The Geography of the Unreal

Stories come alive from the land

May 11, 2025

On Friday I returned to the Mawddach Residency. The last time I came here was in November, two and a half years ago. Now, the world has changed colour and the place where I have spent two years living in my mind is laid over this real place, different, shifting, the two things true at once. Since the last time I was here, I have spent so much time inhabiting this place in my mind - I set a novel here.

I have spent more time in the house of my novel than I ever spent in the real one. The rooms are multi-purpose, filled not only with all the things we did the last time we visited, but with all the things I have imagined into being, playing out in this space which now will always be two things. In this room, with its double arch window and view of rippling water and distant hills, I can see myself starting a novel and playing with blue paint, and I can see the same room filled with costumes for a silent film, which plays out in a novel only a few, so far, have read. I can see my characters sleeping in the room where I slept then, where I sleep now, I can see them waking in the night, see them searching through the chaos of a messy room for something lost, see them hurrying out, early, for a day of work.

On the twisting road from the station, I can see my characters walking beneath twist limbed trees that used to be bare, their last orange leaves just clinging on. Now they are almost entirely hidden beneath bursting green. The water where I swam through every possible shade of grey, the water my characters worked and fought and filmed beside, holds blues and greens it never did in autumn, never did in my mind.

In this small bay, a man who never existed cranked the handle of film camera, while another called through a megaphone. In this one a crowd of imaginary reporters gathered. The road, here, stretches beside bog. In reality, the bog is removed, off on a track through the woods not right beside the tarmac. The same road runs toward the small train station; in my mind, in my novel, you can just see the grey slate church, the small graveyard, in the distance from here. In reality, the church is a good few miles away by road; what I was thinking of was the path through the bog, that spits you out into the road within sight of the steeple. I have merged the two things in my mind, and yet the imaginary geography feels realer to me than the one I find here, bursting with spring.

I walked the bridge into town on a grey November day. My character walked back across it in the pitch black, and now I walk on it in glaring sunshine. The house numbers run the opposite way to the way I thought they did, but in my mind the real way is the way I have written them. I have seen winter weather here that I never saw then, that I will not see now. I can see it all so clearly.

All things co-exist at once, place laid over place, the place that inspired the story, that became the story, where the story now lives on - real to me but not, not yet, to anyone else. Even Catherine Lovett, who I am sharing this adventure with, who has read an early version of this novel, does not know it the way I do. These things have passed fleetingly through her mind; I have lived them, time and time again, have drafted and tweaked and cut and shifted until it all feels real as anything else, until it becomes immersive. And now I am back, physically immersed in this place again, this place which is changing.

I will start a new novel, not set here, but born of this expansive space, this wide sky. I will return, too, to the stories we began two and a half years ago in a chilled November. The stories I began to write and Cat began to illustrate. Stories inspired by old folklore, stories rooted in a land that was different the last time we came.

Last time I let the light wake me. From the studio, we watched the mountains appear out of the night and the light filter softly onto the estuary. This morning, it was bright by five. Last time, we watched the day disappear, the hills blue black, the water holding the light until the last moment before slipping into night. Last night it was light until ten.

The place is brand new and it is old all at once, as all places are when you think of it. I can see myself here before and I can see my characters here, but every home has a history, has stories that have played out before ours. The echoes of what has passed. We lay our stories, real and imagined, on top of what has come before. We repeat the old and we try again and we go on, as the leaves burst out, as the bare limbs lurk, as the land lends itself to misremembering, and we watch it all turn, imprinting ourselves hopefully into it. This is fiction; the real, becoming imaginary, becoming real again.