Navigating Different Narrative Paths

Step into the enchanting world of Amit Chaudhuri, a literary luminary known for his exploration of diverse creative forms and their connection to the human experience. Join us as we uncover the secrets of Chaudhuri’s work, from his love for Indian Classical Music to his thought-provoking insights on storytelling. Prepare to be inspired and captivated by the brilliance of Chaudhuri’s literary legacy.

One of the most intriguing things about literary giant Amit Chaudhuri’s work, is his interest in the way different creative forms speak to human experience.  

Amit Chaudhuri - Finding The Raga Book Cover. The Book cover features a swirly red pattern with a North Indian classic design.Chaudhuri’s work has always reflected his interest in Indian Classical Music and in the non-fiction work, Finding the Raga, he writes about the difference between experiencing the world as language where the word ‘morning’ is only arbitrarily connected to what we understand the word to mean, and experiencing the world through the representational act of telling stories. He sees the first as akin to poetry and the second akin to narrative forms like the novel.  

For Chaudhuri, a Western musical tradition is wrapped up in a linear exploration of the human at the centre of things and the Indian tradition decenters human action and refocuses attention on experiences that slip out of standard narrative interpretation and linger in the present.  

Amit Chaudhuri - The Immortals Book Cover. Book cover features a small cut out image of a hand touching a flower.When I read novels like Afternoon Raag or The Immortals it is this ability to discard some of the strictures of beginning, middle and end, and to focus instead on those moments in which time seems to stand still, in which nothing dramatic happens and yet the sense of what it is to be a conscious, breathing human is elegantly brought to life, that makes Chaudhuri’s work so engaging and exciting. This is poetry working within the novel and as a reader I find my way into his work through this intense love of those moments, or moods of being. 

This is of particular interest to me as a writer in my third year of a creative writing PhD at the OU, writing my novel, All The Hollow Places, that centres around the last day in the life of Gertrude Bell, the archaeologist, traveller, linguist and political officer who helped to draw the lines around modern day Iraq.  

I’ve spent the last few years thinking hard about the ways in which we interpret the world through the many filters of our familial, social, educational and cultural backgrounds. I’ve wondered about how I can reimagine Bell for a modern audience in a way that not only brings her to life on the page, but encourages a reader to question her interpretation of the world and, by extension, their own. 

Some of this needs to be done through interrogating that representational, linear act, and just like Chaudhuri, thinking about how to embrace moments out of time that collapse the linear spatiotemporal structures we generally use to situate ourselves. In this way, we can understand what it is like to wake early to the call of the muezzin because we have all had moments of being that seem, in the words of Annie Ernaux in The Years, to ‘float on top of each other’. Annie Ernaux names the feeling of such moments ‘the palimpsest sensation’ and like her, I feel this sensation could be an alternative ‘instrument of knowledge’, one which the novel, that expansive, potentially circumlocutory form, has the ability to wield to startling effect. One which Amit Chaudhuri wields beautifully himself.  

Amit Chaudhuri - Afternoon Raag Book Cover. Book cover features 6 books, piled on top of each other.One of my favourite passages of Afternoon Raag describes the protagonist imagining his mother making and drinking her early morning cup of tea. This is something she does every morning and, just like this repeated act, we imagine that tea twice. We start with her boiling the kettle to a ‘solipsistic bubbling’ (p24), divert to other things she does throughout the day, other observations about her hair and character, and then we return to the tea: ‘there (on the veranda) she stands with the teacup balanced in one hand, pausing now and then in her thoughts (for she is always thinking) to sip her weak tea politely, watching the lane’ (p26). We are not sure how often the protagonist has actually watched this moment, and understand this rendition of her morning to be one collated over a series of specific moments that together form more of a generalised sensation of his mother moving about the house before dawn, waiting to drink tea as the sun lifts over the horizon. Her habits are the stuff of life, the background comforts of home that offer quiet solace to her son in a cold, damp Oxford, far from his parents’ Bombay flat. 

The memory reveals the value in the everyday, the meditative, undramatic moment that weaves through our lives and holds a sense of our identity unshackled by strict chronology and the events that we tend to use to shape our histories (births, marriages, deaths). This is the kind of mood and sensation Chaudhuri evokes with such gentle poetry. 

Being asked to interview Amit Chaudhuri for the MK Literary Festival is a dream come true. As he writes in Finding the Raga, ‘a creative work is engendered, almost always at a crossroads’ (p52) and I hope, in our conversation, to tease out the multiple creative impulses that generate his literary and non-literary work, and to find inspiration for my own work as I try to marry past and present, form and content in my novel. 

My creative practice PhD combines a novel and critical thesis centred around the life of Gertrude Bell (1868-1926). As a distant relative of Bell, my novel uses multiple perspectives – including a personal one –  to explore the controversies of Bell’s life, from her hand in establishing modern day Iraq, to whether her overdose was really suicide. Both novel and thesis examine the ways in which we tell and use stories of the past, searching for new approaches to collective and individual storytelling that might help us think and act differently in the present.

Headshot of middle-aged woman with blonde hair wearing tortoise shell coloured glasses, a grey t-shirt and black dungarees.

Rebekah-Lattin Rawstrone

Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone has a Masters in Creative Writing from Birkbeck, University of London, a Masters in ‘Issues in Modern Culture’ from University College London, and a degree in English from Cambridge University. Her fiction has received Arts Council funding and her PhD is funded by the OOCDTP.

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The Long And Short Of It, Session 2: The Richness Of Short Stories

On Monday 12 March 2024, we had the privilege to hear the writer Rattawut Lapcharoensap in conversation with OU Associate Lecturer Dr. Alistair Daniel. In this second instalment of the MK Lit Fest series The Long and Short of It, they explored the unique challenges and pleasures, and possibly also pains, of short story writing.

PhD student, Anne Wetherilt, offers here a summary of the event for those of you who couldn’t make it.

A headshot of a middle-aged bald male with a beard, wearing rectangular glasses and a floral shirt

Alistair Daniel

Black and white headshot of middle-aged Asian male author Rattawut Lapcharoensap. Author has short hair and is wearing circular glasses and a collared shirt.

Rattawut Lapcharoensap

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Alastair Daniel wrote earlier this month burst onto the literary scene in 2005 with his debut story collection, Sightseeing. It won the Asian American Literary Award and was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award. 

Short stories, Edgar Allan Poe famously wrote, need to be read in one setting. But this, Lapcharoensap argues, short-sells the short story. An avid reader of the form – he quotes James Joyce, Frank O’Connor, Sherwood Anderson, Flannery O’Connor, Alice Munro, Katherine Anne Porter and Junot Diaz amongst others – Lapcharoensap is drawn to the short story because of its ability to capture the individual and the collective experience, and its intense awareness of human loneliness. 

 His short stories have a strong sense of place. ‘I want to write the truth about the communities I felt part of’, he tells us. Indeed, in Sightseeing, he gives us a richly detailed picture of Bangkok in the 1980s and 1990s. The stories are rooted in experiences he witnessed as a young person and carried with him as an adult. And whilst they touch on topical political issues, his main aim is always to tell the truth about his characters’ lives. 

 When Sightseeing came out, William Sutcliffe, writing in The Guardian praised its ‘novelistic richness’. Lapcharoensap aims to achieve this richness through his characters. Even though a short story gives the reader only a glimpse of the character’s life, you can present the whole person: where they came from; what they have done earlier in their life; how they have lived their life. You can write beautifully and with great emotional clarity, he asserts, a short story need not be short in terms of descriptive power. 

 In Sightseeing, these stories typically narrate the experiences of young boys or adolescent men. But they are brought to us by older first-person narrators, who calmly observe and report their own earlier encounters with life. This older first-person narrator, Lapcharoensap reflects, brings an interesting perspective to the story. They may have greater articulacy, but often continue to be bewildered.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZFdz-TVUuQ

Given the centrality of place and character in his stories, it is perhaps no surprise to learn that Lapcharoensap usually starts the writing process with a scene or a character. Asking ‘who is speaking’, he expands on a notion, a feeling, a telling detail or bird’s eye view. The story line may emerge later – although sometimes it doesn’t. This early composition is like playing in the dark, he explains, and proceeds without a plan. But planning comes in when he starts revising and here we get a glimpse of the personal discipline Lapcharoensap applies to his writing. Revision is about looking for opportunities to exercise the imagination, he believes. The creative act is not just the initial inspiration – the artist struck by the imagination in his study. Rather, such moments occur in the sequence of drafts, when ‘something beautiful emerges from the lumps of despair’.  

 For all their promise, short stories can be prone to clichés and pitfalls. Lapcharoensap is particularly wary of the emphasis on epiphany. The Joycean epiphany can be beautiful, he argues, but as a narrative habit it can also be limiting. Not every character needs to act, stumble and learn from their mistakes. Weak epiphanies or false epiphanies abound in short stories, and as a genre requirement, it can limit a young writer in their development and imagination. Another pitfall, he admits, is to create characters like yourself, which you don’t allow to fail or behave foolishly. Invariably, this reduces the richness of the story, and the fictional narration becomes wishful fulfilment. 

 Part of the joy of being a short story writer, Lapcharoensap notes, is in seeing them published as part of a collection. Each story is written on its own and should stand on its own feet. But they are enriched by their neighbours, as the writer organises them in a particular way to achieve formal and thematic dignity. 

 Sightseeing closes with ‘Cockfighter’, which at 90 pages is closer to a novella. This particular one did not end, Lapcharoensap explains. ‘It just wouldn’t stop and I continued to be interested in it’. As a reader, he loves the novella – it has the expansiveness of the novel yet requires the rigour and economy of the short story. To this reader of Sightseeing, Lapcharoensap moves effortlessly across the two forms, offering us ‘novelistic richness’, as well as sheer reading pleasure. 

 The series will delve into the novella form on Monday 18 March and conclude with the novel on Monday 25 March.

Banner advertising upcoming Monday evening online events: Short story, 11 March; Novella, 18 March; Novel, 25 March. Images of book covers by each of the guest authors.

 

Headshit image of a middle-aged woman with blonde hair in a ponytail wearing a black crew neck t-shirt

Anne Wetherilt

Anne Wetherilt is a part-time PhD student in the Department of English, funded by the Open Oxford Cambridge (OOC) Doctoral Training Partnership. Her thesis – ‘Decolonisation and the Female Middlebrow: Politics, Economics and the Novel’ – studies the work of women writers, who witnessed the end of the British empire. Her supervisors are Prof. Alex Tickell and Prof. David Johnson. 

 

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Apparently True: Writing A Novella By Accident

Creative Writing PhD student and Associate Lecturer Sarah Bower found herself inadvertently crafting a novella during the second lockdown summer of 2021. Ahead of Monday’s online event with fellow OU novella writer Emily Bullock, Sarah  unveils how writing a novella helped her uncover hidden layers of her larger literary endeavors.

 

Rather as Withnail and I went on holiday ‘by mistake’, in the second lockdown summer of 2021 I wrote a novella by accident. In August 2023, it was published by Story Machine as Lines and Shadows. Admittedly, it seems an odd sort of mishap, and you would be within your rights to doubt my assertion that it was an accident at all because who writes an entire book – even a short one – by accident?

Let me tell you how and why it happened.

I was in the first summer of my PhD in creative and critical writing, for which I am writing a much longer novel, part of which, set in 1968 and 69, is about the role of women in the manufacture of spacesuits for Apollo. End of year marking was over, there was little or no prospect of diversions such as test cricket or holidays. The PhD beckoned. I opened up the file…

Notebook with two pages of handwritten notes…and picked up a notebook in which I started writing, by hand and with no conscious forethought, something completely different.

I headed it ‘Ghost Story’ and wrote: ‘The letter from the Ministry of Defence was lying on Ginny Matlock’s plate when she came down to breakfast.’ Beyond that point I knew very little.

Fiction writing is a peculiar process. The writer is split between the mechanical brain which wields the pen or types on the keyboard, undertakes the research, knows how to spell and where to put a comma (most of the time). Then there is the parallel universe of the imagination in which she is not only not herself but may be many others. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, in The Last Tycoon, ‘Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.’ The writer is never entirely in control of all these people and sometimes, the ones who have been waiting patiently in the background – perhaps for years – decide they’re tired of waiting and elbow their way to the front of the queue.

The character waiting for me was, in the Romantic tradition, a place: the Suffolk coastal town of Orford. I had lived in Suffolk and known I wanted to write about Orford for many years, not only for its bleak, beautiful and ever shifting landscape. I had written about the East Anglian coastline and its unpredictability before, in my novel Erosion. But Orford has a strange history, which transports the imagination from a medieval merman to nuclear weapons testing and Cold War listening posts. It had lain dormant in my subconscious for twenty years or more, and it was initially a mystery to me why it chose to rise to the surface in that particular summer.

Image from outer space looking at the Earth

Earthrise 1968

The novella is set between 1960 and 1962, culminating with the Cuban Missile Crisis, in a fictional village called Aldeford. This is closely based on Orford but the inability to conduct either location research or visit the relevant archives in Ipswich due to lockdown meant that I could not achieve the historical accuracy necessary to set my story in the real place. This was liberating, however, as was scribbling in a notebook in the unstructured spaces of my day – while waiting for the kettle to boil, eating breakfast, watching the bath run. I was daydreaming on paper. The characters conjured into being this way – Ginny, the mathematics prodigy from Manchester, her society girl housemates, the Korean war hero Philip and the mysterious Artist – had the freedom to do as they wished and to tell me what they wanted to.

It wasn’t until they had finished and fallen silent that I understood their function in the process of a whole lot of people trying to become me. I realised, during the course of discussions with my editor which helped to sharpen the novella’s focus, that its creative impulse was a means of delving into the deep backstory of my PhD. It prepared the ground for writing about the proxy war that was the space race and the real war in Vietnam that was the grisly underbelly of America’s triumphant moonshot. Kennedy became president in 1960 and made his ‘We Choose to Go to the Moon’ speech at Rice University in 1962, a month before the missile crisis. While my characters’ lives and loves and encounters with ghosts and spies were unfolding on a secret airforce base in Suffolk, the building blocks for 1968 – for everything from student riots to Earthrise – were being assembled in America.

Black and white book cover featuring a white image of a satellite

Lines and Shadows by Sarah Bower

Lines and Shadows is my first novella. At 40,000 words it is long for the form but about half the length of a novel.

Perhaps, in the context in which I was writing, it took this form because the novella too shape shifts like the Orford coast. Neither novel nor short story, it is commonly seen as originating in fourteenth century Italy with Boccaccio’s Decameron. The word ‘novella’ translates from Italian as ‘a short story related to true, or apparently true, facts.’ What better way to describe a book written by accident, set in a fictional version of a real place and tucked into the corners of another book altogether.

Banner advertising upcoming Monday evening online events: Short story, 11 March; Novella, 18 March; Novel, 25 March. Images of book covers by each of the guest authors.

A headshot of a woman with short grey hair, wearing a denim jacket and a white and pastel-pink scarf.

Sarah Bower

Sarah Bower is an Associate Lecturer at the OU, where she is also reading for a PhD in creative and critical writing. She is the author of three previous novels. Her first, The Needle in the Blood, winner of the 2007 Susan Hill Award, was re-issued in September 2023. She also writes short fiction and has edited anthologies of memoir and of literary translations into English. She is currently working on a book of prompts and inspirations for creative writing for imprisoned people.

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The Long and Short of It, Session 1: It went in a flash!

A middle-aged Caucasian woman with short blond hair, wearing long multi-coloured beads and a floral headress. She is looking up to the left-hand corner of the frame, wearing a cheeky grin.

Electra Rhodes

A middle aged woman with curly auburn hair stands in front of the tree and looks thoughtfully into the middle distance.

Jupiter Jones

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just like a piece of flash, the session was compressed with wisdom about writing and enjoying this difficult but rewarding form. Electra’s ‘In Momma’s Shoes’ packed such a punch in three short paragraphs. Who knew that everything about child neglect and poverty could be contained in a 300 word capsule of flash – travelling at speed to the pinpoint precision (quite literally) of the end.

Electra gave us 11 quickfire features of the short, compressed narrative that is flash:

  • Under 1,000 words
  • Distinctive form – hermit crabs, for instance, are flashes made of different forms such as menus or surveys
  • The title really works, doing the heavy lifting
  • Compression and intensity
  • Language that is tight, bright and right
  • Like the after-image of a camera/phone flash
  • Use of image, metaphor, archetypal trope, fable and fairy tale to draw in extra layers of meaning
  • An ending that lands – if a story is like sewing, this is the thread pulled taut with a twang
  • Experimental
  • Plot involves a shift of some kind
  • Lots of stuff happens off the page

Like a balloon, you feel your way to the right length of the thing, containing just the right amount of air. Electra advises ‘Start late and get out as early as you can!’ Look for a chewy satisfying landing . It is the briefest invitation into a world, requiring intimacy to ‘read’ the space between the lines and off the page, to let go and trust the reader will get it.

Flash is thriving, many anthologies to read full of wonderful examples of form, style and length – and infiltrating other forms with its fracture, compression and oomph!

A final tip that stays with me: read it out loud, record it, play it back in your own and different voices, then you will see what lands, the final form. When you write something and someone else gets it, it is just the best feeling.

As Electra and Jupiter both say, read it, jump in, try it, be experimental … What’s the best that can happen?

A woman with chin-length grey curly hair smiles into the camera.

Grace Kempster

Grace Kempster’s  full-time PhD explores the representation of cloth and stitch in the mid-Victorian novel (1845-75).  She is examining 6 key texts by Thackeray, Dickens, Oliphant, Yonge , Eliot and Trollope to explore the tropes and consider a new paradigm of textile fluency affecting the novel. Her supervisors are Professor Delia Da Sousa Correa and Professor Nicola Watson.

Clips from the event will be included in the OU’s updated Advanced Creative Writing course (A363) launching in October. The series continues with events on the short story and novella, at 7.30pm on Monday 11 and 18 March, and one on the novel at 5pm on Monday 25 March. The series will conclude with an in-person panel event at Milton Keynes Central Library at 11am on Saturday 6 April.

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Revisiting Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s Sightseeing: Timeless Charm, Cultural Subversion

Enter the world of Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s “Sightseeing” through Alistair Daniel’s insightful biography. Lapcharoensap’s debut collection, born from his upbringing in Thailand and Chicago, challenges Western perceptions with its nuanced portrayal of life in Bangkok’s margins. Daniel’s exploration unveils the enduring relevance of Lapcharoensap’s work, making this biography essential for literature lovers.

 

Sightseeing Book Cpver by Rattawut Lapcharoensap. Book cover features a man sat on a brown bench with his legs folded reading a map.Rereading can be a hazardous affair. There’s nothing more disappointing than returning to a book you once cherished only to find that you and it have fallen out of love. The characters seem wooden, the dialogue flat, the plot predictable (even allowing for the fact that you already know how it ends). Your love of this book, you realise, had more to do with you – with the age you were then, the situation you were in, the things that were preoccupying you – than with the book itself. So one of the great pleasures of rereading Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s short story collection Sightseeing has been discovering that the qualities I admired in it the first time are all still there: the precision of the writing, the beautifully constructed plots, the compelling narrators and, perhaps above all, the indelible images: Priscilla the Cambodian’s golden teeth, Anek with his face on fire, or Clint Eastwood, the narrator’s pet pig in ‘Farangs’, swimming desperately out to sea.

 

Black and white headshot of middle-aged Asian male author Rattawut Lapcharoensap. Author has short hair and is wearing circular glasses and a collared shirt.

Rattawut Lapcharoensap

Born in Chicago and raised in Thailand, Rattawut Lapcharoensap burst onto the literary scene, in the US and far beyond, in 2005 with his debut story collection, Sightseeing. Published when he was just 25, the collection delighted readers and critics alike with the freshness of its perspective and the maturity of its voice. ‘Sightseeing is not mere reportage, but storytelling of the highest quality, profoundly human and universal,’ wrote William Sutcliffe in The Guardian. ‘Every story in this collection is dense with event, emotion and meaning.’ It won the Asian American Literary Award and was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award. In 2007 Lapcharoensap was named as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists.

 

One of the great strengths of Sightseeing is the way it turns Western clichés about Thailand on their heads. This is not the Thailand of tourist fantasy. Though ‘farangs’ – Thai slang for foreigners – certainly feature, in all their inevitable crassness and cultural insensitivity, the stories in Sightseeing are told mostly from the point of view of the Thai characters: children, troubled adolescents and their just-as-troubled parents, often living hardscrabble lives on the edges of Bangkok, or running a motel on a resort island choked with tourists, or scraping by in menial jobs.

 

A lake in Thailand, surrounded by lush green hills with a red wooden hut standing on stilts in the water. The sunset and the light reflecting on the water surface creates a picturesque scene of natural Thailand.Lapcharoensap’s Thailand is a world dominated by gangster capitalists, a world in which the military runs a corrupt draft process, in which teenage girls work as prostitutes, in which whole neighbourhoods are falling into ruin; a world where drunk men conspire to burn down a refugee camp and rats rifle cheerfully through garbage. It’s a world the West has permeated in many ways, from tourism to films, even inveigling its way into the dreams and aspirations of the characters, though more often than not it only serves to disappoint (the eleven-year-old protagonist of ‘At the Café Lovely’, tasting his first American burger, is promptly sick). Yet it’s also a world of extraordinary beauty and human warmth, where two brothers can share a moment of tender solidarity on the back of a dilapidated motorbike, where a bicultural family can bond by playing bumper cars at their local Buddhist temple, and where, for one brief summer, two Thai boys and a Cambodian girl can make their own entertainment out of an empty swimming pool. A world where pigs can’t fly but they can swim.

 

One aspect of Lapcharoensap’s work that’s always compelled me, both as reader and writer, is the narrative voice. While his protagonists are often children or adolescents, flawed, fallible, and – like the lovesick narrator of ‘Farangs’ – somewhat lacking in self-knowledge, it’s their grown, or older selves who tell the story, often writing long after events, with all the melancholy wisdom that comes with knowing how everything turned out. These first-person narratives should really be called first people narratives, since often what we get are two voices – the young protagonist and the older narrator – and the challenge of capturing both of these voices on the page – capturing, in short, a sense of personal identity and how it evolves – is one Lapcharoensap navigates with aplomb. I’ve no doubt that his facility for narrative voices has influenced my approach to my own – very different – narrator, Simon Pritchard, the protagonist of my novel, Montreal, which I’ve just completed as part of a PhD in creative writing at the Open University. And it’s this – and many other – qualities that give Lapcharoensap’s work the novelistic richness that makes it feel so vital. I can’t wait to hear him speak about his work, and I hope you’re as excited as I am.

A headshot of a middle-aged bald male with a beard, wearing rectangular shaped glasses and a floral shirt

Alistair Daniel

Alistair Daniel is an Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Open University. His short stories have been published in journals including The Missouri Review, Narrative, Litro, The Stinging Fly, The Irish Times and Stand, and he has held the Charles Pick Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. He has an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and a PhD in Creative Writing from the Open University.

 

 

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You’ll Get Old Sitting There: Contempt for Aged Males

In a new publication, OU Creative Writing lecturer Dónall Mac Cathmhaoill and Kevin De Ornellas of Ulster University explore ageism as presented in Edward Bond’s ‘Shakespearean’ trilogy about aged men

Book cover of Negotiating Age: Aging and Ageism in Contemporary Literature and Theatre. The cover image features a silhouette of two figures sitting on a bench watching the sun set over the sea.

Negotiating Age: Aging and Ageism in Contemporary Literature and Theatre, edited by Mária Kurdi, and published by Debrecen University Press

It is argued that three plays by Edward Bond, born in 1934, should be regarded as a loose trilogy—and that the plays are united because they use the legacy of Shakespeare to provoke uncomfortable reflections on aging and ageism.

Two Bond plays are renowned for addressing the vexed legacy of Shakespeare head-on.

Lear (1971) is an uncompromising appropriation of King Lear in which Bond ‘corrects’ Shakespeare’s too-casual treatment of the under-represented effects of the mad king’s actions on the poor of the mismanaged kingdom of Britain.

Bingo (1973) is a bitter depiction of a dying Shakespeare who realizes that his art has been worthless because it has done nothing to frustrate murderous inequalities in post-Tudor England.

It is less well known that The Worlds (1979) is also a Shakespearean adaptation. The story of an arrogant company director, Trench, who loses his position and degenerates into a rabid, destructive, tramp-like, terrorist-supporting misanthrope, is an adaptation of Timon of Athens.

Bingo is a quasi-biographical conceit; the other two plays are radical appropriations.

Julie Sanders’s definition of appropriation as opposed to mere adaptation is important here. She argues that appropriation represents more decisive journey away from the informing text into a wholly new cultural product.

In other words, appropriations, such as those by Bond, are new works in their own right. They are not adaptations of Shakespeare but radical new plays contrived to perpetuate Bond’s theatrical, political, and moral vision.

Edward Bond at the Théâtre National de la Colline, Paris, January 2001. Author: D. Tuaillon. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

Many critics have written about Bond’s engagement with Shakespeare—especially Lear and Bingo. But none have afforded The Worlds the same attention as the previous two.

Crucially, critics have, understandably, concentrated on the quasi-Brechtian staging techniques in Bond’s plays as well as the blistering, uncompromisingly leftist critiques of historical and contemporary economic and social inequalities. But none have addressed the arguably more humanistic issue of ageism.

This is important because the lead characters in the three plays are all victims of ferocious ageism. Despite his callousness, Bond’s Lear is a man more sinned against than sinning because his aged impotence and alleged senescence are met with even more overt contempt than in Shakespeare’s original.

Shakespeare, in Bingo, is openly mocked for willful inactivity by his supposed friend, Ben Jonson, and by his shrewish daughter, Judith.

And Trench, in The Worlds, is revered when fit to run his company but ruthlessly marginalized and discarded when he is forcibly retired from his own executive board.

The descent into psychological torment that all three lead characters endure is directly related to ageism. Aging is almost entirely presented as a cause for scorn and derision in these plays. Bond generally sidesteps any sense of aging well: in his plays, good aging cannot be bought. The three leading characters addressed in this essay do improve as people—but only within themselves and in a manner unnoticed and/or unappreciated by their contemporaries.

The plays are set variously in ancient Britain, in Jacobean England and in late-1970s Britain: it is widely acknowledged that Bond rightly or wrongly sees consistent economic discrimination across these vastly different eras. It should, we argue, also be apparent that Bond sees bigotry towards the aged as being another social malady that is consistent across centuries and even millennia.

Shakespeare’s plays are full of reflection on aging and on inter-generational conflict. Characters in Shakespeare plays often ‘retire’: King Lear relinquishes his kingship; Lady Macbeth skulks off and gives up on public life; and Prospero breaks his staff.

Across Bond’s three plays, he appropriates Shakespearean meditations on aging and juxtaposes them with his own observations about society’s disregard for those who are no longer economically productive.

This blog post is an adapted extract from: Kevin De Ornellas and Dónall Mac Cathmhaoill (2024) “You’ll Get Old Sitting There”: Contempt for Aged Males in Three ‘Shakespearean’ Works by Edward Bond. In: Kurdi, M. (ed.) Negotiating Age: Aging and Ageism in Contemporary Literature and Theatre. Debrecen University Press, 26-47.

The authors would like to thank Anoush Simon for practical assistance in the production of this essay.

Dónall Mac Cathmhaoill, a lecturer in Creative Writing at The Open University

Dónall Mac Cathmhaoill is a lecturer in Creative Writing at The Open University, United Kingdom. His research interests are in authorship and structures of production in theatre for social change, and theatre in post-conflict societies. Upcoming publications include a chapter on ethics and aesthetics in applied theatre in the Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Literary Evaluation, chapters on writing drama in the upcoming Creative Writing Handbook from Bloomsbury, and a monograph on post-conflict Irish theatre for University of Exeter Press.

Kevin De Ornellas, a white middle-aged male with a beard. He's wearing a black beanie and a maroon woollen jumper, and he's crouched in front of a patch of daffodils.

Kevin De Ornellas, a Lecturer in English at Ulster University

Kevin De Ornellas is a Lecturer in English at Ulster University. His PhD is in English Renaissance Literature from Queen’s University Belfast, and his research focuses on drama on stage and on the page – especially Renaissance and post-War drama. He is also interested in the study of representations of animals and the environment in literature and culture. His publications include The Horse in Early Modern English Culture (2013), chapters in several books, among them The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature, and the Companion to Literary Biography. He is an editor of the forthcoming  Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Literary Evaluation.

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Kidnapped by Agatha Christie and OpenLearn

In readiness for the BBC’s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel Murder is Easy, which will air this festive season, senior lecturer Anthony Howell lets us in on how the Queen of Crime has added a touch of mystery to new Open University courses.

The sheer star power of Agatha Christie took me by surprise, I must admit. I was aware of the statistics (her novels have sold over 2 billions copies) and that her best-known protagonist, Hercule Poirot, was enjoying new prominence as a result of the recent Kenneth Branagh adaptations. But given that I primarily investigate the dusty corners of the late 18th- and early 19th century (and am used to being read mostly by two old university friends and the dog) I was struck by the degree to which she justified the label ‘popular’. We had decided to make ‘Literature and the Popular’ the organising theme for the first block of teaching material on the new MA in English Literature (A893). But, quite honestly, there is popular fiction and then there is Agatha Christie, in a class all of her own.

Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot in Death on the Nile (2022). This image is publicly available.

With some trepidation, I volunteered early in module production to contribute a unit on Christie for the new MA. I had enjoyed her novels since my teenage years but writing about them in a teaching context would involve venturing some distance from my specialism. Nevertheless, I was confident that with some preparation I could get a handle on it. Christie is normally considered ‘middlebrow’ as an author and, clearly, her work is intended as a form of escapism. Among other things, I was able to touch on how this made it, in the words of Alison Light, an invaluable ‘literature of convalescence’ for the British public after the the First World War. However, Christie also possessed a seemingly supernatural skill for crafting a satisfying clue-puzzle story and it became clear to me that this was the key to the cultural impact of her fiction.

The unit was later adapted into an OpenLearn course, Agatha Christie and the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, with the help of the module Chair, Alex Tickell. Launched in 2006, OpenLearn is the Open University’s home of free learning. It hosts over 10,000 free courses, articles, activities and videos. There were around 15 million visits to the platform last year from all over the globe so pairing Agatha Christie with OpenLearn always had the potential to be a powerful combination. You can view the course here.

OpenLearn: the home of free learning at the OU

Right away, it seemed to have a ready-made audience and the ability to travel all by itself with minimal effort (certainly from me). A range of people interested from all walks of life began to click though the minute it landed on Google. I was invited to take part in different kinds of media to promote it. Local radio, for example, with a lighter tone and a mainstream audience. It was hugely enjoyable. The Faculty’s social media team created a buzz with some activities on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. People responded immediately, sharing pictures of their own rare collections of Christie’s novels, participating in quizzes and games and generally responding very warmly to this opportunity to share their enthusiasm for one of their favourite authors.

Although we did take the course out into the world, the world also came looking for us. For the first time, I received emails out of the blue from learners not yet enrolled on an Open University course. One wanted help to download and print a copy of the course for her elderly mother, who struggled to read on a screen. Another had recently visited Torquay museum and thought the course might be a good fit for the Agatha Christie display there.

Agatha Christie at her home: Winterbrook House, Berkshire, 1950. This image is publicly available.

Professionally too, unsolicited requests arrived. An offer came to act as a reviewer for a new course on European Crime fiction, currently under production in the school of Social Sciences at the OU. I was encouraged to attend ‘Captivating Criminality’, the annual conference of the International Crime Fiction Association, which took place at the imposing setting of Corsham Court in Wiltshire. Experts in the field were keen to hear more about the OpenLearn course and the feedback from students. I’ll be moonlighting at the next one in Budapest too.

This is a very roundabout way of explaining that, since writing the course, I have found myself periodically snatched away from my usual teaching and research interests and taken in quite different directions. It sometimes feels as if I have been kidnapped by Christie herself and taken by her to new places without very much agency of my own; plotted helplessly into a new narrative.

Agatha Christie and the Golden Age of Detective Fiction now feels established on OpenLearn. In the first few weeks, the course page had received over 15,000 visits. As of this month, that has now risen to 57,000 visits and 2,460 enrolled learners (with 806 gaining statements of participation). I was delighted to learn that the course will soon feature in a new landing page featuring Women in the Arts, curated by Hannah Parish. I would say that it’s comfortably the biggest pedagogical impact I’ve managed to have in my career so far. But, although it’s been enormous fun for me, it doesn’t feel much like my impact. I’m left, in the end, along with the detective fiction enthusiasts, to ponder a familiar question: whodunit?

Anthony Howell is a Senior Lecturer, Staff Tutor and Associate lecturer in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at the Open University. He is currently Chair of the MA in English Part 2 and a module team member on A893 and A894. Anthony has contributed teaching units to a variety of OU modules and developed new teaching strategies to support students in secure environments. His research interests are in the field of Romanticism, in particular the work of Sir Walter Scott, William Wordsworth and John Clare.

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A Fine Balance: writing, teaching, public engagement

When the world opened again after lockdown, my steadfast companion was the view out my home office window of a fell in Cumbria. Fell ponies often arranged themselves along the ridge of the commons above grazing sheep, backlit by low winter sun. I would gaze at their silhouettes when I needed a break from my computer screen. Former colleagues at brick-and-mortar universities in the US and UK began heading back to campus as COVID restrictions were lifted. I’d taken a job at the OU working from home during the pandemic, and I’d moved five hours north in search of an affordable house with a garden. My ‘new’ office was in a converted bedroom. I couldn’t go to campus or meet colleagues face-to-face for several months after lockdown eased, so I dug in and reconciled myself to living and working in what I came to think of as my ‘fast-moving cloud,’ the western slope of the Howgills.

Fell ponies

Working at the OU has transformed my life as an academic. Moving into a home-based role that is part operational, part distance learning, and part research has provided time for reflection. Most days after lunch, I walk a different lane or track or public footpath in my tiny village where sheep outnumber humans, and I think about things. I live on the edge of the Lake District, countryside that writers Dorothy and William Wordsworth and their friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge would have found familiar. At first, the reality of experiencing the romantic notion of the ‘sublime’ was quite a shock, and it took months to connect with the land in a way other than fear (of high winds, low clouds, and gusting rain) or dread (of same). With time, though, I settled in and got on with work and with writing and connecting with local writers and artists, which has made everything better, especially the low-lying clouds.

Like other writers who have lived in isolated landscapes, I’ve found this time fruitful. A collection of personal essays There is Fire Here was published in September by a small UK publisher, Signal 8 Press. I have long been a fan of the ‘fourth genre,’ and There Is Fire Here has been a satisfying opportunity to bring together fifteen essays spanning the day I dropped out of high school in Texas and left home on the back of a motorbike at sixteen, to my move across the Atlantic to the UK, where I learned how to write poetry.

Some of the joys of being a writer and an academic are the connections between your research, your teaching, your colleagues, and public outreach. My work in creative nonfiction includes my own writing, my teaching, and public engagement—a circle which is finely balanced within my role at the OU.

While I was working on finalising the manuscript for There Is Fire Here, I was asked to serve on the panel that would be revising the third-year Arts & Humanities module, A363 Advanced Creative Writing. I proposed that we expand the teaching on life writing.

Emma Claire Sweeney, the discipline’s Media Lead and a fellow course author, asked if I might like to interview Kit de Waal for the Milton Keynes Literary Festival. De Waal’s debut memoir Without Warning and Only Sometimes had recently been released and the festival needed someone to interview her. It was a dream role. I was sent all her previous books to read, which included several novels and an anthology she edited, Common People. I set those on my bedside table and devoured them.

Kit de Waal

During my conversation with de Waal at Milton Keynes Lit Fest, I confessed in front of the festival audience that I had cried on the train finishing one of de Waal’s novels, My Name Is Leon. In the same way that she had wowed me with her stories, Kit wowed the crowd, made them laugh and cry, held them enthralled for the entire hour. An OU camera team were there to record it all.

Soon, clips from that conversation with Kit de Waal will be part of the next iteration of A363 Advanced Creative Writing, a culmination of research, teaching and public engagement woven through bespoke teaching materials for the OU. I’ve sent Kit a copy of my book, and fingers crossed, she’ll be attending my online book launch on Wednesday 8th November, when I’ll be in conversation with brilliant UK writer, Zoe Lambert.

Tickets are free and it will be a relaxed evening. I’ll be joining from Cumbria, in a comfy spot by the woodstove. Grab your favourite drink, settle in somewhere cozy and join us.

Lania Knight

Lania Knight holds a BSc in Plant Science and Environmental Conservation from the University of New Hampshire, and an MA and PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri. She is the author of four books, including two novels, Three Cubic Feet, shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award in Debut Fiction, and Remnant, a dystopian novel set in the American Midwest, as well as a poetry pamphlet Single-Track B-Road, and a collection of personal essays There Is Fire Here.

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