I am in love with Sweden. It’s so similar in wet weather to Wales, & as green & glorious. Stockholm is an amazing city & I love hearing the wealth of languages as we travel Europe, although I’m now acutely aware of how little I understand the languages in these Northern European countries.
I’ve had a difficult relationship with language & place identity. Because of a chaotic, transient upbringing nothing gives me anxiety more than the question, ‘where are you from?’
Knowing ‘who I am’ had to come before I could even begin to answer ‘where I’m from’, & still it’s taken a long time for me to answer.
My (great) grandparents were economic migrants from across the British Isles to north Wales & just across the border in England. We’re English-speaking Welsh borderlands people.
Truly understanding the country of my birth meant educating myself on the deliberate dismantling of Welsh language & culture by English oppressors, & so I learned Welsh, embraced the beautiful minority culture that I shared a landmass with.
Did I then go too far?
English, my first language, is that of oppressors, colonisers, & slave owners, but perhaps I began to take too much responsibility for that; maybe my connection to the very language in which I write & think & dream, that is the language of my ancestors & grandchildren, became disjointed as this schism deepened.
I turned to creating literature as a way to explore this dichotomous life, employing narrative arcs in The MthR Trilogy to navigate through themes of language & place.
I emerge from that piece of writing a different woman, someone who has made peace with herself, & her mother tongue; someone who can acknowledge the difficult history of the English language while still embracing this gorgeous international linguistic kaleidoscopic form of communication spoken by so many.

#amwriting #languages #ddwyieithog #themthrtrilogy #poetlife #writing #books #indiepublishing #bookthoughts