What are 5 things you would want to find?

1. The synthetic cherry smell of my childhood

2. The photographs of my mother’s life that her dad threw away when her mother died

3. The violin that I once threw into a bin on the street (a complicated story)

4. The cold, crisp feeling of the north of England in winter (I am currently living in Spain and miss this the most)

5. The right way to be

What are 5 things you would want to hide? 

To me, being a writer feels like the opposite of hiding things. It is about taking feelings you have buried and holding them to the light. The internet has changed that landscape, too – perhaps the things that we say have more permanence now (or perhaps not). It often feels very exposing, so I suppose sometimes I would like to be able to hide from that feeling, and take it all back.

If you could choose anywhere in the world for your book to be hidden, where would it be?

I would hide it on Washington Viaduct, which is a place in my hometown where teenagers go to drink cider. That seems like the right place for Saltwater to be; where young people might find it and see the poetry in their lives reflected back at them.

If you could find any book, which would it be and why?

Patti Smith’s old notebooks, from her first years in New York.

Who would you want to find your book (another author, celebrity, et cetera)?

I would like my teenage self to find it, or my mother when she was 40, afraid of what direction our lives might take, because, really, those are the people I wrote it for.