Hi, I'm Siobhan Fletcher, one of the journalists, up at Manx Radio, and welcome along to the latest edition of our newscast. Now, as you may have heard us talking about in the run-up to the event, this year's edition of Manx Lit Fest is now well and truly underway. This evening, that's Wednesday 25th of September, the island is playing host to an award-winning writer, environmental activist, and professor of contemporary fiction at Manchester Metropolitan University. Monique Roffe will be at the Erin Art Centre tonight from Half Pass Seven to discuss her latest book, Passion Tide, and how fiction is an important tool to tackle big topics. Earlier today, I sat down with Monique and Fiona Gell, who's brought her over to the island for Manx Lit Fest, to find out a little bit more. Here's that interview in full. Hi, I'm Monique Roffe, and I'm a writer, a climate activist, and also professor of creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. And yourself? Hello, I'm Fiona Gell, and I'm a marine conservationist and climate change policy specialist and also a writer. And we spoke recently, Fiona, actually, didn't we, about the series of workshops you're running. But tonight, we've got kind of an exciting thing that's brought Monique over to the island, so can you tell me a little bit about, tell me what's happening this evening, first of all? This evening, I'm going to be reading from my new novel Passion Tide, which was published by Penguin Random House at the end of June. I'm currently on tour, and I was invited to be here by Fiona. And so I thought, yeah, I really want to come to the Isle of Man. I'll be reading, and Fiona will be asking me questions. I'll be in conversation. Be a chance to hear a bit about my book, and, you know, grab a chat afterwards by a book, have a drink. Perfect. And so I guess, Fiona, why bring Monique over? Why was this something that you really wanted to happen? So I'll be very focused on climate change for the last few years, and also on writing. And I think I'm really interested in how writers and artists more broadly can help people engage with climate change and help people think about how we do build a better future and tackle the challenges about climate change and the ecological emergency. So I got to know Monique through doing a writing course when I was writing my book about the marine environment, and I was aware of her work with writers' rebel and mobilising writers to help with climate action. And so it was, you know, a brilliant opportunity to get somebody who's really a leading figure in as a writer, and also as a climate activist to come and speak to people here who – and there's a lot of people on the Isle of Man who are really passionate about climate change and making a real difference locally and internationally, and also a lot of really keen writers who will be able to benefit from Monique's visit. I suppose tonight, then, it's tackling those questions then of how you put those themes in your work. I mean, simply, I mean, from reading the book as well, these are massive topics that you're tackling. So how do you actually weave them through a narrative in a way that's accessible for readers, I suppose? Well, I think, well, first of all, passion tide is not a climate change novel. It's about something very different. It's about femicide, which is a global phenomenon. But because I've been active in Extinction Rebellion for several years, a lot of the activism that I witnessed and took part in and even helped plan has gone into passion tide. I think what fiction can do that – watching Channel 4 News or News at 10 can't do – is it can activate our heart into – and galvanise us into activism. I think too often we hear about a woman – three women being shot dead by a crossbow or an athlete being burnt to death by her partner or we see something happening in France, something – some terrible rape case or we hear about what's going on in Lebanon or we just – we disassociate. We disconnect from all the big things, you know, climate change, all of the big things that are going on. And I think through fiction, the opposite happens. We actually connect. We invest. We're emotionally engaged and involved. So I think this is a really good way to get people on board. And how do you kind of, I suppose, pick the topics that you want to tackle. I mean, like you say there, you're right. I think we're quite desensitized. I mean, I read the news often on the actual radio every day and in the international news, it's usually a stream of horrible things, but you read them and then the next day it's another stream of horrible things. So, obviously, passion-tied is based – you know, it's loosely inspired by a real story. Can you tell me a little bit about that and why that may be stuck out to you that this was something you wanted to touch on in the book? Well, it is based on a true story of a young woman who was killed in Trinidad back in 2016 and there was an enormous protest at the time and it brought about the downfall of the mayor of Port of Spain, but after that, it sort of things went back to business as usual and this woman really stuck in my memory and my – you know, I didn't stop thinking about her and more and more women have been murdered and femicide since in horrific ways. And I mean really horrific ways like this athlete who's been burnt. And so, I kind of wanted to write something to inspire the next gen of feminist activists in the Caribbean in Trinidad in particular and to sort of hand over some kind of blueprint and like, you know, hey, it is possible for us all to get together. Misogyny and gender-based violence, femicide, it affects us all. We're all here. There's not one particular type of woman who faces this worse than others. We all know what it's like. So yeah, this is something that I really wanted to write about and bring alive for a generation, your generation. I feel like it's one of those things, I feel like I'm jumping in on some of the questions Fiona's going to ask later really, but I mean, when you're reading it, it's shocking but also not – it doesn't shock when you see that in the news so often. For example, when you're reading the book and your character of the mayor in the book says those things about carnival and how the women were almost asking for it is the thread of what you're saying. But then you look up the story that has inspired you and it's pretty much what was said. So you know, you're reading this book and you're like angry and shocked reading it, but then find out actually it's rooted so much in truth. So again, how do you – that inspiration of taking from real life, actually, are you often shocked by how much happens in the real world that then you can literally transplant into fiction because it's actually not that out of this world that it's happened? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, obviously I couldn't quote the mayor directly even though he's actually dead, the man who said that. So just to give some context, when this young woman was found dead, not long after the mayor of Port of Spain, basically victim blamed her and said to all women in the Caribbean when Trinidad, you have to take care that you don't get molested during carnival time, which was why they were such a massive outcry. But you know, that was in 2016. I feel like that old woman that you see with the sign that says I can't believe we still have to protest this shit, you know, that woman who's still there and I'm speaking to you, I'm almost 60, you're, you know, much younger woman and I'm like, you know, keep it up. And also something about feminism not being a 20th century phenomenon. Like I think I think if we're not careful, we could end up like there and that what's happening in America. We can't take our rights for granted. Look at Meryl Streep's been talking in the UN about the Taliban. You know, Kamala is facing Project 2025 in America. They've repealed Roe versus Wade. I mean, this is happening right now. And yet I think there's this kind of sleepover happening with feminism. If it was a 20th century thing, your generation don't need it anymore. You are a feminist, you could, you know, we can switch off, which just isn't the case sadly. And like almost that idea of, like you said, the story being based kind of on a true story and then there was this uproar and now it's died down again. So the power of fiction to really like keep these issues relevant and also just keep the conversation going. Do you find it's also important to obviously you're from Trinidad and then you know, you're using your cultural, I suppose, background, but also amplifying those issues for a UK audience, I suppose, in a way as well. I think it was important for me to make the point that this isn't just happening on a small island. It's a global phenomenon. It's happening here. Like I said, not long ago, a man shot three women dead with a crossbow. The statistics tell us that one woman every three days is murdered in the UK, OK, one woman every three, then the domestic violence data and statistics is also one in three. You know, assault against children. You know, these are kind of endemic, hidden, mundane, everyday crimes that are happening in UK households across the country, which we don't like to talk about, but they're really mundane and they're everywhere, but we don't talk about them. So when these things do happen, we keep quiet and the keeping quiet is a big problem. I suppose from a writer's point of view as well, I mean, often we use fiction to kind of escape from the world. We're actually using it to amplify these issues and we're going to touch on the climate crisis as well. But how do you then switch off when you're writing these intense, you know, very rooted in truth stories? How do you then, can you step back from it? Or is it just constantly in your mind, are you thinking of the next project and what you want to talk about? I am writing another book, but I do see that fiction has a place in the world of activism. So this is really a protest novel, there have been loads of protest novels, there have been novels about climate activism, about all kinds of activism, novels tend to be political vehicles also. I mean, if you look at any book that's won, either the Women's Prize or the Booker Prize, in the last 10, 15 years, these are books that are working with the big issues of the day, whether it's gender, race or climate or, you know, writers aren't sitting around knitting, you know, writing, I mean, I would say literary writers are not sitting around writing happy, happy stories for like entertainment. I think it's part of, it's my job to engage with the issues of our time. And I suppose bringing you in, Fiona, I mean, we talk about, obviously this, yeah, we're talking about femicide in this book, but it's a very different topic, but in terms of climate, with spring tides, you're talking about the, you know, the climate of the Isle of Man and your history here as well. But how do you then use in that scientific knowledge in your own writing to try and get those issues across? I mean, how are you tackling it? Yeah, I think this is, you know, there's a lot of parallels with the, you know, communicating climate and environmental, the climate crisis and the ecological crisis in that, you know, we are, you know, we've got all the information and we have fed all these new stories about terrible things that are happening in terms of, you know, losing habitats and the very visible effects of climate change that we're seeing already, but we don't really talk about it enough. And I think, you know, that's sort of the way that, you know, we can use personal stories to help people, you know, go beyond the new stories and actually think about, you know, their own, their own role in changing things for the better in terms of climate change. And also, you know, when you start thinking about the next generations and, you know, what life will potentially be like for them, we don't start really acting in earnest. So yeah, I suppose, as a, for my, for my point of view, I'm used to writing more technical writing in a, in a scientific or policy perspective, but I think taking, you know, personal stories and, and, you know, bringing it zooming down to the kind of, you know, perhaps what people can recognise more easily from their own life, rather than cystics and graphs and, you know, all the kind of horrible, horrible facts that we have to confront. Yeah. I mean, there's an accessibility to it, isn't there? I mean, like I say, covering the news every day, but then oftentimes, you know, people will watch a David Attenborough documentary and come away with, oh, that's awful. But then what does it stay with them? And then books, you say, like, a lot of the book prize, for example, I think one I read recently won the book prize was Prophet Song, which is about, like, quote-unquote illegal immigrants coming across in small boats, is essentially the core message of that book is look how easy this could happen anywhere. So there's these topics, the massive topics that you can grapple in fiction in a way that makes it more accessible. I guess, I mean, switching a bit for tomorrow, you're doing a workshop. These are the sort of things you're going to try and talk to the students there about, like, how do you, and I suppose in your role as professor at Manchester Metropolitan University, how do you grapple these big, massive topics into creative writing then? Well, it's interesting. So tomorrow's workshop is titled Thinking Like a Mountain. And I'm going to be using, as a springboard, an essay written by an environmentalist called Aldo Leopold, and he wrote a really famous essay called Thinking Like a Mountain. And it's really an account of him killing a wolf, and having a real thrill of killing the wolf, but also having a very big aha moment and insight because wolves are predators, but at the same time, they have their place in the ecosystem. And mountains without wolves get deforested very quickly because the deer that they're killing eat the forest. So it's all about not thinking like us individual omniscient heroes that we're here to save the world and save the climate and probably use a gun and shoot everything and not understand the complex interconnectedness of our entire planet, of which we are very much part of. But we are causing the sixth mass extinction. So as writers, we need to start rethinking the narratives that we are currently engrossed in. And so we're going to be talking a little bit about the idea of this hero. Do we need, is it time for a new hero? Is it time to rethinking, rewilding fiction, thinking like a mountain, thinking like a woman, thinking like a river, the sea, rethinking like the community? Is it possible that one man with a gun isn't going to save the world or the community? Is it possible that the community is going to save the community? So tomorrow we're going to be looking at these ideas of like how do we rethink who the central characters are, if really, I mean, there's a horrible, horrible turning point here because we all think of ourselves as heroes of our lives and we think of ourselves as sympathetic, as sort of sympathetic, worthy people. But unless we start to think like a mountain, like nature and start to like flip our point of view, we do have to ask ourselves how sympathetic and heroic we are. So that's a taste of what we're going to be talking about tomorrow and there'll be some field work and there'll be some immersion in nature, there'll be some meditation. So it's, you know, you're just going on with these questions for the world, it's basically it. I mean, it was an interesting phrase, you said they're rewilding, sort of agile writing. I mean, that sort of thing as a community is, well, I mean, the big thing now in social media as well is everyone's got main character syndrome, don't they, like everyone's the main character in their life. And so I don't want you to give too much away, but you're going to basically be trying to widen that perspective and essentially with the writers. Yeah. And there's a long history of rewilded fiction and we do teach it and talk about it on our green writing module over at Manchester Metropolitan. But we talk about, you know, books that have been around that don't have necessarily human protagonists, the call of the wild, you name it, there are loads of people who've tried to rethink without anthropomorphizing nature, but to try and put nature as a central protagonist and to wild fiction, to invent language, invent points of view, think closer to nature, as opposed to separate to nature. So that's all going to be part of tomorrow's ex's workshop. I feel like I could talk to the best of you for hours about this. Yeah, I definitely, I mean, even like that, I mean, when I was, when I did my year broad in uni, I studied in Calgary and we studied a load of Margaret atwood, obviously, because I was in Canada. And Wilden has tipped this one that's very much about like backwater Canada and what it's like, you know, so, so for anyone who's listening then and maybe thinks, oh, I might go and give it a go, what, what, or if they can't make it out today, what's the starting point for them? What do you think? How do they start broadening that horizon when they're writing? Well, I think you can think about listening, listening to nature, listening deeply, going into nature, spending time, maybe 10 minutes, maybe 20, walk, get out of your car, get off the road, get out of your bedroom or your living area. I mean, we're on this incredible island here. It's surrounded by your in deep nature, but go and listen and maybe even take your phone and record nature and listen to what nature sounds like at night. I live in London and, but where I live, there's lots of canals and on the canals there's lots of birds. So we have geese, ducks, swans, you name it, little ducks, all kinds of things, turns, all kinds of things. But if you walk around at night in London, they're all asleep and they're asleep on the river. And you can see these little bobbly, bobbly things everywhere and it's sleeping nature. And I mean, I think you really need to start, we need to start paying attention. Well, yeah, funnily enough, you mentioned the writing in nature, I would turn to Fiona, you're in the middle of a series of workshops here on the Isle of Man, which we talked before they got started, basically doing exactly that really. It's all about writing by the city. How have they been going so far and I suppose, is that the in essence, what you're trying to do with them, with the writers who come along to those workshops? Yeah, I think we've had two so far and it has been great to get out onto the shore and particularly, in both cases so far, we've been able to do a little bit of rock pooling and I think that that's is a really good thing that we can do on the Isle of Man really easily. And the shore at Leitide, you suddenly get this glimpse under the surface of the sea and I think just being able to do a little bit of that and then go straight back and do a bit of writing around that, it's been really lovely to have that chance to do it. And I think it is, even though we live so close to all this here, it's so easy not to go out and do that when you get the chance on the Isle of Man. I think the other thing that has really come out of doing the workshop is just that kind of thing we've been talking about just now about connection, about how, if we start thinking about how we're connected to the sea and how what we do impacts the sea and how the sea, all the kind of good things that the sea does for us, then that's come out a lot already in the writing that people have done and in the discussions that we've had that seeing ourself as part of nature and part of a marine ecosystem, it's such a healthy way to think and it does make you approach things in a completely different way. So I know it's been, I've loved the workshops we've had so far, the people that have come along have been a mixture of people that really love writing or just really want to learn more about the sea and we've had such exciting conversations about marine life and being on an island and how we can use writing and our knowledge to build a better future for the island and also think outside the island about our role in the world as well. So there's still faces left on the remaining eight workshops, so it'd be great. People still want to sign up, they can. If anyone's listening and they want a book on this evening, there's still tickets available at the talk at the Erin Arts Centre, that's tonight at half past seven and tomorrow morning as well, that's at Port Erin in St. Catherine's Church Hall at 10am, that writing workshop. All the details are at Manx Litfest's website and yeah, thank you very much for your time, do you think I've missed anything, anything you want to add? I just have to say, we're very grateful for the advance council for underwriting these two climate writing events, so we're very grateful for that support. I feel very grateful to be invited up here, it's wonderful. If you want to come to the workshop, please bring pen and paper, laptop, anything you'd like to write on, and I think it might rain tomorrow, so waterproof clothing, we're going out into nature. I love that, it can be out in the rain now, I suppose actually before you go, how you found the Isle of Man if you enjoyed it so far? I've been looking to the stone circle, tramping through the gorse, we've seen seals, and what else have we seen Fiona? And we've been to the Viking burial at night. Oh, the Viking burial, and we're now off to see some Celtic crosses, and so yeah, I'm enjoying it. Yeah, in fact, hopefully you can go with some inspiration from the Isle of Man for future novels. Yeah. I'll brilliant never know. Thank you for making it to the end of the Manx Radio newscast, you are obviously someone with exquisite taste. May I politely suggest you might want to subscribe to this and a wide range of Manx Radio podcasts at your favourite podcast provider, so our best bits will magically appear on your smartphone. Thank you. a lot. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. a lot.
