Birmingham Lit Fest Presents….

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 comforting beverages to drink. And I'm just wondering, both the stories, having these very, very strong female characters, Eliza in The Wild Swans and Bernine in East of the Sun. And, as you say, Bernine’s story is, she doesn't go for the leading man in the way that you would expect a female character in a folktale to go.

Jackie Morris 

Yeah, she goes her own way, really, she grows through the story. And very much did go her own way. I was trying to write her in one direction. And she had come to life so much that she refused to go where she was supposed to. Yeah, so I have had letters of complaints that the story is wrong, you've written the story wrong. But I'll take that.

John Mitchinson

I mean, they're very powerful, I think, very powerful stories for any age. They work for any age.

Jackie Morris 

I hope so. Yeah. I mean, I think the character in Wild Swans who really fascinated me, is the stepmother. I think women come out of a lot of these folktales very badly, often. 

John Mitchinson

Yes, and you kind of rescue them in a way. I mean, it's a very ambiguous ending, Wild Swans, that you give it where the stepmother has apparently changed. Again, I think we can talk about these things because if people are reading them for the plots, maybe they're reading them in the wrong kind of way, if there is a wrong kind of way. But she falls pregnant and then she transforms herself into a hare and then goes and leaves the King, the father of Bernine.

Jackie Morris 

Yes. And why wouldn't you really because I think during the time that she was with him, she did love him, but he couldn't trust her enough to share his children with her. So, he was quite happy to marry her, but never to trust her with his children. She showed no malice at all towards anybody until her heart cracked. And then she has a wonderful time with the wild white hares, I think, in the woods, so it might be his child that she's carrying, but it might be a hare child anyway. This fascination with transformation that I have, I think, because when I was a child, I kind of didn't want to be human. You know, people would ask me what you want to be when you grow up and when I got my head around the fact that you had to grow up I would think well, you know, I want to be a bear.

John Mitchinson

And you write so sensually about the smell of the feathers of the doves or the swans in Wild Swans or the amazing bear in East of the Sun, who is obviously an enchanted character that change changes into a prince, but I feel that you rather preferred him when he was a bear. 

Jackie Morris 

Yeah, I always preferred in Beauty and the Beast, I was always disappointed that she'd fallen in love with this creature and then he turned into a man, and it was a bit like, oh, never mind.

John Mitchinson

The other thing that really struck me, certainly in The Wild Swans, is obviously there's a lot of dreams and both of these women have to go through a lot of loss and a lot of pain in the stories before they reach the end. But there's a particular quality to Eliza’s story where she has to not speak for a long period of time in order to restore her brothers to their human state, they've been transformed into swans. And that thing of silence is interesting, because at first, the silence works in her favour. Everybody projects positive things onto her. But then there's a malicious character who starts to spread rumours about her, which of course she can't. I just thought that was very interesting, it felt to me that you were trying to say something interesting about women and their role in story and their role in culture and their silent witness.

Jackie Morris 

Yeah, it's partly about silence. But I became fascinated during that period by the idea of silence, I would actually just, I was knitting at the time. And I would take my knitting up the hill, and just sit for half an hour knitting, without speaking. Eliza does it for years and she can't say a word, she can't utter a word at all, she can't make a sound. If she does, then all the brothers will die. And there is so little silence in our world at the moment. It's really hard to find a place that’s silent, even where I live, you know, just as this podcast was beginning, the lawn mower started up in the holiday cottages next door. Most of the day, I've just been listening to the sound of raven’s wings going overhead and the sheep in the fields next door. But silence is a rare commodity. And silence with humans is very rare. Usually, I think if you don't have a voice, if you don't speak, people will say your words for you. That happens a lot with women. 

John Mitchinson

There's a texture to silence you say at the beginning of the The Wild Swans, she learns the many textures of silence and she learns to listen, which is another skill.

Jackie Morris 

Yeah. Well, I need that one more. I need less of the speaking and more of the listening. Always, always, I think I need to learn to throw a small question out and then sit back. 

John Mitchinson

I'm curious as to why the books came as a pair?

Jackie Morris 

East of the Sun I wrote and then I submitted it to many, many publishers for seven years. And I got rejection letter after rejection letter for seven years. And then I took it to a publisher, at the time I was working with Francis Lincoln. And they did picture books. They didn't do longer books, but my editor there, Janetta, she read it and she said yes, yeah, I want to publish this. So, I illustrated it. And it sold out of its first edition in about a week. And then it went into seven editions, which was rather nice. But in the meantime, the publisher had been taken over by a bigger press and my relationship deteriorated. I think the best thing I can say is that eventually I got the rights back on all my books, and then took them out to other publishers. I did take them to other people before Unbound but one of the best days in my publishing career was the day that I walked into the unbound offices with these books, and all the things that I wanted for them, and the answer was yes. And it was including, you know, everywhere I'd been people said, oh, well, we've got our own designer. And I said yes. But you know, Alison and I just, we get each other. It would be like me going to a publisher, and they say, oh, well, we've got our own writer, and I'm going yes, but I work with Robert Macfarlane, they go, oh, no, we've got our own writer who will write the books for you, you know. And I think it's so rare that people see design for what it is, which is such an integral part of a book and Alison has gone through these books word by word, and she's set the words like images in a way, as well as the images alongside each other. The pace, she allows it to breathe. So, where it needs just space, there is space.

John Mitchinson

The books, you fill them with wildlife. 

Jackie Morris 

Always birds. I'm really struggling at the moment because I'm doing a book of birds and birds have usually been in the background of all my books, and now they are centre stage flying through. And it's oh no, what do I put in the background? Other birds!

John Mitchinson

There's also, I have to say, some beautiful moths in The Wild Swans as well.

Jackie Morris 

Can you tell that the character that kind of took over The Wild Swans was the stepmother with her crown of moths? She needs her own book at some point.

John Mitchinson

I thought that and also there's that marvellous transformation scene, which I think you write beautifully. One of the things I really like when people illustrate is that it would be very difficult to illustrate Eliza when she's been enchanted, and her teeth have been blackened. And you do that, you do it to an extent, but you don't try and make her look as monstrous as the text makes it sound.

Jackie Morris

See, I don't think of her as being monstrous. That is the look I aspire to. I mean, that's like a wish fulfilment. That's when she's at her most beautiful, most powerful, I think. But I do think, both of the books, they don't really end they kind of begin at the end. And my hope for the reader is that there's a life outside the book. So, you would wonder what happens to the stepmother? Where is she? Is she still in her wild hare form? Is she a person? What happens to Eliza and the prince? Can they kind of get over this burning scene? What's it like every time he strikes a match around her? Because I wouldn't be so forgiving if somebody had tried to burn me at the stake, I have to say.

John Mitchinson

That's a pretty shocking scene, that scene.

Jackie Morris 

Yeah, and then there's also the fascination of, you know, there's the thing about people not listening to Eliza because she's silent. But also, she never asked the boys whether they want to stay swans. And her youngest brother, who has always loved flight, didn't quite dodge the shirt well enough at the end and so there is another book there.

John Mitchinson

The half man, half bird book and does he ever return to fly again. I mean, so that's a kind of, let's say, indeterminacy, that you quite like. You take that to a whole different level with your book, The Unwinding, which is the book we published last year, which is a braided together series of narratives, and reflections. I mean, it's not really a story, is it? 

Jackie Morris

No. And yes.

John Mitchinson

It's many stories. 

Jackie Morris 

The stories for The Unwinding lived in the images for the most part. And every time you look at the images, you could make a new story, if you wanted to. The words that live alongside the pictures are almost catalysts for storytelling, really. And it was about halfway through the book, that I realized that it would be quite a good idea to remove all the words in what I call my most radical editing job ever. And have the book that runs alongside it called The Silent Unwinding, which is like a silent movie, really, it's the same book, but without any of the words. So, into that space, you can write your own words, or you can draw your own pictures, or even do both at the same time.

John Mitchinson

And people have really responded to it. People have shared online their finishing or taking of Jackie's images and adding their own illustrations and words. I wish we could say we've been incredibly clever to have thought this up as being the perfect antidote to people suddenly finding themselves in lockdown and having much more time on their own to think and reflect and to listen, all the things that we've talked about that are important, but The Unwinding became almost, for a lot of people I think, quite a talismanic book through lockdown, because it encouraged that. You say it started as a sort of a pillow book. Do you want to say what a pillow book is?

Jackie Morris 

Yeah, I used to write a blog years ago. And it was partly a way for me to learn to write. And somebody said to me one day oh, your blog just reminds me of The Pillow Book of Sei Shonigan and I thought, oh, I wonder what that is, I'll go and have a look. And I found this amazing, 1000-year-old diary of - I guess its attention, isn't it, it’s paying attention to different things. The fact that her words spoke to me through a century was just astonishing. So, a pillow book is like a small collection of writing that you would tuck underneath your pillow, and maybe you would add to it yourself. Or maybe it was just for reading. 

John Mitchinson

But there was a kind of a sense that there was some degree of calming solace, that it was something that would enter your dreams and feed your unconscious.

Jackie Morris 

Yeah, and I think at the time I was aware that the world was quite an anxious place. I had no idea that things were going to become far more anxious over time. I live in quite a blessed little bubble in my studio and when I venture out of it, which I do less and less these days, I find the world to be quite a chaotic space so what I wanted to try and do was think of books as being a bit like theatres and I was trying to make a very small theatre prayer book, a place of calming, place of peace within the pages within the covers. A place of dreams, a place of stillness.

John Mitchinson

Which I think is what a lot of people have responded to in the book but also in The Silent Book as well, it's just there is something incredibly liberating about looking at a sequence of images, like a sort of build your own adventure. It's a tell your own story through the images that are there on the page.

Jackie Morris 

Yeah, I hope it invites people in. Some people have said they couldn’t possibly write in it as it was too intimidating, but I think most people managed to. Once you start then it becomes easier, it's like everything else, you know, when you're writing a book the hardest thing to do is the first few words

John Mitchinson

We should say that, this is obviously going out under the auspices of the Birmingham Literature Festival, but you were born in Birmingham.

Jackie Morris 

I was, it's very long time ago, it was almost 60 years ago, I was born in Loveday Street hospital which they, shortly after my birth, they knocked down but it was too late because I was out in the world by then and there was no stopping me really. And then there are what you called once the Hollywood years because I lived in Hollywood until I was four.

John Mitchinson

That's Hollywood near Bromsgrove.

Jackie Morris

My Hollywood was…I remember snow, baked potatoes, a cardigan with a zip on and a hood that I absolutely adored. Mostly snow, you know, rolling snowballs in the garden that were bigger than me.

John Mitchinson

It's interesting there's so much snow in your in your work.

Jackie Morris 

I love snow and I live in one of the least snowy parts of Britain really.

John Mitchinson

Yes, because of that salt in the air, it's not great for it. Did you always draw?

Jackie Morris 

I always did draw as much as I can remember. I think I probably came out of the womb with a crayon in my hand. When I had both my children I took my sketchbooks into hospital foolishly thinking that while I was in labour I could do a little bit of drawing and then when I was six years old I watched my dad's drawing a lapwing and I guess I didn't really think I want to be an artist because, you know, I didn't know about jobs but what I wanted to do is to be able to do that thing that I was watching him do which was like alchemy, which is taking a blank piece of paper and making a bird land on it using a pencil. that's kind of what I’ve been aiming for all my life really.

John Mitchinson

It is kind of alchemical I think watching you draw and paint. I mean I’ve watched you paint foxes live and it's astonishing. The most astonishing thing I think I’ve ever seen was watching you paint two foxes simultaneously with paint brushes in in your left and your right hand.

Jackie Morris                                                                                                                                              

Yeah, I'll tell you what would be even more miraculous is painting them and then they come to life, that would be good.

John Mitchinson

Well, more of that anon because yeah, we'll talk about that in a moment, but obviously we've talked about paying attention and looking at things more closely. I mean you tend to draw from nature, you tend to draw the birds, the flowers, the moths, the butterflies, the plants that surround you in a kind of, in a very precise and an accurate way and yet you have this capacity I think to make them feel animated. I mean is that important, are you trying to capture some sort of spirit when you're painting? 

Jackie Morris 

I’m going for the soul really, always, and that may stem back to me once asking a vicar whether animals had souls and he said no and that was it then I was done with Christianity forever. I think everything, every painting that I do is just chasing creatures not in order to capture it but just to show it, to try to show the sacred in life, I guess. What is most important to me is that the rights of life, the rights of all life. It’s an understanding that we need to come to. If we don't, it is to our peril, I think, because everything is so interdependent, you know. I grew up at the time when the there was this kind of Christian dominance with man at the top and everything else underneath. And I think it never made any sense to me, the only way that world made sense to me was through First Nations stories where all life was equal, where there was a balance, where every action had a reaction, where you honoured the tree that you cut down, you never took more than you needed, and you tried to put back and thinking forward for generations. That's what is so needed. And more and more, I think those are the stories that we need to tell. So that's what I guess I'm trying to do in my painting.

John Mitchinson

In lockdown, though you started on a project which doesn't involve painting at all. It involves what some people might think is the kind of the opposite, it involves old typewriters.

Jackie Morris

It does yeah, it has curious roots, I guess.

John Mitchinson

It's called Feather, Leaf, Bark and Stone, so it sounds like it's a deeply kind of natural, very safe, Jackie Morris territory. But in fact, you're typing directly onto squares of gold leaf, and then photographing those. 

Jackie Morris

Yeah. And so, everything that is written, there is an attention to every single word. I know, in Western culture, there's almost like an antagonism between words and images, words are seen, I think, to have a dominance over images. I hear so often The Lost Words described as Robert Macfarlane’s book, with illustrations by Jackie Morris, it's a real imbalance. Never, by the way, by Robert, he would never say that. But I think we fail to realise that words are actually just simply and only images. 26 images make the alphabet. And what fascinates me about that is that you have these 26 images, but they build worlds, they build characters that you can fall in love with, they build places that you want to go to. So, in the typing on a typewriter, it's a very different experience to typing on a computer. It is that one letter at a time, and the attention that you have to pay, especially if you're typing on gold-leaf because you can't go back and rip it out. It's quiet. It really focuses the mind.

John Mitchinson

Yeah, it's extraordinary. So, it's like a collection almost of poems or meditations. But at the end of the book, you even start typing directly onto feathers, and leaves and bark.

Jackie Morris 

Well, I just started to think, you know, I had some feathers. And I thought, what would happen if I put that into my typewriter, and you know, in the age of Photoshop, where you can put type onto a feather really easily, I thought, no, I want to put it in my typewriter. And I was putting leaves from trees and silver birch bark, typing on it. Again, you know, you need to be quite accurate in your typing.

John Mitchinson

So, I guess it'll be like a collection, each one in a way is an individual, independent artwork. But they do thread somehow together? 

Jackie Morris

Yeah. And I'm not really sure what it is, when asked to describe it. I'm not sure what it is. But for me, it was my new form of unwinding, and calming my soul at a time when life was very chaotic for me. I'd lost my father, my brother-in-law killed himself, it was lockdown. It was extremely dramatic. The weather inside my head was not good. And it was a therapy.

John Mitchinson

You talked about it also as navigation and one of the beautiful things you thread through the book, there are some labyrinths with precise coordinates on. Do you want to explain what that is? Because that's the stone bit of the book isn’t it?

Jackie Morris

Yeah, well, years ago, I started picking up beautiful stones off the beach, stones that have been carved over time by the sea, and the sand, all the elements and I would take them home and I would paint onto them the shape of a labyrinth which is a beautiful and ancient symbol, and then I'd take them back to the beach and I'd leave them and sometimes I would leave them above the high tide line and sometimes I wouldn't, sometimes I put them into water. That's always a lovely one if you put them into water, sometimes where people step over a stone so they would look down to see where their feet were going and sometimes I would know that they would be found and other times they just, it's giving back really. So I’ve done that for quite a long time and because I use transfer leaf you have a tissue of gold that is left, so I started putting the map coordinates of where I left them onto these traces and those kind of move through the book as a navigation. The whole thing is a navigation really like a compass. Why I do these things I don't know. I’ve recently begun painting feathers onto stones, and I love the heavy light thing, you know, the feather, whenever you hold a feather in your hand it always, you can feel it trying to get back in the sky, it has this breath of air that goes underneath that tries to lift up. So, to paint with gold-leaf, again, you have this thinness, this lightness and if you use loose-leaf as well it dances in the slightest breath of air. Put it onto stone and you have a heavy light and I rather like that as well.

John Mitchinson

So that's Feather, Leaf, Bark and Stone which is published next May that people can pre order on the Unbound site. But there's also another project which you've launched which is completely different which is painting and which we hope is going to be a huge collection of, we’re calling them accordion books because they are basically concertina eight panels and you stretch them out and it's a tumbling string of foxes.

Jackie Morris 

You can't do this without moving your hands, I tend to wave mine in a zigzag line but if you think of the shape of a screen, it's almost like a folded screen when you shut it up. So, I painted using paints that are…years and years old, Colourman started to make these little paint cakes which are made of pigments, and they have honey in them, and they have gum arabic and that's watercolours. Before that artist’s had to make their own paints and these revolutionized painting and you can still buy antique boxes of paints and I have about seven now, I think. So, these paints have been asleep for nearly 200 years but you can wake them up with a little kiss of water and that's what I’ve been using to paint these accordion foxes into books and I began doing it as practice for performances that I do with Spell Songs, teaching myself how to paint the shape of a fox. I'm actually going to be in Birmingham in January at the Symphony Hall with my band, as i like to call them, Spell Songs.

John Mitchinson 

And will you be painting foxes and otters live on stage?

Jackie Morris 

I will probably be painting both. I have to say that when we did Birmingham Town Hall that was the biggest round of applause I’ve ever had for going on stage, so thank you very much that was fantastic, but yeah foxes and otters.

John Mitchinson

Jackie it's been wonderful talking to you.

Jackie Morris

It's been quite nice talking to you as well John.

John Mitchinson

So I should say East of the Sun, West of the Moon and The Wild Swans by Jackie, published by Unbound in October, and then if you're interested in Feather, Leaf, Bark and Stone and her first two accordion books, I think we're planning to do maybe six next year and then we'll see where we get to, but Fox and Otter are the first two and they're all available for pre order on the Unbound site. Jackie Morris thank you. I’m John Hutchinson, you are Jackie Morris and this is the end of the podcast, thank you.

Outro

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The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.