Glen James Brown’s Shelf Life

Glen James Brown was born in County Durham. His first novel, Ironopolis, was shortlisted for the 2019 Orwell Prize and the 2020 Portico Prize. His second novel, Mother Naked, is due to be published on June 6th, 2024. He lives in Manchester.

How and where are you?
Manchester airport Terminal 3, waiting for a flight to Marseille. The place is heaving with hen and stag dos. Twelve feet away from me, a man in green fishnets has a large ‘marital aid’ strung around his neck.

I’m going because my first novel, Ironopolis, came out in France in late 2023 and has done ridiculously well for a story about a fictional magic-realist council estate in northeast England. I’ve been invited to do four festivals there this year, this being the third. It’s very surreal, but I feel thankful.

What are you reading right now?
The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan. It’s about a woman who suffers sudden deafness and withdraws to her tiny apartment to come to terms with it. It treads an interesting line between fiction and memoir. As a writer, I’m a sprawler by inclination, so I admire the economy of Callahan’s novel.

And, of course, watching or listening to?
I don’t listen to music when writing, but I listen all the rest of the time. Some stuff I’m currently enjoying:

Reverend Kristian Michael Hayter’s album SAVED! is a collection of hackle-raising dustbowl revivalist songs that sound like they’re emanating from a deep, dark crack in the Earth—please listen to I WILL BE WITH YOU ALWAYS. I love techno and acid house, and Paranoid London have been giving me a lot of joy. There’s the shimmering beauty of Ethiopian pianist Emahoy Tsengé-Maryam Guèbrou. I also keep coming back to Requiem for a Dying Planet by Ernst Reijseger and the Senegalese singer Mola Sylla. Doolittle by Pixies, which I’ll never stop listening to. Brazilian punk bank Yur Mum. And Craig Finn’s solo records. I’m waiting patiently for this guy to write a novel because his lyrics are pure storytelling.

I don’t watch a lot of films or TV anymore. For some reason, they often trigger a fight or flight response in me. I’m still figuring out why, so what I do watch works as brain-off balm. I put something generic on in the background to half-watch while I cook. The other day, I watched this Jennifer Lopez sci-fi thing about AI robots called Atlas. It was forgettable, which was the point.

What did you read as a child?
I credit my mother with getting me hooked on reading from a young age. She read the Ladybird books with me, and her Enid Blyton books from when she was a child. I was also obsessed with these books about an old car called Gumdrop. Later, I moved onto R.L. Stein’s Point Horror, then Stephen King, who I still think is great. I imagine a lot of other readers of a certain age and demographic followed a similar trajectory. But it was special to me at the time.

Which books and/or writers have inspired and influenced you?
This is going to be a longer answer, but this is Shelf Life.

I try not to read with a ‘good book / bad book’ binary mind set. Every book contains a lesson. However, some books have fundamentally altered what I thought fiction could do. My first skull-rattler was maybe Henry Miller’s Sexus, which I must have read when I was about 20. It was a deep-dive in psyche, dream, and surrealism, juxtaposed with the sordidness of post-war New York. I remember reading it in a laundrette, my back against the hot drier, quietly reeling.

So that was the first, I think. Other work that has more recently inspired me includes:

Charles Reznikoff’s monumental Testimony: The United States 1885-1915: Recitative. Reznikoff spent decades trawling municipal court records, boiling down tens of thousands of words of testimony—much of it violent and brutal—into, say, a 150-word poem containing no figurative language. No metaphor or linguistic flare. These poems are the final stark traces of forgotten people. Read independently, none of them would stay with you. But collected over 600-pages, they are a sledgehammer.

Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature. He writes with a mixture of eloquence and anger that is simultaneously incredibly resilient but also infinitely fragile. Not sure how he pulls that off. And his character vignettes are amongst the best I’ve ever read.

Russell Holban’s Riddley Walker. A classic. What this novel does with language is truly, truly special. The entire book—character, plot, world—radiates from every single word. The sheer audacity of it was a huge inspiration for my forthcoming novel Mother Naked.

Yiyun Li’s Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. Li wrote her memoir while struggling with suicidal depression. It’s a dialogue between herself and authors she loves who went through similar experiences. Her central question is whether writing is enough to keep her from ending things, and her conclusions are without sentiment or pity. For me at least, this suffuses the book with a strange hope.

Preti Taneja’s Aftermath. Taneja had a personal connection to the Fishmonger Hall attack of 2019. Her book is a searing indictment of the institutional racism at the heart of the UK justice system, and the state at large. Taneja’s ferocious anger is filigreed with her own personal grief and despair at what happened that day. Even the typography and layout of the book reflects this duality. The prose is scalpel precise and never, ever relinquishes beauty.

Myla Goldberg’s Feast Your Eyes. A novel about a fictional female photographer named Lillian Preston (think Vivian Maier or Diana Arbus) who struggles to make art in the face of 1950s patriarchal subjugation, and maternal expectation. The novel book takes the form of the catalogue of a retrospective exhibition of her work, with each chapter being a label for one of her photographs. I love books that experiment with form, and Lillian feels so real, even though she’s fictional. I gifted this to a friend once, and she said she tried looking Lillian up. I totally understand why.

Robinson Jeffers’ Cawdor. A long narrative-poem which reads like some forgotten Ancient Greek, but is actually northern California, circa 1909. In other ways, too, Jeffers was ahead of its time. When a human or animal dies in the story, we journey deep into their physical minds as the synapses and neurons gutter, and whatever trace of essence is re-absorbed by the cold, unfeeling cosmos. Jeffers’ other poems are also terrifying in scale, sometimes taking place at the end of planet Earth, the heat-death of the universe. I can’t think of another writer who feels located at the very beginning and end of time simultaneously.

Paris by Hope Mirrlees. First published in 1920—175 copies hand-sewn by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Paris is a long walk Mirrlees took through the city after the war; the people, objects, street signs, smells, sounds, all mingled with her fragmented thoughts to form a ‘cubist’ Paris on the page. My friend and French translator gave it to me because Mother Naked takes the form of a monologue, and has similarities in how irregular line breaks, ellipses, and space represent aspects of speech. I don’t understand all of Paris, which is fine. But I keep going back to it and all sorts of valves turn on in my head.

Finally, I’m deeply inspired by my little writer- feedback circle. I have a handful of extremely talented writer friends—including my wife, who is also a novelist—and we share work in progress. The feedback I get is invaluable, of course, but honing my critical skills on their work is just as important. I don’t know where I’d be without that.

What’s the worst review you’ve ever received?
I think I’ve got 2-star reviews—maybe even a 1—on Goodreads. They just said my book didn’t work for them. That’s fine because books often don’t work for me either. Ultimately, both good and bad reviews exist beyond one’s locus of control, meaning neither are good for you.

Tell us a little about your creative process.
I get slower as the day progresses, so I start writing early, like 6am. If I’m at my day-job, I get up even earlier. I’ve also recently changed how I approach plot and structure. It used to be I’d just sit down see where the story goes, but life is too short. Now I plot in advance and let research dictate the story, rather than try to impose research on preconceived ideas. You can’t win against historical precedent.

Tell us about your experience of the publishing industry.
Peninsula, my publisher, really believe in Mother Naked. It’s amazing to have that support. I also have the faith of my wonderful agent, and my previous publisher, Parthian, and French publisher Les éditions du Typhon have also been incredible.

Independent presses do a lot of the heavy lifting. Isabel Waidner is a great example. I remember reading their first novel Gaudy Bauble on Manchester-based Dostoyevsky Wannabe (which don’t seem to have a website anymore) back in 2018. Waidner shreds the rulebook; truly mind-bending stuff at times, though with serious examinations of sexuality, gender, politics and power couched in all the gonzo playfulness. Would a bigger publisher have gambled on that at the time? I’m not sure. Now Waidner is a Goldsmith winner, and I admire how they never compromised while brute-forcing their way into the mainstream. Indies offered a platform for that to happen.

I’d also like to touch on those other times in publishing—the times where not much is happening. Ironopolis took over a year to sell. My next one didn’t sell (and took four years to write). Mother Naked, my third, thankfully did. The months and years of waiting and rejection and silence are difficult. The only thing you can do is to write something else, which, sure, is good advice, but it needs unpacking. When I hear about writers who have managed to publish after lots of rejection, the narrative is often framed as success against the odds. A triumph of conviction and self-belief. But every time my work got knocked back, I lost self-belief which never returned. This has caused me to examine how the publishing side of writing has affected my mental health, so I’m interested in the idea of how doing any form of creative endeavour might mean taking self-belief out of the equation all together. How refusing to quit might actually mean feeling like shit. There’s a certain freedom in that, but it comes at a price. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, which is why Yiyun Li’s memoir really hit me.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
In 2013, I was fortunate to win a scholarship to study an MA in creative writing at the University of Chichester. My supervisor there was a wonderful teacher and writer who told me: Think of your reader as twice as smart as you, but only half as invested. This, I’ve just realised, was also Jenn Ashworth’s advice in her Shelf Life. So two people have said that now, which must mean it is really good advice.

My other advice comes from a writer friend in that feedback circle I mentioned: Exposition should always go in-scene. I’ve always struggled with exposition, and especially so with Mother Naked, which is set in the 1400s and means nothing about that world can be taken for granted with the reader. My friend is a master at making exposition integral to the scene itself, via dialogue or action or allusion. So I try to do that now, which is when the Ashworth-endorsed advice kicks in. If you insert exposition responsibly, respecting the reader’s intelligence, they will understand, and then the writer doesn’t have to resort to info-dump paragraphs.

What are you working on right now?
I’ve got a solid draft of a new novel written but work on Mother Naked and French stuff for my first book have put it on the back burner. I work part time at a university and get summer off. In those two months, I’ll get back to it.