I’m dead chuffed to announce that my first piece of creative non-fiction has been published. You can read it in full on the Ellipsis Zine site here Third Best Fighter in the Year.
This is a departure for me from working on fiction to creating a novel length memoir that focuses on working class masculinity and ADHD.through me and my father’s lives.
A mate, said, ‘Who’d want to read a memoir about you. You’re not famous.’ This is true and it’s the question I most often ask myself when writing a piece of creative non-fiction: why am I writing this? Who will want to read this? But good creative non-fiction isn’t just about the narrator, or subject, as in the person at the centre of it, it’s about the themes they touch on, the connections they make and their voice.
Creative non-fiction uses the same literary styles, tools, and storytelling techniques of fiction applied to real events to create a compelling narrative.
The piece in Ellipsis Zine is short, just under a 1000 words, but gives a flavour of what I’m aiming for, so if you do read it, let me know what you think.
I’m currently writing a memoir centred around my dad and me, looking at working-class masculinity with a bit of ADHD thrown in for good measure, and it led me to remember an incident at school that turned the notion of the weaker sex on its head. If you want to find out more about this, you’ll have to keep an eye out for the August edition of Ellipsis Zine. This is the second piece of creative non-fiction I’ve had accepted for publication and could possibly be the first that you, wonderful reader, will get to see.
This image of me, I’m the one on the left, is from around the time the story is set, probably slightly earlier. Looking at my hair, I’d say I’m at the tail end of my Suedehead stage and moving into full-on Mod mode. I’m wearing a Fred Perry t-shirt and my coveted red Harrington jacket.
The guy next to me is called Rupert, which is about the best name, short of Tarquin, to guarantee getting your head kicked in at Mereway Upper School. I can’t remember how we became friends, probably a shared taste in music and clothes, but he was the first middle-class kid I ever met and became a conduit to a world I’d only seen on TV.
Like me, he lived close to the school, but unlike me, he lived in a large semi-detached house with a huge garden and a short drive out the front, which made our two-bed council house seem positively hutch-like by comparison. He never spoke about his dad. His dad was not present, but his effervescent mother and eccentric grandmother made me feel incredibly welcome. I think his mum was slightly concerned about him hanging out with the rough kid from the council estate, but his gran spoke to me like an equal and regaled me with tales of India and the Far East.
I never really knew how he felt about me because we don’t speak about stuff like that. He often seemed aloof, acting superior when it came to matters of music and clothes, but would defer to me when we were threatened by others; he wasn’t a wimp. Fighting was best avoided as it could lead to a torn shirt or scuffed shoes. Maybe he used me as muscle, I don’t know, but I know I got as much from him as he got from me with regards to tips on music and clothing, and I think that’s pretty good for any relationship.
I thought he was the best drummer in the world, although, to be more accurate, he was the only drummer in the world that I knew. He would calmly tolerate my discordant chord-chopping on my shit guitar and drum along perfectly to the first Specials album.
Me at art college, Bradford 89-91.
I bumped into him once in The Racehorse pub in Northampton. It was the mid-nineties, and I’d not seen him since school. I’d been away to Bradford studying Art and found myself unemployable and back home. We hadn’t spoken for 6 or 7 years. I’d embraced Acid House and Baggy culture, and my days of short hair and Harringtons were long behind me. It was early afternoon, and I’d already had a couple.
‘Betsy!’ No one used his first name.
‘Betsy!’ No one used his first name.
He flinched, as if bracing for an assault.
‘Fucking Hell, man. How are you doing? Let me get you a pint. Lager?’ Two beers into the afternoon, and I
He nodded.
‘Sit down. Sit down. I won’t be a minute.’
I placed a pint of lager and a pint of bitter on the table.
‘What are you up to these days?’
Again, that look, like I was the Stasi checking his papers at a Berlin checkpoint. I ploughed on. Asked him questions and never once thought the silence was oppressive. Eventually, three beers in, I learned that he’d sold his drum kit and now worked as a panel beater in some small industrial unit off the Welly Road.
‘You sold the drums?’
‘Yes.’
‘You sold the drums?’
‘We’ve covered this.’
As weird as his working as a panel beater was, it was the selling of the drums that floored me. Effectively, we’d swapped roles. I was working in a care home, a stopgap to build up funds and go travelling, but painfully aware I didn’t belong there, while my former mentor in music and clothes was wearing shitty overalls and hammering metal all day instead of doing the thing I’d thought he was born to do.
Rupert will feature in future writing, but to learn more about the world I grew up in, you’ll need to wait for the August edition of Ellipsis Zine.
Following on from my visit to the University of Leicester last week here are some pics of me in action and a link to the podcast that came from the day. Scroll down for the link.
Definitive book-pointing pose. Reading to 3rd year creative writing students.
Click here for the Golden Room podcast featuring me interviewed by Dr Kevan Manwaring.
I’m pleased with the podcast because I don’t sound like an arse and you can hear that we genuinely get on and enjoy talking about writing – there’s quite a bit of laughing, which can’t be bad. There’s also a couple of old songs from me, not too cringeworthy, as well as some recordings of the work I read on the day.
I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Leicester answering questions from the students and sharing my limited insights into the world of writing and publication. I hope you enjoy the podcast and pictures, well, the podcast more than the pictures.
I feel very honoured to have played a small part in the short but dazzling life of Splinter Magazine.
Andy Winter, as part of his new site, lays out the fun, sweat and tears that were integral to its inception and subsequent issues. Andy and the backroom team worked their sweaty little balls off every month to get a rather wonderful, scathing, joyous, flawed magazine out most months. I fear that the majority of poor spelling and grammar was down to yours truly, but by Lemmy’s mole it was a wonderful, terrifying, possibly illegal, crazy time.
Huge thanks to Andy for taking me on and putting in the hours and mentioning me in such glowing terms in this piece. God, I miss those days. Hopefully, those that I offended have since received the medical support that they so desperately needed.
Check out Andy’s retelling of those heady days in the 90’s on his new site that covers comics, film, podcasts and a whole host of stuff. Just click here.
This weekend has been a bitter-sweet affair. On Friday, I celebrated my 48th birthday. It was a beautiful evening spent with friends, slowly getting drunk, ruminating on life, love and loss and, as usual, talking bollocks – note to foreign readers, bollocks is British slang for testicles, but in this instance can be substituted for nonsense. We sampled a few of Birmingham’s finest drinking holes, made fun of each other, swapped news and decided to meet up again in the summer to really get to the heart of whatever shite it was we were talking about. One of my mates bought a copy of my book, Night Swimming, for me to sign, which was an unexpected pleasure, and as I was signing, he told me that my old English teacher, Mr Alsop, had died. This was a shock.
A few of us had stayed in touch with Mr Alsop. Some of the lads saw him around town, and one even joined in the weekly pub quiz that he ran. Most of my contact with him, apart from the occasional pint when I was in town, was through social media. Those of you who read this blog will know that I gave up Facebook just after Christmas. The giving up of Facebook has been a real liberation regarding work output and quality time and is something I would highly recommend. Well, I would recommend it as long as you stay in touch with people via other means. My blog posts and tweets still post through onto Facebook and, despite me announcing my leaving the site, my mates assumed I was still on it and knew that Mr Alsop was ill.
Alsop, as we called him, was a brilliant teacher. I went to a rough school. Learning wasn’t the top priority of most pupils or even teachers, and discipline could be tenuous at best in some lessons. An example I often use to illustrate how rough the school was, is the time a pupil brought in some live ammunition and threw it into the metalwork furnace – that was an interesting day. There are many others I could use. Some teachers had no control; their lessons were exercises in shouting and threats. Learning outcomes didn’t exist then, although I guess there must’ve been a plan of sorts – I seemed to spend a lot of time copying stuff off the board and staring out the window. But Alsop was different. He commanded the classroom with his physical presence, his love of his subject, English, and his scathing wit. No one pissed about in his lesson, and you learnt stuff. I remember, at the height of the miner’s strike in the 80’s, a load of us decided to go on strike and walked out of the school gates after break. We refused to go back into school and jeered at whichever teacher it was that tried to get us back in. Alsop walked out, said, ‘In’ and everyone shuffled in without a murmur – you didn’t mess with Mr Alsop.
He had a genuine love of literature, from Chaucer to John Cooper Clarke, Shakespeare to Douglas Adams, Thomas Hardy to Joe Strummer and everything in between. And his energy and enthusiasm were contagious. We were studying Evelyn Waugh’s, Men At Arms, and he delivered it with such insight and passion that I went on and read the other two books in the trilogy. I already had a love of reading before I met Mr Alsop, but he helped to focus it and showed all of us that words are important and that when they are combined in the right order, with the right intent, they can have a profound effect upon the reader. It only takes one bad teacher to put you off a subject for life. I was lucky; I had an excellent one.
I wanted to thank him for giving me, and all those he taught, such a rewarding time at school. For being so passionate about literature and creativity and for giving a shit. I mention him in the thanks section of, Night Swimming, but he died before he got a copy. I’m hoping to make his funeral in two weeks time. I know there will be lots of ex pupils there wanting to pay their respects. Here’s to you Mr Alsop, ‘So long and thanks for all the fish.’
Garrie Fletcher 