Author Interview: Nicola Garrard
Interview between Jenna Adams (she/her) and author Nicola Garrard
It’s Pride Month! We at The Book Network are celebrating by championing some awesome LGBT+ agents, authors, and books. The Book Network’s in-house writer Jenna Adams was lucky enough to chat all things books and Pride related with Nicola Garrard, whose debut novel 29 Locks is dropping in September.
29 Locks by Nicola Garrard
Set between inner-city London and the rural Home Counties, 29 Locks is a gritty, urban tale of redemption. Growing up in Hackney with his loving but troubled single mum, fifteen-year-old Donny’s life has been shaped by poverty, crime and casual violence, including grooming by a local gang. When his mum is jailed for drugs offences, Donny is fostered outside London to the Hertfordshire countryside. Life in the rural Home Counties is a bit like landing on another planet but doing work experience on the Hertford Union Canal, Donny feels like he’s finally found his purpose.
When Donny’s posh new friend Zoe is offered a dubious modelling audition in London, the pair decide to ‘borrow’ a canal barge and navigate the 29 locks down to Kings Cross. As they start out on their journey the future looks as unpromising as Zoe’s fake audition. But as each lock is navigated and conquered, their adventures take on a new dimension, and life will never be the same again.
Fast-paced, tragic and tender, 29 Locks is an unflinching depiction of urban teen life.
1. How did you get into writing?
I spent quite a lot of time writing poetry and had a few things published. That was where I found a voice at first, by writing very short, polished pieces. Crafting a poem is an exercise in self editing so I think it helped when it came to giving that same attention to long form prose.
2. Your debut novel 29 Locks is coming out on September 30th, and is available to preorder now. How did you get the idea for this book?
The catalyst for it was a huge amount of anger and grief and bereavement. I taught this sweet little boy and he turned into a lovely teenager. Just as I left teaching in London and started teaching in Sussex, he was murdered. I was feeling incredibly sore and bereaved and angry because when I was looking for the news on him, nothing was coming up. It’s almost as if the media felt that because he was black and 18, somehow it wasn’t important. And as a result of the lack of publicity, his killers still haven’t been brought to justice. If an 18 year old girl, particularly a white 18 year old girl had been murdered, I can’t imagine that that would have been left to lie by the media in that way.
So I wrote the book because I wanted to address negative stereotyping of the kids that I’d taught in London for 15 years. I wanted to think about how I could convey their resilience and their humour and all the things that make them very special kids.
3. 29 Locks explores some pretty serious topics such as racism, poverty, knife crime, and the foster care system. What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
I’m writing for two audiences really: I want the boys that I taught in London to feel represented, I want them to see themselves and think, “Yeah, that’s me, I’m a hero.” Like Rudine Sims Bishop wrote about children’s books acting as mirrors and sliding doors, I want to hold up that mirror to the kids who are living my main character’s life, and also sliding doors for other people to step into that unfamiliar world and develop empathy for the lives of others. I think it’s really useful for teenagers to see how other children live.
4. Do you have thoughts on the use of sensitivity readers? Did you use one for your novel?
I used several. I’m white, I’m in my 40s, I’m from Sussex, so apart from 15 years of teaching kids in gangs and kids affected by the themes in the novel, I’ve never lived that, so I thought it was absolutely essential. I’ve asked teenagers that I’ve taught in London to read it, teachers, parents. There are British-Nigerian characters in it so I had a Nigerian sensitivity reader look at it. I have an ex-student who has served prison sentences and was recruited into drug dealing when he was 12. He’s now a mentor and working to help boys not join gangs. I taught him when was 14, 15, and he said he never thought he’d read something that showed the way that he lived.
I’ve come at this from a position of learning from the kids I’ve taught. It seems people from those backgrounds feel that I have made that imaginative leap, that leap of empathy, and understood the things that they care about. It was really 15 years in the making; if I haven’t taught in a challenging school in London I wouldn’t have been able to write it.
5. What does your writing process look like?
For 29 Locks the first 60,000 words came down in 6 weeks. So I did that lightning first draft and then spent a lot longer editing, a couple of years. I print out the drafts and feel bad about the environment. I read aloud every single draft. I think that was particularly important with this one because it’s written in MLE, Multicultural London English, it’s very much about the rhythms. It’s quite a rich and percussive dialect so it definitely needed reading aloud.
6. What did you find most difficult about writing?
Slowing down. I’ve had a history of sending manuscripts off to agents too soon, or to my agent now too soon. I really need to give more time between drafts to let things bed down and approach it as a first-time reader again to see the problems in it.
7. How did you find the publishing process?
There’s a feature of 29 Locks, I think people see it as something that’s important. So with the very first drafts that I sent off I immediately had agents ask for the full and then not sign me, but help me to think about ways that I could redraft it. It is quite a political book and I think a lot of people have got behind that.
I went to a How to Get Published day at Writers and Artists, and Alysoun Owen, their editor, I chatted to her for 5 minutes and she said “Why don’t you write a blog about this?” So I started a blog a few years ago with them, looking at my journey to publication. And of course The Good Literary Agency helped. They are crusaders for diversity and representation in fiction so they’ve definitely helped being supportive of everything from me being a lesbian writer, to my themes of underrepresented teenagers.
8. We’re celebrating Pride Month here at The Book Network! Why do you think it’s important to support LGBT+ writers?
I grew up in the 80s and it was hell in the 80s as a teenager. I was taught in the Section 28 days… everything was wall-to-wall hatred and homophobia. My experience as a teenager was creeping around my local library, honing my research skills looking for LGBT+ books that I could read inside the library because I wouldn’t dare take them out because it might show on my lending record.
Nowadays, we’ve got displays in schools, public libraries, bookshops, and it saves lives. Supporting LGBT+ writer and their stories, and then having them prominently displayed in school libraries is just amazing, I would have loved that.
It’s not just LGBT+ students and children who need YA novels that depict their feelings, their life. My experience as a teacher shows that there’s still homophobia, there’s still transphobia, and straight kids reading books written by LGBT+ writers with LGBT+ themes is important for them, as well. I had a straight boy who had the usual kind of lazy, mild homophobia – “that’s so gay”, that sort of thing – and he read a Juno Dawson book and she sort of spoke to him. I think having that in school is really humanizing for everybody.
9. What effect do you think LGBT+ representation in fiction has on the world we live in?
It actually does save lives and have such an important effect on young people who are really impressionable. The experience of reading gives them that much closer empathy towards how people are feeling. The Black Flamingo by Dean Atta, a wonderful first novel, I think that kind of representation is brilliant – for boys particularly, boys of colour, coming out. Another lifesaving novel, and very responsible as well; it’s not shying away from sexual health issues and issues of being vulnerable.
And then these incidental characters like in Gloves Off by Louisa Reid, about a girl who takes up boxing. She develops a romantic relationship with a fellow boxer. It’s not essential to the plot, and I think that’s just as important. There’s a big mixed bag at the moment and I think I’ve seen the effect on teenagers is absolutely superb.
10. Do you have any thoughts on the current climate of queer publishing in the UK?
I think in YA it’s very strong. School librarians are really on board, they’re wonderful at signposting LGBT+ books. I was always frightened that the librarian would tell my parents I was reading Virginia Woolf looking for the gay bits!
My own agency The Good Literary Agency was set up to make publishing more accessible to underrepresented groups. Having a literary agency that is just for writers of colour, working class, disabled, and LGBT+ writers, shows that publishers are taking on authors and stories in the mainstream, and that is a brilliant change in publishing.
11. Do you have any favourite LGBT+ writers or novels?
I’ll always love Jeanette Winterson because I wrote to her as a teenager and her PA sent me a lovely card with oranges on it. Another writer – I’ve loved everything she writes – is Sarah Waters. From the 90s she’s been out and willing to talk about her experience as an LGBT+ writer. We’re very much spoilt for choice at the moment.
12. What advice would you give to an aspiring author?
One of the things that Stephen King said in his book On Writing was “take the plug off your TV.” Writing takes a lot of time. One thing people can do if they’re serious about writing is to throw their TV out and read, or to stop watching mainstream television and just immerse yourself in writing. And read everything!
Leave time between drafts to forget it and to read as a reader rather than as a writer. Try to delight yourself – or in my case I’ve written what I know would delight my students in school. Write the things you’d want to read – the stories, the characters, the people you’d want to see.
13. What are you working on next?
I’m writing a new novel for teenagers, it’s set in a rundown seaside town with three brothers who are left to fend for themselves.
Thanks for chatting to us Nicola!
You can keep up with Nicola on Twitter and read her Writers & Artists blog. And don’t forget to preorder 29 Locks! Wishing you all a safe and happy Pride.