C O M P : Congratulations on the publication of your debut novel, Ambergris (Barnard Publishing, 2025)! The book is a haunting and deeply affecting page-turner. It’s also a remarkably literary novel: discussing or referencing numerous canonical works (Romeo and Juliet, Dracula, Strange Case of Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde, Of Mice and Men, etc); adopting or adapting conventions of crime fiction, mystery novels, coming-of-age narratives, family melodramas, and love stories; and foregrounding literary form (the chapters present, in third-person limited, the POVs of four characters: Henry, Madeline, Lacey, and Elen). Can you discuss how Ambergris explores the relationship between art and life, and how this exploration developed within or alongside the central plot?

Briony Collins: Thank you! What a great question. Something for which I will always be grateful is the opportunities I’ve had to study Creative Writing at a university. It is not a privilege I take lightly. The very best thing this has done for me is it has opened my eyes to the different ways art can matter to people. During the pandemic, art saved lives. While we were locked down for months in the UK, we relied on films, books, TV shows, games, YouTube, etc. to fill our days. People started baking, crocheting, painting, and yes, even writing. When there was nothing else, there was art. Art doesn’t just imitate life. It is life. It’s the whole point. I spent most of 2020 seeing how people who were scared, worried, or unwell reached for art as a lifeline.

I first wrote Ambergris in 2018, while in the second year of my Bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing. That is where a lot of the references and genre conventions come from – this is a novel that plays with other novels, because that is where I was as a writer, still learning – but what transformed them into a strength of the novel was in my editing, post-pandemic. I didn’t return to Ambergris until 2023, when I sat down and started to edit it. I was a more experienced writer, and I had seen what writing can mean to other people. I made references clearer, conventions and subversions more overt, and really engaged with the form of the novel and what it could be. I had seen how people depend on art for a sense of belonging and to feel part of a conversation bigger than them. It was important to me that Ambergris, however literary or strange it might be in places, was still welcoming to readers, and allowed them to be part of this rich literary conversation that all novels sit within. It’s also why Lacey is such an important character to me. She is in this age and space of learning, and so she draws on art above all else to make sense of her world, and the world of the novel she lives inside. She’s a lot like the reader in that way.

It's a hard question to answer, but if I had to be pithy, that’s what I’d say. The relationship between art and life, to me, is a desire to learn, and Ambergris is all about characters trying to make sense of things.

C: The opening chapter, which we’ve published as an excerpt here, features the dreamscape—or psychological landscape—of comatose Henry Belvidere. It’s among the novel’s most imaginative and memorable settings. How did this dreamscape evolve? When did you grasp the narrative purpose(s) and interpretive possibilities of Henry’s coma dream?  

B: The entire novel really began with a question. I was interested in stories about people who are comatose but wake up and report that they remember family members visiting with them and speaking to them. I wondered what that might look like for a character in a novel. What might they experience? At first, Henry’s dreamscape looked very different. It was more of a blank space, with memories rather than present visuals. Henry was sort of floating there, in this strange, undefined space, hearing the real world. It was interesting, but it wasn’t really working for this novel. I needed Henry’s coma dream to be a place of self-discovery, which would adapt and change as he comes closer to his epiphany. That is when I changed it to the beach. It is reflective of the moment and location of the injury that placed him into a coma, but it can evolve along with Henry as he begins to remember what happened to him and why.

For me, Ambergris is ultimately about the way people haunt themselves. Our past actions and memories, and the possibilities of our futures and dreams return constantly to haunt the present. Henry’s dreamscape is a haunted space, where the truth of his injury lurks in every grain of sand, every rolling wave, even before he knows it. Much of my research as a scholar is on hauntology which is, to borrow Mark Fisher’s excellent phrasing, the focus on the ‘no longer’ and the ‘not yet’. The strain that the past and future pulling apart places on the present is something that affects every member of the Belvidere family deeply, but especially Henry, and it is most overt when he is haunting the shores of his psychological landscape.

C: Your characters are capable, at times, of uncharacteristic behavior, whereupon they are estranged from themselves and from their loved ones. This is perhaps the engine of the plot and the novel’s central subject. How did you approach the formation and direction of your characters (Henry, Madeline, Lacey, and Elen in particular)? Do your characters and plotlines progress in tandem? When, if ever, do you relinquish authorial control?

B: Character voice is one of the most important things to me as an author. I try to be as acutely aware as possible of the differences between my characters, and use those differences to drive their development. For example, Lacey as a fourteen-year-old girl needed to sound and feel very different to Henry as her grandfather. I think that Lacey’s chapters read as though they are part of a novel intended for younger readers at times, because the way the writing expresses her character is more immature and naïve to reflect where she is in her life. Henry and Madeline, on the other hand, are older, and deal with heavy realizations much earlier in the novel than Lacey does, as she is shielded from the truth. This has the effect of pulling Lacey’s chapters away from the rest of the novel sometimes, because she is not always aware of what is truly happening. Though her chapters are very consistent with her voice and character, they are perhaps uncharacteristic of the novel as a whole, and that is very interesting to me.

Madeline is the character who I feel displays the most uncharacteristic behavior, and this presented a unique challenge in the writing; how could I write a character who was believable and grounded while also allowing her to step outside of herself? She is a doting mother, loving wife, and caring grandmother, but she is also capable of some terrible things. I find that in many works, positive traits are used to mask negative ones, as though they are a ruse or disguise, or by the time the character is displaying negative traits, they have developed away from the positive ones and changed into another person. I didn’t want to do this with Madeline; she is as sweet and loving as she is dastardly – two sides of the same coin, and both important. This was much more intriguing to me, and it became a blueprint for Henry too. He is the victim of the novel, but not entirely innocent either. Establishing this allowed me to take my characters in unexpected directions because even when they are displaying uncharacteristic behavior, they never stop being themselves.

Ambergris began with me wondering how a coma dream could be presented in a novel and the idea of a family, but it was through Elen that I was able to engineer a plot. As a detective, she walks next to the reader, uncovering pieces of a puzzle and putting it together as she goes. Her character developed alongside the plot more so than any of the Belvideres, who were already in my head when I started. Writing a mystery is very challenging, because I had to know what the truth was and how to get there before starting, and I needed a character who could bring this to life in a manner that masked the calculated approach I had to take with the narrative. She quickly became the glue that held the novel together. She is outside the situation like Lacey, insightful like Henry, fierce like Madeline, and dealing with her own life outside of the Belvideres. It was ultimately through developing her life beyond the Belvideres that I mask the way she facilitates the plot; Elen cares about her work, but it isn’t her whole life. She has a family, friends, a home, a cat…an entire world exists beyond this narrative of which she is part, and infusing the novel with these details that may be inconsequential to the main story can often help to disguise pre-planned plotlines.

As for authorial control, I don’t believe I really relinquish it here. I have in other works, including a moment in another polyvocal novel I wrote for my PhD thesis wherein a character kills another before I’d even processed what I was writing! Up until that moment though, and throughout Ambergris, I’ve always been very much in the driver’s seat. I think it’s as much the nature of the genre as where I was in my writing journey. This is certainly something to look out for in my other work!

C: Ambergris can be read as a geriatric novel, a book that explores aging, care, illness, and life-partnership—all under-discussed issues. Were there any models or influences for you?  

B: When I was eighteen, I moved in with my grandparents and lived with them until I left for university at twenty-one. I had spent a lot of my life with them anyway, but moving in with them full-time, at the point when I was beginning to grow as a writer, was hugely significant to me. Living with them really shaped how I think about aging. I have always been largely unbothered by the thought of growing older – after losing my mother when she was thirty-three, I viewed aging as a privilege – but hadn’t really thought about what it would be like to experience the process. Then I moved in with my grandparents.

I knew from the beginning that I didn’t want to write about an elderly couple who were archetypes of their age. I wanted to write Henry and Madeline with the same depth and liveliness as characters of other age groups often have, but elderly characters rarely receive. My grandparents have always been the most loving, hilarious, bright people I’ve ever known. Living with them introduced me to versions of them from decades past; I saw glimpses of what they might have been like as teenagers, as newlyweds, as parents to my mother and aunt, and so on. Echoes of their past selves were very much still with them, and they never lost that spark of youth. That’s why Madeline wears bright pink pajamas and still thinks about the boy who bullied her in school. Henry plays in the sand and recalls his mother’s “famous” Christmas cake. Together, they recount how young they are, that they aren’t a day past sixteen. I think that, if we’re lucky, that might be what it is like to age. Our bodies change, but we’re always just us, just as we are.

C: You’re a poet as well as a fiction writer. Are the two genres symbiotic for you? Or productively at odds? In general, how does your fiction-writing process differ from your poetry-writing process?

B: I tend to use poetry and fiction in distinct ways as a writer. For me, poetry is a space in which I say things that I cannot always say in my day-to-day life. Much of my poetry is confessional in this manner, and usually reveals something about myself. It can be really challenging at times, because there is a balance between revealing oneself and giving oneself away – too much of the latter and I’d have no private life! Instead, my poetry tends to focus on specific moments in my life and explores them in depth. For example, my first pamphlet, Blame it on Me (Broken Sleep Books, 2021) is about the death of my mother, and how that grief and the friction between myself and my father continued through the years that followed. There is much I didn’t put in the pamphlet, because grief is still very private, but it is when I became overtly interested in hauntings. Hauntology calls for a prolonged state of mourning, a resistance to letting what is unresolved go by continuing to invoke the ghosts of the past and possible futures, calling for change in the present. Poetry, for me, is a deeply haunted form, because it is entangled in the grief of my life, and in my refusal to let the possibilities of an unfinished life go.

Fiction is a more dialogic space – different perspectives and ideologies can be represented, but I don’t necessarily have a personal connection with them. Through characters, I can explore different ideas and experiences that I may not have and discuss them openly on the page. I find fiction writing a more liberating experience in many ways, because I have not conditioned myself to grieve in that form. My fiction is often dark, but frequently joyful too. My pamphlet of short fiction, All That Glisters (Broken Sleep Books, 2022), features four short stories about elderly characters, and is infused with a lot of humor and zeal for life. It was written after Ambergris was first drafted and in some ways is a continuation of my explorations of aging and illness. If you enjoy Ambergris, I heartily recommend All That Glisters!

My writing processes for poetry and fiction are largely the same. It’s not free flowing and I’m certainly not one of those writers who eats, sleeps, and breathes their writing. I’m very methodical and organized. I write only during work hours when I can carve out some time and never in the evenings or on weekends. It’s work to me, so I figure out roughly how much output is needed, schedule it into my workday, and don’t let it consume me. No 2am typewriter-and-whisky sessions for me! It isn’t romantic or exciting, but it works. Perhaps this is the nature of spinning as many plates as I do; I work two jobs, have spent the last three and a half years doing a full-time PhD, and run a publishing company. My time off is the most important thing in the world to me, and writing, unfortunately, doesn’t count as taking a break.

Though my habits are the same for poetry and fiction, productively they are at odds, yes. What I mean by this is that when I am in poetry-mode, it is very hard for me to switch to fiction, and vice versa. I think this is likely due to the very different headspaces I have for each form as I have explained. I do find that I alternate forms for projects though; I cannot jump between two projects in two different forms, but I can follow on from a complete one with a different form.  A fiction project usually follows a poetry one, and so on. Poetry brings me back to my roots, and helps me to refocus on what I want to say and why I’m trying to say it. It recalibrates me before my next fiction project, which can often be much larger and more consuming. I usually have a couple of poetry projects on the go at the same time, so I can still have work in the pipeline when I switch to a fiction project, which takes much longer to produce.

C: What’s next? Another novel? A new poetry collection? Editorial/publishing news? We’d love for you to share any exciting forthcoming work with our readers.

B: I’m finishing corrections on my PhD thesis this summer, and then I’ll be all done with that! I’m starting to query with the novel I wrote for it. I have a new poetry pamphlet – I Know Where the Pelicans Go – coming out with my own press, Atomic Bohemian, in August, and later in the year I have another – Wyoming – coming out with Black Bough Poetry. Atomic Bohemian also has an incredible line-up of books coming through 2026, so keep an eye out, because the books I’m publishing over the next eighteen months are absolute game-changers by phenomenal writers.