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Issue 47/December 2020

Brittle Star magazine is 20 years old in 2020. Issue 47 is hot off the press and the last issue in our 20th birthday year.

Issue 47 is full of wonderful poetry and short fiction from around the world, as well as articles, features, interviews and revews. Read brand new work from: Peter Arscott, Ben Banyard, Ace Boggess, Max Cavitch, Kathryn Daszkiewicz, Holly Day, Jane Devoy, Jo Dixon, Brian Docherty, Charlotte Edwards, Lara Frankena, John Haynes, Becki Hawkes, Emma Hellyer, Hannah Hodgson, Louisa Hooper, John Kaufmann, Lisa Kelly, Christopher Lanyon, Kik Lodge, Mark McGuinness, Devon Miller-Duggan, Jacques Moulin, William Millar, C.P. Nield, Evanson Njuki, Michele Pollard, Liz Proctor, Mohammad Razai, Shloka Shankar, Kat Siddle, Jean Stevens, June Wentland.

Column by Sarah Pasingham – Rising to the Top of the Pile: Lockdown 2

Short fiction Reviews by Fawzia Muradali Kane – “Never put off for tomorrow what could be put off for the day after tomorrow.”

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Whisky, Tango, Foxtrot

[…] We are living in unprecedented and strange times; times of political change and upheaval, violence in our streets, times of mistrust and no confidence in the people who should be protecting us – politicians, police, military. These are times in which the people who are actually protecting us in very real terms were, until recently, considered low-skilled. They are in fact low-paid – somewhere along the misguided way lack of money has been translated as lack of skills. This is baffling. And the backdrop to this is a global pandemic. I’ve called this editorial ‘Whisky, Tango, Foxtrot’ because the language of the times is startlingly militaristic amongst all the chaos – we are at war, we must stay alert, we will win, we will beat this, we are warriors and heroes, battling on the frontline!

Footage, postings and news reports make it feel like we’re living through one disaster movie after another. Our leaders appear to think so too. However, when they don’t like the direction of the movie they tend to fire the directors, if the directors are scientists, that is. Or in some countries they abandon the film altogether in favour of an action flick with bible wielding would-be hero protecting his property from angry mobs (with no regards or empathy for why they might be angry in the first place). Or in the UK, maybe the movie is the tale of a man so desperate to protect his family in the midst of a plague he’s willing to sacrifice anything – and everyone else – to travel half-way across the country to reach his parents and find sanctuary for his children. But we’re not living in a movie, this is real life. Narratives are played out in real time and by people’s real actions and reactions – they aren’t fiction or film scripts. And, although we’ve been mostly locked in doors draining Netflix of its content, we can tell one from the other. Even if our leaders can’t.

But what has this got to do with art and literature? […]

(Editorial extract by Jacqueline Gabbitas)

Issue 46 of Brittle Star includes poems and stories by Janina Arndt, Edward Avern, Heidi Beck, Alison Binney, Ama Bolton, Jo Brandon, Justine Louise Budenz, Peter Burrows, Tamsin Cottis, Tina Cole, Jane Devoy, Philip Dunkerley, Maia Elsner, Madison Feshler, David Frankel, SK Grout, Karen Green, John Greening, Janet Hatherley, Louisa Hooper, Annette Iles, Fawzia Muradali Kane, Joan Lennon, Stephanie Limb, Simon Maddrell, Cara L McKee, Valeria Melchioretto, Julie Mellor, Jesse River Dylan Merry, Shan Mukhtar, Max Mulgrew, Jane Pearn, Kenneth Pobo, John Pucay, Rebecca Shore, Jill Townsend

Column by Sarah Pasingham – Epistolary Un-lockdown

Poetry Reviews by Paul Blake – Family Trees & Other Dark Woods

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[…] FOR THIS ISSUE, we read a lot of darkness. Graphic violence – especially against women – aggressive sex acts, bodily-fluids – a lot of snot and blood – war-metaphors, broken bodies, broken souls. Too much to read at once, too much to carry around in our heads. The reason for the sheer volume of it is unclear: it could be a witnessing of dark times, a presaging of times ahead of us, it could be that writers, especially poets, think this is what will get them published (and there is some evidence for that), it could be that the season calls for such things, it could be a mass expulsion of a shared anxiety – a sort of collective scream to relieve the pressure of living in our world, it could be desperate voices trying to speak to our dying planet, it could be humans needing to speak to other humans, to say ‘I’ve lived through it too’. It reminds me of Don Paterson’s poem ‘The Scale of Intensity’ building from the ‘Not felt [...] Sea like a mirror’ of the first verse to ‘Damage total […] Sea white’ of the twelfth and final verse. As editors we work with what you send us, and you sent us darkness. Not all the stories and poems in this issue are dark, and those that are have their own windows to be opened. And if the reading this time calls up the Paterson poem it doesn’t mean the world reflects it. Not yet.. (Editorial extract by Jacqueline Gabbitas)

Issue 45 of Brittle Star includes poems and stories by S.P. Hannaway, Stuart Charlesworth, Kitty Coles, Anna Robinson, Katherine Gallagher, Kenneth Durham Smith, Eva Hibbs, Robert Etty, Brian Docherty, Tina Preston, Anna Seidel, Diana Cant, Paul Blake, Kae Banner, Steven Taylor, Trish Kerrison, Di Slaney, Bianca Jaros, Miles Larmour, Anne Ryland, Eleanor Page, Sheila Martin, Sue Johns, Michael Loveday, Yuko Minamikawa Adams, Marcus Smith, Jim Conwell, Katherine Meehan, Daniel Bennett, Pascal Fallas, Sue Wallace-Shaddad

Column by Sarah Pasingham – Short Stories Don’t Have to be Short Fiction
Gavin Jones – “We With Wisest Sorrow Think” – On Ghosts, Loved and Spurious
Fawzia Muradali Kane – Cherrywood and Special Brew: Short Fiction Review

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Issue 44/June 2019

SO MUCH WATER: Sometimes themes arrive when we’re putting a magazine together. It happens organically. […] We like the poems and stories in Brittle Star to live with one another no matter what they’re about, to love one another, build houses together, wage wars, form community gardens, go on rallies, shout out loud about a million things, whisper about a million more. We like the magazine to reflect something of the variety of the worlds in which our writers and readers live, the relationships they might have with other people and things. […]

One thing we do know is that, if this watery work does anything, it does the thing we, as editors, want it to – what I spoke of at the beginning of this editorial – it reflects strongly the world in which we live. It’s a world where the ice-caps are melting, water levels are rising, shorelines disappearing, where plastic bags choke whales. And it’s a world where creatures made up of almost 70% of water respond to it with art, passion, and care for the other creatures made up of water. The next issue may be very different. We may have poems about deserts, stories about nuclear winters, or we may have nothing at all. It will be interesting to see what comes in. (Editorial extract by Jacqueline Gabbitas)

Issue 44 of Brittle Star includes poems and stories by Avril Joy, Ben Verinder, Ciaran Buckley, Gill McEvoy, Gillian Somerscales, Haley Rice, Howard Wright, Ian Patterson, Jack Houston, Jeremy Page, Jill Townsend, Joe Cullen, Jonathan Totman, Jonny Wiles, Josephine von Zitzewitz, Josh Ekroy, Julie Mellor, Kitty Coles, ky li, L Kiew, Lydia Harris, Miriam Patrick, Morgaine Davidson, Phil Knight, Ruth Esther Gilmore, Sarah Passingham, Serge Neptune, Sophie Hopesmith, Stuart Charlesworth, Zoe Mitchell

Column by Sarah Passingham – Titles are the writer’s shop window

Article by Jacqueline Gabbitas – And the Poems Came

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Issue 43/November 2018

Kneeling in a little glade of birch and beech trees, among the rabbit shit and deer shit, I’m listening with headphones to a small black button of a microphone taped with black electrician tape to a birch stump covered in moss. I listen and record. I run my fingers along the very tips of the moss. Have you ever stood near an aeroplane as it took off and heard how it rips the sky with its engines, its velocity, its red shift? My fingers on the moss, heard through this contact microphone, is just this sound. Powerful, ancient, and to the naked ear, inaudible. [...] Or it could be the moss talking to me. My agency on the moss was loud, impressive. I made the sounds by stroking it; tuned the moss in a way. My actions were important, weren’t they? Then, the sound of the moss crackling. [...]

I wonder about agency. About authenticity - this still very fashionable word, especially in poetry. I wonder what the authenticity of this sound is, this crackle, when the agency is imposed. I’d love to know what would happen if I took a contact mic to a poem, to a story? But perhaps I do. Isn’t listening to the poem doing exactly that? Trying to find what it wants to do, how it wants to be written, where it wants to go? Isn’t trying to find the story in the story draft doing the same thing? If I took a contact mic to a story, what would be amplified? The structure I layer it with? The dialogue? My clever little twists and the phrasing I’m so pleased with? Or the semi-, almost sub- conscious, tone of the piece working away at me, trying to talk to me, locked-in, its voice inaudible.

I’m not looking to give answers. In fact, if I think about it, I’m not looking at all. There is such importance given to the visual (we need a strong image, a clear visual metaphor, a symbol) but what of the aural metaphors, the sound symbols? We talk at length about the voice of the writer. We sometimes talk about the voice (or register) of the story, the poem, but how often do we actually listen to the things themselves? … (Editorial extract by Jacqueline Gabbitas)

Issue 43 of Brittle Star includes poems and stories by Ali Pardoe, Brian Docherty, Cecile Hendriks, Christopher Williams, Daniel Bennett, David Harmer, David Lukens, Denise Bennett, Di Slaney, Frank McMahon, Fred Johnston, Gail Harland, Heidi Beck, Howard Wright, James Lewis, Jean Stevens, Joanna Ingham, John Michael Mouskos, John-Paul Burns, Joshua Judson, Kostya Tsolákis, Krishan Coupland, L Kiew, Laura Reinbach, Lauren Garland, Mahdi Ranaee, Mahdi RanaeeTranslation: Simindokht Dehghani, Paula Kaufman, Robin Lindsay Wilson, Sam Reese, Sarah Barnsley, Stephanie J Angelini, Sue Riley, Suzannah V Evans, Terry Trowbridge.

Column by Sarah Passingham – The Benefits of Long Term Memory-Mining

Article by Lucy Hamilton – Festivals & Exchanges: Rich Readings with the Chinese

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There is a justifiable impulse in all writers not just to write, but to have the work received; by a reader, a listener, a viewer even in our age of YouTube and Instagram. We tell ourselves we write for ourselves and, while there is some truth in this, it is, more or less, a lie. Many people, I know, will contend this with me, but you’re reading this editorial in a literary magazine, one that may or may not have published work you’ve written, so bear that in mind, please, when you do. That we write to be read is part of the food chain, one in which we’re nourished and we provide nourishment for others. How does the cliché go? She read the words, hungrily. It’s the hunger that pains us, gives us the shakes, drives us to be sated. We are a text-hungry world, even while we’re still told the message’s medium is the image. Watching the recent friendly match between England and Costa Rica, I was enthralled not just by Welbeck’s goal (we came in late and missed the first goal) or the lovely interplay of passing the ball back, forth and on, but by the rolling advert screens. I must have watched them for a good long minute: Search Lidl, Search Vauxhall, Search Mars. No images that I could see, just simple imperatives for us in an online world.

I think much about the way we use words, why out of all the species on Earth we have two distinct forms of language: spoken and written and, extending this, how splintered language is into other languages. But is splintered the right word? It implies a single core of language that has been shattered, perhaps, or if not so dramatic an act, at least broken up in some way; that a language not our own is a remnant of a damaged thing. And that certainly isn’t the case. When we write, in whatever language, there are commonalities of being human. In writing workshops and in literary criticism we call this ‘universality’ but that implies the universal lived experience is only human, which it isn’t. It’s a small universe if it is. Sharing in these commonalities is part of the hunger; I read to sate that part of me that needs to make sense of the world. I read short fiction but especially poetry to make sense of it more acutely, more distilled, than other forms of writing allow… (Editorial extract, by Jacqueline Gabbitas)

Issue 42 of Brittle Star includes poems and stories by Dan Spencer, Di Slaney, H Alder, Ingrid Leonard, J Mellor, Jim Conwell, John Greening, Josep Chanza, Julie Burke, Julie-ann Rowell, Kathy Pimlott, Kenneth Pobo, Kitty Coles, Miriam Patrick, Patricia Leighton, Pippa Hennessy, Ray Malone, Robert Etty, Sarah Whiteside, Sue Spiers, Tina Preston, Victor Buehring, Zhanna Sizova.

Columns by Wayne Burrows – Rainwater Puddles on a Crazy Golf Course and Sarah Passingham – Finding Flow

Articles by Robert Chandler on Vasily Grossman & an excerpt from ‘Stalingrad’ and Joolz Sparkes and Hilaire – London Undercurrents

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Issue 41 of Brittle Star includes poems and stories by Anna Robinson, Daniel Bennett, Daniel Licht, Ed Cottrell, Greg Forshaw, Jacob Braun, Jean Stevens, Kittie Belltree, Lauren Mason, Lisa Kelly, Martin Reed, Mary Gurr, Myra Barrs, Natalie Whittaker, Olivia Walwyn, Philippa Matthews, Robert Ford, Sam Reese, Sarah Wimbush, Wayne Dean-Richards.

Columns by Wayne Burrows – A Thousand Empty Bowls and Sarah Passingham – When a Comfort Zone is not the Goal

Poetry Reviews by Paul Blake – Psychodramas: Graham Mummery: Meeting my Inners, Maxine Linnell: This Dust, Soundswrite, Shivanee Ramlochan: Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting

Short fiction Reviews by Fawzia Muradali Kane – Walls, Primates, Gods and Tea: Krishan Coupland: When You Lived Inside The Walls and Other Stories and Erinna Mettler: Fifteen Minutes

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Issue 40 of Brittle Star includes poems and stories by Alexandra Melville, Barbara Cumbers, Brian Docherty, Charlotte Baldwin, Christian Wethered, Clive Donovan, Dan Spencer, Daniel Bennett, David Greenslade, Ilse Pedler, Jack Houston, James Aitchison, James Costello O’Reilly, Jen Emery, Jennifer Johnson, Joan Lennon, Joanna Ingham, Joe Carrick-Varty, Jonathan Greenhause, Judith Taylor, Kate Hendry, Kitty Coles, Lara Frankena, Linda Kunhardt, Norbert Hirschhorn, Paul Surman, Penny Ayers, R. S. Stewart, Robin Houghton, Rosamund Brown, Sam Kemp, Steve Xerri, Vicky Morris and Yvonne Eller.

Columns by Wayne Burrows – A Metaphor Backed by Law and Sarah Passingham – Runners, Writers and Support Groups

Reviews by Paul Blake – Fun and Games; first collection reviews – David Clarke: Arc (Nine Arches Press) and Peter Ebsworth: Krapp’s Last Tape – the Musical (flipped eye).

Articles by Anne Holloway – Peer Publishing in the Shed

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IThe latest issue of Brittle Star includes some wonderful short stories and poems, a fascinating article on poetry and song in light of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize win, an instructive piece on the structure of short fiction, reviews of three first full poetry collections (we only review first full collections), and articles on Traverse Poetry Trading Cards and Arkbound publishing.

In this Issue, poems and stories by Julie Mellor, Michael Farry, Edd Ravn, Julian Cloran, James Aitchison, Richie McCaffery, Graham Mort, Jenny Booth, Peter Ebsworth, Stuart Nunn, Julian Flanagan, Sue Burge, Ingrid Leonard, Jayne Marshall, Rodney Wood, Hilaire, Marija Smits, Rachel Thanassoulis, Belinda Rimmer, Stephen Mcnought, Jenny Booth, Miriam Patrick, Sue Dymoke, Laura Seymmour, Kitty Coles, Jay Whittaker, Sarah Marina, Michael W Thomas, Brian Docherty, Dharmavadana, Edd Ravn, Kaye Lee, Sarah Marina, Howard Wright, Clive Eastwood, Dominic Fisher, Kaye Lee, Jeremy Page.

Columns by Wayne Burrows – The Lyric Mode and Sarah Passingham – Not Getting to Grips with Structure.

Reviews by Paul Blake – Vicky Arthurs: Limehaven, Iron Press, Jill Munro: Man from La Paz, Green Bottle Press and Di Slaney: Reward for Winter, Valley Press.

Articles by Stephen Mcnought – Publishing for all: An Introduction to Arkbound and Jacqueline Gabbitas – Put a Human in Your Pocket

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In this Issue, poems and stories by Anne, Diane Mulholland, Terrence Dooley, Donna Berliner, Jonny Wiles, Gill McEvoy, DA Prince, Christine Curtis, Diana Powell, Paul Blake, Naydin Rowland, Lisa Kelly, Elizabeth Newman, Jessica Mookherjee, Kieran Setright, Maggie Sawkins, Rosie Breese, Yannis Sarigiannidis, Pedro Salinas, SP Hannaway, Robin Houghton, Rowena Warwick, Robin Thomas, Shirley Wright, Allen Ashley, Richard John Davis, Jean Harrison, Fred Johnston, Jørn Otte, Julian Dobson, ky li, Martin Reed, Elizabeth Horsley.

Competition poems and stories by Jennie Carr, Jeremy Galgut, Kathleen Bell, Ren Watson, Sue Spier, Nicola Warwick, Kay Harrison, Ella Frears, KM Elkes, Tanya Royer, Sally Jubb, Natalie Whittaker, Polly Tuckett.

Columns columns by Sarah Passingham – No laughing matter and Wayne Burrows – Full Spectrum Poetry.

Columns by Paul Blake – Myra Connell: House, Christy Ducker: Skipper, Zelda Chappell: The Girl in the Dogtooth Coat.

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In this Issue, poems and stories by Polly Tuckett, Alan Dunnett, Anne Stewart, Stuart Pickford, Philippa East, Philip Beverley, Jonathan Totman, Beth Somerford, Brian Docherty, Ali Lewis, Vishvantara, Zoe Mitchell, Lee Nash, Hugo dos Santos, Cat Woodward, Rebecca Gethin, Peter Ebsworth, Howard Wright, Ilse Pedler, Kitty Coles, C M Buckland, D A Prince, Paris Morel, Patri Wright, John Newton Webb, Nick Norton.

With columns by Sarah Passingham – When support is lacking… get onto Twitter and Andrew Bailey – Gaps.

First collection reviews by Paul Blake – What makes a collection? James W Wood: The Anvil’s Prayer and Matthew Hedley Stoppard: A Family Behind Glass.

A Message of Welcome, an article by Jacqueline Gabbitas.

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In this issue, poems and stories by Robin Houghton, Di Slaney, Fawzia Kane, Robert Etty, Terence Dooley, Gill McEvoy, Jocelyn Page, Ian McEwen, Peter Phillips, Julie Mellor, Alan M Kent, Kathy Pimlott, Nicola Warwick, Jonny Wiles, Jenny Danes, Kate Taylor, James W Wood, Stuart Pickford, Gordon Scapens, Simon Collings, Joolz Sparkes, Hilaire, Jack Houston, RG Foster,

First collection reviews by Paul Blake – The Problem of Pain. Bobby Parker: Blue Movie and Karen McCarthy Woolf: An Aviary of Small

With columns by Sarah Passingham – Reading as Performance and Andew Bailey – Something Small and Wonderful.

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In this issue, poems and stories by John Sibley Williams, Jake Campbell, Katherine Reeve, Kyle Cooper, Jennie Carr, Michael Bartholomew-Biggs, David Frankel, Kay Buckley, Jack Houston, Rose McDonagh, Estill Pollock, Clive Donovan, Simon Robson, Nat Newman, Terence Dooley, Dharmavadana, Mark Carson, Kate Woodward, Jonny Wiles, Karen Leeder, Sue Norton, Mary Maher, Dan MacIsaac, Joe Woodhouse, Mandy Haggith, Gary Budden, Kitty Coles, Stewart Carswell, Ruth Stacey, Veronica Barnsley, Jonathan Doering.

With columns by Andrew Bailey – Unfrustrated and Sarah Passingham – Self-Belief.

First collection reviews by Paul Blake – Jemma Borg, The Illuminated World and Angela McCabe, Honeymoon in Coalisland

With an article by Michael Bartholomew-Biggs on London Grip – the inside story