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Lust

For Stylist 

I grew up in a small fundamentalist church that taught me to fear lust above almost everything else. I was taught that bodies, especially female bodies, were things lying in wait to trip you up with their sneaky, immoral urges. I was taught that you should be on your guard at all times.

I couldn’t even blame the devil, as the church believes the devil is just a symbol of your own sinful nature: you have no-one to blame but yourself if you give in to it. While I was in my early to mid-teens I became convinced that red underwear meant you were one of many words I don’t use any more – promiscuous, slutty, loose – take your pick. I developed this fixation on what different colours of underwear meant after watching the Nineties teen film 10 Things I Hate About You. There was a scene where we were told black panties meant you wanted to have sex one day (which, in hindsight, is confusing from several angles). In a simplistic sideways leap, I surmised red underwear must mean you were already having sex, which to me was terrifying.

I was scandalised by any glimpse of scarlet in the school changing room. I left the church years ago, and objectively know these things to be nonsense, but years of being told them had worked their way deep inside my brain. It took a long time for the way I think about sex, and the language I use around it, to evolve. In the church, women weren’t allowed to teach or speak during services (so there’s something undeniably empowering about writing about lust) and I internalised a lot of damaging language. It took a lot of reading and listening to other, wiser women for me to realise that words such as slut and promiscuity were tools used to police women’s lust, and now I choose my words with more care.

In the end, it took turning 30, some good friends, a few trips to Moulin Rouge (the immersive Secret Cinema version staged last summer), and a lot of soul-searching to make peace with lust and my own sexuality. I still get nervous about buying red knickers, but after growing up being told that my body was terrifying and my voice was unimportant, being able to make a living as a writer, especially writing about gender and feminism, feels like a triumph.

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Can thrillers really be feminist?

For The Pool

There is a dead woman. She is bloodied and battered. She’s probably naked, she’s almost definitely beautiful. A ruggedly handsome detective with a dark past stands over her and shakes his head at the sadness of it all. A steely look enters his eyes as he resolves to avenge this horrible waste of female flesh.

The above may read as sarcasm, but it’s an all too familiar opening for the crime genre. All stats seem to show that thrillers are overwhelmingly read by women and yet we still have to regularly negotiate the uncomfortable or downright problematic treatment of women and women’s bodies. But, increasingly, people are saying enough is enough. The team adapting Robert Galbraith/JK Rowling’s Cormoran Strike books for TV have recently publicly criticised the “voyeuristic level of violence against women” in TV dramas. And, when it comes to books, there is an increasingly noisy collection of female characters wielding axes, cocktails and secrets, and an ever-deepening pool of writers questioning whether there’s another way to explore our darkest fears without having to sacrifice any feminist principles.

There’s still a strangely intense fascination with women who write crime and thrillers; still regular thinkpieces, even documentaries, where women writing about violence are treated a little like dogs walking on their hind legs. It smacks uncomfortably close to the rather Victorian belief that women couldn’t be surgeons because of their constitutions, as if dealing with blood coming out your vagina once a month would make you more, rather than less, squeamish. And, despite this, more and more male writers are writing under genderless or even outright female names. Author Martyn Waites describes the books he writes as himself as “more complex, more metaphorical, the kind of things things I like in writing” whereas (although it’s unclear if these are Waites or the journalist's words) when he writes as Tania Carver, the books are “simpler” and “more mainstream”.

Last year, Terrence Rafferty wrote a piece for The Atlantic called “Women Are Writing The Best Crime Novels”. The title of the article is deceptively positive and, among his praise for specific books, the piece is full of frustrating, patronising assumptions about female writers and readers. Even though it’s male writers choosing to write under female pseudonyms, apparently it’s “a bunch of very crafty girls” sneaking in, redefining the genre. On the subject of recent megahits like The Girl On The Train, Rafferty goes on to explain that “writers of the current school tend to favour a volatile mixture of higher-pitched first-person tones: hectoring, accusatory, self-justifying, a little desperate. Reading these tricky 21st-century thrillers can be like scrolling through an especially heated comments thread on a web site of wandering unaware into a Twitter feud”. Leaving aside that the horrors of comment threads or Twitter trolls are distinctly male-dominated, the language used here shows that, even very loosely masquerading as praise, there’s a deep discomfort with the way women have changed the crime and thriller market.

But, as with many things, peel away the layer of men making things weird (#notallmen) and you have a lot of women (and some men) getting on with actually interrogating what writing a feminist thriller really means. Erin Kelly’s latest book, He Said/She Said, revolves around a Ched Evans-esque rape trial, after a couple see what appears to be a sexual assault during an eclipse at a festival. The book grew from the idea of a crime taking place during an eclipse, not the desire to write a feminist thriller, but as Kelly says, “It must be feminist, because I’m getting emails from Men’s Rights Activists telling me that I’m a rabid man-hater.”

Kelly’s book explores sexual assault head-on; it’s at times a difficult book to read, but it shows that thrillers can tackle these things without slipping into gratuitous descriptions of violence against women. “The best thrillers don’t deny the female condition, but hit the sweet spot between exploiting real-life victims for cheap thrills and turning a novel into a morality play. I agonised over using an allegation of rape as a plot device,” Kelly says. “More so than I ever have when writing a murder. But for every sensitive, thoughtful examination of rape in fiction there are literally thousands of raped and murdered and mutilated women whose victimhood is little more than a plot device. I knew I was treading on eggshells, but I walked with incredible care. I researched this book more thoroughly than anything else I’ve ever written.”

Ruth Kenley-Letts, the executive producer for Strike, said “great efforts had been taken to treat the crimes against female victims with sensitivity on screen” and it’s something book editors are increasingly sensitive too as well. “It’s a tough one,” Sam Eades, a commissioning editor at Orion, says. “It’s important for fiction to reflect the society we live in – and violence against women happens to those we love and care abou – but that’s not to say I wouldn’t love to read a thriller that explored the world how it could be, not just as it is now.” Alison Hennessey, a commissioning editor for crime at Bloomsbury, has issued a blanket ban on books that start with the rape or murder or a woman being investigated by a male detective: “There are enough of these books out there already, and enough violence in the world, frankly, that I’m not interested in contributing more to that unless the book was doing something to explore why this happens.”

I can’t help but think of the people who defend the level of sexual violence in Game Of Thrones by saying it’s historically realistic, or that’s just what would have happened in a society like that, even though it’s a society where there is also magic and dragons. Art in whatever form is important because it lets us explore how we feel and react to the real world, and yet it is fiction – it does not have to do or be anything. But if fiction is where we explore life, thrillers are where we explore fear. They arguably don’t work if they’re not tense, uncomfortable reads. I had to stop reading He Said/She Said at several points to calm down, and I worked myself up into a righteous fury reading Little Deaths by Emma Flint – but at what was going on in the story, not because of the way the writer was handling it. “I don’t know a single woman who has never been made to feel threatened or afraid,” Flint says. “Our real-life experience gives an extra frisson of terror to reading about a woman being followed home, a woman who has a stranger sit next to her in an otherwise empty train carriage. We are used to being afraid that we will become victims.”

So, it’s not that these subjects shouldn’t be tackled in thrillers (as Kelly says, “I read this shit on my phone every day – not to explore it is just another kind of silencing”) – it’s how to skirt a very delicate line without tipping into gratuitous and exploitative presentations. How do you write a book about people doing awful misogynistic things without writing an awful misogynistic book? There’s no easy checklist of how to make a thriller feminist, and everyone has their own definition of what that means. But, as Kelly says: “I think any novel that makes the reader think seriously about the fact that women still cannot move through the world with the same ease as men can be read as feminist. Sometimes the authorial intent to write a feminist novel is clear, but with crime fiction it’s more of a Trojan horse. Big Little Lies arguably got more women examining their prejudices about domestic abuse than a Guardian editorial.”

Here are a few of our favourite feminist thrillers to try:

THE POWER BY NAOMI ALDERMAN It would be impossible to not mention the book that won this year’s Baileys Prize. A tense, blistering, darkly humorous look at what might happen if women suddenly became the physically stronger sex. It’s impossible to read it without interrogating your own perspective on gender.

LITTLE DEATHS BY EMMA FLINT A startlingly insightful, intelligent read about the way society closes its walls against women who are not what they are asked to be and the way the patriarchy is terrified by the women it cannot control, and how far it will go to reassert that control.

HE SAID/SHE SAID BY ERIN KELLY A pageturner that tackles sexual assault head-on. When a couple witness what seems to be a rape during an eclipse, they get embroiled in a court case and the lives of the two people affected. It always puts plot and character first, but isn’t afraid to interrogate how we decide who we believe and who to trust.

PULL ME UNDER BY KELLY LUCE Coming out next month, this scratches at the edge of the genre, as there is no trail of bodies or plot twists. Instead, it’s a tight, intense portrait of one woman’s psychological state as she tries to leave behind the legacy of a horrifying act she committed as a 12-year-old. A sharp literary read about guilt and anger.

OUT BY NATSUO KIRINO From one extreme to the other, this shocking, violent crime novel follows four female friends working together in a factory who band together to try and cover up the murder by one of them of their abusive husband, and things escalate from there. One for readers who like their biting feminist commentary with some dismemberment.

THE WOMAN WHO RAN BY SAM BAKER While it’s a little awkward to mention a book by the co-founder of the site, a list of feminist thriller recommendations would be incompletely without this modern take of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall. Not quite a retelling, but playing with Brontë’s themes of gossip, broken relationships and carving out your own identity.

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Interview: E. Lockhart

For Books for Keeps

E. Lockhart can’t resist the unexpected. In both the books she writes and the books she reads, she’s inevitably drawn to things that make you think, that surprise you, or challenge you. Genuine Fraud, her follow-up to We Were Liars, is another twisty, subversive look at growing up and finding your place in the world. It follows eighteen-year-old Jule, who we first meet in a hotel in Mexico before jumping back in time as we retrace the steps that led her there. ‘I’ve wanted to write a backwards book for a while,’ Lockhart says. ‘I often set myself some kind of structural task that pushes me to be creative within a certain set of limitations. It’s interesting to have something to push up against; that restriction of technique forces you into creative expression you wouldn’t get to otherwise.’

On top of the structural challenge there were several literary references percolating, from superheroes to Dickens: ‘I started thinking about plot events that would be similar to The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith but I quickly realised I was layering in a lot of influences from Victorian orphan stories of class mobility - Great Expectations, Vanity Fair. And then also certain kind of superhero origin stories where somebody goes from feeling like nothing to a position of great but complicated power. I wanted to interrogate that escalation from powerlessness to power through this backwards antihero story.’ That antihero narrative is the final jigsaw piece that makes up Genuine Fraud: ‘I wanted to tell an anti-hero story that was about a young woman because I think there’s still a lot of pressure to make female character likeable and relatable in a way we don’t have with our male characters.’

Jule is not, in Lockhart’s own words, a good person but she’s not worried about having her at the centre of Genuine Fraud. ‘What’s going to happen to me?’ Lockhart says, ‘Some people will say you wrote a bad book? You’re a bad person? I’m not Genuine Fraudscared of those people. I made a piece of art that reflects ugly things about human beings, and my own self as well, but I don’t think my job is to write books that will model awesome behaviour, I don’t think that’s what literature is. I think sometimes people get confused when they’re talking about young adult literature because they want - from a very loving place - the books that their children read to provide hope, healing, role models. I’m glad those books exist, I read many of them and like them very much. However you never know what is going to make somebody see themselves in a book, and acknowledging the breadth of human rage and complexity and ugliness has a value too.’

Although she enjoys challenging the YA status quo, Lockhart has a deep affection for it: ‘I really like writing for young people, there’s a friendly attitude and supportiveness to the community. Everyone is looking to increase young people’s access to books and literacy. The attitude among writers I know is that someone’s success is a success for all of us. Because John Green is a juggernaut more teenagers are reading, more teenagers love books, more teenagers are sharing books on the Internet with each other. John wins, we all win. There’s this feeling that we’re all in this together to make beautiful or funny or cool books that will get children and teenagers excited - I like that atmosphere so much. I don’t ever feel limited.’ And Lockhart sees Genuine Fraud as firmly YA, even though its main characters are 18 and no one’s in school: ‘All the main characters have separated from their family of origin, and I think that’s a fundamental subject matter for YA - the separation from the family, the making of some kind of new home, the assertion of the self as separate.’

Despite Jule’s decisions and actions (to mention any plot points in much detail would be to spoil the experience of reading Genuine Fraud for the first time, but the cover blurb mentions murder) it’s hard not to root for her. ‘I’m interested in putting you in a position of complicity,’ Lockhart explains. ‘I’m not telling you what to think about your moral code, I’m just forcing you to We Were Liarssay, oh, I rooted for this person, what’s that all about? In films we’re told who’s on the side of right and then we’re easily able to root for them if they beat someone up - in a book you’re complicit in the making of the meaning.’

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Review: The Road to Vermilion Lake

For The Literary Review

The Road to Vermilion Lake careens from the tedious to the absurd en route to a finale where an orgasm causes a geological fissure, forcing the couple responsible to move to a Hawaiian island. It aims to be a postmodern fever dream exploring the human condition, but it turns into a masturbatory fantasy where nothing is said that could not be expressed with 50 per cent fewer adjectives.

At the centre of the book is Tom, a man who cannot see a woman without describing her breasts in detail. He is working as a blaster’s helper and first-aid attendant on a project finding a passage to the titular Vermilion Lake, an idyllic heart-shaped paradise. The boundaries of credibility start to strain when, after the team has spent seven years blasting through mountains in order to build an exclusive village at the lake, the project’s architect arrives. She turns out to be not only an intensely Catholic woman named Johnny but also, improbably, the sister of Sally, a woman Tom once kissed and whom he fantasises about while he and his colleagues slide ‘dynamite sticks into the long thin holes we’d drilled into the rock’.

Sally is barely given the luxury of a back story explaining how she met Tom before she is taken out of action in a freak landslide accident. This causes her conveniently to lose her memory, rendering her presence in the book entirely redundant. It does, however, introduce the reader to a farcically negligent doctor who recommends they re-create Sally’s past according to their own whims; he calls this ‘an exciting construction project’. Johnny takes this one step further by suggesting they create a time capsule of Sally’s memories and then ‘perhaps bury it deep in a beautiful rose garden I could design and work into the landscaping plans for my lot at Vermilion’.

With Sally unceremoniously swept out of the picture, the only obstacle to Johnny and Tom’s happy ending is her deeply held religious beliefs that prevent her from having sex before marriage. However, in a scene ripped from a teenage boy’s imagination, she is soon so overcome with lust for him that she just can’t help herself, telling him, ‘you … make me want to be all I can possibly be as a woman.’ Johnny is an uncomfortable fantasy of a female character, whose virginity and the loss thereof are fetishised in sordid detail. She uses the words ‘Catholic’ and ‘medieval’ interchangeably to describe her outlook on life, and the most interesting thing about her is the vague suggestion throughout the book that perhaps she is in control of some sort of literal magical medieval mysticism. But, apart from the aforementioned earth-shattering orgasms, there’s never any resolution on this front.

Vic Cavalli was perhaps aiming to reduce his story down to archetypes to explore big ideas about humanity, but instead he has invented a plot that’s a zero-sum game and characters who are the antithesis of authentic. Both are merely vehicles for the author’s clunky, pseudo-philosophical exposition, which fails ever to say anything of real weight or beauty.

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Here's What You Should Know About That Immersive "Moulin Rouge" Production

For Buzzfeed

Graphic: Rebecca Hendin/Buzzfeed

This is a story about truth, beauty, and freedom, but above all it’s a story about love. It’s also a story about growing up, immersive theatre, art as revolution, and the current Secret Cinema production of Moulin Rouge.

I first watched Moulin Rouge 15 years ago; it was 2002 and I was 15. I was very tall, very ginger, and very awkward, and I grew up as part of a small, fundamentalist Christian church whose views on gender and sexuality would politely be called traditional – I spent all of my Sundays in services where women weren’t allowed to speak. All of this added an intensity to the already thorny mix of contradictory messages that all teenage girls grapple with. I was by no means unhappy and was – and still am – part of a close, loving family. But I was deeply uncomfortable in my own skin, terrified of my own body, and wrangling a lot of internalised sexism in the years before helpful YouTube tutorials or indeed any online communities where I might find another way of being.

And so of course I turned to stories – books in particular. I was not much of a discerning film watcher; our family favourites were George of the Jungle and The Sound of Music, but I read and wrote avidly. But then, one day while home ill from school, I watched a Blockbuster VHS of Moulin Rouge, purely because it was there and I was bored, and I fell in love. I can remember the experience of watching it in intense and specific detail, and I can still easily conjure up the feeling as it ended, watching every moment of the credits, not wanting it to end. I fell for it with the intensity that comes only with the things you first encounter as a teenager.

At the time I wasn’t analysing why I’d connected so fiercely with the film, but in hindsight it’s almost embarrassingly obvious. Firstly there was Nicole Kidman as beautiful but doomed courtesan Satine. Seeing that level of gingerness and confidence existing simultaneously was addictive to me; she is so tall and ginger but so beautiful and elegant, and I was utterly entranced. Not to mention her big solo is literally called One Day I’ll Fly Away. And then there’s the penniless writer Christian, played by Ewan McGregor, who leaves his traditional, safe life to seek truth, beauty, freedom, and love in Paris surrounded by artists, bohemians, and revolutionaries. (McGregor, or rather McGregor’s singing voice, certainly added something too.) And finally there’s Baz Luhrmann’s version of the Moulin Rouge itself, a place of dancing, freedom, and abandon. Everything about the film was quixotic to me.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve watched Moulin Rouge; the songs and the script are second nature to me. I make niche jokes about it that my friends don’t get, and know an unusually large amount of trivia from watching the extensive extras on the special edition DVD. It’s played on loop in the background since I first discovered it; through my teenage years, going to university, leaving the church, embracing my hair, moving to London. It never stopped being my favourite film, but somewhere along the line of growing up, it lost some of its potency: I watched it for fun but it didn’t come with the rich hope of my teenage viewings.

At the end of 2016, Secret Cinema, an immersive theatre and film company, announced Moulin Rouge would be its next production, and I was thrilled. But the truth is, my adult self had lost sight how much the film had meant to me when I was a teenager. I also had very little idea of what to expect, having never been to a Secret Cinema film before. In my mind it was going to be a dress-up, singalong sort of situation, with actors playing out bits on stage, kind of like the interactive performances of Rocky Horror I’d been to. So, excited as I was while I got ready with my friends over a few bottles of prosecco, soundtrack blaring, nothing in me was prepared for how transformative the experience would prove to be.

More than a fancy dress singalong in every way, Secret Cinema has turned a huge space in east London into the streets of 1899 Montmartre. The night is a spectacular sensory ravishment from beginning to end, a shot of absinthe straight to the heart. There’s hours of open-ended exploring before the screening, where characters you feel you know so well are walking among the audience, talking and singing and dancing with you. It’s an intoxicating world where real life blurs with story. We duetted with the Duke, met a courtesan backstage at the Moulin Rouge, were taken to a secret bar by a drag queen, and became part of the beating heart of the bohemian revolution as we sang and danced and laughed and cried with nearly a thousand strangers.

And then, to a soundtrack that captures the elated anarchy of Luhrmann's film, we were transported to the Moulin Rouge itself as part of a sequence full of so much joy and magic that it is worth the ticket price alone. Part way through it one of the dancers beckoned me towards the stage, where the actor playing Moulin Rouge owner and impresario Harold Zidler held out a hand and pulled me up, dipping me into an over-the-top staged kiss. It passed in a blur of concentrating on not falling up the stairs and hearing my friends hollering from the front row in excitement. But there was a moment where the storyteller in me kicked in, I remembered what the movies have taught me, and I kicked out a foot pop just as a flash of a camera went off and the audience of the Moulin Rouge exploded in cheers. It’s the freeze frame in my mind that will forever be associated with Secret Cinema. And yes, it was just for a very quick set piece that happens every night and, yes, it was essentially random that I was stood in the right place, but imagine a character from your favourite film reaching a hand out and saying, come, be part of this story with us. It’s Hagrid opening Diagon Alley for you, or Gandalf knocking on your front door. It’s Jareth inviting you to waltz or Lucy Pevensie leading you into the wardrobe.

The person behind these moments is Fabien Riggall, the founder of Secret Cinema, a man entirely and sincerely invested in his audience. “We give so much love to the idea of what the audience feel – it’s always about the audience and how we take what people love and translate it into an experience which they can be part of,” he told me in May when we sat down to speak about this current production, and the bohemian ideals driving it forward. “I think incredibly intensely about what it means to take these stories that people adore and create something where people feel so joyous at the end of the night. Think of when we did Star Wars: These are people’s memories of their childhoods, of going to the cinema with their fathers.”

I was keen to ask Riggall why he chose Moulin Rouge, and how he reacts to the challenge of creating experiences for audiences who have such close emotional relationships to these stories. For him, the bohemian revolution is key and the hashtag they’ve chosen – #SocietyOfLove – is more than just a pithy phrase: “With every Secret Cinema we look at how the world feels, and what society is going through at that specific point. So with Moulin Rouge, it’s the current disenchantment, disenfranchisement, the breakdown of democracy, the increase in nationalism. It plays on all these themes that feel so relevant today: protest, revolution. We wanted to do something joyous, that celebrated multiculturalism, that allowed audiences to become part of a society of love versus a society of division and hate.”

Riggall, and therefore Secret Cinema, is unashamedly political. He cofounded the March for Europe against Brexit, and the company’s social channels are full of pleas for people to vote, to engage, and to empathise. This week, in the lead-up to the election, they’re showing I, Daniel Blake in London and Newcastle with free tickets for jobseekers and reduced prices for under-25s. Each night at the Moulin Rouge there is a collection for Help Refugees and an in-character speech from Zidler about tolerance and inclusivity is shouted to raised glasses and cheers of solidarity. Despite criticism for political rhetoric on the official Secret Cinema channels, for Riggall the idea of using story to make you see something another way is crucial: “I fear that people feel like culture’s become a commodity, it’s become art for art’s sake. But art can change the world. Art is political. When you watch a film or see a piece of art, or you’re inspired by little things, that is political. Everything is influencing someone over another thing. It’s so important to remember that whether it’s a theatre show or a book you can change the world.”

I’ve had mixed reactions when I’ve tried to articulate quite why Secret Cinema had such a profound effect on me. Many of my friends are writers, and they’ve understood it instantly, because they deal in the healing powers of stories themselves. (And a moment here to raise a glass of absinthe to my friends who came with me more than once: Here’s to friends who never make you feel silly for the things you love, and don’t just merrily enable you living out your teenage fantasies but cheer you on as they happen.) I needn’t have worried about trying to explain to Riggall why Secret Cinema meant so much to me, though. He gets it: “You should never underestimate stories, I think now more than ever. All that I see in the world is story; you’re telling me your story, I’m telling you mine. Why are people saying this is one of the best nights of their life? It’s the sense of story, the sense of wellbeing, the sense that you can reimagine another way.”

In many ways, Secret Cinema is an opportunity to throw off your inhibitions and reality and lose yourself, but it ended up giving me a way to find a bit of myself, as trite as that might sound. I felt as though I was coming full circle on the desperately lost teenager who first saw Moulin Rouge and felt her heart and her world get a little bigger. I cheerfully recognise the joyful absurdity of dealing with a religious childhood by dressing up as a turn-of-the-century Parisian courtesan in east London, and of course Secret Cinema is not a cure for anything – but it is a balm. Each time I’ve been it’s felt like a gift to my 15-year-old self, and I can’t help believing that there’s little lovelier than doing something for the teenager you used to be.

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Children’s Book Reviews: Scoop

I review one middle grade title a month for Scoop, a print magazine for primary school children. You can find out more and subscribe here.

Recent reviews include Running on the Top of the World by Jess Butterworth, Who Let the Gods Out by Maz Evans, and The Lotterys Plus One by Emma Donoghue. 

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Lush Book Club: Katherine Arden

I’m working with Lush on a new series of book events at their new London offices in Beak Street. Our inaugural event was with Katherine Arden, author of The Bear and the Nightingale. You can watch the whole interview below, and keep up to date with Lush Book Club events via the Lush Life social channels, as our September and October events will be announced soon! 

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Interview: Elizabeth Wein

For Books for Keeps

Elizabeth Wein’s new novel, The Pearl Thief, may technically be a companion book to her 2012 megahit Code Name Verity, but it is resolutely its own story. It follows Julie, one half of the duo at the heart of Wein’s Carnegie Medal-shortlisted book, years before those events are set in motion and readers can happily come to The Pearl Thief knowing nothing of what lies in store for Julie during the Second World War.

Here we get a younger and more carefree Julie, returning from boarding school to her home in rural Scotland for the last summer at the family estate before it is sold to raise much-needed money. Add in an accident, a host of potentially suspicious characters and some missing pearls and you have an old-school mystery book. Wein has long wanted to write a proper mystery story and the urge to revisit Julie was irresistible: ‘I’m such a fan of classic mysteries, and I love the 1930s, between-the-wars setting and the character of Julie just presented herself because she would have been in her teens then. I absolutely loved writing her narrative voice, it was so easy to channel.’

Although Julie will be familiar to many readers, The Pearl Thief isn’t a prequel in any traditional sense; when it comes to the plot there’s barely any foreshadowing: ‘I tried very hard not to be heavy-handed. I left the war out, even though there would have been rumblings of war around them. The story is very insulated from that - it’s a separate story. But Julie is the same and this is where the prequel quality comes in - you see why she develops into the character that she becomes.’

Although Julie’s family are dealing with financial constraints, they are still a wealthy, titled family and Julie is forced to reevaluate what that really means in The Pearl Thief: ‘It’s interesting because I don’t believe the word privilege was in use at the time. It’s easy to talk about the book in terms of Julie’s privilege, but that’s not something she or anyone around her would have applied to her situation. So it was a concept I was dealing with very consciously, though not able to articulate it as such for any of the characters. The language of equality changes all the time - every term we use becomes loaded with negative connotations and then we have to get rid of it and find another one.’

The book covers big ideas of privilege and prejudice, as well as Julie’s burgeoning sexuality, but at its core The Pearl Thief is resolutely a mystery. Although several of Wein’s previous novels have a thrillery sort of feel to them (‘A lot of my novels are kind of mysteries - Code Name Verity even won an Edgar, which is supposed to be for the best mystery!’) with clues and reveals and plot twists, but writing an old-school mystery proved to be its own challenge: ‘I knew what the big twist at the end was, it was how I was going to get there that I had trouble with! It was unbelievably hard to pull it all together and keep the tension up.’

Wein talks about having to research how long bodies deteriorate in water, how easy chimneys are to climb, and how to fish for pearls among other more niche queries - she also mentions finding a note to herself that said only ‘LEGS’ in capital letters which she couldn’t remember anything about. When she thought she was about there, and was two full drafts and five different editors in, a new editor read it and suggested a tweak on the reveal: ‘And I was like “oh my god yes!” - and of course that changed the entire plot and I went back and rewrote the whole book in six weeks and it just made so much more sense.’

The problem with writing mysteries is trying to see it from a reader’s perspective when you know all the answers: ‘I honestly don’t know what it looks like to someone who isn’t me writing it, what it looks like to a reader who comes to it fresh. I don’t know where their minds go as they’re working out the mystery and trying to figure out who did it. You have to give it to someone who hasn’t read it yet and let them have a look. It was so hard; I just kept flailing and the timing kept going wrong - it was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.’

What Wein’s ended up with though is a tightly drawn mystery full of tension and genuine surprises. Julie finds herself embroiled in a mystery with deeper roots that she initially realises, one that incorporates family secrets, class tensions and a local family of travellers. Wein did plenty of research into the Scottish traveller community; there are several autobiographies from the time The Pearl Thief which she read. She also interviewed some of the authors: ‘I spoke to Jess Smith [who wrote an account of her childhood as a Scottish traveller] after I’d written the first draft and she actually had quite a bit to add; not just in terms of bringing the traveller sections in line, but also with the plot! It was a fun collaboration.’

When I ask Wein if this is the last we’ve seen of Julie, she laughs: ‘I don’t want to be seen as getting everything I can out of this character, and to a certain extent I think people like to have a bit of mystery to her… but I do have ideas, I love writing her!’ But Wein has put Julie to bed for at least the moment and is working on a handful of other projects; two of which are in the middle of contract negotiations and so still under wraps. The project she can talk about is a middle grade non-fiction book about the women who flew as combat pilots for the Soviet Union during the Second World War. It’s being published by HarperCollins in the US and is about to start looking for a British publisher.

Although Wein dabbles in other markets, she sees herself firmly as a YA author despite being regularly told she’s wrong about that: ‘I’m constantly getting people saying this book isn’t YA about everything I write! The characters are too old, or there’s too much violence.

I’ve always seen myself as a YA writer - why would I be anything else!’ Wein is, though, very careful about the way she writes potential controversial subjects: ‘I do feel a responsibility for things that I’m writing about - a responsibility to tell the truth. But you’ll never get graphic scenes of torture - or sex - from me. You get my characters’ emotions, their reactions, their interactions, but no actual graphic violence.’

The Pearl Thief does has distinctly less torture scenes than many of Wein’s previous books: ‘My books are always miserable! Well maybe not miserable, but certainly intense. There’s a darkness in them, and I think this one has a lot more light. It was a fun book for me to write and I hope people will enjoy reading it - but if there’s a message it’s one of tolerance, and appreciation of the things we have that we take for granted.’

[annajamesjournalist-blog]

Nine Books That Explore Autism

For Penguin

The first child was diagnosed with autism 75 years ago, but the condition remains one that’s  often misunderstood. If you’re looking to read more about it, these books offer lots of places to start.

From non-fiction delving into the science behind autism, to memoirs and novels that explore personal perspectives and celebrate the diversity of our brains.

For more information or support, visit the National Autistic Society.

Read more at https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/find-your-next-read/reading-lists/2017/june/books-to-explore-autism/#GkXw04LtTE0L1j4K.99

[annajamesjournalist-blog]

Ten Books They Tried to Ban

For Penguin

Books have been accused of promoting everything from cannibalism to witchcraft. From children’s stories to classics, here are the stories of ten they tried to stop you from reading...

Read more at https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/find-your-next-read/reading-lists/2017/june/banned-books-reading-list/#XaSxmBQS83quH7cO.99

[annajamesjournalist-blog]

Interview: Sebastien de Castell

For Books for Keeps

Sebastien de Castell is no stranger to writing fantasy, but with Spellslinger, the first in a new six book series for Hot Key, he’s turned his pen to YA for the first time. Having said that, it didn’t start out as YA: ‘As an author, there’s a part of you that says I just write the story, to hell with genre or categories, but I found with the first draft that I was writing a hyper-cynical character, and really it was an adult looking back and remembering what happened and it wasn’t working. And so I went back and thought about what it would look like when you were in that moment.’

What emerged was the story of Kellen, a fifteen-year-old member of the Jan’Tep society where your worth is proved through your magical ability. Everyone is tattooed with bands symbolising the six sources of magic; iron, ember, silk, sand, blood and breath, but not everyone can use them all and as teenagers approach sixteen, they are expected to ‘spark’ their bands, which demonstrates their ability to master that type of magic. If you don’t manage any magic, you’re relegated to a lower class of citizen and Kellen, perilously close to his sixteenth birthday, has sparked none. To make matters worse his precocious little sister Shalla has already sparked several of hers way ahead of schedule. When Kellen attempts to bluster and con his way through his first mage trial, everything starts to derail and the stage is set for adventure.

The details of the magic system were nailed down out of necessity at the behest of De Castell’s editor at Hot Key, Tilda Johnson: ‘I’m incredibly belligerent about this stuff. As a writer, I’m a servant of drama. I will write that which is dramatic, everything else is left out unless it’s needed in the moment. But Tilda pointed out we actually do need to know - so I went through and built out this system. I thought about it in terms of a system that would be relevant to you as a teenager when you’re building your own identity.’ Having said that, De Castell is happy for readers to see whatever they need or want in the book: ‘I believe that once you write it down, the text is the only thing that exists, and it’s open to all forms of interpretation. I’m not a postmodernist by any stretch of the imagination, but I do believe that every reader has an equal right to interpret the text, and the author’s intent ceases to have any relevance.’

‘You have to work out how to make yourself special, and that’s kind of the ultimate coming of-age quest of every teenager.’

De Castell describes Spellslinger as ‘Harry Potter in reverse. He explains: ‘If you think about Harry Potter it’s all about thinking you’re mediocre, but realising you’re the most powerful wizard, that your parents loved you more than anyone’s parents ever loved them, and also you’re secretly rich. Kellen’s the exact opposite of that - he thought everything was in line but it all turns out to be rubbish.’ De Castell is a big fan of Harry Potter, and loves a well-executed ‘chosen one’ narrative, but he wanted to try and subvert that idea with Kellen - who in many ways is aggressively normal: ‘I can distinctly remember going to high school and looking around and realising I wasn’t the strongest, or the smartest, or the best looking and thinking what do I do? You’re brought up to think you’re special, but you have to work out how to make yourself special, and that’s kind of the ultimate coming-of-age quest of every teenager.’

Although De Castell had this very universal teenage experience, much of his upbringing was more unusual: ‘My father passed away when I was nine, and my mother was 44 when I was born and had MS so it was a real struggle. So during my key teenage years, I was really raised by my sister, who’s a feminist scholar, and her partner, a wonderful woman who was a feminist activist. They were the people who took me aside and pointed out the things I didn’t see as a teenage boy.’ A lot of this was channelled into the character of Ferius Parfax, a mysterious woman who emerges just as Kellen’s trial starts to go awry: ‘She comes in and, very gently, starts peeling away the layers for Kellen. She doesn’t say this is how it is, this is who you are, she asks him questions, and she’s really a composite of all the amazing women I grew up around. In many ways, she’s my favourite character to write.’

After an unusual childhood, De Castell’s also had an unusual career which has spanned archaeology, music, teaching, acting, and fight choreography before turning his hand to writing. It’s the latter which he feels has had the biggest impact on his books: ‘When you’re writing a sword fight for the stage, you learn that every move has to reveal character, and the fight itself has to tell a story. Every choice is revelatory of character.’ De Castell repeatedly emphasises ideas on this theme: ‘I’m not trying to be a great writer, I’m trying to write great books. I’m collaborative as a writer, I’m happy for an editor to tell me what sucks and what needs improving. I guess for me it’s that each book is sort of a journey, a marathon - you can travel the 26.2 miles running, but you can get just as far walking or crawling. So sometimes I crawl, and sometimes I run.’

[annajamesjournalist-blog]

Spoiler Free Tips for Secret Cinema Moulin Rouge

For Methods Unsound

There are no explicit spoilers below, but the more practical elements are at the beginning of the list. So if you want ticket/travel/logistic tips, but also want to enter Montmartre a little bit purer, then you can happily read until #25. There won’t be anything that will spoil your fun after that, but the later tips are more focused on enjoying yourself once you’re inside.

Firstly, it is an utterly magical night – the stuff dreams are made of.

To my mind it is absolutely worth the ticket price, especially the standing tickets. No spoilers, naturally, but there is a twenty minute section that for me was almost worth the ticket price alone which I would like to experience over and over again in a loop.

Although initially sold out, an extension until 11th June was recently announced and there are tickets left on most nights from May onwards at various price levels on their website.

There are also people regularly offering tickets for sale on the Secret Cinema Facebook page.

There’s a fair amount of variation in ticket prices, which I’ll cover in the next few points. Each night has three price tiers but costs also vary depending on what night you go on. The cheapest you can get is £49 for a Creatures of the Underworld ticket on a Wednesday night, but they go all the way up to £175 for an Aristocrat ticket on a Saturday night.

The key difference between days of the week is how late it runs; on Wednesdays the night wraps up pretty quickly after the screening, on Thursdays and Sundays there is about an hour’s dancing afterwards and on Fridays and Saturdays it goes on until late (around 1am).

The price tiers affect more than just the seating; they dictate your character. The three price points are “Creatures of the Underworld”, “Children of the Revolution” and “Aristocrats”.

Creatures of the Underworld are standing tickets (there is a small amount of unreserved seating too). This has pros and cons; you’re in the thick of it during the screening, and will be up close and personal to everything going on *but* you will have to stand throughout and if you want to buy more drinks, you’ll risk losing your spot if you’ve managed to get near the front. I would say that if you can cope with standing for the whole thing, these tickets allow for a lot of fun and interaction. Character-wise, we’re talking prostitutes, models, freaks, journalists, etc.

Children of the Revolution are unreserved seated tickets. Just before the screening begins, you’ll be directed upstairs to a comfortable seating area. The seats run about five rows deep and I would recommend trying to speed up the stairs, especially if you’re in a group and all want to sit together. However it didn’t seem like any of the seats would be a terrible view. You’ll get a good view of the film and anything going on onstage, and you can easily go and buy more drinks and return to your seat. You are a little further removed from the action with the actors though, if this is important to you, but it was still a rowdy singalong upstairs. Characters are painters, writers, poets and suchlike.

I’m afraid I can’t tell you much about the specific perks of being an Aristocrat but there was a separate, quieter bar area before the screening, and reserved seating with larger seats and small tables. I believe drinks are also included in the price, and the potential for some unique experiences/interactions with the actors. Characters are dukes or duchesses, marquises, or barons and baronesses.

After you buy your ticket, you’ll be sent a registration email where you add some personal details and are assigned your character. You cannot edit any of this once you have registered.

You’ll be asked to specify an entry time. I would recommend arriving as early as you can to give you the maximum amount of time to explore before the screening starts, but no one seemed to be checking that you were arriving at your set time. As long as you get there before the last slot you should be fine getting in.

The location is a very short walk from a zone 2 tube station – less than five minutes – and you’re clearly directed. There was a very short queue to get in, where your ticket is scanned, and your bag searched. You’ll also be given a wristband if your ticket allows you to a seating area during the screening.

If you haven’t printed off your ticket, they’ll still let you in with your PDF ticket on your phone.

You will be given a pouch to seal your phone in, and they will check you have done this more than once before you enter. You are not allowed to take photos. Be sure to take any photos you want before you go in. Everyone in the queue will happily take photos of you and your friends, and you should return the favour.

It is indoors, and warm, you won’t need a jacket or jumper once you’re in but there is a cloakroom and it’s free so you can leave coats and bags there.

Women: take the smallest bag you need so it doesn’t get in the way and you don’t need to worry about it – you could probably get away with not carrying anything on you once you’ve gone via the cloakroom.

Inside it is card-only – no cash, but they take contactless and everything is very easy and smooth.

The food and drinks is all suitably Parisian and very plentiful. There is a pretty wide selection of Parisian street food, with short queues and relatively reasonable prices (no more than you’d pay for street food at a food market elsewhere in London). You can get a really tasty cheese crepe for £4.

The drinks are also not horrifyingly expensive. Glasses of champagne and cocktails (including absinthe cocktails) are £7 – £9, a bottle of champagne is £40, and there are several prosecco and cocktail stands around the venue meaning there aren’t long queues. There are also a few more substantial bars with a wider variety of drinks.

Your character comes with a backstory, costume, in-world contacts and a person you should find to get your story going. More on the storytelling and interacting later, after a few more logistics.

Everyone is dressed to the nines: it would be near impossible to overdo your costume. There was the odd person who hadn’t really gone for it, and they stuck out. You’ll be given a signifier for your character – a yellow feather, or a black ribbon, or an orange handkerchief – it’s worth trying to get hold of one of those.

However, don’t worry about sticking too much to the costume description if you don’t want to. If you’ve paid £80 for a ticket and you want to wear a cancan skirt but your character is assigned a cardigan, just wear a cancan skirt. As long as you’re dressed for the theme, and you have the signifier for your character, dress to feel good and to feel confident. Most of my group took inspiration from the costume description, but we ad-libbed generously.

There’s a pretty extensive official shop, which stocks all the signifiers, but it’s not particularly cheap. The style of clothes are easily found all over the internet, and Amazon has plenty of cheaper alternatives (see bottom of this article). But it’s a good place to start for inspiration, or for the more niche items.

On to the experience once you’re inside… I’m incredibly wary of ruining any of the wonder of seeing what Secret Cinema has created for the first time, so apologies for the fuzzy language, but you will thank me I promise once you’ve visited. One final note for people stopping here:

Remember this is an immersive experience, and it’s Moulin Rouge, so it’s pretty sexy. We found most of the actors – while giving a veneer of abandon – were obviously fairly sensitive to people who were keen to interact or who weren’t but it’s something to be aware of as there were some fairly racy set pieces with plenty of audience participation. If that would make you uncomfortable, avoid interacting with the actors, or being at the front during the screening. There’s plenty to do and look at, eat and drink without that element (although arguably that element is what makes it Secret Cinema – and you are in Montmartre after all).

As always with Secret Cinema, the main tip, once the above proviso is mentioned, is to interact with everyone. There are several secret rooms and bars that you won’t find unless you’re taken by an actor. I’m not going to explicitly state how to do this, because that would ruin the fun, but if an actor engages you, then absolutely run with it.

If you hear bells, something is about to happen in the room you first enter as you arrive.

It can be quite hard to tell who’s an actor and who’s a punter because everyone’s costumes are so incredible. But anyone who approaches you, or speaks French, is probably an actor.

Just before the screening starts, it’s very much worth trying to be near the front. There is a section of pure magic just before the film begins, with a lot of interaction from the actors. While the whole night was wondrous, this was the bit that was just everything I wanted from a Moulin Rouge Secret Cinema.

Again, one last proviso that you’re at the Moulin Rouge, it gets sexy. Don’t stand at the front and don’t make eye contact with any actors if you don’t want to get involved. But if you do… Just remember, what happens in Montmartre, stays in Montmartre.

[annajamesjournalist-blog]

Review: Difficult Women by Roxane Gay

For the LA Times

In her new short-story collection “Difficult Women,” Roxane Gay is razor sharp on the constant contradictions of being a woman — the terrible mundanity and the terrible violence of it all, and the way these two things rub up against each other so fondly.

In 2014, Gay seemed to be everywhere, with Time declaring it “the year of Roxane Gay” after the publication of a book of essays, “Bad Feminist,” and her debut novel, “An Untamed State.” The essays were exciting because she put a label on a debate that had been stewing for a long time. If the term “bad feminist” doesn’t sound that revolutionary from a 2017 perspective, in the 2014 maelstrom of heated arguments about what feminism means and who is doing it “right,” her collection of essays came just at the right moment. Suddenly the phrase bad feminist was everywhere, and Gay managed to strike a chord on how complex intersectional feminism is. Not that these debates have gone away, but they have evolved, thanks in part to Gay opening up the conversation.

“Bad Feminist” was published in Britain while I was working as the literary editor for Elle UK and although it was enjoyed in the office, it was ultimately not mentioned in the magazine after being deemed “too American” by my editor. But Gay’s reputation spread: Everyone was asking if you’d read “Bad Feminist,” and she was a veritable phenomenon in the U.S. So when I received a proof copy of her new collection of short stories from her U.K. publisher, I was interested in the way I am always curious about writers who elicit excitement when they create something new.

“Difficult Women” is about many kinds of women; they vary in race, ethnicity, sexuality and age. It is about sisters, friends, daughters and wives, although those simple labels belie complicated relationships. Many of the relationships are with men, but the really interesting ones are about the bonds between women, and two of the most affecting stories concern sisters (“I Will Follow You” and “How”)

These short stories have given Gay’s writing and ideas a way to transcend boundaries in a way “Bad Feminist” couldn’t and reveal her to be a writer as interested in form and language as she is in social commentary.

The stories are explicitly or implicitly set in the U.S. but they feel universal in a way nonfiction never truly can, because it does not need to be mired in the particular or the accurate. Gay then builds on this feeling by the clever use of magical realism. There’s a distinct echo of Angela Carter or Helen Oyeyemi at play; dark fables and twisted morality tales sit alongside the contemporary and the realistic, although the majority of them have some element of magic or the surreal at play.

There are common themes throughout the collection, but you never know what you are going to get next. Dark twists move to happy endings, brutality moves to romance from story to story. Although most are straight prose there are moments of narrative playfulness. “Florida” features snapshots of different lives within a gated community in Naples, and in the title story, a taxonomy of different types of women is used to great effect: loose women, frigid women, crazy women. Each woman is divided into sections: “What a Loose Woman Sees in the Mirror”; “What a Crazy Woman Thinks About While Walking Down the Street.” The respective answers are: “Nothing. She doesn’t look. She doesn’t need to. She knows exactly who she is,” and “It’s the presumption in the way he doesn’t hide his interest that makes her hold the sharp letter opener in the cool palm of her hand.” The story ends with dead women: “Death makes them more interesting. Death makes them more beautiful.”

The stories are frequently about sex or rape but  are not titillating or gratuitous; they are harrowing and unflinching. The scenes of sexual violence feel relevant, raw and true to life, and they are effectively contrasted against scenes of consensual, if rarely gentle, sex. Among them are a handful of unashamed, unusual, love stories; “North Country” is about a tentative relationship in snowy Michigan and “The Sacrifice of Darkness” is a fable about the legacy of a man who flies into the sun.

The longer stories are almost always the most successful; managing to balance clever concepts with a more languid reveal. The very short, “flash” stories can collapse a little under the weight of the one idea or line that birthed them. Having said that, of a collection of 21 stories, eight were truly exceptional pieces of storytelling and I actively disliked only one (“A Pat,” the shortest story, which seemed a touch trite to me, standing out in a collection that mostly fiercely resists cliches and convention).

That she slips seemingly effortlessly among the voices of these different, difficult women is perhaps the core of why new writing from Gay is so exciting to so many readers. The stories feel like snapshots of real lives, even the more fantastical stories.

It is a book about the violence done to women and the violence of being a woman. The book is dedicated: “For difficult women, who should be celebrated for their nature” but it is not quite a celebration but more of a history and a testament. It feels like the book we have been waiting for Gay to write.

[annajamesjournalist-blog]

Interview: Francesca Simon

For Books for Keeps

The Monstrous Child is a book that stubbornly resists categorisation. It’s a retelling of the myth of Hel, the goddess of the underworld, casting her as a sarcastic teenager angry with her parents and her lot in life, and with a huge crush on recently-arrived in the underworld god Baldr. It’s written with a stark lyricism that feels almost like verse, and a pitch black sense of humour. It’s quite the shift from the books that made Simon’s name, the Horrid Henry series: ‘It just came from my gut,’ she explains. ‘It very much caught me by surprise. It means so much to me; it cracked something open while I was writing it and I just went for it.’

Although Simon’s interest in myths and legends is long-held (she studied medieval history and literature at university and has explored the Norse gods in previous books for younger readers), the idea for The Monstrous Child came to her out of the blue: ‘I would never have had the idea abstractly but I was on the subway in New York and her voice just came into my head and it said ‘You’d think after my brother the snake was born they’d have stopped at one’ and I just knew who it was and that became the first sentence of the book.’

Once she had Hel’s voice, Simon did do some more research; both into Hel but also from some more unlikely sources, especially when it came to Hel’s relationship with Baldr: ‘I wanted to channel that feeling of girls who worship bands like One Direction. So I watched a documentary about their fans and it was all about how they felt that the band made their lives worth living - that complete fantasy relationship and the terrible poignancy of it. So it’s about survival but also about being hopelessly in love with the most beautiful boy in school. It’s about being so wounded but so fierce.’

When it came to the more traditional research, there’s relatively little to be found about Hel. One of the problems Simon came up against was that she has a heroine with rotten legs who can’t move easily confined to one, very grim, place: ‘You have to avoid it being too static; if you can’t move physically you have to move imaginatively. How do you get a sense of forward motion while someone is just sitting on a grave mound waiting. I actually wanted a section where there is one word per page to get across the slowness of her world, but my publisher nixed it!’

Simon isn’t actually a big planner when it comes to writing: ‘I do a lot of research and writing in notebooks, and then I do a one page of what needs to happen, but I have no idea how I’m going to get there. For me it would be like painting by numbers to plan so much in advance - I think I would be too bored.’

Editing is the part of the process that Simon really loves: ‘I’m quite good at turning the editor off to allow myself to write the bad first draft, but once I’ve got something, that’s the bit of writing I really enjoy. That point when you realise it’s going to work, that you’re going to have a book and I spend months editing.’ One of things Simon was particularly conscious of while editing was repeated words: ‘My father, who’s also a writer, read it and he said ‘Well Francesca, I think this is the best book you’ve ever written but I think a few putrids go a long way!’ and I did a word search and I found I’d used the word putrid 26 times so I took some out!’

While writing it, Simon was entirely focused on the character but when she read it back after it was finished, she was interested by what else was there: ‘I realised after I wrote it that there is so much in it about women and girls and their ideas about their bodies; that feeling that you are monstrous, that huge discomfort in your own body. When you use myth as a framework it gives you permission to write about all kinds of other things that bubble up. I love book where lots of things collide.’ This leads us on to the book that Simon is currently reading, recent Guardian Prize winner Crongton Knights by Alex Wheatle: ‘I love the idea of putting a story about knights and quests and castle onto this really dangerous, stressful estate,’ she explains. ‘It’s a brilliant idea, it’s basically a medieval story but in a bang up to date way.’

Simon is an avid reader, and always has been: ‘As a child I had three library cards because I was reading two books a day! I volunteered in my school library basically so I could get first dibs on the books that were being returned. I’m really passionate about the whole library thing, it makes me really angry,’ she goes on. ‘And having a trained librarian is so important, a volunteer can stamp out a book but it’s that guided reading - it’s someone who can say ‘I noticed you really liked this, have you tried that?’. The library is such an incredible place to be; I’ve never met a children’s writer who didn’t basically live in a library.’

[annajamesjournalist-blog]

Interview: Ross Welford

For Books for Keeps

It’s been a good month for Ross Welford. Not only has his debut children’s novel, Time Travelling with a Hamster, been shortlisted for the Costa Children’s Prize, he’s just found out that he’s also made the shortlist for this year’s Blue Peter Book Prize. In his words, it’s been ‘most exciting’, and it’s going to be rounded off with the release of his new novel, What Not to Do If You Turn Invisible, published right at the end of December.

Welford, a former business magazine journalist turned television producer, had a slightly bumpy road to publication: ‘I was doing a lot of live studio television stuff, and it really was the best fun but I drifted out of it and started freelancing and it is hard work to freelance in telly. I was in my 40s and a senior producer, but I wasn’t much much better at my job than someone who was 25 and much much cheaper, and the phone kind of stopped ringing.’

Although he’d played with the idea of writing a book for a long time, including through an MA in Screenwriting, the tipping point eventually came from two different directions. Firstly, Welford was hired as a joke writer for a documentary about dog owners: ‘I was employed for about six weeks and I went to the screening and not a single one of my lines was in it!’ And then his family moved to Sweden for two years for his wife’s job and eighteen months in, he ran out of excuses.

The origin of the story is a bit vague: ‘I don’t really know where ideas come from! You have to come up with some weird story that is entertaining but I don’t know, it really just popped into my head!’ but Welford’s interests in science and cosmology combined to create Time Travelling with a Hamster; a funny, moving story of family, home and time travel as a boy called Al tries to change the course of history and avert a go-kart accident that will go on to kill his father. He wrote about a quarter of it in Sweden but had stalled aa little before a friend told him about NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, where writers pledge to complete 50k words in the month of November: ‘It’s a weird little thing but it works’, he explains. ‘It gives you the disciplines to just barge through. If it’s not working you can just leave a hole and go back to it; you can’t edit a blank page. And that’s how I ended up with a first draft.’

After a bit of editing Welford signed with his agent, Silvia Molteni at Peters, Fraser and Dunlop and two months after that HarperCollins bought the book. His journey continued in a slightly unexpected way: ‘The thing that surprised me was everybody saying how funny it was because I didn't know I’d written a funny book - I know that sounds like a humblebrag, but it’s not a comedy, not in the same way a book by someone like David Walliams is.’

Another surprise was the intended audience: ‘I thought I was writing it for older kids, I suppose subconsciously I was writing it for my twins who are 14. So when HarperCollins bought it and my editor, Nick Lake, said ‘This is a wonderful middle grade’ title, I said ‘What’s middle grade?’ but now I know that this is a huge and very important market that is much loved and respected by everybody! I occasionally get the ‘Ah, sweet’ thing, like writing children’s books is easier. My editor is adamant it’s far harder to write a successful children’s book than to write a long indulgent literary thing!’

Writing about time travel was anything but easy: ‘I’d never recommend it as a theme for a first novel! I wanted to avoid the doppelgänger thing that you see in Back to the Future or Bill and Ted where they come up against other version of themselves. I love it, but it’s been done before. But I think the plot is watertight - I’m sure if some smartarse on Amazon was being really hyper-critical then might be able to find flaws but I’ve tried to unpick it and I can’t!’

Having tackled time travel, Welford hasn’t made things any easier for himself and has moved on to invisibility with his new book: ‘It’s about a 12-year-old girl called Ethel who accidentally discovers the secret of invisibility and it’s terrifying. That’s kind of the way I work; think about what would really happen in an extraordinary situation. I have one big implausibility but then the rest has to be super real. If you become invisible unexpectedly, would you really find it a hoot? What would really happen if a boy found a time machine?’ 

[annajamesjournalist-blog]

Interview: Patrice Lawrence

For Books for Keeps

In the opening chapter of Orangeboy, our hero Marlon is on a fairground date with a beautiful girl he has admired for a while. Patrice Lawrence compares it with her book being shortlisted for the Costa Children’s Prize: ‘Sonya is way above Marlon’s league and this was so way above my league! You don’t know you’re in the running so there’s no build-up - it was so unexpected!’

Contrary to Lawrence’s feelings, Orangeboy is very much at home on this year’s four-strong shortlist. Her story of 16-year-old Marlon who gets sucked into a spiral of bad decisions despite his best intentions and promises to his mum is thought-provoking, thrilling and beautifully written. Although gangs and guns do feature quite prominently, at its heart it’s a family drama: ‘It’s been really interesting how people have said it’s about guns and crime. I remember reading Anthony McGowan’s The Knife That Killed Me which is about a young boy who gets involved with knife crime - but no one says ‘Oh it’s about crime!’. It’s got racialised I think; there’s an assumption that it’s a world I know but I grew up in Haywards Heath! I had to Google it! I researched it like everyone researches their books!’

Race and diversity is being talked about a lot in publishing at the moment and Lawrence thinks it’s definitely a good thing, or at least a good start: ‘It’s important to actually have these open conversations. Growing up I had friends who, with the best of intentions, would say they didn’t see my colour, and that’s great but it means that when someone yells out of a car at me I can’t talk to you about it because you’ll get embarrassed. It’s about listening and understanding what it’s like to be another type of person and how people’s lives are different. Nobody is neutral,’ she explains. ‘It’s about recognising when you’re in a dominant group. As a straight woman, I never really wanted to get married but then when I did I could - the world is set up for me as a straight person so I’ve never had to think about it. So you rethink.’

Lawrence blogs regularly about her publishing experience, and has nothing but praise for her publishers Hodder and in particularly her editor Emma Goldhawk. Lawrence was keen to make the publishing process a little more transparent for the benefit of aspiring writers: ‘There are a lot of people coming up behind you and you want to let them know how it happens, particularly for young black writers. I want to show that I’ve had a good experience of publishing and give people hope that they can tell their stories.’

The story of Orangeboy was first seeded when Lawrence attended a crime writing Arvon course led by Dreda Say Mitchell and Frances Fyfield: ‘I went thinking I was going to write a crime series set in 1940s Trinidad but they set us this piece of homework to hide a sentence within a paragraph and mine was about dreaming of yellow. And then I was at Hyde Park Winter Wonderland with my daughter eating hotdogs with mustard - and I suddenly got this picture of a boy getting a hotdog and a girl watching him.’

Lawrence was encouraged along the way by her writer’s group, including bestselling YA writer Jenny Downham who was the one who pointed out that she was probably writing YA, although it didn’t affect Lawrence’s plans too much: ‘I cut down on the swearing. And then there has to be consequence - you can’t glamorise things. So not preaching, just showing consequences.’ Lawrence describes her own life as ‘quite interesting, I suppose’. Her mum was the youngest of 12 children and came to England from Trinidad to undertake psychiatric nurse training, which was where she met Lawrence’s father: ‘The psychiatric hospital was in the middle of nowhere and had a social club and there were people from all over - so lots of babies! My mum found herself pregnant quite quickly but they split up before I was born.’

From the age of four months to four Lawrence was privately fostered with a white working class family in Brighton who took her on regular trips to the library, and her mum, a big reader herself, continued the tradition. Lawrence describes a reading list of Mary Poppins, Little Women and Swallows and Amazons mainly discovered through the local library: ‘Haywards Heath has a really good children’s section. A few weeks ago I went down to see my folks and I walked past the library for the first time in thirty years and felt I had to go in. I told them that I used to come here and that it encouraged me to write, that being a writer is a direct result of being able to use the library.’

[annajamesjournalist-blog]

Interview: Brian Conaghan

For Books for Keeps

‘The funny thing is the vast majority of this book was written in a Costa Coffee in Dublin - I’m not even joking!’ So says Brian Conaghan as we speak about his Costa Children’s Prize-shortlisted The Bombs That Brought Us Together.

This is the second time that Conaghan has been shortlisted for a prize (When Mr Dog Bites was shortlisted for the 2015 Carnegie). The news comes at a point where he’s just gearing up for the release in February of his next book, We Come Apart, written with Sarah Crossan: ‘Bombs has been out for a while now,’ he explained. ‘I just assumed it had floated away a bit. So when I heard it had been shortlisted I was just delighted. I hope it will ignite it a bit and give it more readers. You hear these figures about how many books are published and if you put them in your head you can get a wee bit downhearted - you’re just trying to find your way in and find an audience.’

Despite not being a big reader as a child, Conaghan became an English teacher, and the children he worked with are what prompted him to eventually put pen to paper: ‘Being in the classroom and seeing what was on the curriculum - I remember having Dickens - how are these kids going to cope with that? I just wanted to connect with those reluctant readers. These boys and girls who felt disenfranchised with what was on offer to them, and alienated from the language and the themes in those books. I find writing really tough,’ he adds. ‘Some days I can rattle off 1000 words no problem, and other days it’s like wading through treacle with a pair of wellies on. But I’m hard-working - I sit there and I make sure it happens because to this day I have those readers in mind - trying to write dialogue they would connect to, with short chapters, lots of debate points.’

The Bombs That Brought Us Together has all of these. It’s the story of the friendship between Charlie and Pavel; Charlie is from Little The Bombs that Brought Us TogetherTown and Pavel is a recent refugee arrival from Old Country. Conaghan started writing it in September 2014, inspired by several events around the world: ‘The annexation of Crimea, the Arab Spring, the war in Syria that was in its infancy and then the Scottish Referendum which was really polarising people. And night after night I was watching the news and it was a stream of people being displaced and there were so many images of children with bags not knowing where they were going or why and I wanted to give them a voice.’

In his efforts to tell the stories of young people, Conaghan did a lot of research on blogs and social media accounts: ‘At the start of the Arab Spring, particularly in Egypt, a lot was based on Twitter and online where they were getting support and driving the campaign. You can read all these blogs about what they were doing and how they were activating and campaigning. And then of course we were saturated online with information about the Scottish referendum.’

Events in Little Town escalate when soldiers from Old Country arrive, tensions spiral and the boys get inadvertently caught up in a local crime ring who are mounting a resistance to the invasion. Although firmly rooted in reality, the book resists grounding itself in a specific country or time: ‘I didn’t want to call it Scotland or England - I wanted to open it up and be influenced by all the other wars and civil unrest in the world. I wanted to create a reality, but also a fable, a cartoon, something almost Kafkaesque.’

The book is undeniably a confronting read, but there is a lot of humour among the darker elements. Conaghan has given Charlie a brilliantly comedic voice, and Charlie’s inability to stop talking even in the most terrifying situations is wonderfully pitched. The humour in the book was important for Conaghan: ‘We’ve all been in those situation with friends where someone breaks a serious situation with one line. And fourteen-year-olds often don’t have the tools to articulate emotion sometimes, so they swear, they make jokes. It goes back to those kids in that classroom - give them a wee laugh and a joke and you’ve got them on side. I try and find humour in a lot of bad places - it’s the Glaswegian in me!’

Charlie is also dealing with his all-consuming crush, which isn’t abated by the falling bombs: ‘I wasn’t writing a book about refugees - I wanted to write a book about friendship, kids, teenagers, wherever they’re from in the world. We all want to be better looking, we all fancy girls, we all see our flaws in the mirror. That transcends boundaries and religion and nationalities.’