So today I went to Cardiff to visit Nia Wyn, the author of Blue Sky July, the source text for my adaptation assessment. I had a few things that I wanted to ask her about her book, society in general, and ‘making it’ as a professional writer. Today was a really interesting and thought-provoking experience, and I want to thank Nia and her son Joe for welcoming me into their home and making me feel very comfortable. Below is a transcription of the conversation that Nia and I had this afternoon. I think that it’s going to really help me with my adaptation project. For some context, take a look at yesterday’s blog post.
Code: CF = me NW = Nia Wyn
NW: In my book there was a lot of looking back at childhood and how life was, and how life suddenly is. juxtaposition
CF: I felt that there was a lot of looking back at your own childhood and comparing it to Joe’s…
NW: The freedom of it
CF: Exactly, and also then a sense of loss, in that Joe wouldn’t be able to experience the things that you did. Would that be a bit of a stretch?
NW: I’ve always felt that, but I think for me, the place that I wrote from at that time… I think it’s a love story like any other love story, I think it’s about love, the whole thing. It wasn’t meant to be about the real judgement of the world that we live in or whatever, it’s about that love that you feel, and all the things that causes you to think and feel around it. and I don’t think that there’s any difference in that, however your child is. I think you feel as much love and longing for them as anyone else, and yet what society does, it kind of divides mothers in that position. “Oh, you go off to the special nursery,” and how that affects your life is that your then not part of everyone else.
CF: There’s a particular scene in the book, where you take Joe to the mainstream nursery for the first time
NW: That was an alternativeness really though, because I suppose in some ways I’ve always been a little bit more alternative in life, but the hardest thing about that day, was even when your trying to fit in, sometimes you’re not allowed to, sometimes that’s by other peoples perceptions, and I think that was the main thing for publishing that book is to show my own perception of it all, which could hopefully influence someone else’s thinking because there’s not a lot of education at all around these issues. When I went to school, nobody told me about Cerebral Palsy, or the struggles that say someone with a learning disability was having in the next classroom, so they tended to be isolated.
CF: Were there people who had disabilities in mainstream education when you went to school?
NW: Well, not disabilities like Joe has, certainly not, but there were children who were slow learners there tended to sort of be a ‘mobile’ class for them, and it breaks my heart to look back at that because I think that they must’ve felt so different, but already geographically they were separated from the ‘normal’ kids, rather than teaching us about difference, and it’s fine.
CF: When kids notice a particular difference between them and another child, if they haven’t been educated on disability at home, there can be a tendency to pick out that difference, and it can lead to stuff like bullying.
NW: Yeah and I think the whole drive at the moment towards mental health, is important too, I was talking to Joe about it the other day, I said “Y’know Joe so many people have problems, just because your problem is there people can see it, what that is. But there are so many problems, be they mental health issues, or hidden physical disabilities. Joe is dealing with that thing of his disability being very visual, but he has an amazing joyous spirit. I said what about someone who is severely depressed and just can’t get up in the mornings because life is so difficult for them, which they’re their own barrier to themselves. It’s hard to quantify, regarding disability.
CF: I suppose it’s about your own attitude towards your disability, if you allow it to control you, and become the main part of your life.
NW: It’s so good to have a mentally strong attitude towards it, because you do need it. I find that kind of rubs off on the people around you and they start seeing things in that way too.
CF: What I was going to ask you about as well, is how did you manage the balance between telling an honest story, and being respectful to the real people within the book
NW: I decided to edit it down, even though I it could be picked up as any other fictional story, but as it was all true, my publisher really felt as though that’s the beauty of it, that it’s all true, I had to be aware that although these are peoples lives, and I’m quite an open, book I suppose other people are different, I don’t think that there’s anyone in the book who would’ve been upset by what was written about them. I would never want to cross that line. I let everyone who was mentioned in the book read it. I needed the reassurance that they were happy with what was is the book. I had that back. Some of the stuff between me and Alex, I only used what would move the story along. Although he was a big part of everything, it was more a story about me and Joe. The mother and child relationship. The book is very much a mother and child relationship. I think for you one of the difficulties (in your adaption project) is that babies can’t act, and they don’t really talk. I suppose that’s the difficult when you’re trying to change the medium of something.
CF: I like a challenge
NW: I suppose if you were doing it from a point of dialogue, unless you were using the words that are there, you would need to write original dialogue, because there not much in the book.
CF: I felt that I could translate what you’ve written into dialogue in a way that the audience would accept.
NW: That’s a lot of thinking work, you must be a good writer.
CF: But then the challenge would be not negating the style in which you’ve written it. it’s quite a balancing act.
NW: You don’t have to worry about that for your project, you’ve got to do your vision. I for me that when you have any tragedy, not that I would describe Joe as being a tragedy, but what happened to us at the beginning, if you look at it structurally it could be called a tragedy. Life has tipped upside down and I couldn’t follow what everyone else did, but you picking up the thing about the school. What it did give me was an ability to stand back from just that motorized thing through education that mothers go through and how they were all caught up in trying to prove that their child was the furthest along academically, and there’s nothing wrong. These parents were anxious about their children not reaching these milestones that the parents themselves had set for them, and the desperate need to show that you child has kept up and been the best. and I thought it’s crazy, because I was thinking, aren’t those children lucky to be able to walk and talk and hold their heads up like that. But what perhaps it does take you on is deeper journey so it’s not just about the physically different journey you go through, it’s also quite spiritually transforming inside.
CF: because maybe you identify as different from the norm and you expect it to be a different journey than your peers who have able bodied children are experiencing. but if you embrace that experience…
NW: I think that the critical turning point was the bit about because you love, you really try to heal and to make that life have as much opportunity as anybody else can have. But the realization and acceptance that life can’t be about looking for that miracle cure or holy grail. But actually when he won that little cup in Craig y Parc (Joe’s special school) and it wasn’t about having done the best, but having come the furthest and realizing that the little journey that we’d been on had been quite an exceptional one. But it was quite upsetting when a newspaper picked up on it and said ‘Mother proves doctors wrong,’ because in truth that wasn’t what it was about. I think it’s about the connection to life you feel which is different to when everything is sunny
CF: I think it gives a difference definition of what we accept life to be, or what society expects from an individual and it shows that you’d don’t have to stick to the path, you can find your own way. It might take a bit longer, and it may be hard at times, but we all get there in the end.
NW: Or we each just have to value the things that we’ve been given rather than constantly complaining about them. I don’t think the norm is a very happy place to be anyway, because everyone I know who claims to have a ‘normal’ life. I don’t look at them and think, “they’re the happiest people I’ve ever met in the world.”
CF: Probably quite boring as well don’t you think? But I think the journey you take us on is emotional but very relatible to a lot of people.
NW: What was interesting to me Ciaran, was when the book was on radio 4 it was read out every morning for a week, and people that called up were not people who’d been affected by disability, or had that in their lives, I’ll never forget the footballer, just driving down the M5, who phoned up and said “I never read or listen to books, but this just got me.” And he’d never been touched by or known anyone with Cerebral palsy. But the fact he was a man, and that he wasn’t connected with the storyline, I thought maybe it’s a universal story. I think that maybe as a writer sometimes that’s all you could wish for, that you’d connected to that main throng of life again.
CF: I guess then you can reach a wider audience than would normally be exposed to this.
NW: I think had I started out with the book from the position of stating that I was very different to everyone else, then I don’t think you would have that connection with people. But in showing that shift from one world into another, and then at the end of the book the state of acceptance, joining that world in some way again it allows people to feel more comfortable going into that world. so there’s a connection first with that world, and then a loss of it, and then regaining. Which I suppose when you do your project, for people to be able to connect to it, it would have to have something that resembled their own world to start off with. So that they could feel comfortable with this character, and that sense of ‘this could happen to me’ sort of thing.
CF: So that they’re not pushed into the deep end of a world which they have very little understanding of.
NW: Otherwise you don’t get that bond between a reader/viewer and the piece itself. I think they feel that it’s away from them because that’s not their common experience
CF: And maybe because I’ve had common experiences, I don’t feel that it’s so alien, but if we look your average person they wouldn’t have experienced these things. But if we give them something that they can relate to at the start, and then push them into the deep end, it begins on a familiar footing.
NW: That’s a technique that I feel helps a lot as well, in ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,’ you had him before the locked in syndrome took hold, and so the audience gets to know the character before that takes hold. So that you can then relate to the situation that he is in
CF: How do you think disability is represented in films and books these days? Do you think there enough possitive representations of disabled characters in the media?
NW: I’m just trying to think of the ones that I know, I haven’t really seen many. I can’t think of what I’ve seen, I’m just thinking of that Ricky Gervais thing, the thing that he does, I think it’s called ‘Derrick?’ I think he takes someone with CP and I though ‘am I going to be able to watch this?’ But I actually thought it was quite clever because he’s so idiotic in the response to the person that has it, that you do end up laughing at this person’s conduct rather than the disabled person themselves.
CF: I think there should be more disabled characters on TV and film, because it needs to be more representative of society, I guess it’s up to disabled writers to write characters which are truly representative.
NW: It’s an important step, because it’s just about making everything familiar to people and break down those barriers
CF: Because if someone thinks that something is completely alien to them, they will instinctively shy away from it. Sometimes it’s the fear of saying something wrong, or getting it wrong.
NW: I think that was a very important thing for me at the beginning of my journey with Joe was that one of my friends made, just a throw away comment. I think I was doing oxygen therapy with him at the time and she said ‘Oh he’s a little air-head isn’t he?’ And when she said it she realized that I could take that to mean as if he’s got nothing in his head at all, and she said ‘I’m sorry,’ and I said to her Julie, if we were going to nervous about anything you said to me just because I have a child that has a disability then the friendship won’t last. I’m perfectly capable of seeing what people mean, I think because we live in such a politically correct age, people are so afraid to say the wrong thing that drives such a huge wedge between them and someone else, because that puts a real sense of isolation around you
CF: If you lose your inhibitions, you might get it wrong, but you can told what language to use, and then it all comes back to education. I think people underestimate the importance of language.
NW: Exactly, how do you describe… do you say ‘differently able’ or… what do you use?
CF: I dislike the term ‘differently able’ profusely, I say ‘I’m disabled,’ but then if I want to give them a better idea of what it entails, I say I have cerebral palsy. Because I think a lot of people’s perceptions of me might be that I have a learning disability. People talk down to me quite a lot. It’s difficult to find a way not to be self-righteous about it, but informing the conduct of other people without being too controlling. Making them feel comfortable, as bizarre as it may seem, considering that you’re the one with the disability, but you have to make them feel comfortable.
NW: That’s what we all want, it doesn’t have to be a ‘thing’ to other people, because actually they’re not dealing with it. It’s you Ciaran, or Joe that are dealing day-to-day with having that disability, there’s something really strange about people making a thing out of it, when it doesn’t have to be.
CF: But at the same time, I think people have to take into account the things that Joe and I can’t do, I think to me on a vary rare occasion it’s been that and not one or the other. It’s being accepted, but with the respect for the challenges that you have.
NW: We could sort the world out, couldn’t we?
CF: Thank you so much for your time today.
NW: It’s been great to meet you. I mean with Joe, and this will sound silly but he definitely doesn’t have the intelligence that you’ve got, but he doesn’t actually have a learning disability, but what he will have is a physical disability which impacts on his learning, because of his poor vision and his cerebral palsy it will impact on his learning. But they’re quite different things, it’s not that he’s unable to think properly, that’s all good you know, and there’s a lot of potential there. Access to appropriate education has been a huge issue and it’s only in the last 18 months with a wonderful teacher called Lisa, that has enabled him to find a communication aid that works for him, and that’s really helping him. But if you are visually impaired, things are not going to be as clear for you or as easy to do, like reading or spelling. They’re going create extra challenges.
CF: Would you say that the visual impairment has been one of the main challenges.
NW: Yeah, and I think that it was possibly the thing that I was so terribly upset about, the visual impairment, but then a friend said to me that communication is the big thing. Finding a way to communicate with Joe has been the most wonderful thing, the thing that I would want above all things. The fact that he can tell me if something is wrong, just basic things, that is huge. I know a few mothers who’s children can’t communicate with them, and that’s much harder.
CF: And for the child in question not being able to advocate for themselves it must be so frustrating.
NW: You’ve got to find a way to get through to them, whatever way you can.
Soon after this Joe came home from School, and it was lovely to be able to talk to him as well and get his point of view. It was a pleasure to meet the both of them. I’d like to thank them for all their help. I know this post may seem a little longwinded, but I hope you’ve enjoyed this post.
Next time: Stan Rogers, I promise
The world according to fitz 