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.

Omar Sabbagh, "Y Knots"

 

Omar Sabbagh is a very widely published poet, writer and critic. Over the last two decades, his poetry has appeared in many prestigious venues, such as: Poetry Review, PN Review, Agenda, Acumen, New Humanist, (T&F) New Writing, The Reader Magazine, Stand, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Banipal, The Warwick Review, The Wolf, among many others. For Echo was his sixth poetry collection with Cinnamon Press, Spring 2024. His first collection and his third were, respectively: My Only Ever Oedipal Complaint and To The Middle of Love (Cinnamon Press, 2010/17). His fourth, But It Was an Important Failure, was published in early 2020. And Morning Lit: Portals After Alia, his fifth collection with Cinnamon Press, was published in early 2022. His Beirut novella, Via Negativa: A Parable of Exile, was published with Liquorice Fish Books in March 2016; and his Dubai novella, Minutes from the Miracle City, was published with Fairlight Books in July 2019. He has published much short fiction, too, some of it prize-winning. A study of the oeuvre of Professor Fiona Sampson, Reading Fiona Sampson: A Study in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, was published with Anthem Press in 2020, and was released in revised, paperback edition at the end of 2021. His book of Lebanese verse narratives, Cedar: Scenes from Lebanese Life, was published with Northside House in summer of 2023; and a collection of his published short fictions, Y Knots, was published with Liquorice Fish Books in autumn of 2023. RIP: Poems after Gaza & Words after Waddah is his latest work, a pamphlet published with Cinnamon Press, March 2024.  He holds a BA in PPE from Oxford, three MAs in English Literature, Creative and Life Writing, and Philosophy, all from the University of London, and a PhD in English Literature from KCL. From 2011-2013 he was Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the American University of Beirut (AUB), and he taught at the American University in Dubai (AUD), where he was Associate Professor of English from 2014 to 2024. He has just begun a new role in Creative Writing and Literature at the Lebanese American University (LAU) in Beirut.

About Y Knots: Short Fictions 
Y Knots is a collection of short fictions, some prize-winning, collating in one volume most of Sabbagh’s best short imaginative prose published between 2004 and 2022. Of the twenty-one entries collected in this book, the fictions vary from the serious-minded to the highly playful and satiric, from realistic narratives to surrealistic ones, as well as from fully-formed stories to extracts from putatively longer narratives. Characters leap off the page and stories rivet, whether the tensions that spur the narratives are resolved or merely explored. Linguistically dexterous and scintillating with intelligence and wit, this book combines deep and compassionate observation with humour and drama, making use of a variegated array of forms and styles, rendering this collection a flaring exhibition of highly engaging and insightful prose.  

You can read more about Y Knots on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a short excerpt from the book

From Y Knots, by Omar Sabbagh

Dye

‘Should I dye my hair this weekend?’

The woman who asked this, whisper-thin in body, had hair the colour of cinnamon, though closer to sparkling raven at times.

‘Well … hmmm … it’s not as bright or juicy as I’ve seen it …’  The woman who responded was no such wraith; she was voluble in body, and bone-deep with goodness because her father had been a baker, and she had grown up, nay, she had leavened with the smell of bready genesis and flour in her nostrils from the early hours.

Twirling her black-pecked white skirt as though to skitter the scent of one who was solicitous, the first woman said, ‘Xavier started on my good side this morning. He told me my hair was nice in brown and if I was German because German women have brown hair.’

The bigger woman chuckled.

‘So should I? Should I dye my hair? I can, this weekend, I mean, I have enough.’

‘Dye your hair or don’t dye your hair,’ the second said. ‘Either way, you’ll still look fabulous.’ Given what we know of this second woman, one might have expected her to have formed some sort of metaphor or simile from the repertoire or the arsenal of bread. And so in fact she did.

‘You’ll always be like a sweet bun, honey, the kind my old father used to make. Oooo … But they were good! The first bite of your mouthed morsel would be a nomad, in some land over the tongue, melting and chewed and unchartered …’

The first woman put a finger to her lips, playfully, grinning from ear to ear, as though she were a child being coddled by a favourite aunt; a tad odd, for these two women, colleagues and friends were very close in age. Indeed, the far more carrot-haired lady, a sliver of coquetry, and the more bounteous woman, whose chocolate skin resonated with a vital periwinkle sheen, were named Mathilda and Marie-Rose, respectively; the one from San Francisco, the other form Trinidad.  

Karuna Mistry and Pratibha Savani, "Sojourn"

Karuna Mistry is a British writer of Indian ethnicity. Born and raised in Leicester, he has published over 60 individual poems in more than 40 anthologies over his first two years of identifying as a poet, including some paid work. Karuna’s creative writing interests are thoughtful and broad, covering life, music, science fiction and spirituality – he has also orated his poetry at public events. As well as poetry, drawing and blogging, his creativity includes magazine editorship, photography and design. Karuna has co-authored and co-illustrates his debut poetry book with his already-published sister, Pratibha Savani, entitled Sojourn: Transcending Seasons. Karuna works at the University of Leicester. Facebook / Instagram: @karunamistrypoetry. His website is here. 

About Sojourn: Transcending Seasons, by Karuna Mistry and Pratibha Savani
Sojourn: Transcending Seasons explores the journey of the soul through loss, as expressed by brother and sister, Karuna Mistry and Pratibha Savani. Containing over 90 poems – including prose, rhyme and visual – the creative siblings also include their own artwork. Guest poets Jill Sharon Kimmelman, Sarfraz Ahmed, and Zaneta Varnado Johns offer insights from their own faith traditions. Uniquely layered, Sojourn is an original read and a gift to the world.

You can read more about Sojourn here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Sojourn: Transcending Seasons

Pascale Petit, "My Hummingbird Father"

 

Pascale Petit, photo by Derrick Kakembo

Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in France and Wales and lives in Cornwall. She is of French, Welsh and Indian heritage. Her eighth poetry collection, Tiger Girl, from Bloodaxe in 2020, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and for Wales Book of the Year. A poem from the book won the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize. Her seventh poetry collection Mama Amazonica, published by Bloodaxe in 2017, won the inaugural Laurel Prize in 2020, won the RSL Ondaatje Prize in 2018, was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize, and was a Poetry Book Society Choice. Trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art, she spent the first part of her life as a visual artist. My Hummingbird Father is her first novel, published by Salt in 2024. Her website is here. 

About My Hummingbird Father
When artist Dominique receives a letter from her dying father, a reckoning with repressed memories and a pull for romantic and familial love sends shock waves through her life, as she journeys to Paris to face the places and events of her early years.

Balanced with visits to the Venezuelan Amazon, where Dominique explores a spiritual and loving longing (meeting a young guide, Juan), a raw and tender unfolding of this love story is a parallel to the uncovering of the shocking truth of Dominique’s birth, and her parents’ relationship.

Pascale Petit’s My Hummingbird Father is a beautifully lyrical debut novel in dialogue with Pascale’s Ondaatje and Laurel Prize-winning poetry collection, Mama Amazonica.

You can read more about My Hummingbird Father on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel.  

From My Hummingbird Father, by Pascale Petit
The letter trembles in Dominique’s hand as if she’s holding Angel Falls – a kilometre-long cataract shrunk to the size of a page. She folds the letter and it’s like trying to hold an archangel’s wing in her palm. She unfolds it and it fills the room. She’s creased it so many times that one line of Father’s address is faint. What if her tears blur his phone number? 

Now she’s dressing, no time for breakfast. She’s running for the tube to the French Consulate, which closes for emergencies at noon. They must renew her passport; she’ll make them do it. 

Now she has her passport and she’s running back home, to the phone, to let him know she’s coming. 

A week ago, she dreamt of him: she was back in Venezuela, at the base of Angel Falls. His face appeared titanic in the tumbling comets. She looked into the vapour as his face dissolved and reformed. First, she saw the lace of a wedding-veil, shreds of skin behind a veil, then his face turned towards her, and she saw her father. 

Dominique dials the number and listens to his phone ringing, and in the pause as she waits for him to answer there is this sound – far away and very near, as if she’s also got the Amazon on the line. A series of low grunts inside her ear, then an icy roar – deeper and longer than a jaguar’s. Howler monkeys swing through the space between them while time drops in light-year-long arrows. And she can wait. She has already waited thirty years. She is not afraid. Then a voice – French, formal, familiar, from the slash-and-burn past: 

‘I have thought of you every day,’ he says. It’s in French, so she has to check she’s heard right. He repeats, ‘I have thought of you every day, chérie.’ 

Dominique tries to absorb this word as he asks, ‘What time will you arrive?’ 

‘I’m catching the Eurostar tomorrow at ten,’ she says.

‘Can’t you come this evening?’ he asks.

‘I have to pack!’ she explains. And she has to tint her hair and wash and dry her best clothes. And there is a mask she has to conjure, to hide her hunting-face.