On being a writer in Wales: Sophie Calon

Sophie Calon

I am typing this on the beach, my pauses filled by the back and forth, back and forth of the shallow waves. The sun is low and the sky is a slow, pale blue. I’m at a writing workshop on the Llŷn Peninsula, northwest Wales. I grew up in the opposite corner, down in Cardiff, and settled on the border near Hay-on-Wye. Even so, this farflung almost-island is a homecoming of sorts.

I was thirteen when I first came to Tŷ Newydd, our national writing centre. We were here to spend a week writing poetry with our English teachers Dr Brigley and Mr Poole. I returned at eighteen, as a medal winner in the Urdd Eisteddfod. Again at twenty-eight, for a weekend at the retreat cottage. A few years on, I’m back for a week of memoir writing and wild swimming.

After an intense morning spent trying to translate lives into words, this afternoon we eased our bodies into a curve of the Afon Dwyfor. My world has expanded since I was last here: I’m now a wife, a mother, and a “real life” writer. It’s the first time I’ve left my daughter. Last night, as I rounded the corner and saw Tŷ Newydd, the teal door and window frames, the light on in the porch, I felt at peace with my decision to come. It was like catching up with an old friend.

Memoirs

I wonder if it’s here that I first felt like a writer. I could try to trace it earlier, back to when I was seven and my teacher put me forward for Cardiff Writers Club. I blurrily remember a trip to the Hay Festival – Jacqueline Wilson’s bejewelled hands – and a workshop with the then-Poet-Laureate Andrew Motion. Or even further, back to when I was five and my dad typed beside me while I dictated Sophie’s Memoirs. But no, I think it was during that balmy, giddy week as a teen here at Tŷ Newydd that I really learned to love words and what we can do with them.

Last month I spoke onstage for the BBC Radio Wales Arts Show’s Hay Festival special. I don’t know what seven-year-old Sophie would have made of that. I was being interviewed about my memoir Long Going. It’s the story of my dad’s alcoholism, which took him from being a brilliant parent and high-flying lawyer to being homeless with a criminal record. He was found dead in Cardiff city centre aged fifty-five, just after Christmas 2021. Addiction can be ruthless.

It’s also the story of how I steered my way through the chaos of our family life and found peace. I wrote the last lines curled up in the windowsill of the farmhouse where I now live with my husband and our child. A place of new beginnings, regrowth. I have called many different places ‘home’, from Cardiff to Oxford to London to Melbourne to Hebden Bridge – and now the borderlands, where I want to stay.

As a new mother at the Hay Festival last year, I took a photo of my tiny newborn next to a sign with a quote from the late, great Jan Morris: “To be born Welsh is to be born privileged, not with a silver spoon in your mouth, but music in your blood and poetry in your soul.” I snapped it flippantly, just a picture I’d send to my sister with a dragon emoji, but I recall it now with more earnestness.

Privilege

Being a writer in Wales is in so many ways a privilege. I had teachers who raised me to love language, and a national writing centre that has watched me grow up. I realise with excitement that I could bring my daughter here when she’s learning what she can do with words.

There’s something tidal about being a writer in Wales, and I don’t think I’m saying that just because the sea is rippling ever closer towards me. While living elsewhere I felt tugged back to our rhythmic, soulful country. Now that I’m home, I feel myself swept up in the currents and buoyed by the abundance of riches. (Spiritual, not material, wrth gwrs, of course.)

I find joy in checking out bilingual children’s books from Hay Library, joining an Abergavenny book club exploring the power of women’s voices, delivering a copy of my memoir for my old school. This spring I went along to the launch of Folding Rock, a new magazine of writing from Wales and beyond, and I hadn’t met even one person there before. Did it matter? Not in Wales. I was late home because I got so caught up chatting and laughing with supposed strangers.

This is what being a writer in Wales means to me. We may not have fancy spoons, but what we have is worth more than silverware – and lasts a good deal longer too. You can’t buy poetry in the soul. In the months leading up to the publication of Long Going, I’ve encountered such depths of warmth and goodwill from writers, readers, even people who rarely pick up a book.

The sun is slipping behind the hills and the wind is pricking my skin. I really need to wrap up, in both senses. As I sit pondering how to close this piece, a woman passes me with her spaniel and we laugh at how I’m persisting out here with my now chilly fingers and bare feet. Ah, Cymru. Tomorrow morning I’ll be back writing and talking and learning at the big table in Tŷ Newydd, where I first sat nearly twenty years ago. In a week’s time I’ll be at the launch of my debut book. At the end of the day, when all’s said and done, being a writer in Wales is a privilege. I wouldn’t swap it for the world.