Birmingham Lit Fest Presents….

Welcome to the last instalment of 2021’s commissioned series of writing. Each month, across the year, we have asked writers and poets to reflect on each month as it has passed. As we say goodbye to 2021, and embrace the start of a new year, we have brought together all those pieces to offer you an insightful, searing and beautiful review of the year.

Show Notes

2021: A year in review
 
Welcome to the last instalment of 2021’s commissioned series of writing. Each month, across the year, we have asked writers and poets to reflect on each month as it has passed. As we say goodbye to 2021, and embrace the start of a new year, we have brought together all those pieces to offer you an insightful, searing and beautiful review of the year.

Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/

Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest

Credits

Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands

TRANSCRIPT 

BLF 2021: A Year in Review

Welcome to the last instalment of 2021’s commissioned series of writing. Each month, across the year, we have asked writers and poets to reflect on each month as it has passed. As we say goodbye to 2021, and embrace the start of a new year, we have brought together all those pieces that offer an insightful, searing and beautiful review of the year.

January 2021
My name is Thomas Glave and I wrote this piece for the Birmingham Literature Festival, January 2021 Writers’ Blog.

What has this past month, partly a time of Covid-caused lockdown, been like? ‘Weird’, is how a Birmingham friend extremely fond of that word might have described it. But ‘weird’ is too vague, and doesn’t make room for all the specific moments. Moments like a walk I took one chilly dusk through Birmingham’s Brindleyplace, where, amidst all those tomb-quiet buildings, it was easy to imagine the opening scene of the zombie-apocalypse film 28 Days Later, that showed an unnervingly deserted London: ‘Hallo-hallo-hallo’, anyone could have shouted that evening, imagining the final-days echo: ‘Is anyone there-there-there?’ And what about the seagulls that flock through the West Midlands (and all the UK) throughout the year, hijacking unsuspecting people’s lunches? Didn’t they appear to be moving closer to the very few human beings out walking, as the darkness encroached and began to whisper, How’s this, you fancy this? And really, except for maybe one or two runners who darted past (and even they, so thin, might have been just birds or the ghosts of birds), there was almost nobody else about. . .nobody except a lone Brindleyplace security guard, who for a few seconds bent his head over a match’s flare to light a cigarette, before he disappeared behind one of those buildings as if he too had existed in real life only for a moment, then had been drawn back into the realm of dreams where security guards, cigarette in hand, wander alone forever, half-alive and half lockdown apparitions that melt into dusk in this city of hills and tall buildings and twisting stretching canals. . . on lockdown evenings like that one, the dusk always descended in time for the ensuing quiet to gather entirely around and wrap itself, its soft thick arms, all around your shoulders: the quiet of pandemic nights, of people gathered indoors and sometimes also isolated there, sometimes alone. 

These past weeks were the unaccustomed quietness of pubs shuttered, restaurants stilled, railway stations and airports emptied, and all of us, the living and the waking, wondering what all this meant or could mean, and – often more insistently -- when it was going to end. Simultaneously, if we knew people who had fallen ill, we worried about them, prayed for them, and did all we could to ensure that they wouldn’t leave us just yet: not leave like that. Not so suddenly, so intubated. Not whilst gasping for breath behind some sterile partition, sequestered in a fluorescent-lit hospital ward. Not like that, without our hands to hold and our face to stroke, as we in turn wanted to hold and comfort them.  Through it all, as we thought of them and seasonal gifts like the sorely missed brighter-than-bright Birmingham Christmas market, there was always the cloaking dusk, and then the sound of our own footsteps.  Our feet that, as the season progressed, began to mutter Slow down, won’t you….please, for goodness’ sake, you simply must slow down.

And out of the slowing down, if we listened to those feet, arose a kind of blessedness as well. The kind that might have moved us to put up festive lights a little earlier in the season, aware that the increased lights and colours may have helped to cheer our neighbours. The kind that may even have moved us in an era of global stress and anxiety to speak with neighbours a bit longer when we saw them, and with more solicitous interest than usual, especially the elderly and the vulnerable. . . although hopefully always at a two-metre distance. 

Our warming planet, meanwhile, began to thank us for lockdown and our decreased travel and traffic. Birds, other creatures, and every tree and bush expressed and continue to express their gratitude, from the Jewellery Quarter to Acocks Green and all the way to Kings Heath, as nature raised its eyebrows at our actual ability to step back and take a breath. Someone told me this week that I should listen carefully, in order to hear the sound of nature politely applauding our efforts.  But if we can’t hear it, he said, this will be only because of the silence in between all other occurring things… the silence that assures that in spite of everything else, our hearts really are still in wonderful working order, still fond of us, and nowhere near prepared to stop.  

February 2021
Hello, my name is Abda Khan and here is a blog I wrote for Birmingham Literature Festival in February 2021.

When I was asked to write about how February has been for me, I started by looking back at photos from the same time last year. It struck me that during the almost yearlong state of lockdown, not only has life changed in ways previously unimaginable, but certain phrases have evaporated from our vocabulary, whilst others have taken hold. As a writer, I am intrigued by this.

February 2020; kicked off at a packed restaurant for a family birthday, I gave a talk about my Sidelines to Centre Stage Project at Wolverhampton Literature Festival where I mingled with attendees over tea and samosas, travelled to Glasgow and sat in a mosque full of hundreds of mourners after the death of my uncle, went into Tamworth Radio to talk about my novel Razia with three of us crammed into an airless studio smaller than a boxroom, had lunch with and gave a talk at Solihull Rotary Club, visited mac at Cannon Hill Park for discussions over coffee about a forthcoming project. And there were many more everyday happenings, not documented by the click of a phone camera, all of which are now unthinkable; legal work at the office where multiple clients would attend together, meeting friends in overcrowded coffee shops, enjoying the pictures with my kids (although they tell me that firstly, no one says ‘pictures’ anymore and secondly, as the youngest is now nearly 16, they’re no longer kids). 

Now, life is Zoom, and Teams, hand sanitiser, and face masks, and everyone knows what WFH means. The most exhilarating activity is my weekly click and collect trip to Asda. Hands, face, space - now, we must all “look like letter boxes”, and the PM must think it peculiar how words come back to bite you.

No more does anyone ask “what are your plans for the weekend?” or “where are you going for your holiday?” No longer are we faced with dilemmas such as “how do I get out of that works do?”, nor does anyone wish “this dinner party would end.” 

The loneliness that comes with being a writer has not changed. It is a solitary pursuit, often undertaken late into the night with only silence for company. Yet, other aspects of my life as a writer have disappeared, and these I miss; interacting at events face to face, being part of the buzz and chatter that can’t be replicated in a Zoom call (which always starts with “you’re on mute”). Still, technology has been a godsend; I have continued with book club, delivered numerous talks, attended courses, taught courses, persisted with my yoga, been to parents evening, hosted a poetry event, and watched every single episode of Spooks.

Having had a nasty run in with COVID myself, I feel fortunate to be alive, to have the hope that at least February 2022 will look more like my February 2020, and that the period of lockdown in between the two will eventually seem like that experience in your life which you hated every minute of, but one from which you learnt a great deal.

March 2021
Birmingham Literature Festival Writers Blog, March 2021. Written by Michael Amherst and read by Ceri Morgan.

This March we buried my mother. She died of cancer, not Covid, something that these days almost immediately needs clarification. There is then the mental gymnastics as to the comparative awfulness of both - the pandemic that prevents victims from saying goodbye to their families or the pandemic that makes victims of other, terminal illnesses unable to live their final months or year.

There is also another mental gymnastics - the dance around the rules and the opprobrium of others. I spent my Mum's final month staying with her and her husband to help look after her. Her doctors encouraged this, in spite of the pandemic, and yet there is a background anxiety that at this, one of the most difficult moments of our lives, we will have been found wanting by others, fortunate enough not to be in this position and faced with these choices.

Her decline was relatively rapid. Even in September I think we believed she might yet recover, certainly that her illness would allow her a year or two at worst. In August she had booked a holiday for us all in a farmhouse in Wales. However she cancelled this as her oncologist advised her that contracting Covid was too great to warrant the risk. My sister and I encouraged her to cancel it - we said there'd be other times, we could do it again next year. Had we known she only had six months left, I think we would all have decided to take the risk. 

The other consequence of a year lived in stasis, in which nothing feels real, or everything feels real in new ways, is that her death does not, cannot feel real at all. For much of the last twelve months my communication with her was daily phone calls. I saw her maybe four or so times, before moving in to help. Usually I'd have visited at least once a month. So her absence has, in some cruel way, already happened. What is new is the lack of her voice on the phone or her loving gestures received by post. I joke that the last year feels like nothing more than a bad radio play. We are all waiting for it to end. And yet, there are brief moments where the reality of her death can be felt, almost as though from the corner of my eye, and I want to howl. Only for it to be swept on by, lost in the last twelve months. 

The greatest comfort I have found has come from an unlikely source: Joseph Frank's Lectures on Dostoyevsky, a book I bought after happening upon a review. There have been times where it has felt the only currency is a rank pessimism - to hope, to look to after this, a failure of some kind. Some people seem to relish the potential horror of this pandemic never being past. Frank writes, 'For faith, in Dostoyevsky's terms, needs (or should need) nothing beside itself. Its purity is enhanced by the fact that it is assumed freely and quite independent of all proofs and rewards.' In different ways I think we are all learning the need and merit of faith of all kinds, even as we feel incapable of it. So I've started with a belief in my mother: her life, her choices, the things she made meaningful and the meaningful nature of her last year, different as it has been from what we all may have wanted.

April 2021
My name is Sue Brown and I wrote the Birmingham Literature Festival poem in April 2021.

A year in a month: April 20th 2021, ONE person was found guilty of a crime that many thousands have been privileged to walk away from aided and abetted by the law.

May 25th 2020, the world witnessed the death of another Black man, George Floyd, by the systemised enforcement of racism. An act played out daily in various degrees around the globe for centuries. 

With credible witnesses, daily protest, the sad truth is that Black Lives is the Matter, a 'Problem'…  and yes, contrary to a commissioned government report, institutionalised racism still breathes today, alive and kicking even within the U.K.

The past year has presented nothing new, and once again, it was televised.

2020 started like any other year; 

I was unaware that the world was on the verge of an insidious order of events that would be drip-fed by the mainstream and social media, Western Governments and scientists.

Late February, reports about a virus began hitting the news daily, although… there was a distance between it and my reality. 

The West pointed fingers towards the Chinese; a plethora of conspiracy theories flowed. 

As the COVID-19 crises took shape, I got a sense that something untoward was emerging. WhatsApp messaging 'ramped up' subversion with creative facts. Public health responses to the outbreaks on cruise ships belied what was coming to the shores of Britain.

Boris led the charge with; hands face space - which became one of the pandemics mantras, spoon-fed between mixed messaging, confusion, and blatant lies to the nation, directing the focus to a new world order.

Imagine my surprise when Black folks, like myself, were identified as 'highly' susceptible to a so-called 'Chinese foreign' virus. Mainstream media drew attention to N.H.S. workers dying, particularly African, African Caribbean and Asian workers. Somehow, we had become a distraction, a dangerous proliferation of the pandemic. 

Diverse communities now herded into a BAME description, while the rhetoric by officials only subjugated our already marginalised identity, and blame became linked to BAME.

Government and health spokespersons 'ramped up' the campaign in trying to 'coax' the vaccine to the 'vaccine hesitant', those who reflected their lack of trust in the 'powers that be' based on hundreds of years of apprehension and suspicion.

Cultural appropriation dominated the nation, yet our voices weren't narrating our story, our experiences, our concerns, fuelling the fear that spread faster than the pandemic itself.
 
I felt the usual disdain, patronised by misinformation and lack of transparency in this hegemonic system. 

Ultimately racism is an inherent power - driven by fear and greed for control. It's an ideology woven into a social structure subtly, savagely and ominously perpetuated only to remain an active justification of superiority.

Until we can identify the facts, the CORE of racism for what it is, and the many levels on which it operates, we will not be able to make the real change necessary for each person to live their purpose without fear of being 'Hue-man', while celebrating and expressing origins.

May 2021
Hi, I’m Maisie Chan and I wrote May’s piece for the Birmingham Literature Festival.

I’ll start this blog in a very British way and talk about the weather. May is usually ‘the summer’ in Glasgow, which is where I now live, and the hottest month of the year for us. But not this year. It’s been damp and grey. I’m feeling a little grey myself. I haven’t been able to travel to Birmingham to see my friends and family since 2019. I feel discombobulated. 

However, I have to live in the present moment and May has been up and down, I won’t lie. 
I’m trying to work on multiple writing projects at once which is great as I’m now a full-time writer. I am learning to juggle, however, as I have around four book projects on the go at once and I’m pitching for a children’s TV show, hoping to get my first screenwriting credits in children’s animation. I feel split down the middle with one part of me in ‘debut author’ mode and the other in drafting mode. 

I’m writing a new novel, which is going very slowly and like pulling teeth. And at the same time, I am promoting my debut novel, Danny Chung Does Not Do Maths, a children’s book out in June. It’s an exciting thought to know a book I started writing in 2018 is going to hit the shelves. And I’m feeling both elated and a little scared that my first novel will be out there, for people to read and judge. It’s not lost on me that my book will be one of the very few with a British Chinese boy on the front cover, there aren’t many even in 2021. Hate crimes against East and Southeast Asians (ESEA) all over the world have increased massively and I hope that my small contribution can help make people like me more visible in the world of children’s publishing. If we aren’t seen at all, then are we real? Are we human? 

I am in ‘second novel syndrome’ which according to many published authors is very real! I definitely feel it. When you write your first novel, it’s not usually under contract, so you can take your time. For the second one, however, you have a smaller time scale in which to write it (mainly for children’s novelists who churn out a novel a year it seems). It’s not been the most inspiring year, my creative well has not been filled. I’ve spent a lot of time stuck inside.

As I bid a farewell to the month of May and prepare to welcome June, with my book launch and birthday around the corner and the hope of sunny skies, I give thanks as I am going to get my first vaccination this month. Perhaps that is the most prized thing of all? 

Signing off. A true Gemini. 

June 2021
This is June’s Birmingham Literature Festival piece, written by Roy Macfarlane. Read by Shantel Edwards.

Try to praise the mutilated world. 
Remember June’s long days, 
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew. 
-Adam Zagajewski, "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" 

June the month of strawberries and creams and the longest day of the year, 21st June, summer solstice day. Boris Johnson tried to bring an end to the mutilated world we’re living in, having visions of Freedom Day as if we were part of the cast of Independence Day, but with a Delta variant fighting back, celebrations had to be put on hold. 

Summer solstice day, solstice from the Latin word ‘sun standing still,’ the timing between planting and harvesting crops has been traditionally the time to relax. As writers we know of planting words, half written in a notebook, or a body of work in files; over the last few months I’ve been planting seeds in competitions, magazines, anthologies and commissioned work, seeing which will flourish, find their roots and blossom in the next collection. June will be the closest I’ll get to relaxing, and getting away from writing, online and social media interaction.

During this month my walks along canals with herons, coots and a gang of seagulls chilling on telegraph wires, watching me walking through their neighbourhood has been exchanged for morning jogs along the sea front where the June sun gives iridescent blue seas and a convention of seagulls, bigger and bolder than the ones from Tipton who stride with swagger.

But the writer in me can’t be quietened, I go into full rage in response to Priti Patel’s interview, encouraging football supporters to boo in response to England football players, both black and white, taking a knee in response to online racism, racism in the stands and the ongoing racism that leads to death. And yet Priti Patel’s response is no different to Donald Trump’s inciting aggressive response to Colin Kaepernick taking the knee. Also, it’s 5 years on from the Jo Cox murder, influenced by divisive, dividing words which inspired such a backlash in the lead to Brexit. 

Thank god for Windrush Day, 22nd June, acknowledging the impact and importance of migration to the making of Britain. The emblematic Empire Windrush signalling the arrival of Caribbean post-war migrants to Britain in 1948; a date in the British identity as paramount as 1066, Henry VIII and all his wives, and 1966 ‘They think it’s all over! It is now.’

In Wolverhampton the unveiling of a blue plaque brought mixed emotions for many, as we acknowledged Paulette Wilson Windrush Campaigner ‘likkle but tallawah’ a reminder of how the government turned a Caribbean post-war migration dream of Windrush into an “illegal immigrants” of the state nightmare.  

I’m reading Just Us by Claudia Rankine, the title taken from the wonderful stand-up comedian Richard Pryor; ‘you go down there looking for justice, that’s what you find just us.’ I guess in taking the knee, in Windrush celebrations, we are simply looking for a sun that will rise on all of us with the same warmth, same freedoms, a sun that shakes hand with the night and meets us back in the morning, alive and well.

July 2021
Hello all you lovely listeners. My name is George Bastow and I’m a freelance writer, journalist and blogger who is also a full-time wheelchair-user with quadriplegic cerebral palsy.

July 2021 has been a funny old month, although there has seldom been anything to laugh about. It’s been a month of exciting highs and abysmal lows with displays of uplifting unity and stark division that have reminded me England is a Jekyll & Hyde nation. A deeply complex country that can flip as easily as any of the coins of its realm. 

At the beginning of July, I could smell optimism in the air, as fragrant and hazy as the smoke drifting from summer evening barbecues; the Euros were in full-swing and if the countless tunelessly triumphant renditions of Baddiel & Skinner’s anthem I heard daily were to be believed football was definitely coming home. In the weeks leading up to England’s history-making championship final against Italy, my heart was lifted by the widespread love for Gareth Southgate’s squad and the refreshing examples of inclusivity they were setting, from the diversity of the players themselves to their decision to take the knee in support of Black Lives Matter and Harry Kane’s rainbow captain’s armband worn in solidarity with the LGBTQIA+ Community. The whole country was inebriated by hope, progress and of course the occasional shandy as we cheered the home team towards their first piece of silverware since 1966, but the dreaded hangover kicked in sooner than anyone expected. In the moments after Rashford, Sancho and Saka missed their penalties my spirits sank as I saw the national coin flip from its shiny, positive side to its insidiously tarnished reverse. The appalling racist abuse the players were subjected to from brutally bigoted so-called fans was truly disgusting. Over the following days however, the country’s coin of conscience turned again as legions of true supporters showed their love and admiration for Saka, Rashford and Sancho and condemned the hatred from a small-minded percentage of the public.

Just as the country rejoined as one in appreciation of three footballing heroes another polarising storm cloud appeared over the horizon… Freedom Day. 

Boris Johnson (a popular tousle-haired Vaudeville clown, famous for his Prime Minister impressions) announced that from Monday, 19th, all legal COVID-19 restrictions would be lifted despite rapidly rising cases of infection. For many a long-awaited return to the Old Normal is hugely welcome but for folk like me with disabilities and compromised immune systems life without masks or social distancing is a dangerous prospect. Even after receiving two vaccinations, to immunocompromised people risking exposure to COVID and the reality of new variants will prove deadly. I understand that to some wearing a mask is an inconvenience they are happy to ditch but for vulnerable communities masks are vital weapons in a daily war to maintain our health. I appreciate the people binning their face-coverings are doing so with optimistic intentions but the virus isn’t going anywhere soon, so by wearing our masks we can help stop it spreading further and save lives while we’re at it.

As July draws to a close and the coin of England’s conscience summersaults in mid-air, we must choose which side it lands on.

Is it heads for fairness, empathy and compassion or tails for intolerance, division and misunderstanding? It’s your call. 

August 2021
Hello everyone, my name is Elizabeth Lee and I wrote August’s piece for the Birmingham Literature Festival.

August has been a month of sunlight and storms, both literal and figurative.

As I walk the canals and fields I’m lucky enough to live by, the air is sometimes bright and hot, sweet with pollen and busy with insects, sometimes filled with needle-sharp rain and biting winds. Always, somewhere, the shouts and laughter of children enjoying freedom from school can be heard. 

On a larger scale, the news feels like a series of earthquakes. I wonder whether we will, like the children preparing for a new school year as summer wanes, at last be shaken from lethargy and compelled to act. As wildfires rage in Greece and Turkey, we are warned that this planet we are the custodians of teeters on the brink of a disaster of our own making. We watch the terrible, terrifying events in Afghanistan take place. In my own home, we celebrate GCSE results that enable the next step on a journey. Exciting times, full of possibility and hope. Nationally, more students than ever end a difficult year by celebrating good results. But there is also a growing gap between North and South, between state and private schools. Those already at a disadvantage have been further failed in the Covid crisis.

But there is also hope. Most of the adult population are now vaccinated against Covid, and we tentatively break free from the past months of isolation and fear. The world might be changed. But it is still here.

Personally, I’m emerging from a post-publication haze as my debut novel was published in April. The fulfilment of a life-long dream that still has me pinching myself, and giving thanks for every piece of luck that passed my way. Set in 17th Century Lancashire, the book is a tale of persecution and superstition, but also one of love, in all its forms. Between parents and children, between siblings, between a man and a woman. Turning my mind to a new project, similar themes emerge; a historical setting that explores the struggle of those trapped by poverty and prejudice. But there is kindness to be found in the chaos. There is hope.

These themes remain relevant, I think, to our world today. A world where women are raising their voices to say Me Too. A world that must address structural racism and respond to calls for collective action on climate change. Where Covid highlighted the danger of isolation, and the importance of community. But there is always sunlight in among the storms, there is always kindness in the chaos, and perhaps we will turn with new vigour, like a child returning to school in September, to protecting this world and valuing all that live in it equally.

September 2021
Hi, I’m Rupinder Kaur and I wrote September’s piece for the Birmingham Literature Festival’s monthly blog.

“Write the tale that scares you, that makes you feel uncertain, that isn't comfortable. I dare you...”
—Michaela Coel. 

I have been thinking a lot about Michaela’s speech, she won best writer at the Emmys for I May Destroy You. Across the past two years, this pandemic gave me the time to reflect on my own life, life around me from my family to the world. As a writer what scares me the most is writing about myself, my actual true and innermost feelings. Until last year I had never written anything that is truly personal and now in my writing I always try to write what is truthful to me. 

September always reminds me of new starts, new beginnings possibly because the academic year starts again in September. It brings warmth and hope that yes the year is almost over but it's not exactly over yet. I have been trying to go on my daily walk almost everyday, something which I have been doing for the past year. Connecting with nature and seeing how nature changes over the months from spring to autumn, hearing the crunchy-ness of leaves when you are walking is a sound I particularly love along with seeing the colours of orange and deep reds. 

It was Mum's birthday on the 16th, so we went to the Botanical gardens. Mum's the biggest nature lover and she talks to plants, thinks they understand her. I wonder what language they actually understand or do they actually have a language. Then we had a nice evening meal at Asha’s and no, Tom Cruise was not there! 

Here is an excerpt from a poem ‘Trace’ I have been working on:

There’s this dream I had where I flicked seeds 
on the garden shed roof until white doves spoke 
to peach trees. One peach tree was Mum. 
I am losing parts of Dad from my face. 
 I am becoming Mum, just taller, 
so I can watch the doves fly for both of us.  

Over September I have been reading The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls by Mona Eltahaway and Luster by Raven Leilani. Mona quoted some of June Jordan’s poetry which intrigued me, so I went and brought her collection Directed by Desire which I have been devouring. It was also super nice to run a poetry workshop in person for the Desiblitz Literature festival! Sharing my love for South Asian poetry and teaching the basics of ghazal writing. If you truly want to understand South Asian poetry and ghazals you have to listen to music, the rhythms. Almost all poetry in South Asia has an oral tradition, it is to be performed such as ghazals, qawwalis, folk songs. To top it all off I went to Ustad Rahat Fateh Ali Khan concert. It was such a magical experience to be immersed in live qawwali music. 

September has had a range of emotions and now towards the end it’s getting cold and dark. I can’t help but think about Sabina Nessa, a young Bangladeshi woman that was murdered. She was literally minutes from home. Is any part of the world truly safe for women, I really don’t know. Iconic Indian feminist Kamla Bhasin passed away this month and she wrote: “The first feminist must have been born the day patriarchy was born…” 

Feminism in simple terms just asks for equality, to be understood. Until patriarchy gets dismantled across the entire world, we still have a long way to go.  But I still have hope that maybe, just maybe, one day this entire world will become kinder and safer for all. 

October 2021
Hello, my name is Brendan Hawthorne, I’m a singer song writer, poet, playwright and I’ve written the blog for October for Birmingham Literature Festival.  

October has become a signpost month in many ways for me. New directions and opportunities have presented themselves. New challenges to keep the old mind alert and the heart full.

Creatively I have had the script of a play published, a new collection of work readied for publication and signed new commission contracts. I am also recording songs with Kerry, my musical partner, for our new CD. Written pre-lockdown, it’s only now being given performance form and life. A photographer friend has offered to take a series of Autumnal photographic portraits of me for promotional use and I’ve bought Lynn, my wife’s, Christmas present.

All good I hear you say, but, as October signals a seasonal change …

I realise the world has changed 
from the world I once knew 
Changed into one that appears 
to be more guarded and tentative
mindful of the tragic consequences in retaining 
liberty, democracy and relative freedom
Many things are now ‘considered’
The atlas shrinks again 
through traffic light travel changes 
to a greater global awareness

I personally love to feel the chill in the night air of the country of my birth. The way … 

our homeward journey is streetlight lit 
by autumnal sunsets directing
us to log burner warmth
Witness the magic of flickering shadows 
that tell different stories 
each time planet saving briquettes are ignited
Smokiness taints the air with comfort
atmospherically blending 
with the smell of tomato soup 
heated on a dancing gas ring 
accompanied by warm crusty bread
fresh from the oven

Then I wonder if the cost of gas will become more than the cost of tinned soup, but for now the concept is too great to stem the flow of intoxicating relaxation.

My mom is 87 this month…

She was 27 when she brought me into the world 
with the help of the NHS
A system of healthcare 
that has cradled many since birth 
but I wonder for how much longer?  
Stories of elderly people falling 
and having to wait for 6 to 10 hours 
for ambulances to attend because 
there aren’t enough vehicles freed up 
by corridor queues in overcrowded A & E’s

With all these cuts, I wonder why queues aren’t included?

I spoke to a young police officer yesterday who told me he had thought he’d found his dream job by helping people feel ‘safe and secure’. He told me of attending drunken injuries taking 6 hours out of his shift to sit with someone waiting for medical attention. I felt his pain, his frustration and career dislocation.

I do, however, laugh at the things I’ve said to myself, expecting answers that never come. With age, does the skill of asking yourself questions become more important? I’ll let you know. 

On the news today I saw a
polar bear clinging for dear life
to a tiny ice flow berg 
Hugging the chill to its bones
it appeared to cry out in anguish 
at its predicament
They know the importance of existence
I thought
Why don’t we?

November 2021

Seaview is a supernatural drama set in Coventry centred around a guy who lands his dream job at a law firm, only for his night of celebrations to go awry and change the lives of his loved ones, forever. The show premiered the first three episodes at the Belgrade Theatre on 10th November with further showings on the 11th – 13th November. I was hired as a staff writer for episode one.

SeaView took a chance on first timers, both in front of and behind the camera who worked alongside seasoned professionals. There was an open call for a writers' room. New writers are often told to “Apply to the BBC writers' room or 4Screenwriting. Go on the Screen Skills website. Have you tried the BFI?” All brilliant and necessary companies. But sometimes, you just want to get paid to write. Without the SeaView writers' room callout, I would still be creditless, applying for these four opportunities on loop. Or alternatively, told to get an agent to get staffed in a writers' room and we know how that catch-22 scenario goes. I doubt open calls for writers will become industry standard, but I’m thankful to the producers for making that choice.  

Seaview is also proof that there is room for a TV & Film industry to exist outside of London. There should be more stories coming from across the UK. There are places I’ve never visited and will not get the opportunity to see. That’s why I want to watch stories from different towns. Despite being born and raised in Edmonton, North London and I will never give up that identity (currently at war with my fading accent), I’ve always been curious about this little Island. 

The curiosity stems from my parents. They were always keen on my siblings and I travelling outside the M25. They wanted us to explore landscapes, historical landmarks, and food. Even though Mum would be up half the morning making jollof, chicken and stew to take with us “just in case”. That curiosity about other towns and cities has helped with the type of topics I cover in my original scripts. 

I still have a way to go in terms of my writing skills. Because of my personality type, I will always compare myself to other’s progress. But getting the ‘yes’ after years of ‘no’ or folks just straight-up ghosting my emails, has reassured me. The fact that I got to play a small part in a project which means so much to the Midlands, is even more rewarding. 

Who knows if SeaView will be the start of the norm or a blip in the Midlands cultural zeitgeist. It's a win for the Midlands, which showcases the area to a wider audience. I hope for investors, the Midlands will be unskippable. It will soon reach a point where you won't be able to hear an advert anywhere in the UK without a Midland accent penetrating through the speakers. So, in conclusion, invest or lose out...Alright, Bab?

December 2021
Hi, I’m Thomas Glave. This is December 2021 and I’m about to read a piece entitled A Keynote in Three Parts
FALLING AND WRITING (A KEYNOTE IN THREE PARTS)
by
Thomas Glave

  1. Unafraid of Falling: A Dancer’s Approach

Once, not so long ago, in that part of the world far across the sea, there lived a young girl who dreamt of dancing – in fact dreamt of growing up to become someone who danced constantly, as if no other way of being existed. During those early years, she never envisaged herself as a ‘ballerina’, so to speak, but simply as someone who yearned to, and was always beautifully capable of, moving her long limbs to music, and actually surrendering herself – surrendering what she would have called her ‘soul’ – to music. This girl grew up to become the great ballerina Suzanne Farrell, internationally renowned star of George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet company, and the foremost interpreter, in the late twentieth century, of his ballets. At one point, in 1965 when she was twenty years of age and he sixty-two, she almost became his sixth wife. (Balanchine’s previous five wives had all been ballerinas.) But marriage and romance mattered far less in Farrell’s life, a life dedicated almost exclusively to her art, than her holy pursuit of dance, and to what dance critics and Balanchine himself, as well as other choreographers, began to observe and refer to admiringly, and often with utter astonishment, as her style of ‘off-centre’ dancing. In Farrell’s vision, ‘off-centre’ dancing was a means of attaining ultimate generosity and daring onstage, a supreme gift to the audience but also a gift to and from the art form itself.  It presented moments in which the vulnerable performer, dancing out her heart and very being across an enormous stage, and ostensibly completely uncaring as to whether she might be taking risks that could hurl her directly into a disaster such as falling off her dangerous balances or worse, became something like a true force of nature, unrestrained by gravity or fear.  As one critic familiar with Farrell’s work and Balanchine’s choreography for the New York City Ballet understood the dancer, Farrell’s off-centre dancing involved ‘astonishing pirouettes, during which...she showed not an eyelid flicker’s worth of concern over whether her partner would be there to catch her at the end.  As a rule he was, though there close calls, and a few terrifying occasions when we thought that...she was truly going to pitch herself into the orchestra’.  
Farrell’s wildness and even recklessness onstage, especially in startling contrast to her deeply taciturn, even aloof personality, beguiled countless people, myself included, all of whom wondered at and reveled in the utter freedom and daring of her artistry: a freedom from the self-consciousness that we all know as both writers and human beings, known and experienced by all artists.  This self-consciousness includes the often gnawing fear that at some point, whilst working on this or that project, or having completed this novel or that play or poetry collection, we may end up making fools of ourselves in front of them: the people out there, actual or imagined (or both): the individuals ever ready, we often fear, to hold our work up not only to cold scrutiny but also inevitably to scorn; the people out there who will surely regard us not with the care and earnest concern for which we yearn, but with cold contempt; the people whose moist breath we can always feel just over our shoulders as we begin writing on a new blank page.  What will they think, those disapproving faces both imagined and real. . .    
Yet perhaps, like daring ballerinas and other artists, we eventually realise that our work, like the work of dancers risking everything on a stage before an unseeable audience enshrouded in darkness, always involves the greatest daring of our most secret imagining selves. In such vulnerability there can be – and there invariably is – the possibility for humility, our embracing of humility, as we grapple with the fact that such deeper giving in art always requires the jettisoning of our egos in service to the art form’s discipline and demands.  A ballerina may indeed fall out of the next sequence of pirouettes or fouettés, but was she giving us all of her energy and soul when she did?  We may stumble over a sentence or a stanza, or find that our hands were wrapped too possessively around a character’s throat in this chapter or that poem, or we may mis-hear the lyric’s begging us to reach for a smoother rhyme, but it always seems – at least until the final loss of our faculties or simple end of our existence – that we do have time to work and re-work, and re-work again, anticipating in calmness the inevitability of falling without engaging any fear of falling.  And again, and again. We certainly have more time than ballet dancers, who daily strive for beauty and grace against the ticking clock of their aging bodies.  As for the patience required for the doing and re-doing, trying and re-trying, the pandemic has impressed upon us nothing if not an understanding of the importance of patience. During the numerous hours I’ve gritted my teeth whilst thinking of the great difficulty, at least for me, in patiently working to inculcate patience, I remembered Farrell insisting that her pre-professional female ballet pupils take an entire ballet class, not only the class’s second half, wearing pointe shoes – ‘Because’, Farrell often told those eager teen-agers, ‘you don’t learn to dance on pointe by not dancing on pointe’.  Like those dancers in their ballet studio or rehearsal hall, we know that we don’t become writers by not writing. Yet I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t admit that tomorrow morning, like so many of us having to face that awful blank page, I remain fearful of falling, and of what they, out there, will eventually have to say. Yet the fall itself is sometimes all we have at the outset, or at least the very best thing in a daily parcel filled with unknowable risks, but also often with surprising joys.  

  1. The Good Fortune of Commands
Sometimes people ask you as a writer to do things: to write a keynote address, or to craft a poem; to ‘work on’ an essay or short story or even a screenplay, or even – so I have heard -- to write a novel and send it to them, as in: ‘Write a novel for me, if you don’t mind? And if you could send it by the end of whenever, that would be lovely’. 
Like many writers, I’ve found these requests serve best when I turn them into secret commands, telling myself things like: So-and-so asked me to do this, so now I must. This or that person asked me to send them whatever, so now I absolutely have to do so, and will in fact have to write the thing first, whatever the thing is.  And I have learnt that in these secret ‘commands’ lies great good fortune: for in convincing myself that I must do something, I – any of us -- can swiftly get to work with a deadline in mind: a deadline often a quite useful tool for sweeping aside the writer’s anxiety that can produce procrastination. How many of us have written works that we might not have begun, let alone finished, had not someone – some editor with an unexpectedly warm face – asked us to ‘do something’, which we then did? This has certainly been my experience, and the demand, as I re-imagined it, lit the proverbial fire underneath my (etc). Moving through these considerations, I return for just a moment to Balanchine: a prolific choreographer, he was known for startling his promising younger New York City Ballet dancers by unexpectedly notifying them that he wanted them soon to perform a distinguished principal role in a ballet in which they had never performed.  With his legendary calmness, he would summarily advise them to begin preparing for the part. . . to which the dancer in question would almost invariably protest that she or he didn’t feel yet ready for such a demanding role. ‘Ah, well, dear, that doesn’t matter’, Balanchine would usually respond with the same unnerving calm.  ‘Get ready’.  The dancer, usually immediately registering both apprehension and excitement, had little choice but to prepare for the role, and ultimately to dance.
We know as writers that imagining such demands from others, and facing actual ones, can help us to write by simply requiring that we do.  Yet there exists another possibility embedded in this task that isn’t always as obvious: the fact that we might not have ventured into other genres, other literary worlds previously unvisited, had we not embarked upon the pretend-demand project. I might never have written ‘literary nonfiction’, which I’d never believed I could really do, especially given that I’d not always known what it was, and am still not certain that I do know, had an editor at a literary journal not asked me years ago to write some ‘literary nonfiction’ on a particular topic for a forthcoming special-themed issue of that journal, after which I began trying to write in the strange new (to me) form, hoping all the while that the exercise inherent in the daily writing and all the attendant struggles of trying to say something that meant something that was not fiction – in short, something that made sense in the realm of this other, as-yet untried genre – would ‘work’, as people like to say. It felt distinctly odd then – as odd as it might feel to prepare a keynote address -- to write words such as ‘I think’ and ‘I believe’, as opposed to thinking about what my characters thought and believed (and sometimes taking refuge behind the greater boldness or madness or just plain strangeness of those characters: the people who so often could do and say all the things that I might have secretly wished I could do and say, not including ugliness or cruelty, but which in our real-time world of constrictions and tight ropes I felt I couldn’t dare do, or say). Yet the younger writer of that time emerged from the process somewhat unscathed, and rather astonished that I had written a piece of nonfiction. Really?  But yes, some critical and editorial voices in the world whispered, some of them even with a welcoming gaze on their watchful faces; and that younger writer who was me, once upon that time and far away across the sea, soon realised that, as with the use of pointe shoes in ballet class for aspiring ballerinas, the best way to learn how to write nonfiction was simply by writing nonfiction: writing it steadfastly, accompanied and enabled by the teeth-grittedness of sometimes gruelling patience.
And so when Writing West Midlands earlier this year asked me, during one of the UK’s Covid lockdown periods, to write something about Birmingham during lockdown, I accepted the request as a command, having no idea that the city’s encroaching seagulls, grown bolder during lockdown and less fearful of humans (if they ever had been), would have much to say to me, including critiques, during their regular evening choruses over Brindleyplace and elsewhere: would I have thought to listen carefully to seagulls’ complaints and observations, and converse with them, and struggle to translate their often hilarious profanity, had this writing request-command not materialised? The request also forced me to look at the hilly, labyrinthine city of Birmingham altogether differently, thorough the twilight lens of lockdown-enforced silences and a Broad Street virtually empty of humans, especially at dusk and afterward, but wildly alive through the darker hours with windblown paper rubbish carousing, even gallivanting, in all the corners and byways where it knew no people would care, because scarcely any people -- at least not people with faces – seemed to have been there, unless I was somehow missing them between dreams and waking. Birmingham’s canals suddenly began whispering, in the snakiest of tones, Do you see now what we’ve been trying to tell you all along? – and as a fairly new resident in the twisting, hilly city, I couldn’t help but respond Yes, yes, and yes. And still I wonder how many requests-as-commands become writing possibilities for each of us: Does Pick up some milk at Tesco become a story, or Could you please walk the dog before it rains? become a novel? I remain certain that now, right now, someone is hearing the poem or the play or the screenplay (or all three) in Will you please email the Council, or Would you like to use these dishes, or Do be careful with all my cactuses. If this is true, then all that I can guarantee at this moment is that everything that the snarky seagulls promised me through all those lockdown evenings shall surely, in the languages of our deepest and most intimate dreams, also eventually be promised to all of us, everywhere.

  1. What You Realise You Know, That They Don’t Know
In conclusion, I wished to include some words in reference to this twisting, hilly, strangely configured city of Birmingham, in light of some of the twisted, strange remarks so many people throughout England in particular have made to me upon learning that I happily, freely chose – and was not required – to live here. What do such words teach us? What on earth can it mean when a well-meaning London-based person stammers, ‘But does Thomas really live in Birmingham? But why?’ What do we learn when we hear English people speak mockingly of Birmingham, deriding the famously constantly mocked Birmingham-area accents, even as I, an outsider to all this British baggage, would be interested in undertaking Birmingham and Black Country dialect lessons? What do we learn when we remember that although so many Londoners sneer at Birmingham, the UK’s esteemed capital and vast home of Big Ben and more is more frequently than ever in our climate change era prone to foul-smelling floods?  How do we feel about the fact that London’s quasi-prehistoric rats appear to possess the very same physical and psychological characteristics as Birmingham’s twenty-first century vermin? 
I believe that the examples of people’s provincialism and ignorance help those of us who know the West Midlands and Birmingham in particular understand, quickly, that we actually know a great deal that these narrow people don’t and probably will never be able to know. They won’t know about Birmingham’s sprawling neighbourhoods with their merciless hills (speaking here as a long-suffering long distance runner), nor about the gleaming domes of particular mosques, nor the windows of halal grocers’ shops that steam up on colder days. It cannot be possible for them to know about the stories within the stories within all of Birmingham’s streets and squares and alongside the murmuring canals (thinking of a story I recently heard of a skulking demon that resides in the canal waters beneath the long Curzon Street tunnel, for example). It might not even be possible for them to understand at last all their own hang-ups about social class and when and where they fit into all of it, or don’t, and who they know who does or doesn’t give a damn. In all of this not-knowing, whilst those Birmingham detractors may know of other things and places (although this possibility appears dim), they’re unable to know and engage with, embark through, these particular stories: a great loss for them. At the risk of sounding like the opening sentences of a Latin American novel, I could have no idea when I arrived in Birmingham New Street station on that fateful day six years ago that I would someday not only find myself shocked into silence by the raucous profanity of Brindleyplace seagulls, but also that I was all at once living in a region – indeed, in a country – in which a great many people often said very little that was meant to say much, whilst other people said some things that hinted at other things they knew they shouldn’t say but couldn’t help inferring, all the while ending their sentences with rhetorical phrases such as Is that okay, or Is that all right, whether or not the thing in question was indeed okay or all right. Here clearly loomed, with open hands, an offered gift: the opportunity to decipher, discern, observe, attempt to understand, and – with luck – uncover the story or stories deeper within the understanding, in the exact heart of where the person or persons existed and, like all human beings, where they yearned, dreamt, lived, perhaps loved, and where, one day, they would, like all of us, die.  Moving through these worlds in our daily living and writing, our dreaming and listening, it seems clearer than ever that we need not waste time with the fear of falling, for in fact all we need do is walk. I couldn’t have said all this six years ago when I first arrived in this city of hidden stories and long hills and twisting streets – and even if I could have, I wouldn’t have remembered until exactly today, right now, that I was first told all of this and more by one of the many shadows that emerged and finally had the chance to voice their whispered stories during the spectral quietness of lockdown evenings, and our recent summer long evenings, as they will do again throughout a future autumn’s golden hours, and through every season to come. Even now I can’t remember all the words that those shadows shared with me, but I do recall their strong Birmingham accents, and the comfort that they seemed to take in the company of particular ghosts, and trees, and all the things that didn’t yet exist because all of us, through all of those twilight hours, were still working so very hard to imagine them. . .working to imagine and produce on the page every word, every breath, and every single remaining silence.


Outro
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. Follow us on Instagram, twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All information about the festival and upcoming events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org. The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.

What is Birmingham Lit Fest Presents….?

The Birmingham Literature Festival Podcast - Welcome to the very first Birmingham Literature Festival podcast, bringing writers and readers together to discuss some of 2020’s best books. Each Thursday we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. Join us each week for exciting and inspiring conversations with new, and familiar, writers from the Midlands and beyond.