Nuala O'Connor, "Menagerie"

Nuala O'Connor, photo by Úna O'Connor

Nuala O’Connor lives in Co. Galway, Ireland. Her poetry and fiction have been widely published, anthologised, and won many literary awards. Her sixth novel Seaborne, about Irish-born pirate Anne Bonny, was nominated for the 2025 Dublin Literary Award and shortlisted for Eason Novel of the Year at the 2024 An Post Irish Book Awards. Her novel NORA (New Island), about Nora Barnacle and James Joyce, was a Top 10 historical novel in the New York Times. She won Irish Short Story of the Year at the 2022 An Post Irish Book Awards. Her fifth poetry collection, Menagerie, was published by Arlen House in late March 2025. Her website is here. 

About Menagerie, by Nuala O'Connor
Menagerie is Nuala’s fifth poetry collection, and her first since 2011. It is a book that centres on casting a compassionate, language-loving eye on the animal world, on neurodivergence, on writing, on marriage and familial love, and on art and politics. Carl Phillips, writing in the Irish Times said Menagerie has ‘a warm feelingful generosity of vision and a distant, diagnostic eye … a collection which is at once involving and clear-sighted.’

From Menagerie

Plum

         

          A poem can’t take the place of a plum. 

- Sylvia Plath

Your glaucous bloom is easily wiped away,
one thumb stroke and you are ruby-skinned again,
a firm bed for lips to wrap around.

But you are a frightening prospect;
your skin might make teeth ache, your flesh
may pull a stripe of bitterness over my tongue.

Still, I am willing to plunge in.
I take you in my mouth,
for better, for worse.


Psychopomp

Desire stretches, elongates, it is cat-paw dogged
and I give in, allow my fingers to scroll and tap.
I want more basalt and gold, seed-pearl and jet,
more hair wefted through its own warp, the strands
of the inscrutable dead, snapped behind back-glass.

My treasure box is a tomb of sepia strangers
but I dreamt my mournful trinkets were stolen,
all gone, those turquoise and vulcanite sarcophagi
meant for lapels and bosom-nesting chains –
grim thieves mocked and saw me off, empty-handed.

So here I am again, haunting online marketplaces,
a banshee keening unknowable but felt losses,
a reaper in search of fresh souls to stack,
in order to stuff my communal vault,
with memento mori, with memento vivere.

Sophie Haydock, "Madame Matisse"

Sophie Haydock is an author, editor and journalist based in Folkestone, Kent. She is also curator of Folkestone Book Festival. Her debut novel, The Flames, was published in 2022. Her second novel, Madame Matisse, about the women who were integral to the life of the French artist Henri Matisse, was published by Doubleday in March 2025.

Sophie will be giving a guest talk, "Madame Matisse: The Women Who Made the Artist," at the University of Leicester on Wednesday 30 April 2025 at 5.30pm. With Harry Whitehead, she will be discussing the women who shaped the life of the artist Henri Matisse, and the process of turning history into fiction. You can see more details about the event and book a place here. 

About Madame Matisse, by Sophie Haydock
Madame Matisse is an fictionalised exploration of the women who played pivotal yet often overlooked roles in the life of the iconic artist Henri Matisse. Through the lives of three extraordinary women, Sophie Haydock paints an emotional portrait of art, love and sacrifice.

At the heart of the story is Amélie, Matisse's wife, whose quiet devotion to her husband's genius leaves her own dreams to wither in the shadows. Her unwavering support is the foundation of Matisse’s career, but it comes at a steep personal cost.

Then there is Lydia Delectorskaya, the dazzling Russian émigrée who becomes Matisse’s muse and confidante. With her fierce independence and enigmatic past, Lydia’s relationship with Matisse is as passionate as it is fraught, as she grapples with her own identity and her complex role in his creative world. 

When his wife, after forty years of marriage, delivers a desperate ultimatum, a question is born: who will Matisse choose? And what explosions lie ahead?

Finally, Marguerite, Matisse's daughter, emerges as a voice of resistance, forging her own path and confronting the turbulent undercurrents of her family dynamic. As she struggles to define herself outside her father’s shadow, Marguerite challenges the boundaries of art, family and love.

Set against the vibrant canvas of 1930s France, Madame Matisse is a tale of ambition, betrayal and the indelible impact these women had on Matisse’s artistic legacy. Their stories of resilience and sacrifice offer a powerful reflection on the often-unseen forces behind the creation of greatness.

You can read more about Madame Matisse here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From Madame Matisse
Make no mistake: Lydia doesn’t care for beauty, certainly doesn’t chase after it as currency, though she understands the privileges it affords her, as a woman about to turn twenty-nine, with pale skin, ice-blonde hair and blue eyes. She has caught the eyes of enough men in her time, usually the wrong kind. But Lydia knows such beauty is not a thing to build a life upon; it will not last for more than a handful of years, nor would she want it to.

She’s sitting alone in the dark with the cool instrument clasped to her breast, lost in a meditative daze, when she hears Monsieur Matisse calling for her. There’s a shift in his tone.

Lydia returns the gun to her father’s briefcase and checks the clasps are locked securely, pushing her thumbs up against them to test for weaknesses, to see if Amélie’s meddling has inflicted permanent damage. Then she conceals the case once more, hidden until the time comes.

Once it is safely put away, she passes from her room, down the stairs, to the studio where Monsieur Matisse spends his days. Birds call from their cages, wings darting. The artist has his back to her as he tops up their seed. She notices the slope of his shoulders, pulling at the centre of his taupe jacket, the material tight between his shoulder blades. He feels her eyes on him and turns expectantly. Her gaze roams to the fireplace. She looks at a pair of pressed violets, long past their best, their colours faded after many years trapped behind a pane of glass.

"There you are, Lydia. It’s not like you to keep me waiting," he says gently.

There’s a seriousness to his features, and Lydia knows something has changed.

"Your wife was looking for you. Did she find you?" she asks.

He nods, and gestures that she take a seat.

He inhales. Pauses. Her body tenses as she waits for him to continue, her heart pounding. She waits for the words she knows are coming.

"I’m afraid my wife has given me an ultimatum," he says slowly.

Pam Thompson, "Sub/urban Legends"

 

Pam Thompson is a writer, educator and reviewer based in Leicester. She has been widely published in magazines including Atrium, Butcher’s Dog, Finished Creatures,The Alchemy Spoon, The High Window, Ink, Sweat & Tears, The North, The Rialto, Magma and Mslexia.  Pam’s last collection, Strange Fashion, was published by Pindrop Press in 2017. A pamphlet, Sub/urban Legends has just been published Paper Swans Press (March 2025). Pam is a Hawthornden Fellow.

About Sub/urban Legends, by Pam Thompson
These poems cross and re-cross boundaries between the real and surreal and take imaginative leaps in form and subject matter. The New York School poets are presiding spirits and Eduard Munch puts in an appearance in a Welsh town. The poems don’t shy away from the darker side of life: loss, grief, mental illness, but there is joy and exuberance and hope. 

You can read more about Sub/urban Legends on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From Sub/urban Legends

In New York City with my daughter

Outside the Whitney, a man sells red roses.

Mother’s Day. Inside, Berdie, Larry Rivers’ mother-in-law

is naked, twice. Every wrinkle and fold. After she died

O’Hara wrote, ‘Berdie, Berdie, where are you

and why?’ Schuyler loved her too.

On Brooklyn Bridge a cyclist shouts at a woman

who has wandered across his lane.

I turn to catch the views Georgia painted, read messages 

on love-locks chained to the rails, ‘I love you

Jay, Carina, Kim.’ Black heart drawn with a Sharpie.

Times Square—two living-statues of Liberty,

bickering through green rubber masks. Rap 

boys pull out stooges from Asia, Australia, the UK—

all brag and swagger, leap over them. Our cameras

OD on light—we lose our bearings, just by looking up.

The Glass Strawberry 

My friend sent his boyfriend a single rose for Valentine’s Day.

It arrived with its head cut off. His boyfriend bought 

him three cacti and put them on a fold-up table

which collapsed which is bizarre because it reminds me

of my daughter’s early Christmas present: three small cacti,

packed flat and posted, wearing woolly hats and scarves.

My cacti lean together in the kitchen window.

My friend sends people care-packages when they’re ill.

I told him I’d read about ‘strawberries,’ little treats 

we should give ourselves when we’re sad, sitting in the sun, 

or stroking a cat, to boost our endorphins.

A homeless man he worked with called them ‘dolphins.’ 

My friend sent me a glass strawberry that’s cool

and slightly spiky. I like to hold it but the glass heart 

with severed arteries stays in its red satin box. 

We have both been in the desert for ages 

but our cacti have pink flowers, are taller than us 

and hold out their arms. And the dolphins leap and leap.

Nearly Easter News 2025

It's been a while since our last News post, and lots has been happening in the last few months in the Centre for New Writing, so here is an update on student and staff news at Leicester. Congratulations and thanks to everyone who helps make this such a vibrant place to be! You can read our previous News article, from November 2024, here. 

News

Firstly, congratulations to all the MA Creative Writing students and MA Modern and Contemporary Literature and Creative Writing students who graduated in January 2025!

Congratulations to everyone involved in the hugely successful Literary Leicester Festival, 19th to the 22nd March 2025. It was an amazing celebration of literature, with lots of different events and authors. Special congratulations here to all the students involved in this year's Creative Writing Student Showcase, who made it such a brilliant event. Speakers included Sonya Hundal, Anna Walsh, Joe Bedford, Aidan Trulove, Laura Besley, Olivia Peachey, Kimaya Patil, Cate Morris, Shauna Strathmann, Daneil Hibberd, Nina Walker, Aarini Mehta, Sandra Shaji, Dave Clarke. 

There have also been lots of wonderful Centre for New Writing events this term with visiting authors and writing professionals. You can read about this term's guest masterclasses and workshops here. There are still more to come after Easter, including a public masterclass by Kit de Waal on Tuesday 13 May (see details here), a talk by author Sophie Haydock on 30 April (see details here), and the Annual Creative Writing Lecture, this year given by Eimear McBride on 6 May (see details here). 

Everybody's Reviewing, our review blog, has now had over 500,000 readers, and Creative Writing at Leicester has now had 350,000 readers! Thanks to all our authors, editors, students, reviewers, bloggers and readers. If you've not done so already, do have a look at our "Favourite Reads of 2024" round-up on Everybody's Reviewing here.  

Rosalind Adam, MA Creative Writing graduate, has had her poem "Decomissioned" published in Amethyst Review here. 

Kirsten Arcadio has reviewed Android Author by Sapphira Olson on Everybody's Reviewing here. Kirsten has now completed her PhD - congratulations! 

Congratulations to PhD Creative Writing student Laura Besley, who was named as a Top Tier Finalist in the Globe Soup Open Short Story Competition 2024. You can see more details here. She also won Second Prize in the Cranked Anvil Flash Fiction Competition. You can read her prize-winning story, "Perhaps on a Summer's Day," here. Her story "Like a Memory or Maybe Only a Dream" was shortlisted for the Mini Welkin Writing Prize. You can read it here. Laura's story "That meeting point where something is as close as it is far away" was runner-up in the Flash Fiction Festival Online Competition. You can read it here. Laura's story "When We Were Raucous" has been published by The Manchester Review here. 

Congratulations to New Walk Editions, which is co-directed by Nick Everett, and which was shortlisted for this year's Michael Marks Awards for poetry pamphlet publishers!

MA Creative Writing graduate Tracey Foster has reviewed The Path of Peace: Walking the Western Front Way by Anthony Seldon for Everybody's Reviewing here, and Fewer Better Things by Glenn Adamson here. Tracey's haiku was longlisted for the Haiku Foundation's competition on the theme of dreams. You can read her haiku and other longlisted entries here. 

Kim Wiltshire has reviewed The Granite Kingdom by PhD graduate Tim Hannigan on Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Kathy Hoyle, PhD Creative Writing student, has stories published in both the Northern Gravy Children's and Young Readers' Anthology and the Northern Gravy Fiction Anthology. Her story "Cockleshell Girl" has been nominated by South Florida Poetry Journal for Best Small Fiction 2024. Kathy's story "Humbug Shark" is published by Does It Have Pockets? here. Kathy's story "Gallows Pole" has also been nominated for Best Microfiction by New Flash Fiction Review. In March, Kathy chaired a discussion at Sunderland Museum with author Louise Powell about oral history and poetry. You can read more about this discussion here. Kathy has interviewed Louise Powell for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

BA Journalism student Saskia Kabongo undertook work experience on Everybody's Reviewing for a couple of weeks in February. She interviewed authors Lisa Bent and Rasheda Ashanti Malcolm for the site, and reviewed Loveless by Alice Osman here, Carrie Soto Is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid here, and Me Before You by Jojo Moyes here. Congratulations and thanks to Saskia! 

Congratulations to Amirah Mohiddin, who passed her viva for her PhD in Creative Writing in November. You can read more about Amirah's PhD project on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Congratulations to Creative Writing graduate Hannah Mitchell, whose essay "Three" has been published on The Audacity here.

Anna O'Sullivan, MA Modern and Contemporary Literature and Creative Writing graduate, has written about her MA Dissertation in Creative Writing here. 

Congratulations to PhD Creative Writing student Cathi Rae, who passed her viva in December! Congratulations too for the re-publication of her poetry collection, Your Cleaner Hates You, by Coalville C.A.N. You can read more about the collection here. One of the directors of the publisher is MA Creative Writing graduate Constantine. 

Sally Shaw has reviewed Red Runs the Witch's Thread by Victoria Williamson for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Extracts from Jonathan Taylor's memoir, A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons, have been published on MIT's Press Reader here.  His article "Ten Things I Wish I'd Known About Bullying" is in the Morning Star here. His article for the charity Kidscape, "Bullying Is ...", is published here. 

PhD Creative Writing student Jane Simmons has four poems featured in the new anthology Lincolnshire Folk Tales Reimagined, ed. Anne Milon and Rory Waterman (Five Leaves, 2025).

PhD student Nina Walker has written about Amateur Hour's second zine and her experience of workshopping with this group of graduates and students on Creative Writing at Leicester here.  

Anna Walsh, MA Creative Writing student, has written about the regular Leicester event "Rough Draft" on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Congratulations to Harry Whitehead, whose novel White Road will be published by Claret Press in September 2025! You can read more about it here. On the 22nd April 2025, Harry will be reading from his novel and talking to Kevan Manwaring as part of the "Writing the Earth" online event hosted by Bournemouth Arts University. You can sign up for this free event here. 

PhD Creative Writing student Lee Wright has reviewed Father's Father's Father by Dane Holt on Everybody's Reviewing here, The Viaduct by David Wheldon here, and Two Sisters by Blake Morrison here. His personal essay, "Old Oslo," is published by Cigarette Fire Literary Magazine here. 

Lisa Marie Basile, "SAINT OF"

 

Lisa Marie Basile is an NYC-based author, poet, and journalist. She is the author of a few collections of poetry, including SAINT OF, Nympholespy (finalist for the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards), Apocryphal, and Andalucia. Her work can be found in The New York Times, Narratively, Entropy, Tinderbox Poetry, Spork Press, Best Small Fictions, Best American Experimental Writing, and more. She has also led workshops or spoken in panel discussions at Manhattanville College, Columbia University, Emerson College, Pace University, The Moon Studio, The Author’s Guild, Stanza Books, and more. She holds an MFA in writing from The New School in New York City. She is an advocate for chronic illness awareness and foster youth, and is the founding editor of Luna Luna. Her website is here. 

About SAINT OF
SAINT OF is a gilded exploration of hunger—the hunger for the erotic, the ancestral, the forbidden, divinity, and reclamation. With themes of grief, illness, and generational trauma woven alongside sensuality and beauty, this collection is both sacrament and defiance. It traces the contours of longing, ruin, and transformation, blurring the boundaries between the carnal and the celestial. These poems are not only an invocation of saints—they are a declaration of self.

You can read more about SAINT OF here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From SAINT OF, by Lisa Marie Basile

Naomi Booth, "raw content"

Naomi Booth is the author of the short-story collection Animals at Night and the novels Sealed and Exit Management. Her work has been listed for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, included in the Guardian’s Best Fiction of the Year, and shortlisted for the Edgehill Prize. Her story, ‘Sour Hall,’ which is set in the Calder Valley, won the Edgehill Reader’s Award and was adapted into an Audible Originals drama series. Naomi was born in Bradford and grew up in West Yorkshire. She now lives in York and is Professor of Creative Writing at Durham University. Her new novel, raw content, is set between York and the Colne Valley, and is published in March 2025.

About raw content, by Naomi Booth
Grace’s work requires her to be careful. She spends her days reading and editing legal case files, making sure the latest judgments are published as quickly and accurately as possible.

But outside of her work, Grace is not a careful person. Her father’s history as a police officer working across an infamous case shadows her life, as does the violent history entrenched across the Colne Valley landscape of her childhood, and her fears often surface as recklessness. 

When Grace becomes unexpectedly pregnant, she tries to accommodate her boyfriend and the prospect of the baby in her life. But after the relief and strange joy of the birth, Grace starts to imagine all sorts of terrible injuries befalling her child. The steep stairs to her apartment, the kitchen scissors, a boiling kettle all suddenly hold visceral and overwhelming potential for disaster. The baby’s vulnerability terrifies her: fault-lines in her relationship begin to show, and her family history and repressed memories of violence break to the surface.

Tender, gripping and life-affirming, raw content tells the story of a woman grappling with a new form of love that feels like a disaster.

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

From raw content

I was born in the back of a Ford Fiesta, a mile shy of Huddersfield Royal Infirmary. As my mother screamed and my father caught me – purple and larded with vernix – in his shaking hands, Jacqueline Hill’s body was being uncovered in the thick of nettles and dock and ragwort on a scrap of wasteland twenty miles away. She had disappeared the night before, becoming the final victim of the Yorkshire Ripper. 

I was born in the Colne Valley, into a seam of abandoned mills. The landscape of my childhood was Salendine Nook and Scarbottom and Titanic Mills. Derelict furnace chimneys and saw-tooth roofs were as intrinsic to the valley as the skylarks and meadow pipits that rose in the sky above us to the Pennine moortops. 

I grew up in a house ten miles, as the crow flies, from Saddleworth Moor, where children lay buried under gorse and heather in unmarked graves – if the crow were to fly up over Marsden Moor and Wessenden Reservoir, to the forbidden and terribly beautiful places: to Dovestones Edge and the Boggart Stones.

My childhood was a map marked with danger zones. Titanic Mills, filled with broken glass and pigeon shit, in which we were forbidden to play. The lanes and ginnels and car parks that run behind old coal yards and pubs, in which we were forbidden to play. The secluded crescents of greenspace next to the canal where people dumped old sofas and chest freezers and tins of paint, in which we were forbidden to play. Even the playground at the edge of our estate was to be accessed only in specific circumstances. It had to be daylight; it had to be before seven in the evening; we were not to speak to strangers; me and my sister must always stick together. We were never, ever, to wander away from the playground into the woods, where people sniffed glue and worse. We were never, ever to walk up towards Scapegoat Hill or Marsden Moor. 

Me and my sister were cared for. We were bathed and fed and clothed. But, as with many children, we couldn’t have told you if we were loved. Our experience of care came in the form of a warning.  

Drew Gummerson, "Saltburn"

Drew Gummerson is the writer of The Lodger, Me and Mickie James, Seven Nights at the Flamingo Hotel, and most recently, Saltburn. He is a Lambda Award finalist, Leicestershire Short Story Prize winner. His stories have been featured on BBC Radio 4, and in various anthologies. https://linktr.ee/drewgum

About Saltburn, by Drew Gummerson

Saltburn is a collection of six funny sad queer short stories, all set in the town of Saltburn which is in the north-east of England. I start with an apology  

May the residents of the real Saltburn-by-the-Sea and neighbouring towns forgive my mermaids, my nuclear power stations, my foetus museums and so on and so on. They were written with love.

Welcome to Saltburn, an extraordinary town on the English coast with sweeping poverty and nuclear fallout, where young lovers, radioactive and lusty, fall in love, and sea creatures work at the local penny arcade. 

In a series of interconnected short stories a young orphan is taken in by an alchemist, and falls in love with a mermaid. The son of a glove manufacturer is sent to Paris on business, where he falls for a deep-sea diver. One schoolboy bites another, gains psychic abilities and realises they will one day be in love. A rock salesman exposes a cover-up by big business and frees kidnapped women.

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

From Saltburn

Warriors of the Wasteland

While their parents watched the actual war spin out on the TV news programme, Look North with Arthur Seagull and Molly Splat, the boys, and one other, being neither boy nor non-boy, played war games down on the mudflats. Setting themselves up into armies, Shirts vs. Skins, Terminators vs. Rambos, Circumcised vs. Hooded (Claws in common parlance, as in, ‘Are you a Claw or Non-Claw?’) they took up positions behind old abandoned shopping trolleys, in forts constructed from for-sale signs stolen from the overgrown gardens of long-derelict houses, and in the abandoned crumbling concrete Martello, stinking of tramps’ piss and filled with sad-looking wrinkled used, sometimes unused, condoms. They were Trojans, all of them.

And these poor innocents, they would go at each other with wild euphoric abandon.

Happy days. The country was never happier, more unified, than when it was at war. 

Except, just as in any war, there were dissenting voices.

Those who were not happy. Not exactly. 

For Sven Tosier-Gumshoe, being the smallest, feyest and, perhaps, because of his position as neither boy nor non-boy, when the war games were coming to their nightly close, ragged, careworn parents having started to line up like gulls along the pier rail, shouting out that it was time for their respective charges to hurry home for tea or there would be tanned hides all round, was the one who was, most often, taken hostage. 

A quick resolution was needed to finish the game. 

‘I’m Private Tosier-Gumshoe,’ they would say. ‘Fifteenth Seal Regiment. Identification Number 35654. I won’t tell you anything.’

Usually then they would come at them with a used condom filled with sand, or a live crab with snapping claws, or the rusty speculum Aart Jansen had stolen from his doctor dad aeons before, telling them with faked horror that a speculum was something you used to look up buttholes. 

‘OK,’ Sven would say, ‘I give in. Our army is massed behind the seal fort… Plans are to advance at midnight… The password is Valkensteeg 17. Just don’t hurt me. I’ll tell you anything.’

My MA Creative Dissertation

By Anna O'Sullivan

Hello fellow creative writers! My name is Anna O’Sullivan and I’m a recent graduate from University of Leicester with a BA in English and MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Creative Writing with Distinction and recipient of the Waddington MA Prize – which is a bit of a mouthful! Since graduating, I work full-time at a college, with plans to travel for several months around Central and South America, starting in May. I aspire to build a career in the publishing industry later down the line.  

As well as a passion for writing, I love arts and crafts. Recently, I created a Gavin and Stacey-themed Monopoly set, and that became my whole personality for the several months it took. Above all things, I love to read. My favourite genres include feminist, historical and dystopian fiction. I have recently joined "BookTok" and am enjoying speaking to people from around the world with a mutual love for books and similar tastes to me. It is welcoming and wholesome, and a great way to share your views and receive recommendations! 

University of Leicester’s MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature was incredibly appealing to me, as it explores a range of literary forms and genres from a period of history that interests me and addresses relevant social and political issues. The books I studied on this module were thought-provoking and helped me to find my niche and shape an understanding of the subjects. The combination of this degree alongside modules from the Creative Writing MA, plus the opportunity to pursue a creative dissertation, was too good an opportunity to miss. 

The Creative Writing Dissertation, weighted 70% for the creative piece and 30% for 3,000 words of a critical reflection, enables total freedom for writers to explore any forms they would like to. Initially, due to my interest in the genre, I had ideas of a dystopian short story that would cover the 12,000-word limit. Although I made in-depth plans for this, upon further reflection, more ideas began to trickle out and I found myself wanting to write a piece that felt much more meaningful. 

"Meaningfulness" was the key to landing on my big idea. I chose to write a collection of short stories entitled Girls about three young women in the genre of post-feminist fiction. Each story was 4,000 words and followed the female protagonist in close third-person perspective as they encountered similar themes of love, desire and sex. The stories were dispersed across three decades (2000s, 2010s and 2020s) but covered similar challenges in contemporary workplace and university settings. The piece, whilst mostly completely fictional, contained aspects of similar experiences that my friends or I have had, and therefore leant slightly towards being autobiographical. 

Whilst writing, if I hit a wall and found I had no idea how to proceed with the story, I read. The novels I know and love – the ones I would consume and think yes, I want to write something like this, they steered me onwards. Three Women by Lisa Taddeo, powerful but flawed in its own way, was a huge inspiration for my piece, as it takes readers on a journey through the lives of three real women and their relationship with sex and desire. I wanted to be a bit like Lisa Taddeo but comedic like Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary with flawed protagonists, like Ottessa’s Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation - my own take on my favourite aspects of these books. I took inspiration from the modules I had enjoyed during my degree. One in which I explored the relationship between work and identity led me down a path of interest in "work novels" and "bullshit jobs." And as meaningfulness wins over, I knew I wanted to write about women and their experiences at work and in other areas that they have historically been regarded as "second." Women. Work. Desire. 

As I had read and consumed so much whilst writing the creative piece, this made the reflective commentary so much more manageable. I had the primary and secondary material at hand, and as I had picked a subject that I was interested in, I was able to discuss it in great detail. I believe a bit of fire in the belly helps steer the work along. I have a lot to say about false ideas surrounding female desire, or modern women in workplace settings, so I channelled my frustration into something creative. I wanted to create a narrative that would resonate with other women.

My greatest piece of advice, therefore, is to write about something meaningful, and something that piques your interest. The creative dissertation is all yours. It’s your vision. With the kind guidance of your supervisor, this piece of work can be shaped into whatever you want it to become. I highly recommend using this opportunity to create something that resonates with your own experiences, interests or values. 

Below you can read three excerpts from the dissertation. 

A snippet from the first short story: Maeve’s Story, 2004 
Maeve Taylor blows out the candles on her twenty-third birthday cake and wishes for the one thing she wants most in the world – to have sex with her boss. 

To repeat the exact words as she says the wish to herself: to have dirty, steamy sex with Max Walters in his office, up against the locked door or on top of his desk, or anywhere he would prefer it really. 

Of course, she couldn’t say this out loud. Her parents and grandma sit on stools on the opposite side of the counter, their faces all filled with glee and adoration, still seeing the sweet, virginal girl Maeve once was. 

It’s lucky Maeve couldn’t say the wish out loud, because her grandma might have had a heart attack, and that would probably put an end to the party. Besides, it wouldn’t come true if she did. 

A snippet from the second short story: Olive’s Story, 2014
Olive Newman screams. STOP IT. PLEASE STOP. I’M BEGGING YOU.

She screams but she can barely hear her own voice over the ringing in her ears. She is thrown to the ground suddenly. Her back smacks against the concrete. She lays there, motionless, staring up at the black, starless sky. Her breaths are shaky and uneven, her heart hammering against her ribcage. 

She reaches her hand to touch the back of her head. When she brings it back to her eyeline, her hand is coated in dirt and mud. No blood.

A snippet from the third short story: Joanna’s Story, 2020
Joanna Weatherford is left on the steps of her accommodation on a muggy September day in 2020. She watches wistfully as her parent’s car signals out of the carpark and drives away without turning back. 

She gazes up at the tall, red brick building beside her. There’s something dingy and cold about it. As she walks through into her ground-floor flat, the pasty white walls and damp smell feels slightly akin to a prison. Her room is at the very end of the hallway, by the fire exit. The floor is covered entirely by various bags and boxes of her possessions. Everything she has collected over the last eighteen years folded and shoved into suitcases.

Judith Barrington, "Virginia's Apple: Collected Memoirs"

Judith Barrington’s Lifesaving: A Memoir was the winner of the Lambda Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. Memoirs in Virginia’s Apple: Collected Memoirs were included in Creative Nonfiction’s “Favorite Prizewinning Essays” and as Notable Literary Nonfiction in Best American Essays. Barrington is also the author of the bestselling Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art and five collections of poetry. She has taught at universities and workshops across the U.S. and in England and Spain, and was a faculty member of the MFA program of the University of Alaska: Anchorage. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

About Virginia’s Apple: Collected Memoirs, by Judith Barrington
The fourteen literary memoirs collected in Virginia’s Apple explore pivotal episodes across poet and writer Judith Barrington’s life. Artfully crafted, each one stands alone yet they are linked—characters reappear and, taken together, the pieces create a larger narrative. 

The content is wide-ranging: the early days of the Second Wave of feminism—the exhilaration, the wildness, the love affairs, the surprises, and the self-invention, as well as the confusion and conflicts of those heady times; navigating a sometimes precarious existence as an out lesbian long before it was commonplace; leaving England and becoming an American citizen; finding a life partner; and growing old with an inherited disability. The author’s friendship with the distinguished poet Adrienne Rich is the subject of one story. In another, there’s an appearance by the notorious murderer, Lord Lucan, whose wife was a chance acquaintance. 

These stories are laced with humor and joy, while pulsing below the surface is the slow unfolding of delayed grief over her parents’ drowning when she was nineteen, revealing how such a loss can shape a life.

You can read more about Virginia's Apple on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the memoirs. 

From Virginia's Apple

Excerpt from “Westering” 

I woke up at dawn somewhere in the middle of Oklahoma. The sun, not yet above the horizon, was announcing itself with a wash of gold. My forehead, pressed against the window of the bus, ached. As I opened my eyes, all I could see were the colors of emptiness—the land, infinite and bare, stretching away in shades of ochre; the sky, bigger than I had ever known it, streaked with wispy clouds whose edges gleamed. I straightened up, dread rising in my throat, and looked ahead through the windshield. The highway ran on forever in a straight line. Turning back to my window, I expected to see at least a few farms or fences, a lonely shack or a corral, but was confronted instead with a mirror image of the view on the other side. With mounting horror, I looked back towards New York; perhaps we had passed through some small town that I would now see receding into the distance. But there was nothing. 

In my early twenties I’d been either adventurous or foolhardy, depending on how you look at it, when I had driven alone all over Europe, crossed Alpine passes in storms, and found my way at night through Spanish mountains populated by bandits. Here, though, was a landscape far more dangerous. I might step down from the bus and walk away with nothing but my shadow between me and the sadness I’d kept at bay for so long. Like one of those tumbleweeds, sorrow would bounce all the way to the horizon and when it returned it would, for sure, knock me for six. I grabbed the arms of my seat. 

Should I take the next Greyhound back to New York or go on to the West Coast? On my tattered map I traced my route: it would be as far to go back as it would be to go on. My finger landed on the red dot that was San Francisco.

Tina Cole & Michael W. Thomas, "Nothing Louche or Bohemian"

Tina Cole was born in the Black Country and now lives in rural Herefordshire near Ludlow. She has three published pamphlets, I Almost Knew You (2018), Forged (Yaffle Press, 2021) and What it Was (Mark Time Books, 2023). As a poet and reviewer, she has led workshops with both adults and children and judged a number of U.K. and international competitions. Her published poems have appeared in many U.K. magazines and collections, including in The Guardian newspaper. She is a past winner of a number of national poetry competitions, 2010-2023, and completed an M.A. in Creative Writing / Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2023.

Michael W. Thomas has published ten collections of poetry, three novels and two collections of short fiction. His most recent poetry collection, prior to this, is A Time for Such a Word (Black Pear Press); his most recent short fiction collection is Sing Ho! Stout Cortez: Novellas and Stories (Black Pear Press); his most recent novel is The Erkeley Shadows (KDP / Swan Village Reporter). With Simon Fletcher, he edited The Poetry of Worcestershire (Offa's Press). His work has appeared in Acumen, The Antigonish Review (Canada), The Antioch Review (US), The Cannon's Mouth, Critical Survey, Crossroads (Poland), Dream Catcher, Etchings (Australia), Irish Studies Review, Irish University Review, Magazine Six (US), Pennine Platform, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Times Literary Supplement and Under the Radar, among others. He has reviewed for The London Magazine, Other Poetry and The Times Literary Supplement, and is on the editorial board of Crossroads: A Journal of English Studies (University of Bialystok, Poland). He was long-listed for the National Poetry Competition, 2020 and 2022, and long-listed and short-listed for the Indigo Dreams Spring Poetry Prize, 2023. Michael's website is here. He blogs here. @thomasmichaelw

About Nothing Louche or Bohemian, by Tina Cole and Michael W. Thomas
A miscellany box of memories, intense and disconcerting; a gently encouraging piano teacher; teddy bears that knew better days; tinkling bottle-tags; classroom faces happy, wistful, preoccupied; a district nurse’s long-ago phone call; an assignation beneath a canal bridge; a father’s jokes worn down to the metal. These and so many other scenes find their places in the landscape of Nothing Louche or Bohemian. As the collection unfolds, threads are caught, drawn out, found to be markers on the map of what once was—and what, in these pages, lives again … enthralling, troubling, never less than vivid. Tina and Michael have known each other for several years but discovered that they’d grown up in the same area of the Black Country – and gone to the same secondary school. Those coincidences prompted Tina to suggest that they collaborate on a project. This is it.  

From Nothing Louche or Bohemian

Intoxication

It's all in the way you look at things 

or so they say. I remember them being purchased 

in a junk shop just behind The Miners Arms.

My hand went out instinctively to three silver

bottle tags, fingers tracing the engraving, whisky, 

gin, vermouth, how they glinted in the forty-watt 

light amongst tarnished soup tureens and discarded 

cutlery, but oh, that word    vermouth! 

                          It was evenings in cerise silk pyjamas, 

something louche, bohemian, a life away from corseted 

cares. Listening to Rachmaninov, nights at the Royal Opera 

not the sixpenny stalls at the Sedgley Clifton. No, the life 

I deserved sitting in a green Lloyd-loom chair, wafting 

about a Hampstead flat thin and mysterious, smoking

something sweetly scented. I would have written 

a clutch of acclaimed collections, beautiful poetry

not the usual tat that is continually rejected. 

                          It's all in the way you look at things, 

in the way one's hand reaches out for beauty,

a rose, a baby's hand, a moment of success, 

and that word vermouth    is still    intoxicating. 

- Tina Cole

Jacqueline Burnett

           Holy Trinity Roman Catholic School, Oxford Street, Bilston, 1958-1965

We were in the same class

at primary school. Shared 

the same birthday. One year

were told to stand up

so the room could sing

and toast the nothing we'd done.

Slight, she was, freckled:

tawny keeps coming to mind.

Already bringing on a bit of a stoop

to oblige the future.

You'd glimpse her 

slipping out to play,

edging the shadows

of the manager's son

and the town-clerk's daughter.

She answered each question perfectly

then retrieved her stillness,

putting the world away from her

till called upon again.

She rarely smiled,

perhaps never,

certainly not the day she and I

held an end apiece of coincidence,

like a pageant-flag

golden from a brush of sun

fluttered in a pocket of wind.

- Michael W. Thomas

"Writing the Coal Face: Oral History and Creative Writing: A Methodology in Practice"

By Kathy Hoyle

On March 1st, 2025, I was invited to chair a discussion at Sunderland Museum with Dr Louise Powell about her work with oral histories and poetry. Louise had used recordings of local people from now-decimated mining communities to create an exhibition of poetry alongside stunning tintype images by local photographer Andy Martin.

When Louise first told me about the project I was instantly intrigued since my own PhD thesis focuses on authentic North-East dialect and narrative voice in working-class fiction. I also use oral history recordings as a springboard for my creative work, so I was keen to see a similar methodology in practice. Moreover, I’m the daughter of a miner. My dad worked in Horden pit, and I was born and raised just down the road from Sunderland, in Hartlepool, so, if ever there was a project that appealed to me both professionally and personally, this was it!

After visiting the exhibition with my Dad, it was clear that ‘Coal Face’ carried a deep reverence for the local mining communities and was a wonderful way of preserving Northeast heritage and history.  By marrying images with poetry and using excerpts of the recordings as voiceovers to accompany both, Powell and Martin had created an exhibition that brought respect and understanding of Northeast heritage to a much wider audience – particularly those who might otherwise have had little understanding of the bravery, camaraderie and resilience of mining communities.

During our discussion, Powell explained that she worked closely with recordings for many months, searching through over 80,000 words of transcript to find emerging themes, phonetic patterns and dialect terms that could be used to create her poetry. In structuring the pieces, she cleverly used different poetic forms to mirror physical and emotional moments in the miners' lives, the constraints of the haiku representing the compact, claustrophobic space within the mine, sonnets reflecting the contradicting emotional lives of the workers, and prose poetry that emulated speech patterns and regional dialect, all perfectly woven through the exhibition alongside the powerful images created by Andy Martin. 

Powell went on to discuss the importance of using dialect in her work. By using dialect, she explained, she was not only preserving heritage and memory but also preserving language. She wanted to stay as true as possible to the recordings and added that to whitewash the local dialect would have made no sense to her at all - how can you authentically represent a regional community without using the language within it?  

She went on to describe her joy at using dialect within her work, the rich beauty of the language and the emotional resonance she felt with the mining community in doing so. 

Several members of the audience were nodding enthusiastically throughout the discussion and one gentleman went on to tell us a wonderfully light-hearted story about how he had worked in a mine in Yorkshire and caused much confusion with his colloquial language. 

It was clear the exhibition was of real importance to the local community, and it has been incredibly well-received. You could see grown men visibly moved while they were walking around the exhibition space. 

My own father’s response was quite visceral, and I was surprised at how emotional he became – holding his hands up to compare his arthritic fingers to the photographs of other miners' hands, his memory sparked by the poetry and recordings and afterward he was quite still for a moment. Then he simply said, ‘I can’t really tell you if these are good memories or bad, but either way, it’s wonderful!’

It seems that Louise Powell and Andy Martin have created something deeply meaningful for both the local community and beyond. It was a real pleasure to be involved and wonderful to see oral history being used so effectively as a spark for creative practice.  

Coal Face exhibition is open until March 15th at Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens- you can find more information here.

Accompanying podcasts by Dr Louise Powell can be found here.

You can read an interview with Dr Louise Powell on Everybody's Reviewing here.

About the author
Kathy Hoyle’s work is published in literary magazines such as The Forge, Lunate, Emerge literary journal, New Flash Fiction Review, South Florida Poetry Journal and Fictive Dream. She has won a variety of competitions including The Bath Flash Fiction Award, The Hammond House Origins Competition and The Retreat West Flash Fiction Competition. She was recently longlisted for The Wigleaf Top 50 and her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best Microfictions and The Pushcart Prize. She is currently a PhD Creative Writing student at the University of Leicester. 

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.