Maria Coffey

Questions

1. Please tell us a bit about yourself and your work.
I started writing in my thirties. My first book was a memoir about my relationship with my partner Joe Tasker, a British mountaineer, who disappeared during a summit attempt on the NE Ridge of Everest, and my own journey to the mountain in the wake of his death. I wrote the book during the first nine months of my marriage to Dag. I often say the writing was done in a ‘great emotional rush’ – for sure it was catharsis, a way of sorting out the past before moving into the future. Since then, writing has been for me a way of making sense of my life, and of encapsulating key experiences. In the early 1990s I gave up my ‘real’ job as a teacher and Dag and I became a freelance writer / photographer team with Dag. Since then we’ve explored, lived and worked in lots of different part of the world, and embarked on some big expeditions by kayak, bike and sailboat. In 2000 we set up an adventure travel company, Hidden Places, and for over a decade we did extensive work on elephant welfare and conservation work in Asia and Africa (by training, Dag is a large animal vet). 

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2. Has writing always been a focus for you or was it a Plan B? 
Neither. I wrote my first book as a way of trying to make sense of the death of my partner on Everest some years before, and to make peace with the tumultuous relationship I had with him. It was a shock to realize I had a talent for writing. The success of Fragile Edge encouraged me to keep going, and more books followed, quickly! Between 1989 and 2008 I had twelve books published – four of them for children. Then I took a break to focus on our adventure travel business. That break lasted longer than I had planned. I turned back to writing in 2019, when I began work on Instead.

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3. How do you explore ideas or find inspiration for your work?
It’s different with each book. Some, like Where the Mountain Casts its Shadow and Explorers of the Infinite, have involved a lot of research and interviews – very much a journalistic approach, with some of my personal experience woven into the narratives. But all of them, including my children’s books, have sprung in some way from my own life. There are the two memoirs – Fragile Edge and Instead. Several books, like A Boat in Our Baggage, recount expeditions and journeys I’ve undertaken with my husband. One of them, A Lambing Season in Ireland, is about the time we spent in rural Ireland when Dag was working there as a vet. So I guess the answer is that the ideas and the inspiration come from my own life!

4. What does the process of writing involve for you?
A lot of hard work, particularly in the editing stage! I don’t have any set process. I’ve written during wild kayaking trips, on a small sail boat, in an open loft apartment that I share with my husband, and a variety of other scenarios. In the early years of my career, at our home base I had a small writing cabin in the garden, which was bliss. I’d love to get back to that, but we’re still too nomadic.

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5. And what does writing then also give you in return?
It helps me to understand and appreciate my life. And most importantly it gives me connection to other people. The greatest reward for me is when readers reach out to tell me how my work has touched them, resonated with them, or helped them in some way.

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6. Has seeing your work in print changed how you view yourself, and also how you view your NoMo status?
I don’t think seeing the work in print has changed me in any way. But the process of writing Instead did. It enabled me to explore my relationship with my mother in a way that was really helpful and healing – I ended up understanding her more than I ever had while she was alive. It allowed me to think deeply about the ageing process, about which I had been in denial (and still am to some degree, so it’s a process). And it led me to explore the concept of regret. Bottom line – I’d been living life at such at pace for so long, slowing down to write the book finally gave me space for these important processes.

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7. Tell us about the wider reception that you’ve had to sharing your story - has it changed how others have viewed you and your identity as a non-parent?

I’ve had such wonderful feedback from readers. The most surprising has been from all the young people who have reached out to me to say the book is helping them, either with a decision they are still making about whether or not to have kids, or in validating the decision they have already made. People closer to my own age have also been in touch, sometimes with sad stories of feeling ‘othered’, and it’s so gratifying to learn that reading about my life choices has enabled them to fully celebrate theirs. I’ve also had interesting conversations with people in the adventure communities – parents and non-parents like. I was at two mountain festivals last fall, in Banff and Kendal, and had so many fascinating interactions, especially after my presentations. In Banff, a man came up to me after I’d finished speaking, took my hand and said, “You changed our family’s life today.” He and his wife were in the audience, along with their grown daughter, who was sitting on the other side of the auditorium. “Halfway through your talk,” he said, “I texted my daughter to say, ‘The pressure’s off.’” He told me that he and his wife had been really pushing their daughter and her brother to start families. But listening to me had given him a totally different perspective.

Also, and importantly, I think the book has opened the way to a deeper understanding and more closeness with some key members of my family, which is really lovely.

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8. How do you feel about the current representation of childless and/or childfree people in literature?
It’s improving! I really enjoyed Emma Gannon’s novel Olive and Sheila Heti’s novel Motherhood. I’ve quoted from both of them in my memoir.

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9. What would you like the publishing world to know about non-parents, both as writers and readers, and our stories?
That there are so many stories out there and it’s time to publish more of them!

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10. What future plans do you have, especially for your writing?
For almost two decades I wrote books back to back: I had barely finished writing one before I was planning the next, applying for grants, pitching publishers etc. But now I’m waiting for Instead to settle, to see where it leads me. Some ideas are bubbling away, but I don’t want to jinx anything right now by talking about them.