How can we bring a place alive in our writing? How can we tackle the challenges of writing different types of books at different times in our writing career? Merryn Glover talks about her experience in this episode.

In the intro, Kobo launches Kobo Plus in the US and UK; Amazon is closing Book Depository; Amazon layoffs in devices and books; end of Kindle newsstand; Moonshots and Mindsets with Emad Mostaque; Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose.

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Merryn Glover is the award-winning author of historical fiction and narrative nonfiction nature books, as well as writing plays and radio drama. Her latest book is The Hidden Fires: A Cairngorms Journey with Nan Shepherd.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

Writing a book based on someone else's work
How Nan Shepherd's books started in obscurity and later became well-known
Hallmarks of the nature writing genre
Legality of using someone else's name and works in your novel, copyright, and permissions needed
The process of writing a sense of place
Radio drama and dramatic adaptations of written works
How to deal with a failed publisher

You can find Merryn at MerrynGlover.com or on Twitter @MerrynGlover

Transcript of Interview with Merryn Glover

Joanna: Merryn Glover is the award-winning author of historical fiction and narrative nonfiction nature books, as well as writing plays and radio drama. Her latest book is The Hidden Fires: A Cairngorms Journey with Nan Shepherd. So welcome to the show, Merryn.

Merryn: Thank you, Joanna. It's just a real joy to be here to chat with you today.

Joanna: This is a fascinating topic. But first up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing.

Merryn: Well, like probably most of your listeners, I have loved words since I was very little. I love books, reading. I grew up in South Asia, and Nepal, and India, and Pakistan. My parents were working in linguistics and literacy, so being surrounded by other languages all the time, I guess that really added to the sense of love of words and communication and language.

I was always talking to myself as a child. And I think as I've grown up and become a writer, it's just the adult version of talking to yourself in lots of ways. I wanted more siblings, I'm the youngest of two, and my parents didn't comply. So I had to invent all of the other 10 children in my family to keep entertained.

So, I just always loved stories, but I'm also really fascinated by inhabiting experiences beyond my own. So I think that is a big part of where my writing has come from.

I went to university in Australia, and I did English drama and dance there. Part of the drama course there, we were always devising material, making up plays and shows and things like that. So in a sense, that kind of led to my first major piece of writing work, which was a stage play after I'd finished university.

But that actually came out of doing a lot of reminiscence work with elderly people living with dementia and capturing a lot of their life stories. That became the ground of this first play, because it was about a woman with dementia and her sister who cares for her.

That was a stage play initially, but then it was adapted for BBC Radio Scotland. And so the plays that I went on to write after that were all radio plays. And so, that was kind of the first sort of major piece of writing that went out there.

Then I did one of those correspondence courses in writing that you can get, shows how old I am because it was in the days when you literally had to type out your work and send it off to the tutor and then they would send it back. I was back working in Kathmandu at the time, so it was Air Mail. That would take weeks to hear back from the tutor.

The early phases of that course were journalism. So then I had some little articles in The Guardian Weekly, Letter from Nepal and things like that, and a few other pieces of journalism that came out of doing that course. It was really valuable, but it also made me realize that what I loved writing was more imaginative material, was the stories, the stuff that I wanted to make up from my head.

So that led to my next kind of major project, which was a series of short stories set in Nepal. Most of them have been as individuals, published in anthologies, or competitions or broadcast on the radio. And I think at some point, I would love to bring out the collection of that early set of stories.

So that was the early stages. And then I went on to write novels. And now it's this nonfiction book, The Hidden Fires: A Cairngorms Journey with Nan Shepherd.

Joanna: I love this. So you're not sticking within a genre at all. You've basically done almost everything. I mean, that's brilliant. Because look, to be honest, this is the creative process, right? It's, I'm interested in this, I'm going to write this, and I'm going to see where it goes, and that it's unfolded this way.

But tell us, why did you write The Hidden Fires? Because for me, it seems it's related to the Nan Shepherd book, and some people might not have heard of her.

What drew you to Nan Shepherd? Why write a book that is based so much on someone else's work?

Merryn: Sure. So I guess the simple first answer to the question is because my publisher of my last novel invited me to submit a proposal for this book.

So to fill in some background for the listeners, Nan Shepherd was an author from Aberdeen. She was publishing novels and poetry in the late 1920s, early 30s. She was a very recognized figure in the Scottish Literary Renaissance at the time, a modernist author. She was very well respected back then. Some of the reviews compared her with Virginia Woolf, she would be reviewed over in America as well as here.

Then there was this period of a long time when she didn't pub...

Writing Nature Memoir With Merryn Glover