Jess Richards’s first novel Snake Ropes was nominated for a Costa award in 2012, and her new book Cooking With Bones marks her out as one of the most exciting new voices in British fiction. Mixing elements of magical realism and science fiction, the novel showcases the author’s ability to create distinctive voices and entrancing landscapes within her fiction. Cooking With Bones follows two sisters, Amber and Maya, as they come of age in a dystopian future. In her books, Richards examines isolated, female-dominated communities, and the ways in which individuals define themselves against the society they inhabit. Here, Ms Richards talks to us about her writing habits, feminism and the power of myths.
1) Both of your novels are set in quite isolated communities - is that sense of distance from the mainland/capital something that's important in creating your fictional worlds?
Isolated communities and imagined places offer huge possibilities for anything to happen. They're closed circles with their own history, beliefs, rules and stories - which can all become part of the setting, language and characterisation. I enjoy the Russian Formalism concept of 'making strange'. Creating a setting and community that's isolated - just off the edge of the map, out of the corner of the eye, slightly forwards / backwards in time, or generally off-centre allows strange and surreal things to happen.
2) You said that Snake Ropes developed from a creative writing exercise after an evening class - did you follow the same process for Cooking With Bones, or did you work more quickly?
Snake Ropes started from a 'character' exercise - where someone asks questions and you reply verbally as the character. That's how Mary's voice and dialect appeared initially. And then her little brother went missing - this event kept me writing her story - unable to stop till she and I found out what had happened to him. Cooking With Bones started with an image - two sisters who looked identical but weren't the same age. Twins but not twins. When the sisters run away from Paradon, they hide in a small cottage with a recipe book, instructions and cupboards full of baking ingredients. Then there's a brutal murder in their kitchen. Kip's narrative started with the voice of a local child who had to keep secrets. I had to keep writing till the dead body was explained. So it's been a similar process for both - though different things started them initially - one was started by a voice, the other, a picture.
3) You create distinctive dialects for your characters - how do you begin to develop them?
Initially I just write them as they sound - then try to establish the rules and grammar of the language fairly quickly so it's consistent. I know it sounds a bit odd to say I hear the characters' voices - but it happened that way with some of them. Mary in Snake Ropes, and Kip in Cooking With Bones - they talked as I listened and typed. Then later on, I edited what they'd said. It doesn't happen like that with all of the characters: Maya in Cooking With Bones has jumbled senses and therefore jumbled language. It took a good few re-writes to work out how she'd sound, particularly when she was under pressure, but it was a lot of fun playing with language so freely for her voice.
4) Matriarchy, and the knowledge handed down from woman to woman, is something both of your books explore - do you consider yourself a feminist author? And does Amber and Maya's escape from Paradon represent a need to find a space for female expression away from male-dominated spaces, or something else?
I would say I'm a writer who simply writes what she's interested in. I'm fascinated by the oral and storytelling traditions in folklore, mythology and fairytale, relationships of all kinds between women, psychology, philosophy and communities. Families are great to write about because of the stories they tell themselves, and the beliefs which are continued through generations - both consciously and unconsciously. I would consider myself a feminist because I'm a female who believes there isn't gender equality, and I also believe that both women and men are responsible for this in different ways.
In Cooking With Bones, Amber and Maya have to leave Paradon because in this futuristic city, what people 'want' has become so amplified that it is impossible to survive as an empathic individual. Maya's a formwanderer - a human who's been genetically engineered to reflect what others want. The city of Paradon is somewhere that human desires and wants have become extreme to the point of 'ideals' - whether it's beauty or money, possessions or perfect weather, status, power or celebrity. Someone purely empathic, 'mirroring' other people's desires in this environment would eventually be destroyed: by the society which made them turning against them, or by their own sense of overwhelm causing them to self-destruct. So in order for Maya to have the chance of survival, the sisters have to leave.
On another level, their escape represents the struggle of the individual within any group or social interaction - how do we know what we want for ourselves and decide if we're entitled to it or not? How much are we influenced by the desires and needs of the society in which we live and the people around us? How much of our identity is formed or manipulated by others? As the novel progresses, it's also an exploration about what would happen if empathy went a bit haywire. Cooking With Bones has many levels and layers of meaning - with identity being one of the central themes, I wanted to write a book which could be read in a variety of ways, depending on who was reading it.
5) In Cooking With Bones, there is a tension between folksy-seeming locations and science-fiction concepts such as the formwanderer - do you enjoy bringing two seemingly different styles together?
I'm curious about genre, style and the many traditions and very breakable 'rules' which apply to creative writing. Cooking With Bones could be described as a magical whodunit, sci-fi with recipes, or folklore with murder and ghosts. It was great fun to write, to take risks and experiment with aspects of established genres and play with the language of the narrators.
6) You have a very dstinctive writing style, but who would you consider to be the main influences on your writing?
I rarely read novels when I'm in the middle of writing one - though I think every book that's been read leaves an imprint. As a child I read folklore and fairytales, Roald Dahl's adult short stories and Agatha Christie's murder mysteries. I read Blood and Guts in High School (Kathy Acker) while I was at art college: she wrote about whatever she wanted to - punk/porn/love/sex. And years later when I read If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (Jon McGregor) I realised that language could be poetic, full of images, and incredibly fluid. So these two significant books showed me it's possible to write about whatever you want, however you want to write it. This idea was also reinforced in a creative writing class, by a very wise tutor.
While writing, I tend to dip in and out of folklore and mythology reference books. There's a fantastic Dictionary of Creation Myths (Leeming, published by Oxford Paperbacks) which always sparks all kinds of thoughts. These tales are from all over the world and throughout history. Sometimes when I'm stuck as to what to write next, I read someone's view on how the world began. Humans have always invented, imagined and created alternate realities to make sense of things. Some of these myths are amazingly beautiful - some are creepy, all are strange. Worlds hatch from eggs, people grow from mud, eagles plant seeds, gods give birth from slits in their thighs. While writing, finding out what things are made from helps me think: metals, steam-powered instruments, the layers of the ocean bed. And I really like looking at diagrams and maps... I think the main influence on my writing is curiosity.
7) Which current writers do you most enjoy?
Too many to list, but I'll try some: Neil Gaiman, Jeannette Winterson, Amy Tan, Joanne Harris, Sjon, Lisa See, and there have been some brilliant debut novels recently: Dear Lucy (Julie Sarkissian) The First Book of Calamity Leek (Paula Lichtarowicz), The Marlowe Papers (Ros Barber). I'm planning to read The Quiddity of Will Self (Sam Mills) and another reference book, the Dictionary of Symbols, this summer.
8) What are you working on next?
A... thing. It's at an early stage at this point, so I can't see what it wants to be yet. I'm going wherever it takes me, and I'll figure out how to describe it once it's reached a conclusion. Each process of writing a book has needed a leap of faith and a hope-jump to trust that it's going to take me to an ending. What I can say is that it's got a fiery setting, because I started it in winter and wanted to get warm.
You can read the Workshy Fop review of Cooking With Bones here
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