I met Valerie at the Amsterdam Literary Festival.  It was a warm summery afternoon and I sat in a workshop with seven other writers when the door swung open.

"This is Valerie," said ALF coordinator, Pip. "She's just had her first novel published and she'll be talking about it later."

Valerie came into the room like a goddess striding into battle. She took the chair beside me and I found out that she had written Borrowed Body, a book I had seen on the Internet and which I had put on my longed for list.  By the end of that afternoon, I had signed up for her book reading at The English Bookshop in Amsterdam and had gotten my own author-signed copy of Borrowed Body.

Valerie Mason John was born on the 22nd of November 1962 in Cambridge, Britain.  She is a British entertainer, playwright, actor, author, journalist, performance poet, and television presenter.  

She worked as a freelance researcher for the BBC, Channel 4, and the Arts Council of Great Britain. She has been a feature writer for the Black national paper, The Voice, and she has been a staff reporter for national lesbian and gay newspaper, the Pink Paper. Her articles have appeared in The Guardian, Social Work Today, South London Press, Capital Gay, and various other publications.

Valerie has worked as an international correspondent covering Aboriginal Land Rights. During this project she lived traditionally among the Yolngu tribe in Arnhem Land. She has also been a reporter on Radio London. She was editor of Feminist Arts News.

Before Borrowed Body, she had already published two non-fiction books, and a collection of her own prose and poetry entitled, Brown Girl in the Ring.

Borrowed Body was born in 2001 when she entered a competition for the best first chapter of a book. Her first 10,000 words impressed the tutor of her MA in Creative writing course so much that she urged her to carry on after she won.

Now, her book is making literary waves and some critics have called it the British color purple.  The teaser alone is enough to catch anyone's attention.  


"I could have been born and raised in Africa. But my Spirit was in too much of a rush to be reincarnated…. At six weeks I was chucked out into the new year of 1965 which wasn't prepared to welcome an African baby, abandoned on a harsh English winter's day."


Talking about Borrowed Body, Valerie says that she started this book on the premise that "we choose our own parents before we were conceived."  


Based on her own experiences, Borrowed Body tells the story of Pauline, who spends her childhood and teenage years in and out of foster homes and back and forth to Dr. Barnardo's Village in Essex. Woven into this account are Pauline's angel and spirit companions – Sparky, Annabel and Snake – who by turns help and hinder her to survive in the "real world".


Valerie talks about her work with passion.  She tells about loving essay writing as a child, about the encouragement she received and how she went on to become a journalist and a reporter for the BBC and other top newspapers.  


Her decision to write a fiction novel, stemmed from her desire to speak about the truth.  She felt that where journalism limited her ability to tell the truth, writing fiction has given her to freedom to tell the truth.

I asked Valerie how her work as a journalist and an activist has influenced her writing and the way that she looks at the world.


Valerie:Working as a journalist and activist has made me aware of the suffering people in the world. It has made me aware that England is not the centre of the Universe. I transitioned from being a journalist to a writer, because I wanted to tell the untold stories. I felt I couldn't be honest as a journalist


Talking about Borrowed Body as a Fictional Memoir blended with magic realism, Valerie says that "Writing in this genre, allowed me the space to enter into the imagined and spirit world and play. It allowed me to tell the story of someone called Pauline. It allowed me to leave my story behind."


Valerie has referred to herself as being an accidental writer.  She spends a lot of time thinking and planning for her book.  During this time, even the way she dresses changes, all her energy is focused on the work, on the story that she is working on. From her, I learned about the Artist's Coma which is the place that we all enter when we are creating story or art.  It is that point where you can see straight through to the end of things.  


This led me to ask Valerie how she goes to work and what tips she would give to aspiring writers.

Valerie:I have a season of writing.... I live in the woods in Michigan America for a month, then travel around....and come back home and write in the Falll


Valerie: On beginning a new writing project:

1.    Obsess about your subject, allow your thoughts to be taken over by the thing you want to write about, speak about it, dream about it, think about it.

2.    Always sleep with a note book by your bed, travel with a note book, and always write down your flashes of insights, phrases, because you'll never remember them in the morning, or indeed when you get home.

3.    Work out which is the best time for you to write, are you a day or night person.... whatever time of day, do something physical before you begin, even if it's the house work

4.    Remember to look after yourself, eat well, avoid caffeine, alcohol, you don't need them, your creative ideas can flourish without them

5.    And remember the writing is in the rewriting. Enjoy the process, there is the thinking, the obsessing, the stream of consciousness if your lucky, the research, the pen to paper, and then the crafting... don't be satisfied with your first draft.

Listening to Valerie read from her novel, this reader found herself transported to another time and another place, to the banks of the Nile where the spirit of a child leaps into the body of a Nigerian woman and becomes the girl, Pauline.
No wonder this book is called, "The British Color Purple".

While it is a work of fiction, it is filled with truth and makes this reader stop to think and think again.