Thursday 14th November 2024
Polly Crosby had a wide-ranging and stimulating conversation with Janet Bayliss about her growing body of work. Janet asked Polly about the title of her first novel, The Illustrated Child. Polly said that in the US it was called The Book Of Hidden Wonders – a title she always feels mis-sold her dark and gothic tale. It had taken a long time for her to get the book to the point of publication: twenty years and six manuscripts. The Illustrated Child was inspired by growing up in Walberswick, with its reeds, rivers and muddy wellies. Polly’s parents were her first readers.
Asked at what time of day she likes to work, Polly said she often types ideas into her phone while it’s still dark. Her brain is ‘like fireworks’ in the morning. For some time she rewarded herself with a book for every 10,000 words, but then recognised that her word count is as likely to shrink as to grow, because she edits as she goes. She’s not someone who naturally plots but with a historical mystery novel, such as The House of Fever she has to plot more; and with her YA books, plotting seems to come more naturally. In her dual timeline books, such as The Unravelling, Polly often uses historical objects to link two eras, usually inspired by the finds of her antique-dealer husband.
Polly enjoys mixing genres and writing for different age-groups. One of her most recent books is a dystopian novel, This Tale is Forbidden, written for young adults. Asked how the process of writing for younger people differs, she said she finds it a big responsibility as she remembers how impressionable she was at that age. Polly is currently writing a second YA book, The Vulpine. She said that this story, about a society that wants only perfect children, grew out of her own experiences as a child with cystic fibrosis. She hadn’t wanted to write about this before lockdown but, being clinically vulnerable and having been told she wouldn’t live past her teens, she wanted to represent children like her. Polly also has a novel ready for submission, The Foretelling, set in Blythburgh in 1777. It began with black shuck but is now more ‘witchy’, Polly said, as it was felt black shuck didn’t quite fit.
Janet asked about Polly’s sense of place, of absent families, and ‘otherness’, that seem to be features of all her stories. Polly agreed and said that for some time, what she’d struggled to write was love, and that she is particularly proud of Vita and the Birds in this respect. Her ‘cathedral of the marshes’ was based on the big glasshouse in the Winter Gardens, Great Yarmouth, where you can see in, but not if the sun’s shining, so ‘there is a lot on show but a lot hidden, like people’. I left with a feeling that there is much to discover in Polly Crosby’s work.
Tricia Gilbey
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