Lucy Caldwell made fellow of Royal Society of Literature

News

Lucy Caldwell has been made of fellow of the Royal Society of Literature as part of the “40 Under 40 initiative” chosen to bring a diverse set of fresh fellows into the society, reflecting the ‘bold expressiveness’ of a new generation in institution that has been ‘overwhelmingly’ white and male.

(by Alison Flood in  The Guardian)


Nearly 200 years after it was founded, the venerable Royal Society of Literature is stepping away from its “overwhelmingly white, male, metropolitan and middle class” history, with the appointment of 40 new writing fellows under the age of 40, ranging from the award-winning Jamaican poet Kei Miller to the bestselling English novelist Sarah Perry.

The RSL’s 40 Under 40 initiative saw publishers, literary agents, theatres and author organisations put forward an array of names to a panel of RSL fellows, who were looking to honour “the achievements of Britain’s younger writers” with the selection of a new generation of fellows. Prior to the initiative, only three of the 523 fellows were under 40, with none under 30 and the average age being 70.

The 40 names they chose were almost three-quarters female, with 30% from black and minority ethnic backgrounds; names range from novelist Jenn Ashworth to poet Sarah Howe, playwright and poet Sabrina Mahfouz and feminist writer Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project.

“We want the pulse of the RSL to keep time with the efflorescing, irrepressible, bold expressiveness of what writers are writing now,” said the society’s president Marina Warner, announcing the new appointments.

Author and critic Blake Morrison, who sat on the nominating panel, said he and his fellow judges had found a wealth of young literary talent in Britain. “For much of its history, the RSL has been overwhelmingly white, male, metropolitan and middle class. But literary culture is changing rapidly and our choices reflect that,” he added.

The society was founded in 1820. Its fellows, who have to be nominated and seconded by existing fellows, have in the past included names from Thomas Hardy to Henry James. New fellows sign the RSL roll book using either TS Eliot’s or Byron’s pen. This year, George Eliot’s pen has been added in a small first for women writers.

Northern Irish novelist and playwright Lucy Caldwell, one of the new recruits, said that when she left primary school in 1992, she was given a copy of Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss “by teachers who were convinced I’d be a writer”.

“I don’t know if any of us would have imagined that one day I’d be writing my name alongside famous writers with George Eliot’s own pen,” she said. “It is a great honour to be elected to the RSL as one of the 40 Under 40 fellows; an honour that belongs too to the teachers, libraries and house full of books that encouraged me at such an early age and set me on my way.”

Lucy’s collection of short stories, Multitudes, is on the shortlist for the prestigious Edge Hill Short Story Prize, which was announced on June 13. Five collections made the shortlist from a longlist of forty-one, four of them debut collections.

Prize organiser Ailsa Cox, the world’s first Professor of Short Fiction at Edge Hill University, said: “What an amazing line-up this is. All five writers are rising stars, and you’re going to hear a lot more of them in the future. In each of these collections, you’ll find passion, wit and intelligence, and above all a way of working with language that is unique to the short story form.”

The winner of the £10,000 prize will be announced at an exclusive Short Story Prize event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on the 26th August, to be hosted by the university in the famous Spiegeltent. The event will be attended by the shortlisted authors and judges

More information can be had at the Edgehill website.

 

Edge Hill Short Story Prize

News

“Mayday” – BBC Radio 4 Drama

Radio Plays

Lucy Caldwell’s new play for radio, “Mayday”, premieres on BBC Radio 4 on Monday, June 12. After broadcast, it will be available for a time on BBC iPlayer. For more information, and to listen, click here.

Synopsis

Coralie is a nineteen year old student. It’s the morning of the 30th April and she had just taken a Mifepristone pill, the first stage of a medical abortion. As she waits the 24 hours until she is due to take the second set of pills which will complete the procedure, she relates and reflects on the events and circumstances which brought her to this moment.

Set in Northern Ireland, the only part of the UK in which the 1967 Abortion Act does not apply, Mayday takes us into the mind of an increasingly isolated, conflicted, and terrified young woman who, having ordered the drugs online – illegally – fears that she, and anyone she might confide in, could face prosecution and jail if her actions are discovered.

Starring Eileen O’Higgins (Brooklyn, My Mother and Other Strangers) as Coralie, the cast also includes Anthony Boyle (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child), Sophie Robinson (Rebellion, Fifteen) and Imogen Doel (The Importance of Being Earnest, Whisper). Production is by Heather Larmour.

“Multitudes” at The Strand Arts Centre

Events, News

“Beautifully crafted, and so finely balanced that she holds the reader right up against the tender humanity of her characters.” – Eimear McBride

The Strand is delighted to welcome the novelist and playwright, Lucy Caldwell, who hails from East Belfast, to launch her latest publication and first collection of shorts ‘Multitudes’. Glenn Patterson, another local literary talent, will be in conversation with Lucy, before she reads from the title short.

Lucy is an established and celebrated young novelist and playwright of our time. Her accolades to date include receiving the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and being shortlisted as Irish Novelist of the Year in 2013, as well as receiving the George Devine Award and the Imison Award for her stage and radio plays. She often draws on her own Belfast up-bringing to inform her work and Multitudes is no exception.

Multitudes’ eleven stories take you from Belfast to London and back, exploring the many facets of growing up – the pain and the heartache, the tenderness and the joy, the fleeting and the formative – or ‘the drunkenness of things being various’. Stories of longing and belonging, they culminate with the heart-wrenching and unforgettable title story.

Mayday

Read/Listen


Written for The Pool Short Story Week. If you prefer you can listen to the story here.

Ten days later, the package finally comes. It is a small, brown, padded envelope, her name and address typed on a white label. The postmark is the Netherlands. Inside is a blister pack of tablets, one round and four ovals. No instructions, no warnings, and nothing to identify the sender. She pops out the round tablet there and then, in the hallway, and tries to swallow it down, but her mouth is too dry. She feels it stuck at the back of her throat. She makes it into the kitchen and pours a pint glass of water, drinks the whole thing down. The glass has a dried scum of lace at its neck and the water tastes stale. She can still feel the sensation of the tablet, lodged. There was a fresher, a Geography student, who died after taking diet pills that he bought online. Boiled alive: that’s what the newspapers said. There was a photo of him in his hospital bed, face swollen so much he appeared to have no eyes, the skin on his torso and arms peeling off in raw red patches the size of sycamore leaves. His parents had released it as a warning, a deterrent to others.

It is the last day of April and she has, by repeated calculations, less than one week remaining.

A memory: aged eleven, a Junior Strings weekend away in Carnlough. On Sunday morning the Catholic children go to Mass in the big church on the Bay Road; the handful of Protestants were supposed to stay in Drumalla House and sing hymns with the cello teacher. She goes with the Catholics: the walk along the rocky shore, the sweetshop in the village afterwards. The sense of something forbidden. Her friends line up to receive Holy Communion and she copies them, kneels and opens her mouth and lets the priest place the dry disc of wafer on her tongue. She chews, swallows. Afterwards they tell her she’s going to Hell. They are falling over themselves to tell her. She’s committed a Mortal sin, and because she can’t go to Confession she can’t be forgiven. And she chewed. They are beside themselves with glee. She cries. The cello teacher tells her it’s nonsense, tells the others they’re being silly. Tells them that, incidentally, the word used in John Chapter 6 to describe the consumption of the Eucharist can be understood as ‘to gnaw’ or ‘to munch’, so there they go, and now enough of all that. They say they were only joking.

She hasn’t thought of it for years, but it surfaces now. The dusty room they practised in, the bars of sunlight. The pebbles on that little rocky shore. The gules of light in the stained glass windows of the Catholic church.

She doesn’t know what to do with herself now, with the hours remaining. She checks her phone. 11:11 is the time. Tomorrow, at this time exactly, the other pills, all four of them at once. There is still time today, if she hurries, to make the midday seminar. But she hasn’t been to lectures all week, hasn’t done the seminar prep. She likes the module, likes the tutor, wants to do well. Last term, her supervisor said her idea had PhD potential, and she replayed the words in her head for weeks. So she goes up to her room now and sits at her desk and flips through the handout and reading lists. Gender, Family, Faith: Norms and Controversies. Paradise Lost in Context. Civil Wars of Ideas: Politics vs Religion. You can’t get away from religion, in the seventeenth century. She reaches for the Norton anthology, opens it at random. A ballad. She skims the first couple of stanzas:

Farewell, rewards and fairies, Good housewives now may say, For now sluts in the dairies Do fare as well as they. 

Lament, lament, old abbeys The fairies lost command; They did but change priests’ babies, But some have changed your land. 

And all your children stolen from thence Who live as changelings ever since. 

She stops, heart pounding. Sluts. Illegitimate children.

Changelings, and fairies to blame them upon. Nothing feels neutral any more, she thinks. It never will again.

And then: wise up, she tells herself, and then she says it aloud. Wise up. Wise yer bap: that’s what they used to say in school. Wise yer bap. She forces herself to tap her laptop awake and type out a few lines of the ballad. It’s going to be fine. It’s all going to be fine.

She closes her laptop and lies down on her bed, scans her body for any signs that it’s starting to feel different. What if nothing happens? What if it is too late? The thing is you find out and you think, OK, nine weeks, that’s ages. But then you do the online calculator and realise with a horrible rush that it’s already more than six weeks, coming up to seven. It doesn’t feel fair, the way they count it. Nine weeks is nothing. Nine weeks gives you little more than a fortnight. She found the website that night, Sunday, and by the Tuesday had made up her mind and placed the order. But it still might be too late. If she hadn’t found out until a few days later. Or if it had happened while she still lived at home, or before she had a credit card or a PayPal account. It doesn’t bear thinking about, but the thoughts keep marching back, a fortnight’s well-worn grooves. If you were in England, the GP would have prescribed it to you, the exact same thing. You’d have taken it already, under medical supervision. It would already be over. If this doesn’t work, she still has options. London, or Manchester: she’s researched the clinics online. She wonders will she tell her mum, if it comes to that. Her mum would make the appointments, book the flights, pay for the hotel. Hold her hand in the waiting room and hug her afterwards. Her mum wouldn’t rage at her, or weep like mothers do in films. Her mum would be pragmatic, calm: her mum would handle it all. Why hasn’t she told her mum? Her mum has raised the three of them to believe that they can do whatever they want, that they’re as good as men, that it’s a woman’s right to choose. Her mum would help her. Her mum would be here, now.

She aches for her.

Another memory: the Junior Debating Club, fourth year, or maybe fifth. Kerry Ferguson passing round A4 pictures of babies smiling in the womb, sucking their thumbs. The women should just have them, Kerry Ferguson said. They should have them and give them to people who want them. Almost nobody voted For. Afterwards, when her mum asked how her day had been, she was too ashamed to mention it.

The day passes slowly, seeps into evening. The sky through her Velux window is high and pale. The sounds of her housemates coming in, the clatter of pans, the smells of cooking. Someone smoking in the yard; the smell of it turning her stomach. Is anything happening yet? Eat and drink as normal, the website says, avoiding alcohol in case it skews your judgement. She hasn’t felt hungry all day, has eaten just granola bars, handfuls of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. One of her housemates taps on her door. Is she OK? Yeah, fine, she says, period cramps. Oh God, poor you, I’ve Nurofen if you want? Nah, thanks a million, but I’ve got some here. Fair do’s. Here, we’re going for a pint in a bit if you feel any better. Thanks, I reckon I’ll just stay here though, watch something. OK, cool, give us a shout sure if you need anything. Cool, seeya. Bye.

The sky is streaked with pink now. Her phone beeps with a text from her mum: her grandma has been taken to the Ulster again, another chest infection. Every time it happens they think it’s going to be it this time, but it somehow never is, and after a five-day course of antibiotics Grandma’s discharged back to the nursing home to lie corroding in her rubber-sheeted bed. She can’t think what to text back. Does her mum mean she should visit? She can’t set foot in a hospital: what if it started happening there, in front of all the nurses and doctors? (If there are complications and you have to go to hospital, don’t tell them. They can’t tell, and they don’t have to know. The treatment in any case will be the same. No tests can prove what you’ve taken, what you’ve done.) She starts to reply, deletes it. Her phone beeps again. Don’t mean to alarm you, her mum says, it’s the same sad old story, just thought you’d want to know. A string of x’s and o’s. Then a third message: Are you back for Sunday lunch? 

She blinks. Sunday. Sunday lunch. Hope so, she replies, then, Sorry, in middle of essay crisis. Sorry to hear about Grandma. Dad’s with her now, her mum says. It’s just so very sad, isn’t it. Poor Dad.
I’ll text him,
she says. A few minutes later her mum sends another text: Good luck with essay! followed by a fountain pen emoji, some books, a cup of coffee and a hamster head. Then another text: Sorry! That was meant to be a lucky cat. Need my glasses! 

An evening from her childhood: this time of year, these lingering days and pale, light skies. Their dad has asked their mum to call in on their grandma the odd time during the week, and one night after swimming they do. They scramble out of the car and race across the green then stop, for reasons they can’t put into words, and wait. A chill wind is coming from the lough, cutting straight through their uniforms: green pinafores and blue summer blouses. Their hair scorched dry on top but still damp at the nape of their necks, the sharp, clean smell of chlorine on their skin. Their mum reaches them, takes her youngest daughter’s hand. The pebble-dashed terrace of houses, each with its dolls’-house gate, impeccable roses or trimmed box-hedge borders. Beyond them the garages, beyond that the forest. It’s not really a forest, though they call it that; just a close-growing cluster of larch trees at the back of the estate. The fallen needles make the ground feel soft and springy and not like ground at all. They absorb all sound, too, the road on one side, the estate on the other, so that as soon as you’re through the first row of trees you could be miles or years from anywhere. But now their grandma’s face is looming pinkly in the bubbled glass beside the door, and the door opens inwards, not enough to let them in. Their grandma touching her hair: What’s this, now, is something the matter?

Her minister is there; he’s stopped by after the Mother’s Union. There are slices of buttered fruit-loaf on the table-nest as well as a plate of oatmeal biscuits. The electric heater is pulled out to the centre of the room, its face aglow with all three bars. The minister stands, greets their mum, then all of them by name. The Reverend knows you from the photographs, their grandma says, and touches her hair again, straightens her blouse. Her youngest sister steps forward, pirouettes. Do you like our new hair? They’ve all had it cut for the summer term, from almost waist-length to bobs, because of nits – but he doesn’t need to know that, they see the warning in their mum’s eye. They all shake their heads to show how it swishes. The Reverend says, Vanity, vanity, and their grandma laughs, but his face is serious. Vanity, vanity! he says again. Vanity in young ladies is a terrible thing to behold, for it takes deep root, and what grows crooked cannot be straightened. Their grandma looks at him and stops smiling, and after that she won’t admire their haircuts or even meet their eyes, and they are confused and afterwards their mum is furious.

His face was red and his hair was white and his eyes were bright blue. He’s dead, now, and soon Grandma will be, whether or not it happens this time. The larch trees are gone too, lopped down to stumps.

She makes herself remember, instead, those Tuesday swimming lessons at Olympia. Imagines watching afterwards, through the observation window in the second floor cafeteria, the lane-ropes being dragged into place and the club swimmers powering up and down in their powder-blue caps, flipping into easy tumbleturns, length, after length, after length.

Her housemates go out. She texted him twice, then a third time. He didn’t reply. Her phone said the messages had been delivered, and once she even saw the dot, dot, dot of him composing a reply, but then the dots went away and the reply never came. She saw him a week later in the Clements in Botanic and he was obviously scundered, said he’d lost his phone and only just got a new one. Give us your number, sure, he said, and she did, but she knew he wouldn’t contact her, and he didn’t. After that she could hardly tell him – could she? – why she’d been trying to get in touch. It should be his problem too, but it just isn’t, the world doesn’t work like that. So he’ll never know any of this. He’ll never even suspect. For a strange moment, she feels almost sorry for him. Something about that makes a sort of sense in the middle of the night. But when she wakes, the feeling is gone.

She can’t be in the house. She walks into town, but it’s too early for the shops to be open, and then it starts to rain, heavy and dull. Yesterday’s high, light skies have closed right down, thick cloud and raw, damp air. It is the first of May. Mayday, she thinks. She remembers from Guides that you have to say it three times in a row. Mayday, mayday. She goes back to her student house. Two of her housemates are up, both hungover, smoking in the kitchen. She makes a cup of tea, sits with them a bit. Talks; hears herself talk. Laughs. Tells them about the Sunday in Carnlough, the Holy Communion. They all laugh about it. She goes up to her room. At 11:11 she takes the second lot of pills: all four of them. They’re chalky and bitter under her tongue. At 11:41 they’ve hardly dissolved at all. Her jaw aches with the effort of holding her mouth and tongue still. She gives it until 11:45, watching the minutes pass on her phone. Then 11:50. That has to be enough. She gulps some water from her bottle. She can’t go out again now. The pills are likely to start working within two hours, but may take up to five, or in some cases even longer. She opens her laptop and goes to the website, checks to see if there’s anything she’s missed. Then deletes her browsing history again: clear history, reset top sites, remove all website data.

She waits for the guilt to start, the regret, but it doesn’t. What does she feel? She tests out emotions. Scared, yes. Definitely scared. She’s deleted her browsing history seventeen, eighteen times. But they have ways of finding these things out: and somewhere, etched onto the internet, is her name, her address, her PayPal account, what she did. When, where and how. She, or anyone who helps her, could be jailed for life. So, scared.

What else does she feel? Sadness. She wants to have babies one day. She wants to see the blue line and feel giddy with excitement, check its weekly growth. She wants to want it. But not like this. The other thing she feels, to her surprise, is relief. An overwhelming, incredible sense of relief: that she is doing the right thing.

When the bleeding comes, the first dull smear on toilet paper, and then the first, warm drops, she will be so relieved (and sad, and scared) all over again that she will cry. She’s bought maxi-pads instead of her usual Lil-Lets, and the trickling feeling between her thighs will make her think of her first ever period, of climbing into her mother’s lap and feeling too big to be there, sobbing. Everything that is irrevocable now: all that has been lost. You mustn’t think like that. She will remind herself: the bleeding and cramps are likely to be worse than a normal period, and there may be clots. Light bleeding may continue for up to three weeks. In most cases, four to six weeks after the bleeding stops, your period will resume. She will recite it to herself, over and over again, like a litany, a prayer. She will be one of the lucky ones. She will. She will.


Mayday – Audio

Listen to Mayday

three-sisters-3“More than 100 years later, the three sisters are still stuck, but in Lucy Caldwell’s admirably free-handed adaptation of Chekhov’s play for the Lyric, the siblings are now mired as much in 1990s Belfast as they are in a particular point in history. In Selina Cartmell’s fluid production a fresh and uneasy peace is still stalked by soldiers, and army brats Orla, Marianne and Erin stand between a past they would rather forget and a future that has no obvious accommodation for them. Some cruelties are amplified (the sisters, defending their territory from a Chinese sister-in-law, are now flat-out racist), some subtleties are lost (the manner of the telling is unnecessarily forced), but Caldwell’s elegiac take on people in transition is absorbing and affecting, squinting uncertainly towards what is yet to come.”
Irish Times

Caldwell has made Chekhov’s play astonishingly resonant, making it alive to past trauma brutally embedded in the present. Even those at a distance to the conflict such as the three sisters stand to be utterly transformed, as a pacing peace process puts their soldiers’ futures in doubt.

It’s an immensely brave point for any writer to make, and perhaps, like Cartmell’s conspicuous staging, more difficult to accept. Those days were horrific, but they were the days that shaped Northern Ireland nonetheless.

Exeunt Magazine

Production Stills

Praise for “Three Sisters”

News

‘An Openness, an Outwardness’

Interviews

Photo by Eamonn Doyle

Lucy Caldwell’s Multitudes and the Possibilities of Fiction
(Susanne Stich for Humag)


May 2016 saw the launch of award-winning novelist and playwright Lucy Caldwell’s debut short story collection Multitudes (Faber & Faber), which presents a fresh and powerful portrait of growing up female in 1990s Belfast. I recently caught up with her during the rehearsal process for her new adaptation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters due to premiere at the Lyric Theatre this month, and which, like Multitudes, is set in early post-Troubles Belfast. The resulting interview covers a vast array of topics, including Caldwell’s meticulous approach to craft, her complex relationship with Northern Ireland, and the effects of reading others on her writing.

Susanne StichMultitudes contains eleven stories and was written over eleven years, while, in parallel, you were working on plays, novels, and giving birth to your first child. The stories explore young female experience, ranging from childhood to new motherhood. Except for the last story, they are all set in your native city of Belfast.

In an interview with the BBC Arts Show you compared the collection to a Cubist portrait of growing up. Elsewhere, in conversation with fellow Belfast-born writer Paul McVeigh (The Irish Times, 6.5.2016), you point out how you find the short story in general to ‘demand a higher price of [the writer]’ than other forms. Perhaps we can begin by talking about what the short story did for you in the process of mining aspects of personal experience across an eleven-year time span.

Lucy Caldwell: When I was 23, in the eighteen-month hiatus between signing a book deal and my first novel being published, I wrote a collection of short stories. They were all narrated by or about girls or young women, and all set in the Belfast of my childhood and teenage years, or between Belfast and London. I saw the collection perfectly in my head before I started to write it – the shape of the whole thing, the different notes I’d strike, the themes and motifs that would weave through. But none of it worked. The collection was far less than the sum of its dismal parts. I had assumed, and I’m almost ashamed to admit this now, that writing short stories would be easier than writing a novel. In part because of their length, but also, although it’s harder to put this into words, because there is something inexorable, inevitable, about great short stories. A seamlessness. I put the collection aside, humbled – but I could never quite give up on the idea. Two of the stories in Multitudes, in fact, have their earliest incarnations in those first stories I tried to write: I just couldn’t let them go, and would come back to them every couple of years. I think it took that decade of writing – three novels, a novella, several stage plays and radio dramas, monologues, and all the rest of it, to have enough of the craft and skill to make a short story live. I often think of the lines from Sylvia Plath’s ‘Stillborn’ where she imagines the poems of hers that failed to live, as if they’re pickled in front of her in specimen jars: ‘They smile and smile and smile at me / And still the lungs won’t fill and the hearts won’t start.’ There is something taut, elusive, alchemical, about short stories. As well as working on the basic narrative level, they have to make sense on a symbolic plane: you’re controlling the surface tensions between those two things, which is very tricky.

Another thing happened to me in those 11 years: I started writing and publishing quite young, and when people would ask me what I possibly had to write about, I would feel bemused, because I’d always been fascinated by other people’s stories. By the fact that you could meet someone, live alongside them, fall in love with them, even, and still have no idea, necessarily, what their secrets and sorrows were, their loves and losses, what they were dealing with or hoping for or dreaming about. Those famous lines of Louis MacNeice’s, ‘the drunkenness of things being various’, or the lyrics of Love’s ‘Alone Again Or’, ‘I could be in love with almost everyone / I think that people are the greatest fun’ – that’s what I felt, and still feel. It took a long time for me to realise that what I had known and done and lived was worthy of writing about. Perhaps, too, there was a guilt about having lived a relatively normal teenage life against the backdrop of the Troubles. People, from penpals to publishers, would – and at times still do – ask about the bombs you’d seen, the bereavements you’d suffered – and there was a sort of shame about not having a big story to tell when you were living in a time of such big stories. That’s the first time I’ve tried to put that into words. I notice only now, and I’m not going to edit it out, because it seems important, that I slipped from the first into the second person for those few lines, as a way of distancing, maybe, of apology.

And so those years it took between that first attempt and the published collection that is Multitudes were a gaining in confidence, on the technical side of things, but also in an artistic, and perhaps even moral sense, about the sort of stories I could tell, that mattered most for me to tell.

SS: I was struck by the laconic and pared down language in these stories. The narrative voice seems to create a contrast with the emotionally complex and frequently harrowing events. The opening sentence in ‘Killing Time’ presents a powerful example:

I try to kill myself on the first of March, a Sunday. I haven’t planned it. I somehow just find myself standing in the bathroom, my heart beating fast, watching the watery light through the rippled windowpanes, knowing I’m going to, and suddenly it all makes sense. (75)

Another opening, from ‘Thirteen’, sets the stage in similarly incisive fashion:

On the first of July, Susan Clarke and her family move to London to start a new life. They’ve had enough is what Susan’s mum says. She just can’t take it any more.

‘This country,’ she says to my mum.

‘This country,’ my mum says back to her, and neither of them says anything else. (11)

Tonally, Multitudes feels different from the more exploratory language in your novel All the Beggars Riding (2013), where the narrator is dubious of language as she attempts to reconstruct her dead parents’ complicated love story:

It’s harder to tell a story, though, than you’d think. As I said earlier, lives aren’t orderly, and nor is memory: the mind doesn’t work like that. (8)

How do you approach finding the register of language for a new piece?

(read the full interview at Humag)