Hello, my name is Melissa McCarthy. In 2019,
Sternberg Press brought out this book, by me.
It's called Sharks, Death, Surfers: An Illustrated Companion.
It's hard to pin down the genre that best describes it. It's partly armchair ethnography, revisionist history, film criticism.
It's an appreciation of certain forms of art and literature from classical times down to the present day.
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.
My prompt to write it was this. I was interested in the obituary as a literary form -
I studied English - when I carried out an interview with a professor of French called Andy Martin, who used to work for The Times.
The Times newspaper has a lobby correspondent who covers politics,
A business correspondent who writes about business.
Martin suggested to the editor that he should be their surfing correspondent, writing about the activity, the art, of surfing.
They took him up on the idea and off he went to Hawaii. So I had an interesting conversation with him,
and from it I started looking at Captain Cook and his journals; at ideas of exploring, mapping and encountering the world; and at surfing.
Then I realised that you can't - well, I can't - talk about surfing without talking about sharks.
They're the flip side. The constant cartilaginous companion that's always with us, just the other side of the surface or the screen.
And as well as the conceptual this prompted a lot of scientific research into shark biology.
I looked at shark eyeballs, at the shark's osmotic processes,
at its whole perceptual world and ecology, the 'merkwelt' as the excellent imported German word has it.
And this set me thinking about a lot of other related lines. I looked at the Kennedys,
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.
It might not be apparent that these are related topics, but that's why I wrote about it. And the process of writing?
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,
but it didn't work out like that. My process was that whenever I was free,
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.
And I just did this until I felt I'd covered everything. Then there was a year or so to pull it into shape.
Nine months looking for a publisher. Six months of image research.
When I began writing, galleries and museums hadn't digitised their collections,
but by the time I'd finished, there was a vast mass of material online which has been very helpful.
I'd say that the hardest part of writing was trying to work out the line between being too obscure and too obvious.
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,
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?
And this was very difficult to answer. At Worcester
I learnt that it's a privilege to live and work in a really beautiful environment.
I got into the habit of pursuing research and investigation right down to the end of the line.
And then beyond that, I think that the main thing I learned was not at Worcester, but from or since Worcester.
And that's that there's no point in rushing things.
Ideas and people that you encounter can take a long time to filter through.
There are parts of my book that have their roots in specific conversations that I had with my tutors, Mr Wilson and David Bradshaw.
And there are parts that come from much more recent thinking.
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;
these things take time. And thank you for giving me your time in listening.
If this podcast has piqued your interest, I've also got a radio series you might like.
It's available online called Melissa McCarthy's View from A Shark.
But for now, that's it. Bye.