...

In this the third and final part of Welsh author Rhys Hughes'' interview with Americymru he poses a number of ( rhetorical? ) questions to the reader. Feel free to respond to any or all of them in the comments box below.

This is part 3 of an in depth interview with Rhys Hughes , the Welsh Wizard of the Absurd. Rhys was born in Porthcawl, South Wales in 1966 and plans to write exactly 1000 stories in his lifetime ( see his blog here:- The Spoons That Are My Ears ). When this interview was originally published he had completed 468. Currently his total stands at 600+. Rhys can also be found on the web at:- The Rime of The Post Modern Mariner and on his Facebook page.

....

Dear Reader,

For the third and last part of my interview with the Americymru Network, I thought it might be nice to do something different. In other words for me to interview you.

So please find six questions below that you may (or may not) answer when you are ready…

1. In Swansea library I recently saw a book with the title "My Ancestor was a Coal Miner". My first thought was how strange it must be to have only one ancestor! I''m confident I''ve had thousands of them and I''m sure that most of them were never coal miners.

Having said that, my grandfather on my father''s side did work in a coal mine as an explosives expert. He kept boxes of gelignite under his bed. But what is the most unusual (or memorable) profession that any of your known ancestors ever had?

2. Authors go out of fashion, sometimes come back into fashion, often don''t. One of the finest and most sophisticated of the English Victorian novelists, George Meredith, is now mostly forgotten and it doesn''t seem likely he''ll ever be accorded the attention he deserves. Despite its rather terrible title, his early novel, "The Shaving of Shagpat", is an exquisite work of deep imagination and manages to combine highly lyrical prose with a humorous muscularity…

Another author with a sinking – perhaps already sunk – star is D.M. Thomas. In the 1980s he was the novelist of choice for all middle class liberal thirtysomethings who wanted to upgrade their emotions and their justifications to ''complex''. I still like D.M. Thomas. Clearly my finger isn''t anywhere near the pulse of modern literary trends. But what unfashionable authors (if any) do you still champion?

3. I have a large collection of books but it''s going down. The reason it''s going down is because every time I finish reading a book I give it away. My aim is to reduce my collection to a manageable size. Otherwise I''ll keep adding to it and will end up with more books than it''s possible for me to read in my entire lifetime!

That seems inefficient and wrong. To stop it happening I have banned myself from buying new books. I read what I already have on my shelves instead. Some of my books have been waiting to be read for thirty years. I don''t want to disappoint them forever! To shrink my collection further I have given away some books that I haven''t read, books I once felt I ought to read but knew I wouldn''t – in other words ''Duty'' books.

Probably the most significant Duty book for me is Robert Tressell''s "The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists". I know it''s a very important novel, a book with a crucial message, but I just don''t want to read it. And I won''t. What books do you own that you know you''ll never read?

4. E-books don''t interest me. I just don''t enjoy reading fiction on a screen. Brief technical articles, yes, but entire novels, no. I can''t bring myself to even read short stories online. That''s why I rarely submit stories for online publication. The only novel I''ve ever read online was James Branch Cabell''s "The Rivet in Grandfather''s Neck" and that was only because I couldn''t find it as a proper book. I plodded through it unhappily even though it is witty, wise and dry. But what is your opinion on this issue? Do you regularly read e-books or not?

5. Writers are required to sit still indoors for long periods tapping away at keyboards or scratching away with pens – I use both methods, sometimes writing one story on a computer and a different story in a notebook at the same time. And yet an inactive life is one that rapidly drives me crazy. I need the Great Outdoors – or in the case of Wales, the Grey Outdoors!

The fact that writing is such a sedate occupation means I''m always fascinated by the attempts of certain authors to infuse physical vigour into their prose. It seems an impossible task, but Jack London and Steinbeck managed it successfully. So did Edward Abbey. But Hemingway and Kerouac didn''t. Just my own opinion. What writers, if any, have made you take to the hills or the lakes or the moors, etc?

6. When I was much younger I read "Lord Valentine''s Castle" by Robert Silverberg. It''s a fantasy novel set on an alien world and many standard fantasy things happen, but the main character isn''t an obvious hero in the conventional sense. He''s not a warrior or a wizard. He''s a juggler. From the descriptions in this book I taught myself to juggle. Balls, fruit, stones, even shoes – though I don''t recommend doing that. Juggling is a practical skill. It won''t help to mend a burst pipe or change the fuse in a plug, but it can break the ice at parties. Sometimes the crockery too. I''m delighted I can juggle and I owe it entirely to Silverberg. Has any work of fiction ever taught you a practical skill?

...

This is part 2 of an in depth interview with Rhys Hughes , the Welsh Wizard of the Absurd. Rhys was born in Porthcawl, South Wales in 1966 and plans to write exactly 1000 stories in his lifetime ( see his blog here:- The Spoons That Are My Ears ). When this interview was originally published he had completed 468. Currently his total stands at 600+. Rhys can also be found on the web at:- The Rime of The Post Modern Mariner and on his Facebook page.

AmeriCymru: You write like you''re writing, not as though you''re working to "be" anything in particular: have you ever created consciously with the objective of trying to be a particular type of writer or to try to convey any particular moral message or do you write just to write the story you''re writing?

Rhys: I don''t like preaching and I never try to convey specific moral messages in my writing, but I guess that an author''s own value judgments must unavoidably inform what he or she writes at some level, even if a conscious effort has been made to go against moral habits. And the subtext of a piece of fiction can be more revealing in this regard than the surface text. I''m sure that my own ethical beliefs saturate everything I write, even though I like to think they don''t, even though I try to present an ambiguous face. I feel strongly about the environment, about fair play, about liberty. Do any of these values overtly announce their presence in my fiction?

But when it comes to wanting to "be" a particular type of writer on a technical level, then yes, I have definitely attempted this numerous times. My most recent novel, "Engelbrecht Again!", was a fully conscious effort to write a sequel to the Maurice Richardson classic set of stories about a dwarf surrealist boxer called Engelbrecht. Richardson''s original stories were published in the 1940s and are utterly imbued with the flavour of a Britain that had just emerged from a devastating war. I did my best to write like Richardson on several levels, to capture his dated but still effective surrealism. British surrealism is different from other kinds, more theatrical and less psychosexual. Spike Milligan, J.B. Morton and W.E. Bowman were other masters of the style, but Richardson was the most inventive and original of the bunch.

However, my most deliberately organised attempt to "be" a particular writer came about three years ago. I wanted to prove that I could write straight realism as well as fantasy. It was something that had been on my mind for years, but reading Calvino''s book of linked short stories "Marcovaldo" really spurred me to try. In "Marcovaldo" nothing is false, everything is completely real but it''s also absurd and this relentless absurdity gives the developing story an aura of the fantastic without diminishing its poignancy. The result is a bittersweet epic, one of Calvino''s best books, the one that synthesises most perfectly his opposing urges towards fable and reality. I wanted to use that book as a model of the way the techniques of fantasy can deal with the situations of reality.

But of course my own book quickly went its own way. It became a sort of benign satire on myself! It contains the only autobiographical material I''ve ever written, semi-autobiographical I should say, as some events have been reinterpreted to catch more closely echoes of other events. The title of the book is "My Cholesterol Socks" and that''s a direct, if somewhat obscure, reference to Welsh literature. I wanted to be as painfully genuine as I could when writing it. The absurdity it contains is always possible, never impossible, and in most cases the absurd events really happened, if not to me then to people I knew.

I''m planning a pair sequels, "Your Saturated Stockings" and "Our Malignant Slippers", to close the loop. The overall title for the sequence will be "The Unfeasible Footwear Trilogy" and I''ve based its structure around inter-subjectivity. In other words, the first volume is narrated by a character who exaggerates his bad qualities and downplays his good. In the second volume the same events are told from the viewpoint of his girlfriend, who always exaggerates the good. The third volume will outline the perspective of a third character whose investment in events is hampered by the principles of fair play, neutrality and non-interference. But in fact his presentation of the facts isn''t the true one either. Each viewpoint forms the point of a triangle and the "truth" is located at the centre, available only at the reader''s discretion!

...

This is part 1 of an in depth interview with Rhys Hughes , the Welsh Wizard of the Absurd. Rhys was born in Porthcawl, South Wales in 1966 and plans to write exactly 1000 stories in his lifetime ( see his blog here:- The Spoons That Are My Ears ). When this interview was originally published he had completed 468. Currently his total stands at 600+. Rhys can also be found on the web at:- The Rime of The Post Modern Mariner and on his Facebook page.

AmeriCymru: You write like you''re having a fantastically fun time, are you?

Rhys: Usually, yes, it's fun. That's one of the best reasons for doing anything. Writing for me is many things. It's an urge, almost a compulsion, but it's also a pleasure. That doesn't mean it's fun all the time. No fun is always pleasurable, strange as that sounds! There's always some anxiety in the background as well, a little tension, the worry that the work I'm doing won't be the best it can be, that it won't express clearly whatever I'm trying to say, that it won't be enthralling for the reader. It's fun but it's also hard work!

But fun is definitely the guiding principle of everything I do. I don't want writing to be a chore. If it becomes a chore I'll stop doing it. I hope this sense of fun conveys itself strongly to the reader. Having said that, the fact that something has been created in a spirit of fun doesn't necessarily mean it's not completely serious, profound or poignant. It may sound a bit cheesy, but great fun creates great responsibility...

AmeriCymru: Who did you like to read when you were a child? What did you like in their stories, what made the biggest impression?

Rhys: I had a somewhat unusual childhood when it came to bedtime reading. I was given adult encyclopedias and history books to help send me to sleep, but in fact I ended up reading most of them several times. I also enjoyed reading about explorers. Marco Polo is still one of my biggest heroes. Until the age of seven or thereabouts I wanted to be an explorer myself. Then I was told there were no new places on Earth left to discover and I remember feeling an acute disappointment! Since then, of course, I've discovered that this isn't entirely true...

Another early disappointment was the realisation that not everything that appears in print is always correct! I was very gullible in my youth and believed everything I read. I also believed everything I heard, so I was easy prey for shaggy dog stories. I was told various incredible lies by plausible adults and accepted them all as facts. They told me the Eiffel Tower was an obstacle that horses jump over in races; that the town I grew up in was Australian, not Welsh, but that this was a secret; that Mount Everest was in Scotland; that rhinoceroses lived in coal mines; that dinosaurs were extinct everywhere except in France; that a mouth ulcer can be used as hard currency in shops.

I sometimes still find myself wondering why all those things aren't true...

AmeriCymru: Who do you like to read now? What do you like about their stories?

Rhys: I like a wide variety of authors, almost too many to mention, but they all tend to be highly inventive. I think it was Michael Moorcock who said he would rather read a bad writer with big ideas than a good writer with small ideas, and I agree with that. Obviously the ideal author has good style and big ideas, someone like Italo Calvino, Donald Barthelme, Jorge Luis Borges, Stanislaw Lem, Flann O''Brien, Boris Vian... Those are the writers I usually list as my favourites, together maybe with Felipe Alfau, Georges Perec, Brian Aldiss, Blaise Cendrars, John Barth, Raymond Queneau, Thomas Pynchon, John Sladek, Jack Vance and Moorcock himself.

There have been periods in my life when I discovered a new author who impressed me so much I instantly became a devotee and an avid collector of his or her work. I also suspect I tried too hard to write like them. H.G. Wells was my first literary hero, when I was about 10 years old; Poe was next, a few years later, when I started writing ''seriously'' myself; then Kafka, Frank Herbert and Ray Bradbury. I remember reading Vladimir Nabokov's novel Transparent Things when I was 19 and being utterly captivated by its contrast of subjective realities, its branching of incidents and truths, and realising that at last I had discovered an author whose impressions of the world truly matched my own. That was quite a relief... Later I learned that this isn't such a wise thing to admit, apparently because Nabokov''s impressions are ''elitist'', ''egocentric'' and ''arrogant''. I don''t share those judgements of his work, incidentally!

Another major discovery was Samuel Beckett. I had been told his works were bleak and depressing, even damaging to the soul, but when I began reading them I found myself laughing. The subject matter may be almost unbearable but his treatment of nihilism is uplifting and deeply humane. I can't understand why his early novels are so neglected. Murphy and especially Watt are comic masterpieces... Another Irish writer, Flann O'Brien, was an even bigger influence on me. Irish writers, and some Scottish writers too, have already attained what the Welsh have failed to achieve, a modern literature that is simultaneously localised and universal, introspective and extrovert, particular and broad, that is both essentially Celtic and authentically global. When it comes to literature, Wales is the poor brother of its larger Celtic neighbours, I'm afraid!

These literary revelations come with much less regularity now. Blaise Cendrars was the last author new to me who really fired me up. I hope he won''t be the last, but maybe I''ve become more set in my ways as I grow older, or perhaps I have already encountered my ideal type of writing and don't need anything different. Or maybe my ideal type of writing doesn't actually exist and perhaps I have to create it myself. Whether it will turn out to be a match for the taste of anyone else remains to be seen!

AmeriCymru: When you're writing a story, how do you feel about it? Do you think about your reader, what effect it will have on them? Do you see the page and hear the words or is it more like a movie in your head?

Rhys: To be totally honest I mostly write for myself. I write the sort of fiction I want to read, not the kind a Welsh writer is supposed to produce, whatever that might be... Calvino said something that made an impression on me. He said he wrote the kinds of books he would like to discover in the attic of an old mysterious house, in other words, books with an exotic aura, books that give off an air of something precious that was lost but is now regained. By definition the ''exotic'' is both alien and alluring, so to write fiction that is auto-exotic requires a fairly major imaginative dislocation at some point. Too much control and the special ambience will break, but too much chaos and it will be lost in a general riot of ideas and evocations.

I guess this is the same as saying I try to write stories that operate on several levels and consist of many layers, with at least some of these layers and levels defying instant interpretation and categorisation. Maybe some levels will even be in opposition to each other. Not that I want to be obscure for its own sake! On the contrary, I hope always to write logically, but there will always be space in my work for engimatic undercurrents and sometimes those more abstruse elements can carry the logical, definite parts of the work with greater force than if everything was only on one level, clearly discernable and conclusive... The point of ''fantastical'' fiction is that it really should be fantastic in the old sense of the word, with a balancing tension between control and chaos.

I rarely see my projected stories as moving films, but I do have a strong visual sense when I'm working. Before I begin a story I usually receive one or more ''still'' images which I can then extrapolate and link together. I prefer to use only images that resonate strongly within me but resonate for reasons I can''t work out... I also have a strong audio sense and frequently I'll divert the course of the story because of some opportunity that language has thrown up. I'm obsessed with wordplay! One disadvantage of this is that my dialogue is never believable, with the exception of a handful of ''realistic'' stories where I deliberately didn't bother with wordplay. If I can ever find a way to make my readers care less about the endless contrivance in the mouths of my characters, to forgive the cleverness, I'll be utterly delighted!

AmeriCymru: Do you have a regular process in creating a story or does it vary from piece to piece? Do you plan your stories or do ideas crowd out and you pick one to finish?

Rhys: My brain is constantly filling up with ideas. The process never stops! I get ideas every day and if I don't use them in a story they refuse to leave me alone, or even worse I forget them and then kick myself for not using them! This has been happening for years. I usually jot ideas down on scraps of paper for future use and then try to forget them until they are needed, whenever that might be! It seems strange now, but I recall that when I first started writing, original ideas came to me with difficulty. Some machinery in my brain must have had a good oiling since then!

I regard my growing collection of ideas as a resource or sometimes a burden! Because ideas do come with such frequency I can't bring myself to follow the orthodox rule of "one idea per story" so I'll try to use as many as possible in as short a space as possible. The danger with this is that the fiction can become overloaded, so the challenge is to make sure the ideas balance each other out in some manner, or amplify or contrast each other, in other words work together.

As for the act of writing, I have several methods that I use. One is to plan the whole thing in detail, but I don't do that very often. My novel "The Percolated Stars" was much more carefully planned than anything else I've done and it ended up having one of my most chaotic plots! Another method is to plant images or incidents through the projected story like oases in a desert and then link them up. That''s the method I use most often. A third method is to rush blindly into the story with no idea what''s going to happen, but even when I do that I still have the same basic structure in mind, which is that I want the plot to be circular, for the ending to mirror the beginning, not as an exact reflection but as a distortion, maybe enlarged or diminished or transformed by irony. I guess I could describe that kind of plotting as being a ''spiral'' rather than a circle! I was once told there's something in the Celtic soul that prefers circles and loops to straight lines. Maybe there is.

But I know exactly when I realised that circular plotting was my favourite kind. It was when I read Jack Vance's "The Eyes of the Overworld". The climax of that unusual, funny and somewhat disturbing fantasy is a repetition of the opening, but because of what has happened during the progress of the novel the context is different, changing the significance of the repeated event, making it more intense. It's a case of something being the same but different at the same time! I was enthralled by this device and decided it was a trick I wanted to play myself!

In my short novel "Eyelidiad", for instance, I began with two sentences, the very first and the very last. I knew I wanted to write a story about a man who carries a living portrait of his younger self on his back, so the first sentence had to be, "On his back, a spare head." Which in turn meant that the last sentence had to be, "On his head, a spare back." Then it was just a case of linking those two equally balanced but different statements with as wild an adventure as possible!

AmeriCymru: Your titles are really wonderful. "At the Molehills of Madness", "The Postmodern Mariner", "Bone-Idle in the Charnel House", "The Just Not So Stories", how do these come about? Do you start with a title and give it a story or the other way around or does it vary? Did these percolate in your head for years or make them up on the spot?

Rhys: For me titles are of fundamental importance. I nearly always begin with the title first. I regard the title as a kind of gene that controls the growth of the story. The more elaborate the title, the more controlled the growth. A title is also the chance for an author to write a one line poem, to create a sense of mystery. I like seeing titles that make me wonder, ''What on earth could that be about? I must know!''

Brian Aldiss said that his own favourite titles tended to be oxymorons, such as "The Dark Light Years", and I can see his point. Such titles create an insatiable curiosity! I yearn to see how the impossibility of the title is going to be resolved, or how the promise of its beauty can be delivered. Boris Vian wrote a book with a beautiful title, "Froth on the Daydream", that also happens to fully deliver its promise. Another of my favourite titles is Milorad Pavic''s "The Inner Side of the Wind", and how could I forget "Dwellers in the Mirage" by Abraham Merritt or "The Well at the World's End" by William Morris?

It's quite easy to create titles that are puns or warped versions of titles that already exist. I've done this many times, often less flippantly than might be imagined. I remember seeing Milan Kundera's novel "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and asking myself, ''Yes, but the unbearable lightness of being what…?'' The title seemed unfinished. For some reason it didn't occur to me that BEING was the quality in question… I considered the matter and decided that the most unbearable form of lightness probably belonged to a steerable balloon or zeppelin. Hence my short story ''The Unbearable Lightness of being a Dirigible''.

That was one of my first efforts in this regard. Others include ''Chuckleberry Grin'', ''Rancid Kumquats are Not the Only Fruit'', ''The Taming of the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shrew'', ''Gone With The Wind in the Willows'', ''Portrait of the Artist as a Rusty Bus'', ''The Non-Existent Viscount in the Trees'', ''Von Ryan''s Daughter''s Express'', ''Oh, Whistle While You Work, and I''ll Come to You, My Dwarf'', ''The Cream-Jest of Unset Custard'', ''Where Angels Fear to Bake Bread'', ''As I Walked Out One Midsummer Night''s Dream'', ''An Awfully Bubonic Adventure'', ''Hannah and her Cisterns'', ''Sadie Loverlei''s Chatter'' and many, many others.

That's a slightly parasitic way of creating titles and is destined to eat itself up eventually, so I also create titles in other ways. Sometimes I work hard with combinations of words until I find something that resonates. Often a phrase jumps into my head for no apparent reason. Other times someone else may say something that makes perfect sense at the time but if taken out of context becomes wholly improbable or even startling. Then I'll ask permission to use what has been said as a title. That''s how my first book "Worming the Harpy" came about. The harpy in question was originally an ugly cat. Or a title may have an obscure personal significance which sounds surreal but isn't really. "The Smell of Telescopes" is one example of that. I owned a telescope when I was younger and it did have a unique smell. I imagined that it smelled like starlight…

The best titles don't always lead to the best stories and my favourites among my own tales sometimes have fairly mundane titles. ''Eternal Horizon'', ''Less is More'', ''In the Sink'', ''But it Pours'', ''Lem's Last Book'' and ''Loneliness'' are tame titles for me but I''m pleased with the stories they tell. Sometimes a simple title is the only feasible one. If I glance at my bookshelves I see lots of great books by great writers that don't have elaborate or clever titles. ''Ice'' by Anna Kavan, ''Leaf Storm'' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, ''Sphinx'' by D.M. Thomas, ''The Last Museum'' by Brion Gysin, etc. Simple titles but effective.

I keep a list of titles that are still awaiting stories. Whenever I come up with a new title I add it to my list. ''Pell Mell in Pall Mall'' is the most recent. I have absolutely no idea why that phrase jumped into my head, nor what the story is going to be about, other than the fact it involves great speed and must be set in London. Like I said, a gene that controls the growth of the story… Many of my favourite titles haven''t been used in stories yet. These include ''My Rabbit''s Shadow Looks Like a Hand'', ''This Werewolf Prefers Muesli'', ''Dynamiting the Honeybun'', ''Nat King Cole Abhors a Vacuum'' and ''Aldrin''s the Buzz Word'' among others… Some readers have claimed that ''Cracking Nuts with Jan Hammer'' is my best title, but I don't think it is. My personal favourite of all is actually called ''The Story with a Clever Title''.

Lloyd Jones will need no introduction to most of our readers. He is the author of two novels, "Mr Vogel" and "Mr Cassini", and has recently published his first collection of short stories ( "My First Coloring Book" ). In this interview he speaks about his life, work and future literary plans

Many of your writings revolve around journeys or more particularly walks. It is well known that you do a lot of hill-walking/hiking in "real life". What initially attracted you to this form of recreation?

"I had been very ill, mentally and physically, following a major breakdown caused by stress and alcohol in 2001. As I recovered from my near-death experience I found that walking was the best medicine for body and soul. It still is - I go for a walk every day. Every walk is a celebration of the concept of freedom".

To what extent is "Mr Vogel" autobiographical?

"Almost all the book is based on my life. I walked completely around Wales, a journey of a thousand miles, in 2002/3 and I have walked across the country eight times in eight different directions since then. Also, I was a patient at Gobowen hospital in Shropshire, strapped to a metal frame for a year, when I was aged about six. The bonesetters of Anglesey, featured in my book, were a real family and they have descendants in America".

You have published a collection of poems which were distributed privately. Do you have any plans to publish further poetry anthologies?

"No. Friends have assured me that my poems should remain in a locked drawer. I have written a narrative poem for 2008 with an entry for each day - and it''s still going strong, in November. It will have 369 poems eventually, and will be published to critical acclaim when I''m dead; if my family burn it my mini-epic will be remembered as the great lost poem of the twenty-first century. Or maybe not."

It has been suggested that "Mr Cassini" is an attempt to explore and elucidate modern problems and neuroses utilizing ancient Welsh myth and legend. Is this true and if so, what role do the stories of the Mabinogion play in the book?

"Yes, Mr Cassini is an Arthurian book based on the legend of Culhwch ac Olwen - probably the first Welsh story ever recorded. Mr Cassini is also a voyage around my alcoholic father. In the Mabinogion legend, the beautiful Olwen''s father is a nasty giant who forces Culhwch to perform a number of Herculean feats before the two can wed. Arthur (Duxie in my book) helps them in their quest. I have tried to use the Arthurian legend in a contemporary Celtic context - as a reaction to the romantic and sentimental rubbish promulgated by TV and film directors."

It has often been suggested that short story writing is a very different art to novel writing. Did you find this to be the case in the course of writing the stories which make up "My First Colouring Book"?

"Short stories are supposed to be a Welsh speciality. The form doesn''t sell particularly well in Britain but it''s popular in North America. Compared to the novel, the short story is a different kettle of fish, and I enjoyed reading a wide range of exponents, from Chekhov and Maupassant to O''Henry and Kate Roberts before tackling the form myself. I thoroughly enjoyed the micro form after writing two macros."

Is there any particular theme which unites the stories in this collection?

"Eros and thanatos - love and death. And colours, obviously. There''s a mysterious, recurring house which links many of the stories. This house demanded its own presence."

What are your future writing plans?

"I have just completed the first draft of a novel in Welsh called Y Dwr (The Water), due to be published by Y Lolfa in 2009. I plan a year off in 2009: I hope to travel to India with my daughter and cross Wales for a ninth time, if I live. It''s going to be a walking year, I hope. Can''t wait. I have no plans for a book after that because I think I''ve dumped enough poo on a very patient Welsh public. Maybe some more short stories?"

Do you have a particular process when you write? Do you have to set yourself up to write or just jot it on candy bar wrappers or do anything in particular to grease your creative wheels?

"Every book is different and has its own dictates, but I tend to write on a laptop in short bursts in the early morning, on my own, in absolute silence. I write a first version, leave it for a while, then return to it. At some stage I engineer a transaction to another person, during which I perceive what needs to be done without words being exchanged. I see myself as a free range hobby writer who delivers bantham eggs complete with shit and straw."

How important is Anglo-Welsh literature to the future development of a distinct Welsh cultural identity?

"Sport, war and literature are possibly the most important components of nationalism. Wales has constantly reinvinted itself to stay ''alive''. If there are enough people who feel passionately about the country, Wales will survive; but the country is under enormous pressure at the moment because of a massive incoming and other global forces, so the next 100 years could be decisive. I wouldn''t like to predict the outcome. We are at the crossroads: Wales could go the Cornish way or it could go the Scottish way. My own writing could be another tiny evolutionary addition to Welsh morphology, or it could be one of its death throes."

Any plans to visit the US?

"American foreign policy under Bush really frightened and angered me: I found it hard to be objective and optimistic about the USA for quite some time. Also, our TV channels are clogged with poor American programmes; I fear that Britain is losing its identity, almost becoming a ghost American state like Puerto Rica. It seems to me at a distance that America is two countries, one dominated by thoughtful liberal people who tend to be on the Democrat wing, and another ''country'' dominated by the Republican Christian right. The latter is a big turn-off for me, so I have to fight a tendency to be bigoted against America with its putrid Hollywood/cool/gunslinging culture, although I know that the continent has also produced a huge amount of excellent stuff in the last century. I suppose I have become reactionary about hawkish America, while tending to forget that America is stuffed full of normal, decent people. Perhaps I have fallen into the trap of simplification and generalisation. But I get the impression, with the election of Obama, that America is now more willing to listen to the rest of the world. I would like to shrug aside my bigotry and come over to see the many beautiful places in America."

Many people in the US are concerned to promote Wales to the wider American public.. What do you think is the most important thing that Americans can learn from the history and culture of Wales? "

Small countries face a constant battle for survivial. Their biggest threat is the screen. Television, cinema and computers have made it increasingly possible for people to live in a virtual world, and that''s the most striking change during my lifetime: the virtualisation of the world. I won''t even watch nature programmes on TV now because it''s too convenient to watch pretty-pretty ahhhh material on the screen whilst the real thing is being wiped out all around us. People will watch panda bears on TV whilst never thinking of looking at a live robin in their garden. Wales is real and it''s different. Wouldn''t it be awful if everywhere in the world were the same? I''m planning to visit India next Spring. Wouldn''t it be terrible if India were full of little Lloyd Joneses? I''d throw myself in the Indian Ocean! As the French say, Vive le difference!"

"Wales has survived against incredible odds. Many thousands of people, probably millions, have died in the fight to keep Wales ''different''. The story of Wales is amazing. The literature of Wales is amazing. And the people of Wales are amazing. It''s a tiny, beautiful country with fabulous diversity. But the Welsh are now an endangered species; the old, shy upland folk are disappearing. Do your bit to save a truly original and different minority. Help to save Wales any way you can...and the best way is to say proudly: I''m Welsh!"