Getting bookish with Emma-Lee Moss and Kathryn Williams

It’s at this inquisitive crossroads that Emma-Lee Moss and Kathryn Williams meet as “two musicians undercover” to examine their own journeys as recording artists turned authors, or “ladies who longform” as Moss deadpans – Moss with her recently released memoir My Cantopop Nights, her first book, and Williams tentatively writing a follow-up to her 2021 novel The Ormering Tide. 

Both have decades of music making behind them, with Moss making waves as Emmy the Great across five albums, a soundtrack, and a handful of EPs, and Williams, whose discography now spans a massive 18 studio albums if you include her many side projects, like 2024’s Willson Williams. Moss retired the Emmy the Great name with a farewell show in 2023, but even at Hay she still brings her gear to play a few songs, not quite ready to believe she can do without the callback.

That feeling may or may not fade as time goes on, but what’s refreshing about sitting in on their conversation at Hay is how little interest either of them have in pretending to have all the answers, or really any answer but one: that creativity isn’t something to be mastered but something that we just have to keep showing up for, and that part of the joy is not quite knowing what you’re doing. 

Williams talks more than once about “learning on the job,” whether that's writing songs or novels or making her recently exhibited matchbox paintings, while Moss insists that even after My Cantopop Nights she still has no clue on how to write a book.

Memoir and novels are, on the surface at least, entirely different feats, but one of the things that connects My Cantopop Nights and The Ormering Tide is that both books share a fascination with place. In Moss's case, it's her childhood home of Hong Kong and its ever-present soundtrack that becomes the book's ecosystem of sorts, while Williams, as she discusses below, keeps her novel's world confined to a fictional island based loosely on the cultural history of the Channel Islands, and it's the framing that's important: place not as a convenient backdrop but as something that can shape a person's whole lifespan.

Without wanting to be too neat about it, that feels like exactly the kind of conversation that literary festivals make possible – and why the most interesting ones often end up heading in directions that you'd never expect…

KATHRYN WILLIAMS: Literary festivals are so much more my world than music festivals. There’s tea, there’s coffee. There are little gardens you can sit in. There’s even walkways with carpet. Everyone’s so nice and kind, and everything’s not a problem. We got a car from the station, then a car to the venue, a car to the hotel. I feel like a lady of the manor.

EMMA-LEE MOSS: It’s very civilised. In my experience working in publishing so far is that people email you back. And what I learnt from, like, 20 years in the music industry is to ghost people, to ‘business ghost’ people. I once thought it was totally appropriate to say to someone, “Look, great, let’s chat about this,” and to never, ever email them again. I’ve been unlearning that for the last few years but working in a different industry where people are just like, “Hey, that thing we discussed, here it is, it’s gonna happen,” it suddenly makes me feel like the record releasing process is a little lawless.

On my last album, as Emmy the Great, I have a song called “Writer” about a woman who just sits all day at her window writing. I think I manifested my dream life, ‘cause that's what I want. Well, the one thing I wanted most of all was to go to gigs without a van full of stuff and wires, but I'm finding it hard to downsize. I did come here with two keyboards and a guitar just to play three songs. I was like, "Listen, I need to talk to someone about my load in." I just can't quite get to the point where I just get on a train with my book. 

Also, I feel like people might not come just to see me as a new author talk about my book, so I try and play songs as well to be, like, "And I can juggle as well," you know?

WILLIAMS: I bought tickets for your event, but then my soundcheck was at the same time so I missed it, but my husband said it was amazing. My event was a Royal Society of Literature and Jerwood Poetry Awards commission, with the four poets who won the Jerwood prize in 2024. They’d had time to work on their own things and then they worked on a collaborative poem all together, and the RSL got me to come in and work with them to set it to music, which was really nice.

I’ve worked with a lot of writers over the years. I made a Christmas album with Carol Ann Duffy and the album Hypoxia, which was based on Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.

MOSS: Oh, one of the songs from Hypoxia is my favourite. It’s so beautiful. [sings] “I am, I am, I am.”

WILLIAMS: “Beating Heart”? Loads of people have said that’s their favourite. I need to put that in my live sets more, I think… 

I also worked with the author Laura Barnett on her novel Greatest Hits, where I wrote a very real but also fictional album for the fictional main character in the book. So, yeah, I’ve done quite a few literary things, and actually I think I go to more gigs now where there are people talking about their book. People love talking about their creative process, and I’m obsessed with buying books about it. I love that feeling of sort of going behind the curtain of someone’s work. 

What I liked about today was that the event was sort of a cross-pollination between spoken word poetry and performance, and I did get to play a few of my own songs too. I think it’s great that you played some music as well, because it all goes into the pot.

MOSS: It feels a bit weird still, to not do music. Like, I try and sing at my family on just a regular Friday. It soothes me to sing. It calms me down, the idea of doing a song. But I sort of feel further and further away from performance, the way I used to do it. 

WILLIAMS: Yeah, most of the time I'm at home painting or writing. The idea of being an entertainer has never been my life anyway. I'm more of a one-on-one, let's have a chat person.

MOSS: So many times I've been to one of your gigs and come away feeling healed. I think there's an attitude that you can have towards performance. One of the reasons I wanna write books and move away from record releasing, in the way I’ve done it before, is because I want my engagement with an audience to be more collaborative, more immersive. 

I really came up in music during the period of, like, you're gigging your album for a year. You're gonna go to King Tut's Wah Wah Hut. You're gonna stand on stage. These are your songs. Sing your best songs last, you know. And everyone's gonna clap at you. You know what it's like. You start to love people in the audience. You don't wanna play a song at them. You wanna be like, "How's your dad?" or “Last time you came, you’d just had a baby. What's going on?" 

You want to be interactive, to get together, and that's what music is supposed to be. It's a communal experience.

WILLIAMS: That's what's nice about Patreon, because you can send songs to people who support you, and then they write to you about how they're doing and all that sort of stuff. 

I'm sort of on the cusp of a second book. I've started tentatively writing it, but I'm sort of stopping myself 'cause I'm sort of scared, because I know how long it takes. And that's so different with songs. You know, sometimes I can write four, five songs in a day. I can come away and feel like, well, I can take the rest of the week off then. But with writing longform, you have to put the hours in. It's like going to the office.

MOSS: I love that though, because in my 20s I was one of those people who really revered people like Nick Cave or Charles Bukowski, the people who are like, “I show up to my desk every day and I write, and that’s my job.” So I have this illusion that I do that, but of course I don’t. I’ll go to the kitchen and eat a cookie or peel an orange, or I’ll go for a walk. But there’s something about the routine of writing that I love.

Do you feel things from your songwriting coming into your novel writing? Because I feel like The Ormering Tide has a song-like quality to it. I mean, how could it not?

WILLIAMS: Yeah. So, it’s written in the first person and Rozelle, the main character, she sees the world in a poetic way so it’s nice to be able to write as her.

I think what’s really come to the forefront is that I feel like, as a creative who writes, paints, and writes songs, you don’t take time off. You’re just rotating the crops. But what I really love is feeling like a beginner at something, and I feel like every time I write a song, I’m a beginner. Because otherwise I’ll just have written a song that I’ve written before, and that’s when it gets boring.

With painting and writing fiction, I like learning on the job. I’ve always been someone whose learned how to do something as I’m doing it, so I value that part of the creative process where you’re sort of working things out – not knowing what the book’s gonna be, or what the song’s gonna be – and, in doing that, finding that the work speaks back to me. But your book isn’t a novel, it’s a memoir. So how did you format that?

MOSS: I’ve actually been writing a novel for a really long time, but stuff kept coming out that felt really personal. I was like, “Okay, I obviously need to write a memoir because there’s some shit that I need to dredge out.” And indeed, it was really cathartic.

Just before I started writing the memoir I’d done a musical with Isley Lynn, who’s a really great playwright and she’s really into form. I’d learned quite a lot from her about the structure of a classical musical, so I sort of understood that the memoir needs to go up and then it needs to come down, and then there needs to be a false ending, and, you know, I managed to find those beats in the story of my life.

One of my favourite books is A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, and what I’ve always really loved about her writing is that she’ll say something like, “He’s walking down the street and sees a basket of cherries, and years from now, when he’s 70 years old and he’s lost all this and he’s realised that, he’s gonna think back to this moment.” You know? It’s the span of a whole lifetime.

So I, early on in writing the book, decided that if this was going to be gripping for me to read, it needed to include the span of a whole life, so I just started at the beginning and got to now. And then it was writing about my parents' lives too. My dad’s 82 so, you know, there’s a lot. 

At first I was like, “Why would anyone want to know about my life,” and the answer is because we all want to know about each other’s lives. I really want to know what someone usually has for lunch, or how it felt to be an accountant in 1975. It’s fascinating. So that’s how I approached it.

WILLIAMS: Because we all have one life, but books give us the chance to live so many.

MOSS: In The Ormering Tide, I was wondering if you had any experience of living in a landscape like the book, because it was so vivid.

WILLLIAMS: So, it's set on a fictional Channel Island, and my husband is from Jersey, so I took a lot of points and places and references from that. But what I wanted to do, because it was my first novel, was to set a really small stage, almost like a studio play where there are hardly any props and hardly any cast members, and it's within a small timeframe so that I could learn and let the characters live. 

A lot of times when I was writing for the characters, they would do these strange things and I’d be sort of saying to the book, “Are we really gonna go there? Why are you taking me here,” you know? So I was really led by them, and I entered that world. And a lot of people have talked about how they liked to be in that world. It’s very much its own place.

MOSS: So how do you feel that the creative process of making an album differs, for you, from a book?

WILLIAMS: With albums, once they’re a batch of songs, I feel like I’m in their world and I’m walking around in it. But trying to write a novel, it’s like, “This is your world. You’ve gotta tell me what you’re up to in there.” 

You were talking about structure before and I feel like I am so unstructured, about so many things, whether I’m writing or painting or making songs. It’s almost like there’s a jigsaw puzzle in front of me, and I know how to put the pieces together to make what I want, but I couldn’t really explain that to someone. It’s so instinctive and intuitive. 

Intuition is such a huge part of being a creative and having to explain it afterwards is almost like you’re trying to translate it, for people who haven’t done the same thing.

MOSS: Like you said, there's the beginner, the Zen concept of the empty cup. Having written a book, I have no idea how to write a book.

WILLIAMS: I feel the same! When you were asking me about structure, a lot of what I did was just to write these individual scenes, and then I sewed those scenes together. 

MOSS: But your story is still really gripping.

WILLIAMS: Well, it made me panic when I was writing some of the darker elements of it. It haunted me and I felt part of it, and I kept wanting to write people out of these awful situations. I feel like songs find you and they channel, like a radio, but I feel like stories choose you. 

MOSS: That’s why meditations are good for writing. My memoir is about recovering places that were lost to me, and because I have, like, a listening practice, I would do that by dropping into the sounds I might have heard back then. I even went back to my old house in Hong Kong and I recorded some of the music around there. Not music, sounds. Like the sound of water. And sometimes if something was really difficult, because the memoir is about certain Cantopop songs, I'd play the song in question, like a Faye Wong song, before I started writing. 

I’d try to get really relaxed and be like, “Let the song tell you what it wants you to write about it.” So, for me, it was less about the brain and more about the body. Do you have any things that you do, to kind of get into a writing space? 

WILLIAMS: Just making time for it, I think. You know, some days I would send the kids off to school and secretly go back to bed with the laptop, then, you know, an hour before everyone was coming home I’d run around, put flour all over myself as if I’d been baking, and then go and buy some shop-bought cakes. Maybe hoover the house and tidy up too, as if I had to justify that time I’d spent writing, and that wasn’t put upon me by anyone except my own mind.

I guess when you’re writing longform, you need to make the time to write yourself into the world of the book. But also, do what you wanna do. I’ve got a few friends who talk about writing books, or writing this or that, as if they need permission or a qualification, and that’s huge. I mean, I never knew how to write a book, I just learned on the job, so I think that if you want to do it, just do it, but don’t try and make yourself a “writer.”

MOSS: I think you are really good at giving yourself permission. Like, your creative flow feels, from the outside, like it’s really healthy. Do you ever hear those internal voices? Like, when I sit down to do painting immediately I’m like, “You’re not a painter. Your dad’s a painter, but you’re not.”

WILLIAMS: I did have that. Since I’ve started having art exhibitions and my paintings are on the walls in some gallery, I do think, “Oh my god, someone’s gonna come up and say, ‘Who do you think you are?’” or something negative like that. But I’m 52 now, so I’m much more inclined to think, “Well, if not now, when?”

You know, I used to be such a people pleaser. I wanted people to like me, to respect me. I had this strong urge to prove myself, to prove that I had worth, and I don’t have that at all now. So when I’m making art, I’m not thinking about who it’s for. I’m exploring the possibilities of where I can go inside whatever it is that I’m doing, whether it’s a book or a song or a painting. They have different disciplines but the same thing applies, which is intuition.

It's like what you were saying before about not listening with your brain but with your body, I think that’s the same as intuition, and that there are parts of us that naturally trigger when something feels right or that it’s hitting on something important. 

MOSS: When you said that, I suddenly remembered that there were some sentences in the book that I did use my brain for, and I felt really clever afterwards… and I took them all out at the end. Those sentences are the ones you write and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, I’m so good,” and then later you’re like, “Oh my god, this is unreadable. This sentence is just a word salad.” It’s all about communication.

WILLIAMS: Yeah. You want to write things that spark beauty, or joy, or heartache, and I think that speaks to the authenticity of a person.

Like, I used to always be embarrassed by myself, and when I had stage fright, early on, I would be convinced that someone was going to stand up and say, “This is not good enough, I want my money back.” I had all those sorts of feelings. But now I just try and stand up that think, “Well, I’m just gonna serve this song to you,” so it’s sort of become about removing the ego. And when I say ego, I don’t mean ego-ego, just not thinking of yourself. 

Claire Potter, one of the poets I worked with at Hay, asked me what it feels like when I’m painting, and my answer was “peaceful.” Whatever I am working on, the prize is not the end result – that’s just the by-product. The bit that’s really amazing is when I’m so involved in a creative process, whether that’s putting shapes or colours or words together, or feeling like a voice is coming out of someone I’ve invented, I’m not really there. It’s the same feeling I get walking around in a wood. It’s the same sense of peace where you’re observing so much around you that you start to lose yourself. 

MOSS: I used to come off the stage and, even if it was a good gig, I'd feel rotten and I would hate myself. So many times all my friends would be drinking in the dressing room after the show and I'd be crying in the bathroom. But when we do songwriting workshops together, I don’t get that, because it feels like we're all part of the communal family. We're holding it together, facilitating space where people can access that flow.

WILLIAMS: And if you make it safe enough for people to play then exciting things happen, because the ego isn't checking in on itself. It becomes an exchange. 

MOSS: I think one of the reasons why events like Hay feel so important is that we live in a world now where it's very easy to get lost in your own internet rabbit hole, where exchanges are not happening in a civil manner. 

WILLIAMS: Our private lives, and all of our lives, are on screens. We carry them around with us, we make notes on them, we converse on them, and we show people where we’ve been in the real world, but they are a barrier. The most precious and private things in our lives – our contacts, our everything – are kept behind a screen. But when you come to an event like this, where there are rooms full of people, books, ideas, and talking, it does feel very free. It makes me feel much more connected to the memories of being a kid, before I had a phone, and there’s something lovely about that. I mean, I think everyone should just leave all their phones in one room and come and do human stuff instead. 

MOSS: In your next book, what are you doing about tech? As in, like, how much access do the characters get to things like phones? 

WILLIAMS: Well, at the moment, there are three main characters but one of them is… well, not a ghost but a character from the 1960s who used to live where the other two are living. She’s called Sybil Leek, she was a witch, and she’s a real character, which I love about her, and she had a pet crow called Mr. Hotfoot Jackson. So, I want the story to be set between the ’60s and ‘90s.

MOSS: I’m already so excited. I went to a talk the other day where they called the book a “period book,” but it was set in the ‘70s? Isn’t that crazy? It feels crazy to me that the ‘90s is considered vintage now.

So, you recently went to see Paul Simon. Do you sometimes feel like, when you listen to a song by, say, Paul Simon or Joni Mitchell, that you’re reading a book in some way?

WILLIAMS: I think Paul Simon, above everyone else, is like a novelist every single time, in every song. It’s like space food.

MOSS: You mean because it’s compacted?

WILLIAMS: Yeah. It’s like space food in the sense that when you rehydrate it, it becomes so much bigger, sort of like how a short poem can unlock a much bigger world of meaning. I would say Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, and Paul Simon of course, are the three artists that I feel have a literary sensibility. They can put a whole world in your head. The characters feel so alive, and there’s a ring of truth to that which keeps you coming back.

MOSS: Like the middle-eight of “American Tune” where you’re like, “They’re where? They’ve gone where?” 

I feel like Paul Simon is really good at jumping through time without telling you. Like that song that goes “We were married on a rainy day, the sky was yellow and the grass was grey,” and then “All that winter, we shared a cold,” and then suddenly they're divorcing, you know? He doesn't pad it out. He leaves you thinking, "Do I need a whole book about this?" But maybe just seven lines is alright.