Interview Time - Roger Harvey
Interview with Roger Harvey, author of Poet on the Road.
I was lucky enough to meet Roger Harvey and I picked his brains on everything from the best way to beat writers’ block, to his life changing experiences when he took his poetry to America. Check out the interview before you read the first chapter of Poet on the Road
Sitting in Café Nero with Roger Harvey, it’s quite hard to imagine the life of this internationally renowned poet and novelist. From children’s stories to radio, Roger’s 40 year career as a professional writer has seen him work in almost every aspect of the media.
Tell me a little about your ties to the North East and how your extraordinary career began.
I was born and raised here and studied law and teaching in Newcastle. However I went into both professions knowing that I didn’t want to make a life out of either. Eventually I asked myself, what can I be good at? What else can I do with teaching English?
So you branched out into other areas?
Yes, I started working as a junior, junior, junior advertising copywriter for Metro Radio. While I was there I also wrote pieces for local newspapers and worked on my first two novels. I was criticised for not trying to make myself rich by specialising in one thing, but working in these various jobs taught me how to add an extra edge to my work and make it digestible for the reader, in much the same way that advertisements are meant to be.
And that eventually paid off with works such as the much loved children’s story, Percy the Fish?
That was my first big break. It was actually an audio book made popular with the fabulous radio voice of Tyne Tees announcer, Jane Jermyn. Also while I was doing that I was working on getting the Silver Spitfire published, a harrowing and romantic true life war tale, told to me by my parents.
The book that we’re featuring in our newsletter this month is Poet on the Road, a novelised version of your poetry tour across America eight years ago. Tell me a little about how that tour came about.
It all started with a reading I did at the Northumbria University, where I met “two fat ladies having two whales of a time.” These ladies were actually English professors in Las Vegas and they put the idea in my head that I should do a poetry tour of the states. They acted as my principle hosts on the tour and helped me get a couple of big bookings, including Disneyland. The rest was down to the success of my first few readings.
And of the 48 stops on the tour, which was the one that you would say, affected you the most?
It would have to be the first reading in New York. It went so badly that I thought I’d died, in the same way a bad club comedian dies in front of his audience. But the decision to carry on and do better was one that paid off. The eight original bookings turned into 48 and I made the most out of being there. It was glamorous in the end and I played up to it. I mean after all, I was the man in the tweed suit with the James Bond accent!
So after this incredible experience, including everything from target practice with a Colt 45 in the Nevada Dessert to refining the cure for writer’s block, what do you plan to do next?
Hopefully it will be a project called Poet Over the Wall, a book based on my experiences in Germany when the wall came down. Compared with the wild and wacky American trip, this was super efficient and filled with glamorous housewives and heavy weight beer drinkers.
