[Interview] Catherine Czerkawska

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

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

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

When did you start writing?

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

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

How would you describe your writing?

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

Who is your target audience?

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

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

Which authors influenced you most?

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

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

How have your own personal experiences influenced your writing?

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

What are your main concerns as a writer?

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

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

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

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

What are the biggest challenges that you face?

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

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

Do you write every day?

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

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

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

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

How many books have you written so far?

Novels

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

Non-fiction:

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

Published Plays:

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

How would you describe your latest book?

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

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

How long did it take you to write the book?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which aspects of the work did you enjoy most?

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

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

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

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

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

In what way is it similar to the others?

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

What will your next book be about?

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

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

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

Related books:

,,

Related articles:

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

[Interview] Charles Derber

Charles Derber is a professor of Sociology at Boston College, a private university in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, in the United States.

So far, he has written and published 12 books, among them, The Wilding of America (Worth Publishers, 2006); Hidden Power (Berrett-Koehler, 2005); People Before Profit (Picador, 2003) and Corporate Nation (St. Martin's Griffin, 2000).

In this interview, Charles Derber talks about the factors which compel him to write.

When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?

I was trying to get tenure at a major university. That required a book. I also found writing something like a meditation. It calmed me and centered me. I also found it a way to think and communicate about issues that I was passionate about.

My first book took five years and I started in the early 1970s. It’s called The Pursuit of Attention and it’s about who talks and who listens in ordinary conversation -- and focuses on how people subtly shift the topic of conversation to themselves. It became a classic and Oxford published a 20th commemorative edition a few years ago, selling more than 70,000 copies.

How would you describe your writing?

I write idea-driven non-fiction books focused on politics, culture and social justice. I try to write simply and clearly about issues that matter. I think of myself as a public intellectual, a relatively small breed of writers who move out of their technical specialties and influence the public.

My target audience is the literate general public, especially those interested in the link between personal life and politics.

I want my writing to help shape the public conversation about moral values, economic justice, and how to change the world. My audience includes social movements for justice and the activists in these movements who are trying to understand how change happens, as well as Democratic Party activists and thinkers who are trying to make the Democratic Party more of a serious change agent.

Who influenced you most?

Originally, America’s most famous 20th century sociologist, named C. Wright Mills. He defined sociology as the study of the relation between private troubles and public issues. Since then, I would say writers like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn have had major impacts on me. I would say movements as well as individuals influence me: the peace and environment movements, the women’s movement, the labor, civil rights and participatory democratic movements.

How have your personal experiences influenced your writing?

I’ve been writing for thirty years and I’ve always written about values and issues that affect me personally.

My experience as an activist in the sixties was a formative event, as I developed a critique of American capitalism and hope about how to change it. My experience in the South as a civil rights activist thirty years ago, and then an anti-war activist, had a major influence.

My relation with two groups -- students and social justice activists outside university -- keep me alive and informed. Students ask the right questions and activists are often the smartest, most knowledgeable critics.

What are your main concerns as a writer?

As already noted, I want to write about serious issues in a simple and electric way that engages the general public. It’s a challenge to straddle popular and serious non-fiction writing. It’s a special niche that a profit-driven publishing industry does not encourage as it looks only for the celebrity or how-to dumbed down book.

What are the biggest challenges that you face?

It’s to keep up hope in a period of war and depression, of mass corruption and propaganda. And that means sustaining my own hope and optimism as well as nurturing those feelings in my readers.

Do you write everyday?

If I’m working on a book, I usually work everyday. I used to write on the morning; now my academic schedule makes it easier for me to write later in the day. The main thing is to have a few hours of uninterrupted time to draft a few pages each day.

What is your latest book about?

The latest is The New Feminized Majority: How Democrats Can Change America With Women’s Values. Paradigm Publishers released the book in February, 2008; it’s very time right now for the elections. Katherine Adam, formerly one of my undergraduates at Boston College, is the first author, and the book evolved from her senior honors thesis. This is very rare and a great accomplishment for her.

The book offers a serious treatment of the relation between women’s values and political change, as well as a strategy for how Democrats can win and change the country. It is a dramatic shift from the focus on Evangelical Christians as the only “values voters” in America.

Paradigm was a great choice because it could get the book out to the general public very quickly as both a trade book, and also as a book for students in college courses. The publisher and founder of the press, Dean Birkenkamp, is an intellectual who understands ideas and authors -- and is willing to devote a great deal of time to the books he publishes.

It is a small press, so it doesn’t have the clout and finances of the biggest [New York] N.Y. houses with which I have also worked. But what Paradigm lacks in those departments, it more than compensates in the close, collaborative and long-term strategy it develops to get its books out to the world. I haven’t felt any disappointments and recommend them enthusiastically.

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

Writing itself is always demanding. Working with Katherine made it a lot of fun. The difficulty was mainly timing -- getting the book out quickly enough to ride the wave of this year’s amazing election. And then the hard work of publicizing the book with the publisher is very time consuming, although also very rewarding.

Which aspects did you enjoy most?

In this case, it was writing with Katherine, who has accomplished something as an undergraduate that rarely happens in America. It’s also the fact that the book has such a provocative and important argument.

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

The unusual collaboration with Kathernine I’ve already described. Also the intense focus on gender as a major source of morality and change in politics.

In what way is it similar?

Like all my work, it is directed to issues of political and social justice; it is popularly written; it is timely; it has important historical elements; it can help transform the public debate about where America and the Democratic Party and social movements can go.

What will your next book be about?

I think it might have a new focus on the relation between the environmental crisis, the progressive movements and the new existential crisis facing the world as a whole. But I haven’t decided for sure -- I have many topics rattling around my brain each time I think about starting a new project and it takes a while to sort them out.

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

I’d say it’s the entire corpus of my work that moves the conversation on social justice a bit further in the U.S. Each book adds a different piece of the picture and I feel a great sense of satisfaction about each of them.

How did you get there?

Obsession, hard work, polishing the craft of good writing, and the misfortune of living in a troubled world that is in desperate need of healing through creative new thinking and action.

[Interview_2] Brian Wainwright

Novelist Brian Wainwright has a deep-seated interest in the middle ages, especially the 14th and 15th centuries; the House of York and the era of Richard II.

He has published two novels, The Adventures of Alianore Audley (Bewrite Books, 2005; Jacobyte Books of Australia, 2002) and Within the Fetterlock (Trivium Publishing, 2004).

Currently he is working on several other book-related projects.

In this, the second of three interviews, Wainwright speaks about the factors that pushed him towards becoming a writer.

When did you decide you wanted to write?

Very early in life; even as a young child I enjoyed making up stories and writing them down. However, it took me a long time before I thought of writing as something that could be done for an audience, as opposed to just for me. It was even longer before I plucked up the courage to submit something for publication. For many years the idea of doing so scared me stiff.

Who influenced you most?

A wide array of writers; if I wrote them all down it would be a very big paragraph. Among writers of the past, Robert Graves and Philip Lindsey spring to mind. Current writers I admire include Elizabeth Chadwick and Sharon K Penman.

What do you admire most about these writers?

I don’t think I have ever read anyone who could write first-person historical novels as well as Graves. He’s always absorbing, and he always convinces, introducing historical detail without making a tedious show of it. I Claudius and Wife to Mr Milton are probably my favourites.

Philip Lindsey always wrote with passion, and you could sense his love of history. He was a great inspiration to me when I started writing. I think his London Bridge is Burning is the one I remember best; it was rather a disjointed tale, but there were some wonderful characters in there, and some unusual aspects of medieval life.

I can bracket Elizabeth Chadwick and Sharon Penman together. First, they write beautifully, but also they go to a great deal of trouble with their research and it’s rare if ever that I’m hit with the shock of an anachronism. Penman’s The Reckoning is an incredibly powerful novel about the ending of the Welsh Wars of Independence. It’s not an easy read in some ways -- there’s a lot of tragedy in there -- but it grips all the way to the end.

Elizabeth Chadwick just goes from strength to strength. Her book about William Marshal, The Greatest Knight which came out a couple of years back, is simply one of the best historical novels I have ever read.

Have your personal experiences influenced your writing in any way?

Not consciously, but I suspect there must be some sub-conscious influences. For example, I worked in the Education side of Local Government for a long time, and that taught me everything I ever need to know about court intrigue, backstabbing and betrayal.

Do you write everyday?

No, I don’t write every day.

At present I am rather idle and intermittent in my work; downright unprofessional in fact. I write when I feel like it and go on until I’ve had enough. This could be ten minutes, or all day.

One of the things I am trying to persuade myself to do is work a little more regularly, establishing more of a routine. I haven’t quite got into the attitude of treating writing as a job (which it now is) rather than just a hobby.

What are the biggest challenges that you face?

My own nature -- my tendency to go haring off after interesting side lines in my research instead of sticking religiously to the task of writing and getting a project completed.

I deal with this by slapping myself mentally around the head, reflecting that it would be nice to have published more than two books, and that I ought to damn well get on with it!

Elsewhere you have said you think history has misjudged King Richard II. Why is this?

Richard came to the throne at 10. That’s a bad start in itself, but the country was practically bankrupt, and engaged in what had become a losing war with the French. They were raiding the coast, and planning invasion. Even an adult taking over at such a point in history, even the greatest sovereign imaginable, might have struggled just a little.

Richard wanted peace with France, which was very much against the grain of the times. The trouble was that most of the nobles and gentry wanted war (they thought that they could profit personally from it) but at the same time they didn’t want to pay for it. There really was no way of squaring that circle. Effective wars cost big money – even back then. The English Crown was not rich, the government of Richard’s senile grandfather, Edward III, had run up massive debts, and Richard’s extended family were always looking to take more out of the pot for themselves.

Richard was only twenty when he faced an outright rebellion, led by his own disloyal relatives, the so-called Appellants, that almost deposed him and resulted in the judicial murder or exile of the majority of his advisers. From that point onward he slowly rebuilt the position of the Crown, trying to do what Tudor monarchs are praised for by historians, putting the nobility in its place. He at last achieved a 28-year truce with France, and he was also one of the very few Englishmen (and I think the only English sovereign) to fight a successful war in Ireland. His foreign policy was advanced, and praised even by historians who don’t otherwise rate him. Although not an intellectual himself he was a patron of the arts, and his court was possibly the most cultured in Europe. Although he is sometimes accused of ‘tyranny’ his political executions were few and far between, whether you compare him to the Appellants or to his successor, Henry IV (Bolingbroke).

Richard was once approached by a soothsayer, who predicted that unless he changed his ways he would be deposed. Richard laughed at him and sent him on his way. A few years later the same man approached Henry IV, and told him pretty much the same thing. Bolingbroke had him summarily executed on the spot. Nothing better defines the difference between the two cousins.

I’m not trying to suggest that Richard is up there with Elizabeth I. At the end of the day he was not a ‘great’ king, and he had many personal and political flaws. But I like him! And I think he’s underrated. Most of the things he was accused of at his deposition could have been said of his successor, or indeed of any English medieval king. I think it’s telling that within three years Henry was at least as unpopular as Richard had ever been, facing rebellion at home and with fighting going on in France, Scotland, Ireland and Wales all at the same time. It was not an easy business, running medieval England. The difference is, frankly, that Henry survived. With a great deal of luck along the way, he even managed to die in his bed.

Related articles:

• Brian Wainwright {Interview_3], Conversations with Writers, February 6, 2008
• 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