Rippling Pages: Interviews with Writers

'Where there is conflict, there is always a path to literature...Freedom is an important topic for me.'

What a pleasure to talk to the Montenegrin writer, Olja Knežević about her trans-generational novel, Catherine the Great and the Small (Istros Books). The novel is translated by Paula Gordon and Ellen Elias-Bursać

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• Lessons from writing in and about a civil war

BUY CATHERINE THE GREAT AND THE SMALL HERE

Reference Points

Writers

• Rachel Cusk

Ideal lockdown literary listening. 

Follow Liam on Twitter - @liamhbishop

'I want the story the story to be as disorientating for the reader as it is for me...I'm not trying to offer an answer or a safe and complete world...'

• That's all we've got time for: setting 'temporal parameters' for writing a story

Buy I'M AFRAID THAT'S ALL WE'VE GOT TIME FOR here

Buy GOBLINS here

Reference Points

Books and Writers

• Jen Calleja's poetry collection, SERIOUS JUSTICE

Films

• Labyrinth (1986: Jim Henson)

Artists

• Paula Rego

Ideal lockdown literary listening. 

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'It felt liberating to find that voice and put it on paper...Some restrictions can be creative.'

Hello! Katharina Volckmer talks about her debut novel, The Appointment (Fitzcarraldo Editions), a TLS 'Book of the Year 2020', and one critics have called 'a darkly funny untangling of national and sexual identity' (The Guardian).

• Can the restrictions of writing in a language which isn't your 'mother tongue' ultimately set you free?

Buy THE APPOINTMENT here

Reference Points

Books and Writers

Thomas Bernhard - The Old Masters

Siri Hustvedt - The Blindfold

Franz Kafka

Ottessa Moshfegh

Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint

Articles

Katharina in conversation with RL Goldberg for the Paris Review

Katharina on 'that strange German silence' that persists over the Holocaust for the Guardian

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‘I do believe that we’re all travellers of a fashion. For the poetic process I personally need a sense of freedom in order to write, and I like to feel free.’

• How 'Growlery', a term from another era, can come to represent the space you write in.

Buy GROWLERY here.

Reference Points

Books

Bleak House by Charles Dickens (Penguin Classics)

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)​

Guy Debord and the Situationist Manifesto 

The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times and Glorious Times of the Situationist International by McKenzie Wark (Verso Books)

Essays

Ange Milonko’s essay on Alice Oswald. (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020...​)​

'I did feel like I wasn't living my own life. I was in the world of Newbury and trees.'

These are some Rippling Pages Pilot episodes published in Summer 2020.

Gaia Holmes talks about her story, '198 Methods of NVDA', which features in Comma Press's Resist Anthology. 

Rippling Points:

• Researching the environment to create your story's environment.

Buy RESIST: STORIES OF UPRISING from Comma Press here.

Circles on the Water – Selected Poems of Marge Piercy - https://margepiercy.com/portfolio-ite...​

The Newbury bypass protest of 1996 - in pictures - https://www.theguardian.com/artanddes...​

Did the Newbury bypass tree huggers change anything - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england...​

How the Greenham Common protests changed lives - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2...​

198 Methods of Non-Violent Action – Gene Sharp - https://www.brandeis.edu/peace-confli...​

Tales of Resistance by Jamie Lowe - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9037272/

‘Things don’t always turn out how you intended them to, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.’

• Using the ‘byproducts’ of our lives and writing in writing

Buy ABOVE THE FAT here.

Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures by Mark Fisher (2014: Zero Books)