Creative Digest #1: Summer reading; Jenny Offill's climate fiction; he said/she said

The first edition of our departmental Substack gives a taste of what we've been reading over the summer, and how that might inform our teaching in the new term.

Welcome to the first edition of Creative Digest, the new Substack from the Creative Writing team at City, University of London, where we teach on undergrad and postgrad degrees in the School of Communication and Creativity. In this edition you’ll find:

• Joe Thomas, asking what we want from our summer reading

• Rebecca Tamás, on Jenny Offill’s climate fiction

• Jonathan Gibbs, on breaking craft rules around dialogue

Creative Digest is a collaboratively written Substack that we’ll send out over the academic year, once every three weeks to start with. It will have different people writing each time, and tackling different topics and using formats and approaches: you might find mini-craft essays, book reviews and close readings, and reflections on the teaching of creative writing. It’s designed to give readers an insight into what it’s like learning on our degree programmes, and to give us as teachers an opportunity to draw connections between our academic and creative practice. We hope your enjoy it!

On the Holiday Reading Experience

by Joe Thomas

I spend a great deal of time working out what I am going to read when I’m on holiday. Far too much time. Piles of books are arranged and rearranged by my bed; lists are compiled in my notebook; it’s a serious business. When you write books and teach the writing – and reading – of books for a living, reading for pure pleasure can feel freighted: how can you read purely for pleasure if you’re always evaluating how an author does something, or why, or what you might learn from them?

The way I read for pleasure – or try to – is to seek out what I call a holiday reading experience. By this I mean a novel – and it’s normally a novel – that I will read in the garden or by the fire without distraction, a novel that will demand I read it to such an extent I’ll sneak off on my own, avoid childcare responsibilities (to a point!), or family socialising to do so.

None of this is especially surprising or original, I know. But what I have managed to do over the last four years – and this coincides with becoming a parent, though so do a lot of things – is identify, clearly, two characteristics of novels that might provide the immersive ‘experience’ I crave. Here they are:

1. They need to be big, ambitious novels of scope and length, preferably over 600 pages long, preferably covering some key historical period or moment within those 600 pages.

2. They need to have style and swagger, confidence and brashness, the sacred and the profane, high politics and low gossip.

I want my holiday reading experience to give me an experience akin to that I had when I read A Place of Greater Safety and Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel, Underworld by Don DeLillo, American Tabloid by James Ellroy, A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James, or The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow. That is: enthralled and thrilled, energised and excited.

Perhaps that’s what I want from any novel, any time, in fact.

This summer, my reading experiences were Paul Murray (The Bee Sting), Bret Easton Ellis (The Shards), Mick Herron (Slow Horses), and, best of all, Tessa Hadley (The Past). It was a good holiday. (Only two of these books are over 600 pages long…)

So what was it that made the Tessa Hadley the best reading experience of the summer? I think it comes down to immersion, to feeling deeply involved in the world of the novel.

• Paul Murray’s rotating narrator structure, each section narrated by a different family member, creates an immersive quality through its completeness; everyone in the family is included, all aspects of family life accounted for (and Murray creates tension within this structure through breaking off from a narrator at a key moment, the reader safe in the knowledge that they’ll come back to them in good time; a classic Jonathan Franzen technique).

• Bret Easton Ellis is immersive through repetition of (questionable, less questionable) behaviours: we see his characters do the same things with the same people again and again and again so that we become habitually involved, immersed in the world via this repetition.

• Mick Herron has a cast of misfits working together and shares a group narrator approach with Paul Murray, though the lack of a strict order means Herron can play around with who speaks when, use this for plot purposes and an immersion is created through this technique: the very clear signposting of plot points.

• Tessa Hadley, though, is immersive. I think, due to her characters and their interiority; she uses free indirect discourse and moves between her characters in such a smooth and well-polished manner, their world is both accessible and alive, perfectly formed.

Of course, I didn’t think about any of this while actually reading the novels: the point of the summer reading experience…

Writing about climate crisis: Jenny Offill’s Weather

by Rebecca Tamás 

Amitav Ghosh, in his 2016 book The Great Derangement, argued that literature, and fiction in particular, was failing to engage properly with climate change and the world-shifting crisis of global heating, biodiversity and extinction. He said: “It is certain in any case that these are not ordinary times: the events that mark them are not easily accommodated in the deliberately prosaic world of serious prose fiction.” He felt that ‘traditional’ forms of the novel, with their expectations of resolution and completion, weren’t able to absorb the strange shape of our new situation. Yet, since Ghosh’s bleak assessment of fiction’s engagement with the biggest crisis of our time, the literary landscape has radically changed – and Cli-Fi has come into the ascendant. 

Cli-Fi (or ‘Climate Fiction’ or ‘Environmental Fiction’), responds to the particular environmental anxieties and perspectives of our time. It also challenges a ‘traditional’ Western view of nature, which places nature in a hierarchy under human beings. No longer is nature seem as something ‘out there,’ with animals and plants sitting below humans in a ‘chain of being.’ There is more of a sense that nonhuman beings and things might have rights, and that we might have a responsibility, to other humans and nonhumans, to take care of and protect the environment. No longer is the biblical perspective, where humans rule nature and take what they want, quite so prevalent. The finite nature of the environment is more apparent, and our reliance on, and intimacy with, the natural world is much more obvious. As eco-philosopher Timothy Morton says, “The ecological crisis we face is so obvious that it becomes easy -- for some, strangely or frighteningly easy -- to join the dots and see that everything is interconnected. This is the ecological thought. And the more we consider it, the more our world opens up.” It is this ‘ecological thought’ that feels so key to the text I want to recommend, Jenny Offill’s original and beautiful 2020 novel Weather, a book that confronts us with the painful intimacy we share with the natural world – its agency and its independence from us, and our vulnerability to it. 

Weather is a book about climate change, but it does not do the things we might expect from a book on that subject. It is not didactic, and it does not try and ‘convince’ us of an argument. Rather Weather is a novel reckoning with the simultaneity of daily life and global crisis.  

The novel dramatises the mundane, painful anxiety of the narrator Lizzie, who is preoccupied by the apocalyptic horizon of climate change, the dark terror at the centre of the novel, and at the same time overwhelmed and distracted by the “feeling of daily life.” Lizzie understands — or at least, enacts — the truth that we inhabit multiple scales of experience at the same time: from the minutiae of school drop-offs and P.T.A. activism to the frictions of our personal relationships, all the way to the geological immensity of our (not so slowly) corroding planet. Climate change is, in this novel, not something distant and abstract, a subject for governments and NGO’s; but a painful part of daily life, where the narrator moves between the tiny scale of her own life and problems, and the huge pressing catastrophe, and guilt, at the centre of our global reality. For Lizzie, fear of climate crisis ties up with her own personal fears about family failure, ageing and weakness: “… one day I have to run to catch a bus. I am so out of breath when I get there that I know in a flash all my preparations for the apocalypse are doomed. I will die early and ignobly.”

The central question of the novel seems to be - How do we live under the belief that we are at the end of the world? How do we live our lives, care for our families, parents, our work and loves, from within the apocalypse of the Anthropocene? Instead of answering this question, the author simply reveals it — reflecting back the contemporary experience of terror and confusion that climate collapse brings. This is not a novel with all the answers, but one that brings painful attention to the current state of things. It shows the intimate way that we live with catastrophe, and the strange experience of being part of a humanity that is both destroying, and being destroyed by, a damaged natural world.  

To think about the environmental crisis in this original way — reflecting its contemporary anxiety and experience, Offill makes use of an innovative contemporary literary form – the fragment. Offill’s whittled-down narrative bursts seem to be ideal vessels for the daily experience of scale-shifting they document — the vertigo of moving between the claustrophobia of domestic discontent and the impossibly immense horizon of global catastrophe. Weather’s broken narrative illuminates not a clear and conclusive plot, but life’s unexpected details;— the crumpled paper receipts, the dummy dropped on the sidewalk, the key whose lock you can’t remember. These bits and bobs highlight “the feeling of daily life,” but their mundane outlines are lit by something more like a devastating explosion. There is a collapse of scale here — where the delicate, fragmentary details only highlight what cannot be looked at directly — the potential collapse of the planet. 

Formal experimentation allows Offill to explore this topic in a way that’s both intimate and emotionally powerful. The domesticity of the anxiety ridden narrator takes us away from the abstraction of such a huge topic (climate change) and makes us feel its reality, its capacity for destruction and transformation. In doing so, it awakens us to the nature of the moment in which we live, and asks – what will we make of it? 

He said, she said: breaking the rules around writing dialogue

by Jonathan Gibbs

Creative Writing pedagogy is mostly about conventions, rather than rules. You’re allowed to break them, is the basic idea, so long as there’s a good reason to do it. So when we teach students about dialogue presentation, and the use of speech tags, we’re teaching them not what they must do, but what will most probably work best, most of the time.

We’re talking here, of course, about the ‘invisible said’ – that bland, common-as-muck, bargain-basement speech tag that creative writing teachers encourage students to use, instead of something more lively or characterful. We don’t like to see characters whispering, yelling or laughing their words, let alone smiling them, frowning them or shrugging them. Let your characters just say things, damn it, and get on with the story.

But of course, writers – writers out there in the world, published writers – break this ‘rule’, if rule it is. Not all the time, but enough to be worth noting. One MA student last year (hi Claire!) took great pleasure in pointing out rule-breakers she stumbled across in her reading. Here are a couple that she sent me:

“Don’t talk about Schubert, I winced.”

(Deborah Levy, August Blue, p74 if you want to check it out)

"‘It's not the same as having your own pool,’ Evan was always sighing, as if to let Zoe know that, as with Zoe, there were still things she, Evan, had to do without.”

(Lorrie Moore, ‘You’re Ugly, Too’, p382 in the Collected Stories)

I replied to Claire that, well, if Levy and Moore do it, then of course it’s fine – though I pointed out that both of these are isolated examples in the texts they come from, and are potentially hedged around with ironic intention. Evan ‘sighing’ her words might be taken as a gently critical character note, as if only ‘bad’ or laughable characters would perform such a faux pas as ‘sighing’ their dialogue, and in a literary story too!

Then, over the summer, I read Nicola Barker’s new story, ‘TonyInterruptor’, in Granta 164: Last Notes, which you can read online here. This is a wonderfully funny story (or extract? I’m not sure) about a man who interrupts an improvisatory free-jazz performance, denouncing the performers and audience for not being “honest”, and then goes on to make a career of this provocative Emperor’s New Clothes-ism.

And, all the way through, Barker uses ‘improper’ speech tags. Characters shrug words, frown them, muse them, guffaw them. They demand them and note them, snarl and snap them, whisper, chuckle and snort them. There are others, but I’ll stop there. It’s like a bingo card of disallowed speech tags, and Barker gets Full House in record time.

Said and says are used once each.

Echoes is used – if further proof of Barker’s intention were needed – twice.

All this frowning, snarling and snorting is done by the bunch of virtuoso – but also touchy, belligerent and self-obsessed – musicians whose pretensions are so painfully punctured by Tony, as his intervention causes ructions in their fragile relationships. They use their dialogue to act out their feelings towards each other. Every utterance, as much as every ferociously anarchic trumpet solo they throw out on stage, is a performance, a reaction, a critique, a raw howl of pained self-expression. And, in creative writing terms, it absolutely works. It brings them alive, on the page, as the minor monsters they are.

So, yes, Barker is showing us: you can break the rules (if rules they are) but break them well, and manifestly, and with a point.

***

Thanks for reading! Do get in touch if you have any questions or comments. If you want to find out more about the programmes offering Creative Writing teaching at City, University of London, then do explore here:

• BA English

• MA Creative Writing

• MFA Creative Writing

• MA Creative Writing and Publishing

• And find details of open days and evenings, and taster sessions, here.

Contributing writers:

• Jonathan Gibbs is the author of Randall, The Large Door and Spring Journal. He is Programme Director for the MA/MFA Creative Writing at City, and is looking forward to teaching The Contemporary Essay in the coming term.

• Rebecca Tamás is the author of Strangers and Witch, and co-editor of Spells: 21st-Century Occult Poetry. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing.

• Joe Thomas is the author of White Riot, Brazilian Pyscho, Bent and other novels. He is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, and is excited to teach the Creative Writing Workshop module, and Working as a Writer, an industry guide for writers

Department news:

Lecturer in Creative Writing Deepa Anappara's second novel titled The Last of Earth, set in mid-nineteenth century Tibet, will be published by Oneworld in the UK in March 2025, and by Random House in the US. More details can be found here.

Jonathan Gibbs has a chapter in the newly published Edinburgh Companion to Don DeLillo and the Arts (EOP), entitled 'The Art Encounter', looking at the way characters in DeLillo's novels confront and interact with artworks in formal and informal settings in novels such as Underworld, Mao II, Falling Man and Running Dog.

Jonathan also has an essay in newly published anthology of writing on film, The Hinge of a Metaphor, edited by Richard Skinner. His essay, 'The End of the Affair: Hal Hartley's Amateur' begins: "I’ve been trying to work out when it was that I fell out of love with cinema. I don’t know precisely the moment of disillusionment, but I think I can identify the high-water mark of my grand affair with the form, which in retrospect seems more like an adolescent crush..."

Jonathan will be reading from the essay at a book launch next month at Burley Fisher Books, Kingsland Road. Thursday 26th October, 6.30pm. Details here.