Jen Hadfield

Interview by Malachy Tallack

As a poet, Jen Hadfield has published four remarkable collections, most recently The Stone Age (Picador, 2021). She has won the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Highland Book Prize and the Edwin Morgan International Poetry Award. This year she was one of eight winners of the Windham Campbell Prize, one of the most prestigious literary honours worldwide. In July, Hadfield published her first book of prose, Storm Pegs. It’s a book about the eighteen years she has spent living in Shetland. It’s about the people, the landscapes and the language of the islands. It’s about finding and making a home. Jen Hadfield spoke to Gutter’s managing editor Malachy Tallack.

MALACHY TALLACK: In your last collection, there’s a poem, ‘Limpet’, that begins: ‘Stop, now you’re / home, and consider / what that feels like – ’. It’s an instruction you’ve followed here, beautifully, in this book, but I wondered what prompted you to do so in prose rather than poetry?

JEN HADFIELD: I think I'm just doing the same thing over and over again in my work, which is saying: Where am I? I thought people might want to read it because people are interested in Shetland, and maybe it’s just me that likes poets’ accounts of places in prose, but I thought I might like to try and write one of those.

On top of that, I use writing to try and anchor myself in where I am and when I am, because – I think I say it in my introductory chapter – I feel sort of all-at-sea in the present tense quite often. You know, the stimulus of the world is sometimes quite dizzying for me, and I find it hard to anchor myself because things are changing all the time.

I find conversations very exciting and dizzy. Meeting people is always fun. And I just feel like everything new that I encounter in the world knocks me off balance a little bit. Which can be overwhelming, and can also be really pleasurable and lovely.

Writing is my way of processing a lot of that stuff. And I think I use the limpet image in the book as well to try and give a sense of creating a sort of home-scar in words. A limpet has a home-scar, which is its home, its address on the rock. And it's the same shape as the limpet shell; it’s a sort of gutter – which is nice for our current context. And the limpet goes prowling around, foraging for algae and then comes back to its rock as low tide approaches. It screws itself down onto its home-scar to lock out the drying air and predators, and to keep the moisture in. I always feel like I'm trying to create limpet shells of words to protect myself from the extraordinary present tense that we all live in. And to digest it, you know, if that makes sense.

MT: So if the writing is partly about digesting that present tense, are you someone who’s kept diaries? Did this book grow out of journals or from memory?

JH: A bit of both. I’m bad with memory, which is one reason that I do the writing, because that immersion in the present tense means I don’t seem to file things very well in my memory unless I write them. And without that I feel like I'm losing precious things all the time. So I had a vast, vast quantity of writing that I worked with. Seventeen years of sometimes daily writing about Shetland. But I really tried to capture some precision and detail of what the experiences were like. I’m glad I did that because Shetland has changed a lot in those years. And so have I. And without that sensory information, I don't remember, and it feels like a loss. It feels like continual losses.

But then I had a very difficult sort of collage process, where I had to create some kind of narrative that felt like it was flowing, with that immediacy and intimacy and authenticity through time. And I found that very, very difficult indeed. I mean, it's too long, isn't it? It's too many years to put in one book. [Laughs]

MT: I was actually going to ask you about structure because it’s a book of many intersecting threads and narratives, and it feels like it must have been very difficult to piece together.

JH: Yeah, and I don't know if I pulled it off. You know, there were definitely times when I thought, I don't know if this is going to work. And then, of course, there was quite a drive from my publishers to call it a memoir, which means that you have to give it a life story.

I think I wanted to write as much in the present tense as I could, and try and keep it with a sense of present-ness and immediacy. And I think the compromise I struck in the end is that the early chapters are more past tense-y, and they feel a bit like setting up a Now that I can write from. So there’s a bit of, okay, this is how I came to Shetland – because people tend to want to know why and how I did that. I wanted to kind of get some of that out of the way, but also set up some ideas about place and time, and establish how the book might be written.

MT: I'm interested both in what the switch to prose allowed you to do that perhaps you couldn’t do with poetry, and, conversely, in what ways you felt prose might have restricted you.

JH: I don't think I felt freed up because I was so burnt with the material. I don’t know that I felt restricted either because I thought I could just maybe get everything in, and I kept trying to get everything in. But I think I have a better sense of what I was trying to do, which is, I wanted to write some really breathy, long, enraptured sentences if I could get away with it. I have had to cut some of them down a bit, just so I could say it in a breath if I was ever called on to do a reading from the book, you know. But I love [John] Steinbeck and [Annie] Dillard and [Annie] Proulx, and I love the intensity of detail, and the flow of some of those writers in some of their works. And I wanted to get that sense that there was so much to say that a sentence almost couldn’t hold it, and I think prose gave me some opportunities to experiment with that a little bit. There’s lots of sentences with and-and-and in them, especially towards the end of the book, where I get to relax a bit and just say the things I want to say because I’ve established all the other stuff.

And there were, I suppose, changes in consciousness that I wanted to explore. So there are passages where I’m thinking through certain themes about language, or concepts of place, or creatures that I particularly love here. And they’re maybe a bit more studied, and a bit more, okay, this is me trying to get some information onto the page. But then there’s moments where the memory does feel alive on the page, for me anyway, and I felt like this is the present tense of me going for a wee wander in my neighbour’s boat or watching Maggie teach me how to fillet a cod, that felt so precious. And I really just want the reader to feel like they're in that moment with me as well. And then I just indulged myself in the and-and-and sort of sentences, and tried to frame those precious moments of consciousness.

MT: I think that one of the ways in which your book is quite different from many of the books that it will probably sit alongside in a bookshop is how peopled it is. And that’s a difference, too, from how Shetland is often written about by folk from elsewhere. Your book is full of characters, full of friends and neighbours. You’re accompanied through much of it. And it seems your experience of place is very much shaped by those people, by that company.

MT: Yeah, so that was a hard thing, but something I wanted to risk doing. And it did feel like it took a bit of nerve to try. Because there’s so many ways, I think, of doing it. And there's a number of real risks there.

Here’s what I thought was at stake: I thought if I didn’t write with people alongside me in the book, which is what I’ve tried to do, that wouldn't be true to what life here is like for me. Because I am in company through much of my life, with friends and neighbours. If I try to talk about things entirely from my perspective – especially on land use and the [Viking Energy] wind farm – that wouldn't be true to here either, because people here disagree, as you know, vehemently, all the time. And I wanted to get a sense of that diversity of opinion, I suppose.

Also, I wasn’t born here. I didn't grow up here. And my perspective will always be different from someone who did. And that needs acknowledging in some way. And I thought, well, better to let people speak for themselves about Shetland if I can. But I'm still mediating that in my writing, so it's a really hard balance to strike. And the only strategy I could come up with is to try and quote people verbatim as much as possible, and to give them a say about whether they wanted to include it or not.

I didn't want to paraphrase. I thought that would be risky. Shetland is written about so much from outside. And sometimes it rings true and sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes it rings really off. I did want to try and have it ring true, at least for me. But I wanted to try and balance that mis-description from outside, where possible, I suppose, by letting folk speak for themselves.

MT: It’s funny, I was going to come to that question, about whether, in this book, you felt yourself writing against a particular idea of Shetland that’s held from outside.

JH: Okay, well thanks for the question because it might be my only chance to answer it. I started writing this book with a few quite vehement chapters about the idea of islands as ‘remote’ places, as ‘depopulated’ places. Just, you know, those words that keep cropping up in relation to Shetland in the wider media. ‘Remote’ comes up so often. And questions like: But how do you spend the long winter nights? What do people do up there? And I guess if you’ve been asked those questions often enough – which I have so, so many times over the years – you get a little bit knee-jerky about it. And there's no one more militant than an incomer, I think. Because you’ve fallen in love with a place and then you're seeing it misrepresented.

Shetland is more than big enough to stand on its own two feet. You know, Shetland doesn't really need to defend itself. I feel like it's confident and knows itself really well. But I get knee-jerky about it. So I wrote really vehemently against those tropes at first – and I've been writing this book for a very long time: many, many years – and then I thought, eventually, I'm not sure this is quite fair. Because it's quite hard for people to imagine Shetland. Especially given that the media is portraying it in a very romanticized, idealised, but also remote-depopulised, kind of a way, over and over again. That's what people have got. Why would they know any different? That's the story.

And I think that's been the dominant trope at least since the Victorians, and probably earlier. You can see it in The Pirate [Walter Scott’s novel of 1822, set in Shetland]; you can see it in the way that William Morris writes about Iceland when he was there [in the 1870s]. But he also does it with passion and love, William Morris, which is really nice. And Walter Scott does let his Shetlanders push back against those tropes as well, which is quite nice. But I think it’s hard for people who haven't been here to imagine the place. And often people are asking curiously and respectfully, but just not knowing where to begin. And I thought, well, you never get very far by being too militant in an argument, you know. What if there's a different way of asking these questions, and asking people to imagine a place differently? So I tried to pull back, and I’m glad I did that. I think there's maybe a couple of moments where you might be able to just feel that serrated edge a little bit more keenly.

MT: I think that edge is important sometimes. It's important for readers to see it in the book.

JH: And it's overdue too, I think. The more book events I go to in Scotland at the moment, the more I’m hearing Highland writers, Scottish writers, Shetland writers, saying ‘We are not remote’. It's sort of coming to the surface now as a dialogue, which I think is really hopeful.

MT: I wanted to ask you about the importance of Shaetlan in the book, and about your own use of Shetland words. [Shaetlan or Shetlandic is technically a dialect of Scots, which includes many words descended from the extinct Norn language.]

JH: The hardest chapter to write was the one about language, but I wanted to try and write it because I love the Shetland language. That’s the chapter where I quote other people most densely, because I thought I need other people to talk about their experiences of this as Shetlanders, their experience of loss and the richness of the language. I don’t feel that equipped to talk about the linguistics either. It’s very complex and interesting, and other people do it better.

So I have a very clear rule for myself with my own use of Shaetlan words – for fear of appropriation really – which is that I'll use in my writing words that I'm just discovering, for the sake of saying: I've just discovered this wonderful word, or met it in my life for the first time. Or [I’ll use] words which I’ve got so used to hearing that I use them without noticing that they’re Shaetlan words.

We’ve italicized the Shaetlan words in the text, but not the Scots words – there's been all kinds of publisher conversations about this – to honour them as much as anything, and there's a glossary at the back to help folk get a bit deeper into those words. I've done my best – I’ve probably made mistakes all over the place – to quote people in Shaetlan when they speak Shaetlan, so that people can get a flavour of what it feels like to live in a bilingual community (at least bilingual, it is a multilingual community).

So I’m really just trying to capture something of that here and now, linguistically – and sometimes I'm having conversations with Shetland folk and they’re moving in and out of Shaetlan. And that's what people do, isn't it? Because they're speaking to me, an English speaker, so they’re knappin, as folk say, all the time [knappin is switching from Shaetlan to English]. And sometimes they're not aware of how much they’re knappin. You can't draw a hard border between these languages, you know, which is beautiful, I think. Folk are quite generous about it in my experience.

MT: I have a friend I've known since primary school, and he speaks fairly broad Shaetlan ordinarily, but he still knaps to me, even after more than 30 years. And he just can’t help it, unless I stop him. It's a kind of mirroring thing, I suppose. I’m not speaking dialect, so he’s not.

MT: Hmm. Yeah, and I think that must have been really drummed into folk, you know. Magnie [a neighbour and friend who appears in the book] was interesting. He said that to speak Shaetlan to me would be rude. He would be being rude to me if he spoke Shaetlan to me. Whereas sometimes I feel a little grief inside if I'm suddenly aware that someone’s knappin to me, because it's like, oh, do they think that I'm different? Or can we not be as intimate? Or do they think that I won’t know these words?

MT: Do you think there is something lost when somebody knaps to you?

JH: Oh, there’ll be continual losses. Yeah, I'm sure. It's not the same, is it? A translation is an approximation. I put three different words in the glossary – at least three – for being full of food, because it gives me such joy that there are three similar words for that experience. It was Agnes at my old work that said you could be steekit, stentit or stuggit. And those would all be things that you might say when you'd overeaten, and that's just so beautiful.

Maybe there are as many words in English. But it doesn't feel like you have that immediate richness for that particular experience. Shaetlan does seem to me, from the outside, to be a very embodied language, and there’s a heck of a lot of words for bodily experiences, and there’s words where I can't just off the top of my head think of a synonym for in English.

MT: You write early on that you’ve never lived anywhere that talks about itself as much as Shetland. It reminded me of Wendell Berry’s definition of a community as a place that is the centre of its own attention.

JH: That's nice.

MT: As I read that description, I wondered whether some of your readers might think of it as something negative, as being perhaps – that loaded word – parochialism. But I think you mean it as praise. And I wonder if you see your own writing as being part of that conversation, of Shetland's conversation about itself.

JH: I think I wanted to flag that up because there's a sort of egotism about . . . oh, there's no ‘sort of’, there is an egotism about writing a book. Any book. And to write a book about a place, especially if you weren't born there, is, yeah, egotistical, I think. So I wanted to keep flagging up that everyone's got their own take on Here, and some are more informed than mine, or more experienced than mine.

And I do mean it in in a positive way. It did occur to me that that comment might be seen as parochial, and I guess sometimes it is that also. But it's that confidence I want to point out. It's not that that confidence of Shetland in itself is unfaltering. Especially at the moment. But people are so proud of their home, and there's so much to be proud of, and there's so much to talk about. It’s that kind of depth of experience in daily life that needs discussed continually, you know [laughs]. If something changes in a park up the road, it must be discussed.

It's not that the wider world isn't discussed at length, too. It is. It’s just that I wanted to write against that sense that Shetland might be finite, and you might be able to come up for a visit and sort of do it in a week, you know. Hit the big sights, and skim over the surface, and that was Shetland done, you know? Cause that is definitely a trope out there as well. I guess an island looks discrete, doesn't it? It looks bounded and finite.

MT: Exactly. An island is appealing to many people because it feels like a thing that you can hold and understand. But of course, the closer you look at it, the bigger it becomes.

JH: Yeah, and those stereotypes that we both know about, there isn't much room left over for them, actually. You know, for me, those images get really pushed to the edge of all the busyness and the depth.

Storm Pegs: A Life Made in Shetland is out now with Picador.