Featured Interview With Philip Spires
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was born in Wakefield, West Yorkshire in 1952 and was brought up in Sharslton, a mining Village. I went to London University, Imperial and King´s, and then became a maths teacher, working initially as a volunteer teacher in Migwani, Kenya. I then spent sixteen years in London, specifically Balham and Islington. In 1992, I left Britain for Maktab Teknik Sultan Saiful Rizal in Brunei and then Zayed University in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates. My wife and I currently live in La Nucia, just 5 kilometres from Benidorm on the Costa Blanca.
I have always been interested in the relationship between nature and nurture within nature, birthright and experience. Themes of culture and identity and their relation to economic roles and social experience underpin my writing. What we are born into relates to what we become, but we are rarely in control of our own destiny. What others do, how we approach friends and foes, our interests and intellects and the way we choose to earn a living, all of these shape us into what we become. It may be that culture is the sum of all assumptions that others make on our behalf, whereas identity represents our reactions to them. Just a thought…
I did a PhD on the effects of education in economic development in the Philippines. My aim was to relate educational experience to culture and identity, particularly in the area of the adoption of personal attitudes and values and how they then relate to desired and realised economic roles. It was far too ambitious and occupied nearly a decade of my spare time. But I am very glad I did it and offer the deepest thanks to those who assisted and supervised.
These days I am pretty much retired. I did a few years teaching in Spain at the Costa Blanca International College, but my wife and I have concentrated on our small tourist rental business for several years. I do a lot of cooking and reading, and the garden is always in need of attention. I maintain a passion for music and am currently president of Alfas del Pi Classical Music Society.
But it is writing that interests me. My books aim to take you there, to live the characters’ lives, to experience their dilemmas. I don’t want to shock or to engage in vacuous fantasy or gratuitous crime. The world we live in is packed with experience, and even the most banal reality is far more interesting than fantastical invention. I hope there are truths in my writing.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I cannot remember anything too specific, apart from getting car sick just once in my life and being asked to read my compositions to the class when I was quite small. The travel sickness came about when I decided to write the story of The Three Little Pigs in an out-of-date desk diary of my dad’s. I was determined to finish and finish I did. I’m afraid the copy got rather messed up when I was sick. And then I distinctly remember that I was repeatedly asked by a teacher to read my work to my classmates. At the time I was convinced I was better suited to maths and science, and I rather dismissed what appeared to be a talent. I have been doing the same ever since. After many Biggles adventures, I can remember borrowing The Plague by Albert Camus from the school library when I was around eleven years old. I am not sure I understood it, but it made me want to read more. I never did and still do not worry myself with anything that might be described as genre fiction. I seek new worlds, not repetition of the familiar.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
Like cliché, I avoid anything claiming to be in a genre like the plague. I see so many authors who claim to be on this number or that in a series and I wonder why they didn´t say it in volume one. I concentrate on literary fiction, where the plot really doesn´t matter, because it´s how and why things happen that´s more important than the “what”. I have just finished a so-called plot-led novel based on the financial crisis of 2008-9, and it was surely one of the longest books I have ever encountered. I had no interest in the people, the plot or what the author was repeatedly trying to tell me. When I see a production of Shakespeare in the theatre, or an opera by Janacek, I know what will happen and I know all the characters before they open their mouths, but how and why things happen is always endlessly and repeatedly fascinating. I grew up worshipping Lawrence Durrell´s Alexandria Quartet and have read al four books about five times. I´ve read A Grain Of Wheat by Ngugi was Thiongó at least three times and Paul Scott´s Raj Quartet also at least three times. And I would read all of them again, because there would still be new experience in all of them.
Feel free to elaborate here.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
Eileen McHugh – a life remade – is a novel about a sculptor whose creative life ended in the 1970s. She left no work, but now an archive of her notes and sketches has come into the possession of Mary Reynolds, who is determined to resurrect the artist’s life and reconstruct her work. She contacts people who knew Eileen as a child and as a student in London. Via these partial memories, she recreates the artist and her work.
Eileen McHugh is an artist. She is a sculptor. She seeks no avenues of compromise in her work. Her career was short and unnoticed. Paradoxically, one of her works has achieved viral status on the internet via a photograph posted in the name of Mary Reynolds, who now wants to create a biography of the artist and a discussion of her work so that she can create a museum to display it. She has contacted Eileen’s mother and has the artist’s sketchbooks and notes.
Eileen wanted to tell stories in her work, stories that arose out of the detritus of people’s lives, their bits and pieces of discarded trash. Her art, at one stage, is described as ‘off the wall’ as well as on it. The form of the book, however, repeatedly illustrates how lives themselves mirror this state. The lives of people who knew the artist come to mimic new works created by Eileen, assemblages of life’s discarded bits and pieces.
The novel begins in West Yorkshire, UK, migrates to London for art college, visits Thailand on a hippie trip and finishes in New Jersey. But the people who contribute to Eileen McHugh’s story are scattered across the world by the time they are contacted, forty years after the events.
Eileen McHugh did not exist, but her story in this novel creates a plausible biography and corpus of her work.
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