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A brief note, mainly for a few readers who’ve been very kind about a couple of recent blog-posts about my experiences of becoming and being a father (here and here). I have a new short story due for publication in Being Dad, an anthology of fiction by writers who are also fathers. On the surface, fatherhood may sound a little like a rather narrow subject matter, but, when I started putting together my story and looking into previous examples of paternity in fiction, the amount which presented themselves seemed incalculable in both number and permutations: the question of what it means to be or to have a dad has been a constant throughout literature. From Telemachus and Odysseus through to Seamus Heaney, JM Coetzee and Wole Soyinka (to name a handful of Nobel laureates), the ways in which the father-son dynamic can be enacted and utilised are myriad, the expectations and realisations timeless, and the tensions, fears, joys, fulfillments – these all pull you close to the core of what constitutes the human experience. Anyway, as well as my own story, in Being Dad there is also fiction from some other amazing, top-notch father-writers: Dan Rhodes, Toby Litt, Nikesh Shukla, Nicholas Royle, Courttia Newland, Dan Powell, Rodge Glass, R.J. Price, Tim Sykes, Lander Hawes, Andrew McDonnell, Iain Robinson, Richard W. Strachan and Samuel Wright. All very exciting. The book will be available next year but you can pre-order it from as little as £5 from the Kickstarter page with the option to add various exciting extras should you so wish. My story is rather catchily titled ‘=VLOOKUP(E2,‘[Turnover year end 2015.xls]Q1SalesLeads’!$E$2:$F$1001,2,0’ and, by way of an appetite-whetter, here’s the opening section:
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I wrote the following for the Curious Tales blog, explaining the inspiration and process behind our latest book, Congregation of Innocents, an anthology of ghost stories which you'll soon be able to purchase.  Let’s begin with a little bit of recent history. The first Curious Tales book, the one which brought us together, was titled The Longest Night: Five Curious Tales. It was a book of ghost stories for Christmas by a small group of contemporary writers in tribute to MR James, the olden days Christmas ghost story godfather. The book was illustrated by Beth Ward in an elegant, quietly melancholy fashion redolent of James McBryde, MR James’ artist of choice. We then put together a mini tour of suitably atmospheric events at which each of us read our stories in their entirety. Part of the beauty of The Longest Night, and part of its spookiness, was the book’s ephemeralness. We had 300 copies printed and numbered. We agreed there were to be no reprints and no Kindle edition. Our mantra was once it’s gone, it’s gone. This seemed fitting for the sort of publication we were aiming for, tying in with a Jamesian preoccupation with obscure books. It remains an entertaining thought: that in years to come someone, whilst browsing a secondhand bookshop, will discover this slim, mysterious collection with its spooky artwork and no ISBN, take it home and be disquieted by the uncanny tales within. A year later we put together a sequel, Poor Souls’ Light: Seven Curious Tales, this time taking our cue from Robert Aickman, another, much less cosy and much less well known writer of supernatural fiction whose centenary took place in 2014 and whose reputation we were keen to do our bit to rehabilitate. This was reflected in the darker tone of the book and its murkier artwork. Similarly, we tried to make other changes: we increased the size of our print run, staged bigger, more theatrical events, and – as indicated by the subtitle – included a pair of guest authors in the collection. But we remained guided by our own curious philosophy, a mixture of DIY ethic and ethereal weirdness.
All of which brings us up to date. This year we’re back with a third anthology. Congregation of Innocents: Five Curious Tales, which will be available for pre-order in the coming weeks. This time we’ve moved out of our collective comfort zone, taking our inspiration from an American author. 2015 marks fifty years since the death of Shirley Jackson, a writer perhaps best known for her novel The Haunting of Hill House, and her short story ‘The Lottery’, both of which are fairly representative of an otherwise frequently overlooked body of work. Jackson’s fiction takes place in the gap where the supernatural meets the psychosomatic, where depths of menace and aberration underlay the United States’ cheery suburbs, where housewives’ hallucinations hint towards a demonic mythos at work in the world. But – a couple of things which I’m not sure can be said with any confidence of James or Aickman – there’s a playfulness to her fiction and a prioritising interest in character. Collaboration became our watchword. Before any of Congregation of Innocents was written or illustrated, a good deal of planning was put into what we wanted the feel of the book to be. In 2015 we’d also published a pair of digital, interactive novels – both the fruits of collaboration – and it seemed to us that this way of working could be used to create a book of stories which, despite being authored by different individuals, had a cohesion and an uncanny unity. We put together something of a mood map for the book, in reality a list of buzzwords written on post-its and stuck to a wall: hot, stuffy, queasy. We all read a good deal of Jackson’s fiction, particularly her short stories. In the very early stages of planning we’d asked ourselves who we might invite to contribute as a guest author. By the time we came to the post-it note stage we were dubious whether a guest author was something we were after at all. This was a collaborative project through and through. What we wanted was someone who would collaborate with us. The obvious person then seemed to be our friend Ian Williams. Ian is a comics artist whose work is informed by his daytime job as a physician: he writes and illustrates Sick Notes, a regular a comic strip for the Guardian about medical news. The Bad Doctor, his wonderfully observed graphic novel about a middle-aged GP, was published in 2014 and had met with critical acclaim. The notion of including a graphic novelist, one au fait with sickness and the mechanics of frailty at that, in the collection seemed somehow both so apt and simultaneously so counterintuitive that Ian seemed to be perfect collaborator.  After this came Beth’s artwork. We have always been keen that the illustrations be much more than simply illustrative, and all the authors agreed that we would wait until we saw the artwork before committing digital ink to digital paper. We then worked towards the imagery. The stories were then edited in unison, with the aim of creating an end product of consistency, with tone, themes and imagery overlapping from story to story. America too dominates Congregation of Innocents. Or, rather, British imaginings of America. Again, for a bunch of solitary writers all of this lies well outside what we think of as our comfortable norm. And so there we have it. Although it obviously functions as a short story anthology (and an excellent one at that – I think it’s the best thing Curious Tales has produced) Congregation of Innocents is also book which serves to close something of a trilogy and which, we hope, is as intrepid and challenging a read as it was to put together. As well as a graphic story from Ian Williams, the book will also come with an introduction from another very special guest author, whose name we’re keeping under wraps for the time being. There will be four-hundred copies printed, available to buy online and at the tour of events (stay tuned for further details on these), and, as always, once they’re gone they’re gone.   A strange business, being kept from sleeping because of a news story. The news is essentially basic information you’re told about people you don’t know. And yet, the other night, there I was, unable to sleep because all I could think about was those photographs of Aylan, the three year-old boy who died in the sea and washed up on a beach and whose name and story we all now know. You'll have become familiar with the images too of course: a tiny body, solitary and prone on the wet sand of a tourist beach, wearing a t-shirt, shorts and trainers; a man carefully carrying him away. At times of political crisis, I often find myself seeking out books which might provide something approaching an answer to the issues at hand or which will at least give me an understanding. As I lay there in my bed in a quiet suburb of Manchester, I thought about Habibi, Craig Thompson's gargantuan graphic novel set partly in a kind of hyper-fictionalised, bizarro-world Middle East – I'd found it a bit odd and a bit suspect when it first came out, but it now seems in many ways horribly prescient. I also thought of VS Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival, with its newly arrived migrant trying to find his place in a confusing and seemingly cold Britain. Neither seemed to do anything to help and I read news articles instead. Over the next couple of days, I read about what was taking place in Budapest, much of which at times carried uncomfortable echoes of history – numbers marked on arms, people tricked into boarding trains to camps, unwanted families journeying Europe from nation to nation – and had another difficult night. I was reminded of, among others, WG Sebald. Two of his books, The Emigrants and Austeritz, both concern people finding and struggling with refuge in unfamiliar lands (Sebald himself left Germany to come and teach here in Manchester). But, as I lay there in the darkness pondering these lost, disparate souls, whether camped outside Budapest Keleti railway station, or setting sail from Bodrum in a cheap raft, or huddled in a crowded camp in Suruç, or sleeping soundly in a fortified presidential palace in Latakia, it was a curious section from The Rings of Saturn, one of Sebald’s strange fictive South Coast travel books, which found its way into my thoughts, and which I was pleasantly surprised to find quoted in the book's Wikipedia entry: As I sat there in Southwold overlooking the German Ocean, I sensed quite clearly the earth's slow turning into the dark. The huntsmen are up in America, wrote Thomas Browne in The Garden of Cyrus and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. The shadow of the night is drawn like a black veil across the earth, and since almost all creatures, from one meridian to the next, lie down after the sun has set, so, he continues, one might, in following the setting sun, see on our globe nothing but prone bodies, row upon row, as if levelled by the scythe of Saturn – an endless graveyard for a humanity struck by falling sickness.  My daughter was asleep in the corner of the bedroom. Instead of her cot, fitted with a brand new mattress and a breathing monitor, I found myself imagining she was in fact crouched in a filthy sleeping bag, And I imagined that when the clock read 3:30 I would wake her and pull her from that sleeping bag. She was, in this imagining, older than she is in reality, changed from a few months-old baby to a child of two. I had dressed her the previous night, I’d picked out the clothes she wore, both in the imaginary sense that I had selected them for our journey – light but warm enough for a cool night at sea – and in the real sense that, maybe a month ago, I had browsed a rack of velcro-fasten sneakers in a shop, I had selected that red t-shirt with a cartoon dinosaur across the front because I think she likes dinosaurs, and I had hitched those shorts around her tiny, squirming waist in a department store changing room to make sure they were a good fit. Then we set off. We left our house, got into a taxi and were taken to a quiet spot on a beach. There were others, hunched in the darkness, arranging themselves in the dinghy, barely seaworthy and already overcrowded. I looked at my daughter and told her everything will be just fine and, even though she barely understands, that I know she can be brave. I lifted her into the boat and pulled her arms into a lifejacket. Her small hand was hot in my first as we were pushed out into the water and the dinghy spun slowly away from the glow of the shore: a handful of flashlights and mobile phones. Whatever did I do, I asked myself, to bring such necessity on my family, to bring us to such a situation? How did it come to this, to be swept from what I knew and found familiar and loved into such unconscionable tributaries, and by the caprices of people who have never laid eyes on me? What force set this moment in motion, for me to be risking my life for my girl, and hers too? What maniac, I asked, looking out at the darkness ahead, devised this world? I returned to reality, to my comfortable bedroom with my child sleeping safely alongside me, and I thought about how, rather than any books I could find, or indeed any great works of art, this is perhaps the truest testament to the imagination, to its power and its scope: empathy, the grand human achievement, traversing continents, uniting us and outlasting us. This, it occurred to me, is what makes those who argue against taking refugees like Aylan into our country, regardless of how reasoned and reasonable they may sound, seem as though they lack something important and the mere fact that their paltry concerns are entertained as being worthwhile is something that keens with the sting of a recalled humiliation. The next day I was reminded of 'The New Colossus', a sonnet welcoming those arriving into turn of-the-century America. It was written by Emma Lazarus, herself an advocate for Russian refugees, and I remembered it initially with a rather grim irony, finding little more than giddy optimism and cheap bombast, products to a bygone mindset, one which values reaching out to those who have nothing regardless of consequences. However, after watching video clips over the weekend of a band of exhausted Syrians being extended a warm public welcome in the heart of Europe – and in the public spaces which once staged some of the darker moments of the continent’s cities' history – I found the poem online and read it again, this time touched with, not quite hope, but at least something similar to hope. It's one of those hokey poems which, despite not really being, I don't think, very good at all, still leaves you with a lump in your throat in the way genuinely good poems only rarely manage. 'Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!' Lazarus writes in lines famously inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty, there to be seen by refugees coming to start their new lives in New York, although it is equally applicable to Berlin or, I'd like to think, to Manchester. Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!  |
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