Interview _ Siobhan Logan

Siobhan Logan is a storyteller and poet.

Her first collection of poems and non-fiction, Firebridge to Skyshore: A Northern Lights Journey (original plus, 2009), was sponsored by auroral scientists at the University of Leicester. It was performed at the British Science Museum, the National Space Centre and Ledbury Poetry festival.

Her second collection, Mad, Hopeless & Possible: Shackleton’s Endurance Expedition, was also published by Original Plus Press, whilst Philae’s Book of Hours was published on the European Space Agency’s website.

Logan's poetry is widely published in magazines and short stories appear in various anthologies, including Wednesday’s Child (Factor Fiction, forthcoming 2020), Leicester Writes Anthology 2017 (Dahlia Books) and Mrs Rochester’s Attic (Mantle Press 2017). In 2014, she led a WW1 writing residency for 14-18 NOW and in 2015 co-edited a Five Leaves Books anthology for refugee solidarity, Over Land, Over Sea.

She is co-director of indie publisher, Space Cat Press, who published her poetry/ non-fiction collection Desert Moonfire: The Men Who Raced to Space in 2019. When not being led astray by stories or dodging the claws of an errant ‘space cat’, Logan teaches Creative Writing at De Montfort University.

In this interview, Siobhan Logan talks about poetry, Desert Moonfire and the race to space.

How would you describe Desert Moonfire: The Men Who Raced To Space?

Desert Moonfire is a collection of poetry and non-fiction about the era when humans became a space-faring species. The narrative centres on two scientists, Sergei Korolev and Wernher von Braun, who designed the rockets that got us there. These two rivals from either side of the Iron Curtain mirrored each other’s lives in uncanny ways, as they struggled to realise their dreams of spaceflight. And it turns out to be a rather dark tale with our protagonists passing through gulags and concentration camps as well as nuclear near misses along the way.

The rocket technology was very much a product of superpower conflict, with the Cold War driving the whole Sixties space project. So that stark front cover depicting a night-time rocket launch captures the mood of Desert Moonfire’s story – both ‘chilling and exhilarating.’ However, I did also get interested in how science fiction first sparked these impossible imaginings for early space pioneers. And indeed, how scientists eventually used sci-fi films and TV shows to harness the public’s support for realising such costly and dangerous ventures.

What influences does Desert Moonfire draw on?

I’m never aware of particular influences when I write. But years of reading – non-fiction, poetry, fiction – no doubt seeped into the boggy ground that I worked over for this project. And sometimes got lost in. It took me seven years, all told. Lots of biographies and books about the Space Race. Also immersing myself in films, TV shows and other art of the period. Because this book did feel rather like writing historical fiction.

I loved going back to read the sci-fi of Jules Verne, HG Wells and others and watching obscure Russian sci-fi films as well as Hollywood B movies etc.

The book began with a sequence of poems which are imaginative re-enactments of real-life events. My friend Rod Duncan has described these as ‘non-fiction poems’. But I approach the material as a storyteller and I’ve been drawn to other poets who write in narrative form. So I think of Susan Richardson’s marvellous sequences about Arctic explorers in Creatures of the Intertidal Zone (Cinnamon Press, 2007) or Lydia Towsey’s The Venus Papers (Burning Eye Books 2015) where the goddess washes ashore in the UK as a Mediterranean migrant. Or the poems of Emma Lee who unfolds tightly compressed narratives in a single poem with great delicacy. Like Desert Moonfire, Lee often draws upon true-life histories, whether WW2 children in the Blitz or women navigating refugee camps more recently. (See The Significance of a Dress, Arachne Press 2020). So yes, I enjoy poetry collections with lots of storytelling and big thematic sweeps, whether historical, mythical or contemporary.

Why does poetry matter?

Why does any creative work matter? Perhaps the instinct to create might counter that to destroy. Or at least keep us sane.

At a time when the world seems to be in free-fall, when we are racked by political crises, a global pandemic and the accelerating crisis of climate change, stories have never been more important. They are at the heart of who we are and how we envision our future as well as our past. They transmit our values and generate the stuff of identity.

My book about the Sixties Space Race came out in 2019 just as the world was moving into a second Space Race. Many countries and companies are chasing to colonise the Moon’s South Pole and its buried supplies of water and minerals. It’s worth looking back to understand the dynamics that drove the last Space Race and ask whether we want to write a different narrative this time round.

Poems to me are stories but in a sung form. Carol Ann Duffy talks about poems singing the stuff of our lives, the everyday as well as the big life events. Like the people singing in deserted streets or calling from balconies, poems will be passed across our spaces of isolation. They remind us of the hidden music of our lives and relationships.

Which were the most difficult aspects of the work you put into Desert Moonfire?

The problematic aspects of the work always generate the most interesting material and push you to dig deep creatively. With non-fiction, it’s about doing masses of research and then compressing these large, complex narratives into a few chapters that each have their own distinct story arc. Trying to make sure the research doesn’t suffocate the narrative. So I’m using novelistic techniques to give pace and urgency to the story of two men caught up in this superpower to chase to the Moon.

For Wernher von Braun, the Prussian baron, it was always a matter of opportunism. Pitching his projects first to the Nazis and then to the American state, to win a chance at ‘the Big Time’, as he called it. But Sergei Korolev faced an ongoing struggle to survive the upheavals of Russia’s Civil war, Stalinist Purges and Soviet realpolitik.

Mostly this comes across as a very male world, as my title suggests. It’s typified by von Braun’s engineers decorating their V-2 test rockets with the logo of a naked woman astride a crescent moon. Women surfaced in sci-fi films as alien sirens or glamorous astronauts but seemed confined to the spectators’ stadium or the back office in the real space programme. The truth was more complex of course. It’s only recently that NASA’s begun to acknowledge and celebrate long-buried accounts of its female and Afro-American ‘Hidden Figures’.

The core of my narrative remains two men from either side of the Cold war locked into the machine of political conflict. But I did explore their relationships with women and wanted those voices to come through in certain poems.

The challenge with the poetry was to find a human centre, given this context of technology and global politics. While the non-fiction chapters conjure up vast social forces at work, the poems open intimate windows into the two men’s lives. They put us right there, in the immediacy of their world.

Often with poetry, it’s about finding a surprising metaphor or image that illuminates the scene. So when I was writing about Korolev sitting out the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, I came across a brief reference to his wife Nina serving up a watermelon. What a gift that was! The whole poem "Martian Watermelon" was built around that footnote, from the red fleshy fruit to the sound of the pips. His men had been trying to launch a rocket to Mars when their launch pad was taken over by the military to ready a nuclear missile for firing.

By contrast, I’d read several accounts of the night the secret police arrested him in the Thirties but couldn’t find out what music he put on the record player while he waited for the knock on the door. That gave me freedom to invent. The spiky rhythms of a tango inspired two poems about the police harassment that dogged his career. So these unexpected details pulled me into their world and I hope that works for the reader too.

What sets the book apart from other things you’ve written? And in what way is it similar to the others

Desert Moonfire is similar to my previous collections, such as Firebridge to Skyshore: A Northern Lights Journey, in that it combines poetry and non-fiction with a strong narrative structure and touches on science, history and politics along the way.

My chapbook Mad, Hopeless & Possible: Shackleton’s Endurance Expedition told an equally dramatic story of two linked Antarctic expeditions during 1914-17 when notions of empire-building and heroism collided in devastating ways. That was another all-male adventure shaped by the somewhat toxic ideologies of the time.

Yet Desert Moonfire is a scaled-up narrative. It starts off discussing the 19th century science-fiction which inspired a generation of rocketeers and rounds off their story in the 1970s, a century later. So yes, the ambition of this book marked a shift for me. I was in no hurry with it, wanting the book to find its own form and the right publishing home too.

Where Firebridge and Mad, Hopeless & Possible both centred on journeying across wild frozen landscapes, Desert Moonfire has a biographical impulse, tracing the life journeys of two men who lived through extraordinary times.

I have noticed there’s various styles and voices here, including poems about deserts and cars and movies, shape poems inspired by rocket technology, dramatic monologues in the voice of bystanders and loved ones, poems of gulags and concentration camps as well as space modules and two lunar book enders. So hopefully something for everyone.

How did you chose a publisher for the book? Why this publisher? And what advantages or disadvantages has this presented?

For some time, I weighed up whether to tilt this book more towards the popular non-fiction market, given the expanding scale of the narrative. Or alternatively to strip it down to a poetry chapbook with a tight focus on these two men’s intertwined lives. I researched possible publishers from both angles. In the end, I decided I wanted to try something different with this book. I knew from my previous collections that there is an audience for this kind of non-fiction and poetry combination but it is a niche audience that I encountered mainly by giving talks, shows and face-to-face readings.

With the sci-fi and space science strand in Desert Moonfire, I was thinking of taking this new book to SFF conventions too.

So I decided to set up my own imprint, Space Cat Press, with an eye on further space-themed books I have on the back-burner. And I was lucky enough to embark on that as a collaboration with freelance editor Darragh Logan Davies. She is the Kaylee of our Firefly rocket and without her, we’d never have got into orbit.

Having got that far, we considered the possibility of using our press to also publish work by other writers, in the form of space-themed anthologies. In that sense, Space Cat Press is a hybrid, combining an indie-author venture with micro-publishing at the non-commercial end of small presses. It’s enabled me to structure the Desert Moonfire book in exactly the way I wanted to and I’m thrilled with the design Darragh came up with. I love the feel and look of the finished article. Plus I’ve learnt a huge amount about how book production and marketing works.

The disadvantages are it takes a lot of time and energy. That’s definitely slowing my writing progress on new projects. We did rush into the anthology rather quickly after publishing Desert Moonfire, so it’s hard to get on with marketing that whilst editing our Race to the Stars submissions. But it’s been so much fun and a real inspiration to work with stories, poems and flash fiction by other writers and watching the anthology take shape. Everything from detailed structural and copy edits to budgeting to working out the brand of the book. And soon we’ll be getting to grips with e-publishing and doing virtual launches as well. Quite the small-press adventure.

What will your next book be about? And, what else are you working on?

Well, I’ll have editors’ credits on our Space Cat anthology, (working title Race to the Stars) which should be out in e-book format by the summer of 2020.

I then have a small chapbook lined up for the SCP roster with a sequence of poems about the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission to chase a comet. An earlier digital version of this, Philae’s Book of Hours, appeared on the ESA website in 2015.

There’s another sprawling non-fiction book on the back-burner about those Space Race sci-fi films I got so engrossed with whilst researching Desert Moonfire. But on the front burner, right now, I’ve dividing my time between a poetry chapbook about my father (who passed away recently) and a dystopian fantasy novel which will probably develop into a trilogy - if I can ever get this first book edited into a readable shape!

So in between teaching creative writing at De Montfort University and running a small press publishing outfit, there are plenty of writing projects competing for my time.

See also:

● Interview _ Siobhan Logan, Conversations with Writers, February 20, 2010
● Interview _ Siobhan Logan, Conversations with Writers, 4 June 2007
● Interview _ Siobhan Logan, Conversations with Writers, 11 April 2007

[Book Launch] Mad, Hopeless & Possible

On October 27, 2011, the Adult Education College in Leicester was the venue of the launch of Siobhan Logan's latest poetry chapbook, Mad, Hopeless & Possible: Shackleton's Endurance Expedition (original plus, 2011).

The title of the chapbook comes from Sir Ernest Shackleton himself who rated applicants for his legendary 1914 Antarctic Expedition as "Mad, Hopeless & Possible". The chapbook also weaves in the hidden shadow-story of the Ross Sea Party, his supply team, who were marooned in the white wilderness just as war consumed Europe.

Leicestershire author Mark Goodwin says, "Siobhan Logan's Mad, Hopeless & Possible lifts the reader out of their warm armchair to place them among the stubborn men of Shackleton's 1914 Trans-Antarctic Expedition.

"This history of polar exploration is at once effectively informative and dramatically powerful: smooth, economic prose offset against haunting poetic soliloquies. It's as if Logan has pulled desperate men's voices out of sub-zero winds."

Related articles:

• Interview _ Siobhan Logan, Conversations with Writers, February 20, 2010
• Interview _ Siobhan Logan, Conversations with Writers, June 4, 2007
• Interview _ Siobhan Logan, Conversations with Writers, April 11, 2007

Interview _ Siobhan Logan

Siobhan Logan is a teacher, a trade unionist, a poet and a storyteller.

Her first published book, Firebridge to Skyshore: A Northern Lights Journey, (Original Plus, 2009) weaves together the science, myths, legends and folk stories behind the aurora borealis.

The book gives a unique and near magical perspective of life under the Northern Lights.

In this interview, Siobhan Logan talks about her writing:

When did you start writing?

Well, I wrote as a child, of course. I remember making up plays for my siblings and friends in the school playground. My sister tells me I was always making things up for them. And bedtime stories. So oral storytelling probably came first. Then later, poems, stories, songs.

But I had fallen out of the habit of writing when I came back to it more seriously in my mid-thirties, realising I needed an alternative life to my busy teaching job and all the union/political activism. I needed that interior space of writing, the imagined landscape and voices other than my own muttering away in my head. And, for a few years, that's what it gave me.

I set about writing first a collection of short stories, to see if I could write and what about. Then I worked through two novels, and got to the point of sending the second one, Northlands, out to publishers. This featured the fairytale, The Snow Queen, in a modern narrative about a daughter whose Irish mother has gone missing.

I knew absolutely nothing about the industry but somehow I got an Irish independent publisher interested in reading more. It didn't come to anything. But at that point, I did a short course at the Writing School Leicester, and joined Leicester Writers' Club. This was a huge leap forward because I began to learn about both the craft of writing and how to engage with the industry of agents, publishers etc. Being part of this community of writers not only helped my sense of purpose but for the first time, gave me an audience for my writing. Which really does transform your writing, I think.

How would you describe the work you are doing?

These days I think of myself as a writer, rather than a poet or aspiring novelist. I often describe myself as a storyteller because performance has become very important in my work and I think storytelling underpins everything I do. Just like that child in the playground. And I'd like to try other forms too -- I definitely want to have a go at Radio plays when I can. And then a major part of my first book, Firebridge to Skyshore: A Northern Lights Journey, was the prose. I enjoyed researching and writing articles about the mythology and science of the Northern Lights and travelogue feature there too, along with the poems that I am most known for.

Audiences have been very diverse. This subject, the aurora borealis, has such a pull and brings in people who would never come to a traditional 'poetry event'. So far they've included astronomers, Women's Institute members, local radio listeners, museum visitors and primary school children, and I love that mix. But I've also published poetry and stories in the small press literary magazines. You could say I hop between page and stage.

Do you write everyday?

I do write everyday. I'm usually into my study by 6.30 am and that's my best time for writing. Before my head is filled with the clutter of the day, when I'm still close to that underworld of dream that writers tap into. I have a couple of hours of just being wrapped in the writing, 'rapt' even, when it's good.

The one day a week I don't teach mostly gets filled up with the 'business' of being a writer; e-mails, blogging, meeting people to plan new projects, rehearsals, networking, all of that. But I'm a great organiser so I like that multi-faceted aspect of the job. One minute I'm designing a flyer or webpage, the next I'm editing a poem or researching a topic. It's all creative.

Which concerns inform the writing you are doing at present?

In my book, Firebridge to Skyshore, I was exploring the myths and science behind the Northern Lights. This started as a commission where I was asked to write about the legends of the lights for the visual artist/ writer, Jackie Stanley.

Ancient stories have always fascinated me. They have a different shape, even a different morality, to our modern narratives, being often highly symbolic, probably because they've arisen out of an oral storytelling culture.

I was very drawn to studying the indigenous peoples of the Arctic. Despite all the pressures to modernise, there is a remarkable continuity of culture in pockets of these northern countries. The Saamis, for instance, have lived in Northern Scandinavia since the end of the last Ice Age. The family of the reindeer herder I met still lived an existence very bound up with the annual migrations of mass reindeer herds. Traditionally, all of these Arctic peoples lived quite nomadic lives and I was interested to learn how they coped with colonisation, often quite repressive, by the nation-states which moved into their territories.

What would you say connects the various aspects of the work you are doing?

I find a big overlap emerging in my latest writing project. In this, I am looking at themes around migration, hoping to draw together memories of my own family coming over from Northern Ireland when I was six, with accounts from archaeology of the ancient migration of our species out of Africa across the continents, and also stories of modern migrants and refugees. People on the move, displaced, resilient, incredibly adaptive.

It's early days in this writing but already I'm finding myself reflecting on how essentially human all these activities are: walking, travelling, cooking, sewing, singing, storytelling, making marks in the landscape, rooting down in new places.

Place is often a starting-point for me, especially the North, so I was thrilled to visit the Arctic as part of my research for the Northern Lights book. But when I arrived in Tromso, North Norway, I found the snow and ice I'd imagined as a child, had been swept away by unseasonal heavy rains. In December 2007, they were experiencing more like summer temperatures. So the story of my journey included the immediate impact of global warming on this landscape. I think that's a subject I will certainly return to, especially as I am now teaming up with another writer/performer, Susan Richardson, to form the Polar Poets.

We plan to offer events, talks and workshops to audiences across the country, focusing on themes around the Arctic, including exploration, wildlife and climate change. I am really looking forward to this collaboration.

We are starting with science festivals and science is also a strong feature of my Northern Lights work. I find the scientific narrative of the aurora borealis every bit as wondrous as the legends of the northern tribes: the journey of sun-dust through the far reaches of space into our atmosphere to end in this collision of light and colour, the aurora.

Which were the most challenging aspects of the project?

One of the great challenges of the work was to find a language that could realise the physics involved whilst fusing that with the mythological response. My interest in the science of the skies was deepened when I met with physicists from the Radio & Space Plasma Physics Group, at the University of Leicester. This relationship began as one of sponsorship as they helped me to visit the Arctic, including an auroral research base in the mountains near Tromso. But it has led to some exciting collaborations.

Dr Darren Wright joined me for an evening about the aurora at London Science Museum's Dana Centre, where we moved between poetry, physics and the wonderful 3-D films of Brian McClave. This proved such a popular event that it was reprised in September 2008 and we are now bringing this Northern Lights Spectacular to the National Space Centre in Leicester February 2010.

I'm thrilled to appearing in this museum with its rockets and space exhibits. Space travel crept into the imagery of my auroral poems and is a theme I'd like to write more about.

Darren and I have also been booked to appear at the Ledbury Poetry Festival 2010, so the pairing of poetry and physics continues to appeal.

Appearing to a packed audience at the Science Museum has definitely been a highlight of my career as a performer. As has staging my own full-length show, Stories Drummed to Polar Skies, at the Richard Attenborough Centre in Leicester. This allowed me to realise my dream of giving the stories and poems a theatrical treatment where I could use music, lights, images and even costume, to bring these Arctic voices to life.

But, as a writer, the biggest achievement has been to find a publisher who has faith in the work and is prepared to invest hard-earned resources in it. Poetry, especially from a new writer, tends to rely on the small press.

How did you find a publisher for the book?

I was very lucky to stumble across Sam Smith of Original Plus. He published a number of my Northern Lights poems first in his magazine, The Journal, and then in the summer of 2009, brought out my collection of prose and poetry, Firebridge to Skyshore: A Northern Lights Journey.

From what I understand, it's unusual for me to have been able to have so much say in the book, from cover design to the inclusion of footnotes and illustrations. I was able to commission my sister, Dolores Logan, to produce these wonderful woodcuts and the distinctive monoprint on the cover.

And I know this combination of prose, poetry, travelogue and illustrations has made the book much more appealing to a readership that don't usually pick up poetry.

Original Plus is a very small press -- just Sam and his computer -- and it was always clear that the book would be sold largely through face-to-face contact with audiences at my events. That approach seems to be working well though I also need to promote it more online, too. The traditional bookshop route is a non-starter as they don't stock small-press poetry generally.

How have these experiences affected you as a writer?

All of that means that my understanding of what it is to be a writer has changed radically.

I need to cover the roles that an agent, a designer, a marketing person might usually perform. I'm learning the skills of a producer and stage manager and performer. And now I'm a blogger, regularly writing in this new genre too, and networking on-line. So the challenge is to wear all these hats and still keep the creative writing, in whatever form, at the heart of it.

Did I mention I also spend four and a half days a week on the 'day job' -- teaching English A-Levels at Leicester College? That's how I pay the bills and fund all the writing activities. But however hectic it gets sometimes, I consider myself very lucky indeed to have writing in my life. To have the space to be creative. And when I meet people at events who are excited by the Northern Lights or the poetry and the science, or I hear some feedback from a reader, then the circle is joined. That's what it's all about.

Related resources:

• Author's website
• Author's blog

Related article:

Interview _ Siobhan Logan, Conversations with Writers, June 4, 2007

Interview _ Siobhan Logan

Poetry, Football and the Spirits in the Sky

For centuries, people in the northern hemisphere have been so entranced by aurora borealis, the eerie display of lights that invade the winter skies, that they have woven myths and legends around these lights.

Colour Catchers, an all-star cast poetry performance that will be hosted on December 12, 2006, by Leicestershire poet, Siobhan Logan will be exploring some of these myths and legends.

The performance will revolve around a sequence of 13 poems which range from intimate personal accounts to epic narratives of unearthly journeys.

Siobhan Logan says:

Some of them focus on the science of what we know about the Aurora Borealis. But for most, I've raided this fantastic story-hoard from countries across the Arctic Circle. "Naming the Lights", for instance, is based on the various names used for the lights by people from the Native Americans of Alaska, to the Inuits of Greenland, the Scots, Laplanders, Russians, etc.

She came up with the idea for the sequence of poems after a collaboration with digital artist and writer, Jackie Stanley.

Originally, I was invited to work with the digital artist/writer Jackie Stanley on an exhibition to be shown in the Physics Department of Leicester University. They have scientists studying the Aurora Borealis there. She produced a short film based on one of my poems, "Auroral Football", and it was shown last May at Frog Island Mills.

Eventually the Physics Department's reception area proved unsuitable for a sound installation, but by then, the poems had grown into a major project for Siobhan Logan.

Over the last year, I've developed a sequence of 15 poems — the material was just so rich and diverse, stretching across many countries and cultures.

She was also drawn to the subject because she has always been fascinated by the idea of the North and with how the legends that have evolved around the northern lights seem to connect diverse cultures.

For me, as a child born in Northern Ireland and growing up in Bolton, Northern England, the idea of the North has always had a pull. We all have our own compass, our own poles, but these legends cross our globe and connect it. Perhaps at a time when ice-caps are crumbling, we should re-acquaint ourselves with a North that may be fast disappearing.

She adds that nothing would cheer her more than to wake up to a good hard frost on the morning of the performance.

She observes that although each culture has its own way of reading the shifting colours in the night sky, there are recurring themes.

I was struck by one story that the lights appear when the spirits are playing football! Both Inuits and Native Americans spoke of this.

Another theme she noticed was that, often, the 'sky-land' is seen as a place where ancestors reside and that this believe is still very present in our lives today.

These myths explore life and death, crossing over the boundaries, how we relate to our dead. But they also are about communities transmitting stories orally.

In her own poems, Siobhan Logan found recurring father-son relationships and stories about how generations connect.

So there's a lot about rootedness and home as well as the mystery of nature.

She chose to stage the performance on December 12 because this seemed to be the perfect time for the performance.

Tucked in between the great festivals of Diwali, Eid and Christmas, between the bonfires and fireworks, these myths are about the lights punching through winter's darkness. Even in Leicester, far from the Arctic Circle, people have heard of the Aurora Borealis, seen glimpses in nature programmes. This performance will bring the lights, and the myths surrounding them, home to us.

For the December 12 performance, Siobhan Logan will be acting as the event's host and will be introducing projected images of the lights and knitting it all together with the poetry.

I will be joined by some friends from Leicester Writers' Club, a community of local writers. Rod Duncan, Chris d'Lacey and Maxine Linnell will help me to dramatise the poems, taking different roles and stories. There will be lights and darkness and voices — and in between, we'll share out some cake.

She found researching the myths and legends that are associated with the northern lights to be a rewarding experience.

Personally, the research and writing of the poems has been an inspiring journey, taking my writing in different directions. I feel privileged to have a chance to share these wonderful stories. Hopefully, the performance will be something of a communal affair itself — hence the cake!

Related article:

Interview _ Siobhan Logan, Conversations with Writers, April 11, 2007

Interview _ Siobhan Logan

The Poetry of Mass Movement

Siobhan Logan is one of the most exciting emerging voices in British literature. Some of her work has appeared in A Slice of Cherry Pie, a poetry chapbook anthology edited by Ivy Alvarez and inspired by David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. The anthology is published in the United Kingdom by The Private Press, and in the United States by Half Empty/Half Full.

Beginning in 2005 with “Black Dog,” and followed this year by “The Dead Walk Box,” her stories have received commendations in the annual Leicester and Leicestershire Short Story Contest for two years in a row. In the same year her poem, “The Builder,” was selected for Body and Soul, a poetry anthology published by United Press. She was also awarded the Merit prize for another poem, “Window,” in the Nottingham Open Poetry Competition.

Siobhan Logan has also been invited to work with the visual artist Jackie Stanley on an exhibition on the theme of Aurora Borealis for the Physics Department of Leicester University in a collaborative project fusing visual arts with poetry. She spoke about her poetry and short stories and the novel she is working on and the concerns that unite her work.

Your short story, “Frog Island Lesson,” seems to be a fragment. Is it part of a bigger story?

I am doing some research and making notes on a novel. The novel is set in Leicester and centers on themes of migration. There are two strands in the story I want to explore in it. I want to explore the story of child migrants - about 10 years ago, Margaret Humphreys, a social worker who worked with people who had been adopted, discovered that hundreds of British children were literally deported to institutions in other countries. Some were sent to places like Australia and Canada.

When was this?

In the '20s and '30s. It accelerated after the war and was happening as late as 1967. There was so little understanding of how this would traumatize children. They had a hard time. The stories of what these children went through are heartbreaking. Their records and identities as British children were erased.

How did these stories come out?

Over the last 10 years or so, quite a lot of them have been trying to track their origins and it has been proving to be difficult. I want to pick up on that story and connect it with one on people working with asylum-seekers and immigrants in Leicester. It will be a challenge to weave the two strands together.

Asylum-seekers are in the news a lot. Do you think the image that is being presented of them is accurate?

I see asylum-seekers as people who are already in a very vulnerable position who then face destitution at the hands of government policy here. They have become a political football for our media and political parties who promote the idea that asylum-seekers are somehow sponging off us.

Asylum-seekers are the modern scapegoat - what Jews were in an earlier period or Irish or Asian immigrants after them.

Why do you think there is this scapegoating?

This shambolic government deflects attention from its own shortcomings by trying to criminalize the poor. They deflect people’s worries about inadequate resources in the [National Health Service] NHS or education onto people who come in with almost nothing.

Yet this government pours billions of pounds in pursuing war and destruction elsewhere. There’s a blank cheque when it comes to war in Iraq yet they say we can’t afford decent pensions.

Asylum-seekers are not scroungers?

If you look at places like Leicester, you can see that immigrants who have settled here have made a huge contribution, both economically and culturally, to the city.

It doesn’t make sense to think of immigrants as a drain on resources. Look at Belgrave, where I live - families arrived here decades ago after being expelled from Idi Amin’s Uganda. Fleeing persecution, they settled here and worked hard to build a future for themselves and their families - it’s now a thriving, busy community that I’m delighted to be a part of.

Asylum-seekers should be allowed to work — we all need the dignity of that –- and where this is not possible, they should be entitled to full benefits. If you don’t allow asylum-seekers to work, you are not allowing them to contribute to the economy. You are creating, deliberately, a very impoverished group. Which is immoral and unjust.

“Frog Island Lesson” is a short story but it has a lot of qualities about it that you would ordinarily associate with poetry. Was this a conscious move?

I am interested in the way people have stories and myths in their heads and how they make themselves out of those stories. I am interested in pushing at the boundaries of form only if the story needs it. You need a character at the center and whatever pushes the story forward is the form the story should take.

What would you say influences you most as a writer?

My family migrated from North Ireland when I was six. I was surprised how much stuff about Ireland comes into my writing. My own family is spread between these three places: my brother and his family are in Eire; my parents might be moving back to North Ireland; and the rest of my family is in Britain.

For each of the five children in my family, the way we see ourselves in relation to Ireland is different. I think that’s why I want to write about migrants because it has some resonance for me.

Related articles:

• Interview _ Siobhan Logan, Conversations with Writers, June 4, 2007
• Interview _ Siobhan Logan, Conversations with Writers, February 20, 2010