Karen Powell was born in Rochester, Kent. She left school at 16 but returned to education as a mature student to study English Literature at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. She lives in North Yorkshire. An early draft of The River Within was awarded a Northern Writers’ TLC ‘New Fiction Reads’ prize, which seeks to support work-in-progress by new, emerging and established writers across the North of England. @karenpowellwrites
What was it about Rochester, Kent that you feel most strongly shaped your voice or perspective? I was born in Essex but spent most of my younger years in the suburbs of Rochester, Kent. London was just an hour by train but to my teenage self, it felt a million miles away. It took me a few attempts to escape – even after working in London and then attending university as a mature student, I drifted back. But for the past twenty or so years I’ve lived in York, a small city in the north of England. My two novels THE RIVER WITHIN and FIFTEEN WILD DECEMBERS were both inspired by the landscape of my adopted county of Yorkshire.
I was lucky enough to travel a good deal as a child. My father was European Sales Manager for a company which made industrial wallpaper, and his work often took him to hotels and conferences centres abroad. In those days – the 1970’s - nobody seemed to mind if you took your entire family with you on business trips, so we travelled all around Europe with him, my brother and I sleeping in the back of the car while he drove through the night. To save money on hotels, or to get there more quickly? We never thought to ask, but I can still remember the thrill of waking at dawn to see an entire snowclad mountain filling the Swiss sky; the day a grand old hotel on Lake Como seemed to be opened especially for us. We travelled to Spain and Italy and Greece too, both for business and holidays. I’ve felt a yearning for ‘a beaker full of the warm South’, as Keats called it, ever since. It’s a fascination I explore in my work in progress which is set at a beach resort between Naples and Rome.
Growing up, were you the kind of kid who devoured books? Voracious, just like every writer I know! I had a particular obsession with the LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE series and also ANNE OF GREEN GABLES and its sequels, right through to RILLA OF INGLESIDE when Anne’s children become caught up in the horrors of WW1.
The narrative styles are quite different, but I was enthralled by both the main characters – the spirited young Laura Ingalls, and accident-prone, romantic Anne Shirley - and also by the vivid descriptions of both landscapes and ways of life far removed from my suburban upbringing. I wanted to travel west across the prairies like Laura and her family, to wander the lanes and woods of Prince Edward Island in Anne’s delightful company. Like most children, I read fantastical stories such as ALICE IN WONDERLAND and the Narnia books, but didn’t much enjoy them. The idea of not being able to return to home and family always felt more like a nightmare to me than a thrilling adventure.
What does a writing day look like for you when you’re working on a book? A typical day very much depends on what stage I’ve reached with a project. When I first begin a novel I approach the work quite lightly, so the working day might be a mix of writing, research, note-taking or just thinking. I’ll definitely take some time off at weekends. Later though, when I sense an end in sight, I’ll write most days and without much of a break. By that point the story is all-consuming to me. I’m at my least sociable, struggle to sleep or to think about anything else.
I’m more of a plotter than I used to be, only because I’ve learned that it saves me at least a couple of drafts along the way. Even so, a book rarely turns out to be what I thought it was at the outset. Frustratingly or magically, depending which way you look at it, my novels insist on discovering their shape along the way, no matter how much I try to impose a structure or themes.
I do start with one or two key scenes in my head. These are cinematically clear to me from the outset and rarely change even during the redrafting process. I knew the opening and closing scenes of THE RIVER WITHIN years before I managed to complete novel, and I understood exactly how I wanted to handle the final chapter of FIFTEEN WILD DECEMBERS before I’d written a page. These scenes become the cornerstone of the narrative and are very useful to me when I ‘m floundering around trying to make sense of everything else.
Tell us about the creative process behind FIFTEEN WILD DECEMBERS. It’s a reimagining of the life of Emily Brontë, so my first step was to return to Emily’s one extraordinary novel, WUTHERING HEIGHTS, and to become more familiar with her poetry. The latter was particularly useful when it came to finding Emily’s voice. I also reread the novels written by her sisters, Charlotte and Anne, and then immersed myself in all the work that has been carried over the years by various biographers and historians. When researching any famous person, a lot of the hard work has already been done for you. Still, it’s important to approach that work with a rigorous eye, and in the knowledge that even the most consciously objective history can only ever be one person’s interpretation of events. As a novelist, there also comes a time when your imagination wants to work its way into the intriguing spaces between the facts, seeking the stories as yet untold.
Living in Yorkshire, I am lucky enough to be within driving distance of the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, a remote village in the Southern Pennines. The Parsonage was once home to the Brontë family – their father, Patrick, was an Anglican Minister at the adjacent church – so it’s an incredible privilege to step inside the house where some of the most famous novels in the English language were written, in secret and far away from literary London. The museum is so brilliantly curated that I almost expect to find the sisters still at work in the dining room that looks out across the graveyard, or to see Emily wandering down from the surrounding moors.
Emily’s attachment to the wild, windswept moorland that surrounds her home is the stuff of legends. In order to invoke her, I needed to walk in her footsteps, to experience that landscape, so different to the suburbs and to the soft, pretty Kentish countryside I’d known as a child, in all seasons and weathers. Besides the reservoirs down in the Worth valley, and the signposts in both English and Japanese to Top Withens, the supposed model for Wuthering Heights, little can have changed.
Do you use a notebook to track ideas for your books? I haven’t kept a diary since I was a teenager, but every novel requires at least one new notebook, the contents of which would be unintelligible to any sane person.
If you had one night to dine with a Emily Brontë, what would you hope to learn? Emily, except that she would never agree to dinner with a stranger and I would be tongue-tied, for fear of her thinking me an idiot. I would give anything though, to be a fly on the wall in the parsonage when she and her sisters were discussing their work, or taking it in turns to walk around the dining table, reading out loud to one another.
Where do you find inspiration outside of books and writing? I certainly ‘see’ the key moments of my novels in a filmic way - it’s hard to imagine a writer who has grown up with TV and cinema not doing this. I find music too distracting in the early stages of a novel, but recently discovered that it can actually help me when it comes to editing. I’m a huge fan of Taylor Swift and listened to her work throughout the latter stages of FIFTEEN WILD DECEMBERS, to the point where certain songs were not only associated with key moments in the story but actually began to inform the writing.
AI and technology is changing the ways we write and receive stories. What are your reflections on AI, technology and the future of storytelling? And why is it important that humans remain at the center of the creative process? Like numerous other writers, I’ve recently discovered that META has scraped my novels for data. I wasn’t at all pleased - it’s hard enough for writers to earn a living without their work being used for free and without consent. Payment and permissions aside, I don’t believe you can shut the stable door once the horse has bolted, so the growth of AI feels inevitable and, in certain fields or work, even helpful. In terms of art, I like to think the human mind is acutely attuned to authenticity. I hope I’m right. I do think that the production of art in itself is an intensely human endeavour. Lose that and we might as well throw ourselves off a cliff.
Tell us about some books you've recently enjoyed and your favorite books and writers of all time. Recently I’ve really enjoyed GLORIOUS EXPLOITS, by Ferdia Lennon. It’s always a joy when a writer leans into a passion of theirs, even if it might seem too niche to appeal. (Who knew that anyone wanted to read an 800-page long story about the French Revolution until Hilary Mantel decided we should?).
Lennon’s story is about a group of Athenian prisoners doomed to die in the quarries of ancient Syracuse until they agree to take part in a Euripides play. It’s hugely funny, wears its research lightly, and is also deeply moving.
I read mostly contemporary fiction these days but the 19th century novel is part of my DNA - the Brontës of course, but also Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, Dickens. These were the books on the mantelpiece in our family home and which my mother encouraged me to try as a teenager in need of new reading matter.
I struggle to decide on a favourite anything except husband, but if I had to name a favourite book, it would be TENDER IS THE NIGHT by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I adore his effortless, elegant prose, am forever captivated by his depiction of French Riviera of the 1920’s and the glamorous, dissolute Jazz Age set who inhabit it. The gorgeous opening scene provided the inspiration for that in my own work in progress.
For you, what is the importance of arts, culture, and The Creative Process? I worry that the arts are undervalued, at least here in the UK. What began as a sensible push some years back to encourage schoolchildren, especially girls, to take up science and technology subjects seems to have developed into a gradual demotion of the arts. University courses are cut and funding for creatives becomes harder and harder to come by. My concern is that we are narrowing the field to those who have other sources of income. I look longingly to countries like Ireland where writers and artists seem to be both valued and supported.
