Amanda Ackroyd

Finally we come to the end of the series of author interviews with talented British author Amanda Ackroyd. But this is also a glorious beginning! Starting with this post, I shall be publishing Amanda’s first novel, Scarborough Baby, one chapter a week. With today’s interview is the teaser and first chapter. Enjoy!

As always, you may listen to the entire interview or this segment, and/or download either mp3 file to your computer or mp3 player.

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• Amanda-Ackroyd-interview-part-iii-12-mins

Ilaria: Well, I have to say that this ability of yours to pare things down is very evident in your novel. So now let’s move on to talk about that. You sent me this wonderful novel, Scarborough Baby, which I read in 24 hours, or 36 hours maybe. I couldn’t put it down, I found it completely enthralling. I really was sucked right in. I loved the beginning. For the readers I will introduce it by saying that it is a little bit of a mystery. The beginning is just lovely, I think. The atmosphere is very pleasant, relaxed, of life just ambling along at its regular, normal pace, nothing out of the ordinary. But the description of the life is very – the description of the way the main characters are conducting their lives brings them to life completely. They come right out of the page and I just feel like I’m sitting in their living room with them and watching them and interacting with them as they go about their business.
And then the protagonist, a young woman of 24, 25 years old, discovers a diary that her mother had written as a teenager, and in the diary she discovers the possible identity of her biological father, whom her mother has never told her about, has always refused to tell her about. So she has always been wondering, she’s spent her life wondering who her father really was. And of course everything begins to unfold from this moment forward.
Amanda, I think you’re very talented as a writer. I think you definitely must be published, and I’m going to endeavor to make that happen. And in the meantime I just would like to ask you, first of all, how you first got the idea for this story.
Amanda: Well, it came about during a conversation with a friend of mine, and she was telling me – Annie is considerably younger than I am – and she was telling me that she never knew who her real father was. And she had asked her mother over the years, just tried to get her to tell her something. And one day, when Annie was about 22, she said to her mother, “Come on,” she sort of tried to do it in a joking way, she said, “Come on, there must be something you can tell me, like the color of his eyes or his hair or something.” And her mother said, “I can’t remember, it was dark.” And when Annie told me this story I was just stunned. I was stunned by the insensitivity of it. It made me laugh but I was shocked. And I came home and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And the more I thought about it, the more I wondered why a woman would deny her child, even a crumb of truth, and couldn’t stop thinking about it. And in an incredibly short space of time, because I think my imagination ran away with me, I started to build a story around the lie. Because it was – I can’t remember, it was dark – it’s a lie, like putting your hand in someone’s face. And one morning, sitting in bed, I penned the whole story from beginning to end. I wrote the reason why and how it unfolded and what happened. And it took me probably three hours of intense note-making. And at the end of it I knew I had to write it as a book, something I had never done before. And that’s where it came from.
Ilaria: That’s wonderful. I love how – this is what they mean when they talk about writers channeling writing, have you ever heard that expression? That the writing is sort of coming from another place and you’re just a channel for it. It’s just coming through you rather than out of you.
Amanda: It felt so much like that. That’s a perfect description of how it felt.
Ilaria: As if you were sort of taking dictation from some plain that’s invisible to the naked eye, but from somewhere, it’s just coming to you and the words are flowing through you and out of your fingers, you know?
Amanda: Yeah, it’s exactly how it felt. And I still have the notebooks where I penned it, and it’s full of arrows that refer back. It was almost like it sort of formed itself, not just in general terms, but actually in – there was sort of chronology in the detail and, you know, and referencing, even in those notes, so that I wouldn’t miss that, or that this would be understood. It was actually quite an astonishing couple of hours.
Ilaria: That’s amazing. I love this story, this is wonderful. Okay, and so at that point you knew that you had to write it as a book. How much time went by between this morning that you spend writing the outline of the novel and when you actually wrote it?
Amanda: Virtually none. And there was a reason for that. And the reason was that just prior to my starting to write this novel I was diagnosed with breast cancer. And suddenly my life was completely taken over by the process of surgery and chemotherapy and I had stopped work because I wasn’t tolerating the treatment well at all. And so suddenly I had this huge amount of time on my hands, and it was almost like everything fell into place at the right time, and it wasn’t just that I had the time. I needed the time to write the book, but I needed the book to fill the time. And so it worked absolutely perfectly. And when I couldn’t sleep because I felt sick, I would get up and I would write. And if I was lying awake in the night because I’d slept through the day, my mind would be racing, and I would be thinking about what I wanted to write. And sometimes I would just wake up and be so excited by the next bit that I wanted to write, that I would just have to get up and write it. And it filled my days, and it filled my nights when I couldn’t sleep. And it was just the most wonderful escape and focus during what was a pretty hard time, really.
Ilaria: That’s a wonderful, wonderful story, and the way you tell it is so wonderful.
Amanda: Well, it actually felt very positive, which was great. It made the time feel like a gift, rather than something terrible. It became a gift in a way.
Ilaria: Yeah, that’s fantastic. And tell me, the entire process of writing the first draft of the novel took how long?
Amanda: It took me about seven months.
Ilaria: And when you were finished, were you also finished with your treatments?
Amanda: Yes, just about. Although I did have more reconstructive surgery to come. But I also had a friend, Jake Arnott, who had already successfully published one novel certainly, He Kills Coppers, and Jake was absolutely fantastic. He kind of mentored me through the process and I spent time in London with him, in Soho and learning about the vice squad in London during the period that the events in the book happened. And he was just fantastic in terms of research. And I spent time in Amsterdam researching. So there were all sorts of things going on throughout the process. And when my treatment finished that input remained, because I then started sending drafts to Jake and he would go through it and say, “This is fantastic, this is dreadful. During this bit I was absolutely losing the will to live, there needs to be more of a major dénoument at the end.” And through him and other readers I then started to cut and pare and polish and get rid of. You know, anything that I looked at and I was utterly beguiled by, I just cut it out. I sort of got to realize that anything that I loved too much was written purely for the pleasure of writing, rather than it being relevant to the story. And there was an awful lot that went that was just me being self-indulgent really. So the writing, the first draft was finished at the end of my treatment, but the process went on for long after that.
Ilaria: Well, what you sent me feels very much like a finished book. I find very little fault with it at all. I think it’s tight, I think it’s full of tension from beginning to end. It sucked me in and it never let go until I finished. So, thank you so much for the opportunity of reading it and publishing it. And I really hope that we bring it to the public at large, because everybody should be able to read it.
Amanda: Well, thank you. I’m very excited at the prospect of you publishing it. And I’m very excited by your enthusiasm and positivity. And I really hope that whatever happens, it’s great, the whole process. And I’m just glad that it’s out there and people can read it, and make up their own minds.
Ilaria: Me too. I think it’s just criminal that it’s been sitting in your drawer all this time.
Amanda: I’m sure there are millions of fantastic books sitting in drawers all over the world, so maybe you should make it your life’s endeavor to get them all out and get them published.
Ilaria: Well, that’s precisely what I intend to do, believe me. Obviously I can’t do all of them, but I’ll do as many as I can.
Amanda: Well, I suspect that you could probably do an awful lot, Ilaria. You’re something of a dynamo.
Ilaria: I wish I felt the same way about myself, but thank you very much for the compliment. Okay, so this wraps up our interview, but don’t hang up the phone. Thank you very much for talking to me today, and for telling me about your writing process. I find it absolutely fascinating.

Scarborough Baby – by Amanda Ackroyd

“Joe, NOW. The keys. Where are they?” I was shaking with fear, reaching and turning in an uncontrollable dervish.
Still he gazed, as if he had momentarily short circuited, then suddenly my fear touched him and he sprang from the chair and began frantically rifling his empty pockets then running his hands pointlessly across the table, his face twisted, white with wide-eyed alarm. I grabbed the phone and dialled 999. Still Joe flailed around, panicking for the keys.
A woman’s voice, “Which service do you require?”
“Police, now. People are coming. I think they’re going to kill us. Please hurry. NOW.” I was screaming.

CHAPTER 1.
I was once asked to leave a cinema when the man in the seat behind me complained about my persistent glancing.  I have, many times, changed direction in the street, barging my way down busy pavements so I could turn and examine a man who had just passed me by.  I once approached a complete stranger and asked if he had ever known Angela Pollard. I have spent a large part of my life looking into the faces of men who shared my sweep of cheek or tilt of green eye and wondering if it might be him. I never knew who my real father was.

I am twenty four, it’s a summer Sunday in Scarborough and I’m having breakfast with my mother, Angie, in her conservatory. At the bottom of the garden, I can see my stepfather, Ken, tending his pigeons.  I am pretending to read the papers, but my eyes are focussed somewhere above the page.
Emboldened because of the companionable hour she and I have spent together, I am searching for the words to begin. Hot little jets of nasty anticipation are needling in my stomach like slivers of glass. I steel myself for the excruciating tip-toe into our mostly silent conflict.
Angie and I have been doing this dance for as long as I can remember; me disgusted by my apologetic whine and vile obsequiousness, the corners of her mouth tightening and twitching as soon as she knows what I’m up to and, if I push too far, she will lose her temper and I might cry.
I take a deep breath, words flitter in my mouth like dry butterflies, my heart feels squeezed, I cringe, “So, come on, my dad, there must be something you can tell me, the colour of his eyes, or hair or something.”  I try to adopt a conspiratorial air, leaning in toward her, making my eyes sparkle, wanting her to look at me.
She inflates, sighs and looks up but not at me, just somewhere into middle distance, her face bored and irritated. Then she turns, looks right into my face, lip curled, sneering, and says with a sing-song, sarcasm, “I can’t remember. It was dark.”
She gets up, casting me a look of hateful contempt, that I should force her to behave this way, and leaves the room.
***
Like two positives we repel. We collide with jerky joy and quickly clash, bouncing away like we’ve been burnt. Our spats don’t last long, we’re just different.
To look at, there can be no mistaking that we belong to each other. Whoever my father was, I have no doubt that I’ve inherited more of my mother than of him, but in spirit, I’m more watchful, more careful with people’s emotions.
Angie is sexy and compelling in a rough around the edges way.  She has a vanity gene like a barn side which is why, at her instruction, I call her Angie and not Mum – she likes to think people might mistake us for sisters.  Men like the flash of her green eyes and the thickness of her shoulder length dark hair. She’s coltish, strong, curvy and slender, a Peter Pan woman of dizzy tangents who is not quite joined up. She kind of pushes and pulls you, she’s warm and cold, funny and sharp, forty two but sixteen; a compassionate bitch.
I was conceived in Angie’s seventeenth year, in Scarborough I have always assumed. The reality I had designed for myself in the absence of any information was that the identity of the man I sought had been lost to her in the sheer volume. If I had lined up the men of the town, of a certain age, and asked my owner to stand up, how many, I wondered, would have risen sheepishly to their feet.
I was born on the 6th of March in Scarborough Hospital, unplanned but wanted. I was to have been called Deborah, but was named instead for the Welsh midwife who delivered me; Haf; that was her name and that was how it should have been spelt; pronounced with a long, curling welsh A and a soft Welsh F. Angie never thought to ask and by the time it was pointed out, Harv was on all my papers. So Harv I was, Harv Pollard, but not for long. I was a one year old in a pink Crotchet dress and white sandals when Angie married Ken Marvin, who she had known for just six months, changing me into Harv Marvin; a name that could only happen when things weren’t joined up.
The lucky marriage was captured in now yellowing 1970’s Polaroid’s, with everyone looking older than they did now, and Angie’s parents Brian and Della looking relieved. This wedding made them respectable again, made a successful coup out of a teenage disaster and positioned their slut of a daughter in the aspiring middle classes, with a husband who had just taken over his small, but flourishing, family business, a home in a larger than average semi and a Ford Capri gleaming in the drive.
Everyone suspected that she would prove too fast for the steady Ken, but hoped that he would calm her down; settle her. It made him sound like a remedy for indigestion. Twenty three years later, they are still in the same house in Scarborough, still in love and still, I’m sure, having sex more often that I do, with Angie settled, but not calmed down.
Ken’s passion are his pigeons or ‘filthy flying rats’ as Angie refers to them. The fancier’s magazines which strew every room in the house, offend her in a way that a pile of XXXX Hustlers never would. He loves his birds. He wins no more races now than he ever has, but with his passion undiminished by his disappointments, he continues to strive for the perfect specimen and tends and encourages them like children.
Angie views pigeon racing as a working class habit.  Ken defends his position by pointing out that these aren’t pigeons in the Town Hall sense. “Listen, during past times, it was contrary to law for a common man to own pigeons, they were the birds of kings, little warriors of the airways, the ultimate communication tool,” he told us indignantly as we sniggered behind our hands. “If it hadn’t been for pigeons, Rothschild would never have made his fortune.”
“Rothschild?” Angie had roared. “It’s a long way from a shed in Scarborough. Where’s the bloody fortune Rothschild?” She had laughed tartily, her palm outstretched.
“It’s not a bloody shed, it’s a loft.”  We infuriated him.
***
Angie returns, tossing her hair, defiant and injured and begins flicking through a magazine as if I am invisible. It is only eight thirty, but already the voile morning sunshine has made the air in the conservatory heavy and treacly.
I get up and open windows a little too aggressively then stand, my arms crossed, staring tight lipped out toward the eastern edge of the garden where the sun has not yet lifted over the limes and where, in the dappled shade, Ken tends his pigeons, sloshing sparkles of fresh water and filtering golden grain. I watch him turn a bird in his hands, see his intense gaze as his mouth forms the gentle pout of a shhhh.
Outside I contract, my arms tightening across my chest, whilst inside my anger and frustration swells until I feel I might explode. ‘I can’t remember. It was dark’, is probably her worst and most insensitive dismissal ever. This from the woman who wears her every emotion, idea, or thought, like a gaping wound; she’s an open book pushed right in your face, what goes through Angie’s head, comes straight out of her mouth, but ask her a question about my biological father and she clangs shut like a cell. She has, through the years, blocked me, humiliated me, slapped my face, and denied me any corner of truth until I seethed to know.
The bird flashes mauve, silver and green, like a spiv’s shot satin suit as he rolls it gently over and over, its little bead eyes, unperturbed, flicking like tiny camera shutters, head cracking back to eyes front like a pirouetting dancer as it slowly spins. I know the corky feel of a bird contained between firm hands, the silky sprung ness of quill and feather and the extreme musculature of the wing and breast. When you handle them, you are struck by the sense of power, yet the muscle is not hard, but soft and elastic.
Angie is still ignoring me despite my glances in her direction.  I can’t leave it alone and I don’t care now if I wreck the day and storm back home. “So, that’s all you’ve got to tell me?” I trample in again.
She doesn’t even look up. “Make another cup of tea Harv love.” It’s like I haven’t spoken.
“So that’s it? All you’ve got to say? ‘I can’t remember. It was dark’.” I am aware of spit of my words and the hurt that is thrumming nastily in my solar plexus, but this time I won’t cry. She still doesn’t look up, just continues flicking through the magazine, except now she’s humming as she scans the pages, a way of putting your fingers in your ears without putting your fingers in your ears. It fills me with the petulant emotions of my six year old self and makes me want to scream and smack her blank, stupid face.
This time I leave the room, childishly sweeping the papers and magazines from the table as I go. I pack my things, slamming doors behind me and drive away, determined that however desperately I want to know, I will never ask her again.
I wish it had been that simple.

Look for Chapter 2 in next week’s installment. And please comment on what you’ve read so far. I find this story irresistible. Thank you, Amanda!

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I am sure all you readers have already read and appreciated Amanda’s first short story, and I am thrilled to publish a short-short story of hers, accompanied by a fittingly short-short podcast interview. As always, you can listen to the entire interview, to this segment, download either to your mp3 player, read the transcript and of course, read the story! So, without further ado, after this short-short intro, here are the interview and story:

• Amanda-Ackroyd-interview
• Amanda-Ackroyd-interview-part-II-3-mins

Ilaria: So let’s talk about the other short piece. Because that one, you sent it to me without telling me anything about it, and so I don’t know what it was for. But I understand that it too came from something that had a limit of words, right? It was only 250 words. Is that possible?
Amanda: Yeah, that was just a 250-word story.
Ilaria: Was that part of a competition also?
Amanda: No, that was actually written purely as sort of a discipline piece, taking a sort of an idea and then having to create a story in a complete round in a very tight – within a very tight discipline. So it was purely for my own pleasure. And also it was kind of a lesson in disciplined writing.
Ilaria: What made you decide that you needed to do this experiment in discipline?
Amanda: Well, some of it was – I don’t know if you remember, going back to our school days, but we had an absolutely fantastic English teacher called David Day, who would occasionally make us do précis work. And it took me a while to actually get the hang of doing that, where you would pare and pare and pare something down, without losing the sense of it, into something concise and clear, but still, you know, something that possessed a sort of a creative edge. And I think in terms of my other writing, which is purely something that I absolutely enjoy doing, in terms of just practicing writing, I think it’s very interesting for me to do that. And it’s something that I do practice, is the taking of an idea and boiling it down into something which is sort of sharp and spare. And that’s the reason I do it, really. It teaches me. I learn when I do it. And I quite like the process of going back, back, back and seeing where it was wrong and where I can make it better, but without becoming overly wordy. That’s why I do it.

250-Word Story Number Two

She flashes him the Monroe smile balcony to balcony across long drop and metallic city air. In her twenties he guesses, white teeth, neat nose and giggly eyes, with a chuckle like Betty Boop. She works in the centre as a warden for the old folks.
He beams back and gives her his air force salute, pulling himself tall, feeling his waistband slip a little as he drags in and up.
At night, lying awake, he wonders how her body might feel sliding across the satin sheets which, some days, slink weightily on her retractable line and thinks about running his hand up the unfeasible curve at the back of her waist, her nipples hard and bright as red liquorice torpedoes, her breath warm and puttery like a pony.
By day, he is drawn toward the window, ashamed and pained by this obsessive and desperate checking. He has filled pots with geraniums allowing for prolonged bouts of watering and compulsive dead heading, his mind and eyes never fully on the job.
Does he stand a chance? She looks over often enough and there is definitely invitation in her backward glance as she turns to go inside and once, three years ago she had, at the centre, held his hand, nuzzled her lips against his cheek and whispered, “Happy birthday” as she revealed the cake into which she had, with skilled fingers and faultless symmetry, inserted through the smooth fondant and deep into the yielding sponge, his eighty five candles.

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Yesterday morning there was a very interesting article in the New York Times about stories and how they’re told, by Michael Cieply, titled Saving the Story (the Film Version). It appears that the movie industry is fearful that audiences are no longer interested in stories. At the same time, the article goes on to describe several new ways to tell stories, new technologies for storytelling and new structures for stories that are emerging all around us. MIT has started a Center for Future Storytelling that sounds fascinating. This is primarily a film-based project, a joint venture between Plymouth Rock Studios and MIT, but they will also develop and study projects in peer-to-peer media like Twitter, where people are already telling stories in new and inventive ways. Twitter novels are already hugely popular in China and have started to pass over into print. Now some people are writing Twitter novels in the U.S. as well. And this opens up a new discussion, for me.

The fact that Twitter novels are passing into print seems to be a contradiction. New media is interesting because it is new… and besides, wasn’t the book dead? Hadn’t we already decided that no one reads anymore, that books are obsolete, old fashioned, musty, moldy remnants of a reality that exists only in the nostalgic memory of elderly English professors?

I say, Long Live the Story! I feel that it is entirely untrue that stories are dying and that people will never tire of hearing them. I also think that people will never tire of reading. It is true that computers, the internet, new media, social networking tools, movies, iPods and all the other technological innovations of our time have changed the way we read. But we still read, and many of us read books, and magazines, and literary journals (for all the talk of how there is no money to be made in magazines and literary journals it’s amazing how many new ones continue to roll off the presses!).

Vladimir Propp told us, in his seminal book Morphology of the Folktale, that there are only 31 types of narrative structures, or narratemes and that all characters can be reduced to 7 broad types. Though he applied himself to the study of 100 Russian folktales, his structural analysis can be applied to any type of story, including films and new media stories. We have all heard the truism that there are only two stories: Man rides into town, Man leaves town; or something along those lines. The fact is that this is what makes stories so wonderful and timeless or rather enduring. It’s not so much the story you tell. It’s how you tell the story that makes it unique and newly fascinating and enthralling, or as my friend Mario likes to say, spellbinding. And the very fact that we recognize the structure or basic plot of stories reinforces our sense of community, belonging, culture and fellowship with other humans.

Just when I am thinking about stories and whether people are really losing interest, whether our attention spans have become so short that we just can’t be bothered to listen to a whole story from beginning to end, I was delighted to find another wonderful item in the New York Times online newsletter Urban Eye this morning: The Moth Ball. This was a benefit event held here in New York the other night to support The Moth, an organization devoted to oral storytelling. Here’s the thing, I think that listening to stories is a form of reading. Think about it; when Homer declaimed the Iliad and people sat around and listened, they were, in effect, reading. When a new installment of a Dickens novel came out, large crowds of illiterate Dickens fans gathered on street corners in London to listen to someone read the latest chapter aloud. They were reading too!

Let me tell you a story that brings all this into focus in a lovely way, I think.

About a year ago my daughter was having trouble getting to school in the morning. New house, new neighborhood, new school… let’s just say she would get lost along the way. So I started taking her to school again, something I had not done in a couple of years at least. We tried the subway, but ended up realizing that the best way was by bus. So every morning we left our Crown Heights house and took the bus further into the Heights to school. The whole trip took at most 20 minutes. The first few days she experienced this as a little bit of a punishment and an embarrassment, but after a while, surprisingly for both of us I think, we got into a rhythm. It was our time together, during which we could really do nothing but talk to each other. We could be silent, of course, but silence lasts only so long…

My daughter does not like to read. Rather, she thinks she does not like to read. I contend that she loves reading, she just hasn’t realized it yet, or perhaps her idea of what reading is and mine do not coincide exactly. A few weeks into our new routine I started reading a book called The Septembers of Shiraz, by Dalia Sofer, a book that I loved for its delicacy, its characters, its insight, its quiet courage, its style, its story. Right from the first chapter I was sucked in, so the next morning on the bus I said to Zoe, I’m reading this great book. Do you want to hear what it’s about? And I told her the first chapter.

Now, people who know me say that if you have listened to me tell a movie you lose all desire to see it because you already have. Some say they are disappointed by the movie if they see it after I have told them the story. The same goes for books. So, in my usual way, I told Zoe the first chapter of Dalia Sofer’s book blow by blow, word for word, with all my comments and asides thrown in. She listened quietly.

The next day, I told her the following chapter, and the day after that the third. And so we went on. Every morning we got on the bus and I would tell her another chapter in the life of the family living in Tehran and struggling to decide what to do in the face of the Islamic revolution. One morning we got on the bus and I was distracted by something I remembered about her schoolwork. So I asked her about it. She said, Mom, forget that, we left off that the little girl was at that party at her friend’s house. What happened next?

People can say all they want about the death of the story, the death of the book, the death of the movie as we remember it. None of this is true. There is nothing, nothing at all in this world, like a good story.

Vladimir Propp in 1928

The image above of Vladimir Propp is a link that will take you to a fun site called Proppian Tale Generator, which will allow you to use all the elements of folktales as identified by Propp to craft your own story. Great fun if you run out of things to make up at night to put your kids to sleep!

What do you think? Do you have stories like this to share? Feel free to comment and leave a story for us all to enjoy!

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