the same in A Fatal Drug and First Dead Body, but in A Fatal Drug I take the action out of Derby, whereas, in First Dead Body, it remained in the town.

The next novel in the series will continue with the main characters (not the villains), but will also be much more complex. It starts by examining payola (bribing DJs to play records) and then moves through drug dealing, the Soho-based record industry, to eventually involve the IRA.

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

Being accepted by my peers as a writer. I was – and to a certain extent – still am, in awe of authors in all genres. After a career in business, even though it was a creative one, it is wonderful to feel part of a growing and developing creative environment that doesn’t judge, is always supportive, and encourages writers to share and help each other.

Interview _ Flair Donglai Shi

Flair Donglai Shi 施東來 is a DPhil in English candidate at Oxford University, a critic in comparative literature (Chinese and English), an occasional short story writer, and a translator.

When did you start writing?

This simple question is also perhaps the hardest. Since I started my university journey, my academic language has always been English. Yet before that I was living in my hometown, a somewhat remote small city deep in the mountainous province of Zhejiang 浙江, China, and my only language was Chinese.

When I was young I was definitely more interested in writing than reading. I got top scores in my Chinese language and literature class but I rarely read outside the curricula. At that time, around the early 2000s, there was a culture of increasing openness in China, and the sentimental, individualistic and urban popular writing was having its moment in the country. So I started writing around themes of loneliness, isolation and dislocation and published a number of short stories in newspapers and anthologies with the help of my teacher. Most of them are lost now but I still have the original manuscripts in my old notebook.

After I started studying in the UK around 2012 I started writing in English, but mainly for an academic audience as that is the mode of writing in English I am most familiar with. I published a couple of short stories in English also, one called “Strawberry Candy” and the other called “China Boy”, in which I play around themes about sexuality and disempowerment. It is really much harder for me to write beautifully in English than in Chinese and sometimes I would just translate my creative writing from Chinese to English in order to preserve that original sentimentality, because I find that I always become too concerned about getting the sentence “right” in English to be able to prioritize my creativity.

How would you describe the writing you are doing?

There is a trend in academia nowadays to challenge the divide between creative writing and academic prose, but in practice this remains unwelcomed. As graduate students we do not have the freedom to write without the standard restrictions on style and structure, and very few academics nowadays produce essays in the manner of George Orwell, D. H. Lawrence or even Virginia Woolf. Most of our essays are so jargon heavy and ideologically entrenched they stop being accessible and influential and become some kind of self-indulgent soliloquy instead. Sometimes I would think the people in the humanities in Western higher education today are like construction workers trapped in a room they built around them, and now all they do is try very hard to find cracks in the wall so that they can write something to fill that blank, and thus to make the room more sealed off from the world. I find this very suffocating sometimes, especially when the election of Trump and Brexit explicitly tell us how higher education has failed to take into action what it preaches.

As a literary scholar, I perceive two kinds of criticism to be worth doing. The first is theoretically informed political reading, such as postcolonial, feminist, or queer readings of the classics, which can offer new perspectives for us to see the structures built around a cultural product. This is more of a cultural history kind of reading. The second form of reading is perhaps a traditional one, which is that we should also read what we perceive to be good literature and promote it by making a sound case for its unique contribution to the wider world. These two modes of reading and essay-writing may sound quite commonsensical, but I think in this era of niche-market obsession, many of us under institutionalized pressure tend to forget about why we entered the field in the first place and choose to prioritize the theories over the literary works themselves.

As for my occasional creative writing, I view them in an old fashioned Freudian way. They are the excesses of the Repressed that I cannot control through rationalization. They are the spills of your carbonated drink that just have to come out when you shake the bottle too hard. I only write short stories when real life interactions with people get too boring and unfulfilling; I only write poems when I want to make a negative comment on something but cannot do so in “normal” language. Literature, in this sense, is exactly what cannot be spoken or written.

Who or what has had the most influence on you as a writer?

My favorite Anglophone writers are George Orwell and J. M. Coetzee, and my favorite Chinese writer is Yu Dafu 郁達夫. Orwell is just a genius. He uses very comprehensible language to tell very clear stories that are easy to follow, and yet every time you finish them you literally feel there is something larger climbing out of the book to challenge your world views. J. M. Coetzee is similarly simple but his writing presents much more ambiguous ideological positions and do not read as sharp as Orwell’s, due to the lack of satire I suppose. As a non-native speaker of English I find these writers really easy to read, and the easy language actually helps with clarifying some of the bigger thematic concerns of the stories for me.

Yu Dafu was a writer from my province writing in the 1920s and 1930s when China was in a semi-colonial semi-feudal state. I like many writers from the Republican era in China (1912-1949) since many of them come from the South and the overseas experiences they had in the UK or Japan really speak to me. I find this transhistorical resonance really striking and sometimes unsettling, as it always propels me to think whether we have really made any progress at all.

How have your personal experiences influenced your writing?

Ultimately, literature as cultural products and literary criticism as processes of critical thinking are all very subjective practices. My transnational journey between East Asia and the Anglophone world has increased my sensitivity to themes of movement, displacement and isolation, whereas my queer identity and the alienation and discrimination I suffered because of it implanted in me a spirit of rebellion that is quite hard to control. Yet I think what literature does is much more than this self-centric mode of identity politics. It is about empathy and transcendence. Solidarity cannot be built by an emphasis of the self.

What has been your most significant achievement as a writer so far?

I wouldn’t even consider myself a writer. I have won a small prize for my story “Strawberry Candy” and that’s pretty much all of the external recognition I have got so far in terms of creative writing. For me, a writer is someone who is writing for a living, or someone for whom creative writing is one of the many important professions they do to engage with larger society. While my original idea about entering academia was indeed to give myself a foothold in a university environment so that I can have the stable income to be able to write creatively, now the pressure in academia to keep up with new developments in the field and article publishing has pushed me out of that romantic dream of writing. Maybe one day I will be less stressed and more able to pick up that passion for creative writing again.

How did you get involved with Journeys in Translation?

I saw the project on Facebook, and was especially attracted to the form of “but one country”. The theme of the collection is topical and powerful and since there was no Chinese translation, I thought I would give it a go.

Which were the easiest aspects of the work you put into the project? 

Since I could pick any number of the 13 poems in the collection, I deliberately picked the ones with simpler language and more straightforward themes. I left out the ones with a lot of technical terms or foreign words since they demand the translator to actually know more than English and the target language. The poems are relatively short and their clear structures made it much easier to translate.

“but one country” is no doubt my favorite but also the most challenging, mainly because of its form. The grammatical genius embedded in the symmetrical visualization of the earth presents a particular problem for Chinese grammar, which often lacks the relational clarity of European languages and their numerous inflectional schemes. However, I suppose the loose grammatical structures of the Chinese sentence makes it easier than English to construct this symmetrical continuity. My method is really to prioritize the form of the original because that was what caught my eye in the first place, so I made sure each line should have one more character than the previous one. Apart from this, I have also tried to build more rhyme into the Chinese translation compared to the English original, such as the ending sounds of guo 國 and wo 窩, li 裡 and li 裡, nu 怒 and fu 覆, which I hope improves the readability and thus affective power of the poem. Yet I still think my translation has not reached the level of visual magic that the original has, and I would love to see a different Chinese translation of the poem.

As for the other ones, particularly “Children of War” and “Come In”, I have tried to create more rhyming effects for the Chinese versions as well. This search for rhyme often led me to look for the right character in a list of homophones for a particular translation, and sometimes I do sacrifice fidelity and choose words that are quite different from the original. For example, in “Come In”, I found the Chinese word for “blanket”, maotan毛毯 especially jarring in the stanza and opted for “warm curtain”, nuanlian 暖簾 instead, so that it can rhyme with “shoes”, xie 鞋. So these translating experiences actually made me realize how much prioritization translators have to perform in their job, and aspects of the original always have to be sacrificed in order for creative energy to grow in the translated version.

Rod Duncan’s “but one country”, Over Land, Over Sea: Poems for those seeking refuge (Five Leaves Publications, 2015) p.123. Translated into Chinese by Flair Donglai Shi.

What would you say is the value of initiatives like Journeys in Translation?

It is immensely valuable as it opens up space for global circulations of politically informed aesthetic practices. It effectively appropriates poetic power for an affective form of activism that pushes people to think critically about the roots of suffering in our world.

I find the first person point of view of “Children of War” very powerful, especially when combined with its resignation about the perpetuation of violence as it enables a possibility of identification through shared memories about entrapment and disempowerment. In a way, initiatives like this are really demonstrations of applied poetics, applied translation studies and applied theory. However, there is also a very obvious drawback to this project due to its Anglophone centric modus operandi—English poetry being translated into less powerful languages, and thus securing its hierarchical power as the centripetal source; I hope our journeys in translation should be larger and more diverse than that.

I am currently editing an academic book called World Literature in Motion, in which we devote an entire section to studies on markets of translations between languages other than English and French, for example, from Korean to Russian, from Chinese to Hindi and etc. For me, merely critiquing Eurocentrism does not go beyond Eurocentrism, only by bringing in other languages and literary traditions can we really provincialize Europe at a deeper level.

Editor's Note:

Journeys in Translation aims to facilitate cross- and inter-cultural conversations around the themes of home, belonging and refuge.

The project encourages people who are bilingual or multilingual to have a go at translating 13 of the 101 poems from Over Land: Over Sea: Poems for those seeking refuge (Five Leaves Publications, 2015) from English into other languages and to share the translations, and reflections on the exercise on blogs, in letters and emails to family and friends, and on social media.

So far, the 13 poems that are being used as part of the project have been translated into languages that include Italian, German, Shona, Spanish, Bengali, British Sign Language, Farsi, Finnish, French, Turkish and Welsh. Currently, over 20 people from all over the world are working on the translations. More translations and more languages are on the way.

In Leicester, Journeys in Translation will culminate in an event that is going to be held on September 30 as part of Everybody's Reading 2017. During the event the original poems and translations will be read, discussed and displayed.

Over Land, Over Sea: Poems for Those Seeking Refuge (Five Leaves Publications, 2015) was edited by Kathleen Bell, Emma Lee and Siobhan Logan and is being sold to raise funds for Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Leicester City of Sanctuary and the Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Refugee Forum.

Copies of the anthology are available from Five Leaves Bookshop (Nottingham).

More information on how Over Land, Over Sea came about is available here.

Interview _ Marilyn Ricci

Marilyn Ricci is a poet, playwright and editor.

Her poetry has been published in a wide range of small press magazines and her pamphlet, Rebuilding a Number 39, was published by HappenStance Press. Her first full collection, Night Rider, is out now from SoundsWrite Press.

In this interview, Marilyn Ricci talks about her writing and about Journeys in Translation.

How would you describe the work you do?

In terms of my poetry writing, I’d describe it as fulfilling and often a huge struggle. When a ‘prompt’ or idea comes to me for a poem (usually through reading other people’s poetry) I feel an excitement because I know I’ve stumbled across something which is important to me. This is the beginning of a process which is sometimes quite difficult but will end, I hope, with a poem which is meaningful both to me and to others with whom I hope to connect. That connection is the important thing.

Which are the easiest aspects of the work?

I think the easiest aspects are enjoying other people’s work, getting together with other poets and gaining inspiration from this. Poetry isn’t a solitary occupation for me.

In terms of the actual writing itself, very occasionally a poem does seem to waft my way and I more or less just write it down and then play with it until it feels right. I wish that happened more often.

With regard to the writing process, one of the most challenging aspects is cultivating patience. When something has prompted me to write, I begin by getting a few lines down. I’m listening for rhythm, wondering about form, cutting out the extraneous to make sure every word earns its place in the poem, looking for what excites me in the subject matter and looking at that from an unexpected perspective or speaking about it in a new way. I’m constantly interrogating the poem as I work on it. This can take a long time and you have to be patient and bold – start all over again if necessary.

I belong to a women’s poetry group in Leicester – SoundsWrite – and I workshop a lot of my poems there to make sure I’m asking the right questions, to help me to be patient and keep working on the poem until it feels right to me. I often refer to a poem as ‘cooked’. What I don’t want is ‘half-baked.’

Marilyn Ricci's books include the poetry pamphlet, Rebuilding a Number 39 (HappenStance Press, 2008) and the poetry collection, Night Rider (SoundsWrite Press, 2017).

Who or what has had the most influence on you?

Regarding subject matter, many of my influences come from my childhood growing up on a council estate just outside Leicester. My parents worked in local factories and I’ve written a sequence about them, “Hannah and Con At Work” – in my latest collection, Night Rider. As was very common in 1960s Leicestershire, my mum worked in the hosiery and my dad in ‘the print’. But they weren’t locals. They were incomers from the mining areas of South Wales and County Durham who were moved during the 1930s on a government scheme to get people out of the depressed areas. They brought their politics with them which greatly influenced my view of the world and so I was very aware of social class differences and the systematic inequalities that produces. This led later to an awareness of gender and ethnic inequalities too and the crazy ways people attempt to justify them and promote prejudice. I hope this is apparent in my poem ‘Framed’ which is being translated – the notion that women covering their heads with a headscarf as something unheard of in British culture is a lie. Not covering the head in public in the UK is a very recent thing and as I said in the poem: my mother always wore a headscarf when she left the house.

The list of other poets who have influenced me is very long, almost too many to name. Here are a few: John Keats, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Stevie Smith, D A Prince, Stephen Dobyns, Carol Ann Duffy, Jackie Kay, Don Patterson, Dennis O’Driscoll, Carole Bromley and many others who may only be known in the small press world.

Supportive editors of small press magazines have also been a great source of strength and encouragement over the years.

What would you say has been your most significant achievement so far?

Getting poems published in magazines I respect isn’t easy so it’s always exciting when I get an acceptance.

In terms of publications, I’m very proud of my 2008 pamphlet, Rebuilding a Number 39, published by HappenStance Press. And this year I’m equally proud of my first full-length collection, Night Rider, published by Karin Koller at Leicester-based SoundsWrite Press. It has been a delight to put together the collection and to read from it at various venues.

Another highlight would be working with Somali friends to translate a beautiful Somali poem, “I Am Somali”, into English and getting that published in Modern Poetry in Translation in 2014.

I have also edited books and written plays that have been performed all over the East Midlands which has been a great experience, but that’s another story.

Marilyn Ricci's poems have been featured in anthologies that include Over Land, Over Sea: Poems for those seeking refuge (Five Leaves Publications, 2015) and Welcome to Leicester (Dahlia Publishing, 2016). 

How did you get involved with Over Land, Over Sea?

I can’t remember exactly but I came across the fact that contributions were being sought for an anthology to help support refugees and asylum seekers. I thought it was a brilliant idea. And it has proved to be so.

Seeing the terrible scenes on the coast of Greece (it’s been happening for years in Sicily too) and then reading the sickeningly nasty responses from some parts of the British media made me want to counter that in some way.

What would you say is the value of initiatives like Journeys in Translation?

The value of an initiative such as this is quite hard to measure. It doesn’t produce the so-called ‘hard’ evidence (usually statistical) that is now so beloved of governments, corporations and many other organisations. That ‘hard’ evidence does have value, but it isn’t the only type of evidence which shows an activity has brought, for instance, great benefit to people.

In this case, it’s a matter of ‘small acorns’ which eventually produce mighty oak trees (there’s a nice English proverb!). Putting people in touch with each other through poetry is the sort of activity which brings fulfilment and a sense of worth to people’s lives and souls. For the writers, it’s wonderful that other people will delve into your poem, pull it apart and rebuild it. For the translators, it’s an insight into another poet’s mind and re-producing the poem so that it becomes meaningful to even more people. For readers it links people together as fellow human beings who may be very different, but also share a common humanity.

Marilyn Ricci’s “Framed”, Over Land, Over Sea: Poems for those seeking refuge (Five Leaves Publications, 2015) p. 114. Translated into Greek by Irena Ioannou. 

Editor's Note:

Journeys in Translation aims to facilitate cross- and inter-cultural conversations around the themes of home, belonging and refuge.

The project encourages people who are bilingual or multilingual to have a go at translating 13 of the 101 poems from Over Land: Over Sea: Poems for those seeking refuge (Five Leaves Publications, 2015) from English into other languages and to share the translations, and reflections on the exercise on blogs, in letters and emails to family and friends, and on social media.

So far, the 13 poems that are being used as part of the project have been translated into languages that include Italian, German, Shona, Spanish, Bengali, British Sign Language, Farsi, Finnish, French, Turkish and Welsh. Currently, over 20 people from all over the world are working on the translations. More translations and more languages are on the way.

In Leicester, Journeys in Translation will culminate in an event that is going to be held on September 30 as part of Everybody's Reading 2017. During the event the original poems and translations will be read, discussed and displayed.

Over Land, Over Sea: Poems for Those Seeking Refuge (Five Leaves Publications, 2015) was edited by Kathleen Bell, Emma Lee and Siobhan Logan and is being sold to raise funds for Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Leicester City of Sanctuary and the Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Refugee Forum.

Copies of the anthology are available from Five Leaves Bookshop (Nottingham).

More information on how Over Land, Over Sea came about is available here.

Interview _ Trevor Wright

Trevor Wright works part time in social care and is the co-director of a community interest company, InSight, which provides autism awareness training. His first poetry collection, Outsider Heart, was published by Nottingham's Big White Shed in November 2016.

In this interview, Trevor Wright talks about the work he is doing.

How would you describe the writing that you do?

I'm relatively new to poetry and so far I've written about family, masculinity and its impact on others, political events in the wider world, key events from my own past with the odd comedic poke at well known public figures. If there's a theme that links many of them it's inequality which has significantly worsened in recent years and is by no means inevitable.

As a writing process, chaotic. Trying to process the endless sensory incoming of everyday life, put some shape to it, find a place within or against it. Sometimes both within one poem. Sin, death and redemption just about covers it.

Who or what has had the most influence on you as a writer?

I didn't study literature after the age of 16 and only started writing a few decades later so I'm still working that out.

The Beano, Sillitoe, Robert Tressell and Michael Foot's biography of Nye Bevan then an overdue catch up on the other half of the population via Virago and the Women's Press when I worked in a collective bookshop. I like to hear poetry aloud so would credit people on the Derby / Nottingham open mic circuit who have been supportive. However, I'd say my main cultural influence has been music and the pictures and rhythms that it embeds. You won't spot the links but the likes of Patti Smith, Leadbelly, Joni Mitchell, and Niney crept into my first collection.

Phrases and rhythms from when I lived in Wales as well, 'everyone has their own bag of stones to carry' for example, and then there's the influence of observational comedy - I've always had a soft spot for Dave Allen.

How have your personal experiences influenced you're writing?

Everyone has highs and lows to reflect on so there are experiences and lessons there to be tapped. Some poems come easy, one about my daughter kicking up leaves in the park, for example ... others are buried, not always whole, in layers of clay, rubble and rock that have to be pick axed out.

Being autistic is a thread. Living with autism means you see things from the margins, rationally, not overly encumbered by emotion but can express that perception with passion. It gives an early insight, not always complete of course, into inequality and diversity.

I draw on a range of experiences, from working with snippets that pop up in a writing workshop, media reports from around the world, looking up from a table at an open mic night to see a lonely bloke staggering across Nottingham's Slab Square dressed as Batman. If it pops up, I'll have it!

What has been your most significant achievement as a writer so far?

Surviving my early open mic and crit group experiences relatively intact has got to be high on the list as has being a Reds fan yet getting a poem accepted for the Welcome to Leicester anthology.

My first collection, Outsider Heart, was published by Big White Shed last November and I never thought that being asked to do that would happen within three years of starting to write. But I'd say, the biggest achievement has been connecting and working with others. Simple things like chatting to someone at an open mic night because a poem spoke to them or the types of creative collaboration central to Journeys in Translation. That can be difficult for someone with autism and against the grain of your instincts and learned experience. Most of us mask and mimic behaviours to damp down the anxieties of 'doing social' or just avoid it altogether.

Writing and performing has enabled me to contribute on my terms, which I'd never really done before. Better late than never!

Trevor Wright's debut poetry collection, Outsider Heart was published by Nottingham's Big White Shed in November 2016 .

How did you get involved with Journeys in Translation?

I had followed the Poets in Solidarity Facebook group and worked up a couple of refugee related poems when the call out for submissions for Over Land, Over Sea was made. I sent in three and one, "Yalla", was accepted for publication in the book. It was later one of the 13 poems chosen for Journeys in Translation.

On the principle of once you're in it, you're in it, I set out to see what translations I could get done. So far, it's been translated into Welsh, Italian, Farsi and British Sign Language with an experimental music version due in May.

We are testing out dual readings of the BSL version and then Farsi version at the Nottingham Poetry Festival next week.

Which were the easiest aspects of the work you put into the project?

Going back to the original poem, having clear images to work from helped ... I was on holiday watching kids playing in small plastic boats from the beach and walked back into the holiday let to see, on TV, people in large and precarious plastic boats on the Mediterranean. Stories about people losing whole families began to filter through and I centred the poem on one person who was in transit and had lost all but one of their family.

Being a parent helped position it. That all came together unusually quickly, providing a core structure.

For Journeys in Translation, its others who do the hard work. Individuals volunteered to translate "Yalla" without too much arm-twisting. People got enthused by the project and the values behind it.

Trevor Wright's poems have been featured in the anthologies, Over Land, Over Sea: Poems for those seeking refuge (Five Leaves Publications, 2015) and Welcome to Leicester (Dahlia Publishing, 2016).

Which were the most challenging?

For the original poem, translating the images into a poem that had noted the suffering without pity. I also wanted to mark the resilience and hope that carried people on - a hope and resilience that I have to say, in hindsight, I don't think we've honoured.

I was still working on the poem after it was accepted so when the proofs came through for checking I agonised about a middle connecting line and only got the revised version in a few hours before the deadline.

For Journeys in Translation, the challenge was being asked questions about what I had mistakenly thought was a finished poem by the translators. Different languages didn't have the words or phrases that I used, for example, or some required gender-specific words when I'd deliberately left the gender of the subject of "Yalla" open.

With the BSL version, it was having to cast aside elements that had worked in the poem to enable the BSL signer to translate phrases into expressions. Each time I had to return to my original images and enter into a new dialogue to answer the question, "What exactly are you trying to say?"

Trevor Wright's poem “Yalla”, Over Land, Over Sea: Poems for those seeking refuge (Five Leaves Publications, 2015) p.94. Translated into Farsi by Mina Minnai.

What would you say is the value of initiatives like Journeys in Translation?

That's the hardest of these questions!

Over Land, Over Sea raised money for refugee charities and profiled a wider range of responses to the refugee 'crisis' than were available to us in the media. So Journeys in Translation has prolonged the shelf-life and spirit of the original anthology, brought people together, provided a sense of connection, contribution and collaboration. There's value in that alone.

Journeys in Translation also gives those Over Land, Over Sea poems extra reach, pushing them out to new communities, and is doing so in different forms, morphing in reaction to new circumstances so mirroring the struggles of people across generations. How much value that adds is probably best decided by others.

Editor's Note:

Journeys in Translation aims to facilitate cross- and inter-cultural conversations around the themes of home, belonging and refuge.

The project encourages people who are bilingual or multilingual to have a go at translating 13 of the 101 poems from Over Land: Over Sea: Poems for those seeking refuge (Five Leaves Publications, 2015) from English into other languages and to share the translations, and reflections on the exercise on blogs, in letters and emails to family and friends, and on social media.

So far, the 13 poems that are being used as part of the project have been translated into languages that include Italian, German, Shona, Spanish, Bengali, British Sign Language, Farsi, Finnish, French, Turkish and Welsh. Currently, over 20 people from all over the world are working on the translations. More translations and more languages are on the way.

In Leicester, Journeys in Translation will culminate in an event that is going to be held on September 30 as part of Everybody's Reading 2017. During the event the original poems and translations will be read, discussed and displayed.

Over Land, Over Sea: Poems for Those Seeking Refuge (Five Leaves Publications, 2015) was edited by Kathleen Bell, Emma Lee and Siobhan Logan and is being sold to raise funds for Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Leicester City of Sanctuary and the Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Refugee Forum.

Copies of the anthology are available from Five Leaves Bookshop (Nottingham).

More information on how Over Land, Over Sea came about is available here.

Interview _ Penny Jones

Penny Jones is a writer from Leicestershire.

She has been published by Fox Spirit Books, Factor Fiction Press, Five Leaves Publications, and Dahlia Publishing. Among other writers' conventions and conferences, she attends the monthly meet up of Leicester Writes.

In this interview, Penny Jones talks about her writing, Over Land, Over Sea and Journeys in Translation.

How would you describe the writing that you do?

I'm new to writing, so at the moment I write anything and everything. I find writing really hard, but find procrastinating really easy, so writing in different styles and genres means that I can try and fool my brain when it is telling me to give up.

I have recently finished the first draft of a novel, and throughout the process all I wanted to do was write the short story I had been commissioned to write; then when I was writing that, all I wanted to do was write the screenplay for the course I was attending, and now I'm doing that all I want to do is go back to re-writing the novel.

Who or what has had the most influence on you as a writer?

I read for pleasure, and admire writers who manage to take big issues and make them accessible through fiction.

I don't tend to stick to one style of literature and enjoy finding new writers, so each year I take up a different reading challenge; for example one year I made my way through the alphabet, another year all the authors had to be from different countries.

I want my writing to be as well rounded and diverse as possible, and so I want as wide an influence of subjects and authors as possible.

How have your personal experiences influenced your writing?

I very much put myself into each and every character I write about, especially my flaws. I like my characters to be well rounded, so I look at my experiences and use those to try and see how I would react to a situation. Also, my background as a psychiatric nurse helps as I can utilise the skills and knowledge that I use as a nurse, to empathetically see how my characters are feeling and how they would react; the protagonist in my novel is a young boy, so his reaction to events will be drastically different to my own.

What has been your most significant achievement as a writer so far?

My most significant achievement so far was my first commissioned piece, which was for a charity zine called Do Something by Factor Fiction Press. The first time you are asked to contribute to something, rather than sending in to an open submission, feels amazing.

How did you get involved with Journeys in Translation?

I felt very strongly about supporting Syrian refugees, so when I saw a post on Facebook, where they were looking for poems for a charity anthology I knew that I had to at least send them something, even though I hadn't written any poetry since my school days.

My poem "What's in a name?" was accepted for the anthology Over Land, Over Sea: Poems for those seeking refuge by Five Leaves Publications, and following on from that one of the editors, Emma Lee, asked if it could be included in a project to bring the message to as many people as possible through translation.

Penny Jones' poem, "What's in a Name?", on the pavement at the Leicester Against War / Leicester for Peace vigil that, since December 2015, is held every Friday at the Clock Tower in Leicester in solidarity with people everywhere who are bearing the brunt of war and those who are seeking refuge.

Which were the easiest aspects of the work you put into the project?

The easiest aspects of the work, was the idea for the poem. I can only really write poetry if I already have an idea in mind, and for this project it was already clear in my mind, that I wanted to look at humanising refugees.

I had seen and heard many people using the terms refugee and immigrant interchangeably, and it angered me that not only did people not understand the difference between someone who was a refugee and someone who was an immigrant; but also that these people who were dying had become faceless and nameless. So I wanted my poem to show that these were people, they were someone's son, daughter, brother, or sister.

Which were the most challenging?

The most challenging aspect of "What's in a name?" was that although the letter "E" is the most common letter used in England, it is the least common in Syria. This is a major issue when you are writing an acrostic using the word refugee, so finding three Syrian names that began with "E" was really difficult; especially as I wanted to use the name's meaning as the crutch for each line of the poem.

It took hours to find three Syrian names that began with "E", and I only then managed it because some Arabic names that are spelt with an "I" have alternative spellings that start with "E". "What's in a name" took about 10 hours to write, but 9 hours was just trying to find those three names.

Penny Jones' poem, "What's in a Name?", Over Land, Over Sea: Poems for those seeking refuge (Five Leaves Publications, 2015) p.5. Translated into Bengali by Rinita Banerjee‎.

What would you say is the value of initiatives like Journeys in Translation?

The value to initiatives like Journeys in Translation, is that you can get the message out to as many people as possible.

Language is a barrier that we all face, but if we can share our stories and our beliefs it can be a barrier we can peep over, shake hands, and discuss our differences, rather than remain hidden behind.

Editor's Note:

Journeys in Translation aims to facilitate cross- and inter-cultural conversations around the themes of home, belonging and refuge.

The project encourages people who are bilingual or multilingual to have a go at translating 13 of the 101 poems from Over Land: Over Sea: Poems for those seeking refuge (Five Leaves Publications, 2015) from English into other languages and to share the translations, and reflections on the exercise on blogs, in letters and emails to family and friends, and on social media.

So far, the 13 poems that are being used as part of the project have been translated into languages that include Italian, German, Shona, Spanish, Bengali, British Sign Language, Farsi, Finnish, French, Turkish and Welsh. Currently, over 20 people from all over the world are working on the translations. More translations and more languages are on the way.

In Leicester, Journeys in Translation will culminate in an event that is going to be held on September 30 as part of Everybody's Reading 2017. During the event the original poems and translations will be read, discussed and displayed.

Over Land, Over Sea: Poems for Those Seeking Refuge (Five Leaves Publications, 2015) was edited by Kathleen Bell, Emma Lee and Siobhan Logan and is being sold to raise funds for Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Leicester City of Sanctuary and the Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Refugee Forum.

Copies of the anthology are available from Five Leaves Bookshop (Nottingham).

More information on how Over Land, Over Sea came about is available here.