"Writing Saved Me"
Former Children's Laureate for Wales Eloise Williams answers the Wales Arts Review Artist Q&A.
In the latest of a new series of Q&A’s with some of Wales’s leading artists, musicians, performers, and writers, former Children’s Laureate of Wales Eloise Williams talks about her inspirations, her battles with self-belief, and Beyoncé.
Where are you from and how does it influence your work?
I’m from Llantrisant, a small town with a big history. It has influenced my work massively. Firstly, I grew up opposite a library, so I fell in love with reading when I was very young. Then we moved – about ten houses up the road – and I grew up a bit more opposite the site of the first cremation in Britain, so I fell in love with the past. There was a castle ruin up the alley from the back of both houses and I spent a lot of time there. My mother would whistle us in for tea or we’d come back after dark. In the summers there were festivals where people would beat the bounds of the town, bands played on the bullring and revellers danced in the street. It was quite a raucous celebration and it happened right on my doorstep. Everyone was poor. I don’t think you ever forget being poor. My parents were young, and fun, and bohemian in many ways. My sister was the very opposite of me, and brilliant because of it.
My work is influenced by all these experiences. The drama and scruffiness. The wildness of the nearby landscape and of being a child in the Seventies and Eighties when you made your own fun. I have always been quite awkward and felt like an outsider, and I embrace that in my writing. I suppose, when it comes down to it, I still feel about twelve-years-old and like I don’t fit.
Where are you while you answer these questions, and what can you see when you look up from the page/screen?
I’m in the living room of my cottage. I can see an old miner’s lamp and an iron kettle against a yellow wall. A half-made wreath which I’m trying to fashion out of hagstones, feathers, shells, driftwood, a small buoy and other found bits. It isn’t going all that smoothly at the moment – I think I may have reached the end of my creative talents with it. A teapot of magenta sweet peas and a curiosity cabinet. Out of one window, a copper wind-spinner catches the sun, and breezy trees sway making the light in the room green. From the other, I can see Monkstone Point – cliffs which look like monks bent in prayer – and a very small sea glimpse.
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Incredible! Resonated a lot. Wonderful to hear voices like this.