Kent Review

🚀 LAUNCHED! 🚀
Yesterday, we celebrated the long-awaited publication of KENT REVIEW Volume IV. What a fantastic night! Scroll for a small selection of pics from the evening.

Thank you so much to everyone who came along to the event, or supported the new volume; to our talented contributing readers, writers, staff; friends and family, donors, the wonderful editorial board, and everyone who helped along the way. Get your copy of the new REVIEW via the link in bio now!

📕 They’re ready… 📕

And we hope you are too, for the second-time-lucky launch of the new KENT REVIEW and website, Tuesday 17th January at 6pm in Keynes SCR! This fourth volume is full of intrigue and travel, light and dark, ambition, illusion, surprise - and some of the best writing from the university’s School of English. Come and celebrate! All welcome.

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and many more - do add tags!
(NB: if any contributors planning to read at the event haven’t had an email from [email protected] in the last couple of days, please get in touch ASAP. Quite a few Kent email addresses are now rejecting messages and we can’t contact you!)

‼️ IMPORTANT: KENT REVIEW LAUNCH RESCHEDULED ‼️

Owing to the double impact of strikes and dangerous road conditions, we’ve made the difficult decision to reschedule tonight’s event. Kent Review IV will now be launched at the first Reading Series of the new term - January 17th - and we’ll keep fingers crossed for both weather and travel. Stay safe out there! ❄️

📣 TUESDAY 13th DECEMBER 📣

Kent Review Volume IV launch! Come one and all to Keynes SCR at 6pm to mark the official release of the new anthology. There will be readers. There will be writers. There will be wine, seasonal festivities, and copies of the new Review.

Come along to hear and celebrate some of the best work coming out of the university’s postgraduate writing courses. Share far and wide. Everyone welcome - see you there! (Copies available to pre-order via the web shop. See link in bio)

Guy Forster-Pearce: ‘The Quuierd Manses’

My submitted extracts hail from ‘The Quueird Manses’, an endeavour spurred on by my attendance to ‘The Book Project’ Module in my 3rd year of Undergraduate Study, here at The University of Kent. While studying, I also attended the ‘Exposure’ Open Mics and ‘Utterance’ Poetry Slams, in Canterbury (), where I refined certain segments through vocal performance.

While redrafting my craft from a plurality of preliminary phrases (initially nestled in notebooks, dictated to my phone and tucked away in rather unkempt digital document folders) I found that the text took on qualities I admired in other writers. Complex syntax convulsed from astute study of Rimbaud’s ‘Illuminations’ while voiced segments found separation through the use of ellipses much like those found in Tommy Pico’s ‘IRL’.

The pieces to be featured in this 4th Vol. of Kent Review each embody a version of contemporary q***r sexuality that relies upon on an ‘orange-mask app’ for intimacy. Ever-present in the voices of these texts is a yearning for the settled stability that an eventual partner would provide, yet this idealised fantasy never arrives. As such, a cyclical return to temporarily fruit-fulfilling engagements prove inefficacious yet immersive.

I’m now reading poetics of disability to inform my next chapbook which will grapple with reflections on the tumultuous relationship I have with my sometime ‘hidden’ disability; Erb’s Palsy (a life-long birth trauma, paralysis of my right arm, resulting from medical negligence).

Katie Szyszko: ‘Traces’

The main themes I explore in the novel are identity, language (its limitations but also its liberating aspects), love, memory, and loss. There are some themes which I wanted to dive into from the moment I had an idea for the book, and others which resurfaced from the depths of my subconscious.

If I was to give one thing that makes me want to write, it would be the fear of death and (to quote Kundera) the unbearable lightness of being. Life is beautiful, short and urgent – this fragility is a constant inspiration in my work. There are writers I’m obsessed with who discuss these ideas so well – George Saunders, Lydia Davis, Aglaya Veteranyi, Olga Tokarczuk, and Cormac McCarthy among others.

My creative process is quite chaotic and organic. I let the story unravel as I write it and later, through editing, find out what shape it actually has. When I become too perfectionistic, I turn away from my laptop and continue the story in a notebook. Handwritten work seems less threatening in moments like this.

Currently, even though I thought I would only stick to short stories and flash fiction, I am working on a second novel. Right now, it’s only a few paragraphs old, but I want to write about my life in Folkestone, a place I found myself at home for the first time in my life.

Luke Berte: ‘Counterparts’

I had wanted to use a gallery/museum as a setting in a story for a while. It seemed like an environment to create opportunities and present characters in a certain way. I had the two protagonists already, and they hadn’t seen each other for a few decades. The gallery had been hanging out in my head for a while, the halls, the echoes, the silence, the paintings. I put the characters there to see what might happen. Then it was important that they didn’t meet right away. I wanted to play with tension and see how suspenseful I could make the scene, given that the reader will understand the chance encounter was nearing.

Other novels inspired me to write in the beginning. I had always read and written, but by my mid-twenties I started to become a sort of ju**ie for reading fiction. After a while, it wasn’t enough to keep picking up the next novel to read. The thing to do was start writing longer form stories.

I enjoy overhearing. I text myself notes and snippets of conversations, any ideas for scenes go into notebooks and I like to observe things happening around me; the way people move when they get on a train for example, gestures between people that might be friends, or colleagues, how is the movement different. So, most of my ideas are overheard, glimpsed on the street, or entirely made up. My stories start there.

It often feels too easy to get started, using all of the raw data available, and then after many months, and up to my neck in problems that need solving on the page, I’m left wondering why I’ve done it to myself.

Books have an intimacy and interiority that captures the strangeness of human experience like no other medium. I suppose that’s what inspires me the most. Novels are escapism, entertainment, learning, knowledge, a map through the world; they’re functional and instructive and beautiful.

I’m currently finalising a late draft of the novel that my extract is taken from. I spent a lot of time redrafting this project, in a way I hadn’t on previous projects. So that was a significant step for me, learning to take a more dogged approach to finishing a piece of work. I hope it’s going to be all the better for it.

Caroline Millar: ‘Peninsula’

‘Peninsula’ evolved from my practice of walking the coastline of the Thames Estuary and the Hoo Peninsula, a long finger of land jutting out into the Thames, surrounded on three sides by water. This excerpt is taken from the beginning when the narrator first sets out on her walk.

The themes have emerged subconsciously through the iterative processes of walking and writing and include isolation and connection; Empire and the ‘new world’; land and water rights; trespass and permission; the instability of language and naming as possession.

I’m inspired by the landscape, and by an attentive walking practice in which I try to stay open to whatever I might encounter. I walk firstly to know a place on the ground, taking photos and voice memos of places that I’m drawn to. I then research the area’s history and archaeology and, once these thoughts and ideas have composted together, a character, situation, or narrative direction suggests itself. I free write using certain key words, photos and fieldnotes and then follow what emerges from this. I’m a huge fan of W.G. Sebald and his talent for disorienting the reader by disguising fiction as fact and of the hauntological screenplays of Nigel Kneale.

Sometimes when I’m on a walk, I deliberately ignore the footpath and trespass across open land. I will deviate from linear walking by other interventions like stopping to swim in the estuary. I’m not a natural rule breaker and I’ve discovered that the tension this creates, in particular the fear of potential confrontation (with an angry landowner) can alter the direction of a piece of writing in a way that wouldn’t otherwise happen.

I’ve recently become part of an interdisciplinary research group looking at liminal landscapes (focused on the Isle of Grain, an almost-island in the Thames Estuary). I think of myself as a prose writer, but I’ve been responding to my experiences of Grain through poetry. I’m surprised by how much I’ve enjoyed writing in this form. I’m currently researching for the second part of my novel, ‘Island’, by walking on the Isle of Sheppey and thinking about the push and pull of ‘islandness’.

Lola Dixon: ‘Vermin’

This piece is pretty autobiographical so it evolved as more bad stuff happened to me. Katie's character was really underdeveloped when I first submitted it in class for work-shopping so I added more about the protagonist's relationship and feelings towards her.

The main themes are Isolation and loneliness, the borders between the private and the public, morality and insanity. It's a COVID piece at heart.

My writing is inspired by strange occurrences that sound even more bizarre when written down. Puns, mainly puns, and rage or lust.

Structuring is a nightmare for me. My thoughts come out like Jackson Po***ck paintings that I then have to organise into recognisable shapes. This involves lying in a pile of printed pages and shuffling them around like a neurotic bird.

At the moment, I’m squishing together all the bits and pieces I have written this year into one longish novel(la) to try and get it published. I am going to try for some short story competitions and maybe some poetry collections too.

Kwaku Fobi: ‘Homeless Guitarists’

The piece, in its nascent form, was longer. I wanted to track the artistic development of a homeless guitarist and have that set against the aimlessness of a young man. I had the Beatles’ Abbey Road on repeat and Bob Dylan’s lines ‘How does it feel? // To hang on your own// With no direction home// Like a complete unknown// Like a rolling stone?’ was stuck in my head. After a very lonely year, I felt those lyrics hit home. What I ended up having, with the story, was a glimpse of a conversation interspersed with flashbacks from the life of Paul and our nameless narrator. I preferred this; there’s an ominousness to this innocuous conversation.

The main argument concerns loneliness: Paul believes that everyone is alone and that you shouldn’t kid yourself. The narrator is undecided but there’s a noticeable fear of being alone. The other theme, work, is, I hope, subtler. I had started working full-time for the first time in my life. I was tired and often dozed off at midnight trying to get words down (a discipline that eventually fell apart). In my fatigue-laden mind, surrounded by working-class citizens, remembering tales about work from friends in Ghana, remembering a taxi driver in Kumasi who often worked close to twenty hours a day, I concluded that life was work. Paul knows this, but the narrator doesn’t.

I’m inspired by other writers, music, stand-up comedy… basically any other art form, that and an initial feeling of desperation or disequilibrium I exorcise by writing. Hopefully by the time each piece is finished I have reached a place of peace… hopefully.

Before I write I have to meditate for a few minutes. Fear is attached to my writing and meditation helps me face that fear.

I’m currently working on more short stories. As much as I love little 6-12 page snippets, I’d like to work on long short stories.

Wayne Berkeley Herbert: ‘If there were no Iran then my body would not exist’ (translations)

I wanted to translate work that hadn't been translated into English before and that spoke to an issue that I'm politically passionate about. I was already aware of the relationship that the UK had with Iran throughout the 20th century, yet none of that is spoken about or used to temper some of the current views of Iran. What better way to show the beauty of Iran than through poetry? The Anglo-Persian Oil company was founded in 1909 and currently exists as British Petroleum. I wrote to BP, sent them a poem, and got a response, but it didn't answer what I'd asked. I focused on two poets who were writing at the same time. I half-expected to find criticisms of the relationship with Britain at the time, but didn't. I found poetry: passionate, patriotic and focused on domestic challenges and splendour. I wanted to keep as true to the Farsi as possible and allowed simple structure and format to represent how it would have been seen in Farsi. I left out capital letters, punctuation and for some of the poems wrote right to left. Not only did it achieve what I wanted, but it created new poems which could be read forwards or backwards.

I am not a poet, but poetry inspires a lot of my writing. The shape and sounds of words when they are together is amplified in poetry and when I have difficulties with my fiction I often go to poetry to solve it. In the novel I'm working on now I was struggling with the level of detail to include. Du Fu has been a massive inspiration. His economy somehow creates a panorama. I'm sure I'm incapable of achieving that, but it's influenced how I've written this section.

I think I'm quite vanilla with my practice, but I do handwrite my first draft in A4 pads. I find the speed at which I'm able to write the words is slower than a keyboard and it helps me to stay in the moment, in the scene, and feel the emotions.

I'm working on a novel which started life as my MA dissertation which looks at the parallels between far-right politics and fundamental religion told through a gay love story. Its working title is Dancing with the Nephilim.

Lindsay McInally: ‘The Merchant City’

During my MA in Creative Writing I had an idea for a story about a couple going on the run after accidentally shooting a Glasgow gangster in the head. However, the gangster interested me more than the couple and he gradually took over, bringing along with him his almost girlfriend, his boss and their families who all play a part in his death. He still gets shot.

The piece’s main themes are denied redemption and human trafficking. The setting is Glasgow, a city built on the proceeds of historical slavery. The themes are dark and there is an equally dark vein of humour running through the novel. I wanted to show that even in desperate situations people still form friendships and find comfort in making each other laugh when they could scream.

I love looking at old photographs and paintings. A self portrait by the Scottish artist Stephen Conroy is how I imagine Elvis to look. I have postcards and photographs, particularly of Glasgow, covering the wall above my desk.

I like writing at my desk in the afternoon and evening with my dogs sleeping on the sofa nearby. I light a candle which is meant to smell of woods and moss and the scent signals the time to work. If I have a deadline I can write anywhere, at any time and I don’t need a candle but it’s always nice to have the sound of dogs snoring nearby.

I’m currently working on a story inspired by the ghostly cocktail parties heard by visitors to Craigievar Castle in Aberdeenshire. There is a murder.