10mh: When did you first get the idea for the book?

I am influenced, against my own better judgement, by the eighties’ teen films of John Hughes. I first saw ‘Pretty in Pink’ at fifteen and the story has stayed with me ever since. I’m still fascinated by the interactions of people who come from opposite worlds but made queer because there were never any openly queer characters in those films. This book is my delayed response to that: a world in which being a lesbian is no issue at all to either the characters themselves or to anyone in their orbit. Of course, I am aware that this is absolutely not the case for most queer people, but I liked working with the idea that nobody bats an eyelid. It’s a love story – simple as that.

I’ve tried to write something that isn’t set in some fanciful pastel coloured romance world but in one that’s a bit grittier, more like the one you might get in a crime novel. But I’m not writing social realism, so everything is done through my own prism. A queer crime influenced Liverpudlian skewed spin on ‘Pretty in Pink’ about sums it up.

I think that the other seed of this book dates from back in my twenties when I was going through a really difficult time and I met a sex worker who seemed to be going through an even worse one. We spoke to each other in the international language of women’s shoes and had a conversation that for me at least was very eye-opening. Then we went our separate ways, and I never saw her again. I have often thought about her though and wondered what happened to her. She gave me some very good advice. We made an instant connection, and I like to think that in a different life we might have been friends. She also told me that she had a brother, and I wondered what her brother might be like. Can people with very different characters and from very different backgrounds make a life together, despite the odds? Can they even be friends, let alone be in a relationship? Those are the questions I posed myself.

10mh: Do you have a best time of day to write?

I’m a morning person and it’s best if I start off writing sooner rather than later. I think the fact that I’m not fully awake helps because my perfectionist side has yet to kick in and so I get to override it and enjoy myself. I love writing and have learnt from experience that even when it’s not going well there is often some bit that is worth coming back to another day. If I’m stuck, I read back over what I’ve already written, or I start a completely different chapter. When I first started writing I thought you had to be linear, but you don’t; I bounce around between chapters and characters. I also write a lot of drafts and do a lot of editing. It’s not efficient and it probably takes far longer than it should, but I have come to embrace this process as my own. I think you need to find what works for you and stick to it rather than following anyone else’s prescription. I’m not good at routine in my writing, not even a self-imposed one.

10mh: Where do you write?

I write novels on a laptop at my desk. I accidently used a red Sharpie to write on a piece of paper once and it bled, so that the words ‘Beggars Would Ride’ now seems to be indelibly printed onto the desk in capitals which makes me smile. I write short stories and poems in notebooks and that can happen wherever. But for a novel I need to be able to cut and paste or I confuse myself. In front of me I have painted a tree on the wall with quotes from favourite writers in the branches. When I’m daydreaming, I sometimes doodle there. There’s something about behaving like a naughty child that must liberate my imagination.

10mh: What book are you currently reading?

I’m reading a couple of books that I’ve been sent to review which is a cool thing to be asked to do. Free books! But I often read more than one thing at a time and so I’m also reading ‘There are Rivers in the Sky,’ by Elif Shafak because my brother passed it on to me. He only really reads thrillers so I reckon it must be good to persuade him to branch out. Her prose is beautiful.

10mh: What is the best piece of advice you have been given and why is that important to you?

The best piece of advice I have about writing comes from Anne Lamott in her book ‘Bird by Bird’. Her brother was overwhelmed by a nature assignment from school and her dad told him to do it ‘bird by bird’. Rather than getting bogged down by the vast nature of a novel and panicking, I deal with the little bit I’ve got in front of me. I don’t have word counts or page counts to aim for, I just do what I can on that day and then come back to it the next.

10mh: Can you tell us three authors you would like to meet, dead or living, who would they be and why?

I’d like to meet Maggie O’Farrell because I heard her on a podcast saying that she had a stutter as a child. When she started writing she found it miraculous that she had access to such a wide range of words, rather than only using the ones that she could say easily. I had a lisp as a child and instead of ‘f’ said ‘th’. I sometimes wonder if something similar happened to me and whether this influenced my desire to write. I’d also like to meet Barbara Trapido because her novels are wonderful. I suppose she’s my writing heroine because she writes things that are funny and clever at the same time. She seems to have gone out of fashion; I’ve no idea why. I’d also like to meet Virgina Woolf because she was difficult and depressive and yet completely brilliant and original.

10mh: What are your aspirations for the year ahead?

This novel is my second and so I’m less naïve than I was first time around and understand the process better. I hope I’m less phased because when ‘A Love Story for Bewildered Girls’ came out I was pretty freaked out and didn’t really enjoy it as much as I was expecting to. It had taken me a long time to get published and so I was expecting to be swamped by waves of confidence but of course that didn’t happen. I then had to deal with what musicians refer to as the ‘difficult second album’ and that caused me a lot of false starts and frustration. The fact that I have produced something that I am proud of I count as a personal triumph. Whatever its fate is in the world I know that it’s the best version I can make of the book that was in my head. This time round, I care a little less about what others think.

10mh: Last one! Can you tell us a joke?

I can’t tell jokes at all, but my dad can. Unfortunately, the ones he tells are only really suitable for his mates and not for polite company. Sometimes I am quite shocked by them myself to be honest.

Emma Morgan’s bestselling first novel, A Love Story for Bewildered Girls was longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize. She was part of WriteNow – Penguin Random House’s scheme for writers underrepresented in publishing and is the recipient of a Northern Writers’ Award for Fiction. She was born and brought up in Guernsey but now lives in Liverpool. Beggars Would Ride is available from Northodox Press.

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It is a book laced with humility. The filmmaker holds no airs or graces and at one point sees him working as a delivery person in the small hours dropping off copies of The New York Times during a financially lean period. Like another one of my heroes, Philip Glass, who worked as a removal guy and a taxi driver to help subsidise his artistic career. Both artists who have to feed their creative projects through graft and not inherited privilege. Actual hard labour over entitlement. Both following the philosophy of:

One must love art and not the concept of oneself in art.

A Stanislavski dictum, a particular favourite mantra of mine.

The famed director’s diet described throughout the biography did fill me with anxiety. Simple grilled cheese sandwiches and afternoon coffee and donut binges. I found myself yearning for a bag of grapes, a banana or some vegetables.
He credits his drive and focus to the daily practice of Transcendental Meditation and credits it with calming a savage temper and energising him. He believes in happy accidents, intuition and advocates that graft does indeed equal craft. The gap between his interpretations of experiences and the facts that are delivered from interviews with people whom he has worked with enables the reader to make their own conclusions and judgements. We are left with wondering will we ever know the real David Lynch? Do we ever comprehend another being? Or even ourselves?

This biography is a fresh take on the format. I also enjoyed actor Steven Berkoff’s FREE ASSOCIATION – writing about his life as if speaking with a psychiatrist, a stream of consciousness on the page. Patti Smiths’ diaries and notepads are pure joy in written form and make me want to pick up a book, a cup of dirty black coffee and discard keeping an eye on the time. Alan Rickman’s diaries, in contrast, I found very frustrating as he complained about the acting game life, its trials and tribulations and other first world problems. Like having to get up at what he deemed a ridiculous hour – 4.00/5.00 a.m. (in my opinion the best part of the day) for a film shoot, even though this short period of employment permitted him to pop off to a farmhouse in Italy as many times as I visit the Aldi in a month to buy my food.

I am not sure that this Lynch book will be one I choose to re-read, like the way with some of his films, I am happy to have seen them once, but not certain I need to see them again. Two biographies I will always re-read include any Derek Jarmans, particular MODERN NATURE, a book that helped me when writing a play about William Roscoe. The horticultural descriptions inspired me to try and re-capture the botanical wonderment of Liverpool gardens in the 1700’s. Jarman’s lust for life and creativity is contagious. In a similar vein, David Hockney’s SPRING CANNOT BE CANCELLED is like literary Red Bull in that it makes you want to adopt a strict creative discipline and just create.

Lynch is a genius and what a portfolio to leave the world. From the bizarre oddity that is ERASERHEAD (1977), the fame fable of MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001), the shocking disturbing BLUE VELVET (1986) and, for me, his finest piece of cinematography, the exploration of cruelty and kindness, THE ELEPHANT MAN, the true story of Joseph (not John) Merrick.

Of course, it would be remiss not to mention the cultural phenomena of TWIN PEAKS. I first watched this alone one summer as an undergraduate in Aberystwyth, renting video cassettes from PIER VIDEO, a haven of film oddities next to an amusement arcade, a cheap nightclub and an ice cream parlour. All locations worthy of a Lynch story. Seeing the TV drama for the first time freaked me out because the small Welsh seaside coastal town had a subtext of dark stories, (like a small leather-fixated gimp man, with a high pitch voice, who ran a Zoo in nearby Borth and a known nudist who swam in the sea late at night). This undercurrent behind closed doors reminded me of the whole theme of the show.

We can see the Lynch diligence in new directors. Like in Robert Eggers’ NOSFERATU, the icy German forest where snow drops fall from the silver screen, or the New York sunrise across the park in Halina Reijn’s BABYGIRL.

Finally, I do have to point out that this book is littered with wise insights.
On failure – it is so freeing, it is beautiful in a way, to have a great failure. There’s nowhere to go but up.
On ideas – ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.

Along with wisdom, a very calm and caring authorial voice emanates from this book. I am particularly pleased to have heard the phrase, ‘HOLY JUMPING GEORGE’, one I will adopt. And I think I am going to meditate more often from now on.

If you have enjoyed this Room to Dream review and are based in the UK, you can buy a copy from an independent bookshop near you via this affiliate link. This site may earn a small commission if you do.

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With great timing, Will and Testament opens on a ‘bright and beautiful late November morning, the sun was shining, I might have mistaken it for spring…’ Bergljot’s enjoyment of the clear day is soon interrupted by a call from her sister, pulling her into a dispute between her two sisters and brother about how their parents have chosen to share out two summer cabins they own. As with any family, there have been quarrels over the years, but certain events have led to a long estrangement. While the two younger sisters always got on well with their parents, Bergljot and her brother have different memories of growing up, alleging abuse by their father that their mother ignored.

What starts as a disagreement over property soon becomes a consideration of how allegations of historical abuse are handled and the difficult path to being believed faced by survivors. The acknowledgement and resolution Bergljot seeks from her family is shut down at every attempt she makes, in favour of keeping her quiet and smoothing things over. Psychoanalysis is key to Bergljot’s beginning to heal and her conversations and dreams, her breakdowns and breakthroughs, are all laid bare. Hjorth also conveys how the other siblings see the estrangement and how the parents playing favourites has affected the relationships between their children. Their different experiences and the way events and words have been interpreted over the years means they cannot find their way towards any kind of reconciliation.

It was exhausting to act politely towards people who presented themselves as loving me.

Bergljot’s life, coming to the reader through first-person narrative, has been traumatic – and as in Long Live The Post Horn! –  Hjorth and translator Charlotte Barslund really nail the way thoughts crowd in and repeat themselves, and language illuminates or distorts. Bergljot and her friend Klara both work in the arts and spend time at plays and exhibitions, writing for magazines and away on retreats or low-level feuding with other creatives. Philosophers and poets are quoted and discussed, as are books they have read. There is a Tove Ditlevsen line that Klara quotes often. This part of their lives is beautifully woven into the story. I love the way Vigdis Hjorth’s books capture how the mundane and the profound mix – how the everyday can intrude at a time when everything seems like it should be falling apart.

I walked past a shop front and saw someone who looked like me in the window, but it couldn’t be me because she looked well. I stopped, retraced my steps and studied myself, a seemingly functioning woman. Could I see myself through her eyes? You’re clever, I said to her, and you don’t look too bad, I said to her. Shouldn’t you be out in the world doing things?

While much of Bergljot’s story is painful and difficult, the fact that she has been out in the world is – while not the resolution she has been seeking from her family – a victory of sorts. Creating and collaborating as well as building her own ‘found family’, with her children and partner and a close circle of friends, including Bo, who studies conflict from the former Yugoslavia to Palestine, and Klara, who has learnt to pick herself up over and over again with the toughness of a streetfighter, Bergljot has been piecing together how to live in the aftermath of trauma. While a much darker read than Long Live The Post Horn!, in common with that book, Will and Testament is an unflinching examination of a woman’s interior life and spirit that acts as a light in the darkness.

If you have enjoyed this Will and Testament review, it is available from Verso Books

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ArtsGroupie CIC have teamed up with Liverpool Libraries and Information Services for a public exhibition of Liverpool’s theatre history from the archives, courtesy of Liverpool Record Office. Long before Liverpool dominated pop music, Liverpool’s theatre scene was once the envy of all the world. Current and former theatres spanning 250-years are to be put under the spotlight together for the first time from 8 November 2024 to March 2025, for the exhibition Lights Up on Liverpool – open now in the Hornby Library at Liverpool Central Library.

Through its theatre history, the city’s social history unfolds in a vibrant tapestry. Liverpool’s groundbreaking, radical, and experimental approaches to theatre is revisited, particularly working-class contributions to UK theatre. This richly unique history makes it a one-of-a-kind journey through time, which has never been displayed so thoroughly.

The exhibition is a response to the decreasing number of working-class professionals in the performing arts. 2022 Office of National Statistics (ONS) analysis revealed that 16.4% of actors, musicians, and writers born between 1953 and 1962 came from working-class backgrounds, whereas that figure dropped to only 7.9% for those born four decades later. 2024 research from charity Arts Emergency found that fewer than 1 in 10 of all arts workers today come from working-class backgrounds.

ArtsGroupie CIC and Liverpool Libraries and Information Services have responded with a flagship project which they say should be a gold standard of the kind of work that is needed to address access to the arts. ArtsGroupie started this summer with a tie-in Arts Council England funded project Emerging Voices, which included drama workshops for children aged 8-13, play-reading sessions at Liverpool Central Library, and free theatre heritage walking tours, all targeted for communities in high deprivation areas of the Liverpool City Region.

ArtsGroupie are now applying with The National Lottery Heritage Fund to expand the work around the exhibition in what will be a large-scale effort to tackle the issue.

Liverpool Screenwriting legend, Alan Bleasdale (Boys from the Black Stuff, No Surrender) said:

In the summer of 1959, when I was thirteen, I was placed at the very bottom of the bottom class in my school, but I was very good at English. I never dreamt that I could make a career simply out of being very good at English, but I did. And if I can do it, so can you.

ArtsGroupie Co-Director, Mikey Garland said:

If the gatekeeping of the arts is not swiftly addressed, the UK’s arts scene is at risk of rapid stagnation. Artistic innovation cannot thrive when it is only represented by those who look the same, come from the same background and think the same way. Working-class life is depicted in film, television, and theatre all the time, but is told by people who have never lived it. They want our stories but won’t let us be the ones to tell them.

Lights Up on Liverpool will be open at the Hornby Library at Liverpool Central Library from November 2024 to February 2025.
More information about ArtsGroupie is available here.

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Malika Moustadraf was a writer from Casablanca who often wrote about the hidden details of women’s lives, often those at the margins of society. Her characters struggle with relations with boyfriends, husbands and fathers, and the patriarchal system that they prop up, but also with finding money, putting food on the table and getting by, never mind getting on. That might sound as if the stories will be miserable but far from it. There is an explosion of life onto the page as the women involved scheme, kick out and try to achieve some semblance of a victory, however small it may be.

Ruse

I loved the gossipy sisters sharing good and bad news in this story. When one has to fess up to knowing about something the other was unaware of, it is almost violent:

Hada summoned all her strength, steeling herself to throw the second grenade in her sister’s face.

Even though what they are scheming over is more patriarchal bulls1t, you have to raise a smile at their eventual cunning.

Just Different

This story is written from a trans or perhaps intersex point of view. It is a plea for tolerance and understanding for anyone who does not fit into expectations of them:

I don’t know why they treat me this way: roughly, rudely, or sometimes with an indifference so extreme it borders on cruelty. In the street they look at me like I’m from another planet, even though the head on my shoulders can’t be so different from the rest of the heads around here.

Housefly, Head Lice and A Woman in Love, A Woman Defeated

And while, as translator Alice Guthrie notes, two of these stories ‘Housefly’ and ‘Head Lice’:

feature what are probably the first ever published literary depictions of cybers~x in Arabic

there is also a longing for a love that, however fleeting, however unlikely, matches the great loves of the songs and stories.

Love is like that, it always shows up without an appointment. Love is like death, like illness, always arriving when we least expect it… I feel cold.  I look up at the dark sky: it’s been abandoned by the stars. It’s going to rain for sure. I sneeze three times; I’m coming down with a cold. I don’t like winter, rainy season of red noses and muddy streets.

Malika Moustadraf

When you have read and enjoyed a collection of short stories by an author, it is natural to want to pick up others by them.  However, the story ‘Blood Feast’ contains something of the reasons as to why that won’t be possible. While there is more available in Arabic, English speaking readers will have to content themselves with this volume, the first of Moustadraf’s work to be translated. In the story, a character is suffering with kidney disease, caught between the unavailability of medical care and common superstitions, where ultimately survival or otherwise will all come down to money.

Moustadraf herself would suffer from the condition and her provocative writing and the things she wrote about likely factored into a reluctance on the authorities to either give her the treatment she needed or allow her to leave Morocco to seek it elsewhere. Malika Moustadraf died aged just 37. It is terrible to accept that there won’t be more forthcoming from such a perceptive and inventive writer, but maybe the best way to remember her is through the sharp and unique stories she left us with.

If you have enjoyed this Something Strange, Like Hunger review, the book is available from Saqi Books or from an independent bookshop near you via this affiliate link (UK only – we may receive a small commission if you use this!)
You can find all our Women in Translation posts tagged here.

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Water Street is a transatlantic story that covers a key moment of Liverpool’s history during the American Civil War. It is part of a series of books covering the city from the mid-19th century, taking in the African and Irish diaspora and the world-changing events of that period. From a direct role in supporting the Confederate Navy and war effort to financing the Lincoln Assassination project and even harbouring the one fugitive to escape the ensuing manhunt, this nefarious episode in Liverpool’s past is brought to life in vivid relief.

Maxwell says,

The novel is still the most interactive form of storytelling that exists, even if it has been around for hundreds of years. In Water Street, my goal is to allow the reader to taste, touch, smell and feel the Liverpool of 1863 as well as see it, taking them into a Western adventure that maps to real-life events at a time when my own ancestors were stepping off the Landing Stage.

Maxwell is a Liverpool writer, filmmaker and lecturer in Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University. Liverpool has always been a place that cultivates amazing artists, curious creatives and musicians. At the moment, with the success of Liverpool Literary Agency, a collective of local writers are continuing that tradition, led by an indefatigable Clare Coombes, championing Northern scribes. Maxwell is from this stable, with other talents like Ashleigh Nugent, author of Locks, and Zoe Richards (Garden of Her Heart), to name just two. The agency is proudly raising awareness of Liverpool’s rich source of ability.

For this 4 July holiday, it seemed fitting for ten million hardbacks to have a sit down with Mr JP Maxwell interview about his work.

10mh: When did you first get the idea to write about Liverpool’s involvement with America?

It was a long time coming. If taken to the furthest degree, my ancestors were directly involved in the mercantile and maritime American relationship with Liverpool – a seafaring three times removed African American grandfather, or a woman who escaped the disaster of the Irish Hunger for instance – so it was simmering away across the generations before it seeded in my noggin. The mothership, Mary Maxwell (neé Burke), grew up in poverty in the Dingle and educated herself, so telling family stories and getting them down on paper was a task she undertook from as far back as I can remember. If you connect the ancestors using oral tradition rather than ancestry.com, 160 years isn’t that long ago. I’m standing on the shoulders of giants.

Earshot of tales about the Confederacy in the city came along much later and once I discovered about the building of a Navy in the yards of Birkenhead and Liverpool, that set the charges off on further research. It’s easy to denigrate the city’s former status on the world stage as pomp and self-aggrandisement, but what I discovered was off the charts in terms of how pivotal this place was to American History. Liverpool was almost a city state in terms of the money and power here, to the extent the tail was wagging the dog in the relationship with Whitehall and Westminster. British neutrality in the Civil War was nothing more than a bit of red tape to circumvent, but Liverpool almost dragged Britain into that war. This would have had savage, unfathomable consequences. To a writer, it was irresistible fare.

Piecing this together all happened during the first lockdown, in 2020 and 2021. The Great Reset gave me a moment to focus upon a project that I had always wanted to pursue, for all the despair, fear and grief that transpired. Plus, I would have done anything to avoid looking at pictures of Boris Johnson.

10mh: Describe your novel in one sentence.

Commander Dunwoody is in Liverpool to win the American Civil War for the South. His wife is here to stop him.

10mh: Do you have a writing ritual or a place where you regularly write?

I’m a flaneur. I’m an itinerant writer, always on the go, calling out to my settings to inspire me by going there; smelling, listening and watching. I have a few quiet sanctuaries where I can double-down on the research, drafting and editing, but they are dotted around the city, at home and at work. A favourite spot is the Picton Library in Liverpool Central Library, an idyll of Victorian calm, but more often than not I’m in some basement silo at LJMU or pounding the pavement. I like my writing to move, so I move.

10mh: Who are your influences?

Me ma, Mary. She taught me to read, listen and write. She gave birth to me and still influences me eight years after she’s gone. All that amounts to a debt that can’t be repaid. I’m biased but she had a similar effect on so many others who weren’t her children.

James Ellroy is far and away numero uno among contemporary writers. He stitches together fact and fiction in a way that transports you to a time and place. There is salacious detail in how he depicts JFK, Marilyn or J. Edgar Hoover, but it is entirely appropriate to salacious times and places. He uses a soul-searching scalpel rather than a thrill-seeking bludgeon. His writing peels off the smooth skin of the American Dream and reveals the rotten interior and I’m a sucker for it every time. It maps to my own writing because he shows how corruption exists on an endless cycle wherever money and power go. Since I come from a long line of people who had neither but were on the receiving end, that theme has a boundless appeal to me. Even now, the past is often shone in a glorious, golden, wholesome light when we should know just how f-cking terrible it was. Ellroy is here to tell you and so am I.

Hunter S. Thompson and Sebastian Barry also spring to mind. Both go after the same rawness as Ellroy, exploring real people and events without pulling punches.

Aside from all these white geezers and me ma, Frederick Douglass is a fundamental influence. He was a self-liberated slave who rose to be one of the foremost American orators, campaigners and essayists of the 19th century. Read his speeches and you’ll feel like putting this messy, complicated and often sh1tty world to rights in 2024. I’ve even fictionalised him in my next book. He was the most photographed man in the United States during the century, a savvy media operator for the day. It’s high time someone made a film about his life, but please make it a good one.

10mh: How long did it take to write the book? Can you describe the process?

160+ years, which doesn’t mean that I’m a vampire, rather that I acknowledge how much my ancestors formed WATER STREET. In a sense though, the book wouldn’t be the same without technology. Only in recent years via social media have the oral traditions of communities become available when the illiterate stories of the working class and ‘Untermensch’ had almost vanished because they were not written down. Marry this to access to archives in as far-flung places as Louisiana plantations and the rapid access to hard data on anyone, anywhere or anything in the mid-19th Century and then you’ve got a tale that would have been difficult to pin down in the same way had I approached it in the nascent days of the internet.

This book is set in 1863 but it was only possible to write it in the last few years, bizarre as that sounds.

I’d like to say that I use cursive longhand in Moleskine notebooks and a Smith Corona typewriter but I’m about as far away from that as possible. I write into the Word mobile app on the bus, on a networked PC, a Mac, a Dell laptop, wherever I go, all backed up into OneDrive. The draft file is navigable using the navigation pane in Word, so I can see all my chapters at a glance and find my way to any part of the folio quickly. Research notes are assembled in Google Keep, all with meta data that I can find in seconds. I like to stay light on my feet so if it gets too noisy or distracting, I turn off notifications and move, even working just on my phone if necessary.

There are a host of devices – my wife rolls her eyes at the amount of gizmos I have – that are all synced. If an idea hits me in the middle of the night, usually between sleep cycles, I’ll record it and set a reminder about it for the following day, or whenever I’m able to follow it up. My job teaching at LJMU involved reading reams of scripts, so keeping momentum and focus is a challenge, which is why I steal every moment, ready to write wherever I go. Writer’s block is alien to me, because there is always something to research, rewrite or design in a narrative. Obsessed much?

10mh: What advice would you give to a new writer?

Story is in everything and if you can drill it down into a visceral, human experience, you’ve got a shot. Get close to your subject matter – I’m so close to mine that it’s in my DNA. In order for a commissioner, publisher or agent to see the potential, you’ll have to live and breathe it. This is not to say that the narrative needs to be layered and complex if a simple delivery will fit. I think it always helps to find a true story to base your first book on, something that will grab a headline.

Don’t expect it to all happen at once. If you step back and think about what it will take to write a full-length novel, it can be crushing and overwhelming. Do your research and don’t stop researching from the earliest sketch to the umpteenth draft. Do a breakdown of chapters – so many writers come up with an opening and then try to busk it through the rest of the novel and they end up treading water and losing the reader. Know your structure, even if that structure changes in the process, you will have a direction for it, which is priceless.

The sad fact is that people don’t like difficult reads these days and you have a sh1t-ton of white noise to compete against – pictures of cats – so if you are a debut novelist looking to get an agent you had better be good or get good in your chosen genre. If I want to be like Thomas Pynchon or James Joyce, I’ll write that one when I’m established. Avoid going over 100k for your debut too. If you do, cut it down, right down.

10mh: What’s next?

My next book is THE AMERICANS ON ABERCROMBY SQUARE, a direct sequel to WATER STREET. It picks up Harriet and Conté’s story two years later in 1865, just as the American Civil War is coming to a close. Liverpool has fundamental links to the Lincoln Assassination and the ensuing manhunt, which I’m exploring with a similar mix of Western sass and political sh1thousery.

This one is with beta readers at the time of writing, but my fingers are still twitching. I’m sketching another book about Pat the Cat, one of the key players from WATER STREET. This is about his journey from Cavan in Ireland during the Great Hunger of 1848 to Liverpool. The Hunger overlaps the American Civil War in a legion of ways, not least the huge influx of Irish immigrants to the city, first generation, which was a torrent by 1863. Digging out so much about what happened during the mid-1800s made me want to explore the famine in a dedicated story, turning the litany of misery into a fathomable human story rather than a dry, historical account. Is this where the gallows Irish – and Scouse – humour emanates?

The arrogance and wilful ignorance of the British government and establishment at the time is astounding, even by the standards of then rather than now. Having never lost a war, making the Irish Hunger and slavery accountable is still a process that Britain is yet to fully deal with. Why should it matter in 2024? Because avoidable trauma should never be dismissed, two seconds or two hundred years ago.

And it all keeps me out of mischief, I suppose.

If you have enjoyed this JP Maxwell interview, WATER STREET is available now via News From Nowhere, Waterstones and all good book shops.
‘A brilliant story’ – David Morrissey
The aftermath of the Great Irish Hunger crashes headlong into the American Civil War in the city of Liverpool in 1863. A toothsome historical adventure thriller.
Agent: Clare Coombes, Liverpool Literary Agency

JP Maxwell is a novelist, filmmaker and senior lecturer in Digital Writing at LJMU. He has produced three feature films, receiving network broadcasts on BBC Television and official selection at major film festivals such as Karlovy Vary and BFI Times London. Maxwell graduated from the London School of Slavonic and East European Studies in 1995, having spent four years under the tutelage of former and existing agents from the Cold War era. This underpins and partly explains his penchant for conspiracy and plot, added to the acidic twist of growing up in Liverpool during the Thatcher years. Published by BK Fiction in July 2023, his latest work is the novel ‘Water Street’, the first book in a series of historical thrillers set in mid-19th Century Liverpool, regarding the city’s seismic relationship with the United States and Ireland in those years.

John Maguire is a local writer and playwright. His historical plays include Kitty: Queen of the Washhouse (about public health pioneer, Catherine Wilkinson), currently being adapted into a novel and A Portrait of Willliam Roscoe, He leads Heritage walking tours for Artsgroupie. Tours the company run include a Liverpool’s American History specific tour, written by co-director Mikey Francis Dunne.

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You can follow along with the walkers, with photographs and words reflecting on each day of the Walk at the Liverpool Irish Festival website.

The route they are walking in Ireland is known as The National Famine Way. It is marked at regular intervals with commemorative bronze shoes. These were cast from a real pair of 19th century children’s shoes found on Strokestown Estate. The Festival’s Artistic Director and CEO, Emma Smith, will walk with History Research Group leader (and ten million hardbacks writer), John Maguire. They’ll be joined by Liverpool Great Hunger Commemoration Committee member (and local historian) Greg Quiery, members of the National Famine Way and Strokestown Estate teams and Ireland’s Ambassador to Canada, Eamonn McKee. The team will carry a pair of bronze commemorative shoes along the route to Dublin. They will then cross the Irish Sea to Liverpool, where the shoes will be taken to the Liverpool Irish Famine Memorial.

Once the shoes arrive in Liverpool, they will be walked from Clarence Dock — where 1.3 million Irish migrants arrived during An Gorta Mór (The Great Famine) — to the Irish Famine Memorial at St Luke’s Church. The shoes will remain in Liverpool as a poignant symbol of the shared history of Liverpool and Ireland, a history both devastating and enriching. Two further pairs of commemorative shoes will travel onward to Canada to be homed there. Later in the year, during the Liverpool Irish Famine Memorial in October, Ireland’s UK Ambassador, Martin Fraser, and Consul General, Sarah Mangan, will repeat the Clarence Dock to St Luke’s Church walk.

The Story Behind the Walk

In 1847 at the height of the Irish Famine, 1,490 men, women and children set out from Strokestown in County Roscommon, Ireland on a walk that would see half of them perish. Guided by their landlord’s agent they walked the gruelling 165 km to Dublin port and onwards to the UK and North America because it was cheaper for their landlord to assist their emigration than it was for him to keep them in the Roscommon poorhouse. 177 years on, Liverpool Irish Festival friends and custodians of Liverpool’s Irish Famine Trail will set off from Strokestown on 19 May 2024 to walk the route of the evictees – now marked by the National Famine Way.

Along the way they will carry a pair of bronze shoes, cast from an exact pair found at the Strokestown estate and now the symbol of the ‘Famine Way’. The shoes mark a reconnection between the Irish famine emigrants and the Liverpool Irish Famine Trail which curates and preserves sites and stories of the Liverpool Irish Famine migrants for future generations. The route will start in Strokestown, moving onward to Dublin Port, onto the ferry from Dublin to Holyhead, Holyhead to Birkenhead and from Seacombe (Birkenhead) by ferry to the Mersey Port. The walkers will then carry the shoes via Clarence Dock Gates, through which 1.3m Irish lives passed and by foot to the Liverpool Irish Famine Memorial at St Luke’s Church in Liverpool.

How can you help?

The team will be raising vital funds to support the ongoing work of the Liverpool Irish Festival in the conservation, digitisation and upgrading of the Liverpool Irish Famine Trail. They are passionate about maintaining this legacy and this history for future generations.

Funds raised on the walk will contribute towards:

• The commissioning of the bronze shoes being cast as tangible heritage reference of the Strokestown Famine group and their link to Liverpool. These shoes will find a permanent home in Liverpool just as the migrants who wore them did

• Maintaining the existing Trail and its heritage whilst exploring new relevant sites of interest. As custodians of the Trail, the group are doing all they can to reinstate it and to refresh the Memorial monument, which has served as a poignant marker for people since 1998

• Developing an app to enable visitors to Liverpool to explore and understand the importance and relevance of the Irish Famine story to the city and its communities.

If you can donate to this cause today, you would also be warmly invited to join the team on a re-run of the last part of the walk on 27 Oct 2024, ahead of an Irish Famine Memorial event planned as part of Liverpool Irish Festival 2024.

Any support of the Strokestown-Liverpool Walk, the Liverpool Irish Famine Trail and helping to honour Liverpool’s role in supporting the Irish Famine poor and the legacy of that support today will be gratefully received and provide encouragement to the walkers on their long journey!

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Although I generally believe that books will find you at the time they are meant to, there are some writers who you read after a long wait and promptly kick yourself for not getting to them sooner. Zora Neale Hurston is one of those writers for me. I was an idiot for not reading her books as soon as I could, so do not make the same mistake and pick up something by her without delay. I have read her non-fiction, essays and short stories and would recommend them all (and hope to review them more fully soon) but for today, from 1937 comes her epic work of fiction, Their Eyes Were Watching God.

When Janie Crawford heads back into town dressed in rough overalls and without the younger man she left with, the local gossips’ tongues get busy wagging. Her old friend Pheoby Watson heads over to Janie’s with a plate of food and a willing ear to let Janie tell her what’s gone on and that’s where the story begins. What a tale it is.

Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf, with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches.

Growing up close to a white family her grandmother, Nanny, works for, Janie never realises she’s different to them until one day she sees a group photograph. Not long after, Nanny catches her kissing a boy over the back gate and packs her off to be married to an older farmer, in an attempt to give her some of the security in life that her mother and grandmother were never able to enjoy. Reluctantly going along with the plan, Janie soon begins questioning whether love should be part of marriage. Her husband sees her as more of a domestic help and Nanny tells her not to fuss too much about love so long as she’s being looked after. But when Joe Sparks with his city clothes and dream of moving to a town that Black people are building for themselves (based on Hurston’s real hometown) comes walking down her road, Janie knows it is an opportunity and grabs it with both hands.

Joe – or Jody sometimes – is a man with big ideas and big plans, and it isn’t long before he’s the mayor and running a general store, a respected man in the town. Janie is a kind of trophy to him, useful as long as she’s enhancing his status among the other men but not much more. Once even that dynamic between them shifts, it isn’t long before she realises her second marriage is no more fulfilling than her first one.

She had learned how to talk some and leave some. She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels. Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what it was. But mostly she lived between her hat and her heels… She got nothing from Jody except what money could buy, and she was giving away what she didn’t value.

What happens to Janie next should be kept for when you read the book, but without spoiling too much, it’s fair to say life isn’t done with Janie yet, with space on the branches of that great tree for more love, life and natural disasters than one woman should have to bear. As it’s the American South in the 1930s, racism is everywhere, including in Janie’s blood. If you have been following some of the conversations in books and other media about how sexism and racism entwine, or on topics like colourism, there is both a feeling of what a modern writer Hurston is, and a shameful indictment of how little things have changed since she was writing. The way Black communities in the book are impacted more by the (real-life event) Okeechobee hurricane had echoes in Hurricane Katrina for me.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is a story of Black women, as told from woman to woman, be it Janie talking to Pheoby or Nanny telling Janie her remembrances of the Civil War, reminding us how few generations there are between slavery and Janie’s time, and back then and now. It reminded me of the intergenerational story in Yaa Gyasi’s book Homegoing. It’s written in a colloquial, dialect style which brings to life the way the characters talk to each other. An anthropologist by training, Hurston had a great ear for dialect, and I think her way of rendering the accents makes for a more vivid read. However, some of her fellow Harlem Renaissance writers disagreed and the style fell out of favour for a while, with some feeling it was a caricature. Instead, it almost makes you feel like you’re sitting next to Pheoby, listening to Janie telling it in your ear. I love Zora Neale Hurston’s way with words, from capturing the townspeople sitting around Jody’s store teasing each other, to Janie’s young man telling her about a night on the town, to the atmosphere after Janie and Joe have had a row where ‘the stillness was the sleep of swords.’ Or how about this description of a friend’s woman:

… git her good and mad and she’ll wade through solid rock up to her hip pockets.

If that expression isn’t currently in use, perhaps it should be!

Janie ends up a long way away from the life she expected or the one that others had chosen for her, but through it all she finds a way to live it her way. The revival of interest in Zora Neale Hurston’s work is a gift to readers, not least because we get to spend some time in her unbreakable heroine’s company.

If you have enjoyed this Their Eyes Were Watching God review and are in the UK, you can buy a copy from an independent bookshop near you via this affiliate link. This site may earn a small commission if you do.

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I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Someday, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.

― Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin

On reading PUSH PROCESS, I immediately recalled this opening quote from Isherwood’s famous novel that became the cult classic CABARET.

Just as a photograph compels the viewer to look at something afresh, a new perspective on the familiar, this unique work offers the reader another way to frame the magical city of Venice. A melting pot of inventive minds, philosophers and artists who all are drawn to this ethereal location. From Luisa Casati to Peggy Guggenheim, Venice attracts eccentrics and outsiders looking to find identity and make sense of their lives. A magical portal which forces you to find yourself and maybe something you did not even expect.

PUSH PROCESS is a genre defying work set in Venice in 2000. Richard is a postgraduate student living in the city to research its past. He is supposed to be working in the archive, but he meets Merlo and Lars, two art students who are more interested in Venice’s present. He decides to pick up a camera and join them. The world comes alive for Richard through photographs: for the first time, he feels connected to a place – and other people. He is determined to continue, whatever the cost.

Push Process is a novel about art, friendship and being European, illustrated with over fifty black-and-white photographs of Venice. It allows the reader to experience a creative being in their element and forever being struck with the jarring aspect of reality. Whilst capturing the elegance of Venice, he never shies away from the raw everyday reality of living in a city swarmed by visitors, where all are tourists.

Everywhere’s a shithole; here’s no different.

The book is filled with references to bars and things only a local would know to avoid, like the pissing dog – the pisciane – a vaporetto that stops everywhere on the water bus route. Images weave their way into the narrative to further embed the experience of reading. They are then all collected at the end of the book, which gives a deeper resonance after reading the text, adding to the context within the narrative arc of the main character’s journey.

A book like this has the danger of being zamzawed, but Jonathan Walker has achieved the right amount of writing and images. His attention to detail in the prose is akin to that found in an image.

Lars had small cuts from the chisel, and older scars; white dust around his fingernails. Merlo bit her nails savagely, so she looked like she’d escaped from a Gestapo prison.

By looking outwardly and capturing the external we start to get a handle on the inner self. Artists and creatives particularly will enjoy this book, recognising the small moments of triumph, the joy and beauty of the everyday, the never ceasing force of impostor syndrome, the innocuous nature of addiction:

Richard didn’t drink single malts anymore – it wasn’t worth it, given how quickly he went through a bottle.

And also, recognising the very questioning and seeking that embody the creative journey.

If you want to immerse yourself more in the Venetian atmosphere, I recommend THE UNFINISHED PALAZZO by Judith Mackrell, PALACE OF THE DROWNED by Christine Mangan, VENICE IS A FISH by Tiziano Scarpa and THE BOOK OF VENICE, published by Comma Press.

If you like the style of this book, I suggest also looking at M TRAIN by Patti Smith and SPRING CANNOT BE CANCELLED by David Hockney.

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PUSH PROCESS is out now from Ortac Press. We received a copy in return for this honest Push Process review, but that did not influence us. 

Jonathan Walker wrote about some of the inspiration for the novel here.

Photographs of Venice courtesy of John Maguire

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I’d never been to Venice when I chose to do my PhD on the city’s history in the mid-90s. In fact, I’d never been to Italy before, and I didn’t speak Italian. Studying Venice was therefore a way to hold a gun to my own head – to force myself to expand my horizons – but it was also a pragmatic choice. I knew the archive there was home to millions of documents produced by one of the most sophisticated bureaucracies in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, and that the Venetian nobility – the group I proposed to study – were a famously circumscribed group, who jealously guarded admittance to their ranks. So Venice seemed a more manageable proposition than Naples or Rome (or Bordeaux or Cologne). And it was less of a cliché than writing about Renaissance Florence.

This unromantic logic actually stood me in good stead: I got to discover Venice on my own terms, rather than in light of other people’s fantasies. And this decisively influenced the photographs I later took, which in Push Process are attributed to the book’s protagonist, Richard.

From 1994 until 2005, I spent several months of each year in Venice, even though I was always officially based elsewhere: as a postgraduate student in Cambridge, then as a postdoctoral researcher in Cambridge and Sydney. The normal thing to do as a postdoc is to rewrite your PhD for your first book. I didn’t want to do that: continuing in that mode felt like voluntarily wearing a straitjacket. So in Cambridge and Sydney I wrote , a book about a seventeenth-century spy whose surveillance reports I’d discovered in the archive. I tried every experiment I could think of to shake up the way I wrote. I started taking photographs as part of this attempt to defamiliarise the idea of history: to pursue analogies between spies, historians and photographers; between the city and the archive. But the photographs quickly outgrew that subsidiary role and became a separate project. A way to challenge even more fundamental preconceptions: for example, my prejudice for the textual over the visual, and for the distant past over the recent.

The history of Venice doesn’t stop with the fall of the republic in 1797. As Richard says in Push Process,

It isn’t finished yet. It’s a work in progress.

And I wanted to photograph that reality: the public housing estates in Cannaregio, Giudecca and Sacca Fisola; the modern port; the shipyards in the northeast corner of the city (or at least their exterior); the ferries at Tronchetto; the bus terminus at Piazzale Roma.

I was particularly interested in the public transport system: an index both of Venice’s awkward attempts to come to terms with modernity and its love-hate relationship with the tourist industry. And of course the bars where I went drinking at night. The novel has scenes set in Café Blue, Caffè dei Frari, Al Postale, Paradiso Perduto, Florian and ‘Da Enzo’. (The last is the only one with a fictionalised name, because the proprietor appears briefly, so it seemed polite to give him a nominal disguise, but it won’t be difficult for anyone familiar with late-night bars in Venice to identify the original.)

What I wasn’t interested in: gondolas, monumental architecture, the Bridge of Sighs. Or rather, these all appear occasionally (the Bridge of Sighs is out of focus for its one guest spot), but they’re not the real subjects of the images.

Richard’s experiences in the novel are similar to my own.

If you kept to the main streets in Venice, the routes trod out by millions of feet, the city felt welcoming – like it was posing for the camera – and no one bothered you except other tourists. But there was a different city, made up of areas demolished, redeveloped, then abandoned again. A city of derelict factories, half-empty warehouses and offices – a city behind spiked gates and walls with barbed wire on top. On the map, these areas often showed as blank, but as soon as you stepped close to their borders, then, at that precise moment, as if by magic, a sullen security guard unfamiliar with the concept of public space appeared.

After Pistols! Treason! Murder! came out in 2007, I felt I had nowhere to go as a historian. It made more sense to switch to fiction, where experimentation was more welcome (at least in theory). My first novel came out in 2010 (set in a fantasy version of Venice) – eventually I formalised the change in direction with a second doctorate in creative writing. But it took me a long time to figure out what to with my photographs: that is, how to turn them into a story.

Push Process is about encountering both Venice and photography for the first time, using each to understand the other. It’s about learning to see what’s really there, what’s staring you in the face if only you can suspend your preconceptions about what you expect to see.

Most attempts to depict Venice refuse to acknowledge the contemporary, or decry its presence, and many visitors dream of finding an ‘unspoilt’ corner of the city in which they are the only alien presence – the only tourist chosen to enter Shangri-La and carry evidence of pure Venetian culture back to the wider world. I wanted to start by acknowledging and insisting upon the absurdity of this dream. There is no unspoilt corner of Venice untouched by the contemporary world, but it was precisely the evidence of this contamination that interested me.

My best friend in Venice was a sculptor studying at the art academy, and without his example, I’d never have picked up a camera. So Push Process is dedicated to all the friends I made in the city: the main characters are English, Dutch, Danish and Italian. Most of these friends were outsiders like me: architecture students, fellow researchers in the archive. One reason I decided to change the focus of my historical research to spies is that they too were often outsiders in Venice, members of an international community of diplomats, couriers and merchants. So I make no claim to show Venice from a Venetian point of view. Instead, I show the international city I experienced – but that’s always been a part of Venice’s identity.

I visited and lived in Venice as a citizen of the EU, and at the end of the novel, when Richard contemplates moving to Europe permanently, someone says to him,

What’s stopping you?

I intended this line to have an ironic charge: the freedom of movement Richard takes for granted has now been lost for British people.

Venice changed my life. It became for me a gateway to the larger worlds of art and history. My imagination has fed on it ever since (three of my four books are set in the city, or a version of it). But the best tribute we can pay to the city is not to prostrate ourselves before its spectacle. Instead, I tried to ‘pick up the past and put it to use’, as one of the characters in Push Process says. Because that’s the only way to imagine a future.

Here’s a short introduction to some of the photographs included in the novel:

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Jonathan Walker is the author of Push Process, now available from Ortac Press.

All photos copyright the author and used with permission.

We previously reviewed Jonathan Walker’s novel The Angels of L19, and he wrote about some of the inspiration for the story here.

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