Through the Fairy Knolls: Quickfire Q+A with Angus Peter Campbell

Join us as Angus Peter Campbell, author of Peggy & the Fairy Knolls, 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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What advice would you give to aspiring authors?

 Read everything that's ever been written.

Where is your favourite place to write?

 I think I compose what I'm writing when walking. And then I write at my desk. In my bedroom.

What's the first thing you do when you sit down to write?

 I think. But if you want specifics, I suppose I look back at what I’ve just written.

What's your favourite line from your own work?

I think the first line of any work is important, since it invites the reader into the story. And though I generally prefer short sentences, I’m happy enough with the first sentence of my new novel Peggy and the Fairy Knolls in trying to set a physical (as opposed to a metaphysical) place for entering the knoll. Here it is:

I’ve always known where it is, and could show you the place, even in my sleep, for I know the shape of the ground and the feel of the grass under my bare feet and the way the primroses grow on the slope after the late February snows, and the smell of clover through the summer months, though maybe you’d have to know all that before you can tell the stories and say the charms and sing the songs.

How do you celebrate finishing a book?

By starting the next one. I don't know if I celebrate. I mean, I think it can be depressing because you've lived in this universe, this world, for so long. And then you're leaving, for example Donald and his ways, or Nurse McLeish, and these characters refuse to leave.

Because the next walk I'm on, Donald is saying something in my ear, and Nurse McLeish is saying something else. So it's good if they live on, it's good, you know. In a sense, a book is never finished.

Did you know how the story would end before you began writing it?

No. It's an adventure. The characters, whether it's Peggy or anyone, they do strange and individual things that can take you places, you know, that you don't really want to go to, but that's fine.

Who is your favourite character and why?

I like the Piper. Because he's not quite sure what he's about – you know, where he comes from and why he's doing the stuff he's doing – he's travelled to South America, and he’s got this magic chanter. There's an uncertainty about him, which I quite like.

Who's your least favourite character and why?

She's not my least favourite character, but Penny is interesting.

She's so friendly as a young girl with Peggy. But she kind of resists things, which is fine to resist things and go your own way. But I wonder how true to herself she is, how authentic to herself she is. And whether she's looked honestly at her own life and said, ‘what am I really about?’ She’s a good contrast to Peggy.

Which character's voice came to you most naturally in the book?

Peggy’s. Having done Donald & His Seven Cows, Donald has his daily journey, and he stops at Mac Talla nan Creag (The Echo of the Son of the Rocks), and at the Poison Pool, and at the big house, and at the Sìthean. He stops at the fairy hill, and I wanted to further explore the notion of the Sìthean and what it means. Of course, it means the fairy knoll. And when you ask people about fairies, they think of Disney-fied versions with wings, and they've got wings. As I say in Peggy, you don't need wings up where I live because of the gale force winds – they can transport you, you know? So the fairies then go into the Jungian collective unconscious, where memories and stories and traditions and language and songs and all the rest of it, where they lie. I wanted to explore that, what that really means.

The only sentence I added to the second printing is that it’s the place you begin to deal with your problems. Jung says, if you have an issue or a problem, just lie in bed and ask your great-grandfather or great-grandmother what you should do and he or she will tell you. It’s a fantastic notion and that all has been forsaken. Or taken from us and replaced by an alien Sìthean where the voices we hear are increasingly those of Farage or AI…

Donald is a gentleman, with his own fairy knoll in his vicinity, but Peggy is a youngish teenage girl. She might be a spiritual successor to Donald, but she had to be a completely different voice, in a different knoll. I suppose it helps that I've got five daughters, so I've listened to them for well over 20 years.

Do you see parts of yourself reflected in any of the characters?  

Well, you're always reflected in your characters, but I mean, but you have to separate.

For a livelihood, I write a weekly Gaelic column for the West Highland Free Press, and I’m paid to give my opinion. And my opinion, as Angus Peter Campbell, and my voice has got nothing and ought to have nothing to do with poetry or with fiction. It should be Donald's voice, should be Peggy's voice.

So I think the challenge is always to detoxify yourself and come clean to that work that's happening and let them speak.

Peggy & the Fairy Knolls is out now.