This week’s episode brings together Birmingham born writer and artist Jackie Morris with her long-time friend, and the co-founder of the publisher Unbound, John Mitchinson. They talk about Jackie’s two new books, East of the Sun, West of the Moon and The Wild Swans, using feminist fairy tales to give voice to the voiceless, the beauty of snow and how it is impossible to draw during labour.
 
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org. 

For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/

Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest

Credits

Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands

TRANSCRIPT

BLF Series 2, Episode 6: Jackie Morris 

Intro

Welcome to the second series of the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast. We are really excited to be back for a second season and to continue to connect readers and writers in the Midlands, and far beyond. 

You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org. 

This week’s episode brings together Birmingham born writer and artist Jackie Morris with her long-time friend, and the co-founder of the publisher Unbound, John Mitchinson. They talk about Jackie’s two new books, East of the Sun, West of the Moon and The Wild Swans, using feminist fairy tales to give voice to the voiceless, the beauty of snow and how it is impossible to draw during labour. 

John Mitchinson 

Hello and welcome. My name is John Mitchinson. I’m the publisher of Unbound, the crowdfunding publisher, and I am here today with the author and illustrator Jackie Morris. Jackie tell us where you're, as they say, calling from.

Jackie Morris

I’m in my roost, my lair, whatever you want to call it, which is a studio in an attic in a small and very tatty house which cl

ings to the cliff tops just outside St. Davids, which is in Wales by the way.

John Mitchinson

Which is in wales, and this is the room in which, people who know your work may know both The Lost Words and The Lost Spells, the two books that co-wrote with Robert Macfarlane, but also The Unwinding which we published last year at Unbound and a couple of books that are coming out later on this year that we're going to talk about.

Jackie Morris 

East of the Sun, West of the Moon and The Wild Swans and all of these were created here because 30 years ago I came to St Davids for the weekend, and I’ve never been able to find my way out really. It's a really strange place that some people say it gathers flotsam and jetsam from the world and we kind of swirl around in this little microenvironment. I very seldom took a holiday, I used to live in Bath which is a beautiful city, and I came here for a weekend, and I walked down the high street and I just got this incredible overwhelming feeling, which I now know is called hiraeth, which is that feeling of belonging. Hiraeth is more a kind of homesickness, and the homesickness was recognizing that this is where I should have been always, so this is where I was going to be. I didn't want it to be a place I came to on holiday, I didn't want to live my life to go on holiday a couple of times a year, I wanted to live here, and I wanted to work here and I wanted to raise children here and that's what I’ve done.

John Mitchinson

It’s amazing and it’s a very ancient bit of the world as well that Pembrokeshire coast, isn't it? Amazing rocks and beautiful beaches and, I think, can't you see from your studio window the top of St Davids cathedral in Fishguard?

Jackie Morris 

I can and when the wind’s blowing in the right direction, I can hear the cathedral bells. I can also see Ramsey Island which is a very old and spiritual place and Skomer and I can see the sea and then if you walk up the hill behind my house there's a long ridge of granite rock that bites out of the sea and then down the other sides there's an old village that used to be inhabited years ago, it's all ruins now, there's hut circles, there's old standing stones, there's beaches where the seals come ashore to breed this time of year, there are raven’s roosts, there’s peregrines, I don't know why I wanted to live here really.

John Mitchinson

Nature is all around you. You have your own menagerie of animals as well.

Jackie Morris

Yeah, I do, I have four cats that share the house with me and are destructive to many things, including the house, often to my peace of mind, but they also come for walks. They're not allowed in the studio because they’re terrible critics of my work, they like to sit on paintings and knock things over and then I have three dogs, one of which is Rosie who is my daughter's dog, Ivy the beautiful and Pie who is just crazy crazy crazy.

John Mitchinson

Let's talk about the two books that are coming out in October, East of the Sun, West of the Moon and The Wild Swans. They're both really retellings of, I think, they're both Hans Christian Andersen tales originally, old folktales, Norwegian folk tales, certainly. But you take the stories, and you completely reinvent them, don't you?

Jackie Morris

Not completely, I changed the endings really. And more so with East of the Sun, than The Wild Swans. I did try very hard to change the ending of The Wild Swans. Yeah, the plot spoiler for that one is, for some reason, at the very end of it, Eliza, who is the heroine of the book, is on a pyre about to be burned as a witch. But she is rescued by her brothers arriving as swans. She then chooses to marry the prince who had sentenced her to death, I still don't understand that really, you know, I wouldn't be quite so forgiving myself. But then if I had brothers who were turned into swans, I would just think fantastic. I've got swans now, not brothers. So, I wouldn't spend years of my life weaving shirts out of nettles for them.

John Mitchinson

Yes, I mean, and you describe weaving shirts out of nettles and painful bloody fingers and painful bloody feet for stamping the nettles into fibres. Two things that strike me about the way that you tell these folk tales is that there's a lot of very strong, visceral, sensual writing in the books. That's one case, Eliza, you know, shredding her fingers and stinging her fingers with nettles. But it's full of delicious, they're always full of delicious foods, and incredibly kind of com...