Sting in the tail for Wasps vs Humans

Marjorie Brennan meets first-time novelist and performance poet Carl Plover

THE thunderbolt of inspiration can come at the most unexpected of times, as Carl Plover can testify. A dose of flu proved to be the impetus the performance poet needed to bring his debut novel to fruition.

“The character in the book is part-fact, part-fiction, he’s having a mid-life crisis, looking back on his life. I had a bout of the flu, I was really medicated, spaced out, and I felt the pressure of the mattress in the bed — that made me try to work out where I was. A week beforehand a friend had showed me a video of a band I was in, Monkeys With Clothes On. Seeing myself as a 20-year-old made me think, ‘where was I at that time?’. Not just the bushy hair and braces… everything about me was different. The guy [in the book] doesn’t know if he’s in a dream or having a breakdown, but I drifted back to where I lived in 1986. I have a recurring dream of walking through the houses I used to live in. The space these houses were in inspired the story — is this real, is it a dream of the future, where is the present?”