It Was Always Spun As A Good Story
Behind the Scenes #7 Interviewing Phil Okwedy for WritersMosaic, being Enchanted and heading to Paris
Hello!
I have some exciting news. My short story, The Divide, (which I wrote about HERE) has been long listed for a Crime Writers’ Association Dagger! Woo hoo! Although, as Lee Child is also on the long list, I am under no illusions as to my progress in this competition. But I might drink the champagne anyway…
Spinning a Story
Meeting Phil Okwedy was a pivotal moment for me — in my life and in shaping Wilderness: In Search of Belonging, the memoir I’m writing.
I first saw Phil on stage in a community centre in a village in Somerset. He, my daughter and I were the only non-white people in the audience. Yup, I’m used to awkward.
Phil was performing his one-man show, The Gods Are All Here, about his childhood as a dual heritage person growing up in Wales and the discovery of a stack of letters from his Nigerian father to his Welsh mother, all interwoven with re-imagined African folk tales.
I knew I had to meet him.
We had so much in common — both of us brought up by white families in white communities without our biological fathers; both of us with a connection to Nigeria; both of us live or have lived in Wales.
Thankfully Phil agreed to be interviewed for Wilderness.
When Colin Grant, director of WritersMosaic and author of I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be, heard that I was travelling to Wales to meet Phil, he asked me if I’d interview him for WritersMosaic too. Colin has just guest-edited an issue on memoir called No facts, only versions. I’m lucky enough to have chapter 1 from Wilderness in the issue too (you can read it HERE)
Here’s the interview I did with Phil for WritersMosaic; it was emotional in parts, particularly where we talked about the bullying we faced at school. The transcript is HERE.
Reading
Enchantment by Katherine May
is simply enchanting. It’s about retuning to a state of wonder we had as children by connecting with the small, the magical and the spiritual in life.“Enchantment is small wonder magnified through meaning, fascination caught in the web of fable and memory. It relies on small doses of awe, almost homeopathic: those quiet traces of fascination that are found only when we look for them.”
Enchantment by Katherine May.
A beautiful antidote for our often overwhelming pace of life where there frequently doesn’t seem time to simply stop and smell the roses.
Also Reading
The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley is, I think, her best book so far! Jess turns up at her half-brother Benjamin’s borrowed apartment in Paris to discover that he’s disappeared, there is a blood-stain on the floor and the place smells of bleach. The apartment is in a beautiful, old grand block of flats in Paris and every resident seems to have their own secrets and to have had their own twisted relationship with the charismatic, charming and enigmatic Benjamin.
The Paris Apartment is a version of a locked-door mystery — we know from chapter 1 that Benjamin knew the person who let themselves into the apartment with their own key — but which resident murdered him and why?
“I’ve never let a closed door stay closed for long: I suppose you could say that’s my main problem in life.” Jess
Simultaneously glitters with Parisian glamour and oozes with a dark grittiness.
Doing
Just finished my tree planting! Woo hoo! 160 trees planted, all kindly donated by the Westbury Community Tree Group. Thank you. I’ve dug in hazel, hawthorn, oak, beech, rowan, wayfaring, wild cherry, sweet chestnut, spindle, crab apple and small leaved lime.
Just in time. The hazel was unfurling its leaves and putting out stumpy new roots, the yellow of fossilised incisors, and the nettles were taking over Bluebell Wood so it was hard to dig without being lacerated; at night, after the last tree planting, my hands fizzed with their stings.
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