Siân Melangell Dafydd is an author, poet and translator. Her first published novel, Y Trydydd Peth (The Third Thing; Gomer, 2009) won her the coveted 2009 National Eisteddfod Literature Medal. She writes in both Welsh and English and often collaborates with artists of other disciplines. She was the co-editor of the literary review Taliesin and Y Neuadd for six years. Her second Welsh language novel and a collection of hybrid literature, Spitting Distance, are forthcoming. She works with authors and poets internationally to translate literature between minority languages and is undertaking doctoral research in yoga and writing as parallel practices. Check out her yoga and creative writing workshops and retreats all over Europe.
Siân works as a lecturer in Creative Writing at the American University of Paris and as a course leader of the MRes in Transnational Writing at Bath Spa University, England. She is currently collaborating with the Malayalam poet, Anita Thampi as a part of Literature Across Frontiers’ Poetry Connections India (performance).
An author’s bio like this can tell you all the facts about a person, but with Siân Melangell Dafydd, as with every writer, every human being in fact, there is so much more. We had the privilege of delving deeper into the world of Siân Melangell Dafydd and here’s what we discovered.
How did you come to writing?
Storytelling came before the writing of things down. Dinners at home served up local news, myths, history, recipes and book-stories as if they were all equal, not separated by genre or time. I think we build relationships by sharing stories. And then, being Welsh, I think we’re very lucky if we’re interested in literature. I entered Eisteddfod competitions for writing. Sometimes I won but I always got considered, compassionate feedback so I kept trying.
How did you come to yoga?
First, thanks to a yoga teacher who was a visiting student at Cardiff University, Evelina Jönsson, from Malmö, Sweden. But my ambition was always to dance, if I’m honest. And had I been able to be honest with myself way back in a school-focused, career-advice phase in life. At the National Eisteddfod, when you win one of the three main literary competitions, you get the ‘dawns y flodau’ dance performed for you by children. As a child, my ambition was to dance that dance, but, I was never the right age when the Eisteddfod passed by our town. I did eventually win one of those literary prizes and watched the dance.
When I met Evelina, I started re-shaping what a day could be like and what life could be like.
What led you to realise that yoga could benefit your writing and your writing could benefit your yoga?
An accident, like when you put two works of art next to each other or facing each other and you hadn’t noticed until that moment how they seem to speak to each other. So, now it’s something I look for. ‘Be receptive’ is one of the simplest and most wonderful things that Sri Dharma Mittra is known for saying in his classes, over and over. Be receptive… Be observant. Slow down. Write what is there and write it fully. That IS yoga for me. More than just a connection between the two activities – the one is the other.
How do you find time for yoga in your busy schedule?
This is such a funny question – I honestly don’t know! But if I didn’t find the time, tasks would transform into ravenous, misbehaving monsters – let alone the e-mail inboxes! My days wouldn’t change really but the way I see them, face them and remember them would. And I know that something more exciting happens to the jigsaw of language and story when I make sure I have the time. So I’m a better person, a better teacher, a better writer. I don’t want to go back now. But finding time can mean a gorgeous, super-long Saturday morning practice without a clock in sight or just meditating on the Metro between two stops!
What is your favourite place in the world to practise yoga?
A writing student of mine was gathering sanctuary stories recently. I’m always in awe of my students’ creative ideas. She had gathered such fun ‘places’ from people: old leather arm-chairs, toilets, mountain tops… But really, I don’t think practising yoga is about place only. I guess we practise when we’re faced with the most trying hiccups or delays in our day.
I did share my ‘sanctuary’ with the student though. So, if I have a favourite sanctuary to practise, it would be between two young oak trees I’ve been observing since they were saplings, on a hill behind my parents’ home.
Are you still living between Wales and Paris? Where is home? What makes each one home?
I do live between Wales and France. It takes a lot of discipline to feel deeply that home is where I practise. Really, going home will always mean going to the Dyfrdwy River – the Dee – North Wales, the Berwyns, speaking and hearing Welsh. In my part of Wales, we say ‘adre’ (‘home’) rather than the dictionary-correct ‘cartref’. Even that word feels like it vibrates like a harp’s string when I say it – the ‘dr’. It’s one of my favourite words. Mary Oliver’s ‘Wild Geese’ reminds me of the ease of being there, ‘adre’.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Meanwhile, I have this curious need to look around and look beyond. So, here I am in France – not Paris but on the other side of Fontainebleau forest. I’ve planted a rare and loved Bardsey Island apple tree next to a cherry tree on the banks of the Seine and I’m letting my little garden teach me a few things. I guess doing that is about letting the ‘soft animal’ of the body ‘love what it loves’ too. It’s just the long way home.
What led you to decide to train as a yoga teacher?
I heard what I was actually telling myself: ‘I’d like to do that but – (insert excuse – I had plenty) so I can’t.’ When I was able to laugh at myself and when I found a teacher I wanted to learn and learn and learn with/from – that was it! I was living on a shoestring, between my parents’ home in Wales and a cupboard-sized flat in Paris, working as a writer, doing freelance things here and there. If I needed anything, many would have argued it was a proper wage. I went another way. I was driven by something stronger, towards the perspective and life skills I’d had a glimpse of in yoga.
Tell us about your creative writing retreats. What does this kind of retreat offer a yogi who wants to write or a writer who wants to practise yoga?
I hold yoga and creative writing retreats all over Europe – a few in Wales (of course!), including at a place all Welsh writers think of as their beloved ‘second home’ – Tŷ Newydd – which is a lovely week’s retreat. Then, day and weekend retreats in France, Portugal, Germany. I also offer weekly meditation and yoga sessions at the American University of Paris where I’m Lecturer of Creative Writing. There’s a synergy between the practices of yoga and writing that I see bubbling to the surface in my own experiments – they’re both creative practices. BKS Iyengar writes that ‘Yoga releases the creative potential of life’ – and it’s true, but putting that to work and giving it space is the thing! It’s amazing when you start to see what happens.
There’s this soft current from writing to yoga, and back. Writing can be a sort of meditation – it can transport you there. Poetry can open up the mind and body more powerfully than other meditation prompts too, so you journey back into yourself. Meditation (in stillness and movement) can churn up stories we thought we’d forgotten and a resonant, personal language that’s all our own. There are stories hiding behind asanas, metaphors in yoga concepts if we look closely, and they translate to story-shapes we can use when we write too.
So during a retreat, I offer myth in meditation as well as ways of meditating through pen and ink. I tell stories/myths from India and many other countries to open out our own writing and asana practice. And of course, there’s a state of being where we feel at our creative best. Everybody’s capable of getting there.
You talk about ‘that sweet place where creativity flows without inhibitions and fear’ – can you say a bit more about that?
The most interesting writing often happens when we forget ourselves. That’s ‘adra’.
I am interested in how our languages are unique, our different and unique Englishes (or multiplicity within other languages!), our speech, or ‘vac’ in Sanskrit. I have recently started a PhD in Creative Writing and Yoga to sort of make a laboratory of myself, to see and record how my writing changes, and then I bring those exercises home, to the retreats.
What is dharma for you?
I wrote a lot about dharma on Susanna Harwood-Rubin’s 30Words30Days recently. I guess it’s choosing to do all of this, what we’ve spoken about here. But it’s also checking back in with myself. The need to make auspicious choices never comes along when we expect them.
Is it true that you’re writing a children’s book incorporating yoga?
My little Welsh book of yoga inspired by Cardiff Castle’s Animal Wall is almost there, yes. I’m looking for the right illustrator and testing out the stories on my brother’s children and friends. I’ve also done some school yoga videos (Pause Points) for Gwylan, recently. The best part for me is when kids invent new asanas based on their own stories.
And finally, can you sum up what yoga means for you in your life?
It’s a way of living more fully – and I know that’s become an almost cliché saying so let’s go a little further! A way of not letting it all slip through my fingers. Life is a speedy thing. Yoga is a way of slowing down so I’m more often hearing that little ‘wow!’ whizz through my mind.
Wow! We’re hearing that little ‘wow!’ right now. Siân has a beautiful way of putting things, doesn’t she? She’s such an inspiration – both to step onto the mat and start practising yoga and to get out the notebook and pen and begin writing. She’s opening up a world of creativity and inviting us in to join her on this journey – wherever we are and whatever we’re doing.
May you discover your own ‘adra’, your own ‘sweet place’.