This One Wild Place Book Launch with Avril Joy

Costa Short Story Award winner, Avril Joy, is both a wonderful writer and a great supporter of authors. We met online some years ago and she endorsed my collection, My Brother was a Kangaroo. Avril is a lovely person and a true creative mind. She invited me to her online launch of this One Wild Place, on 27 October, which was a really inspirational event, filled with readings, questions and discussion and hosted by her publisher, Linen Press.

This new collection of stories from Avril brings together her finest published and unpublished work. From the Costa winning Millie and Bird to the recent A Morning Tide, listed for the Fish Short Memoir Prize, she weaves narratives of hope in the face of loss, transformation and redemption, and the enduring power of love. Combining a poet’s gift for language with a keen naturalist’s eye, she journeys across landscapes from Venice to the East Anglian Fens, from Cape Cod to the shore temples of Mahabalipuram. This One Wild Place, a novella set on a northern hill farm during the pandemic, echoes the mood of the other stories. Moving and poignant it is told with an unerring compassion. She explores first love, families, marriage, childhood, mothering, social class, escape, gardens, birds, seas, tides and stray dogs. These stories are about the wild places we call home.

At the book launch, Avril read beautifully from the beginning of How the River Breaks Your Heart, and from A Morning Tide, her creative memoir, while editor, Lynn Michell, who hosted the event, asked some interesting questions about the connecting themes and issues between her short-form and long-from writing, as well asking Avril what a sense of place means to her as an author, given the strong sense of place within the stories, which are deeply rooted in physical surroundings that are often as important as the characters.

There were recurring themes in her reading, including dogs and water. Her childhood days spent playing near the water on the Somerset Levels, where many people drowned each year, are reflected in her writing. Another strong influence in Avril’s work is her experiences of twenty-five years of working in HM Low Newton, County Durham, as a Prison Governor, where she began teaching and says she, “became deeply involved with the women and their lives, and in many ways that never leaves me. I see it creep in again and again, often through the back door, into what I write.” I am currently reading and am deeply moved by her poetry collection, Going in With Flowers, borne out of her experiences at Low Newton and the lives of the women she met there. Through this collection, Avril gives voice to the lives of the prisoners, exploring through poetry and prose the daily going in through locked gates to meet darkness and pain as well as laughter and hope.

This One Wild Place is set in the time of the pandemic. Lynn asked Avril how Covid influenced the story and her writing. Avril talked about the joy of being able to tuck herself away and immerse herself in her writing, without negating the obvious challenges of the pandemic for many people.

Lynn also raised the issue of the uncanny similarity between Sometimes A River Song and Where the Crawdads Sing. Both have a strong watery backdrop, both have a wild heroine with an unusual narrative voice, both use literacy as the escape route from a patriarchal society. With Where the Crawdads Sing going on to sell 11 million copies and being made into a major film, Lynn asked Avril if it troubles her that Sometimes A River Song has been less in the limelight. Pay cheque disparities aside, Avril highlighted the positive and personal aspects of working with an editor who she has got to know really well, and of working with a small press in terms of her own author input into cover design and other aspects of book publication. Avril has had experience of contracts with larger publishers and says she wouldn’t switch. Lynn is enthusiastic, experienced, personable and is also a writer!

Through her writing, Avril displayed her well honed skill of being able to draw the reader into a world that is entirely unique through her descriptive, lyrical prose. She has a way of describing people and places that leaves you with an understanding of the narrative as much through what is left unsaid as the words written on the page. Her observations and descriptions of the small details are astute and razor-sharp. She clearly has a deep understanding of the human condition, of love and loss, and of what makes people different and similar.

If you haven’t been acquainted with her work, I would highly recommend her writing. You can find her books here.

About Avril: Avril Joy is a short story writer, novelist and poet. Born in Somerset, she has travelled widely in India, Kashmir and Nepal. She was a Prison Governor in a women’s prison in County Durham and was awarded a Butler Trust Travel Award for ‘an outstanding contribution to prison care.’ It was here in 1999 she met the Writer-in-Residence and was inspired to write. Her short fiction has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies, including Victoria Hislop’s, The Story: Love, Loss & the Lives of Women. Her work has been shortlisted in competitions including, the Bridport, the Manchester Prize for Fiction and The Raymond Carver Short Story Prize in the USA. In 2012 she won the inaugural Costa Short Story Award. Her latest novel, Sometimes a River Song, published by Linen Press, won the 2017 People’s Book Prize. In 2019 her poem Skomm won first prize in the York Literary Festival Competition. She posts regularly on her blog http://www.avriljoy.com/

About Linen Press: Linen Press is a small, independent publisher run by women, for women. They are the only indie women’s press in the Uk and encourage and promote women writers, giving a voice to a wide range of perspectives and themes that are relevant to women. Linen Press rejoices in the differences in female creative voices, publishing books that are diverse, challenging, and surprising. The collective background of writers is a multi-coloured patchwork of cultures, countries, ages and writing styles.

Established in 2005.

Finalist 2015 Women In Publishing Pandora Award.

Shortlisted 2019 Most Innovative Publisher Saboteur Awards.


Nine Years of Blog Posts on Writing

I began writing this blog nine years ago today. It’s been a journey of interviewing authors, like Matt Haig and SJ Watson, sharing book reviews and writing news, as well as writing posts on the craft of writing, which have proved highly popular. I’ve met some wonderful people along the way. Thank you to all of the people who follow and engage with these posts.

What We Can Learn About Plot Writing From Thriller Series, Vigil

Photo: BBC

Plot is arguably one of the most important elements of fiction writing – from it stems, the characters, the mood, the pace. It sets the scene for the whole tone of a fiction novel, so it’s important to get it right. When you’re writing crime or thriller novels, it is absolutely key, and there are ways of raising the stakes to keep your reader hooked.

Here are a few that I noticed, while watching the BBCs recent new thriller, Vigil. If you haven’t seen it, you can watch it on catch-up. As a writer, it’s difficult not to consider plot, when watching high-tension drama on television and and in Film!

  1. Put your characters in a challenging environment or physical danger.
  2. Introduce vulnerabilities and character flaws.
  3. Create secondary characters to add new tensions to the plot.
  4. Allow tension to ebb and flow.
  5. Create obstacles and conflict between characters.
  6. Keep raising the stakes.
  7. Make the viewer (reader) ask questions.
  8. Create internal and external conflict.
  9. Leave things unresolved until close to the end.
  10. Remind the reader of the stakes.
Photo: imdb

The plot hinges on a Detective Chief Inspector Amy Silva (played by Suranne Jones). DCI Silva works for the Scottish Police Service and is sent to HMS Vigil, a Trident nuclear submarine, by helicopter for three days, at first, to investigate. Shortly after the mysterious disappearance of a Scottish fishing trawler, a member of the crew on Vigil is murdered, and DCI Silver has been sent to investigate. The series takes viewers on a journey into a world of submarine warfare and security threats.[Skip ahead to the next paragraph to avoid a plot spoiler] Having lost her husband in a car crash, where the car is submerged in water, Amy manages to rescue only her daughter. She suffers from flash-backs, depression and anxiety, for which she is taking medication.

Much like Carrie, in Homeland (a highly-skilled, but bipolar CIA operative), it’s this vulnerability that makes Silver so likeable and her achievements all the more impressive as the plot unfold (see no. 2 in raising the stakes). Finding character flaws and vulnerabilities draws the reader to the character. The human need to connect through vulnerability is best illustrated in Brené Brown’s TEDxHouston Talk, The Power of Vulnerability. In this twenty minute TED talk, she describes vulnerability as uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure, but says that vulnerability is not weakness; it’s our most accurate measure of courage. It’s this courage, despite character flaws and vulnerabilities, that makes the best protagonists so appealing and keeps viewers and readers hooked.

DCI Silver’s investigations, along with her team on land, create conflict between the police, the Royal Navy and MI5 (see no.5 in the list of raising the stakes). She is in a challenging physical environment (see no.1) in a confined space, away from her daughter, her normal routine and recent partner, DS Kirsten Longacre (Rose Leslie), leaving her conflicted.

While there were a few plot holes and inconsistencies in places, it was a gripping series, with tensions ramping up towards the end. The finale provided both the tension and resolution that viewers were hoping for, with some impressive redemptive qualities.

Photo: imdb

You can find out more about plot, tension and story arcs, from several of my other posts (links below):

Narrative Arc: Shaping Your Story (one of my most read post’s with almost 15,000 views)

Plot, Characters, Homeland, and What You Need to Achieve to Keep Readers Engaged

What we can learn from Beauty and the Beast About Plot, Tension and Obstacles

And Other Stories Celebrates its 10th Anniversary

Independent Publisher, And Other Stories, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this autumn with a redesign as well as physical and digital events. They invite you share your book photos and videos with fellow readers using the hashtags #AndOtherShelves and #aos10, as well as tagging them on Instagram (@andotherpics), Twitter (@andothertweets), Facebook (@AndOtherStoriesBooks), YouTube (@andothervideos) and wherever else you hang out.

I’ve supported them for some time and have my name inside the covers as a previous subscriber. Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home, reviewed here, is one of my favourite books. Their authors are bold and daring, with each book surprising the reader. I love the variety of styles and the different settings and cultures in which the stories are set. These are just a few that I own, but I have more scattered around the house in various places. I don’t like to be too far from a book! I love the cover designs, too.

Swimming Home

Founder and publisher Stefan Tobler says that the team will mark the milestone from September on into the new year with new designs, online events and in-person parties and bookshop displays. The publisher’s titles will get a different look from September onwards, thanks to new house-style typefaces as well as the appointment of an art director, designer Tom Etherington.

Reflecting on the early days of And Other Stories, Tobler says: “To be honest it feels like a minor miracle that the press started at all. I was a single parent, not living in London, and so not getting out all that much. I had never worked in publishing. It was amazing how ready with advice others in publishing were, like Pete Ayrton, and organisations such as Arts Council England.” He notes that while And Other Stories was something of a pioneer with its focus on translated writing and its subscription model when it began, in the last decade the landscape for both has changed a lot (The Bookseller, 23 July 2021).

And Other Stories publishes contemporary writing, including many translations. As a publisher, they aim to push people’s reading limits and to open up publishing so that, in their own words, “from the outside it doesn’t look like some posh freemasonry.” They believe that more of the English publishing industry should move out of London, Oxford and their environs. In 2017 And Other Stories moved their main office to Sheffield and recieved a warm welcome. The move helped them to discover great new writing from the North of England, including Tim Etchells’ Endland, Amy Arnold’s Slip of a Fish and Rachel Genn’s What You Could Have Won.

And Other Stories is made up of readers, editors, writers, translators and subscribers, with books distributed widely through bookshops, although they say that subscriber support is what makes the books happen. They now have about 1,500 active subscribers in over 40 countries, receiving up to 6 books a year. If you are interested in subscribing, click here.

Do you have any And Other Stories books? Let us know and share any snaps in the comments…