Falmouth lecturer Luke Thompson to release book on conversing with animals

I also wanted to try the various techniques people have used to communicate with other species, including some of the more unusual practices. So yes, I did train as an animal psychic, spend hours in a floatation tank, and disappear into the wilderness with a crystal ball.

It was a lot of fun to write.

How does it compare with your other writing?

On the surface this one’s completely different from everything else. Previously I’ve written a collection of poetry and a couple of pamphlets of poetry, as well as a lengthy biography of a poet, and I’ve published (in the broader sense) performative works like a Phonetic Ouija Board and Psychic Test Cards for various events and exhibitions. They all sound quite different from a book about talking animals, don’t they. But what I’ve started to notice recently is that there’s a theme that goes back further than I thought—back to when I was young and first started reading and writing properly, as well as when I left work and travel and went to study philosophy at university. It’s about sense, language and the borders of what can and can’t be said. Poetry is always troubling these borders, taking language to new places, and that’s ultimately what this book is about too.

When and where do you write?

I am writing this at a spine-defying angle on the sofa at home. This is where I write up and where I tend to edit. But a good deal of the book was written out and about and in notebooks, whether that’s in the waiting room outside the floatation tanks or in an isolated hut in the Tamar Valley, where I was attempting to communicate with angels. (That hut was a great place to write—no electricity, no phone signal—amazing!)

When did you know you had a passion for writing?

Ach, I’ve always written. My father was a writer so it’s always been an acceptable and everyday thing. And always been recognised as a discipline, if that makes sense. The best lesson I think I learned from Dad about writing was the graft of it. When I was a child, he was always already downstairs on the sofa when we woke up, his A4 pad on his lap, writing with an implausibly sharp pencil, and he was usually in his study when we went to bed at night too. So I knew writing wasn’t just about having a good idea. My first idea of what writing was and what a writer was came from seeing this graft every day. I think that’s probably unusual.

But also, I think only quite recently I realised I was ‘a writer’ in a different way and that my ‘passion’, if you like, was also different. That is, you will always meet people who say they want to be a writer or that they are a writer, and you share stories or poems or you discuss books, and so on, and they might have tons of talent or an amazing way of seeing and describing the world or ideas, but then at some point, they slow down, or maybe they stop writing. Sometimes I think it might be the discipline of it. I don’t know. I don’t know if they give up or what happens really. I know life can get in the way, as some say, but I suppose what I’ve found is that it doesn’t work like that for me. Bits of my first book were written in the 15 or 30 minutes I had between the time I finished work at the fishmongers and the time my wife Sarah finished at the bakery. Poems in Singing About Melon were written while sitting up at night watching over Dad when he was dying of cancer. That’s not to say I’m a super-hard worker, but rather that writing is how I live. It’s a habit. A habit of thinking as much as a habit of doing.

And now just about every aspect of my life is books. I’m a writer, yes, but I’m also a publisher, an editor, a freelance book producer, and of course a teacher of writing. It’s all books.

The cover looks amazing! Could you tell us more about how the collaboration with Donya Todd came about?

Yes! Donya is a comics artist based in Cornwall and she’s phenomenal. There’s no mistaking Donya’s work.

I actually first became aware of Donya’s work while working with the National Trust and one of our writers at Falmouth, Wyl Menmuir. We invited artists on the MA Illustration: Authorial Practice course to pitch to illustrate a short story pamphlet by Wyl, and Donya was one of them. Donya’s work didn’t match what the Trust were after (‘Too many boobs’, as Donya put it later), but her work was so unlike anything else we saw that day that I soon commissioned her to illustrate four stories for my publishing company, Guillemot Press, instead. And they were wonderful.

We’ve stayed in touch since, occasionally working on little bits and pieces. Then, during the development of the cover for Domadomadoma, the publisher sent a list of wonderful cover artists together — all people they’d worked with before. Honestly, a brilliant line up of artists with phenomenal book design pedigrees. But then as a footnote, they said, ‘But it might also be fun to work with someone you know, so if you have any ideas…’

I sent them Donya’s work and here we are. It’s come out really well!

You're going on tour! What’s the route and where are your favourite places to visit?

It’s a jerky sort of tour. Basically two months of desultory travel. I’ve done events all over the place prior to this, but this is a more sustained assault on the public than anything I’ve done before.

External links

Luke’s website

Book profile on publisher’s website

Find out more about our Professional Writing MA