Derek Healy, "Children in the Window"

 

Derek Healy grew up at the foot of the Cotswolds Hills in Gloucestershire and, before a career in mental health social work, studied English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford University. However, overcoming that impediment, he has gone on to see his poetry appear in many journals, including The Road Not Taken, The Lyric, Ibbetson Street (all USA), Orbis, Snakeskin and The Cannon’s Mouth. His fourth collection of poems, Children in the Window (Graffiti Books), was published very recently (January 2026).  It follows Made Strange by Time (2018), Home (2020) and Uncharted (2022). Now a proud and far-flung member of the Ohio Poetry Association, Derek lives on the Malvern Hills with his wife Candida, where they have no children, no dogs and no cats but make do pretty well with each other and some fine friends. 

About Children in the Window, by Derek Healy

Children in the Window, Derek Healy’s fourth collection (Graffiti Books 2026), ranges far and wide, both in its themes and its styles. Sixteen sonnets are dedicated to his wife. In blank verse and free verse he contemplates the bizarre contradictions of the universe we inhabit. Cinquain stanzas take a tongue-in-cheek look at religion, whilst in 6/5 syllabics he peers into some corners which those closest to us never get to see. There is even a rarely encountered ghazanelle, discussing the fad for lovers’ padlocks weighing down bridges. Poignant, vivid, humorous and meticulously crafted, Children in the Window offers up poems to which a reader can return again and again.

You can read more about Children in the Window on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Children in the Window

Downhill      

At five feet ten he peaked,

but now a full half inch and more

has stooped or crumbled away;

white hair thins around a tonsure,

hands sprout spots like mould,

ears need turning towards every voice,

whilst three pairs of spectacles

mete out his sight

and names jump ship in the dark.

Yet these are the best of times:

up with the early sun

when the world lies silent,

free to fashion what he will

from words arranged on a page,

to look not out but in,

discern within himself

the glint of age-old truths

waiting his discovery;

steer his own course at last,

long years of labour behind him,

sunset ripening ahead.

The Shirtwaist Factory Fire

          (Manhattan Island, March 1911)

All ways out locked

against petty theft

or early slopings off to lovers' arms,

the girls have panicked from the flames

to this one high window

they could muscle open.

So far below

the cold dead street

lies empty for them,

the pavement thronged

as though the carnival

might be half a block away

and coming.

Names meet mid-air for one last time.

Then – as though in a moment

become mothers to each other –

one by one they take the ledge,

scramble a goodbye or prayer,

and drop, eyes heavenwards,

two hundred feet.

One final girl appears,

dark hair streaming in the wind

and swirls of smoke,

helped to the precipice

by the day's young stand-in foreman.

Briefly they fumble

a never-to-be-bettered kiss,

before he hands her out

to all eternity

as though onto a train

bound out of state,

her eyes not leaving his

until she drops.

As he follows her

his trouser legs bulge

in the upwards rushing air;

flame light, like chandeliers,

spangling his proudly polished shoes.

Colette Paul, "A Complete Success"

 

Colette Paul was born in Glasgow. She is the author of Whoever you Choose to Love (Weidenfeld & Nicolson/ Phoenix) , a collection of stories which were serialized on Radio 4, and shortlisted for The Spirit of Scotland Writer Award. Colette’s work has appeared in several anthologies and magazines, including Mslexia, Edinburgh Review, Stand, and Litro. Colette’s story ‘O Tell me the Truth About Love!’ won the Tom Gallon / Royal Society of Authors Prize, and three of her stories were included in Victoria Hislop’s edited anthology, The Story: 100 Great Short Stories by Women. Her second collection of stories, A Complete Success, is due to be published this Autumn. Colette lives in Cambridge, where she teaches Creative Writing at Anglia Ruskin University. 

About A Complete Success, by Colette Paul

This is a sharply observed collection which finds comedy and sadness in the ordinary lives of ordinary characters—teenage girls, middle-aged divorcees, a man facing his last night alone in hospital. The stories are linked by a sense of lives in transition, with the attendant fear, exhilaration, and sense of loss those moments can bring. Time after time, characters struggle to understand and communicate their feelings, to their loved ones and to themselves. Despite the melancholy theme, the stories are shot through with humour and lightness, a sense of life in all its complicated messiness. 

You can read more about A Complete Success on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the opening story of the collection. 

From A Complete Success

From 'Rats'

Before my boyfriend leaves for work he says, ‘I saw another rat last night. You better talk to that neighbour today about feeding the birds.’

‘You talk to her,’ I say. 

‘You’re the one who’s lumbering around the house all day,’ he says. ‘I’ve not got a minute to myself from the moment I get into the lab.’

‘Lumbering,’ I say, ‘that’s very nice!’

‘You were still in your dressing gown when I came home last night.’ 

‘Because I didn’t feel well!’ 

He stops fiddling with his bike helmet and says quietly, ‘Why are you crying?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Why do you think I’m crying?’

He lets out a sigh of frustration. ‘It’s really annoying how you answer a question with another question.’ He sits down next to me with a look of defeat. ‘Do you think you might be depressed?’

‘Oh,’ I say, ‘is that a question? I thought we weren’t allowed to answer a question with another question.’ 

Since we moved here six months ago, we argue all the time. I blame my boyfriend for bringing me here, where I have no job and no friends. It doesn’t matter that I’d just got made redundant, or that my best friend had moved to Spain, or that I was actually excited to move somewhere new—I still blame him. It’s not fair, I know, but that is one of the downsides of being such a decisive and definite person, like my boyfriend. 

*

I get dressed and put on some makeup and knock on my next-door neighbour’s door. She is a tiny, stooped old woman, with bright eyes like Mrs Tiggy-Winkle. From our bedroom window we have witnessed her throwing bird seed around her garden with surprising energy.

‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ I say, ‘but we live next door, and we’ve been getting a lot of rats in our garden. The internet says it might be because you’re feeding the birds—the rats are attracted to anywhere they can find food.’ 

‘Oh dear,’ she says, ‘have you got them as well?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Loads of them. They seem to be coming from your garden.’ 

‘I hear them scurrying around, scratch-scratch-scratch, all hours of the day.’ 

‘In your house?’ I say, horrified. 

‘I don’t know,’ she chuckles. ‘The council’s been round a few times, but they can’t see where they’re coming from either.’

‘Well maybe you could try stopping feeding the birds,’ I say. ‘That’s the biggest way to get rid of them, the internet says.’ 

‘Oh I love my birds,’ she says. ‘I sit and watch them all day. They’re the only thing that keeps me going since my husband died.’ 

Roger Bygott, "Ginsberg & Manchester"

 

Roger Bygott is a writer and researcher living in Manchester. He was an ordained Buddhist for twenty years and lived in a monastery in the Spanish mountains for three years. He studied Interactive Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University, which led him to co-found and co-direct Manifest Arts, a biennial arts festival in Manchester that highlighted the city's network of arts studios between 2015 and 2019. His essays have been published in Beat Scene and Dark Mountain.

About Ginsberg & Manchester, by Roger Bygott
Allen Ginsberg visited Manchester twice. He barely figures in the city's history, and Manchester barely figures in his. Yet two brief visits — a summer afternoon in 1973, a Library Theatre reading in 1979 — hold richer stories than the bare facts suggest.

Ginsberg & Manchester brings together several figures whose lives were touched by Ginsberg in different ways: Alan Wise, a charismatic music impresario (manager of Nico, John Cooper Clarke and Donovan) from Salford, whose letters to Ginsberg span fourteen years; Steven Taylor, a guitarist born in Gorton who became Ginsberg's closest musical companion for two decades; Jonathan Williams, the American avant-garde publisher (Jargon Press) who first brought Ginsberg into the city centre; and Jampa Thaye, a Manchester grammar school boy who discovered Buddhism through Kerouac, became an influential Buddhist teacher, and who was Ginsberg's host when he came to the Library Theatre. This is a story about how a great American poet left a faint but enduring mark on an English city that never quite noticed he was there.

The book also features rare and unpublished photos of Ginsberg and his associates.

You can read more about Ginsberg & Manchester on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the book. 

From Ginsberg & Manchester
In one of Allen Ginsberg’s date books, there’s a barely intelligible squiggle across the boxes for 4–6 June 1979. On the sixth day, at the end of the squiggle, is an arrow and the question: ‘Manchester?’ 

What was the story behind that asemic flourish? It had been five years since Ginsberg’s fleeting visit to Manchester in August 1973. There weren’t many reasons for him to return; his connection with the north-west of England was primarily with Liverpool, thanks to his fascination with the Beatles and connection with the Merseybeat poets. 

That arrowhead was inviting enquiry. What was he doing? Who was he travelling with this time? The existing biographies were of little help. Ginsberg could pack his days with meetings, readings, socialising and cultural events, so it’s not surprising that his all-too-brief visits to Manchester get short shrift in his letters and the many biographies of him.

Michael Schumacher, in his biography Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg, notes that in 1979, ‘Allen’s European reading tour included visits to Paris, Cambridge, London, Newcastle, Rotterdam and Rome – all in a whirlwind schedule that lasted less than a month.’  Manchester has got lost in the whirlwind. Barry Miles’s biography of Ginsberg mentions neither his 1973 nor his 1979 visit to Manchester. I started to wonder if the question mark in Ginsberg’s date diary might indicate a possible visit that never materialised. 

Then I discovered a June 1979 letter to his friend and fellow Beat poet Gary Snyder, sent from the Netherlands on 14 June 1979: 

After triumphant tour of the capitals of Europe – Genoa, Milan, Spoleto, Paris, Manchester, Cambridge, London, Amsterdam, Rotterdam – we’re dragging our weary tongues o’er the sea to Newcastle to visit [Basil] Bunting and last reading there … We brought Steven Taylor to guitar and sing and all turned out funny and energetic like a folkie tour. 

Steven Taylor, Ginsberg’s guitarist and musical director, is an integral part of the story. He was born to a working-class family in east Manchester, who emigrated to the USA in 1965 when he was ten years old. 

On 5 June, Taylor joined [Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Anne Waldman] on the 12.55 p.m. train from Euston, heading north for a reading at the Manchester Library Theatre ...

Katherine Howey, "In Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens"

 

Katherine Howey lives in Leicester. She has a special interest in the social history of the late Georgian period, and realistic portrayals of neurodiverse and disabled people. Her historical fiction focuses on themes of outsidership and disability, and the struggle to break free of stereotypes to achieve a fulfilling and authentic life. In Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens is her debut novel and book one in the Lucinda series. Book two, Reeve’s Emporium, is also out now. She has published academic work in the fields of assistive technology and has a certificate in Creative Writing from the University of Leicester. She previously taught neurodiverse students in both further and higher education.

About In Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, by Katherine Howey

In her debut novel, In Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, Katherine Howey weaves a compelling tale of heartbreak, courage and love set against a background of revolutionary politics and social unrest in late eighteenth-century England.

Lucinda arrives in London, bright, pretty, but impoverished. Her efforts to support herself through respectable work as a seamstress are thwarted when she becomes ill with rheumatic fever and is unable to continue in her trade. She encounters the handsome but troubled physician, William, whose path mirrors her own, but her hopes of love collapse at the whims and tyrannies of the upper classes.

In desperation, she goes to Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, a notorious meeting ground for all levels of society. Can she find a path out of destitution, and claim her independence?

You can see more information about In Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel.

From In Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens

Chapter 17

Drowsy in the heat, Lucinda could hear the small waves slapping against the sides of the boat as it made its way upstream to Vauxhall. She had not been to the Pleasure Gardens before, their being considered less salubrious than the Gardens at Ranelagh which she had visited with Richard Meadows just a few years before, her heart full with such soaring hopes, but she knew of them through reputation. The small craft glided through the water. She looked curiously at the riverbank. They had left the looming white mass of the Tower and its sinister, moss grown Watergate entrance far behind them, and she could see the vast edifice of St Paul's jutting on the skyline beyond the mudflats of the shore and she fancied that the grand cathedral held her in its protective gaze.

Her palms were sticky, and she began to feel apprehensive at what could lie ahead. Reluctantly, she turned her thoughts to how she might carry out her intention. She had heard many times of how the courtesans and street-walkers came to the gardens. She wondered if she had the courage to take a step that would take her beyond the pail, and yet how else, no matter how hard she worked, could she save enough money to leave London? At least in Vauxhall, away from her locality on the fringes of Southwark, she could conceal her actions. She dreaded the thought of her landlady, Daphne, and her girls finding her out, and had no wish to become known in Southwark as a streetwalker. At least she could keep her reputation and her respectability as a teacher to the trades people of Southwark who send their children to her to be educated. 

The current was swift and soon the power of the river had carried them swirling through the arches of Westminster Bridge. Alert now from the reviving splash of the water, Lucinda felt the prickle of dread crawl up her spine as she observed the huddled forms lying precariously atop the starlings, surrounded by the lapping waters, drowsing in the filth. Her heart wrenched as they swept by and a woman lent towards them from her perch with outstretched hand clamouring for alms. Her face was swathed against the heat, and Lucinda thought she saw the pale orb of a babe’s head at her shoulder. Uncomfortably, she faced towards Vauxhall, her resolve strengthened.

Claire Walker, "How to Shape Our Mouths"

 

Claire Walker’s poetry has been nominated for the Forward Prizes, and shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award. Her work is published in journals and anthologies including Poetry Wales, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Finished Creatures, Dust, Aesthetica, and Ten Poems about Daughters (Candlestick Press). Her new pamphlet is How to Shape Our Mouths (Black Cat Poetry Press, 2026). Claire is co-editor of Atrium poetry webzine, and is currently studying for a Creative Writing MA at the University of Birmingham.

About How to Shape Our Mouths, by Claire Walker
How to Shape Our Mouths is a consideration of womanhood, exploring experiences of artists, writers, muses, mothers and daughters, often through an ekphrastic lens. 

You can read more about How to Shape Our Mouths on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From How to Shape Our Mouths

In which I am one of Modigliani’s nudes

We share a cigarette at the window, blow smoke out into the evening. This is our 1917 Paris skyline, and you are in full bloom, the exhibition imminent. We’re down to embers, so I remove my robe, the cliched silk slipping easily away. I move to the couch and recline. There is tenderness as you ask if I’m comfortable. Amedeo, here I’m so comfortable I could dream. You lift my head, place another cushion for me to rest on. By now, you have a reputation for drink, though you’re not yet tragic, and I am not yet grieving. The walls of your studio are blush-soft. You take up your brush, mix colours to match my hair, contemplate the correct earthy tone for my skin. My spine uncurls, my neck grows long upon the canvas. Here, we are comrades, the moment both abstract and acute. Let’s take my sadness, your poor health, and let’s make something beautiful. This is not sex, or love. There is a little pigment of my heart that wishes to be seen, and there is your longing for greatness. Come, see you whisper. I notice you have captured the exact shade of my irises, the exact shape of my eyes, not your go-to almond form. You tell me you’ll paint the background warm and red like the soul. Modi, by now, all the good light has gone. We circle back, we share a cigarette, blow smoke out into the Paris night. A night so black we no longer see our breath escaping us.

Unzipped

"It was as if another woman had been waiting inside her all along, ready to slip out" - Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.

After I gave birth to my daughter,

I cradled her on the crisp clean sheets.

My body grew a new version of me,

one long exhale, skin unzipped 

and out she slid, quiet and instinctive. 

I knew how to hold the girl, 

was so sure of this fresh employment. 

My baby and I made friends with ourselves 

and those like us. I felt sweet at ease 

teaching how to feed, smile, count on fingers, 

how to shape our mouths into mama.

  

At thirteen, our certainty is delicate 

as sugar work. Those two, who slipped 

knowingly from me, have less to say. 

Still entwined by blood and love,

some days laughter halts in thickened air. 

The bared teeth of that zip pull away, 

come apart. And although we remember 

how to smile, sometimes our mouths cloy 

with stuck apologies. There is a confusion

within us. Those people we once knew —

not quite gone, not quite there either. 

Constantine, "The Lady of Atlantis"

Congratulations to Constantine, MA Creative Writing graduate, who has just published his new children's novel The Lady of Atlantis!

Constantine is an autistic author and father. He achieved a first-class BA at Middlesex University in 2017 and completed his Master's Degree at the University of Leicester in 2022. Between the two degrees he wrote four episodes of the Children's TV show Pablo and has written and published the picture book Tiya and the Minotaur and The Cats of Charnwood Forest and its sequel Jötunheim. He runs the not-for-profit publishers Coalville C.A.N. Community Publishers. 

 

About The Lady of Atlantis, by Constantine

Sa‑ra has always heard the voices. On Thira, that makes her a priestess. But as the mountain stirs and the earth convulses, she realises the truth: her world is running out of time.

The Lady of Atlantis is a vivid retelling of Atlantis, not as myth but as living history. It is inspired by the archaeology of Akrotiri and the author’s own translations of Minoan writings.

You can read more about The Lady of Atlantis on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample from the opening of the novel. 

From The Lady of Atlantis
I was about eleven when I first was asked to pa-pa-ra-te.*
 
A young woman from Akrotiri came to the palace in great distress. It appeared she carried a great burden in her mind. For she was wealthy, even by Therian standards, where it was the custom for women to be the heads of households and to hold the purse strings.

Being both wealthy and not unlovely to behold, there were men in plenty wishing to court her. Two in particular caught her eye. One was a hard-working fisherman. He was kind and pious, the years at sea had roughened his skin, and at first glance perhaps, he was certainly not what the fashion of Thira saw as "beautiful." However, he was not "unlovely," he had a sparkle in his eye and a wit which was hard not to become enamoured with. Indeed, I had seen this man, and he reminded me of my father. No greater praise could I give

The other man had recently returned from the games on Crete. Where it is said he bought Thira much honour.

He was handsome and well-knit in frame, being an athlete. He was a good man by all reports. But he was vain, caring more for his own looks, and it seemed that women in plenty flocked to him and were enamoured of him.

She wished for me to take the vapours and tell her who she should marry.

"You do not need the vapours," I said. "You already know."

"But I am in great doubt," she said. "Can you not help ease the burden?"

 It seemed strange to me that having to choose between two good men to be a burden. 

 "You desire children," I said. It was a statement, but she nodded.

"Close your eyes," I said. "Picture yourself in bed. A priestess hands you your first child. You look up into the face of your husband ... Who is it?"

Her face betrayed her shock, and then she smiled, knowing truly where her heart lay.

"I do not prophesy for good or ill," I said, "for marriage is the work of two people, and there will always be hardships unknown and joys unlooked for. But if he wants you as you him, you will both be happy."

In time, she married her choice, it was the athlete, for though he was vain, he was not conceited. Whilst he sought fame, being a good husband and a role model for his children was his first concern; and he had eyes for this woman from when they were youths. 

*This meant "to let the goddess’s radiance speak through you." Over time, this idea became the word prophecy.

 

Ellistown Primary School, "The Sum of Our Parts"

 

About The Sum of Our Parts
The Sum of Our Parts is a new anthology of Creative Writing by Year 6 students at Ellistown Primary School in Coalville. It is published by Coalville C.A.N. Community Publishing. Congratulations to all the students involved! The anthology is edited by Constantine, University of Leicester MA Creative Writing graduate. 

You can read more about the anthology here. Below, you can read the foreword by the headteacher of the school, and two of the stories from the anthology.

From The Sum of Our Parts

Foreword
by Simone Fellows (Headteacher)

Once again, it has been a pleasure to work with Coalville Community Publishing, to give our year 6s this fantastic opportunity - a chance for our young people to receive feedback from an author/publisher in Constantine and to see work that they are proud of in print. It is especially exciting for the children, knowing that a copy of their anthology will be held at the National Library alongside the works of some of their favourite authors!

Having a real-world audience and knowing that their work would be published creates a real buzz in class, inspiring even our most reluctant writers to aim high. Some of our children sent multiple drafts and received feedback two or three times in pursuit of a finished piece they can be proud of. This created a real discourse between writer and editor and enabling the children to develop their resilience and set high expectations for themselves.
 
As ever, a heartfelt thank you to Coalville C.A.N. and Coalville Community Publishing for this opportunity. Special thanks to Constantine, for your patience and support in bringing this together over many months. It is a pleasure to work with you on this important project and your openness about being neurodiverse gives our children permission to embrace their own individuality and to find a voice they may not have known they had. Every time we create an anthology together, you help Ellistown Primary School children see their own potential.

The Beach of Hell

by Myles H

Decades have passed since D-Day. I fought in many battles after that. I even fought in Vietnam.

But D-Day? That was a hell of its own.

Normandy: Dead bodies everywhere, bullets ricocheting … Up above Germans stood behind turrets firing at anything that moved.

The objective: There was a wall which offered some cover, getting there was the job.

I waited for the boat door to collapse open. A soon as it did a soldier in front collapsed to the floor: between his eyes was a gaping hole where a bullet had shot through. I dived forward to shake of the fear. As I stormed through the water a bullet screeched past the man in front and rebounded off something before slashing through my foot. A throbbing pain shot through my body.

"Medic!" I screamed over and over again before something grabbed me and dragged me behind the wall. There a medic stood holding my foot before strapping a belt around my ankle.

"It needs amputating!" he shouted in my face. I had no idea what that meant.

I know now. I know what amputation means. When I wake in the night it still takes me a moment to remember that I only have one foot.

Her

By Layla T

Walking through the heart of the field, as the sun dipped behind the clouds, I carried my backpack trying not to look too interested. Football practice was ending, but one player was still out there-running drills after everyone had long packed up.

Her. The girl who played football like it was part of her heartbeat.

She sprinted, slowed, set the ball and shot. The sound echoed through the field-sharp and perfect. I stood there for a moment, watching her determination, the way her ponytail swung with each stride, she didn't seem to care that the sky was turning gold.

She glanced up and noticed me. I froze.

She jogged over, wiping sweat from her forehead.

“Hey," she said with a breathless smile, "you need the field?”

I shook my head. "No ... um ... I mean I'm just walking home."

She laughed softly, not in a teasing way, but like she found your awkwardness kinda cute.

 "I'm Layla," she said tapping her boots on the grass.

"I'm Johnathan," I replied with a smile, "You're really good." And I meant it; I thought she has great potential.

“Thanks," her eyes lit up with pride, the kind only passion can give. "I love the game.”

I hesitated then added, "I can tell! ...The way you play - it's like you were born with a ball at your feet."

She was shocked, "That's the nicest compliment ever ... I mean everyone normally says I am just a girl."

“I see a lot of potential here ... in you ..." I replied. "So, sign this form, and come this Friday.”

Her face lit up like Christmas morning. "OMG... NO WAY!" she cried.

"Yes way," I said smiling.

"Thank you so much .... I .... I will be there," she said happily.

 

Hannah Stevens, "On the Bodies of Strangers"

Congratulations to UoL PhD Creative Writing graduate Hannah Stevens, whose new short story collection, On the Bodies of Strangers, has just been published!

 

Hannah Stevens is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. In Their Absence, her debut collection of stories was published by the Stretto imprint of Roman Books and was translated into Bulgarian by Ana Pipeva for Altera Press.

Her writing has featured in numerous anthologies including The Fairlight Book of Short Stories, High Spirits: A Round of Drinking Stories and Unthology 10: Fight or Flight. She is widely published in literary journals and magazines globally including Archer Magazine (Australia), Loose Lips (Canada), Necessary Fiction (USA), Litro Magazine, Idle Ink, Losslit, Fictive Dream and TSS Publishing (all UK).

She is currently working on her third collection of stories inspired by her time living and working in Taiwan. She has undertaken writing residencies in Yangon, Myanmar, The Literature and Translation House in Sofia, Bulgaria and the Taiwan Literature Base, Taipei.

Hannah is also an editor and creative events producer and has worked around the world on projects using writing and storytelling as tools for positive social change, partnering with the BBC, the British Embassy, Greenpeace and many others. Her website is here. 

About On the Bodies of Strangers, by Hannah Stevens

Shortlisted for the W&A Working Class Writers’ Prize 2022. A collection of short stories linked by the theme of tattoos.

Our lives, our experiences and the people we encounter leave behind indelible marks. On the Bodies of Strangers explores marked lives and marked flesh. The stories in this collection are linked by a single thread: the tattoos of their protagonists, traces of experiences and meaning etched onto their skin.  

 

These are stories about the chaos of ordinary lives, about people who are flawed, complicated, but always deeply human. From domestic abuse to unexpected friendship, mixing horror and hope, intimacies and lies, On the Bodies of Strangers explores the many ways we mark each other and ourselves as we deal with the complexities of human behaviour.  

You can read more about On the Bodies of Strangers on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories.  

From On the Bodies of Strangers

Extract from Stick and Poke

The sun is higher now and the air is hazy with dust. The factory is in full sun, and so they’ve had to move for some shade. They sit beneath a tree across the wasteland close by.

Angel opens her bag and pulls out an old towel. She lays it carefully onto the floor, smoothing out the rucks as best she can on the uneven ground. Alma watches, nods her head in approval.

"It’s getting real now," she says. Angel doesn’t speak, takes out a plastic pouch filled with a handful of sewing needles. Next she brings out a pencil, a spool of thread, and then a tiny pot of blank ink. 

"This is everything," says Angel, sitting up and straightening her back. 

"So, how does it work, then?" Alma asks. She shifts slightly, trying to get comfortable on the hard ground. 

"Well," says Angel. "You dip the needle into ink and then poke it into the skin. Like, over and over again."

 

"Yeah, even I got that," says Alma. "So the tattoo is made out of dots, not lines?"

"Yes," says Angel. "I’ll be poking dots, not drawing lines, and I’ll have to go over it a few times. It’s going to hurt." She stops talking and looks at Alma.

"It’s fine," says Alma. "I can handle it." She sniffs, avoids looking directly back at Angel. 

"What design do you want?" Angel asks. 

Alma doesn’t want to say, somehow. "I thought you were supposed to be the artist," she shrugs.

"I wouldn’t say that," says Angel. "Anyway, you should choose. It’s your body." 

A woman with two kids appears on the canal towpath. She is carrying shopping bags in each hand. They look heavy, and her shoulders sag. Alma can see the woman’s face is red, set hard against the distance she’s got to walk home. The two boys trail behind her, struggling in the lunchtime heat. Alma wonders who they are, who they’ll become, if they’d disappear eventually too. Just like her dad. 

"Maybe a moon," says Alma finally. She remembers that time when her dad was home. Just for a short while. How he showed her the moon from her bedroom window, said that whenever she saw it, she should think of him, how he loved her. It was the only time she’d heard him say that he loved anyone. She remembers the moon’s white glow, the curl of it against the dark, empty sky.

June Wentland, "Factory of Light"

June Wentland would like to be able to say that she has a degree in Cosmology from Samarkand University and now divides her time between Milan and Vienna as a doyen of both dance and fashion but this would not be true. Married with a child by the time she was twenty, she’s an ordinary woman from Hull and now (via Manchester and Bristol) lives in Wiltshire. Her novel, Foolish Heroines (Valley Press), was published in 2021. June has an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and her poems have featured widely in literary journals and magazines. Factory of Light (Fox and Star Books) is a limited edition poetry chapbook and her first collection of any kind.

About Factory of Light, by June Wentland
When I was recently asked, in a Poetry Society Stanza group meeting, what I would look for if I ever had the fortune (or misfortune) of judging a high-profile poetry competition, I said I would be hoping for a poem that created a  world which insinuated itself into my literary landscape. Poems which approached the unsayable or were of such clarity that they landed in the very heart of a feeling. A big and intimidating ask! 

I hope that the poems in Factory of Light go a tiny way towards part-achieving some of these aspirations, whether it’s by inviting the reader into a Daphne Du Maurier-loving garden or sharing a Eureka moment in an electric lighting factory when a flat piece of cardboard is conjured, at the flick of a wrist, into an object with volume. The chapbook has been put together with the belief that it’s wonderful to sometimes look beyond the scaffold of our tired perceptions and use words to rediscover the miraculous in everyday things.

You can read more about Factory of Light on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Factory of Light 

Reading Rebecca

Last night my garden dreamt of Manderley. 
I only have myself to blame – 
wandering below the green domes 
of Du Maurier’s prose.

No one told me how impressionable 
foliage is to literature in April – 
its cuticles absorbing words 
with frail spring sun.

The garden listens, sleeps and grows, 
advancing gothic-stemmed through dusk. 
Slugs creep through clumps of sub-plots, 
snails through sage, thyme and tortured love.

The neighbour’s gardens are more formal,
but if they were better-read
they too could dream of Manderley – 
seeding ideas outside the neat edges

of their flower beds. The walls of this house
are a breakwater for surging blooms – 
tides of hyacinths and hydrangeas, 
sagas of azalea and chard. 

Here, you can listen – not to the sea – 
but to the swish of couch grass 
where a woman might falter in a flimsy boat 
and perish on the waves of greenery.


Summer in the factory of light 

          The former Cascade Lighting factory, Radcliffe, Manchester

To the sound of Diana Ross and the Supremes, 
we worked in teams and over the sunny weeks, 
grew close. Fingers filled with washers and threaded-rods, 
we disclosed intimacies – finnicky as circuit wiring – 
the positives and negatives of our lives. 
The other girls were all sixteen 
I was sage-like in my twentieth year 
and as we ate our Friday fish and chips 
I gave them all advice. 

In the packing bay I had my own epiphany. 
Never before had I considered 
the aspirations of cardboard. 
How flatness could flick to volume – pre-
configurations opening in a man’s quick hands – 
futures seeded in papery DNA. 
Panels like corrugated petals, blooming
or geometric creatures unfolding from a pupal state.
Their flaps fledged only for closing – never flying – 
their limits taped in place. 

All through those warm, slow-moving weeks
I thought of boxes. 
Their inclinations and their secret needs. 
I was just nineteen. 
I was a mum, a mortgage-holder, student and a wife – 
I was a sorcerer of cardboard. 
I was an oracle on love and life.

"Creative Writing and the Critical Commentary: Reflection, Influence, Process," ed. Karen Stevens and Jonathan Taylor

About Creative Writing and the Critical Commentary: Reflection, Influence, Process, ed. Karen Stevens and Jonathan Taylor

Almost all Creative Writing courses at University ask students to write reflectively as well as creatively: to submit commentaries alongside their creative work. This groundbreaking guide shows how to do this well - indeed, how commentaries might be works of art in themselves. 

In this unique collection of essays, published writers offer an intimate view of how their work has been informed, shaped and transformed by their literary, political, philosophical or personal influences. Providing models of the critical commentaries that all students of creative writing must write, each essay from contemporary authors of fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, scripts and digital writing demonstrates how what writers write is determined by what they have read, and what they read is then determined by what they are writing. As writers reflect on their process of moving from sources of inspiration to a finished and original piece of writing, they reveal their anxieties, passions, discoveries and motivations, offering fascinating insights into the imagination's journey. Introductory chapters explore why writers reflect on their own work, and place this practice in wider contexts, offering theoretical frameworks for understanding process, influence, and inspiration.

As illuminating for aspiring writers as it is for students reflecting on their research and process as part of writing courses, Creative Writing and the Critical Commentary will change the way writers talk about and engage with other texts.

You can read more about Creative Writing and the Critical Commentary on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read the list of contents, about the editors, and a short sample from the introduction of the book.  

Contents of Creative Writing and the Critical Commentary

Chapters include:

Part One: Introductory
1. Preface
2. On Reflection in Creative Writing
3. On Influence in Creative Writing

Part Two: Sample Critical Commentaries

4. The Personal Is Always Political, by Karen Stevens
5. The Art of Persuasion, by Jo Nadin
6. On the Genealogy of Memoirs, by Jonathan Taylor
7. "The Community of Sorrow," by David Swann
8. The End is Never Where You Think, by Dan Powell
9. The Age of Influence in the Age of Authenticity, by Jemma Kennedy
10. Go Outside, by Shaindel Beers, Blue Mountain Community College
11. Jesus, Fairy Tales and Flash Fiction, by Kit de Waal
12. Alternate Truths and Fake News, by Anietie Isong
13. Memoir and Main Character Syndrome, by Jenn Ashworth
14. Experimental Poetic Autography, by Lila Matsumoto
15. Digital Narratives, Technology and the Domestic Gothic, by Kate Pullinger

Part Three: Postscripts

16. Further Reading: Selected Bibliography

About the editors

Karen Stevens is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Chichester, where she specialises in teaching fiction. She is an author and editor, and has edited two critical and creative anthologies: Writing a First Novel: Reflections on the Journey (2014) and High Spirits: A Round of Drinking Stories (2018). Her debut collection of short stories Brilliant Blue (2025) was published with Barbican Press. She is on Twitter @KarenStevens01.

Jonathan Taylor is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Leicester University, where he directs the MA in Creative Writing. His most recent books are A Physical Education (Goldsmiths, 2024) and Scablands and Other Stories (Salt, 2023). His website is here.  

From Creative Writing and the Critical Commentary

From the Preface, by Karen Stevens and Jonathan Taylor

Welcome to the mirror-world: the world of Creative Writing in higher education, where the assumption is that learning is, in part, reflective. You learn to write – or learn to write better – by reflecting on your own work and the work of others. The mirror-world reflects both yourself and your (literary) surroundings, and you learn by studying those reflections, by staring into the mirror. In that sense, a reflective practitioner is a split self: you are both a writer and someone who stands outside yourself, reflecting on your own practice, reading and critically evaluating your work as if you were someone else. You are both a writer and a writer who writes about their own writing. 

To put this more simply: almost all Creative Writing courses in formal education – whether at undergraduate, postgraduate or PhD level – include some kind of reflective element, and this manifests itself most obviously in the form of a written text which accompanies your creative work. That is, when you are asked to submit a piece of Creative Writing as part of your course, it is (as you may already know) customary for that work to be accompanied by some kind of "supplementary discourse" – a "reflective commentary" or "critical commentary" or "critical exegesis." (The names vary from institution to institution, but for the purposes of this book we’ll stick with "critical commentary," for the most part). As Maria Taylor suggests, the "critical commentary" allows the writer to see their "'other' self … the twin … in the mirror …. Reflective writing allows for engaging with that mysterious mirror-image figure, and gives the writer fresh insights into the practice of their own writing …. Students must be encouraged to take that brave first step through the looking glass into themselves in order to understand their motives and processes as writers" (The Place and the Writer, 2021: 130-1).

This book aims to help you to take that "step through the looking glass." It is about the process of reflection generally, and its written incarnation, the "critical commentary," more specifically ... 

Carmella de Keyser, "Chasms"

Carmella de Keyser is a prize-winning British poet, known for explorations of identity, and the liminal spaces of human experience. Her writing spans both adult and children’s poetry. Founder of Harlow’s first Poetry Society Stanza, judge for the Harlow Poetry Open, she is committed to the democratisation of poetry and is an active figure in the grassroots UK poetry scene. De Keyser has five books published or forthcoming, from Hedgehog Press, Alien Buddha Press, Parlyaree Press and the Seventh Quarry Press. Her accolades include winning first prize for the Hedgehog Poetry Press Pamphlet competitions of 2024 and 2025 and achieving over 100 of her poems published in contemporary journals such as The Madrid Review, Hooghly Review, Dream Catcher: International Arts Journal and Dust Poetry Magazine amongst others. She has had her writing selected for podcasts and radio shows including for the BBC and has had the honour of having her poetry widely anthologised including by the major publishing house Macmillan. Her website is here. 

About Chasms, by Carmella de Keyser
Chasms is a reflective journey into intersections, an exploration of identities, trauma, conflict, justice and recalled memories of visiting the Balkans juxtaposed with London life in the 90’s. The word chasm originates from the Greek word "khasma" meaning yawning hollow or gulf. It can also be a profound divide, rift or impassable rupture in the earth between peoples, feelings or ideas. The poems within Chasms consider dissonance and identity across different settings, borders, edges, and of projective identifications of self and the other, yet they also invite in space for bridges to be built across these gulfs via joy, integration and reconciliation.

From Chasms

Reflections

Baba's face resembles railroad tracks that disappear into each other. 

Like an Escher woodcut. 

I can look at it for hours …

She has been perma-sketched by early dawns in the Balkan sun. 

Grooming her garden,

Twisting cucumbers away from their tender climbing. 

When she smiles, three more lines crack open - from each of the sides of her cinnamon eyes. 

As her lips downturn again, the motifs across her face are filled with wholesome flesh, plumped up by "baklava," "tulumba" and "revani." 

She has toiled for her whole life and her skin is all stories. 

My reflection has no novellas,

Or folk tales, 

Or kneeling in the early womb of the teeming soil, 

It’s paler than hers, has lived in colder climates, 

My cheeks are smooth, mirthless urbanised tombs,

Yet for a moment -

Drawn in, by her flare, and her gaze,

Her face warms mine.

 

No More Anniversaries

A pile for "her" and a pile for "him,"

Twenty years and it’s come to this.

The mahogany music stand – "his."

The mini pyramid ornaments – "hers."

The toaster – "his."

The porcelain chopsticks – "not sure."

Plates from his intrusive mother – "Who cares?!"

The origami child coiled in the corner – "theirs."

Some things can never be unshared.

Martin Goodman, "Swimming for England"

Born in Leicester, raised in Loughborough, and then let loose on the wider world, Martin Goodman settled down to become a writer at the age of twelve. It’s the one plan that stuck. Books evolve in his head while others come out in the world. Spanning fiction and nonfiction, sixteen titles take on spiritual journeys, reckonings with ancestral heritage, great lives, eco dramas, and gay themes. Some books win prizes, others win a few readers, and he figures all were worth the years that went into them. See his website here for more. 

About Swimming for England, by Martin Goodman
As a Leicester-based site you’ll probably get my brief pitch: Joe Orton on the Beach.

Faisal arrived in England in a boat of refugees from Calais. This time he’s swimming the Channel.

An English couple wait on the beach. They save lost boys – turning them into real men. Faisal will be their triumph, their first cross-Channel swimmer.

They plan to celebrate. Then out of nowhere Cameron appears. He’s Scottish but black, in smart clothes but with dirty hands. 

Is this another young man they can save? Or has he been digging around in their dark secrets? Now do they have to save themselves?

A chilling examination of English identity, toxic charity, and the violence that can erupt when we don’t get what we want.

You can read more about Swimming for England on the publisher's website here. Below, you can short a short extract from the novel. 

From Swimming for England

That bit about the sea swallowing him up, surely he didn’t mean… ?

Or is this him coming back?

It’s a young man for sure—but he’s not wearing white. He’s not wearing anything; well just a band of the briefest black swimming trunks. Black hair, brown skin, his feet stepping securely on pebbles like they were cushions of moss, walking with such poise, and as he steps free of the mist the daylight catches the wet sheen on him.

Eileen opens wide her arms. "Faisal!" she says.

"Hello Mum."

Faisal kisses Eileen on the cheeks. His lips are cold and he smells of the sea. Her waterproofs crinkle as she wraps her arms about his waist.

"You did it!" It’s hard to speak, her head pressed against the flesh of his chest, his heart beating fast, faster than hers, but she manages it. "Our boy’s a cross-Channel swimmer!"

He presses his hands on her shoulders and levers himself away. It’s not unkind. It’s just that Brian has stepped so close that Eileen’s squeezed off to the side.

"Dad." Faisal wraps his arms around Brian and they do a bear hug. 

Brian laughs that the boy is so wet and his oilies are working. "Go on," he says. "Shake yourself. Like a puppy. I said you would."

Faisal shakes himself. His black hair flicks wide from the wetness of his scalp and droplets rain in a silver shower all around him. Brian and Eileen laugh so Faisal shakes himself again.

There’s a roar. It comes from inside the mist, from the sea, a male bellow that swells like it was going somewhere, an anger set to explode, and then it just stops. They listen for more, and hear just the crash of a wave, and then another.

"What was that?" Faisal asks.

"That’ll be Cameron."

"He’s a young man," Eileen adds. "He’s got a good voice but he can’t swim. I think he’s thrown himself into the sea."

Peter Thabit Jones, "The Boy Who Drew John Lennon"

 

Peter Thabit Jones has authored eighteen books, including the Dylan Thomas Walking Tour of Greenwich Village, New York with Aeronwy Thomas, Dylan’s daughter. He and Aeronwy Thomas did a poetry reading tour across America in 2008, organised by Stanley H. Barkan, their American publisher. Peter has participated in festivals and conferences in America and Europe. His work has been translated into over twenty languages. He has received a number of awards, including the Eric Gregory Award for Poetry (The Society of Authors, UK), The Royal Literary Fund Award (UK), an Arts Council of Wales Award, the 2016 Ted Slade Award for Service to Poetry (UK), and the 2017 Homer: European Medal for Art and Poetry. His poem "Kilvey Hill" is incorporated into a stained-glass window in Saint Thomas School, Swansea.

Three of his dramas for the stage have premiered in America. His opera libretti for renowned Luxembourg composer Albena Petrovic Vratchanska have premiered at the Philarmonie Luxembourg, the National Opera House Stara Zagora, Bulgaria, the Theatre National Du Luxembourg, and the Sofia Opera and Ballet in Bulgaria. 

In April 2014, he was inducted into the Phi Sigma Iota Society at Salem State University, Massachusetts, USA, for his contribution to literature and literary translations. He gave the Guest of Honour speech before his induction.

He tutored English Literature and Creative Writing on the part-time degree programme at Swansea University’s Adult Education Department for twenty-two years, retiring in 2014.  

Further information can be found on his website here. 

Front cover drawing of John Lennon by Peter Thabit Jones ©2026

About The Boy Who Drew John Lennon, by Peter Thabit Jones

The poems range from the poet’s childhood in the shadow of Kilvey Hill in Eastside Swansea, where he was raised by his Welsh grandparents, to his times (2010 to 2025) spent as an annual writer-in-residence in Big Sur, California. Other subjects include poems about poets, such as Elizabeth Daryush, Ivor Gurney, Federico Garcia Lorca, R. S. Thomas, and Welsh language poet Alan Llwyd, artist Stanley Spencer, the jazz and swing music singer Billie Holiday, Elvis, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, war, a refugee mother, a victim of domestic abuse, homelessness, widowed women, and the 1926 General Strike in Wales.

You can read more about The Boy Who Drew John Lennon here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From The Boy Who Drew John Lennon

Lassen Volanic Park, California

            (for Patricia and Bill)

We followed the rough path,

Below the mountains

Stretching to a visual heaven

And the wide splinter of a lake

Of greyed placid blue.

We talked as we walked

Above the deep valley of nature,

Like two people who have awoken

In another planet’s landscape:

A landscape that was shaped 

Through a time before mankind’s

Strict calendars and clocks.

A time when volcanoes raged

With eruptions and the land

Slid and moved, broke apart,

Catapulting boulders

In the rising collapse,

Until the agitated storm

Noise of it all settled

Down to a stilled calmness,

Like the silence sleeping

On the glassy face of a pond.

We strolled down to where

The geysers were smoking

From a dulled snow surface

And the strong sniff of sulphur

Fouled the afternoon’s air.

Tourists, we took our photos

To solidify our memories.

Then breathless with hiking

And our excited achievement,

We climbed back to the parked car.

Below, the warm day spread out,

The landscape the physical evidence 

Of this planet’s ever-changing 

Body, its chaos and its creation—

The natural engines of its internal magic.

In the Poetry Class

He left you, you said,             

In the country of tears.           

He left you broken,                  

Your beaten mind                      

A junkyard full                              

Of his angry menace.                

I am your teacher                       

And you told me                         

Last week, when my other         

Students had left.                                   

I glance at you,                                    

Your young hand hovering       

Over the blank sheet                

Of writing paper.                                                       

Do your eyes now sadden    

 

Because of the ugly bruise        

Of your memories,                    

The Jekyll and Hyde                 

Of his so-called love?           

I watch as you                          

Start to scribble                      

Down your gathering thoughts,     

The nervous rivers       

Of blue words claiming       

The clean land of the page,        

As I hope one day                              

You fully claim back your life        

From the prison of pain,      

Claim back the true you      

That his shadows still occupy,      

So that you find the calm       

Rhythm of real caring               

And a happiness unchained  

In the whole of your being.