New from Five Leaves, Ship of Fools by Rod Madocks

Some years ago I got an email from someone called Graham de Max, offering his new book, a novel. The subject sounded interesting, but I was not looking for new material. However I knew Graham de Max slightly, a housing officer in the town I live,  and didn't want to be rude, especially as my partner had worked with him on refugee matters. An email conversation ensued that soon began to make less and less sense. To cut a long story short, the approach had been by one Rod Madocks, wanting Five Leaves to publish his novel, but because of the sensitive nature of the novel he wanted to use a pseudonym. One of his favourite writers is Graham Greene, and the de Max came from the interesting character of Max de Winter in Rebecca - hence Graham de Max.
In due course Rod's real identity came out - I knew of him too, he was a mental health worker in Nottingham, who'd worked directly with my partner. He'd never heard of the real Graham de Max.
I thought I'd look at the manuscript to give a bit of friendly advice, which I normally try to avoid... But in the end we published the book, and it did well, being shortlisted for the ITV Thriller Award, enabling us to change the cover from a rather dire brown set of stairs to a moody secure hospital corridor.
I insisted Rod publish under his own name, as I wanted to set up readings for him, and in any case he was not the best picker of pseudonymous names. And so No Way To Say Goodbye appeared, a rather creepy novel about a mental health worker who obsessively tries to trace what happened to his murdered girlfriend among the ranks of his charges in mental health secure prisons. Well worth reading.
Last night we launched his second book, Ship of Fools - stories from the mental health front line. These stories comprise twenty in number, one for each year Rod spent in mental health. Though the stories are in the first person, they are fictional, but like his first book real places and real cases are mentioned to give the impression of personal experience. The narrator - as in the first book - is not necessarily a nice person, especially to his colleagues, and veers from being bored and sick of his charges through to the most tremendous empathy for them. In some stories the narrator just watches, reports and tries to be a reliable witness. The "ships of fools" - the narrenschiffe - were packed with the insane, and sailed off down the Rhine by Hanseatic cities five centuries ago, and aboard this ship are the narrator, his many charges and those whose lives intersect with those who are insane.
The book will be of interest to anyone working in mental health, or living with serious mental health problems, or people trying to understand mental health.
 

Ship of Fools, Nottingham book launch

States round up

As with Lowdham's winter weekend a few postings ago, it is difficult to give an objective review of your own event, but I'll try. The fourth States of Independence took place over the weekend - as mentioned in the last posting. Over 300 attended (we have ways of counting people), with most people staying for most of the day. This was a bit down on past years - though more people stayed for longer. These two points were partly related as in previous years I'd spent a lot of time contacting special interest groups whose members might not have been interested in the whole day, but might have been interested in one particular event so that diverse grouping was not so numerous, and, for no apparent reason, there were fewer students around this year. Return to that aspect next time, I think.
The organising team had a disproportionate number of non-literary issues to deal with in the run up. At one stage I was all for skipping a year but my more realistic colleagues (at the Creative Writing Team at De Montfort) felt we would lose momentum so even if we went for a much smaller event we should keep going. But we still had 24 events, as originally planned, and one more bookstall than previous years. And people did stay longer. Last year one of our last slots had nobody but the speakers but (unless I have yet to hear) nothing was embarrassing this year. The traditional organisers' view of events starts with complete failure, moves up to embarrassing and anything above embarrassing is a great success... And some of our events throughout the day were packed to the gunnels, or if not packed, the right amount of people for a specialist event and some good discussion. At the LGBT writers meeting people said the discussion was particularly intense. Good. And many were a great success.
Stall takings are always interesting, though perhaps mostly to other stall holders. We had difficulties with the stall layout meaning a couple of awkward pinch points stopped people getting round as much as I'd have liked, but the stall with the worst position (Shearsman), who is given a free extra table to make up, had their best year so far. Their display is always attractive and I think the firm knows that the specialist poetry buyers will find them and flash the cash.
This was the first year I've ever gone to one of the events as I'm usually on the info point/Five Leaves stall, but this year was in conversation with Alison Moore, our local Booker shortlisted writer, published by the indie press Salt. That event was packed and Alison is a delight to interview. Five Leaves' Pippa Hennessy ran two sessions on ebooks, one on theory, one on practice. Pippa is now running a lot of these sessions. If I could have left the stall I'd have attended the rather riotous session on literary sex before and after 1963, the novelist Kerry Young's talk, that by an old friend and colleague Sarah Butler on "Ten things I've learnt about literature" (the title echoing the title of her first novel) and Maureen Makki on Sudanese women. Don't be surprised if all of these events are replicated in Lowdham during the summer. Of Five Leaves writers, Rod Madocks talked about his new set of short stories on mental health and Ian Parks (who is editing a book for us on Yorkshire poetry) gave a well-attended talk on Chartist poetry.
States also saw the announcement of the shortlist for the East Midlands Book Award. Two States organisers, Kathy Bell and I, are Trustees of EMBA, but the astonishing part of the announcement was that two of the other States organisers, Will Buckingham and Jonathan Taylor, were among the shortlisted writers and Alison Moore was one of our guest speakers on the day. Will and Jonathan even share an office at De Montfort. I'll post later on EMBA, but this year Leicester was particularly well represented on the shortlist of seven. When States was chosen for the announcement none of us knew who was on the shortlist or where they came from.
I should also mention that the day was supported financially by Creative Leicestershire. This enabled us to pay some people's travel from further away and reduce Five Leaves's financial subsidy to the event.
I also want to thank Cathy Galvin who stepped in at no notice to run the short story session with Charles Boyle after Ra Page from Comma Press had to drop out following a bereavement. We have not seen the last of Cathy around the East Midlands I think.
And special thanks to Simon Perril from DMU who, this year, was in charge of logistics, tech and DMU matters, and those students who helped with tables and with chairing.
Finally... it was a book festival... My purchases from other stalls were A Vanished Hand: my autograph album Anthony Rudoph (Shearsman), Ten Things I've Learnt about Love by Sarah Butler (Picador) and Getting the Coal: impressions of a twentieth century mining community edited by Jeane Carswell and Tracey Roberts (Mantle Oral History Project)

What else can you do with a book apart from read it?

One encouraging development has been people taking their Five Leaves' books onwards and outwards in different ways. Jazz Jews by Mike Gerber has turned into a monthly radio show, Kosher Jam, on UK Jazz Radio http://ukjazzradio.com/presenters-mikegerber.htm), Dave Bell encouraged Alun Parry to turn his book Dirty Thirty into a song, http://parrysongs.co.uk/go/2011/02/new-song-the-dirty-thirty/, and here we have Rod Madocks who has made a short film - seven minutes or so - from his book, No Way To Sat Goodbye:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUcUlu_6oeE&feature=share. A challenge then to our other writers... just skip any ballet, please. I was particularly pleased with Rod making this short film as his book first came out in 2007. It did pretty well at the time, being shortlisted for the ITV 3 Crime and Thriller Awards, but like most five year old fiction, there is a tendency to slumber. This is a nice piece of work.

Rod Madocks on Left Lion

There's a terrific, long interview with Rod Madocks and No Way to Say Goodbye on the WriteLion podcast below. Rod is interviewed by James Walker and comes in at 47.20

http://www.leftlion.co.uk/audio.cfm/id/86

States of Independence

A regional event
INDEPENDENT PRESS DAY
Clephan Building, De Montfort University, Oxford Road, Leicester
10.30am – 4.30pm, Saturday 20th March.
Independent presses from across the region (and some from around the country) will be on site, together with many regional writers whose work is published by large and small independent publishers. Join us for an hour or two or the whole day.
Open to all and free of charge.

Forty writers, mostly from the East Midlands, will be reading from their work at an events programme to accompany an equal number of independent publishers and writers' organisations staffing bookstalls and displaying their work.
Authors include nationally known figures including children's writers Berlie Doherty (twice winner of the Carnegie Award) and Chris D'Lacey, novelists Anthony Cartwright (Heartland, recently read on Book at Bedtime) and Rod Madocks (shortlisted for the ITV Crime and Thriller Awards) and poets Gregory Woods and Deborah Tyler-Bennett. We'll also be providing a Leicester launch for Maria Allen's first novel, launching the international poetry magazine Cleave and featuring talks on independent football magazines, the 1984 Miners' Strike and well known phrases and sayings.
Independent press editors taking part include Iron Press's Peter Mortimer on his “40 years before the mast” as a publisher, and Lynne Patrick from Crème de la Crime, probably the only female crime fiction publisher in the UK. Publishers, groups and magazines from the East and West Midlands and the North East in particular will be represented.
Organised by Five Leaves Publications in Nottingham and the Creative Writing Team at De Montfort Univeristy.
Printed programmes available from info@fiveleaves.co.uk, 0115 9895465. Web programmes: http://www.statesofindependence.co.uk/

It's not the winning that counts

Rod Madocks' No Way to Say Goodbye was shortlisted for the ITV3 Crime and Thriller Awards in the section for the John Creasey First Novels in conjunction with the Crime Writers Association. Sadly it did not win but Rod got to walk up a red carpet. He was interviewed by ITV, bankrupted himself by buying wine for his table at the glitzy venue and watched Lynda La Plante rant against crap books written by TV "personalities". Given that she was on the box and there were plenty of TV personalities in the room it was a brave act. It was a night of crime, film stars and frocks. So here's Rod - scrubbed up well - the crime writer, but sadly no frocks in this picture.