I always enjoy hosting guests on sharkfishinginwales, the main reason being that they receive far more page views than any posts that I write and I know that today's guest will be no exception. I consider Remy Dean to be a kindred spirit. He had the vision to interview me here and I wanted to interview him for my blog to discover more about the
'Man from the Moelwyns'
Remy Dean : Folklore Talk : Ty Meirion
Tell us, Remy, about your journey from early writing days to where you are now?
I was writing stories as soon as I could write and long before I could spell! Mostly, reworkings of what I’d seen on telly or read in comics. I remember writing my own take on Watership Down, only with bumblebees, instead of rabbits, who have to leave their nest when its attacked by wasps…
I remember proudly taking my first published piece of writing into school – it was a letter I sent into ‘Fantastic Film’ magazine. I think seeing those words I’d typed in my little bedroom, on my toy typewriter with its plastic strikers, appear in proper print on the pages of my favourite film magazine put the idea of being a writer into my little brain. Back then, though, I was keener on being a film director! I eventually took a degree in audio visual design with that in mind.
It wasn’t a film school course, so it covered all aspects of film, photography, radio, music and drama including the scriptwriting. I learnt that filmmaking is a team-sport with lots of compromises and it was the writing that allowed the individual more creative expression. Also, a good film relies on the quality of its script more than anything else. So, by the time I had my degree, I was more interested in the writing side of things and my first volume of poetry was published the year after I graduated.
My first job out of college was as a Press Officer for a big non-profit organisation. That was great for making contacts and taught me the ropes as a journalist. I started out writing snippets for newspapers and magazines, then longer features and eventually I was getting big publishers coming to me with book commissions. That’s an enviable position for any writer to find themselves in but what I enjoyed most was writing for small indie publications, what we called fanzines back in the day.
I loved writing fiction and experimenting with words. The professional writing jobs got me a reputation and I was taken seriously as a writer… that led to a publisher picking up my first novel, ‘Scraps’, an anarcho-punk-noir-crime story. I enjoyed some critical acclaim, did a few interviews in the writing magazines. There was even some interest from a film company. I also realised that there was a lot less money in fiction than in mainstream book commissions, so to follow the dream I had to redesign my life…
How did the journey take you from Newport, Monmouthshire to Blaenau Ffestiniog?
My family moved from Newport when I was about two years old and my dad’s work meant we relocated several times over the next decade or so – Liverpool, Surrey, Skelmersdale, Kingston, until settling in Lancashire where I spent my formative teen years. I studied in Wigan, Stoke and Blackpool before moving down to London as a so-called adult.
With the advent of t’internet and a new-fangled technology called electronic mail, I realised it was no longer essential to be London-based and so we moved back to Wales. I took a part-time teaching job to cover the bills, intending to concentrate more on fiction.
What happened is that I loved teaching so much that it became more than full-time for quite a while. Gradually though, being a teacher became less about teaching and inspiring, and instead started to be much more about judging and assessing and box-ticking. The immense rewards of teaching started to be overshadowed by stress and frustration, so the focus shifted back onto my own art and writing.
What have been the challenges of living in such a Welsh speaking area?
I only speak a spattering of colloquial Cymraeg, so I’m not confident enough to use it in a professional setting. Blaenau Ffestiniog is more than 80 percent first-language Welsh, but we were welcomed into that community and have enjoyed living as part of it for more than 20 years now!
For most of that time I was working in the bilingual settings of two local colleges. The only real downside is because I enjoy working in the community with creativity and well-being projects and many of those commissions require you to be a ‘fluent Welsh-speaker’, regardless of whether you’re actually Welsh or not. Which means I sometimes have to go a bit further afield to take up such opportunities, but I think that’s something you’d have to do in any rural location…
I’d like to speak better Cymraeg and have taken several courses, but perhaps my experience of learning French in school has convinced me I’m hopeless at learning languages – I had the lowest exam score ever achieved in my school, in my GCSE French – 3 percent! Though the same year I did get the highest grade in the school, too! Biology, 100 percent.
Do you draw inspiration from the landscape around you?
Absolutely! I think the land is the biggest single influence on what I do as a creative, though I’m also inspired by films and literature from far beyond my immediate horizons…
Did you know straightaway after landing that you would be doing a Moelwyn's Morning Feature? Please tell us about that!
I started photographing the Moelwynnion mountains as soon as I saw them! I was doing that for my own pleasure, as a visual record and a way of learning about my immediate environment.
I didn’t envisage it as a creative project until I signed up with twitter and saw David Lynch doing his daily weather comments… they were really odd and very cool and I missed them when he stopped doing them. So, I thought, well the thing I do most mornings is go for a walk and greet the Moelwyns, so I could do my own visual version of a weather report… and the #Moelwyns project was born!
They’re as ‘old as the hills’, quite literally, but they’re different every day, sometimes from one minute to the next. They’ll never ‘get old’. They’re now a major part of my spiritual connection with the land, in a kind of Arthurian-shamanic sort of way…
What is the main genre your writing fits with?
Genres are something I dealt with a lot as a teacher of Media and Film Studies and still do as a film critic. So, I have thought about the idea of genre quite a bit. They’re just a sort of contract between creator and consumer - a short-hand for what kind of thing to expect. Most genres get tired very quickly because when one is identified as being popular, producers try to meet audience demand and saturate the market. Genres seem to work best when they collide and become hybrids.
Is ‘keep it interesting’ a genre? If so, that’s the one I’m aiming at!
I don’t really think in genres, though I would say my favourite is Horror, that’s what I read the most. I also love Fantasy, but I don’t love many fantasy books… I usually find them such a trudge to get through. That’s something I’ve tried to be aware of when writing my own epic fantasy, ‘This, That and the Other’. I hope it stays exciting, fast-moving and thought-provoking for the reader. My latest novels identify as children’s fiction and that’s what I’m getting the most enjoyment out of writing right now!
Tell us about your current writing project.
‘This’, is an epic fairy-tale-fantasy inspired by local folklore and written with my daughter as creative consultant. It’s my first book for children and young adults and is being published as a part-work. The first three parts of book one are already out.
Part four of ‘This’ will be published in the summer and then I’ll be moving on with, ‘That’, the second and, eventually, ‘The Other’, third and final book in the trilogy. I expect they’ll be broken down into parts as well… The whole story arc is plotted out and big chunks are written, so, the more copies that sell, the faster the publisher will be able to put the whole story out.
‘This, That and the Other’ charts the special friendship between two girls, Rietta and Carla, who get pulled into a magical adventure together, across the three realms – the world we live in, the world of the fairy folk, and the dark, sinister place were the ‘others’ have been banished. It’s a modern fable inspired by Welsh fairy tales and world folklore.
It’s written in a contemporary style, for sure, but harks back to classic fantasy like, 'The Neverending Story', 'The Box of Delights', 'The Chronicles of Narnia'… I hope it’s an exciting, intriguing adventure, but also that it empowers young people and encourages them to think more deeply about the important issues they face today…
Tell us about your art and your creative output generally please.
Remy Dean: asemic writing talk: Plas Tan y Bwlch
I approach writing as an art. I approach art as a form of writing. I find it difficult to define a border between the two. Much of my visual art, the stuff that goes into frames and is shown in galleries, comes from ‘asemic writing’, mark-making that uses those same ingrained pathways - from mind, through brain, to hand - as the written word. Those conditioned reflexes we use in our hand-writing, creating a unique visual language that shares many formal elements with writing, and may express ideas and emotions in a similar way, but without forming words and literal meaning… and perhaps avoiding the cultural dogma often attached to words and languages.
I think Antonin Artaud experimented with the use of voice in a similar in the theatre. He tried to use sound to express emotional truth without letting words get in the way and put up their barriers of meaning.
I wrote an article considering the boundaries and overlaps between art and writing which you can read in ‘The Signifier’:
Usually, stories are at the heart of my creative approach and my favourite mode in visual art is something called ‘objet-avec-courte-histoire’ - an artform that I claim as my own centred on objects with a short story attached to them. In my case the objects can be photographs, found artefacts, places and physical things I’ve made.
But I think good writing is a type of visual art. Because with a successful piece of fiction, you become transported, you see what is being described, as if in a film or a dream, and the words on the page disappear!
When I remember a good novel I’ve read, it’s the poetic imagery, the pictures my imagination painted in response to the words that I recall, not the words themselves. Good writing is a form of magic in that way.
Thank you, David, for inviting me onto your lively website!
Thank you and Diolch Remy for agreeing to be interviewed.
Note to Readers: I have purchased two copies of Remy's first book for children and young adults for my two nieces.
Why not consider doing the same for the young folks in your family?
