I am here.

I'm a writer and my debut novel, Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, is out now. Also the Fiction Editor for independent press Burning Eye. Love wine and books and scotch eggs.

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Review: Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

Softly spoken and lyrical, Station Eleven begins with the end of the world by charting the early progression of a high-contagious flu epidemic.

There are definite echoes of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the same sticky paradox at its heart – the world has ended and yet there’s still a story to be told. Everything is gone, and yet it isn’t. With the world stripped down to bare bones, the thematic question that bubbles under the surface of lots of novels is never as pure as it is here – what really matters?

The writing is deceptively simple as it’s easy enough to follow but there are lots of perspectives and arguably two main characters: Kirsten, an actress who was a child when the flu hit and who makes her way through the New World with three knives in her belt, and Arthur, an actor who dies on stage just before the epidemic hits, and flashbacks to his life in Hollywood represent the Old World.

Here’s a snippet from the beginning: “Well, here’s to Arthur,” the bartender said. In the children’s dressing room, Tanya was giving Kirsten a paperweight. “Here,” she said, as she placed it in Kirsten’s hands, “I’m going to keep trying to reach your parents, and you just try to stop crying and look at this pretty thing…” and Kirsten, teary-eyed and breathless, a few days shy of her eighth birthday, gazed at the object and thought it was the most beautiful, the most wonderful, the strangest thing anyone had ever given her. It was a lump of glass with a storm cloud trapped inside. In the lobby, people gathered at the bar and clinked their glasses together. “To Arthur,” they said. They drank for a few more minutes and then made their separate ways into the storm. Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city.

Mandel weaves all these different characters, times and perspectives expertly, and has a way of hinting just enough to keep the pages turning, while holding back enough to make revelations late in the book.

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Review by Max Cairnduff

Max Cairnduff gave Everybody Knows This is Nowhere a cracking review on his blog - he says, “What’s rather wonderful about Everybody is that all this could be terribly bleak, or worse yet dull, and yet it isn’t. Furse has a neat sense of comedy, partly in situations like the narrator’s habit of stealing office supplies as a form of revenge on the tedium of office life, but mostly in Furse’s deadpan tone” and also likens it to Bukowski! Wow. Read in full here

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After Nyne's Top Choice - World Book Day 2015

Everybody Knows This is Nowhere was chosen as one of After Nyne's Top Choices for World Book Day 2015

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Interview with CultureFly

I talked Everybody Knows, the state of the job market for grads, social media and publishing here with the good dudes at CultureFly - read full interview here

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Review: Everything's Fine by Socrates Adams

It’s always seemed strange to me that despite the fact most of us spend the majority of our time working, work is relatively seldom the subject of novels. To me, it’s always been pretty fertile ground for writing because we tend to have a bit of a love/hate relationship with our jobs – they’re never perfect, but rarely wholly unbearable either.

At the heart of Everything’s Fine is Ian, a salesman both obsessed with – and terrible at – building rapport with people. Appropriately enough, he is a character that I have a love/hate relationship with: on the one hand there’s frustration at his sheer blindness to the soul-sapping and pointless nature of his job, yet on the other he’s the most profoundly emotional character you’re going to find in the world of grey static that Adams has created. Here’s Ian, going to see his boss…

This is the first time I have been in this room on my own. I feel lonely. My boss arrives. I don’t feel lonely any more. I feel dead. ‘Sit down.’ ‘I am sitting down.’ ‘Oh,’ my boss looks at me. He is angry. ‘That’s weird, people normally stand up when I enter the room.’ I stand up. My boss sits down, makes a note in a black book, then begins to speak. I’m still standing up. ‘Do you know why we have autodial buttons, Ian?’ ‘To save time,’ I say, with confidence. ‘No. It’s so that people like you, with no qualifications, can use the phones, Ian. I want to talk to you about why you were not using your autodial function. Even for someone with no qualifications, Ian, you are very stupid. Why don’t you have any qualifications, Ian?’ ‘I do not perform well under exam conditions.’ ‘You do not perform well under any conditions.’ My boss looks fantastic.

The deceptively simple style expertly draws out the subtexts and hypocrisies of workplace interactions, time and time again. As with a lot of office novels, the workings of a hierarchical structure are exposed and ridiculed but here they are ironically exaggerated to almost nightmarish consequences.

And yet, the incisive knowingness of the writing makes the worst place imaginable hilariously funny. Offices, for all their mundane rituals, tangled politics and offbeat characters are notoriously hard to bring to life – especially as most people who work in them don’t want to think about them any more than they have to – but the subtle voice manages to make the familiar something extraordinary.

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The Tree

Here's a short story I wrote about a funeral near Christmas, called The Tree. It was published by Litro magazine in December 2014.

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Now I Know Why They Call it a Book Launch

About two weeks ago, when I threw a book launch for my first novel, Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, I was sure I’d feel exactly the same afterwards.

It was my first launch – and only the third one I’ve ever even been to – but I imagined that it would be like turning thirty where I waited for some apocalyptic thunderstorm but woke up feeling totally normal.

The book launch however, was different from anything I’d ever done. Uncharacteristically, I made a big deal out of it and gave it all I had with both barrels. I spent hours scouting for venues, wording and designing and sending out invitations, sorting out a poster and flyers and food, working out costs, deciding what on earth to wear.

I had anxiety dreams every night and woke up at 4am most mornings to mull it over for three hours before getting up for work. It was in those dark hours that I’d usually stay away from the lists and just lie there stewing and worrying and watching Friends like it was a comfort blanket, but sometimes I wondered how the hell I was going to feel on the night itself. I imagined this:

That I’d feel like an imposter (as I did at university, so much so that I visited my tutor to turn myself in, sure that my high marks must have been a computer error)

I went through a period of being certain that guests would feel short-changed by coming and getting only me, and for a while I played with ideas about having other writers do readings from their books too

I was sure that, at any minute, someone was going to ask me if the book was really worth all this fuss and attention

Sometimes I felt as if I was on an irreversible road to my own public execution

Of course, I didn’t have to throw a launch. No one told me to do it and I knew it didn’t matter to anybody else as much as it mattered to me, but it felt important for reasons I couldn’t fathom.

When the day arrived, I’d hardly slept. I got up at about 5am to finish some last minute preparations. I couldn’t eat, or sit down for any length of time. I felt a deep nausea but just forced myself to execute the schedule I'd planned out.

Then it was evening, and guests started to arrive and talk and drink and as I looked around the place, at my balloons and my book cover everywhere my overriding feeling was absolute gratefulness.

It sounds over-the-top, but I’d never felt so lucky in my whole life. I was completely calm, as if I was suddenly sitting in the middle of the tornado that had ripped through my life, and at the same time I was sure that I was exactly where I should be, doing exactly what I should be doing. I was home. It was better than drugs, and I couldn’t stop smiling and hugging people.

Then the other night, I was watching Grayson Perry’s brilliant documentary series Who Are You? and he talked about rituals being a way of signifying a change. Of course, he’s absolutely right. It’s what Christmas, birthdays, weddings, bar mitzvahs, all that stuff has in common – they’re rituals that all say things will not be the same afterwards.

When I woke up the morning after the launch, I didn’t feel much apart from a sore head and like my tongue had turned to suede, since the afterparty had been in a karaoke booth and lasted until 3am. It was 7am and time for work, so I showered and dressed carefully in a bedroom strewn with the previous night’s outfit and event debris. When I looked in the mirror I thought, I am a published author, I am a published author, I am a published author.  And I actually laughed.

For the following week, I felt total exhaustion as all that nervous energy drained away. Every night I went to bed at 8pm and slept through.

I had random thoughts about me and the book, like how now I’d definitely not change my name if I got married. And how anyone I meet now will never know me unpublished.

I feel a certain detachment from the novel. Now I know why they call it a launch: it’s out in the world and doing its thing, a boat pushed out onto an unknown sea. When people talk to me about the book and tell me their opinion of it, it doesn’t feel anywhere near as personal as it did before. I'm glad they've read it, but that's about it. The book is based heavily on my own experience and contains some of my most innermost thoughts and yet it isn’t mine anymore. It doesn’t belong to me.

A few days ago, I went to an event that would have intimidated me once because it was full of people with business cards and proper shoes and handbags while I bowled in wearing DM boots and an old mac. For a minute, I had that familiar feeling of being the underdog in a room full of people who had access to a rulebook that I couldn’t read.

Then I thought I’m a published author. How many of these guys can say that? I don’t mean to be snotty. In lots of ways, it means absolutely nothing – I still have gas bills and dental appointments and messy housemates. I know true confidence comes from within and validation isn’t about external accolades but I also know that I’ve done something that not everyone can do, and I’ve done it in the way that I wanted to do it, and I’ve done it in a way that feels good to me.

Publishing a book is the best thing I’ve ever done. It feels better than I ever dreamed. And I am a different person because of it.

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Everybody Knows This is Nowhere - The Launch!

Well, nothing says special like a homemade scotch egg - so I made and wrapped one for every guest who came. Read about the trauma of that here

As about 50 people were coming, I had to kind of had to take over the fridge in our flat. Lucky I have pretty understanding housemates...

A poster! With my book on it!

Guest list only, ha!

My best ever teacher, who taught me English at A level, even turned up! She had a massive impact on meas a teenager and even got me interested in Shakespeare, which was no mean feat. Here she is with my mum...

Was so nervous about the speech and the reading beforehand that for a month I woke up at 4am every day. In the event, needn't have worried. Didn't freeze. Didn't forget to thank anyone. And they even drunkenly heckled me. Never felt more relaxed behind a microphone.

After that I hardly time for a ciggie before I was selling books and signing them. Totally got over the embarrassment as I felt so genuinely grateful to people for turning up and actually buying a copy

Here's me and my mum...

Karaoke bar til 3am followed, but luckily no photo (or sound) evidence survived. What a night.

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How to Make 48 Scotch Eggs

On April 10 this year, I got an email from a publisher who wanted to put out my novel. On April 12, I moved to a new house I was to share with perfect strangers. On April 18, I split up with my long-term partner.

The breakup left me feeling lonely and sad and strange for months and I cried on trains because between work and home it was the only place I wouldn’t be disturbed. There were a lot of times when I literally didn’t know what to do with myself, where to go, who to turn to, what to eat, how I was ever going to get better.

And all the while, my book was going to be published. People kept asking me, “Are you excited?” but excitement isn’t an emotion that you can feel continuously for a long time, and I didn’t really know what I felt. I started working a lot.

  Now it is the night before my book launch. It's the biggest event I’ve ever organised on my own and I thought for a long time about what I should do, and then what I could do, and then what I wanted to do. And eventually I decided that one of my favourite things in the world is a homemade scotch egg, and what I wanted to do was make one for each guest. I got invitations printed up and 48 people confirmed.

So yesterday, I made 48 scotch eggs. Here’s how:

Buy 60 eggs and boil 48 of them. Peel them.

I’ve always wanted to be a writer. When I was eight I wrote about what my bears said when I left the room, when I was twelve I wrote a series of stories about a girl with one leg, when I was a teenager I filled spiral-bound notebooks with awful poetry and burnt them in the garden. I studied it at university. After I graduated I missed being a student so much I worked two jobs to save the money for a unique MA programme that allowed me to write a dissertation and start a novel. I started Everybody Knows This is Nowhere and then finished it, but gave up quickly on the idea of it being published.

Five years later, in January this year, I self-published it, did a little PR, and then a publisher wrote to me and said he wanted to put it out. I didn’t actually realise that I’d been waiting for the validation until it came. And then, of course, I didn’t know what to do with it. 

Lay out some bread for a day so gets nice and stale, and then blend it all to crumbs.

In the time since I discovered I was due to be published, I went to a lot of literary events, usually alone, to try and understand the book world. Some were warm and fun and very drunken. Some were cold and unwelcoming and made me feel like I had no right to bowl about in the London night claiming to be a writer. But nevertheless, I learnt how to talk about my novel, how to stop looking at the floor when telling people I’d written one, and how to answer the question, “So, what’s your book about?” without feeling like a total dick. I watched other writers and how they did readings and panel discussions, and I started standing up in front of audiences to speak about my novel.

Get your flavours ready. Garlic and chilli, salt and pepper, spring onions and cumin. You’ll realise later that this is hardly half of what you need.

The sleepless nights began and I often woke up at 4am or 5am, unable to stop thinking. I had a series of anxiety dreams where people didn’t come or I was standing on stage and couldn’t find the passage I wanted to read. It took me a long time to realise it but mainly I worried about not being worth the fuss and attention. What if everyone who even came felt it wasn’t enough and left disappointed?

Add flavours to your first batch of sausagemeat and mix with your hands. Cover the boiled eggs in flour, and set up beaten eggs and breadcrumbs like a production line.

I spent time in my new home getting to know my new housemates. I’ve lived in houseshares for the last ten years and I don’t know if it’s just me but the first couple of months are usually a bit bumpy, especially if you’re strangers. The honeymoon period is about a fortnight long if you’re lucky; after that you have a fair idea of how things are going to fit together.

Wrap the meat around the boiled egg. Make sure that there are no gaps whatsoever, and that you use plenty of sausagemeat as otherwise the meat splits and the whole snack looks like something out of a Hieronymous Bosch painting. If one does split, and it inevitably will, the good news is, you can eat it.

Lottery winners often say that every relationship gets tested overnight when they get the money, but I found that happening to me without the millions of pounds sitting in my account. Friends that I thought would always be beside me did great vanishing acts, while others who I thought I could never rely on have been caring and encouraging and given me ideas. It feels very uncomfortable to say, but I’ve started to look inward more. 

After you’ve done the meat, cover the whole thing well in beaten egg and then roll in the breadcrumbs until it’s completely coated. Drop into hot oil, and fry for 10 minutes until golden brown.

Making them takes about twice as long as I thought. When I’m six hours and about two thirds of the way through the kitchen stinks of frying, there’s oil all over the top of the hob, breadcrumbs and egg everywhere and I’ve run out of sausages and chilli and garlic. I think about stopping. Every surface in the kitchen is covered with batches of cooling eggs, and I have no idea where I’m going to store them all or how on earth I’m going to have time to wrap them. When I said I was going to make such a large batch, a few people did tell me I was mad or stupid and at that point I was starting to believe they were right.

But then I remember why I’m doing it, and that is because I think a scotch egg is one of the best things in the world. I’ve had lots of them. Crispy ones, gooey ones, hot ones, cold ones, freshly fried and oven baked. Chicken ones, chilli ones, tikka ones, from street markets and from fancy restaurants with beetroot rocket. They’re like little worlds in themselves. And it’s the best thing I can think of to give the people who have made the effort to come and support me and the book.

So I go to the supermarket, buy the rest of the ingredients, and carry on until they are finished. Nine hours after I started that morning, I’m done. I cry. And then I wrap them.

I have so many hopes and expectations for tomorrow night that I can’t eat or sleep. I have thought about it so often, obsessed about it even; from what decorations to have to how I’m going to get everything to the venue to what I’m going to say in my thank you speech to how much wine I’ll drink to how I’m going to feel about this and that and the other. The thoughts have been swirling around my brain for so long that I’ve almost started to just wish it was just all over.

Sometimes life leaves you feeling like there’s nothing to hold on to. But if nothing else I can hold on to this: that I’ve written a book, and that the book is published. And that’s enough.

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Marina Abramovic - The Artist is Present

Among the many great things about being single, my new number one is that I can watch whatever I like on a Saturday night – perhaps with just the odd eyeroll from my housemate Norbert – and last weekend that included a documentary about an experimental Serbian performance artist.

Marina Abramović’s work pushes boundaries that most of us have never even considered in a very bold and intense way. Her work is often about performance itself, exploring the relationship between the artist and the audience by challenging herself physically and mentally to the very limit.

In one of her most famous installations, Rhythm 0, she lay naked on a table along with 72 different objects like scissors, a rope, a gun, sleeping pills and so on. She agreed that any visitor to the gallery could use the objects against her in any way they wished and they would not be held responsible. She says that doing it meant completely swallowing her fear of pain, and also that people operate under only a “veneer of civilisation”. Here's what she looked like afterwards:

Her ability to be so vulnerable in public leaves me totally in awe, and I don’t say that lightly. I’ve struggled to comfortably speak in front of audiences – without really knowing why it’s so hard – but she has had the guts to actually invite people to inflict pain on her. Throughout her career she has faced fears absolutely head on (and in public).

“Performance is all about state of mind,” she says. “There is a direct energy between the public and a performer and it must come from an emotional place. You have to be in the present time and let something emotional open.”

This is similar to something I’ve been thinking about recently: performing well is much more to do with your state of mind than that of the audience. When people ask about my book launch, they’re always surprised when I say I’m desperately nervous about doing the thank you speech. “But everyone’s there to support you!” is the usual response. It’s true, but does absolutely nothing to reduce the fear. I’m not worried that I’m going to be pelted with rotten tomatoes: what really bothers me is whether I have any right to be on show like that and if I’ve got anything worth saying that actually matters.

The film really got me thinking that self-belief is actually what allows you to step forward and do your thing and maybe feel it was worthwhile. Putting the audience’s support – or lack thereof – to one side and relying on your own opinion makes the whole process of not being very good and learning something in public much easier to swallow.

Abramović says, “The artist must be a warrior. They have to have determination and stamina to contact new territory and himself. And his weaknesses. We are used to cleaning the outside house, but the most important house to clean is yourself – your own house – which we never do. Happiness comes from the full understanding of your own being.”

The Artist is Present is another great documentary from Dogwoof - watch the trailer and Buy the DVD here

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Soho Literary Festival

Saw Craig Brown & Friends and Sam Leith in conversation with John Sutherland at the Soho Theatre

Very nearly didn’t make this as I had to do the tough thing and drag myself away from the pub, but I’ve loved satirist Craig Brown for a long time and he pretty much stole the show at the Private Eye event last Christmas so I knew it’d probably be worth missing out on wine and gossip. For those not familiar with him, Brown is a genius at parodying famous people, and his range is extensive – no one is out of reach.

He was joined by author and Oldie theatre critic Paul Bailey, legendary funnyman Barry Cryer, Dead Ringers supremeo Jan Ravens, playwright Tallulah Brown and the outrageously talented Peter Serafinowicz (Duane Benzie!).

The spectrum of the impressions was immense – Yoko Ono told us the secret of happiness “Drop a carrot on the floor. Get your personal assistant to pick it up”, a foul-mouthed Janet Street Porter told the story of her birth, Richard Dawkins took us through his recent tweets on the ice bucket challenge and various celebrity deaths, “RIP Robin Williams. He had a terrific sense of humour. I met him a few years ago and he laughed hysterically at all my jokes.” Jeremy Clarkson’s account of taking a ride on the London Eye was a thing of joy too: “To add insult to injury, after twenty minutes we wound up in exactly the same place we’d started from.”

Every bit of the show was pitch perfect and they didn’t even mention the book they were flogging –The Lost Diaries.

Journalist Sam Leith in conversation with Professor and author of How to be Well Read, John Sutherland, was a completely different tone as it was a discussion of what it means to be well read and explored why he reads so much, and how we should decide what to read when there are millions of books out there. When asked why he chose the title, lifelong reader Sutherland said that he had wanted it to be called “Remnants of a Wasted Reading Life” but the “poor publisher wanted to make money” and didn’t think it would sell.

Apart from the fact that he’s absorbed a mind-boggling number of books, it was just great to sit and listen to someone who obviously loves reading and has got a lot of insight from doing it. There was a great bit where he talked about how writing is the most free of all the arts, which is something I’ll be thinking about for a while. He also spoke about how you can’t go into Tesco and try a bit of one croissant, put it back, and decide to take a bit of another in the way you can with books in a bookshop. “Something funny happens when you step inside a bookshop,” he said. “They truly are homes of free spirits. And they have armchairs for god’s sake!”

  The Soho Literary Festival finishes on 28 September – see the full programme of events here

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I Laughed, I Cried

I Laughed, I Cried is about one woman’s mission to complete 100 comedy gigs in 100 nights to find out if she can, and should, be a stand up comic. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are some really funny accounts of the more disastrous nights, like the one where she shares a car journey with four other comics only to stop at every service station, be late, and end up spending more than just buying a train ticket.

The book is so much more than just a straightforward diary of gigs. It also raises a number of questions that feel pretty relevant to me at the moment, like how we decide whether we can do something as a career, whether we should pursue it, what counts as success, and just how far you can or should push yourself to achieve. In Viv Groskop’s case, that is incredibly far.

Given that when I had two speaking events for my book in one week I felt shattered at the end, I am absolutely over-awed by her lining up 100 gigs in as many days and then resolving to actually do them. (Oh yeah, and she has three kids too.)

On top of that, she’s insightful about her experience and honest about her doubts. She says, “Everyone knows it’s very hard to achieve anything in life without being single-minded. But it’s also incredibly difficult to make a start at something like this before you have any proof that it will work. It’s much easier to defend it once you have become incredibly successful. Suddenly everyone thinks it was all worth it. But that’s just hindsight.”

She’s right. It’s a massive relief to know that, in trying to launch my writing “career”, I’m not alone in finding it tough-going. Because it’s also difficult to make a start on something when you’re constantly asking yourself why you’re doing it, whether you’re any good at it, and what the point of it is.

I couldn’t really have picked a better time to read this book, as I packed it for a solo camping trip that I took because I felt so strung out and basically needed a few days of not speaking to anybody. Since finding out four months ago that someone wanted to publish Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, I’ve gone from utter amazement and excitement, to getting stuck into marketing it and meeting people, and somewhere along the line I’ve started to panic about not being good enough, and become a bit obsessed with being the best I can possibly, possibly be at this one thing. Because if I don’t try hard enough, it might fail completely. Because it might be the only thing I ever publish. And even though I work until midnight most days, I still go to bed thinking of what I haven’t done and worrying about things over which I have no control. Most days I feel like I’m living under a very heavy rock.

Of course, I understand that no one’s forcing me to do it, but it taps into my whole idea about who I am so much that I’m not sure it is much of a choice as it appears. Viv talks about this when she reflects on the fact she is spending her evenings at comedy gigs instead of at home with her children: “I do feel bad about the children because of course I would be a better mother to them if I wasn’t going out every night. But it’s partly because of them that I’m doing it. I don’t want them to grow up with a parent who didn’t have the guts to do what they really wanted to do with their life. I don’t want them to grow up with a mother who is defeated and cowed and couldn’t be bothered to see things through because they got a bit tough. I want them to see that you have to work hard to get better at things. I want them to see that it doesn’t matter if you fail initially. What matters is that you keep improving.”

I don’t have kids, but I totally understand what she means and I love her for saying it. What she achieved is incredible, and the fact that she can look back on it with humour gives me some faith. I don’t have to drive myself crazy by working. It's enough just to keep improving.

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Sex Idiot

I know that it’s shit for a writer to admit that they can’t describe something, but this show is so truly different from anything I’ve seen before it’s a pretty tough job.

The blurb says that Sex Idiot is “a glittering, unabashed cabaret of confession with a wonky DIY feel” as “following her first STI test, Bryony discovered she had a common sexual disease. Not one for looking back, she was faced with the arduous task of retracing her sexual footsteps to see where she'd contracted her little problem.”

What you might not get from that is that it was impossible not to feel absolute admiration for the sheer balls of this girl, who wrote the show and then, acted, sang, and danced out a number of stories about previous sexual partners. As anyone who’s been around the block a few times, it’s not always easy to revisit the times you’ve been fucked over (or fucked others over) so to put on a one-woman show revealing all takes serious cajones.

Little vignettes showed her singing all the different names you can think of for the vagina (and many you can’t) to the tune of Subterranean Homesick Blues, smashing a bunch of flowers over her head to illustrate how it felt to date one particular guy, but she also talked about jealousy, about people who emailed her telling her that they never wanted to see her again and a whole plethora of emotions that arise from adventures in love.

The finale was one of most shocking pieces of audience participation I think I might ever see as she handed out three shot glasses and three pairs of scissors and asked people to fill them with their pubes. The fact that she got all three glasses back full is one thing, that she then made a moustache with sellotape and wore it for a final song is quite another and utter testament to extent to which she had the audience on her side.

Can’t wait to see the next one.

Follow Bryony on Twitter here

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The New Libertines

A poetry/spoken word evening at the Old Fire Station Café in Oxford with Lucy Furlong, Rohan Quine, Rebecca Woodhead, Dan Holloway, Me! and Polly Trope, with music by Superhand

I knew weeks in advance that this would be a pretty special evening for me, as not only was it the first time my name was on the bill but it was organised by writer, journalist, revolutionary, and basically all-round good guy Dan Holloway.

The six degrees of separation rule that applies to most of us is more like two degrees for Dan, as he just knows everyone. I met him when I initially self-published my own novel in January, and discovered him as he'd been a massive champion of developments in self-publishing for years.

As well as writing about self-publishing for the Guardian, Dan is also a literary/experimental writer in his own right: earlier this year I read Songs from the Other Side of the Wall, which is a fiercely good yarn and also happens to have the best description of online relationships that I’ve read. He also runs a superb blog which is well worth checking out (link below). If only to give you a better idea of how this guy thinks, his manifesto on writing deserves to be reproduced here:

- Art can, and should try to, change the world.

- Art should tell the truth, the artist’s truth, scraped from the deepest place inside them

- There are too many “good” books already. We shouldn’t add to the number.

- Everything is political, and nothing more so than mealy-mouthed writers claiming they aren’t political.

- Great writing doesn’t think outside the box. It never knew what the box was in the first place.

- Every life is precious and unique, and has the right to be told, and heard, in its own voice.

- It is better to try to be extraordinary and fail than to try to be ordinary and succeed.

- Art should be free wherever possible, but those who have been moved by it and can afford to do so should pay for it.

With this in mind, I was pretty excited to be going along to The New Libertines, an event designed to be a showcase of self-published writers (and me). Perhaps it was because of that, or the warm atmosphere, but I felt easier behind the mic than I ever had before – almost to the extent that it felt like somebody else was speaking from my heart, instead of me.

I’ve heard about book events that the nicest part of being in them is meeting the other writers, and even after just one I instinctively feel that’s true.

Afterwards, I got to chatting with Polly Trope, who lives in Berlin and released her first novel, Cured Meat, last year. We talked about the difficulty of writing about our own experiences, how you can never write life as closely as you’d like, and the difference between calling something a memoir and a novel.

When we go for an afterparty drink with Rohan and Rebecca, and Polly tells me quite casually that she used to be a prostitute in London. Naturally I’m fascinated but all I can think to say is, “Wow. How did you explain that on your CV?” She doesn’t seem to mind and lets me grill her from everything from the shift pattern to what she thinks about Belle de Jour. We then figure out that in the same year she was doing that, I was a dealer in a casino in Leicester Square – one that she probably came into many times. What a small, amazing world.

  Only a few chapters in, but I’m really enjoying Polly Trope’s Cured Meat: Memoirs of a Psychiatric Runaway. It has a strong central voice with an unforgiving eye for detail and some incredible characters. Here it is an Amazon

Find out more about Dan Holloway and his work here and his latest novel (Life:) Razorblades Included is on Amazon here

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BoxedIN

Open mic night at Boxpark, Shoreditch, with two feature acts – Polar Bear and Alim Kamara

Having managed to take the most incremental of baby steps into the whole public speaking shiz, I knew the time was approaching when I would just have to get up and do it.

It was hot evening but we were in a pop-up mall which was mainly constructed of wood and scaffolding, so it was nice and breezy. I was wearing black from head to toe and I thought about pretending that I was going to do a mime.

I didn’t even feel nervous until I actually got there and put my name down, but then I felt the familiar jangling in my belly. I got a marguerita, found a nice spot to sit in and watched the fixed gear bikes and beards fly by while telling myself that this was not the end of the world as we know it, even if I crashed and burned in the worst possible way. All I was doing was standing up and chatting about the book. A book that I know inside out.

The turnout was decent so there was enough to people to create an atmosphere and make a bit of noise, despite the fact we were between restaurants and a corridor ran between the audience and the microphone.

The acts started. And they were really good. None of them had scripts, and I looked at mine nervously and touched it with increasingly sweaty fingers. I was one of a few white faces, one of a few female faces, and the only one who was reading fiction. For a moment, I think about going. I feel like it wouldn’t matter if I did. But it’s not in my blood. Apart from myself, my mum would be horrified.

My name was called. I took a deep breath and walked up to the front.

And all of a sudden there’s a mic in front of me.

My first line was: “So, I’m going to do something just a little bit different…” and then I left the script tucked away and just spoke about why I’d come to write the book. The title, Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, got a single “Whoop!” which was enough for me to give a nod to Neil Young, and the audience laughed so I did too.

I was surprised how close I felt to them and I thought of the acting workshop, and picked a girl about three rows back, who is the most attentive listener I’ve ever seen, and I made eye contact with her and tried to speak as if we were having coffee together. And then I did that with another person. And then another.

When I read from the book, I tried to be slow and put as much into it as I could.

I was surprised again when the audience laughed. I’ve been so close to the book for so long that it almost feels like another part of my body. Their reaction is making me look at it fresh, and reminding me that it might have a life of its own.

As a friend points out later, the laughter is probably not because what I’ve written is side-splitting, but – and I really hope she’s right – it’s more likely because they recognise something in it that they’ve felt too.

BoxedIN happens at the end of every month. The organisers run a tight ship and managed to pack 21 open mic-ers and two feature acts into two hours, which is no mean feat and made it a great night out. Check them out on Facebook for regular updates

The two feature acts of the evening were both totally brilliant and well worth a look:

Hiphop artist/storyteller Alim Kamara is on Twitter @alimKamara and will be performing live at the Jazz Café in Camden on August 11

Writer and performance poet Polarbear is on Twitter @homeofpolar and does a lot to develop young spoken word artists

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How to Survive an Acting Workshop in 5 Easy Steps

  1. It’s going to be awkward. It’s going to be hard in ways you cannot yet know. You don’t like standing in front of people and having them look at you. Small groups, big groups, even when you’re passionate about what you’re talking about, it makes no odds. You even hate your friends singing Happy Birthday to you. You even hate singing Happy Birthday to your friends. Reconcile yourself with being bottom of the class and crack on with it.

2. The teacher will say, “Don’t think. Just do. Don’t think. Just be.” He partners you up for an eye contact test. You try too hard, and you’re thinking. You’re thinking before doing, and failing before you’ve started. He can see the cogs of your mind turning as he asks you to do something and you’re figuring out how to do it best. He says, “You’re thinking. Don’t think. Just do.”

3. You wanted to be good at public speaking because you thought it wasn’t a million miles away from writing. Both involve being understood, being clear and come from believing that you have something to say. Except with writing, you have the option to hide your mistakes private until you decide otherwise (in theory). But then as someone points out, once you’ve done a little skit it’s gone. Writing is there forever. In a sense, you should be fearless.

4. You have to partner up. You stand side by side. One person walks, and the other jumps in front of them and screams in rage, only saying “ABC”, with enough power to stop the other person from walking. You and your partner are first up. When you open your mouth you don’t know how your voice is going to sound because you don’t have enough experience of just letting it go like that. When you do it, it sounds weak and you start laughing. This is harder than you imagined but you know you have to do it. You go back to the beginning. Don’t think, just do. And you start and you still sound weak but then you notch it up, until you’re screaming from a place that you have never screamed from before. And it’s done and the others are clapping. You’re shaking, you and your partner are laughing, and then you hug.

5. A few days later, you rehearse your spiel again. You feel some of the tangle of nerves in your belly, but something has released and you know it. You can feel a difference. You breathe. You put your shoulders back, you start speaking. You make some eye contact with the person who’s assessing you. You’re not crippled by the idea they might think you’re stupid. You’re not so bound up with being nervous that you can’t put any flavour into the words. You know it’s far from perfect, or even all that good, but you also know that you’re just starting to like the way you sound.

I did the one day acting workshop at the Hampstead Academy of Acting and Drama - find out more on their website here

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Fishing in the Aftermath: Book Launch

Salena Godden is exactly the sort of person I hoped I’d meet when I started making my way in the literary world. She’s ballsy, seems to say whatever’s on her mind and writes great poetry about anything from having sex in a train station car park to being in New York when the planes went into the Twin Towers.

The introduction charts her career, from the first poetry gigs to the present day and deserves to be read in full, but to give you an idea her first and last day job was Acid Jazz A&R Assistant, which culminated in her working on the Woodstock 25th anniversary and then taking a Hunter S. Thompson inspired road trip across the states. Once she got back she handed in a resignation letter and devoted her life to writing full-time. Basically, she just epitomises rock ‘n’ roll.

So it was a privilege to be at the launch of her book of poetry, Fishing in the Aftermath 1994 – 2014, and catch a first glimpse of the punkier side of the lit world. The collection spans twenty years of Salena’s writing, where she’s become massive on the spoken word scene. This meant that the launch consisted of a poetry karaoke, where different performance poets got up to read a poem from the book.

Being seasoned performers, they were all fantastic: confident, loud, funny characters who all had a very different but strong stage presence. Highlights for me were “A loner in a crowded head” which was read by Rob Auton and “Imagine if you had to lick it!” read by Joelle Taylor, plus of course Salena herself taking the mic.

I haven’t heard a lot of poetry read aloud until recently, but I have loved discovering it and always wonder why there isn’t more of it. I imagine that if I said that out loud to any of these guys it would induce the sort of eye-rolling I do when I read another article on The Guardian saying knitting is coming back into mainstream. People have always knit! And, judging by Salena’s intro, people have always read poetry to audiences that get more rowdy and sweaty and drunk with each poem.

Great evening and a superb book – thank you Salena and congratulations!

Buy Fishing in the Aftermath here