Rivers of Wales by Jim Perrin, with a foreword by Rob Mimpriss, forthcoming from Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 2022. From the foreword:
In Snowdon Jim’s prose is erudite and purposeful. In The Hills of Wales it vividly reflects the sparseness of a landscape of ‘startling geometries,’ ‘elegant, sharply defined,’ which speaks to us most clearly when we are alone. His descriptions of the hill-slopes above Llanllechid at dusk, the hill-slopes I have known since childhood, convince me that his writing will not lead us astray. Yet in contrast to the focus of the other books, Rivers of Wales gives us Jim at his most companionable. It is filled with books he admires, folk-tales and anecdotes that will entertain us, people with whom he has shared the landscapes he describes, and it is a delight to be led through the book as though by a long-familiar walking partner, knowledgeable, observant and funny. It is a cliché to say that Seneca is pleasanter to read than the other Stoics because he is more fleshly and fallibly human. Jim differs from Thoreau in part because he lacks his po-facedness and pomposity.
If one is taken aback by the range and ferocity of his views, one will contrast them with those of the bigoted, who in fact have few opinions because they have few interests, and who express those few with the meanness and fearfulness which have polluted their capacity for joy. Jim condemns ‘that spiteful, stiff and self-regarding crew’ of the book world and of academia, condemns authoritarianism in wilderness management and self-righteousness in the arts, yet the far greater part of this book is given over to praise. Jim will celebrate a good ale, a hearty meal, a lively conversation; he shows an affectionate enjoyment of the eccentricities of those he meets; yet the quality of which he speaks most is generosity. This habit in his thought reminds me of the earlier writer of landscape and heritage, Glasynys…
The Sleeping Bard by Ellis Wynne, translated by T. Gwynn Jones with an introduction by Rob Mimpriss. Cockatrice Books, 2022.
Three nightmare visions of the world, of death and of hell.
The anonymous poet is dragged from sleep by the fairies of Welsh myth, and rescued by an angel is taken to see the City of Doom, whose citizens vie for the favour of Belial’s three beautiful daughters; to the realm of King Death, the rebellious vassal of Lucifer; and finally to Hell itself, where Lucifer debates with his demons which sin shall rule Great Britain.
First published in 1703, this classic of religious allegory and Welsh prose combines all the blunt urgency of John Bunyan with the vivid social satire of Dryden and Pope, and is published in the T. Gwynn Jones translation of 1940, with an introduction by Rob Mimpriss reflecting on its political significance as the union of England and Scotland comes to an end.
Published as part of the Wales in Europe series, celebrating the past and future of Wales as an independent nation.
‘The Ladies and the Baggage: Raymond Carver’s Suppressed Research and the Apologetic Short Story.’ In Creative Writing Studies: Practice, Research and Pedagogy. Edited by Graëme Harper and Jeri Kroll. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2008.
It is curious that these statements take the tone of apologies, since few novelists would seek to excuse their use of long narratives by an excess of wealth or leisure. As apologies they are also inappropriate to these two writers’ achievements, since their stories remain among the finest the form has yet produced. But one notices in both writers the guardedness of the explanation, the ‘perhaps,’ and one may suspect that more lies behind these writers’ choice of form than they are willing or able to say. Kate Roberts’s comments about craft and inspiration are hard to reconcile with the stories themselves, and Raymond Carver’s pedagogic essay, ‘On Writing,’ offers few original insights, consisting largely of slogans and quotations which he invites us to record on three-by-five cards.
But perhaps ‘The Student’s Wife’ reveals most clearly Raymond Carver’s thinking about the short story form. For it is, very clearly, one of his most graceful designs: covering the hours between night and dawn, and with one major and one minor character, it nevertheless conveys a picture of their life together and a sense of the world they inhabit. Thematically, it is one of Carver’s most far-reaching, for the protagonist’s solitude and insomnia, her fear of the sunrise, and the brevity and ambiguity of her prayer encourage us to read the story as an exploration of ontological suffering. But it is also thoughtfully modelled on a Chekhov story, ‘The Student,’ and the protagonist’s experiences recall the main themes in Frank O’Connor’s study of the short story form, The Lonely Voice. My burden, presented by a detailed close reading of ‘The Student’s Wife,’ is that, rather than explaining or defending his use of an unpopular form through his critical or pedagogic writing, Carver – and other writers like him – may encode such an apologetic within his creative practice. Moreover, this apologetic could not otherwise be expressed without embarrassment, for it refers to the less considered aspects of O’Connor’s argument: to the experience of ‘religion [as] the aspect of depth in the totality of the human spirit’ to use Paul Tillich’s (1959: 7-8) phrase, on his experience of religion as ‘ultimate concern’.
I am the author of four short story collections.
Reasoning and
For His Warriors,
originally published by Gwasg y Bwthyn, Caernarfon, with Welsh Books Council support, now join
Prayer at the End
and Pugnacious Little Trolls
in revised editions at Cockatrice Books.
My anthology of fiction, Dangerous Asylums, including work by Gee and David Williams, Glenda Beagan, Carys Bray, Simon Thirsk and others, was published by the North Wales Mental Health Research Project, October 2016. I am a contributor with Nigel Jarrett, Rachel Trezise, Tristan Hughes and others to Brush with Fate (Albawtaka, 2014), an anthology of Welsh fiction in Arabic translation by Hala Salah Eldin, to Land of Change (Culture Matters), and to Creative Writing Studies (Multilingual Matters, 2007), essays on writing as an academic discipline edited by Graëme Harper and Jeri Kroll, and of the foreword to Rivers of Wales by Jim Perrin (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, forthcoming).
I am the translator of Going South: The Stories of Richard Hughes Williams (Cockatrice, 2015), Hallowe’en in the Cwm: The Stories of Glasynys (Cockatrice, 2017), A Book of Three Birds, the seventeenth-century classic by Morgan Llwyd (Cockatrice, 2017), and of fiction by D. Gwenallt Jones, Angharad Tomos, and Manon Steffan Ros. I was Artistic Coordinator of the North Wales Mental Health Research Project convened by Prof. David Healy at the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board, and am the editor of Cockatrice Books. I hold a Ph.D. in Creative and Critical Writing from Portsmouth University, and in 2011 I was invited to membership of the Welsh Academy in acknowledgement of my contributions to Welsh writing.