S.C. Ashton is a local author and prize-winning poet who recently released her second novel, Playing the Sister Card. We caught up with her to discuss sisterly relationships, Jane Austen, and York’s flourishing poetry scene…
Your prize-winning poem, Ilaria Triptych, was nominated for the 2022 Forward Best Single Poem Prize. What can you tell us about that piece?
Ilaria Triptych won me a wonderful prize and a trip to Italy, which was fantastic! Poetry doesn’t usually earn you anything, but that got me a trip to Milan, and I read at a festival at Lake Orta. That was a poem well worth writing and persevering with!
As a York Stanza member, would you recommend the group to other local poets?
The Stanza group is of an extremely high quality. Dynamic, very exciting, lots of really good poetry successfully entered into competitions and being published. It’s a fantastic resource for people who write poetry. Carole Bromley, who runs it, is very good for poets. I’ve been really impressed. I can really recommend it.
Do writing poetry and prose differ, and which do you prefer?
Novel writing is hard, but so is poetry. You become obsessed with the right words, and in that sense, they’re similar – the words are so important. But, novel writing is expansive; you zoom in for some chapters but also zoom out, and you’ve got a lot more potential for vocabulary and description. With poetry, it’s concise – it’s all about pairing and cutting away what you’ve already written. You don’t want excess; it’s got to be absolutely precise and perfect.
They’re both challenging and wonderful, although it’s harder if your memory’s not so good with novels. You’ve got 89,000 words, so you’ve got to have a really good system for remembering what you’ve written – it’s a completely different process!
Your new novel, Playing the Sister Card, was influenced by Pride and Prejudice. How did Austen’s novel inspire your writing?
I must say, I would never compare myself to Jane Austen. She was a very astute writer. She wrote about what she knew, and she knew a lot about siblings and sisterly relationships. Those sisterly relationships, sisterly rivalry, sisterly secrets and the dynamics within families are a rich source of inspiration. Siblings don’t always tell each other the truth!
Both your debut novel, The Unravelling of Michael Gilchrist, and Playing the Sister Card examine tricky familial relationships – do you have any advice for readers who may be navigating similar struggles with family?
It’s never too late to change. If your family have prejudices that are holding you back, you can overcome them. We inherit a lot of baggage, but we can overcome it, and hopefully, find some happiness…
Visit www.sharonashtonpoetry.comto find out more about S.C. Ashton. Playing the Sister Card is available to purchase now via www.bookguild.co.uk/bookshop/contemporary/playing-the-sister-card, and Waterstones, TGJones, and Amazon Kindle.
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