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Never judge a book by its cover

British writer Clare Wigfall finds success in her adopted city of Prague

By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
December 5th, 2007 issue

KURT VINION/THE PRAGUE POST
Character painter extraordinaire. Clare Wigfall's first collection of short stories has been winning readers throughout Europe.
COURTESY PHOTO
READING Clare Wigfall will read from her book, The Loudest Sound and Nothing, Dec. 9 at 1:30 p.m. at Big Ben Bookshop, Malá Štupartská 5, Prague 1
The Wigfall file

Born: 1976 in Greenwich, London
School: At age 2, moved with her mother and architect father to Berkeley, California. Attended a U.S. elementary school.
Favorite writers: Philip Roth, J.D. Salinger

Clare Wigfall is as chameleonic as her writing; she defeats categorization.
The first time I saw Wigfall was at a reading for her Ancient Geek writing students during the Prague Fringe Festival two years ago. At first I confused her with one of the readers, as her youthful appearance belied the fact that she was a woman then approaching 30.
After receiving an e-mail from her thanking me for my review of the reading, I noted that her email address included the word “littleclown.” Rummaging about on the Internet, I discovered that Wigfall not only taught writing to kids, but also worked as a face-painter at orphanages and at luckier children’s private birthday parties. Naturally, I thought I had her pegged: A nice, young Englishwoman (Home Counties, probably), rather demure, who is out to better the world.
A year later, Wigfall wrote wondering if I would be interested in reading her new collection of short stories, The Loudest Sound and Nothing, and I was hesitant.
I had fears that her book would be a treasury of British middle-class episodes — of garden walks and lonely teas; a cardigan read, not really of great interest to me. Again, my vaunted skill at judging people was to be thoroughly trounced.
The Loudest Sound and Nothing is of a fierce talent, with stories running the full gamut of styles and voices, including one excellent “cardigan” story. More surprisingly, there’s a heart of darkness beating in a few of Wigfall’s tales, filled, as they are, with murdered babies, bodies in gardens and self-starvation, not to mention a climb into the mind of an American gangster.
Never judge a book …
Meeting with Wigfall, it’s now tempting to believe she hides a moldering portrait of herself in a locked attic. She has actually lived an adventurous life, and is now embarking on an even more exciting phase, as an acclaimed, published author.
“I fell into writing,” Wigfall tells me over coffee. “When I was younger, I was convinced that I was an artist.”
After leaving school, she was admitted into London’s prestigious Camberwell College of Arts. But a year there convinced her that art wasn’t her destiny, “though it was fun pretending to be an art student,” she says wryly.
From Camberwell she enrolled at the University of Manchester, reading English and American literature, as well as taking a creative writing course. It was in the latter class where her future would be established.
“We had a guest speaker one day,” Wigfall remembers, “an editor from Faber and Faber, and he invited us to give him our writing. I felt I had nothing to lose and gave him a story. The next day he contacted me, and said, ‘Have you anything else?’ ”
Not only did she gain a foot in the door of one of the English world’s most desirable publishing houses, she quickly came to the attention of one of the United Kingdom’s best agents, the late Giles Gordon.
Gordon’s “list,” his client sheet, included Fay Weldon, Peter Ackroyd and Vikram Seth, not to mention Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales. It was more than an auspicious start for a young writer.
Before graduating from Manchester, Wigfall made a trip to Prague with one of her writing friends, Tod Wodicka, whose own acclaimed first book, All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well, has just been published by Jonathan Cape in the United Kingdom, coming out next year in the United States by Pantheon.
The two young writers came for a 10-day stint, but Wigfall was determined to return.
“I’d been accepted into the master’s program at the University of East Anglia,” Wigfall says, “but I knew my heart wasn’t in it. I wanted to be in Prague.”
At East Anglia, she interviewed with Andrew Motion, Britain’s current poet laureate, and signed on for various courses.
“I regret now not having read the work of the instructors available beforehand,” Wigfall says ruefully. “I could have studied with W.G. Sebald, but I didn’t know who he was at that point.”
Prague and a paintbox
Wigfall finally moved to Prague in 1998 and, though fully committed to her writing, found her previous brush with the art world handy in finding employment. She worked at the Jiří Švestka Gallery for five years, living in a room above the gallery that was usually reserved for artists.
“I loved it there,” Wigfall says.
Her art-school training also came in handy when Wigfall found herself in Granada, Spain, for six months, while her boyfriend was there studying. In an attempt to make some money, Wigfall positioned herself on the city’s belvedere overlooking the Alhambra, and painted the city.
“I was the only artist up there,” she says. “I was expecting a sight like Charles Bridge. But I held the monopoly on street painting there, and did quite well with the tourists. In fact, I’m still in touch with many of the people who bought my work.”
Back in Prague, she utilized her paints in a different fashion. “I learned how to paint clown faces on people when I was 11, living in London,” Wigfall says, laughing. “I even started my own business, and advertised in news agents and shops as a professional, who could work at parties or school fetes. I called myself ‘Face Painters Extraordinaire.’
“Adults were always a bit confused when this young girl arrived at their door carrying a paintbox. ‘You’re the face painter?’ ”
As in Granada, Wigfall soon discovered that she was Prague’s lone specialist painter.
“Face-painting was really unknown here,” she claims. “So, again, I cornered a market.”
During this time, Wigfall was getting her short stories placed in various British magazines, such as Tatler and Prospect, as well as the Dublin Review. She also received a commission to write for the BBC’s Radio 4.
In 2005, Wigfall took her writing in another direction, and founded her writing workshop for kids, the Ancient Geeks. Beginning with five children (one of whom accidentally supplied the group’s name), Wigfall now runs a large class of young, talented writers. She’s even recently started a class for adults, many of whom are the parents of her original students.
The loudest sound and success
It’s standing room only in the backroom of Shakespeare and Sons on Krymska one Saturday last month. Wigfall is here for her second reading in Prague, after the crowded reception she received at the Globe Bookshop the week before.
The Loudest Sound and Nothing has been doing very well, with excellent reviews coming out of London from The Guardian and Time Out. Even The Times is impressed, though writer Kate Saunders starts her review thus: “Wigfall runs a face-painting company in Prague, but don’t hold that against her.”
Wigfall couldn’t be happier. “The good news is that the book is well into its second printing,” she tells me between greeting arriving friends for her reading. “Faber also featured the book at the Frankfurt Book Fair, so, perhaps, there will be some more interest in it from elsewhere.”
Ideally, Wigfall would like to see the book picked up by a U.S. publishing house, though such trans-Atlantic grabs are more common with novels than with short story collections. Nonetheless, Wigfall does seem to have a knack for being in the right place at the right time — who better to buck the trend?
As she settles into her reading at Shakespeare and Sons, it isn’t difficult to believe this is but one of many such evenings to come for this modest, marvelous writer.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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