An Interview And Introduction by Malcolm Paul.
Rachel Trezise Introduction……
I am pleased to say that my online interview with author Rachel Trezise is now complete and International Times is now bringing it to you.
I have followed Rachel’s writing since the publication of her first critically acclaimed novel In and Out of the Gold Fish Bowl in 2002. After this success Rachel went on to win the inaugural Dylan Thomas Prize for her short story collection Fresh Apples in 2006. Since then Rachel hasn’t looked back – publishing six novels and entering the world of Drama with her first play Tonypandemonium in 2013.
Now Rachel; several plays later; is about to see the release of a new play No Man’s Land at Sherman Theatre in Cardiff.
Rachel is so often described as a writer of “gritty” fiction, that I reckon with the overuse of that adjective she could probably get her driveway re-surfaced a couple of times over. Add the description “raw” and you get a perspective that makes me wonder if some of the reviewers have any idea; let alone experience; of what it’s like to grow up in a world like the one Rachel describes: the Thatcher era destruction of the mining communities like the Rhondda Valley – where Rachel was born and raised. They provided livelihoods and social cohesion for so many men and women, working in pits and bringing up their families with some hope of having a future that offered opportunities and employment. After the Miners Strike of 1984 that all came to an end after the pit closures – a vacuum was created into which rushed poverty, crime and addiction and the daily struggle to win through and provide for your family and not to anesthetise one’s despair with whatever one’s drug of choice whether it was family dysfunction or the crime. If you didn’t grow up in an environment like this and lived amongst the people trying to survive, then how could you possibly understand that no matter how hard life in the Rhondda Valley or many of the other Thatcher era deliberately vandalized towns and cities, that people didn’t just give up and abandon themselves to despair.
It takes a chronicler of Rachel Trezise’s talent to get it all down on paper so we can at least try to feel/understand what it is like to grow up in a world like the one Rachel describes so successfully in her novels, short stories and her plays. We don’t get backseat ‘reportage’. We get real top grade literature describing a whole amazing array of characters who manoeuvre their way through situations that most of us would never have the energy, determination and spirit to get through unbroken. We get Social realism with an open heart damaged but made of gold. Rachel’s writing is up there with her favourite author Ron Berry and I’d say Rachel’s story-telling is an equal to Emile Zola’s Germinal era novels and Upton Sinclair’s King Coal meets the generational struggles one finds in the novels of local authors in Wales like Niall Griffiths*, and in the films of Shane Meadows and local Goth/Metal Punk.
If the working class/underdog and those struggling to triumph retain humanity and laugh in the face of adversity needing a committed voice to tell their stories, then they have a great spokesperson and champion in one of the UK’s finest contemporary authors Rachel Trezise.
* My thanks to Niall Griffiths who aided with contacting and persuading Rachel to do the interview.
1) Rachel, when I first contacted you via a mutual acquaintance, the author Niall Griffiths, you were working on the second draft of a new play, which you hoped to be finished by the end of September.
How did that go and where are we in terms of seeing a stage production anytime soon?
It’s because there’ll be a stage production soon that I hope to finish the draft by the end of September. The play, which is called ‘No Man’s Land’ opens at the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff on October 14th this year, then moves to the Park and Dare Theatre in Treorchy, (my own local theatre) on the 23rd of October.
2) Could you tell us a bit, what your new play is about?
I’m sure we would all like to know. No spoilers of course.
The ‘No Man’s Land’ in the play’s title refers to the mental dystopia eighteen-year-old Lewis Llewellyn retreats to in order to process the trauma going on in his real life. It’s set in a rugby club in the south Wales valleys and deals with issues around class and toxic masculinity, whilst also, hopefully, celebrating valleys humour and culture.
3) On the subject of plays I’ve just finished a second reading of Tonypandemonium.
I have to say Rachel that it’s a great play, tough, yet funny and it’s got a momentum that knocks the breath out of you.
It’s got almost a Musical Hall knock-about double act feel, as two comedians/characters chew lumps out of each other, mother and daughter, and the seemingly hapless Tommy trying to broker a peace deal and reconcile them. You said it was one of your favourites. Can you say what you specifically found satisfying about it?
It was my first full length stage play and when John McGrath commissioned it for National Theatre Wales he gave me no restrictions or conditions, just simply ‘Write a play about something you care about.’ I was so naive about how much it costs to pay actors I went back to him with a huge cast of characters, but he let me keep most of them and the director completely understood my vision, and built on it by bringing her own, which I loved. I feel it’s the only play I’ve written which is truly mine. Everything else has been much more of a collaboration. I didn’t know how lucky I was to have so much creative freedom the first time around.
In John McGrath’s introduction to the play he makes this comment after offering you a commission.
“She started sending me ideas – usually brief scenes from possible plays. The initial version included none of the characters seen in the script, and yet there was one consistent element; the title, Tonypandemonium.”
4) Is this the way you like to work? Imagining a character/characters somewhere in your head and you want to get them down on paper or on stage as fast as possible? Do you feel almost an urgency to bring your characters to life whether it’s in novels, short stories or plays? They all have such strong presences – they just seem to be bursting with life – Is Rebecca from In And Out of The Gold Fish Bowl a particularly favourite one?
Sometimes it starts with characters, as it did in Tonypandemonium and many of the short stories, but sometimes it’s an idea or a plot that’s more important to me. Rebecca from In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl is my least favourite character because she’s the closest to me, (although not completely me.) I’m most proud of the characters who’re the least like me – completely fabricated, like Tommy from Tonypandemonium and Matt from Fresh Apples. That may also be why I enjoy writing male characters. They force me into a more creative place, away from the influence of my own experiences.
5) Would it be a fair observation to make that your first novel In And Out of The Gold Fish Bowl and short stories Fresh Apples and Cosmic Latte were a preparation for you to find a natural creative home on the stage? Almost as if you were auditioning characters, who could be the type of people in a variety of situations – often tough – who were just made to be stepping onto the stage? Is that a fair comment?
Absolutely, that’s a fair comment. I wasn’t aware of it but other people seemed to be. As soon as Fresh Apples was published many people in theatre and audio approached asking me to write drama because they loved the characters and the dialogue. I think people from the South Wales valleys were made for performance anyway – they’re so dramatic and want to story-tell all the time. I felt a bit like I was surrounded by people ‘performing’ their lives when I was growing up, despite never having gone to the theatre or listened to a radio play.
6) Do you think you will settle with writing for TV and Stage now?
Or do you think you could easily fall back into writing novels and short stories?That’s assuming you are not doing both already.
I love both but because of the way plays gestate over a long period of time, featuring many periods of research and development, rewrites and collaborations, they seem to take up most of my time. I’m always working on my own fiction between other things but the stopping and starting isn’t conducive to the concentration a work of fiction requires. I find I’ve often outgrown ideas before I get to finish them. I’m due to take some time away from scriptwriting solely to focus on fiction for a while.
7) Maybe I should backtrack a bit here. You are on record as having started writing your first novel – In and Out of the Gold Fish Bowl* at 17 and having finished it by the time you were 19.
A subsequent collection of 11 short stories Fresh Apples went on to win the Inaugural Dylan Thomas Prize – and that must have been a pretty momentous happening. Having a lot of recognition and success from the beginning, and just never looking back. How did it feel at the time? And now? Could you share some of those emotions with us?
Yes, I won the Dylan Thomas Prize when I was 27. You had to be under 30 to win it at that time. Now the age restriction is 39. Also the prize was £60,000 when I won it; richer than the Booker. Now it’s £20,000 I think, so I completely lucked out winning it in its own infancy. But just as great as the money was the appointment as writer of residence at Texas University in Austin and the chance to travel across the States. (I got married in Vegas while I was there.) At the time the Prize felt like vindication because not even my publisher expected me to win it. Now, twenty years later, I realise I’m forever going to be in competition with a prolific and energetic prize-winning late twenty-something version of me.
8) A lot of authors I’ve interviewed have usually identified their early teens 12 and 13 as the stage at which they started writing – did you have a similar start in your writing career?
Is there a bottom draw full of finished/unfinished stories, novels we might see coming to life sometime in the future?
I was fifteen or sixteen when I started writing. It’s hard to remember exactly what sparked it. I think my English teacher gave me a creative writing task, to write a modern version of Macbeth or something like that. I enjoyed the writing so much that I totally forgot about the Shakespeare part and flew off writing a complete standalone story.
I do keep things I started and never finished, and things nobody wanted, but rarely go back to them. There’s so many subjects and characters I want to write I tend to just move quickly onto the next idea.
9) Did you come from a family environment where there were books in the house?
Did you get a lot of encouragement to read or write either at school or at home?
I just interviewed the author Tony O’ Neill and he said that when he was growing up in Blackburn Lancashire the only book in the house was a “Morris Minor handbook… Nobody read for pleasure “. I mean that’s a tough environment to have to write your way out of! If you were reading at an early age what were you reading?
Did you have an interest in counterculture literature as you went in your teens and had begun writing In And Out of The Goldfish Bowl? I’m thinking maybe the Beat Generation – or 60s/70s Rebellion Lit? Would that have been of any interest to you? Or is that Lit from for another generation? Maybe ‘outsiders’ – or perhaps you were influenced by writers who documented the tough uncompromising side of growing up in a world where there was dysfunction – drugs, booze and personal/social disintegration. Books like Niall Griffiths’ Kelly and Victor or Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and Ecstasy. Didn’t I read somewhere that you were being compared to Irvine Welsh? How do you feel about those comparisons? Connections?
Did you have a favourite book or genre in Literature that you were drawn towards? Was University a place where you could find more freedom?
Well, similarly the only book in our house was my mother’s medical dictionary, which she’d had since doing some work experience in a pharmacy. A teacher at junior school read Roald Dahl’s ‘The Twits’ to the class. I think that’s when I fell in love with literature; it was so subversive. Although I didn’t really read again until we did texts for English Literature at Comprehensive. I really, really loved In Cold Blood and Animal Farm and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and it was around that time I started writing my first novel and I’d waver between thinking it was gold one day and complete rubbish the next. I had a couple of good English teachers in school who recognised my talent, but writing wasn’t a viable thing in the south Wales valleys in the early 90s. Nobody would encourage writing or the arts. Singing and rugby were encouraged at a push, but it was all about getting a secure job on a production line.
It wasn’t until my first year at university I started reading contemporary fiction. Because I’d loved all the classic literary texts from school I’d worked my way through George Orwell, then I read JD Salinger, then onto Hunter S Thompson, Chuck Palahniuk and Hubert Selby Jnr. I still love American writing. I love Willy Vlautin and Annie Proulx. The book I’m reading at the moment is one of the best things I’ve ever read, a debut novel by an Irish woman, Orla Mackey, called ‘Mouthing’.
It’s a compliment to be compared to Irvine Welsh but I think it’s a lazy comparison. We both write about working class lives in the places where we grew up and we’ve both written about drug-taking, but I think the similarities probably end there. I did read Marabou Stork Nightmares by Welsh when I was in University and loved it, but I still haven’t read his novels. I think I was influenced by the fact a working-class writer had given himself permission to write and was successful at it, rather than the writing itself.
10) Later on you went on Tour with the Welsh band Midasuno and wrote a book about it: Dial M for Merthyr. Was there music playing in your house when you were growing up?
I’m sure somebody would jump in here and say: of course Shirley Bassey.
But I’d rather hear it from you.
There was some Shirley Bassey! And lots of Tom Jones. Yes, what my house lacked in books it made up for in music. My brother was really into punk, so I inherited a lifelong love of The Clash from him. And my mother loved country music; Dolly Parton, Bobbie Gentry, Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash, Kenny Rogers, Conway Twitty, all of those huge names from the 70s. I loved that there were stories in that kind of songwriting. The songs had plots and twists and real narrative drive.
11) On the question of how autobiographical an author’s books and stories are, when I asked Niall if people identified him too closely with the characters in his books and their crazy out of control lifestyle/backgrounds, he replied: “I deal with my life through the prism of my characters.” It’s not as if your books – from the way I read them – are some sort of Misery Lit’ that was trendy a few years ago and even seemed to gain some literary kudos – but ended up drowning in their own tears because they just didn’t seem real, only sensational and exploitive and lacked the type of realism you afford your characters from In And Out of A Gold Fishbowl onwards. Do you find that people identify your characters a lot with yourself and your upbringing? I write this from the standpoint of not knowing anything about your personal circumstances. I think along the lines that most things an author writes about are often seen as autobiographical. Is that a problem for you?
In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl is autobiographical, and I’ve always been open about that but as soon as I started writing short stories they were completely fictional, an amalgamation of people I knew vaguely and people and plots I dreamt up from scratch. There’s always a flavour of me in a story or a novel or a play because I’m the one writing it, the fiction is filtered through my own experiences and viewpoints but everything I write now is fiction. I’d really love to write a memoir and maybe only then some people would understand the differences between myself and my fictional characters, not that it bothers me if people do assume all my work is autobiographical. That’s the nature of fiction – nobody can really know where it came from, including me sometimes.
12) If an author like yourself sits down and writes a novel like In And Out The Goldfish Bowl and stories like Fresh Apples do you feel that you are excluding yourself from the London based mainstream literati often Oxbridge educated and your readership will be divided into two distinctly different camps?
– Those who can relate to your experiences on a personal level and come from that world.
– And those from a totally different background, who see and experience your writing not as literature but ‘reportage’ from a social world they don’t understand and have never experienced? Just can’t relate to it?
Did you feel that way at all when you started writing?
Do you think I’m making a fair distinction?
Yes, I suppose that’s true. I didn’t think about any kind of audience when I started writing, I just wanted to write about lives I knew the way I understood them. I hear that men rarely read books by women and maybe class works the same way. Why would middle class people be interested in hearing about working class lives if they’re looking for themselves in a story? I can tell the background of a reviewer without ever having met them; an Oxbridge person will invariably describe my work as drudgery, whereas working class reviewers usually manage to find the hope or joy embedded in there.
13) Does being described as a Welsh, Scottish or Northern Irish writer act as an advantage or does it further act to marginalise the author? Writers from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland tell me that they feel that they have more freedom writing as someone from the regions, Devolved nations. Do you agree? Often the smaller publishers don’t have the same Corporate pressures as say the London based ones. Would you say there is mutual loyalty amongst the regional authors and their publishers?
It’s a bit of both. Welsh publishers definitely don’t have the same corporate pressures as London based publishers since most of them are subsidised by the government funded body of the Welsh Books Council. This makes writing in Wales easier as it gives the writer more creative freedom, but it also makes the gulf between the major English publishers and the small Welsh presses wider. People are always describing me as a Welsh working-class woman writer, which is probably limiting my audience to Welsh working-class women readers. Sometimes I’d like to take a pen and cross everything except ‘writer’ out but how can I argue with it? It’s true that’s what I am and that’s what I write about. I just hope that some people do read outside of their own class and country like I regularly do.
14) In my interviews we invariably end up talking about music – which is great – we all hopefully love music.
Dial M for Merthyr
Do you mind if I quote from Goodreads?
“The jacket will tell you this “part reportage, part social history and part memoir,” and while this is all true, Dial M for Merthyr is also about the relationship between art and audience. It’s about human folly and the absurdity of dreams. And as all books about rock and roll are, it’s about redemption and rebellion.”
I read Dial M for Merthyr when it came out. I really enjoyed it. I have memories of reading it and thinking thank god it’s not just another Rock and Roll on the road shock horror book full of Babylon unplugged.
Like hanging out with Guns and Roses or The Happy Mondays.
It’s a really enjoyable read, funny and done in your deft engaging style.
Being no stranger to a life lived in excess I was grateful “warts and all” didn’t include dragging us all through the sewer of depravity – I could sit back and just think it is not a great way to earn a crust – or for that matter what is.
Do you still keep in touch with the band?
I really hope that everything worked out for them. I mean they might not have sold zillions of albums or filled stadiums but as you write in your book if you don’t live a bit when you’re young wtf.
As Socrates wrote: “the unconsidered life is not worth living”
I bet Socrates would have been a pretty mean Bass player.
Any ideas what kind of instrument Socrates might have been good on?
The Goodreads reader obviously thought it had a deeper meaning and a message?
How do you react to a comment like that?
How would you characterise the role music played in your life when you were growing up? Soundtrack? Influence? Inspiration? Or all three?
I do keep in touch with them as much as I can. The band split up in the mid-2000s but got back together very recently. The frontman lives in Australia now so they’re writing music on Zoom presumably! I think the reader is right about the absurdity of dreams. So many artists are never going to make it big but it’s the taking part that counts. It’s important to apply yourself to your dreams because that is what draws your character and makes you who you are, whether you become conventionally successful or not. I’m simultaneously being interviewed about Dial M for Merthyr by a PhD student whose thesis is about the 2000s EMO scene in south Wales. Apparently such little non-fiction has been written about Welsh music, Dial M for Merthyr was on the University of South Wales music production degree reading list for a time.
I don’t know, Socrates looks like a killer drummer to me!
Yes, music was all three of those things and everything else when I was growing up. My whole teen-hood revolved around getting Kerrang magazine on a Wednesday and staying up late on Sunday to watch Headbangers Ball on MTV.
15) Did you ever feel part of a group/a culture/a counterculture – if you want to call it any of those?
Did you feel particularly drawn to any particular political party/movement growing up in such a harsh environment created by a Prime Minister like Margaret Thatcher and politics that destroyed the mining and industrial base in the UK? It was hard at the time not to be angry and want change.
Did you or do you feel politically motivated or do you think you could express your thoughts and feelings in a much clearer way through your writing?
It’s only with hindsight I can see the damage Thatcher did to my community. I was only six when the UK Miner’s Strike happened, not old enough to engage with the politics of the time, but I caught up. By around fifteen I was a paid-up member of Greenpeace and the Anti-Nazi League. Since I found my writing voice I’m not so much of an activist. My politics are inevitably expressed in my work.
16) You got expelled from Comprehensive School for ‘excessive use of the school photocopier to run off copies of a fanzine you were editing. What do you think now looking back?
We won’t dwell on the stupidity of the education system, as one who was also expelled for publishing and distributing my own underground mags and satires at school, I’m not surprised by the way you were treated.
It was at my further education college I got into trouble over the photocopier. I got banned from the library where it was located. Not because the college was trying to discourage my fanzine habit, (although maybe they should have), but because I frequently didn’t leave enough money to cover the cost of the paper and ink. It was supposed to be 5p a go. When the librarian went out on her cigarette break I took many liberties.
17) I’d love to hear more about the fanzines. Do you still have any copies? Can we use one in the interview?
I saw a post recently where you were acknowledging the fact that you failed your A level English 29 years ago.
Did you really not get on with school?
(I failed my O Level English so I sympathise – I spend my retirement years interviewing people who left school at 15 – failed their English but later went on to become successful writers, oh, and usually got expelled like the pair of us did somewhere along the line – small world.)
After school you went to two Universities – Glamorgan University (now University of South Wales) and the University of Limerick.
A good experience? And how did that experience contribute to your writing?
My fanzine was called Smack Rapunzel. It was a mixture of band reviews and interviews, and little bits of my art and photography. I was obsessed with metal music from the age of fifteen and went to all the local gigs. The local newspaper had a column called ‘Just Look who’s been in court’ so I did a parody column called ‘Just Look who’s cut their hair.’ I’ve got one physical copy of the fanzine left, which sits on the shelf with all of my books in their various covers and languages. (Attaching some photos you could use?)
I loved school, especially art and English but I was an average student academically. I left after my GCSEs/O Levels to go to the local further education college where I did a hodgepodge of things I liked the sound of; art and English A Levels and psychology and sociology GCSEs. I was singing in a band by then and my English lesson clashed with band rehearsal, so I rarely made it to class.
After the failed A Level I did more A Levels in media studies and film making then went to University to study media with a view to becoming a journalist. I did some creative writing on the side to make up my credits, which made me want to write fiction even more than before. Because I went to the closest university to my area I didn’t feel I was getting the proper university experience, so I signed up to do Erasmus and went to Limerick for a year. They didn’t have media or creative writing, so I studied geography and more sociology, which I loved. I’m not sure Ireland directly contributed to my choice to become a writer but much later on I wrote a play about abortion rights set in Northern Ireland. I don’t think I would have had the confidence to set work in another country had I not embarked on the Erasmus scheme. And of course, Ireland has a very rich literary history. People in pubs talked about and appreciated the arts in a way I’d never known before.
15) Do you feel you have lived your writing career in stages?
If yes, where do you feel you are now?
Is it as I suggested earlier now working with plays, theatre or TV?
A friend of mine said to me: “How does Rachel live with all those characters in her head – some must be based on real life people and probably give her bad dreams?”
How would you reply to that?
Do you listen to music when you are writing and if the answer is yes, if I were to walk in, what would you be listening to?
I don’t consciously think of my writing career in stages but now that you’ve mentioned it there are three stages: youth, young adult and middle age. I think I wrote In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl before I was ready to write for an audience. It feels like the ramblings of an angry teenager. I know that’s why some people like it but I’m quite embarrassed about it. Then when Fresh Apples came out I was just finding my voice and experimenting with different forms of writing. And now that the pressure of the prizes has dissipated and I’m about to make room in my life to write more fiction, I feel like I could write my best work yet.
I don’t live with the characters in my head. I leave them on the page and pick them up again the next day. I purposely listen to true crime podcasts as I drift off to sleep in order to keep my characters and projects at bay. If anything gave me bad dreams it’d be those, but they actually help me sleep!
Sometimes I listen to music when I write, always something I know inside and out so it doesn’t pull me out of the work, often Leonard Cohen, or early Bruce Springsteen.
* Published 2006 now reissued 2021.
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