{"id":9731,"date":"2021-12-01T03:36:25","date_gmt":"2021-12-01T03:36:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eu-china.literaryfestival.eu\/?page_id=9731"},"modified":"2021-12-01T03:42:18","modified_gmt":"2021-12-01T03:42:18","slug":"interview-with-jan-carson","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/eu-china.literaryfestival.eu\/zh-hans\/interview-with-jan-carson\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview with Jan Carson"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
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\u201c<\/strong>At least 70 per ce<\/strong>nt of my writing is done in my head\u201d<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Interview with Jan Carson<\/strong><\/h5>\n

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Jan Carson, winner of the EU Prize for Literature among a host of other accolades, says she typically brings her characters and narratives to life in her mind and most of the story is outlined before she even types a word.<\/h5>\n

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\u201cAt least 70 per cent of my writing is done in my head and so the story is often fully thought through and the characters already well-developed before I sit down to write. I spend a lot of time walking around the area I live in just thinking about the concepts I\u2019d like to write about and particularly trying to find a voice for the characters and hear the story they want to tell,\u201d Ms. Carson said, speaking ahead of her appearance at the 6th<\/sup>\u00a0EU-China International Literary Festival.<\/h5>\n

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A highly versatile writer, who has recently produced novels, short story collections, micro-fiction collections and plays, she said this process helps her identify which genre is most suited to the narrative percolating in her mind.<\/h5>\n

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\u201cBecause of this I often know exactly which vehicle I want to employ before I begin to write novel, short story, micro-fiction or play. For a novel, I\u2019ve learnt the hard way that you need to be really interested in your characters and subject matter before you commit to spending 100,000 words and several years of your life with them. Short stories are more like fleeting relationships. They\u2019re often a space where I can briefly deep dive into an idea or theme I\u2019m intrigued by, knowing it\u2019s a much shorter commitment.\u201d<\/h5>\n

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In her novel The Fire Starters<\/i><\/em>\u00a0Dr Jonathan Murray fears his new-born daughter is not as harmless as she seems, while Sammy Agnew is wrestling with his dark past, and fears the violence in his blood lurks in his son, too.\u00a0The city of Belfast is in flames and the authorities are losing control. As matters fall into frenzy, and as the lines between fantasy and truth, right and wrong, begin to blur, the question the novel asks is who will these two fathers choose to protect?<\/h5>\n

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Ms Carson has worked extensively as a community arts facilitator in Belfast for over two decades, ever since the Good Friday Peace Agreement of 1998, and she said this work helped sow the seeds of the novel.<\/h5>\n

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\u201cI was initially drawn to the character of Sammy after spending the last two decades as a community arts facilitator repeatedly encountering older men who\u2019d witnessed, or even been party to, desperately difficult things during the conflict and simply couldn\u2019t speak about what they\u2019d experienced. In the wake of the Troubles, we\u2019ve had a mental health crisis here in the North and much attention has been focused upon encouraging men like Sammy to talk about their trauma and begin to process it. I wanted to reflect this in my novel. Jonathan, as a character, is very similar to me. We both come from quite conservative backgrounds where we\u2019ve struggled to express our emotions as adults. I grew up in a conservative Presbyterian community where art and self-expression were frowned upon. Becoming a writer in my twenties really helped me to find an outlet for my thoughts and ideas. In writing Jonathan, I wanted to explore what it might be like for a contemporary who\u2019d not been able to find an appropriate outlet. Jonathan\u2019s quite a troubled character.\u201d<\/h5>\n

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In terms of the themes in The Fire Starters<\/em>, Ms. Carson said she was interested in exploring contemporary Belfast.<\/h5>\n

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\u201cMany of our best and bravest pieces of art are focused on the situation in Northern Ireland pre-1998 and I wanted to write a novel which looked at both the legacy of the Troubles and the uneasy peace we currently live with. I also wanted to bring humor, absurdity, and a little element of the fantastical into a canon of literature which is predominantly focused upon the realistic.<\/h5>\n

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Ms Carson said she identifies strongly with Northern Ireland as a writer, and the people, culture and politics give her rich material to work with.<\/h5>\n

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\u201cI feel very strongly that I am a Northern Irish writer. When I first moved back from five years living away from home in America and London, writing about Northern Ireland helped me to reconnect with the place and the people here. There\u2019s nothing quite like forensically observing the place you live to make you fascinated by all its quirks and absurdities. Belfast really is one of the most odd and intriguing places in the world and, living here, you never run out of material to write about,\u201d she said.<\/h5>\n

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\u201cI don\u2019t feel any pressure to dissect or make sense of the complexities of Northern Ireland\u2019s history or politics in my work. However, I do live here. I work in the community and feel like I am a contributing part of it, and I think it\u2019s unsurprising that my stories often seem to tackle the big issues associated with contemporary Northern Ireland. Sometimes I\u2019m not even aware that I\u2019m doing this. I\u2019ll write a story and then afterwards realize that it\u2019s engaging with a theme pertinent to my community. Writing can be sneaky like that. It tends to come from a subconscious place.\u201d<\/h5>\n

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Working as an arts facilitator has also given her in-depth insight into many aspects of the post-conflict community, she said.<\/h5>\n

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\u201cA lot of community arts projects have been used to bolster the peace process here in Northern Ireland and most of my projects have been focused on bringing together groups from across the sectarian divide in order to listen to each other\u2019s stories and write together. Projects like this have often provided a rare opportunity for people who might never have met to get to know each other and realise that they have more in common than they think. For the last ten years my work has been primarily focused on older people and I\u2019ve garnered so many brilliant stories and insights into Northern Ireland\u2019s socio-political histories from these encounters. Rarely would I write someone\u2019s whole story as a piece of my own work; though I have been asked to do this on several occasions and obliged. But a lot of the detail, nuance and depth in my writing comes from encounters with real people. Sammy in The Fire Starters<\/em>\u00a0is a prime example of this.\u201d<\/h5>\n

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In terms of style, the fantastical and magic realism feature in several of Ms Carson\u2019s novels and stories, elements she feels were naturally introduced.<\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cI never made a conscious decision to introduce fantastical elements into my writing. I have no background in creative writing and when I first began to write seriously in my late twenties, simply wrote the kind of stories I wanted to read and tried to write the world the way I saw it. I grew up in a very religious household and from a young age was trained to appreciate the possibility of the supernatural in the world around me. I honestly think my childhood experience had the most influence on shaping me as a writer and I still return frequently to Biblical stories and storytelling structures \u2013 particularly the miraculous and the apocalyptic \u2013 when I\u2019m writing. Later, when I discovered there was a handy label for the way I wrote, I read a lot of the big political magical realists like Gunter Grass, Salman Rushdie and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and realized the potential for using metaphor to engage with difficult, and potentially problematic, subjects. However, in all honesty I think I\u2019d already learnt this method of storytelling from dissecting the teaching style of Jesus in the Gospels, the way he used parable, metaphor, and allegory in order to teach his followers. For me, the main use of the fantastical is to encourage the reader to approach a topic or situation which they think they fully appreciate and understand with fresh eyes. So many other writers have written about the political situation in Northern Ireland I felt the fantastical might help readers to see our story from a different angle.\u201d<\/h5>\n

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With her international reputation rising rapidly and her work coming out in several new languages lately, Ms Carson has been busy on the speaking circuit which has cut in on her writing time. Ideally, she likes to write for the first few hours of the day, when she feels freshest, and she always encourages aspiring writers to make that daily writing time a priority if possible.<\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cAlways prioritize your own creative writing and give the best of yourself to it. I\u2019d say I\u2019ve now become more of a \u2018splurge and retreat\u2019 writer. I tend to spend eight months of the year doing PR and events and then just disappear on a residency or hole up at home like a hermit writing for the remaining part of the year. It\u2019s not ideal, but for the time being it\u2019s allowing me to continue to write a book every 18 months or so,\u201d she said.<\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

At the 6<\/em>th<\/sup><\/em>\u00a0EU-China International Literary Festival, Jan Carson will join Liang Hong from China and Joanna Bator from Poland to discuss their writing lives and how they engage with concepts such as community, trauma, humour, and truth in their celebrated works.<\/em><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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