Roopa Farooki

This week the Creative Writing Reading Series welcomed back Roopa Farooki, a former lecturer of creative writing at Kent who now teaches at Oxford. Born in lahire, Pakhistan, and brought up in London, Farooki talked about how this affected her writing – saying that, although she always had Asian or part-asian protagonists, nationality is never what any of her novels turn on, though hey do sometimes turn on a sense of otherness. This deliberateness of not having race the central issue is obviously a deliberate tactic, but Farooki also talked about her choices of character in terms of representation – if she didn’t write about Asian characters, who would – the white middle class? She had felt previously, she said, on the subject of representation, that she had been aiming more for a non-racial universality in her novels rather invoking cultural clash – something she was, she said, changing her mind about.

She has published six novels to critical acclaim and, regularly, the Orange prize longlist: Bitter Sweets (Macmillan, 2007), Corner Shop (Macmillan, 2008), The Way Things Look to Me (Macmillan, 2009), Half Life (Macmillan, 2010), The Flying Man (Headline, 2012) and The Good Children (Headline/Tinder Press, 2014).

Six novels in in eight years is quite the productivity rate – but when asked by Dragan about this, Farooki revealed that she’s actually written twice that many – and has six completed unpublished novels at home! Although some of these were before Bitter Sweets, she did say that, despite her success in sales and prize listings, she still does get books turned down by her publisher – in the case of her first because, she feels, it was incredibly personal, and later, it seems to have been the more experimental novels that haven’t been taken off – perhaps due to a playing safe, in terms of what constitutes a sellable book, by more mainstream publishers. When asked what she did with these books, Farooki replied that (and this is unlike how David Flusfeder, Alex Preston and Nicholass Hogg talked of their ‘failed’ novels) that not only are these books ‘complete’ finished manuscripts, but that she tends not to recycle any of them into new novels – instead viewing each novel as a very separate entity – partly because, she believes of a belief that your best book is still to come, and that each book is an improvement on the one before. So whilst we may still find six (or maybe more!) experimental Roopa Farooki novels published by a more avant-garde press at some point, she was doubtful that they would ever be revisited in this way.

So, Farooki has actually written twelve novels in just over eight years – an even more impressive feat. When asked how she had achieved this – Faooki put much of this down to a disciplined schedule, particularly since she is the mother of four children. her daily schedule involves getting up at 5 and writing for 3 hours before the children wake up and she has to go to work – insisting what many of us hate to admit to – that three hours early in the morning with a coffee will invariably produce better writing than 3 hours in the evening with a glass of wine! In those 3 hours, she aims to write 500 words, but, she says, is still happy when she only gets a few hundred good ones. She also warned about getting greedy – she wrote 2,000 words recently only to have to scrap them because the writing was too sloppy – she said it was best to stop yourself at 500 to keep the writing taut.

She also talked about editing – saying that initially, when she had more time, she used to edit as she went – doing a 6 hour stretch each day, half of which would be spent re-reading and editing the last days work, and half of which would be spent writing 500-1000 new words. As she only now has 3 hours, she just writes, and the editing occurs at the end. She recommended spending as much time on editing as on the original writing, and recommended not getting too disheartened by an original draft, saying that you have to accept what you write first isn’t perfect but that there’s always a better book in there.

Conversation and reading centered around her latest novel, The Good Children, which she explained came out of an interest in the 1961Milgram experiments, which happened in response to the trial of the Nazi was criminal Adolf Eichmann, and was designed to test questions of personal culpability and the defense of following orders that the trial – and the Nazi rule, raised. In this experiment, participants were tricked into giving another supposed participant (actually an actor), electric shocks every time they answered a question posed during the experiment wrongly – these shocks were to increase in strength, and the participant was monitored by one of the scientists working on the experiment, who would urge them to continue for the sake of the experiment, and assure them of their lack of responsibility, if they expressed a desire to opt out. in Milgram’s first set of experiments, 65% of participants administered the final, fatal, 450-volt shock. Farooki sad that this interest had combined in her mind with her simultaneous reading of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, where she became fascinated by Grendel’s monstrous mother, and by a telling of she had given one of her children, when she told him to ‘be a good boy, and do what you’re told’. This led to the question ‘do good children do what they’re told?’, from which The Good Children was born. It applies the idea of the Milgram experiments to a domestic situation, exploring the effect of a manipulative mother on her children. Although, as Dragan pointed out, Farooki has been criticized for being a personal, rather than political writer, it seemed that the domestic scenario gave her an intimacy in talking about important political questions – here of participation and authority – but also of gender – she discussed the deliberate choice to take on the voice of a male character in The Good Children and have the female children presented in the third person as a comment on how these women perceived themselves and how they were perceived. Overall, Farooki offered a perceptive discussion both of her work and her writing processes that was useful partly in its concreteness, though I have yet to get up at 5 for a coffee-fuelled writing session. Maybe tomorrow.

Geraldine Monk

This week’s Creative Writing Reading Series saw the, as ever, irrepressible Geraldine Monk on fine form. Geraldine has been a leading light of the UK innovative poetry scene since the seventies, and during her reading gave us a taster of a wide sweep of her poetry – from her most famous collection – 1994’s Interregnum to one of her most recent – and as yet unpublished – poems, started onlt two weeks ago. This poem, ‘Deliquium’, was written, she says, half-way between Crete and Canterbury (a place which you may be surprised to learn is actually Sheffield – Monk’s hometown) – looking forward to her journey to Canterbury, and inspired by a scrap of paper she found after her holiday two weeks before with the name of her holiday location in Crete and the word ‘deliquium’ written on it – a word which she says, despite having made the note (and she talked about how her note -taking is more a scraps of paper than a notebook affair), she was intrigued by – loving the sounds, but having no idea what it meant. Having looked it up & found four very pleasing definitions – including ‘in a languid, morbid mood’ – a four part poem was born.

Monk’s poetry is both innovative and immediate – its eschewals of the conventional rules of grammar allow for a space in which words are both stranger and more present. Take ‘Pendle’, the first poem of Interregnum:

(brooding dislocation)

limits

push

over

iced Pendle water warm English beer

sipspeed under

grazing

headlights

catch

odd eye

starlets

hearts

odd creatures

sometimes missed

sometimes hit

warm runny things

cold unmoving tarmac

(lascivious sprawl conscious and livid)

Here the poem both enacts the brooding quality of dislocation, and allows for quite brilliant dislocations and relocations of meaning – for example the way the outriding ‘sometimes hit’ forces the doubleness of meaning in ‘odd creatures / sometimes missed’ to shift emphasis. The poems work, in rhythm and content, with song and childhood games – a play which can be quite sinister – Monk’s very physical reading of the ending of another of Interregnum’s poems

and the stained black habit

flapped away

cawing

taa taa taffa-teffy

taa taa taa-a…

was menacing, and followed by an account of growing up in a Catholic school, so scared of the nuns who taught her that she wet herself rather than interrupt a music lesson.

What this type of writing, in its sparse denseness, allows, is a method for voicing – an allowing in of what has been repressed in dominant linguistic and historical accounts. Its aim is, as Monk says, ‘evocation rather than saying something’, and what Monk evokes, repeatedly, is women in history whose speech has been silenced. Most interesting, perhaps, is Interregnum, which is a poetic account of the Pendle Witches – seventeenth-century residents of Pendle hanged as witches in Lancaster. As the blurb to the book says ‘They had fallen victim to a language-magic far more potent than their own’, and Interrgnum fights back with its own language-magic. The project is both explicitly feminist, and geographically located – Monk being originally from Lancaster and deeply involved in its language, spaces and history. This is both a full history – involving thorough archival research (which, on the Pendle Witches was admittedly rather slighter in the early nineties than now – Interregnum was ahead of the curve in what is now a booming industry of the history of witchcraft within academia) and a pared down one – this research then stripped back to its barest words.

Similar, though interestingly different in intention, was Monk’s reading from 2005’s Escafield Hangings, which re-writes Mary Queen of Scot’s letters to her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I during her imprisonment in Sheffield in the section ‘Unsent letters’. Mary, who admittedly had much more access to a voice than the Pendle Witches, is, accordingly treated with more humour – Monk was particularly amused by the refrain ‘I don’t complain’ in her original letters, sandwiches as it is in what Monk calls a catalogue of ‘whinging’. Nonetheless, these letters again write of how women’s struggles with voice are involved in their struggles for power.

Monk also read from Songings – a text which later turned into a musical collaboration with Martin Archer and Julie Tippetts called Angel High Wire, Ghost & Other Sonnets (2009) and 2011’s Lobe Scarps & Finials – which she described as a monthly diary of November 2010, and an attempt to encounter head on the recurring urge to write about the moon in her poems – her answer, she said was to ‘bombard a year with moons – moons from around the world and down the ages’.

She ended back in Crete – with a tribute to a matriarchial culture of goddesses – a poem to Artemis of Ephesus – and a quibble with her evolution and present day reputation as a virginial huntress – the Ephesian Artemis was originally the ‘great mother godess’, and Monk’s Artemis was characterized by abundance. One can see why the similarly effusive Monk likes her.

Kat Peddie

Viv Albertine

On Wednesday evening Viv Albertine performed what is now becoming a more usual kind of gig for her to a packed room. She was reading from and discussing her memoir Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys (Faber and Faber).

The title, apparently, used to come from her mother’s favourite nag – that she wads only interested in’ Clothes, clothes, clothes. Music, music, music. Boys, boys, boys’. ‘Which goes to show’, said Albertine, ‘that no matter how superficial your interests, if you try hard enough you can really turn them into something.’

Perhaps not quite what her mother had in mind, but it is, of course, this mixture of subversiveness, humour and readiness to make herself the butt of the joke that is, and has always been, Albertine’s great appeal. Both in her extracts from the book and in person, Albertine was sharp, engaging, confident in revealing her quirks, mistakes and lacks of confidence, and incredibly likeable.

Most famously the guitarist of The Slits, Albertine’s book, as she pointed out, is not purely, or even predominantly, a factual autobiography of her time in one of the punk movement’s most famous bands, but, as a personal memoir, a book that spans much wider period of time. And, as she pointed out, being in the band, though it may be the most important thing about her to others, is not necessarily the most important experience of her life. Nonetheless, there is not only a lot of material from this time, but in many ways the ethos of the band – uncompromising, problematically feminist, messy, defiant – is also the ethos of the book, which deals such post-punk material as cancer, IVF, divorce, Audis and middle-age with as much visceral frankness and humour as her stories of trying to give Jonny Rotten a blow job, or having Johnny Thunders persuade her to take heroin.

On which note, we did get a tour of the book’s sex scenes – whilst Albertine assured us there was ‘other stuff in there’, she couldn’t resist the urge to give us what she clearly considers the most entertaining sections of the book – which are ribald but deftly written scenes of embarrassing sexual encounter – which Albertine seemed to take some delight in retelling. One had the sense that perhaps she deliberately makes herself take on more humiliation than the situation demands – but it was clear that she viewed encountering the ways in which she experienced her sexuality, and expressions of it, as humiliating, as an important feminist project – an attempt at honestly analyzing how the pressures put upon women to express their sexuality – both in the seventies and nowadays – manifested themselves in her own experience. She was also insistent on seeing her whole career through the lens of feminism – pointing out that punk’s refusal to assimilate to the expectations of larger culture was, for The Slits and other female punks, an explicitly feminist project – even being in a band was a refusal of the expectations of the limited life that women at the time, from childhood, were trained to expect and desire.

Albertine was also incredibly thoughtful and eloquent about craft – proving repeatedly that even a memoir which may seem very warts-and-all is actually the product of a huge amount of structuring and editing. Talking about her initial ideas of structure – that each chapter would, stemming from the title, be structured by a ‘boy’, this scheme, she says, fell away a year into the three year writing project – but was fundamental in getting the memoir started. Albertine revealed that she kept a note over her workspace saying ‘The Book is Boss’ – subordinating any personal discomfort for the sake of a better book – but also editing out many scenes and events from the first to second draft in order to make the book’s structure work. Part way through, she said, she realized that she was writing a story about a woman who had struggled against expectations to make music, retreated to middle-class, married life and then had to struggle against the expectations and conventions of this new found life in order to, yet again, make music. This structure of life and book discovered, scenes which detracted from this narrative, or weren’t deemed interesting enough for the reader, were discarded, while pieces that she had written for herself, only as a joke or to get her started writing first thing in the day, ended up having to stay – including a piece about her labia that many critics have picked on as one of the braver pieces of the memoir. It seemed that, although Albertine may often be the butt of her own joke in the book, the process of writing it had enabled a form of self confidence and allowed her to find, not only structure in her life, but understanding of the events of it – it was only when writing the book, she said, that she realized that Johnny Thunders had manipulated the situation leasing up to her taking heroin in order to make her vulnerable, rather than acting kindly by pre-warning her that she was about to be kicked out of The Flowers of Romance. Both the life she told, and her insights into what enabled her to tell this life as well as she has done, were fascinating.

Nicholas Hogg

Next up in the creative writing reading series was Nicholas Hogg, novelist, poet and short story writer. Nicholas was, as a poet, twice shortlisted for the Eric Gregory award, and later, as a novelist, His first novel, Show Me the Sky, was nominated for the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary prize, and his second novel, The Hummingbird and the Bear, was published in 2011 and the recipient of a K Blundell Trust award. His third novel, Tokyo, is published by Cargo next summer., and this was his first public reading of its contents.

Nicholas didn’t always know he wanted to be a writer – it seems to be a myth that all writers do – indeed it seems we might have lost him to professional sports if not for a serious shoulder injury. He described his early adult years as itinerant – for example, to took a job on a ship aged 28 – accumulating experience that he now puts to use in his novels. And experience, personal experience, did seem to have particular importance, with Nicholas describing much of something akin to veiled memoir – with his experiences transposed onto different characters and plotlines to his own experience – the 14 year old runaway in Show me the Sky has experiences that are transposed scenes from Nicholas’s own experiences of hitchhiking. Though he assures us his life has been quite unlike the adulterous romance of The Hummingbird and the Bear, he moved to new York for 6 months in order to write the novel – walking in the city every day and building up a visceral connection with the place of the novel. Each day would impact on the story, allowing in the discoveries of exploring the city, and the story impacted on each day, sending Nicholas out to search for the locations of the scenes of his novel. Again, and as with Alex Preston and David Flusfeder, we were encouraged to practical research to fully understand the places and stories of our writing. Tokyo, though less autobiographical than his previous two books, comrs out of the two years Nicholas spent as a TEFL teacher in Japan, consciously earning the money that would then allow him some freedom to write. In fact, it was even more useful than that – Nicholas credits this teaching experience with sharpening what he believes to have been previously fairly lax use of language, vital in turning him into a writer. Worth remembering in the classroom.

Previous to Show me the Sky, Nicholas wrote a first – and he describes it as ‘baggy’ – novel that was never published. He urged budding writers not to become disheartened by initial failure, and to see the potential use of a ‘failed’ novel – saying that many pieces of Show me the Sky, including the passage he read to us about the motorcycle crash of a teenage runaway – were taken from the first novel. Sometimes, even years later, you can take pieces out of a ‘failed work’ and rework them into something successful.

He also advised, a similar technique if, unlike me, you’ve managed to be successful across disciplines – saying that he will sometimes use, not a line necessarily, but a piece, or few words, of poetry and transpose it onto the page of a novel in order to achieve a denseness, or concentration to set off the rest of the prose. He did, however, warn against overloading, repeating a piece of advice that Margaret Atwood once gave at Hay Festival and that has always stuck with him, that she restricts herself to a maximum of one simile per page.

Conversation, and reading, concentrated on Nicholas’s novels – Show me the Sky is a novel of people trying to escape their lives – the runaway, a rock star who fakes his own suicide (based on the Manic Street Preacher’s guitarist Richey Edwards’s presumed suicide, or disappearance) and the return journey of a young Fijian who has been subject to the British practice of kidnapping children, educating them in Britain and then sending them back as missionaries. Tokyo is, conversely, about people trying to find their life – the girl going out to Tokyo from California to meet her estranged father, her father’s pursuit of a Japanese ex-girlfriend, her pursuit by a man she has met on a plane, who identified her with the moon princess, Princess Kaguya. Even now when mount Fiji smokes, legend has it that the fumes are that of the everlasting life potion of the emperor, who threw away this gift from the princess when she returned to the moon, his will to live forever broken by the fact that that life would be without her. Drawing on Japanese folk legend, and acute and sympathetic observations of Japanese culture, this promises to be a beautiful book, and one to look out for come summer.

Alex Preston

Next up in the Creative Writing Reading Series was another of our Creative Writing lecturers – Alex Preston – reading from his latest novel, In Love and War (Faber & Faber). The novel is set in Florence during the second world war – although in part it is also a Bildungsroman, with its protagonist, the British Esmond, coming of age fighting to undermine the fascist government from within.

Alex is already an award-winning novelist, his first novel, This Bleeding City, having won the Spear’s and Edinburgh Festival first book prizes as well as being chosen as one of Waterstones New Voices. His second book, The Revelations, was shortlisted for the Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize. This, his third novel, has already been selected for BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime, although as Alex said, this novel – as with David Flusfeder’s two weeks ago – had rather different beginnings, coming out of what was originally intended to be a research project for a non-fiction book on fascist Florence. Alex is also a journalist, and talked about how the writing of the novel had influenced his journalistic choices – leading him to choose to do an on-the-ground piece on Boko Haram in order to help him understand his character – to put himself in a position outside his sphere of knowledge – a residing idea of the novel being that one is able to discover what sort of person you are based in how you react to situations beyond your previous experience.

As with David’s talk, Alex urged practical research upon practitioners in the room, saying that you have to involve yourself as fully as possible in the world of your story, particularly in a historical novel. He recounted an anecdote of overcoming (or at least facing) his fear of flying at Duxford Imperial War Museum, being taken for a flight in a still (just about) operational De Havilland Dragon Rapide in order to write the initial scene of Esmond’s flight from England to Italy.

Esmond is the only fictional character in Alex’s novel – all other events and characters are historical, and Alex spent three years researching the novel – the first six months of which he thought he was spending working on a non-fiction book. Whilst stressing that each book tells you how to write that book and not the one before, he said that in his own practice he had held off writing as long as possible – immersing him first in the historical resources in order to write with the requisite amount of information and immersion in the period to give him the authority to create the world of the novel. However, when it came to writing, and most particularly editing, he advised an ability to be able to abandon fascinating research if needs be – very strictly making sure that the novel’s focus was on its story and central character – cutting vast amounts of historical detail in order to have the story tell itself most effectively. In terms of the in-depth pragmatics of writing, he advised that every scene have 2-3 things absolutely right in it rather than trying to offer a panorama – keeping the focus of storytelling, but retaining the authority of research.

Why the shift from a historical account to a historical fiction? Partly for this focus – Esmund, the vehicle of the imagination in this story, allowed an outsider perspective that perhaps chimed with the author’s, being a young British man observing and coming to terms with fascist Florence in a way that, of all the characters, is closest to the work of research that had to go in to the writing of the novel. As importantly, if not more so, is Alex’s belief that the novel provides a more effective way of getting into the minds of others than any purely factual account can possibly allow – and that it is this imaginative empathy which allows for a closer readerly experience of history. Alex had wanted to write about the effect of the fascist regime on Florence, the city of the Renaissance – and the novel is imbued with a particularly visual sense of place, but it is through the Esmund that the reader is allowed access into this world.

Kat Peddie

Peter Hughes

The first poetry of this year’s series came from Peter Hughes. Peter is already well connected with the poetry scene at the University of Kent – his pamphlet Radioactive Relicts: Petrarch Sonnets, 117 – 136 recently came out with Litmus publishing, co-run by our very own Dorothy Lehane, and other Petrarch sonnets have appeared in ZONE, co-edited by me and Eleanor Perry. In his other guise, as small press publisher, Peter has published Ben Hickman’s recent pamphlet Later Britain, and Michael Grant and Ian Brinton’s translations of Yves Bonnefoy with Oystercatcher Press, Winner of the Michael Marks Publishers’ Award for outstanding UK publisher of poetry in pamphlet form. Oystercatcher pamphlets are consistently lovely publications from leading poets, and, Peter also being an excellent artist, they are often beautifully produced with Peter’s artwork – some of which we saw during the event.

Peter’s latest long project has been translating all of Petrarch’s sonnets – which will be produced as Quite Frankly:  After Petrarch’s Sonnets by Reality Street in 2015 (http://www.realitystreet.co.uk), but Peter also read from his translations of Calvacanti, his Behoven (Oystercatcher Press, 2011) and The Sardine Tree (Oystercatcher), a life of Miro, and The Pistol Tree Poems (Shearsman, http://www.shearsman.com) – a collaboration with Simon Marsh in which each sent each other poems that decreased by a line each round – so that the collection ends with two one-liners. Peter’s poetry manages to at once be a very serious engagement with another artist – be it Miro, Petrarch, or Marsh and an original work that wears its learning lightly, even joyfully, something that makes the pleasure of his texts both immediate and lasting. Take this Petrarch sonnet from ZONE 2:

6 / 143

Per mezz’ i boschi inospiti e selvaggi

Thirty Seconds to Mars on the 13th

& the great Neil Young on the 25th

who help me sing along to memories

of other gigs we missed along the way

history seethes with dates & locations

in which she had nothing to do with me

such as now when my only defences

are built on the grammars of displacement

unplaced love spreads out through the surroundings

gilding the repossessed houses & shops

startling the small dogs pissing up bus-stops

making commercial music sound profound

energising all the little bushes

& helping me to grit my teeth like this

This engages with Petrarch, though Petrarch is, as Peter said a ‘springboard’ rather than a text to be faithfully translated, and that springboard allows both for complex relation and meditation on the concerns of the original text, a playfulness, and an immediacy of reference and vocabulary. And there are few poets who can marry the humorous with the profoundly moving as well as Peter can.

That most of Peter’s projects are based in engagement with other artists allowed for a very interesting discussion of how to go about creating the conditions for writing, and how to go about putting together a procedure or project that will result in a sequence, rather than an individual poem. Collaboration, creative translation, and various forms of limit were posited as points from which Peter’s own poetry had sprung – Behoven, for example, being a series of poems created from texts that Peter wrote in the spaces of time of the movements of Beethoven sonatas – thus they are both responses to the music and pieces produced under constraint. The constraint needn’t always be there in the finished piece – Behoven is edited, but its initial existence can set both the terms of engagement of a whole series of poems and provide a spur to writing that can often be hard to find – something worth bearing in min both for those who find it difficult to get started, and those MA students taking Poetry 2 next term – which focuses on ideas of sequence and/or long poems.

Peter also read with the poet Anthony Mellors the next night at Free Range – a weekly music and/or poetry event produced in collaboration with ZONE poetry that runs every Thursday from 8. Visit www.freerange.co for further details.

Kat Peddie

David Flusfeder launches new novel at Kent

Kicking off the 2014-15 Creative Writing Reading series was our very own David Flusfeder, launching his latest novel John the Pupil (4th Estate), a fictional account of a real-life medieval quest – the journey of Roger Bacon’s pupil, John, to deliver a copy of his master’s Opus Majus to the Pope in Rome. Roger Bacon, a thirteenth century English philosopher and Franciscan friar – circumvented the Franciscan rule banning the publication of text by friars by having Pope Clement IV personally order him to write to him concerning the place of philosophy within theology – thus John’s journey to Rome. The Opus Majus – famous for proposing the concept of the leap year – although it was 300 years before it was finally accepted and the Julian calendar of 365 and a quarter days replaced by the Gregorian calendar – is a work that argues for the application of Aristotelian philosophy and scientific discovery and method to theology.

But John the Pupil is not about Bacon, or the Opus Majus, so much as about John – a bit-player unfilled by historical account – and the extraordinary journey he undertakes to deliver this important work from Oxford to Rome. The novel purports to be a found document, containing fragments of John’s chronicle of his journey, translated, and arranged in an order which is plausibly, but not certainly, that of its supposed chronology of writing.

David read from sections of the novel, and spoke illuminatingly about how the writing of the book related to concerns about how to write historical fiction. Addressing issues of fictionalization and the creation of historical verisimilitude, David stressed that the novel was an attempt to challenge the oft-found fiction in historical fiction – that its characters, from whatever historical period they inhabit, are essentially ‘like us’, characters easily identifiable with how a twenty-first-century western subject understands subjectivity: a universal human, albeit one encountering different historical contexts, events and living conditions. This concern with characterization – how to present the mind of a thirteenth century monk whose primary teachings on how to encounter the world were not only formed from religious texts, but religious texts fundamentally different from those we now know – was one that permeated every aspect of style and vocabulary in the novel. David talked about how he had to expunge the rhythms and vocabulary of the King James Bible, for so many centuries the definitive version of the bible, and a work that fundamentally altered our relation to our religion, in order to present a monk raised on the Latin Vulgate. Every word in the novel has roots in the thirteenth century or is a translated Latin word – rendering certain vocabularies, and thus ways of understanding experience, inaccessible within the book, as they would have been for John.

Introducing the interroflus – an interest in presenting a mind through its available, and, to us, strange, vocabulary allows one certain imaginative freedom, and this comes in the novel in the form of a new punctuation mark – a question mark with a comma, rather than full stop underneath. This allows you to ask questions that are imbedded in a larger sentence, an innovation that could have saved me hours worth of editing if I’d known about it earlier.

Despite the dissimilarity of the medieval mind, David urged students to come into as close a contact with their materials and the experiences of their writing as possible: in his case this involved a recreation of the journey he has John take – walking from England to Rome. Whilst being an obviously different journey in many ways from the one he has John make over 700 years earlier, this helped him both understand the physical journey and landscapes and cultures encountered. It was also, in some ways, an extension of the very idea of pilgrimage (which is the venture that John’s companions, for much of the book, mistakenly believe themselves to be on) – as David’s recreation of his own characters fictional journey maps on to pilgrimage’s basis in its preoccupation of its recreation of another journey – Christ’s final journey.

The session ended with a rallying call: not to be suspicious of the pleasure, and excitement, of writing – the novel having come out of a sentence David discovered in his research on explosives for an abandoned seventh novel – and to trust those instincts that tell you when a book is going to be a pleasure, or not, to write. Sound, as well as heartening, advice.

Kat Peddie

Summer Reading Series: Sam Jordison & Stefan Tobler

It’s the end. Cases are packed. Summer jobs replace exams and deadlines. Offices are emptying; library books are back on the shelves. Is anyone still out there? And are you doing any writing?

If so, Sam Jordison and Stefan Tobler may want to know about it. They are on the hunt for literary talent and when they find it, they shout about it. Against the odds, the finance and the logistics they have compelling success stories to tell. They may look and sound gentle enough, but Jordison and Tobler are dynamos of the indie publishing world and an increasing threat to the bosses of big book publishing.

Amy Sackville; Sam Jordison; Stefan Tobler

Jordison set up Galley Beggar Press in 2011 with Eloise Millar and their bookseller chum Henry Layte. It began when Layte was approached in his Norwich bookshop by an author unable to place his manuscript, a curious bit of ‘autobifantasy’ about the writer’s great-uncle Robert Graves. Layte read it and passed it to Jordison and Millar, who felt it had to be seen. Unwilling to leave the author at the mercy of vanity publishers, Jordison and co set up a press and printed a thousand copies of the book. The White Goddess: an Encounter by Simon Gough received rave reviews. ‘Thankfully’ says Jordison ‘we sold all the copies, so we didn’t go bankrupt.’

Since the first of those thousand copies hit the shelves, Galley Beggar Press has thrived, building a steady reputation as a publisher of solid literary fiction with surprising sales potential. When they launched Eimear McBride’s Baileys Prize-winning first novel ‘A Girl Is A Half Formed Thing’ last year, they knew it was good, but Jordison hadn’t foreseen the level of success it would bring. ‘Having a big prize winner on the list has been a huge boost.’ If you look for a copy of the novel on the GBP website, the gratifying words ‘sold out’ appear – but they certainly don’t apply to the publishers themselves, who are holding firm to their indie mantra of being ‘an old fashioned publisher for the 21^st century’.

It’s a similar story for & Other Stories, the press set up by Stefan Tobler in 2010. Tobler was a freelance translator with a passion for Brazilian poetry. Frustrated by the decisions of big publishers who, for commercial reasons, failed to invest in writers deserving of an audience, Tobler set up his own company to do just that. & Other Stories publishes quality fiction and poetry written in and translated into English. Starting small with seed funding from the Arts Council, Tobler looked to the 18^th century business model to run his press. ‘We run by subscription’ Tobler explains. By using crowd funding, the emphasis is not on pleasing a board of directors but on bringing books to an appreciative audience. Pay an annual subscription fee – ‘the cost of a magazine’ – and you can receive up to six books a year through the post, and know you are helping keep the publishers and their principles afloat. More on this, and on the ethics of the press, which is run as a not-for-private-profit company, can be found on the & Other Stories website.

Tobler’s dream of bringing a new readership to existing writers has extended into publishing debut novels. Like Galley Beggar Press with McBride, & Other Stories hit gold with the publication of Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home, shortlisted for the Booker in 2012. Titles from indie presses are filling up the literary shortlists. While the big publishers remain risk averse, smaller houses have the time to invest in new or overlooked authors. ‘We are small and agile as an indie press’ says Jordison. ‘We are not tied to some person that has the chequebook. We are the chequebook!’ Tobler agrees, although he admits the chequebook is still pretty small. What about the lure of money for writers who are getting some interest? ‘Big publishers can take up authors once they are established’ says Tobler. ‘We’ve both lost authors that way.‘ It’s a sorry tale of riches over loyalty, but both publishers shrug it off – they have earned their stripes this way. And there are plenty of reasons why a writer should go indie regardless of the money. Both Jordison and Tobler love books as objects and believe in the aesthetic of the book. They use the same printers – ‘people with pride in what they do’ – to ensure consistent quality. They invest in their authors, promote them, support them with readings and appearances and get their books reviewed and onto prize lists. Alongside the traditional values of book publishing, they embrace the possibilities of technology too. Galley Beggar Press promote the short story as a monthly ebook sent to subscribers, a piece of hand-selling that, as Jordison points out, is only ‘possible through contemporary technology’. For Tobler, Twitter is a useful tool for creating a buzz about a book. ‘A large part of the publicity for literary books is through word of mouth, not on the sides of buses. Social media is great for this.’

If you are looking to get signed up by either press, you could be in luck. Both Galley Beggar Press and & Other Stories operate an open submission policy. You don’t need representation by a literary agent to be considered: there are no gatekeepers in the indie world. All Tobler asks is that you buy one of & Other Stories’ books – a policy that Jordison vows to take on. After all, ‘if you aren’t interested enough to buy one’ says Tobler, ‘why would you want to be published by us?’

Given the evidence, why would you want to be published by anyone else?

Galley Beggar Press is based in Norwich where the founders have their roots. Find them at www.galleybeggar.co.uk . & Other Stories straddles continents, if in an unassuming eco way. Visit www.andotherstories.org to find out how. Both presses and Tobler and Jordison are active tweeters, so do look them up.

That’s it for the term and the academic year. Thanks to our postgrad readers from the last in the Reading Series: Matthew West, Beau Jackson, Michael Milton and Jacob Peatey. Thanks for being at events, for listening, writing and reading.

Campus may be quietening down, but the summer will be full. There will be festivals. There will be nervous interviews. There will be grand graduation ceremonies in Canterbury Cathedral. And maybe there will be some Kent CW leavers in literary shortlists before the next year is out.

Have a great summer.

Sonia

Summer Reading Series: David Miller

The decorous beige face of Keynes SCR is wearing a slightly twisted complexion. Design work on the walls, heads in glass cases, ceramic shopping bags. Flags of oversized print hanging above the audience. A man in an apron flaunting kitchen utensils over the speaker’s right shoulder. Postcards of grimacing Elizabethan clowns dishing out steaming bedpans.

The backdrop of the Fine Arts degree show may have heightened the irreverence, but David Miller doesn’t need much encouragement. Here was plain-speaking from the first moment. Miller interrupted his host (and client) David Flusfeder to rephrase his opening remarks: ‘I’m editing already’. After the postgrad readers – Katie Szyszko’s memories of wheat barns and family tragedy, Alex Carey’s pacifists at an air show, Melissa Hicks’ sentient mirror and Charlotte Geater’s dawn gin & tonic – Miller deflected the attention back to the audience. If we had questions, we were to interject, not wait politely for the end and forget what we wanted to say. ‘I’m not here to do a miserable parody of a Samuel Beckett monologue.’

agent & client: David Miller, David Flusfeder and some familiar CW faces

David Miller has been an agent for half of his life. He schooled in Canterbury, studied theology at university and ‘hadn’t a clue’ what to do next. Then he was tipped off ‘by the woman who was the object of my desires’ about an agent who represented ‘everyone I had ever told her to read’. The agent needed an assistant. Miller sent in his CV, and after three months of silence he phoned to ask if there was a still a post. There wasn’t, but he got an interview anyway, and started soon after as a receptionist at the agency where he still works, Rogers, Coleridge & White. ‘I was a smug twenty-three year old. I didn’t know anything, but I stuck around and now represent the authors I’m proud to have on my client list.’ It’s a list which includes Kent tutors Flusfeder, Scarlett Thomas and Abdulrazak Gurnah. So how do aspiring writers get on it, and what would someone like Miller do for them anyway?

Miller described the literary agent as ‘the ghost in the machine’, a shadowy role that encompasses counselling, representation, being a middle man, handling money, nursing bruises, industrial espionage, match-making and ‘acting as a Jiminy Cricket’. By way of explanation, Miller read an extract from the work of one client, Keith Ridgway, featuring a down-at-heel writer lunching with his exuberant agent. The writer, while determined to retain his integrity, is penniless, recently dumped and really just wants to get drunk. The agent, whose significant pauses are intended to suggest import but actually signify confusion, bemoans those publishers who only pay for inconsequential trash, and suggests that the writer gets a job to keep him afloat. Could he teach Creative Writing, perhaps? The writer is horrified. The agent smoothes him down.

Miller batted away applause for his reading. ‘Save it for Keith. Buy his book!’ When asked if this story was typical of the agent-writer relationship, Miller claimed that his relationships with authors are ‘singular’, atypical, and that the whole business is ‘disgustingly promiscuous’. Does every writer need an agent? ‘I have never said that a writer has to have an agent. So why do they?’ Miller puts it down to the amount of legal bureaucracy thrown at them by publishers. ‘A writer wants to go off and write. Some might want to run their own business, in which case they don’t need me to do it for them.’ An agent’s job, Miller said, is to ensure that a writer reaches ‘the audience they deserve’, but he baulks at the sense of entitlement that some writers convey. His own experience as a novelist made him realise that ‘a lot of people whine’, something he has no time for. ‘When I took on the writer Magnus Mills, he drove a bus. He’s written nine books and he still drives a bus. He doesn’t feel entitled.’ By staying in the world of work, Mills is also well placed to gather inspiration for his writing. Miller admires those writers who have ‘lived a bit first’ and started their careers later in life, such as Penelope Lively and Anita Brookner: writers who embrace the ‘slow build’ of a reputation, rather than chasing the money and ‘going for advances’.

Miller conceded that publishers take fewer risks these days. ‘There was more originality and risk-taking twenty years ago’, when publishers were willing to create a readership for new authors. ‘It’s no surprise that people who have won prizes lately have been with smaller publishers, where there’s more ‘room’ for them.’ But publishers have to make their money too. ‘A publisher isn’t a charity.’ As far as Miller is concerned, part of the problem is that books are just too cheap. We’ve lost respect for them. ‘You don’t think twice about spending £10 on a Pizza Express pizza, where the ingredients probably cost 60p. But you if you go into a bookshop and what you want isn’t in the Buy One Get One Free you think you’ve been diddled. Why do we think the price isn’t worth the value?’ While Miller feels that some of the blame for this rests with the publishers and their price wars, and the stranglehold of a few retailers, it is also our fault for ‘not valuing our literary culture’.

Much of what Miller had to say about selecting writers chimed with Lee Brackstone’s talk the week before. ‘Write a good book. Be careful about it, think about it and mean it.’ Miller won’t accept a partial manuscript, although other agents may. He doesn’t need any more clients, so if he takes one on, he knows it’s because he really wants them. Don’t send him your manuscript just because he has published something similar before (‘why would I want it if I’ve already got one?’). He promotes what interests him, which is why his list is ‘all over the place’.

If your idea of an agent combines the starchy non-nonsense comforts of a house matron with the irreverence and comic timing of that Elizabethan clown, David Miller could be the man for you. Find out more about him at http://www.rcwlitagency.com.

Last of the season: Ink, Sweat & Tears and Sabotage Reviews, 11^th June; Gallery Beggar Press and & Other Stories, 18^th June. Keynes SCR as usual, £2, 6pm start.

Keep writing.

Sonia

Summer Reading Series: Lee Brackstone

It’s ten to six. In a few minutes you’ll be reading your work in public. Maybe it’s the first time you’ve done this. Breathe. Drink some wine (enough for the nerves, not too much for the tongue). The room is filling up. You know some of the faces, but there is one you daren’t look at. Now the hush, the introductions. The paper in your hand wrinkles. That was your name. Was that your name? Stand up, walk to the front of the room. Everyone is looking at you, and one of them, that one, with his hand on his chin, reading your words as you stumble over them, is a man who has been in the industry for two decades, made literary stars out of unknown scribblers – people like you, people like you want to be – and he has rubbed shoulders with the writers whose work you have spent the last five years of your life studying, distant legends of poetry and prose.

Thankfully, Lee Brackstone knows how you feel. Before launching into stories of his publishing career, his own mistakes and successes, he praised the bravery of those CW Reading series postgrads – Hristina Hristova, Inge Watson, Matthew Gregory and Wendy Edwards – who had graced the stage before him. ‘Reading in public doesn’t get any easier’ he said, ‘but publishers function better on two glasses of red wine after six o’clock.’

Amy Sackville, Lee Brackstone

Of few words before the event, Brackstone had plenty to say when given his ground. He has seen vast changes in the publishing landscape since he cut his teeth in the offices of Faber and Faber in 1996. Having fallen in love with the ‘handsome black livery’ of Faber’s literary list of the ’80s and ’90s – ‘those incredible authors like Milan Kundera’ – he found his first secretarial job there, reading the slush pile, aged 21. Stepping into this circle of privilege – he studied in Manchester, ‘not Manchester, Cambridge’ – Brackstone was one of few ‘outsiders’, signifying a seachange due since TS Eliot’s editorship. He is now an institution himself: or, as he put it, institutionalised. He worked alongside Ted Hughes on The Birthday Letters. He spotted the genius of Jeet Thayil’s stunning debut novel Narcopolis. He now is Editor of Faber and Faber’s Fiction and Music lists.

So what advice did he have for the writers in the room? He admitted that ‘publishing is intimidating’ and can seem ‘like a guarded fortress’. Although there are no secrets to unlocking that tower, some ways are better than others. Firstly, Brackstone’s list is pretty full these days, and the chances of being acquired on his fiction list are slight. He may publish only one new author a year, and he never touches ‘commercial’ fiction. Most books he takes on come through agents; there is no slush pile any more, although exceptions do occur. He looks for ‘that spark’ in a manuscript that sets it apart, and responds ‘at the level of the sentence’. Working on sentence-level writing is key: a writer, he said, should be ‘like a carpenter, learning to plane a table’. Brackstone expects ‘technical virtuosity’, and writing by authors ‘that take risks but are in control’. He likes to know ‘from the first sentence’ what the moral compass of a book will be. The title, first sentence and opening paragraph are, for Brackstone, ‘the blueprint of a novel’. Authenticity is essential: he can see through those who write to pay the mortgage, rather than those who simply ‘have to’ write. ‘I read for style; it’s the style that excites me.’

Balancing his high expectations of literary fiction with the demands of the Sales Director and financial targets is a major part of Brackstone’s job. Many of his acquisitions go on to be prize winning successes, so he is known to have a good scent for talent. Despite this, he has his ‘war stories’, those missed opportunities that he never got to sign. His first acquisition for fiction didn’t get the go-ahead, so someone else signed up Dave Eggers’ AHWOSG. He hounded colleagues with a 600 page masterpiece by ‘a dead Chilean writer that nobody else believed in’, and watched as another house enjoyed the acclaim of publishing Roberto Bolano in translation. There are other times when he has failed to spot things himself. ‘Sometimes the reading doesn’t go right.’ And there is always the matter of taste, which is why Brackstone has fellow fiction editors to pass books to that have potential but just don’t appeal.

So, supposing a writer has fulfilled these criteria, what route does he recommend for publication? Firstly, finding an agent: the right one. ‘Find out which agent represents the kind of writing you like. Publishing works on every level on the basis of sycophancy and flattery.’ An element of showboating is essential, while maintaining that vital authenticity. ‘You need to get their attention. It’s all about showing you are smart enough and you care, and that what you do is true.’

So you’ve read your work and survived. You’ve got a script. You’ve read Lee Brackstone’s recommended fiction highlights (The Sun Also Rises; Tender is the Night; Something Happened; White Noise). What next?

Bring your notebook along to Keynes SCR on Wednesday 4^th June, 6pm, and find out What Agents Really Want. David Miller of RCW Literary Agency will be ready to answer your questions.

See you there.

Sonia

P.S. Don’t forget there is more still to come of the Full English Festival, including a programme of high profile speakers throughout the week – facebook.com/fullenglishfestival