Fiona Shaw
Sian Turner talks to author and writing fellow at York, Fiona Shaw, about her newly released novel Tell It To The Bees.
As the current Royal Literary Fund writing fellow at York, it is Fiona Shaw’s job to offer writing advice and guidance to students, be it on an academic or personal level. She holds a PhD in the poet Elizabeth Bishop, and has just published her third novel.
Set in the 1950s, her new work, Tell It To The Bees, centres around the question of what would happen if two women fell in love and one of them had a child. As Julia Weekes’ marriage falls apart, her son Charlie forms an unlikely friendship with Jean Markham, the local doctor, who keeps the bees to whom Charlie confides everything. Her son’s new friendship allows an intimacy to develop between the two women, an intimacy that changes all of their lives forever. Shaw describes the work as “a three-hander novel,” as it moves fluidly between the lives of the three main characters, Julia, Charlie and Jean. “I wanted to explore having a child at the centre of a novel,” she reveals. “I wanted some of what happens between the adults to come through the way of a child. He’s sort of like an emotional barometer for what’s going on between the adults.” She admits a particular partiality for the character of Charlie, whom she based on herself as a child: “Charlie is very much a boy and he’s very much a fictional character, but if he’s drawn out of anybody, he’s drawn out of the child that I was, or the child that I might imagine myself to be if I had been born a boy.” Charlie’s curiosity as a child and his desire to watch the world, to observe its nature echoes Shaw’s own childhood temperament, where she would spend hours watching the activities of ants.
With two novels preceding Tell It To The Bees (The Sweetest Thing, 2003, The Picture She Took, 2005), Shaw has an established reputation, with a critically lauded body of work. However, her first venture onto the literary scene was not a work of fiction, but a memoir – Out Of Me – in 2001. Charting her slide into severe post-natal depression and her desperate attempts to free herself and rebuild her life, it was this work that first launched Shaw as a writer. It was not an easy process, however: “I was very glad I wrote it, I’m still glad I wrote it, I’m glad it’s still in print,” she says, pausing momentarily to consider her words, “but the writing of it had an emotional cost unlike any of the other novels. The publishing also took a real toll in a way I don’t think I could have anticipated. There was a lot of publicity, and most of it was very positive, but it was also very exposing, and hard on your family.” Shaw’s openness and willingness to share with others a period of her life which saw her undergo emotional turmoil and electric shock therapy lead to a nomination for the MIND prize. Out Of Me now features as a set text on the training course for many health professionals.
Describing writing as “most definitely a need, and sometimes a release too,” Shaw explains her novels coming to her “very, very roughly, often in the form of a time period and an idea that I want to explore through a story.” All of her novels have a very strong grounding in a particular historical period, and she confesses that “it actually feels less nerve-wracking to write about that than it does about my own time. I guess in a more pragmatic way too, you’re free from having to write about mobiles, about Twitter, Facebook, any of that stuff!” She is currently beginning work on a fourth novel.
Tell It To The Bees is now available nationwide for £9.99
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