Review by Doryn Herbst of "The Headland" by Abi Curtis

This is a speculative novel running along two timelines: the aftermath of the Great Storm in southern England, 1987, and events that unfold several decades later.

Delores, a painter, has been unable to produce anything for over a year. She decides to move permanently to her summer studio in the Headland, a coastal community of free-spirited artists, fishermen and tourists but overshadowed by the nearby nuclear power station. 

The morning after extreme weather ripped across the South, Delores walks along the shingled beach near where she lives to assess damage and to check up on her friends.

She stumbles across a piece of driftwood, utterly beautiful, smoothed by water and smelling of sea salt. Preparing to take her find home for the garden, Delores sees something strange sheltered inside a crevice resembling a mouth in the wood. The something is plant-like, animal-like, energy-like, a ball of pulsating colour, and alive. Delores feels a connection to the creature but wonders whether it has emerged as a result of the storm, radioactive emissions or a mixture of both.

The driftwood is installed on her living-room table. Delores subsequently develops an emotional relationship to the being inside, calling it Violet. Her new companion becomes a source of power which fuels inspiration and a phase of prolific creativity follows.

Approaching forty, Morgan is at the Headland, the place of his childhood summers, to tie up legal formalities and attend his mother Delores’s funeral. Her solicitor gives him a box of documents and a letter from her explaining its contents and their importance.

Morgan’s girlfriend is pregnant but he doesn’t feel ready for this next phase of his life. He does not know who his father is and hopes the box will contain information about this stranger. Instead, Morgan uncovers other secrets within the pages of a journal his mother kept following the Great Storm.

At the core of this captivating story is the experience of loss and of being lost, the devastating consequences of grief and the process of healing. The narrative also explores the yearning to belong and the need to understand the past in order to encompass the present. Questions about fundamental beliefs challenge lineal notions of time and space and suggest the relationship between the two may not be what we imagine.

About the reviewer
Doryn Herbst, a former water industry scientist working in Wales, now lives in Germany. Her writing considers the natural world and themes which address social issues. Poetry in print and online includes work in: Osmosis, The Storms, The Wild Word, anthology – It’s not SYMPTOMATIC It’s Systematic. She is a reviewer at Consilience.

You can read more about The Headland by Abi Curtis on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Rebecca Reynolds of "Write Cut Rewrite" Exhibition at the Weston Library

"Kill your darlings," enjoined Stephen King, talking of the need for writers to cut words which may have taken hours to develop. This exhibition of writers' editing processes at the Bodleian's Weston Library gives evidence of such murder through manuscripts, jottings and notebooks.

So what "darlings" do we see here? Opening the exhibition is a twelfth-century manuscript, The Ormulum, commenting on the Bible in early English. This is a literal cut and paste – one page trimmed to a third of its size, overlying another with almost every line heavily scored through. "For a notebook which is almost a thousand years old it looks surprisingly modern because it features so many crossed-out passages," says the label.

Yet why do crossed-out passages look more modern than the finished product? Because they show a common human impulse to revise, with its hesitancy and changes of mind, in a way that the fixed final text does not? Doodles in Shelley's notebook, displayed here, also seem strangely modern. Perhaps it is use of the pen rather than fixed type which makes them seem more human?

Also included are three wonderful sheets of witty lines kept in reserve by Raymond Chandler for his detective novels, marked off in pencil after being used. Unused was "I left her with her virtue intact, but it was a struggle. She nearly won."

Editing materials are important. Unlined notebooks allow Alice Oswald to do the swirling coloured sketches which she then tries to translate into words. Le Carré‘s drafts are handwritten, then typed up, then the typescript is cut up again and stapled between further handwritten parts.

Sometimes little is edited – Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism has one large manuscript page with just one correction. Were the robust rhyming couplets a confident guide, so little revision was needed?

And what of today’s untraceable electronic editing? A digital display shows "Cuttings," a poem by Fanny Choi, where one can track the electronic editing process – "every keystroke, every pause, every typo, every half-developed idea later abandoned." This is a fascinating exhibition with an excellent mixture of writers.

Write Cut Rewrite is at the Weston Library, Oxford, until 5 January 2025.

Photo by Ian Wallman

About the reviewer
Rebecca Reynolds has worked as an English Language teacher and as a museum educator at the Victoria & Albert Museum and Reading University museums. She completed a Research Masters in Literature at Liverpool University in 2023 and is considering undertaking a PhD in either Literature or Creative Writing. She blogs here.

Review by Tracey Foster of "The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience" by Jennifer Higgie

The act of self-reflection is an indulgence and one that women throughout history have seldom had the opportunity to do, more often being the object of scrutiny and worship by the male gaze. Women who flew contra to convention, female artists who rebelled against stereotype and chose introspection over objectification, have their unique stories told in this book: "A painting is a pause in life's cacophony. It does not demand conversation or justification. It does not hector her. She has stilled herself for it. It cannot and will not tell her what to do. She controls it. She concentrates, her paintbrush in hand, the mirror close by. She is defiantly, splendidly, bravely, heartbreakingly, joyously alone."

Higgie takes us on a tour of time, place, social expectations and gender battles to uncover the lives of women who dared to paint, despite objections and difficult circumstances. Reading from our present perspective, it is hard to imagine women artists being rejected from academies, refused from attending life classes or painting their own bodies, their work spurned and excluded from galleries. They often worked in secret, hoarding their work and making a record of their life for themselves only. Painting was a deeply personal act, which involved recording every stage of an aging process and for some their downfall into obscurity. Very few women made it to recognition and success. Many of these names are not known to the public and Higgie takes time to give them their due: "She looks at herself in order to study what she's made of, to understand herself anew and, from time to time, to rage against the very thing that confines and defines her."

Recent technologies have enabled wrongly-attributed works to be recognised as works by women painters. The catalogue of once-unknown artists is expanding and allowing us a better understanding of the challenges they overcame and the prejudices they faced. History is told in words and more often written by men allowing this gap in our knowledge to happen. Many of our well-known masters had patrons who bought, displayed and championed their careers. This was highly unlikely to happen if the painter was female; she was more likely to be derided for shunning marriage, motherhood and domesticity. Only two of the artists explored in this book have found recent recognition: Frida Kahlo and Artemisia Gentileschi. The rest are ours to discover. 

Most of us have some knowledge of the pain and suffering that Kahlo had to overcome after a serious accident on tram as a young girl, the endless operations, miscarriages and consequent body-disfiguring impacts on her female from. These experiences are embedded into her visceral paintings, blunt self-portraits and graphic imagery. Gentileschi too had to overcome the horrific experience of repeated rape by her art tutor and endure a seven-month trial where she was tortured to prove her innocence. This manifested in her allegory paintings of religious scenes, often reinterpreted from the female perspective. To view these artworks without prior knowledge of the life experiences of the painter is to only half see them. With this book we begin to peel back the layers of each image and understand it better: "A painting will always reveal something about the life of its creator, even if it’s the last thing the artist intended. A self–portrait isn’t simply a rendering of an artist’s external appearance: it’s also an evocation of who she is and the times she lives in, how she sees herself and what she understands about the world."

In her chapter aptly named "The Liberating Looking Glass," Higgie explores the development of self-reflection. A relatively modern invention, mirrors were a luxury item; made from highly polished volcanic glass, they were like gazing into black water. Leonardo da Vinci was obsessed with mirrors, both as objects and metaphors and said: "The mind of the painter should be like a mirror which always takes the colour of the thing it reflects." What such an object meant for a female artist was freedom; the ability to paint in isolation, have an ever-ready muse and to take time to become proficient: "A self-portrait is not only a description of concrete reality, it is also an expression of an inner world."

These stories are fascinating; 500 years of decadence and revolution, nobility and poverty, art movements and politics. You do not need to be an art lover or an art connoisseur to appreciate tales of women battling against the odds to create a realistic image of their own identity. In a time of the ubiquitous shared selfie, we need to understand the huge challenges these women overcame, in capturing a single expression that was often hidden from the public for decades. As Alice Neel writes, "When you're an artist, you're searching for freedom. You never find it because there ain't any freedom. But at least you search for it. In fact, art should be, could be called 'the search.'"

About the reviewer
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, The Arts Council and she writes on her own blog site The Small Sublime found here.

Review by Sally Shaw of "Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay" by Jeff Young

Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay is a mixture of memoir and storytelling, by Jeff Young, published in 2020. Jeff Young is a playwright, screenwriter, writer, lecturer and broadcaster.

The hardback edition dustcover has a sepia photograph of two young children stood in the doorway of a terrace house. They seem to be looking out for someone, leaving or returning, I’m not sure. Jeff Young steps out from his family home to journey through the streets of Liverpool, his childhood, and life. The purpose is to find and preserve Liverpool. The book has seventeen chapters. As I’m reading, it occurs to me that these chapters are vignettes, and for a moment I’m reminded of Sandra Cisneros’s The House On Mango Street. I know I’m not on Mango Street: it’s the beauty of the writing that grips my hand ensuring I don’t get left behind.

The opening chapter "Gutted Arcades" provides a wonderful insight to why Young is on this journey: "My mother liked to trespass - she didn’t call it trespassing, she called it having a nose. We’d have a look round the Corn Exchange or go up the back stairs of an insurance building, slip into the Oriel Chambers and sort of just … breathe. We were breathing in Victorian dust and the pipe smoke of Dickensian ledger clerks; drinking in the shadows and gloom and beams of light." In these few sentences I can see the awe and wonderment Young has for his mother, I sense her wit and love for the heartbeat of Liverpool. I have a glimpse of Young’s ability to form a link to people of the past, present and future - that the ghosts are held in the very structure of a city for all to see should they choose to. 

Throughout his journey, Young bumps into many ghosts, too many to name here: "When I was seventeen I picked up a copy of Malcolm Lowry’s Ultramarine in a bookshop in Exchange Station - a station used by Lowry, en route to Norway in 1931 - and I discovered that Lowry had been a haunter of Liverpool’s streets and cinemas, too." Chapter by chapter, the reader follows Young through Liverpool, his childhood, adulthood, reflections trying to make sense of it all, with each step meeting family members, childhood friends, buildings, colourful characters real and imagined. 

What becomes apparent is the gradual disappearance of Liverpool, through buildings destroyed, redeveloped or left to decay. They’ll remain invisible if people forget, have no history or relationship with the place they call home. Young’s writing enables the reader to be part of his journey to find himself within the streets, buildings, sights and experiences of Liverpool. 

Ghost Town is a treasure chest of what it is to be human, community, family and the beauty of memories. Young shows me the complexity of memories, how through life one gathers them, some belonging to you while others are on loan from writers, musicians, artists, buildings, and family. They aid an understanding of self and life events. I found some of the stories within the chapters complex, others upsetting; some made me smile, others held the wonder of childhood. The last three chapters for me are outstanding. In "The Haunted Lullaby," Young writes of an experience where dreams and  his imagination merge with raw reality - how this has impacted his writing and has never left him or Liverpool. "In some ways, I think this is what made me a writer; it’s the origin story for the way I see and hear Liverpool. Elsie’s lullaby seeps into the city, haunting it, disturbing it, creating endless, turmoil. It’s beautiful and strange." The last chapter is magical and moving, Young’s description of searching for the "Stanley Park treasure-tree" is enchanting and leads the reader into knowing his sister Val who lived in a treasure trove house. I will say no more, so you can discover the wonder of Val, Liverpool and Jeff. The vignettes will never fade from my memory and I hope neither will Liverpool. 

About the reviewer
Sally Shaw has an MA Creative Writing from the University of Leicester. She writes short stories and is currently working on her novel based in 1950s Liverpool. She sometimes writes poetry. She gains inspiration from old photographs, history, her own childhood memories, and is inspired by writers Sandra Cisneros, Deborah Morgan, Liz Berry and Emily Dickinson. She has had short stories and poetry published in various online publications, including The Ink Pantry and AnotherNorth and in a ebook anthology Tales from Garden Street (Comma Press Short Story Course book 2019). Sally lives in the countryside with her partner, dog, and bantam. Twitter: @SallySh24367017