Tag Archives: Summer term

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

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 21st 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 18th 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

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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

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, 11th June; Gallery Beggar Press and & Other Stories, 18th June. Keynes SCR as usual, £2, 6pm start.

Keep writing.

Sonia

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Summer Reading Series: Tony Frazer

Debney & Frazer

Patricia Debney; Tony Frazer

Back to Keynes SCR for two events last week, and a familiar face on both evenings. On Tuesday, Nancy Gaffield launched her stunning new collection of poetry Continental Drift, published by Shearsman Books and sold, hot from the press, by the publisher. On Wednesday, the man who is Shearsman was in the chair himself, the first of the Summer Reading Series industry professionals.

Tony Frazer has spent 30 years in the poetry publishing business, and runs one of the UK’s longest surviving small poetry presses. After an initial foray into magazine publishing, and the inevitable folding of that early venture, Frazer found that the submissions still kept coming. ‘It seemed wrong to send these things back’, so while the steam was up he created a modest publication, printing ‘some 100 copies’ which were ‘passed from hand to hand’. A cult following of sorts was established – ‘a virtuous circle of readers’ – and Frazer sensed there was a market. Publishing poetry was never going to make money, of course (‘I had a job for that’), but it was a hobby that took on increasing significance, and eventually began to pay for itself.

Working abroad seemed to help. ‘I was based in Hong Kong,’ Frazer said, ‘and people would get requests from me and think – who is this guy over there? – and then they would send me poems.’ Rather than being away from the centre of literary activity, Frazer was documenting it, creating it. ‘I asked people for poems and I got them: Roy Fisher, Robert Bly – even Doris Lessing sent me something.’

Publications came and went. Frazer collaborated with friends for a while, but discovered that co-editing wasn’t for him. Rather than producing a magazine that published ’everybody’s second choice’, Frazer decided to go alone, setting up Shearsman in the early 90s, where he could publish what he wanted and practice his preferred ‘benign despotism’. Like most small press offerings of the time, Shearsman Magazine ran as a quarterly pamphlet for several years before the hike in postage costs caused Frazer to rethink. ‘So many presses gave up’, but doing the sums, Frazer realised that Shearsman could continue to produce a biannual book at a lower cost. Chapbooks and occasional collections followed, ‘because people kept sending in good manuscripts’, but Frazer was beginning to run out of money. Then digital publishing changed the face of small publishing. ‘Suddenly there was no need to produce copies which were destined to remain in boxes in the garage.’ No master copy, no typesetting, no minimum print run – print on demand was a financial salvation. ‘Finally Shearsman started making money. It had never happened before!’

Patricia Debney, interviewing Frazer, asked why he kept going. ‘It’s difficult to get off the carousel once you are on it’, he said. ‘I’ll keep going for another eight years or so.’ And then? ‘A long established press is interested in ‘buying’ Shearsman.’

For now, would-be contributors to the Shearsman stable have only one person to please. So what does Frazer look for? ‘It’s hard to say’, he claimed – although it is clear that anyone submitting work should study the guidelines on his website, and stick to the two annual ‘reading windows’ when sending in writing. What about personal taste? Shearsman is known to have experimental leanings, but Frazer considers it ‘a broad church’. It’s about the eye, and the ear. ‘Some stuff comes in that defies all strictures and if it still works, it’s in.’

If those readers brave enough to start the evening were listening, publication surely beckons. Moyra Tourlamain is already set to publish her collection The Book of Hours of Kitty Power with Verisimilitude later this summer (see Kent Review and previous blog for a sneak preview), and she enjoyed a stint of recognition as the Canterbury Poet of the Year in 2010. Less familiar with the travails of public reading, Jan Mowbray delivered a confident rendition from her series of poems produced this year, including some metronomic lines with ticking syllables ‘like a skein of birds’ (and not a single nervous quiver). Ben Porter read from his series ‘Greyhound Gallop’: pacy, racing lines that landed with the quick grace of forepaws on dirt track. Perhaps bravest of all was Claudia Orduz-Landinez, who had read her poems in Spanish before, but never in English. After embracing the teaching of Simon Smith and the realisation that ‘all writing is nonsense’, putting two languages together posed no problem. The resulting poems not only straddled cultures but seemed to envelope them in each other, a double helix of meanings that made absolute sense, and yet none at all.

A high bar has been set for the term.

More words from the wise over the next few weeks: literary agents, publishers and dauntless postgrad readers every Wednesday at 6pm in Keynes SCR. Keep on coming.

Sonia

 

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Students in print

The new term is swiftly upon us, a summer that will see many Kent Creative Writing projects come to fruition.

The Reading Series will welcome professionals from the publishing industry over the coming weeks. Students will be able to share their work, receive advice and get questions answered. And many of them will already have something in print to share and celebrate.

 

The Book Project is a hugely popular module with Creative Writing undergraduates at Kent. An intensive course run by Simon Smith, it gets students writing new work with ambitious scope, building up a body of pieces or a novel that acts not only as a portfolio but a finished, saleable product. Students visit the Poetry Library in London and look at artists’ books in the Templeman. After a period of writing, planning and workshops, each student produces a finished book that is printed, glossily bound and ready for sale. A reading and launch is held. Participants get a true taste of the gigging writer’s life: deadlines, jacket designs, nerves, a live audience, applause. Selling and signing books. Exhaustion and elation.

What do they make of the process? I asked Joe Hill, whose experience with publishing his first poetry collection through the project may have given him the live reading bug. He found the module useful and informative. ‘While it’s been great on the creative writing side, it’s been equally useful to know about self-publication and the like.’ There’s a distinct camaraderie to the Book Project too – the students are in this together, facing similar challenges rather than bowing their heads over solitary desks or fire-fighting those editorial deadlines alone. ‘Like so many of the creative writing modules, you really get to know your fellow students well on a personal level.’ And what about the launch itself? ‘The reading was nerve-racking,’ Hill admits, ‘but really gratifying as a book-end (no pun intended) to the module.’

MA students have been getting their teeth into the magazine industry with a module run by Dragan Todorovich. Well versed in this medium, Todorovich has organised his team of students to work to professional industry standards. ‘I have organised the whole process to resemble editorial work in a proper magazine.’ There are five students in the group, each taking a clear role as well as forming the magazine’s editorial board. ‘This approach is working very well’ Todorovich says, with the team steering away from traditional forms of print-on-demand and opting for a magazine in a box.

Box[ed.] is in its final production stages now. As well as writing their own creative pieces during the term, the students have been active in advertising the magazine and seeking submissions, reviewing proposed pieces, working on design and production costs, building an online presence and keeping a journal of the whole experience. Editor-in-Chief, Jane Summerfield, has been keen to keep up the pace. Her task has included a firm grip on editorial meetings – ‘cutting down the chat’ – and reducing over 70 submissions to a final list for publication. The team has met regularly and reported back to Todorovich through weekly seminars, combining editorial with workshops of their own writing. ‘We informed our leader about our progress with the magazine and about the submissions we had,’ Summerfield states. After weeks of planning and work, the project started to come together and seem real. The boxes arrived, ready to be filled with the final selection of new writing. ‘It felt like a proud moment, as if we had all overcome another challenge with the project.’ Choosing the pieces wasn’t easy. ‘The process was heavy, and challenging people’s opinions was a tough action as Editor in Chief. Ultimately I made the call on pieces with a mixed reaction.’ But rejection from the magazine isn’t the end point. Summerfield has made a point of writing to all hopefuls, successful or otherwise, and asking them to keep in touch. The team is working on new projects and there will be further openings for student writers. ‘One of which is the new website, where we hope to have a writer’s spotlight and sub-sections of writing. An online presence is important.’

Find that presence at www.boxedmagazine.com and keep up to date with publication and launch news.

More student work can be found in the new anthology Kent Review. Volume 1 of this biennial series will be launched on May 14th. It’s a book of some 30 selections, showcasing pieces from current and recent Creative Writing postgrads. Amy Sackville, one of the book’s creators, is justly proud. ‘The book itself is looking beautiful, with an elegant, contemporary design befitting the brilliant work within.’ And the work itself? Expect short pieces and extracts from novels in progress on diverse topics, ‘bees, bikes, ghosts, happiness and jazz…short stories that will make you think and leave you moved, unsettled, and possibly disturbed; poetry full of flair and flex, pushing at the boundaries of what text can do, and exploring the spaces left behind and between words.’

Kent Review 1 will be distributed to publishers, agents and the media, highlighting the writers and their potential. Celebrate the launch with staff and students at Waterstones, Rose Lane, Canterbury on 14th May, 6.30pm. The book will be available to buy at £7.99 at the event, from the Centre for Creative Writing and from Blackwell’s bookshop on campus.

See you at a reading soon.

Sonia

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Spring Reading Series: Open Mic

A change to the line-up of the last Spring Reading Series from a poetry double-bill to – well, a slightly different poetry double-bill, with side dishes. As Jane Monson was unable to join us, Patricia Debney joined forces with fellow Kent poet and tutor Nancy Gaffield, followed by an open mic featuring staff and students.

The premium spots of the evening gave us five minutes apiece of poised, polished poetry Patricia Debneyfrom experienced readers. Debney began, offering a change from her prose poetry (as seen in collections How to be a Dragonfly and, more recently, Littoral) with some works from her ‘newish collection’ Baby. Here were open planes of poems, free verse forms with the odd catch and hook of internal rhyme and assonance. Within each frame, microcosms of emotional relationships and the hovering presences of parental figures. ‘I can’t see your face’, we were warned, ‘it is some kind of horror space’. Seeing and not seeing: vastness and minutiae. The ‘I’ of the poems charted ‘water of biblical proportions’ and the rolling fog that ‘settles into valleys’, obscuring the view through a windscreen. Under the same scrutiny came a litany of material objects, ‘coral, gold pendants needing chains, kaftans’, the stuff of tasteful but empty riches that prove ‘hard to live with’. And as if a piece of trumpery can pass judgement on its wearer, the ‘single eye’ of a silver pearl ring ‘stares right at me…until it closes’.

Gaffield’s recent experiments have been with mathematical poems, employing geometry and the Golden Ratio. Working with the Fibonacci sequence has produced syllabic verse reflecting structure in sound as well as providing ‘attraction of form’ on the page.Nancy Gaffield Gaffield has been working on a sequence of these with fellow poet David Herd for performance at the forthcoming ‘Sounds New Poetry’ festival (see below), ‘but I’m saving these’… Instead we were given a poem inspired by Da Vicni’s Vitruvian Man, exploring the ‘harmony of symmetry’, while other pieces expressed and reflected upon sound and form. These were poems full of atmospheric landscapes, plays of light and natural forces. Wild weather and the wilful elements are not to be shifted with ‘soft syllables’ or ‘antiphonal phrases’. Even the laws of language and abstract mathematics are no match for a proper Kentish flood.

After our scheduled readers, MC Ben Hickman opened the floor to those brave / foolish enough to sign up on the door, whether they had planned to or not. The rules were clear – one poem or one page of prose. Offerings could be rough and raw works in progress or finely tuned and edited finished pieces.

There were plenty of takers.

First up was MA creative writing student Jane Summerfield, whose poem ‘Batteries Included’ – relating the exploits of a hormonal slumber party – has been created under the supervision of Gaffield.  Tutor & PhD poet Kat Peddie followed with a two-line poem in honour of the lost word ‘owhere’ (inspired by Gaffield’s recent pamphlet of the same name), committed to memory but jotted down ‘just in case’. Neelam Saredia, a final year CW undergrad, performed a memorised poem ‘Dress Sense’, a dress rehearsal of sorts for the Gulbenkian Poetry Slam (with prompt notes, ditto). In the only prose offering, I slipped in a page from my recently finished novel Eden (thanks for the cheers at this announcement). Tutor Juha Virtanen gave us another paperless piece, a word explosion extracted from a long sound poem, read from the screen of his phone. Geography and otherness peeped through the poems ‘My Friend from China’, read by Edward Greenward, and an extract from Sam O’Hana’s long poem, also written under Gaffield’s supervision. O’Hana was followed by three fellow final year CW undergrads: Tom Cox, who read his prose poem ‘Citizen’s Advice’, featuring cannibalistic chickens and chronic dissatisfaction; Joe Hill, whose joyfully silly and poignant ‘Much Against Everyone’s Advice’ chronicled a life of bad decisions and loss of body parts, and James Richardson, who gamely read a poem of muddy sinking and slippage, fresh from the clay of a recent seminar, which he titled on the spot ‘Already Stuck’.

after the open micAfter the readings and the consumption of all remaining wine, the talk and drinking moved downstairs to the Keynes bar, where the evening was balmy enough for us to sit outside and pretend it was already Summer Term.

This may mark the end of the Spring Reading series, but there is plenty more to come. Next term the Centre for Creative Writing will host a series of evenings with publishing professionals and readings from MA students. Many staff (as seen and heard above and elsewhere) will appear at the ‘Sounds New Poetry’ festival in May: for more details see the listings at http://soundsnew.org.uk/sounds-new-poetry . Some of Kent’s dedicated CW students, led by organiser Sam O’Hana (also see above), will be hosting the UK’s first Creative Writing Undergraduate Conference, ‘Vox’. The programme will run during the exciting ‘Full English’ literary festival taking place at Kent this June. Undergraduate creative writers from all universities are encouraged to submit proposals to ‘Vox’: the deadline for abstracts is 15th April 2014. For more details and the call for papers see http://voxconference2014.wordpress.com .

Look out for a last spring blog celebrating our students in print, a final flourish over the Easter vacation…

Sonia

 

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Tuesday Reading Series: Rogers, Coleridge and White/ Zone

Jennifer Hewson from RCW literary agency

Jennifer Hewson from RCW literary agency

Hi there, hope everyone’s been enjoying some time off after the exams or some time inside writing dissertations while everyone else gets to throw frisbees in the sun. But not to worry, for those who also think that frisbees are best left to domestic animals and people who wear visors, the summer is the time where most of the work gets done. And so this will be the belated post for the events on the last week of term, plus some recent news that have come to my attention (but not, as is mostly the case, to my understanding) from poetry-land.

On the last Tuesday reading series event we had Jennifer Hewson from the Rogers, Coleridge and White literary agency. She gave us some advice related to contacting agents and getting people interested in your writing. She underlined the importance of using your contacts, if you have any, to ensure manuscripts get read or at least seriously considered. Then we had some readers too.

Some people find it really hard to hear about this. I mean, most people I’ve met who want to have a career in writing tend to (ironically) consider writing as something other than a normal job. While different people might have varying modes of work, and it is, like any other art, very much down to talent and style and things that you can’t always teach, I actually like the way most of the talks we’ve had this year have de-idealised the whole process. They have repeatedly made us aware that basic things necessary in all jobs (i.e. networking, a good presentation letter, persistence, etc.) are also things you need to have. It dismantles the whole myth of the artiste, the hedonist and bohemian pseudo-intellectuals who never work for anything else other than themselves, or who hold the dismissive belief that what they do is somehow morally superior to other occupations. In this sense, Sherman Alexie was right to call writing ‘manual labour’. Leave that other fancy stuff to Lady Gaga and the Mumford people and their little guitars, all of them devoid of empathy.

Lastly, I have some news on the new Zone magazine. This is a poetry and criticism magazine started in Kent by staff and postgrads and its first issue comes out early September. It will feature poetry by Denise Riley, Simon Smith, David Herd and Natalie Bradbeer to name a few. I will be reminding people of any events linked to the launch for you in here, so you keep visiting in the months to come.

There are people throwing a frisbee outside and they look so happy. There’s no one else in the third-floor quiet study area where I’m at right now. I want to ask them to come and throw it inside the library. I want to participate. Enjoy the summer.

g

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