Layers of Meaning - Interview with Wyl Menmuir

Interview with Wyl Menmuir
Interviewer - Rupert Loydell

Am I right in thinking that the title of your new book, The Heart of the Woods, is a nod to Alan Garner and Russell Hoban's novel Riddley Walker? Is there any more of a link between them than the phrase?

I’m influenced by both Alan Garner and Russell Hoban though, while there’s an echo in the book’s title with Hoban’s phrase the hart of the wud, it is an echo rather than anything more, an influence rather than something I explore in the book. I suppose, like Hoban was, I’m interested in interpolated stories and in particular, using them to get to the heart/hart of things.

Your book is in many places very rooted in the personal and your family. Did you have any concerns about that? How do you rationalise any worries about ego, and whether your experiences are special or worth telling to readers?

I don’t have any concerns about using personal stories in my books, whether fiction or non fiction. If I didn’t have a personal connection to a subject, I’m sure it would be a very different book, but you’re right that I’m invested in story. My own interests and experiences are often the starting place for both fiction and non fiction – these stories matter to me. That said, I would hope ego isn’t an issue in the book, as my experience might be the starting point but it’s rarely the point in itself. I hope that I privilege and re-present the voices of other people far more than I do my own voice. As far as my experiences being special, I suppose yes, I consider them special in that people who have particularly strong relationships with trees, woodlands and wood have given their time and expertise, and I consider those experiences to be special and worth telling to readers. I wouldn’t include a story if I didn’t consider it to be worth telling. I woudln’t want to waste the reader’s time with anything I didn’t consider worth telling.

And what about the authorial interruptions in the book, where your voice is even more prominent and you offer summaries and wisdom about what has gone before?

As narrator, I see my job as being to contextualise, to give opinion, to link and connect the stories. Sometimes, that job is one of summary or of drawing what meaning I see from what I’ve seen, heard or experienced. It comes of a book that is part memoir, part social history, part nature writing, but perhaps doesn’t fit entirely into any one of those camps.

In some chapters, you are curating and re-presenting other people’s stories. Is that you as editor, ventriloquist or collector? Tell us about your research and writing process.

I purposefully set out to listen to other people’s stories and to attempt to do those stories and those people some justice in the book. I don’t see it as ventriloquism, but more a careful act of listening and re-presenting, of framing those stories in a way that connects with readers. It’s part of a conversation with the people involved that starts long before I meet them and continues long after any formal interview. It’s a process of listening, writing, re-represensting, checking, seeking permission where I might have added information or interpreted a story in a particular way. It feels like an honest way to go about research, to me, to involve the people I’m talking to throughout the process.

What do the photos in your book do that language can't?

I hope they add richness. The shape of a branch or a leaf, the curve of a hand-carved netsuke, the way in which certain trees grow together or apart – all those things can be written about, though sometimes it takes a photograph to give a fuller picture. My hope is the text and images work together to give another layer of meaning.

If I may be so bold, I felt that the chapter where you travel to Japan to meet traditional woodworkers and a sacred forest (not to mention bears) is somewhat out of place. The rest of the book feels inescapably 'British', rooted in mythology, ecology, rituals and the society of this group of islands we live on. It's a fantastic piece of writing, but weren't there any traditional woodworkers nearer to home?

There are plenty of traditional woodworkers close to home, but my idea with this is that a lot of non fiction about place can be quite inward-looking. In each of these books, I want to offer a perspective that is quite different. So in The Draw of The Sea, I have a chapter set in Svalbard, a perspective I wasn’t able to get travelling around Cornwall and Scilly. With this book, I saw a lot of parallels between woodworking cultures in the UK and Ireland with Japan – we are island nations, at roughly the same latitude, though with vastly different approaches to wood. Japan is very heavily wooded, compared to our sparse tree cover and, in Japan, certain forms of woodwork are very highly valued as cultural capital. I had read a lot about the wood culture of Takayama and thought it would add to the richness of the book, and perhaps put some of the UK and Ireland-focused chapters into relief, through offering something quite different.

What are you working on next? I mean we've had water and wood, so I am assuming air, fire, earth and perhaps something like brick or concrete (so you can write about towns and cities) are being planned?

That’s a fair assumption.