Creative Writing alumni: Jo Beall and her new novel

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By Jo Beall
 

 

Meadowlands Dawn is a multi-layered drama entwining love and politics across three decades. Verity, a naïve young white woman falls in love with Tariq Randeree, an older Indian anaesthetist and anti-apartheid activist. She follows him into the underground and is imprisoned and interrogated. At the end of Part One she is unsure what is true and who can be trusted. Part Two sees Verity thirty years later returning to South Africa as a recent widow, once again fixated on finding out what really happened.

The most rewarding part of the process was learning to write fiction and to do so alongside a great, if small cohort of people on the course with me, as well as wonderful staff and visiting writers to West Dean. Of course being accepted by a publisher was incredibly rewarding but it was sharing the process with other people on the same learning journey that stood out.

 

I was mostly motivated and inspired across the two years of the course and the two years subsequent to that during which I looked for an agent (unsuccessfully) and a publisher (with happy success). Of course there are down days when the words don’t come, or don’t come perfectly formed, or when your favourite words or paragraphs end up on the cutting room floor during the editing process, which I understand is a common experience. I kept my motivation alive by sitting down to write, every day, and especially through the West Dean alumni group who are an amazing group of people who are sharp in their critique and generous in their support.

 

I was an academic for over two decades at the London School of Economics and then moved into education leadership first at the University of Cape Town and then at the British Council. I have always written and am well published as a scholar, but writing fiction is another whole ball game. It was the pandemic and lockdown that gave me the time and inspiration to write a novel, and to learn to use my right brain alongside the left. This was no automatic switch but something I had to learn and I’m ever grateful to West Dean for that.

Part One is set almost entirely in a South African prison during the 1980s. It is inspired by real events, some of which happened to me. It was important for it to be historically accurate, not least because there were just a few years between the events that take place in Part One and the heady moment in May 1994 when Nelson Mandela became the first president of a new, non-racial, democratic South Africa. Without the benefit of hindsight, it was important to convey a sense of Verity and others living through history as it was experienced then, without any clear vision of when it would end.

Part Two is set thirty years later and takes place in a free South Africa, post-apartheid. The timeframe was chosen so that the protagonist, Verity, now a woman in her early fifties, was at a life stage where she was old enough to look back reflectively, but also young enough to act on events. The landscape and the changing nature of cityscapes are part of the continuities and changes she encounters, at a time of inherited hope and political disappointment born of over promise and human frailty.

West Dean under pandemic conditions especially, was a haven of creativity and human contact. I loved the interdisciplinary nature of the course and being exposed to other forms of creativity, especially as writing is such a solitary pursuit. The MA in Creative Writing and Publishing attracted me because the assessment was based on a novel in draft, written as a craft, not as the by-product of a study of literary theory. The focus on the act of writing as a way of understanding the world and as a transformative and regenerative act is something that makes the West Dean course unique and valuable. I hope that readers will recognise this in the journey of my protagonist, Verity, as she grows from an idealistic young woman to a reconciling truth that releases her from the captivities of the past.

 

In my current writing, I am in continual dialogue in my head with the experienced authors, sage minds and light humour I encountered at West Dean. The words of my tutors, fellow students and alumni, as well as the writers in residence, all ring in my ears as I sometimes default to the exposition of academic writing. By having these imaginary conversations or real flashbacks in my head, I am able to haul myself back into a more creative route towards sharing scenes, episodes and plots, as well as ideas, thoughts and feelings.

 

Jo Beall is will be coming back to visit West Dean on Wednesday 11 December for a book talk. She will be in conversation with course leader Mark Radcliffe about her new novel, 'Meadowlands Dawn' as well as discussing what fiction offers as a way of trying to understand the world and ourselves and writing as an act of transformation.

 

Book here

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