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Origins of The Community
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JOE HAKIM photo by Graham Oxby
Inspiration
It’s a slippery bleeder, inspiration, innit?
For most of my life, I’ve held onto the belief that the source of a writer’s inspiration, and their methods in general, should be held onto tightly and kept from view like the secret to a really stunning magic trick. And if I’m honest, deep down, my belief has been reinforced by a fear that revealing anything about my personal little writing rituals would somehow rob them of their power.
Like a lot of writers, one of my main sources of income comes from teaching creative writing. I work with schools, community centres and charities, and I particularly enjoy working with people who think that creative writing ‘isn’t for them,’ or that their background, education, or social class somehow excludes them from writing and the arts in general.
Most people, when faced with the prospect of sitting down and writing something, immediately throw up barriers. And the earliest set of questions I get when start working with a new group of writers also happen to be the most difficult to answer: ‘How do you make a start? How do you find inspiration?’
In classic stage-magician style, I address these questions by avoiding them. Instead, I tell them to cast aside fears about spelling, punctuation and grammar: it doesn’t matter, we can go back and fix them later. Then I ask them to do simple writing exercises based around memory, association and sensory input; lists in the most part. And most, if not all, find that writing for the sake of writing – with no expectation or anticipation of how it’s going to turn out – makes those precious bubbles of inspiration float to the surface, ready to be popped.
Because distraction is not only one of the most powerful tools in a stage-magician’s repertoire, it’s also an essential part of writing as well, not only for the readers, but for the writers themselves.
And that’s how I’ve managed to write a feature about inspiration without saying anything about the inspiration behind The Community, my new sci-fi/horror novel set on the streets on Hull, published by Wild Pressed Books September 2019.
Because I’d much rather you see the trick first, and maybe, if you catch me backstage after the show, I’ll explain how I did it.
Here’s an excerpt from The Community…
It’s a slippery bleeder, inspiration, innit?
For most of my life, I’ve held onto the belief that the source of a writer’s inspiration, and their methods in general, should be held onto tightly and kept from view like the secret to a really stunning magic trick. And if I’m honest, deep down, my belief has been reinforced by a fear that revealing anything about my personal little writing rituals would somehow rob them of their power.
Like a lot of writers, one of my main sources of income comes from teaching creative writing. I work with schools, community centres and charities, and I particularly enjoy working with people who think that creative writing ‘isn’t for them,’ or that their background, education, or social class somehow excludes them from writing and the arts in general.
Most people, when faced with the prospect of sitting down and writing something, immediately throw up barriers. And the earliest set of questions I get when start working with a new group of writers also happen to be the most difficult to answer: ‘How do you make a start? How do you find inspiration?’
In classic stage-magician style, I address these questions by avoiding them. Instead, I tell them to cast aside fears about spelling, punctuation and grammar: it doesn’t matter, we can go back and fix them later. Then I ask them to do simple writing exercises based around memory, association and sensory input; lists in the most part. And most, if not all, find that writing for the sake of writing – with no expectation or anticipation of how it’s going to turn out – makes those precious bubbles of inspiration float to the surface, ready to be popped.
Because distraction is not only one of the most powerful tools in a stage-magician’s repertoire, it’s also an essential part of writing as well, not only for the readers, but for the writers themselves.
And that’s how I’ve managed to write a feature about inspiration without saying anything about the inspiration behind The Community, my new sci-fi/horror novel set on the streets on Hull, published by Wild Pressed Books September 2019.
Because I’d much rather you see the trick first, and maybe, if you catch me backstage after the show, I’ll explain how I did it.
Here’s an excerpt from The Community…
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Steve
The first time I saw a UFO was a Thursday – PE day – and for years after, I often wondered if it was something I dreamt, because no one acknowledged the event after it happened. We were on the field and it was my turn to use the javelin. Wilson’s ingenious javelin activities involved putting a plastic marker on the ground and reeling off his usual borderline-racist spiel about people in Africa using spears to hunt food. ‘That’s a rabbit,’ he said, pointing towards the small, red, plastic dome. ‘You miss it and your tribe doesn’t eat tonight.’ ‘But wun’t a rabbit move around, Sir?’ ‘It’s a fucking rabbit, just get on with it. Look at your arms, son – they’re like rubber-bands with knots at the end, you should be able to sling it to the other side of the field.’ Wilson had this way of picking out the things you were most self-conscious about, and then broadcasting it at the top of his voice so everyone else could take the piss as well. He walked away, leaving me standing there with the javelin. I prepared to sling it at the crap plastic non-rabbit while Pete Ashworth attempted to light half a fag he’d pulled out. I noticed the sound first. But… it wasn’t really a sound as such. More like some sort of low-frequency buzz. You could feel it in your ear, like you sometimes get when you’re around electronics. Intense, disorientating. ‘What the fuck is that noise?’ I said. The sky quickly lost colour, like someone turning the contrast down on a telly. And then the ball of vivid blue light appeared. It was high up, distant. At first, I thought it was the beginning of a storm but there was no clap of thunder or flash of lightning. The blue ball hung suspended in the air for a moment before slowly falling. ‘Are you all seeing this?’ Everyone stopped what they were doing. We all turned to look at the blue light. I felt this chill run through me, this judder that made my entire body rattle. Wilson came running over. ‘What’s that, Sir?’ I asked, pointing at the sky. ‘Ashworth, gimme that fucking fag, now!’ he barked. ‘Sorry, Sir,’ Pete handed it over. Wilson shook his head, took the fag and stalked over to the back of the science block. He didn’t seem the slightest bit interested. It was like he couldn’t see the light, it didn’t register with him. ‘I think it might be some sort of flare,’ Gaz said. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I glanced at the others to see if they looked as scared as I felt. Pete stared up at the sky, shielding his eyes with his hand. Gaz slowly shook his head. We all stood there, gobsmacked. The light continued to descend before stopping, suspended in the air. It was fucking creepy – you just don’t normally see this sort of shit, especially not before lunch-break. It felt like the time my shit of brother made me watch A Nightmare on Elm Street just before bedtime. Everything stopped, like someone had just hit the pause-button on a video. The more I stared at the light, the more I thought I could make out some sort of shape behind it. And then it split into three parts. Three smaller balls of light rapidly changing colour, flashing. |
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Childhood, Wyndham, And All That
I attended a very small primary school in Hull, a fantastically ornate pre-war building that somehow managed to avoid being destroyed in the blitz. It was the same school my Gran and Mam attended, St George’s, just on the corner on the street where I lived.
Because it was such a small school, they had to put a portacabin in the playground so they had enough class-space for the pupils.
When I was about 8 or 9 years old, and ensconced in said portacabin, our teacher was taken ill, and so a supply teacher had to fill in. He was a lot younger than our regular teacher, hadn’t yet succumbed to the rigours of routine and results, and was clearly desperate to make a good first impression. His bid to establish instant rapport was to get us to play Blindman’s Buff, but a group version, where a team of blindfolded kids tried to find the voice.
After we finished the game, he said: ‘Now imagine if that happened to nearly everyone, everywhere, overnight,’ and he read the opening sequence of John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids. My young mind truly blown, on my next trip to the library with Grandma Topsy, I immediately sought out the book so I could find out what happened next. It was the first ‘adult’ book that I had engaged with, and it left a big impression.
Brain Aldiss once famously described Wyndham as ‘the master of the middle-class catastrophe’ focusing on ‘cosy disasters’, and looking back on his work now, it’s impossible to not wince slightly at the quaint tweeness of his writing. But Wyndham did something that forever changed my view on not only science-fiction but writing in general: he put it in my backyard. Up until that point, for me, science-fiction was something that happened in outer space, in galaxies far, far away. And if the story wasn’t set in space, it was usually set in America.
With The Community, I wanted to take a classic sci-fi plot, the alien invasion, and firmly root it in Hull. I wanted to populate it with characters I know, with situations that I find familiar. And discovering Wyndham’s work at an impressionable young age facilitated the thought process that led to the creation of not only The Community, but a lot of my work.
It’s to my eternal shame that I can’t remember the name of that supply teacher. He was only with us for a couple of days, I couldn’t have possibly comprehended how that encounter would go on to reverberate throughout my life. But I’d like to thank him, where ever he is, along with John Wyndham, for opening a little door in my head, one that has never swung shut since.
Let’s finish with another excerpt from The Community…
I attended a very small primary school in Hull, a fantastically ornate pre-war building that somehow managed to avoid being destroyed in the blitz. It was the same school my Gran and Mam attended, St George’s, just on the corner on the street where I lived.
Because it was such a small school, they had to put a portacabin in the playground so they had enough class-space for the pupils.
When I was about 8 or 9 years old, and ensconced in said portacabin, our teacher was taken ill, and so a supply teacher had to fill in. He was a lot younger than our regular teacher, hadn’t yet succumbed to the rigours of routine and results, and was clearly desperate to make a good first impression. His bid to establish instant rapport was to get us to play Blindman’s Buff, but a group version, where a team of blindfolded kids tried to find the voice.
After we finished the game, he said: ‘Now imagine if that happened to nearly everyone, everywhere, overnight,’ and he read the opening sequence of John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids. My young mind truly blown, on my next trip to the library with Grandma Topsy, I immediately sought out the book so I could find out what happened next. It was the first ‘adult’ book that I had engaged with, and it left a big impression.
Brain Aldiss once famously described Wyndham as ‘the master of the middle-class catastrophe’ focusing on ‘cosy disasters’, and looking back on his work now, it’s impossible to not wince slightly at the quaint tweeness of his writing. But Wyndham did something that forever changed my view on not only science-fiction but writing in general: he put it in my backyard. Up until that point, for me, science-fiction was something that happened in outer space, in galaxies far, far away. And if the story wasn’t set in space, it was usually set in America.
With The Community, I wanted to take a classic sci-fi plot, the alien invasion, and firmly root it in Hull. I wanted to populate it with characters I know, with situations that I find familiar. And discovering Wyndham’s work at an impressionable young age facilitated the thought process that led to the creation of not only The Community, but a lot of my work.
It’s to my eternal shame that I can’t remember the name of that supply teacher. He was only with us for a couple of days, I couldn’t have possibly comprehended how that encounter would go on to reverberate throughout my life. But I’d like to thank him, where ever he is, along with John Wyndham, for opening a little door in my head, one that has never swung shut since.
Let’s finish with another excerpt from The Community…
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Gemma
I butter some slices of bread, and we eat off our knees on the sofa. Laura watches the kid’s channel for a while, and then we put Emmerdale on. Although it’s still early, I’m worrying about Lee. I send him a text. – PLS LET ME NO U R OK HUN X. I can feel Laura beginning to slump, so I go and run a bath for her before she’s too tired to bother. I run it how she likes it: lukewarm with plenty of bubbles. After she slides in, I take the picture that she made at the after-school club and use a magnet to fasten it to the fridge. I tilt my head slightly so my face lines up with Barry’s. He’s trapped in the bedroom as the house begins to fill with water. Where am I? Where’s Lee? Where’s Laura? I imagine we’re probably just off to the side somewhere, out of the frame of the picture. Perhaps our crayon faces are scribbled into a scream of horror. Or maybe we’re just holding hands, and smiling… Catching myself drifting, I shake my head, go upstairs to check on Laura. She’s laid out in the bath, her head poking out from the water, a cleft of bubbles under her chin. She looks like a mermaid. ‘Are you alright, darling?’ I say, perching myself on the toilet. ‘How was school?’ Her hands break the surface, her arms swishing about like eels. ‘It was good. We did reading and comprehension in the morning, which I like, and then we did RE in the afternoon.’ ‘Really? RE at primary school… what was you learning about?’ ‘Sikhism.’ ‘Are they like Muslims?’ ‘No,’ she says, and she giggles. I feel like an idiot. ‘What? What did I say?’ ‘Sikhs aren’t anything like Muslims, Mam. They’re like, totally different,’ she says, and then she places her hands either side of her head and uses her fingers and thumbs to block her ears and nostrils, takes a deep breath, and quickly submerges her head. She stays under for a couple of seconds and then sits up, exhales in a gasp. She rubs her face, runs her hands over her head and through her hair. ‘I mean, they both worship Allah and that, don’t they?’ I try again. ‘Actually, Sikhs believe in something totally different,’ she says. ‘They follow the teachings of Guru Nanak. And they don’t worship Allah. They believe in the constant.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘They don’t really know. They think you can’t really know. Like god is something so big and weird that you can’t understand it. But it’s there.’ ‘Right. You learn something new every day.’ ‘You do with me around,’ she says. ‘I’m going to get out now.’ ‘Okay,’ I say. I go and fetch her PJs while she gets dried off. |
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Unlooked for Places
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'Unlooked for Places’ takes its name from Liz Berry’s collection, Black Country, specifically a poem titled Trucker’s Mate. In this poem, and many within the collection, Berry investigates experiences and identities in the region with this lens of mystery and in-betweenness, often showcasing a sort of mucky, sexual, beastial aspect to the Black Country.
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One of the significant markers of the Black Country environment is found in spaces that are in-between. Spaces where urban and rural mix, where industrial decay and the weeds of semi-rural space tangle for territory. There is a sense of pride and nostalgia for the area’s industrial heritage and working class ethics, as well as a sense of despair towards the ruins, waste grounds and new enterprises that now replace it. We’re not quite north and not quite south. We’re not quite the same as brummies. We’re not quite city and not quite countryside. We can’t even decide where the Black Country begins and ends. I think cultures stemming from this sort of unmappable, in-betweenness, imbibe a sense of the borderless, the ghostly, the uncanny.
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Much work has been done in the field of environmental psychology in terms of how the formation of identity is linked to sense of place. It is, in some ways, a Freudian model, without the focus on the bodily. Their argument suggests that one’s identity is formed, in part, through a series of drives and acts that either attach or distance the subject from their environment – essentially creating a sense of place. They argue that:
people use place identifications in order to distinguish themselves from others. In this sense place functions in a similar way to a social category and therefore place identifications can be thought of as comparable to social identifications.
The Environmental Psychologists suggest that our sense of place, be it attachment or detachment, is based around a system of symbols that organise the cultural identity and demographic of place; what Harold Proshansky called Place-Identity. Notions of self are inextricably connected to our sense of community and place, which in turn, is built up from a series of attaching and distancing acts that the subject plays with alongside history, heritage, landscape, family etc. As such, the perceptions we have of ourselves are harnessed by our relationships with our place, space, community - and all their multiple contradictions.
people use place identifications in order to distinguish themselves from others. In this sense place functions in a similar way to a social category and therefore place identifications can be thought of as comparable to social identifications.
The Environmental Psychologists suggest that our sense of place, be it attachment or detachment, is based around a system of symbols that organise the cultural identity and demographic of place; what Harold Proshansky called Place-Identity. Notions of self are inextricably connected to our sense of community and place, which in turn, is built up from a series of attaching and distancing acts that the subject plays with alongside history, heritage, landscape, family etc. As such, the perceptions we have of ourselves are harnessed by our relationships with our place, space, community - and all their multiple contradictions.
What then, if yo’m from the Black Country - where we don’t really have a map of where it starts and ends, where our industrial heritage is quite far removed from our modern life, where strange patches of rural space cosy up to rusted forges, where Merry Hill Shopping Centre, built on the remains of Roundoak Steelworks, shares the same patch of land as Lodge Hill Estate and Saltwells Nature Reserve. What does this do to a sense of self and a sense of place then? Because we have this constant reminder of what Black Country means, but also no concrete idea of where it is or what it might be in the future, we’re subject more and more to these feelings of borderlessness.
An interesting way to play with this is through psychogeography. Guy Debord defined psychogeography as, “The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotional behaviour of individuals.” It focusses on Urban Wandering, “the imaginative reworking of the city, the otherworldly sense of spirit of place, the unexpected insights and juxtapositions created by aimless drifting, the new ways of experiencing familiar surroundings”.
So, the psychogeographer no longer walks to work and says this is the library - a place for books, this is the lecture hall - a place for teaching. The psychogeographer drifts and allows a re-imagining of space and the structures of power that are at play within those spaces.
In his Pocket Essentials to Psychogeography, Merlin Coverley argues, “The city must be rebuilt upon new principles that replace our mundane and sterile experiences”, and that the way this can be done is through this Urban Wandering, essentially becoming, one who “remakes the city in accordance with his own imagination […] that seeks to overthrow the established order of the day”. We could see this as taking a pick and mix approach to looking into one’s sense of place, space and history, drawing conclusions on how it affects the community and / or how it might be challenged.
So, the psychogeographer no longer walks to work and says this is the library - a place for books, this is the lecture hall - a place for teaching. The psychogeographer drifts and allows a re-imagining of space and the structures of power that are at play within those spaces.
In his Pocket Essentials to Psychogeography, Merlin Coverley argues, “The city must be rebuilt upon new principles that replace our mundane and sterile experiences”, and that the way this can be done is through this Urban Wandering, essentially becoming, one who “remakes the city in accordance with his own imagination […] that seeks to overthrow the established order of the day”. We could see this as taking a pick and mix approach to looking into one’s sense of place, space and history, drawing conclusions on how it affects the community and / or how it might be challenged.
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In terms of my own argument here, I'm suggesting several things:
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I focus on this in my upcoming Wild Pressed novella, Bella. The region becomes a symbolically charged space for my narrative - dealing with the conflict we have here between loss and progress, between community and estrangement, past and present, wild and domestic, dead and alive.