Ask the Author: Tim Ellis
Answered Questions (3)
Tim Ellis
I have recently completed my latest poetry collection "Birder in the Bushveldt" and am now submitting it to publishers. It's based on trips myself and Robbie my partner have made to South Africa over the years, focussing mainly on the wildlife of the region. Well it would, wouldn't it! Am I not The Bird Bard? Alongside some profound and highly formal poems, it incorporates many others that are lighter in tone and intended primarily as performance pieces. People who follow the Yorkshire poetry open mic scene may already be familiar with such crowd-pleasers as "600 Elephants", "You Big Baboon" and "Runaway Ostrich".
I haven't decided yet where to go from here. I have an idea I've been mulling over for a third verse-novel, but I don't feel very much enthused over sacrificing the huge amount of time and effort that "On The Verge" and especially "God The Banana" took me, in the knowledge that only a handful of people have ever read either book. So maybe I'll continue versifying random thoughts for a while and hope a theme emerges that I can turn into another themed collection. What do my readers want me to write next?
I haven't decided yet where to go from here. I have an idea I've been mulling over for a third verse-novel, but I don't feel very much enthused over sacrificing the huge amount of time and effort that "On The Verge" and especially "God The Banana" took me, in the knowledge that only a handful of people have ever read either book. So maybe I'll continue versifying random thoughts for a while and hope a theme emerges that I can turn into another themed collection. What do my readers want me to write next?
Tim Ellis
The plot of God The Banana is something I've mulled over for almost twenty-five years. My first great adventure outside of Europe was in 1989 when I spent four months backpacking around India and Thailand. Asia was a complete culture-shock; fascinating, irritating and exhilarating in equal measure. I was appalled to witness the gruelling poverty that's endured by many people even to this day, but also uplifted discovering the exotic bird and animal fauna there, and I reawakened a dormant passion for the natural world that has dragged me across five of the six continents over the past quarter century.
I'd had some very vague notion I might write a book based on my travels when I returned home, but I was a young man and all my notions then were very vague. I was dissuaded from this ambition by meeting so many other young travellers following the by then deeply rutted Hippy Trail, approximately half of whom told me they were going to write a travel book when they returned home. Perhaps a decade later I read Alex Garland's cult classic "The Beach" which must have had its genesis round about the same time, and I screamed, "DAMMIT! That was the book I was going to write!!" I swear that Alex Garland was in Bangkok staying in the same grim Khao San Road backpacker joint as me on exactly the same night, because that French couple kept me awake too...
I brought one useful thing home from my wanderings though: a sense of how well fitted the backpacker world is to the structure of a novel. When I was in India I'd estimate there could have been no more than a few hundred young European, North American and Australasian adventurers bumming around the subcontinent on a similar shoe-string budget to my own, because we kept bumping into one another everywhere. Not so unbelievable really - in the pre-internet era the only reliable source of information for independent travellers was guide books, and there were only two series that were good enough to be useful: the Rough Guides and Lonely Planet. Since we took the word of our preferred book as gospel and always headed for whatever cheap hotel it reassured us to be most habitable, there were two mutually exclusive backpacker tribes working their way around the famous sites.
I was in the LP camp myself, and I would only rarely meet members of the RG clan, in towns where both our books put the same low dive at the top of their Budget Accommodation list. It ceased to surprise me if I woke up in a frosty dormitory high on the blizzard-swept Himalayan ridge of Darjeeling, to see a man or woman asleep in the bed next to mine that I'd had dinner with two months previously, five hundred miles away in the stifling tropical heat of Bombay.
That is the outrageous sort of coincidence that is both the bane and blessing of many a classic novel - if you've read Hardy or Dickens you'll know that feeling of part-excitement, part-disappointment when you realise the stereotypical mad old lady who's arrived in town and could be anybody in theory, within the parameters of a thought-out plot cannot be anybody but the Furmity Woman who saw the protagonist disgrace himself thirty years earlier; that's how novels are fabricated. But here in India I was noticing that such affected fictional coincidences do happen in the real world. The archetypal youth who "finds" him- or herself after an epiphany on a beach in Thailand had already become a figure of fun in British culture by the late '80s, but I had an idea it could still be acceptable to use the scenario facetiously. The seed of a novel was sown in my mind...
It was not until I visited Guatemala with my partner Robbie in 2004 that the idea of Amanga was born. Various aspects of Guatemala reminded me of India fifteen years earlier: the rural people in their traditional costumes; the diversity of local languages; the decaying remnants of majestic European colonial-era buildings; the garishly decorated buses overloaded with people and livestock, but lacking essentials like brakes; and the pantheon of pre-Christian gods and demons that are openly worshipped even within the Catholic churches, which to my mind had a whiff of Hinduism about them.
Over the next few years the pair of us visited Costa Rica, Peru, Chile, and Panama, and I assembled the poems that became "Gringo on the Chickenbus". But at the same time my mind was working on a far grander project, originally conceived as a novel, about a fictitious tropical post-colonial nation, utilising many of the locations I’d visited. I sketched out the full plot of God The Banana in 2008, appropriately enough whilst lying on a top-bunk in a sleeper carriage on a painfully slow 20-hour India Rail journey from Jaisalmer (the desert citadel of Rankoor in the book) to Delhi, during my second visit to India.
I'd had some very vague notion I might write a book based on my travels when I returned home, but I was a young man and all my notions then were very vague. I was dissuaded from this ambition by meeting so many other young travellers following the by then deeply rutted Hippy Trail, approximately half of whom told me they were going to write a travel book when they returned home. Perhaps a decade later I read Alex Garland's cult classic "The Beach" which must have had its genesis round about the same time, and I screamed, "DAMMIT! That was the book I was going to write!!" I swear that Alex Garland was in Bangkok staying in the same grim Khao San Road backpacker joint as me on exactly the same night, because that French couple kept me awake too...
I brought one useful thing home from my wanderings though: a sense of how well fitted the backpacker world is to the structure of a novel. When I was in India I'd estimate there could have been no more than a few hundred young European, North American and Australasian adventurers bumming around the subcontinent on a similar shoe-string budget to my own, because we kept bumping into one another everywhere. Not so unbelievable really - in the pre-internet era the only reliable source of information for independent travellers was guide books, and there were only two series that were good enough to be useful: the Rough Guides and Lonely Planet. Since we took the word of our preferred book as gospel and always headed for whatever cheap hotel it reassured us to be most habitable, there were two mutually exclusive backpacker tribes working their way around the famous sites.
I was in the LP camp myself, and I would only rarely meet members of the RG clan, in towns where both our books put the same low dive at the top of their Budget Accommodation list. It ceased to surprise me if I woke up in a frosty dormitory high on the blizzard-swept Himalayan ridge of Darjeeling, to see a man or woman asleep in the bed next to mine that I'd had dinner with two months previously, five hundred miles away in the stifling tropical heat of Bombay.
That is the outrageous sort of coincidence that is both the bane and blessing of many a classic novel - if you've read Hardy or Dickens you'll know that feeling of part-excitement, part-disappointment when you realise the stereotypical mad old lady who's arrived in town and could be anybody in theory, within the parameters of a thought-out plot cannot be anybody but the Furmity Woman who saw the protagonist disgrace himself thirty years earlier; that's how novels are fabricated. But here in India I was noticing that such affected fictional coincidences do happen in the real world. The archetypal youth who "finds" him- or herself after an epiphany on a beach in Thailand had already become a figure of fun in British culture by the late '80s, but I had an idea it could still be acceptable to use the scenario facetiously. The seed of a novel was sown in my mind...
It was not until I visited Guatemala with my partner Robbie in 2004 that the idea of Amanga was born. Various aspects of Guatemala reminded me of India fifteen years earlier: the rural people in their traditional costumes; the diversity of local languages; the decaying remnants of majestic European colonial-era buildings; the garishly decorated buses overloaded with people and livestock, but lacking essentials like brakes; and the pantheon of pre-Christian gods and demons that are openly worshipped even within the Catholic churches, which to my mind had a whiff of Hinduism about them.
Over the next few years the pair of us visited Costa Rica, Peru, Chile, and Panama, and I assembled the poems that became "Gringo on the Chickenbus". But at the same time my mind was working on a far grander project, originally conceived as a novel, about a fictitious tropical post-colonial nation, utilising many of the locations I’d visited. I sketched out the full plot of God The Banana in 2008, appropriately enough whilst lying on a top-bunk in a sleeper carriage on a painfully slow 20-hour India Rail journey from Jaisalmer (the desert citadel of Rankoor in the book) to Delhi, during my second visit to India.
Tim Ellis
Read, read and read! Look at small press magazines and poetry websites and see what sort of material they are publishing. Submit work to places that publish the same sort of writing to your own, but make sure you are not just repeating what everybody else writes - you need to develop your own unique subject matter and style. If you never read other people's poetry you will never write anything that will interest others.
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