She-devils and evil monsters
IT IS TEMPTING, WHEN READING cases of historical murder, to find comfort in the knowledge that there lies a distance of hundreds of years between us and those dreadful events. We may look upon the laws and attitudes of the early moderns as relics of a bygone age, and perhaps congratulate ourselves that these sorts...
Moving on from making monsters
MONSTER-MAKING IS CONTAGIOUS. Centuries-old narratives about who does or doesn’t belong in a community or a nation and about who is monstrous because they threaten the imagined unity and distinctiveness of the whole have a habit of inspiring new monstrifying narratives. The Nazis explicitly studied, adapted, and expanded to a terrifying degree European formulations of...
The causes of a life: Mary Shelley in Bath
STRICTLY SPEAKING, OF COURSE, it wasn’t Mary Shelley who arrived in Bath on 10 September 1816, but Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. The nineteen-year-old who alighted in the city that Tuesday afternoon wasn’t yet the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the up-and-coming poet and heir to a baronetcy. Instead, she was his unmarried partner, as well as...
Climate change: truth and fiction
DAVID BOWIE HAD A remarkable talent for writing songs that could conjure up a story. It is impossible to listen to ‘Space Oddity’ without imagining Major Tom sitting in a tin can, drifting forever into space. But the Bowie song that stays with me most is ‘Five Years’. It tells a very simple story. News...
Dark, ingenious and daring: Pretty Ugly by Kirsty Gunn
THE WAY PEOPLE TALK ABOUT short stories often inclines to silversmithing analogies: burnished, finely wrought, beautifully crafted. That, or Fabergé eggs. And we say short story collection rather than group. Collection suggests careful selection from an array of available possibilities, white daisies on a vast lawn. In the afterword of Pretty Ugly, a collection of...
Hemingway in Havana
Ian Fleming, then Foreign Editor of The Sunday Times, sent Norman Lewis to Cuba in December 1957. Fleming had recently met Lewis, and became a fan of his writing. Having been sent a proof-copy of The Volcanoes Above Us, he wrote to Lewis’s editor, ‘Volcanoes is a wonderful book… showing a fascinating mind and really...
Black Country noir
WHEN I SIT DOWN TO WRITE, I always – and I mean always – wonder why it is that I sort of default to ‘the dark side’, and why said dark side always positions itself in my writing here, where I live – where I actually live – in the Black Country. You probably don’t...
Beauty out of grief
I began writing The White Flower after the loss of my mother. I needed to find a language for what I was feeling and to create something new – and beautiful – from the pain of her absence. It was a way of keeping her memory alive and honouring the incredible lifeforce she possessed. Around...
Beyond language
Indeterminate Inflorescence is a collection of aphorisms on poetry-writing taken from the creative writing lectures of Lee Seong-bok, one of South Korea’s most prominent living poets. These 470 meditations, collected by his students, are evocative micro-poems in their own right. Some express ideas at once familiar and breathtakingly new – truths we could sense but not put...
Disavowal
Today, we are exposed to an entire series of traumatic and disturbing events: the catastrophic effects of climate change, wars, migrations, the disintegration of the social fabric that unites a society, the growing gap between the rich and the poor which threatens to trigger social upheaval… Then there is the rise of the new far...
Thoughts from/on the frontier
A ‘frontier’ is a place where one society meets another. A place of risk and encounter, where one wilderness sees itself change into something ever wilder. The historic American West might be the archetype of this idea of a frontier; the most famous of belts between the known and unknown where opportunity, change, exploration and...
The Komagata Maru incident
The colorful history of the Western passport does not account entirely for passportism against Third World countries. For the crucial piece of subtext missing in this history, we have to read between the lines. In the nineteenth century, the British had made it a common practice to move around indentured labor between their colonies. However,...
