"Writing is who I am."
Novelist Carole Burns answers the Wales Arts Review artist Q&A and discusses her latest book, The Same Country (Legend Press).
Where are you from and how does it influence your work?
Such a complicated question for me! As an American living here, I am asked this a lot – my accent gives me away. (I still remember with bemusement shopping for mangos at Clare Food in Grangetown one day and the shop assistant running over to me, calling out “American! American!” to catch my attention.) Usually when asked, I answer Washington, DC – everyone’s heard of it – but I’m originally from a small working class city in Connecticut. And of course, now I’m also from Cardiff. All these places influence my work, first in terms of setting. I go “home” to Connecticut in my fiction quite a lot, as many of my short stories and my new novel, The Same Country, end up being set there; it’s not really my choice, as much as where the stories take shape in my head. Moving away from Connecticut, then from the United States altogether, means these places have influenced my fiction in terms of outlook as well, as in, where I’m looking out from. I am viewing Connecticut in particular and the United States in general from the distance of both years and also culture. I understand my country differently as a result of living here; I am part of that culture but also see that culture from the outside now, and I think that’s been influential in the writing of The Same Country especially.
Where are you while you answer these questions, and what can you see when you look up from the page/screen?
It’s the weekend, so today, I’m sitting at the table at my newly renovated, brilliantly yellow kitchen/dining room in Cardiff – a room that still gives me a thrill – with a large (and gorgeous) painting by my partner, Paul Edwards, in front of me, and outside the glass doors, our yard with a flourishing hibiscus plant, a struggling rose bush, and a pile of old kitchen cabinets and guttering and packing material that is waiting for the skip we haven’t yet ordered. This mix of color and art and mess is probably typical of my life, I must admit. Despite the best of intentions things end up in disarray, in part because I’m sitting here writing this instead of weeding or cleaning out the front room. Or dusting, god forbid. There’s a pile of books on the table, too – two by James Baldwin, a Granta issue, a notebook, a book about Islam, a New Welsh Reader, and crisp copies of my new novel, which landed yesterday.
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