Charlie Hill, "Encounters With Everyday Madness"

 

Charlie Hill is a critically-acclaimed writer of novels, short fiction and memoir, whose work has been compared by his peers to Kafka, Georges Perec and Beckett. His new book of short stories, Encounters With Everyday Madness, is published by Roman Books, as part of the Stretto Fiction series. His website is here. 

About Encounters With Everyday Madness, by Charlie Hill

Encounters With Everyday Madness is a collection of short stories about the manifestations and causes of contemporary "madness." Looking at grief, PTSD, romantic obsession, domestic oppression and work, it asks the reader to reconsider what they know about "difference" and the psychological other.

Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories. 

From Encounters With Everyday Madness

A New Job

Today there is a difference. He wakes as usual to a residual fear from dreams that seep and overflow, his eyes are heavy-lidded – it is as if he knows he will not like what he sees when they are open – and yet, despite it all, his heart is light. This is because today is a new day. Today he will catch a bus he doesn’t know and travel to work in a new job in a different part of town. Today he will begin again.

He was in his old job for five years. Five will-sapping, personality-crushing, energy-draining years. People there joked about his leaving. They referred to it as his escape but they were missing the point because this is precisely how he views the change. It has been a long time coming. It is not just the particulars of the position – it is, nominally at least, a promotion – but the fact that it will allow him to make a fresh start. He understands this concept is a loaded one but it is no less a necessary goal for all that, for he was tired. He was tired of his job and he was tired of the people he worked with; he had played out the novelty of spending time with "colleagues" – a word he finds strangely infuriating – who, if asked to name his favourite music or novels or TV, if asked to describe his hopes, dreads and perversions in a sentence or two, would have been so far off the mark they may as well be talking about a different person: he was tired of the fact that the incremental degradations of this supposed familiarity made him somehow smaller and less vital than he was or could have been.

Now fully awake, he is ready to begin the process of renewal. He showers, deciding not, for once, to condition his hair. He dresses in a stripy shirt before choosing to wear instead one decorated with bold flowers; for breakfast, for a change, he takes an omelette, made with a shake of soy sauce, and a hefty dusting of the chilli powder he keeps for every other Friday night. He has never eaten this much spice in the morning and the effect is invigorating; he  blinks his eyes and there it is, his kitchen, hall and bathroom the same of course, but shifted on their axes too ...

I.M. Julie Boden, 1960-2021

By Jonathan Taylor

On Tuesday 28 September 2021, much-loved Midlands poet, performer and literary advocate Julie Boden passed away, following a long illness. 

Julie was born in Sutton Coldfield in 1960. She worked as a teacher, Creative Advisor and then full-time poet. At various times, she was Birmingham Poet Laureate, Director of Poetry Central, Poet in Residence at Symphony Hall, Birmingham, a Director of Warwick Words Festival, Founder of the Oasis Café Theatre and a Fellow of Hawthornden. As a passionate spokesperson for poetry, she toured and performed nationally and internationally, nurturing and promoting the work of hundreds of other writers, of all ages and experience. She organised and ran workshops, readings, events, lectures, poetry competitions, and interdisciplinary collaborations – between, for example, musicians and writers. 

Julie’s poetry is musical, emotive, humorous and approachable, with a wide range and appeal. Almost uniquely, it manages to ‘sing’ both in performance and on the page, in the reader’s mind’s-ear. Her books included Beyond the Bullring (2001), Cut on the Bias (2002), Through the Eye of a Crow (2003), Wasted Lives (2003) and Bluebeard’s Wife (2005). She edited and co-edited five anthologies, including Bluebeard’s Wives (2007), with Zoë Brigley. A selection of her poetry, entitled Aheenthi, was translated into Gujarati by Adam Godiwala and published in India in 2006. Her poems and articles were widely published at home and abroad, and featured on BBC Radio and TV. 

 As well as her own work, Julie will be remembered for her enthusiasm, kindness, humour and unique ability to communicate those qualities to others. She enthused everyone who she met about poetry, and fostered new connections and collaborations between hundreds of artists. She will be hugely missed by all whose lives she touched. Like so many other writers in the region, I was lucky enough to call her a friend. Thoughts are with her son and daughter.

Here are two beautiful poems she wrote for children:

Happy Day

Today is a good day
A yellow day
A golden sparkling silky day.
A smile day
A play day
A let’s jump up and sing day.
A chocolate day
A strawberry day
A birdsong all day long day.
A cuddling your pet day
A never to forget day
A feeling like a Queen day.
A warm glow in my tummy day
A ‘Look how good you’ve been!’ day
An everybody loves you day
A yellow day
A shining day
A good to be Alive day.

Sad Day

Today is
A sad day
A dark day
A bad day
A grey day.
A bleak day
A weak day
A coarse hair blanket scratchy day.
A broccoli day
A rainy day
A something in your eye day.
A bad egg day
A lemon day
A nothing in my tummy day
A porcupine to touch day
A creeping down the stair day
A whisper to my bear day
A grey day, a sad day
A please give me a hug day.

Middleway Words: The Programme

We recently announced news of a new book festival based in the Midlands, Middleway Words, which will take place from the 5th to 11th September 2021. You can see the original announcement and information here. This is an online festival of books and literature across the Midlands, aimed at promoting authors and books in the region. There will be events, talks, workshops, readings and interviews, and all of it is free. 

You can now register for free tickets for the festival on Eventbrite here. 

You can download the programme for the festival on the Eventbrite site, or directly here. 

On Friday 10th September at 4pm, the festival includes a conversation between novelist Kerry Hadley-Pryce and Jonathan Taylor of the University of Leicester. All are welcome, and the event, like all others in the festival, is free. 

Middleway Words: Announcing New Book Festival in the Midlands

A new online Midlands Book Festival is to be established to celebrate the large number of writers in the region – and to inspire a new generation to express their creativity.

Organised by members of the Society of Authors, Middleway Words will feature five days of free online events between September 5-11, bringing together readers and writers to discuss and discover many great books, covering a broad range of genres, from the Midlands.

"We have a long and proud tradition of great writing in the Midlands," says Ignaty Dyakov-Richmond, a co-chair of Society of Authors Warwickshire, and co-founder of the Festival, "and there are so many excellent writers in the region who readers would love if only they were introduced to their work. With Middleway Words, we aim to bring them together. We are formulating an exciting programme of events which will have something for everyone who loves books. Not only will Middleway Words promote those who are already creating great work, we want it to provide helpful advice to inspire others to write.”

The Festival will feature five days of events, interviews and videos which will be available to view live for free on the Festival’s YouTube channel. 

It will begin on Sunday, September 5, with author-led panel discussion on how a book is born. Sessions aimed at adults and children on how to write fiction and poetry to appeal to readers of all ages will follow. The closing panel, on Saturday, September 11, aims to introduce different types of writing, including script, translation, education and theatre narrative. 

In between, there will be two or three sessions a day, in which regional authors will talk and answer questions about their books and the writing process. There may also be talks from others in the book business, including a literary agent, a publisher, a book-seller and a librarian.

Short videos from other authors speaking about their books will be aired prior to and during the Festival, giving readers plenty of chance to add new names to their reading list.

For more details about Middleway Festival, you can email middlewaywords@gmail.com, and see: 

twitter.com/middlewaywords

and https://www.facebook.com/middlewaywords/

Two Poems by Bert Flitcroft

Bert Flitcroft grew up in Lancashire and now lives in the Midlands. A graduate of Sheffield University, he is an experienced and accomplished poet who for some time has been quietly and unassumingly spreading the poetry word as teacher, mentor, workshop leader, poet-in-residence, and reader. He has two collections of poetry published: Thought-Apples with Offa's Press and Singing Puccini at the Kitchen Sink. He is a prize-winning poet, has been published in well-established national poetry magazines and performed on several BBC local radio stations.He ran for a number of years residential poetry-writing courses working alongside poets such as Carol Ann Duffy, Adrian Henry, Linda France and others. He was Staffordshire Poet Laureate 2015-2017 and curated The Staffordshire Poetry Collection. In 2015 he was Poet in Residence at The Southwell Poetry Festival. He has performed at a number of national Festivals including the Edinburgh Book Festival, Birmingham, Stoke, Lichfield, Ilkley, Buxton, Stafford, and has performed at The Door at The Birmingham Rep, as well as the CBSO Centre and The Conservatoire in Birmingham. In 2016 he was Poet in Residence at The Shire Hall Gallery, and recently has been Resident Poet at The Wedgwood Museum and The Brampton Museum and Gallery. Bert's website is www.bert-flitcroft-poetry.com 

Waiting for Anna

This Moses basket fresh by the bed
is waiting,
like a promise, like a Truth 
about to come true.
Not for a casting off among the reeds
but for a coming 
home.

To open a door, to enter a room,
is always to begin again.
Already the basket’s empty space,
the very air inside it, 
is sacred.
There is nothing more to say.
Silence has a voice.
Emptiness is eloquent.


Off

Imagine the pent-up energy, 
the violence, of a single electron 
spinning madly around its nucleus, 
unable to break free.
Think millions of them, going nowhere
in the red-hot cauldron of their universe.

Until some outside force charges in
and scatters them, 
or marches them in lines 
directing them to travel North or South.
Imagine their excitement at the thought
of travelling, of having somewhere to go.

There are such moments,
when the world shifts.
Imagine Einstein pushing off his little boat
at midnight across a sea of relativity –
all those ricocheting atoms.
Or Rutherford as he fired his first alpha particles.
All those electrons suddenly weighing up
the possibilities, high-fiving, punching the air.