CYMRAEG | ENGLISH

In this interview John Good speaks to Menna Elfyn, an award-winning poet and playwright who writes with passion of the Welsh language and identity. She is the best known and most translated of all modern Welsh-language poets. Author of over twenty books of poetry including Aderyn Bach Mewn Llaw (1990), winner of a Welsh Arts Council Prize; the bilingual Eucalyptus: Detholiad o Gerddi / Selected Poems 1978-1994 from Gomer and her previous collection, Cell Angel (1996) from Bloodaxe, children’s novels and educational books, numerous stage, radio and television plays, she has also written libretti for US and UK composers.

John:  As a person who has learnt Welsh in America after leaving Wales in the 70’s, I have a great interest in the experiences of Welsh speaking people abroad. As an authoress, are you ever surprised by the enthusiasm and welcome your work has received across Offa’s dyke from people who don’t speak the language?

Menna:   Well in truth I am. I never dreamt that my work would cross Offa’s Dyke then reach America, China, Spain, Norway and other countries but it is a lovely feeling because it means that audiences get to know that I primarily write in Welsh but my perspective is wider than that. I see the world through the Welsh language and there isn’t a subject that cannot be written about in that language. There you go, Harlem yn y Nos (Harlem at Night), a poem that I fashioned when I was writing a libretto for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and I had to live there for weeks at a time, over a period of a year and a half, having to meet with the composer who lived in Washington Heights … and return afterwards through Harlem.

One example perhaps, but I continue to say to everyone when I go on Literary Excursions that I write for the whole world and, truthfully, it isn’t a surprise. Since November 2013, I have read in China, Hong Kong, Vancouver, Seattle, St. Andrews Scotland, and next week Grasmere, Wordsworth’s home, then in Cornwall at the beginning of May. So I’m always roaming and always start readings reading in Welsh and then read [English?] passages between poems, because the Welsh mixes naturally with the English translations. My first poem is always ‘Cusan Hances’ (Handkerchief Kiss) after RS Thomas (he translated two of my poems by the way), saying that poetry in translation is like a kiss through a hanky! Better that than no kiss at all!

John: I read your bi-lingual book MURMUR recently. Would you outline and explain your approach to translation by other writers and by you yourself?

Menna: From the outset, when I was asked to read in places like Spain and Ireland I relied on poet friends -- Nigel Jenkins, Gillian Clarke and my best friend Elin ap Hywel and others for the best translations possible. I had to do some myself but Tony Conran said '' you are not worthy of the poet!'' because he believes I’d get lost while translating and not be faithful to the poems. But why should I? And that’s what’s bad about translating yourself, that you would end up somewhere else other than keeping to the work in hand. That’s why translation is an art that needs to be done carefully. I had one dictate for the translators – make the poem better – turn it into a self-contained poem, but with the ghost of the Welsh language. It has to live as if independent of its sister.

Translations to other languages are more problematic of course and it takes time. There are volumes available in Hindi, Arabic and Catalan, to name but a few. In the case of the Arabic volume, it was pure luck to find someone, after a reading, saying they would like to have my work in their mother tongue i.e. Arabic. As in this case, poetry can fly presumably. There will be some bad ones of course in some books, for example, the Chinese translator translated ‘Drws yn Epynt ‘[Door in Epynt] in a book of my work in that language as ‘Drws yn Aifft’ --Door in Egypt! Of course they didn’t know anything about Epynt in Wales and the people being driven from that part of Powys for the army to train there.

But, on reflection, there was a surprising new spirit to the poem with its new mien and it worked with everything that was happening in that sad country at that time. In Murmur, two of the translators were new – Damian Walford Davies and I’m trying to urge Paul Henry to do more, for he is such a brilliant poet and speaks Welsh. I lost my first translator this year when Nigel Jenkins died and he and I translated each other in the beginning back in the 80’s. It was a personal loss to me and a greater loss to his family and Wales. But there I go wondering off the question. Nigel read the poems in translation at one of my book launches in Abertawe as he was such a close and dear friend to me.

John:  Once, a Welsh teacher asked me if I could speak Welsh. “Only ‘Cwmafan’ Welsh” was my answer. Straight away he said something like “That is Welsh!” What are your thoughts on the importance of dialects and how can ordinary and literary people and societies like AmeriCymru step into the breach to save them?

Menna:   I dote on dialects and collect everything I can in order to use sometime later in poems. After all, a poet is a squirrel and words are her nuts. Yes, they should on every account be collected, their use, their safe keeping and [also] the formation of brand new words. Take the word ‘selfie’ for example, by now it has turned into self-portrait, which I think is really neat.

John: Every now and then and sometimes frequently the ghost or shadow of “Cynghanedd” [strict-meter/Bardic Welsh poetry] is found in your work. Is the harmony and counterpoint of words an equal partner to meaning in the composition?

Menna:   When I was writing in the 60’s, I didn’t have time to learn the rules and try to rein in my work – I had things to say without the fetters of cynghanedd. And then despite my father writing using Cynghanedd and trying to show me a variety of such lines, going on to tell me there were mistakes in the stresses was enough for me to give up. But cynghanedd as one stratum is lovely – and even though by now I am able to use it and make a decent enough englyn or cywydd it doesn’t excite me as much as free verse.

Robert Hass has said…’ I love the line, following the line - I''ve never written a sonnet in my life''. Well, I have written in a form when it works effortlessly but I dote on American poetry – the range of the poets is so wide, so unfettered, and that’s what I try to do in my own work. You must have the initial passion and strike at it afterwards, and if a line of cynghanedd appears or comes into view, all the better, but I don’t start from that place. I see it like swimming in a swimming pool – up and down, keeping in your lane with the other swimmers, while free verse allows me to swim in the sea, without knowledge of the depth and without knowing its danger and able to go from one place to the other without anyone limiting me –except for myself of course.

Menna Elfyn reads ''Handkerchief Kiss'' / ''Cusan Hances'' and other poems YouTube

John: Are you fond of deadlines? Some say it sparks the imagination; others the opposite. Also, what are your thoughts on commissions?

Menna:   Well, these days I live on commissions, be they radio dramas, or poems or stage plays. But having said that, poets always have their eyes open for the next poem. And the unexpected always excites me.

I was asked to write two lines about Catrin Glyndwr for a statue that was erected to her in London and I wrote –

Godre twr adre nid aeth
[At the tower end –far away from home
Aria ei rhyw yw hiraeth
[Longing is a woman’s song]

Here’s one place where cynghanedd helps create something concise, neat, a touching hope. But after it was written, Catrin Glyndwr was on my mind and every now and then I would think about her situation with her children in the Tower of London, and was saddened thinking about it. And even though in truth the poems took ten years, those were the first poems I would include in ‘Murmur’. The volume is full of Murmuron [murmurs] of course but these poems express something deep about being locked up in a foreign country without your mother tongue.

Recently I began a personal campaign of saying ‘diolch’ not only once when leaving shops in a Welsh-speaking area and places where the person didn’t  speak  Welsh, but three times in the hope perhaps they would turn to saying it in Welsh.

John: Wales and welsh people are an integral part of your literary work. Is it different writing away from home? Do you have a favorite work place?

Menna: When I am home, that’s the time when I’ll have the chance to think, to consider everything. When someone is travelling there are so many things to see, and to be careful checking bags, locking hotel doors and so on. At home, that’s when I am free and also where Welsh is heard on the street. Llandysul continues to be one of the strongest Welsh-speaking villages in Wales and I have the satisfaction of being able to speak Welsh in every shop. But I am also frequently irritable with myself and my fellow Welsh. 

Recently I began a personal campaign of saying ‘diolch’ not only once when leaving shops in a Welsh-speaking area and places where the person didn’t  speak  Welsh, but three times in the hope perhaps they would turn to saying it in Welsh. More often than not I got only ‘thank you’ which is shameful when you think about how many times they must have heard the word from me. And that’s the first word I learn going overseas. If you’re not able to go further than ‘diolch’ then …well, it’s better not to start that conversation!

John:   For a very long time, Welsh poets have been fearless craftsmen, even with the responsibility of speaking about injustice. Give us your opinion please on politics in art?

Menna:   Sometimes I see the two things come together. Nigel Jenkins and I started an anti-apartheid campaign in the 80’s not allowing our work to appear in South African shows. Standing up against unfairness always has been the every-day work of poets BUT when you write, the work calls for you to be faithful to the craft and all kinds of feelings, prejudices will rise to the surface. Therefore, I don’t write pieces with a didactic or politically feminine tone. Perhaps this is a shame to some who have seen me as an emissary of special causes.

Having said all that, I am excited that PEN Cymru is about to be launched, because I started researching the possibility some decades ago but travelling made it impossible to commit to its establishment. I’m so happy that it will be a reality before long. As a citizen, you have to be political of course and I support many political causes – too numerous to mention here.

There’s going to be a volume about ‘Cwsg’ [sleep] before the end of the year for Wasg Gomer that’ll be published in 2015.

John: Anything in progress? Any wish that needs to be realized?

Menna: There’s going to be a volume about ‘Cwsg’ [sleep] before the end of the year for Wasg Gomer that’ll be published in 2015. Because of other works it’s been stop and go. Also there’ll be a theater production with Theatr Clwyd and ‘Gair a Gnawd’, an oratorio written by Pwyll ap Sion and myself that is about to go on tour in 2015 with The Welsh National Opera Company ( it had two performances in 2013) and we’ll have  added to it before it goes on tour again. I want to translate more Welsh poetry into English as in Murmur – that has 3 poems of the work of Waldo [Williams] in it.

John: Any final message for the members and readers of AmeriCymru?

Menna: I really enjoy this site and am delighted that it is so lively – on every account, we should embrace and thank Ceri for it. Since my first visit to The United States in 1997 I have returned to read or visit very nearly every year. I am in my element there, so if you invite me to give a reading, I’d be delighted to come to you. Bye for the time being, and thanks for the chance to be interviewed on AmerCymru.

Interview by John Good

AmeriCymru: You have recently published a book entitled: Perspectives Of A Gay American Immigrant Scientist . Experiences over half a century in the United States and Britain?

Meurig: Yes, this was published by Amazon as a paperback in December, 2013. A Kindle online version is also available.

AmeriCymru: Tell us a little about your Welsh background.

Meurig: Over the generations my family members have been involved in a very wide range of occupations, including farmers, coal miners, small shopkeepers, paramedics, running a small betting organization, paratrooper who landed in Normandy on D-Day, policeman, many teachers at schools and universities, an uncle who died at the age of 107 and whose funeral was attended by many of his college students from far afield including European countries, consulting Forensic Engineer, Foreign Office professional, Chairman of British Beer festivals, human rights lawyer in Africa, Mayor of a town, County Council member, Associate Director of Education, escort for social events to an unmarried Conservative Lord Mayor of London, CEO of a chain of retirement homes, CEO of the Welsh TV station S4C, TV host (on S4C) of a Welsh cultural affairs programme together with Owen Edwards, managing directors at large banks and other companies, an MBE and a CBE. The free secondary education afforded by state-funded grammar schools, founded in the 1944 Education Act, and State Scholarships to universities which were based on merit, were strongly instrumental in the career success of recent generations. By emigrating to the United States in 1962 I lost touch with many of these interesting and colorful people so, in that sense, it was a double edged sword.

It is a matter of significance and pride to me that almost of these family members are or were fluent in the Welsh language, mostly for the purpose of everyday discourse. Others, I am proud to point out (I was not among these) are/were experts in Welsh to high academic standards. In fact, one of these, was the first woman president of the Dafydd Ap Gwilym Society at Oxford University, to which I also briefly belonged, until it quickly became evident that my ability to express thoughts beyond those required for everyday existence was just not there. In the last few decades there has been strong resurgence in Welsh pride in general, and the Welsh Assembly, created in 1998, must have contributed to this, as did the fine St David’s Hall, built in 1982, where concerts and other events of international stature are held, perhaps the most prestigious being the Cardiff “Singer of the World” competition for opera singers from all over the world. It is notable that this building was highly praised by The New York Times architectural correspondent. Ability to speak the Welsh language is a big part of this pride and today, for most public jobs in Wales, such as teaching and representation in local government, applicants are required to demonstrate their proficiency in the language, whether purely verbal or in written form. What a change from the days of “Welsh Not” when pupils were punished for speaking Welsh in schools in the late 19th and early 20 century, and this apparently persisted in some schools in North Wales until the 1940s.

AmeriCymru: How about your education?

Meurig: After Llandeilo Grammar school, I entered Jesus College, Oxford with a Meyricke Exhibition in 1955, interestingly (to me at least) the same award that was held by T E Lawrence (of Arabia). I received a first class honors degree in chemistry, followed by a DPhil (that is the Oxford fancy version of PhD) in peptide chemistry. You may have noticed that amino-acids always have the letter L preceding their names. This is because amino-acids can exist in two forms, L and D, which are identical except that they are mirror images of each other, just like our hands are. L and D stand for Laevo (left) and Dextro (right). A string of several amino-acids joined together form peptides, which constitute many naturally occurring substances in the human body, for example OXYTOCIN, a well-known pituary hormone affecting human reproduction. Proteins are simply very long strings of amino-acids joined together. One of the mysteries of nature is that almost all of the amino acids in naturally occurring peptides and proteins are of the L configuration. On account of their physiological importance, laboratory synthesis of peptides is of huge importance to pharmaceutical companies. Such synthesis is complicated by many factors, not the least being that, in most cases, some of the L form is converted to the D form during the synthesis, like an umbrella turning inside-out in the wind. The D form is then an impurity, so it is important to minimize its formation. That requires understanding how and why it occurs. Generating that understanding was my task in order to get a DPhil degree under the guidance of Dr G T Young, who had also been my undergraduate tutor. Sometimes luck does come one’s way, and I was able to solve that problem quantitativelyI was offered a Fulbright scholarship by Professor Sir Ewart Jones, a fellow Welshman who was born in the small town Rhostyllen, near to Wrexham, and was described as the most influential British scientist of his generation on account of his contributions to government committees, etc. The Fulbright would have provided very generous financial support over 2 years for continued studies at a university of my choice.

AmeriCymru: When and why did you emigrate to the United States?

Meurig: The Fulbright offer came with a caveat – I had to commit to returning to the UK after its completion. To the big surprise of Professor Jones, I declined and told him that I wanted more flexibility, but I did not tell him that the reason for that was primarily to escape from the horrendous homophobia which was prevalent in England at that time. Some will remember the notorious Lord Montagu case. Words like “monstrous perversion” were newspaper headlines for months on end. Murder was a crime against society, but homosexuality was a crime against nature.

Several times during the course of my career, I received letters from Professor Jones enquiring about my well-being and career, and mentioned that he occasionally ran into Dr Young. It was much later that it occurred to me what he may have been getting at. Dr Young’s wife had become Baroness Young of Farnworth, the Conservative leader of the House of Lords. Her main claim to fame, or should I say notoriety, was her adamant stance against giving any kind of equal rights to homosexuals. She ranted and raved on that subject as if she was in some way personally impaired, to the extent that she lost favor with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. London gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell correctly declared that “she had poisoned society with prejudice and intolerance, and future historians will rank her alongside the defenders of apartheid”. I believe that, in view of my close relationship with Baroness Young’s husband, Professor Jones had figured out the reason for my flight from the UK and was concerned about that.

I knew that I was gay from a very early age and always considered homosexuality to be a perfectly normal and healthy part of the human condition, so the opportunity to escape from that hostility was very appealing. My solution was to accept a post doctorate position that the University of California, Berkeley in 1962, where I was tasked with isolating and characterizing the world’s first plant sex hormone, Sirenin. Here is a brief description.

Sirenin was the first fungal sex hormone to have its structure determined. It is produced by female gametangia and gametes of the chytridiomycete genus Allomyces and attracts male gametes of the genus. It was discovered in 1958 by Leonard Machlis and, with the help of organic chemists, was purified and had its structure determined by 1968. Machlis's success is attributable to his association at Berkeley with the world authority on the genus, Ralph Emerson, to his meticulous physiological work on the genus in the 1950s, to his skill in devising bioassays and to his organising ability and drive.

Put simply, Allomyces is a filament-like water-mold plant. Female parts discharge tiny amounts of a chemical substance to which the sperm generated by the male parts is attracted, and this results in fusion. I was presented with a large jar of brown water and told that this contains minute amounts of Sirenin. Using standard chemistry techniques, combined with a very clever method developed by Professor Machlis to assay its concentration, I was able to isolate it in pure form and start the complex process of structure determination (1). This was completed a few years later by a successor of mine.

AmeriCymru: How did your career develop after that?

Meurig: I joined the DuPont Corporation in Wilmington Delaware and stayed for 5 years in spite of a high degree of incompatibility. I will pass over this experience here in order to describe my later experiences at Xerox where the events which led to my recent book originated.

I joined the Xerox Webster Research Center in suburban Rochester, New York in 1970. Its appeal to me was twofold. It was a rapidly growing company with an exciting new product, the copier, which was of surging demand, and also that copier technology was based on sciences that were not well understood, which provided an opportunity for leading edge research. The success of Xerox represents one of the greatest technological triumphs in history, on account of the extraordinary complexity of the process combined with that lack of scientific foundation in two areas. One of these is called triboelectricity or simply contact charging. Whenever two materials touch and separate, an electric charge is generated. Buildup of such electrical potential can lead to electrostatic discharge with consequences that can range from discomfort, such as the mild jolt we experience by touching a doorknob after walking across a carpet, to disaster such as the fiery crash of the Hindenburg. Until recently, there was extremely little understanding of how and why such charges are generated, one of the main reasons for this being the assumption that it was a physics problem. I pointed this out in a cover page article in the July-August 2012 issue of The American Scientist, entitled: “What Creates Static Electricity? Traditionally considered a physics problem, the answer is beginning to emerge from chemistry and other sciences" (2). In addition, I published a detailed review of this subject in AIP (American Institute of Physics) Advances in February, 2012 (3), so I am well positioned to provide the following elementary explanation of this phenomenon.

When two metals touch and separate, it is well established that it results from the simple exchange of electrons from one to the other, a straightforward phenomenon in physics. When both materials are electrical insulators, such as most polymers, the mechanism is complex and is currently being unravelled in brilliant research by two groups, headed respectively by Professors Grzybowski at Northwestern University and Galembeck, Director of the National Nanotechnology Laboratory, Brazil. When two polymers make contact, some degree of entanglement occurs between the polymer chains at the surfaces, so that separation is accompanied by polymer chain scission and the transfer of material of nanoscopic dimensions between the surfaces. This chain scission is accompanied by the formation of free radicals at the ends of each chain. As is well known, free radicals are highly reactive and are converted to positive and negative ionic charges either by reaction with ambient water or exchange of electrons. Use of advanced high resolution analytical techniques revealed that each surface, after separation, supports a random mosaic of oppositely charged regions of nanoscopic dimensions, and the net charge on each surface is the arithmetic sum of the individual domain charges. So it is the mechanical forces causing bond cleavage of the polymers that is the driving force for charge generation, and this takes future studies into the realm of mechanochemistry, an obscure and complicated field. Grzybowski et al took this understanding a step further by explaining that the surface charges are stabilized by intimate association between the polymer radicals and the ionic charges. They pointed out in a recent paper in SCIENCE that, if the polymers contain materials that act as radical scavengers, the stability of the surface charges is lost and the charges fail to build up or dissipate rapidly. I explain this here on account of its extraordinary importance to the electronics industry. Damage to electronic equipment by static discharges accounts for the loss of billions of dollars each year. And the continued miniaturization of electronic equipment renders it even more susceptible to low voltage discharges. Gross reduction or elimination of such discharges by the above process discovered by Grzybowski et al would go a long way to the prevention of such losses. It is my opinion that this work by Grzybowski et al may well result in a Nobel Prize on account of its combination of scientific brilliance and enormous economic importance.

The third case, of course, is contact between a metal and a polymer, and it is believed that both of the above mechanisms, electron and material exchange, occur. I have been the first to recently propose an approach for determining the degree to which each occurs in any given contact event (4).

AmeriCymru: How is this related to your book?

Meurig: My book was not originally a planned event. I have now been retired for 13 years, and is not uncommon to reflect upon the past in retirement! Such reflections on my early career led to a discovery only a few years ago of some shockingly unprofessional behavior by my colleagues at Xerox several decades ago. I thought that a description of these events, together with an analysis of cultural factors pertaining to them, made a good story that would be of interest to some readers.

It was my response to that shocking discovery that led to a process of self-reinvention resulting in my book. I described this process in the following comments I recently contributed to an article “American Voices on Reinvention” in The Huffington Post (5):

"The driving force for self-reinvention can evolve and change as the process takes place, so that one reinvention leads to another. Well into retirement, I recently discovered that my scientific publications from 35 years ago had been treated by corporate colleagues in ways that could be considered misrepresentation and plagiarism. Addressing those injustices after such a long time required a reinvention of myself by returning to the world of scientific journals and research after an absence of over 30 years. Thanks to the online availability of scientific journals, I brought myself up to date on the recent developments in the field, and integrated them with my early work. This resulted in a series of successes - several publications in peer-reviewed journals, a cover page article in The American Scientist in 2012, an invitation to be a keynote speaker at a major conference hosted by NASA in 2013, and a job offer. On further reflection, I wondered if there could have been a connection between the way I was treated and the corporate culture of those times. Being both a relatively openly gay man and an immigrant (from the UK) was a combination which made me a socially acceptable target for homophobic and other forms of abuse. Such thoughts propelled me into a second reinvention. I wrote a book entitled "Perspectives of a Gay American Immigrant Scientist," which explored and expanded upon these considerations, including a discussion of experiences and cultures at Oxford University, UC Berkeley, DuPont, and Xerox.

AmeriCymru: Do you think homophobia is any more or less prevalent then it was half a century ago?

Meurig: In general, homophobia in most developed countries is far less than half a century ago, but there is still a very long way to go before we are well integrated into society. The clearest indicator of progress is the advances made in legalization of gay marriage. The most pronounced generalization remains the correlation between progressive attitudes on homosexuality and the general standard of living in a country. Scandinavia and Holland have long been at the leading edge, and African and some Caribbean countries at the other. I have not yet heard an explanation for Putin’s retrogressive attitude.

A very important development for scientists and engineers was the establishment in 1983 of the major and thriving organization NOGLSTP (National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professionals, Inc.), based in Pasadena, CA. This is a non-profit organization that educates and advocates for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer students and professionals in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

In addition, the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) announced in January 2014 a change to their code of ethics to include language prohibiting discrimination on account of sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression. The importance of these changes cannot be overstated. With nearly 400,000 members in 160 countries, the IEEE is the world's largest professional organization. Now, electrical engineers and computer scientists around the world, including those in countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia, know that their professional organization stands for non-discrimination against LGBT individuals both as practice and as rule.

A very surprising event was the recent position taken by Pope Francis that he would not pass judgment on gay people. Whether this is true leadership or political positioning remains to be seen. Wouldn’t it now be time for the British Royal family to show leadership on this issue? Are we to believe that they are the only family in Britain not to have any gay members? We know better of course and, the Queen being the head of the Church of England makes it a bit sticky for them. Both the Church of England and the Catholic Church have in common large numbers of gay clerics as most people know, but this still needs to be unspoken. A prominent gay Welsh Bishop was a personal friend of mine at Oxford, as was the chaplain of one of the older colleges.

Several gay athletes are now coming out of the closet, as they say, and this is clearly just the beginning of a trend. Very recently, 24 year old University of Missouri's star football player Michael Sam announced that he is gay. Unlike many athletes, Sam chose to come out at the start of his career, which will represent a test for the readiness of the NFL (National Football League) which he is expected to join later this year. His name is added to the growing list of prominent sportsmen and women who have come out: Gareth Thomas, Wales's former rugby union captain; retired Aston Villa midfielder Thomas Hitzlsperger; Surrey cricketer Steven Davies; Orlando Cruz, the Puerto Rican featherweight boxer; and basketball star Jason Collins. Sam was personally congratulated by President Obama and his wife Michelle. Sam’s timing is also opportune. With gay rights issues overshadowing the Sochi Winter Olympics and Casey Stoney, the captain of England's women's football team, declaring herself gay, the sports world has found it can no longer confine the debate about the sexuality of its stars to the margins.

AmeriCymru: Where do you go from here?

Meurig: I am considering writing another book. Now why would I want to do that? The process of writing is addictive and it is a satisfying experience when one can put forth thoughts and ideas hopefully in a clear and logical manner. Then, my published book could have been a bit less terse, and I could have smoothly elaborated on many of my points. But above all, it is this. In the book I have made comparisons between Britain and the United States and Scandinavia, but none between England and Wales. And yet, I have long been of the opinion that the acceptance of homosexuals was very different in these countries. I have described that “of all of the world’s developed nations, Britain stood alone in its extreme attitudes towards, and heavy penalties for, homosexual acts”. I used the word Britain loosely here when I should have used the word England. I do have some ideas on why Wales was far kinder to homosexuals than England several decades ago and, if I am able to research and develop a persuasive case for this, then another book will be in order.

AmeriCymru: Any final message for the readers and members of AmeriCymru?

Meurig: Whereas I state that “my purpose in writing this (book) is to make a small contribution to the furtherance of progress by throwing light on some personal experiences”, I have also introduced some provocative ideas and hypotheses which may be debatable. It is my hope that a discussion on these can be stimulated.

References

1. Production, Isolation and Characterization of Sirenin, L. Machlis, W H Nutting, M W Williams and H Rapoport, Biochemistry, Vol 5, No 7, July 11, 1966

2. What Creates Static Electricity? Traditionally considered a physics problem, the answer is beginning to emerge from chemistry and other sciences. Meurig W Williams, The American Scientist, July-August 2012

3. Triboelectric Charging of Insulating Polymers, Meurig W Williams, AIP Advances, Feb 8, 2012

4. Triboelectric charging in metal-polymer contacts – How to distinguish between electron and material transfer mechanisms, Meurig W Williams, Journal Electrostatics, Feb 1, 2013

5. American Voices on Reinvention, The Huffington Post 2/12/2014. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/russell-c-smith/american-voices-on-reinve_1_b_4777992.html

AmeriCymru spoke to Welsh author Meic Stephens about his new book Rhys Davies: A Writer''s Life. This is the first biography of the "..most prolific, dedicated and accomplished of Welsh prose-writers."

Buy Rhys Davies: A Writer''s Life here

Check out Rhys Davies on Amazon here

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AmeriCymru: Hi Meic and many thanks for agreeing to be interviewed by AmeriCymru. For any of our readers who are not acquainted with the man and his work, can you explain the importance of Rhys Davies in the history of 20th century Welsh literature?

Meic: Rhys Davies (1901-78) was the most prolific, dedicated and accomplished of Welsh prose-writers. He wrote more than a hundred short stories, some twenty novels, three novellas, an autobiography, two plays and two topographical books about Wales. But it was as a short-story writer that he excelled and influenced other writers. Taking Russian and French writers as his models, he took the form to its limit in objectivity. Before him there was only Caradoc Evans, but he left his mark on later Welsh writers such as Glyn Jones, Gwyn Thomas and Alun Lewis. He was, in short, and by general assent, a master-craftsman in the form.

AmeriCymru: What inspired you to write a biography of Rhys? How did your interest in him evolve?

Meic: I first read him as an undergraduate in the 1950s, and my admiration grew as I worked through his oeuvre. I met him in his London flat in the 1970s and kept in touch until his death. Then, one day in 1990, I was contacted by his brother Lewis Davies who wanted me to set up a Trust in his memory. This I did, with money provided by Lewis, and after Lewis’s death in December 2011, the Trust inherited his entire estate. I became its Secretary. The Trust is chaired by Dai Smith and the other two Trustees are Sam Adams and Peter Finch. Its aims are to keep the writer’s memory green and to promote Welsh writing in English. For example, we put up plaques in memory of writers and help fund the work of Rhys Davies in every possible way. The conference organized by Literature Wales in 2013 was funded by the Trust, which also commissioned me to write the biography.

AmeriCymru: Davies''s autobiography ''Print Of A Hare''s Foot'' is evasive and unreliable. How much of an obstacle was this to you in your research?

Meic: It soon became apparent to me that the events mentioned in Print of a Hare’s Foot didn’t always correspond to the known facts of Rhys’s life. Lewis was a great help in pointing to where the book strayed from what had actually happened. It is particularly misleading in that it tries to hide or camouflage the author’s homosexuality. It must be remembered that homosexuality was illegal in Britain until the Sexual Offences Act of 1967. Rhys was promiscuous as a young man but never mentioned his sexuality or wrote about it, except tangentially. Other facts are contorted or obscured for no apparent reason except that he seemed incapable of giving a straight answer to a straight question about himself. This presents a problem for a biographer who has to know when the false trails laid down by Rhys are leading nowhere and how to decipher the code in which he habitually wrote about the things that mattered to him. His instinctive need to dissemble explains to some extent the detached, almost clinical way in which Rhys observed other people without becoming emotionally involved with them. It gives his prose a chilling quality that some readers admire. He enjoyed no lasting sexual relationship with another person and with the women who found him kind, gentle, witty, charming and excellent company, such as Anna Kavan, he maintained strictly platonic friendships. Above all, he protected his privacy and independence, fearing intrusion into his inner life by anyone who came too close, man or woman. It suited him, too, to have no close companion because he maintained a rigorous work-schedule that left little time for an emotional life. The title of his autobiography was well chosen. The hare is a secretive creature in folklore, said to change its shape while always resolutely remaining itself, sexually active, living by its wits and giving out misleading signals, a symbol of paradox, contradiction and transitoriness, both lucky and unlucky, damned in Deuteronomy as unclean and forbidden, an endangered species, lying low and leaving only the lightest of prints before disappearing into its form in its own mysterious way.

AmeriCymru: Can you tell us a little about his Welsh background? Would it be accurate to describe him as an outsider, a ‘marginal character’?

Meic: Rhys was born in the mining village of Blaenclydach, near Tonypandy in the Rhondda Valley. His parents kept a grocer’s shop known as Royal Stores. He had an elder brother who was killed in the last weeks of the Great War, three sisters who became teachers and a nurse, and another brother,the benjamin of the family, Lewis. Their status as shop-keepers kept them apart from a working-class community on which they relied for custom and which, in turn, was almost wholly dependent on the coal industry: they employed a maid and a man to take deliveries up and down the valley, enjoyed holidays and were never short of food like many of their neighbours. The parents and older children spoke Welsh. Rhys was brought up in chapel but as a teenager began attending services at a church where the services were in English, losing his Welsh along the way. Just before his fourteenth birthday he decided he had had enough of school and left, much to the chagrin of his parents. He spent the next seven years wandering the hills above Rhondda, reading voraciously, and helping his parents in the shop. This last was crucial: he learned to listen to the customers, particularly the womenfolk, with whose tales of woe and misfortune he was able to sympathize. Many critics have remarked upon his ‘feminine’ sensibility and the fact that many of his stories are about women or written from a woman’s point of view. His female characters are brave and resolute, determined to overcome whatever life throws at them while his menfolk are craven creatures, the victims of cruel circumstance. There is very little discussion of politics in his books but he did observe the Tonypandy Riots which brought troops into the Rhondda in 1910.

AmeriCymru: How would you characterise his relationship with the Rhondda?

Meic: I’d say he had a love-hate relationship with the Rhondda. It provided him with material for most of his books, and he knew it. But he found it hard to break away and write about somewhere else. Most critics think his Rhondda stories and novels are far superior to work set elsewhere. He was, however, disgusted by what he saw as the ugliness of the coal-mining community, the muck and mire of the industry and what it did to people’s lives. Although he often went home, especially when money was short or he had nowhere to live, after his parents’ death he had no reason to visit the Rhondda and lost contact with the Valley.

AmeriCymru: Davies was a friend of D.H. Lawrence. Do you think Lawrence influenced his writing in any way?

Meic: He was invited to stay with the Lawrences in the South of France in 1928 and later accompanied them to Paris. He carried the manuscript of Pansies back to London and through the customs which had seized them previously. He had admired the English novelist long before that and there are traces of his influence throughout Davies’s early work, in particular in his depiction of women: the Lawrentian woman appears more than once in his stories. He was aware of it and, as he matured as a novelist, began to shake it off.

AmeriCymru: ''The Black Venus'' was one of his most popular titles. Can you tell us a little about this book? How representative is it of his work?

Meic: Published in 1944, the novel is set in the fictitious village of Ayron in Ceredigion; when Davies wasn’t writing about the Rhondda, he often set his work in west Wales, for which he had a sentimental attachment. It’s a fantasy created around the custom of courting in bed, or bundling, by which a young woman was allowed to receive suitors who would stay the night on, rather than in her bed. The custom was common among the peasantry in the 18 th and 19 th centuries. Opinion seems to be divided as to whether it was observed under conditions of strict chastity, with a bolster placed between the sweethearts, or whether sexual contact was allowed. Olwen Powell, the beautiful young heiress of a large farm, uses it to test the eligibility of various suitors, thus turning the custom on its head, much to the disapproval of the community: the woman is in control and eventually triumphs. Critical opinion is divided about the sexual significance of the Black Venus, a carving which is to be seen in Olwen’s room, though it adds considerably to the amusement of the novel. It is not Davies’s best but it went into several editions.

AmeriCymru: Davies is noted for being a particularly hard working author. Can you tell us something about his work routine , ethic and preferred working environment?

Meic: Except for a few years as a draper’s assistant on first going to London, and a short stint of war-work, Davies managed to live almost wholly by his pen. His meagre income was not supplemented by any teaching, journalism, broadcasting, or hack-work of any kind. He sat on no committees, signed no manifestos, believed no political nostrums or religious dogma, never read his work in public, attended no conferences, never edited a magazine, engaged in no literary squabbles, spurned all cliques, shunned the company of academics, had no taste or talent for self-promotion, joined no literary clubs, never competed for a prize, never sat in judgement on his fellow writers as an adjudicator of literary competitions, and only very rarely as a reviewer of their books. He believed the proper business of the writer was to be writing. Living in rented or borrowed accommodation from which he invariably soon moved on, he maintained a rigorous work-schedule, writing, eating and sleeping in one small room. He cultivated detachment as if by not fully belonging to any one place, he could preserve something of himself, something secret, his inviolable self, which he prized above all else. When immersed in a story, as he often was, he wrote a thousand words a day until it was finished. Domestic comforts, such as a home, a regular partner and some security of income, which make life tolerable for most writers, were not for him. He did not even turn to the anodyne of drink, which has sustained and destroyed so many, though he was not averse to the occasional glass in one of his favourite pubs. As for drugs, he had seen what they had done to the only woman he cared for, the heroin addict Anna Kavan. The only time he was celebrated as a writer was when he won the Edgar – the prize awarded by the Mystery Writers of America – for his story The Chosen One in 1967 . Towards the end of his life he found a new readership in America.

AmeriCymru: Davies was a prolific short story writer. Are there any of his stories that you would particularly recommend?

Meic: The stories I admire most include ‘Nightgown’, ‘Canute’, The Benefit Concert’, ‘Revelation’, ‘The Pits are on the Top’, ‘Weep not my Wanton’, and ‘Resurrection’. Unfortunately it’s difficult to find books by Rhys Davies, except via Amazon. The three-volume Collected Stories I edited in 1998 is no longer available. But there will be several in Dai Smith’s anthology due from Parthian shortly in the Library of Wales. There are also seven in Nightgown , published by Carreg Gwalch. The Rhys Davies Trust is currently considering grant-aid for the Selected Stories .

AmeriCymru: Any final message for the readers and members of AmeriCymru? Why read Rhys Davies?

Meic: Take a look at Amazon to see whether any of his books can be bought there. His novel The Withered Root has been republished in the Library of Wales. You might also read my biography as an introduction to his work! You can read Rhys Davies solely for the literary pleasure it affords. But he was very much of his place and time. His achievement as a writer was that, by the mysterious process we call art, he left work that is timeless and universal, and that still speaks to the human condition.

Julie McGowan is a Welsh writer, living in Usk, south Wales. Her first novel, ''The Mountains Between'' was a regional best-seller on its first release and is now in its third edition, having received much acclaim in Wales (including promotion on BBC Wales radio). ''Don''t Pass Me By'' is also set in S. Wales. It was released a month ago and is already achieving great sales and reviews.'' Buy ''Don''t Pass Me By'' here

Read Julie''s guest article here:- What''s In A Name?

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AmeriCymru: Hi Julie and many thanks for agreeing to be interviewed.‭ ‬You were born in Blaenavon and lived there for‭ ‬12‭ ‬years.‭ ‬Can you describe the town for our American readers‭? ‬What effect did your upbringing have on your writing‭?

Julie: Thank you very much for interviewing me.‭

Blaenavon is a small town in the Eastern Valley of S.‭ ‬Wales,‭ ‬sprawled across the lower slopes of the Blorenge mountain which separates it from the market town of Abergavenny,‭ ‬gateway to the Black mountains and the Brecon Beacons.‭ ‬Facing the town rises the Coity mountain,‭ ‬where major coal mining took place.‭ ‬Blaenavon grew substantially in the industrial revolution,‭ ‬when coal began to be mined there and an iron foundry was developed.‭ ‬It is of sufficient historical importance that it is now a world heritage site,‭ ‬although the iron and coal are long finished.‭ ‬However,‭ ‬the mine‭ – ‬Big Pit‭ – ‬is now a national museum.

Row upon row of terraced houses were built during the industrial time when the town prospered,‭ ‬to house the miners and their families,‭ ‬and most of those terraces are still lived in today,‭ ‬although they have been modernised.‭ ‬I grew up in one such house,‭ ‬but at that time we had no central heating‭ – ‬just coal fires in the downstairs rooms‭ – ‬and no running hot water.‭ ‬There was a cold water tap in the kitchen,‭ ‬no bathroom‭ (‬we bathed in a tin bath in the kitchen,‭ ‬which was filled with water heated by a small electric boiler‭) ‬and there was one toilet outside in the yard.‭ ‬But there was no sense of deprivation because everyone else lived in similar houses‭ – ‬we were all in the same boat.

‭ ‬Social activities also took place in the‭ ‬Workman’s Hall‭ – ‬a wonderful Victorian building built from the penny subscriptions of the miners,‭ ‬which housed a library and a cinema for everyone,‭ ‬and billiard rooms used only by the men and from which children would be chased away.

The Workman’s Hall Blaenavon

So it was a very close-knit community,‭ ‬and,‭ ‬as families rarely moved away,‭ ‬one had relatives in every street‭ – ‬and even those adults who were neighbours rather than actual family were referred to as‭ ‘‬auntie‭’ ‬and‭ ‘‬uncle‭’‬.

The cliché‭ ‘‬we were poor but we were happy‭’ ‬really applied during my childhood there‭ – ‬particularly as we weren’t aware of our level of poverty because it was all we knew.‭ ‬Winters were cold and harsh,‭ ‬with biting winds coming off the mountains,‭ ‬often bringing snow with them,‭ ‬but summers,‭ ‬even though not particularly hot,‭ ‬were times of freedom,‭ ‬when we would go out to play all day,‭ ‬roaming throughout the town and the mountainside,‭ ‬secure in the knowledge that we knew everyone and everywhere was safe,‭ ‬and with very little traffic around to worry about.‭ ‬We would only come home when we were hungry or when our inbuilt clocks told us it was nearly a mealtime.

Cottages of Stack Square,‭  the oldest in Blaenavon,‭ ‬built alongside the‭ ‭ ‬derelict but preserved‭ ‬Iron Works.

Blaenavon is still a close-knit community of people who have lived there all their lives,‭ ‬brought their children up who have also stayed and married within the town,‭ ‬and so on.‭ ‬But it has suffered in recent decades from the loss of the mines and a big downturn economically that even the world heritage status has failed to alleviate.

Thus,‭ ‬my upbringing gave me a huge sense of the importance of family and community,‭ ‬and a need to belong.‭ ‬The feeling that Wales is home never left me because we always came back.‭ ‬Although we moved to England for my father’s work,‭ ‬every holiday we‭ ‘‬went home‭’ ‬to visit the vast network of family and friends,‭ ‬and,‭ ‬after‭ ‬20‭ ‬years back in Wales,‭ ‬I still get a thrill when driving through the spectacular countryside and the little streets and lanes of my childhood,‭ ‬that I am‭ ‘‬home‭’ ‬again.

The chapel side of my upbringing also gave me a sense of duty‭ (‬without meaning to sound pious‭) ‬and a continuing faith,‭ ‬and,‭ ‬being part of a community where it was important to stop and chat to your neighbours and friends whenever you met them,‭ ‬I have an abiding interest in the lives of others‭!!

AmeriCymru: When did you first become aware that you wanted to write‭?

Julie: I had always loved English literature lessons at school,‭ ‬and went through the common habit of writing poetry‭ (‬seen by no-one‭) ‬to describe my teenage angst.‭ ‬However,‭ ‬the desire to write properly came about when we were living at a private school where my husband was headmaster.‭ ‬As the headmaster’s wife in such a school it was always one’s fate to be roped into something that no-one else wanted to do.‭ ‬I had been a keen participant of amateur dramatics since a child,‭ ‬so when there was no-one to run the school annual drama performance,‭ ‬that task fell to me.‭ ‬I then discovered that it was nearly impossible to find a script that had sufficient parts for all the children‭ ‬I‭ ‬needed to get on stage.‭ ‬So,‭ ‬in my rather typical‭ ‘‬gung-ho‭’ ‬fashion,‭ ‬I decided to write one,‭ ‬and that was my first foray into writing.‭ ‬Not only was it well-received,‭ ‬but I found myself enjoying it enormously and decided that I would embark on writing as a part-time career.‭ ‬I felt that I had at least one novel in me,‭ ‬but,‭ ‬given the work ethic that a Welsh chapel upbringing had impressed upon me,‭ ‬I couldn’t justify writing as an indulgence if it wasn’t going to pay.‭ ‬So I started writing commercial short stories,‭ ‬and only when they were being bought and published did I feel that I could also give novel-writing a go.

AmeriCymru: Your first novel‭ The Mountains Between ‬enjoyed considerable success.‭ ‬Care to describe it for our readers‭?

Julie: ‘The Mountains Between‎’ ‏is set in my favourite part of the world‭ – ‬Blaenavon and Abergavenny‭ – ‬between the years of‭ ‬1929‭ ‬and‭ ‬1949‭ ‬and follows the fortunes of Jennie,‭ ‬youngest daughter of a prosperous farming family who live just outside Abergavenny,‭ ‬and of Harry,‭ ‬youngest son of a family living just the other side of the Blorenge mountain in Blaenavon‭; ‬a very different existence marked by poverty and unemployment.

Jennie is just‭ ‬8‭ ‬years old,‭ ‬living a difficult,‭ ‬though comfortable life,‭ ‬under the critical eye of her harsh,‭ ‬autocratic mother,‭ ‬Katharine.‭ ‬At the start of the book Katharine has just told Jennie that she was never wanted.‭ ‬This rejection haunts Jennie throughout her childhood and,‭ ‬ten years later,‭ ‬spins her into a hasty marriage as World War‭ ‬2‭ ‬breaks out.‭ ‬The malign influence of Katharine continues to spoil her life and ultimately she has to make the decision to take charge of her life if she is ever to overcome her sense of unworthiness.

Harry,‭ ‬meanwhile,‭ ‬although poor,‭ ‬is surrounded by people he loves and who love him.‭ ‬At the start of the book he is‭ ‬15,‭ ‬desperate to be a man and go down the pit,‭ ‬but ends up working in the local co-operative‭ ‬store.‭ ‬He is also desperate to find a girlfriend,‭ ‬and the first section of the book follows his fortunes in this department.‭ ‬But life grows harsher still as the Depression hits the community hard,‭ ‬and by the outbreak of the Second World War Harry is already a young man who has known much sadness and heartbreak.

Do Jennie and Harry ever meet‭? ‬Do they each find someone to love‭? ‬You have to read the book to find out‭!

‘The Mountains Between‎’ ‏came about after I started recording the memoirs of my parents and realised that not only did they give a fantastic insight into life in the early part of the‭ ‬20th century,‭ ‬but also that they had had such different upbringings that it was a wonder they ever got together‭ – ‬and so the idea for a novel was sparked.‭ ‬All of the places and big events that happen in the book are real,‭ ‬only the story is fictionalised.

AmeriCymru: Your second novel is set in Cornwall.‭ ‬What can you tell us about‭ Just One More Summer ‭ ?

Julie: ‘Just One More Summer‎’ ‏is a modern novel which came about while I was trying to get‭ ‘‬The Mountains Between‭’ ‬published.‭ ‬I entered a‭ ‘‬start of a novel‭’ ‬competition,‭ ‬where you had to write the‭ ‬1st‭ ‬1,000‭ ‬words‭ – ‬so that’s what I did.‭ ‬The competition was judged by well-known British writer Katie Fforde,‭ ‬who gave my story‭ ‬1st prize,‭ ‬and commented that she would love to know what happens to the main character Allie.‭ ‬At that point I didn’t really know,‭ ‬as I had simply written the required‭ ‬1,000‭ ‬words.

However,‭ ‬the premise of the book is that Allie,‭ ‬at nearly‭ ‬30,‭ ‬is recovering from a broken marriage and decides to spend the summer in Cornwall,‭ ‬the place of long-remembered childhood happiness,‭ ‬in order to lick her wounds.‭ ‬She herself is the product of a broken marriage and had vowed that when her turn came she would have a long and happy partnership,‭ ‬so she was devastated when her husband left her.‭ ‬In Cornwall she strikes up a friendship with an unlikely group of young people who appear to be led by an ageing hippy-type of woman,‭ ‬Marsha.‭ ‬Allie discovers that the other members of the group have all been‭ ‘‬rescued‭’ ‬at one time or another by Marsha,‭ ‬who helps Allie to find her own hidden strength.‭ ‬But as Allie finds herself falling for one of the young men,‭ ‬Adam,‭ ‬she also discovers that Marsha has secrets of her own,‭ ‬that Allie’s idyllic memories of childhood are flawed,‭ ‬and that back in London family issues have become ever more complicated.‭ ‬And at this point her husband,‭ ‬Will,‭ ‬decides that he wants to give their marriage a second chance.

Again,‭ ‬to find out what happens to Allie,‭ ‬you will have to read the book‭!

AmeriCymru: Your third novel‭ Don''t Pass Me By ‭ ‬is about a group of children evacuated to rural Wales from wartime London.‭ ‬Care to tell us more‭?

Julie: When I was researching World War‭ ‬2‭ ‬for my first book,‭ ‬I read a lot of accounts from people who were evacuated during the Blitz to South Wales.‭ ‬It struck me that these days we tend to look back on this mass evacuation of children with nostalgic rose-coloured glasses,‭ ‬but,‭ ‬in reality,‭ ‬whilst some children were very well cared-for,‭ ‬others had a really bad time with their‭ ‘‬foster‭’ ‬parents.‭ ‬At the same time I was writing features for magazines about how we agonise these days when our children leave home to go to college‭; ‬will they be safe,‭ ‬will they be happy,‭ ‬will they manage‭? ‬And these are‭ ‬18-year-olds‭! ‬Yet,‭ ‬in the Blitz,‭ ‬these small children of‭ ‬5‭ ‬years upwards were sent across the country to goodness-knew-where to live with complete strangers.

So I increasingly felt I wanted to write a book which reflected some of the things that evacuee children encountered.

‎‘‏Don’t Pass Me By‭’ ‬has three main characters:

Lydia is a young woman who is desperate to escape from her violent husband,‭ ‬and joins an evacuee train with her young baby in order to get away.‭ ‬Once in the tiny village of Penfawr,‭ ‬near Swansea,‭ ‬the billeting officer has no idea what to do with her,‭ ‬as she‭’‬s not on his list,‭ ‬so she is foisted onto the unwelcoming local doctor,‭ ‬to act as his housekeeper.

Arthur is a young lad from the East End who just wants to go back to the life he led with his mother‭ – ‬who‭ ‬leads a rackety sort of existence,‭ ‬the immorality of which Arthur is only vaguely aware of.‭ ‬He loses contact with his mother during his time‭ ‬in Penfawr and subsequently causes a lot of headaches for the kind family who have taken him in.

Amy is also from the East End,‭ ‬a timid child who is scared of the dark.‭ ‬She is placed with the bitter,‭ ‬God-fearing widow,‭ ‬Mrs Preece,‭ ‬and her strange son,‭ ‬Edwin.‭ ‬Amy suffers terribly during her time in this household and doesn’t know who to turn to.

The stories of these‭ ‬3‭ ‬characters intertwine throughout the book and,‭ ‬ultimately,‭ ‬none of them can help themselves without helping each other.‭

AmeriCymru: You have also been involved with local theatre in your home town of Usk.‭ ‬Is theatrical writing something that you might explore in the future‭?

Julie: I run the local theatrical group with my husband,‭ ‬and write all the scripts for our shows and our annual pantomime‭ – ‬a strange,‭ ‬very British concept‭ – ‬and sell these scripts via my website.‭( ‬ www.juliemcgowan.com ‭)‬ I really enjoy this work,‭ ‬especially as most of it is humorous,‭ ‬so is very different from much of my other writing,‭ ‬but I don’t have a burning ambition to write for the theatre in any other way.‭ ‬I think my scriptwriting is too light-hearted for modern theatre which seems to need a lot of depth and angst and to be more obscure.

‎ AmeriCymru: What are you reading currently‭? ‬Any recommendations‭?

Julie: I’ve just finished reading‭ ‘‬All Change‭’‬,‭ ‬the‭ ‬5th and final volume of the Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard.‭ ‬The books are a wonderful evocation of English upper middle class life and I’ve enjoyed them enormously.‭ ‬Each volume can stand alone,‭ ‬but I would recommend that anyone who is interested should really start with volume one‭ ‘‬The Light Years‭’ ‬and work their way through the whole series.

I’ve also just read‭ ‘‬The Testament of Mary‭’ ‬by Colm Toibin,‭ ‬which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.‭ ‬It’s Mary’s account of what happened at the crucifixion‭ – ‬beautifully written,‭ ‬but I’m going to read it again as I’ve been discussing it with a friend and we’ve come away from it with completely different views‭!

One of my favourites from last year was‭ ‘‬Me Before You‭’ ‬by Jojo Moyes‭ – ‬a brilliant book which took me by surprise with its depth and emotion when I thought it was going to be quite light and frothy.

AmeriCymru: ‎ ‏What''s next for Julie McGowan‭? ‬Are you working on another book at the moment‭?

Julie: Yes,‭ ‬I am working on another book,‭ ‬but it’s slow going when I have to currently spend a lot of time promoting‭ ‘‬Don’t Pass Me By‭’! ‬The working title of this next one is‭ ‘‬Yes I’m gonna be a star‭’ ‬and it’s the story of a teenage girl in‭ ‬1971,‭ ‬who decides that she wants to be a famous singer,‭ ‬and goes off to London to do just that.‭ ‬She succeeds,‭ ‬but there are dreadful costs to pay along the way.

AmeriCymru: Any final message for the readers and members of AmeriCymru‭?

Julie: I am very grateful for the opportunity to promote my books with you.‭ ‬I sincerely hope that‭ ‘‬The Mountains Between‭’ ‬and‭ ‘‬Don’t Pass Me By‭’ ‬fill readers with nostalgia and love for‭ ‘‬the old country‭’ ‬and that they enjoy reading them as much as I’ve enjoyed writing them.‭ ‬I would love some reviews‭ (‬good or bad,‭ ‬but hopefully good‭!) ‬on Amazon,‭ ‬Goodreads,‭ ‬and any other book-based sites,‭ ‬and welcome emails from readers‭ ( ‬juliemcgowanusk@live.co.uk ‭)‬ And finally,‭ ‬congratulations to all at AmeriCymru for the work you do in promoting all things Welsh‭ – ‬if any of your members are ever in this part of S.‭ ‬Wales I would happily give them a guided tour of my little part of it.

Product Details

'Dovetail' - A Review

This book is a must for anyone with a taste for the bizarre and grotesque. Tim is emasculated in the course of an extreme school bullying incident. He spends the rest of his life acquiring the skills necessary for an aesthetically beautiful revenge. Set in Spain and Risca this novel is at once a psychological thriller, a reflection on the nature of obsession and a good guide to advanced woodworking practice.

The unbalanced state of Tim''s mind is explored with cold, clinical precision as he apprentices himself to his Spanish mentor and perfects his skills with devoted and obsessive diligence. The love interest is provided by Elena, his childhood sweat heart but to dwell on that would be to give away too much of the plot. .

Practical woodworking tips abound as this macabre tale unfolds accentuating the obsessive nature of Tim''s mission and perhaps providing a useful supplementary primer for students of the craft. A mysterious, imaginary character called ''The Conductor'' also makes frequent appearances. His conflicted relationship with Tim is related in the form of an ongoing interior dialogue fraught with ominous overtones. ''The Conductor'' is based upon a character in a 1946 movie called ''A Matter of Life And Death'' starring David Niven.

Interview With Author - Jeremy Hughes

AmeriCymru: Hi Jeremy and many thanks for agreeing to be interviewed by AmeriCymru. I have seen Dovetail described in the following terms:- "American Psycho meets The Wasp Factory". Care to comment? Does it have anything in common with these two titles?

Jeremy: The voices in American Psycho and The Wasp Factory are both thrilling to me.  The protagonist of American Psycho describes his actions and beliefs with conviction and ‘normality’, though his evaluation of situations and events is completely warped when judged against what is conventionally acceptable.  The Wasp Factory is a master class in keeping the reader interested.  I hope I’ve managed to capture something from both of these books.

AmeriCymru: Revenge and obsession. Would you agree that these are the twin themes of ''Dovetail''?

Jeremy: These might be regarded as main themes, but there is also striving for great art and the exploration of personal identity.  Love and death are clearly important, too, as well as the tensions between binary opposites throughout.

AmeriCymru   There is an enormous amount of detail concerning the art and craft of woodworking in the book. How did you go about researching this?

Jeremy: I trained as a carpenter/joiner before I went off to university, so most of the research was what I already knew.  Craftsmen have a particular and almost ineffable relationship with their tools.

AmeriCymru: You reference the David Niven film ''A Matter of Life and Death'' a number of times in ''Dovetail''. Care to tell us a little about its significance?

Jeremy: I first saw the film as a child and was completely enamoured with the fantastic nature of the story i.e. that a man fails to go to heaven at his allotted time, and the normality of Niven’s character being able to see heaven’s Conductor 73.  The significance of the film within the book ultimately lies with the reader.

AmeriCymru: Given the intensely ornate and detailed nature of the infernal apparatus with which Tim despatches his victims were you tempted to include graphics in the book, diagrams etc ?

Jeremy: The killing machine is better left to the reader''s imagination, but I did sketch details for my benefit when I was working out the book.

AmeriCymru: Can you reassure our readers that there are currently no mass murderers on the loose in the vicinity of Twmbarlwm?

Jeremy: The last time I was there, no, but now...

AmeriCymru   Who are you currently reading? Any recommendations?

Jeremy: Over the last twelve months...

Fine Memoirs:

Andrew Motion’s In the Blood

Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

Diana Athill’s Somewhere Towards the End

And one especially  for Welsh expats: Byron Rogers’s fabulous Three Journeys.  He also wrote the very good biography of R. S. Thomas, The Man Who Went into the West.

Many war books, including Karl Marlantes’s novel Matterhorn (Vietnam), Sebastian Junger’s reportage War (Afghanistan), and Patrick Hennessey’s memoir The Junior Officers’ Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars.  Adam Thorpe’s novel The Rules of Perspective(WWll) is wonderful:  humane, perceptive, writerly and surprising.  Pat Barker’s superb novel Regeneration (WWl).  I found Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient (WWll) deeply satisfying.

Other novels:

Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections

Paul Harding’s Tinkers

Don DeLillo’s Point Omega.

AmeriCymru: What''s next for Jeremy Hughes? Any new work currently in progress?

Jeremy: My second novel, provisionally titled Tender Green, is very different, set in America, England and Wales.   The first half of the book concerns the pilot of a USAAF Flying Fortress who is stationed in Suffolk, England during 1943.  He marries a woman from the nearby town and is lost when returning from a mission his aircraft crashes in Wales.  It’s a mystery, since the bodies of the crew are recovered, but not the pilot’s.

The marriage produces a son who is not permitted to know about his father, because the mother is so grief-stricken.  When the mother dies and the son turns fifty, he sets out to find the place where his father crashed. He unearths much more than he expected about his father and mother, as well as himself.

I am about half-way through the first draft of novel three, Paint, a crime novel set in Wales, Madrid and Barcelona.   I’ve had a wonderful time doing the research, visiting the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, as well as the Reina Sofia and Prado in Madrid.

AmeriCymru: Where can our readers go to find your other published works?

Jeremy: I have published two pamphlets of poetry, breathing for all my birds, which is no longer in print, and The Woman Opposite, which is.  Unfortunately, I haven’t written any poetry for several years since concentrating on fiction.

AmeriCymru: Any final message for the readers and members of AmeriCymru?

Jeremy: I am delighted that there is an audience for Welsh writers in the US.

I have been meaning to visit New York for some time (yes, I realise that’s not representative of America!), to visit the fine museums and galleries.  There are so many paintings I’d like to see.  But all sorts of things have conspired to prevent me.   One day.

I hope AmeriCymru readers enjoy Dovetail.

With all best wishes,

Jeremy Hughes  

Book Details

Dovetail

Tim is emasculated by a gang of bullies at the age of fifteen and devotes his life to revenge. He plans to build a machine that will kill each member of the gang one by one.

Written by: Jeremy Hughes

Published by: Alcemi

Date published: 2011-09-11

ISBN: 0956012531

Available in Paperback

Jeremy Hughes - Cillian Press

Jeremy Hughes - Writers of Wales Database

AmeriCymru:  Hi Dennis and many thanks for agreeing to be interviewed by AmeriCymru. Care to introduce your new book ''A Tale of Sound & Fury'' for our readers and tell us how and why you came to write an autobiography?

Dennis:   Hello Ceri. First of all, it''s a real honour to be interviewed by you. I''ve been aware of Americymru for some time now, so it''s very gratifying that my compatriots or Cymru in America should invite me to speak about myself. Thank you for that.

I''d never seriously thought of writing an autobiography, although now I''ve started, I have to say that A Tale of Sound & Fury is the first of perhaps three such volumes, because it was impossible to put all the stories into one book and do them justice. The book came about by chance when I spoke separately to two friends late last summer, who both urged me to write it. One of them is Pete Mills, someone I''ve known since the early 1980s when I was living in London; he''s long been a highly respected archaeologist with his own consultancy in central London, but he''s also a born storyteller and I''ve lost count of the amount of times that he and I have swapped tales over a few pints late into the night in shady taverns around the country. He''s known me for around thirty years, so when someone like him suggested that I write down my own stories, it really made me think.

The other person is Vivian Widgery, someone else I met not long after I moved to London in 1979. She worked for Hansard for almost thirty years, so she spent most of her career in the corridors of power in Westminster, meeting and working with a vast array of lords, parliamentarians, journalists, consultants and other informed observers on a daily basis. Aside from any other consideration, I''d always been in awe of Vivian''s drinking prowess, so when she too urged me to write an autobiographical work, I was bound to take the idea seriously and I also invited her to write a postscript for the book, which she very kindly did and I''m grateful to her for her generous words of praise.

I also have a son named Jack who''s eighteen and a daughter named Tanith who''s sixteen. It is the way of things that people of that age should regard people of my age, and perhaps their parents, with pity or contempt, so I won''t deny that I wanted to commit to print one or two things that would make them sit up and take real notice, although it remains to be seen if they''re impressed or not! Then I thought about how I''d had an idyllic childhood in a small village in south Wales in the 1960s, so I realised I wanted to record this out of sheer gratitude, if nothing else. There were plenty of other elements involved in my decision to write this book, but I''m pretty sure I''ve told you the most important ones here. 

Dennis at his desk with ever present gargoyles

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AmeriCymru:   We learn from the product description that the book contains an account of your ''missing years'' after leaving school. Can you tell us a little more about that period in your life?

Dennis:   Yes, of course, but I suppose I should first explain something about the ''missing years'' reference. Over the last seven or eight years, I''ve had a lot of favourable media exposure on account of my investigations into what you might call ''ancient mysteries''. I''m not complaining about that and I didn''t write "A Tale of Sound & Fury" to ''set the record straight'' in any way, but all the writing I''ve done has meant that I''ve spent a lot of time locked away in my study alone by the dead of night and I''m aware that as a result, I have a certain reputation as an archaeologist, a man of letters or something similar. I''m grateful for all this, of course, but my life hasn''t always been like this by any means.

The bare bones of the matter are that I won a Jones Scholarship to Monmouth School in 1971 and I will be grateful for the education I received there until my dying day. It was the ordained scheme of things that I should go on to university, where I intended to study Egyptology and this was in 1977, before anyone had heard of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

However, as I''ve described in detail in the book, I ended up meeting all four members of Black Sabbath when they were writing material for their Never Say Die album at Rockfield, just outside Monmouth. I was an impressionable teenage kid, so to actually meet my idols in the form of Ozzy, Bill, Geezer and Tony, then to speak with them for around an hour, was a pivotal experience for me. They were the most warm-hearted, generous-spirited people anyone could wish to meet and this made a huge impression on me, to the extent that I pretty much lost interest in my studies, although they shouldn''t be blamed for this.

I left school and worked for a while in Wales while my friends all went on to university, then I moved to London to find work in the winter of 1979. I sang in rock bands for some years, both in London and in Wales, while I later spent five years travelling around Britain, Europe, Scandinavia and Russia as a knight on what was the world''s only touring mediaeval jousting tournament. In the first part of the 1990s, I had a career on television and I suppose the highlight was when I appeared as an actor in the last two series of the Crystal Maze, although there were plenty of other series, rock videos and programmes I appeared in and for the most part, I thoroughly enjoyed all this.

I did all this and a great deal more over the years, so I''ve written about as much of this time as I could in A Tale of Sound & Fury. My son Jack was born in 1995, after which we moved out of London to live on Salisbury Plain just a few miles away from Stonehenge, because I wanted him to have the benefit of a rural upbringing in a small village, just as I''d done. This was around the time I started working in archaeology again, but that''s another story.

Dennis Price as a Knight touring Scandinavia

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AmeriCymru:   In an appendix you have reproduced your interview with Captain Robert Fore, concerning his experiences during the 1981 rescue of the crew of the Primrose from North Sentinel Island. What can you tell us about this incident? How did you become interested in it?

Dennis:   I''ve been trying to remember precisely when I first learned about North Sentinel Island, but I can''t be sure, I''m afraid, although I''ve been mesmerised by the place for the past three or four years. It''s in the Bay of Bombay and it''s home to the last uncontacted island race on Earth, so this alone makes it unique and fascinating, long before we consider what little is known about this secluded realm and the people who live there.

I came to write about the place because I was writing an article on Stonehenge and trying to describe the difficulty of seeing the ruins through the eyes of the people who built it; our ancestors, who have been dead for around four and a half thousand years. As I''d learned about North Sentinel Island beforehand, it dawned on me that there were people alive today who are to all intents and purposes just as remote from us as our dead ancestors are, because the North Sentinelese are unrelentingly hostile to those outsiders they encounter, the most recent example being 2006 when they killed two Indian fishermen who had drifted ashore in their boat. We know next to nothing about the North Sentinelese - we don''t know what language they speak, what gods they worship, what their view of our world is, what they call themselves and so forth, but I don''t think we''ll ever have the answers to these questions.

After I''d written about these people on my Eternal Idol site, I was contacted by Captain Robert Fore, who had a fascinating story to tell that I vaguely remembered hearing about a long time before, back in the early 1980s. Very briefly, a freighter called the Primrose had been stranded on a coral reef just off North Sentinel Island in 1982, which led to the ship''s captain issuing a distress call because he feared that he and his crew of thirty-two sailors were about to be killed by "wild men", as he described them.

These were the North Sentinelese islanders, who were building boats on the shore and waving a variety of weapons in unmistakably hostile gestures, so this rapidly became world news at the time. Due to the appalling weather, the Indian Navy were unable to rescue the ship''s crew, so these otherwise doomed men were most fortunate that Captain Robert Fore was based nearby and immediately agreed to try to rescue them by helicopter, which he succeeded in doing despite the extremely adverse and hazardous circumstances.

Dennis Price with Captain Robert Fore

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AmeriCymru:   You were also involved with the search for missing estate agent Suzy Lamplugh. How did that come about?

Dennis:   Strictly speaking, I wasn''t involved with this search, because all investigations were a matter for the police. For those who haven''t heard about her, Suzy Lamplugh was a beautiful young woman who disappeared in broad daylight from a busy London street in 1986 and she has never been seen since, other than by the person or persons responsible for taking her away. All these years later and hers is Britain''s best-known or most notorious missing person''s case, as it''s never been resolved and she has never been found.

What I can only describe as a cosmic coincidence ultimately led to me meeting and speaking with a man who was suspected at the time of being involved with Suzy Lamplugh''s disappearance. He was and still is serving life in prison, having been convicted in 1989 of the murder of another young woman, so this is where I met him and spoke with him, as he''d invited me to visit him for reasons of his own. This is all described in what is by far the longest chapter in the book and it recounts certain events that made a great deal of news in what was a pre-internet age.

It was all a long time ago for me, but the circumstances of my peripheral involvement were so incredibly strange and they made such an impression on me for such a prolonged period of time that I felt I had to write about them. I''ve been scrupulously careful because I''m fully aware that I was writing about the disappearance and presumed murder of a beautiful young woman who is still remembered and mourned by her surviving family. I can''t do justice to such a prolonged and tragic episode in an interview, so everyone will make their own minds up about my memories of this bizarre episode in my life when they''ve read what I had to say about it.

AmeriCymru:   Your first book ''The Missing Years of Jesus'' evolved as a study of William Blake''s ''Jerusalem'' and explores the possibility that Jesus Christ may have visited Britain. Can you briefly outline the evidence for this theory?

Dennis:   To begin with, I think if there''d ever been a vote taken when I was at school in the 1970s to decide who was the pupil least likely to go on to write a book about Christ, I think I would have won by a unanimous decision! Thirty years down the line, however, and I found myself fascinated by the idea that Jesus, the most famous person ever to have lived, is unaccounted for during his teenage years and early adulthood, because the Bible stops writing about him when he''s aged twelve, then it resumes when he begins his famous ministry at the age of thirty or so. He was ''missing'' for something like eighteen years, which is over half his entire life, so when this dawned on me in 2004 or thereabouts, I became more and more intrigued by it.

To cut a very long story very short indeed, I found that William Blake''s poem was effectively the best-known expression of the many older legends in Britain that maintained that Jesus had once visited our small island. The more I looked into them, the more surprised I became at just how many legends there were, while they all consistently spoke of him coming ashore from a ship to find water, then working in mines in the West Country. Others were even more specific, telling of how he built what was in effect the world''s first church in Glastonbury that he dedicated to his mother, but I found there were still more legends and they all seemed perfectly credible to me. They were widely dismissed by most academics as being mediaeval fabrications, but I kept wondering why on Earth people of that era would invent what is the face of it the most unlikely story you can imagine.

So, I was hooked, and the more I looked into it, the more evidence I found and it was all absolutely fascinating. I learned of coins that had been struck by the ancient Dubunni tribe in the same area and at the same time that Jesus was said to be there, and these coins carried the name "Esus". I learned of evidence of ancient mariners travelling to Britain from the Middle East and a very great deal else besides, so from what I can judge, there''s an overwhelming case in favour of the idea that Jesus did indeed once visit and live in what is now the West of England and South Wales, but that''s just my personal opinion   and others will have to decide for themselves.  

Dennis with daughter Tanith at Stonehenge

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AmeriCymru:   You are recognised as an expert on Stonehenge. How and when did your interest in this subject develop?

Dennis:   My Mum and Dad took me and my little sister Carol there in 1969 when I was nine or ten and I can still remember it as if it were yesterday. At that time, we were free to wander among the stones and the ruins were so huge, so strange and so baffling that they made a profound impression on me. I read a lot about the place over the years, because there was no shortage of books and documentaries about the monument, then by pure chance, I ended up moving to a small village on Salisbury Plain just a few miles away from Stonehenge in 1996, with my young family. I quickly realised that I was eligible for a free local''s pass to the ruins, so I must have gone there roughly three times a week for ten years or so until we finally moved away from Salisbury Plain in 2005.

Jack and Tanith - my son and daughter - would sit in their pushchair eating icecream in the early days, then they virtually learned to walk on their later visits there, but I''d also take them for walks in the landscape to the surrounding barrows and other places. We went to every open access event, as well as to some private ones and the more I saw of the place, the more my fascination with it grew. I regularly spoke with the English Heritage custodians, who were all very helpful and a mine of information, while I also read more and more about the site. I made a short film about Stonehenge for ITV in 1997 or 1998, while I was also interviewed by other channels as someone who was knowledgeable about the extensive folklore connected with the monument.

From early 2000 onwards until around August 2003, I was employed by Wessex Archaeology, so I ended up working on the A303 Stonehenge Test Pit Project, which was a particularly enjoyable experience. I also worked in the Media and Communications Department when the world''s press descended on the place after the discoveries of the Amesbury Archer and Boscombe Bowmen in 2002 and 2003 respectively and of course, I ended up spending a great deal of time talking with other archaeologists who were extremely knowledgeable about all aspects of Stonehenge.

AmeriCymru:   Your site ''Eternal Idol'' contains a wealth of information and information about Stonehenge. Can you tell us a little about the history and purpose of the Eternal Idol site?

Dennis:   Well, I started Eternal Idol   in 2005, I think, because I felt I had original things to say about Stonehenge. This was at a time when it was believed that it was impossible to contribute to our sum total of knowledge about the ruins without recourse to excavation. I thought otherwise, so I started writing about the place in the face of almost universal scorn, but I was never remotely concerned by this. I regularly receive correspondence telling me that Eternal Idol''s the best Stonehenge site on the internet because there''s such a vast amount of information there and because it''s had such favourable coverage over the years in the media, while I also welcome anyone who has anything at all to contribute.

Eternal Idol long ago became so huge and so busy that it became impossible for me to manage on a day to day basis, so I''m fantastically lucky to have a lady from the USA by the name of Aynslie Hanna to help me run the site. Dan Johnston''s another friend of mine from the USA who regularly contributes and he actually published his own book on Stonehenge last year - Stonehenge Unhinged   - which is a superb investigation into the monument. Juris Ozols of Minnesota is another long-standing friend and contributor to Eternal Idol, but there are others in what I often refer to as the North American Chapter of Eternal Idol. Anyone is welcome to write in and I''m always happy to promote the work of other writers or investigators. I''m on cordial terms with many archaeologists, as well as with Druids and other pagans, but people of all faiths and none can write in and they frequently do.

There''s just so much there that it would be very hard for me to describe in an interview such as this, but of course I''m particularly interested in the Welsh origins of Stonehenge, such as the famous bluestones and more recently, the so-called "Lord of Stonehenge" from around 3,500 BC whose remains are now on display in the new Visitors Centre, a man who seems to have originated from what''s now Wales. Honestly, I could write about it all for days on end.

 Dennis Price at Stonehenge

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AmeriCymru:   You were born in Usk, south Wales and educated in Monmouth school. What memories do you have of those days? Can you describe the area a little for the benefit of our American readers?

Dennis:   Usk is a small village or town in south Wales that used to be the capital of the ancient Silures tribe, the one group of people in ancient Britain who were never actually defeated by the Romans, because the classical accounts hint at some agreement that the warring parties arrived at after around forty years of vicious conflict on a small island. It''s a lot more peaceful now, of course, with a still-inhabited castle on a hill in the centre of the town, a river, streams, outlying hills, fields and meadows, some churches and a ruined priory.

I can clearly remember growing up there in the 1960s and I loved the place. At one time, it had around thirteen pubs for a population of less than two thousand, but there was a rugby club, a cricket club, a football club, an amateur dramatics society and just about every other amenity you could imagine. It was like Heaven on Earth and I still can''t believe just how lucky I was to have been born and raised in such a place, so I''ve written about it at some length in my book.

By another cosmic coincidence, a friend of mine by the name of Isobel Brown   has recently started her own blog site dealing almost exclusively with Usk and its history. She''s a fantastic writer and photographer, so I''ll be featuring her writing on a regular basis on the Facebook site I''ve set up to help promote A Tale of Sound & Fury . If anyone''s curious about Usk, then you honestly couldn''t ask for a better place to visit online, although I''d hope that people will also choose to visit the place in person and of course, I''ve written about it fairly extensively in my book.

As for Monmouth, I won a Jones Scholarship there in 1971 and as one of the conditions of the scholarship, I had to board there, which was a huge culture shock to me as I''d lived literally within a stone''s throw of the schools I''d attended in Usk itself. The school was a wonderful place and I ended up specialising in Latin, Greek and Ancient History, although I studied many other subjects as well and in the last few years, I found myself sharing a house with Eddie Butler, who went on to captain the Welsh national team before becoming a regular commentator on the Five and Six Nations Championships.

The town itself was beautiful and interesting, with all manner of shops, alleyways, markets, museums and pubs, so it was always pleasant to take a stroll around the place after school. The River Monnow flowed past at the end of the town, joining the Wye which ran past the school itself, the other side of the dual carriageway, so this reminded me of my hometown of Usk. Towering over Monmouth itself is the huge bulk of the Kymin, a hill surmounted by a naval temple, oddly enough for such an inland location, but the whole setting was beautiful beyond words and I''ve tried to do the place justice in my book, as well as recording details of my time there. Both Usk and Monmouth are fascinating, enchanting places in their own ways and again, I consider myself very lucky to have been born and raised in the one place, and educated in the other.

AmeriCymru:  What''s next for Dennis Price? Are you working on any new projects at the moment?

Dennis: I''m working on another book as we speak and it deals with North Sentinel Island and Captain Robert Fore''s mission   in 1982 to save the crew of the Primrose. One reason for this is that I consider the word ''hero'' to have been overused in recent times to the point where it risks losing its currency, but what Captain Fore did that day was heroic in every sense of the word, so I feel I should do justice to the way he risked his life to save the lives of many others from what would have been an appalling and terrifying end.

I learned the details of all this a few years ago, but something about the whole event nagged at me, although I couldn''t pin it down. A little while ago, however, another aspect or way of looking at North Sentinel Island and the rescue of the crew of the Primrose finally dawned on me from out of the blue and it left me stunned, so I''m writing about it now.

The ''Primrose'' stranded off North Sentinel Island

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I''ve also started writing a fictional work with the provisional title of "Spirits from the Vasty Deep". I''ve spent the last decade or so intimately involved with non-fiction in various ways and I still enjoy what I do, but I feel driven to complete a work of imagination as best I can. I don''t think I''m a novelist, so this will be either a very long short story or else a novella, but as I''ve found myself dreaming repeatedly about the dark, sci-fi scenario, it''s something I want to capture in the form of the printed word.

Otherwise, I''ve been invited to appear in a documentary that''s due to start filming later this year. Some of the other guests who are scheduled to appear in it are giants in the worlds of entertainment and conservation, so I''m incredibly honoured by this, but I think I''ll wait until it''s officially announced before I say any more, as I wouldn''t want to tempt Fate. There are various other projects I''m involved in that may or may not come to fruition, but for now, these are the main three and I''m very pleased with them.

AmeriCymru:   Any final message for the readers and members of AmeriCymru?  

Dennis: I''m sorely tempted just to write "I am dreaming of the mountains of my home..."  or even simply "30 - 3", but I''m grateful to Ceri for inviting me to appear here on AmeriCymru because there''s something extremely heart-warming about recognition of any kind from a compatriot. I''m grateful to everyone who''s read this far, so I sincerely hope you found it worth your while and aside from recounting events like visiting vampire-infested graveyards in Britain, personally knighting Scandinavia''s biggest rock star and other unusual occurrences that came my way over the time recorded in my book, I''ve done my best to do justice to my hometown and homeland. Y Ddraig Goch has an almost mystical resonance for me and I suspect for many others, wherever they now live, so thank you all once again for your time and I wish you all a peaceful, pleasurable and prosperous 2014.

AmeriCymru spoke to Welsh author Evonne Wareham about her work and future plans. Evonne is the winner of the Joan Hessayan New Writers'' Award 2012 for her novel Never Coming Home

Evonne''s Website

Evonne on Wednesday ( Blog )

Choc-Lit UK ( Publishers Website )

AmeriCymru: Hi Evonne and croeso i AmeriCymru. If I may quote you:- "...walking on the beach to the sound of the waves and the gulls....and plotting murder." Could you tell us a little more about your creative process? Which part of the Welsh coast do you most favour or frequent

Evonne: For me, producing a book is as much about the thinking process as it is about writing. At least, that is my excuse for staring into space, sitting in the garden, walking on the beach … There is quite a long gestation period before I begin drafting, when I test out ideas, do research, collect background material and absorb atmosphere.  Once the book is begun there are always points where it ties itself into knots, or where your characters run off and do something that you did not expect, leaving you to deal with the mess!  Then you need some space, to sort it out. I was born and brought up by the sea, in Barry, although I spent a long time living in London, so for me the word “walk” always means “beach”.  I now live about ten minutes from the Barry Island section of the Wales Coastal Path and my feet go towards the sea automatically.  I also have very good memories of childhood holidays in Pembrokeshire. In that case it was beaches and castles.

AmeriCymru: How would you describe your work? "Romantic fiction with a dark edge"?

Evonne: I write romantic thrillers – what are known in the States as romantic suspense.  There is always a strong love story and I adhere firmly to the principle of a happy ending, although it is not achieved without a struggle, and some characters do not make it to the end of the book. I blame the thriller elements of my work on my addiction to the theatre, especially early exposure to Shakespeare and the Jacobean dramatists, as in those plays betrayal, murder and mayhem are always mixed with love, beauty and poetry. 

AmeriCymru: Your first novel, Out of Sight, Out of Mind made the final of more than one competition in 2008. Can you tell us more about the book and the success it enjoyed?

Evonne: Out of Sight, Out of Mind is a paranormal romantic suspense, with a hero and heroine who read minds. It was my first excursion into writing romantic thrillers and was a finalist in several contests on both sides of the Atlantic, but the biggest was the American Title contest, which was run by Romantic Times Magazine (Now RT BookReviews) and Dorchester Publishing.  American Title was a reality writing contest. Parts of the novel were printed in the magazine, and readers voted for their favourites, over the Internet. I didn’t win, but I had a fabulous time and travelled to Pittsburgh for the RT Booklovers Convention where the award was presented.  The following year I entered the contest again, and was again chosen for the final – the only person ever to have done it twice. I didn’t win that time, either, but had a lot of fun. And that book was Never Coming Home .

AmeriCymru: Care to tell us a little more about  Never Coming Home

Evonne: Kaz Elmore, the heroine of the book, has lost her young daughter in a fatal car crash while she was on holiday in the United States with her father, Kaz’s ex husband. Six months later, in London,  Kaz has a visit from a stranger, who has a very different version of the crash from the one Kaz received from her ex. Naturally she needs to know what happened to her daughter, and she hires the stranger, Devlin, to help her find out. The search for answers takes them across Europe and uncovers a complex web of plots and conspiracies. Something very nasty from Devlin’s past comes back to threaten him, people start dying and Kaz and Devlin fall for each other. This is a particular problem for Devlin, as he considers he is not capable of love, because of things he has done in the past.

It has been an incredibly exciting journey to see the book published. The excitement was compounded in May this year, when Never Coming Home won the Joan Hessayan New Writers’ Award from the Romantic Novelists’ Association, here in the UK.

AmeriCymru: We learn from your website that you have many unpublished manuscripts including one particular favourite - ''The Time We Have Left''. Are there any plans for publication? Please tell us more about the book?

Evonne:   The Time We Have Left is the book that ran away with itself. It’s meant to be the first part of a trilogy, and is over 140,000 words - which is a very fat book. It’s a regional family saga, set in the South Wales coal ports of Barry and Cardiff during World War Two, charting the lives and loves of a family of three sisters. It was written a number of years ago and is nothing like what I write now, but it was a major part of my learning curve as a writer, when I was experimenting to find my style and favourite genre.  Although it is an early manuscript it has received good feedback from experts and I have a very soft spot for it, as I spent a long while writing it - 140,000 words do not happen overnight. I did a considerable amount of archive research for it and it also owes a lot to family members and friends, who gave me first hand background material on what it was like to live through those times. It also records and celebrates things about Cardiff and Barry, particularly buildings, that have disappeared or been substantially changed - landmarks and lifestyles that no longer exist. It would be lovely to work on it with an editor, to find out if it could be brought up to publication standard, but I don’t see it happening in the near future. A retirement project, perhaps?

AmeriCymru: What do you read for pleasure and what are you reading at the moment? Any recommendations?

Evonne: I’m a compulsive reader in all sorts of genres. In my own genre of romantic suspense, Karen Rose, Nora Roberts and Jayne Anne Krentz are favourites. I also read historicals and I enjoy the golden age detective stories, as well as contemporary police procedurals and thrillers.  I’ve recently finished Season of Storms from Canadian writer Susanna Kearsley.

For anyone interested in sampling a wide variety of women’s fiction from the UK,  they might like to take a look at what is on offer from my publishers, Choc-lit, who are small independent publishers. The Choc-lit authors have a number of award winners amongst them and we all write in different genres – paranormal, historical, fantasy, romantic comedy, thrillers, contemporary romance …

Choc-lit are currently looking to recruit two new authors, one from Australia and one from the U.S., and are running competitions for unpublished writers. They also have a tasting panel, made up of readers, who comment on submissions and recommend them for publication. Choc-lit are recruiting from America and Australia for that also. Details of the writing contest, the tasting panel and the Choc-lit catalogue are all available on the Choc-lit website. All the authors blog there too,on a regular basis.

http://www.choc-lit.co.uk/

AmeriCymru: What''s next for Evonne Wareham? Any forthcoming publications or projects in the works?

Evonne: Never Coming Home , my debut published novel, was the finalist from my second American Title contest. Choc-lit have also contracted for Out of Sight, Out of Mind and that will be out in the UK in March next year. So – both my American Title books will be published, but in reverse order. I’m hoping to make it over to the States next year to attend the RT Booklovers Convention. Fingers crossed on that one. I’d also love to attend some of the crime and thriller conventions such as Bouchercon and Thrillerfest, but I think that will have to wait for a while.

AmeriCymru: Any final message for the members and readers of AmeriCymru? 

Evonne: I like to include at least one scene set in Wales in all my books, so if Americymru members and readers are persuaded to try one of them, I hope they will enjoy the connection to Wales.  In Never Coming Home the scene is a short but crucial one, near the end of the book, which takes place in and around Cardiff station.  In Out of Sight, Out of Mind , Wales has a much larger role, as a chunk of the action takes place in Pembrokeshire. 

I’ve really enjoyed talking to Americymru and would like to thank Ceri for some interesting questions. If I’ve tempted  you to read my work, I do hope you enjoy it.

"When Dewi is clobbered by a falling rat, the nosy Welsh dragon snoops his way into a challenging predicament. Helped by a toad with a passion for chemical wart cures, Dewi discovers that a megalomaniac baron is secretly breeding mutant corn at an unfriendly castle. To thwart the genetically modified-corn baron''s sickening plan, he must use moxie and firepower in a series of catastrophe-skirting capers."

Dewi And The Seeds Of Doom

Americymru: Hi Maggie and many thanks for agreeing to be interviewed by AmeriCymru. You were born in Wales. Care to tell us a little more about your Welsh background and how you came to the States?

Maggie: I was dragged kicking and screaming into this world in my grandparent’s terraced house in the Ryhmney Valley coal-mining town of Ystrad Mynach in what is now the county of Mid Glamorgan. My maternal and paternal grandfathers were coal miners. My maternal grandmother’s mother tongue was Welsh, which colored her English, often amusingly so. My father was the first in his family to go to college, and I was the first female in the family to throw myself into the academic melee. I have fond memories of Bangor University, which was Bangor College, University of Wales, when I graduated. I’m even nostalgic about the gales that blew—seemingly continuously—from across the Irish Sea, pouring cold water into my wellies and darkening the Gothic college buildings until they resembled something Sauron would have enjoyed living in.

After graduation, I stumbled through a motley slew of jobs from unofficial spy (for the Brits, in case you’re worried) to musicologist (I studied piano and music theory) to orchestral manager to law-firm media relations consultant to academic editor, in the UK, Romania, and—when the glitter of the gold-paved streets beckoned—the USA. I even tried my hand at teaching English to recalcitrant schoolgirls in France. Well, they were recalcitrant until I switched from grammar to medieval history—there’s nothing like castles, dungeons, and torture chambers for winning friends and influencing minds.

I was recruited in London for a job at the World Bank, Washington, DC as a trilingual secretary, but that changed quickly once I discovered the thrills—and spills—of writing program notes for National Symphony Orchestra audiences who would rather search for their names in the donors’ lists than learn what Beethoven had for breakfast. And I went downhill from there …

Americymru: We learn from your biography that after arriving in the US you "... gravitated to Virginia where I threw myself—not literally of course—into editing and writing nonfiction, mostly for adults." Can you tell us more? How would you describe your writing background?

Maggie: That motley slew of jobs in the business sector all had one thing in common—writing/editing, writing/editing, and more writing/editing—on everything from astronomy to Zen Buddhism. I’ve always loved words, and I’ve always loved research. In fact, I was often so absorbed by the research that I put off getting around to the writing. That still happens.

Americymru: Dewi is not your first venture in the area of childrens writing. Can you tell us a little more about your previous work for children?

Maggie: I’ve always been fascinated by children’s literature from the time I was small and my parents read me bedtime stories to becoming a mother myself and reading my own child stories, sometimes the same ones I enjoyed as a child. When my son grew too old for stories, I needed an excuse to borrow books from the children’s library. Declaring myself to be a children’s writer did the trick. Studying the work of great children’s writers gives me the chance to indulge my love of that enchanting mix of innocence, escapism, imagination, and humor that bubbles out of children’s literature. My first efforts at writing were articles and poetry written for the online Stories for Children Magazine, and knowonder! magazine published my first novella, Dewi, the Red Dragon. My adventure story Vin and the Dorky Duet for middle-grade readers was published this past summer.

Americymru: What can you tell us about Dewi and the seeds of Doom? What inspired it? Where can readers buy it online?

Maggie: When I first created my character Dewi, a young and nosy Welsh dragon, I wanted to spread the word, in my very small way, about the land of my birth—its gorgeous countryside, its inspiring history, its fascinating legends, its impossible language. I don’t see why Wales can’t enjoy the kind of global awareness that Scotland and Ireland do. Dewi and the Seeds of Doom combines fantasy—the setting is a historically dubious Wales—with a contemporary problem: genetically modified organisms (GMOs). GMOs in the human food chain are very scary—much scarier than any horror movie could ever be. They are now to be found in 80 to 90 percent of all processed foods in the USA. I have enormous respect and admiration for those courageous folks who are trying to educate the public about them and get them removed from our food supply. I hope children who read Dewi and the Seeds of Doom will enjoy a romp with a feisty little Welsh dragon turned amateur detective. I hope their parents will subscribe to the underlying message about GMOs.

Dewi and the Seeds of Doom is available most places where books are sold, including Amazon and Kindle, and the publishers’ bookstores: for the e-book, MuseItUp Publishing and for the paperback, Halo Publishing International at and of course through Americymru’s bookstore. For more information, check my website at Maggie Lyons Children''s Books

Here’s a brief description of the story:

When Dewi is clobbered by a falling rat, the nosy Welsh dragon snoops his way into a challenging predicament. Helped by a toad with a passion for chemical wart cures, Dewi discovers that a megalomaniac baron is secretly breeding mutant corn at an unfriendly castle. To thwart the genetically modified-corn baron’s sickening plan, he must use moxie and firepower in a series of catastrophe-skirting capers.

Americymru: What''s next for Maggie Lyons?

Maggie: I’m working on a sequel to my children’s adventure story Vin and the Dorky Duet and I’m also chewing on an idea for a sequel to Dewi and the Seeds of Doom, this time inspired by the history of the National Eisteddfod, in which, as a very young pianist, I once competed.

Americymru: Any final message for the readers and members of AmeriCymru?

Maggie: A very heartfelt diolch yn fawr for reading this far.

Interview by Ceri Shaw

The Cuckoos of Batch Magna - "When Sir Humphrey Miles Pinkerton Strange, 8th baronet and huntin'' shooting’ and fishin’ squire of the village of Batch Magna in the Welsh Marches, departs this world for the Upper House (as he had long vaguely thought of it, where God no doubt presides in ermine over a Heaven as reassuringly familiar as White’s or Boodle’s), what’s left of his decaying estate passes, through the ancient law of entailment, to distant relative Humph, an amiable, overweight short-order cook from the Bronx."

...

AmeriCymru: Hi Peter and many thanks for agreeing to be interviewed by AmeriCymru. Care to introduce the Batch Magna novels for our readers?

Peter: Thank you, Ceri, for inviting me. I appreciate it. The novels, of which The Cuckoos of Batch Magna is the first in the series, are set in a river valley in the Welsh Marches, the borderland between Wales and England (though I’m sure that doesn’t need explaining in this company). The squire of the village there, Batch Magna, dies, and what’s left of his decaying estate crosses the Atlantic and passes, through the ancient law of entailment, to distant relative Humph, an amiable, overweight short-order cook from the Bronx.

Sir Humphrey Franklin T Strange, 9 ^th baronet and squire of Batch Magna, as Humph now most remarkably finds himself to be, is persuaded by his Uncle Frank, a small time Wall Street broker with an eye on the big time, to make a killing by turning the sleepy backwater into a theme-park rural paradise for free-spending US millionaires.

But while the village pub and shop, with the lure of the dollar in their eyes, put out the Stars and Stripes in welcome, the tenants of the estate’s dilapidated houseboats take a different view, and when they’re given notice to quit by the new squire they stand their ground. And the fun begins.

The novels were inspired by nostalgia, of a time in the mid 1970s spent gloriously free living in a small colony of houseboats on the River Medway, in deepest rural Kent. The houseboats there were converted Thames sailing barges; for my houseboats, on Batch Magna''s river the Cluny, I used converted paddle steamers (once part of an equally fictitious Victorian trading company, the Cluny Steamboat Company), simply because I like the vessels.

They are feelgood books (The Wind in the Willows for grown-ups, as one Amazon reviewer described Cuckoos), pure escapism - for me now, looking back, and I hope for my readers.

AmeriCymru: What is the connection with Wales? How much of the action takes place west of Offa''s Dyke?

Peter: The stage is shared equally. The books were conceived with a nod both to Mercia and to Powys. The imaginary Welsh/English border running through Batch Valley and its village twists and turns, bestowing Welsh nationality on one villager in one part of it and English on another. And their accents, as they tend to in the Marches, share that duality, sounding Welsh to English ears and English to Welsh. A duality which also allowed me to have fun with Welsh/English banter.

AmeriCymru: How many books are there in the series and how would you say the plot and characters have developed over time?

Peter: I have two sequels to Cuckoos finished and waiting their turn (why this is so involves rather complicated reasons when I was under contract to my last two publishers), and I’m several chapters into a third sequel. And I think there’s enough mileage in the characters and place for at least several more. I don’t think anything changed much really, apart from the plots. The characters, I suppose, like actors, have settled into the parts more in the sequels, are more perhaps rounded, but rather like Batch Magna itself, everything else is just as it always was.

AmeriCymru: I have to ask....did you have any particular village in mind as a model or paradigm for Batch Magna?

Peter: Yes, well two villages, actually, Ceri, and appropriately enough, one was in England (Somerset), the other in Wales (Pembrokeshire). The interior of the Batch Magna pub, the Steamer Inn, was taken from Somerset, the shop and post office from the Pembrokeshire village.

AmeriCymru: How has your background as an ex-actor, fringe theatre director and script writer influenced your writing?

Peter: That’s an interesting question. I am all of those when writing. I write the script, while seeing the scene through the eye, as it were, of the camera, direct and act it out on paper. But it’s that first bit, the ‘seeing’, I think that is important, it’s from that which all else follows. The late Yorkshire novelist John Braine said you can break all the rules written about novel writing, and still write a good novel. But if you break the rule which says you must see the action as you write it, no matter how trivial that action might be, then your words will stay on the page, will never take on a second life in the imagination of the reader (and reading should also be creative). And when a writer hasn’t done that then I think it’s noticeable – especially in any kind of action novel.

AmeriCymru: Are all the books in the series currently available? If so where can readers go to purchase them online?

Peter: It pains me to have to past up an opportunity for a plug, but I’m afraid the answer to that must be that your readers can’t, not yet. The second book will be out sometime this year. but I can’t even give a date for that yet.

AmeriCymru: What are you reading at the moment? Any recommendations?

Peter: I’m reading a book I picked up the other day in a second-home book shop in Hay on Wye (where all the second hand bookshops of the country are massed, ready to make a last stand) It’s a book of essays called At Home and Abroad by one of the great travel writers, V. S. Pritchard, a writer with a marvellous ability to conjure up the essence of a place and its people. (He was also of course, in addition to his biography and literary criticism, a renowned short story writer)

AmeriCymru: What''s next for Peter Maughan? When can we expect a new episode?

Peter: Well, as I said, there are two sequels finished, which, as with Cuckoos, I’m bringing out under my own imprint of The Cluny Press, and I now have to judge what is the optimum time to release the first one.

AmeriCymru: Any final message for the readers and members of AmeriCymru? .

Peter: Well, if they’ve followed my ramblings this far I’d like to thank them for that. And to thank you also, Ceri, for having me. And from me to them and you: hwyl fawr.

...

Christian Saunders is an author from New Tredegar in South Wales. He has worked as a freelance writer contributing to several international publications and a regular column to the Western Mail newspaper.

His short stories have been anthologised in numerous horror publications and his latest novel is: Sker House and a definitive account of the history of Cardiff City Football Club: From The Ashes: The Real Story Of Cardiff City FC

....

....

AmeriCymru: Hi Christian and many thanks for agreeing to talk to AmeriCymru. When and why did you decide to become a writer? What was the first work you submitted for publication?

Christian: I guess I always wanted to be a writer, but to be perfectly honest I wasn’t the brightest at school, so most people thought it was beyond my capabilities. I wasn’t stupid, exactly. I just had no interest in the things I was meant to be learning at school. I much preferred reading books by myself. I always remember being 16 and the deputy head asking me what I was going to do with my life. I said I wanted to be a writer, and he laughed out loud. Well, the joke’s on you now, Mr Richards!

I didn’t have much confidence in my ability at that stage, though. I left school with no qualifications, went to work in a local factory in the south Wales valleys, and wrote stories in my spare time for my own amusement. When I was in my early twenties I thought it wouldn’t hurt to send a few stories out, just to see if they were as bad as I thought they were. This was the late 1990’s, pre-internet, and the small press was flourishing. There were thousands of genre magazines on the market. One, called Cambrensis, specialised in Welsh fiction written in English and was run by a sweet old guy called Arthur Smith, who sadly isn’t with us anymore. By some unimaginable stroke of luck he accepted the very first short story I sent out, which was called Monkeyman.

Looking back, I think I got the sympathy vote from dear old Arthur. I submitted the entire story in BLOCK CAPITALS! But he would do anything he could to give writers a start. He saw it as his life’s work. He re-typed the whole thing, and sent me a few encouraging letters. The payment was a subscription to the magazine.

AmeriCymru:   You write mainly horror fiction. What attracted you to the genre?

Christian: It’s just what comes naturally to me, I guess. For me it’s by far the easiest genre to work in. I wouldn’t know where to start with a love story! I’ve always been a fan of horror movies and books, though ‘horror’ is a very broad genre and can encompass most things.

I’m a jack-of-all-trades, really. I’ve also written non-fiction about the unexplained and supernatural, some music journalism, I do a lot for men’s lifestyle magazines, now I write mainly about sport. It’s strange, though. People only ever notice my fiction! 

AmeriCymru:   Can you tell us which anthologies your work appears in and where they can be purchased online?

Christian:   So far, I’ve been lucky enough to have had stories published in nine or ten anthologies. The most recent was The Delectable Hearts in Legends of Urban Horror on Siren’s Call.

Legends Of Urban Horror

I have stories in two other anthologies, which will be available in the coming months. The Elementals & I in Dark Visions 2 on Grey Matter Press.

Dark Visions 2

And Altitude Sickness in the first anthology by DeadPixel Publications, which is basically a collective of independent writers.

Dead Pixel Publications

When I write fiction, I use the pseudonym CM Saunders.

AmeriCymru:   Is there a horror fiction writer that you particularly admire or would like to recommend? Are there any that strongly influenced your writing?

Christian:   Sorry I can’t give a more original answer, but I love Stephen King. He’s a master storyteller, and his story is inspirational. He used to work in laundry in the days and write in the nights. Apart from SK its good to see his son Joe Hill continue in the same vein. He’s a great writer. Credit to him for not taking his dad’s name for the commercial value attached to it, but if anything he’s trying a bit too hard. Let it go, dude. Just write. I also like Dean Koontz (though he’s been wheeling out the same formula time after time for the past fifteen years or so, some of his earlier works are stone-cold classics), Richard Matheson, Graham Masterton, Richard Laymon, Ramsey Campbell, and Joe Lansdale. I’m more of a contemporary horror fan, though I did read and enjoy a lot of Poe, Lovecraft, M.R. James, Jules Verne and Robert Loius Stevenson when I was younger.

I think everything you read, and everything you see and hear, influences your writing to an extent. As I get older I find myself reading more autobiographies. I am currently reading American Sniper by Chris Kyle and Waiting to be Heard by Amanda Knox.

AmeriCymru:   We learn from your bio that you are are currently living and teaching in China. Is this a permanent relocation and how are you enjoying your experience there?

Christian:   Actually, I’m back in the UK now! Maybe I need to update that bio. I came back in January to work for a magazine in London. I eventually went to uni as a mature student, after that 9-year factory stint, then when I graduated I went freelance. I was living in Southampton at the time, and I just had the urge to travel. I’d always been drawn to Asia, and China in particular. It’s a vast, mysterious country. The kind of place you can get lost in. I taught English to university students there in Beijing, Tianjin, Changsha and Xiangtan, and stayed for five years altogether. It can be a bit surreal but all-in-all, it’s a great life. I had a lot of time to travel, think and write. I did very little journalism out there (you need special accreditation from the government, and a license) so that was when I went back to writing fiction after a long gap. I was never a teacher. I was always a writer in disguise!

Looking back, I’m glad I had the experience, and I feel lucky. It’s important to explore other cultures. I’m from a very small village in the Rhymney valley called New Tredegar, which has a large percentage of narrow-minded people who very rarely (if ever) leave the place. I didn’t want to be one of those.

AmeriCymru:   You have also recently published a novel Rainbow''s End Would I be right in saying that it is partly ''autobiographical''?

Christian: Yes indeed! I would say it’s around 90% autobiographical. I made up the other 10%. But of course, I would never tell anyone which 10% I made up! It’s about a young guy growing up in south Wales who wants to be a writer and travel, but various things hold him back. Until, eventually, he finds a way out.

AmeriCymru:   Which brings us to From The Ashes How did you come to write it and how long have you been a Cardiff City fan?

Christian:   I’ve been a Cardiff fan for about 25 years, I guess. The first game I ever went to was a 1-1 draw with Barnet when we were in the old fourth division. Every club has a lot of history, but the Bluebirds have more than most. We remain the only club to take the FA Cup out of England, and won the Welsh Cup that same year, making us the only club in history (as far as I could tell) to hold the national cups of two different countries simultaneously. That FA Cup was the first to be broadcast on live radio, and the Radio Times published a numbered grid to help listeners follow the game. That, allegedly, gave rise to the popular saying ‘back to square one.’

I started writing the book about ten years ago, using mainly the microfilm newspaper archives at Cardiff library. I got a publisher interested in the book, but they pulled out saying, basically, that the club wasn’t big enough to justify costs. After that I moved on to other things, and only when it looked like we might win promotion last season did I start offering it around. Luckily, Gwasg Carreg Gwalch expressed an interest so then it was a mad rush to bring the book up to date, which I managed in just a month or so. The hardest thing was sourcing the pictures. I contacted the club, who were no help at all, and ended up buying a load from Getty.

So far the book is doing very well!

AmeriCymru:   OK I have to ask...can Cardiff City cut it in the Premier League and where do you think the Bluebirds will be in the League table at the end of the season?

Christian:   Sure, I think we are more than capable of staying up. Malky Mackay has made a couple of great signings this summer. Both Gary Medel and Steven Caulker were wanted by much bigger clubs and ended up buying into the dream and moving to the CCS. There are much worse teams than us in the Premier League! I’m under no illusions, I don’t think we’ll qualify for Europe, but we won’t finish in the bottom three, either. Somewhere in-between, I’d say. After the move from Ninian Park, last season we turned CCS into a bit of a fortress. If we can continue that home form, and it’s looking good so far with that win against Man City and the draw against Everton, two of the better clubs in the league, we have every chance of staying up. The win against Man City, when we came from behind to win 3-2, gave the players, fans and the local media a massive confidence boost and hopefully we can build on that.

AmeriCymru:   What''s next for Christian Saunders? Do you have any new publications planned?

Christian:   At the moment I’m working full time for Sports Direct magazine, so any new fiction will have to take a backseat for a while. Saying that, I’m always working on something, and I have lots of projects at various stages of development. I’ve decided to go independent with regards to fiction, and early next year I’m putting out an ebook compilation of short stories called X, most of which have been published before in various places. It’s all ready to go. If I don’t go through a publisher I’ll be able to sell the book a lot cheaper and hopefully reach a wider audience. I’m also re-writing my first book, Into the Dragon’s Lair – A Supernatural History of Wales, which will be reprinted by Gwasg Carreg Gwalch hopefully sometime next year. When that is done I’ve been thinking of doing a follow-up to Rainbow’s End, about a valley boy and his experiences of living and working in China!

AmeriCymru:   Any final message for the readers and members of AmeriCymru?

Christian:   You only have one life, so follow your dreams, do what makes you happy, and don’t let anyone hold you back!

Thanks for reading, and feel free to drop by my blog:

http://cmsaunders.wordpress.com/" target="_blank"> http://cmsaunders.wordpress. com/

Or follow me on Twitter CMSaunders01