By BRUCE DENNILL
Written in the six weeks following the sudden death of her soulmate, Mat, South African author and journalist Melinda Ferguson’s Swift is a raw, breathtaking meditation on grief, survival and release. At its heart lies the tenuous rescue of a Little Swift, a baby bird Mat identified just days before his sudden and inexplicable death. Now with her soulmate gone, Ferguson struggles to keep the half‑dead bird alive, while propelled through shock, fury, and unspeakable sorrow. The bird’s fight to survive becomes a mirror of her own mammoth struggle to navigate the absurd bureaucracies of death and the unbearable sorrow of silence.
An unexpected guide suddenly appears in her DMs: Hannah, a “Swift Queen” whose devotion to helping Swifts in the UK, forges a pact across oceans. Together, they embody the strange intelligence grief unlocks when the heart is cracked wide open.
Writing a book is a huge commitment. What are the elements that need to be in place if you are going to meet whatever writing goals you set?
The writing of Swift didn’t take on the shape or form of any of the previous four memoirs I’d written – Smacked, Hooked, Crashed and Bamboozled – which were all planned to a certain extent. Swift was birthed in early December last year, two weeks after Mat died unexpectedly. I felt almost possessed by a need to write. For the next two weeks I landed up writing for between 12-18 hours a day. I would just sit down and download, pages and pages of work. I seldom experienced any fatigue. I was obviously in deep trauma and grief – I still am. Once “it” all came out, I spent the next four weeks editing and structuring it. It soon emerged that the majority of the book would take place over a period of 15 days: the seven days before my soulmate died and the eight days thereafter.
Conversely, what are the strangest or most creative procrastination techniques you’ve devised to avoid all that work?
I do a lot of writing courses with people who come to me because they are crippled by procrastination. The writer is a master of delay and so we spend a lot of time trying to undo all those excuses. Strangely, for this book, I had no issue with procrastination at all. In fact I had the exact opposite. I experienced this insane energy, like a thing inside of me that needed to find form and be born. In the book, the death of my soulmate coincides with me rescuing a baby bird, close to death, who had fallen out of its nest on a farm in Breerivier, close to where I have a cabin. When Mat died I was left holding the bird, which he had identified as a Little Swift just two days earlier, when I brought it back to our home to Cape Town. A swift is an insectivore and so, in order for it to fledge, there’s a really intricate thing happening where it needs to be the correct weight, wingspan etc. On some days, I was feeding the greedy gumdrops up to a 100 live crickets a day! Somehow, having to take care of a needy bird, helped me to shift the focus from the brutal death of my soulmate to the bird’s rescue. And so, once it flew, after a really crazy and magical seven days, in order to assuage the emptiness, now left by the departure of both the bird and Mat, there was nothing to do but write. There was no time to procrastinate.
Is there a specific author (or writer, journalist, etc) who made you feel, “I want to be an author”? And what was it about them that spurred that feeling (anything from admirable eloquence to an outrageous public persona)?
As a young girl, I loved reading and I suppose the two writers who got me wanting to write were the poets Sylvia Plath and TS Eliot. At the age of 11 or 12, I came across poems like The Hollow Men and The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock by Eliot and all those amazing Ariel poems by Plath. I was blown away by their amazing genius with imagery and words. As a result, I wrote a lot of poetry during those teenage years. I was always writing something.
Do you tend to read the same kind of material (genre- or style-wise) that you prefer to write? If yes, what makes that particular niche so attractive to you? If no, what do you think it is that makes each different area appealing?
I’m also a publisher so my job entails reading a lot! I find it increasingly difficult to read for recreational purposes because of all the reading that is required in the work I do. But when I do get the time, I do tend to read memoir. I’m attracted to the story of the “I”. The majority of the books I have published are also in this genre, so those are the kind of books I read. I also gravitate towards opinion-type books, but then I’ll probably listen to them on Audible because I travel a lot.
Outside of your profession, what role do books play in your life? Are you constantly reading; is your house lined in bookshelves; are books the ideal gift to give or receive, etc?
Books are literally everywhere in my house. I even have a really gorgeous staircase to my loft that doubles up as a bookshelf. My house is absolutely covered in them. And of course, as a publisher, I don’t only have them in my house, but also in my head.
Who is your favourite literary character?
That’s a hard one, I have so many. But definitely one of them is Hamlet. I’ve always been attracted to him as a character because he reminds me of parts of myself, the ones that are full of inner pain and many contradictions. Throughout the play, he overthinks, spirals and self-sabotages, but then he somehow manages to slice straight through all the falsity and illusion around him, with surgical precision and comes up with some brilliant insights. He sees too much and feels too much. I think Hamlet is trying to understand what it means to exist in a world that is fundamentally brutal, unjust and off-kilter. I relate to that. He interrogates stuff like grief, morality, truth and even his own sanity until the lines blur and it feels like he is the only one who is actually sane and awake. Even though the play was penned back in the late 1500s, the character of Hamlet feels eternally modern. And his “To be or not to be” speech is in my opinion, one of the most brilliant examples of great writing in the history of literature.