On Being a Writer in Wales: Laura Sheldon

Laura Sheldon

I was still in the womb when my parents moved to Swansea. Mum, stranded at the top of the mountainous Cwmdonkin Drive, spent those first few years with a toddler, a baby, a dog and no car, pushing or pulling various incarnations of the above (plus food shopping) up the relentless hill. She shaped my world with stories at bedtime (or anytime, really), music in the kitchen, her fingers on piano keys as I sat underneath by the pedals in that wood-scented world of being small. 

Being first generation Welsh with English parents and a very English mother who corrected my nursery-school lilt as naturally as she did my posture, felt almost as though I was an imposter. ‘You don’t sound like you’re from Swansea’ people said – still say – with an accusatory lowering of eyebrows. 

But I am. I am very much from Swansea. And now, on reflection, I can see how much of that is woven into what I write and how I write it. My writer’s voice has been shaped as much by this place – and my relationship with it – as it has by anything else I’ve seen, heard, read or experienced.

My older brother, Simon, born in Newmarket (always, in my mind, some sort of stall for babies) insisted he was English, maybe recognised the exotic origin as a point of difference, but I was determined to be Welsh. I wanted the accent, and tried it on when Mum couldn’t hear me. I wanted the proper St David’s Day costume, I wanted the chords of Ar Lan y Mor lodged in my cochlear because my grandmother used to sing it.

Writing this, I’m aware of how much Welsh culture has influenced me, despite feeling slightly on the outside- listening to childhood friends with envy as they casually threw in references to a mamgu, living around the corner. What an exotic thing, to have a mamgu living around the corner, with all the rich history and close connection that brought. I longed for the badges of belonging.

I bumbled into the world of writing for children in 2014, when Firefly Press launched a children’s book prize. The call out was for contemporary writing for children set in Wales. At the time my own boys were little and I was teaching in a primary school. I was utterly immersed in children’s literature and yet it hadn’t occurred to me how under-represented my boys and my pupils were within it.

I wrote Mr Mahli’s Shed and a Ghost Named Dylan drawing on my hazy understanding of what growing up in the same streets as Dylan Thomas might mean. The school in the story was an amalgamation of Sully, where I was teaching, and Brynmill, my own primary school. The teachers’ voices came from my own teachers and those of my colleagues. It was completely natural to make it feel Welsh. But now, with a couple more books under my belt, it’s more apparent to me how the subtle differences between what I am writing and the more anglocentric world of popular children’s fiction might feel to children growing up here.

My move to Llantwit Major in 2017 made sense of a lot of unformed questions about my creative output, that I turned out to be harbouring.

The writing circle, lovingly formed and nurtured by Kath Giblin pulls together an intergenerational, unlikely family of poets and playwrights, of novelists and nature writers, and all of us joined by a  shared desire to make sense of something, to communicate something novel or personal, and to get better at what we do.

Without the writing circle I wouldn’t have ever shared my poetry, and without sharing my poetry I don’t think I would have attempted to tell a story through free verse. Yet, when I started to write my new verse novel Circling the Stars in this format, it felt like the most natural and honest way to express what I was trying to say.

I am writing this article with days to go until the launch date. My laptop rests on a piece of rough cut welsh oak, I have a sketch of Dylan Thomas’s writing shed and a lino-cut a friend created for me based on one of my poems framed in front of me and I know that when I finish I will wander down the road to Bardic Books and meet a writer friend for a coffee and talk about writing and writers. 

This writing community is where I finally stopped feeling like an imposter and understood how my love for the place I live and the people who share it with me, has more influence on my writing than anything lurking in my veins might.

Being a writer in Wales means all manner of things for me. It means solid foundations of storytelling. It means drawing on landscape shaped by limestone and nature, then language and culture, then industry and politics. And it means – for me above all, access to and support from a warm and passionate community. 

It may sound over-sentimental but, god, I love writing here. And if anyone scoffs at that I challenge you to come to Llantwit Major and sit in Bardic Books for a while, talk to the gaggle of writers that gather here, walk the crumbling coast path or sit in the beer garden of The Old Swan and look at the square that has barely changed in centuries, and not go away inspired.