Rachael Clyne, "You'll Never Be Anyone Else"

Rachael Clyne, from Glastonbury, is widely published in journals and anthologies. Now retired, Rachael was a professional actor in her youth, appearing in TV dramas and series including Coronation St. She also worked in theatre and in the 70s, briefly joined the Sadista Sisters female rock cabaret. She also played the lead in Victoria Wood’s first play, Talent. This has fed into her enjoyment for live readings of her poetry. She later trained and worked for over 30 years as a psychotherapist, practicing in various settings and running counselling trainings. She has published two self-help books, for cancer patients and on self-esteem issues, and co-founded one of the first cancer support resources in London.

It is only in later life that she began to seriously develop her poetry. Her prizewinning collection, Singing at the Bone Tree (Indigo Dreams, 2014), concerns our lost connection with nature. Her pamphlet, Girl Golem (4word.org, 2018) explores her Jewish migrant heritage. This new collection, You’ll Never Be Anyone Else, was published by Seren in 2023.

About You'll Never Be Anyone Else
You’ll Never Be Anyone Else reflects the poet’s journey of coming to terms with her sense of otherness. Her alter-ego Girl Golem, based on the legendary man made from clay to protect Jewish people from persecution, appears at several points in the book. Rachael explores her Jewish and LGBTQ+ identity, which she says felt like a double whammy during the era in which she grew up. She surveys attitudes both past and present. This collection joins a chorus of poetic voices who challenge us with their difference and touch our shared humanity. Rachael uses a variety of forms to explore migrant heritage, sexual orientation, relationships, domestic violence and ageing. Her work is peppered with quirky imagery and humour, even in its darkest corners. The poem, "Jew-a-lingo – Codeswitching for Jews," takes the form of a lesson in how minority groups behave within their culture, then self-censor in the outside world. The book presents a distinctive voice from someone who has learned self-acceptance and as a therapist has used that knowledge to help others do similar.

You can read more about You'll Never Ben Anyone Else on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample poem from the collection. 

From You'll Never Be Anyone Else, by Rachael Clyne

Three Piece Suite

Mother, the rickety chair, teeters; 
needs a wedge to steady her. 
A chair from the Old Country, 
carried on backs, luggage racks, smuggled

across borders. Father, a wooden 
ironing board, hides in the understairs 
cupboard, lost in the hiss of his steam-iron, 
whistle of hearing aids and bash of his klomper.

Grandma, the leathery pouffe, smells 
of olives, lemon tea and shit on shaky fingers. 
Between chair, ironing board and pouffe, 
I, their tailor’s cushion, bristle with pins.


Girl Golem

The night they blew life into her, she clung 
bat-like to the womb-wall. A girl golem, 
a late bonus, before the final egg dropped. 
She divided, multiplied, her hand-buds bloomed.
her tail vanished into its coccyx and the lub-dub 
of her existence was bigger than her nascent head.

 
She was made as a keep-watch, in case 
new nasties tried to take them away. 
The family called her tchotchkele, their little cnadle,  
said she helped to make up for lost numbers –
as if she could compensate for millions. 

With x-ray eyes, she saw she was trapped 
in a home for the deaf and blind, watched them 
blunder into each other’s neuroses. Her task, 
to hold up their world, be their assimilation ticket, 
find a nice boy and mazel tov – grandchildren!

But she was a hotchpotch golem, schmutter garment 
that would never fit, trying to find answers 
without a handbook. When she turned eighteen, 
she walked away, went in search of her own kind, 
tore their god from her mouth. 


Golem: man made from clay and Kabbalistic spells, by rabbis to protect Jews from persecution. Truth: אֶמֶת was written on his forehead and God’s name on his tongue. Tchotchkele (diminutive of tchotchke): a trinket, a cute child. Mazel tov: good luck. Cnadle: a dumpling. Schmutter: a rag. 

Unfitting

           After Caroline Bird

Like a glove on the wrong hand, 
the moon out at noon. I was salt in tea,
shoving my leg into a sleeve,
stuck on the singles table at weddings,                                                   
stifling the crush on my best friend,  
calling my partner they, or trying 
to book a double room in a B&B.

How I distanced myself from those women
in the bar on the Kings Road, 
where some wore cufflinks, others, 
heavy perfume, tight dresses. 
I couldn’t bear a skirt, without 
the safety of a gusset.

The chips from my shoulders make 
a magnificent outfit: gloved, salty 
and stitched with gold. 

You’ll never be anyone else

so you – yes you, with your warts and wings 
will just have to do.
 
Acceptance is your food and shelter, without which 
you are brushwood

left to the mercy of any foul wind. 
Stop drinking the poison 

labelled Hate me. It’s that simple.
I didn’t say easy.

Michael Bartholomew-Biggs, "Identified Flying Objects"

Michael Bartholomew-Biggs is a retired mathematician living in London. He is the current poetry editor of the online magazine London Grip and, in partnership with Nancy Mattson, has for over twenty years organised the Islington reading series Poetry in the Crypt (now re-invented as Poetry Above the Crypt). His latest book, Identified Flying Objects, contains poems triggered by quotations from the prophet Ezekiel and thus maintains the fondness for unusually-themed collections shown in his previous publications Poems in the Case, which combines poetry with a murder mystery, and Fred & Blossom which tells a more or less true story of love and light aviation in the 1930s.

 

About Identified Flying Objects, by Michael Bartolomew-Biggs
The USP for Identified Flying Objects is that all the poems are linked to quotations from the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel. The idea of using this as a basis for a collection came to the author when he was semi-immobilised with a broken leg and, like Ezekiel, was working out how to deal with misfortune. The Book of Ezekiel is of course concerned with a much bigger misfortune – the plight of the Israelites taken captive by the Babylonians during the 6th century BC – and it seeks both to explain why God let it happen and also to offer a divine promise of eventual release.

Whatever one believes about its theological content, the Book of Ezekiel does contain some remarkable passages such as the first proposal for a heart transplant and an almost cinematic image of a valley full of dry bones which reassemble themselves and then gain sinews, flesh and skin to become living bodies. More down-to-earth (and still relevant) are the stern and imaginative rebukes Ezekiel delivers to corrupt and abusive rulers and his exasperated likening of the general public to ill-natured sheep led by incompetent and irresponsible shepherds. And of course there are also his mysterious visions in the sky which inspire the collection’s title poem.

Although the poems in this collection have been triggered by some of Ezekiel’s words they do not aim to paraphrase Ezekiel’s message. Some of them place an Ezekiel-like (or Ezekiel-lite!) speaker in a modern setting while others offer a twenty-first century reaction to a single image from the prophet’s text. Ezekiel might recognise – even endorse – the sentiments of a few of the poems; but many of them would probably puzzle him or even arouse his disapproval.  Attitudes have changed in the last two and half thousand years and Ezekiel’s view of the collection might well include a Hebrew equivalent of the word “woke”. But, even if his words have been carelessly and anachronistically appropriated, Ezekiel’s prophetic voice might still be heard, urging present-day readers to resist the regrettably common human tendency to ignore well-founded predictions.

From Identified Flying Objects

Heart Transplants - Side Effects & FAQs  

Rejection is a major issue
when a doctor takes a stone-still heart  
and substitutes donated tissue.

But if physicians have dismissed you
as a hopeless case you’ll take the risk – 
rejection’s not your biggest issue.

At the brink of that abyss you
wish you had been born with nerves of steel
instead of much-too-nervous tissue.

When something inside’s gone amiss you
might not need replacement body parts
so much as fresh supplies of sisu.
**

You meet your surgeons who address you
only from behind a mask: perhaps 
because they do not want to face you?

You’re told by the anaesthetist you
sleep before you’ve counted down from ten.
You hope his needle doesn’t miss you.

You dream that nurses come and kiss you
wearing scrubs – are antiseptic pecks 
distractions so they can undress you?

And when you start to convalesce, you
don’t get solid food: will you survive
digesting only tiramisu?
**

I’ll turn your stone hearts into flesh: you …
needn’t care what rocks you’ll lose – your faith
in miracles is what’s at issue.

If old resentment finds a fissure
In your new-made heart my remedy
is grafting in forgiving tissue.

(Redemption is a bigger issue.)

I will also give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit within you. I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh. Ezekiel 36:26

Sisu is a Finnish word whose meaning can be approximated by a combination of such concepts as stoicism and determined resistance.

Social Distancing

We are managing the situation.

Whenever people flow like water
through the holy interlocking boxes
of a stadium, emporium
or auditorium, their leaders
and role models must be seen among them
only briefly rubbing elbows –
never pressing hands – and passing on 
no more than they brought in with them.
They are all in this together.

As they stream through lobbies,
passages and concourses
from north and south not one of them 
may leave the way they entered.
All turnstile counters click in one direction
for the regular attenders;
any strangers, misfits
or occasional creatives
have to slip through gaps in calculation.

He who enters by the way of the north gate to worship shall go out by the way of the south gate; and he who enters by the way of the south gate shall go out by the way of the north gate. He shall not return by the way of the gate by which he came in, but shall go out straight before him.  Ezekiel 46:9,10

 
Identified Flying Objects

Sceptics guess that magic mushrooms helped
to open Heaven – or perception’s doors –
in Babylon  and show the awed and shocked 
Ezekiel some version of
the gyroscope and helicopter
in advance of L. da Vinci.

Ezekiel did not make sketches. He left
words instead of blueprints. Hence his engines,
while attracting less mechanical
analysis than Leonardo’s,
leave a lot more room for extra
terrestrial imaginings.

Some fantasists insist that aliens
can scrawl art deco doodles in our fields
and navigate the planet via ley lines.
Others say time-travellers
could show Ezekiel a future
three millennia ahead.

Perhaps he caught a glimpse of locust-gunships
stuttering across Iraqi deserts, 
stop-start – like the freeze-frame hovering
of hummingbirds he’d never known –
and bringing down much cruder forms
of shock and awe on Babylon.
 

The heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God… Out of its centre came the likeness of four living creatures. …There was one wheel on the earth beside the living creatures … Their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel within a wheel … When the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up.  Ezekiel 1:1-19

Some explain Ezekiel’s vision as a clairvoyant’s (or time-traveller’s) preview of modern – perhaps military – technology. Josef Blumrich (The Spaceships of Ezekiel (1974)) claims it describes a genuine extraterrestrial encounter of the kind reported in literature dedicated to phenomena like UFOs, ley lines and crop circles. 

Diane Simmons, "William Prichard & Co"

Diane Simmons is a writer, editor and Co-Director of National Flash Fiction Day (UK). She has been widely published in magazines such as New Flash Fiction Review, Mslexia, Splonk and FlashBack Fiction and placed in numerous flash fiction and short story competitions. She is the author of four published novellas-in-flash: Finding a Way (Ad Hoc Fiction), An Inheritance (V. Press), A Tricky Dance (Alien Buddha Press) & William Prichard & Co (Arroyo Seco Press). You can read more about Diane on her website here, and connect with her on X/Twitter @scooterwriter.

About William Prichard & Co
William Prichard & Co is a novella-in-flash. The novella starts in 1886, and in 33 flash fictions, it follows 65 years of the Prichard family and its perambulator business, holding up a mirror to society and the changes in attitudes, industrial practices and politics, as the family move from the Victorian era to the 1950s.

You can read more about William Prichard & Co on Diane's website here. Below, you can read one of the flashes from the book. 

From William Prichard & Co, by Diane Simmons

Perfectly Put  

1891

‘You look magnificent, Bertram,’ William says when his son walks into the breakfast room.

Bertram bows, removes his cap and examines it. ‘That’s the school crest,’ he says, pointing to the badge on the front. He runs his fingers over the four blue ribbons that criss-cross over the cap. ‘I like these too.’

‘You’re a lucky boy – it’s a marvellous school. You must make sure you work hard – I will be relying on your brains when you’re old enough to join me in the perambulator factory.’

Bertram giggles and sits down at the table. He displays no signs of nerves for a boy about to start his first day at prep school and tucks into toast and scrambled egg with enthusiasm. He is an impressive child – so clever and self-assured. 

As William eats, he allows himself a momentary day dream and imagines an adult Bertram at the helm of the factory. Such a move would enable William to have more free time to pursue other interests such as politics. William Prichard M.P. would sound rather fine and it would be satisfying to help halt the rise of the blasted Liberals; factory owners like himself should not have to put up with constant government interference. His employees are paid well and have excellent working conditions; he hears no complaints.

His younger son calls out to him and William looks across at him and smiles. Hugh is an exceptionally good-natured child, a pleasure to be around. But he doesn’t have Bertram’s confidence or academic promise. It’s surprising – the operations he endured as a young child meant that he’s always received plenty of attention from the family.

‘When I’m big will I work in the factory?’ Hugh asks. 

‘No, no. It will be Bertram. It is always the eldest who follows their father into the family business.’

Hugh screws up his forehead. ‘But Clara is the biggest. It should be her.’

Bertram laughs and digs his little brother in the ribs. ‘Girls can’t do things like that, silly. They need to stay at home to look after the men and children.’

William lifts his son’s cap and ruffles his hair. For a seven-year-old, Bertram has such a grasp of things – William really couldn’t have put it better himself.  

Jonathan Taylor, "A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons"

The only remaining photo of Jonathan Taylor's short-lived career in ballet, c. 1977

Jonathan Taylor is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Leicester, where he directs the MA in Creative Writing. His books include the novels Melissa (Salt, 2015) and Entertaining Strangers (Salt, 2012), the short story collection Scablands and Other Stories (Salt, 2023), and the memoir Take Me Home (Granta, 2007). His new memoir is A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons (Goldsmiths, 2024). Originally from Stoke-on-Trent, he now lives in Leicestershire with his wife, the poet Maria Taylor, and their twin daughters, Miranda and Rosalind. His website is here. 

 

About A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons
What does it mean to be a bully? What does it feel like to be bullied—to be a victim, a pariah, a scapegoat? What are the techniques, patterns, and languages of bullying?

Intermingling memoir with literary criticism, philosophy, and sociology, A Physical Education attempts to answer these questions. A highly original exploration of the uses and abuses of power in the education system, it examines how bullying and discipline function, how they differ from each other, and how they all too often overlap.  

Taylor interweaves his own experiences with reflections on well-known literary representations of bullying and school discipline, alongside sociological, psychological, and philosophical theories of power. He discusses the transition from corporal punishment to psychological forms of discipline that took place in the UK in the 1980s, and he also investigates the divergences and convergences of physical, psychological, and linguistic bullying. 

Above all, A Physical Education sets out to understand bullying and discipline from an experiential perspective: what these things feel like from "within," rather than "above," for all concerned. There are horrors, tragedies, and cyclical traumas, certainly—but there are also absurdities, contradictions, grotesque comedies. Sometimes, beneath the Gradgrindian tyranny, there is trickery, laughter. And sometimes there are chinks in The Wall, through which other possible worlds might be glimpsed.

You can read excerpts from one of the chapters from the book on The Times Higher here. You can read further details about the book on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read the opening of the first chapter. 

Jonathan at school, c.1982

From A Physical Education, by Jonathan Taylor

P.E.

It’s January 1985. I’m eleven. We’re lined up on the school football pitch, ankle-deep in slushy brown snow. It’s -2 degrees and raining ice, blowing across our faces in gusts like acid – which may be literally true, given the air pollution in ’80s Stoke. We’re shivering in shorts, white t-shirts, itchy ribbed socks and football boots with studs on. I’ve got plastic studs on my boots, but others like Danny Beaker – who, already at 5’11, is a good foot taller than me – have got metal spikes. There are a couple of punctures in the tops of my boots from previous games, when Danny stamped on them. 

The wet is seeping into my socks through the holes, while the sleet slanting from the sky is somehow creeping up my shorts, in a cruel contradiction of Newtonian physics. Every other part of my body is already soaking, and gradually freezing over. I glance around. The other boys are the same, wet through, hands in armpits, stamping up and down in vain effort to keep warm, their smoky breaths mingling above their heads like a big speech bubble: Get on with it, sir. 

Sir gets on with it, inevitably choosing the giant Danny Beaker as captain of one team, a second Godzilla-like boy as captain of the other. They nominate who they want on their teams in turn. I’m usually last, after ‘Pi’ the school Tory (one and only), who looks like his parents mistook a Stoke comprehensive for Marlborough, and my friend Steed, who pretends to have asthma to get out of running. In team sports, the three of us are the crumbs at the bottom of a crisp packet, the broken bits of Rich Tea in a biscuit barrel. 

Steed’s on Danny Beaker’s team, so Godzilla II gets the final crumb that is myself. He doesn’t even bother to call my name, merely rolls his eyes and turns away. He slouches over to the centre spot – or, rather, the hole in the slushy snow Sir has dug with his heels, to mark the centre spot – and waits for Sir to blow the whistle. Godzilla II’s holding his balls, jiggling on the spot, his vaporous speech bubble presumably saying: Get on with it, sir, before these freeze off.

Sir’s rather allegorical name is Mr Yorwin. He’s dressed in a brown sheepskin knee-length coat, woolly tracksuit bottoms, and is smoking a cigarette. The smouldering cigarette end is the one bit of colour in the whole landscape. “Taylor,” he grunts out of the side of his mouth, “get your arse in gear.” The other boys snigger. 

I jog over to him: “Sir, please, can’t we wear …?” But he cuts me off. 

“Don’t be a poof, Taylor. You don’t need yer tracksuits. You’ll warm up on the pitch if you play proper.”

“But, sir …”

“Shurrup. Get over there. You’re defence.”

“Some defence,” mutters Godzilla II from a distance.

Mr Yorwin blows his whistle. Danny Beaker is immediately thundering down the pitch towards me like a bull ... 

The Joe Orton Creative Writing Competition 2024

 

The School of Arts, Media and Communication at the University of Leicester runs an annual Joe Orton Creative Writing Competition that invites A-Level students to write an Edna Welthorpe letter.

"Edna Welthorpe" was the persona that Orton invented to satirise the values he abjured - middle-class, middlebrow, conservative. Through Edna's letters of complaint (or praise), Orton lampooned social and sexual convention. 

Below, the 2024 winner, Mona Bacon (Brighton, Hove & Sussex Sixth Form College) reflects on her experience of the competition.

You can read Mona’s winning Edna Welthorpe letter here. Details about previous years' winners are on Creative Writing at Leicester here. Next year’s competition is already open – deadline: 30 June, 2025. Details are here. 

By Mona Bacon

Having previously only vaguely heard of Joe Orton, I was charmed by his playful approach to his characters when I read his plays. I particularly love the way he embraces the extremes and absurdity of the world he saw around him but avoids cruelty or personal insult in his prank letters, channelling his frustrations into humour.

As I recently started working part-time in retail, my entry into the competition was inspired by the somewhat ridiculous comments and complaints that many of the British public still generously employ. While the term "Aunt Edna" may have originally described theatre-goers of the 1950s, the entitled attitude of Edna Welthorpe is still no thing of the past.

This competition was a lovely way to get back into the Creative Writing I used to enjoy, reminding me that it can be silly as well as serious. I found the experience of writing from the perspective of someone so different from me incredibly freeing, and this has been a brilliant exercise in using tone and voice to create an interesting and engaging character.

While Edna’s abundance of self-entitlement is certainly excessive, I do think that small doses of this confidence can be a very helpful asset, and I hope to continue applying this to my writing and my own character. Perhaps, every once in a while, we should all be a little bit Edna Welthorpe.

F. C. Malby, "A Place of Unfinished Sentences"

F. C. Malby writes novels, short stories, and poetry. She has travelled widely, teaching English in the Czech Republic, the Philippines and London. She is a qualified teacher and a photographer, and is currently studying for a Masters in Theology. Her debut novel, Take Me to the Castle, set in early 1990s Czech Republic, won The People’s Book Awards. Her second novel, Dead Drop, set in Vienna, is a lyrical, daring thriller about the undercover world of art crime. Her debut short story collection, My Brother Was a Kangaroo, includes award-winning stories published in literary magazines and journals worldwide. Malby's poetry has appeared in journals, magazines and podcasts, and her second collection of short stories, A Place of Unfinished Sentences, includes stories that have been published in anthologies with Reflex Press and Pens of the Earth, and placed in competitions. She is a contributor to four print anthologies (the forth is forthcoming with Pens of the Earth in Oct 2024). She is also a contributor to anthologies published by Reflex Press, Unthank Book and Litro. Her short fiction won the Litro Magazine Environmental Disaster Fiction Competition, and was nominated for Publication of the Year in the Spillwords Press Awards. Her stories have been widely published both online and in print. Her website is here. 

About A Place of Unfinished Sentences, by F. C. Malby

This second collection concerns the sentences we leave unfinished, questions surrounding sudden loss, a decision on a train. It covers themes of relationships and memory, exploring what happens when memory fails. It looks at beginnings and endings, weaving through themes of generations, family, uncertainty, and what happens when experiences change us.

From A Place of Unfinished Sentences

The woman sitting opposite me looks like the guy I used to date. Her face is angular, her eyes fixed to the page of a book I cannot see. I wonder why she reminds me of him. The door clunks back into the frame of the train’s carriage. A thud as it stops makes me jump, and a man with a trolley walks through and scans the seats.

“Tea? Coffee?” he asks, glancing at the ex-boyfriend lookalike.

“Neither,” she says, her eyes remaining fixed on the pages in her hands. 

He looks at me. “Coffee, black, no sugar,” I say, without waiting to be asked. He lowers his shoulders, exhaling slowly as he pours me a cup from a large metal coffee pot. Steam rises from the spout, the scent of it licking at my nostrils. Saliva fills my mouth in anticipation.  

“Snacks,” he says, almost as a statement. I can hear my Grandmother telling me that it's rude not to form full sentences. Nobody is in a full sentence mood this morning. The trains have been delayed by three hours because of a ‘body on the line’ and the weather is damp and oppressive. Normally, the announcement is ‘leaves on the line.’ This morning it's a body. An elderly lady told me it was a young man. Such a waste of a life, she had said with a tone of disgust, eyebrows raised, as though taking your own life was comparable to a child throwing away a gift they no longer wanted. I had started to explain that you don't know what's going on in someone else's life, but she walked away mid-sentence. 

London was a place of rush, a place of interchange, a place of unfinished sentences. The young boy's life might have been an unfinished sentence: a friend in a rush, too busy to hear that he had felt low for months; an interchange of parents going to and from work, passing like ships in the night; a sentence about feeling hopeless, left unfinished. 

Megan Taylor, "The Therapist's Daughter"

 

Megan Taylor is the author of five dark novels, most recently, The Therapist’s Daughter, an eerie psychological thriller, released from Bloodhound Books in September 2024, and We Wait, her take on a traditional haunted house mystery. Megan’s short stories can be found in her collection, The Woman Under the Ground, and in many other places, including Weird Horror Magazine and GONE: An Anthology of Crime Stories. For more information, please visit her website here. 

About The Therapist’s Daughter, by Megan Taylor

Forgetting is difficult but remembering might be worse …

Caitlin Shaw fled Underton fifteen years ago when her girlfriend was accused of murder, but concerned for her mother’s health, she’s forced to return to the village and face the secrets she thought she’d left behind. As her family starts to unravel, Caitlin’s soon questioning the truth about the tragedy and her girlfriend’s guilt. But if her first love was innocent, could the killer still be out there, watching and waiting, far too close to home?

From The Therapist's Daughter

“Enough,” Jill muttered. “For Christ’s sake, stop.”

She refused to put up with the racket from her daughter’s room any longer. The ceiling was quivering, the whole house bristling, and with her head feeling just as invaded, she stalked out into the hall. But she’d barely mounted the stairs when the girls’ infuriating whoops and laughter erupted into screams.

The noise was dazzling. It sheared the air like knives and Jill’s first instinct was to cover her face. Instead, she broke into a run.

But though she flew up the steps two at a time, as soon as she hit the landing, everything apart from the screaming slowed to a sludgy dreamlike pace. The wallpaper’s roses tumbled lazily past, the deep pile carpet tugged at her heels, and even when she made it, panting, to Caitlin’s door, she felt like she wasn’t keeping up, as if she’d left herself behind. 

Another Jill remained holed up in the living room, still jabbing at the stereo and knocking back her Chardonnay, and still cursing Richard – bloody Richard – for abandoning her. He should have been home hours ago.

Except what was she thinking? Caitlin was behind that door, part of those screams, and coming abruptly awake, Jill grasped hold of the handle and plunged inside, and the darkness was nearly as shocking as the sound. She longed to back away.