We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Miriam Hastings. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Miriam below.
Alright, Miriam thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?
When I was a child I spent a lot of time in fantasy worlds that I created. I was ill a great deal from babyhood so I spent a lot of time alone in bed and all my friends were characters I met in books or in the stories I invented myself. So I never made a conscious decision to be a writer – I have been making up stories ever since I can remember and writing them down from the moment I learned to write. I think I write fiction as an adult to meet the same needs I had then. I was a lonely and often an unhappy child so this was partly a need to escape from reality but also it meets a need to address the problems life poses by approaching them from a more creative angle. Writing is a way of taking control of reality because you can shape it and reshape it through words, expressing your own experience and vision of the world and, through doing that, you can transform reality into something greater.
I’ve always enjoyed writing and the more imaginative, the more removed from my own life, the better. For this reason I particularly enjoy writing historical fiction which involves imagining what it was like to live in society at a time when values, beliefs and expectations were quite different to life today. However, writing a novel can be very daunting: it seems such a big, long-term commitment, and it is lonely work. This means a novelist needs perseverance and patience in the face of isolation as a writer. I think this is where being ill so much when I was young has proved very helpful because I learned at a young age to entertain myself and to set myself goals.
I would ideally like to write for at least an hour or two every day, but I am disabled with a progressive degenerative illness that affects my spine. It has caused fusion of the vertebrae and progressive narrowing of my spinal canal so these days my major problem is living in severe chronic pain and also suffering from stiffness and weakness in my hands and wrists which make the physical act of writing difficult. I use voice recognition on my computer to overcome these problems, and I have a wonderful dictaphone which I can carry around with me and use for making notes and capturing ideas. I can download my notes to the computer from my dictaphone, although this involves a lot of correction and editing so it isn’t always useful. My voice recognition software (Dragon Naturally Speaking) is very helpful because I’ve been using it for years so it has become trained to my voice and my vocabulary. In the beginning I found it quite a challenge. Sometimes it would write things totalling different to anything I had dictated! This could be quite surreal.
I think working with people has always fed into my writing because people fascinate me. I can’t imagine how I would create my characters if I didn’t know how people think and feel, and something of the richness of their lives.
For many years, I worked part-time in the field of mental health. I ran therapeutic creative writing workshops for survivors of mental distress and childhood trauma. I was also a part-time tutor at Birkbeck College, London, teaching creative writing for personal development as well as cross-cultural literature.
With a colleague, I set up and facilitated a writing therapy group, the Reflections Project, for women survivors, funded by the Arts Council of England.
After I became too disabled to work through statutory bodies, colleges, or other institutions, I began working from home, leading guided creative writing for personal development but largely concentrating on my own writing.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I suffered from an extreme anxiety disorder as an adolescent, caused by childhood trauma, so I was admitted to an adult acute ward when I was 14 and kept there for three and a half months. This experience inspired my first novel, The Minotaur Hunt, which I wrote in my 20s, it was first published by the Harvester Press and won the MIND Book of the Year Award. While I was writing the novel, I worked with people who had been moved out of the big asylums (like Bradley Hospital in the novel). First I was working in a MIND day centre and then in a group home. I did voluntary work too, on the Executive Committee of my local MIND association and on the Management Committee of a National organisation, Good Practices in Mental Health. I have always seen writing as a political act, however, I don’t necessarily set out to express a particular message. I don’t consciously write stories to state an opinion so much as to express a vision. On the other hand, the outsider is a constant theme in my work, and in all my writing the main protagonist is in some way an outsider.
I wrote The Minotaur Hunt because I wanted to help people understand what it feels like to suffer from mental distress and to be labelled as “mad” or “mentally ill”, and the way it renders you totally illegitimate within society, so that your feelings and experiences are pathologised, your experience of past trauma is disbelieved, and the social and family problems causing your distress are ignored and never addressed.
My novel, Walking Shadow, is a historical novel with profoundly modern themes: the fear of terrorism, political manipulation of information, and issues of religious fundamentalism and intolerance. It’s set at the time of the gunpowder plot and the story is told by Edmund/Rosamund, William Shakespeare’s younger sibling, who has been arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London. As the novel unfolds, the reader begins to uncover the truth about Edmund, about his identity, about his involvement with the conspirators and to reach some understanding of his guilt and his innocence. Was the gunpowder plot organised by the Jesuits, as Salisbury claimed, or was Salisbury himself orchestrating the whole affair for his own ends?
Being something of a nomad, I have intimately known and loved many places that have all inspired my novels and short stories. Most recently I published a novel, The Dowager’s Dream, set on the far north coast of Scotland during the brutal Highland Clearances. For several years I was researching the Highland Clearances and while this novel is set in the early years of the 19th Century, themes of dispossession and ethnic cleansing are central to the novel.
I have just finished writing a novella, The House of Consolación, based on two isolated regions of rural Spain where I’ve spent a lot of time. At present I’m based in a small market town in Devon where I’ve joined a collective of writers called Chasing Driftwood, who all work in the West Country of Britain.
Besides several novels, I’ve had articles and essays on mental health and pieces of short fiction published in magazines, journals and anthologies. I had a collection of short stories, Demon Lovers, shortlisted for the Scott Award in 2010, which I’m planning to publish independently as it’s so difficult to get short stories published. I have already published three short stories as a pamphlet on Kindle and Kobo, The Doll and Other Stories: Strange Tales. I think it’s really sad that so few publishers, including small independent presses, publish short stories. I love reading short stories myself and I know lots of other people do too.
What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?
With both my writing and my work as a writing mentor, I have always found that personal satisfaction has been the most valuable source of attracting new readers and clients. Nothing can beat “word-of-mouth”, from customers telling friends and family to buy my books or attend my groups. My clients have often claimed that working with me has helped them change their lives. However, glowing references and reviews on social media also help. It is useful having my work available on both digital platforms, such as Kindle and Kobo, as well as in paperback.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
As an author, self-promotion and marketing are the part of writing that I have always found most difficult. I hate it! And I am really bad at it. When I first wrote The Minotaur Hunt I went about practically apologising for having had the temerity to write a novel, and I never mentioned that it had won an award. I am getting better at this partly because I’ve realised I must, given the extreme commercialisation of the publishing world today. I do have two websites, a linkedin account and a Facebook author page and I’m learning to stop apologising for my own work.
I was brought up to believe that it’s wrong to promote myself or talk of something I have created as being good. I was told that it’s wrong to “blow my own trumpet”. For me this was a lesson I definitely had to unlearn!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://miriamhastings.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/miriam.hastings3/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MiriamHastings.author/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/miriam-hastings-922a2843
- Other: Second website: www.miriamhastings3.jimdo.com