From Imaginary Towns to Real Changes: FOTW's August Update

SJ Bradley's BBC interview, MLF collab & more inside

A very happy Friday Scribblers,

August feels like a sleepy time for most, but at FOTW it feels like we’re just gearing up for our big highlights September - October! We’ve just officially announced our performance collaboration with Manchester Literature Festival - the Northern Publishers’ Fair on Oct 5th (tickets and tote bags here) and SJ Bradley was interviewed on BBC Upload (you can catch up on BBC Upload here - about an hour in!)

On a personal note, I feel like I’ve just figured out how to navigate the world of being a limited company after a month and a bit! I’ve avoided the extra admin for years now, but we’ve bitten the bullet - and got lucky in that ‘Fly on the Wall Press Ltd’ was indeed available as a name… Imagine if we had been forced to change names at this stage!!

And we’ve just launched pre-orders for a very special novel by award-winning Manchester writer, Sheena Kalayil: ‘The Others’ - set to be our longest, and possibly most moving, book yet!

Secrets, lies and love as the DDR collapses.

Three young people from vastly different backgrounds - Armando from Mozambique, Lolita from India and East German national Theo - are drawn together in a small Baltic city in 1989, just as the DDR begins to collapse around them.

While a quiet revolution sweeps through Eastern Europe, they find themselves in a poignant love triangle, as their lives intertwine and collide with each other in a messy, beautiful ways.

Today I have the pleasure of sharing an interview between SJ Bradley and our own Louisa Wagstaff, ahead of the release of short story collection, ‘Maps of Imaginary Towns’ in September - subscribers, you’ll be receiving your collection in the post next week!

With lyrical prose and psychological depth, Bradley illuminates the quiet heroism pulsing through seemingly ordinary lives.

Beleaguered, yet resourceful social workers battle towering workloads; a harassed elderly childminder collapses under the strain; a victim of domestic abuse strikes out for freedom and disgruntled workers in dead-end jobs dream of a brighter future.

Gritty yet tender, "Maps of Imaginary Towns" celebrates the resilience of the human spirit.

Louisa: Maps of Imaginary Towns is a short story collection of remarkable range and takes readers across an expansive terrain. From the ticket office of a Yorkshire Cineworld to the extra-terrestrial Ganglian realm, what is fundamental to your stories is their contemporary and relevant social issues. How do you strike a balance when creating fantasy worlds which are nevertheless grounded in very real and pressing issues?

SJ: I’ve been very influenced by writers like Joel Lane, JG Ballard, Lesley Nneka Arimah, and Nnedi Okorafor, among others. Writers who use the palette of fantasy and speculative worlds to write about the worlds we inhabit. I was really struck by how all of these writers used fantasy worlds to critique society, and imagine how it could be different or better. Or worse, if you’re talking about JG Ballard.

It’s so hard to depict progressive politics in realist fiction without making your characters sound like a bunch of witless sixth formers. But what strikes me the most about speculative genres is that they allow you to create whatever future you want. It’s like the idea of a world without patriarchy, or whatever, is so completely unimaginable to us, that we can’t envision it in our own world. We can somehow see it more clearly if it’s in a story set 700 years in the future, where it’s all happening in another solar system altogether.

I see playing with genre as a way of freeing yourself up and trying new things. Exploring genre is a dressing-up box, rather than a cage. You can do lots with it. And the more speculative fiction I read, the more I realise that’s where all the exciting literary work is being done. So much of the best new writing is happening in that space.

Several of your stories, for example ‘Backstreet Nursery, 2050’, ‘The Gordon Trask’, and ‘The Discrepancy Matrix’, amongst others, explore the social impact of living under austerity measures. Did any of these stories grow out of first-hand knowledge and/or experiences? How much research went into constructing these austerity-hit story worlds?

Unfortunately for me, in a way, I’ve been working in the public and voluntary sector for the past 14 years. I spent a lot of time dodging getting made redundant and/or applying for my own job, and watching services and support dwindle away to nothing. It hasn’t been the most fun of times, to say the least. I am hopeful that things will improve under the new Government, but who really knows?

The only way I can make time and space to write is to work part time, so I usually have two or three part time jobs running alongside one another. Over the years I’ve worked for the council or at various charities, and I spent quite a long time working in a special school in Bradford, which was ace. All of the jobs were public-facing, and most of them were with children with special needs and their families.

At one point I was working in a special needs arts service, and one of our buildings got shut down and sold off, because the council didn’t have the money to do the repair work to fix the building up. That particular incident inspired The Gordon Trask. I don’t particularly blame the council – at that point, they were having to sell buildings off because of their own funding cuts. But it was an awful thing for people who really needed that centre, and it had all these ripple effects against people who were least able to do something about it. And these crap things happened every day under that Government, to people who didn’t cause austerity and didn’t ask for it.

I wanted to write about the kind of things that were happening, and the people they were happening to. It felt important to me and I didn’t know of anybody else doing the same thing.

Unfortunately, I’m not in the position of being able to work full time. I’d love to be able to take a few months off to go on a research trip, or live somewhere else for a bit, but that sort of thing is totally out of the question for me. You have to work with what you’ve got, which in my case, usually, was my job(s), and the things I saw and the people I met. I sometimes think of what I do as ‘public sector fiction’. It’s writing about people’s everyday lives in a way that makes it interesting. I don’t know of anybody else currently doing this type of writing. It’s not kitchen sink exactly, it’s more sort of magic realism. A magic kitchen sink.

Your story ‘The Gordon Trask’ vividly displays the impact of underfunding on public services, particularly those facilitating arts and culture, and how this is changing the topography of our towns and cities: buildings and services that have been at the centres of communities are more frequently becoming nomadic institutions that do not have the means to reconstruct themselves. What do you think the long-term impact of this underfunding will be, particularly in the realm of arts and culture?

I hope the arts will recover. Until they do, I think we’ll see a bit of a ‘lost generation’ of people who weren’t able to have the opportunity to become artists. I hope we’ll see increased investment and spending in the arts in a way that it’ll bring it more into communities.

One of the things I don’t really agree with is that Higher Education has become the only accepted route into becoming a professional artist, and anyone taking a craftsman-type or apprenticeship-type route will find lots of doors closed to them. There aren’t so many artists being able to develop through a community route and make a living which, to me, makes the arts world poorer. There’s been a lack of opportunity through every route and at every level, which makes it harder for people to access the arts. The lack of funding means that there’s less art and creativity available that’s accessible to communities. To me, all of that is wrong.

I do have optimism, though. We’re creative and resilient. Plus, I think the pandemic has made an enormous change to the way we think about art and work and their places in our lives. It’s made a change to how we value local and public spaces. I do worry a bit about AI, but I also think humans will always have that desire to create and to connect with one another through the arts. Over time, I think, what we’ll see is a strong reconnection to the power of arts within communities. It will grow back, eventually. That’s what I think.

Particularly prevalent in the story ‘Coming Attractions’ is an awareness of the North/South divide, as our protagonist strives to leave his job in the Cineworld ticket office to travel to London where, as he sees it, he will inevitably become an actor. As a writer from Wakefield, how have you seen the North/ South divide develop over the years, and how do you think this gap can be narrowed?

I grew up in Wakefield in the 90s. It was a pretty depressing place then, and to be honest I’m not sure it’s improved that much. I don’t know what you can do about a place that has a massive Category A prison right in the centre of town.

It’s really about lack of opportunity. There’s not much of it in Wakefield, and I’m sure that’s true of many other small towns in the North. It was a divide that sort of temporarily flattened during the pandemic, and then opened up again. Lots of institutions opened up their opportunities nationwide during the pandemic, then pretty quickly stopped doing that again as soon as the pandemic was over. Apparently offering opportunities and genuine access isn’t really a priority for some organisations. A lot of theatres that get national-level funding were pretty quick to take things offline as soon as they could. I don’t understand that at all. One of the ways in which the North/South divides operates is by the concentration of resources in one part of the country. It never fails to astound me that arts organisations display such a fundamental level of lack of creativity around closing off access and opportunities.

I’m not a politician, so I won’t pretend to have all of the answers. But there’s just so many bits to it. The poverty in some parts of the North is insane. In some places, even if you wanted to leave, you can’t, because there’s no way you could ever get a job that pays well enough for you to save up enough to be able to leave. And even if you were able to, you’d have to walk three days to get to the next big town, because there’s no buses. People are trapped by these situations. They can’t pull themselves up by the bootstraps because the bootstrap shop closed down and now there’s a betting shop where it used to be. It’s a depressing situation to be in, and you have to be really determined, or get extremely lucky, to get out of that. People are ending up working in a Morrison’s warehouse instead of drawing graphic novels or designing haute couture. I wonder sometimes how many potentially brilliant artists we’re losing. Our arts world could be so much richer if more efforts were made at genuine inclusion. 

I don’t know. I’d like to see more remote opportunities, arts funding spread better across the country, better lifelong support for artists. There are loads of people and organisations in the North doing great work, and artists producing work up here. It’s just that a lot of it doesn’t get national attention. We sort of fly under the radar here. It’s a bit double-edged, that.

Layered with the broader political themes of your collection are the ordinary lives of your characters, with your stories being told from those unheard and often silenced voices, for example the victim of  domestic abuse in ‘Dance Classes.’ Why do you choose to highlight the quieter voices of ordinary people in your writing?

The people in these stories, they’re me, they’re my friends, they’re everybody I know. Ordinary people are so interesting. I’ve always thought that. We might not be doing murders or solving them, but we’ve still got drama of various kinds in our lives. I guess I just like quiet people and quiet stories.

Another central concern for many of your characters is the quest for human connection. In a world that is becoming ever more politically divided, what role do think fiction and storytelling has in bringing people together and salving the social wounds caused by such fraught politics?

People now are reading more fiction than ever, it’s just that half the time, they don’t recognise it as fiction. Look at the way Qanon has spread across America. It has huge power and influence, it destroys people’s lives, and it has led to riots and an attempt at destroying democracy. And it’s all completely made up. Pure fiction. I wouldn’t mind my books having that kind of power. But for good, obviously.

It’s the creation of empathy that creates fiction’s power. Read a book of narrative non-fiction and you’ll see somebody else’s perspective. That’s important, when we are now all being pushed into certain directions by social media.

Probably the biggest way people consume stories now is through streaming. I’d love it if a million Trump supporters read my book and saw the error of their ways. But if they insist on not doing that, the next best thing might be if they watched all of Small Axe, or Community. Watch stories of communities that help you understand what they’ve experienced, and TV that celebrate the stories of communities at their best.

Many of your stories feature characters constructing fantasy worlds for themselves, for example the eponymous ‘Maps of Imaginary Towns’ which Hollis draws and builds out of Lego, and the so-called ‘Life of Your Dreams’ which lies between Mars and Pluto. Following the recent General Election result, as a country which is positioned on the brink of seismic social change, I wondered what a ‘dream life’ looks like to do? Do you think this could ever be achieved, and if so, how?

I can tell you what I want, and that’s more free time. I’m sure others feel the same. It would be great if we all could work a bit less, and do the things we love, without needing to worry about turning it into a side hustle that brings in money. I’d like everybody to have more time to do creative stuff just for the sake of it. So I’d like to see better paid, more better quality part time work, and a decrease in the number of hours that we all work. Unfortunately this would mean an increase in the number of poor quality buskers, but personally I think that would be a price worth paying.

If people wanted to carry on working 37 hours or more a week, they could do, if they really wanted to, the weirdos. But for those of us who want to slack off a bit, for want of a better phrase, we’d all have more leisure time and more money, we’d be able to go to the cafe more often to hang out, so the cafes would be better, and there’d probably be more of them, as well. That would mean better quality brunch and coffee for all. A win.

We all wouldn’t be in such a rush because we’d have more flexi-time or more remote work, so there wouldn’t be so many cars on the road. We could all ride our bikes or walk everywhere. So there’d be cleaner air and it wouldn’t be so dangerous to get places. Another win.

There’s lots of other stuff I’d like to see. More renewable energy, better quality housing, better education, more opportunities for adults to learn things at whatever stage of life they’re at.

A dream life for me would mean a more community-based way of life, a more localised way of living. Trying to do stuff nearby and having stuff within walking distance. More locally owned organisations and businesses, and less of corporations having an impact and a say on our lives. I hope something like this could be achieved. I can tell you it’s certainly something I’d enjoy. I don’t know if I can make it happen, but I certainly try to write about the world I’d like to see, and hope to get others to come around to my way of thinking.

Thanks so much for chatting to us SJ! If you’re based in Leeds, do join us below for the launch… the much-loved bookshop on a barge, Holdfast Books, makes its way on land!

Until next week lovely Scribblers,

Isabelle