A Quick-Fire Q&A with Julie McNeill
Join us as Julie McNeill, author of Love Goes North, takes part in our series of quick-fire Q&As!
What is a quick-fire Q&A?
We have our interviewee pick a number at random and we ask them the general question listed next to it.
Shortly after we switch to asking book-specific questions, to give you a brief insight into our wonderful writers and their books.
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I think just to keep writing and to build a community of writers.
The best thing that I did was to join a writers’ group because building more confidence in your work, writing regularly and sharing your work, I would say, was the biggest thing that was kind of the catalyst to me then being able to publish a book.
Reaching out to people, writing regularly and building that community of people around you.
Well, I wasn't born in Scotland, so I moved to Scotland when I was 17 and I had this kind of coming home experience.
My parents are Scottish and my grandparents were Scottish so obviously I'd spent a lot of time here, but I think it's one of the most welcoming, beautiful places in the world.
I feel really, really lucky to live in Scotland.
When I first moved to Glasgow, I felt like I'd always lived there really, and I think it's just a wonderful place to live.
Oh, it depends.
I mean, if it's a weekend, I quite like a fry up, I do a kind of bacon and scrambled eggs. I quite like a bacon and scrambled eggs.
And you know, if I'm in a hurry, I like a croissant or a little pain au chocolat.
Sometimes; I think it depends.
Most of the time I'm really lucky that I just write when I feel inspired to write. So if I see something and I feel like I really want to capture it, then I've got a means of doing that through poetry.
I think probably it's a lot harder to do that if it's a novel and you're trying to sustain a kind of longer piece of work.
The only time I found a kind of slight writer's block wasn't for this book but for the last book, the We are Scottish Football book, because there was a deadline and also I was writing some of the poems for different themes that I had to research and sometimes finding a way into that was a wee bit tricky.
So I sometimes used to kind of stare at the page for a couple of days before it clicked, you know, to find an angle.
But in general, no, I think that poetry is that brilliant thing where it kind of taps you on the shoulder and you feel inspired to capture something at that point in time.
They wouldn't know that the majority of the poems are written are not at home.
The majority of the poems are written mostly on trains, on buses, in the corners of cafes and pubs and restaurants.
I tend to find that most of my ideas come when I'm on the move, when I'm not sitting at a desk, sitting staring out of a window.
So, yeah, that's something people might not be aware of.
No, it's 5,000 times more beautiful.
You know, I think Luath produces really beautiful books.
And when Amy designed the cover and when she first sent it through, I mean, it looks a wee bit like a 1930s kind of railway poster and it just captured the essence of the book so well.
I think it's such a beautiful thing to look at. I know it's my book, but I think it's such a beautiful thing to look at.
I never actually imagine when I'm writing that these things are going to end up in a book. And I don't kind of envisage the order they're going to be in or anything like that.
So it always sort of takes me by surprise when we start that process and things come together and you find that themes fit with other themes that maybe wasn't intentional, because I write them all kind of on their own, isolated.
So as the themes emerge and as the book comes together and as the cover goes on, I could never have pictured how beautiful that is.
This one's been in the works for quite a long time.
I mean, some of the early poems in that book are maybe nine or ten years old.
It feels really nice, actually. It feels really settled, like a settled collection, you know.
A lot of them, probably two thirds of them, have been written in the last kind of three years. But there are also poems that I've gone back to and reworked, worked or kind of looked at again from very early, when my children were just born, or, you know, going through kind of different experiences.
It’s been on and off in the works for years and years, but I suppose trying to mould it into a book has been the last maybe year to 18 months.
Oh, that's tricky!
Poetry, travel, love, adventure, heartache, I would say.
I mean, there's that thing of as soon as you press send, you write a really good poem or or there's something else that you wish you'd included, you know, because that process is quite long, isn't it, between you actually writing the book and then it coming out into the world.
There's always a point that you think, I should have slotted that in there, or I should have kind of moved that about.
I did swap about a few poems, actually, when the manuscript was being edited. And, you know, there has to be a point where you stopped and that becomes something else.
At the same time, there’s nothing I wish I’d known, in a way, because I think that it is what it is.
It marks a moment in time where I think that's as good as I can write. It's as good a poem as I can produce at this point in my life.
You know, I'll probably look back on it in a year or two's time and think, oh, I should have done that, or I should have done that, or I should have included a different poem.
But I think at the point in time where I press send, that's my best work.
And I feel sort of proud of the poems that are in there and I feel proud of the themes that are covered, and I'm really, really happy with it.
So that's a nice feeling.
