Creatives in profile: interview with Justin Sullivan

August 10, 2018August 9, 2018 / nitrbcontributor / Leave a comment

Justin Sullivan

Justin Sullivan is a singer and songwriter; the founding member and lead singer of New Model Army. Formed in 1980 to play two gigs, 14 studio and four live albums later they are still going strong, releasing Winter in 2016, and currently touring South America. He also has two solo albums, and is part of Red Sky Coven, in which he performs with Joolz Denby and Rev. Hammer.

INTERVIEWER

Tell us about yourself – your background and your lifestyle.

SULLIVAN

I never tell too much about myself. It’s all out there if people really want to know…

INTERVIEWER

Music or writing as a first love – which came first, and how do they coexist in your output?

SULLIVAN

Music always came first. Like many people growing up, music made sense of the world and the mysteries of life and experience when nothing else did. I found that I had an ability to shape ideas and words later. Their coexistence is a tricky issue for me – how much precision and meaning to sacrifice for the sake of the song as a whole is a constant question. I love the ‘ideas stage’ of song-writing; that’s the easy bit – but the actual construction of songs is just a question of ‘putting the hours in’.

INTERVIEWER

Who and/or what inspires you?

SULLIVAN

Anything, everything. Things I see, read, stories that other people tell me. I try not to write too much about my own life and experiences; many songs begin with ‘I’ but really they are other people’s stories.

INTERVIEWER

You have often told of your love of being “by, in, or on the water”, and much of your work details this love. Where does this love stem from, and how does it inform your writing?

SULLIVAN

There is a physical sensation of communion when swimming in the sea or rivers because the water is moving around you, with you, almost like another sentient being. I also think that constant change is the principle of life but while forests and mountains and seasons are changing they’re not really happening in our time scale. The movement of waves and tides is much more something we can relate to.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have a writing practice/system/habit?

SULLIVAN

The way we write songs is to have two cupboards. One is marked musical ideas – like drumbeats, chord sequences, bits of melody, bass-lines, jam sessions, anything collected from all members of the band. The other is marked lyrical ideas and at all time I have notebooks with me in which I write – sometimes just a line or idea, sometimes a whole story or rambling thought. When both cupboards are full I sit down and start to put things together; it’s important to wait until both cupboards are full and not be stuck in a studio scratching heads looking for inspiration. If you’ve got enough in storage the process becomes pretty easy – again just a question of ‘putting the hours in’.

INTERVIEWER

Your writing work is sometimes cited as poetry – is there a significant difference between the poetry and lyrics in your mind, and if so, what is or are the differences?

SULLIVAN

I think there is a difference. Poetry (or at least good poetry) can have a certain musicality but it doesn’t have to be sung. The rise and fall of words can be altered by the person reading. In song-writing the melodic rises and falls are fixed and have to be right.

INTERVIEWER

Your lyrics are syntactically coherent throughout each song, and many convey full and detailed stories and sentiment. Many musicians write music first, fitting the vocal line, and thus the lyric, to the melody. What is your practice, and how does it affect the writing of lyrics, and the evolution of a song?

SULLIVAN

Mostly (though not always) I write in a recognisable form of structured verses, choruses, breaks etc into which I have to fit lyrical ideas as best I can, which takes more work and involves more hard choices.

INTERVIEWER

You and Robert Heaton worked closely with writer Joolz Denby, putting music to her poetry for several of her albums. In terms of composing music for lyrics/poetry, what do you think is most important to keep in mind?

SULLIVAN

I have done a few albums with Joolz – as have other musicians. These are particularly attractive projects because her poetry usually has a strong narrative, which allows music to be built around it – almost like a film soundtrack. On top of this she has an outstandingly musical reading voice (she once worked with a very famous Canadian jazz pianist who said it was like working with a jazz singer). We begin with the poem of course but can spend so long on the music that it’s important not to forget that in the end it’s still all about the poem…

INTERVIEWER

Do you have a specific ‘reader’ or audience in mind when you write?

SULLIVAN

No, never.

INTERVIEWER

Is language itself a love for you, or just a tool? What are your thoughts on fluidity and development of language in the age of “text speak” and emojis?

SULLIVAN

Yes, language is a fascination and I am in total admiration of certain poets and authors, but as I said at the beginning, it does come secondary to the music for me. I like the way language changes. I love text messages for their brevity and precision. I’m not especially quick-witted in conversation. So the chance to think for a minute before replying is welcome. I don’t hate emojis as some people often claim to. In wider social media (I don’t do Facebook but of course I’ve seen it often), they are essential. In normal every day human conversation we read each other’s faces as well as listen to words which is incredibly important to gauge what people really mean, whether they’re joking or not, whether they’re hurt or upset. Without this communication the possibilities for misunderstandings and the escalation of bad feeling is multiplied many times over; hence the development of emojis.

INTERVIEWER

How would you say your writing has changed through your career, and what have been the major influences on its development?

SULLIVAN

When I started, I felt a need to state positions, emotions. After the first few years, I’d done that and didn’t feel the need to repeat them. Instead it became interesting to tell stories, even those of people whom I don’t naturally agree with or find sympathetic. It goes without saying that Joolz has been the most major influence on my development as a writer but of course there have been many others too. As lyricists I really admire Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen, Gillian Welch, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, lots of country and hip-hop artists all for their precision and poetry. Oh and many, many others.

INTERVIEWER

In Song To The Men Of England, you “co-write” with Percy Bysshe Shelly, and the social climate in the West is hugely polarised, monochromatic and angry right now – what are your thoughts on poetry and music as protest and documentation?

SULLIVAN

Well I wouldn’t say we co-wrote it. It was for a straightforward political project – I can’t remember whose idea it was to use the Shelley poem, probably Joolz’s, and we created some music that fit with her reading. Political poetry and music rarely change people’s minds but what they can do is give focus and clarity to a half-thought and, most importantly, make people aware that they’re not alone in how they feel about the World. This is incredibly important. We’ve really felt a new electrical charge at our concerts in the last 5 years or so – as if people NEED this music more than ever and the sense of community that it creates.

INTERVIEWER

When we last met, you were telling me of how you’d found a proper original punk rock recording studio in Bradford, that you were looking forward to going to. Has that bourn fruit, and if so, what and when should we expect?

SULLIVAN

A long time ago now. ‘Winter’ was made there and so will at least part of whatever we do next.

Creatives in profile: interview with Will Eaves

July 30, 2018 / professorwu / 3 Comments

Will Eaves is a novelist, poet and teacher. He was Arts Editor of the Times Literary Supplement from 1995 to 2011 before moving to the University of Warwick, where he is an Associate Professor in the Writing Programme. His novel-in-voices The Absent Therapist was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2014. The Inevitable Gift Shop, a collection of poetry and prose, was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for Poetry in 2016 and commended by the Poetry Book Society. The first chapter of his most recent novel, Murmur, was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Prize in 2017.

In other words, Will Eaves is an okay dude. His writing has been described by critics as “scrupulous, humane, sad and strange”, carrying “an exciting sense of newness” that feels crucial at a time when mainstream publishing seems increasingly interested only in publishing copies of risk-free, commercially successful novels that are copies of other commercially successful novels.

In conversation, Eaves speaks the way he writes—with point, clarity and wit. Indeed, the reverse is also true: he writes in a way that feels like conversation.

INTERVIEWER

Tell me about yourself, where you live and your background/lifestyle

EAVES

I live in Brixton, at the top of Brixton Hill. I’ve been in the area now for nearly thirty years, though I come from the West Country (Bath) originally. I went to a comprehensive school: I think it’s the best kind of education there is. Far from perfect, but fair. It is absurd to talk about freedom of choice, in education or health, if choice is something only the rich can afford. Of course, environment has a lot to do with contentment at a young age, and the setting was beautiful. I liked Cross Country rather than contact sports – I was small and thin – and the weekly runs that the bigger kids hated (because of all the hills) took me through a kind of paradise of beech forest and meadows. While the PE teachers repaired to the staff room for a well-deserved fag break after all that fiddling about with whistles, we ran through Rainbow Wood at the top of Ralph Allen Drive and then down through the grounds of Prior Park towards Mike Casford’s house, where we’d stop for coffee and biscuits. I can’t run any more, which is a shame, but I can remember – well, I conjure up – the trees and thistles on those runs, and the view, and the freedom. The teachers smoked, we had coffee. Fair enough. There was some bullying at school, but nothing too bad. I was conscious of being small. I still think someone is going to push me into the road. On the other hand, I could be sharp, and I learnt to answer back. I don’t mind being taken to task, or disagreed with, or even disliked. I mind being exploited by the dull and fortunate.

INTERVIEWER

Is writing your first love, or do you have another passion?

EAVES

It is a habit, more than anything else. I think of it as the sum of things that leads to a poem or a story or a book. I’ve always liked trees, and seeing seeds I’ve planted come up in the spring. Music, too: I played the piano and organ as a teenager; I liked the sociability and solitude of both those instruments; I can sing a bit. I enjoy acting. If I could afford it, I’d have a house with a music room. I was a latecomer to sex, and then had a great deal of it for twenty-five years! I’ve loved being gay. Even the bad experiences have been good, because you meet such different people. I’ve been properly in love twice. The last time was eight years ago and completely changed me.

INTERVIEWER

Who inspires you?

EAVES

My aunt. She is ninety. She left the UK in 1947, at the age of nineteen, and went to New York, where she taught at the Central School and met her husband, Bob Bollard, who was a Broadway composer and director. She got to know Sydney Pollack and Harry Belafonte and became involved in Democratic politics for a while. Bob died of cancer in his thirties and Scilla was completely stuck, no money, three kids. But she got a government grant to go to medical school and became a doctor. An ear specialist. I have never heard her complain about anything. I dread losing her. She is ten times the person I will ever be, but I try to follow her example. She liked Murmur, and if it passed muster with her, well, that’s good enough for me.

Writers – the Exeter Book, Shakespeare’s late plays and sonnets, Montaigne, Austen, Coleridge, George Eliot, Flaubert, Christina Rossetti, Auden, William Golding, Penelope Fitzgerald, whoever I happen to be reading (Patricia Beer), Elmore Leonard, Thom Gunn. Also, many comedians and comic writers – Victoria Wood, Lily Tomlin, Joe Keenan, Billy Wilder, Paul Rudnick. Musicians and composers – Bach, Poulenc, Chopin, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin.

And my Dad, John. He is a painter. He has felt it necessary to keep going. His approach is very much “do what you can” in life, which is sensible (and kinder than “do your best”).

I also admire my friends for a variety of reasons.

INTERVIEWER

Your books The Absent Therapist and The Inevitable Gift Shop have both been praised for their fragmentary form. Could you tell us a little about why you chose to structure your work in this way?

EAVES

I like the way speech patterns and conversations derail themselves. Good dialogue, like most things in life, is a combination of determined response and wild digression or misprision. I like the moments in arguments when people suddenly hear themselves yelling, or realise they’ve lost ground, and try to shut things down by changing the subject or feigning emotion. Or play dumb, or defend people who don’t need defending and infuriate everyone else. Anger is often dangerous in life, but it’s also the essence of comedy. I was so frustrated with my life, just before I started The Absent Therapist, and felt I’d run aground. Nothing more to say. Which was a kind of turning-point, because when you have nothing to say you start listening, and The Absent Therapist is really a short book about listening – to the people who interrupt each other, the people who sit quietly and take mental notes. The little monologues are both external and internal, and often seem to be about recreating a moment or justifying a position in retrospect.

Memory is dynamic. It isn’t the retrieval of discrete bits of information, but a sort of paradoxical jigsaw puzzle in which the remembered image changes with the piecing-together. I think that’s what I was trying to get at in The Inevitable Gift Shop, which was an attempt at an honest and therefore slightly discontinuous memoir. I was also in terrific pain at the time, and pain has a way of completely fracturing the mind. You don’t lose your mind. In some obvious ways, the qualia of mental experience are massively heightened. But the intensity of pain can be distracting.

INTERVIEWER

While the idea of collage as an artistic form is not new in the visual arts, do you think it is increasingly a form that is influencing writing – or the literary industry?

EAVES

There does seem to be a fashion for it, yes. But I wonder if the difference between collage and continuous narrative isn’t overstated. For example, a lot of ancient text is fragmentary – all that’s left after the ruin of the ages – and the suggestive reconstitution of those fragments (the psalms, the surviving tragic drama, the Exeter Book etc.) has helped build the Western canon in its long and short forms.

All writing is collage, or perhaps tapestry, in the sense that it is a composition of elements. The distinguishing property is the ordering of those elements – whether the collage serves one story, or image, or many; and often the “one story”, on closer inspection, is the many. Proust is long but kaleidoscopic, motes in one immense shaft of sunlight. I think that a lot of the fuss about experimentalism is slightly embarrassing. If you step back from the collage, you rediscover a sense of its cohesiveness; the edges become joined. A political metaphor.

INTERVIEWER

We know that life does not run in linear patterns – and rather comes in flashes; moments of clarity and inspiration. As Daniel Dennett notes in his work, ‘Consciousness explained’; “we tend to conceive of the operations of the mind as unified and transparent, [yet] they’re actually chaotic. There’s no invisible boss in the brain, no central meaner, no unitary self in command of our activities and utterances.” Do you think collage – or a fragmentary plot structure – is a more natural way of organising a piece of writing than traditional models, such as the plot-driven novel?

EAVES

There are lots of different questions, here. I think we need first to clear up something about linearity – to distinguish between the nature of time, as it affects the objective world (and the body), and the nature of mental reality. It’s an exaggeration to say that “life does not run in linear patterns”, because of course it does have a marked linearity for humans: we are born, we live, and then we die. That is the plot of life. But that is only time as we conceive of it historically; on closer inspection, time as we really apprehend it mentally is rather different: a thing that is experienced both as a linear process (we see its ageing, history-producing effect) and as something that can be reconfigured in (see above) the dynamic of memory. The odd thing is that this mental dynamism – a property of the consciousness that Dan Dennett and others consider to be an effect of ordinary material processes – turns out to be quite a good description of the way time operates at the level of the quantum equation, where physical law does not discriminate between the past and the future. (The direction of time’s arrow is given, it is thought, by the state of extreme orderliness at the beginning of the universe; but, statistically speaking, “chaos” is much more likely.)

What this combination of characteristics suggests to me is that consciousness, like time, is both highly personal and fundamental: the subjective component, the feeling that we are experiencing something unique to us, is not an illusion, or “just” an ideation, but an aspect of reality – of relativistic spacetime, in fact. Dennett is a brilliant man, but “we tend to conceive of the operations of the mind as unified and transparent” seems to me to be wide of the mark. I have never met anyone who thinks of her mind in this way. The homunculus language of psychology – the “boss in the brain” – is a cartoon. Unless we are on powerful drugs, we normally conceive of minds as being complex and irreducible, as they may well be. My own feeling is that consciousness arises from material processes but cannot be reduced to them (the No Way Back Paradox). The fact that it cannot be reduced without losing its USP – the personal vantage-point – tells us something about our inadequate grasp of those ordinary material processes and their relationship to time.

I don’t see how a fragmentary narrative could be “more natural” than a unitary one because both are artistic constructions. But is fragmentation more realistic? Possibly.

INTERVIEWER

Your latest book, Murmur, puts us inside the mind – inside the dreams, even – of Alan Turing during his chemical castration. Simply, what processes do you go through to so vividly depict the most intimate moments of a genius’s mind at a time of extreme pain?

EAVES

I’m glad you feel that the experiment worked: thank you. It’s hard to say what one does. Writing a book – and perhaps especially a book about a dreadful transfiguration – is a little like having a protracted fit. Once it’s over, there’s no way to retrieve the feverish actuality of the creative moment. Thank God. I just remember not enjoying it very much, and feeling exiled from myself – a dissociative condition I couldn’t very well moan about because I’d chosen it. It’s a short book, but it took years to write, mostly because it coincided with a period of restricted movement, and of course I wonder about the relationship of that period to the anxieties inherent in the subject-matter. I also had to continue working as a teacher to pay the mortgage and the bills.

I was very nervous about tackling Turing. I’m not a mathematician so I had to work hard to understand the meta-mathematics of Godelian incompleteness, the Entscheidungsproblem, etc, and I hope I haven’t made too many errors. For fictional purposes, he had to be his own avatar: I couldn’t allow myself to put words into the mouth of a genius. That would have been wrong. But I think my overall wager is sound. Murmur tries to find a dramatic paraphrase for Turing’s physical, mental and political predicament. It asks: how does one fit the personal experience of trauma into a material conception of the world? The story’s scientist, Alec Pyror, discovers that the outward responses one gives to the world are not necessarily related to the inner life, which may be crying out, in great distress. At the same time, the novel resists that pain. It’s the story of a man trying to overcome desolation and self-pity by objectifying the trauma.

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel any ethical responsibility as a writer?

EAVES

Yes. Ethics is the social dimension of morality. Lots of books have been written about the social role of the artist, and I don’t wish to misrepresent the complexity of that commentary, because there are so many different ways of making an artistic contribution to society. But, as I see it, my ethical responsibility is not to wear uniform. Writing springs from a strange combination of personal aesthetic ambition, vanity, and guarded conviction. It is much more provisional than the artefactual solidity of a book might suggest: this book is what I have to say this time, and it will be a different performance next time. Ethics, for a writer, are unavoidable because publication is the social dimension of private inquiry. The process is, and should be, discomfiting. One way of producing bad writing, bad philosophy and sclerotic politics is to attempt to get art, argument and policy to represent a standard of conduct that already exists – an ideology, I guess. Writers should be wary of all that. If you find yourself expressly on the side of a political party, or a movement, fine, but be prepared to find yourself in disagreement with it. Soon. The most important thing about a conviction is the moment when circumstances threaten its validity.

INTERVIEWER

What role do writers and artists have in shaping culture – or influencing social conversations?

EAVES

This is an enormous question. There is one’s ambition to do something, and there is the true state of play. There is the role one’s ego perceives a writer to have – the role one desires, or fears, perhaps – and there is one’s actual insignificance. How you think you come over, how you are. What you think you can do, what gets done. If one thinks of art and writing as one might think of anything else in life, then the answer must be that one shapes and influences one’s surroundings in a piecemeal fashion, sometimes by design but mostly by accident, and of course the shaping and influencing are reciprocal. Often, it’s the work and the actions that take place on one’s blind side that count for most: the contributions to a local paper, the email sent at just the right time, the note to a councillor. Nothing lasts, and that’s fine. We rediscover art and culture and form and justice. Also, it’s a mistake to confuse the public voice with the social voice. Private correspondence is social, too. The most important things I have written have been letters to people who, for one reason or another, needed some acknowledgment.

INTERVIEWER

What, do you feel, is the relationship between fiction and non-fiction; prose and poetry?

EAVES

A fruitful misalliance. W. Somerset Maugham (in his postscript to The Casuarina Tree): “A work of fiction, and perhaps I should not go too far if I spoke more generally and said, a work of art, is an arrangement which the author makes of the facts of his experience with the idiosyncracies of his own personality.”

INTERVIEWER

A running theme in some of your books is the subject of Artificial Intelligence. In a world increasingly full of modern technology, and in which we now have computer programmes writing prose and poetry (including re-writing Harry Potter), what role do human beings have to play when surrounding by all this early-form AI? Are you as sceptical about AI as, say, the late Stephen Hawking?

EAVES

I’m not sure Hawking was sceptical about it. He was alarmed.

There are two issues. One is the sci-fi existential anxiety about conscious machines, which is obviously predicated on an understanding of what sort of thing consciousness itself might turn out to be. We don’t know. We’re not there, yet, and conscious robotics are a way off, because what we have so far is responsive machinery behaving in ways to which we may, if we choose, assign the properties of intelligence. But assigning such properties to a piece of technology is not the same thing as claiming intentionality for the machine itself – that is, the capacity to refer to things outside itself, to understand the meaning of the rules it follows, etc. Metaphorical language isn’t helping us much, because we tend to forget that “messages”, for example, are conscious-user-dependent concepts. A computer doesn’t send messages; you read them.

Conscious machinery will happen. But machinery doesn’t need to be conscious for it to play a significant, symbiotic and potentially destructive role in social and economic development. Non-conscious tech – automation – has been around a long time and is becoming more sophisticated; the efficiencies/growth model of capitalism means that it will absorb most remaining manufacturing labour in the coming decades. What then?

The vulnerability of labour in a national context is the second problem. Our anxieties about borders and migration are displaced anxieties about borderless technology and the silent transfer of executive power from the defined state (a country with a border and jurisdictional limits) to the transnational corporation. Cyber warfare is a demonstration of the fact that states are losing their integrity: the more powerful countries use the “freeflow” of cyberspace to advance their political agenda (as Emily Taylor has argued in Cyber Policy Journal); but this goes hand-in-hand with corporatism, it turns out, because the media platforms manipulated by these countries, and flooded with bots and micro-targeting, are mega-companies with enormous worker populations across the globe and the ability to pick and choose their tax liabilities.

I’m not sure how we wrest back control. Corporates create the tech, the tech crosses or cancels the border, the states survive in name only, the corporates stay in charge.

INTERVIEWER

How would you define creativity?

EAVES

Consequential wonder.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have a typical ‘writing process’?

EAVES

No. I used to say “start, then keep going”, but I don’t know what “start” means any more. I try to nurture a habit of reading and annotation, hoping that the trail of scrawl will lead to an interesting, half-original thought, and so to a premise, and then some figures in a doorway . . .

INTERVIEWER

What does the term ‘writer’ mean to you?

EAVES

Not much. Journalism is a profession – and an important one. Writing is one of its tools. Writers are presumably people who write. It’s too vague as a term to be of much use, though people do like to call themselves writers, don’t they? It’s a conversation stopper, that’s for sure.

INTERVIEWER

Could you tell us a little about some of the future projects you’re working on?

EAVES

I’m sorry to say that I can’t, because there aren’t any.

INTERVIEWER

Could you give your top 5 – 10 tips for writers?

EAVES

Read slowly and carefully. Write letters. Eat properly. Walk. Don’t be afraid to stop: other people matter more in the end, and it’s not a race. Learn to spell and punctuate. Look up.

Creatives in profile: interview with Anna Saunders

June 18, 2018 / professorwu / Leave a comment

Are there any sights more cheering than crowds of readers tramping across a field carrying books, or sitting under canopies discussing the minutiae of a single line of poetry, or a page of fiction? Increasingly, we live in such a fast-paced world that leaves precious little room for these acts of literary activity (for ‘activity’, may we read instead, ‘rebellion’?). Instead of thinking about Tennyson, or Eliot or Woolf or Plath, we must spend our days flicking through the endless annals of social media; while corporations pipe endless Muzak into our ears and other orifices, and we slave away for 80 hours a week for stagnating wages, just so we can afford the shiny and colourful things advertising billboards and signs on every public surface insist we must purchase immediately.

In such a world, events that enable literary conversations and communion to flourish are, therefore, to be cherished. It is an honour, therefore, to bring you the following interview with Anna Saunders – founder of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival.

Anna is the author of Communion, (Wild Conversations Press), Struck, (Pindrop Press) Kissing the She Bear, (Wild Conversations Press), Burne Jones and the Fox ( Indigo Dreams) and the Ghosting for Beginners ( Indigo Dreams, Spring 2018 ) described as ‘ a beautifully evocative read’ by Fiona Sampson.

She has had poems published in journals and anthologies, which include Ambit, The North, New Walk Magazine, Amaryllis, Iota, Caduceus, Envoi, The Wenlock Anthology, Eyeflash, and The Museum of Light.

Described as ‘a poet who surely can do anything’ by The North, ‘a modern myth maker’ by Paul Stephenson and as ‘a poet of quite remarkable gifts’ by Bernard O’Donoghue, Anna founded the Cheltenham Poetry Festival in 2010 as an all-singing, all-dancing festival – one that fuses poetry and music, film, drama and visual art. Most importantly of all – it helps brings creatives together (which is where they belong, if you ask us).

INTERVIEWER

Tell us about yourself, where you live and your background/lifestyle

SAUNDERS

I live in Cheltenham in Gloucestershire though originally come from Hoylake – a coastal town not far from Liverpool. I am lucky to be able to go ‘home’ often and enjoy the vibrant cultural life of Liverpool, and walks along the shore, as well as having a home in the heart of the Cotswolds.

I come from a family of journalists and writers – one boss said I had ‘ink in my blood’. Most of my life has revolved around the literary arts; consuming or producing them. I am a poet, author of 5 collections of poetry and the Founding Director of Cheltenham Poetry Festival, I also teach creative writing.

INTERVIEWER

Is writing your first love, or do you have another passion?

SAUNDERS

I love any immersive experience – walking by the sea, watching live music, reading, going to the theatre, spending time with people who inspire me.

Running a poetry festival is a great joy too – it’s exhilarating to have a creative vision and see it come to fruition. I really enjoy ‘poet shopping’ when I am building the programme. It’s always a thrill to bring your literary idols to town. Last year for example I booked Matthew Sweeney, whose work I’ve always greatly admired;I programmed Kathy Towers, Sasha Dugdale, Fiona Sampson and Wayne Holloway Smith, too. It was a thrill to meet them all and I felt a little star struck.

INTERVIEWER

When you write – be it poetry or fiction – how much of the finished manuscript is in your mind when you start out?

SAUNDERS

When I started writing my last two collections, I had some idea of the shape of the books, or at least their driving themes.

Burne Jones and the Fox (Indigo Dreams) was inspired by a love affair between Maria Zambaco and the pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne Jones, I tell the story of their intensive and destructive love affair through a series of poems, the collection also explores what I see as the duality within us – between the feral and the civilized, the artist and the fox. Ghosting for Beginners also has a consistent theme – i.e. what ‘haunts’ us for good or bad. I guess both these books are like concept albums!

INTERVIEWER

Joyce Carol Oates once said that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out “are they as crazy as I am?” Do you have any particularly crazy writing habits?

SAUNDERS

I usually have to write first drafts on rough scrappy paper – ideally without lines! I do a lot of walking around, muttering to myself – is that crazy enough?

INTERVIEWER

For all writing, the importance of finding the right ‘voice’ is of course crucial. What voice does Anna Saunders, poet, speak with?

SAUNDERS

I have been told I ‘write like an American’ –perhaps that’s because of my direct, ostensibly conversational voice. Rory Waterman said my work was ‘superbly imagistic’ which was a huge compliment – I aim to empower my work with the use of potent images, and of course I use legend, and classic narratives.Paul Stephenson called me a ‘modern myth maker’.

INTERVIEWER

Does your reading affect what you write?

SAUNDERS

Yes – absolutely. I read a lot of poetry and while I am writing I keep dipping into books. It’s impossible for me to write well without reading, it’s like needing to hear the music before you start to dance.

INTERVIEWER

Looking around at current trends in poetry, what are your thoughts and feelings on the ‘poetry industry’. If we can define it thus. And how would you advise aspiring poets to break out onto the ‘poetry scene’?

SAUNDERS

I think the poetry scene is thriving. We’ve seen a huge increase in audiences at Cheltenham Poetry Festival and poetry book buying has surged too. There seem to be some incredibly talented spoken word artists and poets emerging daily and I am completely in awe of the work being published by Nine Arches, Indigo Dreams, Bloodaxe, V Press, Seren and other publishers. It is, however, a really competitive industry – and the route to publication can be a convoluted one! I’d advise aspiring poets to read copious amounts, study craft, write every day and keep their eye on journals and on line publications, keep submitting and build up that CV so they can meet the requirements of the publishing houses.

Though having said all that – it should be all about the creative act really, rather than public success. As Virginia Woolf said ‘writing is the most profound pleasure, being read the superficial!’

INTERVIEWER

Can you talk to us about the ethos behind the Cheltenham Poetry Festival – is it important, do you feel, to bring writers and creatives together?

SAUNDERS

I think the Guardian put it perfectly when they described the Festival as ‘a poetry party with a healthy dose of anarchy’ – we try to have a punk spirit; and be questioning, free thinking and speak out against the system from time to time.

We are serious about poetry, but like to have a good time too. There is a great buzz when the festival runs – with audiences getting the chance to hang with some of our greatest living writers. Since the festival kicked off in 2011 we’ve been lucky enough to enjoy performances by some stellar names– they include John Cooper Clarke, Fiona Sampson, Owen Sheers, John Hegley, Hollie McNish, Don Patterson, Clare Pollard, Matthew Sweeney, Murray Lachlan Young, Jacob Polley– to name just a few. And yes, it’s incredibly inspiring for creatives to meet the writers they admire.

INTERVIEWER

James Joyce argued poetry was “always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.” In the modern world, ‘actuality’ is increasingly hard to define – with reality often seeming more fictitious than fiction and beyond the imagination of mainstream culture. How does poetry revolt against actuality in a reality increasingly ‘false’? And what role can poetry play in protest and activism – specifically protest and revolt against current dictats of ‘reality’?

SAUNDERS

My recent work has been inspired by events on the world stage, politics and the crisis of austerity – but I try use dark humour and some aesthetic beauty to address these subjects.

I have found it increasingly difficult to turn away from some of the horrors we are experiencing due to governmental decisions.

I am working on a new book which uses figures from Greek and Roman myth to explore contemporary issues – in one of the poems Persephone goes on Question Time to interrogate Hades, who has abducted her and taken her into the underworld to starve – a great metaphor for the punitive measures of austerity.

INTERVIEWER

Could you give us your top ten writing tips for writers?

SAUNDERS

Read widely and copiously – not just the poets you admire but the ones you find challenging, even dislike. Study the craft. We can learn so much from the writers we love or even loathe.
Ignore the Inner Critic – give yourself time to free write – set a timer and just let your ink flow for 10, 15 minutes – let your imagination have free reign, don’t stop to correct spelling or punctuation. Write wild. Your most exciting ideas can emerge this way.
Write regularly. Keep your appointment with the page and the muse will know when to show up.
Keep a journal, or a writers notebook – open your eyes and ears to what is around you. Get in the habit of being a word magpie and steal conversations, quotes, scenes from around you and get them on the page.
Use a mixture of Latinate and Anglo Saxon language. Too much of the first and your work may seem overwritten and too much of the latter, and it may not sing.
Edit. As Hemingway said ‘first drafts are shit’. Revise, redraft again and again.
Avoid clichés and tired expressions. Avoid abstract nouns and excessive use of adjectives.
Listen to feedback and accept intelligent critiques of your work if they help your hone your craft. Embrace any opportunities to learn ( I studied for a Masters in Creative Writing).
Take risks, believe in your vision, keep going.
Ignore all advice. Except this advice.

Creatives in profile: interview with Michael Caines, co-editor of the Brixton Review of Books

June 11, 2018 / professorwu / Leave a comment

It increasingly appears as though we live in an era where the biggest publishing companies and media organisations are only concerned with stabilising profits for shareholders – and are prioritising making money over supporting originality and new creative ideas.

With the largest corporations influencing so much of the culture we consume, this has the potential to limit us to a devastating cycle of reboots, sequels, prequels and franchises; where the only novels we read are copies of novels that are themselves copies of commercially successful novels. This risk-averse and profit-focussed approach in turn risks homogenising our culture; and limiting our exposure to new ways of thinking.

Yet there are reasons to hope. Across the world, new creative ideas are being put to seed – supported by groups of energetic and enthusiastic individuals.

We caught up with the team behind one such creative endeavour: the Brixton Review of Books, a new literary quarterly magazine – published by a team of creative volunteers who help ensure the magazine remains completely free to readers (though you can also have four copies delivered straight to your door for a tenner).

It’s an honour to bring you this detailed interview with Michael Caines, co-editor of the Brixton Review of Books. Caines also works at the Times Literary Supplement, and is the author of Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century and a founder member of the Liars League.

INTERVIEWER

Tell us about yourself, your background and ethos.

CAINES

I’m an editor on the Times Literary Supplement by day and a layabout by night. I write the odd review, and the odder poem as a private distraction, and have made limited forays into academia, such as writing a book about Shakespeare and the eighteenth century, and editing some plays by female dramatists of the same period. Brigid Brophy and T. F. Powys are among my more recherché hobbyhorses, although I’d argue, of course, with the tedious fervor of the true acolyte, that both should be more widely known that they are at present.

INTERVIEWER

Who inspires you?

CAINES

Brigid Brophy and T. F. Powys. Jane Austen. William Makepeace Thackeray. Anne Thackeray Ritchie. Vernon Lee. Sylvia Townsend Warner. Ronald Firbank. Italo Calvino. Alberto Moravia. Christine Brooke-Rose. The Oulipians. Marguerite Youcenar. Penelope Fitzgerald. Michael Haslam. Lorrie Moore. Peter Reading. Weldon Kees. Elizabeth Bowen. Elizabeth Bishop. Henry Green. Nicholas Mosley. Stewart Home. It’s an incoherent set of influences, I grant you. Yes, they are, some of them, names off the top of my head. There are others who will come to me later. More seriously, there are others who are mainly TLS editors, of infernally greater mental powers than me – damn their eyes.

INTERVIEWER

Can you tell us a bit about Brixton Review of Books – how was it borne into existence?

CAINES

It’s an experiment, you might say: people take all kinds of free newspapers and magazines at tube stations around London, but might some of them take a free literary paper made up of long reads rather than short ones? There are some obvious and quite brilliant models – such as the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books and the TLS itself – to which I suppose the BRB pays the impudent homage of imitation, while paradoxically trying to do its own thing at the same time. I hope for some readers the BRB will serve merely as a suggestion of what’s to come if they aren’t already readers of one of those other, infinitely more prestigious publications. This particular literary newspaper is free, though, and available to all who pass a tube station at the right time, or spots it in a café, bar, bookshop, library, gallery, waiting room etc (the kind of places to which we’re also distributing it).

The Brixton Review of Books – look out for a copy at tube stations around London.

INTERVIEWER

It’s no easy feat to bring a new independent literary magazine into existence. What are some of the main challenges you faced in establishing Brixton Review of Books?

CAINES

Well, for the most part, I put together the first issue by myself, and I enjoyed that a great deal. But it’s a relief to have a small team working on the paper from here on.

Then there’s the money. This “experiment” wouldn’t be happening at all if it weren’t for the generosity of the Literature Matters awards established by the Royal Society of Literature. They gave the BRB the funds and the endorsement to get things going.

Thirdly, there’s usually some agony with the administrative side of these things, such as subscriber copies going astray in the post.

And I also worried for a time that the first issue would be universally despised and scorned and laughed out of existence. That hasn’t happened . . . yet . . . that I know of.

INTERVIEWER

What, do you think, are the biggest opportunities for independent writers and artists within the publishing sector?

CAINES

I suppose there’s a sense in which all writers and artists are (or ought to be) independent, assuming that all trade on some inalienable, intrinsic idiosyncratic approach to their work. Some are just more obviously amenable to the established trade publishers than others, perhaps, and therefore able to cut some kind of a deal. It depends on what a writer or artist truly wants. Publication can mean many things – this airport novel or that pentagonal limited edition with unique perfumes embedded in every leaf – but maybe there’s a mode of publication to suit all tastes. So I suppose the opportunity is out there, and the challenge is finding the right one.

INTERVIEWER

In an era of digital content and e-zines, as well as ‘fake news’ and social media; what role do printed publications like Brixton Review of Books have to play?

CAINES

I’m one of those people – it’s not just me, I hope – who stare at screens for a large portion of the working day but love print. I think I even mean that I can love the material book as a work of art, and reading online, necessary though it often is, forms an instructive contrast to that art. But, er, in less hilfalutin terms, I hope that reading the BRB, or any newspaper or printed work on paper, is simply a change from reading on a screen, and being continuously poked in the eye by electric light.

INTERVIEWER

As editors, do you feel any ethical responsibility for the content you publish?

CAINES

Absolutely – although I tend to mistake ethical responsibility, in this context, for aesthetic responsibility. The two are so easily confused, don’t you think?

INTERVIEWER

Julian Barnes has stated that the problem with the big publishing companies is that they are too risk averse: they are only willing to “publish novels that are copies of other successful novels”. Do you think that independent magazines have a duty to champion independent voices of authors and essayists whose writing may never be given a chance by the bigger companies in the sector?

CAINES

Perhaps, unfortunately, the indie economy as a whole doesn’t have much say in the matter. But either way, I guess that there are plenty of writers temperamentally too rich for the mainstream, and who flourish in indie magazines and in the literary communities to which those magazines belong. But it depends on the magazine’s character. There seem to be some indies that seem to embrace underground-ness, and others that nurture more commercially lofty ambitions. There’s room in the world for both, I hope.

Regarding an aversion to risk: beyond the world of books, some big companies run (what I think they call) “accelerators”, designed to promote and invest in innovation, because innovation is precisely what big companies, for the most part, don’t do well. It’s interesting that so many big publishers, for their part, now run nimble, pseudo-indie imprints, which are arguably meant to play a similar role. The real indies, meanwhile, don’t necessarily receive the recognition and remuneration they deserve – but that inability to er realize an investment may be a further mark of their indie-ness.

INTERVIEWER

The future of literature; of writing – and indeed the future of publishing – are all frequently discussed at great lengths. What are your thoughts on current industry trends – where are we heading?

CAINES

I’m no industry guru. So rather than second-guess the future, may I instead offer you a naïve wish-list?

1) That the books business gets over its daft dependency on the insipid drug that is literary prize culture.

2) That the indie scene flourishes in perpetuity.

4) (3 was unprintable, even online, and was basically a curse on reviewers who think their duty is to their pals in the business rather than their readers.) That somebody in television works out how to make a show about books again.

5) That Amazon mends its ways.

(Well, I did say “naïve” . . . .)

INTERVIEWER

How would you define creativity?

CAINES

A terrible problem we all have to deal with, but some of us are more successful at banishing it than others, poor souls, who have to slog out their guts over “novels” and “villanelles” and the like. Pity them in their enslavement to the myth of art!

Sorry, what was the question again?

INTERVIEWER

Can you tell us a little about your editorial and submissions process? How can aspiring writers get involved?

CAINES

For the most part, we’re commissioning reviews, and trying to come up with an eclectic mixture of voices: younger writers and worn-hoarse-by-time-but-very-much-still-worth-hearing, from different backgrounds, with varying interests. We have three months between issues, and it’s the middle month when things start to get serious – when deadlines becoming more deadly serious/merely deadening etc. I hope we’ll be trying out new writers (writers new to us at least) in every issue, albeit probably not as many as we’d like. The budget isn’t limitless, and dependent to an extent on advertising. Aspiring writers are welcome to get their moneybags mates to take out full-page ads in every issue.

INTERVIEWER

What advice would you give to authors thinking of submitting their work to BRoB – or other publications?

CAINES

We’re only publishing four issues a year, and most of those issues will be full of reviews. We’re planning to run poetry in every issue, and maybe some fiction from time to time. So with expectations suitably lowered, I hope, I suggest that anybody who’s still interested check out our website, then drop us a line and declare some area of especial expertise or even enthusiasm.

I’m not so interested in “pitches” for particular books, incidentally. I’m not ruling them out altogether, but pitches can sometimes seem a little intellectually suspect: it’s not that I sense outright cronyism in every e-mail; rather that I wonder if the would-be reviewer has already made up their mind about the book, whether they’ve read it yet or not. So the result may be fine, terrific even, but can also feel shop-bought and stale rather than nattily bespoke.

INTERVIEWER

What’s next for Brixton Review of Books? What should we look out for?

CAINES

In the not-too-distant future, we’ll do the decent thing and expand the website to look proper n all. We’re hoping to put on a few bookish events around town. (Go on, guess which part of town. Go on!) And there are going to be some good things in the paper itself later in the year. I’m very much hoping, for example, that a few writers with Brixton connections are going to give us little stories about their personal experiences here. That’d be an acceptably educational digression from reviewing books, I hope.

INTERVIEWER

Could you write us a story in six words?

CAINES

Joan arrived, kicked ass – and left.

INTERVIEWER

What are your 5 – 10 top tips for aspiring writers and artists?

CAINES

I’m still aspiring myself, and must stock up on gnomic tips for these occasions. Revise until it looks like you haven’t. Remember style is the ultimate expression of substance. Read New Grub Street. Um. Don’t automatically “um” in the presence of uncertainty? And I’ll get back to you when I’ve thought of a fifth. . . .

Creatives in profile – interview with Katie Paterson

May 23, 2018 / professorwu / 4 Comments

Katie Paterson. Photo by Giorgia Polizzi.

In 2114, 1,000 trees planted a century previously in the Nordmarka forest in Norway will be cut down. From their wood, the pages of 100 texts from 100 authors will be made and published.

How can we make such predictions? Well, this is the end-goal of a generation-defying artistic project called the Future Library. Conceived by Scottish artist Katie Paterson, and supported by library curator and entrepreneur Anne Beate Hovind, it is an idea that has captured global imaginations.

Celebrated authors Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, and Sjón have already committed works to the project, with Turkish novelist Elif Shafak set to add her manuscript to the project at a handover ceremony in early June 2018.

This is a living, breathing, organic artwork that spans time, literature, ecology and human mortality.

So how does one first conceive of such a project? The Nothing in the Rulebook team were honoured to catch up with Paterson – widely regarded as one of the leading artists of her generation – to find out.

It is an honour to bring you this detailed interview…

INTERVIEWER

Could you tell us about yourself, where you live, and your background?

PATERSON

I’ve recently moved back to Scotland, I live in Fife, before that I was in Berlin for about 6 years and before that I lived in London. I studied at Edinburgh College of Art and then the Slade School of Fine Art. I graduated nearly 10 years ago, which is frightening!

INTERVIEWER

Is art your first love, or do you have another passion?

PATERSON

It definitely is; it was the most obvious direction I was going to go in. I knew that from a young age – I was always a daydreamer and spent time lost in other worlds. Of course, it’s difficult when you’re at that age to have any sort of clear vision of what the future is going to hold. I would never have predicted or been able to visualise what has happened in the years that have followed.

INTERVIEWER

Could you tell us a bit about your journey from making that decision – to pursue art – to where you ultimately are now, particularly with the Future Library project?

PATERSON

Throughout my career I’ve remained open to different disciplines. At art school I was wondering around and changing between sculpture and fine art and fashion – and later astronomy and geophysics – and I couldn’t settle on a discipline. It makes sense now because I still don’t really settle when it comes to any disciplines.

I’ve always been quite resourceful when it comes to trying to make projects happen – it was quite clear to me from early on that the kind of ideas I have are complicated and they were never going to happen unless I worked really hard to make them happen – they were going to need willpower and dedication; not just from me but also from other people who would need to be invested in the projects.

INTERVIEWER

It’s interesting you mention the need to rely on others and pitch them often quite complicated ideas; because, as Anne Beate says in her interview with us, when you first get approached with the idea for a project that is for 100 years in the future, it can be quite crazy. But you were quite aware of that?

PATERSON

Oh absolutely – I am so lucky that I met her! She is an absolutely remarkable woman – it takes a lot of dedication for somebody to take on one of my projects; they’re not simple by any means! And especially Future Library. It’s the sort of project that you throw your life into.

INTERVIEWER

With a project of such scale, how did you first conceive of the Future Library?

PATERSON

It was simple I’ve got to say. As these things often can be at the beginning – or at least, it seemed simple. I was drawing tree rings, and as I was doing that I very quickly made a visual connection between tree rings and chapters in a book and paper and trees and time. And I had a vision of a forest that was growing a book, and that the book was made of chapters of tree rings – and it would evolve and grow over time.

That all happened in a snippet of time and then, from there, it grew. I met Anne Beate and it became a stronger concept once I realised that it could happen in reality – even though in my mind it had been one of the wilder ideas that I’ve had.

Tree rings. Future chapters. Photo by Giorgia Polizzi.

INTERVIEWER

In terms of just the practicalities of actually making an idea like that a reality – what steps did you both have to take at that point?

PATERSON

The very first step was proposing it to BI, the producers: ‘I’ve got this idea to grow a forest over 100 years’! Incredibly, they said yes – and then we built the idea slowly, ‘brick by brick’.

I called Anne Beate when I got back to Berlin a few days after the proposal and asked if I could come back to Norway immediately and go to a forest and stay for a while. She was quite surprised, then set it up and I stayed in her relative’s cabin deep in the woods where there was no electricity, no running water.

INTERVIEWER

How did it feel to get really back to basics in that way?

PATERSON

It was a remarkable experience – until then the idea for Future Library was so abstract, I felt I had to go and be in a Norwegian forest for some time to visualise it becoming a reality. There, it became a more solidified idea, imagining the authors and the time scales and how we might build in a ritual every year with the ‘handing over’ ceremonies.

From there, there were several different stages, including finding the forest. Anne Beate liaised with the City of Oslo, who donated us the land and the trees. And then there is the library aspect; we’re creating a silent room inside the new Oslo public library that will open in 2020. It’s going to house the manuscripts for the future, I’m designing it with the architects of the library.

Designing the silent room in the Oslo public library where the manuscripts will be stored for the next one hundred years. Photo credit: Atelier Oslo and Lund Hagem

Many aspects were in place before we started inviting the authors. We didn’t approach Margaret Atwood until we felt like this was really happening.

INTERVIEWER

Until it felt more real and tangible.

PATERSON

Exactly. The trees had taken root.

INTERVIEWER

Did you have any expectations for the project at all? Did you realise it was something authors would want to get involved in, or were you sort of cautious when you first approached Margaret Atwood?

PATERSON

Oh sure we were so shocked and amazed and delighted. It was such a wonderful moment when she said yes, it was a huge seal of approval. Margaret Atwood was a remarkable writer to open the project. Even though we’d planted the forest it was at that moment when I realised ‘this is it; this is something that is going to continue for the rest of our lives’.

Margaret Atwood was the first author to donate a manuscript to the Future Library. Photo by Giorgia Polizzi

From there, it just grew and grew; it’s gone from a project that was quite theoretical to a living artwork that is really taking form. We’re now on year four – the handover with Elif Shafak is next week (2 June) and we’re working with next year’s author too. Future Library is a major part of our lives; it’s intertwined with daily life, and the ritual that repeats each year is a defining moment.

INTERVIEWER

There’s something striking about the rituals built into the project and how they are set to carry on for a hundred years. We live in this age where everything is so focused on the present and the here and now, that we have lost track of ideas that span across generations. Was the idea of longer term, ‘cathedral’ thinking specific in your mind when you first came up with the idea? Or is it something that solidified more as the project progressed?

PATERSON

It wasn’t specific at the beginning; the initial idea appeared in a flash, the repercussions of the idea were unclear. Future Library is evolving into something far more complex than I could have imagined.

The ‘cathedral thinking’ you mention is really interesting. I continue to be inspired by a place I’ve visited called Ise Jinju in Japan, a Shinto shrine near Kyoto. Here shrines have been built and rebuilt in exactly the same form every 20 years, for a few thousand years. And the community have been growing the wood for the shrines in a special forest, over this vast expanse of time.

I love the idea that you need to plan hundreds of years ahead for something to last or exist; it seems the antithesis of the current mode. Instead we live in a ‘one click’ world.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think it feels there’s a certain ‘unreal’ element to our lives in that respect? As you say we spend all this time clicking on social media; but not actually participating in our social lives. It definitely seems to stand in contrast to those things that are real – a forest and nature, but also an actual physical printed book.

PATERSON

Exactly. Of course, I’m absolutely part of this technologically driven culture, too. Though when I am inside the forest there are moments when I am acutely aware of the timelessness nature of trees. It could be any era on earth there, just about! You could be standing thousands of years in the past in the same forest or you could be standing there thousands of years into the future and it could almost be the same place.

I love that feeling to be sort of outside of time or inside of time – to be somewhere, where time is drawn out, and to not have this ‘instant-ness’ feeling that seems to be there in many other aspects of life.

INTERVIEWER

How do you feel that sensation of time slowing down – especially during the handover ceremonies or when you’re in the forest – affects you at all? Is there a spirituality to it?

PATERSON

Last year, we had a golden harp brought in for the ceremony and the musicians were warming up with us there early in the morning – there was such quietude, a serene moment that’s hard to define, when everybody was gearing up amongst the trees – time slows down and it’s just precious. Then the authors arrive and walk in the footsteps of the previous authors and those of the future and it’s all part of this rite we’ve created that will continue for the next 96 years. Elif Shafak uses the term ‘secular acts of faith’ and I believe Future Library is one of these acts.

A golden harp for the 2017 handover ceremony. Photo by Kristin von Hirsch

INTERVIEWER

The relationship with nature is clearly so bound up with the project – do you think that the project speaks to people partly because we live in an age where we are also suffering the effects of environmental break down?

PATERSON

I think so. The planet is being destroyed and it’s affecting all of our lives. In that sense nature feels really close – you can’t help but think how even the rain falling on our heads is connected to the changing climate and the way the planet is trying to survive.

I think appreciating our natural environment is something Norway does exceptionally well. Our forest is a tiny patch inside the larger forest that surrounds the whole city of Oslo, which is protected under law so developers aren’t allowed to encroach on it. Oslo’s citizens deeply appreciate the forest too, and I think in a way this cultural link with the forest is why the city have been so supportive of Future Library.

INTERVIEWER

It seems really appropriate in that sense how links up the timeless nature of writing – you think of Shakespeare, Shelly, Austen, Joyce – and how writing and literature can stretch across centuries; just as trees and forests do, too. How do you think authors today can write for the readers of tomorrow?

PATERSON

A book is an object that survives time and passes voices through time.

It’s so easy to forget that books come from trees! I am an e-reader and use technology all the time; but how can we improve on the printed book? It’s not possible! Who knows what the methods of reading will be like in a hundred years’ time. The form of reading may be something that’s so far beyond our imagination right now.

If you jump back a century – that generation would never have guessed the authors that are writing now – it’s unimaginable – it’s too long a gap to perceive of. I find it odd that the authors right now will be authors from the past, many will be dead. And then the authors at the end of this project will still be alive and be read by their contemporaries.

INTERVIEWER

There’s a certain sense of mortality tied up in the project. Do you think about that or dwell on that at all?

PATERSON

I do; and it can be disconcerting. Of course, I did conceive this project so that it would be going on beyond my lifetime so I was always aware that I wasn’t going to be around to see it through – it’s about getting everything set up to ensure it keeps going after we’re gone.

The question of mortality is there – even the legalities of artist’s contracts have to contain clauses relating to death. I had a child this year and so he’ll be coming with me to the handover ceremony. He won’t quite be one years old at that point; I’ve thought how I deeply hope he will be around to read these books.

INTERVIEWER

Thinking about the future, do you have an idea or ideal in your head about what the final ceremony will be like. Or are you very prepared to let it go?

PATERSON

My greatest hope is that it’s still there at that point and that there is a ceremony and that the world hasn’t collapsed in on itself! It’s an emotional thought, the final ceremony, and the idea of those vast trees we know so well, being cut.

We’re always troubleshooting with Future Library and thinking what could happen that we need to prepare for – but it’s the unpredictable things that worry me. But ultimately you have to have trust and hope and I think those are key concepts within the project.

INTERVIEWER

Do you ever think about the authors and what they’re actually writing and the stories they are going to produce – is there anything you are hoping for?

PATERSON

We leave it entirely up to the authors, it’s important that they have free reign to write whatever they chose. The only rule we have is that there are no illustrations – just the written word. I like to imagine what is hidden within their manuscripts, but it’s more satisfying to not know because in some ways that’s the key to it all – that none of us know and it’s going to be a complete surprise to those in the future.

Each author brings a completely different perspective to the project, and that’s important, it doesn’t concern one set theme – it’s about bringing people together.

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel there’s a certain sense that each author brings something different but complementary to the project, in that case?

PATERSON

Yes, I think there is a thread that connects all the authors together. There is this almost familial bond that we create with them. Like a family tree, and each author follows in the footsteps of the one before and through the annual ceremony we do create a chain of people who are connected through time and through the trees.

A path through the Nordmarka forest – where the footsteps of authors past, present and future will follow. Photo by Kristin von Hirsch

INTERVIEWER

Isn’t that the truth of so many artists and writers in general; we’re all in conversation with one another.

PATERSON

Absolutely. And here they are each having a conversation with the authors that have come before; but also those who are still to come.

INTERVIEWER

And what’s still to come from you – could you tell us a little about some of the future projects you’re working on?

PATERSON

I’m actually working on a book myself at the moment – called ‘A place that exists only in moonlight’. It’s a collection of over 100 short texts that are similar to haiku; they are ideas for artworks to exist in the imagination. I have a lot of ideas for artworks but not all of them turn into real forests! So I’ve been writing them as text works, they come alive in the reader’s minds.

INTERVIEWER

There’s a certain lightness there it sounds like to be able to note down these ideas without necessarily having to worry about putting them into reality. And it’s interesting to consider what you mentioned earlier about not ever committing to an artistic discipline and possibly pigeon holing yourself into that. Do you think that creativity is something that can be defined or is it something we can pursue in many different ways?

PATERSON

I’m so open when it comes to creativity – that’s what creativity is; it’s about being as open and curious as you possibly can be. For me creativity flourishes most when I don’t pay attention to boundaries or limits. It doesn’t matter whether an idea exists as something real or not – it’s about letting the imagination go as far as it possibly can – even to the point of absurdity.

INTERVIEWER

If you had one piece of advice for people – artists and writers – what would it be?

PATERSON

The imagination needs tending to. Take good care of it.

Tending trees as you must tend to your imagination. Photo by Kristin von Hirsch

Creatives in profile: interview with Dr Chuck Tingle

April 30, 2018April 29, 2018 / professorwu / 2 Comments

A few years ago, a new literary sub-genre exploded onto the publishing scene. The sub-genre in question was dinosaur erotica (no need to beat around the prehistoric bush here – these are books where dinosaurs have sex with humans. You can read our detailed introduction here). And, as sales of these books started to take off, so too did the careers of the pioneering authors behind them.

Among these pseudonymous writers, one name perhaps stands above all others: Dr Chuck Tingle – the Hugo Award shortlisted author of Space Raptor Butt Invasion and My Billionaire Triceratops Craves Gay Ass. Self-proclaimed as the “greatest author in the world” during one of the most incredible Reddit AMAs to date, Dr Chuck Tingle is somewhat of a mythical figure – with questions over his identity still very much unanswered.

Always keen to shed light on the work of creatives working around the world, Nothing in the Rulebook reached out to Chuck to see if he would be willing to be interviewed by us. And we were genuinely delighted when he agreed.

It is a rare privilege for the team here at Nothing in the Rulebook are able to interview someone at the very cutting edge of their writing field (not to mention a Tae Kwon Do grandmaster with a PhD from DeVry University in holistic massage). It is therefore a true honour to bring you the following interview.*

INTERVIEWER

Tell us about yourself, your background and ethos.

DR CHUCK TINGLE

My name is DR CHUCK TINGLE and i am from billings montana. i was born in HOME OF TRUTH UTAH with mom and dad and that was a very lonesome time. i was by myself in the fields walkin around learning the ways of the world like what is the wind and why do the trees sing? so then i learned this way. i started writing books there but i gotta hide them under the floor so mom and dad dont know whats going on in the butts heart of man of chuck (then boy of chuck) then one day was THE BIG FIRE and this was a scary way next thing i know im on the road to billings then i became a billings man started a dang life. now i am the worlds greatest author and i like to tell stories but i also like to prove that love is real on all timelines. thanks.

INTERVIEWER

Who inspires you?

DR CHUCK TINGLE

well there are all kinds of ways to be inspired sometimes it is just waking up and hearing the neighborhood birds that inspires my way. thinkin ‘WOW there they are again just talkin their talk and learning about the world maybe i should learn about the world too.’ but other ways of inspiration as a writer is R M STIME hit writer of books THIS LAND IS HORRIBLE AND A MONSTER IS HERE and MY DUMMY IS HANDSOME and DANG THATS A HAND ON THAT DOOR BETTER CLOSE IT so that is important but also STEVES KING writer of JACKS BACK: MY DAD IN THE MAZE and other tales. lets so other insperation is classic jokerman name of ANDYS KAUFMAN he is very funny when he is the worlds fastest taxi driver on television but i do not think this show is on anymore on this timeline. but most of all NUMBER ONE way of chuck insperation is my son jon he is so smart and handsome he always helps out around the neighborhood and i hope one day i can be just like him.

INTERVIEWER

Is writing your first love, or do you have another passion?

DR CHUCK TINGLE

holistic massage is very important but that is JOB not passion as man of chuck and i am retired in this way so yes it is nice to be a big time writer as a FIRST LOVE. i would say i am PASSAIONATE man in a lot of ways to prove love is real actually all timelines, so i am also passionate about TIMELINE TRAVEL it is very interesting to see other ways that the universe could have been or other layers of reality where fish are made of gold or hands are eyes or maybe a timeline where all foods are made of diffrent kinds of bread and thats it. i do not want to live on these timelines but I enjoy learning about their way.

INTERVIEWER

A lot of our readers are quite interested in the rise of dinosaur erotica as a sub-genre in erotic fiction. What is it about dinosaurs, do you think, that makes them so ripe for this kind of writing?

DR CHUCK TINGLE

well i think that they are NOTORIOUS BAD BOYS and that is always a very good character type in a story or maybe in a hot date so i think that is important. everyone likes a bad boy who plays by his own dang rules and says ‘GET THE HECK OUTTA THE WAY THIS TRUCK HAS NO BREAKS LOOK OUT IVE GOTTA SAVE THE DAY’ then they drive it to a cliff and then jump out as the truck goes off the cliff then the bad boy looks at the camera and says ‘lets see truckman do that’ and then the truck explodes behind him and he dosnt look at it just keeps looking at the camera.

INTERVIEWER

As a writer, and human being, how can you imagine a world where humans and dinosaurs co-exist – how do you get inside the heads of your characters to make your stories believable?

DR CHUCK TINGLE

there are a lot of timelines where dinosaurs and humans trot together including this one so that is an easy part of WRITE WAY YOU KNOW so if i see a handsome dinosaur i will think about his way and say ‘what is it like to be that much of a bad boy’ and then i write and write and write and then son jon takes a look and says ‘wow chuck great job’. so i think it is easy to make this beliveable because we encounter dinosaurs all the time in our daily lives it would be much harder to write about something like ted cobbler being a nice man (this is not possible) so I think i have a simply job as writer thanks.

INTERVIEWER

What is your favourite kind of dinosaur?

DR CHUCK TINGLE

handsome lawyer dinosaur check please

INTERVIEWER

In your book ‘My billionaire triceratops craves gay ass’, Oliver, the protagonists gay former pet triceratops, is both an erotic dancer and a heavyweight in the financial sector. Firstly, do you think that dinosaurs would be inherently business-savvy, and secondly, did you choose to use dinosaurs as a metaphor for the financial sector in any way?

DR CHUCK TINGLE

well i do not understand this question entirely but i will give it my best shot i would say that dinosaurs are good in business because of their bad boy way this can mean they are RUTHLESS and sometimes this is not fun to be around thinking ‘dang i hope this dinosaur dosnt bite me with his sharp teeth’ but also they have a lot of CHARISMA and they make people think ‘oh wow i am on the INSIDE TRACK this dinosaur lawyer knows what hes talkin on better follow him around and listen up buddy!’ so this also means that they will probably make a lot of money in these big timer jobs but i do not think that is true of all dinosaurs this is a very broad generalization there are many wealthy living objects cant even imagine how much the sentient manifestion of money has to spend on chocolate milks dang

INTERVIEWER

Are there any taboos or topics you wouldn’t personally write about, or do we remain too much of a prudish society?

DR CHUCK TINGLE

yes i do not write about famous ladybucks because i think they are talked about in this way enough already so it is my way to think, well lets leave that to someone else. but also recently a big time movie company has come to me and said ‘we would like to film a tingler’ so they do not make my perferred pound (bud on bud) but they have said i can write a ladybuck on ladybuck movie for them so i will try that because it is not poking jokes at a famous lady. mostly i would just not like to poke jokes at famous ladies i would like to lift them up instead so that is my line.

INTERVIEWER

Where do your ideas come from?

DR CHUCK TINGLE

most ideas come as morning meditation first things first gotta wake up and have a big bowl of spaghetti and some chocolate milk then after that go sit on the deck and THINK with a clear mind this is when the best ideas come you just have to listen.

INTERVIEWER

What, do you think, is the most important thing to keep in mind when writing a book?

DR CHUCK TINGLE

most important thing to keep in mind when making all things as ARTISTIC BUCKAROO is to prove love that is only thing that matters really everything else is just decoration. there are so many ways to prove love so there are lots of options, but it is very important to REMEMBER that only rule for all layers of the tingleverse is that love is real this is consistant across all timelines.

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel any ethical responsibility as a writer?

DR CHUCK TINGLE

i think that it is okay to make any kind of art that is the point of art so i am a FREE SPEECH buckaroo in this way because i think if i see something that i do not like i will just say ‘okay you are wrong in this way but thats okay im going to trot over this way and ignore this now’ and that is just part of life. but for me as MAN NAME OF CHUCK WORLDS GREATEST AUTHOR i have my own set of being responsibles these are not for others they are for me only. and i give myself this task of saying HOW DOES THIS PROVE LOVE? WHY IM I PUTTING THIS INTO THIS TIMELINE? and these are things to consider i think but this is a limit that is different for everyone.

INTERVIEWER

You often say it’s important to remember that LOVE IS REAL. What precisely do you mean by that, and what do we, as a society, need to do more of, in your opinion?

DR CHUCK TINGLE

I have already explained this a bit in earlier questions but this is basically way of saying that on all timelines of reality there are MANY variations but love is always real on every one of them and i think this is a BIG DANG DEAL. because there are so many other things that are not real on some timelines like shoes or dogs or the sky or toms cruz. but love is always real and when you UNDERSTAND this way i think it is easier to enjoy life and ignore the call of the lonesome train.

INTERVIEWER

The future of literature; of writing, is frequently discussed at great lengths. What are your thoughts on current industry trends – where are we heading?

DR CHUCK TINGLE

as man name of chuck worlds greatest author i think that way of the AUTHOR is interesting one. on other timelines this way is much bigger deal here it is big timer but not BIG BIG TIMER not like famous movie star CHANNING TATUM in SPECIAL MIKE 2: A DANCER’S DREAM STORY. but i do not think there is solution to this really and i think it is okay, but in the future maybe there will just be CREATORS of things big and small and you just expirence them in all of their ways. this is how i feel sometimes because i am worlds greatest author but also i have a podcast and also other projects so i think, maybe i am not just an author and maybe this is the way of the future?

INTERVIEWER

How would you define creativity?

DR CHUCK TINGLE

being creative is just being yourself and trotting with YOUR OWN unique way. just waking up in the morning and stetching your bones is creative because every moment is making infinate timelines. you are so powerful in your way because for every decision there are so many new worlds spinning off and if that isnt dang creative i dont know what is thanks

INTERVIEWER

What’s next for you? Are there any exciting new projects or books that we should look out for?

DR CHUCK TINGLE

i am very excited for erotic film that i am writing it is like tingler but it is with real people (ladybuck and ladybuck) i think that i will work hard to make sure it proves love and make sure that is PUSHES CREATIVE LEVELS UPWARD to create something new and exciting this puts a spring in my trot

INTERVIEWER

Could you write us a story in six words?

DR CHUCK TINGLE

my last pound, my first love

INTERVIEWER

What are your 10 top tips for aspiring writers and artists?

DR CHUCK TINGLE

drink chocolate milk buddy not that sick water throw that out
you are important and so is your way. this is already a story that can be told
the void is not worth your curiostiy
listen to your buds
there is something to learn from traditional horseplay and there is something to be learned from modern trots. respect both
dont try to tell people what art is you will always be wrong
there is not very much that separates you from a big timers sometimes it is hard work and sometimes it is luck but its almost never talent
spend time with your family
have gratitude if you dont youll look like a goofball and youll feel like one too
prove love always

*Please note: all of Dr Tingle’s responses have been reprinted verbatim from our interview with him. Our thanks once again to Chuck for his time!

Before you go, remember to follow Dr Chuck Tingle on Twitter @chucktingle!

Creatives in profile: interview with Anne Beate Hovind, the curator of the Library of the Future

April 24, 2018April 24, 2018 / professorwu / 4 Comments

In Norway, a thousand trees have been planted in a forest just outside Oslo. In 100 years’ time, they will be used to make the paper for an anthology of books, which will form part of the so-called ‘library of the future’.

Conceived by Scottish artist Katie Paterson, the project has captured the attention of great authors across the world, including Margaret Atwood, who was the first writer to pledge her story to the future collection.

Planting an entire forest that will one day help make the books of the library of the future takes time. Photo credit: Bjørvika Utvikling by Kristin von Hirsch.

Yet 100-year art projects, by their very nature, take time. When you work with timescales longer than the average human life, the focus of the work shifts: it is no longer about outcomes, or about critical reception from the artistic and literary communities. Rather, it’s about the experience, and the journey, that takes everyone involved in the project along with it.

Of course, there are also certain logistical necessities that go hand in hand with creating a project of this nature. How do you convince authors to write books that will never be read in their lifetimes? How do you ensure the forest you have planted is used to make the books, and not cut down to make way for some new highway or housing development?

How do you ensure the forest you have planted is used to make the books of the library of the future, and not cut down to make way for some highway or housing development? Photo credit: Bjørvika Utvikling by Vibeke Hermanrud.

To try and iron out some of the answers to these questions, the Nothing in the Rulebook team caught up with the project manager and curator of the project, Anne Beate Hovind.

It’s an honour to bring you this detailed interview…

INTERVIEWER

So tell us about yourself and your involvement with the Future Library project

ANNE BEATE

I’m the commissioner and the producer for the project. It’s a magical sort of idea that really challenges our concept of time, as well as of trust, and I think ultimately has a lot to say about our world, and the way we interact with it as human beings.

What I think is extraordinary about the project is the opportunity to work so closely with the artist, Katie Paterson. In a way, I sometimes have to pinch myself when I talk about how I became involved in the artwork because in a way it’s crazy – because just imagine the pitch that begins ‘I have this proposal: but it’s going to take 100 years’. That’s when you panic. Because you think ‘100 years?! Oh my god”. Then the artist says, ‘and, we’ll also need a forest’. And you know, you immediately ask yourself – where will the forest grow? Because I work in the Oslo harbour development area – where and how do you grow a forest in a harbour? And then, on top of all that, the artist says, ‘one more thing – we need authors, famous writers, who are willing to participate, because it’s their work we’re going to print, a hundred years from now’.

But even though it’s a little crazy it really is extraordinary and I actually think in my role, it’s an interesting one to see how you have the relationship between the artist and the commissioner or producer, because where the artist is creative in that kind of traditional artistic way, I’m creative in making it happen!

INTERVIEWER

The project wouldn’t happen without you!

ANNE BEATE

Well I think it’s an interesting relationship – I was actually talking about this with another friend of mine, a Norwegian artist called A.K. Dolven, and we were discussing what it means to put an artwork into the control of the producers and so on who make art ‘happen’. Because you need both the creative idea and inspiration and also that inter-displinary competence and almost entrepreneurship to make those ideas into a reality.

INTERVIEWER

You’re the curator, in a sense

ANNE BEATE

I wouldn’t call myself a curator because I’m not an artist in the traditional sense – I’m an entrepreneur first, I create start-ups. And I actually spend a lot of my time working in the construction business, which is quite crazy, but I always get into this situation where I get into the exploratory work; the ‘make things happen’ kind of work; so even though I’m in a different field of work professionally, there are elements where I work in the same way – it’s about attitude; methodology; it’s a way of working exploratively. And it’s quite similar to the way artists create art. And this is what I like to share and talk about when I give talks and stuff.

INTERVIEWER

You were in Austin, Texas, recently for the Southwest by Southwest festival. Can you tell us a little more about the talks that you give?

ANNE BEATE

I was invited there as a speaker for their official programme, and actually on the way out I was a little nervous because I’d never been there before and on my plane out the Crown Prince of Norway was on the same plane and there was a band on board and the fanfare was a little overwhelming. But once I got off the plane I realised quite quickly I was actually the only Norwegian speaker in the official programme, where I was set to appear on their ‘live’ show.

I didn’t know what to expect but it was really interesting to be a part of. I shared a few of my thoughts about what leadership is about when it comes to making things happen.

INTERVIEWER

What do you mean by that?

ANNE BEATE

Now, I think what it comes down to is approaching a new project with a kind of explorative attitude – you kind of have to have this tacit knowledge of where to start: what doors to keep open as long as possible, which ones you have to close. In my day job, there’s a lot of risk assessment involved. There’s a totally different risk-mind set involved compared to what I do in my daily life in the construction business; because in order to be innovative – in order to make innovations happen, you have to take risks, you have to be risk taking – and though you might be aware of some of the potential challenges or risks, you have to strike out and lead from the front.

INTERVIEWER

How do you identify what sort of projects you’re going to pursue with that vigour? How do you maintain the energy for it?

ANNE BEATE

I think what it comes down to is more about your attitude. In any job I do I try to make the most I can out of it. So I can do things that other people might find quite boring or not really very ‘arty’ but I don’t mind. I’m very curious. I learn everything about hospitals when I build hospitals. I worked in shipping classification for the shipping bureau and I learned a lot about that and I’ve worked at the main airport in Norway and I learned lots about that and the aviation sector and I do art – and other things – I think, because of that curiosity. If I’m curious about something or something grabs my attention, I want to find out more and I want to see where we – the project and I – can end up.

If you’re not curious about something, how can you have the passion for it, how can you find that energy? You know, that’s what it’s about. You have to know how to run a business or a project; but you also absolutely have to know how to stay with it.

INTERVIEWER

Surely that’s a really important point in this day and age because, in, for instance, London alone, there are so many different free presses or websites and magazines that start up, and they might be around for a year or two years, and then they die off – or they print one anthology and disappear. Because it’s really hard to sustain a project and keep it going, especially in the world we live in where it’s hard to keep funding coming in. And so often there’s a difficulty in building in a sustainable, long-term view to your project. That you can keep building on.

ANNE BEATE

Oh absolutely and you know, I think we might have a similar approach to you at Nothing in the Rulebook, because I like to ‘put bricks on bricks’ – that’s a saying I often use. This whole ethos really resonates with the Future Library project. What we say in Norway is ‘all wood’ – it’s wood all the way through. It’s an expression that basically means something is authentic; it’s true; it’s solid; and it has good correlation between what you say you are and what you do. And building this sort of thing takes time, it takes time and conscious effort. You have to pour yourself into it in a way and make sure your idea doesn’t just stop.

“‘All wood’ – it’s wood all the way through” – Anne Beat Hovind. Photo credit: Giorgia Polizzi

This whole attitude can be seen in the way we approached the project too, I think. Because we don’t spend anything on communication. And Katie Paterson, who is the incredible artist behind the idea, the two of us work very intimately and very closely together. Even though the Future Library project is quite big and quite well-known in the world; it’s mostly me and her.

INTERVIEWER

So how does that work? How do you do it? Especially when it comes to first launching the project and getting people involved like Margaret Atwood.

ANNE BEATE

How do you do it? How do we do it? We just ask! It’s such a fascinating story – people ask, ‘why don’t you make e-vites when you invite people to the handover ceremonies – but I said, ‘no – I’ll do it personally’. Because I think; that’s what fascinates people. We’re not part of a big organisation. The project does not have a lot of money behind it. It’s small and grounded and goes slow. It’s personal. It’s not like this big stuck up thing. It’s exactly what it says it is.

I think when you are living in this fast living world, with all this start-up thinking it’s like something gets blown up and then just as quickly it’s like PUFF – gone. But the Future Library isn’t like that at all; it’s totally different. And I think this aspect of the project is what people really respond to and connect with, you know, because it has real meaning and authentic content and impact.

INTERVIEWER

It’s this idea of longevity being built within the project from the outset – the entire ethos of it. We live in an age where thoughts around cathedral thinking has disappeared – the idea that we used to build something that would last hundreds of years for future generations, and now, it’s the opposite…

ANNE BEATE

Precisely. And it’s interesting you mention that idea of cathedral thinking because this notion is so important. I was thinking a lot about what Stephen Hawking says about this and I totally say the exact same thing about it.

And you know the day before I was due to give the talk in Austin, Texas, Stephen Hawking died – and I was quite touched by the timing of it because I always mentioned cathedral thinking whenever I talked about the Future Library project and Hawking has been the spokesperson for this idea that we need to invest in ideas for the future, which are made and built for the generations that come after us. And so the night before I gave this talk I totally changed the start of my presentation and I started out with a quote from Hawking about cathedral thinking. And people got really emotional here – and some actually cried. It was very moving.

But this I think is what makes people feel such a connection for the project. Because people are longing for slow, cathedral thinking projects that are grounded; that are not ‘tech tech tech’.

INTERVIEWER

So what influence does technology have on our modern lives and culture, do you think?

ANNE BEATE

Well I think firstly I should say that I love tech. You know. I drive a tesla – I was the one of the first persons in Norway to buy a Tesla. In our household we have two electric cars – we don’t have gas or petrol fuelled cars. We Live in a three-generation house run by solar energy and a thermal well – we have a lot of technology. But for me, technology should only be used to facilitate my life.

INTERVIEWER

Technology is an enabler.

ANNE BEATE

Yes, exactly. It’s about being a human being and keeping hold of that. And I think people are longing for that – to be reminded of what it is to be human, forget about the other tech stuff.

INTERVIEWER

Yet we live in a world where you only have to walk down the street to see almost everyone always on their phone. Living their lives plugged in constantly to the digital world. And it can seem difficult to separate the technology that can do brilliant incredible things that bring us closer together – speeding up communication and living our lives more effectively – while of course avoiding the danger that we get sucked into this world of technology where it’s all we think about – and our social media lives take precedent over our social lives; which are actually the real, authentic parts of our lives that allow us to build real relationships with other people that last years; not seconds.

ANNE BEATE

This is why projects like this are so important for our time. Just a couple of generations back, people were thinking this way all the time. You know, you build something or plant a forest, you don’t do it for your sake – you do it for future generations.

We kind of have this fast food thinking and now we have to prepare something for the next generation. I think more people realise the world is a little lost and we need to get back on track.

INTERVIEWER

We are designed in our society to be constantly stimulated – To constantly go out and get things for ourselves and gratify ourselfs and just go, go, go, all the time. We’re constantly walking through our cities plugged into our headphones, but you can’t get away from the music in waiting rooms or shops and supermarkets. We don’t even have time to sit and be bored anymore, let alone think about building forests.

ANNE BEATE

And this is the world where this Future Library artwork comes in, that’s entirely based on the idea of planting trees – it’s about walking in the forest; doing rituals!

Photo credit: Bjørvika Utvikling by Kristin von Hirsch

INTERVIEWER

And how important is the relationship between nature and art? Especially in a world where we now have eBooks, rather than physical books. How important is it for us to keep creating these projects that entwine physical ‘real’ nature with art?

ANNE BEATE

It’s interesting you ask this question about the relationship we have with nature and how we connect to it, because it’s actually a very personal topic to me.

I grew up on a farm. I carried the farm name – which is 1000 years old. It was once a Viking farm. And when my father died when he was young, I was supposed to inherit it. And in Norway, this is almost taken for granted as a rite of passage, that you would take on the farm and run it as a farm. And you are in fact obliged to run it as a farm if you take it.

And my father died when I was 22 and I really had a difficult decision to make; about whether I would take it on, and I said ‘no’. So it’s no longer part of the family.

And this is a decision I haven’t regretted. I realised I wasn’t a farmer, and that that was okay. It was maybe a brave decision, but the right one. And oddly enough what the whole experience has taught me – is that life, in a way, is about planting trees. And planting grains – because my other project is about planting farm crops in the middle of Oslo. And when I first heard about these projects and became involved with them, they both confronted me with how disconnected I had been from nature, even though I have such a long family history of living and working on a farm, which is so connected to the natural world.

And so when I think about this, I realise that both of these artworks are about sustainability. They’re both about the importance of protecting our environment; about living in this world and our collective futures, and having to protect what we have for the long term. We really need to reconnect with nature and the world.

So it’s amazing how both these artworks are so rich in the way they communicate a very fundamental message about being human, which is that no matter how much technology we have, we are still the same animals that evolved over millions of years and thousands of years of modern civilisation to live as part of nature – not apart from it. We need to save our world and our planet. So artworks that speak to this fundamental need are really important.

INTERVIEWER

But of course, we live in an era of catastrophic climate breakdown – do you think these artworks have a call to action in encouraging people to take better care of our planet and our environment? Do we need to each start planting more trees?

ANNE BEATE

So even though Margaret Atwood is kind of quite ‘black’ in her writing, she really isn’t when it comes to her outlook. And when I spoke to her she said “this is a hopeful project” – she’s the one who really knows what it means when it comes to environmental activism. She’s there, on the front of it – and she’s been there all the time; but we haven’t necessarily been listening. And it’s partly her environmentalist background that made her say yes to participating in this work – it took her maybe only two minutes to make up her mind, she said.

Of course, we were SO happy, when she said she was willing to get involved. I can still remember where I was when I got the message saying she would do it. I was so happy! Because it was at this moment that I realised ‘this project is actually going to happen’.

Anne Beate Hovind and Future Library contributor, Margaret Atwood. Photo credit: Bjørvika Utvikling by Kristin von Hirsch

INTERVIEWER

Did you have doubts that the project might not take off before you got Atwood’s backing?

ANNE BEATE

Not necessarily doubts, but I knew it was a challenge, because, as we said earlier, there aren’t many projects or ideas these days that are built around cathedral thinking – we don’t even build monuments or buildings that won’t be finished for 100 years, let alone art. So how do you talk to a board about this? How do you convince them that 100 years is nothing?

But it’s been a fantastic journey so far, and it is fantastic still. I’m so happy and grateful to be a part of this work, and it has changed me – it’s been life changing.

INTERVIEWER

Why do you think this project resonates so much with so many people, including yourself?

ANNE BEATE

Some researchers should do some research on this, you know. When I saw the article had been upvoted so many times to the front page of Reddit, I thought, what is it that makes people upvote it so much? What is it all about?

INTERVIEWER

There’s a core essence, perhaps, that the project has which has the capacity to capture people’s imagination’s in a really quick way.

ANNE BEATE

And it’s so positive: the engagement people have with it is so built on hope and trust and empathy and compassion. I think it’s really basic human things that we need and are in need of.

I don’t have the answer of course; I can only try to imagine. But when I hear people say things about it, or when I have people ask me ‘how can you be sure that someone will take on this project after you are dead’ (so there’s even an aspect of mortality here that is intrinsically involved), well, I say it’s all about trust.

But when you say that – people have a really shocked reaction – they think ‘that’s so crazy’!

INTERVIEWER

So how do you sustain the project for the future? In 70 or 80 years time, how will you make sure it’s still running?

ANNE BEATE

Trust! It’s all about trust. You know we have set up a formal trust and intention agreements with the relevant municipal authorities in regards to the forest and the room at the Oslo Library, so we have kind of rigged up that admin aspect of it. But to run this project is also about energy – its about respect for the artwork and how it’s set up; and it is about loyalty.

There will be things the board and the trustees will have to solve that me and the artist couldn’t forsee. So there will be people who have to take on my job and fulfil it.

Oslo Public Library, where the books of the library of the future will be kept. Photo credit: Atelier Oslo and Lund Hagem.

The great thing about this artwork now is that I’ve seen there is a whole world protecting it. So if the forest is threatened by anything – the whole world will make sure to guard it and the books.

I have no choice other than believing in the project. And there’s also trust the other way – because the coming generations have to trust us that we do these kinds of thing for them. They have to trust that we will do things that take care of the planet – that we create work of arts for them.

INTERVIEWER

Art is about what brings people together and the connections that this kind of project can form. Do you have any hopes for yourself about how this might turn out? If you could see the ceremony that takes place 100 years from now, what would you like to see?

ANNE BEATE

I’m sure it’s going to be very emotional. I hope some of my great grand-children will be there and for them to maybe think ‘it was crazy for my great grandmother to take on this idea 100 years ago’, and I hope they think about that and what it means. Because it’s about building bridges between now and the future – but to turn it around, it’s also going to be about the present in the future and the past.

Creatives in profile: interview with Wundor Editions

April 9, 2018April 9, 2018 / professorwu / 2 Comments

Matthew Smith, founder of independent publishing house, Wunder Editions.

It seems old hat to say that mainstream publishing has been facing an existential crisis in recent years. As profit margins thin, the industry has been forced to seek new and innovative ways to survive.

One fantastic – and relatively new – player within the sector is Wundor Editions, a London-based publishing house committed to producing innovative and challenging literature and images, while working with new and established writers and photographers.

It is an honour to bring you this detailed interview with the founder of Wundor Editions, the author, photographer and designer Matthew Smith.

INTERVIEWER

Tell us about yourself, your background and ethos.

SMITH

I’m a writer of fiction and poetry, a photographer and a designer. I read English Literature at Oxford, but part of me had wanted to go to art school in London. Both the literary and the visual have always been key for me. In my own creativity and in the work of the artists I am inspired by I like to be surprised by the work of the imagination. A ‘wundor’ is an Old English word for something unimaginable, perhaps a miracle, perhaps a monster. This is the stuff of storytelling, so I named my publishing house after it.

INTERVIEWER

Who inspires you?

SMITH

Nas, Billy Corgan, Pep Guardiola, Marilynne Robinson, Bjork, Warren Buffet. All people with a singular vision who have managed to bring it out of themselves.

INTERVIEWER

Can you tell us a bit about Wundor Editions – how was it borne into existence?

SMITH

I wanted to make compelling books and present them to readers in new and engaging ways. By fusing together the worlds of striking photography, illustration and design with original, new works of literature, I felt we could make a world of creativity that people would want to be part of.

INTERVIEWER

It’s no easy feat to bring a new independent publishing house into existence – the sector is so dominated by the established ‘big five’. What are some of the main challenges you faced in establishing Wundor Editions?

SMITH

The main challenges are to do with becoming known to readers. First you have to become known to bookshop owners. Before that you have to become known to reviewers, a distributor and a sales team. You have to take the vision out to these people first, and convince a lot of people that your vision will come to fruition with perhaps only one book in print form that you can use to demonstrate this.

INTERVIEWER

What, do you think, are the biggest opportunities for independent publishers within the publishing sector?

SMITH

There are lots of artistic works out there that are not given the time of day but they could find an audience. There is no shortage of this stuff, that’s a myth. You just have to know what you’re looking for, and be grateful that it’s not what someone else is looking for.

INTERVIEWER

What do you think a publishing house or printing press should be for? Why are they important?

SMITH

They give artists a platform and inspire their readers.

INTERVIEWER

Julian Barnes has stated that the problem with the big publishing companies is that they are too risk averse: they are only willing to “publish novels that are copies of other successful novels”. Do you think that independent publishers have a duty to champion independent voices of authors and artists whose books may never be given a chance by the bigger companies in the sector?

SMITH

Great books are great books – big companies publish them, small companies publish them. Independent publishers should be careful not to define themselves by their differences to bigger companies, thereby limiting their own potential unnecessarily. And independent publishers do fall into the same trap Julian Barnes rightly mentions. But hopefully more often than not their independence allows for a more nimble and agile approach to creativity, and the courage to take risks on original works of art. The challenge is to build this ethos into a growing company that continues to take risks as it grows.

INTERVIEWER

SMITH

I’m just looking for exciting new authors and photographers who have unique visions and who have taken the time to develop their technique so they can express their ideas brilliantly. The future will look after itself.

INTERVIEWER

Obviously, the rise of the internet has seen a big culture shift in the way we communicate. What role do you see traditional presses playing in this new “digital era”?

SMITH

The same role they’ve always played. The internet is great for seeking out specific pieces of information and for communication, but after prolonged periods it wears away at your concentration and offers little in the way of sustenance. Traditional presses can make books we can treasure and that have meaning – both in their physical form and as vehicles for stories and poems. There is a power that a book lying on a table has that is magnetic. The internet can’t compete with it.

INTERVIEWER

How would you define creativity?

SMITH

The ability to imagine something and then to make it accessible to others.

INTERVIEWER

What advice would you give to authors thinking of submitting their work to Wundor Editions?

SMITH

Go for it! It doesn’t have to be perfect – we will work with writers to develop their stories and their poetry. But you do need to have an original voice.

INTERVIEWER

What’s next for Wundor Editions? What should we look out for?

SMITH

We’ll be publishing an Australian literary heavyweight for the first time in the UK later this year, and we’ll be launching our first photobooks too.

INTERVIEWER

Could you write us a story in six words?

SMITH

Oh no. Wait. That’s it! Hmmm.

INTERVIEWER

What are your 5 – 10 top tips for aspiring writers and artists?

SMITH

Trust your own instincts completely but be open to other people’s ideas.
The only thing worse than refusing to take advice is taking advice you’re not comfortable with. Take advice from a number of sources and pick and choose what resonates with you. Be your own executive editor.
Know that you might have to put your work out there before it’s perfect, and perfect it along the way.
There’s no such thing as writer’s block, only fallow periods. If you don’t have any ideas, don’t write anything. Wait for the urge to come back. You’ll save yourself a lot of hours of editing.
There’s always time to write a novel if you really want to. Be ingenious in your scheduling.
Minimise all engagement with digital stuff if you want to rediscover deep concentration.
Don’t buy into the dream of a life where you only have to write. You wouldn’t find it fulfilling because there are other kinds of work which can provide things that writing can’t. And if you can earn money from another source, you’re free to pursue your vision unimpeded by commercial concerns. Ironically, if your work is good, there’s a good chance it will sell.

Creatives in profile: interview with The Ultra

April 3, 2018April 3, 2018 / professorwu / 1 Comment

The Ultra. Photography by Mike Dodson/Vagabond Images.

In the latest of our ‘Creatives in profile’ interview series, it is an honour to introduce you to Joel Alexander and Paul Dogra – the duo behind independent rock/electronic band, The Ultra.

First founded in East London, The Ultra is a band that likes to experiment and create interesting emotive music that captures memorable hooks and melodies. To date, The Ultra have two EP’s and two videos out, as well as a write up in in the popular local magazine The E-list. They also have their debut EP ‘When The World Turns Out Its Lights’ signed to Platform Records and recently had their track ‘Universe In Two’ used on a trailer for a new computer game called ‘Die Young’.

You can check their music out here and follow them on Twitter @UltrabandUK. We hope you enjoy this detailed interview…

INTERVIEWER

Tell me about yourselves, where you live and your background/lifestyle?

THE ULTRA

Joel:

We are Paul and Joel Aka ‘The Ultra’, and we met and started creating music after meeting through a musician’s site in London.

I am originally from all over the south of England as my parents liked to move around. Later I was actually living round the corner from Paul when we met, which was convenient. I now live with my partner in Copenhagen, Denmark and fly back regularly to work with Paul. My background has always involved singing in bands and writing lyrics.

Paul:

I am originally from London and studied in Brighton. I currently reside in East London to be near my 5 yr old daughter who delightfully absorbs my time when I am not writing music. My life revolves around my daughter and music – these are both what make me content and purposeful in life.

I have been in various bands over the years that were more guitar based and played many gigs in the late 90s and early 00s in London. I have worked with other musicians over the years on a variety of projects, but more in the background. There came a point in 2014 when I rediscovered dance and electro based music again, and so I started to write with this in mind, with the primary focus of forming a duo with a co-writer/singer.

INTERVIEWER

Is music your first love, or do you have another passion?

THE ULTRA

Joel:

I would probably say yes, as I have grown up listening and being very passionate about music, probably also due to my parents playing a wide range of music when I was a kid. I also enjoy travelling very much and – of course – spending time with my partner, Ida.

Paul:

Music has always been my passion and it is how I express my emotions and inner most thoughts. I use music almost as a form of meditation – to help forget my worries and concerns. My other passion would of course be my daughter, Orla, who I adore and is my absolute world!

INTERVIEWER

Who inspires you?

THE ULTRA

Joel:

I have been inspired by great bands from Depeche Mode to Pearl Jam, Peter Gabriel and Dire Straits. I am also inspired by people who have overcome great hardship.

Paul:

The main artist that inspires me musically and spiritually is Depeche Mode, also the U2 period 1991 – 2005. I am also inspired to write music to enable my daughter in years to come to admire my creative side and be proud of what I achieved. I guess its about wanting to leave a legacy of music for her.

INTERVIEWER

Who were your early teachers?

THE ULTRA

Joel:

I guess it was the music I listened to as a kid, Eddie Vedder was a great teacher from afar. I have worked with vocal coaches over the years too, some good, some not so good. When you find your true real voice it gets more straight forward.

Paul:

I am fan of U2 musically and lyrically. Their songs taught me how to approach writing a song in terms of dynamics, textures, and creating atmosphere. I was heavily influenced by the guitar style of The Edge to play a minimalist yet effective guitar sound. Depeche Mode obviously too.

INTERVIEWER

How would you describe your current sound?

THE ULTRA

Joel:

I would say electronic with rock elements, experimental and atmospheric.

Paul:

I would say it is electro/alternative and experimental. We like to challenge ourselves to create emotive and interesting music that hopefully captures people.

INTERVIEWER

As primarily a community of writers, we’re keen to learn about your creative songwriting process. How does a song usually develop – do you first start with the lyrics, melody, chord progression, or something else?

THE ULTRA

Joel:

Paul will normally send me over a melody idea and then I will start writing to that, after we have the rough lyrics and a guide vocal we will then build the track around that.

Paul:

It starts in various ways – sometimes a drum loop or beat I have found, or playing around with synth sounds – this then creates a mood with which to build upon. I’ll then put down a basic template of chord progression and sounds. Then I will send this to Joel who will work on melody and lyrics. When Joel feels he has a basic idea, we will record vocals and work out what does and doesn’t work. That will then provide a template to build upon with more sounds and instruments.

The exciting thing is that I wouldn’t have heard Joel’s ideas until he records a draft vocal – I always look forward to this. As always, Joel will complement the music ideas I have so well.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have a favourite place or time that you like to write?

THE ULTRA

Joel:

Not really – when I sit down and decide to write. I generally get lost in the track so anytime works.

Paul:

I am at my most creative at night and like to write and lay ideas down then – usually with a glass or two of red wine!

INTERVIEWER

Where do your ideas for songs originate from?

THE ULTRA

Joel:

Current feelings I guess, also what may be happening in the world at the time or something I have seen recently that sticks with me.

Paul:

From a certain emotion, thought or mood I am in at that time – that could be about my personal life or something I have heard or read in the news.

INTERVIEWER

Does a certain emotion trigger your songwriting impulse?

THE ULTRA

Joel:

Often feeling reflective, full of questions or if I really feel I need to get some words/emotions out.

Paul:

Yes, usually an emotion of sadness, hurt or doubt. Certainly I know that Joel’s lyrics complement the basic mood I try to write from a music perspective.

INTERVIEWER

What do you think is the relationship between lyrics and poetry?

Paul:

Yes, I would say there is a relationship, but I do not know if Joel approaches his lyrics in this way. My favourite lyricists are Bono and Martin Gore, who I feel have a sense of poetry in their writing.

Joel:

Lyrics are poetry to music.

INTERVIEWER

When putting together a new song, do you tend to work in long stretches, or short bursts?

THE ULTRA

Paul:

It depends on how creative I get when writing. This can mean long bursts because I am determined to get a basic idea down.

Joel:

We spend a long time crafting the songs once we have the idea down, it is a nice process.

INTERVIEWER

When creating a new song, how do you maintain motivation through the whole process – from the initial idea, to writing the lyrics and music, playing, rehearsing, practising, editing, finally recording and then releasing to the public?

THE ULTRA

Paul:

This can depend on song the song(s) we are working on. From my point of view, when I have an initial idea (and if it is really inspiring) then this will increase the motivation and workflow. If I have an idea that I think is really good, I will want to get a very basic template down and then send to Joel for his thoughts and suggestions. Joel will then work on his melodies and lyrics for the song.

When Joel feels that he has good ideas we will co-ordinate dates to record draft vocals in London. Once these are completed this will motivate me to work more crafting the song with layers and sounds based on Joel’s melodies. Once we are both satisfied, then we set a date for final recording of vocals. We have a very dedicated and intense recording workflow.

I then spend much time editing the song which involves more dynamics and textures. I know at times Joel can get frustrated as to why a song takes so long to have a final mix! I guess I am in my element when I am mixing and editing away on a song – sometimes I do need Joel to say “come on mate, don’t over do the song now!”. Setting deadlines is how we tend to motivate ourselves, which we discuss in detail.

Joel:

The belief in the songs and the excitement I get as they develop keeps me motivated for sure! But, yes, as Paul says I think it is important to set deadlines as to not let the song stagnate.

INTERVIEWER

A number of songwriters have spoken about the power of music to change the world. In these turbulent political times, what role do you think music has to play in putting forward new ideas, or challenging existing ones?

THE ULTRA

Paul:

Certainly I would suggest that music is an ‘escapism’ from the reality of the turbulent times that surround us. I guess music and lyrics can help define a mood, thought, or worry a person has and ‘hide away’ from the worries at that time. Lyrics most definitely make a statement about the times we are in.

Joel:

Yes, I think you can get a strong message across through music and this has been done many times over the years. Whether the people who can actually do something listen is a different story.

INTERVIEWER

In Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher speaks about the catch-22 situation some musicians find themselves in, where “a protest against MTV is the only thing guaranteed to get you airtime on MTV”. How do you perceive the relationship between new or independent music artists and the corporate music studio corporations and power structures?

THE ULTRA

Paul:

This really resonates with us, because we are independent and self-financing musicians. The corporate music studios and power structures hold immense sway in getting music heard on radio stations and promoting artists. I think that there is a ‘battle’ against the independent artist and the big corporations for exposure and to make an impact. Unfortunately, the independent artist does not have the same money or influence as the corporates, so this is so frustrating when all we want to do is ‘get our music heard’ and play decent music venues.

Joel:

It is difficult as an independent artist trying to get your work out there; but I think when things happen for you it is all the more rewarding. It is a shame there seems to be such a big divide these days. I can’t remember last time I heard a new experimental song in the charts. But then again I don’t listen to the charts often anymore.

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel any ethical responsibility as musicians and artists?

THE ULTRA

Paul:

Yes, in terms of honesty. In my personal life, I would like to think I am ethically responsible in my everyday life of how I treat people. I am aware that I have a young daughter who will be on this planet for years to come and so from an environmental point of view and how to behave, I like to think I am ethical.

Joel:

Yes I do, I think how we as artists come across is very important and it is also important to stick to one’s beliefs.

INTERVIEWER

What are your thoughts on some of the general trends within the music industry? Is there anything in particular you see as being potentially future-defining?

THE ULTRA

Paul:

Certainly it is much easier to be able to ‘put your music out there’ for people to hear and watch, and the power of social media is clearly evident. However, there unfortunately is still an element that the big-label players have the connections to elevate your music and contacts for air/video play.

Joel:

I think a shake up needs to happen sometime. Spotify is a big one where the artist has control of their music and can get it out there and earn money from it without needing support from a label.

INTERVIEWER

Could you tell us a little about some of the future projects you’re working on?

THE ULTRA

Paul:

We have a live performance video of our song Incognito in final editing at the moment, which we will then promote. We are also working on new ideas and hoping to look towards targeted live performances with a drummer later in the year.

Joel:

Exactly what Paul said, we have loads of stuff coming up!

INTERVIEWER

Could you write us a story in 6 words?

THE ULTRA

Joel:

The world spun then went numb.

Paul:

This is impossible!

Creatives in profile: interview with Helen Rye

March 26, 2018 / professorwu / 2 Comments

The world of a short story may be more condensed than the world of a novel, but its emotional impact can be as wide-ranging as a novel’s. Indeed, whether you want to call it micro-fiction, sudden fiction, smokelong lit, short-shorts or flash fiction, writing short stories requires dedication, skill and applying new techniques to make them zing. But, when done right, these pieces of fiction can offer a true – albeit fleeting – moment of literary delight to both writers and readers.

With booksellers reporting a surge in the popularity of the short story, Nothing in the Rulebook caught up with one of those writers brave enough to embrace the short story as their form of choice.

Helen Rye has arrived on the short-story scene with quite the onomatopoeic splash and bang since her debut short story was nominated for the 2016 Bridport Prize – with her stories variously winning or being shortlisted for a number of other prestigious short story competitions since.

It is an honour to bring you this detailed interview…

INTERVIEWER

Tell me about yourself, where you live and your background/lifestyle

RYE

I live in Norwich, UK, a beautiful city packed to the seams with talented writers, due in part to the legendary MA creative writing programme at the UEA. I don’t have an MA, but I have benefited via a sort of trickle-down effect from some brilliant classes and writing groups run by people who do.

My main work background is in homelessness and drug work, but I’ve also been a lab technician, a classroom assistant, a cleaner, an admin worker, a voluntary theatre company director and an underqualified parent. I’ve wanted to be writer since I was eight and was encouraged by a couple of English teachers to pursue it seriously, but I dropped in and out of school as a teenager. After being told in sixth form that there was no way to study creative writing beyond school, I ended up leaving to work in a science lab, studying physics part-time at a tech college.

I was always writing in my head, but too afraid to put it down on paper for such a long time in case I turned out not to be any good at it after all. For years I kept telling myself that soon I would write, until I was staring down the barrel of a milestone birthday and decided it was now or never. I took a couple of courses and joined a writing group, where I was introduced to flash fiction via a Kit de Waal story. I REALLY wanted to learn how to do that, so had a stab at it, and that story – the first thing I’d ever subbed anywhere – ended up being shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. That gave me enough of a confidence boost to try writing some more and (I know this sounds incredibly jammy), the next story I sent out won the October 2016 Bath Flash Fiction Award, out of 700 entries.

I’ve since had other stories published in various online and print journals and anthologies and went on to win the Reflex Fiction Prize in the summer of 2017, as well as unceremoniously crashing and burning in other contests. Confidence is such a strange thing, isn’t it. I’m still really reticent about sending stuff out, and am fairly brutally aware of my shortcomings as a writer. The last few months have been a particularly busy and difficult time in my life, but I’m hoping now to press through this hesitancy – basically, to get over myself and get subbing.

INTERVIEWER

Is writing your first love, or do you have another passion?

RYE

No, it’s writing. That’s my thing. I also love music, though, and I have been part of an improv comedy troupe, although I’ve come to the conclusion that my brain just doesn’t work fast enough for that. I do love the creative, collaborative nature of music and of improvised theatre, though, and the incredible sense of teamwork and connection that comes with both – I get that from the writing community, too – the flash fiction writers are my lovely dysfunctional extended family. We get each other in a way that nobody else does, beautiful obsessive weirdos that we are.

INTERVIEWER

Who inspires you?

RYE

Oh, gosh. Well everyone who can write a beautifully constructed sentence that takes my breath away with its emotional impact, and anyone who can produce a flash story that shines with heart and poetry. So many writers. My mentor, Tania Hershman – as well as being a wonderful, joyful writer, she is a shiny, glowing human full of life and encouragement. One or two of my closest writing friends who would probably be embarrassed if I named them, but they know who they are. People who give so much to the writing community in editing journals, helping other writers develop, writing incredible stories themselves. People who always make time to workshop your story twenty minutes before the deadline you forgot you had. People full of kindness, humour and humility who are willing to slice open a bit of their heart and lay it on the page, make themselves vulnerable in order to say something worth saying. These guys keep me sane and keep me writing with their support and encouragement.

INTERVIEWER

Who were your early teachers?

RYE

I had two dedicated and (here comes that word) inspirational English teachers at school who both said they were keeping stuff I’d written because they thought I’d be a famous writer one day. Sorry to disappoint you there, guys. But thank you so much for your encouragement – I definitely wouldn’t have tried to write at all if it weren’t for you. Then in more recent years I did some creative writing courses with former UEA people Lisa Selvidge, Stephen Carver, Andy McDonnell and Ian Nettleton. They’re all utterly fantastic teachers, genuinely.

INTERVIEWER

What draws you to flash fiction?

RYE

Flash is everything that’s best in writing, to me. It’s closer to poetry than it is to longer fiction, I think – the condensing of ideas and feeling, the need for single or pared down imagery and language. At its best (i.e. other people’s) it’s a laser-cut jewel of perfect shining prose. It can break your heart in pieces in such few words. I love poetry too, but I don’t understand it well enough to write it well and I relate better to the clearer narrative of flash. A great flash story will make me feel something, and that’s almost the whole reason I read. Writing it lets me work out and express what I feel or think about something better than anything I know. I’d trot out that old line that it’s faster to write flash than longer fiction, but for most flash writers I know that’s not actually true. When you have few words to tell a story you try to get every one of them right. I hope there’s no function on my computer that can tell you how long I’ve spent per word on a given story – I’m sure whole novels have been written faster and better.

INTERVIEWER

How easy do you find it to move between different writing forms/mediums – can you balance writing a novel with crafting flash fiction or short stories?

RYE

I’m focussing on trying to get better at writing flash at the moment, but have accidentally written some hybrid pieces that stray towards prose poetry territory. I have begun thinking about returning to the shambolic collection of scenes on my laptop that I’ve sometimes described as a novel draft, and I have a couple of children’s fiction drafts and ideas I’m wanting to find the time to return to. How easy I’ll find that shift, I’ll let you know when I try it!

INTERVIEWER

How do you maintain your motivation for writing?

RYE

The crazy obsessive in me can’t let it be. It’s how my brain works, I think in terms of stories and eccentric language and metaphors, and it’s one way I try to make sense of the world. If I didn’t keep writing now I’d probably develop some other, more self-destructive habits, so I need to keep it up, I think. And the support and encouragement of writer friends. I’d be weeping under a duvet without them.

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel writers should feel any ethical responsibility in their roles?

RYE

I don’t think you can divorce ethical responsibility from anything you do. Nobody wants to read preachy writing, but sometimes what drives us to write is an unbearable sense of injustice, or the suffering of other people. And maybe occasionally a story will make someone think – or rather, feel – deeper – who knows. Doing our absolute best not to be a part of endemic racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism etc is everyone’s responsibility, and that extends to art.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have a specific audience in mind when you write?

RYE

No. Maybe I should, I don’t know. I kinda just write and hope it might end up beautiful in some way, say what I want it to say, and that someone somewhere will read it and not completely hate it.

INTERVIEWER

What are your thoughts on some of the general trends within the writing industry (if we can call it thus)? Is there anything in particular you see as being potentially future-defining?

RYE

I’m a mum from Norfolk and I’ve only been submitting stories for about 18 months – I’m not sure I’m aware of general trends within the writing industry… I think flash is becoming more mainstream, maybe? There seem to be more opportunities for chapbooks and collections to be published commercially than a year or so ago, which can only be fairly wonderful. Maybe the literary world is catching up with us flash writers, here at the tiny but sharpened cutting edge of short story writing…

INTERVIEWER

Could you tell us a little about some of the future projects you’re working on?

RYE

I’ve just joined the editorial board of Ellipsis Zine, a fantastic online flash fiction magazine, and also been asked to act as fiction editor for another print journal. Both of those are incredibly exciting for me. I have a back catalogue of mothballed flash stories in need of editing and sending out and I’m hoping desperately to find the time and confidence to do that now. I have that half-written and possibly very bad novel hidden in a dark corner and I need to brush the beetles off that and see if it’s worth working on. I also have some children’s picture book texts I’m trying to psych myself up to send to an agent. And an idea for a children’s novel that’s been occupying a small space in my head for about a decade. What I really need is someone to prod me with sticks until I get over myself and just do this stuff because who knows, hey. It’ll definitely never get anywhere if nobody ever sees it. And that’s what writer-friends are for.

INTERVIEWER

Could you write us a story in 6 words?

RYE

No.

Kidding, but they’re so hard! Ok, erm…

Whiteness would have made him bulletproof.

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nothingintherulebook

A collective of creatives bound by a single motto: There's nothing in the rulebook that says a giraffe can't play football!

Creatives in profile – interview series

Creatives in profile: interview with Justin Sullivan

Creatives in profile: interview with Will Eaves

Creatives in profile: interview with Anna Saunders

Creatives in profile: interview with Michael Caines, co-editor of the Brixton Review of Books

Creatives in profile – interview with Katie Paterson

Creatives in profile: interview with Dr Chuck Tingle

Creatives in profile: interview with Anne Beate Hovind, the curator of the Library of the Future

Creatives in profile: interview with Wundor Editions

Creatives in profile: interview with The Ultra

Creatives in profile: interview with Helen Rye