When we began corresponding, in our heads there were a whole lot of words waiting to be written for a long time. But time is one of the most deceptive things on Earth. Of course, it went by very quickly just like it always does and left behind nothing but far away shadows. After all, as we write and live, aren’t these shadows the only things left for us after so much toil, trouble and weariness?

For these last few months we’ve chatted a lot, albeit not sitting across each other sipping on Turkish coffee, but at our keyboards, knowing that we were being read in faraway places. As always, we took shelter in words to express what went through our hearts. And now, what is left in our minds of those words we trust so much? Thankfully, they are all written down. Still, I believe that, when writing and living, we shouldn’t make too much of words, giving them more meaning than what they are, we should remember that they aren’t “things” but their names.

As this is the last letter there is no harm in telling, in fact, it is the right moment to do so. At the start of all this hullabaloo of corresponding in which we talked about literature and life, as two people who didn’t know one another, we both were curious about how we would be writing to each other. As letters started to move back and forth the curiosity got replaced by the concern if we would be pleased to meet. To tell my side of the story, as I was busy writing my new novel about two sisters corresponding, sometimes their letters and mine got intertwined. Not topically of course, – they were in the 30s and in completely different conditions – but emotionally. Something strange happened, after a while I began to feel as if I were one of the sisters writing to the other. It was as if a bond of sisterhood had formed between us. And time showed us that we had a lot in common, more than we could have imagined. Yet it also showed us our many differences, ranging from our language to our style, from the issues that troubled us to the way we solved them. (Later, we would attribute some of them to the properties of the cultures that shaped us.) I think it was our differences more than our similarities that enriched our letters, which was also what made me await your next letter with excitement and read it with delight…

When we neared the end of the letters, we knew much about each other. We had written so fully that it was as if we had been friends for years. However we had never met in person! And we were in agreement that this had a romantic air to it.

We were to come face to face for the first time at the Istanbul Tanpınar Literature Festival. We had arrived in Istanbul, I from Barcelona, and you from Preston. We were going to meet at the opening ceremony that was going to be held at the Netherlands Consulate. I remember as if it were yesterday; it was the beginning of October and a warm Istanbul evening.

I had arrived early and had begun waiting for you. For a while, as the garden of the consulate became populate with more and more people, I became worried. Because when you’re looking for someone you only know from photographs, a crowd doesn’t really help things. You could even consider it already an effort in vain. As I was too conscious of this I couldn’t help glancing around as I spoke with familiar faces; and I kept asking Cihan from Kalem Agency if she had seen you whenever I ran into her. But you hadn’t even met her yet either! Who knows, maybe you had already arrived and were among the crowd looking for me. You had become a complete mystery, Jenn, you just wouldn’t show up!

As I almost emptied my third glass of wine I finally found you. You stood before me with a great big smile across your face. Strange, but we hugged like friends who hadn’t seen each other for a long time. Okay, it was the first time we were side by side, but after so many letters, we knew one another far more than those who got together often but never managed to really listen to each other…

In the following days, we travelled all around the city, every place we dreamt of in the letters. And better yet, we read the letters which we had written from afar face to face at the Istanbul Tanpınar Literature Festival. It was wonderful to be able to hear your words in your own voice.

When our Istanbul adventure ended, we moved to England. You took me to that wonderful garden in Preston, the one you had mentioned in your novel, Cold Light; I saw the pond at its center. It was just like crawling into a novel and quietly walking around inside it! Then, at the University of Lancaster, at the Manchester Literature Festival, we read our letters, pieces we chose from our novels and talked at length about what this special journey we had embarked on by grabbing on to the wings of the letters contributed to our lives. Everyone was asking us the same questions: “How did it feel to have met after so much time? Did you like each other? What if you hadn’t?” What if we hadn’t liked each other, Jenn? Then, I guess we would have politely finished what we had started and then retreated to our respective corners. But that never happened.

Eventually, summer is over, the year is about to end too and we are at the end of this beautiful journey. We shall keep on writing to one another in private, of course, but now, here in this last letter that I’m writing for the Manchester Letters, I would like to convey my love and thanks to those who accompanied us on this journey. As I believe that it is a fine example for showing us which doors the road can lead us, I’d like to end my letter with that interesting incident that happened to us in Istanbul.

I believe it was the day after when we had first met. We were at Hagia Sophia. Although it was a place I had been to and had been influenced by many times before, I never considered writing anything about that magnificent church. As soon as we passed through the doors of the 1500 year old edifice, something truly bizarre happened. As we were gazing at the wonderful mosaics on the ceiling with our mouths open, a man that no one else noticed suddenly appeared beside us. (Well, literature is also lying beautifully, so with your permission, I changed “in our minds” to “beside us.”) The man seemed to be from a different time. There was something in his composure, one could tell he was definitely in the wrong time but most certainly not at the wrong place. He looked at you, then at me. We looked at him, then at each other. Then, somehow we began to write a story about this mysterious man who had entered our minds at the same time. As we walked around the building, we told each other the story of this man, a mosaic worker who made the mosaics of Hagia Sophia… Thus, our mosaic worker had become real. Of course, his was an unfinished story.

Since that day, whenever I sit down at the computer to write to you, the mosaic worker appears beside me. “I,” he says, “am half a story now, thanks to you. You just left me like that. Could you please complete me?” I could just scribble something to make him happy, but can’t bring myself to do so. I look at his face, sulking like a child, and tell him “Wait, just wait a little longer. Because the best stories are the ones that wait for the right moment.” Because, Jenn, this story that we started together, I want to complete it together as well. After the talks we had, I’m sure you feel the same way.

So, dear Jenn, if the fruit of these letters is to be a mosaic worker who came to life between us, I’m in! I know that one day we shall write that story. And now I call out to that mosaic worker at Hagia Sophia: “Don’t think that we have forgotten you! Be a little more patient. Because the patient ones are the heroes of the best stories. Know that one day we shall come back to you. Writers who are short of words always come back!”

love,
nermin

You asked me if I thought there was a connection between where we are and how we write. And I’ve been mulling it over for so long that my last letter to you is now quite late! My answer is that I think of course, there must be – we’ve already written about the practical ways that a writer must live and fit their work into the shape their life leaves for it (or perhaps it should be the other way round?) and how the meat and potatoes of those practicalities might change the work. We’ve also tackled, during our events, if not in our letters, the different ways our literary contexts and cultures might shape our writing – the benefits when it comes to publishing, of writing in English. The difficulties of working with other people’s lazy stereotypes about your home city. The effect censorship, or the threat of it works for writers in Turkey and in the UK. But now I think you’re talking about travel – about going away from home, and experiencing the unfamiliar.

I haven’t travelled nearly as much as you have – perhaps that will come as my children get a bit older – and maybe it is because travel hasn’t been an important part of my life so far that most of my writing is somehow, about ‘home’ – feeling at home, or not at home. I’m interested in recognition, the uncanny, in making the familiar feel strange and in uncovering the frightening and unknown things that exist very near to us. I wonder if I’d be that kind of writer if I had travelled more? Who knows? As we said in one of our earlier letters, the kind of writers that we are is probably going to change very many times before we’re done!

Writing about home might feel lazy or like a shortcut. After all, if I write about a place that is familiar to me, I don’t need to do any research at all. One of the ways I try and make home seem strange is by concentrating on details – tiny details that come from intimate knowledge, not a tourist’s eye look at the world. And another way I try and do this is by picking what is unique or unusual or overlooked about the places I write about. I am only following that old chestnut of writing advice and ‘writing what I know.’ But I don’t think a writer should write about ‘what they know’ at all. I don’t think you can really start writing by ‘knowing’ anything – only by having a set of questions and putting pen to paper (or hands to keyboard, in my case) in order to set about examining (and only rarely answering) them. I have come to believe that being a writer takes more than just showing what you already know to the world.

I liked your ‘Paul’ very much – I almost recognised him and I expect the next time I visit Manchester I’ll be seeing glimpses of him around every corner and standing at every bar. Your ideas about cities – Manchester or Istanbul – becoming characters in their own right made sense to me, but I don’t think it works that way for me in my writing life.

I went to an event last week and listened to the writer David Vann speak about the way he worked with a sense of place and landscape in his work. He read a little from ‘Legend of a Suicide’, which is set in a place that he knew very well. After the reading he spoke about the way a writer can put a description of landscape under pressure, and when that happens description becomes something much more than pretty scene setting, but a way of making visible a psychological or internal landscape. When I heard him say that, bells went off in my head. That’s exactly how I want to write about ‘home’ – or, indeed, any place at all. I think the things we find in the places we visit and live say more about us than they do about the place itself. The Preston of Cold Light is a strange, cut-off place, full of instabilities and continuity errors because it is described through the eyes of a character who is struggling with stories – who can’t tell what is real and what isn’t anymore. How else would the world look to her? I think we can write about the way a character sees the world, but we can’t ever really write about the world itself – as you said in one of our events, people don’t come to novelists for ‘the facts’ and we shouldn’t ever fool ourselves into thinking that we deal in them.

Another thing that David Vann said was that writing, for him, was an ‘act of transformation’. I am still wondering about what that might mean. It immediately made me think about changing your mind, about learning something new or even going on some kind of journey. About the beginning of writing being a place of unknowing, and writing itself being a kind of finding out. It certainly feels that way to me. Even if I know, or I think I know, what the ending of the book will be when I start, I certainly don’t know why I am writing it or what I hope a reader will get out of it until the very end. Maybe it is because I am at the very beginning of a novel and in a place of great unknowing, awaiting transformation, that I am finding it difficult to answer your question with anything but more questions.

I’m not going to write about our meeting because I know in your letter you said you were saving it for the finale! So I will end this letter and my part in this project by saying that most of all, writing to me is a conversation. Novels might look like formidable chunks of text with no room for anyone else to get a word in edgeways, and reading might look like a silent, stationary and solitary exercise, but I don’t think of it that way. I think of reading and writing as a set of letters – one half of an act of creation, the other half done by the reader who imagines and engages and completes the writing in some special and mysterious way. I don’t travel much except by my reading – which brings me into challenging and intimate conversation with writers and characters from all over the world. Just like the conversation we’ve been having these past few months, and one which I hope we will continue after this project is over. It’s been wonderful being your reader in my half of this conversation.

Jenn

I wrote this letter to you the day I arrived at my home in Barcelona after a long journey which lasted more than a month and took me through Barcelona-Istanbul-Ankara-Yalova-Istanbul-Manchester- Lancaster-Preston-Manchester-Barcelona-Londra-Barcelona. After so much running around, I’m finally here in the room where I wrote my first letter to you. Do you think there is a connection between where we are and what we write? Maybe the past, by which I mean memories. But those only exist because they have already been gone through, finished and belong to a different time and space. Don’t they?

Do you remember, at the Manchester Literature Festival panel in which we both participated they asked us a question about the place of cities and locations in our novels? While giving my example I mentioned how powerful a character Istanbul was. In my second novel, Dreams Are Untold, Pilar, a Spanish woman, comes to Istanbul for the first time in order to search for her missing husband and finds herself in an unexpected adventure. As I mentioned on that day, as I was trying to write Pilar’s adventure, Istanbul was always all smiles and moving about like an actor trying to steal the scene. If I had let myself into its arms, it would have gotten a much bigger role than I intended to give it and would have stolen scenes from my poor characters. But I didn’t fall for any of its tricks and whenever it tried to put itself in centre stage I patiently and reverently directed it towards its spot. After all, Pilar hadn’t come to Istanbul as a tourist, but as a desperate woman in search of her missing husband. She was in no shape to take in the majesty of Istanbul. Therefore Istanbul’s place in the novel was limited, it had to be. But to write about such strong cities or stories that take place in them could sometimes have this danger lurking about. Their characters could dominate over the characters we try to create. I guess one has to always keep that in mind while writing.

The characters of the cities… Yes, to liken cities to people is an old game most of us like to play. For me, Istanbul is a cheerful, yet just as sad fisherman who sets out to sea before sunrise to cast his nets with his calloused hands while singing to himself a folk song; husband to the same woman for twenty eight years and father to a son for twenty five years. He’s always on the lookout for whatever is to suddenly turn up as if he has lost what he was looking for in life to the sea and what’s he was looking for in the sea to life. In the evenings he has a drink or two and when he overdoes it he peels away at the scabs of his wounds and silently cries.

I’ve said this before; Istanbul has too many layers to be a single person. It could easily be a prostitute. A broken-hearted beautiful prostitute, who has seen it all, who is distrustful of everyone. Or it could be a quiet young girl with big eyes and a small mouth who likes Wednesdays, daisies, cherries, sycamore trees and lemon yellow, who draws a family with two children and a house with a garden on pieces of paper as wishes on Hidrellez, and wishes happy days from the future… There are so many people in Istanbul’s multi-voiced lives chorus… Believe me when I say don’t know which one to choose…

When I first came to Manchester (I was watching the city through the windscreen of Charlotte’s, one of the festival officials, car, just like you did in Istanbul when you were going from the airport to the hotel) I asked myself, what kind of person would this city be if it were a person? Before I had left for Manchester, everyone warned me “it is the city of rain, don’t you dare go there without an umbrella, a raincoat”, however when I was there I only saw a couple of raindrops, and the sun rays that filled the sky licked my face generously like playful cats. Who was this Manchester, who could it be? I knew so little about it. Things everybody knew… I already loved the city even if it were only for The Smiths and Joy Division, for the sake of Morrisey and Ian Curtis. At the end of the six days I spent in the city, I finally found a character I could dress it up in. Surely, there is more than one protagonist hidden in it, a different one waiting in every corner. Unfortunately I wasn’t there to meet them all. All that I have learned was in six short days… And now, with your permission, I’d like to introduce to you the Manchester in me:

It could be called Paul. Manchester, I mean, Paul, is a seventeen year old young man. While everybody thinks that he’s into football, girls with pretty smiles and walking in the rain, he actually is interested in writing poems that he never shows and never will show to anyone. He is going through tough times where he believes no one understands him. He’s struggling to find new meanings of life. Because he grew up in a world where wounds are considered ugly, he hides his from everyone. Paul doesn’t want to be like anyone around him. But one day he will see that he is becoming more and more like the others. The realization is going to pain him. He is going to drink a lot because he won’t be able to think of anything better to do. In his moccasins which he wears without socks, he is going to walk in the rain. Neither girls with pretty smiles nor falling in love is going to alleviate his pain. Despite all the people surrounding him, his family, his friends, he won’t be able to dissipate the void that he grew inside himself. Every morning he will wake up in that void, and every night he will curl up in the middle of the same void. But when probed, he will never mention his sorrow, he might wave the question away saying “I’m drunk.” Because in his world… the wounds are always kept a secret. The wounds have to be kept a secret…

As I was leaving Manchester, I said to Paul “farewell, until I see you again.” Yes, I will return…

So there you have it, Jenn. Here we are at the end of a letter written a little trivially. I confess, I went near many things I wanted to talk about, however I touched upon none of them. We had so much to talk about, didn’t we? After so many letters we wrote without knowing each other, we met in Istanbul, then in Lancaster and in Manchester. We came face to face. Together, we participated in literature festivals, went around cities. We put into voice all that we had been stuffing into words and had long chats. But I didn’t mention any of this in my letter. Since the day we started corresponding, I wrote to you everything candidly, managing to forget about everyone else who would get to read these letters. I wrote everything honestly, just as they popped in my head, without planning, editing, in its most natural state… However, this is the first time that I make use of my novelist side and add a little editing trick into our letters. To be more precise, I am participating in the game you started with your latest letter which you had written after our first meeting but in which you hadn’t mentioned about our meeting. I leave our meeting and all that followed to our last letters (the ones after this) so that we could have a nice, strong finale. Just like the ones we like having in novels…

love,

nermin

Your fourth letter was posted online while I was flying out from Manchester to come and meet you. So this is a cheating sort of letter – written in my hotel room after we’ve already spent the evening together. And we have not ‘cheated’ at all so far – even though I know you are on twitter and I know your email address, we can both, hands on our hearts, say that we’ve only contacted each other through the letters sent for this project so far.

Speed, eh? I know what you mean. There’s such a pressure to do everything right away, and now lots of us own gadgets that mean you’re never supposed to be just idle, looking out of windows, thinking and waiting – but ‘multi-tasking’ and checking your email. Even though right now I am far away from home, staying in the hotel Gradiva in the heart of Istanbul, I have my computer with me…

On the plane on the way here I had to remind myself to shut off my kindle (I was reading Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk, of course) and turn off the in-flight film so I could look out of the window and so I could eavesdrop, as a writer should, on the conversations going on around me. There are so many books to read and films to see, so many places to go, so many people to meet and conversations to be had. Thinking about all the things that need to be done, that should be done, feels overwhelming and exhausting sometimes. Anyone is bound to be a failure in the face of such a formidable to-do list.

Writing itself can become, if I’m not careful, a kind of task to be rushed through as soon as possible. For me, becoming a teacher, and thinking carefully about what teaching creative writing might mean, has helped me become less fixated on the product and more respectful of the slow, halting mystery of the process. We wrote in our last letters about how frightening and risky writing can be sometimes. About how on earth we ‘dare’ to do what we do. Maybe going slowly is another way of making that risk feel like a thing that can be negotiated with. I hope so. I am going to try it, although working in an academic environment where putting out publications fairly regularly is a vital (indeed, an essential) way of demonstrating your value and proving that you’re been busy makes that difficult. Maybe we’ll speak more about that some other time…

Here I am in Istanbul. And what a change for me this is. Maybe this change, this abrupt feeling of being not-at-home is the stumble and falling that you spoke about in your letter. The way the world forces itself past all the speed and business and to-do-lists that we make for ourselves. I brought two cardigans and a duffle coat with me and this morning, when I left Manchester, I had to de-ice my car. And here in Istanbul it’s 27 degrees and as the taxi brought me from the airport into town (a frightening ride, where I had to apologise for clutching, in terror, at the thigh of the Slovakian Ambassador, with whom I was sharing the cab) I saw the sea, and a low-slung orange full moon, and heard the call to prayer float over families picnicking on grass verges, having barbeques, enjoying the late evening sunshine. It was impossible to rush through this – the traffic jam I got caught up in ensured I had to sit and watch. And wait. I’m in no hurry to decide what I think.

I come from Lancashire, which is, even if you’ve been born and brought up there, a strange sort of place. We’re sandwiched between Cumbria and Greater Manchester – both of those places have such strong identities that Lancashire can feel a little anonymous, a little liminal. I like that. Lancashire is in the shadow of two great places, and I think a writer should seek out shadows. Cumbria is fierce and beautiful – sublime in the Romantic sense of the word, and laden with literatures. Manchester is a wonderful place – home to people from all over the world, proud of its gay community, its music, the heritage of its working people. But I come from Preston. It is where I was born and it is where I live now.

My favourite place in Preston is Avenham Park, which is in the heart of this small city. It used to be a park full of old Sycamore trees, but a year or two ago they all became diseased and had to be cut down. My little girl cried about it, and I still can’t really get used to how big and shorn the place looks. When I used to play truant from school (very often) I would be in the library or this park. There’s a Japanese water garden and the park benches have cast iron Sphinx busts on them and the brown, lazy, dirty river, choked up with old bikes and shopping trolleys, meanders through the park and spoons the city and sometimes floods the houses nearest to it. It feeds the nearby marina, which is toxic and stinking with blue algae.

Preston, and the park in particular, were important places in my second novel – Cold Light. I wrote the book knowing that most of the people who would read it wouldn’t know anything about the place and therefore wouldn’t have to battle with clichés and lazy shorthand impressions of the place they’d received from other people or other books. I could let Preston be as quietly strange, as shadowy, as slippery and odd, as it has always felt to me. You’re going to have a wonderful time in Manchester, but perhaps I could invite you a little further north, while you’re here?

Jenn

Ever since speed became a goal rather than the means to achieve it, many of our old habits such as writing letters have been put away after being tagged as nostalgic, even romantic. Now we prefer to spend as little time as possible on all our needs, including communication. We think that as our mobility and speed increase, life becomes easier, but can’t be sure if it’s getting any better.

Doesn’t a letter have functions other than carrying news? Taking care in handwriting, choosing colourful envelopes and stamps, going to the post office to send it, then waiting excitedly for the reply, isn’t all this more than just communicating? I believe it is.

Obviously I make use of the practical convenience of the internet. But in these last years, as I think about the never ending rush we are in, I cannot help but question the distance between “speed” and us. And not just when we’re communicating; while we speak, eat, read, even while we think… Don’t you think we have become a little too impatient?

If life is a journey, we seem to be running, covered in sweat, towards the destination without taking time to enjoy view. So much that we only notice our surroundings when we stumble and fall. That’s why falling down once in a while is good for us (at least I think it is).

I think I’m one of those who are for “slowing down”. I’m not saying that I’m rejecting the benefits of technology, but that I’m of those who is trying hard not to sacrifice all the niceties that are good for our souls to speeds which occasionally become pointless and to never ending rushes.

Your question on social media is really a delicate matter. I’ll try to answer it at length in one of the future letters. But for now, let us give priority to an old friend, to Istanbul.

In my last letter, I said that I was going to give you a taste of this beautiful city. But first I have to mention two ways that many writers choose to describe Istanbul, a city which is considered to be a bridge between East and West, to foreigners. Ways I don’t care much for. The first is to embellish the city, turning it into a mysterious eastern fairy tale. The second is doing the complete opposite and tell stories of damnification. Whereas the Istanbul I know, a city (cities) within a city, is too large to fit in any single story, too precious to be washed in the waters of orientalism. It truly is much more than that.

Of course there could be differences between talking about Istanbul to tourist who has come to see it, and trying to reflect it into a novel with the good and the bad. In short, just like I would prefer talking to a friend of mine visiting me in Barcelona about Gaudi, the Sagrada Familia instead of talking about the financial crisis, the unemployment rate among teenagers nearing forty four percent, I will now tell you about the countless beauties that Istanbul harbours. Therefore, I have to talk not about Küçük Armutlu which has witnessed death fasts, but about Arnavutköy which looks out on the cool waters of the Bosphorus; not about the tearing down of Sulukule, where gypsies have lived for generations, in name of urban transformation, but about the legendary Maiden’s Tower that rises out of the middle of the deep blue sea, about the mesmerising Hagia Sophia that has been standing for one thousand and five hundred years, about the magnificent domes of the Süleymaniye Mosque, built by Mimar Sinan and has survived many earthquakes, about the grandiose treasure room of the Topkapı palace. However, Istanbul is such a big city and so full that it is impossible to squeeze it into this letter. So for now I chose a single locale to tell you about: Pierre Loti.

Pierre Loti is a French writer and an officer who came to Istanbul during the Ottoman Empire’s final decades and wrote about the city. The name of the appreciative Istanbulite was eventually given to a street and a wonderful coffee house located at the top of the town of Eyüp. There you have it, one of the places I love most in Istanbul (it appears in both of my novels) is this beautiful coffee house carrying the name of Pierre Loti. To get to this place, you have to climb a narrow slope located between graveyards full of enchanting gravestones remaining from the Ottoman days. You have to walk a little unsettled, a little scared, most certainly full of thoughts, and slowly so you don’t run out of breath. When you go past the deathly silence and reach the top of the hill, you come face to face with the noise of life, its cheeping, its irresistible charm. Then you sit at one of the tables covered with square textured tablecloths and order tea in a thin waisted glass. While watching the captivating view of Haliç (better known as the Golden Horn over there. Although Europeans relate the name to Greek mythology, the tradesmen of the Grand Bazaar say that it is called so because the dust from the processed gold runs down here with rainwater and because it resembles a horn) you will feel not like drinking tea, but a whole river. To me, this is one of the most magnificent Istanbul locales that one writer could recommend to another. I used the word ‘writer’ to tie up the subject. Because it doesn’t matter if you’re a writer or not at Pierre Loti, that scenery will make you one anyway!

See you soon in Istanbul, Jenn! When we finally meet, we’ll have many more stories to tell, and places to see…

Lots of love,

nermin

Time is fast creeping up on us and I’m already so excited about meeting you and seeing your city. You’re right: it will be my first visit to Istanbul. I’m really looking forward to drinking in everything the city has to offer. I read this article recently in The New York Times. Do you think we’ll have time to make a visit? Is there anything else that I really shouldn’t miss? And what about you? Have you been to Manchester before? I’d love to show you around. You know Manchester’s nickname is ‘the rainy city’ though, don’t you? Don’t forget to bring an umbrella!

You asked me what I thought about doing research to make sure any of the characters I write are fully realised in their historical and social context. While in the abstract I do agree with you, I can’t say that I’ve done much of that kind of research myself – mainly because, I think, the novels I have written so far are based very much on the places that I know well and have grown up in, and are about people who are familiar to me – who are of the same social class, the same economic background. This might make me an unadventurous writer, but then again, I am ‘writing what I know.’ I worry about not having enough objective distance sometimes, but then again I think I can use real lived detail that makes my work authentic. I hope so, anyway.

This might all change with my fourth book though. I am only just thinking, very very provisionally, about what I might write next. But I am thinking I might like to write about a small Northern seaside town in the 1960s, and an extraordinarily, almost angelically beautiful gay man who arrives there from Scotland with the power to heal the sick. Don’t tell anyone yet though – I haven’t made up my mind properly!

There’s a couple of things that make me nervous about this idea – first, that I know I’d have to do a lot of research into what 1960s culture was like in small Northern towns (not like London – I expect the sexual revolution was a little delayed in its arrival up here!) and also to write a gay character. I wouldn’t feel I had an authority or any right to tell that person’s story unless I’d earned my stripes through research – and maybe not even then. Another writer told me that unless thinking about writing a book scares you a little, it’s probably not the right one to write. Maybe writing is supposed to be scary, to feel risky for the writer as well as for the reader. And maybe the more you think about writing and what it really means, the riskier it seems. What do you think about that?

Something that I wanted to ask you – about the internet. I know this project involves us writing each other old-fashioned letters, but it wouldn’t be possible, at all, without the internet. And we’re both on twitter. I use facebook and I write a blog – I have lots of email pen-pals and I like getting emails from people who’ve read my books. It seems so much of a writing career now is a life lived online, and there’s something wonderfully connecting and inspiring about that possibility (a growing friendship like ours, for example) as well as something a little fragmented, shallow and unreal. Sometimes I feel like I want to unplug from it all, sometimes I want to throw myself into it as much as I can. Do you feel a pressure, as a publishing writer, to make yourself known on the internet – to use social media and have an ‘online presence’ to help promote your work? Is that something you enjoy doing, or do you find it tricky? There’s a lovely bit of game-playing there for a writer who is interested in personae and game-playing with stories, in thinking about the way she might present one of her selves online.

I really liked what you said about our writing potential changing over time – just as our skills, and our interests, and maybe even the way we look at the world (‘our reality’ as you put it in your last letter) might change or develop or even improve as we go along. Have you noticed any changes like that in yourself and your own writing so far? We are in our early days, aren’t we, with the best yet to come? I know I have certainly become less cynical – less harsh in my writing. My first two books are quite tough on human beings and the things they do to each other, the way we are dishonest and hurt each other with the stories we tell. It’s a sort of truth, I think, but not the complete truth. The Friday Gospels is the first book I’ve ever written with a happy ending – one that seems to suggest human beings are just about okay, at least some of the time. Maybe I am mellowing as I age! Maybe the jigsaw you talk about applies to a writer’s works across her whole career – maybe we’ll only get a sense of the way we really see the world when we are very old ladies looking back over the jigsaw pieces of all the novels and stories we have written. What a thought!

I will leave you with that strange thought, wish you well, and look forward to your next letter

Jenn

Finally, after days of nauseating heat, it’s raining in Barcelona today. A perfect weather for writing a letter!

With each letter, the topics deepen and the writing process becomes more and more enjoyable. To me, trying to get to know someone through letters seems like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. At first, you think you have placed a piece in the right place, but then a single word from the other person gives you a whole new set of clues and you feel like you have to change the piece’s place. One thing is certain however, with each new piece you become more curious as to what the finished picture is going to look like.

I would like to begin with clearing a misunderstanding. It is true that I write novels based on research, but I definitely don’t write novels that are not fiction. It’s only that I like to build my fictional imaginary reality on a factual social reality. Previously, I wrote that in order to understand man, one has to look into the time he lived in and that I take care to remember this while writing my novels. Of course, a person who tries to understand and describe man (a novelist, for example) doesn’t have to be a historian, anthropologist, sociologist or a psychologist, but I believe that to do preparations and conduct research is my responsibility in order to create a text that satisfies myself and to do justice to the writing. What are your thoughts on this?

About the matter of the realistic novel… When I have a true historical period as a background and even when I make enough effort to reflect that period, I don’t believe that I write realistic novels in the classical sense. In this regard, I should point out that I try to feed off the magical realism movement of South American literature. As you have mentioned, reality and realism are quite confusing notions. Especially when we consider how many different versions there can be of “an object in its real state”…

Here is a simple example at the risk of looking to cliches for help. Let’s say we’re talking about a story about a fibre factory where thirty three workers have been discharged. Now, do we tell the reality of a worker who, when he goes home in the evening, has to explain to his pregnant wife and three school-age children that he will no longer be able to bring bread to the table or the reality of the endearing factory owner who tries to make his three year old grandson laugh at a plentiful dinner table on that same evening? Which one is the reality of this story? Of course, the reality here is the one we choose. Just for the sake of being fair, we could tell all of it with a multi-directional narrative, or choose one to reflect our own perspective, or we could choose “none of the above” because we might have a better idea. In the end, we have to make a choice. One way or another, there is always a choice to be made.

In short, when talking about realism in a literary work, we should not forget that we are talking about the writer’s reality. Under these circumstances, I don’t like to take on ethereal tasks such as delivering news from actuality or embark on didactic and pretentious endeavours teaching what I believe is right. Never do I act with the belief that I’m telling something nobody knows. But like you said, I find projecting my reality or allowing reality to be projected through my characters, having the reader ask questions, or, if could pull it off, going beyond the ordinary, just that much appealing.

By the way, let me answer your question about if there isn’t a topic I believe I can’t touch. To me, to doubt your own potential while writing while you are very much aware that there are so many magnificent writers, alive and dead, is one of the fortunate things that can happen to a writer. Moreover, to be in a contrary position is a perfect opportunity to talk about pride. We see that being aware of your potential has a different effect on different writers. Some choose to not push themselves harder, prefer to remain in safe harbors. Some strive to go beyond the limits, to discover new lands. -What I mean by limits is not literary limits but the writer’s own.- Though it isn’t the safest, I prefer the second path. But I try carefully to differentiate between the boldness to go beyond yourself and impertinence. I think this differentiation is of vital importance for us young writers.

What we can write and how much we can write about it should be related to natural talent, the feelings we grow within ourselves, the way we understand man and the world, and the effort we put in to this understanding. The potential we’re talking about could increase as well as it could decrease. In previous letters, we talked about how the writing process changed with time. The same is possible for our potential, the change could be positive or negative. After all, isn’t time where everything changes?

I also have to mention that I really liked you likening the effect that some novels have on readers to the effects of drugs or too much alcohol. You’re right, in situations like this reading is an effervescent pleasure, a temporary effect. A momentary taste that doesn’t linger. While many readers might be contented with this, many might ask for more from a good novel. Of course we can’t expect every novel to make a change in our lives, but we shouldn’t forget that great novels often come out from those which can achieve that.

PS: There is one month left to our meeting in Istanbul! It’s very exciting to know that we’re finally going meet. In my next letter, I’d like to write a little about what a writer could do in this city of fairy tales. This will be your first visit to the city of seven hills, won’t it?

Love,

nermin

Another lovely letter, and so many interesting points for me to mull over this week.

I love what you say about being willing to ‘occasionally inconvenience’ your reader, as it gets right to the heart of a few of the ideas we’ve been talking about. I know there are some writers who see themselves as entertainers – their job is to give their reader a nice time, to shock them or thrill them or intellectually engage them with a plotted puzzle or a moral problem, but, in the end, to return them to where they started when they began the book. The books are like taking a drug or drinking too much – an intense, engaging emotional experience, but one which you are unchanged by when it all wears off. And I think there are other writers who write with no special consideration for their reader at all – they want to push the boundaries of what it is possible to do with writing. They are interested in style, in form, in making sure the novel stays new and fresh and really does respond to this very confusing and fragmented world – never mind ‘occasional inconvenience’ – they want to shake the reader to the core! And where-ever on this spectrum you fall, some of your readers are going to complain that you’re not doing it right – you’re either writing post-modern whimsy that only other writers are going to bother with, or you’re churning out something that someone, somewhere else, has done before and sooner or later the novel is going to die and it’s all your fault for wanting to give your reader a nice time!

I’m interested in connecting with my readers – in presenting something to them that they can recognise, even if it at first seems unfamiliar – so perhaps that makes me the safer sort of writer – the first kind? As novelists, we don’t only compete with other books – we need to lure a potential reader away from television, from the internet, from the cinema and all other kinds of narrative art forms. In my own work, I use suspense and the idea of the mystery to lure the reader in – and hope that in the end, my books have a little more than just that to offer them. But I never forget that a book doesn’t really exist until it is read, and I want my books to be approachable – to entice someone into reading them.

I have to say though, that I think you’re right and that it’s a good thing if we expect our readers to have to endure difficulty sometimes – to look up unfamiliar words or ideas – to examine scenes and characters in ways that they’re not used to, to be confronted with ideas that discomfort them, or to present our readers with a form or a style that is difficult – that is new and takes work and doesn’t give up all its treasures right away. It takes an amazing amount of – I was going to say courage, but I think the right word is hubris – to be able to do that, doesn’t it? To think that you have something new to say? Where do you think a writer can get her courage from?

With The Friday Gospels the decision to write in the first person took care of a lot of these stylistic decisions for me – about how much information to give, how much to spell out, how much I was allowed to ‘inconvenience’ (what a wonderful, well-mannered word) the reader. We don’t walk around our own lives explaining every little detail to an imaginary audience, do we? I didn’t let my characters do that either. So parts of the novel will seem strange and unfamiliar to readers who don’t have a Mormon background. But I can live with that. I never wanted to educate people, (though I agree with you that when books do that, it can be wonderful) I just wanted to ask questions and share the feeling of curiosity that I had about a culture I knew very well.

Like you, I am led by my ideas about realism – that books which portray people and things as ‘they really are’ are good books – but even as I write that, I wonder about the idea that we’re leaving unchallenged – realism’s central assumption that it is possible to utilise prose fiction to say something about ‘the way things really are’ or even that there’s such a thing as ‘the way things really are’ at all. Do you ever wonder about that? I know I do. How does it show up in your writing?

Your description of your research – your trips to Auschwitz – I think it’s fearless of you to engage with that period of history – the significance and impact of those events – the scale of the human evil and suffering is incomprehensible to most, and for a writer to take on the task of writing about that, well, it’s remarkable. Let me ask you – do you have any fear about your capacity to write about these things? Is there anything you think you really couldn’t write about? Are there some subjects, do you think, that can’t be tackled by a realist novel? You said you were writing a non-fiction piece based on your research – I wondered, are there some places realist fiction can’t touch? I don’t have any answers to these questions, but I am interested in hearing yours.

Take care

Jenn x

I eagerly awaited your letter, and read it with pleasure. Let me begin by answering your first question. No, I don’t write my novels thinking that one day, they might be translated into another language. I believe that when writing, having future related plans and preoccupations would hurt the sincerity of the text by turning it into an overly calculated effort. However, I’m still at the beginning of the journey. Apart from my first novel which is being translated into Bulgarian, I have no other experience. Let’s note these overconfident words of mine somewhere (I think here will do) and if one day, my books are translated into more languages, let’s bring this up again!

About the concern whether local languages or dialects from different parts of the country spoken by the characters would be understood by the readers… I, on my behalf, don’t avoid regional language differences. Despite that this might occasionally inconvenience the reader a little, in order to create a realistic character, I choose to set free his or hers tongue. We should make use of the richness of languages and people rather than whittling the characters down to only two dimensions.

By the way, I think that when having a character speak, taking into account its gender, where it is from, its psychology, its socioeconomic class, its identity’s reflection in the language seems to me like a carnival to itself. How about you?

So, the family in your novel is a Mormon family. To be honest, I’m not very knowledgeable about Mormons. All I know about them consists of second hand information begging to be confirmed… Was it difficult for you to capture their tongue and soul in writing? How did you do it?

I feel strongly about writing and reading about lesser known cultures and societies, especially those we are prejudiced against. Because I believe that the only way to fight the hate culture which keeps spreading across the world is to know and understand each other. In short, I already love the topic of your new novel, Jenn! I look forward to reading it.

You asked in your letter if I travel frequently. In recent years, I’ve often been going on the road on the trail of various curiosities. Most of the time, the instigating factor behind these curiosities are the books I read or write. For example, two years ago, I went to Budapest in pursuit of The Paul Street Boys. I found the street where my childhood friends lived, the terrain they fought for, even the house where my dear Ernö Nemecsek died. Last year, I was in Saint Petersburg, following the trail of Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov. I don’t know if it makes any sense, but I love these literary detective games. The moment I breathe in the air, I feel as if I’m gliding through the opening pages of novels which have left their marks on my soul.

Regarding the travels about the books I write… Last week, I was in Poland doing research for my new novel. I went to Warsaw, to Krakow, and finally, to the Auschwitz concentration camp. I mentioned before that I was writing a novel consisting of letters that two sisters living in different countries wrote each other. The background of these letters is the first half of the 20th Century. Therefore I have the opportunity to touch upon many subjects such as the cultural separation experienced in Turkey during the first years of the republic, established after the Ottoman Empire, and the war ridden dark civilisation of the Europe of that period. I visited Auschwitz before I began the chapter on WWII. This is something I often do, or try to do, placing all the history, culture, social conditions of the period in which my novel takes place into the background of the story. Because I believe that in order to understand people, one has to look at the period they live in.

Back to Auschwitz, the remains of the concentration camp were more than enough to send shivers down my spine. Also, I interviewed old people who lived through those times, and the grandchildren who grew up listening to the horrifying stories. I might have even convinced one of the grandchildren to write a book on his grandmother. One has to keep alive these social memories of such atrocities, regardless of wherever they took place, of the religion, race, people they were aimed at, in order to avoid similar sufferings happening. I’m planning on publishing an article on some of the things I saw and heard there, in Poland, in a newspaper on the 72nd anniversary of the beginning of WWII, on September 1st. We’ll see…

In my previous letter, as I mentioned that writing among daily responsibilities, and having a room of your own, in a physical sense as well as psychological sense, was more difficult especially for women, I was trying to remark on a kind inequality that exists outside of literature as well. I believe that having that room has to do with financial conditions which allow living independently from others, as much as it does with politico-cultural reflexes, habits, social roles and patterns. Generally, when a man is in his room in intellectual production, he doesn’t have to concern himself with cooking nor washing. The housewife would have already told the children, “Hush! Your father’s working,” and has already quietly completed the daily chores of the house. But when it’s a woman in intellectual production, I don’t know how many men there are who would make the same sacrifices for his wife working in her room (At this point, I would like to express my sincerest respects to your husband who is feeding little Aiden downstairs while you’re writing me a letter.)

Ursula K. Le Guin says that women can write at the kitchen table when it’s necessary. And if there are women who can write at kitchen tables today, this goes to prove not the ordinariness of what they do, but their genius.

Writing a letter is like making a fair copy of what’s in your head. It makes your thoughts clearer. Thank you very much for your lovely letters that give me the opportunity to organize the inside of my head and to think together with you. I look forward to your next letter.

Love,
nermin

Thanks so much for your lovely letter. Right away I get such a strong sense of you and your personality from your words – it’s easy to forget what magic a good writer and a good translator can make when they work together!

Before I answer your questions, I have one of my own. When you are writing, do you ever write with translation in mind? I remember hearing Kazuo Ishiguro say in an interview that he was always very aware that his novels would be translated into many languages, and because of that he decided to avoid using certain puns and jokes that he feared wouldn’t survive the journey from one language to the next. That’s really something, isn’t it?

For myself, I can’t say that I write with those kinds of thoughts of the future – but I do become increasingly aware as I move through copy editing (the stage I am at now with The Friday Gospels) that there are certain phrases and words that my Chorley-born characters use (or even syntactical differences – like ‘try and’ do something instead of ‘try to’) which are regionally correct and perfect for the voice that I want to create, but are going to sound unfamiliar – perhaps even a bit odd, to readers in other parts of my own country. Lots of regional accents are quite distinct here – I love it.

What makes the task even more difficult is that the family (there are five, first person narrators) are Mormons. (You asked for a sneak preview: here it is – the four members of the one family are waiting for the fifth member – the middle son – to come back from Utah where he’s been serving a mission. He’s been away for two years. They all want him to come back and solve the problems in their family, to rescue them in some way. But in fact it turns out he needs a bit of rescuing himself.)

Mormonism is a very minority religion here (I wonder if you’ve heard of it?) so it’s been a tricky balance to strike – between being true to their voices, their language and vocabulary, their way of viewing the world – while also making sure that an eventual reader is going to understand what they (and I) are trying to say. And all that is just within my one language, English. I think I’d go mad if I wrote while considering all the future issues with translation too. How does it work for you?

You asked a little bit about the way I wrote my second novel, Cold Light. That was a tough year for me – I was working full time at the prison and it was the kind of job that didn’t leave any time at all for thinking and daydreaming and planning the book. I did enjoy working there, but that hour at lunch time was the only time I had at all to write. I managed a very messy first draft that day. But, as you would expect – the novel had been written in one-hour bursts and felt very disjoined and episodic because of that. In the end I applied for some writing money from the Arts Council and was able to stop working for a while so that I could finish the book. No matter how interesting and stimulating the job is, sometimes you just need a bit of quiet, don’t you?

I liked what you said about a room of your own – it really made sense to me. And yes, it is an unattainable luxury for most writers – women or not. I think people forget the whole of that Virginia Woolf quote, which is that a woman needs a room of her own and five hundred pounds a year! (I don’t know what the equivalent amount would be today, but it sounds like a lot…) Writers don’t need much money, but they need lots of time – and often the writing itself does not pay for that time. I know when writers get together the conversation turns as much to cash and the lack of it as it does to the art! I have an office of my own at work at the University of Lancaster – but I don’t at home. Right now I am writing in bed and I can hear my husband down-stairs cooking lunch for our little boy. No silence here!

Your project in Barcelona sounds really interesting. It’s been a while since I did one – but the last one I did was in Manchester – the Station Stories project. There’s a link to it on my website. My work tends to stay in the North West of England, as you can see. Do you travel a lot? Does that travel find its way into your writing, in some way? And can you tell me a little about what projects and writing you are working on now?

Hoping this letter finds you well and with all best wishes,

Jenn