I first heard about Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children when I discovered that Tim Burton would be directing the film adaptation. Despite not being a big fan of things on the eerily creepy side, I have a lot of admiration for Tim Burton’s works. So I picked up a copy of the book. Ransom Riggs has a fascination for things of the peculiar and started visiting abandoned places and collecting eerie photographs which the intention of creating a books of the things he had collected. However, his editor said this wouldn’t sell, so suggested that Ransom try to create a story from the photographs, and so this novel was born. This is the first book in the trilogy and follows Jacob who idolizes his Grandpa due to the stories he tells from his time in Miss Peregrine’s orphanage, to the odd photographs he owns. In Jacob’s fifteenth year, his Grandpa takes a bad turn, believing that invisible monsters are coming to get him, and shortly dies leaving behind his dying word: Rosebud. Suffering a monumental loss lands Jacob with a psychiatrist who tells Jacob that to best way to deal with his depression is to go the his island his Grandpa grew up on, and find the explanation behind his cryptic last words. On Cairholm Island in Wales, Jacob finds Miss Peregrine’s home – which is in ruins – and starts to investigate. Here he discovers a girl who can create fire with her hands and a boy who can turn invisible. Both he has seen before in his Grandpa’s photographs. They chase him and Jacob suddenly finds himself trapped in September 3rd 1940, the day Miss Peregrine’s home was destroyed by a bomb dropped during World War II. And he’s stuck in a time loop where the day restarts just as the bomb hits the home. I simply adored the use of prose and photographs and how they worked together to move the story forward. If you’re looking for a creepy read, this is it! About the reviewer Charlotte Selby is a 22 year old Creative Writing and English DMU graduate who can be found in a dark corner working on her novel.
Having seen some of the previous figure work in the unnamed series by Dips Patel, I was excited and honoured that he offered to create a one off unique piece for me.
Untitled. Pen and Indian Ink on Canvas (60” x 24”) 2012
Looking at this piece it is easy to overlook the complexities depicted within the perceived simplicity of the figures. When I look at this piece I am drawn to the emotions that I feel each individual figure appears to represent. The slight tilt of a head showing me sadness, two figures facing each other showing me friendship and love and two back to back figures showing anger and frustration. I feel that you can look at this piece in a range of different moods and find a figure that you can relate to at that specific moment in time, demonstrating the subjective nature of this work.
Untitled. Pen and Indian Ink on Canvas (40” x 35”) 2014
Each time I look at it I notice new intricacies and have new thoughts about the work. The fading of the figures into the background adds another level of depth and the perception of infinity, perhaps also representing the infinite amount of emotions one can displace onto the figures.
About the reviewer Hesmita Patel has recently qualified as an Occupational Therapist, embarking upon her career in sunny Manchester. She likes baking, reading, occasionally running quite far for charitable causes and has been known to worship at the altar of fizzy cola bottles, having converted from the Church of Strawberry Laces.
I discovered her novels this summer. The first two – Black Water Rising and The Cutting Season – kept me awake. I needed to know what happens next. The third, Pleasantville, must wait until I can afford a couple of sleepless nights.
Attica Locke writes thrillers. But her novels are more than that. They explore the very recent past but also a deeper, troubling history. Jay Porter, the lead character in Black Water Rising, cannot escape the damage and injustice he and his comrades suffered during the Civil Rights movement. Caren Gray in The Cutting Season, manages a southern plantation which is romanticised for modern tourists, but the six surviving slave-huts remind her that her ancestors were once “owned,” and later controlled, by the rich white people who possessed the estate.
Both novels do what good thrillers must: they tell a gripping story and create suspense. They do more than that too. Thrillers are always concerned with uncovering a secret which matters to the characters in the novel. But these thrillers also uncover secrets which matter to us all, and which challenge the comforting stories about our world’s history.
The main characters Attica Locke has created are not perfect human beings or simple victims. They are people who are complex and sometimes inconsistent – as most people are. They make decisions which are sometimes wrong. While they are affected by historical oppression, they are also capable of standing up for what is right – but they know the cost may be heavy and that it may also be borne by those they love most. As readers we are drawn in by the agonising choices they are forced to make.
If you like thrillers, and if you care about people and history, read Attica Locke. You won’t be disappointed.
About the reviewer Kathleen Bell is a poet and fiction-writer whose recent pamphlet at the memory exchange is published by Oystercatcher. She is a Principal Lecturer in Creative Writing at De Montfort University.
I confess that although I’ve enjoyed watching Bette Davis on film, I know very little about her, other than her reputation as a bit of a diva. So it was fascinating to watch this play based on key incidents in her career, which challenged that reputation and put it in context.
Starting with her arrival in Hollywood, supported by her strong and determined mother, Bette immediately appears as independent, ambitious, and unafraid of voicing her opinions. The studio are more interested in her looks than her ability, but this is an attitude Bette refuses to bow to, and her early career is characterised by frequent spats with producer Jack Warner. Although he attempts to sideline her by casting her in second-rate films, Bette is not to be deterred, and succeeds in becoming one of the most famous, Oscar-winning actresses of the Golden Age of film. But it’s not without pain.
The play is cleverly structured so that an older Bette, drunk after winning an Oscar, reflects on the path of her career, which is told in a series of flashbacks. Confiding in lighting engineer Bud Gabrielli, she reveals the struggles she has faced but also the strength she gained from her mother’s support, which gave her the belief and commitment necessary to succeed as a woman in a man’s world. She has indeed had to be “more than a woman”. Counterpointed by Bud’s own story of his same-sex relationship, and how he has to disguise his true self from an intolerant society, the play highlights the flipside of the Golden Age and how people adopt different strategies in order to survive and thrive. It’s moving, and still very pertinent: the film industry is still rife with sexism, and homophobia is all too prevalent, so by holding up a mirror to the past it makes you recognise the continued struggles of the present. It’s also frequently funny – the character of Miss Murgatroyd, Warner’s secretary who cheekily subverts his instructions and his rages is brilliant, and the Catholic landlady Mrs O’Leary’s tirade against the “boy and his handyman” living upstairs is just hilarious. The actors portraying all the roles in the play are excellent; Bette’s sheer physical presence, ably played by Francesca Leone and Emily Dilworth, is spot on, really conveying the feistiness of Bette as both a performer and a person. And Bryanie Whittingham-Ball as Miss Murgatroyd and starlet Miriam Hopkins almost steals the show. Ben Crome as Jack Warner clearly thoroughly enjoyed being nasty (although bested every time by Bette!) and Alex Hatcher’s role as Bud is nicely understated, hitting just the right note of genuine in an industry of fakery.
Russell’s play is finely observed and crafted with great affection for his subject, his passion for this era of film-making shining through. He commented to me after the play’s second performance that he wanted to portray strong women, and I certainly feel that he succeeded; Bette’s story is quite inspirational, and it’s given me a new perspective on the old films that I’ve watched (and will now seek out to watch as well). This is Russell’s first play to be performed, but I hope it’s the first of many – his blog at https://russelliney.wordpress.com/ charts his creative work and the play is available to watch on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITmPCh_011Q. Well done Russell on a brilliant début!
About the reviewer Jo Westwood is a librarian, editor, writer, gardener and geek who loves curling up with a good book. As her job as a specialist children’s librarian means she reads at least one novel per day, that’s rather fortunate, and her obsession with the novels of Phil Rickman in particular is praise indeed. She’s currently working on creating a time travel device that will allow her to fit in even more reading, as there are far too many good books and rather less time in which to read them than she would like. Jo's blogs at anniseed.com
There is a wonderful twentieth-century composer called Webern, who managed to encompass whole Mahlerian symphonies, whole concertos, musical drama, tragedy, comedy, in the space of a couple of minutes. Something similar might be said of a new miniature e-book by Ambrose Musiyiwa, called The Gospel According to Bobba. Here, encapsulated in twenty-four micro-poems, is a microcosmic universe of knowledge, encompassing everything from politics:
Bobba says in a country that's afraid of its own shadow schools should be places where light is cast on shadows
... to philosophy:
Bobba says there's something about tea and biscuits which makes the world a beautiful place
... to the significance of an elephant and the number three in a shoe box:
Bobba says imagine a shoe box with an elephant and the number 3 in it
In miniature form, there is surrealism here, psychology, playfulness, sadness, even mini-narratives sustained between the individual micro-poems. The collection might take five minutes to read, but its nano-wisdom reaches out far beyond its twenty-or-so pages. Like Webern's epigrammatic music, it's all rather wonderful.
About the reviewer Jonathan Taylor's books include the novel Melissa (Salt, 2015), and the poetry collection Musicolepsy (Shoestring, 2013). His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk.
Wow, what a story, and a true one… Grab a pizza, shut all your devices, jump in bed and start reading: be prepared to laugh a lot, to cry sometimes, and, most important, to watch all your life walking side by side with Liz in her amazing life journey.
Elizabeth Gilbert, an American journalist and author of short stories, essays and novels, released to the public her memoir in 2006 entitled Eat, Pray, Love. With humour and wisdom, she describes her journey along Italy, India and Indonesia in her attempt to find herself and to discover what really matters in her life. It’s a book about a new beginning, about wonderful people, about sorrow, joy and love.
Eat, Pray, Love is not just a story, it is an inspirational book to everyone, a call to look ourselves with sincerity, and ask whether we truly experience the life that we want.
Thank you, Liz, for sharing with us all your naked thoughts, all your feelings and experiences, all your ups and downs and for showing us that is possible to just pack up your past life and start all over again.
About the reviewer Diana Voinea is a Romanian who started a new life, at the age of 44, in the UK and is having a lot of fun running a coffee shop where she can meet many people and listen to their stories, and that’s just like reading a book every day. In her spare time she loves to travel, climb mountains, run on a snowboard and enjoy every second of her life.
Poet, musician, and teacher Darius Degher interviewed by Alexandros Plasatis
Darius Degher
Darius Degher is a poet, musician, and teacher. His poems have appeared in literary magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. His 2014 poetry book To See the Sound is a New Formalist collection that’s been praised by poets and scholars in both the US and UK. He teaches creative writing online in the English department of Malmö University, Sweden. He’s the founder and editor of the Shipwrights Review, an international literary magazine for second-language English authors. He has a BA in English from UCLA and an MA in creative writing from Lancaster University in England. Darius is also a singer-songwriter who has released six CDs and performed at iconic music venues around the USA. AP. What’s your story with the English language? Did you find it difficult to learn English?
DD. Well, I’m a native Californian, so I didn’t have to work especially hard learning it.
AP. Oh, pardon… I thought you were Swedish. How about Swedish then? Was that difficult?
DD. Yeah, Swedish took some work, and although I’m fluent, I guess I’ve never become an especially good speaker of Swedish. This is because Swedes are such excellent speakers of English that it bred laziness in me. But yes, although I’m a native English speaker, I find beauty in the English language. More importantly, I find bizarre idiosyncrasy, and this is what makes English so rich and vibrant, it seems to me.
AP. You coined the term “decentred English”. Tell me about it. And what's the difference with the term “exophonic writer”? DD. Decentered English is a term that describes the condition of English for the majority of English speakers in the world today. Since the combined number of Second- and Foreign-language English speakers now triples that of native English speakers (1.2 billion to 375 million respectively), native speakers are in the distinct minority.
I coined the term as I pondered this, thinking about how the language will, inevitably, be changing in the future and what constitutes “correctness” in the face of the above numbers. But it’s important to remember that I am not a linguist but a poet. So, the term came from a place more poetic than linguistic. Nevertheless, when my colleague Jean Hudson, who is a linguist, heard the term, she thought it aptly described the situation and encouraged me to use it.
Writers who come from the world of decentered English are usually exophonic writers.
AP. Any advice for decentred English writers?
DD. Yes, submit your work to Shipwrights. More seriously though, decentered English writers face the same challenges of craft mastery that native language writers face. But they face additional challenges related to understanding the idiomatic aspects of English, not to mention dialect and other issues. Imagine the challenges of writing accurate and believable dialogue in a foreign language.
I’m continually amazed at some my students’ ability to do this the way they do. Sometimes I’ll read a text and wonder whether the writer is, in fact, even an exophonic writer because of its remarkably high quality. Then I’ll have a Skype meeting with that same student and hear a definite accent in the spoken English. This surprises and fascinates me.
AP. And the story of Shipwrights?
DD. I founded Shipwrights some eight years ago. It began as a forum for the students in the writing courses at Malmö University in Sweden, but I hoped it would grow beyond simply that. And it has. We now get submissions from, and publish, writers from various countries. The Internet is a natural home for decentered English, and Shipwrights is open to any exophonic writer on the planet. (It’s also open to the submissions of native English writers who live in Scandinavia, because I felt it would be odd to forbid native English writers living in Sweden. So, they are the exception.)
Shipwrights, however, is still growing – and I hope to increase its reach in the coming years.
Every second year we award our Conrad-Nabokov Award to the most promising exophonic writer we’ve published in that period. The award is judged by an outside judge. Once it was judged by Janet Burroway, perhaps the world’s best-selling author of creative writing textbooks. She was surprised by the quality of the writing.
AP. How’s the Creative Writing course at Malmö University going? DD. The Creative Writing courses at Malmö University are about ten years old. There are three levels. I’ve been told that the introductory course is one of the most applied-for courses at the university. Last term there were more than 1000 applicants for the course, which accepts about 70. Sweden doesn’t have a tradition of creative writing at universities, so it was not an easy sell initially. Now that its popularity is proven, and it generates money that supports other courses, it’s been accepted. Our program of three levels is the only thing like it in Sweden, I believe.
The courses also serve another interesting function: they allow expatriate Swedes living all over the world to be part of the Creative Writing community we’ve started.
AP. Do you have mainly Swedish students?
DD. Yes, the majority of students are Swedish, but there are many who are not, including perhaps 5-10% native English speakers. That these writers blend in perfectly well with the Swedes is a testament to the English language skills of the Swedes.
In a way it makes perfect sense for Sweden to be a host of the decentered English community, because Swedes are pretty remarkable foreign-language English speakers.
AP. Why do Swedes want to study Creative Writing in English?
DD. Why Swedes (and others) want to write in English is a fascinating topic. Of course, many of my students are there for purely proficiency-related reasons; but the ones who are more serious as writers have interesting reasons indeed for doing it in English. One reason is the same one that inspires Swedish pop artists to record in English: the market is so much bigger. When you come from a language of only 9 million speakers, there is certainly sometimes a temptation to want to reach more people than that. More interestingly, however, I have students every term who claim they feel more comfortable and more inspired writing in English than they do in Swedish. This is really interesting to me. And this population of decentered English writers is not limited to Sweden, although Swedes may be the most proficient. I’m also getting increasing numbers of students each year from places like Russia and Greece who also want to write in English.
AP. Thanks for this, Darius. Can we listen to one of your songs now?
About the interviewer Alexandros Plasatis lives in Leicester and had short stories published in Overheard: Stories to Read Aloud (2012), Unthology 6 (2015), and Crystal Voices: Ten Years of Crystal Clear Creators (2015).
Untitled. Pen and Indian Ink on Canvas (60” x 24”) 2014
To look at Dips Patel's work is to enter a seductive yet quietly disturbing world where Giacometti-like figures appear to stoop, stare and search the canvas for a way out.
Patel's elongated pen and ink figures have a deep sense of melancholy. The untitled series for example consists of miniature block canvas with two or more figures contained and constrained within a simple linear grid. The deep block frame in which the canvas hang only seems to accentuate the deep sense of foreboding these figures permeate, stuck in an eternal void, suspended in timeless stagnation.
Untitled. Pen and Indian Ink on Canvas (10”x 6”) 2002
That the artist chooses to construct the work using a monochrome palette serves to simplify the response from the viewer. With no palette to distract the eye, the viewer immediately begins to contemplate each figure's presence. The 2D realm in which these eerie figures exist seems silent without sound or depth. The fact that the viewer's interpretation of any narrative is subjective, only serves to enhance the forlorn charm each piece displays.
To view Patel's work is to momentarily escape the at times frenetic and absurdly modern pace of life we now so often inhabit. The viewer has time to draw breath, and quietly absorb the simplicity and elegance of each work before opening the door, powering up the smartphone and stepping out once again into modern wired life.
About the reviewer Suzanne Wells is an Art History graduate from the Courtauld Institute of Art. She has her own caricature pet portrait business producing quirky one off pieces with a strong emphasis on character.
It was a fortunate moment when I started reading Divergent. Indeed, I was living in England at the time, and I had the chance to spare some time to visit a town near Leicester, where I was living. And it was by train that I wanted to travel. It was a period of changes for me: I had been living on my own, far from my country and I had just decided to travel alone to visit some place. So I was in Birmingham train station, waiting for my train and I decided to buy a book to read during the waiting and the travelling. I was looking at the titles and then I saw it. I had seen the movie just two months ago, and I liked it, so I said to myself, “Why not?” And I must say, it was worth it. The story is set in a dystopian world, and the first volume of the series is basically about feeling different from the others and the will to change, and this for me meant a lot. I had never travelled alone, and also I had never been far from home or lived on my own, but I decided to be more independent and, as the character of the book, those things made me very strong. So it has been the perfect reading for travelling, both while I had been waiting for the train and during the travelling. I would really recommend it. About the reviewer Sara Bernardi was born in Italy and studied Dentistry at the University of L’Aquila. She is currently a 3rd year PhD student and had lived in England for 4 months in 2014 as a visiting PhD Student at DMU.
