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writing the outside in; an anthology of stories from the edges

About the Author

ELIZABETH BAINES’ latest novel is Astral Travel. She is also the author of the novels Too Many Magpies and The Birth Machine, and two collections of short stories, Balancing on the Edge of the World and Used to Be (all available from Salt). She has written prizewinning plays for Radio 4 and for theatre, and has been an actor and teacher. She lives in
Manchester.

NEIL BARTLETT is an acclaimed author of plays, adaptations, translations and novels. His first novel, Ready To Catch Him Should He Fall, was recently republished by Profile as a Serpent’s Tail Classic, his second, Mr. Clive and Mr. Page, was nominated for the Whitbread Prize in 1996, his third, Skin Lane, was shortlisted for the Costa Award in 2007, his fourth, The Disappearance Boy, earnt him a nomination for Stonewall Author of the Year 2014. Neil is also a maker of theatre, and was awarded an OBE in 2000 in recognition of his work as Artistic Director of the Lyric Hammersmith. He has created work for the National Theatre, RSC, Manchester Royal Exchange, Bristol Old Vic, Edinburgh International Festival, Manchester International Festival, Aldeburgh and Brighton Festivals, Wellcome Foundation, Artangel, Tate Britain—and the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. An expanded version of Twickenham appears in Neil’s new story collection Address Book, published by Inkandescent.

JULIA BELL is a writer and Reader in Creative Writing at Birkbeck where she is the Course Director of the MA Creative Writing. Her work includes poetry, essays and short stories published in the Paris Review, Times Literary Supplement, The White Review, Mal Journal,
Comma Press and recorded for the BBC. Her most recent book-length essay Radical Attention was published by Peninsula Press.

BIDISHA is a broadcaster, writer and film-maker. She writes extensively for The Observer and The Guardian and broadcasts for the BBC, Channel 5 and Sky News—where she has been a regular since 2016. Her fifth book is Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices (Seagull Books, 2015) and her sixth is the essay The Future of Serious Art (Tortoise Media, 2020). Her first film, An Impossible Poison (2017), was selected for numerous film festivals and her latest film series, Aurora (2020), is out now. Bidisha is a longtime trustee of the Booker Prize Foundation.

OLLIE CHARLES is a London born queer writer of prose & poetry. He enjoys exploring gender, identity, celebrity and pop culture within his work. His poem, How to Fall in Love, was a placed winner in the Streetcake Experimental Writing Prize (2020). His poetry has also featured in Lucky Pierre Zine, Queerlings, Poem Atlas and The Babel Tower Notice Board. Ollie is co-founder of Untitled, a literary salon founded to amplify the work of underrepresented writers, and co-editor of Untitled:Voices, a global online journal.

DJ CONNELL was born in New Zealand and has lived and worked in various countries including Australia, Japan, France and the UK. She began her writing career as a newspaper journalist, and also wrote for the international non-profit field and advertising before becoming a novelist. Her first novel Julian Corkle is a Filthy Liar was shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize and optioned by Sarah Radclyffe Productions and Macgowan Films. Her latest novel will be published by Simon and Schuster in 2022. DJ Connell recently moved from London to Sydney.

JUSTIN DAVID is a child of Wolverhampton who has lived and worked in East London for most of his adult life. He graduated from the MA Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London and is a founder member of Leather Lane Writers. His writing has appeared in many print and online anthologies and his debut novella, The Pharmacist, was published by Salt as part of their Modern Dreams series. He is also a well-known photographer. His images of artists, writers, performers and musicians have appeared on the pages of numerous newspapers and magazines including: The Times, The Guardian,
Attitude, Beige, Classical Music Magazine, Gay Times, Out There, Pink Paper, QX and Time Out. Justin is one half of Inkandescent with Nathan Evans. Their first offering, Threads, featuring Nathan’s poetry and Justin’s photography, was long-listed for the Polari First
Book Prize. It was supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

KIT DE WAAL’s debut novel, My Name is Leon was the winner of the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year 2017 and is being adapted for the BBC. In 2016 she founded the Kit de Waal scholarship at Birkbeck, providing a fully-funded place for the MA Creative Writing to a talented student who otherwise would not be able to afford to participate. It is now in its fifth year. Kit’s second novel, The Trick to Time, was longlisted for The Women’s Prize. Her first YA novel, Becoming Dinah was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal Award. In 2019 she crowdfunded Common People an anthology of working class memoir by new and established writers. She co-founded the Primadonna Festival in 2019 and, in response to the Covid-19 crisis, she founded the Big Book Weekend, a free virtual literary festival which had an audience of 24,000. She has won numerous awards for her short stories and flash fiction and has written for performance for BBC Radio 4, The Old Vic, The Abbey Theatre, and co-wrote The Third Day for SKY/HBO. Her latest book, a collection of short stories called Supporting Cast was published in 2020.

NATHAN EVANS is a writer, director and performer whose work in film and theatre has been funded by the Arts Council, toured by the British Council, broadcast on Channel 4 and archived in the BFI Mediatheque. He’s worked at venues including Royal Court, Royal Festival Hall and the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. His films have won awards at the London Short Film Festival and screened at festivals across the world. His poems have been published by Manchester Metropolitan University and longlisted for the Live Canon International Poetry
Prize; his first collection, Threads, was shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize, his second CNUT, is published by Inkandescent. His short stories have appeared in Untitled: Voices and Queerlings. Nathan is one half of Inkandescent and studied fine art at Oxford University.

LISA GOLDMAN is a writer, dramaturg, director and social tech entrepreneur. Plays include immersive, site specific Hoxton Story (2005), Cable Street (National Theatre Connections 2022 and screenplay) and Remedy (Writer’s Attachment, National Theatre Studio 2021). Lisa
is author of The No Rules Handbook for Writers (Bloomsbury/Oberon 2012) and is a busy script consultant. As Artistic Director and Joint Chief Executive of the Red Room (1995-2006) and Soho Theatre (2006-10), she developed, directed and produced numerous award-winning new plays. This is her first published fiction.

GAYLENE GOULD is a creative director, cultural broadcaster and award-winning writer. Her short stories have been published in Mechanics Institute Review, Closure: Contemporary Black British Short Stories and X-24 Unclassified. She won the Commonword Penguin Young
Adult Fiction Prize. She also creates interactive art projects and events through her company The Space To Come, is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4 arts programmes, and writes for Sight & Sound and other culture publications.

ALEX HOPKINS is a journalist of many years standing. He has worked as an editor of several print and online magazines, including Beige magazine, a high-end quarterly publication and digital platform which provided a fresh approach to LGBT culture and heritage. Most recently, he was research manager for a leading NGO investigating civilian harm on the battlefield. He is currently working on his first novel.

KATHY HOYLE is a working-class writer, born and raised in a North-East fishing town. She came to writing late in life, after spending twenty years as Cabin Crew. She completed her BA (Hons) in Creative Writing from The Open University by writing essays in hotel rooms around the world. She has since completed an MA at The University of Leicester. Her work has been published in litmags including Spelk, Ellipsizine, Lunate, Virtualzine and Reflex Fiction, and her stories have been shortlisted in competitions such as The Exeter Short Story
Prize, The Fish Memoir Prize and Spread the Word’s Life Writing Prize.

KERRY HUDSON was born in Aberdeen. Her first novel, Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-Cream Float Before he Stole my Ma was the winner of the Scottish First Book Award while also being shortlisted for the Southbank Sky Arts Literature Award, Guardian First Book Award, Green Carnation Prize, Author’s Club First Novel Prize and the Polari First Book Award. Kerry’s second novel, Thirst, won France’s prestigious award for foreign fiction the Prix Femina Etranger and was shortlisted for the European Premio Strega in Italy. Her latest book and memoir, Lowborn, takes her back to the towns of her childhood as she investigates her own past. It was a Radio 4 Book of the Week, a Guardian and Independent Book of the Year. It was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and Portico Prize and shortlisted in the National Book Token, Books Are My Bag Reader’s Awards and the Saltire Scottish Non-Fiction Book of
the Year. She was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020.

HEDY HUME was born in 1996, on the Isle of Man. They studied Drama & English Literature at Aberystwyth University, graduating in 2018. They are currently living and working in Cumbria, close to the Lake District. Their prose writing is inspired by Franz Kafka and Ursula K. Le Guin. They enjoy reading and writing poetry, and are obsessed with cats, frogs, and other uncanny creatures.

IQBAL HUSSAIN studied Mathematics at a small Welsh university, but later chose to earn a living with words. He worked as a journalist for many years, for publications ranging from The Guardian’s Education Supplement to The Young Telegraph. He was shortlisted for the Penguin Random House WriteNow 2017 programme and is an alumni of the inaugural London Writers Awards 2018. He won Gold for his short story Home from Home for the Creative Future Writers’ Award 2019. Iqbal is working on his first novel, Northern Boy, a coming-of-age story about what it feels like to be a ‘butterfly among the bricks’.

JULIET JACQUES (b. Redhill, 1981) is a writer and filmmaker, based in London. She has published two books, Rayner Heppenstall: A Critical Study (Dalkey Archive, 2007) Trans: A Memoir (Verso, 2015), with a collection of short stories about the history of trans and non-binary in the UK, Variations, due out on Influx Press in June 2021. Her essays, criticism and journalism have appeared in numerous publications, and her short films have screened at
galleries and festivals worldwide. She also hosts the arts podcast Suite (212).

KEITH JARRETT is a writer, educator and international poetry slam champion. His poem, From the Log Book, was projected onto St. Paul’s Cathedral as an installation. His play, Safest Spot in Town, was performed at the Old Vic and aired on BBC Four. His collection,
Selah, was published in 2017. Keith was selected for the International Literary Showcase as one of 10 outstanding LGBT writers in the UK. He has judged the Polari Prize, the Foyle Young Poets Award, and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2021. Keith is now teaching
at Birkbeck University and completing his debut novel.

JONATHAN KEMP’s debut novel London Triptych won the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award. The Guardian called it ‘an ambitious, fastmoving, and sharply written work’ and Time Out called it ‘a thoroughly absorbing and pacy read’. His next book, Twentysix (2011), was a collection of queer erotic prose poems. A second novel, Ghosting, appeared in March 2015. His non-fiction includes The Penetrated Male (Punctum Books 2012) and, Homotopia? Gay Identity, Sameness & the Politics of Desire in 2016. He teaches creative writing at Middlesex University and London Lit Lab.

NEIL LAWRENCE grew up in Liverpool then moved to London where he taught Wellbeing Education in secondary schools for 25 years. He is now a life coach and organisational consultant. His short story Diaspora was chosen to be included in the Arachne Press anthology Solstice Shorts 2019: Time and Tide. He is currently redrafting a novella of short stories, Absurdity of Truth: 11 Tales of the Fantastic and The Mundane and an experimental novel Sometimes Lies. He is a member of writing groups WOOA (Writers of Our Age) and Leather Lane Writers, and lives with his partner in South East London.

GISELLE LEEB grew up in South Africa and lives in Nottingham. Her short stories have appeared in over thirty publications including Best British Short Stories 2017 (Salt), Ambit, Mslexia, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, The Lonely Crowd, Black Static, Litro. She has placed and been shortlisted in competitions including the Ambit, Bridport and Mslexia. She is a Word Factory Apprentice Award winner 2019/2020 and an assistant editor at Reckoning Journal.

POLIS LOIZOU is a multidisciplinary storyteller who draws on history, social politics, folklore and ‘queerness’ in all its forms. His debut novel, Disbanded Kingdom, was published in 2018 and was longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize. His second novel, The Way It Breaks, is set in his motherland of Cyprus and will be published in 2021. He lives in Nottingham with his husband.

NEIL MCKENNA is an award-winning journalist and writer. After a successful career writing about gay issues in the gay press and in the wider national press, Neil turned to gay history. He is the author of the acclaimed biography The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde and the bestselling Fanny and Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England. Neil is now writing fiction and completing a novel. He lives in London and Norfolk with his partner,
Robert, and their cat, Lupin.

PAUL MCVEIGH’s debut novel, The Good Son, won The Polari First Book Prize and The McCrea Literary Award, and was shortlisted for many others including the Prix du Roman Cezam. Paul’s plays and comedy shows toured the UK and Ireland including the Edinburgh
Festival and London’s West End. His short stories have appeared in anthologies, journals, newspapers, on BBC Radio 3, 4 & 5 and Sky Arts. He co-founded the London Short Story Festival. He co-edited the Belfast Stories anthology, and edited Queer Love and The 32: An
Anthology of Irish Working Class Writers which included new work by Kevin Barry and Roddy Doyle.

GOLNOOSH NOUR studied English Literature at Shahid Beheshti University and completed a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at Birkbeck. Her short story collection The Ministry of Guidance was recently published by Muswell Press. Her debut poetry collection Sorrows of the Sun was published in 2017. She has been widely published and platformed both in the UK and internationally, including on the BBC and Granta. Golnoosh teaches Creative Writing at the University of Bedfordshire and hosts a monthly radio show called Queer Lit on Soho
Radio Culture.

AISHA PHOENIX is completing a speculative fiction novel. Her collection, Bat Monkey and Other Stories, was shortlisted for the SI Leeds Literary Prize and she has been longlisted for the Guardian/4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize, the Bath Short Story Award and the Fish Flash Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in: Peepal Tree Press’s Filigree, the National Flash Fiction Day anthology, the Bath Flash Fiction anthology, Strange Horizons and Litro USA Online. She has an MA in Creative Writing (Birkbeck) and a PhD in Sociology (Goldsmiths).

PHILIP RIDLEY was born and grew up in the East End of London. He studied painting at St Martin’s School of Art. He makes images and tells stories in various media. His first two novels, Crocodilia (1988) and In the Eyes of Mr Fury (1989), and his short story collection, Flamingoes in Orbit (1990), are now regarded as LGBTQ classics. In 2012 What’s On Stage named him one of the most influential British writers to have emerged in the past six decades. He has won both the Evening Standard’s Most Promising Newcomer to British Film and Most Promising Playwright Awards—the only person ever to receive both prizes.

CHRIS SIMPSON grew up in Bracknell and Slough. He has worked as a waiter, a cinema projectionist, a shoe salesman, an attendant in an amusement arcade, hiring out construction and demolition tools, a pasty seller, a caretaker for a primary school, a teaching assistant, a tutor and a facilities manager. He has also performed as a stand-up comedian. In 2020 he had a special mention for the Spread The Word 2020 Life Writing Prize. In 2019 he was nominated for the inaugural Agora and PFD Lost The Plot Prize. In 2018 he was an awardee of the inaugural Spread The Word’s London Writers Award. He received a First in Creative Writing at BA level from Birkbeck University. In 2016 he was
nominated for the Royal Academy and Pin Drop Short Story Award 2016. He lives in London.

LUI SIT was born in Hong Kong, raised in Australia and now lives in London. She is currently completing her first middle grade children’s book. She was longlisted in Spread the Word Life Writing Prize 2018 and shortlisted in the Penguin WriteNow 2018 Memoir category. She is an alumnus of the Spread the Word 2018-19 London Writers Award. She has a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Murdoch University and a Graduate Certificate in Creative Writing from Birkbeck University. She won the 2020 Superlative Short Story Competition
and is a recipient on the, A Brief Pause development scheme.

PADRIKA TARRANT was born in 1974. Her teenage years were complicated; she has had about ten psychiatric holidays in her time, and lived a few dull years in residential care. Much later, emerging blinking from an honours degree in sculpture, Padrika found herself unhealthily fixated with scissors and surrealism. She won an Arts Council Escalator prize in 2005. Her books include Broken Things (Salt 2007), long listed for the Frank O’Connor Prize and The Knife Drawer (Salt, 2011), shortlisted for the Authors’ Club first Novel Prize. These days she lives in Norwich in a little council flat with her beautiful daughter and some lovely stuffed animals.

Reviews

"In these locked down and unfocused times the short story is a much needed respite from the current Covid-19 bleakness. With Mainstream, Inkandescent has gathered together a wonderful collection of fascinating and eclectic stories. Sad, funny, horrifying and demystifying, the unique voices within take us on an open-minded journey around the world. Loved it." – Kathy Burke; "A riveting collection of stories, deftly articulated. Every voice entirely captivating: page to page, tale to tale. These are stories told with real heart from writers emerging from the margins in style." – Ashley Hickson-Lovence, author of The 392 and Your Show; "A triumphant celebration of exiled voices" – Cash Carraway, author of Skint Estate; “MAINSTREAM. An Anthology of Stories from the Edges was published by the indie publisher Inkandescent, crowdfunded through Unbound and edited by Justin David and Nathan Evans, who also run the press. So many aspects about this book and the stories caught my interest – from the publisher to the crowdfunding campaign, to the way they 'found' the authors and, of course, the stories themselves. I’m always a bit nervous to write about anthologies, concerned not to do justice to their authors and the breadth of their topics, takes and techniques, but I will give it my best because I really enjoyed it and encountered so many authors I would like to read more from. The publishers actually had me at their name… (I’m a sucker for an evocative pun). But it’s not just the name, it’s also their "by outsiders for outsiders" statement and their invitation in the anthology’s dedication that reads: "for everyone who’s ever been kept out because of who you are or where you are from, come in…" I’ve heard a few of those promises and they often wake the cynic in me. After having read the stories in the anthology and after having browsed their front- and backlist, this seems to be one of the genuine ones. Interestingly, in our research about the 'diversity' in British publishing, my colleague Anamik Saha and I encountered an unease or ignorance of publishing staff about how to approach and sell to people beyond the white middle-class and their fictitious impersonation "Susan". Inkandescent just do it. Another revealing but maybe not surprising observation is that MAINSTREAM (Inkandescent, 2021) – just like Common People (Unbound, 2019 ), The 32: An Anthology of Irish Working Class Writers (Unbound, 2022), The Good Immigrant (Unbound, 2016; UK edition), and Nasty Women (404ink, 2017), to name just a few – is yet another crowdfunded anthology that aims to rectify an imbalance in publishing and give a stage to voices that are often marginalised and/or ignored. I’ll leave it at that. Golnoosh Noor read from her story "Happy Ending" at the anthology’s launch in July 2021. There are 30 contributions in this anthology – 15 written by established writers, 15 by emerging ones – and it’s rather impossible to sum them all up. They vary in style, theme, mode, perspective and every other possible element of a good story. Some follow realistic conventions, others not at all; one contribution even uses the structure of a nursery rhyme. While some stories are rather straight-forward, others take more time to figure out. The narrators reveal different levels of reliability, but they all suck you into their respective story. I was tempted to just quote some of the endorsements, but I’ll try to be more specific. Let me start with this first observation: what the stories have in common is that they don’t fall into the trap of the single story. There would have been many opportunities to tell the story of a queer Muslim woman in Iran and Saudi Arabia or an encounter between a gay teenager and an older man in the lavatories of a train station that would have perpetuated the stereotypes with which we are so often confronted. Golnoosh Nour ("Happy Ending") and Neil Bartlett ("Twickenham") created complex characters and scenarios with round characters (and, in my opinion, very credible teenage minds) that give you a completely different view. Throughout the book, I found, the round characters provided a welcome change from often stereotypical depictions of, e.g. gay teenagers, working-class children, trans women, people who are HIV positive, street sweepers (not that I have come across that many before), and Muslim families. In the MAINSTREAM anthology, you will find stories written from the point of view of children and elderly people with dementia and everything in between. In fact, the stories are arranged according to the age of the characters and that makes for a very interesting read (says the person who likes to jump around in anthologies). Some of the recurring topics are the barriers that marginalised people encounter in the UK and beyond – and it’s not just London or England and not just contemporary settings – experiences of a pressure to conform as well as the search for and finding ones 'tribe'. Hedy Hume’s "The Beach" is such a story about the life-changing effect that the encounter of a loving community and becoming part of it can have. Some stories are told in retrospect from a more mature perspective, so we’re observing the characters trying to make sense of their lives and how they got where they are now. In "The Beach", the retrospective is interrupted by some memories on another time level, while the act of remembering and sense-making is solved differently in other contributions. In Neil Bartlett’s "Twickenham", the narrator thinks about the many "kinds of silence there are in this story" and how these could be seen as "places we might need to get back to, if we are ever to understand how we got from there to here". Families play a rather important role throughout the anthology. As they do in life, I guess. Here, I felt they were often included as the first space in which the characters explored their identities – or the first collective that demanded conformity ("people like us aren’t like that" – Nathan Evans, "Going Up, Going Down"). Many contributions directly or indirectly allude to the past and the families of their protagonists. How families can be a loving and nurturing environment, or how they can have a detrimental effect on the very fabric of your body (an allusion to "Scaffolding" by Giselle Leeb). And in some cases, the reflection of the protagonists can change their perception of the past: “sometimes the way we choose to love perpetuates the damage we seek to diminish.” (Alex Hopkins, "Last Visit") However, the stories are never just about one thing, one aspect of a character’s identity, one issue with the family or one ‘problem’ they need to overcome. They are also not 'just' about the struggles the off-mainstream characters face, even though it does play a role how the characters are marginalised and hindered in their choices by ‘mainstream’ society. Or how they are discriminated within what one could see as ‘their own’ community at first glance, e.g. for being gay and HIV-positive. The 30 stories leave lots of space to come to one’s own conclusion. And they also provide opportunities to check your own perception and maybe even your own tendency to pigeon-hole as you read.” – Sandra van Lente, Literary Field; "Mainstream, the new anthology of short stories from Inkandescent, is a kaleidoscope of experiences. For a reviewer, this is a challenge — it seemed almost impossible to compress each narrative together into one single review. The resounding message from the collection, ‘stories from the edges’, is as promised in the title and also more – these are universal challenges told from the margins, but also with the ugliness and discomfort which is symptom of demystifying hard truths. Mainstream should come with a trigger warning: it’s furious and it doesn’t take prisoners. You can expect to feel uncomfortable as you intrude on the lives of each of the narrators in these works. You can also rest assured that nothing will be glamorised for your benefit. David and Evans write in their introduction that their publishing company was: founded "by outsiders for outsiders", to celebrate original and diverse talent and to publish voices and stories the mainstream neglects – specifically those of the working class and financially disadvantaged, ethnic minorities, the LGBTQ+ community and, crossing the Venn diagram, those with physical disabilities and mental health issues. From this, you can gain that Mainstream will not be a smooth or homogenous read, but I also had my concerns upon reading this. Would it be one of those book collections that only accepted each ‘minority’ writer under a certain condition? That they might be compelled to only talk about their particular disadvantage? But Inkandescent are more aware than that. While each story does chime with the next, following a coming-of-age trajectory that navigates desire, identity and self-worth, there is very little else that joins each of the writers together. Whether you are reading about the fantastical island of Massor in Bidisha’s 'The Initiation' or the heart-wrenching autofiction-esque talk on a park bench in DJ Cornell’s 'Coup de Grace', there is a lack of pandering to a reader’s desire for a similar tone or genre. There are no heroic, plain and likeable underdogs. Cruelty and neglect are systemic to the five very different childhoods that are presented in the opening five stories by Kathy Hoyle, Lui Sit, Padrika Tarrant, Lisa Goldman and Gaylene Gould respectively. The distorted grip on reality that each of these young narrators show reveal real worlds that have turned against them, although some understandings of this are better than others. In Lisa Goldman’s 'Easy Peelers', the death of a loved one and the discrediting of the working class are recounted through the easily impressionable nature of a young girl. With her mastery of the slightly-altered language in this piece, the writer shows how an impressionable mind is shifted from what is real into the dominant version of a tragedy: where being an 'easy peeler' is due to your own laziness, where ‘England’s plugged into the sun’ and it’s ‘making the world better […] because we’re the best and things are bad', and finally where the 'May Day Massacre' can be quickly softened into the 'London riots'. Innocence is synonymous with invisibility, and imaginative inner worlds are often discredited in these stories – 'we’d just read a story about an alien who talked to a flower [..] she had to believe me,' Lui Sit’s narrator writes in 'Giant’' and yet his inner world must be disbelieved if he is to conform to his mother’s idea of the real world. The final story I wanted to single out from this impressive, opening five was Gaylene Gould’s 'The Spinney'. Tracing the movement through puberty of a young woman, Gould presents stigmas around period shame and rape culture in the unfolding of a painful warning tale. The power of myths written in to cover up a taboo, in this case the 'Witch' who is fabricated in the place of a rape at school, holds such influence that it remains with the narrator even when she reaches adulthood with a daughter of her own — 'Elaine breaks into a run and with each breathless step reminds herself that she is no longer ten years old, and that there is no such thing as witches, especially those that come to take your bleeding daughter as retribution.' The power of the myth is tangible and silencing, leaving a terrible taste in the reader’s mouth. Being susceptible to the power of someone (or something) else is also another ongoing presence throughout the collection, and there are no sudden acts of heroism or deus ex machinas popping out through the structures of any of these stories. Neil Bartlett’s 'Twickenham', Golnoosh Nour’s 'Happy Ending', Juliet Jacques’s 'A Review of "A Return"', Justin David’s 'Serosorting' and Keith Jarrett’s 'It May Concern' all resonate in their navigation of love and its disturbing relationship with power. Sometimes brutally sensory and exciting, other times revealing the blandness of casual relationships, self-worth is often a victim here. As Keith Jarrett’s narrator writes — 'I searched for the ugliness I thought I deserved'. Being an object of desire also feeds off these narrators, and relationships are formed out of disassociations where even being named becomes a danger — 'if you name something, you can fix it to you'. There is also a lonely beauty in the language and detail of these stories too, like this passage from Neil Bartlett’s 'Twickenham': 'Most inexplicably of all, there’s a piano — really — a great, big, black grand piano– something I didn’t know anybody had in their house — and it seems to be collecting all the light in the room. The lid is a pool of oil — and there’s a sheet of music on it, floating. It looks like something somebody must have lost.' Another connection to make between these stories is an obsession with physical and psychological dismorphias. Giselle Leeb’s haunting 'Scaffolding' is a frightening study of the psychosomatic, finding parallels with DJ Connell’s comment in 'Coup de Grace' that 'this caring for the bruises of others was what had me trapped'. The AIDS crisis looms in several of the stories too – it is a grim shadow running through the bodies and psyches of multiple characters. Justin David’s character in 'Serosorting' pointedly marks it as the 'grubby stains of mortality… an infection running through us all […] we are all unclean'. Polis Loizou’s 'Pixmalion' is a subtle study of the impact of social media on the modern relationship. Louizou’s multimedia narrative describes the defensive rhythms of messaging a stranger online, and the desire to seem both unattainable and uninterested: 'There’s a "sticker" on the photo, with a flame emoji to slide up so as to express your lust for him. It takes Herculean effort, but I only slide the flame to just over halfway. I’m sure I’m alone in doing so. Let his ego be starved a little; the doubt may even nourish him.' This piece exposes those safe, 'screen' flirtations which usually trail off immediately. It is brilliantly captured. Iqbal Hussein’s 'The Reluctant Bride' is the study of the Partition, in which the harsh politics of love are told through the allure of an almost unbelievable fairy tale. A homage to the magical realist format, a semi-real churail narrates the piece with a playful layering of stories and a spine that 'rat-a-tats like a burst of firecrackers'. Full of imagination yet equally weighted and painful, I was glad that the curators of this anthology included the more fantastical and speculative genres alongside pieces that were more obviously social commentary. Mainstream is blunt, sexy and unapologetic. I was intrigued by the liveliness of each voice that Inkandescent gave ear to, and the great difficulty for a reviewer trying to pull each of the works together. Each story is its own very different act of defiance, making for an unexpected and addictive read.” – Georgie Proctor, The Word Factory