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Revisiting Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s Sightseeing: Timeless Charm, Cultural Subversion

Enter the world of Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s “Sightseeing” through Alistair Daniel’s insightful biography. Lapcharoensap’s debut collection, born from his upbringing in Thailand and Chicago, challenges Western perceptions with its nuanced portrayal of life in Bangkok’s margins. Daniel’s exploration unveils the enduring relevance of Lapcharoensap’s work, making this biography essential for literature lovers.

 

Sightseeing Book Cpver by Rattawut Lapcharoensap. Book cover features a man sat on a brown bench with his legs folded reading a map.Rereading can be a hazardous affair. There’s nothing more disappointing than returning to a book you once cherished only to find that you and it have fallen out of love. The characters seem wooden, the dialogue flat, the plot predictable (even allowing for the fact that you already know how it ends). Your love of this book, you realise, had more to do with you – with the age you were then, the situation you were in, the things that were preoccupying you – than with the book itself. So one of the great pleasures of rereading Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s short story collection Sightseeing has been discovering that the qualities I admired in it the first time are all still there: the precision of the writing, the beautifully constructed plots, the compelling narrators and, perhaps above all, the indelible images: Priscilla the Cambodian’s golden teeth, Anek with his face on fire, or Clint Eastwood, the narrator’s pet pig in ‘Farangs’, swimming desperately out to sea.

 

Black and white headshot of middle-aged Asian male author Rattawut Lapcharoensap. Author has short hair and is wearing circular glasses and a collared shirt.
Rattawut Lapcharoensap

Born in Chicago and raised in Thailand, Rattawut Lapcharoensap burst onto the literary scene, in the US and far beyond, in 2005 with his debut story collection, Sightseeing. Published when he was just 25, the collection delighted readers and critics alike with the freshness of its perspective and the maturity of its voice. ‘Sightseeing is not mere reportage, but storytelling of the highest quality, profoundly human and universal,’ wrote William Sutcliffe in The Guardian. ‘Every story in this collection is dense with event, emotion and meaning.’ It won the Asian American Literary Award and was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award. In 2007 Lapcharoensap was named as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists.

 

One of the great strengths of Sightseeing is the way it turns Western clichés about Thailand on their heads. This is not the Thailand of tourist fantasy. Though ‘farangs’ – Thai slang for foreigners – certainly feature, in all their inevitable crassness and cultural insensitivity, the stories in Sightseeing are told mostly from the point of view of the Thai characters: children, troubled adolescents and their just-as-troubled parents, often living hardscrabble lives on the edges of Bangkok, or running a motel on a resort island choked with tourists, or scraping by in menial jobs.

 

A lake in Thailand, surrounded by lush green hills with a red wooden hut standing on stilts in the water. The sunset and the light reflecting on the water surface creates a picturesque scene of natural Thailand.Lapcharoensap’s Thailand is a world dominated by gangster capitalists, a world in which the military runs a corrupt draft process, in which teenage girls work as prostitutes, in which whole neighbourhoods are falling into ruin; a world where drunk men conspire to burn down a refugee camp and rats rifle cheerfully through garbage. It’s a world the West has permeated in many ways, from tourism to films, even inveigling its way into the dreams and aspirations of the characters, though more often than not it only serves to disappoint (the eleven-year-old protagonist of ‘At the Café Lovely’, tasting his first American burger, is promptly sick). Yet it’s also a world of extraordinary beauty and human warmth, where two brothers can share a moment of tender solidarity on the back of a dilapidated motorbike, where a bicultural family can bond by playing bumper cars at their local Buddhist temple, and where, for one brief summer, two Thai boys and a Cambodian girl can make their own entertainment out of an empty swimming pool. A world where pigs can’t fly but they can swim.

 

One aspect of Lapcharoensap’s work that’s always compelled me, both as reader and writer, is the narrative voice. While his protagonists are often children or adolescents, flawed, fallible, and – like the lovesick narrator of ‘Farangs’ – somewhat lacking in self-knowledge, it’s their grown, or older selves who tell the story, often writing long after events, with all the melancholy wisdom that comes with knowing how everything turned out. These first-person narratives should really be called first people narratives, since often what we get are two voices – the young protagonist and the older narrator – and the challenge of capturing both of these voices on the page – capturing, in short, a sense of personal identity and how it evolves – is one Lapcharoensap navigates with aplomb. I’ve no doubt that his facility for narrative voices has influenced my approach to my own – very different – narrator, Simon Pritchard, the protagonist of my novel, Montreal, which I’ve just completed as part of a PhD in creative writing at the Open University. And it’s this – and many other – qualities that give Lapcharoensap’s work the novelistic richness that makes it feel so vital. I can’t wait to hear him speak about his work, and I hope you’re as excited as I am.

A headshot of a middle-aged bald male with a beard, wearing rectangular shaped glasses and a floral shirt
Alistair Daniel

Alistair Daniel is an Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Open University. His short stories have been published in journals including The Missouri Review, Narrative, Litro, The Stinging Fly, The Irish Times and Stand, and he has held the Charles Pick Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. He has an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and a PhD in Creative Writing from the Open University.

 

 

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You’ll Get Old Sitting There: Contempt for Aged Males

In a new publication, OU Creative Writing lecturer Dónall Mac Cathmhaoill and Kevin De Ornellas of Ulster University explore ageism as presented in Edward Bond’s ‘Shakespearean’ trilogy about aged men

Book cover of Negotiating Age: Aging and Ageism in Contemporary Literature and Theatre. The cover image features a silhouette of two figures sitting on a bench watching the sun set over the sea.
Negotiating Age: Aging and Ageism in Contemporary Literature and Theatre, edited by Mária Kurdi, and published by Debrecen University Press

It is argued that three plays by Edward Bond, born in 1934, should be regarded as a loose trilogy—and that the plays are united because they use the legacy of Shakespeare to provoke uncomfortable reflections on aging and ageism.

Two Bond plays are renowned for addressing the vexed legacy of Shakespeare head-on.

Lear (1971) is an uncompromising appropriation of King Lear in which Bond ‘corrects’ Shakespeare’s too-casual treatment of the under-represented effects of the mad king’s actions on the poor of the mismanaged kingdom of Britain.

Bingo (1973) is a bitter depiction of a dying Shakespeare who realizes that his art has been worthless because it has done nothing to frustrate murderous inequalities in post-Tudor England.

It is less well known that The Worlds (1979) is also a Shakespearean adaptation. The story of an arrogant company director, Trench, who loses his position and degenerates into a rabid, destructive, tramp-like, terrorist-supporting misanthrope, is an adaptation of Timon of Athens.

Bingo is a quasi-biographical conceit; the other two plays are radical appropriations.

Julie Sanders’s definition of appropriation as opposed to mere adaptation is important here. She argues that appropriation represents more decisive journey away from the informing text into a wholly new cultural product.

In other words, appropriations, such as those by Bond, are new works in their own right. They are not adaptations of Shakespeare but radical new plays contrived to perpetuate Bond’s theatrical, political, and moral vision.

Edward Bond at the Théâtre National de la Colline, Paris, January 2001. Author: D. Tuaillon. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

Many critics have written about Bond’s engagement with Shakespeare—especially Lear and Bingo. But none have afforded The Worlds the same attention as the previous two.

Crucially, critics have, understandably, concentrated on the quasi-Brechtian staging techniques in Bond’s plays as well as the blistering, uncompromisingly leftist critiques of historical and contemporary economic and social inequalities. But none have addressed the arguably more humanistic issue of ageism.

This is important because the lead characters in the three plays are all victims of ferocious ageism. Despite his callousness, Bond’s Lear is a man more sinned against than sinning because his aged impotence and alleged senescence are met with even more overt contempt than in Shakespeare’s original.

Shakespeare, in Bingo, is openly mocked for willful inactivity by his supposed friend, Ben Jonson, and by his shrewish daughter, Judith.

And Trench, in The Worlds, is revered when fit to run his company but ruthlessly marginalized and discarded when he is forcibly retired from his own executive board.

The descent into psychological torment that all three lead characters endure is directly related to ageism. Aging is almost entirely presented as a cause for scorn and derision in these plays. Bond generally sidesteps any sense of aging well: in his plays, good aging cannot be bought. The three leading characters addressed in this essay do improve as people—but only within themselves and in a manner unnoticed and/or unappreciated by their contemporaries.

The plays are set variously in ancient Britain, in Jacobean England and in late-1970s Britain: it is widely acknowledged that Bond rightly or wrongly sees consistent economic discrimination across these vastly different eras. It should, we argue, also be apparent that Bond sees bigotry towards the aged as being another social malady that is consistent across centuries and even millennia.

Shakespeare’s plays are full of reflection on aging and on inter-generational conflict. Characters in Shakespeare plays often ‘retire’: King Lear relinquishes his kingship; Lady Macbeth skulks off and gives up on public life; and Prospero breaks his staff.

Across Bond’s three plays, he appropriates Shakespearean meditations on aging and juxtaposes them with his own observations about society’s disregard for those who are no longer economically productive.

This blog post is an adapted extract from: Kevin De Ornellas and Dónall Mac Cathmhaoill (2024) “You’ll Get Old Sitting There”: Contempt for Aged Males in Three ‘Shakespearean’ Works by Edward Bond. In: Kurdi, M. (ed.) Negotiating Age: Aging and Ageism in Contemporary Literature and Theatre. Debrecen University Press, 26-47.

The authors would like to thank Anoush Simon for practical assistance in the production of this essay.

Dónall Mac Cathmhaoill, a lecturer in Creative Writing at The Open University

Dónall Mac Cathmhaoill is a lecturer in Creative Writing at The Open University, United Kingdom. His research interests are in authorship and structures of production in theatre for social change, and theatre in post-conflict societies. Upcoming publications include a chapter on ethics and aesthetics in applied theatre in the Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Literary Evaluation, chapters on writing drama in the upcoming Creative Writing Handbook from Bloomsbury, and a monograph on post-conflict Irish theatre for University of Exeter Press.

Kevin De Ornellas, a white middle-aged male with a beard. He's wearing a black beanie and a maroon woollen jumper, and he's crouched in front of a patch of daffodils.
Kevin De Ornellas, a Lecturer in English at Ulster University

Kevin De Ornellas is a Lecturer in English at Ulster University. His PhD is in English Renaissance Literature from Queen’s University Belfast, and his research focuses on drama on stage and on the page – especially Renaissance and post-War drama. He is also interested in the study of representations of animals and the environment in literature and culture. His publications include The Horse in Early Modern English Culture (2013), chapters in several books, among them The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature, and the Companion to Literary Biography. He is an editor of the forthcoming  Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Literary Evaluation.

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Kidnapped by Agatha Christie and OpenLearn

In readiness for the BBC’s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel Murder is Easy, which will air this festive season, senior lecturer Anthony Howell lets us in on how the Queen of Crime has added a touch of mystery to new Open University courses.

The sheer star power of Agatha Christie took me by surprise, I must admit. I was aware of the statistics (her novels have sold over 2 billions copies) and that her best-known protagonist, Hercule Poirot, was enjoying new prominence as a result of the recent Kenneth Branagh adaptations. But given that I primarily investigate the dusty corners of the late 18th- and early 19th century (and am used to being read mostly by two old university friends and the dog) I was struck by the degree to which she justified the label ‘popular’. We had decided to make ‘Literature and the Popular’ the organising theme for the first block of teaching material on the new MA in English Literature (A893). But, quite honestly, there is popular fiction and then there is Agatha Christie, in a class all of her own.

Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot in Death on the Nile (2022). This image is publicly available.

With some trepidation, I volunteered early in module production to contribute a unit on Christie for the new MA. I had enjoyed her novels since my teenage years but writing about them in a teaching context would involve venturing some distance from my specialism. Nevertheless, I was confident that with some preparation I could get a handle on it. Christie is normally considered ‘middlebrow’ as an author and, clearly, her work is intended as a form of escapism. Among other things, I was able to touch on how this made it, in the words of Alison Light, an invaluable ‘literature of convalescence’ for the British public after the the First World War. However, Christie also possessed a seemingly supernatural skill for crafting a satisfying clue-puzzle story and it became clear to me that this was the key to the cultural impact of her fiction.

The unit was later adapted into an OpenLearn course, Agatha Christie and the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, with the help of the module Chair, Alex Tickell. Launched in 2006, OpenLearn is the Open University’s home of free learning. It hosts over 10,000 free courses, articles, activities and videos. There were around 15 million visits to the platform last year from all over the globe so pairing Agatha Christie with OpenLearn always had the potential to be a powerful combination. You can view the course here.

OpenLearn: the home of free learning at the OU

Right away, it seemed to have a ready-made audience and the ability to travel all by itself with minimal effort (certainly from me). A range of people interested from all walks of life began to click though the minute it landed on Google. I was invited to take part in different kinds of media to promote it. Local radio, for example, with a lighter tone and a mainstream audience. It was hugely enjoyable. The Faculty’s social media team created a buzz with some activities on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. People responded immediately, sharing pictures of their own rare collections of Christie’s novels, participating in quizzes and games and generally responding very warmly to this opportunity to share their enthusiasm for one of their favourite authors.

Although we did take the course out into the world, the world also came looking for us. For the first time, I received emails out of the blue from learners not yet enrolled on an Open University course. One wanted help to download and print a copy of the course for her elderly mother, who struggled to read on a screen. Another had recently visited Torquay museum and thought the course might be a good fit for the Agatha Christie display there.

Agatha Christie at her home: Winterbrook House, Berkshire, 1950. This image is publicly available.

Professionally too, unsolicited requests arrived. An offer came to act as a reviewer for a new course on European Crime fiction, currently under production in the school of Social Sciences at the OU. I was encouraged to attend ‘Captivating Criminality’, the annual conference of the International Crime Fiction Association, which took place at the imposing setting of Corsham Court in Wiltshire. Experts in the field were keen to hear more about the OpenLearn course and the feedback from students. I’ll be moonlighting at the next one in Budapest too.

This is a very roundabout way of explaining that, since writing the course, I have found myself periodically snatched away from my usual teaching and research interests and taken in quite different directions. It sometimes feels as if I have been kidnapped by Christie herself and taken by her to new places without very much agency of my own; plotted helplessly into a new narrative.

Agatha Christie and the Golden Age of Detective Fiction now feels established on OpenLearn. In the first few weeks, the course page had received over 15,000 visits. As of this month, that has now risen to 57,000 visits and 2,460 enrolled learners (with 806 gaining statements of participation). I was delighted to learn that the course will soon feature in a new landing page featuring Women in the Arts, curated by Hannah Parish. I would say that it’s comfortably the biggest pedagogical impact I’ve managed to have in my career so far. But, although it’s been enormous fun for me, it doesn’t feel much like my impact. I’m left, in the end, along with the detective fiction enthusiasts, to ponder a familiar question: whodunit?

Anthony Howell is a Senior Lecturer, Staff Tutor and Associate lecturer in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at the Open University. He is currently Chair of the MA in English Part 2 and a module team member on A893 and A894. Anthony has contributed teaching units to a variety of OU modules and developed new teaching strategies to support students in secure environments. His research interests are in the field of Romanticism, in particular the work of Sir Walter Scott, William Wordsworth and John Clare.

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A Fine Balance: writing, teaching, public engagement

When the world opened again after lockdown, my steadfast companion was the view out my home office window of a fell in Cumbria. Fell ponies often arranged themselves along the ridge of the commons above grazing sheep, backlit by low winter sun. I would gaze at their silhouettes when I needed a break from my computer screen. Former colleagues at brick-and-mortar universities in the US and UK began heading back to campus as COVID restrictions were lifted. I’d taken a job at the OU working from home during the pandemic, and I’d moved five hours north in search of an affordable house with a garden. My ‘new’ office was in a converted bedroom. I couldn’t go to campus or meet colleagues face-to-face for several months after lockdown eased, so I dug in and reconciled myself to living and working in what I came to think of as my ‘fast-moving cloud,’ the western slope of the Howgills.

Fell ponies

Working at the OU has transformed my life as an academic. Moving into a home-based role that is part operational, part distance learning, and part research has provided time for reflection. Most days after lunch, I walk a different lane or track or public footpath in my tiny village where sheep outnumber humans, and I think about things. I live on the edge of the Lake District, countryside that writers Dorothy and William Wordsworth and their friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge would have found familiar. At first, the reality of experiencing the romantic notion of the ‘sublime’ was quite a shock, and it took months to connect with the land in a way other than fear (of high winds, low clouds, and gusting rain) or dread (of same). With time, though, I settled in and got on with work and with writing and connecting with local writers and artists, which has made everything better, especially the low-lying clouds.

Like other writers who have lived in isolated landscapes, I’ve found this time fruitful. A collection of personal essays There is Fire Here was published in September by a small UK publisher, Signal 8 Press. I have long been a fan of the ‘fourth genre,’ and There Is Fire Here has been a satisfying opportunity to bring together fifteen essays spanning the day I dropped out of high school in Texas and left home on the back of a motorbike at sixteen, to my move across the Atlantic to the UK, where I learned how to write poetry.

Some of the joys of being a writer and an academic are the connections between your research, your teaching, your colleagues, and public outreach. My work in creative nonfiction includes my own writing, my teaching, and public engagement—a circle which is finely balanced within my role at the OU.

While I was working on finalising the manuscript for There Is Fire Here, I was asked to serve on the panel that would be revising the third-year Arts & Humanities module, A363 Advanced Creative Writing. I proposed that we expand the teaching on life writing.

Emma Claire Sweeney, the discipline’s Media Lead and a fellow course author, asked if I might like to interview Kit de Waal for the Milton Keynes Literary Festival. De Waal’s debut memoir Without Warning and Only Sometimes had recently been released and the festival needed someone to interview her. It was a dream role. I was sent all her previous books to read, which included several novels and an anthology she edited, Common People. I set those on my bedside table and devoured them.

Kit de Waal

During my conversation with de Waal at Milton Keynes Lit Fest, I confessed in front of the festival audience that I had cried on the train finishing one of de Waal’s novels, My Name Is Leon. In the same way that she had wowed me with her stories, Kit wowed the crowd, made them laugh and cry, held them enthralled for the entire hour. An OU camera team were there to record it all.

Soon, clips from that conversation with Kit de Waal will be part of the next iteration of A363 Advanced Creative Writing, a culmination of research, teaching and public engagement woven through bespoke teaching materials for the OU. I’ve sent Kit a copy of my book, and fingers crossed, she’ll be attending my online book launch on Wednesday 8th November, when I’ll be in conversation with brilliant UK writer, Zoe Lambert.

Tickets are free and it will be a relaxed evening. I’ll be joining from Cumbria, in a comfy spot by the woodstove. Grab your favourite drink, settle in somewhere cozy and join us.

Lania Knight

Lania Knight holds a BSc in Plant Science and Environmental Conservation from the University of New Hampshire, and an MA and PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri. She is the author of four books, including two novels, Three Cubic Feet, shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award in Debut Fiction, and Remnant, a dystopian novel set in the American Midwest, as well as a poetry pamphlet Single-Track B-Road, and a collection of personal essays There Is Fire Here.

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The OU Near You: summer festival edition

In this bonus summer post, Jennifer Shepherd, Chair of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences team in Ireland, shares a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the Open University’s partnership with the John Hewitt Society’s annual Summer School.

What does summertime mean to you?

For me, it’s festival time.

Each summer, I find myself in the picturesque cathedral town of Armagh, Northern Ireland at the Marketplace Theatre, home to the annual John Hewitt International Summer School. Now in its 36th year, the festival is hosted by the John Hewitt Society, established to celebrate the legacy of local poet, art historian and social activist John Hewitt.

Hewitt’s legacy is everywhere in evidence here in Armagh in late July, as a diverse group of writers, visual artists, musicians, political commentators and social entrepreneurs gather to celebrate the power of story to explore some of the most pressing social issues we face today on the island of Ireland.

It’s warm and unpretentious and full of surprises.

One day the mainstage hosts eminent Irish playwright Frank McGuiness, sharing the wit and wisdom of a literary career spanning over 4 decades; another day finds bestselling crime writer Denise Mina discussing her take on hard-boiled crime fiction; still another, a round table of political commentators and journalists pitch ideas for engaging citizens meaningfully in the Northern Ireland political system.

Everywhere there’s story, whether it takes the form of images – such as Nigel Swann’s haunting photographs of the ‘Yellow Star’ houses of Budapest – or music, provided by award-winning folk artist Jack Warnock.

As an OU academic based in Northern Ireland, I have the pleasure of managing a partnership with the John Hewitt Society on the delivery of the Summer School. It’s a natural fit since the Open University has much to offer local conversations around politics, history, and creativity.

Collaborating with the John Hewitt Society for the last decade has allowed the Open University in Ireland to showcase the incredible quality of our teaching and research, particularly in the area of creative writing.

Heather Richardson, Nessa O’Mahony, and Siobhan Campbell

It’s a pleasure to meet festival-goers during the week who have signed up for workshops led by OU writers – this year, we were joined by novelist Heather Richardson, and poets Nessa O’Mahony and Siobhan Campbell. Festival-goers are full of praise for our teachers, noting that OU writers really ‘see’ each student and bring out the very best in them and their writing.

‘Oh, you’re with the OU,’ is how I’m often greeted when I introduce myself in the busy foyer between events—because if there’s a proverbial zero degrees of separation in Ireland, the same holds true here for the Open University.

Jennifer Shepherd (right) with former OU student

At the local book vendor’s festival stall, a man tells me his friend is studying on the new English Lit MA and really enjoying it. I encounter a woman at the OU pop-up stand who confides that she’s already got a place reserved on an MA programme and wonders if she can get further details.  Another man lingers over the OU leaflets on display and tells me a long story about a professional life that took many unplanned turns. He always wanted to study law but never got the chance – did I think it was too late for him? A former OU student of my own waves from across the crowded foyer and makes her way over for a catchup and selfie.

She reminisces fondly about her first OU module and grins at the memory of her debut at an Open University open mic night, the first of many engagements over the years as an accomplished poet and flash-fiction writer.

And maybe this is what I like most about my annual pilgrimage to Armagh each summer: to see the power of story at work in unexpected places.  While speakers on the mainstage are inspiring us with tips for master storytelling or compelling new visions for a shared future in Ireland, I’m seeing something just as exciting at my Open University pop-up stand. People talk about their daily lives and, when they do, I get a glimpse of the way in which OU study allows people to write new futures for themselves and shape the story of their own lives in fresh and exciting ways.

Jennifer Shepherd

Originally from Canada, Jennifer Shepherd completed her PhD at the University of Alberta and post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Hull. She is a Senior Lecturer and Staff Tutor in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at the OU. As chair of the FASS team in Ireland, she is responsible for facilitating local knowledge exchange and engagement opportunities, as well as maintaining partnerships with Ireland-based organisations which include the John Hewitt Society, the Belfast Book Festival, and Dublin/Belfast Culture Nights.

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From creative practice PhD to academic book publication: a eureka moment!

The previous post in our series on the PhD journey and beyond explored the nature of research in Creative Writing. Following up on this, recent PhD graduate, Shanta Everington, shares her experience of adapting her practice-based PhD research for publication.

Much has been written about turning the traditional academic thesis into a monograph. As a researcher undertaking a practice-based PhD, my journey to book publication was a little different. A PhD in Creative Writing typically comprises two connected components – a book length piece of creative writing (in my case, experimental life writing) and an accompanying critical commentary exploring the process of producing the creative writing.

Many Creative Writing PhD students write novels or poetry collections which are then published by mainstream or independent publishers on completion. As a previously published novelist, I initially planned for my life writing to be published as a stand-alone creative non-fiction book, and the content of the critical commentary to find its way to an audience via peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers.

Contemporary explorations of motherhood have primarily focused on the biological mother raising the child she gave birth to. My research project, ‘Other Mothers’, aimed to give voice to women who become mothers through the alternative routes of adoption, surrogacy and egg donation, and their silent partners – the birth mothers, surrogate mothers and egg donors – who make motherhood possible for them.

I interviewed six women, drawing on a range of interdisciplinary approaches, and created a body of experimental life writing, which aims to expand our understanding of what it means to be a mother.

The research presents the stories of a mother via egg donation and adoption; an egg donor; someone who became a mother through surrogacy in India; a surrogate mother; an adoptive mother of two who was herself adopted as a baby; a birth mother in her seventies who gave her baby up for adoption fifty years ago. My own personal experience of pregnancy loss and adoption offers a seventh voice.

At the end of the PhD, I approached a few literary agents who handled creative non-fiction. Although I received a few encouraging rejections, I wasn’t hitting the mark for the mass-market route. Then I had my eureka moment!

Another Mother: Curating and Creating Voices of Adoption, Surrogacy and Egg Donation

Through creative practice as research, I developed an experimental approach to writing lives – a hybrid form of curated material (edited interview and quotation collage) and created material (poetry, reimagined scenes and lyric essay), a literary tapestry building on Jo Parnell’s idea of the literary docu-memoir. There is a duality to the research’s original contribution to knowledge which lies in both its expansion and analysis of life writing techniques. Both components – the experimental life writing AND the critical meta-narrative analysing the artistic, ethical, personal and political considerations involved in transforming life into literature – are of equal significance and belong together. After a rethink, I decided to pitch a book consisting of both parts. In some ways, this might limit my readership – for example, women considering adoption, surrogacy and egg donation might be interested in a book of women’s stories but perhaps not so interested in critical analysis of form. Yet in other ways, it expanded the book’s potential readership, to anyone interested in motherhood, gender and women’s studies, life writing studies, the sociology of reproduction, creative non-fiction writing approaches, oral history and ethnography studies.

It seemed that an academic publisher would be my best bet for these audiences. Pitching to an academic publisher was quite unlike my previous experience submitting to literary agents, the gatekeepers of commercial publishing. Although I didn’t need an agent, there was a new set of gatekeepers to get past – the peer reviewers.

My external viva examiners helped me frame my writing as a form of autoethnography, connecting my own personal experience of motherhood and the experience of other mothers to wider cultural, political and social understandings. After looking at a range of academic publisher lists, I found a commissioning editor of an ethnographical series who I thought might be interested in work spanning both literature and social sciences.

Emily Briggs at Routledge expressed interest and helped me rework my proposal. At this stage, I still planned for the book to be published in its original structure: creative writing first and critical commentary second. Emily sent me a similar creative-critical title that she’d commissioned, Situated Writing as Theory and Method: The Untimely Academic Novella by Mona Livholts, which presented the theoretical framework before the novella; Emily and I agreed a similar structure for my book, switching the original order.

Peer review flagged up problems with connotations of ‘other’ in research title ‘Other Mothers’, and so, ‘Another Mother’ was chosen to represent the triangular nature of motherhood via adoption, surrogacy and egg donation. I took on board suggestions for beefing up existing content and adding additional material, mainly in the areas of politics and power, as well as gender identity issues dissecting with motherhood.

As a creative writer responding to feedback from sociologists, I had to remain clear on my research aims and parameters. Brochner and Ellis (2016) set out two forms of autoethnography: analytic and evocative – the former developing theoretical explanations of phenomena and the latter offering a narrative presentation that opens up conversations and evokes emotion. My work was firmly the latter, raising questions to which there are no easy answers, offering a discursive site on motherhood. The book presents a collage of voices and forms, offering stories which are open to multiple readings and interpretations.

 

Shanta Everington

Dr Shanta Everington is Associate Lecturer at The Open University, where she gained her PhD in Creative Writing. A creative and critical writer working across a range of forms, much of Shanta’s writing explores recurring themes of difference, identity and belonging. Previous books include novel Marilyn and Me (2007), narrated by a young woman with a learning disability, and young adult dystopian novel XY (2014), exploring gender identity. A consultant for the Royal Literary Fund, working as a Writing Fellow and a Reading Round Lector, Shanta is also a member of the National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE).

Another Mother: Curating and creating voices of adoption, surrogacy and egg Donation was published by Routledge on 8th June 2023.

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Custom and Practice in Creative Writing Research

We kicked off our series on the PhD journey and beyond, with a post from an English Literature PhD student, which offered a glimpse into a trip to an archive. This month, one of our Creative Writing PhD students, Alistair Daniel, shares his reflections on a very different form of research.

The customs officer flipped the pages of my passport and frowned. ‘What’s the purpose of your visit?’ he said.

I removed my fingers from the biometric scanner, leaving little crescents of sweat. I had not been looking forward to this question.

‘I’m doing research for a novel,’ I said.

The officer frowned. ‘Why?’ he said. ‘Can’t you just make it all up?’

Creative writing research has an image problem. While few people question the idea of research in other disciplines, in my experience, when you tell someone you’re doing creative writing research, they start to smile, visualising a pair of air quotes that hover over the word ‘research’ like a sceptical drone. If, when pressed as to the nature of this ‘research’, you admit that it involves spending five days in a bed and breakfast outside Hallowell, Maine, where you plan mostly to sit by a lake, the smile tends to broaden considerably. This is just a jolly, says the smile. You’re having a laugh.

Even if your trip doesn’t bear a suspicious resemblance to a holiday, the question still stands: what is creative writing field research for? After all, some writers don’t seem to need it. Shakespeare never went to Verona. And it’s amazing what can be gleaned nowadays from YouTube and Google Earth. Did I really need this field trip at all?

Montreal, the novel I was planning to research, is set not in Montreal but in a summer camp in central Maine where my protagonist, a hapless 19-year-old philosophy student called Simon Pritchard, has come to work in the kitchen. When not dicing carrots, Simon plans to spend his time transforming himself into a philosopher. To cut a medium-length story short, his plan goes tragically wrong.

Over the previous five years, I’d done the work of imagining Simon and his world – of making it all up – but that (I didn’t tell the customs officer) was partly why I needed to go: I needed to see how much of it was true. But there were other reasons as well. As a philosophy student, Simon is full of romantic Sartrean ideas about self-transformation. He finds an idyllic spot by a lake, a boulder hidden from the rest of the camp, and attempts to philosophise there, making phenomenological observations about his surroundings and noting them down. I needed to know what he would note. I needed to see what he saw. I needed to sit by a real Maine lake on a real Maine rock observing real Maine dragonflies, insects and birds, observing the kind of moss that grows on the Eastern Hemlock, touching the bark of an Eastern White Pine, hearing the unsettling cry of a loon, inhaling the stench of lake mud and Amber Solaire. I needed the sort of rich sensory detail that can’t be conjured by watching videos on YouTube.

Alistair sitting on a rock at the edge of a vast lake, notebook in hand.

Arriving in Boston I was excited, but anxious. Any writer knows that the timing of research, as much as the research itself, can be crucial. I’d originally applied for a grant in 2020, but Covid intervened. It intervened again in 2021 and by the time I was finally able to go, in the summer of 2022, my novel was almost complete. What if I’d got everything wrong? I was due to submit my PhD in three months’ time. How much would I really be prepared to rewrite at this stage? On the other hand, if it turned out I’d got everything right – that you can, in fact, make it all up – I would have wasted both my time and the university’s generous research grant. The trip would have looked – and felt – like a jolly.

In the end, I needn’t have worried. As I travelled around Maine, following in Simon’s footsteps, I soon realised how worthwhile it would be. Some things, I discovered, I’d got more or less right. There were plenty of rocks at the edges of lakes, many of them suitable for sunbathing and phenomenology. The loons really did sound insane. In this respect, the trip was good for my writerly confidence.

But I made fresh discoveries too. I drove the freeway Simon takes towards Canada – a road you can’t find on YouTube. I ate Maine dishes of the kind served at summer camps (popovers, whoopie pie). I walked out to Bar Island at low tide, a trip Simon takes with the kitchen crew. Two friends in Freeport showed me how to cook a lobster, which Simon does in a climactic scene at camp. I auditioned five different lakes and half a dozen rocks. None of them were exactly what I’d imagined, but between experience and imagination I worked up something that felt right.

And it was while sitting on those rocks that I had some entirely new ideas. I’d already pictured the movements of the dragonflies at the edge of Simon’s lake – after all, I’ve seen dragonflies elsewhere – but I hadn’t realised that Maine has so many kinds. And I discovered that they were hard to identify, even with a guidebook in hand. In previous drafts I hadn’t considered this. I’d imagined Simon buying an Audubon guide and painstakingly identifying each type. In practice, I realised, that would be hard. Dragonflies tend not to stay still, nor do they match the pictures in the book. Very little, in this world, matches the picture. I’d not considered this, or how a somewhat rigid and unimaginative boy like Simon might struggle to cope with the dragonflies’ refusal to conform to a neat taxonomical system. Or how this refusal, this resistance of the world to classification, perfectly suited a novel in which Simon continually pigeonholes other people, fitting them into his own taxonomical system, with fatal results. In this way, I came home with far more than 24,000 words of fresh description: I had new metaphors for the themes of the novel, and new ways of presenting character.

Next time, I’ll tell the customs officer.

Alistair Daniel

Alistair Daniel is an Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Open University, where he is completing a PhD in Creative Writing. He has an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths and has taught at the University of the Arts London and the University of East Anglia, where he held the Charles Pick Fellowship. His short stories have been published in magazines and journals including The Missouri Review, The Stinging Fly, Narrative, Litro, The Irish Times and Stand. He was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize in 2011 and 2020.