Interview with Max Porter on Grief is the Thing with Feathers - by Foyles

Max Porters debut, the novella Grief is the Thing with Feathers opens in a London flat, as two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother’s sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness. In their moment of despair they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This self-described sentimental bird is attracted to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him. As weeks turn to months and physical pain of loss gives way to memories, this little unit of three begin to heal.

Exclusively for Foyles, we talked to Max about the relationship between his book and Ted Hughes’ work, Crow; how a meeting with a friend of his late father helped him re-shape the role of Crow in his book, and how writing has changed him as an editor.

http://www.foyles.co.uk/max-porter

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Author photo © Lucy Dickens

Guardian podcast from Max Porter

https://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2015/sep/18/max-porter-katharine-norbury-grief-literature-podcast


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Max Porter reads from his debut novel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShRQdyLVmHc


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Author photo © Lucy Dickens

Who is Max Porter?

Max Porter is a senior editor at Granta Books and Portobello Books. He previously managed an independent bookshop and won the Young Bookseller of the Year award. He lives in South London with his wife and children. 

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Author photo © Lucy Dickens

September's new book is:

Grief is the thing with feathers by Max Porter

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, is Max Porter’s astonishing debut novel, which was shortlisted for the Guardian first book award in 2015.  

The book opens on a desolate scene. In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother's sudden and inexplicable death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness.

In this moment of despair and seemingly impossible recovery they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This self-described bird is attracted to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him. As weeks turn to months and physical pain of loss gives way to memories, this little unit of three begin to heal.


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#Max Porter #FaberFaber



Who is Patrick Ness?

Patrick Ness was born in the U.S. near Fort Belvoir army base, near Alexandria, Virginia, where his father was a lieutenant the US Army. They moved to Hawaii, where he lived until he was six, then spent the next ten years in Washington state, before moving to Los Angeles. Ness studied English Literature at the University of Southern California.

After graduating, he worked as corporate writer for a cable company. He published his first story in Genre magazine in 1997 and was working on his first novel when he moved to London in 1999.

Ness was naturalised a British citizen in 2005. He entered into a civil partnership with his partner in 2006, less than two months after the Civil Partnership Act came into force. In August 2013, Ness and his partner got married following the legalization of same-sex marriage in California.

Ness taught creative writing at Oxford University and has written and reviewed for The Daily Telegraph, The Times Literary Supplement, The Sunday Telegraph and The Guardian. He reviews for The Guardian as of July 2012^[update]. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund and was the first Writer in Residence for Booktrust.

Walker Books has published all four children's novels by Ness to date, one annually from 2008 to 2011. According to news coverage, "He turned to children's fiction after he had the idea for a world where it is impossible to escape information overload, and knew it was right for teenagers."

The first was The Knife of Never Letting Go, and it won the annual Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime book award judged by a panel of British children's writers. The Ask and the Answer and Monsters of Men were sequels to The Knife; jointly they are called the "Chaos Walking trilogy" and The Knife has been reissued with a front cover banner "Chaos Walking: Book One". Ness has also published three short stories in the Chaos Walking universe, the prequels "The New World" and "The Wide, Wide Sea", and "Snowscape", set after the events of Monsters of Men. A Monster Calls (2011) originated with Siobhan Dowd, another writer with the same editor at Walker, Denise Johnstone-Burt. Before her August 2007 death, Dowd and Johnstone-Burt had discussed the story and contracted for Dowd to write it. Afterward, Walker arranged separately with Ness to write and Jim Kay to illustrate, and those two completed the book without meeting. Ness won the Carnegie and Kay won the companion CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal (established 1955), the first time one book has won both medals.

On 7 May 2013, he was revealed to be the author of Tip of the Tongue, the May e-short featuring the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa as part Puffin's eleven Doctor Who e-shorts in honor of the show's 50th anniversary.

His next book, More Than This was released on 5 September 2013. More Than This has since been nominated for the Carnegie Medal of 2015.

In 2014, Ness held the keynote speech at the Children´s and Young Adult Program of the International literature festival berlin.

He announced that he was working on a new book called The Rest Of Us Just Live Here set for a 2015 release. On January 20, 2015, Ness announced the official release date of the book via his Twitter account: it will be released August 25 in the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand; and October 5 in Canda and the USA.

On October 1, 2015, the BBC announced that Ness would be writing a Doctor Who spin-off.

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July's Book of the Month is:

The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness

A new YA novel from novelist Patrick Ness, author of the Carnegie Medal- and Kate Greenaway Medal-winning A Monster Calls and the critically acclaimed Chaos Walking trilogy, The Rest of Us Just Live Here is a bold and irreverent novel that powerfully reminds us that there are many different types of remarkable.

What if you aren't the Chosen One? The one who's supposed to fight the zombies, or the soul-eating ghosts, or whatever the heck this new thing is, with the blue lights and the death?

What if you're like Mikey? Who just wants to graduate and go to prom and maybe finally work up the courage to ask Henna out before someone goes and blows up the high school. Again.

Because sometimes there are problems bigger than this week's end of the world, and sometimes you just have to find the extraordinary in your ordinary life.

Even if your best friend is worshipped by mountain lions.

A cross-over novel, for anyone who enjoyed the Curious Incident of the dog in the night time.

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Alys Conran on writing Peigeon

‘Look up pigeon in your good field guide, if you have one,’ says Simon Barnes in The Bad Birdwatcher’s Companion. ‘You will probably find that the pigeon does not exist.’ I felt that about many of the children I knew growing up. Their stories pecked around in the background, unheard. The child whose mother left his hair uncombed every time after the nit treatment, little black bugs paralysed in his mousy locks. The girl who regularly had cigarette burns on her china- white hands. The faltering teenager who told what was done to her at youth club, and was disbelieved. There are a lot of pigeons in Wales.

In my twenties, moving my temporary bird box of a life between cities in the UK and abroad, where a nice unobtrusive dash of ethnicity was for the most part a badge of honour in artistic and creative circles, I felt a bit of a pigeon too. And it was ‘as if pigeons were an embarrassment to birdwatchers – as if pigeons were an embarrassment to proper birds,’ because Welshness, especially the liminal, obtrusive, politically urgent blend of it I’m made of, didn’t seem quite appropriate.

But, as the bad birdwatcher puts it, ‘Pigeons, however, exist... Try telling them they’re not proper birds.’ And so, in my shy young adulthood, the pigeon in me shimmered greyly, its feathers tinged with green and purple, like slate.

The pigeon my book’s named for is a young boy, shoulders delicate as eggshells. Almost as soon as I started writing he wandered across the page in a vagabond, alternately lively and listless way, and he caused trouble always, sticking strawberry chewing gum to the high, white ceiling of my flat on Meadow Place in Edinburgh, or scratching his name onto the perspex window of Barcelona’s Línia 4 Metro carriage as I made my way home from work. I didn’t find a place to put him for ages. But he was a genie not happy to wander his way back into his pigeonhole, so he eventually trespassed onto some uncategorised pages of writing, made friends with a haunted young girl called Iola, who competed despite herself for the role of protagonist, and made a novel that’s both a battleground and a love story. Iola has a great love for Pigeon. When I think of him, I ache.

When I think of my novel with his name, I cower. It’s been a painful process. Pigeon was born of the conflict between the language of my pen and its subject – the Welsh heartland I was writing myself back to. The book wouldn’t exist without that essential untranslated heart and the related guilt which bleeds across its pages. There I was, a homing bird, trying to find a way back, but betraying Home – word by (cooing) word, by writing in English.


To read more of this article in the New Welsh Review, please visit http://www.newwelshreview.com/article.php?id=1118

Who is Alys Conran

Alys Conran is the author of 'Pigeon' (Parthian Books, 2016).


Her short fiction has been placed in the Bristol Short Story Prize and the Manchester Fiction Prize. She completed her MA Creative Writing at Manchester, graduating with distinction, and is currently, with the support of a scholarship, working on a second novel about the legacy of the Raj in contemporary British life. She has read her fiction and poetry at The Hay Festival and on Radio Four and her work is to be found in magazines including Stand and The Manchester Review, and also in anthologies by The Bristol Review of Books, Parthian, The Camden Trust and Honno. She also publishes poetry, creative non-fiction, creative essays and literary translations.


Originally from north Wales, she spent several years in Edinburgh and Barcelona before returning to the area to live and write, and speaks fluent Spanish and Catalan as well as Welsh and English. She has also trained and practiced in Youth and Community Work, and has developed projects to increase access to creative writing and reading. She is now lecturer in creative writing at Bangor.


www.alysconran.com

July's Book of the Month

Pigeon by Alys Conran

An incongruous ice-cream van lurches up into the Welsh hills through the hail, pursued by a boy and girl who chase it into their own dark make-believe world, and unfurl in their compelling voices a tale which ultimately breaks out of childhood and echoes across the years.


Pigeon is the tragic, occasionally hilarious and ultimately intense story of a childhood friendship and how it's torn apart, a story of guilt, silence and the loss of innocence, and a story about the kind of love which may survive it all.

Reader Comments: 

Who knew a feminist inspired travelogue would make such a good read? This is a really great and very accessible way to learn about Mary Wollstonecraft but it's a lot more than that. It's a very entertaining and readable tale of retracing a journey which raises so many questions about the role of women and motherhood today.

Following the life and journey of the feminist Mary Wollstonecroft with a baby in tow is no easy task but Bee Rowlatt does it with grace and determination, making this a wonderful story for all to read. She discovers things about herself and the feminist as they try to find the answers and balance between careers and babies. Also learning that love holds it all together as it flows through our lives.

In Search of Mary is nearly as moving, inspiring, intellectually stimulating, and hard to categorize as Mary Wollstonecraft herself. 

Do you agree with the three comments?

In Search of Mary by Bee Rowlatt

Bee Rowlatt is a writer and journalist. Her current book, In Search of Mary is inspired by the life of Mary Wollstonecraft. It's published by Alma Books.

The best-selling Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad (Penguin) has been dramatised by the BBC, and translated into numerous languages. Bee won the Society of Authors’ K Blundell Trust award to complete the travels for In Search of Mary.

Bee contributed to Virago's Fifty Shades of Feminism, and has clocked over two decades at BBC World Service (now freelance). She speaks fluent Spanish and has a research background in Latin America. She's written for The Telegraph, The Independent, Grazia, Die Welt, The Times, The Guardian and The Daily Mail, and appears regularly on TV and radio.

Bee does regular workshops and events on journalism, working motherhood, and feminism. She is chair of a campaign for a memorial statue of Wollstonecraft, has four children, and is currently based in New Delhi.

 (photo by Laurie Sparham)



June's Book of the Month

In Search of Mary by Bee Rowlatt

Toddler in tow, Bee Rowlatt embarks on an extraordinary journey in search of the life and legacy of the first celebrity feminist: Mary Wollstonecraft. From the wild coasts of Norway to a naked re-birthing in California, via the blood-soaked streets of revolutionary Paris, Bee learns what drove her hero on and what’s been won and lost over the centuries in the battle for equality.

On this biographical treasure hunt she finds herself consulting a witch, a porn star, a quiet Norwegian archivist and the tenants of a blighted council estate in Leeds – getting much more than she bargained for. In her quest to find a new balance between careers and babies, Bee also discovers the importance of celebrating the radiant power of love in all our lives. 

Interview with Martin Edwards - Murder Squad

The Starlings and Other |Stories edited by Ann Cleeves

 

 

Martin was interviewed on Legal tv by Raychel Harvey-Jones. To hear it again http://www.murdersquad.co.uk/index.php?edwards

 

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Who are the Murder Squad

The Starlings and Other Stories edited by Ann Cleeves

 

 

 

Murder Squad are a collective of six crime and mystery writers based in the north of England. They are: Ann Cleeves, Martin Edwards, Margaret Murphy, Cath Staincliffe Kate Ellis, Chris Simms. They have each recruited an accomplice to contribute a story to the collection. They are: Mary Sharratt, Valerie Laws, Toby Forward, Jim Kelly, Helena Edwards and Christine Poulson.

 

Ann Cleeves writes:
Back in the year 2000 seven crime writers living and writing in the north of England came together to form Murder Squad. It was the idea of the wonderful Margaret Murphy, who went on to chair the Crime Writers Association. She was getting good reviews, but sales were disappointing and in publishing, the marketing budget tends to follow success. So she decided it was vital to promote her own work and thought that it would be much easier to do that collectively than as an individual. I was delighted to join the group and my fellow squaddies have become great friends.

We produced a brochure, contacted libraries, bookshops and festivals and travelled all over the country to talk to readers. We published our first anthology of short stories. We now have two new members to replace John Baker, Chaz Brenchley and Stuart Pawson, who retired due to ill-health. Stuart died in February 2016 and is sorely missed, though his Charlie Priest books live on.

Our careers have moved on since the group was formed - Cath Staincliffe developed work in TV and radio, devising Blue Murder, starring Caroline Quentin, for ITV. She was commissioned to write the Scott & Bailey books based on the hit show. Martin Edwards changed the settings of his books from Liverpool to the Lake District and continued to work tirelessly editing anthologies of crime fiction for the CWA. My own Vera Stanhope novels and Shetland series have been successfully adapted for TV. Margaret Murphy has been collaborating with forensic scientist Prof Dave Barclay, to create a new strand of forensic thrillers published under the name A D Garrett. Kate Ellis continues to write contemporary novels with a historical storyline. One series is set in Devon and one in a very spooky York. Chris Simms, described by the Guardian as one of the best of the new generation of crime writers, also writes two series, the DI Spicer novels and those featuring DC Iona Khan, Chris is an active force behind the Crime Readers Association. And our second anthology of stories yielded two which were joint winners of the CWA Dagger for best short story of 2012 – very gratifying!
Murder Squad are keen to gain a wider audience for their work, which has been highly praised by both readers and reviewers, and has gained them many prizes. They appear collectively and individually across the country: for details of their joint activities see the links on the left. More information about each of the writers, and their latest books, can be found by following the links on the right.

You’ll see from our list of events that we continue to work with libraries around the country as well as developing links with independent bookshops, visiting readers’ and writers’ groups and contributing to literature festivals. Further afield several of us have new foreign publishers.

Taken from www.murdersquad.com

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Llyfr y Mis - Mai

Iddew gan Dyfed Edwards

Nofel hynod o bwerus sy'n ein dwyn i ganol bywyd cythryblus Yeshua bar-Yosep Natz'rat (Iesu fab Joseff o Nasareth), a'i daith i'r Groes. 

Meddai Dewi Prysor am y nofel wefreiddiol hon: 

'Dyma nofel ysgubol ac eithriadol iawn; gwaith o athrylith sy'n gwthio ffuglen Gymraeg i dir newydd.'

Book of the Month - May

The Starlings and Other Stories edited by Ann Cleeves

Twelve pictures, twelve tales of crime and mystery. Written by Murder Squad and their six accomplices, these page-turning stories uncover a world of intrigue, suspense and fear. With contributions from celebrated crime writers including Ann Cleeves and Martin Edwards, each tale is inspired by the atmospheric and evocative Pembrokeshire collection of photographer David Wilson.

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The Roots of Rock from Cardiff to Mississippi by Peter Finch

Photo by John Briggs from: http://www.peterfinch.co.uk/pfphoto6.htm

Praise for Peter Finch and his work:

"Since the early 1970s, Finch has been the principal innovator in Welsh poetry.....he deserves a Welsh knighthood." - Richard Kostelanetz, Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes
" Just this side of chaos" - Jon Gower

"almost a wave by himself...." -. Victor Golightly, NWR

" there's no-one writing quite like him in Wales, despite the emergence of younger urban poets in Cardiff and Swansea." -John Barnie, (on Food), Gwales.Com 
            
" I was lucky enough to catch Peter Finch, Welsh performance poet, poetry activist, editor and impresario (he's been central to the Welsh poetry underground scene since the 60s), at a show last week, and was blown away. Wild, witty, staccato and with a voice that hints of Hopkins' Hannibal with a velvet edge, he was doing "tens" without trying. His book Selected Poems is a good place to start" - Todd Swift, in Hungary's virtual magazine @gent

" The man is like Alka-Seltzer. His words (and sounds) fly at you and fizz in your face.....Breathless and manic with dramatic pedigree, and funnnier than most stand-ups, Finch's 'intros' had the audience howling at every turn." -John Elcock, (on a last Thursday performance at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea), Roundyhouse.

"In this book, Peter Finch gets the balance damn near spot on, casting the gentlest of aspersions, giving the knife a tiny twist where necessary, but always while staring you unwaveringly in the eye as a true poet. This is not just true poetry, however, it is also travel writing of the sharpest kind.....Finch's particular skill is his supreme ability to weave the past in with the present, and to that end his illustrations are often exquisite in their sparseness". - Mike Parker on Real Cardiff Two, Planet, April, 2005

"This is a marvellous book - one of the very best books about a city I have ever read. It makes me feel terribly old-fashioned - superficial too, because I have never actually lived in the cities I have written about. I skip most of the poems, which I don't understand, but everything else in it is gripping me so fast that I have momentarily suspended my first ever reading of Wuthering Heights." - Jan Morris, writing to the author.

Taken from: http://www.peterfinch.co.uk/aboutpf.htm

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Who is PeterFinch?

Photo by John Briggs from http://www.peterfinch.co.uk/pfphoto6.htm

Peter Finch is a full-time poet, critic, author, rock fan and literary entrepreneur living in Cardiff, Wales. Until recently he was Chief Executive of Literature Wales (formerly Academi), the Welsh National Literature Development Agency. As a writer he works in both traditional and experimental forms. He is best known for his declamatory poetry readings, his creative work based on his native city of Cardiff, his editing of Seren's Real series, and his knowledge of the UK poetry publishing scene. His latest work, however, traces the music all the way from Cardiff to Mississippi and back again. The Roots Of Rock appeared from Seren in November, 2015.

He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Architects of Wales (RSAW), a Fellow of the English Association (FEA) and a Fellow of Yr Academi Gymreig / The Welsh Academy. He won the Ted Slade Award for Service to Poetry in 2011.

In the sixties and seventies he edited the ground-breaking literary magazine, second aeon, exhibited visual poetry internationally and toured with sound poet Bob Cobbing. In the eighties and nineties he concerned himself with performance poetry, was a founder member of Cardiff's Cabaret 246 and of the trio Horse's Mouth. This was work with props, owing as much to theatre as it did to literature. In the new Millennium he was worked on psychogeographies and alternative guides to his native city of Cardiff. The city has become his obsession.

These days he is much in demand as a reader as well as a lecturer at festivals and venues up and down the country. You can get into Finch's performances. There's little deliberate obscurity. His talks on Cardiff and how it is with urban living are always entertaining.
From the early seventies until the late nineties he was treasurer of ALP, the Association of Little Presses. From 1968 to the mid-1980s he involved himself in the organising of weekly poetry readings in Cardiff. These events encouraged new writers and celebrated the established. Between 1975 and 1998 he ran the Arts Council of Wales's specialist Oriel Bookshop in Cardiff. In 1998 he was appointed Chief Executive of Yr Academi Gymreig/ The Welsh Academy - later Literature Wales. He stood down in 2011 to write full time.
Peter Finch has published more than 25 books of poetry. His most recent is Zen Cymru, published by Seren Books. His other titles include Food, Useful & Poems For Ghosts (Seren) and Antibodies (Stride). His The Welsh Poems appeared from Shearsman in 2006. His Selected Later Poems was published by Seren in 2007. A recent work is hammer lieder helicopter speak a sonic history of twentieth century music published as number one in Antonio Claudio Carvalho's revived futura series put out by p.o.w. ( poetry / oppose / war ). There are four examples of his poetry incorporated into public artworks in the city of Cardiff.
His prose works include a number of critical guides including How To Publish Your Poetry and How To Publish Yourself (Allison & Busby) as well his famous alternative handbooks, guides and literary rambles, Real Cardiff , Real Cardiff Two and Real Cardiff Three (Seren). With Grahame Davies he edited the anthology The Big Book of Cardiff (Seren). He is currently editing titles for Seren's Real Wales series and has published a book that takes in the whole country - Real Wales. His Edging The Estuary, (2013) is a psychogeographic unravelling of the Bristol Channel. His latest book is The Roots Of Rock From Cardiff To Mississippi And Back. He is currently working on a further book about Cardiff.

Nerys Williams's essay on Finch's work appears as Recycling the Avant-Garde in a Welsh Wordscape in Slanderous Tongues - Essays On Welsh Poetry in English 1970-2005, edited by Daniel G Williams and published by Seren, 2010.

Finch writes the self-publishing section for A&C Black's Writers' & Artists' Yearbook. He is a book reviewer and writes articles on Cardiff, Wales and the Severn Estuary. His poetry and criticism is widely published in magazines and anthologies.

His blog is at http://peterfinchpoet.blogspot.com/
His rock blog is at https://rootsofrock.wordpress.com/
His photography is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/peterfinch/
Taken from http://www.peterfinch.co.uk/aboutpf.htm

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Book of the Month - April 2016

 

The Roots of Rock from Cardiff to Mississippi and back by Peter Finch

A musical memoir:
Peter finch reflects on how popular music has shaped both his life and the culture in which he lives, from first hearing American music on the radio in his Cardiff home in the 1950s to the compendious and downloadable riches of digital files.  Finch has always gone to gigs and now he travels to the bars of Ireland, the clubs of New York, the plains of Tennessee, the flatlands of Mississippi and the mountains of North Carolina to get a feel for the culture from which his favourite music originates. The resulting book mixes musical autobiography with an exploration of physical places in western Europe and the US. It is a demonstration of the power of music to create a world for the listener that is simultaneously of and beyond the place in which it is heard.  The cast of musicians includes Muddy Waters, Taylor Swift, Bessie Smith, Tommy Steele, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, Chris Tweed and singing cowboys. Each chapter is accompanied by a multitrack play list.

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