Books and Anthologies

NEW READS!

NEW WRITING! 

POETRY! PROSE!

ESSAYS! FICTION! MEMOIR!  

VIVA! BOOKS! VIVA! ANTHOLOGIES!

  

a rich selection of thought provoking 
and ground breaking books 
where you'll find some of my 
poetry, stories and essays

Eighty Four 

Published January 2019, an anthology of poetry on the subject of male suicide in aid of CALM. Poems have been donated to the collection by Andrew McMillan, Salena Godden, Anthony Anaxogorou, Katrina Naomi, Ian Patterson, Caroline Smith, Carrie Etter, Peter Raynard, Joelle Taylor, while a submissions window yielded many excellent poems on the subject from hitherto unknown poets we are thrilled to have been made aware of. 

Curated by poet Helen Calcutt, the anthology features a host of male and female voices sharing their experiences of suicide, mental health, or grief – from those who have been on the brink of suicide, to those who have lost a loved one, or been moved more generally by the campaign. It is both an uncensored exposure of truths, as well as a celebration of the strength and courage of those willing to write and talk about their experiences, using the power of language to openly address and tackle an issue that directly affects a million people every year. We hope this book will shed light on an issue that is cast in shadow, and which is often shrouded in secrecy and denial. If we don’t talk, we don’t heal and we don’t change. In Eighty Four we are all talking. Are you listening? 

Verve Poetry Press  www.vervepoetrypress.com

this book is in aid of thecalmzone.net

Others 

A beautiful book that celebrates how words can take us out of the selves we inhabit and show us the world as others see it. Fiction writers and poets will make us look out through other pairs of eyes; essayists will probe the mental blocks that can make it hard to see the realities beyond the media bubbles. The contributors will do nothing they don’t already do – make the homely strange and the exotic familiar – but they’ll do it with an unflinching eye on today’s social inequalities and the thirst for political change.

Others has been successfully crowdfunded with Unbound and ALL net profits of this book are going to anti-hate and refugee charities. It is a spectacular line up that will include Damian Barr, Noam Chomsky, Rishi Dastidar, Salena Godden, Colin Grant, Matt Haig, AL Kennedy, Kamila Shamsie and many other-others, edited by writer and psychologist, Charles Fernyhough, due for publication later in 2019. 

Pre-Order Unbound:
https://unbound.com/books/charles-fernyhough-others

This book is in aid of 
refugee-action.org.uk & stophateuk.org

What is Masculinity? Why does it matter? And other BIG questions 

A highly topical look at the subject of masculinity, encouraging readers to think for themselves about the issues involved. Edited and curated by Darren Chetty and Jeffrey Boakye. Masculinity is being discussed more than ever before, in a range of contexts. People talk about 'toxic masculinity', claim that there is a crisis in masculinity or argue that we need to 'reclaim masculinity'. 

There have always been many ways of being a man, and many people who have claimed that there are correct and incorrect ways of being a man. This important and timely book looks at the big questions surrounding definitions of masculinity, and discusses where ideas of masculinity have come from and the effects of gender stereotyping. Published by Hachette Childrens group, out summer 2019.

Hatchette: https://www.hachettechildrens.co.uk

Smashing It: Working Class Artists On Life, Art And Making It Happen

Edited by poet and playwright Sabrina Mahfouz. The book began when Mahfouz wrote a tweet about how being working class has been the principal obstacle she has faced in the arts, although she is only ever asked about her gender or ethnicity. The tweet was viewed 214,727 times and clicked on almost 7,000 times, and prompted a host of responses. Mahfouz took this as a call to action and set up a free workshop to help working class writers access UK arts funding, The success of that first workshop, which attracted people from around the country, meant Mahfouz now holds them monthly. 

Smashing It will use contributions from writers, musicians, visual artist and filmmakers, including Kerry Hudson, DJ Target, Riz Ahmed, Bridget Minamore, Anthony Anaxagorou, Salena Godden, Madani Younis and Bryony Kimmings, to explore how they overcame obstacles from the financial to the philosophical. It will incorporate journalistic, reportage-style pieces alongside memoir and excerpts or images of original works, as well as offering practical information in a guide section on issues such as how to apply for funding or present a proposal. This book will be published autumn 2019 by Westbourne Press. 

Westbourne Press: http://www.saqibooks.com

Bookseller preview: 

https://www.thebookseller.com/news/

Woman: 

Remapping The Territory Our Way 

Indie published, this gorgeous hardback book is edited by Rita Osei and Michelle Olley. It features 50 pieces by a selection of 16 female creators from across the globe: Bishi Bhattacharya,  Basia Palka, Cajsa Landin, Cerris Morgan-Moyer, Nina Ghana, Salena Godden, Stav B, Marianna Palka, Marijne van der Vlugt, Moksha Watson, Leah Moore, Hélène Muddiman, Zoe Palmer, Kate Enters and Spirit De La Mare. 

This special collection includes published works, repertoire pieces and new verses written especially for this book. The #Woman anthology is organised around three themes: birth, growth and adolescence. A sumptuous read. London launch September 2018 and Los Angeles launch March 2019. It is out now and available on  Amazon  

Wall Street Journal review: 

https://wsimag.com/culture

The Dizziness of Freedom

Shortlisted for London's Big Read - A stunning collection of writing on themes of mental health awareness is out now on Bad Betty Press. It was launched in September in London and then followed by various events up and down the UK. A broad range of contemporary poets speak out about mental health in this groundbreaking anthology. Edited by Amy Acre and Jake Wild Hall. Foreword by Melissa Lee-Houghton.  

Features writing, poetry, videos and performance from Amy Acre, Raymond Antrobus, Mona Arshi, Dean Atta, Joel Auterson, Rob Auton, Dominic Berry, Mary Jean Chan, Sean Colletti, Iris Colomb, Jasmine Cooray, Dizraeli, Caleb Femi, Maria Ferguson, Kat François, Anne Gill, Salena Godden, Jackie Hagan, Jake Wild Hall, Emily Harrison, Nicki Heinen, Gabriel Jones, Anna Kahn, Malaika Kegode, Luke Kennard, Sean Wai Keung, Cecilia Knapp, Melissa Lee-Houghton, Amy León, Fran Lock, Rachel Long, Roddy Lumsden, Katie Metcalfe, Rachel Nwokoro, Kathryn O’Driscoll, Gboyega Odubanjo, Jolade Olusanya, Abi Palmer, Bobby Parker, Deanna Rodger, C.E. Shue, Lemn Sissay MBE, Ruth Sutoyé, Rebecca Tamás, Joelle Taylor, Claire Trévien, David Turner, R A Villanueva, Byron Vincent, Pascal Vine, Antosh Wojcik and Reuben Woolley. 

Bad Betty: https://badbettypress.com

The Good Immigrant USA

In this much-anticipated follow-up to the award winning and bestselling UK edition, hailed by Zadie Smith as 'lively and vital', editors Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman hand the microphone to an incredible range of writers whose humanity and right to be in the US is under attack. Chigozie Obioma unpacks an Igbo proverb that helped him navigate his journey to America from Nigeria. Jenny Zhang analyzes cultural appropriation in nineties fashion, recalling her own pain and confusion as a teenager trying to fit in. Fatimah Asghar describes the flood of memory and emotion triggered by an encounter with an Uber driver from Kashmir. Alexander Chee writes of a visit to Korea that changed his relationship to his heritage. These writers share powerful personal stories of living between cultures and languages while struggling to figure out who they are and where they belong. Welcome to the family! Hits UK shops, March 2019! 

Dialogue: http://www.dialoguebooks.org

The Good Immigrant UK

Compiled by award-winning writer Nikesh Shukla – who has long championed the issue of diversity in publishing and literary life in the UK – this book explores why immigrants come to the UK, why they stay, what it means for their identity if they’re mixed race, where their place is in the world if they’re unwelcome in the UK, and what effects this has on the education system. 

Contributors to this ground breaking and award winning work include: Musa Okwonga (poet/broadcaster), Chimene Suleyman (poet/columnist), Vinay Patel (playwright), Bim Adewumni (Buzzfeed), Salena Godden (poet/writer), Sabrina Mahfouz (playwright), Kieran Yates (journalist), Coco Khan (journalist), Sarah Sahim (journalist), Reni Eddo Lodge (journalist), Varaidzo (student), Darren Chetty (teacher), Himesh Patel (Tamwar from Eastenders), Nish Kumar (comedian), Miss L from Casting Call Woe (actor), Daniel York Loh (playwright and actor), Vera Chok (actor/writer), Riz Ahmed (actor/rapper), Inua Ellams (poet/playwright) and Wei Ming Kam (writer).

The essays are poignant, challenging, funny, sad, heartbreaking, angry, weary, and, most importantly, they give a platform to some of the most interesting BAME voices emerging in the UK today. This best selling book was people powered, crowd funded and published with Unbound, the ebook, audio book and paperback are out now and available everywhere.

Unbound www.unbound.com

Penguin https://www.penguin.co.uk/books

Audible The Good Immigrant Audiobook

HOT TICKET

SEE YOU ALL NEXT WEEK

LEICESTER UNIVERSITY

JANUARY 29 at 5pm

Top 10 Rough Trade  - Books Of The Year

http://www.roughtrade.com  

'Pessimism is for Lightweights - 

13 pieces of courage and resistance' 

published by Rough Trade Books: www.roughtradebooks.com

'Salena Godden LIVE at Byline Festival EP'  

out now with Nymphs and Thugs: www.nymphsandthugs.net

Archive: BBC documentary 

'Mrs Death Misses Death' on Mixcloud 

https://www.mixcloud.com/salenagodden

Interview One: Oli Spleen

photo by Jonathan Dredge, Gay Times

Interview One: Oli Spleen

Salena Godden

I have known Oli since he was 17, we met in Hastings over twenty years ago. I know him as a great and loyal friend and also as an indie artist who's work ethic, passion and determination I've always admired. 

Aged only 22, Oli Spleen was hospitalised and fighting for his life. Although that was back in 2000 I recall that time vividly, I remember the phone calls and I remember regularly visiting Oli in the hospital and taking him a walkman, cassette tapes and books.

As Oli recovered he had an epiphany that he must follow his heart and write his way toward a better future. The resulting work was the astonishing debut book Depravikazi, which was published in 2003 by Running Water Publications. This poetic memoir sang out to me. I felt it was all about living defiantly and owning your struggle, it was a tender, brave and brutally honest account of being young and gay and contracting HIV at the turn of the millennium.

It was at the Brighton launch of the book that Oli's first band The Flesh Happening was formed and Oli started writing songs and performing live.

Later in 2009 Oli formed the band Pink Narcissus - I remember their first festival show was with the Book Club Boutique at Standon Calling and I recall the punk spirit in the tent, the raucous music, powerful and passionate. During this era Oli also released his first solo album Fag Machine which spawned a Brighton club-night of the same name which ran for three years and was the first to showcase live original music on Brighton’s gay scene.

Oli is currently living in Brighton where he still writes and performs with his two bands Pink Narcissus and Spleen. On February 9th, Oli is releasing his second solo album Gaslight Illuminations, a glorious dark and haunting work, which explores themes of psychological manipulation and the emotional fallout of toxic relationships. 

The work is also a salute to his dad John Speer who died in January 2018. I was so fond of John. I nicknamed him Papa Sausage because he gave us sausage sandwiches and whisky coffees the mornings after our boozy adventures in Hastings.

Oli Spleen is the mother of invention. I find his creations intriguing and extraordinary. I was excited to be sent his new solo album Gaslight Illuminations. In Gaslight Illuminations Oli Spleen has pushed himself further than ever and appears to have reinvented himself yet again...

SG: Let’s begin at the beginning, looking back can you remember your first gig and the those early years and tell us a little about it please?

OS: I remember meeting you when I was seventeen and how you took my bad teenage poetry seriously and would ask me to go on stage to introduce you to big London crowds. Sometimes you'd ask me to read a poem first, a prospect which was daunting to me back then. My crowd pleaser in those days was a poem about necrophilia. It was more than five years on before I formed a proper band and though I couldn't sing, your encouragement gave me the conviction to keep trying and the confidence to confront a crowd.

SG: How has the landscape changed since you first started making music and writing and performing?

OS: It's become increasingly harder to find decent gigs, in London particularly. Promoters don't seem to do any promoting any more, they only seem to want acts that can guarantee a crowd and how can you begin to build an audience if they won't take a chance on you in the first place?

Also many great venues have been closed down. A lot of the wonderful places which my first band The Flesh Happening would play at the start of the millennium, such as The Bull & Gate in London and Hectors House in Brighton have been turned into hipster gastropubs, favouring craft ale and food served on a slate over original live music.

Pink Narcissus

SG: I think you are one of the most motivated and driven independent artists I have ever met. What drives you and motivates you to continue to make work?

OS: I do it for myself primarily, as a form of therapy. Nothing else gives me the same release. The subjects which I write about are often very personal and frequently touch on traumatic life experiences. To write and perform the songs is a catharsis.

I'm privileged to still have many great collaborators to work with and an audience for what I do. I used to think that interest in my music would gradually diminish but even through times when it's been a struggle to keep an audience I haven't been able to stop. I needed that release.

SG: Being an independent artist you juggle so many jobs and do so much of the work yourself. What part of your process are you enjoying most, the writing, the recording, studio time with the band, or your film making, making the artwork, or the live performances or is it something else? Where are you happiest? What brings you the most joy?

OS: I love being in the moment of creation and feeling the sense of achievement which hopefully lingers for some time after; be it completing a lyric, developing the words into a melody or song, seeing it come to life in the studio or realising it visually in the form of a video. All of these processes give me some sense of achievement but there is also a feeling that you can't take credit for what you have created, as Rimbaud said "I is someone else" meaning we are not fully within ourselves at the point of creation, so how can our egos take credit for it? That said I get post creative depressive slumps as well but Gaslight Illuminations has put me on a real high, I almost have to pinch myself to believe I've manifested this thing.

Behind the scenes, the making of the 'Almost Young' video

SG: I love the haunting melodic qualities in this album. There are themes of growing older, life and death and mortality running throughout the album - Please can you tell us more about where this inspiration came from and how you approached writing these poetic lyrics and songs?

OS: Some ideas within the album go back over ten years but had been put on the back burner as I didn't feel they suited the rock vibe of my bands. I really wasn't expecting the songs I chose to flow so well and reveal a greater narrative throughout the album, that only came when I thought about a running order. The idea of the songs being illuminations was inspired by notions of light and dark within Kabbalah and other spiritual teachings, it's about taking the darkness of life's suffering and "making light" of it.

As for the gaslight part, I was in an abusive relationship with a toxic person, he inspired the thread which runs through songs like Gaslight and Never Known. Other tracks depict my own experiences with substance abuse as well as my own mortality. As you know I almost died due to HIV complications at the turn of the millennium. Toward the end of the album it gets extremely dark and hopeless but with the final track Furnace my spirit is reborn from the ashes.

My dad died in January 2018 which kickstarted this project and forced me to confront my own mortality once again. We even used his ashes as a shaker sound, most notably on the track Ghost.

Oli and Papa Sausage

SG: Can you tell us a little bit about the making of the album? You put a team together for this album, can you tell us about the other musicians on the album and what they each bought to the finished album? What was the vibe in the studio?

OS: Ohh that's a hard one to answer as the producer and pianist I chose no longer wanted to work with each other but they thankfully came together one last time for the sake of this project. They were members of Brighton Indie-Noir band Birdeatsbaby who I had previously collaborated with on covers of Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood's Some Velvet Morning and Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights. In retrospect I think the personal tension between musicians may have brought out the best in everyone.

The songwriting process was fairly swift. I sat next to Mishkin at the piano, sang her the songs and within a few hours we had knocked out the bare bones of the whole album. Mishkin seems to have the ability to instinctually read and translate my emotions into music and violinist Hana works with her so well it seems almost effortless.

Steve who was in my band Spleen played bass, I gave him some cash toward a fretless bass and suggested that some songs use double bass too as I wanted the bass sound to flow with the fluidity of the piano lines. Forbes the producer had worked with Birdeatsbaby as producer as well as being the drummer of the band. He was able to create click tracks that followed the line of the piano, slowing down or speeding up to suit the mood. I also brought in Ben from my first band The Flesh Happening to play pedal steel and other members of Spleen band make an appearance too.

SG: In this album I feel you have pushed yourself harder than ever, and that you are revealing more of yourself, peeling back the layers, it is a very different feel and a new direction for you, can you tell me more about that vulnerability and more about this reinvention?

OS: It's the album I had always wanted to make but never believed I could. I was in rock bands up to now as I didn't have the confidence as a musician to call the shots myself; instead I learned to adapt to the energy of others and find my voice in their structures and sounds rather than giving my words the space they needed to breathe and be heard.

I have for some time been a fan of the French Chanson tradition which favours heartfelt visceral poetic intensity and a strong narrative over disposable melodic pop. I had always wanted to do my take on this approach but wasn't sure how to go about it. When my dad died I became driven and didn't even let myself stop to think if this album was achievable or not. I couldn't help myself. It's the album I feel he would have enjoyed and understood much more than my previous works.

SG: You are your own boss: What are the great challenges you face as an indie artist? What are the great highlights and perks?

OS: For me the greatest challenge is not creating the art but selling it. When you have exposed so much of yourself and made yourself so vulnerable it's very hard to see the fruits of that process as a "product" and then to try to push for it to be heard and potentially face rejection which in light of the subject matter can feel like a personal attack and cut very deep emotionally. Then when someone does get it and gives it a platform it all seems worthwhile though the hustle to get noticed can feel utterly soul destroying at times. The main perk is when someone tells you how your music had helped or healed them in some way, that's the real pay off. Commercial viability comes second to touching people's hearts.

SG: Your work is so often political, you have marched at protests by my side and you have used your lyrics to speak up for gay rights, and all human rights, please can you tell us a little bit about any of the politics (if any) behind this new album?

OS: I feel that the personal is political. What we go through in relationships, how people support or manipulate one another is a microcosm of the wider political landscape. Witnessing the blame politics of the likes of Trump it seems clear to me that gaslighting is not something that just happens on a one to one basis. Governments and leaders manipulate us as well. I feel today it's more important than ever to speak out against the many injustices of the world if you have the strength to do so. Some days it all seems so overwhelming to me that I don't feel as though have the energy to fight. I guess in a sense the album is about retaining your sense of individuality and not letting the bastards grind you down. To be openly and defiantly yourself is in itself a political act. If that makes me a snowflake then I'm damn proud to be one!

SG: Last question: Who would you most like to work with? What would be your dream gig or collaboration?

OS: Well it's on the cards to duet with you which has been high on my list for some time.... are we saying living or dead? Dead would include the French chanteuse Barbara, Nina Simone or maybe Leonard Cohen. Living perhaps, Janis Ian, Benjamin Clementine or Kate Bush, maybe a music video featuring the cast of Fraggle Rock? ... I can but dream.

Oli Spleen will host a launch party for Gaslight Illuminations 

at the Hope and Ruin, Queens Road, Brighton on 

February 9th, which is also Oliva's birthday! 

See you all there!

Oli Spleen Bandcamp: https://olispleen.bandcamp.com

Oli Spleen youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/olispleen 

Here's some pics of us over the years... 

Here's raising a sausage to the next 20 years friendship and laughter!

Good luck with the new album

 - Rest In Peace Papa Sausage -

See you all in Brighton

09. 02. 2019

photo by Jonathan Dredge for Gay Times

photo by Jonathan Dredge for Gay Times