By Yong Shu Hoong

Agnes Meadows is a "well-travelled" writer in every sense of the word. Aside from making numerous trips all over the world as a tourist, the British writer has also participated in many international festivals as a featured poet – from Bangladesh and Taiwan, to the United States. Her visits to Iraq for the Babylon Festival of International Cultures and Arts in 2012, 2014 and 2016 form the basis for her seventh poetry collection, Back to Babylon (Palewell Press, 2019). The description of the book on her publisher's website reads, "From convivial jasmine-scented nights in the old city of Babil to the horror and grief at Al-Mawahil with its mass grave of 13,000 disappeared Iraqis, her writing takes the reader ever closer to life in this troubled region."

Meadows was a guest poet at the Austin International Poetry Festival in Texas for 10 consecutive years, twice winning awards for outstanding writing. She has also published an English-Chinese bilingual poetry collection, The Light on the Wall (Morgan's Eye Press, 2017), from which she read at the 2017 Formosa International Poetry Festival in Tamsui, located at the northern tip of Taiwan.

In London, where Meadows is based, she ran Loose Muse Women's Writers Night from 2004 to 2020, with regular satellite events elsewhere in England. She has guest-edited the Spring/Summer 2020 edition of the Atlanta Review, focusing on the work of poets living in or hailing from the regions of Cornwall and Wales. And as she continues work on her first novel, she engages in a different kind of travel – journeying back in time to the 12th century.

1. What are you reading right now?
Literally just finished a trilogy about William Marshal by Elizabeth Chadwick, and looking forward to reading her trilogy about Eleanor of Aquitaine. Have just started Big Sky by Kate Atkinson, a modern-day thriller, but finding it a bit verbose.

2. If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play or poem, who would you be and why?
The mother in Emma Donoghue's novel Room. The story is told from the perspective of a five-year-old boy, Jack, being held captive in a small room along with his mother. She shows amazing fortitude in keeping the boy healthy and happy, despite having been held captive for years by a perverted man using her for sex. It's an extraordinary tale with an extraordinary central character. I admire her strength, and her stoical belief that good can be created regardless of how bad reality is. I loved Emma's writing and the way she uses simple language to draw an extremely complex picture.

3. What's the greatest misconception about you?
That I'm incredibly confident, when I'm actually really quite shy, and insecure about my work.

4. Name 1 living author and 1 dead author you identify with.
Isla Dewar, a living Scottish author whose work I really admire for its fluidity and the strong characters of each of her contemporary novels. I aspire to write as well as her and to make the characters in my novel as robust and interesting.

John Steinbeck, the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, because of what he wrote about and the strength of the characters he created, all exceptionally robust, colourful and relevant to the times he was writing in. His work changed the way I looked at literature and strengthened my desire to become a writer.

5. Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
I have always said I don't believe in writer's block, just that the writer has run out of things to write about, or neglected to take their inspiration from the many, many extraordinary things around them. If you don't look, you don't see, and if you don't see, you don't exercise your creative imagination and translate those observations and emotions onto the page.

6. What qualities do you admire most in a writer?
a) The ability to stick at it – to write when you least feel like writing;
b) A good, broad vocabulary to paint your word pictures;
c) Sensitivity to the characters you are writing about;
d) Intense and thorough research, regardless of the genre.

7. What's the one trait you deplore most in writing or writers?
Over-research and over-wordiness, trying to prove to the reader how knowledgeable and educated they are, rather than just telling the story or painting an appropriate word picture in poetry, and lack of emotion in their writing.

8. Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
Favourite line is the opening line of Sorley MacLean's poem 'Hallaig' about the Highland Clearances (translated into English by him from his original Scottish Gaelic version – NOT the much inferior translation by Seamus Heaney). The first line actually embraces the first two stanzas of the poem, as follows:

"Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig"

The window is nailed and boarded
through which I saw the West
and my love is at the Burn of Hallaig,
a birch tree, and she has always been

between Inver and Milk Hollow,
here and there about Baile-chuiru:
she is a birch, a hazel,
a straight, slender young rowan.

Favourite advice from Raymond Chandler (and I paraphrase): "When the storyline flags, introduce a man with a gun" – or in my case a woman with a sword!

9. Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I…
was a historical re-enactor and, for years, a member of the Richard III Society, a society set up to underline the king's innocence in murdering his nephews.

10. At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, tragedy, or an action thriller to watch, what will you go for and why?
It depends entirely on my mood and what has been happening in my life. I enjoy all of these genres of films, and do not have a preference.

11. What is your most favourite word and least favourite word?
I believe all words are created equal, so I don't really have most/least favourite words. Having said that, I find certain swear words really offensive and don't ever use them in my work or in conversation. Also, certain modern words/phrases, eg. "minge". And I still don't understand what a "meme" is.

12. Write a rhyming couplet that includes the following three words: mood, room, plug.
Not the best I've ever produced, but here it is:

In writing mood, the room is still, the paper bare,
I un-plug the phone, take up my pen, and silently prepare.

Black ink pens (rather than biros), with red biros to make alterations as I go along, on a writer's pad. I always write long-hand on paper before typing up – I read (and I agree) that this is more conducive to the creative process as it engages more fully the creative part of your brain. I then edit/revise the typed-up versions as I go along.

14. What is the best time of day for writing?
For me it's always mid-afternoon onwards. I find it really hard to write in the morning – I'm not really awake until lunch time.

15. If you had a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree and why?
Josephine Tey – a writer of detective novels, who wrote the formidable Daughter of Time, a book about Richard III told as a detective story. Would love to exchange thoughts and ideas on Richard with her.

John Steinbeck – the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, who wrote such masterpieces as The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden and Of Mice and Men. I first read his work as a teenager, and it completely opened my view of writing.

Bill Bryson – writer of a number of hilarious travel books, plus really interesting books on Shakespeare and the English language. He clearly has a brain the size of a planet, so I'd love to have the chance to pick that brain.

16. Can you tell us about the novel you're working on, and what it's like switching gears from poetry to fiction?
My novel, The Book of Betrayals, is set in the 12th century, with its main character a woman soldier, the only female warrior in the army of the Byzantine Emperor Manuel Comnenus. It opens with the protagonist, Morgan Micepheros, regaining consciousness in a forest in Kent, and she has lost her memory. The action moves between her time in Byzantium fighting the encroaching Seljuk menace, and her time with an English noble family, where she's also combating the machinations of an evil abbot. As the story unfolds, she gradually regains her memory, in a tale replete with battles, friendships and betrayals.

I found it really hard to make the switch from writing poetry to writing a full-length novel, and while I've been writing The Book of Betrayals, I haven't written much poetry, as it comes from an entirely different creative head-space, and requires a different kind of focus.

17. What would you write on your tombstone?
To paraphrase Spike Milligan – "I told you it was serious." More seriously, something like "She tried always to exercise the currency of kindness."

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