Editors of , Diran Adebayo, Blake Morrison and Jane Rogers have a retrospective muse on the selection process, the notion of post-post-colonial writing, the politics and trade-offs involved in editing, and literary envy.
BLAKE
Blake Morrison © Mark Gerson
One of the great things for me about editing this anthology has been getting to know new voices – whether people I'd never heard of, or people I'd just not got round to reading. I used to work as a literary editor on the , and later the , and I'd have to send out new fiction and poetry for review, so I was seeing most of what was being published, and actually reading some of it too. But for the past few years I've worked on my own as a full-time writer, and it's harder (and more expensive) to keep up. So editing has been a revelation, and certainly more pleasure than grind. I might never have read Nick Barlay, for instance, who I think is terrific, and as good as Martin Amis at capturing certain images and timbres of contemporary urban life. On the strength of his stories in , I went out and bought three of his novels, and I'll be reading everything he publishes from now on.
DIRAN
Diran Adebayo © Virago
I'd certainly agree with Blake that when you write full-time you tend to read less, and editing has likewise given me a very useful overview of some of the stuff that's out there, or wants to be out there, across the different writing forms. Useful for me as a writer, one because, as you go though the tonnage of submissions, you are placed so firmly back in the someway forgotten position of the reader's chair; secondly because, even in the mediocre submissions, there is often a turn of phrase, or a wisdom, or an angle of approach to something that is novel to you and which you can learn from; and thirdly, because in making the key editorial judgements of what should and shouldn't go in, you find yourself developing an ever clearer view of what you think good writing is. A certain arc of confidence has been a notable feature of editing for me: to begin with, reading quickly through so much stuff, and a fair amount of it much of a muchness but not actively bad, and sometimes the submissions from published authors not necessarily better than those from unpublished ones, you start to wonder whether you can properly say that X is better than Y. On what grounds?... But then you read the gems – writing that is distinctive and attentive, work that is bringing something new or true into the world – and your faith in the idea that there is a difference between X and Y, almost in the nobility of your profession, is restored.
I'm pleased that we have non-fiction pieces in our anthology. A former journalist myself, like Blake, I know that that is where many fine writers 'go', but here they've been able to write on themes and in forms they would have struggled to in their usual homes. It may have been, actually, that the non-fiction contributors were at something of an advantage compared to creative writers in that I always felt more at ease editing/amending a non-fiction piece than a poem or story. With the non-fiction you felt you could work on it, sometimes with the contributor, to make it more what we wanted, whereas somehow a creative writer's words always felt/feels to me more sacrosanct. If I didn't like them, or some of them, I'd be more inclined to ditch the whole piece. So I do have regrets there – a couple of the creative writers who wrote borderline pieces for us who I feel that, had I been less timid in enquiring about changes, might have made the volume.
I imagined too, initially, that I would get more representatives of the spoken-word/performance-poetry world which is quite a big scene in London right now (and one of the main ways that I've been accessing new voices down the years). Unfortunately, most people's work didn't stand strongly enough on the page. You feel, as well, that had you bugged certain potential contributors one more time then maybe they would have delivered on that interesting idea they told you about... normal stuff for editors, I'm sure. One 'regret-free' area, interestingly, was the potentially problematic business of three opinionated editors reaching a consensus on who to include. No doubt the book would be a bit different if any of us had been editing it singly, but I felt we all spoke up for what we liked and articulated our issues or enthusiasms. There were no dramatic divergences in taste. Praise Be!
JANE
Jane Rogers © Anita Shiffer-Fuchs
Diran's point about there being no dramatic divergences in taste between the three of us is an interesting one: it is where tastes diverged that discussion became most intense. We each took a long list of preferred pieces and absolute rejections to our first editorial meeting, and I think all three of us were reassured by how much overlap there was on those lists; for us all, the good writing shone out and we had an immediately agreed core of work for inclusion. Likewise, very little disagreement on what to reject. The process of a story/poem/essay one of us liked and the others hadn't singled out was more complicated. We each came away from that meeting with lists of each other's preferences, and I found myself rereading and thinking about work I had rejected, and working out why I had rejected it. In a way that was the most interesting part of the whole editing process, because it forced me to consider my own prejudices as a reader, the sorts of writing I dismiss very quickly, because I know in advance I don't like it. A useful exercise in humility and an interesting exercise in bargaining – because at the end of the day no two people are ever going to think exactly alike about one piece of work. This anthology contains one piece of work I absolutely dislike, and that I know I conceded it both because I think a taste for that type of writing is a gap in my reading spectrum, and because in conceding it, I gained ground to push harder for the inclusion of a piece I felt more strongly for than either of you two did. The point I want to make here is that yes, the best pieces did hit us all – and that self-selecting the shortlist was the easy part. It was in dealing with the pieces added in, from the longlists, that I found myself learning as a reader, hearing why either of you thought such a piece was good, extending my own range; and also analysing and arguing for those pieces where I saw value and you didn't – being forced to articulate what I had assumed was obvious, exactly what was good in a piece (and occasionally discovering that it didn't stand up to that sort of attention, and could indeed be quietly forgotten). The finished copy looks good, doesnt it? Apart from the typo on page one of the introduction, 'interior monologues musings' – argh!
BLAKE
You both have a few reservations about what's in and what's out (I can guess which piece it is Jane dislikes!), and I suppose that's true for me as well. But let's not be too downbeat. There were more nice surprises than nasty ones. I was especially struck by the range of voices coming at us. You remember the talk a few years ago about The Empire Striking Back – this was in the wake of the early successes of Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Michael Ondaatje, Caryl Philips, Rohinton Mistry, etc. On the evidence of this anthology I'm tempted to say the empire's striking back more than ever, but I'm not sure the phrase has much meaning today. I prefer to think in post-post-colonialist terms of a multiplicity of Englishes – there's the English spoken in Harare and Hobart as well as Hoxton and Huddersfield, and the old hierarchies which said that one kind of English is 'better' or 'more correct' than another have disappeared. Often what brings English alive is precisely its impropriety – its local accent, its colloquial idiom, its unfettered tongue. I don't only mean street talk, and anyway street talk can be immensely sophisticated. For instance, Julian Gough plays with the language of economics, and the Nairobi dialect used in Binyavanga Wainaina's piece doesn't preclude the discourse of literary gossip and lit crit. To state the obvious: good writing enlarges our sense of the world and of the possibilities of literature; it provides information as well as entertainment; and there's writing of that kind in this anthology. Which makes me pleased to have been involved in it.
DIRAN
I hope that Blake's phrase 'post-post-colonialist' writing gains wider currency. Certainly, something needs to come along to replace 'post-colonial'. As something of a veteran of post-colonial seminars and conferences I have never been comfortable about my work, and the work of other non-whites born and bred in the UK, being discussed in that context. Although as the child of Nigerian migrants my presence here stemmed from the colonial relationship, growing up here you don't feel 'post' anything. The English language is as natural to you as it is to your white English peers/friends, the culture too, except that, with your other, family culture one that you're answering too also, you tend to have a more detached attitude towards UK culture. Growing up in an immigrant-rich, fairly working-class neighbourhood, I was aware of the naturalness of different registers of spoken English spoken and of different points of view on UK culture, with those around me embracing it to a greater or lesser degree. All of which is to say that I suspect those experiences sharpened whatever literary biases I naturally had – predilections which, as Jane noted, become very apparent when editing a book of this nature. I like particularity – it could be in the point of view, or tone, or language a writer uses (I often remember what the Russian Formalist critics said about literature being work that 'defamiliarises language...makes us see differently...'), or just a sense you have in reading that you're tuned in to a unique consciousness. As such, I'm very pleased that we have pieces such as Nick Barlay's, Sophie Woolley's, Sukhdev Sandhu's, Emma Brockes' and Binyavanga Wainaina's in this volume.
BLAKE
I know it's an invidious exercise, but if, say, you were urging someone to buy the book and they were allowed to sample half a dozen contributions, which pieces would you make them read? I'd say: the novel extracts from Glenn Patterson and Julian Gough; the poems by Vicki Feaver and Alan Jenkins; Nick Barlay's three monologues; and Sophie Woolley's story. And that's leaving out all the non-fiction (eg. Alex Clark, Ian Sansom and Sukhdev Sandhu), which is tough.
JANE
This is a cruel thing to do, there are more than six pieces I'd recommend to anyone! But here goes: three are overlaps with Blake – Glenn Patterson, Nick Barlay and Vicki Feaver, all so good it makes you jealous. And then: Julia Brosnan's extract (from a novel still looking for a publisher, incredibly); Helon Habila's evocative, chilly ; and Jane Stevenson's passionate essay on Hunger.
DIRAN
Overlap again: I have a top nine (though I like five others almost as much) : Sophie Woolley, Nick Barlay, Julian Gough, Sukhdev Sandhu, Jane Stevenson, Alan Jenkins, Glenn Patterson, Vicki Feaver, Binyavanga Wainaina. At a pinch, if you ask me what I'd recommend (slightly different from what I like) then, to showcase our volume's different strengths most quickly, I'd go for the first six.
Diran Adebayo worked as a journalist and in television before publishing his first novel '' which won the Saga Prize and a Betty Trask award. His new novel, is due out in 2004.
Blake Morrison is a novelist, poet, critic, playwright and writer of non-fiction. His first novel, is a fictional account of the life of the fifteenth-century printer. His non-fiction includes two family memoirs and .
Jane Rogers is a novelist and teaches creative writing on the MA course at Sheffield Hallam University. Her novels include (which she adapted for television herself), and . She is the editor of the OUP
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