Creative Sisters

Awhile back I featured a call for historical stories of Hong Kong by co-authors Carol Major and Hilda Tam who were working together on a novel inspired by events in Carol’s husband’s family.

Last week, Carol and her sister Alice were in London for a family gathering and to my great delight, they found a slot of time for us to meet up and have coffee.

Since my post about their project in March, Carol and Hilda have now started work on their novel, working together intimately although Carol is based in Australia and Hilda in Macao. When we met at a Cafe Nero in St Martins Lane last week, Carol explained how this collaboration worked. The protagonist is a Eurasian woman who has been adopted by a British family during the colonial occupation of Hong Kong and in order to integrate into the white world, she has suppressed her Chinese side until one day, events conspire to break through her white mask and she is forced to confront her Asian roots. Carol writes the sections of the novel that relate the protagonist’s white point of view while Hilda works on the Chinese point of view. The two writers have only met once face to face, spending one day together in Hong Kong, but apart from that, they have conducted this collaboration by email - they do not even speak on the phone.

To me, this is a fascinating creative process! This sort of collaboration could never have been possible in the days before the internet and email - nor in the colonial times when the story is set. I am really interested to see the outcome of the two voices, one Chinese, one European, each telling the story of one Eurasian. Also, what is the impact on the two writers themselves of conducting their collaboration primarily by written word, writing on their screens on emails in correspondence and also writing on their screens when they are inhabiting the character of their protagonist? Does this process help them meld into each other’s psyche and creativity? Do they respond to each other as Carol and Hilda or as parts of their character’s personality?

Meanwhile, Carol’s sister, Alice Major, is the first poet laureate of Edmonton, Alberta in Canada and has published numerous poetry collections and won a number of awards. We talked about the importance of sense of place in novels as well as in writing and how conjuring place in her writing was an important aspect of her role as poet laureate. The Edmonton city website explains the role:

“Historically, a Poet Laureate served as the official chronicler of state events and occasions. In ancient times, the Laureate was the central means for recording and communicating history. “Laureate” comes from the Latin word ‘laureatus’, meaning adorned with a crown of laurel, an honour also bestowed on the earliest Olympic athletes.

More currently, the role of a Poet Laureate is to reflect the life of a city through readings of poetry. As an ambassador for the literary arts, the Laureate incorporates poetry into a range of official and informal city activities.” [my emphasis]

Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough time to talk about all the things I’d have liked to have known about the poetry that “reflects the life of a city” and whether the role includes having to write poetry on demand about civic events - and if so, how difficult was that to be poetic on cue? They had to head off after our all-too-brief chat as Alice was giving a reading at Foyles bookshop from her new collection of poems.

I don’t know when we’ll all meet again as it’s not likely that I’ll be in Edmonton or Australia any time soon - so I will have to hope that one or other of them stops by in London again. The great thing about the internet and blogging is that it opens up so many possibilities to meet fascinating and creative people from all over the world - but then one is still stuck physically in the real world so that we can never truly “hang out” properly with each other in real space and real time.