Reading at Moseley

I'm going to be reading along with fellow Nine Arches poets Angela France and Daniel Sluman at the Moseley Exchange, Birmingham, at 7pm on July 14th. The event, presented by Cannon Poets, is part of the Moseley Festival, and admission is £2.

Poetry reviewing

It's not often I find my way over to Facebook these days, but I have been following an interesting discussion on Rob Mackenzie's wall this week, about the way that poetry is reviewed in this country.

It's a complex subject, and to a large extent I find myself agreeing with the thrust of Jon Stone's argument (why can't poetry be reviewed in the same way that, say, film and music are?), as well as feeling a good deal of sympathy for Rob's starting-point.

I suppose one of the angles that hasn't been explored fully is where the reviews are appearing. I've no idea what The Guardian (or any of the other broadsheets) pay their reviewers, but I'd assume they do, and that would inevitably create a different situation to that of reviewers writing for a small press mag for no financial reward. While it might on the one hand make it easier for the reviewer to be critical (not having to worry about offending a potentially large proportion of the magazine's subscribers), it might also work the other way - the paper would be reluctant to consistently be too lukewarm towards the books of a regular advertiser.

In poetry mags and webzines themselves, it's a bit different. The reviewer is often writing for no reward other than a free copy of the book (although some, such as Magma, certainly pay). From personal experience, that's fine - it's a chance to read more poetry than I could otherwise afford, and especially to take a chance on books that I'd otherwise have thought looked interesting but didn't feel like shelling out for. It does mean, though, that the reviewer is often predisposed to like what they're reading - you're unlikely to take the time and effort to read the book carefully, make notes, then write the review, if it's something you just don't like.

The same's true on blogs, and that's certainly unashamedly the case here at Polyolbion. I don't get the time or the money to read anything like all the poetry I'd like to, so I'm not going to waste precious time writing a negative blog review when I could be just getting on with finding something I do like. I don't get enough time to be positive about all the things I do like, for that matter, so a great many good books go unheralded.

Finally, someone in the discussion brought up the subject of what a review is actually for. I haven't ever, I don't think, bought a book of poetry purely on the strength of a review, but a good review (as in a well written one) is often enough to spark my interest in a book that might otherwise have passed me by - again, it might well encourage me to take a few chances.

So what is a good review? Well, as Rob originally suggested, I want to see some suggestion of weak points, as well as strengths (and I can't think of a single collection I own that doesn't have at least some negatives), and I want to see both highlighted with plenty of reference to the actual text. In that, at least, I suppose it's always going to be different to any print review of film or music, where examples can only be described.

New at Nine Arches

Nine Arches Press has two new debut collections out now - Melanchrini, by Loughborough poet Maria Taylor, and Absence has a weight of its own, by Cheltenham-based Daniel Sluman. Having heard them both read from the books, I'm looking forward to getting stuck into them, because they're realkly both very distinctive poets.

Meanwhile, over at Gists & Piths, Simon Turner is interviewing another Nine Arches poet, C J Allen, whose At The Oblivion Tea-Rooms was recently published. Regular readers here might recall that I'm a big fan of both Clive's and Simon's poetry, so it's probably no surprise that it's a terrific interview, with a lot of interesting things to say about form, among other things.*

Finally, the next Nine Arches/Crystal Clear Creators Shindig takes place at The Western in Leicester on July 16th - be there!

* Incidentally, I think Clive's reason for wanting to be a painter - "I liked the smell of linseed oil and the way they hardly ever seemed to do anything" - probably sums up my childhood ambition to be a cricketer, and continuing obsession with the game.

Tom Duddy, RIP

The weekend brought the very sad news of the death of Irish poet Tom Duddy. I'd never met Tom, but his wonderful HappenStance pamphlet The Small Hours and the ensuing full collection, The Hiding Place, were evidence of an exceptional and highly individual talent, and a sharp, incisive yet deeply compassionate intelligence.

Helena Nelson, who deserves credit for first bringing Tom's poetry to a wider audience, and Matthew Stewart have both blogged about a writer who really does deserve to be better known and more widely read, and say it all far better than I could. I'd known Tom was very ill, but the end still came as a shock - as Nell says, he was taken long before his time. 

The poems remain. I think The Small Hours is long gone, but The Hiding Place is still available, and as Matthew mentions, SoundCloud also has some recordings of Tom reading his own work, and reading it very well.

Ray Bradbury, 1920-2012

Writers probably get thoroughly fed up with responding to that old question about who their main influences are, but I have to admit, I rarely get fed up of reading their answers. The better interviewees make a point of explaining exactly how those influences worked. Otherwise, I think there’s a default assumption (or maybe it’s just me) that Writer A reads Writers B, C, D and E and becomes something that’s an amalgam of all four.

The death of Ray Bradbury this week, at the age of 91, set me thinking about this, and other things. When I was a kid, I think around 9 or 10, I read a story of Bradbury’s in the Reader's Digest. I was a pretty voracious reader anyway, but it was the first time I’d come across Bradbury, so had no preconceptions about his status as a science-fiction writer (he considered himself a fantasy writer, incidentally, but both terms tend to get used rather sniffily by literary critics*).

All I can remember of the story now is that it was set in an American small town, and centred on a boy’s longing for a new pair of sneakers that he sees in a shop window. Perhaps that was all there was to the plot. That’s not really important. What is significant is that I distinctly remember realising that it was the first time I’d read something and enjoyed it for no other reason than the way it was written. The writing was what made it pleasurable, not the narrative or anything else, and to prove that to myself I read it again and again over a few weeks.

I didn’t go away and read libraries full of Bradbury. I came back to him much later, after university, I think, and read The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles, and what I’d consider his masterpiece, October Country, and I loved them, but I don’t think I’ve ever had the urge to write anything along remotely similar lines. Where Bradbury did influence me, probably more than any other writer, was in making me want to write. Anything. Everything. Every day, if at all possible. So, thanks Ray. Every time I re-read those books I mentioned, I still get that same feeling.

* It'll be interesting to see how Bradbury is re-evaluated in the next few years, because despite the fantasy/sci-fi settings of much of his work, his real subjects, of course, were the USA, and the 20th Century. It's a constant source of irritation to me that so-called 'genre' fiction is so often sidelined, or treated as somehow less serious than 'literary fiction. If ever a writer shattered that myth, it was Bradbury.

Clare Best nominated

I'm delighted to see that Clare Best's Excisions, from Waterloo Press, is on the shortlist for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for best first collection. It's a terrific book, and thoroughly deserves to be on there. I should get my act together and finish and post the review of it I've been writing.

Nice to see Waterloo getting some recognition on a shortlist, too - they've got a strong and varied stable of writers, and their books are beautifully produced.

Witch

Just came across this at the Seren site - I was a big fan of Damian Walford Davies's collection Suit Of Lights, and I'm a sucker for all things 17th Century, so this is a must-buy.

Catching up

I've been out of circulation for a few days, so I'm just going over a few things I missed, and that you might have, too.

Monday night's Shindig at The Western, in Leicester, featured the launch of C J Allen's new Nine Arches Press collection, At The Oblivion Tea-Rooms. There's a sample poem from it here at Litterbug (and the New and Selected from Leafe Press that's mentioned there comes highly recommended, too).

Meanwhile, at the HappenStance blog, Helena Nelson has some very interesting things to say about selling books through Amazon. I try to buy direct from presses where I can, or at readings, but I have taken the lazy way out at times.

Finally, my review of Carcanet's An Andrew Crozier Reader is at the Magma blog now - it's a book I reccomend highly.

New Walk 4

Issue 4 of New Walk magazine is out now, and includes new poetry by Carol Rumens, Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch, Evan Jones, Sarah Jackson, Clive Watkins, Julith Jedamus, Quincy R Lehr, Chris Preddle, C P Cavafy (translated by Ian Parks) and others.

Other features include Victoria Field remembering Peter Redgrove, Gerry Cambridge on Robert Frost and Scotland, David Cooke on Derek Mahon, fiction by Alessandra Lavagnino (translated by Adam Elgar), and art by Jeffrey Blondes and others.

J A Baker revisited

Leicester poet Roy Marshall, whose excellent chapbook Gopagilla is out now from Crystal Clear Creators, has very kindly chosen my poem Variations On A Theme By J A Baker for his Favourite Poem of the Week column.

He's also provided a link to an article about Baker, who's something of a hero of mine. I've actually just been reading Conor Jameson's excellent Silent Spring Revisited, which starts with his discussion of whether Baker was in fact seeing escaped falconry birds as well as wild Peregrines (we published a version of this in Bird Watching last year). Far from diminishing Baker's achievement, Conor puts Baker's extraordinary work into the context of an era in which modern conservation movements were just emerging, after the massive numbers of bird fatalities caused by unrestricted use of pesticides.

So, read Roy's blog, read Roy's book, read Conor's book, and read Baker.

Troy Town reissued

My first full poetry collection, Troy Town, is now back in print from Arrowhead Press, and you can buy copies directly from them here. It's a handsome-looking hardback, and costs just £8.99.

Whistle

Martin Figura's poetic coming-of-age tale, Whistle, is on at the Roundhouse, Chalk Farm Road, Camden, London, from May 22nd-26th at 8pm each day. There are clips and previews here, and booking information here. David Morley, writing in Magma, described it as "magnificent and genuinely haunting", while Jackie Kay called it "moving, brave and unsentimental" - I certainly couldn't say it any better.

If you'd like to get familiar with the extraordinary story behind the show beforehand, or if you're unable to get to the show, the Arrowhead collection Whistle is available here.

The pros of prose

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I’d been reading Neil Roberts’ fine biography of Peter Redgrove, A Lucid Dreamer. In it, he talks about the strict routine of drafting and revising poems that Redgrove developed later in his career, which often involved starting by writing a prose draft.

There’s an apparent risk in such a strategy, of the final poem appearing to be a prose piece chopped up into lines, although anyone who knows Redgrove’s work well (I’ve read a smattering of his collections in the past, and I’m now enjoying the Collected-that’s-actually-a-Selected) will rightly point out that it’s a charge you’d struggle to make stick with a writer as musical as him. For us lesser mortals, though, it’s a far more real danger.

But anyway, having reached rather an impasse in a number of poems I’ve been working on, I thought I’d try it. I started from scratch, got everything I had down into the prose drafts without stopping to worry too much about structure, narrative coherence or even consistency of tone, and then put them away for a few days.*

Having looked at them again over the last couple of days, my immediate response was that new ways into each poem seemed to have opened up - in all but one case, a far better opening line than the original presented itself from deep in the heart of the prose, while in the other, the opening line got changed almost beyond recognition. They're all still a long way from being finished, even now that I've written a verse draft of each too, but they all feel far livelier, and far more open to taking an unexpected turn (which for me is always the interesting part of writing a poem). Some might even stay as prose.

I'd guess this might have happened in large part because restarting them in prose helped break that attachment that the poet always has to the original kernel of the poem - no matter how many times you remind yourself that nothing is sacred, it's very hard during the revision process to ditch what can feel like the nuggets of inspiration that sparked the poem in the first place (they're not, of course, they're just the way you first chose to shape that inspiration).

Whether I'll carry on with this method I'm not sure, but if nothing else it's reminded me that getting out of old habits and trying something different in the writing process is always worth a go.

* I think Redgrove actually left his drafts much longer, and was very strict about not looking at them again until a certain time had passed. I'd like to develop that sort of patience.

Hidden Nature

A week on Saturday, May 5th, I'm running a poetry workshop - Hidden Nature - at Attenborough Nature Reserve, just outside Nottingham, in conjunction with Nottingham Writers' Studio. It starts at 10.30am and runs until 4.30pm.

We'll attempt to translate birdsong into poetry, track down long-distance travellers in transit, turn the tables by watching the birdwatchers, and make maps of our experiences. The morning will be spent out on the reserve (which should be full of migrant birds at this time of year), and the afternoon in the comfort of the new visitor centre.

If you don't know Attenborough, it's a great reserve created out of gravel pits next to the River Trent. Although there's still a working quarry on site, it's got a great record of attracting interesting birds, especially migrants on passage.

You don’t need any previous experience of watching wildlife - the emphasis will be formly on writing, rather than rarities. Just bring a pen, paper, bags of energy, and a pair of binoculars if you have them (don't worry if you haven't, I'll have some spares available to borrow).

Price is £55, £40 for NWS members. To book, download a form using the link here, or call 0115 959 7947. Lunch is available at the Visitor Centre cafe. More details on other NWS workshops, courses and events can also be found here.

Poetry and prizes

There's a good article here, in the Fortnightly Review, about prizes in poetry. I haven't really got time at the moment to get any coherent thoughts about it down, but I think I agree with the central thrust of Peter Riley's argument. It's not that I object to some poets or books being singled out as better than others - clearly they are - it's what Riley calls the "culture of the superlative" that starts to put my back up. I'm not entirely sure John Burnside is the best example to choose, but I'll have to give it some though, and return to it when I've got a few minutes.

Cold comfort

I didn't realise quite how cold I'd got in All Saints Church, Aldwincle, until I got up to leave at the end - testament to how riveting a show Riverlands: A Journey On The Nene was.

In fact the atmospheric, cleverly-lit venue, one of two impressive churches in this pretty small Northamptonshire village, added plenty to the occasion, but it was the words of poet Jo Bell and storyteller Jo Blake-Cave that really illuminated the darker corners of the old building, and warmed the heart.

Taking as their starting point the writings of Denys Watkins-Pitchford (better known as 'BB') about the River Nene, they approached their subject through a variety of voices, including birdwatchers, boaters, anglers (they might have a thing or two to say once they've seen the show!), and of course local residents. And although Jo Bell's pieces, for example, seemed to work very differently from her work on the page, it struck me later that one of the things that was most enjoyable about the performance was how much it trusted the audience to sit and listen, and listen hard.

Further performances are planned, across the country, so keep an eye out, and go and see it.

A couple of things more. Aldwincle already has a literary claim to fame, as John Dryden was born in the village rectory. And I found myself wondering if the church was one of those that inspired J L Carr in writing A Month In The Country. He lived locally, in Kettering, and it felt like his sort of building.

A journey on the Nene

As I've mentioned on here before, last April I joined poet Jo Bell, storyteller Jo Blake Cave and visual artist Jo Dacombe for a dawn chorus walk along the River Nene at Wadenhoe in Northamptonshire, following in the footsteps of nature writer BB. We walked, we heard the birds sing, and we talked poetry over tea on Jo's boat. 

Now the Three Jos In A Boat project has borne fruit in the form of Riverlands – a journey on the Nene, the national premiere of which is being staged at All Saints Church, Thorpe Road, Aldwincle, NN14 3EA, this Saturday, April 21, and Sunday, April 22, from 7.30pm. The hour-long performance promises atmosphere, mesmerising stories, humour and humanity. The evening will also see the first availability of Alwalton-Wollaston, a visual response to the journey on the Nene by Jo Dacombe and Kate Dyer. A limited edtion will be for sale at the performances.

Tickets are £10, or £8 for senior citizens, students and the unemployed, and include a £2 donation to The Churches Conservation Trust. If the event is not sold out, tickets will be available on the door.

For further information, you can contact Rosalind Stoddart, tel: 01536 370 108, email: ros@rosalindstoddart.co.uk; website: www.rosalindstoddart.co.uk

Some poems to enjoy

Stride is a reliable source of excellent poetry and reviews, and this week I've been enjoying these poems from Steven Waling, particularly My Father's Ship and Front Rooms: An Essay.

Peter Redgrove

I spent part of the Easter weekend reading Dr Neil Roberts' fine biography of Peter Redgrove, A Lucid Dreamer. I'm sometimes a bit wary of biographies of poets, especially when they start dealing too heavily in material best left on the psychiatrist's couch. Here, though, it works well, perhaps because Redgrove believed so passionately in creativity's power to heal psychic hurt, and above all Roberts does justice to a writer who's too often been left in the shadow of Ted Hughes and others.

I bought the e-book version (much cheaper than the hardback), and soon found myself going back for the e-version of the Collected Poems, too. As anyone who ever tried to keep up with Redgrove's prolific output could tell you, a real Collected Poems would occupy a small room, so it's actually a selection, by Roberts, from across Redgrove's career. But whatever - it's as highly recommended as the biography.

Epicentre launches

Epicentre is a new online poetry magazine with rolling content, and Issue One is out now. There are poems from the likes of Helen Ivory, Roy Marshall, J T Welsch and Claire Trevien, plus Mark Burnhope on a biography of David Gascoyne. Plenty to get your teeth into, there – I look forward to having a good long browse later.

Reading in Leicester

Last night, I was at the University of Leicester, reading to a forum of post-graduate creative writing students. It was a thoroughly enjoyable evening - the reading went well, and the three papers presented by students were extremely thought-provoking.

The first, by Michelle Fossey, was an extract from a novel in progress which is centred on one subject I'm fascinated by (religious cults) while analysing another (the clarity and transparency, or lack of it, of language). She also mentioned something that intrigues me - the tension that arises when conducting a solitary, private activity - writing - in an academic, supervised environment. Of course, that says something about my own writing methods and/or expectations, as there's no reason why writing should be solitary or private, but it set me thinking.

Gail Knight (I think I've got the name right) read an extract from her children's novella - as one of the other guests pointed out, even though it wasn't the sort of thing I'd expected to appeal to me, I found myself wanting to know what happened next, which I'd guess is what any writer of fiction wants more than anything.

Finally, Gwynne Harries read a number of his own poems as part of a look at the poetry of identity, and specfically dual identity (he's an English-speaking Welshman). My own mother's Welsh, so it's something I'm very interested in, and Gwynne also set me off looking into some of the traditional Welsh verse forms he touched on (I've tried the odd englyn in the past, but there's a lot more to discover), plus Rolfe Humphries, a relatively neglected literary figure these days.

Heartfelt thanks go to Rory Waterman (a very fine poet, and the man behind the excellent New Walk magazine) for his kindness in inviting me, and for the splendid curry at Kayal.

Decisions, decisions...

So, do I do a poem a day in April for National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo)? I'm wavering, but I'm beginning to think it might be the kick up the arse I need at the moment.

Inspiration

I was thinking, over the weekend, about the way reading poetry works upon the unconscious mind, and then feeds into your own writing. If you're trying to write poetry, than reading as much of it as possible can only be a good thing, as far as I'm concerned - the wider the range of influences you get exposed to the better.

Having said that, I've long been wary of trying to write too soon after reading poetry that I like a lot, because bitter experience tells me that the result is often a series of third-rate imitations of the writer in question. Far better to digest the other poet's work slowly, very slowly, and fully absorb the literary nutrients therein.

Sometimes, though, reading something that's just shout-out-loud brilliant does have an immediately inspirational effect, and the only thing to do is to get the notebook/beermat/laptop out and write. It happened to me last week. I'd been rather stuck on several (largely unconnected) poems for weeks, months even, and couldn't find a way to move forward with them at all.

Then, after reading a particular poet's latest book, I had a blinding-flash revelation of where I wanted to go. I was very dubious at first, but went with it, and have been checking and rechecking ever since that what I came up with wasn't a pathetic retread of their work. I'm pretty sure it's not (although that's not to say it's any good) - in fact, I think it's stylistically a very long way from what I was reading.

So how does this happen? I tend to think that it's simply that reading a great poem reminds you that such things are possible - spend to long looking at your own failures, or even just your own almost-poems, and you start to forget what a real poem is. All of which is a way of saying again that the more poetry you read, the better, because the more likely you are to come across something astonishing, or inspirational.

Some current reading

I've been reading a lot over the past couple of weeks. Here's most of it:

Selected Poems - Cesar Vallejo (Shearsman)
Collected Shorter Poems Vol.2 - John Matthias (Shearsman)
Days and Nights In W12 - Jack Robinson (who, it turns out, is actually Charles Boyle, the man behind CB Editions, who publish this)
Early Train - Jonathan Davidson (Smith Doorstop)
God's Machynlleth - Michael W Thomas (Flarestack)
Port Winston Mulberry - Michael W Thomas (Littlejohn and Bray)

Aly Stoneman - Lost Lands (Crystal Clear Creators)
Jessica Mayhew - Someone Else's Photograph (Crystal Clear Creators)
Charles Lauder Jr - Bleeds (Crystal Clear Creators)
Roy Marshall - Gopagilla (Crystal Clear Creators)
Silent Spring Revisited - Conor Jameson (pre-publication proof)

A conversation with Mark Howard Jones

 

It’s a fortunate day when you find out your boss shares your regard for the weird fiction of HP Lovecraft. Back in the late 1990s, that’s what happened to me when I was working at the Western Mail and Echo in Cardiff.

Mark Howard Jones, who was my chief sub-editor, has since become a full-time writer, with his most recent book, Songs From Spider Street coming highly recommended by no less an authority than Ray Bradbury. I talked to him about his work…

I wanted to start by asking how you go about getting short stories, and especially ‘genre’ short stories (we'll get on to my problems with that label later) published? From the outside, I get the impression that there are even fewer outlets for short stories than for poems.

Getting short stories into print is inevitably an uphill struggle because Britain is such a small place with so few magazines that publish fiction. The outlets that do exist often seem to favour their friends so, if you haven't fallen down in a drunken heap with the editor at some stage, it's highly unlikely you'll be published by them.

But persistence and the discovery of the odd discerning editor are the keys to publication, I think. I'm getting more and more work published in America, where there are a greater number of outlets of course.

Incidentally, I don't see myself as writing ‘genre’ stories. I think genres are useful only to publishers, booksellers and librarians, to be honest. But if you steer clear of using different genre ideas in your writing (for whatever reason) it’s like only ever cooking with one or two ingredients; you won’t starve...you’ll just wish you had.

I agree about that term ‘genre’, or at least the way it’s used to try to separate so-called literary fiction from everything else. I can remember the first time I ever read a piece of writing and enjoyed it for the quality of the writing itself – it was a short story by Ray Bradbury, in the Readers’ Digest, when I was about 11. It was only years later that I realised he tended to get sidelined by critics as a sci-fi writer. Does that sort of separation in fiction still go on as much as it appears from the outside?

I think it does but the edges are finally beginning to blur, thankfully. I’ve been published in ‘genre’ magazines and anthologies simply because they were willing to publish my work. But there are other facets of my work that they wouldn’t have touched with a bargepole.

While I admit I admire writers such as Machen, Lovecraft, Dino Buzzati, Ballard, and Bradbury, I've also absorbed a lot of influences from surrealism, magic realism, expression and other literary movements.

And 'literary fiction' (an absurd label!) has now fallen into its own trap and become a genre itself, of course.

So can you recommend some good eclectic, open-minded mags and webzines for writers and readers? Short stories seem to be skimming even lower under the radar than poems, these days.

Haha. That's asking me to cut my throat really, isn't it? Rather than play favourites I'll tell you which magazines I enjoy personally at the moment.

In this country I always try and read Dream Catcher, Midnight Street, Estronomicon, Sein und Werden, Triquorum (though I think that might sadly be dead now), 3 AM, Black Static, Theaker's Fiction Quarterly, Polluto and Wordland. My favorites across the Atlantic are Weird Tales (still going after all these years!), Medulla Review, Weird Fiction Review, Bare Bone, The Dream People, and Night Train.

There are probably a lot more I should be reading but until they add another two hours to each day, I’ll stick with the ones I’ve listed.

Following on from that answer of yours, I’d like to ask more about writing processes. How do you work, typically? I’m very conscious of the fact that, although I try not to have any little rituals or anything that I follow, I nearly always end up writing in the same place, at the same time, etc.

I don’t have any method or rituals. Other than scribbling things down on pieces of paper that are too small.

I can’t sit in front of a blank page and I’m a little suspicious of those writers who claim to write every single day; if they really did write as much as they say they do, then they’d have around 9 novels by the end of the year!

No, I just write where and when I need to. I generally let things ferment in the back of my brain until they’re ready to be written. Having said that, I’ve noticed that I do respond well to deadlines. Maybe that’s my journalistic background coming out.

And what about revision? I find that I leave poems longer and longer before going back to them these days, but is that easy to do with short stories? I’d be terrified that the longer I left it the harder I’d find it to pick up the threads...

Generally, I try to do any revision within a few days. But the longest period I’ve left between writing (most of) a story and revising it is five years. The story ended up being very different to the one I began writing and has proved to be one of the most popular in my collection Songs From Spider Street. So maybe that should tell me something.

It wouldn’t be practical to leave all my revision that long, of course. I’m slow enough finishing stories as it is and, unless I discover the secret of immortality, one collection every 50 years just isn't practical.

What about that moment of inspiration? Do you scribble ideas down on the backs of beer mats, or do you trust them to stay with you?

I owe everything to small bits of paper torn off the edges of forms, letters, magazines and so on, which I place on my chair so that I won’t miss them the next time I sit at my computer to write.

But I do carry ideas and the shapes of stories in my head for a long time – sometimes a year or two – before I get around to actually writing them down. I seem to have a good memory for that sort of thing but often forget to put on my shoes before leaving the house.

And if it doesn’t sound too obvious, where do you get your ideas from? Obviously influences come into that a bit, but there’s a lot in your stories that has no obvious point of origin.

That's difficult to say. And I'll take your second comment as a compliment, by the way!

I seem to have lost a lot of people in my life, so I write about that, one way or another. I just write what I feel needs to be written. It’s not about stories (although there’s always a story there because people need to be engaged and entertained) but it is about things that can’t always be spoken of directly – things that are only seen out of the corner of the mind’s eye. If I can capture some of those things on the page, I’m happy.

What about those influences? Have you been compared to any writers in particular? (I don’t think I’ve ever met a writer who doesn’t like being compared to others at least sometimes).

Yes, I’ve been compared to quite a few other writers, though I take that all with a pinch of salt, to be honest.

One story of mine that people mention a lot is The Ice Horse. Most of that was written in the same room in Portmeirion where Noel Coward wrote Blithe Spirit, so maybe I was channelling him when I wrote it. Though nobody’s ever compared me to him – yet!

I wondered too about how you first started writing? I think I started writing poetry by writing lyrics for bands that didn’t exist, but writing prose fiction seems to me to demand a more deliberate and definite starting point.

Well I was often ill as a child so I spent a lot of time on my own, reading. I loved science fiction in particular. You could say my ABC was Aldiss, Ballard and Clarke.

At the age of 9 I decided I wanted to be a writer. So I tried and tried until finally, at about the age of 39, I succeeded in putting something on paper that had a beginning, middle and end that made some sort of sense. Learning the actual mechanics of writing was simply trial and error, you could say.

Incidentally, I agree with Jim Thompson who said there are many ways to write a story but only one plot – things are not as they seem.

I thought that one of the strengths of Songs From Spider Street was that you have some great opening sentences, opening paragraphs, often – “I’ve been blackmailing myself for years”, “There he is again; the twin that I’m not one half of”, for example. Are lines like that ever the kindling point of the whole story? I’ve had poems grow out of opening lines like that, but I’m also always very conscious that you can get a bit too enamoured of a particular line, as a writer. Is it the same with short story writing?

Sometimes it works that way. But I often add the first line of a story when I’m halfway through writing it, or even once I’ve finished the rest of it. I don’t think either of those examples were the starting point of the stories, in fact.

And, yes, I’ve come up with a ‘good line’ that I simply had to change later because it no longer fitted the story. To be honest, it’s often more to do with mental images with me – only later do I ‘translate’ those images into words. I went to art college straight after school, so I’ve always found the visual arts quite inspiring.

The second of those openers you quoted makes no sense at all, of course. But that was in fitting with the narrator’s mental state.

Another great strength, I thought, was that there’s a very European feel to a lot of the book – the likes of Kafka seem as much an influence on it as the American influences that seem to dominate a lot of fiction of this sort. Would that be fair?

It’s really good to hear someone pick up on that. A lot of editors I’ve dealt with seem to have only read literature by British or American authors. And then, only relatively recent ones.

I’ve read a lot of European authors, thanks initially to the wonderful library in the town where I grew up (the librarian was the poet Harri Webb). I suppose that’s bound to leak out in my writing. Two particular favorites of mine are De Maupassant and Dino Buzatti, though there are many, many more inspiring authors from Europe.

Farther afield, I’ve found Borges, Bioy Casares and Mishima to be among my favourites.

A couple of questions about particular favourite stories, firstly Heart Is Where The Home Is. I think this was probably the standout story for me – could you tell me a bit about its genesis?

That was written to some guidelines issued by a magazine. They gave you a title – A Steampunk Orange – and wanted your take on that.

In 1923 the Swiss architect Le Corbusier came up with the slogan ‘A house is a machine for living in’. I decided to take him literally. The mechanical girl has appeared in lots of places, of course, but most memorably for me in ETA Hoffmann’s 1816 tale The Sandman. In fact, that may have been where she cropped up first.

So, the idea for the story simply came out of the collision of those two ideas.

And then The Condition. I love the little prose poem-like passages that bookend it, and I like how much is compressed into that story. That economic, taut style is there in a lot of your writing – do you hone it back to that, or is it how it’s written in the first place?

That’s just how it comes out. In fact, I’ve sometimes had complaints from editors that my stuff is too short.

I’ve always admired and read writers who can say a lot with very little. Angela Carter’s stories were an early influence and later I discovered Alice Munro, who can say more in one story than most other authors do in five novels.

I also love the work of VS Pritchett. And I think I learned something from Richard Brautigan’s brilliant Revenge Of The Lawn - his one paragraph story The Scarlatti Tilt is a masterclass in storytelling brevity!

Finally, the structure of the whole book is great. Again I like the way the Spider Street stories bookend it, but I also like the fact that there are lots of threads running from story to story without the themes becoming too overpowering. Was the book conceived that way, or was it more a case of it coalescing around some of the key stories.

No it didn’t spring to life fully formed, I’m afraid, though I did think carefully about the sequence of the stories (which are drawn from a period of about five or six years). It can be read as a portmanteau novel by starting at Page One and working straight through it, or you can ignore the ‘bookend’ stories and just dip into it as a short story collection.

I’ve been told by several people that if you adopt the former approach it has a lot more power. Stupidly, I’ve not learned that lesson and my next book will be a collection of stories with just the covers to hold them together.

The Condition, by Steve Upham