Tell us about your debut novel, The Steps. It appears to be quite autobiographical. What are the challenges and rewards of reworking and fictionalising aspects of your own life?
The Steps opens with Derek, having reconnected with his widowed childhood sweetheart Sophie, trying to fit into the family dynamic with his five strange stepchildren. As their griefs begin to haunt him, he starts to wonder what exactly he has let into his home.
I’d say it’s more autobiographically inflected, the rewards being that I could use minor details from my life to round out characters, and to make it feel more true. Some of the things that happen are real things that can happen to real families just like yours. (But of course, most of it didn’t happen at all.)
The title functions on multiple levels – Derek’s position as a stepfather, the staircase where someone falls, the Twelve Steps of addiction recovery, and the biblical imagery of Jacob’s Ladder. Did you start with this motif in mind, or did the steps emerge organically as you explored the characters?
Well, you know what else functions on multiple levels … It started out with just the first two aspects, and the more I wrote the more I realised there are steps everywhere for those with eyes to see.
Mythmaking and storytelling are central to how The Steps navigate their trauma. The children use different mediums to process their grief. Why was it important to explore grief through the lens of art and stories?
I can’t imagine navigating life without art and stories; it seemed inevitable that these children, who are passionate about art and stories in the good times would turn to them for solace in the bad times.
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Do you have a favourite child in your fictional family?
I love all my children equally.
Tell us about YourShelf, your bespoke book-subscription service and podcast. It’s how you came across Tramp Press?
Yes – not long after I started, almost 10 years ago, Tramp sent me some books to consider including in the book bundles I was sending out to subscribers, and it was love at first read. They’ve never published a bad book.
YourShelf Press published your debut poetry collection All Those Bodies And They’re Moving (2020). Tell us about it and the switch to prose.
I think poetry was always the detour.
You introduced Florence Welch to the Strasbourg dancing plague of 1616 through your poem Strasbourg, which inspired her 2022 album Dance Fever. Tell us more.
It is never not surreal that one of my favourite musicians wrote something inspired by something I wrote and a phenomenon I’m obsessed with. I always wanted to bring the dancing plague (safely) to life; during one of Florence’s shows, as she sang the aptly titled Choreomania, running into a crowd of about 15,000 people dancing all around her, I realised I’d indirectly done it. Proud to be patient zero for that one.
In 2021, you took on “the deranged undertaking of reading and reviewing a book a day”. What did it teach you about reading and writing?
I’m suspicious of writers who don’t read: at least 50 per cent of writing is reading. Reading constantly and widely improved my writing through osmosis and inspiration, if nothing else. And the fact it rarely felt like a chore reminded me why it was my first and most enduring love.
Tell us about your PhD, Promptbook Practice: Cutting Shakespeare at the Royal Shakespeare Company, 1961-2021.
People are often surprised when I tell them Shakespeare’s plays are hardly ever performed in their entirety, without some abridgment or editing going on behind the scenes. I wanted to explore certain directorial dilemmas. Does anyone want an unabridged, four-hour Hamlet? What should a director do with comedies like The Taming of the Shrew that are not always comical to us now, through shifts in both language and sensibility?
Which projects are you working on?
A novel about multiverses, a novel about a war correspondent and a memoir about art and obsession.
Have you made a literary pilgrimage?
Every journey is a literary pilgrimage if you read enough.
What is the best writing advice?
Via my editors, and also Annie Dillard: sometimes the scaffolding can, and has to, come down.
Who do you admire the most?
My baby brother. (He’s 20 now, but still.)
You are supreme ruler for a day. Which law do you pass or abolish?
I simply should not be given that kind of power.
Which current book, film and podcast would you recommend?
I recently finished Ben Pester’s novel The Expansion Project and I need everyone to read it so I have people to unpick its weird mysteries with until the end of time.
Your most treasured possession?
I love all my children equally.
What is the most beautiful book that you own?
See above. (But maybe Anne Carson’s Nox.)
Which writers, living or dead, would you invite to your dream dinner party?
I love all my writers, living or dead, equally.
The best and worst things about where you live?
I’m moving house today – let me get back to you.
What is your favourite quotation?
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
Who is your favourite fictional character?
I love everyone else’s children equally. (But probably Mathilde in Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies.)
A book to make me laugh?
I worry I don’t read enough that makes me laugh, but I did laugh through much of Isabel Waidner’s latest novel As If, a surreal comedy of errors.
A book that might move me to tears?
Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s forthcoming Said The Dead. Cried through much of it.
The Steps is published by Tramp Press
