How to Create and Maintain a Writer’s Eye, with Samantha Clark

SAMANTHA CLARK IS THE AUTHOR OF the brand new memoir, The Clearing: A Memoir of Art, Family and Mental Health, just out from Little Brown. Samantha is a writer and artist who lives on Orkney, an archipelago off the Northeastern coast of Scotland. She’s a visual artist and a writer, and I’ve dearly wanted to speak with her about how to create and maintain a writer’s eye. Listen in and read along as we talk about that, and so much more.

Marion: Welcome, Samantha, it’s a joy to have you on today.

Samantha: Hello, Marion, and thank you so much for inviting me.

Marion: I’m delighted to have you here. You’ve been awarded a PhD in creative writing from St. Andrew’s, a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Awards, a Cove Park Scottish Emerging Writer Residency, so you’re a well published, as well as well decorated, writer, but you originally trained in art at the Edinburgh College of Art, Belgrade Academy of Fine Arts, Slade School of Fine Art. Oh yeah, and in 2010 you gained an MA in values and environment from the philosophy department at the University of Central Lancashire. So it seems you missed the memo to pick one thing and do it, so how did that happen, Samantha?

Samantha: Yeah, I think I’m probably the definition of the eternal student. Yeah, I went to art school when I was young, I think I was 17 when I left school and headed off with my spotted handkerchief and went to art school, and I’ve really just followed my nose ever since. And it’s always been this creative impulse that has driven what I’ve done and the decisions that I’ve made, so I was finding myself doing a lot of reading and thinking about certain ideas about environment, and that was what led me to doing the philosophy degree, because I thought, I want to just get right in here and really get under the bonnet and see how this is all working. So I did that, and actually I think that’s really where I cut my teeth writing, because I found I really enjoyed it, I really enjoyed doing the academic writing.

But I still had the creative itch, and I was asked if I wanted to do a PhD in philosophy and I said, “Well, that would probably mean putting my creative work on a back burner for another God knows how many years.”

Marion: Mm-hmm.

Samantha: But then I thought, well, I can do a creative PhD, so that then led me to doing the creative writing. The writing had already been going in the background all the time, I mean, I’d always been writing as part of creative process, part of my thinking process, I’d sketch books that were full of notes and little bits of writing here and there, so it was always there.

Marion: Mm-hmm, and that’s so encouraging for people who want to be writers. I think people have this idea that it drops from the gods, or the muses, into your head and comes straight out your fingers, and if it doesn’t, there’s something wrong with you, and you’ve got this really beautiful mix of education that is apparent in everything you do. I think particularly of this project you did in 2014, you received a Scottish Arts Council Funding to make new work in response to Edinburgh’s University’s natural history collections, and you wrote a blog, and you took lots of photographs, and the final outcome is this remarkable photo essay called “The Curators Room,” published at terrain org, and I’ll put the link in the transcript I provide on my website.

But it’s a gorgeous piece of writing, and I was searching through it for some clues to you, and in one particularly beautiful passage you mention, you remind us, that Wordsworth famously composed as poetry while walking. And I wonder, where do you compose your work? Are you sitting still? Are you out walking? Are you looking around? You mentioned that one and I thought, so what’s the key here, Samantha, in terms of why are you telling us this?

Samantha: In my own process I don’t have one particular way of working. Sometimes I just take my phone and put the headphones with the headset on and do voice recording as I’m walking. Sometimes I just go for a walk, or something, and then come back and just sit and write. Sometimes I just set a timer and give myself a regular time slot and slog away for an hour, and then, right, okay, job done, go and do the next thing. So I wouldn’t say I have one particular way of writing, but I think I write because it slows me down. I write because it makes me pay attention, and I think that’s also why I draw, because both these seem to be disciplines that slow you down and give you a focus.

Marion: Yes.

Samantha: And my writing process is very slow, it’s quite iterative. I revise and revise and revise, and I go back into a text. I mean, that essay you mentioned, I think I worked on that for, I don’t know, might’ve been on and off for a year or so, until I worked out what it was I was trying to say, because I didn’t quite know at the beginning, but I worked it out through the writing. It’s like Joan Didion says, “I write in order to know what I think,” and I think that’s definitely true, I write in order to know what I feel, I write in order to know what I’m looking at, so I think that’s probably the heart of it.

Marion: I think that’s a good heart. In the same essay you pose the idea, you say, “What is writing but this task of capturing and stabilizing thought, what is the writer but a kind of curator,” and I really, my heart just sat down in the good seats when you wrote that, and I read that and I said, yes, a kind of curator. Do you care to expand on that, the idea of curating?

Samantha: Yeah, I mean, in the context of visual art, a curator is someone who is trying to tell a story or perhaps make an argument through a certain selection of artworks, and I guess writing memoir, because that’s the writing that I have done mostly, is very much the same, you have to select from that huge ongoing rush of lived experience, the talismanic experience that will propel your argument or tell your story, and that has a coherence, because life’s not terribly coherent, or certainly mine isn’t, as it’s lived, but we make art to make sense of that. We make art to find the pattern and the meaning and the structure within that, because it’s there, but it’s not always immediately evident. So yeah, I think it has a lot in common with this idea of curating.

Marion: I use the phrase a lot talking to writers, but I hadn’t seen it in your work before, or hadn’t seen it elsewhere in anybody’s work so much, and I loved that. You end that remarkable essay with the phrase, “Practice systematic wonder,” and the benefit of you doing so is all over your pages, all over the visual art that I’ve looked at of yours. So if you had a group of us sitting in front of you, which you kind of do here on the podcast, can you give us an assignment to help us practice “systemic wonder?”

Samantha: Yeah, systematic wonder, the practice of science. I’m not a scientist, but I have a huge interest in science, and I have friends who are research scientists, and yeah, there’s a rigor in their process, and that’s the systematic part, you ask a question and you have to then set about answering it, but it has to be driven by a sense of wonder or otherwise what’s the engine behind it? So I would say writing is also practicing systematic wonder, because you maybe see something that moves you, but then you don’t know why. Why am I fascinated by this thing? Why do I keep, my attention keeps coming back and back to this phenomenon, maybe it’s the natural world, or maybe it’s people around you, or an experience that you’ve had. And yeah, the systematic part of it is the discipline, isn’t it? It’s the sitting down, glue on seat, and getting the words out, and then trying to them in the right order.

I’m a great believer in this word practice as a discipline, if you like, it’s something that you just sit down and you do every day, or whenever you have time, and you maybe are not so attached to the outcomes of it at the onset, you just do the practice ,and then you read the results in due course. It’s like having a yoga practice, or a running practice, or practicing a musical instrument, playing your scales. I think that’s the systematic part, is the rigor and the discipline, which are unfashionable words, they sound quite cheerless, but there’s a real freedom, I think, in just okay, it’s this time, I’m going to sit down and write. Whether I want to or not, whether I like it or not, whether I’m inspired or not, I’m just going to do it.

My partner is a bit of a runner, he likes to run marathons. I certainly don’t. But yeah, that’s one thing he says is the hardest thing, is just putting your shoes on and getting out the door for a run, so he just makes it into a habit. And habit is our friend, really, when we’re trying to do something like write, we form the habit, we form a good habit, a helpful habit, and that will see us through a lot, that will see us through those days when we don’t feel particularly inspired, or where we’re tired, it’s just a habit. Before you know it you’re sat down and you’ve opened your notebook, or your laptop, and you’re starting to put words down.

Marion: Yeah, the discipline is so important. I’m a huge believer in discipline, I’m not a woowoo person at all, I’m a disciplined person, and I believe in the discipline. And the results of your discipline, of your systematic wonder, is so evident to me in The Clearing. And it’s your first book, and I have to say, it’s breathtakingly beautiful.

Samantha: Thank you.

Marion: I truly love this book. I have held it to my chest while I read, had to stop and just hold it to my heart and say, “Oh, wow.” And when I described this book to people, and I do frequently, I talk about how you see things. I say you have an artist’s eye, a scientific background that includes a good working knowledge of metaphysics, and a fascination with, of all things, the history of ether, all of which you apply to examine the spaces between what we can learn in those spaces.

And what astonishes me about this book is that the spaces you take on are the spaces between people, between us and our possessions, our ideas, our guilt, our grief, and you pretty much do this in the assignment of clearing out your childhood home after the death of your parents. So let’s start with when this idea occurred to you to write the book. A lot of us have to do this, we have to go to our childhood home where our parents still are and clean it out. It’s an astonishing place from which to write. When in the process did you say, this is what I’m going to write about, and then when was it a book, please?

Samantha: Well, first of all thank you for saying such lovely things about it, it’s so nice to hear about being received so warmly by readers, and that completes that journey, I suppose, that was begun, for me, a long time ago. So like I said, I was writing bits and pieces as part of my creative process, and as a visual artist for quite a long time I’d been really fascinated by this idea of a gap, or a space between, or what’s there when nothing is there, and I’d been really drawn to this idea of the ether, which is from science in fact, from even what they would have called natural philosophy, before even the word science was used. It goes right back to Aristotle as a way of understanding how light from distant stars can reach us, what’s in the spaces between things, what’s there, when we don’t really understand what’s there. It was this really shape-shifting idea that lingered in science for a couple of thousand years, it was still hanging around in Einstein’s day. And even now you hear physicists talk about quintessence dark matter, I mean, quintessence is the essence of ether.

So I was really so fascinated by this idea, but I didn’t really quite know why. And then, as I said, I’d studied philosophy, and I kept coming back to the ideas of nothingness and gaps in philosophy as well, so I was coming at it from lots of different angles, I was interested in Buddhist ideas about emptiness. And yeah, I chewed on this idea for years, and I read this essay by the poet Mark Doty, who explains the process of writing one of his poems, and he wrote about metaphors, and he says, “Our metaphor is new things before we do, that they’re a form of intelligence that reaches out into the world and fastens onto things, because they are helping us to understand something, or to handle something that’s perhaps too delicate or too charged to hold directly.” And that really spoke to me and I thought, gosh, yeah, this is a clue, perhaps.

So anyway, off I went, and I was embarking on this PhD in creative writing with this very nebulous cerebral idea of writing about ether, and gaps, and nothingness, and it was going to be terribly philosophical, and very high minded. And then my father died, and then 18 months later my mother died. And I was embarking on this lengthy process of clearing out their very, very cluttered house, it was absolutely full of stuff, they’d lived in it for 45 years. And there was a certain moment, really, when I walked into my father’s room, he had been a radio and television engineer, and when he retired he’d also been a radio amateur, and he made remote control aircraft, and he had this room that was just absolutely stuffed with old radio sets and homemade airplane models, and he had these maps on the wall that showed where radio signals could reach, and frequency allocation charts.

And I realized that he’d been fascinated with ether as well, ether as radio, ether as the ether that we talk about, and we’d never talked about it. And I started to realize that maybe it was about him and about my mother, and about our relationships, and those silences and gaps between us, because my mother suffered from long-term mental illness. So the personal story started to elbow its way in, it was too front and center, I couldn’t really ignore it. So I kept finding myself writing towards the things I needed to understand at that point. So I surprised myself that I ended up writing a memoir. So there wasn’t one moment when I sat down and said, right, okay, I’m going to write a book, or I’m going to write a memoir, it evolved gradually, and it turned into The Clearing.

Marion: So wonderful: Permission that you suggest that sometimes is provided, when we find something in our own backyard that could command our attention, but that you could create a bowl underneath it of the things you’ve been thinking about, and in this particular piece your grief and guilt are braided beautifully with your science, and this seems to come naturally to you, the way some people see metaphor, as you said, the Mark Doty essay on metaphor is so incredibly helpful. And every writer listening to this wants to feel the permission to see the world the way they see it, but if you give themselves that permission. And when pitching those metaphors across the dining room table to our partners and kids, we frequently just get some cold stares like, oh, there goes mom again, she’s nuts, or whatever. So to whom do we want to talk to this, about what we see? In other words, talk to me about your support network that allowed for such illuminating thinking and writing. Where did you get your support for these ideas?

Samantha: Well, when I said there wasn’t a moment when I sat down and realized I was going to write a book, actually that’s not entirely true. I went on a writing retreat run by the Arvon Foundation, I don’t know if you’ve heard of them in the UK, it’s a standard week long, well five day long retreat, with a couple of writers as tutors, and one of them’s in Ted Hughes old house, and they’re in these really nice places. But there’s a very nice collegial atmosphere in them, they’re not all about luxury, they’re about writing. And I went on one that was run by, one of the tutors was a writer called Jay Griffiths, who’s a wonderful writer here in the UK, and I’d read a lovely book of hers called Wild, which I think was published in the US as Savage Dreams. Loved the poetic intensity of her writing, and I went along with some of my little scribbly scrappily little bits of tense to writing, and she literally took me aside in a room and sat me down and said, “Okay, so what’s your book about?”

And I answered, and it was like she’d ambushed me, it was just like, oof, and out this answer came. I didn’t expect it myself, I said, “I want to write about the ether, I want to write about the gaps between things, blah, blah, blah.” And she just looked at me with her eyes shining and she said, “You must write this book.” So I thought, oh, okay, I suppose I better. So somehow it’s odd that we need to ask permission. I think I waffled, I said, “Yeah, but I’m not a writer, I’m an artist.” And she said some very wise things, she said, “It’s the same job, you know the job, it is the same.” And she was right, actually. Yeah, what was the question? I’ve lost track.

Marion: Yeah, that’s it. And I wonder, in the industry end of it, did you get pushback when you tried to sell it? Agents, publishers, editors, did some people say grief? Guilt? Science? Cleaning out a parent’s house? What? I mean, we always want to publish with someone who gets us, obviously, but I wonder, when you took it to market, was there any pushback that you got for braiding together these ideas?

Samantha: So yeah, you were asking about support network as well through the long process of writing it, because it took about six or seven years to write, and that was one of my reasons for deciding to do a PhD, because here in the UK, I think it’s slightly different in the states, but here in the UK a PhD is absolutely your project, it’s up to you, and I realized that I was going to need some input and maybe a bit of structure, so that was basically why I ended up doing it as part of a creative writing PhD, because I would have that framework. And I worked with a wonderful writer called John Burnside, who’s known as a novelist and a poet, he’s a very fine poet as well. And so I just had these, every couple of months I’d rock up and have this rather freewheeling conversation with this amazing writer who I really admired his work, and we just had these really riffed on ideas for an hour or two, and then off I went and wrote another chapter.

So that was a really useful support, but I was actually, other than that, incredibly secretive about what I was doing, because it was quite personal, and even my partner didn’t know what I was up to. So this PhD was a really useful smokescreen, because people would say, “How’s your PhD going?” And you just go, “Yeah, it’s really difficult and complicated, it’s a PhD, you wouldn’t understand.” So it was a really useful smokescreen to stop people asking too many questions, because I would just give them some metaphysics, and that would scare them off, so that was quite useful. But when it came to finding a publisher, I was really fortunate in getting an agent quite quickly, again through the support of another writer who had read the manuscript and loved it and said, “I want to introduce you to my agent.” And I am so indebted because it’s hard to get off the slush pile.

So I had an agent, but yeah, it went through so many publishers before it actually got a taker. And what was quite frustrating was every publisher had a different reason for turning it down, so I couldn’t see any logic. But I think, yeah, people were a little bit puzzled about how they were going to market a book that was about science, and grief, and art, and clearing out a house, and yeah, it was, I think, a bit of a tough sell.

Marion: Yeah, they can be, but I’m so glad you persevered and braided those all together, it makes for such a rich tale, and it’s deeply reassuring that there are publishers there that are not just looking for the one trick pony. I want to talk a little bit more about this eye of yours. You live in a remarkable part of the world. Do we say you live in Orkney or on Orkney? Because it’s a series of islands, so how is it phrased?

Samantha: Yeah, you are very correct and astute because you wouldn’t say you’re on Orkney because it’s not one island, it’s a group of islands, none of which is called Orkney, just to confuse you. So I live in Orkney, and also I like to say I’m in Orkney because it’s a community, it’s not just a lump of land dropped in the North Atlantic somewhere. So yeah, I live in Orkney.

Marion: No, and it’s an extraordinary place. It’s north, you go as far north as you can in Scotland, and while it’s not as far north as the Faroe Islands, it’s safe to say it’s remote. So let’s hone in a little bit about what you see every day there at the near top of the world and how that influences what you write, I’m fascinated with. I looked at a lot of pictures of Orkney before this interview and I thought, I think I can almost smell the sea in some of the things you’ve worked, and certainly in your visual art, but what about you, in terms of the way you think and write, how is that landscape affecting your work?

Samantha: Well, it’s a very dynamic landscape, it’s a very dynamic environment. It’s pretty windy, you’re aware of the weather, it’s actually really still this evening, I’m just looking at the window, it’s very still, but that’s unusual. But it’s not remote in that it’s actually, it’s quite populous, it’s quite fertile, there’s a lot of farming, it’s quite green, but there’s very spectacular cliffs along the west coast, and the waves come pounding off that coast in the winter. But as a result of that, we have a very active research and development in renewable energy, so it’s also a very forward-looking place, really groundbreaking stuff’s going on with generating electricity from the tidal currents, which are really strong here, and from wave energy and wind turbines.

And then right beside all of that, you’ve got Skara Brae, a village that’s 6,000 years old, you’ve got standing stones of the Ring of Brodgar that are thousands of years old. So you’ve got this really long sense of time, a layered sense of time, it’s all here, it’s all just right under foot. I think just a couple of weeks ago the front page of the paper was a local farmer had lifted a slab in one of his fields that the plow turned up, and lo and behold found himself looking at, I think a 4,000 year old skeleton, I can’t remember what the age of it was, but it was just like, whoa, there you go, it’s right there under your feet all the time.

But I’m really finding myself really drawn towards looking at and thinking about water. I’m actually, right outside my window here there’s a lake, a loch, freshwater loch, and as you say, the sea is a constant presence. But also water as it moves through the landscape, and rain, and fog, and mist, and the water that moves through our bodies, it’s another one of these imponderable elements, I suppose, that you can use as a thinking tool to think about all sorts of questions about boundaries, and where do we stop and the rest of the environment begins? And about surface and dept, ambiguity, and yeah. So water seems to be flowing through everything since I moved here.

Marion: Well, I’m glad that it does. I will put a link in to the project, you did the major public artwork project at the Balfour Hospital in Kirkwall, which if ever there was water, it’s there. It’s a 30 meter long mural, is that right? It’s enough to make me get on the plane and come see. I have to say, it’s pretty beautiful. When did you complete that?

Samantha: Yeah, that was a commission that came up when they were building the new hospital here, it was a really big building project for the island, so it was quite a big deal to get that commission. It’s in this hub area as you come into the hospital, there’s some big areas of internal glazing for the office spaces, for the doctor’s offices, and so on, and then also this long curved wall, so I proposed to make this artwork that would just unify the whole space. And I got the commission, I think while I was finishing off the final edits for The Clearing, and literally I hit send to the publisher on the 4th of January, and literally had to start right away on this commission for the hospital, because it was on quite a tight turnaround.

But yeah, even while I was writing I was still keeping things going in the studio by just drawing, just going and picking up a pencil and doing some drawing, so it was like I’d kept the pilot light going.

Marion: Yes.

Samantha: So when the commission opportunity came along, I had a really clear idea of what I wanted to do, and I thought, this is a good fit for what I want to do. And for the commissioners as well for the hospital, it fitted what they wanted to, so it all dovetailed in quite neatly. But because I had been, we come back to habit, and we come back to discipline, because I had the habit of drawing. Every time I just needed a break from writing, or I had half an hour to spare, I would just pick up and start drawing, bang, oomph, it all opened up again because the pilot light was there, and I was able to really hit the ground running and do this project, which was quite a gargantuan task. I think I was working for 10 hours a day, seven days a week, for three and a half months to finish it. So yeah.

Marion: Well, we’re very grateful you did, and very grateful for your presence here today. Thank you, Samantha, it’s wonderful to have you. The book is The Clearing: A Memoir of Art, Family and Mental Health, just out from Little Brown. See more on her at samantha clark dot net. I’m Marion and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont, our assistant as Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit Marion roach dot com and take a class with me on how to write a memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to and QWERTY and listen wherever you go, and if you like what you hear, please leave us a starred review, it helps others to find their way to their writing lives.

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