Ross Bradshaw gives an overview of the work of Jon McGregor, one of the most talented writers working in the East Midlands today.

About four years ago Jon McGregor was one of the featured writers at the Nottinghamshire Readers Day. His session, which people had a choice to attend, was packed. His second book had just come out, but most people there wanted to talk about his first book, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. In fact many of them wanted to say that they didn’t really like it, and one person said she didn’t even like it the second time she read it. Yet there they were, and all said they were looking forward to reading his new book. What did that reveal? Well, I had some sympathy with them as I was not sure about the style of If Nobody… yet eagerly bought his second book. But on re-reading I enjoyed it immensely.

I think what this reveals is that the group – and critics were in a national minority – could see that the boy had talent and wanted to see what else he could do. On this the critics were right. He has talent. And with his third book, Even the Dogs, recently released we can now have a better overview of the writer who, in my view, is the most interesting writer currently being published in the East Midlands.

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things is a novel set over one day in a street in an unnamed inner city. The setting could easily be Forest Fields in Nottingham (though it isn’t); a not very well off multicultural area with a lot of students living there. The day is the last day of summer, the students packing and leaving. There is a restlessness in the street. And we know from the start something will happen, something tragic, that will change the lives of many people in the street. We get to know the people, their individual stories.

Though seemingly unconnected, observant readers will notice one person’s story has its roots in Jon’s second book, So Many Ways to Begin. This book takes the form of a more traditional narrative: two main linked stories which must at some stage meet, when the full picture will, or may, finally be revealed. The book opens with an Irish woman leaving home for London a generation or two ago, but the two main characters are a museum worker in Coventry and his Aberdonian wife, who, from a promising start in life, begins to lose confidence. What will become of them?

In this book Jon McGregor, like the museum worker, is a collector of stories: stories given, stories hinted at and stories never explored. What impressed me most in this book is Jon’s description of the Aberdeen working class family, whose daughter is the first to be offered a university place in her family, and her whole community. There is a small party, the letter offering a place is shown round proudly. I know something of this world and Jon has a tremendous feel for the time, an ear for dialogue.

His third novel (like the others it is published by Bloomsbury) may be the most controversial of all. Even the Dogs is entirely set within a community of heroin users. There are visible traces of Nottingham city in the book, but the setting is an amalgam. What the book did for me was make me notice the city more, the people who live in the shadows. Near where I work there is a place, out of sight of CCTV cameras, where dealing goes on. I now notice the quick meetings, the furtive scurrying away to find a place to fix. I notice the people in Boots picking up their daily script, knocking back a small cup of methadone in the shop. The book has an interesting form, the narrators are always given as “we”, and, like a Greek chorus, they comment on the scene. They join us watching the dealing, the lives of the people. They are in the ambulance taking a dead man to the mortuary. One gets used to them as they, and the reader, see the story unfold. And there is one long sequence, it takes eleven minutes to read out loud, where we follow the path of the poppy seed from a field in Afghanistan, to its manufacture into heroin, to how it is smuggled into this country, to how it finds its way into the hands of a junkie, and how it is made up and how it works in the bloodstream of the user. I heard Jon read this piece at the Flying Goose in Beeston, before it was published, before anyone knew what he was working on, and at the end there was no applause, simply silence.

Ross Bradshaw runs Five Leaves Publications, the region’s “biggest small press” and jointly organises Lowdham Book Festival. For ten years he was Nottinghamshire’s Literature Development Officer, and, earlier, spent seventeen years working in a radical independent bookshop – http://fiveleavespublications.blogspot.com

Ross Bradshaw puts his money where his mouth is and decides to spend a year reading only books published by independent presses. How will this epic adventure end?

One of the more annoying, but endlessly fascinating trends in the current book trade is to do something, or do without something, for a year. Write the book, get in the colour supps, and then go back to normal life. Recent examples include having sex every day for a year with your partner, living according to the Bible, living entirely without money.

I don’t fancy any of them, besides they have been done. The literary version is Susan Hill’s Howard’s End is on the Landing: a year of reading from home, where the author spent a year re-reading from her book collection.

I thought of this when noting down the first books I read during the year – the first seven were all from indie presses. Right then. No book deals, or colour supps, but this year I’ll only read books from indie presses. For years I’ve banged on about indies, this time I’ll put all my book buying money where my mouth is. There will be sacrifices. Sorry, no, I have not read the new Andrea Levi, and – dammit – I was going to finally read Madam Bovary, but it is published by Penguin. And not just buying new; second hand, library and personal borrowing will only be from indies.

So far I can’t say it is a hardship. There have only been two occasions when I struggled to find a book from the right type of publisher. In the WH Smith Carlisle station, the much reduced bookstock indicated that the long journey ahead would include reading every word of the Cumberland and Westmoreland Herald (“Firm’s Haulage Depot Appeal Rejected” looked an interesting story) and a dog-eared solitary New Statesman. Fortunately I remembered that White Tiger, which won the Booker Prize last year was published by Atlantic.

The second time, also journey related, was trying to find an indie book in a British Heart Foundation charity shop. Well, the Bedside Guardian of 2008 seemed expensive at £2.50, but needs must. Shame it was an Olympic year but the rest of it was good.

There are big indies – Verso, Bloomsbury, Faber, Granta as well as the groundlings, so I’m hardly going to be spoilt for choice. And look, Quercus has the Stieg Larssons. Nae bother. I’ll report back sometime.

Supported by Writing East Midlands

Ross Bradshaw runs Five Leaves Publications, the region’s “biggest small press” and jointly organises Lowdham Book Festival. For ten years he was Nottinghamshire’s Literature Development Officer, and, earlier, spent seventeen years working in a radical independent bookshop – http://fiveleavespublications.blogspot.com

Ross Bradshaw takes a walk through the history of Indian writing in the United Kingdom.

In the past, every household with a decent book collection would probably have had at least one of Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, EM Forster’s Passage to India and Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. Later there would be Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust which won the Booker Prize in 1975 (JG Farrell’s Siege of Krishnapur won the Booker in 1973, but I can’t remember seeing it around much then and it is now, I suspect, not much read). And any hippy worth their salt would have had Love, Siri and Ebba, a famously stoned travelogue!

Many people assumed Jhabvala was Indian but she was a German Jew married to an Indian. Indian writers themselves were less read. RK Narayan and Mulik Rak Anand were available but attracted a more specialist audience. The Bengali poet Rabindrath Tagore (who’d won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913) was long dead, though not without followers. VS Naipaul, the Caribbean writer of Indian descent also won the Nobel Prize, though he has been criticised for his patronising view of the developing world.

Perhaps the first Indian writers to have a big impact on the British reader were Anita Desai and, above all, Salman Rushdie when his Midnight’s Children won the Booker in 1981. His main character was born at the moment India becomes independent, setting the book immediately in that most important time of Indian history, independence, closely followed by partition. Many people also bought Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy but were daunted by its length (I’m guilty as charged).
Coming more up to date, Arundhati Roy won the Booker with God of Small Things. Roy has used her fame to campaign in India against inappropriate development. Other Indian writers to win the Booker include Kiran Desai and, a couple of years ago, Aravid Adiga. I’ve read Desai’s Inheritance of Loss, which I found more moving in retrospect than at the time, but not yet read Adiga’s The White Tiger, which also shows some of the seamier side of Indian society.

The sales of these books indicate that literary readers are keen on books on India written by Indians, but some of the major books promoted by the Richard and Judy Book Club indicate that the general reader is equally keen on books from the Indian sub-continent. Every book club has discussed The Kite Runner, with most readers going on to Khaled Hosseini’s second book, A Thousand Splendid Suns. I’d imagine most have read The Bookseller of Kabul too!

Asian writing in Britain has been slower to take off. In the 1970s there were massive audiences for talks by Amrit Wilson on Finding a Voice and new writers like the lesbian Sunita Namjoshi also attracted large numbers to her readings. Surprisingly this was not sustained until Monica Ali had the break through novel, Brick Lane, which had the confidence to portray her Bangladeshi community with “warts and all” rather than as some Bangladeshi community leaders liked it to appear. Around the same time Daljit Nagra started winning prizes for his first full collection, Look We Have Coming to Dover! He came up through the small press scene, indeed several of the poems in that collection had been published by Five Leaves in the Dutch/English anthology By Heart/Uit Het Hoofd.

On a more popular level, the actor Meera Syal seemed to be everywhere for a while, including the best-seller charts for her variable novels, and now the Glasgow Sikh comedian Hardeep Singh Kohli is everywhere, including in the book charts for his Indian Takeaway. More serious is the Pakistani-born journalist and novelist Kamila Shansi, author of Burnt Shadows. Big publishers are now prepared to get behind British Asian writers, though sometimes they get it wrong. Gautam Malkani was given a huge advance for Londonstani, a book about streetwise youth. This time they got it wrong on sales and the book bombed.

Locally we have Bali Rai, writing about our multi-cultural UK; Debjani Chatterjee active in the National Association for Writers in Education; the sometime Nottingham novelist Shanti Sekaran; Mahendra Solanki (quiet at the moment but his Shadows of My Making is well remembered) and BK Mahal, though she too is currently quiet. More would be welcome.

Ross Bradshaw runs Five Leaves Publications, the region’s “biggest small press” and jointly organises Lowdham Book Festival. For ten years he was Nottinghamshire’s Literature Development Officer, and, earlier, spent seventeen years working in a radical independent bookshop - http://fiveleavespublications.blogspot.com

As the new year unfolds before us, Ross Bradshaw shares his own personal top ten books from the year before.

• Deer Hunting with Jesus: guns, votes, debt and delusions in Redneck America by Joe Bargean (Portobello). Anyone reading this would have known the sub-prime market would collapse. See? One book could have saved the world’s economy. Read this and weep. Yup, fucked over, heavily armed, anti-union… this lot will vote Palin for President if they get the chance.
• Edward Carpenter: a life of liberty and love by Sheila Rowbotham (Verso). The big biography of the most interesting of sandal wearers, a socialist, a vegetarian, an adult education lecturer, a believer in “dress reform” and feminism who lived in an openly gay relationship near Chesterfield at a time when such things were considered impossible.
• Homage to Caledonia: Scotland and the Spanish Civil War by Daniel Gray (Luath). This is the book that told me that in my home town workers took over a knitwear factory to make clothes for Spanish people and ran it as a co-op. Didn’t learn that in school.
• Every Secret Thing: my family, my country by Gillian Slovo (Virago). A re-read here, in prep for interviewing the author at Lowdham Book Festival. The family in question were Joe Slovo, who became a cabinet member in Mandela’s government and Ruth First, assassinated by the apartheid regime.
• Who was Sophie? By Celia Robertson (Virago). Celia’s search to find out what had happened to “Sophie”, her grandmother, once a poet published by the Hogarth Press, who became a bag lady on the streets of Nottingham.
• Cello by Frances Thimann (Pewter Rose). A book of short stories by a new press in Nottingham. Delightful cover, elegiac short stories about old age.
• Writers on Islands edited by James Knox Whittett (Iron Press). An anthology by mostly well known writers about the islands around the coast of Britain and Ireland, including Kathleen Jamie, JM Synge, George MacKay Brown and many more. Lots of good short pieces.
• Cold Granite by Stuart Macbride (Harper Collins). McBride’s first tartan noire book, set in Aberdeen. Mentions many of my old haunts and it is good to know that police still feel unsafe visiting the Fersands estate where I used to live!
• The One That Got Away by Zoe Wicomb (The New Press, USA). Internet only for this one for the moment, short stories set in South Africa and Glasgow, mostly with South African characters. One story, “N2” is near perfect.
• Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire by Iain Sinclair (Hamish Hamilton, but due out in paperback in February). A rag bag, mishmash, rattle bag of Sinclair’s usual concerns featuring a cast of the missing, the eccentric, the fictional, the even more unlikely factual.

There are probably others that would have been top tenners that I’ve forgotten, loaned out, returned to libraries, misplaced, but this seems a good enough selection. It was a good reading year, despite the misery in the book trade. Five of the ten were written by women and (phew) six were from independent presses. What were you top books of the last year?

Supported by Writing East Midlands.

Ross Bradshaw runs Five Leaves Publications, the region’s “biggest small press” and jointly organises Lowdham Book Festival. For ten years he was Nottinghamshire’s Literature Development Officer, and, earlier, spent seventeen years working in a radical independent bookshop. fiveleavespublications.blogspot.com

Ross Bradshaw asks if creative writing courses give their students an advantage in becoming published.
The excellent Tindal Street Press from Birmingham is a well known publisher of fiction from Birmingham, whose modest output has a singularly strong record in being shortlisted or winning various literary prizes. They have just published Roads Ahead, short stories by 22 newish voices, some from the West Midlands, some from further afield. The book is edited by Catherine O’Flynn, one of their earlier big success stories. As the title suggests, the book is a marker for the future with most of the contributors being at a fairly early stage in their writing career.

Of the 22 writers, five mention that they have completed or are attending creative writing courses at university level. I know two of the others, both of whom used to live in the East Midlands and both of whom completed creative writing courses but did not mention doing so in their authors’ notes. It may be that some of the others have also completed such courses, but at least seven have certainly done so. Of the others, four currently teach creative writing at university level.. Thus at least half of the line up is involved in that world.

It takes a few seconds on google to find that there are many creative writing courses. Locally you can find them at Nottingham University, Nottingham Trent University, Derby University, University of Lincoln, De Montfort University, Loughborough University. Apologies if I have missed any. The number may well have increased since starting this article.

Creative writing courses may well have replaced the old style writing groups. They have, however, been subject to some criticism. Nottingham writer Jon McGregor, for example, as part of a most interesting article on making a living as a writer, comments “Some will find patronage within the great pyramid schemes of creative-writing courses…” as an alternative to his dressing up as a bear, handing out leaflets outside the pound shop in Barnsley, as a way of getting by as a struggling writer. (You can find the full article in Pen Pusher 12, orderable via www.penpushermagazine.co.uk.)

I don’t think Jon was suggesting his ursine habit was a better option. Nor here am I criticising M.A.s in Creative Writing. Some of my best friends etc. And some of the authors I have published or have signed up have done such courses and some teach them.

But I don’t think it would be a good idea if the road ahead for any small publisher had the equivalent of a bus lane for people on creative writing courses.

Supported by Writing East Midlands.

Ross Bradshaw runs Five Leaves Publications, the region’s “biggest small press” and jointly organises Lowdham Book Festival. For ten years he was Nottinghamshire’s Literature Development Officer, and, earlier, spent seventeen years working in a radical independent bookshop. fiveleavespublications.blogspot.com

You leave a country for just thirty or so years and, blimey, it changes. Here’s a few things there never used to be:

The Scottish Review of Books – a high quality quarterly newspaper given away with the Herald, in bookshops and libraries. The handful I’ve picked up led with the novelist Janice Galloway, the Canadian/Scottish diaspora writer (who happens to be my favourite short story writer) Alistair MacLeod, the new biography of Muriel Spark by the East Midlands’ writer Martin Stannard and a feature on the deserted villages of Europe. You can subscibe via www.argyllpublishing.co.uk or track down copies when you are up there.

Northwards Now – this is the one that intrigues me, a thrice yearly literary magazine from Inverness. Again free, I picked up my copy at the arts cinema in Glasgow, but you can subscribe for a fiver via www.northwordsnow.co.uk. This one has an orientation towards the north of the country, as the name suggests, so there is a bigger Gaelic content. But what interested me is that it is not have the feel of the kailyard and is quite mouthy. The current issue addresses the new round of Scottish poetry coming from Salt, admiring the look of the books but suggesting they suffer from “emporer’s new clothes” due to the absence of professinal editing.

Book Festivals – look beyond the overpriced Edinburgh Festival. How about the little one in Portobello (a town that does not even have a bookshop), Nairn, Ullapool, the biggie at Wigtown. Take it as read that Glasgow, Dundee and Aberdee also have theirs. The one I’m not overwhelmed by though is the Borders Book Festival. Overpriced, virtually nobody from the Borders, held outside of Melrose with no involvement of the local bookshop or local businesses and based on the hero worship principle. They could do better.

Bookshops – I hear great things about some of the northern shops, the bookshop/restaurant/gallery at Durness and The Ceilidh Place Bookshop in Ullapool. On my old stomping ground there is the charming and busy Masons of Melrose, Main Street Trading in St Boswells (set up by an ex-Bloomsbury worker) and, astonishingly The Forest Bookstore in the small town of Selkirk, which specialises in the build environment. All have the advantages of Scottish history and fiction for visitors (the Aberfeldy bookshop said in The Bookseller that their sales actually go down towards the Christmas period as there are less visitors) but none of the shops I have mentioned go for tartan tackiness, something so prevalent at tourist haunts. (It annoys me when crossing the border to see bagpipers – the Borders’ tradition is small pipes and no artificial highland dress.)

STANZA – Scotland’s big poetry festival, held in March (www.stanzapoetry.org). Their early programme is out already with Seamus Heaney topping the bill,but there is also a St Patrick’s Night celebration and evening of poetry from Shetland as well as Vicki Feaver, Moniza Alvi and a host over others – including readers from Cuba, Italy and Croatia. Scottish literature has always been internationalist.

Even my own town of Hawick is gettng in on the act. Its second hand bookshop, Waterspode, appears to have given up the ghost – I never, ever found it open anyway – but there is a festival weekend with Kathleen Jamie (one of my favourite Scottish poets) and Janice Galloway.

Yes, there were good things happening thirty years ago. I was introduced to the work of Edward Carpenter thirty years ago in Aberdeenshire by Noel Greig, who has just died, and there were several radical bookshops. But now (most of the developments mentioned above started withing the last few years) it really does feel that literature is centre stage throughout the whole country, in all the languages of Scotland. And I’m homesick.

Ross Bradshaw runs Five Leaves Publications, the region’s “biggest small press” and jointly organises Lowdham Book Festival. For ten years he was Nottinghamshire’s Literature Development Officer, and, earlier, spent seventeen years working in a radical independent bookshop. fiveleavespublications.blogspot.com

Ross Bradshaw, publisher of Five Leaves press, tours the sights of literary Scotland and shares his discoveries.

After a couple of hours around Arthur’s Seat (or Arthur Seaton, as my literary Nottingham-centric companion called it) we dropped down to the Scottish Parliament, sitting in its shadow. The cost overrun and the fascinating architecture of the place have been rehearsed well enough, but it is worth a guided tour by anyone visiting Edinburgh. In its first year over around a million people, mostly Scots, went round their Parliament which probably makes Edwin Morgan’s “For the Opening of the Scottish Parliament, 9 October 2004” one of the best read poems going since every tour stops in front of it.

Edwin Morgan is the current “Makar”, the Scottish equivalent of the Poet Laureate, now in his eighties, a belatedly out gay man and a terrific poet. His Scottish Parliament poem is a celebration, but also a warning to the Members of the Scottish Parliament that it should not be a “nest of fearties” and worse of all not a place where they famous Scottish phrase “it wizny me” is used. Had more British Parliamentarians assented to his line “We give your our consent to govern, don’t pocket it and ride away” they might not be in the mess they currently are.

A hundred yards from the Scottish Parliament lies the Scottish Poetry Library (www.spl.org.uk) which proudly boasts the new Edwin Morgan archive (www.edwinmorgan.spl.org.uk). You can pick up some free postcards of Morgan poems like my favourite “Strawberries” or some of his sound poems, so loved by children. Morgan’s archive is not small as he, more than many, contributed to broadsheets, fugitive material of all types, as well as his main publications.

The Scottish Poetry Library is a rare calm space just off the Royal Mile, with a modest events programme, an annual small press fair and a very good broadsheet magazine, Poetry Reader. The library is well laid out with material to borrow or to examine, and some on sale. There’s a children’s area and an area for magazines. Naturally the coverage is slanted towards Scottish poetry, in all the languages of that country. On my visit there was a special exhibition of Ivor Cutler’s poetry and graphics. The same weekend there was a seminar on war poetry, with some current serving soldier poets attending and reading their work.

Without overstating the case, it felt to me that poetry plays a stronger role in Scottish life than here. Burns is never far away. And nor is haggis. I could not believe it at first but it does appear to be true that in 1984, when the Poetry Library first opened (in previous premises) the haggis manufacturer Mcsweeney’s made a vegetarian version that was so popular it went into general manufacture. I’ve bought it and enjoyed it a few times – never knowing its literary origins.

The Scottish Poetry Library produces a neat little pamphlet giving a history of the Library, on its 25th anniversary. £3 well spent.

Later, walking down a footpath by the Water of Leith we stumbled on the Dean Gallery, a building previously quite unknown to me. For the first time ever my jaw really did drop when I went into the exhibition recreating the studios of the Scottish sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi. You have to see it. The literary interest is in the adjacant room, the Gabrielle Keillor Library where the work of the surrealist French poet Paul Éluard is on display, and is broadcast, backed by artists books and illustrated books from the Dada and Surrealist tradition. The Gallery as a whole specialises in Surrealism.

The final literary call was on the new Edinburgh Bookshop in Bruntsfield, a spin off from the children’s book in the same street. The shop had been open a few days when I called, with a small but carefully chosen stock of 3,000 books, mostly displayed face out in single copies. It will not replace my favourite Edinburgh bookshop Wordpower as my first port of call, but is another sign of the welcome return of confidence to independent bookselling.

Supported by Writing East Midlands

Ross Bradshaw runs Five Leaves Publications, the region’s “biggest small press” and jointly organises Lowdham Book Festival. For ten years he was Nottinghamshire’s Literature Development Officer, and, earlier, spent seventeen years working in a radical independent bookshop.

Small presses are often based on one individual. Is that a bad thing? Ross Bradshaw considers.

Here’s some names. Arc – Tony Ward, Iron – Peter Mortimer, Smokestack – Andy Croft, Anvil – Peter Jay, Waywiser – Philip Hoy, Shoestring – John Lucas, Menard – Tony Rudolph, Hearing Eye – John Rety, Comma – Ra Page, New Departures – Michael Horovitz, Rockingham – David Perman…

Given that this is on a literature website, even if you don’t know any of the above you can probably guess that the fist of each paring is a publisher, indeed, a small publisher. You can probably guess that each of the names is the editor. In fact all of those mentioned are founders of those presses and still run them. Six of the presses have been going for over thirty years, forty years some of them; two or three of them about half that with only Comma and Smokestack going a few years only, but both are established. All of the presses listed publish poetry. Comma, Shoestring, Menard publish other material too.

Some of the above have more than one person involved now, most have been one man bands since they started. Between them they have been responsible for publishing hundreds of books, hundreds of writers, many for the first time and some throughout their career. None of their founders has made themselves rich though all are not without influence in the world of literature, in cases way beyond their small press work. All have given strong editorial direction to their presses. There is a tradition of these sort of presses. It is a tradition that works. I’m not suggesting that this is the only way to run small presses but it is a way that works. The list could be much, much longer.

But what of the bigger poetry presses? They do have more people involved than simply their founders, but it is hard to imagine Bloodaxe without Neil Astley or Carcanet without Michael Schmid or – let’s go international – City Lights without Lawrence Ferlinghetti, or imagine that New Directions could have survived so long without James Laughlin. Let’s go backwards… Adam International Review – Miron Grindea, or into other languages… Loshn un Lebn – Avrom Stencl. But I’ve made the point

Collectives, management committees, well-funded organisations, career minded literature professionals all have their place, but you can see how much of the non-commercial literature scene relies on hard working individuals with dogged and long term commitment. No false modesty here, I can be a bit dogged at Five Leaves too.

But what happens when we have to give up the ghost, or worse, become one? There is no doubt that the The London Magazine and Stand suffered very badly when Alan Ross and Jon Silkin went to that great editorial meeting in the sky. Both lost their influence and sales. That position may be reversed (and The London Magazine is now under a new, much younger editor) but are they really the same magazines/publishing houses as they were? The alternative is simply to close, as Peterloo did recently (though thankfully its founder and editor Harry Chambers is still with us). It would have been impossible to imagine Peterloo without Harry Chambers or, say, New Beacon without John La Rose (although the New Beacon Bookshop sustains).

But if such long term projects do close, they leave room for others to come along. Having a succession plan is not necessarily a good thing. Let someone else start up their own press, with all the joy, excitement and long hours that come with being the founder. Create something in their own image without having anybody saying “It’s not like it was when XXXXX was the editor…”

One more point – and I’ll come back to small presses in a later article – where are the women? When I wrote “one man band” I used that word with care. Being a small press publisher is mostly a man’s job. There might be reasons for it. Maybe all the editors above have a little woman in the background doing the shopping and bringing up the kids, or maybe, like trainspotting, running a little press is something men are particularly attracted to. It would be dead easy to double or triple the list above of influential long standing small presses set up and run by men. But women? Lilian Mohin at Onlywomen comes to mind, there since 1974, but damn few others. Maybe a flood of emails will prove me wrong or at least argue the case.

But that might be changing. Here in Nottingham Candlestick Press and Pewter Rose, both set up recently, have women founders and editors, and the current editor of The London Magazine is a woman. I hope they will be around in thirty years and be surrounded by other presses run by women. Though somehow I doubt trainspotting will ever catch on among people of the female persuasion.

Supported by Writing East Midlands

Ross Bradshaw runs Five Leaves Publications, the region’s “biggest small press” and jointly organises Lowdham Book Festival. For ten years he was Nottinghamshire’s Literature Development Officer, and, earlier, spent seventeen years working in a radical independent bookshop.

Getting free public libraries was a struggle. So what can we do to keep them? OK, I know that the Old Etonians are about to take over the country from the other mob but if I were to start planning a socialist and green world, the first thing I’d do would be to invent libraries.

What other service offers something for free, every time? Hours of harmless fun, internet access, the opportunity to read the daily papers and, subject to the book fund and the whims of the library staff, access to all sorts of stuff you would never have thought of. And you can take most of that stuff home on the utopian promise – nearly always kept – that you’ll bring it back when you are finished. Then someone else can take home the same items for free after you. Sounds pretty green and socialist to me.

Next, I’d make transport free. But this is a literature blog, not one for trainspotters, so books it is.

Of course getting free libraries in the first place was something of a struggle. The workers had to set up their own union and “penny libraries” while the upper classes had their private libraries, the middle classes their commercial circulating libraries, and the concerned middle classes set up improving libraries for the workers. In many towns there was great resistance to free libraries – on the rates! – but the battle was won.

OK, libraries are not perfect. They don’t stock the right books, they have been given too many tasks to do by their local authorities, the pay is poor, many of the buildings are past their sell by date and in the wrong place. But there’s not a lot on telly either and 97% of the population have one.

But if – humour me – the principle of libraries is socialist and green, why do they appear so conservative?

Back in 1972 John Noyce set up “Librarians for Social Change” from his home in Brighton. It carried on until 1986. There is a small movement called Information for Social Change, but the front line of radical librarianship in the English language is of course in America. Mind you, with the Patriot Act waiting to be used to find out if people read anything other than Harry Potter and some rural library boards wanting to burn Harry Potter you’d be surprised if American librarians were not at the forefront of pressing for social change or at least defending civil liberties.

This blog was prompted by the arrival of the catalogue from Litwin Books/Library Juice Press from the USA. Among the books on offer are “So you want to be a librarian”, “Questioning library neutrality: essays from Progressive Librarian”, “Out Behind the Desk: workplace issues for LGBTQ Librarians” (forthcoming) – and “Greening Libraries.” See www.litwinbooks.com and www.libraryjuicepress.com.

I was also reminded of the socialist nature of libraries on re-reading Bernard Kops’ now much anthologised poem “Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East”.

I emerged out of childhood with nowhere to hide

when a door called my name

and pulled me inside.

And being so hungry I fell on the feast.

Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East.

…

And Rosenberg also came to get out of the cold

to write poems of fire, but he never grew old.

And here I met Chekhov, Tolstoy, Meyerhold.

I entered their words, their dark visions of gold.

…

And Lorca and Shelley said “Come to the feast”

Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East.

(Sadly, the library where Isaac Rosenberg wrote his poems, Mark Gerlter and David Bomberg borrowed art books, Jacob Bronowski (The Ascent of Man) learned English and Arnold Wesker wept over Wind in the Willows is no more, though it has a half life as part of Whitechapel Art Gallery, and a quarter life as the absurdly named Idea Store.)

If you would like to support your local library, use it. Write to your council about the good bits and the bad bits. But if you want to keep in touch with library campaigns the most lively at the moment seems to be the “Campaign for the Book” which was set up by the popular children’s writer Alan Gibbons. You can find details about the campaign on his website, www.alangibbons.net and sign up to receive campaign mailings.

Supported by Writing East Midlands

Ross Bradshaw runs Five Leaves Publications, the region’s “biggest small press” and jointly organises Lowdham Book Festival. For ten years he was Nottinghamshire’s Literature Development Officer, and, earlier, spent seventeen years working in a radical independent bookshop.

Keith Leonard, best known as a founder of the Mushroom Bookshop in Nottingham has sadly passed away. Ross Bradshaw remembers his contribution to the book life of Nottingham and beyond.

Keith Leonard will not be known to most readers of this website, but at one time he had a major influence on reading patterns in Nottingham. With Chris Cook, his then partner, he was one of the founder members of Mushroom Bookshop in Nottingham. Keith and Chris started the shop in 1972 in shabby premises in Arkwright Street, moving to low rent premises on Heathcote Street (sadly low rent no longer). He left following a stroke in 1998 and was never able to work again, being in poor health the rest of his life. He died after a short illness in the early morning of 7th August in hospital.

Keith had a degree in Mathematics from Cambridge, which was of little value in bookselling, save for giving him the ability to add up vat returns in his head and – in pre-computer days – to memorise ten digit ISBN ordering codes for books he sold regularly. The shop came out of the libertarian milieu of the time, the “Mushroom” of the title being drawn from Lewis Carroll’s Alice. It was a hippy, anarchic and anarchist shop, which gradually moved closer to mainstream and for a long period became a real alternative to the book chains, while holding on to at least some of its early politics and style. The cookery section, for example, was always vegetarian and the shop was a major supporter of the peace movement.

Keith’s particular strong points as a bookseller were in science fiction, poetry and American imports. Mushroom was the main regional outlet for poetry from New Directions, City Lights, little presses. Keith took a special interest in American imports – then a rarity in Britain outside of Compendium in London, introducing people to Marge Piercy, Wendell Berry, Tillie Olsen, Maya Angelou, Gary Snyder and others long before they were published in the UK, or even heard of. He also took great pleasure in those pre-internet days in importing cheap American editions of books then only available here in expensive hardbacks. He took equal pleasure in outwitting the “secret state”, being one of the first people to organise importing of Spycatcher to the UK from various countries overseas.

Mushroom Bookshop grew to be a very successful independent, before shrinking again in more difficult times, closing in 2000. Keith was probably at his best in the early days of the shop, and the later periods of growth when there was a hunger for new types of literature, often from America, often of ecological or feminist orientation. Together with Peace News, then in Nottingham, the bookshop was one of the main reasons I moved to the City in 1978, working at the shop until 1995. Keith was not always the easiest person to work with (who is?) but he was a bookseller through and through.

Old hippies who have a yellowing copy of “Alternative England and Wales” (1975) will find a picture of Keith Leonard on the back cover. In a collage of mostly hirsute men, Keith stands out as the most hirsute of all.

He leaves behind a much loved daughter, Anna.

I was excited to come across a new festival in an area I love (I won‘t give you its name). All the big names were there. No small names, or even medium names. And there was nobody from that area reading. It was a celeb fest. Local distinctiveness? It could have been anywhere with only the rural backdrop and the sponsors’ package changing. And it was £12 to attend each hour long event. Go to three events, eat, drink, travel. It adds up.

One criticism of book festivals is that – big names notwithstanding – they rarely include the books that lots of people read, for example on transport, on sport. Over at Lowdham we try to have a wide canvas. We do have celebs (but not the ones whose books you find in huge piles in chain bookshops) but within a balanced programme where there is something for everyone; events on transport; cricket, politics, fiction, poetry, travel and biography. And the last day is always free – with a big emphasis on East Midlands’ writers.

Lowdham will never be in the big league, but about 6,000 people came to the 54 events and the schools’ programme. Regional writers included Karen Maitland (Lincs) , Stephen Booth (Notts) , Dan Tunstall (Leicester), Matthew Beresford (Derbyshire). The new press Pewter Rose had an outing, with a good house for its two short story collections by Nottinghamshire writers. Not that we are parochial; one of our writers came by Eurostar and another flew in from Canada.

With this year being the tenth, we wanted to try that bit harder. The Festival ran for longer, and we had forays into Calverton, Nottingham and Caythorpe. Not as dramatic as the Festival trip to Dublin a few years back, but still. Best bits? For some, the rap guide to Darwin, for a participatory talk on pantomime, and for others still, Jackie Kay at her effervescent best. For me it was two autobiographical moments. The novelist Gillian Slovo telling us what Nelson Mandela said to her just after her father, Joe Slovo (Minister of Housing in the Mandela government) died. Mandela talked about how hard it was for the families of leaders like himself and Slovo who had devoted their lives to the cause, damaging their ability to be a good parent. The other was Nell Farrell’s description of being thirteen in Eastwood, bored, alienated ,and finding – among her mother’s crap records – Roberta Flack‘s “Just Like a Woman”. Our techie had the song well up, filling the hall, while we sat watching the author, knowing that had been a life changing moment for her. Time seemed to stand still.

It’s exhausting though. By mid-afternoon on the last day I was beginning to wilt. Tidying the cups, crumbs and plates off the café tables I wondered if Peter Florence at Hay does that. “I won the Booker Prize once you know,” I mumbled to a table of literary types, wiping the tables in front of them. “’Course you did, dear,” said one of the group, patting my arm sympathetically.

And then it was over. Apart from the last book launch that seemed to have developed a life of its own. Apart from stacking trestle tables, packing boxes, the marquees, the report to write, the thank you letters, the actual to compare to the estimate, the photos to send to the artists, the trip back to take down the forgotten Festival banners. The audience response forms. The debrief and the tentative plans for the year ahead. Two or three days after the Festival my colleague Jane Streeter and I realised that, pretty shortly, we’ll have to do it again.

Hardest point – the morning I was supposed to be booking my holiday but someone from the WI said we could not get into her hall to set up until the yoga finished, but everyone was somewhere else. Trivial, resolvable, but the holiday never got booked. No, I fib, the hardest point was deciding we were not happy with the original programme and we had to put the printing back a week, then another weekend, and in that weekend we secured five acts we wanted. We lost ten days publicity time but had a line up we wanted.

Taking the Festival home… Book festivals are nothing without books. Here’s what I picked up: The Owl Killers, medieval thriller by Karen Maitland; Chaplin’s Girl, biography by Miranda Seymour; Stephen Booth’s latest; Holding Stones, short stories by Roberta Dewa; Silas Marner by some bloke called George Eliot; biographies of Edward Carpenter and DH Lawrence.

Supported by Writing East Midlands

Ross Bradshaw runs Five Leaves Publications, the region’s “biggest small press” and jointly organises Lowdham Book Festival. For ten years he was Nottinghamshire’s Literature Development Officer, and, earlier, spent seventeen years working in a radical independent bookshop.

This is the second article about class in Nottingham novels. But before I go there I need to go back to when I turned up in this City.

All I knew of Nottinghamshire writing before I came here was reading the dirty bits in DH Lawrence, which had no impact on me, when I was an immature teenager. Thankfully I was a bit more mature when I arrived in Nottingham in 1978 to live in the building where the magazine Peace News was then produced. Over the road was a large semi-permanent graffito saying “Socialism will come, riding on a bicycle”. My kind of town.

Another graffito, elsewhere, was also attractive in its own way – big letters on the Forest “mmm… marijuana”. Surprisingly that was either a hang over or a reprise of the same graffito mentioned in Ray Gosling’s Personal Copy: a memoir of the Sixties: the first book that gave me a sense of place in Nottingham. Peace News sat on the fringe of St Anns, where Gosling had lived and campaigned against the destruction of the suburb made famous by Ken Coates and Bill Silburn’s Poverty: the Forgotten Englishman (still available from Spokesman Books). But rereading Gosling now it is his cameos of the City that strike me. Saturday afternoons at the Kardomah looking out over the City “’Just waiting for a friend,’ you’d say to the nippie.” Sundays down the Market Square, the Sally Bash at one end and the Communist John Peck on his stand at the other. Gosling describes how Arnold Wesker’s Centre 42, a national touring project to bring culture to the trade unions, bit the dust in Nottingham with local promoters putting on competing events at the same time. There are lots of literary nuggets, Colin MacInnes, Philip Callow… and a visiting Adrian Henri, delighted to see a bus going to – or possibly called – Arnold.

But the decade I’d missed, the 60s, was a decade of change for working class people. Alan Fletcher in his three self-published novels of Mod life described himself and his colleagues as the first generation of working class youth which had money in its pockets. Wanting to spend it on looking good. To get away from the dreariness of the demob suit and the flat cap.

Michael Standen, in Start Somewhere (soon to be republished by Shoestring Press) catches the moment when the previously sharp divisions in class are starting to fall apart. His novel describes a teenage romance. Mr Griffin – a Grocer – warns his son: “You be careful. Their station isn’t ours. They have a different road of going on. Her father’s someone in the Town Hall; I’ve seen his name in the Post…. If you think I’m complaining because you’re mixing with a good class of person, I’m not. Miss Cooper’s got real breeding… So don’t start treating her like the girls round here.”

Next thing, people will not be standing up when the Queen comes on at the cinema…

In the last article I mentioned women’s voices. From the working class of that period, in Nottinghamshire, there aren’t any that have come my way. That is not to say there are no books. The publisher Persephone has been busy rescuing Dorothy Whipple. Worth reading, but her books are those of the well off, the people who had servants. What the servants had to say is not recorded.

A more dated writer yet is Rose Fyleman. I’ll summarise one of her stories. A group of children (think Famous Five) come across a caravan, nearby was a baby in its cot, nobody else in sight. The obvious solution was that the baby had been stolen by gypsies, “because they do, you know”, such an assumption being confirmed by the baby being blue eyed and blond. So, some of the children rescue the baby while others head off to the road to stop any car with “decent looking people” to get the police. Of course the baby turns out not to be a stolen baby at all, but the nurse of a nice respectable couple, holidaying in their caravan, had left it out in the open (then to be stolen by hideous racist middle-class white children) while she went spooning with the boy in the farm next door.

A restorative read after that is Carol Lake – not Nottingham, but Derby. Lake has been overlooked of late, which is a shame for she won the Guardian fiction award with Rosehill (a penny from Amazon), set in Derby. But her Switchboard Operators is still available from Bloomsbury, which, with gentle humour describes that now vanished but once important job from a women’s point of view.

Supported by Writing East Midlands

Ross Bradshaw runs Five Leaves Publications, the region’s “biggest small press” and jointly organises Lowdham Book Festival. For ten years he was Nottinghamshire’s Literature Development Officer, and, earlier, spent seventeen years working in a radical independent bookshop.

Class is that big thing we don’t talk about in relation to fiction. Mostly we don’t talk about it at all.

Anyone who’d read Deer Hunting with Jesus by Joe Bargeant (Portobello) will have known that the economy would collapse soon. His book about blue collar America, concentrating on one town, must have been written in 2006 and it was clear from that book alone the extent to which sub-prime mortgages had been sold to economically insecure workers already carrying debt. See? For want of reading a book capitalism has gone belly-up.

But Bargeant’s impression of those horny handed sons and daughters of (soon to lose their) toil gives the impression of a hopeless bunch, wrapped up in the flag, the church and sleepwalking to their doom, each carrying a loaded weapon. But that’s America for you.

What about over here? What about… what about Nottinghamshire?

At the start of DH Lawrence’s The Rainbow, he describes the pastoral scene of men working the fields, in the shadow of the church-tower, working good land in the way they had for generations. The men were stolid – “inert” writes Lawrence – the women of the farms being more the go-getters. Creeping in were the railways, the mines, ugly industries for ugly people. People whose children the girl school teacher Ursula would beat to show them their place on her way out of her class – and ironically towards feminism, socialism, lesbianism, and education.

It is generally assumed that when Arthur Seaton opens Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by falling drunk down stairs this was the start of the regional working class novel. Seaton was different. Someone recently reminded me of the opening scene of the Karel Reisz film where Seaton swaggers, runs for a bus. This was his city. Nobody could hold him back, not the bosses, not the unions and not the women. He was in control.

There is progenitor. Penny Lace by Hilda Lewis, published in 1946, which has the Mr Penny of the title swaggering. Nothing could hold him back, not the bosses, not the unions and not the women. And he took control by learning his trade – the trade of lace – and opening a mill in Long Eaton, out of reach of the lace trade unions so he could undercut the Nottingham firms and put his own former master out of business. I’ve often wondered if Sillitoe had read his book.

But it is coal that runs through the Nottingham working class novel. Leslie Williamson, from Lawrence’s Eastwood, in Jobey gave the rougher side of miners’ lives – describing two miners solving their disagreement by kicking each other’s shins with their pit boots on until one fell. On the other hand Stanley Middleton, in his best book Harris’s Requiem (Trent Editions) describing the packed-out concert of the Blidworth Band “The band all wore their military caps; we’ve paid for ‘em, you shall see ‘em. … There was none of that demanding concert-hall cough, no last minute titter. The music was starting and there was a money’s worth to be got.” The Band played a concert of Beethoven, “Findlandia” and “finally a mighty tone poem, specially composed with solos galore”.

Mining. It is hard not to be moved by Lawrence’s The Collier’s Wife, a poem about a pit accident. Or the opening scene of the children’s book The Secret World of Polly Flint by Helen Cresswell (I was pleased to reprint that one) which starts with Polly’s father being brought up injured from the pit. Or the modern writer Deborah Tyler-Bennett describing the four lines devoted to her great grandfather in the local paper, killed in a mining accident on Valentine’s Day, 1914, while “Fifty lines on how King George may visit/the Duke of Portland and attend the hunt/and thirty on a bride-to-be named Blisset/whose name on marriage will be Lady Blunt.”

Tony Hill brings us almost up to date with his autobiographical novel, If the Kids are United (currently available from 1p on Amazon), writing about Jacksdale. The title comes from the Sham 69 song, but you knew that. His book is a roughly affectionate story of that former mining town, then in terminal decline thanks to Thatcherism.

Next blog I’ll move on from mining, and see what the women were saying. But with the anniversary of the Great Strike mining is in the air. I remember going to an NUM rally at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh, early seventies. Hearing the mining leaders Lawrence Daly quoting Shelley (Ye are many, they are few…) and Mick McGahey replying with Shakespeare (The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings) did more to tell me of the power of the literature than six years of secondary school.

Supported by Writing East Midlands

Ross Bradshaw runs Five Leaves Publications (www.fiveleaves.co.uk)