carelessly turns up the volume dial in her drifting ’94 Aerostar to muffle the summer tantrums howling from the backseat.

Even with the windows down, the restless Hudson dog days cling to her like a hot skin, and she floors the van down Avenue C. wildly

singing along to Frampton Comes Alive! over wind-butchered wails. She knows you can’t find much cold or free inside Bayonne’s July—

instead, she savors the taste of a fast ride. Her confused four-year-old cries: Mommy, where are we going? and Small Angry Mama hisses back: Crazy!

as she speeds into the Quik-Chek parking lot to buy a Coke slushie and finally light up. But, by the filter hit, it is almost shift time at the Big Apple; she leaves for home.

She drives, hanging high over the port city like the Bay’s nightfall smog, fluttering in thick waves of afterglow until the sunshine runs dry.

Maeve Holler is from Shelton, Connecticut. She is an MFA student at the University of Miami and a Poetry Editor of Sinking City. She recently received her BA in English and Gender & Sexuality Studies from Tulane University in New Orleans. Maeve's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Cardiff Review, WILDNESS, Mantra Review, T.NY's The EEEL, Broad! Magazine, Lotus-Eater Magazine, and Tulane Review.

Gerald Murnane

And Other Stories, £10

GERALD MURNANE SLEEPS in a single room filled with what he calls "archives". These include hundreds if not thousands of sheets of writing—diaries, drafts, notes. One of them contains meticulous descriptions of horses, horses which occupy the imaginary countries of New Arcady and New Eden. Last year, an academic conference about his work was held at his local golf club in Goroke, a tiny village of barely more than six hundred people. He tended bar during the lunch break.

Murnane is, for want of a better word, eccentric, even in the unconventional world of scribblers and hacks. Perhaps

Tamarisk Row is a highly idiosyncratic book. Written in the third person and present tense, it relates the childhood experiences of Clement Killeaton in the Australian town of Bassett. It is made up of short episodes, each of which carries a bland title such as "Bassett hears music from America", "Augustine becomes a husband and father" or—even more cursory—"Clement Killeaton looks at a calendar". Superficially these vignettes are unremarkable. But Murnane, writing in lyrical, even ethereal prose, conveys their significance and indelibility to the characters involved, and Clement in particular.

Nine-year-old Clement is a lonely child. He has scrapes with local boys, tries to understand sex, and questions the mysteries of the Catholic Church. The dusty backyard in which he spends most of his time is a vast world of his own imagining, and there he plays with marbles and dreams about horse races. His father, Augustine, has a weakness for the real thing, and spends his weekends at racecourses in Melbourne, taking tips from local punters and, most of the time, losing money. Clement’s exasperated mother, meanwhile, turns to her faith for solace.

There is no real plot that follows; only a series of isolated episodes offering a highly original perspective of boyhood in mid-twentieth-century Australia. As the book goes on, these scenes become increasingly obscure. Many are pregnant with ambiguity. It is not always made clear what is taking place and what Clement merely believes is taking place. He lives, for instance, in a town in northern Victoria, but it is described, in a gross overstatement, as "the largest city for a hundred miles in any direction". For Murnane, this half-real and half-imagined world is the perspective of a "considered" narrator, or "Implied Author", as he puts it in the foreword. "I would hope that the text of Tamarisk Row could be said to have brought to life the fictional personage responsible for it: the narrator through whose mind the text is reflected."

Accordingly there’s a distinctly modernist flavour to Tamarisk Row in its form as well as its style. The living, feeling mind of Murnane’s "Implied Author" certainly evokes Woolf and Joyce, though the most fitting comparison may well be with Proust, whom Murnane reveres, and with whom Murnane shares an interest in memory and a fondness for the long sentence. Writing in Meanjin Quarterly, Murnane called the passage in Remembrance of Things Past in which the narrator stumbles against a paving stone and is overwhelmed by a feeling of rapture as "one of the grandest passages in the most memorable book I have read". Like Proust, Murnane is interested in the significance of the inner world. He seems to insist on an external world that is highly subjective, an external world seen and understood through the prism of an individual.

Murnane’s writing is at once strangely hypnotic, exacting, and compelling. Simple accounts sometimes give way to vivid and striking descriptions: "Big slow plains are creeping sadly away from the house. A haze of dust from the north makes a sign in the sky and tries to reach Bassett, but the blinds are pulled down all over the city and no one sees the silent empty places where they may all be going." Part-way through the book, the sentences overflow into lengthy, arresting passages, most memorably in the episode titled "Clement sees wonderful things in marbles":

Often at night he thinks of the soft dust gradually sifting down onto his purplish lakes, whose depths no light now enters, and the white arcs of his shores that perhaps no one will ever hold up to his eyes and dream of crossing and of all the years when the house still rests solidly on its foundations and he, Clement, grows up and goes away and the new family living there never suspects that Tupper Winterset is somewhere beneath them …

The American writer Teju Cole called Murnane a "worthy heir to Beckett". The New York Times, in a 2018 profile, called him the "greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of." Since his revival, it seems praise of Murnane’s work has been as free-flowing as his prose. Even judging only by Tamarisk Row, you certainly find yourself agreeing that there’s something extraordinary about Murnane’s fiction. And given the author’s affection for memory, it’s fitting that, though at times abstruse, even inscrutable, Tamarisk Row is unforgettable.

Harry Readhead is a writer, editor and critic based in London. His work has been published in The Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post

Cath Barton

New Welsh Writers is an interview series in which we speak to new voices in Welsh literature, delving into how they got their start and what advice they might have for other emerging writers.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

When did you start writing?

CATH BARTON

When I was a student at Keele University, many years ago, English was one of my subsidiary subjects. My tutor, a charismatic Irishman called Francis Doherty, generously encouraged his students to write creatively in lieu of essays. I wrote two embarrassingly bad short stories; he did not deride them as some might have done, but told me in the kindest of ways that I needed to, as it were, distance myself from my own experiences when writing about them. I wish I could thank him now that I’ve got a book published, but when I looked him up I found that, sadly, he’d died some years ago, too early.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What do you find are the most enjoyable and most challenging aspects of writing/being a writer?

CATH BARTON

Most enjoyable: Being able to explore beyond what we call the "real’"world. This is not about escapism, as it might sound, though it is about a form of travel—in my mind, I suppose. And what is really wonderful is finding that I can communicate something that matters to me, to other people. I’ve been touched that so many different people have told me that my novella The Plankton Collector has resonated with them.

Most challenging: Dealing with rejection when I submit work to competitions, journals, publishers. But it’s always going to happen and if you believe in your writing you have to rise above it and carry on. Persistence does pay off, as we know from all the stories of now-famous authors who were rejected so many times.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

When and where do you write?

CATH BARTON

I mostly write at home, either in my office in the house or in a garden room, where I have a laptop with (deliberately!) no internet access.

I don’t write every day, or at a set time. The pressure of the deadline seems to work for me, whether the deadline is external or self-imposed. Last November I took part in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) for the first time, and met the challenge of writing 50,000 words in a month. That kind of time challenge is good for a first draft, but of course the hard graft of editing takes the time it takes.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What starts a new piece of writing for you?

CATH BARTON

I love visual prompts. I use the monthly prompts in Visual Verse, for example, as an exercise. Then there are bigger spurs. In 2016 I went to see an exhibition of the work of Hieronymus Bosch, put on by the museum in his home town of Den Bosch in the Netherlands to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the painter’s death. I went because it was described in The Guardian as one of the most important exhibitions of our century! It was truly extraordinary, revelatory even, and a year later I found myself starting to write stories inspired by the paintings and drawings I’d seen. Then I applied for and was awarded a place on the Literature Wales Mentoring Scheme 2018, to work on a collection those stories, which I’ve just completed.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Do you plan your writing or discover along the way?

CATH BARTON

With short stories I start with an idea and see where it takes me. With longer work I have to do more planning. When I started my NaNoWriMo novel I had the main setting, characters and an event. It was a kind of adventure/quest. As I continued writing I discovered that there was another side to the story. I also realised that there was no way I could get through 50,000 words without some planning. So the answer to your question is half and half.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What has that path to publication been like? Can you speak to some of the challenges you faced?

CATH BARTON

I won the New Welsh Writing AmeriCymru Prize for the Novella for The Plankton Collector in 2017, and the prize was publication, which was great. I’m just beginning to send out my short story collection to potential publishers. I know it may take a long time and that I have to be patient and ready to deal with rejection. But the good news is that there are small presses out there that are ready to consider unagented single-author collections of short stories.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Was there a moment when you started to think of yourself as a writer?

CATH BARTON

When I won the novella prize the very best thing about it was the affirmation it gave me, and the impetus to get on with the next big writing project.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What role, if any, has Wales played in your writing?

CATH BARTON

Living in Wales makes me eligible for some specific writing opportunities, and I try to make the most of those. Literature Wales in particular has helped me, through their Mentoring Scheme.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Has anything changed, in terms of how you approach writing, since you’ve been published?

CATH BARTON

It’s made me more disciplined!

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Which writers do you admire most, and why?

CATH BARTON

Just a couple of examples: I reread Orwell’s Animal Farm recently, and it’s as pertinent today as when it was written in 1945, as relevant to the politics of the world now as it was then. As for contemporary novelists, one I admire, for the vivacity of her writing, is Jess Kidd. Her first novel, Himself, is a fabulous read.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What advice do you have for other emerging writers?

CATH BARTON

Believe in yourself; you are the only person who can tell your story.

The Plankton Collector, now published by New Welsh Review Wales Arts Review

They loved the muck of the ditches,

the deep-rooted murk of the woods:

poison-dusted clumps, a forcefield

buzzing like bees. They were always

shadowing a glance, lunging up,

pulling you from the bridge, a threat,

the punishment-push of fallouts;

or just shushing wind, shrinking

till you brushed past into the pang

of afterthought, the nippling sting,

the serrated rip so loud and sheer

there must surely be tears of blood.

Yet every time the welts settled,

a fire doused with a leaf’s fresh smear.

It was still not impossible

then for the body to forget,

or not to know that in the midst

of all we were given—conkers

and sycamores, puddles, mud-stains—

in the high-boughed hush of the woods,

some things didn’t want to be touched.

Iain Twiddy studied literature at university, and lived for several years in northern Japan.

The Long Takeby Robin Robertson

Picador, £9.99

CHRISTMAS DAY

Robin Robertson’s Man Booker-longlisted poem, The Long Take, is not coy about its influences. It owes clear debts to Noir detective movies and to the violent genre of crime thriller popularised by Raymond Chandler. Yet it is testament to Robertson’s extraordinary abilities that he makes of these well-worn materials a work of art that is muscular, vivid and defiantly his own.

The novel-length poem is easy to summarise: it tells the story of Walker—"walker by name and by nature"—a Canadian D-Day veteran, who drifts on the currents of paranoia, fantasy and corruption that swept through post-WWII America, shuttling between New York, San Francisco and eventually washing up in LA. There, Walker finds work as a reporter, covering mob hits, movies and corruption—the full garish palette of 1950s Tinseltown.

But Walker also embeds himself with the city’s broken creatures: its pimps, "whores" and pushers, its druggies and alkies, its veterans and left-behinds. And through the quiet act of his listening, they are invested with humanity, and he exposes the inhumanity of the political system that excludes them—"They call this progress, but really it’s only greed." In this concern for the downtrodden and the destitute, Walker’s tale is bitingly contemporary. Above all, it is humane in its desire to give voice and presence to those who are voiceless and forgotten.

But such a description wrestles against the irreducible vitality of the poem. Though a relatively short work, The Long Take is capacious: knotted with image and internal resonance; taut with excitement and incident; seamed with pathos and depth of feeling. Any long narrative poem measures itself against the long tradition of oral literature, the bedrock of Western storytelling. These narratives are often the subject of lazy comparisons. But in the case of The Long Take, such comparisons are inevitable—and warranted. Epic both in scale and subject, it is a work of vertiginous achievement.

It owes much of its achievement to the timelessness of its themes. The warrior returning from war, steeped irreparably in what he has witnessed and in the gap that witnessing has placed between him and world back home, is a trope at least as old as The Odyssey. Yet here, its familiarity does not seem threadbare. On the contrary, I was captured by the notion that events which we now view as well-picked-over history—WWII, McCarthyism, the rise of Hollywood as our collective factory of make-believe—can be seen instead as akin to the Classical idea of destiny: vast, implacable forces that swept over and through individuals, granting them the barest of understandings. At one point, for instance, an unplaced voice rises out of the scrum of narrative—it recalls a Greek chorus or Eliot’s The Waste Land in its disembodied prophecy—“The things I did! The things I did! / But always the wrong things, always the wrong things.” It is a cry that echoes, endlessly, throughout the poem.

Indeed, the knotted legacies of actions and events are another of poem’s central concerns. Violence, in Robinson’s formulation, is a twofold phenomenon: there is the act—and there is its remembrance, which continues to inscribe itself long after the blood has cooled. The Nigerian-American novelist Teju Cole, writing about the relationship between the rough mob justice and insidious corruption that stalks his native country, has characterised these different aspects as "slow violence" and "fast violence". His differentiation is useful here. The Long Take has many examples of fast violence; the work of the knife, the gun or the fist is conveyed with sickening impact.

I was talking to this North Shore corporal and I’d looked round to check the

road and he wasn’t there.

Sniper got him in the middle of the forehead.

The back of the head was gone, brains and everything, gone.

Yet slow violence wreaks its own form of trauma. Walker is shadowed by the acts he has seen and committed and they seep ineluctably into the verse, bending and bruising its language.

There were parts of the city that were pure blocks of darkness,

Where light would slip in like a blade to nick it, carve it open:

A thin stiletto, then a spill of white.

Slow violence is not only evident in the poem’s bloodied idiolect; politics and ideology are also shown to be heavy with threat. A background of rising McCarthyite paranoia darkens the story. As do the callous efforts of LA city council council to ‘clean up’ their streets. Which, as more than one character remarks, are simply a lazy euphemism for wholesale racial and economic discrimination. "Two thirds of this city is fenced off ghetto/ [and] there’s graft and corruption running right the way through it. […] We won the war, but we’re living like we lost it."

The souring of the American Dream is hardly an original theme. Robertson’s take, though, is lent force by the empathy Walker evokes, and verve by his utter commitment to setting. Walker is quite the film buff, and movies are a counterpointing voice to his narrative: their plots, titles and locations provide existential compass. They are the landmarks through which he comments on and confirms his story of self. Again, Robertson is not the first author to view his protagonist through the prism of other media—Thomas Pynchon’s symbol-drunk Oedipa Mass of The Crying of Lot 49 springs to mind—but few writers are capable of such superb and sustained effect over 200 pages of verse, and for that—amongst many other successes—he deserves recognition.

The Long Take shone off the Man Booker longlist for its confidence and formal daring (writing a novel in verse takes, as a character remarks to another: "cajones".) But the most striking aspect of the book is not that it is told in verse, but that it reads as if it could not have been told any other way. And that is testament to the love, anger and precision that Robertson brings to Walker’s epic. The poem’s subtitle is "A Way to Lose More Slowly". But Robertson shows that the process of loss—in language as much as in life—brings with it a purifying clarity. And that, thus exposed, only the essentials remain: Christmas Day, LA, 1956. Night.

Alex Diggins is a writer and journalist based in London. In his day job, he follows Royal Mail couriers and Underground tube drivers. By night, he contributes essays and reviews to Bristol 24/7, Bristol Life, New Welsh Review, Caught by the River, The Cardiff Review and numerous other magazines. He is published in the forthcoming anthology, Rife: Twenty Stories from Britain’s Youth

Marlon James, Hamish Hamilton, £20

IN

Reading Marlon James’s new novel is no different. It’s a dark and sinister world, populated by witches and giants, lightning birds and winged beasts, roof-walking demons and monstrous humans. Time slipped while I was reading. After finishing the book, I had that stirring feeling in my chest.

The novel is set in an ancient and fantastical Africa, drawing from the continent’s rich history of myth. The protagonist, Tracker, a well-known hunter famed for his ability to smell out his quarry, is hired to find a boy who has been missing for three years. He joins a fellowship of mercenaries, witches and an Ogo—a giant that doesn’t like being called a giant—to find the child. But the boy’s identity is elusive, and the circumstances of his disappearance strange. The truth is concealed from Tracker and his attempts to find the boy are hindered by the others hired alongside him. Nobody can be trusted, and everyone has their own motivations, their own tale to tell.

James has drawn inspiration from classic fantasy, especially Tolkien and the unlikely fellowship of The Lord of the Rings. Black Leopard, Red Wolf’s publishers, Hamish Hamilton, have also been eager to promote the novel as the "African Game of Thrones". There are certainly similarities. The narrative is continually drawn to the underbelly of society, with cities populated by priests, eunuchs, mercenaries, kings and queens in constant powers struggles. But James builds on these foundations. His mastery of language enabled him to compact a world as vast and complex as Tolkien’s into just the first book of the planned trilogy. Every sentence builds on the world, story and characters, so much so that it requires a conscientious reader to avoid missing crucial details early on. Black Leopard, Red Wolf is more than a heroic battle of good over evil, or of despots clinging to power. The novel’s rooting in African history and myth will excite any fantasy lover, breathing fresh life into the genre. But despite its fantastical setting populated by monsters and demons, it’s the human stories that make the novel compelling.

Many of the characters are outcasts, and James uses them to explore many ideas familiar to the contemporary reader. After one of the characters is kidnapped by a man, she explains to Tracker why she didn’t report it. "You could have run to a prefect," Tracker says. "A man," she replies. "A magistrate," Tracker says. "A man," she replies. Racial discourse, however, is seen from a culture in which blackness is the norm. Many of the characters believe white is the colour of demons, and the White Scientists are the cruellest of them all. Nothing is simple, and James consistently refuses binaries and simplification that inevitably cause conflict, even when the characters live by them. Nobody is good or evil. Their actions are the consequences of the years of brutality and violence inflicted upon them. The fear and hatred that results only goes on to entrench the destructive beliefs.

Violence comes with the genre, but James makes it visceral, personal. At times, the level of violence made it uncomfortable to read, heightened by the amount inflicted on children. There is no end to the methods of mutilation and persecution, a cycle of brutality perpetuated by people once victims themselves. They nourish the younger generation with their own bitterness and resentment.

I found myself thinking of Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie, a fellow Man Booker Prize winner. Like Rushdie’s novel, Black Leopard, Red Wolf’s narrative is anything but linear, a meandering weave of interconnected stories that enticingly deviate at every moment. The world feels vast and bustling, loud with diverse voices and overpowering smells. Midnight’s Children’s Saleem recalls the events of the past to another, just as Tracker does to an Inquisitor who seeks the truth; something that will continually elude the characters and the reader throughout. Black Leopard, Red Wolf shares Midnight’s Children’s richness that is at first head spinning—and then enthralling.

It’s difficult not to compare Black Leopard, Red Wolf with its fantasy counterparts, the backbone of the genre which inevitably influenced its creation. But James builds on this foundation. His fantastical Africa is something not previously explored in contemporary mainstream fiction. The plethora of issues the novel raises elevates it, the narrative constantly leaving you questioning what is truth and what is lie. It comes as no surprise that Michael B. Jordan has already bought the rights for a screen adaptation. But perhaps the best indicator of a good book is that you don’t want it to end. I certainly treasured and luxuriated in Black Leopard, Red Wolf’s final pages, making them last as long as I could. I’m excited this is only the first book in James’s Dark Star trilogy, and I look forward to him building on an undoubtedly remarkable start.

.

Jeremy Dixon

New Welsh Writers is an interview series in which we speak to new voices in Welsh literature, delving into how they got their start and what advice they might have for other emerging writers.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

When did you start writing?

JEREMY DIXON

When I was studying for my GCE "O" levels I decided that I really, really wanted to be a poet and began writing what I thought were poems (I still have some of them). But at that age I was never told that poems only exist by revision and drafting and editing, that a poem doesn’t spring fully formed as they do in the movies and because I was never happy with any of these one-take "finished" poems I thought I couldn’t write and that was it. But I did keep journals and notebooks and when I lived in Bristol in the 1990s I started going to slam poetry nights, it was an amazingly vibrant scene and there was an event to go to nearly every week. Long-suffering friends grew tired of my constant complaints that I should be writing, but that I wasn’t good enough, that I would love to compete but I couldn’t as I’d be awful, and without telling me they entered me in an open slam competition. I had one week to write three poems (in the very unlikely event that I made it to the final). At the slam I did actually get through to the second round and loved the experience so much that I carried on writing more and more poetry.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What do you find are the most enjoyable and most challenging aspects of writing/being a writer?

JEREMY DIXON

The most obvious challenging aspect of being a writer is making ends meet, but at the moment, as long as I break even at the end of the month then I’m happy. About a decade ago, I resigned from a full-time job in graphic design in order to concentrate on my own creativity. I was working in a museum and grew tired of promoting the work of other artists and writers and thought it was about time I started developing my own work. In order to support myself I now have a "portfolio" career comprising yoga teaching, shop work, dog-walking, freelance graphic design, and teaching book-making workshops. This freedom of lifestyle and expression, and the lack of needing to conform to a management power structure is also one of the most enjoyable aspects of being a writer.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

When and where do you write?

JEREMY DIXON

My "portfolio" career means that I don’t have a specific daily routine of writing because every day will have different and sometimes conflicting priorities. My only rule is that I try to do something creative every day, be it writing, drafting, revising, marketing or making books.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What starts a new piece of writing for you?

JEREMY DIXON

An idea will arrive in my head, usually sparked by a memory, or music or a conversation, and I have to write it down immediately in a notebook or on a scrap of paper before it disappears. Something or someone or some conversation that happened on the shop floor of the high street pharmacy where I had a part-time job inspired all the poems in my debut poetry collection IN RETAIL. In the lull between customers I would scribble words on the back of a piece of till roll and stuff it in my sock hoping that today wasn’t the spot-check-in-the-security-cupboard day (no personal items were allowed on the shop floor, a tissue was all you were allowed to have on you!). The shop proved an incredibly inspiring place for poetry and I wrote a great many poems based on my time working there.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Do you plan your writing or discover along the way?

JEREMY DIXON

The poems I wrote for IN RETAIL were really the first time I had an idea for a theme that I wanted to explore in my writing. I always saw these IN RETAIL poems as different parts of a whole, but I didn’t write to a specific content plan, or try to write poems to fit a particular hot shop topic.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What has that path to publication been like? Can you speak to some of the challenges you faced?

JEREMY DIXON

My path to publication has been a long one: my debut poetry collection IN RETAIL was published by Arachne Press in February 2019, one month short of my 55th birthday. An early IN RETAIL poem was published by Eye Socket Journal in 2012, but the journey towards a collection only really began in earnest when another IN RETAIL poem was accepted for inclusion in THE OTHER SIDE OF SLEEP, an anthology of long poems published by Arachne Press in 2014. The launch of the book in London was the first time I really felt happy with the poem I was reading in front of an audience and the experience was a great boost to my confidence and generated more poems. I also workshopped new work with my poetry support/reading group "Chapter 11", who would meet once a month in Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff. More of the individual IN RETAIL poems were subsequently published in magazines and online platforms, and I entered a selection for a pamphlet competition where they were long-listed. Then in 2017 Cherry from Arachne Press asked all the writers she had published so far if they had any proposals for new books, so I sent her a bundle of all the IN RETAIL poems I had written to date. To my amazement she accepted the idea with a view to publishing a book in 2019. Most of the publication challenges I faced were due to my inexperience of the publishing process. I had sent Cherry the poems in the order they were on my computer, my book submission lacked any proper order or structure, which thankfully Cherry was able to work with and find a format for. She also suggested the reversed text at the top and bottom of the pages to give an impression of till receipts, and it was then a matter of finding the right words and phrases for these extra lines. Once the poems were in order, I began to notice repetitions in how some of the poems began, or that I had referred to job titles or parts of the shop in different ways, so there was still quite a lot of editing and rewriting to do. I was also still coming up with ideas for new poems so we had to find a way to include them as well. It would have saved time and stress if I had planned the manuscript more in advance, but then again I would not have arrived with the book as it is now. As a graphic designer, relinquishing control of the cover design was the biggest challenge of all, however Cherry was very understanding. The illustrator was wonderful and the design process proved delightfully collaborative and I am very, very happy with the final cover.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Was there a moment when you started to think of yourself as a writer?

JEREMY DIXON

I’m very fortunate in that my boss in the village shop where now I work part-time has allowed me to install an IN RETAIL pop-up bookshop and I have been steadily selling copies to customers. A pupil from the local primary school came in to buy sweets, took one look at the banner and the display of books, and then pointed to me and said, "You must be the poet!" That was the moment I really started to think of myself as a writer!

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What role, if any, has Wales played in your writing?

JEREMY DIXON

All of the poems in IN RETAIL are inspired by and are about working in one specific store in Cardiff Bay. Those poems were then completed at home in the Vale of Glamorgan, so to me, the whole book is grounded in Wales—IN RETAIL wouldn’t exist without Wales. It was only really when I returned to live in Wales about 15 years ago that I began to write poems that I felt happy with and which then went on to be published. I had an inspirational English teacher when I was at comprehensive school in Radyr, who encouraged us to recite Dylan Thomas, which then led on to reading RS Thomas and Edward Thomas. I have also had the privilege to learn from two amazing National Poets of Wales, Gwyneth Lewis and Gillian Clarke. Just over a decade ago, during a one-to-one session at a poetry course held in Ty Newydd, Gillian looked at me and said, "With a lot of work, I think you might have the makings of a poet". How can you not respond and rise to that challenge?

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Has anything changed, in terms of how you approach writing, since you’ve been published?

JEREMY DIXON

Having my collection published has given me confidence in my work, confidence in performing, and confidence to push further the boundaries of how and what I write about, and to try and excavate deeper into myself. Publishing has also made me realise that poems in print can become very powerful, like some kind of spell. For example, to mark the publication day of IN RETAIL, I held a poetry night in the village hall where I read a poem from the collection about an homophobic attack that happened to me at the youth club there when I was 15 years old. This assault triggered a subsequent suicide attempt. To read this poem in the actual hall where the event took place was one of the most amazing experiences in my life—a poem I had written was now in a book that I was reading in a space I was once too terrified to enter, and instead of teenage bystanders there was now an empathic audience who all sighed with me at the last line. That experience has changed me, I think it has even changed my past, and has definitely changed my future approach to writing.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Which writers do you admire most, and why?

JEREMY DIXON

Now that I have actually been involved in the process, I really admire any poet who has managed to have a poetry collection published! As for individual poets, I always find it difficult to list poets, as any list will inevitably change from day to day and you always feel you have left someone vital to you off the list. However, my poetry temple would contain Emily Dickinson, Thom Gunn, Rae Armantrout and CA Conrad. These four poets are probably the ones who have most influenced my writing, and my ways of looking at, creating and performing my poetry.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What advice do you have for other emerging writers?

JEREMY DIXON

My advice would be to read as much poetry as you can; to be supportive of other writers; to not compare your work or level of success with that of any other poet; to find a writing group to share your work with; to submit your work to magazines and competitions; and to attend and participate in local poetry readings and events.

We decided to give the TV a break.

We unplugged it from the wall & placed it gently

in the recliner with refreshments & snacks nearby.

Next we performed several one act plays

before the television. Small affairs,

not needing much furniture or costuming

or too many characters for the scene. & the TV!

The TV remained silent, appreciative, awed.

William Wright Harris’ poetry has appeared in such publications as Canyon Voices, and Poetry Salzburg Review among others. He studied at University of Tennessee-Knoxville and DePaul University and currently is an Adjunct Professor of English at University of Memphis and Southwest Tennessee Community College.

here we lay amongst the chill and the tinny phone speakers. the ice doesn’t melt under the heavy snow and still between the wooden blinds the white light manages its way out

and then i am in the backseat and then it is summer then it is summer, and the windows are rolled up—she says air is coming out of the vents, but does it really? sweaty thighs against the sticky leather seats, huff a breath onto the window and trace your fingerprints in the condensation i see her smile in the rearview mirror and shift in my seat. i think we’re almost home

Dream Noir, Angry Old Man, Zin Daily, and Anti-Heroin Chicamong others, as well as an upcoming astrology column in Dark Wood Magazine.

Harkby Sam Lipsyte,

Granta, £12.99

Hark is Lipsyte’s second novel to effectively engage with the zeitgeist. His 2010 novel, The Ask, dealt with a financial recession. Published in the wake of the 2009 financial crisis, The Ask dropped into the economic background a recently jobless artist who "fantasise[d] about winning the lottery, or inheriting vast fortunes." The novel hit readers at precisely the right time, its black humour, tuneful prose, and likeable first-person schlub earning it both New York Times bestseller status and critical acclaim. With Hark, however, Lipsyte has moved away from satirising plainly political or economic circumstances. For this book, Lipsyte probes the process of belief and its various objects. Hark presents cast of characters who can no longer believe in one another or the ideas and institutions that shaped them. This, of course, is not very funny. What’s funny is thinking a cult is the answer.

Hark introduces us to the cult of Harkism, aka Mental Archery, fronted by Hark Morner, but the character closest to a protagonist is a Harkist acolyte, Fraz Penzig. Fraz’s story stretches between, on the one hand, his duties as a father of two and as husband to Tovah, a "still employed" poet with a job in tech, and on the other, his devotion to Hark and “the power of focus.”

If the character names—near-anagrams that turn out probably not to be anagrams—bring Pynchon to mind, you’re in the right mindset. Hark’s plot darts among characters, set pieces, and schemes on a scale that, at least compared to Lipsyte’s previous novels, seems more Pynchonesque. Lipsyte’s standard devices of family drama are manoeuvred in Hark with his usual dexterity: the self-loathing, dithering dad in Fraz, the smartass kids in David and Lisa (when Lisa is feared dead, David informs Fraz that his "bald spot is much bigger"), the competent, jaded wife in Tovah, and the predatory romantic rival in Nat Dersh (his first name spelled "with a silent but somehow still audible G").

Woven in between the familial tensions in Hark, however, are elements of fabulation and high farce new to his novels. Kate Rumpler, an heiress and Hark satellite, travels to Sweden to traffic bone marrow in order to fund Harkism, but gets tricked by a fake cancer patient. Teal Baker-Cassini, described as "the discipline’s leading intellectual light," spends time unethically mediating conflict in Fraz and Tovah’s marriage and getting roasted in the comments section of Hark Hub (their social media site) while posting (and deleting) under a sock-puppet account. Dieter Delgado, a corporate villain with "deathbird eyes of shiny chartreuse", co-opts and eventually commercialises Harkism for the masses.

Whenever a TV turns on or dialogue wanders, we get mentions of a vague geopolitical force called "the Army of the Just, those nutso motherbangers marauding Europe," in "the Battle of Antwerp" or the "Battle for Bratislava." And all this happens tangential to Hark Morner, title character and guru/cult leader, who promulgates his Mental Archery philosophy through opaque woo-woo speeches weaving historical tidbits about archers into self-help boilerplate.

It’s quite a lot.

As with even the great postmodern farces of Thomas Pynchon or John Barth, a good deal of character development and internal life gets left unwritten, quite possibly because there isn’t enough space in the story. During one of the novel’s climactic moments, when Fraz takes one page to ponder his belief system, Teal interrupts his internal dialogue with, "How’s it going over there, Fraz?" The discussion turns on a dime to comedic riffs about Revolutionary "lobsterbacks" and commercial slogans. The change of novelistic focus from internal conflicts to external systems is an aesthetic choice counter to some readerly sensibilities—but not mine.

The success of a novel like Hark, then, hinges on some sort of glue to hold the disparate parts together. For Lipsyte, the glue is an ornate and acquisitive prose style. Critic William Giraldi writes of Barry Hannah, one of Lipsyte’s main stylistic influences, that Hannah wrote with, "the calculated elocution of someone who handles a sentence like an affable hatchet." In the case of Lipsyte and Hark, language, specifically comedic language, is more like the affable machete the narrator uses to clear a path in the jungle of the plot. A character at a bar introduces himself through slippage in dialogue: "I’m still living at home but things are, I don’t know. Fraught? Freighted? Fraughted? The air is so thick you could butter it with a knife. Is that what they say? Anyway, this place. I come here sometimes." Mashed up cliches snowball into scenes: when Hark complains of having "never even had a friend to piss on," Fraz proceeds to piss on him in a bizarre comedic bonding. Meanwhile, in the background of the narration, there lies the lyricism of, "Clouds bull across a sky of silly blue."

Lipsyte’s style is distinctive not just because it binds Hark’s wacky plot, but because it’s even more pronounced here than in his previous work. It’s been a while since Lipsyte attended the notorious Gordon Lish workshops, and any remnants of the minimalist editor’s austere restraining impulse seem to have faded. Gone also is Lish’s signature first-person narration, present in Lipsyte’s Venus Drive, and instead replaced in Hark with a roaming omniscient third. Lists unfurl luxuriously when describing the world’s problems ("The fouled sky, the polluted food, the pharma-fed rivers full of sad-eyed Oxytrout") or even Delgado’s dinner ("caviar, gravlax, pickled carrots, and vintage Little Debbie snack cakes"). If there is a narrative style capable of containing this world, it is Lipsyte’s.

But it would be tedious merely to name all the absurd qualities and features of Hark. What matters, and what can easily slip into the backstory of the book behind all the baubles and bits, is the connection between absurdity and belief. As the narrator of Hark would put it, the "front story" of the novel is that the absurd may be the only remaining mode in which belief is an acceptable currency. There’s a shorter way, after all, of saying suspension of disbelief: belief. Hark spends nearly three-hundred pages presenting a ridiculous solution to a problem whose main hangup is thinking all solutions are ridiculous.

Fraz Penzig himself acknowledges the strangeness of this paradox, believing in something absurd: "How strange, Fraz muses, to be Fraz, a fairly sharp guy raised by atheists, and still want to believe in this stuff." Yet, as the thought continues, "Better to believe than fetishize doubt, that dubious lodestar for all those sweat-bright wrestlers of faith." Fraz, by the novel’s climax, has presented the readers with the two options we have during a recession of belief: "fetishize doubt," and bow your back under nihilism, or fetishize a former stand-up comic who asks his friends to piss on him and rattles off dubious facts about Mongol archery. And that’s pretty funny.

Entropy, Essay Daily, and Yes, Poetry

BE Jones

New Welsh Writers is an interview series in which we speak to new voices in Welsh literature, delving into how they got their start and what advice they might have for other emerging writers.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

When did you start writing?

BE JONES

I started writing when I was about seven years old, or at least scribbling down stories, though my first efforts tended to feature either precocious children from the Home Counties solving mysteries or plucky Victorian orphans escaping dastardly plots by conniving relatives. This might seem odd, considering it was the 1980s and I was growing up in the post-industrial South Wales Valleys, but I was reading a lot of Enid Blyton and girls’ annuals full of historical heroines at the time. That probably explains the diaries I kept, from the age of about nine or ten, that read as if I was born in the 19th century or the 1940s. My first crime novel, now reissued under the title Lies You Tell, started its life in my early 20s, during my English Literature MA at Cardiff University, though I never showed it to anyone as I’m terrified of creative writing groups! It took me almost eight years to finish it in my spare time, while working crazy shifts as a journalist, so I suppose that’s when I started writing with a clear purpose in mind.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What do you find are the most enjoyable and most challenging aspects of writing/being a writer?

BE JONES

The biggest challenge is getting the pesky little visions of characters and scenes, constantly bumping around inside my head, to sit still for five minutes and arrange themselves into a sensible plot. There’s a lot of chatter up there and it’s a discipline to listen to just one or two voices among the chaos. Yes, there are voices in my head, I admit it, but that’s the fun part too because they tell me some fascinating tales.

The more practical challenge is trying to tell the story you want to, while making it accessible to the reader and your editor. There’s a lot of crime fiction out there and it’s hard to convince people that there’s a readership for anything that deviates even slightly from the formula. But readers are very smart—we should give them more credit. It’s a real “air punch” moment when a reader reviews my books and says, for example, that the twist in Halfway, my “village beset by a snowstorm with a killer on the loose” novel, blew them away, or Where She Went, my contemporary and anti-ghost story with a dead narrator, completely creeped them out. I’m writing for them, and if I can entertain, surprise and unsettle them, that’s the best reward.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

When and where do you write?

BE JONES

I write on my laptop at home, at the desk in my spare bedroom, never anywhere else. No coffee shops, restaurants or park benches for me. I write as often as I can, which is basically whenever my insane wire-fox terrier, Erin, runs out of batteries and I’m also confident that there’s no need to nip out to the supermarket for a couple of days. I like to work in the evenings but I’ll grab any time I can. I’m very fortunate in that I’ve never suffered from writer’s block (yet). I can type for hours and easily pour out 3000 words in one hit. The trouble is, they’re not always good words.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What starts a new piece of writing for you?

BE JONES

I always have half a dozen novel plans floating around in my head, and hard-backed books full of story sketches, because dialogue and situations constantly fly into my brain when I’m travelling, when I see something quirky on TV, or when I overhear a snippet of conversation that sets off a little flare of excitement in my gut.

With my current novel, Halfway, it was a wintry drive I took from Brecon to Llandovery. At the bottom of a narrow, wooded valley was a sign that said “Halfway”, close to an old, disused chapel and a war memorial. The writer in me was fascinated by that idea, of a place that seemed to exist just to let you know you’re between two other destinations, and it’s just as far to go back as to go on. It made me think of a turning point, perhaps a choice and also, what a great spot for a murder! That’s a good example of how a spark of inspiration ends up as a novel.

It was something similar with my new book, Wilderness, due out in May, 2019. It was inspired by a road trip I took with my husband through some of America’s stunning national parks, including Yosemite in California. While admiring the scenery, my writer’s head was also thinking, “Oh, this would be a great place to kill your husband and make it look like an accident.” Don’t worry, apart from the locations it’s completely fictional!

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Do you plan your writing or discover along the way?

BE JONES

It’s strange, since I have a background in literary criticism, and then worked as a journalist, where clarity and structure shaped everything I wrote, I’m always in uncharted territory with my own fiction. Usually I know exactly where I want to end up, and often write the last scene first because I’ve seen a snapshot of a situation that I know makes a great finale. Sometimes I hear a few lines of dialogue that spur me on to write a prologue loaded with a little taste of the crimes to come. I do like to drop a reader right into the middle of the action if I can, then take them backwards and show them how the characters got there.

Though I don’t always know the exact route I’m going to take between the stops, things seem to come out alright in the end, since the voices make suggestions all the time, 90 per cent of them good.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What has that path to publication been like? Can you speak to some of the challenges you faced?

BE JONES

I managed to find my agent, Peter Buckman, almost ten years ago, which helped me get that first foot in the door as so many publishers won’t accept unsolicited manuscripts any more. He’s probably the sole reason I’ve seen six books in print so far, because he understood what I was trying to say and championed every novel for me, offering great advice along the way. But I had many rejections and disappointments with small publishers before I signed with Little Brown.

I think the difficulty is, even when you’ve been published, the challenges never really stop. Unless you’re lucky enough to be one of those writers whose debut novel becomes that mystical beast of a “bestseller” and the film rights sell for a five-figure sum, it’s largely an ongoing labour of love and trial and error. You have to accept that so much of it is luck and timing—getting a book in front of the right publisher when the stars align and a sort of magical momentum, or word of mouth, following. Otherwise you gear yourself up for the launch, slavishly look for reviews, promote like crazy on social media, then it all goes quiet and you start all over again with word-one of a new manuscript (and crossed fingers).

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What role, if any, has Wales played in your writing?

BE JONES

My gritty crime stories are inspired by my “real life” crime career as a journalist for The Western Mail and BBC Wales, plus several years as a South Wales Police Press Officer and Media Manager. So, my career, and upbringing in Wales, have definitely played a huge part in the feel and texture of my novels. If I’d been born and worked somewhere else, the influences and the emotional flavour would be very different.

Also, as an English speaker from the Rhondda Valleys, I’ve always felt strongly about the complexities of Welsh identity and the difficulty of transcending preconceptions about our country that people from elsewhere often have. I hope my stories, which deal with the dark side of human nature, are ones that anyone could relate to, but “Welsh crime” as a genre has not yet had its moment—it has a long way to go to reach the levels of awareness and glamour that, say, the booming Scandi Noir, or Scotland’s Tartan Noir scene, has experienced.

We still need to convince people (and publishers) that there are a huge number of Welsh crime writers behind the scenes now, producing everything from unsettling psychological mysteries to brilliantly atmospheric historical crime thrillers, that have national and international appeal.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Has anything changed, in terms of how you approach writing, since you’ve been published?

BE JONES

Definitely! When I didn’t have a publisher, I had the luxury of time and autonomy, though I always worried about getting a book in print. Now I worry about being able to deliver the manuscript my publisher wants by the deadline they’ve set. Because you’re not alone in creating the work anymore; you have to accept that it’s a job and a commercial process, and be prepared to take on board lots of criticism and feedback.

Of course, being a journalist, I’ve had plenty of experience of slashing or redrafting my own work for panicking editors or irate producers on a deadline, so I have an advantage when I get to the “editing” cycle and rewrite phase so many authors dread. It’s much easier of course, if you have great editors like I do. You have to find a way to stay true to your vision but also make it resemble what they’re paying you for. But I still write the stories that I’m passionate about, rather than trying to curtail my style. It’s too much effort to spend six months writing 80,000 words if you don’t love what’s going onto the page.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Which writers do you admire most, and why?

BE JONES

As a teenager I was an avid Stephen King fan and, recently, one of my reviewers described my snow-bound mystery, Halfway, as Misery meets Fargo. Any homage to King was entirely unintentional, but that shows how you can absorb the atmosphere and narrative feel of writers who first sparked the twisted joy of being scared in you. Also, I was blown away by Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, which I discovered the year I started university, mesmerised by the truly horrible group of students at an isolated New England college. Amoral, self-absorbed, they opened my eyes to how characters could be fascinating even if you abhor them. That takes real skill.

Over the years my police work showed me that very few people wake up in the morning and decide to be a horrible and violent person. We just find justification for the terrible, selfish things we do until we step over a line. That’s why I love the work of Patricia Highsmith and the late PD James, masters of that style of writing, of creating a sense of self-serving unease beneath a civilised exterior. Ruth Rendell, writing as Barbara Vine, was also the genius of the “psychological thriller” decades before it became a popular buzzword. A Fatal Inversion, which I read when I was 16, had a huge influence on my own work, as has the brilliant Kate Atkinson (especially the Inspector Jackson Brodie series) and Gillian Flynn, whose characters live on the fault-lines where the mundane and terrible merge.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What advice do you have for other emerging writers?

BE JONES

The best advice is to be clear about what you want to achieve. If you simply love writing poetry, or are happy tapping away at a novel for the creative joy of it, then that’s brilliant. But if you want to see your work published you need a finished 75,000-word draft, properly laid out and proofread, or 15 to 20 poems ready for a collection. Then you need to know what your work is about, what genre you think it is and be realistic about who your audience is.

I’m not saying don’t write that hybrid-horror, family saga set in 11th century Finland, or a dystopian, free-verse poem about a dog that can talk, if that’s your passion, but be honest about who is likely to read it or pay you for it! At least practice how you’ll convince agents, publishers and, most importantly, readers why it’s the best book in the world and they need to get behind it and buy it right now! Because you will have to sell yourself over and over again before anyone else does.

If it helps, I’m terrible at writing synopses and trying to explain what my next book is about in less than a million words, but a decent four or five paragraph blurb, or project pitch in your back pocket, goes a long way to help you focus!

After completing her English Literature MA at Cardiff University, and a brief attempt at teaching, Beverley Jones became a professional "nose-poker-inner", i.e. a journalist, working for The Rhondda Leader and The Western Mail, then a broadcast journalist for BBC .

She also worked as a press officer for South Wales Police, dealing with the media and participating in criminal investigations, security operations and emergency planning, including security preparations for the 2012 Olympics.

She is now a freelance writer, novelist, and slave to a two-year-old wire fox terrier, Erin, a.k.a. "The Monkey" or "Miss Piddle".

Halfway is her fifth crime novel, following Where She Went, and previous titles, Lies You Tell, Make Him Pay and Fear the Dark, all available now from Little Brown.

She tweets at @bevjoneswriting.

I carry the weight of my mother on my chest, each breast an urn or a gaping maw or a crystal ball that I look into and hold my breath, searching for smoke. In the shower I cradle them to me like stillborns, decrepit mausoleums, futureless fallen fruit bruised my fingers itch to tear them open, to scatter the pomegranate seeds so I can watch them seethe into caryatids or stone cemetery angels outside my bedroom window, a garden of putrefaction, the knotweed that riddled my mother manifesting as slow-worms in me.

Ellora Sutton, 21, is a recent Journalism and Creative Writing graduate from Hampshire, where she works in a museum gift shop. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Eye Flash Poetry Journal, Constellate Magazine, Young Poets Network, Paperfox Lit Mag, and Blue Marble Review, among others.

Co. Donegal, July 1994

NIALL OPENED

His pencils were arranged in order from left to right, with the darkest pencil last. He lifted the 4B pencil and started on her eyes. In the pupil alone there were so many shades of light and dark that it took him several minutes to fill it in. He left a rectangle of white at the centre so that her eye appeared to catch the light.

He had watched a film starring Nicole Kidman one night when his parents were out. It was the first time they’d left him alone in the house in the evening but his mother said it was okay because he would be twelve soon, and they wouldn’t be late. The film was on after 9 PM on Channel 4 so he listened out for any sound of them coming home in case he needed to change the channel quickly. The story was that Nicole had married an old Australian man who had taken her away on a boring holiday on a tiny yacht, and then the yacht was taken over by a maniac who was much younger and better looking than her husband. Nicole and the maniac chased each other around the boat, and the maniac wore very few clothes for most of the film. He had black hair and dark eyes, and his lips looked like they were pressed against glass. He was always covered in a glaze of sweat and his skin was the colour of cold tea. Nicole’s head was a frenzy of red curls and her skin was so pale it was like she’d never seen a lick of sunlight in her whole life. It took Niall half an hour to walk up the stairs to bed because he was convinced the maniac was behind one of the doors on the landing and would jump out and try to strangle him like poor Nicole.

Niall bit down hard on the end of his pencil and told himself to stop thinking about the maniac. He closed his eyes and tried to squeeze him out of his mind, but the man’s slick brown body kept sliding back in between the gaps in his thoughts.

“Crazy for trying, and crazy for crying and crazy for loving you.” His mother’s voice drifted to him through the glass doors that led off the dining room. She was watering the hanging baskets on the patio. His mother said that you had to talk to flowers to help them grow and if you sang to them they grew twice as fast. But lately, she’d be singing one moment and the next she’d be staring silently into space.

Izzy Keaveney, he thought, picking up the 4H pencil and shading in the light grey patches beneath Nicole’s eyes. “IZZY KEAV ENEY,” he said to himself, dividing the letters of his mother’s name into groups of four. Words that could be separated in this way had something satisfying and correct about them. His own name had thirteen letters but he’d decided that when he was an adult he would lose one of the “l”s because “Nial” looked much more sophisticated. Nicole Kidman had the right amount of letters in her name and the film—Dead Calm—was as perfectly even as two words could be. Billy Zane, who played the maniac, had nine letters in his name, and Niall reminded himself to stop thinking about him.

He picked up a Fruit Pastille from the diamond-shaped arrangement he’d made on the cowslip pattern tablecloth and popped it in his mouth.

His mother breathed a big sigh as she came through the patio doors. “It’s going to be a scorcher,” she said. “The flowers will need to be watered again this evening. Will you remember to do them when I’m out?”

He was inscribing Nicole’s eyelashes.

“Are you listening to me, Niall?”

He gulped back the sweet. “Mammy, I’m trying to concentrate.”

His mother was going around every window, giving another exaggerated sigh each time she threw one open. The room had large windows on three sides. Niall liked to draw there because it got so much light. And because they lived on a hill and the dining room had a view of sea and mountains and sky, he felt like he was suspended above it all in a glass box.

He could hear noise from the pier and he looked down to see if any of the boats had left their radars on. Jason Meehan’s older brother Brendan worked on one of the fishing trawlers, and he’d told them that when you saw the bar spinning on the top of the boat that meant the skipper had forgotten to turn the radar off, and cancerous waves were spreading outwards from it. Niall had lain awake at night imagining the radiation reaching him and penetrating deep into his bones. But the last time his sister Orla was home from College she said that it was impossible to get cancer that way and that Brendan Meehan was talking rubbish.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and he smelt the sweet sharp scent of his mother’s sweat.

“Oh Niall. You make a great job of the eyes. I wish I could draw like that. Conor said that if you get the eyes right you’re half way there.”

His mother had taken up a drawing class and he had gone with her once. It was Conor, the teacher, who had taught him how to grid the page.

“Is she the one who’s married to Tom Cruise?’

“Yeah, Nicole Kidman.” He jiggled his shoulders back and forth while he tried to decide what part to draw next.

“Jesus—would you look at the head of hair on her. She’s like Orphan Annie! You’ll have a hard time drawing that.”

He laughed and looked up at his mother’s face.

She squeezed his shoulders gently. “I need you to go to the shop for me.”

“Which one?”

“Doherty’s.”

He groaned.

“Oh, big deal. Get on with it.” She handed him a list written on lined notepaper:

white sliced pan

½ pound cooked ham

litre milk

20 silk cut purple

“Oh, mammy, I hate asking them for cigarettes.”

“Just hand over the note and they’ll see my handwriting and they’ll know they’re for me. Now, go on. And make sure the milk is well dated.”

HE WALKED SLOWLY, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his shorts, kicking stones along the road in front of him. When he reached the laneway he stopped. Sometimes gangs of lads from St. Joseph’s went there to smoke because the top of the lane was hidden from the main street, and if he saw them he took the longer route down Bridge Street. But the lane was empty and as he made his way down the steep path his pace quickened. He rubbed the ten-pound note in his pocket between his fingers. At the bottom of the hill he turned the corner. A group of boys from the year above him at school were waiting at the bus stop outside Doherty’s in their red and yellow football strips. He lowered his head and kept walking. Bony white legs criss-crossed the pavement in front of him. He felt his thick hairless calves rubbing together. He stepped off the pavement to move around the group, and one of the boys said “poof” and Niall looked up. He used the word so casually it was like he’d said his name. It was Dermot Brogan. The shape of the word hung around his lips, his mouth listing between a smile and a sneer. The other boys sniggered and jostled each other on the crowded pavement and one bumped against Niall. He felt a heat rise up in him like the shame was going to sear the skin from his body. He pushed open the door of the shop and let it shut on the noise of laughter.

Mrs Doherty was standing behind the counter. She lowered the newspaper she was reading.

“Hello, Niall,” she said.

“Hello.” He handed her the list.

He went to the fridge for a carton of milk, and grabbed a sliced pan from the shelf and tried not to look at Dermot Brogan who was standing at the window, staring in. Niall returned to the counter where Mrs Doherty was working the slicer. The ham was bound in twine. She fed the enormous hunk of pink marbled meat to the spinning blade. Thin slices of ham slid onto the lilac greaseproof paper. She turned the slicer off and folded the paper over the meat then wrapped the parcel in cellophane. She slipped it into a white plastic bag and dropped a packet of cigarettes in on top.

He handed over the ten-pound note. “Thank you, Mrs Doherty,” he said, as she gave him his change.

He crossed the shop floor to the magazine stand, with Dermot Brogan’s dark haired figure following along beside him on the other side of the glass. He stared at the covers of the magazines: “THE 50 MOST BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE IN THE WORLD 1994”; “WINONA’S ON-SET MELTDOWN”; “THE FIFTY MILLION DOLLAR DIVORCE”; “TEN STEPS TO A BRAND NEW YOU”.

There was a gentle tap on the window and Niall turned his head. Dermot was mouthing that word at him, his pale face just a few feet away. He was saying it over and over again so that his breath blotted the glass.

Niall looked back at the magazine. “TENS TEPS TOAB RAND NEWY OU”, he said to himself.

A bus pulled up. He waited until the boys loaded on and the bus drove away. When he looked down at his hand the thin handles of the plastic bag were twisted tightly around it. He let them spin loose. Deep white furrows marked his skin like the lines on the ham where the twine had scored the rind of fat.

THE SIDE DOOR of the house lay half open. He stood on the doorstep, listening. His mother was talking to someone in the kitchen. It sounded like his father, but he was in Dublin for work so he guessed that it was Father Dempsey. In the confessional Father Dempsey’s voice was deep and soupy, but now he spoke to his mother in soft wet whispers.

He walked in and they stopped talking. His mother’s arm was clasped across her stomach, a hand upon her chest, like she was about to make some great declaration before he interrupted her. Her eyes were shining. She’d been crying or would start crying, he thought.

“How are you, Niall?” Father Dempsey asked, flicking his ash into the ashtray.

“Fine, thank you, Father,” Niall mumbled. He placed the plastic bag on the sideboard and walked towards the dining room.

“Niall? Where do you think you’re going? It’s a beautiful day. Get out and enjoy the fresh air. Go over to Meehan’s and see if Jason’s around.”

He turned and looked at her. She knew that Jason had barely spoken to him since he’d started secondary school, that whenever he went over to the house Jason said he had too much homework and he’d see him another time. She would not meet his eye now but she wore that stretched expression that told him there would be no further discussion on the subject.

He walked out the side door and as he passed the kitchen window he heard the sound of their voices again, like water lapping against the sides of a basin.

The day was hot now and he could feel the heat prickling his skin but he knew that if he went back in to look for sun cream his mother would get thick with him. He decided to go and hide out in the trees near his house, and shelter from the sun. The trees were on a small patch of land that all the neighbouring houses looked onto, including Father Dempsey’s. He could wait until he saw Father Dempsey leaving, then try to sneak back into his house without his mother seeing him, and carry on with his drawing.

He walked through the trees to the tyre swing. He stepped onto a bank, grabbed the rope with both hands, and pushed off. He sat down into the crook of the tyre and stared at his house and followed the path that Father Dempsey would have to walk down the road and up the long line of steps that led to the front door of his own home. Father Dempsey’s tall square house was perched high up on the hill. It was like a giant cuckoo clock keeping watch over the parish.

It used to be that Father Dempsey just came for lunch some Sundays. His mother felt that it was her duty to feed the parish priest occasionally because he was their neighbour. The priests before Father Dempsey had small hands and gentle manners. Father Dempsey smoked and swore and told stories in a bluff way that made his parents laugh. But then he’d started to go golfing with his father on the weekends and sometimes he would be chatting to his mother in the kitchen when he got home from school. And now they fell silent every time Niall walked into the room and he knew it was because they were talking about his father.

“Separation,” Niall whispered, as he leaned back in the swing and it spun around and the leaves above him dappled the sun. The last time he heard his parents fighting, his mother had used this word. “SEPA RATI ON.” He said the three parts of the word aloud, and there was something worryingly complete about the way the last part formed a word of its own.

He didn’t know anyone at school whose parents were separated except for Carl Crowley, and one of the boys in his class told him that was because Mrs Crowley had had an affair with a man in Galway and had gone to live with him. He tried to think about his own mother and father living apart but he could not imagine what that life looked like. He could not place himself within it. The blankness terrified him.

He heard a banging noise and slowed the spin of the swing. He looked down into Meehan’s back garden. Jason was kicking a football against the wall. He wore a long black Nirvana T-shirt. He kept flicking the ball up on to his toe and soloing it, then firing it at the wall. Niall watched him look up and chip the ball into his hands. He stood holding the ball against his hip.

Niall slipped off the swing and sidled down through the knotted forest floor. He sat himself on the wall of Meehan’s garden.

“Y’alright?” they said to each other at almost the same time.

Jason kicked the ball at the wall again, and it rebounded into his hands. He wore satin basketball shorts that hung down almost to his ankles like some kind of circus performer. His head of tight brown curls added to his clownish appearance. He had caught the sun and a smattering of freckles dotted his nose like they’d been drawn on. He was taller than when Niall had last seen him, and his chest and shoulders almost filled out his over-sized T-shirt.

“Did you watch the World Cup?” Jason asked.

“Yeah,” Niall said. “It was so annoying. My mother sat on the floor in front of the TV for the whole thing and screamed at the players. Every time one of our players ran up the pitch she rocked forwards, and whenever a Dutch player got near our goal she rocked back.” He leaned to and fro on the wall.

Jason laughed. “Your mother’s gas craic.”

“Yeah,” he said. “So what have you been up to?”

“Not much.” Jason bounced the ball a couple of times, then spun it on the tip of his finger and caught it between his hands. “What about yourself?”

“Not much. I’m going to Dublin next week for my birthday.”

“That’s class.”

“Yeah. Orla will probably bring me into town—take me shopping, maybe to the cinema. Did you see that film that was on telly a few weeks ago? Dead Calm?”

Jason was knocking the ball into the air with his fist and catching it again. “Was that the one on Channel 4? On the boat?” he asked, his eyes widening as he knocked the ball faster and faster into the air.

“Yeah, with Nicole Kidman.”

“And she got up on top of that fella and rode him!”

“Yeah.” Niall was laughing, kicking his legs back and forth.

“You didn’t really get to see her tits though.”

“No.”

“Have you ever seen a proper porno?” Jason asked, his voice lowered.

Niall stopped swinging his legs. “I’ve seen stuff on the satellite channels, but it’s kind of fuzzy—”

“No. Not like that! I mean films with people really shagging?”

Niall thought he was going to lose his balance. He jumped down off the wall. He put his hands in his pockets and scuffed the grass. “No,” he said, looking at the ground.

“Do you want to see one? Brendan got one last time the boat was in Amsterdam,” Jason said.

“Come on,” Jason said, nodding towards the house.

Niall watched Jason’s back draw away. Jason disappeared into the house and Niall ran after him.

The Meehans lived in an old two-storey cottage with thick stone walls. The house was shaded by trees and hedges on all sides, and Niall felt instantly cooler as he stepped through the back door. He followed Jason up a spiral staircase to a narrow landing, into the room where Jason and his brothers played computer games and watched films. A row of cupboards with latticed doors lined one wall, with sofa cushions and pillows covering the top. When they were younger he and Jason would remove all the items from the cupboards and pretend the doors were the hatches they had to climb through to enter their time machine. He climbed up on to the sofa cushions while Jason searched the cupboards beneath him. Jason’s back end poked out through the doors, his basketball shorts pouring over his ankles like a skirt. There was a table against the opposite wall with a television, a VCR, and a Nintendo with two plastic guns attached to it. A whorl of wires topped the Nintendo, the red guns planted in it, crossed at the barrel.

He could hear Jason sifting through objects, lifting and pulling and throwing things aside, until eventually his head emerged from the cupboard and he smiled up at him. He was holding a maroon cassette case. Jason crossed the room to the table. He removed the video from the case and Niall could see that the label read Crocodile Dundee. Jason slipped the video through the mouth of the VCR.

Niall swallowed as the television began to emit a low monotone buzz and the screen turned a lighter shade of grey. He wiped his sweating palms on the cushions and sat back against the cold wall. Jason pulled the blind on the window and the screen darkened. A puce background sprang up and yellow lettering writ itself across the screen: Cockodile Dundee.

“I’ll fast forward this bit,” Jason said. “It’s just about some eejit from Australia who goes to America and all these women want to ride him.”

Grey lines slithered down the screen. A man wearing a pair of blue jeans, a leather waistcoat and a cowboy hat, scurried along an endless highway, a bag slung over his shoulder. A car approached from a long distance away and pulled up beside him. Jason pressed play and sat beside Niall. He pressed himself into the corner, leaving a wide space between their bodies. He lay slouched, with just his shoulders against the wall, and Niall edged forward slightly to match his pose.

The woman driver of the car had a perm the colour of blackcurrant cordial. She wore glasses with blue plastic frames, and big square lenses, and her white blouse was almost entirely unbuttoned. She rolled down the window and the man folded his arms and leaned on the window frame. You could see then that his hat was trimmed with corks dangling from strings. A leather strap was tied around his right bicep. He had thin lips and stubble and his skin was tarnished like a copper pot. He tipped his hat to her. “G’day, he said. “You’re one good lookin’ Sheila.” But he didn’t sound like any of the people from the Australian soap operas that Niall liked to watch. And then the woman asked if he needed a lift and all of a sudden there was a flash of light and they were parked in a television studio made to look like the desert, with plastic cacti and painted boulders and a fake sunset. The woman had taken all of her clothes off and was kneeling on the driver’s seat with her buttocks pointing out the open car door. Niall had never seen a woman displayed in this way, had never imagined they could look this complicated; so many folds of skin all different shades of pink so unlike the rest of the woman’s snow-white body. The man was on the passenger side. Now he was only wearing his leather waistcoat and his hat. He had tipped back the seat and the woman had her face in his lap, and was making choking, gurgling noises, and the more she choked the more he pressed her head down and said, “Come on—suck my cack!” having entirely lost his Australian accent. When she did manage to pull her mouth away she drew strings of saliva with her. She yanked at him, with her fingers placed in a delicate way so that her pointed white fingernails never touched him. Her hand looked tiny.

“American’s all get their foreskins chopped off,” Jason said. “That’s why it looks like that.”

“Oh, yeah, I thought it looked a bit weird alright.”

He glanced sideways and saw that Jason had pushed down his shorts past his buttocks and was cupping himself with both hands. In the space between his hands and his T-shirt a thicket of hair sprouted as dense as the woman’s perm. Niall undid the button on his shorts and slipped them over his hips. He pulled his T-shirt down to his thighs.

The man and woman were out of the car now. They had laid a picnic blanket on the ground. The man was lying on his back and the woman was straddling him. He had finally taken off his hat. The woman’s breasts drooped down to her navel and a lip of fat sagged from her waist. The man was entirely hairless in the place where Jason had so much hair. The woman was lifting her hips and bearing down on him, and each time she made a sound like nothing Niall had ever heard before: "Oh nyeeeeeeaaaaahhhhhhh! Oh nyeeeeeeeaaaaahhhhhh!"

He could hear Jason panting. He inhaled and his breath seemed to get tangled up in Jason’s. He could hear the patter of skin against skin and out of the corner of his eye he could see that Jason’s shorts were down at his knees and that his knees were spread open stretching his underpants wide like a catapult. Niall moved his shorts and underpants up his legs and over his knees. They slid down his shins, hung from his toes for a second, and dropped to the floor.

HE WAS at the kitchen table, sitting on his hands—head bowed, eyes closed.

“Niall, I’ve left a fiver on top of the microwave for you to go and get a takeaway.”

He could smell his mother’s hand lotion.

“What’s wrong with you, Niall?”

He heard the swish of her palms rubbing together. “I have a headache.”

“Is it one of your migraines?”

He nodded slowly and looked up at her.

“Well there’s nothing else for it pet—take two Solpadeine and go lie down with the curtains closed. It’ll pass in a few hours. And your father will be home shortly.”

“Can I come with you?”

“Ah, Niall—sure you can’t come with me if you have a migraine. You’re better off where you are.”

“Please, mammy.’”

“Niall, you can’t come with me every week.”

She went to the medicine cabinet above the sink and broke two tablets form a foil packet.

“These classes are something I’m doing for myself,” she said, placing the tablets and a glass of water on the table in front of him. “I’ll check on you when I get home.” She picked up the white canvas bag she used to carry her pencils and sketchbooks and walked out the side door.

He stared at the two chalky white pills on the table. He imagined himself swallowing them, but he knew he would only throw them up. Painkillers never worked for his migraines—he had told his mother this.

He climbed the stairs to his bedroom. He drew the curtains against the evening sun. He slipped off his shoes and climbed into the bed and pulled the duvet over his head. A swarm of lights lit the blackness. He thought about going downstairs again to lock the side door, that way if someone came looking for him they would think the house was empty. If he lay where he was until the morning then all of this might pass. But then he heard the handle of the side door squeak, the hall door open, footsteps ascending the stairs. The lock on his bedroom door clicked.

“Niall? Are you alright?” he heard his father say, and he was reminded of Father Dempsey’s voice, that his father’s was muddied by years of smoking. He thought about being in the darkness of the confessional. But being in the confessional was like closing your eyes—it was not real darkness at all. You could be seen. And when you could be seen, you could be named, and after Niall confessed his sins and was offered his penance, Father Dempsey always said to him, “Goodbye now Niall.”

“Do you have one of your migraines?” his father asked, his voice closer.

Niall pulled down the covers and nodded.

“That’s a shame. Where’s your mother?”

“She’s at her drawing class.”

“Did she leave any dinner for me?”

He opened his eyes and examined his father’s face.

“Not to worry,” his father said. “I’ll look after myself.”

He pulled the covers over his head and listened to his father’s soft footsteps retreating, the door closing.

He was sweating beneath the covers and he thought about getting out of the bed and taking his clothes off but instead he flipped the duvet over onto the cool side. He curled up tightly and tried to think of what he would say when Mrs Meehan came looking for him, what excuse he could invent for why he had left his underpants on the floor of the games room. She had shouted up the stairs, “Are you there, Jason?” And Niall had panicked—jumped down from the sofa and pulled on his shorts and ran down the stairs, and he knew right away that he had left his pants behind but he was too scared to go back for them. And now Mrs Meehan would find them and ask Jason about them and come to the door of his house clutching his underpants in her fist. And she would name him. She would name him to his mother and father. She would name him like the boys on the main street. His mother would speak of him in hushed tones to Father Dempsey. Rooms would fall silent when he walked into them, and Jason would never talk to him again.

“Niall Keaveney is a poof,” he said to himself. “NIAL LKEA VENE YISA POOF.”

Alan Murrin is a fiction writer from Donegal. He is a graduate of the prose fiction masters at the University of East Anglia.

This story originally appeared in issue 11 of The Cardiff Review, the queer issue.

[after dawn] I listen for the fall of your feet I know your steps as well as my own gelled atoms lovely girl you are like water on stone with the singing bell of your pail in your white hand.

[enter a girl, who dips her pail three times into the water] drink from me, singing girl, you suck like a seal pup drink my lovely for beneath my low belly the tide washes in and out calm as a moonflood nothing can hurt you while you dip your pail into my water

[the girl tips the water into irrigation channels below the castle keep] drink and pour my sweet water on the land little girl singing like a bell nothing can hurt you

[the girl weeps] don’t look up wishing at the herring gulls my lovely, do not be fooled their white wings are not free watch: even they are shackled they cannot help but return to the sea tomorrow and all the days afterward

[enter the girl; the well sings] drink, lovely girl with the white hands do not chafe your mind at the horizon drink and pour your water on the land stay my lovely and suck your years into the sky and let the green fields flow from your singing pail drink and never stop you must not fly away for I and the green fields would weep for you

[the stage is empty. The well calls for the girl] lovely girl the morning is old and you do not come your pattering feet are silent as a dry river why do the gulls circle and cry out? my waters rise like blisters

I cannot hold them you must suck, singing girl like a bell swinging your empty pail

[the well’s voice begins to waver] the tide swells like a bell’s round belly I cannot stop her hunger she is coming up over the lip of the low hundred seeking you, licking her tongue on the stones Mererid!

[the well calls a warning over the sound of noisy waves] return or the sea will find you, lovely girl, and all your green fields your homesteads and horses and all your people, your men and your women and your babies, will be salted with her tears

[The girl does not come. A deluge floods the stage.]

Swansea’s Rae Howells is a poet and journalist. She has won the Welsh International and Rialto poetry competitions, and been shortlisted in the PENfro and Arvon competitions. Her work has appeared in the New Welsh Reader, The Rialto, Envoi, Marble, Poetry Ireland, The Bay, and New Welsh Review. Her pamphlet, five

Matthew Haigh

New Welsh Writers is an interview series in which we speak to new voices in Welsh literature, delving into how they got their start and what advice they might have for other emerging writers.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

When did you start writing?

MATTHEW HAIGH

It was late 2007, I had a copy of PJ Harvey’s White Chalk album, an ancient piano I’d bought from eBay, and depression. Besides looking for work I mostly spent my days listening to that haunting, gothic piano-lead music and writing little poems. I have no idea why I started writing poetry—I’d never had any interest in it until that point—but it was a constructive thing I could focus on.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What do you find are the most enjoyable and most challenging aspects of writing/being a writer?

MATTHEW HAIGH

The most enjoyable aspects for me are in the making. Maybe as a result of studying art and design in my youth I tend to approach writing more in a visual sense, or at least that’s how I made Death Magazine, my debut collection. Thinking in terms of blocks of text and how they’d look on the page and what imagery they evoked in my mind. Putting together the book was as much a work of design as it was of writing.

The main challenge for me has always been finding where my work fits—trying to break into certain publications with the type of poems I make. Last year the poet Chrissy Williams created Perverse—an online poetry magazine dedicated to more experimental work that went against the standard practice of what poetry is, and I placed some collage poems there that were made using episode guides from the TV show Golden Girls, and The Naked Lunch by William Burroughs. This is the kind of thing that’s been difficult to find, I suppose: publications that place an emphasis more on ideas and artistic play than emotive heft. Not to say experimental poetry can’t be emotive, but I think there should be more.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What starts a new piece of writing for you?

MATTHEW HAIGH

It’s usually a certain aesthetic. I don’t tend to go into writing with a specific message or motto or point to make—what I want to communicate is often more imagistic. So I might just have ideas of perfume adverts from the 90s, glossy magazines, muscles, a good violent shade of pink, some Giger-esque warping of the human body, or the pixellation of vintage video games. It changes all the time but I have definite constants.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Do you plan your writing or discover along the way?

MATTHEW HAIGH

I start with that initial “mood” and then I’ll spend a lot of time just listening to music or walking or drinking with friends, letting things come to me. So, for example I might just think to myself “I really like flowers at the moment”, or it could be, “futuristic, clean, wide open Nordic rainswept spaces” or “tar-black, sinister, Hans Bellmer-inspired body contortion”. Phrases like that just sit with me for days and eventually start becoming words. My ideas come so slowly, I annoy myself with how slow I am. But the ideas build and eventually coalesce into a poem or poems.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What has that path to publication been like? Can you speak to some of the challenges you faced?

MATTHEW HAIGH

The first time I ever submitted a piece of work was to Poetry Wales magazine, and I was met with a really positive reception from the editor at the time. I got a nice postcard back with a handwritten note saying that I piled the adjectives on too thick, but that I should keep going and submit again. The third time I submitted work I got an acceptance, which felt incredible. That gave me the confidence to just go off and submit everywhere. I got plenty of rejections, as is standard, but looking back now I know that the reason for most of the rejections was that I was pitching to the wrong places. You have to be sure the people you’re sending work to are the type of people who “get” what you’re doing. I’m quite resilient when it comes to rejection, rather than get downhearted about it I just think whatever and move on.

It used to be more difficult finding places to submit work to, but Twitter has been a boon for that—there are so many great indie places popping up who are happy to read work. The major challenge is keeping on—staying confident—believing in your work. I got so despondent for a while, but last year I just thought sod it and I sent work to Broken Sleep Books to see if they’d like to publish a pamphlet. Aaron Kent, the editor, said yes. Then a few weeks later the editor of Salt got in touch to see if I’d like to send him a manuscript for a full length collection. Death Magazine is what was born out of that.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Was there a moment when you started to think of yourself as a writer?

MATTHEW HAIGH

Not really. There’s this idea that you get to a point, eventually, where you’re like "Ok, I’m the master of this now, I know what I’m doing". It’s not really true. Everything is trial and error and experimenting and guesswork, over and over.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What role, if any, has Wales played in your writing?

MATTHEW HAIGH

That’s an interesting one! I’m not sure it has played a direct part in the writing itself. It plays more a part in the community aspect. I’ve been writing poetry for more than ten years now but it’s only in recent months I’ve attended poetry readings and read my own work aloud to an audience (I just never had the confidence before). There’s a much more active poetry scene in Wales than I even knew about, and lots of kind and supportive writers who champion each other’s work. This is still quite a new thing for me, but getting more involved in readings and being part of that community is something I’m looking forward to.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Has anything changed, in terms of how you approach writing, since you’ve been published?

MATTTHEW HAIGH

For sure—when I first had something published I was writing poetry as I understood it—poetry that I perceived to be “allowed” in a sense. My current feeling is more radical—I want to dismantle what poetry is to me, and do something as new as I can. I tried to strip out a lot of poetic conventions with Death Magazine, so a lot of the poems replicate the columns of text in magazines and don’t really use line breaks or anything like that. I get most excited when I look at something and wonder whether it’s a poem, and if not, what is it? That’s really exciting to me. I’m into the Brutalist approach at the moment—poetry that looks hard and sharp and cold. SJ Fowler was the last person I read who gave me that jolt of something original happening (I hope he doesn’t mind me describing his work as Brutalist).

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Which writers do you admire most, and why?

MATTHEW HAIGH

As a general rule, I love anyone who has a single-minded vision and pursues it 100 per cent. I adore Scott Walker, the musician, and how his latter albums are just so pitch black, they feel like slipping into an alternate reality. One of my favourite poets is Mark Waldron; his work is dark and humorous and bizarre, but to narrow it down specifically to what I like about him: he takes those odd tangents of thought we all probably have and pushes them until they blossom out into something really perverse. More recently I enjoyed reading All Fours by Nia Davies—apologies, I’m not a critic and can’t express my feelings like one, everything is a sort of image or aesthetic to me. So when I think of Nia’s writing I think of sharp angles and futuristic rooms and the music of a band like Autechre. Just stripped of standard sentiment and existing in its own weird sphere.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What advice do you have for other emerging writers?

MATTHEW HAIGH

The landscape is quite different now from when I started writing poetry. Now you have social media exploding with poetry, and it can feel pretty intense at times. Everyone and their uncle seems to be writing and getting published and there’s a constant pressure to be the next shining star of the poetry world, to be young, to be forever “emerging”. It’s a vanity thing, but I think it’s also quite dangerous for art. It’s not supposed to be competitive.

The paradox is that poetry is growing in popularity and you have so many avenues for it—but that can actually make it harder for anybody or anything to stand out, and good work gets lost. So many people, myself included, post the standard: “Happy to have a poem published in X magazine” and that’s great, but the volume of that is exhausting. And even if you don’t want to be competitive about it, that climate sort of forces your hand to do something extra if you want to be heard.

I think being quiet is quite radical now. I dip in and out of Twitter to get ideas for places to submit work to, but I mostly ignore it and try to concentrate on the actual writing. So my advice at the moment would be: don’t be afraid to be quiet or invisible while you work on your stuff, gather inspiration, and then pop your head up when you have something to say.

Edinburgh by Alexander Chee

Bloomsbury, £9.99

TRAUMA DOESN'T HAVE a clean end. Its affects are muddied, rippling out into the fabric of people’s lives in strange and ever-unforgiving ways. Sometimes victims feel as though they can paddle through it, other times they’re anchored to the sea bed.

The depiction of trauma in Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh feels both visceral and confessional. In interviews since the book’s original US publication in 2001, Chee has recounted a number of run-ins with fellow writers and readers who struggle to stomach the relationship between the novel’s plot and his own experiences.The novel opens by centring on the ethnicity of protagonist—the queer, coming-of-age Aphias—weaving in references to his Korean heritage and his struggle to find a place in America. Throughout the opening pages of Edinburgh, it feels as though Aphias is lost somewhere in the cultural overlaps of these two worlds.

Chee’s prose, however, is never imbued with a sense of strain; the language is stripped-back, but gently colourful, like a tree on the cusp of shedding. The careful yet expressive writing can be summarised in the first few pages which are, like much of the novel, doused in a filmic sense of nostalgia. Chee evaluates the past through one position: as observer. His writing gives the same sort of impression people get from holding an old photo album or encountering a long-forgotten scent; it’s rigidly analytical, with Chee inviting the reader to watch the past with himself, the writer, just as disconnected as them.

What gives Edinburgh its staying power, though, is the way Chee negotiates his own past through the book’s trauma. The protagonist, along with a cohort of his choir friends—his best friend and first love, Peter, included—are regularly sexually assaulted by their adult choir leader, Big Eric. The subject matter of this book does not skirt the borders or allude to the event; it tackles their past head-on, unflinchingly. Aphias’s difficulty in uncoupling his association of homosexuality with abuse is particularly harrowing, but Chee’s cast of characters are not solely victims. They are a group of boys that negotiated these turbulent years with bravery, but the rawest sense of despair is how, despite reverting into their youthful sense of masculine stoicism, it proves to be a short-term solution with disastrous long-term consequences.

While the shadow of Big Eric casts itself over the entire story, it isn’t the entire tale. Edinburgh’s honesty extends to its depictions of the North-East, paying both tribute and criticism of this oft-forgotten cross-section of America’s working-class roots. Chee’s depiction of Maine is told through the lens of himself as an Asian-American, delicately torn between his Korean roots and his adoption of America’s most-loved pastimes. A particularly poignant moment occurs when Aphias sends a letter to a distant cousin in Korea in the form of a comic book sketch of his own; it’s an attempt the boy makes to form a connection with his Asian heritage through the means of American art, leaving his attempt simultaneously sincere yet diluted.

Despite being well-connected to his Korean family, Aphias feels thoroughly lost by his place in the world. On the one hand, he’s a distinctly East coast boy: he reads comics, he attends choir, he rides bikes, he’s somewhat of an adrenaline junky. On the other, he’s a Korean boy lost in a milieu that desires him to reject his ethnicity. Underpinning all this is his struggle to come to terms with his primordial sexuality. This is all bubbling under the surface of Edinburgh, until Big Eric lights the fuse. Suddenly, Chee pushes the reader forward to Aphias’s adulthood.

To venture any more into the book’s jump forward would likely spoil a prospective reader’s enjoyment of Edinburgh. What the jump does teach us, though, is that time doesn’t always heal wounds; sometimes time just infects them. What Chee has achieved with Edinburgh’s dual timelines and brave writing, however, is a deeply personal reflection on what it means to be a victim and how, inevitably, we must turn around and look our own pasts in the eye.

Ben Newman is a freelance journalist and writer. His particular interests in fiction writing include modern technology, the internet, and the changing relationship between man and nature in an increasingly digitised world. Loathes adverbs, but only when he uses them.

I'M ALWAYS QUITE

Firstly, I was lured in by the classist controversy surrounding its win. What is a difficult book, after all? And shouldn’t it be difficult books, the ones that push boundaries and ask us to question literature as a medium, that win these prizes? Shouldn’t it be books, and writers, who seek to open us up as readers that get the plaudits? Shouldn’t it be books that remind us (or teach us) that the beauty of writing is not the art of joining works together until they make pretty sentences? I liked that I read somewhere, in response to a London critic who said the book was “difficult”, that an Irish critic just said it was “Irish”. So there’s that going on—the pricking of the bubble of the London literati—and I enjoy seeing that. I enjoy that we live in times where things like classism can be openly addressed in the arts—that they are debated and not just the rasion d’etre of a few grizzled artists fighting the good fight.

So what am I thinking of Milkman as I take a slow stroll through it? I am finding it exhilarating, and I’m reading it slowly because I want to get into every nook and cranny of its craft. It’s a book about the Troubles in Northern Island, yes, but it seems to be doing something with it that is, okay, crucially Joycean, but is also flexing outside of that. Burns doesn’t seem interested in explaining any of this world to you, she is in the thick of it, in the mud of the human experience from the start, and there are no reference points. I noticed one reviewer on Amazon disparagingly wrote about it as a Dystopia and I’m not sure they had entirely grasped it’s not a sci-fi novel. But Milkman has that kind of claustrophobia to it, and it has that kind of world-building, as if the bricks and mortar are going up behind you, in the shadows, as the action keeps you uncomfortably focused on the things in front. For such a rich prose style, there is something arid about it.

I have had a fascination with long sentences for a couple of decades—something I never really incorporate into my own work—but it reached an apex ten years ago or so when Bolaño dropped that 5 page sentence in the first book of his 2666. I studied that (in translation) over and over again. Burns doesn’t come near that length, but her sentences have a vocal quality that snaps in the wind. I just get so pumped when reading it. I used to have a rule that I would not read novels while I was working on one, because I always feared I would end up mimicking a voice I fell for. (This can work to your advantage of course, and a slow day can always be given an injection of adrenaline by picking through a couple of paragraphs of one of the great stylists). But if I were deep into writing a novel, I would stick to non-fiction books and poetry for my reading. But for the last two or three years the novel-writing has been breathless for me, and I am at work on one right now—I’m taking an hour out to write this—so I have had to read novels alongside or not read them at all. And I’ve tried to keep it detached—recently books like William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and a really dark Pat Barker novella (Blow Your House Down—my god that was depressing!)—and I thought I was keeping equally detached with Burns. But I already feel that narrative voice make its way into my writing. I’m happy with it though, as it seems to have given my narrator an extra swagger. And it’s not like my narrator now apes Burns’, but rather as I write a feel a little bit looser in the shoulders, my fingers go over the keys with a bit more of a trip.

And Milkman is funny. Did I mention how funny it is? A reminder that humour always exists, and it’s important to not write humourless books, because they are disingenuous. I think Milkman will be a book that becomes more important to me over time, and for the whole time I’m trying to write novels.

Gary Raymond is a novelist, critic, and broadcaster. He is editor of Wales Arts Review, and presenter of BBC Radio Wales’ The Review Show. His latest novel, The Golden Orphans (2018), is available from Parthian Books.

When I miss you, I get up onto a sleigh,

command reindeer to charge backwards

twenty-three years, reconstruct how you sang

La Paloma when braising your pheasant

—without commenting on my vegan soup—

the way you puffed like a bottlenose dolphin

blowing bubble rings when you saw the baby

pig in the woods…the uh-hum you grunted

through zipped lips when I talked about

Instagram... I sailed through the Land

of Silence, laughed at your BBC vowels,

swore at your hunt-and-peck on the keyboard…

I still get up at 2am, fluff the empty pillow next to me…

Were your vocal chords bent into a spherical shape or how

come there was such a depth to your voice ‒ and yet

such a high pitch in your off-tune whistling?

I ride in the white land with the jingling

of sounds that even after the freezing halt

can still signal your presence.

Eleni Cay is a Slovakian-born poet living in the UK. Her poems were published in three pamphlets by Westbury Arts Centre and Eyewear Press. Eleni is known for her film poems, dance poems and multimedia poetry, which have been screened at international festivals and featured on Button Poetry. She has been invited to read her poetry at the Harvard University, International Ars Poetica Festival, Frankfurt Book Fair, Villa Trebitsch in Vienna, Blackwell's in Manchester, Poetry Cafe in London and many other beautiful venues.

Dan Summers

New Welsh Writers is an interview series in which we speak to new voices in Welsh literature, delving into how they got their start and what advice they might have for other emerging writers.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

When did you start writing?

DAN SUMMERS

I started a blog writing celebrity satire articles aged 33.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What do you find are the most enjoyable and most challenging aspects of writing/being a writer?

DAN SUMMERS

The most enjoyable aspect of writing is creating something out of nothing. I’ve always loved creating characters and if I can use elements of some of the crazy individuals I’ve been lucky (or misfortunate) enough to have known over the years then all the better. The most challenging aspect of writing is finding the time and making sure you’ve hit all your deadlines.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

When and where do you write?

DAN SUMMERS

Anytime and anywhere I can squeeze it in! I have three young children so I grab any available opportunity. I seem to produce my best work when in a crowded public setting, like a busy cafe or a pub.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What starts a new piece of writing for you?

DAN SUMMERS

A memory of a situation, an introduction to a new person or a place or perhaps a conversation with an old friend about something I’d completely forgotten. It depends on what format I’m writing in.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Do you plan your writing or discover along the way?

DAN SUMMERS

More often than not I’ll build up several bits of dialogue over time using the Notes app on my iPhone, then once I have enough to sketch out a scene I’ll switch to Final Draft. Other times, I’ll have a full-blown idea and go straight to Final Draft. It depends on whether I’m writing an article, a sketch, a full episode, or as I’m doing at the moment, a feature-length screenplay.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What has that path to publication been like? Can you speak to some of the challenges you faced?

DAN SUMMERS

In the beginning, you feel like nobody is reading anything you’re doing and it can feel a bit bleak. I started questioning what I was doing and if it was actually any good. Then I wrote a piece for a website about an astronaut getting an extremely high mobile phone bill for using data outside of his home network. It got loads of nice feedback, a six-figure hit rate and really spurred me on. I think it's important to get feedback on what you’re writing, even if it's from your partner or friends.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Was there a moment when you started to think of yourself as a writer?

DAN SUMMERS

I’ve always thought of myself as "not proper" because I didn’t study English at University and started out writing blogs and satire articles. I guess the first time I actually felt like a writer was on set whilst filming a pilot for Welsh comedy MumDem and one of the actors said to me: “I love this character and I love the terrible things he does. How do you come up with this stuff?” That was nice. Seeing characters you’ve created and stories you’ve written come to life on screen is probably one of the best feelings in the world. But I also really enjoy getting good feedback on articles I’ve written, too. There are so many things I love about writing.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What role, if any, has Wales played in your writing?

DAN SUMMERS

Wales has played a huge role in my writing. Whilst living in Cardiff, I came up with the ideas for the two pilots we’ve shot (MumDem and Spirit Breaker). There’s so much scope for humour in the Welsh culture and I love how blatant and to the point Welsh people can be. It’s refreshing and lots of fun to write. Cardiff has an extremely creative vibe going on at the moment and I find it inspiring to be amongst it.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Has anything changed, in terms of how you approach writing, since you’ve been published?

DAN SUMMERS

Nowadays I don’t delete anything! I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve revisited and recycled something. I think I have more confidence in my writing these days, but there are occasions when I write something and think “What a load of rubbish” and abandon it, only to come back to it later. Or not. That happens a fair bit, too.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Which writers do you admire most, and why?

DAN SUMMERS

I love Sam Bain and Jessie Armstrong; their style of mundane madness is just great. Graham Linehan is amazing, very off-the-wall and very funny. Even though he hasn’t written on it for years, I still laugh at Oli Beale’s "football" blog.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What advice do you have for other emerging writers?

DAN SUMMERS

Write every day, even if it’s one paragraph. Don’t drink too much booze and try not to get bad credit, you never know when you’ll need to borrow some cash to get a project off the ground. Don’t criticise anyone too severely, it can bite you in the backside later on.

Dan Summers is an award-winning British comedy writer. He began writing for satire magazines The Shame and The Noos before progressing to TV (2015’s MumDem and 2018’s Spirit Breaker) and film (2018’s The Job Interview). His pilot for Spirit Breaker, starring Peep Show’s Liam Noble, is currently showing on Amazon Prime Video in the UK and USA.

Instead, vocals rise from the space between the seats

in plumes, obscuring him from view. You grip the steering wheel

until it gasps. Percussion is the turn signal clicking reminders

of every time you could’ve said it, could still leave this moment

in a turn lane. Approaching the beach are pad chords

like tumbling through waves, the crown of your head

hitting the bottom. Where rhythm lulls you, painless.

The verse burns as the clichéd sunset; close to bearable

but not the album art you wanted. The vocals (you)

reenter as if clinging to a ladder in the wind, arms heavy,

rungs unwelcoming. Wanting to let go. Even more so when

he won’t not look away, stop nodding to the syncopation

of your words. You sing his part like always:

flat, through the nose, unconvincing. Eventually—

eventually there’s the instrumental of driving him home,

his caved-in mouth close to falling on your name. Both waiting

to be rubble. Peel hands from your bones and forget to whisper

goodbye. Rather, it burns in your wildfire lungs. Listen:

the guitar melody chokes on your fingers. Stuck to the strings,

savouring the vibration. The thrum against them, alone.

CD Eskilson is a queer writer, educator, and editor living near Los Angeles, California, where they are an associate editor for the Exposition Review. CD’s work has appeared in Teen Vogue, After the Pause, 30 N, and elsewhere. They like reenacting David Lynch movies and drinking coffee.

*“White Ferrari” by Frank Ocean, Blonde (2016)

In Her Shambles, Elizabeth Parker

Seren, £9.99

THE TIGHTLY WOVEN POEMS Gabriel Rossetti); the engagingly direct ("Rescues"); and the tantalisingly oblique ("Dry"). But while there is no obvious theme in Parker’s collection, there is the emergence of a confident and accomplished voice.

If one of the duties of the poet is to make us see the world afresh, then Parker’s imagery is capable of rescuing us from the expected to introduce the new. In "Rescues", an homage to her father’s kindness to animals and to his daughters, for instance, pipistrelle bats become "black fruits he gently unpeeled/to show us the wings laced with limbs". Birds, mice and shrews are rescued from the "white portcullis of the cat’s teeth". In "Sipped" a chicken cooking in the oven is "sweating to a crisp". This is no enamelled "poesy", a striving for effect. Parker is an acute observer of objects, relationships and moods, with a canny skill in exploiting the associative power of extended metaphors to unpick the trajectory of a relationship.

As to form, Parker favours stanzaic free verse, predominantly unrhymed and often sparsely punctuated. Consider this stanza from "Piano":

Every week we sat beside a tutor

with a strand off spittle

strung between her long front teeth.

Resonance and unity through phonic chiming, striking images and subtle cadence nail dislike of the tutor through simple physical description.

Poems such as "Rescues" and "Home to the Garden Centre The Forest of Dean" assume a seemingly straightforward autobiographical "my" and "we", respectively. And in "Clasp" and "Clean", Parker writes touchingly in elegiac mood on loss and evocations of the absent partner prompted by everyday material objects; his clasp knife in "Clasp" and a lingering scent of Aramis aftershave in "Clean". However, one of her more observable fascinations is with pronouns such as "she" and "he", which at once cunningly suggest identity but limit specific identification. Her intriguing "White Vase", for example, is a poem about introversion, power and pathology communicated through the voice of a detached observer. A female potter "blooms" a vase, in which the "he" of the poem is a shadowy figure who remains distanced throughout: she would "not let him near it". "She never drops his shop bouquet/ through its slim neck", preferring her own "garden flowers and leggy weeds". Parker’s ability to charge factual detail with inner energy and implication is wonderfully apparent in the closing verses. The vase becomes a reflection of the potter’s possessiveness: "Even a window/ reflected on its glaze/ annoys her". Does the vase represent her desire for inviolable perfection; her emotional sterility; her desire to control; her fear of intimacy after personal violation—"the vase is the only place she can keep unmarked"? And we wonder if she is the agent or the victim in the relationship. To be told would be to "own" the poem. Parker wisely remains silent, and lets the poem work its suggestive magic.

Parker also loves the ambiguity of first person pronouns that lack specific gender definition. The dynamic between “I” and “you” or “him” in several poems challenges the gender assumptions we make when we read. In "Lasagne", for instance, the "I" figure is engaged in preparing an evening meal for "him", as he "pulls a cord/ turning blinds". Read one way, they are a man and woman engaged in mundane everyday events, and it is a poem about comforting and rather loving routine. Read another, they are an observation on the assigning of culturally determined roles within an inter-gender relationship: "I peg pasta/ between fingers and thumbs/ lay it down for him". Read yet another way, there is nothing to say that the "I" figure is not another male, in which case the poem’s gender dynamic shifts markedly to indicate that those culturally determined roles are under threat. Parker delights in exploiting the capacity of such language to be at once seemingly direct yet tantalisingly evasive. It invites us to ponder how we read, and reminds us that we bring to our reading, to language, all kinds of unexamined assumptions, convictions, prejudices even.

Parker approaches the same topic in "Manus", a poem named for the Latin word for hands. The domestic location is precisely established: the observer scrutinises the hands of the lover playing the piano. The poem meditates on the extraordinary uses of the human hand, but focuses finally on its power for erotic stimulation, and possible dissimulation. The observer pads "fingertips over creases/ in the spongy saddle of your thumb", but "shimmers/ when you touch my face/ with a pressure light as petals". Touch is connection, a kind of intimacy. And yet, the "I" poses the uneasy question: "How much do you hold back/ distilled in fingertips?". Parker never specifies the gender of the "I" and the "you"—who is the watcher, who the watched? Are both female, both male, a man and a woman, in which case which is which? Instead, she invites the reader to consider another, more intimate, example of the hand as agent of power: "conspiring to do nothing more/ than quicken my pulse".

Elsewhere, in poems like "Chatelaine", "She Paints Him", and "Writing Him Out", Parker connects women with the creative arts, especially writing, and power. "Writing Him Out" offers a variation on the "I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair" thread of female retribution, but instead of shampoo Parker’s "I" uses the cathartic power of language to clean in water the nib she has used in writing him out of her life, so that "The plughole glugged up stained water/ then swallowed him down for good".

Parker’s interest in woman as both victim and communicator is further explored through the fate of Lavinia, Titus’s virginal daughter, in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. In the play, Demetrius reminds Chiron on the morning of a hunt that they "hope to pluck a dainty doe to ground", the doe being Lavinia: the male as unconscionable predator. Later, after brutally raping her, they cut off her tongue and hands to silence her. Lavinia defiantly uses every means possible to identify her violators, and in this way "writes". In Parker’s poems "Following Lavinia" and "Lavinia Writes", Lavinia as victim and avatar, the urge to communicate, and the poems’ tightly controlled rhythmic forms coalesce to shattering effect.

"Following Lavinia" comprises four short, sequential poems charting Parker’s developing relationship with the Lavinia figure. The first three, all "I" poems, reference John, Neil, and Paul whose behaviour as men is framed by Parker’s persistent reading about or watching in performance the hunt scene in Titus where the two male characters seal Lavinia’s fate. It is a fascination bordering on obsession. The first poem,"John", is set "after John moved out". No hint is given as to the reason, but through the poem’s oblique method the pain of his departure is communicated through lingering attachment to spaces he occupied and objects he touched: "I read the hunt while spotting grazes on paint/ pale patches on the carpet/ mapping where his furniture stood". The implication is of betrayal, abandonment and loneliness, a withdrawal into oneself after being hurt and, through the hunt as trope, a sense of being, like Lavinia, merely an object in male eyes.

Neil, directing the play at the Edinburgh Festival, "refused to cut her uncle’s elegy/ to her limbs, her voice". Lavinia’s uncle Marcus’s elegiac speech on the horror of what has happened to her is fifty seven lines long and often cut from productions, but thoughtful Neil "laid the lyric gently on her cheek", and stands in opposition to the shadowy John.

A hungover Paul leaves a screened production when "they staked [Lavinia] out/ on silvered wetland". For the "I" subject it is a moment of revelation regarding Paul’s deficiencies, but is more than compensated for her by Lavinia’s "new language/ scribbling from her mouth/ her wrists/ her fluent heart"; "scribbling" not "dribbling", such a small but wonderfully resonant touch. In a manner of speaking, Lavinia "writes". In the final poem,"Their Names", she actually does. The poem is prefaced by a stage direction from the play; "She takes the staff in her mouth, and guides it with her stumps, and writes". Parker switches the viewpoint from the "I" to the "she" in this poem, and the focus is directly on Lavinia as exemplar of the woman determined to express herself, even if foiled on this occasion when the sea "blanked the beach to a nonsense of weed".

"Lavinia Writes" is a blasting, surreal, first-person lyric in which it is almost as though the "I" subject and Lavinia become indissolubly merged. It rejects all attempts by the sinister "they" to conventionalise and contain women’s insistence on expressing themselves. "I am told ... I refuse". It is a voice like nothing else in Parker’s collection, a voice of controlled fury and inviolable intent. The "I" subject picks "at the stitches/ in the root of my stolen tongue" and writes in blood: "words pump/ breach the dam/ fill fibres, glut pores". Compromise is rejected: "They sew me up again/ offer a fountain pen./ I refuse ink,/ tear their neat stitcheries". It is self-expression through willing self-violation—"I tear more, free more/ until I am fluent"—and it is terrifying, exhilarating and unstoppable.

In this collection, Parker’s poems pulse with strong feeling filtered through a cool intellect. We see her establishing distinctive styles and tones across a range of subjects. In "Hues", she suspends her fascination with words as forensic tools for immersion in natural colours, "a fusion of greens", but nonetheless promises: "We would return to names". After reading this fine collection, let us hope so.

After a career teaching, lecturing, writing textbooks and study guides, John Perrott Jenkins completed a PhD at Cardiff University on the industrial Welsh novel. Forthcoming articles are on the novelists Ron Berry and Menna Gallie.

Kneel

In Sunday School today I called her name,

Miss Hooker's, but only Miss Hooker since

I don't know her first. You could say I fell

asleep because that's what happened although

it didn't last for long and when I woke

I guess only seconds had passed but still

enough of them to get Miss Hooker from

behind her fake wood desk over to me.

She stood over me with her arms crossed which

might've been painful because her chest's big

but anyway when I opened my eyes

there she blew and with a frown on her face

and, what the hell, her whole body frowning

so I thought fast and smiled like a baby,

her baby, her first baby, she hasn't

got any so she looked astonished and

then smiled back at me so my hasty plan

worked, if it was a plan at all and not

a miracle from God but then again

it could've been Satan made me so quick

but it doesn't really matter, at least

not now, I guess I'll have to wait until

I'm dead to know, when it will be too late

if I'm wrong. I'd ask Miss Hooker herself

but after Sunday School she made me kneel

on the old hard linoleum of our

portable classroom and pray about my

sleepiness. I peeked at her with her eyes

closed. She looked like a sleeping baby but

of course she was speaking the Lord’s Prayer

like a grownup and made me fall again.

Green

When Miss Hooker dies I'm not going to

her funeral, I'd rather remember

her alive, she's my Sunday School teacher

and at 25 she's lived long enough

I guess, I'm only 10 so there's some time

to go but I've heard that at funerals

a dead person's body looks pretty good

and sometimes better than when he was

alive, or she, as if they didn't die

at all or are only asleep and if

you looked too closely at her or you breathed

on her she'd wake or at least open her eyes,

or him and him and he'd and his, the truth

is that the body's dead and the soul

goes to Heaven—at least in Miss Hooker's

case, she's a cinch, she works for our church and

God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost--or

Hell, which is likely where I'll wind up if

I don't get saved, Miss Hooker tells me so

after almost every Sunday School class

and all I ever say back to her is

Yes ma'am, it's time for me to walk home now

and she says, Be careful on the turnpike as if she knows all about getting run

over herself. I wonder how she'll die

but I guess when she's dead it won't matter,

at least not to her up there in Heaven

and looking down on me, maybe in class

with some other Sunday School teacher and

I hope she won't get jealous, I love her

enough to quit God completely. Amen.

Gale Acuff has had poetry published in Ascent, McNeese Review, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Weber, Maryland Poetry Review, Florida Review, Slant, Carolina Quarterly, Arkansas Review, South Dakota Review, Orbis, and many other journals. He has authored three books of poetry: Buffalo Nickel (BrickHouse Press, 2004), The Weight of the World (BrickHouse, 2006), and The Story of My Lives (BrickHouse, 2008). Gale has also taught university English in the US, China, and the Palestinian West Bank.

Matthew David Scott, onthecrowd.com

New Welsh Writers is an interview series in which we speak to new voices in Welsh literature, delving into how they got their start and what advice they might have for other emerging writers.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

When did you start writing?

MATTHEW DAVID SCOTT

I suppose everyone started writing at school, didn’t they? The first story I remember writing was in infants, and it was about an elephant. I used four fingers of space between each word so it would seem longer, and I got shouted at.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What do you find are the most enjoyable and most challenging aspects of writing/being a writer?

MATTHEW DAVID SCOTT

The most enjoyable thing is the act of writing itself: being totally with the words and nothing else. The most challenging thing, for me, is time. I’ve never not had a job while writing. And I know that goes for most people, and they are probably much more disciplined than I am, but I’ve noticed as I’ve got older and become a dad that I find it really hard to find the time. In 2009 I published a novel, wrote three plays, and had a full time job. In the last couple of years, I think I’ve written three short stories. And when I say time, of course I mean money. If I didn’t have to work all week I’d probably have written at least four.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

When and where do you write?

MATTHEW DAVID SCOTT

When? See above. When I can. As for where: I like to write lying down. In bed, on the couch, as long as I’m horizontal I’m good. I’m like Marvin Gaye in that regard, as well as in many other ways also.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What starts a new piece of writing for you?

MATTHEW DAVID SCOTT

I have no idea. But I know by the time it’s finished, whatever started it will seldom still be there.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Do you plan your writing or discover along the way?

MATTHEW DAVID SCOTT

I tend to have an idea, but I don’t write it down into an actual plan. I did for my first novel. I actually found those notes while packing after a recent house move and I was pleased to see that even way back then I was ditching the plan as quickly as possible: it bore little resemblance to the finished thing.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What has that path to publication been like? Can you speak to some of the challenges you faced?

MATTHEW DAVID SCOTT

I have been published and have been very, very lucky. Parthian have published both of my novels so far and, way back when, they used to have a stall in The Hayes in Cardiff—I want to say at Christmas but I don’t know if I’m remembering it that way in the hope of lashing on even more syrupy metaphor—and actual published writers would critique your work if you dropped off a few pages. This one day, Niall Griffiths was the writer on the stall and I was a huge fan so left the first ten pages of Playing Mercy with him. When I came back he asked me to go for a pint and recommended that I get the full manuscript into Parthian as soon as possible. I was then lucky enough to work with the brilliant Gwen Davies as editor—now of the New Welsh Review—on getting that manuscript into shape and out into the world. Others have much greater challenges than I’ve ever had, so I wouldn’t really want to talk about that. I’ve been a lucky boy.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Was there a moment when you started to think of yourself as a writer?

MATTHEW DAVID SCOTT

Drinking red wine and listening to jazz in my mum and dad’s front room while back for a reading week in my first year at university is probably the most I’ve ever felt like a writer.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What role, if any, has Wales played in your writing?

MATTHEW DAVID SCOTT

I wouldn’t be published if I hadn’t moved to Wales. I don’t think. Maybe not. None of my theatre work with Slung Low has come to Wales, which sometimes feels a bit weird, so I’d have probably been writing theatre still. But I was lucky to be surrounded by a great many fantastic writers when I moved here and first got published: Rachel Trezise, lloyd robson, Rob Lewis, John Williams, Des Barry… all more than up for help, advice and pints. I also got to put on the Balloon series of nights with Matt Jarrett, which allowed me to have some of my favourite writers come to town such as Willy Vlautin and Richard Milward. We put on Kayo Chingonyi, the most recent winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize, at a boxing/wrestling-themed poetry barbecue at Gwdihw back in 2010. An enormous John Cena duvet cover was the backdrop. In fact, Balloon is only semi-retired. We should maybe do something again. But then again there are loads of great young writers in Wales at the moment and I mostly just think, "Well I’m forty now; let that lot put on Chris Killen in Clwb with a noise band that only play in their pants".

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Has anything changed, in terms of how you approach writing, since you’ve been published?

MATTHEW DAVID SCOTT

For a while it did. And not just published but produced: I’ve written more plays than books, and those commissions and deadlines do take their toll, I found. I know, I know: moaning about having to work when you want to write but then moaning about people actually paying you money to write. What can I say? I need a patron. But in all seriousness, that work-rate, on top of a pretty full-on full time job, did knock the joy out of it for me for a while. I had a good break from writing anything and it took me a couple of years to work out that the just writing bit was the part I most enjoyed. Perhaps the only bit I really do enjoy. So even though I was complaining about being much slower in recent years, thats actually been a conscious choice. I tend to only write when I want to nowadays, otherwise it drives me a bit mad.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Which writers do you admire most, and why?

MATTHEW DAVID SCOTT

An impossible question to answer really. I’m a reader before a writer. I think all writers should be. I love Willy Vlautin, as I’ve previously mentioned. Nelson Algren’s The Man With The Golden Arm, and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison are two of my favourite novels. I find Gwendoline Riley’s writing terrifyingly great. I’ve recently finished Gerald Murnane’s collected short stories, and he’s one of those writers that makes you start wondering if the thing you were doing before reading him was reading at all. Gary Owen is a brilliant writer—because playwrights are writers, too. Oh, there are just too many. But I’m going to say Niall Griffiths for his incredible taste and talent-spotting abilities.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What advice do you have for other emerging writers?

MATTHEW DAVID SCOTT

I’d never presume to advise anyone on how to do this silly thing.

Matthew David Scott is a novelist, playwright and founder member of the award-winning theatre company, Slung Low. He is a recipient of the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award and his first novel, Playing Mercy

i)

First I was shown a world through a window,

invited to witness at seventeen

how one woman’s heat could be passed

to another, the comfort and risk

of a closed door, delicate and sweet

as a promise. The way soft lighting

can bruise silence into a throat;

signposts in The Yellow Room

all pointing to images in my own mirror.

Stanzas thick with language I ached

to translate and when I finally found the words,

tasted them in the curve of a pale neck,

I spoke them aloud, not in my voice but hers,

recognised the rabbit’s foot dim with dust,

cooling jewels alone in their beds and

all night I felt their absence and I burned.

ii)

Years later love led me to where women

waited with children young like mine,

their lexicon full of all I couldn’t name,

handed over heavy as bad news.

Details penned precisely, I read

till I understood the burning in my gut.

The loss they knew, those women

who loved with an almost fearful love.

They filled their books with ways my own parents

remembered their small son, gone too soon from them.

These women put into words

what a swing looks like when a child

no longer plays in it, how bags of clothes

drag in a tearful hoisting to an attic’s dark.

One assured that the art of losing isn’t hard to master,

but how wrong she turned out to be, how wrong.

Liz Quirke lives with her wife and daughters in Spiddal, Galway. She is pursuing a PhD through Creative Practice (Poetry) at NUI Galway. Her debut collection is The Road, Slowly (Salmon Poetry). Quirke was nominated for a Hennessy Award in 2016 and won the 2017 Listowel Writers’ Week Originals Short Poem Prize.

Dale Frances Hay reading at First Thursday, Chapter Arts Centre

New Welsh Writers is an interview series in which we speak to new voices in Welsh literature, delving into how they got their start and what advice they might have for other emerging writers.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

When did you start writing?

DALE FRANCES HAY

I’ve been writing fiction off and on since childhood; when I was six years old, I folded a piece of paper in half and wrote what I considered to be a book on the resulting four pages. I started writing my first novel for the fun of it, as a break from the academic writing I did for my actual job. I began to learn more about writing fiction when I took a Lifelong Learning course at Cardiff University.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What do you find are the most enjoyable and most challenging aspects of writing/being a writer?

DALE FRANCES HAY

The most enjoyable part of writing fiction is imagining interesting people who appear in your head, start talking in their own distinctive voices, and then take on a life of their own that you must record as faithfully as possible, working out the plot so that story does not betray the characters.

The most challenging aspect is the fallow period between projects when you think you may never generate another idea that could turn into a story. But then you do.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

When and where do you write?

DALE FRANCES HAY

I write notes and plot outlines and write rough drafts of scenes while drinking coffee in my favourite cafes. I then type up those drafts, editing as I go.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What starts a new piece of writing for you?

DALE FRANCES HAY

Most of my short fiction began with a prompt, either a picture or a set of words, often in the context of a writing game played monthly with other members of my Cardiff writing group over the last few years. My four novels all started with visual images: a scientist receiving messages on a screen on her desk (okay, it was the seventies when this was unimaginably futuristic); a teenage girl staring at a horseshoe crab; a young woman in a ball gown riding a mechanical bull; and a blue baby lying on the Gorsedd Stones in Bute Park.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Do you plan your writing or discover along the way?

DALE FRANCES HAY

I make a lot of notes and write plot outlines, but then make discoveries along the way that lead to unravelling and modifying the initial attempt at a plot. My novels often follow a clear timeline that helps me plan the characters’ journeys, while still leaving room for side trips.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What has that path to publication been like? Can you speak to some of the challenges you faced?

DALE FRANCES HAY

The Lifelong Learning course at Cardiff University, which was taught by Richard Asplin, was the first time I even thought about trying to publish something that I had written. I followed that up by joining a writing group, going to two Arvon Foundation courses in Scotland, and a couple of writing weeks in the US; these experiences gave me a whole community of fellow writers. About six years ago, I started sending out pieces of flash fiction and short stories, and several were published in online journals in the US and UK. I was particularly pleased to have a story accepted in an anthology of work from the Welsh Short Story Network, edited by Barrie Llewellyn, and a story called ‘The Witches of Cardiff’ published in The Lampeter Review.

The first novel I wrote was something like a "starter pancake", a learning experience more than something that was publishable. I did pitch my second novel, a literary novel with each chapter set against the background of a US Presidential Election, with encouragement and requests for more material, but no agent offering representation. I then began another project for an online novel-writing course, a speculative novel about life in Cardiff following Brexit and the break-up of the United Kingdom. This eventually became my debut novel, The Night Fogs.

When I was first sending out query letters about The Night Fogs, a friend sent me an article about small literary presses in the UK which included a description of Holland House books; they were developing a literary science fiction imprint. I thought this might be a good fit for my book. And then world events began to echo the fictional world of my book. I submitted the first three chapters to Holland House during the week after the 2016 Referendum; within days, the Editor, Robert Peett, asked for the full manuscript. He then expressed some concern that the plot of the book was almost too timely, but after more deliberation The Night Fogs was published in July 2018, under the main literary fiction imprint. Working with Holland House has been an exceptionally positive experience.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Was there a moment when you started to think of yourself as a writer?

DALE FRANCES HAY

I have had a long and enjoyable career as an academic psychologist and so I have only seriously begun to think of myself as a writer in the last few weeks, since I have taken full retirement. Enrolling for a part-time MPhil in Creative Writing was a step toward thinking of myself as a writer; I have submitted my fourth novel for that course and am awaiting my viva voce examination.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What role, if any, has Wales played in your writing?

DALE FRANCES HAY

I only started writing fiction seriously when I moved to Wales. I have benefitted greatly from the vibrant literary community in Cardiff. I am not a poet, but I very much enjoy the exciting poetry I hear at First Thursdays at Chapter and other venues, as well as reading and admiring the short stories and novels being published by Welsh writers.

My own writing has been inspired by the landscape and, in particular, the strange beauty of my own corner of urban Cardiff. I started writing The Night Fogs partly as an exercise to write down what I saw each day as I crossed the bridge over the River Taff and walked to work through the changing seasons in Bute Park. I edited the final version with the help of a workshop with the Park Writers group, who meet in the education centre in the park. Other friends took me to sites in the Vale of Glamorgan that proved important for my story.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Has anything changed, in terms of how you approach writing, since you’ve been published?

DALE FRANCES HAY

Once you have published a story, you know that it’s actually possible to get published, and so you want to write more publishable work. This has the side effect of making you somewhat impatient with projects that don’t seem publishable, either because the topic is not very marketable in the present climate or because there’s something problematic about the writing or the plot. This isn’t helpful. It’s important to move beyond fretting about possible publication and just get immersed in writing new stories.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Which writers do you admire most, and why?

DALE FRANCES HAY

The first adult books I truly loved were written by the great 19th century storytellers: Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Gaskell, Gissing, James and Tolstoy. Other writers I enjoy, who similarly write complex novels about people and communities, include John Updike, Margaret Drabble, Ursula Le Guin, Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Laurence, Gail Godwin, Ian McEwan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Vikram Seth. Two contemporary Welsh writers whose work I really like are Alys Conran and Rebecca John.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What advice do you have for other emerging writers?

DALE FRANCES HAY

Never, ever think it’s too late. You can emerge from the writing chrysalis at quite an advanced age. I started writing fiction seriously in my mid-fifties and became a debut novelist at the age of 68.

Dwight Goss

I DID MY best to hide my shock as I handed over a twenty. “Wow. Those are some expensive hot-dogs,” Brooke said quietly, behind her teeth. The aside bought me some extra seconds to find the coins needed to make up the change. I needed a one, a twenty-five and a dime—or a couple of nickels, and they all looked the same to me. She leaned in to help and her skin touched mine for the first time that day. I made my palm into a dish as her cool fingers retrieved the small coins one by one, from the spill of bright silver and dulled metal.

We pulled down two royal blue plastic seats in the stands. I had on a shirt in the same colour blue—a Toronto Blue Jays T-shirt I’d bought especially for the game. It was the only risk I’d taken that day. I hoped it would make her laugh.

I’d spent the afternoon on the beach at Woodbine Park and was wearing a skin full of freckles that had begun to blur together. I swam in the cold water of the Great Lake until it was too much, and lay out in the sun until I’d got too hungry. It had been impossible to eat on the sand at the water’s edge. I barely had my sandwich unwrapped when I was set-upon by a swarm of wasps and driven into the lake. By the road, they buzzed around drinking straws, poked into the domed lids of sticky plastic cups as ice cubes melted into brownish water. It was September. The beach and the boardwalk were loaded with baseball-capped slow-walkers. Sweet iced-coffee cups filled the trash receptacles as did used napkins starred with sugar granules. The summer seemed to be lasting out. And the wasps were reeling.

It was four o’clock by the time I left the park and I was starving, but I resisted spoiling my appetite with a stop-gap. I’d been promised The Ultimate Hotdog at the game. I also hoped, secretly, that there would be the kind of vendors who sold peanuts from a tray that tied up around the neck, and that the snacks would be passed down along the rows, as is always the case in baseball movies. I was smiling as I walked to where I could catch the streetcar downtown. I had my last token, but I’d let it get mixed in with my change and there was another fiddly moment trying to find it again, before the 501 came gliding down to Brooklyn Avenue.

There was a low wall, the right height for sitting, across the street from Brooke’s office. It was a side street of Queen Street West where the tram had dropped me, and the exact same spot where three months earlier, on another searing hot day, we’d arranged to meet.

I FRIST MET Brooke on a Saturday afternoon, in the middle of July of the same year. It was my first visit to Toronto. She’d been my first swipe-right, and an instant match. We drank gin in a tiny terrace bar opposite a building with a glass roof made from different sized panels, all slanting at angles, catching and batting back the light—this way and that.

She took care to stir the gin into her tonic; hands bent like willow branches, space between the elegant bones of her wrist and the hem of her sleeves. Her shirt was carefully pressed and made of a light bleached denim. She had bright eyes and pale skin; small features and was decidedly symmetrical from head to toe; except for one tiny gold nose-stud; a glint. She looked like the pages in magazines I bought occasionally from London street-side vendors; imported from Scandinavian countries, with those fashionably washed-out photographs of lush mountain scenes, clean layouts and words I cannot hope to read.

She’d grown up on a boat and saved her pocket money to buy books whenever she could. I imagined her boat—like the magazine—alone on a glimmering fjord encircled by deep green pine forests and clouds thin like a steam. Somewhere in northern Ontario. And I loved the name Brooke.

I WORE A stupid hat. I let it put me off.

I’d been in Canada almost a month and had cursed myself most days for packing the only pair of jeans I owned, for no good reason, with artificially made rips and an affected fade through the blue that I now found repellant. Some other person was driving the date, while my brain was thinking that I should have bought better jeans.

Brooke and I parted happily enough, with her heading north and me taking a line west, opening and closing my book all the way to St. George station. I thought about the perfect drop in the fabric over her shoulders and collar-bones; gold buttons; wrists. I ascended the subway steps in need of air, with all the angles wedged in my throat. Miniature recollections of the delicate symmetry kept me out of sorts for the remainder of afternoon. I found myself barely present at a friend’s barbeque on the west side of town. The sun set over High Park in a dust-dry sky. I walked in a loop around the neighborhood when it was finally dark. Candy colours lit by strip lights glowed inside windows of ice-cream shops, still open. The temperature was easing down and I began to collect myself. I hadn’t expected to like her quite so much. I hadn’t expected anything like that.

MY HOTEL FOR that trip was down at the water and I ran the next day, past the harbour and racks of brightly coloured canoes. My legs worked harder and carried me faster as the sun broke into the late morning, sparkling along the tops of the shining new high-rises.

I thought of my friend, Tom, back at home in England. He’d told me once over coffee about a time he’d met a girl on a train. He’d not met her exactly but made eye contact enough that he leapt from his seat as she alighted at her stop. His shoulders were crushed between the closing doors. It had been a fight, he’d said, to force them back. His glasses fell down though the gap between the train and the platform, never to be seen again. Tom won a date with the girl, though it wasn’t a lasting romance. I admired his tenacity and wondered if I, too, had the resolve to alter the ending of the story.

On the edge of a grassy park there was a court with a dusty asphalt floor, for playing softball. It was empty. The area was surrounded by wire fencing but the gate wide open. I sat on the middle step of the bleachers at an end shaded by the trees behind, so that I could see my phone screen.

I texted Brooke and asked if she could meet in ten minutes.

She came down from her office block, in her work clothes. She looked great in a blazer. We met on the side street with the low brick wall. We sat close together there and talked for a little bit. Even in my running vest and shorts, I felt better than in my hopeless hat and ripped jeans. When it fell to quiet, I let my fingers on one hand trace her jawline, bringing her nearer; into a kiss. It lasted only a few seconds, but I felt, finally, like I was up to speed.

THREE MONTHS LATER, I came back to Canada. It was as hot and unrelenting in September as it had been in July and I waited in a familiar slant of sunlight for Brooke to meet me—as if no time at all had passed.

There was something easy and uncomplicated about going to a baseball game. We took our seats in the top tier—the nosebleeds—just right of the bottom of the diamond with a great view of the ground. The outfield looked exactly as it was laid out in the diagrams. The pitch was immaculate and people came out periodically with huge rakes to smooth the dirt. The lid of the Skydome was wide open and the night committed itself to a deep navy.

I bit into the slippery skin of the hotdog. It’d over shot the bread bun. The strips of peppers and onions were flailing limply without their cradle. My tactic was to even up the edges, to make everything flush, to stabilise the structure. I don’t know how I did it, but I bit down carelessly. I miss-bit. I let my concentration slip for a moment and something went wrong.

A normal bite would have been a relatively simple cadence: the drawing of teeth open and closed and over again, until the food is an easily swallowable mush. I remember I even adopted it once as a way to lose some weight, forcing myself to chew my food twenty-five times before swallowing. It made no difference.

In spite of being so well practiced though, my error here had occurred with the chewing. The bumpy surface of my molars seemed to cut in with a normal and good amount of traction. It must have been the angle that sent the chunk of meat into its backward spin. It was just like in the game—when the pitch ricochets backward off the bat—a foul ball. The bite of hotdog flew backward down my throat—unmushed, unchewed, whole.

I remember having a bit of time to think. I wasn’t sure whether the tightness in my throat was a firm signal from my body saying that the food was stuck, or whether I could try to encourage it down with a gulp. I thought about Bugs Bunny gulping down great lumps of things, anvils and scrap metal. Bugs Bunny never panicked. He had a ferocious gulp. I tried it. It made my throat ache.

I wondered whether I would still be able to speak and if I could turn around and perhaps calmly ask Brooke if she wouldn’t mind giving me a quick thump on the back in the hope that we might dislodge the problem between the two of us. I imagined how the exchange might play out, and how I might side-step some of my due mortification by affecting my English accent to be at it’s most charming. I experimented quietly with a tiny offering of a sound—a little hum. Nothing came out. I couldn’t speak a word.

The Jays were batting again, providing plenty of distraction. I began to feel panicked. I struggled to siphon enough air in through my nose as my body demanded more and more oxygen. Adrenaline sloshed around in the pit of my stomach and it burned. My heartbeat became so wild for moment that it shook my ribcage like a toy.

I was running out of air. It was a fight to hold myself still, while my insides were pulsing and my ribs were rattling. After a few moments I felt the lump jiggle a little and it seemed to move a bit more with every hard involuntary pull of my stomach muscles. It was like one of those lottery balls wobbling up on a high-pressure jet of air, before it rolls down a chute to make somebody an overnight billionaire.

If I couldn’t gulp it down, then I had to cough it up. Even if it was awful.

Brooke was talking intermittently—giving me snippets of commentary on the game. She had her eyes on the batter. A group of lads a row down and five or six seats over started chanting, teasing the pitcher and making everyone in the stands howl. This was my opportunity. I swivelled in my seat so that I faced a few degrees away and took a moment to ready myself. One… two…

It was the most incredible good luck. In one cough I dislodged the lump of sausage in to my waiting crumply napkin, snapping it shut and drawing my fist tightly around it so quickly that it might have easily passed for an ordinary cough. My lungs sucked in air and my eyes filled with a gloss of water that held itself. I was determined to play it the fuck down.

I thought once more about Tom, crushed in the closing doors of the tube train, seeing the glasses he relied on slip down onto the tracks, sitting like a blurry, achy hero on his date.

The Tigers came up to bat.

“Southpaw,” said Brooke, her eyes still fixed on the diamond. I nodded. That made him a left-hander. The “DH” next to his name that flashed up in lights on the scoreboard told us he was also the Designated Hitter. My voice croaked a little as I hummed in agreement. Brooke looked over and smiled.

I’d made sure to know the rules of the game, to understand the jargon, to show up on time and in the spirit, to not wear a stupid hat.

Setback over, I was back in the game.

Jess Morgan is an MA student of Creative Non-Fiction at the University of East Anglia and is published in Oh Comely, L’Éphémère Review and Make. Jess writes about chance encounters with strangers, relationships and intimacy.

Today is a transformative day!

After months of b.i.d., I’ve started speaking in peonies.

Triphthongs peel into pinnate leaves,

my tongue whips petioles from my gum ridge,

and when I hum a springy corolla

is spun from nothing but sound.

Sentences eject full shrubs.

I burp my friends bouquets.

At parties, I’ll drink until my words reek

of dried peonies and I puke out died peonies.

Today is a transformative day,

which is to say, peonies.

Even my partner is supportive.

Sometimes he will look at me like I used to look

at the girls who left flowers in a snail track;

I complimented them, but they never made it home safe.

Other times, when I’m in important rooms,

I’ll whisper buds into my palms and pick them

until they bleed green wax, wondering,

are they the perfect peonies? Every night this week

I lie in the garden like a dryad

regurgitating a winter interest. Do you regret it?

Maybe I’ll recite rondeaus in chlorophyll.

It seems like an impossible thing,

but most days I think I can or want or try. Today.

Today was a transformative day

of peonies, which is to say—

Joey Belonger is a queer transfeminine writer, educator, and printmaker from Chicago, IL. They are currently working toward their MFA in poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Previous work has appeared in Tropos, Storyscape, and a decade-old young poet’s anthology which they hide in their family’s basement.

Mari Ellis Dunning

New Welsh Writers is an interview series in which we speak to new voices in Welsh literature, delving into how they got their start and what advice they might have for other emerging writers.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

When did you start writing?

MARI ELLIS DUNNING

I’ve written for as long as I can remember. When I was little, it was mostly just fantastical stories and information pamphlets! As a teenager I began to take writing more seriously, and used poetry to process and work through the difficulties of adolescence and mental health challenges. It was a way to express myself, and to form in writing what was going on in my mind.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What do you find are the most enjoyable and most challenging aspects of writing/being a writer?

MARI ELLIS DUNNING

I enjoy brainstorming new ideas, and that break-through moment when you’ve written something you know really works, but I struggle with self-doubt, which often hinders my motivation to put pen to paper. Knowing your words have touched someone or had an effect on someone is fantastic, and keeps me going when I’m uncertain.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

When and where do you write?

MARI ELLIS DUNNING

As a writer, anywhere and everywhere can be your writing space. I write at home, in coffee shops, on trains, and in summer, outdoors. I like to write on paper before sitting at the laptop—I find working with a pen and notebook more freeing, it encourages more creativity. Typing up afterwards affords you the space to redraft as you go, so it’s a win-win.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What starts a new piece of writing for you?

MARI ELLIS DUNNING

I’m fascinated by people, by their lives and their inner workings. Hearing a story about an interesting character or something strange that’s happened usually gets my creativity kick-started. My poetry collection, Salacia, is filled with poems centred on my own experiences, mental health, and narrative poems in the voices of various women whose stories I was completely compelled to tell. I like to get inside a person’s head and let the writing stem from there.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Do you plan your writing or discover along the way?

MARI ELLIS DUNNING

A bit of both! If I’m writing fiction, I like to have a rough scene by scene account of the story, as it helps keep me motivated. It’s less daunting facing a blank page when you know what’s coming next. It never pays to be too rigid though—the story will go where it wants to go and the characters will take the lead.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What has your path to publishing been like? Can you speak to some of the challenges you’ve faced?

MARI ELLIS DUNNING

Publishing my debut poetry collection came as a result of years worth of work, and some failed publishing attempts. I was lucky enough to win a couple of competitions, through which I met some really wonderful people, who’ve been able to advise me with my writing and help me along the way. I think my biggest challenge as a writer has always been finding the self-confidence to bring the stories to life and believe that people will want to hear them.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Was there a moment when you started to think of yourself as a writer?

MARI ELLIS DUNNING

I’m still waiting for it! When people ask what I do, I often struggle saying "I’m a writer" as I worry it sounds pretentious, although it shouldn’t. I think it’s sad that the first thing people tend to ask is what you do for a living, so even if you’re only writing for your own gratification, you should still be able to call yourself a "writer", since it’s something you do that you enjoy.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What role, if any, has Wales played in your writing?

MARI ELLIS DUNNING

Wales has played a huge role in my writing. The rolling hills and wild coastlines in Wales have always influenced me. My poetry collection is filled with imagery surrounding the sea (Salacia was the Roman Goddess of the sea) and my fiction tends to always be set in Wales. I’ve written a horror novella which is set in the Welsh countryside—I feel the landscape lends itself well to mystery and unease, which is probably why they film a lot of crime dramas in Wales.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Which writers do you admire most and why?

MARI ELLIS DUNNING

There are so many. I admire poets who can write about their own experiences with dignity and grace and beauty, poets like Rebecca Goss. I’ve been reading a lot of short fiction lately, and I’m really enjoying stories with a touch of magic realism and strangeness—Daisy Johnson’s writing continuously astounds me, and I’ve always been a big fan of Murakami.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What advice to you have for other emerging writers?

MARI ELLIS DUNNING

It’s important to remember to be playful, without the pressure of creating something perfect. I’ve always been a perfectionist and struggled to write freely, without trying to tighten everything as I go along, but no creative process can work that way. I’d advise anyone to write unselfconsciously, as though no one is going to see the piece—they won’t, until you’re ready.

Mari Ellis Dunning is an award winning Welsh writer of poetry, short stories and children’s books. Her debut children’s book was launched at the Abergavenny Writing Festival in 2016 and her debut poetry collection, Salacia

UNBEKNOWNST TO MYSELF, after a month in the flat, I had gotten a job in the shop underneath. The owner’s hands were tense and swollen from rheumatoid arthritis, perpetually stiff like a grappling hook. Each Wednesday the cash and carry would deliver his order and each Wednesday they would unload it onto the footpath outside the front door of the shop. Tighter insurance regulations meant the cash and carry lads were covered to lift the boxes out of the van, with the regulation two-wheeler, but not past the threshold of a customer’s premises. “Look, we would if we could.” My midweek alarm was the buzzer, three short presses, the man in the shop ringing up to see if I would come down. Who would say no. Who would have the heart. Vocationally unemployed and light on my feet, working on what could become my first book, I snatched at the chance to derive some sense of purpose from the world. I rearranged the shelves and cleaned them down with soapy water. With a Stanley knife I sliced through the “Handle With Care” tape that sealed the boxes, unpacked them and then flattened them down to fit in the recycling bin. The old man folded up his newspaper behind the till and praised my youth. He sent me back upstairs to my flat with a candy-stripe plastic bag with a sliced pan, a litre of milk and a box of cigarettes, a cream bun balanced in the palm of my left hand. I wasn’t a smoker but I let the boxes accumulate in the drawer from all the Wednesdays, using them in poker games because I never had money to play with, more often than not returning home with them again.

Emma Flynn is a queer emerging writer from Ireland. She studied Creative Writing at the National University of Ireland, Galway and is currently working on her first book.

Lucie McKnight Hardy

New Welsh Writers is an interview series in which we speak to new voices in Welsh literature, delving into how they got their start and what advice they might have for other emerging writers.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

When did you start writing?

LUCIE McKNIGHT HARDY

I have always worked in jobs where writing was an essential skill—advertising, marketing, public relations—but it wasn’t until I was a mother, at home with small children, and needed to pursue something that was just for me, that I started writing fiction. I started with a creative writing module from the Open University: online study, and not too time-consuming, but challenging enough that I could prove to myself that I could do it. Then, I enrolled on the creative writing MA course at Manchester Metropolitan University, and haven’t looked back.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What do you find are the most enjoyable and most challenging aspects of writing/being a writer?

LUCIE McKNIGHT HARDY

The most rewarding thing about being a writer is completing a body of work, whether that is a novel or a short story. To think, "I made that; before I sat down to write that, it didn’t exist. I crafted that from nothing more than the words in my head". It’s a form of alchemy. The most challenging thing about writing is to find that elusive moment when the inspiration and the opportunity collide. I used to sit at my desk, waiting for the muse to strike, being somewhat in awe of the piece I was working on, thinking I could only tackle it if my mood was right, or the planets were in alignment. I know now that this very rarely happens, so I just have to throw myself at it, tackle it. Take it down.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

When and where do you write?

LUCIE McKNIGHT HARDY

I’m not one of these people who can write anywhere, in a crowded café or on a train. I’m happiest writing in silence, with a large supply of coffee, at my desk, in an empty house. It can be any time of day or night.

I’ve had the same desk for years now. I bought it—as a postgraduate student at Cardiff in the 1990’s—from a junk shop on Crwys Road. When I was renovating it a few years ago, I noticed that it is stamped underneath with the words "Glamorgan County Council". I often wonder about its former life, about which schoolchildren or office workers used it before me.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What starts a new piece of writing for you?

LUCIE McKNIGHT HARDY

A sentence overheard at the checkout in the supermarket; the woman in laddered tights shuffling along the footpath in front of me (what’s her story?); a nasty experience in the doctor’s waiting room. Anything and everything can trigger the desire to start tapping away at the keyboard, and when the words flow and the sentences start to form; it’s the best feeling in the world.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Do you plan your writing or discover along the way?

LUCIE McKNIGHT HARDY

In my earlier attempts at writing, I would try to find my way as I went along. I would form my characters and blindly let them run amok. This approach meant that I went round and round in circles, constantly writing myself into rabbit holes, from which I was unable to escape without rewriting a huge amount of what had gone before. Because of this, Water Shall Refuse Them took about three times longer to write than it needed to. I learnt from this, and meticulously plotted out my second novel before I started writing it. As a result, there was no challenge, no joy to be had in the serendipity of off-the-cuff narrative development, and as a consequence, my prose was flat and insipid. I’ve since put that book to one side, and have started another novel with just the characters in place, and a rough idea of where it’s heading. It might be a longer journey than is necessary, but it will be a much more joyful and picturesque one.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What has your path to publishing been like? Can you speak to some of the challenges you’ve faced?

LUCIE McKNIGHT HARDY

My novel, Water Shall Refuse Them, will be published in July by the Liverpool-based independent publisher Dead Ink. When I completed the manuscript I was keen to seek publication with an independent press (as one of the assignments for my MA, I’d researched the indie presses in the UK, and had developed an understanding of why they were a good fit for debut authors). Because of the very nature of the small presses (few employees, working within budget restraints, and publishing a relatively small number of books each year), most of the indies were closed to submissions when I started looking around. I sent my manuscript to a handful of literary agents, but the response (when there was one) was along the lines of "it’s good, but not for us". Then Dead Ink opened up for submissions and I was straight in. Fortunately for me, my first three chapters and synopsis were enough to make them want to see more, and it was a very quick process from the submission of the full manuscript to an offer of publication. Since then, it’s been a fairly straightforward and enjoyable process. I was lucky that there weren’t substantial edits required, and the majority of those that were suggested were things that I agreed with and have certainly made the book stronger as a result. At the time of writing (January) we have commissioned the cover design and the advance review copies are being typeset. Exciting times!

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Was there a moment when you started to think of yourself as a writer?

LUCIE McKNIGHT HARDY

This morning, somebody asked me what I did, and I only hesitated for a short while before I said "I’m a writer". It’s a sentence I’ve been getting used to over the last couple of months. I’ve tried different variations of it: "I’ve written a novel", "I’ve been writing a few short stories", but now I think I’ve got the hang of just saying "I’m a writer," and then it gives the other person a chance to enquire about what I write (which they inevitably do) and that, in turn, gives me a chance to talk about my writing!

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What role, if any, has Wales played in your writing?

LUCIE McKNIGHT HARDY

Wales is very dear to me, and is an intrinsic part of me. Water Shall Refuse Them is set in a village on the border with England, and one of its themes is that of not really belonging: my parents moved from London to a small village near Carmarthen when I was two, and even though they settled into the community and I grew up speaking Welsh, there was always a feeling that we were a little bit different. In my book, the setting is as important as the characters; in fact, while writing it, I approached the village as one of the characters, and tried to depict it with a personality of its own. The novel I’m working on at the moment is set in a fictional coastal town on the West Wales coast—it’s a mash-up of Aberaeron and Tenby: two places that have very distinct characters.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Has anything changed, in terms of how you approach writing, since you’ve been published?

LUCIE McKNIGHT HARDY

Nothing has changed. It is still as arduous, painful, excruciating, awe-inspiring, wonderful and rewarding as before.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Which writers do you admire most and why?

LUCIE McKNIGHT HARDY

Shirley Jackson for her ability to uncover the unnerving in seemingly bland moments and settings; Alison Moore for absolutely everything—she has the ability to weave a devastating story seemingly effortlessly; Andrew Michael Hurley—The Loney was published just as I was struggling to find the voice of my narrator, and even though the books are very different, I find myself coming back to The Loney whenever I am stuck with tone or voice; Sarah Waters and Kate Atkinson and Iain Banks—for their solid ability to weave a brilliant story and tell it in an equally brilliant manner. Beryl Bainbridge, Muriel Spark and Patricia Highsmith, purely for being wonderful storytellers. I think all those writers would make very good dinner party companions, don’t you?!

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What advice to you have for other emerging writers?

LUCIE McKNIGHT HARDY

Don’t be afraid to champion yourself and your book. If you don’t have faith in yourself, you can’t expect others to believe in you. Now is not the time for modesty!

Lucie McKnight Hardy grew up in West Wales, and is a Welsh speaker. Her work has featured or is forthcoming in various places online and in print, including The Lonely Crowd, The Shadow Booth, Best British Short Stories 2019 and as a limited edition chapbook from Nightjar Press. Her debut novel, Water Shall Refuse Them

Claire Williamson, Seren, £9.99

AN EARLY PIECE IN

The accusation of sentimentality might sting, but it does not seem to have prevented writers—largely, though not always, women—from finding worthwhile subjects in their pets. In a long tradition of literary dogs, we find Virginia Woolf channelling Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel in her pseudo-biography Flush, Eileen Myles’ memoir of her pitbull, Afterglow and Emily Dickinson, who once sent a friend a lock of fur from her Newfoundland, Carlo, claiming it was her own. Maybe these writers, already deemed too feminine or too confessional, felt they may as well dig deeper into the emotional landscapes of domestic interdependence. Beneath an apparently "sentimental" bond, they find the complexities of the strange and intimate act of caring for an animal. As Myles put it in Afterglow, a dog is "like an eternally silent child. Who you trust. Who shouldn’t trust you."

Its "sentimental" force became more clear to me in the collection’s second poem about a dog. “Laika” recounts the story of the first dog in space, the Moscow mongrel who "became a name on the world’s lips". Laika has had a long afterlife as a "rising star"—a symbol of utopian progress—but her body had a different fate. Her heart, Williamson writes, was "hard-wired to the spaceship"; she survived a few hours in space—two, maybe three—before she died, overheated and panicking. Her death casts a shadow over the pet dozing sweetly in the earlier poem. From the outset of Visiting the Minotaur, there is tenderness but there is also grief, the anticipation of loss.

Although she only appears in one poem, Laika reverberates throughout the collection. She’s the Icarus in the collection’s extended retelling of the myth of Daedalus and the Minotaur. Through her, we are pulled in two directions, towards the animal body, and towards the mythic. Williamson’s poems are rhythmically and formally straightforward, often in the first person and the present tense. Their lightness allows her to navigate this balance.

In Visiting the Minotaur, the body is always the body under pressure. There is the emotional pressure of grief; the death of a mother, a brother, and other losses in between. In "Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide", Williamson recounts a desire for a return to normality after a violent death, a wish to take part in the "banality / of clothes, shoes, what so-and-so said / to whom" instead of the "confidential histories … about pills, hangings, drownings, / fault, guilt and blame."

And there are the pressures of motherhood. The physical pressure of breast-feeding and of childbirth, the "spine bent … as if in labour", compared in "Extremities" to the mountain-climber’s ascent of Everest, one of many moments in the collection when the vocabulary of the body seeps into natural and urban landscapes. In the fourth section of a poem called "Temple Church, Temple Street, Bristol," Williamson writes, "My tower tilts like the mast / of a sinking ship on a grassy sea. / My body is a whale’s carcass". The medieval buildings also have a touch of that Icarian balance between vulnerability and resolve; standing firmly after hundreds of years, they lean into decay.

Along with Laika, many other animals populate Williamson’s collection—birds, rats, cows, deer—but the book’s central animal is the Minotaur itself, the monstrous hybrid that threads the poems together. The collection begins with "Swimming with the Bull", in which "the animal is bookended by two women … body curving like a dolphin", and ends with the poet’s declaration that "I’m here because I am the Minotaur". The lurking horror of the monster in its labyrinth, and the expressive voice of the poet are combined into one, into the relatively stable lyric "I" that carries the reader from the beginning of the book to its end.

Although Williamson speaks as the minotaur, Daedalus, as architect and as parent, is a significant presence in the collection. The death of Icarus is partly caused by his father’s zeal for invention; a frightening figure for a poet weaving her children into her lines. More so than with any other subject, the themes of motherhood are threaded equally with fear. In "Bathurst Pool", she watches her daughter vanishing into the water, the "seconds stretching / into our drowned future". In "Split Ends", she relinquishes her children to their father for "four days", measuring the banal, tragic distance between them—"seventy-five minutes apart… eighty-miles-per-hour-cars". At times, the desire to mother and be mothered come together painfully, as when she writes, in the acutely poignant "Unimaged Mother II", "I long for you privately / to buy me a surprise red winter coat / with roses round the hood, / to love my daughters, have them on your mind."

As well as Greek myth, Williamson alludes to fairy tales and the semi-mythic figures of a sprawling European canon—Shakespeare, Chaucer, Eliot, Vélazquez, Picasso. Williamson’s allusive palette is a familiar one, but it doesn’t make for overly-familiar poetry. As the poet Jack Spicer once wrote, "prose invents—poetry discloses." In Visiting the Minotaur Williamson discloses the fragile, interconnected worlds of mythology and childbirth, griefs personal and historical. In this space, Williamson sketches an image of a mother and daughters framed, as she describes Vélazquez in his famous "Las Meninas", "at vanishing point."

Catherine Kelly is from Dublin. She is currently completing an MA in Contemporary Literature, Culture and Theory at King's College, London and tweets from @catnicheallai.

Rhys Warrington, Photography by Mildred

New Welsh Writers is an interview series in which we speak to new voices in Welsh literature, delving into how they got their start and what advice they might have for other emerging writers.

CALLUM McALLISTER

When did you start writing?

RHYS WARRINGTON

I’ve written, in some capacity, for as long as I can remember. When I was in primary school (I hope I don’t get in trouble for this) I would dictate short stories to my mum and she’d write them out for me, ensuring that the spelling and grammar was correct. I’d then copy them out into my schoolbook and take full credit (smug face). It was terribly mischievous, but she never doctored the stories—the actual plots/characters were all me. Fortunately, the stories themselves were often praised and this praise, at such an early age, from teachers and my parents encouraged me to keep at it and made me believe that it was something that I could do.

CALLUM McALLISTER

What do you find are the most enjoyable and most challenging aspects of writing/being a writer?

RHYS WARRINGTON

When you begin to capture a characters voice / thought-process / internal rhythm and they slowly start to take over/begin to dictate the direction of the drama–it’s the most exciting feeling. Sometimes the character can take you in a direction you never expected, sometimes they say things that you never would have thought up, and it’s these moments, when the "planets seem to align" for want of a cliché, that writing is easy, exceptionally freeing, and most importantly of all enjoyable. When writing isn’t those things, when the character doesn’t come ... it’s a challenge. It’s pulling your hair out with frustration. It’s trying to convince yourself that you’re not worthless.

CALLUM McALLISTER

When and where do you write?

RHYS WARRINGTON

Normally first thing in the morning at around 9 o’clock. The house I live in in London has a conservatory and–although freezing in the winter—has great natural light. I make myself a coffee, lock my phone away, organise my notes and just hope that some inspiration will manifest itself. I like to act out all the characters when I write so ideally I like to have the house to myself, but if not, I sort of just whisper and grunt under my breath (it has to be seen to be believed). But this does make writing in a café/public space slightly problematic.

CALLUM McALLISTER

What starts a new piece of writing for you?

RHYS WARRINGTON

This, I’m finding, fluctuates massively. I’m always on the hunt for new ideas and inspiration and it’s remarkable when, where, and how new ideas can pop into your head. Once they do arrive however, I normally swill them around in my brain for a bit to try and flesh them out. I once read that, if you have a good idea, an idea worth pursuing, then you won’t forget it. I like to take this approach—I don’t rush to put an idea straight down on paper.

Once I have settled on something I want to write I then normally go out and buy myself a nice new notebook, a new pen, and then just try and write down everything that I feel I "know" about the piece. This can be characters, action, settings, themes, conversations I’ve dreamed up; anything really that could weave its way into the play. After I’ve done this, I normally investigate where the holes are, looking at the things I feel I "don’t know" and doing any research that might be beneficial or even imperative.

CALLUM McALLISTER

Do you plan your writing or discover along the way?

RHYS WARRINGTON

I actually do quite a lot of planning before I start as I find that it’s the easiest way to “get to the end” which any writer will tell you is the most difficult part of writing anything. I find having a plot structure to be super useful—especially on days when the dialogue might not be naturally flowing from me—as it enables me to just keep going and to work through my lack of inspiration. However, as I write, I equally like to deter away from any plans that I may have made, as I allow the characters to take over and dictate the direction of the drama. I find that this is often when ‘happy accidents’, as I like to term them, take place—things that I didn’t plan but have subconsciously and rightfully weaved their way into the play.

CALLUM McALLISTER

If you’ve published, what has that path been like? Can you speak to some of the challenges you faced?

RHYS WARRINGTON

It’s been unbelievable really. When Rebecca and I first dreamt up BLUE, never in a million years did either of us expect that it would be published. Once we secured funding for the play and knew that it would definitely be happening, we sent the script off to publishers—on a bit of a wing and a prayer. Luckily people liked it and from there we had several meetings (where we kept being given things—plays/tote bags/mugs). Then we had the difficult task of choosing who to go with, but I am absolutely delighted with the choice that we made—the whole team at Methuen have been so supportive and the whole process—so far at least—has gone swimmingly.

CALLUM McALLISTER

Was there a moment when you started to think of yourself as a writer?

RHYS WARRINGTON

I’m still working on this. My absolute love of literature makes it such a loaded word for me. But I guess now is as good a moment as any to start thinking that of myself way.

CALLUM McALLISTER

What role, if any, has Wales played in your writing?

RHYS WARRINGTON

Wales has had such a massive impact on my writing so far and I know it will continue to do so. I have a love-hate relationship with the country, and with Carmarthen (where I’m from) in particular. This conflict is something that manifests itself very visibly in BLUE and I know is something that will permeate itself through all of my work. The landscape and the rhythms of home is something else that I’m noticing is bleeding into all of my work, along with my love for writing Welsh characters, as I find that I hear that "Welsh voice" so clearly and find it so easy to conjure up.

CALLUM McALLISTER

Has anything changed, in terms of how you approach writing, since you’ve been published?

RHYS WARRINGTON

Not really no. The only thing that I am more aware of now is that it can be slightly problematic if you pepper your play with film, song, or TV quotes as you have to seek copyright permission—which makes sense.

CALLUM McALLISTER

Which writers do you admire most, and why?

RHYS WARRINGTON

I absolutely adore the Classic American Dramatists. O’Neil, Miller, Williams, Wilson, Albee, Mamet are huge inspirations of mine for obvious reasons: they knew how to write bloody good plays. Flawlessly structured, but still with enough life to make they fly, the worlds they create draw you in, tickle you with humour, and then leave you totally devastated at the end. They also knew how to write good characters—which actors and audience always respond too. And those pesky Americans are still at it with the likes of Anne Baker, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Bruce Norris, and Lynn Nottage carrying on this tradition while they also, dangerously, begin to play with form.

CALLUM McALLISTER

What advice do you have for other emerging writers?

RHYS WARRINGTON

Get to the end. See and read as much as you can. Take a risk. Love yourself. Eat cake.

Rhys Warrington is a young Welsh writer and actor from Carmarthen. Rhys trained at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and his West End credits include Great Expectations (Vaudeville Theatre) and The Mousetrap. BLUE, created with Rebecca Hammond, the Artistic Director of Chippy Lane Productions, is Rhys’s debut play, premiering at Chapter in February 2019. Methuen will be publishing BLUE

Chippy Lane Productions’ world premiere of BLUE which will run at Chapter in Cardiff from 5 – 16 February 2019

Callum McAllister is assistant editor of

Mothlightby Adam Scovell,

Influx Press, £9.99

OF ALL THE STARTLING facts that make up the biology of butterflies and moths, perhaps the most impressive is their varied and wide-ranging use of mimicry. Numerous non-poisonous lepidopteran species have evolved a colouration similar to that of the toxic monarch butterfly, fooling predators wary of an unpalatable meal. Certain species of the subfamily Arctiinae take things a step further, resembling wasps almost completely—their colouration, body shape, wing size and even behaviour all altered to achieve a more wasp-like appearance.

Only, in reality, the change is not by design. There is no intention involved on the part of the moth. Rather, the species finds itself slowly resembling another, transformed by natural selection, a force beyond its understanding and marked only by uncanny echoes of past forms and the slow, gradual loss of what once made them distinct.

Adam Scovell’s debut novel, Mothlight, is a book concerned with both moths and mimicry. Our protagonist Thomas is drawn into lepidoptery by the mysterious Phyllis Ewans—a woman he first meets, along with her sister Billie, during his childhood in Cheshire—his fascination with the sheer volume of mounted moths that adorned her walls growing into an interest of his own. When Billie dies of old age, Phyllis does little to mark her sister’s passing, leaving the role of organising her death to Thomas’ grandparents. What instigated such apathy is unclear, and Thomas’s burgeoning curiosity extends beyond mere moths and onto the Ewans sisters themselves.

Theirs was a house of ghosts and memories, where secrets were locked away in photographs and trinkets, the dust comprising scales and wings from insects long dead. Scovell recreates the sensation by placing photos amidst the text, images possessing the fading ache of time that belies their fictional context. Phyllis is fictional; yet Scovell implies otherwise, his pictures serving the hauntological purpose of bringing to life that which has never existed, Derridean ghosts whose emotional weight outweighs any logic or reason.

Phyllis herself represents such a ghostly presence within the narrative. She moves to London and out of Thomas’ life, though despite her absence, something of the woman stays with him, lurking somewhere just over his shoulder, whispering in his ear. So, when the newly qualified Thomas also decants to London for a new job at a university research lab, he is only half surprised when a chance encounter reveals Phyllis’s connection to his new role. Soon they are meeting as regularly as in his childhood, dedicating hours to talk of moths and walking once more.

Their bond only strengthens, and Thomas finds himself slipping into the role of companion and then, as Phyllis’ health deteriorates, carer; nursing her through her final days as old age claims its second Ewans sister. The situation not only resurrects Thomas’ old curiosities but puts a clock on them, the truth of what happened between Phyllis and Billie set to be lost forever, though all attempts to raise the subject are met with firm silence.

Only, Thomas begins experiencing a strange phenomenon, or rather sees something he has felt since childhood intensify until he can ignore it no longer. For all of Phyllis’ reclusive, secretive habits, Thomas starts understanding her thoughts and recognising facts he could not possibly know, as though the life of Phyllis Ewans is bleeding into him, or his into her. Scovell reinforces this with further photographs, putting the reader through the same experience as his narrator, the unfamiliar pictures imbued with an inexplicable weight, the fictional world breathing down the neck of our own.

Like the Arctiinae moths, Thomas’ transformation operates beyond his agency. Visions of times and places now past haunt his waking hours, nostalgia for experiences he never lived, even the ghostly apparitions of hands and heads belonging to whom he cannot be sure—though the answer seems to lie in whatever happened between Phyllis and her sister. Scovell pushes his narrator into an increasingly disturbed and dazed position, sifting Phyllis’ postcards and photographs and pin-stuck moths, his voice tending toward repetition and over-explanation, though more for his own benefit than that of the reader. The result is a strange blend of the explicit and implicit—none of Thomas’s thoughts or actions left to the imagination, yet the mystery behind the narrative never venturing from behind the dusty shadows.

“I feel as if I am letting a ghost speak for me,” goes the Jacques Derrida quote Scovell uses as the epigraph. “Curiously, instead of playing myself, without knowing it, I let a ghost ventriloquise my words or play my role.” Thomas undergoes this very process with alarming totality, though it is in Scovell’s ability to invoke something of the experience in the reader that is Mothlight’s true strength. Within the accumulation of photographs and postcards lies an insidious undertow, one that wants to pull you into its own world, a place where the figures and places make sense and you are no longer quite yourself. Like the Arctiinae moths perhaps, morphing into another creature gradually and without control until all there is left to do is yield to the process, to join the dance with the ghosts that assail you.

Katie Munnik

New Welsh Writers is an interview series in which we speak to new voices in Welsh literature, delving into how they got their start and what advice they might have for other emerging writers.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

When did you start writing?

KATIE MUNNIK

I’ve always written. My mother will moan and tell you her house is still filled with my old notebooks. Those writing muscles are old. Throughout school and university, I submitted poetry and prose to all sorts of small magazines, and later, I started writing novels. All unpublishable, but still there were sentences and pages and chapters. It all laid the foundations for what I write now.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What do you find are the most enjoyable and most challenging aspects of writing/being a writer?

KATIE MUNNIK

I love to be able to work with everything that interests me. Anything can be research for story—anything that catches my attention—and writing is making places for all these attention-catchers to sit. Maybe it’s akin to carpentry like that. Box-making or bench crafting. And like carpentry, it requires focus and discipline. You need to pay attention to what works and be conscious of where the dangers lie. Or you get splinters or a nail through your thumb.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

When and where do you write?

KATIE MUNNIK

I try to keep my writing to school hours because that’s when I have the house to myself, and I write at home in the living room. I live with my family in a typical mid-terrace Cardiff house, but at some stage in its history, the fireplaces were plastered in, so we have two alcoves in our living room where they used to be. One holds the kids’ doll house and in the other, there’s my desk. Beside that, I have a kitchen trolley where I keep my dictionary, thesaurus and a stack of clutter that tidally drifts up and down.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What starts a new piece of writing for you?

KATIE MUNNIK

Place. My first novel started with a road sign. My current work-in-progress started with a house along the highway and a river running past. But, that said, once I have the place established, it feels almost as if the story had been there all along, lurking in the shadows, waiting for me to realize it needed a place to go.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Do you plan your writing or discover along the way?

KATIE MUNNIK

A bit of both. Once I have the place and the story, I learn fairly early on what questions will be important, but I don’t chart out a plot. I like the discovery process, all those moments of realization that crop up. Maybe that makes the writing harder or more chaotic, but I like surprises.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

If you’ve published, what has that path been like? Can you speak to some of the challenges you faced?

KATIE MUNNIK

My first novel is coming out in April, so I’m currently in the middle of that path and I must say it’s been lovely. I was lucky to win The Borough Press Open Submissions contest in the summer of 2017 which brought me both a book deal and my agent. Before that, I spent about nine months looking for an agent and that definitely had its ups and downs. Within twenty minutes of first submitting, I had a request for the full manuscript from a delightful, articulate agent whom I never heard from again. Charming. After that, there were various blips of hope and success—more requests, more email conversations—and then many disappointments and long months of wondering if I was doing the right thing at all. It all felt like dating. You flirt. You show up. Exchange interests, maybe talk about the future or a rewrite a little. Then, no go. For one or the other of you, it just isn’t right. So, then when I won the contest and won my agent, it felt like an arranged marriage. And it’s working beautifully, thank you very much.

Since then, I’ve been through the editing processes—there are several—which aren’t as painful as I expected. The team at The Borough Press is wonderful and I’ve felt in very good hands through the whole thing. As we speak, the cover layout is being put together and I can’t wait to see it.

I think the biggest challenge is patience. I had to wait—and work while waiting—to find the right home for my novel and then wait the best part of two years for my novel to be published. Books take time to be born and you need to hold your nerve and learn to trust.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What role, if any, has Wales played in your writing?

KATIE MUNNIK

I have a lot to thank Wales for. When I moved to Cardiff from Edinburgh, three and a half years ago, I knew I was going to write a novel. The time and the conditions were right. In Edinburgh, I could always distract myself by ringing up the neighbours and heading out to a café to drink coffee and knit, but I didn’t have that luxury in a new place so there was nothing to do but write. Being in a new place gave me the energy and the focus for a new project.

But Wales also gave me community. Because the city was new to me and I was new there, I needed to be intentional about finding like-minded people. I started going to a monthly book night called First Thursday at Chapter Arts in Cardiff. It’s hosted by Seren Books and Literature Wales and it’s half-book promotion and half-open mic. And it was oxygen. I am so grateful for that space. It is a place where books and writing are real and vital and where I could take my own gestating novel seriously. The feedback I received there was so encouraging and gave me stamina for solitary writing.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Which writers do you admire most, and why?

KATIE MUNNIK

Those who keep going. Those who manage to, despite everything else. That is what I’d like to do.

If I have to be drawn into specifics, I’ll say Alice Munro—because she shows us how ordinary life can be the centre of great fiction—and then also Michael Ondaatje—because of his lyricism, imagination and beauty, as well as his ability to share and reshape history. These are great gifts and maybe it’s parochial to only mention fellow Canadians but then Alice Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize and Michael Ondaatje was tipped for the Golden Booker just this year, so they are both gifts to the world and I’m not alone in admiring them.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What advice do you have for other emerging writers

KATIE MUNNIK

Write on paper. It’s quieter there, more private and not connected to the internet. Paper make writing physical. The risks you take can’t be so easily erased so you can follow your own thought processes more clearly. Paper also makes you write more slowly and that is a good thing.

Jamie Gillingham is editor of The Cardiff Review.

Blue Pill, Erna Kuik

Can I call you Bill? Seems easier, more casual.

Did you like what I did there, Bill – using two of your descriptors to create

a neologism, a portmanteau? By calling you Bill, I mean

to poke fun at your unwelcomed presence. No, Bill, that’s a lie.

I mean to keep you up at night, writhing, waiting for me to find you

as an equal in a dimly lit alley. But you are not a Bill, a you.

You are a reaping, a lasso wound into incandescence,

a small bandage stretched tight over a harvest of tissue,

neurons. Bill, if I can call you Bill, you are sent to make

nice, to untwine, to wrangle a wild, sad mind, and so

I’m warning you, Bill. I’m keeping my distance

as I take you into my body, as you move unwanted

about my bloodstream. Don’t get too comfortable,

Bill, because when you least expect a storm, I will be

the thunder whipping outside your locked door,

the branches breaking apart, the clothesline snapped in two.

This poem and image are part of a collaboration between poet, Christie Collins and Dutch visual artist, Erna Kuik. More information about the collaboration can be found at loveofliterary.com.

Christie Collins is a doctoral candidate in Creative Writing at Cardiff University, where she also teaches creative writing workshops. Her critical and creative work has been published or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review Online, Entropy, Cold Mountain Review, Chicago Review of Books, Canyon Voices, Appalachian Heritage, Poetry South, Still: The Journal, Wicked Alice, So to Speak, and Reunion: The Dallas Review. Her chapbook titled Along the Diminishing Stretch of Memory

Erna Kuik is a Dutch photographer, visual artist, and writer. After graduating from the Artez Academy in 1992, her artwork was awarded the Gretha and Adri Pieck Prize, an award to encourage young, promising artists. Her work tends to an expressionistic style, known for its strong lines in linocuts and its poetic content. She wrote and illustrated children's books about very creative hares published by Atlantie Verlag Switzerland and has published other work that features her photography and illustrations. Her art can be found in many private collections worldwide and is exhibited in museums like the Haags Gemeentemuseum in The Hague and Museum De Fundatie in Zwolle and in galleries most recently during Slow Art In Motion Zutphen, Weg van Kunst in Kampen, and Lingeprint Grafiekmanifestatie in Huissen in the Netherlands. She loves to be in her studio; the spirit of making fluid thoughts into sparkling crystals on paper keeps her going. Her book Zwei lange, lange Ohren received many good reviews and was nominated for the Luchs Award by die Zeit in Germany.

Emma Glass

A note to the reader: While this interview does not discuss the details of any particular sexual assault, the conversation does touch on the ideas of abuse, rape and other related topics in literature.

January can be a strange time of the year. While the big blockbuster books will all have been published in Autumn, the new year is a good time to quietly publish books that are a little more thoughtful, a little more avant-garde.

I caught up with Emma Glass a few days before her debut novel, Peach, was published in paperback by Bloomsbury. While a more peaceful time of the year for me, for Emma, a novelist and full-time nurse, any time of the year can be a busy time.

—Callum McAllister

CALLUM McALLISTER

What would you usually be doing at this time?

EMMA GLASS

I just recently finished my second novel. So at this time I’m normally lying on the sofa watching Poirot. But if I’m working on something then I’ll normally run home from work just to clear my mind and then start writing. It’s kind of hard at the moment to find time in-between work. The head space is something I’m not very good at finding. I could be a lot more productive than I actually am.

CALLUM McALLISTER

Do you find that work-writing balance difficult to navigate?

EMMA GLASS

It’s always been difficult because I’ve always worked full-time, and I’m quite insistent that I carry on with my day job, just because I worked really hard to get my nursing degree. I really love the work, but I sometimes wish that I could have a bit more of a balance. Financially, because I work and live in London, it’s really hard to say I’m going take six months off and write. In an ideal world, I’d nurse three days a week, and write two days a week or the other way round. But I’m not there yet.

CALLUM McALLISTER

Congratulations on finishing the second novel, though.

EMMA GLASS

Thank you. I’m really surprised about that one! Just because Peachtook nearly eight years to finish. I didn’t feel forced to do it, but when I signed my contract with Bloomsbury it was for two books. They have never put any pressure on me to deliver by a certain date. They’re really supportive of the fact that I work a different job. They kind of say it’s ready when it’s ready. But at the same time, if somebody tells me that, it’ll never be ready. So I self-imposed a deadline and managed to get it done by Christmas. So the second book has only really taken about a year to do. I mean, it’s really short, but that doesn’t bother me. I need to be able to close the loop of a project. It could be a hundred words or a hundred-thousand words.

That being said, I’ll never be fully happy with anything that I write. But there’s nothing worse than being haunted by a story.

CALLUM McALLISTER

I was surprised when I read that you were a full-time nurse. For some reason, it doesn’t seem that typical for a writer, despite it being a reasonably typical job in the context of the UK economy.

EMMA GLASS

I don’t know many people who do it either. Before I became a nurse I studied creative writing and when I graduated from uni it the recession hit. I’d always dreamed of writing in some sort of capacity. I think really early on in my degree I realised that creative writing is something that—this was my view then, this obviously isn’t my view now—I would only ever be the sort of person who could do it as a hobby. My parents are both from Wales—and my mother’s a nurse, my father’s a plumber—and they always put a lot of emphasis on my sister and me getting a job so that we’ll always be able to provide for ourselves.

When I graduated, rather than ploughing my energy into finishing my novel, I dropped it completely and went into something where I’ll always be useful. I’ll always be able to find work. I always felt like I needed to justify my space on the planet.

I moved to London three years after signing up for the degree and now I’ve been here ever since, getting on eight years now. I took on a pretty intense role as a rotation nurse working on infectious diseases and oncology units, kind of the real tough stuff. Six months into that I thought, “This is what I wanted to do for the last three years, I’m finally here I’m finally doing it.” But emotionally I needed that creative outlet again.

So I started going back to my writing and reconnected with some old uni friends. They were always really encouraging about my work, and I got back into writing Peach, and that for me became a real space where I could just defunk. All the way through writing that it was just writing it to clear it from my mind. It was never “I’m going to get out of my job, this is going to be my livelihood from now on.” My good fortune of being published by Bloomsbury was a complete fluke. Because I’m aware of that, I’m really scared to let go of the job that keeps me secure.

So there are quite a lot of reasons why I still do the work that I do. I find that human connection is really important. I’m privileged to be able to go to work and meet new families everyday and look after people across a massive spectrum. I’m now an antibiotic nurse specialist. I tend to work on the happier side, where children are getting discharged and I’m looking at coordinating their care in the community, and the emphasis is very much on that family outside of the hospital environment. It’s quite a joyous job, in a sense. Some days, like today, when there’s a child with a really difficult infection, it keeps me so aware of how privileged I am. To be able to have that little insight into someone else’s suffering and to be able to help—that’s really important. Not just morally for me, but I guess for the writing as well. The writing that I do, I really want it to reflect that unique human condition. Not a lot of people are as privileged as I am to be put in that role of trust. I’ll meet a family, I’ll be chatting to them for five minutes, but you’re instantly granted access to their trust and to their love and to the thing that’s most precious to them in the world. I take that very seriously and I don’t really want to let that go.

CALLUM McALLISTER

What drew you back to Peach, in particular, after all that time?

EMMA GLASS

Peach didn’t really start with a story, as such. It was my final creative writing piece, sort of like my dissertation project. Peach really started, born out of complete frustration at not being able to construct anything that looked like a story. At the time that I was writing, convention just made me want to throw up. I found myself having to really draw back on this idea that I could create a world. I took it really back to basics and thought about managing to string a sentence—that was the first aim. I got so cross with myself, because I’m my own worst enemy in life at most things, always, but in particular when someone asks me to write a sentence. Even if i’m writing patient notes it takes me a while to get to the point. But I really stripped it back to just a word. I closed my eyes, and it was dark , and it was really late, and I was really tired. And this red image just came. And so I started writing from that point.

Pretty soon, I had this really distorted voice come out and once I followed that voice, the beat of the words just dropped down on the page. It was like following somebody’s footsteps, and when I realised that someone was Peach, the story started to show itself. I wrote it pretty much as you would read it. Every word came out in that order, which is probably why it did take eight years. But once it was there, it was completely embedded in me. Even after a summer of not thinking about it at all, it was always just lingering in the back of my mind. And when I started writing again, all those years later, I didn’t immediately go back to Peach. I started writing some short stories that all just sounded like Peach. So I thought, let me go back to that. It felt like the easiest thing in the world.

There’s something quite toxic about that story. To me it was partly to exorcise the ghost, but it was also partly to finish it. That’s something that I found really valuable to be able to do. To zip up the sleeping bag. It was never going to go anywhere, but I wanted to brag to my old lecturer that I had finished it, eight years later. It literally was that kind of odd, cringey email where you think back and wonder “Did I actually do that?” But I was lucky because they were really positive and said that they wanted to send it out for me, if I didn’t mind. Me not having much self-esteem—the idea of being rejected by hundreds of agents and publishers just doesn’t appeal in the slightest—so I said that they could go ahead.

CALLUM McALLISTER

Did that frustration with convention come out of the structure of your creative writing degree, or perhaps what you’d been reading at the time?

EMMA GLASS

A bit of both. I’m still not sure where I sit when it comes to the value of creative writing degrees. I mean, I have one, and I loved it. But I think there is a body of cynicism. Obviously, if I didn’t have mine, I don’t think I would have ever written. The structure of the course was really broad, and we were encouraged to write all kinds of things, but I think where the frustration came was during seminar classes, where we would have to read out segments of what we’d written and they would be critiqued in a workshop. Something that got my back up was how people would go “Oh, yes—the metaphor!” The metaphor for this, the metaphor for that. And I sat there thinking, “Pretty sure when that person wrote down to write that book they weren’t thinking of all the metaphors we would hundreds of years later pull out in a creative writing class.” That’s not how it happens.

I got on a bit of a soapbox about convention in that sense. I was in a minority of people who thought that you didn’t need a story to tell a story, if that makes sense at all. You certainly don’t need resolutions to stories to be successful in your endeavour of telling it. You certainly don’t need metaphors. I was caught by this idea of what if it’s not a metaphor, what if it just is? What if it reads as a metaphor, and it’s surreal and it’s strange, but what if it just is. And so I had real fun with the first few hundred words of Peach that I workshopped, because people would say “Ah, we really loved the metaphor of the stone, because that’s obviously pregnancy.” And I’m like, no it’s not. I was straight down the line. She’s actually a peach—wrap your mind around this one! But obviously there’s only so much I can say about that. When the piece is complete, readers do read metaphors. They don’t read it straight up one way or the other. They don’t just read a girl; they don’t just read a peach. And I like that ambiguity. I like that the work can be dynamic enough that people can draw out their own ideas. Obviously, with that comes a lot of criticism, some negativity. It’s not for everyone. And that isn’t unexpected at all.

The best way to make people fall out of love with literature is to put them on a writing degree. The last year, I got so little enjoyment out of what I actually read. Your brain is completely wired to critique everything. So I think I was just completely tired. The works that really spoke to me were the ones that didn’t make any sense at all. Like, Ulysses and Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. I found so much escapism in just the words. Once I started reading that kind of fiction out loud, that’s when things really clicked into place for me. I realised that the point doesn’t need to be about character development. The point can just be there is so much beauty in the word button.

I guess I’m not really doing James Joyce or Gertrude Stein any justice. I think that work is so fun, though, you know? You could be anywhere and you could be anyone and your heart races along with the language. That’s what I wanted to do. There are so many barriers when you construct dialogue correctly with punctuation. Not always—I like reading. But I think the reason that I’m a writer now is because I decided that I didn’t need rules. Now as an older writer, and a writer whose written some other things too, I realised that’s not true. I guess this ties me back to the creative writing degree. You need to know the rules to then be able to break them, and to be fearless. I think that’s what really excites me as a writer now, is the fearlessness. But also, acceptance of fearlessness. I think if I had struck lucky with Peach ten years ago, I don’t think it would’ve been published. I’m fairly certain it wouldn’t have been finished at all.

CALLUM McALLISTER

I’m curious as to why you think that.

EMMA GLASS

It wouldn’t have been published because it was too different. The stuff that was popular at the time, or even the stuff that’s popular now—there’s not a whole lot of difference. That’s not to devalue any successful writers that work towards a mainstream audience. I think all books that are published are right to have been published because they reached somebody, even if it’s just one person. But I think at the time, perhaps, the themes, and just purely the form—I don’t know that people would’ve been as open-minded as they are now. Lots of people sort of suggest that Peach came about in a time of #MeToo, and the new wave of feminism, and lots of people are really shocked when I say that it started in 2007, and not consciously of themes of rape or feminism. None of that was conscious. Certainly not the violence. It was like, I was in a dream when I reread it, which is a really scary feeling, like getting to work and not realising how you got there.

The sort of feedback I got from my creative writing class was like “Yeah it’s cool. But where are you going with this?” My lecturer implied that I was sacrificing my plot development for my rhyming scheme, to make that really stubborn point that I was trying to make. But I persisted, and was like no, I fully believe that this can be a fully-formed story. But even now, in 2019, there are people who still find it difficult.

Ninety percent of the reception’s been great. People will have different reactions; I’m really sensitive to that. I feel responsible for what I put out. I feel a degree of responsibility if it hurts people. Which art does. I’ve been hurt by books in the past, and I don’t hold the author to account—I don’t think anyone’s holding me to account. But it’s surprising because at the end of the day, what I always try to remind people of is that it’s fiction.

CALLUM McALLISTER

You were just speaking about how some people try and describe Peach as topical. Does that grate on you at all? Given that it’s about rape: it’s not as though violence against women is new.

EMMA GLASS

It’s increasingly grating on me. More from a sense that, until quite recently I didn’t openly identify as a feminist. Not that I wasn’t one this whole time—not that it’s not inherent in me—but that particular identity has taken a while to come out. I was brought up in a very traditional family. And particularly in working class Wales, my role as a woman was given to me at birth. It’s inherent in me that I must help others, and I must be kind, and must orientate myself around a male-dominated society. It’s never put that plainly, but I’m aware of it. That’s one of the reason I am a nurse. To recognise that quality has existed in my life for so long—not violence, not anything awful, certainly not sexual assault—but that inequality and that passivity is so part of me it’s been hard to shake off. And when I find myself on a feminist panel with the incredible June Sarpong, I kind of think “What am I doing here?” Then connecting that with what I’ve written, it does increasingly grate on me, now that I have an emerging feminist persona, that people assume—again assume—that I’ve written this to join the march. And I haven’t. I wrote this for a love of language. But then I can’t deny, and I will never deny, that it doesn’t belong in our newly feminist-focused society. Some readers have said that Peach has helped them speak up. That to me is the most amazing thing to hear, but that’s not why I wrote it.

CALLUM McALLISTER

Back to that playfulness with language: it’s not new, of course, but the last few decades of contemporary literature have seemed to be very focused on realism. Yet, in the past couple of years, there’s been a bit of swing back. When I was reading Peach, I was thinking of Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing With Feathers. Maybe there’s more of a mainstream literary space for that.

EMMA GLASS

Definitely, and I figure that’s sort of reflective of the time we live in, as well. I hate to take it to politics, but I’ll just go there for a second. Certainly in America, it’s like a bad game show, and the same could be said for certain elements of the British government at the moment. Surrealist writing is not so much of a stretch. Obviously the hyper surreal—fruits and sausages wandering around—is a little extreme. But actually grotesque imagery is more and more of what I see in real life. On the other side of that, people are going to that surrealist place because it’s an escape.

I read Max Porter’s book when it came out, maybe three months before I got my book deal. The first thing I said was “Oh fuck, someone’s got there first.” I couldn’t really see that there would ever be the opportunity for another book written in strange prose poetry. I kind of just thought it was all over. But I was so thrilled by the reception that that book had. And when I read it, I remembered the feeling that I had when I read Ulysses. I remembered that strange, visceral, almost bodily response to the words. It’s a whole different level of reading experience. It gets under your skin, and that’s one of the reasons that Peach went as far as it did. I wanted to give readers the opportunity, not just to read something and think about it and have a psychological experience, but to also have a physical experience. Lots of people have attributed vegetarianism to me. I’ve ruined sausages for many people, for which I apologise. But, if you got a feeling in your gut, or if you felt a little bit sick, that makes me really happy.

CALLUM McALLISTER

Playfulness being the main project of Peach, to begin with, why choose to bow to some of the trappings of plot? Playfulness in language, in its pure form, could be considered the domain of poetry, so I guess I’m wondering why Peach became a novel.

EMMA GLASS

This is where I sound really, really stupid. Having read quite a lot of poetry for my degree, I realise it was just too hard and I couldn’t possibly write poetry. Those are rules of writing that I never learned, and I’m not sure that I ever will.

The other side of it was I didn’t know what I was writing. I wasn’t disconnected from the writing as such but from the end product. That niggling voice from the creative writing class, that if you ever want this to be read by anyone else—which at the time I didn’t care either way, I was just having a good time with it. But that niggling voice that said you need a story, you need substance. I think I’ve gotten away with the bare minimum. I love poetry, but I’m never clever enough for that. This felt a little easier.

And then I think my lecturer had a real point. There’s only so many times you can say “Rip, stick, sticky”. It has to go somewhere. So the plot—because I decided she was right, it does have to have something—I just wrote out bullet points. Where is she going to go, what is going to happen.

CALLUM McALLISTER

I mean, it’s as much the distinction between Grief is the Thing With Feathers, as a novel, for example, rather than a work of prose poetry—that’s essentially a marketing decision. It’s what a publisher wants to present it as.

EMMA GLASS

Yeah, and I’m not sure I ever thought of it as a novel or a poem. I don’t know what I’d call it. My writing friends, who helped me get back into writing, sort of referred to it as “that weird thing”. When I emailed my lecturer I was like, “ So you know that weird thing I was working on?” I think Max Porter’s work and mine—when publishers take them on, yes we’re published and it’s brilliant—but publishers will still feel the fear of where it’s going to go. Because the market for poetry is considerably smaller than for novels, I think it’s a smarter decision really. That being said, Peach gets put into the literary fiction category. That’s just as bewildering. It could’ve gone under the “weird thing” heading in Waterstones. Literary fiction is a baffling kind of place to put any book.

CALLUM McALLISTER

It’s constantly on my mind because I have worked in bookstores for the last few years. The divide between genres and forms feels very arbitrary sometimes.

EMMA GLASS

Something that I got really upset about last week, somebody on Twitter, of all places—why do we go there?—said something that really got my back up, along the lines of, “Just worked out how to write literary fiction. I just remove all of the speech marks from my dialogue.” I was enraged! When I read the comments—why would I read the comments?—it was this whole group of people like yeah I hate books like that, I vow never to read any book like that again, amen, preach preach. You’re doing yourself out of some of the most incredible work I’ve ever read. I have obscure taste but that’s because I’m weird, not because I want to read “literary fiction”. I’m not sure I feel particularly comfortable being a “literary fiction writer”. I would never say that if people asked what section my book comes under in a bookshop, I just go “Oh, I don’t know, G?”

But it’s because if you say the words literary fiction people have real prejudice against it because it’s considered stuff that just clever people read. I don’t want to alienate anyone with what I’m writing. Obviously, I picked a terrible subject for Peach if I want it to be inclusive or widely read. But I don’t want readers to feel alienated because of the structure. I want them to find it accessible. And that’s one of the deeper reasons why she’s a piece of fruit and why the world is weird around her. Because if that was straight up men and women, that would be vile, no one would read that. It would be devastating. It’s hard enough to go back to it now and read it and realise how disgusting it is. But it’s that space that the reader can get. In the back of their mind, maybe she’s just a bit of fruit, so maybe it isn’t as intense. It’s got a different dynamic, or a different energy to it.

CALLUM McALLISTER

It’s interesting you bring up complaints about the supposed obscurity of literary fiction. For me Peach seems like the opposite. All the characters are exactly what they are. For example, Peach’s parents always say exactly what they’re thinking, in a way that no real person ever would. It’s like the opposite of the creative-writing-degree, Hemingway style where no one says what they mean, and instead you have to search in the subtext.

EMMA GLASS

I wanted it to be the exact opposite of what you’d expect. I didn’t necessarily want it to be shocking in that way. Lots of people, including my parents, are shocked by the parents. But I had so much fun writing those two particular characters. They’re not based on my mam and dad, just to make that very clear. But it was just really fun to do something completely flat. I mean, flat out. This is not the norm, not the expected. And how can anyone possibly read metaphor into something that’s obvious and blatant.

CALLUM McALLISTER

I was reading Vertigo & Ghost by Fiona Benson very recently, a poetry collection out from Jonathan Cape. She uses Greek myth to tell a story about a modern serial rapist. This schema is laid over a story about something real, in quite a similar way to Peach.

I was wondering what you thought about how these kind of techniques relate to stories about women’s pain. Whether it’s a topic that can be approached realistically in order to be read by a general audience. Or conversely, what’s gained from that approach to the theme?

EMMA GLASS

It’s difficult, and I’ll say two completely contrary things. I think my approach to writing Peach was to write fifty words, and then make it perfect from a spoken word perspective. It was really important for the words to sound right when spoken out loud. But I was heavily blinkered to what I was writing. When I started writing the bathroom scene, although I’d gone over that piece maybe twenty times getting the words just right, it was sometime afterwards that I recognised the violence in it. I was really surprised at myself and I was really scared. Although the physical trauma is nothing I’ve ever experienced, that trauma is my trauma, in a different guise. It felt right that there was that detachment, so if anyone from the outside looked in on that, there’d always be that surrealist element. It’s not real. There’s that strange, little girl fairy tale aspect to it. Which I think I used to protect myself whilst writing it.

At the same time, the physical suffering is something that I have unfortunately seen in my life. Not something I’ve physically experienced, but people that I know, some of the patients that I’ve looked after, the huge amount of suffering and violence against women. I think if Peach’s story was told without the abjectness of the setting, I think it would be too intense an experience for somebody to read. But I don’t think women’s trauma necessarily needs to be told in that way. I’m just not sure readers are ready for it.

At the moment, where I feel most comfortable, certainly talking about my own trauma or using my own experience, is through the surreal. Perhaps that will change, but I’m not sure I’m ready to go there as a writer. I hope that others are, because I think it’s still such an area of society, even with the liberation that we have with social media and activism, where there’s so much more to be done.

The other thing about using fiction to tell stories of women’s suffering—I’m not sure that this is the right thing to say or not—but people won’t take it seriously, either.

CALLUM McALLISTER

I guess there’s a tension in that: in fiction, a reader can accuse it of being unrealistic, made up or false, but if it is too realistic then perhaps they’ll not read it as fiction. They’ll read too much into it, and make insinuations about the writer’s life.

EMMA GLASS

Something that I was really scared of, actually, when I knew that Peach was going to be published, was how people would respond to me. I work with children and it’s not a secret. My place of work knows that I’ve written it. I didn’t write Peach under a pseudonym because I feel like it’s really important that people know the writer. It’s opening a window for people and I’m quite happy for that window to be open a fraction. But I was really terrified that people would say that this must be me—and obviously it’s in the perspective of a young female voice—so oh this is obviously Emma’s story, this is obviously something that happened. And my biggest ever fear, was somebody in an interview setting asking me if I’d been raped. But part of me forgot that most people are really respectful and do see me as a writer of fiction. But it is something that does come up occasionally. Sometimes people go “This must be so and so, and this must be something you’ve experienced.” People really assume that I’m a hardcore feminist and that I started writing this at the dawn of #MeToo and that’s fine but it’s not true. That’s why I’ve found it really important to do interviews and talk to people about where the work came from. It does still scare me.

I was in Pakistan earlier this year for the Lahore Literary Festival, which is this incredible, international festival which has only just started getting going again and attracting quite a big international audience. Pakistan is still obviously a very conservative country and I gave a talk on Peach. There were lots of conservative men and women in the audience, and there were also lots of liberal, mostly women, in the audience. Because I so regularly say this is not my experience, some women did stand up and say we have experienced this, so what makes you an authority? What makes you think you can write about our experiences when you don’t share them? Hands down the hardest forty-five minutes of my life, but also one of the most eye-opening and interesting experiences of my life. They are right, who am I to? But just because I haven’t had that experience—and I’m devastated that people have—but that trauma, the pain, and the emotion is me. It does come from me, of course it does. How can I not be connected to it when I go so deep? I explained that as respectfully as I could, and then I ran off and cried.

But I welcome those kind of questions because that’s what makes me a better writer and a better person. I can’t share the experience but I can sympathise with it and I can perhaps try to understand it so that my writing can be more representative of women who have had those experiences. That sort of line of questioning, it did scare me then but less so now. It does make me laugh because you read interviews with male writers, and no one ever asks Stephen King how many children he’s decapitated. A lot of people do think they have a right to ask women questions, and a right to ask for justification, but the balance doesn’t seem to be there with male authors. It comes back to saying, you put yourself out there, so you have to deal with the criticism, which is entirely true. But there are ways of being critical and there are ways of being respectful.

CALLUM McALLISTER

Especially funny you mention King because so many of his novels are about writers with drinking problems. There’s a famous, maybe anachronistic, story of Charlotte Bronte meeting Thackeray and having him introduce her to someone else as “Jane Eyre”.

EMMA GLASS

I do have writer friends who refer to me as “Emma Peach” or “The Peachy One”. I don’t take offence, but it’s quite funny actually. They know full well it’s not about me. It’s a little running joke.

CALLUM McALLISTER

You were just talking about not taking a pseudonym, and why you thought it was important that writers are available to, or known by, their readers.

EMMA GLASS

I find the idea of pen names really exciting. When I was little, I would imagine what my pen name might be, how cool it would sound. It’s exciting. You have the anonymity that means you can go for it. Because in Peach, I do in fact “go for it”, part of me was really considering whether I’d be better off using a pen name. I’m not really into this idea that we have celebrities. Celebrity culture really bothers me. It’s such a distraction. I mean that’s why it exists. But it bothers me because I feel like it devalues a lot of hard-working people.

But when I knew Peach was going out into the world, I wanted it to be from me, so that if it did offend or upset, I wanted to be able to talk about that and defend that from my side as a writer, but also defend the people that it may have hurt. And to just be available for people to ask questions. Stories only become stories once they’re read. Peach wasn’t anything other than a weird little thing until it was read by somebody else and they put value to it by calling it a story, by seeing it as something worthy for people to read. There’s a part of me that wants to be congratulated for having done something unusual. I think it comes back to the connection with human life. It’s important for me to be connected to others. It’s much harder to be connected to someone who’s made up. Some of the most joyful messages I’ve gotten from people since publication are that they’ve talked to me because they know that I’m a nurse and they think that’s interesting. I’m not necessarily there to defend the acts of violence or to justify why I’ve done this, and certainly I will only justify that to a point. But for people to then go, you wrote this, you work as a nurse, I’m a nurse or my mum’s a nurse. Those kind of questions really fascinate me, and really help me feel connected.

The weirdest thing in the world is having a book published. I’ve never given birth, and I do not want to belittle that experience, but it feels like that. You nurture it for a time, some people longer than others, and then it goes out into the world. Then to have that disconnection from it, it feels really weird. I feel disconnected already because it’s not mine anymore. The people who’ve read it, it’s their story not mine. Being able to say, but I did do it, it helps me feel connected to the universe.

When you’re dealing with that really acute human emotion, it’s only fair for somebody to connect that to a name and a face. Especially for aspiring writers, that’s a really lovely thing for me to able to do. To say, look it does happen. The dream does happen. I didn’t have a hundred rejections letters. I got really lucky and sometimes luck is the element you hope for. It might not necessarily get published but it might be worthwhile if it gives somebody the feeling of escape, if it’s an outlet. It’s really nice when somebody goes “Oh Emma, I’m a nurse. Can I write?” And I say “I don’t know, but why not?”

In another way, to kind of just be true about what life is. When I did get the publishing contract, I think my friends and family thought I’d be whisked away in a limousine to authorland and they would never see me again. And I’m always very honest about that. One of the reasons I still have a full-time job is because I need one financially.

I wasted a lot of time at university trying to prove that Shakespeare didn’t exist and all his plays were written by four other people. I loved the whole conspiracy around that. That being said, I was absolutely devastated to learn that my favourite author as a child, who was Lucy Daniels, who wrote the Animal Ark series, is actually not a woman called Lucy Daniels. It’s some bloke. And then actually a large number of blokes who were churning out these children’s novels. I had this pristine image of Lucy Daniels in my mind as a child, and she wore a floral skirt, and she drank tea and ate welsh cakes, because obviously everyone else in the world was Welsh, too. But in fact she’s this bloke in his fifties.

CALLUM McALLISTER

I always find it to be a nice antidote to celebrity culture when you learn about authors who are frank about their lives. It gives a certain amount of permission to people. I respect writers who do choose to wall themselves off. But one of the best essays I read recently was one from Alexander Chee’s collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel—which is out from Bloomsbury, too. He’s talking about working as a personal waiter for a public figure who wrote horrible things about the victims of AIDS. As a gay man, it was fairly degrading, but it also gave him the financial freedom to write his novels, it gave him creative freedom, and so it was empowering in that way.

EMMA GLASS

One of the reasons I think Bloomsbury took a chance on me was because they know I don’t rely on this. So many writers do, they go advance to advance, and they’ll get paid twice a year if they’re lucky. Some people are able to manage that and will put all of their time into their writing. Like we said earlier on, I wish that I did have a little bit more freedom. But at the same time, my parents were completely right, you have to be practical. There is a certain amount of fickleness in the publishing industry. You could be the hot new literary debutante one day, and the next day you’re in the bargain bin at The Works.

Bloomsbury know I’ll always be creatively free. They know what I come up with won’t be because I’m trying to please anyone but because I’m trying to dig deep and create the purest form of art that I can. That’s a really lovely feeling. To an extent, there are deadlines and expectations, and certainly writing a second book has been harder because I think, “Oh gosh, what if so and so off of Goodreads give this one star”. Between me and you, I don’t care. But there is that level of expectation. I’m maybe a little more inhibited then I was writing Peach. But I know I’m going to be able to eat tomorrow, so I’m going to go for it. It’s always a risk because whoever publishes my work might turn around and say no. Write whatever comes into your mind obviously isn’t it either. But it is nice to know that I have the security of something else. And also did you know Magnus Mills was a bus driver? I just love that!

And I also love the writers who you know, fuck it, have this massive house somewhere and do live in authorland. You know, good for you. It takes all kinds, doesn’t it.

CALLUM McALLISTER

Though you said you found the creative writing workshop approach quite limiting, is there someway you look for outside influence on your work now, so it’s not just you, so that your work is tempered in that way.

EMMA GLASS

It’s interesting because I really hated the workshops in uni, but I’m actually in a creative writing group in London, made up of friends that I met at uni, and other waifs and strays along the way. They were really helpful in terms of getting Peach to where it is. I feel like I only felt okay with that because I was pretty stubborn about what I wanted Peach to be. When I first submitted to the group, I had to put a disclaimer: Do not correct my punctuation. Do not correct my grammar. I am not telling this in the third person, I never will. And the feedback was really helpful.

The most benefit I get from that group is reading other people’s work. Just having something regular to read that the outside world doesn’t have an opinion on yet. There’s nothing worse than picking up a book that has had a hundred thousand reviews because then I don’t know how I feel about it. Reading really rustic work that’s straight from the author, that’s a real privilege. And just that regularity of reading and being accountable to a group of people who expect you to submit—I find that really helpful. But what I did find with book two was that I didn’t want to send them anything, and I haven’t. I wanted book two to be as pure a writing experience as Peach was in the beginning. Because in the beginning it was just me and my desk lamp, and Deftones on loop. That was a real joyful time. So the second thing only got shown to an early reader a month or so ago. And I showed them it in entirety, and I wasn’t quite as strict about what I wanted it to be. But for me it’s really important to make that definition early on. What I don’t want is for somebody to go back and go “Yeah, this is great. Do another 30,000 words and add in an omniscient narrative strain.” I can’t work like that. I have to be really decided on what I want the outcome to be. What I did with book two, which is what I like to think of as a ghost story, is I wanted to know “Is there enough ghost?” essentially.

CALLUM McALLISTER

Is there anything you’re reading, or anything you’re looking forward to, that makes you excited about literature right now.

EMMA GLASS

This is normally where I crack my worst joke ever and tell you that I’m not really a big reader.

At the moment I’m reading—something quite off piece for me—Swan Song by Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott. She’s a friend of mine, actually. It’s fictional but it’s about Truman Capote and his society friends and his success and his unravelling. It’s just really luxurious and long. Two things I don’t usually go for, but it’s beautifully written. I feel like I’m sitting in a bar, drinking a Manhattan, listening to people gossiping around me. And that’s kind of nice.

Next on my list, I got as a secret Santa book swap present, The Vegetarian by Han Kang. I’m desperate to get started, but I generally can’t have too many on the go at any one time. I also want to read Convenience Store Woman and I’m also halfway through Evening in Paradise by Lucia Berlin—that’s really beautiful.

I’m looking forward to The Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler. I just got sent a proof of that. I’m just standing in front of my bookshelf right now, because when people ask me what I’m reading I always default and say “Umm, Tenth of December”. But I can’t get away with that anymore, because I’m not constantly reading that book. Although I am kind of constantly reading that book.

I’m always grateful for recommendations and I’m always grateful for books that get sent to my house. I always try and read the proofs that come in, because I’m aware that I would’ve been a proof for someone once, and it’s only fair to give new writers support. Something that I read last year, which is possibly my favourite book of the last five years, except for Tenth of December, is French Exit by Patrick DeWitt. It’s not something that I would’ve picked off the shelf, but it is just exquisite, so if you get the chance. I’m looking forward to the new Max Porter, but I’m just terrified because he’s a real heavyweight.

CALLUM McALLISTER

I have a proof. I’m very much looking forward to reading it. But I know what you mean. I’m planning on reviewing it, but putting it off because I want to do it justice.

EMMA GLASS

I’m actually quite jealous of your work. I think in another life, if I’d come out of my creative writing degree and thought of other avenues I could pursue. If I could have gone down the route of reviewing or editing, or thought more about it, or had more opportunities. Talking to authors all day, I would have loved that.

CALLUM McALLISTER

What’s next for you?

EMMA GLASS

I’m trying to conceive book three at the moment, and I’ve already decided it’s a family saga, because that’s the exact opposite of anything I would ever write. And I want to push myself a little bit.

We’re all really quite sadistic as writers, aren’t we? We all want to do the stuff that makes us feel the most sick we possibly can.

Emma Glass was born in Swansea. She studied English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Kent, then decided to become a nurse and went back to study Children’s Nursing at Swansea University. She is a clinical research nurse and lives in North London. Peach is her first book.

Callum McAllister is a writer, bookseller and musician from Bristol, UK. He is assistant editor of

WHEN I WAS in college I went to mass in the afternoon. It was in the high school chapel, but college kids went there pretty often. I wasn’t the only one. I played with a baby over a man’s shoulder. Hey, fat baby.

There’s a particular thing you learn to do at Catholic school during the homily. I learned it while Father Liam was giving his when I was in seventh grade, over the course of a week. He had such a giant face, big and red, floating over his vestments.

The goal is to balance the kneeler on its corner with no hands. I’ve done it the length of a full mass, but you can only get to this point if you put in the work, hitting yourself in the shin time after time. I would spend hours a week balancing the kneeler to get it just right.

So you can imagine that at afternoon mass I performed the trick like an old pro. Hooked a shoe under the padded edge and shwiff, boom, it’s balanced. The baby was no longer looking at me, but I knew what I’d done.

AFTER MASS, I met Nadja and Garrett at the McDonald’s down the street from the high school. Seniors on their off periods dripped in through the entrance with their hoods up like Sith Lords. Outside, it was rainy and cold.

“Did you just walk from somewhere?” Nadja said. She had big flaky lips, like crescent rolls, and hair that always looked like she had just wet it down.

“My dorm,” I lied, and turned to Garrett. They were both sitting across from me. “What’s up?”

Garrett nodded. “Elmo,” he said, acknowledging me. He rarely spoke, and then only a word at a time.

“You’re supposed to come over for dinner tonight,” Nadja said. “My parents told me to tell you.”

“Oh,” I said. Nadja was my friend, more or less. Garrett was more or less her boyfriend, and we all definitely lived in the same dorm at the university. Or, at least, I think Garrett did. He was new. And sometimes, like tonight apparently, we went to Nadja’s parents’ house on the weekend.

“Garth and I,” she said, pointing to the guy whose name, bafflingly, wasn’t Garrett.

She didn’t finish the sentence, and everybody paused.

“So you know what I found out today? You know the phrase, ‘make ends meet’?” I started.

“Garth and I,” Nadja said again, trailing off.

“Garth and you what?” I said.

She said nothing, again, and looked out the window. I followed her gaze. The rain looked wet, I guess.

I started again. “But did you know that it’s meet, like m-e-e-t?”

Garth nodded; he was with me.

“Like a meeting?” I said.

Garth nodded.

“How did everyone know that?” I said, gesturing across the whole table like there was everyone.

Nadja snapped back sharply, and her eyes were red. “What’d you think it was?” she said, with too-big annoyance.

I cowered a little. “Well, like, meat. M-e-a-t. The food.”

Garth let out a sigh.

“Like that’s all you could afford,” I said, sitting up, suddenly defensive with good posture. “The meat off the end of something, like the crusty part of the meatloaf or something.” I paused. Not an unreasonable conclusion, I still thought.

The McFlurry machine started up in the background.

“Garth and I are leaving,” she finished.

“Or a roast or something,” I said.

IN THE BACKSEAT on the way over, I took the orange bottle of Vyvanse out of my pocket and looked at it. Still half an hour.

“You shouldn’t mess with those,” Nadja said, turned around in her seat and looking at me.

“No,” Garth agreed.

I nodded and put the bottle back in my pocket.

“I don’t know what we’re having. Sorry if it’s bad,” Nadja said.

At dinner, we were too afraid of her parents to talk, but up in Nadja’s room after, on the big bean bags, we got high. She and Garth smoked from a bong, and I took a Vyvanse, wincing at the bitterness of the blue-and-white capsule. They sat back and watched Futurama, and I ranted at them, joyfully.

“I’m just amazingly glad we’re friends, like all the time,” I said.

“I love sappy Elmo,” Nadja said.

“Yep,” Garth said.

“I feel like I could pull the whole world through a pinhole,” I said. “Do you ever feel like that?”

“Isn’t that like a saying?” Nadja said. “Like, ‘poking a needle in the eye of a camel?’”

“You’re rich,” I said.

SOME YEARS LATER I went back to church for my sister’s wedding. She and her fiancé took photos on the church steps, preening and laughing. I was a gargoyle in my stone suit. The bridesmaids wore scarlet. Nadja was there, all dressed up, but without Garth; she had dropped him quickly, years before. She and I had both been alone for some time now.

Father Liam married them, and his homily involved, inexplicably, Balaam’s ass. “We can all talk,” he explained. We all went in the church basement for the reception and ate nervously.

But what got me was my parents, preparing for the wedding. I was staying with them while I was in town. That morning my dad had poured water on his cereal. I cleaned it up for him and made eggs instead.

My mother spent most of the night before creaking in the rocker in the guest room. I paused in the hallway and held my breath, like when I was a kid. She was crying in a sleepshirt, saying, “What happened to my little girl?”—over and over. I stared and felt around my throat; there is a sorrow so sharp it hurts going down, caught like a fishbone.

Before we left for the church that morning, I flung open the front door and saw it had snowed overnight. Drifts against everything. I paused on the porch, feeling with the toe of my dress shoe for ice on the steps, squinting. Because the light that hit me was so bright.

Jane Fraser

New Welsh Writers is an interview series in which we speak to new voices in Welsh literature, delving into how they got their start and what advice they might have for other emerging writers.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

When did you start writing?

JANE FRASER

I started writing as a child at school. I was a compulsive diary keeper (it had a lock and key) and a poor short story writer (most would end with "it was only a dream"). My mother tells me I had an "over-active imagination". Then I didn’t write for years until I started attempting very poor free-verse poetry and rhyming "ditties" when I was in my forties, along with a chronology of my life to that point. These creations never saw the light of day and were stuffed into the depths of the attic cupboards.

But I was writing every day in my day job as Director and copywriter at NB:Design, the branding and graphic design agency I started in 2000 along with my husband, Philip. I always felt the urge to be creative and express myself and realised that I was not getting any younger so I needed to be serious about it. I tried art (a miserable failure) and rekindled an interest in the piano (passable). But it was writing that tugged at me.

I started exploring options and by chance landed on the Swansea University Creative Writing website. The MA looked fabulous—a mix of genres that promised to give me the toolkit to being a better writer. And I could do it part-time over 2-3 years so I wouldn’t bankrupt the business. In fact, I might even add value to the business!

It was here, under the teaching of Stevie Davies, Jon Gower and the late Nigel Jenkins, I discovered a love for creative writing. I was hooked. It became a new way of life.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What do you find are the most enjoyable and most challenging aspects of writing/being a writer?

JANE FRASER

The most enjoyable aspects of being a writer are that I am in complete control of what I create and that I can immerse myself completely. Sometimes I think this is selfish and an absolute luxury after years of subsuming "the self" to the demands of other things—ex-husbands, children, work, etc. The most challenging aspect of writing is simply time—lack of!

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

When and where do you write?

JANE FRASER

I write when I am not working in the day job—at the end of the day, most weekends. I do not seem to suffer from writer’s block so if I have the time and the "mental space", the words seem to spill on the page. I suppose I am lucky in that way. I write mostly here at Channel View—on the settee with the PC on my lap usually. I can write on a train. I can write (if and when) we go on holiday. Anywhere, apart from the studio where I work in the day job. In fact, I have two different devices for writing—one desktop for the day job and the PC for the creative work; and never the twain shall meet.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What starts a new piece of writing for you?

JANE FRASER

My writing is always prompted by "something" outside of myself or deep in the subconscious: perhaps a dream (I keep a journal); a phrase that is overheard in passing; an image that startles and won’t go away until I write it away; a photograph. But I have to admit that psychogeography has been the way into most of my writing—ideas that surface on the hoof as I connect with my place in Gower and the intimate history and knowledge I have of it. It is then a question of re-casting my observations and turning fact into fiction.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Do you plan your writing or discover along the way?

JANE FRASER

I am not a planner or a plotter. I try to slice in at a moment in time and see where my starting point takes me. Sometimes this works. Sometimes not. If I’m working on short fiction, I try to write through to the end image in one sitting to keep the arrow in flight and maintain the voice and the ‘zone’ I seem to be in. I then tend to sit on it before revising in the true sense of revision. To see again. To see anew. I feel more in my natural comfort zone writing a short story though I am enjoying the current challenge of writing my first novel, as yet untitled.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What has the path to publication been like for you? Can you speak to some of the challenges you faced?

JANE FRASER

Over the years, I had individual stories and articles published in anthologies and literary magazines such as Momaya Press, Fish, New Welsh Review, and The Lonely Crowd, for which I am very grateful. But it will be this June, 2019, that my first single-authored collection, The South Westerlies, will be published by one of the UK’s foremost independent publishers, SALT, as part of their 20th anniversary list. This is an exciting and surprising outcome for me as I’d been concentrating on my PhD for a few years and vowed that I’d have to get my act together and approach publishers. I did one and was duly rejected and then, SALT approached me last July as they did not accept unsolicited submissions of short fiction. It turns out my work had been recommended to them as a result of being a finalist in the Manchester Fiction Prize in 2017.

I know there are challenges in getting your work to publishers, especially without an agent. I know also that there is little appetite from mainstream publishers for short fiction. SALT was my dream publisher and I cannot quite believe it is happening. They are champions of short fiction and debut writers of any age. And they’re small. Committed. Independent.

I think as an emerging writer you need to be visible and constantly trying to raise your profile and improve your CV—articles, competitions, placing individual stories, perhaps a website and a Twitter presence. A slow burn if you like. But SALT know the game better than most and have a great and very honest guide to getting published on their website.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Was there a moment when you started to think of yourself as a writer?

JANE FRASER

Like most writers, I tend to suffer from "imposter syndrome", feeling that I’m not a real writer which is often driven by fear of being caught out as a fraud. However, in 2017 I saw a call out from Hay Festival seeking applicants to be part of their 11 day CPD programme, Hay Writers At Work, funded by Arts Council Wales and managed by Literature Wales. I was successful and it was then that I realised (and was told) that I’d earned the right to be there as a writer with potential. This was a light bulb moment and when I realised that I had to try and capitalise on all the opportunities that were afforded me there, to try and be the best I could be.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What role, if any, has Wales played in your writing?

JANE FRASER

Wales has played big part in my development. I am proud to call it home. I see myself as a Welsh-European. It’s where, in my own patch of Gower, I feel grounded and have what Durrell called ‘an identity with the ground’. It’s where I feel secure and in the frame of mind to write. Wales has also a strong community of writers that have welcomed me through schemes such as Hay Writers at Work and the events organised by John Lavin, Ed. The Lonely Crowd, who brings together writers on the page as well as face to face through readings in Cardiff and Swansea. Wales has also offered me two languages and two cultures to explore and plunder as a writer, and although I am not fluent in Welsh, I am learning.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

Which writers do you admire most, and why?

JANE FRASER

There are so many writers I admire, dead and alive. Where to start? As for the dead ones, all the Brontë sisters, D.H. Lawrence, Hardy, Flaubert and Zola. And those alive: Jon McGregor, Cynan Jones, Tristan Hughes, Anna Burns. Why? Quality of prose—the elaborate and the stripped-back. Great characterisation. Unique voices. Sense of place.

I’m a short story girl at heart and can only give a smattering of those writers I admire. Top of the list must be the Irish writer, Claire Keegan—quiet, understated, timeless. In fact, I love Irish short story writers so I need to add Edna O’Brien, Billy O’Callaghan, Gerard Donovan, Colin Barrett, John McGahern, Roddy Doyle. I could go on and on but there’s something about the 'oral" nature of the storytelling that gets inside my head—the great use of dialogue, the rhythm of the prose. And then there’s Welsh-exile, honorary Irishman, Thomas Morris. I can’t forget him.

The list is endless. Add Sarah Hall and her visceral prose. Add Daniel Woodrell and Annie Proulx for painting never-to-be forgotten images of The Ozarks and Wyoming.

JAMIE GILLINGHAM

What advice do you have for other emerging writers?

JANE FRASER

I don’t think I’ve been in the writing "business" long enough to give advice to others. What works for me is to just keep writing and try to improve in the doing of it. For most, to use the cliché, it’s a marathon not a sprint. As the wonderful writer and mentor, Claire Keegan, once said to me: “Writing is not for the faint-hearted and if you’re not serious you may as well give up.”

Her second collection, Connective Tissue, is complete and she has a novel in progress.

She is represented by Gaia Banks of Sheil Land Literary Agency, London.

Jamie Gillingham is editor of The Cardiff Review.

Vertigo & Ghostby Fiona Benson

Jonathan Cape, £10.00

A FEW DAYS AGO

Glass’s surreal debut novel Peach follows the aftermath of a violent rape, an idea she started working on almost ten years ago. It can’t accurately be labelled as stemming from #MeToo. Even so, writing about violence against women and women’s pain, outside of the specific contexts of the movement, aren’t topical. Topicality, by definition, is restricted to the current moment and implies an expiry date. But not only have women suffered misogyny and misogynistic violence for millennia, it’s also one of the most well-trodden—though, more often than not, poorly trampled—subjects of literature, both written and oral. Maybe just, only now, grappled with by the wider cultural conversation.

And this is where the first section of Fiona Benson’s two-part collection, Vertigo & Ghost begins—riffing off of characters from some of the seminal works of Western literature. It draws on the stories of Zeus’s so-called "erotic escapades"—a veiled euphemism that suggests infidelity, rather than abuse of both unwilling and unwitting victims.

What’s important here is framing. In the first part of the collection, which works more as a complete piece than a collection of distinct poems, she blends the classical and the modern, characterising Zeus as a serial rapist and taking care to write from the perspective of the women and girls he abuses. Their suffering is not aestheticised but visceral, internalised. Whereas, his actions are always seen as they are: criminal. Moreover, Zeus’s point-of-view isn’t voiced. In the poems where he does speak, it’s always in the context of “surveillance”. He’s not speaking to, or for, us; we’re watching him speak, a step removed.

Indeed, the girls are the only characters with a first-person voice. While not obviously so radical a choice, it’s also not especially typical, even with texts which are supposedly sympathetic towards the victims of misogyny. Think of the chorus of “The Boys” in Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides or the three-fold narrative form of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian—in part a retelling of the story of Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne. Across three acts, the eponymous Vegetarian is twice seen from the point of view of male characters. One sexualises her, idealises her, and ultimately treats her as an aesthetic, artistic project. The other treats her as his property. These aren’t necessarily bad, uninteresting perspectives. But they come from a position of sympathy rather than empathy. Contrast this with the voice of Benson’s characters:

"I came to understand

rape is cultural,

pervasive;

that in this world

the woman is blamed."

"Rape is rarely

what you think.

Sometimes you are

outside yourself

looking down

thinking slut"

So often the badly-trodden motif of the battered woman is overly aestheticised. It’s sometimes a selling point in itself, as in true crime or highly-violent television and film. Realism is treated as an aim. Explicit portrayal of violent misogyny is justified by its veracity, rather than from the perspective of the overall work, which on a surface level should intend to expose or challenge the cultural narrative around violence against women but instead merely replicates it. When a work reproduces images of abuse, it doesn’t in itself represent a challenge to the ideology of rape culture. Often, the abusers are more well-represented, nuanced, sympathetic characters than the abused—and they are in fact part of the sell. Watching people behave badly, and get away with it, can be entertaining. Where the victims are pitied, rather than humanised, the abusers are carefully considered, analysed in their context. But fundamentally, they’re still distanced from the consumer. Our culture, our internalised views, are rarely culpable in their actions. Misogyny is seen as more a force of nature, than something our society has a hand in.

But here, both Zeus’s characterisation and our access to him as a character are carefully tempered. Titles which implement the language of the modern justice system, for example the titles "[archives] Zeus on parole", "[forensics]", "[surveillance] Zeus under sedation", mark him out as distinctly criminal and distant. When we are given access to his voice, he speaks in all-caps, and his words carry the pace and flavour of online misogyny, with content as troubling and ridiculous as the worst internet comments. For example, in a poem titled, simply, "[archives]":

"Zeus on parole:

NO FUN

THIS ANKLEBAND

TAZERS ME

EVERY TIME

I BRUSH THE BOUNDS

AND YET IT IS

SHALL WE SAY

EROTIC?"

And yet, allusion to myth and classical literature can often feel obscuring rather than illuminating.

But in Vertigo & Ghost, I think allegory is additive rather than reductive—moreover, it effectively informs our understanding of misogyny and abuse.

On the surface level, the "erotic escapades" of Zeus are explicitly reframed as serial rape and abuse. In this sense, it’s not a one-size-fits-all schema laid over the work, but a invocation of the classical in an attempt to reinterpret it. But more so, the allegory works best in what it tells us about the nature of male violence and our culture’s acceptance of it. After all, in mythology and literature, characters such as Zeus and Apollo are essentially positive, noble figures—if flawed. In many stories, they are the protagonists. They have positive traits and connotations, and they wield both supernatural and institutional power. Their image, their names, allude to greatness and perhaps even moral goodness. But most of all, authority.

As a stand-in for male violence, they represent personalities we’re familiar with, culturally. The realisation that goes with their abuse of power is also the realisation of betrayal familiar to the modern reader. They’re not the cliché of the stranger in the alley, but institutional power and celebrity. Where the focus of #MeToo was specific—to uncover specific instances of abuse and rape by well-known and often well-loved public figures—it was also generalised. #MeToo, as a name, came from the wave of solidarity and the acknowledgement of widespread violence. In this way, mythical figures share this same space—both specific and named, but also non-specific, allegorical, generalised. And though the individual case is different, the pattern is the same. Towards the end of the first section, there’s a particular line that draws this out:

"Someone else’s Zeus

shit-faced at the school gates"

Here, the second part of Benson’s collection departs radically from the first in style and tone. We leave the Greeks behind entirely, and characters in the latter part go mostly unnamed, but feel much closer to home, more personal. And it reads more like a traditional collection, where the first part read as a single, cohesive piece.

Yet Benson manages to make both parts feel like two acts of the same project. It’s subtle enough that the work risks being entirely defined by its first act. But where it’s more strictly conventional—or at least familiar—in tone and form, it stands out in its use of language. Here is where Benson’s imagery is at its most vivid, and the writing at its most personally moving and, often, deceptively simple. In the first poem, "Dear Comrade of the Boarding House" she employs a technique I have always loved in its simplicity:

“This is the poem in which your jeep does not crash;

the roads are not potholed dirt, a goat does not

wander into your path”

It carries on until "in which you are still / practically a schoolgirl, dear comrade, / and never anything but dead."

Where there are invocations of violence, Benson deliberately negates them. But in doing so, those assertions are made suspect. In terms of the literal text, we might expect a sharp break from the previous section. Violence, death and rape are explicitly invoked, but in the negative—which somehow feels more direct. It’s wonderfully effective signposting: what’s next is different, but consistent. We are given two different approaches to the same ideas.

And so the second part is certainly more conventional, but also so beautifully written. While separate, distinct pieces, an invocation of the natural world runs through each work. The narrative voice ruminates on individual plants, animals and images, with a hint of Hughes-like melancholy. Birds, toads, bats, and rabbits are, for the most part, dead or dying, infected or wounded. But, less like Hughes, Benson points a finger of blame. The violence of these poems is often manmade. And unlike Hughes, there are connections to gender, motherhood and grief. The voice of each piece often links animal suffering with femininity, and women and girls are always compared to animals, be they wildebeests, baby elephants, or termites. Again suffering is not merely image or aesthetic—it's brought home. Towards the final moments of the book, the poem "Wood Song" puts it thus:

"Daughters, when they come

we will hide in the forest,

we’ll cross the meadow

and the orchard,

their shifting rooms,

till we are deer in the woods —"

I was unsure, going in. I love reading poetry, but have certainly tired of classical schema and reinterpretation—in part because sometimes I don’t know what they’re trying to add. And largely because I’m not especially familiar with Greek myth. But Vertigo & Ghost tackles these well-trodden motifs in a particularly thoughtful, refreshing voice—one which effectively adds layers of nuance to its themes. With it Benson paints a sweeping portrait of societal misogyny, and also successfully represents our deepest internalised notions of violence and gender. It’s a conscientiously written collection that rewards a slow, careful read—as does all great poetry.

Callum McAllister is a writer, musician and bookseller from Bristol, UK. He is assistant editor of The Cardiff Review.

I HAVE A keen interest in storytelling, and my work often involves a strong narrative. It's very inspired by medieval and renaissance imagery as well as nature, which I'm surrounded by living in Dyffryn Cellwen, commonly known as Banwen, South Wales. I work primarily in pencil, watercolours and inks to create my illustrations, but I'm also open to new ways of working and am constantly experimenting.

The seven images below were created while exploring my love of storytelling. "The Unicorn", "Wildflowers" and "The Selfish Giant" were a result of examining different ways of creating medieval inspired scenery. I’m fascinated by the flatness of medieval art and the presence of religious icons, and it's that feeling I tried to achieve in these works.

As for storytelling, I enjoy classic stories, like "The Frog Prince", reimagined below. With "The Princess and the Dragon" I wanted to poke a little fun at the traditional kidnapped princess trope but having her look rather fed up with the situation. My take on Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice was actually a part of the final project for my degree. I chose to twist Alice with Russian history, specially the Romanovs and the revolution, leaving hints of that historical time while still keeping Alice’s familiar story throughout.

The Unicorn, Scott Keenan

The Child, Scott Keenan

A Mad Tea Party, Scott Keenan

Mermaids, Scott Keenan

Wild Flowers, Scott Keenan

The Princess and the Dragon, Scott Keenan

The Frog Prince, Scott Keenan

Scott Keenan is a freelance illustrator and artist who lives in a small, rural village in South Wales. He studied Illustration at Cardiff Metropolitan University and graduated in 2015 with a First Class degree. He’s recently exhibited work in The Albany Gallery in Cardiff and hopes to one day be illustrating children’s books.

Velizar Ivanov

YOU LOSE YOUR virginity on a Skype call. It costs your client ninety dollars for his fifteen minutes. He refers to the event as a "deflowering ritual". Men, they do so like their little rituals. For this momentous event you choose red-checkered knickers last worn in high school and a pink bow for your red tousled hair for that crucial girlish effect.

Christmas Eve, you're up at dawn. You prepare for your deflowering by snorting a tiny mound of cocaine from the tip of Penny's house keys. Your client lays belly-down on a twin-sized bed. He is much too big for it. The garish winter sun illuminates a mottled dome of scalp through pale, thinning hair. You see blue walls, white trim, a neatly tucked duvet and two My Pillows, As Seen On TV. It's that old scratched desk pushed close by the bed with the little figurines on it and the Confederate flag stretched wide and taut as your legs that clues you in.

“Mama’s boy,” you whisper and Penny laughs and licks another fleck of white powder off your lip. Your client is into that.

He wants to negotiate how young you're willing to pretend to be.

“Why do you need us to specify, honey, we’re just your little schoolgirls, right?” you ask him.

He just does. And after all, he'd be the one paying. You settle on sixteen, but the long negotiation upsets you far more than the notion of a deflowering ritual ever did. It is amusing to contemplate how excited this big man is, pining for his sordid little ritual so hard that it takes two women to satisfy him, to play out a fantasy deep inside his mother’s house. Maybe it means that much more to him this way, bringing it home.

You moan and slump back on the bed, spread your legs wider. He selected you to play his virgin. You knew that he would. Sprawling on the green duvet you aim your crotch at the camera eye while Penny, the dildo expert, arches over you, dark hair trailing your collarbone. You give another measured moan. As she leans in closer, flexing, you find yourself whispering panicked in her ear. "Do I look fat to you?"

BLOOD PRESSURE

It was the same nurse who asked me about my goals and, having none, I proposed my forthcoming London trip, anything not to have to talk. I was preoccupied with my naps and slept during snack time, group work, homework time, the family nights my family never came. I slept relentlessly, on and on until they snatched away the pillow and blanket and banished me to the floor with a tub of moon sand. Bad girl.

“It’s all going to be okay,” the music therapist simpered at me. She had hair of a hue unknown to nature and a tambourine. “You’re going to be healthy and beautiful again!”

“I don’t think healthy is beautiful,” I told her, being malicious. “I like how I look now, except for those extra five pounds.”

Disturbed, she resorted to showing me many photographs of starving women from an old documentary about Ethiopia, someone always starving somewhere, and asked whether those poor women were beautiful or just sad and pathetic. “Don’t you care about your life?” she tried.

I think that pathetic woman actually expected hand-held drums, ukulele, and egg shakers to teach us to care. But what she could never grasp was that we knew we were sick, knew it far better than she.

I dream always of a woman I have never met. Her hair is dark and heavy, worn loose down her back or twisted into coiled intricacy. Her features are clear and sharp, arched brows, a slant jaw. The clothes she wears are strange, peculiar blues and greens that cover her frame completely, a style entirely foreign to me. Still, asleep I feel I know her intimately. She never speaks, never acknowledges my presence or meets my eye. In her world, I am the ghost.

This woman is wan and pale, which makes me uncomfortable, because I want so bad to be wan and pale. The other women who weigh me, prick my veins, see me as a delicate porcelain figurine, but I want more than anything that walk of hers so smooth she might float on air. I know she’s small as she is because of hard winters, poor soil, failing crops. This is nothing to do with desire. Which is to say: I don’t think she belongs here, in my present.

In one dream, I am a child, following her along the coil of a long dark river. Later, I will compare this river to the Thames because, the first night I stroll its banks upon leaving the Globe, I feel a strange recognition, a sense of coming home.

On the shore, she lets the hem of her dress float in the current. A summer day it is, blue skies and sunshine, a solitary purple wildflower behind her ear.

She is the most familiar figure I carry with me. I can’t call up at will the image of my grandmother or my mother. But this woman on her lonely sullen shore? It’s as easily done as this.

FINDING THE RIGHT website requires serious research. Then there's so much to do. You have to submit photos, a snapshot of your student ID, identify your body type, create a stage name, leave enticing little breadcrumbs all over your model profile, Easter eggs they say. Jesus, you say. It's hard work creating a new identity. You are now Anya Quinn. Hello. The name comes to you completely formed, Anya Quinn. It's cute, seductive, combines Eastern-European haughtiness and Irish fire.

Your dorm-mom from boarding school told you all about the business of selling nudes to her Sugar Daddy. $400 a pop she'd said, for Pop too. You haven't forgotten. You can learn a lot from older women. Your first message is from a rich New Yorker looking for a full time 24/7 dedicated Sugar Baby. You watch him amble around his Manhattan penthouse apartment wheeling his camcorder at the expanse of glass wall to reveal a sunset-over-skyscraper horizon. You admire that finely crafted and deeply oiled furniture scattered so sparsely through their homes as though to flaunt how much space they could fill if only they had the inclination. And then you stop admiring. He never directs the camcorder at himself though, the male body off-limits.

“What do you think?” he asks. “What kind of cars do you like? You’d definitely need, after all, something to get you around if you came out here.”

He says he'd fly you down to Miami, put you up in a hotel suite he’d never have a key to, just to meet him is all. And if you didn’t like him, well you would never have to speak to him again. It's that easy when you're that easy.

“Do you like Mercedes?” he inquires of you, curious and squinting. “How's about red, to match that stunning hair?”

WEDNESDAY GROUP NIGHTS

My dream woman is always alone. The pine trees are thick, but somehow distant, shedding needle showers. A landscape ripe and green, but it’s cloudy out, and cold, and she wears a hood. I can tell she knows this road by her sure-footed gait and that she is unafraid because she never once turns her head. I walk behind her, follow her up a steepening incline, but I'm lost in a dream so my legs don't ache at all. The land goes on and on, horizon stretching forever, until it doesn't. My stomach lurches the way it does when a plane takes off. The woman approaches a cliff edge. It's a cliche of sorts. Gannets wheel overheard and there is nothing below the spinning gulls but sea. I hear the surf roar, smell salt tang, but can’t bring myself to the edge. She sits there, tilting her chin slightly and closes her eyes, perfectly at ease.

YOU FLIP THROUGH sites to see which you can mail your dirty panties, $25 a pair. But you need to wear them for three days first, apparently. You wonder if it's worth it. It doesn't seem altogether hygienic.

I LET MYSELF be brought to a world of guarded mealtimes and a purple couch. To replace the curious act of voyeurism that was watching myself disappear with cold, bloody facts about perforated esophagi and the caustic burn of kidney failure. Soon, I couldn’t remember what it was to be out in the world living a life, couldn’t recall what might be taken from me, and how at any given moment all could be snatched away so easily. My mind voyaging into some kind of church, some sanctuary of dim hush and dry air where the candles lined aged stonewalls, a continual reminder that the difference between light to dark is a solitary breath.

We begged the nurse to let us take a walk through the city. She was foolish. Released, we ran through brush like wild animals. We darted across the badly mowed public park near the crisscross train tracks, fast enough that our minder could not keep pace. We bolted across the rails as the train approached, slipped ourselves out of sight in a new way, ducking under construction tape. She found us an hour later draped around the lip of a fountain by the museum entrance, bare feet dangling in the water, ignoring chattering teeth. I shouted, “Mary Beth! I feel so alive!”

For living, we couldn’t get punished.

On the shore of the lake late at night, close to curfew-call, the horizon line solidifies in the cold, trees on a distant shore, a solid black band. Still, the cold water rushes in across the sand, sweeping shells. Late November, ice starting to splinter and crack on the rocks, on the branches of the trees. In the dream the woman walking there, as in a dream.

BUT YOU KNOW the girl your client really wants. You remember your first period. You were eleven and in seventh grade geometry. You angled your protractor against the worksheet of isosceles triangles when something twisted in your lower belly, as though wrenched by pliers. In the bathroom you unwrapped the pad with trembling fingers, unable to look away from the red drip on white marble, pale as you. He wants you like that, a frightened schoolgirl quaking in the stall with her Aeropostale jeans around her ankles, bleeding and scared, a worksheet waiting.

I HAD ALREADY swallowed six Xanax and called her four times. “I don’t know if I can do this,” I tell her, pacing away from where the rest of the class were clustered by the departure gate.

“So don’t go.” Marya was being flippant. She’d resorted to deploying reverse psychology to make me understand how irrational I was about the flight.

She informed me wryly that there was a higher probability of me being kicked to death by a donkey than dying in a plane crash. But another friend was once in a flight that got struck by lightning. For thousands of feet his aircraft dropped like a stone, passengers screaming like schoolgirls. I hated Marya. She knew if I didn't go to London I’d be stuck in my parents' house, another month of flitting surreptitiously into the kitchen late at night to sneak the next day’s alcohol ration, Christmas preparations to endure, visiting aunts barking at me to hold the door for my male cousins, my mother yelling at the cat as he pawed the porcelain Jesus from His manger again.

What I craved more than anything was an IV drip of Haldol right into my arm.

“I have to go,” I tell Marya. “It’s too late not to go.”

I hear her smile from a thousand miles away. “Honey,” she says, “You don’t have to do anything.”

“Of course I have to go. I’m going to go.”

She knows I have to go.

I go.

I realize that the woman is not supposed to be walking alone. No one in their right mind, armed or not, wanders solitary on these country roads on winter nights. Not when snow falls in small flurries, furrows fields, leaves the cold world helpless, drifting.

Maybe the woman has never thought of hurting anyone and so cannot fathom how harm can come to herself. Perhaps she is a saint. I cannot begin to fathom her.

YOU ARRANGE THIS on-camera dance party in Penny's apartment, giggling while your bare feet glide over the scuffed wooden floors, shimmying together in slips and bralettes, doing each other's makeup, tossing your hair and tossing your shots. In an hour the pair of you make two hundred dollars each. Besides dancing you do a little kissing, a bit of touching, but mostly you fake it. In time you learn to fuck ecstatically without even touching. In time you learn how to manufacture the best orgasm of your life as a smokescreen for the hysterical laughter set to erupt as soon as your client shuts off his computer.

This is what you think you do. You finesse men out of their money—men who call you baby, men who send you snapshots of their cocks, men who believe you do all this for them. For a while it feels like you are exacting justice for everything that every woman has to put up with every day. But then there are the incontrovertible rules: no lactation, no menstrual blood. You see that the sex industry is a darker murkier world; on camera there is no urination, no defecation, no [other] men [but the one behind the camera, watching], no pets, no mention of children, no beating, no rape, no cutting, no torture. There is a body here, but it is not a real body.

I HAD NOT seen a corpse in a while. My great grandmother was laid out on white satin at her wake. It was strange seeing her stretched out like that. I’d never seen her once lie down. Alive, she was always in the kitchen, stirring bubbling pots, scrubbing bubbles on all fours, bickering over ingredients. At the funeral home, between rounds of tag, my cousin dared me to touch her body. She felt like I thought she would; squishy like shriveled, old fruit.

These corpses though were part of the mummy exhibition at the British Museum. My breath felt shallow before the glass cases nesting the sarcophagi. For some reason, I had imagined seeing the mummies’ flesh and not yellow bandages. Bodies so fragile that unraveling a single binding would mean a reversion to dust. Most were plainly wrapped, but some of the more important had distinguished bindings; arms and legs wrapped separately, leather straps criss-crossing arms and forming Xs across chests. Hieroglyphics painted neatly onto the wrappings covering their knees. An exclusive few wore gold masks with eyes outlined in charcoal, heavy brows, curved mouths, thick, braided wigs. In death only the rich earned their faces back. Most were child-sized. People in the ancient world were smaller. Even Shakespeare’s best and second-best beds, which I pay homage to in Stratford, are cramped by our standards. A warrior used to stand 5’ 4” tall, two inches above me. I am so easily scooped up. In a battle I’d be so scared of dying I’d just freeze and let it happen. I'm a fragile thing, too.

I scuff the glass casings with a finger. Did you lie in the sun? Stroke your Phoenician cat? Bathe in the waters of the Nile? Did you raise a cup of fermented wine and smack your lips at the rim? Make love outdoors in the warm night air? Were you ever afraid of being wrapped up, tucked away? Did you think about how it would feel to die? But the one thing I am certain of is this: never in your wildest nightmares did you imagine yourself encased here amid marble and metal and concrete so far away from Luxor, me contemplating you behind glass.

She wears a thick white cloak, which is valuable, definitely worth something. Wrapped in this, she is the perfect prize. When the men kill her, I know why I never saw her with children, never saw her grow old: it’s because she’s there, sprawled in the dream snow, all the white in the world going to red. When it’s over she’s without her coat. It's like she's made a forever snow angel. And now she's gone.

FOLLOWING YOUR PENETRATION, the client inquires if your hymen is still intact. He groans, needing to know if it or you were breaking. But just before you can fake the rip he so craves, there is another sound. An older woman’s voice, shrilling, “Honey, breakfast time!”

It is his mother.

“Honey?” she repeats, concerned. "Christmas Eve Breakfast time!"

“I’m on an important call!” he shrieks in terror, pug nose flaring in panic. He sits up in bed, flesh spilling everywhere. “It’s important!” he bawls, this grown man in such desperate need of his privacy. He sounds now like he is being strangled, as if his mother, with our help, was busy garroting him before our eyes. And she was, in a way, and you suppose you were, too, because flailing madly, eyes bulging at us through the screen panicked he suddenly comes, spurting everywhere.

The ritual complete, you delete your profile that night.

MY ROOMATE AND I meet the Englishmen somewhere in the city late at night. We are drunk. They are cute and dark haired, but we tell them we’re lesbians, invent a whole love story on the spot, threading our fingers, shooting each other star-crossed looks. The only reason we invite them up to our room for a drink is because they appear supportive of our monogamous fictitious romance. We want friends who are native Londoners, who can show us the best clubs for dancing, the cheapest food, the secret places. We wedge into the taxi that takes us from Soho to Russell Square and I find myself telling them that I'm a writer and that fiction and nonfiction are the same thing really.

"I don't see how that can be," one says, looking querulous and English.

"It's all narrative you see," I tell him. "Just the bits and pieces that nearly hold us together. I'm just the story I tell myself to get by and it's all broken up."

"You're drunk," he observes, correctly.

"I'm just these fragments spinning into coherence," I tell him, incoherently. "I'm the fiction of my own autofiction."

The men exchange glances. The bad news is I'm crazy. The good news is one of them might get to do me in this state.

“The hotel manager told our group that we couldn’t have overnight guests,” I say in the elevator. This is my attempt at establishing that the two will not be staying long

But these two men are going nowhere without adding a foursome to our love story. It's not our narrative anymore. They've taken the story over again now.

“Be in love tomorrow,” the one with the longer hair insists.

“Live tonight,” his friend chips in, gripping my arm tightly.

Suddenly, I am very drunk and weary. I feel like I've been kicked to death by a donkey. I watch my roommate becoming smaller and smaller on the bed, shrinking with fear, disappearing into herself, and know now that something terrible will happen tonight.

Recently, I’d begun to feel like I now cared too much about my life. My doctors were overjoyed to see me looking eight times before crossing a road. Toddlers played along the yellow line in the London tube, but I stood there with my back pressed hard against the wall, faint with the image of some madman shoving me onto the tracks and the Victoria line train barreling over my torso. I’d been petrified leaning over the railing of a Thames bridge, overcome and dizzy, the vertigo that is my life. The self-awareness that had crippled me so long now made me angry and unafraid.

"Go." This I say quietly. "You have to go."

They laughed, exchanging nervous glances.

“Get the fuck out,” I clarified.

The men are confused and then angry. Later they will begin yelling at me. I laugh, lurching towards them. Some part of me wants them to hit me, perhaps so I can strike back harder. “Go. Or I'll call security and have you chucked the hell out!” I savor the word 'chucked' because it's one of theirs and I've taken it from them.

All at once I realize that they are afraid of me. These men, boys really, scrambling for the door. “We’re going to call a hooker, now!” one screams at me, face contorting.

“Well I’m incredibly fucking sorry for her!” I scream back.

They leave at last and silence descends. My roommate still trembling on the bed, sober now. I realize that I've spent ten minutes fighting to be something other than stunned. I am stunned by this.

That night I wake horrified, slide down the wall of the shower sobbing. I cry for lunches, Xanax, scary men, the breakdown of the body, and, most of all, for the unexpectedness of it. How the world is just a trap, waiting for a misstep as you stumble through. How much time I spend waiting to hear the snap of the jaws.

ON A WINTER DAY without snow, this before London, I sat drinking tea with a friend. She poured the water into blue mugs, readied the bags, while I traced the sweep of her lawn up into the white fugue of the sky. There was a pile of nuts on a small napkin near a cup of purple and blue pens and the white square of it piled with wedges of dark chocolate. These details seem unimportant, and yet not. My friend was musing on all the ways I might die on my way to London. How an engine of the plane might shudder loose. How the hull might crack open like an egg, spilling our guts out the belly of the plane. How tatters of fiery metal would trail behind me like pink ribbons. I'd be like a comet then, my death of astronomical proportions.

“Before you suffer the sensations of a free fall, the pressure would make you black out,” she was explaining, reasonably.

It was not a reassuring conversation, but she was a good friend, and so I didn't mind, a friend, moreover, who once told me, when I was still sick and close to dying, that every single goddamn day I must do something to save myself. “Some people drink beer, some people write poems.” She’d shrugged at me. “What about you?”

“What about me?” I whispered.

“What do you do to save yourself?”

I had to think about that question a long time before I could answer.

This.

Carly Anna Miller is a current graduate student of Clinical/Community Mental Health at Western Illinois University. She graduated from Knox College with a B.A. in Creative Writing and Psychology. She is a former Editor-In-Chief of Catch Magazine, and Managing Editor for Unify Galesburg, the alternative, underground publication of Galesburg, IL. She has previously published in Midwestern Gothic.

Peter Goulding

LEE AND I

A young couple are walking along the Dinorwic quarry road along the hillside above Llanberis. They see us already climbing so stop for directions.

“Hello,” he says, “do you know where Twll Mawr is?” He pronounces it right: “Tuff Mour” rhymes with hour.

He is pleasant and she is Californian—and hot—so of course I offer to show them where it is. They want to do a climb called Supermassive Black Hole, which is becoming a classic. I think they are on a climbing date. They are carrying climbing-brand rucksacks—if we look down the valley we can see the DMM factory where his was stitched. We walk towards the twin slate pillars called Watford Gap, chatting as we go.

There is a barbed wire fence sectioning off Twll Mawr, but the end post doesn’t quite meet the sheer wall of slate next to the road. We squeeze past it, and now we are in a part of the quarries where we are “Not Allowed”.

We walk around the edge of the pit. Above us are tall cliff walls, the clean, barely possible wall of The Quarryman, the quarries’ most famous climb. Below us is the sheer drop into the pit, seventy metres straight down. The drop gives you a specific kind of fear where you think you should throw yourself off the edge just to get it over with.

I point out the route. Far below us a tiny, orange-rusty ladder leads up to a tunnel entrance. The route is next to it up an arete and finishing on the quarry rim: seventy-five metres, longer than most ropes. We are standing well back from the edge, heather and grass have bonded tiny fragments of slate together, but it still feels as fragile as sand.

The girl looks over and sniggers nervously.

“Ohmigod! It looks really out-there.”

I don’t think they’re going in.

THE QUARRYMEN called this pit Matilda. Twll Mawr just means “the Big Hole”.

During World War II, millions of roof slates were blasted off houses. But the industry had been declining for years before that. Ceramic and concrete roof tiles could be made cheaper, and that is what new post-war housing was roofed with. The Dinorwic slate quarries, owned by the Vaynol estate, had employed two thousand men in the middle of the nineteenth century. Whole villages were supported by the quarrymen’s wage packets. After World War II, there were less than three hundred men working there, but still an essential part of the local economy.

In 1969, the remaining quarrymen of Dinorwic went on their two week-holidays. It was common then for everyone to have their leave at the same time. Every summer, the quarries simply closed as a whole, and reopened when everyone came back a fortnight later.

The postmen came round the villages while the quarrymen were on holiday, with sackfuls of identical letters. The Dinorwic quarries were closed, three hundred jobs gone, and three hundred incomes lost.

The main customer had been a French firm for the last few years, and when that contract was cancelled there was no reason to keep the quarries open. The steam engines and equipment were sold off at auction, the majority of the buildings were stripped or abandoned, save a handful that were preserved as museum pieces.

Around the same time, the Vaynol estate sold off many of their estate’s cottages and houses. They were sold cheaply, for as little as a hundred quid. A few of the buyers were climbers, moving away from the North of England to be closer to the fantastic variety of Welsh rock.

LATER IN THE WEEK, Lee and I hop over the five bar gate. A path leads down the hill, and two terraces down, we head left. We go around the hillside, across level ground. In places the train tracks from the quarry still survive. We scramble over a dicey mess of scree, and there, through the eye of the skull, you can see from the valley road. The tunnel is cool, despite the heat of the day, early for May. At the end, we take the right fork—the left ends in a thirty metre drop. It’s where that tiny, orange-rusty ladder is. It no longer reaches the floor of the pit, wrecked by rockfall, the steel dangling like two stray strands of spaghetti.

We walk past a quarryman’s hut. The timbers have rotted and the roof has fallen in. All around are mattresses of soggy moss and shell-bursts of bright green ferns growing out of any crack their spores have landed in.

We step onto the glacier of slate scree, and walk down it like uneven steps. All this rock was brought down in big rainstorms in the 1980s, a slumping slide of rubble that poured down the side of the pit. The slate lumps are all sizes from cup-coaster to large van, they lock together stable, but tilt a little as we stand on them; clock, clock.

Lee and I drop our backpacks onto the ground. We look around for “crag swag”, nuts and cams that might have been dropped from above. No luck, there are barrels and bits of cars, bones from a wild goat. A daisy chain of old climbing rope has been stashed here, now it is rat-chewed, the white of its core fluffs out from the nibbles.

Harnesses on, shoes squeaked clean for maximum grip. We are using my new Spanish rope. It is turquoise blue, the colour of the Med. It twists and tangles. A few routes and it will soften, the twist curled out, but right now it has its own life.

Lee flakes the rope out, I sit on a handy block, getting ready. I watch my hands tie the knot to my harness. They know what they’re doing. I take a breath, Lee sees it and clips me into his plate.

“Nice one, Pete. Enjoy it.”

“It’s only climbing,” I say, making him laugh. As if we care so little about it.

Off I go, up the cracked fin of rock, big ledges to stand on and pike heads for handles. I haul myself up easily at first, clipping the stainless bolts resined into the face. It isn’t hard to keep the fear small.

Then I get to the bit I’ve been waiting for. The holds run out. I have to leave the fin and step across space onto the smooth cliff wall. There is a little seam, a ridge to use. It’s the width of a the edge of a light-switch fitting. That’s big for slate. I can reach across with my foot to find a little ledge. But I’m spread out too far, so I rock my weight onto that foot, drop the other foot, and my hand flicks and reaches for a perfectly round hole at waist level.

I stack my fingers in. It is a shothole, where a quarryman drilled into the rock and poured a handful of blackpowder. The explosion was small, just enough to open up the natural seams of the rock so it could be levered off. Wherever we climb, we are on what the quarrymen chose to leave us, the rock faces that would be no use because they were rippled, or had a dolerite seam, or just couldn’t be got at easily enough.

I come into balance, and my fear releases itself into a string of words that pop like bubbles across the still air—“I-never-expected-to-get-here…” and echoes off.

The rope comes tight, I bounce and dangle on the end of my rope, which runs back to the last bolt I clipped. I’ve hardly fallen a metre, quite safe.

It takes me a few more goes, but I get through the hard bit of the first pitch. Upwards another two pitches, easier but still exciting, getting further from the quarry floor and closer to the top.

The last pitch is very unslate-like. Perhaps superheated steam blew through a crack and into a chemically different area of baked mud: the slate here has a coarse grained grippy texture, much more like igneous rock. It is a pink colour and there are pockets, like leech’s mouths filled with quartz crystal teeth.

We see someone wandering about around the rim of the quarry. He’s got a young collie dog, and he’s shouting at it in Welsh: “Atal! Atal”. Stop, stop; because the collie hasn’t the sense of danger and is nervously trying to find the edge of the scree.

This could be anyone, and we tense up. Sometimes kids throw stuff in, just for the thrill, and it wouldn’t take much: a brick sized lump of slate or a stolen car radio.

Just as I am about to start climbing again, the man walks back down the scree and looks over the edge below, studying the pit. He’s got some business here, he’s no straying tourist. He’s not a security guard either, they never come away from the road. Then he looks left and sees us on the stance. He walks straight over to the edge above us, untroubled by the exposure, he looks determined and he’s coming straight for us.

“That’s one of mine you know!”

And I know who it is.

“Alright Ian!” I laugh.

Ian Lloyd-Jones is the climber who first put up Supermassive Black Hole, bolted it and named it. I had recognised him and introduced myself the year before. He has put up many routes in the quarries, all of them fully bolted to be safer, and he is fiercely proud of them.

“People don’t realise how much work there is putting up these routes. You abseil in, and knock off all the loose rock, tons of it, to get to something that can be climbed.”

Lloyd-Jones came from a quarrying family, his grandfathers and their fathers before them had worked on the ropes in these pits. Ian’s grandad had been a Rhaffwr, Welsh for “ropeman”.

“In a way, we were doing the same work. They went down ropes with just an iron bar. They were levering off blocks for roofing slates, I was levering off loose blocks to find a climb. When I was on the rope, I didn’t feel like I was alone. It sounds a bit fanciful perhaps, but it felt like they were with me.”

We climb over the top. The sun is high in the sky; Lee and I coil up our ropes and pack our gear. We walk out along the quarry road, heading for our vans.

Peter Goulding is a climber and writer originally from the North of England. He has spent most of his working life in kitchens, pubs and on building sites. He is working on Slatehead, a history of the North Wales climbing scene.

Bruno Ramos Lara

This is why

the first person

to pull up

behind us

after your car

hits the deer

(the car giving

way like it,

too, knew

the shock

of finding

a life on

the other side

of action,

the deer’s body

lying down

like a little

hotel) is not

checking on us,

is not curious

if we survived

the event

intact.

What he wants

is to know

what we will

share. If

we will eat

this good meat

with him.

Ben Seanor graduated from the Texas State MFA in Creative Writing in 2015. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in the minnesota review, decomP, and Cimarron Review. Ben has also worked with the journals Front Porch and Arcadia in an editorial capacity.

Paweł Czerwiński

Time dilated the moment I entered your orbit at Joe T. Garcia’s for our first date. I knew it when I saw you in that orange cotton sundress walking toward me through the dusty gravel parking lot as I waited for a table on the patio.

For hours, we sat sweating in the shade under the thick, breezeless foliage, condensing ourselves into a single conversation like a run-on sentence, cooling our nerves and the July afternoon with pitchers of frozen margaritas.

But now, on our wedding day, I believe the sweltering heat of our first date was caused by the accretion of our individual nebulae beginning to form a new solar system.

When I make my vow to you I’m really saying that I believe love is subject to the laws of physics,

that Einstein’s theory is applicable to my human state of matter whereby all I encounter is relative to your gravity,

and that in the endless darkness of the universe my trajectory is permanently aligned with yours.

A Texas native raised in Wisconsin, Ryan Kuether completed his BFA at Stephen F. Austin State University in 2009. His poetry has previously appeared in HUMID and The Oklahoman Review. Ryan is currently writing a creative nonfiction memoir detailing his grandmother’s experience growing up in Germany during the height of World War II. He lives in Hickory Creek, Texas with his wife, Vicki.

Annie Spratt

All names are recognizable, some even the same; Hamlet remains,Laertes; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Polish Ophelia, Ofelia, more phonetic, Saxon, austere; opposite of all I have learned to expect from this language, not that I can speak it past gratitude and greeting. Polonius and Claudius unchanged but for a final letter z affixed, Gertrude Gertruda. I dawdle through the pages, knowing I will recognize To be or not to be, its echoing poetries, but not remembering act or scene. Hamlet the prince Danish, Hamlet the thing British. I wonder how it would be to watch Shakespeare in a language I do not know. I have a vague notion of how to pronounce some Polish.Akt trzeci, scena pierwsza. Seen it performed once, at Keble College, Oxford: woman as Horatio, the whole cast English. Between a black Americano and warmed brownie I sound this verse made strange.

Annie Diamond earned her BA in English and creative writing from Barnard College in New York City. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Laurel Review, The Columbia Review, Cargoes, Misadventures, and other publications. She has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, The Lighthouse Works, and Boston University, where she completed her MFA in 2017.

A Simple Scale by David Llewelyn

Seren, £9.99

PAINFUL EVENTS AND feelings have a way of lingering in the memory. Figures from the past haunt the halls and corridors of our minds. We imagine what we could or should have said during some argument or other—Diderot called it l’esprit d’escalier: the predicament of thinking of the perfect reply too late—or we otherwise dream of having committed to an alternate course of action, one whose eventual outcome might have been better, or at least different, to that which materialised. Not all memories are painful, of course; in David Llewelyn’s A Simple Scale, the author also captures something else: the peculiar bitter-sweetness of our reminiscences: the painful echoes of the past which, in time, lose some of their potency and take on a character that is altogether more palatable.

Llewelyn does this by giving us a seat in the audience for the most significant experiences in the lives of his characters. We are there, both as the memories were formed, but also while experiencing them as a memory, from the perspective of the present day. For Sol Conrad, one of the central figures of Llewelyn’s story and a former film composer now in the throes of dementia, memory comes and goes. Yet for his assistant, Natalie, reminiscences and the music that so readily brings them to mind are inescapable. At the novel’s beginning she wakes following a party feeling a little the worse for wear, with only the vaguest recollection of singing along to a song she didn’t know. Even the time-honoured remedy of weed and booze fails to inoculate her against her memories of 11th September, 2001: the attack has taken place only days before. And it’s Natalie who must delve into and confront the past—though not her own—to find answers when a young Russian named Pavel Grekov comes to New York accusing her elderly employer of theft.

Llewelyn likes to move between perspectives and tenses, times and places. With each chapter, we are somewhere new, and sometimes even someone new, addressed directly as a character in our own right. In the bleakness of Stalinist Russia, we follow a young gay composer, Sergey Grekov, grandfather of Pavel, as he endures as best he can the treacherous Gulag setting in which he finds himself, separated from Leningrad by the harsh winter climate and acres of snow. A younger Sol Conrad, working in Golden-Age Hollywood, lives a double life in paranoid McCarthyist America, yearning for intimacy but finding little in his brief, impersonal encounters with other men. As the story unfolds, these shifting settings and tenses and points of view come to form a tapestry independent of time or place for which music is the thread. The piece of music is the Pechorin March, named for the ironic (and Byronic) hero of Lermontov’s tale of the Caucasus, A Hero of Our Time. It’s a piece of music stolen or appropriated or recreated, claims Pavel, for use in a cult TV show theme.

We become familiar with Llewelyn’s fondness for noirish, almost Ellrovian prose, particularly in the scene-setting opening lines of each chapter. “Three more beers,” begins one. “A cheeseburger from the counter near the window, served up on a paper plate. She carried on drinking.” And then: “Another time, another place; the city grey, the snowflakes falling in the street like ashes.” Close your eyes, and you can’t fail to imagine the world-weary private investigator, cigarette between thin lips, collar turned up against the wind. These hard-boiled and script-like fragments, which are sometimes dreamlike and evocative, become too familiar with each passing chapter and lose effect. But the suggestion of detective fiction, at least, is not out of place. Rather, A Simple Scale both invokes and subverts the genre. In their unspoken communications, their discreet encounters and their anxiety and alienation, the central characters—decent and civilised gay men living in indecent and uncivilised surroundings—often have more in common with the fictitious gumshoe than the lawmen that hunt them do. And in the shape of the likeable Natalie we have a quasi-detective, one not entirely unencumbered by the paranoia that is both a tragic and necessary feature in the lives of Sol and Sergey. Natalie wakes on the very first page in the insecure atmosphere of the morning after, and instinctively sees in Pavel a potential psychopath and conman looking to exploit the man in her charge.

As the narrative picks up speed, the different pieces of Llewelyn’s mosaic start to come together and a vivid picture comes into view. The supposed theft of the Pechorin March becomes secondary to the experiences of the men involved. It’s just as well, because though it is Pavel’s accusation which sets the events of the story in motion, the question of whether the music was stolen is ultimately uninteresting and, it seems to me, largely irrelevant. A Simple Scale is not a story about theft, but about lives half-lived, and in some sense reflective of each other. Sol and Sergey are divided by time and place, but united in their experiences as artists and gay men living in times and places hostile to both.

Though the story’s premise (and indeed the book’s opening quotation) hints at a kind of antagonism between the characters and legacies of Sol and Sergey, their grievances are not with each other. Tense confrontations arise in a diversity of settings, and these repeated "duels" are a feature of Llewelyn’s story that becomes impossible to ignore. It bears noting that a duel also comes at the climax of Lermontov’s novel, as well as ending the life of Alexander Pushkin, whose resentful and murderous Salieri gives A Simple Scale its curtain-raiser as well as its name. They say that so enthralled was Pushkin with the notion of envy that having finished his draft of Mozart and Salieri—one of the so-called "Little Tragedies" and the inspiration for Amadeus—he branded the word on the containing envelope.

But if there is envy in A Simple Scale, it is an envy of those not freighted by the artist’s need to create or the gay man’s need to avoid detection from hostile authorities. Indeed, A Simple Scale has far less to say about envy than it does about isolation and loss, music and memory. People die. Things end. But art, Llewelyn seems to say, is eternal and thus immortalises its creators. It speaks to our feelings, calling forth those sensations that we have long repressed or thought to be forgotten. It was Shelley who put it best, I think, when he wrote that "music, when soft voices die,/ vibrates in the memory". A Simple Scale is far from perfect, but in his originality and ambition, Llewelyn captures this most enduring idea.

Harry Readhead is a writer, editor and critic based in London. His work has been published inThe TimesandMetro.

Friday Black,Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

riverrun, £12.99

READING FRIDAY BLACKmade my breathing irregular. When I first picked up Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s debut, I wasn't expecting to switch from shortness of breath to having to take deep, long breaths. I paused before I began each story, bracing myself for its beauty and brutality. Four stories in, I’d learn my lesson: there’s nothing I could anticipate, neither on the sentence-level nor in terms of plot. All my defences would fall. I also paused after I had finished each story—momentarily, or for a day, sometimes even longer. This I knew from the start: I’d never be able to re-read Friday Black for the first time, and I had to both relish and ration its prose.

It’s no surprise that, at first, I struggled to find the words to describe the collection, to liken it to other works of literature or pop culture. Since its publication in October by riverrun, an imprint of Quercus, the collection has been compared to works by literary heavyweights including Ralph Ellison, Anton Chekhov, and Kurt Vonnegut. The author was also named among the National Book Award’s "5 under 35". Charlie Brooker’s dystopian, science fiction TV series Black Mirror came to mind, as did Jordan Peele’s comic horror film Get Out. The closing story, “Through the Flash”, sets up a Groundhog Day-like scenario. I settled on James Baldwin meets Black Mirror meets Cards Against Humanity, to provide some semblance of a description or recommendation to friends.

In his rave New York Times review, There, There author Tommy Orange draws various similarities between the characters’ voices in Friday Black, as well as the aesthetic preoccupations of Adjei-Brenyah, with that of his mentor, the short story extraordinaire, George Saunders: “Whether or not that writer’s tutelage shows here, I can think of no better a short story writer to borrow from or emulate. That being said, Adjei-Brenyah’s voice here is as powerful and original as Saunders’s is throughout Tenth of December." The author himself aims to follow in the literary footsteps of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and George Saunders—knowledge we’ve gleaned from his various interviews and features since. His epigraph is a Kendrick Lamar quote: “Anything you imagine, you possess.” He also took a writing workshop with Lynne Tillman, who first encouraged him to read Saunders and Baldwin, among others. Adjei-Brenyah’s stories range from realism (“The Finkelstein 5”) to what can be understood as magical realist (“The Lion & the Spider”) and also (largely dystopian) science-fiction (“The Era” and “Zimmerland”)—all equally dark and disturbing, and yet deliciously funny offerings. While “The Era” envisions a future at the apex of scientific advancement and genetic modification—residents are injected with a dose of “Good” each morning—the sixth story, “Zimmerland”, is set in a theme park, where racism is “managed” through virtual reality, and paid patrons are able to play out their (frankly, extremely problematic) fantasies. (Theme park settings are well-traversed territory in Saunders’ fiction, too.)

A triptych of satirical stories—the titular “Friday Black”; “How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing”; and “In Retail”—explore the ruins and repercussions of mall-culture, capitalism, and consumerism, arguably quintessentially American concerns. Here, Adjei-Brenyah’s act of turning the traditional, annual American shopping holiday Black Friday on its head, inverting it, can also be read as a case of mirroring contemporary social reality (and his own experience working at a retail store). Describing the stampede of frenzied shoppers, Adjei-Brenyah writes: “Some bodies fall and get up. Some bodies fall and stay down. They scream and hiss and claw and moan. I grab my reach and watch the blood-messed humans with money in their wallets and the Friday Black in their brains run toward me.” A broom is used to brush aside the dead bodies. The previous year “the Friday Black took 129 people” we’re told. Tommy Orange writes of this, the title story, that the author “turns everything inside out to expose our blood and guts and desire and greed and savings. Every bit of hyperbole holds more truth than most of what the news, which only sometimes tries its best to be cool, calm and objective, has to report”.

Indeed, the stories in Friday Black are home to a host of issues that make headlines: school shootings, rampant systemic racism, abortion, violence in America, and 21st century consumer culture. Unsurprisingly, then, there is a sentence-level shock-value in these stories. Sample this from the opening story, undeniably the standout story of the collection for me, about the Finkelstein verdict where a white man had been acquitted of decapitating five black children:

The court had ruled that because the children were basically loitering and not actually inside the library reading, as one might expect of productive members of society, it was reasonable that Dunn had felt threatened by these five black young people and, thus, he was well within his rights when he protected himself, his library-loaned DVDs, and his children by going into the back of his Ford-F15- and retrieving his Hawtech PRO eighteen-inch 48cc chain saw.

Among the gut-wrenching moments of violence in the story, and of these there are many, are flickers of Adjei-Brenyah’s playful genius: his protagonist Emmanuel adjust and tempers his “Blackness” on a scale of 10. He dials it down to a 1.5 when speaking to a potential employer and shoots it up to full potential in the penultimate moments (“The feeling of his Blackness rising to an almighty 10.0”) before the story closes. And when it does, “in that moment, with his final thoughts, his last feelings as a member of the world, Emmanuel felt his blackness slide and plummet to an absolute nothing point nothing”.

It’s noteworthy that while these stories are newsy in nature—the author doesn’t care much for the adjective “timely”—they’re not pamphlet literature, per se. We learn from Adjei-Brenyah’s Paris Review essay “Why Do You Write Political Stories?” that he was in college when Trayvon Martin was murdered. The author shares that he created an anonymous pamphlet as an artistic response to the atrocity, of which he scattered 500 copies across campus, but to no avail. “Years later, he’d write “The Finkelstein 5” in an effort to “translate the ways in which the justice system is often a cruel joke for black Americans”. And while he does write stories that are political, he is “decidedly out of the pamphlet game,” he clarifies: “To get to a story like “The Finkelstein 5,” I had to first have a professor, one Arthur Flowers, offer me and my entire class a prompt: Write a story to save the world. To that, I wrote a two-page story about my mother, basically saying, I love you mom”. This story, “Things My Mother Said”, immediately follows “The Finkelstein 5” in the collection. The book’s dedication reads: “For my mom, who said, “How can you be bored? How many books have you written?”. The presence of parents is also seen in stories such as “Lark Street” (featuring talking twin fetuses), “The Hospital Where” and “The Lion & the Spider”.

If the twelve stories in Friday Black had a contemplative quality to them, demanding to be read slowly (whilst fighting all urges to speed through them greedily), and which meant I often had to come up for air, they were also a breath of fresh air—especially in the present political moment. This is America of the past, present, and future—raw, exposed, and put on trial through fiction. Going forward, one can only breathe a sigh of relief that voices such as Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s, and stories such as those in Friday Black, exist.

Sana Goyal writes on all things bookish for Mint Lounge, India,Scroll.in, and Huffington Post, India. She’s a PhD candidate at SOAS, University of London, and her thesis focuses on contemporary African writing in English and literary prizes. She’s also reviews editor of the third issue of CHASE’s Brief Encounters journal. She’s at home in Mumbai and London and tweets @SansyG.

started a new job at Cardiff University, lecturing in Creative Writing, and one of the modules I was given to teach was on the short story. Coincidentally, this past summer I was fortunate enough to be asked to co-tutor, alongside Cynan Jones, a residential writing course on the short story, at the Tŷ Newydd Writing Centre in North Wales. As a result, over the past year, between other reading and research I’ve had the chance to revisit and rediscover some of my favourite short works, in anticipation of sharing them with my students. In doing so, the main problem I’ve faced has been trying to slim down my selections. How to choose between "Miles City, Montana" by Alice Munro, and "Queen of the North" by Eden Robinson? Carver, or Hempel, or both? A dash of the classics—Chekhov, Mansfield, Poe—or keep it entirely contemporary? In making these decisions, a few jewels have stood out, and have provided wonderful exemplars for teaching.

One of them is Nam Le’s near-perfect short story, "Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice". The title is taken from a Faulkner quote (explained in the story), which summarizes what Faulkner believed authors should write about: the "old verities and truths of the heart". Le’s work is an ideal story for aspiring writers, since the narrator—also named Nam, and seeming to represent a literary alter-ego of the author—is a student on the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop (graduates of which have gone on to win a total of 17 Pulitzer Prizes, among other accolades). The prose is both precise and poetic: a rainy sky looks "gray and striated as graphite", and the electric typewriter he buys to overcome his block "buzzes like a tropical aquarium" when plugged in. The story is also exquisitely constructed: the plot focuses on the final weeks of the narrator’s studies, when he is struggling with writer’s block, made all the more difficult by the arrival of his father, visiting from Sidney, Australia. At its heart it is a powerful family drama about displacement and generational rifts, but along the way it examines (and critiques) writing programmes, the publishing industry, and the creative process. The combination is absolutely unforgettable.

In addition, Amy Hempel’s "The Harvest" struck me anew with its verve and courage and fearlessness. Again it’s a piece that seems to draw on semi-autobiographical elements: in this case, the narrator suffers a terrible injury in an automobile accident (as Hempel herself did). Lines such as "but I won’t get around to that until a couple of paragraphs" immediately draw the reader’s attention to the fact that this story is constructed, and heighten rather than lessen its sense of authenticity. The leg injury becomes a symbol for (among other things) the emotional damage we do to each other in relationships, and the story charts the narrator’s recovery, culminating in a brilliant moment when the narrator exposes her damaged leg at the beach and begins to wade in, explaining to a young surfer that "a shark had done it." When he asks if she’s going back in, she says, "And I’m going back in."

That could have been (and once was) the ending to the story, but the second half continues: "I’m going to start now to tell you what I have left out", and proceeds to deconstruct the first half, pointing out the fabrications that have been grafted on to the "facts". For me the bold technique transcends the trappings of metafiction – in part because the story isn’t that interested in being ‘fiction’ at all, but a ferocious analysis of traumatic experience, recovery, and also our writerly impulse to use it as material (sometimes with exaggeration). It gives new meaning to the narrator’s rhetorical query: "Aren’t we all somebody’s harvest?"

Alongside those, Jhumpa Lahiri’s "A Temporary Matter" has left me reeling all over again. From a practitioner’s point of view (or at least this practitioner’s) her work is daunting because it is difficult to pinpoint just how she achieves her artistic effects. The prose is not layered with poetic descriptions and flashy imagery; critics have called it "plain" but that seems reductive: rather it is subtle and self-effacing, and reminiscent of Alice Munro in that respect. On the surface, the subject material is not dramatic or sensational: a young woman, looking after her toddler while her husband is away working, is visited by her widowed father ("Unaccustomed Earth"); a schoolboy gets a new baby-sitter, and has to go to her house after school since she is unable to drive ("Mrs. Sen’s"); a couple receive notification that the neighbourhood is to experience five days of electrical blackouts ("A Temporary Matter").

And yet in each case the story manoeuvres you into a deft hold until you find you’re completely gripped and enthralled. In part this is because beneath the surface of these ‘ordinary’ dramas are concealed secrets and passions that can emerge or flare up, disrupting the everyday. This is very much the case in "A Temporary Matter": from the simple premise of the blackouts, as the story progresses it becomes clear that the couple at the heart of the story, Shoba and Shukumar, are dealing with a painful trauma and, having reached a tipping point in their relationship, are disconnected from each other. It’s only during the blackouts, when they dine together by candlelight, that the two begin to communicate again, sharing their real thoughts, and emotions, and secrets – leading to an ending that leaves you bereft.

I want to go on. Preparing for my short story module at Cardiff and the residential writing course at Tŷ Newydd has renewed my passion for the short story form, and writing in general. I’ve published two books this year—my novel No Good Brother, and a paired novella project with Eluned Gramich as part of W&N’s Hometown Tales series—and since then I’ve felt somewhat artistically depleted. Having reacquainted myself with these stories and other favourites, I’ve also regained some creative charge. Such feelings ebb and flow, so it’s best not to become too grandiose—but I’ll appreciate it while it lasts.

Tyler Keevil is a novelist, screenwriter, and short story writer from Vancouver, Canada. His latest book is No Good Brother.

My Year of Rest and Relaxationby Ottessa Moshfegh

Jonathan Cape, £12.99

IN HIS 2013 BOOK

The unnamed narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s latest novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, appears subconsciously aware of sleep’s countercultural force. Living in Y2K New York, the character commits to a hibernation period of sleep and VHS Whoopi Goldberg movies—the year of rest and relaxation—in the hope that such a break from life will spark some personal or spiritual revelation. Moreover, the ascetic lifestyle also cuts her off from the pursuits and activities that typify the narcissism of the age, which for many represent the closest thing to a millennial American religion. Healthy eating, personal fitness, beauty regimes. High fashion. Higher art. Each of these are forsaken in favour of inactivity. Inertia as the new growth, as though the solution to consumerist narcissism is deeper submersion within one’s own concerns. A more complete solipsism.

Only, the endeavour cannot be completed without help. The hibernation must be facilitated by a dizzying array of medication. Valium, Nembutal, Seroquel. Benadryl and Xanax, Ambien and trazodone. Lithium, Lunesta, melatonin gummies. The entertainingly awful psychiatrist Dr Tuttle, a woman found in the Yellow Pages who the narrator describes plainly as “not a good doctor,” is all too happy to prescribe this periodic table of psycho-pharmaceuticals, raising a fatal flaw within the attempted escape from capitalistic forces. Writing for The Baffler, Sophie Haigney follows Crary’s logic and points to the newfound trend of "nap factories", such as The Dreamery by direct-to-consumer mattress start-up Caspar, as capitalism’s successful invasion of this once sacred space. “If sleep is really the final frontier of capital,” she writes, “we know now that the border has been breached, the insomniac conditions met.” Through insurance-driven drugs, Moshfegh makes clear an earlier, more ubiquitous foray into capitalising the uncapitalizable. For-profit medicine.

Rather than providing competent, ethical healthcare, Dr. Tuttle grants the narrator something more enticing—an immediate, private remedy. Gone are the arduous tests, the long waits, the embarrassing excavations of past trauma in $100 hour-long sessions. Rather, Tuttle provides an unending sheath of prescriptions and a laissez faire attitude, her only concern being how to best present her offerings so as to provoke no suspicion from the insurance company. She might not be a good doctor, but she’s the perfect doctor for the narrator, who embraces the pill-popping with zeal. In one scene, the narrator accuses her best (and only) friend Reva of being addicted to chewing gum, and claims Dr Tuttle would be able to prescribe a pill to solve the problem. It’s not an addiction, Reva insists, but a habit. She enjoys the gum. “But you could just have the medication instead,” the narrator argues, “and spare your jaw from all that chewing.”

Drugs become the answer to everything, the pharmaceutical industry a house of benevolent wizards working to design increasingly specific spells for every possible ill. Even, that is, the ills which they themselves cause. Working her way up the list of strengths and potencies, Tuttle eventually prescribes the narrator Infermiterol, a fictional drug that induces three-day blackouts with unnerving reliability. Several such experiences prove too much for the narrator, the relics of her lost time suggesting alarming, out-of-character behaviour. The panic induces a severe, genuine insomnia that her other medications cannot ease, but Tuttle’s response is to double down on the drug, to prescribe more at higher doses, to be taken more regularly.

This is an example of what Crary views as capitalism’s “ongoing dismantling” of human necessities such as sleep and nourishment in order to fully commodify those very resources, which he makes clear through the analogy of pre-packaged water. “Universal access to clean drinking water has been programmatically devastated around the globe by pollution and privatization,” he writes, “with the accompanying monetization of bottled water.” Capitalism not only sells the solution to its own symptoms, but in doing so magnifies those problems. More bottled water means more carbon-heavy production and delivery, more plastic clogging the waterways and choking the seas, and hence the need for more bottled water. More models and mirrors and make-up mean more wrecked self-esteems, meaning further masks and manipulations from the beauty industry. More addictive or insomnia-inducing medication results in more addiction and insomnia. “All of the encroachments on [sleep],” Crary writes, “create the insomniac conditions in which sleep must be bought.” Such counter-intuitive wisdom (or, intuitive capitalism) is unmasked by David Crow’s reporting on the opioid crisis for The Financial Times, where he highlights the concept of "pseudo-addiction". Patients complaining of signs of addiction, Crow found, are told it is merely pseudo-addiction and given higher doses of pain medication, on the logic that successfully managing the pain will stop drug-seeking behaviour.

What’s worse for Moshfegh’s narrator is that it’s not just the insurance company making money from her Infermiterol prescription. During her three-day blackouts, she abandons her austerity and indulges in the full materialism of New York City. She finds herself freshly waxed and manicured, surrounded by packages from Victoria’s Secret and jewellery stores. With Infermiterol, capitalism manages to both commodify and defeat sleep, providing comatose release for the customer without losing them, and their wallets, to unconsciousness. The narrator’s reaction is to ignore the signs of her missing time. To hide the products and settle into the rhythms of her blackouts in blissful ignorance.

This wilful rejection of extra information extends to all aspects of her life. “At the beginning of this,” the narrator says, “I’d look up any new pills she gave me on the Internet to try to learn how much I was likely to sleep on any given day. But reading up on a drug sapped its magic. It made the sleep seem trite, just another mechanical function of the body.” Information does not foster reason and understanding, but, in contrast, terrible doubt. “The ‘side effects and warnings’ on the Internet were discouraging,” she says, “and anxieties over them amplified the volume of my thoughts, which was the exact opposite of what I hoped the pills would do.” Similarly, the narrator finds herself unable to watch a large portion of the Whoopi Goldberg filmography during her movie binges, despite holding Goldberg as her ultimate hero. The Colour Purple is just too sad, Ghost too full of longing, Sister Act too fun, too exciting, the songs too catchy. “That would not be good for my sleep,” the narrator admits, settling for Soapdish and The Player back to back, over and over again.

The information age has no respect for sleep, and the algorithmically-powered hooks of news sites and social media utilise this to minimise time spent away from screens. Indeed, during her Baffler-chronicled trip to the Caspar nap factory, Haigney’s first response upon climbing into the hermetic sleep pod was to access to the outside world. “I checked the hours on my phone,” she writes. “I took the opportunity to send a text: ‘I can’t sleep!’ I noticed a news alert about Hurricane Florence. I remembered I had been meaning to learn more about Gary Indiana because of the reissue of his books.” The committed eschewal of such outside information is key to Moshfegh’s narrator’s hibernation. Sleep might be restorative, but it’s the accompanying lack of consciousness that makes it so appealing. Which also explains the severe self-imposed limitations in her waking hours, the short walks to a selected bodega and pharmacy, the familiar VHS movies played on repeat, the monotonous routine of it all. If the endless flow of infinite information can only create doubt, then endless repetition of limited information surely achieves the opposite. Through simplification, reinforcement and familiarity, repeated exposure to a constant message engenders certainty. Unable to watch television (“TV aroused too much in me,” she admits, “clicking around, scoffing at everything and agitating myself. I couldn’t handle it”), the only news Moshfegh’s narrator receives is that snatched in passing from bodega tabloids while getting coffee. As such, she is insulated from the trouble and danger of the world, convinced that she occupies a different dimension that cannot be touched by outside forces.

"Things were happening in New York City—they always are—but none of it affected me. This was the beauty of sleep—reality detached itself and appeared in my mind as casually as a movie or a dream. It was easy to ignore things that didn’t concern me. Subway workers went on strike. A hurricane came and went. It didn’t matter. Extraterrestrials could have invaded, locusts could have swarmed, and I would have noted it, but I wouldn’t have worried."

The narrator sees herself as little more than a viewer, and reality itself an entertainment that can be ignored if one so wishes, a channel that can be changed to comforting, nostalgic alternatives.

Over this mindset looms the shadow of approaching catastrophe, the date slowly ticking toward September 2001. However, when the day finally comes on the page-long final chapter, there is no change. “On September 11, I went out and bought a new TV/VCR at Best Buy so I could record the news coverage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers,” she explains. “I watched the videotape over and over to soothe myself that day. And I continue to watch it, usually on a lonely afternoon, or any other time I doubt that life is worth living, or when I need courage, or when I am bored.” The striking image of the disaster for the narrator is that of a woman leaping from seventy-eighth floor, an image beguiling not because the woman looks like her best friend (which she does), but because of how alive she appears in the footage. “There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.”

The conclusion is open to interpretation, and the optimist might point to the final line as the narrator’s epiphany moment, the realisation that there is beauty and grace in the act of being alive and conscious. However, there is another reading, and one that could be argued to be more Moshfeghian. Be it Reva or her doppelganger, the person leaping from the soon-to-be fallen tower is a figure of hyper-wakefulness, driven by extreme stimuli to grand action. Indeed, that she was in the building is a sign of wakefulness in and of itself, the first plane hitting before nine in the morning. What if the narrator’s comfort in the footage is not some trite appropriation of tragedy as a beautiful image of life, but rather a sense of validation in her own choices? Her privileged, soporific fantasy world might be unhinged from real life, yet which reality is on fire, collapsing into rubble and dust?

If capitalism denatures our existence into an unbearable state, then the obvious reaction is to rebel against capitalism. Only, Moshfegh’s narrator finds a dead end down that path, with art, protest and even complete withdrawal already co-opted and commodified to become just another version of neoliberal life. The second option, then, is to abstain from life altogether. If the parasite can’t be killed, then what about killing the host? Which means locking your doors, abandoning your friends, doing everything you can to minimise your existence. In this way, Moshfegh offers her own counter-intuitive cure—narcissistic solipsism as the antidote to a culture of narcissistic solipsism. Capitalism will still try to draw from you in this state, yes, but does it matter if one has no memory of its fangs? Perhaps the stunning, inconceivable reality of sleep is not that nothing can be extracted from it, but rather that nothing can get inside.

Jon Doyle is currently working on his debut novel as part of a PhD in Creative Writing. His writing has appeared inCritique: Contemporary Review of Fiction, 3:AM Magazineand other places, and he runs the arts websiteVarious Small Flames

Photo by Callum McAllister

Callum McAllister isLit Links columnist and assistant editor ofThe Cardiff Review.