Reading as a Radical, Creative Act
Reading alone, you're never alone
Today sees Karen Stevens’ Brilliant Blue launch into the world, helped by a Substack review from Stephanie Norgate
This is Karen’s debut, the third in a trio of Barbican Firsts – debut fiction under 50,000 words. It comes from Barbican Press, my publishing house, and this debut series was spurred and supported into being by Maggie Hamand.
Maggie’s a novelist who ran the gutsy independent Maia Press for years. Doing such a thing is like adopting an orphaned baby rhino – it disrupts your life, chews up your resources, and neighbours fail to see its wonder. Why would writers behave so rashly?
Because we’ve been there. We know what it’s like for a writer to produce something precious that cannot find a home. When my first story was accepted, by Iron magazine, I took the acceptance letter and ran with it to the village phone box to tell my mother the news. Publication redeems a writer’s life.
The writer Jonathan Taylor recommended Karen’s book to me. At an event with literary agents the other day we all agreed that a book stands or falls by its opening lines. They needn’t be showy. Here’s the opening paragraph of Brilliant Blue, which worked for me: ‘It was knocking on four o’clock when Andy decided he’d had enough. There was no end to it: road after road of council houses with verges that he needed to strim. He’d taken his time again; just couldn’t be bothered. A full hour for lunch and several tea breaks, while Maciej – Mac, they’d nicknamed him at work – kept on going. The man was a machine. Intensely efficient.’
What pulled me in? The voice for a start – it’s not striving to be literary but speaks like a human, that ‘knocking off’ ‘had enough’ ‘couldn’t be bothered’. We get one character already mid-drama, weary of an endless job, and then a second character who’s different. We have a setting – and that this is a worker on a council estate already makes the book stand out from middle-class fiction.
Brilliant Blue is a startlingly fine collection, characters weaving between stories and homes on the estate. Checkov, Alice Munro, Tessa Hadley, Grace Paley, Mavis Gallant, (check those links!) there’s a host of big reputations out there whose first books of stories came quietly into print. Maggie and I read their work and it helped shape us as writers. In the tales of Brilliant Blue we recognized those qualities that mean a book enters your life and changes you. It’s great to share books that mean so much. Now Karen Stevens’ first book is in print. Others have the chance to share it too.
Reading is a solitary act, but a book ignites your imagination – reading in this way is co-creative, you take a writer’s work and your response is unique to you. The book lives inside a reader the way it doesn’t on the page or in any other reader’s life. Read and you are as much a part of a community as if you were sitting with an audience in a theatre. Books vibrate in their readers.
We’re running an online festival with our fiction writers just now. In our conversation Damion Spencer, whose The Devil’s Horsewhip is a feast of storytelling that leads you from Tokyo to Damion’s home country of Jamaica, claimed to have reached the stage where he is happy if just one person reads and appreciates his work. That’s right of course – engage in writing a short story and you are being willfully uncommercial. Still, as a publisher, it would be fun if thousands find their way into Damion’s world.
Similarly with the first of this debut trio, Sam Lee. Here’s the opening paragraph of her A Trail of Blood on the Snow:
‘I am unhappy with life. I am very, very bored with it. When I met my wife we were sixteen and her eyes were sparkly and on our first date, we went to a diner and shared a banana split. She had eyeliner on and dangly earrings and she smiled a lot. It was like she tricked me into thinking I’d be happy with her for the rest of my life, because now I’m 41 and she’s 41 and we’re only halfway through this whole shit show and happiness is nowhere to be found.’
Do you see how Maggie and I were pulled in?
It was interesting from our online conversation to learn how Sam just blasted out the first draft of her novel, encouraged by living in a cold and desolate landscape and watching a run of horror movies. It was a draft of two halves. She loved the first and threw away the second, grafting for years to construct the second half in the way we read it now. The novel leads you, twist by twist, into ever greater depths.
Sam’s and Damion’s interviews will be posted online. As will Karen’s – but you’ve the chance to be there live and ask her questions yourself. Event details here!
The New Fiction Festival concludes with Miranda Miller – whose novel When I Was is far from a debut. It is, though, the portrait of a writer as a young girl. 1950s London, and we come to know a family that has been compared to the Durrells in Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals. Please join Miranda and myself in conversation.
Bishnoi updates
India keeps doing My Head for a Tree proud – with recent reviews from India Today and Mint. Those are behind paywalls – but one that isn’t is by Kate Horsley for Inkfish Magazine. It dives to the very heart of the book.
For a different perspective, please read this piece on the Bishnoi in World Atlas. I’d have cited it in my book had it been out in time. It quotes a head priest who refutes my claim (as I was told) that you can’t become a Bishnoi, only be born one. So we CAN become Bishnois. Let’s do it!