We caught up with the newest tutor on the Creative Writing MA block at University of Brighton, Dr Bea Hitchman, who shared her experience as a novelist and academic exploring contemporary queer fiction, ethics of historical fiction, recommended reads and the impact of early cinema on people’s romantic subjectivity.

Bea also reveals how best to approach the ending of a novel… and so much more!

Read through the interview or watch the full discussion below (or both!)

You are the newest addition to the Tutor team on the Creative Writing MA at University of Brighton – how are you impacting the course?

I am a new lecturer in Creative Writing, I joined in January. I teach across all levels right from first year all the way up to PhD supervision. I’m a prose specialist, I have a go at poetry but I’m a little lost if things go beyond a sonnet. I’m always doing my own practice based research and hopefully feeding those insights back to students – but teachers learn as much from students!

Your research focuses on contemporary queer fiction, the ethics of historical fiction and writing the remote past – what is it about these areas that interest you?

My research is really around contemporary queer fiction, ethics of historical fiction and increasingly writing the remote past. I’m always drawn to this idea that history is a site of possibility for us, but also a contested site. Margaret Atwood says “if you are going to delve into the past you’ll have to deal with those from previous layers of time”, it’s

this idea that you are always in dialogue with the past, in some way owing something to the people that have gone before. This comes into sharp focus when we think about queer communities of the past when the history has been lost or warped, or only exists through criminal record for example.

There is a whole sense of affective imaginative sense of community that isn’t there. I’ve been really interested in how we go about doing things like ‘imaginative recovery work’ – building an imaginative sense of a useable queer past. But of course this presents ethical questions about how much you can make up.

Most recently I’ve become really interested in what happens if we try to write a past where there isn’t a written record, pre-alphabet. I’ve become fascinated by decorated caves and art representations. We are starting to see now that it wasn’t potentially homosapiens who were the first artists. That can be challenging to us with our anthropocentric ideas, but the evidence is changing and that impacts how we as a species see ourselves.

What reading do you recommend that explores queer fiction, ethics of historical fiction or writing the remote past?

Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes – a science book about how we re-interpret the evidence around Neanderthals to see them as fully formed communities and not knuckle-dragging savages.

The Ethics of Opting Out – Queer Theory’s Definat Subjects by Mari Ruti – intervening in a debate of lived reality for lots of LGBTQ+ people around how we exist in this neo-liberal matrix and how we manage different feelings of shame, panic, loss, and how much we try and blend ourselves into the hetero-normative matrix.

I was civilly partnered, first in line to do that and my wife and I got married, but all the time there are people around us that thought we were trying to fit in with the heterosexual ideal. There is always this lingering question of how much you want to go along with this late capitalist ideal.

This contribution from Mari Ruti is really helping me think through the strain of my own experience of normative and non-normative. A fantastic scholar and a very clear writer.

Described by the Guardian as ‘Complex and cerebral, (Petite Mort) is softened by beautifully drawn characters, lightly drizzled period detail and an abiding suspicion that love and cinema might be part of the same illusion.’ your novel Petite Mort was published by Serpent’s Tail in 2013, what were the key themes you explored in that story?

That review has really put a finger on love and cinema being part of the same illusion. The themes emerge in hindsight. In the time of writing it I was working on a film set as a runner and a video editor. I was very exposed to the idea that the cinematic hyperreal took a lot of work, it’s so meticulously done. When we watch something on screen we accept it as this beautiful hyperreal reality. Behind the scenes I was seeing the gap behind this glossy image and all the work, effort and ideology it took to make that. There is an anecdote that illustrates the moral panic around early cinema, where an audience in the late 1800s saw a train plummeting towards them and they all darted towards the exit. I was really interested in what mass produced moving image did to people’s subjectivity, romantically.

Petit Mort was also adapted into a ten-part Woman’s Hour drama on Radio 4  – what were your views on this?

Many more people heard an interpretation of the book. That was frightening for a while. Suddenly my name was out there. It did feel a little bit like coming out, particularly with gay content. There was lovely feedback and such lovely feedback.

Over the past year of lockdown and social distancing how has your writing been impacted? Writing is often seen as an individual pursuit, has this period of isolation made it easier for you to connect to writing, or have you faced obstacles that have made it more difficult – what has helped?

A colleague recently made it apparent that writers need quite a lot of selfish alone time. I also feel that during the pandemic we had lots of enforced solitude but I think it has to be a choice to feel productive, otherwise you just feel isolated – I think authors need to be in control of when they sit down to write or when they are social. Even though there has been lots of time available I don’t think it has been that productive.

Sitting down remotely with people on Teams. I’ve been sitting down with friends on Teams and we’ll write for two hours. There’s no talking but there is a presence in the room. Jess Moriarty and I put these ‘Let’s Write’ sessions in place on a Wednesday where people can drop in, have a bit of social time and also accomplish a short burst of writing. I think its about structure.

You have a new book scheduled for publication on 5^th August 2021 – what is it and what’s it all about?

It’s called All of You Every Single One and it’s set in 1910. It’s about two women who elope together from France to Vienna. This book is an attempt to see what happens in a very long relationship. There is a lot to contend with politically in Vienna, a lot of Freud and currents of desire weaving through it. It’s a love story set against the birth modernism.

You are a theorist of endings/closure events of novels – what bits of advice would you give to writers out there who are looking to nail the end of their novel?

Coming to the end of a novel, readers are in a weird position. If you think about reading a physical book, you can see you are coming towards the end because the pages are running out – you are approaching that jumping off point where you are going to get thrown out into the world. If you’ve enjoyed the novel you won’t want to go there, but it’s the point where the real world starts to intrude in the story.

I think of the endings of novels are a bit like a beach! You reader is looked forward and back in this weird fuzzy space where they expect to see a plot resolution of some kind, and also some cultural meaning inserted into the text. I think that’s why you often get this weird zooming out moment at the end so you see it in the Line of Beauty, you also see it in the Line of Duty too!

The reader is moving that position of being outside the text, all you have to do is shepherd that and make it enjoyable. Leave them feeling changed in someway, it’s a bit ceremonial. Think of endings of novels like a beach and you won’t go too far wrong!

To keep up to date with Bea’s upcoming publications and projects (Line of Duty obsessions too), follow @hitchmanbea on Twitter .

Article written by Joey Lee