‘The fact that we’re here at all is so extraordinary’: An Interview with Rolf Venner

Photo credit: Natasha Nayee

By Carolien Wielockx

Edited by Jon McGregor

‘I’m always firing off letters, not just to The Letters Page, but also to friends and family… and dead people – but then I can’t send them, so I just write as if everybody’s still there. I just keep them in a drawer, with instructions for having them burnt one day. They’re a form of diary, letters are part of that.’

Rolf Venner, a writer who exchanged cities like London, Paris and Leipzig for his current abode in Derby in the East Midlands, has sent us several letters over the years we’ve been in existence. Previous letters of his hand were published in 2015 and 2018. Wanting to find out what it is about our journal that has kept him coming back to it over a sustained period of time, I interviewed him about this, his view on letter writing and how to be in a world where people seem to have lost touch with touch.  

‘I’ve never thought about it as a publishing thing. It was just somewhere else to send a letter. It was a stray thought to The Letters Page, which is a very good institution because of what it’s trying to do, and because it’s so communal and all-embracing, and this is partly because of the sort of worldview that is behind it, Jon McGregor’s way of looking at humanity, which seems to be incredibly sane.’

‘I like to write for the archive. It’s a bit like the UK’s Mass Observation project (http://www.massobs.org.uk) that began in the 1930s and was relaunched in 1981 – a project for which various people were asked to write about their lives. I quite like the idea that everybody has a chance to say something, which seems to me part of the project of The Letters Page. It’s partly to celebrate physical letter writing in a digital age, but it’s also just writing for the hell of it. Not everything has to be instrumentalised or monetised. Writing purely for a market is fine if you’re doing genre fiction, but if you’re just a literary fool like me, then you don’t care about that stuff. I do the same with poetry writing. Contingency is very important, the fact that we’re here at all is so extraordinary and therefore we should sometimes do things that have no obvious purpose.’

I write so many letters to you in my head, and then, of a sudden, one becomes ink. I don’t question the whys and wherefores, and the orbits are positively Ptolemaic…

‘These complex orbits are a metaphor for what happens in the human brain; we tend to over-complexify instead of simplify, and my head is full of overcomplexity. The challenge when writing is to get away from that and keep it clear.’

The autumn leaves that we’re enclosing with Rolf’s letter are echoing the fallen leaves on which he had written messages for us at The Letters Page. I asked him what was behind this original gesture:

‘It was a mixture of a number of things. I just wondered if you could write on a leaf properly before it disintegrates, and I found I could with the right felt-tip. It was partly because you can’t get closer to writing, because we write with our bodies, and I think this is why today’s technology is so overwhelming for people. But it was also political in the sense that loads of trees are dying and not enough of them are being replanted.’

I wondered then if the writing on our phones and computers is still being done with our bodies or if this feels to Rolf as an alienated state of writing:

‘I find it very abstract. When I write fiction, I write longhand before I write on the computer. And I nearly always have a piece of pencil and paper on me. I’ll make sure that they’re in every coat. I feel very odd if I haven’t got them. But I don’t mind if I’ve left my phone at home.’

‘The paper will last a little bit longer than the leaves, but even that will go and I think writing and mortality are very closely linked. If you look at the old Japanese poets, their main aim on their deathbed was to write the perfect haiku, and then draw their last breath.’

I was curious to know what Rolf had meant exactly when he wrote that letters are silent and that he was grateful for that, and if he still receives physical letters nowadays:

‘The silence is quite recent because in the past it was incredibly noisy to write with a quill on a piece of hard paper, and I thought that’s something to remember, that there wasn’t always quiet in writing letters.’

‘I still send letters quite often and then if somebody replies it’s usually as a text or an email. But I’ve kept lots of letters. A folder with letters from people who are no longer there is so much better than looking at emails from long ago, even though you could argue that it’s the thought and the feeling that counts. Even sometimes when people write a very long email, I’d rather have that as a letter, physically through the post, because of the immediacy and because I think letters are to do with touch. And I think we’ve literally lost touch with touch in every single way. Even knowing how to address people or how, when you meet people in the UK, you typically don’t shake hands. All kinds of human touch have been thrown into disarray, mainly because of society’s tendency to pathologise everything.’

‘Letters, too, are very fleeting things, but you can keep them for a long time. The electronic stuff that’s supposed to last forever feels more throwaway, disposable, and then there’s also the handwriting, and the way your heart leaps when it’s a friend’s or a lover’s, or a sibling’s or a parent’s.’

At The Letters Page we were intrigued by Rolf’s statement that he is a believer in ‘afflatus’ – divine creative inspiration – admittedly, we were not quite sure what it meant:

‘To be clear, I don’t think I’m actually divinely inspired – I’m not like the English Romantic poet William Blake, who was a visionary. For me it’s just a way of saying that we don’t quite understand where this other expressive part of ourselves comes from. And I wouldn’t want to reduce it to some scientific chemical in the brain or something.’

‘I woke up a few years ago with the line ‘nothing is lost for its once having been’. Even the people you knew who are dead, they’re not lost, because they have been. If they’d never been there in the first place, that could be a kind of loss of what wasn’t there. But if something’s happened, and it’s dead and gone, even without leaving a trace, that’s different from something not having been. This phrase came into my head and it preoccupied me and eventually ended up in a poem somewhere. So I suppose afflatus is when you take seriously stuff that comes from the outside into your head.  Though it also comes from the inside, because it’s your physiology. The problem is, everything nowadays is pathologised, whereas I think it just means you’re supremely alive, you’re a fizzing, functioning person. It’s a very solemn and earnest way of being alive.’

About the ‘scream of nature, and of this agonised world’ which suffuses his letter, Rolf said:

‘The screaming is again just a metaphor. I try not to drive and instead walk as much as possible, and suddenly you find plants that you’ve never seen before in your local area. They look so exotic, and then you realize they’ve taken up the whole of the hedgerow and all of the old wild flowers that used to be there in Hardy’s time, or DH Lawrence’s, or any of the other English nature writers of that time – that these things are no longer there. They’re being crowded out by species that have been brought over, and this monoculture is a great shame, I think, even though these new plants look amazing.’

‘I’m also referring to our feeling of powerlessness about global conflict. You can write to your MP, or you can go on a march. Maybe go on both marches, for both sides of the conflict. The natural world is screaming, but so is the global world we’ve created. And the two are interlinked.’

Rolf and I felt that it’s difficult today for people to say that they don’t know. Somehow we feel like we should have an opinion about everything, that we have to take sides. But we don’t always have to choose. And on this note we ended our conversation – that if more people could just say, ‘well, honestly, I don’t know’, then this, as Rolf said, ‘would bring the aggression threshold right down throughout the world, just like that.’

---

The Letters Page team are back in the office, and ready to read your real letters again. We publish stories, essays, poems, memoir, reportage, criticism, recipes, travelogue, and any hybrid forms, so long as they come to us in the form of a letter. We are looking for writers of all nationalities and ages, both established and emerging. 

Your letter must be sent in the post, to : 

The Letters Page, School of English, University of Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK. 

See our submissions page for more information. 

To stay up to date on The Letters Page newsletter publication, subscribe here.