AN: This is a profile I wrote about a lecturer on my creative writing MA. I wrote this after only having known him for 2 hours. No one else has supported me in my writing more than him. I’m loath to sell anything to anyone, but buy his books! They’re really fucking good. 

The blue corridor is narrow and quiet, save for the faint droning of various lectures behind closed doors. As I scan the plaques for the correct room, I am met with a scribble in marker pen, ‘206’, at the far end of the hallway. The room is currently occupied, so wait out of sight I must. 

‘That’s one of the most important things we can take away from Joyce, is the form.’ 

Although I don’t know it yet, Jon Gower sits at the back of the seminar room, Celtic literature a mainstay in all his creative writing lectures. He gives no hint of his 64 years bar the iced tips on his sideburns. In walking shoes and waterproof trousers, the prolific Welsh writer is what my sister would affectionately deem ‘organic’. 

The fervour with which he cycles through anecdotes is opposed to the relaxed slouch he employs, one leading arm and projecting voice. Throughout the seminar he breaks off into tangents that have their own tangents, some great tree infinitely growing. He apologises, centring himself, but no one minds. He’s a storyteller, after all. A true Welsh storyteller.   

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The Pwll of the Stars 

Thirty MPH speed limits along claustrophobic residential side streets, thinned out further by rows of parked cars on either side. Perhaps unexpectedly affluent. Churches and a single primary school, miners’ cottages and semi-detached manors, public cemeteries, and private cemeteries, all with a view of the flat and meandering Loughor. The Pwll through my car windscreen is no doubt very different from the village where Gower grew up in the 60s.

It was in faraway Aberystwyth where he attended primary school, however, the first ever Welsh language primary school in the country. Understandably, it was here that a deep affinity for his nationality was nurtured, to the extent that he laments his unfortunate anglicised name as the only thing that disconnects him from his countrymen. But, beaming in his rugby pullover and explaining how he didn’t learn English until he was 8, it’s clear that if we could quantify ‘Welshness’, Gower would be very near the top of the list.

“I need to contribute to the Welsh language,” he explains, one of the few people who not only play a part in reviving and reclaiming the Welsh tongue but push it forward with a blossoming vocabulary and staunch dedication to our history. 

Gwlad Llenor 

It’s fitting then, that over half of Gower’s 40 published works deal with Wales or topics surrounding Wales. But each one of his travel memoirs, novels, collections of essays and biographies pushes him into new passions, with a renewed respect for the craft. 

“It requires bravery.” He tells the room of 7 budding writers. A fact he has no doubt learned throughout the years, fending off belligerent teachers and one, count them, one critic who still scorns him. In his support, entirely non-judgemental, he is not only protecting Welsh literature but the craft in general and all perpetrators of it. 

When it comes to his own work, there are still missed opportunities. Regarding his masterwork, he expects the time for him to write it has long passed. 

“I’m getting better at what I’m doing, but I’ve got less energy. I don’t have time to write the great Welsh novel….I’d like to be a short-story writer if I had the courage.” 

‘Unflagging and Unfailingly Inventive’

It wasn’t until he was 17 years old that Gower would spend a fated summer on Bardsey Island. Off the shore of the Llyn Peninsula, the island of only 11 inhabitants is famed as the legendary final resting place of Merlin. On this occasion, his love for the small piece of green fixed in the sea seems less related to its history, and more to the freedom it offered him in his youth. 

“I can never leave there…It was the perfect summer. I can’t swim, but I did that summer. I swam out to my own lobster pots to get lobsters from a shallow bay.”  

Gower has not stopped taking advantage of this freedom, flitting between Wales and Patagonia like a manx shearwater, California and Ireland as a galley. There are people who, having lived a life akin to his in interest and intrigue, would be wholly more full of themselves. Instead, there is a reservedness to Gower that, at times, borders almost on the unconfident. 

With excitement, I tell him I have bought my stepmother one of his books and I will be back shortly with her review. 

“Oh, if she hates it don’t tell me,” he asks, though he does not break his warm eye contact. Instead, he smiles. 

“Spare me that.” 

After the seminar is over, we walk out of the building together. He becomes smaller somehow under the corduroy pullover, no longer the lecturer but the writer. It is his turn to ask questions of strangers, of friends, of characters. In an instant, he is ready to find sense in my nonsense, put syrup on the waffle. 

“There are 3 million people in Wales, that’s 3 million stories.” 

It seems he has already collected a few thousand of those stories. But, I suspect that, even with the coming 11 weeks’ worth, we will have barely scratched the surface of Jon Gower.

header image credit: https://wellhopper.wales/2015/03/10/bardsey-island-wells/