Tell us a bit about
yourself and your background
I’m a Welsh man. From Neath
in the Southern region of Wales. I was born into a dysfunctional family of hell
raisers, criminals and alcoholics. My mother was pregnant with me whilst in
reform school (juvenile prison) in Swansea for being out of control. She gave
birth to me just after being released, aged 15. My father (the most demented
and craziest Tristram that ever lived) was 21 years old at the time, and
serving time up in a notorious Scottish prison. I was expelled from school and
have no qualifications. We were poor and had nothing
at all, [which is] the best position to prove your strength and character from.
What kind of writing do
you do?
Creative writing of any kind. Novels, short
stories, flash fiction, journal entries… anything that keeps the engine oiled
and ticking over. I write at least one poem every day.
When did writing become
something you wanted to throw yourself into?
I wrote my first poem when I
was 18 years old, without trying or planning. It just popped out one night. I
sat staring at it for awhile thinking ‘and where did you come from?’ The same
thing happened a few years later when it was time for me to start writing
stories. I sat there with pen and paper ready to write the day’s poem and the
first chapter of my novella ‘The Candletree Graves’ just leapt out. It was a
little like being possessed by a mental, derailed locomotive… I could barely
keep up. But getting back to your question, after I had written the very first
poem, I knew everything had changed for me and there was no going back.
When did you feel
confident enough in your writing to unveil it to the public?
Not being academic, and not knowing anyone
else who wrote anything, I did not think in those terms. I simply composed and
filed it away. I wrote my first poem in 1988 and sent off my first poem, which
was accepted and published on the Arts Page of The Cornish Guardian in 1996.
Then, a second poem in 1998 in the homeless magazine The Big Issue. I must add, I only submitted to these two places
because I saw other poems from the public printed there; I wasn’t looking for
it, really. Then, a couple of years later, I got hold of a copy of The Writers Handbook and Light’s Literary List and started
storming the walls of every magazine and journal listed there.
Tell us a bit about your
most recently published book.
My book Scribblings Of A Madman was released in December of 2015 by Lit
Fest Press in America.It’s a strange beast. A
collection of short stories mixed in with journal entries, thoughts and
daydreams.I wrote it as I was coming out
of a 5 year relationship. I ended up in a block of bedsits surrounded by other
lost, half-crazy people, drinking themselves to death, and gnawing away at the
loneliness. I joined them, but took an hour out of every day to type a page of
the book. Some of these characters made it into the book… they are all dead in
real life, a long time now… apart from me.
What was the hardest
thing about writing your latest book?
My novel Kicking Back Drunk, based roughly upon my late teenage years in the
pubs of Neath, is being published by Lit Fest Press later this year. The
hardest part of writing that book was the first draft! The flow was tremendous
and I literally had to jump away from it each day and then get drunk, because I
could not switch my head off after each session. I found the revising and all
other drafts quite pleasant really.
Do you draw from
personal experience while writing?
Yes and No. A lot of it is, but unless
it’s a large work like a novel, I don’t plan. I just get my space ready and
write every day. Whatever decides to come out… comes out. Sometimes it’s pure
imagination, or something I heard in the pub.
Who are some of your
literary and poetic influences?
I am a voracious reader. I like
quite a few of the classics, [including] Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens,
Dostoyevsky. Charles Bukowski. Baudelaire, Dylan Thomas, Auden, William Blake,
Celine, Rimbaud, Hunter S. Thompson, Carver, Hemingway, Ballard, Plath, Sexton,
Emily Dickenson, Selby, Kafka, The Fante’s. Chekov, Huxley, Henry Miller,
William Burroughs, Ginsberg, and quite a few of The Beats… the list goes on and
on.
Have you read any good
books lately that you'd recommend to other readers?
Franz Kafka’s The Castle is just magical. Ernest Hemingway’s
short stories. At this exact moment in time I am reading Chekov’s short
stories, Dylan Thomas’s collected poetry, and Irvine Welsh’s Porno.
Do you have any current
works in progress or ready for publication?
Yes, a couple of night ago, actually. I finished
collecting all of my previously published (in magazines and journals) short
stories and flash fiction together, along with the novella, which I talked
about earlier, into one manuscript. Hopefully, (fingers crossed and all that)
I’ll give it one more look over and see about getting it in front of someone.
What advice would you
give aspiring writers and authors?
I don’t know? If you are
going to do it… you’ll do it. It might break you down at times, have you
screaming at the God’s, raging in despair… but you’ll keep doing it. If writing
is what you were born to do… then there is nothing else.
Where can readers view
your writing? Where can they purchase copies of your published work?
My book Scribblings Of A Madman is available through Amazon and quite a few
other book places. The new novel, Kicking
Back Drunk, will be the same when it appears sometime in Autumn. I have
vast amounts of poetry and short stories published in online and print
magazines and journals. If you Google my name, be sure to ‘poetry’ after my
name; there are a few people with my name, and not all of them be me.)
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