Elizabeth Baines: How do you identify as a writer?

At Easter I was at a conference at Salford University on writing and the small presses, and Professor of English Lucie Armitt, who'd invited me to speak, asked me if I identified as a Welsh writer. For a moment I felt stumped. Did I or didn't I?? It's one of those questions that have me floundering, and feeling that there aren't enough words, or the right words, to tackle this whole issue in a single conversation. I answered that no, I didn't identify as a 'Welsh writer': my Welsh background does of course strongly influence my outlook, and therefore of course how I write, but there are other strong influences - not least my education in English Literature and the many long years I've lived in England, as well as my father's Irishness, and the fact that some of my ancestors were quite probably from Eastern Europe and that others may have been black slaves. I've therefore never really identified strongly with any particular nationality - I always refuse to fill in those sections on questionnaires, and national pride usually gives me the creeps - and of course all of this affects who I feel I am as a writer. Writing to me is a state without boundaries: and realising this makes me realise also that this is why I write.

And then the other day on her blog the writer Nuala Ni Chonchuir called me 'the English writer Elizabeth Baines.' It's fair enough: I live in England and have done so for many years, I've mainly been published by English publishers, and, perhaps because writing to me is this universal place beyond geographic boundaries, I tend not to name locations in my writing, and they're probably taken as consistently English although some are Welsh. But, I tell you, the phrase really shocked me. I found myself thinking: Me? English? But I'm Welsh by birth; by parentage I'm? half-Welsh, half-Irish! And don't I write against the English canon? English? Me? That, I discovered, is how I feel after all these years of Anglicisation - my Welsh grandmother's punishment in school for speaking Welsh, my own inability to cope in a Welsh-speaking school, the way that, by the time I was a ten-year-old in England no one would have guessed from my accent that I hadn't been born there, the way I felt English - indeed, identified as English - at a Welsh university. No, I was far more shocked, in the end, to be called an English writer than to be asked if I identified as a Welsh one. Maybe I'm not as impartial as I've thought...

Source: http://elizabethbaines.blogspot.com/2012/08/how-do-you-identify-as-writer.html

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