Julia Deakin participated in the Alton Towers Residency in April 2019. We spoke to her about landscapes, writing poetry, and her connections to Alton Towers.
What are the themes which underpin your work?
I would say compassion is a big one for me, and social injustice. I cover those themes in all sorts of ways ranging from the very grim and bleak to the actually quite humorous, offbeat, and satirical.
In particular at the moment I’m looking at the 1970s, and what a devious decade it was for women. I was in my teens in that decade. While now there’s a lot in the public domain about that era, while living through it you just sensed it. I don’t think there’s a single woman who lived through the 1970s who didn’t experience some kind of abuse in public places. So I’ve been looking into that. It’s quite dark, but it needs saying.
What’s your connection with Alton Towers? Do you have an Alton Towers story?
From the ages of five until ten I lived in a village from which you could see the flag tower and the wooded hill of Alton Towers on a clear day. It was our annual trip from Primary School. We went there and went out on the boating lake, rode a little merry-go-round, saw the model railway, and of course explored the Towers themselves.
I don’t have very clear memories of those trips, but I know we did go there, and that Alton Towers was a household name. I’m very grateful to Alton Towers for that period of my life. It put us on the map! When I moved to Manchester and people asked, “Where did you used to live?” I could say that I lived near Alton Towers and people would instantly respect that! So I do have an affection for it, yes. In its present form I’m less fond of it, but there we go.
You know the area surrounding Alton Towers very well. How does the theme park fit in to the landscape around it? Has the way it fits in changed over time?
I think it doesn’t fit – not very well, anyway. It’s a bubble of unreality. I don’t know that it ever used to fit either, because it was a vestige of the landed gentry’s greed and land-grabbing, and it was probably constructed on the strength of colonialism and slave plantations. That’s probably how Ingestre Hall (where the residents lived before they moved to Alton Towers) was funded. Given that they made their pile on the basis of slavery, the place was always a bit of an anomaly even in the 1960s.
So conceptually it doesn’t fit, but I have to say that – having walked all around the surrounding villages as part of my preparation for this project – it is surprisingly well hidden. That’s quite sinister, but also quite reassuring.
You currently live in Yorkshire, which is a landscape all of its own. How does Yorkshire differ from Staffordshire, both in terms of landscape and the feel of the landscape?
I’ve thought a lot about this. I live nearly at the top of a moor in Yorkshire. And this area is known as the Staffordshire Moorlands, but it’s not the same thing at all. This is undulating and altogether more small scale: lots of deciduous woodland, little cotton wool flocks of trees, low undulating hills, and red sandstone. I love all the red sandstone. There are red sandstone houses that have worn away to some very rounded shapes, and that kind of tugs at my heartstrings. And dry stone walls – I love the dry stone walling, although it’s different in shape and style from Yorkshire dry stone walls. I did a dry stone walling course, so I would know how to do it with millstone grit and granite and other similar kinds of stones, but how they do it in Staffordshire is totally different.
So it’s very different, but I do love the Churnet Valley. There’s a little hill which I always think of as my little hill, where ideally I would like to be buried – although that’s unlikely as it belongs to a long-established dairy farm! When I was in primary school I used to play there, and I’m very fond of it. I love walking along the Churnet.
You’ve been writing poetry for a while now, and had some notable successes in that field. How did you start out writing poetry in the first place?
I’ve been a writer of some kind all my adult life. About halfway through that, when I was nearly 40, we moved house and I spotted an ad in the local paper for a Poetry MA. Something clicked and I thought, “Well, I love reading contemporary poetry…” We never did much at university, and I decided I’d make the time and space to fill in that gap.
So I did an MA in poetry. And I found that, by the time it came to the dissertation, we were the last cohort, and as a result we basically had to do a creative portfolio of poems. That hadn’t been on my radar – I had planned to do a theoretical dissertation, as I actually love literary theory. But as it turned out, I had to do a creative one instead.
I attended poetry workshops, and at first found it all a bit bemusing. I’d never done anything like that before. I froze up and couldn’t write anything… until somehow it all fell into place, and I managed to write a portfolio. Some of the poems that were in that MA portfolio have done very well on any terms, and it became a bit of a turning point. After that I felt as though I had quite a bit of lost time to make up for, lots of poems there waiting to be written.
Julia Deakin was born in Nuneaton and spent some of her childhood in the Potteries. Widely published, each of her four poetry collections is praised by nationally-renowned poets. A former lecturer and a compelling reader, she has read on Poetry Please and won numerous prizes. www.juliadeakin.co.uk.