J DAVID SIMONS
About J. David Simons
J. David Simons was born in Glasgow in 1953. He studied law at Glasgow University and became a partner at an Edinburgh law firm before giving up his practice in 1978 to live on a kibbutz in Israel. Since then he has lived in Australia, Japan and England, working at various stages along the way as a charity administrator, cotton farmer, language teacher and university lecturer. In his most recent guise as a journalist he has written extensively about the Internet and new media. He returned to Glasgow in 2006; The Credit Draper is his first novel.
The author's website is at http://www.jdsimons.demon.co.uk/
An interview with J David Simons
When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so?
I always wanted to write – I just felt I had to wait until I had something to say before I could do it. Sadly, that meant I didn’t actually start writing seriously until I was 40. At that time I was living in Japan and was inspired by the sparseness and simplicity that runs through the art and culture of that country so I wrote a very sparse and simple short story. To my surprise it was published.
Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind
this work in particular? And about what you were trying to achieve; what ideas
you were trying to convey?
The credit draper of the title was a kind of travelling salesman who peddled
goods on credit on behalf of large city warehouses. At the time of my novel
– the early 20th century – a lot of new Jewish immigrants to the
Gorbals in Glasgow became credit drapers for the Jewish-owned warehouses.
It was an easy way to give and to gain employment. I always understood these
credit drapers to work in and around Glasgow, but when I discovered they also
went out into the Highlands, the seeds of my novel were sown. What must it
have been like for say an Orthodox Jew from Russia with all his strange customs
and language to come into contact with the villagers, crofters and shepherds
in northern Scotland? But this novel is also about community and how as we
age, we shift in and out of different communities as some become more important
to us and others less so. But yet somehow that first community – the
one we were born into – retains such a hold on us.
How and when do you write?
I was always told to treat writing as a proper job so when I first started out I wrote from 9am to 5pm. However, I found that I spent the first half of my day in total distraction and that it was only really around 2pm that I could begin to put finger to keyboard. So on the days that I write, I now reward myself with the morning off to officially engage in my distractions and then sit down at my desk in the early afternoon for an intense session of around four hours of writing.
What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?
I enjoy all good fiction. I almost never read any non-fiction – not even instruction pamphlets or travel guides. I bow to the greats – Joyce’s Ulysses, Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song, De Lillo’s Underworld, Updike’s Rabbit series. But I also love the multi-culturalism that has informed writing in the UK for the last twenty five years or so, from Rushdie (in the early years), Okri, Ishiguro and Kureshi through to Zadie Smith, Monica Ali and Andrea Levy. The most recent book I enjoyed of this ilk was Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss. It’s so impressive and humbling to see how effortlessly she can move between the northern Himalayas and the streets of New York, confidently plucking words and ideas from different languages and cultures to create her own colourful tapestry – and she’s not even 40!
