“Language is about becoming in the world”: Interview with David Almond

What is the meaning of place and belonging in your work?

For a long time I did not want to write about “that place,” I wanted to go over the horizon, but I only began to discover my voice when I turned my imagination back and began to use that place. It was the sense of drawing on a whole culture: the language, the landscape, the people. It was in a sense a way of finding my limitations, but also discovering the freedom. So, now all of that landscape, the north-east, Tyneside, has become the geography of my imagination. It’s a real place, but it’s not the real place. I have reimagined it. Now when I make a new story, it just finds its home there. And I can draw on so many things that for me enrich the way I write.

Your place is also very much about layers of time.

Yes, I always seem to be writing about going further down, layers. It is like an archeology. I find the roots of the world as it is now, as well as the roots of my imagination and my language.

How do the stories and songs you heard as a child influence your writing?

If literature is any good, it is about voice and it is about things being passed down generations. So, that’s another thing about going through the layers. I am going back to people telling stories. Kit’s Wilderness draws on that. It is a kind of exploration of what it means to write, what stories are. Stories are not just books on shelves. They resonate in our minds and in our bodies.

Several characters in your books are writers and storytellers themselves. What does it mean to write for you—to be an author, to be a storyteller?

I am fascinated by what it means to be a writer, and especially coming from an area which is not traditionally seen as a very literary place. I come from an area that some people would say is underprivileged and uncultured area. So, what does it mean to be a writer in that kind of area? But it seems to me that it means the same thing as it means to be a writer anywhere: you can decorate the world, or you can do a magical thing and change the world.

It has to do with myth as well. I have been haunted by the Orpheus story since I first heard it. Orpheus sings and actually changes the world. With A Song for Ella Grey, I thought it was time to do it properly. While working on an earlier book, I could sense the story assembling itself. I had used bits of the Orpheus myth in My Name is Mina, and I thought it’s time to do it properly this time. So it is the same story but set in Tyneside with schoolchildren, six-formers, and they have ordinary teenage lives. And Orpheus appears in the midst of them. He is a wandering musician. Every time you tell an ancient myth, it is told for the first time. So in this story, it is like the first time that Eurydice dies. It is the first time Orpheus goes into the underworld. And that’s also one of the joys of writing for young people. When you are writing for young people, the world is brand new; every time someone falls in love, it is the first time anyone has fallen in love, and every time someone dies, it is the first time someone dies. That’s the great thing about writing for young people. You are constantly on the edge of total newness.

You have Orpheus moments in some of the earlier books, as in Kit’s Wilderness.

When I was writing the underground section in A Song for Ella Gray, I noticed it and thought, yes, Kit did this, too.

When Lak battles the polar bear in Kit’s Wilderness, you write, “He rushed...