MANDY HAGGITH
About Mandy Haggith
Mandy Haggith first studied Philosophy and Mathematics and then Artificial Intelligence, and spent years struggling to write elegant computer programs that could help to save the planet. A decade ago she left academia to pursue a life of writing and revolution, and has since travelled all over the world researching forests and the people dependent on them, and campaigning for their protection. In 2003, she returned to Glasgow University to study for an MPhil in Creative Writing, gaining a distinction. This is her first book-length collection of poetry. Her first novel, The Last Bear, is also published by Two Ravens Press. She lives on a woodland croft in Assynt, in the Scottish Highlands.
An interview with Mandy Haggith
When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?
I write out of wonder. Life – nature in all its many forms and rhythms – is my core inspiration. For some reason it is not enough for me to perceive the many little miracles of nature. I need to point them out and say ‘Look! Look!’ So, writing’s first function is communication of awe.
And then I find myself writing to explore answers to compulsive questions, and when that exploration gets too big for a poem, I find myself resorting to prose. I have never managed to write successful short stories, and I think that is because if the issue can fit into something that short, I deal with it in a poem.
I take Philip Pullman’s advice and ‘read like a butterfly, write like a bee’. My first love was The House at Pooh Corner. Herman Hesse was my guide into adulthood, although arguably I learned nothing from him and wasted a decade in my own Glass Bead Game. Barbara Kingsolver has been a huge inspiration in recent years and Margaret Elphinstone and Rose Tremain taught me how to bring stories back from times long gone.
Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind The Last Bear in particular? And about what you were trying to achieve; what ideas you were trying to convey?
One question has obsessed me for decades: who killed the last bear in Britain? For as long as I can remember I have been mad about bears. They are furry and dangerous, and a thousand years ago people wiped them off the face of this island. But unlike the killing of the last wolf, which has been the source of numerous myths and legends, we seem to have forgotten the story of the last bear. It was clearly my mission in life to find that story, and I wrote The Last Bear in order to discover it. In doing so, I realised that I was telling the bigger, deeper story of extinction in general, which is not only about nature, it is fundamentally about human culture. All over the world, the loss of biodiversity goes hand-in-hand with the loss of indigenous cultures. I surmised that the reason we in the UK had lost the story of the last bear was because the people who had lived with the bears, and who might have kept that story alive, were destroyed along with it. I had to tell the tale of those people, and one woman in particular, Brigid, became the lens through which I could see the bear.
The time of the loss of the bear was a period when the local, indigenous society of the extreme north of Scotland where I live unravelled in response to two other social threads: the Vikings who had political control and the Scots who were trying to take over from the south and bringing their religion, Christianity. These three societies are represented in the story’s love-triangle: a Viking man loved both by indigenous, pagan, Brigid and Margaret the Christian Scot.
Scotland’s pre-Christian people, if they wrote at all, would not have written using roman letters. They would have used the Ogham alphabet, and this alphabet became the core symbol of their culture, and along with all of its tree, bird and mythic associations, it gave me both the formal structure and conceptual shape of the story. The use of the Ogham letters and their associated trees as the chapter headings is therefore not just cosmetic: it is the book’s architectural principle.
From a human perspective, the heart of the last bear’s story is that she had no offspring. Her human parallel, Brigid, had to face the same predicament. The story is an exploration of what childlessness feels like. Girl, mother and crone are the three phases of a woman’s life and the earth goddess is represented throughout much Celtic mythology in these triple roles. The failure to achieve motherhood is therefore a kind of ‘breakdown’ of the Triple Goddess.
How do you go about creating your voice on the page?
I first wrote The Last Bear as a fairly standard third person narrative, but it transformed when I decided to try writing from Brigid’s point of view. I’ve retained the third person narrator for events when Brigid is not around. I’ll try writing from all kinds of different perspectives. I even tried the bear’s view of the world, but finally decided writing first person bear was impossible, so the reader is spared a talking bear!
How and when do you write?
I write long-hand every day with a silver fountain pen and blue ink. Whatever comes. That’s the easy bit.
Writing the novel was achieved with great difficulty. I wrote most of it in a tiny bender by the shore of Loch Roe, on the croft where I live in Assynt. I would go there every morning and make myself write one page. It took about six months to write the first draft and I had to promise myself I would not allow anyone else to read it. It took about two-and-a-half years of editing to reach something like completion, and a further two years of polishing to get it right. All of that rewriting has to happen on the computer, and it involves countless hours of painful time at my desk, which fortunately looks out into the woods.
What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?
I start every day by reading poetry, and at the moment I am alternately absorbed by a book of Sufi poems, The Drunken Universe, and Kathleen Raine’s collected poems. I am also reading Giving Voice To Bear by David Rockwell, and a lot of non-fiction environmental and travel books, none of which has been better than Kathleen Jamie’s Findings. Novels are a treat in between, most recently Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson – great swashbuckling fun.
