Author: Cheryl Morgan

The chances of getting good SF&F writers at Hay are very slim, but you do get good history and feminism writers, and anyway it is just over the mountains from me, so I figured I should go and support the general idea of books.

Much to my surprise and delight, I managed to pick a day on which there were four writers I was interested in seeing, and one of whom was a friend. So off I went.

The first session I attended was with Edith Hall. She’s a well-known Classicist, but the book she was promoting is a bit of a departure. It is an book about The Iliad seen from an environmentalist perspective. That may seem a little odd, but actually there is a substantial amount of environmental destruction that takes place in the book. Have you any idea how many trees you have to fell to build a thousand ships? And then the Greeks are camped outside of Troy for 10 years, meaning that a lot more wood is required for building camps, repairing ships, cooking meals, raising funeral pyres, and of course building a wooden horse.

There’s also the question of weapons. The Trojan War took place in the Mediterranean’s Bronze Age. Smelting metal requires a very hot fire which means, you guessed it, more wood. Hall is of the opinion that we should date the start of the Anthropocene from the birth of metallurgy. I can see her point.

What you may not know is that the area around Mount Ida, the mountainous country to the south of the plain on which Troy stands, is an area of outstanding natural beauty. In times past it was sacred to the goddess Cybele. However, Hall revealed that a mining company has been busily felling many of the trees in the area. The Turkish government is now supposedly taking action, but the damage has been extreme and it is unclear whether the govenrment has sufficient will to do anything effective. I was so appalled that I went straight to the Woodland Trust tent at the festival and signed up. Not that that will have any direct effect in Turkey, but I’m assuming that Cybele will notice. I’m sure she can think of a suitable punlishment for the miners.

Anyway, the book is called Epic of the Earth, and I am looking forward to reading it.

Next up was Amy Jeffs and her new book, Saints. This is a collection of stories about saints, some of whom have remarkably interesting lives. Jeffs seems to have constrained herself to writing about people whose sainthood has actually been approved by the Catholic Church, which is a shame because many of the Welsh saints have even more bizarre lives. I might have to write a companion book.

Jeffs is a remarkably talented young woman. She does all the art for the books as well as write them. The content is a combination of fiction and history. And in the session she showed that she has a fabulous singing voice as well. Fortunately I am too old to be jealous.

Session three was with one of my feminist heroes: Cordelia Fine. She’s a psychologist and feminist philosopher from Australia who has written some wonderfully insightful and entertaining feminist books. I did a review of her previous book, Testosterone Rex, on my blog back in 2017 and have included it in this issue.

The new book, Patriarchy Inc., is all about the Diversity & Inclusion industry, and why Fine thinks it fails at what it sets out to do. As a former diversity trainer, this is of considerable interest to me. Fiona Moore, if you are reading this, you should get the book too.

I got to ask a question at the end of the session. Fine said that it was “very insightful”. I can die happy now.

Mid afternoon my friend Jo Lambert arrived and we did a bit of shopping. Then there was the food hall. Pizza!

The final session that I had booked was with Sion Faye, whom I knew from Bristol (where she grew up). Her new book, Love in Exile, is not specifically about trans issues, but it is of course deeply informed by the difficulties and dangers of dating while trans. It is also informed by her time as an agony aunt for Vogue. Sion is very smart, and I’m looking forward to seeing what she has to say.

I stayed over in a nearby hotel because I couldn’t face a 2 hour drive home late at night. I highly recommend the Castle Hotel in Brecon, should you ever be around these parts. And I spent Saturday morning checking out the Roman remains in the area. Brecon was home to a unit of cavalry from Hispania. That makes it hugely important to the post-Roman history of Wales.

This year’s Eastercon took us back to Belfast and the site of the 2019 Eurocon. I’ve come to love Belfast as a city, so I was keen to go, even though the post-Brexit bureaucracy surrounding getting goods in and out of Northern Ireland made having a dealer’s table impossible.

For the Eastercon we had space in the convention centre attached to the Hilton. I’m not sure if this is new, but it is certainly excellent space. We didn’t use all of it, so it could have handled a much bigger event. Getting around is a bit of a challenge, but once you got your bearings it was easy enough. The only weird thing was that to get from the hotel to the convention centre you had to walk along a passageway that was airwalled off from the biggest programming room. Quite why the builders did that is a mystery to me.

Something that is new is Belfast Grand Central Station. The old Victoria station is in the process of being torn down and replaced by a shiny, new modern facility just to the north-west. It is very impressive. There is still a lot of work to be done, but it is already sporting a sign claiming that it is Belfast’s premier shopping destination despite the fact that the only shop it has right now is an M&S food hall. Doubtless more will come.

One thing that concerned me about the event was getting food. Belfast has a reputation of being a rather religious city, and regardless of their sectarian beliefs no committed Christian is going to be working over Easter. I needn’t have worried. Belfast is a tourist destination these days. The lovely St. George’s Market was only open on Saturday, but there were plenty of places open through the weekend. The M&S in Grand Central Station seemed to be open any time I passed through.

I didn’t attend a lot of programming, but I was very pleased to get to meet Emily Tesh and chat to her about The Female Man, a book which manages to be fiercely feminist and appallingly TERFy by turns. I’m looking forward to reading Farah Mendlesohn’s new book, Considering The Female Man, which is due out from Luna Press Publishing in the summer.

On the subject of feminism, the shouty feminist panel that Juliet McKenna and I were on got put in the main hall. The room was less than half full, but I think that is because there were not that many people at the convention. Some of the other panel rooms filled up and had to turn people away. We had a good rant anyway, but it is rather depressing to keep having to say the same things decade after decade and see nothing much change.

The Dealers’ Room was fairly sparse, primarily due to the aforementioned bureaucracy. A few people from the UK smuggled books in via suitcases and car boots, but the main book dealer was a shop from Cork. They had a pre-release copy of the new Emma Newman novel, which I was very pleased about. They did not have anything by Everina Maxwell, which was sad because she was getting praised highly on several panels. Must catch up with her work.

Some kind folks (who might not want to be named due to the aforementioned book smuggling) volunteered to put the few copies of Fight Like A Girl 2 I had with me on their table. They all sold. We didn’t win the BSFA Award, but the Punks for Palestine anthology did, and I cannot complain about that.

The art show was much more full of stuff from the rest of the UK. Goodness only knows why. Much of it was for sale, after all. There was some lovely Fangorn art on show.

Overall I think the weekend went very well, despite numbers being somewhat down on an English or Scottish Eastercon. I’m delighted that Northern Ireland has got to host the convention at last, and it now seems even more egregious that Wales has never done so. Facilities are, of course, a major issue. I’ve looked at hotels in Swansea and there is nowhere I would even try to host something like BristolCon. Sigh.

Here in rural Carmarthenshire we have our own little literary festival. It is very Welsh, and there is little in the way of speculative literature at the moment. I plan to change that, but for now I’m just attending to hear interesting stuff, and to sell books.

The selling books thing wasn’t exactly official. Sarah, my hairdresser, offered to let me run a pop-up stall in her shop. It wasn’t hugely well advertised, but I sold five books over the weekend and didn’t have to pay for a dealer table. I’m happy with that. It also meant that I had three days very close to Llandeilo’s amazing donut shop.

My main reason for going to the festival was to support my friend Jo Lambert. She has a book out, Found Wanting, which is a YA queer romance set against the backdrop of the County Lines drug dealing network. It sounds really great when Jo talks about it.

Also appearing at the event was my local Senedd Member, Adam Price. He was interviewing Richard Wyn Jones, a professor of politics from Cardiff University who has a new book out on the political thought of Plaid Cymru (Putting Wales First). Like all political parties, Plaid has mutated through the years. Listening to Richard threw a lot of light on why my parents, so proudly Welsh, were so antipathetic towards Plaid.

Finally on my list of things to attend was a talk by my friend Kirsti Bohata from Swansea University. She has been editing the diaries of Amy Dillwyn, a successful woman novelist from the late 19th Century. After the death of her MP father in 1892, Amy inherited his spelter works and became a successful businesswoman. She was also active as a Suffragist.

Despite the tomboyish nature of many of her heroines, and her very masculine style of dress, no questions had previously been asked about Dillwyn’s sexuality. On reading the diaries, it was immediately obvious to Kirsti that this was because the matter had been deliberately suppressed. In fact Amy nurtured a lifelong crush on her childhood friend, Olive Talbot (yes, those Talbots, Kingmaker players). What’s more there are passages in which Amy dreams of being a mediaeval knight. As Kirsti explained, Dillwyn’s novel set in the Rebecca Riots (The Rebecca Rioter) can now be read as a very complex meditation on gender.

One session that I missed and am kicking myself about featured the new Manawydan Jones novel from Alun Davies. The books are written in Welsh, which is how come I hadn’t noticed the content. As far as I can make out, they are a Welsh version of Percy Jackson. Manawydan Fab Llyr is generally accepted to be an ancient Welsh sea god, and Percy is (spoiler for book 1) the son of Neptune. My Welsh isn’t up to reading these yet, but I’m working on it. One day I would love to publish English translations of them.

I was somewhat surprised, last year, to discover that there was such a thing as the Association for Welsh Writing in English. Jo Lambert told me about it. People at Aberystwyth University were encouraging her to go. It looked like a serious literary event, but I offered them a paper on Nicola Griffith’s Spear and it got accepted, so I went.

I think I had four people in my audience. There were two parallel sessions and the other one had papers about poetry.

On the other hand, the conference takes place in a fabulous location, Gregynog Hall in central Wales. Also I made friends. It turns out that Matt Jarvis, one of the then co-chairs of the Association, knew Farah and Edward well. His fellow co-chair, Kirsti Bohata, gets featured in my report on the Llandeilo Lit Fest. She talked a bit more about Amy Dillwyn at the conference as well.

This year I offered them a paper on the figure of the Lady of the Lake. That was a lot of fun to research, and led me down all sorts of avenues of Welsh folklore. It turns out that lakes in Wales are often inhabited by moistened bints, but rather than handing out magic swords they are far more likely to gift people herds of magic white cows. Which, if you think about it, are probably a lot more useful. If you are going to be at Archipelacon 2 you will have a chance to hear an expanded version of that paper.

The paper seemed to go down very well, and I got some good questions. One in particular came from a Celticist friend, Rhys Kaminsky-Jones. He asked me why it is the Lady of THE Lake. Which Lake? Why does it have a definite article?

I had to admit that I had never thought of that before. Being brought up in Y Gwlad Haf tends to result in your assuming that there is only one Lake, and it is the one that surrounds Glastonbury in the winter. But Rhys asked the question, and the answer came to me in a flash of inspiration. It is a translation from Welsh.

Welsh does not have an indefinite article. There is no ‘a lake’, there is just ‘lake’, but Welsh also puts in a definite article when an English speaker might not expect it. For example, a street which, in English, is called Park Lane, would in Welsh be rendered Lôn y Parc — Lane of the Park. So our mythical woman might be Dynes y LLyn – Woman of the Lake. Or perhaps, as my Welsh tutor suggested, Morwyn y Llyn, if these women were supposed to be virgin priestesses.

There were plenty of interesting papers this year. There was an entire panel on coal mining horror stories. The theme of this year’s conference was ‘underscapes’ so a lot of underground (and underwater) stuff happened. But the other paper I wanted to mention was the one by Aidan Byrne from Wolverhampton University. It was titled ‘Among Others’, and if you guessed that it featured the Jo Walton of that name you would be dead right. It also featured stories of Welsh girls in English boarding schools, which led me to talk to Aidan about the Crater School books.

Slowly but surely we are getting more spec fic content at AWWE. Hopefully I can continue the progress next year, though May 2026 is very busy what with the Senedd elections, Satellite in Glasgow, and Åcon.