an interview with georgie codd and alex ivey
Georgie Codd wants you to know she is not brave. Yet her first non-fiction book, We Swim to the Shark, is all about conquering fear, in her case a very specific phobia: ichthyophobia or the fear of fish. She chooses an extreme form of therapy to do so. The book charts her quest to immerse herself in the vast ocean that scares her so much to try and find the largest fish in the world: the giant and elusive whale shark. But still she wouldn’t describe herself as brave, “I don’t know what bravery really is. If bravery is doing something when you’re scared then yes I am brave but I don’t feel heroic and I’m no role model. Brave is weird. I think it’s people going 'I would not do that'".
Alex Ivey, a fellow writer and friend (the two met at UEA’s Creative Writing MA in 2010) disagrees, “Georgie is one of the bravest people I know.” Codd shakes her head while Ivey continues, “I know she doesn’t think of herself that way at all, but she is because who the hell does what she does? She does all these mad things that no sane person would do. She’s crazy but she’s not a coward.”
Ivey herself is re-drafting her new novel, Roam, about homeless teenagers who decide to set up a sustainable community in the woods in Portland, Oregon, “They have the best intentions, but it all falls apart.” It all began with an image of a petrol station on the motorway backing onto the woodland and the notion of the liminal spaces between nature and big cities like Portland which have a huge forest on their doorstep. As Ivey explains, “I was thinking what if somebody lived there and was trying to wash their stuff in a creek that runs alongside it with the cars moving by.” Portland also has one of the highest populations of homeless youth in the US and Ivey travelled there as research for her novel, “The care system has changed a lot, the provision for homeless and at risk youth has changed dramatically [since the 90s]. I met with a girl who had been homeless but was now in a transitional youth program and talked to her about how she ended up there and what it was like. There was a lot of research for this book.”
The beginnings of Codd’s book also started out with travel but involved research of a different sort. Initially We Swim to the Shark was never meant to be a book but on the way back from a trip to New Zealand she realized she could fly back via Thailand and stay there for a month at little extra cost. Her agent read a piece she had written about her time trying to find the biggest fish in the world and called her up to suggest they shelve her novel they were shopping around and concentrate on this instead. After that the writing came together quickly: “I like to write between 1500 to 7000 words a day when I’m in a writing mood. My process is I very much need to get the book out as quickly as I can because psychologically, I get really put off only having written two pages in a week. I’ll go bulk and write a ton of stuff and I know that I’m not going to use a lot of it. But it’s a nice feeling to look at the word count and be like “oh I’m at 15,000 words, I’m at 40,000.”
So what’s next for these two writers? Ivey is hoping to finish her re-draft this year as she has an extra day for writing now that her young daughter is at nursery, while also juggling her work as a Community Development Worker in Norfolk. For now Codd is being coy/koi (I’ve avoided fish-puns so well but this one is right there!) about her next project but promises it will be another “non-fiction adventure, it’s another quest and I’m looking for something but it’s a very different kind of adventure.” Whatever it is it’s sure to be brave even if Codd herself doesn’t think so.
Thank you to Georgie Codd and Alex Ivey for coming to chat with me about their books and writing processes! We Swim to the Shark is out now and available from all good bookshops -- you can find Georgie on Twitter, Instagram or on her website.
If you have a story or book you’d like to chat to me about do get in touch at tinynarrative@gmail.com
If you have a tiny narrative to share please get in touch at thetinynarrative@gmail.com