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| Image courtesy of Alice Hendy |
Julia
Forster was born in the east Midlands in 1978. Although she says she regrets
never becoming a pop star – her early days were quite music obsessed – she has
achieved success in the literary world.
Receiving
the Derek Walcott Prize for Creative Writing, while studying Philosophy and Literature
at Warwick University, gave an indication of Julia’s passion and potential for
the written word. She also holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the
University of St Andrews, Scotland.
Julia has
been in the publishing industry for many years and has received valuable
experience in many fields. She spent
time ploughing through manuscripts at a literary agency in London and was
involved in marketing and publicity for the literary magazine New Welsh Review.
In a
journalistic capacity Julia has written for many prestigious publications
including Agenda, Resurgence and the Western Mail. Now working for Literature
Wales she is involved in awarding bursaries to established and emerging
authors allowing them the luxury of time to write their novels. Julia was
fortunate, in 2011, to receive such a bursary enabling her to begin her debut
novel What a Way to Go.
Although her first novel, Julia published a book called Muses: Revealing the Nature of
Inspiration in 2007.
What a Way to Go follows twelve year old Harper
Richardson as she seeks her identity growing up as a child of divorced parents.
It is 1988, a time of great experimentation with clothes, hair and just about
everything else. Harper, as she moves between the homes and lives of her
parents just gets on with life as best she can.
Julia has
captured, with great observation, the emotional journey of a teenager whose
parents are caught up in their own traumatic circumstances after the divorce.
They leave their daughter without many of the boundaries they would normally
have set. It is a moving story told with humour and wit and we wish Julia every
success with her debut novel.
1. Tell us of your journey as a writer
I began writing in 1998 when I
was nineteen and at the University of Warwick. I chose a module in my second
year called composition and creative writing. The author who was leading our
very first session, Russell Celyn Jones, asked us to write about something
traumatic; nearly twenty years later, I’m still responding to that brief in What a Way to Go.
The Warwick Writing Programme
had only been running since 1996, and as such office hours weren’t well
attended. I would sign up for a ten-minute session on the tutors’ doors, but
I’d wind up getting a full hour of one-to-one tutorials because the other
students hadn’t yet cottoned on to how useful they were. My office hours were
mostly with the poet David Morley, who still runs the course at Warwick. I
credit David with putting me on a poetic escalator; by the end of the first
ten-week term, I had written a poem about the death of someone close to me. Not
long after that, I walked past his office door, which was wide open, and he
called out ‘Julia Forster! Poet!’ That anecdote still makes me giggle today. My
husband calls me JFP for short now.
Funnily enough, although I went
straight on to study creative writing at St Andrews after graduating, I never
studied how to write novels, so I’ve learnt how to write longer pieces of
fiction by picking up tips from all kinds of different text books, including
books on screen-writing such as Story
by Robert McKee, but mainly from reading widely. I read a lot of contemporary
novels, but also plenty of classics.
2. How do you see your role as a writer and what do you like most about
it?
I think it differs depending
what I’m writing. In the case of What a
Way to Go, I had a strong conviction to write from a pure, emotional place
about what it feels like when your parents divorce. The story took me to places
that I couldn’t have anticipated. I most enjoy that I get to follow my
intuition with writing. Although I have done many other jobs in the past,
mainly in publishing but also in the environmental sector, this is the job
which I think both stretches and surprises me the most.
3. Have you ever created a character who you dislike but find yourself
empathising with?
That question about the act of
empathy is an interesting one. In What a
Way to Go there is an elderly lady who is prejudiced and narrow-minded
about her son’s sexuality (he’s gay), and there’s also a mobile librarian who
patronises young Harper when she goes to borrow Forever by Judy Blume. I see it as my job to inhabit all the
characters’ psyches while I write them, and to see the world from their unique
perspectives; even if it’s just for one or two scenes, and even if I’m writing
from a different point of view (in What a
Way to Go, all the action is seen from the perspective of twelve year-old
Harper). As such, I think it’s vital that I can empathise with the characters’
world views while I write them so that they feel authentic, but it doesn’t mean
I share their outlook – in both cases that I mention above, I don’t whatsoever.
4. GW recently organised #diverseauthorday: do you think literature accurately
reflects the diversity of culture we have today?
No, I don’t. We live in a richly diverse
country and I don’t see that reflected on the bookshelves in shops. One of the
characters in my book, Cassie, is adopted. She’s also black. However, I don’t
make a big thing of this in the book because the story is seen from Harper’s
point of view and Harper doesn’t notice skin colour until it is pointed out to
her. That was exactly how it was for me, living in a diverse suburb of an east
Midlands town: it was my experience that you didn’t question or even notice
people’s skin colour. I take my hat off to initiatives like #diverseauthorday and
bloggers like Naomi @Frizbot and Dan @Utterbiblio who are spreading the word
about books by authors from different backgrounds.
5. If you could be transported instantly, anywhere in the world, where
would you most like to spend your time writing? And why?
Twice in my twenties, I saved
up my pay checks and then booked a week’s writing retreat on my own. Both
times, I chose cities: the first time, Paris; the second, New York. In the
latter case I stayed one cold January in a beautifully bohemian apartment which
was just off 42nd Street, and it was run by artists. The cost of
accommodation was kept artificially low so that artists and writers could
afford to stay; I got an awful lot of writing done (I was working on a book
which is still under my bed), but I also had a lot of fun.
It snowed so heavily that on
the very last day of my retreat, a Sunday, my flight was cancelled. About five
feet of snow had fallen in just a few hours. Instead of flying back to London,
I went out for a beer with another artist who was staying there along with the
son of the man who owned the apartment. We walked down the centre of the
snow-filled Fifth Avenue. The whole city was choked by snow. Driving was
impossible. We had a snowball fight and our laughter was muffled, as if we were
playing in a sound-proof city.
If I could be transported
instantly to anywhere in the world to write, I would go back there. But, sadly,
I think I would also have to go back in time, as I am pretty sure the little
bohemian slice of paradise in the centre of Manhattan no longer exists…
6. What is the one book you wish you had written?
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
7. What advice do you have for would be novelists?
1. Silence your inner critic;
there will be enough of these in the outside world.
2. Enjoy all your attempts at
writing your novel – whether you fail or succeed.
3. Surround yourself with ‘can
do’ positive people from all walks of life.*
*One of the people who inspired
me to give this novel a go was a good friend who works for a forestry
organisation. She had three children under 18 months at one stage, and yet
despite spinning so many plates, she always has a positive attitude. She leaps
over physical and emotional hurdles with the grace of an athlete and with an
infectious joie de vivre. Novel
writing is about solving one knotty problem after another; if you can get into
the right mind set for that kind of challenge, then I really believe you’re
half way there.
8. What are you currently working on? What can we look forward to
reading?
I have just finished a
full-length radio drama which is on submission at the moment, and I am
limbering up for a second novel. I’m not sure yet what it will be about, and
I’m looking forward to finding out.
Thank you so much for having me
to visit your blog!
