From Organic Farm to a PhD in Creative Writing

By Joe Bedford

Joe Bedford, photograph by Deborah Thwaites

In some ways, I feel like an unlikely PhD candidate. My PhD journey began ten years ago in South Africa, on a commune run by a family of hippie Afrikaners. I went there to learn how to live outside of the usual parameters of society, and while this desire was probably just a product of living in central London, I was still starving for meaning. What I found in South Africa was a farm of a few dozen acres, planted in sandy ground about an hour’s drive from Cape Town and battling a tangle of invasive Port Jackson willow. The farm provided for two small families – both Afrikaner – and was worked according to the principles of permaculture (organic farming). Other than these three adults and four children, the only other visitors were farmers from other settlements, labourers from Cape Town and illegal economic migrants who lived in the nearby township. Within this limited community – off-grid and with little contact with the outside world – I thought I had found a version of the life I wanted to live.

In my experience, there are two things that motivate people to rearrange their relationship with society. In the simplest terms, the first is love of family, community and nature; the second is frustration with human behaviour. Speak to anyone who has made or wishes they could make radical changes in their relationship with society and you will often find expression of one of these two things, usually both. "I want my children to know the names of the plants in our garden." "I’m sick of the way politicians allow our environment to be trashed." "When I’m in nature, I find an inner-peace I can never find in the city." "The new development at the edge of town has destroyed that poppyfield." At its extremities, this kind of love produces people who are blissfully reconciled to their place in the natural world. But what is at the other extreme?

In South Africa, I found a group of people who had decided to escape the city, just as I had. They did so because they loved their children and wanted them to have a relationship with nature that had been unavailable to them in Cape Town. They also did so because they felt the life they were escaping from was degenerative, corrupt and void of meaning. While driving on the motorway between Cape Town and Malmesbury, we almost hit a resident of a township through which the motorway passes. Rather than walk several miles to the nearest footbridge, he had chosen to run between the highspeed traffic on his way to the other side – a common sight on that stretch of road. The farmer I was travelling with had to swerve, and without blinking shouted a common racist expletive at the top of his voice. What followed was a tirade about human stupidity, immorality, uncleanliness and poverty. This farmer’s anger came not just from the complex racial dynamics of post-apartheid South Africa but from a deep-seated frustration with how human beings cannot take care of themselves. "It is no surprise we are trashing the planet – we can’t even take care ourselves."

This might sound like the product of a damaged political system, but it may not be that simple. The seeds of misanthropy are sown widely in our cultural lexicon, including in our nature writing and nature fiction – at least, that is one argument of my thesis. In the ten years since my experiences in South Africa, I’ve seen countless examples of how the dual motivations of love and frustration drive our relationship with nature and its continued degradation. How can you not be angry when you see raw sewage contaminating our rivers? How can you not feel hatred when you see unnecessary rail projects tearing through the green-belt? When something you love is under threat, your instinct is to raise your fists to protect it. Which is exactly what activists on both the left-wing and right-wing are doing.

With the encouragement of my lead supervisor Jonathan Taylor I began to approach these themes with a creative and critical eye, which led me to Bernhard Forchtner’s work on the ecology of the far-right and to ecocritics like Jonathan Skinner. A year into working with this team has left me invigorated, writing more than ever and reading some of the most stimulating literature I’ve found in years. I write this blogpost from south London, the city I had wanted to escape from when first arriving in South Africa ten years ago. Outside the window there are schoolchildren walking back from the nearby academy and a man who circles the estate shouting in Jamaican patois. Beyond them is the corner of the park where luminescent ring-necked parakeets – a population of escapees who have thrived in the city – chase each other through the plane trees. From that corner you can see the Shard, rising up from the edge of the Thames. It is in every sense a thousand miles from Malmesbury, but it feels like a thousand times more where I am supposed to be today.  

About the author

Joe Bedford is a writer from Doncaster, UK. His short stories have been published widely, and have won various awards including the Leicester Writes Prize 2022. He is currently working on a composite novel focused on the intersections between English rural fiction and right-wing attitudes to nature, supervised by Dr Jonathan Taylor (Leicester), Dr Bernhard Forchtner (Leicester) and Dr Jonathan Skinner (Warwick). His debut novel A Bad Decade for Good People will be released by Parthian in Summer 2023. His website is here. 

Other Lives in Samuel Pepys's Diary: A Collection of Creative Writing Inspired by Pepys's Journal of the 1660s

By Kate Loveman

Samuel Pepys’s diary of the 1660s is famous for detailing his hectic private life, alongside major events such as the plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London. In the diary, there are also glimpses of female servants, enslaved Black people, and other Londoners whose lives barely appear in more conventional historical records. The diary is a tremendous source for historians and a great inspiration for creative writers.  

The Reimagining the Restoration project was set up to investigate the history and reception of the diary. In May 2022, the project funded online Creative Writing workshops for the public, led by Yvonne Battle-Felton (a historical novelist and Creative Writing tutor) and by me, Kate Loveman (the project’s lead researcher and a specialist on Pepys).  

Over the next few months, some of our writers developed their work for an online collection, Other Lives in Samuel Pepys’s Diary. They produced lively, witty and provocative pieces based on three figures mentioned in the diary: Jane Birch (a servant in the Pepys household); an unnamed Deaf boy whom Pepys encountered at a party; and Mingo, a young Black man who had been enslaved as a child and who lived next door to Pepys. The collection features an introduction to each figure (with diary excerpts), followed by the imaginative responses from our authors.

You can download the ebook here.

By way of example, below are excerpts from Pepys’s description of the Great Fire of London and a story from one of our authors, Sue Wright. Here Sue imagines Jane Birch writing to her mother following the disaster.

If you’d like more information about the collection or the project, please see our website or email Kate Loveman (pepyshistory@le.ac.uk).

If you’d like to hear a story performed, listen to Elizabeth Uter read her work "The Glorious Life of Mingo – William Battenby – In Service to Life" here.

Reimagining the Restoration is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council

Samuel Pepys’s diary, 2 September 1666

(Lords day) [Sunday]. Some of our mayds sitting up late last night to get things ready against our feast to-day, Jane called us up about 3 in the morning, to tell us of a great fire they saw in the City. So I rose and slipped on my nightgowne, and went to her window, and thought it to be on the back side of Markelane at the farthest; but being unused to such fires as followed, I thought it far enough off; and so went to bed again and to sleep. About seven rose again to dress myself, and there looked out at the window and saw the fire not so much as it was and further off. So to my closett [study] to set things to rights after yesterday’s cleaning. By and by Jane comes and tells me that she hears that above 300 houses have been burned down to-night by the fire we saw, and that it was now burning down all Fish-street, by London Bridge. So I made myself ready presently [immediately], and walked to the Tower ...

(Text from the 1890s Wheatley edition, more here).

"Too Weary to Write All Week," by Sue Wright

… Do not be alarmed when I tell you about a fire. All is well. James saw the first signs when he went out to fetch more wood for the stove. He called me outside where I witnessed an orange glow over the rooftops, black smoke darkening the night sky hiding any stars. My master was not alarmed when, frightened, I roused him. Indeed, he cursed me and soon returned to his bed and seemed undisturbed by the commotion in the streets as people fled the fire. Sarah wept until dawn for fear we would be burned. My teeth were on edge with all her sobbing and wailing, and her complaints about the smell of fish causing her to feel ill. James sought to comfort her when my back was turned but I soon sent him back out to keep an eye on the fire and for the watchman for any word. 

Although many houses were lost in the fire, we remained safe, thank the Lord. Our neighbours were uninjured, but I feared there are people without homes. My master woke early, demanding breakfast. I told him of houses burned down in the night and he ventured out to explore, returning with his clothes and wig smelling of smoke and smeared with ash, hurriedly changing before his guests arrived. He has no thought for the laundry he creates or the laundry-maid’s chilblains. 

Amirah Mohiddin, "The Storyteller: My PhD in Creative Writing"

 

Born and raised in the U.K., Amirah Mohiddin spent much of her childhood (and teenage years!) writing and dreaming up fantasy stories. She developed quite a following in school as a storyteller that told ghost stories in the winter. She now spends her days working on a PhD in Creative Writing attempting to reconstruct female heroism in traditional Arabic literature via a YA fantasy novel. Her short stories, 'Alraqs,' 'Ruhi,' 'My Silence,' 'The Next Dawn' and 'I’ll Show you a Villainess' have been published in magazines, ebooks and physical books. She lives, breathes and bleeds writing but does occasionally enjoy going on a little walk and embroidering nerdy pictures from anime and books. You can read her story 'Ruhi' at Litro Magazine here. 

The Storyteller

By Amirah Mohiddin

In the summer of 2016, I decided to write and finish my first novel, blissfully unaware of how addictive writing really is. Now, five years on and five months into my PhD in Creative Writing, I can’t imagine a day without writing or thinking about writing. 

I’m (already) five months into the first year of my PhD in Creative Writing with the University of Leicester. I’m working on a 65,000-word YA fantasy novel, The Storyteller, and an accompanying reflective commentary of 25,000 words. My novel is about a seventeen-year-old girl, Huria, who develops the power to change stories on her sixteenth birthday. She can stop rainfall with a couple of sentences, bring characters to life, or even change a person’s memories. But her power comes at a cost. If she stops rainfall, it comes back as a deadlier thunderstorm, and if she changes another person’s memories, she also forfeits one of her own. Her parents believe she is a musiba, a calamity, with catastrophic levels of power. They lock her in a silo. A year later, Huria wakes up, teetering at the top of a wall surrounding the fortified citadel. She has no memory of the last year. She puts the pieces of the situation together, quickly realising that her life is under threat. To control her own life and story, she makes the drastic decision to sacrifice the people of the kingdom to keep herself safe. Huria’s story flips between past and present as she pieces together her memories, showing how she became a villain in someone else’s story and her choices towards changing her own story.

My writing is heavily inspired by female heroism in Arabic epics. Beyond the warrior women who physically fight, I’m also interested in the women who use stories to fight their battles, manipulate situations and drive the plot to a resolution. Key characters that I’m interested in are the well-known Scheherazade from A Thousand and One Nights, and also the lesser-known villainess, Qamariyya, from The Adventures of Sayf Ben Dhi Yazan. My main character, Huria, is a mixture of both heroic Scheherazade and villainous Qamariyya.  

My research focuses on a few key aspects, namely, young adult fantasy and Arab female storytelling. I’m looking at how Muslim women use fantasy, myth and folklore in storytelling to articulate female trauma and empowerment to rebel against patriarchal authority. One of the key pieces of advice writers get is: write what you know. As a writer – and I think many writers will agree – I put a piece of myself in my writing by writing what I know. Sometimes that’s with world-building, making it an Islamic state and using mythology and superstitions as the basis for my magic system. Other times it’s my experiences of gender inequality. With The Storyteller, I wanted to see a character who wasn’t purely a fierce warrior, but someone more representative of myself, a person who loves stories, writing and words. In essence, I want to see a Muslim bookworm or a bookdragon in a story. 

My PhD in Creative Writing has only just begun and I’m enjoying it immensely. In the last five months, I’ve been able to fully immerse myself with The Storyteller, a story idea I chose because it’s so close to my heart and because I want to do it justice for all the bookdragons of colour out there.