Quick-Fire Q&A with Marjory Harper
Join us as Marjory Harper, author of Northern Isles No More?, 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.
__________________________
What is your favourite thing about being an author?
The opportunity to work with words. I have always enjoyed that from my earliest days; I'm told I learned to read at a very early stage in life, and I've always enjoyed books.
And from my primary school days, I remember a teacher writing in a report, ‘She is a very good storyteller.’ And then he put in brackets, ‘in the best sense of the word.’ And so I've always liked writing stories, but, as I grew older, I decided I would go for writing historical books rather than fictional stories, because I thought, at least with that, I have a route, I've got sources with which I can work.
And I think one of my greatest pleasures is working with the sources that I find in archives, particularly personal testimony, the letters and the diaries, and in more recent years, the oral testimony of the people whom I've met. It's been a huge privilege.
What attracted you to writing in this genre (historical non-fiction)?
I was really privileged to have an amazingly enthusiastic schoolteacher, history teacher, in my last couple of years at school, and then even more privileged to have a tutor at university who let me have my head and write essays about what I wanted to do rather than just what was on the essay list. And I remember writing something about Scottish emigration in my third year at uni as an undergraduate, and I'm thinking, wow, this is really interesting, I'd like to pursue it further. And I took it further in a PhD and then expanded my research at postdoctoral level and was fortunate enough to get a position in the university. And that's where I've been ever since, juggling teaching with writing. And of course, writing about emigration, you're writing about people, real people, all with different stories. And I'm just fascinated by people's life narratives.
Who is your favourite author (apart from yourself)?
Well, that's a difficult one to answer because it has varied at different times in my life. The book that's had the biggest influence on me throughout my life, certainly since the age of 18, is a multi-authored book which I dip into every day. That's the Bible, because as a Christian, that's the standard by which I chart my life.
But if you want a more general answer to the question, I would say in my early teens and really, probably for most of my life, Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte. Jane Eyre has been a book that I've always gone back to. I just love the romance and used to picture myself as Jane.
And, for light reading, in recent years, I have fallen in love with Alexander McCall Smith. Both the Ladies Detective Agency and I think particularly 44 Scotland Street. I just love his characterisation. I can picture those characters who inhabit Edinburgh’s New Town.
Another author that I would go back to from probably my teens, and one that's probably not very well known in this country, is Owen Wister. I think his book was written about 1905. It's called The Virginian, and there was an eponymous TV series in the 1960s and 1970s that was based loosely on the book. And, again, I just loved the romance, vicariously, of course, of the North American West in the late 19th century.
What would the title of your autobiography be?
Of my own life story? Saved by Grace.
How long has this book been in the works for?
Well, this was my Covid project. I was originally commissioned to write about emigration to New Zealand, which would have required a trip to New Zealand but of course that wasn’t possible during the Covid years and I needed a project that was closer to home.
I realised, that although I'd been writing about emigration, particularly from Scotland, for virtually my whole career, I'd never really focused on the Northern Isles except in passing. And it dawned on me that it was an important but very badly neglected story. So I thought, well, I'll do this and it'll be a short project during the Covid period. And of course, it grew arms and legs as I was gradually able to go to the archives and see the wealth and variety of material in those archives. The project just grew and grew, and I think it took me, in the end, about five years. It took much longer than I had expected but it’s been a hugely enjoyable journey of exploration.
Is the finished book what you expected when you first started writing it?
Not really, because as I researched and wrote, and you do those two things in tandem, I met lots of wonderful people. That's been my main privilege, I think, in writing this book - to meet people either in person, people who emigrated in the 20th century and some of whom came back, and also meeting previous generations of emigrants through the pages of their letters and diaries. And you never quite know what you're going to come across in the source material. So, yeah, I had an idea of what the general structure of the book was going to be and that shape did remain the same. I look at people's motives for going, the mechanisms that helped them get from A to B, their experiences in terms of practical settlement, the issues of identity, what they felt like, did they still see themselves as Orcadians and Shetlanders overseas, or did they adopt new identities? And then it looks at some of the tragedies, some of the misfortunes that they experienced. So I had that general structure. But within that framework, there were many changes that took place as I went on with my research and made new discoveries from an ever-expanding corpus of sources. I think most authors find that the end product is different from their initial expectations as they are steered by their findings into new and sometimes unexpected avenues.
What advice would you give to someone interested in writing non-fiction?
Be confident in your ability. Be rigorous in your consultation and deployment of archival material. Look for as much material as you can. Always look for corroborative evidence. Be honest. If you find material that doesn't agree with your preconceptions, you have to address that material. Don't just ignore it or manipulate it to fit a preconceived agenda.
To reiterate, certainly one of my main pieces of advice would be look for as much evidence as you can, including corroborative evidence. And then weave all those pieces of evidence together into a lively and readable narrative. Non-fiction doesn't have to be boring. What I've always striven to do in my writing is write in an accessible way so that I'm both analysing sources and telling a compelling story to illustrate my analysis.
In other words, I try to write scholarly works that are also attractive to the general reader, rather than dry academic tomes that simply sit on library shelves and are rarely consulted. I would like people to read my books and get pleasure from them, and this would be the advice I'd give to others: write books that are simultaneously rooted in scholarly research and accessibly written.
What's the main message you would like people to take from this book?
That there is an important story, a largely untold story about the long history of emigration from the Northern Isles. And that that story is shaped by the proximity of the sea, which has had a clear influence on Orcadians’ and Shetlanders’ perceptions of the outside world, not least the promise of wider horizons beyond their shores.
Some of the story is identical or virtually identical to what happened in other parts of Scotland and elsewhere. But there are unique elements about the Northern Isles that need to be told.. And, it hadn't really been told before. It had been told in part, in a piecemeal sort of way, but there had never really been an overview of emigration from the two archipelagos over a 300-year period. And that's what I am trying to do in this book.
