Writers That Inspire Us: The Eccentric and Exquisite Details of Claire-Louise Bennett
Photo Credit: A N D R E W G A L L I X
“A leaf came in through the window and dropped directly onto the water between my knees as I sat in the bath looking out. It was a thoroughly square window and I had it open completely, with the pane pushed right back against the wall. It was there, level with the rim of the bath—I didn’t have to stretch or lean; it was almost as if I were in the coniferous tree that continued upwards, how tall. There was a storm, an old storm, going around and around the mountain, visiting the mountains again perhaps after who knows how long, trying to get somewhere, going nowhere.”
So writes Claire-Louise Bennett, in her debut (and, to-date, solo) book, Pond. The book is brilliant—a uniquely meditative, funny, observant, and self-deprecating record of one woman’s life in a rented cottage just outside of a small coastal town in Ireland. Fragmented into short, wonderfully descriptive and often hilarious segments, it paints a picture of both the external and internal landscapes of the narrator.
Pond is not exactly a page-turner—it’s more of an invitation to savour each passage. There isn’t really any plot to speak of, and nothing in particular “happens,” although small instances and ideas are given profound treatment. This wild abandon of conventional narrative is one of the reasons why I love it so dearly, and why I find it so inspiring.
Would-be writers are often taught that there are certain key components to storytelling. Essential to master, we are told, is the PLOT. This involves an inciting incident, a main conflict, a lot of little conflicts, and an eventual resolution. We should also be sure to include characters, and dialogue, and a theme, etc., etc. This map of how to tell a story has always left me feeling a little bruised. I find it incredibly difficult. I have tried and tried to strengthen my ability to craft such a story, but you know what? It just never happened. I’m much more interested in moments, in words, in details. And that has always seemed like a detriment.
In an interview with the Irish Poet Laureate Sebastian Barry, Claire-Louise Bennett declares, a little self-consciously, but in no way apologetically, “I’m not really much of a storyteller, to be honest with you.” She goes on to say that as a child, she found stories alarming, and then says that she went to quite a bad school, really. As a child of young, sporty parents who were not remotely bookish, she was not introduced to really good books until her A-levels in school (around age 16).
How this reassures me! So often, when reading biographies or memoirs of writers I admire, I find myself enviously hearing of their literary upbringings, of their family’s libraries, of their exposure to the classics and the iconic stories of folk and fairy tales in their formative years. As a child who read cheerful and vacuous 1980s pop culture storybooks of My Little Pony and The Babysitter’s Club instead, I have sometimes despaired that some essential piece needed to be a really good writer might be missing from my history.
But Claire-Louise Bennett doesn’t seem to do things by the book (pun intended). Interviewed after the release of Pond in 2015 by The Honest Ulsterman, she talks about inhabiting the world in a different way, about how her very early writing was not intended to engage with anyone else at all, and about the fact that she doesn’t know why she was writing at all—it wasn’t to “figure things out” (which is often given as a reason for writing when we do not have an end goal or audience in mind).
“I had a sense of myself in the universe, if you like, quite strongly.…There was something slightly phantasmagorical about these writings. They didn’t make much sense, and their point wasn’t to make sense either. They were just a lot of words.”
In an unexpected and somewhat refreshing twist for a writer, she talks too, about the failings of language: “I’ve always struggled with language, and it just doesn’t seem to be adequate, or help me with the most important situations in my life.”
Claire-Louise Bennett, not surprisingly, has not followed the typical trajectory of an author whose debut book was rapturously received. It was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize in 2016, and my edition has no fewer than four pages of praise, contributed by everyone from The New Yorker to Library Journal to O, The Oprah Magazine. But Claire-Louise Bennett has seemingly not troubled herself to produce another book while her star is high in the sky. Instead, she writes short pieces for Frieze’s contemporary art magazine, and recently contributed an essay for Juxta Press’s Words for Portraits series, based on a self-portrait by surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning. In Bennett’s signature style, this essay, entitled Fish Out of Water, is singular, bewitching, and has a laugh-out-loud ending. Also in Bennett’s style, it is obscure enough that I had to order my copy direct from the press in Italy.
To be unabashedly oneself, a gifted writer who will stand up and say that they’re “not really much of a storyteller,” and to publish a book that is at once beautiful, quirky, witty, and eschewing of preconceived notions of narrative—now that’s what I call inspiring.
RECOMMENDED READING
Pond. Stinging Fly Press, 2015.
Fish Out of Water. Juxta Press, 2020.
Work in Frieze magazine, 2015-2020.
About Lindsay Hobbs
Lindsay is a freelance editor, writer, and podcaster living in the Haliburton Highlands of Ontario, Canada. In between reading books (and writing about them), she works as a library branch assistant and program developer. Currently, Lindsay is an editor at Cloud Lake Literary and the co-host of Story Girls: A Fortnightly Podcast About Books, with a Dash of Absurdity. You can find her personal bookish musings at her blog, Topaz Literary.
