The View From Here issue 18

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issue 18

Lily Cole in DISTRESS – Inside: The Lone Ranger comes to the rescue!

Cover image: Diego Cupolo Artwork: Fossfor The Magazine on-line: http://viewfromheremagazine.com EDITOR: Mike French Managing Editors: Sydney Nash & Michael Kannengieser The Crew: Kathleen Maher, Paul Burman, Stella Carter, Naomi Gill, Jen Persson, Jane Turley, Grace Read, Diego Cupolo, Kerrie Anne, Charlie Wykes, Lori Andrews, Carly Bald, Shanta Everington & Fossfor.

Copyright: The View From Here magazine 2009-12-04 Published by BLAM Productions based in the UK email: info@viewfromheremagazine.com Painting of microphone used throughout: Fossfor Fiction articles in this magazine: All people, places and events depicted therein are fictional and not meant to resemble any actual people, places, or events unless otherwise specified.

A distinct sense of energy exudes from the pages of The View from Here magazine. This is a magazine to leaf through for diversion and inspiration.

EssentialWriters.com

interview by Paul

I'm something of a mailbox junkie.

There, I've confessed it. There's nothing quite like opening the mailbox and discovering a wad of envelopes waiting to reveal their secrets. Why, even half a dozen bills and bank statements bring an excitement akin to Christmas morning. So imagine my delight when, out of the empty blue, a large padded envelope was delivered a few weeks back and, within the envelope, a book: The Ghost Poetry Project by Nathan Curnow.

The best gifts are surprise gifts unbirthday presents - as this was.

Packed and posted by a good friend, who thought I might enjoy it. And I did. So much so, that I felt compelled to track down its author, Nathan Curnow, and interview him for The View from Here.

Ten nights. Ten haunted locations.

One terrifying adventure across Australia. From a gaol cell to a lunatic asylum to a night in a haunted hearse, The Ghost Poetry

Project is one poet's attempt to find a language of guts and daring. A unique e exploration of fear, courage, and the power of mystery and myth.

The Ghost Poetry Project is something of a rarity among poetry anthologies: it's a page-turner. page Not only is its premise intriguing but, with each section introduced by a brief description of that particular location's history and reputation, the reader feels compelled to follow the journey... alert, breath held, eyes

peeled. And the richness of the writing leads us on. We track each phrase, each image, through a startling broadness of range - of voice, style and vision - and frequently discover an incisive sharpness of focus that is haunting in its own right and which brings each stage of the adventure vividly to life.

From the prosaic Preparation: My wife buys three stones for their spiritual powers, says they need to

be touching my skin. She wants me to practice holding them as if it's easy to get that wrong. And all the sachets in the hotel room I am meant to swipe for her collection. She just loves the trim of their packaging. It's not stealing if they expect to replace them. to the deftly juxtaposed Slater Bug and Colour of Asphyxiation: He has got to understand for the good of himself, how much love she has to give.

- so evocative that I almost found myself curling up on the floor in a tight ball and gasping for breath.

From the picturesque Postcard from Richmond Bridge: A boy with a net, his pants cuffed high, stirs the silt of the riverbed.

With each careful step bright scimitars clash, a crusade of light on stone. to the humorous Portrait of a Headless Man Wearing a Straw Boater Hat.

Perhaps we could start with you describing your journey as a writer. How did you arrive at being a poet?

About ten years ago I decided that I wanted to become an international best-selling author. It was at a particularly lonely point in my life and I thought that if I became a successful writer, and knew myself as one, then everything would be resolved and fall into place. gain control of my life, hungry and tenacious and so wonderfully deluded. But my skills didn’t develop until I enrolled in a creative writing course at university. It was there I became exposed to a wider range of texts, and saw for the first time what contemporary poetry really was.

I suddenly realised that there were all sorts of writers, and found myself choosing the form of poetry whenever I had something to say. I guess the demands of it attracted me. For some reason it just seemed a natural fit.

As a poet, playwright and performer, how do these different roles influence the way you work and the way you see the world?

Poetry and plays are very similar.

There are common elements to both, such as musicality, rhythm, economy of language, layering of ideas and symbols etc. So for me the working process is also very similar. But performing is something else entirely.

Performance is putting yourself at-risk in a very public, immediate and sometimes unforgiving way.

There are so many risk-factors, and that’s the adrenalin rush of it. If it all goes well you find yourself knitted to the audience, sharing an experience as the piece reveals itself to you in a new way as well.

Or else, sometimes no matter how prepared you are, the planets just don’t align and there’s a heckler to deal with or the microphone doesn’t work.

With performance I’m most interested in the process of presentation/representation. Unlike the blank space of the page the performer is far from neutral. The audience begins to make assumptions as soon as you take to the stage.

So the performer becomes the appearance, rhythm and voice of the piece while also having to step out of the way of it, letting it speak through them as if they aren’t necessary/essential to its delivery. It’s the art of being present and unattached at the same time.

Visible and invisible.

I’m reminded of that wonderful poem by Australian poet Sarah Day titled Cat Bird where the cat through the slow act of stalking not only becomes invisible to the bird, but in some way the bird itself.

How did The Ghost Poetry Project germinate as an idea and how did you go about developing it?

The Ghost Poetry Project sprang from an interest in fear, courage and how language works to both terrify and embolden us. One of my kids was particularly afraid of bunyips (a monster from indigenous stories/dreaming) and no matter how we tried to explain them to her or explain how fear operated, nothing

could relieve it. Until one day a school friend told her that: bunyips only eat avocados, and right then, with those four simple words, her fear totally disappeared.

So I wanted to explore this mystery, and immersing myself in an extreme situation such as at haunted sites around Australia seemed a good way to explore fear, courage and the power of story and suggestion.

When the Australia Council for the Arts decided to fund the project there was definitely no backing out.

I chose ten sites to stay at within twelve months, a real variety of places that might give each chapter (of about seven to eight poems) its own flavour. So I ended up in a gaol cell, an old Lunatic Asylum, a museum, a spooky mansion and even in a haunted hearse.

What was the most interesting, intriguing or scary experience you had when staying at the ten haunted sites?

It was midnight and I was standing on the staircase of what many consider to be South Australia’s most haunted building, a cell-block inside Old Adelaide Gaol. I had been taken on a one-on-one five hour tour and was dead-bored and tired when my guide said: Did you hear that? It was faint at first but enough to interrupt his stories, a tapping noise at the top-left hand side of the stairs.

The sound grew louder until it was like a cane being struck on a ballroom floor, like a rack of billiard balls breaking open. Access to the second level was blocked by an iron, padlocked gate, and based upon what I knew of the gaol, which is run by volunteers, the chances of a prankster hiding up there was so remote it was ridiculous. But it kept on, over and over, echoing through the entire wing.

We returned twice more and within a minute of our arrival the sound started up again.

There are frequent sightings, day and night, of a figure at the top lefthand side of the stairs but with numerous executions and suicides having occurred in the building, it’s impossible to know who it might be.

Oh and then there was the ghost train of Picton Tunnel. But that’s another storyC Can you describe how you approach writing – specifically the poems that comprise The Ghost Poetry Project? Do you start with a phrase, an impression, an observation?

The project put me under intense creative pressure, which means I now have a much better understanding of how I work. To be honest, I wasn’t sure I could pull the project off. I had never written so hard before, and as a result I learnt how to find poems in a very short, intense amount of time.

Arriving at each site I would scavenge for information. I talked to anyone/everyone, listening to what they were and weren’t saying. I took photos and brochures and remained as alert as possible to the environment I occupied. This meant that when I arrived back home I would have enough stories, along with my own experiences, to go to for inspiration.

So yes, a phrase, an impression, an observationC these were all catalysts. And poems often spring from juxtapositions or symbolic moments, like the story of the ‘prisoner’ at Fremantle Lunatic Asylum who desperately threw a love letter weight by a stone over the wall to a woman he’d seen on the other side. But always there is the hard slog of working a poem into what it’s trying to be. You write a word, you cross it out, you try another.

It’s notoriously difficult to get poetry published – especially an anthology – so perhaps you could say something about this side of things.

Poetry in Australia has been largely abandoned by the major publishers because there is this entrenched belief that poetry doesn’t/won’t sell.

And I’m not naïve, but I do think that this ‘given’ should be challenged on a regular basis. If there are low expectations for a book then it won’t be supported with publicity, which means it won’t sell and then we’re

back again to low expectations. It’s a wicked trap, but I think that some books of poetry can be circuit breakers if given half a chance.

That’s where small presses like Puncher and Wattmann come in.

Based in Sydney, and despite limited resources, it has been punching ing above its weight for years.

It has vision and takes the kind of risks that the major publishers (who can afford to) should be taking.

Now that The Ghost Poetry Project is published and available in booksellers, what next?

Thanks again to the Australia Council I am currently working on a new play based upon the convict stories I collected during The Ghost Poetry Project. In particular the dog chain at Eaglehawk Neck in Tasmania.

The dog chain was a line of savage dogs that stretched across a narrow strip of land between the brutal prison of Port Arthur and the settlement of Hobart. Any convict that escaped had to confront the dogs sooner or later and figure out a way to cross without being mauled to death. Only three convicts conv ever made it across.

What’s your vision for yourself as a poet, playwright and performer? What would you like to accomplish in, say, the next ten years?

I guess the plan first and foremost is to keep writing somehow. It’s a roller-coaster coaster of a life, l and not only do you have to ride it but you have to lay the track at the same time. A little more security would be good, but that’s often in short supply for poets and playwrights. As long as I keep learning how to balance it all so that in another ten years I can say: I’m still here, writing hard, interpreting the world the only way I know how, through language.

Thank you, Nathan, and all the very best for you and The Ghost Poetry Project..

at four am the street sweeper brushes the room with unequivocal light a swift exhibition like a beating of wings the knuckled man inside me clenching this remarkable darkness in secret places the gutters of my aching flesh stiff with the drawing heaving up leaking from the purse of my mouth from Unequivocal Light, The Ghost Poetry Project

Celebs in Writing Distress:

Lily Cole

Dear Lily Hi Lone Ranger Gosh I'm such a big fan of you and like all your heroic stuff.

So, I'm writing my first novel at the moment and I'm basing it on the Adam and Eve story. My question is, there is a lot of nudity in the book and I'm not sure how graphic I should make the sex ex scenes? And I'm really stuck with what to call "things".

Help me Lone Ranger! love Lily X P.S Can you send me a signed nude photo of you riding Silver? (Just put love to Lily.)

Gosh my girl, I cannot send you a nude photo of myself, get a grip.

As to your question, well it depends, writing sex scenes is very hard and if not done right just come over as laughable. First forget your Mum and everybody else and enter the world you are creating without any inhibitions. Then write what feels right for your story –is is it important to describe things? Does it add to the tone and story?

Is it better to leave things to the readers' imagination? If you do describe the act of sex itself, then do be careful with your y choice of words, having made the decision to describe it don't come over all shy in your word choice the reader has to believe what is going on, not be jarred out of the story. As to "what to call things?" - it is a problem and you have to use your skill as a writer to decide which words to use - for example "tits" or "boobs" can make you sound like you are a Sun newspaper writer, but may work depending on the style of the narrative.

I'm off to have a shower.

The Instant Pet Peeve

by Stella

An apology in advance: Sorry, I may end up ranting.

We all have our pet peeves – little things which really really really annoy us and we don't know why. Our annoyance is not proportionate to the action. If someone tries to run you over, then getting mad is reasonable. If someone puts the milk carton back in the fridge with only three drops of milk left in it and you throw a fit – you're overreacting. Your annoyance is understandable, of course, but not entirely tirely rational. Full disclosure: I have been known to put the nearly empty milk carton back in the fridge and so I humbly apologize for provoking ire.

Then there are the pet peeves which pertain to spelling and grammar.

Some people clench their teeth over the confusion of your/you're, then/than, and the like. Other people get fidgety when infinitives are split or metaphors are mixed. While I can't say I've never twitched over the aforementioned, one thing which makes me feel like some cruel being is scratc scratching his or her fingernails up and down a blackboard with malicious intent is the phrase "instant classic." If you've never come across it (too late now, huh?), it's supposed to mean something was really unbelievably fantastically mindblowingly fabulous as to make you and everyone else take note of the thing's existence and never forget it.

Urban Dictionary says it was coined in a Washington high school.

I don't care.

I can deal with "tweet" no longer referring to the sound a bird makes. I can cope with Fac Facebook turning "friend" into a verb. By now I'm used to

"text" being used as a verb. But I will never get used to that stupid oxymoronic "instant classic."

"Instant" implies immediacy, "classic" implies a quality recognized retroactively, as in a while later, r, usually a long (long) while later. There isn't a specific amount of time to determine the object/subject's status as a classic, but it's damn well longer than an instant.

So by all meansSay it was stunning.

Say it took your breath away.

Say it was an instant sensation.

Say it took the world by storm.

Say it created an immediate craze.

Say this thing or this moment will probably be remembered a long time from now.

But please don't say it's an instant classic.

That makes no sense.

It's like saying someone/something e/something is suddenly traditional. Or casually uptight.

Or calmly upset.

Or spectacularly ordinary. Or incredibly realistic. Full disclosure: I've used "incredibly realistic" on more than one occasion. Nobody's perfect. Which reminds me – you can't be perfectly rfectly flawed or exactly imprecise either. I know this doesn't have much to do with writing other than belonging to the mistakes-to-avoid avoid category, so I welcome everyone to share their writing pet peeves. I feel so much better now that I got that out of my m system.

Background image: John Goodridge

How Competition Kills Craft

by Andrew Oldham

This article is the first step to generate an open discussion on UK Publishing; whether to embrace a new ethos of co-operation or to continue with the principals of competition. This debate must be held as we move into new technologies, new social networks, new ways of selling, reading and

writing, in a bid to connect directly to an audience. The old argument of art for arts sake is lost, withdrawal of ACE funding, the move towards sustainable business models all dictate this. Writing, reading and publishing is now, more than ever, a global commodity thanks to the internet. The internet is built in one

ethos, co-operation. operation. Years before the web became a place to sell books, writers and poets where using it to improve their work, at such places as, ABCTales, East E of the Web and Poetry Circle. Now, UK publishers are starting to see the web as another way to sell sel and compete.

Think.

What does competition mean to you?

Competition provides choice. Wrong.

If you want proof of the failure of competition look at your own high street, the same names, same supermarkets and out of town shopping malls that could be in any UK city. It is a cheap lie that competition creates choice; it kills craft and creates carbon copies.

Now, a whole new generation of writers and poets want to be next Terry Pratchett or JK Rowling. Rarely do they want to be the first of something new.

Competition undermines the independent publisher, reader and retailer. There is the old tired argument that the independent bookshop cannot compete with the big chains and this is transferred to the independent publisher too.

Wrong.

Stop thinking in a competitive manner, it is not about competing, it is about providing a choice to the reader. There are ways in which you can connect with the reader, and still sell.

A number of independent publishers have embraced the spirit of co-operation. Comma Press (Manchester) are now producing films by pairing poets and film makers together and connecting with new audiences.

TTA Press (Cambridgeshire) is out at the conventions, festivals and has a connection to their readers via forums and podcasts (Transmissions from beyond). Route Publishing (Pontefract) are tying in with successful films (Looking for Eric), launching podcasts, forums and blogs. All our regional based UK Publishers. All have a National and Global identity by connecting, cooperating and working with readers.

It is important to remember that competition and promotion are two different things. Being competitive is a fruitless past time. Fifteen years of promoting reading and publishing has taught me this. I have sat on panels at Literature festivals and at local libraries, under the banner of how to get published. There is a constant question, why them, not me? You have already provided your own answer.

I have not met any publishers that are alike, not one editor, not one reader, not one poet or writer but for some reason many feel they must be in competition with each other,

believing they have or are the next Terry Pratchett or JK Rowling.

Wrong. Here is the universal truth if you believe this, they do not exist, there is only one of them and you’re not them. The upside is that you are the only you, now celebrate this and write like you.

Yes, it is true that publishers compare their writers and poets with other writers and poets, this is promotion. It helps readers it doesn’t help writers or poets. It really doesn’t even help the publisher. Readers are clever than that.

Then there is silly competitive part in UK Publishing, selling. Big chains force down book prices, generate figures on how much one cheap book is out selling another cheap book and big publishers have a knee jerk reaction and produce the next Dan Brown. Wrong.

Unfortunately, competition and knee jerk reactions are creeping into the Independents too. In 2003, I founded Incwriters with the aim of bringing publishers and readers together. In six years I have seen doors close for new and established writers, poets, publishers but the choice for readers has exploded because of the web. This cannot be sustained. A reason for this is competition. Publishers are running scared. Publishers cannot afford to take chances. With the death of chance goes co-operation. Incwriters has set up Save Our Presses to turn back this tide, bringing together over thirty publishers who want to cooperate and take a chance.

Not every UK Publisher is mean spirited or co-operative but the growth of the web, of social networks will mean readers are more connected with publishers, writers and poets than ever before.

It will reveal those who are truly committed to excellence in publishing and those who are just looking to make money quick. True.

Publishers who seek to dominate the market are barking up the wrong tree. They are over compensating for a sense of inadequacy.

Unfortunately, inadequacy spreads easily and is the root of all our competitive natures. Inadequacy is easily transferred between

publishers, readers, writers and poets.

Readers feel inadequate that they are not well read compared to other readers. Poets rage at why their poems are rejected while another poet they know is always published. Writers seethe at not being having that big but simple idea that Terry Pratchett or JK Rowling had. We call this competitive spirit.

Wrong. Inadequate spirit. True.

True The idea that we are in competition with each other must be guarded against, laughed at.

Competition kills craft, kills coco operation and could kill the web.

Publishers, poets, writers and readers must celebrate the individuality of themselves and others.. Publishers, poets, writers need to accept that readers don’t really care if you’re the next someone, they want to know if you have something to say.

Just remember next time you walk down your high street past all those names that can be found in any UK city, competition leads to monopoly, monopoly leads to no choice, which leads to apathy, apathy leads to frustration, frustration leads destruction. Just to be global.

You can do that by switching on your computer and opening a social network.

Andrew Oldham ham is the Director of Incwriters (www.incwriters.co.uk). He is an award winning poet and writer.

Photo Credit of blindfolded writers: writers J Hayne

The Lost Egg

by Brent Powers

Gardy and Tania sat in the chicken coop, breaking eggs. They were hunting for the right egg.

"Well, what is it?" Tania whined.

She was getting tired of doing this.

She wanted to do something else.

"What is it supposed to look like?"

"I'll know," Gardy said. "'I'll know,' she said, making fun of him in her mind. "Well, big deal.

'I'll know.'"

Tania wanted to break all the eggs (get them out of her life). She figured that if she broke them all and

they still didn't find it then they could do something else. What would they do, though? What were you supposed to do in this place? This was a stupid world with nothing but junk in it. Sometimes you got a chicken dinner with mashed potatoes and corn on the cob with butter smeared all over it, all over everything, fingers included.

Sometimes you bit your fingers, thinking they were chicken so then there was blood in your food.

The eggs were smelly and runny. They were getting all over everything. The whole chicken coop was gooey and smelly and empty of love. Pretty soon they'd be up to their necks in all the runny egg stuff and then when it dried they would be glued in there forever without even finding the stupid egg, and in a world full of stupid things yet empty of love. This husband was a dork.

She shouldn't have picked him. If she hadn't picked him though

she wouldn't have anybody and then where would she be? A girl without a husband in this world is taken by the Civil Service and neutered and stuck in a cubicle forever. That would be worse than breaking eggs like this. In the Service you count things and make entries. Your fingers get stiff and you get mouse thumb and they don't give a rat's ass about your pain.

They don't know what a pain it is to be in Civil Service because they have forgotten, or maybe given memory pills. See, there were no more boys in the lottery that day so she got Gardy, who was last. The biggest dork in the world and now he was her husband. Her life was now all about Gardy and his eggs and chickens, and the Lost Egg, which was special.

Here is the story of the Lost Egg: Once upon a time there was a chicken farmer named Smallwood or something, doesn't matter, but Smallwood had been taking in his eggs one morning and there was the Lost Egg. It wasn't lost then so it had no name, only there was something special about it. You couldn't tell what, really, but you knew, or Smallwood knew. He left all the other eggs there to rot in the chicken coop and all the hens mourned.

Smallwood took the one egg and put it in a special place in his house, a high place with doodads and stuff, old bills he never paid and letters he never answered, stuff like that, but he cleared all that off the high place and installed the egg. He took one of those little metal thingies in which you place a boiled egg in order to eat it and he stuck the Lost Egg there.

He figured the egg had magical properties. It could get him the things he wanted without his having to do anything other than think at the egg, for instance with, "I think I'd like to have me a broiled trout fish with its eye looking right up from the plate while I eat all around it, and then some beer to wash it down with."

This did not happen. He must have been going about it in the wrong way; or he just couldn't have such a thing in this life, so maybe he better ask for something else.

So then, through a process of elimination he came to his true

reward which was a stand up whale balloon with feet that you could punch and it would never take the fall. You could just punch the dang thing silly and that old whale would bounce right back and give you its stupid idiot smile which was printed on there permanent. Even when he covered it with duct tape it didn't help because the smile was still there, it was in the whale's silly eyes, his eyes were smiling, too, and when Smallwood covered those eyes with smaller patches of duct tape he still knew that old whale balloon was smiling at him, only now it was in secret which was worse, it was like someone laughing at you behind your back, or they could be looking right at you and making fun of you in their mind and thinking you didn't know it but you could feel it, didn't they know that? You could feel things like that.

So he just punched a little harder.

"It's all I ever do now," he told his friends in town (he thought they were his friends, anyway, only secretly they hated his ass, and he knew it only he hid it from himself with a sour smile in his own mind which grew and grew; it grew to whale size) and C well, to make a long story short, when the bill collectors came along with the letter writers who were all women complaining of unwanted pregnancies, all they found was the whale balloon all covered in duct tape which was such a strange thing that it was taken off to the modern

let him bang away at her from time to time just to keep him working.

Now, this kid. The one who began as an unwanted pregnancy, well, that became Gardy finally. He was a crooked kid with meat lips and all his wires were crossed. From the time he could speak he insisted that there was eldritch horror in the hen house; either that or a magic egg, he couldn't decide which. When he came into season finally and attended the Marriage Lottery he was the last to be taken. By Tania.

Poor Tania.

"Come slut," Gardy had said, and led her along on a rope with flowers attached, as was the custom in our town, to his chicken farm where he lived alone now because he had eaten his mother and the tramp she slept with, the old smelly snerd who wanted Gardy to call him "Pa." By now Tania and Gardy were sitting in a pile of egg shells and they were knee deep in ick and the whole place stank of unborn chickens with all their dreams of glory sort of flying up in miasmic black and blue steam and getting all mixed up together so that when they finally did enter some womb door to be born when it's time came a confused being would arise, half chicken, half rainbow, some would even say partially nothing and partially everything you could think of, a wood chuck, a ladder of lights, Bill and Sally, Mildred of the Bees, the Birdmen of Alakazam or a fish

Smallwood took the one egg and put it in

a special place in his house, a high place with doodads and stuff art museum while Smallwood, who was thin and dead yet still punching in reflex was put underground, rest in peace. Grass grew over him, and trees.

One of the women with an unwanted pregnancy decided to stay at Smallwood's place and raise her child on good farm cooking in order to ready him for The School of Life Around the Corner. She had no husband so she took in a tramp and

looking up at you from a plate, giving you the evil eye which would make you bald forever. Tania and Gardy were here though, without life or adventure, without meaning. All they could do was break eggs, break eggs and weep. Gardy thought this was a satisfactory life for a young couple.

"Look, hon," he said. "You just gotta be patient. Soon we'll find it, and it will make us free."

"Well, how's it gonna do that?"

Tania wanted to know.

"By us thinking at it, you dumb ass!"

"What will we think about, Gard?" she chided. Or did she really mean it? Hard to say with her, she is a mysterious creature.

Gardy considers this.

A mysterious creature. A rare thing. Could it be?

Could it be?

He looked at her.

He said, "Tania? When you were born C how were you born? I mean, was it in the regular way?"

Tania withdrew one hand from the muck and flung strings of it every whichway. "Ah, come on, you're not gonna pull that on a girl, are you?"

And yet it had been rumored of Tania at the School of Life Around the Corner that she had not been born in the regular way but had in fact been hatched. Gardy had asked them, "Well, from what? From what?"

"Dunno," they told him, picking their noses and looking up at the sky. "Prolly something eldritch, though, half whale, half Drano. Who can say where little girls come from?"

"Tania," he said. "You're it, aren't you."

"Not it!" she cried.

"Yes, Tania. It. You're it. You are the lost egg."

And Tania arose from the slime and muck and mix of evil intentions unborn and ran out, sliming everything with fragments of thought in the form of shells which would take on a brief semi-life to effect ugly works in the world, and Gardy gave chase, and found her. He found her at last, hiding under a small wooden temple, and he turned her to his needs, and she did serve him, she did give birth to his every wish.

They found them there. Tania's feet were nailed to the floor. A huge

spring was attached to her, driven into her back, and the other end of the spring was stuck in the floor.

Gardy was punching away at her.

She wasn't dead yet but why live now? Why live? This was what Tania was thinking when she expired and flew away with all the unborn thoughts and intentions and she wound up in the modern art museum.

about the author Brent Powers came into this world seeking the Pearl of Great Price and got lost at the inn. Pretty good inn.

Nice food. Drop on by.

Photo Credit: mangpages on Flickr

Science Fiction: The Final Frontier

by Jane

I’m back. I guess you’ve all been wondering where I’ve been in my absence. Writing the next Pulitzer winning prize fiction or the Queen’s next speech? Unfortunately not.

I was abducted by aliens.

Yes, yes I know it’s hard to believe. But there I was at the kitchen sink with my Marigolds immersed in the soap suds when suddenly I was bathed in an ethereal light.

My toes rising from the floor, a gravitational pull elevated me towards the ceiling. Had I drunk too many sherries or were the flatulent side effects of the herbal diet pills working overtime? Before I had time to use my litmus test, a huge WHOOSH reverberated in my ears and I found myself transported to another dimension, imprisoned in a glass cell aboard an alien spacecraft.

Oh no! What gross, sick and disturbing experiments awaited me?! Perhaps I would be tested for endurance by watching endless repeats of Freddie Mercury leaping up and down in his harlequin suit? Or maybe the 1981 Royal Wedding? Or maybe just Gordon Brown attempting to speak sincerely? With these terrifying thoughts spinning like a carousel in my mind I was soon a gibbering wreck;; eyes rolling, saliva dribbling and cowering like some wretched animal awaiting a mercy killing.

Then they came, out of the dark recesses, ghostly apparitions resembling the figures of men. Had the green, bulbous creatures with nine eyes and forked tonguess which I had imagined as alien beings ever since watching the Teletubbies metamorphosed into human form?

As the first of the aliens stepped into the light, my breath grew short and rasping. He resembledC. I could barely believe itCit was too much to takeC He looked just likeC George Clooney.

What vile plot had I unwittingly become involved in?

An alien conspiracy to subjugate the female species by impersonating Gorgeous George?

“We have come to examine you. Our quest for knowledge must be fulfilled.”

“No, no, no!” I screamed, whilst admiring George’s silver lamé suit against the flecks of grey in his hair and his omnipotent looking light saber.

Well naturally, I fought. Tooth and nail. I mean you have no idea how hard. Seriously, seriously, hard. Until I was s totally and utterly exhausted. Then, just as I found more energy to continue frolicC fightingC I found myself back at the kitchen sink, my hands still in the suds.

Had it all been real or were the herbal diet pills causing delusions? I wasn’t taking any chances; so I got out my magic beans and threw them out of the window.

Oh alright, alright! I'm guessing some of you don't believe me. I'll come clean then. The truth is I’ve been getting into science fiction. Now I’ve got to admit that I’ve not always been n so keen on science fiction which is surprising really because I love science fiction movies. In fact I can quote Star Wars verbatim and as a child I was glued to Star Trek.. (Poor William Shatner had a hard job peeling off the adhesive though.) Anyway, I think long ago I must have read a book that began something like this; “TheNighthawk137nucleothermospeedstealthspacefi ghter touched down on the rocky surface of Deltapizzasurprise 4.99, a planet on the outskirts of the Chickenugget galaxy and part of the Bigmacburger B EmpireB.” At which point my brain probably went like this; Whoa, Whoa! Warning, warning! Red Alert! This is an emergency situation. We are in foreign language mode!

Close the book or take the paracetamol now!

And more often than not I would close clo the book.

However, something has happened to me recently because my eyes have been reopened to science fiction.

How did this happen? Well, a few weeks ago I met science fiction writer Chris Beckett winner of the 2009 Edge Hill short story contest for his s collection of stories entitled The Turing Test.

The Edge Hill Prize has only been in existence since 2007. However, as a result of his win Chris has already been boldly going places he has not been before. (Sorry, had to get that in!) As the only competition that rewards a collection of short stories by a single author in the UK and with a healthy £5,000 prize it attracted some big names into the arena this year including Shena Mackay, Ali Smith and Booker prize winner, Anne Enright. But as the victor, Chris Beckett’s star is now on the rise. Having written ten for the science fiction magazine Interzone for years his recent success has finally secured him a two

book deal in the UK with Corvus. The first of his two full length novels The Holy Machine which previously had only been published in the US will now be printed at home where his work is, at last, being given the recognition it deserves.

The success of The Turing Test is not a token gesture towards science fiction writers as some might suspect, but a truly worthy winner. It contains 14 short stories all of which are easily readable and enjoyable.

The key for me was that the science fiction element was secondary to the story. Time machines, virtual worlds and futuristic societies were just tools to illustrate Chris’ insightful view of the human psyche and the way we currently live. His view of the future, whilst being fantasy, also has an element of worrying truth and possibility. It made me ask questions about the direction of our society - and whether or not I like it.

Chris has a background in social work and as well as being an author he now also lectures in social work. I’m inclined to think that a lifetime observing some of the more problematic aspects of society has given rise to some of his intriguing ideas about our future world and how individuals might function within it. Relationships, loneliness and self knowledge (or lack of it) are all addressed in what is at times quite a melancholic collection of stories. Yet, despite this underlying sadness, I felt that there was something to learn, to understand in these tales. They were stories that made think and feel and that, for me, is always a winning combination.

So back to my meeting with Chris, who I’d met at a reading he’d been giving at a local library. Interestingly, in the discussion afterwards it became apparent that I was not the only one who had, perhaps misguidedly, thought that science fiction was the prerequisite of laser guns, shuttles and space gibberish. As Chris pointed out, 1984 By George Orwell is actually science fiction but no one refers to it as science fiction.

So what exactly is science fiction? Of course they are sub genres within science fiction like space opera and cyberpunk which may be more technical and extraordinary but generally a good proportion of what we read is “science fiction” but we just don’t recognise it as such.

Well I thought about Chris’ comments and realised just how many books I’ve read could be classed as science fiction; recent reads such as Blind Faith by Ben Elton (a must read for every blogger and internet lover) and Never Let me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (nominated for the 2005 Booker Prize and soon to be film starring Keira Knightley) and old reads like 1984 and On the Beach by the perennial favourite, Nevil Shute. Maybe, as Chris pointed so aptly pointed out, if a book is about the future then it is actually “science fiction”.

Not so long ago a friend of mine asked me if I’d read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy because she said it was just my sense of humour. “Nope,” I replied, “that science fiction thing puts me off.” Well I guess I finally need to read it because now that I’m back into science fiction mode I’m ready to take it on.

Anyway, I’ve always liked phasers and probes.

Just ask Captain Kirk.

Ps: I should add that the lovely Chris Beckett doesn’t wear a silver lamé suit. And he didn’t show me his light saber. (Which is a pity because the local history section of Leighton Buzzard library can be very dull.)

Above: Sci Fi author Chris Beckett - looking surprisingly normal. Blast.

Book Review

Goodnight Vienna

by J H Schryer Published by The History Press Ltd Review: Grace Judge this book by its cover and you won't be disappointed. Goodnight Vienna is a soppy romance set within the Secret Service in pre-World War 2 Europe. It was, disappointingly, exactly what I expected: Mills and Boon crossed with a History textbook.

War and romance are two topics which totally disinterest me, so the two together struck me with dread.

I have never read a romance novel, and I can count the number of war novels I've read on one hand. However, I persevered and read the whole book, always with the na誰ve hope that it would get better. But it didn't.

The story is mildly compelling, if totally predictable, with one dimensional prototypical characters. There is the man's man with a deep voice, strong sense of duty and hidden emotional depths. There is the young, beautiful, intelligent, seductive woman. There is the confident, handsome, charming ladies-man. And, of course, there is a fraught and torrid love triangle.

All this is set on the background of Jewish persecution and Hitler's rise to power in the late 1930s.

The most engrossing parts of the book were those which sensitively portrayed the struggle of individual Jewish people and families. However, the gravity of these very real and truly horrific struggles was undermined by the trite romantic plot. I couldn't help but laugh out loud at sentences like '...she moved tightly against his thighs, his manhood giving up the ghost of respectability' and feel uncomfortable at the author's decision to merge these two topics. One is a light-weight genre, while the other is a part of our world history. Can the two be merged together with sincerity?

Perhaps I'm looking too deeply into the issue. Since starting to read Goodnight Vienna I have been talking about it with friends. I was genuinely shocked to discover that Historical Romance is a well-established literary genre. So I guess many serious historical events have been used as a background for many romantic affairs.

I must conclude, then, that Goodnight Vienna does what it does brilliantly. It is historical, it is romantic and it is a good ol' story.

In Defence of Prizes

by Gavin Freeguard

One of the interweaving plotlines in Sebastian Faulks’ latest novel, the state-of-the-nation A Week in December, revolves around the state of the literary world, and specifically, the state of literary prizes.

And what a state it is.

The Pizza Palace Award, the focus of one of the characters’ attention, gets a deep panning. It serves only to increase pizza sales – a winning book about Hitler is tastefully honoured with a vegetarian

layer – and to provide employment for a public relations company. (And, of course, drinks for the witless glittering literati). Such is the proliferation of prizes that one of the characters, clutching her copy of a novel, ‘could barely see the photo on the jacket – a barefoot waif in a bomb site – for the prize sponsors’ bright stickers’; as her husband remarks, the book has ‘more endorsements than your driving licence’. Books are not books – they

are simply commercial products like any other, and like the pizzas whose sales the prize seeks to increase.

If any of those things ever becomes true of the Orwell Prize, which I administer, you have – to paraphrase Sir Steve Redgrave – my permission to shoot me with the looks of disdain normally reserved by broadsheet reviewers for Dan Brown.

Prizes are not perfect. Many are set up by enterprising PR companies

to provide themselves with work; the equivalent of going on an Easter egg hunt when you’ve laid all the eggs yourself (as it were).

Others are focused on raising the profile – or the finances – of the company associated with the prize (consider the university spending tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of pounds on a prize to raise its profile).

Prizes can be led into the temptation of rewarding that which is shocking and different, rather than that which is simply good; less the shock of the new, than a philistine flock to it.

And of course, as St George himself once wrote, ‘The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them.’ Prizes in any part of the arts world can overlook outstanding works: Richard Burton, Peter Sellers and Alfred Hitchcock never won an Oscar between them; Radiohead have been shortlisted four times for the Mercury Prize without ever winning; I find myself enthusiastically recommending books which weren’t even longlisted for the Orwell Prize (‘the ones that got away’ would make a great feature, should any literary editors be reading). Great works sometimes don’t satisfy the entry criteria, don’t jump out at judges in the inevitably limited time available, or simply don’t jump out at the judges at all. For all the rules and regulations you can implement to ensure their integrity, for all the work you put in to getting both quantity and quality of entries, for all the rigour rules and regulations can inject into a judging process, it remains a subjective choice by a selection of human beings. If you disagree with the judges’ choice, it doesn’t mean that the process is corrupt, the judges ignorant, the prize worthless; it simply means you disagree with the judges’ choice, and they with yours. We must accept prizes for what they are, and not imbue them with an unrealistic omniscience: a prize winner can only ever be the best of the entries received, within the criteria set,

according to the taste of those judging the prize, in the time available.

If we accept those limitations – and that not all prizes would themselves win prizes for virtue or value – we can see the benefit prizes have for the author, for the publisher, and for the public. For the author, a prize is at the very least a pat on the back, a vocal ‘well done’, a recognition and affirmation of their talent. The importance of the financial boon should also not be underestimated. But it can also introduce a wider audience to their work and their message – literary editor of The Guardian, Claire Armitstead, admitted to ‘the faintest twinge of regret from those of us who have always regarded her as our secret’ upon Hilary Mantel’s Booker win.

From an Orwell Prize perspective, Delia Jarrett-Macauley described winning as a ‘serendipitous gift’ which provided ‘the most elegant acknowledgement of the novel’s intentions, accessibility and merit’, while Raja Shehadeh’s win was swiftly followed by an honour from the Prime Minister of the Palestinian National Authority, ‘a testament to the creativity which still can flourish under the most difficult conditions faced by a people’.

Mantel’s recent win also demonstrates the benefit for the publisher: credit not only in terms of a job well done, but in the bank.

Thomas Cromwell divorced Robert Langdon from the top of the bestseller charts as a result of Wolf Hall’s triumph – no mean feat – although such financial success can sometimes be offset by financial barriers to entry. Catheryn Kilgarriff, MD of Marion Boyars Publishers, recently blamed prizes in part for the closing of the company: ‘Even if I get a book on a shortlist I couldn't afford the fee, so I no longer wanted to win prizes.’

I would argue that the most significant benefit a prize can – and should – have is on the public.

Prizes are useful as signposts in an

increasingly ‘infobese’ world, where criticism is democratised and the demands on our time legion. But prizes should also spark debate – and debate far more significant than whether a particular work is a novel or merely a novella. Longlists, shortlists, winners can all get the public talking about writing and its worth – about the skill of individual authors, the thrill of different genres and the effect they can have on each of us. Reading is, after all, about the interface between what the author has written and how the reader interprets it.

But beyond simply literary merit, the books recommended by prizes can change the way we see the world: good writing should make us think. At the Orwell Prize, for instance, we seek to reward good political writing, but also to encourage political thinking and enthuse the public about politics and journalism. In addition to awarding our annual prizes, we run discussions and debates around the country, bringing key writers and thinkers to the public. I might be biased (okay, I am biased), but it’s the sort of thing more prizes should be doing, when they can be easily dismissed as PR opportunities, as expensive irrelevances in an austere era, and as gilded metropolitan elites far divorced from the real world reinforcing their bubble with baubles and gold.

The characters in Faulks’ novel are all trying to escape the real world. The tube driver escapes to her fiction and online role playing; the literary critic to the 19th century; the hedge fund manager to worship Mammon; the Islamic extremist to worship Allah in Paradise. The literary world escapes to the Pizza Palace awards ceremony and its plaudits and product placement.

Literary prizes are at their worst when they become wrapped up in their own worlds. They are at their most important when they embrace, engage with and enthuse the real world, real life, and real people.

Gavin Freeguard is the Administrator of the Orwell Prize, www.orwellprize.co.uk Photo credit: Wiennat Mongkulmann

The Story of a New York City Street Peddler

by Dr. Howard Karlitz It's February, 1980, and Ira Greenberg is standing in front of a class of delinquent kids in a South Brooklyn juvenile detention center trying to teach reading. While patiently guiding them through a short story called "Young Pablo Picasso," his eye is caught by a reproduction of the artist's flamboyant signature that has been emblazoned across the top of the page. He puts the book down to stare at the lettering and then happens to notice a little blurb in a newspaper lying next to it on his desk announcing an upcoming show of Picasso's work, a major "Retrospective," scheduled to take place that year at the Museum of Modern Art. It was strange, the signature and show coming together like that.

His mind wanders. An idea is taking form. Suddenly it comes to him. Just in time too, because the kids are going bananas and a piece of chalk whizzes past his ear, powder shattering against the green board behind him.

That evening, in the safety of his modest suburban home, he announced his plan to his wife.

"Jill," he boasts, "this is it, the big one! I'm going to sell Picasso TShirts at the Museum of Modern Art this summer."

Quite naturally she's leery. In fact she thinks he’s mad. And he really can't blame her. In the first place she's wondering why in the world anyone would want to buy a T-shirt with Picasso's name on it.

And secondly, they had just been through a nervous breakdowninducing business bankruptcy after

he had invested their life's savings in three waterbed stores, all of which sunk after only 5 months, leaving them in a blizzard of attorneys' letters, injunctions, collections notices, court fees, judgments, tax liens, law suits (both of the civil and criminal variety), and every other form of lawyer-related horror one could dream of.

But he had to give this one a shot and Jill understood why. She understood that he was tired of trying to make it on a teacher's salary, tired of wheeling around suburbia in one clunker after another, tired of never even considering a vacation, tired of not being able to take his family to a decent restaurant, depressingly tired of watching the bills pile up on the kitchen table month after lousy

he was terrified. He had no license, if there was such a thing, no permit, nothing.

Here he was, a schoolteacher, with a masters degree no less, slinking around the museum entrance on 53rd Street between 5th and 6th Avenues like a criminal. He felt like a derelict, or worse yet, a pervert. He wanted to run, back to the burbs, but something grabbed hold of him at this moment of truth and he slipped out a shirt and held it up in front of him at arms length. And like magic, a very well dressed woman walked over and began to finger it. "Pretty," she says. Pretty my ass, Ira’s thought, she's a cop. She pulls out her wallet. Here comes the badge.

"How much?" she asks, and when he tells her five dollars she hands him a

It was getting hard because the villain, Mr. 80's,

a/k/a "Greed and Excess," was stomping on their fingertips month. They had held on to our 60's ideals as long as possible, but like the man desperately clinging to the ledge fifty stories up, it was getting hard because the villain, Mr. 80's, a/k/a "Greed and Excess," was stomping on their fingertips.

He hooked up with a real character named Benny who owned a T-shirt printing shop near his job.

Ira showed him the signature from the school book. "Nice shot," Benny says. Everything in this business is a "shot." Said he can copy it, enlarge it, and press it onto a shirt. A "heat shot" he calls it.

"What do you think of my idea?"

Ira asks. "Picasso, that is."

"Great" Benny lied. Thought he was nuts. "How many ya' wanna start with? A hundred dozen? Two?" "No, 48."

"Dozen?"

"No, shirts. Black ones, with white lettering."

His first day out was in April. He rushed into the city after work figuring to go after the early ticket buyers. The shirts were stored in a knapsack on his back. As he walked down the block, however, his confidence melted away. Suddenly

ten and walks away with two. He’s rocked. Other people who have been watching now come over to buy shirts too. And this is the first critical lesson he learns about peddling, to draw a crowd and let people see money changing hands. It adds credibility to you and your action. It’s called it disalienation.

Within half an hour, he’s sold out, but decides right then and there to quit because it's just too damn scary, too risky, for a schoolteacher with a masters degree that is. But that night back home, he’s throwing the cash around the kitchen, and then he’s on the phone with Benny ordering more shirts which he picks up the next day on his lunch hour which he’s selling that afternoon at the museum after work because already he’s totally addicted to the money and the action!

The Picasso Exhibit opened to rave reviews and the crowds were enormous, with lines snaking all the way down the block and curling onto 5th Avenue. Business took off, so he hired his recently unemployed fatherin-law, Syd, to help him out. Syd, one of the greatest, cast aside (noteven-a-gold-watch) garment center

salesmen of all times, covered the 54th Street entrance while Ira worked on 53rd. When the end of June rolled around and the tourists poured into town, business exploded and suddenly they were moving a couple of hundred pieces a day.

Then, summer vacation kicked in, thank God, and they were working nine to nine, seven days a week.

It was about this time that Ira’s first competition showed up; two punk types from Hoboken. They copied his idea. What could he do?

Sue? Call a cop? They hurt Ira’s numbers because they were showing colors while he was only showing black. So Ira got colors too, a whole rainbow, and now he and Syd are moving even more shirts.

Then they got Kiddie T's (for the grandma and grandpa set) and French cuts (for those long, tanned arms.) It was Jill's idea.

More competition hit the street: a couple of Israelis, a one-armed Cuban with a Ph.D. in physics, two accountants, at least one lawyer that he knew of, an insurance salesman from North Carolina, a keyboard player and drummer from a defunct rock band, and a host of college students on summer vacation. The place started to look like a flea market, but it was OK because there was enough for everybody.

Meanwhile the idea was feeding on itself. Soon everyone was walking around with a Picasso T-shirt, whether they've been to the show or not. It's big in the Hamptons. Fire Island also. Store owners buy them by the dozen, and Ira’s starting to see them in some very chic Madison Avenue shop windows marked up four to five hundred percent. He was doing serious numbers, so serious that Benny put all his other business on hold and printed only Picasso shirts. Very entrepreneurial. Ira was hot, and there was nothing he couldn’t handle now...except...the...truck!!

One day a scruffy looking moose of a guy in worn jeans and sandals was looking down at Ira’s T-shirts and asked for a pale pink extra large.

Rather strange Ira thought. He bends down and rummages through his suitcases and comes up with the guy’s order and suddenly he’s

eyeballing a police badge. "Don't cry," the plain clothes cop says, "just show me some I.D." But Ira’s ready, and pulls out his wallet with a fifty dollar bill taped to the inside leather flap. "Don't even think about it," the cop says. "Put it away. I.D." So Ira hands him a valid driver's license.

"You'll have to do something about this MR. IRA GREENBERG." Ira has no idea what he's talking about. The cop writes out a summons, hands Ira the pink portion of it, gets on his walkie-talkie, and in seconds a paddy wagon comes roaring up. This is it, Ira figures, he’s screwed. The cop opens the back door and Ira starts to climb in when the cop growls, "What the hell do you think you're doing. Get out!" and he grabs Ira’s suitcases full of shirts and throws them into the truck. "Pick'em up at 2 o’clock. Got any back-up?" the cop asks. Again Ira doesn’t know what's going on. "Shit to sell, until you come in." Our hero’s drawing blanks. "You're not a virgin Ira, are you?" he asks, somewhat surprised.

Ira’s too petrified to speak. "You'll learn. See you at two. Midtown North Precinct," and he was gone.

At the appointed hour, Ira finds himself in the bowels of a west side station house located in the heart of the city's sleaze district, the denizens of which would probably associate the name Pablo Picasso with some new, well-hung porno sensation.

He’s huddling against the wall of a dingy basement room crowded with an assortment of motley characters, many of whom he later learns are more plainclothes cops. An air conditioner belches and death-rattles ineffectively.

Everyone's milling about until one guy, a hippie type cop, sits down behind a typewriter and yells, "OK, who's up first?" and all hell breaks loose with peddlers rushing him, waving their pink summonses in his face in order to pay a $20 "ransom" for their confiscated merchandise and get back on the street where capitalism in its purest from awaits them.

Ira hangs around to the end, nervous, scared, like any lawabiding, middle class suburbanite would be when Gus Reuter, the officer who took his shirts, asks for the summons and $20 (the

"administrative fee" the city figures it costs to grab his stuff and haul it to the station house). He types up a voucher, asks Ira to sign it, and then hands back the summons and a receipt for the twenty. As for the summons, Ira’s informed that end of it is handled like a parking ticket, and has to be cleared through a different city agency, Consumer Affairs. And the fines Reuter warns, usually $100 a pop, can add up quickly. Ira was then told he could take back his suitcases, which were stacked up unceremoniously against a far wall.

When he got home that night he burst through the door screaming "I quit! I quit!" waving the pink summons around like a madman.

But the following day, he and Syd dug up some extra suitcases, "backup," which they would stash on the side in order to continue working between the time they got hit and the time they had to pick up their "shit." ("Shit," by the way, is the official term for the merchandise in your "joint."

Your joint consists of your "shit" and your "rig," in his case, three or four suitcases lying open on the sidewalk.

Shit + Rig = Joint.)

Their identity situation was deftly handled by the slick Pakistan proprietor of a Broadway arcade, who decked them out with social security cards and some neat looking plastic employment badges from a bogus Brooklyn construction company. Ira proudly became Roger Mantle! What the hell, he figured, if you're gonna do it...

The system worked perfectly.

They got hit, waited a bit, re-opened with back-up, continued peddling for

But it would be impossible to close this chapter of the story without some pain. There were two periods during that summer when Ira thought they had him. The first was during the Democratic National Convention, which happened to take place in New York that year. Word came thundering down from the mayor's office to sweep the midtown streets clean of vermin, especially around the museum where each conventioneer's agenda would include a trip to the Picasso exhibit.

He particularly didn't want them in contact with vendors. Little did he realize, however, that out-of-towners out love peddlers, and consider them to be just one more vibrant element in the city's personality. The peddler detail sought to temporarily suspend peddling operations and warned every street vendor in the strongest terms not to work midtown that week. k. The other T-shirt T people stopped immediately, but Ira was getting greedy, and the next day opened up, business as usual. He was hit four, five, six times a day.

Gus told him he was making "enemies on the force," the ultimate threat. Sergeant Laverty, head he of the detail, cornered him in peddler room one day and said if he kept it up, he'd never work the streets again. Ira was scared and considered stopping, but then went back out anyway. And since the competition had dried up, he made out huge, even with the extra hassle. Towards the end of the week the detail even let him slide one or two times. In the end they earned each others respect.

When he got home that night he burst through the door screaming "I quit! I quit!" waving the pink summons around like a madman. a couple of hours, then went to the precinct to ransom their shit, and were back in front of the museum in no time. The tickets, like of those of every other peddler in the city, became toilet paper. Everyone's figures were healthy. The peddler detail was vouching record numbers, while the T-shirt vendors' bottom lines were blacker than ever.

The second time Ira was almost put out of business happened when Picasso's greedy heirs decided that the shirt represented represe a copyright violation and that they "owned" his signature. An army of treasury agents, suit and tie guys in unmarked cars, hit the museum one day, confiscating shirts and handing out injunctions ordering peddlers to

cease and desist until a federal judge would hand down a ruling in two weeks. The press had been tipped off the previous night and the street was teeming with reporters, photographers and cameramen.

As Ira sadly walked back to his car, he passed a bear of a guy, a grizzled street vendor pulling a monstrous rack of designer tops down the middle of 54th Street toward Fifth Avenue. He was leaning into a thick rope that was slung over his shoulder, the other end of which was tied to his joint. Traffic was backed up behind him all the way to Sixth Avenue, and each time an irate motorist was able to squeeze by, he

seen them on TV and were desperate for them. Benny made two, three, sometimes four vanload deliveries a day. Ira and Syd dumped them on the sidewalk and watched their clientele pounce on them, grabbing ten, fifteen at a time.

Spiro was right about the Feds too.

They never came back. In fact, the case was lost with the court holding that the signature was clearly in the public domain. It belonged to the people.

By the time the competition came back, it was too late. They had missed the best two weeks of the season. Summer was winding down.

Gus told Ira there would never be

Within minutes Ira was on the phone with Benny

screaming at him to print everything he had. was blasted with a car horn. His response was a calm, detached, "Idon't-give-a-shit" raised middle finger. Ira recognized him from the peddler room. His name was Spiro, a Greek, one of the few other vendors who had worked convention week.

"I saw what happened," he said to Ira, dropping the rope in the middle of the street in order to stretch out his shoulder. Horns chorused.

"Yeah, they gave me this," Ira answered holding up the injunction.

"The hell with it man. Go back to work."

"And get arrested! You're crazy.

I'm quitting. For good."

"Hey, they did you a favor.

Cleaned up the competition. They ain't coming back. It was just a big show. For the press. The Feds got better things to do than bust T-shirt peddlers. You'll never have this chance again." He picked up the rope and began lugging his rig toward Fifth. The line of cars started inching along behind him. "Now is the time," he called back to Ira. "NOW!" Within minutes Ira was on the phone with Benny screaming at him to print everything he had. And Spiro was right. For the next two weeks he was the only one out there selling the "banned" shirts. Everyone had

another two weeks like it again. And he was right.

The show was scheduled to end after Labor Day, but the museum was doing so much business that they decided to extend the show through October. Every day for the next eight weeks Ira rushed into the city after work, once again leading the double life of pedagogue/peddler; two seemingly incongruous pursuits, yet manageable, even to the point of benefiting his classroom technique.

As a result of an injection of street wisdom which his streetwise kids instinctively picked up upon, control ceased to be a problem. They seemed to understand and respect each other more than ever before.

When the show finally did close, Ira decided to quit peddling for good and devote himself fully to teaching.

But he was addicted to the street freedom and ended up quitting teaching for good and devoting himself to peddling. The next day he was in front of Saks Fifth Avenue pumping scarves and gloves in the crisp, exciting, autumn air.

This was the mainstream of New York City street vending, Fifth Avenue, the "Diamond Mile," that stretch of intense commercial activity running from 59th to 47th Street. It was the time of giant rigs rolling up

and down the block, each manned by four or five peddlers selling everything from lingerie to jackets, to sweaters, to pocketbooks, to dresses, hats, records, jewelry, make-up, wigs, belts, toys, pants, shoes, socks, radios, TV's, telephones, over-the counter medicines, tools, tires, car batteries, flashlights, condoms, birth control pills, even eyeglasses. It’s true. Ira once saw two entrepreneurial characters with a large box filled with prescription glasses. As one partner deftly placed a pair on a costumer's nose, the other held up an eye chart exactly 20 feet away. "Can you see the "E" lady? No? OK, here, try another pair." They went for six bucks a throw, two for ten dollars.

And as Christmas drew nearer, more peddlers appeared, store owners from the suburbs and the outer boroughs opening weekend Manhattan "annexes." The streets were wall-to-wall until ten, eleven o’clock at night. Of course the Fifth Avenue Merchants Association screamed bloody murder, so more beat cops were assigned to the detail and they'd hit the avenue every hour on the hour, setting off a wild stampede of flying vendors and careening dollies which bowled over everything and everybody in their paths, because nobody wanted to get vouched and lose precious time in this most precious of seasons.

Ira always worked small, out of a suitcase or on a garbage pail, usually with scarves and gloves in the fall and winter, and anything from wallets to T-shirts to ties in the spring and summer. But he moved with the times and never allowed himself to get locked into any one particular item. One season he did incredibly well with dollar chain, "Bro' Gold" as it was called in the ghettos, "Phonay Monet," or "sluummmm...," the definition of which can be found in the Unabridged Riker's Island Dictionary of the English Language.

We're talking cheap costume jewelry, which he always sold as cheap costume jewelry, a buck a throw, six for five, as opposed to wise guys who’d stamp it 14 karat and sidle up to tourists looking for a quick hundred. Ira became known as the "Slum Lord" during a chain snatching epidemic by advising his well heeled

clientele to "keep the real stuff in the vault and let the snatcher have this," holding up a nifty, one dollar, 18 inch herringbone necklace. "Laugh as the mugger hi-ho silvers it down the block."

What a great mix of people out there too, all working together in relative peace and madness: Greeks, Turks, Israelis, Palestinians, English, Irish, Poles, Italians, Indians, Pakistanis, Swiss, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Mexicans, Salvadorians, Costa Ricans, Russians, Prussians, Hessians, Saxons, Celts, Incans, Thais, Vietnamese, Lebanese, Taiwanese, Afghans, Ukrainians, Bulgarians, Rumanians, Albanians, Iraqis, Iranians, Transylvanians, Koreans... each representing a distinct immigrant wave that had come to New York, the greatest city in the world, to seek refuge and a degree of economic security on its golden streets, in the same way the founders of some of the city's greatest retail establishments had done generations before.

But even though Christmas was around the corner, the time for giving, not everyone was in the giving mode. Members of the Boards of Directors of the big time organizations like Saks, Bergdorf, Bonwits, Bloomies, to name but a few, cried the loudest. "Rid the streets of this peddler trash,” they chorused, “they're killing us. How dare they sell an umbrella for three dollars when we can get fifteen!"

Were they forgetting their roots?

Forgetting where the seed money came from? Forgetting how their great grandparents came to this country penniless and toughed it out with nothing but a dream and a pushcart on the cold cobblestones of Hester Street or Avenue C? And as for the greatest store of them all, the "Big M" on 34th, are they forgetting about R.H.Macy, the original "Yankee Peddler!" Evidently.

So, at the urging of these the yuppie captains of commerce, the rules of the game began to change.

Under pressure from the Association, the city raised the ransom on any joint that rolled to $65. Ira didn't care. His garbage pail didn't have any wheels. The rollers didn't care either, particularly the

Izod and Polo boys. A couple of sixty-fives a day would hardly put a dent in their pre-Christmas action.

measure. They hit the streets just like every previous immigrant wave had done since Peter, the 'bead

They call it

"forfeiture of seized property."

Ira calls it highway robbery.

So the next move on the city's part was to raise EVERYBODY'S confiscation fee to sixty-five. When that plan flopped, they decided to "impound" wheeled rigs under the guise that these "rolling platforms posed a hazard to pedestrian traffic."

No big deal. The big operators switched to blankets. "Forty in the store. Ten on the floor!" Meanwhile Ira is still working his garbage pail with a piece of cardboard on it. He’s selling leather gloves, showing only three or four pairs at a time. The rest are stashed in a bag behind him and are not subject to confiscation because they aren't on display. If Roger Mantle happens to get popped, he loses only ten or fifteen dollars worth of merchandise, and does not go directly to jail, but passes Go and avoids the ransom by letting the city keep the goods.

The politicos finally get to the big joints with Article B23-507.0 of the Administrative Code. They call it "forfeiture of seized property." Ira calls it highway robbery. No more ransoms, they're keeping it all now.

The heavy hitting Izod and Polo peddlers scream bloody murder, threaten to form an organization in order to hire a lawyer in order to fight this latest outrage. They circulate petitions (which everyone signs with a phony name) and ask for contributions (cash...what else!), but soon the whole thing collapses because they’re really a pack of unorganizable nomads and suddenly everyone's working small and garbage pails are at a premium.

So it's a whole new board game, the rules of which peddlers learning to live with when a fresh group of players suddenly sits down at the table. A wave of Africans came ashore one day, Senegalese for the most part, but with Liberians and Ethiopians sprinkled in for good

vendor,' Minuet worked his joint on Manhattan's south forty 350 years ago. And like their predecessors, they were tired, poor, scared, humble, but determined. There was only one difference though. Quite evident too. It was right there in black and white.

There was a story going around that a big mucky-muck walked out of Bergdorf Goodman one day and was "shocked" by the bazaar that had seemingly sprung up overnight in front of the store, looking like "Istanbul on Sunday." His hallowed sidewalk was speckled with dashiki clad vendors hawking African flavored bracelets, necklaces, earrings and statuary, not to mention sunglasses and umbrellas (pronounced "sugahs" and "umbahs" by the new arrivals.) The Bergdorf guy cranked up the Merchants Association, which revved up City Hall, which shook up the Police Commissioner's Office, which gave birth to the “Alpha Squad”, a new, heavily manned detail of plainclothes peddler-busters, so named because in the beginning they rode around in vans and light trucks rented from an outfit called Alpha Rent-A-Car. Between these new kids on the block and the regular detail, the pressure was enormous as they incessantly swept the midtown commercial districts, confiscating displayed merchandise as well as back-up if they could find it. A lot of old time peddlers packed it in. But the Africans stayed out there.

The next move was to crack down on identification. Pakistani plastic became unacceptable. They wanted valid paper: drivers licenses, rent receipts, telephone bills, green cards. And if you couldn't produce, you were hauled into the precinct and hassled around for a couple of hours. For awhile Ira kept working,

taking tickets under his real name and paying them, but finally quit for good when he started getting phone calls and threatening letters from some collection agency, probably the same corrupt one back then that was involved with the thieving Parking Violation Bureau. But the Africans hung in there. And why not? When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose.

The crusher came with the strict enforcement of penalties under Section B32-510, which states that unlicensed general vending is "a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of not more than $1000, or by imprisonment for not more than three months or both." This all but eliminated the few non-African vendors from the city's midtown commercial areas. A lot of guys Ira knew became "moles," working the subways where the rules were different, or "book" peddlers (protected by the First Amendment).

Some began working side streets, off the avenues, or all the way downtown in lower Manhattan where there was less of a chance of getting arrested. Some, however, still chanced Fifth Avenue, usually at odd hours looking for a quick morning or night rush. And every now and then you might even have caught one doing a lunch hour, particularly toward the end of the month when the rent came do.

As for the Africans, they still hung tough in midtown because "three hots and a cot" in the Tombs or on the "Rock" was not that far removed from ten in a room at dilapidated flophouse.

Epilogue: A Play in Three Acts Act I: It's a week after Ira quit for good.

He’s on the corner Fifth Avenue and 42nd street talking to a hot dog guy about then Mayor Koch backing down on his attempt to eliminate food vendors. "Too much Greek clout," the vendor says, "especially with Dukakis on the way up."

Suddenly a police van pulls up and three cops jump out and arrest a peddler for selling her photographs of New York in front of the library.

She's cuffed, Miranderized, and led into the back of the truck.

Meanwhile, across the street, a three card monte game goes on undisturbed, with a large group of French tourists being bilked out of hundreds of dollars as pickpockets work the periphery of the crowd.

Next to them some dope dealer is selling crack, another quaaludes, another loose joints. It's not the cops' fault. Evidently they're being told what to concentrate on. It's the city's doing, the result of the "crackdown of the month club." It's all part of what they consider to be the "effective utilization of law enforcement personnel."

Act II: Ira didn't quit. You knew it all along.

He’s on Fifth Avenue selling wallets, feeling safe, surrounded by African Rolex guys, when suddenly someone breaks down and runs shouting "Alpha, Alpha!" He runs too, and from around the corner nervously watches a van cruise down the block on a "click-click" patrol. ("Click-click," by the way, means arrest in African lingo, the sound of handcuffs snapping shut.)

He hangs out, and a little while later Gus comes up to him. "Be careful," he says, "the Africans got a lawyer.

ACLU. He claims they're being discriminated against. That 99% of the collars are black."

"He's right," Ira answers. "That's because there's no other peddlers left. Alpha chased them away. It's like Catch-22."

"So,” Gus continues, “they’ll be looking for the few old timers still out there. To kind of even things up."

"Forget it Gus," Ira laughs.

"They'll never catch me. I'm too quick. Besides, I'm protected, an endangered species. The great white fucking hope!"

Act III: Ira got click-clicked for the first time the next day on the corner of 40th Street and Fifth Avenue selling scarves off a garbage pail. They grabbed him and an African to his

right. The cops came up on foot behind them. Ira and the African never had a chance.

An hour later the two of them are sitting alone behind bars in a downtown holding tank and get to talking. Surprisingly the African speaks pretty good English. He's from Ethiopia and the conversation soon turns to home and the stories Ira’s hearing regarding violently repressive conditions are unbelievable. Ira quickly realizes that to him, this is all child's play.

Twelve hours later a guard comes over to the cell and tells Ira that his I.D. checked out and since he has no priors, he’s being released under his own recognizance. He does, however, have a court date next month. When the guard opens the door and Ira gets up to leave, the African instinctively rises too. "Where are YOU going?" the guard growls.

"Sit your black ass back down."

"Sorry boss,” the peddler responds step-n-fetchitly.

The metal door clangs shut behind Ira, leaving the Ethiopian alone in the cell. Ira starts walking away when suddenly he stops and turns back to the jailed peddler.

"Why do you stay here man?" He asks. "Really?"

"Because I'm free," he answers.

about the author Dr. Howard Karlitz is an educator and writer, having received his Masters Degree and Doctorate from New York’s Columbia University. His works of fiction, non-fiction, research, and political and economic commentary have appeared in a myriad of literary and professional journals, magazines and newspapers. “Confession of a New York City Street Peddler” is based upon a recently completed, yet-to-be published novel of the same name.

Howard Karlitz can be reached at wordcredible@gmail.com.

Photo Credit: wallyg on Flickr

A Childhood in Fiction

by Jane

Books played a vital role in my childhood. Forty years ago, before the advent of computers and game stations my days were spent drawing, making mud pies and, most significantly, reading. My world was one of fairytales and fables, myths and legends, witches and wizards.

With no Sonic or Mario to distract me the open pages of a book were the places where my imagination took flight. Like Dorothy, I was swept away to a land of make believe.

My first school memory was being the second child drawn to the front of the class to read aloud from a newspaper, the reward for becoming a competent reader. I recall too that Sarah, my best friend, was first and though pleased for her I jealously noted that she was 5 months older and so must have received an unfair advantage.

Those early days were filled with Ladybird editions and picture books where simple texts were enhanced by pictures of handsome princes, hideous ogres and rosebud princesses. I remember too sitting in

my grandmother’s high bed listening to her read more advanced texts like The Little Princess. I was fascinated by the written word and, more often than not, in my mind I became the central character. Indeed some nights, before I understood religion, I prayed that I would be left a sparkling dress like Cinderella. Of course it never happened but nevertheless the disappointment never stopped me from fantasizing.

But it was in 1973, having just turned eight, when something happened that made me not just an imaginative reader but an avid and inspired one. My grandparents took my sister and I on holiday to Portugal and one day, whilst browsing the gift shops, my grandparents stopped to peruse a rotating bookstand on the sidewalk.

Exclamations abounded as on the stand they found a copy of their son in law’s first novel, Run Down. They were amazed to find it in such an unexpected place and duly bought the book and a postcard to send him

on which they wrote “Run Down to Faro.”

You'd never guess from this cover that my y uncle's book was published in the 1970s would you?

(Possibly, it might also have contained some violence.)

Of course, for a young girl interested in books, it was exciting enough to discover my uncle was an author but whilst my grandparents enthused something even more important was about to happen. As I too spun the bookstand I found a book that would set me on course for a lifetime of reading. For there, amongst the holiday reads, I discovered The Famous Five.

I can’t remember which adventure it was now, although my favourite has always been Five on a Hike Together, but Julian, Dick, Anne, George and Timmy awoke in me a new love of fiction. Their wonderful adventures seemed almost real and tangible; I didn’t need golden tresses or magic tinder boxes, all that was required of me were potted shrimp sandwiches and lashings of ginger beer. Perhaps it’s not surprising then that on returning to England, I made fast tracks to our mobile library and within a very short time I’d read the entire collection.

Below: I say, what a super, corking read! Hoorah!

The library was my salvation. My childhood was relatively frugal and books were purchased sparingly but in the library I found an endless supply. Having quickly devoured the likes of Enid Blyton, Ruth M Arthur, C S Lewis, and Tolkien I moved into the adult section. No one ever queried my reading choices and nothing was off limits. It was a less politically correct world back then and thank goodness for that.

At about nine I was moved into the notorious Miss Walsh’s class.

Although past her prime, freckled and with slightly hunched shoulders Miss Walsh was still sharp in intelligence and tongue. Miss Jean Brodie was, alas, but a poor imitation. Miss Walsh frequently interspersed her teaching with tales of The Blitz, London’s theatres and other curious events but when it came to education she meant business and her Speed Reading Challenge was one of her favoured tools. It was glorious to win but then there was always the catch recounting the story in minute detail to the entire class. No doubt Miss Walsh was an oddity but if ever I thought her tales were untrue my thoughts were banished when in the course of time I inherited from her a 1935 copy of Theatre World, autographed by Laurence Olivier.

It was with Miss Walsh’s expert training I sped through the shelves of the mobile library and by my early teens my first port of call was the returns section which I would scan for interesting unread novels before heading to look for my preferred

authors. With a taste for adventures with the human touch I became particularly fond of wartime tales, both fictional and autobiographical. autobiographic Nevil Shute, Douglas Reeman and Alistair Maclean were firm favourites.

But by then, I’d also discovered Ian Fleming and it was with Bond that my destiny as a thrill seeking, adventure loving, gun toting groupie was finally set.

Today, now I’m past my prime p too and heading for Sunset Avenue my reading has diversified. In recent years, as a member of a book club, I’ve read novels that previously I would never have even contemplated. It’s been, I guess, a “novel” experience. And now, with or without my Book Boo Club Ladies, I’ll read just about any genre and attempt any book. It’s been rejuvenating. However, without a doubt, my first true fictional love will always be the wonderful world of adventures that began on a bookstand back in 1973.

You know, over the years y there’s been as much criticism as there has been praise for Enid Blyton but I, for one, will always be grateful to her for setting me on the path to a lifetime of thrills, spills and spiffing good yarns.

Some of my favourite books which did make it onto on my book shelves. Not as gruesome as my uncle's book but that witch in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was pretty beastly I can tell you.

Background : Paul aul Sandham

interview by Kerrie-Anne

Kate's passion throughout the book is evident. Her love of the characters and drive to tell, educate and inspire others carries you along a path of waiting, of wanting the world to be saved, of needing to know someone can fix x the mess we have made.

A wonderful merger of one possible future and that of myth and legend.

One which I would hope every person who loves a great book and has a conscience will pick up, read and share.

The White Horse Trick should be on every school reading re list, every young adult and adult for that matter.

You have said you fell in love with India. What was it that captivated you about the country?

I often will praise a book, admire an author's talent and find myself immersed in a tale one way or another. Rarely do I find myself lost in a fictitious world such as the one found in Kate's latest book, The White Horse Trick. It is hard to know where to begin. Is it a fairy tale? Well yes. An eye opening story as to the possible future given the effects of climate change? Most definitely, but the White Horse Trick is more than either of these two descriptions. It is to my mind a journey encompassing both. Kate takes the reader through vivid landscapes ravaged by the effects of climate change, wild storms, years of drought, rising oceans, soil erosion. She then leads you through the land of the Fairies, a kind of Utopia. Bright colours and calmness surround you as you read.

The contrast could not be anymore striking.

A merger of Mythology and possible fact. I rarely find myself in such a place inspired and confronted, bewildered and yet with a sense of purpose. This is such a book.

It is difficult as you read to dismiss the story as a fictitious world for Pup, Jenny and humanity on a whole as mere supposition, yet many will. The world Kate describes is one full of clarity, you can almost feel the sun on your skin, hear the wind howling and the rain torrenting down. The strength of the story's message is balanced perfectly with the personalities of each character from the greedy warlord, his brother, the people whose world is crumpling around them to the apparent carefree nature of the fairies.

A vibrancy and immediacy about every-day day life. Returning from India was like stepping out of a coloured coloure world and into a black-and-white black one.

Each novel I pick has its base in one or more controversial topics: Genetic Engineering, Extraterrestrial Life, Alchemy and Climate Change. How influential was your families interest and involvement in areas such as the anti-nuclear nuclear movement as you were growing up?

I suppose it’s impossible to be sure about exactly how much any given set of circumstances has influenced anyone. But it seems very likely that growing up in a politically and socially lly aware household has left its mark.

What inspired you to write your first novel Switchers?

I had published a book of poetry and was working on a novel for adults, when I met an Australian writer, Isobelle Carmody, who writes mainly for young adults. We hit it off and became good friends, and I read one of her books and enjoyed it. I had never considered writing for children before that, but it made me realise how well the medium suited my wild imagination. Switchers was born very soon afterwards.

Throughout your writing your passion for the given subject is obvious as well as refreshing.

What is it that drives you to be so passionate about topics such as Global Warming?

I can’t say, exactly. But once I’m interested in a subject I have to turn it inside out, examine it, ingest it, then make something out of it.

Where global warming is concerned, what surprises me is how few people are really genuinely concerned about it. Or perhaps they are, but feel dis empowered. Most developed countries have stagnant politics, entirely governed by an impossible concept, which is constant growth. It doesn’t take much brain power to see that the planet can’t support this as a fundamental principle, but where we are going to find a sensible alternative politics is not clear. The status quo is very powerful.

You said in your recent article Writers Block for The View from Here, ‘The White Horse Trick is

my nineteenth book in twelve years, and I am suddenly empty.

Burned out. I am all out of fascination, all out of righteous indignation about political and social problems, all out of drive and fixations. I am, for once in my life, devoid of passion.’ Is this a shift in your perception of the world around us or reprioritizing of life, the universe and everything in between?

I don’t know. Passions and obsessions can’t be turned on and off at will. I see it as something that is just happening, and over which I don’t have much control. Maybe it’s just my age.

What is it about Irish Folk Music which captures the imagination so readily?

Read The New Policeman and find out!

I love your use of Irish Folklore and mythology within the story.

So many people have grown up with stories of the Puca, Aengus and the land of Tir na n'Og. How did you research Fairies, The Dagda stories and characters?

Most of the research was done long ago. I didn’t consider it research at the time – I just loved reading the old myths and legends. Lady Gregory’s collections were very influential, as was James Stevens. When I came to write the New Policeman, I revisited some of the stories, to reacquaint myself with them, and enjoyed them just as much second time round.

Your descriptions of the quick time and effects effe of Climate Change through Ireland sent shivers down my spine. It causes you to think and take stock of the things which are important and how each of us has contributed to these changes. What do you hope readers will take away when they finish reading?

It was a bit of a juggling act. The book is essentially for children, so my intention wasn’t to either blame them or terrify them. But I would hope that a lot of the content will provoke thought, not only about the possible consequences, but about our way y of life and our addiction to acquisition.

As I read The White Horse Trick it was very easy to visualise the scenes faced by the people surviving. Aidan’s Fort, the Terraces, the inundated landscape of Kinvara and Ireland as Aengus flies overhead. How did d you discover such places and where did you find the inspiration for them?

I’ve lived in this area for fifteen years now and have spent a lot of time tramping around in the Burren. The place where Aidan’s castle is situated is near here, and I’m often up there. I have probably made a few subtle alterations to the landscape to fit the story, but essentially it’s all on my doorstep.

Do you feel Climate Change the greatest challenge facing us?

In short, yes. If I were to take a bit longer, I might go into detail about the erroneous belief that many of us have; that owning more things and better things and bigger things is going to make us happy. And about the disconnect with the natural world that is possibly the cause of our unhappiness.

And about the manipulative practices of moneylenders and multinational companies which drive us out to the shopping centres to fill their pockets, while they wreak havoc with the environment and create political instability across the globe.

My favourite characters would have to be Pup and Jenny. Pup for his strength of character and perseverance. Jenny for her patience. Did you model their personalities on any person in particular?

No. All my characters are entirely fictitious, with the exception of Ann Korff, whose presence in the series is explained at the beginning of The New Policeman.

of the rate of change are far too conservative. So I felt I had license to create a world, not too far into the future, where very radical changes has already happened.

As the White Horse Tricks ends parallels can be drawn as Creationism merges with Evolution encompassing the Biblical story of Adam and Eve. What made you decide to take this road rather than one which was devoid of any religious connotations?

The link with creationism is pretty tenuous. I doubt many creationists would endorse or celebrate the ending of The White Horse Trick.

Throughout the series I’ve played with the idea of a parallel, timeless world, and I love the way in which so much of human mythology, whatever its source, could theoretically tie in with the concept.

Were you tempted to have Aidan face another fate than the one which befalls him?

Spoiler Alert

No. I can’t think of a worse one.

Throughout the story the plight of the human race is evident. How hard was it to write given the current debates and lack of action?

How do you approach writing a novel?

Given the lack of action, it was quite easy to write. I did a lot of reading during my residence in Bristol, and some of the forecasts are truly terrifying. The problem is that no one really knows exactly what will happen, but a lot of scientists are predicting that most prior estimates

I let it gestate for a long time before I begin writing. Then I write a first draft all in one go, longhand, from beginning to end. Flat out. If I have time I let that rest for a few months before returning to type it up, revising as I go.

The best aspects are being your own boss and creating your own work schedule. The process itself can be pretty brilliant as well – the high of creative energy. The worst aspects are loneliness, post-book post blues, and lack of job security.

Any advice for or budding authors and where should they start?

Be original. Write what you want to write and not what you think publishers might want to publish.

Youthful budding authors should start by getting a life. The more experience a person has and the more thinking ing they do about their experience, the more they will have to offer in terms of their writing. Go out and live, have adventures, explore things and ideas no one has explored before, then come back and tell us all about them. Older authors, provided they have h done all that, just need to sit down and get on with it. Ideas and intentions are worthless without hard graft.

How important is it to have something to say when telling a story?

For me it’s pretty important. I can’t speak for anyone else, but when I’m I reading I like to be stimulated as well as entertained.

Whilst you’re taking a break from writing and a little well earned R&R. Where to from here for Kate Thompson?

Who knows? I don’tC

What would you say is the best and worst aspects of being a published author?

No Returns

by Jane

I’d never stolen anything before. Honest. It was the first time.

I guess there’s a first time for everything.

A first time for living, and a first time for dying.

It slipped silently into my pocket. No one saw, no one ever does. Least of all him. I don’t exist xist as me. Just a useful puppet. A puppet with broken strings.

It’s lavender fragrance. “Calming” it says on the bottle. It swirls, blends with the steaming water. The deep purple essence dilutes to shades of lilac bindweed, warm, inviting.

My fleshy thighs hs fade to shapeless shadows. My breasts lie flat. No more womanly curves. Just an amorphous being who cooks, cleans, and draws clouds in the dust.

Water trickles down the overflow. I don’t suppose many people have a waterfall for a requiem.

The bottle sits ts on the shelf, carton discarded. The scent spirals upwards, weaving its way to freedom. If only I could escape my box so easily. Climb free, run wild.

But I’m sealed with sellotape and tied with string.

The water creeps into my ear, my head lolls. I feel relaxed, sleepy.

Sometimes it can be quite cosy in my box.

I hear small muffled voices. Crying, laughing. It’s just a trick. But it makes me wonder. Wonder whether I should sleep or not.

Bubbles in my nostrils. Only a moment longer now. I could hook my leg g over the edge...or welcome the embrace.

But whatever I choose, they’ll be no return.

Photo credit: Laura Chifiriuc

The Fantasies of Writing

by Maxine Linnell How many people do you meet who have always wanted to write a book? I seem to meet them all the time. And I was one of them until three years ago. I wrote my first poem at four, about a candle. My first book was for children, completed when I was about twenty. I sent it off to a publisher, who wrote back fairly quickly rejecting it, but inviting me to write another longer book for older children. If I’d known then what I know now, I’d have run to my desk to do exactly that – it was an opening for the publishing I dreamed about. Instead I allowed it to convince me that I was no good as a writer, had nothing to say, and should give up the whole project.

The fantasies of writing led me to university to read English. At the time, the syllabus was almost entirely pretwentieth century literature, and almost entirely written by men. There was no room for students’ own creativity, and my efforts at reviewing for the newspaper and writing for the magazine went unnoticed. I felt squashed under the weight of all these classics, all this marvellous, inimitable literature. Even if I could write well, the world didn’t need more books: there were far too many to read already.

I ended up writing in other ways – essays, lectures, editorials for a magazine I edited for ten years. I supported other people in their wish to be creative, to write that novel, paint that picture. There was success, but not in the area which I’d always known was closest to my heart.

And then, much later, I got ill – not in a lifethreatening way, but as I recovered slowly I realised that I mustn’t wait any longer. There was never going to be a magic ‘right time’, and I didn’t want to end up with this big regret. I knew some of the things that made it difficult for me to write – the aloneness, the lack of identifiable goals and structures. So I went about finding some of those structures outside. I enrolled on an MA in Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University. I knew that I was there mainly to be given deadlines, projects and encouragement – and that it would be whatever I made of it.

I put many hours into the work, did extra groups, made writing contacts and friends. The certificate was not important, but two years of having other people take my work more seriously than I did were central. I also joined Leicester Writers’ Club, a group of over forty writers, published and yet-to-be-published, who meet every week to support each other, encourage development through feedback, and celebrate successes.

Within the two years of the course I finished my first book. I sent it out to nineteen agents and publishers, and

each time it came back I took a deep breath and sent it out again. The twentieth saw something she liked, and we met up.

The first disappointment was that she didn’t think this book would sell at this stage. I could have given up yet again, but I decided to take up her offer – to support me in writing a second book.

This time I knew how much the offer was worth. The ideas came easily, the book was easier to write than the first.

Vintage – a book about adolescence and identity, covering 1962 and 2010, arrived.

The book went out to publishers, and found an independent publisher – Ross Bradshaw at Five Leaves – who read it overnight and wanted it. Several edits later, I’ve just received the proofs to read. And I also received a commission to retell three novels by Thomas Hardy for children.

So in 2010 there will be four precious books out with my name on the front cover. Do I wish I’d done it earlier? Yes. Am I glad I’ve done it now? A hundred times yes.

Maxine Linnell lives in Leicester. Her book Vintage will be published by Five Leaves in 2010, and is about adolescence - in 1962 and 2010. She has also published poetry and short stories, and wants to do more and more. www.maxinelinnellwriter.com

Photo credit: Lil Larkie

Hotel Aloha

by Kathleen

After graduation in May, 2008, Daisy and I started at Salinger Brothers. The economy had flat flat-lined; layoffs deluged every bank. But Daisy’s Uncle Bernie was vice vicechairman. Typically an analyst’s first year is volunteered slavery: running spreadsheets nonstop for eighteen hours. Thanks to the collapse, however, Daisy and I ran spreadsheets lackadaisically and still pretended to act busy. We left at six o’clock, seven tops.

Our goal was to rise at a fabled financial institution and to stand out as stellar beauties on the late late-night glamour scene. So even though we made decent enough money, the social aspect required Armani, DiorCLouboutin heels and nd artistico hairstyles and maquillage. Knock-offs fooled nobody.

To compensate, we rented one-sixth sixth of a studio apartment and ignored our hulking coevals. Sometimes we sneaked into Versailles (Uncle Bernie’s membership helped) for body work and basic morning ing grooming. We enticed still-rich rich fellows to buy us drinks and dinner.

Skimping on breakfast and lunch kept us willowy.

We honestly relished working in the historic Salinger tower. And at penthouse parties we feigned insouciance while secretly basking in the city’s incandescence. By the winter holidays our social whirl sped so quickly as to make us dizzy.

But in January, a massive pall took hold. The exquisite dinners dropped off; the glitter faded; and our roommates, now unemployed, stunk up the studio w with take-out food, poor hygiene, and sloth.

Bad before, but now double-digit digit layoffs swept through Salinger’s every echelon, every week. Daisy phoned her mother who was not reassuring. “Do not bother your poor Uncle Bernie,” she said.

So we held tight, made e no mistakes ever and affected brisk, inconspicuous attitudes.

In May, Daisy and I and two hundred other survivors convened for “Continuity Management.” Or, how to keep Salinger afloat come some global catastrophe.

During a restroom break, Daisy and I discovered the “Aloha Suite,” a floor of offices reserved for fired chieftains. Unlike those escorted out by security guards, the top dogs retired here until they had their prospects and portfolios in order.

We ditched the seminar to explore the higher flo floors.

And guess what? No people. And yet: electricity, water, functioning computers, lounges, and mini mini-kitchens.

That night we invited Nico, a club kid who specialized in popping locks, and moved in. (Oh yeah, closets

galore!) Nico opened the media room and the gym. And on the top floor, we found the catering room from back in the executive dining room days—with with industrial washer and drier.

Daisy and I still worked and still partied, but lived in luxury.

Last night we traipsed home around midnight. At the forty-ninth ninth floor the elevator door opened and an old man shuffled by in robe and slippers.

“Hey Uncle Bernie,” Daisy called. He dashed out of sight, dropping a toothbrush. Apparently, unlike us, he doesn’t love the new Hotel Aloha, the quintessence of Wall Street.

next month

interview with Todd Heldt

next month’s issue out: 8th January

http://theviewfromhere.magcloud.com

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