Rory Waterman, "Sweet Nothings"

Rory Waterman was born in Belfast in 1981, grew up in rural Lincolnshire, and lives in Nottingham, where he is Senior Lecturer in English at Nottingham Trent University. He has a BA and a PhD from the Department of English at the University of Leicester. His first collection of poetry, Tonight the Summer's Over, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Prize. His second, Sarajevo Roses, was shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Prize for second collections. The poems featured below are taken from his third book, Sweet Nothings, published by Carcanet this month. He is also the author  of several books on modern poetry, and co-edits New Walk Editions. You can find out more about Rory and his work at www.rorywaterman.com.

Sweet Nothings, his new collection, is about absences, how they tempt us, and sometimes what they make us do. An absence is a conjuration, not palpably present in longing, imagination or dream. We are lured on by absences, and how they call to us, in Thomas Hardy's memorable phrase. The poems sometimes come in sequences; always they are in dialogue with one another, responding, echoing - within and between the book's two sections. At times, the leitmotifs are apparently personal, exploring divisions and painful losses. But we also encounter the largely invented academic Dr Bob Pintle, promoted at work since his cameo in Waterman's previous book, an anti-hero of the modern university system. In this book we also find the zero football score, the zero scores in life's more significant conflicts, and an obverse: the desire to settle at nothing, or for nothing less than what life might offer. Sweet Nothings is in fact a book of hopes and passions - quiet and lyrical at times, but also fiercely witty and bold.

Until 28 May, you can get 25% off the cover price of the book at www.carcanet.co.uk, if you enter the code WATERMAN25 at checkout.

Here are some poems from the collection:


Reaping

          ‘We need to test harder whether we can take a young 18- or 19-year-old out of their 
          PlayStation bedroom, and put them into a Reaper cabin and say: “Right, you have 
          never flown an aircraft before. That does not matter, you can operate this.”’

- Air Marshal Greg Bagwell

18 or 19 – what was I doing then? 
Well, one day, I biked here 
to RAF Waddington’s ‘viewing point’, 

from where I saw no action –
called by the urgent Tornados
which had skimmed our village 

shocking pliant heads
at intervals of my childhood,
and must have come from somewhere.

Runway approach lights have switched on
and point skywards at nothing 
coming in. A pigeon. A slip of moon.

A screech owl would be too apposite. 
But I saw one once a mile from here,
on Bloxholm Lane. It stalled a moment, 

then beat on past the hedges
tall as houses, living its purpose
suddenly beyond range.

And who knows what they do 
in a concreted cube two hundred yards
behind wires and warning signs,

or who does it – or why
an inch from where it would have died
a sandfly fills its nest?

Grasses by the road 
dip like a million rods 
to a million tiny catches. A saloon

half a mile off indicates 
only to the clouding dusk,
slows to corner the perimeter

on a red route B road to home. 
Nothing to do but follow
at a generous distance.


First published in PN Review. 



Where to Build

I never thought I’d have a home
but then I’d built one up from the bay,
a shrub-scrubbed cleft half-hiding it,
a plunging stream behind the grate

and locals pointed up, or down,
to where I lived beside myself
for years, with all I’d wanted most,
building a greenhouse, annexe, shelves, 

and made it all I knew to want
and drowned the voice that said I don’t
with all I’d always done for this
and grew tomatoes, seed to light

and ate them, happily, every night,
and fixed the leak that drew the rain
and fixed it when it sprung again.
Well, I knew of rock across the bay – 

a skerry? – green-topped, curving round
to out of sight behind near rock.
But rain set in, the endless rain,
and through the sheet of endless cloud

a jet of sudden light cracked down
across that further hunk of land,
which glimmered ginger. And it stayed
for seconds, minutes, hours, days,

the whole life of my house away.


First published in the Times Literary Supplement. 


Re: Application

FAO Dr Bob Pintle
Senior Lecturer in Professional Creativity, Peterborough University

Dear Robert,
                    The Board regrets to inform
several colleagues, including you,
that your recent sabbatical applications
will not go forward, after review.

The panel felt that ‘Write some poems
I haven’t yet written, so it’s absurd
to say much else’ lacked requisite rigour.
We do ask for ‘No more than 2000 words’

but suitable answers require something close.
We advise you attend our ‘Winning Support for
Sabbaticals Workshop’, when places are open.
There are none at present. We’ll advertise more

when we secure funding. To raise an objection,
write to your Sub-Dean of Sub-Research. State
your grounds for appeal, in accordance with Guideline
11 6 2 (Staff Handbook, page 8).

Ensure your 4* REF Output Agreement
and book contract are both attached to the email,
with endorsements from two Student Reps and your Mentor,
and a piece of your heart. Should your first appeal fail,

we invite fresh applications each year,
though from March 2020, all will be screened
for written support from Lead Industry Partners
linked to our Strategy Goals. We are keen

to support your research. We value team players
and wish you every success going forward.
Lastly, I’m pleased, on a personal note,
to congratulate you on your Teaching Award

(Bronze.) Our Faculty Press Team will write
a blog post next week, and request you take part
in our new poster ad, so congratulations!
Yours,
Dr Jim Jones
Dean, School of Arts


First published in Wild Court. 


Re: Re: Application

FAO Dr Jim Jones
Dean of Arts, Peterborough University

Hi Jim, Bob pecks, then deletes. Dear Jim, Oh YES!
I’ll write with that! Those sabbaticals: who got them?
And have those colleagues had thirteen precious years
on what you term ‘the front line’? Anyway, Cheers!
When I find time, I’ll thank you in a poem,
and place it in the fucking TLS.

I see you proclaim in your email signature line
you’re ‘often abroad and send out-of-hours emails,
but rarely expect instant replies to them.’ 
Well, Jim, tonight I marked till 10pm:
Rhetoric essays. I’d give your email a Fail,
you shite-backfilled and heaving cliché-mine.

On a personal note, how are the kids, you knob?
See much of them? Does Nanny wipe their arses?
And what are the call girls like out in Guangdong?
He sighs. Holds backspace till all his work is gone.
The cursor blinks along with his catharsis,
and he stabs Dear Jim, That’s excellent! Thanks. Bob.


First published in Wild Court. 


You can also watch Rory perform one of his poems here.
. 

Call for Submissions: "Yours Faithfully, Edna Welthorpe (Mrs)" Annual Creative Writing Competition

Time, Narrative and Genre

By Jonathan Taylor

          We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths; 
          In feelings, not in figures on a dial.
          We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives 
          Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best. 
          And he whose heart beats quickest lives the longest: 
          Lives in one hour more than in years do some 
          Whose fat blood sleeps as it slips along their veins. 
          Life's but a means unto an end; that end, 
          Beginning, mean, and end to all things – God. 
          The dead have all the glory of the world.

 – Philip James Bailey

Literary Time
Over the last three or so months, as part of one of the modules on the MA in Creative Writing, we’ve been exploring the theme of time, in relation to writing. This semi-module is trans-generic, and we’ve looked at time in fiction, non-fiction, poetry, philosophy, science fiction and films. We’ve covered subjects including ‘Narrative Time,’ ‘Creative Historiography,’ ‘Writing Historical Fiction,’ and ‘Time Travel.’ 

Time is a central – but sometimes overlooked – aspect of writing. ‘Literature,’ write Janet Burroway and Stuckey-French, ‘is … by virtue of its nature and subject matter, tied to time in a way the other arts are not.’ And conversely, if literature is ‘tied to time,’ time is tied to literature – or at least to storytelling in the widest sense: our perception of time is often determined by modes of storytelling. As H. Porter Abbott suggests, ‘Narrative is the principal way in which our species organises its understanding of time … allowing events themselves to create the order of time.’ Or, in the words of the nineteenth-century poet Philip James Bailey: ‘We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths; / In feelings, not in figures on a dial.’ In everyday life, we experience time primarily through ‘deeds, … thoughts … [and] feelings’ – so that some minutes in our lives feel like hours, some years like minutes – and that experience is mirrored in our stories.

Story Time
This is why stories convey such a complex, flexible, even capricious notion of time: they are shaped around ‘deeds’ and ‘feelings,’ and focus on them at the expense of a more regular, clock-based time-span. In stories, that is, minutes can sometimes last hours (of reading time), while years can last seconds, depending on the events and feelings being described. As Bill Greenwell writes, ‘Almost invariably, the time shown by the writer will be only a fraction of the total time in which the action of the narrative takes place … Sometimes you may find that years, or even centuries, are covered in only a few sentences; at other times, you may find that the time covered by the writing is roughly equivalent to “real time.”’ 

The time-span of Arthur C. Clarke’s novel (originally a short story) and Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey is millions of years, while there are, by contrast, many novels which last less than a day. Tobias Wolff’s famous short story, ‘Bullet in the Brain,’ for the first two or so pages, comes close to what Jean-Paul Sartre termed ‘durational realism,’ whereby the reading (experiencing) time is very close to the time-span of the events described (especially if, like me, you are a slow reader). But then, once the main character has been shot, time massively slows down, so that real time and reading time diverge. The final section of the story magnifies something that presumably takes barely a nanosecond into two or so pages of visionary description – rather like a slow-motion sequence or film montage. It’s a vivid demonstration of the way in which narrative time – time based on ‘deeds, … thoughts … [and] feelings’ – departs from the ‘figures on a dial.’

On a much wider canvas, history itself is often conceived not (primarily) as ‘figures on a dial,’ but as a series of ‘deeds, … thoughts … [and] feelings.’ As Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick recognised, history, in a word, is itself narrative (or a collection of narratives). Many historians and historiographers have made this point. A. R. Louch writes that ‘the technique of narrative as it is used by historians … is not merely an incidental, stylistic feature of the historian's craft, but essential to the business of historical explanation.’ Most famously, Hayden White claims that ‘in general there has been a reluctance to consider historical narratives as what they most manifestly are – verbal fictions ...  If there is an element of the historical in all poetry, there is an element of poetry in every historical account of the world.’ So history and poetry – history and Creative Writing in general – overlap; and history and historical fiction, at some level, are doing the same thing.  

Personal Time
Another, analogous way of conceiving Bailey’s distinction between ‘deeds’ or ‘feelings’ and ‘figures on a dial’ is by referring to the difference between subjective and objective time – between, that is, a relativistic time versus an absolute notion of time. Stephen Hawking discusses this key distinction in A Brief History of Time: ‘Up to the beginning of the [twentieth] century, people believed in an absolute time … However, the discovery that the speed of light appears the same to every observer, no matter how he was moving, led to the theory of relativity – and in that one had to abandon the idea that there was a unique absolute time. Instead, each observer would have his own measure of time as recorded by a clock he carried … Thus time became a more personal concept, relative to the observer who measured it.’

According to James Gleick, the idea of a subjective, relative time has had a major impact on literature, and our conceptions of narrative: ‘Literature creates its own time. It mimics time. Until the twentieth century, it did that mainly in a sensible, straightforward, linear way. The stories in books usually began at the beginning and ended at the end. A day might pass or many years but usually in order … Not anymore. We have evolved a more advanced time sense – freer and more complex. In a novel there may be multiple clocks, or no clocks, conflicting clocks and unreliable clocks, clocks running backwards and clocks spinning aimlessly. “The dimension of time has been shattered,” wrote Italo Calvino in 1979.’

Genre Time
Clearly, Gleick is generalising here: there are plenty of pre-twentieth-century instances of non-linear literary narratives, and many twentieth-century linear narratives. Also, though he’s ostensibly talking about ‘literature’ in general, implicitly he’s referring mainly to novels (‘stories in books’). What I’ve noticed, since starting to teach this semi-module on Time and Creative Writing, is how differently the various literary forms and genres deal with time – to the extent that the various forms and genres might, in part, be defined according to their dominant conceptions of time. 

For a start, I think Gleick might be (at least partly) right in his suggestion that the novel form, by and large, assumes a linear, maybe even chronological, structure. Of course, there are probably more exceptions to this generalisation than there are novels which conform to a linear narrative structure; but I do think there is something about the novel as it is commonly understood which – even when the form is being challenged, subverted – at least implies a linear mode of storytelling. In fact, self-conscious non-linearity in the novel often encodes the dominance of its opposite, implying an overarching linear framework (in the novel itself, in the reader’s head, in other novels, and so on). I’ve written about this aspect of the novel at greater length here.

Plays and films assume a different model of time. Again, there are a million exceptions, and plays which subvert conventions, but the general assumption of an audience in a theatre is that any given scene – especially one featuring dialogue – is happening in some kind of real time. In his discussion of moments in stories where ‘the time covered by the writing is roughly equivalent to “real time,”’ Greenwell notes that ‘the most obvious example of this is when dialogue is being used.’ Dialogue – both on the page, and particularly on the stage – at least suggests a kind of ‘durational realism.’ No doubt it is this which makes dialogue seem so immersive, that lends it so much immediacy: it feels ‘real,’ in a time sense. Most scenes in Shakespeare’s plays seem to be happening in some kind of real time, even if there are huge time lapses between scenes. And similarly, scenes in conventional movies often assume a mimetic notion of time – which is perhaps why montage sequences stand out so much, and are often used as climactic devices, because they provide a very different experience of time, telescoping it, playing with it, collapsing it.

I’ve always felt that the form which has the most (naturally) flexible relationship with the dimension of time is poetry – and maybe also, to some extent, memoir. In his memoir, Speak Memory, Vladimir Nabokov talks of the ‘coloured spiral,’ ‘spiritualised circle … [of] life,’ the ‘“rhythmic patterns” [and] … “contrapuntal” nature of fate’ – and if, as Nabokov demonstrates, memoir can capture these spirals, patterns and counterpoints, poetry can do so in a peculiarly condensed form. Of all forms, poetry, I think, finds it most easy to flit between different time frames in a tiny space, superimposing memories and histories on top of one another. Poems, it might be said, are miniature warps or holes in the fabric of space-time. Poems flit easily between, or knit together, different spaces and moments; they can bring different pasts, presents and futures into close proximity, drawing connections or contrasts. Different times can co-exist between and within stanzas and lines; and poems can even superimpose one time frame onto another, like a palimpsest, through imagery, plays on words, radical ambiguity. No doubt this flexibility is partly because of poetry’s neutron-star-like density – like super-dense cosmic objects, they bend and distort space-time for readers. Poetry is often read very slowly, with intense concentration, in a way that’s far removed from ‘durational realism,’ and it brings with it very different expectations, on the part of the reader, in terms of its (non-)linearity, ellipsis and narrative structure. I’ve written about this aspect of poetry at greater length here.

Time Travel
Given its near-infinite temporal flexibility, ‘poetry is time travel,’ as Tarfia Faizullah declares. But then so, in their different ways and to different extents, are all literary forms: they are all means of travelling to the past, to the future, of flashing back to childhood, of flashing forward to death, of reconstructing histories, of inventing alternative histories, of dreaming of possible futures, of slowing time to a near-halt, or speeding it up, of superimposing onto the reader’s present any number of different moments. As Gleick puts it, reading is ‘time travelling by page turning,’ and ‘our imaginations liberate us in the time dimension, even if we can’t have a Wellsian time machine.’ In this sense, H. G. Wells’s famous novel The Time Machine merely stages readers’ experience of all literary texts; it brings to consciousness what readers unconsciously already understand: that all literature is time-travel literature. 

Works Cited 
H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative
Philip James Bailey, ‘Festus’
Janet Burroway and Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft 
Arthur C. Clarke, ‘The Sentinel,’ and 2001: A Space Odyssey
Tarfia Faizullah, Interview with Kathleen Rooney, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/146089/exquisite-dissonance
James Gleick, Time Travel: A History 
Bill Greenwell, Chapter 6, in A Creative Writing Handbook, ed. Derek Neale
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
A. R. Louch, ‘History as Narrative’
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory: An Autobiography Revisited
Jonathan Taylor, ‘Research Notes: Entertaining Strangers,’ http://necessaryfiction.com/blog/ResearchNotesJonathanTaylor, and ‘On Prophecy and Time,’ https://nikperring.com/on-prophecy-and-time-jonathon-p-taylor/
H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
Hayden White, ‘The Historical Text as Literary Artefact’
Tobias Wolff, ‘Bullet in the Brain’  

Jonathan Taylor is director of the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk 

Call for Entries: G. S. Fraser Poetry Prize 2020

This is a call for submissions for this year's G. S. Fraser Poetry Prize.

Guidelines
Any student currently enrolled at the University of Leicester may enter. Entrants may submit up to three poems. Poems may be on any subject but must not exceed 40 lines. Poems must not have been published or have won another prize.

How to enter
To enter please email your poem(s), one poem per page, in a Word or pdf attachment from your University email address to ngre1 [at] le.ac.uk, with ‘G. S. Fraser Prize’ in the subject line and your name in the message. 

Timescale
The deadline for submissions is: 5 p.m. on Friday 22 May 2020. The result will be announced on Friday 19 June. A prize of £50 will be awarded to the author of the winning poem. 

Laura Besley, "The Almost Mothers"

Laura Besley writes short (and very short) fiction in the precious moments that her children are asleep. Her fiction has appeared online (Fictive Dream, Spelk, EllipsisZine) as well as in print (Flash: The International Short Story Magazine) and in various anthologies (Adverbally Challenged, Another Hong Kong, Story Cities). The Almost Mothers is her first collection and is published by Dahlia Publishing.

About the book
The Almost Mothers by Laura Besley is a flash fiction collection exploring the theme of motherhood.

A first-time mum struggles with her newborn baby. An alien examines the lives of Earth Mothers. A baby sleeps through the night at long last.

Written with raw honesty, Laura Besley's debut flash collection, The Almost Mothers, exposes what it really means to be a mother. 

Below, Laura talks about the experience and process of writing the book. 


Writing The Almost Mothers 
By Laura Besley

I stopped writing for about a year after having my eldest son. Not because I wanted to, but because I was exhausted: physically, mentally, emotionally, and it left no space for anything else. When I started writing again, in fits and starts, one of the first pieces I wrote was ‘The Motherhood Contract.’ Elspeth, the main character, is not me, but like me, she is struggling with becoming a mother, and making sense of her world now that she is a mother. 

As I started writing more, I noticed that I had a growing number of pieces about motherhood, with different characters, covering different facets of motherhood, and in 2018 I did FlashNano (write a piece of flash fiction for every day of November) and most of these pieces were about motherhood too. In December 2018 I put the collection together to enter into a competition. It was long-listed and this gave me the confidence to submit to Dahlia Books when Farhana Shaikh, editor and director, put out a call for submissions in April 2019.  

There’s been a surge in ‘honest’ writing about motherhood, something I felt was lacking only five or six years ago when I first became a mother. There was an expectation of motherhood and the gap between that and reality, I felt at least, was insurmountable. I’d like to think that the overall message of this collection is honesty; we’re not all going to find it easy. 

Here’s an extract from one of the stories:


From ‘The Motherhood Contract.’

You must not tell the mother-to-be that she will lose herself.

Elspeth feels cheated. No-one warned her that she would no longer recognise herself: physically, mentally, and in every other way. She looks in the mirror and wonders who that person is with pale skin and massive purple globs under her eyes; lank and greasy hair; and a body that still looks six months pregnant months after birth.

Meeting her old friends no longer holds appeal as she has nothing to talk about but the baby, and their frustrations seem so trivial. Meeting the women from her antenatal class is unappealing because all they talk about is babies. And going out without the baby isn’t an option.

"Small Press Publishing: The Dos and Don'ts"

By Isabelle Kenyon

I started writing Small Press Publishing: The Dos and Don'ts because, when I started publishing anthologies at the end of 2017, there were no books or advice columns out there for new publishers. I contacted every single publisher on the Northern Fiction Alliance page (around 50 UK publishers) and offered to work for free, explaining that I had already taught myself a lot about the business, but now wanted to apply that knowledge to a professional team (in a small press, you often do every single part of the publishing process, but ideally, you have the budget to allocate roles and salaries, so I was intrigued to see how this worked). Unfortunately, only two people replied and they said they didn’t have the capacity to take me on.

This frustrated me because I knew I wasn’t a hindrance to their day-to-day activities – I’ve always worked hard and independently. Instead, I just tried harder to work through the legalities of becoming a sole trader, sorting out a distributor, developing relationships with bookshops, etc., myself. A lot of those publishers now book tables from me for the Northern Publishers’ Fair which I organise!

It’s entirely possible to build your own niche within a busy book market. You have to be organised, determined and have a supportive network, who are passionate about the kinds of books you produce. My network is predominately supportive US readers who I communicate with on social media, and book bloggers who give so much of their time to reviewing my titles (thank you!).

With this book, I wanted to help the many who are never given work experience, by talking them through the steps that I have gone down over the past two years. I’ve also interviewed a series of small publishers in various genres because all publishers run their businesses differently, and I wanted to show those varying models.

There is a lot more to succeeding as a publisher, and as a business, than a good idea. You need to maximise your chances of success. In this book, I take the reader through the process of branding, working with authors, the publishing schedule, marketing and distributing and how I started my business. For example, in one section we look at:


Important questions to ask yourself before you launch your press

What is it about your book or your publishing strategy that encourages customers to choose you? For example, I believe that, for Fly on the Wall Press, it’s the quality of the books and the diverse range of voices, which we represent.

As a publisher, you need a very clear idea about what your books represent and why your publishing niche is important in the industry.

Why do you want to open your own publishing press?

What previous work experience will help you to do this?

What qualifications or training do you have, which will help you with your business endeavour?

Which future training courses do you want to complete in order to develop your business?

Especially on a small press level, you are your own best advocate and if people are interested in your books, it is usually because they are interested in you and what you stand for. To begin selling books, you must be able to sell yourself as a business owner. Have confidence in what you are doing and really define what your press represents.


About the book

Small Publishing: The Dos and Don’ts, by Isabelle Kenyon

Start with a good idea.

Set up your own business.
  
Fill a niche in the publishing industry and turn your hobby into a full-time career.

If you feel passionate that you can fill a niche in the publishing industry, but you haven’t managed to get your lucky break so far, this book is for you.

If you have already started running your own online magazine, small press or are publishing your own work in book form professionally, this book is for you.

With interviews from Indigo Dreams Publishing Ltd, HVTN Press, Louise Walters Books, Newfound Journal, Ghost City Press, Broken Sleep Books, Mason Jar Press, Queen of Swords, Neon Books and more.

The book is available from Fly on the Wall Press here.


About the author

Isabelle Kenyon is a northern poet and the author of This is not a Spectacle, micro chapbook, The Trees Whispered (Origami Poetry Press) and Digging Holes To Another Continent (Clare Songbirds Publishing House, New York) and Potential (Ghost City Press). She is the editor of Fly on the Wall Press, a socially conscious small press for chapbooks and anthologies. In 2020, she will be published by Indigo Dreams - poetry chapbook Growing Pains - and Wild Pressed Books (short story 'The Town Talks').

​She was shortlisted for the Streetcake Experimental Writing Prize 2019 and for The Word, Lichfield Cathedral Competition 2019. Her poems have been published in poetry anthologies by Indigo Dreams Publishing, Verve Poetry Press, and Hedgehog Poetry Press. She has had poems and articles published internationally.

She will headline at Cheltenham Poetry Festival  2020 and has opened Coventry Cathedral's Plum Line Festival.  She has performed at Leeds International Festival as part of the 2019 'Sex Tapes' and for  Apples and Snakes' 'Deranged Poetesses' 2019.

​She is a fierce dog lover and a confessed caffeine addict.

Tania Hershman, "and what if we were all allowed to disappear"

Tania Hershman, photo by Naomi Woddis

and what if we were all allowed to disappear is Tania Hershman's seventh book. Tania's poetry pamphlet, How High Did She Fly, joint winner of Live Canon's 2019 Poetry Pamphlet Competition, was published in 2019. Her debut poetry collection, Terms & Conditions, is published by Nine Arches Press and her third short story collection, Some Of Us Glow More Than Others, by Unthank Books. Tania is also the co-author of Writing Short Stories: A Writers' & Artists' Companion (Bloomsbury, 2014), the co-creator of @OnThisDayShe, and the curator of short story hub ShortStops. She has a PhD in Creative Writing inspired by particle physics. Tania was recently writer-in-residence in the Southern Cemetery in Manchester, and made a radio programme about her residency, Who Will Call Me Beloved.  Hear her read her work on SoundCloud and find out more on her website here.

Her new book, and what if we were all allowed to disappear, is a collage of poetry, prose and prose/poem hybrids. It's a story of fragmentation, collision, absence and presence. Inspired by particle physics, Tania plays with words and narrative to create new shapes and stories, asking the reader, "What does it mean to be in pieces? What might it mean to be whole?" It's published by Guillemot Press on March 4 2020, and you can see more details here. Below, Tania introduces the book, and you can read a sample from it. 

By Tania Hershman

This is a version of the book I wrote for my PhD, for which I took inspiration from particle physics to look at the idea of parts and wholes. I have a BSc in Maths and Physics, but was never cut out to be a scientist. I became a science journalist, and slowly slowly moved towards my first love: fiction. When I started writing short stories - and then later, poetry -  I didn't want to leave the science behind so I played with it, using articles about science, and then time spent with scientists themselves, as inspiration. 

For the PhD, I took this to a whole new level. I had a particle physicist as an external supervisor, and went and sat in on some of her lectures because particle physics has evolved over the past 25 years! I immersed myself, not only in physics, but in everything to do with parts and wholes. Which, as it turns out, is pretty much everything. Every topic has something to say about what “part” means, what “whole” is, how something can be one, the other, or even both. I followed tangents and went in such fascinating directions, from fractals to Gestalt psychology. 

And while researching these topics, I was also experimenting on what I called “particle fiction”: books made of parts that were intended to work as coherent wholes. Not just chapters, something odder, more disjointed. The books I looked at in detail – and in one case physically took apart – were Bluets by Maggie Nelson, An Acre of Barren Ground by Jeremy Gavron, and Mr Fox by Helen Oyeyemi. When I say “experimented,” I came at it like a scientist, taking measurements, then plotting results on graphs and pie charts. I had such fun. The idea was to see how these books worked and then create my own. 

The result was and what if we were all allowed to disappear. I never explain anything that I write, I will never tell a reader what I think it's “about,” because everything - especially the shortest and most experimental things - is a co-creation with the reader. I don't know what anyone will make of this book, in which prose morphs into poetry and vice versa and there are many gaps left for the reader to fill in. I really would love to hear if and how it speaks to people. 

I can't quite believe this odd hybrid book found a publisher! I couldn't be more delighted with how the excellent Guillemot Press took what I'd done – which is formatted very precisely, printing the PhD was a bit of a nightmare – and came up with creative ways to present it, including pages made of tracing paper. And the GOLD COVER. Oh my. It's beyond anything I could have dreamed of. You don't need to know anything about, or have any interest in, particle physics to read this book. It contains parts which I hope work as a whole, and it looks at the idea of taking things apart and what is revealed. I will say no more about it, here is a little taster. 


Susy sits in the waiting room. She feels like there is something she's forgotten. Although they did not ask her to bring anything. Susy is not sure what they want. She is also not sure exactly what this place is. She wonders if they are watching her. She looks around. 
Susy is worried that she has left the gas on, or the taps, a door unlocked, a window open. She sees herself before she leaves the house, closing, switching off, holding keys. Susy breathes. 
They call her name. 


They call her name.
Susy breathes. She sees herself before she leaves the house, closing, switching off, holding keys. Susy is worried that she has left the gas on, or the taps, a door unlocked, a window open.

She looks around. She wonders if they are watching her. She is also not sure exactly what this place is. Susy is not sure what they want from her. Although they did not ask her to bring anything. She feels like there is something she's forgotten. Susy sits in the waiting room. 


In the waiting room,
Susy sits. There is something

she's forgotten, Susy feels.
Bring anything,  although they

did not ask her. Not sure  
what they want

from her. Susy is this
place? She is also not.

Sure. Exactly. What if
they are watching her, she wonders.

Around she looks, left.
The gas on, or the taps, a door

unlocked, a window open? Susy
is worried herself. Before she leaves

the house closing, switching
off, holding the keys. She sees

that she has her name.
Susy breathes they.

Call.