See also Davies’s website, including earlier and other versions of chapters related to The Welsh Girl, and a deleted section from that novel:
http://www.peterhodavies.com/oeo.htm

and text of interview from Sydney Writers Festival 2008 [see also videos online]:
Interviewer: Peter thanks for joining us today.

Peter Ho Davies: Thanks for having me here.

Interviewer: Why did you become a writer?

Peter: I think like a lot of writers, I started off by being a reader of course, and I at first wanted to become a writer, probably when I was thirteen or fourteen.
And at that point I'd read nothing but science fiction and kind of bad science fiction like novelisations of science fiction movies back then. And I stumbled across in a book store, a book called 'Who Writes Science Fiction?', it was a book of interviews with science fiction writers and I read that and was really interested in what those guys had to say about what they were doing.
It was really the first time that I'd thought about becoming a writer.
My father, as it turns out was an engineer you know I eventually went off to college initially to study science and I could sort of imagine becoming an engineer or a scientist.
And it was hard for me as a kid to imagine becoming a writer but because so many of these science fiction writers were engineers or scientists first and then had become writers as well, I just began to think that I can maybe write this stuff that I love to read, so that's really the first sort of glimmer of it.
I wasn't a very good science fiction writer I have to admit.
If I had been any good at it, I might still be doing that but I've gradually moved on to other kinds of writing.

Interviewer: What inspires you to write?

Peter: Oh, so many things really, I don't think it can be - you can't put your finger on just one thing.
Sometimes it'll be things going on in my life, it can also be other things that I've read, that have really inspired me, or that I've loved, that I've admired in other writers' work.
I think probably though the instinct that makes me want to write is just to understand things, either understand aspects of my own life, understand the world.
So, very often in the fiction that I write, it's an effort for me to try and understand why the people did the things they did or why the world is set up in this particular way in a particular story.

Interviewer: How do you balance teaching and writing?

Peter: Probably badly, I would say.

I mean I love teaching and I find it kind of actually inspiring to me, although I will have to say it's - I feel, I'm spoiled as a teacher.
I'm nearly always in rooms of other young writers, who want to learn how to write.
And that means I'm always in classrooms where the kids all wanted to be there and are doing something they love so it's a great teaching experience for me, and the reason why I say that I probably balance it badly is that I probably give up a little writing time for the teaching.
But I think any time one teaches, you know, one ideally has to love the students a little bit and love what you're doing with them.
And I think anything you love like that you're inclined to give up a little extra time for, so I always thought the balance probably leans a little bit more towards the teaching but I'm not sure I would have it any other way, frankly.

Interviewer: What's your inspiration for your characters and their relationships?

Peter Ho Davies: Oh, so many different things, probably when I think about all of my characters, although they are, in many cases very different ...in terms of their life experiences from me, they're not - you know, they're not these sort of cloaked ...versions or disguised versions of myself exactly.
They're all though, I think, connected to me in ways I often describe my work as being emotionally autobiographical, so even though I've not lived the lives of most of my characters,
I do feel I have gone through some of the emotions that they have gone through.
So if a character of mine in war time is facing extreme fear, I'll try to think of some equivalent in my own life where ...I've been fearful or felt in some kind of anxiety and sort of think about those emotions for myself ...and then project them into that space for the character.

Interviewer: How do you make your characters convincing?

Peter: Oh, well, whether or not they are convincing or not of course really lies in the eye of the beholder, the eye of the reader.
For me it goes a little bit back to that question we were just talking about, if I can believe in them for myself, if I can believe in their motives, their actions, can believe in them emotionally, I hope that initially it's a case ...of convincing myself as their writer of their reality and hopefully that if I can pull that off, then it can convey itself to the reader as well.

Interviewer: Do you have a favourite character?

Peter: I have a bunch of favourite characters; to some degree I'm probably obliged to learn to love all of them to write about them.
Even the ones who do terrible things you have to find some point of sympathy with them but in my novel 'The Welsh Girl', strangely enough, there is a character there who is half-German and half-Jewish.
His father is Jewish, his mother is German and he's a refugee from Germany during the Second World War, comes to work in Britain for British intelligence and, you know, every detail about his life is incredibly different from my ... own life and yet partly because he's drawn between these various loyalties to Germany, to England, between his Jewish-ness and his German-ness, I feel a great sympathy with him partly because, you know, having a Welsh father and a Chinese mother, having been born and brought up in England and now in living in the US, I feel that same sense that I think he does, of not knowing quite sure where one belongs ... or what one's identity is, or to whom one's allegiances are owed.

So I have a lot of sympathy for this character Rotheram in the novel even though he's very distinct from me, very unlike me in other ways.

But, there are lots of characters I think one has and even if they're distant characters, one learns to love them and, in fact, you close that distance between characters who are very unlike one's self through that act of loving them ...and getting to know them very well.

Interviewer: Rotheram appears only at the beginning and the end of 'The Welsh Girl'.

Why did you choose to have him appear only twice?
Peter Ho Davies: Well it's really that he's, for me, a great way of exploring this character of Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy Fuehrer, who is also a prisoner in Wales at this time and because the novel is about and sort of features, German prisoners of war.

But they're sort of, you know, average soldiers who'd been captured for the most part. But I wanted to explore both the experience of an average soldier but also one of the leaders of the German government.

One of the order-givers, essentially when we think of the morality questions of the Third Reich.
So, Hess provides a little bit of background, I think gives us a sense of the larger conflict going on behind my main characters.
Rotheram, simply being half Jewish also of course speaks into those core issues.

Interviewer: How do you plot a story?

Peter: There are so many different ways I think about plot in a story.
I've certainly gone through most of them in the various stories that I've written.
Sometimes I do have a sort of plan for the story.
Most typically though I'll have some idea of the direction the story is going in.
The trick I find as a writer is not to force the story to go there if during the course of writing it seems to go in some other direction.
So I often have an ending in mind.
The story may finally stop short of that ending or maybe might go through that ending in some instances as well.
I tend to think a story is ... at least as I begin the draft of them as almost like a scientific experiment in that I kind of have a hypothesis,
I'm going to test it in the lab and it may be proved to be true.
The story may indeed end where I think it ends or indeed my hypothesis may be wrong and the story may end somewhere else which means I learn something new about the stories or the characters.

Interviewer: Your stories explore themes of belonging and identity.

Why are these themes important to you?

Peter: Sure, I think they became very important to me as I was writing the novel because I started it just before September 11th, 2001 but wrote most of it in the aftermath of the attacks on that day and I was writing it in the US where there was a lot of talk of patriotism in the wake of the attacks.

While I think that patriotism is a powerful force of drawing a community together, often in very useful and very strong ways, I also feel it can be a tool that can be misused in the wrong hands, sometimes politically.

It became I think really interesting to think about patriotism, just the word 'patriotism', the way it's constructed, as you know : love of our 'Fatherland', our 'Motherland.'

Of course 'Fatherland', seems very important for the German prisoners in the novel 'The Welsh Girl'.

And because I'd written previously on the relationships between parents and children and this difficulty as children loving our parents as much as they love us, this felt like one space in which parents or the older generation expect children not only to love the 'Fatherland' or the 'Motherland' intensely, but even to give their lives for it.

So those issues became very important to me and also felt like they it linked back into some of the more personal issues that I dealt with in previous work as well, just that those personal issues now were on a more national, more global stage.

Interviewer: What responsibility to be historically correct do you accept as a fiction writer?

Peter: Not too much responsibility.
I've said in the past that if I have to choose between fact that's less interesting and a more interesting fiction I'll gravitate towards the fiction.

I am a fiction writer after all.

But particularly when writing about the Second World War and bumping up against questions of, you know, the concentration camps, the Holocaust it did feel very important to try to be as accurate as possible.

So I did do as much research as I could.

It's still a question, and one can only be human in these regards,

I'm sure that there are aspects of that period that I'm evoking that I'm inaccurate about but I did want to try and be as faithful as I could to the reality of the situation.

Interviewer: Can you describe what it's like to be a writer?

Peter Ho Davies: It's really hard to summarise that, the actual day-to-day existence of it is probably pretty mundane.

I sit down, I face the blank piece of paper, it's still very hard for me to do every day.

There are a lot of times when I doubt that I can do it, I have a lot of self doubt about being a writer. I think when I was younger and thinking about becoming a writer, I thought it would be very cool.

And the truth is it's not all that cool.

And actually I was a little disappointed with that for a while but then it dawned on me that coolness is the antithesis of being a writer, you might define coolness as a kind of ability to go into an unusual situation and be unfazed by it, take it in stride, be really relaxed, be very calm about the whole thing.

Writers though, tend to be the people who notice everything, you go to new spaces and it's look at that, look at that, look at that ... and that's not very cool but it is very true to being a writer, that you're always noticing details ... and bringing them back and therefore into your fiction.

Interviewer: What advice would you give someone who wants to be a writer?

Peter: There are so many things.

Probably now when I think about it and I work with, when I'm teaching, with a lot of young talented writers and ...almost the one thing they lack, precisely because they're young and talented, is patience.

The great French writer Flaubert talks about 'talent is long patience', he says.

And I never understood that when I read that quote when I was younger but it takes a long time, the writing career and the writing life.

Even when one has a moment of success and I wrote the first story I published when I was eighteen and ... I think it came out when I was twenty one but I didn't write another story that got published until I was 26 or 27.

So there is a long stretch of time in that process.

This novel took seven years to write, which now that I'm finished with it, feels like about the length of time it needed to take but ... but of course in the middle of it, it felt like forever, I mean literally because I thought I ... might not finish the book and it really would take forever.

And it's important I think to have the patience to let the characters speak to you in some ways.

Interviewer: Thanks Peter for your time today.

Peter: It's been a great pleasure.

©State of New South Wales, Department of Education and Training 2008

Author Profile - www.contemporarywriters.com
Peter Ho Davies
Biography

Peter Ho Davies was born in 1966 to Welsh and Chinese parents. He has degrees in Physics and English, and was awarded an MA in Creative Writing from Boston University. He has worked in Malaysia, Singapore, and the USA, and was also, for a time, UK business manager for Varsity.

His work has appeared in a variety of magazines and newspapers, and his short fiction is widely anthologized, including selections for Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards 1998 and Best American Short Stories 1995, 1996 and 2001. His own first published collection of short stories was The Ugliest House in the World (1998), which contains tales set in Malaysia, South Africa and Patagonia. This collection won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award and the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. His second collection, Equal Love, was published in 2000.

Peter Ho Davies lives in the United States and directs the MFA Programme in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. He is a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. In 2003, he was named by Granta magazine as one of twenty 'Best of Young British Novelists'.

His first novel, The Welsh Girl, set in a Welsh village during the second world war, was published in 2007.

The Ugliest House in the World Granta, 1998
Equal Love Granta, 2000
The Welsh Girl Sceptre, 2007

Prizes and awards

1997 H. L. Davis Oregon Book Award The Ugliest House in the World
1998 Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize The Ugliest House in the World
1999 PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award The Ugliest House in the World
2000 Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Fiction) (shortlist) Equal Love
2000 New York Times Notable Book of the Year Equal Love
2001 Asian American Literary Award (shortlist) Equal Love
2008 British Book Awards Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year (shortlist) The Welsh Girl

Critical Perspective

As the English-born son of Chinese and Welsh parents, and living as he does in the United States, there is something of the outsider to Peter Ho Davies. His two collections of short stories, The Ugliest House in the World (1998) and Equal Love (2000) have looked at the way in which human beings deal with the reality of being in some way outside of every relationship to which they belong, be that filial, familial, romantic or platonic.

Anthologised several times and celebrated by many critics as being reminiscent of Joyce and Raymond Carver, Ho Davies has also won several awards for his work, as well as finding a place on Granta’s prestigious 'Best of Young British Novelists' list. Currently working on his first novel, Ho Davies is a writer of some considerable power. Eschewing formal experimentation in favour of imbuing his stories with emotional depth, he is an acute observer of the often unsettling ordinariness of life; his stories resonate with simple yet beautifully judged images. He conveys eternal truths with precision: the search for connection, the need for emotional reciprocity, the complexity of sentimental ties. Yet Ho Davies suffuses his work with subtle ambiguities. The reader can never be sure of a narrative stance. His stories have that magical breath of independence which allows for personal interpretation; they rest in the mind long after the final page is turned, demanding examination while resisting simple analysis.

Ho Davies’ two collections of stories are impressive in their temporal, geographical and emotional range. The reader is taken from modern-day Chinatown in San Francisco to a Welsh slate quarry at the end of the 19th century, from the Malaysian jungle in the 1940s to 1960s New Hampshire. Ho Davies displays an impressive variety of voices, a disparate series of narrators and protagonists which reveals his desire (and ability) to occupy the mental space of those far removed from his own sphere: a heroin addict attempting to win back custody of her son in 'Everything You Can Remember in Thirty Seconds is Yours to Keep'; a young girl hoping to find a new love for her divorced father in 'Brave Girl'; a lieutenant in the Boer War suffering from flatulence during an officers’ dinner in 'Relief'; a middle-aged man working for a helpline that specialises in dealing with potential suicides in 'I Don’t Know, What Do You Think?'

Ho Davies’ work is notable for its confidence, its directness and its clarity. There is nothing showy about his writing. He relies upon the carefully understated sentence, and the spaces between words. In 'On the Terraces', from Equal Love, a man keeps vigil by the bedside of his brother who is dying of AIDS. ‘Every few minutes I try to look up to see if he’s awake. I watch the circles of condensation bloom and fade against his condensation mask, and then go back to my paper.’ The choice of the verbs ‘bloom’ and ‘fade’ is inspired; Ho Davies conveys with impressive economy a sense of the brief burst of life, an explosion of quiddity which is nothing but a prelude to the inevitable ultimate finality. And then, following the terse beauty of the image the reader is brought short with the abruptness of the next phrase. The brother goes back to his paper. We understand that there are hidden depths to this relationship, a past, things left unsaid, stories and rivalries and issues unresolved. We sense the brother is acting out of duty, wherein there is also love, but a love which is somehow indistinguishable from that duty.

In the best of Ho Davies there is also the suggestion of dramatic possibility, of places unexplored. Many of his pieces could be extended. Indeed, one story, 'Today is Sunday', from Equal Love, began life as a novel, before becoming a beautiful eight-page meditation on father/son relationships during which the son pays an unexpected visit to his father. When told his timing is bad he asks, ‘Christ. Am I not allowed to care?’ There is more poignancy in that one simple question than in many 400-page novels. 'A Union', from The Ugliest House in the World, is, at 80 pages, the longest story from Ho Davies’ two books to date and one that would perhaps gain something from the longer form. It examines the affect of a prolonged strike on a small Welsh slate mining community and is also a subtle portrait of a marriage. It reveals Ho Davies’ gift for historical fiction and in its tone, its rich palette of colours, its earthy feel for the raw lives of those whose very existence was shaped by the ground upon which they stood, it recalls Bruce Chatwin’s sublime On the Black Hill. Yet the reader is left wanting more. It is no surprise that Ho Davies’ first novel is to be a work of historical fiction.

Ho Davies’ first book, The Ugliest House in the World, is notable for the different worlds to which the reader is taken. That they are completely convincing, and that they are evoked with an exhilarating and vivid attention to detail and a depth of feeling which is not at all fashionable in modern literature, is Ho Davies’ triumph. In his second collection, Equal Love, there is a more consistent theme, what Margot Livesey has described as ‘the impossible compromises of love.’ It is this themic unity which gives Ho Davies’ second book a more polished coherence than its predecessor. There is still the same impressive range of subject matter and voices (The Literary Review described it as a ‘feat of ventriloquism’) yet there is a certain refinement, a more pronounced sense of purpose. The majority of the stories are set in the United States where Ho Davies lives and works. Equal Love is a series of meditations on the bonds and ties of love, particularly between parents and children, but it also examines the ebb and flow of power and relevance across the generations. 'The Hull Case' deals with a couple who cannot have children; 'Small World' with the impending arrival of a child, and 'Frogmen' with the consequences of the death of one. The title story examines the relationship between two friends who, on the point of committing a very awkward adultery observe their respective son and daughter kissing and with a simple, ‘oh well’ and a pat on the back, think better of what they have been about to do and go to meet their, ‘glowing, lying children.’ Equal Love improves upon Ho Davies’ first book without a radical transformation in style or daring leaps into the unknown. It is full of a quiet grace and is suffused with warmth and humour; even at its bleakest moments it has the power to make the reader believe in the need for compassion and understanding.
One finds a longing, and a reaching melancholy in Ho Davies, a belief in humanity and a corresponding awareness of its failings. His first two books are refreshingly free of cynicism, which makes the experience of reading him quite novel, in a time in which the cynical is the default emotional setting of the contemporary imagination.
Garan Holcombe, 2004