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.’

Anna Vaught, "The Alchemy: A Guide to Gentle Productivity for Writers"

 

Anna Vaught is an English teacher, mentor and author of several books, including 2020’s novel Saving Lucia and short fiction collection, Famished; 2023 saw Saving Lucia published to national acclaim in Italy as Bang Bang Mussolini, memoir These Envoys of Beauty, the magical realism novel The Zebra and Lord Jones and, after The Alchemy, the Curae anthology of short prose from the winning entrants to the prize she established in 2023 for writer-carers; next year sees her first essay collection, To Melt the Stars. Her shorter and multi-genre works are widely published in journals, magazines and anthologies. Until recently, she was a columnist for Mslexia and has written regularly for The Bookseller, including as a columnist. With a background in secondary English, mentoring with young people and community arts, Anna is now a guest university lecturer, tutor for Jericho Writers and teaches occasionally at secondary level. She works alongside chronic illness, and is a passionate campaigner for mental health provision and SEND support for young people. She is a PhD candidate at York St John from December 2023-4, undertaking a PhD by Published Works on Magical Realism and Trauma, foregrounding her own work. Her title begins with a quotation from her memoir: "Go there on a wing in your imagination": Magical Realism and Imagination as Therapeutic Writing in Saving Lucia and These Envoys of Beauty. 

About The Alchemy

The Alchemy is a robust, frank and loving guide to an often opaque industry. As well as offering tips on working in gentle increments and re-imagining what productivity and the work of writing look like, there is advice on sending out work and navigating the industry, looking after your mental health as you go.

Full of practical advice, strategies, comfort and the occasional entertaining essay, The Alchemy is about writing a book when you thought you could not. It is for all writers, but with a particular eye on those who are tired and lacking in confidence, and those who face significant challenges – perhaps you are chronically ill or care for a loved one. It is a book for beginners, but it is also for those of you who are stuck in your habits and practice – perhaps you just need a pal to guide you through the day to day with the book you wanted to write. That’s what The Alchemy is. Let’s do this together.

You can read more about The Alchemy on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a short extract from the introduction to the book. 

From The Alchemy, by Anna Vaught

Welcome

The Alchemy is about writing a book – a work of fiction of whatever kind – when you thought you could not. This is a book for everyone, but with a particular eye on those who are tired and lacking in confidence; those who are disabled, chronically ill or perhaps care for a loved one who would struggle without them. Essentially, this has been me for some time now, and that is how I know about productivity – and how I know about challenging what it is; how we think of and understand productivity in terms of a creative project.

I thrived not only from deadlines, spreadsheets and flow charts (although these things are excellent), but from learning to work with what I had, when I could and, also, in understanding that writing a book happens all the time. Much of what can become a book, or deepen what you already have, might be found in being observant in your daily life – insofar as you can be, because I want to exclude no one here. Not everyone will be active.

I want to free you from the idea that you must write every day to be a writer, or even if you want to complete a full-length book. If that works for you, wonderful, but it won’t work for everyone, and won’t be possible for many. So I try to get us to think about the creation of a book in different terms: in observations, but also in knowing that thinking is also a huge part of the job. Give yourself unhurried time in which to do this.

In laying all this out, I am going to offer you various essays full of ideas and first-hand experiences, and I will suggest writing exercises as I go. Finally, I am going to offer thoughts on sending out work and navigating the industry, looking after your mental health as you go. This is a book for beginners, but it might also be for you if you are stuck in your habits and practice; perhaps you are newly unwell or constrained in some way, or perhaps you just need a pal to guide you through the day-to-day with the book you want to write.

Anna Vaught, "The Zebra and Lord Jones"

Anna Vaught is an English teacher, Creative Writing teacher, mentor, editor and author of several books, including Saving Lucia, Famished, Ravished and These Envoys of Beauty. Her short creative works and features have been widely published, and she has written for the national press and has had a column with The Bookseller and Mslexia. In 2022 Anna launched The Curae, a new literary prize for carers. Anna is also a guest university lecturer, a tutor for Jericho Writers, and volunteers with young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. She is the mother of three sons, comes from a large Welsh family and lives in Wiltshire. The Zebra and Lord Jones is her third novel and seventh book.

About The Zebra and Lord Jones

A listless aristocrat, Lord Jones, finds himself in London during the Blitz, attending to insurance matters. A zebra and her foal, having escaped from the London Zoo during a bombing, cross his path, and he decides to take them back to his estate in Pembrokeshire. Little loved by his fascist-sympathiser parents, something in Lord Jones softens, and he realises he is lost, just like these zebras. 

The arrival of the zebras sparks a new lease of life on the Pembrokeshire estate, and it is not only Lord Jones but the families his dynasty has displaced that benefit from the transformation. Full of heart and mischief, The Zebra and Lord Jones is a hopeful exploration of class, wealth and privilege, grief, colonialism, the landscape, the wars that men make, the families we find for ourselves, and why one lonely man stole a zebra in September 1940 – or perhaps why she stole him.

You can read more about The Zebra and Lord Jones on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From The Zebra and Lord Jones, by Anna Vaught

It is the autumn of 1940 and the staff of the London Zoo have been hard at work on the preparations for keeping the animals safe. Soon, the Blitz will begin. All the venomous creatures have already been destroyed in case of their escape, or perhaps to prevent their falling into the wrong hands; as in other menageries, the seals have been sequestered for submarine-detection training; in food shortages, some of the smallest creatures have been fed to the biggest and hungriest. Londoners have taken to the animal-adoption scheme to help keep the creatures in food and bedding; some of the tiniest are boarding with families, with the dormice shoeboxed out. It is some miniscule recompense for owners of the 750,000 pets put down when war broke out. But then, late one September night, the zebra enclosure suffers a direct hit, and Mother the zebra and her foal Sweetie escape and outrun the keepers. This is a true story, and is recounted in the journals of Dr Sidney Huxtable, eminent zoologist and director of the zoo, who gave directions that night for the seal pond to be drained in order to provide more water for the firefighters. 

Also in the city that night – as the zebra and her foal ran amidst the flames and rubble, through a tableau of extraordinary suffering – was Lord Robert Ashburn, Baron Jesmond (to be known to you as ‘Lord Jones’, for which read on), attending to his family’s property in Mayfair and Knightsbridge (a little late, as ever) and accounting for insurance expectations in the event of destruction by Hitler, about which the family had serious concerns (in terms of guarding bricks and mortar) ...