A few American visitors to the website have asked about the origin of the name Meredith. Astonishingly, they've usually been called Meredith.
Well, it's definitely a Welsh name. It was originally and still sometimes is used as a male first name. Variant spellings still in use are Meredydd and Maredudd. In Welsh 'dd' is pronounced as a soft 'th' sound. The spelling I've inherited is in effect a slight anglicization. The name should be pronounced with the accent on the central syllable. The habit of saying it with the accent on the first syllable is in fact an English mispronounciation.
There was a poet named Maredudd ap Rhys who flourished 1440-1483, but the name was already ancient by then. It's thought that the 'udd' or 'ydd' ending could mean 'lord' (in Welsh the modern word for lord is 'arglwydd') but this is speculation, and the meaning of the stem of the name is lost. One romantic theory is that it's somehow connected with the sea (Welsh 'mor' = 'sea'), but I know of no evidence for this.
Surnames which have evolved from 'Meredith' include 'Merridew', possibly 'Reddy' and, believe it or not, 'Beddows' in all its variant spellings. In medieval times, 'Bedo' was the familiar form of 'Maredudd'. Hard to credit, but think of Bill deriving from William and Jack from John. There's a tendency in Welsh sometimes to elide unaccented opening syllables, and the 'o' ending was common in pet forms of names, much as 'y' is in English (Jimmy, Betty, etc.), and is still heard occasionally.
In the 15th century there were at least three Welsh poets named Bedo. One of them, Bedo Brwynllys, took his second name from a village in Breconshire, now called Bronllys, where I lived for some years. You'll find a reference to this Bedo as my namesake in a poem called 'On Hay Bridge' in my book Snaring Heaven.
Working methods: anyone interested in how I write may like to look at a chapter I wrote in Maura Dooley's How Novelists Work (Seren 2000), called 'Telling and the Time'. In it I discuss the ways I worked on the first two novels.
'What role does the character O play in Shifts?' I've been asked this quite often. I had a go at answering it in a video interview with Tony Brown of Bangor University. The video is called 'Writers in View: Christopher Meredith' and is available from the Arts Council of Wales (9 Museum Place Cardiff CF10 3NX, Tel: 029 20 376500, Fax: 029 20 221447). The discussion ranges over the poetry as well as the first two novels.
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