Fritillaries and interiority in West Dean

Just spent a night and a morning in West Dean, Edward James’s extraordinary estate in Sussex, now run as a foundation for musicians, artists, makers, writers. The glorious kitchen gardens are approached through a walled garden where an orchard is coming into leaf, with a carpet of fritillaries at the feet of the trees. I’ve never seen so many of these  flowers before. I find them moving, I’m not sure why. It may be the speckles, it may be the way they hang their heads. I was there to speak at a lit fest mostly for debut writers called First Fictions, and I talked about my own first novels, all of which failed, and why and how I kept going. Then in the morning I listened as an audience member to a panel of writers telling of their own way of working. A novel in iambic pentameters (multi-award winning), a graphic novel, a novel written in the second person – so many different ways of working – but all doing what only novels can do, which I now know is called ‘interiority’, the empathetic imagination that enters the minds and hearts of others. This is the reason I read and write.