Ed Garland participated in the Heathrow Airport Residency in September 2018. We met up with him in Terminal 2, where we talked about sound in fiction, his studies, and his forthcoming essay collection.

You’ve mentioned that you have some degree of hearing loss. Is this something that influences your writing, and if so, how?

I have hearing loss and tinnitus. The two things go together – you can have one without the other, but often they go together. Tinnitus is a constant ringing noise (mine is two different tones that fluctuate to different rhythms) and my hearing loss is basically things being muffled; I can’t hear birdsong that well. Or other people if their voices are within a certain frequency range. I got two hearing tests before I realised I had hearing loss, and before I did anything about it. Before that there was three years of me walking around being really irritated by sound.

Around the same time that I got those hearing tests and went to a doctor, I got married and moved from Bristol to Aberystwyth. It was only once we’d moved that I realised how noisy Bristol was! I was in Aberystwyth to do a part-time MA in Creative Writing. I’m not really sure why, but at the time I was researching philosophies of sound and trying to read about the different ways in which people think about sound. A lot of what I found was very closely tied to music – not much of it looked into sound within fiction, even though sound is quite a big feature.

One of the things that first came up was a book by Henry Roth called Call it Sleep. He crops up in secondhand bookshops a lot. Someone somewhere said Call It Sleep was “the noisiest novel ever written”. When you read that and then read the book you realise it’s so rich in sonic detail, so noisy. It’s almost a list of all the sounds in New York, and it’s really interesting to see the way it affects the protagonist.

Ever since that, whenever I read a book I pay attention to sound and to attitudes to sound. Some characters treat it as a thing to deal with or a source of stress. Or else the only sounds the author mentions are those accompanying terrible events: people shouting and that kind of thing. So that’s what I’ve been thinking about since starting the MA.

And now I’m going to be doing a PhD, trying to make something out of all this research into sound. When you look at it it’s clear that different authors use sound in different ways, and have different attitudes to it. And, underlying that, I think for people with hearing loss and tinnitus, it might be useful for them to read fiction and pay attention to the sounds within it, and maybe by paying attention to the sound elements of these books we might learn something about our relationship with sound and hearing. Are we like a character who’s harassed by noise? Or can we have a relationship with sound where we think of it as something to accept?

If you go on the Action on Hearing Loss website or the British Tinnitus Association they say that reading helps because it’s relaxing and takes your mind off your problems, but I think we can be more specific about what kinds of reading might really help your hearing. I think we could gather a reading list for people with hearing loss, and a reading practice – perhaps an introduction to theory: look at sound studies, and then look at fiction with the ideas from sound studies in mind, and see how that might help us have a better relationship with our hearing, rather than just thinking, after your diagnosis, oh it’s damaged, oh I’ll have to spend six grand on hearing aids.

How did you start out writing? Was it something you always did even before undertaking the MA at Aberystwyth?

I was always doing it, but I never could bring myself to talk about it or try and learn formally about it. I’d been writing since I was 16, on a thing called Diaryland – a blogging platform that’s weirdly famous now, because the guy who owns it never did anything to update it, and so it still looks like it did in the 1990s. Anyway, I did that for a long time, and then had another blog for five years, before that gave out. It was fun at the start, but towards the end the persona behind the blog just become bitter and angry. It was complaints, mostly – always very oblique and exasperated.

Later on I did start telling people that I liked to write, and I started doing the odd collaboration or two. I considered it something I enjoyed doing and would do more often, but that took a really long time to arrive at.

Now I’m a lot more relaxed about it, but I think that’s through talking about it. I used to be quite superstitious about it, as though it was something that shouldn’t be talked about. I did tell a few people, and I shared bits with my friend Sarah, an illustrator, and we did some collaborations. I’d write something, she’d illustrate it. She’s always taking things as far as they can go, always thinking what the next step might be.

From just having a conversation with her, you can end up having an exhibition in London. That was me and Sarah and a photographer called Anthony St James, and Tom Hare who sculpts massive willow sculptures. We had this big exhibition. When that happened and I saw what I’d written in the world – not just on the internet anymore – I started to think maybe I’d follow this and see where it went.

So is fiction now more your thing?

I find it really hard. I’m not sure if I can do it. The stuff I come out with doesn’t have the right feeling ever. I watched an interview with Tao Lin, and he said what he writes is what he wants to read on a sentence by sentence basis. I’m not his biggest fan, but I thought that was a really great thing to consider when writing. But then trying it I found that I didn’t know what the next sentence should be. I just got stuck.

I’m still trying to write fiction. I used to try and write poetry to get some relief from failing to write fiction, but it was always found poetry. Now I’m writing essays too, though, and that seems to be going better than the fiction has gone. That seems to be working, and I’m getting some satisfaction from it. I’m focusing on that.

And your essays have been doing quite well…

I was never expecting to get the response I got to them. I’ve accepted it now, but it’s a bit like switching into a parallel universe. It’s been a real surprise. A good shock. And it sort of confirms that I should be moving away from my old bitterness and irritation – as fun as it was to write that at the start. I still enjoy reading customer service complaints, by the way. Exasperated writing and that whole mode of expression is fun.

Do you have any recommendations for people who want to start thinking more about sound in fiction?

Definitely Alexander G Weheliye. His book Phonographies is really good. That tells you a lot about the different ways writing and sound are involved with each other, as well as the significance of the particular writers he looks at. He’s got this term: sonic Afro-modernity. He calls Ralph Ellison one of the architects of sonic Afro-modernity, and when you read it you wonder why you’ve never considered it before. He’s a really good writer, and he strings together a lot of lofty concepts in a really interesting and stylish way.

Salomé Voegelin has a book called Sonic Possible Worlds, which is really dense, but I found it exhilaratingly dense. She’s a relentless thinker. If you’ve had no experience, like me before I read it, it really does change your listening and your relationship with sound. But it’s one where you have to read the same sentence over a couple of times, the same paragraph over a dozen times and let it wash over you. It changed my mind a lot, and enabled me to hear things I couldn’t hear before. Quite a lot of it is about sound art as well, opening up sound art and enabling you to enjoy sound art so that you’re not just hearing noises.

There’s a philosopher called Maurice Merleau-Ponty – he wrote a book called Phenomenology of Perception – who says an interesting thing about perception. There’s an area of sound studies that looks at the phenomenology of it, and you can trace a certain strand of sound studies back to him.

There’s a guy called David Toop who wrote a book called Sinister Resonance and another called Haunted Weather, both of which are good for sound in literature, and how sound can behave in a spooky way in literature.

Then there’s a blog called Sounding Out which is really good, and covers the social aspects of sound and music and listening, and what we don’t hear when we listen, and how different cultures hear things differently. The blog is filled with interesting ways that sound interacts with different people and different cultures.

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Ed Garland won the New Welsh Writing Awards 2018 with his essay collection Earwitness: A Search for Sonic Understanding in Stories, which is available here. He is completing a PhD thesis entitled Sonic Experience in Contemporary Fiction at Aberystwyth University. He is on Twitter: @EdGarland9.