I’m delighted to chat to Tania Hershman about her latest hybrid publication it’s time: a chronomemoir (Guillemot Press: Cornwall, 2025) in my Writers Chat series (watch Tania’s book launch here). This post is published today, 31st December, also the date of the release of the first audio section of the book: audio sections, read by Tania, will appear on the day they appear in the book on Tania’s free Substack.
SG: So Tania, the book, it’s time: a chronomemoir begins (first) on 31st December 2018 and finishes (at least by the last date noted) 26th April 2021. It seems – to this reader anyhow – both a linear and circular book, a series of questions and answers to and from (your) self in relation to time and the space you’re within at every given (sometimes labelled, sometimes not labelled) time. A fascinating premise in and of itself, can you talk about the origins of this book?
TH: The seed of an idea for this book was planted more than a year before I started writing it! I was driving back from holiday with a friend, and Cornwall to Manchester is a long, long drive. I was driving, and at a certain point my friend asked how much further to go – and I noticed that I answered in hours, not miles, in time not distance. And then suddenly, my brain exploded with thoughts about what we as a society, as a culture, have made time into. This is quite dangerous when driving… At the next service station, I started making a list of time-related topics I wanted to explore, and I also told my friend she couldn’t go to sleep and leave me to my thoughts, she had to keep talking so I wouldn’t be distracted!
I didn’t start the book straight away because I was finishing a PhD, and wanted to get that done before beginning something new – although I’m generally always writing at least two things at once. As you see from the first page, I had told myself I would start on Jan 1st 2019 – but couldn’t quite wait that long! I had never written a book like this, which I call “hybrid creative non-fiction”, but I do these days give myself permission to write the books I want to write in the way I want to write them, so I started writing to find out what the book might be. It started as a diary and then, as you know, certain things occurred to make me loosen that!
SG: And I loved how your response to “things occurred” is recorded in the book too. I have to remark on the beautiful design and production, especially given our leaning towards digital things. I love the soft cream against the aubergine purple which highlight the beautiful cover art. Can you tell us a little about the design and how it fits with the themes of the book?
TH: It’s such a beautiful object, isn’t it! I can’t take any credit for that, it’s what the wonderful Guillemot Press does – my publisher, Luke, adores paper, different thickness, different weights and types, and I knew after he published my first hybrid book in 2020 that he would also create something gorgeous. He commissioned an illustrator he works with regularly, CF Sherratt, to design the cover, and I was blown away when I first saw it. I had worried that they’d come up with something involving clocks. But what he did took the themes of the book and presented them in such a surreal and stunning way, with a seed, a tree, and a kind of flow-chart. I love it and I love the colours. This is one of the joys of working with small presses who care so deeply about each book!
SG: It’s a joy to have input into and direct feedback on the physical book, isn’t it? Early on, on page 11 to be exact, you say,
Time is everything: waiting, patience, duration, longing, memory, hope. Time is change, evolution, decay. Time is life, and death. Time is what makes everything relative – I am happy, then I become happier. Time is outside me, keeping me in check and giving me something to rebel against, and my organs and tissues also take time in their own way.
I found myself returning to this passage (having underlined it and then wrote beside it ‘time!’) as I read the book, again when I finished it, and yet again when I started to formulate these questions. It seems to encapsulate what your book is about: the mind and body of time, our minds and bodies in time, your book written in multiple times and spaces, and therefore read in infinite time and spaces, and places. It brought to mind (!) Roland Barthes’ theory of the death of the author – once a text obtains a reader, the author (as they were as they wrote the text) no longer exists, and therefore is no longer needed. It struck me that in reading your text – and thinking about it in my own time – I was, as Barthes might (not) say, re-writing your text within time. Have you any thoughts about this?
TH: My thought is: I love it and, as the author of the original words, I can’t imagine anything better than a reader rewriting the text. I have always – first in my short and very short stories, then in things called poems, and more recently in more uncategorizable pieces I call “hybrids” – left space for a reader, invited them in to be part of the creative process. I don’t like to read things I considered to be sewn up tightly, with no space for me, I find it can feel suffocating. You’ve paid me the greatest compliment, you never know what a book might do when it’s out in the world – and I never assume when I am writing, even though this is my tenth book, that I will have even one reader, that it will be published at all. I write the sort of books I would want to read. I love the process of writing so much, that’s what is the most important to me. Everything else – your comments and questions, anyone who chooses to get in touch to talk about a book – is a wonderful and joyous bonus!
I decided recently, after someone who heard me do a short reading from the book at a Zoom event asked if there would be an audio book (which my publisher doesn’t do), that I would start reading the book in audio instalments, publishing each one on my Substack on the day they appear in the book, which, as you know, is (loosely) structured as a diary, starting on Dec 31st! It’s completely free to listen to, and I am looking forward to what thoughts and questions and comments this new format might bring forth from listeners. (Sign up here if you’d like me to read to you; older instalments are available if you miss the beginning – or, rather, beginnings!)
SG: Having attended your Zoom launch and heard you read, I will look forward to hearing you read more passages. You channel Einstein and Woolf throughout the narrative and I visualised them, like book ends on a bookshelf, or a frame around your multiplicities of stories in and of time, guiding, prompting, and more than anything, playing with you. Alongside, them of course, like a backbone to this book was Viktor Frankl’s incredible attitude to and use of time, which saved him, as outlined in Man’s Search for Meaning. Did you feel the presence of guiding lights of science and literature – essentially your two halves – as you wrote, as you thought?
TH: I love all this too, thank you for sharing how you see it. I never have a plan when I write, I write for me, I write to find out what I want to say. Einstein has been coming up for me for many years, since studying physics as an undergrad. My adoration of all things Virginia-Woolf-related has been more recent, I only began reading her work about seven years ago. Viktor Frankl’s writings saved me when I was in a very dark place, and they save me over and over whenever I need reminding. I have never thought about it in terms of their presence as I write, but I have so many voices in my head, and a psychic once told me that Einstein was watching me and found me very amusing, that I wouldn’t be surprised if they were some of my guides! Virginia is coming up in almost everything I write these days, so she is a bit of a stronger presence now, especially since the novel I am working on is partly set in a post-patriarchal society (see below).
SG: I had so many quotes marked throughout to ask you about and now that I find myself writing these questions, my overall sense of what I took from your book focuses on:
- “wonder” (p215)
- how your writing knows more than you do, teaches you things that you are only just realising, “about time and timeliness and living inside and outside the cage of time, the cellphones and the satellites with their rubidium atomic clocks” (p158)
- your description of your imagination “where you imagine, and where you listen to all the clocks inside you, ticking” (p179),
- How you address your Future Self and Past Self and the Growing Block
- How we are not just beings we are doings (p234), thinkings (p236)
And the overall sense that you’re writing about the writing process as much as life in time – the re-reading, the fresh eyes, the taking time slowly, and when you are stunned by James Woods’ words about Woolf “the novelist who has become nothing less than time itself” (p226), I too was stunned into thinking that actually, if Woolf is time, and the novelist is time, you as novelist/writer are also time. So what this reader has re-written is that it’s time: a chronomemoir could also be entitled it’s Tania….Have I misunderstood completely or touched on a metanarrative that runs through the book?
TH: Once again, and at the risk of becoming very repetitive, I love this! As I mentioned, I don’t plan before I write anything, and I write to find out what I want to write about, what is preoccupying me at the time. It has turned out, in the few book-length works I’ve written and the one I am writing now, that I am always writing about the writing process in some way, because it really is fascinating to me, how and why I do what I do (which has changed and changes over time), which I have been doing in one way or another since I was a kid.
I learned after my first book, a short story collection, came out in 2008 that once a piece is out in the world, it is not for me to say what it’s about, so there is no possibility of you or any other reader “misunderstanding” anything, that’s just not an option. Everything on your list is something that is important to me, that I’ve been thinking about for many years, and at the same time I know other readers have taken other things from the book. It’s for me to let it go and be whatever it wants to be for each reader, as that co-creation you so beautifully talked about.
SG: And that ability and willingness you have to “let it go” beautifully shines right through your work, Tania.
The text – your text, your thoughts – is punctuated by google searches related to time, and poems relating to (it seemed) your state of mind within a particular stage of time. The Covid Pandemic hit the world in the last third of the book and you bring us into Lockdown Time. I smiled at this, as it seemed oddly appropriate to the book you were writing, as if time itself was having a laugh, playing with you – just when you seemed to have completed your research and interviews with scientists and biologists and other specialists in time* and thought/wrote your resulting theories/thoughts, along came the world and asked for a pause. Looking back on this now, how has your perception of and attitude towards time changed as a result of both your book, the pandemic and the uncertainty of life?
* too many to mention here but I loved Jordana Cepelewicz, I adored the 365 knitting clock by Siren Elise Wilhelmsen, your experiment with Kwa time, no time, not using Gregorian time, the poetry…..
TH: I definitely thought that Time was having a laugh, as my conversations with Time were showing me that Time has a wicked sense of humour! Me documenting my own Illness Time a year before Covid arrived seemed very interesting “timing”, or perhaps “Time-ing”, too. I finished the book a few years ago, and funnily – or perhaps not – it was only over the past year, as we were proofreading etc… to get ready for publication last July, did I make some major shifts in my own approach to the kinds of time our society insists on us, which I can do as someone who works at home and for themselves. I decided to stop wearing a watch about a month before the book came out, and I really like that. If I need to “know” the time, there’s always something around that can tell me. I also decided to stop making such a hard and fast distinction between what we call “weekdays” and “weekend”, because I noticed there were things I gave myself permission to do on weekends, like turn off the Internet and spend the day reading, which made me feel peaceful and happy, so why wasn’t I doing this during this thing we call a “week” too? I feel that Time approves. I’d love to hear about any other things people have done to mess with Time!
SG: Lots to consider there, Tania! If Time plays with us, we can play it wit, too. We will finish up with some short, fun questions:
- Coffee with or without milk? With – oat milk.
- One or more cats? One cat, a different beautiful companion from the one who kept me company while I was writing It’s Time.
- Watch, clock, mobile time or sky time? As I mentioned above, none of those.
- What are you currently writing? I am in what may be the final stages of a book that looks like a more “traditional” novel, but is still my kind of playful. I am imagining a version of our society where people like me, happily moving through life alone, are the norm, and not only has marriage fallen out of fashion, there is no such thing as a “couple” either. It’s a thought experiment! I am alternating between sections set in this society and sections set 100 years or so before, around the time of WWI, where I imagine this shift could have taken place. So it’s a sort of alt-history/speculative fiction, and I am having fun making changes to the historical timeline, and also – given that I don’t plan anything – constantly finding my characters surprising me! I wasn’t expecting women’s football to play such a huge role in the historical sections. I’m having SUCH fun, which, for me, is what writing is all about. I want to finish it and also I don’t want to finish it, I will miss them all terribly.
- That sounds amazing – both as a process and what the text might bring to the reader. Lastly, what are you currently reading? I am always reading several things at once: I read mostly sci fi and fantasy novels at night, they help get me to sleep, the most recent being Poisoned Saints by Sarah KL Wilson, which I was completely gripped by. I have also just read a non-fiction book, Night Magic, by Leigh Ann Henion, about the joys of nighttime and darkness, which is such a beautiful and thought-provoking book. I am definitely going to run one of my Unbox Your Words Zoom writing workshops inspired by Night Magic at some point in 2026, and I chose some sections as Unbox Your Words writing prompts for December over on my Substack.
Best of luck, Tania with it’s time: a chronomemoir and with your novel-in-progress. Follow Tania on her website and purchase it’s time: a chronomemoir (Guillemot Press: Cornwall, 2025) from Guillemot Press, or direct from Tania’s online shop if you’d like a signed copy.
To listen to Tania read it’s time: a chronomemoir in audio instalments, sign up for her free Substack. The first instalment is out today!
Shauna Gilligan Writer 