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A Child’s Christmas in Wales - ( click to download the flier )

2 - 4 pm, Dec 14, 2014
Bryn Seion Welsh Church, 22132 S. Kamrath Road in Beavercreek, Oregon 

Continuing a longstanding Portland tradition,   Jonathan Nicholas   will give a reading of   Dylan Thomas’   much-loved tale “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” at Oregon’s own Welsh heritage church,   Bryn Seion . This year’s reading has special significance as it marks the centenary of Wales’ most famous poet and writer (Dylan Thomas, 1914-1953). The Festival Chorus of the Welsh Society of Portland will present a preview of Welsh songs and carols from their upcoming concert for this occasion. Afterwards, everyone is invited for a Welsh Tea - with Welsh cakes and other delicious treats.

Welsh-born Jonathan Nicholas was a columnist for The Oregonian for 26 years.

READING - MORE DETAILS/DOWNLOAD THE FLIER HERE

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Wales and World War One by Robin Barlow is the first English language, single volume, full treatment of Wales and the First World War.

Thousands of books have been published on the First World War with ‘Britain’ in the title, yet one will search in vain through the index of nearly all of them for references to ‘ Wales ’, or indeed ‘Scotland’ and ‘Ireland’. The old cliché still applies: ‘For Wales , see England’.

Wales paid a heavy price for a place on the international stage between August 1914 and November 1918.

Over 30,000 Welshmen sacrificed their lives on the battlefields of the First World War , a war which continues to create, even as it is commemorated, great controversy. For some it was a futile and wasteful war ; for others it was an unavoidable necessity.

Inspired by the fact that the distinctive contribution that Wales made during the First World War has never been fully documented in a single volume, Robin Barlow aims to describe and explain what happened on the home front in Wales during the war and what happened to Welsh men and women abroad. With more than 80 photographs, Wales and World War One also includes extracts from diaries and letters not previously published.

Dr Robin Barlow lives in Myddfai and was, until his retirement, Higher Education Advisor at Aberystwyth University. Prior to that he was a teacher, headmaster and schools’ inspector. He has written extensively on Welsh involvement in the First World War , notably in the A New History of Wales series (Gomer) and The Great War , Localities and Regional Identities (Cambridge Scholars Publishing).

Wales and World War One is available from

all good bookshops and online retailers.

For more information, please visit www.gomer.co.uk

From our interview with Bel Roberts:- " Surfing Through Minefields belongs to the hybrid genre ‘reality fiction’. I have set the story in a fictional contemporary comprehensive school in Monmouth and have researched the facts surrounding the Senghenydd Pit disaster of 1913 in such a way that the history of the event is seen from the prospective of a modern teenager and by the residents of an old people’s home who have actual mementos of the tragic event. The heroine, Lauren, is an English teenager sent to stay with her grandmother in Wales while her parents sort out their various problems." ... read more here

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This is the story of a teenage girl coming to terms with her parents divorce. To complicate matters she is sent away to live in Monmouth, a small town on the Welsh border so she must also adapt to a new school and learn to make new friends a long way from her former home.

The book touches on many themes that you might expect in a teenage ''coming of age'' novel. Lauren''s early experiences with the opposite sex, school bullying and racism all form part of this well paced and lively story. In the course of a meeting with her Welsh grandmother at a convalescent home she learns that a distant relative ( her grandmothers half brother ) was a victim of the Senghenydd mining disaster on October 14th 1913. The following day at school she learns that she must pick a GCSE coursework assignment and decides that she will write on the Universal Colliery disaster and consult with her grandmother for personal recollections and details of this catastrophic event.

The rest of the book interweaves her historical research with her day to day efforts to cope with her life and circumstances in a rich and compelling narrative which will appeal to many adult readers as powerfully as it will to its intended teenage audience.

In the course of her researches Lauren unearths many interesting snippets of information from the newspapers of the time:-

"Today His Majesty King George V sent his condolences to the bereaved families of Senghenydd in The Rhymney Valley, South Wales and expressed his genuine shock at the scale of the disaster. He regretted that he could not visit the scene of the disaster immediately, as he was currently involved in the marriage celebrations of Prince Arthur of Connaught and the Duchess of Fife."

"Many of the bodies show horrific burns and other forms of mutilation but most of those awaiting identification are decomposing fast and should be laid to rest with dignity. One young boy hardly in his teens was identified by his new boots, worn for the first time on that fateful morning, another by a champagne cork, a treasured souvenir rescued from the pit owner’s garden and carried as a lucky omen."

It is clear throughout that Bel Roberts has thoroughly researched her historical subject matter and this is to be commended when you remember that the few books on the tragedy are either difficult or nearly impossible to obtain ( both W. H. Davies Ups And Downs and John H. Brown''s Valley Of The Shadow are referenced in the text )

In conclusion this is a book with the potential to delight readers of all ages. Whether you are interested in the problems confronting teenagers growing to maturity in modern society or with the details of Wales and Britains'' worst colliery disaster this book has something for you. An unreserved thumbs up and 5 star recommendation.

AmeriCymru spoke to Shan Morgain about her passion for the Mabinogi and about her excellent website: Mabinogi Study. Shan has lived in Wales for 25 years, studying the Mabinogi and Middle Welsh. She is a storyteller and writer. She fell in love with Welsh myth, then a Welshman, then the Mabinogi. She is currently starting a PhD at Swansea and creating a collection of resources for fellow Mabinogi lovers (aka the Mabinogion). www.mabinogistudy.co.uk has lots of helpful articles from history, literature, translation to storytelling and arts. Discussion forum. Massive bibliography. Weekly seminar chats.

AmeriCymru: Hi Shan and many thanks for agreeing to this interview. How would you describe the Mabinogi to someone approaching it for the first time?

Shan: This is a collection of stories, the oldest literature of Britain, including the earliest stories of King Arthur. They were originally in an older form of Welsh, but now widely known in translation.

Yet though so old, these stories are so well written they are read, told and performed across Wales, and wherever people connect to Wales and its traditions.

One of the things I love about the Mabinogi stories in Wales is you can go into any pub or supermarket and Welsh people know these stories just like the latest fashionable TV drama. If you know the stories a bit too you are welcomed with open arms.

I saw the Mabinogi performed as a stage play directed by Manon Eames for the Youth Theatre of Wales. If that had been Shakespeare performed in England the audience would have been stuffy intelligentsia, literary types only. But for the “Magnificent Mabinogi” it was all the local families – and their children.

AmeriCymru: How did you first become interested in the Mabinogi?

Shan: As a young farm girl who went up to London in her teens I was always mad for mythology. I remember Tolkien first coming out was a huge event. (There was not a lot of fantasy in those days.)

I read Greek, Egyptian, Sumerian, Viking, Japanese … you name it I read its mythos. Voraciously. But it was the Celtic legends that most spoke to me, and of them all, the Welsh.

I wouldn’t have known the name Mabinogi then. I just knew there was something different, something much more … mature, intricate, sexy, philosophical and magical about these particular stories.

One part of me did a BA Philosophy at London University, which trained in strict line thinking, the codes of logic. Sadly it seemed my two passions for mythos and logic, could not meet as one. In yet another part of my life radical feminism burned my synapses, challenging the roots of my society. But back then, Celtic dreaming, logic, and being a woman, all had to stay in separate pots.

I was given a Welsh name which was wonderfully prophetic. Eventually at 40 I found my wild and tender sexy Welshman who climbed the magical Glastonbury Tor to find me sleeping in the sun.

Like Rhiannon I chose him later for my own, by pouncing on him; which he says he is always devoutly thankful I did, dear heart.

He showed me his wet green land, and I was doubly, deeply in love. Would I have loved him so very much if he’d come from Birmingham? To speak truth, I doubt it.

Pillow talk is, just as they say it is, the best teacher. By now in the 90s I had become quite a well known Craft priestess and my John helped me run a Celtic study circle. My first big discoveries about the Mabinogi came out of that circle. I also became a storyteller for both adults and children.

AmeriCymru: What is your current involvement with the Mabingi?

Shan: Ah well, by now I have learned so much more. The Tales are inscribed on my cells I think. Being old is so delicious because of knowing more about how things fit together.

Philosophy has changed now too. Western thinking is no longer obsessed with straight line logic. Post-modernism, theoretical physics, and loads of other -isms have opened up thinking in interesting patterns – much more like the ancient Celts.

So now my Philosophy brain is no longer split in two. Annwfn, the deep world of Welsh spirituality, and this world, weave into one another. Logic is servant not master. Worlds are not separate; they are a web of threads going over and under each other. Holding them in the world is my woman life, and there too the Mabinogi speak to me in intricate ways.

Which all brings me to a PhD in the Mabinogi at Swansea university. In particular I am exploring my beloved Rhiannon. She’s a lady, a horse, a politician, a goddess, and the pivot of a multivalent matrix.

I have the honour to be supervised by Christine James, the Archdruid of Wales. You’ll have seen her on the news leading the national Gorsedd ceremony.

AmeriCymru: What is the history of the work? How did these tales come to be collected together?

Shan: The Tales were developed in oral tradition, that is, in storytelling by living voices. There were the great bards who made power poems in praise of kings and heroes, who were like the big bands of today with names up in lights. Then there were the cyfarwythdydd – terrible mouthful that! the storytellers. So there seems to have been a fairly clear split between the high world of the noble poets,and the people’s world of storytellers, a mediaeval pop culture.

It is also a very distinctive thing that the British (now called the Welsh) told their first great stories in prose. Most of the other old European cultures told their sagas in poems.

The storytellers were an odd lot. They didn’t leave their names attached to the stories but quietly passed the stories around to each other anonymously.

The original King Arthur is in there but he’s very different to the Arthur of romance. The older Welsh Arthur is a rough edged warlord, who has to be dragged off by his mates from doing some pretty cruel things. Not a shining ideal!

The Mabinogi stories are about politics, especially dirty politics, and history. They tell of past events and the lessons we can learn from them. They are about love, sex, war, magic, children, questing, and heroes with swishing swords and huge horses. About people making the agonising choices of destiny. Oh and monsters, giants, magic cauldrons.

The big change came when those rough, tough Normans conquered Britain in 1066 which meant Wales too was invaded. The fighting, storytelling, princes of Wales gradually became Englishified. A few of them decided to preserve their old stories by having them written down, because everyone was dumping the bards and storytellers in favour of the fashionable new French troubadours.

This written record in mediaeval manuscripts was a jolly good thing because otherwise these oldest British stories would have been lost forever. You can still see the precious papers in Aberystwyth and Oxford, in museums.

But the stories then slept quietly in old Welsh books for centuries until an impossibly aristocratic Victorian English lady married a Welsh ironmaster. That was a major scandal, as he was far beneath her socially you see! She fell in love not only with him, but with his heritage. These Welshmen have a magical effect you know!

Anyway Charlotte Guest was a genius scholar who already knew seven languages including Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Persian. So Welsh, even mediaeval Welsh, which is a hell of a language to learn, was no problem for her! In between having ten babies and running the biggest iron foundry beside her husband, dear Charlotte translated the Mabinogi Tales into English and published them (in both Welsh and English) in a series of three books, 1838-1849.

Interest from the public exploded and edition after edition has been published right up to today.

AmeriCymru: Which of the various translations would you recommend?

Shan: Charlotte Guest is still very good and easily available online, but a bit Victorian for modern taste.

My all time personal favourite is John Bollard “Legend and Landscape of Wales: The Mabinogi.” (2006) It’s not only a lovely easy read, it’s a beautiful book full of photos of the places around Wales where the stories happened.

https://sites.google.com/site/themabinogi/home

Bollard also gives a thoughtful introduction which reflects his position as the modern pioneer of new thought about the Mabinogi as living literature, not just leftover fragments of the past.

Sioned Davies recent “The Mabinogion” (2007) is also very popular, and she has skilfully explored the practical storytelling aspect of the tales, which is very important.

For anyone on a very tight budget you can read a major part of the Tales completely free on Will Parker’s generous site here: http://www.mabinogi.net/translations.htm It gives you’re the Four Branches. This friendly and reputable translation is so useful online to quickly look up what was actually said in a story, and to copy/ paste a quick quote. Saves boring copy typing, so thanks Will -he’s a darling too.

(Parker has also published a substantial book about the Mabinogi for serious interest later; “The Four Branches of the Mabinogion” 2005.)

Now some prefer to listen and watch than to read. After all this is what the Mabinogi were intended for, a living voice by a person, not print.

Cyb the chuckling monk offers you some free video tales:-

www.valleystream.co.uk/products.htm

or you can buy them all. Note the complete set has not been recorded but most are there.)

Colin Jones has the First Branch as a recording with haunting music, on his site, free.

http://themabinogion.com/album/mabinogion-the-four-branches

Or buy all four Branches as a download.

For those who want to get more serious here’s a mini guide.

1) Read the introduction sections to the above translations.
2) Get Patrick Ford “The Mabinogi and Other Welsh Tales” (1977) and read his intro.
3) Splash about on my website, contact me;
4) Order this book from the library: Charles Sullivan, The Mabinogi: A Book of Essays. (1997). Sadly otherwise unobtainable.
5) See my weekly online seminars, which are live chat based, and free.
http://mabinogistudy.com/

AmeriCymru: How important is the Mabinogi in Welsh literature and history?

Shan: It’s rather like the Welsh Shakespeare as people and situations from the stories appear all over the place. But it’s not just literature, it’s part of Welsh identity as an independent nation.

Wales has had to rebuild itself from a conquered people who were not even allowed to speak their native language. Children were bullied and shamed in school, if they forgot and used their native Welsh words. In my dear John’s lifetime he was sent far from home as a child to be trained to speak with a perfect Oxford English accent. It was the only way he would get a good job.

The Welsh know all about racism; colonial domination was practiced early on in Wales and exported to Africa and India. Oh my dee-ah not a Welsh maid, they’re so dirty they don’t even know how to use a tap to wash. (No taps on mountain sheep farms you see.)

The Welsh diaspora is no new subject to americymru folk of course but know with pride that the Welsh did it especially well. With stories, and poetry, music and beliefs in helping each other, Wales’ children have quietly spread across the world. Pushed to survive, their myths and dreams have sustained them into successful lives.

Nowadays there is S4C, the BBC TV station in Welsh. But in 1980 it took a hunger strike threatened to last to death by Gwynfor Evans, a Welsh MP, to get it.

The Mabinogi has played its vital part in the building of the vigorous society of Wales today, and wider Wales. A people must have its myths, its own sacred stories of origins, in order to believe in itself, or there is no sense of being a people. Knowing we have the oldest British literature in our keeping is a backbone, a fiery pride. That it is a sophisticated literature, with powerful philosophy and human understanding – plus a lot of fun! adds to its proud gifts.

That is why the Mabinogi are told, sung, performed, everywhere the Welsh gather, across the world.

AmeriCymru: In your opinion which of the Mabinogi Tales is the most significant or important? Do you have a favourite?

Shan: I would be presumptuous to judge which Tale is the most significant. We are not a people who go for the One Truth. We can hold with contradictions before breakfast. We are also politically aware and I am not going to open myself to furious condemnation from opposing camps!

I can however say that the Four Branches are the most popular which is a form of significance. These Four Branches are a quartet of stories in four chapters, which can also stand each by themselves. Or you can fit them together in puzzle patterns, an interlaced logic like the ancient Celtic knotwork. (See John Bollard’s modern innovative theories.)

The Branches have strong women, interesting thoughtful men, extraordinary villains, and a tenderness for children. It is easy to relate to these people as women and men, even if they turn into animals in places, or cook up zombie soldiers. One minute they are like you and I, next moment they are not.

The other stories are either the older Culhwch, a rollicking adventure story with much more limited depth; or later romances and tales much more influenced by French troubadours. So I think the Branches do hold a special place.

My favourite? Ah that is Rhiannon, in the First Branch. Like her I came to Dyfed, West Wales, as a powerful stranger woman, and found my love there. Like her I have one precious son with him. Like her I am proud, strategic, realistic, sensual, clever and devoted.

Like her I am quick to rebuke and generous in giving. My own darling Pwyll, like the one in the old story, is not at all what he appears to be. Like many Welsh he will allow himself to be unnoticed, or underestimated, while deftly getting exactly what he wants. It’s a conquered people’s skill he says, and its skill amuses him.

I cannot share my lady’s horse nature though – big teeth and hooves terrify me!

John comments: Shapeshifting is why Welsh identity is very hard to define satisfactorily. It is elusive. That is not an accident. In Wales we have learned that if we define ourselves openly and explicitly, what we define as Welshness is in danger of being devalued or even officially abolished. So we are deliberately vague in key places, leaving our enemies in England fighting the fog. There is often lots of fog in Wales! We are very comfortable with it.

AmeriCymru: You run an excellent website called ''Mabinogi Study''. Care to introduce it for our readers?

Shan: Thank you kindly sir. I started Mabinogi Study because I detest how students have to constantly reinvent the wheel. You have to find out what to read, and then get hold of it, both very difficult to do once you go beyond the first step or two. You copy type and make notes endlessly, which duplicates what a thousand others have done.

So all my notes and lists are going online. Who has translated the Mabinogi and which one is a good starter? What is Middle Welsh like? What’s this interlacing malarkey? Is Rhiannon really a goddess and if so what does that mean? What are her politics? What about shapeshifting? Why did Arianrhod get found out? Where did things happen? What do the names mean?

Plus a comprehensive bibliography of 1,000 listings, searchable. Biographies. A baby course on Middle Welsh, or a for those who just want to dip, a one page dictionary of the essential words. A weekly live seminar online.

Here’s some useful links to get started:

First Steps with Mabinogi: recommended starter reading, video, recordings.

http://www.mabinogistudy.com/xz-articles/first-steps-with-y-mabinogi.1/

Four Branches, brief summary: Overview of these well loved stories.

www.mabinogistudy.com/xz-articles/the-four-branches-a-brief-summary.171/

The Mabinogi Bibliography: This is on a separate site where I have collected about 1,000 books, articles, recordings etc. Not much fiction, interpretations, that will come later. Here you can search on a type or topic, even make your own booklist from mine.
www.zotero.org/groups/mabinogistudy/items/

Index of All Articles: www.mabinogistudy.com/xz-articles/articles-index.24/

The Mabinogi Meetings: www.mabinogistudy.com/xz-articles/mabinogi-meetings-weekly-welsh-myth.110/

AmeriCymru: That’s a lot! Anything else planned?

Shan: I’m waiting for a software script to be ready so I can post up a small encyclopaedia, a Mabinogi A-Z.

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

Shan: Yes please. I’d like to say how very touched and pleased I was at how Ceri welcomed me on americymru. He didn’t just say the standard Croeso.

When I wrote and criticised his little 2010 Mabinogi quiz as inaccurate in a few places, even though I did it with courtly gentlesness, I expected the usual dickwaving defensiveness. I knew I risked a faceful of rudeness. Not a bit of it. Ceri actually welcomed the chance to consult me, and immediately proceeded to put me to work.

This is very rare. Most people don’t handle expert elders at all well. They are far too touchy and insecure, and as a result don’t learn, and don’t become expert in their turn. Nor do they get gifts of help on the way, and struggle more than is needed.

I’m well aware that in fostering and exploiting my talents Ceri is gaining much for americymru while helping me too. It works both ways. But again so few people know this skill of mutual support and flourishing called collaboration.

I’m well aware that in fostering and exploiting my talents Ceri is gaining much for americymru while helping me too. It works both ways. But again so few people know that skill of mutual support and flourishing.

I’m still exploring americymru full of admiration for what this skilled couple have built. I’ve already met some fascinating people here, and that is treasure to me.

To end I will just say that a warm welcome awaits you here in the homeland. Let me know you’re coming, then the cawl pot will simmer and the kettle boil as John collects you from the station, or as you park your car outside our rambling Welsh manor. We’ll gladly help you visit the beautiful places here. Just bow down to the mighty Cat clan and you are our honoured guests, my gentle readers.

Shan Morgain © March 2014

"Novelist, poet, photographer, essayist and short story writer, Jo Mazelis was born in the middle of a summer storm on the edge of the Gower Peninsula. She grew up in Swansea, later living in Aberystwyth and London for over 14 years before returning to her hometown.

She has won a prize in the Rhys Davies Short story award five times, was longlisted for the Asham Award and her first collection of short stories Diving Girls was shortlisted for both Wales Book of the Year and Commonwealth Best First Book. Her work has appeared in New Welsh Review, Spare Rib, Poetry Wales, Raconteur, Cambrensis, Nth Position, the Big Issue, Corridor, The Ottawa Citizen, Everywoman, Tears in the Fence and Lampeter Review amongst others. Several of her stories have also been broadcast on BBC Radio 4."... Read more here

AmeriCymru spoke to Jo about her writing and her new novel Significance

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Jo has also contributed a short story, 'Mechanics' for the forthcoming edition of eto. For an excerpt click here

AmeriCymru: What can you tell us about your new novel 'Significance'?

Jo Mazelis: It’s hard to explain in a nutshell – on the surface it seems to be a book about crime and its detection, but it isn’t - not in the traditional sense. The title ‘Significance’ draws attention to the way a reader looks for and finds significance in plot and character which is how all novels function. When there is a crime involved in a story these signs or clues seem to point to a solution and thus narrative resolution. In the real world when a crime has happened, especially a serious crime like murder, those closest to it begin to review past events differently, they restructure their thinking, their plans, their judgement of other people and their surroundings, and crucially even when the culprit is caught people remain haunted and altered by the crime.

I began writing ‘Significance’ in 2007 at a very unhappy moment in my life and I think that is why the book is so much about running away and escape – escape from external factors but also from the self. At times I had to imagine I was an entirely different person when I was writing it; a more confident person who was not afflicted by the self doubt and self hate and depression I was suffering.

I think if the book had to be categorised it would be a novel of ideas rather than thriller or detective genre. I spend a lot of time explaining what it is not and as I said find it difficult to summarise what it actually is. My aim was however to produce a work which could be read at different levels and lent itself to multiple interpretations – sometimes I had in mind a giant riddle or perhaps a maze, but what the answer to the riddle is I prefer not to say. In a similar way I very much wanted the narrative to be open ended. Not so that I could write a sequel (though at times that crossed my mind) but because I wanted readers to make up their own minds about it.

AmeriCymru: When did you decide to start writing and why have you concentrated on short stories until now?

Jo Mazelis: I discovered almost by accident that I had some ability when I was quite young, perhaps 15 or 16 – I had been moved down to the English class that took a lower grade of exam – then known as the CSE. This was not the qualification that led to Higher Education so the approach was informal. The teacher was an ex-merchant seaman and published poet known to be quite tough but he was passionate about writing. One day after we had done a homework exercise in alliteration he told me that I wrote almost as well as he had at the same age. I guess those words planted a rare seed in my head and stuck because I very rarely heard any words of praise from teachers. The following year I moved to the O-level English class which was taught by the headmistress and more than once she read my compositions (they were short stories in reality) aloud to the class. But none of this meant anything really – certainly not university as I had hardly any qualifications when I left school – just enough work in a portfolio to get me into Art College. I began writing seriously around the time my daughter was born in 1987 but as a working single mother there wasn’t an awful lot of time. However I had always loved short stories whether written by DH Lawrence or Thomas Hardy or Edna O’Brien or Ian McEwan. The words ‘...and other stories’ on a book jacket was never a turn off for me as it supposedly is for the majority of readers.

I think there is a lot of confusion around short stories currently; people try to read them by ploughing on through a collection as if it were a novel. Each story needs to be read and savoured, then reflected on. Of course this demands a certain level of engagement on the part of the reader – or rather a different sort of relationship than a reader has with a novel. Further confusion seems to exist around word length – how short or how long should a story be?

Sadly in the UK there are few (if any) general interest magazines that regularly publish short stories – no equivalent to The New Yorker for example. I think it’s such a pity that newspapers like The Guardian or The Times don’t have regular short stories, not only from the point of view of opportunities for writers but as a means of familiarising ordinary readers with the form.

It struck me a few years ago that while Britain is meant to be the country of long tradition (to the point of rigid stodginess) while the US is that of innovation (think of that clichéd image of flashy newness) it is in the US where you find that a magazine like the New Yorker sticks to its menu of quality fiction and brilliant journalism on a wide range of topics from politics to science to culture. The New Yorker you might say – knows what it is – and doesn’t attempt to change itself somewhat hysterically every couple of years.

Despite the gloomy prospects it was a combination of a love affair with short stories and a lack of time that kept me glued to the form. Annie Proulx followed a similar pattern; publishing short stories in magazines for at least ten years before her book Heart Songs came out.

When my first collection of short stories Diving Girls was well received, being shortlisted for both Commonwealth Best First Book and Welsh Book of the Year, I discovered that what was expected of me next was a novel. This was perplexing as I had spent years working on the short story form with its particular demands of speedy elegance and brevity, and I felt I’d proved myself to some extent. But no, the attitude seemed to be that short stories were a lower form, done only as exercises in the run up to the real event, the novel. A case in point followed the untimely death of Raymond Carver, when some critics bemoaned the fact he hadn’t quite got around to writing that novel and therefore his true status was open to debate.

It’s no coincidence that the great age of the novel was the nineteenth century and that many of its most notable authors had swathes of time on their hands and few distractions. But for me, in the period after Diving Girls I was still a single parent, still working almost full time, still broke. I tried to write a novel but failed, and instead brought out a second collection of stories Circle Games. For some reason this book sunk without a trace and I, as its captain went down with it.

I began Significance in 2007 and had a first draft completed by 2010 or thereabouts. After the book had been rejected by the London publishers I had got to the point where I was planning on self-publishing, merely to have a few copies to distribute amongst friends, when someone suggested I approach Seren and thankfully they took the book.

AmeriCymru: Care to tell us a little about your two published anthologies, ''Diving Girls'' and ''Circle Games''?

Jo Mazelis: The stories in Diving Girls and to a lesser extent Circle Games were written over a long period of time, the earliest of these The Blackberry Season was written in 1987 when I was living in London, it was published in a Cambridge student magazine which was very strange in a way because at that point I didn’t have a degree let alone a Cambridge degree.

It was another fourteen years before my first book was published. When I look back at my writing career I think anyone with an ounce of sense would have given up long ago. I suppose every so often something or someone along the way reaffirmed the idea that I had some talent to go along with my staying power.

Recently on a short story forum someone asked if a collection should have a theme or not? It struck me then that a lot of new writers especially those doing creative writing degrees were constructing collections of short stories in a far more formal way than I ever did. My stories came one at a time, each changing according to what was happening in my life at that moment; what I was reading, or remembering or experiencing.

For example Too Perfect was informed by several sources; a news story about supposedly documentary photographs of lovers embracing on the streets of Paris. Someone had come forward to claim that the images had been posed by models. As documentary photographs get much of their power from the idea that they represent truth this was shocking. A year or so before I learned that a woman student at college with me was having an affair with one of our lecturers and then I read The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism by Katie Roiphe. I think I also saw David Mamet’s play Oleanna about this time. So essentially all these informed my story, in particular the questionable view that a photograph represents a moment of truth and secondly the idea that a woman (if she is over 21) does not act under her own volition. I wanted to make the man and woman in the story equally culpable, equally reckless, equally regretful afterwards. This description makes that story sound like a dull thing built purely on theory, but when I created it I was hardly aware of everything I’ve just described. It was only with hindsight that I was able to see the subconscious mechanism behind the creative process.

Too Perfect as a phrase is tautological and I used it for that reason - calling attention to a thing which cannot in reality exist. The story is about surfaces; how people judge things by their appearance only, so this motif recurs more than once in the story and is at its heart.

AmeriCymru: Is there any one of your stories that you are particularly proud of or that you would like to especially recommend?
 
Jo Mazelis: I think I am always most enamoured by whatever the last thing I produced was – maybe because new work makes me feel more alive and active and hopeful. I was recently commissioned to create a story that reinterprets a classic Welsh story by Arthur Machen and it was such a pleasure to write that it is still buzzing about in my head. Buzzing so loudly that I wonder if I shouldn’t try to develop it further and create a novella.

There isn’t a lot of my work available online but I have a story called Atlantic Exchange which can be found in The Lampeter Review. It’s a magic realist story about Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath meeting in New York and is quite different from much of my other work. Also online is a non-fiction piece called Haunted Landscape available in Wales Arts Review’s nature issue.

AmeriCymru: I''d like to ask you about your writing process. Do you have some kind of creative routine or do you write as and when inspiration occurs? 

Jo Mazelis: You can’t sit around waiting for inspiration; you have to actively summon it. Sometimes that means writing even when it feels flat and mostly worthless, but doing this means that you acquire the habit of writing. I always use a pen and notebook in the first instance as this seems to allow me to find a sort of natural flow. My words are somehow more tangible on paper and rather childishly I like to look back on page after page of my handwritten text. Strangely I’ve noticed how my handwriting improves when things are going well and deteriorates when I’m struggling.

AmeriCymru: Are there any writers that you draw inspiration from or especially admire?

Jo Mazelis: There are so many it’s hard to know where to begin. Lately I haven’t been reading so much fiction, but among non-fiction I love Joan Didion. I first read her in the seventies and more lately she’s produced two powerful memoirs, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. I loved Graham Swift’s 1983 novel Waterland and Ian McEwan’s collection of stories First Love, Last Rites. After reading Jane Eyre when fairly young, Wuthering Heights just left me reeling with its claustrophobic weirdness. I read everything by Richard Brautigan from In Watermelon Sugar to Sombrero Fallout to So the Wind Won’t Blow it All Away. Everything by Edna O’Brien too. I adored Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, in particular the story A Temporary Matter.

A huge influence on me when I was young were the stories of Hans Christian Anderson and also an unexpurgated copy of the Brothers Grimm that I found in my grandmother’s house – in these books little girls get their feet cut off or freeze to death and false princesses are put in barrels filled with spikes, princes are blinded by thorns and wander through the world helpless, children are abandoned in the forest and cloaks are woven from stinging nettles. These stories still take my breath away.

AmeriCymru: What are you working on at the moment?

Jo Mazelis: I’m hoping to bring out a third collection of stories – these will be a mixture of stories that have been published in magazines and unpublished work new and old. Because there is an excess of material – I’ve got around 125 stories of which 36 appear in my first and second books leaving around 90 potential stories. I just don’t know how to decide which to choose. Some form parts of my attempts to create linked stories for example there are several stories set around the early 20th Century in an invented village called Cwm Bach, another group are set in 1969 in a large Welsh comprehensive school. Other stories might be linked because they are ghostly or gothic or dystopian.

I think the most important thing for me now is to complete a second novel. I’ve got several in different stages of development and they are all very different from each other and different from Significance. As with the period when I was writing Significance I may have to stop writing any new short stories or anything else at all and immerse myself totally in the new novel, but what that book will be is very uncertain at present.

Chris Keil''s long awaited and widely acclaimed third novel ''Flirting At The Funeral'' was launched at Waterstone''s in Carmarthen on September 25th. AmeriCymru spoke to Chris about the novel and his future plans. Read our review of Flirting At The Funeral. Chris''s new novel is published by Cillian Press and is available from amazon.com. Buy it here:- Flirting At The Funeral

AmeriCymru: Hi Chris and many thanks for agreeing to be interviewed by AmeriCymru. You are celebrating the publication of your third novel ''Flirting At The Funeral''. How has the book been received?

Chris: Really well. I’ve been very lucky in having a brilliant new publisher - Mark Brady of Cillian Press - a new star in the publishing universe! We’ve got events lined up in UK, Ireland and Portugal in the near future, and many more in the pipeline. Best of all has been the amazing response from readers - enthusiastic, emotionally sophisticated, alert to language - exactly the kind of readers I write for. Readers have responded to the narrative, to the interplay between characters, but also to the aspects of language that engage me as a writer - to tone, rhythm, cadence, to repetition, half-rhyme, musicality. I can’t ask for more
than that.

AmeriCymru: ''Flirting at The Funeral'' has been described as "...urbane, serious but also seriously entertaining writing." How difficult is it to be serious and seriously entertaining at one and the same time?

Chris: Many thanks to Jon Gower for those generous words! Not an easy question to answer. Flirting deals with serious themes, but hopefully not in a heavy-handed way. Life is scary,funny, sexy, sad - often all at the same time - and one of the functions of art is to try to capture some of that texture.

AmeriCymru: The book betrays a profound pessimism about the current political and economic condition of Europe. To what extent is this a major determining factor in the actions of its characters? Would you describe ''Flirting At The Funeral'' as a political novel?

Chris: OK. I don’t feel that Flirting is simply a political novel, although it’s certainly about politics, among other things. It’s been called a philosophical novel, and it’s a novel of ideas, I suppose, but ultimately it’s a novel about people, about human beings and their complex, tragi-comic interactions with each other and with the world. I’m not sure that the book ‘betrays a profound pessimism…’ If there’s a single emotional theme, it’s probably more like rage, but the emotional tone is not unified - it’s disaggregated across the range of characters in the book: certainly the terrorist Dave Leaper is filled with venom, but among the central characters Morgan is detached and a little cynical, Matty is… I’ll come back to Matty; and the young film-makers are busy trying to take themselves seriously while having a seriously good time. But of course the melancholy span of history across the last forty years hangs over the book, like the suspension bridge across the Tagus in Lisbon. “The people, united, will never be defeated…” Oh really?

AmeriCymru: Two characters meet each other after years living separate lives; in the interim, they''ve each enjoyed success but seem to have each come to a point in their lives in which they have to compromise as they get older - how did you develop them and the choices they make and do you think we all come to that point in our own lives and have to make those same choices?

Chris: I suspect that this never sounds quite plausible, but I really find that when the process of writing fiction is going well, the characters develop themselves. What happens to them, and what choices they make, derives from who they are, from their individual autonomies. With each of my books, I’ve probably spent as much time not writing, as writing. When I finally get down to starting the book, I’ve spent so much time thinking about the characters that they hit the page fully-formed, if not running. They’ve existed for a year or two in a fluid, inchoate and unwritten state before hardening into flesh and bone and personality. By that time they make their own choices, or fail to choose, or choose unwisely.

AmeriCymru: Is youthful idealism always destined to fade? Is life nothing more than a series of grudging compromises with mere survival as the ultimate goal?

Chris: No it isn’t! That’s really depressing! Of course, the book suggests that life has the capacity to destroy you - before it kills you, that is - but a person is always implicated in their own psychic destruction, at least to some extent. If your life ends up as ‘a series of grudging compromises’ (good phrase, by the way!) it’s because you weren’t quite brave enough, or passionate, or crazy enough, above all not clear-headed enough, to resist the compromises that fear or insecurity offer. Matty says: “People make choices, don’t they? I choose what happens to me. Or maybe I have no choice. I suppose it comes to the same thing in the end.” For me, those words inscribe her epitaph, metaphorically. Incidentally, it’s been very reinforcing for me as a writer to see the range of readers’ reactions to Matty - who is after all the central character of the book - from fascination, to loathing: intensely positive or intensely negative, but always intense.

AmeriCymru: There are conversations in this book in which it seems as though the characters are speaking to each other at right angles. One character responds to questions and statements about his wife''s illness with completely inapposite topics; what is this dialogue telling us about these characters and about this story?

Chris: There’s a couple of points I’d want to make about dialogue in Flirting. Firstly, it reflects the way I hear people speak, although obviously in a heightened, theatricalised mode - for me, the effect of naturalism is achieved by pretty much the opposite: exaggeration, over- emphasis, over-articulation. What I wanted to capture was the way that I hear people talk: at each other, across, over, down to each other; they hear things that haven’t been said, answer questions that weren’t being asked and ignore the ones that were. And beyond that of course, many of the characters in the book are alienated, isolated from each other and from themselves, trapped in their own speech-bubbles, so to speak.

AmeriCymru: What''s next for Chris Keil? Are you already working on another project or have one in mind?

Chris: Yes I do. The next book is going to be a re-imagining of the life of the Roman poet Ovid, transposed into modern times. It’s a story full of possibilities I think. Ovid was the most talented and successful poet of his generation, writing glittering erotic satires, mixing with the elites of Roman society; he was a super-star. And then, unwittingly, he did something to offend the Emperor - people think he must have been complicit in a scandal involving the Emperor’s family - and was banished, forced to leave Rome and live in exile and virtual imprisonment in Tomis, on the Black Sea, in what is now Romania but was then the very edge of the Empire and the known world. “Beyond here,” he wrote, ‘lies nothing.” He spent what was left of his life writing the Tristia - the Lamentations - poems of terrible grief, of obsessive longing for the past. I’m going to set it in the present, and the current working title is “Vodka, Depression and Temazepam.” Only kidding; it’s going to be very pacy - more or less an out-and-out thriller… but with added metaphysics.

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

Chris: Yes, I have two. Firstly, Portland is a brilliant city, full of beautiful and talented people, and I aim to be back there in 2013. Secondly - this is for everybody - as soon as you’ve finished reading this interview, find the Amazon button on the AmeriCymru site and buy a copy of Flirting at the Funeral! Do it now!

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