The Mermelf: A Fable for Our Times follows a wingless, tailless blue mermelf that falls from the stars into the enchanted world of Merbay, whose awakening sparks a resistance on Earth where imagination is outlawed.  What was the original spark for Xiu?

In my book, an idea from 1803 is a living presence: ..” The Idea / breathed two sighs, one of relief and one/ of a shortcut onto a dusty and / forgotten shelf of Cranny’s mind.” In the book, I see ideas as living things looking for someone to manifest them. Xiu comes from Cygnus. Throughout history, the stars of Cygnus were seen as a point of origin and return for the human soul. Many ancient sites -including the Pyramids of Giza, and various European megaliths (Newgrange) -are claimed to align with the stars of Cygnus, particularly the star Deneb. This ancient reverence may have been based on an understanding that high-energy cosmic rays that influenced life on Earth may have originated from the binary star system Cygnus X-3. In the March 2006 edition of Astronomy Now, the British anthropological writer Denis Montgomery argues in favour of a connection between cosmic ray activity and the relatively sudden transitions in human behaviour patterns around  35,000 BP.  Gwythian’s relatively dark, coastal location provides excellent viewing opportunities, especially for locating the star Deneb. I was on holidays in Gwythian, Cornwall when I dreamed of a blue mermelf coming to Merbay astride her fireflier. The depth of the ocean I had swam in earlier, the blue of the sky, Virginia Woolf’s lighthouse on the horizon, the shape of Cygnus in the night sky, and the fantasy novels strewn over the coverlet of the sofa in the little tin hut I was renting from the enigmatic Queenie all coalesced. I think many fantasy writers are inspired by myths, as we see ourselves as heirs to ancient folklore. Tolkien drew heavily from Norse and Anglo-Saxon mythology, and I am often inspired by both myth and answering a ‘what if’ in the context of scientific logic. But my mind is most open when it is in a dremang state. Dream as it meets with the what-if of characters who become lifelong companions. It took some time to find Xiu’s name, arriving as it did when I eventually wrote the line: ‘Cygnus catches dreamers with her daughters’. When something is outlawed, it goes outside the norms of a given place and time. My own life had followed a trajectory that did not include accepting the received wisdoms of status: I holidayed in Cornwall every year as a balm against liaising through prejudice in my work as a Community Worker. The systems and structures that uphold a world of insiders and outsiders is one that needed imaginative repsonses to navigate. Imagination is one of the tools that we as human beings have at our disposal to make this world a fairer and more equitable one for everyone, including Nature and the inhabitants of all our imaginary worlds too, so my dreams brought me a blue mermelf from the Cygnian constellation to help my readers and me see another way.

Your prose is lyrical and rhythmic. Do you write with sound in mind first, or image?

What a lovely question. I tend to experience sound and image arriving together rather than separately. I’m very conscious of rhythm and cadence as I write-the movement of a line, the weight of a syllable, the way phrasing carries emotion-but at the same time, I’m seeing the moment visually. For me, metre and image coalesce; the music of the line often shapes the image, and the image in turn suggests its own pace and tone. I’m also led strongly by character. Once I’ve a sense of who is present in a scene, their emotional life begins to guide the language, the rhythm, and even the imagery that emerges. It often feels less like I am constructing the moment and more like I am listening and watching my characters move, speak, and perceive the worlds in which they find themselves. And the language follows those impulses. The sound, the image, and the characters all work together to carry the story forward or backward, as Time is not linear.

The book feels timely in its warning about forgetting what makes us human. What concerns were you exploring?

That is another excellent question. I believe that art is for all of us, not for the privileged few. To that end, I have always tried to bring poetry into the community, sometimes on a voluntary basis, sometimes more formally, as in the Japanese Poetry Workbook: Master Haiku, Tanka, Renku, Haibun & more with prompts and exercises I just self-published on Amazon Kindle. Imagination is coralled by so many gatekeepers, sometimes financially but more often by draconian groups such as The Nomenclature. The idea behind the Nomenclature grew partly from looking at how regimes built on fear try to control not only other people’s actions but their inner lives. I was thinking about periods in history where imagination, books, and independent thought were treated as dangerous, and how conformity was treated as dangerous. I was also thinking about periods that particularly outlawed imagination for girls, as my lead characters are female. Throughout history, women’s access to imagination and creative expression has often been constrained, especially during times of authoritarian control: Fascist Europe, the Middle Ages, the Victorian era and the early twentieth centuryto name a few. Sauron and his legions in Middle-earth,, Imagination, fantasy, and creativity and anomaly have always intertwined with how we see and interpret Nature, and how we construct real and imaginary worlds. Many of the fantastical worlds that women writers have imagined have been a blend of imagination, science, and social critique, whether the eerie landscapes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or the cultural worlds in Le Guin. The anomalies in my book reflect a long history in which society has often restricted imagination, particularly for anyone or anything that is different, and very often it is the female who carries the brunt of this censure. Imagination thrives in freedom, and I have tried to show in my book that Imagination remains both necessary and revolutionary, and how the wider society, no matter what that society is or in which timeframe it exists, has still never solved the problem of fearing it. That is, until the mermelves and those marked with a blue birthmark. Beacons of hope in this, our Age of the Machine.

If imagination is a star, as the book suggests, what happens when people stop looking up?

When we stop looking up, we become our shadow selves, and the world becomes a shadow of what it could and can be. The light that guides creativity, curiosity, and hope begins to fade. Life becomes smaller, meaner, confined to what can be quantitatively measured, confined to GDP. Not that the small and the tiny are not larger than life in The Mermelf. It is all a question of perception. 

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