On being a writer in Wales: Tim Cooke

Tim Cooke

Writing an article about being a writer in Wales is not straightforward for me. I left Bridgend in my late teens to study English literature at the University of Sussex, met my current partner there, and have lived in Brighton and then London ever since.

I’d always wanted to be an author and started writing reviews and features for newspapers and magazines soon after graduating. I got a series of jobs in communications, press office work and copywriting, before finally turning my attention to more creative projects towards the end of my twenties.

The first piece I wrote and everything that has followed since – but for one brief deviation to Orkney – has been set in Wales.

Madness

The main reason for this, I think, is my interest in literature concerned with childhood and adolescence – specifically that which explores the wildness, horror and madness of our formative years, and does justice to that experience. I recall, for example, first encountering Caradog Prichard’s One Moonlit Night and thinking that this was as good as it gets – this was what I wanted to do.

At the same time, I was reading lots of books about place and landscape, and it was the coming together of these themes that felt like a natural starting point for my own work: childhood, for me, is inextricably linked to its landscapes, and I don’t just mean the concept of home, but the specific places we frequent as children and teenagers.

The first things I wrote were short works of weird fiction, set mostly in a darkened, somewhat warped version of the Bridgend I grew up in. These early stories, which I was lucky enough to place with some great journals and anthologies, eventually became the collection Where We Live (2020).

Smoke pot

The book follows a group of adolescents as they seek out new places to smoke pot and chat shit, slipping away from society into altogether more obscure and unsettling realities, or unrealities. It’s in these places, often infused with some form of horror or threat, that the characters are free to explore and grow. I would come to realise later that what I was really writing about was play.

In 2016, I was working for an education charity, writing a lot about further and higher education, when I decided, for various reasons, to follow my partner into the teaching profession. I was accepted onto a very practical programme that meant I was paid while learning on the job, but I was offered a position as an early years teacher.

At first, I was unsure of whether I wanted to teach three- and four-year-olds, but on reading about the learning through play approach, I decided to go ahead and quickly came to love it. My first daughter was born a few months before I took my first class, and my second daughter followed two years later. Childhood was now everything.

In 2018, I started a part-time PhD in creative writing at Swansea University, supervised by the brilliant Jasmine Donahaye and working mostly remotely. My dissertation – which is ongoing – has many strands, but a large section of it is focussed on the relationship between place and play, and how we recall, understand and write about things that happen in childhood and during play.

New Welsh Review

I’ve had fantastic support from the likes of the New Welsh Review, who published a few of the chapters and awarded me the 2022 Rheidol New Welsh Writing Prize for an essay about the Ogmore River, which runs behind my childhood home. Before starting that piece, I’d been directed by a colleague to the subject of dark play – described by Richard Schechner as, among other things, the play that takes place ‘when contradictory realities co-exist, each seemingly capable of cancelling the other out’ – and the concept has since come to the fore in my work.

Folk horror

While bogged down in a stretch of quite heavy critical writing, I returned to weird fiction and wrote the first story of what would become my latest collection, Dark Play. The idea for the project initially came to me during lockdown. My partner had been told to shield, and we spent most of that first period with her family halfway up a mountain near Abergavenny.

We were completely isolated for the entire time and my four-year-old daughter threw herself into long spells of roleplay, which I’d often join. The landscapes around there, some of which have histories of hardship and violence, can appear quite gothic, and I began to see potent links between theories of play – dark play, deep play and new materialist ontologies of play, particularly – and aspects of folk horror that I’m interested in.

Fragments

The resulting book, published by Salo Press, is a collection of linked stories and fragments about a father and daughter living alone in a farmhouse on the side of a mountain. The daughter has developed an intense form of imaginative play that seems to connect her to the surrounding landscape, where the past leaks into the present.

The man could easily be a grown-up version of the central character from Where We Live. He’s damaged and flawed, has made mistakes and paid a serious price, and he continues to make more, but he loves his daughter. He takes care of her and joins in her games, trying to see the world through her eyes. Other times, he takes things too far and opens them up to jeopardy. She learns to do the same.

A few years ago, I was asked how much of an influence Wales was on my work. Having mentioned the role of writers such as Niall Griffiths, Ron Berry, Angharad Price, Caradog Prichard, Arthur Machen, Christopher Meredith and Dannie Abse, I explained that the locations that appear are all in Wales, where I grew up, but I was not trying to write something uniquely Welsh.

I was more concerned with exploring the ways in which children engage with place, hopefully producing something universal as a result. While I still strive to do that, I am yet to write anything set outside of Wales. Even Dark Play, which features an amalgamation of places I’ve known, is undeniably Welsh. Whenever I write, I am drawn back to the landscapes of home.