Review by Lee Wright of "An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Leicester" ed. Jon Wilkins

In 1975 the French novelist and filmmaker Georges Perec spent three days recording the everyday events he witnessed through different café windows in the Saint-Sulpice Square.  The result of this became the much-loved An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, a short collection of observations that has since been held up as an example of good writing. It is an eerie, fascinating read, turning the somewhat innocent act of people watching into something more surreal and sinister. The short book takes the reader on a journey of secrecy, privacy and voyeurism. So much so, that Perec’s piece deserves to be on the bookshelf next to the best collections of Raymond Carver, who in turn was fascinated by and wrote about similar subjects.  

Inspired by Perec’s work, writer Jon Wilkins has published and contributed to his own attempt at exhausting a place. His new anthology An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Leicester brings together seventy-three separate pieces comprising stories, poetry and monologues by a whole host of writers in an attempt to wring out everything that makes up the city of Leicester. And there is some rich material to exploit. Authors such as Colin Wilson, Sue Townsend, Joe Orton and Julian Barnes were all born of the city. In recent times there has been the exhumation and reburial of Richard III and of course Leicester City’s Premier league win of 2016. But it is the little things written about the city that hold the most pleasure. Poet and musician Lauren M Foster’s poem, 'Bus Stop, Woodhouse Eaves,' opens with the lines:

It’s late.
I wait
some more.

And goes on to describe two separate conversations which end with the poet graffitiing the bus stop timetable whilst waiting for the bus that never arrives. This short poem best captures the inconsequential moments that Perec was striving for when he wrote his Paris project. So too does Lisa Williams’s flash fiction piece, 'Community,' which captures a ripple-effect moment in Victoria Park that is as beautiful as it is satirical. There are also reminisces of being bought apples from Leicester market and political poems of belonging. But the best parts of this anthology are the ones which read like a water-damaged love letter to the small moments as they happen in the city - which Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris was all about. 


About the reviewer
Lee Wright was born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire in 1980 and has been writing both fiction and non-fiction since 2008. He has just completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester.
            

Review by Kirsten Arcadio of "Bollocks to Brexit" ed. Ambrose Musiyiwa

As an ardent pro-remainer, I joined The People’s Vote march in the spring of 2019. ‘Bollocks to Brexit’ was a phrase I yelled during the march, so when the opportunity came up to review an anthology of the same name, I jumped at it. From discussions of the language we use to describe our crisis to reflections of our predicament, this anthology of anti-Brexit poetry and short fiction is a joy to read. The collection is brimming over with pertinent questions: the question of our children’s legacy; the effect on our businesses; the loss of our European identity; our repulsion at the sudden rise of anti-immigration sentiments; the lies told to us by the Leave campaign, to name but a few.

I particularly enjoyed 'Peregrines' (Yvonne Reddick) with its feeling of transience and reminder that most of us hail from elsewhere and, like the author, I would love the freedom to stay on the move; 'Yes there will also by singing' (Deborah Harvey) is a beautiful poem that echoes Bertolt Brecht’s ‘Motto,’ a collection of verses he wrote after fleeing Nazi Germany. 'Reverse Brexit' (Rachel Hardisty Vincent) is a clever poem you can read top down or bottom up for two entirely different reflections on how a person could have voted in the referendum – very nicely done and it works as a quick an effective mirror on current society. 'Before and After' (Pam Thompson), about an Italian café through the pre and post referendum period, is almost too close to home (I own an Italian café). The two verses of this poem show the golden era of tolerance and multi-cultural European values before the vote and the quick reversal of that afterwards. I enjoyed the immediate image of Disney villain, Gru, that 'Bad bad man' (Andy Callen) brought to mind. This poem reminded me that, in a world where a PM plays the fool to win voters’ affection, we should examine our begrudging affection for cardboard cut-out villains. Maybe it’s time to look behind their larger-than-life characters to see what they are really up to?

Bollocks to Brexit is a wonderful collection of poetic reactions to our current state of affairs. The works outline, in succinct form, the predicament British society finds itself in at this peculiar crossroads in time. It delivers a great slap in the face for complacency in bite-sized but not easily digestible chunks - and is worth carrying around to delve into every time a reminder is needed of what’s at stake. 


About the reviewer
A Ph.D student of Creative Writing at the University of Leicester, Kirsten Arcadio is an entrepreneur who runs a business alongside her writing career. She has written and indie-published four novels:  Borderliners, Split Symmetry, WorldCult, and Zeitgeist, each with a different speculative theme.

Review by Paul Taylor-McCartney of "Bystander" Anthology

This anthology has been created by MA Creative Writing students at Nottingham Trent University, and features writing inspired by exploring the perspective of the bystander: the one witnessing the action. This is an interesting premise, in that the reader is often cast as a text’s primary bystander, and so there are parallels drawn here between the many unheard or unregistered voices of society and those actively constructing meaning from often very sparse narrative detail. 

This is certainly an eclectic and diverse set of creative pieces: play-script, poetry and short stories sit happily alongside one another, jostling to be heard. Many of the pieces work best when read aloud, particularly the poetry and play texts, but some of the shorter narratives gain from this approach, too, with the form being used to give a platform to hitherto silent, or silenced characters. Standout pieces are those that turn economy of form to their advantage. A short poem, ‘Party Time’ by Tim Youngs, reflects on the ways in which we are all at the mercy of time itself. In ‘To stop times fall / I hold it steady / my hips don’t swing,’ there is a sense that humans are pre-disposed to oscillate between moments of private contemplation and the intoxicating draw of life itself. In another highlight, ‘Changelessness’ by Jonathan Taylor, a despairing parent tries to make sense of a home that has fallen silent, the children having ‘gone, gone’ and is brilliantly captured in a single page of prose. The hopelessness of being forced to move from active participant in one’s own life to observer of a ruined domestic scene is perfectly captured in the narrator’s ‘half-hearted imitations of real tidiness.’ 

There are other thought-provoking moments in the collection, and the anthology gains much of its power via the process of reading one piece after another, the slow accumulation of ideas and styles, which often takes the reader off in new and exciting directions. It is the mark of good editors that the anthology is sequenced to highlight talent on the MA course, both students and lecturers, as well as a wealth of other guest lecturers and writers. An engaging and thoughtful read.   


About the reviewer
Paul Taylor-McCartney is currently Head of Secondary Teacher Education at Warwick University. He has enjoyed a long and varied teaching career in the discipline of English / Theatre Studies and is following a part-time PhD in Creative Writing with Leicester University. His research interests include dystopian studies, narratology and 20th century literary criticism.

Interview with Siobhan Logan

About Siobhan Logan
Siobhan Logan's poetry/prose collections Firebridge to Skyshore and Mad, Hopeless and Possible are published by Original Plus. They have been performed at Ledbury Poetry Festival, the British Science Museum and National Space Centre. Her digital narrative Philae's Book of Hours was published by the European Space Agency in 2016. She led a WW1 residency for 14-18 NOW and co-edited a Five Leaves Books' anthology for refugee solidarity, Over Land, Over Sea. Her short fiction has won prizes and appeared in appears in various anthologies and literary magazines. She lectures in Creative Writing at De Montfort University, Leicester. In addition, she co-runs The Writers' Shed, an on-line service for writers. http://siobhanlogan.blogspot.co.uk/

Interview with Lee Wright

LW: Orwell proposed that 'good prose is like a window pane.' In your own writing, have you ever been tempted to smash all the windows? 

SL: Not for the sake of it. But I'll refer you to my thoughts on locating 'the voice of the story' below. This can sometimes lead to wrenching grammar, disrupting word-formation, dislocating the tidy order of a stanza or natural line-break – but only when that comes organically out of the story itself. In whatever form, I think of myself as a storyteller. Poetry, short fiction, digital narrative, blog etc. Let that speak, first and foremost. 

LW: It has been said that writers cannot begin their work until they have a voice of their own. How did you discover the voice for your Antarctic expedition piece, Mad, Hopeless & Possible? 

SL: I've just finished delivering a workshop on Narrative Voice – which I feel is as important in a poem as it is in a novel or story. But I would re-frame that concept. I find authors seeking 'a voice of their own' to be rather misleading. I mean, we all have our own idioms and preoccupations and linguistics tics, whether in speech or on the page. It's easy to get rather self-conscious about 'our own unique voice' as a writer and feel we need to show off with language or strike a pose somehow. But what I think we need to pay attention to is finding the voice of the story – whatever medium that's in. I've never thought one register or 'voice' could possibly encompass the range of writing I do, even within one collection. Instead I'm listening for and refining a voice that works for each story or poem.
In my Antarctic expedition sequence of 25 poems, Mad, Hopeless & Possible, my research led me to books including Shackleton's own about the 1914-17 expedition. Shackleton issued diaries to every crew member and required the men to fill them in and hand them over at its end. So, his book is full of those intimate, diverse voices, across classes and occupations, all articulating their own experience of the gruelling voyage. This was a real gift to me as a poet. I enjoyed channelling those voices, playing with Edwardian idioms and naval slang. The viewpoint is frequently that of an unnamed crew member but the plural pronoun 'we' is most often used, suggesting a collective experience: 'we pass our days rotting / in blubber smoke'. Their identity as a group was a powerful thing, welding them together through quite grim circumstances. 

Elsewhere a singular voice articulates the loneliness and despair of being lost in those vast wildernesses. I was probing the psychological pressure on individuals like the 27-year-old finance clerk, Victor Hayward, writing to his fiancée: 'I'm a laggard pulled out the team / Snow is white treacle. Rotten stuff / What will you think of me?'

But there are also poems in an omniscient voice, taking more of an authorial retrospective view, that questions the values and drivers of that mission. And poems where the voice is that of a landscape or ice-scape: 'the vast disarranged jigsaw / jammed with pancakes and floes, / fields and hedgerows of sea-ice...'

Then again, in each of my collections, there are prose 'chapters' too, written here in a voice that one reviewer found 'at once efficiently informative and dramatically powerful: smooth, economic prose offset against haunting poetic soliloquies.' So even within this chapbook, there are different voices at play, though given cohesion by the focus on a distinctive landscape of Antarctica. 

LW: Can knowing too much be a hindrance to the writer? 

SL: You often hear the adage 'write about what you know'. I can only say I've found the opposite approach results in far more sparky writing that really takes me somewhere and stretches my writing voice/s in the process. I always seem to write about what I don't know, about worlds and people quite alien to my own experience. But they fire up my curiosity. I think that's really something for a writer, to set off into the Unknown in someone else's shoes. Of course, you always discover yourself along the way, which is a bonus. But it's the energy of that curiosity and discovery that transmits itself in the poetry or narrative, that a reader picks up on.

I'm also taking this to be a question about research, which can certainly press too heavily on the writing sometimes. I like to immerse myself obsessively in research about a period or story – and then let it settle in my mind before the creative writing. I wait until I can't not start the writing – and then the raw material can come out quite quickly. Most of the Mad, Hopeless & Possible poems were written in first draft form over one heady week in my sister's front room where I retreated with my notebooks to embark on the voyage. I had about 18 poems then. Then I have to leave the material to 'settle' again and when I come back to editing, there'll be fresh bouts of research to sharpen the focus and texture of specific detail, even to sharpen the language of a place or story.  

LW: Dylan Thomas said that he used everything and anything to make his poems work. Is this true of your own poetry? And if so, where do you find your everything and anything? 

SL: Hmm, I wish I knew what he meant. Thomas always seems to be hurling words into a forge to bash them about. He's very vigorous in this hammering. Well I've looked up the quotation and he's talking about using every figure of speech and linguistic trick in the book. And then some. I love what his process produced. But it isn't mine. For me, it's about listening to the work and letting the language come organically out of the story. That's when I find myself being most inventive with form or imagery, because it seems the only way, the natural way, for that particular poem or series. I'd like the voice to be clean in that way, no fussier than it needs to be, even when it's tone is rapturous or horrified. That doesn't mean that I can't succumb to over-writing but I will try to excise that in editing. 

LW: Have you ever seen struck by the despair of writing nothing and having nothing to write? 

SL: I can't remember 'having nothing to write'. But sometimes I haven't been in the right place, energy-wise, to write, for months on end. Life, work, family, health; sometimes these things smother the energy you need. And it's no bad thing to retreat and hibernate at times. The back-brain is still doing its thing. 

But I did once have a novel die from under me. Or more precisely, my passion for it died. At the time, I kept thinking of the Australian author Thomas Kineally, saying that sometimes a novel just died right under you, like a horse. I'd spent at least five years by then working on this novel. I'd been focusing on it for an MA course I was doing. But after several drafts, I just knew it wasn't 'the one'. I'd learnt a lot trying to fix it. And I had a few agents interested in seeing what I wrote next. But I didn't have that belief in it to sell it to an agent – so I could hardly expect them to go out and sell it for me. I put it aside and started notes for a new novel. But while I was dealing with that novel-lag, I got ambushed by poetry and a project that turned into my first published collection, Firebridge to Skyshore: A Northern Nights Journey. Ten years later, the same thing is happening in reverse. I have a poetry project on the Space Race, waiting for me to finish it – but I've been ambushed by a novel instead. 

LW: Whether writing poetry or prose, how important is it to ‘write without fear?’     

SL: Write with fear. And doubt. And all manner of anxieties pursuing you like banshees. I once heard an Australian author say that all of these emotions are just like the weather. They surround us, they're an inevitable ever-changing part of the landscape of writing. Look out of the window, then proceed to ignore them and get on with the work. Tomorrow, just as unaccountably, there'll be sunshine or a sparkling frost. Equally irrelevant. 

If you mean write up against taboos and the dangerous stuff, that's another matter. I think in creative writing, you often don't know what you're writing up against because you're in the thick of it. But write where the energy is, write where you are somewhat out of your depth but happily obsessed. This is too uncertain a business to do it any other way than because you have to. Then whatever the sheer hard slog of it, there will be joy in it too.  

LW: You’re currently in the process of writing a novel. How has the experience been for you thus far?   

SL: Well, exactly as above. I'm out of my comfort zone, writing in a genre that's totally different to anything I've written before. Dystopian fantasy, probably for a Young Adult readership.  Heaven knows what I'm doing here. But this story did ambush me, one foggy weekend at the seaside, and would not let me alone. That's a rare thing, so I'm going with it and doing what I'm told. In my mind, the gods of story have dropped this in my lap and my job is not to mess it up too badly. That remains to be seen. But I am really enjoying the world-building, writing action scenes and sweary dialogue. Whatever else, getting the pace and narrative momentum to work for this will be a huge stretch for me and that challenge can only do me good.

LW: You teach creative writing at De Montfort University. At the risk of biting the hand that feeds you, can good creative writing actually be taught? 

SL: No risk involved. I find it an odd question really. We don't think to ask this about teaching dance or acting or music or film-making. Of course, there are distinct skills and craft issues that can be taught with writing. Some authors have taught themselves by sitting down and assiduously studying successful works in their genre to figure out why and how. But none of us have to re-invent the wheel. There are strategies that we can learn from experienced authors – though it helps if they have some skills for communicating those too. Confidence and motivation mean we can be patient with ourselves through the hard graft of it. 

Certainly, some writers will have an instinctual flair for certain aspects of storytelling or plotting or using language etc. Just as some of us are tone-deaf and can only get so far with music etc. But I did hear a radio programme talk once about child prodigies such as Mozart and how there was a correlation between the sheer number of hours of study or immersion in their craft and the extraordinary 'gifts' that emerged. After all, the human brain is extremely plastic. And being a writer also involves a certain way of paying attention and tuning into the world which is naturally full of stories if we but hear them. 

About the interviewer
Lee Wright was born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire in 1980 and has been writing both fiction and non-fiction since 2008. He is taking an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester.

Review by Lee Wright of "Writing Lives Together: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose"

The Centre for New Writing's Writing Lives Together: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose brings together contributions from eight writers who have been inspired by nineteenth-century works. Dickens, Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, Edmund Grosse, and William and Dorothy Wordsworth all provide a springboard for twelve new creative pieces.
   
Inspired by Dorothy Wordsworth’s The Grasmere Journals, Richard Byrt’s "Two Bags, Two Voices" explores the similarities in homelessness between 1796 and 2017: “All I own in two bags. Only a barn for shelter .... // Now all I own in two bags. Only a doorway for shelter.” Byrt shows us how much time has passed, and yet how so little has changed.

Anna Larner, author of the novel Highland Fling, gives us two pieces in this collection. In her first poem "On Reflection," she leaves flowers to wilt at Coleridge’s door. And her prose poem, "Writing is a leap of faith," takes Dickens’ Autobiographical Fragment, and delivers a piece pumped full of sentiment: “How awful the gap, and how hopeless my attempts have been to close it.” Larner expertly explores the push-pull life of the writer between the authentic self and the "other. 

In William Wordsworth’s "A Complaint," loss is everything, and the University of Leicester’s Jonathan Taylor makes Wordsworth accessible for modern day minds with his poem, "Out of the Well": "From deep within, I hear them pleading." Taylor concludes that love is terrifying and sharpens the appetite for both Wordsworth and Japanese author, Koji Suzuki.

“She said, eat it. So, I shoved that piece of news into my mouth and chewed”: Alyson Morris describes the experience of eating a piece of acid coated newspaper in her poem, "At De Quincey’s Pleasure." She makes Thomas De Quincey’s language interesting again. Morris’ poem, like others in the pamphlet, carries more weight than expected and brings Victorian literature out from under the staircase.  

Aysar Ghassan gives us a kind of bug-hunger in his poem, "Greater Than Illiterate Love," where he powerfully combines stale rock cakes and the death of Betamax, whilst stepping on the toes of the value of love. 

About the reviewer

Lee Wright was born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire in 1980 and has been writing both fiction and non-fiction since 2008. He is taking an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester.