Open Page with Ashley Hay

Why do you write? It’s a hopeful or optimistic thing, I think, to try to catch bits of life, large or small, and explore them, understand them, then offer them up to readers who might also connect with them or for whom they might make sense. Are you a vivid dreamer? At the beginning and end of projects. In the middle I tend towards either the insomniac or the comatose. Where are you happiest? On a beach staring at a horizon – which might be my topographical equivalent to a blank page. What is your favourite film? Truly, Madly, Deeply And your favourite book? Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine. Hilary Mantel, Thomas Cromwell, and Ben Miles, the actor who played Mantel’s Cromwell in London. Which word do you most dislike, and which would you like to see back in public usage? I dislike the word ‘like’ when it’s, like, used as punctuation. ‘Umbrage’ has some potential as a more nuanced alternative to today’s more automatic ‘rage’. Similarly, I’d like to get back to ‘fact’ after our recent dalliance with its ‘post-’ relative. Who is your favourite author? There’s never only one. And your favourite literary hero and heroine? Elephant and Piggie, from Mo Willems’s series of books. I’m probably more like Gerald the Elephant but I aspire to the bouncier world view of Piggie. Which quality do you most admire in a writer? The veracity that gives any genre of writing its truthfulness. Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa. I didn’t understand Jessica Anderson or Jane Austen when I had to read them in Year Twelve. With all the certainty of being seventeen, I felt that neither Tirra Lirra by the River nor Pride and Prejudice had much to say. Now I reread them both regularly and am contemporaneously inspired and retrospectively abashed. What, if anything, impedes your writing? That I am unfortunately still not in possession of Hermione Granger’s Time-Turner. How do you regard publishers? I feel incredibly fortunate that my words have found the publishers they’ve found, and incredibly grateful for the resources they invest in those words. What do you think of the state of criticism? There’s a fantastic line about musical compositions in Zoë Morrison’s Music and Freedom: ‘in order to interpret a work correctly, you need to get to the spirit of the composer, their moods and intentions’. If you substitute ‘writer’ for ‘composer’ in that sentence, I think it hints at the way the most constructive critics somehow augment a piece of writing through their exploration of it. And writers’ festivals? I’ve had some amazing conversations with writers at writers’ festivals, and I love being part of a dedicated writing and reading community for a few days. The best festivals are like an escape from the real world. Are artists valued in our society? I can’t think of anyone who doesn’t intersect with a range of different artists’ works every single day, through what they read or listen to or look at or watch or wear or use or live in. This mightn’t speak to recognition or reimbursement, but it underscores how essential artists are to how everyone marks out their own distinct life. What are you working on now? I’m back inside a new novel, hoping to remember all the things I was trying to do the last time I was there, and seeing things I hadn’t seen before that might help it to make its own sense. Ashley Hay was the 2015 ABR Dahl Trust Fellow. She has published several books, including Gum: The story of eucalypts and their champions (2002), and The Railwayman’s Wife (2013). Her new novel is A Hundred Small Lessons.

Why do you write?

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Where are you happiest?

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A Memoir of My Former Self: A life in writing by Hilary Mantel, edited by Nicholas Pearson

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