The author explains how an uneasy fascination with the shifting, treacherous coastal sands led her to write Fell, a story of sickness and healing
Writing has become my best and most persistent way of attending to the world. Fell took me four years and, while it is a novel about sickness and healing, it is also a diary of looking – of what I paid attention to during that time. But when I try to think about what started the work of attention that writing the novel involved, it is tempting to mythologise its untidy beginnings and, in the telling, to neaten them.
I can say that Fell grew from a particular place. The unbiddable, uncanny, shifting sand of Morecambe Bay intrigued me because I was frightened of it. I had been taught to be frightened of it, to watch the sands, to never walk there alone. The bay holds its own dark histories of flux and danger. It is a place of work and leisure and rest and peril. It demanded its place not as a mere backdrop for action, but one of the novel’s most shifty characters.
Related: Fell by Jenn Ashworth review – healings and hauntings
We expected her to come home to us eventually but we never thought it would take her so long. We never thought at all, if we’re really being honest. It was a no-time, a dark-time, until the key in the lock jangled us back to the trees. But there she is, breathing in the stale air. She touches the walls, shakes her head. What did she think would happen? Time has not been kind – we know that – and we know there were things that should have been done in the house that were not done. Repairs and improvements should have been made that were not made. Things have declined somewhat. But what could we do?
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