nawr 008 Spring/Summer 2022

ISSUE NO 8 | SPRING/SUMMER 2022

n awr cofio/anghofio

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Contents art

literature

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Mamgu Fach NIAMH GRIFFITHS

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Ghosts Have Been Following You MARIA TILT

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I think there will be cake/ Dwi’n meddwl fydd na gacen MARY THOMAS

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Under the magnolia KATIE GRAMICH

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19 ROSIE COUCH

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Lessons From His Mantel EVELYN WOLSTENHOLME

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Selected Bronze Work CHARLOTTE HUBBLE

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Sodade EVE RUET

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Vanita ANDREW WEBSTER

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Teimlad cyfarwydd ELENA GRACE

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Brecon Jazz: Twenty Five Years ROB BALDWIN

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Other towns JOSHUA JONES

Andrew Webster, page 18

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IN CONVERSATION WITH: CHRISTOPHER MEREDITH 34

W.E. Best RACHEL VERNER

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Part Dust, Part Deity MORGAN OWEN

Cover Image

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This issue’s cover image comes from Liam Webb.

Suffocation NON CHARLES

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Beth sy’n digwydd?

MILLIE BETHEL

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Selected Photographs CATHERINE YEMM

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Turbary Tithe HUGH DOYLE

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How to Pickle an Adder LIAM WEBB

See more about Liams ‘How to Pickle an Adder’ project on pages 49-54.

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Editors’ Letter To remember; to forget. One is not possible without the other. On the edge of our memories, of the stories that we tell, is the absence of the things we have forgotten to recall. Our neighbour’s name; the age we first learned to ride a bike; the words we said last to a relative now gone. Memory might even be thought of as an act of choosing: we value sentimental moments and decide to keep them close.

Even then, it is uncooperative, unpredictable and unreliable. It shifts and moves without us noticing. As we gather new memories, the old ones seem to thin out, to become more fragile. Sometimes those beloved memories are shattered by the recollection of sour events that we don’t want to remember at all.

In the end, we are left with a narrative that represents what we have witnessed, what we have experienced, and we see that memory with the knowledge and experience gained from the moments between the event and the recalling of it. Memories, then, are more about the present than they are the past. They are shaped by who we are now.

It seems strange that nawr has not yet featured the theme of memory in an issue: Wales is a place packed with memory, a nation whose identity seems to be reliant on recalling past victories and struggles in order to assert its separateness from the United Kingdom.

Perhaps we forgot.

new, diverse, disparate images of the nation and its art and writing to emerge from nawr.

But can we ever really shake off those memories? What are we? What is human consciousness if not an endless stream of memories that come together to create a person? The pieces of work we received for this issue of nawr tackle the personal and the public, the positive and the negative, aspects of memory. From Katie Gramich’s critical essay Under the Magnolia on page 8, which unites people through space over time, to Rachel Verner’s W.E. Best on page 34, transferring memory onto objects and back again, each piece in this issue reflects on memory in a unique way. We were lucky enough to be joined by Christopher Meredith for this issue’s ‘In Conversation With’ who co-editor, Martha joined earlier this year to talk about his work and the ways that it intersects with our theme.

The whole interview can be found inside on pages 26 to 33. This issue, our Culture Writer, Millie responded to the theme with a creative piece that can be found on pages 42-45.

We hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as we enjoyed creating it. Special thanks go, as always, to the tireless work of our designer, Anja Quinn, in making nawr’s vision a reality.

Diolch yn fawr,

At the same time, that notion of remembering Anna and in order to construct the present is something that we’ve always grappled with. nawr: our Co-editors name itself is stuck in time, in place, right now. We are interested in breaking free from memory; in constructing a space for Welsh and Wales-based art that belongs to the nation because it is now, rather than because of the claim it makes to history. We always strive for

Martha

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Mamgu Fach Me, age five and three quarters, holding onto your hand as if it were part of my own small body.

Down Voylart Road and up the big hill to see friends, family, and Father.

Gathered to celebrate the Mysteries every Monday morning, my little voice filling the side room.

Fairy tales and parables muddling and muddying the streams of thought in my fragile, developing mind.

The Gospel according to Biff, Chip and Kipper.

Walking alongside the buggy, stubborn to be at your side or nowhere at all.

Catching drops of rain on my tongue as we stroll along the seafront.

Four little ladies in waterproof ponchos, hoods up and facing the wind.

Trams in the distance and the smell of toasted teacakes luring us in.

Uncle John picking out the currants while you laugh and say something about him and my little finger.

“Duw, she’s a good walker, just like her Grandmother” The greatest compliment I could’ve had.

Though my limbs grow heavy I smile in my chair, this time I don’t refuse the buggy.

The car is parked by Joe’s but it’s too cold for ice cream today.

By the time Grandad puts me in the back seat, my eyes are already closed.

Niamh Griffiths, Cardiff/Swansea

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Cardiff

Ghosts have been following you

Maria Tilt

Mary Thomas I think there will be cake Dwi’n meddwl fydd na gacen

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Under the Magnolia

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he small, flat box arrived yesterday morning, a blowy March day in Aberystwyth, which sent the magnolia petals swirling from the tree outside my window. The tree is huge and probably the same age as the house, built in 1905 for a widow called Charlotte Wyllie. There are touches of Arts and Crafts style still here: the shape of a door, the carving on the banisters, a William Morris flash of stained glass. We moved in a month ago and I’ve been tracking down Charlotte Wyllie in the National Library down the road.

She was an artist herself, exhibiting her Pre-Raphaelite paintings in the Grosvenor Gallery in London in the 1870s and 80s. The Grosvenor was one of the few galleries that welcomed women artists’ work. She was a friend of well-known painters including G. F. Watts and the Alma-Tademas but after she married her painting came to a gradual stop. Christie’s, the auction house, has a poignant note on her which surmises that ‘marital duties’ and a lack of recognition of her talent led her to give up. Because talent she certainly had. Three paintings of hers can be found online, all exquisite, dreamy, flower-laden canvases. I have just ordered a print of her painting ‘A Wanderer in the Elysian Fields’ to hang above the fireplace in what was once her dining room. It seems a small recompense after all these years.

But what was the wealthy English lady, Charlotte Wyllie, doing in Aberystwyth? The answer lies in the Cambrian News report of her bequests after her death in 1909. She leaves the house and its contents (including books and paintings) to a Miss Mary Hughes, who had been her housekeeper/companion for more than twenty years. And Mary Hughes, it turns out, was the daughter of a farmer whose house is still a hundred yards down the road from here. So Mary Hughes, Welsh to the core, persuaded her artistic mistress to move to Wales to build her retirement house on land that once belonged to her parents. A win all round.

After the death of her mistress, Miss Hughes soon became Mrs Griffiths and advertised for servants to work in her ‘small flat’ in London. Mary was a Cardi entrepreneur, one of the few who escaped from domestic drudgery, thanks to female friendship.

But let’s return to the box which arrived yesterday: inside are twenty-four brittle, sepia-coloured copies of a women’s magazine called Y Gymraes (The Welshwoman), dated between 1896 and 1929. Each copy has ‘Miss Lloyd, Corner House’ scrawled in pencil on the front cover. A friend of mine from Aber-porth found them in the attic and sent them to me, knowing my interest in Welsh women’s history. I have no idea yet who Miss Lloyd was but the National Library will lead me to her sooner or later, I’m sure.

So, in 1908, just as Charlotte Wyllie sits gazing out at her newly-planted magnolia, and Mary Hughes is busy with her embroidery, Miss Lloyd – let’s call her Catrin – returns from the infants’ school where she works, makes herself a pot of tea, and sits down to read her favourite monthly magazine from cover to cover. On that cover a Welshwoman in a tall hat, shawl, and apron, sits knitting in front of a small cottage, with a steep, rocky slope of a mountain in the background. Inside, the big topics are Temperance and Religious Revival.

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The illustrations within, though, have a definite Arts and Crafts style, and the many languid female figures could easily be mistaken for Lizzie Siddal or Christina Rossetti. Catrin Lloyd prefers the intellectual to the pragmatic contents – an essay on Emerson’s conception of friendship, rather than the recipe for getting rid of warts. She also enjoys the poetry, especially the one by Awen Mona about lost love, which she reads more than once.

Still, Miss Lloyd is a feminist, even if she would balk at the label. This is the Welsh feminist journal of the age, highlighting active, campaigning women as role-models for its readers: temperance activists, writers, nurses, and teachers like Miss Lloyd herself. Their photographs are stern and impressive. Y Gymraes leaves you in no doubt that Temperance was a feminist movement in Wales – arguably more important than suffrage, it was all about women leading the way, and trying to make sure that men followed.

And so, Miss Lloyd, Mrs Wyllie, and Miss Hughes carry on drinking their tea. Only in the tiny print of obituaries and small ads in the local paper are their lives recorded. But they left traces for us to follow. A painting from the 1880s by a forgotten artist, a collection of dusty Welsh women’s magazines, with a repeated name. Mrs Wyllie, Miss Hughes, and Miss Lloyd, grandmother ghosts still flitting under the magnolia.

Katie Gramich, Aberystwyth

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19 1. I felt it when she left. The sky shifted. I don’t know how else to describe it.

2. I dreamt that we bumped into each other, out shopping.

3. I dreamt that she was living somewhere new, in a flat of her own.

4. I dreamt that I saw her at a train station, darting in and out of waiting rooms, searching for her mother.

5. For three days after she died, I stayed in bed. The new year arrived.

6. When she was fading, she rebuked the doctor who spoke as if she was already dead.

7. I am here, you know.

8. New years keep arriving.

9. She said: I’ve had to let go of a lot.

10. Sometimes, I think a version of me is still in that bed.

11. I dreamt that she was finding a dress for my graduation. Somebody took it from the rail, and wouldn’t make a trade. I woke up and knew: if that happened, I’d steal it.

12. A certainty (a rarity). I would steal it.

13. My iPhone collects images from when she was unwell, placing them alongside those from before.

14. A beautiful parataxis.

15. I dreamt that she walked down the stairs and curled into the dining room.

Bathed, wrapped in her dressing gown, smelling of her body lotion.

16. Surprised, she asked: how did you do it?

17. I dreamt that she was holding an open book. I read about well-worn floorboards creaking underfoot.

18. She told me not to cry.

19. We laughed and returned to the page.

Rosie Couch, Cardiff

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Evelyn Wolstenholme Lessons from his mantel Cardiff/swansea

The untouched glasses on the sideboard.

The scraps of paper with trivial handwritten scrawling’s.

The presence of the absent.

With a focus on materials and process, I create tactile pieces working with photography, performance and the found object, that explore the ideas surrounding ‘What Remains’, examining the ways in which we grieve through an anthropological and phenomenological lens.

Born out of my own experiences with processing death within a family home and the responses of society, or rather the lack of one, I aim to create a visual language for the grieving when words fail us. While simultaneously opening difficult conversations around experiences of grief and death, bringing about a deeper empathy and understanding within society, by creating settled social rituals that allow for poetic, real and honest outpourings of grief, away from stigma.

Much like grief, there is no ending to my work, as we learn to live and grow with it.

The thread of my work is never ending.

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13 Evelyn Wolstenholme

Charlotte Hubble bronze work Cardiff ‘hanging on the telephone’ The mobile phone being cast in bronze has in some ways immortalised the old model of phone at the same time as making it seem more ancient than it is. An object made of plastic and batteries has been turned to bronze using a lost wax casting method that dates back to ancient times. The piece speaks to the durability of these types of phones. For example when I uploaded a photo to Instagram, I received a comment: ‘still got two bars on the battery’.

The solidity and durability of these phones, and now this piece, serves as an allusive personal reference to the unchanging nature of being working class and not living materialistically, but rather practically. This particular phone model sparks nostalgia for many.

‘3 rings when yam home’ ‘3 rings when yam home’ is not only the title of this work, but they are also of great importance in my body of work. It’s something my late nan would always say to my mom, no matter the length of the journey: whether it was the 5 minute drive back from hers or if going on holidayand had landed safe in Spain. ‘Give us 3 rings when you’re home’ or ‘3 rings when you get there’ are instructions to call to let the person know that you got somewhere. The ‘yam’ in place of ‘your’ is a (probably obvious) nod to being from the Black Country, Dudley - home to an unmistakable accent. I have changed the meaning of ‘rings’ from the ‘ringing’ on a telephone to being actual rings. I enjoy the shifting meanings.

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Sodade In different cultures and the artistic emanations of these, notions of memory and/or memories have various significance and value. It is compelling to look at the different expressions and semiotic utterances which refer to the very act of remembering through artistic creations. Remembering and forgetting are both simultaneously individual and collective social phenomenon that can be performed through artistic means or expressions.

‘La madeleine de Proust’1 is not a delicious cake invented by the French writer of the 20th century, but a whole concept in French culture and language. This expression refers to a sudden childhood memory triggered by a particular experience of a sense, here the taste of the madeleine and tea. Imagine, there was this pudding you were only allowed as a child, when you were visiting your favourite auntie, because she used to make it especially for you and knew you would devore it as quick as lightning. One day, years later, you are having a joyful lunch with your family, bring a fork to your mouth and suddenly the memories associated with the pudding are thrown back to your face. The memory is triggered by senses in the experience of the real. Proust’s madeleine is actually more than a memory, it is a reminiscence, a memory that one does not identify as such but inhabit oneself for an instant. Remembering is giving ourselves a history, anchoring ourselves in our present, through our past. The taste of the cake is bringing us back through nostalgia, which paint the past with beautiful colours, to a time that seemed simpler, sweeter and easier. This moment links our minds to the present, comforting us that our existence has a linear flow constantly going forward. This is at an individual level, but a shared and collective experience can also be triggered with the sense stimulated by music.

Cesaria Evora sings the feeling of longing of the small country of Cape Verde, with transporting melodies and lyrics. Often considered as a very melancholic genre narrating poverty and deep sadness, the ‘morna’ is the traditional style of music of Cape Verde, made internationally famous with Evora’s talent. In reality, according to Maliesky (1996)2 this is a misconception, the ‘morna’ is all about Cape Verde; the nation itself. Historically, Cape Verde was a colony of Portugal, suffering from poverty and the dictatorship of Salazar, most of its population had to leave to be able to provide for their families staying in the country. ‘Sodade’ by Evora, is about this story and nostalgia of the small country, and the forced emigration. For Maliesky, who studies the history of Cape Verde and the link with music, the nation is made within the work of memorialising. Art in this case, can help to create a collective memory, that seems to secretly links all its members together. In another dimension this echoes the notion of ‘hiraeth’ in Wales, and how art can be a way to actively remember and trigger memories potentially for the audiences.

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Having to leave, without being given the choice to, tears apart an individual between their lives abandoned and their new horizons. In this gap between the two parts of themselves, the ‘hiraeth’ or ‘sodade’ is finding its way, filling the gap. When looking back at the past and the life that used to be familiar and natural this feeling of sodade will accompanied any thoughts.

The action of remembering and the memory is the link between our past self and present self, aiming to create a linearity in our own history. Giving it a meaning, and organised sense. The notions of ‘sodade’ and ‘hiraeth’ I believe, are individual experiences but collectively shared.

A particular membership to a community is created through the art and the shared feelings triggered in the loss of the country.

These two examples could be expanded and explored more in-depth, but they show how arts and memories interact through different processes and channels. They also bring the mind and body closer together and make a point for the role of the senses in this experience. The comfort and emotions given by the madeleine or the music gives us a sense of self undeniably coloured by nostalgia running through our veins.

Eve Ruet, Cardiff

Proust. M (1913). Du côté de chez Swann. Grasset Maliesky, D. 1996. 12. Cesaria Evora : l’ambassadrice aux pieds nus. In Darré, A. (Ed.), Musique et politique : Les répertoires de l'identité. Presses universitaires de Rennes. doi :10.4000/books. pur.24580 1 2

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Andrew Webster ‘Vanita’ Camarthen

During the Dutch ‘Golden Age’ ( c 1588 – 1672) a genre of painting rose to prominence within the still life tradition. The Vanitas painting incorporated symbolic representations of the pleasures and indulgences of life, juxtaposing them among elements which remind the viewer of their unavoidable mortality.

These photographs are part of a contemporary Vanitas series, concerned with current and recent events along with the photographer’s preoccupations. The objects are garnered from significant personal possessions which, although particular to the artist, can sustain a range of individual interpretations.

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Elena Grace Teimlad cyfarwydd oil on canvas Cardiff

Elena’s work explores grief and loss in the preservation of memories. Through their painting they contemplate the absence of interior spaces. Additionally, they question the nostalgic value of inanimate things such as furniture and personal possessions.

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Other towns Other towns may build bridges Cobbled streets leading to boat-lined docks Workers with arm hair finer than horse tail Hotel chains where tourists sleep well In the fantasies they’ve allowed to be sold to them Other towns have gastro pubs, resourceful youth centres, communities Names that English tongues can pronounce with ease Some of them even have bookshops This town breaks everything.

This town broke me in the park near my parent’s house was the first time I accepted defeat as a child.

It was a hot day I was sweating hard.

Other towns have LED streetlights These nights are sepia each night we are walking through the past I had my first cigarette crouched against the wall in the back alley behind the house of an older girl She wore skinny jeans she bought from a shop in the city and We could probably see the city from our town’s highest hill Probably walk there if weren’t for the bear traps Lining the railway tracks.

And she had racoon hair that I thought was finer Than any man’s horse tail arms but I think I was wrong.

And we stood on the town’s highest hill Which was the hill closest to our houses so we weren’t late for curfew And our lips tasted like her older brother’s body spray We stood on our tiptoes and tried to look across the peninsula.

Other towns are better to sleep in.

They have the same brands of hotels but the sleep is always just better.

I can’t remember the last time I had a good night’s sleep.

I now think it’s because I never left this town, not really.

It broke me in like a pony, like a new pillow.

Joshua Jones, Cardiff

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Brecon Jazz: Twenty Five Years Brecon Jazz, Twenty five years Whats that, nineteen eighty four When I was twenty six And dad was still listening To the Dave Brubeck Quartet Of a style fashion and what hasn’t been played, yet Just around the corner from Mainstream In perimeter set, of which, in time, becomes more downtown.

Like the waves of the sea, it is, From calm to rough and choppy, around To more evening sunset smooth, In pleasant drift accordingly; Mood or in the groove, away past midnight Young and old; panama hats that stay For the duration, and Bars, not smoky anymore But just the same, filled with all emotion And where do I belong, in all this razzmatazz; Well I guess I’m like the sea, just as it plays Without generation, but just to watch and listen On this music as it sprays.

And somewhere further out, maybe to be soaked.

It isn’t what anyone else thinks about, In atmosphere, this jazz is to experience, that is all Where it hits upon this spotless moment Perhaps to move or shift this inner arrangement And in another twenty five, of course There will be a different note, But this chord will remain the same.

Rob Baldwin, Brecon

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Christopher Meredith Co-editor Martha joined Chris at his home in Brecon to discuss his novels and poetry and their relationship with this issue’s nawr theme, cofio/anghofio.

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hristopher Meredith is a novelist, poet and translator originally from Tredegar. His literary prizes include an Eric Gregory Award, the Arts Council of Wales Young Writer Prize and the Fiction Prize for his first novel, Shifts, which is regarded as a contemporary classic. In 2014 Shifts was shortlisted for the title of ‘Greatest Welsh Novel of All Time’ by Wales Arts Review. His historical novel Griffri was shortlisted for the Welsh Book of the Year Award and his poetry collection The Meaning of Flight was longlisted for the Welsh Book of the Year Prize 2006. Christopher’s work is well-studied in the field of Welsh writing in English, and he has given talks and lectures all over Britain; he is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of South Wales. In April 2021 he published his latest novel, Please, and poetry collection, Still, on the same day.

M: You’ve written novels, poetry collections, short story collections; for the benefit of our readers, I wanted to ask you to a little about your process, your work now and your journey into writing. How did you get started and end up where you are, with all of these different forms and genres?

quick. With reading, as with writing, there’s an intense sense of closeness with it that engaged me. Sometimes an intense sense of privacy, I think, when you’re reading on your own. An intimacy, if you like, with the words on the page, whether you’re reading them or writing them. And sensuousness. They’re things, they’re objects, and there’s something C: Well that just about covers everything. innately creative about making signs into When people ask me that question, I often pictures in your head. They’re of a piece with quote something that P.G. Wodehouse said. the imagination you had as a child.

‘I started writing when I was five. I don’t know what I was doing before that; loafing I I was interested in visual art as well. In suppose’. It wasn’t quite like that, but at the university, I did visual art in the first year as age of about nine or ten in junior school, I can well as other subjects. So my interests fell remember Mr David Davies in Standard Two wider than writing, but I always felt that I was giving us a course book called something like a writer, even when I wasn’t writing anything.

Good English Prose. I can’t remember if it I wrote some songs when I was in my late was any good as a book, but I got it straight teens but I also wrote some very bad poetry, away: that language was stuff that you could almost as bad as the songs, but I was always shape and make into something good. aware that they were two different things, the two categories. The songs were much more He asked us to stand up in turn and describe of a communal act with some friends. When something; just talk about it. It was something I got to about eighteen or nineteen, in the way that I probably already knew, I was probably you do when you’re that age, I had a sudden already engaged with it, the “thinginess” of intuition. Poetry was dead and it was all to do language. The plasticity of it. The fact that with prose and I should write fiction. I think I you can mould it and it will let you do some read some of James Joyce’s prose and decided, things and not others.

‘Wow! That’s the end of poetry!’. And so I grandly abandoned poetry for a bit, but then, An awareness of engagement with writing later it came back - especially when I had to started there, but of course it goes back to teach it, when I became a schoolteacher. It reading as well. I think writing starts with made me read poetry with an intensity that I reading. I can’t remember a time when I hadn’t done for some time before that and that didn’t love reading. I wasn’t a big reader as a took me back to it. kid, and I don’t think I was a particularly good reader as a small child. I don’t think I was So, from then on, I’ve always written poetry 27

and fiction and never really made much that I decided to be a Welsh writer. I think distinction between the two as far as their it’s possible for some people to do that, to be significance, or even to some extent, the elective about it, but it wasn’t for me. process of them, are concerned.

I’m particularly interested, alongside Your works are very distinctively Welsh Welshness, in our theme for this issue have you always written that because you ‘cofio/anghofio’. It’s a theme that seems to are Welsh and it’s something you know, or be everywhere in your work once you start was it a conscious decision? At what point looking for it: you’ve even written a historical did you become a Welsh writer? novel, Griffri. Is this a conscious decision on your part? There seems to be a grappling I didn’t put it on like a coat. Not at all. It’s with the movement of time in your poetry always been there, even though I’m from collections, particularly Air Histories and southeast Wales, in what was the oldStill. Are you interested in memory or does it fashioned Monmouthshire - Tredegar is in seem to bleed through subconsciously? the old-fashioned Monmouthshire, Blaenau Gwent nowadays - which was conventionally You know Christopher Lee, the Dracula actor? regarded as pretty Anglicised. It was largely When he was an old man BAFTA gave him a linguistically Anglicised, yes, but in every Lifetime Achievement Award. He walked out other way not, I realise now. When you’re on stage to talk and he said, ‘Thank you for a kid, you don’t really think of yourself as this, I’m very interested to find out what I’m belonging to a particular group. I didn’t going to say’. And I feel a bit like that when realise I was working class, I didn’t realise I I’m writing. I’m very interested to find out was Welsh. I didn’t particularly realise I was what I’m going to write. a snotty-nosed teenager either. You don’t see yourself as those things at those stages in your It’s not entirely, but it’s partly a process of life. It’s only later than you can see yourself discovery. Partly discovery, partly invention, and partly intention. You may set out thinking, in a context.

‘In work X I am going to achieve Y’. But But I was Welsh, and so it’s bound to emerge actually, it goes back to the thinginess of that way. I don’t know if it would’ve been language. You have to find out what the dishonest exactly, but it would’ve been material permits, what it’s happy with. And odd to have done other stuff. When I was a these things emerge. I think themes partly schoolteacher, I used to find it strange that emerge, and then when you begin to see them children would write what they read rather emerging when you’re redrafting, you’re than what they experienced. There used to be more consciously working the material. It’s a a series of books for girls called Sweet Valley negotiation between some strategic bit of your High, American books for kids. I remember brain that’s good at manipulating this stuff and girls of eleven, twelve, thirteen in secondary an innocence about the material that emerges school, would write school stories and they’d and staying faithful to it somehow. be Sweet Valley High stories. They’d start off, ‘Stacy was an antsy kid in the third grade’ - As far as ideas to do with memory are and these were schoolchildren in mid-Wales. concerned, you mentioned Griffri and it’s But you know, you absorb these worlds out particularly significant in that novel, I think. of the literature around you and I dare say I It’s a first-person novel, which some people probably did a bit of that in some of the stuff think of as a very simple way of structuring a novel, like Robinson Crusoe. You think of early I did as a kid, but it falls away. It’s superficial. novels written in that form, bildungsroman It’s not so much that I write about Wales, or stuff. But I think it’s a difficult form, because you’re attempting to shoot the whole film with nawr

one camera, with one viewpoint. For that reason, it’s technically interesting to do. How do you do it? How do you get the characters to see everything that’s going on? In Griffri, the narrator’s talking to another character, who we never meet, on two different occasions twelve years apart from one another. He slips into telling the story of his life to this man, so clearly memory is at the centre of it.

gwall means a fault. Memory-fault. A loss of a grip on yourself is implied in the idea of gwallgofrwydd. So Griffri is supposed to be the memory of himself and the idea of selfhood in this group of people, and Meilyr is kind of the nightmare reversal of that. As a poet, Griffri invents, but he also is a medium for memory. So the book became partly about the relationship between memory and imagination, and how the two are a large part In his role as a court poet in medieval Wales, of what we are. he’s the man who keeps the list of genealogies for the prince and recites them. He’s the It’s existential in the sense that it’s about the memory of the people, the remembrancer. substance of us and how happy or unhappy we He represents a certain kind of formal are with that. When Griffri encounters Meilyr remembering, and revering, and containing he’s appalled, not because Meilyr is appalling, in a social sense. Those men would recite but because it suggests things about himself genealogies from whoever their current prince and the world be that he’s unwilling to face. was to Adam. They literally had a list that went back to Adam, and they’d memorise this That’s one example but in other things it works stuff. Memory there is to do with the identity in different ways. There’s also the whole technical thing with Griffri remembering of a group. his life, and there’s a certain amount of But also, for the individual, the poet telling artificiality in that, as there always is in works the story, it’s about him. And memory is of art. He remembers his life in improbable inseparable from the idea of self; it’s part of detail sometimes, and he also talks for an what we are. If you don’t have a memory, in awful long time. There’s a willing journey in what sense do you have an identity? You kind the imagination of the reader that involves a of have a present, but with no memory some certain sleight of hand. large part of yourself is gone. There’s another character in the novel who’s a madman. He’s one of the characters in the book who draws on a real person. There was a real Meilyr who’s mentioned in Giraldus Cambrensis’s Journey through Wales. This madman from When you’re a kid, the southeast, where Griffri is from, has an you don’t really encounter with a succubus, goes crazy, and he’s taken off to St. David’s, to west Wales, think of yourself and the monks there help him to recover and then they bring him back. He can tell the as belonging to a future, and he’s revered, and Giraldus rather funnily says that he could read books even particular group. I though he was illiterate.

“

In the novel he actually looks like Griffri.

They’re kinds of twins, but Meilyr is a nightmare mirror image of Griffri.

Something which struck me was the Welsh word for mad is gwallgof. Cof is memory,

didn’t realise I was working class, I didn’t realise I was Welsh.

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If you’re writing about people, how do you not involve memory? I was thinking about this theme before you came, and it occurred to me that essentially memories are about the present. You have the memory now. It’s a memory of the past but it’s something that’s happening to you now, when you remember it. There’s some kind of presence - it’s got the idea of present in it, in memory. There’s the idea of a haunting: the ghost is there now.

I think that happens in Still - for example in ‘Air Camera’, there’s the process of making a memory by reflecting on the present and choosing what you’ll remember. Even in Shifts, for another example, Keith is so interested in local history that he’s not looking at the present, at history being made in the closure of the steelworks.

There’s an interesting act of choosing that goes on there.

Yeah, that’s an interesting example of how things emerge. At the start of Shifts, as I was writing all those years ago, I just saw this man, Keith, with glasses. Near the start of the novel we see him wandering around; he’s preparing a talk for the local history group. He’s trying to imagine what places would’ve looked like in the past. So he tries to unsee, if you like, bits of the buildings and landscapes and then fade in what would’ve been there a hundred and fifty, a hundred and eighty years before.

So he takes his glasses off, because he’s a bit short-sighted, and the picture blurs, so he can see the history better. When I set out with that I didn’t think, ‘Oh, if I give him some glasses now I’ll be able to do this clever trick where he takes his glasses off’. It wasn’t mechanical like that; the image as it emerged in language enabled the metaphor.

He gets enmeshed in detail all the time.

I’m very wary of generalisation. It’s very easy to make sweeping generalisations. The world is composed of detail - but, if you can’t generalise then you live in a, to pick a phrase from another poem, a world of ‘mad particularity’ [‘What Flight Meant’]. Things come apart because of the amount of detail in them. And Keith is looking for a way of nawr

seeing that demands that he’s able to get rid of some detail in order to get that. And he sort of does by the end of the novel. When he looks at the steel mill at its death, it becomes a symbol for the historical process which has been puzzling him all the way through. He sees history as being like a blind mill that rends material through it. I don’t necessarily agree with that view of history, but the point is that he arrives at a vision of what the historical process might be which he didn’t have at the start of the book. He intuits something about the way the world may change and how forces may operate in the world which he doesn’t have at the beginning. He achieves a moment of insight.

“

I think that there’s The big parades a sense there of him witnessing Event, with a Something in m capital E, and that also happens in Sidereal like that. I’m pu Time. Sarah’s very anxious about event the relationship versus process and how individual exper she can find event in process. And again, in historical proce Brief Lives, your short story collection, we see a lot of the time these ordinary lives of the world see through time. There are big things going on bearing on wha in the background, but there’s this sense that until suddenly t time is marked through ordinary people’s lives.

Do you think there’s something political to that, where history and memory is more individual than the grand narratives we’re familiar with?

I’ve said this before in an interview: I’m very suspicious of big parades. The big parades of history. Something in me doesn’t like that. I’m puzzled by the relationship between individual experience and historical processes, because a lot of the time the big events of the world seem to have no bearing on what we’re doing, until suddenly they do.

There’s a poem in Air Histories called ‘The Record Keepers’ which is about an extraordinary sentence in the medieval Welsh chronicle Brut y Tywysogyon. The chronicles are great things. Some of the material for Griffri came out of that. Give a date, say, 1132 - in that year, there was a plague of frogs. No more explanation. 1137 - in that year, so and so killed such and such, and such and such happened. You get this fragment of a political story. But there’s one astonishing entry in Brut y Tywysogyon, and it says something like ‘for four years, there was no history worth recording’; for four years History stops. And when Henry I dies, history is kickstarted into action again. Of course, it didn’t stop. The poem is about that idea that history s of history. goes on in the interstices of these supposed key me doesn’t moments.

uzzled by p between rience and esses, because e the big events em to have no at we’re doing, they do.

We’ve talked about that sleight of hand that happens when Griffri tells us about his life, but in your most recent novel, Please, I think the opposite thing happens.

We’re so conscious that Vernon is recalling things; he even forgets that he’s recalling things and interrupts his own memories with other, irrelevant memories. He seems to be stressed, he doesn’t seem to know which bit is the bit that he should remember.

It’s also very much the case that language gets in the way. The odd thing about that book compared to any of the others is that it literally started with having the first sentence in my head. ‘Punctuation killed my wife’. I don’t know where that sentence came from. It was putting odd words together and seeing what happens, because then sparks fly. The entire narrative unpacks from that sentence. So in that sense, the story has a kind of relentless logic.

It puts language on the agenda immediately.

The “thinginess” of language was there right at the start.

Vernon is very erudite. He knows lots about language and is constantly wrestling it to the floor like a cowboy wrestling a calf, saying, “Do what I want you to do!” And it won’t. It keeps rebelling. The absurdity of the struggle with language is absolutely at the heart of Please; and memory too, of course, because Vernon is 80-odd. It’s quite nice to have him forget some things. He can never remember the name of his wife’s best friend. His repeated memory failure becomes a refrain in the first section.

But it comes from that first sentence. I didn’t know it was going to end where it did. A writer friend of mine who I respect a lot, looked at me and said, “Come on, you had a plan”, but the entire story emerged out of the material.

I wasn’t entirely surprised when I got to the last few pages, but I didn’t know it was going there until well into the book.

Formally, it’s not a complicated book. It’s one voice, three sections. The parts get less generalising and more specific as it goes on. There are more generalised scenes at the beginning; Vernon’s mind flits about a bit more, and he covers a longer period in that first section. The second section is essentially one scene with some moments from the past interpolated into it. And the third one, similarly, is one scene with one or two scenes interpolated into it from the past. It becomes more distilled, I think, as it goes on. Structurally it gets more complex than it seems at first, as we not only have Vernon remembering, but also remembering remembering. But the focus tightens. It plays partly on an idea that comes up in Griffri, I think. There are a couple of moments in Griffri where Griffri asks, is something important because we remember it, or do we remember a thing because it’s important? I think both those things are possible, but it’s significant.

If things are important because we remember them, then there’s a kind of arbitrariness 31

to life. But if we remember things because they’re important, there’s a sense that life is somehow less arbitrary. This moment that is happening to us now is vital and essential. It means that that moment has significance. Well if you just happen to remember, I don’t know, a child’s glove stuck on a railing in Narberth four years ago for no reason at all, there’s a randomness to that.

There’s Freud’s screen memory theory isn’t there - that we actually remember random details because something more dramatic happened to us then that makes us remember it. I think that links back to this idea that we are just made up of memories, that we’re just accumulations of experience.

I think sometimes it could well be a screen memory, but maybe you just remember the glove. I think the idea that things become significant because we happen to remember them is powerful too. It’s not to belittle that idea, but it draws on a rather bleaker view of life. If you remember things because they’re significant, it suggests that the ‘now’ of life has more important moments. In that sense it seems more purposeful. But if you randomly happen to remember something, it’s not to say that image can’t have power, but life is a bleaker thing. It matters less.

Do you think that this idea of nowness, past/ present/now/then, the way memories happen in the present, do you think this connects to this wider theme of ‘borders’, like, for example in your poem ‘Borderlands’, where edges make meaning happen. Do we need an ‘edge’ to the ‘now’ for us to process it?

I don’t know if the idea of a border is all that important with memory. I mean clearly, in order to function you need to know what’s happening now and what’s going on in your memory. A lot of the comedy in fiction generally, certainly in my writing, is in the way what’s going on in a character’s head plays with or against the moment that they’re living through. In order to function, you need to be able to keep that distinction. nawr

I feel I’m in danger of starting to overgeneralise now. In Brief Lives, there’s a story, ‘The Cavalry’, which I particularly like. It’s a Christmas story and has three points of view.

It’s about two little boys and their mother on a Christmas morning around 1960, 61. In the story there’s a mother, and two little boys, one is barely more than a toddler. The father appears in the evening right at the end of the story. Between, there’s an older man who the mother goes to visit. She walks the two little boys to this poor old man living on his own with a couple of pathetic Christmas presents.

It’s about these two little boys meeting the old man in this strange encounter. It’s a threeact drama in miniature: there’s the family at home on their own at the start, then the mother takes the two little boys to see the old man in the middle, then there’s the scene of the family at home again in the evening. But the perceptions and inner lives of the mother, the older little boy and the father, and the suggestions of the memories of the old man from the older child’s perception of him and his strange home dominate the piece.

From the older boy, we get a very intense engagement with the now of the Christmas morning. They’ve never had electric lights on their Christmas tree before, it’s just the beginning of ordinary people having lights on the Christmas trees; having a fire lit in a room where they never have a fire except at Christmas. He perceives the little toy soldiers that he’s got in intense detail. So it’s a very particular engagement with the now, the absolute marvelousness of all of this ordinary stuff.

The mother’s much more interested in the processes of the day. She’s thinking, “got to go get the dinner done and I want to go and see old Bert. The two boys, I’ve got to get them ready”. She’s engaged with the now in a different way, in a way of keeping it going. It’s a little bit like Sidereal Time, with Sarah being constantly worried about planning and what she has to do next and what she did yesterdayand losing sight of now. But ultimately the mother in ‘The Cavalry’ and more obviously

the father later on are haunted by memory and we should question. Maybe that’s a very Welsh a sense of mortality immanent in their ‘now’ thing, arguing about it. I think we should be in a way that it can’t yet be for the child. suspicious of the ideas about ourselves that we cherish.

I’m thinking about that Welshness again, now that you’re talking about things. There’s We’ve talked a lot about the past, so I just that trope of Wales being ‘brutal with relics’ want to finish on the note of the future. Is as R.S. Thomas puts it. There’s this idea of there anything that our readers can look out the Welsh landscape being imbued with for from you? culture, memory, hiraeth - I can see you rolling your eyes at that word! Do you think On the grounds that two books came out last it holds back a certain progression in Wales year you may have to wait a bit. I can say that to be, as RS Thomas says, ‘worrying the Shifts will be reprinted in the Library of Wales carcase of an old song’? His poetry asks, series, so that’ll be exciting to see it in a new why are we obsessed with the past in Wales? cover, a new edition and a new typeset.

I don’t know whether he believed that or not. I think as with his religious poetry, R.S Thomas was interested in testing his own his own feelings to destruction, you know? I don’t know if we are ‘worrying the carcase of an old song’. I’m deeply suspicious of these images we have about ourselves, when people say, ‘We have a great sense of community here, we are a community’. I don’t know; I mean, communities tend to be full of people arguing with one another. People airbrush that out when they say ‘we are a community’.

Find out more You can buy Christopher Meredith’s books from Seren Books, The Welsh Book Council, or your local bookshop.

I think nostalgia is an interesting word. Vernon picks this up; the ‘algia’ bit means pain. So it’s about home pain.

Which is kind of what hiraeth is about.

Yeah. I don’t know the roots of the word hiraeth – a word I’ve come to hate when used in English - but once you’ve got the word pain in there, as Vernon says, nostalgia is a much flintier a word. The word nostalgia sounds squashy, but actually the pain of homecoming - there’s a spikiness to it that I rather like.

So there’s no uniqueness to the Welsh nostalgia?

I don’t know; what are we nostalgic for? The qualities that we flatter ourselves with, like being warm, literary, liking song, rugby and Mam and all of that? They’re the very things 33

Rachel Verner W.E. Best Eight net curtains which belonged to my late Grandfather, on each of them the contents of a draw containing his personal belongings have been printed.

Exploring the fragmentation of memory through the physicality of found objects, my work has become an archive of my family history. Due to the archival nature of my work, I replicate ways of preserving my objects through the attentiveness of their presentation. Print allows me to produce this repetition of images creating a conversation between the idea of recalling memories and the uniformity present in my display. Through this process of recollection of the past, my work touches on themes of sentimentality, family and wistfulness, creating a sense of intimacy. While the physical contents I explore hold personal significance, the subject matters I address are universally experienced. My work intents to provoke this emotional participation from the audience surrounding the viewer’s own relationship to these themes.

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Part Dust, Part Deity This past is part dust, part deity: a residue and a stubborn abstraction. It was conjured before me by a boring and reactionary article on why the 90s were in fact a – or was it the? – Golden Age after all. I was 5 when the 90s ended, so it is to me a time of formative and impressionistic memories of a large post-industrial Welsh town, Merthyr. Memories defined enough to be certain, but too green to have been forced into the mind’s rigid mould.

Wales is a hiraeth-addled country, and most reminiscences of the past succumb either to benign and timeless nostalgia or relentless gloom. But hiraethism is not inevitable, and I now find myself at an age when my earliest memories are discussed and picked apart as the past in a definite sense, a change that seems to have come about suddenly but irretrievably. The eulogising only begins in earnest when the subject is truly dead. I must now look at the 90s as though it were a static object in the distance, no longer a clear road to where I am now.

Other than feeling a bit old, I have some things I need to say before they too fade into generalisation. I come at this without hiraeth, and must strike while the iron is hot, as hiraeth has claimed even the most resolute among us.

Merthyr in the 90s was the end of a world. There was no Nando’s then. In fact, where there is now a Nando’s there was a field, where I ran and ran. There was no retail park either: that was waste ground, occupied by weeds and an old industrial unit. Where Trago Mills is there was more waste ground, a huge expanse of old spoil heaps and the foundations of the old brickworks. The town hall was empty too, having most recently been – unbelievably now – a nightclub. What I am saying is that there was a joyful dilapidation – joyful because to my young mind these were places to explore and romanticise, like all ruins. But the memories of these ruins confound me now, because although they suggest hardship and misery, what I most remember a sense of ease and contentment when I think of the people around me then.

I see that I risk sounding nostalgic here – as though everything was better then. It wasn’t. I grew up in a working class environment, and most of us did not have much money. It would have been better had neglect of my post-industrial town not created made those ruins in the first place. But I do remember how busy the town was, how full of people. This was before we had computers, and before most people had a mobile phone, and to get something, or to get something done, you had to go to town in most cases. There was simply more… ymwneud.

The Welsh word fits better here: it means ‘having to do with’, but not needing a specific object The general condition or state of having to do with others. This is not about the fate of the high nawr

street, however; Merthyr in the 90s was in certain senses poorer, and much less polished, but it. was more alive in a visceral, immediate sense. Late capitalism hadn’t quite arrived and smothered the memories of working-class solidarity and collective power that were still tangible, with the last mines and steelworks having been only fairly recently closed down. That world really is the past now, and I think my generation was the last to glimpse it before it became a ghost.

What ended in the 90s here, then? A certain kind of working-class experience, and the last gasp of an analogue world. But also a certain Merthyr that’s difficult for those who came later to get a feel for. The hiraeth-laden moment is upon me as I see and hear this past invoked and eulogised, but I will let it pass in a sort of cultural mindfulness. Let others invoke it and reminisce. The past is truly the past when it comes back at you as a gaudy re-enactment, cool by its distance. A nice face over a mute void.

Wales, often preoccupied by the past, sometimes lets the present flit by. But we are not the passive subjects of history. When the Merthyr of my childhood breaks my mind’s surface, I won’t plunge my hand to grasp at it: I will trust instead that it is within me – that it is me.

Nothing but this present-mindedness can make sense of memory.

Morgan Owen, Merthyr/Cardiff

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Non Charles ‘Suffocation’ Cardiff

I am a Wales-based creative currently studying Fine Art in my final year at Cardiff Metropolitan University. Through the medium of tufting and ‘painting with yarn’, my work explores the processing of memories of loss, failure, and suppressed trauma in relation to my queer identity. Addressing the struggle of living honestly surrounded by the hauntings of suppressed memories, and the subsequent impact this causes on my perception of the world, alongside the feeling of being constantly watched by the people of my past.

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BETH SY’N DIGWYDD?: Aquamarine Walls Watched Me Live

by MILLIE BETHEL, Culture Writer, Tredegar

T

rying to move away has been harder than I’d thought. Suddenly afraid I’ll forget, I’m hypersensitized to the home around me. All the small quirks are new again and background noise is replaced by lustre. They are a companion to which my life has spiralled over and over again since I was a tiny baby brought home without a middle name.

In parts of the house the decoration has stayed the same. Lime and aquamarine walls meet true 90’s wallpaper. Complete with embossed Chinese symbols, they wink at me as I pass on the stairs. And I know the sound of every step, a well-rehearsed creak as worn carpet meets old floorboards one, two, three, four—thirteen times. I corkscrew around my very own stairway to heaven.

And let’s not forget the arches and cupboards and little doors. Some of them lead nowhere whilst others hoard years of hand-me-down Pac A Macs, dusty wellies and fairy wings. In my room there used to be a little bookshelf which you could take out to access the attic alcove.

It’s gone now but I can still see the bumps of plaster where we filled it in. The skirting board doesn’t sit flush and I like to think of these as clues gifted to whoever lives here next.

I was sad to say goodbye to the little bookshelf but it was time for another home improvement.

Dad always knowing the solutions and me always happy to act as gofer, I would watch intently, forever fascinated by the process of fixing. Our soundtrack would be Chilli Peppers or Phonics, Kelly singing Caravan Holiday as we welded or grouted or painted. If I wasn’t allowed to help I’d watch. You standing on the Perspex roof ready to sweep off the moss: “I’d never do it now,” you say, “heights are a young man’s game.”

Sometimes, though, what was once fixed will be broken again. Several winters had made the decking sag, one side letting out a limp sigh whenever it was stepped upon. It was time for an overhaul, so you sawed a walkway where it bowed and got rid of the planks. Sitting underneath, a phrase was revealed– ‘7/7/07 Millie and Lucy’- we’d marked our presence in a cement signature, I don’t know for who to see.

If I could forget this small gesture for fourteen years and ten months, what else won’t I know I’ve left behind? Maybe that’s why leaving feels so hard. I want to remember everything we fixed—take the spirit of it with me to clad the new walls and floors. Eventually, I’ll know the place and I’ll call some of its stories my own. The creaks will be familiar, there’ll be a photo of us by the door. That still won’t change how I feel about home, though. I’ll always have aquamarine at my core.

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Catherine Yemm These are photographs that I took of my nan’s house after she passed away and before the house was sold. It was important to me that I captured the little things that I loved about her and her home because I knew that over time my memories would fade.

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Turbary Tithe Structured over slow distilling time bottled memories broken over brows of brown bellied hills torn open.

Sodden temples of past erected by hands.

Times threaded bones replicating fathers.

Centrally placed burial mounds, Axis Mundi binding digger and dug.

Offering back from oil black earth that which was laid as gift or store for harder days.

Lost to fragile landscapes or difficulty of memory, here sea urchin spiked grasses finger tidal winds, blackening inks of deep-sea, seep staining crusted clumps of singed scrub.

All life mirroring itself refracting in smoky seaweed sods licking ancient hands.

Horizon’s cold milking curdling elements of said, unsaid, lost and found, living and dead. *Turbary - A turbary right refers to the ancient right or easement to dig, cut and carry away turf on a bog located on another person’s land to use as fuel for one’s house Hugh Doyle, Llangeinor

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Liam Webb How To Pickle an Adder In 1983 when an inquisitive fisherman picked up a rock and threw it up the steeply-shelving beach at Cell Howell, he could never have dreamt that it would send shock waves across three continents.

How to Pickle an Adder is the retracing and reconstruction of Dyfed-Powys Police’s 1983 operation codenamed “Seal Bay”.

The operation is the story of one of the largest and most complex drug smuggling conspiracies seen in Britain. The smugglers built a high- tech cavern out of fiberglass under an inaccessible cove in North Pembrokeshire. Using the smuggling routes that generations have ran centuries before them, the smugglers intended on bringing in 3 tones of cannabis a week into the UK. Unbeknownst the nosiness of the locals were to spoil their plans.

How to Pickle an Adder has drawn influence from cinematic lighting and constructed landscape whilst also making visual reference to forensic photography and the infrared technologies used by the police force. The body of work presents itself as a crime story through a mix of photographs, text, and archival material forcing the viewer to navigate moments ranging from the vapid to the substantial, and to decipher clues as if at a real crime scene.

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Liam Webb Edited by Anna Bland and Martha O’Brien. Designed by Anja Quinn.

All work is copyrighted to the author or artist. © nawr mag 2022 www.nawrmag.wordpress.com | @nawrmag