Rudy Harries: My Time on the Representing Wales Programme

This is a blog post by Rudy Harries, who looks back at his time on the Representing Wales programme. 

Representing Wales came as a complete shock to the system to me. When I got the call that I’d been selected, I was struck speechless – and trust me when I say that doesn’t happen often.

Thinking back to when I started the program, I had only really just started to get back into the habit of writing after a long, long break. I was ambitious, though, hoping to finish a first draft of my first novel by the time the year was over. And though I didn’t get there, I feel I’ve completely transformed as a writer. I remember being so nervous about whether I was literary enough, high brow enough, smart enough, and it’s been a huge relief to discover that all writers feel this way – from the others on the cohort to my incredible mentor, Rachel Dawson. I’ve learned that there is room for me, that my work has merit regardless of whether it ends up published, that it doesn’t matter so much what I’m writing as long as I write. I will never forget nervously confessing to Rachel that I hadn’t made much progress on my novel because I’d been (gasp) writing fanfiction instead, and her first response was ‘oooh, which fandom?’ That moment alone healed so much of the elitism that had been ingrained in me doing Creative Writing at university. I started Representing Wales terrified that I wasn’t good enough and finished it knowing that ‘good enough’ isn’t a meaningful measure of art in the first place. What matters most is the joy of creation itself.

One of the highlights of the year was the two residential masterclasses that took us all up to Tŷ Newydd, a beautiful house up in North Wales, where the cohort got to spend precious time together and write. The first was close to the beginning of the programme, and it was only my second time taking the train up North. It was massively delayed, naturally, but I was in such a good mood that I didn’t care. I reflected on the enormity of what I was becoming a part of – as towns and fields and mountains rolled past my window, I grasped at the sheer breadth of Wales, and what it meant to be Representing Wales. It made me feel like a tiny piece of a vast, vast puzzle. No one person could ever hope to represent everything that Wales is and could be, but really processing that this programme had given me the gift of being a part of that huge tapestry was humbling and exciting in equal measure. I’m still processing that, the gratitude I feel, the ways that I’ve evolved, and I am so, so glad to have experienced all of it. I feel moored, supported, energised, and perhaps most importantly for someone who once believed that a happy life for a queer person could only happen outside Wales – more connected to my home than ever before.