Writing through spaces
Aminata Sow in conversation with Ella Frears
Aminata Sow, Ella Frears
Aminata Sow: The first thing I wanted to talk about is renting, because I’ve been renting in London for almost eight years now. I think it does something to you – not just in terms of finances and stability, but also in your relationship with your own body, and the sense of occupying a space that’s not yours, that’s always provisional. It feels more individualising because you can’t identify yourself with the context you’re in. So I wondered how you felt about that, and whether the feeling of never quite belonging gets inside the writing itself – not just as subject matter, but as a way of inhabiting the poem.
Ella Frears: When I started writing Goodlord, I didn’t exactly set out to write a book about housing. It was born out of real emails with an estate agent – Goodlord is a real property company. At first it was a specific kind of anger: not visceral, not bodily, more a strange cerebral irritation. I was just annoyed that it was called Goodlord. But as soon as you start pressing that button, you start to realise – the rule I made for myself was that every space the voice occupies had to be a real space I’d rented – just how ridiculously awful the situation has become for renters. And the thing you keep telling yourself, even now, is: well, it could be worse. There are people who are homeless. At least I have a flat, at least I’m living in London, living the dream, but then you step back. I lived for a whole year in a bedroom with no windows. And at the time I was like, God, how lucky – it’s close to the pub where I work, I can just walk. But it’s nuts. I was a different person when I occupied that space. Less healthy. It does something to your mental health. And as soon as you start to think about who has access to really beautiful places to live, and what that must do for them – you realise just how ridiculous the situation is. If you were building a community from scratch, you just wouldn’t choose that as a system.
AS: At one point the narrator lives in a basement, and reading that section reminded me of an essay by Natalia Ginzburg from 1948, called “On Women”. She says that all women – regardless of whether they’re rich or poor, happy or unhappy, fat or thin – have this habit of falling into a well. There’s this idea of being a woman and going underground, and the loneliness of it. It made me wonder whether, for you, there was also a sadness beneath that loneliness – because Goodlord reads to me as quite an angry book, but I wonder what’s underneath the anger.
EF: I love Natalia Ginzburg. We’re what – a year and a half on from Goodlord coming out? And the main criticism, when there have been criticisms, tends to be: oh, I thought this was going to be a book about housing, and it’s actually about sexual assault – or about the body, being a woman, patriarchy. For me it’s neither, or maybe it’s both. I think it’s an interesting reader response. When I was writing it, I was just following a specific feeling of anger – about the various tenancies I’d occupied – and then following that feeling I realised I had exactly the same type of anger about lots of encounters, mostly with men. I think there’s something atmospherically connected, at least for me. When you’re a young woman, things happen constantly – non-consensual moments, harassment, microaggressions – and you think: well, it’s bad, it’s of how things are, and you push through, you get on, because otherwise you’ll go mad. I felt the same way about renting.
AS: Could be worse.
EF: Exactly. So I was just following that state of being: there’s nothing I can do about this right now, so I’m going to go ahead and live. In many ways the anger is misplaced in that book – I wanted you to feel a bit sorry for the estate agent by the end. I think that’s more interesting. It goes so far the other way that you can’t possibly get behind the protagonist, you’d go to prison if you sent that email. But beneath that dynamic, there are real things surfacing, things she should be angry about. And there’s a level of passivity in the voice, I suppose, which could also be read as loneliness, or sadness, or pathos.
AS: Reading it, it felt to me like a book about power – and powerlessness – and how you respond to that. The image of the narrator putting on a lab coat and acting as a scientist when she’s harassed felt really striking, because it’s a way of dissociating, of studying the thing and observing how it acts on you without being inside it. And at the same time, the lab coat feels like a way of reclaiming power, or masking as power. What was writing that like for you? And do you feel that writing is a way of dissociating from what you’re describing, or inhabiting it?
EF: I think that’s really well perceived. The nice thing about being the writer of a book is that you don’t have to come up with a diagnosis for your own voice/s – that’s for others to do. But you’re right – it’s probably a form of dissociation. This is happening anyway, so I might as well observe it. I wouldn’t advocate for that as a healthy way of living but I’m not a lifestyle guru, I’m a poet. And I do go through life always writing in my head, and the gap between things happening and me thinking could this be a poem inevitably gets shorter and shorter – to the point where something potentially awful might be going on and I’m thinking, at least I can write through this afterwards. It’s that Nora Ephron everything-is-copy thing.
What I really want is to get at something that isn’t fully straightforward. With some sexual encounters – especially early ones – it’s not simply wanting or not wanting. There’s a strange in-between place where you’re trying to figure out if you do want, and you might be doing this figuring out while it’s already happening. I’m not trying to minimise, and – often it tips over into something less positive, more non-consensual. But there are moments where those things can turn into something interesting. There’s a section in the book where she encounters an estate agent from the town where she grows up, who pulls her hair, and she’s not not interested. That not not thing is what really fascinates me in a writing context. What’s going on there?
AS: I get frustrated when the discourse around consent is so black and white, because lived experience is nothing like that.
EF: No. Not always. And I wanted the book to be a little whiplash-inducing – humour butted right up against the darker material. Because I love when people, friends, are talking about something difficult, and already have a joke ready. Even if it’s not a ha-ha joke, there’s an intimacy to it. I think humour is radical when it’s placed that close to something complicated or murky. I wanted to complicate things, because that’s what art can do. It’s not an essay on consent – it’s this strange monologue in the voice of someone who is angry and unravelling. She doesn’t think or feel exactly as I think or feel, and creatively I found that exciting.
AS: It feels like the book is constantly moving between intimate encounters and the larger structures that shape them. There’s a moment in the book where the narrator says she and her flatmate could have been friends if the architecture had allowed it, and I loved that line. When I first moved into a student house, the living room had been turned into an extra bedroom, so there was nowhere to eat together. I became weirdly obsessed with that and started writing a poem called On Tablelessness. Having grown up in a very communal food culture, I was struck by how materially loneliness can be produced. Did that feel important to you when writing the book?
EF: Yeah, completely. I think it’s really tragic, architecturally, what’s happening. Landlords want as many bedrooms as possible, so they strip out the communal areas and turn them into rooms. And then you’re living with strangers and there’s nowhere to be together – you can’t really hang out in someone’s bedroom. When I think about the spaces I lived in, there are people I lived with who I liked but never properly connected with, and I think it was for architectural reasons. My partner’s a builder – he sees it far more than I do. And it’s sad, especially for students going in now.
AS: A few years later, I had the opposite experience: I lived in a warehouse in Harringay with a huge communal space, and one thing I loved was that we were allowed to keep its history. There were objects and bits of furniture left by previous tenants, painted walls, loads of plants. It made me think of all my previous experiences where that sense of history had been completely stripped out, and all that remained was the residue of damage – stains, things left broken. I ended up really valuing that chaos. It made me think about writing too: whether it’s more like encountering a blank page, or whether there’s always some residue of what you’ve written before, what you’ve read.
EF: I’m very envious – I never had a warehouse moment. I think there are things about it that would drive me crazy, but still. It’s funny how quickly you become nostalgic for communal living, even for housemates you hated. When I was writing Goodlord, I felt quite nostalgic for a lot of the characters who appear in it, because we were all so weird. When you live with other people you develop these strange shared habits and routines that fit around each other and make no sense to anyone outside.
But to your question – I think sometimes you have to give yourself a break and let the residue pass. Between Shine, Darling and Goodlord there were about five years where I hardly wrote anything, because I was still inside the world of that first book. And it took me a while to get out of Goodlord‘s headspace too – I got slightly embroiled in a council dispute about a year ago and caught myself about to write about it, and had to stop and think: no. I’ve done property revenge lit. I need to move on. But it’s hard, because the system hasn’t changed. There’s something quite reassuring, though, about knowing that work can circle around the same themes and keep returning to motifs – that that’s maybe fine, maybe even interesting.
AS: It’s fun to have an obsession – until it eats you alive. Or until you can’t afford not to. I came across an article by Claudia Durastanti, who wrote Strangers I Know – autofiction, translated into English a few years ago. She then published a more speculative novel, and this article reflected on both experiences, arguing that the rise of autofiction is tied to the material conditions of writers. It’s so hard to make a living that you have to work around other jobs, and writing about yourself is cheaper – in time and research – because you don’t have to spend months on worldbuilding or imagining lives you haven’t lived. I found that quite a truthful darkness: that we’re forced to use ourselves as creative material, and that imagination is a privilege. I wondered how that lands for you.
EF: I find that so fascinating. I can only speak for my own writing. Obviously, I really wish poetry was more lucrative – or that we didn’t need money at all. I’ve been a full-time poet since 2014, doing all the things jobbing poets do: workshops, readings, commissions, residencies. I really like it, for the most part, but it is exhausting. And Goodlord was written at five in the morning, before all those other jobs.
Though, I do think the financial pressure has driven me to complete work I wouldn’t otherwise have finished. I’ve been contracted to deliver things every few months, and that’s meant I’ve had to keep developing, keep moving forward. And the friction between what I was being asked to write and what I would have naturally have written has produced something I find more interesting than whatever either thing would have been alone. Something weird happens when you’re pushed into a corner and have to write out of it. Living through those awful flats and horrible tenancies became genuinely fruitful, because Goodlord drew on all of that. I wouldn’t have written it had I not felt really trapped. (I’m not saying I’m grateful).
AS: I guess what comes out of constraints is worth celebrating! You threw an office Christmas party with Rough Trade Books last year, and I was gutted to miss it – a party where nobody read their work. Was there something about the standard poetry reading you wanted to push back against?
EF: It’s more that I just think poets are great at partying en masse – we’re really fun, we have a strong sense of community. I wrote something for the RLF recently where I argued that poets are good socially in part because you can get to know someone’s work in about three minutes. Poems are short. I can look someone up and read something whole and have a real sense of them very quickly – it’s not like a couple of pages of a novel. So we’re all aware of each other in quite a deep way. Yes, it gets bitchy, yes, it’s competitive at times – but it’s still really fun. I love poets.
And sometimes the best part of a poetry reading is catching up with everyone. Sometimes it feels like a shame that there has to be a hierarchy – readers and not readers. It doesn’t always feel that way, but sometimes it does. So I thought: if I throw an office Christmas party, everyone can just chat, there can be karaoke, everyone can have fun. And no poems. We’ve had enough poems for the year.
I think so much of what’s happening in society and arts funding right now is telling us to hate each other – to compete for the same tiny pots of money, where only a few will be selected. So anything we can do that brings us together and says: actually, we all love making things, we enjoy each other’s work, and we’re fun – that matters.
AS: Yes, the poetry world is more social than other literary worlds – whenever I go to a poetry event, especially a small one, it’s less about the work itself and more about being in the same room doing something together.
EF: Definitely. It’s not the same with every profession. I went to a house party recently that was all architects. It was the worst house party I’ve ever been to.
AS: Oh God.
EF: I think it’s a real testament to poets – we know how to party. And you and I did, after all, meet at a party.
AS: We did indeed. And when we met, I remember mentioning I was from Turin, and you told me you own a house in the mountains nearby. I’d love to hear more about that, and whether it’s influenced your creative practice at all.
EF: I’m completely obsessed, so I’m very happy to talk about it. During lockdown, I’d started writing Goodlord and was feeling very trapped – no outdoor space, very little light – like many city tenants. One day, I Googled “house for sale, northern Italy” and it was the first house that came up. A strange-looking old farmhouse, completely derelict, very cheap – one of the ones you see in the news, basically for nothing. My partner’s a builder, so I showed him the listing and asked how difficult it would be to make it liveable. He said: not that difficult. As soon as the lockdown lifted, we were on a plane to see it. We bought it, and we’re about four years in now – one floor is liveable, though it’s a bit like camping. But the main thing is that I can see the sky. There’s a horizon and fresh air.
And I’ve been learning Italian, which has completely changed the way I think about words. I know that’s not a remarkable experience – lots of people in the world speak more than one language. But for me it was new, and it just feels like a massive gift. We’ve got lots of friends in the village now. Most of them are eighty-plus.
The village recently asked me to write a poem for them, which was really fun. I wrote it with the Italian in mind and then translated it myself – imperfectly, but it feels like a real marker of where I was last year, with the language and with the place. And it’s now in a book the village published about their local history. I can’t imagine a village in England pulling someone in that quickly. Everyone’s been so generous and welcoming – just: no, you’re part of our story now. I find that quite emotional.
But I haven’t actually written while out there at all. The house is somewhere I exist, experience things, have real interactions – and then I come back to London and write it all down. Watching a storm break over Turin from up high – it’s just more poetic than anything I could write. Some things don’t need to be poems.
AS: Can you say more about how the language has changed the way you think about words?
EF: I’m hesitant to speak with too much authority on this, because I know I’m new to it and many people have written about it so well. But I am already noticing that I’m different in Italian – I have a slightly different personality when I speak it. In English, I’ve really cultivated a kind of uncertainty, a love of not-knowing. But working in Italian, I tend to be more certain in how I express myself – maybe just because I don’t yet have enough words to be uncertain. And that’s had an effect on the poems. I’m more likely now to go for a sure, direct voice than I was before.
For example: my default in an English restaurant would be to dither. But I’ve realised that the restaurants near us much prefer it if I walk in and say, I feel like ham. And they immediately engage. Whereas oh I don’t know, I’m not sure – they don’t really know what to do with that. So my poetic voice has become a lot more I like ham.
AS: That’s interesting, because English can be more direct in some ways, but there’s a British politeness that’s completely absent from Italian culture. Though when it comes to abstract ideas, we use a lot more words – we’re not as succinct.
EF: Maybe it’s that there’s a higher tolerance in Italian for being emphatic – for taking up a bit more space. Though I should say I’m mostly only talking about food, politics, and ordering bags of sand and cement. So my range is limited.
But I also think it’s about the people the language opens you up to. I’ve become really close with a woman in her nineties in the village – she’s an artist with a gorgeous garden, and she gives me cuttings of her plants that I have absolutely no idea what to do with. I take them home and they die. She keeps giving them to me. And that’s a kind of relationship I just don’t have here. Whether that’s countryside versus city rather than language – probably both. But it’s all bleeding together, and it’s all happening in that language.
AS: There’s something playful about it that your first language just doesn’t allow.
EF: Absolutely. And you have to be willing to be embarrassed – it’s genuinely humiliating. I accidentally asked someone at a supermarket counter what flavour chicken was. I meant was it seasoned, but I asked her what flavour chicken is. And she tried to explain chicken to me. I was mortified. But I really enjoyed the language she used to describe it.
AS: Someone once called moths “butterflies of the cupboard” when they didn’t know the English word. Honestly, I think it’s better than just “moth”.
EF: So much better! You weather the embarrassment and emerge with a new perspective. I’ve been a stupid little baby wandering around, and it’s been quite humbling and illuminating. I love it.
Ella Frears is a poet and artist originally from Cornwall, now based in London. She’s the author of Shine, Darling, shortlisted for the Forward Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize, and Goodlord, a hybrid work which takes the form of one long email to an estate agent, also shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Ella will be a Fellow at Columbia University’s Institute of Ideas and Imagination in Paris 2026-27.
Aminata Sow is Managing Editor at Poetry London and a writer working in Italian. Her short fiction has appeared in Scomodo, Topsy Kretts, Altri Animali, and the anthology Quasi di nascosto (Accento). She is currently part of the Gymnasion Academy with Itaca Colonia Creativa.
