Gareth is our latest author; his first novel for young people, The Only Way, was released earlier this year. I asked Gareth to write a little bit about himself, which I am delighted to reproduce here:
“I grew up on the ragged edges of a big city. It was a place where the houses, shops and warehouses merged into scrubby and unloved wasteland. It was a place where those who knew where to look could find the crumbling remains of factories and air raid shelters, ancient oak trees to climb, wild blackberry bushes big enough to crawl inside and ancient churches where the gravestones seemed to whisper secrets from a different age. It was a place through which there ran an old canal where the waterlilies grew and the swans came to give birth to their young each summer. When I was younger I wanted to follow the canal out of the city and far away into the countryside. I wanted to have adventures and to write stories about them. I still do. When I grew up I really did leave the city. For a while I lived in a castle surrounded by a deep river; later I lived on a farm in the hills; now I live in a little brick house with a yellow door and fruit trees in the garden. I’ve been a banker, a shelf stacker, an accountant and a teacher but my real vocation is to sit at the window and watch the rain fall from the heavens and water the garden.
I grew up in Bootle on Merseyside in the 1970s and 80s. We had no money but lots of love and freedom. I was a devotee of Enid Blyton and rather fond of Asterix. I tended to get whatever books I could find in the local jumble sale so it was a bit hit and miss. I was an only child but had lots of cousins who were good substitutes for brothers and sisters. I was not from a church family but God came knocking pretty early on in my life. I never felt at home in the city and the family holidays we had in the mountains of North Wales were sublime moments of joy followed by devastation as the city closed in on me on my return. This idea of the natural world as a pointer to the divine runs throughout the book [The Only Way] but rather than following a quest up into the mountains we see nature breaking out in the city: in Lily’s garden, in the waterlilies on the canal, in the flower growing in the cracked pavement.
I decided to become a writer at whatever age it was that I read my first Enid Blyton book. Once the decision was made I was content and so felt no compulsion to do anything about it – like actually put pen to paper. Eventually I began to write poetry as a teenager and have continued to do so ever since. In 1999 I began the MA in Creative Writing at Northumbria University and started to think about writing prose (mainly because it was impossible to fulfil the word count with poetry). I started with short stories, moved on to a turgid and dull campus novel and ended up trying to write fiction for young teenagers. 'The Only Way' is my first published novel.
I become a Christian something like this: during the summer holidays one year I went to a group called CCC (Children’s Christian Something?) at the local church; I’ve no idea how or why. Later a friend who was in the Boy’s Brigade made it sound cool so I joined and started going to church. Skip a few years and I’m at a Billy Graham Crusade at Anfield: Mission England (was that ‘82? – if so I’d be nine). Anyway that’s when I made the BIG DECISION and dedicated myself to Christ. Afterwards I carried on with church, BB, Truth, Beauty and God until I left home and went to university.
By the time I left home, a) I was pretty unconvinced about all this religion business and soon started using the A-word (agnosticism) b) I can actually remember making the decision to ‘try life without God for a while’. Of course now I realise that it is logically inconsistent to try to dump a god who (probably) doesn’t exist – but I’m making no pretence to logic here. Anyway I’d have probably found the idea of being strictly logical suspect and un-artistic. Needless to say, university (Durham by the way) wasn’t much fun. I wandered around In Despair for three years while friends and family concluded I had gone mad. Somehow I got both a degree and a job in accountancy but things continued to get worse. After a couple more years I decided to go back to God.
The next decade was much more fun. Externally it involved getting married, having children, becoming a teacher, regular communion, prayer and reading the scriptures. Internally it was a reorientation away from self and towards God. Unfortunately it is a process which is nowhere near complete: if embodied existence is a process of turning bits of clay into gods – I’m at the stage of being rather like the character Morph from the 1980s TV show ‘Take Hart’.
I’m married to Sue who looks after our two daughters, Rebecca aged six and Isobel aged two. The only thing Becky likes more than school is playing schools: because then she gets to be the teacher! Isobel has just started playgroup and for her the main attraction is the endless supply of paints coupled with the lack of parents hovering around protecting the walls from her artistic endeavors.
I enjoy walking in the countryside, reading and staring out of the window. Recently I bought a dilapidated piano which I sometimes abuse frightfully in the name of making a joyful sound. In the last year I have taught in high school and prison and I am now back at university studying to work with people with learning disabilities.
'The Only Way' is for the dissatisfied, dispossessed Children of God. It is for those stuck in dull uninspiring urban wildernesses of high rise flats and endless expanses of concrete. It is for those who feel disconnected from parents, from friends, from everything. They should read it because it doesn’t shrink from admitting how awful the world can seem. They should read it because it shows that no matter how bad it seems, new life is always waiting to burst forth the moment it is given the chance. They should read it because it shows the power of love to conquer the darkness in which we sometimes find ourselves.”
'The Only Way', for young people 12+, is available from your local bookshop, online bookstores and direct from our website. As with all our books, you can read the first chapter online: www.dernierpublishing.com/theonlyway.php
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