Creative Digest #7: What diversity entails; the personal and the historical; 'the story is not elsewhere'
The latest edition of our departmental Substack looks at how to think about diversity and decolonisation, the process of aligning fiction to personal history, and a lesson from a poet-turned-novelist.
Welcome to the seventh 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 you enjoy it.
Upcoming event:
Thursday 7th March, 5.30pm: Postgraduate online taster session – Rebecca Tamás looks at Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and asks what lessons creative nonfiction writers can take from this brilliant, genre-defying memoir. Register for your free place here
Diversity and decolonisation – what do they entail?
By Deepa Anappara
Once, during the course of a humiliating interview for a teaching position I eventually didn’t secure, one of the academics asked me: ‘You speak about diversity in reading lists—but all our students are white and middle-class. Why would they be interested in what you’re teaching?’ The assumption that the white experience is universal while those of people of colour is particular has been encoded into discussions around literature and writing for so long, this academic felt entirely comfortable raising a dubious question in front of his colleagues. (Worse, I couldn’t come up with a good answer—as is often the case when confronted with racism, I can think of a clever retort only hours after the fact.)
Unlike that place, which will forever go unnamed, much attention is paid at City to decolonising the syllabus, reflecting the diversity of its student body—and I don’t say this only because I work here. In other parts of this country, however, I understand this isn’t always the case. An academic told me recently that her students were perplexed that her reading lists introduced them to writers from around the world. Where is Chekhov and Hemingway, they wanted to know.
Another academic spoke of the difficulties of finding ways to discuss structure that went beyond popular narrative arcs like the hero’s journey. I was reminded of the writer Vida Cruz-Borja’s piece on the inactive protagonist (published in Fantasy magazine and reprinted in the essay collection I co-edited, titled Letters to a Writer of Colour), in which she argues that not all heroes have to scale mountains on their quests. Marginalised people, by standing the ground, can overcome obstacles and thus become the mountain themselves, she writes. Such discussions, on narrative shapes that deviate from the norm, should be part of creative writing classes, but often aren’t.
There is a suspicion around these discussions still, visible in tabloid stories about English universities edging out Shakespeare to teach M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong, as if there’s no possibility the two can co-exist. A commitment to diversity is also equated with lowering standards; students feel they have to read books that haven’t earned their place in the canon. Part of what I hope to achieve with my reading lists is to encourage students to discuss the creation of this canon, and the unequal dynamics of power and economics that often still decides which books acquire canonical status. If students are sometimes puzzled by the texts they encounter, I hope they are also challenged.
To discuss these questions, I, along with Farhana Shaikh, publisher of Dahlia Books and lecturer in marketing at De Montfort University, will be organising a conference addressing decolonisation in creative writing pedagogy and publishing later this year. The two of us have been talking about it for over a year now, in part because decolonisation and diversity have become buzzwords in academia and publishing. But do words really translate into actions? I hope to hear, and learn, from peers who have diversified their reading lists and decolonised their classrooms. Which strategies have worked? How do they deal with pushback? Are these efforts, in some parts of this country at least, apparently doomed by the lack of diversity in the student population? (Why that is the case is a question for another piece.) I am under no illusion that a conference will magically solve our problems, but at the very least, I hope it will lead to the creation of a network that academics, researchers, and writers can lean on for support.
Air thick with smoke – on the personal and the historical
By Joe Thomas
For this post, I’m going to write about writing about me. Well, not quite: I’m going to reflect on what it has meant to write about aspects of my life – my childhood, specifically – in the context of a series of political crime novels. Two of my colleagues – Jessica and Deepa – were guests in my MFA class last term, and both of them spoke insightfully about personal truth in fiction, i.e., the difference between fact and truth and how writing fiction can bring out truth in a non-factual scenario. This might include writing about family, or friends, or it might be thinking about how our work outside of writing has been informative, thinking about what your fictional truth is based on. This month, my most recent novel, Red Menace, was published, and the excitement of this is tempered by anxieties over how publication might go, and reflection on whether the novel is actually any good. Here are some connected thoughts on writing about what is true and what really happened.
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I was born in Hackney in 1977 and for 25 years I wanted to leave. Now, it’s an aspirational address, gentrified and expensive. I was born in Hackney Mothers’ Hospital on Lower Clapton Road which was later to become known as ‘Murder Mile’. I lived on Mildenhall Road, just down from Clapton Pond. I wrote White Riot to try and better understand the Hackney I grew up in, the time and place, and how the borough, it seems to me, is something of a lightning rod for the political and social currents of the country. I wrote Red Menace to extend the geographical focus, to widen it to other areas of east and north London.
Red Menace is a historical, social crime novel about police corruption, institutional racism, the devastating effects of Thatcherism, and the counter-cultural movement of the ‘80’s. The novel takes in Live Aid, the Broadwater Farm uprising, the Wapping Dispute and, like White Riot, is rooted in the Hackney experience of the 1980s. Mark Sanderson, writing in the Times, called White Riot, ‘a love letter to London, seething with outrage’. In Red Menace, the love is still there, but I think the outrage is intensified.
I remember the Hackney Show on Hackney Downs, the Labour Club in Dalston, steel bands and heavy reggae, kids in ‘I Love ILEA’ and GLC t-shirts, Granny’s takeaway and Chimes nightclub, where, for a period, serious violence was a regular occurrence.
In the novel, I write about the Hackney Show of 1986, one I went to, and the fictionalising of it is an insight into how I accessed sensual memories, sights and sounds, smells and tastes to try to recreate – and reimagine, resurrect – Hackney in the 1980s.
Here’s an edited extract from the novel that I think is instructive:
“Over the weekend, the football season safely finished for another year, there’d been the festival up on Hackney Downs, the Hackney Show. Fairground games and food, Jean Breeze and Dennis Bovell, the London All Stars Steels and the Perpetual Beauty Carnival Club, stunts, stalls and side shows –
Across the park, on the north side, a little bit away from the festivities, a tent emitting pounding reggae, pulsating dub.
He and the boy had wandered over towards it, the towers of the Nightingale Estate to their right, Hackney Downs School to their left –
The tent shook with the soundsystem, the sides flapping, the roof lifting and falling, one or two men dancing on their own just outside it, shirts off and bare feet, eyes red, eyes wild –
Jon felt the bass tearing through him. The boy slowed down a touch as they approached.
Jon shook his head and put a hand on his shoulder. The boy close, like when he was a shy toddler, wrapping himself around Jon’s leg, pouting.
The volume and depth of the music made the lights shake and flash.
Air thick with smoke –
Jon seeing the boy’s eyes start to water, not a great deal else.
They stayed about fifteen minutes, Jon recognising a Steel Pulse track that had been stripped right down and then powered right up, an MC over the top of it, that was enough.
On the way out, one of the men winked at the boy, grinned.
‘Welcome to Jamaica,’ he said.”
All of this is true, all of this happened, but how much more is there that I can’t remember?
Writing about your own past in the context of a transparently political novel, a novel unashamedly interrogating society, does something to your own history; if you can get that right, then it’s a good start.
‘The story is not elsewhere’
By Jessica Andrews
Last week, I went to see poet Andrew McMillan speak about his debut novel, Pity. This multi-voice novel, set in an ex-mining town in South Yorkshire, is deftly told from the perspectives of three generations of one family. It is also interspersed with sections narrated by anonymous bystanders, fieldnotes from a team of academics who are running a local project on urban memory, and a lyrical refrain from the past which portrays the bruising, repetitive work of coal mining. These narratives attempt to reconcile the fractured identity of the town, in the wake of a collective trauma, amid the legacy of de-industrialisation.
During the event, an audience member asked a question about McMillan’s writing process, to which he replied,
‘The story is not elsewhere; it is inside of you.’
This struck me as an important thing to remember. I often see students struggling with narrative threads and character construction, skirting around themes and reaching blindly for something ‘great’ or ‘interesting’ which they believe to be beyond themselves, and therefore ‘universal.’ I have been there myself, feeling in the dark for something bigger and more important than my own perspective, which tells the story of the world, and is therefore worthy of literature.
This idea is partly influenced by the existence of the western literary canon. In 1994, literary critic Harold Bloom published a list of 26 authors whom he believed were widely acknowledged as the most influential authors of western literature throughout history. This list was rightly criticised and contested (and later expanded), however the influence of the writers he named, and the role of their work in shaping our definitions of ‘literature’, must also be acknowledged. Writers such as Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Milton, Dickens, Austen, Eliot, Dickinson, Joyce and Woolf, to name a few, have had a huge influence on western literary culture. It is widely accepted that their work engages with ‘important’ ideas, connecting with a world beyond their novels, across time.
Today, there is growing awareness of the need for a greater diversity of voices within literary culture. Although there is still much political work to be done to achieve this, we have reached an understanding that we must acknowledge the social inequalities which allowed these canonical writers to reach prominence. We must consider legacies of colonialism, gender inequality, classism, homophobia and ableism in our historical assessment of literature. It is right to question the notion of the ‘universal’ novel and interrogate our own biases and subjectivities, refusing the narrow definition of literature we have inherited.
As a result of the elitism of traditional western literary culture, we might read these writers and feel that the lives and stories represented on the page are very distant from our own, leading us to believe that narratives which are closer to our own experiences are undeserving of literature. Yet, each of these canonical writers is a product of their own time, drawing on elements of their own experiences, ideologies, and the eras they moved through. Many of Shakespeare’s plays reflect the fears and concerns of Elizabethan society. Milton’s Paradise Lost echoes his republican political views and non-conformist theological opinions. Austen’s novels frequently critique the 18th century dependence of women on marriage for socio-economic security, and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man criticises Catholic and Irish conventions the author himself grew up with.
In other words, these garlanded writers reached inside of their own experiences. They saw literature in their own lives, and in the stories of the people around them. We ought to think critically and contextually about the means through which they were able to make time for writing and publish their work. However, we should not internalise the elitism of the literary canon, which can limit our own literary ambitions. As McMillan put it, Pity is the story of Barnsley in South Yorkshire, but it is also the story of Northumberland, North and South Wales, Cumbria, Kent, the West Midlands, and many other ex-colliery towns and cities in the UK. These stories form the narrative of a country still divided by the effects of de-industrialisation. It is the story of the place where McMillan himself grew up, but it is also a story about contemporary British identity.
This doesn’t mean that we must write autobiographically, or feel the burden of representation, reduced to a set of identity markers. Rather, a novel’s content is produced by a complex intersection of cultures, interests, experiences, circumstances and beliefs, which are unique to the author. Instead of reaching beyond ourselves, towards something we cannot quite grasp, we must turn inwards, reflecting on our own position in the world, and how this connects to the lives and stories around us. The story is not elsewhere; it is inside of you.
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:
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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 is teaching The Novel and the Creative Writing Workshop this 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 is teaching the Creative Writing Workshop this term.
Joe Thomas is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and is the author of White Riot, Red Menace, Brazilian Pyscho, Bent and other novels. He is teaching the Working as a Writer module this term.
Department news:
Joe Thomas’s new novel, Red Menace, is published 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.
Deepa is also co-organising a conference on decolonisation in Creative Writing teaching and publishing with Farhana Shaikh, an editor and lecturer in Publishing at De Montfort University. Please see here for a call for abstracts.