‘WRITE what you know’ goes the old and possibly clichéd advice to authors.

If it’s true, Bethany Pope will never run short of material.

At just 28, her memories already include the kinds of experiences most of us will never have. They range from being a child witness to the end of the hated Marcos regime in the Philippines to suffering horrific abuse in a North Carolina orphanage.

Bethany Walsh Pope was born in Waynesville, North Carolina, the daughter of a Presbyterian Minister and a former actress and model who suffered lasting health problems following a serious car crash.

When Bethany was six months old, the family moved to Edinburgh, where her father served the church. Money was tight. “We did spend an awful lot of time in the National Gallery because we didn’t have heat in the house – for about six hours a day. I remember that vividly.”

Arts and culture were always a high priority for the family. Bethany’s mother would read aloud from works by authors including Shakespeare, Homer and Dante.

The family’s next move, when Bethany was three, was to the Philippines, where her father was stationed as a US Navy chaplain after joining the service. The year was 1986, and unrest surrounding the toppling of dictator Ferdinand Marcos was ongoing.

“We were there during the last bit of the revolution,” said Bethany. “I saw a lot of shooting, violence and disease. We worked with the Sisters in Manila – Mom brought them rations. Toilet paper was a big thing; that was rationed. She would ration us further in the home so we would have more to donate to the nuns.”

A younger brother, Day, was born in the Philippines, and a sister, Katey, was adopted. When the family returned to the States, living in Florida, Bethany began to suffer anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder and anger problems as a result of things she’d seen in the Philippines, worries about her mother’s health and other family stresses.

Eventually she was sent to live for what turned out to be three years at an orphanage.

Her early months there were marred by physical and sexual abuse, notably by a 13-year-old girl who had been herself horrifically mutilated by her drug-abusing mother. Bethany credits her survival of this abuse as the catalyst for her vocation.

“Rape is an act of obliteration,” she said. “It is the rapist trying to say that you do not exist.

“It is them putting some of their own emptiness inside of you and hoping you will be destroyed. It is a form of murder. There are two responses to facing annihilation. You can either accept it – and I think that’s what happens when people turn to alcohol or drugs – or you can choose the other way and say that there is no such thing as nothing.

“I am an entity. I am real. I exist.”

In spite of dropping out of high school, Bethany eventually continued her education, securing a BA in English Literature from Mary Baldwin College in Virginia, a Master’s in creative writing from the University of Wales and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Aberystwyth. It was there that she met her Swindonian husband.

She has a message for others who face the worst that life can throw at them: “I would say that they are not alone, no matter how isolated they feel, and that the best way, I have found, to battle darkness, is to make something that can generate light.”

* A Radiance is published by Cultured Llama (www.cultured llama.co.uk), and another collection, Persephone in the Underworld, will be published in June by Rufus Books (www.rufusbookspublishing.ca). A novel, The Life of Dogs, is available as an Amazon e-book.