Interview with author Jackie Meekums-Hales

Author Jackie Meekums-Hales is here today to chat with me about her new women’s fiction, Shadows of Time.

During her virtual book tour, Jackie will be giving away a $25 Amazon or Barnes and Noble (winner’s choice) gift card. To be entered for a chance to win, use the form below. To increase your chances of winning, feel free to visit her other tour stops and enter there, too!

Bio:
Jackie is a member of the Society of Authors, whose debut novel Shadows of Time was the fulfilment of an ambition nurtured during her working life as a teacher, inspired by her research into her own and others’ family histories. She has been writing as a hobby since childhood, contributing to poetry anthologies since her undergraduate days and being a Poetry Guild national semi-finalist in the 1990s. She has also written short stories for friends, family and students. Since retiring, she has contributed to Poetry Archive Now (2020), with 20-20 Vision, uploaded to YouTube, and has had poetry and flash fiction published online by Flash Fiction North. One of her flash fictions is to appear in an anthology, having been selected from entries during the Morecambe Festival 2021. She had a creative memoir, Shelf Life, published by Dear Damsels in 2019, a precursor to collaborating with her sister on a creative non-fiction memoir Remnants of War, published in 2021. She writes a blog about her walks and thoughts in the Yorkshire and Somerset countryside.

Welcome, Jackie. Please tell us about your current release.
Maggie’s daughter, Cathy, is a successful business woman in Australia. After the failure of a relationship and her mother’s death, she returns to England for the funeral, hoping to rekindle her childhood sense of carefree life in the Yorkshire countryside. She is confronted by revelations about Maggie’s tragic past, which has a legacy of loss overshadowing her family’s present and future. As Cathy and her sister June unravel the truth, her mother’s story unfolds in a flashback to 1945. Life for the young Maggie before they were born reflects the world of mid-century attitudes towards women who dared to have a baby out of wedlock. The illusion of the Maggie her daughters knew is dispelled.

Meanwhile, two young women explore family history, and fate takes a hand. Three families are linked through coincidences and circumstances they did not know they shared. Cathy must decide how far, and for what reasons, she allows herself to live in the shadows of the past.

What inspired you to write this book?
Because my dad used to tell us about family stories, I was always interested in previous generations, and once information became available on the internet, I spent two years researching our family history, tracing the truth of the oral versions of who my ancestors were. I found it fascinating! There were real life stories among the names and numbers, with real people like my great grandmother, who lost all three sons in the First World War, and several women who were pregnant when they got married, in a society that probably gave them no choice. There was infant mortality and there were twins where only one survived. There was emigration, and I eventually traced distant relatives in New Zealand and Australia, including some that were adopted. The more I found out, the more I wondered how these women had coped, and how much was actually acknowledged. When I was growing up, I knew of at least two people who’d had to give up babies for adoption in the 1950s and 60s, and all the grief that caused. It seemed to me that women have carried the burden of loss across the ages and across the world, and television programmes were being made about a whole generation of women who were made to give up their babies because they were unmarried. I wanted to highlight that injustice and its potential consequences for both the mothers and the children, so Maggie was created, and her family grew around her.

Excerpt from Shadows of Time:
As she looked out across the water at the familiar silhouette of the city, she realised that what mattered was the past she carried within her, a past that time could not change. Her mother had kept her sadness and her loss to herself, but, like so many of her generation, she had gone to her grave with that trauma unresolved and the sorrow never wiped away.

That evening, on her laptop, Cathy listened to the testimonies of the children who were part of the “stolen generation”. There was a lot wrong with the world, but thank goodness it had changed. Their experiences seared her heart. “Half-caste” children had been forcibly removed in an attempt to dilute their brown skin in the future. How could that have been seen as right? How could it have been right to take away a baby born of love to a woman who had already lost the man who fathered it? She felt the weight of being a woman in a world where women had, for so long, been victims of hypocrisy and twisted morality. Somewhere in her head, those Aboriginal women and her own mother blended into one huge, tangled barb of loss. She would understand, next May, her country’s “Sorry Day.” She only wished there could be another, across the world, for all those women who wept for the children taken from them.

What exciting story are you working on next?
At the moment, I am reviewing and revising two novels I have written during the pandemic. One is about a widow in her sixties, who wants to keep her independence, and the other is about a school reunion, twenty-five years since a group attended the same boarding school. That explores friendship and how they all behave during a lockdown.

My next idea is for an epistolary novel, with letters/emails/messages between two sisters living very different lives. I thought Alice Walker used this form brilliantly in “The Color Purple”, but I know my own sister and I communicate through Messenger most of the time, sometimes nearly every day.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?
This is a tricky question, because I didn’t really see myself as a writer of novels until I’d finished my first novel – the one currently being published. Before that, I saw myself as more of an amateur poet, because poetry was what I had published here and there since my student days. I’d written fragments of prose as an outlet for thoughts and feelings, and I’d written short stories for family, but I didn’t call myself a writer, because I saw myself as a teacher who wrote, sometimes to amuse or encourage my students. It was only when I retired from teaching, so that identity faded into the background, that I began to write more and submit more, and to see myself as possibly being viewed as a writer first and foremost. I started writing a blog during the pandemic, in 2020.

Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your work day like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
No, I don’t write full-time, so I’m able to choose when I want to write. I am retired from teaching, but I still work for the school I taught in for 26 years, as one of the governing body. It’s a boarding school, and I’m involved in compliance with all the regulations that govern it, so it does take up quite a bit of time, and during the pandemic it’s been exceptionally busy, with changes in guidance coming so often. I actually do a lot of writing for that, but it’s the less interesting kind – reports or policies.

I also do a lot of walking, but that’s often when I come up with new ideas or untangle those that need to be shaped into something to write. I walk nearly every day, somewhere between three and five miles – over fields and footpaths or down along the river. I might write a whole poem in my head while I’m out. The problem is then remembering it all when I get back to my laptop!

What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?

Having spent years teaching teenagers they must write words in full for examination purposes, I have to discipline myself to write contractions, instead of “she had not”, for example, so that my narrative doesn’t sound too polite and formal. I have to break what were my own rules!

As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be a teacher. Then, when I became a teenager, I went off the idea of going through school, into college, and back to school, and I didn’t actually go straight into teaching. Being a writer wasn’t even on the radar for a working-class girl from a London suburb. In the 1960s, options for girls were still very restricted.

I did become a teacher, having worked in offices for a while and realized that wasn’t how I wanted to spend my life.

Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
My younger sister also became a writer on retirement, and she encouraged me to finish my novel. We’ve collaborated on a memoir about post-war childhood, but what we didn’t anticipate was the lucky coincidence that Between the Lines would accept my first novel, as they did hers. They had no idea we were sisters at the time, because I used my married surname, but I was doubly thrilled when they contacted me a couple of days before my seventieth birthday. During all those busy years of teaching and looking after family, I always used to say I would love to publish a novel one day, and this is fulfilling that ambition, proving it’s never too late!

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