Goodbye 2024

My 2024 has been dominated by a series of publications and, perhaps inevitably, by a struggle to balance the productivity these have required with my own health.

Three projects I worked on reached publication this year: Writing the Murder, Lost Levenshulme and the third iteration of Ghosts at the Old Library. Each represents a different are of interest and a distinct piece of work that I’m proud of, though their journeys to completion were far from straightforward.

Writing the Murder is the third collection of essays edited by Dan Coxon and myself for Dead Ink, following Writing the Uncanny and Writing the Future (both British Fantasy Awards winners!) I’m always very proud of the writers I’m lucky enough to commission for a book or project, but the essays in Writing the Murder, which explore the mechanics of the crime fiction genre in depth, as with all the Dead Ink books Dan and I have produced, also touch on broader themes - the act of murder, the concept of justice, the nature of evil - while also bringing in personal reflections. I was really pleased 3AM published ‘It Bleeds’, the opening essay from the book by Tess Little (you can read it here, and I pray that you do). It’s a strange job, editing anthologies - in a sense I actually create very little. Instead, it’s the authors who do all the work. The humbling thing for me is when a writer sends through their finished piece and I get to read something - a section from a book! - which would not have otherwise existed. Of all the dozens of stories and essays I’ve commissioned, I really think Tess’s might be one that elicits that feeling the strongest. It’s such a strange and fascinating piece and I’m so proud to have had a hand in bringing it into the world.

Next was Lost Levenshulme. This was a seemingly small project, but it has gone on to take on an odd little life of its own. Lost Levenshulme is a zine I put together - also designing it and writing for it - which looks into the hidden histories and local lore of Levenshulme, a district in Manchester where I live. I assembled it for Levenshulme Old Library, the arts charity I run based in the local Carnegie library building, built in 1904 and closed by cuts in 2016. Despite Levenshulme being a built-up urban neighbourhood, I was drawn to the idea of creating a publication which had a faintly countryside-ish, folklore-ish quality. I researched the origins of the stone circle which was installed in my local park about 20 years ago; I republished a knock-out piece about the Levenshulme landgrabbers, a radical land ownership movement which was active in the area in the early 20th century; I commissioned a personal piece on local graffiti and ghost signs; worked with a new writer on a short story inspired by a local pet graveyard (you can hear Ella read it here); and I was incredibly pleased to finally commission a piece on Frank Tilsley.

A brief detour into Frank Tilsley. Tilsley was born and raised in Levenshulme and went on to become something of a household name. He wrote novels, screenplays and journalism, and was a frequent presence on radio and television. After his suicide in the 1950s he seems to have been rather swiftly forgotten and all his books are now out of print. I first became aware of him when I started working at Levenshulme Old Library. I got in touch with Frank’s estate to ask if he had ever written about the library and received a response from Frank’s granddaughter, Jo Tilsley, who sent me through an article Frank had written, celebrating public libraries with a particular focus on Levenshulme. The piece itself was wonderful, but what also interested me was Frank’s broader story. Jo is in possession of an enormous archive of Frank’s works which she has spent years sifting through - and has her own fascinating story of how she came to learn of her strange, illustrious lineage. The act of forgetting has always held great sway with me, and I’ve always had a particular interest in what I think of as lost literature - books and authors who were once well known but have now slipped, unseen, out of public consciousness. I haunt charity shops, market stalls and the little libraries people house in their front gardens, hoping to chance upon for some forgotten masterpiece of a paperback, once perhaps loved dearly, if only by its previous owner, the dull flame of its magic kept alight in my imagination if no-one else’s. Ever since Jo (herself a fantastic poet) first responded to me, I’ve been trying to work out what to do with the story of Frank Tilsley. We’ve discussed a podcast, a republication project, an exhibition - but, for a variety of reasons, we’ve never quite landed on anything. So it was particularly satisfying to finally feel like we’d made a start by having a piece by Jo (but also sort of by Frank) featured in Lost Levenshulme.

The odd little life that this publication had - a willfully obscure, independently published zine about hyperlocal history - was that it was successful! I initially created a print run of 50 copies, thinking we would sell maybe a dozen copies but it would reflect well on Levenshulme Old Library when fundraising for future, more normie heritage projects. But that print run sold out within an hour and a half of it being announced. A second larger print run followed and similarly sold out faster than I could stuff them into jiffy bags. A third final print run, larger still, was ordered - which I handed over to Bopcap Books, my local bookshop, giving them the responsibility of managing the sales. These too sold out, after which I declared the zine officially out of print and began work on volume II.

And finally, I once again undertook Ghosts at the Old Library.

Ghosts at the Old Library is an annual ghost stories project which I run at Levenshulme Old Library and which has now entered its third year. Each Christmas, I commission writers to create new ghost stories inspired by Levenshulme. The first time I ran this project, I asked the writers to respond to the Old Library building itself. The second year, writers were each given a different local landmark as their starting point. This year, I had an idea of using ‘households’ as the theme. ‘Household’ is a seemingly innocuous words which conceals a great deal: it refers to bricks and mortar dwellings, the families who live in them, and also units of the communities they inhabit. So I asked each of the writers I worked with to speak with a different resident about whatever they thought of as their ‘household’. The writers then created ghost stories with some of what they heard percolated through to their tales. These stories were then performed in full at Levenshulme Old Library by lantern-light across three evening events, published individually as Christmas-card sized chapbooks, and performed by their authors in a recording studio for release as podcasts and broadcast on a number of radio stations in Manchester. As well as all of this, two of the writers I commissioned were emerging writers, at the early stages of their careers and practice, who I mentored for two months, ostensibly to ensure their story was a good as it could be but also to help them develop a footing in a murky industry. Despite nurturing the series with a great deal of care and affection, I began this year’s Ghosts at the Old Library with less enthusiasm than I’ve had in the past, largely due to exhaustion. By the end, however, I was fully fired up: the stories are incredible, the performances went well, the recordings sound gorgeous, and everyone who has come into contact with the project seems to have had a good time.

Alongside these projects, I’ve been consumed by the seemingly more humdrum day-to-day work at Levenshulme Old Library. The building and organisation has demanded huge amounts of my time and energy this year, particularly as we navigate the process of the Community Asset Transfer. People who have to deal professionally with their local council will often tell you what an absurdly bureaucratic undertaking it is. And do you know what? They’re right. Trying to work with Manchester City Council is almost mind-bendingly labyrinthine, each process we go through seemingly designed specifically to wring out every droplet of patience and sanity. However, an asset transfer, which would see the community take on a long term lease of the building, holds the promise of the greater autonomy the space really needs to survive. Most people are surprised to learn that, despite managing the building successfully for almost a decade, the community still don’t actually own it or have a long-term lease in place. This is why some areas of the building still have horribly outmoded features and why certain spaces are usually too cold to use in the winter. The promise of addressing this is what keeps us going and 2025, hopefully, will be the year which sees it happen.

Reading! Some books which came out this year which I loved:

Monumenta by Lara Haworth - I’m not sure how I came across this book but I don’t think I’ve ever read the synopsis of a brand new, completely-unknown-to-me novel and then smashed the ‘preorder’ button on the hardcover edition before. The plot: Olga receives a letter telling her her home is to be requisitioned to become a monument commemorating a massacre. But what massacre? No-one is quite sure. The book is rich on the deep absurdity of memorialising history, particularly in a region riven by sectarian conflicts. It was supposed to be my holiday read but I finished it on the Eurostar before we’d even reached France.

Something Wicked by Carol Ann Lee - When i heard that Lee, one of my favourite authors, was writing a book about the Pendle witch trials of 1612, I felt a little disappointed. Lee’s background is in true crime, but she really operates in a class of her own, creating deeply serious, thoughtful, careful books on 20th century figures like Myra Hindley, Jeremy Bamber and Graham Young. I wondered what she could have to say about such a deeply historical case, one with which I was fairly familiar - indeed, one which has been raked over so many times. I was wrong: this is a bravura performance of research, uncovering aspects of the case which somehow have been previously overlooked, giving readers an almost uncanny understanding of the families involved, the allegations and the trial that led to the execution of ten people. But the real star of the show isn’t necessarily the new evidence, nor even how Lee places everything within the wider historical context of the aspects which entrenched society in the early 17th century: superstition, poverty, misogyny, religious persecution. The knock-out impact this book has lies in how it takes all of this and uses it to create such a confident and gripping piece of storytelling.

Learning How to Think by Tracy King - I loved this book. I read it not long after it came out hand after a friend recommended it and have found I’ve probably thought about it a little bit every day since. It’s a memoir of Tracy's journey from a chaotic upbringing - one which encompassed faith, poverty and grief - in a gloriously rendered 1980s Birmingham to the liberating discovery of critical thinking via Carl Sagan. Speaking in broad-brush terms, I think the lack of working class representation might be the biggest scandal in publishing. Obviously, class definitions are tricky to pin down, and the class system itself is this big, complex, ever-evolving, frequently poisonous mess, but the widely accepted estimate is that around 60% of people in the UK fall into the general category of working class. That’s the majority of the population! The fact that there is such an absence of authentic books out there that can reflect the lives of most of the people in the country is, in my opinion, a huge deal (I wholly recommend this recent piece by Sunjeev Sahota on the abject morass of class and UK publishing). Anyway, encountering Tracy’s book, which not only provides an affectionate and serious representation of working class life but also talks outright about challenging the stereotypes which exist and the toxicity around the class system in general, massively hit the spot. TL;DR my book of the year.

The Bullet by Tom Lee - Another memoir, this time one which intertwines Tom’s absolutely horrendous-sounding personal struggles with near-fatal anxiety and sundry other illness with reflections on the legacy of Britain’s mental health institutions, particularly Severalls Hospital, exploring the complexities of psychiatric care and recovery with a focus on Lee’s own parents, who both separately spent time as patients at Severalls. I found the writing in this book at times almost painfully moving in how unguarded it was about another massive national topic, one which, despite all of our messaging as a society about the importance of talking about it, we still haven’t come to terms with in all its ugliness and messiness and dominance: mental illness.

As well as all of this, there were two not-so-recent books which I also loved. I read The Mayor of Casterbridge for the first time this summer. I’d somehow got it into my head that it was a faintly minor Hardy novel and I was essentially doing the mopping up after covering the bigger beasts. Turns out it’s a page turner, one with a structural bomb going off every few chapters.

Another book I loved was The Gamekeeper by Barry Hines which I picked up after BBC4 screened his heartwarming 1980s romcom Threads. The novel follows George Purse, a former steelworker turned gamekeeper, raising pheasants which he then spends his days and nights protecting from predators and poaches in order that they may be shot during the hunts led by his aristocratic employer. The novel explores the themes of poverty and privilege, independence and subservience, with a real delicacy which I found incredibly impressive. The focus on the hard, often brutal realities of rural labour, suggests seemingly little in the way of sentimentality, but below the surface there’s a powerful communion with the British class system, but also something more profound. I underlined this sentence: “George Purse never killed anything for fun. He only killed to protect his pheasants, which were then killed by other people for fun.” This is perhaps a joint-winner alongside Learning How to Think.

Music!

Nick Cave is an artist I've found myself falling deeply in and out of love with over the years. However, when Ghosteen was released in 2019, it coincided with my dad having his second stroke, and I began making weekly trips to visit him as he gradually deteriorated, listening to the album endlessly during the long nocturnal journeys across the unlit Yorkshire Moors. I found that record’s themes of fatherhood, childhood, and grief bracing in their authenticity, but there was something in that authenticity which felt necessary. I was actually a little anxious about the emotional impact a new Nick Cave album might have on me, but Wild God, it turns out, is an album of joy and love. While musically it feels less adventurous compared to the wayward direction Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen seemed to be moving in, there’s a richness and a beauty which, while more traditionally arranged, are nonetheless frequently overwhelming. I attended Cave’s performance in Manchester during the arena tour supporting the album and, although I’m generally a little agnostic about gigs on this scale, it really was an enriching, transcendent experience like in all those broadsheet reviews you’ve seen.

I wrote about Nadine Shah’s song ‘Topless Mother’ on my end-of-the-year blog last year. The single had been released in October and Filthy Underneath, its parent album, came along in February this year. It’s a personal album that takes fragments of grief, trauma and healing and feeds them through some textures, rhythms and melodies, as well as some straight-up rock music, all of which is just interesting.

I felt Your Community Hub, the fifth album by Warrington Runcorn New Town Development takes another step in transforming the eerie, hauntology-inspired sound heard on releases from labels like Ghost Box into something which is somehow fresh, intriguing and far stranger. Like many artists, WRNTD creates music which has a spectral, nostalgic quality, but somehow the focus on community, urban development and modernity, but moreso the incredible richness of the sound - both in texture and composition - suggest a new relationship between past, present, and future.

I wish I could say I listen to contemporary Italian jazz all the time, but I discovered Nerovivo, the debut album by drummer and singer Evita Polidoro by chance on Spotify. There’s a hypnotic quality to the music, elegant, melancholy, brimming with ideas, and at times the sound is almost pock-rock.

I hesitate the include GNX by Kendrick Lamar because it only came out a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve been listening to it a lot. I found Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers a bit baggy and unfocused, but GNX is just fascinating. The blend of storytelling, lush production and generational innovation really do cement Lamar as one of our key cultural figures.

Some favourite songs: