Both of your books are very place specific. What was it that attracted you to writing about these particular landscapes?

My collection of short stories is set in Cornwall, which is where I grew up. I think I had probably always taken the landscape around me for granted, but when I came to write my MA dissertation (which became three of the stories in Diving Belles) I realized that all my ideas for stories were linked to the landscape that I knew best. I seemed to have a store of images and ideas that I hadn’t really known about before. I’d been reading a lot of poetry about landscape and place, poets such as Alice Oswald and Jen Hadfield, and they inspired me to think about bringing in more magical, uncanny elements into my fiction – which quickly led me to the idea of basing the collection on Cornish folklore. The folklore is intricately connected to the landscape – stories about giants come directly from shapes in the granite, and mermaids from treacherous stretches of the coastline where people drowned – so I became interested in exploring how the stories emerged from the place.

For my novel, it was almost chance that I ended up in the landscape that inspired it. I was moving around quite a lot, renting in different places and generally being unsettled, and I ended up in a wooded river valley near Dartmoor. I found the landscape interesting because it was so different to the coastlines I had written about before – the woods changed so much with each season, and the river changed all the time depending on the weather, the light, or whatever suddenly washed down it. I thought the river valley would be an interesting place to set a novel, and I also wanted to challenge myself to write about a place that I didn’t know quite so well.

We tend to think about place as something stable and grounded and yet water seems to be fundamental to your writing. Could you say a little about the relationship between water and place in your work?

I tend to feel landlocked if I am not living near a wide stretch of water, so I guess that I find water an essential part of feeling inspired and at home in a place. I think the tension you’ve asked about, between what is stable and what is constantly in flux, is the very reason why water features so much in my fiction – it’s that conflict between stability and change that drives narratives and creates characters. I’m interested in the ways that people often resist change but how we slowly, incrementally change anyway, without really noticing it. Water is a good symbol for these kinds of ideas – and both the river and the sea offer up really interesting contrasts. The river is a constant feature of the landscape but it is also changing moment by moment: small changes such as flipping over small stones and flashing in the light, and big changes, like biting away at the bank and changing its own shape. I am also fascinated by the way the sea can wash things up out of nowhere and then cover them over again.

When you started writing Weathering, did you have the idea for the story first, and then fit that into the setting, or did the landscape influence the story?

I think I have a set of overall ideas that I will probably always come back to in my writing – ideas about home and belonging and family – but the actual story itself pretty much came out of the landscape. The river valley offered a lot in the way of dramatic tension; it is a beautiful place, with fascinating birds and plants, but it’s also isolated, very cold and damp in winter, and it’s difficult to get around. The contrast between the different aspects of the place and the landscape gave me the idea of writing from three different perspectives – playing around with the conflicting versions and experiences there are of a place. It was easy to imagine someone who loved living there, someone else who was forced to live there and desperate to get out, and someone else who had become stuck there and let the years pass by before they really knew it. These became the outlines for the three interconnected narratives that made up the novel.

Can you say a bit more about how you used these three different narratives to explore the landscape?

Each chapter in the novel follows the story from one of the three main characters’ point of view. All of their concerns and perspectives collide and contrast, but also sometimes overlap and mirror each other. They all have very different perspectives on the place they have found themselves in, based on their past and present experiences of it. But equally, their perspectives tend to colour or distort how they view the place too – so because Ada, one of the main characters, doesn’t want to be there, she notices grey skies and gloomy weather and the constant thump of the river, whereas Pepper, her young daughter, who is fascinated by the place, notices the colour of mushrooms and the flash of a kingfisher. Each of the characters can’t help but bring their own baggage along, which influences how they view the landscape.

Both your books draw on particular places, but there aren’t any specific place names or locations mentioned. Why did you make this decision?

I decided when I first started to write Diving Belles, that although I was writing about a specific place, ie. Cornwall, I didn’t want to use specific place names, or real towns or anything like that. Partly it is to do with the fact that, as soon as you say, ‘this story is set here’ then there is a chance you will have got it wrong in some way, some minor detail will inevitably not be quite plausible in your story (at least, I imagine that would be what would happen in my stories!). Also, everyone’s perceptions of place are different, and I wanted to draw on this and try to create a sort of patchwork effect, an overall impression of a place, which people can then situate as they want. I hope it allows the reader to draw more on their own imaginations and perceptions. Places are a combination of detail, imagination, and personal experience, and I draw more on that idea in my writing I think.

How different was it trying to evoke a sense of place in a novel compared to short stories?

It was quite a different experience. In the short stories I think I used broader bush strokes in lots of ways, because the place had to be captured quickly to get each story going. I probably conjured up a more general and less specific landscape than the one I created in my novel. Partly this is to do with the sheer amount of time and space spent in the one small setting of the novel, and maybe partly to do with having more experience this time around.

However, writing about a place in the novel presented difficulties, because there are certain things you categorically have to talk about, and you can’t gloss over and use sleight of hand in the same way as you can in short stories. For example, in the novel, I suddenly had to think about things like, ‘where is the nearest petrol pump?’ ‘Does it actually make sense that this particular bird would be around at this exact time of year?’ ‘I need there to be bright colour in the landscape for the main character to notice and wonder at, but apart from maroon bracken what else is there in early winter?’ (Lots of things, including spindle fruits and gorse!) In lots of ways the narrative forced me to create a more detailed picture.

You have described your writing as magical realist; is this style/technique particularly useful for evoking landscape and place?

Magical realism can offer a different perspective on a place and a landscape. By slightly skewing our perceptions of the everyday, it can more strongly evoke the beauty, the wonder and the strangeness that is already inherently there. In Cornish folklore for example, the buccas, or wind-spirits, draw our attention to the ferocity and temperament of the Cornish weather. Mermaids evoke the beauty and danger of the sea. In stories of mermaids luring men out to sea, there is the whole history of drownings in a community lurking under the surface.

I find ghosts a particularly interesting way of exploring landscape and place. In my novel, one of the three main characters is a ghost who is stuck in the river because her ashes have been scattered there. I hoped that the ghost would add another layer to the evocation of the place. She is suddenly a part of the river, and a part of the landscape; she experiences the tiny details of the landscape, but also gains a sense of its vast scale. Magical realism highlights the richness of the places we find ourselves in, and encourages us to wonder at things – the magic is already there.

You mentioned before about being inspired by poetry, how exactly does this kind of writing feed into your fiction?

I definitely read more poetry than fiction while I am in the depths of a project. I find it useful to read from different genres to the ones that I’m working in. I enjoy poetry that is very rich in images and description and which uses unexpected, startling language. As I mentioned earlier, I found that magical elements in poetry such as Alice Oswald’s Dart and the strange, uncanny glimpses in John Burnside’s poetry, helped inspire me to bring these elements into my fiction. I think reading poetry also encourages me to make sure I’m always searching for the best word to use when describing something, and not to just go for the easy option.

Do you see yourself continuing to write about the South West in the future?

I hope so! Partly it depends on practicalities, such as where I will find myself living. But I am keen to go back to writing about the sea and the coastline next. I think that a river worked well in the novel because it twined right through its length, whereas the sea has made me think again about a short story collection – the small things that are washed up and taken away, the ebb and flow of the tides suggest small surges of stories. I would like to be more specific place-wise with these short stories, and set them in North Cornwall perhaps, which is near where I grew up. And I would like to carry on exploring the idea of ghosts – I am really interested in the idea of haunted landscapes.

Cyfarthfa Castle, Merthyr Tydfil

It’s hot and Taking Flight Theatre Company is leading us into Merthyr Tydfil’s Arden, in a promenade production of As You Like It. High up out of the town, the leafy clearing where we’re gathered says nothing of industry, a castle built on mining; success, decline and depression. The actors have been rehearsing here for weeks. They know the park, as do all the people I speak to. Walking dogs. Walking children. What’s my accent, they want to know? Ice-creamy kids in swimsuits join our small group of adventurers and we set off. When we go into Arden, we’re all explorers together.

Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court? (2, 1, 1-4)

Jacques sings under a tree and Orlando enters through the brambles. A silver Honda ignores the traffic cones and interrupts. We smirk, wait and speak to strangers. Splash pools, burger vans, squirrels and Shakespeare.

Did you dare to sit in the forest? What kind of ground did you sit on? So many gnats under the trees. I never have a picnic chair. Twigs, pebbles and bits of plastic stick to my sticky legs sticking out of shorts.

‘It makes you see the park in a different light’, they tell me.

Thompson’s Park, Cardiff

A week later, Arden is in Thompson’s Park, Cardiff. The summer is still hot and the audience assembles inside the gates around a fountain. Someone tells me that she has lived in Cardiff all her life but has never been in this park. We start near the bandstand, on theatre seats that are bouncy, short and neat with heaps of legroom. A man points to a frog hopping from his sandal. ‘Cool’, says the boy with him, chasing after it with a phone camera.

Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head (2, 1, 12-14)

Now we’re up and off into Arden via a path through the woods. I spy love-letters tacked to trees. Actors’ voices echo back from the terraced houses beyond the railings. The city isn’t far away. Merthyr prepared me but Arden is new again in Cardiff. I don’t know this park and I don’t know where we’re going. Not even the lady that runs through this park every morning knows where we’re going.

O Rosalind, these trees shall be my books
And in their barks my thoughts I’ll character;
That every eye which in this forest looks
Shall see thy virtue witness’d every where (3, 2, 5-8)

We stop for the Duke’s feast and I crouch in the long grass behind the park bench where it’s all happening. Sinking in, I’m comfortable in the give of this bit of wildness in a city park. The audience spreads in front of the bench and, though I think I’m safe behind, watching, Orlando careers over the hill, carving a path and taking me by surprise. I remove a bug from my hair, leave it in the grass and we’re off exploring the forest again.

‘It makes you see the park in a different light’, they tell me here too.

Blaise Castle, Bristol Shakespeare Festival

It is the end of July and Arden has come to the gardens of Blaise for the last performance of the tour. The cast are more weather-worn than they were at Cyfarthfa, and I need a jumper. An administrative glitch means that our journey is stalled for fellow travellers returning from faraway toilets.

We’re in a small, walled amphitheatre. It’s dry and comfortable and we sit together on steps carved from earth and planted with grass. This feels formal, structured and a bit like a theatre – a court even. What kind of adventure can happen here, I wonder? And where is Arden?

Orlando escapes, Rosalind is banished, disguised, and off we go through wrought-iron gates into a landscaped garden, into the woods; strangers, visitors and audience members; temporary dwellers in our temporary Arden. We’re all explorers together.

And this our life exempt from public haunt
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in every thing. (2, 1, 15-17)

Some of the people I speak to afterwards walk, run and play at Blaise on other days.

‘It makes you see the park in a different light’, they tell me.