MUSE :: INTERVIEW with Katherine May the author of "Wintering"
The Muse Letter No. 58
In the midst of winter last year I was reading a book month by month called “Wintering”. It felt like perfect timing to read about the season and metaphorically speaking that moment in your life when everything feels bleak, unmoving and dark. Katherine May the author of said book took me on a journey through a time in her life where her own kind of wintering was very apparent.
I think that’s why I love memoirs so much lately because it connects us and makes us feel less alone. Every paragraph a blanket I could wrap myself in.
In this week’s Muse Letter I speak to Katherine May about the influence of bad teachers, writer’s block and how writing a memoir is in many ways a political act. Follow her on Instagram here.
How did you start writing?
From a very young age as soon as I could physically write I was writing stories and plays and poems and always enjoyed it tremendously but then in my teens I gave up because I just got embarrassed and really self-conscious about this kind of thing. People at school were taking the piss, so I just gave it up.
For a long time I didn’t write at all. In fact I had to go and see a therapist before I could even get one word down to overcome my big fear of failure. I was in my mid-twenties when I realised I was still nurturing this ambition to write and I found it very hard to go back to it then. I had a real block and it felt like a lot more pressure as an adult than when I was a child. So I did a course and slowly with time found my way back to it.
It must have been really hard at school then. When you were sharing it back then when you were a teenager, was it fiction or was it personal stories?