STORY AND POEM OF THE MONTH

Picks for the month of May very kindly chosen by Sean McNulty: Story: The Green and White Dress by rosaliekempthorne https://www.abctales.com/ story/rosaliekempthorne/green- and-white-dress The Green and White Dress is a wonderful piece of writing. It feels like a timeless, classic satire – the characters and the setting could exist at any time in history. It feels so real, yet plays out like images twinkling in some fantastic magic lantern...

Last night's terrorist attack

Horrible news again. I often feel that terrorists hold lefty-liberals like myself in even worse contempt than the hard right. When we say 'have what religion or non-belief you like and we don't care who owns the land provided we all have food and water and have whatever views you like provide you stick to words only' I am sure we are seen as being human toilet paper because they don't understand us. My thoughts are with the relatives of the 10...

Elena Ferrante (2015) The Story of the Lost Child, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein.

The Story of the Lost Child, Elena Ferrante’s fourth and final novel, is largely set in a working-class district of Naples. The narrator in each novel has been Elena Grecco, born the reader is told in August 1944 and this narrative takes us up to 2005 and almost the present day, when she’s an old woman in her late sixties, sitting on her balcony, looking over the Po, a view of Vesuvius and the semicircle of Naples. She is content, a writer, in...

Story and Poem of the Week and Inspiration Point

What a lot of great pieces this week - it's been very hard to choose just two! Big congratulations to Lille Dante for his poem ' my spectre hits the shopping mall of time' which makes me laugh each time I read it, and to love_writing for 'My Mother and I aren't Talking and Other Tales' - a finely drawn picture of a disordered childhood. If you haven't read them yet, please do! https://www.abctales.com/story/lille-dante/my-spectre-haunts-shopping...

Broken, BBC 1 (iPlayer) written and produced by Jimmy McGovern and directed by Ashley Pierce.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08s323v/broken-series-1-episode-1 I watched Episode 1 of Jimmy McGovern’s series Broken . It was meant to be on last Tuesday, but because of the Manchester bombing was held over for a week. I’m a fan of Jimmy McGovern. His dramas are usually about working-class people that are broken, in some way, and have to find a way forward. A sympathetic portrayal, and counterpoint to the propaganda from sources such as...

POETRY MONTHLY

From the brilliant Noo: After a trickle at the start, we had a near flood of poems for Poetry Monthly by the end! Thanks to everyone who put fingers to keyboards and wrote – there were many interesting and different takes on the theme, but three that particularly stood out for me were: Luigi Pagano’s warm, nostalgic ‘Beautiful Day in San Remo’ https://www.abctales.com/story/luigipagano/beautiful-day-sanremo London Calling’s wispy and wise ‘...

Another Time Another Place by Jessie Kesson

'The Girl in the Book', that's the title of an English Studies Course that a young relative of mine has recently completed at uni. In The Girl, the book by Meridel le Sueur that I recently blogged, the girl, the central character of the book is given no name. In Another Time, Another Place the time is World War Two and the young married woman in the tiny farming community someplace in the north of Scotland is simply 'the young woman'. The young...

Richard Holloway (2004) Looking in the Distance: The Human Search for Meaning.

Richard Holloway’s Looking in the Distance , predates, his classic autobiographical account, Leaving Alexandria of leaving the Anglican church, where he was a Bishop of Edinburgh, Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church and Gresham Professor of Divinity, which is quite a mouthful for an agnostic. This is a short volume. A working out of ideas, a companion piece to Godless Morality , which I’ve not read and not likely to read. It reminds me a bit...

Dark Arts Circus

I'm going to read one of my recent pieces at the Housemill in East London on Friday June 23rd along with fellow ABCtaler Peter Kennedy and others in the Dark Arts Circus . It should be a fun evening of dark and interesting fiction in a beautiful, atmospheric setting. I hope to see some of you there. Alex

Jago: A life underwater, BBC 4, iPlayer, produced and directed by James Reed.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08rp0ld/jago-a-life-underwater?suggid=b08rp0ld If a documentary can be poetic, a meditation on life and death and the sea, then this is it. Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea springs to mind. Rohani was different from the other kids, swimming underwater and hunting fish. He could hold his breath longer and as an adult his eardrums burst as he got to depths of twenty fathoms on mouthfuls of air. I had...

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