The thesis contains a creative text, along with a poetics of the work. The Ghost of Your Father is the story of unusual childhood adventures in the small village of Ramsbottom, Lancashire, with chapters also dedicated to exploring the forests, mountains, rivers and family members of Trebija, Yugoslavia, during the long summer holidays of the 1980s. Remic’s father, Nikolas, was a child of Yugoslavia, enlisted in the army at the age of seventeen and captured by Germans during WWII. He subsequently escaped from a POW camp, was rescued by US troops, and brought to the UK where he joined the RAF and met the author’s mother, Sally, a Liverpudlian working in the NAAFI. The thesis is a childhood memoir of clashing worlds: village life in Lancashire, contrasted with village life in Trebija, Yugoslavia, and is infused with the new dawning age of the 1980s computer revolution, and the author’s conflicting desire to become both an author and computer game programmer. A strange merging of country life and 8-bit technology, of Tolkien fantasy novels and differing cultures and customs, the text reveals these two very different worlds, searching for linking threads, and is the source of what made Remic the genre novelist he became. The text explores life in Ramsbottom and life in Slovenija – and presents childhood adventures in the 1980s, and those same places and faces experienced a quarter of a century later. The text contains a travel section detailing an account of the events that occurred when Remic returned to Slovenija to meet his long, lost, beloved Aunty Mary, taking his children on that same voyage of discovery he experienced as a boy, and which he believes shaped his imagination and fired his creativity to create a genre novelist working in the field today. Part memoir, part travelogue, part exploration and decoding of a child’s-eye view of a world filled with fantasy monsters, pixellated graphics, mountain-top escapades and small-town haunted houses, The Ghost of Your Father is a book of contrasts, of exploring imagination, creativity, ethics, and the very twisted essence of subjective memory. It is a story of a child then, and a child now, based on memories, interviews and new experiences. It is a fictional representation of a factual past, and a factual exploration of a fictional present. It is the truth, perhaps not as it was, but as it might have been. The poetics is an exploration of the writing process of The Ghost of Your Father. It’s an investigation of why, and how, Remic decided to create this text, examining contextualisation, where this work sits in the field of contemporary memoir, reflecting on the process of writing the text, including how Remic was inspired and arrived at conclusions over memory, tone and research for form, and ultimately concluding with how this project has altered Remic’s perspective of research, creative writing, and how it has informed Remic’s genre writing and creative writing as a whole.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:753960 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Remic, Andy |
| Publisher | Edge Hill University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://repository.edgehill.ac.uk/10442/ |
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