Tiny TripFiction Talking Location with James Dixon, author of The Billow Maiden

10th July 2022

To celebrate the launch of his debut children’s book, The Billow Maiden, Tiny TripFiction is thrilled to welcome James Dixon to the blog to tell us all about the beautiful landscapes that inspired his writing.

Illustrated by Tamsin Rosewell

Location is everything in The Billow Maiden.

I am a great Salman Rushdie fan. Specifically, I have always enjoyed the fact one of his earlier novels, Shame, is set in a place not-quite-Pakistan. It is a fairy-tale with nevertheless firm roots in reality.

This is what I had in mind with the island in The Billow Maiden. It is not-quite-Skye, or perhaps not-quite-Bute, with a little not-quite-Great-Cumbrae. These are all places I’ve visited; they are all places that stuck with me. The island in The Billow Maiden is all of them and none of them, with a lot of other influences thrown in from across the British Isles.

I wanted a seaside setting in Scotland. I was, after all, looking to write a novel about a selkie – or a billow maiden, or mermaid, or siren. Ailsa and her mum are also pretty much from Glasgow, where I live (or maybe they are from not-quite-Glasgow.) You can drive from Glasgow to a few different islands in an hour, maybe two, which suits the story perfectly. Though they live in another world, Aunt Bertha and Uncle Nod are only ever a short drive away. You can step from one world to the other and back again in an afternoon.

Not long before writing The Billow Maiden, my wife and I stayed at Corsewall Lighthouse Hotel in Stranraer, a short distance south of Glasgow. It’s a fully functioning, automated lighthouse whose main buildings and outhouses have been converted into a hotel. It went in straight away as a sanctuary for my protagonists.

There is a small nod to Wales in the novel, too. The Gallachs are local islanders. However, go back a few generations and they are nomadic seafarers. The word gallach has a few different meanings, which all come together to mean something like smart, sensible, yet nasty. I hope I’ve not butchered that too much – my knowledge of the Welsh language peters out quite quickly. However, I liked the idea that their kin had always faced out to the Atlantic and the Irish Sea but had only settled anywhere fully in the last few generations. Readers will know that this plays a pivotal role in the novel’s backstory.

Finally, there is a good dash of Cornwall in the setting. Poldark readers will likely feel at home with the rockfaces and caves that Ailsa explores in the book’s early passages. This is the geography of my childhood. My parents used to take me and my brother to stay in Cornwall for a week or two every summer. Dad, my brother, and I would all disappear into the caves lining Cornwall’s coastline. It’s proper smuggler’s territory (again, as Poldark fans will know).

Everything is pretty bleak along that coastline. Memories of mine of Tintagel and Trebarwith Strand are packed with black rocks, cold rockpools, steep drops, and bare greenery just about clinging on before the land meets the sea. The sights and smells, the feel of the place, went into my writing. Ailsa may have begun in the Scottish islands, but she certainly spent a lot of time disappearing into Arthurian lands.

However, though these different locations all exist and sort of rub along together, they have an obvious unifying theme. Or two, rather. They are all coastal and bleak, and they are all places I have loved over the years. Together, they make up a perfect setting for a stranded selkie (or billow maiden), a subsiding township, falling into the sea, and a child’s adventure one hot, lonely summer.

James Dixon

James Dixon is a London-born, Glasgow-based novelist, poet, and playwright. His debut novel, The Unrivalled Transcendence of Willem J. Gyle (Thistle, 2017) was shortlisted for the 2018 Somerset Maugham Award by the Society of Authors. His debut play, It’s My Turn, was performed as part of the 2019 Edinburgh Science Festival, aimed at younger audiences. The Billow Maiden is his first novel aimed at younger readers.

Chat James on Twitter @James_D_Dixon.

The Billow Maiden is published by Guppy Books, July 2022.

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