Notebook

A few days ago I had the privilege of interviewing Benjamin Zephaniah. What's not in the interview is the conversation I had with him about his version of Tam Lin, Tam Lyn Retold, recorded with The Imagined Village. I told him how much Tam Lin meant to me -- that my novel Seizure was partly based on the story -- and he laughed, I like to think with delight. "I’m not just saying this," he said to me, "but I get this almost every day. One thing I find about people who are into Tam Lin, is that they’re really into it. And maybe I shouldn’t admit this, but I didn’t know it at all. Maybe that helped me, because I could just look at it and think, how would I tell this in a modern setting? What wld be the modern day version of this? it’s interesting reading what people said about it – I dunno, it’s diff icult to say, you can’t go back to the past, you can’t imagine knowing something you didn’t know, but I think it would have been harder if I’d known it. I would have been asking myself, like, what would Erica think? And from all over the world I get people writing to me about it – some one just the other day from central Africa, from Malawi, wrote to me, saying something like, you’ve done us good."

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