‘To help people, you need to be able to strive for hope, really’: An Interview with Martha O’Brien

By Inakshi Bagga

Edited by Annabel Wearring-Smith

Photo credit: Getty Images

When Martha O’Brien, co-editor of nawr, an online magazine featuring contemporary Welsh art, literature and philosophy, sent us a letter about our capacity to move beyond despair in the face of relentless tragic news reports – in the media as well as in our own communities – we felt shouldered by her words, lifted by her tender message of hope and the possibility of agency in us all. 

“I have found that in the past I’ve just been making the despair convincing. I’m like, ‘Wow, the world is ending,’ but actually- if we’re in relative safety and comfort- there is a way that we can make help possible for the people who aren’t. I think that’s where that feeling came from, of spending years being like everything’s burning and then sort of coming to this realisation of to help people, you need to be able to strive for hope, really.” 

It was a cold October morning when I sat down to interview Welsh writer and academic, Martha O’Brien, author of The Letters Page newest aerogramme issue. I was keen to delve deeper into her background as a writer and her process of writing this letter, discussing topics such as her deeply personal connection to Wales, her views on communication in a world of political unrest and her inspirations for writing.   

In her letter, Martha explores the beauty of the Welsh countryside, interweaving an incredibly poignant portrayal of the often negative state of media communication with the simplicity of nature, creating a striking commentary on what it means to share news with people in the 21st century. I was curious to know more about her choice of setting. “So there are three mountains that overlook Abergavenny, which is about an hour and a half from where I live. There’s the Skirrid – the big one – the Blorenge and the Sugarloaf, and the little Skirrid is the little mountain next to the Skirrid. They’re mountains that I’ve gone up loads of times. As you can imagine from what I’ve said, I love walking, I love nature and I love being lucky enough to live near mountains.” 

Martha tells me that settings and nature are one of her main influences for writing; she enjoys drawing from her personal experiences with places to explore major themes in her work. “I’m really interested in noticing what makes the mundane interesting. I’m very into looking at a place and seeing it in a new way, and seeing sort of the hidden histories and the hidden layers to something.”   

I was intrigued by her choice to ground this theme of communication in vividly picturesque descriptions of Welsh nature. “I’m interested in deconstructing the cliches about nature. I think that people often say that nature is this sort of all-encompassing, welcoming place, and I don’t think it always is. Especially with Wales. I think people are like ‘oh, Wales is so timeless and perfect and full of fairy tales’, and I’m like it’s also got a lot of issues. I’m just interested in the complexities of place, really. I think nature can encompass a lot of things, but it’s definitely something I’m really interested in.”  

Our conversation moved onto her personal life, given that she has chosen to address her letter to her brother Kieran. I wanted to know more about her relationship with her siblings and the way that they have influenced her writing. Martha enthusiastically told me that she comes from a big family. She’s the second youngest of six, with two older brothers, two older sisters and one younger brother.   

“Kieran’s six years older than me. When I was ten, he was sixteen, and what’s a ten-year-old girl got to say to a sixteen-year-old boy? Not much. In our twenties we’ve been spending more time together. We’re interested in the same things- we’re both into music and philosophy and Welsh politics. So, we’ve been spending more time together and chatting, and I think we’ve realised that actually we are probably the most similar. Our brains are the most similar out of the six of us. We’re really close now and we just talk all the time, and I think we’ve got a good relationship. We’re very open with each other and we help each other a lot.”  

Part of Martha’s letter which depicts a conversation between herself and her brother particularly stood out to me. The letter reads, “You sat in the passenger seat, your guitar between your legs, and asked whether it was helpful for us to know. They wouldn’t, you said, report on a peaceful de-escalation of violence, celebrate the heroic act of a young man saved.” These lines outline the premise of her piece succinctly, and I was eager to understand how this moment in the letter came to be. “It genuinely did come out of that thing that he said in the car, which is how helpful is bad news- and that was kind of it really. The letter is actually very authentic- it was from the thoughts that came out of that conversation- so it was just genuine thoughts that I had.”  

I was interested to hear that she had sent the letter to Kieran before submitting it to The Letters Page: “I think that helps to craft the letter into what a letter should be, which is a one-on-one conversation, but also being aware of a wider audience.”  

Our conversation moved from her brother to her perception of communication as being predominantly negative, both in the media and also in our conversations with each other. I thought Martha’s views were incredibly insightful, and I enjoyed hearing her delve into the broader societal discourse surrounding communication in a time of such struggle. “We’re living in a very difficult time, no doubt, and I think that we all have a responsibility. I think the role of the news is to inform, and unfortunately things are not good. I think that it can be… a lot of us in the UK are living in relative safety compared to places like Ukraine or Palestine at the moment. I think that it’s really important that we focus on communicating positively with each other to balance out the negative news, because if we’re in relative safety, it means that we’re better disposed to help people who aren’t.   

“I think the only way we can do that is by sort of staying mentally uplifted with each other, staying aware of these things. If we communicate only negatively about those things, it means that we’re de-energised to do anything about them and we feel despairing.”  

To conclude our conversation, I asked her about her experience with writing using the letter form when submitting to us. “I did think it was intimidating to be more vulnerable, knowing that people would read it. But it was a really nice challenge, sort of working out the balancing, what I wanted to say, and those kinds of things.”  

If you would like to read Martha O’Brien’s letter, then it’s not too late! Send us a letter of your own to receive a copy of Martha’s letter in the post. And if you’ve already written to us, an aerogramme will be in your post-boxes in the near future.    

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