Simon Says

Always a grafter, eminent poet Simon Armitage has also written travel adventure ( Moon Country), worked as a probation officer, shelf stacker, Radio 1 disc jockey, lathe operator, lecturer, reviewer and broadcaster. He has now written his first novel, Little Green Man ; the tale of a thirty-something man reuniting with childhood friends to play a dark and dangerous game of dare:

Waterstone's: After writing poetry, plays, TV/Radio scripts and travel literature what made you decide to write a novel?

Simon Armitage: I think it was just the right time for doing something more expansive. The idea came along, and I could see it wasn't going to fit into a sonnet. I've never wanted to restrict myself to just one code of writing, and the other prose book All Points North had done well. So maybe I had the confidence all of a sudden to tackle something bigger.

Waterstone's: Barney, the lead character in Little Green Man appears to be trying to re-capture feelings and events from his 1970's childhood. Do you think that we, at times, can be prisoners of our past or our memories?

Armitage: I suppose we can, but we can also have a great time in the pub talking about Public Information Films and The Singing Ringing Tree. Maybe it's peculiar to my generation, or maybe we're just getting our own back after hearing our parents bang on about the sixties all the time - all those funny dances. I do think the seventies was the last era of wonder, before video and computer kicked in.

Waterstone's: Subbuteo, Scalextric, The Tomorrow People, playing dare and long summer nights of football are just some of the childhood pastimes mentioned in the book. What were yours?

Armitage: Fingerbobs had a marked effect on me-I haven't been able to look at my hands since without seeing them as some odd, zoomorphic entities.

Waterstone's: How do the pleasures and pains of writing a novel compare with those of poetry?

Armitage: The pleasure of writing a novel is being able to get on with it on a day-to-day basis. With poems, I can go for weeks without being in the mood. On the downside, there's an awful lot of writing in a novel. Like, pages and pages of it. You can hold a poem in your head, pretty much, and work on it as composition, without having to be clamped to the w.p. for several hours at a time

Waterstone's: What next for Simon Armitage?

Armitage: A rest. Then I've finished another book of poems, The Universal Home Doctor , which will come out next year, and a pamphlet called Travelling Songs. And I'm writing another play for the West Yorkshire Playhouse, a short story for the Ilkley Festival, an essay on Bob Dylan, and a text/installation piece for the new Baltic art gallery on Tyneside.