writing the outside in; an anthology of stories from the edges
ELIZABETH BAINES’ latest novel is Astral Travel. She is also the
author of the novels Too Many Magpies and The Birth Machine, and
two collections of short stories, Balancing on the Edge of the
World and Used to Be (all available from Salt). She has written
prizewinning plays for Radio 4 and for theatre, and has been an
actor and teacher. She lives in
Manchester.
NEIL BARTLETT is an acclaimed author of plays, adaptations,
translations and novels. His first novel, Ready To Catch Him Should
He Fall, was recently republished by Profile as a Serpent’s Tail
Classic, his second, Mr. Clive and Mr. Page, was nominated for the
Whitbread Prize in 1996, his third, Skin Lane, was shortlisted for
the Costa Award in 2007, his fourth, The Disappearance Boy, earnt
him a nomination for Stonewall Author of the Year 2014. Neil is
also a maker of theatre, and was awarded an OBE in 2000 in
recognition of his work as Artistic Director of the Lyric
Hammersmith. He has created work for the National Theatre, RSC,
Manchester Royal Exchange, Bristol Old Vic, Edinburgh International
Festival, Manchester International Festival, Aldeburgh and Brighton
Festivals, Wellcome Foundation, Artangel, Tate Britain—and the
Royal Vauxhall Tavern. An expanded version of Twickenham appears in
Neil’s new story collection Address Book, published by
Inkandescent.
JULIA BELL is a writer and Reader in Creative Writing at Birkbeck
where she is the Course Director of the MA Creative Writing. Her
work includes poetry, essays and short stories published in the
Paris Review, Times Literary Supplement, The White Review, Mal
Journal,
Comma Press and recorded for the BBC. Her most recent book-length
essay Radical Attention was published by Peninsula Press.
BIDISHA is a broadcaster, writer and film-maker. She writes
extensively for The Observer and The Guardian and broadcasts for
the BBC, Channel 5 and Sky News—where she has been a regular since
2016. Her fifth book is Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices (Seagull
Books, 2015) and her sixth is the essay The Future of Serious Art
(Tortoise Media, 2020). Her first film, An Impossible Poison
(2017), was selected for numerous film festivals and her latest
film series, Aurora (2020), is out now. Bidisha is a longtime
trustee of the Booker Prize Foundation.
OLLIE CHARLES is a London born queer writer of prose & poetry. He
enjoys exploring gender, identity, celebrity and pop culture within
his work. His poem, How to Fall in Love, was a placed winner in the
Streetcake Experimental Writing Prize (2020). His poetry has also
featured in Lucky Pierre Zine, Queerlings, Poem Atlas and The Babel
Tower Notice Board. Ollie is co-founder of Untitled, a literary
salon founded to amplify the work of underrepresented writers, and
co-editor of Untitled:Voices, a global online journal.
DJ CONNELL was born in New Zealand and has lived and worked in
various countries including Australia, Japan, France and the UK.
She began her writing career as a newspaper journalist, and also
wrote for the international non-profit field and advertising before
becoming a novelist. Her first novel Julian Corkle is a Filthy Liar
was shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize and optioned by
Sarah Radclyffe Productions and Macgowan Films. Her latest novel
will be published by Simon and Schuster in 2022. DJ Connell
recently moved from London to Sydney.
JUSTIN DAVID is a child of Wolverhampton who has lived and worked
in East London for most of his adult life. He graduated from the MA
Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London and
is a founder member of Leather Lane Writers. His writing has
appeared in many print and online anthologies and his debut
novella, The Pharmacist, was published by Salt as part of their
Modern Dreams series. He is also a well-known photographer. His
images of artists, writers, performers and musicians have appeared
on the pages of numerous newspapers and magazines including: The
Times, The Guardian,
Attitude, Beige, Classical Music Magazine, Gay Times, Out There,
Pink Paper, QX and Time Out. Justin is one half of Inkandescent
with Nathan Evans. Their first offering, Threads, featuring
Nathan’s poetry and Justin’s photography, was long-listed for the
Polari First
Book Prize. It was supported using public funding by Arts Council
England.
KIT DE WAAL’s debut novel, My Name is Leon was the winner of the
Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year 2017 and is being adapted for
the BBC. In 2016 she founded the Kit de Waal scholarship at
Birkbeck, providing a fully-funded place for the MA Creative
Writing to a talented student who otherwise would not be able to
afford to participate. It is now in its fifth year. Kit’s second
novel, The Trick to Time, was longlisted for The Women’s Prize. Her
first YA novel, Becoming Dinah was shortlisted for the Carnegie
Medal Award. In 2019 she crowdfunded Common People an anthology of
working class memoir by new and established writers. She co-founded
the Primadonna Festival in 2019 and, in response to the Covid-19
crisis, she founded the Big Book Weekend, a free virtual literary
festival which had an audience of 24,000. She has won numerous
awards for her short stories and flash fiction and has written for
performance for BBC Radio 4, The Old Vic, The Abbey Theatre, and
co-wrote The Third Day for SKY/HBO. Her latest book, a collection
of short stories called Supporting Cast was published in 2020.
NATHAN EVANS is a writer, director and performer whose work in film
and theatre has been funded by the Arts Council, toured by the
British Council, broadcast on Channel 4 and archived in the BFI
Mediatheque. He’s worked at venues including Royal Court, Royal
Festival Hall and the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. His films have won
awards at the London Short Film Festival and screened at festivals
across the world. His poems have been published by Manchester
Metropolitan University and longlisted for the Live Canon
International Poetry
Prize; his first collection, Threads, was shortlisted for the
Polari First Book Prize, his second CNUT, is published by
Inkandescent. His short stories have appeared in Untitled: Voices
and Queerlings. Nathan is one half of Inkandescent and studied fine
art at Oxford University.
LISA GOLDMAN is a writer, dramaturg, director and social tech
entrepreneur. Plays include immersive, site specific Hoxton Story
(2005), Cable Street (National Theatre Connections 2022 and
screenplay) and Remedy (Writer’s Attachment, National Theatre
Studio 2021). Lisa
is author of The No Rules Handbook for Writers (Bloomsbury/Oberon
2012) and is a busy script consultant. As Artistic Director and
Joint Chief Executive of the Red Room (1995-2006) and Soho Theatre
(2006-10), she developed, directed and produced numerous
award-winning new plays. This is her first published fiction.
GAYLENE GOULD is a creative director, cultural broadcaster and
award-winning writer. Her short stories have been published in
Mechanics Institute Review, Closure: Contemporary Black British
Short Stories and X-24 Unclassified. She won the Commonword Penguin
Young
Adult Fiction Prize. She also creates interactive art projects and
events through her company The Space To Come, is a regular
contributor to BBC Radio 4 arts programmes, and writes for Sight &
Sound and other culture publications.
ALEX HOPKINS is a journalist of many years standing. He has worked
as an editor of several print and online magazines, including Beige
magazine, a high-end quarterly publication and digital platform
which provided a fresh approach to LGBT culture and heritage. Most
recently, he was research manager for a leading NGO investigating
civilian harm on the battlefield. He is currently working on his
first novel.
KATHY HOYLE is a working-class writer, born and raised in a
North-East fishing town. She came to writing late in life, after
spending twenty years as Cabin Crew. She completed her BA (Hons) in
Creative Writing from The Open University by writing essays in
hotel rooms around the world. She has since completed an MA at The
University of Leicester. Her work has been published in litmags
including Spelk, Ellipsizine, Lunate, Virtualzine and Reflex
Fiction, and her stories have been shortlisted in competitions such
as The Exeter Short Story
Prize, The Fish Memoir Prize and Spread the Word’s Life Writing
Prize.
KERRY HUDSON was born in Aberdeen. Her first novel, Tony Hogan
Bought Me an Ice-Cream Float Before he Stole my Ma was the winner
of the Scottish First Book Award while also being shortlisted for
the Southbank Sky Arts Literature Award, Guardian First Book Award,
Green Carnation Prize, Author’s Club First Novel Prize and the
Polari First Book Award. Kerry’s second novel, Thirst, won France’s
prestigious award for foreign fiction the Prix Femina Etranger and
was shortlisted for the European Premio Strega in Italy. Her latest
book and memoir, Lowborn, takes her back to the towns of her
childhood as she investigates her own past. It was a Radio 4 Book
of the Week, a Guardian and Independent Book of the Year. It was
longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and Portico Prize and
shortlisted in the National Book Token, Books Are My Bag Reader’s
Awards and the Saltire Scottish Non-Fiction Book of
the Year. She was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of
Literature in 2020.
HEDY HUME was born in 1996, on the Isle of Man. They studied Drama
& English Literature at Aberystwyth University, graduating in 2018.
They are currently living and working in Cumbria, close to the Lake
District. Their prose writing is inspired by Franz Kafka and Ursula
K. Le Guin. They enjoy reading and writing poetry, and are obsessed
with cats, frogs, and other uncanny creatures.
IQBAL HUSSAIN studied Mathematics at a small Welsh university, but
later chose to earn a living with words. He worked as a journalist
for many years, for publications ranging from The Guardian’s
Education Supplement to The Young Telegraph. He was shortlisted for
the Penguin Random House WriteNow 2017 programme and is an alumni
of the inaugural London Writers Awards 2018. He won Gold for his
short story Home from Home for the Creative Future Writers’ Award
2019. Iqbal is working on his first novel, Northern Boy, a
coming-of-age story about what it feels like to be a ‘butterfly
among the bricks’.
JULIET JACQUES (b. Redhill, 1981) is a writer and filmmaker, based
in London. She has published two books, Rayner Heppenstall: A
Critical Study (Dalkey Archive, 2007) Trans: A Memoir (Verso,
2015), with a collection of short stories about the history of
trans and non-binary in the UK, Variations, due out on Influx Press
in June 2021. Her essays, criticism and journalism have appeared in
numerous publications, and her short films have screened at
galleries and festivals worldwide. She also hosts the arts podcast
Suite (212).
KEITH JARRETT is a writer, educator and international poetry slam
champion. His poem, From the Log Book, was projected onto St.
Paul’s Cathedral as an installation. His play, Safest Spot in Town,
was performed at the Old Vic and aired on BBC Four. His
collection,
Selah, was published in 2017. Keith was selected for the
International Literary Showcase as one of 10 outstanding LGBT
writers in the UK. He has judged the Polari Prize, the Foyle Young
Poets Award, and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2021. Keith is
now teaching
at Birkbeck University and completing his debut novel.
JONATHAN KEMP’s debut novel London Triptych won the Authors’ Club
Best First Novel Award. The Guardian called it ‘an ambitious,
fastmoving, and sharply written work’ and Time Out called it ‘a
thoroughly absorbing and pacy read’. His next book, Twentysix
(2011), was a collection of queer erotic prose poems. A second
novel, Ghosting, appeared in March 2015. His non-fiction includes
The Penetrated Male (Punctum Books 2012) and, Homotopia? Gay
Identity, Sameness & the Politics of Desire in 2016. He teaches
creative writing at Middlesex University and London Lit Lab.
NEIL LAWRENCE grew up in Liverpool then moved to London where he
taught Wellbeing Education in secondary schools for 25 years. He is
now a life coach and organisational consultant. His short story
Diaspora was chosen to be included in the Arachne Press anthology
Solstice Shorts 2019: Time and Tide. He is currently redrafting a
novella of short stories, Absurdity of Truth: 11 Tales of the
Fantastic and The Mundane and an experimental novel Sometimes Lies.
He is a member of writing groups WOOA (Writers of Our Age) and
Leather Lane Writers, and lives with his partner in South East
London.
GISELLE LEEB grew up in South Africa and lives in Nottingham. Her
short stories have appeared in over thirty publications including
Best British Short Stories 2017 (Salt), Ambit, Mslexia, Lady
Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, The Lonely Crowd, Black Static,
Litro. She has placed and been shortlisted in competitions
including the Ambit, Bridport and Mslexia. She is a Word Factory
Apprentice Award winner 2019/2020 and an assistant editor at
Reckoning Journal.
POLIS LOIZOU is a multidisciplinary storyteller who draws on
history, social politics, folklore and ‘queerness’ in all its
forms. His debut novel, Disbanded Kingdom, was published in 2018
and was longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize. His second
novel, The Way It Breaks, is set in his motherland of Cyprus and
will be published in 2021. He lives in Nottingham with his
husband.
NEIL MCKENNA is an award-winning journalist and writer. After a
successful career writing about gay issues in the gay press and in
the wider national press, Neil turned to gay history. He is the
author of the acclaimed biography The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde
and the bestselling Fanny and Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked
Victorian England. Neil is now writing fiction and completing a
novel. He lives in London and Norfolk with his partner,
Robert, and their cat, Lupin.
PAUL MCVEIGH’s debut novel, The Good Son, won The Polari First Book
Prize and The McCrea Literary Award, and was shortlisted for many
others including the Prix du Roman Cezam. Paul’s plays and comedy
shows toured the UK and Ireland including the Edinburgh
Festival and London’s West End. His short stories have appeared in
anthologies, journals, newspapers, on BBC Radio 3, 4 & 5 and Sky
Arts. He co-founded the London Short Story Festival. He co-edited
the Belfast Stories anthology, and edited Queer Love and The 32:
An
Anthology of Irish Working Class Writers which included new work by
Kevin Barry and Roddy Doyle.
GOLNOOSH NOUR studied English Literature at Shahid Beheshti
University and completed a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing
at Birkbeck. Her short story collection The Ministry of Guidance
was recently published by Muswell Press. Her debut poetry
collection Sorrows of the Sun was published in 2017. She has been
widely published and platformed both in the UK and internationally,
including on the BBC and Granta. Golnoosh teaches Creative Writing
at the University of Bedfordshire and hosts a monthly radio show
called Queer Lit on Soho
Radio Culture.
AISHA PHOENIX is completing a speculative fiction novel. Her
collection, Bat Monkey and Other Stories, was shortlisted for the
SI Leeds Literary Prize and she has been longlisted for the
Guardian/4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize, the Bath Short Story
Award and the Fish Flash Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in:
Peepal Tree Press’s Filigree, the National Flash Fiction Day
anthology, the Bath Flash Fiction anthology, Strange Horizons and
Litro USA Online. She has an MA in Creative Writing (Birkbeck) and
a PhD in Sociology (Goldsmiths).
PHILIP RIDLEY was born and grew up in the East End of London. He
studied painting at St Martin’s School of Art. He makes images and
tells stories in various media. His first two novels, Crocodilia
(1988) and In the Eyes of Mr Fury (1989), and his short story
collection, Flamingoes in Orbit (1990), are now regarded as LGBTQ
classics. In 2012 What’s On Stage named him one of the most
influential British writers to have emerged in the past six
decades. He has won both the Evening Standard’s Most Promising
Newcomer to British Film and Most Promising Playwright Awards—the
only person ever to receive both prizes.
CHRIS SIMPSON grew up in Bracknell and Slough. He has worked as a
waiter, a cinema projectionist, a shoe salesman, an attendant in an
amusement arcade, hiring out construction and demolition tools, a
pasty seller, a caretaker for a primary school, a teaching
assistant, a tutor and a facilities manager. He has also performed
as a stand-up comedian. In 2020 he had a special mention for the
Spread The Word 2020 Life Writing Prize. In 2019 he was nominated
for the inaugural Agora and PFD Lost The Plot Prize. In 2018 he was
an awardee of the inaugural Spread The Word’s London Writers Award.
He received a First in Creative Writing at BA level from Birkbeck
University. In 2016 he was
nominated for the Royal Academy and Pin Drop Short Story Award
2016. He lives in London.
LUI SIT was born in Hong Kong, raised in Australia and now lives in
London. She is currently completing her first middle grade
children’s book. She was longlisted in Spread the Word Life Writing
Prize 2018 and shortlisted in the Penguin WriteNow 2018 Memoir
category. She is an alumnus of the Spread the Word 2018-19 London
Writers Award. She has a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature
from Murdoch University and a Graduate Certificate in Creative
Writing from Birkbeck University. She won the 2020 Superlative
Short Story Competition
and is a recipient on the, A Brief Pause development scheme.
PADRIKA TARRANT was born in 1974. Her teenage years were
complicated; she has had about ten psychiatric holidays in her
time, and lived a few dull years in residential care. Much later,
emerging blinking from an honours degree in sculpture, Padrika
found herself unhealthily fixated with scissors and surrealism. She
won an Arts Council Escalator prize in 2005. Her books include
Broken Things (Salt 2007), long listed for the Frank O’Connor Prize
and The Knife Drawer (Salt, 2011), shortlisted for the Authors’
Club first Novel Prize. These days she lives in Norwich in a little
council flat with her beautiful daughter and some lovely stuffed
animals.
"In these locked down and unfocused times the short story is a much needed respite from the current Covid-19 bleakness. With Mainstream, Inkandescent has gathered together a wonderful collection of fascinating and eclectic stories. Sad, funny, horrifying and demystifying, the unique voices within take us on an open-minded journey around the world. Loved it." – Kathy Burke; "A riveting collection of stories, deftly articulated. Every voice entirely captivating: page to page, tale to tale. These are stories told with real heart from writers emerging from the margins in style." – Ashley Hickson-Lovence, author of The 392 and Your Show; "A triumphant celebration of exiled voices" – Cash Carraway, author of Skint Estate; “MAINSTREAM. An Anthology of Stories from the Edges was published by the indie publisher Inkandescent, crowdfunded through Unbound and edited by Justin David and Nathan Evans, who also run the press. So many aspects about this book and the stories caught my interest – from the publisher to the crowdfunding campaign, to the way they 'found' the authors and, of course, the stories themselves. I’m always a bit nervous to write about anthologies, concerned not to do justice to their authors and the breadth of their topics, takes and techniques, but I will give it my best because I really enjoyed it and encountered so many authors I would like to read more from. The publishers actually had me at their name… (I’m a sucker for an evocative pun). But it’s not just the name, it’s also their "by outsiders for outsiders" statement and their invitation in the anthology’s dedication that reads: "for everyone who’s ever been kept out because of who you are or where you are from, come in…" I’ve heard a few of those promises and they often wake the cynic in me. After having read the stories in the anthology and after having browsed their front- and backlist, this seems to be one of the genuine ones. Interestingly, in our research about the 'diversity' in British publishing, my colleague Anamik Saha and I encountered an unease or ignorance of publishing staff about how to approach and sell to people beyond the white middle-class and their fictitious impersonation "Susan". Inkandescent just do it. Another revealing but maybe not surprising observation is that MAINSTREAM (Inkandescent, 2021) – just like Common People (Unbound, 2019 ), The 32: An Anthology of Irish Working Class Writers (Unbound, 2022), The Good Immigrant (Unbound, 2016; UK edition), and Nasty Women (404ink, 2017), to name just a few – is yet another crowdfunded anthology that aims to rectify an imbalance in publishing and give a stage to voices that are often marginalised and/or ignored. I’ll leave it at that. Golnoosh Noor read from her story "Happy Ending" at the anthology’s launch in July 2021. There are 30 contributions in this anthology – 15 written by established writers, 15 by emerging ones – and it’s rather impossible to sum them all up. They vary in style, theme, mode, perspective and every other possible element of a good story. Some follow realistic conventions, others not at all; one contribution even uses the structure of a nursery rhyme. While some stories are rather straight-forward, others take more time to figure out. The narrators reveal different levels of reliability, but they all suck you into their respective story. I was tempted to just quote some of the endorsements, but I’ll try to be more specific. Let me start with this first observation: what the stories have in common is that they don’t fall into the trap of the single story. There would have been many opportunities to tell the story of a queer Muslim woman in Iran and Saudi Arabia or an encounter between a gay teenager and an older man in the lavatories of a train station that would have perpetuated the stereotypes with which we are so often confronted. Golnoosh Nour ("Happy Ending") and Neil Bartlett ("Twickenham") created complex characters and scenarios with round characters (and, in my opinion, very credible teenage minds) that give you a completely different view. Throughout the book, I found, the round characters provided a welcome change from often stereotypical depictions of, e.g. gay teenagers, working-class children, trans women, people who are HIV positive, street sweepers (not that I have come across that many before), and Muslim families. In the MAINSTREAM anthology, you will find stories written from the point of view of children and elderly people with dementia and everything in between. In fact, the stories are arranged according to the age of the characters and that makes for a very interesting read (says the person who likes to jump around in anthologies). Some of the recurring topics are the barriers that marginalised people encounter in the UK and beyond – and it’s not just London or England and not just contemporary settings – experiences of a pressure to conform as well as the search for and finding ones 'tribe'. Hedy Hume’s "The Beach" is such a story about the life-changing effect that the encounter of a loving community and becoming part of it can have. Some stories are told in retrospect from a more mature perspective, so we’re observing the characters trying to make sense of their lives and how they got where they are now. In "The Beach", the retrospective is interrupted by some memories on another time level, while the act of remembering and sense-making is solved differently in other contributions. In Neil Bartlett’s "Twickenham", the narrator thinks about the many "kinds of silence there are in this story" and how these could be seen as "places we might need to get back to, if we are ever to understand how we got from there to here". Families play a rather important role throughout the anthology. As they do in life, I guess. Here, I felt they were often included as the first space in which the characters explored their identities – or the first collective that demanded conformity ("people like us aren’t like that" – Nathan Evans, "Going Up, Going Down"). Many contributions directly or indirectly allude to the past and the families of their protagonists. How families can be a loving and nurturing environment, or how they can have a detrimental effect on the very fabric of your body (an allusion to "Scaffolding" by Giselle Leeb). And in some cases, the reflection of the protagonists can change their perception of the past: “sometimes the way we choose to love perpetuates the damage we seek to diminish.” (Alex Hopkins, "Last Visit") However, the stories are never just about one thing, one aspect of a character’s identity, one issue with the family or one ‘problem’ they need to overcome. They are also not 'just' about the struggles the off-mainstream characters face, even though it does play a role how the characters are marginalised and hindered in their choices by ‘mainstream’ society. Or how they are discriminated within what one could see as ‘their own’ community at first glance, e.g. for being gay and HIV-positive. The 30 stories leave lots of space to come to one’s own conclusion. And they also provide opportunities to check your own perception and maybe even your own tendency to pigeon-hole as you read.” – Sandra van Lente, Literary Field; "Mainstream, the new anthology of short stories from Inkandescent, is a kaleidoscope of experiences. For a reviewer, this is a challenge — it seemed almost impossible to compress each narrative together into one single review. The resounding message from the collection, ‘stories from the edges’, is as promised in the title and also more – these are universal challenges told from the margins, but also with the ugliness and discomfort which is symptom of demystifying hard truths. Mainstream should come with a trigger warning: it’s furious and it doesn’t take prisoners. You can expect to feel uncomfortable as you intrude on the lives of each of the narrators in these works. You can also rest assured that nothing will be glamorised for your benefit. David and Evans write in their introduction that their publishing company was: founded "by outsiders for outsiders", to celebrate original and diverse talent and to publish voices and stories the mainstream neglects – specifically those of the working class and financially disadvantaged, ethnic minorities, the LGBTQ+ community and, crossing the Venn diagram, those with physical disabilities and mental health issues. From this, you can gain that Mainstream will not be a smooth or homogenous read, but I also had my concerns upon reading this. Would it be one of those book collections that only accepted each ‘minority’ writer under a certain condition? That they might be compelled to only talk about their particular disadvantage? But Inkandescent are more aware than that. While each story does chime with the next, following a coming-of-age trajectory that navigates desire, identity and self-worth, there is very little else that joins each of the writers together. Whether you are reading about the fantastical island of Massor in Bidisha’s 'The Initiation' or the heart-wrenching autofiction-esque talk on a park bench in DJ Cornell’s 'Coup de Grace', there is a lack of pandering to a reader’s desire for a similar tone or genre. There are no heroic, plain and likeable underdogs. Cruelty and neglect are systemic to the five very different childhoods that are presented in the opening five stories by Kathy Hoyle, Lui Sit, Padrika Tarrant, Lisa Goldman and Gaylene Gould respectively. The distorted grip on reality that each of these young narrators show reveal real worlds that have turned against them, although some understandings of this are better than others. In Lisa Goldman’s 'Easy Peelers', the death of a loved one and the discrediting of the working class are recounted through the easily impressionable nature of a young girl. With her mastery of the slightly-altered language in this piece, the writer shows how an impressionable mind is shifted from what is real into the dominant version of a tragedy: where being an 'easy peeler' is due to your own laziness, where ‘England’s plugged into the sun’ and it’s ‘making the world better […] because we’re the best and things are bad', and finally where the 'May Day Massacre' can be quickly softened into the 'London riots'. Innocence is synonymous with invisibility, and imaginative inner worlds are often discredited in these stories – 'we’d just read a story about an alien who talked to a flower [..] she had to believe me,' Lui Sit’s narrator writes in 'Giant’' and yet his inner world must be disbelieved if he is to conform to his mother’s idea of the real world. The final story I wanted to single out from this impressive, opening five was Gaylene Gould’s 'The Spinney'. Tracing the movement through puberty of a young woman, Gould presents stigmas around period shame and rape culture in the unfolding of a painful warning tale. The power of myths written in to cover up a taboo, in this case the 'Witch' who is fabricated in the place of a rape at school, holds such influence that it remains with the narrator even when she reaches adulthood with a daughter of her own — 'Elaine breaks into a run and with each breathless step reminds herself that she is no longer ten years old, and that there is no such thing as witches, especially those that come to take your bleeding daughter as retribution.' The power of the myth is tangible and silencing, leaving a terrible taste in the reader’s mouth. Being susceptible to the power of someone (or something) else is also another ongoing presence throughout the collection, and there are no sudden acts of heroism or deus ex machinas popping out through the structures of any of these stories. Neil Bartlett’s 'Twickenham', Golnoosh Nour’s 'Happy Ending', Juliet Jacques’s 'A Review of "A Return"', Justin David’s 'Serosorting' and Keith Jarrett’s 'It May Concern' all resonate in their navigation of love and its disturbing relationship with power. Sometimes brutally sensory and exciting, other times revealing the blandness of casual relationships, self-worth is often a victim here. As Keith Jarrett’s narrator writes — 'I searched for the ugliness I thought I deserved'. Being an object of desire also feeds off these narrators, and relationships are formed out of disassociations where even being named becomes a danger — 'if you name something, you can fix it to you'. There is also a lonely beauty in the language and detail of these stories too, like this passage from Neil Bartlett’s 'Twickenham': 'Most inexplicably of all, there’s a piano — really — a great, big, black grand piano– something I didn’t know anybody had in their house — and it seems to be collecting all the light in the room. The lid is a pool of oil — and there’s a sheet of music on it, floating. It looks like something somebody must have lost.' Another connection to make between these stories is an obsession with physical and psychological dismorphias. Giselle Leeb’s haunting 'Scaffolding' is a frightening study of the psychosomatic, finding parallels with DJ Connell’s comment in 'Coup de Grace' that 'this caring for the bruises of others was what had me trapped'. The AIDS crisis looms in several of the stories too – it is a grim shadow running through the bodies and psyches of multiple characters. Justin David’s character in 'Serosorting' pointedly marks it as the 'grubby stains of mortality… an infection running through us all […] we are all unclean'. Polis Loizou’s 'Pixmalion' is a subtle study of the impact of social media on the modern relationship. Louizou’s multimedia narrative describes the defensive rhythms of messaging a stranger online, and the desire to seem both unattainable and uninterested: 'There’s a "sticker" on the photo, with a flame emoji to slide up so as to express your lust for him. It takes Herculean effort, but I only slide the flame to just over halfway. I’m sure I’m alone in doing so. Let his ego be starved a little; the doubt may even nourish him.' This piece exposes those safe, 'screen' flirtations which usually trail off immediately. It is brilliantly captured. Iqbal Hussein’s 'The Reluctant Bride' is the study of the Partition, in which the harsh politics of love are told through the allure of an almost unbelievable fairy tale. A homage to the magical realist format, a semi-real churail narrates the piece with a playful layering of stories and a spine that 'rat-a-tats like a burst of firecrackers'. Full of imagination yet equally weighted and painful, I was glad that the curators of this anthology included the more fantastical and speculative genres alongside pieces that were more obviously social commentary. Mainstream is blunt, sexy and unapologetic. I was intrigued by the liveliness of each voice that Inkandescent gave ear to, and the great difficulty for a reviewer trying to pull each of the works together. Each story is its own very different act of defiance, making for an unexpected and addictive read.” – Georgie Proctor, The Word Factory
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