May 2021’s online live event brought together two writers whose books are rooted in the Midlands, Emma Purshouse and Lisa Blower. In conversation with author Kit de Waal, they discuss their latest novels Dogged and Pondweed, making space for more working-class writers and characters in contemporary fiction and capturing a variety of Midlands dialects on the page.
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/
Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Series 2, Episode 10: Lisa Blower and Emma Purshouse
Intro
Welcome to the second series of the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast. We are really excited to be back for a second season and to continue to connect readers and writers in the Midlands, and far beyond.
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
May 2021’s online live event brought together two writers whose books are rooted in the Midlands, Emma Purshouse and Lisa Blower. In conversation with author Kit de Waal, they discuss their latest novels Dogged and Pondweed, making space for more working-class writers and characters in contemporary fiction and capturing a variety of Midlands dialects on the page.
Kit de Waal
Hello, everyone, its my pleasure this evening to introduce you to two friends and two great writers, two great women, who both have books out - these two books - which we're going to hear a lot about this evening as well as more generally talking about accents, dialect and snobbery in literature, which obviously is one of my pet subjects. Just to introduce who we're talking about this evening, first of all, we've got Lisa Blower. Lisa is the author of the short story collection, It's Gone Dark Over Bill's Mother's which came out in 2019 and a contribution to Common People which was the anthology of working class writing that came out the same year. Her fiction has appeared in The Guardian, Comma Press anthologies, New Welsh Review, Luminary Short Stories Sunday on Radio 4 and her debut novel Sitting Ducks was shortlisted for the inaugural Arnold Bennett prize and longlisted for The Guardian Not the Booker prize. She's also a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Wolverhampton University. Emma Purshouse left school in the early 1980s at the age of 15. She's got an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Met and her passion is writing about working class communities she's lived in, often making use of Black Country dialect within her work. In 2017, she won the international Making Waves Spoken Word Poetry competition, she's also Poet Laureate in the city of Wolverhampton and she's also one of the writers in Common People, the anthology of working class writing, and she teaches poetry in schools and community groups. Hello, both of you. We've all got the short vowels tonight, which I'm very happy about it, so to speak to you, and speak to you about two very, very funny books. First of all, it's such a comfort to read these books, because it's about worlds that are so familiar to many of us. And I just want to talk to you, Emma, first about Dogged. And I don't believe I've ever read a book before that revolves around a win on the bingo, which I love. I mean, it's just so fantastic to read. In fact, you tell us, what is the book about and who are the main characters?
Emma Purshouse
Like you say, it's sort of about a bingo win initially and the two main characters are women in their late 70s. You got Nancy Maddox, and you've got Marilyn Grundy, and it's Marilyn who has this bingo win, but nobody's quite sure how much it's for. And really, the idea behind the book is about how Marilyn has to protect the bingo winnings. And then Nancy gets enlisted into this and it's the adventures they have as they try to protect the bingo winnings, which are stashed in a shopping trolley.
Kit de Waal
And so not only have you rooted it very much in the working class, but you've rooted it in an area, you've rooted it in the Black Country. How does the Black Country feature in this story and more generally, in your work?
Emma Purshouse
I think in this story, it's where it's set, but they're ingrained in the landscape. Everything's kind of, you can’t have one thing without the other. And when the dialect comes in, it's as much a part of it as the characters in the landscape. They say, write what you know, it's what I know. So that's why I've set it there. In my poetry, again, it's what I'm living in so I kind of want to respond and show people what it is and talk about it and share it because I love it.
Kit de Waal
What I think that does come through both of these books is a massive sense of pride and no apology about who we are and where we're from, there's a real sense of pride in this. Do you want to just read us a bit Emma.
Emma Purshouse
I’ll read the prologue which kind of introduces the two women really.
‘Nancy stands on the step. Her shoulders have been aching all night. Years of scrubbing quarry tiles up at the Dartmouth are taking their toll. She rolls her shoulders forward and twists her head to peer over towards her back. A lump has started to form under her overall. “Wot now? If it ay one thing, its summat else.” As she watches, the lump starts to bulge, move, and rupture the skin. She hears Mr. Maddox’s voice.
“If God’d uv meant uz to fly, e’d uv givun uz wings.”
The voice is accompanied by the sound of a trickle of whiskey being poured into a glass.
Her emerging wing - just the one - unfurls itself in a grand gesture and then flails against her back. It is large and black. It is oily, tarry, nicotine-stained, and the feathers are stuck together. It hangs like wet washing in a back yard on a windless day. “Sort of bost,” says Nancy. “Shit!” she thinks, as Marilyn comes out onto her step and waves. Nancy tries to wave back without showing her new wing.
“Is that…?” says Marilyn screwing up her orange lips into the shape of a cat’s arse.
“No!” says Nancy, cutting her off in mid question. “It ay!”. The conversation is ended.
“Bloody dreamin agen,” she thinks as she awakes.’
Kit de Waal
Oh, that's great, that's good. ...
