Sparks: fiery imaginations |
THE FIRST THING that strikes you about Sparks, Bath Spa’s anthology of creative writing, is the cleverness of the packaging. It’s a box of matches – a cardboard sleeve mimicking an old-fashioned matchbox, from which slides the book itself as a tray of safety matches. New writers as budding incendiaries. Perfect.
There are 39 writers in Sparks, all graduates of Bath Spa’s MA creative writing courses in 2004-5. In recent reviews I’ve looked at prose-writing from UEA and poetry from Goldsmiths, so this time I thought I would make my life easier by focusing on contributions by graduates of the new MA Writing for Young People. Actually, it doesn’t make life much easier – it’s hard to find a way in to work which never had you as a reader in mind. I found myself muttering I don’t know, perhaps this is what young people like… and feeling terribly old. But I’ve got over it: anyone can appreciate good work (I’m currently a huge fan of Fireman Sam and Charlie and Lola), and anyway, all good writers are writing for themselves.
My immediate favourite from the collection is Silver Boots by Karen Priest, about a girls’ football team. Priest’s familiarity with her 8-12 year-old audience – she has worked for several years as a primary school teacher – gives her writing a confidence and enthusiasm that I found irresistible:
Today, after a good ten minutes of being told to run, jump and land, I could see she was getting fed up. Every time Billings blew her whistle, Charlotte scowled at her, and traded a look with her best friend, Becks. Although Becks wasn’t too bothered. She was pleased to be giving her new trainers an outing. She kept bending down to rub at the specks of dirt on the white bits, in between the blue stripes. Her new trainers were expensive. I knew that because she’d already told me.
Sporting stories like this tend to the inevitable victory against all odds in last minute-of cup final cliffhanger, so I kind of hope Priest has found somewhere different to take her engaging cast of characters – though you can’t let down your readers down of course. One niggle: unless they are abridged the chapters are too short, even for this age group.
The other six writers from the MA have all opted for an older, teenage audience. This allows them a wider thematic and emotional range, but the difficulties of writing for this ambiguous age group are evident in extracts which tend either to the doom-laden or the insubstantial. The opening chapter of Marie-Louise Jensen’s Between Two Seas has the Victorian heroine nursing a dying mother while suffering the violent abuse of her vicious neighbours: Where’s your mother, the whore? It’s powerful stuff, which gives the novel’s journey plot a tremendous initial impetus. But it seemed a tad overwrought to me, and the writer might perhaps have focused on atmosphere and local detail – these Grimsby lasses talk in standard English! – rather than burdening her heroine with such a sudden freight of misery.
Like Jensen, David Bull’s novel The Mistletoe Giant explores an adolescent’s relationship with a terminally ill mother. This is intensely difficult material, which the author handles with sensitivity and conviction:
Her long hair had gone, to make it easier to keep clean. Her eyes were sunken like buried treasure. They shone brightly from the shadows of the room. A book rested under the palm of one hand. A pen and paper lay by her side. She stared at me and tried to smile. She was wondering what was wrong with me. Her eyes followed my gaze as I looked around the room.
Bull has worked in children’s animation for twenty years, and his visual imagination is evident in the striking mythic imagery that he weaves into the story – the products of his protagonist’s feverish inner life. The extract at moments seems to want to break free from the constraints of the novel form; whether Bull is able to keep the narrative in check, and prevent it morphing into a kind of literary animation, it’s not possible to tell from this single chapter.
Of the teenage novel extracts the one that most gripped me was Joyrider by Karen Saunders, in which a disaffected middle-class girl, Becky, has taken up with local bad lad Adam, who has pinched his stepfather’s car:
Adam twists the steering wheel to one side and the car swerves across the road. We miss him by inches. I see his terrified face looking at mine as we swoop past.
It’s only as we speed onwards away from the man, away from my house, that I realise I’ve been holding my breath. I glance over at Adam and I’m shocked to see he’s laughing. He actually thinks it was funny. I’m about to give him hell, when I notice his knuckles on the steering wheel are white. His fingers are gripping on tightly.
Their escapade ends in a car crash at the end of the first chapter, and where the novel goes from here would be interesting to know. Saunders’s first-person prose is stripped down and economical, and it drives the story uncompromisingly forward. If the completed novel finds a compelling and original storyline, it will make powerful reading.
Another opening chapter, of a different kind, is taken from Playing it Cool by Matt Dix. In the story, 13-year-old Ben prepares nervously for his first date with classmate Claire. Like all the authors in the collection, Dix’s writing is competent and well pitched for a young teenage audience, but it’s let down by a banal storyline, composed of a succession of tired clichés: embarrassing parents, the girl who transforms herself into a stunner, the same old adolescent dilemmas – Should I put my arm around her straight away, or wait until she gave me some sign? It’s a classic example of second-guessing the reader, feeding them familiar material rather than surprising them with fresh ideas. Perhaps it gets more interesting in chapter two.
As the first intake of a new MA course, the seven authors featured in Sparks have set a clear benchmark for future years. It will be fascinating to see how future student writers build on this, and we can hope to see a clutch of relevant and courageous novels for young people emerging from the course within the next few years. |
