Interview: Julia Bell on writing Hymnal

In advance of the publication of Into Being, about the transformative power of memoir, I am sharing the interviews that I did as part of my research ... this is the fourth

In this series of interviews, I will be talking to memoirists, both published and working towards publication, about their writing process, and how writing memoir has helped them better understand themselves and their place in the world. I am also interested in how a writer navigates difficult territory for themselves and those they love. I will be using these interviews as research for my upcoming publication, INTO BEING: The Radical Craft of Memoir and its Power to Transform (published on 7th October)

Julia Bell’s most recent publication is Hymnal, a moving memoir in verse. It’s a compelling book, made up of vivid jewels of experience of growing up and coming of age under the influence of a religious and repressive family. It captures memory in all its fragments, making a whole from the spaces between. A unique contribution to the memoir form. I am also a huge fan of Julia’s personal essays, and her ability to capture the zeitgeist in an unflinching way. One of my favourites is Really Techno

Julia Bell is a writer and Reader in Creative Writing at Birkbeck where she is the Course Director of the MA Creative Writing. Her work includes poetry, essays and short stories published in the Paris Review, Times Literary Supplement, The White Review, Mal Journal, Comma Press, and recorded for the BBC. Her most recent book-length essay Radical Attention was published by Peninsula Press. Her poetry collection Hymnal – a memoir in verse – was published by Parthian in April 2023.

How did you land on your idea?

Hymnal emerged in a series of poetry workshops that I took with Gillian Clarke and Carol Ann Duffy in Ty Newydd the writing centre for Wales on the Llyn Peninsula. The combination of being in Wales and of hearing the language and poetry of my childhood started the project which quickly turned into a flood of poems. I saw the work as a photo album, a series of snapshots of life in rural and costal Wales in the 70s and 80s.

Did it feel essential for you to explore this subject? Was it urgent? Persistent?

Yes. I think I realised early on that the language of my childhood was uniquely poetic – hymns, the Bible, the Welsh language and Welsh and English poetry. The voice was already there, I just had to follow my instinct. It was cathartic too. Growing up gay in quite a strange family with parents who had a full-on mission from God was both funny and painful. I tried to capture that mixture of humour and poignancy. I wanted to get to the essence of how it felt for me.

Did your voice come naturally, and your authority as the person telling this story, or was that something you needed to work on – did it come more easily the deeper you went into your research?

Yes, the voice was already there – it still is – for me, my poetic voice is like a hum in my head that I can tune into. I kept having more and more ideas. I think it took me a long time to feel as if I had the authority to use that voice. But the more I wrote, the more I felt as if I had some control over the situation, which was messy and complicated. The evangelical church, and fundamentalist religions generally, have a very strange and phobic and therefore controlling relationship with human sexuality. The atmosphere of perverse repression was sometimes funny but often very uncomfortable. The more I wrote the more of a solid sense of my own experience emerged, and that felt like a necessary and loud corrective. As Ted Hughes says writing is ‘about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.’

And how did you navigate writing about family members or those who are close to you?

I think this is a tricky question because it’s a tricky situation. Writing about family and people close to us is fine and necessary when it’s in the notebook. It’s when the work is published that things become more complicated, because we must take responsibility for what we have written. I always say to my students that the reader is not your therapist, so the work of the writer, when the work is to be published, is to process that experience for the reader. The quality of the gaze is what matters. Which is why it took me ten years to bring this book to print – I wanted it to be right. I vacillated about publishing it, because I’m aware of how exposing it can be for the families of writers – they didn’t necessarily ask to be put under this kind of public scrutiny, and yet, my father has very public homophobic views and I felt that it was a necessary corrective to put my truth, out there. I also had a very public childhood, which for a quite shy and introverted person was at times a real hell. I don’t think it’s been easy for them to read this work, but I hope over time, it will be cathartic. And because I took a long time to publish it, I edited it a lot and I think that the poems which were written in anger were taken out. Also, I think the key factor here is that this is poetry. In poetry I think I can get much closer to emotion, there is an emotional justice to the lyric which can make something new from these experiences.

What has been interesting in the responses to the work is how much people have seemed to enjoy the sense of childhood in it – they can relate to their own experiences of growing up even if it wasn’t the same as my own. Also, I think some of this was/is funny. I tried to get that humour in there too and I think that’s landed well with readers.

Were there aspects of your story that you resisted, that you thought you could get away with not writing, but then realised it wasn’t possible – and if so, how did you protect yourself, or how did it feel to write those sections?

Yes, I think I was ashamed about writing about sexuality, and I think a big part of the urge to write the book was to rid myself of that shame, to put it where it belongs – back in the church and away from myself, into words. Also, I didn’t want to be pigeonholed. I find identity politics generally uncomfortable territory. It’s important, obviously, that there is representation for marginalised groups, but my experience doesn’t stand for all LGBTQ+ experience, nor should it preclude experiences of people who don’t identify as LGBTQ+. Identity politics can have the weird effect of re-marginalising the marginalised. I think it’s important to represent and underline human experience – hence again the poetry – there is I hope a universalizing aspect to poetry which is all about the use of language. It’s a very human experience to have a desire which is not approved of by your parents for whatever reason. Also, I realised I was also trying to portray a particular time and place of Wales in the 70s and 80s. It’s a love song to Wales too, and to the echoes of the language that are still in my head. I wanted the experience of reading it to be filmic, every poem a small scene which builds into a bigger picture.
Was it a process to become ‘ready’ or ‘prepared’ to go to the places that you might have otherwise resisted?

Yes, I think taking your time is important. Writing is part of the process of healing – I often think of the phrase ‘coming to terms with’ – which literally means finding the words for, which is what we’re trying to do in personal narratives. But thinking through trauma and life difficulties can sometimes be re-traumatising too and taking the leap to publication a whole other issue. When you are essentially offering something up for public consumption. It has to be right, so you need to be ready for that, you’re right to call it a process. For me it took 10 years.

Does writing memoir offer cohesion to otherwise fractured memories and experience, and is that cohesion empowering? If so, expand on why?

This is an interesting question: I think memoir is a way of dealing with and packaging experience. It’s not the last word, it’s a version of experience and there will always be more to say than can be said in a small book. Also, when I put the final version of the book together, I was also very conscious of needing to give the whole a sense of structure. Poetry books aren’t often meant to be read whole – this one is, but I’m sure I got some of the sequences wrong – I don’t remember everything in exact linear order. And there are almost enough poems left out to make another book. But what I was trying to capture was an essence, a feeling, an atmosphere. It’s not the last word on my childhood but it was very empowering to put it into words, have it live outside me, beyond me. I think of Hymnal like a song. Perhaps in the same spirit as Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself – poetry as an act of self-actualisation. The consolation of art.

Hymnal is unique in that it is a memoir in verse – do you think this book could have existed as a straight piece of prose and if so, how would it be different?

Maybe, but I’m not sure I remember my childhood in anything other than short starbursts of lyric. Memories are notoriously slippery and difficult. Especially work that deals with childhood. Again, this is why for me, poetry felt more honest. I could get to the heart of the feeling of my childhood rather than having to remember or recreate days, weeks, years or sequences of events in detail. To me this would have been dishonest, and poetry is also a big part of my writing practice, so it made sense to make it into a book or at least a sequence. It would require a different kind of gaze to make it into prose.