An Interview With... Gareth Spark

1) The world ends in 24 hours. How are you spending it?

24 hours wouldn’t be enough to do the million things I’ve promised myself I would do if I ever got the news this world, or myself, which is my world I suppose, were to end: go to New York City, head to the East Village, then Washington Square Park, find Shade Bar and buy Todd Robinson a drink; go back to Spain one more time, find the guy who owned the bar where I worked and kick him in the nuts, good and proper; smoke cigarettes in a sleazy hotel in Berlin listening to Nick Cave before heading out to do something insane in the moonlight; riding a fast horse across a lightning struck prairie someplace in Wyoming; fight a cold storm on the North Sea in a boat that’s too small and the feeling that comes when you realise you’ve survived and, finally, to find the woman I called Louise in my poems and tell her she was right about everything. 24 hours would never be enough for even one of those. I think I’d settle for cigarettes, whisky, and then going out like Spike in the last episode of Buffy…. disintegrating whilst laughing.

2) What was the first book you remember reading?

Treasure Island. The character of Israel Hands saying to Jim, “I never seen good come o' goodness yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don't bite; them's my views.” There’s a lot of lessons in that book and a ton of fine writing. In terms of the portrayal of treachery, greed and fate, it’s flawless.

3) What is your favourite book / one book everybody should read?

Anything by Raymond Carver, but I’m going to say the poems in particular. They look so simple, but they’re so not; they have a limpid clarity that’ll haunt you, an honesty that kills more convoluted poetry stone dead. It’s the real deal.

4) Bruce Springsteen once told me about his hometown. Tell me a little about yours.

Whitby. If you look beneath the picture postcard corniness and Goth sentimentality run wild, it’s a small, hardscrabble place that holds little or no future for anybody under 30. The native industries of fishing and boatbuilding have died out and there’s little else unless you like working in Chip shops or cleaning holiday cottages for people who’ll spend more on a coffee machine than you’ll make in a week. The parts of Whitby I like are in the liminal zones, the borderlands at the edge of town, where the broken walls of former factories and coal yards are overgrown by weeds, where the sediment heavy river runs past the abandoned gas works, and the sun falls like mercy on the abandoned Scarborough Railway line. Those places made me the writer I am.

5) What are you most afraid of?

Waking up one day and not being able to write.

6) What makes you feel nostalgic?

Music, definitely; the bands of my youth, that mid-90’s shining Britpop explosion; the Dylan and Cohen songs my first wife listened to; the Damien Rice songs I listened to endlessly during a horrifically painful break-up (I know, sucker for punishment, right?) Other things? The smell of cigarette smoke on a late afternoon; the sea, first thing on a summer’s day, before it gets too hot; the smell of Spanish food, and if ever I hear a foghorn, it takes me right back to being a kid, and the fog thick as snow in the street outside as the ‘Hawsker Bull’ sounds on the cliffs in the distance.

7) Do you have a set writing process?

I think my life would be a lot less difficult if I did but, no, I just write when the ‘muse’ grabs me, usually on the fourth beer.

8) What advice would you give to young writers / people who are hopeless at doing it?

Be honest in your work, utterly honest, write about what hurts, what shames you, what

makes you afraid; write about your life, your true life, the things only you can know, and then you’re on the way to making something worthwhile. Don’t give up but, above all, be honest. Be so honest it hurts.

9) If you could commit one crime and get away with it, what would it be?

I’d rob a bank and steal enough money to travel the world; just enough to fund a life’s bohemian vagabondage would be quite nice.

10) Go on, have a superpower. What would you like?

Invisibility. This is a small town, you know, and there are a lot of ex-girlfriends, old landlords and disgruntled former friends out there!

11) You can smack any living person in the face and they won’t sue, I promise. Who are you hitting?

Just one? Well, discounting work colleagues, Poetry editors, former Agents and one Spanish bastard it’d have to be Zuckerberg, for giving me one more way to thoroughly waste my time.

12) It’s hard being a writer, isn’t it? Why do you do it?

It’s a duty, a compulsion, a gift, a curse; it’s the only way this messy world can ever make sense to me. I don’t know which writer it was said that there comes a time in a man’s life when he’s old enough to look back and start to see some structure to his life, some shape, some sense of destiny, well mine brought me here, and I’m past the P.S.R. To quote that noble text, Alien Vs. Predator, “The P.S.R. is the "point of safe return". It means we've used up half our fuel so we can't turn back.” In a couple of years, I’ll be 40 and I’ve used up half my damn fuel to get to that point. For good or ill, I’ll be writing until the chopper goes down.

13) You can sleep with any famous figure, alive or dead. Who are you taking?

Even if they were dead, they still wouldn’t take my calls.

14) What are some of your other passions, other than literature?

Cinema. That’s the true dream of our times, the only medium besides poetry capable of capturing the fractured insanity of what it means to be alive at the butt end of 2016. Cinema is a true Gesamtkunstwerk, a synthesis of all other Art forms; music, literature, the visual Arts. It’s unfortunately a very expensive medium to work in, unless you happen to have a trust fund but I’d LOVE for a cinematic version of Punk to bust out one day, and by that, I mean something made by the working class for themselves, something anarchic and revolutionary and meaningful. You’ve got to take the power away from the social and economic class who control the Film Industry in this country, make your own, make it new, reflect your own life, your own dreams, your own passions. Don’t let somebody in London tell you via your TV what it should mean to be you. Take control and show THEM what it means to be you. The same applies to all the Arts.

15) Tell me about any work you have published / will be publishing / can only dream of publishing

I have a story called THIS NOTION OF A FIRE over at Near to the Knuckle right now I’m pretty proud of (close2thebone.co.uk) and some poems up at Versewrights, but there’s tons of things out there, just a google search away.