Q&A: Alison Layland talks to Linda Newbery about her new novel AFTER THE CLEARANCES

 

"It's not only a Welsh community, but also a large-scale environmental stewardship project that is threatened with destruction, uniting two of the key themes of the novel."

After the Clearances: They were eager to remind themselves, and teach the children, that nothing should be taken for granted; things didn’t just happen at the flick of a switch

In a fractured world, the past is never truly buried and the future depends on what we choose to remember.

On a remote island ravaged by storms, a community of exiles known as the Seeders fight to preserve a fragile, self-sufficient way of life. When Sandy arrives from the mainland bearing secrets, young Seeder Glesni is forced to confront long-hidden truths about her people.

Far away in the wild hills, Bela lives by her own rules. Fierce, unyielding and shaped by the land itself, her voice carries the weight of loss in a world scarred by collapse. But when she encounters Winter, a fugitive from a shadowy government programme, their unlikely bond forges a path that leads back to the Seeders and a reckoning with the myths that bind them all.

Rooted in Welsh history and rich with the rhythms of its language and landscape, After the Clearances is an evocative, hope-filled story of resilience, resistance and what it means to belong in the ruins of what came before.

Alison Layland answers questions from Linda Newbery.

Linda: First, congratulations on writing such a compelling follow-up to Riverflow. As you know, I admired and enjoyed that (a link to my review is below) and now find myself equally impressed by this new novel, which moves forward to 2056.

Alison: Thank you for the invitation; it’s lovely to chat with you here on Writers Review. I'm delighted you enjoyed both novels.

Linda: Although After the Clearances includes some of your earlier characters, it can also be read as a compelling stand-alone. It's difficult to say more without spoilers, but were you already thinking of this new setting and time period while working on Riverflow, or did the idea come to you later?

Alison: Although I knew the connections when I began writing After the Clearances, it wasn’t something I’d had in mind from the start. I was reluctant to let go of the Riverflow world, and since both novels are set against a background of concern for the environment, and the issues surrounding protest, it made sense to look at how my characters would be faring some 35 years on – the world has already changed considerably since 2019, with the effects of climate change becoming ever more apparent, and the UK laws on protest becoming increasingly draconian, so I wanted to imagine how things would be in the 2050s, when the Paris Agreement targets are supposed to have been met, but look unlikely to be achieved.

Linda: Clearances has a particular resonance in Scottish history and is equally dramatic here. Was After the Clearances always going to be your title?

Alison: It wasn’t; in fact, this is the first time I’ve been asked to change a title – no small feat, since I find titles difficult! My working title throughout the process of writing, which had become entrenched in my mind, was Tidings (reflecting both the ‘tide’ and ‘news’ meanings of the English word, as well as the Welsh word taid, grandpa, since Glesni’s grandfather is a significant figure). However, my publisher, Honno, had recently published a novel called Tiding, so we agreed to change it. The ‘Clearances’ in the novel refer to a government scheme of deliberate rural depopulation to new towns, with the aim of greater control and simpler distribution of scarce resources. This policy was officially dubbed the Resettlement, but popularly known as the Clearances (or Digartrefu in Welsh, with the added meaning of ‘making homeless’), with all the historical associations. There is a similar colonial feel to the hints in the novel at typical English attitudes to the Welsh language and culture.

Linda: I liked the framing of the story with the viewpoint of teenage Glesni, who was born on the island, Ynys Hudol, and has never known any other life. We meet the various other 'Seeders' as established members of the community (apart from Sandy, the new arrival), gradually learning about their occupations and experiences before coming to the island - Cai, for instance, had been a policeman who became disillusioned with increasingly draconian measures towards protestors. I found this effective - too much of this from the beginning would have taken our attention away from the island set-up. You obviously thought in great detail about Seeder philosophy and ground rules - there are sections of their manifesto, or creed, in the book. Was this your starting point, or did you elaborate as you got into the story?

Alison: My story always featured the Seeders as an idealistic community, living apart from the world but trying to establish a blueprint for a new way of life, kinder to both the environment and people. At first, I introduced various aspects of the community’s rules, customs and values, largely from Glesni’s point of view, within the main narrative, but at a later stage decided I could say more, while interfering less with the story, by incorporating extracts from Seeds of Change, the founders’ record of their experience and a blueprint for the community. I found it surprisingly easy, presumably since the community’s ethos was already embedded in my mind, and founder Edith Turner’s voice flowed readily (the pamphlet is credited to both founders, but for some reason I think of it as her voice). The hard part was slotting the extracts in, at the beginning of the relevant parts of the novel and at key points in the narrative, while taking care to edit out the previous references as appropriate, to avoid repetition.

Linda: Bela's sections are different in tone and style from the rest - first-person and very direct, a stream of consciousness. Living in the woods, in solitude until the fugitive Winter comes into her life, she is alone with her thoughts and impressions. Did you decide on this approach immediately, or was it something that grew from the writing?

Alison: Bela was there as a character from the start, as was her voice and attitudes. However, as I tend to make things up as I go along (I’m very much a ‘pantser’ rather than a ‘plotter’, to use the common writers’ terms), I only worked out where her story fits in as the novel developed.

Linda: It does take the reader a while to realise how Bela's sections connect with those about the islanders - it's a puzzle that slowly comes together, with hints along the way. Did this require careful tracking as you wrote - i.e. what you want the reader to guess at any point, and how soon the links and connections should be revealed?

Alison: It definitely required careful attention, but more at the redrafting and editing stages – which is how I tend to work. In the finished novel, some aspects are maybe revealed sooner than I intended, though it has varied from reader to reader. As I got feedback from early readers, it became clear that there were certain connections that some people were missing altogether, which made me realise I was perhaps being a little too subtle! I won’t talk about specific examples because of spoilers, but I hope I’ve managed to retain a certain amount of mystery without being downright confusing!

I did apply careful tracking throughout, as I always do when writing. I have a detailed timeline, both of characters’ backgrounds and events referred to – in the characters’ past but our future. I also have a detailed outline of each chapter with key points, both to ensure balance between chapters from different characters’ points of view, and also so I can detect and correct continuity issues if, or when, I move things around.

Linda: The main part of the story is set in 2056 but we're referred back to a dramatic incident in the 2030s in which some of the island community may have been involved. That the UK (not Welsh) government plans to take over lovingly restored land for a dam and reservoir to provide water supplies - for England! - was particularly poignant. Were you thinking of real-life settings where this sort of thing has happened?

Alison: Yes; the fictional Irlas Dam incident is based in part on the Llyn Celyn dam and reservoir. In the late 1950s/early 1960s, the Tryweryn river valley was dammed and the Welsh village of Capel Celyn drowned, to form what is now known as Llyn Celyn reservoir, which to this day provides water for the city of Liverpool. Despite extensive protests, both by the villagers themselves and much further afield, the project went ahead, drowning a traditional Welsh-speaking rural community. It was an significant event in the burgeoning Welsh language movement, which ultimately led to the language being given its due status in Wales, and to the fight for devolution. The beautiful and apparently peaceful waters of Lake Vyrnwy and the Elan valley reservoirs conceal similar tragedies, but it was Tryweryn captured the public imagination. This was partly due to its immortalisation in a famous graffitied slogan near Aberystwyth in the early 1960s that has become an icon – it even has its own Wikipedia page if you want to read more. The slogan Cofiwch Dryweryn (Remember Tryweryn) has seen a revival in recent years, with copies springing up throughout Wales.

In After the Clearances, it is not only a Welsh community, but also a large-scale environmental stewardship project that is threatened with destruction, uniting two of the key themes of the novel and highlighting the interconnectedness of social and environmental issues.

Linda: The 'Seeders' community on Ynys Hudol is convincingly drawn - the daily lives of the inhabitants, their communal beliefs and practices, but also the conflicts and tensions. Some members of the group are described as 'purists' - they want to live entirely self-sufficiently without recourse to trips to the mainland, or the use of money, and without harvesting fish from the sea - while others are more pragmatic. All this has the ring of truth about it which I feel must surely come from your own experiences with activist or community groups?

Alison: It’s largely human nature but yes, experience of community and activist groups comes into it! Although the Seeders are an idealistic community with a vision of how to live in the face of the effects of climate change, I wanted to make sure that they’re realistic, not all sweetness and light. There are always differences in opinion. For instance, there are constant debates within activist groups about whether it’s more effective to undertake direct action or concentrate on community-based activism, which takes time that we can ill afford to build up. I believe we need both – the attention-grabbing actions are still needed in the face of government inaction, but these need to be backed up by work at grass-roots level, both to do essential work in the community, but also to build up acceptance of, and support for, more radical protests.

Despite differences in opinion, the shared vision – both in real life and in the novel – is more important than the differences; my experience, for instance with deliberative democracy in people’s assemblies and guarding against the build-up of hierarchies, fed into the Seeders’ system of governance and decision-making, with Gatherings and regularly rotating co-leaders.

As far as the details of daily life are concerned, I enjoyed a number of fortnight-long stays on Ynys Enlli/Bardsey Island, which was the inspiration for my fictional Ynys Hudol. The guest accommodation there is lovely, the welcome warm and the island truly atmospheric, whatever the weather, but the houses have no electricity or running water and the facilities are basic (though there is excellent provision for guests, I hasten to add). These experiences helped to feed the detail of what life for the Seeders would be like. It also helped me become immersed in the atmosphere of the island – you can get a glimpse of this in the lovely video my daughter made on location to accompany the launch of the book. 

Linda: After the Clearances could be classified as cli-fi. All fiction set in the present day should surely at least include references to the existential crisis we all face, while stories set in the future will need to look at how the climate emergency has been addressed and how humanity has adapted (or failed to). Are there ‘cli-fi’ titles you particularly admire?

Alison: I recently loved The Wager and the Bear by John Ironmonger, published by Fly on the Wall press. With relatable characters and a brilliant combination of humour, tragedy and the tackling of serious issues, it’s the kind of enjoyable novel perfect for drawing people in – it’s made its way round my family with the speed of a calving glacier!

Another climate fiction novel I’ve particularly enjoyed is the magnificent Playground by Richard Powers, which does for oceans what The Overstory did so powerfully for trees.

And of course, there’s your own The One True Thing, a beautiful novel which may not immediately appear to be climate fiction, but has love of the environment and natural world firmly at its heart, as you suggest in your question.

Linda: Thank you! Can you give us any idea of what you'll write next? Are you thinking of making another leap forward in time with some of these characters, or will your next project go in a different direction?

Alison: I haven’t started writing a new book yet, but I’ve got ideas for Bela’s story in my mind – the events that led her to where she is now, and what shaped her unusual personality. Alternatively, I’m toying with the idea of connected short stories – before I began to write After the Clearances, I had an idea of people on Ynys Hudol sitting round a campfire, or the benches of the community’s roundhouse, sharing their stories. This didn’t come to pass, but may well make its way to the page in future!

Linda: Thanks so much for sharing these insights, and I hope After the Clearances will find its way to huge numbers of appreciative readers!

After the Clearances is published by Honno Press.

Linda's review of Alison Layland's Riverflow

Q&A: Jane Rogers on her new short story collection, FIRE-READY

 

"In fiction you can test things out and examine both sides of a question. I write to explore."

Photograph by Linda Newbery

Jane Rogers has written ten novels, plus radio drama and stories. Her subject matter ranges from the past to the present to the distant future. Prizes include the Arthur C Clarke Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Writers Guild Best Fiction Book Award. Jane’s new collection of short stories, Fire-Ready, was published by Comma Press this November. 

Jane teaches writing at all levels, currently running workshops for MsLexia and mentoring for Gold Dust. Find out more from her website. Here she answers questions from Linda Newbery.

Linda: First, congratulations on publishing your second collection of short stories, following Hitting Trees with Sticks (2012). In between, you’ve written two novels and several radio dramas and adaptations, including Clear Light of Day, a dramatisation of Anita Desai’s novel which was broadcast this summer on BBC Radio 4. What draws you to the short story form?

Jane: Thanks Linda. I think of myself really as a novelist, and I find the short story form extremely challenging. Very occasionally there's an idea which presents itself immediately as a short story (like the title story of Hitting Trees with Sticks), and that is great. But more often, it’s a question of endless revision and cutting and battling to actually locate the story in the mass of ideas and words of a first draft. As a reader, I used to think stories were slightly inferior to novels; then I read Alice Munro, and I realised that a really well-crafted story can contain as much as a novel, if the writer is skilful enough. But it is a different craft from writing a novel. I suppose I have written in lots of different forms; radio, TV, adaptation, novel and short story – I quite like a challenge! At the end of the day, I tend to feel more confident about my novels than my stories.

(By the way, off topic, I know many people now disapprove of Alice Munro so strongly that they have stopped reading her. Yes, it seems she behaved badly in her personal life. But quite frankly, if we stopped reading authors who have behaved badly – well, as King Lear says, Who shall ’scape whipping?)

L: One striking thing about this collection, and of your novels too, is the range of subjects and genres you cover. Here we move from the present to the near and more distant future; some stories could be classed as sci-fi, cli-fi (climate fiction) or even veer towards horror (Clearances) while others are tender explorations of domestic life and relationships, one of which, Treasure, I suspect comes from your own experience with a grandchild. A thread that links them is the struggle of ordinary people to find purpose in life, to make space for themselves, to appreciate everyday pleasures. Some are bound by duty or by the restrictions of lockdown; in more than one, the birth or prospect of a baby offers hope and a glimpse of uncomplicated innocence.

How did this collection come about? I see that several have been published before, while most are new. How did the idea of a new compilation come to you? Fire-Ready is the title story – was that always your choice of title, and does it suggest a unifying theme?

J: It’s a good question, and to begin with I couldn’t really figure out if this was a collection or not. I certainly didn’t sit down to write a collection – the stories have accumulated over years, and I was not able to find many common themes between them. My editor, Ra Page, was helpful here, because he identified four interlinked themes; the climate emergency, activism, and aging and relationships with children. Together we eliminated the weakest stories, and he suggested I write an additional cli-fi story, to even out the balance. So I have spent most of my writing time for the past 4 months working on the opening story, Hope. 

I was surprised when I realised how many are about parents (or a single parent) and children, but then I realised that in fact that is a central theme in several of my novels.

And re the title – I hope it does suggest a unifying theme. The term is actually used in Australian government warnings about bushfires. Farms in the path of fires have to be made ‘fire-ready’, that is to say, with sprinklers on the roof, shutters, reserves of water, an underground spot where important documents can be securely left, and so on. And more generally, characters in some of the other stories are trying to make their homes or lives ‘fire-ready’, in the sense that they know they will be tested.

L: For one of your Writers Review contributions, you chose Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, in which he asks: ‘What is it about climate change that the mention of it should lead to banishment from the preserves of serious fiction?’ In the eight years since his book’s publication, that’s changed, with books such as The Overstory, Orbital and The Deluge featuring on shortlists. But still, fiction that portrays the climate emergency in the context of ordinary present-day lives seems rare. Some of your stories do just that – Fire-Ready, set in Australia, sees Kayla preparing for the very real threat of wildfire, while others look at likely changes to society and adaptations in our behaviour. Climate concerns run through this collection but without dominating – did you feel that the balance between bleakness and hope was important?

J: Like many people, I am haunted by the climate emergency, and the thought of the devastated world we are leaving to our descendants. I set out to write a novel on the topic, soon after reading The Great Derangement. To begin with I read as much future fiction as I could find, and quickly realised that novels which simply focus on a very bleak future are simultaneously depressing and rather preachy. There are a lot; I could give you a list of titles not to read, but that would be cruel! Two which deal with the topic much more imaginatively are Bewilderment by Richard Powers, and The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Both highly recommended. There’s no point in writing doom and gloom, everyone knows it and it doesn’t make anything better. I don’t think I was trying to create a balance between bleakness and hope (though I am glad if that’s the effect!) I think I was trying to examine specific situations through the minds and experiences of my characters. Human beings are wonderfully adaptable, so that even in bleak situations, hope and joy can be found. For example, in Hope, the child Kara who has been evacuated from a no-longer-viable Earth, is thrilled by the sight of distant stars and galaxies in deep space. As individuals, we feel pleasure as well as pain, and good writing describes individual experiences which are universally recognisable.

L: The hope in many of the stories comes through a kind of epiphany, and I love the way you show these – not in any flash-of-light sense but more a kind of quiet acceptance, especially for your older characters. More than one of these is faced with a rearrangement of their life following release from the duty of care to a relative or partner – situations I feel sure will resonate with many readers.

J: Yes, there’s quite a lot about growing older – I guess the topic is on my mind, now I’m in my eighth decade! Again, I’m interested in the pleasure, or relief, of letting things go in older age – as well as the grieving for the past. ‘Letting things go’ is probably the story I am most pleased with, because I was afraid readers might find it quite mad that my protagonist can happily lose himself for hours in sounds from the distant past; but so far the responses have been very positive.

L: There’s humour too, in Weeping Beech and in The DNA of Bats. You must have given a lot of thought to the ordering of the stories?

J: Ha. Indeed. And since I carefully ordered them, they have been re-ordered so many times by my editor that I honestly can’t tell if it works or not. Readers will have to let me know!

L: I want to ask about the final story, The Night Before, without giving too much away. Anyone who’s campaigned (as we both have) with Extinction Rebellion has been told, in connection with roadblocks etc, “I like what you do but not the way you’re going about it”. But what actually does make the kind of difference needed to confront the climate emergency? Your character here, Szandra, is on the brink of doing something most activists would (fortunately) baulk at – but can such an action be justified? She’s questioning herself about that, right up to the abrupt shock of the ending. Can you tell us how this story took shape?

J: It began as a ‘What if?’ What if you were asked to do something which is really dangerous, which will have tragic consequences, in the service of a cause in which you believe passionately? I love the fact that you can explore an idea in a story, test it out, see how far you can go. I have been asked if I agree with or condemn the characters’ plan in that story. And the answer is, neither. That’s not the point. Any more than I agree with or condemn Jessie Lamb’s action, in my novel of that name. The point is to honestly explore an idea, an action, the potential consequences. In fiction you can test things out and examine both sides of a question. I write to explore.

L: More generally, how does a short story idea come to you? Does it arrive in your head complete, as it were – I mean the shape of it, the point? Or do you discover that through writing?

J: It really varies, from story to story. That’s one of the maddening things about writing, isn’t it? It never gets any easier, you have to re-invent the wheel each time. I usually have a sense of what’s at the heart of the story, but how to reach that, or, as you put it, ‘the shape of it’ – that is something I have to work out as I go along.Weeping Beech, for example; my idea was for a tree surgeon who couldn’t bear to fell a beautiful tree. So he was conflicted. Gradually, as I worked on it, the conflict became externalised, and his opponent became, not his own appreciation of the tree, but a retired parks and gardens employee who knows all the old trees in the town. Other characters came in to take sides, and I was pleased (especially with the nosy neighbour!) because the story became funnier.

L. The reader learns to adapt quickly to each new story: learning not only about the characters and their relationships but about where we are in time, how society has changed and how new rules and conventions dominate their lives. You’re adept at conveying these things without overwhelming the reader. Does beginning a short story feel very different from beginning a novel?

J: You have to establish the world of the story very quickly – so yes, that is a difference. In a novel the reader is usually content to be drip-fed information that builds a picture of the novel’s world, and in fact, in a novel, that slow release of information can be part of the suspense. What’s fascinating is how little the reader needs, to understand they are in a different time and place. And that’s something I’ve learned through cutting my stories. For example, in Daytrip to Glastonbury, the opening paragraph describes the coach journey towards Glastonbury along recognisable A roads. But the coach stops at Wells. ‘From Wells the only way was by boat.’ Suddenly the reader is transported to a future where swathes of the country are underwater. No date or backstory is needed.

L. You’ve done a great deal of tuition and mentoring, at Sheffield Hallam and with Mslexia, Faber Academy and Oxford University Department of Continuing Education. What advice do you give to students about writing short stories?

J: Well, I could give you the outline of the five-day short story course I’m going to teach for Faber Academy in the new year . . . But that might be a bit much! I guess the single most important thing is CUT. It is amazing how much you can cut out of a story, and how every cut seems to improve it. All the cliches are true; Get in late, get out early. Cut adverbs. Strip down adjectives. Make every word work. I think short story as a craft is closer to poetry than it is to novel.

L. Finally, what are you working on now?

J: A novel! And it’s only tangentially about the climate emergency.

Thanks for your thoughtful questions, they have really made me focus on the stories and why I wrote them.

Fire-Ready is published by Comma Press.

Read Jane's review of The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh