Abi Andrews: Author of "The Word for Woman Is Wilderness" Discusses Ecofeminism, Metafiction and the Women That Shaped Her as a Writer
In Abi Andrews's debut novel, The Word for Woman Is Wilderness, Erin, a 19-year-old girl from middle England, is traveling to Alaska on a journey that takes her through Iceland, Greenland, and across Canada. She plans to not only explore these destinations alone, but she is also making a documentary about “how men are allowed to express this kind of individualism and personal freedom more than women are, based on masculinist ideas of survivalism and the shunning of society.” What began as an idea for a feminist adventure story for Andrews, soon took form into a type of time capsule of different mediums from personal narrative to fact, anecdote to images and maps. This clever and timely novel is full of witty and sharp dialogue while flipping the masculine travelogue narrative on its head.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Abi via email where she discusses writing about things you don’t have the answers to, ecofeminism, ditching art school to pursue writing, creating the unique structure of her novel and the women writers that shaped her.
The book has extensive examples of scientific research and mentions of historical instances that prompt Erin to take this journey into the wilderness. Take us through your research process for this book—did you work off existing knowledge and facts you already had, or were you researching new snippets of information as you wrote?
I think the sentiment that you should write about things you don’t have answers to yet is a very good one, and I very much went through my own development of ideas while the novel went along. It transformed throughout the years of writing it, and it’s still ongoing. It’s very strange that a published book feels like this static thing and while it was under development it was so fluid and mutable and open to change.
I had some existing bits, and it became this task to sort of try and build a web that connected these seemingly disparate things. The basic premises changed as the book went along. The process of writing brought a lot of my own once quite firmly held ideas into question. When I started I really did think I was just writing a feminist adventure story, but I don’t think I ended up with that.
The structure of the book is unique in that you chose to intersperse images, drawings, hand-written lists, and other visuals with the text in lieu of giving them separate sections. Was this a feature you always wanted to utilize or was the decision made during the publication process?
If I remember right, I was always intending the text to be a sort of time-capsule, or a diary/ memory-book my protagonist has made for herself. I wanted to play with metafictionality and make ambiguously fiction/non-fiction. The drawings and lists etc. were always a device, to steer it towards being read as a real nonfictional travelogue. I entered bits of the book into travel writing competitions early on, trying I suppose to make a point about the ways we attach words to place and how those words are not that place. And then it developed into how they are also that place, and worth holding on to.
You studied creative writing at Goldsmiths college and have consistently had work published after graduation. Did you always know that you wanted to be a writer? Or were there other career paths you had explored first?
I spent most of my life so far wanting to be an artist! Up until I was 18 on my art foundation course where that part of me shriveled up and died. I had always been good at art when art was looking at a thing (mostly animals) and making something that looked like it and doing it well. It was really core to my identity that I would be a painter. But when I got to art foundation my tutors wanted me to do all this conceptual stuff and at the time I just thought, conceptual art is all very well but please I just want to make nice paintings of animals. The work I produced on my art foundation was really rubbish, and I applied to all the best London art schools but I didn’t get into any.
I was doing well with my art crit essays and one of my tutors suggested I follow writing instead. I’d always loved writing stories, and always read, but had never made the connection that I could do writing and it could be about the world and feel important because I’d always just thought I would die if I wasn’t an artist. I had actually applied to do Creative Writing at Goldsmiths the year I started the art foundation because I was interested in what writing could be, but I got rejected.
So the following year I applied to the art schools while also applying to several creative writing courses again. And then I got rejected from art but accepted by writing, which was good because by then I thought, screw art if I can’t just make things look like they should! It was a confusing time.
There are numerous references to female writers and explorers in The Word for Woman is Wilderness, but I was wondering if you could tell us more about your biggest literary inspirations. Who are some of your favorite writers? Which pieces of writing have inspired your career the most?
I really see writing as taking ideas others have already put out then and bringing them together in new ways. Like weaving something new from recycled yarn. I really love my old yarns, and all of my writing is indebted to so many women writing before me. I continue to read more things that go into the yarn basket.
I read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which I had to get out on special request from my university library and sitting, reading it, really felt like I was being let in on something very important. It came at a time when I was just only just realising the extent of the impact of western civilization on the rest of the planet, and I remember just trying to get everyone I knew to read it. Then I wanted to write something that would introduce younger generations to her work, I wanted to make discourse around climate more accessible (which it has since had to become!).
It was reading H is For Hawk by Helen McDonald that I first really understood what writing about the natural world could do emotionally, it made me realise that instead of painting, I could look at the thing I loved to study (the natural world) and do much more emotional and visceral things with it. Writing started to feel like getting closer to things than I’d ever been able to before.
In my third year, I was taking a course called Gender & Anxiety, and I think about this class a lot. We were a big class of all women bar one man, and there were no cishet men on it like they didn’t think gender implicated them at all. Reading Kathy Acker really blew writing apart for me then. I had found this place where women spoke all these things I had felt and never known how to articulate, and there were all these ways to create from it that were so very particular and specific to the experience of being a woman in the anthropocene.
I started reading lots of academic stuff on ecofeminism and found women who were writing academically but politically, trying to make their work accessible, which was so exhilarating when I found so much academic prose cold and alienating. I felt welcomed in, embraced. Writers like Ursula Le Guin, especially when she was writing about writing, and Donna Haraway on thinking about thinking as a woman. I really wanted to try and write about ecofeminism in fiction, to try and expand the audience to all these ideas outside of the academic.
Take us through the development of The Word for Woman is Wilderness. How long did it take you to write the novel and what was the editing process like once you were picked up by your publisher?
It took me about five years from concept to publication. I did most of my editing with my wonderful agent Harriet Moore. She read an extract of it published in a journal and asked to see the full manuscript. We worked on it for something like two years. She was brilliant at helping me see the important parts that needed more care to flourish. Then it was roughly in the shape it wanted to stay. Once we got it to Serpents Tail, my terrific editor Nick Sheerin took care of it and helped to get it to its book form, more solid and sure of itself, which felt like a relatively quick transformation after the soul-baring process with Harriet.
Erin is the main character of your book and she speaks in such a clear, relatable voice that I found refreshing as I was reading. How did you go about building the character of Erin and discovering how you wanted her to speak to the reader throughout the novel?
It was an erratic process. First, I actually wrote early drafts of the book with another main character, Erin’s best friend Freya, who did the whole journey apart from the cabin with her. It took me ages to realize that Erin is so concerned with authenticity, is so earnest that she needed to be completely alone. And her age wasn’t pinned down for quite a while. I kept finding myself steering her to my own age without meaning to, sort of getting too close to her and then noticing when I felt my nose pressed against the screen. But I realised I wanted her to be at this particular point of discovery and just-tipping-into adulthood and found a place for her that was held away at a good distance. I wanted her to be wide-eyed and free of the formalities of intellectualizing, just to run with things and not be so self-conscious about them yet. And I wanted her to still have some sense of rebellion against the adult world that had spoilt her future, refusing to let coming of age on a dying planet sap her love for it.
I was wondering if you could describe your writing process to us—do you prefer to write at a set time of day, or do you write when the mood strikes you? Do you work in silence, or is there music you like to play while you’re writing?
My life always seems to end up transient, and I have to find ways to be able to write in my car, or in a cafe, or in someone else’s kitchen. There’s no way to get the work done without sitting down to slog away at it, and I can be quite sensitive to my environment and not take my best advice of being adaptable -- I’m distracted very easily. I do have to work in quiet as a rule. Music really bothers me.
Generally, if I can get up early in the morning and sit somewhere quiet with a coffee I can get more done. I have inspired moments, but usually only when I’m busy doing something else, so the notes on my phone are hastily written thoughts I’ve had in the middle of walking somewhere or mid-conversation.
You’re currently working on your second novel—is there anything you can share with us about what the story is going to be like?
It feels premature because I haven’t shown anyone any part of it yet, although I’ve been thinking about it since WWW was published. I don’t know if when it’s looked at I might just get told kindly that it doesn’t work. I live in dread of this at the moment.
But I would love to be writing something that looks deftly at storying, things we tell ourselves about the way the world is going and what we tell ourselves about our power to change this. I want it to be affirmative, about knowing the difficulties but insisting a new world into being, and about utopia as a horizon to strive for. And to look at dark tendencies in current eco-thought.
Abi Andrews is a writer from the UK midlands. She studied at Goldsmiths college, and her work has been published in Five Dials, Caught by the River, The Clearing, The Dark Mountain Project, Tender and other journals, along with a pamphlet published with Goldsmiths Shorts.
Her debut novel The Word for Woman is Wilderness was published by Serpent’s Tail in February 2018, in the US with Two Dollar Radio in 2019, and will be translated into German, French, Spanish and Italian. She is working on her second novel.
About the Interviewer
Sam Cohen is a writer and editor based in New England. She lives with her wonderful partner Caleb, and enjoys learning new languages, drinking lattes, and spending time with her loved ones. Sam is an avid reader who practices yoga and tries to laugh as often as possible. She hopes to be a published author one day. She can be found on Twitter and Instagram.