Q: I am interested in studies of phenomenology; the relation between space, time, place and experience. If ‘everything in the Universe is an echo’ as Gaston Bachelard says, what are you echoing in your work? And why?

A: Saltburn is a satire and satire is an absurd reflection of the world we live in. So, Saltburn is an echo of the world – big business taking over, the hypocrisy of the press. We’ve all witnessed the move to the right over the past few years, the pushback against what the press defines as ‘woke’. I mean, I love being woke – conscious to the inequalities that exist in the world. But the word has come to be used negatively. So Saltburn is an echo of anti-wokism.

But I don’t think any of this was conscious. The world exists around me. I react to the world. These are the stories that come out. There are six of them. They all take place in the small seaside universe of Saltburn with its own rules and regulations. Editing them, I thought, where did that all come from?

Q: How, if at all, does class interact with gender and queerness in Saltburn? Does class affect expressions or non-expression of queerness?

A: I see myself online aligning myself to working class and queer writers. And I suppose that is what I am? Although I don’t exist in any kind of community in real life. I don’t have any friends. I had counselling last year. I wanted to explore why I find it impossible to make connections and the end result was that I found the things that make me happy are done on my own.

So I find it hard to answer that question. Or I’m not the right person to answer it maybe. I’m not part of either of those communities, queer, working-class, to pass comment.

Q:  The line between monstrous and queer in this book is flippant and natural, fluid and normal (without being normalized.) It is not Tragically Gothic or woe is me in a very Frankenstein mode, either. For instance, Corey fears that his difference is “written on his face” 101. Many of your characters seem to fear detection of their difference if they don’t already suspect it’s readily plain, while also being able to just…naturally change. Sometimes into mermaids! As a book set primarily in a small town where everyone knows everything, how did you deal with issues of conformity versus ‘monstrosity’?

A: Well, although it might be a small town it was supposed to be a reflection of a wider world. So I didn’t think of my characters battling any small town values. Their battles are with themselves. Ginny feels a monster because he/she changes gender every twelve hours. Sven was born a boy but wants to live as a girl. I think when they accept themselves they are accepted by the world around them. Saltburn is a kind of utopia in that way. In my head the book is six very sweet love stories. I don’t see the rudeness or wackiness that gets mentioned in the reviews. I probably need to get out more…

Q: I have listened to your playlist for the book. How does music inspire Saltburn? Does the Vangelis track from Blade Runner signify how we should read otherness in the text or is it just a fun nod in the music? (I was thinking of Nabokov’s Pale Fire and the ways in which the notion of “cells interlinked” influenced the sequel and how it discusses the ways in which otherness has echoes and resonances, but that could be a total digression etc.,)

A: Ah, the music. When I was first writing Saltburn back in 2020 I posted it in 2500 word sections on a writing website called ABCTales. Each post was accompanied by a link to a YouTube video of a song. That would often be a song that is mentioned in the book. When the book finally came out I wanted it to have a playlist because that is how the book first appeared. It was the publisher’s idea that we could have a QR code in the back of the book that would link to the playlist. I was inordinately excited! Not a single person has mentioned it. Haha. Welcome to the world of publishing.

Q: How do you use satire in Saltburn? Do you think there is a certain type of queer satire or a queering of satire as resistance?

A: I didn’t consciously set out to write a satire. I usually think about a book for years before writing, make notes. But Saltburn came from nowhere (wherever that is). I started it the week after I finished my previous book Seven Nights at the Flamingo Hotel. I’d found that intense because it dealt with mental health and failure and I thought I needed a break but then Saltburn just appeared.

And this is it.

I’d published Flamingo Hotel on ABCTales in short sections and in each section, as a kind of running joke, there was some kind of bum related escapade involving the main character. So when I first started Saltburn I thought, that’s it!, no more bums. So I created a society where bums are banned. And what sort of society is that? One where the New Puritans are in power. And that was the birth of my satire. New Puritans, in cahoots with big business. Looking out for themselves, controlling the little people. The characters inner journeys, accepting themselves, are separate to that. I think. I think there’s a joy to the love they all discover that runs opposite to the satire.

Q: I have also recently read your short stories outside of Saltburn. what do you enjoy most about characters who shift genders or live in more than one gender? I think it is so delightful and real to read, especially compared to the ways in which gender can sometimes be sanitized for queer people by media and amongst people who gatekeep how and who should present in queer spaces.

A: I like that question. Because yes I’ve always thought of myself as trying to present unsanitised gay/queer people. My very first book The Lodger back in 2002 was written in reaction to a newspaper headline saying gay people shouldn’t be allowed to adopt. So, The Lodger, as well as a murder mystery is a gay adoption story. But I wanted the main character to be a promiscuous man. Being promiscuous / sexually active does not exclude him from being a great dad.

Me and Mickie James has a loving gay couple as leads. I’d never seen that.

Flamingo Hotel has a much more fluid representation of sexuality. I couldn’t tell you what the main character’s sexuality is. And I like that. It exists in the moment.

And Saltburn is a continuation of that. I have gays, straights, bis, mermaids, a character that is both a woman and a man, and a boy/man who wants to be a girl/woman.

I’m proud of that and this Saltburn world I’ve created.

Q: Corey’s drive to start over is often frustrated by the obligations he feels to his parents. Family ties and family conflict generally seem very restrictive or obfuscated in Saltburn. On top of the small town setting, how did you want themes around family to affect this work?

A: Wendy Erskine writes stories set in a small area of Belfast. But I don’t think her characters are in any way limited by the small town setting. I wanted my characters to be the same, both unique and universal.

For me, the conflicts in the family, are to do with money. That’s the biggest pressure on family life and the driving force in the book. People have to act in a certain way to find the money in order for them to live.

It’s all about a safety net. If you don’t have the safety net of money life is precarious.

Q: I am also interested in the way the narrative breaks off into the epistolary at times. I think the epistolary creates an intimacy of absence in a way that’s perfect for the written word. Do you write letters IRL? How do you deploy the epistolary there versus fiction if so?

A: I used to be a great letter writer. I would write letters every day. But that was a long time ago. I imagine they would have been very boring. That’s the thing about writing for an audience. I worry about being boring so that is how I judge every line. Is it entertaining? I go over and over it. I can’t do that IRL in company which is why I think I am better in a room on my own.

Q: I love the descriptions of the New Puritanism Party and the effect its unwieldy populism has on some of the characters. I’m not too current on British politics but a lot of their talking points remind me a lot of Mary Whitehouse and her increasingly Quixotic crusade against ‘permissive culture’. Does the rhetoric of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association still hold some appeal or sway in the modern UK? How has NVALA mutated in the modern age?

A: I think Mary Whitehouse would have been a big fan of Nigel Farage. She came to my sixth form college once. It was the time of Section 28. It was illegal to promote homosexuality in an educational environment. We had a teacher who was a lesbian. We all knew that. Whitehouse said something that was anti-lesbian and this teacher challenged her. Whitehouse said, ‘Are you a lesbian?’ which of course she couldn’t answer back then. So before she could answer we all caused an uproar and Whitehouse was escorted from the building. At least that’s how I remember it although I can’t honestly say it happened.

Rights are cyclical. Thatcher’s crackdown on gay men in the 80s was a reaction to greater gay visibility from the previous two decades. The same is happening now with trans rights. I’m hopeful that the forward progressive movement will win out again in the end. Writing books is part of that forward movement. In a very tiny way I want to be part of that.

On a related note I love the books and movies that are referenced throughout Saltburn, and noticed quite a few of them (even Little Women) have been restricted/banned in school boards and public libraries the world over. What gives some of these unassuming books such power over the people that fear them? Do you think Saltburn would ever be a banned book— and alternatively, does it matter?

A: Saltburn would definitely be banned. If anyone with certain views looked at it would be banned. But ban me. I don’t care. I know I am good and kind and on the right side of history.

(Funnily enough, Me and Mickie James got banned. My agent back then had a son and her son loved my book and was passing it on to his friends at school which came to the attention of the school librarian who didn’t deem it suitable for young minds…)

Q: What are you working on now?
A: The next book is finished. I’ve written 20 short stories each based on a Tom Cruise film. Each story has the same characters P and K but in each story they are in a different iteration; gay, straight, lesbian, alien, android… And each story is written in a different style; letters, flash, notes, crime story, 1^st person, second person, first person plural (a first for me). But I don’t know if it will ever see light of day. That’s publishing life. I’m not much of a success.

Drew Gummerson’s latest collection of short stories, Saltburn, is available through Renard Press.