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Hello, my name is Melissa McCarthy. In 2019,

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Sternberg Press brought out this book, by me.

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It's called Sharks, Death, Surfers: An Illustrated Companion.

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It's hard to pin down the genre that best describes it. It's partly armchair ethnography, revisionist history, film criticism.

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It's an appreciation of certain forms of art and literature from classical times down to the present day.

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And it's also just a story about a line of investigation I undertook, sharing some of the brilliant things I discovered along the way.

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My prompt to write it was this. I was interested in the obituary as a literary form - 

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I studied English - when I carried out an interview with a professor of French called Andy Martin, who used to work for The Times.

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The Times newspaper has a lobby correspondent who covers politics,

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A business correspondent who writes about business.

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Martin suggested to the editor that he should be their surfing correspondent, writing about the activity, the art, of surfing.

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They took him up on the idea and off he went to Hawaii. So I had an interesting conversation with him,

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and from it I started looking at Captain Cook and his journals; at ideas of exploring, mapping and encountering the world; and at surfing.

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Then I realised that you can't - well, I can't - talk about surfing without talking about sharks.

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They're the flip side. The constant cartilaginous companion that's always with us, just the other side of the surface or the screen.

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And as well as the conceptual this prompted a lot of scientific research into shark biology.

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I looked at shark eyeballs, at the shark's osmotic processes,

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at its whole perceptual world and ecology, the 'merkwelt' as the excellent imported German word has it.

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And this set me thinking about a lot of other related lines. I looked at the Kennedys,

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JFK and the rest of the constantly dying clan; at the physics of friction and slipping; I looked a lot at the book and the film of Jaws.

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It might not be apparent that these are related topics, but that's why I wrote about it. And the process of writing?

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It took a long time. I began the project when I was eight months pregnant thinking, well, I'll just try and knock this out before the baby arrives,

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but it didn't work out like that. My process was that whenever I was free,

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I'd sit down every day with my pen and notebook with some postcards stuck on the wall to look at when I was pondering.

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And I just did this until I felt I'd covered everything. Then there was a year or so to pull it into shape.

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Nine months looking for a publisher. Six months of image research.

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When I began writing, galleries and museums hadn't digitised their collections,

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but by the time I'd finished, there was a vast mass of material online which has been very helpful.

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I'd say that the hardest part of writing was trying to work out the line between being too obscure and too obvious.

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When I stumbled onto a really good idea, it was hard to believe that everyone wouldn't already be aware of such an important discovery,

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but you work it out. And the third question I was asked for this podcast was what did I learn at Worcester that has helped my writing career?

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And this was very difficult to answer. At Worcester

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I learnt that it's a privilege to live and work in a really beautiful environment.

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I got into the habit of pursuing research and investigation right down to the end of the line.

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And then beyond that, I think that the main thing I learned was not at Worcester, but from or since Worcester.

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And that's that there's no point in rushing things.

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Ideas and people that you encounter can take a long time to filter through.

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There are parts of my book that have their roots in specific conversations that I had with my tutors, Mr Wilson and David Bradshaw.

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And there are parts that come from much more recent thinking.

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But the main thing I realised is that the point of something you learn at Worcester might not become clear to you until years later;

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these things take time. And thank you for giving me your time in listening.

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If this podcast has piqued your interest, I've also got a radio series you might like.

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It's available online called Melissa McCarthy's View from A Shark.

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But for now, that's it. Bye.