Amy E. Weldon, "Advanced Fiction: A Writer's Guide and Anthology"

 

Amy E. Weldon is Professor of English at Luther College, USA. She is the author of The Hands-On Life: How to Wake Yourself Up and Save the World (2018), The Writer’s Eye: Observation and Inspiration for Creative Writers (Bloomsbury, 2018), and Eldorado, Iowa: A Novel (2019). Her website is here.

About Advanced Fiction: A Writer's Guide and Anthology, by Amy E. Weldon

After the publication of The Writer’s Eye, I’m thrilled to be returning with Bloomsbury to a conversation about the next level of the fiction-writing process, starting with the place many of our craft questions really start – in our minds. What do we know, or not? Feel uncertain about, or not? In my own and my students’ and friends’ experience, readjusting our internal sense of our projects can unlock difficulties that “craft instruction” alone can't quite do, because our mental approach to the project shapes the words we bring to the page.

The concept of psychic distance is a great example. Essentially, it means “the degree to which you are pretending to be your character, seeing through her eyes to render reality as she understands it, including what she sees and hears around her, while still giving readers the information we need to be able to understand your story.” Students tell me often that understanding psychic distance is one of their most important breakthroughs as advanced writers, since establishing your psychic distance – your relationship to your character and the depth of your immersion in her reality – determines how your point-of-view apparatus and your sentences work. If your psychic distance is too far, readers can feel stranded at an unchanging distance from characters, and the story can feel impersonal because we can’t quite get into anyone’s head. (Sentences can get boring, too, because, eager to close that distance, you may start telling readers what we need to know from your point of view, not a character’s). Too short, and readers feel trapped within the character’s sensibility, with insufficient information about the world beyond her head. But if you can establish and move through a range of psychic distance that works for you (like a film director moving from a long or medium shot to a close-up), you can build a convincing world around your character and signal to readers that this character is the fully developed person we’re meant to be following as she moves through that world.

You can read more about Advanced Fiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology on the publisher's website here. Below is an excerpt from the book, in which I describe how dialogue and psychic distance can interact.

From Advanced Fiction: A Writer's Guide and Anthology

Surprisingly, dialogue can be a psychic-distance block too. Dialogue can feel intimate and fun when you’re writing it, because you can “hear” it from inside the story’s world – you’re the writer. But readers are already external to the story’s world – we’re not you, remember?  And overusing dialogue can distance us even further, because dialogue is external to a character; spoken into the world beyond their heads and limited by what would be believable in that situation, it’s therefore limited in what it can tell us about a character’s interior life (unlike italicized “voiceover” thoughts, for example, or sensory detail about what a character’s noticing around her). And without access to that interior life, the psychic distance between the reader and the character grows .... Overreliance on dialogue may also signal that you don’t know enough about your fictional world yet to animate it through action, sensory detail, and other, non-dialogue modes of characterization. What you don’t know, readers can’t know. 

This is why dialogue, especially if it isn’t ballasted with actions and sensory detail, can feel so much like disembodied voices in space. Plus, long stretches of dialogue can give the feeling that the writer is impressed with the characters’ cleverness and wants readers to be as well. (We feel shoved into sitcom studio-audience chairs, watching the characters on stage, invited to applaud at conversations that go on just a little too long). “I want my readers to view this character as X” – without imagining that character as X to write the character being X in reality as they understand it – can be a recipe for psychic-distance weirdness.

Take a look at your paragraphs and your major scenes: where does dialogue appear, and for how long? In many student stories, paragraphs begin with lines of dialogue, then move to exposition kind of grudgingly, then get back to dialogue as quickly as they can. Some also revert to dialogue (or long speeches by characters) to reveal important plot or backstory information. For a first notes-to-self draft, this is OK. In revision, try something else. (Unless you’re James Baldwin writing “Sonny’s Blues”). If your paragraphs fall into a dialogue-then-exposition pattern, reverse that order. If using dialogue, keep it short and interwoven with external and internal detail. If writing a longer scene (like an argument), keep your stakes high (and obvious to the reader), keep the external world present (someone’s gripping that paperweight, ready to throw it), and be sure the characters’ words could believably emerge from an actual, non-televised human’s mouth in that situation. (Remember: high emotion often makes people less, not more, articulate). All these things will help keep your psychic distance on track.

Tim Hannigan, "The Granite Kingdom: A Cornish Journey"

Congratulations to UoL PhD English and Creative Writing graduate, Tim Hannigan, whose book The Granite Kingdom has recently been published by Head of Zeus!

Tim Hannigan was born and brought up in the far west of Cornwall. After starting his working life as a chef, he eventually made it to the University of Gloucestershire to study Journalism, after which he moved to Indonesia where he began his writing career as a travel journalist. His first book, Murder in the Hindu Kush, was published in 2011, and he subsequently wrote several books on Indonesian history. In 2016 he started work on a critical-creative PhD at the University of Leicester, supported by the Midlands4Cities DTP. This project produced his book The Travel Writing Tribe, published by Hurst in 2021. He lives in the west of Ireland and combines his writing with part-time teaching roles at the Technological University of the Shannon and the University of Hull. His website is here. 

About The Granite Kingdom

From Daphne du Maurier to Doc Martin, and from the romantic melodrama of Poldark to gritty TV depictions of the modern fishing industry, Cornwall is densely laden with images, projections and tropes. But how does all this intersect with the real place, its landscapes, histories, communities and sense of identity? In The Granite Kingdom, Tim Hannigan sets out on a meandering, 300-mile journey to find out, travelling on foot from the banks of the River Tamar to his childhood home near Land’s End. 

Combining travel writing, memoir, history and literary criticism, the book explores the varied landscapes of Britain’s westernmost region and grapples with the complex idea of Cornwall itself – a cosy English seaside destination for some, a fiercely independent Celtic nation for others and one of Britain’s most impoverished post-industrial regions for others still. It considers the way literary narratives from without have sometimes informed identities from within – including the author’s own – and asks awkward questions about what it means to be “Cornish” in the twenty-first century.

Below, you can read an excerpt from The Granite Kingdom.

From The Granite Kingdom, by Tim Hannigan

Chapter One: Bordering

If you stand at the threshold of Number 2 Cyprus Well, you have a choice. It is the middle cottage of three in a little terrace facing a bank of sycamore saplings on a steep lane called Ridgegrove Hill. Above the single ground-floor window, a plaque records that ‘Charles Causley, Poet’ lived here from 1952 to 2003. They might have added the word ‘Cornish’ to the description, for that is the adjective most commonly associated with Causley. And indeed, he lived in Cornwall – right here in Launceston, in fact – not just for fifty-one years, but for almost his whole life. 

But if you stand at the threshold of Cyprus Well and turn left, you can see Devon. 

It shows beyond the point where the lane bends downhill: a gathering groundswell of trees and pasture. From the doorstep of Causley’s cottage, it seems natural to turn that way, to go with the flow. At the bottom of Ridgegrove Hill you’ll meet the little River Kensey. Within a mile, the Kensey will carry you to the Tamar, and the Tamar will bear you away south, between dark woods to the grey docks and end-of-terrace pubs of Plymouth, with the busy waters of the English Channel beyond. But if it’s Cornwall that you want, then you have to turn against gravity, against nature, pull steeply up Ridgegrove Hill then on up Angel Hill to pass, breathless, beneath the fortified arch on Southgate Street. And if it’s a decent prospect to the westward that you’re after, you’ll need to cross to the other side of Launceston and climb the motte of the castle. 

On a midsummer morning, I stood on the pavement outside Number 2 Cyprus Well. It was early, and up the hill Launceston gave off the faint hum of a small town readying itself for the working day. To the east, the valleys were liquid with yellow mist. A few intersecting ridges rose above the flood, trees and hedges in dark profile. But it wasn’t clear to whom they belonged. I glanced left and right, fiddled with the straps of my backpack, looked at the map. Then I turned downhill, into the mist ....

Kathy Hoyle, "Chasing the Dragon"

Congratulations to PhD Creative Writing student Kathy Hoyle, whose novella-in-flash, Chasing the Dragon, has just been published by Alien Buddha Press! 

Kathy Hoyle writes short fiction and flash fiction. Her work can be found in publications such as Fictive Dream, Lunate, Ellipsiszine, The Forge, and Emerge Literary Journal.

She was the winner of The Bath Flash Fiction Award, The Retreat West Flash Fiction Competition, came second in The Edinburgh Flash Fiction Award, and the HISSAC Prize and third in the Cambridge Flash Fiction Prize. Other stories have been listed in various competitions such as The Exeter Short Story Prize and The Fish Short Memoir Prize.

She holds a BA (Hons) and an MA in Creative Writing and is currently studying for a PhD at the University of Leicester. Chasing the Dragon is her debut novella-in-flash.

About Chasing the Dragon

Chasing the Dragon is a visceral, searing novella-in-flash that explores the complexities of familial relationships in a small-town community reeling from the after-effects of the Vietnam War. 

When two young men return home from war, both deeply troubled, their mothers must deal with the terrible fall-out. 

Willy is addicted to opiates and suffering from PTSD. Chester, no longer able to freely express his thirst for blood and combat, seeks other ways to wreak havoc on those around him. And their younger cousins, TJ and Cal, desperate to emulate their hometown war heroes, head off into the woods, only to find there is terrible danger there too. 

Meanwhile, in Vietnam, Bihn, who is terrified of dark spaces, has lost his parents, his home and has nowhere to turn, except the GI camp, where he vows to make himself useful, not knowing that he is entering into the darkest place he will ever know. 

You can see more about Chasing the Dragon here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novella-in-flash.

From Chasing the Dragon, by Kathy Hoyle

Dark Spaces

Bihn does not like dark spaces.

Every day, he digs with grandmother, making holes to hide in, like rats. 

When the soldiers come, Bihn is forced inside. His uncle always sits too close. Bihn can feel sharp whiskers brushing his cheek and smell his uncle’s fetid breath. Fear clutches Bihn’s heart. He cannot help but cry. When they crawl out into the bright sunlight, Grandmother whips him hard with bamboo. Too much noise, she hisses. 

Bihn goes with grandfather to the river. He sees a rare blue lotus flower and bends to cradle it in his small hands, mesmerised by its beauty. A bullet whistles overhead. He looks up to see grandfather fold into the water. Blood pools on the surface. His uncle scoops him up and carries him back to the village. His whiskers scratch Bihn’s cheek.  Grandmother beats him. Your fault! Your fault! 

Bihn steals away at night. His eyes are good, he knows the way through the shadows. He moves, quick and agile, through the dark spaces. Rain pounds his face. He must not arrive shivering like a starving dog or they will not keep him. He must be useful. 

His sister, Thùy Linh, answers the door. She looks like a movie star, kohl-eyed, rippling crimson dress. She brings him inside, holds him to her. She smells like apricot blossom. Mai is pinched and angry. She screeches at Thùy Linh, No! No kids here! He shows Thùy Linh his bruises. Thùy Linh tells Mai that Bihn must stay. She lays out a bed for him in a dark space. Bihn does not like dark spaces.

Mai hisses at him, keep your eyes and mouth shut! He knows how to keep quiet. Each night he falls asleep to the rhythmic thumps of the bed.

Bihn runs errands. He collects the opium, learns how to crush it, how to clean the pipe. He is useful. The GI’s give him Hershey bars. They laugh, and drink and throw the girls around like hollow dolls. Afterwards, the girls hold them while they cry for their mothers. Bihn brings the pipe. The men lay on Thùy Linh’s bed, eyes glazed while Bihn cleans up the mess.

Thùy Linh has a special friend, Willy. She hums to Willy and tells him stories about the dragon father who protects his people. Willy says he will marry Thùy Linh and take her back to America. One night, Willy brings a tall, thin man with him. Bihn sees hatred in the man’s yellow snake eyes. The thin man reminds Bihn of his grandmother’s bamboo whip. His snake eyes loop around the room and settle on Bihn, nestled in his dark space. 

How much for the boy?  

Michelene Wandor, "Orfeo's Last Act"

 

Michelene Wandor is a playwright, poet, fiction writer and cultural critic. She has taught Creative Writing for over three decades, currently as tutor on the Distance Learning MA at Lancaster University. Her most recent poetry collection is Travellers (Arc Publications). She is editor of the anthology Critical-Creative Writing: Two Sides of the Same Coin. Her new novel is Orfeo's Last Act (Greenwich Exchange, 2023). Her website is here.  

About Orfeo's Last Act: A Novel in Two Parts

Set against the backdrop of seventeenth-century northern Italy in the Golden Age, Orfeo’s Last Act brings the magic of Mantua, Florence and Venice to vivid life.

The Gonzaga Duke objects to the violent ending of Monteverdi’s opera, Orfeo. With the help of Jewish composer, Salamone Rossi, Monteverdi supplies a new happy Act V. The original ending is lost.

In twenty-first-century Britain, amateur musician, Emilia, discovers a faded musical manuscript in an East Anglian stately home ... Across the centuries, harmony and discord vie for resolution in a story which thrills and shocks.

A triumphant debut from the poet and critic, Michelene Wandor, Orfeo’s Last Act is a must read for anyone interested in historical fiction or classical music.

You can read more about Orfeo's Last Act on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an extract from the opening of the novel. 

From Orfeo's Last Act, by Michelene Wandor

One

The mist mixes with spatters of mud, the stench of shit and sweat, wet and warm, mud drops on my arms, my face and round my eyes, till I blink and breathe water, human and animal detritus, the fertile muck of the fields. It reminds me of the rains of 1599. Mutazione di secolo. The end of the century, or the end of the world.  

I climb up the bank from the lake, skirt the Castello di San Giorgio, and walk round the Cattedrale di San Pietro. I stand for a moment: across the Piazza di San Pietro, I see the Palazzo Ducale. 

I walk along the side of the piazza, thinking I must be careful not to tread on any of the cracks in the cobbles. If I do, the ground will heave and throb under the sucking impact of my soft, silent shoes, and I will be sucked down into the marshes until there is nothing left of me but my voice.

I know this is ridiculous. First of all, the cobbles are so small, that I can’t help treading on the joins between them, and nothing happens when I do. Anyway, it is a long time since the marshes threatened anyone at this end of the island, this fiercely covered and protected end. The marshes have long been drained, filled in, built upon. 

There are still canals, remnants of the many rivers and waterways which criss-crossed the island. And yet, I am safer here than in Venice, where canals haunt at every turn, where it is easy to disappear in the middle of the black night. I am safer here than on the hills of Florence.

Barbara Cooke, "Evelyn Waugh's Oxford"

 

Dr Barbara Cooke is a senior lecturer in English at Loughborough University. She worked in publishing before completing a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia. She is Co-executive Editor of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh and the author of Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford.

About Evelyn Waugh's Oxford, by Barbara Cooke, with illustrations by Amy Dodd

Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford is a site-specific, creative-critical biography focusing on Waugh’s emotional and creative connection to the city. It begins by looking at Waugh’s Oxford through the lenses of invention, memory and imagination before exploring locations in the city that are particularly significant to his life and work. Waugh was a visual thinker, and the book includes reproductions of archival objects alongside specially commissioned images by Amy Dodd to create a dialogue between words and pictures, the imagined and the real.

You can read more about Evelyn Waugh's Oxford on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the book's location vignettes. 

From Evelyn Waugh's Oxford

Hall Brothers

When Waugh was at Oxford, all dapper undergraduates bought their suits from Hall Bros. The tailors were a city institution, and in the 1920s traded from a mock-Tudor building, replete with Elizabeth I’s coat of arms, at 94 Magpie Lane. 

…

In the 1920s they became the city’s foremost purveyor of ‘Oxford bags,’ very wide trousers first popularized by Waugh’s friend Harold Acton. Oxford bags really took off after Waugh had left, but they belonged firmly to a period when he still thought, talked and dressed like an undergraduate and became one of those – as he put it – ‘who cannot at once sever the cord uniting them to the university and haunt it for years to come.’ Like his student friends, Waugh teamed his bags with a high- or ‘turtle’-neck jumper which, he observed in November 1924, was ‘rather becoming and most convenient for lechery because it dispenses with all unromantic gadgets like studs and ties. It also hides the boils with which most of the young men seem to have encrusted their necks.’  

…

Waugh’s appreciation of the turtleneck jumper was typical of his pragmatic approach to fashion at the time .… As his financial situation eased, however, Waugh raised his sartorial ambitions. His brother Alec introduced him to Anderson Sheppard of London’s Savile Row,  whose suits made him feel, for the first time, not ‘the worst dressed person in every room.’  Being well turned out satisfied more than just Waugh’s vanity. For a man of his relatively humble origins, the cut of a seam could be the difference between social acceptance and rejection.

Illustration by Amy Dodd

Tracey Foster, "Deep Diving the YA Market: My Creative Writing Dissertation"

For my MA Creative Writing Dissertation last year I intended to write for the Young Adult market, classified as readers of twelve to eighteen years-old. This was a target market I knew a lot about after working as a secondary school teacher for over thirty years. This group of readers has seen an explosion in choice content over the last decade with a range of formats and new authors to choose from, names that now fill the shelves at Waterstones: Malorie Blackman, John Green, Suzanne Collins. This diverse content has covered a huge range of challenging and controversial issues, from genocide (Boy in the Striped Pyjamas), racism (Ghost Boys), teen pregnancy (Boys Don’t Cry), transgender (The Art of Being Normal), and bereavement (Holding Up the Universe). The bar was set high for me to write a novel to sit along these ranks.

My first mission was to read all the classics, novels that were not always written with this market in mind but have since become a go-to for adolescents. The current top 100 list compiled by TIME magazine (see here) features Lord of the Flies, Little Women and The Catcher in the Rye, novels that we were encouraged to turn to as children and that formed our early understanding of the adult world. As I reread all the classics, I began to feel undercurrent themes of loss, hardship, and inevitability. This was understandable as many of these authors wrote in a period either between or after the wars, when there was an uncertainty about our future and a pervading sadness about the human condition. William Golding witnessed the horrors of the D-Day landings before writing Lord of the Flies, George Orwell served in the Spanish Civil war before penning Animal Farm, J.R.R. Tolkien had served in the trenches in the First World War before starting on the idea that would become Lord of The Rings. A melancholy that pervades these books stems from the experiences of the writers, but when read by the young it seems to resound with their yearnings to find a place in the world. 

Modern stories have moved more directly to tackle issues that are current and all-consuming. Many authors today often choose to shift the narrative away from third-person description to a first-person perspective, and this gives the tone an immediacy and intimacy that appeals to modern readers - a confidential tone that appeals to younger readers and is a quick let-in to the action. Some authors have chosen to employ alternative voices to narrate each chapter, showing the scene from different viewpoint and allowing the reader to choose their favourite. The YA audience likes this approach as it works on a few levels, moving the action along and showing prejudice and preferences. This has led to a series of online formats pushing similar novels written in the multiperspectival style (see some examples here). 

One of the biggest outputs in the YA market in recent years has been the multicultural novel. Like buses, you wait several decades for one and then you get a whole shelf full. This has been one of the most successful areas of writing as the market seems to lap up these newcomers with open arms. Read avidly by all YA readers, the multicultural novel has explored all aspects of multiculturalism in society from many different viewpoints (see some examples here). 

The Carnegie Medal, first established in 1936, sought to identify and celebrate the best in British children’s literature. Its aim is to publicise and reward those authors whose works stay in the imagination long after closing the cover, and while the content may be challenging for the audience, the readers must leave with a sense of closure and pleasure. These books are sometimes not written for the YA market but become championed by it. They are often a good starting point when beginning to dip into the field of YA material and are usually available in most libraries. (See Carnegie Medal Winners here).

After spending a long summer reading as much YA material as I could get my hands on, I wanted to consult the experts and, having the target market close to hand, I thought I could survey my pupils on their reading habits. This required a few careful steps before starting. I needed to approach the Ethics Committee at the University of Leicester and also seek permission from the principal of my school. Secondary education is already protected by many safeguarding measures, and students' information is secured within an IT safe wall. I was able to use these systems to create a survey that asked my pupils about their literature preferences and dislikes. The online nature of this survey meant that I had complete control over the collection of the data and could interact with it as needed but always keep the student’s data anonymous. The Ethics Committee had to check my questions and the school’s safeguarding measures before giving me the green light to go ahead. Working with the head of English, we selected the students according to their English sets, choosing the ones most likely to be avid readers and asked the pupils to complete the survey over the summer break. (The school already had a cluster of students that took part in shadowing the Carnegie medal every year and who read and reviewed the short list together). The survey was very informal and used a Loom video to introduce and to personalise the task. All the students knew me well and the questions embedded this approach as I asked, ‘tell me,’ rather than ‘tell the school.’ From this lengthy questionnaire I sought to determine a few things.

• What they would recommend as their favourite reads, genre, format, author
• What they had a dislike for, authors, genres, particular novels
• What were the key themes, topics that they found engaging or a turnoff
• What topics were controversial to them, how easily were they shocked

I had no preconceptions about the survey results as these were discussions we had never had, and, more importantly, neither had the English department. Given that curriculum syllabi have spoon-fed a diet of classics for years without asking the audience what they really want to read, I found it fascinating that nobody had talked to the students before. What I found was an articulate, vocal, perceptive audience who most definitely had something to say about what they really wanted. Responses included the following:

‘I think that in today’s generation, there are very little topics that can be classified as extremely controversial due to progress for LGTBQ+, black and female rights. YA is arguably one of the most controversial genres due to the varied ages of the readers, but this is simply the nature of YA.’ 

‘I think things are controversial when they aren’t spoken about correctly. If they are talked about in a way that highlights issues people go through, then I think it is important to speak about them.’ 

‘I do not mind "disturbing" content as in the right context, it’s interesting. If I’m reading murder mystery, I would obviously want more gruesome descriptions. As long as the author isn’t being offensive themselves, they are allowed to make their characters antagonistic.’

‘Women are still considered inferior and instead of reading books with misogyny and about patriarchal societies we should read books about matriarchal societies and support female authors.’

The students identified their biggest pet-hates in novels as misogyny, animal cruelty and racism and instead recommended stories that had spoken to them. Clustered with the obvious best sellers was a surprising gem, Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar. The YA popularity of this novel about a young woman’s decent into mental breakdown, subsequent hospitalisation and suicide attempt has even sparked mimicry by other authors, like Meg Wolitzer’s Belzhar. The students also suggested a few other novels not originally intended for the YA audience, showing that that are happy to browse the shop shelves and be discerning buyers. All of these novels showed a similar use of an informal first-person narrator, a clear voice, quick pace and the use of good metaphors. 

One of the best of the bunch was The Lie Tree by Francis Hardinge, winner of the Costa award. My original intention for my novel was to culminate with a horrendous accident in which the father is killed, so this book proved to be good research for both in technique and content. Teens are very adept at handling mortality and death is a topic often explored in YA fiction. The classics often set out with an orphan’s perspective to elicit empathy right from the start - e.g. Secret Garden, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations. This enables a confidential tone to the narration as we become their sole confidant in a lonely world.

I also set up a shadowing group at school and gave students the early drafts of my story to read. This process was invaluable, asking the readers what they think whist creating the plot. Hearing first-hand opinions on the scenario, pace and voice was really exciting. I can recommend this process to everyone as it was fascinating to hear what the readers inferred from my words and finding new perceptions that I hadn’t even intended. I was initially concerned about my opening paragraph as it stemmed from a real incident that had affected me as a child. The teenagers of my focus group were much less disturbed by the incident and even found the idea amusing. A viewing diet of TV and films means that the YA market is much more likely to have been exposed to death at a tender age. The survey had identified that young readers have a fast filter that enables them to quickly identify good and bad content and make their own decisions.

Concluding from this experience, I would recommend reading as much relevant material as you can get your hands on. Seek out your audience and, if possible, open a dialogue with them. Ask pertinent questions to determine what likes and dislikes your readers have and be open to criticism. Show them first drafts and allow them to find their own way through the plot you will be amazed what others perceive from your words. Listen to your readers to become a better writer.

Some useful links include:

• https://nybookeditors.com/2017/08/5-tips-for-marketing-your-ya-novel/
• https://www.penguinteen.com/2023-ya-book-preview/
• https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/index.html
• https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/10/the-8-habits-of-highly-successful-young-adult-fiction-authors/280722/

About the author
Tracey Foster started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature and The Arts Council. 

Tristram Fane Saunders, "Before We Go Any Further"

 

Tristram Fane Saunders lives in London and works as a journalist. He is the author of five pamphlets including The Rake (The Poetry Business, 2022), and is the editor of Edna St Vincent Millay: Poems and Satires (Carcanet, 2021). His poems have appeared in The TLS, The White Review and Poetry Ireland Review. Before We Go Any Further is his first collection.

About Before We Go Any Further

The full-length debut from one of the UK's most widely read poetry critics, Before We Go Any Further is a book in three sections, moving from darkness into light. Beginning with nocturnes for a sleepless, lonely young generation, passing through surreal and darkly comic poems and word-games, it ends with hope, in a sequence about love, friendship and family.

Winkingly allusive, but immediately accessible and enjoyable, these poems' intricate rhythms create an effortless music that demands to be read out loud. Forms include sonnets, syllabic poems and lipograms using only one vowel. Throughout are funny, moving poems of friendship and loneliness in London, written with dazzling rhyme. 

You can read more about Before We Go Any Further on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Before We Go Any Further, by Tristram Fane Saunders

Home,

like pigeons do. We follow
the pull of sockets deep
in our thick, wet heads,
our sodden radar: warm,
warmer, colder, warm.
The yearn, that sub- or ultra-
sonic wumph from tail
to beak to gut, that hits
whenever we face due you
or you-by-near-enough.
The clunk, that eight- or cue-
ball of yes dropped snug
into the centre pocket
behind the eyes. Half-
recognised, we follow
what recognises us
by the usward trail it lays:
breadcrumb, breadcrumbs, dust.
Guided, or strung along, amazed,
stumbling home. Tug, tug.


The Sphinx

Crystal Palace Park

It’s lunch, and I’ve one leg on either side
of the brick-red haunch. Astraddle, or astride.
A flask on his flank, a sandwich where the spine
would lie, if either of us liars had one, 

hindlegs before me and the fore behind.
Although it’s true we don’t see eye-to-eye
(uneager for the future, I’ll keep mine
fixed on what for him’s already gone)

we’ve this in common: neither will admit
we’re going nowhere. Someone taught him ‘sit’
in 1854. He mastered it.
The hand that framed this fearful symmetry

made something less the bane of Thebes than kith
to Clifford, Big Red Dog. The hieroglyphs
say nothing: lorem ipsum dolor sit
in Middle Kingdom script. The riddle’s why

the hell we’re here, red-faced. Him? Blame the eye
of Mr Jones, first pharaoh of primary
colours when London’s walls and tastes and skies
were grey. Me? I’ve been struggling to cope.

The thermos spirals open with a sigh.
Pandora’s dog-red lunchbox will be empty,
the lone and level sandwich gone. Still, why
not give the box a shake. It sounds like hope.