Tony Warner

Macrame: Please tell us a little bit about your journey as a writer. How did you get started and how has your writing evolved over time?

Tony Warner: I was an only child and my widowed mother worked long hours. So I read. If you read a lot you eventually get the urge to write: the school magazine, short pieces for hippy journals, writing for art magazines, helping on the staff of a poetry magazine, acting as the secretary for various societies (Josef Stalin did that; it’s the person who writes the record who is in charge of the history.)

Macrame: Your writing has varied widely and has included articles, poetry, and several published books. Which of your written work do you consider to be most significant, and why?

Tony Warner: This is like asking a mother which of her children is the favourite. Vincent and Pablo was the most fun to write and I enjoyed poking fun at the art history establishment. Childhood, Boyhood, Youth has far more of me in it (though it’s by no means an autobiography) and is the more passionate novel. I’m proud of both of those and of many of the short stories, but I’ll never make an academic author.

Macrame: What is your writing process like, and how do you overcome any challenges that come along the way?

Tony Warner: My wife is a painter and has a studio on a local industrial estate. The estate also has its own café, where I sit and work while my wife paints. Not quite Hemingway in Paris but it gives me reasonable quiet and at least ten hours a week dedicated writing time. It also forces me to work; I need to have something to show my wife after looking at her morning’s painting in the studio. I have a little black notebook, where I jot down odd ideas. When ‘blocked’ I pick one out at random, head it onto a blank page and start writing……

Macrame: Your published books span a range of genres, for example: Vincent and Pablo centers around art, and your most recent Childhood, Boyhood, Youth is a work of realism set in 1960s. Can you describe the path that led you to write on these distinct themes.

Tony Warner: Vincent and Pablo is partly the result of taking an art history degree as a mature student. The faculty was very much based on deconstructivism, which I consider just another form of French metaphysics totally inappropriate to the analysis of art. Discussion of what real artists actually do was strictly forbidden, so I produced my alternative non-deconstructed novel. Childhood, Boyhood, Youth takes its title from Tolstoy writing on aristocratic life in Russia in the 1860s. My version looks at working class life in Britain a hundred years later. It’s based on a place, time and milieu I know very well, a change from much contemporary literature which deals with the angst and inner monologues of middle class Anglo-Saxons.

Macrame: If you had to describe yourself as a particular kind of writer, what kind of writer would you say you are? What life experiences have made an impact on you and your writing?

Tony Warner: I had a working class upbringing where I was left to myself much of the time. Fortunately my local school was just what I needed, introducing me to a wider cultural outlook. And reading the great nineteenth century novelists at university (when I should have been reading Kant and Wittgenstein). Then the cherry on the cake, meeting a bright, intelligent, cultured woman who has encouraged me for the last decades, whether I deserved it or not.

Macrame: How did your background in philosophy and art influence your writing? Is it a natural progression of your interest in these fields or an independent form of expression?

Tony Warner: Philosophy gave me a basic sub-strata and taught me to write clear explanatory passages. Art is the structure around which we twine our lives. Together they stop my writing becoming disorganized and uninteresting.

Macrame: Who are you as a reader? What is on your reading list now?

Tony Warner: Currently reading ‘Chaucer’s People’ by Liza Picard, an account of everyday life in 14^th century England. Next I’ll be carrying on with the project of reading every novel by the Turkish/British writer Elif Shafak

Macrame: You mentioned that you are currently involved in an interesting project – restoring a 13^th century church tower to make it into a scriptorium. Please share with our readers what exactly is a scriptorium, and what is your ultimate vision for this fascinating undertaking.

Tony Warner: Until the invention of printing, all books were copied by hand, usually by monks, hence the word ‘transcript’. Monasteries had dedicated rooms in which the monks wrote, the scriptorium. My tower has a space at the top which used to hold the bell. When the church restoration is finished this will be the quietest room in the building, ideal as my scriptorium. It will also keep me fit walking up and down the 60 stairs.

Macrame: What advice can you give our readers regarding writing or life in general?

Tony Warner: ‘Enjoy your life, this is not a rehearsal’ is a slogan I saw recently on a hippy van. If you aren’t enjoying writing why are you doing it? And don’t expect to make any money at it. Other than that: read like mad, write whatever you can wherever you can and live life to the full.

Macrame: What can readers look forward to reading from you next?

Tony Warner: I’ve just published a collection of my short stories (‘Criminal Matters’), bringing together many which have appeared in magazines, plus a few fresh ones. This autumn I’m expecting to publish a new novel ‘All the Nice Girls’, a romance set in the Royal Navy in the period 1939-1945. I hope you will all like it!