The heart of the story is the suicide of of a young boy, and a double chip to crack journey that winds around itself like an ouroboros/moebius strip/double helix/any other metaphor critics love to use but don’t really understand. On the one hand the ripples (see, I knew there was another metaphor) from this event flow outwards through the boys family and in particular the life of his surviving siblings, the brother who walked out on the day of the funeral and Emma, the sister at the story’s centre, piecing back the jigsaw. It is also about the internal shockwaves working their way back in time from that moment, a story of how minds fracture and families fracture in their wake.

The metaphors, allusions and parallels, in fact, are so rife (think of a tradition whose finest roots lie in the American Gothic of Poe and Faulkner, a literary landscape where the cracked psyche is revealed of the surface of the families it contorts into the grotesque. Think of its British counterparts, from Wilde’s Dorian Gray to the disintegration of the narrator’s family in Josephine Hart’s Damage) that I had, at this point, better withdraw. Suffice to say, for all the allegorical richniess this is a book of exquisitely, painfully, beautifully constructed detail, a book that pours compassion and empathy upon its characters, a book that needs, demands, to be read as a perfectly-crafted account of mental illness and its insidious consequences. And for the brilliant scalpel it takes to the ubiquitous self-help platitude that “give it time and it will be all right” this is a book we should all be standing up to applaud.

So, enough from me. Suffice to say this is something we’re passionate about at eight cuts gallery. We’ve even themed a show on the subject. I was lucky enough to hear Becky talk about The View on the Way Down at the excellent Short Stories Aloud at Chipping Norton Literary Festival, and she was kind enough to talk to me about it afterwards.

1.      The first thing that strikes me about The View on the Way Down is the title, which I love. It’s unsentimental and frank, which I think is very important, but I’m surprised in a way that Picador let it go out – were there any discussions about it, or about where the book would be positioned?

‘The View on the Way Down’ was always the title I had in mind whilst I was writing the book – it felt right to me. Interestingly, there was never any discussion about it later on. If I’d been asked to change it, I expect I would have – my instinct is to trust my publisher – but it would have been with a heavy heart. I think the way the book’s been presented also lends a certain ambiguity to the title at first glance (whereas its meaning becomes clearer as you read the book). For instance, the blurb Picador produced is fairly enigmatic, and I think this works well. In some ways the novel works best if you come to it without knowing too much, beyond that it’s about a shattered family. That way, the subject matter and certain revelations come as a shock to the reader, just as they do to the characters.

2. So much writing about mental health takes the form “don’t worry, it’ll all work out”. Were you conscious of avoiding any particular stereotypes or storylines?

I wanted to be truthful. That meant not being afraid to write a sad or harrowing book. Sometimes the story isn’t about how everything worked out in the end – it’s about how people have learnt to cope with the fact that it didn’t. But on the other hand, I didn’t want the book to be a miserable slog for the reader. I felt that it needed moments of humour and hope too, which reflected my own experience. I don’t think a book about mental illness has to be unremittingly grim.

3.      Are you aware of how people have responded to the book (do you read or avoid reviews?) and has that surprised or pleased you?

I’m mildly terrified of reviews, though fortunately they’ve been positive so far. Having your work critiqued in such a public way is something you have to adapt to as a writer. At the moment it still feels weird to me, as I’m used to my mum being the only person who reads my stories. And she’s not exactly the harshest of critics. I generally do read my reviews – though warily.

But the best thing about publication has been the people who have got in touch to share their own experiences of depression, and to say that the book resonated with them in some way. I’ve found that quite unexpected and moving.

 4.      You have described writing the book as incredibly helpful to you – could you explain a little more about that?

 The book’s based partly on my own experience of depression as a teenager. It was something that was very hard to put into words at the time – it was impossible to explain how I felt to other people, and impossible to explain it to myself. Writing the book was a way of going back and taking up that challenge. The process gave me a better understanding of what had happened to me, and also forced me to look it full in the face, rather than trying to erase it from my memory.

  5.      Some people are wary of fiction that “raises awareness” of an issue. How did you walk the tightrope between creating a self-contained world that functioned according to its own principles and saying the things you felt you had to say?

 The story always comes first. I didn’t want to write an ‘issue’ book. I set out to write about a group of characters and a situation that really interested me, and to do it in a way that readers might find interesting as well. But at the same time, there were certain questions I wanted to raise in the novel – the kind of questions that had been bothering me for a while. I don’t think The View on the Way Down has any clear message or moral (or at least not one that people will agree on), but hopefully it does address some things that people aren’t always comfortable talking about – or even thinking about.

6.      Moving onto more generally writerly matters, if you could have written any book in the past ten years other than yours, which would it be?

Ah, this is a game I sometimes play, though it usually leaves me feeling a bit deflated, given that I didn’t write whatever book it is… But at the moment, I’d probably say Mother’s Milk or At Last by Edward St. Aubyn. His prose is clear and sharp, and his observations are capable of flooring you.

 7.       And what do you think is the great unwritten book of the 21st century?

 Interesting question, but I have no idea! I think sometimes the greatest novels are the ones that seem incredibly weird and surprising when they’re first published. Who could have predicted Ulysses?

To pre-order your copy of any (or indeed all) of these titles, simply Paypal £6 per title to songsfromtheothersideofthewall@googlemail.com and add £1 each title for UK postage or £3 for postage anywhere in the world outside the UK, and stating which collection(s) you would like and your address. At today’s exchange rate that’s US$13.82 incluiding postage and shipping to the US, CA$14.02 to Canada, AU$13.86 to Australia and 10.66 Euros to Europe. The collections will be officially launched on June 10th at a week long installation at Oxford’s Albion Beatnik Bookstore featuring not only a live performance on the 14th and a reception on the 10th but original artwork from our authors, a modern mystery play, and copies of NOTHING TO SAY’s stunning poetry and prose for you to read at your leisure in its own dedicated space all week. All copies pre-ordered by the end of May 17th will be dispatched so as to arrive on or before Saturday June 8th. All orders will be acknowledged by email within 12 hours of receipt (PLEASE check your spambox if you haven’t received confirmation – emails will come from songsfromtheothersideofthewall@googlemail.com which is a long address and sometimes gets filtered to spam).

But before you add postage to your order, we are thrilled to announce three special preview events for NOTHING TO SAY where you can pick up any pre-ordered copies:
May 29th, The 2013 Saboteur Awards - the UK’s premier awards night for pamphlets and spoken word, held at The Book Club in London.
June 1, 6.30pm a unique preview night of poetry and art at the Oxford studio of renowned artist Tom de Freston
June 8, Stoke Newington Literary Festival where the writers of NOTHING TO SAY will be puttng on a spoken word extravaganza as part of our touring troupe The New Libertines, who have performed to sell-out crowds at the festival for the past two years.
If you would like to pick up your books from any of these, please say which when you place your order and we will bring your sparkling copy with us for collection.

We are a tiny press, but we cherish both our readers and our authors. As a result, we do what most presses our size (and many poetry publishers much bigger than us) do not do – we pay our authors up front (we also pay our fabulous cover artist, Eleanor Leone Bennett). Not a huge amount because we deal in limited editions, but at £1 per £6 book we’re not only different in paying up front but it’s a larger percentage royalty than pretty much any other publisher will pay on a paperback. We also submit their work for the most prestigious prizes and for review at the leading publications. We do this without private funds or support from the Arts Council and that means we run a very tight line with our budget. So in order to fund our print run, we rely on print orders.

If we do not sell out (I should add the last time I did a limited edition, at eight cuts gallery press, we sold out through pre-orders in under a week and before the launch date), we will print some unreserved copies that you can pick up at the above events, but only a very few. Like I say, like several other great small presses, we rely on pre-orders so we can do what we do, and do right by everyone. We hope you understand. And to show our appreciation to you, all pre-orders will come with a free copy of my own new pamphlet, also published by 79 rat press, i cannot bring myself to look at walls in case you have graffitied them with love poetry.

So, here they are in all their splendour. Our writers come from all kinds of backgrounds. Some have won prestigious awards, some have previous collections, some have glorious blogs, some run underground zines and spoken word nights. But we figure you know how to use google, so we’re not going to tell you about that (you can read some offbeat interviews with them here though). We also, again unlike many presses, think what has gone before is really relevant to now. If you know them already then, well, you know them already and you want their new work because you know it will be stunning. If you don’t know them already, you probably don’t care where they’ve had poems published or whether they’ve had poems published before (and if you do, as I said, you can probably manage google). What you do care about is these books. So here are very brief descriptions and a brief sample of poetry form each book.

Paul Askew’s Animal Magnetism is a beautifully surreal journey through love and loneliness in the company of Wthnailesque narrators and a delicious assortment of poetic animals. His work has the fragility and lightness of a paper lantern but it also has a glorious sense of the absurd, and comes in equal parts T S Eliot, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and internet poetry.

Orange Was the Colour of Her Dress, Then Silk Blue

I ordered a date
and was given the future.

I don’t know why, but I’m imagining you
listening to Charles Mingus and smoking a Gauloises.
Everything changes with the dusk;
your dress, your hair, your lipstick, the way you move.
In deeper light, you become the evening,
just as you had been the day.

The song’s still playing as you undress,
turning into night. You click your fingers
and I come.
And now it’s November.
We’re huddled in coats, drinking whisky;

the fireworks are done. We have a clear sky
and a fire that neither of us will let die.

wide-shining is a collection of retellings of classical myths constructed with filigree precision. Like a Dali painting, each poem is a thing of beauty and yet each leaves you with the disconcerting sense that something you can’t quite pinpoint is ever so slightly wrong. What makes these poems so startlingly fresh is the precision of that ever so slight imbalance that lifts these poems from the classical to the absolutely contemporary.

Persephone

Most mornings I can barely stand to look at this
something-like-happiness misting our periphery,
an epiphany spat out like pips from our tongues,
all our half-sung songs stringing along behind us,
and you, dark god, perfect weight above me, telling me
you love me and me drop dropping droplets through your hand,
my stolid body turning liquid as sand and running our fierce current
fast as silver-quick fish, my flick-flecking lips biting like teeth
as I shoal beneath you, held so tight I can barely breathe.

The shift of the seasons sinks us,
and at my brink I tip through
summer autumn winter spring
– all the fast-spin of cold and heat –
fells me as I fall back replete,
my heart beating pomegranate red,
jawing my mouthful of seeds.

Dirty White Everything is what happens when the poetic blank generation gets dressed up for a goth night out. The ultra-modern post-consumerist sweats of Brett Easton Ellis are delicately fused with the lace and velvet of fin de siecle Montmartre to deliver an unforgettable journey into a dark night of emptiness and exquisite pain.
Catching Flies

Train drags itself back to Swindon,
back legs a burden, wounded animal.
Sitting backwards, wrenched
all fingernails and heels and
Fay Wray King Kong scream,
spitting lipstick saliva at authority.
I am dragged home back to
awkward adolescence,
the floor is sticky
with discarded lollipop stick.
Dragged towards
Job Centre Tuesdays,
orphaned shopping trolleys,
trees blooming Tesco plastic,
garish carpet and
knick-knacks that only ever remind you
of buying them.
I look out the window
see a dead seagull on the tracks,
look back and notice
a spelling mistake
on the safety card.
The man sat beside me
looks like my dad
sleeping with his mouth open.

Andy Harrod fuses media more perfectly than any other writer in the UK today. Blending art, photography, conceptual typography, poetry and prose with a musical sensibility that earworms its way inside you as you read, spending time with this collection is like watching in horror and amazement a skilled surgeon take the top off your head and lay every part of your mind out in front of you. It is impossible to read this book without coming away with a profoundly changed sense of yourself.

mammal is unlike anything else. Structurally it is, well, a mammal, a living creature constructed from limbs and a head and a torso of poems that are not quite separate but not quite parts of the same whole, bleeding into one another but separated by silk-thin membranes. Its content is surreal, transgressive, humorous, disturbing, rhythmic, complex, like watching the slow dissection of a living creature unfold before your eyes.
Now i am a jaybird.

i live among the copies
behind my life is violets

the violets copy in the brushgrass behind
the violents copulate & scrub behind the brush
we fuck & fall away like brushstroke
Cheryl & i

brushgrass like an oil painting
brushfire we fly away the waitress
the waitress with child
the waitress scatters us away with glasses
vermouth glasses & ghosts.
pink lady stains from a pure clear mouth
a strain mouth pretty pure
Our beaks are black.
dark our beaks at our backs
are our black tails hedged & angled
we wrestle with the angles
math across the door & lambsblood
we spill the oil & the bread
we get us wet
we fill us with what
with what

fill us with what we want.
lord give us strength to copy
fill us with what we want
we want
to copulate in love
to violate to blank
to violet.
to violet
to copy in love
to xerox the deity

xerox the deity
Where’s Cheryl.
she blisses at the slightest provocation
she’s blissing on the ground with others like us
like us, i am on the bough with others
others like me
brothers mothers
nothing the others
as we utter with pleasure & ruse
repetitive herds of blackbirds rue
as we utter with dainty want
it’s us we want
we want us.
we want our daily want
us we utter with deity want
give us our daily bread
give us our olive oil
pus the violets
boil the violets

Imagine an earthquake destroyed Manchester and buried everyone and everything in it. And imagine in 700 years’ time an archaeologist uncovers a box and in it are unanswered love letters from someone no one knows to someone no one knows. That’s the closest I can get to describing the sense of voyeuristic heartbreak experienced as you read this beautifully, painfully intimate and needle-sharp collection.

Designs Charged Wearable

You don’t know it yet but one day I’ll seem very important to you.
One day I will mean nothing to you at all.

When you forget about me, your mind will
Congeal in cool, wax clumps
Like a switched-off lava lamp

You don’t know it yet but one day I will seem very familiar to you.
One day you won’t recognise me at all.

You’ll be like a man-trap in the un-walked woods
I’ll be the leaves that disguise your entrance
Nobody will ever fall in
And together we’ll be the world’s worst kept secret

One day I’ll make a lot more sense to you.
One day you’ll wonder how you ever understood me, but
You don’t know that yet.

If I ever get scared of the dark again
I’ll ask you to walk me upstairs
Shadow puppet plays at midnight
Might make me feel better.
I’d make a great stay-at-home-widow.
“The dark is so dumb” you will tell me
“And the dead are so ignorant”

You don’t know it yet but one day I’ll be your phone wallpaper background
One day you’ll delete my phone number.

You may one day find yourself taking my
Poetry books to the cancer shop
Along with two of my dresses
After tiring of explaining the logistics of
Any given Pixar film to me

One day I’ll get around to subscribing to your feel.
Would it be wrong or would it be hilarious
To make a snow-cock today?

I tried to work an allusion to GK Chesterton into this poem
But I soon lost interest,
But
You don’t know that yet.

This summer, my imprint 79 rat press will be launching NOTHING TO SAY, a project featuring pieces and collections from some of the very best poets currently writing in the UK, and one or two beyond. There will also be an exhibition after the fashion of the great YBA shows like Freeze and Sensation, and in keeping with our general multimedia approach, our covers, posters and exhibition will feature the work of one of the most exciting new photographers in the UK. I recently got to ask a few questions to the ridiculously talented Eleanor Bennett, who has already won a humungous number of prizes, and has just been made the new children’s editor for poetryspace:

DH: You’ve worked a fair bit with publishers of books and magazines with a very contemporary feel to produce some very striking covers. What is it about your work that makes it fit this role so well?

EB: I produce so much work and so often that it is difficult for my clients to ask for images I can’t provide. My library of images is always growing daily. I had such a passion for reading as a child that converting my exhibited and award winning images to book covers seemed the obvious route for me. Me and my Mum used to take home from my library enough books to break my backpack when I about 6. I was a massive fan of fiction and non-fiction on Egyptian mummies. It shows now in the fact I love doing horror cover art and fiction artwork.

DH: What do you prefer as a subject, the city or the country?

EB: As a choice the city. I don’t often get much time to do photography so when I do I like a large mass of subjects surrounding me all at once. My favourite places to photograph are museums, grand houses, auctions, thrift shops and built up areas. A lot of my newer work survives on texture and clashing. In the countryside outside of the magic hour I can be more inclined to becoming bored. I would rather have too much to photograph than too little.

DH: What one thing would you like to show people about the world?

EB: I may sound naive but I would like to appeal to all tastes with my work. Seeing as I am universally published by so many different countries so often I can say with my work I want to create unity.

DH: With whom would you most like to work?

EB: People who are underrepresented by the media. I notice imbalance in what is covered and what art is created out of. Especially with my cover art. I want to give everyone a chance to become the cover star eventually. Only problem currently is because of my age I’m not allowed to travel to meet those new faces. As soon as that changes I would tell my current audience to expect big changes. I prefer my cover art of contemporary objects as apposed to self portraits for the uniqueness. Because of my current lack of travel I invest in the knowledge that objects can tell all stories.

DH: Your collections have a wonderful feel of both movement through the pieces and unity. How do you go about putting a collection together?

EB: I was putting collections of images together when I was 12. Even making little youtube music slideshows accompanied by britpop and indie music. I’ve always loved technology. And in my very early days practising in that helped me evolve into the collections I compile today. Tone, lighting and composition aid me and make the following featured image in the set almost obvious to what the viewer would like to find next.

DH: You would like to be known as…

EB: the youngest to win the most major art awards in the United Kingdom

DH: You will be known as…

EB: the girl who never sleeps

DH: What do we not look at enough as a society?

EB: the finest art pieces in the world. The type of work kept hidden in private collections, auctioned at Christies and never seen again. Photographs, sculpture, automatons,music boxes, jewellery, historic portraiture ect

DH: What do we spend too much time looking at?

EB: what we are manipulated/forced/coerced to.

That’s all I need to say really about the wonderful Dictionary of Peril, the invention of Laura Heron. I met Laura whilst compering the Warwick Words Flash Slam. She performed the utterly marvellous “The Peril of the Iamb” which, whilst as funny as it sounds, is also deeply moving and not a little disturbing.  Anyway, go and dip your toes in a multifariety of lexicographical perils.

And best of all, this is a site with a mission, to give voice to poetic youth. Founder Walton is just 17 but already seems to have himself fully embroiled in as many plans and projects as we do and is clearly not just a talented poet but someone with the commitment and drive to make it happen.. Do go pay a visit. And check out Milk and Honey Siren, with submissions open to December 21st.

There is a full call for submissions here.

Please feel free to quote at will from the press release below, or download it from the exhibition site here.

An exhibition of the written and spoken word to be held next summer promises to provide literature with its equivalent of the Sensation art exhibition and Turner Prize shows that propelled the so-called Young British Artists into the public consciousness. Dan Holloway, organiser of NOTHING TO SAY, believes that “The literary world desperately needs an event to catch hold of the public imagination and turn people’s idea of what words are capable of doing on its head the way for example Tracey Emin’s My Bed not only made people question what art actually is but suddenly made people aware that their everyday lives and sufferings were of infinite importance. Ebooks and the Internet are changing publishing, but the literary world using and talking about that new publishing landscape remains stuck, and the public is still wedded to a very outdated view of what literature can be.”

The exhibition will consist of collections from 6 of the most exciting new voices in literature, a catalogue featuring the works of around 20 more writers, and a live installation comprising spoken word alongside paper and electronic reading material and exhibits that will range from traditional poetry through formats increasingly used by a new generation of writers, such as image macros, to video and other installations more usually seen in the art world.

The first contributors to be announced are Sian S Rathore, a leading figure in the UK’s alt lit movement, Paul Askew, editor of art and poetry magazine Ferment whose works are surreal meditations on loneliness, and Emily Harrison, winner of the prestigious Tower Poetry Prize in 2010. The three will each contribute collections to be published on June 1^st. There will also be exhibits from the event’s organiser, Dan Holloway, who won the international spoken word show Literary Death Match in 2010 and whose recent books include a collection of 512 limericks composed from just two words. An open call for submissions can be found on the website of 79 rat press, Holloway’s conceptual publishing house.

NOTHING TO SAY takes its name from the sense among many commentators in the literary establishment that contemporary literature, especially performance poetry and online writing, are superficial and have nothing interesting to offer. NOTHING TO SAY is a door into a world brimming not just with energy, but with the potential to change the way people see themselves, their place in the worlds, and what words have the potential to do.

“This is a landmark event,” says Holloway, who has run the alternative arts event Not the Oxford Literary Festival for the past three years, “because by focusing on writing and writers that are both instantly accessible and deeply strange, we are bringing some of the most important conversations out of the rarefied academic atmosphere they have occupied for too long and relocating them to the bus queues and watercoolers and twitter feeds where they belong. Language itself, with its rules and assumptions and history, is a cage that keeps people prisoner, but it can also be the hacksaw with which they can cut themselves free. By downplaying alternative popular or experimental forms of writing that throw out many of the rules of language as being amateurish, careless, or just meaningless, the media and the world of cultural punditry is not making a serious academic point, but a statement of political aggression against which NOTHING TO SAY is an act of defiance.”

Adelle’s 3rd collection, Dark Corners of the Land, was published by eight cuts gallery favourites Blackheath Books last month and my exquisite copy is already a treasured possession.

I’ll be reviewing the collection shorly for Sabotage Reviews. Suffice to say – buy it, it’s a work of art as a thing, but the poetry is so much more – haunting, evocative, cruel and joyousall in one. It is a pleasure to be have the chance to talk to Adelle about this wonderful book and her remarkable career to date.

1. I know you’ve been working on Dark Corners for a long time, but the recent coverage of the badger cull on the news and on social media makes this feel like the perfect moment for its release. Would you care to reflect on the way the media sees the country and the truths you are trying to tell about it?

I think there’s a perception in the media (which is very urban-centric) that the countryside is full of rich farmers or uncultured heathens. The only time farming gets mentioned is when it relates to something like the badger cull, foot and mouth or foxhunting. All of those things bring about an idea of the countryside being either incredibly cruel, or completely pastoral. I don’t know about the truth I’m trying to tell, but I suppose the poems are my version of country life which kinds of hits the middle ground. It’s violent, cruel and beautiful at the same time.

2. If I may go back to Brutalism, one of the things that’s so interesting about it is the way it is described as an internet-spawned literary movement and yet it is so clearly rooted in geography. Did you feel that at the time as a tension or a natural coupling?

Even though Brutalism was rooted in northern locations, all of us were writing about those places from a distance. Tony was in New York, Ben was in Peckham, I lived on the edges of Bow. We were writing about a time in history as much as place. The experiences that came out of the poems could be felt by anyone, and people related to them from an international perspective. The internet was just the quickest and most democratic way for us to get the word out. The perfect tool for causing trouble.

3. It seems to me that the real cultural significance of the internet is not the growth of the global but the local, and that one of the positive impacts of the wave of low-value digital culture is the resurgence of artisanship in return. Thinking about that brought me back to the rural life as we see it in your poetry and my first question, and I wondered if you feel any of these polarities at all in your writing? Are you aware of pushing against anything, or are you taken out of those dualities altogether by the intensity of your poetic world?

I’m very much of the Walter Benjamin school where the artist has more power as the producer. It gives you a sense of freedom. Being able to write a piece of work, create the layouts, print or e-publish it yourself, and create another book from the profit is some of the best things that have come out of the digital age. That sense of restriction has gone, although I do think there are many benefits to having rigorous editorial processes. The craft or artisanship aspect of DIY culture is something that is part of my personal history as I used to run a venue, write fanzines, manage bands and promote club nights. It’s second nature to me. I don’t feel any conscious push or polarity in my work, it may exist on some subliminal level but it’s not something that I pay much attention to.

4. You write about the country, but you also write beautifully about cities (Sacred Heart is one of my favourite poems). You also write in a wide variety of forms and rhythms. This gives me the feeling of a deep restlessness, and I’m not sure how that fits with the sense I also get that your life is almost hewn from the land.

I think that’s quite a good observation, but that comes from my approach to writing poems. For me, poetry is a slow process. I write when I feel inspired to write, and that can sometimes make me prolific and more often than not, create poems at tortoise pace. I have spent the past six years studying poetry which has meant that I’ve ingested thousands of poems. I’m still at a stage where I’m spewing them back out in random order. I have no discipline and only write when a thought gets stuck in my head. Writing allows me to sort my head out, put things in order and understand the world around me. It keeps me sane. When I don’t write my head clutters up and clouds over with mashed potato.

Although I grew up in a rural environment, I also spent twelve years living in London and the arse end of Leeds. The areas I’ve lived in have been pretty tough – Hackney, Bethnal Green, Murder Mile, Peckham, Hoxton etc. I moved back up to the countryside a few years back. It’s nice not to be watching your back all the time, though there are elements of the big city that I miss.

During my degree I was experimenting with Ghazals, Sestinas, Pantoums, Sonnets, Haiku – and I tried to shoehorn my city experiences into those forms. Since I’ve moved back to Yorkshire I’m writing pretty much in blank verse, although certain rhythms keep popping out when I least expect it. Who knows, maybe what surrounds you does have an effect on the lines you create? Poetry remains a delightful mystery.

5. How many times do you get asked if the land is a metaphor in your work, and have you ever given the same answer twice?

I get asked quite a bit about the rural/urban aspects to my work, but I always try to think of a new way to reply, I guess it helps me work through the writing in a different way.

6. Bad Blood is a remarkable poem in so many ways, and an incredibly brave one structurally with its clear evocations of Howl. I begins “Over the water” and in the place of the “best minds” of Ginsberg you give us plastic bags, urban detritus strangling your idyll. I’m reminded of the last survivors in On the Beach resignedly waiting for the airborne peril to come and finally snuff them out. I guess my questions, or comments, are about the extent to which this feels like your attempt to grapple with something wider, to situate yourself culturally and comment upon your poetic neighbours. And it feels as though in a way you are terrified by what you see there, and run straightaway back into the river and the perch of murmur…

Originally, Bad Blood was just an experiment with family myths and secrets. I wrote down as many things as I could remember and drew them on a page. It reminded me of a family tree. I wanted to play around with long lines and was inspired by John Ashbery’s Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror. That night I walked home along the Calder, and saw all of these rotten plastic bags hanging from the branches. I thought about cloutie trees, and the significance of making prayers with pieces of rag. The plastic bags were like abandoned prayers. I was also reading Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, in particular his chapter on how the druids formed the very first alphabet from naming types of trees. All of these ideas were thrown together, though I referred to Whitman in order to make some sense out of it all. It took over 15 months to get Bad Blood right. I had to persist with it, but I feel that it is the most original poem I’ve written. People have commented that it reminds them of Howl, but the rhythms are quite different. I have no plan to read it naked. Well, unless you pay me a million pounds.

7. What have we lost as a society?

I’m not sure I’m the right person to answer that. Maybe that’s one for the religious orders to grapple with.

8. These poems surround us with death and sadness, but its omnipresence feels very comforting (rather in the way that cosmology is comforting, reminding us of our smallness, of the normality of nothingness. Would it be fair to say that what we have lost is the everyday presence of death?

In the Western world death is kept away from us. At one time people would have been laid out in the front room for a few days, though most bodies are hidden away in our modern culture. The Taoist way of thinking about death is that your energy goes back into the life cycle. I’ve had to think about death a lot over the past few years, and I always return to this idea of just accepting, not fighting your destiny. A close friend of mine took his own life last year, and the experience has been one of the most horrific things I’ve ever encountered. Like a nuclear bomb going off. The only way I could get through it was to watch crap TV, meditate and read poems by Chinese wilderness poets. I couldn’t write for six months after it happened, but poetry helped me find a way out of it. I hope that Dark Corners isn’t too dark and has some light flickering out of the mineshaft.

Anna Harte was one of the first people I ever met in the virtual writing world. She is one of the lynchpins at 1889 laboratories, *the* home of serial webfcition and pioneering site in much that is exciting and innovative in web fiction. She is a tireless champion of the fascinating and the cutting edge, and now she has her very own book out and it is a true pleasure to be part of the tour for Above Ground and to ask her about the book and web fiction in general.

Before the interview starts, please go here for the chance to win some superbluous prizes. And do follow everything she’s up to this month here.

Above Ground is on Kindle US and UK.  Here is the blurb:

The first glimpse of sun may be her last.

When Lilith Gray goes above ground for the first time, she hardly expects to stay there — much less be trapped on the surface with no way home.

Hunted by trackers and threatened by the infected, Lilith is on the run, desperate to return underground. Her only hope for survival lies with a taciturn werewolf with a dark agenda of his own.

Lilith’s old carefree life has been reduced to one choice:

Adapt. Or die trying.

1. “Above Ground” – a very suggestive title – just how many metaphors have you packed into it?

Sadly, I’m not one of those clever author types who inject symbolic meaning into their every word from day one. The original thinking behind the title ran along the lines of: “What should I call this story about a human girl who gets trapped above ground? Hmmm… why, ‘Above Ground’!”

Happily, over the 3+ years of writing this novel, the meaning behind the title has deepened for me – or maybe the novel has simply grown into its name, much like how babies go from shapeless blobs into real people.

As for what the title actually stands for… I like to think it might mean different things to different people. There’s no right answer, so I’m open to your ideas.

2. Whilst on the subject of metaphor, a lot of work that deals with this subject matter uses non-human/human interaction and interaction between non-humans to make social and political points. Do you find that freeing, enabling you to do the same, or do you worry that this history (H G Wells kept coming to mind) means you will have meanings grafted onto your work that just aren’t there?

I loathe the idea that a text is meant to only convey the meanings the author intended. I battled with my literature teacher over this very point: how do we really know what long-dead authors and poets meant, anyway?

As such, I never worry about having meanings grafted onto my work. While I do hope to convey some small part of my thoughts and opinions, I also realise that my readers may find their own meanings in my work which resonate more with them than anything I could say.

If so, fair deuce. That my work was able to guide them to find some sort of meaning at all is satisfying enough for me.

However, I’ll take a moment to convey what I think about “Above Ground”.

So: yes, I would agree that generally works with multiple races are used to make social and political points. Without a doubt, “Above Ground” relies heavily on the power struggles between races and the difficulties different communities have when living side-by-side.

Lilith, as a newcomer to the mixed community above ground, first views all of the non-humans as the same – barely more than animals, worthy only of contempt. Throughout her journey, she discovers not only the distinctions between various non-human races, but begins to realise that ultimately – no matter their appearance or beliefs – they are all people, just like her.

So I suppose if I was forcedto ascribe a meaning to “Above Ground”, it is that we may all have our differences, but ultimately we are all equal.

Phew, that was a long answer!

3. I have to ask a couple of questions about serial web fiction whilst I have your attention. First, and for readers’ benefit, what are the most exciting things you’re seeing in serial web fiction?

What I’m most excited about is that there is a growing awareness in the wider reading community about the existence of web fiction. While some web fiction authors might be irritated by Amazon’s attitude that they’ve invented online serials, I think the Kindle serials are a positive addition to the community.

Community sites like Wattpad are also raising web fiction’s profile because they have the money to properly market their successes. Even amusing connections like how 50 Shades of Grey was originally fanfiction help to spread awareness.

Of course, it’s not just serial fiction that is getting a boost in publicity — Twitter has announced their first ever twitter fiction festival, which will run for five days at the end of this month.

The indie web fiction author (the category I belong to!) will always have a place, but I’m very excited to see big names endorsing online fiction.

4. Second, do you see serial web fiction as driving literature forward, creating something new, or driving it back to its periodical, even oral roots, returning to it something it missed with the novel form?

A bit of both.

Web fiction gathers readers as the story progresses, building communities and encouraging interaction in much the way oral storytelling must have done. There does seem to be either a shorter reader attention span or an increased appetite for shorter reads, so in some respects we are reverting to serialised stories in order to accommodate for the current demand.

But this appetite comes from the changes in technology, and the changes in the way we consume information, so while we are reverting to an older format, we’re using it in a new context.

In ye olde days, you couldn’t have mixed media serial fiction. You couldn’t click on a character’s name and open up a wiki page about them. Stunts like livewriting, or the use of polls to influence a story’s progression — all the interactive elements have been multiplied tenfold.

As a result, we are creating something new… even if it’s from something old.

5. I promise I will have a question that’s not about metaphor, but given our history at eight cuts (our first ever live event was called Lilith Burning, and featured a whole host of takes on the Lilith myth courtesy of Katelan Foisy, one of the collaborators on the book Lilith, Queen of the Desert), I have to ask…Lilith? Do tell.

You know, I honestly have no recollection of why I picked the name Lilith.

Unfortunately, I’d already settled on the name before realising that it does have some negative connotations. My muse is stubborn, though: once a name is picked, it feels utterly wrong to change it.

I do remember researching Lilith after having already decided it was the protagonist’s name, and reading about demons… and stumbling across the Middle Ages legend that Lilith was Adam’s first wife, and left Eden after refusing to be subservient to him given that they were both made from the same dust and hence equal (which, supposedly, would explain why Eve was then made out of a rib).

My character also leaves her home and ends up consorting with demons of sorts. She is also feisty, hard-headed, and determined not to be subservient to anyone. Furthermore, given that the novel is about everyone being equal, I do like the feminist take on the Lilith legend. God knows that I wouldn’t have put up with Adam’s nonsense either!

But, yes — all of these thoughts may have come after I’d already settled upon the name.

6. A straight forward question to finish. What draws you, as a writer and as a reader, to dark content?

My deeply hidden violent urges.

Just kidding.

I suppose the reason I’m drawn to dark content is that I find it more emotionally involving. I can’t seem to take happy stories seriously — throw in a bit of darkness and you’ve got me hook, line and sinker.

Dark stories are simply more fascinating. They show people at extremes, force characters to reveal their true nature. I don’t feel like I have anything in common with a vapid chick flick protagonist whose only concern is finding shoes to match a dress; dark stories offer a catharsis.

It’s not just any dark content I like, though. I avoid gore and any kind of physical violence, and I also tend to avoid horror given my predisposition to nightmares. Stories about loneliness and grief, about fighting to survive, and about the dark sides of love, are the ones that pull me in the most.

What that says about me, I’m not quite sure. I’ll leave it to your imagination.

(Paul Askew’s unique performance style on the 2011-12 New Libertines tour)

Full line-up
MC for the night, Dan Holloway, 2010 Literary Death Match Winner
Sian S Rathore, editor in chief of Sadcore Dadwave
Paul Askew, editor of Ferment Magazine
Anna Hobson, poetry MC for Oxford Pride and Oxford International Women’s Festival
Anna McCrory, President of Oxford University Poetry Society
Kate Walton, Warwick Words slam champiom
Anna Percy, host of Manchester’s Stirred Poetry
Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of Last March
Laila Sumpton, Keats House
Tina Sederholm, 2010 Oxford Hammer and Tongue slam champion
Fay Roberts, host of Hammer and Tongue Cambridge and Allographic
Claire Trevien, Salt Modern Voices and editor-in-chief of Sabotage Reviews
Pat Winslow, published by Templar Poetry

The New Libertines stand for human experience in its glorious, messy, complex entirity, and stands against everything that is blank, bleak, and brutal, one dimensional or slick in contemporary culture, especially current literary culture. With roots that spread to burlesque, Beat, fin de siecle France and ecstatic mystics before slapping its influences around the face with a knuckle-dusting of postmodern wit and Modernist anger, New Libertinism is a celebration of light in dark corners, desire in the face of boredom, despair hidden beneath the underskirts of affluence – of everything it means to be human.

WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT THE NEW LIBERTINES

“Forget the ennui of the 9-5.
Stories of bingo, of sex, knife crime, coagulated time.
Performed with passion, physicality and style.

Let your bones submerge in this bath of finely spiced voices” (Daily Information, Oxford, on Oxfringe Read Full Review)

“a compelling kind of New Libertine vibe, and offer something different – perhaps more thoughtful – from some of Oxford’s more established open mikes. Well worth checking out.” (Daily Information on This Is Oxford Read Full Review)

“a brilliant night” (For Books’ Sake)

“While ‘The New Libertines’ sounds like a Granta style tag for a new movement, there was too much variety on show for the acts to be pigeonholed – it does appear to be a guarantee of a good night out though” (Workshy Fop)

“the most oh-wow-this-is-tops event of 2012″ (Fat Roland of Flashtag Manchester)

“quite fabulous” (Elizabeth Baines, author of The Birth Machine)