Christy Edwall, 2013

Christy studied an MPhil in English at Clare. She now teaches English at Lancing College in West Sussex and has just published her first book 'History Keeps Me Awake At Night.'  

Christy's story

My time at Clare was brief but significant: nine months of intensive reading, writing, and wandering. Mornings were spent running to Grantchester past the house on Eltisley Avenue where Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes first lived together. In the afternoons, I read the footnotes of long eighteenth-century poems which would later form the foundation of my doctorate on Romantic taxonomies at Oxford. Evenings were passed cementing new friendships after lectures by George Steiner, JH Prynne, and Rowan Williams. I looked up Christopher Smart’s manuscripts in the Pembroke library and saw Blake’s prints in the Fitzwilliam Museum.  I bought so many second-hand books in the central market that the stall owner recognised me three years later. Towards the end of my first term at Clare, the first pages of a novel I had begun writing was publicly ‘edited’ by Richard Beard of the National Writing Academy. And, while that novel stalled, I was sure that I would keep writing.

That Thanksgiving, my grandfather died, and the college helped me buy a ticket to Florida to see him in his last days. This was only one of the many kindnesses I received while at Clare. Another was my luck in being supervised by Fred Parker, who read my work generously and interrogatively. I owe a great debt to his support, as I do to the company and instruction of Ruth Abbott at St John’s, Mina Gorgi at Pembroke, and Sarah Haggarty at Queen’s, all of whom modelled answers to the question I was perpetually asking: how is one to live, how to think and be as a woman, within and beyond the institution? 

If I could give a word of advice to my younger self, I’d tell her to shrug off any sense of imposter syndrome. At the time, feeling exiled to the suburbia of Newnham Road, I felt outside the conspiratorial intimacy of Memorial Court. Clare’s Graduate Common Room, which was warm and gregarious, felt off-limits somehow: I was shy at occupying space in the armchairs. Instead, I met literary friends in ramshackle pubs, and skirted Maid’s Causeway at night. Now I wish I’d lingered in the Common Room, drunk too many whiskies, and interrupted the conversation. I was lucky that I made friends with brilliant Clareites after the year was over.

I would also tell that younger self to keep on writing her daily sketches: the opportunities for eavesdropping in café’s or across the dining table were infinite. Cambridge is a city full of monologues and confessions. Re-reading my diaries ten year’s on, I find them full of the detritus of the day, flakes which eventually add up to (literary) experience.

Clare has a great history of literary alumni – Siegfried Sassoon, John Berryman, China Miéville, Tessa Hadley. Hadley is particularly important to me. Her stories, particularly those published in The New Yorker, sift luminous moments from ordinary life. Their revolutions of memory and leaps in time feel inevitable, but below such inevitability lies Hadley’s artfulness, her careful scaffolding of plot and character.

Hadley trained as a teacher at Clare and, having spent the last few years teaching in a secondary school myself, I’d like to ask her about the relationship between the classroom and the writing desk. How might a teacher’s ‘professional curiosity’ (as we’re invited to call it) be distinct from but also overlap with the work of fiction? In some ways, this is the same question I asked at Clare. How should we live? How can we think and make and be?