Anyone, Anyone...

So, as part of my MA, there is a substantial amount of work covering the Teaching of Creative Writing, as well as the Writing element.

And tomorrow marks my first major development on that front, as I'm going into a local school to be the 'visiting writer' for their Creative Writing club.

I've had some excellent and inspirational visiting writers recently: Tessa Hadley, Clare Potter, James Smythe and Gwyneth Lewis (the first Welsh Poet Laureate, no less).
Each writer generally sets tasks appropriate to their field of interest, or experience, and  helps us to write more efficiently, more effectively, by sharing tips and techniques.

So I've got a lot to live up to tomorrow. I'll be doing my best to give the kids at the school the sum total of my knowledge, and, once it's done, there's the small matter of teaching a 3rd year undergraduate class in a fortnights time. And a 6000 word portfolio. And an essay on Teaching Creative Writing...

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Oh yeah, I had a VERY short story pop-up on LIT BOMB - a new online lit journally thing with a very good name. The story has an equally good name, suggested by my ace tutor at the OU: it is called Alexander and Burgurs and Xavier and it is safe to say I will not be reading this out tomorrow.

2012, yeah?

PROLOGUE
2012 has been a bit of a year, don’t want to brag, like, but compared the very little I’ve done since 1977, it deserves a bit of a hurrah.
We had a really cute baby (well, I just sat and napped and watched while my wife had the baby, but still...), and we named her Josie, a cool punk-rock-kitten sister to Jacob who is nearly four now.
I got a degree, and started a Masters.
I ran and completed a 10k race, having ‘taken up’ running a couple of months before.
I’ve read some stories out in public, and had one published by the EvergreenReview.
The wife and I DJ’d for a music festival which took place in a West Bromwich art gallery.

BUT MORE IMPORTANT THAN ALL THAT SELF-CONGRATULATORY NONSENSE, MY FAVOURITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR ARE:

This Is Life by Dan Rhodes

This is Life is the reason that Rhodes’ best novel to date was called Gold: because this is as good as Gold. Laced with Rhodes’ comedy and economy – not one sentence is unnecessary – this novel manages to host complex arguments of art and science, and the meaning of life, and the pain of loss, while being a genuine lovely and exciting Parisian romp. I recommend someone reads Dan Rhodes at least once a week: this week is no different.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
I wrote my final dissertationy-thing on Eugenides’ debut The Virgin Suicides: it’s fair to say I was already a fan when I bought this book the moment the paperback came out. And while the David Foster Wallace connotations are wasted on me (I made it halfway through Infinite Jest and gave up) the pragmatic love story at its heart is wonderfully realised, and the novel is splattered with a degree of intertextuality that in the wrong hands would be cloying and convoluted, but in Eugenides’ delicate and un-rushed typing, adds colour and texture that really makes it something special indeed.

Everything by Andrew Kaufman     
I’ve read All My Friends are Superheroes, The Waterproof Bible and The Tiny Wife by the Canadian author Andrew Kaufman this year, and fell in love with his work in the same way I did with Dan Rhodes. Clever, surreal, witty and funny and utterly heartbreaking, Kaufman has the same concise style of writing as Rhodes, and every word is as rich as can be. His latest novel Born Weird is out more-or-less now – I’ve pre-ordered the Kindle version which is out on Jan 2^nd, but the hardback is already in shops.

Sunstroke and other stories by Tessa Hadley
The stories in this collection are each seemingly domesticated and commonplace and straight-forward slices of life. But each has an under-current of subversion, of taboo-breaking, and of realism – each narrator is so real and alive and known – and ever-so-slightly magical. Her work reminds me of one of my favourite writers, Katherine Mansfield, and that is always a good thing.

How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005

by Richard King
A history of indie music, and independent record labels, written with real heart and awe. An indie little brother to England’s Dreaming, it is naturally selective and narrow in it’s scope – otherwise King would still be writing it today, and it loses nothing by leaving out band x or band y for the sake of narrative or space.

AND 2012’s OTHER FINE MOMENTS INCLUDED:

The New Yorker Fiction Podcast
Introduced by the lasciviously-intellectually voiced Deborah Treisman, this podcast gets New Yorker short story writers – Dave Eggers, Tessa Hadley, Daniel Alarcón – to choose and read their favourite story from The New Yorker’s vast archives. Well worth subscribing to on the iTunes programme thing.

Diseases of England by The Indelicates
Parts I and II are out and are as bitter and vital and sneering and desperate as any other band releasing records ever.

American Sitcoms
I love American sitcoms at the moment. 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, The Office, Community, Up All Night, Whitney... they’re just in such a rich vein of form. Worth moving to the US for alone, I’m sure.

So yeah, here’s to 2012, thanks for all the fun, and roll on 2013, and HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

Post-Graduate Post #1

So, then, University, eh? Cardiff is a wonderful place to do anything, especially to learn. I've had to re-learn how to cross busy roads, and how long it takes to walk somewhere as opposed to how long I think it takes to walk somewhere, for example. And lots about writing and creativity, too.

My fellow students are all very lovely, although they make me feel a bit old: the majority of them are around the 22-25 mark, and I was born in '77 as my digital identity will forever remind me. One of my classmates blogs here: http://owainglynevans.wordpress.com/ on the whole, some very tight and concise and enjoyable short stories.

My Course Director / main Tutor here is the awesome Richard Gwyn who also blogs under the alter-ego Ricardo Blanco. After embarrassing myself with a tale of Dionysian excess in the first workshop, I shall endeavor to Google all of my tutors and read their whole oeuvre in advance, rather than accidentally trip onto their territory with a clumsy stumble... luckily next week's guest tutor is a poet, and I don't do serious poetry, nor do I do poetry seriously, so shouldn't have any problems there. Given who s/he is, it certainly won't/ will help that I've watched The Wire, but couldn't get into Treme.

One important part of our course is the regular open-mic style events that we take part in. Our guest tutor, a writer of some repute, will do a reading of some description, then myself and the rest of the class read some of our work. At our first session, I read my piece 'Points of Articulation' that was in Evergreen Review, and a new story called 'Discussion', which I'm just about to post here. In fact, you may just have read it. It's kinda weird reading your work out like that, but I'm actually really excited about next weeks session. And only maybe a little bit 'cos it's held in a pub bedecked with Manic Street Preachers memorabilia.

Bookshelves and Books and Writers 2011

The website Bookshelfporn.com is amazing. It's aspirational. And a little bit crazy. So here's what's on mine...

I’ve mainly been reading guilty pleasures of late: football books. Gary Neville's autobiography Red is a sturdy, solid read, not especially exciting, but dependably relentless none the less. There are a few glaring errors (surely it’s Salford Quays, not Keys?), but that just adds to the way the book reflects Neville’s career.

Football - Bloody Hell!, Patrick Barclay’s book on Sir Alex Ferguson, is a bit too stop-start for my liking, jumping about too much to deliver a consistent narrative. Every time I thought ‘this is getting good’ the subject changed.

I’m reading Player One by Douglas Coupland. It’s  very good. I love Coupland. The way he writes these ‘big issue’ books in such a personable and relatable manner, with tiny vignettes and trivia and pop culture references that just decorate the scenes beautifully.

I’ve been discovering the work of Rachel Trezise, recently. She’s a brilliant writer who I discounted years ago as the only book of hers that I’d heard of at the time was called Dial M for Merthyr shares a title with a brilliant compilation album, and therefore I thought it could not live up to the (unrelated) LP. But her short story collection Fresh Apples is awesome. And the half of Sixteen Shades of Crazy I managed to read before I had to take it back to the library.

I met Richard Gwyn the other day. That was quite an honour. I was made aware of his poetry in a creative writing class at University, and particularly love a poem called ‘Dusting’.

“You run your finger down a ledge and it returns covered in the filth of 1976. Punk dust. It is now 1999. You wonder should you lick this dust, would you get a flavour of the past?” 

Really want to read his newish memoir, The Vagabond’s Breakfast.

I keep buying Margaret Atwood books in charity shops and then forget to read them. This is something I shall rectify in the next few months.

My very good friend, the part-time supermodel and compulsive liar A.K. Bruty, has had a story published in From Glasgow to Saturn. It’s very, very good. Download the full magazine for free from their website. Now.

A.K. ‘47’ Bruty gave me a birthday present a while ago, and apart from the bit about Spillers Records having a soul aisle (it doesn’t), Miranda July’s short story collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You, is stunning.

Anyways, Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. See you soon. Et Cetera.
(Not my bookshelf)