April newsletter

   The Glue Factory April newsletter

This monthly newsletter is to let you know about forthcoming events and/or publications involving writers and creative practitioners I admire, all of whom have taken part in our online gatherings over the last few years and who will therefore be familiar to many of you. 

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Marvin Cohen (1931-2025) 

A very engaging short film by William Coles about the New York novelist, essayist, poet and playwright Marvin Cohen, who died on March 15th, aged 93. Do watch this, then check out some of his books here. He will be much missed.

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Spring is here - official!

Why not subscribe to this brilliant print quarterly? The Exacting Clam website offers many compelling reasons to do so, featuring a mighty cohort of contributors on both sides of the Atlantic.

Featuring fiction, non fiction, poetry, prose, criticism and no end of other good things. Get involved!

Very short notice

The Prompt is a brand new series for writers, presented and produced by Zoë Comyns. This series will be broadcast over 8 episodes on RTÉ Radio 1.Their guest writers - including Wendy Erskine and Lucy Caldwell - have set writing prompts and you can submit short essays, pieces of fiction or poetry (no more than 750 words/3-5 mins reading time per piece) inspired by the creative prompt. Poetry can be shorter.

Read the prompts here, choose one, write your piece and submit it here. Please ensure you read the terms & conditions carefully - find them here

The deadline is Sunday 6th April 2025 12pm so get weaving.

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Radiophrenia

Radiophrenia is a two-week art radio station broadcasting from Glasgow's CCA, 7th - 20th April 2025. It goes out on 87.9 FM in the Glasgow area, and is also on Resonance Extra via their webstream and on DAB+ Digital Radio in Brighton & Hove, central Bristol, Cambridge, Greater London and Norwich.

Our former roving reporter Melissa McCarthy will be taking part with a three-part series called Who Will Win?, on Monday 14th April, Wednesday 16th and Friday 18th at 10am. (You may remember from previous years, her broadcasts on The Slipping Forecast; and, the traffic and vehicles updates of All That Flow.)

Here’s the trailer:

Join writer Melissa McCarthy here in the dug-out as she brings you the sports reports, the match updates, and the game theory. Dr Jekyll 4, Mr Hyde 1; War 5, Peace nil; Antony 3, Cleopatra 3. Walrus 7, Carpenter 2. 

For all the latest scores, the transference news, and the analysis, tune in to this three-part investigation into writing, listening, literature, and sport.

Upcoming fixtures: Tom versus Captain Najork; the Harvards versus the Yales; God versus Satan. 

Who will win?

 Click here for the complete schedule.

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Tramp Press latest

Water in the Desert Fire in the Night by Getahn Dick will be published by Tramp Press of Dublin on 15th May. Founded in 2014 and run by Lisa Coen and Sarah  Davis-Goff, Tramp is a leading indie with a magnificent backlist. They publish the likes of Sara Baume, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Mike McCormack and Joanna Walsh. Here’s the pitch for Water in the Desert Fire in the Night:

Because the thing about the end of the world is that it    happens all the time.

Someone leaves and it's the end of the world.

Someone comes back and it's the end of the world.

Somebody puts their cock in you and it's the end of the world.

Somebody stops putting their cock in you and it's the end of the world.

A novel about mothering, wolves, bicycles, midwifery, post-apocalyptic feminism, gold, hunger and hope.

It's about an underachieving millennial, a retired midwife and an Irishman who set out from London after the end of the world to cycle to a sanctuary in the southern Alps. It's about the porousness of the female bodily experience, the challenges of being an empiricist with a sample size of one, what's worth knowing, what's worth living, and the necessity of irrationality. It's about the fact that the world ends all the time, and it's about what to try to do next. 

More details and order here.

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Will Eaves: Four Diptychs and other publications

Will’s third (and best) poetry collection Invasion of the Polyhedrons was published by CB editions in October last year. See here. 

Earlier this year I went to the launch of The Point of Distraction, published by TLS books. See here. The venue was the Wigmore Hall, a very lovely venue which attracted a large audience and where, as well as readings, there were performances of some of Will’s piano compositions. Here’s an extract from his publishers Harper Collins’ website:

A memoir by the 2019 Wellcome Prize winner Will Eaves that looks at the creation of eight piano pieces.

'A brief yet elegant excursion into the nature and execution of creativity' Clemency Burton-Hill, Financial Times

'A wonderfully sensitive and probing meditation on the writing of words and music' Rolf Hind, composer and pianist

What lies behind the creation of a piece of music? Does it spring fully formed from a composer’s mind, or take shape in the recesses of the brain, revealing itself in stages over time? Is the creative act deliberate or happenstance? An inspired vision or the result of practice?

Will Eaves, author and musician, shares his experience of writing eight new piano pieces after many years away from the keyboard. Some of the music is found in old notebooks and teenage enthusiasms, some of it is caught on the wing – a response to the resurgence of the natural world during COVID lockdown. None of it is what he is meant to be doing.

But then not all artistic interests are primary or professional interests. Sometimes it’s the second-string activities, the diversions, that bring work – and life – into focus.

The Point of Distraction is a unique account of music-making that embraces Bach, film, jazz, literature, neuroscience and the mystery of will power in its search for meaning. At its heart is a love of skill, an openness to self-doubt, and a belief that we are all more than our declared aims.

 

Now a boutique music publisher, Edition HH, run out of Oxford by Per Hartmann, has taken up the music from the book and is publishing it as ‘Four Diptychs’ - a separate, full-size score.

Here’s the cover of the score and you can hear a couple of the pieces performed  here.

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Podcast Corner

First Graft

Here’s the latest episode of First Graft (and the last in the current series) in which Heidi James @heidijames.bsky.social talks to  Adelle Stripe @adellestripe.bsky.social about the creative process, living with another writer, working through self-doubt and the punk rock gardening club. Listen

The Last King of Elmet

Here’s the second episode of The Last King of Elmet, a podcast featuring publisher Kevin Duffy of Bluenose Books and author, artist and postman Kevin Boniface. 

This one features: 

Spectral Flaneurs.

Singing Posties.

Sorting Office Playlists

White - Tailed Eagles.

20th Century Roundheads.

Astral Projection.

Martin Amis's teeth found in Patagonia.

Books....

But there’s more yet.

Kevin Boniface has created (squints at notes) something called a ‘Spotify playlist’ featuring songs that are regularly performed quite loudly by fellow postal workers in the sorting office, very early in the morning. It’s an education. Listen here

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Poetry

The Irish poet Nuala O’Connor has a new poetry collection entitled Menagerie, published on 31st March by Arlen House. 

'Menagerie is playful, spry, and rich in myth. Here is a true poet, one with a storyteller’s eye.' 

                                                        - Patrick Chapman

I’ve read and re-read this powerful, deeply personal and illuminating collection and recommend it highly. I’m delighted to say that Nuala will be my guest at the James Joyce Centre in Dublin on Friday 13th June. 

More details in the May newsletter.

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Vlatka Horvat

By the Means at Hand offers a look into the London-based artist Vlatka Horvat’s eponymous project, presented at the Pavilion of Croatia at the 60th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia in 2024. It’s published by Archive Books and available to order on their website

Horvat invited some 200 international artists – friends and friends of friends, all living “as foreigners” in different countries around the world – to exchange small-scale artworks with her, all made for the occasion. For every work she received, Vlatka sent to each artist a collage from the series she was making while in residence in Venice, using images of the city she has taken on her daily walks. All the artworks travelled to Venice and back via informal transport networks; in bags and suitcases of friends, acquaintances, and sometimes strangers enlisted as couriers for the project. 

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Galley Beggar Press

The 2024/2025 Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize winner is ‘Dangerous Materials’, by Nicole Sellew.

You can read it in full here and see for yourself how clearly it speaks about class, desire, ambition, the impossibility of ambition.

Galley Beggar co-director Eloise Millar says:

This is a finely crafted story, surprising and full of sharp social commentary. It is revelatory without ever feeling laboured or didactic. It is also deliciously subversive with a feeling that boundaries are being gently teased and tested. It’s wonderful to discover a writer who can approach difficult themes without sacrificing a lightness of touch.’

The prize has now generated a really serious archive of fine literature. There are dozens and dozens of top quality stories to read. All other years can be found if you dig around on the prize page as well as fascinating Q&As with longlisted authors. 

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Scratch A4 1000 word story competition

Submissions are now open to the Scratch A4 Summer '25 1000 word short story competition, which explores ‘the rich and exhilarating possibilities of the short, short story.’

This year's judges are: Denise Rose Hansen (editorial director at Penguin Books), 

Liv Bignold (literary agent at C&W literary agency) and Tom Conaghan (publisher of Scratch Books).

Full details here.

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Toothpull of St Dunstan

There will be no stranger novel published this year than Kevin Davey’s tale of a seemingly-immortal Canterbury dentist who lives for more than 800 years and records the changes going on in the wider world. That bare summary can’t begin to do justice to this magnificently original, frequently hilarious novel. 

It’s the third part of a loose-knit trilogy of novels set in Kent, following Playing Possum and Radio Joan. All three are touchstone modern fictions - fearlessly inventive, adventurous and unpredictable. Don’t expect them to appear on any Booker longest - they’re far too good for that. Davey is a complete original but (struggling for analogies) I’d say he bears comparison with William Golding and Russell Hoban.

Toothpull of St Dunstan is published on 1st April by Aaaargh! Press and should be available to order from their website

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The Orange Notebooks 

Susanna Crossman will be in London next month to launch The Orange Notebooks - ‘a dazzling novel about a mother's journey through grief to radical hope.’ This will be in the Trafalgar Square branch of Waterstones on Thursday 22nd May, when Susanna will be in conversation with Catherine Taylor. Free tickets will be available from the Waterstones website soon.

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Plug 

A Crumpled Swan is a collection of fifty essays (all by me) prompted by a single short poem ‘In the dream of the cold restaurant,’ by Abigail Parry. It’s published in June.

A first (anonymous) notice has appeared ahead of publication in The Kirkus Review, and I read it with a mixture of relief and even more relief. Here it is:

A journey into a dream.

In 50 brief, illuminating essays melding memoir, close reading, literary analysis, and cultural criticism, critic and essayist Collard takes Abigail Parry’s poem “In the dream of the cold restaurant,” from her collection I Think We’re Alone Now, as inspiration for reflecting on poetry as genre and on this singular, enigmatic poem in particular. “I want to be able [to] bring to a poem the same knowledge and attention that an art historian brings to a painting,” Collard writes. The poem relates a scene involving a man who fashions a napkin into origami shapes; a surly 17-year-old waitress with a mysterious scar from, perhaps, a burn; and another diner, seated on a mezzanine, reading: All are depicted with both the “glib economy” and “gaunt extravagance of dreams.” Collard reads and rereads the poem, each time “impressed and astonished” by its “subtly-managed uncertainty and instability.” He investigates its language, rhythm, and allusions to Greek mythology. He brings to bear a range of contemporary critics. Not alone among poems he admires and discusses in these essays, this one obsesses him: “I carry the poem with me, and am in turn carried by it, or carried away.” Having grown up among Jehovah’s Witnesses, Collard, as a teenager, escaped a cult that severely circumscribed his world. “My behaviour from the age of eight, when my parents were evangelised, was constantly policed,” he writes; “everything I did and everything I said was either approved without warmth or criticised and corrected.” He saw literature as an antidote, “a way of engaging directly with other thinkers, other perspectives.” In Parry’s poetry, he feels “in direct contact with an intelligence I find sympathetic.” Collard’s insightful essays reveal him, as well, as a sympathetic presence, sensitive and wise.

Fresh, perceptive literary essays.

There will be launch events in Dublin (at Hodges Figgis on Thursday 12th June), in London (date and venue to be confirmed), and online (date also to be confirmed). Other events may well happen. Extracts will appear in Exacting Clam, The London Magazine and elsewhere.

Details of the book are on my publisher’s website here. You can pre-order from Barnes & Noble here. Or from Asterism Books: here.

And as mentioned earlier I’ll be at the James Joyce Centre in Dublin the following night (Friday 13th June) to host an evening of Joyce-adjacent readings, music, performance and conversations as part of the Centre’s Bloomsday week celebrations. Guests will include Rónán Hession (making a rare appearance as his musical alter ego Mumblin’ Deaf Ro); performer Stephanie Elleyne, and author and poet Nuala O’Connor (see above).

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Should we call it ‘The Barbie’?

 Finally - I’m delighted to be working with author Jake Goldsmith and others to re-launch the Barbellion Prize. This, you’ll know, is a prize for disabled writers which Jake created, funded and has run single-handedly. For health reasons it’s been on hiatus for the past two years, but will be back in September this year. There’s a lot going on at the moment and some exciting news will be announced very soon. 

Meanwhile here’s the website.

That’s all for now. If you’re still reading this, thank you. 

David

PS Authors and indie publishers and all creative practitioners - let me know if you have a book coming out or a project you’d like to promote and I’ll be happy to include details in future newsletters. These will be monthly, more or less, throughout the year, and I’d appreciate any notifications by the end of February. And do let me know if you’d rather not be on the mailing list and I’ll happily stop badgering you. D.