From the fishing heritage of Grimsby to the nutty notes of the haslet, Fee Griffin discusses her connections to Lincolnshire, her writing style, and her interest in folklore. Look out for Griffin’s highly inventive contribution to the Lincolnshire Folk Tales Reimagined anthology, which will be published early in 2025.

1. Please introduce yourself and your connection to Lincolnshire.

I’m a poet who spent part of my childhood in Lincolnshire, returning here to live, work and raise a family years later. My first collection of poetry was based partly on the jobs my parents had near Grimsby, in frozen food factories and their canteens. Before I knew it, I’d lived here longer than anywhere else.

2. How would you describe your writing style?

Opportunistic and unromantic. I collect bits and pieces on the notes app of my phone, and then fit them together like a puzzle I have to figure myself out of. I like to combine the ordinary—bus rides, coat buttons, cutlery drawers—with the extraordinary. I think it’s that combination which first attracted me to the Tiddy Mun story. 

3. Yes. Could you talk a little about the folk tale you worked with for the anthology: why did you choose it and how did you adapt it? 

I just read through as many as I could find until I found something I found truly strange and interesting. Here, it was that combination of the ordinary with the extraordinary: that eerie image of the villagers, standing at new moon with a bucket of water each to tip into the dyke—full-on folklore!—with the historical backstory of the Dutch engineering team, led by Cornelius Vermuyden, who were commissioned by the Crown to drain the fens in the seventeenth century. 

4. If you could ask any author, living or dead, to adapt any piece of Lincolnshire folklore, as you have done with Tiddy Mun, whose adaptation would you most like to read and why? 

I’d nominate Caroline Bird. I love hearing her talk about her process in interviews, how she “flings open the door of a first line” then just follows to see where it takes her. There’s so much potential for Lincolnshire’s weird folklore to provide that inciting line!

5. Haslet is one of Lincolnshire’s delicacies, a kind of meatloaf with herbs, often made out of pork. Despite the similarity in names, it is far more obscure than its cousin, the Haggis. If the Haslet was a mythical creature, like the Wild Haggis, what kind of creature would it be? 

It always sounded like “hazelette” to me, so I guess a kind of Smurfette version of a hazelnut?