Special feature Q&A: Cindy Jefferies talks to Linda Newbery about THE HIDE

 

"I wanted to explore ways in which passionate involvement could either tip over into obsession or become a defining purpose in life."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. Cindy Jefferies is a regular contributor here.

Cindy: Congratulations on your new novel, Linda, including a wonderful jacket illustration, which really intrigued me, making me want to pick up the book and start reading. I think you commissioned the illustration. Can you tell me a little about what went into your decision to commission original work?

Linda:  Cover art is important to me, especially as art is of key importance in the novel! Having been given a range of covers in the past, ranging from excellent to mediocre and sometimes with little choice in the selection of artist or image, it was a novelty to be able to choose the artist myself. I found the brilliant Owen Gent when I was looking for a cover designer for The One True Thing, my previous novel, and was delighted with what he did, so he was the obvious choice for this one, too. I love his colour palettes and the distinctiveness of his work. (I've written a Substack post about this.)

Cindy: What particularly spoke to you about the picture you chose?

Linda: Owen sent me four rough ideas to choose from. I liked all four, and was tempted by one that showed Alys in a gallery looking at an Egon Schiele nude (and this would have been the choice of my editor, Jon) but I think this one suits the title better, allowing for more than one meaning of the hide. The cottage looks isolated and vulnerable, which is how Alys often feels, and the shadows give a sense of creeping menace, offset by the soaring red kite on the spine suggestive of freedom.

Cindy: The title is so mysterious. To begin with, I wondered if the novel was going to be about someone who studies animals and birds, but that’s not exactly it, is it?

Linda: Thanks! There is a bird hide near the village Alys has moved to for her new job, and she comes across it on one of her explorations with her camera, but the metaphorical meanings are more important. Alys is secretive about her past, from a deep sense of guilt and shame - and this is set against posing naked or semi-naked as Leon's model, which is the opposite of hiding. In Rowan's story, there's the concealment of animal exploitation from the public on intensive farms and in laboratories, and also the ways in which most people hide from the truth by closing their eyes to the cruelty behind their everyday choices.

Cindy: Why did you fix on using both of the main female characters to unfold the plot? It works really well!

Linda: Thanks - it's a favourite structural device of mine to use more than one viewpoint and more than one time-frame, too. So here we have Alys in the present, taking up her new job as head of art in a rural comprehensive school and hoping for a fresh start but bumping up against troubling reminders of the past; Allie (Alys's younger self) as an art student, through which perspective her damaging relationships with Leon and Fraser are slowly revealed; and Rowan in the present, deciding to take a gap year, becoming increasingly involved in animal activism and finding independence away from her parents (Alys and Rowan's father have never lived together). The juxtaposing of past and present and different viewpoints gives, I hope, a freshness and variety and allows for the links between the sections to become apparent to the reader.

Cindy: I love your opening paragraph and was going to ask if you had a specific photograph in mind but on Substack you reveal that it’s a photograph of the artist Schiele. What was it about that particular photograph, and indeed that artist, that drew your attention?

Linda: I became fascinated with Egon Schiele many years ago when I saw his work in the Shönbrunn Palace in Vienna, and my interest grew from then on. More recently I saw his work at the Klimt : Schiele exhibition at the Royal Academy (which I've moved to the present for the purposes of the novel). The appeal? It's the blend of sureness and vulnerability, of provocation and tenderness, of beauty and what often seems like deliberate ugliness. His work looks as fresh and compelling as it did over a hundred years ago. I've written about him in this article - about his life, work and early death.

Cindy: I think you were at one time interested in studying art, but writing became your choice. Do you see yourself making different choices in the future, or is writing always going to be the main way of expressing yourself?

Linda: Recently I've been trying to re-establish the habit of drawing, and have attended classes, but I can't see it replacing writing as a priority. Photography is a keen interest now, as it becomes for Alys in the novel.

Cindy: There is a strong animal rights thread running through this novel. Are you involved in animal rights or was online research and reading articles the limit of your involvement?

Linda: I don't think I could have conveyed Rowan's depth of feeling on the subject of animal exploitation if I didn't completely share it. I've been advocating for animals for years now, in various ways, and have been vegetarian since my twenties, vegan for the last nine years, vegan for life. I believe that future generations will look back with shame and horror at the ways in which we abuse animals, and will find it hard to believe that this was acceptable to most of the public.

Cindy: There are two really interesting themes in this novel: one is the art, and Alys's involvement with that, and the other is her daughter's involvement with animal rights. How are the two linked?

Linda: In both parts of the plot there is someone who is driven by purpose - Leon in Allie's sections, and Rowan in the present. I wanted to explore ways in which passionate involvement could either tip over into obsession or become a defining purpose in life. It's partly about identity: Leon strongly (and inexplicably, to Allie/Alys) identifies himself with Egon Schiele, while Rowan, throughout the novel, greatly admires the dynamic activist Vix, wanting to emulate her, before finding her own path and defining her own principles. At this early stage I'm wondering how readers will see Rowan. I know that vegans will identify with her feelings of 'vystopia' and probably be glad to see that represented in fiction, but how will her views and actions strike other readers? 

Cindy: Do you see Alys as a self destructive person because she can’t forgive herself for her behaviour a long time ago?

Linda: She's never had a satisfying relationship, partly because she's made herself believe that she's not deserving of love or attention. I want to leave it to the reader to speculate on whether she's right to have carried the sense of guilt and self-blame for so long, as the story unfolds of what happened in her student days. It's difficult to say more without spoilers, but at one crucial point someone tells her to stop making herself a victim. Has she? Or is her self-recrimination justified, and if so, what should she do with that?

Cindy: Looking into the future, art plays a part in several of your novels and animal rights inhabits this one. I wonder what you might tackle next?

Linda: I have in mind the beginnings of a new novel, but I certainly won't start immediately. First I have a children's book to revise - a continuation of Lob - and after that I plan to update and reissue my guide to compassionate living, This Book is Cruelty Free: Animals and Us. That title was the publisher's choice; I'll probably go for just Animals and Us for the reissue. It's a book about the daily choices we make - what to eat, buy, wear, use, waste - and how those choices affect animals and the environment. Even if we have no direct involvement with animals, for instance with pets, our choices have a direct impact on animal lives through what we pay for and use. We can choose cruelty or we can choose to avoid it wherever possible. 

Cindy: Thank you for your patience with my questions and your thoughtful answers. I will certainly be telling friends about The Hide and urging them to read it.

The Hide is published by Writers Review Publishing.

See also Linda's Q&A on her previous novel, The One True Thing.

Special feature: GREEN RISING and the Climate Fiction Writers League, by Wren James

 

"Writing is activism. Over a decade as a published author, I’ve come to learn this. It’s subtle, and slow working, but incredibly effective."

Wren James is the award-winning British author of many young adult novels. Their books include Last Seen Online, Green Rising and The Quiet at the End of the World (previously published as Lauren James). The Loneliest Girl in the Universe is in development as a feature film with RK Films.They have won the Sustainable Story Award and been shortlisted for the YA Book Prize, Carnegie Medal and STEAM Book Award. Their upcoming title is The Victors (May 2026), a graphic novel illustrated by Beth Fuller.

A story consultant on Netflix’s Heartstopper (Seasons 2 & 3) and a RLF Royal Fellow, Wren is also the founder of the Climate Fiction Writers League, creator of The Climate-Conscious Writers Handbook, and editor of Future Hopes: Hopeful stories in a time of climate change. 

Wren is on the Society of Authors’ Sustainability Steering Committee and works as a consultant on climate storytelling for museums, production companies, major brands and publishers, with a focus on optimism and hope. They run a Queer Writers group in Coventry. Follow them on Instagram at @wrenjameswriter or find out more at their website. 

Writing is activism. Over a decade as a published author, I’ve come to learn this. It’s subtle, and slow working, but incredibly effective. My book about climate magicians, Green Rising, was recently used to kickstart a discussion of climate-friendly investments in a book club for fossil fuel bankers and their families.

In Green Rising, teenagers can grow plants from their skin. They use their powers to rewild the planet and stand up to the profit-hungry corporations driving carbon emissions.

The fun adventure story hit home for the investment bankers in a way that a newspaper article wouldn’t. When we read about fictional characters and experience their emotional highs and lows for ourselves, it unlocks a higher level of empathy and compassion. Even after the book is long finished, these characters stick in our minds. We are able to imagine their feelings in a way that we can’t relate to a faceless population on the news.

For climate activism, this is incredibly important. So many of the effects of climate change feel so distant, both in time and location. It’s hard to connect that to our daily lives. Fiction can help inspire people to act – whether that’s talking to their employer about their pensions scheme’s investments in fossil fuels, or changing to an eco-friendly energy tariff.

More importantly, fiction can help us to feel hope. 62% of people say they hear much more about the negative impacts of climate change than they do about progress towards reducing climate change, resulting in a perceived Solutions Gap. If you feel like the world is doomed, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it, then there’s no reason to take any action.

I expected the process of writing Green Rising to be depressing and mentally exhausting. But, in fact, immersing myself in the climate debate helped me to stop feeling anxious and helpless about our future. I could see all the things that needed to be done to fix the future.

As writers, we can engineer a future world long before it exists in real life. In the forties, creators were envisioning men on the moon long before space travel existed. That cultural drive led to so much energy being invested in the Apollo missions and our successful journey into space. Without those early science fiction stories creating a cultural desire to walk on the moon, we wouldn’t have been driven to make it happen so soon.

In the 1900s, stories about a future where women had the vote encouraged support for the suffragist movement. In fact, a group was founded in the UK in 1908 called the Women Writers Suffrage League, whose mission was to encourage writers to mention the fight for the vote in their writing. As their prospectus stated, “a body of writers working for a common cause cannot fail to influence public opinion.”

Climate writers today do the same thing for our future. By creating stories about worlds filled with climate solutions, we are changing our collective picture of the future.

The Suffrage League inspired me to set up my own group, the Climate Fiction Writers League. Our guiding principle is to spread awareness of the importance of mentioning climate change in fiction of all types, from poetry to Eastenders. In my work in the writers' room for Netflix’s Heartstopper, I was able to showcase how this can be done naturally. The character Elle tours an art college when she’s applying for sixth form. An art exhibition at the college is based around climate change, meaning several scenes take place surrounded by artistic representations of the climate crisis.

The Climate Fiction Writers League now has over 300 traditionally published authors as members, who have all written climate fiction. Through the group, we partner with climate organisations and consult with museums and production companies.

It’s especially important for children to see hopeful visions of the future world they are going to grow up in. A few years ago, I pitched to my publisher a ‘positive’ climate anthology for children. The authors were given a list of solutions believed to combat climate change most effectively, and encouraged to create stories set in the future.

I told them to use their anger and frustration to drive their writing, but not to write an angry book. Their settings aren’t always positive utopias, but they don’t represent a hopeless dystopia. We want children to read stories that convey the seriousness of the situation without making it seem futile. They need to see that climate change is solvable.

I was also very careful about where we laid the blame for the climate crisis. I didn’t want to leave our readers feeling guilty about their carbon footprints. We want to inspire people, not panic them. No one will engage with climate activism if they’re just going to be made to feel guilty about not recycling!

I wanted to encourage the writers try to show the industry, economics and political factors which are to blame. To call out the companies who have been specifically working to slow climate activism, like fossil fuels companies who spread climate science misinformation in the nineties.

Adding in these elements meant I could add teaching questions and resources that would make the stories useful in a classroom setting, leading to discussions of wider issues around the climate crisis.

Ultimately, climate change is a political topic – it has to be. It’s unavoidable. The end of world is profitable. My characters are angry they’re being told to reduce their climate footprint, that they’re being made to feel guilty about their personal pollution when industry is responsible for the vast majority of emissions.

I wanted to create a book for young people who are anti-capitalist and pro-revolution, who are changing the world at an incredible pace against the enormous weight of the existing establishment.

The best climate fiction captures the feeling of being part of an ongoing green revolution. It acknowledges that we are living in a time of unprecedented existential fear. And then shows people how to turn that fear into hope and action.

This piece was commissioned by the innaugural Norwich Book Festival 2024.

Find out more about Green Rising, which is published by Walker.

For more about The Climate Conscious Writers Handbook, see Wren's website.

MODERN NATURE by Derek Jarman, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"The New York Times described his film The Garden as 'a peculiar blend of reflectiveness and fury', which could apply equally well to this journal."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review.

"I have re-discovered my boredom here," Derek Jarman writes, finding at Prospect Cottage, his Dungeness home, an escape from the celebrity he earned through his films and his activism. "All around the traps were set. Traps of notoriety and expectation, of collaboration and commerce, of fame and fortune. At first a welcome trickle, something new. Then a raging flood of repetition, endless questions that eroded and submerged my work, and life itself. But now I have re-discovered boredom, where I can fight 'what next' with nothing."

Well, not exactly nothing. Beginning after Jarman's diagnosis as HIV positive (which gave, at that time, a grim outlook) his 1989-90 journal conveys a time filled with interviews, film projects and visits to London exhibitions and social events, interspersed with the making of his iconic Dungeness garden, constantly planting, propagating and making sculptures from objects found on the shore. The contrasts are stark, moving from the many demands on him in London to the quieter, reflective times at Dungeness. He writes of  "the separation of my two lives ...  work here (in London), sunsets and sunrises there." Always in the background is his sorrow at the death of friends from AIDS and the foreboding of his own, which by the end of the journal seems close, although he lived for another three and a half years, regaining enough health and energy to film Edward II, Wittgenstein and Blue.

Having visited Prospect Cottage and somewhat fallen under the strange spell of Dungeness, its flat horizons, big sky and sparse vegetation, I found that these sections appealed to me most, beautifully evoking that distinctive terrain with the nuclear power station looming in the background. "There are no walls or fences. My garden's boundaries are the horizon," he writes, and of the night sky: "So flat is the Ness that those stars that lie at the horizon touch your very feet and the moon tips the waves with silver ... The nuclear power station is an ocean liner moored in the firmament, ablaze with light: white, yellow, ruby." Both my visits have been in calm July sunshine; the place must be very different in harsh winter weather. Once in this memoir Jarman feared that the cottage roof would be torn off in a gale, while on another occasion a lightning strike at the power station sent him and other residents into a panic, rushing to pack for a hasty evacuation (which, fortunately, wasn't needed).

Derek Jarman is an engaging diarist, full of contradictions and charm. The boldly unconventional film-maker, rebellious activist and one of the first public figures to be open about his HIV diagnosis expresses a wistfulness for pre-decimal coinage and describes himself as too shy to try on clothes in shops; as a student at King's College in London he felt "frightened and confused," convinced that he was the only gay in the world. Almost every writer or artist will identify with the self-doubt he experiences: "All the way back on the train I was plagued with misgivings about The Garden. Looking at the rushes over the last six days, I discovered not one sequence that worked. Glaring faults everywhere ..." At the same time he feels a compulsion to write. "I find it difficult to write each day, but if I don't I'm swamped with guilt. Where does the compunction come from?" So strong was it that even when he temporarily lost his sight while being treated in hospital he dictated his journal entries to his devoted companion Keith Collins (referred to by his nickname HB in the book). 

Those us who were around in the 80s may remember how the AIDS epidemic was viewed by some who saw it as a punishment for homosexuals. "Last week a doctor in the mainstream of research with a leading drug company said that looking for drugs to combat the virus and to prolong the lives of those already infected posed an ethical problem, as keeping them (read me here) alive only exacerbated the situation. Better we should all die quickly. Every day, in many little ways, we are subjected to this terrorism. Our relationships unsanctioned, beyond the law." No wonder there is always anger simmering beneath the surface of Jarman's writing.

As it's a journal, events are understandably related without context, which can sometimes confuse the reader with a great many names, places, and visits whose purpose is unclear. Interspersed with these almost daily records are reminiscences from his childhood, spent in various countries with the RAF father with whom he had a difficult relationship. But it was early in childhood that his fascination with plants and gardening began: at four his parents gave him an illustrated Edwardian book, Beautiful Flowers and How to Grow Them, an unusual gift for so young a child but one which provided a lasting influence: "Flowers spring up and entwine themselves like bindweed along the footpaths of my childhood." The early part of Modern Nature refers constantly to plants in folklore, in herbalism, in classical literature. "If fate had turned out different," he writes, "I am sure I would have been a professional gardener, rather than an enthusiastic amateur."

In between making videos for the Pet Shop Boys, filming The Garden, beginning to research Edward II and frequently staying at his London flat, he spends his time at Prospect Cottage walking the shores of the Ness, collecting and arranging the driftwood, stones and found objects which give his garden its unique character. He reports constantly on the progress of his seedlings and cuttings. Even at his lowest, when friends' deaths are reported with horrible frequency, he finds solace in his plants. "I plant my herbal garden as a panacea, read up on all the aches and pains that plants will cure - and know they are not going to help. The garden as pharmacopeia has failed. Yet there is a thrill in watching the plants spring up that gives me hope."   

The New York Times described his film The Garden as 'a peculiar blend of reflectiveness and fury', which could apply just as well to this journal.

                                                           

Modern Nature is published by Vintage.

Derek Jarman photograph from Wiki Commons. Others by Linda Newbery.

For more of Linda's nature and garden writing choices, see:

Natural Selection: a year in the garden by Dan Pearson

Q&A with garden designer Cleve West on The Garden of Vegan

The Invention of Nature: the adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the lost hero of science by Andrea Wulf

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

The Flow by Amy-Jane Beer