Tim Atkins is a poet and lecturer at the University of East London. His book Collected Petrarch came out in 2014, and he has a new book of poetry due to be published later this year.

Tim told us that he read a great translation of Petrarch a few years ago, when he was in San Francisco. He left the book there, and then spent a long time searching for the right translation again. The others that he found were super tedious, and it was annoying not to be able to find the right book. So, in the end, he decided to translate them himself. And in the end he found the translation that he had enjoyed in San Francisco — published by North Point Press.

He used 73 rules for translation at various points when working on the book. He doesn’t read Italian, and often made things up. He says that around half of the poems are translations, and half are just poems that he wrote that fit the project. He said that he hopes his poems stand alone — that you don’t have to know his processes to be able to enjoy reading them. He likes poetry that doesn’t need footnotes — “if you need that to begin with, you’re doomed.”

Asked about Buddhism and poetry, Tim talked about how the experience is wordless — and so, as soon as you put it into words, it’s a definition, position. It’s better without that, but — he feels that the positions he does hold are slippery. It makes him skeptical politically, which of course has a bearing on his work. He’s had a long correspondence with the poet Sean Bonney, because Bonney said that he’s always attacking the left. But Tim said in reply — I always doubt everything, but it doesn’t mean I don’t believe anything.

This led to a question about the place of fatherhood, violence and politics in his poetry. About whether poetry is a place for creating a world for our children — Tim’s daughters, in this case — to grow up in. Tim said that he thinks that poets and artists should be able to do what they want, when they want. He writes a lot about politics in his work and sees it as a necessary action, but at the same time he cautions about poets thinking that their art will change the world. It’s not going to overthrow governments.

But it also appalls him that — if you open an anthology you’re much more likely to be faced by poetry about war than poetry about children. He said that so few male poets have written about having children, which is the most profound, moving experience of his life. And so by writing about fatherhood — that is one way of changing something.

He was asked about influence and intertextuality, which led Tim back to talking about his Collected Petrarch. He said that Dryden talked about how you can translate either the word, phrase, or sentence — and these will, of course, give different results. When translating Petrarch, he read a bit about him and the things he did. He wanted to be the most famous poet of his age. And he thought about his themes — love, and difficulty, were themes that engaged him the whole way through. Every part. He said that all poems work as translations — that we should read as widely as possible, because everything feeds in to writing. “Process everything you’ve read and then something comes out.”

There’s a model of antagonistic influence that gets talked about, particularly with male writers, but he thinks of his work as engaging in more of a dialogue with Petrarch than fighting with him. OULIPO had experiments about antithetical translation, and his antithetical translation of Petrarch was — to put his children into the poems. Petrarch’s children were never in his poetry. But it’s not antagonistic — it comes from an engagement with his life, from thinking about him as well as against him.

The Petrarch poems started as Tim’s PhD thesis, and to begin with a selection of them was published by Crater Press. So about 70 of 400 poems had come out, and he said that he’d been boasting about this large number of poems he had written but unpublished — and then Crater Press said they wanted to publish all of them. So he had to spend a year going back and redoing them for publication! Some had been written procedurally, and those were left as they are — but that still left a lot. Some came quite quickly, but it varies massively from poem to poem. Some are translated properly, but others aren’t. He had written them quickly for the PhD, but spent a year working them over and probably changed about 50% of what he’d written by the time he published the book. It’s good to remember how much the drafting process can vary — and to allow yourself flexibility with your writing, space to think.

In celebration of 25 years of the Charles Wallace India Fellowship, last week two current fellows came to read and talk to us. Bikram Sharma is a graduate of the UEA writing MA, and he’s just started his fellowship at Kent, while Simar Preet Kaur is an experienced travel writer who travelled down from her residency in Stirling for the reading. The fellowships bring writers over for three months, and they often live on campus (at Kent or elsewhere). It’s the oldest fellowship that’s still running on campus at Kent, and it often benefits writers early on in their careers.

Bikram told us about having just finished the MA at UEA. He’s currently working on a novel, but he didn’t read from it because it’s still in the initial stages. He’s told us that he started writing flash fiction about nine years ago, and he read us a couple of pieces of flash fiction (very short fiction!) that he’s had published in literary magazines instead. The first story was about a woman who sees a man try to kill himself, and the second was more speculative — a magical realism story about a vanished girl that only the narrator can remember. Bikram talked about how he enjoys reading magical realism, his writing is particularly inspired by Gabriel García Márquez.

Simar is working on a book about what she called “a road in the sky” — a route in the Himalayas, mostly used by truckers, that’s inaccessible for four months of the year. She’s been living there and working on it for almost four years — the fellowship has given her time to edit before she goes back for the next season. She read to us from a chapter about winter, when there’s about 60 feet of snow. She’s been working on the manuscript in isolation, and this was the first time she’d read from it to anyone else! She’ll spend two more seasons there, and then the book will be done. She told us about how she’d worked for a travel magazine before she started work on the book, and she came across the truck drivers and the area and kept thinking about it — about how she wanted to go back. And so she did.

Asked if the isolation in the mountains is conductive, Simar says yes — it really helps her to dwell in isolation, and she can then emerge with work. She’s cut off from her peer group, which she finds helpful when writing. She also finds that the truck drivers are good to talk to about writing — they’re especially keen on poetry. She feels like she’s being trusted with their stories and she has to be careful and respectful with them. Because of climate change, this year the road will be opening early, in April, and she’s going to miss a month while she’s in Stirling. But the distance is helpful for working on the manuscript, too. “And it’s cold, which helps!” She says that it does make her characters seem more bizarre, when editing the work so far away — but it also shows her that the work is interesting to people very far away from the community.

Bikram was asked about what led him to working on a novel, since he’d focused on short stories before. There was one particular image — of a girl and a boy crossing the road in Bangalore — that he kept coming back to, and he started writing from that. He was also working with an idea he got from his mother — this idea that there are lots of different Indias that overlap. He says that he and his friends feel like they’re part of a real lost generation — there’s so much development and so many promises from the government but they don’t know what will actually happen. He sometimes feels despair, but — “then I read a book!” He says that his writing has also been shaped by living in the USA (Bikram did his BA in the US). “India is not what it’s been made out to be,” he says. The setting of his work is very important to it, but it’s not “exotic”. He wants to focus more on regular people and their realities. Writing about people, not just cultural markers.

The best part of the residency, Bikram says, is the uninterrupted time to write. He tried to be very disciplined in his regular life, and write every evening, but it’s great here to often have the whole day. He also says that when writing about a particular place it can be hard to know what to write about and what to leave out — and the distance makes it easier.

It was really interesting to hear from early career writers about their works in progress, especially about two such different projects that are interested in place. We’ll be looking out for any news about both books!

In conjunction with the University of Kent’s LGBT Writers’ Week, on the 16th of February Zoë Strachan came to talk to us and read from her 2011 novel, Ever Fallen In Love. Zoë Strachan is a Scottish writer, and she teaches Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. She has published three novels, and is currently working on her fourth.

Zoë started the evening by reading from different sections of Ever Fallen in Love. She decided to read from this book first (rather than her work-in-progress), because she’d been thinking about it as a themed event — shaped both by LGBT Writers’ Week and LGBT history month. Ever Fallen In Love has a gay protagonist, while her upcoming book doesn’t. She read from the prologue of the book — a section that she described as being sort of out of time with the two main timelines in the novel, and then moved forward. The book is half set in the past, at university, and half in the protagonist’s present. She described it as something like an anti-Brideshead — playing around with the same structure, and the same kind of social climate at university, but developing very differently — with a very different relationship to social class. She then quoted a veteran, who she’d once heard say “the whole of my life was lived between the ages of 18 and 21; the rest is just the credits rolling.” People do get stuck on times in their life, if they’re particularly intense, she said — and so all of this fed into the novel, the story she wanted to tell.

In one of the later sections Zoë read from, her protagonist, Richard, talked about being from a place that was “a shithole, we called it.” Zoë talked about how she’d always been fascinated by small towns — where there’s obviously a lot of social pressure. This seems to tie in well with the idea of the book focusing on a relatively small period of time, even much later on — the sense of a small, intense place that forges you is a powerful one.

After these readings, Zoë told us about the new book she’s working on. It’s a family saga, set between 1935-70, and different in some ways from what she’s written before. It centres on a couple who live in a prosperous small town. She read from a section of the book set in 1961 — it’s interesting how her books use time, and directly show us the same characters from multiple, distinct places in their lives. She said it took her a long time to write — she had the idea 10-15 years ago, but it took her a long time to be able to properly fictionalise what she wanted to write about, and to think of the specific story. But once she had that worked out, it came quite quickly.

When discussing the family saga — and how it centres on a married couple in mid-20th century England, Zoë talked about how she still feels that the book has a queer aesthetic that she can feel creeping in, even if it’s less overt than in anything she’s written before. We discussed the idea of a queer aesthetic, and what it can mean — how often it becomes part of the coding of the novel, the subtext, even if it’s not necessarily textual. How it’s a way of reading as well as writing.

When asked about her writing process, Zoë told us about the genesis of Ever Fallen in Love as an example. She dreamed a conversation between Richard and Luke while she was on a very quiet writing retreat. The dynamic between the two characters, the idea or problem at the heart of how they relate to one another is what grabbed her — how does a character persuade another character to do something that goes against his principles? This was how she started. She referred back to the quote from the veteran about his life happening in a very short period of time — this would have stuck with Richard, which is why it’s still central in the sections of the book set later in his life. The sections in the book set later on are written in the third person, while the past is in the first person — this was also, she said, to make the past feel more intense, personal, while the present is at a greater distance. It helped the texture of the book, allowed Richard to be dislocated from himself in the present while he tells and re-tells stories about the past, quite consciously. She says that she usually starts writing in first person just to learn about the character, and for this book, the split came to her halfway through writing it.

But although the two timelines in the book are separated, and are written in different ways like this — they are tied together by character and memory. Zoë talked about Don Paterson having said that the upper classes claim a better vocabulary, but the actual distinction between how people from different classes talk is in syntax. So Richard leaves home and he learns whole new vocabularies from the people he meets at university — but he still uses the syntax he grew up with. After Zoë discussed this, Amy Sackville asked if she thought that class marks him as more of an outsider than his sexuality. But the two can’t be entirely separated — Zoë talked about how he’s very concerned with masculinity, and how the things that surround that are all very tangled up. He wants to be unassailable, stoic. This is part of building characters — thinking about how important aspects of context and character like class and sexuality intersect and work with each other.
Asked about whether there’s a different UK and US queer aesthetic that she can identify, with Alan Hollinghurst and Bret Easton Ellis given as examples, Zoë talked more about class, and the idea that there might be more specifically a Scottish aesthetic or sensibility. In Scotland she can identify a number of prominent queer female writers, but thinks that queer male writers are underrepresented. But then — she talked about how it took a long time for Scottish literature to even be read with a consideration or an eye for themes or aspects such as sexuality or gender in the first place. Maybe the idea was that it was the dominant struggle — class — first, and everything else second. And that’s somehow allowed one kind of scene to be built, and not another. But — the fact that she can identify a number of prominent queer female writers means that either this is no longer the case, or people are done waiting. There’s very much a sense of writing — and especially writing about topics like sexuality — as a place to experiment, and learn.