Creative Digest #5: end-of-the-year round-up: favourite books and teaching highlights
The fifth edition of our departmental Substack gives City's Creative Writing lecturers the chance to look back over their year for reading and teaching highlights
Welcome to the fifth edition of Creative Digest, the 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. We hope your enjoy it
Deepa Anappara on Brinda Charry and Ciaran Thapar
Brinda Charry’s The East Indian, published by Scribe earlier this year, is set in the early 1600s and tells the story of a young boy from the Coromandel Coast in South India who becomes an indentured labourer in a Virginia plantation. Inspired by a name in the ledger that pointed to the first known East Indian in North America, Charry recreates the boy’s life on the page with vivid, specific detail. Charry’s novel is a reminder of how the best of historical fiction can evoke the lives of those erased from the archives because of the colour of their skin and the attitudes of their colonial masters, and she does this while telling a cracking good story too.
This term, I taught an extract from Ciaran Thapar’s Cut Short: Why We’re Failing Our Youth – and How to Fix It (Viking, 2021), a compelling work on youth violence that follows a cast of characters as they navigate school and London streets. Thapar visited my class to speak to the students about his research and writing, and an interesting discussion followed about ethics and journalism. This term the students have been reflecting on the power a journalist has over the subject – Janet Malcolm famously said the profession was ‘indefensible’ – but Thapar offered what I thought could be a counterpoint: interviews conducted such that the process becomes much more of a collaboration, and the person interviewed has as much agency as the interviewer. An extract from his book can be found here: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jun/12/did-they-give-life-no-so-how-can-they-take-it-on-the-frontline-of-knife
‘Did they give life? No! So how can they take it?’: on the frontline of knife crime
Jessica Andrews on Nathalie Olah and Max Porter
This year, I really enjoyed Bad Taste: Or the Politics of Ugliness by Nathalie Olah, which explores social class through the notion of taste. The book opens in the author’s local Blockbuster video shop in the 90s, with a description of a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Pamela Anderson in the film Barb Wire. Olah presents this image as a symbol of working-class femininity through its boldness and ferocity, shaping the book’s central interrogation of what is deemed to be ‘classy’ or ‘trashy’ by tastemakers who uphold social hierarchies.
This book deconstructs middle-class taste markers and considers the ways in which working-class people are taught to be ashamed of the ‘tacky’ aesthetics of their own lives. Figures such as Pamela Anderson and Dolly Parton, who famously said - that’s what I want to be when I grow up. Trash - resist this hierarchy, claiming exuberance and ‘tastelessness’ as power. Bad Taste examines pop culture, fashion trends and social media discourse, forming a vital contribution to contemporary understanding of the power structures which dictate many aspects of our lives.
I loved teaching Grief is a Thing with Feathers by Max Porter this year. This book often challenges and confronts students, disrupting their expectations and expanding their definitions of form. My class engaged deeply with the innovative use of language and complex intertextuality at work in this novella, learning how to meet a piece of fiction on its own terms. I believe that discomfort, or a position of unknowingness, is an important place for us to be as writers, as it introduces us to new possibilities. Experimental work asks us to interrogate our own subjectivities, which allows us to develop our own voice and style. Grief is a potent evocation of loss, family and language and my students called it deceptively simple, moving and alive.
Jonathan Gibbs on Tessa Hadley and Marina Benjamin
One of my books of the year has been After the Funeral, the fourth short story collection by Tessa Hadley. For those that don’t know her, Hadley is a British writer who has attained that particular pinnacle in the literary world of being a New Yorker writer. The magazine has published 31 of her stories in the past twenty years, including seven of the twelve stories in this latest collection. My take is that the journal does a bit of a number on its non-fiction writers – the long reads all ending up reading a bit the same – that its fiction writers escape. Or if they don’t, then it’s a style that suits Hadley just fine. These are literary stories from the middle ground: white, mostly middle-class characters seen through limpid, exquisitely observed close-third person prose. But equally they’re stories that jump and squirm in your hands. Hadley is the master of the unexpected leap in time, the jump sideways into the shoes of a new narrator, the narrative trapdoor that opens under the characters. Two of the collection’s best stories – ‘After the Funeral’ and ‘Funny Little Snake’ – were New Yorker stories, so if you’ve never read her, why not make them two of your six free stories a month from the website.
One highlight of my teaching this year was having writer and editor Marina Benjamin come into my Contemporary Essay class on the MA Creative Writing. As well as talking to the students about her career, Marina went in detail through two essays, one of her own (‘Personal Growth’, available on the Granta website) and one that she edited for Aeon, Susanna Crossman’s ‘The Utopia Machine’. She was so insightful about both processes, gave excellent recommendations (Julia Blackburn, Dea Birkett, Nigel Slater’s Toast) and introduced a new word to me: ‘kludge’, as in ‘kludging’ parts of an essay together.
Rebecca Tamás on creative non-fiction in 2023
As one of the lecturers responsible for the Nonfiction pathway of our Creative Writing postgraduate degrees, I thought I’d focus my final post of the year on some of my best creative nonfiction books of 2023!
My creative nonfiction books of year are –
Lovebug, by Daisy Lafarge (Peninsula Press)— infection, love, and the permeable space where human and nonhuman meet, energise this beautifully written and deeply intelligent reworking of our creaturely boundaries. Theory, memoir and environmental writing collide in a book that feels utterly fresh and original.
A Flat Place, by Noreen Masud (Penguin)— an evocative, lyrical and stark exploration of trauma and place, that is also a rebuttal to the heteropatriarchal structures of traditional nature writing and its use of nature as human tool or ego boost. Masud’s book is a new kind of nature writing, fiercely potent, and open and alert to nature as a community of beings— finding beauty in the freeing, capacious possibility of flat landscapes.
Arrangements in Blue by Amy Key (Jonathan Cape) – a book of longing, brutal self-examination and the magical solace of Joni Mitchell. This profoundly affecting memoir looks at the way society treats single people, as well as considering the kinds of love which may burn more brightly than romances ever could. A vivid account of the tender, precious work of making a meaningful life.
Vita Contemplativa, by Byung Chul Han, trans Daniel Steur (Polity)— this is a bit of a cheat, as it’s really theory/philosophy, but you won’t read a more beautiful or important book this year. Chul Han argues that without creating space for pause and for rest, our ability to truly connect with ourselves, and with the natural world, will be blunted, degraded and then destroyed. An argument against the relentless pressures of capitalism in our minds, bodies and spirits. A vision of another way of life.
On Trampolining by Rebecca Perry (Makina Books)— a slim, springy and deft memoir that recounts the author’s youth as a competition gymnast, reflecting on the shift from childhood to adulthood, and the delicate, strange and painful journey of the body.
Twelve Words for Moss, by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett (Allen Lane)— A luminous mix of poetry and prose, where the writer explores the strange, undersung world of mosses, at the same time that she considers grief, history and memory. Another book of 2023 that is rewriting what nature writing and environmental writing are, and can become.
My teaching highlight of the year—
Listening to our MA students brilliant dissect the essay 'Speaking/Not Speaking' by Irish contemporary writer Emilie Pine, subtly drawing out the ways in which in its fragmented, episodic structure allows the writer’s childhood memories to come hurtling back in all their visceral power. Their reading allowed me to see the essay and its formal choices in a whole new light. Our students’ ideas are always illuminating.
Joe Thomas on a year of reading
My favourite novels published this year, in no particular order: Trespasses by Louise Kennedy, Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks, Soldier, Sailor by Claire Kilroy, The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis, and The Bee Sting by Paul Murray. In terms of non-fiction, Party Lines by Ed Gillet, which has also been invaluable for researching my next novel. I also admired Red Memory by Tania Branigan very much. I've recently enjoyed three novels published next year: I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning by Keiran Goddard, England is Mine by Nicolas Padamsee, and Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman. And I'm looking forward to reading The Fraud by Zadie Smith, The Enchanters by James Ellroy, and A Thread of Violence by Mark O'Connell over the holiday!
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:
You can find details of open days and evenings, and taster sessions, here.
Contributing writers:
Deepa Anappara is the author of Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line and co-editor of the essay collection Letters to a Writer of Colour. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing and will be teaching The Novel and the Creative Writing Workshop in the spring term.
Jessica Andrews is the author of Milk Teeth and Saltwater, both published by Hodder & Stoughton. She co-runs literary and arts magazine, The Grapevine and co-presents literary podcast, Tender Buttons. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing and has just finished teaching the Short Fiction module.
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.
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 and will be teaching The Non-Fiction Book next term.
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:
Joe Thomas’s next novel, Red Menace, will be published in February 2024 by Quercus. It follows White Riot as the second in a trilogy of novels set in East London, and will be followed by True Blue.
Deepa Anappara's second novel, titled The Last of Earth and 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.