REGI CLAIRE
About Regi Claire
Born and brought up in Switzerland, Regi Claire now lives in Edinburgh with her husband, the writer Ron Butlin, and their golden retriever. Her mother tongue is Swiss German, but she writes in English. She has had three books published: Inside~Outside (shortlisted for the Saltire First Book Award), The Beauty Room (longlisted for the MIND Book of the Year Award) and Fighting It. Her work has appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies, also in translation and on BBC Radio 4. She won The Edinburgh Review 10th Anniversary Short Story Competition, was a Cadenza prize winner, and has received Bursaries from Scottish Arts Council, Pro Helvetia and Thurgau Lottery Foundation, as well as a UBS Cultural Foundation Award. She is a creative writing tutor at the National Gallery of Scotland.
Regi's website is at www.regiclaire.com.
For an interview with Regi in The Scotsman, click here: http://heritage.scotsman.com/features/Regi-Claire-interview-The-fight.5380543.jp
For an article on illness and creativity by Regi on the Vulpes Libris blog, click here:
www.vulpeslibris.wordpress.com/.../thursday-soapbox-regi-claire-on-illness-and-creativity/
For a similar article on the 'City of Literature' website, click here:
http://www.cityofliterature.com/news.aspx?sec=5&pid=22&item=810
For an interview with Regi in The Short Review, click here.
For an interview on the 'Books from Scotland' website, click here: http://www.booksfromscotland.com/Authors/Regi-Claire/Fighting-It-Interview
Praise for Regi Claire:
'Her prose has a cut glass quality. Clear and crisp as Alpine air, it refracts the light at startling angles, illuminates the singular, the striking detail, turns a flashlight on the dark corners of the psyche, and manages not to flinch.' Alison Miller, Scottish Review of Books
'Claire's virtuosity lies in her range. Though she plays her characters out in quite a narrow emotional tonal space - right at that high-pitch, straining end of the scale - the scope of their identities and the settings she puts them in are breathtaking. While so many authors tend to stick to a particular subculture, Claire ... roams the length and breadth of Europe, taking in a French ambassador's wife, a German undertaker, a wealthy couple who live for their flowers and racehorse, a Presbyterian child in Dundee in thrall to her father's Bible; all ages, all classes. It is as if she is saying that wherever you come from, when we are up against a wall and fighting it, we are all similar animals. ... There is nothing ordinary about these tales. They are all extraordinary.' Vicky Allen, Sunday Herald
‘Regi Claire is a writer of compassion and determination. Her stories are filled with the details of pain and physical bewilderment and leavened with tenderness.’ A. L. Kennedy
‘Sharp, intense and almost frighteningly perceptive.’ Lesley Glaister, Sunday Herald
‘What she certainly has is the storyteller’s gift.’ Edwin Morgan
‘Claire’s writing is taut yet supple, bursting with exotic images, not a single one of which seems superfluous. She’s sharp as a scalpel, and compassionate too. Instruct your bookseller to order one for you and a dozen for the shop.’ Nicholas Royle, Time Out
‘Never insipid, full of imagination.’ Times Literary Supplement
An interview with Regi Claire
When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?
I’d always put authors on an imaginary pedestal – until I married the Scottish writer Ron Butlin and was relieved to find they’re as ‘normal’ as everyone else. Ron gave me the courage to set aside my Ph.D. thesis on Graham Swift and try my hand at writing fiction instead. Winning first prize in the Edinburgh Review Tenth Anniversary Short Story Competition (Previously Unpublished Author) was a wonderful endorsement and gave me the confidence to carry on.
Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind Fighting It? And about what you were trying to achieve; what ideas you were trying to convey?
I never consciously try to convey any ideas or messages. Still, living in a ‘foreign’ country and writing in a ‘foreign’ language has made me keenly aware of my ‘in-between-ness’, and it’s a force field I tried to explore in Fighting It. The stories give voice to misfits, people who don’t quite belong, be it socially, emotionally or sexually. Often they are caught at crisis point. They find themselves forced to make a stand in order to remain true to themselves, retain their self-respect or to survive. They fight in all sorts of ways, sometimes feebly because they know it’s a losing battle, sometimes desperately, viciously, even murderously. It’s that sense of struggling and striving, of not giving up – not without a fight, at any rate – that lies at the heart of this new collection
Coincidentally, Fighting It has gained an added poignancy for me as I’m recovering from cancer, diagnosed soon after the book was accepted by TRP.
How
do you go about creating your voice on the page?
.
I just let it happen; I don’t really think about it. I might hear a
few words in my head – ‘Russian Blue’ started out like that.
I might simply imagine someone – Max Gruber in ‘Cool Room 3’,
for instance. Or I might be haunted by something I’ve read or heard
– the title story, for example, was sparked off by a newspaper article
my mother had sent me; ‘I Call Her Salome’ originated from the
overheard sentence: ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been moved
by anything, or anyone, in my life’; and ‘The Death Queue’
is a fictionalised homage to my best friend in Switzerland.
How and when do you write?
I use a computer; it’s great to be able to edit as you go along, ending up with a clean-looking draft rather than lots of messy pages with scored-out passages, multiple asterisks, arrows and numbers.
I usually defer writing until I feel the house is, more or less, in order and I have no more excuses left for not sitting down at my desk. I particularly enjoy writing late at night, after dinner and an hour or so of TV.
What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?
I love reading fiction. Fiction that’s well-written, well-paced and original without being pretentious. Favourite women authors include Carson McCullers, Jean Rhys, Katherine Mansfield, Rosamond Lehmann, Elspeth Davie, Patricia Highsmith, Irène Némirowsky and Toni Morrison. Among my all-time favourite male writers/playwrights are Charles Dickens, Graham Greene, Harold Pinter, William Faulkner, Ross Macdonald, Raymond Chandler and James Lee Burke. Also Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Henrik Ibsen, Max Frisch, Friedrich Dürrenmatt (‘The Judge and His Hangman’, ‘The Visit’), Otto F. Walter (‘The Mute’), Jeremias Gotthelf (‘The Black Spider’), Stefan Zweig (‘The Royal Game’), Alfred Andersch (‘Flight to Afar’) and Heinrich Böll (‘The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum’).
At the moment I’m reading Flannery O’Connor’s Complete Stories – they’re first-rate!
