Katy Wimhurst, "An Orchid in My Belly Button"

 

Katy Wimhurst is a writer and visual poet. She has had three collections of short stories published — An Orchid in My Belly Button (Elsewhen Press, 2025), Snapshots of the Apocalypse (Fly on the Wall Press, 2022) and Let Them Float (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). Her fiction has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies including The Guardian, Writers’ Forum, Cafe Irreal, Kaleidotrope, and ShooterLit. Her first book of visual poems, Fifty-One Trillion Bits, was published by Trickhouse Press (2023). She occasionally writes literary essays on speculative fiction and interviews writers for 3AM Magazine. Her website is here. She is housebound with the illness M.E.

About An Orchid in My Belly Button
These short stories savour the surreal, flirt with magical realism, dabble with dystopia. A boy sees the ghosts of dead crabs. A girl with a fox tail is bullied. A disenchanted woman sprouts orchids from her belly button. Fashion models pursue the trend of having plants as hair. Electronic goods amassing all over London herald an apocalypse. Darkness and wonder, the strange and the ordinary, interweave to offer an environmental and social portrait of our times. Guaranteed to evoke a response, whether a giggle, a gasp, or a nervous gulp, these stories will stay with you, enriching your perception of the world.

Surreal, absurdist, magical realist: Katy Wimhurst writes speculative fiction that meditates on our reality. Although bleak themes are examined – dystopian futures, the climate crisis, bullying – a quirky imagination and wry humour lift the tales above the ‘realm of grim.’

An Orchid in My Belly Button is published by Elsewhen Press. More about it can be found on the publisher’s website here. An extract from one story is below.

From An Orchid in My Belly Button, by Katy Wimhurst

Snow on Snow

Snow flutters down in her living room, even though the windows are closed. She blinks. The flakes pattern the carpet into white lace and dust the top of her cacti collection. She can’t afford to heat the flat, so she puts on a woolly hat and curls up on the sofa, tugging a tartan blanket around her. She gazes at the icy miracle. How remarkable! 

When the snow stops before bedtime, she makes hot chocolate and changes into fleece pyjamas. Snuggling under the covers with a hot water bottle, she remembers camping in the garden for a week one December when she was a teenager, sixty years ago; she preferred the quiet, cold tent to the heated rows of her parents. Before she drops off to sleep, the icy tingle on her face tells her more flakes are falling. 

She awakes to a flat carpeted in snow, which reaches a few centimetres up the skirting boards and collects footprints when she crunches over it. Nature has adorned the place festively, even if she hasn’t bothered to put decorations up. She puts on warm clothes, a woolly hat, mittens, a jacket, and boots. Her bones are chilly, but the magic of this arctic interior lifts her spirit. 

Hot porridge warms her. Then, using a pastry brush, she flicks the snow off her cacti collection—the Fairy Castles, Old Ladies, Moons, Stars, Bunny Ears, and Golden Barrels. Her ex-husband said they were like her, prickly but resilient. Worried about what the cold might do to the plants, she wraps strips of hessian around their bases, pricking her finger twice.

With a duster, she wipes the snow off a photo on the wall, revealing her niece and two great nieces in Montreal, Canada; so far away. She doesn’t bother wiping the one of her nephew and his family outside Tate Modern, London. 

Do Too Many Cooks Spoil the Draft? Some Reflections On Amateur Hour's Second Zine and Group Feedback

By Nina Walker

(You can read more about the group and zine Amateur Hour on Creative Writing at Leicester here). 

There is a popular idiom that too many cooks spoil the broth, that too many people getting involved in a project, sticking their dirty fingers in and poking about, tends to make the project worse. But is this true of creative writing? Is there a point at which a perfect balance is achieved between opinions and inner clarity, and how on earth do we reach this mythical balance? As one of the organisers of a creative writing group, my position ought to be obvious: Yes! More people are great, and new perspectives always yield insights grand enough to send Percy Shelly back up Mont Blanc to have another look. But the reality is more complicated. I believe in the inherent value of outside perspectives in the process of redrafting. I also believe that if you were to make every adjustment suggested by others your work ceases to truly be your own. The idea of writers having a signature style or voice is dependent partly on the ability to resist criticism and persevere. Often when giving feedback I have to stop and wonder whether I, a woman covered in crisp shards working from her bed, is truly an authority on what constitutes a ‘weak metaphor’ and what constitutes a ‘good’ one. Often my feedback initially will simply resemble a series of ‘this doesn’t work for me’ or ‘I love this,’ which all contain the inherent caveat that this is just my singular opinion: your reader's opinions will (hopefully) contain multitudes. 

When we produced our second zine, I finished the process feeling more satisfied than when we produced our first; this was for a few reasons, but a key one was the sense of unique voices within the collection. It was clear that members of Amateur Hour were not all singing from a mass-printed song sheet, and I liked that! I get the impression that it is incredibly difficult to teach people how to receive feedback (and indeed give it, we have learned as a group mainly through practice) but almost two years in it’s clear to me that the group has gotten better at receiving and applying feedback. The knotted truth about feedback is that it is often wrong, not in the sense that it is irrelevant or purposefully disruptive, but in the sense that it is only one perspective upon your work. People will misread your similes, critique what you thought was your strongest sentence, and ask whether such and such is a ‘real word.’ All of this instinctually will feel wrong when you sit down to absorb your comments and sometimes that instinct is worth honouring. Your work can have strengths that aren’t apparent to anyone. Your work can also be worse than you perceive it to be. The skill comes in differentiating which comments ought to be listened to and which ought to be ignored.

The way we submit our feedback has changed over the two years that the writing group has been running. We used to have people upload their own annotated version of the document. This method had strengths but also many weaknesses: it was a pain to collate thoughts when going back over what you’d written, and people inadvertently ended up giving very similar feedback with areas of work barren of thoughts. But it did avoid the tricky pitfall of being persuaded by the feelings of others. Now we all work on one Google doc and annotate it, which overall is much more successful and allows people to have conversations as they feedback. I prefer this way of working because it allows people to be inspired not just by the work but by the way it is received by others. This is not always a net positive, however: sometimes comments get stuck in a ‘feedback loop’ of agreed, agreed, agreed, agreed and you begin to wonder how it’s possible that so many people read that sentence and came to the same conclusion. You also wonder whether those who liked the sentence now felt too embarrassed to say so (delusional as this thought may appear the embarrassment of being a dissenting voice is genuine). There is also the question of whether you take a sentence hated by the masses to be objectively worse than one that received mixed responses— feedback supported by a group always feels more ‘objective'— the answer I tend to come to is yes. But sometimes you aren’t in agreement and then it becomes the writer vs the collective and that’s a far greyer zone to operate within. 

There is an importance to learning how to reject feedback; there is an importance to removing your ego from receiving criticism. Often, I and, I’m sure, many others end up realising: you knew what you were going for, but it only exists in your head and not in that Google doc. All of this is to say that from my perspective too many cooks spoil the draft if the head chef doesn’t feel like he can say no to the chefs. If he spends all his time flapping around following orders it's likely his final dish won’t be the nicest. I am also aware here that I speak for a group of people who all have their unique perspectives on how to give and receive feedback (indeed that is one of the groups strengths), but my hope is that the support of the writing group breeds the confidence to have the final say on what does and doesn’t work. I used to have fairly high-minded beliefs that often poems come out perfectly formed, like babies or diamonds, but this is an extremely rare thing. In reality, most poems improve from redrafting and most novels would benefit from a nice (brutal) cutback. We tend to be gentle with our own writing, sentimental about our visions and our hopes, and sometimes having people cut into that gentleness spurs a more grounded perspective on what people are hearing rather than what you’re trying to say. Writing is deeply personal so sometimes feedback feels deeply personal too; what comes from a writing group is the trust that everyone there isn’t motivated by anything other than wanting to see you improve. 

We made several moves when we produced our second zine: we changed the font, we made a web-store (here), but most importantly we all wrote to the theme ‘Stew.’ Writing to a theme in my opinion produced a more unified front. The fact we were all in a sense attacking the same problem seemed to create a mindset that was more open to feedback. Below I’ll include two examples of work written to the theme that exemplify just how varied our output was even though we were all dipping into the same feedback pool.

From Amateur Hour, issue 2

The Cattle are Lowing

I bucked and chased you 
across the rutted field.
Scaring you senseless.

Diving beneath wire,
you cursed catching your sleeve.

The small cut in your leather arm 
seemed ominous—
but there was no blood.
Just a neat incision—
easily stitched.

Beefed up, 
I stared 
then strutted away
across our turf—
hard like.
 
Later, I followed the gang.
The familiar track sighed.
We mounted each other,
the gate turned away.

It was a warm evening.
The flies were humming

We relaxed and spattered brown
sauce down our legs.
Tails twitched.

I skirted the cattle grid,
turning left.

The truck, looking guilty,
sidled by.

Hazard lights sealed it for me.
Backed into a corner, 
We hustled in…

I’d like to say we were excited 
by the unexpected trip
because ‘abattoir’ had a French ring to it—

but there was a whiff of hysteria
as we tried synching our kick-ups—
a posse of demented Can-Can 
dancers—Dexy’s Midnight Runners.

But it was futile—
They were gunning for us.
Stunning
to think that this morning I held all the power
as you cowered beneath wire.

Yet now there’s only resignation
for my exsanguination.

Hung by Achilles. Our skirts—
ripped off. Dainty shins—
chopped. Cheeky smiles—
lopped.

Then sold to shops
for stew or stock

- Annabel Phipps

Some memory, or all of them

Swathes of summer bruises appear –

skin, untouched,

raw and tender, stewing

comes free from bones of Bethlehem.

Birds and bees and blades of grass, the likes of everyone

jam together in one big song –

it burns bright as that thing called daylight.

A whole swirl of blonde hair,

cans of lager sit on green cushion

four at a time, rarely finished,

left for a fury of sounds sent sadly from small speakers

and spent from pink lips, wide and brilliant, 

plump with their need to show, tell, find a thing

 to whisper to and dream about.

The sheer joy of pavements and autumn smells

under the influence of youth

intoxicates a whole people at one time –

a hundred, a hundred thousand

a hundred thousand million

all stomping in their wispy boots of breathing –

something new, everything new!

But behind a time of innocence

trails a puddle of tiny memories

big as the day they were born. 

And beating a rock of living takes a toll –

rocking and dipping and diving

becomes a chore, a life.

Then comes the night

but now they’re for sleeping.

Bubbling away some brown dearth –

some ugly thing as big as a thumb –

swallows the entire lot whole

and they no longer live, that youth…

In times of sunken hearts and dull aches around the sides,

heavy fathers sit on the heads of mornings,

hoping to find some thing.

A new-old life revealed, 

warmth in the dark.

Take this spinning head and run –

youth will always grasp the gutters that made it.

Trudge the filth and eat –

 gorge on what was once and never will be.

But see 

a heavy sworl, a chest weighted

an air, weighted

breathing for the first time, twenty six

see the possibility

unfelt 

and walk to that place that will be your Bethlehem

my Bethlehem

my mother, father 

me.

- Matt Walton

I want to finish this reflection by thanking everyone in the writing group (members past and present) for continuing to dedicate time and care to the betterment of everyone's writing. If there are too many cooks, then I’m glad it's these cooks in particular. If you’re interested in the writing group or would like to get a zine for yourself, please get in touch at amateurhourpublications@gmail.com. 

About the author
Nina Walker is a poet and first-year English Literature PhD Student who has been co-running her Leicester-based writing group 'Amateur Hour' for nearly two years and has overseen the production of their 2024 and 2025 Zines. More of her poetry and short essays can be found on her blog here.

Charles G. Lauder, Jr, "Year of the Rat"

 

Charles G. Lauder, Jr, was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, graduated from Boston University, and has lived in southern Leicestershire since 2000. He is the author of the pamphlets Bleeds (Crystal Clear Creators, 2012) and Camouflaged Beasts (BLER, 2017), as well as the collection The Aesthetics of Breath (V. Press, 2019). His latest pamphlet is Year of the Rat (Blueprint Poetry Press, 2025). From 2015 to 2018, he was the Assistant Editor for The Interpreter’s House, and since 2008, he has run the South Leicestershire Stanza, a poetry writing group affiliated with the Poetry Society. He’s currently working on a second collection. His website is here.

About Year of the Rat
Many of the poems in the pamphlet were written during or just after the lockdowns of 2020–1, and though COVID is never mentioned, its shadow lurks at the poems’ margins, manifesting in a theme of survival, not only physically but also spiritually. Coincidentally (or not?), the year 2020 was the Chinese Year of the Rat. Taoist philosophy underlies the poetry here, including the titular sequence of sonnets, which is about the rats that came to live near our rural home during this time and their attempts to endure, despite predators and harsh weather. Most importantly these poems focus on the significance of family bonds in the dire circumstances of a pandemic.

From Year of the Rat

September 24th

On the same day the old upright
is busted apart in the kitchen
because they can’t get it out the door.
Hammers and ivory flats and sharps
splintering across the counters and sink.
Long-silent keys cry out, stripped-bare 
metal skeleton groans beneath the mallet.
The dog, deaf but feeling the vibrations
of the blows, hides with us in the lounge.

Our old piano tuner sounded the death knell 
months ago: this Weinard over a century old 
didn’t have long to live: Piano makers were once 
all over London, names no one remembers.
Pre-war survivors sell for a song on eBay,
ours having lived in a church hall for years,
then a damp barn, before the farmer
toted it here on his tractor, smoothly rolling
into our home, now refusing to leave.
On this same day the baby grand is tuned,
previously owned by an in-law and willed
to her priest but he was already in a home.
Elvis the mover had to remove a closet door
to get it inside our house. The piano tuner
turning up today is young, a jazz musician
by night. As if finding a lost soul a new home,
he cocks an ear, taps a few keys, sprinkles out
notes, then when satisfied he plays.

Autumn leaves cover our drive
and fill our dining room.

from The Year of the Rat

We try to inventory them—amongst
the chickens, beneath the duck hutch, 
two in the woodshed, one in the hedge 
scampering under the gate to the compost 

(and tunnelling through the straw
in the greenhouse?)—compared to the dead
found beneath the dining table

or in the cat’s bowl, bodies too cumbersome 
to be dragged upstairs and left beside the bed.
Sometimes it’s only a heart or liver,

sometimes the head is missing, the rest
too big a meal. Like censuses of old,
we only count the heads of households.
No telling how many pups they’re feeding.

Guest Lectures and Masterclasses Spring 2025

As usual, there are lots of exciting events happening in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Leicester this Spring. Here (below) are some of them. All are free and open to everyone, though please do register in advance for the workshops with jt265@le.ac.uk because places can be limited.  

Centre for New Writing events, Spring 2025

On Wednesday 26 February, 4-6pm in Attenborough room 1.11, David Barker will give a guest talk on The Publishing Industry in the UK. The talk is open to all. Dr David Barker is Senior Lecturer at the University of Derby and Programme Leader for MA Publishing. Previously, he worked in the publishing industry for twenty years, starting out as an editorial assistant in London in the 1990s before moving to New York to work for Continuum there, becoming Editorial Director. When Continuum was acquired by Bloomsbury in 2011, David became Publishing Director for the Humanities and Social Sciences and moved back to work in Bloomsbury's London office. He has been at the University of Derby since 2017. In this talk, David will give an overview of the UK publishing industry, discussing different roles, departments and market sectors. In particular, he will offer insight and advice on finding an entry-level role within this competitive industry, and will be happy to answer any questions about working in publishing or getting published yourself. 

On Wednesday 12 March, 1-2pm in Attenborough room 2.06, Melanie Abrahams will be giving a guest talk on "The Literature Ecology and What It Can Do for Me: Curating and Producing Work (and Life)." This session will explore the literature ecology and the ways that you can design and produce the career you'd most like to have - or at the very least - explore more deeply the options you have before you. It will look at the role literature can play in helping you to curate and produce your work and life and will include some perspectives and tips on making the most of your interests and resources. The session will include a Q & A session to provide an opportunity to bring and ask questions and dig a little deeper into the themes being explored. This talk is suitable for anyone who works in literature or is planning to whether you are a student, publisher, writer or interested in developing a role that has not yet been created. Whether you know what you wish to do at this stage, the session will encourage you to think about your skills and abilities and how you can apply them to your chosen career. Melanie Abrahams FRSA Hon FRSL is a curator, visiting lecturer and creative producer who has channelled a love of words and books into initiatives. She consistently pushes for greater diversity in the arts, with a focus on narratives of race, class, background and mixed race identities. Melanie is Creative Director of organisation Renaissance One and spoken word project Tilt, both of which have championed literature/spoken word artforms through events, mentoring and learning for over twenty years. She has curated festivals and programmes including Caribbean Fest (marking Caribbean creativity), Modern Love a spoken word project exploring contemporary love and relationships which toured the UK and Europe, and an events series on "otherness" for the Bronte Parsonage and Museum (This, That & The Other). You can register for the event in advance here. 

On Friday 14 March, 1-3pm in SBB room 2.05, author Jane McVeigh will give a writing masterclass: "Turning Life into Story: An Introduction to Writing Biography." As Claire Tomalin writes, "I think the impulse behind writing biography is the same as the impulse that lies behind most writing. It’s the ability to see stories, to tell stories" (Claire Tomalin in Lives for Sale). Places are limited, so please sign up in advance by emailing hdw5@le.ac.uk. 

On Wednesday 19 March, 2-4pm in Attenborough room 2.12, journalist Jess Bacon will give a talk on freelancing: "How to Get into Journalism." Jess is a freelance film, culture and lifestyle journalist and former editor with over six years professional industry experience. She’s written for outlets such as Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Elle, British GQ, Dazed, Cosmo, Stylist, Digital Spy and Radio Times. She is currently working on her first novel. This workshop is part of the MA in Creative Writing, but is open to all. Places are limited, so please sign up in advance by emailing jt265@le.ac.uk. *NOTE: THIS EVENT HAS NOW BEEN POSTPONED*

The University of Leicester's annual Literary Leicester Festival runs from Wednesday 19 March to Saturday 22 March 2025. All the events are free, and you can see the programme here. As part of the festival, we will be running our annual Creative Writing Student Showcase. This will take place 4.30pm-5.45pm on Wednesday 19 March. You can see details here. If you are a current or ex-student of Creative Writing at Leicester, and would like to perform at the event, please email jt265@le.ac.uk in advance. 

On Monday 24 March 10am-12 in Attenborough room 2.10, author Dan Powell will give a writing masterclass: "Finding the Story Moment: Prose Fiction and (Pre-)Closure." The workshop is part of the MA in Creative Writing, but is open to all. If you'd like to attend, please email jt265@le.ac.uk in advance, because places are limited. 

And finally, on Tuesday 13 May, 11am-1230pm in Attenborough room 1.11, Prof. Kit de Waal will be giving a writing masterclass: "The Good, The Bad & The Ugly - Building Believable Characters." This is part of the MA Creative Writing's annual Dissertation day, but the morning workshop is open to all. If you'd like to register for the event in advance, please email jt265@le.ac.uk. 

Janet Burroway, "The Dancer from the Dance"

Janet Burroway is the author of plays, poetry, children’s books, and nine novels including The Buzzards, Raw Silk, Opening Nights, Cutting Stone (all Notable Books of The New York Times Book Review), Bridge of Sand and the soon-to-be-published Simone in Pieces. Her Writing Fiction, now in a tenth edition from the University of Chicago Press, is the most widely used Creative Writing text in America; and Imaginative Writing, recently published in its fifth edition, covers poetry, prose and drama. She is author of a collection of essays, Embalming Mom, poems Material Good, and the memoir Losing Tim. Winner of the 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing from the Florida Humanities Council, she is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at the Florida State University.

 

About The Dancer from the Dance, by Janet Burroway
A striking, enigmatic American girl arrives in Paris and disrupts the lives of a medical student at the Cité, a famous French mime, his protégé, the protégé’s Spanish wife, an ancient, suicidal British inventor of perpetual motion machines, a benevolent old woman, the long-suffering wife of the narrator, and the “sixty-year-old smiling public man” who tells the story. According to the narrator Stanford Powers, an acquisitions official of the UNICEF office in Paris, Prytania is one of those “fey, unfathomable creatures who float a few inches above the ground.” She seems at once helpless and quick. But which of these people are trying to help her? Which of them have fallen in love with her? Which of them may be manipulating her? And which of them are the fools?

The Dancer from the Dance is published by Michael Walmer Publishers. You can read more on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample passage from the novel. 

From The Dancer from the Dance

“The trouble is,“ he said, “That we’re stuck with the body. I hadn’t looked that far back for it before.”

“Yves would love that,“ Laura observed. “Cognac, or a sweet one?”

Bent over, he raised his head expectantly to us. Laura was crossing to the dolly of liqueurs. Elena yawned luxuriously. I hadn’t understood him. With an impatient gesture, Jean-Claude rolled forward onto his head and one forearm, hung his legs asymmetrically in the air, and wound his free arm in a crooked oval.

“Now,” he demanded very distinctly, as if his inversion might make him inaudible, “if I were to stay like this for thirty-six hours, do you think you might be able to think of me as something else than a person wrong end up?”

As he spoke his tie, a bright, deep red affair in silk shantung, slunk down his shirt front and draped itself languidly over his face. Elena sat up for the first time since dessert.

“Jean-Claude,” she said, “your taste is beyond salvation.”

Unable, anyway, to get the tie out of his eyes without altering the pattern of his arm, Jean-Claude put his legs down and sat up on the floor.

“It’s the principle of motion sculpture,” he said listlessly. “I think it is. I’ll have to ask a motion sculptor. You’re freed to see the pattern of a thing precisely because it’s doing something that it isn’t meant to do.”

“Did you buy that?” Elena insisted.

Jean-Claude tucked the tie possessively back into his jacket and gave his wife a look mock-wounded and mock-resentful. ‘I did,” he said. “But it was a sentimental purchase.”

“All right, she said, “you may wear it as much as you like at home, but I won’t be seen in company with it.” She smiled oddly. Jean-Claude took her foot and traced a ring around her ankle with his finger.

Maggie Brookes-Butt, "Wish: New and Selected Poems"

Maggie Brookes-Butt has been writing all her life, starting work as a journalist and a BBC TV documentary producer. Her books include six poetry collections as Maggie Butt and two historical novels as Maggie Brookes, published by Penguin Random House. She taught creative writing at Middlesex University for 30 years, and was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Kent. As well as being a writer she is a compulsive reader, hopeful gardener, dreadful cook, besotted grandmother and a Londoner to the bone, though she loves to swim in the sea.

About Wish: New and Selected Poems
Wish contains 50 poems from Maggie's six previous collections, about the strength of women, concern for our planet, and hope in the power of love. They are gathered here alongside 21 bitter-sweet new poems about the joys and fears of a grandmother in this troubled, vulnerable and precious world. The new poems are addressed to her young grandchildren, to be read by them when they grow up.

You can read more about Wish on the author's website here. Below, you can read two poems from the poetry collection. 

From Wish, by Maggie Brookes-Butt

Murmur

My heart is whispering – this faint back-wash
is slush and suck of waves over shingle,
tumbling the stones which will lie underwater
when storms rage far above their flooded world.
 
My heart is whispering – a breeze turns
over leaves, its shivery message passes
from branch to branch at the far-off crackle
of forest flames and thudding feet of animals.
 
But whispers lullaby your sleeping form,
your peaceful unknowing, sharing secrets
of here-and-gone, here-and-gone. Listen
to its echo: love ... love ... love ...
 

Eyes
 
Mine have seen first breaths and lasts,
the beginning and end of everything,
 
green shoots and heaps of rotting leaves.
They've seen horses pulling coal drays,
 
milk bottle tops pecked by blue-tits,
peace camps, walls torn down, glass
 
ceilings cracking, gay weddings,
but children slippered in class, life vests
 
washed up beside migrant boats, turtles
choked by plastic bags, smoking ruins.
 
Mine are hooded now, the teal and amber
marbled irises surrounded by crinkled deltas
 
of skin, but still see clearly thanks to small
acrylic miracles and astonishing dexterity.
 
Yours are wide and bright, the whites whiter
than paper, almost blue, the irises two shades
 
of grey, dove grey circled by wet-slate grey.
They can spot the smallest dot of crumb,
 
bending to retrieve it, or point to the woods
where a squirrel is camouflaged against a trunk.
 
I can see what's coming, my vision unclouded
by the twin cataracts of helplessness and dismay.
 
Polar bears claim abandoned villages. Tanks roll
in again. Together we watch the leaves fall.