Alys Conran on writing Peigeon

‘Look up pigeon in your good field guide, if you have one,’ says Simon Barnes in The Bad Birdwatcher’s Companion. ‘You will probably find that the pigeon does not exist.’ I felt that about many of the children I knew growing up. Their stories pecked around in the background, unheard. The child whose mother left his hair uncombed every time after the nit treatment, little black bugs paralysed in his mousy locks. The girl who regularly had cigarette burns on her china- white hands. The faltering teenager who told what was done to her at youth club, and was disbelieved. There are a lot of pigeons in Wales.

In my twenties, moving my temporary bird box of a life between cities in the UK and abroad, where a nice unobtrusive dash of ethnicity was for the most part a badge of honour in artistic and creative circles, I felt a bit of a pigeon too. And it was ‘as if pigeons were an embarrassment to birdwatchers – as if pigeons were an embarrassment to proper birds,’ because Welshness, especially the liminal, obtrusive, politically urgent blend of it I’m made of, didn’t seem quite appropriate.

But, as the bad birdwatcher puts it, ‘Pigeons, however, exist... Try telling them they’re not proper birds.’ And so, in my shy young adulthood, the pigeon in me shimmered greyly, its feathers tinged with green and purple, like slate.

The pigeon my book’s named for is a young boy, shoulders delicate as eggshells. Almost as soon as I started writing he wandered across the page in a vagabond, alternately lively and listless way, and he caused trouble always, sticking strawberry chewing gum to the high, white ceiling of my flat on Meadow Place in Edinburgh, or scratching his name onto the perspex window of Barcelona’s Línia 4 Metro carriage as I made my way home from work. I didn’t find a place to put him for ages. But he was a genie not happy to wander his way back into his pigeonhole, so he eventually trespassed onto some uncategorised pages of writing, made friends with a haunted young girl called Iola, who competed despite herself for the role of protagonist, and made a novel that’s both a battleground and a love story. Iola has a great love for Pigeon. When I think of him, I ache.

When I think of my novel with his name, I cower. It’s been a painful process. Pigeon was born of the conflict between the language of my pen and its subject – the Welsh heartland I was writing myself back to. The book wouldn’t exist without that essential untranslated heart and the related guilt which bleeds across its pages. There I was, a homing bird, trying to find a way back, but betraying Home – word by (cooing) word, by writing in English.


To read more of this article in the New Welsh Review, please visit http://www.newwelshreview.com/article.php?id=1118

Who is Alys Conran

Alys Conran is the author of 'Pigeon' (Parthian Books, 2016).


Her short fiction has been placed in the Bristol Short Story Prize and the Manchester Fiction Prize. She completed her MA Creative Writing at Manchester, graduating with distinction, and is currently, with the support of a scholarship, working on a second novel about the legacy of the Raj in contemporary British life. She has read her fiction and poetry at The Hay Festival and on Radio Four and her work is to be found in magazines including Stand and The Manchester Review, and also in anthologies by The Bristol Review of Books, Parthian, The Camden Trust and Honno. She also publishes poetry, creative non-fiction, creative essays and literary translations.


Originally from north Wales, she spent several years in Edinburgh and Barcelona before returning to the area to live and write, and speaks fluent Spanish and Catalan as well as Welsh and English. She has also trained and practiced in Youth and Community Work, and has developed projects to increase access to creative writing and reading. She is now lecturer in creative writing at Bangor.


www.alysconran.com

July's Book of the Month

Pigeon by Alys Conran

An incongruous ice-cream van lurches up into the Welsh hills through the hail, pursued by a boy and girl who chase it into their own dark make-believe world, and unfurl in their compelling voices a tale which ultimately breaks out of childhood and echoes across the years.


Pigeon is the tragic, occasionally hilarious and ultimately intense story of a childhood friendship and how it's torn apart, a story of guilt, silence and the loss of innocence, and a story about the kind of love which may survive it all.