Jenn Ashworth was born into a Mormon family in Preston in 1982. She studied English at Cambridge University and was awarded an MA in creative writing from Manchester University. Her fourth novel, Fell, is set near Morecambe Bay.
Fell is narrated by the ghosts of Netty and Jack Clifford, who speak with a single voice. What challenges and opportunities did that present?
A lot of my drafting was about trying to get that voice right. I wanted to create a voice that worked like I thought the landscape in the novel was working – that sense of there being no boundaries, no borders; a very shifting, quite dangerous, landscape.
The story moves between past and present, knitted together by the myth of Baucis and Philemon. Why that myth?
Very often the moral of that myth is [taken to be], “You must be kind to visitors because you don’t know if they’re a god in disguise”, but it seems to me that another interpretation is, “Be careful what you wish for.”
The Lancashire coast and the Cliffords’ crumbling house are both characters and metaphors in the novel. What’s the secret of writing place?
If I knew! The place really shaped the book. It is called Grange-over-Sands but there are no sands any more. There were TB hospitals there because of the fresh sea air, and then in the first world war they were changed into convalescent homes for wounded soldiers; so it’s a place to do with being ill and with getting better. And it’s a haunted place: you see Morecambe Bay and you remember how many people have died out there.
Your last novel, The Friday Gospels, was about a Lancastrian Mormon family, and faith is central here, too. Does having had faith help in writing about it?
I don’t know what faith is. I wouldn’t say I ever had it in the way my community would have liked me to have had it. Mormons don’t talk about believing, they talk about knowing, and I never knew. And I don’t have atheism in the way lots of atheists would like me to have it, but that’s a good place for a writer: to sit on the fence.
Negative capability…
Exactly! It’s probably more important that we are asking the questions. I spend a lot of time going on walks and thinking about why my Mormonism is intimately connected with me being a writer, and I think it’s to do with big stories, and being curious, and expansions of possibilities.
If you hadn’t have been a Mormon, do you think you would have been a writer?
No, I don’t think so.
You’re an examiner for a creative writing PhD. What’s your approach to teaching writing?
I don’t try to teach students rules for writing, because I don’t know what they are, and whenever I find them out, I try to take them apart and break them anyway. But I try to find out what it is the student wants to do, and I recommend lots of reading, and try to make them more ambitious.
You’re currently judging the Gordon Burn prize; has Burn been an influence?
I’ve come to him fairly recently – I wish I’d come to him earlier – but what I love about his work is something I strive to achieve: it’s to do with his humanism and curiosity which encompass violence and ugliness. And the way that he can write intricately and beautifully patterned and structured prose.
You tweeted recently that you couldn’t finish writing a story because you weren’t in your dressing gown – an exaggeration?
When I wrote Cold Light, I wrote the first draft in my lunch hours, sitting in my car, because I worked [as a librarian] in a prison at the time and I couldn’t have a computer in the prison. For Fell, it was bed and night, and a blanket and a hot-water bottle, and vast amounts of crisps. I wonder what the next book will require of me? But the dressing gown is important.
Fell is published by Sceptre (£18.99). Click here to buy it for £15.57
