"The Subtle Art of Short Fiction," ed. Isabelle Kenyon

About The Subtle Art of Short Fiction, ed. Isabelle Kenyon
The Subtle Art of Short Fiction explores the power of short fiction in today’s fragmented world. Renowned authors and critics offer advanced techniques for crafting nuanced, impactful stories.

Learn to master short story structure, subtext, micro-tension, and sensory minimalism. Ideal for experienced writers seeking to refine their skills in this sophisticated art form, or those who love short fiction, and want to learn about the craft behind it.

The book includes essays and writing exercises by Kerry Hadley-Pryce, Daisy Johnson, Matt Wesolowski, Sascha Akhtar, David Hartley, Mahsuda Snaith, Jonathan Taylor, Sarah Schofield, SJ Bradley and Farhana Shaikh, and has an introduction by Dr Paul March-Russell.

You can read more about The Subtle Art of Short Fiction on the publisher's website here. 

About the editor
Isabelle Kenyon is the Managing Director of Manchester publishing house Fly on the Wall Press, and was named a Leader of the Year by the Bookseller in 2025. Founded in 2018, she has led Fly on the Wall Press from Small Press of the Year finalist status at the British Book Awards 2021-23 to their win in the North, in 2024. She is the MA Module Leader for "Publishing in the 21st Century" at Arts University Bournemouth, and the author of psychological thriller The Dark Within Them and poetry collections including Growing Pains (Indigo Dreams).​ She previously coordinated the Northern Fiction Alliance and runs PR campaigns for writers and publishers under Kenyon Author Services. 

From The Subtle Art of Short Fiction

From The Art of Anticipation and Revelation

by Daisy Johnson

I have noticed something recently about children. It is the waiting that they love. My sons sit at the kitchen table watching me, spoons floating half way to their open mouths, eyes wide. I am doing something silly, making a noise or pretending to hide or doing a funny walk. Each time when I stop they call for me to do it again, again, again. I pretend not to, I cannot possibly, no, I am very busy, but they know I am lying. It is this moment of withholding that they find most joyous. The best short stories, for me, carve out most perfectly that delicious space of anticipation.

In Miranda July’s short story "The Metal Bowl," the protagonist describes herself acting in a porn video when she was younger. "I wasn’t directed so much as given a series of props to make my way through, like an obstacle course. A turquoise Teddy bear, a pillow, an empty beer bottle, a metal bowl. Not everything was clear to me (the bowl), but I was too nervous to speak." From this moment we move through the story with a growing question. What was the metal bowl for? The question is an elastic tension which connects us to the protagonist.

In Shirley Jackon’s "The Lottery," the very title of the story is a question which we go in asking: what is The Lottery? The people of a small village begin to gather in the square: "Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example." As with the mysterious metal bowl, we wonder, what are these stones for? Unlike July’s story it is clear that the characters know more than us, that the trembling, questioning tension belongs only to the reader ... 

Peter Kalu, "Act Normal"

Pete Kalu recently received the Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship Award 2024 for his "impressively experimental, thoughtful and challenging" writing. His memoir-essay mashup, Act Normal, was published in October 2025 by Hope Road. He is also the author of the novel One Drop (Andersen, 2022). His short stories can be found in Book of Manchester (Comma Press, 2024), Colonial Countryside (Peepal Tree, 2024), Collision (Comma Press, 2023), Glimpse (Peepal Tree, 2023). Instagram: @petekalu

About Act Normal, by Peter Kalu
In this polemical and poetic collection of 250 mini-essays, personal history becomes a lens for cultural critique. Through fragments and feeling, it asks what we remember, what we forget, and who gets to tell the story. Unflinching and yet tender, these  vignettes are a fierce yet joyous meditation on Black memory, identity, and resistance. Merging memoir, reflections and observations in the style of Annie Ernaux’s Exteriors, Act Normal challenges erasure, mourns what was lost, and dreams of what could be. This is a lyrical reckoning with history, silence, and the radical act of speaking back.

You can read more about Act Normal on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a short sample from the book. 

From Act Normal

Watermelon

I have great difficulty eating watermelon in front of white people. Throughout my childhood white people invested so much time and energy in their literature making us into these eye-rolling, big-grinning picaninny idiots who chomped on the big green and red fruits that I boycotted them for decades. Then I met someone from Iran, and they loved watermelon and didn’t carry my cultural baggage. They were mad for it. Watermelon was in their fridge, on their kitchen counters, in their dreams and all over their late-night cravings. I was tempted. In my mind, I resisted. So much weight and volume, so little taste, those slithery pips that require spitting out making it an outdoor fruit rather than a dining room fruit, the crazy prices, the ecological damage of growing those things which drink litres and litres of water, the mess, the stickiness, the perfumy smell … My mind went on and on, but my stomach rumbled and I gave in. Now I eat watermelon clandestinely. I only buy it from black stores. I only eat it around Global Majority people. My daughters eat watermelon unproblematically. "Deal with your issues, Dad," they tell me, "Deal with your issues." 

Anna Vaught, "These Envoys of Beauty"

 

Anna Vaught is an English teacher, mentor and author of several books, including 2020’s novel Saving Lucia and short fiction collection, Famished. Her shorter and multi-genre works are widely published in journals, magazines and anthologies. She is currently a columnist for Mslexia and has written regularly for The Bookseller, including as a columnist. Anna’s second short fiction collection, Ravished, was published by Reflex Press in 2022, and 2023 will see five books: memoir, These Envoys of Beauty (Reflex Press), new novel The Zebra and Lord Jones, plus The Alchemy, Anna’s first book about writing (both Renard Press, UK and Commonwealth). Saving Lucia will be published in Italian by Milan’s 8tto Edizioni as Bang Bang Mussolini. Anna is a guest university lecturer, tutor for Jericho Writers, volunteer with young people and has recently established the new Curae prize for writer-carers, with industry-wide support, and the editor of Curae: An Anthology from the Inaugural Prize (Renard Press). She works alongside chronic illness, is a passionate campaigner for mental health provision, including in the publishing industry, and she is represented by Kate Johnson of Wolf Literary, NYC. Anna has just finished a collection of essays and is working on a new novel, while two of her books are on US submission. Her website is here. 

About These Envoys of Beauty: A Memoir

In These Envoys of Beauty, Anna Vaught explores her relationship with the natural world, how it fed and feeds her imagination, and how it gave her hope of something different beyond the world she experienced as a child and young person. She writes about how she oriented herself to the natural world and lived within it while growing up in a rural home; about wishing trees, talking streams, and her early knowledge of plants, animals, and botanical names; about her passionate relationship, even when very young, with foraging and what was edible, how things smelled, licking the rain from leaves, drinking, growing, and cooking.

Over twelve essays, Vaught uses her relationship with the natural world to explore themes of loneliness, depression, and complex and sustained trauma within the family home, issues that shaped her early life and continue to have a far-reaching impact decades later. The text is both a detailed natural history and a complex mental health chronicle, with an exploration of intergenerational trauma; it is both personal history and a scholarly work. These Envoys of Beauty is frank in its treatment of difficult issues but offers many hopeful suggestions and ideas. 

You can read more about These Envoys of Beauty on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the memoir. 

From These Envoys of Beauty, by Anna Vaught

. 

‘On Depression: Flood and Mud’ 

If ever I felt desperate as a child and teenager, I would run and run and go to one of the two weirs close to our house and hear the rushing anger of the water, the gorgeous curve of it and the pound. I was comforted and grounded by the sense of danger. That done, I would wade into the river Frome from one of the little mud beaches I loved so much, hopping through the holes the cows had made when coming down to drink. I would feel the slap of water weeds around my calves, then thighs too, and sometimes I would press myself against the bank, pushing my arms hard back behind me, grabbing on roots, too deep, not steady, but enthralled by the water and its rapid movement. 

On it went. It didn’t see me or care for me and that it could kill me without even knowing was a comfort: it made sense of how very tiny I was, and that, for some reason, made me feel safe. The roar of the weir was at my back, supernatural, and its volume made my anxiety and my cry small too. 

I would go home, wet, calmer, and slope to my room, or sometimes curl into a ball in my den in the creepers. I remember being in year nine in secondary school and feeling a sense of separation and my oddity. I was certain that no other fourteen-year-old in school curled themselves into a ball in a creeper den and wished themselves away. I was certain that no one else would have understood the weirdo pressed into the riverbank. What you do not know until you grow up a bit more is that the world is full of weirdos like you: water lovers, chuggers in the mud, wailers in the fields where the cows have been. That is an encouraging thought ...

A. J. Lees, "Brainspotting: Adventures in Neurology"

A. J. Lees was born in St Helens and qualified in medicine from The London Hospital, Whitechapel in 1970. He trained in neurology at University College Hospitals, London and La Salpêtriere in Paris and was appointed to the staff of the National Hospital, Queen Square at the age of 32. He is one of the three most highly cited Parkinson’s disease researchers in the world and was responsible for the introduction of apomorphine therapy as a treatment for advanced Parkinson’s disease. For his contributions to medical education and his research achievements, he was elected a member of the Brazilian Academia Nacional de Medicina in 2010. 

His first book to be published by Notting Hill Editions, entitled Mentored by a Madman, described how the writings of William Seward Burroughs helped him to operate effectively within the complex milieu of UK medical research and inspired some of his research. Several of his books, including Ray of Hope and The Hurricane Port, grew out of  a deep love for the port of Liverpool. His last book, Brazil that Never Was, described a yearning for an idealised adolescent past, in which he had dreamed of losing himself in the Amazon forest, inspired by the adventures of Lieutenant Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett. His new book is Brainspotting: Adventures in Neurology, published jointly by Notting Hill Editions and New York Review of Books. 

About Brainspotting:  Adventures in Neurology

This is a collection of essays explaining the making of a neurologist. An interest in bird watching as a child taught Lees the importance of observation and the need to record precisely what one sees, skills which gave him a head start when he began his training in neurology. In another chapter, he explains how the methods of crime detection used by Conan Doyle’s fictional detective Sherlock Holmes were a valuable introduction to the  diagnostic method of neurology, but in order to relieve suffering it needed to be combined with the humanity of Dr Watson. Lees believes that people can be trained to see things their mind does not yet know, and that attentive listening not only gives neurologists the diagnosis in two-thirds of cases but, like touch during the physical examination, can be a transformative healing ritual. In the last chapter, while extolling the miracle of modern neuroimaging, he warns that when used inappropriately or as a substitute for clinical training brain scanners can become weapons of mass destruction.

You can see more details about Brainspotting on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read three short excerpts from the book.

 

From Brainspotting, by A. J. Lees

When I tell people I am a neurologist, very few have much idea of what I do. Common reactions are: "Isn’t that the same as Gregory House?" or "How wonderful it must be to study the human mind?" When I reply that I make the blind see, the lame walk and can calm the shaking palsy, many assume I must be a brain surgeon. The media prefer to call me a "leading neuroscientist" even though I spend no time in a laboratory and carry out no research on the healthy brain ...

My mother, who sometimes used birds to tell fortunes, conserved my bird journals for many years. After I had qualified as a doctor she handed them back to me, reminding me how as a twelve-year-old I had felt the need to name every little brown bird that came into view. She then said, "Do you remember when you found that dead blue tit unmarked in the garden and how you buried it under the laburnum marking its resting place with an ice lolly stick?" At the time she had told me that when sailors were lost at sea blue tits carried their souls to heaven ...

Soulful neurology has realistic expectations that allow me to reduce the burden of suffering through my understanding of life as well as my scientific credentials. It embraces anecdote, cordial laughter and tacit knowledge but never lapses into sentimentality. It insists that mistakes in medicine are inevitable, but when they are admitted and taken to heart  become future friends. It expects me to talk unhurriedly to my patients as if they were my close relatives and to try to be kind and nuanced when forced to give bad news. It reminds me that neurological disorders can rupture aspirations and dreams and lead to frustration, loneliness and a profound sense of hopelessness ...

Ian Humphreys (ed.), "Why I Write Poetry"

 

About Why I Write Poetry: Essays on Becoming a Poet, Keeping Going and Advice for the Writing Life, ed. Ian Humphreys

What motivates poets in the 21st century? How do they find their voice? What themes and subject matters inspire them? How do they cope with set-backs and deal with success? What keeps them writing? Why I Write Poetry, edited by Ian Humphreys, combines twenty-five lively and thought-provoking essays, along with individual writing prompts to help you create your own new poetry.

The book includes essays by Romalyn Ante, Khairani Barokka, Hafsah Aneela Bashir, Leo Boix, Vahni Capildeo, Mary Jean Chan, Jo Clement, Sarah Corbett, Jane Commane, Rishi Dastidar, Jonathan Edwards, Rosie Garland, W. N. Herbert, Ian Humphreys, Keith Jarrett, Zaffar Kunial, Rachel Mann, Andrew McMillan, Kim Moore, Pascale Petit, Jacqueline Saphra, Clare Shaw, Daniel Sluman, Jean Sprackland, and Jennifer Wong.

Ian Humphreys, photograph by Sarah Turton

About the editor

Ian Humphreys’s debut collection Zebra (Nine Arches Press, 2019) was nominated for the Portico Prize. He is the editor of Why I Write Poetry (Nine Arches Press, 2021) and the producer/ co-editor of a forthcoming anthology on Sylvia Plath (Nine Arches Press, 2022). His work has been highly commended in the Forward Prizes for Poetry and won first prize in the Hamish Canham Prize. A fellow of The Complete Works, Ian’s poems are showcased in Ten: Poets of the New Generation (Bloodaxe).

You can read more about Why I Write Poetry on the publisher's website here. Below, the editor Ian Humphreys shares an anecdote about an encounter and advice he received, and his own later instinct to "voice the unsayable." 

From the Introduction to Why I Write Poetry

The late poet John Ash once pleaded with me not to take up poetry. 

It was 1983. He had cornered me in the newly renovated kitchen of a house in Whalley Range. John rented the adjacent room. My friend Tarik rented a room on the second floor. Another friend Mark was pirouetting by the dishwasher when John stormed in to complain about the noise. 

We had been giddily fixing 3am snacks while attempting an off-key rendition of ‘Love Pains’ by Yvonne Elliman, so it was a fair cop. John didn’t stay angry for long. He asked what I was studying, what my plans were, and seemed relieved to hear they did not involve poetry. 

‘Good choice, very sensible. Whatever you do, please don’t become a poet! Stick to something where you can earn a bit of money.’ I remember laughing to myself. At that moment, I honestly could not think of anything I would enjoy less – an occupation that seemed duller – than writing poetry. 

While researching this book, I discovered that around the time we met, John had written a short essay about his collection The Goodbyes (Carcanet, 1982). The piece was republished two decades later in Don’t Ask Me What I Mean: Poets in Their Own Words (Picador). 

One part of the essay, in particular, caught my eye: ‘… many of the poems were written to the accompaniment of the kind of music you might hear at parties or in good nightclubs, that is to say, songs of August Darnell, Ashford and Simpson or the Chic Organisation, and on occasion the words of these songs have found their way into the poems.’ 

If only John had mentioned this during his pep talk. Perhaps I wouldn’t have waited thirty years before starting to write poetry myself. At school, we were taught the Romantics, nothing modern. After sitting my A-levels, I did not pick up a book of poems for two decades. I was unaware that contemporary poetry celebrated popular culture, that a ‘serious’ lyric poet could be inspired by August Darnell aka ‘Kid Creole’ of Kid Creole and the Coconuts. 

John and I hardly spoke again. Once, over burning toast, he recommended Prince’s overlooked early albums. A year or so later, I heard he had moved to New York where he became associated with the New York School of poets. 

Several poems in my debut collection Zebra (Nine Arches Press, 2019) explore my coming of age in 1980s Manchester. The gay club I had frequented the night John advised against poetry as a vocation is a touchstone in the book. I began to write about those early days on and around Canal Street, I think, to try and work out something about my formative years. For sure, there was joy, exhilaration and freedom. But there was also fear; a background dread that we accepted back then as part of life’s rhythm, as relentless as the four-on-the-floor beat of those Hi-NRG hits we lived for. It was fear of the unknown. Fear of illness. Fear of society’s disapproval which at any moment could mutate into danger.

Such contradictory emotions can be difficult to articulate, as slippery as a lager-soaked dancefloor. What I longed to communicate was feeling not fact, and this seemed best conveyed through the shimmering medium of poetry. 

The need to voice the unsayable – reach for the ungraspable – is one of the main reasons I write poetry. It’s a motive I share with many of my peers. When I turned to social media to ask why poets do what they do, many replied with answers along the lines of: 

To make sense of life. 
To make sense of the world. 
To connect with my inner world. 
To say things I could not otherwise express.

Another response that came up, again and again, was compulsion: 

I write poetry because I must. 
It is a thing I do, like breathing. 
I wrote poetry before I could write. 
I can’t help myself. 

Over one hundred poets responded, with variations on these two themes accounting for around ninety percent of all answers put forward. This posed a question: how could we prevent our contributors from writing multiple versions of the same essay? 

The answer? Jane [Commane] and I identified what we most admired in the work of the selected poets. We then asked each of them to explore a theme reflecting this idiosyncratic quality as they riffed on their craft. 

As you will discover, the tactic worked wonders. The resulting twenty-five essays are fascinating and varied. There’s little repetition, and thankfully even less navel-gazing. 

Each piece is unique in its approach to the trials, tribulations and pleasures of writing poetry. The mix of styles is satisfyingly rich, from the informal to the academic, the lyric to the dreamlike. Together, the compositions stand as testament to the robust state of poetry in 21st century Britain. 

Had I not started writing eight years ago, I would have missed out on so much, including the chance to curate and edit this book. As such, I am delighted I listened to instinct rather than advice, and eventually shimmied my way towards a calling, of sorts, in poetry. 

Dan Coxon and Richard V. Hirst (ed.), "Writing the Uncanny: Essays on Crafting Strange Fiction"

About Writing the Uncanny

From M.R. James to Shirley Jackson, the Uncanny has long provided fertile ground for writers – and recent years have seen a notable resurgence in both literature and film. But how does the Uncanny work? What can a writer do to ensure their fiction haunts the reader’s imagination?

Writing the Uncanny sees some of the best contemporary authors explain what drew them to horror, ghost stories, folklore and beyond, and reveal how to craft unsettling fiction which resonates. Authors such as Jeremy Dyson, Alison Moore, Jenn Ashworth and Catriona Ward share their insights on psychogeography, fairy tales, cultural tradition and the supernatural, and offer practical advice on their different approaches to the genre.

Writing the Uncanny is an essential guide for both the casual reader and the aspiring writer of strange tales. It features essays by: Jeremy Dyson, Alison Moore, Nicholas Royle, Gary Budden, Catriona Ward, Jenn Ashworth, Robert Shearman, Claire Dean, Michele Roberts, Lucie McKnight Hardy, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Chikodili Emelumadu and Timothy J. Jarvis.

About the editors

Dan Coxon is an editor and writer based in London. His anthology This Dreaming Isle was shortlisted for both a Shirley Jackson Award and a British Fantasy Award, and his debut short story collection, Only the Broken Remain (Black Shuck Books, 2020), was nominated for two British Fantasy Awards. His non-fiction has appeared everywhere from Salon to The Guardian.

Richard V. Hirst is based in Manchester. He is the editor of We Were Strangers: Stories Inspired by Unknown Pleasures and That’s the Colour: Stories Inspired by Low, both published by Confingo Publishing. His writing has been published in The Guardian, the Big Issue, Time Out and others.

You can find out more about Writing the Uncanny on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the Introduction to the book.

From the Introduction to Writing the Uncanny, by Dan Coxon and Richard V. Hirst

Just over a hundred years ago, in 1919, Sigmund Freud published ‘The Uncanny’ (Das Unheimliche), a paper which developed a theory for a particular kind of response to certain phenomena: a mixture of fear, repulsion and distress, all of which, Freud argued, are rooted in our everyday experiences. The paper took in inanimate figures that seem to be alive, severed limbs, doppelgӓngers and – perhaps most importantly for our purposes – storytelling.

In exploring his topic, Freud undertook a psychoanalytic deconstruction of E.T.A. Hoffman’s short story ‘The Sandman,’ eventually concluding that the peculiar potency Hoffman’s story holds over its reader was an ‘unheimlich’ one – that is, specifically in opposition to ‘heimlich,’ which can mean homely and familiar but also secret and concealed. The ‘uncanny,’ therefore, was not merely something unknown, but something that had been hidden or repressed. He famously called it ‘that class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.’

‘The Uncanny’ remains a relatively minor component in Freud’s overall legacy, yet in the artistic world it has become a key text and its influence remains significant, creating an ever-spreading shadow which stalks our mainstream culture. While Sir Walter Scott defined the literary style of the nineteenth century with his tales of Romantic heroism, it is Edgar Allan Poe’s obscure Gothic tales that have the longer-lasting legacy; although The Great Gatsby regularly tops readers’ polls of their favourite twentieth-century novels, few would deny that Franz Kafka, with his patchwork oeuvre of anxiety and surrealism, feels like the bracingly authentic voice of the age; and while the dominance of post-war Hollywood glitz seemed to find its apotheosis in the films of Steven Spielberg, it is David Lynch’s demented and dreamlike Americana that presents the more truthful vision. Increasingly, the owls are not what they seem.

It’s not only in the cinema that the Uncanny has come to prominence. On the printed page it has become one of the most persistent and adaptable literary modes of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, bubbling to the surface in Arthur Machen’s weird supernatural tales in the late 1800s and in M.R. James’s ghost stories at the start of the nineteenth century. H.P. Lovecraft then adapted the Uncanny to terrifying ends in his Cthulhu mythos tales, before it resurges in Shirley Jackson’s short fiction in the late 1940s – as well as in her novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle – and in the ‘strange stories’ of Robert Aickman in the 1960s and ’70s. The course of children’s fiction in the past century has also been guided by a strong current of the Uncanny, with novels like Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising proving hugely influential and instilling a lasting appreciation of the Uncanny among legions of impressionable readers.

In more recent times, the Uncanny has increasingly seeped through into mainstream ‘literary’ fiction. It might easily be detected in writers committed to horror like Ramsey Campbell and James Herbert, but when Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney won the Costa First Novel Award in 2015, it proved that the Uncanny was no longer simply a footnote in the history of modern literature – it has become one of its dominant features, easily spotted on high street shelves in new releases by Daisy Johnson, Sarah Hall and David Mitchell. In its sense of disquiet and unease, the Uncanny may be the perfect genre for the modern era, reflecting the political uncertainty of our times – and the disordering of our everyday world that has accompanied the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. 

Paul McVeigh (ed.), "The 32: An Anthology of Irish Working-Class Voices"

 

About The 32

The Observer recently described Kit de Waal’s My Name Is Leon and Paul McVeigh’s The Good Son as the 'exceptional working-class novels from the last few years' so it seems apt that Kit passed the baton from her bestselling Common People anthology to Paul McVeigh to edit The 32: An Anthology of Irish Working Class Writers.

Like Common People, The 32 is a collection of essays and memoir, bringing together sixteen well-known writers from working-class backgrounds with an equal number of new and emerging writers from all over the island of Ireland. There are contributions from Kevin Barry, Roddy Doyle, Lisa McInerney, Danielle McLaughlin and Eoin McNamee to name a few.

About the editor

Paul's debut novel, The Good Son, won The Polari First Novel Prize and The McCrea Literary Award, and was shortlisted for many others including The Prix du Roman Cezam. 

Paul began his writing career as a playwright and comedy writer. His short stories have been in numerous anthologies, journals and newspapers, as well as on BBC Radio 3,4 & 5, and Sky Arts. He co-founded the London Short Story Festival and is associate director of Word Factory, London, ‘the UK's national organisation for excellence in the short story’ (The Guardian). He co-edited the anthology Belfast Stories, and edited Queer Love & The 32: An Anthology of Irish Working Class Voices. He has judged numerous literary prizes, including The Edge Hill Short Story Prize, The Dylan Thomas Prize and, currently The V. S. Pritchett Short Story Prize for the Royal Society of Literature. His writing has been translated into seven languages. His website is here. 

Below, you can read an excerpt from Paul's Introduction to The 32, which introduces this brilliant collection of personal essays and memoir.

From the Introduction to The 32, by Paul McVeigh

If one of the defining characteristics of the wealthier members of our society is the desire to pass on their riches and privileges to their progeny to maintain the status quo, I find that for the working class who’ve achieved success in the arts, many become passionate, if not warrior-like, about passing on their wealth in precious knowledge to those of their feather who are following behind, to bring about change; the cartography for navigating the obstacles on the way to joining them. I’ve also described it as ‘leaving a trail of breadcrumbs’ and Kerry Hudson recently in the Guardian as ‘send[ing] the elevator down.’ As a working-class artist, it can often feel that on your journey you watch others flying past because they have a car while you are on foot, watch others waved through at gatekeepers’ check points while you are stopped and found to be carrying the wrong papers. Successful working-class artists often travel between worlds and are likely to pull over and offer you a lift. 

Kit de Waal is a prime example. Having gotten a substantial three-book deal on the back of her debut, My Name is Leon, Kit de Waal used some of the money to set up an annual scholarship at a London University for a student from a marginalized background. She also came up with the idea, and raised the funding for, Common People: An Anthology of Working-Class Writers. The book contained thirty-two pieces of memoir about working-class life, sixteen established and sixteen new writers, including an essay by Dave O’Brien on the impact that class background has on your chances of breaking into the publishing industry as a whole. The statistics are shocking in the UK and you can check out that essay, or, online, find numerous surveys conducted by a number of organisations, such as the Society of Authors, some including data on Northern Ireland. Though some research has been done in Ireland recently, the statistics are largely unknown but you can read an essay which raises the subject at the end of this book from Dr Michael Pierse.

How did The 32 come about? The short version is, Common People was a huge success and while touring festivals in Ireland with the book, Kit de Waal was asked on many occasions ‘will there be an Irish version?’ and voilà! It was by no means a simple transplanting, however. Some questions I’ve been asked might be best answered here, briefly. The name change. The phrase ‘common people’ didn’t have the same connotations in Ireland as it did across the water, so we needed a new title. As there were thirty-two contributors and the book would be all-island, I thought The 32 would work and changed ‘writers’ to ‘voices’ as there were a couple of contributions that wouldn’t be from writers. 

Those commissioned were chosen due to a number of factors. Most, I, or in some cases Kit, had worked with in the past, we knew their background and interests, and that they could be persuaded to come on board to lend their talent and literary weight to the topic and the project. I tried to find a spread around the island and a variety of forms and genres. The expression ‘you have to see it to be it’ was on my mind. As a working-class boy from Belfast, I never thought I could be a writer. This may sound strange to some, but if I’d known a working-class boy from the north became the Books Editor of The Irish Times, I think it would have impacted what I thought might be open to me ...

Marshall Moore and Sam Meekings (ed.), "The Place and the Writer"

About The Place and the Writer, ed. Marshall Moore and Sam Meekings

The Place and the Writer: International Intersections of Teacher Lore and Creative Writing Pedagogy is the inaugural work in Bloomsbury’s Research in Creative Writing series. The motivation for creating this volume was the occasional disconnect between theorists, educators, and practitioners of Creative Writing. The chapters in the book examine the spread of Creative Writing around the world, and how this has led to lore manifesting in problematic areas, such as workshop structure; canon; issues of authenticity and appropriation; and pedagogical clichés (‘write what you know,’ ‘show, don’t tell,’ ‘find your voice’). The volume challenges many areas of the received wisdom that persist in the field, as well as refracting these through the perspectives of voices from outside the traditional poles of English-language scholarship. The book is full of diverse contributions from around the world (from South Africa to Brazil to Finland to Japan) and these decentre historically dominant views and voices in Creative Writing to focus on the connections between teaching practices and issues of identity, culture, and practice. 

The book includes a chapter on writing memoir, 'Scenes of Judgement: Genre and Narrative Form in Literary Memoir,' by Jonathan Taylor of Leicester University. 

You can see more details about the book on the publisher's website here. 

Below, you can read about the editors, and an excerpt from the 'Foreword' of the book. 

Marshall Moore is a Course Leader in English, Creative Writing & Publishing at Falmouth University in the UK. He is the co-editor of this volume. He is the author of several novels and collections of short fiction, the most recent being Inhospitable (Camphor Press, 2018). With Xu Xi, he is the co-editor of the anthology The Queen of Statue Square: New Short Fiction from Hong Kong. His short stories have appeared in Asia Literary Review, The Barcelona Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (QLRS), and many other publications. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Aberystwyth University. His website is here.

Sam Meekings is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Northwestern University in Qatar. With Marshall Moore, is the co-editor of this volume. He is the author of Under Fishbone Clouds (called ‘a poetic evocation of the country and its people’ by the New York Times), The Book of Crows, and The Afterlives of Dr Gachet. He has a PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University and has taught writing at NYU and the University of Chichester in the UK. His website is here. You can read more about The Afterlives of Dr Gachet on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

From The Place and the Writer

Excerpt from the 'Foreword'

As one might expect from the title, Paul Engle’s landmark essay 'The Writer and the Place,' a meditation on the origins of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, proposes that the school's serene location in the American heartland has an inspiring, enlightening effect upon the students fortunate enough to be accepted to the program. This is not merely to do with the benign atmosphere created by mellow Iowa prairies and the lazy, muddy river running through them. Something greater is at work here: Engle's hypothetical young writer should find that Iowa offers—along with bracing criticism—an alternative to the hubbub of Hollywood and the noise of New York. Freed from big-city distractions, the young writer will have ample time and space to reflect upon their work. Also on offer is community, and Engle suggests this is one of the Workshop's greatest benefits: the company of other young writers with similar dreams, aspirations, and levels of talent creates a unique environment in which the work and the writer may flourish. However, it is the idea of place that propels Engel's thoughts on Iowa's mystique. There is an ineffable combination of solitude and down-home American goodness to be found there, he asserts. A creative singularity. Or an exceptionalism, if we are to view the matter through the lens of today's geopolitics.

While one can today read Engle's essay and appreciate the passion he felt for the program he helped establish and the bucolic location it occupies, a contemporary scholar-practitioner might raise an eyebrow at his assertion that '[w]e do not have that intense concentration of talent in one city, as certainly exists in Paris, London, or Rome, where writers either know each other or know a good deal about each other' (1961: 5). At least in the English-speaking world, New York must surely rival London in terms of literary output. Other North American cities boast respectable literary communities as well: Los Angeles, Toronto, Chicago, San Francisco, New Orleans, Portland, and Vancouver come readily to mind. Yet what remains unquestioned in the essay is the supposition—the article of lore, as it were, or perhaps the myth—that a location offering a combination of beauty, stillness, and cultural virtue is a writer's nirvana. In such a setting, Engle suggests, writerly reflection will lead to the process of self-discovery from which inspired creative ideas will flow.

As expatriate scholars and practitioners, our combined experience both confirms and confronts these notions of place. Moore is from the American South, a region with a strong literary tradition of its own, distinct from that of the country as a whole. Growing up in semi-rural eastern North Carolina, he was keenly aware of the difference that accompanies Southern identity in the United States. However, it took him moving to California for that regional identity to assert itself. Moving out of the country several years later, first to South Korea and then to Hong Kong, he found that the regional distinction mattered somewhat less than it had in the context. Overseas, he was simply American. Meanwhile, Meekings is from the south coast of England, yet it was only when he moved abroad, living and working first in China and then the Middle East, that he began to notice the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of English and British identity and how these had manifested in his educational experiences. In short, both our international experiences led us to consider the complicated relationship between practice and place and consider what other lores might look like, as well as how and to what extent might cultural beliefs around writers in general manifest in the classroom? This book attempts to answer those questions.

The Dream I Held in My Hands

By Karen Argent

In October 2017 The Letterpress Project, a not-for-profit initiative that promotes the importance of the printed book, lost one of its founder members, the wonderful Jane Slowey. She died from a disease that she had fought off once but couldn’t keep at bay a second time, and she died far too young. 

As she had always brought her keen enthusiasm and skills to the project, we wanted to publish a tribute to Jane’s ability to inspire those she met. We asked people to honour her memory by thinking about which books had inspired their imaginations – and the response was exceptional. The result was an anthology of short pieces about reading called The Dream I Held in My Hands: Dedicated to the Memory of Jane Slowey.

The beautifully illustrated book is available as a free pdf from The Letterpress Project website here, and is also available as a limited printed publication by request. Please contact karen [dot] argent [at] btinternet [dot] com for further details.

Below you can read one of the essays from the book. 

An Enchantment: The Book That Made Me a Reader

By Leila Rasheed

I still have the book. I hold it in my forty-year-old hand, and the ghost of my seven-year-old hand holds it too: an enchantment, like those padlocks on bridges that mean two lovers clasp each other, hand in hand, forever. In 1980s Benghazi, where I grew up, there were no shops, or very few – a baker, a butcher, the souk, and one vast, concrete department store that had nothing inside it but a sack of flour, leaking and weevil-ridden on a pallet. Libya had its own enchantments, curses and hauntings, but for books we had to migrate. I would guess we bought this particular book at Galt or Early Learning, during one of our summer journeys back to England.

I’ll put it down here, so you can see it properly. The first thing you’ll note is the fragility. The pages are weathered yellow, and it comes in chunks, this book; sections splitting off from an osteoporotic spine from which the glue has long ago perished. The spine has been Sellotaped and re-Sellotaped until the tape shatters at the touch. Love spells sometimes look like this: like a padlock on a bridge, or an unskilled repair. Spells to keep things, like people, from coming apart. 

With a title like The Puffin Book of Magic Verse, you would expect a dark cover. But the cover is nothing as obvious as black. It’s deep purple, the colour of a Libyan-grown aubergine, burnished by a diet of sun. And now the other magic flickers into life, the magic fire of illustrations. This book may have made me a reader, but it was never just the words that did that. Look at the head on the cover. It must belong to a child, but what a child! The offspring of the Medusa and the Green Man - hair bristling thick with leaves, owls, cats, witches. Genderless, the face doesn’t look directly at the reader, but off to one side. The child’s eyes and mouth are a little open, not in glee or rage, but in wonder. As if it has just seen something astonishing - and this, mark you, when it, itself, is the strangest thing that any reader could ever have seen. From the very cover, the book isn’t inviting you to read it. It isn’t daring you to read it. Like the master magician’s spell book, it is just there, and you reading it or not is a matter of indifference to it. What child wouldn’t open a book on these tempting terms? What are you looking at? Can I come with you? 

Open the book, then, and step in. Immediately you are falling into poems, like Alice down the rabbit hole, woozy, twisting, slow and dreamlike. When you find your feet, the floor staggers, tilts you forward. The whole book is on the slant. It leads you onwards, draws you in, down long galleries of verse, past images that shine like stained glass windows. Through section after section; doors in a house haunted by poetry: Charms, Ghosts and Hauntings, Curses, and Changelings. Poem after poem enchants, provokes, intrigues, just like the shy, uncanny creatures on the cover that crept for protection into the accepting, warm and non-judgemental wild mind of a child.

Poetry, like lightning, isn’t meant to be grounded, but an anthology like this can act as a conductor. A stroll through the index of first lines demonstrates the range of poems included, from rattling, runaway comic verse - The Resident Djinn" and Colonel Fazackerly Butterworth Toast are two characters that will stay with me forever - to this tiny, unforgettable gem (translated from a Native American language, and presented, as was sadly common at the time of publication, without context) in the voice of a ghost:

          My friend

          this is a wide world we are travelling over

          walking on the moonlight

What all these poems, regardless of form or origin, have in common is that they describe, evoke or embody the mysterious and wonderful. This is a collection that honours the strange, that is wide and unwavering of gaze. Perhaps it could only have been produced in the 1970s, and by a poet of genius – Charles Causley - who was unafraid of childhood.

When we finally closed the wardrobe door on Libya, we gave away most of our toys and packed all our favourite books in our two suitcases. At that time, due to the political situation, there were no direct flights from Libya to the UK. We landed in Malta and changed to another airline. When we took off from Malta, most of our suitcases stayed where they were, with the books inside them. I arrived in Birmingham scattered; trailing words, like feathers, across the wide blue Mediterranean. My books, gone: my world, gone. I would spend a lifetime trying to find that lost world again, seeking pieces of my childhood like Isis looking for her love, through second-hand bookshops and later, online. The Puffin Book of Magic Verse was in the one suitcase that survived the journey.

It’s hard to know, if the rest of my books had made it through, whether The Puffin Book of Magic Verse would have been so important to me. Perhaps I would have taken the presence of books for granted. As it stands, it is one of the very few things – books or otherwise - I have from my childhood. It haunts me.

When I was young, I used to like to imagine that I would be buried with my books, so we’d biodegrade together, and archaeologists of the future wouldn’t be able to tell the ink from the flesh. Now I’m older, I think that’s a bit morbid, and I know how much burial plots cost. All the same, those pages are yellow with my handling. I have put myself into that book just as it has put itself into me. Bridges and love spells may rust and crumble, but a book can go all the way with you, holding your hand.