Today I'm talking to Jen Campbell, the author of the bestselling 'Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops' and also, now, 'The Hungry Ghost Festival' – her first collection of poetry, which has just been published by The Rialto.
AJ: Hi Jen, thanks for
talking to me. Congratulations on The
Hungry Ghost Festival, which I found to be a really engaging and poignant
collection of poems. Can you tell us a little bit about how the collection came
about and how long you worked on it for?
JC: Thanks, Andrea! I
think the poems span over two years, when you look at them from start to
finish. I didn’t deliberately set out to write a collection about the
north-east, and my childhood, but I began to notice that the poetry I was
writing tended to fall into one of two categories: one of those was a
nostalgic/north-east/childhood/sea-memory type, and the other concerned freak
shows, deformity and identity. The latter’s a longer collection I’m working on
at the moment.
‘The Hungry Ghost
Festival’ is
not about what actually happened when I was younger; it's often not even about
real places. It's about misremembered and strange things. It's about girls
praying to The Angel of the North. It's about the idea of a mermaid born in the
river Tyne. It's about another girl who's bullied for being a 'real-life
mermaid.' It's about Chinese lanterns, teenagers at the beach, and a family who
run a sacred farm. It's about lots of things.
AJ: ‘The Hungry Ghost
Festival’ is a Chinese festival which is held on a night where it is believed
the boundaries break down between the living and the dead (and the dead visit
the earth looking for food and entertainment). In your collection you explore a
similar idea with the past and the present, but in your hands memories of
childhood and childhood events become magical, almost fairytale-like, and we
even see fragments of fairytales and children’s rhymes appearing in some poems.
In ‘When We Found The Tide’, we think of the owl and the pussycat with the line
‘That this water is the sea and the lawn our pea-green boat’. And in ‘Gambit’
you mention ‘trailing breadcrumbs’. Can you talk a little more about fairytale
and folklore as inspirations in your work?
JC: I hold my hands up; I
am enthralled by fairy tales, especially the sordid pasts most of them seem to
have. I find it fascinating that we’re brought up with them when a lot of them
have extremely dark connotations. I suppose that’s also part of it; we accept
fairy tales when we’re younger; we accept Disney’s version of events. I’ll
never forget the first time I read Peter Pan myself and realised that the
Disney film is really not what Barrie had in mind. I’m talking about Hook being
‘obsessed’ with Wendy; I’m talking about Tink stumbling home from orgies (yes,
orgies). I don’t remember that in the animated film, ha! So, yes, I suppose I
associate fairy tales with growing up, and looking back and seeing things
slightly differently, which is what this collection is all about, too. Mermaids
and selkies feature in this collection a few times; growing up by the sea meant
I was especially interested in folklore associated with water.
AJ: The collection has a
strong sense of place, being set, on the whole, in the Newcastle area. There is
the Angel of the North, of course, and the speech (‘bairn’) and, for example,
in ‘Written in my 1999 Diary: Newcastle Futures’, there are the lines: ‘Wind
farms/of hands which turn but don’t make bread’ (a beautiful image by the way).
Can you talk about the importance of place in your work?
JC: I find it easier to
talk about places and things I’m now distanced from. I think most of us find
that, perhaps because the feelings associated with those things have had time
to settle. Whenever I’ve tried to write about something happening now,
something I perhaps haven’t come to terms with yet, it all gets a bit angst-y
and, well, it’s not very good. All my family still live in the north-east, so I
do go back and visit often, and I feel a strong connection with the place. I
never used to like the Angel of the North (we called it ‘Old Rusty’), but my
relationship with it has changed somewhat, mainly because I feel like it’s now
a symbol that welcomes me home.
AJ: Water is very present
in the collection – the sea, mermaids, fish, starfish, seagulls. Do you feel
you have a strong connection to the sea, especially with regard to childhood?
JC: I went swimming a lot
when I was younger, but I don’t think that’s why I feel such a strong
connection with the sea and water. I used to walk along the coast, as a
teenager, and write about it. One of my first published poems, when I was
thirteen, was about a love affair between the sea, and the shore. I have a lot
of respect for it; the power that the sea has, and I love the way that you can
walk along the same bit of coast and it’s never the same to look at. I also,
bizarrely, feel some connection with it because I have ectrodactyly. That’s
‘Lobster Claw Syndrome’ by it’s rather coarse nickname.
AJ: The language in the
collection is beautiful – unusual and striking. For example, in ‘Angel Metal’
you say winter scarves over faces ‘catch our breath/like cloth balloons’, or in
‘Like a Fish Out’ there’s ‘sun light-bulbing on a netball pitch’. Have you
always loved being inventive with language?
JC: Yes. As far as I can
remember, I’ve always wanted to be a writer (apart from a very brief period
when I was seven and I was utterly convinced I wanted to be a lollipop lady).
Because of the afore mentioned ectrodactyly, I spent a lot of time in hospital
when I was younger and devoured book after book. I was told I wasn’t going to
be able to physically write, so I stubbornly disagreed and vowed to write more
than anybody else. That’s how I fell in love with words: practise, lots of
reading, and stubbornness.
AJ: I found some of the
poems to be quite moving. In ‘The Angel’, which relates to the Angel of the
North, the final lines really caught my attention: ‘Her arms reach out to touch
the sky./I think she does not touch it.’ When I read this I felt a sense of
sadness, of things being unattainable, of dreams not being reached. Is this
poignancy something you’re aware of in your work?
JC: I’m glad you found the
poems moving. As for my awareness of unattainable things, I’m not aware of
dreams not being reached, but definitely of a sense of loss. However, whilst the collection is
about the riverside and rumours in the hills, and falling in love with someone
you're not supposed to be found with; it's also about whatever you, and other
readers, want it to be about. Poems are like birds; you’ve got to let them
fly.
AJ: Thanks for talking to
me and good luck with the collection.
* Jen Campbell, 25,
grew up in the north east of England, and graduated from Edinburgh University
with an MA in English Literature. She now lives in London where she runs an
antiquarian bookshop. Her first book, ‘Weird Things Customers Say in
Bookshops', was a Sunday Times bestseller, and her first poetry collection,
‘The Hungry Ghost Festival’ is published by The Rialto.
