Writings and Exclamations
A book, a story, some essays, some reviews
I published an essay in the eighth issue of Tolka, which describes itself as a ‘journal of formally promiscuous nonfiction’, and is run by a remarkable and generous team of editors. The essay, ‘A Disgorging Head’, is about a green man festival in my sort-of hometown, the history of that figure, and the slipperiness of ‘British’ folklore. The issue is out now and can be purchased here.
Splendide Mendax is the title of a short story I published in Issue 22 of The Fence. The story follows a character called Fed, who is a Julian Assange truther and suffers from stress-induced migraines. The issue is out now and can be purchased here.
I reviewed Oliver Sack’s Letters for the Guardian, which I found absolutely wonderful. You can read the review online, here.
Also for the Guardian, I wrote a piece about Walt Whitman’s wellness tract – ‘Manly Health and Training’ – and current trends in male wellness. The piece aimed to be a bit tongue-in-cheek while also hitting some serious notes. Publishing it taught me a lot about the selective reading of people in the Guardian comments section, and resulted in a slew of unsolicited DMs (okay, three or four) from semen retentionists.
Strange Relations, my debut nonfiction book, published in July. It tells the story of the interconnected lives and works of Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, John Cheever and Carson McCullers, and explores their personal and artistic investigations into masculinity, misogyny, power and violence; fraternity and friendship; love, sex, desire and intimacy. It can be ordered here, and will be out in paperback in a few months.
As part of publication, I had some very interesting conversations with other writers about the book, one with Philippa Snow at the LRB Bookshop, which can be listened to here (free), and one at Storysmith x Tenderbuttons, which can be listened to here (free).
Early in the year, I published an essay in Granta Magazine’s Generations issue (#166), about the transitional period living at my mum’s the winter before last. An excerpt can be read online.
In the coming year I will need to completely rethink the structure of my life, which seems to be something like a house of cards I have laboriously stacked over the course of a decade, on a mound of sand, by a very turbulent sea, with the wind picking up, and I don’t yet know how writing will fit into this new configuration. If you are a reader of this increasingly infrequent Substack and/or have enjoyed any of my writing, you can drop some coins here by way of a tip, if the impulse strikes you <3
