AUTHOR’S NOTES

linguistic communities are. Without living communities, there can be no thriving Welsh language.

“I was also keen to offer a clear-eyed document of the west Wales I knew from the 1980s and 1990s. Nostalgia can become embalming. My ambition was to keep the work mobile through anecdotes, changes in register and typeface, bursts of pop songs, citations and changes in sentence and section length.”

Tell me about your decision to write prose poems and why this approach appealed to you.

“Some of the key ideas were generated from a journalistic essay that I wrote for O’r Pedwar Gwynt about 1980s gigs in Wales. The work was wellreceived. I was encouraged by my husband to put down an oral history on paper, for my daughter (who has been raised a Welsh-speaker in Ireland).

“Working full-time as an academic means that time for writing creatively is precious. I set myself a rule – each section was to be 20 sentences, which felt doable. The paragraph became a unit of thought, the sentence became a measure which enabled departures into play, lyricism, sometimes humour. rule-governed writing offers a paradoxical freedom. The format enabled writing ‘to begin again and again.’ rules oddly generate chance – I found it liberating.”

How does the Wales of the 1980s and 1990s differ from the Wales of today?

“I have been away from Wales since 2002, so it is dangerous to generalise. The 1980s was a tough decade. Now I can only speak from my understanding of my own community, which is struggling acutely with incredibly high house prices, second homes, a disproportionate retired