• Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

Cinnamon Press

Small miracles from distinctive voices

  • Home
    • About
    • Submissions to Cinnamon Press
    • Staying Safe Statement
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms & Conditions
  • Books
    • Poetry
    • Fiction
    • Creative non-fiction
    • Kith Review
    • Cinnamon Subscribers
    • Featured
    • eBooks
      • Ebook downloads
    • Our imprints
      • Liquorice Fish Books
      • Down Deep Books
        • DDB Publications
      • Leaf by Leaf
        • Leaf by Leaf Books
  • Events
    • Launches
  • Publish
  • Literary Awards
    • Poetry Pamphlet Award 2023
      • Poetry pamphlets past winners
    • Literature Award 2022
  • Mentoring
    • Mentoring application
    • Cinnamon Pencil Terms & Conditions
  • Courses
  • Cinnamon Blog
  • Shop
    • Basket
    • My account

Writing process

Nov 25 2021

A winter of resistance and hope

 

What role can Athurian legend play in saving the future?

In the darkest times, where do we look for the light?

 

 

On the 18th of November a group of writers and readers gathered on Zoom to launch and celebrate two Cinnamon titles — one relaunched after 13 years in print — a novel that predicted Brexit and looked to how we use mythology in dark times — the other a new prequel.

The Standing Ground is set in a near-future world without privacy or freedom, life is unravelling for Luke, a teenager whose questions and individuality have no place in surveilled society. When a virtual encounter with a girl who claims to live beyond the all-controlling grip of E-Government, sets him on a quest not only for answers, but for escape. But is Alys real? Why are there echoes of her world in his father, Nazir Malik’s home, especially since Nazir is a celebrity artist trusted by E-Government? And what role can characters from Celtic Arthurian legend possibly play in saving the future? Most urgently, can Luke overcome the threats that surround him and find the Standing Ground?

The Roots of the Ground is the prequel toThe Standing Ground. We travel back two generations to the origins of the oppressive E-Government state that gradually infiltrates every aspect of people’s lives in the decade following Brexit and global pandemic. But as the darkness overtakes Britain and other areas of Europe, the light of resistance wakes in a community that spans the Celtic outposts of Brittany and North Wales. And in a strange child, Myrddin Emrys, who has also been known as Merlin.

The launch took the form of a conversation with Adam Craig about the issues raised in the novels, interspersed with short readings from the two books and followed by questions from those attending. If you couldn’t be with us for the launch the video is below and you are welcome to use the discount code WINTER20 which will give you 20% off everything in one basket when you buy these or other Cinnamon Press books.

 

Written by Jan Elisabeth Fortune · Categorized: Authors, Background, book launches, Writing process

Nov 22 2021

Stone memories

A boy at Stonehenge (photo: David Craig)

A childhood memory revolves around a deeply overcast sky, unhemmed by hills or rooftops, a wind against face and ears, hands resting on a rough, cool stone, the stone gritty under fingers and palm, solid and unyielding, the stone a presence, huge, weighty, lying on its side and long grass growing up around it, the wind setting the grass swaying, the stone unmoved, its surface resting against the small hand resting against it, experiencing its existence. And shortly afterwards, sitting on another fallen stone, under grey clouds, stone hard — the impression of it against thighs, calves, still here, still summonable after so many years. Those physical sensations more vivid than the balance of this memory, facing towards the camera, the man behind the camera, the standing stones behind us, the resulting Polaroid skewing perspective, objectifying stone ring, boy sitting, the fallen rock: at odds with the matrix of remembered sensations, the obvious fact the boy looked into the camera as the father looked out. And pressed the shutter.

In the early 1970s, visitors could freely move around Stonehenge. No fences, no visitor centre, no interpretation boards. Simply the stones, the plain, the weather. And one’s senses and the physical interaction with the stones, the half-dome sky.

Wayland Smithy (photo: Adam Craig)

A much more recent memory: visiting Wayland’s Smithy. A still September morning. Overcast also but raining, a steady drizzle, neither winter-chilled nor late-summer warm. We get lost searching for the site. Joke we’re being led astray by the faery. The rain patters on a pulled-up hood. It drips from hedgerow and runs between clasped hands. Walking hand-in-hand until, through the trees, the old stones appear. Set within a ring of trees, the rain slackening and fading into silence. Stones arranged into an entrance portal, the mound long gone. Crawling into the tiny burial chamber behind the portal stones. Stone walls brushing against arms, head ducked. Smell of damp earth, rich and cool; smell of stones, enclosed space. Semidarkness, body blocking dim light. Crouched, turning little by little to face out, between the portal stones. Stillness. Drip of water. Stones hard against shoulder, close to crown of head. Hand reaching to rest against speckled rock, aware of hardness, cool, uneven. All these sensations more vivid, more evocative than the photographs taken

Wayland Smithy (photo: Adam Craig)

from this vantage, looking out of the chamber, as are the physical impressions of walking around the monument, seeing it from each angle, pausing between photographs, slowly returning to niche and portal stones.

Not that it has to be ancient monuments—a house in early evening, summer sun casting this side into shade, uneven paving stones underfoot, a voice, a face seen for the first time, air still and scented by the sea only a short walk away. A meeting that led to walking hand-in-hand in search of Wayland’s Smithy.

Hannah Arendt once said story reveals the meaning inside sensory impressions. Story comes in retrospect, drawn from memories that are themselves drawn from the interactions between the incarnate, feeling-experiencing body-mind and the world in which it finds itself.

The American poet, Jake Skeets, calls this the ‘memory field’, a matrix of place, sensory experience and memory, in which the elements making up the field interact in ways that make it hard to be certain exactly who is acting on whom. From Skeet’s perspective, time is fluid within the memory field. He speaks of that too-easy-to-ignore fact that the light we see from stars is old light, radiated years or millennia ago. Our present is the star’s past, our observation set some time in the star’s future. Place, time and memory interact with a similar disregard for the notions of linear time represented by calendars, timetables and smart technology’s pestering reminders it’s time to go to sleep.

As we’ve considered before: memory is a present thing, not the past tense of literary convention. Just as sensory experience is encountered in the moment, a continuous unfolding now, so our memories return to us in the same way: a small hand resting against a fallen stone at Stonehenge; the same hand, decades older, pressing against the stones of Wayland Smithy. These are together, in the same moment of recall and, in that recall, they are now.

Stonehenge (photo: Adam Craig)

Time becomes layered in memory. Skeets has spoken of visiting the Grand Canyon, of seeing the valley, aware of the place in the moment of sensory experience and, in that same moment, aware of the age of the site, of the millennia needed to carve the gorge out of the sandstone, the passage of weather patterns and days leading up to this now. Likewise, in remembering Stonehenge and Wayland Smithy, not only are decades conjoined into a moment of recall, so the awareness of how long that fallen sarsen must have lain there impresses itself as much as the awareness that once the chamber at Wayland Smithy was enclosed, buried.

Much as the star we see this evening is a star from the past experienced in this present.

Memory is not anchored by time but by place. The writer BS Johnson once stepped into the main hall at Nottingham railway station and was struck by a welter of memories about a very close friend who had lived in Nottingham. The station was a part of those memories (he had come to the city by train to visit his friend) as much as it was the trigger for the memories to return.

The landscapes we inhabit inhabits us, in memory, in story, in the very physical sensation of our experience of them. Landscape in this sense is far from passive — the field that Skeets refers to is both the zone of interaction and the physical field of the landscape itself. There’s no duality in this. Memory and experience don’t divide past from present, external landscape from internal sensation. The notional duality of person and/or place grows less clear the deeper we delve, as does the strict line between past and present: a child who visits Stonehenge always remains linked to that place, carries the sensation of the visit in an ever-afterwards… now.

Written by Adam Craig · Categorized: Background, Writing process · Tagged: BS Johnson, deep time, embodied experience, Hannah Arendt, Jake Skeets, memory, memory field, stonehenge, time, wayland's smithy

Nov 06 2021

Stories of experience

Shadows (photo: Adam Craig)

A night of broken sleep gives way to sleeplessness. Awake. No going back. Mind on the move, in turmoil. Uncertainty, emotion. Rest-less. Before dawn: twilight heavy grey, still. Alone with anxiety, unfixed. Alone although someone nearby breathes, sleeps: distant, unknowable. Conflicts and circlings, supposings and worries. Thoughts restless, tormenting.

Too much to lie still. Must move.

It is a morning on the cusp of June, sunrise still an hour or more away, hidden beyond grey cloud. All is grey. Shadows limiting vision, unpicking road, trees, footpath, even feet and hands. In daytime: all familiar, all taken for granted, all solid and reliable. In daylight the path is unseen: its existence is assumed from memory, from the way the daytime world works. At this time, liminal, neither of night or of day, the path hardly appears to exist. To walk is to move with caution, requires more than usual trust in the world being consistent and concrete. A trust tested at each step.

The footpath runs through an avenue of trees, tree limbs unpiecing the sky. Emotions cluster, mob: doubts, self-justifications, recriminations, memories retold and recast, futures unwritten and rewritten. Semidarkness. Shadows. Vision limited, unreliable. Sounds: rustlings, scrape of footfall, a branch snapping, trees restive, a faint breeze. Air cool, darkness rendering it grainy. A medium to travel through, the accepted made conscious: another thought in the welter of thought, in the careful placing of each step, balance equivocal because it comes as much from familiarity as from the inner ear. The opportunity to move freely, take for granted and assume, filter out: the reflexive, daily ignoring of all but a very little of immediate environment.

Immediate environment is monochrome: areas of shadow, near black, impenetrable and featureless, largely formless; mid-greys emerging, forms guessed, constructed from hint, memory, a few pale grey highlights. From pausing to squint, peer.

Restlessness gives way to concentration. One step. The next. Air, against forehead, ears, lips, tongue, throat. Exhale. Listening to branch, breeze, the stillness between each footfall. Silence: standing still, breath quiet, not the puff of emotion, body under tension, muscles made to relax, self made to listen. This silence is formed of the sounds of the river, nearby, beyond the trees; of the sounds of the trees, moving; no birds, although something moves, beyond the path, in the undergrowth part-glimpsed, part-assumed. Moves. Makes no further sound.

Trees overhang the path. Path curves. Patch of sky (mid-grey, featureless, no texture, only sky, only grey… gone in a few steps). Embankment to the right (trees, tall). Slope to the left, dropping away (trees, tall on the vergeside), river only a sound. Rising of hills from the opposite bank a memory, an inference (greys, near-blacks, densities, a darkness of its own). Yet: less dark, path wider, clearer to the senses. Going on, steps less cautious. Mind freer to wander. Turmoil distant. Not forgotten but less. No longer acute. Not… present.

Present is: cool air scent and touch, first bird waking, river’s purl and lap, muscles, breath, step, stride, feet against path, path against feet, weight of boots, rustle of clothing, gradual change in light, greys paler, shape and form becoming apparent. The path gains solidity, is no longer an assumption.

Later, sitting on a bench beside the path. Less night than day but not yet day. Grey-on-grey forms; a sense of depth and differentiation. A bat circles unseen: sound of wings, the impression of movement. A bird calls into the silence, to fall silent in turn. Silence: of the body, of the path, trees, long grass hissing, the bench answering to small and unconscious movements, river ceaseless. The almost day. Sitting.

Sitting.

Sunrise (photo: Adam Craig)

Months later. This event comes to mind and with it the urge to make a story of it. A homily, maybe, about how emotions pass and are not concrete, not like the present, physical moment. A good life lesson. But what is here when the storytelling reflex is resisted? What can be gleaned from the impressions and memories of a small-hours walk?

Narrative realism — the default mode for writing in the Anglosphere — is based on a given: no psychological change, no story. Actually, ‘plot’ is a better term. ‘Plot’ is the direction of the flow of events propelling the reader from the start of a narrative piece (novel, article, documentary programme, feature film…) to its culmination. Plot implies resolution; maybe epiphany, maybe a happy ending, maybe an ending that leaves threads unresolved but nevertheless coincides with a change in the energy and flux of the narrative. Archetypally, a realist narrative will have characters who change during its course. They learn things about themselves, grow, overcome, become fuller. Implicit, even when the narrative remains open, is that life makes sense, or that sense can be made of it.

By our natures, we make stories. We live by stories. It’s how we are.

The beginning-middle-end cycle of narrative realism is ingrained in our culture but the materials such stories are cut from — the stuff of direct, bodily experience — rarely, maybe never, conform to such expectations. The circumstances that spurred this early morning walk weren’t resolved by the walk; no epiphany, only experience. The walk, from a narrative point of view, led nowhere. It simply was. Much of life simply is. Its sensations, like those of the walk, might be used a dozen different ways but they also remain: thus, just so, not the elements of a story at all. Without story, we find instead a sequence of impressions, a series of encounters with the environment in which the walk took place. And without story, the whole thing appears meaningless, an incident unworthy of being written down.

But at the time, even once emotions grew muted, the experience appeared anything other than unworthy. Is this apparent in the writing? Very probably not. Try not to narrativise, try to keep out character in the conventional (realist) sense, and what sediments out is a series of impressions, words and phrases that can only approximate the simultaneity of the lived, sensory body-mind experience. A closer approximation might come from taking a step away from the linguistic into the visual arts. Yet the experience of any moment is a confluence of body and environment, an interactive whole, complex, sometimes subtly so. Not matter the medium, to describe is to unpick and to unpick takes away the very ‘thusness’ of the experience.

What we write, what we read, the paintings we study, the movies we consume: none of them are better than approximations. The stories we base on such experiences, or the description of such experiences, are fabrications in the sense that they are neither recreations for the qualia of the moment-by-moment, nor are they any sort of direct substitute.

Manchester (photo: Adam Craig)

Our bodies experience in concert with environment and our body-minds (or, rather, body-mind-environments) can create stories to give direct, carnal experience meaning — to make a verity. We bring meaning to experience — this is who we are as incarnate beings, as beings not observing but intimately participating in our surroundings. In the world.

Narrative realism, with its ambition of ‘illuminating the human condition’, ultimately fails in its task because it confuses approximation with real experience. Realism comforts us: there are explanations, there is sense in things and events, there is a direction to life. In this way, realism is the most unrealistic literary genre, as JG Ballard once said.

That we search for meaning is not a flaw in us. The great 20th Century composer, Elisabeth Lutyens, was fond of saying that the truth should never get in the way of a good story. Lutyens, as raconteur, drew from her direct experience and her anecdotes and tales often conformed to some verity that spoke of a ‘truth’ beyond the mere facts of a day-to-day encounter. Stories can ‘lie’ and tell us verities in the same breath.

Stories drawn from other stories become a cerebral activity that’s attenuated from the world of experience. The novelist who draws most from the descriptions and events found in other novels; the poet who describes a painting only in terms of what’s visible on the canvas: neither is even approximating actual experience. To create stories in this way is to step away from the actual, moment-by-moment ‘thusness’ of being incarnate within an environment. It is to step back from the world and into fantasy. Should writers only write ‘what they know’? Hardly — that would be a different kind of handicap. The imagination feeds on the thusness of being a body-mind in the world. It’s not either-or, always both-and: a relationship and an interchange. As we need experience so we need story; as we understand the world through story, so we understand the story through experience. Verities come in many guises. As many as experience itself.

Written by Adam Craig · Categorized: Writing process · Tagged: contemplation, embodied experience, memory, nature, night walks, realism

Sep 29 2021

You can’t have a hero called Ken!

In this follow-up to ‘Always judge a cover by the book‘, The Crossword Solver author, Andrew Dutton gives us an insight into the novel’s (long) gestation and the inspiration for the book. So, get yourself a glass of what you fancy and join the rest of us in the corner of the bar…

— Adam

You can’t have a hero called Ken!

I have always ‘wanted to write’, but perhaps my early efforts (as a student and then during an embarrassingly long period of unemployment) are in the best place — one known only to me. Obtaining full time work seemed to put an end to the notion: it was just a phase, eh, and anyway I had no life experience, what could I write about?

A new town, new people, ideas and experiences, it was all quite enough to be going on with; but perhaps the writer, although slumbering, was still taking note, if not actively taking notes. One of the new people was a gentle man called Alan, always there in the pub surrounded by a come-go crowd of friends and acquaintances, always with his pint and his cryptic crossword, talking, discussing, disputing, laughing, nailing those elusive clues. I was only ever a marginal presence at that pub table, but I was impressed by the camaraderie, the variety, the inclusiveness of that circle. When Alan died, suddenly and tragically, it seemed fitting that it should be in the pub with his pint of Guinness, worrying away at an annoying Five Down. A close friend of mine was with him when he died; Neil still holds Alan Day in that pub on the sad anniversary. To him I pledged that one day I would write ‘The Alan Book’. The writing was back.

Its return was problematic: I went through an uncomfortable period of refusing to read novels ‘In case I accidentally steal ideas’, for which I was rightly mocked, but like a musician who can’t shake off the sound-shade of, say, Bowie or the Beatles, I feared writing pastiches which may as well have been signed off by F. George Ernest Faulkner Hemingwell. I got over it, but deep down I still fear the late-night knock of the Ripoff Police.

Letting on that you are writing a book is a conversation-killer and room-clearer par excellence, but before I learned this lesson I set out my half-baked plan to another friend: a book set in a pub, telling the story of a man, ordinary and yet magnetic, who stole his paper every day from the Sainsbury’s next door to the pub, who was always surrounded by interesting characters, who would be the centre of as-yet unwritten adventures. As an ordinary type of hero, his name was to be Ken. “You can’t,” the friend slapped me down, “Have a hero called Ken.” . That was me told.

I began a notebook, working title The Crossword Solver; I asked Neil for his reminiscences, and then character names, chapter titles, an outline of the book began to form. My writer-ego was boosted by a short story prize in late 2009 and it seemed that the Alan Book could be the next step. 2010, however, had other ideas, and the Alan Book joined all the other stuff, in a box, out of sight.

Wind forward seven years; a great deal of writing had gone on, but with prizes, acclaim and, erm, anything at all, noticeably absent. I wrote a short story called ‘Magic Whisky’, in which appeared the character Pilot Ken; he had Alan’s appearance, his RAF-style jacket, playful manner and likeability — not that the central character of the story saw him that way. Within six months I had reopened my old notes, made big changes to the shelved plan, and appropriated ‘Magic Whisky’ as a chapter of the new piece.

The Crossword Solver proper took shape between 2018 and 2020: better nearly twenty years late than never. It was one of the things which helped me to manage the Covid lockdown; thinking, remembering, writing, being in a pub when I couldn’t actually go into one. As a spare-time writer, time is precious, and during the long lockdown evenings, with music booming away or endlessly-recycled episodes of old favourite murder mysteries on the TV and my cats coming to help add a few random words here and there, the new version of the book took its form. Pilot Ken is not Alan, but some things are taken direct from life – the nicked newspapers for instance, and his tales of exotic ex-girlfriends. The people surrounding him are fictional, but they have traits, strange stories, small heroisms, quirky views, based upon many different conversations in many pubs over a span of years.

Title of the book slanted and cross over puzzle between coloured disks
The cover of The Crossword Solver

My brother asked me ‘Is this new one going to have a beginning, middle and end?’. Well, yes and no. It definitely begins and definitely ends. Pilot Ken is at the centre of everything, but everyone’s story is told; most of the action plays out in the pub, some characters are exactly what they appear to be, but secret thoughts and hidden stories, not to mention agendas, also emerge. It’s odd what will sometimes come to light over a pub table. In the stories of Ken and his friends, I wanted to tell some old pub stories, commemorate a man and a time and a place, but also ask some questions, such as is it any longer possible to hold opposing views to the person on the other side of the table and air these civilly without them becoming enraged and regarding you as an idiot, traitor, dupe — and vice versa?

Pilot Ken doesn’t rescue anyone, doesn’t beat the baddies, save the day or triumph in a grand denouement. He is an ordinary man living in a town where the money is running out and the bulldozers are closing in. He is peaceful and tolerant, but he will stand up against the intolerant and bigoted. Like most of us, he can’t change the world, all he can do is look on, make the best of it, get another pint in, solve that wretched Five Down.

We can have a hero called Ken.

Written by Adam Craig · Categorized: Authors, Background, Writing process

Footer

Archives

  • Contact
  • Join our mailing list
  • Impressum

Designed by Cinnamon Press using Copyright © 2023 · Altitude Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress ·

Cinnamon Press, Office 49019, PO Box 15113, Birmingham, B2 2NJ (please do not send manuscripts to this address. General enquiries are best by email to info [at] cinnamonpress.com) Log in

Manage Cookie Consent
We use the least cookies possible to optimize our website and our service.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
Preferences
{title} {title} {title}
Manage Cookie Consent
We use cookies to optimize our website and our service.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
Preferences
{title} {title} {title}