Latest / Mythmakers / Let's talk about mermaids: Berlie Doherty, Tamsin Rosewell and The Seamaiden's Odyssey

Transcript

Let's talk about mermaids: Berlie Doherty, Tamsin Rosewell and The Seamaiden's Odyssey · Mythmakers

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  Hello and welcome to MythMakers. MythMakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy
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  creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy.
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  Now today I want to take you on a journey into an underwater kingdom because I am joined
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  by Burley Doherty and Tamzin Rosewell who have collaborated together on this beautiful book,
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  The Sea Maiden's Odyssey. And the first thing when you pick up this book you'll notice is it's just
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  beautifully produced full of wonderful illustrations done by Tamzin and Burley has reinterpreted what
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  we might call as the mermaid story for our era. But before we swim off into mermaid business,
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  I wanted to ask you about the fantasy books that inspired you when you were growing up.
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  And rather than talk about the writers, I wondered if you wanted to mention any
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  illustrators that really have stuck with you over time. For example, like I remember the
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  illustrations and the children of Green No and obviously the Narnia, the Pauline Bains
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  illustrations and Tolkien's illustrations. Do you have your own favourites that you immediately
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  summon up when you think about children's fantasy books? I'll ask first our artist among us
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  and that's Tamzin. Thank you. Yeah, that's a really interesting question because I think for me
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  it's always been the images that come first. So I'm a huge follower of William Blake, for example,
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  whereas where my colleagues at the Blake Society talk about the books that they like of his and
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  the quotes and things. For me it was always always the images. I do have a couple of really early
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  memories of images. One is of, I think I must have been about two or three really, really young.
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  I'm at the sitting on my grandmother's rug as a very young child with an enormous family
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  bible, probably a doorway bible. And I remember being really frightened by the picture of the
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  witch of Endor. But sort of delightfully frightened, deliciously frightened the bias in a,
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  you know, MR James sort of pleasing terror kind of way. So that's a really vivid memory.
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  And I think, you know, I've always liked that kind of creepy sinister atmospheric illustration
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  since then. And the other is actually only a few years later, for a fourth birthday I was given
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  Errol the Cain's Thorn Rose, which is his retelling of a sleeping beauty. And I just
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  remember being dazzled by the illustrations. I couldn't read at that age and I didn't really
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  need to. I just poured over the detail in them, the level of, you know, the colour, the intricacy
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  of the images and everything was illustrated. All the borders, everything. And I just loved it.
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  And you know, that I actually dedicated this book, you know, in my corner to Errol the Cain
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  because that really was a formative moment for me. Now, Berly, I suspect that you might be more
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  of a word person than a drawing person. But do you have some favourite images from books when
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  you were growing up? Well, yes. I mean, we were at, we weren't a household of books. We didn't have
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  books at home at all when I was a child. It wasn't until I was about nine or ten. My big sister
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  was 13 years older than me, used to buy me books. So I didn't own any. We used to get books
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  in a library. Dad and I used to get books in a library. But I loved that I of course didn't know
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  at that time the names of illustrators. But I did love fairy tales and they would be books
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  we got from the library. And when I see Walter Crane illustrations, for instance, in Arthur Reckham,
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  then I reckon I do recognise him for when I was little of the beautiful, I loved colour plate.
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  When you do have illustrations that seeped across the page and across the margins that I,
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  I was aware of anyway. But I do and there's one illustration in particular that I loved fairy tales.
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  But there was one story that I couldn't bear to have read to me because the illustration terrified
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  me. It was a story of Bluebeard. I loved the name Bluebeard. It's beautiful name. But the illustration
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  of when the door is opened that she mustn't open and on all the maidens are hanging.
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  Oh dear, I can visualise it now. It has never left me and I used to put my hand over. I didn't want
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  to see that page at all. I can completely understand because it's a very dark story, that one.
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  Yeah, very dark and beautiful without any illustrations. So for the scene made in its Odyssey,
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  the style of illustration is silhouettes on a very beautifully drawn background.
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  And it's reminiscent if you, I was thinking of Yampiankovsky. I particularly remembered him
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  illustrating a Dronakin series of stories called the necklace of raindrops. I always used to go to
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  that bit of the shelf in the library and pick that off just to look at the illustrations,
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  the magic of the raindrops and the illustrations. So, Thompson, is that the Yampiankovsky approach?
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  Is that one? You always take or is it just for this book? I kind of combination of both. I was
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  lucky enough to really get to know Yala and David not long before Yanz death and I got to talk
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  to him and spend some time with him. Yeah, absolutely. He's been a huge influence in my life. I
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  love those, you know, books of his and David's and of all. So, you know, his illustrations to
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  J&A, King's work is amazing. But, you know, as a silhouette artist and he didn't only do silhouette at all,
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  he's actually following on in a really long tradition of illustrative work, which is particularly
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  the telling of fairy tales and mythology, I think, in silhouette. And we can trace that right back.
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  I mean, you know, barely mentioned of Walter Crane and Arthur Ratham and certainly both of those
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  were using silhouettes as well. But, you know, we can go, we can trace it back even further through,
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  you know, 18th century fashions for, you know, silhouettes art in other countries, the, you know,
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  the shadow puppet tellings of the Ramayana and sort of cycles of mythology. We can even trace it
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  back to ancient Greece to, you know, all those vases with silhouettes of sirens and telling the
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  even back to cave art, you know, those are really early images. So, I think it's always been with us
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  in the form of storytelling. And it just seemed to fit perfectly. Although it's not where we started,
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  Berlin, I started, you know, the conversations about illustrations somewhere really quite different,
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  looking at colour and form and what these sea maidens looked like. And it was actually the designer,
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  Becky Chilcott, who said, I think you should try working in silhouette because I think it'll offset
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  the idea of, you know, a really contemporary retelling of, you know, fairy tales mythology,
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  you know, really, really nice little kind of blended altogether. I'll say that's where we went.
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  Yes, it does definitely give it that classic fairy tale feel, but also it means that the great
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  thing about silhouette is you're not telling us what's one looks like. And you can then project
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  what you want onto that. So, okay, let's talk a little bit about the story. So,
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  Berlin, do you want to tell us the outline of the tale that someone will get when they pick up
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  the sea maidens, Odyssey? Oh, okay. It's a story within a frame, a contemporary frame of a young
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  woman who's working in a sea life sanctuary, sea world sanctuary, and a strange and very
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  beautiful sea creature is brought to the sanctuary. She is on duty and it becomes something that she
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  has to care for. And it's not a fish. It has the looks of a fish, but in glorious colours and
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  wonderful intriguing strands, but the extraordinary thing about it is that it has the face of a young
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  woman and has hands. And gradually, as the relationship develops, as caring relationship,
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  they begin to speak to each other, to talk to each other. And in the end, the sea maiden that
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  has been brought in is encouraged to tell her story in exchange for something very, very precious.
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  And what the girl who works in a sanctuary, what the young woman who works in a sanctuary
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  wants to know, the question she's asked her is, what is your community like? What is your
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  way of life? What is your family? And this is a story that's that emerges when we
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  enter into the real text. And they are people, sea people, sea maidens, sea creatures,
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  sea folk, I don't know what you want to call them, but who live within the vastness of the ocean
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  can communicate with each other from time to time, they are one big family. And our attention is
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  focused on the youngest, the very youngest of the people, the sea people. And the her beloved older
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  sister who has been kidnapped has been stolen, captured by sea men, by fishermen working on the sea
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  men folk who take her sister away. And this is the most terrible thing that can happen.
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  And the young sea girl, whose name is Maryne, when she's approaching young womanhood,
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  is asked to do something which she cannot accept by her father. And she's not ready. And she
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  needs to leave the family. She needs to get away and be on her own. And she goes into the depths
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  of the underwater caves, caverns and tunnels, maze of tunnels, and fetches up in a pool on
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  a mountainside and can't escape from it. So she's there on her own in this bleak pool which has
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  none of the life of the ocean in it. And I don't want to tell you anymore.
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  No, that's very good. We must leave it on a cliffhanger. And so just to give people an idea of a
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  structure, because a lot of people listening to this are aspiring to write, it's got similarities
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  to the Frankenstein structure with the outer layer of the sort of scientific world, then the story
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  of somebody inside that. And then in the heart of it, there's the story of the loss, the loss
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  sister who's had the sort of worse experience. And then moves back out again to the back to the
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  outer layer and they all interconnect. So it's a beautifully organised book. You're obviously
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  writing in the shadow of other myths and legends about mermaids. And you've purposely gone for
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  the alternative term of sea mage and for a different iteration of the physicality of mermaid.
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  George tells a little bit about your thinking around that.
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  Yes, it's something that Thameson and I both agreed on immediately.
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  I've started to launch into this book. Well, at first we did think we were writing and
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  creating a book from younger readers. And it was our publisher Hazel Holmes at UCLan,
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  who said it and I'd love it to be for young teenagers. So a vastly different story from the one
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  that I had originally. But even so in when we were thinking of perhaps for six year olds,
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  we knew we didn't want to write to create something about a sparkly mermaid with the mirror and
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  conscious or sequence. Singing on a rock. Singing on a rock and disnified. We didn't want that.
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  We wanted to look at some some creature who would be like us in many ways emotionally
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  just relating to people like ourselves, but other and other creature and other community.
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  So the words see mermaid just was wrong because it had the wrong connotations for us,
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  so that's why we developed the idea of a sea maiden. And Thameson, do you want to say about the
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  lack of a single fish tail in the sort of fish you buy from Sainteby's kind of style?
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  Yeah, no, absolutely. I'm at least right that the word mermaid is actually very loaded.
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  I think it's a conversation I haven't been able to write as well, particularly if they're writing
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  about fairies or fairies. We've got exactly the same problem with word fairies in about days.
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  Probably people listening to this podcast will know that fairy law and mermaid law is actually
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  really dark. These things have always been about the other. They've been about the
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  distressing elements of humanity. And yet somehow we've got to this place where everything
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  is sparkly and sequined, and we didn't want to start there. But I did, you know, earlier I did
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  both start with the folklore. You know, we both, we started talking about, you know, how we have
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  this history, folkloric history of inland manmates. We've still got places called mermaid,
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  poem, called, you know, with references, but far inland. So we must have had it at one point.
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  And then from my point of view, I started thinking about the way a mermaid would look.
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  And for me, I think they probably sit in the folkloric realm more comfortably alongside
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  cryptids or monsters, in fact, in that they're very, very physical. So unlike a ghost or a fairy,
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  which you might be able to summon, but you couldn't grab it in a net and put it in an exhibition
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  in the same way. We knew we were starting with something physical. So we had quite a fun and
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  interesting conversation very early on about, you know, if we had evolved to be a critic,
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  what would we actually look like? And we realized we probably look something like malities.
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  We, you know, things like necks and hair and fingers are actually pretty useless underwater.
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  But then we're not in that realm. We are in the realm of fiction. So we are then able to add back
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  in what we wanted. We knew, you know, there's lots of descriptions of, of marine feeling her way
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  through unfamiliar dark caverns. So we knew they needed fingers. We wanted them to look very other,
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  but very beautiful in their own way. So we didn't want to add the sequence. And then I think
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  the early actually came up with the idea of them almost looking like tropical fish with these
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  frills, with these extraordinary, you know, the sense of movement. And for me as an artist,
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  I can add that movement. And they're in, you know, but it is almost in the ear of color,
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  I think, and when you're working in silhouette, you can add in a huge amount of atmosphere
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  using those frills. So they do indeed have fish tails, but it's not fish tails with that sort of
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  classic fin divided fin at the bag. It's like direct, almost like fabric drapery in that,
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  as you were saying, in the tropical fish wave, you just think of an aquarium with the
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  flowing movement that you see in tropical fish. So it's not right to say they don't have a
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  fishtail, is it? It's more that it's a new sort to get away from the silhouette, which we all
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  know so well. And the, you know, the, there's a strange and I think to, you know, one of the
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  appeals of tropical fish is the strange and I saw to them that, you know, that they do have a kind
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  of a fairy quality, don't they? That they are based things. We slightly ethereal and not,
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  it's certainly not quite, you know, of this realm. Well, I think we wanted to capture that,
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  and I think those frills do that. And then after that conversation, they worked their way into
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  the text as well. I began to see Drafton Berlin, which the frills, you know, things were caught in
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  the frills. Yeah, because it's so graceful, it added such elegance to, to Tamsen's illustrations
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  as well. And it did replace the color when, when she first, when we first started, Tamsen was
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  sending me amazing illustrations using her incredible color palette and beautiful, beautiful colors.
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  And suddenly, I was guessing black and white one, black one, silhouette, silhouette, and I thought,
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  what's happened to the color? Of course, the color comes back in in the background, but, but almost
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  replacing that is this elegance of shape and form, which embodies movement yet, lovely, lovely to
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  So it's in many ways a coming of age story, as mermaid tales often are. And in the classic little
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  mermaid tale, it's about a mermaid changing themselves to fit a man and a man's world
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  in painful and sad ways. You're obviously taking a different approach to the relationship to
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  men, men, folk, and women, and women, folk. Do you want to say a little bit about that aspect to
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  it? So it just seemed a major theme without giving too much away, but I don't know if you don't want
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  us for the end, but is it fair to say it's about sisters and sisterhood? It's very much about
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  family, sisters, especially the female line through from the grandmother and the mother and
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  the grandchildren, the grand girls. Yes, there is a strong element of love in it, and there is a
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  point at which she has to choose. She really does have to choose between her and is very conflicted
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  between the love that's been shown to her by virtually the only person who seems to want to really
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  get to know her, a young farmer, come to the poor, the inland poor regularly, and her desire to
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  return her, her feeling that she is now ready to return her, not to be tired to a land person
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  in some way. She belongs to the ocean, she belongs to the sea, and that's the big kind of conflict
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  and pull in the story, and it is in both senses to do with love and what feels right, the right
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  thing for her to do as well, the love of her community. So I think it's like the perfect gift, I mean,
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  it's going to be read by anybody, of course, but I would say it's a perfect gift for a young teen
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  middle-grade reader, a girl who's thinking through these things, which is very good, I think,
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  talking about doing things when you're ready is another theme, I sort of picked out.
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  The other part of the title, which we should pause over, is the word Odyssey, of course, which
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  has its roots back in Odysseus and the Homer's Odyssey, which is a sea voyage as well.
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  What made you pick that as the title? Is there a connection to that story that you see?
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  Well, there is, in the sense, it is a journey, a very eventful journey, both emotionally and
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  physically eventful journey that she has to make in order to become herself.
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  And we went through four different kinds of titles, which I kept throwing backers and forwards,
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  and then the journey of the sea maiden cropped up, and that didn't seem quite as nearly there,
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  but not quite, and then I hit on the word Odyssey and felt that's the word I want to use.
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  It gives it that kind of weight and it's a very significant journey that she makes.
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  So I went for that and immediately a positive response for once.
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  It seems to be like a female version of an Odyssey, because Odysseus is going from land through
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  the sea to go home to the land, and Erin is doing the opposite. And many of the encounters in the
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  Odyssey, especially in others, these sea creatures feel like they're telling it from the
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  monsters point of view, they're not monsters, but the other point of view. So I enjoyed the
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  thinking about the literary connections, that choice raised for me.
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  Okay, so we're talking here about two people who are collaborating together, writing a book
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  can be a very lonely business. So did you actually have the whole text first,
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  or did you sort of do a little, did you send a little
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  instalments, or did you sometimes write to an illustration? How did it work?
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  Oh, it's hard to remember now, but except that we both knew that we wanted to work on a book
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  together, because Tamsen and I had met for the first time when we were launching the haunted
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  hills, which Tamsen had done the cover artwork and inside
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  black and white illustrations for. And we subsequently two more of my covers, and we felt
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  that we really understood each other, and I loved her artwork. So I think we began just by talking
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  about folk tales and fairy tales that we just surrounded ourselves with folk and fairy tales,
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  and Tamsen said, well, is there a local legend that you could perhaps work on?
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  And then I thought of the mermaid pool, which is just below where I used to live.
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  In the peak district, I live just below the mermaid pool. It was just below kinder.
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  And that immediately appeals, that idea appeals to Tamsen, and she is just an incredibly fast
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  and versatile and thoughtful artist, and immediately was kind of coming up with wonderful ideas.
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  And we should mention for those listening from abroad, the peak district is nowhere near the sea.
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  No, no, because this is from away from the seas you can get. Yeah, on either direction,
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  yeah, I could assume from the sea. Sort of, Manchester down a bit.
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  Yes, across the borders by.
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  There are in fact actually two pools up on that area of the piece, which both have
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  mermaid stories associated with them of different kinds. And you know,
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  Burley has very heavily woven both of those elements of folklore into his narrative.
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  You know, both, there are two pools in this story when they have different sorts of
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  sea creatures in them, shall we say? Yeah, without getting too much away.
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  Yeah, I think it's quite unusual for an author and an illustrator to work together in this way.
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  I think, you know, those of you who have been one girl, most people, you know, who are listening
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  who've got some experience of publishing would probably know that what's normal is for an illustrator
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  to be given perhaps an extract of a book when it's complete and not read the whole thing,
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  but be told by a publisher, you know, we like something like this to other book covers.
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  But in these colors perhaps, you know, this sort of template and actually they're really
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  not connected to the author and I just, I just don't, I don't think I could work like that.
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  We really worked on this from the beginning. Burley would send me drafts or email me about ideas
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  for what happened in the plot and I would respond visually and sometimes, you know,
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  that was an actual painting and at other times that was, you know, what each plot point would
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  would be able to inspire visually. So, you know, there's a scene in it which I don't want to spoil too
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  much, which is quite dramatic and involves, you know, somebody actually being raised up out of
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  the water, which is a wonderful image. And so, you know, when she talked to me about that, that's
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  the way I responded was, you know, verbally, but to say, this would make an amazing image,
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  this, you know, I can imagine this, you know, in this way. So, yeah, it really was right from the
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  beginning that the images and the words sort of kind of arrived pretty much together.
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  One of the things that attracts people to listen to something like this is to actually find out
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  how you do stuff. So, how do you actually draw terms in? What do you physically do when you're
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  actually doing a picture in response to something Berly said? Okay, so I think the first thing to say,
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  which perhaps isn't necessarily obvious, by the time you're looking at it in a book, you're never
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  really going to be sure, but I worked traditionally and not digitally. I'm not out of any great principle,
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  but because I'm not believe, I'm a very analogue person. I love ink, the painting, which anyone
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  watching on YouTube will see behind me as one of the images. They're huge. This is on canvas.
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  It's ink on canvas with silhouette cut out by hands on top. The huge advantage for me
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  of working traditionally, not digitally, is that I end up with a whole series of physical objects.
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  I've got nine canvases like this behind me and a whole folder of black and white images that can
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  go round and support the book and be part of that narrative, part of that discussion. People can
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  look at them and think about, as you have Julia, the representation and how they've been physically
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  created. I tend to do a lot of what I call studies, so Berly and I spent quite a lot of time
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  really outside of the conversation with publishers, with towing and throwing and me drawing
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  different shapes of sea maids and how thrills might work and move and where the movement was and
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  how they would be differentiated from each other. I'm a huge believer in the theory of doing it
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  again. Sarah Moss, the author, literally takes her entire script and gets rid of it and then
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  does it again. I don't think I go quite that far, but I really do if something isn't quite right,
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  I will just physically start again. I'm quite a physical sort of interact. I don't
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  say to a computer and do it digitally. I'm full or unusually covered in it as well.
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  One of the things that she's really lovely about your book is they are sensual creatures
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  without being sexy, because one of the problems about mermaids is the shell breasts and
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  the little tummy buttons, which make them feel like a teenage boy's dream as opposed to a real
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  creature. You just get rid of all of that with the beautiful outlines that you're using,
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  which I found very refreshing, I must admit. I should also mention that the publisher has
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  actually spent on your book, because you've got some wonderful gold foil highlights,
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  which we all know is a little bit expensive, so it looks fantastic.
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  They really did go to town. I think you are saying again for those listening who aspire to write
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  that when you're creating a book like this, there are more and more people involved than the author
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  and the illustrator that, you know, our designer Becky was a huge part of that conversation,
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  and really it's Becky who absolutely went for it and would send me notes saying, you know,
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  can you do me like a whole sheet of bubbles? And I go, okay, do I want you to go? And she,
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  you know, got me to create all of the in-key swirling backgrounds that you can see in that
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  those different shades of blue was changed throughout the book and enabled her to separate the
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  beginning of the book from the end of the book from that, you know, audacity part in the middle.
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  You know, there are editorial discussions as well, which, you know, obviously,
• 29:06
  but all of Berlin's, you know, not mine, but they were, you know, the iceberg of Berlin,
• 29:10
  I was kind of the nucleus of it, but actually the discussion was much, much bigger.
• 29:15
  Yeah, yeah, I'm casting my editors, it was superb in her encouragement, but also in her,
• 29:25
  pushing me further, as she kept saying. And I notice that, um, so I'm being published by
• 29:31
  Harper Collins at the moment in a historical murder mystery. And they've just started putting
• 29:36
  at the end like a credits page, which they don't show me, it just, I just opened the book that, oh,
• 29:42
  well, and it's got like you sitting in in the cinema, production team, accountants,
• 29:48
  like a whole page. And I just thought, oh, well, wish they told me they're going to do this,
• 29:52
  because I want to thank those people. But I think it's a lovely idea to actually capture
• 29:57
  because I only really talked to my editor, and maybe the copy editor, but that's it. But they're
• 30:04
  obviously working in massive teams, so you don't get any recognition. So I don't think they've
• 30:09
  done that with your book. I'll just quickly check it at the back, but it's around time we recognize.
• 30:15
  Yeah, yeah, you know, so do do pay attention when you get to the end of a book if they do that.
• 30:20
  Yeah. So we've talked about drawing, but barely. Are you straight onto a computer gal or are you
• 30:31
  pen and paper gal? I'm pen and paper. Certainly for most of my books in my, I'm just a lot of them.
• 30:42
  Unfortunately, having recently moved, I can't find the book to write a book in as what I call it when
• 30:48
  I've got a book in my mind. I go and buy a large book. It's got to have a nice cover.
• 30:53
  Perhaps a William Morris print on the cover. And that's where my story begins. And it's just,
• 31:00
  sometimes it's just a random collection, not starting from the beginning and finishing at the end,
• 31:06
  but a random collection of ideas and notions and questions. But sometimes it does actually begin
• 31:14
  at the beginning and I've flowed through, but it's always a scramble. And then eventually, of course,
• 31:21
  I do put it on to computer, but yeah, that feeling of the connection to the pen and to the ink
• 31:28
  and it's flowing from you is a very powerful one and very different from the clack, clack, clack, clack at her.
• 31:35
  It's a computer and a keypad on the screen.
• 31:40
  If we were talking about, just before we started the session, about the beautiful penmanship of
• 31:47
  some writers and see writers, would you say your handwriting is beautiful in the way that
• 31:53
  Alan Garner's and Tolkien's was? Or is it? No, it's like a doctor's prescription.
• 32:01
  It's, I mean, I do a somewhere on my website. There is a photograph, I think, of one of my pages.
• 32:09
  No, it's all a bit of a scroll in the end. It starts off very neatly, I guess, more of a scroll.
• 32:16
  And I do write on every other line and every other page to allow for more ideas to be put in.
• 32:24
  But Tamsen's handwriting is beautiful. Oh, you didn't confess that. Is that something you've developed
• 32:31
  on purpose, Tamsen, as part of your visual? It probably was developed on purpose. I think I
• 32:39
  write very carefully. I'm very, very left-founded. And as a school child, I was, I really struggled to
• 32:45
  read. So I've always been quite a visual person. And, you know, I remember in secondary school,
• 32:52
  you know, you know, in nowadays you'd be diagnosed with dyslexia and there'll be support
• 32:57
  and there's wonderful barrington stoke books and, yeah, you know, Oxford published something
• 33:01
  similar. And, you know, at the time I was just slow. You know, I was the one who was rather left out of it.
• 33:08
  So, you know, I did, and I think I had to work really hard, make my handwriting legible.
• 33:16
  I can write backwards fluently, the same way that William Blake had to want his plates.
• 33:22
  And I think that's a result of being very, very left-handed in my brain. Well, actually,
• 33:26
  I realise I paint from right to left as well. So I think if you write, if you're left-handed and
• 33:33
  you write from left to right, it's natural that if you're left-handed, you'd write the other way
• 33:39
  like mirror writing. So I think a bit more as a party check than anything useful. Well,
• 33:45
  Leonardo da Vinci got there first. He did, yes. I write backwards fluently. My writing has always
• 33:52
  been needed backwards and forwards. But interestingly, actually, I've also struggled with school maths,
• 34:01
  but with visual mathematics and geometry, I've no problem at all. In fact, maths is one of the
• 34:08
  first things you ask, well, you know, how do I actually work? One of the very first things I do
• 34:12
  is actually rule out the mathematics of an image. And in the same way that, you know, a writer will
• 34:18
  know how to manage pace, how to, you know, inject urgency into scenes and, you know, where the
• 34:26
  tension needs to be. You know, I've also got my eye on how people's eye will travel around the image,
• 34:34
  how, where the actions got to be taking place, whether I need it to be creepy or time of day,
• 34:40
  that kind of thing. And mathematics is a huge part of that. The opening image in the book is one
• 34:50
  of which I used to double for the Nazi sequence in order to gain, no, sorry, not that one, that the one
• 34:56
  of when when Yanna is taken on the boat, where there's this raging sea, I've created one spiral
• 35:02
  moving one way and another spiral moving the other way, which centers on the moon and one end
• 35:07
  centers on her core in the net. And actually, mathematically, the result of that is that if you're
• 35:14
  looking at it, your eye doesn't quite know where to rest. So I wanted that to almost give you a
• 35:18
  sense of being a psychedistic set to increase the sense of movement. And you can do that with
• 35:22
  mathematics, but you've just got to not think about it. Just school mathematics. Yeah, this is visual.
• 35:28
  Does that sprain encouraging for people out there who have struggled to be to do something that's
• 35:32
  a conventional way, but has their own way of doing it? Yeah. So people listening to this,
• 35:43
  do you have any tips for those who wanting to get into the world of illustration or writing?
• 35:48
  Things that work for you in your own careers? Burleigh will go to you first. How did you get to be
• 35:54
  a writer, I suppose, that's asking. Well, I just started. Yeah, I mean, I think about it, just do
• 36:02
  writing since I was five writing stories and put them, doesn't it? Just is what I do, you know,
• 36:09
  always has been, I was never going to be anything. I was new. I wanted to be a writer and
• 36:14
  everybody else knew I was going to be a writer. It's very hard because it's all very well
• 36:22
  wanted to be a writer, but I should be coming a writer. I agree, isn't it going to be?
• 36:28
  Yes, you and I both started a while ago. Maybe you were a little bit before me,
• 36:33
  and things have changed a lot. There are new roots to being published, but I think you're right to
• 36:38
  say that if you want to be a writer, write something. It's an amazing number of people who come
• 36:44
  out. It's a really good idea. It's a really good idea. But you actually have to sit down and write
• 36:49
  it, see if you can sustain a whole story or a book or whatever it is you're aiming.
• 36:53
  Absolutely. There's no other way around it. You just write it and work, so it doesn't work,
• 36:59
  and you keep sharing, be willing to change it, be willing to readraft and readraft.
• 37:05
  Yeah, and try and be easy to work with is the other thing, which is the thing about agreeing
• 37:09
  to change things. Yeah. If you're really setting your ways, it's very hard for people to
• 37:15
  help you make something that's published. Because an outsider sees something that you don't see.
• 37:20
  You can't see it because you're kind of focused on your vision of something, but maybe you'd
• 37:27
  haven't expressed your vision of it properly. And how about you, Tamsay? What would you say
• 37:32
  was a tip? Do you need to, for example, go to art college? No, I didn't go to art college at
• 37:37
  all. I'm of that generation where, you know, to go to art school, you have to have a foundational
• 37:42
  course. And for both the art school and the foundation course, you had to pay. There weren't
• 37:47
  grants available, and I certainly didn't come from the kind of family that would have had the
• 37:51
  money to do that, and probably wouldn't really have valued it either. They, you know, I think they
• 37:56
  still probably thought that it was a hobby rather than anything that could be experienced.
• 38:01
  I know I definitely didn't go to art school, but I've always drawn. It's always been a passion.
• 38:06
  I think, actually, everything that you've been discussing about writing also applies to
• 38:10
  illustration. I think be flexible, you know, when your designer comes along,
• 38:13
  says, oh, I know you've done all these studies, but I think you should work in silhouette. Give it
• 38:17
  a go. I think, you know, often they're adding something that you can't see that you don't know
• 38:23
  in exactly the same way. I think with illustration, I think you've kind of got to be in, have the
• 38:30
  confidence to be in what I think of as a state of play all the time. You've got to have that
• 38:35
  energy and the fluidity and the joy pushed into it. If you've got to the stage when you're spending
• 38:40
  about 20 minutes doing one tiny bit of cross hatching and being really anxious that you're going
• 38:45
  to do it wrong, you're going to go wrong and make a mess of it, then actually that's when it loses
• 38:49
  all the energy, that's when it loses its character and its form and actually it kind of dies on,
• 38:56
  you know, I think, you know, I think that that kind of confidence to just push through, keep going
• 39:02
  and, you know, do what is right for you, you know, what your vision is, I think is incredibly
• 39:08
  important in illustration today. It's a very good advice indeed. So we always finish with a little bit
• 39:14
  of fun and we imagine all the fantasy worlds that we've ever watched or read or had poems about
• 39:22
  whatever it might be that been created. I'm going to ask you where you think it would be the
• 39:28
  best place to be a sea maiden or mermaid. You don't have to have them there already, you can
• 39:34
  drop them into some a new place. Where would you like to be a sea maiden, which is the best place?
• 39:41
  Clarence, did you want to kick off? I think there's a novel that was written in the mid-late 1800s,
• 39:55
  which I think is probably quite important to the Oxford world of fantasy, which is George
• 39:59
  McDonald's Fantasties, which was a hugely important text for CS Lewis in particular and many others.
• 40:07
  And I think I drop some mermaids into Fantasties because what he's written, I read now as
• 40:15
  it's a very political text, it's quite feminist in its outlook that there are a lot of
• 40:21
  mediums, so a young man ends up in the world of fairy and he meets all sorts of women on the way.
• 40:31
  These are denizens of the world of fairy, but they're older women, they're younger women,
• 40:35
  they're associated with different sorts of places and they all actually offer him really sound
• 40:43
  advice and our intelligent beings and have their own destinies. He ignores all of them to his
• 40:50
  detriment and to his fate, but I think actually if you're going to be a sea maiden to be in that
• 40:55
  environment where you are allowed your own personality and allowed to an ask to give advice,
• 41:02
  I think that would be a better place than probably in Anderson's story in which they nowadays.
• 41:08
  Yes, yeah, and I haven't pushed Anderson's stories of it.
• 41:13
  Problematic, I think. Verly, how about you, where would you like to be a sea maiden?
• 41:19
  Well, I think I'd like to be in the sky, if the sea wasn't my element, I think it would be
• 41:27
  the sky because it has its own currents and things fly instead of swim and I just think it would
• 41:34
  be an extraordinary idea for a story. Are you reinventing the sea maiden to a sky maiden?
• 41:42
  I'm reinventing the element, but she lives in an exploring a different kind of beauty and
• 41:50
  and another place that seems to have no boundaries, no frontiers.
• 41:56
  I remember also because I should confess here that we've done this conversation before and I
• 42:00
  failed some of the AI companion, nixed the recording and I remember you said,
• 42:06
  and Verly, that you don't actually need to go into fantasy world, you actually would rather like
• 42:11
  to be a mermaid and explore our real seas, which have not been explored, which I thought was a very
• 42:16
  good answer. Yes, I've forgotten. I remember, I thought that was a really good answer, I'd
• 42:21
  hand it back to you. And as for me, I would I'm afraid it's very much a sort of fairly predictable
• 42:29
  answer for me, but I think there is a wonderful scope to be a mermaid in the world of Lord of the
• 42:35
  Rings because you can go and visit the sunken worlds of Numenor and you could swim over to the
• 42:41
  undying lands and explore all the, go up the rivers, not too far, of Middle Earth, and it would be
• 42:50
  just great fun. There just seemed to be, I can't think of there being any mermaids in Lord of the
• 42:57
  Rings. I know there are the sort of valla who have sort of power over the ocean, so maybe they
• 43:01
  have some Maya who are more like sea veins. Anyone who knows, writing and telling me and are
• 43:08
  looking up the references, but that's where I'd like to swim around, go and visit Numenor
• 43:13
  under the sea. If you're going to write your sky mages, I'd love to paint the sky.
• 43:20
  You know, I can imagine them in the stars, swimming through constellations.
• 43:26
  Yeah, I'm totally into that. Okay, so look out, guys, for the
• 43:30
  just glad many things, how to see. Thank you very much for joining me for this conversation today
• 43:37
  and it's been lovely meeting you both. Thank you very much. Thank you.
• 43:40
  Thanks for listening to MythMaker's podcast.
• 43:49
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