Ladies and gentlemen, I am delighted to welcome Mari Strachan to Lizzy’s Literary Life. For the next two hours, Mari will be here to chat and answer your questions about her own literary life and, of course, her debut novel The Earth Hums in B-Flat. Mari’s novel was included on the Amazon Rising Stars promotion and rightly so. It’s a fabulous read!
In order to keep some semblance of order, please post your questions here. Your question and Mari’s answers will then appear in comments on this post. (It’s probably a good idea to have two windows open.) Don’t worry if things go awry – Lizzy, your editor-in-chief for the evening, will try and keep proceedings smooth.
Don’t be shy – there’s a prize on offer for the question that Mari enjoys the most. More about that later.
And so, without further ado, let me hand over to Mari ….. (Cue applause!)
EDIT: Interview now complete and Lesley’s question about ambiguous endings wins the surprise prize. It’s a real surprise because even I don’t know what it will be. I’m going to bring back a souvenir from the Ullapool Book Festival. So, Lesley, congratulations and I’ll be in touch early next week!
Thanks everyone. I hoped you enjoyed this. Could I ask you to show your appreciation with another round of applause for Mari and the generosity of her answers …..
Lizzy's Literary Life (Volume One) 
Mari, do you still have a toby jug on your mantelpiece?
I don’t have a Toby jug on my mantelpiece – and I’m sorry to disappoint anybody – but I’ve never had a Toby jug on my mantelpiece! I do remember that my grandfather had two Toby jugs which I always found rather scary when I was small – but my memory of them is rather vague.
From The Lost Book
Mari – did you have a favourite and least favourite character as you wrote the book? (I don’t know if Gwennie would automatically be your favourite. I had a soft spot for Sergeant Jones…)
My least favourite is easy – the villain of the piece (though he was a good shepherd!) – Ifan Evans.
I had a soft spot for most of the characters – but the one that tickled me most was Aunty Lol who never appeared in person because she was off doing something really important like playing for the women’s football team or practising to put out fires with the fire brigade or playing her trumpet in the town’s Silver Band.
What about everyone else – any favourites?
Given my online persona, it’ll come as no surprise to anyone that I have a soft spot for women with nervous and depressive disorders. Mari, I’m not sure whether you meant for Gwennie’s harassed and miserable mother to evoke sympathy but she certainly did over here!
Absolutely, Lizzy – poor old Mam. No-one had any idea how to treat her illness. And of course Gwenni accepted it as the norm, at least at the start of her story though she knew something was amiss in her life.
Hi Mari,
I love the book. It’s both enchanting and thought-provoking. The 1950’s period detail transported me back to childhood memories – how could I forget how much I loved pineapple chunks? It also reminded me of an era when taboos and often feelings were really things best left unspoken. Gwenni completely won me over with her brave search to unravel her family’s secrets. So much so I worry about her future and my questions are :
Will genetics play as large a part in Gwenni’s life as in her sister Bethan’s? Will she inherit the mental illness that blighted her mother and grandmother’s lives or can we take comfort that people with the illness can be creative and this is an explanation for Gwenni’s vivd imagination? Alternatively was her imagination and flying her way of surviving her invisibility to her mother – or is flying and hearing the earth hum in b flat more magical and something she may have inherited from her father?
Lesley
Q: Will genetics play as large a part in Gwenni’s life as in her sister Bethan’s? Will she inherit the mental illness that blighted her mother and grandmother’s lives or can we take comfort that people with the illness can be creative and this is an explanation for Gwenni’s vivid imagination? Alternatively was her imagination and flying her way of surviving her invisibility to her mother – or is her flying and hearing the earth hum in b flat more magical and something she may have inherited from her father?
A: Brilliant!! These are exactly the questions I hoped the reader would ask after reading the book. The answer could be any one of these you’ve suggested, or a combination. Sometimes I’m not sure, myself, which is the answer. But I veer towards your first two suggestions: Gwenni is an imaginative child who senses that something is not quite right in her home life, and deals with it by projecting her unease onto inanimate objects, like the Toby jugs, or onto the landscape in which she lives where there are watchers in the sea and wraiths rising from damp ground. She also tries to distance herself, to escape, with her flying dreams and her desire to fly. But she is a bit obsessive about it all, isn’t she, a bit over the top? I suspect that she has, within her behaviour, the seeds of her mother’s bipolar disorder. I remember a TV programme with the actor Stephen Fry and others talking about their bipolar disorder and they all came to the conclusion that they would not be without it – that while it took away from their lives in some ways it also contributed to who and what they were in a way they would not want to change. I feel Gwenni would see her illness in that way, rather than as the blight it was for her mother and grandmother, and use it creatively.
People have told me at signings after a reading that they are convinced that Gwenni does actually fly. Gwenni herself believes she does – and really, who is to say she doesn’t? There are more things in Heaven and Earth… There were one or two things in the book that I didn’t know were going to happen until I wrote them – and the very end with the revelation Gwenni feels her father has made, was one, though once I had written it I could see all the threads in the book leading to it – and also I felt that it would make readers think again, maybe, about what they’d thought the book was about.
I love ambiguous ending to books that make me really think about what the book was all about, and I was really pleased mine turned out like that.
Q: How is life as a successful debut author and is it as you imagined it would be?
A: I had no idea what to expect! I sort of thought there would be readings and festival appearances, and I’ve really enjoyed those – it’s great to talk to readers and would-be readers of my book, and it’s interesting to find how differently people read the book, and how they respond to it. I’ve been asked to write short articles and Q&A pieces for various on-line publications and blogs, which I hadn’t anticipated. I’ve also broadcast on Welsh, Scottish and Australian radio, and appeared on a Welsh TV programme – again something I hadn’t anticipated! One thing that really amazed me was the sale of the book to so many different countries a year before it was published here. The book is now published in Australia and the Netherlands, will be out in the US in June, and in Sweden, Norway, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Turkey sometime this year, and in France next year – I never imagined any of this! It was wonderful! And the covers are different in each country – it’s fascinating to see what covers appeal to readers in different parts of the world.
Lizzy
Q: Your novel has a gorgeous cover. Tell us something about the designer and did you have an input into it?
A: It is gorgeous – both to look at and to feel. I wish I could claim to have had an input into its design – but I can’t! Canongate went to a great deal of trouble with the cover design. Several were tried and rejected because they didn’t capture what Canongate wanted the cover to tell the reader about the book, and at one point they commissioned a photoshoot but none of the images from it were quite what they were looking for. So, it was a long haul for them, but the end result is, as you say, gorgeous.
You mentioned in a previous answer that the covers are different the world over. I’m trying to find some online. However, which is your favourite and why?
So far, I think you can only find the Australian, the US, and the Netherlands cover on-line. I’ve been sent a copy of the German cover to look at and I think that is a very intriguing cover, with nothing but the title and a fox peeking round the edge of the cover.
Lizzy
Q: I’m interested in the choices you made in the writing of the Earth Hums In B-Flat, particularly in regard to a) choice of place and time; b) lead character; c) tense and d) language. (In this regard do you think you’ve caught the musicality of Welsh in your English rendition?)
A: Most of the ‘choices’ were made after a winding journey and much trial and error!
Character: I’ll begin with the lead character, because really, everything else stems from her. She’d been in my head for a while before I even began thinking about writing The Earth Hums – a child standing on a chair trying to fly. I’ve no idea where she came from or what to do with her, but she wouldn’t go away. So when I had this vague idea for the book it was natural to look at her in more detail and the rest grew from there.
Place and time: When I did look at Gwenni carefully I could see she wasn’t a modern child and her clothing reminded me of the fifties, the time when I grew up. And because that was a time of great change and I’m interested in those kinds of things, I decided to set Gwenni’s story in that time. It was also a time when children were seen and not heard, people hid their secrets rather that share them with the world, and nothing was ever explained. The place of the story is a fictionalised version of the small town where I grew up – I don’t live there any more so it was easier for me to look back on it as it was then.
Tense: and I think I’d add point of view here, too, because when I was working on this aspect of the book they were inextricably linked. And I arrived at first person, present tense after lots of experimentation with other pov and tenses, and finding that this very immediate, as it happens narrative was the one that worked best for Gwenni’s story.
Language: Gwenni is growing up in a Welsh speaking community where she would not naturally speak English. To make the point that she’s talking to the reader in Welsh I occasionally have someone say something ‘in English’. I had to consider very carefully how to write the Welsh in English, and decided that I would avoid ‘Welshisms’ but use proper names as they would be in Welsh. I have been surprised by the number of people who have told me they can hear a Welsh ‘lilt’ in the writing. I’m not sure if that is because they expect to hear it, or whether somehow the rhythms and sounds of my first language colour the writing of my second.
The other aspect of the language I use is that Gwenni has three different ways of telling her story. I decided to do this because I thought one voice all the way through might get a bit boring for the reader, and I wanted to show that Gwenni is a complex character. So there’s the voice she speaks with to other people; the voice with which she addresses you, the reader; and the voice she uses when she’s musing upon something, which reflects her interest in words and writing.
You’ve said that you held onto welsh language rights, in case you should ever want to (re)write it in Welsh. What would be so different do you think?
JenP
I think it might be a case of re-working it into Welsh as opposed to translating (though I’m sure translators do that to some extent all the time). I think it would have to be in the vernacular Welsh of the area it’s set in. Have you read One Moonlit Night? it’s an English translation of a book on a similar theme that was originally written in the vernacular Welsh of the Bethesda, old Caernarfonshire area.
Thanks Mari, yes I too love ambiguous endings.
You mention that there were one or two things you didn’t know were going to happen until you wrote them. Does this mean you meticulously plotted the novel before you wrote it – and if so how long did it take to plan the book as opposed to actually writing it?
No, no long term meticulous plotting of that nature, but I had an idea when I wrote a scene or chapter what I wanted to happen in it, and sometimes an idea seemed to come from nowhere which changed what I though I was doing. Another instance is the chapter where Gwenni hears a neighbour tell her Nain that Mrs Llywelyn Pugh had killed herself – I didn’t know that was going to happen until I wrote it. Cue creepy music!! I’m sure it was there in my subconscious all the time!
Thanks – not yet, but I’ll have to add it to the TBR pile. I’m so interested in the way multi – local -languages get included in books and how it can work well. Thanks for being here and sharing!
Happy to be here, Jen.
The Lost Book
Q: One last question, linked to Lyzzy’s – is Gwennie a character who has been with you for a long while, who you’ve always known you wanted to write about? Or, did you think of the plot and the setting (The Earth Hums… has a very strong sense of place and period) and then realise that the perfect person to tell the story would be a young girl?
A: As you’ll see from my reply to Lizzie’s question(s) Gwenni came first and the rest followed!
Will take a look at the The Lost Book site later – thanks.
I’m interested to know how many of you here tonight are writers as well as readers, and if so, what are you writing, or what have you written? And do you find it useful for your own work (as I always did) to ask published authors lots of questions?
I’m a reader first and foremost and probably always will be. My interest in author Q&A’s is to gain a better appreciation of the artistry of writing – to better inform my reading (and ultimately my reviewing).
Q: Gwennie is reading of Marjory Allingham’s “The Tiger in The Smoke”? Is there any particular significance in this?
A: She loves detective stories and this one has a resonace with the secrets that are coming to light in The Earth Hums – it is set after WW2
I wondered if maybe there were some style issues also. A gentler type of detective story, maybe? Which leads me to ask – who are your favourite crime writers and if there was one must-read crime novel, what would it be?
Bit late for this perhaps – but I like melancholy detectives – currently I’m fond of two translated authors : French Fred Vargas and Icelandic Arnaldur Idridasson. Wouls have to think about the must read. Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir trilogy, perhaps.
Well, would you credit it? I’m currently in the midst of Berlin Noir and Vargas and Indridason are must-buys as soon as published in this house! You (and I) have impeccable taste!
From Farm Lane Books
Q: I haven’t managed to read the book yet (sorry – I will do at some point!) so apologies if this is covered in the book, but is there a significance to the B flat in the title? Does this note have a particular meaning for you?
A: It’s explained in the book to the extent that G knows the sound is B Flat. It’s intended as a kind of metaphor for the book. It has a significance for me in that I came across it when working in a visitor attraction that had a big gallery about the earth and this was one of the things in it – the sound of the earth. It came back to me when thinking of a title.
Lizzy
How does the success of your debut novel make you feel about your second? (There will be a second won’t there?)
I’m a bit behind with the second because of the success of the first!!
The second will be a completely different novel – and I’m really looking forward to getting back to grips with it.
Good to hear. So no worries about second novel syndrome, then?
What – you mean the ‘disappointing second novel’? I just try not to think about that – the next one has to be better than the first! Fingers crossed!
As we’re coming to the end of our allotted time, would you care to divulge a secret about “The Earth Hums” that you’ve never told anyone before?
Well, OK, I’ll let you in on one secret – but you musn’t tell it to anyone else. Promise? Cross your heart and hope to die?
One of my fave characters is Aunty Lol, as I mentioned earlier, who is an important presence in Gwenni’s life but never actually appears in the book because she’s always too busy doing something else. I had great fun writing Aunty Lol, and – this is the secret – she is based on my own favourite aunt, (the only one of my characters who is based on a real person). My aunt is now in her late eighties and when she told me she’d enjoyed the book, she had a definite twinkle in her eye!
Oh I like that …. a lot!
Mari, thanks so much for your time and energy and illuminating responses. I’ve just one more favour to ask. While I pour you another glass of wine, would you please nominate the question you most enjoyed answering?
Thank you for arranging all this, Lizzy. Thank you all for your questions, all interesting to answer but the one that I enjoyed most was the first question that Lesley asked me about the ambiguous ending of the book.
Many thanks and Nos Da (Goodnight)
I’ve just got back to my computer and caught up – thanks Lizzy and Mari for the great Q&A.
Lizzy, Thanks to you and Mari for the very enjoyable Q and A session. I love surprises almost as much as ambiguous endings… Enjoy Ullapool.
Hi Mari
Thanks for a wonderful book. I have read it for my ‘book club’ and we will be discussing it on Oct 5th. It was the best book I have read in a long long time and I could not put it down. One question, will you be writing a sequel as I would love to know what happens to all of the characters in the next episode? Thanks again for a delightful and almost magical experience of reading this wonderful book.