Author Gemma Seltzer on writing women’s experiences in London
Mining the city for stories, London as a companion, and Ladywell's best coffee shop
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London gets quite badly treated in modern fiction. Too often it’s drafted in to serve as a recognisable backdrop, a lazy cliche or a clunky metaphor. So many people! So unfriendly! So much money! So much poverty!
But Gemma Seltzer loves London too much to treat it like that. In almost everything she’s written, from the fictional blog ‘5am London’, to the flash fiction of ‘Speak to Strangers’, through to her new short fiction collection ‘Ways of Living’, London is rendered with as much compassion and care as any of the ‘flesh and blood’ characters.
In this conversation with Gemma we asked her about how she created that working relationship with London, how the last two years has changed the way the city feels, how she drafted her new book while walking the streets, and why it was important to her to populate that book with women and their friends.
What’s your personal relationship with London? When did you first come to London and what made you stay here?
When I was writing Ways of Living I did a bit more delving into my passion for London and I discovered that my grandparents and great grandparents lived in Whitechapel, and that my great grandfather had a shop on Whitechapel Road. I knew some of that already but I don’t think I understood what it meant until I started really writing about London.
Whitechapel is so interesting historically. I used to work there and I loved to walk around that area because it’s one of those places that doesn’t seem to shed its history, you can see the traces of the past so much on the streets. So I feel like I’ve got London in me in more ways than I had really thought about until I started writing about it.
Your work is obviously very connected to the city and its history and it feels like (just to be cliche for a second) like London is a character in a lot of your stories. Is that something that you consciously set out to do, or is it just something you found yourself doing naturally?
I think one of the reasons I’ve always loved London and always wanted to be in London was the range of people here. London’s like a city of stories, it has so many people and so many different kinds of people.
The first creative project that I did was Speak to Strangers, which was about capturing conversations with random Londoners and presenting them back into the world in 100 word stories. For me that was a project about people. I wanted to see if I could chart a version of the city through the people who live here. So I would travel around to different places and try to map the city. That project was definitely about people, but once I’d finished it I realised it was about people in a place and how those two things intersect. It’s about how people live their lives in the city, what gives them freedom, the city being a companion and a witness and a friend and a confidante to people.
London is never just a place is it? To all the people I spoke to it was more than that; it was kind of holding them or they were in a constant conversation with London.
You did the Speak To Strangers projects in 2009. Was there a kind of selfish motivation there in terms of getting to know the city and going to places that you wouldn’t normally have gone to; almost giving yourself a reason to go and explore and see places and meet people?
I think that’s exactly it. I moved to the city in 2006 and I had a really interesting job and I was meeting loads of people and I was trying to make sense of the city. I was stimulated by everything and everybody and the concept of Speak to Strangers was really about capturing a sense of all that. I wanted to capture those fleeting moments.
For me, it felt like a very London thing, the idea that you could meet somebody at an event or a party, chat for a while and then never see them again. In that way London can be quite transient. At that time it really appealed to me that you could meet anyone and do anything and that any day you could find a new corner within all these different layers and sides of London. So I was trying to capture what I was doing in words and make sense of these new experiences and then offer them back to London like an act of generosity to the strangers I was speaking to, to the city itself.
The next thing you did was the Live Writing Series, is that right?
In between that I did a project called Look Up At The Sky which was about collecting quiet places in London. It was a personal, creative project about finding quiet pockets of peace amongst the hustle and bustle of London.
I’d had several years of talking to strangers and trying to get to know the city through all the people. Walking had played a big part of this work, so a new project where I was walking and trying to get a sense of the landscape through the rhythm of walking rather than through its people felt like a natural next step.
After that I did 5am London, which was a collaboration with a photographer taking place in different parts of London very early in the morning, to peel back the layers to find out what London is at 5am.
Really all of these projects are about trying to get a hold of a city that is so impossible to know and looking at it from different angles. Thinking about the sounds and the landscape and the people who live here, to try and find out what it is about this energy of London that means I never want to leave. I think London will always be able to offer me something new.
Yeah, it’s interesting isn’t it because you can slot into a very easy pattern in London. You can slot into your own little bubble, your own neighbourhood, your own friends, and all of a sudden this huge city becomes very narrow and if you don’t get out of that every now and push at the edges of what you experience every day then you risk getting bored of the place. Especially when you’ve been locked down for two years!
It’s interesting how many of us there are that never give up on London isn’t it? Even though it’s the most frustrating place in so many ways, it can be so expensive and so difficult. But it’s that wanting to know it or wanting to get close to it but knowing that it’s fleeting and knowing that it may not give you what you need… But still we go on!
I was thinking recently about the way that you can try on different selves in London. That’s a bit of a cliche maybe, but I think the city allows you to be both anonymous and part of a community at the same time and for me that feels really important. I’ve only been able to identify that feeling during lockdown when I wasn’t able to have both of those things simultaneously. When I couldn’t disappear into a crowd and be part of a community at the same time. Because it’s freeing to do that! It frees us from society’s expectations you know, and that’s liberating. As creative people we get to try on different selves through wandering through the crowd, to explore different kinds of people and pretend you’re someone else for a while. I think during lockdown it really struck me that I didn’t get both of those things anymore.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there. One of the things I missed during lockdown was the ability to lose myself in London, to be on my own among people I don’t know. Does that make sense? The ability to almost be part of different crowds and communities, and just kind of drifting in and out of those is a very London thing. You definitely capture some of that feeling in Ways of Living.
Well all of the stories in the book were drafted while I was walking around in the city. So there is something about London’s energy and the rhythm of walking that gives it its shape and structure. So yeah, it feels like, in that way, it is a very London book.
Tell us a little bit about that process. How do you draft a book while walking around London?
Well I walk a lot anyway. I always prefer to get off the Tube early and walk and connect up places by foot, especially when I’m going somewhere new. I know London well enough now to navigate around the streets, and because I like quiet London I’ve also got an internal map of the peaceful parts so I can wander around those.
I feel like I’m very alert and in the world when I’m walking so I don’t always have my notebook out. I don’t even have my phone out. I am just absorbing what I see, so the city’s always a backdrop to my writing. I’m sort of carrying it with me, the overheard conversations and memories and ideas are carried with me in my body while I’m walking around.
I keep a few notes in my notebook, but more or less I’m holding everything in my body and then when I get back to my desk the impressions that I’ve had, what I’ve remembered and what I’ve seen will just flow out. There’s a really nice quote from Grace Paley that I think about a lot, which says “You write from what you know, but you write into what you don’t know”. I like that idea that I will take what I’ve seen and heard and then I will write out of that. So I’m not looking to directly chart the city, I’m looking more for an impression.
All the stories in the book are set in reality you would know and there specific streets and places like Beigel Bake on Brick Lane and the Betsey Trotwood pub. But they sit alongside cafes and bookshops and other places that could possibly be there. It’s a mixture of the reality that I’ve seen and experienced and an imaginative territory and memories that have risen up as I’ve been walking around.
It was very nice to read a whole collection of stories from the female perspective. Why did you choose to do that? Why was it important for you to keep to that structure?
I knew I wanted to write a fictional book about women’s experiences in London because I read a lot of city books, and I love city books and I love psychogeography. But often they’re nonfiction. They’re people’s experiences in the landscape. And they’re often by men. The main writers working in that field are men…
It’s a very blokey genre. I don’t think anyone would dispute that!
Exactly. But there’s room for different kinds of voices because this subject is fascinating. It’s people walking and experiencing the landscape and looking at it from their experiences and looking at the different layers. I've recently been reading Tice Cin’s Keeping the House which is a beautiful, lyrical novel set in Tottenham (see our London fiction guide for more on that - ed). Vanessa Onwuemezi’s bold short story collection Dark Neighbourhood brings mythical cities and places to life in an extraordinary way, too.
Like Tom Chiver’s book, it’s literally the different layers of London. It’s such an amazing subject. But there are fewer women’s voices in that field and even fewer that are creating fiction around it, which is what I’m interested in. So with that in mind these stories kind of evolved on their own. I wrote a few stories and then realised that there were particular themes coming out of my fiction, which revolved around women walking in the city.
It felt important to me to populate my version of the city with women because I don’t see it so much in fiction. I don’t see it so much on television or films, and most of the action in the book takes place outside. All the stories take place whilst they’re walking or they’re outside the home. They’re in public. They’re in communal spaces. They’re in hotels and cafes and restaurants and shops and synagogues and parks and offices and all kinds of things. So we get to see how women navigate public spaces and navigate their relationships in those settings.
I was very intrigued by that. What does that look like from the perspective of many women side by side? How do they move around the city? How do they navigate it? What’s their wider world like? I love to think of the book as embodying the right of women to be visible and seen in the city in a way that you don’t always see in fiction or in the world.
The book is about friendship as well, and I think that the vein of psychogeography or new nature writing often presents a sole figure in the landscape. And while there are women on their own in my book, they’re often in pairs or in groups. They’re taking up space in the city with their friends and I love that. Again, we don’t see enough women with their friends. Friendship is such a vital part of our city lives, and I am interested in the version of ourselves we are with our friends so I wanted to explore that.
What are you working on right now?
This collection took me about eight years or so to write. It was almost like a jigsaw, with different versions of friendship, different parts of London, different kinds of people. I still don’t think I’m done with that yet! I realised Ways of Living has many knotty female friendships, so I’m working on something new that is still about friends and still about London, but is full of joy and passion, heartbreak and great affection. The novel really foregrounds friendship, as opposed to romantic relationships. And it’s set in south east London of course, where else?
That brings us nicely to the last question, which we like to ask everyone. Do you have a favourite local independent business that you’d like to tell people about?
Millions! But I’ll pick one. In Ladywell there’s a cafe called Oscar’s, which is the very best place in South East London to get a coffee. They are really community-minded, they’ve got brilliant, friendly staff and they’re leading the rejuvenation of our high street. They involve the whole community in making Ladywell a lovely place to live. Oscar’s in SE13. Go there!
You can read more about Gemma’s work on her website and you can buy Ways of Living through the Foyles website.
Gemma also runs Write & Shine, a programme of morning writing workshops currently taking place online. More on that here.
Follow Gemma on Twitter and on Instagram.
News bits
Sadiq Khan has told LBC that “he's looking forward to standing for another term as Mayor of London” and he doesn’t want to be leader of the Labour party.
The Guardian profiles Forest Gate community school, which has gone down to a four-and-a-half-day week (and might be going down to four days).
While Royal Mail deliveries are back to normal across most of the country, Covid-related absences are still effecting delivery offices in Camberwell, Herne Hill and West Norwood.
The New York Times has taken a long and in-depth look at the issues of “gentrification and displacement” at Brick Lane.
Apparently Westminster Council are thinking about replacing the monkey bars at Paddington Rec with “a smart activator screen,” which would show exercise classes. This has not gone down all that well.
Last year, there were 39,560 crypto ads on London’s transport system. That’s “the highest number of crypto ads recorded in any city around the world.”
If the closure of the Bank branch of the northern Line has screwed up your commute a bit, then Footways London as a few suggestions for walking routes to Bank:
From Thursday The Cartoon Museum has a new exhibition celebrating the 45th Anniversary of Judge Dredd and 2000 AD. ‘Dredd @ 45’ will take a look at the evolution of the character since 1977, and how artistic techniques have changed alongside the character.
