Menopause: The Anthology Advance copies have arrived

We have office stock for Menopause: the Anthology! These are mainly going to authors, endorsers and reviewers, (If you are a reviewer and this appeals to you, give us a shout)

We are taking pre-orders for October now!

Gorgeous cover by Kate Charlesworth.

A wild and wonderful mix of poems and short fiction edited by Catherine Pestano and Cherry Potts

Is the menopause really all about hot flushes, empty nests and HRT? Forty-three writers challenge the clichés in poetry and short fiction.

This anthology will be published on Menopause Day, 18th October 2023. When, we have decided, all (post)menopausal women should celebrate their last period, since we never actually know when it happened. Memorial or celebration, you choose, but we will be having cake. Put the date in your diary!

ISBNs: Print 978-1-913665-85-2 100pp £9.99
eBook: 978-1-913665-86-9 £4.00

By turns furious, funny, passionate, elegant, eloquent, sometimes all of these things at once, but always intimate and incisive, this is an amazing collection from a wonderfully diverse range of voices. It absolutely exemplifies what the arts can do to communicate personal experience in a highly political and socially impactful way. I LOVED IT!


Joanna Brewis, Professor at The Open University and menopause at work researcher

Utterly relatable and so, so clever! I love the combination of humour, sadness, anger and strength that shines through the writings of these talented women.


Jackie Lynch, The Happy Menopause nutritionist, author & podcaster

 

This is such an important book. The menopause should not be just a vanilla-sisters, posh white woman conversation. It affects all of us and global majority women often have worse symptoms which start earlier. I found these stories both inspiring and moving. I’m sure you will too.

Eleanor Mills, Founder of Noon.org.uk – home of the Queenager

The subject of Menopause is just beginning to break the barrier of taboo and become a mainstream discussion point, but that discussion has until now been very serious, medical, and, we would argue, heterosexual and white. This anthology of poems and short fiction aims to address that, with wild and wonderful writing from humour and anger, relief and distress, by women who have experienced menopause, whether naturally or as a result of surgery; with a healthy dose of views from the global majority and the lesbian, bisexual and trans communities.
poetry and stories from:
Adele Evershed
Alison Habens
Alyson Hallett
Amanda Addison
Anne Caldwell
Anne Eccleshall
Anne Macaulay
Cath Holland
Cheryl Powell
Chloe Balcomb
Claire Booker
Claire Lynn
Clare Starling
Ellesar Elhaggagi
Elizabeth A Richter
Em Gray
Erica Borgstrom
Genevieve Carver
Ginger Strivelli
Helen Campbell
Jane Ayres
Jane Burn
Jane McLaughlin
Jessica Manack
Joanne Harris
JP Seabright
Julie-Ann Rowell
Karen F Pierce
Kavita A Jindal
Kim Whysall-Hammond
Lucy Lasasso
Marina Sànchez
Martha Patterson
Mary Mulholland
Rachel Playforth
Ruth Higgins
Sian Northey
Susan Bennett
Susan Cartwright-Smith
Tessa Lang
Tina Bethea Ray
Victoria Bailey
Victoria Ekpo

Understanding the past – Holocaust Memorial Day and In the Blood

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, when we remember the six million Jewish men, women and children murdered in the Second World War, and all victims of persecution and genocide around the world.

Author Anna Fodorova grew up in a family where everyone except her parents had been killed in the Holocaust.  Both in her career as a therapist, and as an author, Anna explores the notion and experience of being a Second Generation Holocaust Survivor. To mark Holocaust Memorial Day, and to remember all the lost families, Anna has shared this blog post with us.

In 1968 I was a student at the Prague College of Applied Arts. Being a Jew in post-war Czechoslovakia seemed then like a dangerous secret, but it was an exciting time – there was hope that the reform of the totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe was possible, and it was the first year that we were allowed to travel and work in the West. When a fellow student showed me the Butlin’s holiday camp brochure picturing a palm tree against the sea, I imagined myself as a barmaid somewhere in the Bognor Riviera and, though I didn’t speak a word of English, I felt I had what it took: I was young, had long hair, wore a miniskirt and intended to purchase some stick-on eyelashes as soon as I got paid.

On arrival in Bognor Regis, the first thing I noticed was that Butlin’s was surrounded by a tall barbed-wire fence and powerful searchlights. I was issued with a uniform and a card with a mugshot of me holding a number that I had to show every time I left or entered the perimeters of the camp. I slept on a bunk bed, and at night I watched the security guards walk around with their scary dogs.

Bizarre though my experience in Butlin’s was, I remained blind to its obvious echoes. I left Butlin’s hoping to hitch-hike around England but then the Russians invaded my country, and I became an emigrant.

Years later, when I started to train as a psychotherapist I gathered the courage to talk about what it felt like to be born into a family where everyone except my parents had been killed in the Shoa. Around the same time I came across the term ‘Second Generation Holocaust Survivors’. When I mentioned it to my mother she looked at me surprised: What second generation? You were born after it was all over, nothing happened to you.

I became puzzled by that nothing. The nothing that we carry inside us, and that formed us in our childhood. I attended conferences about the transgenerational transmission of trauma where, to my amazement I met people who, though coming from different countries and circumstances, had similar experiences of silence, denial and guilt. I published a paper about it in Psychodynamic Practice journal called Mourning by proxy: Notes on a conference, empty graves and silence. The same journal also printed another paper of mine called Lost and Found: The fear and thrill of loss. As a part of my research I visited the London Transport Lost property office and, seeing piles of toys, shoes, suitcases, push chairs (what happened to the child?) and other personal belongings who lost their owners, my internal associations were no longer a mystery to me.

I realized that the loss of someone or something and the search for them was going to be a theme that stayed with me. Another theme I wanted to explore was heritage, both psychological, and the one we carry in our genes.

My new novel, In the Blood, explores the impact of history on the personal lives of three generations – a mother, a daughter and a grandmother. My main protagonist, Agata, is the only child of Czech/Jewish parents. She grew up in Prague, believing that all her relatives perished in the Holocaust. Now living in London with her English husband and their daughter, Agata discovers astonishing news: not everyone died.

Like Agata, I too believed that my mother was the only member of her family to survive the war. When, to my incredulity, I found out that it wasn’t quite so, I tried to understand why this was kept a secret. What was there to hide?

Eventually I realised what that secret was: it was trauma, but in my novel Agata sets out to discover ‘the truth’.

Through her subsequent search for her surviving relatives, she meets a young man, the grandson of a Nazi who is writing a thesis about the transmission of trauma to the descendants of the perpetrators as well as the victims. They form an odd relationship. Soon Agata’s pursuit turns into an all-consuming obsession that alienates everyone around her. Yet for Agata, despite her quest risking the tearing apart of not only the family she already has, but her very own identity, finding out what happened in the past seems vital, the past that we all need to understand, whether that is to come to terms with the transmission of trauma, or as in Agata’s case, to put names and dates and faces to all the lost families, and to discover the not so lost.

To find out more about Holocaust Memorial Day you can visit www.hmd.org.uk. At 4pm today people across the UK will take part in a national moment for HMD by lighting candles and putting them in their windows to remember those who were murdered, and to stand against prejudice and hatred. You can take part as an individual and share a photo of your candle on social media using #LighttheDarkness.

You can read a first chapter extract of In the Blood in this blog post from earlier in the year.

Exclusive first chapter extract of In the Blood

As the end of summer approaches we’re looking forward to the autumn publication of In the Blood – an unforgettable twentieth century family saga that explores the impact of historical events on the lives of three generations – a mother, a daughter and a grandmother.


In the Blood
 is set in 1980s London, Prague and Munich, against the backdrop of the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, and the novel opens on this day, 21st August, 1988; twenty years after the Warsaw Pact invasion of then Czechoslovakia.

Exactly to this day, twenty years ago Russian tanks rolled under our Prague balcony, Mama reminded Agata only this morning. Imagine! Military invasion in central Europe! ‘Now we’ll never see our daughter again, she’ll stay in England,’ your father said – no, he sobbed. Soft. That’s what Pavel was, but here – here they are not interested in what happened to us in 1968, here the radio is interested in some actress from some Corporation Street and her stupid breasts!

Author Anna Fodorova opens the book on this day to emphasise the intertwining nature of personal and political histories:

“In the Blood begins on the 21st August 1988, twenty years after the Russian tanks rolled into Prague, the brutal invasion that shocked the world and altered the fate of my main character, Agata.

When I wrote the story, I couldn’t know that history would repeat itself this year with another catastrophic Russian invasion – I was interested in how the past shapes our private lives.

Agata’s story culminates a year later with the fall of the Berlin Wall, another world-changing event which is paralleled by Agata’s crumbling relationship with her family, particularly her mother, who has built her life from half-truths and secrets.” 

Read the first chapter of In the Blood now.

Pre-order your copy of In the Blood.

An Author’s Best Friend: Lily Peters’ Top Dogs in Fiction

One thing that really struck us when we first read Accidental Flowers, Lily Peter’s novel-in-short-stories, was the descriptions of the numerous canine characters.

As this week is #LondonDogWeek AND #NationalDogWeek over in the U.S, we asked Lily to rank her favourite dogs from classic and contemporary literature. Disagree? Tweet us @ArachnePress with your favourite fictional hounds.

 

An Author’s Best Friend – Lily’s Greyhounds

 

I wrote, illustrated and bound my first book when I was eight years old. Its main character was not a plucky young girl who dreamt of becoming a bestselling author, but rather a very lazy and quite fat Dalmation named Slobdog. Although for an eight-year-old, my spelling and grammar were excellent, there are, perhaps, superior literary dogs that should be celebrated:

To begin, let us put our paws together for Toto from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. A wise terrier, with a sensible aversion to tornadoes. He is the best friend a lost girl could have and has excellent people instincts (which I find to be true of most dogs), revealing the Wizard for the sham that he is.

Next, we have the entire cast of dogs present in Dog Boy, by Eva Hornung. The novel tells the story of abandoned, four-year-old Ramochka and his hero dog, Mamochka, who adopts him as one of her own. He grows and learns with a pack of feral hounds – becoming one himself. It is a beautiful story that celebrates the canine moral code and it has a growl of an ending that will not disappoint.

Then, of course, there is the heart-wrenching folk tale (folk-tail?) of Hound Gelert. In Welsh folklore, the story goes that Llewelyn the Great wrongly accuses his own faithful pooch of killing his infant son. As he administers a fatal blow to Gelert, he hears his son crying and discovers him safely hidden, beside the corpse of a wolf – whom Gelert had obviously slain. Realising his mistake, Llewelyn is doomed to forever hear Gelert’s indignant, dying yelp.

Serves Llewelyn right.

It is my firm belief that we humans don’t always deserve our dogs. And yet, they keep finding us and loving us with huge generosity. Many of my favourite characters share their fictional spaces with beloved creatures and nowhere is this more true than in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Pullman depicts a world in which every human shares their living days with an animal extension of themselves, their Daemon. When we adopted our greyhounds, Jasper and Joni, I knew I had found my very own pair: long-legged busy-bodies, with a ridiculous love of salty snacks and an inability to cope with change.

In my novel-in-short-stories, Accidental Flowers, dogs abound. Abandoned, beloved or left behind, they pad their way through the stories, sniffing out adventure and love. I can’t pick a favourite. Perhaps Juliet, a ghost of a Jack Russell who haunts the pages of her story with her vital loyalty and companionship? Or maybe Boatswain, a greying lurcher and huge fan of the beach, so long as the sea stays where it should? Can either of them compare to Argos, whose friendship and quiet, fuzzy-eyebrowed understanding helps one protagonist discover their true self as the world lurches to a stop?

How can I choose?

Best to let someone else decide for me, while I take the dogs for a walk.

Accidental Flowers by Lily Peters is available now. Buy a paperback copy from our webshop or why not get the audiobook?

You can find Lily Peters on twitter as @SenoritaPeters.

Claude at Harfleur – The Story Sessions video

A second video from July’s The Story Sessions.

Alix Adams reads from Marjorie Phillips‘ historical adventure young adult novel, Claude at Harfleur. Set during Henry V’s campaign in Northern France and featuring 12-year-old tearaway Claude. Originally written in the 1950s, and published posthumously by Curved Air Press (curvedairpress(at)ntlworld(dot)com). We have a few copies available at Arachne, if you’d like a copy, get in touch.

Submit to Arachne Press

Ok, we’ve had enough with the enquiries. We weren’t going to open submissions until the end of the month, but due to popular demand they are now open, but only until the end of MAY. So that’s your window – or possibly letterbox?

Read the GUIDELINES and get in touch, we are really interested, and excited, wondering what you have in store for us.

Romantic Trysting Spots

Where is your favourite place for spending time with the love of your life? What about it gets you hot and bothered, or meltingly romantic?

Dramatic scenery, intimate eatery, garden, beach, mountain, chocolate shop, theatre, fleapit,hotel, nightclub, pub, market, skating rink, crossroads … what makes for the perfect time out with your beloved?

Thinking about the (possibly world – no stop – don’t get carried away!) tour that will launch Lovers’ Lies, we’d like your thoughts on the best romantic places in the UK (for now, although we apparently have a small fan base in Switzerland…) and what it is that makes them special.

The Brief Encounter clock at Carnforth copyright Cherry Potts 2012

It doesn’t matter if you’ve never been there, or if it seems completely impractical, tell us anyway. It can be the site of a great fictional romance (Carnforth Station! Waterloo Bridge!) name-checked in a famous lovers’ ballad  (Allanwater!) or it can be where you first met your one-and-only, just so long as it’s a real place, and still there, not built on since.

If you think it’d be a great place for a reading tell us that too (especially if it’s somewhere near a literature festival or a really good bookshop), and if you can broker an introduction for us, even better – think of it as a blind date between publisher and venue, the sort of thing where you think they’d be perfect for one another, and with just a little nudge

Give us your suggestions (tweet, ‘comment’ on this post, or use the contact form) and we’ll see which we can make work for us. And if your suggestion ends up being our launch venue, and we’ve got your contact details, you’ll get an invitation to the wedding – sorry – launch.

© Arachne Press

Underground fiction

I was chatting with Robert Hulse the Director of the excellent Brunel Museum the other day about Stations, and mentioned Barbara Vine’s King Solomon’s Carpet which got me on to thinking about how the London Underground turns up all sorts of places.  Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere being an obvious example. So I did an idle search (the way you do, and found this: Wikipedia list of fiction on the underground. 

I don’t suppose this list is in any way complete, and for a start, I remember a story set on the Piccadilly line I read on-line last year which involved spectacles left at Cockfosters and lost luggage offices which was very entertaining which isn’t on here (Can’t remember who it was by, can anyone help?). And I met Sarah Butler at a NAWE workshop a couple of weeks ago, and she produced The Central Line Stories with London Underground a couple of years ago – so, with next year the 150th Anniversary of the Underground, maybe its time to read some London Transport fiction?  You could start with Stations, which will be gracing the bookshops and not a few railway carriages, I shouldn’t wonder in only a months time!

Stations Reading at Deptford Lounge

Stations Cover. Image copyright Gail Brodholt

Our second reading for Stations, in honour of New Cross, will be at the Library at Deptford Lounge, a short walk from New Cross Station.

Library
9 Deptford Lounge,
Giffin Street
SE8 4RW

Thursday 29th November 2012 7-8.30pm

(Although free, you need to book via the Albany 020 8692 4446)

As this is on actual publication day it is in effect our Local Launch so we are aiming at quite a few writers, all reading shorter snippets, so the line up is:

David Bausor (New Cross)
Rosalind Stopps (Brockley)
Paula Read (Honor Oak)
Joan Taylor-Rowan (Anerley)
Adrian Gantlope (Surrey Quays) Getting Adrian to speak in public is a major event, you won’t want to miss it!

Ellie Stewart (Wapping)
Bartle Sawbridge (Shadwell)
Katy Darby (Shoreditch High Street)

Join us for a whirlwind tour of the Overground by way of a foreign student’s first taste of South London, a brief encounter at Brockley, homelessness and homebaking, a lesson the birds and bees, transience by the Thames, failing to learn from beetles and film makers in East London.

London Lies at Waterstones Oxford Street

London Lies Authors will be reading, chatting and signing books at
Waterstones 421 Oxford Street London W1C 2PQ (Immediately opposite Selfridges, nearest tube Bond Street)
7pm Thursday 22 November 2012
(There are 2 Waterstones on Oxford Street, so make sure you turn up to the right one!)There is a £4 admission charge but this includes a glass of wine and is discounted against your book should you buy a copy of London Lies. 
Waterstones: 0207 495 8507
Line up:
Katy Darby reading from Simon Hodgson’s story Thieves We Were
Danielle Fenemore  reading from Emily Pedder’s  story Are We nearly There Yet? (Set in Selfridges)
Nichol Wilmor reading from his story Made for Each Other
and Joan Taylor-Rowan reading from her story Renewal