Neil Campbell, "Saying Dirty Things in Regional Accents"

 

Neil Campbell's new collection of short stories Saying Dirty Things in Regional Accents is out now. From Manchester, England, he has appeared four times in the annual anthology of Best British Short Stories. He has published three novels, six collections of short stories, two poetry chapbooks and a poetry collection, as well as appearing in numerous magazines and anthologies. His website is here. 

About Saying Dirty Things in Regional Accents, by Neil Campbell

Campbell gives voice to the extraordinary (never ordinary) men and women of Manchester. He goes beyond the King's English and formulaic approaches to short stories to capture, in print, how people really talk. Think James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, but Mancunian. Funny and heartfelt, this book is a romp to whizz through with pleasure. Forget mad for it Madchester, this is the Manchester of now, where Hacienda clichés turn into corporate nightmares and the only art is in marketing.

Read more about Saying Dirty Things in Regional Accents on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an except from the collection. 

From Saying Dirty Things in Regional Accents

Job and Knock 

Chris does the nightshift because no other fucker wants to do it. So he deserves the better money and the fact that they can usually get the job done early doors. It’s what they call job and knock.

Most of the lads are on the iPlayer all night, catching up on the football or Line of Duty or whatever. But they’ve been getting away with it so long they’re even getting bored of the iPlayer.

Why don’t we just go to the boozer for a bit, says Chris, to Phil, the lad he’s on the job with. Phil can’t come up with a reason not to.

Nobody ever mentions management. They’re a joke anyway. Most of these nightshift lads said could have got management jobs if they’d wanted but they couldn’t be arsed with the hassle of going to meetings and all that, they just wanted to crack on with the job.

They started the nightshift at six bells and by eight they went to the boozer. It was only about a thirty-yard walk from the exchange. Months they’d been dragging this job out, on and off.

They went in the pub and it wasn’t like they remembered. Instead of cosy corners and comfy seats it was full of tables and families sat there having meals. Screaming kids all over the place. Both Chris and Phil had enough of that at home. Part of the reason Chris did the nightshift was that he got more kip on the hammock in the back of the van than he did in his own bed.

The pints cost a fortune and of course you had to go outside with your fags as well. Just wasn’t the same. It was like they were deliberately trying to get rid of pubs for the drinker. They were just restaurants that sold the occasional lager now. This boozer didn’t even do Guinness anymore. They always used to have great nights on the Guinness in there.

On the way back to the exchange they stopped at an off licence and picked up a four pack of Foster’s and some fags. Back in the exchange Chris turned on all the lights and they flicked on one after another. They sat there at the tables and then Phil asked if Chris knew the way onto the roof.

Yeah, think so.

Better than being stuck in here. Let’s have a wander up there.

They trailed up the stairs carrying the beer with them and went out through the fire escape and onto the roof. The bright lights of the big city stretched out before them.

Phil went back down and brought a couple of chairs back up and they sat there on the roof smoking and drinking.

This is fucking quality, said Phil.

 

Nice and cool on here as well. Boiling in that exchange.

Better get these beers down us.

Save a couple until tomorrow mate. No sense driving home pissed. One’s enough anyway. It’s like the fucking Shawshank Redemption up here.

David Frankel, "Forgetting is How We Survive"

David Frankel was born in Salford and raised on the westerly fringes of Manchester. His short stories have been shortlisted in several competitions including The Bristol Prize, The Bridport Prize, The ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award, The Willesden Herald, and the Fish Memoir Prize. His work has been widely published in anthologies and magazines, and also in a chapbook by Nightjar Press. He also writes nonfiction exploring memory and landscape. Forgetting is How We Survive is his first collection. 

About Forgetting is How We Survive

A plane crashes. A boy drowns. A body is found on a dark lakeside. A woman tries to make sense of a strange memory from her childhood. A father searches for a missing dog – his only link to his lost son. A boy on the brink of adolescence embarks on a journey and gets more than he bargained for. Young lovers get their kicks trespassing in empty houses. A young man prepares to leave his hometown for the last time, and a giant sink hole threatens to swallow EVERYTHING.  

In Forgetting is How We Survive, people are haunted by ghosts of the past, tormented by doppelgangers and pining for the futures that have been lost to them. Each faces a turning point – an event that will move their life from one path to another, and every event casts a shadow. 

The stories in this collection come from another England in which earthy realism hides another world where anything is possible. 

You can read more about Forgetting is How We Survive on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the collection.

From Forgetting is How We Survive, by David Frankel

Ghost Story

More investigators come, so you tell your story again. Some believe you, others don’t. Some pay, others don’t. Sometimes you forget details, or the story gets muddled and you are forced to double back, retracing your steps. Sometimes you get excited as you describe what happened and, in your enthusiasm, you embellish — you are only human, after all. These variances create doubt, and you don’t want to be perceived as dishonest, so you begin to consider your words more carefully. Each time you recount the facts, your delivery becomes more refined. You know, now, how to project integrity, trustworthiness, and when to pause to allow the gravity of what you are saying sink in. You understand how to present your best side to the suspicious lens of the camera. 

Although you only ever wanted to tell the truth, you cannot remember what that strange mixture of feelings was like. You know only how it looked in your mind’s eye the last time you recalled it. Each time you recount what happened that day, you piece it together from what you remember saying the time before, the image resolving a little more with each re-telling, its edges becoming more clearly drawn, and you are comforted by this lack of doubt. So you tell the story of what you saw again; the memory of a memory of a memory. A ghost, if you will.

Brian Howell, "The Man Who Loved Kuras and Other Stories"

Brian Howell, photograph by Mark Alberding

Brian Howell lives and teaches in Japan. He has been publishing stories since 1990. His first collection, The Sound of White Ants, was published in the UK by Elastic Press in 2004. His novel based on the life of Jan Vermeer, The Dance of Geometry, was published in March 2002 by The Toby Press. His second novel, The Curious Case of Jan Torrentius, about the notoriously libertine Dutch painter, was published in 2017 by Zagava. His third novel, Sight Unseen, which follows the intersections of a group of characters who are under the spell of a mysterious Dutch seventeenth-century genre painting, was published in 2019 by Zagava. He likes film, cycling, Japan, the Low Countries and listening to podcasts. 

 

About The Man Who Loved Kuras and Other Stories, by Brian Howell 

My stories in this collection have been written over a number of years, a little under half in this particular collection being quite recent and previously unpublished. The title story, like many of those included, owes a debt to happenstance in that I have been living in Japan for over twenty-five years and rather than heavily research the country and its history as a whole I prefer to let my eye fall on whatever stands out at a given time. In the case of kuras (a kura is a distinctive type of Japanese storehouse which you can find all over Japan. It reminds me of European architecture and probably invokes an aspect of nostalgia for me), I only became aware of them as distinct Japanese buildings in the last few years, partly from my cycling rides in the country. However, I soon realised that they are all around and pretty much taken for granted by the general populace. I saw in this recent mania of mine a possible starting point for a characters’ obsession that gets out of hand and ends up filling a lack that he isn’t aware of and symbolises his loss of control of his life and leads to a horrible conclusion. 

The idea for "The Night of São João" was simply a gift that started with a stray comment by a stranger when I was in Porto, Portugal. The fact that I experienced the festival at first hand at all was serendipitous, because I was only able to take part in it because it coincided with a conference I was attending, and even then, when it came to the actual celebrated night of the festival, I was indifferent to the idea until I was cajoled along by two friends and colleagues. I then had an experience that reminded me of a time when I regularly went to celebrate New Year’s Eve in Trafalgar Square when I was a teenager. The Portuguese version of this in the form of this particular summer festival was a total contrast in many respects, except in so far as I found myself in an extremely uncomfortable situation at a much older age in a crowd, from which I barely extricated myself, in a place I didn’t know. Yet the idea of making contact with strangers in a way that wasn’t usually the case for me as a teenager in London or would be for an older man and a younger woman as it unfolds in the Portuguese setting in this story represents for me a sort of correlation.

In the case of one of my earlier stories, "Meeting Julie Christie," that story actually came out of a series of coincidences involving the famous actress that ended up continuing even after I had finished the story and checked with her for permission. Although I was trying to break into film reviewing at the time and was able to interview a number of my idols, the one time I saw Christie and the other times which counted as near-misses had a certain magical, frustrating quality about them which I wove into some of my more personal experiences from the same period. 

"The Mannikin" (extracted below) grew very much out of my long-term interest in Dutch C17th-century painters when I was conducting some research into the painter Gerard Terborch, a contemporary of Johannes Vermeer, with whom the older artist shares many characteristics and who has a cameo in my novel about Vermeer, The Dance of Geometry. In this case, an actual letter by Gerard Terborch’s father was the inspiration for a fictional version of this letter. The theme of dolls or mannikins is one that I have always been attracted to, as is the idea of the presence of the many C17th-century Dutch genre painters who made their way to England at that time. This is also something that I touched on in my novel about the (to some at the time) infamous Jan Torrentius, The Curious Case of Jan Torrentius.

Many of my other stories in this collection either reflect some running themes from the place I grew up in, such as south London, or my trips or stays abroad. Sometimes I like specifically not to mention a time or place, as in "The Folding Man," even though it may be based in a specific experience or culture.

In other cases, as in my story about a man’s infatuation with a dental hygienist, the idea developed from the, to me, incredibly thorough regimen that my own dental treatment in Tokyo imposed unexpectedly on me, even though I had nothing that ostensibly wrong with my teeth and had already been visiting a previous dentist regularly. Nevertheless, I had never before experienced quite that form of attention and care that I was offered by this particular surgery. Whilst never being uncomfortable with it, I wondered how a character might take the idea of this attention too far, become dependent on it, and imagine a world around it, both as regards the technical side of dentistry and the more personal one of the relationship between a patient and a dental worker, whom he soon conflates with that of a sex worker, whom he starts to frequent around the same time. Needless to say, all the extreme events around this character’s story are all freely imagined.

You can read more about The Man Who Loved Kuras and Other Stories on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories.  

From The Man Who Loved Kuras and Other Stories

The Mannikin

It was dark very soon, and the smells from the street dissuaded me once more of my idea to go out even for a brief stroll. I found also the shouts from the street and what I believed to be coarse words very unedifying. Therefore, I set to experimenting with the mannikin, to moving its limbs in all manner of ways that would conform to different postures. I generally thought that it was convenient to not have to worry about the kind of things that one would ask of a real person, to move an arm or even a leg in such a way that one could not conceive of doing with a live model. Yet, sometimes, having moved her to a chair now, I might put a limb in such a way as she sat there that I might hear a sound which seemed not exactly human but also not truly inanimate, a sound as of air being pressed or released. This would be mixed in with the sound of the rubbing of polished wood moving in a socket of some kind. I had not investigated the inner workings of this doll yet, and in truth I preferred to leave some mystery. And I certainly did not want to take apart this … device. I believe I was only interrupted the once, by the maid bringing me a very large glass of ale; when she saw me kneeling at the doll, she quickly withdrew, giggling.

I confess it was not wisest to investigate the creature in the dimming light and with candles, so I fell asleep till the next morning. 

Yet when I awoke it was not to see the doll in the chair as I had left her, but to see her on my bed next to me, her skirt uncouthly lifted, face down. I could not recall how she had come to be in this position and quickly I lifted her up by the waist and carried her to the chair, where her head sank down as if in a sulk, reminding me of the first day when I had placed her on the floor. I examined the skirt particularly closely, worried it may have been damaged, but I was relieved to find nothing amiss.