Life-Sized Bears Taking Over Bookshops
Plus: LGBTQ Magic Realism and John Ironmonger's Reading List That Will Change How You Think About Climate Fiction
A very happy Friday Scribblers,
It’s been a very interesting week for me because I started a new role as Module Leader for a Creative Writing MA (online) at Arts University Bournemouth! The module I’m developing is called ‘Publishing in the 21st Century’ and I have one month to create the overall structure, before I get to the nitty-gritty…
Back in 2018, I discovered firsthand how challenging it was to secure publishing work experience in the North of England. Instead of following the traditional route, I learned through practical experiments and YouTube, creating my own frameworks and developing a dynamic approach to the industry. In many ways, this hands-on experience proved more valuable than traditional observation might have been – it forced me to think differently and taught me the ins and outs of running a business.
Now, I face an interesting challenge: translating my practical, real-world knowledge into an academic format. With one month to create the overall structure, I'll be working to bridge the gap between practical skills (the ones that actually land publishing jobs) and academic learning. And yes, I can already imagine the groans of Creative Writing students during Book Design week!
We had an excellent time at Waterstones Deansgate so thanks to all who joined us to hear from Rosie Garland’s magical realist LGBTQ collection ‘Your Sons and Your Daughters are Beyond’! Your next chances to see her will be either at Barnsley Book Festival, in conversation with the king of the short story, in both publishing and author capacities, Nicholas Royle! Tickets (Wed 26th Feb)
Or travelling ALL the way down to the very tip of the UK, join us in Folkestone, Kent! Tickets live soon, Rosie will be doing a workshop AND a launch event. Workshop takes place Saturday 26th of April from 10am. In the meantime, check out Folkestone Bookshop’s website, where they are offering a tasty £3 off Rosie’s collection!
Now it is just seven days until The Wager and the Bear by John Ironmonger is released into the world, and bookshops have started celebrating with us - look at these beautiful displays and bears!!
And this one from The Book Vault, Barnsley, gearing up for John’s festival appearance there (in conversation with journalist and nature writer Anita Sethi on the 3rd of March. Tickets here.)
So chuffed with how the bears came out - they seem to be making all the difference with book visibility!
This week we chatted to John about books which inspired his writing…
You can find the whole list on Bookshop.org here or read on below…
Books that Influenced ‘The Wager and the Bear.’ Perhaps …
So this isn’t easy for me because no book stands out as a particular influence (apart from ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’) … Instead I’ve tried to pick books that influenced me as a writer – or books that I love.
A book that certainly did affect me (that I credit in the acknowledgements of ‘The Bear’) is 'The Uninhabitable Earth,' by David Wallace-Wells. It's a non-fiction exploration of the climate crisis. This is the blurb: "The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn't happening at all, and if your anxiety about it is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today." This is a genuinely scary, and life changing book. I would recommend it to everyone.
2. When I discovered ‘Silent Spring’ in 1974 the book had been out for twelve years and it was already a phenomenon. This was the book that arguably kickstarted the environmental movement. It was Rachel Carson’s excoriating account of the way pesticides (specifically DDT) were destroying the natural environment, and how chemical companies and their lobbyists were conspiring to conceal evidence. The lesson from ‘Silent Spring’ is that well argued science can impact public policy and change the world. Let’s hope this is still true.
So I’m going to have to move onto books that influenced me as a writer – and books that I love. This could be a very long list. But here are just a few.
3. ‘The World According to Garp,’ by John Irving is the book that made me want to be a writer. It was, I think, the first time I truly understood the extraordinary power and poetry of good writing. I found myself as a young man re-reading some pages over and over to try and figure out how Irving had done it.
4. 'Address Unknown' by Katherine Kressmann Taylor (published in 1935) is an exquisite and deeply moving piece of writing. It is the profoundly intimate and troubling exploration of a friendship torn apart by the cult-like power of nationalism; an unsettling unravelling of human nature... but with just about the best ending you will ever encounter. Whenever I visit a book-club, this is always the book I recommend for the group to read next. People have written to thank me. Imagine that.
5. The Jack Reacher books by Lee Child. I make no apology for selecting these. When it came to writing the action scenes in ‘The Wager and the Bear’ I could often sense Child’s prose style leaking out onto my page. So what is it about the Jack Reacher books? They are not great literature (sorry Mr Child). They don’t explore the great themes of the human condition. But they are extraordinarily well written. I feel as if I have to say this twice, because the received wisdom is that this genre of books is a kind of semi-literary canon-fodder for people who don’t really read. Nonsense. These are brilliantly written novels. They are technically well constructed and they’re smart. Child has a way of breaking every rule of writing and making it look ok. And they’re page turners. That is rare in novels these days. At least it is for me.
6. ‘Mother Tongue,’ by Bill Bryson is quite simply the best exploration of the English language you will ever read. Every page is packed with gems. It’s a travel book of a kind, touring the world’s use of its widest spoken language, from ancient Britons to modern creoles via cockney rhymes, swearing, and word origins. It is utterly delicious.
7. I was eighteen when I first read ‘Slaughterhouse 5,’ by Kurt Vonnegut. At the time I was reading nothing but science fiction. I could read three or four novels in a week. And I did. But Slaughterhouse 5 does a strange thing. It creates a hybrid story. In one thread, a man, Billy Pilgrim, is abducted by aliens and becomes unstuck in time; but in another it becomes an account of the dreadful firebombing of Dresden in World War 2 – an account based on Vonnegut’s own experiences as a prisoner of war. The way Vonnegut marries fiction with a hugely serious story is a lesson I tried to borrow for ‘The Wager and the Bear.’
8. For me ‘The Goldfinch’ is almost the perfect book. I love Donna Tartt’s beautifully worked writing and the almost photographic way she creates scenes. If The Goldfinch is an influence on ‘The Bear’ it is, perhaps, because it is a whole life story. I enjoy seeing a character develop from innocence into adulthood, a journey always laden with narrative potential. Tartt gives us the coming of age of Theo Decker who loses his mother in a terrorist bombing at a New York gallery, but who remarkably ends up rescuing and concealing a painting from the ruins. It’s glorious.
9. The Jeeves novels and short stories by P.G. Wodehouse represent the epitome of comic fiction. Never been bettered. Never likely to be. Oh, and please don’t try to disagree with me – it will only make me upset. They probably don’t belong on this list since I don’t think they influence my writing at all. Which is a shame. I should love to write as well as this.
10. ‘On Broadway,’ by Damon Runyon. Runyon was a New York newspaperman who wrote comic tales of the great depression and prohibition in the 1930s. They’re not terribly relevant to the world of today. They are written in a curiously unique style which takes some getting used to, and they employ a vocabulary of jargon that is never adequately translated. They may even be out of print. But I love them. And I have borrowed one small feature of Runyon’s writing for the final chapter of ‘The Bear’ (and actually for every one of my novels). These chapters (like Runyon’s stories) are written in the ‘historic present.’
(This last one was out of print John, sadly!!)
Last, but certainly not least, we hope you’ll pop this Stockport date in your diaries - FOTW authors and animal lovers in conversation! Dr David Hartley interviews John Ironmonger at Serenity Booksellers. Tickets
If you can’t make it, you can grab a copy of The Wager and the Bear from Bookshop.org or us direct - both come with beautiful painted edges!
Until next week,
Isabelle x