Book Review: Pupa

Pupa, by J.O. Morgan, is another triumph from the Henningham Family Press. The author has created a story of the pains and pleasures of young love – although the emotions portrayed are never described in this way – that is eerily disturbing. It explores repercussions when one party chooses to move in a new and unanticipated life direction.

The protagonists – Sal and Megan – are not human as we would understand the term, and yet they populate a world recognisable for its behaviours. The power of the novel comes from the skill with which this world is built and gradually revealed, avoiding detailed exposition yet giving the reader everything they need to know to understand why choices are made. What comes to the fore is how any future remains unknown until personally experienced, however much research and preparation is undertaken. Even those trusted will, at times, prove unpredictable.

The story is divided into two sections – early phase and late phase. It opens with Sal in bed at home recounting a dream, and provides the first descriptions of what we will learn are known as larvae – the juveniles of the population. Sal lives with his father, Madox, although this older being is also a larval.

Adults exist, such as a family acquaintance, Inspector Augustine, who claims he wants to help Sal with whatever decisions he makes. Free choice and support is available, but the young do not always fully understand or trust the vague promises and reassurances of their elders. Occasional transcripts from radio broadcasts suggest a strange type of propaganda is being deployed.

The larvae are humanoid if not human. The young are fragile creatures but as they grow become capable of working repetitively. I was drawn to examine, as the story unfolded, how every stage in their development can easily be transposed onto our own life choices and changes – emotional as well as physical. Any such comparison is subtle and nuanced, adding depth without clagging the flow of reveals.

Larvae can pupate and, in this world, it is a choice, but one that comes with risk. Lurking in the shadows are beings who choose to destroy potential lives, something Augustine’s job requires him to investigate and which he attempts to share with Sal.

There are areas of housing within the locality of the setting regarded as dodgy, in which goings on are kept hidden despite authorities being aware of what is likely happening there. Sal and Madox are just beginning to explore what lies beyond the routine of their safely controlled day to day, although doing so individually. Each wants to share with the other but fears their disapproval.

The undercurrents may be disturbing but this is not a horror story. Rather, it holds a mirror to our own supposed civilised existence, reflecting attributes that discomfort when stripped of veneer. The precision of the prose is impressive, enabling the plot to retain pleasing momentum even as it percolates.

The build up to the denouement is imaginative while oozing trepidation. The author skilfully renders some of the costs of maturation.

As with every book from this press, the physical form is something special. From the feel of the cover through the artistic end papers and quality typesetting, the complete product is a pleasure to hold and peruse. All this would, of course, add little if the story told were not so beguiling and engaging. An audacious and highly recommended read.

My copy of this book was provided gratis by the publisher, Henningham Family Press. 

Q&A with Henningham Family Press

Henningham Family Press is a microbrewery for books.
Our ingenioous handmade editions can be found in the V&A, Tate, National Galleries Scotland, National Poetry Library and Stanford University.
Our Performance Publishing shows compress the creation of printed matter into hectic live events.
Now our Fiction brings to you authors who are reinventing the conventions of Modern writing.

 

Today I welcome David from Henningham Family Press who kindly answered my questions on his innovative press and the form of the book. I recently reviewed their most recent publication, The Blackbird, noting that as well as being a fine story, the book itself is a work of art.

 

Can you tell me a little about Henningham Family Press and why it was set up?

Ping and myself have been working together since 2006, making fine art prints, Artists’ Books and Performances. Our work is collected by places like V&A, Tate, Stanford University, National Galleries Scotland, as well as by regular people. We started our fiction list in 2018; we wanted to see if we could get the same pages on the shelves of High Street bookshops that we were placing with national collections.

How do you select the titles you wish to acquire?

The books we hunt for have the same playful, intellectual spirit as the work we’ve been making since 2006. We look for formal invention, like Mr. Beethoven by Paul Griffiths, or books like The Blackbird by Claire Allen or Now Legwarmers by Pascal O’Loughlin, which take the conventions of the novel in new directions. Vivid imagery or process-based writing is good for us, as we can develop them as Artists’ Books. We aren’t ideal for the debut novelist; we can accomplish so much in our studio that the newbie tends to be overwhelmed by the possibilities. So we most often work with people who have already cut their teeth in another discipline, such as the poet Chris McCabe, or Griffiths’ music criticism and librettos.

What about the form of the book – what do your buyers want?

We make a paperback and a handmade deluxe edition of every novel, using the same offset litho printed pages for both. All the covers, paperback and deluxe, are handmade in our studio, most often on our foil debossing press. The paperbacks are bound by TJ International. We insert handmade additions and hand-bind the deluxe editions in the studio — we make them up as we go along.

The Blackbird is no exception. Both editions are illustrated in black and yellow. One of Claire Allen’s characters, Robert, was a civic sculptor in his prime. As a Sculpture MA (Slade), this was something I understood very well. I did drawings from life as he would have done for his public artwork Hide And Seek. We took children to the park to play the game. When they were discovered, they had to remain still for as long as the countdown had taken, and my drawing was executed within that time. 30, 10, 5, even 1 second. This way the pose was natural. I also did charcoal sketches of a Blackbird that took up residence in our back garden. We’ve never had one before, so — thank you Mr Blackbird.

We were approached by G.F Smith papers, to see what we could do with their new Urban range. The paper is, I believe, literally concrete. It has a varnished concrete texture, which goes with the Brutalism of the Blackbird estate in the novel very well. And a slight glitter, like paving stones have. We like to choose papers that have a thing-character like that. Mr. Beethoven had recycled coffee cup lining (Extract), a nod to the composer’s love of coffee houses. As pulp-dyed papers they don’t crack or scuff and feel nicer than laminate. We pay close attention to typesetting too. The Blackbird pays homage to William Golding,
author of The Spire. We chose two classic Faber fonts to support Claire Allen’s equally accomplished voice: Minion and Albertus, plus Futura as a nod to the Brutalist architecture of the Blackbird estate. The chapter titles sort of represent 2014, and the body text 1941. Ancient and Modern.

These days readers are used to a nice white gap between the text and the page numbers and headers, but in the olden days that would have required a sackful of lead and they always abutted. To evoke the ‘40s, but avoid distraction, we printed the page numbers and headers right next to the body text, but in yellow so that it would sit back. Black with a dash of yellow makes each page a little blackbird too! The strictly limited deluxe version will have a cloth spine (half-bound) and a unique hand-drawn fold-out insert. We will make about 20 of these. They tend to sell-out before we even make them.

What is the most rewarding aspect of independent publishing, and the most challenging?

Being able to invent in collaboration with an author and have nobody put their oar in and sink it. Books are often engineered for the middle of the road, but that’s a dangerous place to be!

Promotion is the most challenging. It is back to front. You have to announce a book and show everyone the cover seven months before you make the book. It would be better to be able to say what you have when you have it and reveal the process as you go. That is where we are heading, I think. Once we are established enough, I think we will have enough people following our books to be able to reveal information in a logical order.

How do you connect with booksellers and readers?

A condition we imposed on ourselves before starting the fiction list in 2018 was getting the agents we needed to sell books. Inpress Books voted us in unanimously, and their sales reps are amazing — their support and training peerless. Arts Council England have also supported us with funding and training to reach readers. We also had a great partnership with Gemma Seltzer, who was at Kickstarter back then, and now with John Mitchinson at Unbound; these were to run direct-to-reader presales. We do a lot of Social Media, but basically we let the experts do the selling so we can concentrate on doing impossible things with books.

 

You may visit the Henningham Family Press website here.

This post is a stop on The Blackbird Blog Tour 2020. Do check out the other varied and interesting stops on the tour, detailed above.

May I urge you to buy the book? Click here.

 

Book Review: The Blackbird

Liverpool Cathedral was built over the course of the 20^th century. As may be expected for such an impressive structure, it took many decades to complete. Progress stalled during both World Wars due to shortages of manpower and materials. The cathedral now ranks as the fifth-largest in the world. Built on St James’s Mount, the shape of the site required that the nave be oriented north to south rather than, as is traditional, west to east. Some believed this would bring bad luck.

The principle characters in The Blackbird certainly suffer their share of misfortune. Across alternating chapters, the story has two main timelines. It opens in 1941 with an accident on a building site where a much reduced team of masons are constructing the tall, central tower of a cathedral. As a result of the incident, a young man is grievously injured. Will Jenner, the on-site manager, blames himself for being persuaded to set the men to work.

Will is married to Mary and they have an eight year old daughter, Hope. The family moved to the city, away from family in rural Derbyshire, when offered the prestigious job opportunity. Will expects his wife to share with him every detail of how she spends her days. When she takes an interest in the hospitalised worker, Will grows suspicious of her motives. He requires that she be quietly obedient, becoming angry if she acts in any other way.

The growing cathedral, and Will’s behaviour, cast a shadow over his family. This is exacerbated by regular, night time aerial bombing raids. Homes have been razed and many killed. People must continue to function despite fear and sleep deprivation.

Moving to 2014, a young mother, Louise, has recently moved into a new flat with her toddler son, Jake. It is a fresh start and one she is content with. Jake’s father, Benny, broke her heart when he left them. Now she is in a relationship with an old friend, Carl, although still relishes her independence. When Benny shows up on her doorstep expecting to be taken back, Louise rejects him. Angered by her reaction, Benny refuses to leave them be.

There is a linking character across the two timelines – Hope – who in 2014 is struggling to care for her elderly husband; Robert has dementia and his behaviour is deteriorating. Through Hope’s thoughts and recollections the reader gains a different perspective on the events her father had to deal with through the war years and beyond.

Undercurrents of male violence percolate along with the limitations in agency women suffer due to their circumstances. The veracity of memory and perceived impact on subsequent decisions is explored and queried. Characters’ choices not to share their reasoning and personal justifications with those around them have damaging consequences. Jealousy and blame pervade.

It took a few chapters before the quality of the writing gripped me. What at first appeared an unremarkable if smoothly told tale established pleasing depth. The plot, whilst engaging, became secondary to my interest in character development. The impact of experience and situation are used to particularly impressive effect.

The structure is well balanced between detail and flow. This was a story I was eager to get back to each time I had to break away. Layered and nuanced yet never heavy, a good read that I am happy to recommend.

My copy of this book was provided gratis by the publisher, Henningham Family Press.

This review is a stop on The Blackbird Blog Tour 2020. Do check out the other fine posts, detailed above.

 

Giveaway time!

The publisher has kindly offered to send a copy of this book to one lucky reader who enters my Twitter giveaway. Follow me here and RT the relevant tweet (from around 8am today) to be in with a chance to win (UK only, ends 5pm BST 31/7/2020).

Book Review: Mud

Mud, by Chris McCabe, is billed as a re-imagining of the Ancient Greek myth of Orpheus & Eurydice, set in contemporary London. Its protagonists are Borak, a failed wizard, and his girlfriend Karissa. When the tale opens they are breaking up having tried living together. To mark their separation Borak asks Karissa to go down with him into the mud, of which he tells her there are twenty-four kinds. They must seek a cube of air and let it out, then they may leave each other forever.

Obviously this is a weird request. To add to the strangeness, Borak wishes to make a film of their journey and has funding for the small crew needed. Karissa agrees to take part and tells her friend Brisa, who may have been more concerned had she not been worrying about a potential date. Watching Borak and Karissa’s love fall apart has made Brisa feel lonely.

The team set out to find the different types of mud. They film on Hampstead Heath and in Wales. They follow tracks that sink into the earth with mud rising to either side. Eventually they go underground and disappear within caves and tunnels that exist beneath tree roots and collapsing graves.

Brisa grows worried about her missing friend. She starts digging for clues, seeking her whereabouts, following voices she hears. She is pleased when her new boyfriend offers to help.

The story plays out in various forms: dialogue, emails, cutouts, and narrative sections. There are descriptions of mud in its various guises. There are strange similes.

“Leaves blew back down the heath like live-fried fish.”

“Brisa’s mind filled up on anxiety like a cat carrier thrown out to sea.”

Recurring items and characters appear in disparate scenes. The Postlude (The Head of Orpheus, Still Singing) is a quick fire rap type dialogue filled with pop culture references.

This playing around with sense and composition can be disorientating to read. The language and flow are not difficult and the story remains somehow compelling but the threads wander at will in directions it can be a challenge to comprehend. For example, a mole appears dressed in a suit and acts as compère for one of Borak’s magic tricks. I remain unclear how this should be interpreted.

As long time followers will know, I enjoy reading literature that pushes boundaries. Mud feels playful and is undoubtedly witty but I wonder if it is perhaps a tad esoteric.

My copy of this book was provided gratis by the publisher, Henningham Family Press.

Book Review: 60 Lovers to Make and Do

60 Lovers to Make & Do, by Sophie Herxheimer, is a collection of metaphorical contemporary love stories – vignettes written in playful poetry. They are presented with associated artwork in collage format which are a delight to explore. Each subject is introduced by their occupation. These women make use of whatever objects are to hand to create their ideal lover. Of course, lovers rarely turn out to be ideal. As in more conventional relationships, some of the pairings work and many do not.

Each poem is short but neatly conveys the complexities of living with a lover – the unexpected turns such alliances can take.

The desire to find a compatible lover is the driving force behind the creative activity. Subjects make the paramour they believe they want but cannot then control what has become a sentient being.

Some of the lovers turn out to harbour interests that were not predicted. The relationships are, very much, reflections of more conventional encounters.

There are a variety of reasons why certain relationships do not last. The bespoke creations turn out to be as varied as those met in other ways.

I mentioned the artwork that accompanies the poems. These collages are cut from a range of sources and it is fun to try to work out connections. They mostly depict the lovers as cutouts and pose them alongside the gap left from their removal.

There are also cut out words and phrases put together to add a further layer of interest.

As well as the poems – the occupations – the index lists the items needed to make the lovers detailed. This was a quirky addition that amused me.

The collection is entertaining throughout but raises serious issues about desire, control and expectation. A distinctive collection of art and poetry that is well worth perusing.

My copy of this book was provided gratis by the publisher, Henningham Family Press.

Book Review: Now Legwarmers

Now Legwarmers, by Pascal O’Loughlin, is set in a housing estate in Ireland that is expanding over rural fields. It is written from the point of view of John who is nearly fourteen and has been living in one of the newly built corporation houses for a few months with his mother, Peggy. John’s father was killed in a road traffic accident and Peggy had not wanted to stay in the flat they shared. Concerned at her son’s lack of friends she bribes him to attend a local youth disco. Here he meets Angela who is a year older than him and lives in a bungalow built on farmland some distance from the estate. She has an older sister, Marion, who goes missing before she and John can meet.

Angela introduces John to kissing and smoking and David Bowie. They discuss books, music, films, and the stories of the people who live or once lived in the places they explore as they hang out together. John has a vivid imagination which helps him to process the grief he feels at the loss of his father, and his concerns for the feelings and changes in his body that he sometimes struggles to understand and deal with.

John is intelligent but attends an all boys’ school where he is expected to conform, especially to the religious tenets of the time and place. His lack of skill or interest in sport adds to his inability to fit in.

“I never knew what a boy was actually supposed to be like and I still don’t. Even now at school I watch them running around, and sometimes I’m running around too, but always it’s a bit like I’m pretending to know the rules to a weird game I don’t actually know how to play.”

John’s father had encouraged him to play football but memories of their visits to the pub are recalled with more pleasure. Peggy disapproved of her husband’s drinking and socialising, wanting him to spend what free time he had after work improving their home.

“she wanted everything to be brand new all the time and spick and span like she didn’t want what she already had at all, as if as soon as you had a thing that you wanted then it was no good. So she always wanted new things or to paint things or to put up wallpaper.”

Peggy is concerned that John is overweight. He hides from her the food he disposes off after pretending it has been eaten.

Angela also hangs out with two of her sister’s ex-boyfriends, Paul and Tony. She tells John of the rows her parents have and how they prefer Marion to her. She talks of the terrible things Paul and Tony have done, although the details sometimes change. Their conversations worm their way into John’s dreams when he is both asleep and awake.

John must also deal with his mother’s burgeoning friendship with a local man, Mr Daly. His feelings ricochet.

All of this is told in a stream of thoughts over several weeks in a dreary winter. John’s life is in many ways ordinary but by viewing it from inside his head the issues and concerns are shown to be idiosyncratic and a challenge for him. The author captures the angst and vernacular of a boy in his situation. The adults around him are well meaning but exist at a distance, unable to reach or empathise with someone his age.

“‘She misses Daddy’, I said.
‘You’re the man of the house now so you have to look after her’
I said nothing. I knew what the man of the house was and I wasn’t that. I was the son.
‘You’re a good lad,’ he said, but I didn’t believe him and the look on his face said something else, it said he didn’t know who I was at all”

The story is quietly devastating in its portrayal of small town life and the invisible lacerations caused by the expectations of family. It is an impressively told reminder that young people think for themselves. A poignant, arresting and satisfyingly original read.

My copy of this book was provided gratis by the publisher, Henningham Family Press.

Book Review: Dedalus

From the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses 2019 longlist – Dedalus by Chris McCabe, a sequel to Ulysses by James Joyce.

In the Republic of Consciousness podcast episode that discussed the prize’s 2019 longlist, Neil Griffiths mentioned that some readers consider Ulysses by James Joyce to be the best book ever written in the English language. I have heard it talked about as one of the most important works of modernist literature. Declan Kiberd (Irish writer and scholar) described Ulysses as

“a demonstration and summation of the entire movement”
“Before Joyce, no writer of fiction had so foregrounded the process of thinking”

The book is vast (730 pages) and, when I have flicked through a copy considering a purchase, written in heavy language. I have not read it.

Ulysses is set in one day, 16 June 1904 – the day James Joyce first went out with Nora Barnacle who he would subsequently marry. Dedalus is mostly set the next day. It is a sequel of sorts although considerably easier to read. Such an audacious concept may be regarded as brave, or perhaps bonkers. It succeeds in being a lot of fun.

The writing plays with and mimics many great and classic works of literature in language and style, referencing and (mis)quoting revered writers with abandon. Interspersed are modern elements such as computer links that suggest you may click to choose your own adventure. Between each ‘Part’ are coded maps that can be slotted together. These summarise the action to date. Certain maps offer suggestions to “>GO TO” earlier or later pages. The book works when read sequentially or as a series of loops.

The story of Hamlet, with its study of a father-son relationship, is a key reference. In a wonderfully meta section the author is interviewed about his own father and his literary inheritance. I have neither read Hamlet nor watched it on stage. I know enough from summary and heresay to appreciate what is being done in Dedalus. Those with more detailed knowledge will likely enjoy the author’s play on particular features.

Dedalus: Act 1, Scene 1, is set in the Martello Tower at 8am. Stephen awakens hungover with memories of the previous day’s activities. He must somehow get to his teaching job so dons the trousers hanging on the back of a chair. They are not his. Outside he encounters Mulligan and then a dead body from the sea over which he vomits. He teaches a lesson at the school, visits a prostitute, goes for a drink in a pub, encounters Leopold Bloom who he calls Leonard. A man in black passes by on several occasions.

Leopold needs to talk to Stephen about Molly, his wife. He picks up the lotion she requested from the pharmacy, a task he should have done yesterday. He returns to the cemetery where they buried Dignam before seeking out Stephen. He is observed and lusted after by a priest.

The story flows and engages yet this is not a book that feels the need to follow any standard ‘rules’ of writing. There are pages that seemingly exist to play with the sounds made by word and letter combinations. A chapter titled ‘Cyclops’ has all the text on each page printed in a single circle, an eye looking out at the reader. There are stylised observations and commentary. Poems explore: urinating, sex, drunken high spirits. Any recoil felt reading descriptions of bodily functions serves to highlight how sanitised life is now expected to be.

“Something is rotten in the state of Dublin”

The paragraphs covering a pub scene are written in the vein of works such as: Gone With The Wind, 1984, Lolita, The Bell Jar, The Handmaid’s Tale, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, and more.

A section of ‘Notes’ at the end of the book explores the story as a history of computers and suggests that the machine’s key developments were foreshadowed in Ulysses.

And all of this somehow works. The plot is almost incidental to the pleasure of reading the inventive prose and recognising where the author took each idea from, how he compiles and builds his tribute to Joyce’s work. It is clever but not irritatingly so. This is a writer playing with ideas and granting them the freedom to fly. It is glorious to read.

Max Porter is quoted on the cover saying:

“Parts of this book will remain with me, and pollute my reading of Hamlet and Ulysses, forever.”

I will not be adding these two great works to my reading pile, but I am very glad to have read Dedalus.

My copy of this book was provided gratis by the publisher, Henningham Family Press.

Guest post by independent publisher, Henningham Family Press

The Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses rewards brilliant and brave literary fiction published in the UK and Ireland by publishers with fewer than 5 full-time employees. Now in its third year, the 2019 longlist was announced last month. I felt privileged to be invited to join the panel of judges for the previous year’s prize as this enabled me to discover some of the best literary fiction published in 2017. Having experienced the process I was eager to read the books this year’s judges were putting forward for further consideration.

When the longlist was announced I invited a number of the small presses who made the cut to contribute a guest post as part of my coverage of the prize this year. I also offered to review the books should they wish to send me a copy. Throughout February I will be posting these reviews and the articles or Q&As received from the presses that responded. These offer a window into the variety of output and current state of play of the innovative publishers whose books I am always eager to read.

The first press to feature is Henningham Family Press whose longlisted book, Dedalus by Chris McCabe, I will be reviewing tomorrow. On the back of this book we are told:

“Henningham Family Press is a microbrewery for books.

Our ingenioous handmade editions can be found in the V&A, Tate and National Poetry Library.

Our Performance Publishing shows compress the creation of printed matter into hectic live events.

Now our Fiction brings to you authors who are reinventing the conventions of Modern writing.”

Thank you to David at HFP for providing me with this fascinating guest post about the press, and his thoughts on literary prizes.

We gave the name Performance Publishing to what we do at Henningham Family Press. We’ve even managed to get newspapers to use the term as if it is a thing.

What Performance Publishing means is that we have been, for more than 12 years now, combining Visual Art, Performance Art and Literature in ways that hope to redefine the act of publication.

For example, in 2016 the British Council commissioned A Line of Five Feet, inviting us to join a delegation of artists and writers representing the UK in Moscow. We taught Art and Art History to Moscow students who went on to help us create, screenprint and bind a monumental concertina book in a bespoke bindery provided within the British pavilion.

That year we also led nine other London Artists in staging The Maximum Wage. An ACE funded show about income inequality. This show gathered, produced and distributed publications with its audience. Teams of volunteers manned our gameshow style print production line producing our own Orwell themed currency, valid in the immediate vicinity. An incredibly diverse crowd of 300 took part in our hectic cycle of production and consumption, going home with the publications they had helped make and contributing their ideas to a later glossy magazine.

When we are not on stage you will find us doing fine printing and master binding in our studio. We often represent the same text in different forms, as we did with An Unknown Soldier; a project based on a poem I wrote about the effect of the World Wars on my family. The National Poetry Library commissioned an exhibition of all the books, artists’ books and screenprints that made up An Unknown Soldier for the centenary year. The exhibition was praised highly in The TLS. We went on to make Letters Home with the librarians; a book teaching children about Modernist Poetry that was praised highly in The TES. (We aim to appear in all the T-something-Ss). Another commission from the time was the Active Service Gospel replica. SGM Lifewords have now distributed about a million copies.

I suppose you could call this an art career, in the sense of a car careering wildly from one side of the road to the other at top speed. The mixture of Art and Literature is hardly surprising, though, given that Ping and myself met at St Martins School of Art. Later, when I was graduating from the Slade MA and Ping was studying MA Modernist Literature at Queen Mary UoL, we started Henningham Family Press together.

Last year (a natural development, or a stab at coherence) we joined Inpress Books so that we could bring our collaborations to the shelves of high street bookshops as paperbacks, as well as to the shelves of Special Collections. 2018 got off to a flying start with us publishing split editions, paperback and artists’ books of Now Legwarmers by Pascal O’Loughlin and the first Ulysses sequel: Dedalus by Chris McCabe. These gained rave reviews (Literary Review, LRB Bookshop, The Idler), effusive endorsements as diverse as Max Porter and Marian Keyes, and our longlisting for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2019.

We specialise in producing novels by writers coming from other disciplines. Poets, artists and performers who bring to their writing inflections from their training. Especially those who pick up the Modernist canon and kick it further down the road. We like working with people who will take their draft as the starting point for a textual and visual editing process. We think of ourselves as book producers, in the same way that Tony Visconti, Steve Albini and Danger Mouse are record producers.

This is the first year we have entered prizes. Before that our work was mainly given the thumbs up by being collected for the nation by institutions like the V&A, UCL, Tate, National Galleries Scotland and the National Poetry Library. Or they began as commissions for touring shows from places like the British Library, Christie’s, Dundee Contemporary Arts. But for novels there is this whole system that we are dipping our toes into.

We got passed over by the Goldsmiths, which packed no emotional punch for us, but on the day of the longlisting for the Republic of Consciousness Prize I found myself utterly useless and completely pre-occupied.

This is easily explained: The Republic.. became (unconsciously) the biggest prize for me personally. It is so well thought through as a premise that it will make a big difference to our survival. Most big prizes present a financial burden. They are locked gates.

The Prize has also formed the backbone of my reading since it started. It feels like a tangible benchmark for ingenuity in art and practice. I went to the launch a couple of years ago as a consumer of canapés. We had no plans to do novels. But when plans began to coalesce they were shaped and encouraged by the existence of the prize and its culture. It would have been harder to focus our wide ranging technical and literary expertise (the unexpectedly prodigious offspring of our dilettantism and a decade-long global recession) into the form of the novel without the reading and solidarity the prize has provided.

Coming from an Art background, though, the big literary prizes (the ones we can’t afford to enter) seem a little over-understated. The ‘party’ finishes and we’re thinking “what, there’s no dancing?” I’ve never seen a fluorescent cocktail at a book event. If book events were an item in the kitchen drawer they would be the wine stopper that keeps wine from going off. We don’t own one, but I saw one once.

What next? 2018 concluded with the first in our series of non-fiction books for children, Colour Experiments for Future Artists, and in 2019 we publish Pattern Power for Future Artists.

Spring sees a second novel from Chris McCabe, Mud, which is a version of Orpheus set in the present day. Borak and Karissa must locate a bubble of air trapped in mud somewhere to end their caustic relationship. The book is “illustrated” with sculptures and concrete poetry.

We are also scouring museums and libraries with Sophie Herxheimer. Looking at Wisdom literature as we embed her sequence of poems 60 Lovers To Make And Do within collages and cutouts.

A version of An Unknown Soldier set to music for the stage with composer John Ringhofer also waits in the wings.

Find out more about Henningham Family Press on their website

You may also wish to follow them on Twitter: @HenninghamPress